Diary of a Network Geek

So, last week I finished You're Not Fooling Anyone When You Bring Your Laptop To A Coffee Shop by John Scalzi.

I've been a frustrated writer since I can remember.
I've read more books on writing than most people even realize have been published! But, this book was different. Most writing books focus on the techniques of writing, dispensing all sorts of marginally useful advice, but Scalzi has some different advice for hopeful writers. He talks mainly about the nitty gritty that the other books leave out. For one thing, he talks about giving up the idea that one should only write "art" pieces. He talks about approaching writing like any other job. It makes sense, really, when you think about it. I mean, if you want to make a living at writing, then you have to write regularly, just like you'd work at any other job. You work regularly to get paid regularly.

Mostly, the advice is hard-nosed and drawn from his own years as a full-time, professional writer. Also, the sections are drawn from his blog, the Whatever and many are answers to questions from readers of that blog. Granted, he's edited many of the original blog entries for the book, but I honestly don't care that it's mostly duplicated material I could get from the web. I find reading it from a book, an actual, bound book, far easier than trying to chase it all down on his blog. It was well worth the price.

I can't recommend this book to most of my readers, but if you're an aspiring writer and are tired of reading the same well-worn advice about how to write, You're Not Fooling Anyone When You Bring Your Laptop To A Coffee Shop may be just the book you've been looking for. It won't tell you much about how to write, but it will give you invaluable advice about the writing life and how to make a living at it.

I made my first, primitive blog entry here nine years ago today.

Back then, I coded every page by hand, often in a text editor and uploaded the pages. That was back before blogging was cool and everyone was doing it, too, so there just wasn't any blogging software to speak of. Everyone who had a blog, which is short for "web log", wrote their posts and pages by hand. Of course, I was mostly out of work back then, too, so I had lots of time to code it all up and link everything by hand. Thank God that all changed! First MovableType and then WordPress. Who knows what else will be coming next?

Of course, a lot has changed in my non-digital life, too. Married then divorced again. Changed jobs four times. Moved once, after buying a house. Survived cancer.
Sometimes, looking back on it all, it sure does seem like a lot happening in a short amount of time. It's crazy, crazy stuff.

Anyway, I noticed that the date was coming not too long ago and I thought I'd point it out.

XMenOrigins-Wolverine

Originally uploaded by Network Geek

Right, so I saw Wolverine Friday night.

It was good, and I'm totally willing to see it again, which is good because I suspect that I will be, but, honestly, it wasn't great. I mean, it was no Dark Knight or Iron Man, but it was still good.
Here's the thing, to a fan, there's nothing new here. Really, what they did was sort of take all the various alternate histories of Wolverine that we've seen in the comic books over the years and sort of munge them all into one. Well, except for leaving out all the time he spent in Japan. But, all the origin history, how he came to be alive, how he discovered his mutant powers, his association with the military and how he lost his memory are all in there. Like I said, though, no real mystery to any real fan of the comic books, though.

So, the movie starts with him as a sickly kid in a wealthy family, with a father who, it turns out, isn't quite his father and a half-brother, who is the mutant Sabretooth. Then, we drift through a montage of history following the two brothers through various wars starting with about the American Civil War and ending up in Viet Nam, which is where the meat of the movie really starts.
Wolverine and his brother hook up with a bunch of U.S. government run mutant "special forces" who are little more than the assassin mercenaries of General William Stryker, who later is a baddie in the X-Men movies. This is just earlier in the timeline. Naturally, Wolverine gets fed up and bails out, retiring to the Canadian wilderness as a lumberjack with a girlfriend. After Sabretooth starts hunting down the old team, he kills the girlfriend to get Wolverine back in the game, so to speak. Also, this is what motivates him to volunteer to get the adamantium skeleton that he's famous for having.
So, yeah, no point in telling the whole story. Either you're a fan and know it already or I'd be spoiling the movie, so, might as well just let it go. Suffice it to say that the plot is a typical action movie filled with betrayal and comic book surprises.

