Somehow, in between all the other things going on in my life at this moment, I managed to get another box up and running at home. I used an old hard drive that had been configured for a dual boot with Windows 98 and RedHat 9 (yeah, it’s been sitting around for a while.) I wiped the RH9 and installed Fedora Core 4, and kept the Win98 because I had personal files on it that I’d been meaning to pull out. Besides, I’m not planning on putting Windows XP on this box, I’m going to install Windows 2000 Server, just like the local server at work. I want to learn enough about Windows Active Directory so that I can figure out how to easily and painlessly configure a Linux client to connect to an MS network – and that’s a tall order! I actually got my partitioning scheme all set up and implemented and FC4 installed before I realized that Fedora Core 5 was released last month, so I had to do it all over again.

Of course, I have a cheapo PCI wireless network card for this box – this time, it’s a D-Link DWL-520 revision E1, which has a Prism 2.5 chipset. Once again, as it turns out, not a Linux-friendly card, so I’ve been learning a lot as I stubbornly plug away at getting it to connect to my wireless network at home. I thought that this time, it would be a lot easier because I could put into good use everything I learned by setting up the Hawking HWP-54G with the Ralink rt2500 chipset on my FC4 box (soon to be upgraded), but that wasn’t the case. The DWL-520 has no firmware, so it has to be flashed every time you boot.

With FC5 out so recently, there’s a paucity of help available in the forums, but it seemed worth it because the best advice I was getting on the solution for FC4 involved recompiling the kernel, and I don’t really feel ready for that yet, especially with a brand-new install of a new distro. Hell, there’s a whole new system of mounting floppy and cdrom drives, and when you don’t have a network connection, those are vital for transfering drivers and whatnot.

I’ve tinkered with it whenever I’ve had the chance, and taken pretty of good notes on what I’ve tried so I can write this all up, but when stuff doesn’t work even when you’re trying to follow directions, you end up trying all kinds of things just to see what happens, and you lose track of what you’ve done and what actually might have made a difference. So, of course, when I was mucking about today, I did something – I’m not sure what – and now it works like a charm. I don’t know whether it’s going to last past my next logoff, so I’ve used the new software updater, pup, to upgrade all my packages, but it’s a real long shot that it will work again after a reboot. At least I know it can be done, but getting it working is not enough – I have to know why it works, and what it took to get it working.

Posted by Greg as Hardware & Drivers, Networking at 18:26 PST

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This morning I met with the surgeon recommended by my oncologist, a Dr. Paul Goldfarb. He went through my medical and family history, and really started laying into me about my smoking. He said that I’ve dodged the bullet so far, and with my weight and smoking, plus the high cholesterol indicated by my niacin regimen, he basically told me I was going to keel over at 60, even without cancer coming back into my life. Now that I’ve had a few friends do so, plus the math – 60 is only twenty years away, and it means I’m already two thirds of the way through my life – this is starting to hit home. He recommended gradual reductions – half a pack a day for a month, then five cigarettes a day, then quitting – and I’m going to give it a try. He recommended against nicotine gum and patches on the grounds that they’re just as addictive and would only prolong the problem, and told me to use a cigarette case, filled daily, so I can’t easily cheat. He seemed impressed that I was able to take 1000 mg a day of niacin, and recommended Lipitor™; I told him I was using the flushless form, inositol hexanicotinate, and he asked where I found it. I really had to hunt for it myself – all the drug stores that I had checked out either didn’t have it, or had it in small quantities of 100 mg pills for exorbitant prices. You want to know where to find true flushless niacin, not time-release, in 500 mg pills for a reasonable price? Try the Walmart. I’ve found botttles of 60-count 500 mg capsules for less than five bucks under the Spring Valley label from Nature’s Bounty – which is cheaper than buying direct.

He also said my former surgeon, Dr. Michael McCue, had been very aggressive in my earlier treatment, much to my advantage, and I think that that had been part of the reasoning behind the “dodging the bullet” statement. My sentinel node biopsy had pulled one node out of each armpit after radioscintigraphy had indicated two sentinel nodes. The one from my left had a micrometastasis of only 0.1 mm diameter and the one from my left turned up a single cell. Initially, Dr. McCue had thought to go after only the nodes in my left armpit – removing lymph nodes from the armpit leaves you with a life-long high risk for edema, which could result in my arm swelling twice its size for up to a year, and it meant I shouldn’t have any restrictions on either arm, including short duration stuff like a tourniquet for blood-drawing or getting my blood pressure taken, and even wearing a watch was out. But during surgical boards, the consensus was to go after both sides. Good thing, too. After my bilateral axillary node dissection, I had seven nodes removed from my left, which all tested clear, and eight from my right, one of which had another micrometastasis.

