As my regular readers know, my translation business has really been on the rocks lately. This isn’t all bad. Being dead broke serves as a lot of motivation to look around for other things to do.

Way back in 1994 I registered the domain cat.net, when such things cost around US$50 per year. For the next six years, cat.net served as my own personal domain, with a Linux server at home and as many as 8 smaller machines in the house at different times. In 2001, I handed the cat.net domain over to my ex-wife as part of our divorce settlement and started using gogulski.com instead. She later sold the cat.net domain for a rather handsome sum, and the domain has been “parked” with various “coming soon” and parked-domain monetization schemes since then. In 2000, the main host, squeaker.cat.net squeaker.gogulski.com (“Squeaker” is one of Henry’s nicknames), moved into collocation with my ISP employer, carrying all of its email accounts, mailing lists and websites with it. The company collapsed, along with my interest in running my own Linux box, and I started migrating people off before everything at the office got shut down. I haven’t been involved in maintaining my own servers since.

Since June of this year, though, I’ve become very involved in building and supporting web infrastructure for various liberty causes, including operating websites for the Free Agents Network, the Motorhome Diaries, and the Ladies of Liberty Alliance. I’ve also started a blog hosting service, Freedom Blogs, which has now grown to a whopping ten users with no promotion, and am working on a few other new web projects besides.

And I’ve started running into limitations with DreamHost, the web hosting provider where all this stuff lives. I love the reliability and security of having the infrastructure taken care of in a secure data center, but, ARGH I want more control over my hosting environment.

So, I’ve been off at Amazon for a little while putting together a short shopping list for a web hosting cluster.

First, some cheapish web servers:

• 3x HP ProLiant DL320 G5p Quad-Core Xeon X3210/2.13 GHz @ $1060 each
• 12x 2 GB – DIMM DDR2 – 800 MHz / PC2-6400 @ $76 each

This could be okay for a just-starting-out database server:

• 1x HP ProLiant DL380 G5 2 x Quad-Core Xeon X5460 / 3.16 GHz @ $5520
• 8x 8 GB ( 2 x 4 GB ) – FB-DIMM DDR2 – 667 MHz / PC2-5300 @ $291 each
• 8x HP Hard drive – 500 GB – 2.5″ SFF – SAS-2 – 7200 rpm @ $583 each

But, oh, I need two of those. One for the database server and one for the storage server. Maybe they can back each other up.

And then a switch, of course:

• Cisco Catalyst Express 520G-24TC 24-port Gigabit Ethernet switch @ $1720

All this for a mere $30,836 plus tax, shipping, insurance, etc. Oh, and then I need some UPS units, some cables, a rack, a KVM switch. I guess I’ll put this on my Christmas list.

Meanwhile, something like just two of those DL320 machines would work. $2576, plus extras… tra la la. Daydreams sure are nice.

This interview was published, in Slovak, by Markíza Magazine on 2 July 2009.

The English text here is a loose back-translation of the Slovak text of the published article, which is available at mojacasopis.sk.

This is a translation of a translation of my own interview responses, and a bunch of things inevitably get lost in such a process. In a couple of cases, I’ve footnoted things that I feel I ought to clarify, but, with that, the text:

Verbal Aspect Bothers Me!

Text: Ľuba Kukučková – Photo: Oles Cheresko

Mike Gogulski has a Polish surname, was born an American and today is a citizen of no state. He has worked in the USA and in Belgium. Lately, he’s dropped anchor in Slovakia and has been living in Bratislava for five years.

At the old Slovak National Theater in Bratislava. Photo: Oles Cheresko, Markíza

To the east, he’s been as far as Košice, Guatemala to the south and Vancouver, Canada to the northwest. He doesn’t feel like a globetrotter, and he’s very pleased to be in Bratislava!

