Diary of a Network Geek

I doubt most of my readers even understand that allusion.
I read an article on Beliefnet about male-female relations the other day and, as always, it got me thinking. One of the themes in the article was about what characteristics made a man. Interestingly enough, the opinion of the writer was that it was patience, kindness, gentleness and internal strength that were the most “manly” attributes. I find it interesting because these are not the attributes I always percieved that society appreciates. Things like “earning ability” and good looks and fearlessness were always what I thought women wanted. And, since I rarely possess any of those things in great measure, I always felt that I fell short in “Makes Good Husband/Life Partner” department. Something, incidentally, that was reinforced for me, one way or another, by various equally damaged ladies.
And, yet, the woman writing the article, who was an apparently loyal and faithful wife of many years, waxed poetic about her husband and sons who all had these traits in abundance. Traits which I have been told, espcially recently, by friends of both sexes that I do, in fact, possess. I have always sought to fulfill my responsibilites, as I saw them. Though I may have fallen short, I always did my best to act with patience and calm toward everyone in my life. Something which my own father, who I very much admire, also, occasionally, had trouble with as well. We’re both getting better at it, even today. Hollywood may not glamourize it very often, but men who simply do their duty to their families and communities, the guys who stick it out and stay for the long haul, those are the real heros. I’ve always tried to be that kind of hero. The same kind of hero that Gregory Peck was in The Man In The Grey Flannel Suit.
I may not have always succeeded, but, at least I always tried. I’d like to think that, one day, I’ll find a woman who appreciates those values and won’t be distracted by money and flash. Oh, I suspect that I’ll “lose” plenty of women to those kinds of men, but, then, what have I lost, really? I just need to remind myself, like that line from that Demi Moore/Robert Redford movie, they’re not better men than I am, they just have more money.

I decided on The Napoleon of Crime : The Life and Times of Adam Worth, Master Thief.
I read the prolog of this little beauty some time ago, but when I re-read it today, I was hooked. I have to admit I have a certain dark fascination with the criminal element of every stripe. I want to know what makes them tick, how they make their choices and what their lives are like as a result. Of course, the fact that Adam Worth was the model for perhaps the most famous criminal of all time sort of weighed in this book’s favor. (For those of you who aren’t familiar with who the “Napoleon of Crime” was in literature, review your Arthur Conan Doyle.) Also, the fact that this guy was at his peak about the time that my paternal grandmother was born didn’t hurt either.
Anyway, it’s a bit of interesting history and may prove useful in my sad attempts at writing sometime in the future.

Oh, lots of junk.
Yes, I queued this up at lunchtime to hit this evening. There were just a bunch of things I didn’t think my faithful readers could make it through the weekend without knowing.

First, there’s the Cisco bug. This bug should actually be fixed, but you’ll want to make sure you’ve got the latest IOS update on your router or you could have a problem here. And, as the security researcher mentioned in the linked article, the thing you have to wonder is, what other bugs have they missed?

Second, if you’re looking at a lonely weekend, again, take heart, soon you’ll have a freakishly realistic Japanese android to keep you company. I doubt she’s anatomically correct, so you can’t carry on a digital “affair” with her, but I’m sure some enterprising geek who’s trying to avoid his wife, his girlfriend, or both, will find a way to make that mod happen. Personally, I think she looks too much like Yoko Ono, but that’s me.

Thirdly, Brooke Burke has split with her husband. Now’s your chance, boys. Get in there while she’s looking to rebound. It’ll be a short, intense relationship, but if you’re lucky it’ll be purely sexual and over before you have to talk to her much. (Personally, I’d prefer Diane Lane, but I doubt she’d leave a young stud like Josh Brolin any time soon! Oh, and her movie, Must Love Dogs, starts today… *sigh*)

A bit of Daily Wisdom from the Dalai Lama:

Many of our troubles are man-made, created by our own ignorance and greed and irresponsible actions.

And, finally, I’m not sure what the sudden interest is, but the last two days my stats suddenly doubled the daily average for the past two months. Hmm, I wonder what I wrote that set off which obsessed stalker…. Well, no matter. The more the merrier!

Well, that’s enough to get you through the rough parts of your weekend. Or to make them.
Have a great one!

