Chris Meller

As you guys all know, I love reading Wil Wheaton’s blog on a daily basis. Unfortunately, as of late, he’s been sick, and I think the sickness is Going to his brain.

Honestly, Wil, this sounds more like a Left Wing conspiracy theory than actual political debate or opinion.

Yes, I consider myself a Republican, but that doesn’t automatically mean that I’m a total far Right-wing Bible-thumping whacko. Even though I AM a Republican, I don’t agree with this Real ID act. Even if I were a Democrat, I wouldn’t start issuing blanket statements condemning the entire Republican community and claiming that they “don’t care at all about upholding the Constitution.”

I’m beginning to lose my respect for you, Wil. If you were throwing out these random blanket insults about blacks or Hispanics, we’d call you a racist pig, but since you’re only doing it against the lousy Republican scum, for some reason it’s ok. When will people realize that the acts of a few bad seeds don’t automatically influence or represent the feelings and opinions of the community as a whole? When will people learn to try and see the matter from another angle, and why are we always so suspicious of politicians, expecting them to constantly have some kind of ulterior and nefarious motive?

I’ve gone over this topic in the past when referring to Inter-Company Politics here at work. I’ve tried numerous times to put myself in my boss’ shoes and see a situation from his angle, and met with varying degrees of success (and failure). The point is I tried! I was willing to put aside my own feelings for a few moments and try to picture myself sitting in his office, looking at things from his perspective and then and only then pass some kind of judgment on his actions.

All I can suggest to you Wil is this: pull your tinfoil hat out of your ass and take an objective look around. Given your radical Left-Wing comments, I have no doubt that you’ll find a way to prove your opinion yet again, but at least make a concerted effort to TRY and be a reasonable logical human being. It’s people like you that make people like me hate and despise politics and all the drama involved with every little nuance of a politician’s daily life.

I have noticed lately that my Blogroll and News Feeds list was getting severely out of date. I kept saying I’d update the feed lists, but never really got around to it. I just got back from lunch and finally decided I was tired of having all those crap entries on my site that were no longer worthy of my RSS Reader.

I just exported all my feeds to an OPML file and imported them into Wordpress. Thanks to Onfolio, exporting them a folder at a time was easy, and I could import all the Blogroll entries and once (and have them inserted into the correct category), and then do all the news feeds at once (and have them inserted into their separate category).

If you’re running Windows (IE or Firefox), I’d highly recommend giving Onfolio a try. Not only does it have a great RSS reader, but it’s also got some amazing web page clipping features. I recently went on a bash.org kick (as I’m prone to do every few months), and “Captured” my favorites into an Onfolio collection. When someone wanted to see them, I simply had Onfolio export them all to a web page (I could have also automatically published them to a blog, emailed them directly, among many other options). It’s really a great product, that I’ll continue to use as long as I have a Windows machine capable of running it.

Anyway, the real point of this blog entry was to comment on the change in the ratio of my links. Previously I’d had an equal number of blogs and news feeds in my reader. Lately, however (and as you can see), I’ve moved away from news feeds and have an enormous number of blogs in my reader. I find this interesting, because I’ve always been one to read CNN or MSNBC. I could honestly sit in front of a TV and watch CNN for hours on end, even if I am hearing the same stories over and over again every hour.

I think this definitely marks a turning point in the web and our society as a whole. I’ve noticed that others have come to the same conclusion as I, and that they too have shifted themselves. While we may keep a few links to traditional news publications, the majority of the reading we do on a daily basis is now of a more personal nature.

I know that I much prefer reading about Wil Wheaton’s every day life, as compared to reading about the famine in Indonesia, or the tornado in Kansas. Not only is it much more uplifting, but from a psycho-analytical point of view, it’s also much more relevant. As horrible as that famine or tornado may be, it really has absolutely no impact on my day-to-day life. However, I can read along with Wil and not only laugh (and cry) along with him, but also learn from some of his mistakes and not have to make them myself.

Is this just me? Has anyone else noticed this trend in their friends’ or their own blogrolls? What’s the ratio of personal blogs to news sites in YOUR news reader?

I was reading an age old story from Gibson Research Corporation about their 2001 Denial of Service attacks. It’s a really good read for anyone interested in network security and networking in general, but the part I found of interest was his link to the official RFC 1459 document, outlining the standards for the Internet Relay Chat (IRC) protocol.

I won’t bore you all with the details, but since I recently wrote my own IRC interface for a PHP script, this was of significant interest to me.

Check it out here.

GRC.com also hosts some other interesting articles. His story about the DoS capabilities of Windows XP is a great read (found here), as well as his story about their second DDoS. Also of note are some of the programs he has developed, all of which can be found directly from GRC.com.