So we decided to wait on getting a biopsy from the lump in my right chest until after my PET scan on Monday. He wanted the benefit of the undisturbed scan, which makes sense, and we’ll do the biopsy in the afternoon. If the lump is benign, I’ll be getting a relatively minor lumpectomy. If it’s melanoma, I’m up for getting a good chunk of my right pectoral muscle removed, and if it’s breast cancer, I’ll lose the nipple and any breast-like material above the muscle. Of course, if the PET scan reveals other metastases, the chest area might be the least of my worries. Stay tuned for Monday’s report.

Posted by Greg as Melanoma, Posts About Me at 13:53 PST

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To quote a bowl of petunias.

A couple of days ago, I was at work, slouched in my chair, scratching my chest, when I felt something that wasn’t supposed to be there. There was a lump in the fatty tissue over my right pectoral muscle – an area I cannot help but describe as my breast.

Normally, I wouldn’t be so concerned that this might be a metastasis of my old melanoma, because it’s not an area that I was lead to expect a metastasis would appear. I was under the impression that it would be more likely to happen in a blood-rich organ, such as the brain, lungs, liver, or so forth, and I just had a PET scan last October that said I was free of any sign of hypermetabolism. But that was six months ago, and I have a family history of breast cancer – maternal grandmother and an aunt – and a local tv personality here in San Diego just recently had a well-publicized case of male breast cancer. So I took the uncharacteristic step of actually going to see my doctor about it in less than a week.

My oncologist, Dr. Jurgen Kogler, a staid German gentleman, confirmed that there really was something there. He wants to check it out thoroughly. His words were guarded – he didn’t give any indication as to whether he thought it was more likely to be a melanoma metastasis, a completely different case of breast cancer, or merely some sort of benign growth. But his body language said differently. Normally calm and reserved, he practically paced around the examination room, and I could tell he was concerned. I got blood drawn right away, I have a consult with a surgeon tomorrow morning, and I’m scheduled for another PET scan for Monday morning.

Hopefully, this will turn out to be nothing important. My research indicates that melanoma metastasizing to the breast is very rare – I found one study of eight patients, all women, with a median time from original diagnosis to discovery of 62 months. It’s been 66 for me. And one case of it occurring in a man. So it behooves me to go through the various tests and wait for something definitive rather than worrying, but I did learned one thing – if it is melanoma, I have awfully dismal odds of living another five years.

I’ll be reporting further as I learn more.

Posted by Greg as Melanoma, Posts About Me at 00:27 PST

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On a recent post I casually mentioned that it was a good idea to search your own name in the Internet search engines every so often, so you can find out what’s out there about you and available to all. You want to do at least the top three – Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

Coincidentally, that point was made for me earlier today when I was reviewing my site visits and I saw a hit from Google using the name of an old boss and the company he still works for. Because I thought he would be interested, and just to catch up with him, I gave him a call to let him know. I had checked myself, and if you Googled the name of his company and his name, my site came out on top of the list. The original searcher must have been disappointed, because that wasn’t much else to find, and my hit was only a casual reference. A few hours later, someone entered exactly the same search terms from a different geographic location, so I figure it was Pete checking out what I had told him. Funny, I never would have pegged him for an Apple man.

One other thing I did tonight was check the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse website. Maybe all this stuff had gotten under my skin, but I was also checking to see if they’d put up an RSS feed yet. About a week or so ago I had corresponded with Beth Givens, the founder and director of that great organization, to ask her if they had any plans on putting up a feed, and she had seemed very interested. I really like their Alerts page, but I’d like to be able to catch anything new right away. I subscribe to feeds from EPIC, EFF, Privacy.org and DRM News that I check every day, and I’d like to add PRC to the list. While I was there, I saw an even better and more complete recommendation for checking readily available information on yourself. PRC recommends checking your credit history, medical records, bank account history, insurance claims, and public records in addition to search engines, and provides links for doing so. Yep – all this stuff is out there for the taking, and that doesn’t even begin to cover what the private data miners know about you! I went over to Slashdot to find a good recent article on those trolls, but there were so many about data mining, identity theft, phishing, and stupid government and civilian blunders revealing private information, you may as well go over and read them yourself if you’re interested.

