Month: June 2013

Sarah and I went to her parents’ place yesterday for her sister’s birthday/delayed Fathers’ Day celebration.
After lunch, my FIL was watching something on HGTV.  Essentially, other rich & famous would hire this soap actress and her musician boyfuck/husband (they got married while they were shooting the episode) re-do a room.  Budgeting is sketchy.  Even more sketchy is scope.
This guy hired them to do the kitchen.  Perhaps the kitchen needed work.  I don’t know.  I didn’t notice anything wrong with it, myself, but I wasn’t there.
Regardless, they spent zero time doing needs analysis with the owner to find out what he actually needed or wanted to be doing in his kitchen.  Boyfuck/hubby, in between clips of him playing guitar, made some changes.
Meanwhile, Ms./Mrs. Actress went about “fixing” the living/dining room adjacent to the kitchen.
That fireplace is a hole of darkness.  It has to have a mantle.
Oh, let’s put up a chandelier, because this room is too dark when it’s not sunny outside.
Naturally, hanging the chandelier was a pain with a seriously vaulted ceiling, and no place to mount it.
Then the one she spent considerable cash buying wouldn’t fit — too big.
My question remains;  how did this help Joe Homeowner make a grilled cheese sandwich?
Maybe he liked the living/dining room fine the way it was?
I talked to my my engineering grad student brother a bit about this this morning.  IT is full of people like these folks who’ll change things up just on their own whims, not because something actually needs to change.
Sometimes the users’ whims come into play, but proper requirements development keeps you from buying a chandelier that’s too big.  Or buying one in the first place if one isn’t absolutely needed.
All that said, I’m a bad person for thinking that way.  That’s been communicated to me enough.  Yes, I got the memo, Lumbergh.
Still, it’s important to remember that my own personal whim isn’t what matters, ultimately.  Maybe I was hired to build a cooking space that is easier to clean up after butter spatters all over it.  Maybe that left rear burner on the range isn’t working anymore.
I wouldn’t know if I didn’t actually spend the time to find out, and just attacked redoing everything just because I thought the old stuff was ugly.
*headdesk*
 

Sarah and I went to her parents’ place yesterday for her sister’s birthday/delayed Fathers’ Day celebration.

After lunch, my FIL was watching something on HGTV.  Essentially, other rich & famous would hire this soap actress and her musician boyfuck/husband (they got married while they were shooting the episode) re-do a room.  Budgeting is sketchy.  Even more sketchy is scope.

This guy hired them to do the kitchen.  Perhaps the kitchen needed work.  I don’t know.  I didn’t notice anything wrong with it, myself, but I wasn’t there.

Regardless, they spent zero time doing needs analysis with the owner to find out what he actually needed or wanted to be doing in his kitchen.  Boyfuck/hubby, in between clips of him playing guitar, made some changes.

Meanwhile, Ms./Mrs. Actress went about “fixing” the living/dining room adjacent to the kitchen.

That fireplace is a hole of darkness.  It has to have a mantle.

Oh, let’s put up a chandelier, because this room is too dark when it’s not sunny outside.

Naturally, hanging the chandelier was a pain with a seriously vaulted ceiling, and no place to mount it.

Then the one she spent considerable cash buying wouldn’t fit — too big.

My question remains;  how did this help Joe Homeowner make a grilled cheese sandwich?

Maybe he liked the living/dining room fine the way it was?

I talked to my my engineering grad student brother a bit about this this morning.  IT is full of people like these folks who’ll change things up just on their own whims, not because something actually needs to change.

Sometimes the users’ whims come into play, but proper requirements development keeps you from buying a chandelier that’s too big.  Or buying one in the first place if one isn’t absolutely needed.

All that said, I’m a bad person for thinking that way.  That’s been communicated to me enough.  Yes, I got the memo, Lumbergh.

Still, it’s important to remember that my own personal whim isn’t what matters, ultimately.  Maybe I was hired to build a cooking space that is easier to clean up after butter spatters all over it.  Maybe that left rear burner on the range isn’t working anymore.

I wouldn’t know if I didn’t actually spend the time to find out, and just attacked redoing everything just because I thought the old stuff was ugly.

*headdesk*

 

(Live), too.  Oh well.

For whatever reason, maybe it had something to do with the XMPP client I installed this week, but the automatic update for WordPress wouldn’t work.  Yet it worked fine on users.

Dunno.

Tomorrow I’ll kick the shit out of this thing I’m working on for work, then go eat Cajun food, drink Abita.

And I’m not working Friday, or any day next weekend.

