The scene: The Ogden Theater, Friday the 28th. Andrew, Ian, and I were standing in the middle of the ground floor, next to the area with the sound and light boards. My ears were still ringing after hearing Kamelot's opening set, which was some serious fuckin' metal; they even played a couple of songs I recognized, "Ghost Opera" and "March of Mephisto." The stagehands were busy removing their equipment and preparing for the main act: Nightwish. This was the concert I'd been waiting for. I'd even spotted Marco out in the alley earlier, as I was waiting in line for the will-call window; he was busy filming an interview of some sort.

Suddenly, two familiar figures appeared on stage: Tuomas Holopainen, the keyboardist and composer for the band, and Troy Donockley, the piper that featured so heavily as a guest on Imaginaerum, and before that, on "The Islander" and "Last of the Wilds." The room erupted in cheers.

Tuomas raised a finger to his lips, signaling for quiet. (He doesn't speak much in public.)

"That means a lot to us," said Troy, before launching into the bad news: Anette, the lead singer, was very sick, had been violently vomiting, and was being rushed over to the hospital as we speak. However, a backup plan of sorts was being worked out. Elise Ryd, backup vocalist for Kamelot, had volunteered to step in and sing what she could, and the band would count on our help with the rest. He put it to a show of hands. I raised both my hands; the theater was a sea of raised hands.

The crowd had spoken. The show would go on.

Now, sometimes, incidents like this result in disaster.

But sometimes--sometimes--this is when magic happens.

So, John Scalzi got this weird idea to put each letter of the alphabet into his Web browser and see what Autocomplete came up with for each letter. Hmm, wonder what happens if I do that?

A - Agony Unleashed, an EVE Online corporation that specializes in training people to fly PvP. That's one thing I can't do; I may need the class...

B - Billboard.com. This is probably related to that news story I put in Quick Hits about Def Leppard.

C - CaptainAwkward.com. I ran across this advice site via Scalzi, in fact, and it made some interesting reading.

D - Divine Ascension's web site. I'll be wearing one of their T-shirts to the Nightwish concert. Their lead guitarist, Karl Szulik, was the one that mailed it to me all the way from Australia.

E - Wikipedia (from the "en." at the beginning of their domain name meaning the English version). Come on, you know you get sucked into this site, too.

F - Facebook.  Love it or hate it, you can't ignore it.  Zuckered again...

G - Gravatar.com.  I think this beat out Google because I was trying to check something related to my login there.

H - Ham Radio Outlet's Web site.  There's a store not to far from where I live. Last thing I bought from there was a power supply for Sabrina's dad...

I - Second Life's OpenID Web site, id.secondlife.com.  Don't ask me why...

J - Jamie Zawinski's web site.  Old time hacker turned nightclub impresario.  Also in the blogroll.

K - KittyHooch.com, makers of fine high-grade Oregon catnip toys for your cat.  Penny loves it.

L - Lewisiana.nl, a site with essays about C.S. Lewis.  Includes keys to obscure references found in the Space Trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength).

M - My Coke Rewards.  This must be its way of guilt-tripping me into entering the codes from all those bottle tops, right?

N - Nightwish's Web site.  No explanation necessary. \m/

O - Optical Masters, the office where I get my eye exams and contacts.

P - Popehat.  Though I haven't put it into bookmarks, I still visit it frequently...and even blogrolled it.

Q - Quora.  Amazing, the mileage I've gotten out of some of the answers I've given to questions there...

R - The Raspberry Pi Foundation.  Unsurprising, since I've been visiting it regularly since I decided to plunk down the $35 and get a Model B.  This will no doubt make for some blog material later.

S - Subversion's Web site at Apache.  This stems from the "setup" post I did, where I wanted to get everything linked.  Oddly enough, a friend of mine used to own the actual subversion.com domain...she used it for advertising her goth club, called "Resurrection."

T - The Oatmeal.  Funny as hell, and awesome as hell for raising a shit-ton of money to build a Nikola Tesla museum on the site of his Wardenclyffe laboratory.

U - The Setup (usesthis.com).  They put my aforementioned "setup" post in their "Community" section.  They are awesome; check them out.

V - The old Web site for the Venice Web Communities System at SourceForge.  I really, really, really need to rewrite that one of these days...

