July 15, 2007
In a nanny state you go to jail without cause for your own good.
In a police state you go to jail without cause for the good of the state.
July 3, 2007
So young, so tragic: TMBG, Birdhouse In Your Soul
In 25 years of TMBG they have lost me for the last eight. It happens. I want to adore them for them teaming up with McSweeneys, Homestar Runner, Dust Brothers, etc., but they have not made up for Factory Showroom yet.
Then again, I decided to grow up and cast off sentimental things somewhere along the way... I can't blame them for being part of the past.
December 25, 2006
For the first time in a score of seasons, I have not heard the execrable Dr. Elmo chestnut "Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer." I'm considering this a good omen for the new year.
November 21, 2006
If I tilt my head just right, I can hear Nico in Colin Meloy's voice; this almost makes me like Picaresque.
September 11, 2006
Oh balls, it's nine-eleven! I totally forgot.
July 20, 2006
For the most of my career (if you can call it that) I've worked for small projects and companies. For all of the disadvantages to small operations, there is one thing they all lack: decorative personnel.
They are what the term describes: employees who fill positions that are for appearance only. They are wax fruit, except they don't seem to come with helpful labels like "do not delegate tasks to this person."
I've made dreadful mistakes lately trying to delegate simple tasks to this type of employee without realizing that they are nodes on an organizational chart for the purpose of the chart. It's been dreadful because in the end it cost more time than had I done it myself and interrupted several high scoring Solitaire games. The mistakes were not entirely my own, however. I was following company policy that had been revised to justify these employees.
At some other point, I'll get into the various odd justifications of how form-only staff have been promoted to functions. The core mistake is trying to make personnel devoted to filling a form position operate in a functional one. This isn't a design question of form-and-function, this is a wax fruit literalism. You can't eat wax fruit, picture frames aren't walls, and decorative staff are not going to execute tasks correctly no matter how long they've been on a project or with a team. If anything, it's a misuse of the employee and should be reconsidered.
I'll reiterate explicitly, however, that they are not useless. Useless employees are typically bunglers and incompetents. They're everywhere and, at one point, everyone. I wince when I think about how I bungled my way through my first real tech job. I digress. The decorative employee is quite handy if you know how to actually work with them.
So far, I've considered the following good applications for office ornaments:
That's all for now. If I revisit this topic, I'll probably elaborate on the purposes and applications for this type of staff. Hopefully the above is enough documentation on this phenomena that others might begin to identify the decorative employees in their organization.
April 20, 2006
Software "dashboards" are a cliche. Stop calling everything that shows memory usage a dashboard. The idiom has merit but it is supposed to have substantial key metrics available at a glance - not dozens of peripheral statistics and numbers.
Also, dashboards are not trending instruments. Do you see a graph of the past six hours of oil pressure in your car? Do you see a 5 minute average of your speed? ('No, really, officer I was going 65 on average - that 100mph dash was an outlier...')
When something is wrong you usually get an indicator light that usually means nothing to you. Sadly, this is where most dashboards mimic the worst part of the idiom: meaningless warnings. People drive with "Check Engine" lights on for months before taking it to a mechanic.
Dashboards should have the granularity of "now."
February 8, 2006
Ruby on Rails is the FrontPage of web frameworks.
January 8, 2006
My job anxieties are beginning to affect my dreams. I awoke from a rather disquieting one in which I was explaining to peers why there was a code side-effect that caused a certain vendor to not see their product even though all their clients could. The vendor had demanded that their ip addresses be hardcoded into the product. A day prior to their trouble reports they had switched DSL providers so now all the old ip addresses no longer worked. The president of said vendor suddenly burst into the room, announced herself, and demanded technical documentation for all the hardware we were deploying on. The meeting ended in a bizarre fracas and I had to go collect a bunch of links to online manuals of various servers. After I sent the links a technician stopped by and mentioned that the vendor was looking to blame the model of hard drives we used.
This was a dream. This hasn't happened. This doesn't happen... I hope.
December 9, 2005
I was going to write something here about books and databases and stuff. Then I realized that it didn't really make sense. The basic idea is that uninventoried assets sometimes yield some interesting finds; but what is the point of that mystery?
December 6, 2005
So. What's up?
November 15, 2005
And there's a perfect kiss somewhere out in the dark.
But a kiss ain't enough.
November 12, 2005
A couple of days ago I sat through an enraging conference call. It was, quite possibly, a Defining Moment. (More on that later, if Definitions reveal themselves.) I can usually bite my lip and let pompus windbags circulate air but this particular constellation of ignorance, arrogance, mendacity, disrespect, contempt, and pettiness nearly required me to swallow my own tongue.
Particularly galling was the insistence of one mouthbreather that his opinion was equivalent, if not superior, to an established set of facts. His interpretation, no matter how misplaced, is canon. How unfortuante for us that it took two attempts to describe certain evidence and data before we realized that this was a precise trigger for his bellowing exhortations of our incorrectness meshed with poorly disguised insults. Apparently it was quite silly of us not to realize that attacks are equivalent, if not superior, to arguments.
