Tag: Uncategorized

Followup to the last entry.  This (PDF, pops) is what I’m getting at.  But if you already have the solution, why waste time asking pointless questions, amirite?

*sigh*

Sometimes what you actually need to do isn’t exactly what you’d envisioned.  Accepting that can be difficult.  It’s more difficult for people who’ve got a vested interest seeing the solution implemented.

That’s made me the bad guy at work for trying to do the right thing.  There’s not much reputation left to protect, so, I’ll take on the role of pincushion if necessary.  (And that I’m not regularly injecting myself with chaff to confuse my immune system, that’ll be a little easier.)

On a somewhat related note, I got a nibble on my car.  I’ll put it out to my scant few readers before I sell it to a stranger one last time.  E-Mail me if you’re interested in a 2003 Mustang GT.

Is that the conclusion I wanted?  Nope.  I used to really enjoy driving, that car, especially.  But I can’t do it anymore, and probably will never be able to do it again.  It happens.

The loss of vision is the main impediment, but working a clutch was getting difficult/tricky last few times I drove, too.

Does anyone know how to go about surrendering your driver’s license to DMV?  Discounts on bus/train fares?

Followup to the last entry.  This (PDF, pops) is what I’m getting at.  But if you already have the solution, why waste time asking pointless questions, amirite?
*sigh*
Sometimes what you actually need to do isn’t exactly what you’d envisioned.  Accepting that can be difficult.  It’s more difficult for people who’ve got a vested interest seeing the solution implemented.
That’s made me the bad guy at work for trying to do the right thing.  There’s not much reputation left to protect, so, I’ll take on the role of pincushion if necessary.  (And that I’m not regularly injecting myself with chaff to confuse my immune system, that’ll be a little easier.)
On a somewhat related note, I got a nibble on my car.  I’ll put it out to my scant few readers before I sell it to a stranger one last time.  E-Mail me if you’re interested in a 2003 Mustang GT.
Is that the conclusion I wanted?  Nope.  I used to really enjoy driving, that car, especially.  But I can’t do it anymore, and probably will never be able to do it again.  It happens.
The loss of vision is the main impediment, but working a clutch was getting difficult/tricky last few times I drove, too.
Does anyone know how to go about surrendering your driver’s license to DMV?  Discounts on bus/train fares?

At work, lately, I’ve been trying to do that.

I spent some time talking about the MVC Model, but I’m not entirely certain that’s entirely the issue I’m working through.

Certainly, a lot of the emphasis the past few years has been working only on the Controller portion.  Where’s that gotten people?  Bloated monstrosities that still don’t let users do what they need to do.  (Inspires flashbacks to funroll-loops.  Sadly, in a professional setting, they aren’t fucking with compiler flags, they’re just cobbling on more and more hardware, using someone else’s checkbook.)

I want to ask the questions that let me know what it is people actually need to do.  I couldn’t care less about the actual mechanics in the early stages.

The people who want the gargantuan solutions don’t want to ask those questions;  might keep them from building that wicked setup.  But that wicked setup might not fill the users’ needs.  How would you know that?  Besides, it’s got this nifty failover…….

Unfortunately, I woke up rather early this morning, and am seeing the reactions to the Zimmerman trial.

One aspect of the response is possibly more disturbing than the complete acquittal, itself.

The NAACP wants the DOJ to pursue charges against Zimmerman for violating Martin’s civil rights.

(Leftie Blog, Rightie Blog, but they say pretty much the same things.)

The LAPD thugs were agents of the state.  Zimmerman wasn’t.  There is a civil remedy available if justice wasn’t served.  LA and the State of California (actually, probably their insurance companies’ policies) paid Rodney King those civil remedies.  Since Zimmerman is a private citizen, all that’d be there to collect would be whatever that wannabe Cartman fat fuck has, personally.

Since the LAPD thugs were acting as agents of the state, the civil claim would have been against the state.

So, what’s the point?  It’s disturbing to think of nationally-institutionalized double jeopardy if criminal proceedings in state courts don’t achieve “justice.”

Where would it stop?  Very disturbed, NAACP.

Now time to sort.  *sigh*  Followup to this from about a month ago.

Long story short, I found a bunch more music hanging around on my wheezing PC.

Positives?  

• Found stuff I knew I had, but hadn’t seen in awhile.
• Have freed up probably 30GB more of disk space

Negatives?

• More duplicates in the library I have to tidy up.
• Still way more music than free space on my iPhone
• ID3 information on many of the things I found is wrong

At some point, probably around 2008, I was using WMP for whatever reason, having switched up from whatever I was using on Linux, and very old iTunes on the Mac.

I had backups of other people’s PCs around, too, so there were lots of things from their libraries just sitting on my disks after I’d finished the jobs.  I know some of it was my dad’s from various things I’d cleaned up for him.  Obviously, he won’t be needing that stuff anymore.  (He’s here…)

Others, I have only sketchy memories.

Regardless, at some point, I wrote a totes awesome skript that copied all those music files into a single directory..

Half a decade later, here I am, shuffling through all the refuse.  *sigh*  I really am probably not going to listen to a lot of that old school hip hop I had, or the smooth jazz that somehow crept its way in.  Or would smooth jazz do something other than creep?  Saunter, maybe?

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.