I thought for a hot second about catching the train to DC to make sure I didn’t work next weekend, but don’t feel like spending the money on it.  Besides, Sarah’s cooking is getting good.  Maybe I can convince her to try something from the Julia Child books I got as gifts.

Somehow, someway….

Yesterday, I tweeted, “Go to Hong Kong?  Okay, if it’d mean good food, and a chance to put my fist through Snowden’s face.”

Some comments I got on Facebook made me think more about it, and the more I think and read about it, the more I want to punch the guy.

From what I can tell, what the government is doing is no different than the highway department putting traffic sensors on a roadway.  You know, the wires spreading across all lanes of traffic that seem to be connected to nothing.  They’re there to monitor the number of vehicles passing over that point in a given amount of time.

There’s also speed sensors that make the chromakey displays behind the perky traffic girl show congestion on a roadway.

What does she do when one goes from green to red?  She pulls up that roadway camera to see if she can see what’s up.

Now, imagine if one of the little pissants running the state’s traffic centers alerted everyone that they were being monitored because of these cameras……

Do I have some issues with the possible long-term retention of traffic?  Sure.  Separate issue.  I know that it’s tough for someone at this nincompoop’s intellectual level to understand.  (Or, for that matter, the average Hannity fan.  Don’t get me wrong, Sean is a genuinely nice guy.  I’ve met him more than once.  His big-time fans tend to be a little, shall we say, simpleminded.  Only NPR has the luxury of choosing its audience.)

But I digress;  back to the issue of monitoring.  The now knocked-up traffic girl only goes to a camera when she sees that there might be a problem.  Analysts brighter than Snowden do the same thing for Internet traffic.

As I told the folks on users, law enforcement generally notifies the provider whenever there’s an investigation going on.  Otherwise, that oh-so-cute fuzzy puppy pic your aunt sent you (because she won’t get on Facebook out of fears someone will steal her identity) just passes by unnoticed.  Just like your car would on the way to the liquor store if you took the Interstate.

Stopping my babbling now.  What are the takeaways?

1.  If you really want to keep something private, don’t put it into a computer, or say it over the telephone.

2.  Punching Snowden (and the people who think he’s a hero) is a-okay in my book.  Not so much for what he did, or may do, but simply because he’s inciting panic unnecessarily.

A big part of what I’ve been trying to do, professionally, is get people to think about what they actually need their systems to do.  We’ll deal with the years’ worth of cruft that’s there after we get a good working setup.

I’m also having to do that with my creaking shit at home.  This weekend’s task?  iTunes.  My libraries are a disaster. Between things I ripped back when I was trying to be a Free Software zealot, various things that I picked up when I was working on others’ computers, etc., my iTunes library is a hot mess.

“I think I’ve finally made mine Bieber-free.”

That’s nice to know, hon.

Bitch point?  ID3 tags go by genre.  If CDDB changes an artist’s genre, you could easily end up with two copies of the same song, from the same album, in your library.  I’m hitting a lot of dupes with Rock/Pop/Alternative, and Rap/Pop/R&B.

This ain’t pop — because that sucks — And you can New Jack Swing on my…

And he makes kids’ movies now, and has been married to the same woman over twenty years.  Hardcore, O’Shea.

Different from work with this is that I really don’t care about being vendor-independent anymore.  I’ve cast bet on Apple.  Oh well.  I hope I don’t come to regret it ten years from now.

(At the same time, I think It’ll be even less of a concern for me ten years from now than it is now…..)

Tecfidera:

It is what it is.  I’m becoming accustomed to it.  I don’t miss Rebif at all.  I’m hoping this latest exacerbation is calming down, though.  My vision has been affected more, lately, and it’s making everything in life difficult.

Side effects?  Digestive, primarily.  Some of the flushing in my face and upper torso. Headaches.  Is it as unpleasant as Rebif?  Uh, no.  Not even close.

(I also reflexively want to add an “h” to Tecfidera when I type it…..

Technology:

I cease to be amazed at how much cruft is around.  Everywhere.  But especially in IT.  Why does some of this cruft persist?  Two reasons.

1.  People are used to it, and demand that it continue in perpetuity, and;

2.  Nobody knows exactly what it is that the technology does.

Digging to the bottom of number two fixes the utility question.  Whether or not there’s a fix for the ubiquity question, I don’t know.  There’ve been baby steps in the right direcion, but the young people responsible for those baby steps have been pushed aside.  The grayhairs waint things to stay exactly as they were, and they’re the ones making the decisions.  So just replacing the functionality isn’t enough to make the argument for change…..

((exasperated sigh))