Diary of a Network Geek

So, I've come up with the perfect antidote to my holiday blues.

I'm having Thanksgiving at my house this year.
Here's a copy of what I sent out to some of my usual suspects:

"Okay, so J. was supposed to do this, but, I want to make sure you all get invites before someone else snatches you all away.
As you all should know by now, the traditional J&L Married-Name Thanksgiving (formerly the traditional J&L Not Married Thanksgiving) has made a break for freedom and is going to be at my house this year. I told J. to invite all the people he'd normally invite, but he's still working out his issues with his guest list and the fact that I'm insisting that it's really okay for him to invite his entire family. So, I'm not going to wait for him.

Y'all come to my house for Thanksgiving.
I'll have turkey and maybe something more, so if you want anything else, bring it! Especially if there's something that makes Thanksgiving happen for you, bring that. Also, if there's someone, or even several someones, that make the holiday happen for you, bring them, whether they're family or not. If you can think of anyone I missed on this list, too, that seems like fun, forward this on to them. If you can, please, give me a count at least a couple of days before so I can plan to have enough turkey and whatever so no one goes away hungry. Oh, and if you have folding chairs, bring them, too.

I'm warning you now, even though I'm cleaning, my house will be a wreck. I'm a total bachelor and it shows. The only woman that's seen the inside of my house in six months or more is my dog, so you've been warned.

Hope you all can make it, even though I know you may have other plans, family, or some other lame excuse to blow me off.

Thanks,
Jim

P.S. So you can find the place, here's a map"

Then, because I left part out, I sent this:

"Right, so, for those of you not attuned to my psychic abilities to broadcast thoughts, I thought I'd actually mention when to come for dinner this time. I was figuring on 2:30pm being 'Turkey Time', but don't hesitate to come over early to escape your family, if you feel so moved. By the same token, I'm sure there will be plenty of food, so come by later than you think you should if you have obligations you can't duck but still want to bask in the warm glow of knowing your house is cleaner than mine."

And, yes, I am cleaning and yes, my house will still be a wreck, but at least it'll be good enough that I won't be too embarrassed to have people over.  Besides, most of them know what my past couple of years have been like so they know why cleaning is pretty low on my priority list.  And, frankly, anyone who doesn't like it can hit the bricks!

I'm actually planning to do a turkey in the oven and a ham on the grill and, possibly, either some beer bread or sweet potato pie.  My beer bread is always a hit and I have a recipe for sweet potato pie that uses canned sweet potatoes that I've been meaning to try.  Who knows, maybe I'll impress someone with my domestic skills.  My ex-wife did always say that I'd make someone a wonderful wife one day.  Maybe someone will show up, one way or another, who needs a little extra tender loving care, just like I did the year my ex-wife left.  That's really why I'm doing this.  Because the holidays can be rough and someone helped me through the roughest of holiday seasons, so maybe now, I can return the favor.

Last week, I read Geek Mafia by Rick Dakan.

Though this book wasn't terrible, I can't really recommend it to anyone. Look, I applaud anyone who can write a whole book and get it published. Just writing a novel-length work is quite an accomplishment, but that doesn't make it necessarily good. That's kind of how I feel about Geek Mafia.
The implication of the title is that the book will somehow link "geeks" with some sort of organized crime, which, to me, usually means La Cosa Nostra, the Mafia. But, the author never really quite manages to accomplish this. The book starts with a comic book artist that's been working for a game company who's about to be fired dodging work at the bar of a Mexican restaurant. There he meets an attractive free-lancer of some kind who immediately starts to flirt with him. Now, in the real world, this should have set off bells and whistles in this guy's head, but it doesn't. Apparently, we're supposed to believe that a pudgy, almost middle-aged guy completely buys that a pretty girl more than ten years his junior, who he's just met, is interested in him and doesn't have any ulterior motive. I know what I think when that's what seems to be happening to me. Yeah, right, I don't believe it could be happening to me, but we should believe that this guy totally buys it. What's more, we should buy it when it turns out to be true.

