You Only Get *One* Pageview: Make It Count

So, yesterday, some blogger decided to use twitter to drive traffic to their site. Specifically, the link they posted was about the poor, beleaguered TSOs that are stuck having to implement the TSA's regressive policies.

Now, don't get me wrong, I understand that, yes, the TSOs "are human beings, too". And, yes, I get that many find things about their jobs that they don't like. Point of fact, most, if not all, people have parts of their jobs they hate. Many people utterly despise their jobs. Many people love their jobs. Most of us fall somewhere along that love-hate spectrum - frequently, all across it, depending on when you ask. So, yeah, "I get it."

That said, when I've hated jobs, I've typically sought and found other, less soul-crushing ways to earn my living. It's what you do if you want to stay sane. It's what you do if you don't want to poison the rest of your life. And, yes, many times, I've had to suck on the poison-pill while I wait for that next job to come along that alleviates my need to deal with the odiousness of whatever the job I seek to escape is.

All that aside, I don't pity the TSOs their positions. They're employed voluntarily. They can leave any time they want - after all, they're employeees, not slaves or conscripts. If they hate that they have to grope people, if they go home crying, every day, because of the verbal abuse meted out to them in response to what they say or do to passengers, then quit.

Chances are, the reason they're crying or just feeling bad is that they know that what they're doing is wrong. Providing the excuse of "just following orders". And, no, it's not unfair for passengers to say that the TSOs are acting like Nazis. At the Nürnberg Trials, some variant of "just following orders" was a fairly popular defense (Adolf Eichmann being one of the most famous for employing it). It didn't work then. It won't work now.

For those TSOs who were in the US Armed Forces prior to the TSA, your military code of conduct says that you should refuse to follow what you believe to not be a lawful or moral order. So, don't try to pull my heartstrings about having served in the military prior to being a TSO. Your military training makes it so you should know better.

For those TSOs of Jewish decent who take offense at the comparison? I've little pity for you, either. As Jews, you should be acutely aware of the history of how distasteful the "just following orders" defense is.

And, to the writer of that blog entry? I don't care whether you feel like you're being a mouthpiece or not. I don't care about the rest of the contents of your site. When you posted your link on Twitter, it was for a specific page on your site. There are billions of pages up on the internet. Only a few of those pages are of sufficient interest to make a reader want to read more by a given author. So, when you use Twitter, StumbleUpon, Digg, etc. to drive traffic to your site, know that 99.999% of the readers who get to your site through those means will only know you through what they see you write on that one page. So, when you add commentary to your article that seems apologistic or you quote links used by the same people that are the source of irritation, you will be seen in the light of those comments. Deal with it.

Do Poll-Quoters Even Understand the Polls They Quote?

Ok, so, I've now seen references to two different polls that claim to support the TSA's enhanced pat-downs. One is the one that the TSA cites in their blog and one was one cited in the LA Time's news blog. In both cases, the people claiming the polls support their view didn't seem to actually read how the polls were structured.

The poll cited by the TSA in their blogs was what statisticians would refer to as a "non-representative sample". The poll was a random sampling of the population-at-large. It was not a sampling of the traveling-population. In other words, the sample population could be be heavily skewed towards respondents not directly effected by the new policies. If the TSA wanted to be more convincing, they'd have polled actual travelers - particularly frequent-travelers. Then there might be something resembling validity in the results.

The poll cited in the LA Time's news blog uses the misleading claim of "travel professionals". It's used in a way to make the un-careful reader think they're referring to people that fly, on a frequent basis, as part of their job. However, if one bothers to read rather than just skimming (or even just taking a headline at face value), one discovers that the "travel professionals" polled were the people making travel arrangements. It wasn't a poll of people that use those travel arrangements. Much like the poll cited by the TSA, it's not a poll of those directly impacted by the TSA policies.

Unfortunately, there's far too many people out there who take things at face value. There's far too many skimmers. There's far too many "headlines-only" readers. Simply put, there's too many people that are simply lazy in how they choose to inform themselves. News organizations, corporations and anyone in the spin business knows this and take advantage of it.

You Call That "Security"?

Ok, so my "security-minded" bank requires you to change your web portal password at 45-day intervals. Further, they require a minimum password length and you can't re-use a password within ten change. Oh... and these rules are in place for a service that gets used once every 30 days (so, it's not like you get a chance to memorize your password by frequent use).

