Walking down the hall today, I passed a young trainee walking toward me. Thinking that she was probably uncomfortable with the newness her surroundings, I decided to abandon my normal code of silence when it comes to non-geek types and say hello.

“How’s it going?” I said in the most pleasant tone that I could muster for a geek who works in a basement.

And then it happened. In a tone that could only be described as boredom mixed with condescension, the trainee did me the favor of saying hello back…while rolling her eyes. I’m no cool young executive on the rise, but I don’t think I deserved an eye roll for god’s sake.

I’m a friggin’ catch. I am. Ask the ladies down at Shady Acres who can’t keep their pinching fingers to themselves.

At what point did I turn 969 years old and fall off of the radar?

This morning, I woke myself up early to see if the recovery worked. I joyously discovered that the program detected 65 Gb of lost data. Unfortunately, because my slave drive was formatted NTFS instead of FAT32, the program couldn’t find a place to put it. Fuckkity shit crap poop. Good Morning!

On the next run, the drive died while reading, leaving me sitting on a floor saying things like “Don’t you die on my, you bastard!”

Now, I have to see if I can get a $200 refund and the drive is going back to Western Digital for replacement. Once I get a hankering to go near a computer again, I’ll need to buy something with a nice racing stripe or speed holes to help re-ripping all that music.

But for now, it’s all over.

Day 4:
I think I can, I think I can, I think I can…

Day 5:
I can’t think, I can’t think, I can’t think…

Day 6 (today):
After 6 days, I finally found a trial program that could read about 65 Gb from my dead disc. It took 6 hours to do so, and then told me that I couldn’t save it and had to buy the full version. Fuck shit ass bitch nuts.

The full version of the program is $200, which is cheaper than sending the drive out to be professionally recovered, but wa-hay-hay more than a geek should ever have to shell out to save something he should’ve backed up in the fist place.

If you asked me 6 days ago to spend that kind of cake on the drive, I would’ve dismissed you with a wave of my nerd cape, but if you saw my clothing and hair style choices right now, you would agree that $200 is a cheap price to pay to abandon this kind of crazy. You can’t buy this kind of crazy from homeless Joe at the bus depot. And that’s a fact. I WHOOPED BATMAN’S ASS! Gagoulijibah.

So, when I wake up tomorrow, I might have blown $200 on a piece of software that wasn’t able to recover the months of music ripping and years of Perl scripts and web design on that drive. My hope, though, is that I wake up with a $200 backup that didn’t have to be sent to a lab.

In either case, #1GF! is completely done with me right now. I haven’t had a 10 minute stint without weaseling the words “hard drive” into the conversation, and I’ve spent more hours staring at the monitor than staring at her over the last 6 days. Plus, I blew off all phone calls and a cookout to work on this thing (Dear Geeks and Nerd, you may not see this as an issue, but that’s why you are reading this from a lab instead of from some naked woman’s apartment. In the relationship world, machine over human is a no no. Don’t attempt to explain the Matrix or the Borg, either. It will actually lose ground for you.)

It’s just that sometimes I lock onto a problem and won’t let go until it’s done. And sometimes, that’s just the way it has to be. Otherwise, I really won’t be wherever I’m standing until I’m standing where I think I need to be. In human relations, this is considered a defect. In problem solving it is an asset.

I solve problems. It’s what I do best. Humans, I’m working on.

Ok. Day Freakin 3 of the Hard Drive Massacre.

I want it noted that this was not a data error like “Whoops I deleted a file and the thing won’t boot.” This is some sort of hardware failure that seems to be localized platter or HD controller damage (although I can’t figure out which).

Yesterday, I managed to install a drive that had been sitting on my desk begging to be put back into action like a 75 year old applicant at Wal-Mart. I slaved the failing hard drive to it and got it to boot every so often. When I could finally access the failed drive’s contents, the data told me that it wasn’t really “feeling me” right before it slammed the door in my face. I think it was hiding and smoking the pot, too because when I finally kicked the fucking door in, it all filed out at a snail’s pace. This pace that was not increased by my propensity to stare at, or talk to the monitor no matter how menacingly.

By 11:30 PM or so, I managed to recover the last 2 years of my digital photos in a mere 6 hours. This sounds like crap, but photos can’t be recreated, and I never backed them up. I’m lucky to have recovered anything at all. I was pretty happy until…

I remembered all the website stuff, the art stuff and all the rest of the digital refuse that I have created over the last few years. I could recreate it all, but why not try to restore it, if possible?

So today, I bought a new drive and have finally, after 3 hours, gotten it slaved and recognized with the old, but hard working drive, and the lazy pot smoking drive. The three don’t seem to have anything in common, but they’re sitting nicely on the floor together talking. I started a data copy from the pot head to the new guy, and the new guy is being very patient, but I’m not confident that the pot head is telling him everything. I think he knows he’s totally fucking fired once he tells all.

