Another Book Announcement and More!

I've just published another book!  Yes! I know exactly what you're thinking:  "What the...? Why do they let him keep doing this?!  Have they no mercy upon our eyeballs?!"

Well, in the interests of science, humanity, environment and the ever-pressing need to keep gasoline in the tank of my car, I've decided it was time to pull together as many of the mindless stories I could from my old-as-dirt years working in the world of IT.  That was a very long run-on sentence.  My high school English teachers are probably rolling over in their graves right now.

There's also quite a lot of blabber about how I got into the world of IT and how I swam through the sea of CAD into the ocean of Infrastructure Management and Software Development. It really is fascinating.  Not how I got into IT, but the fact that I could construct a sentence that almost sounded coherent.  Wow!

What's this New Book All About?

The new book is called "You're Only as Good as Your Last Mistake".  Sub-titled "25 Years of Boneheaded Reflection and Stupid IT Stories to Dull your Senses".  It's a blending of a little biographical nonsense, some seriously pretentious pontification, some articles adapted from my blog (this blog), and stories about things going bump in the electronic night. I suppose it could be called a BioTechieHumorFailDisasterFest.  Uhhh.  Yeah.

It's available on the Amazon Kindle store in every country where Amazon can sell books (US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, India, Japan, Spain, Canada and Brazil, as far as I know).

Here's the GOOD NEWS!

• It's only $2.99 (USD) and whatever that translates to in other currency
• Don't have a Kindle?  No problem.  You can download a FREE Kindle Reader app for iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone, Windows XP/Vista/7/8, Mac OS, and ...
• You can read Kindle books online in almost any web browser using the Kindle Cloud Reader!
• If you are an Amazon Prime member, you can "borrow" eBooks, including all of my eBooks, for FREE!

What's the Catch?

• I only ask a small favor:  It's a BIG favor for me, and a small effort on your part, but I really would appreciate honest reviews of my books.  If you've purchased, or borrowed, any of my eBooks and actually read them (without pausing in the middle to stab yourself in the eyeballs with a fork), please go to the Amazon web site for the book(s) you've read and submit your opinion on them?
• You can start at my Author Profile page to make it easy.
• Thank you!

Sample: "Where it All Began: From Doritos to Digital Ships"

"Chronologically it's weird, because some of those jobs were in parallel with others.  For example, in that maze of titles I managed to fit in roughly five good years of rock and jazz band, but whatever. I also weaved in about ten years of artwork (painting, drawing, squishing clay stuff around, and so on) which never earned me more than "Hey man, that's cool!"  I remember responding a few times with "Cool enough to buy?", and the response to that being something like "Yeah! By somebody.", but somehow "somebody" could never be found. 

Sometime in early 1984, Mark, one of my brothers stoned friends, walked into our kitchen while I was maniacally inhaling a bowl of Fruit Loops (my favorite cereal at the time).He stopped at the doorway to exclaim "I got a job, dude!" to which we all replied with stunned silence.  I decided to inquire, saying something intelligent like "Oh yeah? What?"  

He explained that he was hired as a "Naval Designer" at a local Naval engineering firm, and went on to indulge us in this magically mysterious thing called "benefits", and something even more interesting, called a "salary". If I hadn't grown up in a Navy town (okay, a Navy "region"), I would have assumed a "Naval Engineer" designed belly-button replacements or something. 

Most of what Mark said was really fascinating, even though I could barely hear his muttering over my own cereal-chewing noise.  The best way to describe him is to think of someone who looks, sounds, and acts a lot like Jeff Spiccolli (Fast Times at Ridgemont High), only not as funny, has a mustache and wears glasses, coming in and telling you he was hired at an engineering firm.  You get the idea. 

Somewhere towards the end of my bowl of cereal Mark said something that perked my ears up.  I think it was something he mentioned about there being more positions needing to be filled, and that they paid pretty well. As it turned out, there were roughly twenty openings for "Drafting Apprentice" jobs, so I ran down and applied.  After a short interview ("Can you hold a pencil, boy? Alrighty! You is hired!"). 

