Welcome to FooFaLoop!

Welcome to the inaugural blog post on my new Tech blog FooFaLoop.  So being the inaugural post, this will be decidedly non-techie and an intro as to the nature and scope of what this is all about.  Some of you might have come here and know me for my Old School Gaming fantasy art and advocacy in the so called “OSR”.  Whilst this blog might from time to time cross over with my other blog Ostensible Cat, I intend to keep them quite distinct.    But like Ostensible Cat, the whole point of FooFaLoop is to talk about my child-like glee about things tech. 

As a professional IT Security Manager, I spend much of my time analyzing minutiae, developing policy, analyzing risk, assessing compliance, discussing threats, etc.  While that is part of what I love, it’s not necessarily what I’ll be covering here.  This will be more on the stuff that I like to delve into on my own time.  I have a degree in C++ programming that I’ve let sit fallow for far too long.  One of the major reasons I got a degree in programming as opposed to say, IT Security, is because I truly believe that to be an effective IT Professional you need to have as many tools in your tool belt as possible – even if it might not seem that it directly relates to the job you currently find yourself in at the moment. 

So there was that, but I also have a deep love for Linux.  Something I’ve been fostering since about 1997 or so when I was working as a tech for a large chain store.  I found the whole concept of an “alternative operating system” intriguing.  The more I learned, the more in love I fell with the idea of Linux – even if the reality of it frustrated me to no end.  I picked up a boxed copy of Red Hat and took it home.  Computers were fairly expensive back then, so I was afraid to try it out and screw up my Windows 95 box with its fabulous AOL dial-up.  If you get the idea that I liked Tech but was not steeped in the arcane nature of it, then you’d not be too far off.  I had worked on computers in the Air Force, but when it came to my home system, I was afraid to tinker with it too much.  Mostly because at the time I had to take out a loan just to buy it in the first place.  However, I did pick up another hard drive and decided to give Linux a spin.  That began an on again off again tryst with various flavors of Linux.  I’d install it and be excited about it but then my interest would shift to other things.  But I’d always seem to find myself coming back.  It just seemed too darned interesting.  But then all of my professional jobs were squarely in the MS camp so Linux was little more than a toy for me. 

Now with the advent of cheap commodity computers such as Raspberry Pi or even my new laptop which cost about 5 times less than my original desktop that I bought back in 1995 along with Open Source and easy to use virtualization tools such as Oracle’s Virtualbox software; anyone can do some pretty cool stuff all whilst sitting on their couch catching up with their favorite show.  A whole Linux network virtualized inside of a laptop to include hacking in security tools – yep, you can do that.  Building a data cluster with computers the size of a deck of playing cards – yep, sign me up.  Teaching my nine and six year old children programming skills instead of playing console games – I’m sold.  All for less than $1000 for everything I’ve just mentioned – Great!  And most of the stuff is free – I’m so there. 

So, that’s what this is all about.  Not about any alpha geek chest thumping; not some from the mountaintop proclamations of tech superiority.  No, just some things I find of interest and want to write about.  And probably all the warts and missteps I take along the way.  I mean, no one is perfect and until you make some mistakes, you won’t ever become a better tech geek (or well anything for that matter).  So forgive me if I come across as a n00b with my enthusiasms and silly hair brained ideas and attendant mistakes.  Learn, smile at some of the foolishness and take away from all of this what you will.

Now on to important matters.  What’s up with FooFaLoop?  Why that name?  Or why the name Ostensible Cat even?  Believe it or not there is a reason for these blog names and they are both related.  You see, I live in Italy and rent a house in the hills.  My wife and I had thought about getting pets, but our landlords (lovely people – they have become our “Italian family”) already had pets and weren’t keen on indoor pets.  One of the cats named Micha (“that is essentially “pussy cat” in Italian) would come over to snooze, eat, and just laze around.  However, she is not all that warm and cuddly.  In fact, just try to pet her and you’ll probably pull back a bloody stump.  Something of a demon cat.  So when I was thinking of some characters for a super hero type plot line I was fantasizing about, the name Ostensible Cat just popped into my head.  The supers story never went anywhere (at least not yet) but I really liked the name and wanted to do something with it.  So, when I found that I should probably have a blog for my fantasy gaming art and writing, I thought about the demon cat and the name Ostensible Cat.  If you notice the Ostensible Cat logo is a cat with the moon casting its shadow and that the shadow is that of a demon and not a cat.  Now you know where the whole Ostensible Cat thing comes from.  How did it get associated with my blog?  Dunno – just liked the name and the image and it has stuck.

What in the world does that have to do with FooFaLoop?  The same landlords have a dog named Fufi – who is very exuberant and his whole body wriggles when he greets you.  I like to play on names and started calling him Foofaloop – it just seemed to fit with his wriggling.  When I decided to start a tech blog about the things I was up to with my technical projects, I wanted a similarly oddball name that reflected the sort of playful nature of what I wanted to do.  I also wanted something a little clever and perhaps tied to my other blog if possible.  Clever – well, I thought so – a little anyway.  Foo is a common term for a generic program, function, command or other tech concept that you are trying to implement (kinds the John Doe of tech speak).  Loops are a common programming concept.  Fa is often the sound made when you screw something up.  If you look at the image at the header of this blog, it is an endless loop Foo that prints Fa (in Python) – so FooFaLoop.  And it ties into my real life pets.  And thus both blogs are tangentially related.  And thus my geek passions roll along.  Clever huh?  Well, maybe not, but hey, I gotta give myself some accolades from time to time.  It’s a cold cruel world out there so you have to give yourself a little pat on the back every now and then.

Whew, that’s a lot of words up there.  When all I really wanted to say is hi, my name is John, I’m a geek and I love this stuff.  I hope you do too!