Wrong Trajectories

Assuming I live to be as old as some of my relatives did, am I going to be able to look back on my life and marvel at how much things have changed since I was a kid? I mean, my grandparents and grand-uncle (who died at 105) got to see a LOT of really meaningful change. Somehow, I doubt I'm going to get to see anything so meaningful as the transition form man not even having powered flight to being on the moon. Right now, it seems like the best I'm going to be able to point to is nifty consumer gadgets. In fact, on the trajectory we're on, I'll be able to say "I remember moon mission" as a kid but have nothing even remotely as awe-inspiring in my adulthood. Pretty sad, actually.

Musings on Mega Lotteries

Each time one of the big US lotteries reach stupidly-high prize levels, it causes me to ruminate on a number of things. I've never had illusions that I might win a meaningfully, life-changing prize, but it's still nice to think of the possibilities. This time, as the prize number became more and more stratospheric, it caused me - prompted or of my own accord, a number of things.

I'm kind of a statistics geek - not so much from the standpoint of being massively into specific statistics but more from the standpoint of being amused by people's habits and interests. I've got to think that things like mega lotteries cause all sorts of interesting queries to end up in Google's data banks. It would be sort of interesting to see what lottery-related questions are asked, how they're asked, how frequently they're asked and how the relative frequencies change as new numbers about the size of the prize come out. For instance, did people ask questions like (because, obviously, these are questions that occurred to me):

• What are the community-property rules of my state and how do they relate to lottery winnings?
• How often do married lottery winners end up divorced after winning?
• Is the post-winning divorce rate any higher than the average divorce rate or the divorce rates of couples who've experienced severe economic stress?
• Of those divorces:
  • how many are prompted by the lottery winnings (i.e., bickering over what to do with it, etc.)
  • how many are simply enabled by the lottery winnings. That is, are they couples who would have otherwise divorced, sooner, but didn't have the financial wherwithal to do so (say because they couldn't afford to live on their respective individual incomes or whatever) or were they simply not quite in love any more, but stayed together because they couldn't think of a compelling enough reason to break up.

You're probably noticing a theme, here. Yeah: I'm married. So, I think like a married guy. I can't honestly say that, after winning a huge jackpot, I'd still be long-married afterwards. Not that I'm actively seeking dissolution of my marriage, but money does weird things....

The other thing(s) that come up are peoples' reactions to lottery moneys they never receive.

More than a few people, after the lottery has ended with a winner (that isn't them), express things akin to sour grapes. There's a tendency to look at whether the winner(s) were deserving of the prize awarded. Often times, it's simple matter of being able to identify with the winners (e.g., "that's why I never win: I don't live in a mobile home"). Other times it's along the lines of "he already had money - he didn't need to win that prize" (because, hey, there's anyone out there that needs $640Mn - especially more than the person complaining does)

Whatevs. Not like someone esle's winning the jackpot diminishes me for having not won. Got other things to worry about (some might say, "clearly, given the bulleted list of questions, above").

The most baffling thing, however are the people who seem to think that certain prizes aren't worth winning. It's compounded by who some of these people are. Case in point was a couple years ago, just after one of the big lotteries had paid out a $300Mn+ prize. At any rate,  I'd had an extra dollar in my pocket, that day, so I opted to buy a lottery ticket. The prize in that day's drawing was "only" 15Mn. The woman behind the counter asked me why I was wasting my money on such a small payout. All I could think was, "fucker, 15Mn is more than you're gonna see in a lifetime (as a 7Eleven clerk, she couldn't have been clearing much more than minimum-wage): who are you to turn up your nose at 'only' $15Mn?" I mean, seriously, while even a $1Mn lottery winning wouldn't necessarily be life-altering to the point of allowing me to retire early, etc, it would still allow me to pay off my mortgage. Given that my mortgage sets me back $30K/year, even if I changed nothing else about my life, I could either just piss away $30K/yr on things like vacations and "toys", or, I could take a job I really liked rather than one that ones dictated by financial needs, etc.. So, yeah, it's "only" $1Mn - I just don't how you could ever possibly question why anyone would "waste" $1 on such a "small" prize.