Mike’s paternal grandparents emigrated to America at the start of the 1900s. His mother’s ancestors came from Germany. Most of today’s Gogulskis live in the area of Poznań, Poland, but Mike doesn’t know them personally. Like many European emigrants at the beginning of the twentieth century, his ancestors, too, wanted to break their bonds with their motherland and become Americans. They had difficult lives, too, and there remained no time to preserve the Polish language and culture for their children. But now their great-grandchild has come back to Europe after all. He speaks four languages and, thanks to his spontaneous approach to people, has made many friends in Slovakia. In this way, he might be called a true world citizen. Mike Gogulski, however, has no citizenship. He renounced his American citizenship, and for the moment is only considering becoming a Slovak citizen…

School, LSD and Beer

Michael was born on 8 August 1972 in Phoenix, Arizona. His father got a job as an electro-mechanical engineer in Orlando, Florida, and there Mike lived with his family until he was 25 years old. Afterward, he roamed a number of states following jobs, from Minnesota to Connecticut and from California to Wisconsin. Eight years ago, his father died of cancer. His mother, Joan, lives in Florida. Mike’s younger sister, Karen, who works as a nurse, is raising two adorable boys – Cole and Chase – in Orlando with her husband, Billy. Mike sees his nephews only in photos, though. “In 1990 I started studying information technology at a university in Orlando, but then my interest shifted to LSD and beer,” he openly confesses. He quit his studies after the first semester. But he’s found his footing in life quite successfully. He has a ten-year information systems career behind him as a systems administrator, network engineer and IT infrastructure manager. He moved around a large area of the western parts of the US after work.

In 2004, in the wake of many work as well as personal expectations and failures, Mike left America. His girlfriend at the time wanted to teach English in a European country, someplace in the eastern bloc. She sent out inquiries and got a response from right here in Slovakia. They both moved to Bratislava and, though their paths parted later, Mike became fond of Bratislava. Since 2006 he’s begun devoting himself more to language, rather than to computers as in the past. He has become a translator, proofreader and editor.

Slovaks are Quieter

“Bratislava has its good and less-good sides,” the American native muses. “I never lived right in the city in the past, in the US. I thought that I’d hate the city, but that’s not so. I find living here pleasant. I like that Bratislava is small enough to offer a peaceful life while being big enough to have everything you’d expect from a city.” He has friends, lovers, ex-lovers as well as enemies here… He has been to Žilina, Košice, Prešov, Banská Bystrica and Zvolen. He has heard that Slovakia is a beautiful land and looks forward to discovering it over time. Does he sometimes compare Slovaks to Americans? To Mike, good and bad people are found everywhere. As a matter of principle, however, he judges people as individual beings, not as members of some group based on place of birth or the geographical divisions of the world. Mike believes that Slovaks, in general, are quieter than Americans. He’s had some awkward moments, though, with the hazards of Slovak. He’d been in Slovakia barely three months when he approached a group of girls at work with whom he often went to smoke outside the building. He asked: “Would you like to smoke?” And they took this a bit differently… They stopped laughing after a bit and explained the sexual undertone* of the question.

At one time he defended his trouble with the language by saying, “my Slovak is good enough for taxi drivers and waiters,” but since then he’s improved dramatically. He reads well in Slovak, in his humble appraisal, writes like a respectable schoolboy but has trouble, though, understanding responses in conversation. He works as a translator, and so he hasn’t mastered slang; he says his Slovak is more lawyerly. Really understanding a language demands growing up in the country. “I didn’t want to live in some sort of isolated bubble with other Americans and English-speaking people,” Mike says. “I would have felt cut off from reality. Many Slovaks say that Slovak is one of the most difficult languages in the world, but I don’t think so. That doesn’t mean, of course, that it’s easy. I took two years of Latin in school, so Slovak declension didn’t surprise me. Still, I’m not good at recalling when and how I should use the various cases. And the hardest thing for me – and perhaps for many westerners who come to Slavic lands – is verbal aspect. I want a magic key that would make it clear for me when to use the perfective aspect, but no such key exists!”

