Eschew Obfuscation

It is a season for the giving of thanks.  We should all take time to acknowledge the many blessings of friends, family, and, in general, the good in life.

I have spoken at some length about my family.  They are truly wonderful and a source of much of my joy in life.  Adding to that are my friends who enrich my life with perspective and the occasional knock-down-drag-out conversation ending with, “I can’t believe you are really that stubborn.” [Please note that absence of an admission of error in that statement.]

Acknowledging that I am truly blessed by the rich associations that I have, I wish to move on to a thing for which I am thankful.

Caffeine.

Ah, yes, my intrepid friend who helps me battle the urge to be idle.  The magic molecule of twitch.  My thoughts are drawn to you today as I have been experiencing a bit of the down side of she for whom I am most thankful.

My wife has had bronchitis since last Wednesday.  In all seriousness, this truly sucks for her.  She can go about 30-90 minutes without having a full on, “Hey, is that my spleen?”, coughing fit that lasts anywhere from 10 seconds to a couple of minutes.  Very few things will disturb my slumber but when my wife is in pain, it wakes me right up.

In short, I haven’t been sleeping too much lately.

Forward to last night and between the jacked up sleep schedule that four days off of work with a sick wife gets you and taking the kids to school, I ended up with a little over three hours of chopped up sleep last night.  Oh, and I HAD TO GO TO WORK!

“It’s OK,” I think, “I can take the Stay Awake I keep in my desk!”

Now, for those of you playing the home game, please pay careful attention to the box.  Yes, campers, you read it right, 200mg.  In the past, when I have taken this, I have needed to push myself after a good nights rest.  Not, repeat, NOT after having just spent four days on the newborn sleep cycle concluded with a three hour romp for good measure.

Needless to say, I was, and remain, a bit loopy.

So, at approximately 1100, I downed the first tablet of twitch.  At 1130,  my arms began to tingle a bit and I could tell that it was really beginning to work when I couldn’t shut up between belching liquid inferno.

“Food!  Must have food to quench the burning!”

For those of you having trouble keeping up, caffeine and sugar are a pretty good combination because the sugar is rapidly consumed by the twitching which brings the consumer, hereafter referred to as TttTwITCH, back down as there is no more energy to consume.  Unfortunately for TttTwITCH’s coworkers, he has brought protein foods to work, ensuring a long-lasting low burn of calories so that the entire office may suffer at his hands.

LONGLIVECAFFEINE!

Not quite capable of putting these facts together, TttTwITCH decided that he was running out of juice around 1400 and had a meeting that he needed to be alert for.

Engage little-yellow-thunder the second.

It’s about ten to midnight now and I think I have managed to force two yawns since I came home at 1630.  You see, at 1630, I felt like I was going to fall asleep standing up.

At 1730, I had dinner.

At 1745, TttTwITCH was back in the house.

That my wife resisted crushing my skull tonight is a tribute to her patience.

And that’s why I love her and am thankful for her above all other blessings.

written by halfdime

So we’re all sitting around the kitchen table settling down to a big bag of choke-and-puke (what my father has always called fast food) for the first time in several weeks.  Me, The Boy, Girlie-Girl and Momma.  It’s a lovely setting with good behavior and innocent discussions about our days when Momma suddenly comments to the boy, “Wow!   You’ve got some big bags under your eyes!”

Not to be left alone in the boat, The Boy looks to Girlie-Girl and declares, “So does she!  And Daddy, too!”

Striving quickly to keep from being left out of the fun, Girlie-Girl says, “And Momma’s got bags too.”

Unable to constrain myself, I look at my wife and say, “Yes, but we call those fun-bags.”

Fortunately for me, Momma wasn’t chewing at the time and I was saved from a spray.

I’m just waiting from a call from school with the teacher talking about how Topher commented on her’s or another teacher’s “Fun Bags.”

I really need to work on that brain to mouth filter.

written by halfdime

When considering the things in life I’ve done and the various hazardous situations I’ve found/put myself in, I wonder at times what my true fascination is with fire.

No, really.  I must have something wired backwards in my head.

My internal dialogue goes something like this:

“Oh, look.  That’s a fire.”

“I bet it’s hot.”

“Oh, I doubt it’s nearly as hot as that OTHER fire we saw the other day.”

“You think so, eh?  How could we test that out?”

“I’d just stick my hand in there.  To make it scientific, count the number of singed hairs in a two second exposure.”

“Right!”

I suppose writing about it only puts me into the raving lunatic camp.

*sigh*

At the end of the day, I suppose the really marvelous thing is that people still come to me for advice with fire.

“Hey.  Nice fire there.  How hot do you think it is?”

“S’not that hot.  Look, here.  You can just barely make out the blisters forming under the blackened skin….!”

written by halfdime \\ tags: random

As I’m wont to blog about a number of technical things, I find that I’m thinking about personalities in the IT landscape.

