The picture at the right is a platelet pharesis machine sitting next to my chair at the West Chester Collection center of the American Red Cross — right behind Senora’s Mexican Restaurant and under Spirit of Yoga. Giving platelets is something I’ve been looking forward to doing once my commute to New York is over — it takes about 90 minutes to give platelets. I started doing this in New York after September 11th (remember that everyone thought the way to respond was to give blood? Me too), and it makes me feel like a rock star because I have O negative blood, which means my platelets are regularly used to avert international crises, move the planets back into their proper alignment, and bring sweet dreams of harmony and love to all the little children everywhere. At least, that’s what they tell me when they call to request an appointment.
Anyhow, I flunked out yesterday morning. The sheaf of tubes at right SHOULD be all Krazy-Straw full of my blood, since the machine takes the blood out of your left arm, runs it through a centrifuge (or something), extracts the platelets, then puts it back in your right arm. During the ninety-minute process, something like SEVENTY PERCENT(!!!) of your blood makes the round-trip through the machine, which I think is just awesomely gross.
But the phlebotomist had a Very Serious Expression when she was tapping my left arm, and we had to try a couple of times, and it didn’t work out. Apparently, I have “skinny veins”, and after two tries without a good flow from my left arm, they detached me, turned off “Spider-Man 3” on the DVD player hanging in front of my face (see, aparesis is also a chance to watch terrible nerd movies your family will never want to go see or rent!), gave me a T-shirt, and sorrowfully sent me on my way.
I felt sad and disappointed about it. I also have some pretty gruesome-looking bruises on the inside of my left elbow, but it wasn’t really that unpleasant of a procedure. And everyone at the blood center was REALLY nice and professional. I guess I’ll wait two weeks, then try again for my next chance to Save the World (and watch a terrible movie!)
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Last month, I wrote that we were looking for a milking trainer, so that Barb won’t be one of the Comedically Clueless about Cows at the Pennsylvania Farm Show Celebrity Milking Competition coming up this Friday. Barb has a hands-on approach to legislating (when she needed to learn more about the challenges of trash collection in West Chester, she spent two entire shifts working on the trash truck, not just a photo op.) So I figured she’d be game for some lessons. My ulterior motive is that I wanted a Mister Rogers adventure with Kate and Lydia. And we got one!I made a number of phone calls to find a trainer. We ended up going out to Seven Stars Farm today. Seven Stars makes organic yogurt — up to 200 quarts a day, six days a week — on their organic farm, which they lease from the Kimberton Waldorf school across the road.
Seven Stars’ co-owner and manager Edie Griffiths, who is a pioneering and veteran biodynamic farmer, showed us the ropes. We got to milk a placid older cow named Renaissance, who was low-key and helpful. And then we got to see the milking machines, the calves, and the yogurt-making operation! All in all, it was a TOTAL Mister Rogers visit, and I had an awesome time. You can see the photoset on Flickr here!
Incidentally, Edie and Seven Stars welcome visitors, and Edie said that she’d give more milking lessons if people are interested. If you want to come out and learn how to milk a cow, let me know! You West Chester Dish folks are very much invited.Anyhow, a million thanks to Edie and all the hard-working folks at Seven Stars for taking time out of their day to show us around. Their work day starts at THREE. THIRTY. IN THE MORNING, washing the cows down and getting ready for a four AM milking.
PS. there were no kittens around for us to squirt the milk directly into the mouths of, but once I saw how Edie milks, I think it’s just as well there aren’t — she could knock a kitten over at twelve feet with the powerful streams she was urging from those teats at lightning speed.
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Last week, Kate and I drove up to NYC to pick up my Lucky Aeron Chair, which Digitas was kind enough to give me after I’ve been sitting in it for seven (eight? nine?) years. Like the UrbanFetch messenger bag, the Herman Miller Aeron chair occupies an important and nostalgic niche in boom-and-bust dotcom history (from status symbol to “stupidity barometer”.) Getting to keep my battered Official-Dotcom-Issue Aeron is WAY better than a gold watch. Thanks, Digitas!You can see me here slowly wheeling myself backwards down Fifth avenue, all the way home to West Chester, PA.
And then, this morning, the first day of the new commute! I’m renting an office in a new building owned by a local law firm, sharing a floor with some other small technologists and marketers. They seem a decent sort so far.
And the commute! The commute! it’s zero-point-nine miles, a sixteen-minute walk, all on sidewalks. Kate and Lydia came with me for the first morning, waving goodbye once we got to the goldfish pond across the street (sorry for the squinty picture, Kate, but I am SO EXCITED about this commute, I can’t waste a single picture!)