The one real downside to the movie is the ending, which was pretty weak. It seemed like it was mainly a setup for a sequel or a spin-off or both. Personally, I'm betting on both based on the weekend's box office returns for this one. These folks made some money. And, rightly so, since Wolverine is one of the most popular Marvel comic characters in a very popular franchise. I mean, really, this has been one of the most anticipated films of the past couple years. Right up there with Star Trek opening Friday.

So, all in all, a pretty good film. Not great, but good enough to pay full price. And, when a friend of mine wants to finally go see this after fulfilling some family obligations, I'll be pleased to see it again and look for details I missed the first time.
Worth seeing, for sure, but not twice for most people. And watch for the next one or the spin-off!

Do you have more than one website or blog you need to watch?

I have several websites and blogs and, honestly, sometimes, I don't visit them all in a given week. And, while my webhosting provider is amazingly good and stable, especially at the reasonable rates they charge, sometimes, one or more of my sites go down without warning. So, what's a bottom-feeding web entrepreneur like me to do? Enter Are My Sites Up! This website will let you monitor your sites and get an e-mail or SMS message to your phone if any go down. And, as usual when I recommend something, it's free. They may charge eventually, but right now, it's free.

Enjoy!

Seems like these might not be all they're cracked up to be.

I've wondered about these since first reading about how they worked. Basically, these solid state drives, or SSDs, are giant flash drives. And, apparently, just like flash drives, they tend to slow down with use. Maybe I've just had too much bad luck with flash drives going suddenly strange and needing a reformat, but I wonder what else might go wrong with them in time?

I wish I'd had my camera with me.

Not sure when, or if, I'll be getting into work today.  I'm on the wrong side of a low point in Houston, apparently.  Normally, I go over F.M. 529 from the 290 feeder, but this morning, the underpass on 529 that goes under the railroad tracks was flooded to the point that pickup trucks were completely submerged and the Jersey Village Police Department actually had blocked traffic to keep idiots from making it worse.  I think I counted more than six cars and trucks floating, yes, you read that right, floating under the tracks there as I rolled by, looking for another way to work.
West Road was flooded on the far side of the railroad tracks there, too.  And, again, police were on hand to keep things from getting worse.  Though, at West Road on the far side of the water, there was quite a bit of traffic backed up and stuck.  I'm sure everyone rushed up to try and get through when 529 was blocked and were as surprised as I was when they weren't able to get through.  So, I made a semi-U-turn back onto the feeder headed back toward home and slowly, gently made my way back to Jersey Village.  And, yes, as far as I could see, the big project they spent so much money on to deal with all the flooding back when tropical storm Allison hit has been worth it.  One of the reasons I was so surprised at how bad things were is that Jersey Village, formerly famous for flooding, was so high and dry that I didn't think it'd be a problem anywhere else.  Surprise!

So, do like the nice folks on the radio are saying today, Houston.  If you don't have to travel, stay home.  That's what I'll be doing, at least until the water goes down some and the crazy people get off the road.

Okay, I should probably save this, but I'm totally not going to.

Let's not ask why I posted this when I should have been working out on a Sunday morning.  I'll get to the workout in a minute, after I finish the post.  Let's also not ask what I was searching on when I found the blog that linked to what I'm about to share.  And, let's ignore the adult language, because, c'mon, people talk that way and it's sort of integral to the bit.  But, most of all, let's just skip right past the part where it's not my first date we're talking about.

Just click the link to the funny first date story found on Craigslist Portland.  The funny thing to me is that even after what happened, he still wanted to date her again!  The link, incidentally, loads a graphic on Picasa for you to read and loads in a new window.

That's International Space Station for those of you who may not be aware.

Now that there's a geek in the top office, maybe we'll see more action in science and space spending. I hope so, since I think that our future really does rest in the stars. Literally, though, not in the sense of astrology.
I know I've been on a bit of a space kick this month, but, as a fan of NASA and space travel, when I saw Slashdot link to a series of video tours of the ISS, I had to share it.

Enjoy!

Right, so this weekend I upgraded my laptop's internal hard drive.

