Sunday of my Life

In my previous post I said that we were going to dinner tonight at my Aunt’s house, with my Dad’s side of the family. It turns out the other night when my grandmother was taken to hospital these plans were changed since the dinner was cancelled. Instead we went to dinner at the christmas party my grandparents on my Mother’s side were throwing. The entire Pickersgill clan was in attendance, as they always are. I had a rip-roaring time. These people I like. These people I’m comfortable with. These people are more truly my family than the brash, arrogant loud-mouths on my Dad’s side (how someone who can be as quiet as my Father can came from that family I’ll never know). SAlmost everyone on my Mother’s side prepares their speciality dish for this annual event. The food is copious, varied and all absolutely wonderful. Everyone, whether directly or indirectly, at some point learns how to cook from my Grandmother, Mary. Her patience, skill and instinct shows through in each of us that learn from her, and that truly shines as we all cook the Christmas Feast.

We drive out through Pakenham, through Korrumburra, right up into the mountains, to the property my grandparents, Bert and Mary, live on up in Mount Eccles. We enter the hill country, and that smell drifts in through the window; the smell of mown and threshed hay, of cold, clear air, of the forests and mountains, of the cattle and the sheep, the woodsmoke of the homstead fires. That smell is plugged directly into my brain, and it triggers something inside. I take a deep breath, and a thought floats through my brain: I’m home…

I really couldn’t tell you about everything I did tonight… there’s simply too much for it. I rough-housed with my uncle Andrew, the one closest to my age at only 28. I ran through the long grass with my younger cousins. I taught yo-yo tricks to a couple of them, and how to get the best sleep times out of their yo-yos. I talked, boy did I ever talk, about anything and everything with everyone. My uncle Andrew, who is also a Network Administrator, told me how proud he was of me with how much I’d learned this past year. In the midst of all of this, I floated on a sea, awash with sensation. I felt loved, and wanted, and appreciated… like I haven’t in a long time now. All my cares, all my worries; they all simply melted away, and I was truly home among these wonderful people of my family.

I’m not sure if I really can put it into words properly. It’s one of those things you have to feel to appreciate it. It was a wonderful feeling to me though, and presented a ray of hope in my existance that I hadn’t realised I had before now. These people know me; they know my faults, they know my weaknesses and they know me at my worst. Yet still they love me, despite all. They see good in me and they cherish that. It bring a tear to my eye, just the thought of it. Thinking on it I realise that I’ve short-changed someone else in this position too… someone who has been there for me through all of my bad times in the past year. Someone who has, at times, had to beat my complete lack of worthlessness into my stubborn head, who has put up with alot and never complained about it, who has always been willing to listen to me, and to offer good, right and practical advice. At this Yule period, I would like to offer my thanks and my love to you, Dorothea Salo, my friend, my confidante, my webhost, my anchor. Without you I would have gone mad long ago, without you I probably would have never recognsied my depression for what it is, an illness that has a cure, and done something about it. You helped me pick up the pieces of my life and kick myself out of my rut. You deserve far, far more in the way of thanks than I could ever give you, so I’ll leave it at that.

That’s all from me for tonight folks. Y’all have a merry Christmas, or Hanukkah, Kwanza, Yule, Ramadan or whatever the hell else you decide to celebrate at this time of year. Appreciate what you’ve got, becuase it’s all worth having.

Point the First: I wish all readers of SoML a very merry Christmas and a happy new year.

It had indeed been a good day, thus far. A great breakfast with the family consisting of ham, eggs and spinach and riccotta pastries, seeing Monica again after 12 months of seperation (seeing Scott again too, but I won’t let that put a dampener on things), recieving well thought-out gifts from family and friends… it’s a great time I tell you. Thus far my aquisitions consist of these:

• Undeniably The Whitlams: The second Whitlams album ever produced, although this technically counts as the fourth since it’s the remastered version. Many many songs I haven’t heard before.
• Eternal Nightcap: Fifth of the Whitlams albums, this one i’ve heard before but I’ve never owned a copy of it. This combined with the last one leaves me back firmly in the territory of Whitlams fandom heaven.
• Various articles of clothing: They fit, they’re stylish, and I didn’t have to go shopping for them. A good buy all ’round.
• Red Dwarf Season 5: Gotta love the Boys from the Dwarf, and season 5 contains a few of my favourite episodes.
• Tenacious D: The Complete Masterworks: I love Tenacious D, and Jack Black’s very weird comedy can always bring a smile to my face, so my sister’s decided they’d seen far too little of that over the past year… sweet girls they are, really.
• The Simpsons Go To Hollywood: Another DVD of Simpsons episodes. I’m nothing without my daily dose of Matt Groening’s madcap characters.
• The Castle: Poolroom Edition: One of the most famous movies in Australia, I doubt if there’s a resident who hasn’t seen it. Story of an absolute battler who fights to keep his house against the compulsory aquisition tactics of the government, who wish to expand the nearby airport. I love tihs movie, always have, since the moment I first saw it, right to this day.

Tha’ts about it for this installment of it… tonight we go to my Aunt’s place to have dinner with my Dad’s side of the family. I will not, though, let that put a dampener on my mood. I’ve had a good day thus far, and come hell or high water I will continue to have a good day.

Merry Christmas y’all… have a good one.

Well, this has been a stressful evening, playing hob with my nerves. I will apologise now for any spelling errors in here, I do not have the inclination to proof-read right now, and I am finding it somewhere difficult to type straight.

7:30 AM
Went Christmas shopping today. I love to give gifts to people, brings a warm glow to my heart, but damn I hate shopping for them, and I hate the big shopping centres (Americans would call them Malls, but that’s what we call them, so there). Fountain Gate, the closest major one to us, is crowded, noisy and close. Christmas shopping crowds are the worst, and when we got to K-Mart at 8AM to go to lay-by and pick some stuff up, the queue was already extended outside the lay-by department and down past several aisles of shelves. We left Peta standing in the queue while went and did the rest of the K-Mart related purchases (several DVDs for my part), and then stood in the queue with her. This marked the beginning of a series of runs to various shops to buy various things, and stops at other places on the way there. My mother and second-elder sister are browsers. They may go in with a list of what they need to get, but they can and will stop and look at unnecessary and inconsequential things and chew up more time doing that than they will shopping for what they need. Christmas shopping gets on my nerves, if you hadn’t already guessed, so this habit of their’s serves to make me slightly irritable.

12:00 PM
Getting home, finally, to a stinking hot house. The town where I live, despite the fact it’s 60 meters above sea-level, used to be swampland. During summer’s heats this means high levels of humidity and mosquitoes galore. The lack of sleep I had last night (my nightmares have returned, so my sleep has been erratic, at best) coupled with this high heat and air thicker than treacle had my fuse shortened right down to a stub. I decided to take a nap to try and clear myself up. So, laying down on my bed with a fan on me, I closed my eyes and was quickly asleep. I awoke about 3 hours later, laying on soaked sheets, sweat dripping off me. My fan wasn’t running, and the hot afternoon sun was beating on my closed curtains. The air in my room was stifling, my thermometer informed me that it was 43 degrees in my bedroom. Turns out we had a power failure around an hour before I woke up. I got out of my bedroom as quick as I could, opening my window and leaving the door open, praying a breze while I got a drink and took a cold shower.

8 PM
The power came back on while I was in the shower, and the fan had managed to pull air into my room fast neough ot cool it down considerably, and the sun moved onwards, so I lay back down and went back to sleep. I got up again at 7:30, sweating again, so I took another shower. Emerging from it feeling considerably better I walked out into the lounge-room to find my mother desperately hunting for something. The keys to my grandmother’s house. As some of you may know my grandmother recently completed a course of radio- and chemo-therapy. my grandmother lives in a bungalow in our backyard, and my mother had been hanging some washing out when she heard an almight thump from inside her house. Upon getting the keys for my mother we went in and found my grandmother unconcious on the ground.

