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Book Review: "Ghost Rider" by Neil Peart

2010-07-17T01:48:26Z

Well, I finished “Ghost Rider” by Neil Peart.

In retrospect, I’m not sure why it took me six years to finally get around to reading it. But, it did. Thom, one of my best friends, was reading “Ghost Rider” while we were traveling through Oregon and Washington many years back. He enjoyed Neil’s commentary on Oregon’s ridiculous laws that mandate that you do not pump your own gasoline. Instead, you must allow a minimum-wage worker to do it for you.

Thom and I share a common heritage of sorts. We both became hardcore fans of the band Rush when we were teenagers. Neil Peart is probably best known for being the amazing drummer for Rush. I venture to guess that a large proportion of the sales of “Ghost Rider” and Peart’s three or four other books come from loyal Rush fans that can’t find enough ways to support their favorite band.

I finally came around to ordering the book from Amazon after I attended a screening of the documentary “Rush: Beyond The Lighted Stage” when it was in limited theatrical release. There was a short segment in the documentary about Neil’s hiatus from the music business, his motorcycle journeys across North America and down into Central America, and the resulting book he wrote about it. I decided it was time to finally read the dang thing.

Why would Neil Peart walk away from the successful role as drummer of one of the world’s most successful rock bands? Well, it was a tragedy. Two tragedies, actually. First, his 19 year-old daughter, Neil’s only child, died in a freak car accident on her way back to college from home. Then, his wife was diagnosed with cancer and died ten months after the car accident.

Neil was left with no family. Neil’s wife Jackie took it especially hard when their daughter died. Neil had a rough time caring for Jackie as she grieved inconsoleably after their daughter’s accident. Then, he had to deal with her descent and surrender to cancer.

Following his wife’s death, Neil described himself as being nearly soulless, to the point of feeling like a ghost. He felt it was torture to sit around home where he had nothing but memories and things that reminded him of his wife and daughter. So, he mounted his “trusty steed,” a BMW R1100GS motorcycle, and headed to The Yukon and Alaska, beginning a journey that attempted to heal a wounded heart, soothe a grieving soul, and patch a broken man.

For those not in the know, in addition to being the band’s drummer, Neil has been the predominant lyricist for Rush since he joined the band in 1974. His influence on the band’s music is heard not only in the complex rhythms and ever-shifting time signatures, but in the reflective and obviously literate lyrics.

Peart’s book is littered with verses he wrote for various Rush songs that, more or less, fit that part of the book. I found it interesting, ironic perhaps, that for a man who seems obviously so inexperienced dealing with real human suffering, he sure had written anecdotally about it a lot over the years.

The writing is an unusual mix of straight-ahead storytelling mixed with copies of letters Neil wrote to friends and family along with transcribed excerpts from his personal journal writings. Sometimes, his letters also include journal excerpts.

Neil’s letters went to different acquaintances, some closer to him than others, but most of the letters included in the book are correspondence sent by Neil to his friend, and riding partner, Brutus. Brutus was supposed to join Neil a month or so into the ride but got himself thrown in jail after being caught with a “‘truckful’ of a controlled substance of a leafy green nature.”

While Neil doesn’t come right out and acknowledge it, it does seem that he finds some rehabilitative help in writing… and writing… and writing… to Brutus. He tells Brutus everything he’s doing, seeing, and thinking while he’s on his road trip. Neil does this both to engage his own need for an outlet, but it also seems clear he wants to make things easier for his friend while he’s in jail. I found that endearing and sweet. I’ve never had someone write to me that much, but then, I’ve never been in jail and I don’t think any of my friends write anywhere close to as much as Neil Peart apparently does.

In addition to writing about his feelings as he’s going through the motions of processing his unbearable grief, the highlights and notable sights of the country he’s riding through, the hotels, motels, and lodges he stays at, the food he eats at the various restaurants and other dining facilities along the way, and the relative merits of BMW Motorcycle dealerships and service centers he deals with, Neil also provides a running list of the books and authors he’s reading when he’s not in the saddle.

As a result, I learned a lot about authors such as Jack London, Ernest Hemingway, Truman Copote, Jack Kerouac, Cormac McCarthy, Edward Abbey, and Hunter S. Thompson.

I think anybody who has been through any kind of significant suffering can empathize, to some extent, with what Neil describes having gone through in “Ghost Rider.” I also think this book could be useful, therapeutically, for someone who is going through a difficult time dealing with some kind of loss.

I’m not in any way suggesting I “completely understand” how Neil Peart felt when he hopped on his motorcycle, hit the road, and repeatedly said he’d never return to playing the drums because he “wasn’t that guy anymore.” But, I do understand the desire to flee from your “old life,” to run away on some mind-numbing distraction involving simply the road and nature.

I remember when I was young — only 22-years-old — I had been dumped, somewhat abruptly, by a girl that I thought the universe of. I had really thought I was going to spend the rest of my life with her and had grown quite attached to her company. It didn’t help that I still had to see her around the college campus we both attended. I’m sure any of my friends at the time can attest, accompanied by sighs of recollection and plentiful amounts of eye-rolling, how grieved and confused I was; How I always wanted to ask the same questions (usually starting with the word “Why”) over and over; How it didn’t matter what the answers were, they never seemed to bring me any closer to moving on; How I neglected my schoolwork, participated in some self-destructive behavior, and spent quite a bit of time driving around on backroads through various rural and mountain areas listening to loud music.

Neil’s detailed and carefully architected expositions about the landscapes he visits are amazing. The way he describes the deserts of the southwest, complete with flora and wildlife, precipitation cycles, and history makes it nearly effortless to imagine what he was describing. The same thing goes for the forests (and the high, barren areas) of the great north Canadian Yukon areas and Alaska, not to mention the cold, icy, muddy road conditions on the Dempster Highway to the Arctic Circle.

Neil employs the same degree of detail in describing the accommodations he finds at each lodging facility he stops at along the way. The same goes for the nearby restaurants.

In a nutshell, reading “Ghost Rider” kind of made me want to go out and buy a nice, big touring bike and hit the road visiting some of the wonders Neil describes.

The caveat, however, is that along with these picturesque word-paintings luring you to various destinations, Neil also injects the would-be traveler with a diatribe of hateful anti-tourist insults. It’s like he’s saying, “These are some amazing, wonderful places to visit, but all the people visiting them are ugly, fat, and stupid.”

