Diary of a Network Geek

Music to read by...

So, as I've been cleaning up the massive pile of magazines that I accumulated over the past five or six years, I've been cutting out interesting articles. One of the more interesting articles, to me at least, was one in Wired magazine about soundtracks to accompany books. The article itself was called Books with a Backbeat and you can read it online if you follow the link. But, this got me thinking about music and books.

There's an old "trick" that's been given a modern twist, thanks to the iPod. In the old days, it was making a "mix tape" that your proto-character might listen to or give to someone. Now, of course, it's all about play-lists on the character's MP3 player of choice, which, usually, is an iPod. I've been thinking about this lately as I've been laying the ground work for my first attempt at NaNoWriMo. One of the ways people manage to get their word quota for that is by shutting out the rest of the world with music. Naturally, I've been ripping CDs and loading them onto my massive, 4 Gig Nano in preparation for drowning out the world. (Yes, for the inquiring minds that made the leap, Snow Patrol is on there.) But, I've been considering what the music I have selected will do to my writing. So, I've been looking at that article online again.

I've been trying to imagine what the sound track to my ur-novel will be like. Lots of Top 40 Pop? Rob Zombie for the fight scenes? Will that Paul Van Dyk that just came up in my random shuffle show up in a dance club? Will it drive my characters to a rave? (Do raves even still exist?) Will Bowling for Soup or Spoon be the love theme? Or will that be Sting or the Doors or, even, Warren Zevon? How is that all going to come together?
So, as I contemplate this conundrum, I've been looking at Albums to Books and seeing what some of my favorite books have been associated with by other fans. At least, I might find some new music out of the deal.

Oh, one other thing... One reason I haven't used my iPod more is that I hate the earbuds that come with it. Sure, the sound is good, but I always feel like they're about to fall out of my ears. Yesterday, I found these great Altec Lansing Clip-On Headphones at a local computer store. If you, like me, hate the default earbuds, try these babies. They stay put and the sound is as good or better than the iPod standard earbuds. I highly recommend them!
And, for all you fellow aspiring writers out there, or any artist really, what do you listen to when you create?

No, not me or anyone I know.

Sorry, but most of the geeks I know either simply are not "hotties" or are men and, well, I just don't see them that way. And, of course, with the way my negative weight-loss has been going, I'm far from that myself. Still, rumor has it that they're out there. Certainly, it seems they're in Australia. At least, if this article about a Hot Geek chick calendar on AustralianIT is to be believed. Certainly, the website for the calendar itself, IT Screen Goddesses, seems to be legit. At least, they're selling calendars of beautiful women. But, what's their "geek cred"? Do they run Linux? Are they programmers? That I cannot say from the article or website, but, well...

Okay, this just struck me as funny. I apologize in advance to any of my readers who might, possibly find this demeaning in any way. And, you have to give them credit, at least they're highlighting beauty and brains, in a single package. Surely, it's no surprise that such things can coexist to my female readers, but it might shock some of my more sheltered male readers.

So, now that I've ruined my chances with any hot chicks who read this blog, you might as well click on the links and get chuckle. It is Friday, after all.

I've been cleaning up my house.

No, that's not a metaphor for a damn thing. I've literally been cleaning up my house one room, one closet, at a time. A couple of weeks ago, I got down on my hands and knees and cleaned my bathroom floor right to the baseboards, getting every stray hair, human or dog. My fingers were pruney with bleach-based cleaner and my tile floor was white again.
I also cleaned my kitchen, but not quite with the same intensity as the bathroom. I still need to do the floor, but I did tackle the counters and refridgerator and pantry. It's amazing to me that I'm still finding food left over from when I was married. Yes, that's not a joke or an exageration. I lost count of the mystery items that I've thrown out of the freezer. And, the other day, I pitched some Slimfast and UltraSlimfast shake mixes. I know these weren't mine, because, well, because they're just not the sort of thing that I would think to buy for myself without a little "help". They were chocolate and chocolate malt flavors and I was tempted to try them to see if they'd help me lose weight.
They smelled okay and were mostly still powdery, but the humidity had obviously not been good for them. I let them sit on the counter for a good three days before I made myself check the date on them. They stopped being "good" in 2003. I still let them sit on the counter for another couple of days before I threw them out. The whole time I was debating what to do with them, I could hear my mother and grandmother admonishing me not to waste food. I mean, they still smelled okay, right? And, Slimfast has got to be mostly chemicals anyway, so would they really go "bad"?

