That's so gay

With my deepest apologies to James Taylor...

Sometimes my brain likes to modify song lyrics and find new meanings in older tunes. So here's my nomination for the Queer Nation anthem:

"Shower with the ones you'd love to love,
Show them the way that you feel.
Everything's gonna be much better
if you only will..."

OK, I promise to behave for a day or two.

San Diego gets weather

COX.net for San Diego - Local: "(San Diego, CA) -- For the second-consecutive day, heavy rains and gusty winds caused blackouts throughout San Diego County. SDG&E officials say most of the outages occurred between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m., leaving a total of about 82 thousand homes and businesses without electricity. Hardest hit were Logan Heights, City Heights, Encanto and the College areas. The public is being urged to stay away from downed power lines. Crews are working as quickly as possible to restore service. For an update on outages in your area, visit www.sdge.com.
"
See, we do occasionally get real weather. Rain, winds, darkness...we'll be talking about this week for the next six months. Any weather outside the usual 50-70 degrees, light winds, sunny makes the news for ages afterwards. Of course our inches of water pales in comparison to the tsunami-affected areas of the world. Tidal waves are things of our nightmares. Living along the coast as we do, it's a frequent worry, and always a possibility. Even here I understand we had 8 foot waves as a result of that earthquake. Amazing.

Blog about a blog about blogging

Take a few minutes and read this Shovelware entry in which Mark Dery shares his thoughts on what constitutes an interesting blog. He even wonders if the term "blog" isn't just ugly and awkward enough to qualify for improvement. I would add that the term "blog" has now become a pejorative term in the general population, spoken with more than a little smirk in the tone. It makes me apologetic when I mention my blogs. "Journal" at least has maintained a bit dignity.

I agree with much of what Mark writes. I'm more a fan of the one-voice blog, even though bOING-bOING and Fark are two of my favorites. But they don't give me a sense that I know the person behind them. I'd still rather read Doc Searls, Joi Ito, Chris Pirillo, and even Mark Dory. I still enjoy a conversation, even when it's electronic. Dave Berry's blog gives you a very general view of what qualifies as interesting to him, but that's it. Doc shows you pictures out his window, then discusses the current state of online publishing, or his recent trip to England. Always interesting, always personal.

But I haven't gotten caught up in the "newsy" blogs much. I admire those with enough time and the proper connections to be able to practice electronic journalism that's as good or better than that provided in print or on television. -I like that major news services are having to credit bloggers with having broken a few important stories, or at least providing the flame that begets the fire. And I'm not surprised or bothered by the bias expressed in their coverage. It's that personal voice thing again. But I'm more philosophical than topical, so I simply don't read that many of them. I do like Andrew Sullivan, because he'll speak forth on esoteric and often unpopular themes.

Spreading the...joy?

Not exactly, unless you enjoy the effects of influenza.

Of course I haven't helped the situation any. I sit and complain about people that come to work with a cold or the flu in an environment in which we share confined spaces and headphones and wind up infecting me...while I too am at work. My excuse is that as a new employee I don't qualify for sick pay until after 90 days. But in truth, none of us is wealthy enough to be missing work very often. So this bug is sure to be going around for a while yet.

I now believe one of the worst jobs to have with an illness that causes you to sneeze and cough constantly and clogs your sinuses completely is one that requires you to talk to people on the phone 8 hours a day. It has to qualify as a form of torture. I'll bet I took half the number of calls last night that I usually do, simply because I had to pause after each one to blow my nose and pop a coughdrop in my mouth.

And my attitude really takes a dive when I don't feel well. I'm one of those cranky sick people. It takes all my 20+ years of customer service skills to remain pleasant and upbeat on the phone. I've noticed that it's also very difficult to troubleshoot a problem when your brain is fuzzy with antihistamines. Usually I try to think in a flow-chart fashion, from easy to hard, simple to complex. Hopped up on DayQuil, my mind seems to wander all over the place. "Oh shoot, let's go back to device manager for the third time and let's check another thing I should have had you check the last two times we were there." Blah...I hate doing that to people. At least they know I'm not following a script. No one would write a script that screwy.

No, the crises ain't over

But I was getting tired of that online mid-life crises thing. It was one of those "good ideas at the time".

