Election

Wow - what a night...

First let me say that i'm a republican from way back, but i've never been a goose-stepping moron who votes the party regardless of its direction. i believe in the fundamental ability of individuals to change themselves and, in so doing, change the world.

however, i have never been comfortable with the marriage of the "old" republican party with the ideals of the social conservative movement. i am a fiscal conservative and a social liberal - end of story. as a result, over the past two and a half decades i have been increasingly at odds with my own party. Never more so than with "W". I think that on a personal level, if i ever had the chance to get to know him, i would like the guy. but i abhor his management style, his outlook and his policies. i think they represent the worst of America.

When the election cycle started, i'd never heard of Barack Obama. I knew that Hillary Clinton was an intelligent, driven person with a tremendous potential - but i also knew that she was a polarizing figure - and that was the last thing i felt the country needed. Thanks to "W", the country was at odds with itself enough as it was. So, in the primary i voted for Edwards - for any number of reasons which i wont detail here.

My oldest son, at 20, saw things much differently. He read everything he could on the candidates, with all the enthusiasm of youth and their first chance to exercise their civic duty at the voting booth. And for months he's been telling me - Obama's the guy.

Like so many other Americans, i watched the debates and when i did, i saw what my son saw - an intelligent, thoughtful man with the enthusiasm and determination of youth and the wisdom of experience, with a dash of "calm, cool and collected" thrown in for good measure. Oh, yeah, and who happened to be african american...

As the days led up to the election, i became increasingly involved, actually donating money to a candidate for the first time in my life - following my oldest son's example. As we sat around the dinner table Monday night, i was was talking to my wife, and my three boys and i looked at my oldest son and said "your generation will decide this election"

they did.

they and millions of others, who were tired of fear, tired of division, tired of discord. and as i watched the election results along with my family, we knew that history was being written before our eyes. we talked about how that two generations ago, an african american man in Virginia couldnt drink out of the water fountain as a white american and that today Virginia elected an african american man president.

i'm old and with age comes a certain amount of cyncism. but last night, as i listened to the words of our president elect, i was filled with hope for our nation and our world. for the first time in a long while, i was proud to be an american. This morning, as i watched Squawk Box on CNBC, i heard Jack Welch, the former CEO of GE, talk of being proud to be an american.

today and in the days ahead, i think we can all be proud that we are americans. not because we're somehow better than everyone else, not because we have the biggest military, not because we're the wealthiest country on earth, but because we once again proved that "government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth..."

Setting a Virtual Machine's MAC Address

If you ever have the need to manually set the MAC address for a virtual machine, be aware that there is a limitation. There are two pools of potential MAC addresses - one for automatic assignment and one for manual assignment.

we had a situation where - because we were using software that generated its key based on MAC address - we wanted to migrate to from a physical machine that had died to a vm and the software was so old that the company was no longer in business. the rub was that the licensing was based on MAC address.

our initial thought was to re-assign the existing MAC address as we were never going to use the old server as it was being trashed. however, when i built the new vm i and then tried to assign the MAC address (Virtual Center --> Edit Settings --> Network Adapter 1), i received the following warning:

The MAC Address entered is not in the valid range. Valid values are between XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX and XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX

this appears to be due to the fact that different ranges of MAC addresses are used depending on whether the address was generated with the vm or manually assigned.

So how to address - no pun intended?

well, i chose to edit the vm's vmx file directly. in the file there is a reference to the MAC address for the virtual NIC. Simply edit this value - with all the obvious warnings taken to heart about duplicate values - and restart the vm:

ethernet0.generatedAddress = "XX:XX:XX:XX:XX:XX"

You should be good to go from there...