My trusty Toshiba Satellite, which I used all through my chemotherapy treatments almost two years ago, came with an 80 GB hard drive and was starting to fill up. All the pictures I take add up, I guess, especially when I shoot in RAW format. So, I decided that with drives being as cheap as they were, it was time for an upgrade. As I wrote Monday, I scooted over to MicroCenter and picked up a 500 GB Seagate 2.5inch, mobile, SATA drive on Saturday. They were on sale for $115, which is, I think, a pretty damn good price. I got a couple other things, too, since the drive upgrade and a previous memory upgrade makes my laptop the most capable machine in my house, outside of the servers upstairs. (Why are so many non-tech people surprised when I mention that I ran cable and have a server room, with servers?) Oh, and before I get too far, let me mention that you can click on any of the pictures here for larger versions if you want a closer look than the thumbnail. Just click back when you're done admiring my work.

The other essential piece of hardware to start out with is an external USB drive adapter of some kind. I bought the Kingwin EZ-Connect, pictured here. I got that at an earlier trip to MicroCenter, with whom I do NOT have an endorsement deal, by the way. I just love their store. In any case, I got this particular one for two reasons. First, it was under $30. Second, it could handle the three major types of drives that I'm likely to encounter on a regular basis.

What you get in the box, as you can see, is a USB cable, a drive adapter, a power adapter and a power supply. Oh, you also get a small CD that has some drivers, which you don't actually need if you're using Windows XP, and some simple backup software. I didn't actually use this software, but, rather, I went to Seagate's website and downloaded their free utility called DiskWizard. There were a number of reasons why this made sense for this situation. For one thing, I didn't want to just back up the drive, but I wanted to make a bit-for-bit mirror copy of the drive so that I can replace the old one and still have a bootable, working computer. For another, I'm familiar with Seagate's utility and have successfully used it before.

So, after installing DiskWizard following the default prompts, I hooked up my new drive via the USB adapter.

I did install the included software and the drive was immediately recognized. Then, again, I simply followed the DiskWizard prompts with a single false step when I had to go back and change an option in the cloning configuration to make sure the new drive was set to be bootable. I cannot stress that enough! When doing this, you absolutely must make sure that the new drive is being configured to be bootable, system drive. If you don't do that, your machine will not boot when you change out the drive. If you use DiskWizard, it will require a reboot. In fact, after setting your configuration, the software will prompt you to reboot and, after the software reboots your machine, it will automatically launch and start the cloning process. The actual drive cloning took about an hour or two. I was running around doing other things, so I didn't get a good time on it. Best just to allow several hours and, like I did, do other things to amuse yourself while you wait.

Now, it's important to remember to both unplug your laptop and disconnect the battery. Just unplugging won't be enough to make your laptop safe to work on. As long as that battery is in there, you could suddenly have a jolt of electricity jump through the circuits and make any planned upgrades pretty much useless. Also? A little jolt of juice can bite you pretty hard, especially when you're not expecting it!

The next step, obviously, is to remove the old drive.

In my case, it was pretty easy. In the past, on some laptops, getting the drive out required taking the whole machine almost totally apart. I'll never forget having to take a laptop's entire keyboard off the top of the case to get to drive bay! I had to take the screen off at the hinge and everything! It was a dangerous, delicate mess! But, on today's laptops, you mostly just have to take off a single panel, as you can see in the picture. The drive was in there really snugly, thanks, in part, to the rubber, anti-vibration sleeves meant to keep the drive quieter in a laptop. What I found interesting, however, is that there were no screws holding the drive itself in. No cages or straps or anything outside of the SATA connections and the tightness of the fit. Because, the drive bay door fit very snugly and I had to apply pressure to get it in place correctly and screwed shut again.

On the right, you can see the drive bay still open with the new, freshly cloned drive in it and the old, small drive laying next to it.

This was actually a pretty simple upgrade to make. It was what I generally refer to as a "one screwdriver job". By that I mean that I could mainly have done it with the tiny pocket tool I carry with me in my pocket. Though, in this case, I used the old, cheap red-handled screwdriver in the picture. It's a freebie that is often used as a giveaway by tool companies. I've had that one since my first IT job, back when I worked for Hyatt Hotels. It's a little beat up now, but it can still handle a nice, easy job like this.

