Terrible Analogies

A typical day for me:

6:50AM: Wake up, get dressed
7:45AM: Arrive at work early.  Update Sharepoint with patch data.  Resolve unpingable server issue
8:30AM: Coding begins again as I continue to undercover how jacked up Windows 2008 is
10:00AM: Attend meeting.
11:20AM: Lunch.  Picked up 28 Weeks Later on Blu-ray at Fry’s (on sale!)
12:20PM: Coding continues on Server Verification program.  Research 2008 default profiling
1:30PM: Coding continues.  Finally have 2008 automatic OS authorization working
2:00PM: Coding continues.  Woot!  Have proof of OS authorization reporting correctly to logs
2:10PM: Resolve why VM host keeps dropping from network
2:35PM: Yay!  Someone took our IP from a VM host.  Ganked it back & dropped their server
2:50PM: Coding continues.  Working on FTP log transmission & error catching subroutines
3:10PM: Repair broken .vbs script.  Charlotte and San Diego now communicating
3:45PM: Emergency request to find missing Novell data, which wasn’t missing.
3:55PM: Coding continues.  Automating 2008 Admin security profiles
4:15PM: Coding continues.  Trying valiantly to hide user account information upon log in
4:30PM: Another emergency.  Cracked into locked server whose password was forgotten
4:45PM: Throw my hands up, tear out my hair, demand my stapler back, walk out early

I’m done thinking for now.  Going home to take a shower and throw on a Babylon 5 DVD (just started season 4).  I’ll leave you with a picture of our cat because, well…just because.

…and before I forget, I want to give a shout out to Nicole from The Madlab Post for her generous review of my blog, and for placing me in amongst the top five badass blogs of 2009 (thus far).  It’s this supportive community of bloggers that makes the whole ritualized blogging process a rewarding one.  Everyone, from the readers, to the contributors, to the writers have my utmost respect.

There are quite a few topics I’d like to address, but as I sit down to write this post I’m not sure which one to focus on:

1- Air Force One doing a low-level flyover of Manhattan and ground zero.  What moron thought that was a good idea?  Whatever happened to “the buck stops here“?

2- Swine Flu:  What’s the real story?  Why is Mexico taking extreme measures to combat this illness while America sits back and does nothing?  Is this a case of hype over facts?  Did you know that 36,000 Americans die every year because of the flu?  The victims are typically the very young and the very old.  This Swine Flu (no, I’m not going to call it H1N1) seems to be killing people of all ages.  I’m not quite sure what to believe about this illness, but I’m not about to panic.

3 – Arlen Spector: The man who created the “single bullet theory” switches political parties, jumping ship to the Democratic ticket.  This is the same Arlen Spector whose key vote helped pass Obama’s pork-filled stimulus bill.  Face it, he switched sides because he had no chance in hell of being re-elected in the upcoming Republican race.  This is yet another example why nobody should be forced to vote along party lines.

4- The University of Central Florida has developed a new technology which could allow for a single disc to store over 4 terabytes of information.  Call me jaded, but I won’t get excited until I can hold a data crystal in my hands.

But above all of this dire news and political flack one thing really had me questioning my faith in humanity and all that I hold most dear in this world.  I thought I knew everything, that nothing of this magnitude could have possibly escaped my finely honed observational senses for all of these years.

Did you ever notice who the supervising producer of Who’s The Boss was?

You doubt me?  See for yourself:

Sometimes I shock myself at what I find newsworthy…

As a child of the 80′s, I grew up on television.  Most days I sat on the floor, legs crossed, slack-jawed and unresponsive as a cavalcade of classic television seeped into my cortex and numbed the part of my brain responsible for intellect and reasoning.  This was the era of CHiPs, Three’s Company, The A-Team, and MTV when MTV played honest-to-God music videos that were hosted by people called “VJs” (shout out to Martha Quinn and Remote Control).  And it was in the 80′s when MTV first began to experiment with the non-musical format.  During this transitional era MTV aired what was one of the most original and unhinged television shows ever to hit the small screen.  

