Diary of a Network Geek

QuantumofSolace

Originally uploaded by Network Geek

I saw Quantum of Solace Friday night, but I’m just getting to review it now.

I have to admit, when Daniel Craig was revealed as the newest James Bond, I wasn’t impressed. But, after seeing Casino Royale, my opinion on the subject changed. Dramatically.
Quantum of Solace, in spite of the goofy, contrived title, is, if anything, better than Casino Royale ever thought of being. In fact, unlike all previous Bond movies, this is the first movie that’s not based on a book or story from Ian Fleming.  UPDATE: I’ve been told by a pair of Bond fanatics at work that this is incorrect.  Goldeneye is the first Bond movie not based, at least in part, on an Ian Flemming story of some kind.  This is, however, the first movie that is an obvious and direct sequel that really doesn’t stand entirely on its own. This let the script writers do some things that they might not have been able to do otherwise. For instance, this movie continues from where the last one ended. In fact, it really sort of helps if you see Casino Royale right before going to see Quantum of Solace, because things will make more sense. Honest.

Quantum of Solace starts with Bond running from pursuit by both classic, unnamed “bad guys” and police. It turns out that he’s running because he has Mr. White, who’s responsible for killing Bond’s lady love in Casino Royale, in the trunk of the car.
Mr. White, in classic “War on Terror” fashion is tortured somewhere off UK soil to get information out of him. But, instead of cracking, with the help of a turned agent in MI6, White escapes. Bond, naturally, gives chase. And chases the whole organization through the rest of the movie. Though it’s not clearly identified, I think, Quantum is the name of the vast criminal organization to which Mr. White belongs. Of course, the chase runs through several exotic and beautiful locations, not to mention the two very exotic and beautiful women that Bond meets along the way.
I won’t ruin the movie by revealing the rest of the plot, but there are a few twists and turns that you won’t expect. Also, an homage to earlier Bond films, including Goldfinger. And, there are quite a few car chases and intense action scenes. The villain is a little weak, especially compared to Craig’s Bond. The only thing that wasn’t there were a lot of gadgets. Oh, sure, Bond had a super cell phone and there were some cool computer gadget things, but those are really almost here now, if they aren’t already.

I won’t say this is the best James Bond film ever, but it’s got to be in the top five, for certain. I’d definitely see this again if the opportunity presented itself. And, no matter what anyone says, Daniel Craig makes a great James Bond.
If you haven’t seen it yet, do yourself a favor and go see Quantum of Solace!

Through a circuitous route, I stumbled across an article by Tony Snow, a speech writer and media consultant for President George H. W. Bush.

Mr. Snow died on July 12, 2008, after fighting cancer, twice. Before he passed away, however, he wrote this article for Christianity Today, titled Cancer’s Unexpected Blessings. Go, read the article, then, if you can stomach some more, come back and I’ll share with you some of my thoughts on slow-dancing with death for the better part of a year.

We humans spend a lot of time worrying about death. Perhaps not on an individual basis, but in the aggregate, we spend a lot of time trying to avoid death, to hide from it, to deny it. When I was diagnosed with cancer almost two years ago, I could no longer hide from it or feel myself into thinking that it was a long way off. It could be tomorrow, next week, months from now, or years, but I’m going to die. In fact, we all are, sooner or later. I’ve heard it said that death is the one thing we all have in common. None of use make it out of here alive.
So, what does that mean? On a practical level, what does it mean to know that I’m going to die? It means that every moment is borrowed time. Every experience, no matter how painful or uncomfortable, is an opportunity to learn something, about myself, about my world or about my God. Frankly, it’s hard to put into words. I think that only someone who’s been close to death really gets it deep down in the bones where words don’t quite reach. Because, you see, when I was there, when I was right close to taking my last breath, I was convinced that it wasn’t quite time yet. Only later, when I’d had a chance to think about it did I truly understand how close I’d come to being gone. When I was there, when the Angel of Death had me in that cold, bony bear-hug, it was the farthest thing from my mind. Then, all I could think about was living. All I could think about was seeing people I missed, doing things that I wanted to do. Maybe trying to correct a few of the mistakes I’d made along the way and, hopefully, God willing, have time enough to take another shot at some of those things and do ‘em right this time around.
Naturally, when I was first diagnosed, I was quite upset. I felt cheated, like God owed me so many more years of life and taking that away from me was unfair. That, however, didn’t last nearly as long as I would have thought.

