Oh poop, has it been 9 months since I posted something, here? You know, I thought I’d get my annual blog-post in early.

My buddy satyr asks me if Spoonfighter is dead. It probably is. Hey - lots of things died in 2009: Michael Jackson, Patrick Swayze, the Democrats ….

I’m actually bothering to blog because I have to tell someone (i.e. the readers of this blog, i.e. no-one) about my goals for 2010. (I’m sure I’ll have others, when I fail at these.)

1) Goal numero uno: Stop thinking until March

This goal was suggested by my buddy Chris. You see, I have a problem. I am addicted to constantly thinking about life’s big questions. Over and over and over and over. Were it not for this goal, I would have already spent most of this morning tallying up the pros and cons (once again) of such questions as, “What do I really believe about God?”, “What is the point of my own existence?”, and “Will anyone notice if I don’t wear underwear today?”

Secretly, you see, I believe I’m a genius, and that I’m smarter than all those other people who have tried to answer these questions, unsuccessfully. (Buddha went commando. And everyone could tell.) Although I’m getting close to the answers (which I will publish in the form of an eBook), some people have suggested that my “obsessive-compulsive over-thinking” (OCOT) might actually be interfering with some of my other goals, like “enjoying life”, and “not being an angry jerk to my kids.”

My buddy Chris said, “Why don’t you try not thinking for a month?” I told him I’d think about it.

2) Goal numero dos: Read everything on the internet

As 2009 was coming to a close, I realized that I only flirt with the internet. I never commit. I don’t jump in at the deep end. I don’t get the big, extra-value, 20%-more free, bottle o’ internet, and slather the entire contents over my whole body.

What a disgusting image. Anyway, this goal grew out of one of last year’s goals, which was to figure out a way to make some money off the internet. I soon noticed that several other people already seem to have had that idea. That’s when it dawned on me that I have almost no idea what’s actually on the internet these days. I don’t have a list of blogs I read. I don’t hang out at YouTube. I don’t Tweet. I only just found out about Lala.

So, in the interest of setting attainable goals, and with all the extra time I have now that I’m not thinking or wearing underwear to work, I will explore the internet, page by page, link by link, NSFW-video by NSFW-video. A journey of a 7,943,567,328,293,335,110,832,477 miles begins with a single step. Those who say it can’t be done should get out of the way of those who are doing it!

At least I already know about lolcats. That’s about 15% of the internet, right there.

In case you haven’t noticed, the economy is bad. In recession. Like what happens to men when they jump into cold water. Or so I’m told. It is especially bad in places like Michigan. Michigan is having trouble because it produces only two things, cars, and mosquitoes. And only the mosquitoes are impressive. (In fact, President Obama was able to sell Michigan to Canada for $37 at the White House garage sale last Saturday. Suckers. They totally paid too much.*) Just kidding, Michigan.

So like I was saying, the economy is in really bad shape. For example, the price of a six pack of my favorite beer has gone from $7 to $9. I want to know what Obama is going to do about that, dammit! When this terrible, terrible thing occurred, I began to pay attention and started learning about economics and stuff. I even read some stuff in Wikipedia. I would like to share what I have learned with you.

First, the main reason the economy is really bad, and not just a little bad, is you! Yes, that’s right, you: the average American. Our economy isn’t doing well unless it is growing, and it doesn’t grow unless the vast majority of you spend an ever-increasing amount of money. But what did you do, when you heard a little bit of bad news about real estate, and the credit market, and the stock market? You stopped spending and started putting your money in savings accounts. Selfish jerks. We’re not going to get out of this mess until you go out there and beg your credit card companies to let you have some more money and then buy eight or nine big screen TVs and a couple Cadillacs. Got it? Also, it would help if the population grew faster, so either have some more kids or quit bitching about illegal immigrants.