I was finger-printed, scanned, questioned, photographed, probed and stamped with a badge and told to show up at 7:30 AM the following Monday.  That led to five or six years of my work as a Drafter/Designer in the U.S. Naval engineering field." 

Sample above (C)2013 David M. Stein, All Rights Reserved. May not be reproduced or copied, transmitted, in whole or in part, for any purposes or derivative use, without explicit written consent of the author (me). And let's face it: If you're so desperate that you'd consider copying this literary fast food schlock, well, you may need some serious medication already.

The Social Network vs. the Book

I saw the Social Network a few months ago, and I liked it very much.  I found it to be very entertaining.  The pace is just right.  The dialog is assembled well.  The scenes don't leave you snoring for the most part.  But then again: That's just my stupid opinion.

Then I read the book from which it was derived: "The Accidental Billionaires".  It too is entertaining. But some of the hyperbole and anecdotal comments the author tosses around made my eyes roll.  For example, there are some sentences in the beginning, when he describes the process by which Zuck pilfers the photo libraries of each of the campus house servers. 

As he hits each one, he lays it on thick as though Zuck is some uber-God that possesses magical superior powers unknown to mortal men.  Um, hello?  wget and grep have been around for decades and I've known literally dozens of genius hackers that could have accomplished that basic feat with less effort.  Come to think of it: Mitnick would have probably figured out a way to get the houses to send it to him without having to write any code at all.  Of course, Mitnick possesses "social engineering" skills, rather than "social networking programming" skills, but whatever.  That part of the book almost made me stop reading, but I persevered and somehow made it through.

Could I have done what Zuck did back in the era mentioned in the book?  Probably not.  I had left college (and UNIX) life behind when I graduated in 1999.  My life since 2000 was (and still is) mostly Microsoft oriented.  But if I had stayed immersed in the world of vi, emacs, pico, grep, regex, wget and apache/php, who knows.  I do know this: there were hundreds of people around at that time that could have easily done what the author paints to be a picture of God-like powers.

But what really matters is timing and luck.  Mark was at the right place, at the right time and struck while the iron was hot.  That's all that matters in the business world.  The more you read books like Myths of Innovation and What Technology Wants, the more you'll realize that few ideas are truly unique.  Most every "innovation" can be traced to many simultaneous discoveries, but only one was lucky or persistent enough to follow through with it.

So, if I had to provide a comparative rating to the book versus the movie, I would have to score a win for the movie in this case.  Usually the screenplay trims out the best details of whatever book it comes from, but in this case it cleaned it up.

Some Quotes from my Past

"I'll cook a plate of dog shit, medium-rare, if someone pays me enough" - John, the head cook at a restaurant I once worked at, after a customer demanded a 2-inch Filet Mignon "cooked 6 seconds on each side".  He tipped John $100.

"Alright.  You ladies grab your tampons and dance up to the roof and start working."  - Mike, construction boss (the roof was five stories high and sloped 30 degrees, it was 4:30 AM and had been raining all night)

"When you get out there, all the directions are based on cows and rusted cars in the yard." - Tim, my boss when I delivered paint.  In this case out in the boonies beyond Arc, Va.

"Don't bother me.  I'm massaging my temples with a .45" - Paul, a former boss in the IT world.  One of his favorite phrases.

"You can't treat users like that.  They're way too stupid." - Betty, an IT manager

"Contracts are made to be changed.  So change it!" - Linda, uber-vicious IT procurement manager for a large corporation, talking to a senior Autodesk or Microsoft rep.  By the way, they changed it.  They always do.

Stories: A Brain Dump from a Derailed Book Idea

A while back I was going to publish a book (e-book) on stories from my years in IT work.  Not the techy, geeky, nerdy crap.  Just the funny, stupid, ironic stuff, memorable moments that have stuck with me for a long time.  Rather than expound upon them into excrutiating detail, I'm just going to post the summaries on this blog.  They're all one hundred percent factual and true.  Names are replaced or omitted to avoid law suits.

