Saturday, August 22, 2015

Where We Came In

☯ To begin is everything. Without beginning, without ever hitting "Publish", this blog is just unfinished drafts staring at me and only me. Taunting me :-|  I love my words, but I cringe at my writing, so things just sit.

Still, I can be cromulent, so I will write briefly (yeah right!) about who I am, and my life, and the things. For starters, this is the personal blog of Philip Eugene "Phil" Vacca. I am a Milwaukee native, the father of one beautiful girl, and a Purdue Boilermaker (by way of UWM & IWU). So stop telling me how good the Badgers are. I know already. I play the guitar when I'm inspired, and the banjo when I'm relaxed. I should like to see the Earth's great megaliths, starting with Göbekli Tepe. I bathe in the light of many monitors all day and all night, and if I'm producing something useful it probably has to do with data, and the problem of why there's so much of it yet so little knowledge or wisdom.

To that end, if you're looking at this entry some time before September 16th, 2015, it's not too late to travel to Dallas, TX for Postgres Open! It is quite a gathering of minds in the open source database world, and this year I am thrilled to be a speaker!

Before I further digress, let me say that the thoughts and opinions expressed on this page are now and will always be my own. They do not reflect and should not be mistaken for the opinions or beliefs of any entity with which I may be employed or otherwise affiliated.

So, all that said, who is Six, and why is he for Two? More to the point, Who is Number One? This is, of course, a reference to one of television's great masterworks, The Prisoner - itself the single minded vision of Patrick McGoohan, who created the show with Lew Grade. I will hopefully take the time some day to explain why I love this show, and what lessons it holds for contemporary viewers; but for now, it's enough to say that it matters to me. And that Six For Two is the campaign slogan of the man who preferred not to say why he resigned.

I imagine this space will end up with an awful lot of talk about computers and computering, and not nearly enough about Pink Floyd or stone age Earth or the Green Bay Packers. It's some sort of inevitable rule. If you use computers - I mean really use them - half of all time you spend on the internet will be devoted to reading about computers and how to better instruct them. The internet pretty much sprang up around astronomers and Unix geeks writing down what they were doing, so it's no surprise that there is essentially limitless reading to be done on the subject(s). The only way to avoid spending all that time reading about computers is to write something about them.

But this isn't a technical piece, it's just an exercise in getting to a published thing. So, while I haven't even gotten to reminiscing about my early interest in computers, which was my original intent, it has gotten quite late and it's a shame not to at least try to dream a little.

Be Seeing You!