The second thing I learned is that economic hard times aren’t always bad. When money gets tight and times get tough, people go back to basics. They spend more time with family. They play board games. They drink more cheap beer. Most importantly, they draw upon strengths and abilities they had forgotten they had, in order to make it through. Many people are growing vegetables in their gardens. Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian are both working on new sex tapes.

I’m finding ways to get through, too. I tried making my own beer last month, ’cause I’m not paying no $9 for a six pack. Unfortunately, it tastes bad enough that college frat boys won’t drink it. And they’ll drink Old English out of a mossy toilet bowl. So now I’m working on a sex tape …

* Ha ha, I can say that cause I was born there.

1. Take off your clothes
2. Stand in front of a large mirror
3. Start jumping up and down
4. Flex all your muscles
5. Observe how much of you appears to be trying to catch up with the rest of you.

Optional step for added “fun”:
6. Perform before and after each holiday meal.

Merry Christmahannukwanzika!

This XKCD cartoon basically explains how I got into my career: link.

In my case, the critical experience occurred after college, when I was doing data entry at Sun Microsystems, and it was Solaris I was messing with, not Perl. (Although I am pretty good at Perl, now, too.)

If you have no idea what I’m talking about:
1. Perl is a programming language.
2. Solaris is an operating system. (Like Windows, MacOS, etc. But way betterer.)

Interesting quote from Timothy Ferriss (author of the 4-Hour Workweek), from his blog, on why he doesn’t do much stock-market investing:

Here’s the deal — to beat the market consistently, you have to: 1) have better information than most people, 2) have superior analysis of the same information, or 3) have better luck than a Leprechaun.

Discarding luck as a strategem, and personally discarding better analysis because I don’t want to spend my life poring over annual reports or evaluating algorithms, there is a simple conclusion: don’t invest in anything that you don’t know inside and out better than most of the world.

I’m on-call at the moment, which means that I get paged any time a customer has a problem with one of their computers, or any time a monitoring program thinks one of those computers might have a problem. The monitoring program has obsessive-compulsive disorder, and it likes to send a lot of pages at night for things that I really can’t do anything about, other than to wake up and curse my pager and then toss and turn for an hour until I finally pass out again so that I’m ready for the next page. I have been on-call in some fashion for several weeks now, and life has lost all meaning. Here is a Haiku I wrote:

Colors fade to gray
There is no joy, no beauty
On-call yet again

Here is another Haiku I wrote:

Nostrils fill with stench
Last night’s meal was a mistake
Now I fart onions

It does not really have anything to do with on-call, but I like it.

Personally, I feel much safer knowing that once something is designated as “suspicious” by our security professionals, it cannot become “unsuspicious” until it has been blown up.

Bomb squad members further investigated the packages and determined they were simply several hot dogs in foil wrappers. Sadly, the wieners were detonated as a precaution. Full story.

Apparently, duct tape and tin foil on anything is considered suspicious. I’m glad that my college days are behind me; there was always the risk, in college, of waking up wrapped in tin foil and duct taped to a pole. “I’m sorry Mrs. Smith, but your son was clearly suspicious. We had to detonate him as a precaution.”

Christianity has done some bad things in its time. The Crusades. The Inquisition.

Now this …

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0wpAJMFpJQ
http://www.theway.org/Current/Mar07/Mar07Hi.htm

(Sigh. First they got it removed from YouTube. Then they removed it from their own site. Maybe the world is a better place without it.)

… and this …

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-NOZU2iPA8

I think God is crying right now.

I just noticed that I haven’t written anything in a month. Pretty much my normal behavior. Naughty Spoonfighter.

If you’re curious, and you’re probably not, I’ve been very focused on a technical project lately. I have been trying to create a working Solaris Cluster* at home, in order to do some personal training in the technology, and to prepare for a cluster build I have to do at work. Initially, I was going to purchase a bunch of old Sun equipment (I did actually buy a SunBlade 1000), but I realized that this was going to be too expensive, and all I’d end up with would be a bunch of old computers that don’t do anything fun and break a lot. (Kind of like me.)

