Diary of a Network Geek

This is not new.

Setting aside for a moment the fact that there is nothing new under the sun, there are some ideas that have been around for a long time that are just now seeing the light of day. The idea I’m thinking about today is regenerative life-support systems for long-term space exploration. The idea is simple, really. You just create a tiny, self-sustaining ecosystem on a spacecraft and send it on its way toward Mars or Jupiter or wherever you’re interested in going. The astronauts tend the garden which provides them with both fresh produce and breathable air. Of course, actually implementing this system is much more challenging than it seems on the surface. Discover takes a little closer look at the problem in a recent article on their blog.

You can read a short-story about this, or at least with this as a theme, in the New Yorker on-line called Lostronaut. It’s good and it inspired the Discover blog posting. Also, it’s science-fiction published in the New Yorker, so it’s worth reading.

I stayed up late Saturday night to finish reading 99 Coffins by David Wellington.

As you may have guessed from both my predilections and the title, this is a vampire story. In fact, it’s the second in a series by David Wellington, who is a relatively new voice in horror fiction. At least, he’s part of what I think of as the “hot, young turks” who have used the Internet and blogs to promote their own work quite effectively. Wellington’s brilliant first vampire novel, 13 Bullets, which is the first in this series, was originally released on a blog. I found it via Amazon, while looking for something new and interesting to read. 99 Coffins is just as exciting and engaging as 13 Bullets, and that’s saying something.

Wellington has created a new kind of vampire. Or, rather, he’s reimagined the traditional monsters in a new way that updates them, makes them different and interesting, but doesn’t make them any less monstrous or any more romantic and “human”. In short, these are the best vampires and vampire novels I’ve read since Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Yes, I think they’re that good.
Wellington gives us vampires that are two-legged, thinking, reasoning land-sharks that can speak to humans and command awesome personal power. They’re deadly and smart and the best and worst of our natures crossed with an insatiable thirst for human blood. In 13 Bullets, there was just one active vampire to start with. In 99 Coffins, there’s also just one, but with a twist.

The book opens with a historical dig on a Gettysburg battlefield. No one expects to find much, since this area has been heavily mined by archaeologists and is pretty well documented. However, a grad student digs up a mystery; a hidden cellar under an old gunpowder magazine filled with coffins. An interesting enough find on its own, the historical mystery is made even more interesting by the fact that each coffin holds the skeleton of what are obviously vampires. Thankfully, they all seem to have had their hearts removed making them almost totally harmless. Of course, even a sleeping, crippled vampire is never completely harmless.
That’s why the local authorities call in former U.S. Marshall Jameson Arkeley and his erstwhile protege, Pennsylvania State Trooper Laura Caxton, the last two vampire killers who exist. Arkeley is old and crippled from their last encounter with these toothed horrors and Caxton just wants to forget about it. She’s done her bit to protect humanity and now she just wants to serve the State of Pennsylvania and her people. But, neither Arkeley nor the newest vampire to prowl the streets will let her forget. At first, she just agrees to give Arkeley a ride to the site and be his eyes, but when she sees the 99 coffins, each with its sleeping vampiric skeleton, and the one smashed coffin, she can’t just walk away. Oh, she tries, to be sure, but when that one missing vampire attacks her on the street in scenic Gettysburg, she can’t just leave the local police to try and handle something they don’t even believe exists.

As you might imagine, it’s an uphill battle for Trooper Caxton, the last vampire hunter. Not only does she have to fight the vampire, but also ignorance, bureaucracy, local politics, vampire “fans”, and her own fears. Her struggles are interspersed with notes and letters from people involved with the historical vampires in those other coffins. The tales intertwine to tell a frightening story indeed. A story far older than the Battle of Gettysburg.
I won’t ruin the story by giving you more detail than that, but, let me assure you, it’s well worth the price of the book. Wellington is a wonderful writer, giving just the right level of detail while keeping the action moving along wonderfully well. Of course, I knew that from having read the first book in this series and I like his work so well, that I bought the third in this series already and have piled it on with the rest of my “to read” books.

If you’re a fan of vampire books at all, you have to get 99 Coffins by David Wellington and read it. Of course, you’ll want to start with 13 Bullets, but, once you’ve read that, if you don’t want to read the rest of the series, I’ll be amazed. Seriously, David Wellington is one of the best new authors I’ve read in the past several years and his vampire stories are absolutely wonderful. I promise, if you’re looking for a new take on an old monster, you’ll love these books.

