May 30th, 2003

Back in the 1970's the Cleveland Indians sucked. I mean, they REALLY sucked....it was difficult to pull in a few thousand people for a game. To bring people into the stadium the marketing folks had to come up with gimmicks, and in so doing came up with the all time stupidest idea every to grace sports: In 1974 some genius decided to try a "nickel beer night."

That's right, someone thought it would be a grand idea to allow people to come to a place, spend $1 and get 20 beers. I have no idea who this marketing genius was, but I imagine he answered to the call of "Oh, pool boy!" afterwards.

It is, I believe, the only professional baseball game that ever had to be forfeited because of drunken fans.

Not bright.

May 29, 2003

I really hate stupid drivers.

Coming into work this morning there's a sign: Right Lane Closed Ahead. It's on a straight road, you can see for 1/2 mile that there is a flashing yellow arrow pointing towards the left, telling cars to get over to the left side.

Sure enough there's a long line of cars beginning at the arrow, with their turn signals on. Because the idiots could read the signs, and were able to see the flashing arrow, but THEY were in too much of a hurry and were FAR to important to, you know, wait like the rest of us.

But the REALLY stupid drivers are the ones that slow down and let them in, slowing down the whole process. C'mon people, just stay in your lane and keep going & let the idiots sit there with their turn signals on until they rot.

Morons. The lot of them.

May 27, 2003

106 Flags.

106 flags graced the park in Orwell, Ohio over the Memorial Day. I helped take them down, one by one. They were large flags, held aloft by thick poles and mounted on the posts that surround the park.

Each of those poles had a tag on it with a name; at one time the flags  had graced the coffins of the men whose names they bore.

One hundred and six people who had fought for this countries freedom. They didn't necessarily die in battle. Some of them had lived a very long life. They had wives and children, they were able to live the life they had fought wars for others to lead.

Veterans, all of them. Scared kids fighting in places they had never been, wondering if they would ever make it home alive. But they grew into men and took with them the memories, and scars, of battles that we never think about.

Roughly ten people showed up to help take down the flags; the head of the project was very pleased, he considered this a pretty good turn out.

I'm told this traditional flag flying may stop next year; the man who does it will be retiring next year, and those who seem to be in line to take his place think "it's too much bother."

I'm glad those hundred and six men bothered when they were needed.

May 23, 2003

Tale of a Dimwit

For the past 14 years I've earned my living by working with computers. It's what I do, and I'm very good at it. But even the best of us can have the occasional brain fart & wind up looking like a (dare I say it?)...user.

I was setting up a machine for my sister, loading Windows 2000 onto it. I got the base install finished & it was getting late, so I plugged my cable modem into it and went to the Windows update page. I started the massive update process and went to bed. I had a nagging feeling something was weird, but I was too tired to think about it and quickly fell asleep.

You folks that understand computers know what's coming, I'm sure.

I got up this morning and checked on the machine. Oddly, it hadn't finished installing the updates....very odd, I thought. Processor running at 100%, machine chugging like crazy...

Then it dawned on me: since the machine was in a different part of the house I had plugged it directly into my cable modem and not into my network. It had no firewall, no protection of any sort; I had exposed an unpatched machine to the evils of the Internet. For an entire evening.

If this machine was a woman I'd be serving life in prison.

Final tally: 83 occurrences of different viruses had infected my machine. Probably several bots, Trojans and worms were thrown into the mix as well. As interesting as it may have been to dissect the problems and see what had happened I chalked it up to lessons learned and have began installing everything from scratch. And that includes formatting the hard drive.
 

So folks, let my small brain warp be a warning to you: make certain that when you're upgrading or installing a machine that you download & install a firewall as one of the first orders of business. And do a virus scan when you're finished.

It will save you a lot of headaches in the long run.

May 22nd, 2003

The one thing I remember most vividly about September 11th was something pretty mundane. It wasn't the towers falling, or the fact that attacks had actually happened; I don't think my mind was able to get itself wrapped around the significance of the event, how catastrophic (and world-changing) it was.