The only thing I hate worse than spammers are stupid spammers.
Does anyone test their code besides me anymore? I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve gotten what are obvious spam e-mails filled with variables that were never correctly processed. It’s ridiculous!
On another note, I would like to take a moment to send the blog comment spammers the following message:
Yes, I like my site design, too. I’m glad it helped you with your homework, but I can’t imagine what you’d be studying that anything I’ve written could possibly have helped you with. I will keep posting similar information, not because you like it, but because, well, it’s part of what I do for hobbies. I’m glad you liked it so much you’ll tell all your friends, but, if you don’t mind, let’s not include the spammers. And, while I’m very happy that you find my site “a refreshing change” from the majority of sites you have visited, not to mention how excited you are by the “potential of the internet as a resource” and, presumably, my site in particular, I’m almost sorry that I have restored your enthusiasm. I mean, as a spammer, I don’t think I want you to be enthusiastic. But, you are welcome and I’m glad you think my “efforts to share insights” will “help the world become a better place.”

Sometime, I’ll have to take the same time to thank all the nice folks who send me unsolicited e-mail, too. Though, I have to admit, I’m not sure how I feel about them offering me discounts on breast augmentation…

Well, more brackish than fishy, I suppose.
I’ve been having some pond problems. First, there were the leeches in the skimmer. No, not the little red worms that turn into some kind of tiny fly that the dragonflies love to eat, but actual leeches. How do I know what leeches look like? Well, let’s just say I was the only one smart enough not to swim in that “special” lake at Boy Scout Camp. So, I poured a bunch of salt into that filter to get rid of them. That seems to have worked so far.
Then, the waterfall started to leak. Well, to be fair, I’ve been expecting this. The waterfall is really not all that great. It’s not very good as a waterfall and had gotten clogged with the nasty papyrus the former owners seemed to have liked so well. I tore all that out, trying figure out a way to fix the leak. The problem is, the leak is caused by the fact that the rotting wood which makes up the sad, sagging framework has given way in one corner, pulling the pond liner down below the water-line there. So, I had to bypass the waterfall with PVC and redirect the water flow back directly from the filters into the pond. I have to replace the water fall with something more aesthetic than two, plain PVC pipes. It just does not work with the rest of the decor!
And, now, two of the three pumps that run the filtration system seem to have given out. So, I have to buy at least two pumps and, if I do what I’m contemplating for the waterfall, most likely, three pumps. No small amount of change, but, unfortunately, neccessary. And, again, not entirely unexpected, considering the age of the pumps. I knew I’d have to replace them eventually, but I’d hoped to do this all next Summer at least. Ah, well, it never rains but it pours. (Which is true here in the Gulf Coast, but the additional fresh water going into the ponds works to my advantage at the moment, so I don’t mind!)

So, now here’s what I’ve been thinking about for the waterfall replacement… Imagine a boiler, or some other similar structure, with its top cut off and plants growing out of it with the final, center auxillary pipe emptying into the pond. Imagine a symetrical network of pipes feeding out of the structure, wrapping around the outside of it, being topped with three plumbing fixtures that have plants growing out of them and feeding into that final pipe before it drains into the pond. Of course, this entire monstrosity would have to be created out of PVC, so as to not poison the fish, but the exterior could be painted so that it would resemble old metal of some kind. It would be strange and surreal and, hopefully, fantastic, but I’m not sure that I’ll actually do it. It’s not the work or even the expense, but, rather, I’m not sure this is the artistic aesthetic that I really want for that portion of my backyard. If it works, it would be a great, cool, wonderous thing, but… But, if it doesn’t, it’ll be hideous. Thus my dillema.

And, yeah, this has been going on for weeks, but I’ve held off posting about it for fear of giving one of my regular readers more information about my life than they deserve to know. In fact, I may end up shelving the project for several months for that same reason. Or not. We’ll have to see.

“Give a thing a name and it will somehow come to be.”
Names matter. Network device names matter a lot and, since it looks like I’ll be redoing my home network, I’ve been thinking about names and naming conventions. I’ve worked with just about any and all naming conventions that you might imagine. Everything from the very practical LocationFunctionSequencenumber scheme (ie. HouAcct01, ChiMIS13, etc. ) to servers named for NASA spacecraft (ie. Challenger, Discovery, etc. ) I’ve seen stuff named for fantasy fiction characters and Greek mythology and Milton’s angels or devils. I even knew a guy who named his routers after dead musicians just so he could send out pings and see the response “Elvis is alive”. No joke. I personally have also used titles of positions in the Yakuza gang structure, as well as various authors and artists. I’ve even heard of guys using their favorite cartoon characters.
Personally, I like to have something with an underlying meaning to it. So, for instance, when I used the Yakuza schema, the main NDS server was “Kumicho”, which is the “boss of bosses”. And, on a whim, I named the printer Hokusai, after the famous artist. The guy who used angels named them based on what each angel had providence over, such as naming his “alerter” Gabriel, who blew his horn to sound the end of the world, if memory serves.
I’ve thought about using both Norse and Voodoo god names, since they’re somewhat unusual, but their “function” is well documented. I’ve also thought about using the various sefiroth of the Kabbalistic “Tree of Life”, for similar reasons. Greek mythology is far too passé to use and, for home, the LocationFunctionSequence method just isn’t fun enough.
So, anyone have any thoughts or suggestions?