NASA, making science-fiction real.

So, it looks like NASA is working on a plasma drive that will take us to Mars in 60-70 days, instead of a longer time period required of a conventional rocket.

And, if we ever get past that hurdle, someone has created a warp drive. Or, at least, theoretically. I mean, all they have to do is figure out how to manipulate theoretical dimensions and they’ll have it licked in no time! (Okay, okay, even the article admits that “Warp drive isn’t doable now, and probably won’t be for the next several millenia,” according to the scientist interviewed. But, still, a guy can dream, right?)

Also, if you haven’t voted in the poll, please, feel free!

This is a quick and clever idea!

Okay, so you remember a week ago the Internet was supposed to melt because of all the problems with this Conficker worm? Did you even notice anything amiss at all? Yeah, me neither.
But, still, if you’re like me, you stay awake at night worrying about all the potential worms and virii that might be sitting on your computer, waiting silently, hiding from the security software that you most certainly keep updated, waiting until your guard is down to pounce! Well, okay, maybe it’s just the full-time, professional geeks like me that worry about that. And, yeah, maybe I worry about it happening on my work network more than I do at home, but, still, you get my point. So, how can you know? Well, thanks to Lifehacker, I bring you the Conficker “Eye Chart”.

The principal is simple, really. Conficker blocks access to several security sites so you can’t download updates or removal tools that would clean it from your system. The Eye Chart simply links to graphics from those sites, and several others as a control set. So, if you can’t see images from the security sites, you know that you most likely have Conficker and have to get the removal tool from somewhere else to clean your system. Pretty neat idea, I think. So, go ahead and click the link to the Conficker “Eye Chart” and check for yourself.

Now, if you do have it, I suggest going to either the Microsoft page about Conficker and its removal, or download the Symantec removal tool from another PC and then take that to your infected PC via a USB drive and run it. Though, to be honest, I think the whole thing was blown out of proportion by a few alarmists in the media. (Though not Houston’s Dwight Silverman, I might note! Which is one of the reasons I follow his blog!)

So, Friday I went to my first geek networking event.

Okay, now, to be clear, I mean the first event I’ve ever been to that the point was to get to know other geeks, not work on computer networking. It was the first of what I think will be many. The event is a monthly “Geek Gathering” put on by Jay Lee and Dwight Silverman of TechBytes and the Houston Chronicle. I was convinced to come out this time by Kristie “Suburban Goddess” MacLaughlin. Though, I have to admit, I think she did it simply to get me active on Facebook, since the event was announced there. We’ve followed each other’s blogs for some time now, and exchanged a few e-mails, but never met. And, before any of my regular readers who are often eager for me to get involved with someone, mainly for the jokes that come out of my so-called love life, let me hasten to emphasize that this was not a date! She’s quite happy with her boyfriend and doesn’t need my uncivilized self mucking things up. Just in case anyone was wondering.

Still, she was quite eager to get me out to meet Jay and Dwight and “the gang”. Now, I did meet those folks, but I got caught in ugly traffic, so I got there a bit late and didn’t get to meet everyone I might have liked to know. For instance, I missed meeting the guys who run the Houston-based Japanese animation and manga convention known as ONI-CON. I did meet a couple of very nice journalists who got laid off from the Chronicle, however, who were there networking as well.
Funny thing about that, the networking thing. I’ve never really done it before, and I think it showed. Living alone, my conversational skills have atrophied so as to be almost non-existent! Thankfully, I was surrounded by people who were good at it and gracious. Donna, aka @Cottonwood2009, was very nice and kept my end of the conversation up as well as her own. And, of course, it seemed that everyone was on either Twitter or Facebook or both. I’m on Twitter for the tools I can add to this blog in case of losing my connection to the Internet again during a hurricane, so my family up North will know that I’m still alive. (They worry.) I was on Facebook, but hadn’t really done anything with the account. Since meeting a few folks, most notably Dwight and Jay, my Twitter followers have more than tripled in the space of two days and my Facebook friends have gone from one to eighteen.
And, I got to talk with several people about photography, too. In fact, it seemed like every third person there had a camera in hand. I didn’t take many pictures this time, but you can see the few I did at my Flickr page, under Geek Gatherings. There will be more eventually.