This show was called The Young Ones, and I instantly fell in love with it.  

The Young Ones centered on four college students (in reality, only three were in school, but I digress) who shared a dilapidated flat on the wrong side of town.  Rick (the anarchist), Vyvyan (the punk), Mike (the cool one), and Neil (the hippie), did whatever they could to get under each other’s skin, spark neighborhood riots, attempt to take over Britain with a nuclear weapon, sham their way on to game shows, and generally scheme their way through life.  

During most episodes there would be extended non sequiturs into abstract sketches, and visits by a comedian who played a variety of characters (a bank robber, mobster, landlord, fascist sympathizer, mentally challenged bicycle taxi driver, etc…).  Surrealistic scenes were spattered throughout the show (ex: house flies filming a documentary, talking vegetables, stuffed animals humping, subliminal messages, medieval dungeon scenes, Russian poet soothsayer) that kept the viewers on their toes.  And, if you paid attention to what was happening in the background, you might catch some strange goings-on.  

But what really put this show over the top was the inclusion of musical acts that would seemingly appear out of nowhere.  Bands such as Madness, Dexys Midnight Runners, Motorhead, and The Damned would jam as, more often than not, bedlam broke out around them.  

This show was sheer genius.  It’s an example of giving the cast complete control to produce a uniquely wonderful product, and to this day it remains my favorite television show of all time.  I’d like to think that this show could somehow be revived, but that would be difficult to pull off because, after all, the four mates all died in a flaming double-decker bus as it careened uncontrolled down a narrow country road before plunging several hundred feet off a cliff (Richard?), exploding in an inescapable fiery fireball of deathly doom as it slammed headlong into the canyon floor below.  

Now….that’s how you make an exit!

Brian "Damage" Balowski takes over the flat during a street riot

"We interrupt tonight's scheduled program, "The Bastard Squad", to bring you up-to-the-minute coverage of a siege which is now underway in North London"

"What I need is the drill, the hedge trimmers, and some ordinary household bleach..."

Accidents are bound to happen whenever you dig for oil in your basement

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?

Here’s hoping that you had a nice, relaxing Valentine’s Day.  

It appears that the weatherman couldn’t have been more wrong about the forecast.  The weather was actually quite comfortable in southern California.  In between celebrating the wife’s birthday and Valentine’s Day I managed to squeeze in two trail runs in as many days.   When the rain does finally arrive I plan to spend my days in the gym, so it’s all good.

Not to get all non-sequitur on you, but for no apparent reason reason I’m been thinking about The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air recently, and something’s been bothering me about the show’s premise for the past three days.  If the Fresh Prince and his mother lived in the projects, and the Fresh Prince had an extraordinarily rich aunt who lived in a wealthy and prominent neighborhood of Los Angeles, why would his aunt let her sister live in such a squalid, dangerous location?  

It seemed that his mother and her sister were on good enough terms to let the Fresh Prince live with the aunt apparently with no conditions attached.  If they were on such good terms, why couldn’t his aunt kick a few bucks his way, helping he and his mother escape from a strangling life of targeted, criminal, gang-related violence?

I mean, here’s the aunt who’s dripping with jewelry, three self-centered kids, a powerfully-connected husband who happens to be a well-respected high-ranking judge, a smarmy butler, gardener, and an unknown number of servants lurking in the background performing a variety of tedious tasks all in an effort to keep her comfortable in the lifestyle to which she’s accustomed.  Floating in a pretentious sea of haute culture and callous celebrity, his aunt couldn’t lift the three fingers it takes to write a check that could change the life of an extremely intelligent, grounded, good-natured child that deserves the opportunity to excel beyond his wildest dreams, breaking the cycle of turbulence and strife that his family has no doubt experienced for generations?

This is, after all, family.  No?