Diary of a Network Geek

A funny thing happened to me while searching for tools.
I found them. Oh, okay, this might not be all that shocking, but, really I didn’t expect to find so many good utilities so quickly, even with Google. So, here you go, you poor, blighted souls that must manage and maintain Windows systems, here are your utility links:

Microsoft Resource Kit Tools
Windows Utilities at LabMice
Utilities at MajorGeeks.com(Not all free, but most are pretty cheap if they aren’t free.)
Freeware Files Windows Diagnostics (Now, these are ALL free.)
Doc Memory RAM Tester (Free for a limited time, so grab it quick!)

Ironically, just after I started this search, my need for these utilities mysteriously went away. Funny how often that happens after a reboot, isn’t it? Argh! Users! Can’t live with ’em and can’t make a living without ’em!

They just seem to multiply.
The slow PCs, I mean. There’s a never ending supply of the little buggers. Why, if I didn’t know better, I’d say someone was out there manufacturing them! Well, no matter where they come from, TechRepublic has a download-able article to help you: Ten Things You Should Know About Troubleshooting A Slow PC. This one is good for the home user, too, not just the hardcore, corporate geek, like me. Though, honestly, most folks bring their PCs to the Geek at work and have them fix ’em up right, don’t they?
Aw, don’t tell me that I’m the only soft touch!

Oh, and forgive the lame post, but I hesitate to post the stuff I’ve been writing, since I know my ex-wife is reading my blog and might do something else crazy as a result of what she reads here.

Your attention, please!
I just thought I should warn everyone who reads, and comments, on my blog that my apparently bitter and vengeful ex-wife still reads my blog. She may follow you from your comments to your blog and comment there in her own very special, petty way. If you suspect such activity, you might trace any IP address associated with comments and see if they take you to either an anonymous proxy or a location in either Phoenix or Glendale Arizona. If said comment originates at either location and is seemingly out of place or otherwise inexplicable, you can be fairly sure that the Harpy has landed.
Please, don’t let this keep you from posting comments. In fact, look at it this way, she’ll add all sorts of intersting traffic to your website/blog! Sure, it might be the Tin-Foil Hat Brigade kind of traffic, but, hey, hits are hits, right? Seriously, I apologize to anyone who’s already been hit by this childish woman who just can’t let go. And, I apologize in advance for anyone who might get her filthy attitude smeared all over their website in the future. But, I wouldn’t worry too much, since she’s basically lazy as well. She might leave a comment or two, but I doubt she can maintain the energy to really do much more than annoy folks for a bit.
At least you get some idea why we’re divorced.

Hey, I remember this!
Back in the Before Time, your Uncle Jim was a pretty adventurous cook. Far from gourmet, but, still, not bad and I usually did it by the seat of my pants. Er, make that, on the fly. Okay, by guess and by golly. There, that doesn’t sound nasty, does it? Well, I’ll admit, it was usually chicken all done up fancy with rice, white or wild, on the side. Occasionally, I’d even do a vegetable.
So, guess what I did tonight for the first time in a very long time? Yeah, I cooked. And I don’t mean pasta. That’s not cooking so much as it is doctoring sauce. Nope, tonight it was Uncle Jim’s Mango Rum Tilapa with broccoli and rice. And, it wasn’t bad, either! Just a big hunk of tilapa, which is white fish, equal dashes of lemon juice and lime juice add an even coating of Old Bay Seasoning and smother in Captain Morgan’s Mango Rum. Broil for about 40 minutes, if fish is still frozen, which mine was, or until done. I did all that in an open packet of aluminum foil with the broccoli. The rice was done in a large rice cooker. Best thing my ex-wife ever convinced me to spend money getting!
In any case, it was yummy, if I do say so myself! I guess having my mother, who loves me, clean my kitchen inspired me to get cooking again. See, ladies? If you hit on me, these are the lovely things that you can expect to come out of my out-of-date kitchen. As I always say, it’s not the tools that determine the finished product, but the artist who uses them.

Oh, and I started sorting out which of my ex-wife’s things I’m going to start selling on eBay. If you’re interested in platinum wedding bands, let me know. Hers was hardly worn!

