Gecko Bloggle

Eep Omnibus Pablum.
(Translation: I got nothin’.)

Yeah, no, I got nothing. This past weekend was good, partly ’cause I deliberately didn’t get into anything from work ’cause I knew this was going to be “hell week,” due to some stuff that’s coming up fast for a Friday deadline. Today, I felt like I was battling all day to stay on target, which was made worse when I suddenly ground my gears to switch tracks entirely for something that’s due tomorrow, instead of something that was due last Friday.

Heh. Ooopsh.

On the upside, I spoke to someone on the phone today who talks even faster than I do. It was awesome. I didn’t necessarily feel confident that he could do what he said he was going to do, but omigod did he ever BELIEVE he could do it. It was one of those rare moments when I found myself thinking “You might be full of it, but I hope you manage to pull it off.”

I wonder how often people think the same about me at work?

So what have I been doing lately? Just for fun, ’cause I’m crazy like that, I installed VMWare, and created a virtual Ubuntu Server. I just wanted to see what it could do out of the box, and found that there was a step with a “do you want fries with that?” checkbox screen, and two of the items were web server and mail server. The very same two things that don’t really work very well on my current server rig right now. So I fired ’em up just to see how scary they were, and they just. Plain. WORKED.

I didn’t install an FTP server (oops), so I couldn’t just start hauling stuff from my currently IIS server into the virtual Apache, but I was pleasantly surprised once again by Ubuntu.

The server version isn’t as exciting as some of the vertigo-inducing effects you can find with the Compiz stuff under Ubuntu workstation, but hey, who needs all those windows doing the hokeypokey like that?

(/me waves hands back and forth, going “Oooh! Ooh!”)

I’m becoming a zealot, aren’t I? Shoot.

If I keep this up, I’m going to end up being the guy running around in shorts, suspenders, and a backpack, telling people “He got Linnixth running on his watch! On his watch he runs it!” I don’t think I’ll ever be as uber as Mister Aardvark, but I’m happy to claim to have been there when he was still a guy working in a bagel place and thinking maybe he should learn about this Linux stuff after he finishes his first album.

Arwen and I went to Deb’s birthday on Saturday night, just like when we didn’t have kids. Rip and I went out yesterday to the park, and there’s some fun pictures up on Flickr (of both events).

On the way home, we hit the bargain bin at London Drugs and bought Super Monkey Ball Adventure, which is a little over Ripley’s head, but sorta slap-happy fun anyway. Two hours of fun for $9.00, not too bad.

OH! I might be going on a business trip soon. Probably. Most likely. We’ll see. Second time in my career I’ve been paid to go somewhere. Last time was when Service Pack 2 for Windows XP came out, and I spent more time going through customs than I did in the air.

This time, I’m gonna have to travel on a Sunday, and come back on the following Saturday (I think, we’ll see). S’gonna be fun (I think, we’ll see). Arwen keeps saying I said I was going to Daytona, but I *know* I didn’t (I think, we’ll see).

For the record (hah!) I bought CDs last weekend, and forgot to tell the world. Despite what groups like the RIAA might have us believe, FREE streaming of music pointed me to music I’d never heard of before, but I like, and then that led me to BUY some for SOMEONE ELSE, ’cause I thought they would like it too…

She just turned 19 (happy birthday last week!), and I’m happy to say she’s my cousin, from that freaky-music-over-talented wing of the family. Somewhere on Youtube I’ve got my uncle John playing a badly tuned piano. I seem to have got the funny gene, but not the musician gene.

Okay, enough nothing from me. ‘nite yall.

Oh, and this song makes me want to do a new style of dancing Mr. Mills and I spoke about in one of our podcasts, and I’m a call it “grumping.” A little moody, and little blue, but funky. Think DeeeLite, but bummed. But diggin’ it. Y’know?
(probably only shows up at http://www.geckotemple.com/blog).

Let’s see.  What’s going on over here?

Caught part of the recent Golden Globes awards “press conference,” which was just kinda painful.  Mary Hart from Entertainment Tonight fame just couldn’t seem to figure out how to turn it off for a moment, which gave her segments this weird “The Office” tension.  You kept expecting her to do/say something desperately inappropriate, and then try to get a high-five from someone while saying “Am I right?  Huh?  People?  You were all thinking it, right?”