That brings me to Halladay Florist. The entrance to my building is on Wilmont Mews, which is the little street behind Halladay. You can see it behind the two trees on the right side of the picture. I walked past the Halladay delivery vans, each with their “I brake for Dogs at Jimmy John’s Pipin’ Hot” bumper sticker, around the corner, and to the front door:
…which is right here. Right now, I’m sitting in my new office, at my splintery old Veterans Administration desk (which lived in Kate’s sewing room until two days ago.)I won’t post a picture of the office until it looks less like, you know… a square drywall box with a splintery desk in it. Once it’s filled with trees, singing birds, and pith helmets, I’ll post more pictures.
Meanwhile, I’ve updated my entry on Google Local Business, so you can see where my office is. If you have a moment, I’d be HUGELY GRATEFUL if you would write a review, whether it’s business-related, general enthusiasm, or filthy lies.
More to come! I want to lure as many interactive developers as possible to West Chester, so, you know, let me know what you’d like to see!
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The box I use to host this blog, plus my own instance of Confluence and Jira, is a humble-but-dedicated Linux server running CentOS 5, hosted by Serverbeach. Yesterday, I got an abuse report that a number of other boxes had been getting automated password scans — originating from my server’s IP address. Uh-oh! Had someone compromised my box?
I opened up an SSH client, and logged in to my server as each of the named users. The bash welcome message showed just what I’d suspect — last login at some reasonable time, from an IP known to me. UNTIL I logged in as the “nagios” user, and discovered that the last login was on December 22, from “ac9ed6e3.ipt.aol.com”. UH-OH. I’ve been PwN3d.
It looks like someone guessed the password for the “nagios” user I created when I was setting up a server monitor. It probably didn’t occur to me that I was creating a public-facing login when I created the “nagios” user, and used something easy to guess. Crap! What’d they do while they were in there?
I pulled the .bash_history file for that user, which you can see here in its entirety, if you’re interested. Unless the user edited the .bash_history file as a red herring, it looks like they downloaded a password scanner utility to /tmp/.k (a dot-prepended directory, so it’d be hidden unless you used ls -a), then fired it up to scan the first two octets of my IP range. And then came back periodically to check results using “screen”.
Here’s what “ps -u nagios” showed:
USER PID %CPU %MEM VSZ RSS TTY STAT START TIME COMMAND nagios 30769 0.0 0.0 2588 736 ? S Oct17 0:10 ntpd nagios 23380 0.0 0.1 3668 1276 ? S Nov03 0:59 ntpd nagios 16926 0.0 0.1 6100 1036 ? Ss Dec22 0:00 SCREEN nagios 16927 0.0 0.1 5404 1396 pts/3 Ss+ Dec22 0:00 /bin/bash
The first two processes, 30769 and 23380, are, I think, Nagios doing its regular thing. But the other two processes were spawned by the uninvited user — a “SCREEN” session, and a login shell.
I quickly changed the password for the “nagios” user, then killed all the “nagios” user’s processes and deleted everything in /tmp/.k. I ran “sudo rpm -Va” to see if any of my packages had been, you know, sneakily altered, but my expertise runs out there.
As a professional, especially as one who depends on others to execute Big Chair Sysadmin tasks, I wouldn’t put a client’s SSH front door out there in the open, where anyone can come knocking. I always request a firewall in front, which usually only allows SSH logins from a particular (or, even better, private network) IP. Get a VPN connection to the hosting provider’s network, and it’s reasonably secure and portable. So this is pretty much a case of the cobbler’s children going shoeless – oy!
Serverbeach doesn’t offer a firewall solution, so I’m going to lock down the SSH on the box myself. Anyone care to offer an opinion as to whether you prefer IP restriction (not all that portable; I’m often on various wireless connections), certificate restriction (spiffier, but more confusing), or some other stealthy methods like changing the default port?
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A Flickr photo of my NERD-lepoint pillow project got picked up on BoingBoing this morning, thanks to Wonderland and Craftzine. Yay, thanks Cory!
On Christmas, Kate’s grandmother gave me a copy of Rosey Grier’s Needlepoint for Men, which is a real book published in the seventies featuring football star Rosey Grier, who apparently was a man of parts. Or he had a ghost-writer, but I’d prefer to think the former.
I already have a copy of the standard needlepoint book called “The Black Bible“, but only Rosey Grier’s book has instructions on how to sew a box pillow with piping. Because, I guess, a box pillow is more manly than a knife-edge pillow. In any case, that’s what I’m going for. Thanks, Rosey! (And thanks, mommygam! You rock!)
The book is totally worth looking at — click on the cover to see some scans of the book that Flickr user “Extreme Craft” put up:
UPDATE: Oh man, Rosey Grier is the one that sings It’s Alright to Cry” on “Free to be You and Me”. Rosey Grier is the REAL THING, baby.