Scripture candy and health food?
Oh, you have got to be kidding me! This is no joke, not only is there “Scripture Candy“, but Bible Bars. I can NOT make this stuff up. Now, I’m a fairly spiritual guy and have started attending church on a regular basis again, but, really, I think this is going a little far. Granted, those health-food engergy bars that are based on Bibilical foods are interesting, but are they any better than anything else I might get from Whole Foods? I mean, all-natural and organic energy bars are all about the same to me. Besides, I don’t see any milk-and-honey-and-locust bars there. That is, after all, what John the Baptist was famous for eating, as I recall: honey and locusts. Sure, they’re technically kosher, but, ugh.
Anyway, Christmas is just around the corner, so you might think about these for stocking stuffers.

Aw, c’mon, it’s Friday and you’ve got nothing better to do than read my blog and click the link, so just give in and do it.

Yes, Directory Naming Service needs security.
Oh, my, in this modern, Internet-enabled age DNS security is a larger and larger concern every man-hour. DNS Spoofing, DNS Poisoning, DNS Highjacking, just to buzzword out a few scary key words, are all issues that need to be addressed. And, once again, TechRepublic has an article on it. This time, though, it’s a download: Ten Things You Should Know About Securing DNS. Granted, this is a pretty esoteric topic, but, then again, you’re at the Diary of a Network Geek, where Alpha Geeks come to sniff each other’s… Er, I think I’ve gone one metaphor too far with that one! Besides, with a name like that, did you expect something simple and user-friendly? No, gentle readers, not here. Nothing but the most difficult and challenging questions and issues. (Coming soon: Geek Dating!)
Anyway, best to read the article before someone starts calling your website names.
Take some advice from your Uncle Jim, computer security is nothing to ignore!

Advice from your Uncle Jim:
"A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is bone to the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog."
   --Jack London

Okay, as promised, here are pictures.
Well, we’ll start off with the parental units. Obviously, the one on the right is my sainted mother who cleaned my house for me. The scruffy looking fella’ on the left is my father. You can expect me to look about like that when I make it to 78. Frighteningly, my ex-wife seemed to think he was better looking as an older guy than in the pictures of him at my age. You know, in retrospect, considering what I know about her now, that’s creepy.
Anyway, this is the stock from which I sprang.

This bad boy is one of the two things my father and I worked on this weekend. Of course we also did some indoor plumbing. In fact, I’m a little surprised that we managed that with as little cursing and shouting as we did. I usually cure like a sailor when I do plumbing. I think I taught my poor step-daughter some new words when I put in the amazing one-horse-power garbage disposal! That impressed my mother, by the way. She was shocked at the idea that I could grind chicken bones in that sucker.

Here it is again. I’m pretty proud of this monster. I designed it myself, bought all the parts, measured, cut and painted it all. I did have help from Dad, of course, but, mainly, I did it. And, I could have finished it by myself, if I really wanted to do that, but it was more fun working with my father. Wow, how many guys can say that and mean it!? Eventually, I’ll have some shots up here of this thing with all the plants in place, too. I think it looks pretty cool.

Just for reference, this is a picture of me and my beautiful girl. My dog, Hilda, and I, that is. Posing by our pond in the backyard. Oh, and I have my full beard in that picture. Notice, while it does exude testosterone, it increases wind drag reducing my aerodynamics. So…
I shaved down to this. See? It’s a bad picture, but even with that, you can see how much younger and more aerodynamic all that youthful skin makes me! C’mon, I’m a professional computer geek sliding into middle age. Work with me!

Anyhow, these are the best of the pictures from the weekend. The delay getting them, by the way, was because my dear, sweet, retired mother was figuring out how to use the digital camera and send pictures. I think she did rather well, don’t you?

I’m homesick.
It started on the way to the airport last night with my parents and just got worse. I had to tear out of the departures dropoff at high speed or else I was going to start blubbering like a baby. The really sad thing is, I’m homesick for a place that doesn’t really exist anymore. That “home” I left and that I miss so much doesn’t really exist except in my mind. The house where I grew up is in a neighborhood that, as my parents described it, is so changed that I most likely would hardly recognize it at all. But, I miss my family something terrible. I’m sure the divorce and attendant “opportunities for growth” that brought are part of my homesickness, but it’s more than that, I think. Equal parts fear of the unknown future and longing for a place that never truly existed. It’s the loss of hopes and dreams and what I thought was a sure future. It’s the fear of never getting past the current depressing circumstances where I’m currently caught. I once read it described as “homesickness for a place I’ve never been”. Weltschmertz. That troubling ache for old, familiar problems in place of the new, as-yet-unquantified problems.
You truly cannot go home again.

