The complete flatline on this blog means I’ve obviously been a little busy lately. The good news is that I’m pretty much done with my UCLA Extension certificate program – I’m taking one last JavaScript class right now, but everything else is done.

The bad news is that in order to actually get someone to hire me, I need to start writing applications that will easily indicate to people who are doing the hiring, “See, I know what I’m doing even though I have no professional experience with this!”

This is, as you might imagine, a little time-consuming.

I also have been working on a bunch of other projects, including updating Designated Nerd, my tech consulting/programming website, which is going to get a lot crazier in the months to come. Lots of back-end stuff I need to work on, but we’ll see how it all goes.

I’ll probably post a bit more here when I’ve got some real, published projects to show off, or when something colossally awesome/stupid happens to me.

But for now, I’m just going to have to put up the “PARDON OUR DUST” banner.

I’d been backing up my entire hard drive off-site for the last couple years with Mozy, mostly because I’m paranoid about an earthquake destroying both my main and backup drives, though other issues like fire or theft are probably more likely.

I liked their service. It was simple, it worked solidly, and the price for unlimited backup was pretty reasonable. And then.

There was some fooferal today because Mozy decided to can their unlimited service, and introduce tiered data pricing. I couldn’t remember quite how much I had backed up with them, so I went to check and see exactly how much it was, remembering it was around 100GB.

Huh, I thought when I looked at at my data total. Why is it only 80MB?

Turns out when I installed an update to the Mozy Mac client shortly before I left for Spain in early December, it wiped out all of my backup settings. The only thing that was being backed up for almost two months was my calendar database.

This, as you can imagine, severely pissed me off.

I hadn’t bothered to check that the Mozy client was backing up what I’d told it to backup because that’s just not a setting you think a company’s own software would obliterate, especially after being solid for 2 years.

But somehow, they managed to do it, and I was left flapping in the breeze until the end of Unlimited backup made me actually look at how much (or more accurately, how little) data I had been storing with them.

I chatted with one agent who told me that the files were still on the server, and if I reset my backup settings it would realize what files were already backed up, and only upload the files that were necessary.

When I got a newer version of the backup software up and running, I checked to see how big the upload was going to be. 133 GB, or basically, the entire contents of my hard drive, an upload that would take days at best.

A second agent attempted to reassure me that no, the data really was there, it would compare what was already on the server to what my software was trying to upload and the full upload wouldn’t be anywhere near 133GB.

And I realized: I didn’t believe him. I COULDN’T believe him because his company’s product had fucked up so, so badly that there was no way I could trust what they were telling their employees and in turn their employees were telling me.

I couldn’t trust that what I thought I’d backed up was actually there, and I couldn’t trust that anything I would back up in the future would ever be there. Online backup software is based primarily on trust, and they’d completely blown it.

So I canceled my account, and started the sloooooow process of re-uploading all my data to one of their competitors.

To their credit, Mozy didn’t put up a fight about refunding me the money I paid for December and January, and they offered their apologies. I said thanks, but I really hoped that whatever idiot let that code out into the wild got fired.

I did not add, though I was thoroughly tempted to, “out of a cannon.”

Clearly, I’m ready to start school  next week with the goal of getting a Masters’ in Computer Science when I failed so hard at researching my new monitor/TV combo for the bedroom that I ordered one that can’t be controlled by a goddamn remote.

I took one guy’s statement in a review about being able to control the volume with the remote to mean it was the volume on the monitor, but after trying and failing to get my remote set up, I went back and realized he was controlling the volume through his Home Theater PC, not his actual monitor. The monitor doesn’t even have an IR receiver. Oops.

I’m super, super excited to pay the return shipping and restocking fees that dumbass move earned. I’m still debating if I want to order a different one online or break down and rejoin Costco for their far more generous return policy.

At least I had two better pieces of technology news today, which helped mitigate my expensive stupidity:

1) I got my iPhone replaced for free after the lock button finally died completely, 10 days before the warranty ran out. I won’t go into the details because it got a bit complicated, but hey, brand refurbished phone!

