A Good Imagination and a Pile of Junk

So at the moment I’m the #1 result for google’s blogsearch for “Jennifer Aniston”

Via Erica on Facebook.

One of these things, which asks the hard hitting questions again. Answer these “30 Things You Wouldn’t Think To Ask,” then tag me so I can come and have a look. After that, tag 25 friends who you’d like to answer these questions (I’m sure we all know the drill by now).

1. Have you ever been searched by the cops? Nope.  Came close, but no.

2. Do you close your eyes on a roller coaster? Nope.  Wide open.

3. When’s the last time you’ve been sledging? Probably around the same time Erica went skinny dipping.

4. Would you rather sleep with someone else, or alone? The Who else is critically important.  If it’s not the right person, alone… hands down.  Still looking for the right who.

5. Do you believe in ghosts? There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy.  But no.

6. Do you consider yourself creative? Yes

7. Do you think O.J. killed his wife? Duh.  He did.  Sorry.  If you don’t think so, I suspect your intelligence.

8. Jennifer Aniston or Angelina Jolie? The ol’ Mary Ann or Ginger question eh?  If it’s for a weekend locked in a bedroom, Angelina Jolie.  If it’s for question#4 or anything that includes (but is not necessarily limited to) “outside the bedroom”, Jennifer Aniston, hands down.

9. Can you honestly say you know anything about politics? Yes.  An awful lot more than I did when I was a bloodsucking liberal pagan shitbag.

10. Do you know how to play poker? Plain old real poker, yes.  Poorly and I have to be harangued into playing, and you can’t make me like it.  I might win though.

11. Have you ever been awake for 48 hours straight? Yes.  Record is a hair over 72.  I miss those days.

12. What’s your favorite commercial? Any commercial involving a puppy sliding across a kitchen floor.

13. Who was your first love? Someone who deserves better than to be an answer to a stupid web questionnaire.

14. If you’re driving in the middle of the night, and no one is around you, do you run a red light? No.  You can’t really ever be “that sure” no one is around,

15. Do you have a secret that no one knows but you? Always have, always will.

16. Boston Red Sox or New York Yankees? I could care less, but it would take work.  If pressed, Yankees just because Boston sports fans are such unrepentant pricks.

17. Have you ever been ice skating? Yep, love it.

18. How often do you remember your dreams? Not much any more.  Starting to come back again.  Seems like a few year cycle.  They’re very rarely pleasant in any way.

19. What’s the one thing on your mind? THE one thing on my mind? Don’t be stupid.

20. Do you always wear your seat belt? Front seat, yes. Back seat no.

21. What talent do you wish you had? I wish I was disciplined.

22. Do you like sushi? Yes.I particularly like those weird “fusion” sushi-like thingies at Sushi Samba.

23. What do you wear to bed? Nothing.

24. Do you truly hate anyone? Yes

25. If you could sleep with one famous person, who would it be? Didn’t we cover this?

26. Do you know anyone in jail? Yes.  I have a cousin who’s doing 25.  I hope he’s got a cell mate who dresses him up in a fucking tutu and broadens his horizons. He should probably be fed feet first into a meat grinder.  Not gonna say what he did.

27. What food do you find disgusting? Peppers. Big ol peppers. Liquify ‘em for sauces and such? Great. Don’t get the fucking things near me or god HELP you, anywhere near my pizza. I’ll gag.

28. Have you ever made fun of your friends behind their back? Not in the last 15 years.

29. Have you ever been punched in the face? Nope, he missed.

30. Do you believe in angels and demons? No.  They’d make the world pretty interesting though.

Sorry, I’m not tagging anybody.  You’ll get over it.  If you picked it up and answered ‘em, gimme a comment.  I’m enough of an internet voyer to read ‘em.

From this article:

Is there truly a tax-the-rich hidden agenda in Washington that goes far beyond the Obama budget?

I wonder about this simply because there’s a much better way to recoup the misbegotten AIG bonuses. Though no one in Congress is paying any attention to beleaguered Treasury man Tim Geithner, he explained in a March 17 letter to Nancy Pelosi that the Treasury “will impose on AIG a contractual commitment to pay the Treasury from the operations of the company the amount of the retention awards just paid. In addition, we will deduct from the $30 billion in assistance an amount equal to the amount of those payments.” So the AIG bonus problem can be remedied in a much calmer and simpler way than returning to 90 percent tax rates.

Makes ya think… or oughta.

As an independently thinking human being, my reaction to Alan Moore’s worldview is at best nausea.

But the spectacle of Watchmen was really quite something. Never having actually read anything of his, I’m guessing he can really put pen to paper.