No, the most significant thing came as I was stopped at a stop light in an area of town that, shall we say, is not known for strong law enforcement. I had my window down because it was an unusually hot day, and a car came up beside me. The person in the other car was obviously from that neighborhood; they looked pretty rough & tumble. I had my radio on listening to the news when they rolled down their window and said, "It's a helluva thing, isn't it?"

I replied "Yeah...glad I live in Akron. Not many terrorists are going to bother running their planes into abandoned rubber factories".

They laughed, the light turned and we went our separate ways. For one all too brief day we weren't black and white, male and female, atheist and believer. We were all Americans, with no hyphenated names in front of the word.

Yes, it was a helluva thing. In more ways than one.

May 20th, 2003

Why are there people in this world that want to be sad? I know people with good jobs, enough money in the bank and incredible prospects in front of them but they're never happy. They're constantly dwelling on the bad things that happen in every day living. Many times they're worrying about stuff that hasn't happened, and probably never will. Instead of looking at the good side of things they are constantly trying to track down the negative aspects.

I'm reminded of a joke: A couple gets married. The first morning the husband brings the wife scrambled eggs, bacon and juice for breakfast. She looks at them and says "I wanted poached eggs this morning." The next day he brings her poached eggs and she says, "I was in the mood for scrambled eggs today". One the third day he brings her one scrambled egg and one poached egg. She looks at the plate for a moment and says, "You scrambled the wrong egg".

I've known people like this. The people they were friends with five years ago they're not friends with now. They're so much of a downer that people who get to know them drift away because they're so depressing.

Kick up your heals every once in a while. Don't be afraid to be happy every once in a while. There really isn't anything wrong with that.

Really, there isn't.

May 19th, 2003

Between the time I was cleaning out my basement, trying to figure out Spam Assassin and rewiring my upstairs bathroom I had another curve ball thrown in my direction.

My company sells accounting software and recently had several people leave. This has left an opening that would like me to fill; I've got the systems running here pretty smooth, and they want me around for both the software & to keep the machines going.

So now I have a choice to make, whether to go into the software/consulting side of things or attempt to break into the security area. Since I have no official training in the security area, and the one opportunity seems to lean far more towards auditing that anything else, it looks like I may shortly become a consultant.

If nothing else at least someone will be claiming me. I've been an orphan between two companies for quite some time & there have been a lot of things dropped in the shuffle.

Time to pick a few of them up.

May 18th, 2003

Oh, the irony. On Thursday I talk about building my basement bathroom. When I built the thing I tried to do everything correctly; it's all concrete board or green board, all wood is heavily sealed and varnished, the floor is tiles and sealed & I've often joked to my wife that I could fill that room with water and it probably wouldn't leak.  I meant it as a joke; it seem the universe took it as a challenge.

After three days straight of heavy rain our basement gave up the ghost. There is nothing quite like being awakened by your youngest child who, with obvious excitement in her voice, tells you "Daddy, there's water all over the basement and mommy needs you right now!"

I walked down to the basement and discovered 2" of water covering my basement floor. Would have been more but I had the foresight to add a drain when I had my floor torn up for the bathroom.

My wife asked me what we were going to do; I told her to tell the kids to go get their plastic boats and play with them, because when are they going to get a chance like this again?

So we broke out the squeegees and wet / dry vacs and proceeded to reclaim our basement. We declared victory about noon on Sunday, helped immensely by the fact that it had quit raining on Saturday morning. All told I figure we had about 500 gallons of water that we pumped out of the basement (the new shop-vac's have a pump setup that allows you to suck out water & push it through a garden hose. Very handy, that).

Looks like my Memorial Day weekend is going to consist of digging a trench around the house and adding drain tiles and waterproofing.

I love being a homeowner.

May 15th, 2003

I'm redecorating my bathroom. I don't mean that I'm purchasing towels, or painting the silly thing; oh no, that would be far too easy. I've removed the walls, the tub, the sink, the toilet and the floor. I have, in the words of Col. Henry Blake, a "great big empty".