2) I got my new dual-network setup up and running with a minimum of issues, so now I have my regular network and my N-Only network ,which is SUPER fast and means I can transfer files about three times faster than I could before. Basically, I can transfer an SD episode of Futurama in its entirety in 2 minutes. Win!

Warning to regular readers of this blog: SEVERE Nerd Alert.

A lot of folks I know who started their blogs out on Blogger have used HaloScan for commenting since before Blogger implemented comments. Since HaloScan is shutting down in the next few days, you’d think you might want to move all your old comments to Blogger.

Good luck.

There’s really no practical reason why someone at Blogger can’t write some sort of comments parser to handle the XML files that HaloScan spits out, but so far, they haven’t. If you want to get it done right now, the only way I found to make it work is a ridiculously cumbersome process.

Basically, that process is to import everything into a WordPress blog where it can all be properly combined, then re-export it, run it through python script, and upload it back into Blogger.

I’ve decided to write up the entire procedure I went through both as an exercise in writing documentation and in order to help anyone else who’s crazy enough to want to try this. If you think you have the patience for this (or would just like to see exactly how insane I am), hit the “read the rest” link that follows.

Read the rest…

Thanks to Haloscan’s decision to shut down, I’ve finally been able to get all my comments out of their system for free. Took a lot of tweaking my old Blogger stuff and a bunch of help from this awesome Haloscan on Blogger > WordPress script and its author, but I managed to get 1413 of 1420 comments transferred.

And frankly, I’m not going looking for the seven comments that didn’t make it. I feel like a 99.5% success rate on something this complicated is good enough, particularly given how much time I already sank into getting it this far.

But the good news is there are now comments going back to 2003, about a year after I started this blog. It’s kind of amazing to realize that although posting has fallen off substantially over time, I’ve been writing this blog for almost eight years.

Since I clearly don’t already have enough outlets for my one-liners on the internet between this creaky old blog and Facebook, I broke down and started posting on Twitter.

Like most internet things I eventually get into, I resisted for quite a while, not quite seeing the point of it until some of my friends who seemed to get it faster really got into it.

But I think after following a few people for a bit, I see where a fun space for it lies between a blog and Facebook and a direct line from my brain to the internet.

Plus, I’ve been functionally unemployed since March. There’s really only so long you can resist a complete time-killer like Twitter when you’re unemployed for months at a time.

We’ll see how I get the hang of it over the next few weeks, but the good news is that the limits of the format dictate that even when what I post is not amusing, it’ll at least be short.

I haven’t actually managed to make New Year’s Resolutions in a couple of years. I was so tied up in Chaplin being sick last year that all I could manage to get out was this post, a sentiment I’m tempted to share again this year.

For some reason, though, I’m not as angry. Probably helps that Chaplin is sleeping on my feet right now and not in an animal hospital, doped to the gills and recovering from surgery.

Probably helps that I’ve finally made a decision to move forward on getting out of showbiz. Probably helps that I feel like I’m on the right path, trying to learn something new instead of just flailing around.

I also think I’m done with actual weight resolutions – I’ve lost 86 pounds and would like to lose the 14 more that would a) take me to an even 100 and b) put me at a BMI of 25, but I feel like that’s going to be a long, frustrating process that’s not really worth making New Year’s Resolutions over. Better to focus on time goals that, while promoting weight loss, feel somewhat more achievable in the space of a year.

So, in the hopes that publicly stating what I want to do this year will give me some motivation to actually do it, my New Year’s Resolutions:

1. Finish redesigning my damn website by the end of January.

The blog is actually fine – it’s the main site that’s a travesty, not updated since 2003. I’ve taken about four stabs at redesigns that have never actually launched, and I am completely out of excuses for why it hasn’t. Happening by the end of January, dammit.

2. Lower my 10k elliptical time to consistently under an hour.

The frustrating part about this is that my ability to do this varies from machine to machine – I’ve actually done this on a couple of machines, but on the machine I use regularly, I’ll need to cut a minute a mile off my time to make it happen. I think over a year, I can do it.