I just hate the “graphic novel” form so much though.

Thank god. I’ve been saying this for a week and a half and never got a comment or a response. Not here, not twitter, not other forums, noplace.

UPDATE:This will make you scream if you’re a reasonable human being.

(h/t to Cassandra over at Villainous Company)

Fucking idiot.

Obama Thanks Himself
A teleprompt blunder has led to Barack Obama thanking himself in a speech at the White House in a St Patrick’s Day celebration.

Barack Obama(R) and Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen

Obama and the Irish PM share the joke during their joint address

Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen was just a few paragraphs into an address in Washington when he realised it all sounded a bit too familiar.

It was. He was repeating the speech President Barack Obama had just read from the same teleprompter.

Mr Cowen stopped, turned to the president and said: “That’s your speech.”

A laughing Mr Obama returned to the podium to take over but it seems the script had finally been switched and the US president ended up thanking himself for inviting everyone to the party.

Mr Obama is an accomplished orator but is becoming known in America as the “teleprompt president” over his reliance on the machine when he gives a speech.

Listen folks…

The whole AIG thing? Yeah. You’re being snowed. This is the ultimate “ooh! Look! Shiny!” trick you used to pull on your kid sister to steal her fries.

1) That One can’t rewrite contract law at will.
2) Were the “EVIL AIG BONUSES!” in place before their massive influxes of cash from the government or were they not? There’s no middle ground. One or the other. (Hint: I know the answer.)
3) When Chucky “make the evil doll look benevolent” schumer says that they need to either give it back or they will tax it from them, he’s unabashedly and perhaps criminally abusing his power. There’s no “no.” It is simply thus.

If you buy this shit as important then you’re just as much of a fool as The Messiah takes you for; and that’s pretty pitiful.

I just posted this to the Software Craftsmanship group/list a couple minutes ago.  Thought I’d post it here just in case.  It frustrates me that I don’t write better.  But the only way to do it is to do it, so I’m going to do more of it.

(err… I posted the below thingie in response to J. B. Rainsberger’s msg here.)

J. B. Rainsberger wrote:
> Hello, folks.
>
> I think the subject line says it all. I believe that a focus on
> software craftsmanship without a similar focus on becoming an
> entrepreneur wastes valuable energy. Most companies will never respect
> the level of craftsmanship you want to attain, so you’ll need to make
> your own opportunities. Whether you start your own business or don’t,
> I believe you need an entrepreneurial spirit in order to turn your
> passion for craftsmanship into better day-to-day work.
>
> What say you? Full of shit? Bang on?
>
> Take care.
>

I’ve been rolling this over in my head a bit and something’s not quite right.

I certainly do think this J.B. is right about the state of business and their understanding.

BUT

If internal customers aren’t going to respect a certain level of craftsmanship, why would external ones?

Think about what’s been going on in the past few years in our industry. It’s perfectly clear to me that WE don’t even know what the hell we’re doing. I don’t mean that we’re a bunch of hacks. But that we’re trying to work out what good software even IS. Agile practices as a widely accepted notion is what, 5 years old at the outside? (people “got it” earlier, just read Kernighan & Plauger’s “Software Tools” book and tell me it isn’t agile.)

This is a young field and because it’s one of the few crafts that works with zero raw materials, there has been no material cost of waste. It is simply not obvious what is bad product and what is good product. If you have a thing of tin and a thing of steel, senses you’ve been developing all your life tell you pretty quickly which one is going to hold up and feel like a more substantial “better thing.”

So a couple very fundamental motivations out of which true craftsmanship evolved simply don’t exist in our field. Throwing something together that just worked well enough has been expedient for the last 40 years and it’s only in the last 10-15 or so that we’re starting to understand the notion of technical debt, seeing what it’s really costing us and our customers.

Add to that the speed of advance in this arena. New languages, techniques and technologies du jour (Client Server, Push, Fuzzy Logic, Data Warehousing, Thin Client, yadda yadda) all of which were seized upon as panaceas which failed to deliver, to the unending and increasing frustration of our customers who began to see us as just wanting them to pay for toys for us to play with.

So now here we are. We’re starting to realize what a horrible fog we’re in while groping our way around the elephant of craftsmanship, trying to replace the natural impetus of material waste with best practices and discipline. We’ve started wrapping these ideas in packages of nomenclature that can be sold and talked about. And It Is Good.

But think about our customers for a minute. They’re going to look at all this, hold their breath and mutter ‘oh here we go again’. By all estimations, they’re right. What possible reason would they have to think anything else? And how are we going to respond?

