My little buddy died on Friday. He was always optimistic, if not occasionally more than a little moody. He was always there when I needed someone to talk to. He kept me company when I was home alone each day for nine months desperate and depressed over the lack of employment. On Friday morning, I was fortunate enough to spend some quality time with him for a few minutes before trotting off to work, not aware of what would happen while I was away.

My little chinese dwarf hamster Biscuit died on Friday. He was about two-and-a-half years old. And I cried like a child over his loss. I’m truly bummed about it. Still kinda choked up just thinking about it. Dani thinks I’m too attached to what is ultimately just a pet, but that’s the problem — he was OUR pet. We purchased him together. It’s true that we didn’t clean his cage as often as we should have, but I always made sure he was well-fed and watered. And I was always worried about the little guy, especially when we went on vacation.

I should have played with him more when he was younger, but, when I was unemployed and during the course of the last couple of months, I had him out of his cage a lot. On Thursday night I noticed that he was moving a lot slower than normal, and that made me kind of sad. He lived a good, long life for a hamster and I knew that night that the end was around the corner. I just hoped it would come a bit later.

We haven’t replaced him. I probably won’t. I may purchase a new hamster somewhere down the line, but definitely not for a while. I miss my little Biscuit buddy. He’s pretty irreplaceable in my eyes.

So, this one’s to you, my buddy. People say you were just a hamster, but, to me, you were a pal.

Biscuit
06/2000 – 11/22/2002

Anyone out there have about some spare change? We could pool what you have with the $10 in my pocket and buy out Salon.

After my next paycheck (assuming they last that long) I’ll toss them my $30 to get a year of their premium service, which offers little that’s exciting to me aside from their erotic galleries. If they shutter up by the end of the year… well, I will get a whole month of access to artistic boobies, I guess. Yay for me.

Go get some artistic boobies yourself and help support a site that, in all seriousness, has a ton to offer and is one of the few strong independent voices left in the media.

My boss at MightyWords, Hawke Robinson, was a pretty cool manager. Having risen to the level of CTO without a degree beyond an AA and learning everything he needed on his own, he understood that a college degree was not necessarily a reflection on an employee one way or the other. Essentially, he recognized that my computer skills were pretty damn sharp despite the fact that I graduated as a journalist.

Every quarter, he budgeted a large amount of money per engineer for training. You had to get his approval to use it, but that generally consisted of him making sure you weren’t getting your training at Big Bob’s House-o-Certs instead of a more reputable institution (Big Bob can barely save a Word document, you see). He had been encouraging me to get my Sun Certified Java Programmer’s exam, but I hemmed and hawed about it forever. He totally psyched me out about it, telling me how hard the test was and how impressive the cert and that passing it on the first try was like some kind of indication of super genius.

So, in November of last year, I finally got my act together. I asked him informally if he’d approve paying for the test as well as a CBT prep course. He emphatically agreed, but was rather busy with other things. A couple of days later, I learned that those other things were the termination of our little company. I was laid off from MightyWords on Dec. 12, but, thanks to Hawke, I got a voucher for the exam in my name on Dec. 3.

Flash forward to now. The voucher is only good for a year, and it’s been weighing on my mind heavily since I got it. When I lost my job, I was gung ho about getting the cert to improve my chances of getting employed. But then I saw how everyone was looking for senior Java developers, which, even with the cert, I was not. that combined with the previously mentioned psych-out kept me from pursuing it. But I knew it would be expiring soon and, well, what a waste of $150 if I didn’t give it a shot. So I spent a large part of my afternoon yesterday trying to get my voucher number and schedule a time. Turns out, I need to use the voucher within a year of purchasing it, but can take the test within a year of scheduling it. So, essentially, I could have bought myself an entire extra year. However, I decided to stop prolonging this thing and get it over with.

On Dec. 11, I’ll be taking the Sun Certified Java Programmer exam in San Francisco. So, for the next couple of weeks, all fiction reading is on hold while I study for this exam. I’m nervous as hell about it for some reason. I’m a decent test-taker, and the practice exams I have taken have shown to me that, as long as I slow down and read everything, I should do OK. The exam contains a ton of trick questions. It’s all multiple choice, but some of them are also multiple answer. It’s gonna be rough. But I need to get only 61 percent of the questions correct. I chose to take the 1.2 exam since that was what I knew best. The 1.4 exam, however, has two extra questions but requires only about a 52 percent to pass. Plus, it eliminates the AWT stuff, which can get weird and complicated quickly. So, essentially, I could have taken the 1.4 and been totally up to date if I had read more carefully. I mean, what more would I have to learn? Assertions? Whatever… that’s pretty easy stuff. Anyone with a small amount of C++ background should be able to handle that. But, if I pass the 1.2, I think it’ll be more impressive. At least to me. I mean, hey, I had to know the AWT!