First Aid Me took over and we get her into the recovery position, checked vitals and finally got her revived. She was dizzy, sweating and nauseous so we called upon the services of the St. John’s Ambulance Service and packed her up and sent her off to Dandenong Hospital for observation, hopefully only over night. Now, we only live maybe a 1km from the Ambulance Station, but we still waited nearly 45 minutes for an ambulance. There was me, drawing funny looks from passers-by as I paced on the pathway outside our house, waiting for them. I was ignoring all else though, only concentrating on trying to mentally make them hurry up and hoping that my grandmother was ok. Finally they arrived, and they cheked her out and were about ot leave hwen she collapsed again, so they took her to hospital, and my mother went with them. So there I am now, at home, alone, and I feel this almighty ache in my hands.

unbeknownst to myself I had been biting my knuckles, as is my wont when I am upset. I’m surprised the Ambos didn’t notice them, I was bleeding from several points on my hands where my teeth had penetrated the skin. I disinfected and bound the cuts, then soaked my hands in cold water for a while to help relieve some of the ache and get the bruising over with.

Silly me

So I was in therapy yesterday and (yes, I know what you’re thinking: ‘You? In therapy? Naaah… get out of here… I’d never have pictured you as the type that would need therapy!’) my psychiatrist said something to me that struck echoes deep inside, and they’ve been bouncing around until just now.

“At the risk of heading down the wrong track, there was a computer game once called ‘Alone in the Dark’. What it was about is unimportant, but think about that name. That seems to be where your fear centres. You are afraid not of being alone, and not of the dark alone, but the both together.”

And, frankly, at the time I was thinking ‘You’re a very intelligent guy, and I respect you, but what a load of codswallop.” But I listen, with both my ears, and I took it in, and I let it settle. My hour was soon up, anyway, and away off home I went. It took a day and a night (there was night, and there was morning, and that was the Monday) but something pinged at me earlier today, and I suddenly realised simply how right he was. The only time my fear of the dark has overwhlemed me is when I’m alone. I know you could say that that’s the way alot of fears go, and you’d be right, but I feel that it means something in this case. Erin draws it a little further, however.

She has it that when I’m alone in the dark I’m disconnected from all references to my reality. Essentially I can’t see what’s coming, or what’s been. So what I fear then is the unknown. I feel that this, too, is correct. A big one for knowing what’s going on I am. So much so that it does form the very basis of what I use to create my reality around myself. So when I’m alone in the dark there’s nothing to reference myself against…

Yes, it does fit. It fits very well in fact. I shall have to speak to Mr. Psychiatrist about this next week (or when I can next afford to see him. $90 a session… hefty, but I afford it becuase I have to.) and see what he says. I will say this: it is a Good Thing to have a sister who’s trained as a psychologist. Sjhe may not be able to take you on as a client for ethical reasons, but that doesn’t stop her giving advice and listening to you. That’s one of the things I’ve always loved about Erin, she’d always, always ready to listen when I need to talk.

Anger

It’s a useless emotion, really. It doesn’t gain us anything, but costs us a lot. We feel it at any number of moments, for any number of reasons, and in the end the results are the same. We are left empty by it, abandoned by the burning fires of its passion. We feel it, it becomes us, a part of who we are, and then it passes. Occasionally it doesn’t, however, and we are changed, but the change is never for the good. In the end anger changes us all, if we let it rage unchecked, and we become something none of us would like to admit is inside of us. The raging beast, ready to do anything to sate the lust of anger.

Why, you may ask (and quite rightly so), am I prattling on at you like this tonight? Becuase not all that long ago a friend of mine pointed my own anger out to me, and had pointed out to me any number of times in the past how useless such anger is. Only tonight did I actually realise how right she is. Those who know me know I have three sisters. The one just above me, Erin, I am closest to. She, and my mother, are what I compare people I meet to, becuase to me they are the epitome of all that is right. The eldest of them is Monica, simultaneously one of the most mature and carefree people I know. I don’t see as much of Monica these days as I’d like to, she lives interstate now and it’s been nearly 12 months since I last saw her.

