abyss Dreamed 39 days ago | Comment | 112 words
destroy your world and i will keep mine
i stop watching the news because it seems
you are doing just fine without any help from me
in growing hatred anew in flooding our oceans with
darkened and poisonous goo seeping from the hole we
swore we could stop as we fed our unending need to make
cars never stop save a dime save ten put a thousand men to
work making them bigger spend spend spend spend spend keep
working to make it better bigger faster more never mind the miners or
the seekers of the sacred ore digging deep beneath the life giving blue abyss
good night my dying earth
xoxohugkiss
Engagement! - 12/17/2009 Dreamed 52 days ago | Comment | 373 words
I have moved the story of my engagement to Annie, my wife from our wedding site for posterity. And because it’s a cute story.
The evening of December 17th will always be a special one. It was Annie’s birthday!
In the evening, we went to Dave & Busters for dinner and gaming. We had a delicious meal and had a blast playing games. At the end of the evening, we cashed in part of our ticket stash for some goodies. As we headed home, I could tell her anticipation was growing as I’d told her I would not let her go out to see her family without some proper hardware on her finger to show off.
Since I was dropping her off at the airport early the next morning she knew I didn’t have much time.
When we arrived home, I pulled the gifts out of my bag and gave her the birthday gifts I had prepared and after them, I pulled out a small box.
Wrapped with a pretty bow. Just about the perfect size…
Her face glowed as she slowly unwrapped the tiny box. The anticipation growing with each passing second. She was ready for what is contained.
A Truffle!
She was mad. Delighted in receiving a delicious truffle but clearly not pleased it wasn’t a ring.
After that I told her that was it for her birthday presents. She then went to pack for the trip and I went upstairs to prepare her some birthday dessert.
This is when I enacted my plan. I took out the frozen custard and fresh strawberries I had stashed earlier in the evening. I carefully washed and cut the tops off each fruit. Carefully arranging the berries in the now-melting custard I took care to cut a small groove in the top of one of the largest berries.
I walked downstairs and asked Annie to close her eyes. She sat on her bed and closed her eyes. I walked over to her, dessert in hand and handed her the dessert. She opened her eyes and immediately spotted the sparkling ring.
I got down on my knees, looking her in the eyes, I asked for her hand in marriage. And, most importantly, she said yes.
A simple afternoon haircut Dreamed 89 days ago | Comment | 652 words
So today I got my haircut. A long overdue errand which rendered me looking more like my driver’s license (taken during a particularly lazy and long-hair growing effort in college) and less like the sleek, sexy, fiancée, to be married in less than a month man that I am.
And I had a thought as I was attempting to communicate to Donna, a nice but nearly impossible to understand Asian woman who was cutting my hair how much the hair cutting experience has changed since I was growing up. I grew up in a small town where there were two barbers. I went to one, Potter’s Barber Shop, religiously. The fellow who owned and ran the place was named Mark Brennan (I believe, his last name wasn’t Potter as everyone in town assumed who did not know him).
I went to his shop from an early age. I was taken there by my parents at first then starting going on my own not only because it was familiar to me. But I loved the atmosphere. Mark was a jovial man and loved to talk sports. I’d listen to the old timer’s talk about the Redskins and the Orioles (this was long after the Washington Senators and long before the Washington Nationals). As I grew I’d interject and we’d shoot the breeze about sports. Local, college, professional. It didn’t matter.
It was great fun and great banter. Later in life when I was middle school I did a little bit of work for Mark. You see, he also started running a sports card business out of the shop. And I helped kids with cards from the case, and rang up customers for cards as he cut hair. He paid me in cards since I was completely hooked on them at that point and clearly didn’t have a good understanding of money.
But I was happy and he was happy to have me since he could focus on hair while I sold cards and when we needed his advice, he would pause, provide it, and keep on cutting. I loved my first job there. I was always excited to come home with my new packs of cards and see what gems were hidden inside.