W - Wil Wheaton's Web site.  He's just this guy, you know?  Oh, and don't be a dick.

X - XKCD.  I agree with Scalzi here, stick figures ARE awesome.

Y - "You Didn't Build That," a Tumblr site devoted to mocking a certain infamous quote from a certain Hussein al-Chicago.  It seems to have languished recently, though.  Guess the joke has gotten old by now.

Z - ZeroHedge, one of the two sites I depend on for the real lowdown on financial news.

Try it for yourself!

• Def Leppard, engaged in a dispute with their former label Universal Music Group over digital royalties from their classic hits, have gone back into the studio to re-record those hits and make those tracks available for download. They've released two so far: "Rock of Ages" (from Photograph) and "Pour Some Sugar On Me" (from Hysteria). I downloaded them; they have more of a "classic rock" sound than the originals, and the production quality is very good, even if Joe Elliot can't quite do the screams anymore. Overall, the best new recordings of 80's music since Journey brought in Arnel Pineda as their lead singer. Recommended.


• Hey, I take computer security seriously--I went through a bunch of security training recently at IQNavigator--but this is ridiculous.  (And a satire, obviously. Via JWZ.)


• Recently, I kept the Weather Channel Desktop app from installing the Ask Toolbar on Sabrina's laptop. Toolbars, in general, are pretty synonymous with "viruses" these days, as this Cracked article will tell you. The Ask Toolbar, in particular, does some pretty underhanded things. In brief: avoid. (The latter article comes via Jeff.)


• If you want to have a look at some deep magic, code-wise, Fabien Sanglard is your guy. He has code reviews up for the code behind Doom 3 and Quake III Arena, among many other things. (All of which is now open source. WIN.) He also has an article on there about doing 3D graphics in Java using LWJGL...the same library Minecraft uses.


• The More You Know: Sometimes you may actually have a legitimate reason to send a takedown notice or a DMCA notice to a Web site. Ken at Popehat offers his advice for doing so while minimizing the risk that your request will go viral and bring the Streisand Effect into play. Basically: don't be a dickhead.


• Amazon, which previously fought against paying state sales taxes, seems to have reversed their stance. But why? This Slate article alleges that what they really want to do is set up same-day delivery warehouses everywhere. If they can make it work, this will bury most retailers. (Don't worry, Sabrina, I'm sure Walmart will survive...)


• Some of these might make good new additions to ESR's Jargon File. (HT: Several IQNavigator developers.)


• What. The. Fuck. Portland school sees racism in peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. The school principal asks us to think, "What about Somali or Hispanic students, who might not eat sandwiches?" Seriously, what the fucking fuck? Last I heard, anybody could eat a sandwich if they want one. I swear, some of these libiots could find "racism" in a dial tone. (And I'm sure they'll think I'm racist, too, for pointing this out, because shut up, you racist racisty racist!)


• This one's making the rounds: An official Playboy Club Bunny Manual, circa 1968. We could have used this with our club hostesses in Second Life...although, even though Playboy Bunny costumes are available, to my knowledge, no one has done a proper animation of the Bunny Dip.


• Some people will do anything to get attention for their startup...even show up at a major trade show crossdressed in a wedding dress. Cofounder Duncan Seay is pitching the new wedding app from his company Evergram (which, despite the name, is not a mashup of Evernote and Instagram), which may in fact be a good idea. But I really don't think he should have gone strapless here, and that train's a bit long for a trade show floor.


• One of the engineers from the Raspberry Pi Foundation writes on Wired.com about the tradeoffs that went into making the $35 credit-card-sized computer, which forced them to "sellout a little to sell a lot." So far, the marketplace seems to have validated their decisions. I have one, and will be engaged in some experimentation with it.


• Chris and Melody Byrne have been adopted by a stray kitten...not long after Chris got a massive dose of radioactive iodine to combat thyroid cancer. The cat seems to like Chris; I hope she doesn't absorb too much of his radioactivity, as radioactive cats have 18 half-lives. (Rimshot!)

Inspired by the interview site, The Setup, where people talk about the stuff they use to get things done.

Who are you, and what do you do?

