Lucky Number 13!

My last post was my thirteenth. I'm not sure whether that's at all significant or if it's just that today's shaping up to be a gem, but here's a fascinating little tale.

As has been mentioned before in the pages of this august tome, I have an affinity for Diet Pepsi. I also, though I've used computers for many, many years and should really know better, often eat and--more to the point--drink while working on the computer. About once a month the beverage gremlins visit me and I put my soda can down improperly, bump it, etc., causing it to slosh.

Since approximately the dawn of time I've used a Microsoft Natural Keyboard, which is possibly the best keyboard ever made. About three years ago I had a beverage sloshing incident, and although only a scant few drops touched the keyboard they apparently hit the critical spot. I took all of the keycaps off and thoroughly cleaned everything I could, but to this day there's clearly something stuck. Attempts to use that keyboard continue to result in text that l$2ook.#_fs t&&&hi@!~ks.

For two long years I struggled with more modern, "upgraded" versions of the MS Natural: the Natural Elite, the Natural MultiMedia, etc. All featured inferior key placements, in particular an unusable arrangement of insert/delete/home/end.

(As an aside, and possibly a topic for later discussion: also since the dawn of time I have used either Brief itself, or more recently SlickEdit in Brief emulation mode--both of which make extensive and fantastic use of the insert/delete/home/end keys--for all of my code-editing needs. This is by far the best way to edit code, end of story. I can accept that some people like emacs; all of you I'll allow to live. To those of you who insist on editing code in Visual Studio: you're absolutely insane and should be put out of your misery at the earliest possible opportunity. And to the two people I know who use vi and/or vi emulation...words cannot even express my contempt for your very existence.)

Roughly a year ago I was at the point where I was looking at refurbished MS Naturals on eBay when I discovered that Microsoft had released a new flagship keyboard--the Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000--with all of the keys back in the correct place. I quickly rushed out and bought one, and have been using it ever since.

Until today that is. Shortly after finishing my previous, lucky 13th post I had another beverage sloshing incident. Once again only three molecules of Diet Pepsi touched the keyboard, but it immediately started producing results exactly like my late, beloved MS Natural. No amount of pounding, shaking, poking, or spraying with compressed air managed to fix it. I'm crossing my fingers that it'll come back to life in a day or two, but I'm not exactly holding my breath.

I don't know whether this was some kind of rebellion from this morning's overuse, if MS keyboards have some fiendishly clever anti-Pepsi self destruct mechanism, or if the 13th post was actually somehow significant. Regardless, I'm typing this from a MS Comfort Curve 2000, and my fingers are in hell...with the rest of me surely soon to follow.

Yeah, okay, not so fascinating a tale after all. That's what blogs are for though, right...?!

Worth A Thousand Words?!

As everyone who knows me personally can attest--and likely coming as no surprise to anyone who's read any of my lengthy blog posts--I have a tendency to be extremely verbose. No point in using one word when ten will suffice! It's one of my charms, and a personality trait that I'm okay with in spite of it occasionally causing me a bit of trouble.

One particularly noticeable issue it creates for all of my friends and business associates is I'm a complete disaster when it comes to replying to email punctually. That's slightly ironic given my technical background, and is problematic given how much social interaction happens via email in our modern world, but try my best--and I've been trying for years--I've been unable to significantly improve. My core flaw here is simply my natural long-windedness. It's nearly impossible for me to write a "short" email, so although I'm about the fastest typist I've ever met, even the briefest of messages takes 5-10 minutes to compose. With the volume of email I receive every day, it's not clear there's enough hours in the day for me to reply to them all, let alone do so and still accomplish anything else.

Clearly an area that could use further improvement, but that's a subject for another post. (Ah yes, here we are in the third graf and I'm only just about to get to my point. Did I mention about the verbosity?) I've been awake for several hours already today and have yet to do anything other than reply to email. I'd have to run it through a word counter to get exact numbers, but it's a safe bet that I'm well over 2,000 words for the day and it's only a little after noon.

Now consider for a moment the plight of a certain J.K. Rowling, author of some vaguely popular novels about a weird private high school of some kind. Although the initial print run of the first book in the series was only 1,000 copies, subsequent installments have done a bit better and the whole set has now achieved worldwide sales of nearly 400MM. The of the seven volumes was I believe the longest, at roughly 750 pages, and using the rough publishing industry metric of 250 words per page we get 250x750x7 = 1.3MM words. Assigning Ms. Rowling a paltry $1 per copy sold, that's about $300 per word.

Imagine if you will the difficulty this poor woman must face every morning. She gets up, presumably makes a cup of tea (she's English), and sits down to check her email. She's slightly better known than I and presumably gets a little bit more email than I do, but hopefully isn't afflicted with my particular overly-verbose nature so we'll call that a wash. Still, if she writes as many words of email every morning as I have today, she's just authored $600,000 worth of text!