I think some that stems from the down mood he was in at the time.

One place he describes visiting that stood out for me was Telegraph Creek, a small settlement in the forests of the Yukon. Neil’s description really gave me a vivid picture of it in my mind’s eye.

The destination I had in mind was Telegraph Creek, because… well, because I liked the name. I first heard of it in Equinox (“The Magazine of Canadian Discovery,” now defunct, unfortunately) in which the writer had pointed out that map-makers seemed to like Telegraph Creek because it gave them a name to put on an otherwise empty region, where northern British Columbia met the Alaskan Panhandle.

The settlement had flourished briefly twice, first during the Klondike gold rush when it was the head of navigation for steamboats carrying prospectors up the Stikine River. From there, they could travel overland to the Yukon goldfields on what came to be known as “The Bughouse Trail,” its history replete with Jack London-style tales of starvation, scurvy, frostbite, and madness. The town’s second life, and the source of its name, came from an American scheme to run a telegraph cable overland through Alaska, under the Bering Strait, and across Russia to connect with Europe, but shortly after the surveying was completed, the project was rendered pointless by the laying of the transatlantic cable. Telegraph Creek once again lapsed into a virtual ghost town, and the only present-day visitors seemed to be attracted by boat, raft, and kayaking expeditions on the Stikine River. Or by the name.

Another siren-call for me was the romantic lure of an isolated, storied destination which lay “at the end of the road.” Telegraph Creek was a dot on the map at the end of a long unpaved road, far from anywhere, the kind of place Brutus and I used to dream about exploding (in fact, it was Brutus, in a recent telephone conversation, who had urged me go there). The guidebooks disagreed on whether I would have to navigate 74 miles or 74 kilometers of that road, but they agreed that it was “rough” and “often treacherous.” In fact it turned out to be 112 kilometers (near enough 74 miles) of dirt and gravel winding through deep forest and steep switchbacks up and down the walls of “The Grand Canyon of the Stikine.” In some places, the sheer cliffs of eroded, multi-layered rock did resemble a modest version of that famed stretch of the Colorado River, and sometime the road was a mere ledge perched on those vertical walls, dropping off into a frightening abyss.

My journal described it as a “scary, scary road,” and I was fairly rattled when I pulled up in front of the Stikine Riverson café, general store, lodge, and boat-tour headquarters. All this was housed in one large white frame building facing the swift-moving river, and I learned later that it had been the original Hudson Bay Company trading post, situated just downriver, and had been moved piece by piece to Telegraph Creek. A few other abandoned-looking houses and a small church clustered on the river bank, but only the Riverson showed any signs of life.

The guidebooks said that a few rooms were available there, but if they happened to be filled it would be a long way back to any other lodgings. The cold, gloomy weather made the idea of camping uninviting, but once again I was glad to be carrying my little tent and sleeping bag, especially when the owner told me he was closing up for the weekend and taking the staff upriver in his tour boat to celebrate the end of their season. Then, after a moment’s thought, he said that I was welcome to rent one of the rooms and stay there on my own. That was thoughtful, hospitable, and trusting of him, and I only asked what I might do for food. He told me there was a kitchen upstairs where I could prepare my own meals, so I bought a few provisions in the general store in the back of the building, including some fresh salmon from the river, and carried my bags to a small bedroom upstairs.

I watched through the café window as the owner and his three employees loaded their camping gear into the motor boat and my only regret was missing the opportunity for a tour of the river myself. I stood on the riverbank and watched the boat speed away upriver against the strong current, and felt a little excited, and a little fearful.

…

I slept soundly with my window open to the cool, fresh air and the murmuring of the river, and took a walk before breakfast on another chilly, overcast morning. Past ruined cabins and abandoned, moss-covered cars and pickups from the 1950s, a narrow path led up a high lava-rock cliff above a steep scree to an old graveyard overlooking the town. As I walked among the stones reading the inscriptions, the bare facts of names and dates had a whole new resonance for me, for I felt them as part of a story like mine, a story of love and loss. I thought about “Honey Joe,” who had died at the age of 105 and was buried beside “Mrs. Joe,” who he had outlived by about 40 years. Then there were all the babies, children, teenagers, and young men and women, and I found myself weeping for all the lost ones, theirs and mine. Ghost town indeed.

After I started reading “Ghost Rider,” I told a friend that I had picked up the book. He said he remembered hearing or reading a little about it and that it struck him as being quite vain or that other reviews had painted Neil as being vain.

I don’t think he’s vain, I think he’s just… odd. Neil Peart is better-read and better-schooled than probably 99% of people in the civilized world. He’s likely afflicted with Aspergers Syndrome because it’s clear he has serious social phobias and obsessive-compulsive tendencies. In his writing, he tends to be blunt, even if his prose is beautiful and intricate. He doesn’t stop until he’s faithfully described what he’s thinking, what he’s seen or what he’s experienced. I can see how some people would find his writing style as vain, but I don’t, really.

One personal observation I made to myself as I read this book was that Neil would have probably dealt much better with his tragic circumstances if he had not depleted himself of religion. Several times in the book he describes himself as a rational-scientific-skeptic. It made me think of a common religious perspective that an atheist is not someone who believes in nothing, but rather someone who can be persuaded to believe anything. There was a moment in the book where Neil takes a chance on a fortune teller who uses Tarot cards or similar to tell Neil exactly what’s going in his life, leaving him stunned. It’s no surprise that Neil has acquired a deck of the cards for himself before long.

But, yeah, it’s sad to read Neil’s constant bellyaching about how confused he is and how unfair his life has been to him and his family. Several times during the book I reflected on how fortunate I felt I was to have a belief system that give me a structure to sustain me if I were to go through such trying times.

Another surprising observation I had as I read the book was just how much of a liberal environmentalist Neil is. For someone who dedicated a record to Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead,” I guess I just thought he’d still have more of an Objectivist outlook toward nature, capitalism, and industry. I guess any of that he once had has been stolen away by his success and now he’s, for a lack of a better description, a snobby left-winger who thinks we need to save the planet from ourselves.

Overall, I liked the book. I have some degree of interest in reading another Neil Peart book, but now I have so many other books on my reading lists thanks to what Neal said in this one.

