The other day I was musing about fear and ambiguity (uncertainty) and a few days later I was browsing Jonathan Fields’ blog and saw that he had written a book on just this topic.  Lucky for me it wasn’t checked out at the library.

One of the single greatest determinants of high-level success as an innovator or creator in any realm is the ability to manage and at times even seek out sustained levels of uncertainty, bundled lovingly with risk of loss and exposure to criticism (p. 10).

The book begins with an in-depth exploration of the three psychic horsemen of creation: uncertainty, risk, and exposure to criticism.  We’ll uncover why they lead to so much suffering and why, in spite of the havoc they so often wreak, they must remain present.  We’ll also look at what happens when you try to snuff them out instead of embracing and even amplifying them (p. 12)

Overall it is good read, though I was left wanting more and feeling that perhaps the concept and packaging were oversold.  I was expecting something a little deeper and memorable.   I appreciated the section about mindfulness and meditation, something Fields refers to as AT (attention training).  Meditation really does make it easier to focus and focus often makes it easier to deal with uncertainty and move through it.

Image by Nicolas Lannuzel via flickr used under a Creative Commons license.

Many years ago, as an internal auditor, I saw this quote pinned to the cube wall of a sprawling loan processing center in Beaverton, Oregon.

We the willing, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much, with so little, for so long, we are now qualified to do anything, with nothing.

At the time I thought it perfectly reflected what was being expected of the employees there.  It seemed then, and still is a sad reflection of the employee/employer dynamic in some companies.  I saw this quote on Johnathan Fields’ blog and learned that it was attributed to Mother Teresa.

Does anyone know the context that Mother Teresa was saying this in?

This is worth thinking about.

Unaddressed fear becomes toxic; it erodes our mind, body, and spirit. When we try to avoid our fear, we feed it. When we lean into it, we soften it. The fear-busting practices of yoga and meditation help us lean into our fear. They help us be present with it—which is when, ironically, it begins to feel more transient, more a part of the ebb and flow of daily emotional life.

This is from Facing Uncertainties and Transitioning Through Them by Bo Forbes at fearlessstories.com.  I’ve never tried yoga, however I have found mediation to be helpful.

This part really resonated with me:

How willing are we to go through the death of old structures in our lives? How ready are we to tolerate lack of definition? The more willing and ready we are, the more we can use fear as an impetus for growth. This, to me, is the true meaning of fearlessness.

Tolerating ambiguity can be difficult.  As I look around I see that most well grounded people are good at it.

Another skill is knowing when to tolerate and “sit with” the ambiguity and let the tension be the teacher.  Or when it is time to break ambiguity down and dig for clarity and definition until it is found.

Image by Alexander Stielau via flickr used under a Creative Commons license.

Starting leading your emails and blog posts off with the punch line.  Here’s why.

Most people write emails and blog posts that build a case, fact by fact and piece by piece, almost like a case presented to a jury.  There’s a false belief many of us hold that other people will read each block of compelling information we present and be persuaded by the conclusion at the end.

That’s where The U2 Method of High-Impact Writing comes in.  Leading with a bang is more important than ending with a bang.  It is more effective because it catches the reader’s attention from the start and pulls them in.

I cannot tell you how many times the last paragraph of a post has become the first.  In fact after a draft is complete one of the first questions I’ll ask myself is, “How can I start this post off with more force and clarity?”  I’ve lost count of how many times leading with the last paragraph or sentence accomplishes this.

If you want to write better emails or blog posts I highly recommend the three simple steps suggested in The U2 Method of High-Impact Writing.  And if you can’t remember all three just think of it like I do, “Make the punch line the start of  your post.”

Right Angle Screw Driver

Until recently I’d never heard of or seen this tool before.  Then a headlight went out on my car and I had to remove three screws in very difficult location.  I found a couple of forum posts describing how to remove the lightbulb along with a few mentions of using a right angle screwdriver.

I was even more shocked to find one for $5 at the local Harbor Freight–the store of disposable tools.  I’m okay with cheap tools as long as they get the job done.  This one definitely did.

I have no technical backing for this suggestion except that I’ve seen it work on two different operating systems with the Google Chrome web browser.

Accessing my self-hosted WordPress blog to add posts and do site maintenance, page loads were taking FOREVER.  The media uploader was hanging too.  I thought it was a plugin hogging resources so I disabled a bunch of them and it still didn’t really help.

