Growing up, I had two heroes that helped to shape who I was and who I wanted to be when I got older: Albert Einstein and Carl Sagan. Geeks, to the highest order of magnitude to be sure, but they were also philosophers and poets and writers and men of peace and constructive thought. My step-dad bought me a book about Albert Einstein when I turned twelve, and on the inside cover of the six hundred page book (that I read several times within a few months), he wrote, “Einstein was not only smart, he was a man of principles and a man that searched for balance in all things. Don’t forget to strive for that, Andrew.” When I was twelve, the idea of balance in all things was mildly lost on me. I knew what he was trying to tell me, but at twelve, there was no need for balance. That’s what parents were for: to help me find my own equilibrium and eventually stand on my own. Or so I thought. I poured myself in to intellectual endeavors when I was young. I spent my spare time wandering through hospitals talking to doctors and nurses, lab technicians, and

Continue readingAnd I’ve been made a pet, chain one mile long, bleed me every hour, keep me from growing strong

Sometimes it’s good to speak, to say the things that we’ve held close to our hearts, to the things that we’ve never shared or would never dare share even in our most inebriated or vulnerable states. And just as equally, there are times when those same secrets, those same bits of information, those things that have helped define us or helped to hurt us, are damaging when they finally come spilling forward in an avalanche of last minute confessions. I don’t have much else to say. It seems the more I speak these days, the more I feel like becoming a mute. The problem with loving someone, whether it’s a spouse, significant other, family member, sibling, or parent; they’re really the only people that can inflict harm. And harm comes in incidental, unintentional ways. Not everyone is graced with the eloquence to know exactly what to say, how to say it, and when to say it. We all stumble along blindly, we do the best that we can, and we try to cling to the good things we perceive, even though they eventually fall in to the background. And what remains but the slings and arrows we’ve managed to accumulate,

Continue readingIf you throw it all away, you’ll spend tomorrow in bed all day. What I’d give to feel so young…

Notable philosophers over the centuries have believed that the soul was not something that you were born with– it was something you earned, something tangible that was gifted to you through trials and tribulations and suffering. I told a friend of mine that I don’t believe in the soul, and that if there is a hell, that I’m okay with going there for my disbelief. I’ve already been to hell, or very near it. It’s livable, manageable, so long as you realize that you don’t have any choice in whether you live in the dark or in the light. And really, it doesn’t matter which. A great poet once told me that there is very little difference between falling in the light and falling in the dark. Everything that is there in the light, will still hurt you in the dark. The only difference is the fear. And that’s how I’m feeling today. I feel like I’m groping around in the dark, waiting for another great fall. I’ve hit rock bottom in the center of my soul somewhere, and I’m scratching and clawing my way back up, just so I can fall down again. I only wish I knew where

Continue readingBreaking in to private places, blacking out so time erases

I managed to cram in a whopping hour or two of sleep tonight. I’m so far beyond exhausted that I’m having trouble holding my head up. I’m at that level of exhaustion that makes you feel like puking. And yet, my eyes refuse to stay shut. It usually starts to become unbearable at right around midnight or one o’clock. The voices in my head start swirling and talking faster. I can’t seem to hold a thought, and at the same time, I’m trying to hold a hundred different ones. I’m not sure why I’m having so much trouble tonight. Probably because I’m feeling vulnerable, and in turn, my self-destructive side thinks that I welcome the distraction from my problems. I don’t. I just hate it when people point out my faults, insecurities, and when they make it blatantly obvious in the ways that I’m failing them. And really, it’s my fault for failing them. It is. But there are ways of communicating that, and there are ways not to. So tonight I’m sitting on the couch, watching bad B movies and waiting for sunrise to come rescue me from myself. The wait is always long and the night always drags

Continue readingAnd in every woman’s man is a little boy that died

For over a week I’ve had nothing useful to say and to be honest, that’s probably a good thing. When I write, it’s generally when things are going wrong or things are bad or I’m just needing a place to rant and rave about the stupidity of others. In that sense, it has been a pretty decent nine or so days. So let’s talk about fear. And not just regular fear, but irrational fear. You know what that is. Everyone does and has some kind of fear that controls them. A fear that consumes them in some manner. A fear that would eat you alive if you hadn’t learned of some way (healthy or not) to deal with it. We tend to calls these types of fears “phobias”, even though a lot of fears wouldn’t normally be associated with a phobia. Merriam-webster describes a phobia as such: an exaggerated, usually inexplicable and illogical fear of a particular object, class of objects, or situation. Now think about that for a second. Have you ever been afraid of something and known, abstractly at least, that it was an irrational fear? Of course you have, and that qualifies as a phobia. Afraid of

Continue readingAshes and diamonds, foe and friend, we were all equal in the end

I wrote a blog entry a few days ago (see the blog entry just before this one) talking about how easy it is to make a big mistake in programming, and how one little character can screw everything up. I was talking about Microsoft’s latest patch to Internet Explorer because, as it turned out, they had added a single extra ‘&’ symbol on one line of code, and it ended up being a security vulnerability. Well, guess what happened to me today? I deal with some of the programming aspects of a search engine at work. There exists a search box, attached to a piece of code that generates a URL and sends data to the user. We noticed that when a person searched from one area of the program it worked fine, but from another, the results were empty. This was a bit of a WTF moment. Looking at the URL’s just a little while ago, I discovered the problem. I wanted to scream. Here are the URL’s, I’ve shortened them down from their insanely long length, down to these short lines below, just so you can see the insanity I’m dealing with. The Non-working URL: &site=PROD_oregon_IMT|PROD_TRG_IMT&output=xml_no_dtd The working

Continue readingIf I had a dollar each time you walked away from me, I’d be the richest man in the world

For the most part, my job is one of programmer and general systems tinkerer and repairer. I ran across an interesting write up of the latest Internet Explorer fix issued by Microsoft and, I have to say, it’s pretty much the archetype of what programmers like myself deal with every day. Okay, so if you haven’t heard, Microsoft released a patch for Internet Explorer 8 to resolve an exploit. What was the problem with the code? What huge mistake did some unnamed and faceless programmer make in the process of creating the code for Internet Explorer? He added an extra ampersand. One. A single ‘&’ symbol, and all their code came crashing down. I’ll explain but it’s going to get pretty geeky here in a second. Here’s the code in question: hr = pStream->Read((void*)&pbArray, (ULONG)cbSize, NULL); And here is the resulting code after the fix: hr = pStream->Read((void*)pbArray, (ULONG)cbSize, NULL); The extra ‘&’ character– which I’ve highlighted in the first line of vulnerable code– causes the code to write data, of size cbSize, to the address of the pointer to the array, pbArray, rather than write the data into the array itself. And that pointer is on the stack. Big problem. This

Continue readingIf you have to leave, I’m begging you please, go all the way to Mexico