Book Review: "The Overton Window" by Glenn Beck

2010-07-01T03:43:49Z

If you know me, you know I’m a pretty big fan of Glenn Beck. I’ve been listening to his radio show for about five years now and have followed his forays into television, live stage performances, and books. It may be no surprise, then, that I liked “The Overton Window,” Glenn’s latest book, a fiction thriller.

Now that I’ve said that, let me qualify it.

“The Overton Window” is a simple story, really. It has its plots and twists like a good thriller should, but its overall story arc is pretty straightforward. The protagonist is an unlikely good-guy, just an average Joe named Noah Gardner. He’s a young, single public relations guy at a big firm in New York City.

The bad guy? Barack Obama.

I’m kidding, but that answer is not that far from the truth. The antagonists in this story is a group of rich, powerful socialists, one of which happens to be Noah’s father. Having declared the old ways of the constitution and freedom-loving America to be a failed experiment, they’re ready to transform the country into what it should be: controlled by a knows-better big-government.

Noah meets Molly Ross, a smart, beautiful seemingly easy-going girl who is has an odd quirk: she’s heavily involved in a movement to get America back to its founding roots.

Intent on getting to know Molly better, Noah attends a meeting at a club in New York, his first Tea Party as it were. While the speakers tell story after story about how the government and those in power are intent on destroying the Constitution and eliminating people’s individual liberties, Noah’s cycnicism and realism boils over. When he utters something loud enough for those around him to overhear, he is asked to explain himself with a microphone so that everyone can hear.

“The United States was built to run on individual freedom, that’s true, but because you’ve let these control freaks have their way with it for about a hundred years, your country now runs on debt. Today Goldman Sachs is the engine, and in case you haven’t realized it yet, the American people are nothing but the fuel.”

Noah goes on to explain all the conspiracy theories bantied about like the Bildeberg Group, the Trilateral Commission, etc. are all true and they’re wealthy beyond believe and they’re globalists.

Noah knows all this because these powerful organizations have long been using PR firms like his father’s to push their transformative ideas on the people of the world.

“There’s no respect for you in Washington. They laugh at you. You say you want a revolution? That Constitution the lady was holding up a while ago? It gives you the power to revolt at every single election. Do you realize in a couple of weeks every last seat in the U.S. House of Representatives will be up for grabs? And the presidency? And one-third of the Senate seats?

“The approval rating for Congress is somewhere around fifteen percent. You could turn the tables and put them all out of a job on that one day. But do you know what’s going to happen instead? I do. The presidency is going to change hands, but the corruption will accelerate. Over ninety percent of those people in Congress— people who are deeper into the pockets of the lobbyists every day they spend in Washington— over ninety percent of them are going to get reelected.”

The story puts Noah on a collision course with destiny. What he learns both from his new friends in the freedom movement and via his ties to the powerful forces through the PR business helps him shed his cynicism and start to believe in the cause.

Now, this book is a very easy read. It’s 321 pages but it goes by fast. My only real complaint about the writing is that much of dialogue between characters doesn’t read like believable dialogue. It reads like it’s written, not spoken. You could easily say the same thing about any fiction written by Ayn Rand, but Beck’s dialogue is a lot easier to comprehend.

The Afterword, the last chapter in the book, contains a surprising amount of information about items in the story that are actually based in truth.

Pittsburgh, Day Five

2010-05-14T20:57:23Z

Day Five was a short day because I had to leave to catch my flight back home around 3 in the afternoon.

Last night, I watched a couple more training videos in my hotel room. This morning, I watched one more and was all caught up on what I was supposed to watch this week. I talked to one of the business ananlysts with some questions I had come up with from watching the videos. I got all my questions answered.

I spent some time with my team leader going over some more development practices. I’m glad he’s patient with me. :)

Last night, I looked up a few coworkers on Facebook and added them as friends. One of them, a functional architect, accepted my friend invite almost immediately. She admitted to me today that she looks up every new hire on Facebook. It was a little shocking to discover I had been “stalked” before I had “stalked.”

Today, I went to lunch with two of the functional architects, one being my new Facebook friend, to a little “hole in the wall Indian place.” The food was super-tasty.

Now I’m on my way home. It’s been a great week.

Now, our development manager talked to me about my blog posts. He’d heard from the functional architect I went to lunch today that I had written about my previous lunches on my blog and that gave her a good idea of where we were going to go to lunch today.

He expressed concern that I had information about the company in my posts. He acknowledged that I hadn’t published any secrets but that I had discussed names and what could be construed as business practices.

I was devastated. For all my efforts to be a good new employee, I had “caused concern” with what I was doing outside of business hours. My lack, perhaps, of tact, respect for the company, consideration of possible consequences of revealing what I did reveal, was causing friction with at least one person of decision-making capital at the company.

Crap!

I went back and edited each of my blog posts for the week, removing any names, any names of any software, hardware, or services that I may have mentioned by name. The only thing I thing I left was my Apple MacBook Pro. I hope that’s not a problem.

In retrospect, I made a serious miscalculation, which isn’t surprising considering I seem to have a history of miscalculating things of a social nature. Chalk it up, maybe, to my maybe being afflicted with Asperger’s Syndrome.

Now that I’ve thought about it, I can see that if I had been an employee with the company for some time, to the point everyone, especially those in decision-making positions, knew who I was, what kind of person I was… Basically, if they knew me well enough to trust me, it probably wouldn’t have been a problem, or as much of a problem. But with me being the new kid on the block, coming in and blogging names and crap, even if I was being careful not to divulge anything that might be a company secret, I understand now why they’d be nervous.

These corporate social dynamics are a real challenge for me. It’s almost like I never know when I’m being appropriate and when I’m not. I guess I should be more careful and just ask more questions about everything.

Pittsburgh, Day Four

2010-05-13T23:13:55Z

Day Four. I will be going home tomorrow and will be home for approximately 28-30 hours before hopping on a plane again and heading back to Pittsburgh for the second week of training.

Today was my first development team meeting. As many of our developers work remotely, the meeting was held via a conference call and an online screen-sharing solution . I liked that it was short (about an hour) and to the point.

I closed three issues today. Now, I wouldn’t be so proud of that except that these were all supposed to be very simple issues, like “change the spelling” types of issues. One of them, however, ended up being more complex than anyone thought. I found the problem extended into the database schema data. As a result, what my team leader thought was going to involve minor editing of one, two, maybe a handful of files, ended up being something like 14 files and a new schema change. To fix this issue, I had to go through the process of testing schema changes and writing detailed instructions for testing.