(BTW, the quote is from George R. R. Martin in Dying of the Light which is one of the greatest “soft” science-fiction books I’ve ever read. It’s perfect after a breakup.)

Or, the interconnectedness of all blogs.
I did something sort of interesting the other day. I was checking on my Bloglines subscriptions and I checked the “Related Feeds” of several of my current subscriptions. The connections were interesting to say the least. On a couple of personal blogs of various people I know, I got a bunch of foregin language blogs in languages that they don’t speak. On my own, I was expecting to get a bunch of technical blogs, which I did get, but I also got several about survivors of abuse. How strange. To the best of my knowledge, I am not an abuse survivor, though I allow for the possibility of incredibly repressed memories, and I’ve only written about spousal abuse once, possibly twice. So, I started doing this for other feeds. The connections were both strange and thought provoking. And, I subscribed to several of them, for possible inclusion to my list of blog links on either of my active websites. (HavePalmWillTravel is so, so inactive, it hardly even shows up in search engines anymore.)
So, if you have any interest in the subliminal messages sent to you by God, or the Jungian Collective Unconscious, or whatever, sign up for a Bloglines account and subscribe to a couple of your favorite blogs. Then, check to see what other feeds are “related”. For even more fun, subscribe to your own blog and see what’s related. Or, if you’re feeling lazy, subscribe to the Network Geek via Bloglines and see what turns up as a “related feed” to my blog. If you’ve been reading me, you’ll be surprised.

Man, I hate to admit this…
But, my home network is illin’, yo. I have run Netware at home for years. My firewall has been Bordermanager, because who the heck knows enough about it, besides me and the guys at Novell, to crack it? Yeah, yeah, I know, security through obscurity is a Bad Thing, but sometimes it does work. Anyway, I have one Netware server that crashes hard with the slightest power fluctuation, even with line conditioners in place. Just the littlest bit of power blip makes it shutdown. Not reboot, mind, but shutdown. And, several weeks ago when it did that, the data volume took a dump and never came back. I have no idea how much data I lost there, or how mad my wife is going to be because of the data she lost there, but I don’t think it’s coming back this time.
So, that got me thinking… Why should I stick with Netware? I’m more of a Linux guy now anyway, so maybe it’s time to look into Linux firewalls.
Any suggestions? And, anyone have any suggestions for ways to try and recover that crashed Netware data volume?

Wow, my traffic sure hit a spike in March!
And, it’s been dropping off ever since. Hmm, I wonder who’s not obsessively stalking my website these days? Or is it that I don’t talk enough about popular subjects, like Strom Thurman. Yeah, can you believe that’s still my number one search term? You’d think that “lucy liu porn” or “mariska hargitay porn” would do it more often, like over at Fantasist.net. Go figure! Well, I’m sure when the divorce is over and I’m feeling a little more talky about strange and personal things, traffic will pick up. Not to mention when I finally start dating again! Hmm, I could test future date’s “geek cred” by seeing how impressed they are with my Googlerank. (I’m still the number one hit for “CNE resume” on Google.) What’s a guy got to do to get webstalkers? Never mind, don’t answer that!

Well, time enough for all that. And, of course, I am more than my traffic stats.

Not a laptop, or a desktop, but…
A computer for your wall, ergo a “walltop“. An interesting conversion or update of the simple digital picture frame, this do-it-yourself project is the first of its kind that I’ve seen. The article literally takes you through cannibalizing a laptop for insertion into a regular picture frame which can then be hung on the wall. Of course, it’s displayed without a charger cord dangling from it, but I’d imagine you’d end up with it plugged in most of the time. Still, the possibilities for digital and interactive art are impressive. Also, this particular DIY article keeps the touch-pad mouse as part of the installation, so there could potentially be some actual interactivity.
Hmm, I think I have an old laptop around that I might be willing to sacrifice for this….

Yikes! I guess I’m getting to be even more of a hardcore geek as I get older! Still, a walltop computer could be fun. Aw, why not click the link and check it out? It’s Friday and you know you’re looking for a good, indoor, project this weekend!