I may go up there and stare at them to see if that speeds things up, but I’m not counting on it.

Update: It’s been another 6 hours. I’m at the point of doing low level copying that has been running for an hour and is 0% complete. It seems that the copy program expects to be done in a little under 1200 hours. That’s a mere 50 days from now for all you liberal arts majors.

As an admin, I know to save early/ save often, but I just had my main hard drive go down for good. Due to the relative newness of the drive and the laziness of the owner, there was no backup. I’m almost positive that the crash was physical, so if any of you so called nerds have any sort of advice on physical recovery, I’m all ears. All I can tell you is the “raw read error rate” is 1, which I think indicates no throughput from the drive. The information seems to still be there, but the controller might be gone.

If I don’t recover the drive, I’ve lost not only 50+ gig of MP3′s, but all the pictures I’ve taken over the last 2 years. I’m contemplating shelling out $300+ to have the drive professionally recovered.

A solution that saves me that kind of cash will get you a free meal, possible protection from the jocks, and a lifetime membership to the Lamda Lamda Lamda fraternity.

Oh, and if anyone has a PC company or recommendations on a new system, I’m all ears. I’m serious this time. Really.

Thanks for all your help.

Update: It looks like a good portion of the drive is bad and the data transfer is complete crap, but I got 90% of the digital photos from the last 2 years back. That only took 2 days. Tonight is the episode where I spend the third night in a row trying to get the rest of the data. Hilarity ensues.

I played video games for so long today that a contact fell out of one of my eyes completely unprovoked. I laughed like hell, got my glasses, and then played for another 2 hours.

I somehow came across 10eastern.com’s found images gallery while surfing about the ‘net. In essence, a guy was out looking for MP3′s via some file sharing app and came across someone’s pictures shared out for all to see. Interested to see if other people had done the same, he started looking for more pictures and the found images gallery was born.

I sat looking at these things for hours (galleries 61 to 114 to be exact). Some of the pictures made me sit and think, some made me laugh, and a few of them elicited a solid “What the fuck?”

I captioned what I could below, and each thumbnail links to the full image over at 10eastern.com. If you do explore their photo archive, make sure that you have the pictures in “full” rather than “thumbnail” mode, because I found that the thumbnails just don’t do the full pictures justice and you end up missing a lot of pretty cool stuff.

After a long Friday at work, I usually unwind by visiting the music or computer sections at the local BestBuy, Compusa, or CircuitCity (It’s not a pretty fact, but it’s a fact). This past Friday was really no different, except that I had just gotten my EVO back after 2 weeks in the repair shop. I really didn’t appreciate the pure grandpa floatirion suckitude of the rental Camry (alignment problem included) until I re-acquainted myself with the EVO’s bone-jarring goodness on its maiden voyage to the local CompUSA.

While traversing the 10 mile hike from my ding resistant spot in the far reaches of the parking lot, I simultaneously reviewed the drive down and pondered the gigs and gigs of storage lining the shelves of the store. Just then, as if to drag me back to an unhappy reality, some guy walked up next to me and just started talking.

DumbAss: WR6.
Me: [ignoring the ramblings]
DA: WR6.
Me: What?
DA: WR6. WR6.
Me: WR6?
DA: Yea. WR6. It’s a WR6, right?
Me: Me? My car? It’s a Lancer Evolution.
DA: A Lancer Evolution WR6
Me: No. You mean a WRX.
DA: Oh, right, a Lancer Evolution WRX
Me: The WRX is a Subaru. Mine is A Lancer Evolution.
DA: Right a Subaru WRX.
Me: No. The Subaru looks kinda like it, but it’s not a Subaru. It’s a Lancer Evolution.
DA: ROCKET CAR!! [walks off]

I have stood for hours listening to insane people that I don’t know rattle off their life stories to me often enough that I usually deal with it without getting the slightest bit annoyed. The 30 seconds that made up this whole exchange left me so annoyed that I was on the edge of actually using the word “fucktard” and telling him to “just shut the fuck up and get away from me.”

Then, I visualized a key dragging across my new paint, and held my tongue to cut the stress level while I stared longingly at shelves and shelves of hard drives and other components.

Do you know why I don’t randomly walk up to strangers with baseball hats on and start shooting the shit about how the “Chicago Red Sox” or the “Cleaveland Cubs” are doing in the race for the cup? 2 reasons: I don’t bother people with questions if I don’t give a shit about the answer, and more importantly, I’d sound like a big, GODDAMNED FUCKTARD.

ROCKET CAR!

As more and more of my favorite reads are abandoned, the list of blogs that I check daily is becoming shorter and shorter. And finding new ones that are actually worth reading takes hours of ploughing through blog directories full of dead links and blogs about how cute someone’s rug rats are.

