Diary of a Network Geek

Oh, I got my glasses yesterday!

Sometime back, I decided that I would get some new glasses from a discount eyeglass place on the Internet. Well, the other night, while I was out, a nose-piece fell off my hoidy-toidy, expensive glasses that have never fit right.  It was the proverbial straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back.  That very night I got home and immediately ordered a pair of glasses from Goggles4U.com, per reccomendations on GlassyEyes.com.  After picking a set of frames and filling out the form with my perscription, my total, including shipping, came to $25.99.  The only downside?  They’d take ten to fourteen business days to arrive.

Well, they did finally arrive Tuesday via the regular, U.S. Postal mail.  They were quite well packaged and came with a hard case and an extra set of nose-pieces!  Also, right out of the packaging they fit better than the one’s I’d paid over $150 for about eighteen months ago.  In short, I’m quite happy with them.  So happy, in fact, that I’ll be ordering at least one other pair, so I have a back-up pair and fashion options.  I think this time, I’ll go rimless.  Possibly, I get a third pair that are different still.  At these prices, it’s almost a shame not to do so.

Sorry, though, no pictures yet.  Not enough hair for pictures, yet.

Advice from your Uncle Jim:
You don't have to be a genius to succeed. You just have to be the cleverest monkey in the cage.

Perhaps “reasonably priced” is more accurate.

Naturally, if you read Slashdot, you know this already, but many people don’t, so I thought I’d talk it up a bit. Fans of this blog will know that I am a big fan of Linux and, in fact, took an old laptop and loaded OpenSuSE Linux on it myself. Well, the folks at Medison have simplified this process by offering a decent enough laptop with Fedora RedHat Linux installed on it for $150. Yeah, that’s right, $150, plus shipping. When you think about it, that’s pretty incredible. For an independant writer, for instance, who doesn’t have a lot of cash to spare, or even a starving college student, that $150 laptop could make the difference between surviving and not.

Besides, it beats the “One Laptop Per Child” machine, which the manufacturers apparently plan to sell on the open market for $200. Of course, you can still use either one to browse pornography, so nothing’s perfect.

On this day in 1951, my profession was, essentially “born”.

Today marks the anniversary of the unveiling of the UNIVAC, the world’s first commercially produced and available electronic digital computer in the United States. The first electronic computers were invented during World War II by the military. Engineers in Great Britain invented the Colossus computer to help break Nazi codes, and engineers in the United States invented the ENIAC, to help calculate the trajectories of missiles.
The ENIAC used 17,468 vacuum tubes, 7,200 crystal diodes, 1,500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and around 5 million hand-soldered joints. It weighed 30 tons, was roughly 8 feet by 3 feet by 100 feet, took up 1800 square feet, and consumed 150 kW of power. The ENIAC radiated so much heat that industrial cooling fans were needed to keep its circuitry from melting down. It took two days to reprogram it for each new task.

The men who created the ENIAC decided to go into private business for themselves, and it was on this day in 1951 that they unveiled their first product, the UNIVAC I, the world’s first commercially available electronic computer. It was quite an improvement over the ENIAC, using a mere5,200 vacuum tubes, UNIVAC I weighed just 29,000 pounds (or 13 tons), consumed 125 kW, and could perform about 1,905 operations per second running on a 2.25 MHz clock, which was the fastest calculation rate in the world at the time. The Central Complex alone (i.e. the processor and memory unit) was 14 feet by 8 feet by 8.5 feet high. The complete system occupied more than 350 square feet of floor space.
The first customer to buy the UNIVAC was the United States Census Bureau, and the computer was used to predict the presidential election of 1952, after early returns began to come in. It correctly predicted that Eisenhower would win. Originally priced at $159,000, the UNIVAC I rose in price until they were between $1,250,000 and $1,500,000. A total of 46 systems were eventually built and delivered.
Thomas J. Watson, the chairman of IBM at the time, thought that computers, with all their incredibly complex vacuum tubes and circuitry, were too complicated. He famously said, “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” But with the invention of the microchip in 1971, all the processing power of those thousands of vacuum tubes and punch cards could suddenly be crammed into a space the size of a postage stamp. Within a decade, the first personal computers, or PCs, began to appear. Ironically, Apple made them popular and inexpensive enough for the home user and drove what we think of as the computer revolution.