I'm Eric J. Bowersox, frequently known as "Erbo," and I code. Presently, I work for IQNavigator Inc. of Greenwood Village, CO, where I work on their application for "buying services better" (management of contract and temporary labor for Fortune 500 companies), which is Java-based on an Oracle/WebLogic platform. My main focus of late has been on client integrations. Before that, I've had a wide variety of programming jobs, in fields ranging from software configuration management to finance to computer-based training to supercomputer clusters to telecommunications. I also did a stint at Durand Communications during the Internet Bubble heyday, where I worked on online community-management software. We were the ones that acquired the Electric Minds community...and, after we were ourselves acquired and decided to shut down the CommunityWare platform that EMinds ran on, I personally wrote a replacement work-alike platform (the Venice Community Management System) to keep the community alive on its own server for years afterward. (It later faltered due to hardware failure and something of a falling-out among the community.) Besides publishing about my exploits on social media, I have From The Erbo Files, a Roller-based blog.

I live in Denver, with my fiancee Sabrina, and our cat, Her Serene Highness, Princess Penelope Ponderosa Pollyanna Peachfuzz ("Penny" to her hoomans). When I'm not coding, I do a lot of reading and a lot of gaming...not to mention a lot of driving. Fortunately, I like my 2011 Ford Taurus. Oh, and I argue conservative politics on occasion.

What hardware do you use?

My personal desktop machine is a custom-built job, as it has been since my first PC-XT back in 1989. Its current configuration is based around an ASUS M4A79XTD EVO motherboard, slightly dated yet versatile. It holds an AMD Phenom II X6 1100T hex-core processor and 16 gigs of RAM; these upgrades were motivated by my desire to compile Android from source. An nVidia GeForce GTX 560 drives a pair of Acer 21-inch displays; with the 19" LCD TV immediately to their left, my computer desk somewhat resembles the bridge of the USS Enterprise. The system has three physical hard drives and two optical drives, which may seem excessive, but there's a method to my madness. Since I dual-boot the machine, I felt the safest configuration was one that gave each OS its own physical spindle, plus one that contains "data" partitions for both, to keep an OS upgrade from hosing critical data. As for the optical drives, one is a read-only DVD drive, the other is a DVD burner, to give me the capability to do physical copies direct without imaging. The keyboard and mouse are gaming-oriented; a Logitech G19 keyboard complete with its own built-in LCD, and a Corsair Vengeance M60 gaming mouse. (I used to use a WarMouse Meta, but, despite the appeal of 18 buttons, the thing felt cheaply built and started breaking down under heavy use; the Corsair is more solid.) And, while I stick with the motherboard's onboard sound, I do run it through a decent speaker system, a Cambridge SoundWorks PCWorks subwoofer-satellite system. (When I need a headset, I use a Sennheiser PC131. Sennheiser is my headphone brand of choice; I picked that up from my ex-wife.)

I run a local server, too, shared with Sabrina for file storage purposes, and also to give me a development server and testbed. This machine is basically a standard "cheap" Compaq tower; the only modification I made to it was to pull out the stock hard drive and install dual 1-terabyte disks, most of which are devoted to a RAID-1 mirrored data partition. I first used this configuration style when setting up our "new" Electric Minds server, and it saved our bacon on several occasions, so I went with it here, too.

My personal laptop is an ASUS K501 I picked up from Best Buy when I was flush with bonus money; it may not be much, but it works pretty well for my purposes. It has 4 gigs of RAM, a Pentium T4500 dual-core CPU, and a 500-gig drive that I repartitioned to dual-boot.

At IQNavigator, all our "workstations" are Dell laptop machines with docking stations; this makes it easy to haul our machines into a meeting or take work home, and, among developers, it encourages ad hoc pair programming as needed. The one they issued me is a Dell Latitude E6410, sporting an Intel Core i5 quad-core CPU and 8 gigs of RAM. Developers get an SSD drive, primarily because that's the only way we can get a build of the software in any reasonable amount of time. The dock on my desk connects to a pair of Acer monitors and a proper keyboard and mouse, as well as the wired Ethernet; we have wireless for when we're in meetings or otherwise away from our desks, too.