Spending a couple of hours surfing around to possibly come up with one good read is two hours that I could’ve spent on more useful pursuits like making tin foil hats or staring at internet pr0n.

I know this is like a DJ asking the audience to call in, but if you know of any interesting blogs that I don’t have in my links list, do me a favor and drop a link to them in the comments. Don’t be afraid of a little shameless self-promotion.

Take me to school.

I’ve been trying to move this blog to WordPress for about 6 months now, but every time I sat down and thought about the work involved, I would stare off into space until it was time to go to bed.

Today, I bit the bullet, accepted the default template, and migrated the blog to the new system so that I could add categories and comments and other useless shit. It was supposed to have a famous 5 minute install, but I found that my careless side forced me into doing database edits and other things that a careful user would not be forced to do just to get this thing up and running. If you’re going to be careless, being an admin has its advantages.

Now, Mr. T. is on Hiatus, Beard shaving 101 and 102 are somewhere out there in cyberspace, and I have this plain, yet calming template staring at me.

I had an e-mail volley with a co-worker the other day that I thought if seen by a non-nerd type person, it would seem like complete gibberish. What is really going on is a series of subtext containing references to geekish culture that must be met, understood, and returned akin to the Masons’ secret handshake or the challenge/response mechanism of the network server. For the non-geek, I tried to decipher just what the fuck is going on.

E-mail to Me
Hi there. How are you doing down there in the dungeon? I’m glad you enjoyed Sideways (Subliminal text: We’ve never discussed the movie, Sideways, but I know about your blog, and I saw your review of it in there.). Anyway, [SNIP: Work question]

-Mr. Employee

E-mail Response

10 print “Hello.” (Subliminal text: I am a Nerd. I am making a comical reference to the Basic programming language that I used with my Commodore 64 and saved to a tape drive in the years surrounding 1983. Every line in a Basic program had to start with a number for the system to process it. Programmers typically numbered the lines by tens so that if they needed to insert lines later they would not have to re-number every line in their code.)

20 print “The dungeon is great. My power is growing every day. With a 5th level sword of power, a cloak of invisibility, and a short sword that’s a +5 against ogres, I will inevitably be dungeon master soon. (Subliminal text: Even though I never played Dungeons & Dragons, it is required that nerds be capable of speaking about it. Do you understand the reference?)

30 print “Your happiness with my choice of movies is, as you know, paramount to my success. For $5 extra per month, you can upgrade to the gold plan, and I will be glad to agree with ALL movies of your choice, eliminating all the aggravating guesswork. Limited offer. Act now.” (Subliminal text: So, you read my blog. Whoopdeedoo. I’m sarcastic and witty. Fear my line. (Subliminal within the Subliminal: “Fear my Pink line is a reference to a 2 year old article in Electronic Gaming Monthly where today’s kids played 80′s video games and told an interviewer what they thought of them. While playing Pong, one of the kids said, “My line is so beating the heck out of your stupid line. Fear my pink line. You have no chance. I am the undisputed lord of virtual tennis. [Misses ball] Whoops.” which, for some reason, can still be heard occasionally in the dungeon where I work. ))

40 print [SNIP: work related]
50 print [SNIP: work related]
60 print “Thanks.” (Subliminal text: I’m professional.)

70 print “King Magnus Resillius”(Subliminal text: …but not that professional.)
80 print “Heir to the Dungeon Throne”(Subliminal text: …at all.)

E-mail to Me:
Echo off (Subliminal text:I caught your reference, and I’m dropping a DOS reference to counter. Although “Echo Off” means that you shouldn’t see any of the following text, I thought that a simple mail with just “Echo Off”, even though accurate and funny, would have been a waste of an e-mail. But, I get it.)

I see. [SNIP: Work related] I think the silver plan is fine for me, seeing that my raise isn’t even $5/week. (Subliminal text: Monetarily they’re choking me more than the air in that fetid basement chokes you.) FIND THE HALFLING!! (Subliminal text: I see your Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master reference and raise you a Lord of the Rings Reference. I have seen the trilogy, but I didn’t wear a cape or make the woman selling me popcorn call me by my Elvish name.)

E-mail Response
[SNIP: work related]
It is not the halfling that is the issue. It’s the valkyrie and the elf: they keep shooting the food. (Subliminal text: I see your Lord of the Rings Reference, and I raise you a reference to the 1985 classic arcade game Gauntlet, in which four players: A wizard, an elf, a warrior, and a valkyrie ran around fighting cooperatively. In the game, the elf shot so fast that he would invariably shoot the food that was required to repair the health of the other players. The game would announce things like “The elf shot the food,” or “Warrior needs food badly,” or warrior is about to die.”)