I remember when the on-line world and the “real” world were mostly separate. I’ve blogged for almost nine years now and never actually expected to meet most, if not all, of my readers. But, as the song goes, the times, they are a-changin’ and now, I fear, I’ll be meeting more and more of them. Perhaps I’ll have to start writing better and more relevant things! Good gravy, I may have to start writing technical posts again! What a strange turn of events that would be.
I have to be honest, and in all seriousness, meeting some of my readers makes me, well, a little uncomfortable. It’s bad enough that my readers often think that they know me based on what I write here, but now… Now, having met me in person, I’m afraid that the lines will become even more blurred. And, anyone who’s read my blog for a long time knows how I like my life neatly segmented and clearly defined. Still, what else is there to do? It’s either that or keep talking to the dog and, frankly, I think she’s getting a bit tired of hearing the same jokes over and over.

But, it was good to be out of my comfort zone Friday. It was good to go to a new place and meet new people. And, it was even good to put some faces to names that I’d seen on-line in any number of venues. I may not be very good at this networking thing, as ironic as that seems considering the title of my blog, but I’m going to keep working at it. It’s the one thing that I should have been working at harder all these years. Who knows, maybe I would have had a better series of jobs than I did? Maybe even a better series of girlfriends? Well, maybe not, but a guy can dream! Certainly going forward, if anything happens to me at my current job, I’ll be better off if I have a good, strong, professional network. If you’re in Houston and a geek like me, it would be worth checking out next month.
And, who knows, maybe one of these times I’ll meet the future ex-Mrs. Hoffman?

Sunday, I finished Fool: A Novel by Christopher Moore.

First of all, you should know that I pretty well love almost anything that Christoper Moore has written.  Granted, some are better than others, but I started with him back when Practical Demonkeeping was new and not even a best-seller yet.  It always struck me as funny when my parents told me about this “new” author who’d written a brilliant re-telling of the Gospel titled Lamb:The Gospel according to Biff, Christ’s childhood pal.  So, that enthusiasm for his work may effect the way I see his most current work.

But, I’ll say this, it is good.
Fool is a retelling of King Lear from the point of view of Lear’s jester, commonly known as a fool.  Naturally, that’s where the book gets its title.  Now, King Lear, if you’re not familiar, is a play by William Shakespeare about a king who, for foolish reasons, divides his kingdom amongst his three daughters, based on how much flattery they can heap on him.  The only problem is one of his daughters, the most faithful and true, in fact, won’t play the game, so he splits his kingdom between his two deceitful, unfaithful daughters.  They’re supposed to take care of Lear in his old age, but they really don’t want to take care of him so he’s sort of forced into the Medieval equivalent of homelessness.  It’s quite the tragedy.  But not in Christopher Moore’s hands.

No, Moore takes this tragedy and makes it into a damn fine comedy, thanks to his narrator.
Moore is mostly true to the story according to Shakespeare, but with a few additional anachronisms.  His writing is light and pithy and quite enjoyable, not to mention smooth and easy.  Really, considering the weight of the subject matter, it’s a testament to his writing that the book moves so easily and well.
The story follows a fellow named Pocket, who is born somewhat disadvantaged and orphaned.  He’s left on the doorstep of a nunnery and it’s the nuns who raise him.  He has some misadventures along the way to adulthood and a job working for Lear as a fool, though we see all that as various flashbacks.  The main story line starts with Pocket relating the tale of how he watched Lear foolishly divide his kingdom.  Then, the tragic results of that somewhat stupid decision.  But, as I mentioned, somehow, he manages to make it a comedy.

Oh, hell, you’ve probably read or seen King Lear at least once.  This is the same story only funnier and written in more modern language.  And, anything by Moore is pretty good, so, all in all, I’m saying, buy this book and read it.  You won’t be sorry.

Oh, this is cool!

Now, you have got to understand that I am a total office supply junkie. I love interesting pens and notepads and all that junk. I have a bunch of Moleskine notebooks, for instance. And, I’ve been trying to sketch out a new WordPress theme in a sad sort of design notebook I’ve been keeping. Obviously that hasn’t been quite as well as I’d like, but this Web Design Sketchbook may inspire me a bit more.