Blackberry Sauce

I came home from a busy Friday at the office and my wife called out from the kitchen.  I walked in with my backpack and lunch box to see a bowl of peeled and de-veined Shrimp relaxing on a bowl of ice and big cup of cocktail sauce.  As I gazed up there was a frosty glass and a cold bottle of some unpronouncable Belgian Ale sitting next to it.  I could hear angels singing and playing harps on the clouds.  I dropped my stuff, kissed my wife, and charged over to the table.  As I rounded the end of the table, my Blackberry belt-clip caught on the top of a chair and forced the Blackberry to pop out, do a few flips in the air, and land squarely in the cocktail sauce.  I froze for a full second, and then panicked and fetched it out.  No more than two seconds elapsed at most.  It was too late.  The combination of vinegar, sugar and horse radish effectively anihilated the circuitry.  The LCD display (2003 we're talking) started devolving the characters within another five seconds until it just shut down and would never again power up.

$80,000 Plotter and a Red Marker

While working [insert U.S. Navy Shipyard] in the data center room, I was assigned to finish up some "Damage Control placard" drawings on a mainframe/workstation Intergraph system (talk about duck hunting with a f-ing EMP ray gun).  The workstation was attached directly to a [insert big corporate brand name] pen plotter that, according to the printed purchase order taped on the side, cost the U.S. Navy $80,000 and change.  It was as big as a hot tub.  Huge!  I went to print the drawings, which were in four colors: cyan, green, black and magenta.  Only problem was that no matter what we tried, it would not print magenta (or red, for that matter).  The vendor rep, assigned to do NOTHING else but watch over this beast, sat in the corner, reading a newspaper.  He did that EVERY day of the entire three months I spent there.  He was paid to sit and read (and actually more time for sleeping, no kidding).

We woke him up and brought him up to speed on our issues.  He made a few suggestions.  None of them worked.  He called corporate.  Corporate pointed him to the engineering office (the folks that designed that contraption).  We put them on speaker phone and spent an hour trying diagnostics, test modes, back-door tricks and everything.  In the end, the engineer on the phone said (and I quote): "I'm sorry, but you'll just have to print it out and trace over it with a red marker."

Colors

In 1988, I was working with a four-man team, three shifts per day, to finish up a 3D model project of certain "spaces" on a naval warship.  This was on a Computervision CADDS CV-4X workstation terminal (state of the art at that time, at $30,000 per workstation (roughly) and we had three going around the clock).  One day our supervisor walked up looking very anxious and worried.  He said "We're expecting a visit from [insert scarry government agency name here] on Monday. They want to see the models."  He had us scared shitless.

Mind you, at this time (1988), those "3D models" were entirely wireframe.  There was no Goraud or Phong shading on that platform. Not even flat shading.  Nothing but wireframe.  You really had to use your imagination when rotating the views around at non orthogonal angles.  We weren't sure what to expect.  Nothing but a mash-up of lines, circles, arcs and text, all in different colors.  The best of what the 1980's had to offer.

Monday came.  I wore a pressed shirt and a tie.  I hadn't worn a tie since the last wedding or funeral some months before.  The moment came.  Four suit-and-tie guys were escorted over by our boss.  They looked serious.  Brief introductions and then I sat back down and started diving into the model.  They said nothing.  Total silence.  My boss issued quiet directions like "zoom up on that" or "rotate around to this".  I navigated.  They breathed.  It was tense.  After a good five minutes of apprehensive silence, one of them finally spoke up:

"Man.  Would you look at all them colors."

Three for Three in Three

Back in 1995, at Christopher Newport University, we had three computer labs: CS, Math and English.  The CS lab was all Sun OS or Solaris, with a small Linux lab running Slackware or Red Hat; The Math lab ran Macintosh computers with Mac OS 8.5; and the English lab ran white-box x86 PC's with Windows 95.  State-of-the-Art at the time.  I was a Freshman that year and still finding my way around the campus, the labs and the social idioms that existed at the time.

At the end of the Fall semester, it was crunch time, when students were cramming into every corner trying desperately to finish up projects before looming deadlines.  I squeaked into the CS lab and had just finished my Oracle SQL-Plus project and submitted my files, then I ran a system check command and the screen blew up.  I waited for the system to reset itself, which it did.  Then I logged back in and ran the command again, and again it blew up.  I called the lab monitor over and he called over three more geeks and they were astounded.  They were pretty sharp guys and couldn't figure it out.  I had to leave, while they kept on troubleshooting, since I had a Maple project to finish in the Math lab.