Finally I cleared the browser cache and cookies and now everything is back to normal speed.

Ideas anyone?  I’m running plugins only provided by wordpress.org and the latest  version of WordPress and everything else.

Mortgage Madness

I refinanced again–once again with no closing costs while sacrificing some on the rate.  Interest rates are again at historic lows which meant I had to take avantage of two great opportunities–lowering my rate by three quarters of a percentage and shortening the length of my loan to a 15 year term.  With no out of pocket costs involved (or closing costs financed), there was nothing to lose.

The upside is that I keep making the same payment I’ve always made and more money goes to driving the principle balance to zero because of the lower rate and shorter duration of the loan.  Two great sites I found for following rates and the mortgage process are:

• The Basis Point
• Mortgage News Daily

Collecting and Sending all those statements

Usually I rely on my tried and true fax machine, but this time I decided it was time to join the rest of the world and managed to collect everything as PDFs. After gathering them all in a folder I realized I didn’t want to send them unencrypted over the wire.

Next I searched for a way to zip all the files and lock the archive with a password that couldn’t easily be hacked and read on Windows. From what I could find on Google, the regular linux zip password protected algorithm was not secure, however encrypting with AES was.

I discovered that 7zip could do strong AES encryption and store in a zip format–presumably most Windows users (and my loan officer) would be able to read the archive, however the instructions I found to do so were horrible.

After google failed me I turned to the powerhouse of Red Hat engineers on an internal list… and in less than 24 hours I had a solid answer–thank you Norman Mark St. Laurent!  There is very little coherent information on Google about using 7zip with RHEL–the package names are confusing, the man pages are incomplete, and none of the examples I found for other platforms worked.  This post aims to remedy that.

Creating an AES encrypted archive with RHEL 6 and 7zip

1) Make sure EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linuxe is enabled)

2) Install the 7zip package (note the package name is not the same as the executable).

$ su -c 'yum install p7zip'

3) Create an encrypted archive readable by WinZip.

$ 7za a -y -tzip -pMY_PASSWORD -mem=AES256 archive-name.zip /path/to/directory-of-files

Image by Alexander Stielauvia flickr used under a Creative Commons license.

This quote from Mark Sigal’s Ruminations on the legacy of Steve Jobs was interesting,

If this seems intuitive, and it should be, consider the modus operandi that preceded it. Before Apple, the hard truth was that the “inmates ran the asylum,” in that products were typically designed by engineers to satisfy their own needs, as opposed to those of the actual consumers of the products.

Moreover, products were designed and marketed according to their “speeds and feeds,” checklists of attributes over well-chiseled, highly-crafted outcomes. And it didn’t really matter if at each step along the value chain the consumer was disrespected and disregarded.

Is this why “the year of the Linux desktop” hasn’t arrived or why after several year of running Linux, I’ve gravitated  towards Apple products (MacBook and iPad) for consumer use–outside of work?

To suggest that engineer led products haven’t turned out well is too broad of a generalization.  This quote could also possibly be misconstrued to say that notion of Open Source folks “scratching their own itch” is misguided and cannot create something great.  The Linux kernel itself refutes that notion, though it is interesting that Linux’s greatest success seems to be at the enterprise infrastructure level and not in the consumer mass-market.

Image by Alexander Stielauvia flickr used under a Creative Commons license.

Today I ran into a strange problem where messages seemed to be missing from my Inbox. Running “repair folder” from the properties tab automatically moved several messages to the trash. Moving them back to the inbox and repeating the process resulted in the same behavior. I thought maybe it was time to move on from the default version in RHEL 6, presently thunderbird-3.1.15-1.el6_x86_64, and live more on the edge.

I’ve also been using the same Thunderbird settings directory for two or three years so there was also the chance of some cruft build-up there as well.  What better way to rule out all possible issues than to run the latest version of Thunderbird with a fresh profile?

A simple way to do this is to rename ~/.thunderbird. If you change your mind or want it back, it’s simply a matter of closing Thunderbird, changing the name of the directory back, and running Thunderbird again. I believe there is also a way to this with the profile manager, but I like this way best.

I ran into one small problem due to my machine being 64bit and the regular Thunderbird Linux download being 32bit.  The solution was in this helpful forum post.

RhEL 6 Thunderbird Installation Steps

1) Download the latest stable Thunderbird version.