Instead I decided to give this blog a more general title, the name I would have given to my bar in the Bahamas had life taken me in that direction. But I never got to be another Jimmy Buffett. Hell, I never got to be another Warren Buffett. Just another cat in cyberspace.

My love for jazz is the inspiration for the Juke Joint subtitle. If I'd have been around in the 40's, I'd have had a juke joint downtown somewhere, a smokey place with live jazz and beer, conversation and marijuana. Basie and Mingus hanging out in the back room, while Peterson held the stage for a set or two. Red neon and Blue Moon.

Oh yeah...dig it

Low man with totem pole

I've had a few jobs where I was able to move from new hire to management in six months. I even worked for a company in the '70s in which I was able to go from part-timer to Vice President within a year.

But I've never before now worked for a company that on my third day of employment invited me to sit down with the head of operations and several others to discuss the future developement of the company. And this was not a "welcome to the job" type meeting. This was a true working session, with input welcome and noted and good ideas incorporated into the planning documents as we talked.

I'm amazed, and impressed. To have the #2 man in the company (actually he's the #1 man, as the company's president is a woman) asking me direct questions and listening to my responses...not just listening but noting down and including in the planning documents my suggestions...made me realize that here is a medium-sized company (perhaps 300 people at this location) that doesn't just say they value their employees, but proves it by recognizing experience within it's employee pool and taking advantage of that experience, even when it involves someone they've only known for a few days. It has certainly given me a reason to try and make this opportunity work to not just my benefit, but the company's as well. I'm always willing to offer my loyalty to a company or group that is willing to reward it by showing loyalty in return. I hope that turns out to be the case here.

Amazing, I've survived two days...

...on this job and thus far no one has died or even been seriuosly injured. I think that's pretty good considering the circumstances.
Tomorrow's only my third day on the desk, and already I've been invited to a meeting being conducted on new directions the management wants to take the company in, particularly a pay-for-call help desk setup. Well, I do have a bit of experience at that, and have a few opinions on the concept, so I guess I'll attend and see how much my 2 cents are worth in the corporate world.

This job is not having any effect on me at all.

The fine print

Thank you so much, Alibris. Tonight I was able to locate and order two books I've been seeking for a couple of years. "I Had a Dog and a Cat" by Karel Capek, a book I read 15 years ago, was the hardest to locate. It's never been reprinted since 1947, and while I have a copy that's in good condition already, I wanted a reading copy. Capek, better known for writing "R.U.R." in 1920, and giving the term robot to the science fiction community, penned this lovely little story about the trials and joys of living with his dog and cat in 1940 that just makes me feel wonderful every time I read it. His use of the language, even when translated from the original Czech, is so tight that it nearly qualifies as poetry.

I was also able to pick up a copy of "Religion and the Rebel" by Colin Wilson. Wilson wrote the book that first woke me up in my twenties and made me start to think about my life and beliefs. That book, "The Outsider", says more about me than I'm usually comfortable having people know. "Religion and the Rebel" picks up where "The Outsider" left off, discussing in even more depth existentialism and the famous people who personified the "outsider" in society.

As I wrote in a review of "The Outsider" for Amazon in 2000, "For over 15 years this has been my favorite book. Wilson explicates a thesis - that much of great Western Literature is written by and concerns men who see and feel more deeply than their contemporaries. Perhaps one might regard them as more sensitive. At any rate, such men are alienated-hence outsiders. Such figures include: Hermann Hesse, Van Gogh, Hemmingway, Lawrence of Arabia, H.G. Wells, Albert Camus, Vaslav Nijinsky, Sartre, Tolstoy, and others.

This book can be used in many ways: as a primer to existential philosophy, an introduction to religious mysticism, or as an introduction to the work and thoughts some of the greatest artists and writers of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Understanding of this book is helped by familiarity with the works and artists Wilson discusses - but it's not necessary. Wilson's discussion of each work/artists is complete enough even without prior exposure. And, indeed, it would be hard to have exposure to all he includes. In a way that, too, is a plus. I used this book as a core curriculum for nearly everything I've studied. I read what Wilson had to say, and if I was interested, I'd then explore those artists myself."

Since existentialism is a philosophy and not a religion, many of those who read "The Outsider" thought that Wilson was selling out with "Religion and the Rebel" when they first saw the title. But what Wilson discusses is religion in the sense of a passion, a fascination with something beyond and grander than the individual. In that sense, you could describe my interest in the Internet as a religion, considering the role it plays in my life.