Oh well, there's no accounting for what goes through other peoples heads.

So You Wanna Screen Employee's FaceBook Pages?

It used to be, some employers liked to do online background check of job candidates by seeing what people were publicly-posting to the FaceBook, Twitter and other online presences. While creepy, this was all public material, so, you could let it slide. Recently, as people have become more sharing-aware, people are doing things a bit more privately. A once useful resource for info-trolling is becoming less so. What's the reasonable thing to do: realize that a tool is no longer useful and move on to bigger and better things or try to force your way into people's intentionally private lives?

Here's a hint: trolling for things that used to be public gave you a barometer of how much discretion potential hires displayed. as an employer. At this point, it should be more than enough to be able to determine, "this guy understands discretion" or "this guy is completely indescrete". An employer should never try to think that it's their right to rifle through a candidates off-the-clock time.

Here's how I look at it if you go to check up on a candidate and find nothing public on their FB page:

• The stuff posted to their FaceBook page (etc.) was set to be visible to specific audiences was it was done so for a reason
• Your insistance on logging into their account gives you more than just a view of the candidate's live, it exposes eveverythin their friends have shared. While it may be arguable that it's reasonable for you to see what your candidate is sharing, it is completely unreasnoabl and unjustifiable to try to see what others are sharing with your candidate. Even if the candidate is willing to give up their own privacy, they have no right to hand over the privacy of their friends and you have no right to demand it and no justifiable reason to business see it.
• FB is single signon service for a lot of other sites. By demanding access to your candidate's FaceBook profile, you're also demanding access to every site that uses the FaceBook SSO engin. You compromise privacy on all those sites as well - many of which are even less relavant to the suitability of the candidate than what they may be saying on FaceBook.
• For anyone - employer, employee, job candidate or a retiree - entering credentials on a foreign computer is risky at best. If it ain't your computer, you never know if there's a keylogger installed on that system. Worse, you don't know if any such keyloggers are controlled by the computer owner (the employee or their employer) or whether it's controlled by the creator of malware.
• Given that FaceBook info is a treasure-trove of information for identity thieves, it exposes ALL of the candidate's other accounts - whether they leverage the FB SSO or not - to informed-cracking attempts ("Bob has a pet dog named 'Sparky': wonder if that's one of his password-recovery answers?").
• Depending on how an employer is running their computers, it's also possible that the candidate's FaceBook profile may have other kinds of hidden treasures. A sloppy (or privacy-conscious but devious) job candidate may have malware apps in their profile. Logging into that profile may provide a nifty vector for malware to enter your computing environment. And, frankly, if your invasion of your candidates privacy ended up damaging your network, you would absolutely deserve it.

Overall, it seems to me that, if a potential employer asks for FaceBook (et. al.) information, they should be joint and severally liable to the account-owner, any site that uses the FaceBook SSO engin, everyone on the candidate's friends list (directly or indirectly) and to any site breached using information from that snooped-on FaceBook account to guess credential-recovery information. I have to think that a half-competent lawyer is going to be able to arrange quite a respectable class-action suit against the snooping employer. I also have to think that a lot of people are gonna want to help with that effort, as well.

To me, as a smart employer, it just wouldn't be worth any information gained from such snooping when measured against all the potential damage it could create or all of the legal liability it would cause to be assume. Even if the ethics of it are merely questionable, all of the other possibilities just scream, "don't do it".

Riddle Me This, Batman

For the last couple months, my laptop's built-in WiFi has been getting progressively flakier. I finally got around to calling HP to see about warranty service (3 year warranty on this beast). The helpful CSR asked me for my identifying info to verify my warranty coverage, then asked me to go into device manager to see which WiFi option was installed in my laptop.

I'd always *thought* I'd had the BroadComm 802.11a/b/g/n+BlueTooth in it. However, Device Manager said I had an Intel Centrino Ultimate-N 6300 AGN adapter. This is a user-replaceable component, so, HP sent me out a replacement.

The replacement arrived Tuesday. Since it was mostly working, Tuesday, I put off putting it in till it crapped out completely, this evening. I powered the thing down, unplugged it and popped the battery out. I removed the screw from the panel over where the replacement WiFi card plugs in and opened it up.