In between these two is Peta. Peta has the capacity to be both mature and childish, as the mood takes her. She’s both generous and selfish. All things considered she’s a good person, good to her friends. But she seems to lack one thing: a sense of familial ownership. She’s very good with knowing what’s hers, and with people outside the family very good with knowing what’s not hers. When it comes to family members although, to her everything is owned in common… sort of. She knows two things, it seems. Mine and Yours, and to her everything owned by a family member is Mine. This tends to get up my nose, so it does. Tonight she took over my computer becuase she wanted to go music surfing and try and find a swag-or-so of Christmas Carols. Normally I wouldn’t mind, that’s why she has an account on my computer. But she didn’t ask me, she just logged me off, closing down what I was working on (my resumé… I count that to be fairly important) and failing to save it, then logging herself in and refusing to let me back on here for 4 hours. That got me angry, and as I sat there and brooded something prodded me in the back of the brain.

Damn… it said to me You’re being silly, boy! It’s a computer, and it will still be there once she goes home again. Build a bridge why don’t you!

And it was right. It pains me to admit it, even to myself, but I was being silly about it. So I let her do what she was doing, and complete it and go home, and I was polite and brotherly to her. I don’t know if anyone else will look at it this way, but to me I feel like I’ve managed to take another step forward, and perhaps now things look a little brighter to me.

It’s over.

Today I had my last exam, handed in my last piece of work, got my marks and it’s all over. My first year of Network Engineering is completed, and (to my own surprise if no one else’s) completed very successfully. Topping my class in several areas. Yes, I was surprised about that.

This year has seen its ups and it’s seen its downs. So, basically, it was just another year. Made some new friends though, Drewboy, Kralc, Jéson, others… enjoyed myself despite the bad points and, at times, despite myself. Will I come back next year and do the next certification? Continue onwards into the third year and get my double advanced diploma in Network Engineering and Internetworking?

On both counts Hell Yes

At Drewboy’s place today, tutoring in the noble art of subnetting. I am a geek, this is well established fact by now, so in the best traditional or nerds and geeks everywhere, I’m going to explain something to y’all whether you want to know it or not.

And God said unto Nigel and Tania ‘Go forth and multiply by binary bit powers’

The very basis of subnetting, as in almost anything to do with IP addressing, if Binary. Base 2 numbering at its finest. Converting between Base 10 (decimal, or everyday numbers as most know them) is surprisingly easy. Any Base 10 whole number can be converted to Binary using a simple sequence of divisions by 2.

Example
Since we’re working in whole numbers your divisions will either have a remainder of 1 or 0, this is what you use to define your Binary bit string.
210 in Binary
210 / 2 = 105 rem. 1
105 / 2 = 52 rem. 1
52 / 2 = 26 rem. 0
26 / 2 = 13 rem. 1
13 / 2 = 6 rem. 0
6 / 2 = 3 rem. 0
3 / 2 = 1 rem. 1
1 / 2 = 0 rem. 0

Can you see it? You divide by 2 as many times as you can, taking only whole divisions into account, until you divide by 2 and turn up a division answer of 0. There you stop. The remainders are your Binary number. So 210 in Binary is 11010010. Let’s try another one, a larger number this time

2365 in Binary
2365 / 2 = 1182 rem. 1
1182 / 2 = 591 rem. 0
591 / 2 = 295 rem. 1
295 / 2 = 147 rem. 1
147 / 2 = 73 rem. 1
73 / 2 = 46 rem. 1
46 / 2 = 23 rem. 0
23 / 2 = 11 rem. 1
11 / 2 = 5 rem. 1
5 / 2 = 2 rem. 1
2 / 2 = 1 rem. 0
1 / 2 = 0 rem. 1

so 2365 in Binary is 101111011101

Marvelous, eh?

Onwards into subnetting…

‘Why would you want to subnet?’, people may ask, ‘if a Class A private IP address provides for over 65 million useable IP addresses, why woud you bother?’. Well, true, it does, but the reasons for subnetting go far beyond this. Subnetting detracts from the number of available hosts, but allows you to have more than one network that acts totally independant of the others. It allows you to segment your network without any hardware, isolating sensitive equipment on its own network so that no one without proper authorisation can go through the routers to get to it.