Even more fun is that: A) they don't have an online password reset tool once you get locked out; and, B) they only have CSRs available M-F during business hours.

Toss in the fact that passwords may not contain the types of characters I use to make my passwords "suitably complex":



...and this bank's authentication system is kind of a joke.

I guess I'm not a good human being or DC-area resident that I don't care about the Chandra Levy Trial...

Where Was My Mind

I have my occasional "absent-minded" moment. Some days, I have more moments than others. Today, I ad a real winner of a moment...

I just went into the kitchen and found the bottle of milk on top of the refrigerator and my pill-box sitting in the fridge on the milk-shelf. I may have been a touch "distracted" when I took my evening pills, earlier, tonight.

Oops.

Fortunately, the two items had only been transposed for less than 15 minutes. So, I don't have to immediately kill a luke-warm, half-gallon bottle of milk to keep from wasting $4 worth of milk.

Probably Never Happen

Many (most?) police departments have taken to recording interactions with the public. It helps provide proof that the law enforcement officer (LEO) was acting professionally when there's questions about inappropriate conduct or police brutality. In theory, it's a great idea. In practice, it still has its flaws (e.g., when there's accusations of wrongdoing and videos go "missing", are "damaged" or there were recording equipment "malfunctions"), but it's a start down the right path.

Right now, the TSA's in the middle of a growing backlash over their increasingly invasive "security" measures. These days, the TSA wants you to be irradiated while holding a "I'm being mugged" pose so that some government drone can look at, essentially, naked pictures of you. As an "alternative", they have been offering people the option of being given a pat-down.

When this started, the pat-down was fairly innocuous. However, too many people were choosing the option, thus defeating the point of billions of dollars in purchases of expensive, "sexy" machines. The TSA wasn't too fond of people opting out of their security theatre, so they decided to make the pat-down an option too unpleasant to consider. They directed their glorified Barney Fifes to conduct pat-downs that, outside of a government-sanctioned context, would be considered sexual assault.

Now, it seems to me that, given what they've put in place, they really should consider the LEO-esque video-taping of such interactions. That way, if a case ever went to criminal or civil proceedings, the TSA agents would be able to provide proof of no wrong-doing in the form of video tapes. I'm guessing, however, that this will never happen. The TSA knows, all too well, that if a case ever went to court, such video tapes would be damning rather than vindicating.

Sunday Dinners

Often times, Sundays are the days that Donna chooses to go all-out when making dinner. Tonight was one of those nights. She put together a nice osso bucco served with chanterelle risotto and a brussel sprout and allium hash. Served it with a nice, bright red wine.

Sunday Dinner

She'll probably write up what she did on her blog.

Avery's a Bum

I'd not shed a single tear were I to open the sports page and be greeted with news of Sean Avery's horrifying, agony-filled death. He's a piece of gutter-trash that the world would be a better place without. I mean, he makes Tie Domi seem like a class act.

Road Trips

So, in a little bit, Donna and I will be heading up to Philadelphia to, hopefully, see the Flyers trash the Panthers. To be honest, if I hadn't seen the team name on the tickets, I wouldn't have remembered that the Panthers even exist - the same holds for pretty much all of the teams from states with no, naturally occurring, outdoor ice.

We're taking my car up to Philadelphia, this time. Donna's in the middle of doing several sewing projects. With the DST nonsense, it will be dark early and Donna will need cabin-lighting to see. The passengers' cabin-lights in the BMW are a lot more directed than they are in the SUV. She can have her light on and not make me night-blind. The same can't be said of the lights in the SUV (just one of many differences between a $50K car and a $25K car, I guess).

For all the expense and niceties of the BMW, it's an old car (a 2002 model year). The head unit that came with it didn't have an auxiliary-port through which to plug in an iPod or similar device. All it has is the CD-player. There's, effectively, little in the way or radio once you get too far north of Baltimore. Pretty much, you have to bring your music with you to cover the hour+ stretch north of Baltimore where radio ends.

When It comes to my car, that means I gotta burn CDs to listen to (if I want new music each trip). It's kind of a pain in the ass.

I'd get a new head-unit for my car, but none of the after-market units work with my steering wheel-based controls. And, at nine years old, I'm always hesitant to spend the money to get someone to do the work necessary to preserve use of the steering wheel controls.