It was a game that finally got me to see the insanity of what I was doing and throw the cans out. As I opened one again to smell check it, and confirm the expired freshness date, my inner-eye flashed to a role-playing game I used to love called Gamma World. It's a post-apocalyptic science-fantasy game filled with rogue robots and marauding mutants. There are countless dangers waiting to kill off unsuspecting and careless player-characters, not least of which was canned food. Yeah, old food from the time of Ancients, before the great wars that destroyed the Earth and made plants into deadly perils to be approached warily. Cans with no labels or unreadable freshness dates that could be a village's salvation, or deadly poison that would kill everyone who ate it. Only a lucky roll of the dice would tell us for sure. But, intelligent characters stopped taking the risk.

I still have the original rules for that game upstairs on a shelf, but I threw out the Slimfast. Just in case.

An old "trick" that never seems to get old, even when it doesn't quite work.

Every once in a while, I actually talk about technical stuff on this blog and this week, I'm focused on Google. Oh, sure, it's called "Diary of a Network Geek", but I generally talk about all sorts of geeky things that have nothing to do with computers or networking at all. Well, today you get a treat, gentle readers, and I'll write a little technical bit about what this is and how it works, or doesn't. Here's the trick, in a nutshell: Google a specific site or page with no extra parameters, using the "site:ryumaou.com" syntax. (To hit a specific page, "site:ryumaou.com/hoffman/netgeek/") When you get your search results, notice at the bottom of each description, there is a link labelled "Cached". Click that and you're looking at the page as it resides on the Google servers. At this point, normally, you'd not be hitting the actual website at all, but simply viewing the page as it was stored on Google's servers when they spidered the site for their search database.

Now, normally, that would hide you from a web log, but not from this blog. Why? Good question. What you see pictured in the graphic on this post is a rookie mistake. Googlecache browsing doesn't work well to conceal one's IP address when browsing dynamic content. I know it might not always seem like it, but this blog is, actually, fairly dynamic. In this particular case, what tripped up our inexperienced sneak is a plugin, or set of plugins, running on the blog. Mainly, it was the plugin that makes the pretty title graphics via PHP. When our tricksy, little Hobbit hit the Googlecached page, his browser made a call directly back to code stored on my site to generate the cool graphics. Graphics which, because they are generated dynamically, are not stored in Google's cache, but created "on the fly" every time someone hits my page. Interestingly enough, even if our erstwhile intruder had turned off the ability to view graphics in his browser, the PHP code would have still generated graphic, thereby alerting me to his rather weak attempt to conceal his identity.
The only thing one might gain from this "hack" is the ability to get around a blocked IP address. Sadly, the sneak doesn't need to do this, as I block very few IP addresses at all. For one thing, an IP block is of limited value for blocking spammers, since they change IPs regularly to avoid such blocks. For another, to deal with spam and other unwanted visitors, I have other tools that work much better. So, really, all this particular tricksy, little Hobbit did was, well, waste their own time and give me a handy topic to write a quick piece about very basic web security.

So, um, thanks. Now, c'mon in from the cold and just browse the site to your heart's content, okay? Oh, and don't forget to vote on the poll in the sidebar there everybody!

Truer words were never spoken.
At the time, I found it amusing. Not that I'm a wreck, but that someone would notice and say it out loud. But, I have to admit, it was less and less amusing with every repitition.

It was a Tuesday night and Ms.NewGirl was over for the first time. It was an evening of apple pie and pizza and roommates and dogs. A test, of sorts, to see if she was up to me. My house is a disaster. I don't say this lightly. It really is. Imagine, if you will, a house that was once mostly orderly and only slightly cluttered. Now, picture what happens when the sole occupant slides into a deep depression with little motivation to eat, much less clean. Add to that a steady stream of papers, legal and otherwise, junk mail, and magazine subscriptions. Getting a good picture? Great, now, factor in one guy trying to scrape the last remnants of a life he'd just as soon forget into one room so the movers can haul it all away, only to find out that those movers aren't ever coming. But, wait, there's more! Add to that a roommate and a dog. What do you have? Yeah, a wreck.