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In eight happy years at Digitas, I’ve been: a programmer analyst, a senior programmer analyst, a senior technology analyst, a technology manager, an associate director, and finally a vice president.
I’ve been through rich years, when the Technology department filled two buses for a team outing to Bowlmor Lanes. And I’ve been through lean years, when I was the only technology staffer in the New York office. The technology itself has grown and changed immensely. During my own job interview, I was asked to identify what an <li> tag was. That, and a professorial bow tie, got me in the door. Now, we routinely ask candidates to write a thousand lines of object-oriented code while simultaneously fighting an electrical fire, annotating a PowerPoint deck, and soothing a noisy pack of spaniels. I was lucky to be in the right place at the right time, and Digitas has been a wonderful place to constantly learn while the interactive industry has been busy inventing itself.
I’ve also been commuting five hours a day for five years. In 2002, I cleaned out my apartment in Little Italy and bought my first of many Amtrak monthly tickets. I’ve spent the equivalent of 260 full days inside a blue Amtrak coach, with a laptop on my knees.
And now, that chapter is coming to an end. Yesterday, David Nie, my boss and colleague at Digitas, took the technology team out for dim sum at 88 Palace, so I could say goodbye. I’m venturing out on my own, starting a small interactive practice with an office just a mile from my house. I’ll be blogging plenty more about what I’m doing, but for right now I just want to say that I’ve been tremendously, wonderfully fortunate both in finding a company that truly values its staff, and finding people that are smart, inquisitive, and care deeply about doing the job right. Digitas and I were a perfect match, and I’m sorry to leave. Goodbye, Digitas team!
I won’t miss the commute, but I sure will miss you folks. Good luck, and I wish you continued success as you go from strength to strength.
PS. New York held up its end of the bargain: it’s always at its most captivating when you’re about to leave. I had never been to a dim sum restaurant before — at least, not the real-deal kind where you sit down and immediately start grabbing interesting, delicious food off of carts that are constantly circulating around the room. All in a secret location literally crammed under the girders of the Manhattan Bridge. I’m on to you, NYC. Nice try. Thanks for the sendoff. -
My mom says that my grandfather’s fly fishing and fly-tying hobby was “a pastime for men with exacting professions”, since it demanded precision, patience, and careful attention to detail. That care and patience would then be rewarded, at rare, fleeting, and magnificent intervals by the presence of the ineffable.
The rest of the time, you’re just trying to tie a piece of chicken hackle to a tiny hook with an invisible bit of plastic, and you can’t see any of it, and it’s all a huge pain in the ass.
But those moments of transcendence transform all the rest, retroactively filling them with grace. One of those moments makes a year of tying Royal Coachman flies that look like the cat barfed them up worth it. Well, almost. My Royal Coachmen were pretty bad.
I was talking to my friend and colleague Rem Reynolds a while ago about blogging in the Epic Mode — that is, when you write about your daily cavils as if you were a hero in a Frazetta painting. My contention is that normal life really is epic, at least most of the time, and that the epic is built from thousands of small, inconsequential details. Those details are baby steps on the way to rare, fleeting, and shining moments of transcendence. Which I will call, without sarcasm or irony, the “Dude, I ROCK!!!” moments. I’m completely and totally serious, and YES, I do make the air guitar motion.
Anyhow, Rem’s point was “Yes, John, but not everything is epic, when you get down to it. Some stuff, there’s no payoff at the end, and there’s no meaning behind it.” Which is an excellent, excellent point, and I suppose (here comes the Blinding Flash of the Obvious) that the hard part is to tell two kinds of things apart. Maybe that’s why we have hobbies that are like our jobs — like any job, a hobby can be filled with details, even with tedium, but a hobby rewards you more reliably with cathartic moments of grace. With fly fishing, the moment of getting a fish on the line is magical (not that I’d know too much about that.) Or the moment of stepping out from between the rhododendrons, into the stream, feeling the cold press of water on your waders, and seeing mist on the rocks.
Anyhow, this started out as a post about needlepoint, because needlepoint, like fly fishing, is a pastime for people with exacting professions. Plus, needlepoint is friggin’ PERFECT for computer artists, because it is both like computer art (tiny picture elements assembled into a coherent whole), and unlike computer art (the thing you make actually, you know, exists, has a pleasing, wooly texture, and has every chance of lasting longer than you do.) My big question is whether or not needlepoint is going to provide a big I ROCK moment after many hours invested in the details. Is needlepoint epic? I’m going to hope that it is, and the first time I slap down my finished mono canvas, throw a double deuce at the sky, and shout “YEAH! I ROCK!”, I will be sure to let you know.