I've never owned a copy of this book, so I'm very pleased to have found a copy in good condition at a reasonable price so I can add it to my "special" bookcase. Those are the books I doubt I'll ever part with, and include the 3 volume set of H.L. Mencken"s "The American Language" and the science fiction novels of Stanislaw Lem, famous for "Solaris" (which has twice been made into terrible movies but was a brilliant book) but also the author of several amazing stories including my favorite "Memoirs Found In a Bathtub", which reminds me of my time at NSA (to quote a review, "A paranoid story from the year 3149 in a world without paper. The protagonist is given a mission so secret that nobody has a clearance to tell it to him. Spies, counter-spies and counter-courter-spies stand in his way as he attempts to solve the mystery of his mission")

So once I get tired of reading about routers and wireless access points for work, I can take my pick of two better works to distract myself from computers for a while.

Welcome fellow LangaList readers

I'm pleased to see so many of you stopping by to see what's going on. I wish I knew.
But since you're here, and obviously in a "clicking" mood, why not click your way on over to my forum, Jeber's Help Desk. If you like what you see there, join up. Share your knowledge, your interests and your thoughts with me and my friends. It's a forum for the more mature computer user. No game cheats, no warez, no music downloads. Just a small group of us who realize there's more to life than a computing, or are at least trying to maintain a life beyond the keyboard. My main web page is at Jebers.com.

And thanks again for visiting.

If you own a D-Link product...

...make damn sure that by Monday you've done all your firmware upgrades, read your manuals and asked all your necessary questions, because it looks like, due to some obvious breech in the fabric of space-time, or perhaps as a cruel joke perpetrated by the gods to amuse themselves, as of Monday, December 6th, 2004, a day that will live in infamy, I will be answering your networking questions at the call center that I'll be calling home until they finally catch on to the fact that I haven't the foggiest clue what I'm going to be talking about, since the very thing in the realm of computing I know the least about has to be networking, although I don't know much about how to add more blinky-lights to my laptop, either, but the odds of my learning how to add more blinky-lights to Gromet are much better than my really understanding networking, so I'l have a hundred little blinky-lights scattered in delightful patterns around my Toshiba's case long before I've managed to get your wireless notebook to connected through your wired router to your cable modem box and out onto the Internet while at the same time trying to DMZ your Xbox so you can get back to your online Halo game.
This should be interesting...

A little blogging humor

OK, yes...I wish I'd written this. Having confessed that, I can recommend this "Review of Blogs..." by Joe Lavin as a good, and I hope not entirely true, comment on the perils of blogging.

Ahhhhhhhhhhh...

That, my friends, is the sound of relief.
I went to a job interview this morning, filled out the application and various other forms and took a test on networking support. I was quite concerned about my ability to pass a networking test. Networking is perhaps my weakest subject, having spent less than a week at school covering the subject. So the last few days I've been reading up on the OSI model, TCP/IP, wireless networking, routers, LANs, WANs, WENs... My eyeballs are swimming in acronyms. On top of that, I was told that I could only miss 5 questions on the test to qualify for an interview. Let's just say I wasn't planning on being interviewed.
Imagine my surprise when I was.
Then I was told that there weren't any more of the part-time positions that I had applied for, but since I was interested in full-time, they'd see if there were any available. "We'll call you" I was told. That's often not a good sign in my experience.
Less than an hour later, I got a call.
Starting Monday, I'll be attending a week of training for my new, full time position as a support technician for Aradiant Corporation, working on the D-Link support team.
I still don't know how well I did on the test...but you can bet I'm still studying my networking books. I'm taking notes now.

JHD-blog...R.I.P.

Well, it was ugly, and at times it looked like the little varmint would escape the fate in store for it, but last night I decided to kill off the blog attached to my Jebers.com website. It clung desperately to life, refusing to be deleted from my host as a unit, forcing me to go in and rip out its guts one file at a time.
I never read what I call "blah-blah" blogs. You know, the ones that are filled with entries that read, "Today I bought new shoes. They're really cool" or other topics that mark them as totally personal blogs. I don't mind them, or think they somehow devalue blogging, I just don't read them. I try hard to make my postings fun to read, and as I'm operating on just a few remaining brain cells (did I mention I'm getting older and should have taken better care of myself?) I'm finding it enough to try and maintain my four main blogs, two on Blogger and two on Type Pad. Each has its own purpose, but JHD-blog didn't. It consisted of entries better posted to my forum. Since I couldn't justify its existence, I knew it must die.
This incident made me aware of another reality. As much as I like and use WS_FTP, there are times that the FTP function built into Power Desk 6 functions so much better. Working with a folder on a remote site as if it were on your local drive is intuitive and easy.

