Diary of a Network Geek

Hey’s it’s Friday and I have no theme to my crazy links.

Look I paid all my important bills last night and I’m too tired to come up with any real theme here, but these all are perfect links for a Friday.
First, in honor of Daylight Savings Time ending this weekend, and me getting an extra hour of badly needed sleep, here’s a link to How To Sleep Better on Boing Boing.
And, since I’m sure you’re probably reading this at work, I thought it was high time I helped you sneak around on the web without getting caught. It’s a site called Work Friendly and it will open browser windows that are camoflaged as Micro$oft Office files. Pretty clever, huh?
Well, you can use that to browse these links…
I started off at Boing Boing looking for the link to the Ben and Jerry’s Waffle Cone Room Fragrance, but, alas, it was no more. But, that led me to a site called CribCandy, which led to me finding wall tattoos, instructions for making a bean bag sofa bed, a DIY guide to painting a mural in your home, a “Falling Water” platform bed, instructions for “growing” your own furnature, a reclining bike/geek desk, and, finally, for Halloween, horror furnature props. (Yes, that all was mostly a shout-out to those of you who voted for Dwell magazine on my last poll.)

So, if I do this NaNoWriMo thing, I’ll have to queue up a bunch of Friday Fun Posts this weekend, since I won’t have time otherwise. Well, in any case, this Friday, you can enjoy these crazy links.

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?

I’ve lost count of how many posts I’ve started but not finished.

Just now, I was writing about the ridiculous situation of being more or less trapped in an office Friday while two utterly clueless guys extoled the virtues of mail order brides and prostitution under the guise of “advice about women”.  The sheer stupidity of their argument and the surreality of the entire, one-sided conversation struck me as so bizarre that it was almost funny, at the time, but when I tried to write it, the whole thing just seemed, well, sad.

I’m not sure what’s going on with me this week, but everything seems to feel that way.  Maybe it’s just the severe lack of cash-flow that’s got me down, or the gray weather, but everything seems sort of bland today.  No food seems to sound appealing to my tastebuds, nothing on television seems interesting enough to really watch, none of the books I have in my queue are all that compelling, and nothing that comes to mind to write seems worth the effort.  Even this almost seems like a waste of time.

I have dozens of posts that are either half-done or done, but never seem right to post, in my blog queue.  I have some that are old and, though they were half-decent writing at the time, are so far detached from where I am today, that they don’t seem right to post without heavy editing.  But, that editing never seems quite right, either.  I suppose, I should just delete them all, but, for some reason, that’s hard to do.

I don’t know what’s up, but if I post a little less frequently this week, or month, that’s what’s going on, and why.

Oh, these are strange, but good.

Here’s a link to a DefenseTech article about the CIA’s Online “Personality Test” which is supposed to open our eyes to what it’s really like to work for the CIA.  Apparently, it’s not ALL like James Bond.  Who knew?

And, in a totally different vein, this is the most disturbing wallpaper I’ve ever seen.  Look really closely at it.  Hmm, maybe for one of the guest rooms…

But, finally, for the geeks, How to Make StarTrek-style LCARS Panels.  I cannot make this stuff up!

So, go, link and enjoy.  It is, after all, Friday!  Whoops!  Now, I’m late to work!!

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?

Yes, there are still some things one can get for free.

There are a lot of ways to find free wireless Internet connections in Houston. Besides using Googlemaps, there’s also the Houston CitySearch pages that list public establishments with free WiFi by category. Not to mention all the Panera Bread Company cafes that all seem to have free wireless, nation wide, as I’ve mentioned in previous posts.
(Sadly, it seems you’ll have to pay for WiFi at the airport, and not just in Houston.)
While a lot of that might not be “fun” for everyone, those of us who live in Houston can now get out this weekend and still be connected. And, for a Network Geek like me, that is fun. So, what the heck, it’s Friday, you might as well click the links and get ready for the weekend.

I have a dream.