On a lighter note, it was an excellent visit with my parental units. We did a lot of eating out, both as a family and with friends. I did my best to get them to the local joints I knew, but my poor Dad with his tender insides as a result of surviving colon cancer had to stick to fairly safe, mainstream fare. In fact, I ate so much in the last several days that I should probably not eat dinner all the rest of this week!
Friday, Dad and I did plumbing. I thought that would be much more frightening than it was. My experiences as a child helping my father do that kind of thing were far, far different than it was this time. It was actually almost fun. Almost. At least, it was as fun as plumbing can ever be. And, he and I finished up the giant, arty water-feature for my ponds on Saturday. Saturday night, we went to church, which was good. I know it was a little different for them, since they’re fairly traditionalist when it comes to church, but they were happy that I was part of some kind of faith community. Of course, I stood up and introduced them, which was a bit of a social stretch for me. But, that was rewarded with the cute girl that I have a crush on, but will never date for reasons too long to go into here, coming over to introduce herself to my parents! Why, it almost made me rethink that “but will never date…” bit. Almost. Oh, and while Dad and I were off doing testosterone-laden activities, my Mother cleaned most of my house for me. It was incredible! Now, I just have to maintain it, and keep going on the war-zone that is my ex-wife’s junk and my home office.
Sunday, we went to the pond store, Nelson’s Water Garden, and got a bigger pump for my water feature and plants. It looks cool and pictures will be forthcoming, I promise. Then, I took Mom and Dad off to the airport and, well, tried not to curl up into a fetal ball and dissolve into tears, fear, and loneliness. Having my dog helped, too, but even she was missing Grandma and Grandpa today. She was getting used to being the spoiled grand-dog, I think. So much extra affection for her! She’s moping about now because it’s just boring, old, depressed Dad who’s always too busy to play for a full eight hours. Oh, the tragedy!
In any case, it was a good visit, though too short, and pictures will follow eventually.

No one coins a phrase like William Gibson.
And, I’m pretty sure he at least popularized the phrase “cool hunter” in his book Pattern Recognition. Well, now Cayce Pollard can take a vacation because there’s a website to help her out called, of course, Cool Hunter. (For those of you who haven’t read the book, Cayce is a cool hunter. Oh, and, uh, go read the book!) And, I have to admit, the stuff on this site is, well, cool.
Like, for instance, Pleasure Cards. They’re the opposite of business cards. They’re name cards with contact info for when you “network” at a very social event and don’t want to use your work information as contact info. Very cool idea, really.

So, go check out what else they’ve hunted up!

That was what I woke up to this morning.
Apparently, the handle leaks on that toilet upstairs now. Yeah, everything else seems tight and non-leaky, but the water level rose to the point that it was streaming out the handle on the tank. Have I mentioned that I hate plumbing?
Oh, and the downstairs toilet has decided to act up, too. This time, though, it’s an easy to identify problem: the connection from the water to the tank. Normally, one would use a flexible hose, but not the guy who I got the house from, no sir! For him, it was ridgid pipe or nothing! So, all I have to do, in theory, is get the right size flex hose and replace that. In theory.
And, finally, I have a confession to make about why I get so much anxiety about this kind of thing when my Dad is coming to town. My family used to own a hardware store. Oh, Hoffman’s Hardware in Morgan Park (which is the South Side of Chicago, for those who are unaware) was nothing but a name on a building corner stone long before I was born, but I still feel like I should know how to do this stuff better than I do. Like somehow, magically, I should have been born with the knowlege and skills to do any home repair instantly, with no mistakes. Ignore the fact that my father almost never did these kinds of things in my presence. Usually, I was just in the way as a kid, so I made myself scarce. So, now I learn how to do it the hard way, just like everything else I’ve ever learned that was worthwhile knowing.
Eventually, I’ll post a picture of the pretty rust colored water stain on my ceiling. Damn hard Houston water.