Month: May 2008

November 2004. The period known as “Black October” has carried on all the way through into November. We still have a ton of stuff to do, not nearly enough resources to do it, we’re undermanned, our manager has been fired and our director is running us in an absentee fashion. We’re not working ahead at all; everything is pretty much to-the-day and we’re struggling to get gear out the door.

I clearly remember this: I would go back to my bench, which was at the other side of a huge pile of…everything. Returned equipment, new equipment, etc etc. I re-arranged that stuff for a while until I had a clear space around the bench, barricaded in by walls of cases and boxes and etcetera, easily six and a half feet high all the way around. On the other side of the wall, random stuff piled high where people had left it. The only way in or out was a passage just wide enough to slide a roller case through – less than 3 feet wide at best – and was blocked by a pallet jack loaded down with 600 lb of desktop machines, so I could easily pull up the drawbridge.

I sat there, no sound other than the tinny streaming radio from the UK and the occasional chime of a rebooting system, and churned out laptops for eight hours straight. Sometimes nine or ten. It was mind-numbingly dull…but it wasn’t customer-facing, it wasn’t physically strenuous, I could sip on a Dr Pepper and hear some music in the background…basically, all the alone-time I needed.

Man alive, what I wouldn’t give now…not to be customer-facing, and to be able to just build up the wall and get to work.

…and not about politics, either. But I will say this: one of the things I’m most looking forward to is a Democratic majority greater than 52 in the Senate, so that the new majority leader can expel Joe Lieberman (Likud-Connecticut) from the party.

There’s apparently a tradition inside the Beltway that states that nobody is more to be honored and respected than somebody who claims to be a member of one party while routinely taking a gigantic Deuce McAllister all over said party. If Holy Joe wants to go into the pages of the New York Times and heap endless slander on a party that put him on their Presidential ticket 8 years ago, I don’t really see why the Dem leadership shouldn’t put his ass on the street.

If you work for Coca-Cola, you ought not be taking out full-page ads about how unsatisfying the taste of Coke is.

Also, just for the record, if you’re one of the 4% that’s still voting for Ralph Nader in 2008, you are too stupid to live and should be put in a home rather than allowed to vote. I’m only going to say this one time this season: politics ain’t therapy.

So I’m flipping through the iTunes Music Store, because the wife is looking for some obscure track, and I find myself on a list of “90s One Hit Wonders.” And looking over the 75 or so tracks, I think about the fact that the list includes some stuff I remember from undergrad, and some stuff that reminds me of those early days in Washington DC, and I can’t conceive of the fact that those were in the same decade.

There are some pretty sharp lines of demarcation. For one, I didn’t even *have* an email address until I left undergrad (it was eWorld, if you must know). For another, I didn’t really become a full live participant in the Greater Zone Community until after grad school was done and flunked out with. And I know I’ve mentioned it before, but in a span of six months in 1997, my entire life was completely transformed – my residence, my relationship, my career path, my bloody time zone for crying out loud.

Looking back, it’s absurd to even consider 1990 and 1999 part of the same lifetime, let alone the same decade. You could make a case that the transformation in my life since 1999 is considerably less drastic, even taking into account marriage and homebuying and the like.

Another hard drive failure. Ticking noises too – this one’s almost definitely a drive failure at the hardware layer. I decided that enough was bloody enough and bought a brand-new 250 GB unit from Fry’s, and incredibly, it took less than two hours from the time I got home for everything to be back to normal with an extra 90 GB of storage space.

You can rest assured that I’m putting all the virtual machines back on here. XP, Vista, and two different Ubuntu flavors, plus a local .Mac disk and some more of the movies and ripped TV shows (every ep of Coupling and Father Ted both!) now that I have room on the local drive coupled with adequate backup space for the whole thing. I guess I’m making a permanent jump to the quarter-terabyte world…this drive is literally a thousand times more capacity than I had in the hard drive of my first Mac fourteen years ago. (“Moore’s Law…been very, very good to me.”)

Good thing I passed the bloody exam, hm?

So I passed the one test for the ACSP today – without taking the course at all. Got 86 out of 90. Now, in fairness, it’s kind of a nubs certification – it’s OS X Leopard only, no Server or anything off the workstation. But it’s a cert, and that’s a line on the resume that indicates that, in the opinion of Apple Computer, I’m competent to work on 10.5-based systems. Which will help matters considerably.

Now, if I can pass the OS X Server test? And get ACTC without taking the class? I. Am. BULLETPROOF.

Geoff Lloyd, on this incident involving Suggs and the Pet Shop Boys:

“Someone must have spiked one of Suggs’s drinks with maybe, like, eighteen other drinks.”

Say what you like about Howard Dean, but you can’t argue with the results: took back the House, took back the Senate, and so far, 3 for 3 in special elections, each one in a more conservative district than the last. Tuesday night, it was Mississippi-1st, a district Bush carried with 62% in 2004, a district that had a Republican incumbent previously, where the National Republican Congressional Committee dumped over a million dollars, where they ran ads tying the nominee to Obama, to Jeremiah Wright, to everything but Osama Bin Laden.

The Democrat won by 8%.

Now, Howard Dean didn’t make Bush as popular as herpes, or hang the economy around the GOP’s neck like an albatross, or stretch the Iraq war out to five years and counting. But because he stuck to his guns on the 50-state strategy, when all that happened, the mechanisms were in place to capitalize on them. And as a result, the GOP has dipped below 200 seats in the House for the first time since…well, it would have to be before 1994 at least.

When you can’t even win by playing the “crazy colored preacher hates America!” card in Mississippi, you are in what we political scientists refer to as “deep deep shit.” Alan Abramowitz (who interviewed me on my official visit at Emory back in the Triassic Era) has put together a 3-part test based on a matrix of GDP growth, net approval rating (approve minus disapprove), and whether the incumbent party has 8 or more consecutive years in control, and right now, his model predicts a 14-point margin of Democratic victory. Now obviously, there’s plenty of time for the economy (and the perception of same) to change, or for the approval rating ratio to improve, but whoever’s running things at the RNC will go to bed tonight puckered tight enough to crap diamonds.

So my laptop died Saturday afternoon. Serious big-time directory issues, to the point that I suspected hardware failure (attempts this morning suggest that is likely). I have a replacement drive but it is not a known good drive (in fact it dates to last August and I don’t know how long it was used before then). It had all better be down to the hard drive, though, because I’m in no shape to splash out on buying a new computer – in fact, if the laptop goes, I will resort to the iMac indefinitely (although restoring all that music will be a right royal PITA) and use the iPhone for all portable computing. Which will at least keep me from parking my ass on the couch and thumping away at the MacBook all evening every evening.
Oh yeah – saw Iron Man last night. It is as advertised. I believe it does for the entire superhero genre what Daniel Craig and Casino Royale did for Bond. I would gladly have turned around and walked right back into the theater for a second viewing.
Anyone have an Asus EEE? Running Linux? What do you think of it?

So as we all wait for the superdelegates to play out, it’s time to think a little more about why they are there. To do this, we have to go back in history a little bit and walk it through to the present day. I know we’ve been over this before, but it bears repeating, so if you’ll just step into that Dr. Pepper machine over there…yes, I know it’s bigger on the inside than the outside, that’s not the point…

(click the jump to depart!)

Continue reading “Endgame”

A bunch of kids with a band in Manchester, unable to finance a video for their song, instead played it in front of surveillance cameras – and then used the data protection and freedom of information laws to obtain the footage.

The kids, clearly, are all right.