Geeky Bob

I've decided that I'm voting for this guy this year...

Don't put him down as arrogant. (Unlike some other candidates,)

PS - Yeah, sure he's Canadian, but since when has a lack of citizenship slowed down anyone's chances for candidacy?

After careful consideration, I have decided that Geddy Lee of Rush is actually a time traveling musical genius who was also posing as the nineteenth century composer Jacques Offenbach... That would explain why Rush named one of their last tours "Time Machine" and their plethora of science fiction lyrics over the years...

Geddy Lee or Jacques Offenbach? You decide.

This was an advertisement on Facebook today - seriously? Asking people to "upgrade" to Windows XP? That's like asking smart phone users to upgrade to rotary dial.

One of the things about being an ubergeek is setting up a full Active Directory Domain to manage all of the computers in my house and running my own proxy server to provide Internet access for our home network. I am currently using Microsoft's Threat Management Gateway (TMG), and before that I was using Microsoft's Internet Security and Acceleration (ISA) Server - both of which have allowed me to do some fun things.

For example, for one whole year I intercepted all requests for the Google website and sent them to a website which I had created that looked and acted like Google but used the Bing API to provide the results. (No one could tell the difference, and I eventually wrote a blog about my experiment called Fun with Search Engines.)

At other times I would intercept my kids' Internet requests and send them to a "Your Internet is Turned Off" page when they failed to complete their chores; this was often met with much grumbling on their part. (Although one of my daughters learned how to pirate a neighbor's unsecured WiFi connection, and I was too proud of her ingenuity to get upset at her for skirting around the house rules.)

Running my own proxy server was good for accountability, too: I created a program which crawled all of the proxy server logs and created detailed reports that were dumped in a public share so everyone in the family could see where everyone else was browsing. (I'm a parent - so there is no such thing as "Private Browsing" in my house.)

That being said, I recently ran into a situation where I felt it necessary to interfere with the Internet for a few days. I had seen too many people post spoilers on Facebook about who died on The Walking Dead, and my wife saw too many spoilers about what was happening on Downton Abbey. With that in mind, when Star Wars VII  was hitting the theaters, I decided that I needed to block Facebook for a few days.

But I couldn't just "block" Facebook, I needed to have fun with it... so I did this - I sent all requests for Facebook to the following page until my wife and I had a chance to see Star Wars:

http://www.geekybob.com/star-wars-warning.htm

Yeah, it's a really simple script - but it did the trick. ;-)

I just re-discovered this story: my son was a senior in high school when he flew to San Francisco on a choir trip. And even though his flight was leaving Seattle around the same time as a flight which I was taking somewhere else, he didn't want to ride to the airport with me. His exact words were, "I'd rather go with people that I can talk to." (This is a teenage way of saying that I was just not cool enough to be part of his entourage.)

However, after I had arrived at the airport and was calmly waiting for my flight to depart, my wife called to tell me that our son realized when he arrived at the airport that he had left his boarding pass and all of his money for the trip at home. I called my son, who informed me that he had already picked up a new boarding pass from the airline, but he didn't have a way to get the money from home. Feeling sorry for him and ignoring his earlier diss about the ride, I agreed to drop by an ATM and pick up some cash to give my son at his gate, which was in a different terminal of the SEATAC airport.

After finding the nearest ATM and withdrawing the requisite funds, I headed off to catch the airport tram to the terminal where my son was waiting for me. I was already en-route to his location when a thought suddenly dawned on me: why in the world was I hand-carrying the cash all the way to his gate, when he was the one who had forgotten everything?

Once that notion had registered completely in my mind, I called my son and told him to walk to the tram station in his terminal and meet me there. As the tram pulled into the stop near his gate, I saw my son and one of his friends waiting patiently for me to arrive. I hopped off the tram, gave my son the cash, took a quick photo of him, and then hopped back on the tram before the doors were able to close - mission accomplished.

In the end I may have saved the day, but I still wasn't cool enough to give my son a ride to the airport.