All of this led to a must-post moment. I know I keep bringing this up, but my interest in personal privacy was born in the early eighties when I did a little bit of hacking myself and found out how easy it was, and knew then just how much easier it was going to get. Not so long ago, a friend of mine went missing and we were worried about whether he was lying dead in a ditch somewhere, and it only took me a couple of hours to find his bank account and social security numbers, and with that I was able to find his most recent ATM transactions and find out generally where he was, and I knew he was ok. He had just wanted some time to himself, but I think that I shouldn’t have been able to do what I did, and I only did it out of real concern.

But I know I’m picking a losing side. Government and private institutions just can’t keep pace with technology; and regulations, like gun laws, mean that only the bad guys will have access. I just hope, forlornly I’m afraid, that social acceptance of our personal peccadillos will follow at a rapid pace behind, because it’s not just how much we make and what we owe and own that is becoming knowable, it’s intimate details, like a credit card purchase in an adult bookstore, a cell phone call from a place you weren’t supposed to be, and what you were talking to that therapist about that is being compiled, archived, and available.

Oh – and by the way, folks – if you don’t want me to see every time you drop by, what pages you read, and how long you spend doing it, try subscribing to my feed. You can just click on the Bloglines or Feedburner images in my right sidebar. It’s been a long time, but I think if you don’t already have an account, they’ll start one up for you. Or, if you’re using Firefox, just add me as a live bookmark.

Posted by Greg as Society at 23:47 PST

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A visitor to my blog recently read my announcement that my site had been promoted to PageRank™ 4 and took the time to comment on my post, congratulating me and asking for tips. I always appreciate it when somebody comments on my blog, especially someone I don’t know IRL; to me, it’s like someone walking up and asking how my kids are doing.

I’ve learned that it is a bad idea to answer a comment with another comment – you can get into some interesting conversations, and it usually gets bypassed by other casual visitors because very few people actually click through to see the comments on a post. So when someone takes the time to post a comment, I want to respond as publicly as my little forum permits.

From what I’ve gleamed from my searches on the topic of search engine optimization, blogs have a natural advantage in the way that Google watches a website and assesses its PR. Google doesn’t like new sites appearing overnight with lots of outgoing links and plenty of incoming ones – it smacks of the sort of enterprise favored by spammers and SEO merchants. Search engines work when they find the results that their customers like, not what online mercenaries want them to find. So Google watches over time. They’re looking for sites that are updated on a regular basis, are judicious in posting links to other respectable sites, and acquire a steady and growing influx of links from other respectable sites. Too fast and you’re suspicious; too slow and you’re boring. It’s an assessment process that’s tailored, intentionally or unintentionally, for favoring independent blogs. You’ve really got to wonder how much credit for the rise of the blogosphere in the last decade, with its attendant growing respect from mainstream media and increasing access to newsmakers, can be attributed to the way Google assigns PageRank™.

And I don’t think it’s an unfair advantage. People turn to the technology of the Internet for information – it’s the modern equivalent of the the evolutionary importance of a steady food supply – but human beings are incredibly social animals. Given the choice between downloading pure information from an inhuman, unemotional source or having to return for dollops of earthy wisdom dispensed with some personality, I think the vast majority of us would take the latter every time. We can’t process huge amounts of information rapidly anyway, and I think that that the relationship between teacher and student is very significant in the progress of learning – for both participants. Blogs impart knowledge with personality, and I think people like that. I love listening to CarTalk on NPR for the self-deprecating humor every bit as much as the practical and useful knowledge they impart about my major means of transportation. Hell, I just love the way Tom and Ray laugh. It makes me feel good, and I keep coming back for that feeling, not because I have aspirations to becoming an auto mechanic.

So I’ve divulged my prejudices. Content is, of course, very important, but unless you’re aspiring to become a mass market media outlet, I think you should place very high importance on style. No, wait a minute – even them. Trust your instincts. I’ve tried to make my website look appealing to me, with a good balance of aesthetics – color, font size, the occasional graphic; and tried to make my efforts towards functionally unnoticeable. It leans towards the utilitarian, true, but I’m not a flashy guy, which I think is conveyed in my writings, so the visual theme fits. But then again, I even use html email occasionally, so I clearly have some concern for appearance. Correct spelling is essential, as is grammar. Grammar, I’ve found, is dialectical, so think about the way you want to construct your sentences and just stick with it. Tell everyone who criticizes you for it that they are snobs: then, as soon as you can, go look it up, and look for a consensus.