Meanwhile, this seems like an excellent time to link to some pictures of the Pohoqualine Fishing Association that my mom took (and developed, and printed in her darkroom) in 1979. Pohoqualine is a private fishing club in Stroudsburg, PA that my great-grandfather and grandfather, and father all belonged to — a Fitzgeraldian bulwark where captains of industry would go to master tiny, niggling details in the hope of catching a moment of grace. Plus, there’s a sock wringer that I always thought was AWESOME.
More to come on the needlepoint later.
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I run all my tikaro web stuff (blog, Jira, Confluence) off a single dedicated server that’s somewhere in, I don’t know… Tampa? Or something?
It took me a while to get used to the fact that my server might be anywhere, and that I don’t know what it physically looks like. Actually, back in 1999, when I first had a dedicated server, I explicitly chose a host located in Kuala Lumpur, because I thought it was so awesome that my packets were going ALL THAT WAY to reach me. I liked to imagine that half the packets were going east, and half going west, because the server was as far away from me as it’s possible to be. Since I was losing half my packets (stuck in the Khyber pass?) I ended up moving the box to the States, but it’s still more of an idea to me than a machine. But it is a machine somewhere.
Anyhow, enthusiastic young programmer Dustin Whitney at [my current employer] (ha! ha! newbie blogger!) send around a coders-list email extolling the benefits of the Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2). Which works like this:
- You make a “virtual machine”, which is a computer that thinks it’s a computer, but really it’s a piece of software that thinks it’s a computer.
Okay, so far so good. My copy of Windows XP running on my MacBook thinks it’s a beige Dell box, but really it’s software. This is futuristic, but I’m used to it. - You package up this virtual machine, and you upload it to the formless, massive grey mist of Amazon S3, the Simple Storage Service.
This is where my head starts to hurt, imagining a global mist of, you know, files and stuff. “S3 was without form and void, and darkness was on the face of the deep.” - You issue a web-service command, and lo! The virtual machine living in the mist comes to life, and becomes AN ACTUAL COMPUTER THAT YOU CAN MAKE DO THINGS.
And the spirit of God moved on the face of the waters, and OH MY GOD IT’S A SHELL PROMPT! (crack of lightning) - You pay by the hour during the time your “machine” actually “exists” (from ten cents to fifty cents per hour, depending on how “powerful” your “computer” is.)
See how I’m having to use scare quotes everywhere? Because nothing’s REAL, man! - Your EC2-hosted application got Slashdotted? Issue some magical web-service incantations, and your virtual computer clones itself.
Like marching brooms! Like a magical pasta pot that makes pasta until you say the magic word! Like an army of unstoppable homunculi! And they’re all real — but not real — they’re AMAZON EC2 CLOUD GOLEMS! - Your web application can even be configured to do this itself — if it sees that demand is exceeding capacity, it can summon more instances of itself, becoming more and more powerful!
See? Do you see why I’m foaming at the mouth here? Jesus H. Montgomery Christ!!! Voltron! Skynet! The first chapter of the Gospel of John ALL ROLLED INTO ONE!
Excuse me while I go sob quietly in a corner. And try to figure out how to get this public/private PEM key pair working.
- You make a “virtual machine”, which is a computer that thinks it’s a computer, but really it’s a piece of software that thinks it’s a computer.
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Ex-colleague and exceptionally well-balanced overachiever ANP read my plea for a milking trainer, and responded by asking her dad, who is clearly an old-school, old-world badass, for some written instructions. Here’s what he had to say to her:
- “You know how to gesticulate to an “OK” sign, right? Do it now with your right hand.
- Visualize making that OK as far “up” the teat (haha)* as possible. Your thumb and first finger (they are forming the OK circle) should be against the udder (again, haha) with the remaining digits hanging loose.”
- …read more at ANP’s blog
* I’m not sure if the parenthetical tittering (haha) is ANP’s or her dad’s.
So far, I’ve got two farms as “possibles”, so it seems like there will be some sort of initial milking 101 training going on this weekend. I will, of course, blog it all AS IT HAPPENS.
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“Engleman Spruce (Picea Doloris Excrutiata):
Similar in color to the Blue Spruce (Picea Pungens). Tall, upright appearance. Ravenously, unbelievably sharp, four-sided needles that pierce the soft, unsuspecting palms of suburban dads who work computers for a living and forget to bring gloves to the cut-your-own christmas tree farm. Trunk, especially, covered with short, needle-like barbs to punish the unprepared.The Engleman Spruce is favored by hard-bitten, Bronte-like Christmas-tree farm owners who thrive on the bitter tears of the soft and the weak.
- Size at eight years: 7-10′
- Identifying characteristics of tree: Starbucks-fogged shrieks of pain; angry red welts on hand and forearm; rolling eyes of spouse; delighted toddler chuckles.”
- Official soundtrack of the Engleman Spruce
tikaro.com 