Over in the Math lab, I logged onto the Mac OS 8.5 desktop and finished up my Maple project and filed it on the disk.  Then I went to drag a file from the desktop into the trash can, but instead I mistakenly dragged the shortcut for the CD-ROM drive into the trash can.  The screen and the system locked up hard.  No response at all.  We had to unplug the computer and plug it back in to do a reset.  After getting the Math lab monitor to stand behind me, I repeated the process and it again locked up and died.  That's two down.

Then I went to the English lab and logged onto one of the Windows 95 computers.  I don't need to tell you how this went.  I'm sure you can guess.  But in the end, I managed to crash a UNIX workstation, a  Mac OS desktop, and a Windows 95 desktop within three hours.  The good news is that I successfully finished my projects and filed or saved them before the crashes occurred.  I was a legend in the labs for about a week.  Good times.

Server Panic

While working on a high-visibility project once, in the IT department of a big corporate behemoth, one of the PM's said "I have friends at [big-computer-vendor].  The server will arrive tomorrow at 7:00 AM sharp.  I want it online before lunchtime."  We clicked our heals and responded "Ya vole! Herr commandant!" and bolted for the door.  The server indeed arrived at 7:00 the next morning.  We unpacked it, and set it in the rack and powered it on.  It wouldn't power on.  We checked all the connections, but nothing seemed to work.  We called the commandant.  He was not happy.  After a gruff bark he hung up, called the vendor, who flew a technician down from D.C. on a private jet.  He arrived an hour or two later.  Five of us stood around the server as it lay open on a table, as if surrounding the remains at a casket viewing.

The technician looked at it for a second.  Dropped his backback.  Reached out with both hands and placed his fingers on the face of the motherboard.  He pushed it gently to one side and it fell into place with a loud "snap!" sound.  We plugged in the cables and it worked.  We were dumbfounded.  He smiled and said "Sometimes you just gotta kick those things to make em work"

Shorter Stories:

Squirrels

A monsterously huge U.S. corporation (no names, of course) was about to test a major data center power failover circuit.  Preparations were made.  Contingencies were discussed.  Documents were overflowing in folders and e-mail inboxes.  IT staff were scheduled for an entire weekend.  When the moment came to kill the primary circuit, the secondary never came online.  Dead.  Only after lengthy investigation was it revealed that the secondary circuit had a fat power cable running into the back of the data center building.  Squirrels had chewed through the cable.  Millions of dollars in disaster protection efforts felled by a small rodent.

Salvadore Dali-top

We had a shipboard technician take a brand new Dell Latitude laptop to the ship for calibration work.  He sat it on top of a steam boiler vessel. When he returned a few hours later, it had melted.  It looked like the clocks in a Dali painting.  I wish I had a picture of that.

Be Right Back

Fighting a Cold while working insane hours on a big project.  Need sleep.  Need to recover.  I’ll be right back.

Meanwhile, I watched “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room”.  It boils down to this, at least from the perspective of how this impacted ME personally…

• Government was strong-armed by lobbyists (Ken Lay, Abrahmson, etc.) to relax Federal oversight (aka “de-regulate”) over energy markets.
• Enron and companies like Worldcom, Tyco and others drank their own Kool-Aid and grew into the Hulk, pushing stock prices higher and higher, artificially.
• They in-turn gave hand-jobs to accounting firms like Arthur Anderson and others to help them inflate market prices and in-turn share in the artificial margins of trading on them.
• Californians got raped like nobody’s business
• The market turned out to be a house of cards and imploded
• People at all levels of the market, the auxiliary markets, and their families and communities were pulled down in a spiral of 401-k meltdown.  Some even killed themselves.
• The government finally stepped in and realized the car was spinning off the road and nobody was behind the wheel.  Investigations ensued and eventually it was “discovered” that oversight isn’t such a bad thing.  Gee. (Personal note: If you have teenage kids, and they want to throw a party at your house, and they say to you “hey, go see a movie, you guys can trust us”, what would you do?  Ok, now imagine those teenagers are drunk on the lust for outrageous profits, insane CRAZY-ASS profits, and they want to party inside your bank account)
• The fallout yields a determination to lay down some new rules on behalf of the two folks Mr. Sarbanes and Mr. Oxley.
• IT folks are left holding the bag to implement and enforce a tangled mess of who can do what and see what between various segments of their financial departments.
• IT folks suffer with SOX compliance and no sleep.  The financial department managers go to Vegas, Orlando, or Honolulu to attend conferences, but tell the IT department there isn’t enough budget to attend MMS or TechEd, sorry.