Traffic analysis is very helpful. Look for who came to your site, how they found it, including search engine and search terms, and whether they poked around a bit or left after the first hit. Try to imagine what these people where looking for and evaluate your site to see if it needs improvement for usability and interest.

I enjoy writing about technical issues, and I actively promoted that interest by searching for other sites that discuss the same issues, especially forums. If I felt I had something to add, I joined in and posted a link back to my site, and I’ve seen consistent traffic from those links. Get in touch with webmasters with similar interests and seek out mutual linking. It’s also important to be aware of where your visitors are coming from, and to consider the cultural contexts. It has encouraged me to talk in SI units, for instance, which I grew up with.

In closing, I’d like to say how pleased I am to be contacted by a member of the Oldham Cricket Club. Since I moved to the US and found it extremely difficult to watch quality cricket, I’m afraid I’ve degraded into becoming an avid American football fan (Go Chargers!) I still get excited, though, when I catch the odd ODI on late-night sports tv. I have very fond memories of watching my maternal grandfather, who was the wicketkeeper for the Highett Cricket Club in Victoria, where he was active for some 40 years. As a child, I was incredibly impressed by his hands – each finger was as thick as a banger. I’ve always wanted hands like my grandfather’s.

Posted by Greg as Family & Friends, My Website at 12:17 PST

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In my last post, I mentioned IBM and Sun Microsystems as supporting open-source solutions. I just got the news that there’s another large technology company that I can add to the list – Microsoft!

MS announced at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo that it was releasing its Virtual Server 2005 hypervisor product as a free download, and for the first time ever, was providing support for Linux, although it is limited to Red Hat and SuSE – two Linux distros that I have used. The technical press is buzzing (4 links), seeing the move as a catchup attempt to compete with the better quality and more established VMware and the fast-growing open-source solution Xen.

If that doesn’t make my case that it should be ok to integrate Linux clients into MS server networks, I don’t know what will. MS, by this move, is acknowledging that users increasingly want and need Linux, and that integration can be achieved.

Hmmm – now it makes sense that Microsoft came to my blog looking for FC4 driver information. They must be building a knowledgebase for support! MS isn’t including Fedora Core versions on the supported list, but if they’re out there searching for driver information, they might be planning on expanding their support.

Posted by Greg as My Website, OS at 14:33 PST

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Dane and Rayna Hershberger found recent posts on my blog that seemed to get them mightily indignant, based on his and her comments, which absolutely horrified me, because they’re my favorite IT people on the face of the planet, and I would never want to offend them. I’ve calmed down some from my initial panic because the first thing I did was pick up the phone and call them, as Dane expected.

Dane said he found my site by Googling his own name (something I’ve done on a regular basis since I discovered Google, and a practice I highly recommend if you have any concerns at all about privacy. The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse has an even more complete list of research you should do on yourself.) I guess getting mail from me in the past with an email address ending in this site’s moniker just didn’t pique his curiosity.

I guess my characterization of the reaction to Linux on the part of most Windows-certified network engineers is based primarily on my experience of their disdain, so I wasn’t surprised to see the MS-minion flavor of their comments, but I was hurt to think that Dane felt he needed to defend the work he put into almost single-handedly creating Corrpro’s WAN. He shouldn’t feel that way, and he should in no way interpret any comment I make as a criticism of his efforts. For the record, I think he, Rayna, and the other folks at the old Corrpro IT department (which was replaced by outsourcing to IIG, which has since been bought by TechniSource) did an awesome job, even without considering how few personnel they had and how hamstrung they where by limits on equipment and software expenditures. I think that if they wrote a book or a website about the experience, it would make a great field reference for other oppressed IT professionals to use as a guide.

Still, I’m not surprised that when the TechniSource folks came in, looked at the existing setup, decided that they had a lot of work to do “building an Enterprise class infrastructure.” Their position is probably flavored by their experience as consultants, coming into existing networks of all different types of configurations, and apparently they have the influence with Corrpro’s refinancing specialists to leverage the investment that the Hershbergers didn’t. I don’t know enough about the nuts and bolts of setting up a WAN to understand it all, so there’s no way I can judge (or even know) what they’re trying to do. I am, however, surprised that they consider the expired security certificate on the intranet site to be a low-priority item.