My endless rambling causes some real punctuality issues even without assigning a dollar value to each word. I can't begin to imagine how much less email I'd reply to if I also had a financial metric floating around in the back of my head. Which I suppose all goes to show that no matter how many problems you think your life has, there's always someone--oh, say, the 13th richest person in England--who has it much worse than you.

BTW, for those paying attention, this post has run about 600 words. I sincerely hope you've derived $180,000 worth of enjoyment from it (whatever that means). If you'd like to help defray my investment, leave a message in the comments section and I'll get back to you with details on where to send the check.

Synchronicity?

Yup, finally got the new site live this week, and ever since I've been doing "slipstream upgrades" to fix bugs, add missing features, tweak this and that, etc.

I develop and test locally, then release the upgrades to the live server when I'm satisfied with the results. Between tweaks to the source files, our back-end database, and approximately one trillion other things, "publishing" the fixes is a major pain in the butt. For many years I've bowed down to the god of Perforce, but even that divine being shudders at the thought of synchronising multiple severs hosting both code and a MySQL DB.

There must be some good way to do this?!

Final Push

A couple of fascinating facts:

* By the next time I sleep the new and improved Eminence Luxury Services website will be live. There's about a million little pieces that aren't quite right, but unlike videogames (console games, that is) that's okay: the website is a living organism, and I can fix it as I go.

* Once the website is live, I predict our rental traffic will increase by an order of magnitude. I say this mainly because I have no other casual way to insert a plug for the company in this post, and I'm required by law to mention that Eminence Luxury Services is absolutely the best place to rent an exotic or luxury car in Las Vegas.

* I'm getting pretty tired, and therefore a bit loopy. In my first pass at the last paragraph I predicted that our renal traffic would increase by an order of magnitude. This may also be true, but I'm holding off on the booze until after the site is live.

* Once I've declared the site "done...for tonight" I shall promptly pass out. Luckily I have a large stack of O'Reilly books here to rest my weary head upon. Once again: damn you Brian! I hope I've managed to purchase the "enhanced" editions, which allegedly work through osmosis, so that I may absorb additional heady goodness whilst I rest.

* Did I mention about the loopy? I knew this blog was a bad idea....

Comma Chameleon

I've always considered myself fairly adept in the use of the English language. My sister is quite the polyglot, but although I'm well versed in many dialects of computerese I've been unable to make much headway in learning even one additional spoken language. I attribute this to the incredible mastery I have over my first language: when you wield one language like a deadly weapon, it's hard to give up that precision to explore the contours of a second. Particularly when you throw in a bit of Type A / OCD personality.

As I've possibly mentioned once or twice in the pages of this journal, I've spent a significant portion of my recent history working on an update of the Eminence Luxury Services website. I'm almost ready to unleash it upon the world--at which point the market for exotic and luxury rentals in Las Vegas will positively explode--so I spent some time this weekend double-double-checking things, making sure all of my 'i's were crossed and my 't's dotted, etc.

Everyone who writes anything has, I'm sure, a few tics. I'm well aware that I use the word "just" far too often, and have a propensity for using multisyllabic words when something simpler would be abundantly adequate. That's just the way I write, and I'm okay with that.

What I'm completely not okay with is my atrocious use of the comma. I once had a friend who, though a native English speaker, was an incredibly bad writer, and one of his major flaws was that he considered it appropriate to use a comma whenever he paused...typing. I've not yet adopted that particular style, but I can't claim that my apparently random use of commas is significantly better. Hopefully this won't be too apparent to readers of my previous posts as I've just (doh!) spent a lot of time editing and de-commaing them.

BTW, if anyone needs a comma I can give you a good discount. I've just (crap!) harvested a bumper crop, and have a significant amount of surplus....

Friday...Beer Talking...

Come hell or high water the new, revamped incarnation of the Eminence Luxury Services website is going live next week--at last--and I've been burning the midnight oil getting the darn thing working. We're only going to end up with about 70% of what I wanted, but as I always say: good enough is good enough; perfect isn't that much better, but is a vastly larger pain in the butt. That's not really my point though....

One of the things we're adding to the new site is a blog. For various reasons the blog itself is actually hosted here at Blogger (thanks Google!) and through some magical incantations is syndicated over to the Eminence site. To make that syndication as seamless as possible I wanted to set up "permalinks" for each blog post. To do so involved a little bit of clever PHP code and some judicious use of mod_rewrite, the two of which together took me far longer to figure out than I care to admit. That's not really my point though....