E-mail to Me:
[SNIP: work related]
I am intrigued by the elf and the Valkyrie shooting the food. That must be annoying. I got a kick out of that. Have a good one. (Subliminal text: Caught the references. I have completed all tests successfully.)

I patently avoid going to the mall for an hour to buy things that I need, but I don’t blink at spending three looking for a collection of electronic components to build something that I don’t.

I couldn’t find the parts to build a unit to send radio over laser (cheap laser pointer, a solar cell: RS part #276-124, and an 8/1000 ohm audio output transformer) so I spent $20 on the possibility of building an infrared emitter/receiver. I say “possibility” because I really know very little about building electronics and I have a crazy look in my eye.

The unit that I’ll be trying to build can be found at http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/86. If it works, I may have enough spare parts for a second unit, if anyone is interested.

A couple of quick accounting tricks that I learned while doing multi-class mutual fund accounting with nothing more advanced than a pencil and a big-ass eraser. I don’t know why they came to mind today, but they did, so I spread the love.

1. If the sum of the digits of a number are evenly divisible by 3, then the number itself is divisible by 3. For example, 2235 (2+2+3+5=12) is divisible by three, while 2235525 (2+2+3+5+5+3+5=25) is not. This might be useful when pretending to be Rain Man or when dividing up a large number of M&Ms.

2. If you are actually one of those humans that balances their checkbook by hand, it is useful to know that transposing two numbers (writing 132 instead of 123) is easy to spot with a simple trick: Take the number that you were supposed to end up with and subtract the number that you actually ended up with. Then take all the digits of the result and add them up. If it is evenly divisible by 9, then it is very likely that you transposed 2 numbers when doing your math. Or you can simply follow the old accounting method of forgoing the math, over and shorting the difference, and spending your time on more useful pursuits.

Last month’s Games magazine featured a series of mathematical crossword puzzles that I’ve become slightly addicted to. Although based upon Kakro puzzles from Puzzle Japan, the fairly large size of the puzzles in Games magazine makes them a little tricky to get the hang of (and for me requiring a fairly large crib sheet), but Puzzle Japan offers several beginner’s problems to get you started.

The Beginner’s problems can easily be completed online, but the time and erasers required for the larger puzzles may require printing and a fairly large amount of bathroom time to complete properly.

So, warm up the printer and break out the bran.

I’ve been working with my host for a month to get my site moved to a new server, and they finally got it working in the last week or so. Because I am a lazy bastard, I haven’t explored the options that this affords me, nor even made a single post.

I’ve been busy working every spare moment that I have. I see it as the first in a series of unavoidable steps toward becoming my father. I’m sure that he didn’t want to work 14 hour days, at first. He probably did a few extra hours here and there, and then 8 hours a day became 9, and a little weekend work to complete a project became working every weekend. And here I am looking down the slope with open eyes and trudging right the fuck down.

So, I buy new CDs, read books, watch movies, or just stare blankly at the TV to take my mind off of it, but it’s always there sewing itself to my other thoughts. I’m donating more and more to the cause and getting less and less satisfaction from larger and larger accomplishments that become standard fare.

If anyone wants to open a warehouse-sized used record store in Boston that just sells CDs to people at a reasonable price and makes money through pure volume, let me know. I will need capital, expertise, and vision to get it off the ground. Oh and we probably need a plan and some sort of logo. And I will probably have to be some sort of silent partner, because with my music addiction, the old pusher’s adage of “Don’t get high on your own supply” would inevitably drive us out of business. But it will be quite a ride, won’t it? Those two weeks where we owned a giant record store? Man, won’t we look back on that and laugh?

Good times, Good times.

Bad Brains I
Last night I dreamed that my forearm was achy so I slid all the meat off only to find that part of my bone was made of rock candy. It seemed to be rotting, so I broke it off and slid the meat back on to the good portion of the bone. I think I was in a bowling alley.

The only thing that seemed to concern me about the situation was that the meat on my arm was no longer very even and I wasn’t sure if I should stitch it up or just leave it as it was.

Jon.Virus.b
After being told of increased IRC traffic on our network, I set out to try to figure out what was wrong. I tracked the issue to a file called SecureAntiVirus.exe that held port 6667 open on the infected machines. As McAfee had no pattern file to detect the virus available, I submitted the file to them for review.

Normally, if McAfee knows about the virus but hasn’t included it in a pattern file, they return a previously created pattern file within 5 minutes. For the file that I sent, it took them about 45 minutes, making me think that I might have been the first person to submit the file to them. I’m not saying that I’m the first person in the world to discover this infection, but it seems likely that I was the first to submit it to McAfee. This may or may not be true, but this virus description page didn’t exist before my submission. Because it’s only the second unknown virus that I’ve “discovered,” I’m taking it.

