Guilty of being a romantic. No, not the flowers kind, the other. The one that’s defined as “a soulful or amorous idealist”.

I read books with characters I can relate to, ones I associate with. Bean from Ender’s Shadow, with his high intelligence and deplorable life. Shadow with his quiet intelligence and cool, calm demeanor. Hiro Protagonist from Snow Crash, with his weird ability to be in the right place at the right time - always “this close” to being the next big thing, yet somehow messing it up. And my newest love, Bukowski’s hard-drinking, fighting, womanizing alter-ego of Henry Chinaski.

I read those stories, and romanticize them. I can feel what they are going through - I know what they feel. I was them. I am them? I know of a life of hard times - living in my car, in a dumpster behind a carpet factory. I know the thrill of being rick on paper, then squandering it all away due to lack of foresight.

I know what it’s like to live hard. My father died when I was 6 weeks, raised by a bipolar mother who refuses to get help or acknowledge her problems. I know what it’s like to have to beg for $20 to be able to buy antibiotics for a double pneumonia from not taking care of yourself. I know what a soaring high, were you feel in control of everything. And crushing lows, where the only sensible way out if a bullet between the eyes.

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So, I’m waiting for the lovely Mishka to bring me my new laptop, since DHL can’t read and apparently none of them own a cell phone. So I’m kicking around the internet and I happened upon an article called 12 essential blogwriting tips for building a  successful blog - and it got me thinking. I halfass update my main site for my photography. I have an entire domain for that, so I don’t think I need to keep it there.

Maybe it’s time I drop the photo site and instead drop in something helpful - I’ve been messing around with a few ideas, and I think I’ll just go with them and see what happens.

See, I’ve owned Pavleck.Com for 11 years now (Even though the registry says 8. I accidentally let it drop for a few months around 2000, then got it back) and I’ve been changing it here there and everywhere. I think I should see if I can’t do something interesting with it - something that takes my hobbies and puts em out there. But I dunno. We’ll see.

Some people have to re-arrange the furniture every year or so to keep things interesting, I seem to have to re-write my website every year.

Various things, in no particular order¹.

1. I’ve been reading a lot of Bukowski² lately. I always knew about and liked his poems, and just learned about the stories. Mishka’s father taught a class on him, and he gave me a book - a reader - about Bukowski. It’s arranged chronologically, and includes both his poems as well as excerpts from his semi-autobiographical books. It’s absolutely fascinating, and I find myself really identifying with the anticulture hero’s “Fuck it all” attitude. There’s a lot of “The road not traveled” as I read it. We both had similar key decisions to make in our lives, and around the same time. He zigged, I zagged.

2. Maybe I don’t have ADHD. The science of sleep is a young one, and there are a lot of problems that get blamed on other things that might actually be sleep related - ADHD is one of them. I take ritalin³ for my ADHD. It’s a stimulant, and it helps people concentrate. They don’t know why. My sleep doctor tells me that it’s very possible I’ve been severely sleep deprived for decades, and the ritalin - as it’s a stimulant - keeps me awake and removes the sleep deprivation stuff such as poor concentration. I go in for another sleep study on the 17th⁴, I’ve gained about 40 pounds in the past year and he fears my slight apnea might have become full blown. We’ll see.

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1. I have a million tiny stories, but I don’t feel like writing anything of importance lately [↩]
2. Right now it’s a Bukowski reader called “Run with the hunted“. I’ll be buying Ham on Rye soon though! [↩]
3. Well, I usually take the much superior adderall, but at $350/month I don’t want to spend all that and my current insurance blows, so back I go to the cheap stuff [↩]
4. Sleep study is called a polysomnograph [↩]

It’s time for the Pavleck.Com Weekend edition. A lot is going on and I’ll make you privy to it all!

First up, it’s that time once again - the St. Paul Art Crawl kicks off tonight at 6pm. I’ll be walking around my building checking out (and buying) some of the art the incredibly talented people in Twin Town can put together - will I see you there? I’m really hoping to!
See if you can find me or my work called “All my exes live on canvas” (A play on an old country song). It may or may not be there. The fun is figuring it out!

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It’s been a few days, and I apologize. Normally I steal some time away from work with which to write but time has been fairly short - not to mention, we’ve been taken things easy lately - beginning to wind down.

I may head to the Minnesota Music Festival today - it’s a mile away, well within walking distance. Not sure though, tickets are $30 a pop and there’s the 2 of us.

Today marks my month anniversary of not smoking. I’ve gained some weight - though I’m not sure if it’s because I’m eating more or because I no longer take the 5+ minute walk to the smoking area several times a day. It doesn’t matter, I’m taking care of it - need to exercise more, but the eating side is under control - a lot more water and a lot less soda. In fact, except for coffee I’m slowing down on the caffeine consumption as well.

I bought Mishka a couple dozen roses last week and a balloon. She’s spent a lot of money on me for my birthday, I can just tell, and I feel so guilty about it - no one ever really spends money on me, girlfriends included. So I had to ‘give something back’.

This is going to be a long post, so I’ll cut it short here - click to read the rest of it.