I also have a number of pieces of hardware I use for testing, special purposes, or just goofing around: an OLPC XO-1 from the One Laptop Per Child project, a Google Cr-48 Chromebook, a Barnes & Noble Nook Color (which I use as both an E-reader and a jackleg Android tablet), and a Raspberry Pi. And, finally, one of the most useful pieces of hardware I have is, of course, my iPhone 4S 64 Gb.

And the software?

Linux predominates among the OSs I use; it's the sole OS on three of the above-named devices, dual-boots with Windows on two of them, and Linux variants (Chrome OS and Android) run two more. The distribution varies, though. The desktop and personal laptop use Ubuntu, and were just upgraded from 10.04 to 12.04 recently; the new user interface took some getting used to, but I don't anticipate any real problems. The server uses CentOS, with which I was very familiar during my years working on supercomputers (it was the default distro we shipped on cluster nodes, unless a customer really wanted to pay for Red Hat or SuSE). The OLPC, of course, uses its own Fedora variant with the custom "Sugar" user interface, and the Pi uses the standard "Raspbian" Debian distro for ARM (for the moment, anyway--you can change out the entire software environment of the Pi by just changing its SD card).

The machines that run Windows all run Windows 7 64-bit. I will not upgrade to Windows 8 if I can possibly help it; Microsoft has completely crapped up the user interface on "regular" computers in order to try and make it look better on tablets. To me, this is the wrong approach; tablets is tablets and PCs is PCs, and never the twain shall meet. But Windows 7 is pretty much "the new XP" around here. We completely skipped the Vista debacle, and have no regrets about doing so. Perhaps the odd-numbered Windows releases are the better ones, in the same way the even-numbered Star Trek films were better...

The Nook Color is a special case. Its built-in OS is a variant of Android 2.2 Froyo with a custom UI...but the hardware can boot a different OS on a MicroSD card without touching the onboard flash. This I have done; I have custom boot cards for Android 2.3 Gingerbread and Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. Both are the CyanogenMod versions of the OS, so they're fairly stock with some useful add-ons.

As you might imagine, I've standardized on Google Chrome as my browser of choice, and I use a number of pieces of the Google ecosystem as well, such as GMail and Google Drive. My standardized office suite is OpenOffice.org, possibly becoming LibreOffice soon. For a "local" mail client to manage my ISP mail account (which runs through my server, using Postfix, Dovecot, and Fetchmail), I use Thunderbird on Windows and Evolution on Linux. Of course, at work, they've bought heavily into the Microsoft ecosystem; it's all Office 2007 and Outlook, all the time. (Which we're actually running through Office 365 these days.) At least they don't force us to use Internet Asploder, except for certain sites that require it; our standard browser is actually Firefox.

Increasingly, I've found myself using a number of cloud-based services to handle various tasks. Besides the aforementioned GMail and Google Drive, I use Evernote and Dropbox frequently. (This entry is being written in Evernote as a draft, for instance.) I haven't really done a lot with iCloud, though it's attached to my phone, of course.

And now, development tools. My main line these days is Java, and I use Eclipse as my Java development environment. It wasn't always so; I've done a hell of a lot of work in multiple languages with just Emacs. But Eclipse has proven itself well-suited to my professional and personal Java development needs. Though Emacs is available for Windows, when I need an editor that's more powerful than Notepad, I use the open-source Programmer's Notepad. It reminds me pleasantly of the old CodeWright editor. I also have Microsoft Visual Studio, but I don't really do any Windows-specific development these days. Version control, of course, I have strong opinions about, given that I used to work on systems like that from the inside. My usual baseline is Subversion these days, though I developed an attachment to Mercurial in a previous job...but at IQNavigator, it was back to Subversion. And I really need to learn more Git.

For graphics, I find The GIMP suits my needs well enough, as well as Inkscape for vector-based graphics. For audio work, Audacity works for me. And, when I need to run virtual machines, it's in VirtualBox. You can tell I have a strong preference for open-source applications.

For some reason, when it comes to accessing Second Life, I'm not as adventurous; I usually use the bog-standard Linden Labs viewer, though I have used the Phoenix Viewer in certain circumstances.

On my phone, besides having obvious apps that act as extensions of services or Web sites I use elsewhere, I have other apps that took over for things I used to use my older phone or Palm PDA for. Because I have a lot of passwords, a key app I use is mSecure, a password manager application that works on both the desktop and phone, synchronizes via Dropbox, and stores everything encrypted with a master password key. Also worthy of note is Gas Cubby, an app that keeps track of my car's gas mileage and expenses.