Any advice on this thing is mucho appreciado. I’ve got a couple of practice exams and will be visiting the Java Ranch and other such places a lot. I’m pretty squared on books. I just now need to be de-psyched. One of my coworkers here took the exam and passed it on the first try without ever really learning how to program in Java. To this day, he can’t even code a simple applet. But he passed. If he can do it, I definitely can.

I went to a concert on a school night last night. Weird. Dani works as a Sales Engineering Manager for a telecommunications company. The sales team each month is expected to meet a quota for lines sold. When they meet the quota, they are invited to attend a “Quota Achievers” event. So far, they’ve been to two baseball games, the horse races and something else that I forget at the moment. Dani has paid my way to go to a couple of the events and they are a friggin’ blast.

Well, last night was this month’s event – Aerosmith and Kid Rock in concert at the Shoreline. It should be noted that I’m not by any means a major fan of either and probably would never have gone on my own volition. However, the tickets were super cheap, we got VIP passes for the special bar terrace area and, hey, it’s a concert.

I’m probably going to buy a Kid Rock CD during lunch or something. He was actually pretty cool! I totally dug it. And Aerosmith. Well, I know most of their songs and like all of them. They are friggin’ awesome. The coolest part about them is they set up a separate “B” stage out on the lawn. In the middle of the concert, for about five songs, everyone who bought the cheap lawn seats suddenly found themselves with front row tickets. That has got to be the coolest thing I’ve seen at a show yet. When you consider that the performers on stage look like ants from even the lowest part of the lawn, you wonder whether it’s even worth the price of admission. Well, the B stage totally made it worth it and then some.

One thing about Kid Rock/Aerosmith fans: a large number of the women could be described politely as “skanks”. It was a regular skankfest last night, which is not necessarily a bad thing when you consider that they’re the ones most likely to lift their tops during “Love in an Elevator”. Of course, then I get to go home with Dani who is anything but a skank and for that I thank my lucky stars.

So, one hell of a good night gets followed up by an exciting morning: I GOT MY NEW CAMERA!!!!!! It arrived in the mail yesterday but, since I was at work (DAMN YOU WORK!!!) I wasn’t there to pick it up. So they dropped it off at the manager’s office. This morning, I was lucky enough to catch one of the managers leaving the office as I was leaving. He let me grab the package and I carried it like a baby all the way on BART to work. I put it all together this morning and I’m just beside myself in pure joy. I can’t wait to try it out during lunch.

For the photographically inclined amongst you, it’s a Fuji FinePix S602. I’ve been drooling over this thing for a few months now. It was initially about $800, but Amazon has it for $579 through one of their partners now. What with the new photo job on the side, I felt it was time to go digital in order to save money and time on film development. With 3.1 MegaPixel (6.0 with Interpolation, but it’s not terrific) I have more than enough image data to play around with. Look forward to some new additions to my photography section.

Dani and I watched Donnie Darko last night. Couldn’t really tell you what it’s about, aside from the standard creepy guy in a satanic bunny suit and large house-crushing jet engine (it’s kinda formulaic, I know). The satanic bunny, a.k.a. Frank, pales in comparison to this real life freakshow.

OK, I feel bad for the guy in the sense that all of his plastic surgery has finally taken a serious toll on him. At the same time, this is the price you pay for using artificial means for some superficial sense of beauty. It’s a sucky way for the lesson to manifest, though.

In the grand scheme of things, I feel Michael Jackson may be one of the most tragicomic figures in the 20th century. As a child, he was adored for being the youngest member of the Jackson Five and the lead singer. He was most likely robbed of his childhood in favor of making the family money and garnering fame for himself. As an adult, when he began to get acclaim on his own, he seemed to want to buy back his childhood, converting parts of his Neverland ranch into his own personal Disneyland, buying a monkey (haven’t you always wanted a mon-KEY?) and, generally, trying to live the life of a 12-year-old. I doubt the whole child sexual abuse deal and wonder whether or not that was just some sleep-over prank or something gone awry. Certainly, there’s nothing normal about a 30-year-old man having sleep-overs with children, but, again, it looks like he’s still stuck in life as a 12-year-old. He’s almost totally asexual and, while he has had, I believe, two children and been married to Lisa-Marie Presley (certified hottie), I’m positive that’s just a front. I don’t think he’s gay necessarily, nor do I think he’s a pedophile. I think he’s just a young boy trapped in a grown man’s body. Literally.