It’s boring, but who cares: W32/Spybot.worm.gen.f

Bad Brains II
Even though my job has kept me very busy over the last week, throwing problems at me that were taking days of research to resolve, I find myself overly tired, but not disgruntled. After dealing with two particularly trying issues simultaneously, I found myself deep in thought. In a brief, but very serious moment, I thought,

“This would all work out faster if I just had two brains.”

When you view yourself as needing a processor upgrade, you might need a little time away from the computer.

Ghost in the Mail
I mailed my movies back to Netflix last Saturday, and just got movies from them today. And out of 3 possible movies in my mailbox, I only got 2. If you make me wait for 7 days, at least send me all fucking 3. In most states, I could get a gun faster than this.

Ghost in the Machine
When windows won’t install a package because it says it’s already installed, things are bad.

If you have to hack both the files and registry entries out manually only to find that Windows still thinks the product is installed, things are worse.

When you get to the point where you have to use MSIEXEC from the command line, forcing its output to a log file (msiexec /i [package] /l [logname]) just so you can figure out what fucking GUID is making a fool of you, things are going poorly enough to make even a seasoned sysadmin unhappy.

If you happen to come across the GUID hours later, and are forced to resort to using Mircrosoft’s MSIZap to locate a bunch of hidden reg keys that you’ve missed, your lack of beard to pull on while you think will drive you nearly bat shit crazy. You may even begin to do push ups between the reboots.

When you finally finish it all, you will have an immense feeling of satisfaction for a solid five minutes until you realize that you just spent 4 hours troubleshooting a single installation, when a reinstall of the entire system might’ve set you back 2.

I smell like frustration with fudge and nuts.

Sure my PC will automatically transcode DVDs to MPEG files for my video library, but why can’t it transcode them in sweet-ass DTS? And how the hell does it transcode the DVD in the first place?

If your computer will do something for you automatically, and you spend days learn the underlying process, you may be a little bit geeky. If you can re-write the process to your liking, geekiness is assured. If you can get the little DTS light on my receiver to light up when I play my MPEGs, you win $3. If you want to enter god mode, make a PVR-350 decode the video while offloading the DTS decoding to an external sound card.

If you have no idea what the fuck I’m talking about, don’t worry about it. Just say, “Nerd,” and keep on truckin’.

Good I
Day 6, and I got not only the 5.1 stereo working on the ol’ sound card, but I got it to output in DTS from a DVD. Next up: getting MPEG2 files to play in DTS. I need to figure that out right after I figure out what I did to get the sound card working. Then, hopefully, I’ll write it down.

Good II
Day 7 and Netflix decided to send me some movies. I made my GF watch Life is Beautiful, warning her that she was going to cry like a baby. And you will, too, if you watch it, you big wuss.

Good III
After Shaving 101 and Shaving 102, I thought that I had covered all possible beard types. The only thing that I could think of to do for Shaving 103 was a Mr. T mowhawk (with beard connection: pic). As I hadn’t yet figured out the logistics of getting away with a celebrity trademark haircut on a basement-dwelling LAN admin scalp, I was lucky to find Name That Beard.

Not only have I never donned the “Franz-Joseph” or the “A La Suavarov”, but I never even considered the “French Fork.” And who knew that mutton chops could be considered friendly? Sorry, Mr. T.

Bad I: You Get What You Pay For
A Chaintech AV-710 sound card with an optical output would allow a person to watch DVDs from their Home Theater PC with perfect Dolby 5.1 sound. And $27 seems like an amazingly good deal, until one spends 5 days trying to get more than 2 speakers to work. On the fifth day, when I finally got the center speaker to play music for the first time, I literally jumped up and down shouting, “I CAN GO TO BED! I CAN GO TO BED!”

Bad II: You Pay For What You Get
This morning, there was beautiful orange sunrise over the water that I caught over my shoulder while driving to work. I thought to myself, “I’m leaving this to go into a windowless basement for the next 8 hours?”

I felt like a fool until I stepped on the accelerator and thought, “Mmmmmmmm Turbo.”

Bad III: You Get Nothing and Like It
Dearest Netflix, I’ve been waiting for 7 days for new videos, now. Cut porking me and send the goods.

I suddenly realized that I have been writing 4-5 times a week in this blog for over 3 years now. I probably should go back and fix all the crappy grammar and confusing sentence structure, but I have this impression in my head that my back posts are wonderfully amusing and witty. Like watching a movie as an adult that you loved as a kid, I’m afraid that the second look may not live up to the eloquent prose I remember it to be.

Truthful news flash: I’m a bad speller, and I forgo the rules of grammar often enough to know that going back to edit a bunch of posts that only I read is as big a waste of time as revamping the crappy colors and structure of the site itself. Time is scarce and needs to be dedicated to loftier projects.