I do all of my development locally, then publish it to our hosting provider (thanks GoDaddy!) when it's ready. As of last night I had the blog permalinks working perfectly locally, but when I put it up on the "live" server it didn't work so good. I'm sure this has something to do with the shared server configuration and couldn't be helped, but I've spent the better part of the day devising a "workaround" and am at the moment supremely frustrated. That's not really my point though....

Wait, here's my point: because the monkey business alluded to above involved some trickery with mod_rewrite, all day I've been referencing THIS page in an attempt to figure out what I'm doing wrong and what to try next. The page itself is very well written and has been extremely useful, but does it have to lead off with a quote from Brian Behlendorf?!

For those of you who don't know (hi, current population of planet Earth - 6!), Brian was my roommate my freshman year of college. One of my best (ok, "favorite") stories is the day we were moving into the dorms: Brian was unpacking his PS/1 and saw me unpacking my mountains of computer equipment. "Gosh, are you interested in computers?" quoth Brian, "I've heard about this thing called 'The Internet', where you can send messages to people and, like, do stuff."

The next day I took Brian down to the shared computing lab and helped him get an "account", then demonstrated for him my vast knowledge (both things I knew) of the (1991!) state of the art in internetting. From there the rest is history. If you've used the internet in the last 10 years, you likely have Brian to thank.

And I claim full responsibility for as much as 1/10th of 1% of that! But here's the thing: I lost track of Brian many years ago, and he has since become my own personal googlewhack. I looked for him on Friendster: nope! MySpace: nope! Facebook: nope! I know he's still out there because his name intrudes on my world at least once a freakin' month (and, in the last 24 hours, every few minutes), but I've completely struck out when trying to get in touch with him and, you know, get the credit I so richly deserve for helping him invent a good chunk of the internet.

So now it's Friday, and I've had a (extremely small, I swear!) helping of alcohol, and I beg of you friendly reader: tell Brian to phone home. Over 16 years later, the friggin' internet owes me one!

Pepsiback

My drink of choice is Diet Pepsi. In fact until I recently discovered those little mix-in packets and started occasionally drinking some scrumptious water, Diet Pepsi was pretty much all I drank. I know it's not exactly healthy; sue me.

One major problem with my prodigious rate of Pepsi consumption is that I keep running out. Occasionally I'm too busy to make it to the store for a day or two, at which point life is very much Not Good(tm). Perhaps due to the lack of caffeine, or perhaps because I'm not quite right in the head, over the last few months I've repeatedly found myself humming a little song whenever I've managed to finally swing by the store and replenish my Diet Pepsi stash.

Tonight was one of those occasions. I stopped off on my way home from the office, and was so exited that I'd have fresh, cold Pepsi tomorrow morning that I was humming my little ditty the entire way up to the house. I would like to share it with you now, both because it's so incredibly awesome and in the hope that by writing it down I might be able to get it out of my head for a few hours and get some sleep...!

Bringing Pepsi Back

Lyrics by Jonah Stich

Music by Justin Timberlake

 

I'm bringing Pepsi back!

Those other sodas don't know how to act

Caffeine makes up for all the sleep I lack

I can't pass out, I gotta get it fast.

 

[Chorus]

I'm bringing Pepsi back!

(repeats infinity - 1 times)

Green, redux

A few weeks ago, in honor of St. Patrick's day, I posted a fascinating article on the Eminence Luxury Services blog about why we have so many green exotic rental cars in our fleet. As a followup, I must now mention an unfortunate downside of being so fond of one color.

Our main printer at the office takes two ink cartridges, one black and one tri-color. This morning the printer reported that the tri-color was "empty", but upon further investigation it was clear that most of the ink remained, we'd just used up all of the green. Again.

This reminds me of an episode of The Simpsons where homer grabs a box of Neapolitan (chocolate-vanilla-strawberry) ice cream from the freezer and discovers that the vanilla and strawberry are untouched but the entire chocolate section is gone. After checking several more boxes, all in the same state, he calls out, "Marge, we need some more chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry ice cream!" Sigh.

Oh snap! Erm...click?

One of the great things about owning a company specializing in exotic and luxury car rentals is that it's easy to borrow a car when it's not being rented. Take last night, when I borrowed our Ferrari 360 Spider overnight: had a nice drive home, it was a fun little commute back to work this morning, everything's peachy.

Well almost everything. A client called last minute to rent the Ferrari, we dropped it off at their hotel about two hours ago...and I just realized that I left my garage door clicker in the car. Whoops! They seemed like a very nice couple, but it'd be a little awkward if they figured out where I live and decided to come say "hi!" tonight.

Big challenge for tomorrow: remembering to get the clicker out of the car after we pick it up. I'm giving 50-50 odds it's still in there this time next week.