That was part of the fun of card collecting as a boy. You never knew who you were going to get in a pack of cards. What rookie card would one day become valuable. What special edition card you’d get a hold of. Who you could find, then trade to a friend for a card you wanted. I was a big Karl Malone fan. Partially because we shared a name but mostly because I just loved the way he played. He was a big man who had a soft touch. He could pound the boards just as easily as he could hit the 20’ jumper. I loved to watch him play with John Stockton, The two of them were magic on the court.
This all hit me today as I was sitting in the chair, surrounded by women in curlers, a cacophony of voices young and old, and the din of a hair salon. And I thought back to that simpler time and simpler place. Three chairs. One case of cards off to the side. A couple different boxes of cards lining the back wall, a tiny bathroom, small coat rack and about a half dozen chairs and benches along with a generous selection of magazines to read or thumb through.
I miss those hair cuts with Mark. Shooting the breeze about the upcoming football season. Looking at the row of autographed pictures he had from the various Redskins and other professional athletes he had met. I feel like that was a simpler time in a simpler place not too far away from where I am now. A mere 60 miles to the west. Over a mountain and into a sleepy little country town.
I respect your time, please respect mine Dreamed 99 days ago | Comment | 391 words
I’ve got this pet peeve. It’s about my time being respected. I hate when my time is wasted because the person I’m corresponding with doesn’t take a second to reply. To be fair, I’ve been a big fan of Merlin Mann’s writings and ideas. In a nutshell, it’s about cutting out the things wasting your time and doing away with distractions and just getting down to work.
As calls and emails come in for support to me everyday I have to respond to them. Sometimes it means a phone call, sometimes it’s an email, and sometimes it means a trip to the user’s desk to troubleshoot or investigate. When I can resolve a problem and close a ticket out it feels good and I know I’ve actually resolved the issue.
However, there are many times when I need to work with a remote user to resolve an issue I can’t directly resolve for any number of reasons. This is where communication is key. I try my best to respond to everyone in a timely manner during work hours and in the evenings after I’ve left the office. I would appreciate the same level of commitment from the people I am trying to help.
I am not saying I expect replies at all times of the day and night. What I would really appreciate is when I send an email or leave a voice mail asking, “Did this resolve your issue?” to get a response one way or the other. A simple Yes or No would suffice.
However, often times I email, wait a day, email again, follow up with a call and if I don’t reach them then I never hear back. I take the position that no news s good news when I hear back from a user. Much of the time I will hear back days or weeks later about how they are still having the same problem as before.
Here’s the thing. You asked me for help. You contacted the Help Desk and I responded and provided some level of support. If you want the help, at least respond if I’ve solved your issue. It seems like our time means nothing to you. We are here to provide the support quickly and correctly. As a user and initiator of the request, you owe me the courtesy of a reply to my assistance.
750 Words (a review) Dreamed 113 days ago | Comment | 373 words
750 Words is a site that encourages you to write. The site is best described as a way to get you to write and keep writing. It’s not a blogging tool. In fact, what you write is not even public in anyway. It’s a totally private writing experience. And it’s simple. The entire premise is, login, write 750 words, which is about 3 pages) and you’re done. That’s it!
No formatting. No images. No distractions. The idea is not to get you to write something to want to share with the world. The idea is to get you writing. To churn out words from inside your head and get them onto the virtual paper.
I started writing earlier this month and have used it as kind of a personal diary of the day’s events. It’s a thought dump for whatever is on my mind. It’s not shared, though parts I have cut and pasted into other posts because I liked them. But that’s not the intention of this space. The intention is a simple, barrier-free entry to writing. I don’t have to save a series of files on my desktop. I don’t dump these thoughts into a blogging engine. These are just simple entries throughout the month I can go back to or search if I choose. Or just I can forget about them.
One of the other unique things I enjoy very much about the site is the small incentives it uses to keep you going. There are little badges when you get a streak going. There’s also a points system for aid in a friendly competition. There’s a signup for each month’s challenge which is to write your 750 words everyday. You can enter a reward and punishment if you fail to complete your challenge. Think of it as a carrot on the end of a stick.