Well, this girl volunteers to help him get one over on his company and bluff them into giving him a bunch of money instead of the two months severance they want to give him.  Again, if this were me, I'd be super, super suspicious, but this joker just completely buys it and goes along, until it's almost too late.  Then, and only then, he gets worried that maybe, just maybe, this girl is too good to be true.
But, all that aside, the writing is just, well, mediocre at best.  The author not only uses all the geek and mystery/heist cliches but he over uses them.  I mean, this guy really piles them on.  In a way, he takes using trite situations and predictable scenarios to an art form.  It's almost like he was trying to make use of every single scene he was given from a writing class or something.  It was amazingly formulaic, from the various scams to the main character trying to join the criminal crew, right down to one of the criminal crew betraying him and his new lover.

The whole thing works, on one level, but it's certainly not "Best Seller" material.  It was disappointing in several ways beyond the lackluster writing.  For instance, it never really lived up to either promise in the title.  There was no mafia in the book and, in fact, barely any organized crime to speak of at all.  Nor did it live up to the geek portion, really, either.  Any technology or "geekiness" was merely a plot device seen at a distance, at best, and was really not required to move the story forward at all.  It could have all pretty much been done some other way without any significant impact.  Or, the technology was used at about the same level that pretty much any traveling salesman might use.  Laptops and e-mail and all the normal trappings of modern life, not really geeky at all.
And the characters did all sorts of fairly incongruous things, too.  They were quite inconsistent, even considering their obviously "hidden" agendas.  They were, at times, wholly unbelievable, acting in ways that I cannot imagine any normal, reasonable person acting.  Not even perfectly reasonable criminals.
This whole book read like someone attempting NaNoWriMo for the first time and not doing any editing work to the manuscript afterward!

Frankly, I had a lot of hope for this book.  The title alone led me to expect an entirely different book.  One which I had truly looked forward to reading.  Sadly, what was behind that title was not the book I'd hoped to read.  So, as appealing as the description of this book may seem, I just cannot recommend it to anyone.

It's getting to be that time of year again.

I've really been craving a cigarette the past week or two. It always happens this time of year. The air turns cool and crisp, which makes it perfect weather to stand outside and suck long drags of hot, molten tar down deep into my lungs. Of course, I won't. It seems morally incorrect to increase my chances of cancer again after M.D. Anderson worked so hard to keep me alive, but, oh, I do so want to just sit with strong coffee and smoke cigarette after cigarette, one after another. I don't know what it is, really, besides the time of year and the change in weather. Perhaps there's something that's making me miss a time long since past, before I moved to Houston, before I was married. Another Fall, in another place, when I was another person.

It may surprise my readers to know that I am a bit of a romantic. I suspect that my co-workers would especially be surprised, since I tend to maintain a somewhat cynic mode of conversation in the office. I think, perhaps, most of my friends from church would be surprised, too. There, oddly enough, most people see me as a wise-cracking joker, I think. But, a tired, world-weary, old romantic is what I am most nights, especially in the Fall.
The holidays are approaching quickly. Too quickly, it seems to me sometimes. And, with the holidays come memories. Memories of old dreams that died young. Memories of old betrayal, old pain, that nags at me like a bad knee in damp weather. The holidays are a hard time for me these days. Alone again, after thinking I'd never be alone again. My family is all in another state, two thousand miles away. Even home isn't home any more, another place that's changed too much and a time that will never return. This season, which includes my birthday, always reminds me of all the things I regret, all the ways my twisty life has gone in circles no one could predict. Even my old ally, words upon words, fail me, leave me stranded. What words can describe the hollow feeling this season evokes in me? Not sadness, not really true regret, but an emptiness so full that it sucks all feeling out of me like a vacuum.