As you can see, the formatted drive is a little smaller than advertised. Also, they tend to round up a little and bytes and megabytes and gigabytes aren't round numbers, so the math gets a little funky. Oh, and there was a special 251Meg partition that couldn't be clearly identified by DiskWizard, even though it cloned the partition just fine. So, when you factor in all those things, you can see the nice, big partition, which is mostly empty and waiting for me to fill it up with great pictures!
Well, that's the plan at least.

In any case, now you have some idea how to change out a laptop hard drive if you should ever want to upgrade for yourself. I really left out a lot of the nitty-gritty detail that I felt was either self-explanatory or that you should really know how to do before attempting this in the first place. Perhaps not the best tutorial, but at least a good step-by-step overview of how to get it done!

Of course, that could describe almost any week or weekend for me.

So, Saturday, I got up early to run out and get a few parts to upgrade my laptop, braving the near cataclysmic, torrential downpour.  Naturally, I was far from the only geek hard core enough to weather the storm to spend some quality time at MicroCenter.  Though I have to admit, it wasn't nearly as crowded as I thought it would be, even with the flooding.  I know that Fry's Home Electronics is more popular with some geeks, but I think MicroCenter's prices are competitive and I think I get better, less aggressive, more knowledgeable, service there.  Though, in this case, I knew just what I wanted.  My main purpose was to get a bigger internal drive for my laptop, because all the pictures that I take suck up drive space like a drunk soaking up free booze and I was starting to feel the pinch.  But, I also wanted to get a wireless, "laptop" mouse that I can throw in my bag when I hit the road, since my laptop is quickly becoming my creative workstation.  I also grabbed a bunch of magazines that I usually don't find in my usual haunts.  Mainly Photoshop stuff, but some others that I wouldn't normally get like Practical Web Design and Giant Robot.  The particular issue of Practical Web Design has an article about time-sensitive, dynamic stylesheets that seemed pretty cool.

In any case, after that, I ran home to start cloning my laptop drive...  In fact, I'll have a better, detailed post on that later this week.  Once I got the cloning process started, I ran over to some friends' house with the intention of all of us going to the Friends of the Houston Library book sale.  However, after having my car almost get caught in water far deeper than it seemed, which was made worse by a jackass in a pickup cutting me off and throwing up a wave of water almost over the hood of my car, we thought better of making the attempt.  So, instead, I did a little work on her laptop, getting it on their wireless network and running some antispyware on it.  (Though, it sounds like it already could use another cleaning, so I'll probably be back.)

After that it was church and dinner.

Sunday, I got up early to get in a good workout.  I've been getting into a bad pattern of exercising late, staying up late and dragging all day long without enough sleep.  After watching another friend at dinner who's burning her candle at both ends, I made up my mind to not let that happen this week.  So, I got my lazy bones out of bed and got breakfast and coffee and got my behind in gear for a good, longer, workout before 10:00AM.

After that I was editing some photos for a project a friend of mine in New York is putting together.  Naturally, I hooked up my new wireless mouse to get better control of my editing tools.  I got a Logitech "laptop" mouse and it works great.  It's a little smaller than a regular mouse, but not uncomfortably so.  What's cool about it, though, is that it has a little USB dongle that links the mouse to the computer.  When it's not in use, it fits on the bottom of the mouse and, when you slide it on and off, it automatically turns the mouse on and off to save battery life.  That may seem like a little detail, but it's a great feature that helps not waste batteries when you're on the road.  That can be a big deal sometimes.  In any case, that probably took longer than it should but my graphic editing skills are weak, weak, weak.  So, the practice no doubt did me good.  Also, it was flattering to have her invite me to submit some of my photos for her project.

I also managed to get in a little reading and some photography, too.  Not much, but, still, every bit counts!  Obviously, when I get through with the book I'm reading, I'll review it.  And, sadly, I still didn't get any work done on the WordPress themes I want to build or the creative website either.  As busy as I get, I'm not sure how I'll manage time to work on that as regularly as I'd like.  I am trying to leverage Google Alerts to get some of that work done, but, there's still a component of it that requires quite a bit of work from me, so...  Well, I'll get there somehow.  (And, yes, I count the new site as part of the "coolness to come", along with the step-by-step post on upgrading a laptop hard drive.)