Diary of a Network Geek

“We can rebuild him…”
Okay, so a couple of weeks ago, I totally ruined several of my favorite shirts with an accidental, but shockingly liberal, splash of bleach. Now, I have several trippy, neo-tiedie shirts that are no longer okay to wear to work. So, I’m going to have to get more. And, that got me thinking…
At least one of my sisters has always implied that I don’t know how to dress and, frankly, I often feel tragically unhip or out of step with good fashion sense. I mean, I am a professional geek, after all. But, I want to dress nicer. More attractively. And, since I have such a large female readership these days, I thought I’d give you all the opportunity to remake me. Dress me the way you think I should be dressed. Make me look the way you think I would look best. Clothe me from the skin out. Start me fresh.

But, first, a few caveats:
1. I will not wear silk underwear. Or thongs. Or “tighty whities”. Or… Okay, look, I’m a basic, cotton boxers sort of guy. Let’s just start there, okay? So, maybe not from the skin out, but at least, from the skivvies out. Okay?
2. I am “poor folk”. If you suggest designers, please suggest low-cost alternatives. Or, understand that I won’t be able to go all out on that particular suggestion. In short, let’s try not to bankrupt the Network Geek, okay?
3. I’m a pretty casual guy, even for work.
4. Yes, you can rebuild my work wardrobe, too, but, remember casual is the key. Though, dressing a little better there, too, wouldn’t hurt.
5. All my footwear is black. ALL of it. UPDATE: Okay, not quite all, but all my work/date footwear is black.
6. Extra weight will be given to the opinions of single women. Especially single women who know and/or might date me. No offense guys, but, hey, I have goals and priorities, too.
7. Let’s start with the non-work wardrobe and give that the most emphasis. My goal here is to be more dateable and less alone. If I find a steady girl, she’ll be dressing me from then on out, but until then, I admit it, I need all the help I can get.
8. I will not make fun of or overly critisize any choices made, but I may attempt to steer things away from things I know I will not ever wear.
9. I’m serious about this, so, please, be serious, too. Really. I know you ladies can make me look better than I do now and I sincerely want to look better.

I’m working out to try and lose some weight and build more muscle, so, make me your living, breathing Ken doll and have fun. Keep it clean. Also, if you’d like to keep your suggestions private for whatever reason, feel free to e-mail me.
Here’s what you have to work with:

(And, special thanks to Doc, my roommate, for taking these pictures this weekend for me.)

Updated Pic

“Do you really read this stuff or just put it out on the coffee table?”

“Who are you? Are you for real? Really for real?”

One way or another, people are always asking me that about the “me” they see on my blog. Not everyone is quite as lighthearted as the two people I’ve quoted here, but, sooner or later, everyone who’s never met me in person asks.
I started to write a long piece about all the things I am, with links to old posts so readers could track back and find all the other very self-involved things I’ve said in past posts, but, well, that seemed a little pointless after I got rolling on it. The best way to find out about me is to use that “search” function on the right-hand side of the page. Want to hear my voice? Search for “voice” or “my voice” and you’ll find samples. Want to see pictures? Search for “pictures” and you’ll see me, my dog, my home, and even my parents. Or, you can click on the category links. They all work and will show an archive of all the things in that category. Want to see my pathetic attempts to get out of my shell and meet datable women? Click on the Bavarian Death Cake of Love archive. Want to see the books I’ve read recently? Try the Review archive or the Things To Read archive. (That’s what the first person was asking about. The crazy things I read.) To see more about my attempts at art, digital or literary, you have to hit my other, almost dead, blog, Fantasist’s Scroll. (That’s what the second person was asking about. Considering how much of a hard-core geek I am in the corporate world, I guess they had a hard time getting their head around the concept that I might do any kind of art.)

I’ve had friends who told me that I’m so honest on this blog that it occasionally makes them wince. And, I have tried to be as honest as I possibly can be here, keeping in mind that potential employers and dates will no doubt read it.