Now, here's where it gets really fucking interesting: there was a SLOT for the WiFi adapter, but there was nothing in the goddamned slot. Even more, not only is the slot empty, but there's nothing rattling about inside the case. Obviously, I'm wondering "how the fuck did this thing's wifi connectivity *EVER* work??" But, I pop the new adapter into the empty slot, button her up, restore the battery and power cord and power on. WiFi's working and happy, again.

So, I gotta wonder, "do I now have two WiFi adapters in this beast that have the potential to conflict if the original ever wakes up again? Or, was the original one integrated and the presence of something in the slot deactivates it?" This leads to the final mystery of, "if the latter is the case, why the hell did they send RMA paperwork?"

I fucking hate mysteries when it comes to computers.

Life As An Engineer

Today, I think I coined a new work-related term: "multi-blocking". It's sorta like multi-tasking, but different.

At any rate... "Multi-blocking" is the (necessary) habit of running multiple, concurrent projects, but letting "blockers" determine which project goals you're actively working towards at any given time. That is, you work on a project until some dependency stops you, then hop onto the next most pressing project that isn't blocked.

Other interruptions to multi-blocking can be "suddenly critical" things that aren't on your project plans being dumped into your lap. These either get added to the multi-blocking queue or supercede everything in it.

The big down-side of this working-model is when you reach a state where you're 100% blocked. Then, it's total frustration time. If this happens frequently enough, or you're given a superceding task that also blocks, it can cause a total freak-out of frustration and denial of satisfaction.

WTF, NBC?

To be honest, I fucking hate when hockey games are covered by NBC. While it's awesome that, when NBC covers games, I get to see them in high-definition, the cost of that high-definition coverage is I have to listen to the inane chatter of Pierre McGuire, Mike Emrick and Eddie Olczyk (and other seemingly worthless sportscasters). Of course, it's even better when they go to the studio: the best they could come up with is Mike Milbury?? Good Christ.

NBC: you're a big network. You have lots of money. You have a big name. You have no fucking competition for talent. Why the fuck do you give us this cast of clowns, year after fucking year? What the hell is wrong with your organization that you can't draw real talent - and, given how much money and name-value you have to have, it's gotta be that your organization sucks so much that good people won't work for you at any price.

At least now I understand why, when Fox won the NFL contract, they were able to snag the Madden crew and the Bradshaw crew. It's gotta be an organizational thing: no one wants to work for NBC. And, given the quality of camera-coverage of games - both NFL and NHL - this extends not just in the broadcast booth, but into the control room and the camera crews.

Awful. Just. Fucking. Awful.

Beware The Genie

Often times, it seems like life is governed by a mischievous djinn. Life frequently seems all too eager to give you exactly what you've asked for, even if what you've asked for isn't really what you meant.

When seeking "balance" in life, it's a good idea to know what that can mean. On the face, "balance" seems to be a worthy goal: no one part of your life dominates the rest. However, just wanting "balance" leaves a lot of wiggle-room for the Universe to exert its interesting sense of humor. It means that, if your life has, on the whole, been pleasant, that seeking balance implies that you need to offset the pleasant parts with misery. It can also mean that, if one area of your life is miserable, "balance" could be enforced by making everything miserable (uniform-misery is its own kind of "balance").

The Universe can be annoyingly literal. If you don't want it to screw you over, you need to be very specific in what you ask for so that there's no "wiggle-room" left for creative interpretations.

Sales Don'ts

Wasted two+ hours of my life meeting with a vendor for a lunchtime presentation.

The lunch was at a restaurant that, of the dozen or so times I've had to go, I've had an edible meal maybe twice. None of those two occasions coincided with a meeting. I'm pretty sure that Rosa Mexicano is unable to make meals for groups and have the results turn out well. Today, I just skipped th food altogether - which was easy, given that they opted for family-style service and I seemed to be sitting in a passing dead-zone (oh well). So, needless to say, as we were entering the second hour of the meeting, I was beginning to itch for the door so I might go some place and get food.