It felt good to get that one done.

The other two were pretty simple. One was just changing the text of a link inside the application. The other was formatting a date from a string that looked like this “YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS” into this “MM/DD/YYYY HH:MM:SS”. Pretty simple stuff, but it still gives me good experience working with the source code management tools, issue management system, and the applications themselves.

Because of all the actual work I’ve been doing, I’m behind a day or so on watching training videos. I’m going to try to catch up on those tonight.

I went out looking for a bookstore last night. Google Maps erroneously told me there was a Barnes and Noble near 6th Street and Wood Avenue. Of course, I didn’t figure that out until I walked over there. A security guard in the building at the address just laughed at me and told me the nearest one was clear out of town.

Bummer.

I went to lunch with two of the system administrators for the company. We had a lot to talk about because of my background doing systems administration.

Pittsburgh, Day Three

2010-05-13T00:41:01Z

Day Three was more of the same. More hacking on fairly simple and straightforward problems. More watching training videos. More training on coding practices and standards. More training on time tracking. Another lunch with a couple other people — a business analyst and one of the developers who I interviewed with a couple weeks ago. They took me to Euro Cafe which was decent food and the dining room was refreshingly quiet compared to most places during the lunch hour.

Tomorrow morning, I’m providing a urine specimen to fulfill the mandatory drug test requirement. They were going to work with the drug testing offices in Utah to get this done before I came out, but the offices in Utah apparently don’t use any of the barcodes or identification numbers that the offices in Pennsylvania do.

I’ve been warned that the drug testing facility is very strict and, to prevent fraud, they have removed sinks from the rooms and a nurse must be present while you… provide you specimen. That has a lot of potential to be embarrassing, don’t you think? Perhaps I’ll ask the nurse if he or she would mind if I took a picture of them while I was providing my specimen? Hah hah.

Google Maps told me there was a Barnes and Noble near my hotel, so I walked to the address given and found no bookstore. Stupid Google Maps.

Lots of stuff downtown closes in the late afternoon. It’s odd, but I guess the bulk of their business is the white-collar crowd that evacuate the city at 5pm.

Pittsburgh, Day Two

2010-05-12T02:12:05Z

I was tired on Day Two because I only got about six hours of sleep between getting home from the Porcupine Tree show and getting up for work. It rained most of the day in Pittsburgh. I didn’t have an umbrella, so I wore my new Porcupine Tree hoodie as I walked to the office. It worked nicely.

At the office, I finished watching a training video I started watching the day before. I also met with another telecommuter via an online screen sharing solution and a phone call to get some training on the internal issue tracking system.

I set up MacFUSE and sshfs on my Mac laptop so that I could remotely access, via SSH, files from the main development server from my laptop. This way, I could use a graphical text editor like MacVim (gvim for OS X) to do my code edits. My officemate — the manager of all software development — suggested I blog about it on the internal developer blog. I did and that stirred up some conversation in the developer chat room.

I went to lunch with one of my co-developers and a business analyst today at a place called Storms. It was alright. The developer asked me what life was like in “semi-rural Utah,” using the words I had included in my introduction e-mail message sent to everyone yesterday. I told him about Herriman- how the population has just exploded over the last decade or so, and how there’s very little sales tax revenue because it’s mostly homes, but that’s changing, and how there are still a few farms and planted fields.

This afternoon, I attended a training meeting with several others and found it to be very educational. Also this afternoon, I committed my first changeset and submitted it to my team leader for code review.

Porcupine Tree @ Mr. Smalls Theater

2010-05-11T23:40:34Z

It’s been three and a half years since I was privileged to see Porcupine Tree play at The Fillmore in San Francisco (See my blog post about it. They’ve never played anywhere in Utah and may never play anywhere in Utah, so my only option is to travel to see them. I was very lucky to be in Pittsburgh on business at the same time PT was playing a show!

First, the venue. Mr. Smalls Theater is much smaller than the Fillmore, and quite a different place. The building itself is a renovated 18th century catholic church. The inside has a cathedral-like shape with a tall, 40-foot arched ceiling. A small stage elevated three feet off the rest of the floor is at one end. A couple bars for food and drink line the exterior walls in the rear of the room. The stated capacity of the room is 650 people and I’m pretty sure it was close to full. Standing room only.

Porcupine Tree was preceded by Bigelf, a band I’d never heard of. I was impressed with lead-man Damon Fox’s showmanship and his ability to multitask between four or five ancient keyboarding instruments and singing, but I didn’t find the music itself very interesting.

Bigelf looked like they either walked in through a time portal from a midwest heavy metal show circa 1971 or from the set of a Geico “caveman” TV commercial. The long, unkempt hair and the beards were… too much.

The music itself was not terribly complex. It was, if nothing else and especially compared to Porcupine Tree, analog. That’s one word that can, in my opinion, summarize Bigelf. The guitarist and the bassist both played through a tube stack. According to the Bigelf website, Fox’s rig consists of some of the following: Hammond C3 & Leslie 122, Mellotron MKII & M400, EMS Synthi AKS, Chamberlin M-1D, Moog 3C & 2P Modulars, Minimoog, Memorymoog, Korg MS-20 & MS-50, Arp 2600, Freeman String Machine, Baldwin Electric Harpsichord, and Hohner Pianet. Basically, old, analog stuff… amplified and sometimes distorted.

It was so loud that many in the audience were plugging their ears when Bigelf started playing. Fox said, “Oh, is it too loud? (Expletive) you! It’s a rock show!” and started another song.

The following photo, not from this show, is a good representation of what Fox was doing for most of their performance (and is a good look at his rig.)

And then, Porcupine Tree. They started the show by playing the entire album The Incident, taking a 10 minute break, and then coming back to play older pieces.

I’ve listened to The Incident a lot, but I still enjoy just about every album before it more. After this concert, however, I have a lot more appreciation for The Incident. One thing that won me over was the harmonies sung by John Wesley and Steven Wilson. They were perfect and beautiful.

I just ran a half-marathon a couple of weeks ago and I listened to songs by Porcupine Tree the whole 13.1 miles. I wondered how many of those songs I would hear live. They played “The Sound Of Muzak,” “Blackest Eyes,” and “Trains” in the second set, all of which I had in my running playlist. Unfortunately, they didn’t play anything from the Deadwing album. That was a bit of a dissapointment to me.