The thing is, though, that all you see when you read this blog is one, very limited, point of view: mine. And, if nothing else has been proven out by my personal history it’s the fact that I do not see myself either clearly or the way others see me. I am, for instance, my own worst critic. But, this is such a flat medium. As I’ve mentioned before, you can’t hear my voice or see the expression on my face or “feel” my timing on a joke. This blog is just one small window into who I am. A door that’s open just a crack. In person, you can walk around me and rattle other windows, or try the latch, or jiggle the handle on the doors to see if they’re unlocked. Whatever you think I am based on this blog, you’re wrong. You’re only getting one, small picture of what my life is like. The picture you get of me in person is very different. At least, I hope it is.

So, yes, I’m real. I’m as real as I know how to be, in person or via print. But, there’s more to me than you see here. If you know where to look.

I started cleaning house a little this weekend.

You see, I have this one room that is filled with the residue of a previous life. Old clothes and books and furniture and papers and junk and… Shoes. Lots of shoes.
I stopped gathering bags of junk to throw out when I hit six because I’d more than filled my garbage cans. I have so many more to fill and throw out that it was almost overwhelming. Almost. Most of the clothes will go to someplace like the Salvation Army or to help victims of Katrina or something. (Yes, there are still people from Katrina that need clothes!) I have old school uniforms and jeans and other kids clothes as well as adult clothes. I haven’t even started sorting the boxes upon boxes of books. Or decided what to do with all the left over furnature. Frankly, there are some heirlooms I’d like to see go back to my former in-laws, so that, one day, my former step-daughter might have them. I’m not sure if that will happen or not though. If you all could see this one room in my house filled with so many boxes and bags and piles of junk, you could see why it was so hard to get motivated to deal with it. There’s a part of me that would like to just heap it up on the front lawn and set fire to it, though I wouldn’t indluge in that kind of waste even if it weren’t illegal to burn that much that way. Still, it has to be dealt with somehow, sooner or later, so I’ve started. A little at a time and it will get out faster than I might think.

I joked with my mother not too long ago that I should have a party to get rid of it all. I could go through my house and tag all the things that I want to “dispose” of and then invite single women in to just cart it off, in exchange for contatct information and/or dates. She thought it was hilarious. I even had a plan for different levels of exchange for the stuff.
I could use colored stickers or tags, with each color requiring a different level of personal info. For white stickers, just a name and good phone number, pre-verified. For red stickers, a name, good, preverified phone number and at least two evenings that the lady in question would be available for a date in the next two months. For gold stickers, a name, a good, preverified phone number, at least two evenings in the next month that she’d be available, and one actual, prearranged date. Obviously, the grade of “stuff” goes up with each sticker and the required information to gain access to the stickers. Each level has access to the lower levels of sticker as well.

Like I said, my mother thought it was hilarious. Have I mentioned that my family has a somewhat twisted sense of humor? And, interestingly enough, my father remained rather silent on that whole subject.
Anyone have any thoughts on the merits of such a party?

Now, you may have noticed that this post is surrounded by pictures of shoes. Lots of shoes. On the top left, a single pair of rather sensible shoes, women’s size seven and a-half. The rest, though, are seven pairs of, well, not so sensible shoes. One is a size eight, but the rest are also size seven and a-half. I should note that these are not my shoes, but shoes I am going to be getting rid of, one way or another, shortly. You may also notice that they have a theme, of sorts, besides being mostly black. Notice the extremely high heels, the amazing platforms. Also, if you click on the thumbnails, you’ll see that most of them are hardly worn, or, in some cases, not worn at all. I should note also, that while I paid for most, if not all of these shoes, I did not really pick them out. I retained veto rights over them, so they all had my tacit approval, but I did not go seeking them. They were not my “thing”, as it were, though I had little argument with them as I bought them. In many ways, they represent the worst kind of residue of that old life. They are not what I’m looking for at all anymore. They weren’t even what I was looking for back then, but they were what I found.
I hope that what these shoes represent don’t frighten or disturb anyone who reads this blog, either employers or potential dates. As I mentioned, they represent a life I did my best to walk away from and leave behind. But, I do hope they explain, a little, that when I say I have a sordid past, or that there are things about me that people don’t know or understand, I’m not joking. I’m not kidding around, or exagerating, or embelishing for effect, or even trying to impress anyone, when I say that I do have an unusual past, a slightly different history, than people might think from this blog and my current life. Or, as I like to remind people, even a priest has a past.