Like becoming the best street racer in the underground before the GF gets home. Word.

If you are at work, and you ask out loud, “Hey, how fast can the millennium Falcoln do the Kessel run?”, there is a good chance that you may be a big, fat nerd. If you do not fear strange looks from your co-workers, there is a good chance that your co-workers may also be big, fat nerds. If you get an immediate response and use the phrase, “That’s what I thought,” then both may be true. If you argue over whether the answer “12 parsecs” is correct, because Han Solo clearly described the ship as doing the Kessel run in under 12 parsecs, even I could probably teach you what it means to be cool. If you consult with any type of hard copy (Star Wars Trivia guide, Living like Luke, The Jedi Handbook, etc.) to prove you are right, you win. But, on so many levels, you lose.

If you live in Hull, you got 3 feet of snow yesterday, and the hurricane force winds created massive snow drifts that were taller than you by a foot before the plow even got there. You are also facing 8-10 inches tomorrow. 8 days ago, you experienced 2 straight days of 60 degree weather.

If I am offered 2 degrees and sunny or 32 and snowy, I’m taking the snow even if its 3 feet and leaves a 7 foot drift outside my door. If you offer 3 feet and 2 degrees, I’m staying in and playing the PS2.

If you take your garbage out in a blizzard, you will wade through waist deep snow and 40 MPH winds to get to the dumpster. In the short walk, your frozen beard will make you look like Mr. Cold Miser. Because life is a comedy, when you get to the dumpster chute and you inadvertently fling one of your gloves in, you will hopefully smile before sliding down the chute after it while your GF doubles over laughing at you.

If you attempt to further entertain your GF by diving off a 10 foot high rock head first into a 7 foot snow bank, after you finish wiggling your legs in the air like you were stuck, you may be surprised at the kids 25 years your junior laughing an waving out of their windows. You will feel young until you later think, “Man, thank goodness there wasn’t a stick in there to take my eye out.”

If you work in IT, you know that there are people behind the scenes snooping everything you do. If you are not in IT, you should be aware that there are people behind the scenes snooping everything you do.

I control virus protection on over 16,000 machines, so I have pretty decent access when it comes to moving around our network. By a stroke of luck relating to a small virus issue yesterday, I got the opportunity to visit a computer forensics lab that was hidden behind what looked like a closet door and was protected by no less than 3 card readers and a fingerprint scanner. I have pretty decent access, and I had no idea that the place was there.

I mean I’m relatively savvy and know how to snoop and repair a PC (including deleted files) without a typical user having the slightest idea what’s going on, as even most moderately decent admins can. But I can tell you that some of the ways that they can find out what you’ve done and the dirty things that you’ve been looking at are pretty amazing. Due to some hefty non disclosure agreements, I can’t really write about what I saw in there, but I can tell you that you should play nice on your work PC, and leave the nudie pictures at home.

If I requested a machine name from someone to update their PC, and they reply with “CAPTAINARCHER,” who is the bigger nerd:

1. Him, for naming it after a Star Trek captain,
2. Me, for recognizing it and replying “warp drives are operational” after the install,
3. Or My Co-workers for not only recognizing the name, but scoffing at it for not being named after a captain from one of the good Star Trek series.

For the Geekily challenged: Captain Archer bio from StarTrek.com

Because I work in a technology field, I like to think that all the people I work with like an orchard full of giant, pulsating geek brains chock full of juicy information ripe for the picking. But a conversation I had today pointed out that not only is my definition of who is a geek too wide, and my definition of those acting within geek culture is too narrow, but that simply working in the technology field does not a geek make:

Scene: A Technology manager walks by table of geeks eating lunch.

Me: What’s up man?
Him: Hey, Didn’t see you at the Christmas party last night.
Me: Yea. Out of bullets (I make management type “looking good” finger guns). Plus, you know (weighing motion) Playstation… Christmas Party… Playstation…
Him: (Semi-horrified look) Whoa there. Don’t let other people hear you saying that.
Me (+ table of geeks): blank stares
Him: …That you play Playstation.
Me (+ table of geeks): blank stares
Him: I mean wouldn’t go telling people that.
Me: (after pause) I think I know what the problem is. You’re not a geek. Don’t say what you just said in front of other geeks.
Him: I’m a geek
Me: No, you’re not.
Him: A little bit.
Me mmm no.
Him: I used to play Nintendo. Totally addicted.
Me: …When you were a kid
Him: Ok, fine then.
Me (+ table of geeks): head shaking

In my mind, I always thought that most people that work in technology are the geeks. Within that circle, I thought that there was a subset of hip, young, bored-looking people with black clothes, IPods, and tiny metal glasses that make you want to just punch them in the face. To me, those people are the ones involved in (and use finger quotes when they say) “Geek Culture.”