I've been watching an old movie. The Yakuza, starring Robert Mitchum and Ken Takakura. Mitchum plays a former service-man who, along with a number of friends, was part of the Occupation after World War II. One of those old friends, played by Brian Kieth, has gotten into trouble and asks Mitchum's character to help him out. The trouble, of course, involves the yakuza. I think it may have been my first exposure to any sort of yakuza movie. It's hard to find, but Netflix had it. Maybe this, too, reminds me of all the ways life has surprised me. And, naturally, it's filled with smoking, which makes me crave that cigarette even more. But, I have to watch it, twice, back to back. It's as if I'm looking for an answer to my own past in the way the characters deal with theirs. I always find myself stuck in no-win situations with people I care about. Someone to whom I can't express my deep affection without causing hard feelings with someone else to whom I owe a debt. There's a line in the movie, one character talking to another about the part played by Ken Takakura. "Yes, he is insufferable at times. Honorable men often are." I sympathize with that, identify with it. Once, when describing a complicated social situation I found myself in to a friend in Japan, he told me I was "more Japanese than Japanese", which is quite a compliment, actually. I've always admired yakuza films, the Japanese film noir.

And, that's the thing, maybe. On the inside, my life feels like film noir, but on the outside it plays like a Doris Day comedy. God, not even a Cary Grant comedy. I could take that. Who doesn't want to be Cary Grant? Even Cary Grant would've liked to have been Cary Grant. But, my problem is I'm always trying to be Robert Mitchum or, yes, even Ken Takakura, "the man who never smiles", except I can't keep a straight face. It's hard to be a tough guy if you can't keep a straight face.
They say every comedian is crying on the inside, and maybe that's me. Maybe that's why I'm always joking, to hide the fact that my life seems a little tragic to me. And, yes, if it seems tragic to me, how must it seem to anyone looking at it from the outside? Almost forty and alone. My friends seem to think I'm undatable, or incapable of picking someone appropriate to date. I'm not so sure they're wrong. If I drank hard anymore, I'd start drinking myself to sleep every night, but even that's not really a viable option to me anymore, thanks to my doctors. I told someone not too long ago that I'd done all my crying and that's why I joked so much now. Because it was a choice I'd made between laughing and crying and I'd cried myself dry. So bad jokes are all that's left. No smokes, no women, maybe a little booze, if it's the good stuff, but all that's left really are bad jokes and brooding self-recrimination.

I suppose if I were smart, I'd take all this ennui, this overgrown teen angst just returned from French boarding school, and channel it into a moody mystery novel or a vampire story or something. But, I'm not, so instead, I just blog. And you read. Thanks.

Even though I use Microsoft Windows Server 2003 at work, I'm an unabashed Novell fan.

This is a total geek-out post, so if you're not into server operating systems or e-mail systems or if up-time doesn't matter in your world, ignore it, okay?

Now, for the few of you who are left, let me emphasize, I am a total Novell fanboy.  I mean, I totally drank the Kool-Aid on this one, okay?  I don't have a Novell tattoo or anything, but I have been a Novell Certified Engineer since Jesus was a baby.  And, I've maintained that certification through the years, even though I have to admit, we're kind of hitting the law of diminishing returns here.
Novell's e-mail solution is called Groupwise.  It started out life as something else, but it's been improved to a very reliable, stable platform that was actually pretty easy to maintain.  Of course, that's relative when it comes to e-mail packages, but it was a good trade off between ease-of-use and robustness that made it a really nice solution.  And, obviously, it integrated very cleanly into the rest of Novell's network management systems.  So, once it was all setup right, you could make a user and a new e-mail account in pretty much the same step.  I loved it.