Caught CBC’s “jPod” tonight.  Very close to the book, plot-wise, but not very close to anything to do with the geek culture the book had.  What’s missing is the odd people who work at the company in question.  Through personal experience via professional placement, I happen to know the author knows the ex-president of the real “Neotronic Arts,” and the question that Arwen had was a valid one:

“Do you think Coupland thought the company was like that,  or did the president think it was like that?“

Yikes.  I probably don’t want to know.

What they don’t seem to have any of is the alarming humongousness of “Neotronic” Arts.  It doesn’t look like a University with low fuzzy walls instead of classrooms, fortified with games-that-don’t-yet-exist posters, and nerf-hurling railguns.  Not at all.  It looked like they took over the set of Good Rockin’ Tonight and Switchback combined* (see that flicker of tin? just me flashing my “old guy” badge), and put some big freakin’ LCD panels on ’em.  The acoustics in that place would be repugnant.  Nobody has headphones on, so you know it’s fake.  Actually, come to think of it, I didn’t see speakers, either, so they’ll never have a round of “My music has more bass than yours,” which is a near-daily tussle in our department.

They’re also missing the wonderful genius weirdo types.  The ones that wander the common areas, muttering to themselves, listening to $800 worth or portable audio equipment while wearing $8.00 worth of clothes.  You can’ write these people, or put them on TV.  No one would believe you.  People don’t like to think that the chainsmoking sketchy dude at the bus stop might have had something to do with a game like Playground.

There’s no Dodgeball League (I kid you not) in Neotronic Arts.  Of course, the book was done before Phase II of our Burnaby campus was completed, so I guess I can’t fault Doug on that one.

That, and playing “let’s hide the ringing cel phone someone left on their desk,” which is, I’m pretty sure, why cube walls are hollow.

Beyond here be the brayings of a techie…  Non-geeks might wanna take a pass on the rest of this post.

Click here to read more.. »

I want one of these little robots really badly, BUT, I can also see how they’d be used for their intended purpose, so it also cool in a more geeky kinda way.

Happenin’ little tune by Spoons, too.

From the site: We are currently developing and studying dance-oriented nonverbal play with between children and the robot Keepon, designed and built by Hideki Kozima. Keepon is a small creature-like robot developed to perform emotional and attentional interaction with children. It has four degrees of freedom, a soft rubber skin, two cameras in its eyes, and a microphone in its nose.

So, after the main drive on our server decided to pack it in after only six years of:

• running on a sad little Pentium III 733
• Windows 2000 server (and IIS, ’cause they said it couldn’t be DONE)
• not enough air flow
• multiple power surges and outages
• three different low-profile power supplies
• a warm day combined with the door on the cabinet sealing shut

the drive made this horrific clicking noise when attempting to boot.

Now thanks to

• some SERIOUS drive recovery karma (I think I’m around 95% on over 100 drives in my carreer: freaky, huh?)
• Arwen‘s CompSci degree
• blind faith to KEEP TRYING even after you’ve already consciously accepted that everything’s gone
• backups I started on a daily/weekly/”otherdrivetarget” back in February

72hrs later, we’re back up. New hardware, new server OS, new everything. NEW.

Same ol’ data though, which is the new sweetness.

Arwen, Monkeypants, Pomodoro and I are all back.

So, “Temple” is in ruins, and “Blackhole” is here to stay, we hope.

Email/comment (if you can) if there’s any weirdness.

Oh, and Email’s not *quite* back up just yet, so Monkey and Pomo are not emailable at this domain for the next little bit.

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I’m running into an autosave bug that acts more like a “save and revert” of some sort.  It’s BRUTAL to be typing for five minutes, rest for a second to think about what you want to say next, and then watch it clobber most of the last paragraph and replace it with some earlier text.

I was doing a little post just now, to give it another chance, and it LOST THE POST I was typing, even though it seemed to think everything was just peachy.  Ctrl-Z to undo?  It put back the last word I had deleted.

Niiiiiiiice.

I think I’ll stick to wBloggar for now.