In another article on MSN, I read “Learning you have cancer and going through treatment can dramatically affect a person’s life. Cancer can be isolating, and depression affects up to 38 percent of cancer patients.” My thought when I read that was, “No shit”. Who can understand something like this? How can you explain it? A fellow cancer survivor, and a good friend of mine, talked about going to the doctor after getting diagnosed to “…see how badly my body had betrayed me.” And, that, as much as anything, sums up that weird feeling of loss and surprise and gut-checking impact when the diagnosis is made, then confirmed. It knocks you off your emotional feet, stalls your motivational momentum, and kicks you in your spiritual nut-sack. Suddenly, every uncomfortable moment becomes more precious than any commodity you’ve ever owned. You find yourself suddenly willing to trade any possession, no matter how precious, for a just a few more minutes in the embrace of an old friend, or the bed of an old lover. Some, like me, may find themselves longing to know the mind of God, but without the big rush to look Him in the eye to ask the questions.
It’s funny, when I think of it now, how many times I’ve contemplated killing myself over the years. Well, it’s funny in light of how many radioactive enemas I’ve had, and how much personal dignity I’ve traded, all in the effort to squeeze a few more minutes out of this drab, pre-processed world of ours. Not too many years before my diagnosis, I was at one of those points. It’d been a rough year, or two or three, and I thought I was done, finally. But, God had a few lessons left to teach me, a few things for me, perhaps, to teach someone else, so I’m still here, flailing about for words to express the unexpressible.

In the end, what cancer taught me was something I thought I’d learned from that old poet, Warren Zevon, several years before, when he was dying of cancer. It was a quote, from his last live TV appearance on the David Letterman Show that appeared on the VH1 retrospective, which I watched again while I wrote the last bit of this post. After long last, I finally understand just how much to enjoy every sandwich.

Advice from your Uncle Jim:
"Denial is a powerful tool. Never underestimate its ability to cloud your vision."
   --Melody Beattie

My house almost blew up tonight.

No, really.
As I write this, I’m waiting for a serviceman from Centerpoint Energy to come out and turn my gas back on. Apparently, shortly after I left for church this evening a neighbor smelled gas by my house. They called emergency services in Jersey Village, where I live. When the emergency services got out, they could smell gas, so they turned off my power and got Centerpoint out. Centerpoint repaired the leak, or so it seems. Actually, the first thing the serviceman is going to check is to make sure the leak isn’t a leak any more. Then, assuming all is well, he’ll turn the gas on and I can light all my pilots and so on. That’s why the gas was turned off when I got home. Naturally, they couldn’t find me, since I’d gone to church, so they couldn’t turn anything on until they knew I could light all the pilots again. Otherwise, my house would have filled with gas, hit something electric and, well, let’s just say I was irritated with the whole thing until I got the lights back on and figured out what almost happened. Thank God!

I guess my little efforts and building up a little good karma in the short term paid off today.
See, I helped two people with computer things today. This morning, I started reformating and reinstalling my friend J.’s wife, L’s, laptop. She’d been having problems with it and I looked at it several times, but I couldn’t find anything obviously wrong. So, rather than spend any more time on it, I backed up her files and started reinstalling it. Of course, that got interrupted by my power being out, but, still, I’m sure I’ll get it done pretty quick now while I wait for Centerpoint to turn my gas back on.

The other person I did a little mitzvah for was Alison over at Inspired Work of Self-Indulgence.
She was having a little trouble with Comcast and their network. More specifically, it seemed to me she was having a problem with the assigned DNS servers. As any good network geek knows, an Internet connection with out DNS isn’t very useful. She had a connection, sure, but she couldn’t get anywhere. Comcast had been out multiple times trying to fix things. They’d even changed out her cable modem, which seemed to be connected fine when I looked at it. But, her wireless gateway was picking up the normal, default DNS servers from Comcast’s autoconfiguration. I reset the wireless router to the factory default and tweaked the settings a bit. The part that I think mattered the most was adding additional DNS servers from outside Comcast’s network. So now, if the main DNS server goes down or stops working, the backup servers should still find what she’s looking for.
Though, if the problem comes back, it occurred to me on the way home from church that it might be her laptop turning off her wireless connection in a power-save mode, so I might have to check that. (If she’s reading this, that’s a hint!) In any case, it was nice to at long last finally get to meet her. We’ve exchanged e-mail and comments and read each other’s blog posts for quite literally years now. She even sent me cookies when I was in the hospital getting chemotherapy that first time! But today was the first time actually meeting. Hopefully, now that she’s seen I’m completely harmless, it won’t be the last time.
Oh, and I got to meet Piedmont and his new pet human, er, owner. Both were sweet, too. And, of course, I got to meet Cheyenne, Alison’s chocolate lab. She’s as cute in person as in the pictures Alison takes of her and as spoiled, too! She has almost as much tummy as my own Hilda!