Thwarting eBay

I do a lot of browsing on eBay--we've bought almost half of our exotic rental fleet there, which means there's a good chance than I've spent more money on eBay than everyone else you know put together. I'm also very fond of using my internet browser's right-click menu and selecting "back" to navigate; so simple, so fast, so easy to use!

Except when some moron decides to use JavaScript to block right-click actions and, instead, pop up an alert warning me that all of their images are copyright. First of all, my computer has a magical ability to capture whatever's displayed on the screen (in the biz we call this a "screen shot"), so if I really want to steal your image it's not that much harder for me to screenshot it than it is for me to right-click and "save picture as". Second of all...no that was pretty much it.

BTW, I think this may be another explanation for why I have such Libertarian leanings. Useless rules, putting effort into trying to enforce some asinine policy and still failing miserably...don't people have anything better to do with their time?!

Best...invention...ever!

I was supposed to have the new version of the Eminence website done by April 1st or, failing that, by the end of this weekend. (Shameless self promotion: once I do, it'll be even more obvious that Eminence is the best place to rent an exotic or luxury car, as well as the place to go for all of your Las Vegas nightlife needs!)

Sadly, being me, I'm not quite done yet--my apologies to all of the Eminence staff who've been waiting with bated breath--but in my own defense I did spend an awful lot of time working this weekend. So much time, in fact, that I ran out of my beverage of choice, Diet Pepsi, was too caught up in work to make it to the store, and had to scrounge around the pantry for some other source of hydration.

Some time within the last year--an interval which is sadly mostly a blur--several beverage manufacturers introduced single-serving "mix-ins" for bottles of water. If you've not yet experienced them, these are little packets of, well, chemicals that you dump into a standard 16.9oz bottle of water, shake briefly, and consume. They're also perhaps the best invention in recent memory.

These little packets point out the major flaw in the modern beverage industry: what they're really selling you is at most an ounce of "stuff", and a whole bunch of water. To make that work they have massive manufacturing and distribution networks set up to basically ship a very bulky item--water--around the country.

Now as it turns out I live in a very modern house, and one of the fantastic features it boasts is a miraculous technology that delivers large quantities of fresh water to several designated rooms, on demand! What I've really needed from America's beverage conglomerates was not another way to transport water but merely a simple way to make that water taste good.

With the new "mix-in" invention I now have the capability to self-generate lots of yummy beverages in the privacy of my own home. Perhaps soon everyone will have a residence like mine, complete with this newfangled "indoor plumbing" stuff, at which point I predict, and in fact hope, that the beverage aisle at every local supermarket and convenience store will shrink dramatically as the many bottles of flavored water are distilled down to their essence and replaced with little boxes of cheap, easily transportable powder.

Technology Overload

I consider myself a fairly technologically savvy person: I used to make video games, and I'm currently developing both a new website for the best exotic and luxury car rental company in Las Vegas and a new social networking site.

I also do most of the management of the various profiles, blogs, and other assorted online presence for both of my companies and for myself. That must add up to at least two dozen different accounts which I check on a near-daily basis. The upside: it's not considered goofing off, it's actually "work"!

The downside? Why oh why is there no way to keep all of these things organized. I want some "meta" network-hub, where I can keep track of all of these different accounts and manage comments, friend requests, etc. More importantly, I want a way to synchronize information between my accounts. 11thPenguin.blogger.com is my "main" blog, but my MySpace account also has blog functionality. What tool do I need to be able to synchronize the two, so that any time I post to one it's automatically propagated to the other?

Google Wizards, where are you?! It seems like you already have the technology to do everything except keep my many accounts up to date and bathe me every morning. I'd be more than happy to take care of the bathing if you could just help me out with the other part....

Introduction

Right, ok....

So for about a month now I've been doing a blog for my company, Eminence Luxury Services. I've been pretty good about updating it weekly, but--although it's still the best place to rent a Ferrari in Las Vegas--the company blog needs to be somewhat...professional.

While crafting my fascinating corporate prose I have various random thoughts and other silliness that isn't really appropriate for that forum, so I've decided to join the hoards and create a personal blog as well. Though by nature I tend to be somewhat verbose, my intention is to make the posts here shorter, and likely more "off-topic". The latter should be easy because--apart from getting to regularly drive a fleet of exotic and luxury cars--I don't really have a "theme" for this blog, and my life is no more or less interesting than any other.

In all honesty, sharing anything that crosses my mind with anyone who has a computer and an internet connection seems a little foolish, but it's apparently the "thing" to do these days, and who am I to judge.

Hmm, perhaps a better name for the blog would be "11thLemming"....

Disclaimer

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.