OK then, so how do we go about subnetting? Well, first some basic principals of IP addresses need to be understood. IP addresses consist of four groups of decimal numbers seperated by dots. None of the numbers is below 0 or above 255. In Binary they consist of eight Binary numbers each. For this reason they are called octets. There are three classes of IP address, Class A, Class B and Class C (there are also Class D and E, but neither of these is subnettable). The first octet is what tells us what class we are in. If it is between 1 and 127 we’re in Class A, between 128 and 191 and we’re in Class B and between 192 and 223 we’re in Class C. Each of these classes has a default subnet mask, called the subnetless mask. For Class A it’s 255.0.0.0, for Class B it’s 255.255.0.0, and for Class C it’s 255.255.255.0. These masks form the basis of our subnetted masks. Anything set to 255 is totally given over to networks, anything set to 0 is available for us to subnet.

When we’re subnetting we borrow a certain number of bits from the host portion of the subnet mask and use them as part of the network portion. If we were working with the Class C IP address 192.168.0.0 we could borrow 4 bits from the hosts and create 16 extra networks. However the basis rule of subnetting, 2ⁿ - 2 ensures that only 14 of these new networks is useable (2⁴ - 2 = 14). So we’ve borrowed four bits, and our default subnet mask in Binary which was 11111111.1111111.1111111.00000000 has changed to reflect this. It now reads 11111111.11111111.11111111.11110000

So now we have 4 ones where once we had 4 zeros, what does this mean to us? To us it means that we split our allowable bits where ones meet zeros. That last octet is, to us, 1111|0000.

The next step is to determine your new subnet mask. You’ve just added another four bits to it, so obviously you can’t have the same one as the default. In a Binary IP Octet there are 8 place values according to 2⁰, 2¹, 2² and so on up to 7. 0 to 7, eight bits. In order from left to right (Binary works from right to left, but we read from left to right, so we’ll stick with that for now) these place values then become 128, 64, 32, 16, 8, 4, 2 and 1. So if we have ones under 128, 64, 32 and 16 then we have to add all of those up and detemrine the decimal number from them. So 128 + 64 + 32 + 16 = 240. So our new Subnet Mask is 255.255.255.240

Armed with this subnet mask we can then move on and work out some subnet addresses. All networks start at 0 when you’re working with the subnetless masks, and such is the case here. The first network starts at 0, but then where does our next network start? This,like the mask, is simple to work out. 0 through 255, the lower and upper limits of the IP Octet range, give us our answer. Between them is 256 numbers. If we subtract our new subnet mask, 240, from 256 we get the incrimental value of our subnets, 16. So 0 is our first network, 16 our next, 32 the third, 48 the fourth and so on until we reach 255. The 0, 16 and so on is our Network Number, the IP that defines the network we’re on, and so cannot be used to support a host. The same is true for the number before them, 15, 31, 47 and so on. These are the broadcast addresses for each of the networks. Messages sent to this IP are picked up by all hosts on the network. Since these two addresses are unusable this is where we get the -2 part of the Subnet rule 2ⁿ - 2. This rule leaves us with 14 useable hosts on each subnetwork.

Say our requirements call for the host range for the 2^nd subnetwork and the 10th host on the 3^rd, how would we get these? Easy too, the same way we got everything else. The host range is simply the first and last useable hosts on the specified network. So the second subnetwork, as previously stated, starts at 16, but we cannot use this, so our first useable host is 192.168.0.17. The last useable host is just as simple: if the next network is 32, then the broadcast of this one is 31 so the last useable host must be 30, or 192.168.0.30. So our host range for the second subnetwork is 192.168.0.17 - 30. The 10^th host of the third subnetwork? If 32 is the third subnetwork address, then 33 must be the first useable host, so 10 on top fo that is 192.168.0.43, the 10^th useable host.

It’s all simple once you know how. I doubt I’ve made the best explanation of it here, but I hope you can take something from this and learn it. Practice, practice, practice… that’s the key. Never stop practicing it and you’ll always have it there.

Must be spam then.

In the never-ending war against the rat-bastard spammers who spam my comment streams I have added a new plugin to my arsenal. Enter Spam Stopgap Extreme, by Elliott Back. A wonderful little plugin that queries your browser with an MD5 hash and requires the correct response within a given time limit (all provided transparently by it’s built in JavaScript magic) or else your comment gets dumped. Now, don’t worry, you don’t have to do a thing. The code they provide does all the work, and it ensures the spammers don’t get through becuase the code only works in browsers. So it’s installed, and running, so now we play the waiting game and see what eventuates.