So, in spite of almost coming home to a smoking hole in the ground where my house used to be, it turned out to be quite a good day indeed! Stay warm, y’all, and make sure to check your gas!

Update: Apparently, my sins still out-weigh my good deeds, since the guy from Centerpoint Energy never showed up. I stayed up waiting for him until 4:00am, then went to bed, mumbling about liars in the night. I wish it were the first time.
I’m half tempted to turn it on myself and to hell with them. But, better safe than sorry, so I’ll just mumble quiet, Lovecraftian curses on them and try to be on about my day until the next lying serviceman arrives.

Advice from your Uncle Jim:
"You can't go back and have a brand new start, but anybody can start now and have a brand new end."

Right, I need to keep this all in mind.

So, as my regular readers know, I’m technically back in the dating world. I say that, “technically”, because, honestly, I haven’t been trying very hard at it. I’m still really recovering from chemo and trying to get my life back on track, which, rightly or wrongly, I feel I need to do before I’ll be ready to date. Naturally, for me, part of straightening out my life revolves around money, or the lack thereof.
See, back when I was out of work for a year, to keep the house and my erstwhile family together, I took a rather substantial pay cut. Now, I’ll grant you, I also didn’t work as hard, or as long, which was fine at the time, since I actually liked spending time with my family, especially my step-daughter. I liked being dad, even if I was one of two and only his “stunt double” most of the time. But, the thing is, I made a trade-off. I decided it was better to not have quite as much money so that I could have more quality time with friends and family. Only, sometime between that decision and now, during the divorce or chemo most likely, I lost sight of that. Until I read this article on MSN about dating a woman who makes more than you.

Sure, the average female lawyer or doctor earns vastly more than I do, but she also has to slave away for 80- or 100-hour weeks, whereas I can achieve my modest income with just a few hours of writing a day. Often, the result is that I’m desirous of her attention, while she’s envious of my ability to kick back on a lazy summer weekday afternoon and do absolutely nothing.

Wow.
I read that and re-read it. Then, it occurred to me just how unhappy I really was when I was “doing well” financially. I was so miserable and grouchy and stressed and … Well, let’s just say I wasn’t any fun to be around anyway, so I might as well have been at work where at least I might do some good.

The only thing is, with medical bills stacking up, I really started feeling the pressure and getting stressed and grouchy and miserable all over again. So, I really need to enjoy that I don’t work every weekend any more, or eleven-hour days. And, I need to not waste that time suckling at the glass teat, either. Geez, I have so many books to read that they’re piling up! Not to mention all the stuff I have to write.

Heh, maybe God really was doing me a favor when He forcibly slowed my life down and curtailed a lot of my spending.

Advice from your Uncle Jim:
"Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That's relativity."
   --Albert Einstein

Now is the time, gentle readers, to help your Uncle Jim out.

So, Thanksgiving is at my house this year. Maybe this will be the start of a new tradition, who knows? In any case, this year, I’m bringing the joy of the season to my house. Only, now, I have a small problem. Outside of making the turkey, which is frightening enough, I don’t have any simple, traditional, passed-down-from-grandma recipes that are easy enough for me to do. So, give me yours.

No, seriously. Look, I’ve invited a lot of people and, while I’ve gotten some polite refusals from some of them, many more have either said yes, or are waiting until the last minute to confirm. What’s more is that I’ve told several of them not to worry about bringing anything, lest that hold them back from coming. All of which means, I have an unknown number of people coming, some of whom aren’t bringing anything and may show up at the last minute. And, now, I sort of feel obliged to, you know, feed them and stuff. Except, I’m a fairly inept cook. Truly. So, I need your help. Kat has already sent me a brilliant and easy corn pudding recipe, which I’ll share in just a minute, but I need more. I especially need a good, simple, but interesting stuffing recipe. Most of you have my e-mail, so if you want to share privately, you can, otherwise, just leave them in the comments. At some point, I’ll collect them all and share them, and let you know which ones I actually try.