What would be your dream setup?

It would probably be built around an Emperor 1510 ergonomic work environment from MWE Labs, or perhaps the Emperor 200, though I'd want to change out the specs of the included PC. Those babies have overhead monitor arms that can support three 24" displays. Throw in a high-end surround-sound speaker setup, and you've essentially got the ultimate gaming/coding environment. But I'd want this work environment to be located in a workshop/laboratory like Jeff's, so I'd have benches and other facilities for doing hardware experimentation.

As for the computer at the core of this system? Stuff it full of as many CPU cores, as much RAM, and as many disks as you can manage; boot it off an SSD for added speed. Dual-boot it, of course. ;Then hook it via Gigabit Ethernet to a big NAS for even more storage, and to a rack full of servers to act as my own private supercomputer cluster (or OpenSimulator grid, whichever). Throw in a powerful Ultrabook I could dual-boot, and a powerful Mac of some sort (Macbook, Mini, iMac, doesn't matter) so I could try my hand at iOS coding. And throw some nice hardware Sabrina's way, too, so she doesn't get jealous.

I may never get around to doing a full report on our vacation that we took in July, but I do want to write about a few things from that trip...especially the second day, when we visited the Kansas Cosmosphere in Hutchinson, KS. And, if you're a space buff like me, you need to visit it. Let's just say it's everything I hoped it would be...and more.

When we got there, it was pretty early, so the foyer (dominated by an SR-71 Blackbird and a mock-up of the side of the Shuttle Endeavour) was pretty empty. When I paid for our "All-Day Mission Passes," they were even nice enough to scrounge up a motor scooter for Sabrina, not unlike the carts she rides through the aisles of Walmart, so she could enjoy everything, too. We took the elevator downstairs to The Hall of Space, which covers aspects of spaceflight from the German V-1 and V-2 programs up through to the present day, with examples of real hardware or very-exacting replicas all along the way...including many examples of Soviet hardware, such as an unflown backup for the original Sputnik satellite and original Vostok and Voskhod capsules. American hardware is also well-represented, with such items as Gus Grissom's Liberty Bell 7 capsule (dredged up from the ocean floor and painstakingly restored), the Gemini X capsule, an honest-to-God Titan II booster rising majestically into the Kansas sky in an outdoor display, and the Odyssey command module from Apollo 13. That area, I think, impressed me the most, and was about where I started to inwardly lose my shit; aside from looking right into Odyssey, past the control panel and seats into the lower equipment bay, I entered one of the original Apollo "white rooms," complete with the signature of longtime pad leader Gunther Wendt ("I vonder vhere Gunther Wendt?", and sat at some of the original Mission Control consoles...It felt like I was watching The Right Stuff and Apollo 13 all over again. Unlike most of the people walking through these halls, I knew what I was looking at. It really brought home to me how much we've accomplished...and how much we've lost as short-sighted politicians continually prioritize other things ahead of the dreams of humanity.

The cheeseburgers in the Lunar Port food court were surprisingly good, at least as good as some I'd eaten in Hana on Maui. We saw the Tornado Alley IMAX movie, in a domed theater like that back at the Reuben H. Fleet Space Theatre in San Diego, and it was most impressive; Sabrina certainly liked it. (Featuring narration by Bill Paxton!) She also got a kick out of the planetarium show, demonstrating the night sky as viewed in all seasons from Hutchinson, which was narrated with plenty of good humor and leavened with some nice pop music clips, including Clint Black's rendition of Monty Python's "Galaxy Song." Then, in "Dr. Goddard's Lab," we got some impressive explanations and live demonstrations of rocket technology, delivered with all the zeal of a Mythbusters episode by a young man who clearly has a lot of knowledge of, and love for, the material. I spent entirely too much on souvenirs and gifts in the Cargo Bay gift shop, which was totally worth it, and nearly ran my iPhone's batteries dead taking about half a gigabyte worth of pictures. All mission objectives complete!

I can't even begin to describe everything there. You need to go there and see for yourself. But, until then, I've assembled an extensive album of pictures, on Facebook and annotated for your enlightenment, that you can gawk at. Thatisall.