Also, I found A Softer World via Karlababble:

They’re all back on my primary blog: http://www.geckotemple.com/blog

Everyone else? As you were.

Got this the other day, and after a second of waiting for the menu to appear, grabbed a screencap of it, since I suspected Windows was just being sarcastic.

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Rough couple of weeks at work, but things *might* be better after next week, as I’ll be in training for 3.5 out of the next 5.

1 day of Windows Vista Stuff (that I suspect *I* could teach, now we’ve taken so much out of the curriculum in order to fit timing.
2 days of “Developing Managers” stuff (I really need to figure out if that’s where I wanna be when I grow up, so they stop grooming me for it).
.5 day of a class called “Difficult Conversations,” during which I hope I don’t:
A) Punch any one.
B) Cry.
C) Both.

So tonight, after helping out a friend with some WEIRD software (designed for making slideshows of photos, but hoo-poi was it harder than it needed to be, and in the end, simply didn’t WORK unless you had version three – you’d think a piece of software made in 2004 would work on WinXP SP2), I came home to my novel-editing partner, and since she’s reading her book out loud to edit, I popped my headphones in and started bombing around for some music.

So I fired up Songbird (which, if you’re into randomly finding music, or just visit a lot of music heavy sites, is a MUST).

Or check these sites with whatever “normal” browser you’re using to read this thing right here.

Wow.

There’s some good stuff out there, that’s free. And not illegal at all. Not just ’cause I’m in Canada, either.

Started at Fingertips and ran through a month or seven of their weekly “This Week’s Finds,” which have a number of tracks with some quite USEFUL writeups about who’s from what band, or the son of which ex-Shriekback member, and the moment to listen for the punchy weirdness in Vocal McYellison’s upper range when he hits E-flat instead of the expected D. Great stuff. Well written. Some really sweet finds here. Going to have to ask for forgiveness (and mention them lots) in our next podcast, ’cause I’m going to rebroadcast more than a few of their finds.

Then I shambled over to Bending Corners (Journeys in Jazz-n-Groove). Oh hell ya. Some of these mixes are pure satin. These aren’t your standard “Hi, I’m DJ Wazoo, and I’m going to play some stuff I found in my mom’s basement, ’cause it says ‘Jazz’ on the front.” mixes. These are well-thought-out, well researched, and some of the most *sincere* mixes I’ve heard in a long time. Anyone who knows me knows I’m a big BIG fan of Coldcut, and the whole SolidSteel style mix show. This is sumpin’ else, tho. Solidsteel is usually a party with a little jazz thrown in. BendingCorners is Jazz with a little party thrown in.

Ended the night tonight at BrokenBeatRadio, which is all over the map, so I’ll probably be back from time to time to see what’s goin’ on over there. Lots of nice 1hr+ shows on there, even if *some* of their shows do get a little too schpeedy for my taste. Good to know where you can find it if you need it.

So… What else?

• I wanna interview at Microsoft, but only if they throw questions like these at me.
• This person (and HotOrNot in general) think too much about what EQUALS “pretty” and not enough about what MEANS “pretty.”
• I’m not entirely sure what Deligio is doing, but it’s very Web2.0 about it. Very hip. Very now. Very very.
• Linking me tends to make me link you. I’m such a ‘ho.
• Geeks are fun to read, even if they have a domain that looks like a Czech radio station.
• Download Squad is always good for downloading fools like myself with more bandwidth and drivespace than their attention span should really allow.
• Speaking of attention spans – The Electric Gumshoe pointed me to this “TinySkweeks” game, so I’ll have to check it out tomorrow, or something.
• and finally, 2600‘s Emmanuel Goldstein turned me on to the very loud and happy about it (or is it “very happy and loud about it”?) webradio station www.kpwr.org via his (Emmanuel’s) podcast Off the Wall.

…and to think I was going to go to bed at 9pm tonight… HA!

So, for no particularly good reason, I’m sitting here at 12:13am, listening to the Kern County, California Law and Fire Radio Scanner (open that with Winamp, MediaPlayer, or iTunes, I’m assuming).

It’s sort of amazing, that there’s so much going on, and yet the dispatchers (all women, it seems) are capable of instantly matching the speed, tone, and urgency of their “folks in the field.” There’s a tonality shift that happens whenever there’s a new hailing on the line, and it’s like they’ll chorus together so they know who they’re talking to when there’s four or five interspersed conversations going on at once.