Alright, I know Matt is probably going to kill me for posting this, but I just had to let everyone know about one of the new demos he recorded last night. I think it’s definitely one of his best yet, mainly because it’s about me… That’s right, I’ve got a song about part of my life. Beat that, punk!

Like I said, he’s probably going to kill me for this. I know he thinks it sucks because he was sick last night when he recorded it, but personally I think it sounds just fine. The lyrics are included at the end of this post, but go ahead and download the track and Matt’s websites while you listen to it!

UPDATE: If you don’t know what this song is referring to, you obviously haven’t read my archives. I would suggest taking a look at: Coffee + Love != Win, which is required reading for anyone to maintain a friendship with me.

Download: 02 Shot.mp3Matt’s Site: Matt GawlikMatt’s Band: The Front Porch Kings

Lyrics - Take Your Shot

she said hi every mornin
when I came through the door
poured me a little coffee
but I always wanted a little more

it took 3 months to get the courage
to finally ask her name
I wanted to make my move
but I played the waiting game

[turnaround]

one day her smile was brighter
than I had ever seen
I was all geared up to do it
I could taste the victory

but as she poured my coffee
my heart just hit the floor
I saw the glitter of a diamond ring
that wasn’t there before


[chorus 1]
i missed my shot
she never knew

i carry the weight
of all dreams
that never will come true

i had my chance
in every glance

now I’m a self inflicted victim of
fear and circumstance

[break]

well a couple of years went by
she still said hi every day
though I couldn’t help but notice
that her smile began to fade away

today when she poured my coffee
it was more than I could stand
at last that shiny diamomnd
found it’s way off of her hand

[bridge]
shoulda and woulda won’t
help me find somebody to share the blame

mighta coulda’s are all I’m gonna have
if I still play the waiting game

[chorus]
so i took my shot
no waitin this time

and I’ll take my heart
and all those dreams
and lay them on the line

and take my chance
make no mistake

we risk and lose so much more
on the chances we don’t take


[tag chorus]
yah i took my shot
at something more

she smiled real big and said “now boy”
what the hell were you waiting for

so take that chance
make no mistake

we risk and lose so much more
on the chances we don’t take

[tag]
we risk and lose so much more
on the chances we don’t take

Wow, it’s been one hell of a day.

I think I took my meds too late last night, so I couldn’t get up this morning when my alarm went off. About 8:00, I finally rolled out of bed and into a cup of coffee. Needless to say, this didn’t exactly start my morning off on the right foot.

Less than 10 minutes after I got to work, the manager of our claims department (and wife to the President of the company) came over asking what we were doing with Hospital claims that were electronically received, because one of our clients had called us wondering why their hospital claim payouts for April had dropped like a rock.

Since this was a fairly new thing, we haven’t actually finished implementing the program that loads the received files from WebMD. Our lead programmer, who had been working on the program for weeks, just happens to be on a cruise this week, and therefore inaccessible. The responsibility somehow fell to me. I got a call from the President of the company 5 minutes later asking me why we weren’t running them. I explained to him that supposedly the program for loading them hadn’t been completed yet, and I was waiting for the go-ahead before I started importing them on a regular basis. The conversation went something like this:

Boss: So why aren’t we importing Hospital claims?
Me: Because <programmer> hasn’t finished writing the program yet.
Boss: Run them anyway.
Me: What if it breaks something?
Boss: I don’t care, do it anyway.
Me: Uhh, ok… If you say so…

Now, just by the grace of god, the program seems to be 99% complete. The only problem I’ve found is that it prints a few things out of order, and it’s missed 30 or so pages out of the approximately 3,000 claims I’ve imported thus far. Simple enough problems, since the actual images of the claims are generated and I can go in and manually print them.

It does make me wonder though… What would have my boss done if I’d run the import and it’d corrupted our database? Honestly, if the programmer who’s designing this program says it’s not done yet, I’m inclined to take his word for it, since we can’t even look at the source code of the program (not that we’d have a clue what all that code meant or did anyway). With an ordinary client-side application that simply rehashes data stored in the database, I wouldn’t care so much if it weren’t yet complete. Chances are it’s not going to do anything that will disturb data on the server anyway. However, since we’re not simply looking at data, we’re inserting it into the database for the entire company to use, and to pay claims off of, I’m significantly more cautious.

In the end, it appears to have worked out alright, but that wasn’t necessarily so. It’s thinking like this that can get people into serious trouble. If this had somehow blown up our database, no one here would have had the specialized expertise to know what it had done to our data. If you ask me, this was a bad call. We’d waited 3 weeks for these things, what’s another couple of days until the programmer got back?

Maybe it’s ‘play-it-safe’ thinking like that that is the reason I’m not a manager. When it comes down to matters like that, I’m not willing to make the ballsy (stupid?) moves that can either perfectly make or totally break a situation.

It’s just another day in ‘paradise’…