I know it was just her way of telling me to get that junk out of the house so she wasn't faced with that part of my past everywhere she looked, but I can't blame her for that. Hey, I'd rather not be faced with it, either! But, it's there. Both the Augean-Stable-like clutter and the past. She may not have to face it, but I do. Every day. But, you know, who I am today is a result of who I was then. It's not good or bad, really, but it is a fact. The man I strive to be is built on the wreckage of the mistakes I made, the poor choices and the bad behavior. Who I am today is not who I was because, today, I choose not to be that guy. And that choice is pretty important. I choose to be who I am. I make choices that have consequences and take me places. Hopefully, different places than I've been or would have gone in the past. So, there's no point running or hiding from any of it. I just have to get started on the wreckage that sticks out where folks might trip over it.

So, that's what I've been doing the past couple weeks. I've been working on it. I mean I've been really working on getting my house in order.

I highly reccomend checking yourself on Google.
Why? Because your next employer may be Googling you, that's why. At least, according to this article on the New York Times, that's what's been happening.  I certainly know that I've been found on Google on more than one occasion.  Not only by employers, but also by potential dates and, well, obviously, dates.  This blog did, after all, start as a marketing scheme, a way to get the search engines to find me and catalog me.  It worked.  Very well, in fact, as this page has a Googlerank of Five out of Ten.  And, if you Google Linux Resume, I'm the second hit.  If you Google CNE Resume, I'm the first two hits.  If you Google Jim Hoffman, I'm the sixth hit.  So, I think about what I say here, and how I say it, because I know people might actually read it.  People I might care about and people who's opinion matters to me or can effect my life.  And, I'm told that in the dating world, it's more and more common to Google potential dates to see what mischief they've been up to on the web.  Obviously, one never knows what might turn up.

This is a special concern for bloggers, of course, who put themselves "out there" on a regular basis.  Do you want a potential employer reading that last rant?  Or about your after-hours antics?  Or about the slacking you do at work to post to your blog instead?  All things to think about.  So, what do you find when you Google yourself?  If you don't know yet, maybe you should try it and see what turns up.

Probably not what it sounds like...

I'm too sensitive. I know this, not because I've been told by my mother and LK both, but because I can see how I react to things. I have a "rich interior life" that no one sees, thankfully, and I think way too much. Way, way, too much. As a result, I'm overly sensitive to a lot of really stupid things.

Case in point,Final Straw by Snow Patrol. Now, that might seem fairly safe. Some rather bland pop band not unlike many, many others. So why would I react so strongly to it? This led to a rather unpleasant "discussion" with LK and I. We'd been out and, as we pulled up, some song by Snow Patrol came on the radio. LK coos that it's her favorite new song and turns the volume up. I asked who it was and she told me. Suddenly, I was nauseous. I sat for a moment and listened, but it got to me too much. Sadly, I apparently whispered my explanation to LK, who couldn't hear me over the song. I sat for a few more seconds then I had to get out of the car. I felt the adrenaline sprint through me making me shake, but with rage or fear or just simple pain, I don't know. She chased me, demanding to know what's wrong and, finally, I choke out "That's how I knew".
"Knew what?" she asked me, bewildered.
"Knew that my ex-wife was cheating on me."

You see, one night after being at one of the men's support group meetings that I'd been attending, she and her daughter were playing that CD. It was obviously not new and I hadn't seen it before. I asked her where it came from and she told me that a "friend" gave it to her. Now, in most situations, I suppose, a man might accept that answer, but, and I say this without any animosity or exaggeration, my wife didn't really have any friends, by her own choice. Really. I am not lying or exaggerating or anything for effect or the sake of a good narrative. It was that precise moment that I knew, for sure, that she'd been cheating on me. There wasn't any other explanation in my mind that could put that CD in her hand. Certainly not the lie that she told me.

But, all that aside, my point is that it shouldn't bother me anymore. I should be past the fact that she did what she did. God knows, I was no angel either, though, I never cheated on her. Small comfort, considering. So, a couple of days ago, I made up my mind that I was going to get that CD and listen to it until those feelings burned their way clean.

I've been listening to that CD for two days now, letting it loop over and over and over. Funny thing is, though they're not my favorite band, and I think their music is somewhat bland, overly "emo" and not all that original, they've started to grow on me.

I love cartoons.

Some of you may have noticed that I'm a fan of rather unusual literature. I admit, I tend toward the fantastic, surreal and bizarre, but, hey, if it's getting published, I can't be the only one! One of my favorites, who I discovered in early High School, is H. P. Lovecraft. I started with The Tomb and Other Tales
and moved on from there.