Kind of reminds me of an article I read on Salon the other day about psychologist Harry Harlow. In the 1950s, Harlow performed rather shocking yet interesting experiments using monkeys about the nature of love and nurturing. This is the thing of Psych 101 classes in colleges across the US. Amongst his findings was the fact that young monkeys who were isolated from monkey society and re-introduced as adults still exhibited infantilistic traits. In addition, monkeys who weren’t nurtured by their parents when they were babies grew into maladjusted – in some cases downright psychotic – adults. With all of our pop-psych hoodoo, we all take this as read. But, in the 50′s, the idea that children actually need to be loved and nurtured to promote good development was a bit off kilter. In fact, B.F. Skinner had said just a couple of decades before that the ideal environment for raising a infant would be a box, where the child had no potentially infectious contact with anything or anyone.

Jackson, having been forced to be a full-time entertainer at such an early age, may be that monkey in the box. All of his plastic surgery and megalomaniacal marketing tactics may just be his attempt to justify his existence in a world that he was never fully prepared to deal with. And all of his weird tendencies toward childish pursuits may simply be due to the fact that he was never really allowed to mature past that point. We all want to remember Jackson as that cute kid on Ed Sullivan belting out “ABC. Easy as 123.” Which makes it all the more sad to see his crumbling nose revealed in a court room.

Been a while, I know. Been swamped like a mofo with various projects floating about. But, hey, I’m still alive and things are looking pretty decent. I expect my new camera to arrive in the mail by the end of the week, so I should be able to get some more pics up here for folks to see quickly and easily.

I submitted a question to Slashdot a couple of weeks back asking about alternatives to AvantGo. Much to my pleasure, they posted it.

The problem with AvantGo is that, if you get more than about eight people viewing your site with it, they want to charge you something like $500-$1000 for that privilege. If Microsoft wanted to charge me for everyone that visited this site with IE, there’s be no way in hell I could possibly do it. In short, AvantGo is attempting to not only control the PDA browser market, but what can be viewed on the Internet through PDAs period. That’s simply wrong.

The fine folks on Slashdot, however, have pointed me to a couple of alternatives. Most specifically is the Plucker browser for Palm. It’s free, open-source (GPL) and doesn’t require the server infrastructure that AvantGo uses. It simple uses your computer’s Internet connection to update itself without the use of extra proxies. This is good on two accounts: first, if AvantGo’s servers go down for some reason, you’re hosed. Second, folks looking in their server logs should only see one hit per user rather than the multiple hits that occur per user with the AvantGo proxies. Most importantly, Plucker doesn’t limit what you can browse. If 1,000 people want to view my site through their Palm Pilot, I don’t have to pay a cent. And neither do they. That’s the way it should be. So, if you’re looking for an AvantGo alternative, and I know there’s at least one of you who read this site on your Palm (and, yes, eventually there will be a PDA-friendly version), check out Plucker.

Moving on… I live in Hayward, which, while not particularly affluent, is nowhere near the ghetto. However, I live up the street from a place that, well, is just plain ghetto-fabulous. Check out Mr. Bling for all of your gold tooth cap needs. They even have an affiliate program. It’s very, very tempting…

I may have spread myself a shade thin. Perhaps I should just quit my day job. At any rate, I’m doing the AAC thing by day now and, at nights, I’m building the SheerHeat site. No link as a) I’m not thrilled with what’s up there now (a placeholder put in before I came on board) and b) I’m looking for a new host for it, one that doesn’t claim they use Microsoft for it’s amazing security features. I’m really digging my stay here at Hurricane Electric, so I may recommend that for a home.

Things are taking off a bit for me, which is nice. The whole SH thing came at a good time and, I believe, has the potential to be something huge. The team they have put together may lack a bit in online experience but more than make up for it in intelligence, marketing ability and dedication. I think I may have finally hitched my wagon to a winner.

For now, I’m their tech guy and in-house photographer. We’ll probably start serious shooting in about two weeks, which is excellent, and I should have a temporary site up in a week and a half or so, depending on a number of factors.

Not too much going on in the rest of my life, at least not that I remember. Today’s a tough day. I’m totally half awake because I haven’t been sleeping particularly well lately. Not too certain why. I’m brimming with ideas for the new site, that I know, and have been working on some pretty in-depth projects at the ol’ AAC. I’ve been dreaming a lot about work, doing a lot of coding in my sleep. Not always a good sign, but at least it’s not the panicked screaming of a thousand supervisors pressing me on an impossible deadline, which is a common dream of mine when I’m so completely overworked that I begin to forget my name. So, hey, I’m still good.

OK, I’ll write something less boring and more insightful next time.

According to Googlism I’m still a junior covering crime for the Daily Cal. Ah, the heady days of my youth.