It’s like there’s this constant flow from Control of “I know you’re in danger, I know maybe you’re scared, but we’re all back here, and we’ll send more to you if you need it, okay? Just keep breathing, stay calm, and watch for the signs.” That’s a lot of data to cram into 2.5 seconds, and 40 syllables.

There’s also all sorts of weirdness (beeps, bleeps, and bloopie noises), and my techie brain instantly jumps in an starts counting pulses to see if I can tell if there were 7/10 codes (a phone number?) or some data stream going on. I’ve listened to enough analog data streams in my time to be able to discern a mod-

OKAY, that was just MORSE CODE, I’m pretty sure.

Oh, and if you have highspeed internet at home, and have one of those little network switches/hubs, (or even a router, probably), stick an AM radio on top of it some time and listen to the distortion that comes out of the network traffic you generate. I did this a few years back with a hub (not a switch) and it was sorta cool. If you like glitch.

Back to the radio…

…oh yeah, and there’s also all kinds of silliness that may or may not be random commentary from the peanut gallery. F’rinstance, there was a notice that went out to let everyone know that something was going to be announced to the entire shift, and after the codes were sent out (I’ve also got a page open with the codes so I can tell what SOME of this stuff is) letting everyone know there’d be a “real” announcement shortly… I heard someone say something to the effect of:

“Neepie heep kebooie – yip yip.”

I’m not kidding. It was pretty clear, and that’s what it sounded like.

There’s even the odd cop who’s voice, tempo, and tone all say “I’m too old for this shit.”

Oh, and it’s true: You really can hear people smile on the radio.

Someone keeps talking about “Ginger Snap” calling (to other units/groups). As if it was a person. I’m looking through the codes, and G-Unit (oh, HEY!) is the Gang Enforcement people.

Hello everyone.

Another long rambly thing from me. Feel free to skip. I won’t be hurt. Heck, *I* probably won’t read this thing again after tonight.

This week has been a good one, even though the (sudden. actual.) snow here in Raincouver has been messing with my commute. I’ve been playing with the “real” version of Vista (downloaded legitimately, via the Microsoft Developers Network), and now that I know a few of the keyboard shortcuts, I’m starting to feel like it’s not ALL bad. Of course, there’s still a lot of “I could do that before, using free utilities” feelings, but for the most part, I’m somewhat amazed at how many devices and things work just fine, with drivers installing on the first plug. Perhaps the term “Plug and Pray” will revert to what it was supposed to be “Plug and Play.”

F’rinstance, I plugged a PCMCIA Adaptec Firewire card into this laptop in order to attach my Western Digital external drive *AND* my Maxtor external at the same time. Hear that, world? I’ve currently got 750GB of drive space attached to this little laptop here. When you start thinking of available drive space in terms of “Three Quarters of a Terabyte,” you start to get a little wobbly remembering that first PC I had with the whopping 110MB of space. These days I carry ten times that in my pocket in the form of a USB drive.

…and don’t get me started on the Commodore 64 my mom bought us back in the day, when she splurged the extra $400 (or was it $600?) for the 5.25″ floppy drive (as opposed to the current-gen standard of the TAPE DRIVE) that was single sided, single density. That’s 180K, if I recall correctly.

Yeah, so, I’ve been more of a techie this week, and less of a manager, which is good. What’s funny is that feeling of getting back to where I’m comfortable in my imaginary stealth chopper. I’m better at figuring out how to deal with some of the more… Office Political… parts of my job. The problems and people I have to deal with that are “less tech / more talk” are easier to work with/around if I’ve had my daily dose of geekery, first (or know that I can geek out later in the day).