Browsing SNAFUs

Yeah, I know that it's actually the fault of AdBlock+, but there's still something weird about the fact that my Google-produced Chrome seems to be unreliable in playing videos from Google-owned YouTube.

Think I'll Pass

Why do I get the idea that Knucklehead will perpetuate the truisms about movies that start professional wrestlers?

This guy?

I mean, "The Big Show" may be a nice guy and all. He may even be of above average intelligence. And, truly, "professional wrestling" is all about acting. I just can't see that he's going to be someone to put on a compelling movie-acting performance. Worse, a movie that centers around a wrestler playing a wrestler (I'm presuming: commercials frequently aren't accurate indicators of movie contents) in a comical farce gives me little in the way of faith that this will be a high-quality flick. Really: I'm wondering how this movie got any budget for advertising. It just strikes me as a movie made to go "straight-to-tape".

Not All Ounces Are Created Equal

So, today, I was telecommuting. I was working on a "how to use NetApp Fibrechannel Storage With RedHat Multipathing" document. As I usually do when telecommuting, I had the TV on to make background noise. At one point, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire came on.

As far as gameshows go, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire is not the most horrible of the bunch. Certainly, it's far better than the ferret-level intelligence required for Wheel of Fortune and less trailer parkish than Let's Make a Deal. Still, the show's a dumbed-down version of the same show that came from England.

Even dumbed-down, there's certain standards that one really should maintain. I mean, if you're going to ask a question - I don't care how hard or easy it is - you should expect a correct answer. More, the answer that you're asking for should be correct.

Today, I had the pain of seeing really poor writing and fact-checking at play. The question asked was something along the lines of, "If a man weighs 150lbs and gold's market price is $1000 an ounce, how much would the man be worth if he were composed entirely of gold?" The answer they wanted (and got) from the contestant was $2.4Mn. Now, that answer would be correct, if gold were measured in the same units that body weight is measured in. However, that is simply not the case. Gold is measured in troy ounces (ozt.). Body weight is measured in avoirdupois ounces (oz.). Ok, typically body weight (in the US) is measured in "pounds" but, that's neither here nor there - it's the underlying conversions that are material to this question.

A quick search shows that, one pound of body weight equates to 16 avoirdupois ounces (or 16oz). Whereas, one pound of body weight equates to roughly 14.583 troy ounces (or, 14.583ozt). That means that the 150lb man would be 2400oz. and 2187.5ozt. (or thereabouts). As previously established, gold is measured in ozt, not oz. Therefore, the calculation should have been $1000/ozt * 2187.5ozt to get a value of $2.187Mn, not the $2.4Mn that was offered as an answer option.

Grr... Sloppy (and, yes, I didn't worry about the significance of my numbers when I placed decimals and did my rounding - sue me).

No KSH Love

I've been using UNIX operating systems (and workalikes) for a long time, now. The first UNIX system I touched was in 1989. As a longtime user of UNIX, I've developed some deeply set habits and preferences.

One such preference is my choice login-shell. I am a Korn Shell (KSH) user. Unfortunately, it's not super well-supported under Linux. It's made available more as a concession to dinosaurs, such as myself, than as a real "we think this is a good shell" type of effort. While each of the other myriad shells in Linux seem to come with a default shell initialization script in /etc/skel, KSH is given no such file.

All I can guess is that the distribution/package maintainers figure, "if this person's using KSH, they have enough clue to know how to put together a proper shell init file - no sense bothering to provide one." Worse, so few of today's UNIX "administrators" seem to get that there's shells other than BASH, that they don't bother to alter the contents of /etc/skel (or, if they do, they only do it for BASH and maybe CSH). Then again, there's a reason I put quotation marks around "administrators".

Alternative Screening Methods

So, the fascists at TSA are trying to push the use of the backscatter scanners by making them the lesser of two evils. Basically, they've instructed their hoards of Barney Fifes to go so far down the path of invasiveness with their pat-downs as to qualify for sexual assault in any other context. They've done this to make the alternative to being scanned even more embarrassing and annoying than being run through the backscatter scanners.

I wonder, though: were I to wear a rubber gimp-suit to go through TSA screening, would they still need to grope or scan me? I mean, it's not like I'd be able to hide anything under such attire. With those things, can tell just how fit you are, just how hung you are ...hell, they can practically tell what your religion is. Certainly, there's no possibility of hiding a pack of sugar, let alone contraband or explosives.