Each day begins and ends at midnight and once the day ends, your writing is locked. You cannot go back and edit it. You’ve moved on to the next day and a new set of words. And with each completed day, you are provided a breakdown of your writing.
If you’ve got questions, the FAQ should get you started.
Malware Battle - My portable malware removal toolkit Dreamed 115 days ago | Comment | 876 words
With each passing month there is inevitably a new round of malware to combat. With that in mind, I have put together a USB key with the tools I go into battle with against these vicious foes. Your toolkit and mileage may vary. However, this is the kit I’ve used with great success to combat the various threats I’ve found in the Windows XP world.
First, if you do encounter a machine you can’t access the Windows installation on through Safe Mode of any command line access, go straight to your bootable Windows environment. In my case, I have burned a copy of the Ultimate Boot Disc to CD so I can boot into a familiar Windows environment and access hard drives or network resources if all else fails. This is usually a last ditch attempt to access and retrieve data off an infected hard drive.
Once I have accessed Windows, I run Autoruns. This will give you a look into every single process, service, and application currently running on the machine. Autoruns shows you the entry (application/service/registry key), description if there is one, Publisher, and the path to the entry. This is invaluable to finding applications that launch on startup. The application 67hklzfrh.exe with no Publisher running in a temp folder is a giant red flag.
ProcessExplorer is a great companion to Autoruns because it will give you far more detailed information about each process running on your computer. If you’re unfamiliar what a application or process is, fire it up. It also had a target icon you can click and drag over an application and it will show you which process corresponds to it. This can be particularly useful if you can’t figure out what process is spawning your popup windows.
Once I have stopped any auto running applications, I move on to CCleaner. If I can, I clear the caches of each browser on the computer first, but even if that’s successful, I move to CCleaner and blow away all the temporary, cache, and unneeded information on the computer. Anywhere malware can hide; I will find and remove it. It also helps to clean up the caches and temp folders.
From there, I bring in the artillery, SuperAntiSpyware. It has been my experience that if there is a threat on your computer, this program will find and eliminate it. There is also an excellent portable version that runs as a .com file to evade any malware shutting down access to .exe files.
Make sure to update to the latest available definitions before you begin as the portable version does not come preloaded with any definitions at all. Then start your scan and sit back. Your time will vary. Allow at least an hour for the scan to fully run. It will popup and alert you when it is ready to remove the threats and offer to reboot.
Once you’re shut down the offending applications and run your full malware scan and rebooted, I suggest rebooting back into Safe Mode and rechecking AutoRuns and seeing if anything looks out of order. From there you can decide if you want to reboot normally and verify the threats are gone. If so, I would recommend rebooting into an account without administrative rights. This will prevent some things from reinstalling themselves if the threat isn’t all gone.
Recently, I worked on an infected computer that hadn’t had Windows Updates run since 2008. AutoPatcher is invaluable in this situation. Once launched, you tell it which version of Windows you’re running and it will go out and collect all the updates it needs, download them, and install them saving you multiple reboots and trips to the Windows Update site. This made the 120+ updates I had to install far more tolerable than if I had used Windows Update.
So far, I have only encountered one PC I could not get into because the spyware had taken it over entirely. I could not boot into Windows, access it in Safe Mode, even booting to an external CD did not work. In that instance, I had to wipe the hard drive and reimage it.
Now that your mission changed from removal to recovery this is when I reach for Unstoppable Copier. Using the standard Windows copier can run into troubles when it hits a file it can’t move it quits or it may hang of fail to write. Then you’re left without any idea of how much data you got. Unstoppable Copier will move data from A to B but with the added benefit of logging each file it moves and skipping locked files so you can get through moving a user’s data without multiple failures. Once it completes, just go back and consult the log for any files it did not move and determine if they’re important or not.
This is what I use to combat malware and spyware in my daily life as an IT Support Technician. Let me know if it works for you or if you’ve found something better. And if you have any questions, ask away.