What a sad story.  Remember to have my part played by Brad Pitt.

Now, think about this: Think that’s all behind us now?  Think again.

Short Story 1

[I dusted this old college paper I had submitted as an exercise for developing vignettes without an explicit introduction or conclusion.  Just a slice from the middle, so to speak.  Anyhow, I thought it was kind of interesting, so I posted it on my blog.  I may dig up more if anyone cares.  Enjoy.]

The guard casually turned the old bulky key in the cage door lock and it made a deep clanking sound as it released and sprung open.   He walked in to the waiting room as the guard held the door open for him.  The entire facility was dimly lit and an overhead fluorescent tube was flickering as if soon it would die, but it somehow flickered on.

“Sign in, please” the guard murmured.  Handing the visitor a tattered clipboard with crinkled papers attached, and a pen dangling from a knotted string.  Tired from long hours inside a world without daylight, only the all-too familiar buzz of fluorescent tubes.  It wouldn’t matter anyway, since it had been raining heavily for days and was still pouring down even on this darkened, early Winter evening.  Outside was violent winds and rain, yet inside was an almost complete silence, as if the weather were miles away.

He scribbled on the clipboard as the guard waited.  He handed it back as the guard turned to put it through the office window porthole opening.

“Wait here.  He should be out in a minute or two.” and the room fell silent.  So quiet, in fact, that the only sounds he could hear was the soft buzz of the fluorescent lights above and his own heart beating.

It was probably only a matter of seconds, but it seemed like hours passed in this dreary silent room.  Then suddenly: the clank of a metal door opening.  A clank that would startle anyone else, but not him.  He was expecting it.  The door was on the other side of the room, with only the simple, flat table and two chairs in between.  The door swung open slowly as the guard held it for the inmate to walk in.  Shuffling his feet, motion limited by the leggings and shackles which were also chained up to the chain between his cuffs.  His dull orange overalls were smudged and wrinkled.  Probably not changed in weeks at least.

The guard sat inmate 10040505 down across from him and the two were now face to face at the same level.  The guard sauntered to the corner and slowly, tiredly, leaned against the wall and began to fumble with his keys on the large ring.  He announced in a drone, “fifteen minutes.” His voice a long, spacious Southern drawl.

And they sat.

Not a word was spoken.  The two men just studied the expressions on each others face.  At first, the inmate looked down at the table without forcing his eyes upward.  The visitor stared directly at him, but not with angry intent.  His expression was almost serene.  As calm and emotionless as a funeral director might have while greeting mourners to a viewing.  He sat completely still.

After what seemed like an eternity, the inmate blinked nervously and alternated his focus on the table and his visitors face, only as many times as it took for him to become frightened at the incessant gaze of the visitor.  His boyish yet worn face looked uneasy, compared to the stoic wrinkled face of his graying visitor opponent.

“What do you want from me?” the inmate mumbled in a half-baked defiance. “Haven’t you had enough?” and his face turned into a slight sneering demeanor.

The visitor didn’t respond.  He didn’t flinch.  Silence.  Silence dominated for another full minute.  Then he ever so calmly reached into his shirt pocket and gently removed a pack of cigarettes, tapped it against his other hand and pulled out a cigarette as if in slow-motion.  Never once did he look away from the inmate’s face.

“You can’t do anything to me now.” the inmate sighed and blinked slowly as if to impress upon the visitor his over-relaxed disconcern. “I’m in here for life, you know.”

