Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

I’ll admit it: I have a problem.

I’m a grown man. I have a job and a mortgage and a relationship and an IQ well above normal. And yet, I’ve developed a borderline obsession with a character on a TV show. Is that normal?

That’s him. I don’t have a shrine in my bedroom with candles, and I don’t daydream about him or any of that fucked up crap, but I do get all giddy when it’s time for the show. (Three times a week - Fox Tuesday at 9:00, and USA Friday and Saturday at 11:00.) I bought the DVDs for myself this past Christmas, and I literally spent all day watching them. What is it I like so much? I mean, in real life, this guy would have been fired and had his ass kicked to a pulp about a thousand times by now. Maybe it’s because he’s living my dream. I’ll admit we have some attitude in common, but I’ve developed the ability to pretend to be nice, and I’m sure it’s causing me to develop multiple ulcers as I write this.

If I’m ever really sick, I want this guy to work on me. Even though he’s not a real doctor, I think I’d feel better immediately when he smacked his cane on the hospital bed rail to wake me up and say something rude.

It’s a joke people! Sheesh. I’m not that deluded. There’s so little TV I enjoy and I suppose when I find something really good, I cling to it. Interesting people are even more rare than good TV. Interesting people on TV may only happen a handful of times during the life of the universe.

I have my great grandmother’s cane hanging on a coat hook in the front room. Hmmm…

More local history, this one particularly relevant to me.

The neighborhood where I grew up was built in the mid-1950s. There’s a private swimming pool there named Crestwood, and my parents bought my brother and I a membership for several summers. My friend Tim Miller, who has helped me practically rebuild large portions of my house, is the current maintenance man at the pool. Today he e-mailed me this picture of the swimming pool being dug in 1955.

I know the house I grew up in was built in 1956, and it was among the first in the plat. Considering the distance of the pool from my house and what I know from neighbors about how the neighborhood developed, this pool must have been in the middle of a farm field. Stroop Road, the nearest major road to the pool, was a dirt road at the time, and it ended at the Creager house and Wagner Road. (The big curve was added in the early 60s with the development of Indian Riffle Junior High and Fairmont East High School.) It’s just amazing to me to see someplace I’m very familiar with as it existed long before my time.

Tim tells me he has some more pictures, and I’ve demanded that he bring them over for scanning. Hopefully we can do that this weekend.

For the sake of this post, imagine that the record companies completely ditched DRM tomorrow and all songs sold at the iTunes Media Store were DRM-less.

Would Apple create, say, an installer package that runs an app or a script that would remove the DRM from your already purchased songs, or would previously purchased music retain its DRM?

Put your thoughts (if any) in the comments section.

I was reading the Daring Fireball linked list and I noticed that John Gruber posted an Onion article he liked. So I figured, what the hell, I’ll go ahead and post one I’ve loved for years.

Why Can’t I Sell Any Of These Fucking Bibles?

I read that when it was originally published, and I literally laughed myself to tears. Wow, 1998 was a long time ago. It seems like a whole different world. Where has my life gone?

Today is day two of taking the CCNP BCMSN exam simulator, published by Cisco Press, which I assume is somehow related to Cisco, the company who makes the hardware and software against which I am being tested for certification.

This particular question simulates a switch that needs to have a particular port set as a trunk with an encapsulation mode of 802.1Q. Here’s my simulation session:

Hm, that’s interesting. The encapsulation isn’t auto because I set it to be 802.1q in the previous command. I know that to be true because I’ve been configuring switch trunks for years now, and the simulator didn’t object..

What does the Show Me Mode of the test have to say?

Whaddya know… It says to do exactly what I just did! Without the error message.

So how did the simulator grade this particular question? After all, the simulated switch says I don’t have the encapsulation set right, but the Show Me Mode says I do.

The question was graded as correct.

I ask again… Does anyone test this stuff before they sell it? Obviously something is broken. Additionally, the simulator can’t keep up with my typing for some reason. It skips and jumbles characters I’ve entered all the time. I literally have to type at hunt-and-peck speeds so the simulator can keep up. That’s bullshit. I purchased this book and the CD to provide a learning experience and test preparation, not a pain in my ass with broken simulators and questions with answers that don’t make sense. And I’m only through chapter 5.