To that end, I wanted to jot down the broad categories of people as I see them in the IT world. As far as I’m concerned, there are only really four classes of people in IT.

The Closet Geek
We all know the stereotypical geek who has bad hair, acne a chronic clothing problem and lacks the social finesse necessary to successfully buy candy at a drug store for fear of interacting with a clerk of the opposite sex. The seemingly dominant personality traits in this type of person is hard to find due to the overwhelming lack of self confidence in a social setting. This is the person that they make movies about and that some people believe can shoot energy rays out of their noses [1].

The Casual Geek
These folks can be hard to spot by other casuals and are often targeted by Alpha’s without a moral backing. The most notable trait these folks have is an absolute passion for computer hardware (everything from PC hardware to gadgets). A common mistake that’s made on their resume is considering using the record function in Excel to be programming. There are scores of these folks working at retail computer establishments doing a great job helping folks determine the best of consumer grade electronics. My most recent encounters with this class of geek has been through IBM support but that’s another story entirely.

The Alpha Geek
These are the closet geek escapees. They’ve managed to become functional in a social setting and some may actually excel in social situations.[2] Frequently alpha’s come off as arrogant due to the, “I NEED TO BE RIGHT” setting in their brains. Patience with anything that isn’t interesting (like people) is often in short supply. The irony of this is that the social ability of alpha’s puts them in constant contact with people who are going to ask that the obvious be explained ONE MORE TIME! If you’re not the one asking for the explanation, it can be quite entertaining to prolong this process and watch the alpha’s head near bursting.

The Non Geek
You know who you are. If you’re reading my blog, we won’t be talking about you any more because we’re really only interested in flavors of geeks here, right? Ok, maybe not. The non-geek in an IT setting is really fun. This is the person that everyone looks at and asks, “You’re not offended by profanity, are you?” Regardless of the answer, this is quickly followed by a quick string of obscenities.

If you’ve kept with me to this point, you’re probably wanting to know what this has to do with the topic line at all.

It’s the interaction of the various groups in an IT environment. Mix in one of each class from above and sit each down with or without alcohol (preferably with for at least one) and wait for the topics to move. It’s a great to watch the verbal gymnastics to get to the topic that each excels at so that they can stick it to each other.

Some of the best humor I have ever been witness to has come from seeing someone go from the euphoria of a great quip to the low of being zapped themselves. The creative juices required to be flexible enough to laugh and still come off as a know-it-all prick is what I like to call, Creative Curmudgeonry.

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[1] Let’s be honest. That’s the biggest thing on their body and likely dispenses a multi-jigawatt bolt if they’ve put any effort into “enhancements.”
[2] I believe that some of the closet dwellers were actually dragged out by their parents and dropped in a vat of toxic sludge and that changed their personality.

written by halfdime

So I’ve started this insidious little creature known as a blog. I think about it all the time.

I start a thought and then immediately diverge to, “Hey! That would be a good thing to blog about.”

Then I start to compose the blog post in my head and realize it’s, at best, a sound bite worth of information and really isn’t getting anything accomplished in line with my goal for this blog.

So I discard the idea and move on to something else.

After a few seconds, the person sitting across from me who said something that set off the whole chain of events in my little mental detour starts to get a concerned look on their face. You know the look. That, “Hey STUPID! I’m over here.” Pretty soon, it changes to the, “Is he having a seizure” look and if left too long, it becomes the wake up slap.

I’m fully aware of my problem with shiny objects and my coworkers (and my wife to a certain extent) are familiar with the problem and exploit it often.

This new blog thought-hijacking that is going on is just disturbing.

I think I need to find a qualified blunt-trauma specialist to knock some sense back into my dome.

Nah. I think I’ll just take a cue from my daughter and talk until someone hurts me. If I use a tape recorder, I should get at least a month’s worth of blog entries out of it before I lose consciousness.

written by halfdime

• If you come home at o-dark-thirty and your wife says, “You’re home early.”…
• If you have a computer that’s over ten years old and you’re lamenting you can’t get RAM for it…
• If you can’t name all the layers of the OSI model but know which layer http is on…
• If you hate programmers (because you would’ve written it better)…
• If you’ve thought of killing someone for top posting…
• If you know of more than 2 IRC servers that are poorly configured…
• If EHLO makes perfect sense to you…
• If seeing SYNACKRST makes you twitch…
• If you’ve ever typed, “AFK. WMA.” into an IRC chat…

Ah the things I think about when moving.

Oh, and for those of you so inclined, meet the bumper dumper.

My favorite t-shirt image from the site:

written by halfdime

I’m getting around to reading my google reader.

Of course I’m behind. Shut up!

So I see this one Jonathan Schwartz’s Blog: Give it Back and quickly recognize it as an April fool’s joke. The best part of the read is the last paragraph and one of the reader comments (no, it’s not me).

The reader posts this horror from the past as his response to Schwartz.

written by halfdime