Another minute of silence.  The guard coughed and cleared his throat.  The inmate turned to see it himself but never committed to full eye contact before turning his attention back to his adversary, sitting calm, motionless, across the table.  The guard shuffled over to the table.  As the visitor put the cigarette in his mouth, an arm reached out with a pewter ash tray, he took it kindly and place it on the table to his left.  After lighting his cigarette and flipping the lighter cap shut, he took a long mouth puff on the cigarette, causing the ash to glow bright and his eyes squinted.  He kept his focus firmly on the inmate’s face the entire time, even as he exhaled the smoke directly towards his face, but not overtly so.

And he spoke.

“The thing is, Ned…” and he took another drag on the cigarette and exhaled, “I know something you don’t.”  He exhaled an endless volume of smoke through only his nostrils.  His eyes sank into a look of derision.  Half-opened lids without a blink to be found.

Ned stared at the visitor’s left hand, which was slowly rotating the lighter around and around in a mantra.  But Ned didn’t speak.  He listened.  His breathing was quicker now, but his eyes remained fixed on the rotating lighter and gentle finger movements.  The movements looked like a skilled card magician performing slight-of-hand in front of a close audience.

For the first time during the entire encounter, the visitor looked down at the ash tray, slowly and deliberately, as if tracking a slow-moving bug going from Ned’s face to the ash tray, as he tapped the ash off his cigarette.  He continued, while his eyes were still watching the motion, “I know when… and where… you… are going to die.”  His words were sparse.  Separated with relaxed pauses that seemed to make the sentence float among clouds of uncertainty, yet every word was certain.  Deliberate.

“Five minutes left.” the guard droned from the distant corner.  His voice was monotone and tired.  It trailed off in volume with an almost haunting sound, magnified by the short echo against the bare brick walls and smooth cement floor.  It enveloped the room in an aura of despair and emptiness.

Ned sat stunned and motionless, staring through his visitor’s chest into nothing at all.  When the visitor finally looked back up at Ned, he could see Ned was slack-jawed and dazed.  He recalled the last time Bob said those words.  It led to this place, and Ned being the only survivor of the twelve desperate men who had once tried to cross Bob.  Bob didn’t like to be crossed.

Bob cracked a faint smile, almost impossible to detect, “Do you remember, Ned?”  His voice was soft and calming, as if reading a bedtime story to a child. “Do you?”

“Yeah.” he nodded gently. “I remember”

2008 vs 2009

For me, 2008 was the year of saying goodbye to jobs, economy, eating out and traveling. 2009 has so far been the year of saying goodbye to friends. Actually, I didn't even get a chance to say goodbye to them, which really sucks. They passed away too soon and too young.

Brian Tucker

I "met" Brian by way of some online friends who pointed us at each other right after I was laid off from my previous job as a consultant. Brian emptied his pockets and mortgaged his house to fund a dream of building an online business of selling subscription-based technical training services using "blogcasts": video podcast format training sessions. I helped him with WSUS 3 and Windows Server 2008 tutorial sessions. It was grueling and a learning experience for all of us involved with that project. Brian was always supportive, friendly and driven. The journey helped me through a very tough time for me and my family. We would have lost our house if not for him offering me the opportunity to work with him. No hand-outs or anything like that, just a chance to earn a small income when it mattered most and someone who understood and didn't let me feel sorry for myself. I am forever grateful.

Brett Rivers

I met Brett while working together back in 1997. We stayed in touch ever since. He moved to Washington state to work for Amazon, then Microsoft. After transferring back to Virginia we met several times and spoke often. He also offered me encouragement when I was going through a bleak period in 2008, and I helped him later as he worked to move beyond some personal difficulties. Always a cheerful person and willing to offer help anytime anyone asked. I will miss talking to him and sharing stories from way back. I don't know what else to say, I'm still kind of in shock.

A Fantastic Article for Veteran's Day

My brother Larry sent me this and it's indeed one of the most interesting stories I've read in a long time.  I couldn't pause while reading it, so I hope you find it worthwhile as well.