The Occasional Blog

My family and I had the opportunity to go see Behind the Myths tour staring Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman two weeks ago. The best way to describe the experience is as “the world’s best school assembly.” They spent time doing some Q&A, explanation on how the show started, their own backgrounds, and general insight as to how they approach the show and the myths they examine.

A big intent of the show is to help people consider and examine the world around them. It was a very fun evening and I’m looking forward to seeing their companion show MythBusters: The Explosive Exhibition when (if) it comes within driving distance.

I’ve been a gamer from the beginning. Good or bad, I’m old enough to have lived through the golden age of video games during my formative years. It was a great way to spend far too much money (and kept me off the streets). Yes, I work in the video game industry (coincidence?), but I believe that some of the most creative games were created ‘back in the day’ due to the fact there were so few rules and genres to be hampered by.

The golden age is coming back for me due to some fortunate recent events. First, iMAME, a version of MAME (an arcade emulator), was released for the iPad a week ago which only lasted for a day before being pulled by Apple in the App Store (presumably for copyright concerns). I was able to get a copy prior to it disappearing. Second, I just submitted an order for a half-price ION Audio iCade which is supported by many games on the iPad, including iMAME.

I’m looking forward to giving some of my favorite games a spin.

For the last little bit I’ve been using a program called MyTime which tracks the programs you use and websites you visit while you use your computer. It’s an interesting little program that I’ve mostly forgotten about. At the end of last month, I decided to take a look what I’ve been up to while working. Here’s the breakdown:

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by how much time I spend in Mail. It certainly feels like that’s how my professional life is.

So, where do you spend most of your time at work?

My son was at Hume Lake with the Junior High group from our church this week. He wasn’t due back until today (Saturday). Plans change. Thursday night, he called home but from the infirmary. He had a sore throat and fever since the day before but it got bad enough over the next day for him to be segregated from the rest of the camp. Between his significant disappointment, a small case of homesickness, and the fact he was likely to be isolated until the group came back today, we decided that it was appropriate to head up Friday to get him. Road trip!

We got up at 4 AM and were driving by 4:30. Driving when we did, we avoided the world-famous LA traffic and were up there about 11:30. The camp is quite impressive and we’ll need to keep it in mind for a family trip in the future. After we signed out Brian, we gassed up, had a little lunch, packed his bags up and we headed back home.

Not as smooth coming back. Due to the timing, traffic made the drive take about two hours longer than the way up. Total trip: 15 hours and 689 miles. Worth every minute and mile.

A ran across this on Twitter and thought it was too funny:

Source: @TDMoss

I have been a geek pretty much my entire life. I am a geek both at work and at home and am comfortable and, in fact, proud of it. Some examples:

• I have built my own PC
• Built a Linux installation from scratch
• Seen Star Wars, the original, in a theater, eight times
• I always worry about having the right cables available, just in case
• I have more screens in use or at-the-ready than I should at any given time
• I’ve been to Maker Faire

That last one is where this confession is related to.

I have one confession that I fear will lower my geek cred with all that know me:

I’ve never seen Doctor Who.

There, I said it. At Maker Faire, we watched a talk by Adam Savage from MythBusters and at the end, he was coaxed into performing an über-geeky, go-go dance to the Dr. Who theme with ArcAttack! It was a lot of fun but it reminded me of this significant lapse in my geek development.

I know that the show is where the Tardis, Daleks, and the Sonic Screwdriver comes from. I just don’t really know what they are. I’d like to rectify that. The question is how does one start? The original series? The new one? Please comment below and help straighten me out.

This past week, I turned in my BlackBerry. At work, we’ve been starting to use Good for Enterprise by Good Technology. That’s an app that runs on iOS (iPhone or iPad) or Android devices and allows me to check mail from my iPhone. The end result is that I no longer need to carry a separate device to have access to work email. That’s great, but I’ve been wearing a BlackBerry on my belt for over six years. It’s going to take some time before I stop thinking I lost something.

This week my boss heads to London for a meeting of the combined IT groups from the three primary PlayStation divisions. It’s the same trip I went to last year that resulted in my extended stay. This time, however, I am unable to go as I had already made plans to attend Maker Faire with my family.

While thinking about that trip, I realized that while I don’t travel too often, I have had the opportunity through work to visit quite a few ‘motherships.’ Since I’m a geek by profession, they’re ones most people wouldn’t care about but some might find the list interesting:

• Sony Computer Entertainment America (my employer) – Foster City, CA
• Sony Computer Entertainment Europe – London, UK
• Sony City – Shinagawa, Japan
• NetApp (storage vendor) – Sunnyvale, CA
• EMC (storage vendor) – Hopkinton, MA
• Apple – Cupertino, CA

I have a love/hate relationship with traveling. I like the experience, but can’t say that I wish to do more. I can’t think of any upcoming additions to the list but who knows what the future has in store.

While I’ve be using this Internet thing for many (many) years, I never really got into the whole IRC chat. When I transferred into the IT group almost six years ago, I was introduced into the internal IRC server that they used regularly.

For the unfamiliar, IRC is a chat server and protocol developed in 1988 that enables standard text chat rooms. It’s nothing special but utility items rarely are. It’s how you use it that makes it work.

Did You Know? Our original IRC service we hosted was on a racked-up PlayStation 2 in one of our data centers?

Six years ago, the IT group I joined was relatively small and we were all in the same hallway. As a result, coordinating and collaborating wasn’t a challenge. Our IRC server was in use back then but was mostly for color commentary on recent events or sharing other geeky tidbits (this was before Facebook and Twitter). As our group grew, however, we became more spread out and IRC started taking on a more tactical vibe. That trend continued as we spread out and more people were still working together on projects. Worst yet, it was becoming more commonplace that you didn’t even know who the right individual might be regarding a particular service or skill.

Today, our IRC server has over a dozen different channels with fun and more business-like exchanges happening every day in each. The real strength, however, is when something has gone sideways. If a system has gone down and our NOC pages one or more admins to work on something, our IRC server becomes exceedingly useful so that status and collaboration can be easily done. Transcripts are often utilized for updating tickets or producing root cause analysis (RCA) documents.

Did You Know? I have the fortune of working with ‘Dalvenjah’ of DALnet fame?

Having not used IRC before I joined the team, I have since grown to truly feel badly for any IT shop that doesn’t use it or something similar. I can only imagine how worse-off we would be if it wasn’t available.

Very creative and very beautiful.