Diary of a Network Geek

I need a new watch.
Should I get the Casio Waveceptor? Or the Timex?
I can’t decide, but I know for sure my old, beat-up super cheapo Casio needs to be replaced. The light doesn’t work and silver-like finish is flaking off. It works still, in that it tells reasonable accurate time, but it just looks bad. When I was married, frankly, I stopped caring what I looked like. What I wore on my wrist, or feet, or whatever, didn’t matter to me as much as making sure my family had the things they needed. Note, I wrote needed, not wanted. My ex wanted all kinds of things, but I was more concerned with making sure her daughter had enough to eat and decent clothes for school. I did without a lot of things to make sure those two got what they needed, and, as much as I could, what they wanted, too. So, the end result is that I have a bunch of stuff that needs to be replaced, updated or simply purchased for the first time. A couple of months ago, it was shoes. Now, it’s the watch.
It may seem like a small thing, but it’s hard for me to spend even that little bit of money on myself. When I finally do, I’ll feel guilty for days. Silly, isn’t it? Well, keep in mind, this post is hitting while I’m in session with a head-shrink to help get over silly things like that.
One step at a time, I guess.
Anyway, you can vote on which watch in the poll to the right.

Oh, God, this is a new low.
So, the other day, I’m joking with a friend about obsessively checking my webstats for certain pieces of information. He sort of laughs at me in e-mail and questions why I haven’t done a PERL script to automate it. And, I did actually think about it. The problem would be, as I explained to him, that I’d have to run the PERL script as a daemon, or process. Or, as a CRON job that repeated every fifteen minutes or so. Otherwise, I wouldn’t get the kind of notification that would make writing a script worthwhile. The only problem is, even my super relaxed webhost, Amzia.net, would eventually have issues with that kind of utilization.
In any case, I scouted around for some PERL code anyway, even though I’d probably never be able to actually use them. Then, one morning this past week, it occurred to me that I had PHP code that I could modify to produce the same results. So, I copied my chunk of code, tested it and put it out there, live. Worked like a charm. I got live results and e-mailed them to my friend and we had a good laugh that I’d gone and written code, that worked quite well, for a very personal, inside joke, that no one but he and I would see, or get. But, no, that’s not the new low.
Later, on the same day I made it live, I was sitting outside enjoying one of my last remaining clove cigarettes and caught myself refining the code in my head. Yep, I’m sitting there, petting the dog, smoking and tightening code in my head. I even started to add functionality as I crunched the code, too!

Oh, God, I am such a geek. I don’t even think another tattoo would help at this point. Oh, well, at least it pays the bills.