The seating, overall, was weird. Normally, when we've had meetings at Rosa Mexicano, there's five or six six- to eight-top tables set up and we spread ourselves out amongst them. The vendor's sales team didn't want people staying too far from the action, so they opted to array four tables into a horseshoe arrangement. Now, I get what they were trying to accomplish, but forcing my to sit cheek-by-jowl with others - especially when food's going to be served and even more especially when it results in tons of wasted space in the room - isn't a way to get on my good side. I like having plenty of personal space. I find being crowded to be unsettling and detracts from my ability to attend to things other than the fact that I'm being crowded.

Given who the presentation was for - a group of engineers who worked for an organization that uses closed networks - one wonders why the vendor's sales folks were so keen to crow about the ability to manage their storage with an iPad app. Given our environment, ability to manage devices from a moble phone or tablet just isn't a priority. Given my feeling about Apple, in particular, it quickly became grating how much time was wasted on the topic.

Lastly, I've been dealing with technology for a long time, now. I've used it in a lot of "edge case" and "forward-thinking" scenarios. That means that I've seen a lot of interesting technologies used in a lot of interesting ways. Giving me a presentation that slags on buying component technologies and going the DIY route, and then pushing how great your solution is when all I'm seeing is shit that I've done years' or decades' previous just doesn't sit well. The reason all your crap is, essentially, old hat to me is because the stuff I did was "DIY". Doing things "DIY" means that I don't have to wait five-plus years for some vendor to discover "hey, if we package this into a turn-key bundle, we could sell the hell out of this stuff". So, don't slag on DIY, especially if your solutions are all things I've already seen, played with or done.

I dunno ...the whole thing just rubbed me the wrong way. Yeah, some nifty, potentially useful stuff, but it was all presented so wrong. It was like a flashback to my SGI days: great technology that was poorly-sold.

Shifting Priorities

One thing I do feel fortunate about when I grew up: even though NASA was winding down, they still did a lot during my youth. I still had the ability, while watching Star Trek reruns, to think "we've got guys working towards those ends - someday, some of this stuff might happen".

 

I'm also kind of sad that my introduction to Tyson was via a damned Internet meme...

 

But, hey: at least the guys on Wall Street didn't have to worry about losing their homes. At least the guys on Wall Street didn't have to worry about consequences. And, that's the real "American Dream" now, isn't it: to be so rich that you're untouchable.

Fuck space.

Little Highs

You know what feels really great? What feels like a little jolt of energy or adrenaline, each time it happens? Being "done" with something. That feeling of accomplishment you get, each time you've completed something and turned it over is just freaking awesome. It was one of the great things about when I was a consultant: I got frequent, regular jolts of that "done" feeling.

About the only thing that's in the ball park is being "next" - particularly if you've been waiting a long time. I think the reason for that, though, is two parts: you're now "done" with being in queue and you're able to start anticipate the rush of being "done".

Murder-Worthy Email Habits

To start with, I think that whoever invented email read-reciepts (and, in case they're different people - whoever came up with the idea) should be stripped of their skins and then dipped in lye or something likely to cause even more discomfort. I fucking HATE email read receipt requests.

If you're one of those people that thinks setting a read receipt request on emails is a good idea, I'll clue you in: it's not. It makes me and most people fucking hate you. If I'm working with an email client that gives me the option not to send a reply, I will never fucky hit yes on the "permit read-response" pop-up. The only way I'm ever hitting "yes" is if my email client ever offers the option to send a custom reply. If it does, you won't like that edited response.

To me, the read receipt request is just snotty. When I see one, the way I take it as "this fucker doesn't trust me to read his emails." Worse, I take it as a really passive-aggressive and cowardly way to convey that distrust.

I live on trust. If I get the impression you don't trust me - especially if I've done nothing to earn that distrust, then I really want nothing to do with you. Simply put, I can't trust someone that (obviously) doesn't trust me. When I see that read receipt request, it does nothing but create contempt in me for you.

The only thing that makes it tolerable is that most of the people using them seem to be fairly clueless - either technically or socially. I get that they may not mean it the way I interpret it. Because I'm a fairly direct person, I'll usually let the sender know, "I don't appreciate this" and tell them why.

If they persist in their cute little habit, that's when they can expect me to stop replying to their emails because I've set up a rule in my mail client to "auto-sort" their communications into a "never gonna read this" folder.