Still with me? If not, skip down to the part where I mention that I’m not going back to law school.

So, instead, I set about trying to create a cluster using virtual machines.** At this point, I have my laptop installed with Ubuntu Linux. It uses Sun’s VirtualBox product to simulate three Solaris systems: one will serve up iSCSI storage for the shared disk, and the other two will be the cluster nodes. Is this interesting to you? If so, you probably have a lousy social life. (Kind of like me.)

In case you haven’t already guessed, I’m not going back to law school. There’s a lot more to it, but basically, one year in law school helped me clarify my goals, and showed me that those goals are better served by building on the IT career I have already developed, rather than starting from scratch in a completely new field.

That said, I am trying to embrace my inner geek. I spend as much time indoors as possible, in order to develop an unhealthy pallor. I am reading fantasy and science fiction. I am playing with cluster, iSCSI, and virtualization technologies in my spare time. And, I have an account on World of Warcraft. It’s probably a good thing that I’m already married.

Anyway, that’s the news from Spoonfighter’s corner of meatspace. Have a good day.

* A cluster consists of two or more computer systems which work together to keep an application running at all times, even if one of the two computers fails.
** A virtual machine is a simulation of a computer system which runs on a real computer system.

Spoonfighter junior is two. I would like to say that he is growing like a weed, but he’s really short and is barely growing at all. So, really, he’s growing more like our lawn. Which is weird because we didn’t put nearly as much fertilizer on our lawn.

He’s not into food, so much. We’re so desperate to get him to eat that we’ll literally let him eat anything he decides to put in his mouth, short of black tar heroin. (It’s a pain in the a** to get out of his clothes.) Pretty much all he likes are donuts and hot dogs. And even to get him to eat hot dogs we have to lie to him and tell him that it’s the meat of some exotic animal. One time we cut the hot dog into long, curved slivers and told him that it was elephant trunk.

His favorites so far are silver back gorilla and baby seal. I don’t know what we’re going to do when we run out of endangered species. We’ll have to get creative, I suppose. “Look! It’s Kanga from your Winnie the Pooh book, remember? Nummy nummy!” (Wait, I’ve already used that one. Yes, I’m a horrible parent.) We recently took him to the zoo for the first time, and I wonder if he was thinking, “Oh, a giraffe. I love giraffe.”

You know, I like the zoo, but it would be a lot better if it was more like Costco or Sam’s Club. You’d go up to an animal enclosure and there’d be this little old lady wearing a hair net and holding a plate full of samples. “Here - try some of this snow leopard. It’s very lean, and it’s on sale today for $5.99 a pound.” Awesome!

The other thing that sucks is that the animals are all pretty lazy. Poke ‘em with sticks or something. Make ‘em do tricks! It’s hard to keep a little kid interested in a lion that sits around like it’s on welfare.

ME: “Hey, loooook! What is that? Is that a lion?”
BOY: “Squiwwel, Daddy! Squiwwel! LOOK DA SQUIWWEL!”
ME: “Yes, that is a squirrel. But don’t you want to see the lion?”
BOY: “Squiwwel squiwwel squiwwel sqiwwel! Yay!”
ME: “HEY - I DIDN’T JUST SHELL OUT 80 FREAKIN BUCKS SO YOU CAN LOOK AT THE LITTLE BEASTS THAT GO THROUGH OUR FREAKIN GARBAGE. LOOK AT THE !@#%!^% LION!!”
BOY: “Bird, Daddy! LOOK DA BIRD!”

I didn’t actually yell at him. I’m really a good parent. When the lions didn’t work out, I bought us tickets for the little train that goes around the zoo. He was totally hooked and threw a fit when the ride ended. This presented a parenting dilemma. I didn’t want to reward bad behavior, but I couldn’t bear to see his sad little face, so I chose a creative “third way.” I slipped the driver of the train fifty bucks and told him not to stop. Then I went home and took a nap.

(Ha ha, I am so just kidding, Ms. Child Welfare Officer.)