So, finally, here’s a little Advice from your Uncle Jim, kids, everyone has a past and that sometimes effects their future. We can change, even though it may be hard and may have a price, but, who we have been will still effect who we become. You can’t always tell who a person was by who they are today.

Advice from your Uncle Jim:
"What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us."
   --Ralph Waldo Emerson

I spent the majority of my day with the pre-sales engineer from Novell today.
And, that was a good thing. I learned a number of things today. (If you’re a non-geek or don’t feel like asking me to translate this into English for you, feel free to skip down to the paragraph break.) First, the bug I reported yesterday was totally false. The problem with Novell’s Open Enterprise Server running on SuSE Linux was that I’m so old school and security conscious. “How’s that?” you ask? Simple, I had a password that started with a dollar sign character. How’s that a problem? Well, it’s like this. The GUI installer takes the information to install eDirectory, Novell’s premier claim to fame, and throws it all at a command-line installer at a hidden console window. Sadly, in bash, the standard Linux shell, when you throw an unescaped “$” at the prompt programatically, it thinks you’re trying to define a string variable. That little misunderstanding throws the command-line eDirectory installer for a loop and it sits there, at its hidden console, prompting for a password and patiently waiting for you to supply it. Then, it misinterprets that and fails. Once the eDirectory install fails, everything afterward, that relies on eDirectory, also fails.
In other words, because I have more admin experience than Novell’s guys in the field and I’m committed to using secure passwords, I found a bug that no one thought to look for EVER BEFORE.

The other thing I learned today is that I know a hell of a lot about all kinds of strange, esoteric, varied and otherwise unrelated computer stuff. And, that is very, very cool.
Now, I’m going to go do something. No, I don’t know what and neither will you. Tomorrow, I’ll post something else. Good night.

Were you a little lonely on St. Valentine’s Day? Then, my geeky readers, I’ve got just the thing for you: The top eleven Geek Pickup lines, third edition, as stolen from BBSpot, for your Friday afternoon funny:

Geek Pick-Up Lines: Part 3
11. I’m attracted to you so much that scientists will begin to doubt the Theory of Relativity.
10. What’s a nice girl like you doing in a chatroom like this?
9. Resistance is futile.
8. No matter how I sort things, you’ll always be first.
7. No, that’s not a Logitech MX-100 in my pants, but thanks for noticing.
6. I think you could be an integral part of my project life cycle.
5. I’d switch to emacs for you.
4. You put the SPARC in my workstation.
3. If you have an empty slot, I have the card to fill it.
2. We’re like SLI. We’re great alone, but we’d be so much better together.
1. You got me stuck on Caps Lock, if you know what I mean.

Hey, they just keep on getting better, don’t they? Well, there are more coming, but, I like doling them out over time. You know, to build the anticipation!
Happy Friday!

It’s been a long week.
And, frankly, next week doesn’t look like it’s going to get any easier. For starters, I’ve been wrestling with this server at work. I mean this has been real Jacob wrestling with the Angel kind of epic battle stuff here. In fact, it was so bad that just today I was looking at returning Novell’s Open Enterprise Server and SuSE Linux in favor of Windows Server 2003. For those of you who know me and know my Novell zealotry, you know how much I would have hated to do that. Thankfully, the guy Novell sent over to help out got me squared away. I think I’ve actually been Novell certified longer than he’s been in the business, but, still, he knew his stuff, so it’s all good.
I’ve been trying to get the server installed for the past two weeks and kept running into strange errors. Well, it turns out to have a really, tiny, picaune thing. Remember some time back I was talking about naming conventions? Turns out it was more important than you could imagine. In the old days, we all used the underscore character in our tree names, as in “CompanyName_Tree”. Now, apparently, no one uses that convention and, as a result, a bug slipped through that kills the install. So, do I get a prize for finding it? Doubtful.
In any case, we managed to convince the boss that we should stick with Linux and OES and that we’d go over the migration tools tomorrow, which is when most of you will be reading this post anyway. So, I’m still going to get those career goals in after all. Woot!