Updated October 27, 2011:  Thanks to the comment from Matej, pre-built 64bit packages are available, I’m not just not sure how regular folks like me would know to find them.  Back track on the link if you want a different language.

2) Un-tar the file that you download.  For simplicity I prefer to put it in my home directory.  With this approach it will not be accessible to other users, however it will not conflict with the existing installed RHEL rpm version.

$ cd Downloads
$ tar -xvf thunderbird-7.0.1.tar.bz2 -C /home/myuser

3) If you are running 64bit RHEL, you may encounter this error message:

thunderbird-bin: error while loading shared libraries: libdbus-glib-1.so.2: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Installing the dbus-glib.i686 package provides the library you need:

$ su -c 'yum install dbus-glib.i686'

4) Run the new version of Thunderbird

$ cd /home/myuser/thunderbird
$ ./thunderbird

5) If you want to modify the launcher to run this version instead of the default installed RHEL version, right click on the launcher icon, select properties, and change the path to point at the Thunderbird binary in your home directory.  Something like: /home/myuser/thunderbird/thunderbird

Nostalgy is the most important add-on

The Nostalgy add-on is the primary reason I can’t bring myself to change email clients.  The ability to file messages with ease into any folder with one or two key strokes is something I cannot live without.  Don’t miss “shift + s” to save a message to the last folder you saved to.

Benefits of the latest version

• Once you set the column view you like you can apply it recursively to all your folders. This was a huge pain in the past where columns had to be set manually for each folder.
• Newer themes work and are compatible
• Everything feels polished, newer and faster

Use at your own risk

The downside of running Thunderbird this way is that you aren’t running the officially supported version provided by Red Hat and you are relying on Mozilla to provide the latest version to you.  This should happen automatically via Thunderbird’s built-in updating service.  Preferences for automatic updates can be changed in the “Advanced” tab.  Naturally the packages built and provided by Fedora and RHEL have this feature disabled.

I’m currently running the latest version of Firefox the same way and have not encountered any issues.

Image by Tonton Jaja used under a Creative Commons license.

My recent post on fixing terminator was months in the making, partly because I lost the environment I was using to double-check all the steps and partly because other things just kept coming up.  Several months back when I found the original fix it was only available as a patch in bugzilla.  I’d constructed a whole article about how to get the patch, update the spec file, build a new rpm, etc. but in the midst of this I lost the virtual machine I was using twice to a suspend that would not resume.  I also ran into some problems using yum-downloader to get the source rpm I could not reliably reproduce or document.

Time went by and an updated source rpm was available to fix vte so it seemed silly to document all the tedious steps to patch the spec file and rebuild when that work was already done, but then I was thwarted again when I rebooted my laptop and forgot I had a guest running.

It was a frustrating situation from the virt-manager GUI and the command line–my only options were resume (which didn’t work because of the error message below) and shut-down (which did the opposite of what I wanted the virtual machine to do).

On Google I found scant references to this situation so I turned to a company-wide mailing list at work where anyone can post technical questions.  I had the solution in 30 minutes!

This was the cryptic error message I received in virt-manager when trying to resume the guest:

Error restoring domain: Unable to read from monitor: Connection reset by peer

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/share/virt-manager/virtManager/asyncjob.py", line 44, in cb_wrapper
callback(asyncjob, *args, **kwargs)
File "/usr/share/virt-manager/virtManager/asyncjob.py", line 65, in tmpcb
callback(*args, **kwargs)
File "/usr/share/virt-manager/virtManager/domain.py", line 1050, in startup
self._backend.create()
File "/usr/lib64/python2.6/site-packages/libvirt.py", line 510, in create
if ret == -1: raise libvirtError ('virDomainCreate() failed', dom=self)
libvirtError: Unable to read from monitor: Connection reset by peer

The error message made no sense to me--I can’t resume the domain because the monitor cannot be read?  How about, “Unable to resume domain.  If this persists try ‘virsh mangedsave-remove’ from a command line to remove the suspended session and reboot your machine.” Including the word “suspend” in the command instead of “managedsave” would also be more intuitive.

Here is the command to remove a corrupted suspended virtual machine session so you can boot your machine again–naturally you’ll lose the suspended session you had:

$ su -c 'virsh managedsave-remove <domain name>'

I’ve also confirmed on RHEL 6.2 (beta) that rebooting the hypervisor with a running guests, smoothly suspends and resumes them again when the hypervisor returns.