As a warning to others in similar situations, I'd like to highlight the linguistic tripwire we crossed. The word "equivalence" stems from the Latin for horse ('equus') and the Middle English for drapery ('valer'). Thus, "equi"+"valence" is literally to spew so much bullshit as to blind a horse.
October 23, 2005
The suck stops here.
September 28, 2005
Good bye, Melinda... godspeed.
damn it all
September 25, 2005
How is it that things keep getting worse? A friend of mine, Melinda Moore, has gone missing. More info here: Find Big Red.
Other things seem minor by comparison, but aren't any less serious for those involved. My employer is going through various weird shakeups. Another friend is getting evicted.
It's getting on toward the rainy season here and I'm not seeing too many silver linings on the approaching front.
August 25, 2005
argh.
August 23, 2005
And what about my dreams?
August 9, 2005
......yeah. Something like that.
July 18, 2005
<nerd type="linux">
Red Hat trawling mailing lists for intellectual compliance? Seriously, what's up with that? In the list post he didn't write "CentOS = Red Hat" - any nerd knows that's an assignment operator and if you assigned Red Hat to CentOS it'd probably overwrite all your config files and then charge you for 12 months of support but then EOL support for the product 7 months later. Hey, Red Hat! CentOS 4.x >= Red Hat. Also, bite my shiny metal ass.
</nerd>
July 13, 2005
No, as a matter of fact, it's not going according to plan at all.
June 4, 2005
I'm generally sick of the news these days and have been pushing myself into other projects (namely work) to not squander any more time on politics that I cannot influence. However, I did want to suggest that any time you hear about the needs of the US military in the news, be on the lookout for any discussion or emphasis on military police and intelligence personnel. A few years ago, some rather dimwitted people argued that terrorism is an act of war and treating it like a crime is not appropriate. Then ask yourself why the US military, in waging the war on terror, needs more police and detectives.
May 16, 2005
The Five Habits of Millionaires, extra short edition:
May 2, 2005
It's clear to me now that a "director's cut" of a film is an oxymoron. It was always my impression that the director of a movie was the one in charge (barring the producers who control the money) and so any version he or she does results in a director's cut of some kind. It implies that there are other captains of the ship.
I've been told that it's just a marketing tool. If true, the studios are completely missing the golden opportunities of other "cuts" like:April 28, 2005
A mildly hopeful bright spot had appeared on the horizon and with a lot of effort it appeared to be close at hand. Then it winked out with not a hint of why it disappeared. I think this is the first time I've actually been disappointed in a mirage.
As Homer Simpson eloquently said: "You tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is: never try."
April 14, 2005
I'm back. Just in time for taxes.
March 22, 2005
As I have noted to a couple of friends, Goudy Extra Bold is quite possibly the least erotic typeface name ever. However, it is the best typeface name that could also be a short adult film about the randy exploits of Fred Goudy, noble type designer by day, satyr by night.
March 21, 2005
Over the past few weeks I've been getting whacked by AIM at a fairly steady rate. It was extraordinary at various points - I signed up with a new nickname only to be suspended within a couple of hours. Once it was only a half an hour between me registering and being suspended.
I follow the form each time and assert that there's probably a mistake - nothing I'm doing is violating the terms and conditions of use. Half the time I'm not doing anything at all except posting "BLOOP BLOOP" at a couple of friends waiting for them to show back up. Occasionally I can reset the password to an account. I have never been told that the suspensions were in error nor have I ever recieved any indication as to why my account was suspended.
I had finally settled into my latest account when, today, I was suspended again.
I give up.
IRC works if you want to hop in and say hi. I even put up a special topic, just for you.
March 19, 2005
I think taking photographs of galaxies is demeaning and exploitative. The fact that they are billions of miles away or quite possibly already dead only adds to the horror: it is necrophilic voyeurism of the cosmos.
March 10, 2005
More music notes:
February 28, 2005
Living in a cultural hinterland (again) and this time lacking access to a radio station, I miss lots of music. Well, I can't exactly blame being in a backwater since they've been around since before 1996 (94?), but I recently stumbled on to Deerhoof. Also and again, more mp3's.... come, come, come see the duck.
February 27, 2005
Today's grammatical irritant: "centered around." Not only is it incorrect, it sounds passive and wishy-washy.
Tomorrow: "whole gestalt thing."
February 26, 2005
No, I was wrong. Windows still holds the crown for painful. Hail to the king, baby.
February 20, 2005
Linux has to be one of the most painful operating systems to install. It's somewhat alarming that Red Hat 7.3 was the best Linux installation experiences I've had to date. Oh sure, Mandrake and SUSE are prettier and somewhat faster. Hell, SUSE managed to identify my old Buslogic SCSI card - I had been dreading the driver fandango to get that working. But can either one not lose their minds on my mouse or my cruddy GeForce card? Nope.