But this conversation caught me off guard enough that I began to wonder if geeks actually even have a culture. Is a geek a solo misfit, or are there patterns of common language, customs, and artifacts that bind geeks and create a culture? Because I am consistently surrounded by geeks, I think I assumed that geek culture didn’t exist, because it’s pervasive enough in my life that I have little to contrast it to. I just followed the typical American pattern of making an uninformed decision on the subject with nothing to back it up: Geeks have no culture, and those that think that they do, are simply elitists that need a good punch in the face.

So, is there a geek culture, or is it elitist bullshit? I honestly don’t think that being a geek is an exclusive club or a fashion statement, and I think defining it is as elusive as trying to describe what is “punk rock” about “punk rock” to a Midwestern housewife. Like obscenity, geeks are hard to define on an individual basis, but you know one when you see one. Yet, if we examine geeks as a group on the basis of language, customs and artifacts, what emerges is something resembling a culture.

Language: Any fucktard in a tie can sound like they’re transferring important information when they bullshit their way through a conversation with buzzwords like “synergy” and “paradigms” but what are they really saying? Because there are no real concepts behind the words, there’s no real language, and thus, no knowledge transfer. No concepts + no knowledge transfer = no language. They’re not really saying anything at all. It’s the professional equivalent of baby talk.

Geek speak is equally as intelligible as corporate jargon to someone who’s never heard it before. If you listen in on a table of geeks, to the untrained ear it sounds like the same bullshit. The difference is that the language used by geeks describes real information and transfers real knowledge between the participants. The transfer of knowledge with words known within a certain group is, by definition, language. If the language is mainly understood only by the members of a certain group, can that group be said to have their own language?

Customs: Do geeks share customs? You bet. They may not admit it, but they all can name at least one video game that they absolutely could not stop playing. They like gadgets. They tend to home brew solutions, and may take some of your favorite things apart to see how they work if left alone for extended periods. They have the right ideas, but are more inclined to use the wrong words to express them (as opposed to corporate culture which can be defined as the right words for wrong ideas). Because mental laziness is not a virtue, they know to google for answers before asking questions, and will generally tell a N00B to RTFM before lending them a hand. And they value the right solutions over the right tie.

Artifacts: What do geeks have as artifacts? They have gadgets in their pockets, caffeine in their veins, and technical manuals on their shelves. They also carry tiny screwdrivers.

So, by the simple criteria above, do geeks have a culture? I would say so. Did I find myself inside of it staring out, today? Yep, I did. Does it matter? Not at all. Is there a good test of who is in and who is out? Not really. Testing a person’s cultural geekiosity in one simple sentence is a tall order, but let’s try:

Did you understand the title, or think that it might indicate a loss of synergy in my paradigm that should be taken off line? One answer would indicate a knowledge of geek culture, and one would not.

An oldie, but a goodie: (All your History)

There’s a lot of talk in the news these days about the violent video games that kids are playing these days and how some religious organizations are against them citing that violent games will produce violent children.

Today, I realized that the people that are against these games have in the front of their houses of worship a cross, on which a man is nailed, graphically bleeding from his wrists, side and head.

If the people are confronted with a giant, bloody, dead man where they go to find peace, shouldn’t they either be violent themselves or severely skewed in what they can or can’t say is too violent?

As a huge fan of Slayer, death metal, and violent video games for well over 20 years, I can proudly say that video games have had little affect on how I interact with the world. Give me a gun in a video game, and I will pop an enemy’s squash like a melon. In real life, though, I have yet to knife, shoot, mame, run over, set on fire, choke, or in any way laser beam a human being.

Does anyone ever think that maybe a little death metal in the ears or grenade throwing on the screen will prevent some fist throwing in the school yard? Actually, the best players of first person shooters that I have met are the most docile away from the screen. Maybe video games and metal are actually cathartic.

Guilt, pressure, and your local priest statistically have a better chance of damaging your children than Judas Priest or a video game. Do the math.

Found Inspiration
People can do wonderful things with web design and CSS. I do my best, but I am not one of them. The people who created CSS Zen Garden make me want to re-design the site, but I don’t think I’ll ever hit that level. If I could though, you would worship me. Wouldn’t you? Just say “Yes” and I’ll stop pestering you.

Found Another Blog
Big Whoop, right? Geese Aplenty

Found A Movie Review #2386253
Along Came Polly (comedy): This is supposed to be one of those feel good chick flicks where the ugly dude (Ben Stiller) gets the Girl (Jennifer Aniston). The only things that you will remember is A. Jennifer Aniston dirty dancing in a see through tank top, B.) A really funny character played by Hank Azaria, and C.) Jennifer Aniston dirty dancing in a see through tank top. I laughed a few times, but I have to give this the old C+.