One huge word of advice for you folks considering something like this: Don't do it! If you feel you must then make absolutely certain you have a second working bathroom before you start work. Trust me when I tell you that EVERYTHING will take longer than you expect. I'll use yesterday as a perfect example.

I was adding a plug to the kitchen, which is adjacent to our bathroom. Since I had full access to one side of the wall I thought tossing a second plug in the kitchen would be a grand idea. The plug that is currently in our kitchen is in an incredibly inconvenient spot.

So my plan was to measure and cut a hole on the wall, put the plug box in, connect the two plugs together and call it a day. Total work time: 1 hour.

That was the plan. How it actually went:

Measure out the box. Draw cutting lines.

Use a blade to cut an outline in the plaster. Smack outline with hammer and chisel.

Hear shattering noise on the other side. Go to kitchen to investigate.

Discover that there the vinyl wall covering was laid over plastic tile. Said tile has no shattered and fallen into the crevice between the tile and the wall covering.

Measure out plug box on the other side. Cut vinyl covering in the hopes that it will be big enough that I can clean out the shattered tiles. Discover that it isn't.

Play hopscotch from one side of the wall to the other, picking pieces out of the wall so it doesn't look like some horribly deformed monster.

Finally get all the pieces out. Place plug box in hole along with outlet and cover. Discover that the top of the plug is too close to the cupboard to fit the covering onto the outlet.

Contemplate simply cutting the outlet covering and calling it done. Deciding that won't work in the long run since there is a plug attachment we need to use that won't work with the top of the outlet that close to the cupboard.

Remove everything. Cut the bottom of the outlet hole another 1/4".

Re-attach everything. Put covering on outlet. Flip breaker on and check with circuit checker. Wow, it works! Something went right!

Total work time: 4 hours.

Tonight I try and put in the fan / light / heater combination. I figure it should take about 3 hours....so I should be done by Monday.

May 14th, 2003

A few days ago I turned on a local radio station, WTAM. One of my friends mentioned that I might want to take a listen to Mike Trivisonno, who is the afternoon drive-time host.

I was able to tolerate it for about 2 minutes. Not because of his opinions or because of anything he said, but because all I could hear was his lips smacking as he was eating something.

What kind of doltish radio host doesn't understand that you don't eat food on the air? Seriously, what kind of moron doesn't understand that it's pretty disgusting, the airwave equivalent of eating with your mouth open? This man is supposed to be a radio professional and he can't grasp this simple concept?

I'm told he does this quite often, even interrupting callers to tell them how good his food is....I guess the smacking lips aren't enough. Perhaps a large belch and a nice loud fart are next?

I've heard a lot of radio hosts do this, and each one gets the same treatment. It's my radio and, if I don't like it, I can change the channel.

Better yet I'll just toss a CD in the player and listen to that.

May 13th, 2003

I have a friend who is beautiful. Well, all of my friends are beautiful, but this one in particular fits the Worlds notion of gorgeous. I've often had lunch with her and had waiters literally push me aside so they can wait on her. Men's heads will snap around when they walk by. On several occasions I've been with her running an errand and I'll see the manager come over to assist her, leaving the person who was going to help her in the dust. By every count she is an incredibly attractive person.

But the strangest thing of all is that I can't see it. I mean, I can look at her and think that her eyes are cute, or that her face is symmetrical, or any one of a dozen clinical observations. Yet, when I look at her, I can't see the incredible beauty that people assure me she has.

I've often wondered why that is. My taste in women tends to be different than most people's, but I can still tell that a woman is pretty. And, by and large, my observations tend to coincide with the observations of my male friends. But in this one instance it just isn't there.

Perhaps the universe decided that she needed one person she could speak with that was more interested in her brain than in her body. It could be the fact that we became friends in a rather unusual way & it just never occurred to me to look at her that manner.

I wonder if there are other people out there like me.