Well, we get to pick.

I don’t think there IS a good answer to that. It asks people who have very little attachment to the inside of the software development process to understand an evolution in our field that’s only beginning and that we don’t understand very well ourselves. At the same time we’re telling them that what we’ve been delivering is probably an awful lot worse than we had previously realized. Who the hell do we think we are to have any expectations that a product customer is going to accept that?

What we can always do is to write software better. No matter how intractable the customer seems, there’s always room for personal improvement through diligance and hard work. You can always clean the code a little more. You can always code for testability. You can always leave a code base better than you found it. You can always have out of band converstaions with QA people, asking what would make their lives easier. If the shop “doesn’t believe in unit tests” then keep your unit tests on your box. There’s always room to pull and ground that can be gained.

We work in a world where you can’t hold up a good thing and a bad thing and tell the difference by visual inspection. You can only tell over time what is strong and flexible, and what is brittle. So it falls to us to create a good thing instead of a bad thing and to do so consistently such that the difference will eventually be obvious.

We are doing all the right things. Sure it looks like floundering around in the dark. But that’s only because we’re floundering around in the dark. It’s a part of the process.

Flipping the bozo bit on our customers, whether they are internal or external, is simply not useful.

I am a: Glock Model 22 in 40 cal

What kind of handgun are YOU?

Ok, I’d have preferred something rugged and classic.

Well… Highlights might be a bit hifalutin.

- Finished Command & Conquer, Red Alert 3.  I know it doesn’t seem like much but it does feel good to actually FINISH one of these games once in a while, instead of just seeing something else shiny and dropping ‘em.  Plus the C&C games are all just top notch.  I still think Generals: Zero Hour is my favorite.  Dunno what happened to those CDs.  Downloaded  C&C RA3 sequel which came out this week some time (via Direct2Drive.  Digital download distribution FTW!)

- Hot Dog and French Fry Pizza.  Really.  Really horrible. No no, it’s so very much worse than you can imagine. No.  Worse than that.  They should sell t-shirts that say “I ate this crap and lived…sorta.”

- Discovered a new, really bad pizza place (see above.) Crust was too soggy, sauce was watery, cheese was bad, undercooked yet burned on the bottom.  FAIL. FAIL. FAIL. FAIL.

Ya know, I keep hearing all about how wonderful Ruby is and every once in a while I think about picking it up. But then I come across something like this and I come to my senses:

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  def download
    dl_opts = params[:dl].nil? ?   ‘attachment‘ : ‘inline‘
    dl_img  = params[:type].nil? ? "" : "_#{params[:type]}"
    dl_file = FileUpload.find_by_item_id(params[:id])
    unless dl_file.nil?
      dl_file_type   = dl_file.mime_type
      dl_file_ext    = dl_file_type.item.self_title
      dl_file_name   = "#{dl_file.original_name}#{dl_img}.#{dl_file_ext}"
      dl_file_path   = "#{RAILS_ROOT}/public/upload/#{dl_file.id}/"
      dl_file_title  = dl_file.item.self_title
      dl_public_name = dl_file_title == dl_file_name ? dl_file_name :
                                                       "#{dl_file_title}#{dl_img}.#{dl_file_ext}"
      send_file("#{dl_file_path}#{dl_file_name}",
                :disposition => dl_opts,
                :encoding    => ‘utf8‘,
                :type        => dl_file_type.content_type,
                :filename    => URI.encode(dl_public_name))
    end
  end

Ruby makes Perl look like English. Come on. That’s not software. That’s what happens when you throw a cat at your keyboard.

Sure, maybe getting a snippet from “RefactorMyCode” is salting the dig a bit but good god.

FAIL

Clay Shirky is one of those people whose name keeps coming up but never with enough context for me to pay attention.

I stuck with this piece and was rewarded: Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable

I re-read this paragraph for about 20 minutes and it clicked a couple things together in my head. My thoughts generally aren’t all that well organized any more, so I’m going to go away and think about this. But see if you don’t see what I saw in this. (Oh, and go read the article. It’s a little ‘zeitgeist’y for my taste, but worth your time.)

That is what real revolutions are like. The old stuff gets broken faster than the new stuff is put in its place. The importance of any given experiment isn’t apparent at the moment it appears; big changes stall, small changes spread. Even the revolutionaries can’t predict what will happen. Agreements on all sides that core institutions must be protected are rendered meaningless by the very people doing the agreeing. (Luther and the Church both insisted, for years, that whatever else happened, no one was talking about a schism.) Ancient social bargains, once disrupted, can neither be mended nor quickly replaced, since any such bargain takes decades to solidify.