Mike is “Polyamorous”

Besides working with Slovak, Mike also translates official documents from Czech into English. He has simplified his lifestyle, and so he’s also living off smaller earnings. If he travels to the Czech Republic, he gets by in Slovak, and says the local people there observe him with interest. He once spoke Spanish very well, but has forgotten a lot. He believes, however, that if he traveled for a month to Spain or Mexico he would speak fluently by the third week. Though he behaves like a world citizen, he hasn’t traveled that much more of it. “In the US I moved from city to city every two years. I have been as far east as Košice, as far south as Guatemala, and as far north and west as Vancouver, Canada. I have been satisfied living here in Bratislava, and I don’t have any urge to move someplace else soon.” Mike got married in the US at 23, but the marriage lasted for only six years. From the marriage he has a nine-year-old daughter, Kyra, who lives with her mother in Georgia. Nobody from his family has visited him in Bratislava yet, though maybe they will come when his nephews grow up. Is he sad to be alone? “No. These days I am polyamorous (author’s note: in love with more than one person) and I’m not interested in an everlasting relationship of the marriage type.”**

Why did Mike renounce his American citizenship? “In its political, governmental essence, the USA appears to be a criminal organization. I don’t want to be connected with it in any way. I’m not against supporting society, but I am against taxes, which the state criminally demands of me from birth, and I don’t want to support others’ privileges. For me, ridding myself of citizenship was a way to bring my legal and social status into harmony with my beliefs. Perhaps later I will apply for Slovak citizenship, but that will be only for practical reasons, so that I can travel. I don’t want to have any sort of connection with the criminal organization known as the state. And, perhaps, I will not be a citizen of any country until the end of my life.”

* The Slovak verb fajčiť means, literally, “to consume by smoking”, as by smoking a cigarette. In slang it also means “to perform fellatio”.

** My actual words: “These days I am openly polyamorous, and not interested in a state marriage of any kind.”

ABC (After Bureaucrash) Action is a working group devoted to the creation of a new liberty activism organization.

From Xaq Fixx, on Facebook:

“ABC Action means After Bureaucrash Action – This group is dedicated to those liberty loving activists that have made BC great over the years but are exploring other options due to the new direction CEI and Lee Doren want to take the organization.”

I have been asked to start up a small sub-working-group, a task force, if you’ll pardon the term, of active people with the time, inclination, experience and knowledge necessary to provide and manage the technology infrastructure for this effort.

This will include, right away, setup and administration of a new ning.com social-networking site, and probably the same duties for a WordPress blog.

Longer-term, we need to create a new activist platform that goes beyond the capabilities of ning, and which could rival the reach and power of the online campaign management and fundraising systems used by groups like moveon.org, Campaign For Liberty, etc.

Anyone who would like to participate in this tech working group — or perhaps become its long-term leader — is invited to contact me directly, and right now!

Full contact info for me is at http://www.gogulski.com/contact.html

Yours in liberty,
Mike Gogulski

A few years ago I was unemployed for an extended period.

When not updating the scripts I wrote (in an obscure but powerful programming language called WebL) which would automatically search all the prominent US job boards and automatically submit my resume and standard cover letter to all new positions that matched my search criteria (hundreds per day with a few clicks), I was playing Diablo 2.

Then I discovered Diablo 2 hacking, and set out to write my own hack which would automate one of the most profitable routines in the game, killing a boss monster named Mephisto for his valuable magic items.

Along the way, I had a few diversions. These included porting the ancient game rogue into the Diablo 2 environment — so that one could play an old-school computer RPG while the newfangled one played itself automatically — and eventually integrating some public-domain source code for a Unix version of classic Tetris as well. Tetris was especially cool, because while the bot was running in the background collecting magic items for you, you could load up Tetris and play… and when that became tiring, whack the “autopilot” button and let Tetris play itself as well.

After the big Slashdot article, which of course nuked the web host I was using at the time, I was contacted by TechTV (now G4TV) and invited to appear on their show, The Screen Savers, demonstrating my Mephbot as well as Tetris running inside Diablo 2. My segment of the episode was posted to YouTube about a year back, and is here for your enjoyment. Additionally, you can download the video from RapidShare (50MB AVI).

