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.

UPDATE: I didn’t write a follow-up on the day, but I did want to post my hand­out: How to Win Staffs and Influ­ence Inter­vie­wees. I hope it’s use­ful to young jour­nal­ists out there.

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!”