Scott Bush

I can tell from the volumes of e-mail from my legions of faithful readers that my prolonged absence in posts has caused great concern. Well, it’s not for lack of witty post ideas, but rather that I’ve been very sick.

Not sure where it came from (though I have an idea or two; I’m thinking of you, fellow co-worker who was a “trooper” and came to work when ill!) but I’m sure it was the flu. I had apathy the likes of which haven’t been seen since sported by teems during the early 90s grunge scene. This was accompanied by aches throughout my body and the sort of general malaise that causes you to moan, not because doing so was easier than talking, or because you’d allowed yourself to watch two back-to-back episodes of Two-and-Half Men, but simply because you felt so miserable it seemed appropriate to do so.

But after five miserable days wondering if I should be wishing for death (it was Easter, after all; oh, and I missed out on my in-law’s Easter brunch, too), I began to feel better. So, with any luck I’ll get some new posts up soon.

Crystal and I “dashed” through downtown Seattle this morning, one of about a million other Seattle-ites. At least it sure seemed that way, as you can see:

We got there early, about 8, to help at the Quadrant reception room. We didn’t do much there, as it was already handled. But we saw some of my coworkers before heading to the starting line. We had to wait for some time but we started out with cheers and a lot of excitement.

Some of the excitement was generated by this guy. Dedicated humanitarian helping his thirsty fellow Dashers? Or horrible perpetuator of Irish-as-drunks stereotype? You be the judge, but all I can say is people love him! He had tiny cups for folks to help themselves to beer or whiskey. The beer was real, I know, but the whiskey might not have been.

The weather cooperated with us this time so (unlike last year), with a brisk wind to cool us off and keep us motivated to move along.

We really were amazed at the energy level of the crowd and how much fun it was to be out there on the Seattle streets. People cheered when we started, whooped and hollered in the tunnels, and were friendly as we all jogged along. Plus the view was great from on top of the aging Alaskan Way viaduct. It was interesting (a euphemism for scary) to see how worn the road was… rebar was visible in many places. Stuff you never really see when driving over it. We took advantage of the view and snapped a shot of us, too.

At the end of the course was the obligatory finish line and a number of sponsor’s booths giving out freebies: energy drinks, cheese, potato chips, Starbucks coffee, and energy bars. All were well received by that time as we were pretty hungry.

But, we weren’t done yet. We had to walk back to our car at the Key Arena!

This is oddly compelling: reading the secrets people submit to a website with complete anonymity. It’s true. Check out Post Secret.

Part of what’s interesting is that the postcards upon which these confessors lay bare their secrets are handmade. Lots of collages, ransom-note style writing, interesting clip art, and many other unique and artistic ways to visualize their secrets.

It reminds me of a web project I was part of in during the heyday of the the dot-coms where any good idea would be soaked in venture-capital money. It was called Bdeep, and its purpose was to allow someone with a concern to invite their friends to “be deep” with them online. Here’s the premise: suppose you want to know what your friends and family really think about something you’re planning to do: get married, go back to school, join the army, get a tongue ring–whatever. You could just ask (but hey, it was the dot-com era and everything was going to the web!), but there’s always social niceties and worries about hurt feelings to get in the way.

Enter Bdeep: you go online, enter some info and set up your questions, then invite friends by their e-mail addresses to log on, answer the questions, and give honest feedback. The website would ensure anonymity of the responders by requiring multiple invitees and not alerting you about the responses until more than one had responded. (We had other ideas to prevent gaming of the system, too.) Of course, you couldn’t see all your friends’ deep feedback without paying a bit. (Hey, we weren’t in it for just the fun of it!).

Despite many meetings, a business plan, and a few revisions of the website, it never got off the ground. That’s mostly due to the constraints of family, school and the regular nine-to-five. But it sure was fun and exciting at the time.

Anyway… read PostSecrets and be glad you don’t have to pay to wallow in your voyeuristic tendencies.

A week from today, 15 March, I’ll be at the Washington Journalism Education Association’s (WJEA) state conference. As I’ve done the previous three years, I’ll be judging high-school students’ write-off entries, though I don’t know in what categories. (If I’m lucky, it’ll be newspaper layout; if not, it’ll be review writing or something else where nervous students accustomed to “txt”ing rather than writing with a pen on paper will scrawl a few near-illegible pages that we’ll have to first decipher before judging.)