So I decided to try Gentoo again.
No really, I happen to like smashing my head against nails to drive them through lumber. It's so much more organic than, say, a hammer.
Let me tell you something you might not know about Gentoo Linux: it's a plot by hardware manufacturers to get Linux users to buy newer motherboards and CPUs. You must compile, and compile, and compile, and recompile nearly everything for your installation. But more unfortunate than that is Gentoo's inverted primitivism.
So Gentoo makes it possible for me to pick my dhcp client and crond right from the start. Why do I need to compile a dhcp client and a crond? Can't Gentoo just provide me one so I can get started? No, I have to choose between vixie-cron or jcron or whatever and still compile every damn little thing. If there were different ifconfigs and mounts, I'm sure Gentoo would be the first disto on the block to offer me multiple choices on which facility I wanted to optimize and customize.
Honestly, I don't have time for this kind of crap; the OS is not an end, it's a means. And I'm only in this tweaker backwater because I can't find a "big" distribution that works correctly with my hardware.I'll grant that Gentoo's 'emerge' utility, modelled on FreeBSD's ports system, is rather nice. It's payoff is in keeping large numbers of packages updated so you don't get trapped in package dependency hell where you can't update foo-1.3.rpm because baaz-1.1.rpm depends on bar-2.0.rpm which relies on foo-1.3.rpm. At least that's the payoff I'd hope for. But even FreeBSD has a core system - a minimal build that gets you where you need to be right away rather than beating you over the head with emerge vixie-cron and emerge grub. I can 'make buildworld' later with my fiddled makefiles on FreeBSD. Why do I have to pay the price up front with Gentoo? What good is all the configurability up front if I have to walk a narrow little path to get started in the first place?
I do not understand why Gentoo doesn't even come with a minimal bootstrap script. One might argue that manually creating one's fstab, allocating partions with fdisk, hopping into a build chroot, and all the other mundane tasks are educational and force to user to pay attention to the little mechanisms that are necessary to Linux. Sure, I'll buy that. But I've done this crap a hundred thousand times. It bores me to tears. I remember Yggsdrasil on floppies - believe me I've seen this show before. Bundle a fast bootstrap so I can get on with my life. Don't make me nostalgic for anaconda and yast.
Gentoo Linux is an altar to the false gods of Optimization and Configurability - a strange and ironic result from a distribution whose philosophy is to let the user drive the tools, not the other way around.
January 12, 2005
Dear Captain America,
Why is it that we have a huge public displays of compassion and support for people whose lives have been destroyed by an uncontrollable act of nature but we stuffily ignore the lives that are being destroyed by own hands?
Your friend,
P
January 3, 2005
Addenda to House Rules for nearlife.org: Invoking Hemingway to defend any position or view not having to do with Hemingway himself results in an automatic loss in any argument the invocation occurs, including but not limited to Understood Universal Truths where substitution would render a winning or persuasive view.
December 21, 2004
Happy Solstice. As far as I'm concerned, it's the New Year tonight. Finally. This past year has been a rough one - and there's not much to show for all the effort and too much disappointment and loss to enumerate without inviting comparison with those who had it far worse (and it can always get worse).
November 26, 2004
The Third Policeman is an absurdist morality play in which a nameless narrator, obsessed with a heavily footnoted crackpot philosopher, kills a man for money and stumbles into an alternate reality with Policemen who steal bicycles to prevent the riders from becoming bicyles themselves. Does that sound weird enough? It's also a funny novel with satirical takes on physics and mathematics. It's tragic that Flann O'Brien couldn't get this published in his lifetime and a black mark on the publishers who passed on it.
I also plowed through Matheson's I Am Legend, lauded to me as a good vampire horror novel. I liked it. A quick read and a surprisingly current-seeming book despite being written in the 1950's of a future 1975. There were only a handful of true anachronisms and they didn't distract from the story all that much. Initially I thought the book had been harmed for me by the fact that I was told that The Omega Man was based on it. In retrospect, I now consider them hardly related except by theme and a handful of plot details.
<sigh> The holidays are upon us. What a drag.
November 20, 2004
I've been sick - it's a lingering thing. The cold, it lingers. I've also been working on a couple of banal projects that will hopefully pay off in the next year or so. It's difficult to want to keep playing when I keep getting dealt losing hands - and I don't mean weak-but-promising-if-only-for-luck-and-pluck, I mean losing. On the mend, however, on the mend.
Prior to falling ill I used some savings that were originally a gift in order to buy myself a new bicycle. It's the first bicycle I've been truly happy with since my original Mongoose BMX with those cheesy and heavy mag wheels. In the past few days that I've actually felt alive, I've switched to the bike for most of my errands instead of the car. It's been a blast. I do not miss that old Novara at all - I gave it away on Freecycle and haven't looked back.
Speaking of bicycles, I just finished Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman. I'll write a brief review here later, I promise. A strange book. Not as funny as I had hoped, but amusing and weird.
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