3. Lower my 2 mile swim time to under 1 hour 10 minutes, and start swimming 4km from time to time.

4km is about 3/4km farther than 2 miles. I want to be swimming 5k’s at some point, but I know I’ve got to get my stamina back up quite a bit from where it is now – having the flu absolutely killed a lot of the progress I made this year in terms of building up stamina. Just got to keep putting down the building blocks.

4. Learn as many new programming languages as possible, with the goal of having a working iPhone application before I go back to school in September.

I’m going to be doing a lot of self-directed learning over the next few months, so I think I need to set a goal to give me some motivation to actually get off my ass and learn things. I think I’ve got a good idea for a program, so we’ll see how it goes.

5. Remember that if my plans and resolutions don’t work out, there are always more plans to be made.

I’m already moving from Plan B (TV mogul) to Plan C (professional nerd), and Plan C has many sub-plans of its own. I just have to remember to keep going with the flow, and try to make enough money to keep myself and Chaplin fed and sheltered in the meantime.

And that’s it. Hopefully everyone has a fun evening tonight, and hopefully 2010 starts off with a nice Northwestern Outback bowl win tomorrow morning, and next year we get into an even better bowl that doesn’t start at eight in the goddamn morning.

Happy New Year!

Until I was about 21, I thought I was going to be a rock star.

Until I was 28, I thought I was going to make movies and TV for a living.

Until I was ____, I thought I was going to be a professional computer nerd.

—

Life has taken a lot of twists and turns for me since the writers’ strike of 2007-2008. Since that strike began on November 5, 2007, I have spent almost twelve of these last 24 months unemployed.

Part of that was the strike. Part of that was my decision to move into the production line and out of working directly for producers, which is an inherently more volatile career path.

But much of it has been the way the bottom has absolutely fallen out of filming in L.A. The combination of the strike starting a rearrangement of the way the business works and the economy in general going down the tubes has contributed to a precipitous drop in filming here. There’s just no work.

I realized a couple months ago as I was making my bajillionth phone call looking for work that I have not received one phone call back since June. June was also my last interview, for a job I had locked down until an actor decided to put in a good word for his niece, and then she had it locked down.

I’ve offered to take PA jobs again, but they’re not looking to take someone with as much experience in higher-up jobs as I have. In some cases, they think it’s because I think I’m above the scut work (which I don’t, I wouldn’t be applying for a PA job if I did), and in some cases, it seems they think I’ll outshine them (with the people who are insecure enough to actually worry about this, that might be a more valid concern).

Everywhere I look in terms of what my skills can get me in the entertainment business, I either see jobs that are so severely overworked and underpaid that I would rather work at Starbucks again than take them, because at least at Starbucks I would get health insurance, or nothing at all.

And frankly, the way things are going right now with the economy and the out-of-state filming incentives and the studios and networks freaking the fuck out about every last penny, I don’t see that scenario changing in the next 18-24 months at the absolute earliest.

Sometimes, you just wake up and realize that the universe is trying to tell you something. And the universe is telling me it’s time to do something else with my life.

—

And now, a brief comic interlude:

Click to enlarge.

From Amazing Super Powers.

—

I’ve always been a pop-culture nerd, but I wasn’t a serious computer nerd until the last 3-4 years. I learned some HTML programming in college, and really enjoyed it, but the complete time-sink that is working in entertainment pulled me off the track that would have kept me learning more about programming.

While the primary technical things that I’ve done in the last few years have involved technical troubleshooting and working as an ad-hoc IT Guy, what I really want to learn about is how to make computers do what I want them to.

And to do that, I need to learn how to program. I need to learn about architecture and C++ and the vagaries of programming for different platforms. I really want to learn how to take some ideas I have for programs and turn them into reality, from start to finish.

This, however, will require a fair amount of school. Right now I’m on step 0.1, taking some very basic classes at the community college level, trying to figure out exactly where my interests take me in terms of how I want to program.