It is a simple dream. No, not winning the lottery, or world peace, or the perpetual motion engine, or even a mythical trip to the Playboy Mansion. No, my dream is that I might get through an entire task without interruption, distraction, mishap, mayhem, or… Sorry, lost my train of thought because the dog started barking at something outside. Now, where was I?

Right, so, Monday, I started out with a few simple bullet items to accomplish. Easy, uncomplicated goals. Just configure a laptop and run a couple of cables out in the shop. Seems fairly straight-forward, doesn’t it? Sadly, those two simple, easy, straight-forward things are still not done, two days later.
Instead, I dealt with spy ware installed on a machine in Bellechasse. A machine that I personally cleaned of spy ware last week. In some cases, deleting, by hand, files and directories and Windows registry entries to kill the offending malware. Two full days I spent on this infernal machine, meticulously cleaning every last scrap of naughty code, only to have it completely reinfected not more than five minutes after it was powered on by the user. Why? Because, no matter how many times I tell my users not to click on any random link they get in e-mail from Bubba Mussolini or Archimedes Hirohito or Kwabena Mieles, no matter how fascinating their offer sounds. Nor should they click on any stupid web page that comes up in a search they can’t imagine would be a problem, no matter how personal it might be. And a guy who’s used AutoCAD for years asked me for help on printing. Me, who’s never so much as opened a drawing in the latest version of AutoCAD, much less tried to send it to a plotter. Naturally, I’ve got him printing in less than thirty minutes.
Then, at home, I made marinara which proceeded to find every piece of clothing I was wearing. That was followed by an attempt at a berry smoothie, made with frozen strawberries, blueberries and raspberries. A smoothie that was so thick and frozen it “poured” like a blender full of half-solid mud. The splash from that minor accident found the clothes that the marinara missed. But, before I could try to stop those stains from setting, I had to hurry and nail up some boards from the fence because my dog had tried to chase a squirrel through the rickety, old thing. Oh, and speaking of dogs, Hilda found something dead and nasty to roll in, after having had a bath Sunday. Now, even though I live far enough away from the city that I pass cows on the way to work, they’re still not in my backyard. Nor am I so close to the projects that she should have found a diaper in the backyard, so what she rolled in, I’m not sure, but, at least now, you have some idea what I was smelling while I tried to get it off her. Again.
(As an aside, I should note that Monday evening, while I was actually having fun installing a blog for a fellow blogger plagued by comment spam, I saw a gecko that was about the size of my pinky scurry across the floor. An hour later, I saw a cockroach by the back door that was at least twice the size of pinky. Who lost the bet with God that allowed roaches twice the size of their natural predator?)

Tuesday, was more of the same, but spiced with visits from phone switch vendors trying to sell me things that I’ve been told I can’t buy. Instead, I have to explain, carefully, to these people that I have two choices for phone switches because a mysterious, invisible “consultant” of some kind, who I’ve never met or talked with, has convinced someone who matters in my company that those are the only two choices that matter. Oh, and the guys in the shop who’ve been waiting on that cable since last week asked about it. And the director of sales needs a photo editor for the Mac he doesn’t want to use, so he can resize pictures to send to clients. And, the engineering department has rehired a former employee, so I need to shuffle people around to get to a computer that has to be totally reconfigured by Monday. (Which is actually an improvement, since I normally get an hour or two’s notice before the guy starts.) And, a giant monitor went out and needed to be replaced. And I have to spec out PCs and a new server, which I’ll have to go install, for that Bellechasse office. And… I’m sorry, something shiny passed by my screen. Where was I?

Oh, right, I should be planning for … Something. Shouldn’t I? Shouldn’t I be planning projects? Planning to improve their IT infrastructure? Something? Who knows. And, what’s more, I don’t have time to worry about it because about the time I have more than two minutes to string together, something else will distract me.
Well, at least they’re still paying me!
But, on the upside, tomorrow night I go in for my last therapy appointment. My head-shrink has pronounced me well. Or, at least, well enough to be turned loose without a keeper, which is all anyone can really hope for, right?