R2D2 was a sailor?

No wonder C3PO could understand him...

Bad Commercials

Like any (relatively) normal person, there are commercials I like and commercials I don't like. In general, I prefer funny, clever and/or weird commercials and I fucking hate annoyingly stupid commercials. Right now, there's this commercial on - I can't remember whose commercial it is because I'm so annoyed by the content - that's been running frequently. It features this cloying family of helicopter parents cooing about their kids "activities" - talking about being mathletes and how "ballet season" is soon to start.

It makes me want to punch the actors and writers of the commercial in the head. Basically, I think that any person/actor/character that utters the term "mathlete" needs a punch through the skull.

Freakish Weather

I've been complaining, a lot, this year about our lack of a meaningful winter. It's been, for the most part, freakishly warm and utterly bereft of snow. It's not that I want my February cold, it's that I fear what August will be like when it's frequently warmer than 60° in February.

DoNotCall? How about "DoNotBother"?

When the feds first came out with the Do Not Call registry, a few years ago, I signed up immediately. And, for the most part, all seemed good. The only tele-spam I got was the stuff that's allowed (political canvasing, charity, and businesses that I already have a direct association with).  And, because I don't generally give out my phone number to anyone, I pretty much never got calles.

For the last several months, however, I've been getting tele-spam from some company down in Florida. They seem to go by variations on the name/initials, "WCA". Whenever I punch their numbers into a Google search, it invariably points to various tele-spam complaint forums.

Their calls fall squarely into the rules defined as "not allowed" and "not excepted" (and, no, I don't mean "accepted" - I mean that the nature of their calls isn't in the list of rule-exceptions). So, each time they call, I immediately browse on over to DoNotCall.Gov and file a complaint.

I'm on my fourth complaint, at this point. Yet, the calls keep coming. So, I have to ask, "does filing a complaint with donotcall.gov actually accomplish anything?" I'm tired of WCA's bullshit robo-calls. If the Do Not Call registry actually means something, these guys should be getting sanctioned. What's more, they should be getting sanctioned at a rate that is high enough to make their activities unprofitable, not just at a rate that can be accepted as "the cost of doing business".

Oh well, I guess the whole Do Not Call thing was yet another one of those "do something for votes, just don't do anything meaningful" types of things.

My Friend, "Too Fat"

A friend was lamenting his weight gain of recent years. And was saying he thought it was time to do something about it. To justify the "do something", he started rattling off a bunch of "you know it's time, when...".

I was amused by some of the items on his list, so, I decided to add some of my own. I'm not sure he was amused when I added, "when your belly button has an event-horizon, it's time to go on a diet."

Weird Things Online

I've the feeling Donna would want one of these for her collection:

Found at Gorey Details

The Joys of Interoperability

Like many large-scale and collaborative operations, we have need of replicated common file-stores. The method we'd been using was fine from a collaborative standpoint, but not so good from a replication standpoint. So, the onwer of the repository opted to move the repository to a new server so that a replication solution could be used.

Unfortunately, the default security settings on the new server made it so the share wasn't usable from Linux clients or from Windows clients not joined to the same domain as the share server. I found the fix and wrote up a page on the subject. But still: I really shouldn't have to bust out regedit (and reboot) just to mount a CIFS export.

Weather really needs to cool the fuck down so we can get some snow (big snow would be great).

Cheese Don't Fail Me Now

Tonight, Donna made a wonderful dinner of cassoulet. We had a guest over to help us eat it. Even pared-down, cassoulet recipes make for a lot of food. Besides: it meant that someone else could bring wine.

After killing the dinner, we opted to hang out for a bit and watch movies. Having an XBox and FiOS, we have a lot of movie options without having to leave the house. I decided to look through our Zune options, first. As I scanned through the "New Releases" menu, I found Nude Nuns with Big Guns ...How do you NOT watch that??

Well, in hindsight, you just go right the hell ahead and skip it. It was rather sucktastic. I'd assumed it'd be in a similar category to Machete: so bad it's good. Nope. It was just bad - awful, actually. I'd embraced the cheese and the cheese utterly failed me.