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Just some random things on my mind and in the news.

1. Neat little Progressive insurance hack (sort of). Know someone’s name and address, but aren’t sure of what they drive? Progressive will help you out! Simply go to Progressive.Com, enter your target’s zip code and hit get a quote. Enter their information in the box and hit ‘Continue’. Up pops a box of vehicles registered to that name at that address - neat eh? (This worked for sure as of 8/16, they may have changed it).

2. My 31st birthday is coming up soon, about 6 weeks or so. Feel free to get me a present - I have a brand new wish list setup over at Amazon.Com you can check out. I won’t be upset, I promise. Or you can pay for an extra Pro year for me on Flickr, or give me a gift subscription to Slashdot (It’s only 5$ - I’m UID 88435). But whatever you do, please don’t buy me this talking heart shaped USB mouse. As much as I would love hearing ‘I love you’ whispered to me as I mercilessly frag unsuspecting noobs, I already have a pretty nice mouse. You could, however, buy me a new monitor, or the Mac mini I intend to connect to that monitor.

3. Searching Google images for DSC00001.jpg (NSFW) shows you that the first shot of that brand new digital camera is often times a nude one.

4. Foxy Brown likes to beat up her neighbors with a Blackberry. And she’s not the only one.

5. There’s really only 2 websites you need in life - LifeHacker.Com and Instructables.Com.

6. People in Minnesota drive like idiots. It’s a fact. Once the bridge went down, they had to divert traffic down Highway 280. To help ensure less fender benders, where 280 and I-94 connect they have closed off the far left lane about a mile before the on ramp, to allow people from 280 to merge more easily. It’s been this way for 2 weeks now. People still selfishly stay in the far left lane until the very last second before violently cutting over to the next lane, forcing a slowdown that makes leaving work anytime before 5:30pm pointless. I hate those drivers. I hate them very, very much.

7. Happy 25th birthday Compact Disc - may you be around for another 200 billion sales.

8. This is the greatest photograph you’ll see today.

9. It’s a fact: Sex is good for the heart.

10. XKCD is the greatest web comic of all time, and today’s comic proves it.

11. I scored 32 or “Very High” on this Autism test. (People with Asperger Syndrome score 35 or higher, the average for men is 17 - eek!)

A few weeks ago Mishka and I went to Unique. Unique is a thrift store in Burnsville, located inside an old grocery store. As such, it’s quite a large place with an extensive range of items made before Americans realized we need to wage a war on terror.

Both of us absolutely love the not-so-little store, though I think for different reasons. Mishka loves the neat stuff that you can get at great prices - you’d be surprised at how much of the stuff your parents had is now ‘in style’ again and commands a hefty price tag, except in the junk stores.

I love it for that, but I love it more for an entirely different reason. I love the philosophical side of it, the human side. I take my time, slowly going through items and wondering about their origin.
A candy dish made from popsicle sticks - that’s a very personal item, probably the most personal I found last time. Carefully glued together, perhaps given to Mom or Dad as a gift. It represents all of our childhood dreams and wishes - why is that dish here? Who owned it? Why was it made? Was it given to someone? How was it given to someone? I can construct scenarios in my head about the origin of said dish and how it ended up next to steins from the Excalibur casino and a well listened to copy of “Styx” on vinyl. Perhaps a son made it at a boy scout event for his parents, where they lovingly left it on the coffee table for years until junior met his end in a tragic thresher accident, and it just hurt to much to keep it around. Or maybe the parents died, and as the relatives were going through the belongings they found it in some old cedar chest in the attic, mixed in among junior high sports trophies and report cards saying “Johnny is such a smart boy, he really needs to start applying himself”

And then you go further through the items and realize that a majority of these inanimate things were once loved and cherished, but now lie on the cold metal shelves with crude masking tape price tags on them, written in half spanish, half english - the Minnesotan version of Spanglish.

Perhaps I read into things to much - but a trip to a junk store always seems to stir up a lot of emotions for me.

It’s a typical Friday at work. Slow, painfully slow. Not much gets started on a Friday, and not much gets completed.
I’m standing, oddly enough, between 2 positions - one being Sr. Infrastructure Engineer, the other the MS Operations Manager guy. Beginning Monday, my time will be split 50/50 between the two. The MOM gig pays more, and I think I can even get more then what they offer - purely based on the fact I’m the only person even remotely qualified for this position that isn’t attached. I’ve been asked by 3 additional firms if I’d like to try for this position. My current firm is already jockeying for someone to backfill my current roll of reading email and clicking buttons.

Don’t get my wrong, I love to make a metric ton of cash doing nothing but surfing the web and blogging as much as the next guy, but I really wish I had days filled with work and tension - I thrive on pressure. The MOM gig is right up my alley.
It’s a solo thing, there’s almost always only 1 monitoring guy in an organization, no matter how large it is or how many servers it houses. This monitoring guy is in charge of a minimum of 2, maximum of 18, monitoring systems spread throughout the company. It could be something as large and robust as HP OpenView or MS Operations Manager, or it could be Bob’s Script that checks on custom application x34, which runs on a Windows NT 3.5 server, connecting to DB2, and using Bill’s (He left the company 10 years ago) custom connector.
Monitoring, reporting, and alerting is an intrinsically important part of any company, especially if your business is online. What doesn’t make sense is, no one wants to do it. Everyone loathes the thought of writing rule logic to intelligently alert when a cluster goes into a failed state, they run away from trending reports which attempt to figure out when the SAN will need to be expanded, they scurry from the idea of creating color-branded graphs that attempt to lay out the company’s entire IT infrastructure in as few primary colored lines as possible.