But, it all started with UNIVAC. So, happy birthday, big guy. Thanks for being just delicate enough to keep me working!

Okay, so my idea of fun may be changing a bit.

I’ve noticed a theme in my cancer caregivers’ rhetoric lately: clean.  Get clean, stay clean, avoid things that aren’t clean.  Wash your hands, gargle with their special solution to keep the mouth sores away, don’t eat raw foods that might have bacteria on them.  This over-riding theme of cleanliness may have had some small effect on my choice of interesting links.

First, with all the house cleaning, there was this tool to minimize, if not eliminate, dust from doing wall-board work.  Now,  that might not seem like a big thing, but, trust me, all that dust is an irritant for months to come after the work is done!  I know, having stuck my leg through a ceiling while running cable and doing the repair work myself.
Next, is a link to a toothbrush sanitizer, which has always been a thing for me.  Well, not toothbrush sanitizing, per se, but generally good oral hygine.  I’m always worried about things stuck in my teeth and bad breath and making sure my gums don’t bleed.  That’s gotten very important to me these days!  Bleeding is bad when my red and white counts are down so low!
And, this automatic soap dispenser caught my eye, since I’m washing my hands so much.  Before I even saw it, I was thinking about how the most likely point of contact for bacteria was at the soap dispenser.  An automatic soap dispenser would cure that and this shiny, chrome one would look nice on my bathroom counter!
Finally, while not a cleanliness link, this web-enabled pill box struck me as just the thing for someone having to track a bunch of medications.  Their service, which isn’t quite available yet, helps a patient keep track of all the various medications and times and frequencies they have to take.  And, at $60 a month, trust me, this would have been a Godsend this past week.  I have so many pills to take that a little extra help keeping them straight would have been a big help!

So, there you are, that’s what sounds “fun” to a cancer patient with a lot on his mind!  Kind of boring, but at least it’s something to think about over the weekend.  Enjoy your Friday!

Well, I had my CT scan this morning.

I headed over to my doctor’s office this morning, arriving very early.  In fact, a good thirty minutes before they opened.  So, I called work to make sure C. knew where I was at and gave her my cell number, in case there was an IT emergency.  Then, I had her transfer me over to the president’s voice-mail, since I report to him, I thought he should know where I was all morning.  Seemed reasonable.  Not that it’s a big deal.  I generally work more hours than all but two or three of the salaried people at my office, so they can afford to give me a little leeway about this pneumonia thing.
So, naturally, I’m on the phone with yet a third person when they open the office and a mess of people get in before me, so I sit and wait another thirty minutes just to get my blood drawn and my order for the CT scan.  Then, I hot-foot it over to the imaging center so I can wait a little more.  Something close to an hour and a half, but they got me in the same day, so it’s not so bad.  Oh, and apparently, my insurance doesn’t cover the CT scan so I had to cough up $450.  Thank God this is a month we get three paychecks!  Normally, I hate getting paid every two weeks, but this month it’s going to work out very well for me.
It was an “open” CT scan, which means it was basically just a donut they passed me through.  But, I had to lay flat on my back.  I got down on my back and immediately started breathing heavy.  The genius tech looked at me and asked if I was having trouble breathing.  I thought, yeah, moron, that’s what the funny look on my face means and why I’m making that strange whistling noise!  But, instead of saying that, I reminded him that I was here because I had pneumonia and probably a lung full of fluid.  So, he told me how the machine was going to ask me to hold my breath and that if I couldn’t, to just let it out slowly and breathe back in slowly, too.  While I couldn’t hold my breath all the way every time, I was able to get by with just a slow exhale to finish out the count for the nice machine overlord.

Now, the doctor didn’t say it, but I’m sure he was checking for cancer, since I have a family history of that.  The tech seemed to think it was just a lung full of fluid from the pneumonia.  I would be surprised at this point if I ended up with cancer.  A bit early for my family, and I’m much more aware of it than anyone else in my family and have made dietary changes to suit my family medical history.  High-fiber and, usually, light on the red meat.  More fish and chicken and even straight vegetarian sometimes.  I know, I know, heresy in Texas, but there you have it.  (Though I have to admit I do have a weakness for bacon.  “Bacon makes it better!”)
So, tomorrow morning at 11:30am, I go see the doctor to get the results.  And, no doubt, several prescriptions to drain the lung and fix whatever else ails me.  Hopefully, I won’t have to go into the hospital to get my lung drained, but whatever the doctor tells me to do, I’ll just do.  Now that I’m under a doctor’s care, it would be foolish to do any less.