Naturally, there was always a rivalry between Novell and Microsoft.  They each fired shots back and forth about who had the better, more reliable product.  Die-hards like me always argued in favor of Groupwise.  Guess what?  It turns out, we were right!  Google did some testing and polling and compared e-mail packages.  Naturally, they came out as the most reliable system, though, if they lock your account, good luck getting it unlocked again.  But, go to their blog entry about their e-mail findings and scroll down until you get to the graphic.  Go ahead, click the link and look at the graphic.  I'll wait.
Did you notice the shortest bar, next to Gmail?  Yeah, Novell's Groupwise.
Groupwise, on average, has half the down-time of a Microsoft Exchange system.  Half!  And, I bet if you loaded it in a multiserver configuration, or even a Linux server, that number would drop even more.  But, still, half as much downtime as Exchange!

So, why don't more people use it?

Brain Hemorrhage Anyone?

Originally uploaded by TangoPango
Looking for some last minute ideas for your Halloween party?

Why not try some really nasty looking cocktails?
Tonight is Halloween, but it's not too late to whip up a bit of last minute fun for the grown-ups. Well, the mostly grown-ups.
The drink pictured is called the Brain Hemorrhage and, as noted, the picture was taken by TangoPango. It's just one of many gruesome-looking, but tasty-sounding, horror-themed drinks you can find via Dabbled. (I found them via BoingBoing who apparently found them via Craft.)

I hope you've enjoyed my Halloween themed Friday Fun links this month. Keep coming back for more strange stuff on Fridays.
Boo.

StJude-withoutFlash

Originally uploaded by Network Geek
I do not believe in saints.

I don't, really. I don't believe that burning a candle to Saint Jude made any difference whatsoever in my divorce when I thought I was going to lose my house, my dog, and everything that really mattered to me. But, I did it. In fact, I did it a lot. I think I have five or six of these Saint Jude candles around and I used to light them all and recite the prayer on the back of each candle as I lit them.

Prayer to Saint Jude
Most holy apostle, St. Jude, faithful servant and friend of Jesus, patron of hopeless causes of things almost despaired of, pray for me. I am so helpless and alone. Make use, I implore you, of that particular privilege given to you to bring visible and speedy help where help is almost despaired of. I promise to be ever mindful of this great favor, to always honor you as my special and powerful patron. Amen!

Well, even though things turned out well there, I'm sure the Saint Jude candles had nothing to do with it. I'm sure. So, why bring it up? Well, funny you should ask....

As with most of my hopeless causes, it starts with a girl. Well, a woman, but when it's a boy pining over her, they're always girls. Do we ever progress beyond Junior High?
So, yeah, a girl. To say that she doesn't know I'm alive would be too harsh, but I'm quite certain I'm not on her radar, so to speak. I'm forty and she's, well, younger. I walk about a mile and a half four times a week, and I've been told she runs six miles virtually every day. I make her laugh until her sides ache. But, a friend told me that Chris Farley used to complain that no one wanted to have sex with the funny guy. Things do not look good for me at all, do they? But, still, I persist. Why? Because Saint Jude is my patron saint, I guess.

Time to start lighting candles, I guess.
"Most holy apostle, Saint Jude, faithful servant and friend of Jesus, patron of hopeless causes and things almost despaired of, pray for me..."

Last week, I finished Glasshouse by Charlie Stross.

I've been reading a lot more lately than I have in a long, long while. Part of that has included a lot of last year's award winners. There's been a lot of really great science-fiction that I haven't read in recent years and I'm trying to catch up a bit. Glasshouse is one of those.

The title comes from the name of a kind of prison where the inmates are under continuous surveillance. However, the story is about a kind of experiment with partially mind-wiped patients. Ah, but I'm getting a bit ahead of myself. The story starts with a man named Robin who has recently undergone a significant surgery, to wipe certain parts of his memory. In fact, he's undergone a rather radical mind wipe, no doubt driven by a significant trauma. At least, that's what he supposes, since no one seems to know and, of course, he has no memory. Actually, he has to rely quite a bit on what people tell him and, frankly, a lot of guesswork. So, with that setting as a beginning, Robin explores who he is, why he's there and why he knows about and is so comfortable with violence.
He quickly meets and gets involved with a woman named Kat. Though, in this future, definitions like "woman" are somewhat flexible. Kat, for instance, has four arms and is blue. And, she's also gone through a mind-wipe, though not as radical as Robin's. She convinces Robin to sign up for an experiment, an experiment in politics, sociology and history. The experiment takes the form of a game, of sorts, set in what would roughly be our time that includes constant observation to make sure everyone stays in character in this artificially created time and place. It's an interesting way to look at gender roles and societal norms of our time, while layering on some other ideas for us to think about. And, of course, nothing is quite what it seems.

