Tag archives for Geek
Geek Poetry – An Anthology for the Inner Geek
Geek Poetry in fridge magnets (photo: James Kemp) The more observant and regular visitors among you will have noticed that I've not posted much for a couple of weeks. Well there's a very good reason for that. I've been busy setting up Castlegreen Publishing, and sorting out its first proper project. This is a poetry anthology titled Geek Poetry. {That's not a typo, I haven't missed an R.} What is Geek Poetry? Poetry is really an oral form, and it works best when it speaks to real people and avoids disappearing up its own fundament. So Geek Poetry is the sort of hyper modern stuff that lives in the 21st century and speaks to the inner geek about all the stuff we love, whether it's computing, role-playing, Doctor ho, Lego, Science Fiction, movies or whatever else gets us excited. I'd class…
A215 – TMA3 Poetry – Chaos Monkeys
This is one of two poems submitted as part of the poetry assignment for A215 Creative Writing. Chaos Monkeys No typewriters for these monkeys, pressing random buttons on keyboards and boxen. There goes the power, the server’s down. Chaos monkeys cannot read, instead they watch Netflix, that set them free in the darkness of the internet. Where did they lurk before? Did they hide in the telephone exchanges, or with gremlins somewhere mechanical and unloved? Down dusty corridors behind doors marked 'no entry to unauthorised personnel'. All they want is somewhere warm, with food. Perhaps they are refugees from a lab where they spent time solving puzzles for treats, until they finally opened the door. At night they wandered corridors, climbed ladders looking for more. Like Pavlov's dog, they explore for food. Pressed into service they explore the world wide…
Chaos Monkeys
I spent a chunk of Friday in an alpha training session on clouds. Much of it wasn't new, but there were some insights into designing stuff for clouds as opposed to fixed infrastructure. The netflix chaos monkeys came up, and it made me think. It isn't the first time I've come across the chaos monkeys, but it put an image in my mind of a chimp in an old fashioned data centre pulling cables out of a patch room and the unplugging servers from the network. Add in a bit of the cliche cleaner who pulls the plug out of the critical system to power the vacuum cleaner and you're away with the mental image. In the cloud no-one has to hear you scream. If you spaghetti cable all the boxes together and make them all redundant by synchronising data…
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Charlie Stross Rocks
I've just finished reading "The Jennifer Morgue", the second of Charles Stross's Laundry series (the first is the "The Atrocity Archive" and there is a third and a few more short stories as well). It is a fantastic read, I really didn't want to put it down, even though family life wouldn't let me read it all in one sitting. Avoiding spoilers the two books are both very readable and set in a sort of modern day techno-magic spy thriller piss take. The premise is that magic is just applied mathematics and there is a very low budget Government cover up, the British civil service meets Delta Green. Having been an official computer geek in the British civil service I can relate to some of this very well, which makes the humour very close to home, in a Dilbertesque sort…