What was interesting, though, was the call I got about 1:00pm.  C. had been out to lunch when I finally came back, so she didn’t know I was in the office.  She called on my cell phone to see how I was doing.  She lost her mother to cancer, so she knows why they tend to send folks for CT scans in situations like this.  It was a little surprising to me that she’d get worried.  Honestly, she’d started to get rather predictable, even going back to her old, less-than-kind  boyfriend when she was denied her work-related dating.  Took about as long as I thought it would, too.  Under two weeks.  Predictable.  But, the concern was a bit of a novelty.  She even apologized for not being as good a friend as she should have been when she saw me in person next.
The other surprise was the other girl who started at the same time C. did, O. coming by to check on me.  I don’t think I’ve ever done more than exchange a few pleasantries with her, maybe flirt a little, but she seemed quite genuinely concerned for my health.
Honestly, I had no idea so many people worried about me!  It’s sort of nice to know.  And, I’m sure my mother is relieved to know that people are looking out for me down here, so far away that she can’t.

So, still, no real news yet.  I’m sure I’ll have more tomorrow after seeing the sawbones tomorrow.

So, today, my Friday Fun Links have a theme.

I’m not sure if it was the cleaning this week or what, but I’ve been feeling very, well, um, “domestic”.  So, my fun links this week pretty much all have to do with things around the house, or housing itself.
Okay, so let’s start from the outside and work our way in.  First, I have a link to some interesting plans for an 11 foot by 7 foot flat in London.  Apparently inspired by a janitor’s closet with a bathroom that sold for £170,000 in London’s upmarket Chelsea, the plan is really quite ingeneous.
Now, let’s talk furnishings…  If you’ve just spent $335,000 on a large broom closet, you probably don’t have much left over for furnature, so it’ll be IKEA for you.  No worries, though, thanks to the IKEA Hacker blog.  Yes, the stuff on that blog all started life as humble IKEA flatpack that got modified into something wonderful.  I especially like the breakfast nook for two.
But, you’ll need light for this tiny hovel, right?  Well, thanks to Gizmodo, you can light your flat with the coolest, freakiest science-fiction lamps ever.  Also, you can use the coolest, hippest, most radically arty light switches ever to turn the lights on.  I thought the pool ball switch was cool for the mini-flat, since it was described as being about the size of a billards table.
But, wait!  There’s more!  Since this flat would be so totally strapped for space, there’d be no room for a rack of cookbooks in the kitchen, er, make that, by the tiny hotplate and microwave.  So, instead, use the coo.boo Digital Cookbook that’s the size and shape of a spatula!
And, finally, in a barely related story, if you can squeeze into the fridge, get out some Ben and Jerry’s Steven Colbert’s Americone Dream ice cream.  No, I’m not making that up, but, also no, it’s not quite available yet.  Yet.

So, there you have it, a geek getting domestic and working on too little sleep.  Enjoy your links and your Friday!
Oh, and don’t forget to vote in the poll!!

Saves Nine.” Though, nine what, I have no idea.

I’ve been thinking about buying a sewing machine.
Okay, go ahead. Just get it all out of your system. When you’re done laughing, you can come back and read my reasoning on this.

Done? Great.
The other day, I was cleaning… No, no, it’s okay. You just go ahead and laugh it all right out of your system. I pretty well expected it.
Anyway, as I was cleaning, I found a great, big bundle of really nice, soft grey fabric that had been intended to make me a robe. Well, that was what I intended to be done with it. I was asked what I wanted for Christmas one year, when money was tight, but several hundred dollars of “birthday money” had been spent on a high-end sewing machine. Thinking of the sewing machine, and the owner’s penchant for wasting money on projects that never were completed, I asked for a home-made bath robe. We picked out the pattern and the fabric and, almost five years later, I still have the untouched fabric, but no sewing machine or pattern. And, that got me thinking.