One thing in my postings that I will attempt to defend is my justification on why it did no harm for me to attempt to set up a Linux client on the MS network. I asked to do it on my own time and virtually without support. The only questions I was asked of IT was how their setup was configured – stuff like the name of the Kerberos realm, and why my Windows client always got the same ip address when it was set to DHCP. I don’t have network administration privileges, so nervousness about any damage I could have caused only reveals insecurity about the fundamental soundness of the system. When I couldn’t get my Linux client to require me to authenticate as system user with my first attempts, I backed off from the haphazard guidelines I had found on the Internet and set out to read and understand the entire Samba manual – all 900+ pages of it.

As to the question to I am so often confronted with – Why? I guess you had to grow up with Windows to be ignorant of the fact that some people have never used it and don’t want to. It’s for all practical purposes a different language. The GUI was stolen from Apple, who stole it from PARC, so there’s nothing new there. I had used several different operating systems before Windows was ever released, and I wasn’t impressed with it at all when it came out. Win95 came out before I stopped using the command line interface all the time on my 3.1 machine. I ran NDOS on top of my older DOS machines, so I didn’t see much advantage in point and click, especially when it crashed on a regular basis.

I’m willing to admit that Linux may have just as many security holes in it as Windows, but when you’re assessing risk, you have to factor in the probability of vulnerabilities being exploited, and the Windows vulnerabilities are too many and too well known. It’s one place in particular where the open-source model shines – vulnerabilities are published, and the patches are often available later the same day. Microsoft, if you’re lucky, will wait at least until their next monthly cycle, and there are plenty of known problems that have been sitting out there for months, going on to years. When I have to use Internet Explorer, I feel like I’m walking around naked with a “Do Me Up the Rear” sign on my back. For the bottom line on systems security, I’d have to defer to the opinion of the world’s biggest consumer of high-end secure systems – the NSA. What do they use? Hell, they wrote SELinux.

In a corporate environment, the whole idea of IT boils down to productivity. If I’m more productive and creative using Linux, why shouldn’t I be allowed to use it? Graphics design and art production houses would shudder at the idea of giving up their Macs because it’s what their people know best. As open-source solutions gain more and more acceptance, you’re going to see an increasing number of talented people who can crank work out on a Linux desktop, but fumble around in the dark when confronted with Windows. I’ve run across several applications that only work in Linux, and I’m going to start actively looking for them in preparation for my planned project request for my own IT Steering Committee. Open-source solutions have been embraced by such luminous names as IBM and Sun Microsystems, and governments around the world are trying it out. IBM has a redbook on migration to Linux that gives a great analysis of the reasons a corporation should consider doing so. If anything, voices like mine are driving the lumbering MS behemoth to be more responsive, and a good free-market conservative should be able to see that.

My little enterprise was along the lines of a pilot project, independent and self supporting, so I think it’s unfair to level criticism against it as opening the doors to anarchy. I guess I don’t see the case for uniformity. What are we trying to preserve? I’m not talking about changing the system, just the way I interact with it. I can provide my own hardware and driver support. All systems users are not equal – I’ve never manned a help desk, but I can see that. There already is a class system for users out there (and 90% are peasants!), and the systems have already been built to accommodate that. Even support systems are multi-tiered. In my small office, we have four different operating systems currently in use, all MS, each with its own quirks. For years, I couldn’t print in landscape to our color printer from my NT 4.0 machine, so I had to go to a different desktop to print charts. Yes, drivers are harder in Linux, but if you work at it, you can generally get things to perform, and you always learn something in the process. One thing I was offering was to write the howto on connecting a Linux box to the existing network. Based on my incoming and return traffic to my wireless card documentation, I think I’ve earned some credentials there. The beauty of the open-source system is that you can get a lot, and it only takes some people putting some back for it all to work.

I could get really worked up about all this, just as my esteemed friends could as well. I think both sides make valid points, but if we sink into debating the relative merits of our cases, we’re wasting our time. Everything is evolving faster than we can prepare our talking points, and the reality on the ground is not going to be changed by anything we say or do. In twenty, thirty, or a hundred years, the MS way might be looked back upon the way we look at the 19th century railroad companies today. I’m going to stop writing and go back to figuring out how to get my Prism2.5 chipset working under Fedora. Dane and Rayna can continue to shake their heads; I just hope they’ll still like me and keep in touch.

P.S. I put in a link to GreatMountain. Keep an eye on your PageRank!

P.P.S. If you guys used Mozilla, you could take advantage of the great SpellBound extension!