I have to admit, even though this won awards and was interesting, it's not my favorite. I have a couple more by Charlie Stross in my stack of books to be read, and I'll definitely read them, but I enjoy John Scalzi better. Still, the ideas Stross presented in this book were interesting and good, hard science-fiction. I won't spoil any plot twists, but he creates a world where people can change gender almost at will and wear pretty modified bodies, too. Also, he portrays a world where, as an outgrowth of the mutable nature of humankind, sex and sexual morality has shifted far from our current standards, even in the most liberal of communities. I like, though, that it all fits together and makes sense internally. Sure you have to suspend disbelief in several instances, but, after that, everything else follows logically. In that respect, Stross is a very good writer, even though his style may not appeal to me. In the end, I'll read more of his work because I can learn from it, and that's more than enough reason for me. Also, there's a fun "inside joke" reference to the Prisoner that made me laugh.

In short, if you're patient and like so-called hard science-fiction, there's a lot to like in Glasshouse. It's well worth finding in paperback and reading.

I voted yesterday.

Yeah, I know, something like two weeks before the normal election day, I was able to vote.  Turns out, there has been a massive response this year and huge numbers of people are voting.  Personally, I think that's great.  I mean, a friend of mine said he'd heard they were expecting something like a 60% turn out rate, which is monster.  As I recall, normally, the percentage of people who vote is less than 20%, so to get so many people out voting is wonderful.

I always have felt that if you want to complain about the way our current leaders are running things, then you better have voted.  Me, I like to complain, so I vote.  From what I understand, this year, you can even vote early on Sunday!  Thanks to Google, you can find your local early voting polling place with just a few clicks of a mouse, so why not do it?  If you haven't voted lately, why not start this year?

Also, I'm not normally a very political animal.  No, really, stop laughing, I'm not.  Oh, sure, I've ranted and raved about certain tiny aspects of politics, but, mostly, I want everyone to participate in the process.  This year, though, I'm going to make a suggestion.  I think everyone tends to get in the mindset that you have to choose between the Democrats and the Republicans, but, you know, we're not a two party system.  There are a wide range of parties in the United States, but the popular news media almost never talks about them.  Did you know that Ralph Nader was running again?  Have you heard of Bob Barr?
Just think about this for a couple minutes.  Over the past fifteen years, both the Republicans and the Democrats have been in power.  Did you like the way either of them ran this country?  If you're not happy with either the Republicans or the Democrats, why not give a third party a try?  The Libertarians are well represented this year, at least in Harris County, Texas.
Maybe it's time we gave another party a chance to make a difference.

I am not nice.

So, I'm kind of, well, not a nice person sometimes. I have been known to be self-serving, arrogant, overly pleased with my own intelligence and, on occasion, too willing to take the proverbial low road. I did that today.

I follow a lot of blogs via an RSS reader. When one that's ostensibly about science-fiction and fantasy fiction and publishing, run, in fact, by people in that business, popped up with a odd-looking picture of Alan Greenspan, I had to see what was going on. They were making fun of him based on a bad picture. Then, in the comments particularly, people were blaming him for the current economic crisis, as if a single man could have caused such a thing. Perhaps it made them feel more intelligent or better in some way to belittle a man so far above their tiny, little world by making fun of a bad picture. I'm not clear, really, because I'm not a knee-jerk Liberal. Some would say that I'm a bit of a knee-jerk Conservative, but, really, I'm not. I am, however, a bit of a prick. You see, I suggested that a dissenting view would be good. And I rather rudely offered one. Why? Well, outside of the obvious, I thought it might be fun to kick over that particular ant-hill. And, I'll bet my website stats for the day spike.