This is really interesting to me.

The keyboard/mouse combo built in to my mactop is just enough of a pain in the ass that I never used the damn thing, not really.  Oh I’d keep it running so I could use it as a second monitor while trading (more on that in an incoming post) but I never really used the thing.  

Trackpads just really suck.  Yes, they’re all clever and everything, but they really just don’t get the job done for me.  I need a mouse that has buttons (which are buttons and not “sensitive areas”.  It’s not a woman, it’s an input device.)

So I finally unbolted the video cable from my Dual G4 (remember THAT? no?  You HAVEN’T been reading me for 7 years?  hmmpf.) and plugged it into the side of my mactop, along with my nice spiffy macally keyboard and some mouse I had in a box called “The Mouse” which seems to be made by a company called MacMice.  It sucks by the way.

Mr. Bernstein will likely be pleased to know that what’s motivated me to do this is Tinderbox.  In all my bizarre casting about for an organizational system (both on line and off, electronic and paper) that works for me, knowing I have Tinderbox sitting on a mactop that’s for all intents and purposes functionally useless to me was driving me out of my mind. And, since it doesn’t look like Eastgate is going to get to Tinderbox for Win32 this decade (relax Mark, I’ve been a developer for 30 years I actually DO know how it is) I figured it was time to get to it.

So now I’ve got all these weird key combinations I have to learn all over again (whether or not I ever really knew them to start with is a matter of … eh, no it’s not.  I didn’t.)

But this should work.  I’ve signed up with MacHeist for all their goodies “and stuff” (in joke, not with MacHeist.)  So here we go.

Now I have to cast about for “the right things to have installed.”  TweetDeck is already on here (it makes for a great “2nd monitor” application) though it had some serious stability problems on this platform (whether it was TweetDeck or Adobe Air I neither know nor care.)

It feels good to have set this up.  Due to the wonderful lag in the gaming industry (driven by sensible market forces frankly) I can take working on this machine far more seriously than on my big gaming rig that’s become my primary machine.  The distractions here are at least interesting ones.

Let’s see… where’s that xcode icon…

UPDATE: Ya know, it’s 3 days later and I still load this up and howl laughing myself hoarse at it; especially when they get going a second time.  It’s the ultimate WHARGARBL.  What’s a whargarbl you ask?

Why, this, THIS is a whargarbl:

I need a reminder.  Between A.D.D. and it’s associated effluvia, I get and stay off track very easily.

I thought about having some kind of interruptive reminder application that would beep or popup or something.  But that doesn’t make sense.

Then I thought that it might make sense to have a sign reminding me, when I looked up (or “noticeably though not disruptively close to my focal point”) to at least be mindful of what i was doing.

Being me I let the idea germinate a bit and I realized there were a couple/few things I need big bold reminders of.

Sparing you the rest of my fragmented internal dialog, here’s the deal strongly and simply stated:

I went to RiteAid and bought 4 8.5″x11″ frames (at $3.99 each) and I printed 4 signs, which I’ve posted.  They’re in time order.  You’ll see what I mean.

1. Let It Go This is the past.  It’s also things about what I’m working on that are bloody irrelevant meaning “everything that’s happened until now.” When you’ve got something to do the only two things you have are the situation or thing which needs work and it’s next state of completion.  Dwelling on the past is neither relevant nor productive.  The motives for doing so are at BEST suspect, frequently serving to keep something in stasis through procrastination or worse.
2. What Now? Now.  Right Now.  What are you doing?  Why? (rolls in to what.)   Know where you are, what you’re doing and what you expect from that action.  IF YOU DO NOT then your current action bloody well ought to be “Figure Out What Now.”  It’s simple really.  This was the first sign I wanted to put up.
3. What Next? So What Now is done, you lean back in your chair.  There’s only one question.  What next?  It’s the next What Now and nothing more.  It’s good to plan these in advance.  Other people are better at describing (and implementing) that process than I am.
4. What Then? Where are you going? Why are you doing what you’re doing?  I almost phrased this as “To What End?” and who knows, I may yet.  If you don’t have something you’re working towards then you’re dithering away your life on minutia.  Stop it.  Someone wiser than I said “Make No Small Plans.”  This is that.  Do that.

These scale well.

Here’s my desktop from 45 minutes ago (click to embiggen):

UPDATE: Hmmpf. Apparently while TwitPic has a “put this pic on your own site” feature, they only put the thumbnail. Fair enough. Click it for the big version.

Blog needs a major overhaul.  I really like the bliki idea (blog/wiki) as it seems the only sensible way of automatically cross linking content such that it remains accessible.  This foolishness of blogging being forceably time linear is as stupid as using cassette tapes for music.