It’s from a site called HuntingLodge.no, which is in Norway, and there is a store, but it was being upgraded when I wrote this. It maybe working now, though. Basically, it’s just a regular sketchbook, but with printed graphics on it that are like a browser window. So, when you’re sketching the design, whoever you’re sketching it for can sort of see how it would look in a browser window. How cool is that!? I know I’ll end up having to get one of these from them when their store is working again, but, until then, enjoy their “review” of it.

I love strange, quirky design elements.

I don’t know, maybe it’s because I used to schtupp a web designer or maybe it’s just that Marketing degree. Whatever it is, I just really enjoy funky design in the real world. But, I am still a hardcore geek at heart, so when something combines the two, I just love it. Naturally, when I saw the Photoshop Magnets and Magnetic Board, I instantly loved it.

Basically, these are just magnets that look like menus and dialog boxes from Photoshop. You can use them on the magnetic board, or buy them separately for your own magnetic surfaces, to hold up your pictures or art. Again, there’s just something cool, and yes, geeky, about having magnets that make your fridge look like Photoshop that just appeals to me.
They’re not cheap, but they do look fun.

“If you’re reading this, I must already be dead…”

No, I’m not actually dead, something which no doubt has disappointed a number of people, including my ex-wife. However, as a single man with few attachments, it does occur to me that I could go missing for several days before anyone thought to look for me. What’s more, I can think of several people who wouldn’t be too broken up over my untimely demise. Besides my ex-wife, I mean.

So, what to do? We live in a modern age filled with technology and wonder, but also, a few modern problems. If I were to die unexpectedly, there are certain bits of information that it might be nice to pass on to the right folks. Things like security passwords and bank access information and the like. You know, all those clever logins and sign ons and “super sekret” passwords that we all have accumulating like so much karmic sedimentary rock in our oh, so very modern lives. These aren’t things I want just anyone to have, nor do I necessarily want anyone to have them just yet. For that matter, there may be things I want gone, too. Files that would be better deleted than passed on to scar loved ones and that sort of thing. So, again, what to do?

Well, someone has started a service called Death Switch. This is a service that gives you a login to an automated system which prompts you for a password on a regular schedule. If you don’t enter the password on schedule, it sends several addition, emergency-level queries to you and, if those go unanswered, fires off e-mail to the recipient of your choice. If you pay for an account, you can attach files and send the e-mail to multiple recipients.
Naturally, being the cheapskate that I am, I searched around a bit for other services. I mean, if I’m loose with what little money I have left, I won’t have much to leave behind, outside of a brilliant library and a fascinating personal journal. (Remember, kids, the juiciest bits of my life don’t really make it into this blog!) Well, what I found was another, free, service calling itself Dead Man’s Switch. Naturally, the service is somewhat more limited, but, again, it’s free. Oh, and I would assume that the level of security is somewhat less, too. Hey, you get what you pay for.

The only thing is, neither of these address the problem of files on a hard drive. Well, I have an answer for that, too. Now, this option is a little more “do-it-yourself” as it’s no longer supported by the author, but it does have the bonus of running right on your computer. Well, your Windows computer. Sorry, this is a Windows-only solution. The bit of freeware is called, not surprisingly, Dead Man’s Switch, though it was most often referred to as “DMS“. You can still download it for free from PC World, though and install it. I used it for quite some time when I was working someplace I didn’t trust. You see, this little doosie can be set to encrypt files, too. So, for instance, if you’re not dead, but you’ve been suddenly let go from a consulting gig, you can set this to run on your workstation and encrypt your files which you were forced to leave behind. Oh, sure, it may not be ethical, but, well, at least you know it can be done.

So, rest easy now, dear readers, and know that I can e-mail postings to this blog should the unthinkable happen. Hell, for all you know, it may have happened already and these posts are all just a sendmail shell script. With the Network Geek, almost anything is possible.
See you on the other side!

Advice from your Uncle Jim:
"The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing in the right place, but also to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment."

I love toys.

I never worked at one of those cool Internet startups in the Nineties, but I sure wanted to at the time. Not just for the cash, which would have been enough of a reason, but because, well, it was were all the geeks were cool. Seriously! And, they had money to blow so they kept places like Amazon flowing and that Internet food-delivery place running. And, they had the coolest toys on their desk…

So, now, when I see cool toys for a geek’s desktop, I have to make a note. That’s what I thought when I saw Tokyo Cube Desktop Toys. So, go re-live those days of yore and oogle the toys.

(And, we already had a Friday the Thirteenth post recently, so I’m not mentioning it again!)