Yeah, that's all I really was after. So, I feel mildly ashamed of myself for using such tactics to draw clicks. I wanted to see if it worked better than putting "free porn" in a title. We'll see, I guess.
Also, now that I've thoroughly irritated anyone who followed my links over from that site, I sort of feel like I should expound on the topic a bit. You see, it wasn't those damn Republicans that got us into this with their deregulation. Nor was it those unholy Democrats who got us into this what with their trying to help the poor buy homes they couldn't afford. No, gentle readers, we can't blame anyone but ourselves. We did this. You and me. We did it through greed and over spending money that we don't have. We did through a culture of "give me mine now" and not worrying about consequences. We did it when we allowed bad managers of failing companies to collect huge bonuses for doing terrible jobs and making things worse then still relying on their Golden Parachutes. Greed did this. Our greed. And, if not our greed directly, then our greed tacitly.

Do I think we should force those skeevy bastards who mismanaged funds while knowing that they were screwing the economy eventually to cough up their balloon payments? Yes. I'd love to let those companies that knowingly mismanaged their credit twist in the wind, the same way many Americans have been left to suffer after being lured in by those empty assurances of endless credit. Oh, and I'm not any better. Sure, I kept my mortgage smaller than I was approved for when I got my house. And, when my mortgage broker and my ex-wife were both pushing to convince me to buy more house, it wasn't easy, I can assure you. But, by then, my credit was already bad, though I have no one to blame but myself.
The problem is if we don't do something to bail these bastards out, we'll have something worse than the Great Depression. I'd love to do nothing and ride it out, letting market forces correct this mess, but I don't want to have to eat my dog. I don't care if it's a delicacy in Korea, she's too happy to see me when I get home to eat. So, we'll be forced to do something. And, so will the world, because their economic situation is tied to ours now, not to mention they've had their own spending issues. I also find it interesting that they have a slightly different view of Mr. Greenspan than those little minds who were making fun of his bad picture.

I find it equally interesting that several people tried to say I was trying to look smart in those comments. I wasn't. I was, however, trying to point out that they weren't half as smart as Mr. Greenspan. Certainly, none of them seemed to have any ideas on how to solve our current situation. They were content to ridicule someone who, frankly, did more to even things out during previous economic hardship than anyone else and, quite possibly, managed to hold off this current situation for far longer than we deserved. He did, after all, retire in 2006, after seeing us through another crash in 1987 as well as the Internet boom and bust a few years later. It's only now, two years after he's retired, that things have gotten bad. And, four years ago he did try to warn us, didn't he? At least, that's how it looks to me in one of his speeches from the Federal Reserve back in 2004. Others seem to agree with that position.

But, what do I know? I mean, I'm just a computer geek with a Marketing degree. Mostly, no matter who wins this next election, my life's not going to change much. I know some people disagree, but, frankly, the Republicans and the Democrats always seem to do the same thing to me. It's just that one group wants to sneak up from behind me and the other wants to look me in the eye while they do it. Neither group is all that admirable and the end result is the same, no matter what method they use.
The most important thing, though, is to at least try. Try to see who voted for what and look at who your local officials are who voted in ways you didn't like. Then, when you do vote, don't vote for them again. Try someone new. I'm tired of the old song and dance routine. I'm ready for a new number and a new show. How about you?

Hey, wanna' see something cool?

How about a home-made zombie movie? This is labeled "Episode 1", which implies they're going to do more, but it's been a long time since the first one, so who knows? Until then, though, go enjoy Episode One of We Are Prey.

Seriously, it's better than some of the stuff that's made it to DVD. Really!