It’s time for me to get back into IT.  Trading isn’t working and, more importantly, I don’t really care about it.  At the end of the day, even if I’ve traded remarkably well the only thing that’s different in the world is the size of my trading account and some femto-modifications to the price of certain instruments as an affect of my involvement.  Money is a necessary motivation and I’ve enjoyed tremendously having lots of it in the past but I’ve never been deluded by it’s value into making it my primary motivation. (Actually, that’s not true. There is a time I chose money over enjoying my job, before I’d had any idea what it was like to have money.  I did make the best decision I could have back then.  Frankly it’s only now, 10+ years later that I’m coming to terms with the fact that I can’t reasonably have expected myself to have made any other choice at the time.)

I say “get back into IT” because while I’ve just started up the job search engines, I’m not married to programming.  It seems to me that this would be a really great time to shift gears a bit.

In a perfect world I’d work on small (time) scale assignments in a hired-gun capacity.  Historically I’ve been far too easy to bore in a noncompelling project.  I’d rather come in with a full head of steam and grind for 6-12 months and leave having done a damn good job.

The Agile/XP Coach job was an interesting experiment because it really shined a light on a great deal of untapped potential.  But it was ultimately doomed to failure as a large-scale teaching job.  Piecemeal and small scale classes, training, pairing and tool creation and setup were wonderful.  When it came time to actually fly half way around the world and do 3 weeks of training, I simply wasn’t ready for it and bowed out, which was unabashedly the right thing to do.

No matter where I land, I simply can’t go through a day without making something any more.  Hell, even in my horrible heroin like addiction to MMOs I spend most of my time “crafting.” But I do very well with small scale quick hit tools and programs.  Everything from protocol ‘breakout box’ taps for testing purposes to banged out html screen scrapers and even mini gui apps that help me get through the day.  I churn these things out all the damn time.  Unfortunately I’ve never been quite focused enough with job responsibilities to be a top tier perl or python scripter in a unixen environment, otherwise there’d be that facet open.

For now, my job search is on autopilot, dice, monster, hotjobs, a couple really great recruiters (yes, they’re out there.  There are a couple who didn’t get their job by failing the ethics exam to be used car salesmen.)

I want something a little different though.  Something that plays to my strengths, but seems to me to be a fairly odd niche.

On To!

Last year I spent a fair amount of energy importing my old posts from other blogs into here.  It totalled a little over 3000 posts spanning 6 years.

I still see incoming references to old uccu urls.  It wouldn’t have been SUCH a nightmare to accomidate that.

The way to do it would’ve been:

- Tag the old posts with the old post id and ‘uccu’

- Add a rewrite rule to the magic whatchamacallit file that would redirect all the /uccu/*html links to a cgi.

- Add a cgi that redirects to a WordPress searche for the post number from the intended url and ‘uccu’.

- Tada!

But I didn’t tag the uccu posts.  After seeing what happened when I tagged the old radio userland posts (massive proliferation of tags and an OldRadioBlog tag) I thought differently.

Well that was wrong.

Now I’ve got people who are getting cached google results coming in to this site and landing on the homepage, which is almost certainly the last thing they want.

Yeah.  Looks like it’s time to do some site work.

Just got back from having seen the Watchmen on a whim (walking past the theater and it “ooh, starts in half hour… no line… ok.)  I was supposed to be picking up my laundry but it’s not like I have a date any time soon.  I’ll get it tomorrow. (I know I know, TMI.  Fuck it, you’ll live.)

I’ve been back here, sitting at my computer for about a half hour and I’ve gotta tell ya, I feel like a drug is wearing off.   It was really very good.  But now I’m in this bizarre place where everything I look at seems monumentally boring.

Otherwise it was a relatively mundane weekend but for a party I went to on Friday night, which was… fun.

Yesterday and today I’ve been working on a little programming project, getting my TDD chops back (and up from there.)  Hopefully I can manage to stay interested in it long enough for it to at least be moderately useful, in direct contrast to the 1.3 million or so lines of code that’s accumulated in the graveyard that is ~/srctree on my machines.

Yeah, blogging’s been slow.  Life frankly just hasn’t been different enough day to day for me to write about here.  I’ve been penning some stuff offline, transcribing bar notebooks (got a box of ‘em) etc.  But frankly this site’s just going through one of those biorhythm lows that I get every few months.

One problem is Twitter.  Twitter really satisfies that microblogging needle in the arm urge, so the pressure to actually write anything for here never really gets a chance to build up.