Well, now, if you’ll pardon me, it’s time to head off to work, so I need to put my cup and mouth guard in before I pull on my stain-resistant body armor.
You know, it really didn’t seem like such a big, impossible dream when I got into this business. Ah, well, maybe next year.

Ahem.

Well, I got quite a surprise this morning. I opened my mail and there was a note from “G_______ @ aol . com”. That girl I knew in college. I think it’s best if I edit myself and not let loose with what I really said, for a change, but I was quite rather stunned. It’d been so long since I sent her the e-mail that I thought I’d never hear from her. I figured that the e-mail address was wrong or that she’d decided she didn’t want to hear from me or… Well, it doesn’t really matter what I thought, since she e-mailed back.

“What a surprise. Of course I remember you.”
That was how she started the very brief note she sent me. It’s been almost 20 years since we last communicated. How do you summarize that much time? “Of course” she remembers me, she writes. “Of course”, as if that one semester should automatically mean as much to her as it did to me. How silly of me to think that 20 years might have erased me from her memory. Honestly? I cannot tell you how relieved I am that she does, in fact, remember me. So…

So, now, what the hell do I say?
Anyone have any advice for your Uncle Jim?

Advice from your Uncle Jim:
Knowing that something is the right thing doesn't always make it easy to do, but that's not an excuse.

Oh, yeah, this is cool!

Remember when the world was young and Atari was the only home entertainment system? Well, those times might be long gone, but Atari is still here. And, now, it’s small enough that you can stick it in your pocket. Yes, thanks to ThinkGeek, you can hang a teeny, tiny Atari game on your keychain. And, yes, it works. You can hook it up to a TV or monitor and actually play this game! How cool is that?!  Yeah, well, maybe it’s only cool to geeks like me, but, still, it sure brings back memories.
Hey, it’s Friday, why not find out What’s New at ThinkGeek?

Cleaning my house has become a treasure hunt.

Saturday, I was looking for something in the kitchen and found a large quantity of popcorn. Not microwave popcorn, all done up in nice, portioned packages, but two jars and a large bag of popcorn kernels. I stood and just starred at it for a few minutes before the implication sank in that somewhere, most likely in the kitchen, I must have a hot-air popcorn popper. So, naturally, I started rooting in odd, hard-to-reach corners of the kitchen cabinets finding, among other things, an EasyBake oven, a rock tumbler and an ice-cream maker. Oh, yes, and the much desired, though slightly antiquated, Poppery II hot-air popcorn popper by West Bend. I cleaned it, because, well, as I didn’t know I owned it I also had no idea at all where it had been in its travels. Cleaning seemed a rather prudent step, even for a half-mad bachelor with a goat-like stomach who’s favorite kitchen phrase is “Well, it doesn’t smell bad yet…”

Then, however, the question of proper and safe usage began to worry me, so I Googled the Poppery II hoping to find manuals in PDF format on the web. Sadly, none were to be had, but I did stumble across a rather interesting community of home coffee roasters, to whom, the Poppery II seemed to represent a kind of Holy Grail. And, while that might be dreadfully useful and fascinating information for another time, it got me no closer to popped popcorn. So, in the end, I simply plugged it in, filled the scoop-like lid and, praying that I started only a small fire, dumped the popcorn of unknown vintage in.

At first, there was nothing but a loud whirring sound as the hot air spun round and round, then, as if by magic, I was rewarded with an explosive pop. This was quickly followed by another and another. Victory! Then, it became quickly apparent that I had chosen a slightly inadequate bowl as the popcorn overflowed the counter and started to spill on the floor. A minor setback! I had achieved fresh, unsalted, no-butter popcorn! Hmm, that seemed more exciting at the time. In any case, I have quite a supply of popcorn now and I can melt as much, or as little, butter as I’d like. I can also salt as much, or as little, as I’d like. Why, I could even add other flavors! I could douse my hot popcorn in Tabasco, if the mood should strike me! Though, frankly, I’m not sure what could move me to do such a thing to popcorn. Still, when I started cleaning in the kitchen, I certainly didn’t expect to find that.
Not to mention the rock tumbler…