Found a Little Problem
The IRS just sent me a letter to the tune of…

Dear Jon,
We think that either you or your preparer may have fucked up your tax return way back in 2002. We just got to it now, because we’re really…uh thorough and we’ve been told that old Georgie needs the cash.
Just send us $528.00 this month and we’ll call it even. Although, we may tag on some penalties. And some fees. And some other stuff that’ll cost you. But, hey you can afford it big guy! This is America!

Love,
The IRS

Crap hell crap.

Found A Worm
On my way to my car this morning, I saw a worm inching its way slowly across the parking lot. As I stared at it, covered in bits of gravel and following the longest possible course to the grass, I thought, “I should help.” I do the same thing with snails I find on the walkway. I pick them up and put them in the shade so that they don’t fry like the stupid crinkled up worms couldn’t find their way to the grass.

As I reached down to throw the worm onto the grass, I stopped. What if this worm was meant to die on the pavement? What if it were to end a bad genetic line of worms too stupid to avoid pavement on hot days? What if I was interrupting the natural food chain and robbing some ants or a bird of a meal? What if, like Eckels in Ray Bradbury’s A Sound of Thunder, I was imposing disorder on a natural order, and making a mess of the future? What if I end up living alone with 15 cats?

I thought all this in thirty seconds while staring at a worm. A worm. What am I a Buddhist? As I wasn’t sure if I had replenished my glove-box stash of Dunkin’ Donuts napkins to wipe the worm slime off my hand, I gave up and let the worm be.

In hindsight, this was probably for the best, although I later realized that I probably backed over it with my car.

The Acronym Tag
So I was looking around the old HTML standards today, and realized that they’ve added a few new tags since I checked them last.  One that I found very interesting was the acronym tag. What it does is allow me to define acronyms so you don’t have to look them up. Mouse over WWDLRD?. See? Ain’t that cool? I’ll try to remember to use it.

Perl for Custom Yahoo! Messenger Icons
Tonight, I added a status icon for the AIM client to the sidebar. Given that Yahoo! doesn’t allow for the use of custom IM status icons, there was no way to have a matched set of icons like are currently shown (Well, actually there is a very easy, very free way, and it’s called onlinestatus.org, but we’re not about easy and free, now are we? We really should be, though.)

Because I’m all about wasting a lot of time on stuff that no one is going to notice, and not a single person on the 85 pages of Google that I checked had a simple Perl script to allow for the use of a custom status indicator for Yahoo! messenger, I sat down and wrote the damn thing myself.

You have my blessing: Steal it at will.

Code:
<br />use strict; <br />use LWP::Simple; <br />my $yahoo=get('http://opi.yahoo.com/online?u=mr_user&m=MODE&amp;amp;amp;t=TYPE'); <br />print "Content-type:text/html\n\n"; <br />if ($yahoo=~/is ONLINE/i){ <br />print q(yahooonline.gif); <br />}else{ <br />print q(yahoooffline.gif"); <br />} <br />

Instructions:

1. Make sure your host allows for SSI and has LWP::Simple installed or no amount of banging your head is going to make this work. (If they don’t, go to onlinestatus.org, and sign up. It’s freer and easier than this hack.)
2. Change mr_user to your Yahoo ID.
3. Change Yahooonline.gif and Yahoooffline.gif to whatever your custom icons are.
4. Dump it into your CGI-BIN directory as ystatus.pl
5. Add this code to your web page: < src= " < ! --#include " virtual = " / cgi-bin / ystatus.pl ">

If you have questions, feel free to let me know. If you used the script and it make things go boom, don’t cry to me…Unless, of course, you’re sad about something completely different. Then, feel free.

50 first Dates: The premise and the movie itself are sappy and weird. I laughed out loud a number of times, but it’s pure Sandler stupidity (IMDB link). B-

Metal Arms: This looks like a kiddie game, but it is THE shooters game. I didn’t realize that I was lacking a game with the speed and pure of the old Quake games until I played Metal Arms. There are so many things to shoot that the PS2 noticeably slows down to handle it all. And like Quake of yore, it the opponents come in waves and do not let up. And the $20 price tag (K-Mart link) is easily justified. B+

Midnight Club II: This is a racing game with no licensed cars, and enough really bad accents to get really annoying quickly. It was only $17 (K-Mart link), and does not compare with the Need For Speed or Gran Turismo series. I needed a driving game to counteract the shooter. C+

A couple of years ago, I wrote a perl script (source) that allowed me to control Winamp by RF remote (X-10: UR47A remote and MR26A serial RF receiver). I read that Mediamonkey uses some form of Winamp in its MP3 player, so I decided to give the script a shot.

I got the script working in a matter of minutes, and I must say that I was psyched until I pressed the wrong button and a computerized voice spoke the song title, scaring the crap out of me.

I put this in as a feature and forgot.

I scare myself.