Geek

As I learned in a sink vs. swim situation, I wanted to share some books and blogs that helped me. UP FRONT LET ME STATE: I am still learning and screw-up ALL the time. I by no means have this figured out and would love to hear what works for you guys. We are all students of the human mind and can learn together on how this works. Books you need to read from Amazon.com I compiled a list there so you can just purchase in whole or pick what is interesting. If you only pick one book be sure it is the Mythical Man Month. It brought home for me the resource vs. task view of the world. Being able to defend your position and schedules is just as important as being able to create them. Highly Recommend ...

I think in part to my tweets of N900 lust and desire, Nokia contacted me to see if I was interested in a demo unit. After validating the email was NOT from Nigeria I quickly responded with a “YES PLZ SEND MEZ FONE!” Why the gadget lust when I have a top-of-the-line iPhone? Easy, I am a geek. While I enjoy the hell out of having nice and easy to use devices, deep down I want to tinker. My original move to Mac was because I didn’t trust myself to have a Linux or BSD machine with me on the road. Every waking moment would be spent tweaking the kernel or compiler options for just a little bit more speed. Bleeding Edge, you betcha. ...

Why stop a geeky tradition?! Here is 2008’s travel graphs. This year I did hit the 2 full trips around the Earth. I am not sure what 2009 holds, but I had a 30% increase in travel and I only have 17% to go before it is a full 100. Here is last years stats: Travel Days for 2007

__Santa is bearded, corpulent, and dresses funny. __ __When you ask Santa for something, the odds of receiving what you wanted are infinitesimal. __ __Santa seldom answers your mail. __ __When you ask Santa where he gets all the stuff he’s got, he says, “Elves make it for me.” __ __Santa doesn’t care about your deadlines. __ __Your parents ascribed supernatural powers to Santa, but did all the work themselves. __ ...

Geeks pride themselves on the ability to institute good backup routines. We laugh in the faces of those poor souls who scream and yank hair as they watch their data disappear into the ether. Tonight I realized that a fresh slate might not be such a poor thing to do once in awhile. My hard drive is full on the MacBook Pro and it is driving me crazy as I attempt to work on some virtual images. I did what any geek in my position would do and wrote a short script to hunt down where the space had disappeared to. I found it in a folder called Annulment. Annulment. I had come up close and personal with my backup routine and knew that I better inspect before simply deleting. It had been years since I looked in the folder which I had encrypted for some reason. That should have been an indicator in and of itself but I decide to unencrypted anyways. Deep down I guess I will forever be a pack rat and the rat had found his old hole now. Slowly the file names began to remind me of what was in this folder and it brought tears to my eyes. Let me state that it isn’t that I am not over the whole ordeal, I am. What is amazing if you line this up with yesterdays post is that we do well to block out the bad. When you find your 3 year old backup routine the bad comes front and center. Why do we keep mementos of a past we despise? Everyone has something in the closet, a shoebox filled with letters from a high school sweet heart, a picture of that time in the military. We keep things. I tried to think back to what was my reason for going as far as to encrypt and store this archive. What were the thoughts on my mind 3 years ago when I went through all this trouble. It seemed that reading through the documents and emails did little to remind me of why I was this stupid. Then I opened one inauspicious file that truly ripped into my heart. To respect her privacy I will only post the snippets that pertain to this 2:45AM writing: ...