On other fronts, I’ve got at least one, dear, sweet lady crawling all over my site to try and find out all about me. No matter what she finds here, and, yes, I am directing her to put the best possible spin on who I am, it still won’t be me. Not all of me. Not the part of me that people really love. The blog gives information, but, I’m more than the sum of my stories. And, in fact, many stories simply won’t ever see print, here or anywhere else. I have collections of odd, little facts and strange, obtuse skills that simply don’t fit well into a blog. And my humor doesn’t really play well in print, either. It’s all timing with me, and you can’t do timing very well in print. Still, I worry that we’ll be all out of things to talk about by the time we actually connect for coffee. I hope she’s ready to talk about herself!
And, several people have come to me for advice in the past week. Or, I’ve seen a couple of situations that I’d like to advise people about. Thankfully, I’ve shown restraint. Mostly. No one really wants me to give them advice. My advice is rarely well recieved, even if it is dead on. It may be my communication style, but, whatever it is, people sure don’t like hearing my advice. i do try and temper it by starting off with “Well, if I were in your position, I’d…” Doesn’t always work that well. Of course, I never said I made the best choices for myself, either! Still, sometimes it’s just like watching a slow-motion train wreck. You can see it all happening, but what can you do? These folks wouldn’t believe me if I told them the pattern I see in their lives. They’d just get pissed off at me. Of course, it wouldn’t change that I was right or that they knew I was right, but, still…

Well, there’s more, but my brain is all a-whirl with thoughts of my upcoming day, weekend and week that I can’t summon them up. Besides, I have a feeling I’d really irritate someone if I did! Always seems to work that way. So, it’s off to a lonely bed with my faithful companion. G’night.

I think it’s going to be a long day…
So, about the fourth time I was falling back asleep this morning, my mind started to wander. Now, keep in mind this is a PG-13 blog and I try to keep it clean, okay? Well, I’d had an e-mail exchange with someone who was sick, who was wishing for somebody to make her soup and snuggle with her under the covers and keep her warm. Yeah, guess where my half-waking mind went this morning in my cold house. Right. And, yes, that would have been a pleasant way to spend Valentine’s Day, frankly. Feeding someone soup and keeping her warm is better than the way I’ve spent that day in the last several years at any rate. Now, you dirty minded people, I told you to keep it clean. I wouldn’t have taken advantage of the sick lady. Just snuggled in and helped her break that fever. Honest. You can trust me on this. I would not lie to you about something so important.
So, does that sound sad and lonely and desperate? Or just warm and fuzzy and cute?
Well, I don’t care, either way. I wasn’t quite awake and my mind was just going somewhere warm. And snuggly.

As a fourth-generation Chicagoan, I celebrate this day a little differently.
You see, not only is this a day that greeting card companies crafted into a reason to waste money on cards, flowers and candy for someone who should love you without all that junk, but it was also a very important day in Chicago history. Today is the day when, in 1929, Al “Scarface” Capone gathered together seven of his closest friends and gunned them down. Yep, the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Old Al was clever, too. Not only did he get seven of his arch rival’s men together, but he dressed his hired guns up as police officers so that if they were spotted any witnesses would assume everything was under control because the police were already there! Yes, sir, that Al sure was an innovator.
So, as you shell out your hard-earned cash for disposable junk that will most likely go to waste, remember how they used to celebrate St. Valentine’s Day on the South Side. Feels about the same, doesn’t it?
Something else to keep in mind this year, the saint for whom this day is named was a martyr. What does that mean to you and me? That means that Saint Valentine was beaten almost to death and then beheaded on this day. Later he went on to perform miracles and all that to become a saint, but, today is the day we celebrate the fact that a hired mob worked him over pretty well with clubs and then chopped his head right off. Sort of sounds like how love feels for some of us about this time of year, doesn’t it?

Hey, all joking and dark humor aside, I hope everyone has a nice day today, whether they have someone to share it with or not.