Terrible Analogies

An hour before I was scheduled to leave work for the day today my supervisor asked me how difficult it would be to write a script that would push a registry change to a few hundred servers with a logging trail we could use for auditing purposes.  Oh, and by the way it needs to run on Saturday, which means I won’t be there to supervise should it fail.  As an added bonus I’ll also need to access the domain controllers, even though the admins have no rights to these servers.  No pressure now…

And so, for a furious sixty minutes I laid the foundation for the prog, getting the needed files pushed to a test group of IPs utilizing the magic of psexec, and managed to get logs reporting back to the host server.  My concern is that not all servers have the same admin rights.  I’ll have to investigate that issue tomorrow morning.

Okay…that last video was fake, but this video isn’t.  I feel sorry for this kid.  I really do.  Ya see, I was at a party once and was dared to eat a mystery pepper some shady looking guy with a bad limp and a lazy eye dramatically produced from a pocket of his greasy black trench coat.  With what looked like a well-practiced sweep of his arms he hoisted the pepper above his glorious mullet and shouted to the heavens daring God himself to consume the hellish, seedy mass of pulpy flesh.

“No problem,” I thought, as I brazenly stepped forward and accepted his obvious challenge.  But after downing this orange pepper of doom I soon discovered that there’s only so much heat a human being can endure before your body starts to involuntarily convulse, your eyes weep uncontrollably, you begin to spastically hiccup, your entire body turns brights red, and you start to sweat profusely.  The next thirty minutes for me were a vague, blury montage of searing pain, vomiting, and “friends” feeding me liquor and beer instead of milk and bread.

Ah….Good times.  Good times….

I guess not all party games are fun to play, eh?

It’s been nearly two years since I had back surgery.

At the time I couldn’t tell you how I injured my back.  I went to bed one night, and the next morning I simply couldn’t move.  What I was experiencing was a singularly unique form of pain.  If I had to describe it, concentrating the feeling into a pointed description, I would have to say that it felt as if a doomed wild beast had a death grip on my lower spine, claws sunk deep in the bone, twisting my nerves out by their roots while I lay on my stomach nearly paralyzed, unable to roll over to defend myself from this ferocious, invisible attacker.

After twenty minutes of incremental attempts I was finally able to fall out of bed and crawl to the cell phone where I called in sick for work.  An hour later I had somehow managed to make it to my feet, where I stood hunched over like an old man with a century’s worth of regret on his shoulders, slowly shuffling forward as I inched my way around the kitchen trying to make sense of just what the hell was happening to me.

To make a long story stuffy, I saw my doctor who referred me to a surgeon who scheduled an immediate MRI.  As soon as the surgeon saw my MRI he booked me for surgery.  A week later I was being wheeled down a hospital corridor, needles resting in my veins with a concoction of beautiful drugs swiftly blanking out reality.  During all the commotion I was more worried about Karin than I was about the upcoming surgery because I could see through her brave front, as she held my hand, that she was feeling sick to her stomach seeing me like that.  

Afterwards, when I woke up in my hospital bed, the doc told me that he had never seen anything like that before.  Apparently, some form of benign growth had latched itself around my lower spine, fiendishly compressing the nerve (see MRI below).

Let me tell ya, with all honesty, that’s something I never want to experience again.

It took me a year to fully heal from the surgery.  I’m still careful while lifting weights, but at least I’ve recovered.  I’m now benching 330lbs and training for a run up Mt. Whitney.  Thank God for modern medicine.  I can’t imagine living 100 years ago and having to suffer with a similar malady.  How someone could have lived with something like this without modern medicine is unimaginable to me.

Circled in red is the odd benign growth that was causing me so much pain

So….Heath Ledger won his posthumous Oscar for his performance as the Joker in The Dark Knight.  To cut to the quick, there was no other way that this saga could have concluded.  The tears shed by those in attendance was a rare example of uncontrollable, honest feelings on full display in a business where deception and duplicity are SOP.  And rare is the film that generates such intense scrutiny as TDK has.  For Heath to win Best Supporting Actor, and for his father to accept the award, was almost too much for this humble blogger.  To say that I wasn’t emotionally touched by this emotional juggernaut would have been a vicious lie.  