Well, this is interesting...II

I think that is enough for a review. See the previous empty entry? That was a rather lengthy post all about how I was checking out this software to do remote blogging called BlogWeaver, and how I intended to review it once I'd used it a few times. Well, after the first usage I went to uninstall it, and found out it doesn't want to uninstall via add/remove programs , either. Read the full review here. I should have it published pretty soon. (Hint: don't waste your time)

Well, this is interesting...

The merry month of December

Since I'm too old to move back home to Mom's house, I've decided to move her in with me. Actually, due to circumstances, Mom will be moving in with me next month, the very same month my current job comes to an end. You say coincidence, I say the stuff is all hitting the fan at the same time.
Not that I don't think her moving in here isn't a good idea. She can't really afford to rent her own house on her limited income and at 81, she needs someone who can check in on her on a daily basis. Neither one of us is a very social person, so it's not like our parties are going to disturb one another. And we both enjoy spending time on the computer. So I imagine we'll get along OK. But it is going to be very weird for a while. Despite the fact we're good friends, I haven't lived in her house since I was 16 years old, 34 years ago, and she's lived independently for those years as well. It's going to be quite an adjustment for us both. Meanwhile, I've rented a storage unit to fill with all our extra furniture and everything else that won't fit in the house with two people living here. There's a lot of work to be done between now and then. And a full-time job to think about as well. Then, come January, all that activity will be over. That's when I'm planning on having my nervous breakdown.
I need another cup...

Progress...

The development of Jebers.com is coming along, but the forum is already in place and ready for visitors. Please stop by, and if you feel so inclined, become a member. Let's talk about the topics of concern to all of us...how computers work and what impact they have on our lives. Do you have gardening questions, want to brag about your pets? Share with us. Jeber's Help Desk is all about the human in front of the keyboard as much as it is the machine on the other side. Come by and see for yourself.

A perfect end to the week

OK, so it's my Friday night (I know it's only Wednesday, but I get the next two days off, thus...) and it's 10:00PM. I get off work at 10:30, and there are no calls waiting to be answered.
Usually, we hate this. It's too early to log out, but we dread that last call that may take us into overtime and earn us the displeasure of the payroll department. So about 2 minutes later I get a call. Uh-oh. And it's someone with a "yearly" pin number, meaning they get unlimited number of support calls for a year. But many of the yearly folk think that means they can talk for an unlimited amount of time on each call. They tend to like to chat. And that really messes up our que for other callers, who have to wait for us to get free of these.
So I reluctantly answered the call. The caller said, "I don't really have any issues, I just have a suggestion. This help desk should offer Linux support. I just wiped Windows off my computer and loaded SUSE 9.1 two days ago, and I love it." That cracked me up. My last call on a "Friday" night, and I get to talk Linux. What a perfect way to end the week.
Thanks, new friend, for letting me leave work this week with a smile on my face. I hope to meet you again in Scot's forum.

It's alive!

I've posted my custom "place holder" page to Jebers.com. I hope it isn't there for long, that I'll soon have at least the main page ready to put up. I'll also be adding a fun little FAQ page to Jeber.net. I'm back to using Dreamweaver for most of the composing, but thanks to Josh's inspiration, I've been trying to make more use of CSS.
One tip you may find useful. SP2 breaks Dreamweaver if DW is already installed. But if you uninstall it, load SP2 then reinstall DW, it seems to work just fine. I have no idea why, or if this will work for you. But it's working fine for me. I do have DW in a separate partiton from Windows. Perhaps that makes the difference.
Keep Jeber's Help Desk in mind, and send me your ideas, tips and suggestions (jebers.help.desk "at" gmail.com). It's all appreciated. And a huge thanks to Scot, Chris, Josh and all my friends at Scot's and Lockergnome forums. You've all truly been an inspiration.