Posted by Greg as Family & Friends, My Website, OS at 23:44 PST

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I came into work Thursday morning, started logging in to the two computers I’m currently using, and launched Outlook on the one that wasn’t getting tweaked with Linux. There was new mail from my compadre in the IT department with the title “Corrpro & Linux”. Right away I knew it wasn’t going to be good, and sure enough, it started of with “I just had my talk with…” “…it didn’t go as well as we had hoped..”

Crash and burn.

Along with a set of perfectly reasonable and sensible explanations, I got the dreaded instructions to remove Linux from any company machine I had installed it on. I thought it had been too good to be true, and it was.

I don’t blame any of them wanting to steer clear of alternate operating systems – they’re all MS certified, MS has been their bread and butter, it’s the devil they know. The party line among their peers is that Linux is too difficult, to complicated, too much of a headache, and not necessary anyway. To be fair, I feel much the same way about protecting ductile iron from corrosion – there’s no way DI is magically exempt from the processes that affect all other metals; the tried-and-true methods of bonded, dielectric coating and cathodic protection would be the best way to protect it, and all those wackos out of DIPRA are just living in fantasy land thinking that polywrap is all that you need – they’re only so adamant because the polywrap solution is the only way they can be cost-competitive with coated steel or mortar-lined-and-coated steel. (Although I’ve witnessed some spectacular failures of polyethylene encasement, I’ve also seen ten-year old DI come out of brackish marsh soil looking brand new – but guess which story I’m more likely to tell.)

Hrmmp. Well, that comparison got as far as it’s going to get – Linux and my support of it are not the same as DI and DIPRA. (And there’s no way I’m going to link to them in any favorable light!)

I guess I had anticipated the reaction to even trying to use Linux. I had been thinking that I needed to put it all above-board; to file an official project request for a pilot project, and had been thinking about how to paint the whole thing as minimal or no cost to the company, offering substantial potential reward, and as sure to increase shareholder value as the sun will rise tomorrow. I have worried that I was going to get my new friend into trouble, and that our reckless tinkering was going to get the entire blame the next time the stock price took any dip, and that we would reinforce any reluctance to entertain the idea. **Sigh**

I’ve been feeling a lot of foreboding, accentuated by the coincidental appearance around the same time of Google Finance, with their page on Corrpro and its link to my blog. I’ve been waiting for the dam to burst, checking my access logs all the time, looking for the inbound flood of traffic because every employee has suddenly found out about it, and what was that blog with the sooo negative title, and who is this guy anyway? Some will come for the schadenfreude, others from the well-instilled reaction to put out any fire they see. Of course, most will come just because they’re desperately trying to figure out what the hell is going on, and whether they’re still going to have a job next month.

It’s funny in a way – even before this, I was starting to feel a little more positive about work. I had realized that the sky wasn’t going to come crashing down on us all when my boss left. I had actually gotten to meet and talk with some of the powers-that-be when they came tromping through; first, to make sure the office would continue to be the money-maker it had been, and second, to go to the NACE annual conference. I was starting to catch up with my backlog, and had finished a few reports that had just been sapping my strength whenever I looked at them, they had gotten so dreary. I had learned a few lessons from the experience, new important hazards to look out for, and how best to deal with them. I had exciting, challenging new stuff ahead of me, and I was getting back to finishing the coding project I had started so many months ago. I was seeing opportunities for the company and for myself. Lately, I been noticing that I’m now answering a lot more questions than I am asked, and I feel more sure about my answers.

I haven’t done myself any favors by describing myself as a maverick and a cowboy. I’ve nearly always tried to be a team player, not someone who thumbed their nose at authority and virtually challenged them to catch me at it. I’ve always enjoyed testing my limits, but always appreciated that firm hand steering me back in the right direction. I’m not someone who causes chaos just for fun.

So if you came here looking for what I have to say about Corrpro, and have read all of the posts I tagged, you should by now be getting the point that this is my blog, my online diary, so to speak. It’s not a CNBC analysis or criticism of an embattled company, not a whistleblower’s journal documenting [insert favorite fear here], not a diatribe against the corrosion industry’s “Evil Empire” (to quote Pete Lamb, a long-time Henkels and McCoy devotee, former boss, and Good Guy.) This blog is about me, what I find interesting, and what I think about it all. Corrpro is just a little part of my world, and after not being able to get back to sleep at three o’clock in the morning, right now it’s just a victim of my proclivity towards introspection, semi-colons, and run-on sentences.

Posted by Greg as OS, Posts About Me at 06:02 PST

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