So, while you ponder that, here’s Kat’s Best-Friend’s Cousin’s Corn Pudding:
Fold in this order: 1 can drained corn, 1 can creamed corn, 1 stick melted butter, 8 oz. sour cream, 1 box jiffy corn mix. Bake at 325 for an hour to an hour and a half (should be the consistency of pudding in the middle). You can also add shredded cheese and jalapeno if you like.

Now, Kat knows me well, so she’s got a handle on the “keep is simple for the kitchen dunce” vibe that I need. Let that be your model and your guide.
Help me cook to fill stomachs, hearts and souls with warmth and joy.
But, keep it simple.

I hate it when the doctors are right.

No, I don’t have cancer again or anything like that. No, I just hate it when someone, especially a doctor, tells me that I can’t do something and they turn out to be right.

HeavyBag

Originally uploaded by Network Geek

In this particular case, I’m talking about running and my knees.
I was pretty well prepared to ignore my oncologist’s advice against taking up running because I’m tired of having even a small gut, even at my age. I know, as I creep up on forty, I should lower the bar, drop my personal standard and just accept that I’m probably always going to carry a “little extra” weight. Except, I just can’t. I hate the pudge that’s built up around my middle. Also, according to an article I read in Men’s Health while I was in the hospital, that “spare tire” could have been part of the reason I actually had cancer in the first place! So, one way or another, that gut has got to go.
Running may be out, but I know aerobic exercise is the best way to drop that weight, so I’ve been walking. Four days a week, weather permitting, I walk. The past month or so, I’ve walked at least a mile and, by my calculations, up to a mile and a-half most of the times I’ve been out. And, that’s good, but it’s not taking the weight off fast enough for me and, well, just not really enough to satisfy me in general. I feel the same about bicycling, though that might still be better than just walking. Not that I’d stop walking, but I feel like I need something more. So, as you can see in the picture, I got my old heavy bag out of the garage and cleaned it up.

Back in the “old days” when I was in something that resembled good shape, I hit the heavy bag twenty minutes, or more, at least three times a week. Of course, I also did some weight training with dumbbells and push-ups and sit-ups or crunches in the morning five days a week. But, I know it was going after that heavy bag that got me and kept me in shape. Thankfully, I still have some of the callouses and the bag gloves and wraps to start up again. I know it won’t be easy, but I’ve got to do something. Besides, I did like being in shape. I seem to recall more than one woman I knew at the time appreciated it, too, and well, my long-time readers will know, nothing motivates me like the opposite sex.
If you’ve never tried it, boxing and kickboxing are great ways to stay in shape. I wasn’t overly lean when I did it, but I certainly carried a lot less weight in general and fat in particular. I mean, I wasn’t like a cast member from 300, but I know I looked better than I do now. Also, I eat better now than I did when I was in my late twenties and thirties. I’m no vegetarian, but I do try to avoid eating whole boxes of Twinkies, no matter how much I love them.

Well, I guess there’s nothing to it, but to do it. So, I’ve got the heavy bag out there and my bag gloves are by the back door. I only managed three minutes after my walk on Sunday, but, well, I’ve got to start somewhere! I’m sure if I keep at it, I’ll be back to twenty minute workouts in no time!

I once read somewhere that doing 100 push ups in the morning makes you feel like you can accomplish anything.

Well, it’s been a while since I’ve done 100 push ups every morning, but, when I used to do that, it was true. I’d feel like if I could do that, well, at least the day wasn’t wasted, so I might as well give whatever crazy task was at hand a try.
Apparently, someone else agrees with me and has actually developed a program, of sorts, that lets you build up to that goal of 100 push ups. Not coincidentally, the site is called “one hundred push ups” and, if you believe their press, following this plan will let you do 100 push ups, in one, continuous set in just six weeks.

I haven’t tried it yet myself, but I’ll get back to you.

Advice from your Uncle Jim:
"They don't hold meetings about rainbows."

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.