I, however, thrive upon it.

I love constructing complex rule logic, ensuring that the proper alerts are sent to the proper parties at the proper time. I feast upon the algorithms that I use to create trend reports. I’m enamored with the prospect of creating custom graphs, showing the progress that a company is making as a whole - I love the fact that something I created, something I made, is being shown to the most powerful people up the ladder. I like it.

It’s not for the feint of heart, that’s for sure. There’s a small sect of us in the midwest that do this type of thing, and we are as fanatical about it as the next Harry Potter fan. We hav e one hand deep in the corporate driven high-dollar professional suites such as MOM and OpenView as well as the archaic deep knowledge of open source free solutions such as Cacti, MRTG, RRD, Nagios and it’s derivatives to numerous to name. It’s not something you become, it’s something you are - an almost asberger-like devotion to the craft. You are timeless, steeped in protocols such as SNMP and Syslog, while also honing your knowledge on XMLRPC and MSMQ. It’s one of the few things that I get visibly excited talking about, my face lighting up as I explain how it can all come together.

I have several projects lined up I want to work on, one involving system and application monitoring. Several other involve industrial art pieces. Another involves electronics. I need to work on those. I hope the new loft will be an inspiration to me. I also hope that canceling my World of Warcraft subscription and getting rid of all the other games on my PC will excel that as well. I need to get my ass in gear an act on some things that could have a high payout in the long term.

How’s that for an ADHD riddled rant? I wonder if anyone can follow my blog except me. I’ll probably have another post later, but figure I should seperate this train of thought with the one that is occurring simultaneously right now, lest they truly clash together into a thought train wreck the likes of which William G. Crush could have never envisioned (I’ll take obscure 19th century train publicity stunts gone bad for $1000, Alex).

Till next time.

This article at Psychology Today takes a look at introverts. After reading, then re-reading it, I’d have to say I pretty much agree with it. I bill myself as the extroverted introvert. Meaning? Well, although my preferred state of being is alone or with my Mishka, I can flip a switch and become Mr. Outgoing Guy - making friends and doing the room.

The article essentially says that there are people, such as myself, who do fine - and actually excel - with a lower need for affiliation. We don’t need to hit the crowded clubs and rub elbows with societies elite. In fact, because we keep to ourselves, we’re actually more creative, and we see things others don’t. Our perspective is different, because we aren’t concentrating on being the life of the party.

Hence, I think that’s one major reason I love photography. I can be in the center of the crowd, but not really be there.

I don’t particularly like crowds. I guess you could say I loathe them. I do well in front of them, I’ll go up and sing karaoke with the rest of them like I did last week - I just don’t like large crowds.
Now, place a camera in my hands, and I’m not really in the crowd anymore. I’m an outsider looking in. Watching everything behind the lens looking for a shot, or something that might become a shot. It takes concentration, and I can’t really pay attention to the drunken college kids next to me, or the old man behind me, or the fat sweaty guy in front of me - nope, I’m just looking for a shot.

Anyway, it was just a random muse, just another mental dump sent over the tubes. As such, it seems to read a little ‘jerky’, and I don’t really care to clean it up. I’ll leave you with my favorite quote from the article:

Previous MRI studies have shown that during social situations, specific areas in the brains of loners experience especially lively blood flow, indicating a sort of overstimulation, which explains why they find parties so wearying. But Guyer’s results suggest that introverts may be more attuned to all sorts of positive experiences as well. This added sensitivity, she speculates, could mean that people who are reserved have an ability to respond quickly to situations—such as coming to your aid in a moment of need—or show unusual empathy to a friend, due to their strong emotional antennae.

So, Sunday we went to Grand Old Day in St. Paul. It was, to say the least…. ok, I guess. There was a tiny art show with an art car and a few craft booths, but other then that it was mostly bland modern music and booze. It truly was a sea of drunken college kids - though there were a couple of girls in bikinis in a kiddy-pool, so that was cool.

We ate at Grand Thai - it was mostly empty as the entrance was behind a large stand that sold lemonade and fried cheese curds. I order the Red Curry, hot, and was pleasantly surprised with just how good it was! It may be the best curry I’ve had to date - real fiery with an overall sweetness from the coconut milk that really cooled it down - I loved it. Mentally added it to my ‘list of places to go’.

Ever since I was wrenched from my bed early on Sunday to deal with some oncall issues at work, I just haven’t felt right - been sort of tired and a general ‘worn out’ feeling. Hopefully it fades for this weekend.

There’s a ton more to read - this was a real mental dump - click below to see it all.

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