There are a lot of things I could do around the house and yard that would be really cool, if I had a decent sewing machine. I don’t need some high-end, computerized, multi-stitch number with a built-in serger or anything like that. Just something good enough to sew, say medium-weight canvas. With that, not only could I make that robe, but I could recover the sofa cushions. Or make a cover for the entire couch. I could make canvas covers for the porch to replace the now quite aged and brittle translucent, corrugated, fiberglass roofing on it now. I could make privacy shades for the porch. I could make either a canvas roof or privacy shades or both for the semi-mythical teahouse/pavilion I have dreamed of putting up in place of the nasty, old shed in my backyard. Really, the possibilities are endless. And, yes, I would follow through on that. And, I figure, in the long run, it would save me money.

So, how hard is it to teach yourself to sew?

Anybody want to buy land in Costa Rica?

So, the other day, I was talking with this guy from church about his impending divorce. It’ll be his second, so there wasn’t much I could tell him that he didn’t already know. And, since he lives in the River Oaks area, there’s going to be a whole lot more money involved than I’ll probably ever see in my lifetime. Again, not much advice I could give him, except, of course, to remind him why one hires a lawyer for these things. I just reminded him that he didn’t need to roll over simply because he was the man and, traditionally, the woman got the lion’s share of the communal property. They’d earned that money together, each contributing their part and he was entitled to his fair share. Besides, at the moment, she actually makes more money than him, so it’s not like he’d be hurting her financially at all. Mainly, though, I “advised” him to let the lawyers haggle it out when things got ugly about the money. Again, that is why one pays for a personal shark in the first place, right?

Anyway, he was talking about investing in real estate in Central America. Specifically, in Costa Rica. Now, a lot of times when guys start in with this kind of thing, I figure it’s somebody trying to impress me, but not with him. Something about the matter-of-fact way he talks about some of this stuff and his plans for developing some of the land and making a resort just ring too true for me to feel like there’s a scam or an ulterior motive. I’ve been wrong before, of course, but, these days, I’m a fairly hardened, bitter cynic and I tend to trust my instincts when it comes to people. Sadly, when I suspect something untoward, I’m rarely wrong.
But, he knows what I do for a living and for fun. He knows, for instance, that I’ve done web design work for my divorce lawyer. And, as a check was on the way, I mentioned that again this weekend when I saw him. Also, it turns out that when you Google Houston Divorce Lawyer, my lawyer already shows up on the second page of hits. Considering that he didn’t show up in the first 20+ pages of hits before I revamped his website, I’d say we’re doing pretty well. A little more time and he’ll be on that Holy Grail of search engine optimization, the first page of Google results.
In any case, I was joking with him, the guy from church, not the lawyer, about how I was in that very unique position of actually making money back from my divorce lawyer. But, it wasn’t long before he was asking about domain names and websites and optimization. And, yes, I found myself volunteering to do a simple website for him and optimize it for the search engines. And, of course, advise him about how to find an URL submission service that would keep his ranking good and high.

And that’s when he jokingly offered to trade me a hectare of land in Costa Rica for doing a website from scratch and optimizing it for the search engines. At least, I think he was joking. I mean, he was sort of laughing about it, but… But, it would be a pretty damn good deal and I’m thinking about calling him to see if he was serious or not. Because, I’ve been looking around at it a little bit and $750 worth of land now could very quickly and easily be over $75,000 some time in the next five years.

And, I was getting ready to tell him I’d do it for nothing.

So, does anyone know about real estate investing in Costa Rica?

“… Puppy dog tails, that’s what little boys are made of.”

So, really, I don’t have anything to say, but I know that if I don’t post something, people will wonder if the aliens have finally come to carry me away. I keep trying to explain that they’ll get the “special” e-mail from my super-secret automated dead-man switch system if that happens, but, who listens to me? So, instead of anything coherent, y’all are going to get some random snippets in a sort of stream of consciousness update.

I got the Waveceptor the other day, because it was under $30 on a closeout special. So, I’m now on atomic time and not living fifteen minutes into the future. Maybe that’s why I’m so tired?