The second set went like this:

Hatesong
Russia On Ice - Anesthetize
Stars Die
Way Out Of Here
Blackest Eyes

Then, the encore:

The Sound of Muzak
Trains

The band started playing Hatesong without John Wesley on stage. He walked out in the middle to sing harmonies with Steven and then walked offstage again. When a part for a second guitar was needed, a pre-recorded track was used.

I was a little bummed that they didn’t finish playing Russia On Ice. Instead, after the second chorus, they went into Anesthetize after the guitar solo performed on the album by Alex Lifeson. Steven Wilson noodled on the keyboard at the front of the stage for a bit before going back to playing guitar and then singing “The dust in my soul…”

Stars Die was an interesting move. There were definitely some hardcore fans there as they erupted with cheers as soon as John Wesley played the opening bit for it.

When the video for Way Out Of Here started, I became very emotional, probably because I’ve been repeatedly watching the video on YouTube of the song that’s appearing on the Anesthetize DVD coming out in the next month and because I learned of the band dedicating the song to Arielle Daniel, a young fan who was killed by a train in 2005 (read about it here). It was an awesome performance of an awesome song. John Wesley and Gavin Harrison (drums) are simply fantastic during the song.

At one point during the show, Steven Wilson surprisingly remarked that he could see lots of “chicks” in the audience. It’s true, there were a lot more women in the audience than you’d expect at a Porcupine Tree show. That being said, the audience was 90% guys in their 20s to 50s. A lot of us seemed out of the mainstream, socially, which also wasn’t surprising.

All in all, great show, as always. I picked up almost $100 in merchandise while I was there too.

Pittsburgh, Day One

2010-05-11T22:40:03Z

My first day at Grant Street Group was a nice mix of gentle easing me into the water and tossing me into the deep end.

I got the expected set of papers to fill out as a new contractor and a guided tour around the office to be introduced to everyone who works there (the ratio of onsite to remote employees is swinging, but there are still a majority of onsite workers.)

I also got my new MacBook Pro and had some time to play with it, learn some ropes.

I watched most of a training video (had trouble playing it on my Mac because it was in some obscure WMV format, but finally got it to play in my Windows XP VMWare guest), got a username and password set up on most all of the systems I’ll be working with, and met (virtually) with my team leader on working with the codebase.

Before day one was over, I had a handful of issues assigned to me to address.

At lunchtime the manager over all development and another telecommuter that was in town took me to Mexico City for dinner. I was excited to have some mexican food as it is one of my favorite food genres. I was a little unsure of what to expect because my experience eating mexican in New York City a few years ago was so bad (“I ordered an enchilada.” “That is your enchilada right there.” “No, this is a quesadilla!”)

Mexico City wasn’t bad, but it definitely represents a far-from-the-border interpretation.

After work, I grabbed some dinner at Subway and took a cab to Millvale, a few miles outside of downtown Pittsburgh for the Porcupine Tree concert I had a ticket to. More on that in another posting.

From Pittsburgh, day zero

2010-05-09T19:40:54Z

I have arrived in Pittsburgh for my first of two weeks of training for my new job at Grant Street Group.

When I flew out here a couple of weeks ago for my interviews with the company, I flew on US Airways on a connecting flight through Phoenix. What was nice about that was that I got to lunch with my good friend Dave during my two-hour layover. What was not nice about that was that it was US Airways. The onboard service was just lacking all around.

I asked if I could fly on a direct flight or a different airline for this trip. Grant Street was very accomodating. In the end, I gave them the flight numbers of the Delta Airlines flights I wanted to take (I researched and found inexpensive flights that resulted in a minimum amount of travel time).

There were no direct flights available, that I could find, but one of the shorter flights went through Detroit. I wasn’t exactly thrilled about laying over in Detroit, but now that I’ve been there, I must say the Detroit Metro Airport is actually pretty nice. I expected portions of the airport to be on fire and people gathered for warmth around 55-gallon drums with burning debris in them, but it wasn’t like that at all.

I didn’t leave the airport, so I have no idea how the environment outside the airport is, but the environment inside the airport was pretty nice.

I grabbed some lunch at one of the restaurants in the airport and was a little taken back by how ambivalent and disinterested the young lady was that took my order. I mean, I’m used to that to an extent from service people at airports, but this ambivalence was cranked up (or down, as the case may be) a couple notches.

A short flight (35 minutes) from Detroit and I’m in Pittsburgh. It’s a little windy, but there’s a baseball game going on across the river from my hotel.

More to come as my stay here unfolds.

Running the Thanksgiving Point half-marathon

2010-04-24T18:25:06Z

Thanksgiving Point in Lehi held their first annual Thanksgiving Point Half Marathon today and I participated as a runner. This was my first long-distance race ever and I’m pleased to say that I finished and not only did I finish, I ran pretty much the entire course. I crossed the finish line at 2:27:40. Not bad for a first half-marathon!

Thanksgiving Point is using the marathon to raise money for a new children’s museum: The Museum Of Natural Curiousity. They plan to raise $500,000 over the next five years and started by raising over $30,000 with this first marathon.

I have very little knowledge of running dos and don’ts, but I tried to incorporate what I’ve picked up into my preparation for this race. I dialed down my training regimen over the last week, only running twice and for much shorter durations. I ate well the day before the race and had a bowl of cold cereal before heading to the race this morning.

About twenty minutes before the race started, I walked around for about five minutes to warm up my legs. Then I went inside, found a place to sit down, and tightened and stretched my shins so that I wouldn’t get shin splints during the first part of my run. Then I did some wall push-ups to make sure the backs of my calves were loosened up.

It was about 35 degrees (Fahrenheit) when the race started at 7 a.m. I had a long-sleeved shirt on under my technical race shirt. I pulled the sleeves down over my hands during the first part of the race because my hands were cold, but it wasn’t long before the sun was out and my hands weren’t cold anymore.

The course for the race started at the Thanksgiving Point water tower and followed trails around the Thanksgiving Point golf course, their tulip gardens, and then along a trail next to the Jordan River up to a park called Willow Park in Lehi. Then the race followed some surface roads back to Thanksgiving Point’s “Electric Park” where the finish line was.

The organizers had a nice number of volunteers along the course route to provide drinks, other aid, and direct traffic. There were 7 aid stations which featured water and sports drinks. Some also featured energy gels, energy bars, and fruit.