For the movie-going audience The Dark Knight was not about Christian Bale.  Batman who?  The public was there in support of the Joker.  

Saturday night Karin and I fired up our blu-ray copy of The Dark Knight (if you haven’t seen this film in the blu-ray format, the IMAX scenes are breathtakingly amazing) and reveled in Heath Ledger’s performance.  I found myself grinning like an idiot whenever the pasty-faced sociopath was on screen.  Heath’s take on the Joker was nothing short of magic, and to think otherwise would be a dishonest, jaded assessment of Heath’s take on the Joker character.  The Oscars typically leans towards leftist ideals and “high-brow” films not normally seen by the general populace.  To deny Heath Ledger a nod would have been an affront to true talent, and a thumb in the eye to fans around the world who have pushed the theatrical earnings of this film past the one-billion dollar mark. 

And to think, just a few hours prior I was gleefully chowing down on a shredded beef tostada in a questionable mexican eatery in a sketchy part of San Marcos.  Sure, the food was fantastic, but for the remainder of the day the toilet and I were locked in a squirming, titanic struggle for my very soul.  

“Customer #30″ indeed…

Whelp, it’s Friday, and I’m all tapped out.  I got nuthin’ for ya.  I’m a shell of my normal self.  Bereft of thought, mentally void, and awash in a warm calming sea of indifference.  All I can think of as I stare slack-jawed and motionless in the center of a dark room staring into the soft glow of my laptop is that it’s finally Friday, and for me that means there’s just one more work day before I can enjoy my one day off this week.  Needy computers…

I’m just glad I don’t have this announcer’s job.  I don’t think I could be witty enough to come up with enough pop culture references to fill an entire season of hockey:

But if I ever did find myself either burnt out from my job, or just simply unemployed, I guess I could channel all of my energy into finally finishing my book, studying for a doctorate, or molding myself into a Tetris god (see how wicked-fast…and invisible…it gets at the end):

Of course, if the unthinkable does happen and I become a drain on society, unable to hold down meaningful employment between hits of Mountain Dew and Twinkies, I could always download a torrent of Final Cut Studio, drop a delicate balance of uppers and downers, and create something as wonderfully twisted as this:

Or I could just take a cue from my cat and chill under the covers all day, which seems more and more like the proper path to take:

Heh…I think she has the right idea…

I’ve been living with a secret, one so dark and heavy it weighs me down with guilt, shortens my step, and drains me of my otherwise radiant charm.  It haunts me, daring me to go one more day before letting loose to the world this dreadful unknown.  

But I can’t bear the burden any longer.  My trembling, creaking bones can no longer carry the weight of this ill-gotten fortune.  I must share the origin of my blog title…

As a child I grew up with comic books.  For several years I even worked in a comic book shop.  My favorite series was one that holds the record for longest running english independent comic…Cerebus.  Originally a parody of Conan The Barbarian, it quickly evolved into a tale of politics, finance, religion, and ethics.  In the 300 monthly black and white issues that this story spanned Cerebus, an earth pig born, was a warrior, Prime Minister, the Pope, a witness to God, and finally serving as His vessel and doing His bidding before succumbing to a sad, uncelebrated fate Cerebus has foreseen and knows is ultimately unavoidable.

And this brings me back to my original point.  The title of my blog, Terrible Analogies, comes from an issue of Cerebus.  In it, Cerebus the Pope is rejected by the only woman he ever loved.  Having shed his papal garb and holding his old blade he stands at a pivotal crossroads; continue with his mad plan to bankrupt the city-state of Iest, or slink back to his old ways of living by the sword.  

If you’ve never read independent comics when they truly were independent, then I implore you to read the history of this series.  It’s a quick read, but well worth your time.  Check out some of the amazing cover art as well.  And after having reviewed this information you find yourself wishing to dive into this series, you can purchase the phonebook encyclopedia novels that covers the entire run of Cerebus.

So there you have it.  Terrible Analogies owes its title to Dave Sim and his amazing body of work.  

My love for this series knows no bounds…