Well, there are a lot of fans out there and we all seem to have slightly skewed senses of humor. Often times, this results in very, very strange homage taking forms that the human mind can barely encompass. The Unspeakable Vault (of Doom) is one of those things. It's a parody of much of Lovecraft's work. It's also a very funny cartoon. Enjoy!

I finished Angels & Demons by Dan Brown last night.

It was good and only slightly marred by the fact that I'd read the DaVinci Code first, so I knew that Robert Langdon would survive. The rest, however, was a merry chase through the Vatican city.
Ah, but I'm getting a bit ahead of myself. This is the story that introduces us to the hero of the best-selling book and major motion picture, the DaVinci Code, Robert Langdon. He's well known by now, of course, as a Harvard symbologist specializing in rather strange and occult subjects. In this book, he's chasing the Illuminati, who were long thought dead or subsumed by the Freemasons. But, with the "invention" of anti-matter, along with a suitable containment device, the Illuminati make a sudden reappearance. They apparently send their agent to steal the highly unstable and explosive antimatter to use as a spectacular act of religious terrorism by blowing up the Vatican City. Robert Langdon is called in by the head of CERN, where the antimatter was created, for his help and to use his expertise regarding the obscure Illuminati to "save the day". The rest of the plot, I'll leave you to discover yourself by reading the book.

Okay, this is not quite Nabakov, but it is a fairly good read. I actually liked it better than The Da Vinci Code, but the writing is certainly no better or worse. Dan Brown isn't the hack that a lot of literary critics make him out to be, but, then again, he's not Ernest Hemingway or Charles Dickens, either. Angels & Demons is good, light, reading that still has some fairly high-minded premise. As I menitoned earlier, it's a decent enough book, though I wouldn't want to make a steady diet of Brown's work.

Today, at lunch, I started reading No Plot? No Problem!, which is the "official" handbook for NaNoWriMo, hopefully, in preparation for attempting to participate in November. That's a ways off, so I'm not quite willing to commit to that, but, still, I'm thinking about it.

I suppose I should explain the new poll a bit more.

I like getting things in the mail.  Well, specifically, things that aren't bills.  I've been a Wired magazine subscriber for more years than I care to count.  But, at the moment, that's the only regular subscription I have going.  I think I'd like to add at least one more, but I have very eclectic taste when it comes to reading material.  So, I'm looking for a little advice.  I've got several magazines in mind, which I listed in that poll, but, in case you're not familiar with them, I'll give a quick sketch of them here.

Dwell- Dwell is a home design magazine that I stumbled across, somehow, right when it first came out.  It's a little edgy, but pretty modern and fairly hip.  It has some interesting ideas, some of which I might actually be willing to try in my own house.  It's arty and would look good on my coffee table.

Men's Vogue- Okay, first of all, I am not making this up.  Check the link, it actually does exist.  I got a free issue in the mail, probably because I subscribe to Wired or something.  It's not bad, but, well, it says "Vogue" right on the cover and seems a little, um, er, queer.  Not that it's bad, but I have enough trouble, seeming a little too feminine probably is not the best way to go for me.  Still, I'm thinking that having a magazine that has Vogue in the title is bound to score some kind of points with someone.
Men's Health- Okay, my thought here was "Get off your lazy ass and get back into shape!"  No, seriously, that was mainly what I was thinking.  But, of course, Men's Health also has a lot of articles on food, entertainment, women, sex, and style, besides just working out and exercise types of things.  Also, would look good on my coffee table.

Scientific American-  Hey, I like science and I'm American, so...  Okay, seriously, I do enjoy keeping up on some of the latest scientific developments and Popular Science is written like USA Today, for the least common denominator.  I need something that doesn't talk down to me.  My concern is, though, that they'll cover some of the same ground that Wired will.  Also, there might not be something that catches my attention in every single issue.

Locus-  A trade mag for science-fiction and fantasy writers.  It shows who's writing what and when it will come out.  Sometimes is even has who was paid what kinds of advances for their novels and such.  Any big shake-ups in the industry show up here.  And, they have decent reviews as well as regular "Top Ten" bestseller lists.  It is a bit pricey though, so even if you all vote for that one, I'll have to really think about it.  My thought here is that if I want to publish in this field, then I should know the field, you know?

Finally, of course, if there's a really good suggestion you think I've overlooked, fill in your own answer!  Thanks for playing.