I spent Thursday and Friday flying to and from Pittsburgh, PA for a job interview. On Friday, I walked about 20 minutes in downtown Pitttsburgh in my dress shoes, and then in the Pittsburgh, Phoenix, and Salt Lake airports on my way home. When I got home Friday night, I had a nice blister on the ball of my left foot. I was worried about how that was going to affect my race. I didn’t know if I should “pop” it or what. I soaked it in some warm water before I went to bed and it felt a little better in the morning, but it was still there. I ran the race on it and while it was a little uncomfortable, it didn’t cause any serious problems. I had some aching in my left knee and groin muscles, maybe because I was favoring the foot that didn’t have a blister.

At the finish line, there was plenty more food to eat and even some massage therapists available for post-race massages.

After the race, awards were given out (I didn’t get one) and then they had some raffle prizes which included running socks, energy bars, Timex Ironman running watches, and two Garmin 405 GPS training watches. The Garmins were the last items to be given out and the last number they read off was mine!

So, it was an awesome experience. I got to say I completed my first half-marathon and got a Garmin 405 as well.

I don’t know when I’ll be doing another one of these races. Right now I’m just happy it’s done, but maybe in a couple weeks I’ll start thinking about doing it again.

Thanks to my family (including my parents and in-laws) that came out to support me as I crossed the finish line. I’ll have to get some pictures posted as well.

Playing tricks in the past

2010-02-20T08:54:38Z

I told this story in the network security class I’ve been teaching this semester. They enjoyed it and figured I might as well type it up for the blog… you know, so everyone else can consume, ingest, etc. the story.

It was in 1994, about sixteen years ago, my wife and I started dating. We had met online, long before eharmony.com or other online dating services appeared on the Internet. It wasn’t via an online dating service, we had both been invited into a kind of virtual party line application on the VMS computer system at Utah State University. A program called PHONE separated the screen into regions, one for each person on the “call.” Each participating user could see what they and everyone else was typing in real time. What happened with Christine and I was that we were both involved in a call with about six people or so and then everyone left except us. The rest is, as they say, history.

But that’s not what this story is about.

Anyway, as Christine and I started hanging out, she explained that one of her best friends had accepted a scholarship to study math at a small private college in the northwest. This school had a student body of around 2,000 students. Where USU had a cluster of DEC Alpha systems running OpenVMS to serve as a central computing system for around 20,000 students, faculty, and staff, this small college had a Sun Solaris Unix system that students logged into to send and receive e-mail and perform other central computing tasks.

At the time, my future wife and her friend had figured out a way to communicate electronically with each other in a manner more interactive than electronic mail. Christine knew her friend’s password on the Solaris system. Christine would telnet into her friend’s account at a prescribed time and they would chat using a program called ‘talk,’ similar to PHONE on the VMS system.

I knew Unix pretty well then. I taught Unix system administration courses for a private training company in Salt Lake City in 1992, had worked as a systems administrator for a couple of companies, and spent a lot of time working in Unix labs on campus. When I found out Christine knew her friend’s password and had gotten to know her friend a little bit, I started forming an idea for an incredibly funny, albeit cruel, geeky prank to pull.

To understand the impact of this practical joke, you have to understand how these computer systems were used back then. The World Wide Web was only barely in use then. The venerable Netscape Navigator Web browser wasn’t to be released for several months. E-mail users at USU and at Christine’s friend’s school used text-based e-mail applications. To access and run these applications, users would use a telnet application to connect to the system and then type in the name of the e-mail application (pine, elm, VMS Mail, etc. Even Mutt — now a favorite among text-based mail applications — wouldn’t be released until the next year.

Christine’s friend, like many at Utah State as well, would go into an on-campus computer lab, boot up a computer, probably running Microsoft Windows 3.1 or Mac OS, and then run a telnet client (most at USU used MS-DOS Kermit because its principal author worked as a professor at USU) to connect to the system where the e-mail application ran.

Telnet has long since been replaced with SSH as the preferred way to log into a remote computer system. Telnet sends all data over the network unencrypted including all login credentials like username and password. Anyone who could intercept (or listen to) traffic between one computer and another could get everything, usernames, passwords, entire e-mail messages, conversations, you name it.

When you telnetted to a remote system, you would generally be prompted for your username and then your password. If you entered the right information, you’d usually then see a command prompt. That’s where you’d type in ‘pine’ or whatever program you wanted to run.

Sometimes, there would be system scripts that ran before you saw the command prompt. The most common would be one that required you to change your password at certain intervals.

Now, back to the joke. I worked for a couple of hours on a shell script that we could upload to Christine’s friend’s account that would get run automatically the next time she logged in. The script would display something like this:

Your password has expired. Please choose a new one.
New Password:

Now, this is where things started to get a little tricky. A real password changing application would not echo the characters typed back when the user typed in a password. My script had to turn off the behavior that normally echoed characters back. This wasn’t that hard. I just had to use the ‘stty’ command in the script to turn the echo mode on and off.

The script notified Christine’s friend that her password had expired and asked that she choose a new one. If I wanted to be really, really evil, I could have captured her password as she typed it and filed it away somewhere, but this was just about fun. After she typed in the password, like any good password changing program, the script asked her to type the password again.

Then, the script said her password wasn’t long enough and prompted her to enter a longer password.

Then, it said her password didn’t contain the necessary assortment of characters, numbers, and special characters.

Then, it called Christine’s friend by name and said, “Oh come on, you can do better than THAT!” and gave her another chance.

I don’t remember how many iterations it went through, but it was at least 4 or so. Then, when it was all done, it removed the directive that made it run when she logged in and deleted itself.

A few hours later, we caught up with Christine’s friend and confessed. She was still frustrated, but began to see the humor in the prank we had pulled on her. She explained that others in the computer lab were puzzled as to why she was yelling so much profanity at her computer screen.

Good times. Good times.

Home-buying travails and endurance

2009-11-13T05:13:36Z

Anyone who’s been through some sort of big deal in their life is familiar with the annoyance that comes from dozens of family, friends, and other people asking for the latest on whatever it is you’re going through. I’m sure anyone who’s been divorced, had a loved one in the hospital, going through divorce, had a family member or close friend be involved in a big court battle, etc. knows what I’m talking about.