What’s new this year is that I’ll be presenting. Exciting, but a bit scary. Last August I ran a few sessions at the WJEA’s Writes and Responsibilities conference, one of which could have gone much better. I hope–and expect–this to go much better. I’ve decided to stray from my usual design-themed topics and deal with the interpersonal. I’ve adapted a presentation I gave to technology workers at the UW’s College of Engineering based on Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People. This time, the presentation is called How to Win Staff and Influence Interviewees. Yeah, a bit of a stretch, I know. I’ll post it with my summary of how the day went in a few weeks.

If you’ve not read this book, you really should. It’s short and many summaries are available on the web. It really changed how I interact with people personally and professionally. It’s been most useful in dealing with people professionally, though. Winning people to my way of thinking and liberal use of people’s names goes a long way.

Exactly one year ago today was the last day I worked at the CESNW/Small Schools Project office in Greenlake. As a way to mark that occasion, I’m finishing a post that I began back then but failed to complete. It was an excellent place to work: an important mission, friendly and dedicated coworkers, and an exceptional view from my desk of the lake.

One of the coolest things I did as the Technology Director with CESNW/SSP was to set up a very robust and secure network. To be honest, this came only after a few months of very rough network problems (appearing on spam lists, frequent e-mail issues, etc.) and I had the very capable help of Dan Schwalbe of Doktor PC. The result was a very fine network, which I then mapped so it could be understood by anyone who would come after me (and, indeed, myself after a few weeks of not thinking about the network).

Hardware

The device that rescued us is from Soekris Engineering. Never heard of them? Neither had I or just about anyone else I asked. But Dan had, and we bought their mid-grade device: the net4801. It’s a solid-state, low-power, 586-class PC in a small box. We went this route after going through three consumer-grade wireless routers (two Linksys WRT45Gs and one D-Link something-or-other). They had pathetic logging capabilities, very limited flexibility in their firewall rules, terrible web-based user interfaces, and the damn things needed rebooting at least once a week. I tried upgrading the firmware, a frustrating IE-partial process (one version eve broke DHCP for Mac clients!) that didn’t help. The open-source DDRT firmware for the WRT45G looked promising, but I could never get it to load. These boxes may be fine for your two-computer setup at home, but they fail miserably at doing any serious work. But, that’s why they cost ~$50.

Software

We installed m0n0wall on the Soekris box to actually manage the network. M0n0wall is great because it offers all the functionality of a much more expensive router on a cheap box. It’s open source so it’s free, which is great especially when you have no budget (like SSP) but need the feature set to get certain things done that cheap routers don’t offer.

I configured the router to allocate two separate IP address ranges to wired and wireless connections. That way it would be easier to track where problems were coming from if they were to happen (they didn’t, though!). Also I set up a number of special rules to allow traffic on some ports through—like Appleshare and MeetingMaker—while everything else was blocked. Of course the whole object of setting up the router was to block spam being sent from our network so I blocked IMAP traffic (port 143 for those network nerds out there, though you probably already knew that) except for our outside mail server at Triversal, Earthlink, and a few other known-good mail servers.

The problem with setting this up was how to make sense of it all. For that I diagramed this SSP network infrastructure map [Update: I removed the link since it's probably not wise to advertise the network config, open ports, etc. on teh intarwebs. Trust me though, the map is cool.] to show what was blocked and what was allowed on each network. It was very helpful in keeping track of everything myself as well as explaining how the network is set up to those who are interested (sadly, there weren’t many ;-)

When I was a teenager, I had a game called Splatterhouse for the Turbografx 16. Crappy game, but my hormone-addled friends and I liked it for the “realism” of 16-bit video-game graphics (we also enjoyed 1991’s Andre Panza’s Kickboxing for the same reason, though that game had all the fast-paced action of Karate Champ and none of its excitement). Fast forward to today; I’ve turned in my game consoles for a wife whose sister-in-law is a forensic scientist for the Washington State Patrol.

Where am I going with this? Almost there.

I learned that the mess of blood at a crime scene left by bullets (or sometimes fists, crowbars, or other things) isn’t called blood splatter. It’s spatter, sans the l. The art and science of forensic discovery from blood patterns is called spatter. The font of all knowledge also reports that paint sprayed off a roller is called spatter, too, as is excess metal while welding.

Another of those oft-misconstrued words that is just accepted by everyone. Upon what evidence do I make that claim? Try searching Google for “blood spatter” and then again for “blood splatter.” Through some amazing feat of SEO, the results are nearly the same. Wikipedia’s entry appears for both, as does bloodspatter.com’s tutorial. Hats off to them, but I hope with this post is the first of many blows against the improper use of the term “splatter!”