Want the Mephbot source code and compiled versions? Gram ‘em here.

Once upon a time, I was a very early employee of an internet service provider that raised hundreds of millions of dot-com boom-days dollars. I was specifically a network engineer, and more generally just an IT infrastructure implementation and management guy. Heady days.

Some time after the company had issued its IPO and begun hiring people by the boatload, control of the IT department fell away from the executives I knew personally and into the laps of a bunch of new “white knight” corporate types hired in from the likes of the local phone company and various billion-dollar black holes of enterprises that had imploded in the not-too-distant past. My role remained in network infrastructure development and management for our customer-facing network; all of the internal stuff got reorganized under a newly-minted CIO. Internal infrastructure wasn’t strictly my problem any more, though I cared deeply about seeing it done right, both because of my own knowledge of the field and due to IT’s pivotal role in the automation and smooth management of a large number of complex business processes facing a customer base and deployment footprint that were literally exploding in size.

The new people charged with running IT were managers, not engineers. Their expertise lie in spheres like hiring consultants, drafting proposals and securing funding for projects. None of them had a deep grasp of the processes they were supposed to implement, and problems began cropping up almost immediately.

Ultimately, there was a grand proposal to spend something on the order of $30 million to outsource the bulk of the IT infrastructure and all of the business systems that managed those complex processes which we were only just learning how to implement, manage and scale ourselves, as a company. Now, outsourcing parts of your IT infrastructure often makes a lot of sense, if several things are true. You must have the right outsourcing partner, who brings solid experience in managing IT in your line of business. These were not in evidence. You must also be in a business where IT itself is far away from the focus. If you’re operating a nationwide network of sawmills and lumber yards, for instance, your top people really ought to be folks who know wood and the lumber trade inside and out. IT expertise is something you can outsource in such a case. But when your business is IT itself,  well, outsourcing your own brain is ill-advised at best.

Eventually I took my concerns to the Chairman of the company, to whom I had personal access simply due to my seniority. The Chairman was a brilliant engineer, a guy who had made a fortune developing a series of innovative projects in a burgeoning field and developed those projects in turn into successful products. His previous start-up had been acquired for a hefty sum, the bulk of which went to him personally, and he had stayed on there for a time helping to manage all the transitional stuff that comes along with corporate mergers and acquisitions.

I laid out my case over the course of twenty minutes or so: what was being proposed was ridiculously expensive, likely doomed to failure for reasons of ignorance of the players involved (the IT management and the proposed outsourcing partner), and foolish for the reason I outlined above. The Chairman valued things like “propriety” and “decorum” and “respecting the chain of command” rather more highly than I ever did, and I quickly found myself getting nowhere, as he assumed that if these men had been hired into these positions to manage IT, they must necessarily know what they were doing.

The end of the conversation boiled down to an exchange that went roughly like this:

“Well, Mike, I hear what you are saying, but what would you have us do? Fire the CIO, Mr. So-and-So?”

“Well, that’s certainly one option, and a better course than the one we’re on now.”

“And what then? Put you in charge? Are you, Mike Gogulski, going to run IT for a half-billion-dollar publicly traded company?”

“Well, if I were assigned to do that, I’d certainly give it a solid go, and I believe that I could do it far better than these jokers.”

“But Mike, that’s insane! We couldn’t give you such a job! You’ve never been head of IT for such a large enterprise before!”

A few seconds ticked by as gears turned in my head, my face no doubt flushing with mounting anger.

“And which half-billion-dollar publicly traded company has Mr. So-and-So served as CIO of in the past? And for which such company have you served as Chairman? “

The response consisted of several deep sighs and a great deal of spluttering — the answers, of course, were “none”.

And thus ended the meeting, with me storming out of the Chairman’s office.

I was reminded of this little anecdote of corporate elitist jackassery while watching the amusing — and terrifying — video at Congressman Pete Stark: crazed lunatic on the disinter blog. Enjoy.