Something comes back to me while I transfer the 232GB of Shitoshi’s recovered drive image, and download the squippy-lookin’ build of Linux that looks like it could probably be the Vista/OSX-For-Linux-Users (Kororaa). This was said to me while I was sheepishly talking about some of the software (some data-recovery and forensics applications) I’d acquired via, let’s say “unconventional” means, and what I was learning to do with said software (and I’m paraphrasing):

“As a samurai, you must keep your blades sharp and practice your craft, in the event that you may be called upon to ‘Save The Day,’ so that you may have no fear in your heart as you descend into battle.” (The Electric Gumshoe put it better, but I’ve forgotten it now).

and I think about that idea of sharpening my blades, and it makes me think of something I call the Intruder Complex, which is that feeling one has in a job where they don’t feel totally comfortable, and they’re not really sure what they’re doing just yet. The feeling is that any moment now your boss/co-workers/girlfriend/child will figure out that you don’t know what you’re doing, and blow you out of the water right there and then. y I remember quite well the sensation that Cam (my first boss in my first techie job, where I learned my way around 386 PCs, Windows 3.1, and Novell servers) was going to haul off and punch me in the face because I had screwed something up on An Important Machine. It would never have happened, of course, ’cause Cam was probably feeling not much different than I was – he was a techie who started a company on the top floor of his father-in-law’s machining shop, and mostly he assembled computers and servers for small companies of about 10-20 users. I was his second employee, ever.

So I learned my craft, and every time I *didn’t* screw things up, I felt a little better, and the better I got at troubleshooting (and/or recovering from my own mistakes so fast nobody noticed I didn’t know it the first time), the less and less I felt like I was going to be fired on the spot. That complex goes away after a while. But it sure comes back every time you get moved on to something new.

And then you move up and up in the ladder of technicians, across the line into guru or mad scientist land. You start pulling craziness from the magician’s hat, only it’s not always a cute little bunny you pulled out of that hat, like people might have expected you to. It’s this horrifying multi-legged gibbering *thing* that came from the deep blackness of the net, and it might eat every machine in a 50-foot radius if you don’t handle it properly. And nobody knows how to handle it properly, and everyone who knows enough about such things knows enough to be a little scared.

I guess that’s the thing: In order to be really good at your job, you’ve got to be crazy enough to handle the dangerous stuff, but strong enough to get yourself out of the bad stuff if the fur starts to fly. If you never do the dangerous/scary stuff, what you do won’t show up easily on the radar (your boss’, your partner’s, your co-worker’s, your kid’s, your own). Even if it’s not in a good light all the time, at least you’re being noticed. I’ve screwed things up before, and come clean most of the time. Fail faster, I’ve been saying over the last few months. If you’re not going to make it out of a technical/political brawl you got into, let the others around you know as soon as possible. If they’re really on your side, they’ll slam their back against yours and start fighting too.

Always have a backup piece. A good backup. It helps to have a bigger and scarier friend you can turn to if things get really out of control, too.

What I sometimes forget is that some of the techies I work with don’t like the scary stuff. It scares them. Scares them back to that horrible “I’m gonna get punched/fired” feeling. I want to be brave for them, but that doesn’t work. My only advice for them is “You have to enjoy the sensation of not knowing. This job is too difficult to do if it isn’t fun. Even if it’s kinda demented that you find the difficult stuff *fun.*”

So what the heck am I talking about again?

I’ll sum up, and since I’m not even making sense to *myself* any more, so I’ll do it in StarWars-ese:

1. Be brave. If it was easy, everyone would do it.
2. Keep your lightsaber nearby (and know how to use it, even with the blast shield down).
3. Find yourself an Old Ben Kenobi (from Episode Four, not One).
3a. and a Yoda (from Episode Five, not One).
3b. and the odd Han and Chewie, just in case.
4. Know what the Empire is building, just don’t mess with it until you know how.
5. Stay on target… STAY ON TARGET…
6. The Force might always be with you, but it won’t help if you’ve got it pointed the wrong way.

That’s all from me for tonight, ’cause my brain’s full of stuff that’s even hokier than that was.

Next post will probably be about my new super-reinforced-stitching button-fly jeans. (I kid you not).

and now, since this post is all about hired assassins and royal bodyguards (what? it wasn’t?), here’s a quote from the film GhostDog, in which a great big black man (Forrest Whittaker) becomes the most believable samurai an American film has ever produced:

There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden shower, you try not to get wet and run quickly along the road. But doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses, you still get wet. When you are resolved from the beginning, you will not be perplexed, though you still get the same soaking. This understanding extends to everything.