My ultimate goal is a Masters’ in Computer Science. I’m in the middle of a choose-your-own-adventure bit of figuring out how that’s going to happen, but I do know that I’m sure as shit not going back to school just to get a second Bachelor’s.

I’m putting together an application to Stanford to start next fall, since a) they have an extraordinarily strong program and b) they are one of the only well-respected Graduate-level CS programs that will actually accept people who don’t have a CS undergrad background as long as they’re willing to learn.

It’s an extremely competitive program, so I have a fairly comprehensive backup plan standing by. I’ll get into it at some point down the road if need be.

If I do somehow manage to get into Stanford, however, I expect to hear a lot of this [note: mp3 link].

—

I’ve talked to a fair number of you guys about all this in differing degrees of depth, but I felt like I really needed to try and bring everything together in one place, almost more for my own purposes than to try and clarify it for everyone else.

I certainly won’t say I’m never working in entertainment again. If someone offered me a job right now that would help me keep my union health insurance even a bit longer, I’d take it in a second. But I don’t see my future in production anymore, and that’s where things have changed.

This is a path that’s been slowly coalescing over the last few months, and has picked up a lot of steam since about Labor day, when I finally accepted that I probably wouldn’t work in entertainment for much of the rest of the year.

It took a long time for the pieces to come together well enough for me to see them, but once they did, my way forward became much, much clearer. I’ve got a plan, or really a bunch of plans all leading in the same direction.

Now all I have to do is try and figure out how to get there from here.

Nothing quite so brick-shitting as the drive with a clone of your main hard drive up and dying just as you need to reimport its contents onto your main hard drive after doing a clean install of a new operating system.

Thank Jeebus I’m paranoid and made a second backup on a different disk before I blew away the main drive. That’s what’s reimporting to my computer at the moment. If I didn’t have that, I’d be completely screwed.

What kills me is that I’d just gotten the computer to boot off the cloned drive half an hour earlier, and there were zero signs the drive was about to die. Second I hooked it up after installing Snow Leopard, it started clicking and refusing to spin up, dead as a doornail.

Now I just have to hope to hell this copy works right when it’s done importing in…1 hour and 15 minutes.

Edit, 2am: Couple nasty bugs in the 10.6.0 version that took me a while and a bunch of Googling to squash, but I think I’ve got the nastiest issues squared away. And even if I don’t…I’m going to bed.

Well, I’m now pretty damn glad I got the iPhone.

I’m leaving tomorrow to visit dad and Ray Ann in Idaho and of course, last night one of the speakers on my laptop decided it didn’t want to go on the trip.

A few seconds of popping, and then an unbelievably high pitched squealing that did not stop until I turned the computer off were all I needed to send me running to the Apple store.

I knew I was probably going to lose the computer for a few days for the repair, so I ran a backup and went to do one final sync of my iPhone…and the whole thing went nuts.

The phone didn’t sync right, I had to restore from a backup, the whole thing was just so annoying. Luckily after considerable fiddling I got it to work, but I was still re-syncing all my music when I got to the Apple store.

The speaker was pretty clearly a hardware issue, so they’re going to fix it. Of course, it’s a 5-7 day turnaround, so I just sucked it up and handed over my computer, asking them to run every diagnostic they has so if anything else was screwy, it’d at least get fixed now.

Godspeed, little computer.

So now I get to have another laptop-less vacation because of a hardware issue (my video card crapped out at Christmas, if you recall).

I think this one will be a little more survivable for 2 reasons – the iPhone is considerably easier to use as a standalone device than the crackberry was, and the fact that it’s Idaho instead of Connecticut also helps.

It’s biking and hiking and fishing and rafting, and not sitting and eating and sitting and eating. It’s the fact that I’m driving and can hop in my own car if my folks start to drive me nuts and just go out.

All that to say: I’m off to Vegas tomorrow morning, then up to Idaho on Wednesday. Hope you all have a good week, and I apologize if I’m slightly incommunicado.