I made red sauce tonight, but this time I added in a jar of fancy, red peppers, because they were on the shelf and I’d forgotten how long ago I’d bought them. Or, in fact, if I had bought them. And, if I didn’t buy them, who’d put them there… Right, see? Better I should use them now, quick, before they go bad. If they haven’t already.

No word back from anyone about the Craigslist.org post again. No word from the lady in question, in particular. Hopefully, she’ll get word and doesn’t freak out about me still thinking about her. Yes, thanks to my divorce, I worry about being percieved as a crazy stalker, even though I’ve never thought of myself that way before.

My mother has yet to read my blog even though she made such a huge deal about reading it for months before I let her. Parents. Pffft!

I found two writing contests that I’m going to enter. In fact, I started on a story for one, and would be working on it now, if not for my lack of sleep for weeks and a low-level state of delirium. Of course, that might simply add to the atmosphere of surreality and fantasy that I’m trying to capture in my writing.

I sold a William Burroughs t-shirt in my Cafe Press store the other day. But, I’m still not seeing a credit in the store. And, who would buy a XXL black t-shirt with a red silhouette of William S. Burroughs on it anyway?

I’ve almost set up an old Dell laptop for my redneck nephew for Christmas. I hope to get Windows2000 loaded on it for him. I’m working on configuring the WLAN card now, so I can get on-line with it and do updates and stuff. I figure I should try to give him something fairly standard and easy to use, but fun, too.

I was looking at better laptop bags than the freebie I got with the Toshiba. Everything seems like it’s close to what I want, but not quite right. I’ll probably have to go to a store and actually mingle with actual consumers, uh, “consuming” to find the right bag. Then I can pass a bag along to my nephew with the older laptop.

I talked to LK the other day. This “just friends” thing is strange, but kind of cool. Never done it before, with an ex, but it’s sort of nice, really.
Or, I’m delirious.
Whatever.
Okay, time to get the coffee ready for tomorrow and catch some ZZZs.

On this day in 1951, my profession was, essentially “born”.

Today marks the anniversary of the unveiling of the UNIVAC, the world’s first commercially produced and available electronic digital computer in the United States. The first electronic computers were invented during World War II by the military. Engineers in Great Britain invented the Colossus computer to help break Nazi codes, and engineers in the United States invented the ENIAC, to help calculate the trajectories of missiles.
The ENIAC used 17,468 vacuum tubes, 7,200 crystal diodes, 1,500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and around 5 million hand-soldered joints. It weighed 30 tons, was roughly 8 feet by 3 feet by 100 feet, took up 1800 square feet, and consumed 150 kW of power. The ENIAC radiated so much heat that industrial cooling fans were needed to keep its circuitry from melting down. It took two days to reprogram it for each new task.

The men who created the ENIAC decided to go into private business for themselves, and it was on this day in 1951 that they unveiled their first product, the UNIVAC I, the world’s first commercially available electronic computer. It was quite an improvement over the ENIAC, using a mere5,200 vacuum tubes, UNIVAC I weighed just 29,000 pounds (or 13 tons), consumed 125 kW, and could perform about 1,905 operations per second running on a 2.25 MHz clock, which was the fastest calculation rate in the world at the time. The Central Complex alone (i.e. the processor and memory unit) was 14 feet by 8 feet by 8.5 feet high. The complete system occupied more than 350 square feet of floor space.
The first customer to buy the UNIVAC was the United States Census Bureau, and the computer was used to predict the presidential election of 1952, after early returns began to come in. It correctly predicted that Eisenhower would win. Originally priced at $159,000, the UNIVAC I rose in price until they were between $1,250,000 and $1,500,000. A total of 46 systems were eventually built and delivered.
Thomas J. Watson, the chairman of IBM at the time, thought that computers, with all their incredibly complex vacuum tubes and circuitry, were too complicated. He famously said, “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” But with the invention of the microchip in 1971, all the processing power of those thousands of vacuum tubes and punch cards could suddenly be crammed into a space the size of a postage stamp. Within a decade, the first personal computers, or PCs, began to appear. Ironically, Apple made them popular and inexpensive enough for the home user and drove what we think of as the computer revolution.

But, it all started with UNIVAC. So, happy birthday, big guy. Thanks for being just delicate enough to keep me working!