Our family has been going through a frustrating situation, but I haven’t really talked about it much, but those who do know about it have been calling me, e-mailing me, etc. to get frequent updates on the status, so I’m blogging about it so I can just say, “Go look at the blog.”

For the last year or so, Christine and I have been thinking about buying a larger house. We bought our most recent house in 2003 when the housing market was experiencing a low period. The house was a HUD repossession and had been trashed — or never taken care of — by the previous owner. We recarpeted, repainted, and repaired damage throughout. Over the years we finished a couple of bedrooms and an office in the basement and put in a yard with a watering system.

That house has served us well, but Christine and I had been looking at some of the houses in the newer developments near our house and wondering if we should upgrade. In fact, we made an offer on a home last year which was accepted. After the offer was accepted, we got cold feet and withdrew the offer because we realized we just were not prepared to commit to short sale moving into a newer, larger house yet. We hadn’t done anything to sell our house so we’d have to pay two house payments until our prior home was sold and who knew how long that would take.

After backing out of that, we finished our family room in the basement and made other minor improvements to the house. We still weren’t complete sure we wanted to sell the house because the family room was a nice addition and gave us a lot more breathing room.

Come Summer, we started seeing a larger home as a wise investment decision. Many of the larger homes near us were being listed at steep discounts by owners that simply could not afford them anymore. We began looking around at what was available and walked through many homes. Christine saw a nice house that caught her eye listed, but when we talked to our agent about it, it had been pulled off the market. Our agent said it hadn’t been sold so it might be relisted. Christine kept an eye out.

Finally, a couple of weeks later, Christine found the house again. It had been relisted a couple of days before. We talked to our agent, got a showing, and decided to make an offer on the house. Our offer was accepted. That was in August.

During the time we were looking at homes and making the offer on the nice house, we put our house up for sale. We had an offer in about three weeks and a closing scheduled for late September.

The closing for the house we were buying was scheduled for mid-October. Christine and I had a vacation scheduled at that time and had it moved to the 22nd of October. As the date approached, the messages we were getting from the selling agent was that they weren’t ready to close.

A little background: As we dealt with the selling agent, the house really started sounding like a short sale because there was talk about them having to get banks to sign off on the sale. But, they never represented the sale as being a short sale. If it was, there would have been additional paperwork, specifically a short sale addendum, involved in the contract.

Well, as 22 October approached, the selling agent indicated they would not be able to close. He blamed it on the bank (or banks). We had arranged to rent our older home from the new owners for the month of October so that we would have a place to live until we closed on the new house. If we didn’t close on the newer home, we’d have to make new living arrangements because we had to be out of our previous home by the end of October.

Nothing happened on 22 October. We gave them a few more days to surprise us with a closing and then proceeded to move everything into storage units. One of Christine’s coworkers said his in-laws would let us live in their basement while we waited for things to come together. We were hoping it wouldn’t come to that, but in the end it did.

We’ve been living in a basement, out of suitcases, since 31 October. We extended the closing until 13 November, but as of today, the selling agent has said they will not be able to close then.

The good news, if there is any, is that the selling agent said today they have written approval on at least one of the banks involved in the selling (apparently there’s stuff between a first and second mortgage that has to be resolved).

So, we’re extending one more time, to 25 November. The selling agent expressed confidence to our agent we’ll be able to close before Thanksgiving.

Our theory is this: The sellers we’re dealing with is a third party to a short sale. They’re working directly with the bank to buy the house in a short sale at a price lower than what we’re offering. As a result, when the sale is completed, they’ll make a few thousand (or a few tens of thousands) in profit. So, technically, we’re not involved in a short sale, but the people we’re buying the house from are.

Should this be legal? Maybe, but I think they should be required to provide full disclosure. It’s a little unethical to paint the sale as not being a short sale when in fact it is. Short sales are historically difficult because the banks involved generally take a long time to move.

We’re very grateful to the Hancocks (the older couple whose basement we’re living in) for their benevolence and hospitality. We’d be in a much worse mess if we didn’t have their basement to call a temporary home.

We’ve been looking at other houses on the market, but nothing really compares to the house we’re set to buy.

We’ve considering renting an apartment in the interim so that we’re not taking too much advantage of the generosity of our hosts upstairs. If this looks like it will go beyond November, we may do exactly that.

In the meantime, we’re crossing our fingers (once again) for a closing sometime before 25 November.

Book review: Superfreakonomics

2009-11-09T19:35:30Z

Superfreakonomics is the new sequel to the best-selling book Freakonomics by Steven D. Leavitt and Stephen J. Dubner.

This book roughly follows the same formula its predescessor established, although the original book seems rough and a bit disorganized compared to Superfreakonomics, which flows smooth and is even easier to read.

The pattern, of course, is to start each chapter with a shocking or strange statement that, at first glance, appears to make no sense. The rest of the chapter leads up to a point where that statement makes perfect sense once you’ve been exposed to the underlying statistical data the authors enthusiastically present. Each chapter contains an assortment of short stories about related events or historical analysis for perspective on each of the studies discussed.

The most memorable parts of the original Freakonomics, for me, were the chapters on Chicago drug dealers and the chapter that suggested that the falling urban crime rates in urban areas like New York City, Philadelphia, and Chicago during the 1990s was due less to bureaucrat policies and more to do with the fact that the landmark Roe v. Wade case had occurred roughly 20 years earlier, thereby allowing legalized abortion. This allegedly decreased the number of children born into poor, single-parent homes that would have basically been bred into a life of crime. The conclusion was that crime rates fell in these urban areas because the would-be criminals were never born.

If you read the first book, you’ll remember the stories and conclusions about inner city gangs and drug dealers. The researchers had to employ some unorthodox methods of data collection because of the closed nature of gang society. THat is, members of inner citty gangs are not going to welcome some college professor into their inner circle with open arms. Even if they did speak to a stereotypical economics researcher, it’s unlikely they would provide entirely truthful or reliable data to the researchers. As a result, these studies required much more effort on the part of the researchers to blend in and become a trusted individual. It was, essentially, an undercover operation that revealed some surprising facts about how gangs and drug dealing worked (and didn’t work).

So, what about this new book? This time they’ve brought us economic analyses of current and past practices of prostitution. How is “the worlds’ oldest profession” enduring? Well, it depends. It apparently depends on who the prostitute’s target customer base is. Prostitutes who “work the street” pretty much all make the same hourly rates and have to deal with some pretty serious side effects of their work including violence, disease, and the (relatively low) possibility of being caught and arrested by the police.

