Dog noses,

A few weeks have passed and all is well. School is better, except for a few frustrating problems that nothing can be done about. I just have to accept them. I’ve been to a few SCA events, visited my mother, my brother, and his wife. I have broken rattan, lost a glove and half gauntlet, questioned my sanity, played with my dogs, read “Preacher” (possibly one of the best comic books I have read since “the dark knight returns”) and really, just tried to avoid thinking about the upcoming election as much as possible. It seems that any one, with any shred of hope of pulling America’s head out of its ass, has been, or is going to be, chewed up and spat out by our political process. In the end it will be the same as it ever was. Some wise person once said, “In a democracy, the people get the government they deserve, not the government they want.” I say “Jesus Christ, who did we piss off? What did we do to deserve this?” R.A.H. was right when he called this time the “crazy years”.

I am finding a fantastic sort of beauty in network that spans our globe. The more I learn about it the more I am amazed and awed. We are rebuilding the tower of Babel. This time the mortar is tcp\ip and the bricks are binary code. Globalization is now inevitable. Communication is instant and knowledge is viral. When we (the Reagan youth {extra props if you recall the band}) were children, it was a big deal to call some one in a different area code. Friends, only slightly older than I, recall party lines. The phone was for important things only; and computers were something that the average home could not afford, much less use. Now, it’s nothing for me to get on line with a machine that fits in my lap and has more processor power than what put man on the moon, and speak with some one on a different continent. In 1980, Michael Crichton published “Congo” In the story the characters used computers that could fit in the palm of their hands. I recall a High school cafeteria conversation that a friend, L.M., and I had where we debated the possibility of such wondrous devices. Here I sit 20 some odd years later, composing this on a machine not much larger than the trapper keeper (because I just had to have the 17 inch laptop) I had at my side that day. The phone in my pocket has as much power if not more than the devices in that book. I can only begin to think of where we might be in another 20 years if we don’t kill our selves first. Just a few weeks ago they took a dead chicken heart and turned it into a beating one. How long before I can upload my self to the net. Remember, death is really just an engineering problem.

Back to school

I’m back in school. Cisco. What more can be said? I will now proceed to bang my head against the wall until, either, my brains fall out and land with a satisfying, plate full of spaghetti splat, and they put me in a nice little box, or until my blood drips to the ground in a nice, hierarchical ,orderly, meticulously numbered and documented pattern.

While I understand the need to learn how to do sub-netting by hand, I also know that if I want to drive a nail, I use a hammer that I bought at my favorite slice of retail hell, not fire up the forge and make one from scratch. Likewise, if I want to create 500 hosts within a class B network, I am not going to sit down with paper and pen and get to cipherin’ like Jethro Bodine. Instead, I, like any other higher mammal, will reach for my trusty subnet calculator and have every thing done in a timely manner. As the wise man said “time is money”. Ah ha!! Screams the naysayer, “What if you have no sub-net calculator”?(ever notice this argument never applies to hamburgers? “but what if you have no grocery store …..” ) Well to them I say, “ If you have no access to a sub-net calculator, you have much bigger problems to worry about” ( For some reason I just pictured this conversation being held in a Victorian drawing room by those two Guinness beer guys. Brilliant!!)

All this anger is really just the result of me being very frustrated. When I left class today I was sure I had this cold. Much to my surprise I did not. When I sat down to do my homework, the part of my brain responsible for sub-netting decided to have an aneurism. I wonder if all that carousing I did in the Army is coming back to haunt me? After several hours of research on the net, all I accomplished was the consumption of one rather large plate of pasta and shrimp, a blinding headache, and not one damn problem solved. I hope I can get my head straightened out tomorrow. I know I can do this.

On the plus side of things, I was at least able to help my mother with her P.C. problems over the phone.

I wanted the first post in this new blog to be something rather profound; a new blog, a new year, and all that. As it turns out, it’s just like the byline….. a pile of fetid dingo’s kidneys.

Until later.