I had a dream last night. Dreamed 116 days ago | Comment | 722 words
I woke up this morning like it was any other morning. However, I had a dream last night. This is a rarity in that I actually remembered something from it.
I was getting on the Metro train to go to work in the morning just like any other day. Except I was getting on at a station along a body of water. I don’t know which body of water but some large body of water.
I was on the train and then all of a sudden I was off the train but on a track going over the water. I have no idea why or how I got there. I was crawling along it, worried another train would come by and moment. I remember crawling under another track that was practically laying on top of the track I was on. I pushed it up with the ease of a child moving a Lego minifig. It was a simple push and I was under it and it bounced back when I let go and moved back and forth as if it was on a spring or something.
I was under this rail track and moving along. All of the sudden I decided I had to get to land immediately. I don’t remember there being a train coming or any immediate threat. I think I decided it was going to take far too long to crawl the distance of the track to my destination.
So I jumped.
I plunged into the water. It wasn’t cold or hot or anything. It was murky I remember and I could see under it and it didn’t bother my eyes at all. I swam towards the shore with my bag full of things for the day, including my netbook and PC laptop. I tried to get to shore but with my clothes and bag it was slow going. Then I decided to dive down to the bottom of the river, lake, ocean, whatever it was I was in. It seemed like a river or canal from the stony sides of the waterway. So I dove down to the bottom and jumped with all my might off the sandy ground and sped towards the top and the shore. I did this numerous times with varying degrees of success.
I finally made it to the stony sides of the embankment. I don’t remember how I got up to dray land after that. I think there was a ladder. So I climbed it. I was on shore, walking down a paved street back towards the metro station where I had begun the day to catch the next train. I was dripping wet and trying to wring out my shirt and pants and things best I could. My bag drenched as well.
Halfway back to the station, I stopped and reached into my bag, worried all of the sudden about the contents of my bag. I remember it being sort of about the computers inside but they didn’t seem like the highest priority. I reached in and miraculously, both computers were fine and booted up with no problem. I was beginning to dry off and that’s where it ended…
Me, crouched in the street or sidewalk. Taking stock of the contents of my bag. Trying to figure out how I was going to get to work and if I’d still be on time and if my clothes would dry…
I never thought about going home to change them. I never thought about calling out sick or anything. I was very concerned about making it to work and not getting left on the rail over the water again.
I have no idea where this dream came from or why it ended when it did. Maybe I woke up. I don’t recall.
It’s also still very vivid in my mind two and a half hours later. Usually when I do dream, the details fade very quickly and if I don’t write them down or record them immediately after waking up enough to write or type, they’re gone. But here it is, 10:29am and I’m recalling the dream I woke up from at 8am very vividly.
Quite a way to start a Monday morning. I have no idea what it means. But here I am sitting at work in my darkened cubicle, spilling everything I can remember to this terminal flickering in the darkness.
I love the Wii Fit Plus! Dreamed 178 days ago | Comment | 359 words
That said, I can’t actually use the Wii Fit Plus because I am a big over the maximum weight supported by the balance board. I need a weight-sensing phone book instead! Despite all that I did have a blast playing it tonight with Annie.
She is able to use the Wii Fit as it is intended so she did the games and Yoga and things on the board while I jogged/cycled/segwayed/Yoga’d along next to her, looking like a loon to the passerby (if we hadn’t drawn the shades).
There are some things that are kinda worthless without the board. For instance the “Lotus Focus” which is basically “sit really still on the Wii Balance Board” I could have done along side her but why?
There are plenty of things where I can stretch and jog and pretend to steer right along with her. It is these games where I too can derive the benefit of the Wii Fit experience and grow to a more normal sized human being. This excites me. I need to lose weight. I want to lose weight. I know I need to workout but every time I start it never sticks.
The Wii is taking my love of video games and using to fuel my excitement to workout. I love it. I love the Wii Fit. I love the games!
There is one that is an obstacles course which I compare to playing to Mario in first person. From the early days of playing the NES at my babysitter’s house I started out jumping when Mario did. (Admit it, you all did it!)
