"Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."
My Boog Pages
Monday, September 8
Once Again, New Phonebooks
I can't believe I haven't posted this yet, but I SOLD ANOTHER FREAKIN' STORY!!!!! This will mark my second book publication (after "The Wrong Briefcase" from BULLET POINTS), and my second paid acceptance (after "Lie Beneath The Clay" from HandHeldCrime). I wrote the first draft of this story over 2 years ago, and when I did I was convinced that I was going to win the Shamus award for the Best Private Eye Short Story. Up until this point, however, I haven't found an editor who felt the same way.
The story behind the story: I was running late to my writer's group meeting when I got behind the definitied Sunday driver. Slowed down at every intersection ("Is this it? No, it must be the next one."), started to turn then swerved back into traffic, etc. From nowhere a sentence popped into my head: "It's tough to follow someone who doesn't know where they're going."
For once I can remember every step in building the plot. Why didn't the driver know where he was going? He'd only been there once, at night, and he rode with someone else. Where'd they go? To a party at a vacant house - the real estate agent let them in (I had a friend in real estate who used to do this). Why's he trying to go back? Guilt. Massive, overwhelming guilt.
Throw in a little home cookin', and there you have it. Look for the description on the Stories page soon.
***
Mad props go out (as they are wont to do) to Miss Cashier, our Surreal Shark Toothpaste Referrer Of The Month. It's nice to know there's somewhere out there reading this; I'm not sure if that will inspire me to greater productivity or send my into a paralytic funk. I guess we'll find out. Be sure to drop by her site and ask silly questions, and tell her I sent you. Actually, tell her John Eklund sent you; I don't want to get in any trouble.
It's been a few weeks now; I guess I can finally talk about it.
I dragged in from work at eight o'clock, tired and cranky. I stuffed dinner in my face and was about to crawl into bed when the phone rang. It was my father. "My computer seems to have a virus," he said. "Have you heard anything about that?"
"Dad," I said. "You have no idea."
Here's a plot for an action movie: Disgruntled sysadmin hunts down worm writer, guns down his witless minions, and serves up some poetic justice. I'm not sure how a computer virus could kill you, but if I ever meet the guy who wrote W32.Blaster, I'm sure I'll find a way.
The first hint I had that everything was not quite kosher was Tuesday morning. It's always bad when a band of techs come and blockade the entrance to your cube. This time it was the email support group. "The cluster's down. Can you take a look at it?" Well, fer shur.
I fiddled with it for a while and thought I had it working when I noticed that there seemed to be a lot of people wandering around the server room, people with worried looks on their faces. "What's up?" I asked. And heard the dreaded word virussssssss.
The worm got inside our firewall even though we're supposed to block the port it uses, so the initial infection probably came from a laptop. The user takes it home, plugs it into the public network, then brings it back to work... voila, just like Outbreak. And I'm Dustin Hoffman. It didn't help that we had seven of our ten people out that day - two in training, two off after working all weekend, and one, well, we're not too sure where he was. In any case it was just me and a couple of other guys left to fend off ravaging gangs of application support techs, all howling "My server first!!!"
Worse, the nature of the virus tended to block attempts to control it. I wrote at least three versions of a batch file to push out the server patch, and all except the last one failed because the RPC service was flooded. We ended up doing it mostly by hand. I also wrote a batch file to put in the login script to patch all the XP workstations, which were also vulnerable. Then I just had to distribute it.
So I started the copy, to our 200-odd branch servers. And waited. And waited. And waited... until three o'clock in the morning, when it finally finished. I didn't help myself either, by botching a line in the original batch file, which I then had to redistribute. Grrr.
Batch files, heh. Yes I am a dos.god.
Eighteen hours that day, twelve the next. After that, several days' worth of configuring servers to automatically download the latest antivirus updates from our internal server. Almost to the minute that I finished, I got an invite to a meeting to discuss implementing a product that does the same thing. It's already bought. Thanks for the heads-up, guys.