But, it's not about that, really, is it? It's about showing the little people who's in power and that they're helpless to do anything about it.

Wasn't Me

I've said it before and I know I'll say it again, "I love StumbleUpon." On a semi-regular basis, they bring you real gems of "news of the weird". In this case, it was the story of a man busted for burglary who, upon vigorous search, was found to have had a mouse in his rectum.

No, I have no freaking clue why he'd have had a mouse in his rectum. Perhaps, the prior night, while stumbling through the dark from his bed to his bathroom, he fell on the mouse and it just ended up in there.

Still, were it me, I'd have to at least try to claim my innocence in the burglary. Perhaps I'd state, "clearly, the mouse was acting as driver and I was just his vehicle." Kinda like Disney's Ratatouille, but up the butt rather than yanking tufts of hair?

Logical EV Buyers

I read C|Net News on a fairly frequent basis. The articles are, generally, fairly concise and "accurate" by current web standards for publishing. They also seem to cover a wide variety of topics of technical interest - green-tech, online privacy, social media, etc.

Yesterday, a news article about GE's intentions to go heavily towards green-tech in their vehicle fleets was featured. The article's headline indicates that it's a move towards electric vehicles, but seems to focus more on hybrids like the Chevy Volt. That said, if EV and other "chicken-or-egg" green-tech propositions are to become reality, efforts like GE's will be necessary.

What's surprised me, at this point, is that a company like ZipCar isn't trying to work with power companies, EV vehicle manufacturers and municipalities to push EV into their own fleets. I mean, ZipCar's primary users are city-dwellers. ZipCars are, when awaiting subscriber-use, parked in specific, reserved spots throughout the service city. Seems almost a perfect context to deploy EVs and EV infrastructure.

Oh well: what do I know (I'm only a casual observer).

MILFs for Geeks

I remember seeing Kary Byron looking very pregnant in an episode of MythBusters, earlier this year. Today, while telecommuting, her new kid-oriented show came on. She's decidedly not pregnant, any more.

Got MILF?

So, I guess, at this point, Kari Byron is officially a MILF?

(More) Seen On TV

So, the days that I telecommute, I generally have the TV on, in the background, as I tap away at my laptop. I usually flip on the Fox 5 Morning News when I come down for the day. Then at 10, when that show goes off the air and switches to the dreadful Wendy Williams show (who the fuck is she blowing to get a TV spot???), I change over to NBC for the last hour of their morning show. Unfortunately, that consists of the only slightly less odious "Hoda and Kathy-Lee" segment.

Today, they were doing the whole "iHoda" thing (basically, a "what's on Hoda's iPod" segment). This is the embarrassing segment where they play some song that she has on her iPod. Invariably, the song is dreadfully awful. Definitely not the kind of music I would admit to listening to, least of all would I play it as some kind of pick of the day. Whatever: no accounting for taste.

They also then had some performance group on. Appeared to be four black early-teens doing a song and dance routine. I think the whole thing was supposed to be them performing their music, but really wasn't paying that close of attention to it. The music was awful enough that it caused me to look up to see what the hell they were doing on the show. It was not impressive. They were outfitted in suitably "urban" attire and bouncing about to some horrid piece of music. They were clearly (read, "poorly") lip-syncing to some awful piece of Autotuned garbage. Not sure if I was supposed to be impressed by their "singing", the music, the dancing or their stage-costumes. If I was, then I guess I was missing whatever it was that was supposed to impress me.

Oh well...

Hallmarks of SPAM

There are any number of attributes of an email that can tell you, within about half a second, that the contents are SPAM. It can be the from address. It can be the to address. It can be the subject line. It can be the greeting.

Today, I got one of those emails that begins with the greeting, "Hello: my dear"". Amusingly, this greeting was accompanied by an opening sentence that was trying to entice me into a "business opportunity."

I mean, even were the email legit, how serious could you take such a "business" missive if they start by calling you "Dear"?

*SO* Not Reassuring

Why is it that every time a manager tells me "all your jobs are safe" I think "time to start looking for a new gig"? Even if a manager is trying to allay anxieties that are stemming from something that is well and truly innocuous, it just tingles your spidey-senses all the more. I mean, historically, such "assurances" invariably act as precursors to negative employment actions. Personally, if there's nothing to fear, said managers should just keep quiet. Offering such reassurances just makes the more career-experienced individuals start looking for new work in earnest.