Nintendo has taken that to its logical conclusion of actually making your character jump when you jump. Run when you run and the plethora of other activities the disc has in store for us.
We only played about 90 minutes tonight exploring the different categories the game had to offer. But from the sampling of what we played I am very confident we will get many, many hours of enjoyment and improvement from them.
I am excited. Finally, I can mix video games with self-improvement and perhaps one day I will just be tall and not fat.
AFI (The National, Richmond VA) Dreamed 284 days ago | Comment | 580 words
AFI was great. I’ve never seen them live before and it as a ton of fun! They didn’t play too much from the new album which was for the best. Torch Song, Medicated, and Beautiful Thieves made the cut as well as a 4th which escapes me.
Girls Not Grey, Miss Murder, The Interview.. really most of Decemberunderground was played as well as some choice cuts from Sing the Sorrow like Death of Seasons including the closer Silver and Cold (an odd choice in my mind to close on.)
That being said, AFI really needs to work on their pacing. I consider Nine Inch Nails one of the best set lists around. It’s not secret I’m a huge NIN fan. However, when Trent & Co. devise a set list it goes through highs and lows. Building you up and bringing you back down in a slow wave.
Putting a couple industrial grinding tracks together to make everyone go crazy. Then transition into instrumentals or slow tracks and finishing with Hurt or something equally soothing.
The set list tonight was up and down up and down up and down. It felt like being in the ocean before a storm. It was fast song, slow song, fast song, slow song. Perhaps that contributed to the my second thought about the evening.
Part of the concert-going experience is to go on the emotional and sonic journey the band has constructed for you. Following through the highs and lows. The swaying, jumping, clapping along. Losing yourself in the lights and sound and general din of your fellow fans.
With such a turbulent set list there was no rhythm to it. The fast song you just heart was immediately followed by something slow, then sped up again, repeated throughout the night. Better pacing and thought given to the speed of songs it would have made for a better experience.
Maybe I’m just showing my age here, but when did concerts become a sea of cameras and cameraphones? I remember when going to a show meant going to watch a band play live and move around. Dance. Thrash. Two-step. Jump. Whatever.
MOVE!
Live music is meant to be moved to. The crowd feeds off the band and the band in turn feeds off the crowd’s energy. If you’re not moving, you’re not doing your part.
This is not to say you shouldn’t take any photos of a band you love. That’s fine. Take a few shots. Put the camera away and dance!
AFI tonight was nothing but a sea of gluey-footed teens wielding cell phones. I was about midway back in The National in Richmond, VA. It’s a tiny venue to begin with so I wasn’t much more than 40 feet from the stage. In front of me, a sea of flickering screens held aloft outstretched arms.
When Davey knelt down, he was totally hidden by the phones. Annoying to say the least. When did concerts become photo opportunities?
Maybe I’m just getting too old and unhip but I remember when going to a show was all about dancing around and singing along. Coming home hoarse and sore. Waking up the next morning really feeling the show I’d attended the night before.
Am I too old or has the Internet changed people?
On a side note, I did count 3 actual lighters on slow songs.
Complaints aside, I did have a fantastic time and really need to get out to more shows. AFI was full of energy and thankfully stayed away from their groan-inducing latest release.
Public Discourse Dreamed 328 days ago | Comment | 149 words
You are aware that you can listen to him speak on education AND not agree with what he says, right?
You are aware you still have the ability to think for yourself, right?
You are aware he’s not going to force ideas upon your children, right?
You are aware children can think and decide for themselves, right?
Maybe he has some good ideas.
You’d never know.
Maybe he’ll say something interesting.
You’ll never know.
Maybe he’ll give away $100 to everyone there.
You’ll never know.
I am beginning to think it’s not possible to have a public discourse in this country any longer.
I am scared for the next 4 years in this country.
As those who are living in fear continue and try to drag the rest of us into it.
And the din increases.
And the irrationalist sensationalist actions increase.
Where does it take us?
At what point do I become afraid to have my own thoughts and my own opinions?