Prostitutes that work as high-class escorts, are well educated, and can carry on conversations with wealthy customers can earn hundreds of dollars per hour. In fact, it seems the more they can charge, the longer their engagements are. Their patrons are less interested in engaging in a single act and more interested in living out a fantasy of living with an “ideal” mate.

What else is in this new book? An interesting study on infant and child carseats. My state just made it a law that children under the age of eight must use car seats or booster seats in a car. The studies done by the authors of this book suggest car seats and booster seats may offer no real added protection to children over the age of two compared to plain old seat belts.

In this new book, the authors take on global warming. I found this interesting because I’m what you might call a “skeptic” or a “denier.” I don’t believe man has much at all to do with what some call “global warming” (or, more recently, “climate change,” because there hasn’t been any warming for a while.)

I was a bit disappointed that Dubner and Leavitt didn’t take on the plethora of data that suggest historic warming has actually been caused more by solar cycles rather than emissions of greenhouse gases. While acknowledging there is no real concensus (sorry Al Gore), they went with the assumption that global warming/climate change is a real problem we must solve and concentrated their investigation on the proposed strategies to solve it.

Most governments want to “solve” our climate woes by capping emissions, taxing production, and thereby stiffling economic growth across the board. This will, of course, impact humanity globally, probably much more than any changes in the climate will. The costs for these measures are estimated in the trillions of dollars, most of which will come from developed nations. Dubner and Leavitt suggest that in many, if not most, cases, the best solutions to problems are often the simple and least expensive solutions.

They outline some solutions proposed by a small group in the northwestern US called Intellectual Ventures. One of their global warming proposals, for example, involves putting supposedly harmfull emissions into a higher layer of the atmosphere. Doing this would be uber-cheap and would effectively stop warming (assuming there is warming). They know it will work because volcanoes do it when they erupt and it cools the planet for a short period of time by blocking the amount of solar radiation that reaches the surface.

I applaud the authors for taking on so many issues and showing that the way we typically approach problems is often the wrong way.

Freakonomics is available now in hardcover for a suggested price of $29.99. I give it 4 out of 5 stars.

Book Review: Your Body

2009-09-02T02:25:13Z

Your Body: The Missing Manual by Matthew MacDonald

My rating: 4 of 5 stars I was hanging out on Facebook one day and O'Reilly Media sent out a status message saying they needed a few people to review a new book Your Body The Missing Manual (go here for O'Reilly's catalog page for the book). I responded and was contacted by an O'Reilly representative who got my shipping information.

Within a couple of days, I received a box. Inside was a stinky (stinky because of the ink and paper they used) book with a green cover.

I didn't really know what to expect. I had planned to compare this to some of the larger encyclopedia-like books that my kids had that were packed with fancy color pictures and diagrams for various aspects of the body. This book isn't like those at all. It is more exposition and less illustration, although there are some very good illustrations in the book. They're just relatively simple compared to other books.

The writing style is very interesting. It is not clinical at all and is littered with sarcastic and sardonic quips. The first chapter -- about your skin -- starts off, in the very first paragraph, talking about robbing a bank wearing a ski mask. When the author wrote about techniques for removing fingerprints to avoid leaving evidence of your involvement at a crime scene, I was beginning to wonder if there was an underlying, hidden agenda in the book.

The text is packed with fascinating callouts that fit in contextually throughout the book. This lets the author pack each chapter with numerous bits of tangential information.

All in all, however, the book is somewhat light on the coverage. This isn't a tell-all, but it is a tell-a-lot. And what it does tell, it tells well. There is a lot of information about latest research and findings. For example, I learned that stretching (in the chapter on muscles) isn't the recommended activity before an aerobic/cardiovascular workout, but that 5-10 minutes of light warm up activity is better.

I learned a lot from this book I didn't know before so I definitely feel more knowledgeable as a result of reading it.

While the other body atlas-type books I've seen seem to be targeted at pretty much all ages, I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone under the age of 16. The reason I would not recommend this book to younger readers is because Chapter 10, the chapter on sex and reproduction, ventured a bit too far out of my comfort zone into sociological and cultural aspects of sexuality than I would ever feel comfortable letting younger kids read. I'm pretty sure my 10-year old does not needs to learn about "Arousal and the Art of Foreplay," "Reaching The Big O," or how to "Engage in mutual exploration."

So, all in all, a good book. It's light, not-very-clinical reading that's bound to teach you several things you didn't already know. You can buy it direct from O'Reilly or from everyone's favorite online bookseller: Amazon.com for $25 or less.

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Book Review: Lone Survivor

2009-05-10T01:13:43Z

Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10 by Marcus Luttrell

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
I'd heard Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell's story in bits and pieces on the radio and on Glenn Beck's TV shows, but I still had no idea how good it would be. This is yet-another book penned with the help of a professional author, but they really managed to leave the book feeling like it was straight out of Marcus's mouth.

The basic premise of this book is that Marcus Luttrell was a member of a Navy SEAL team -- an elite military force -- stationed in Afghanistan in 2005 and sent on a mission to spy on a remote village looking for a high-value military target and, if seen, take him out. The mission was compromised and, after a prolonged firefight with Taliban fighters, Marcus was the only one of his small 4-man team left alive. A helicopter full of SEALs sent to rescue Marcus and his fellow SEALs was attacked by the Taliban as well making this battle the single most-deadly fight in Navy SEAL history.

Marcus was listed as Missing In Action for several days as his family in Texas impatiently waited for news from Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Marcus ran, fell, and crawled seven miles while being tracked by Taliban fighters and made his way to a small village where, surprisingly, he was cared for.

There's an immense amount of backstory about the preparation the typical Navy SEAL has to go through to get to be a SEAL. At first, I wasn't sure why this was necessary, but it makes sense later in the story when you consider what kind of people these soldiers were, what they had to endure in their training, and what their experiences had been prior to fighting America's enemies.

Not only did I learn a heck of a lot about Navy SEALs, I also learned a lot about the terrain, culture, and politics in rural Afghanistan. Marcus spends a good amount of time writing about ROE (Rules Of Engagement), the news media, and other issues soldiers have to take into consideration when dealing with enemies (and potential enemies) in battle. It was very eye-opening.

View all my reviews.