Your Estimate is Wrong — I’ve been doing both software development and construction for a long time, and universally?  You’re off — by a lot.   Not just a little, and if that ever happens, you’d better count your lucky stars and buy a lottery ticket, because it won’t happen again.   Ever.

© Nathan Pralle for PhilosYphia, 2011. | Permalink | One comment. One lonely comment looking for a friend. | Subscribe RSS

Professor Walt Will is one of the many excellent professors in the Computer Science department at Luther College in Decorah, IA, USA. During my tenure at Luther, I got the pleasure of having him for a few classes, the most noted being Databases. These quotes are collected from that class session. At the time, I printed these out and handed them to the entire class prior to the final exam, including a copy for Walt, whom I recall laughing a lot once he found it on the podium. I present them here so other students of Walt’s — and the general public — can appreciate his unique teaching style.

Walt is retiring this year and will be greatly missed; I am honoured to have been one of his many students.

“Have you hugged your computer account lately?”

“…and I’ll try to make those times as gentle as possible as we slam you to the mat.”
– Walt on relational databases and the math involved in them.

“One of the prerequisites for the course is to read — or read if you are pressed. I’m pressing.”
– Walt on his theory of motivation

“Oh…Oh…damn it anyway.”
– Walt trying to work out a math problem on the board and coming up horribly wrong.

“…couldn’t we bring this tuple into the join and give it some friends to play with?”
– Walt on sympathy towards tuples lost in natural joins.

“When you want it, you really want it. But you can go days — weeks, even, without wanting it.”

“That should have given you who are going to copy this time to get it copied, and the rest of you time to fall asleep. Good job on that so far.”

“You walk into your typical bar in Decorah and I’ll bet you won’t.”
– Walt on the lack of people who can write SQL in Decorah.

“It amazes me how you can walk down the street and meet people every day that couldn’t write a line of C++ if their lives depended on it.”

“Have you seen this textbook in the room at all??”
– indicating the course’s one-and-only textbook.

“…where you were thinking about something else and he was up here babbling on about whatever he talks about. I’ve been there.”
– Walt on the attention span of his 2:30pm class.

“You get a good score, I get the illusion that I’m teaching well, everyone’s happy.”
– Walt on his teaching strategy.

“I apologize for being too lenient and I promise to make it up in the future.”
– Walt on the easy grading on a certain test.

“I’m skipping over the part I really wanted to skip over for the time being.”

“The great thing about standards is how many we have.”

“So as you sit here ignoring me, in a skyscraper in Manhattan and a barn in Wisconsin, people are writing SQL queries….”
– Walt on the importance of SQL in daily living.

“…just imagining a person on a mountain bike with pink sprockets just puts a little joy into my life.”

“Well, you look around for awhile, and unless some of you have names I don’t know about…there are no Ferraris in the room.”
– Walt somewhere on the intricasies of functional dependencies.

“And it caught the attention of those people sleeping, just for an instant; I don’t have high expectations here.”

“I’m suggesting that most of you are well enough traveled that you know that there is a First Avenue in more than one city. Also, that Decorah isn’t the only city with a main street.”
– Walt on travel habits of college students.

“You can come in here and hold hands and sing, ‘We are the World’ or something, but if you can find something else to do at 2:30 on the Friday before Spring Break, go for it.”

“…And if this trips your trigger, you can read all weekend if you want.”
– Walt on the erotic pleasures of multivalued dependencies.

“I had this debate with myself, which I lost.”

“We’ve all become so perverted that we think that a tree’s roots are at the top and leaves at the bottom.”
– Walt on CS vs. Biology

“I can only lose so many battles with myself.”
– Walt showing the strain of a long spring semester.

“Oh, just kidding. Just trying to wake a few people up, just for a moment. Kind of ease ‘em back into reality.”

“Get a life.”

“You have big buffers. Nothing personal, but you do.”
– Referring to the size of some people’s memories.

“They tend to love their computers in a way that’s, well, kinda scary sometimes.”
– Walt on Macintosh owners.

“Back in the 60′s and 70′s everyone thought it was smoking dope.”
– Walt on hashing algorithms.

“Maybe it’s a database of stolen cars. And the one you bought doesn’t show up there. That’s a good thing.”
– Walt on the positive aspects of databases

“I have nothing against fractions and some of my best friends are decimals, but…”
– Walt on his relationship to math.

“Dang it to heck.”
– Walt on stubborn B-tree algorithms.

“Dammit anyway. Or ‘gracious’, whatever the expletive of your choice might be.”

“Sometimes your little sister could answer it.”
– Walt on the obvious answer to some final questions.

© Nathan Pralle for PhilosYphia, 2011. | Permalink | 2 little comments jumping on the bed. | Subscribe RSS

No, not the guy with the big ears from Star Trek, either — quarks, as in the really, really tiny particles that make up things like electrons, neutrons, and protons.    Did you know that?   Each of those things are made up of a lot smaller things called, “quarks”.   Now you know; go tell your mommy.

Here’s the really Fun Fact™ for today that I wanted to share with you, though, about quarks.   If you don’t think anything is amazing in the world, get this one:

Quarks always exist in pairs (at least) — a regular quark and an anti-quark.    The “anti” partner is exactly the same as the quark, just an opposite charge, so kind of like how you have yin and yang, right?    This partner arrangement is called a, “hadron”.   A hadron’s quarks are always stuck together like that couple in high school that moved as single unit and used up the four minutes of passing time between every class to exchange oral flora.   A quark pair is held together with a sort of stringy stuff/force called, “gluons”.     (The physicist who thought up that one was freaking sharp.) It takes a whole heaping lot of force to even try to pull them apart.

However, if you beef up and try to separate a pair of quarks, which you can only do in experimental arenas like particle accelerators, a funny thing happens.      The gluons stretch, forming stringy “tubes” between the quarks, somewhat like a rubber band.     If you could actually see it (nobody has), it might look something like this:

But a funny thing happens when you get the quarks too far apart and you push them even further away from each other.     Instead of the gluon tube breaking and letting the quarks fly free, the tube splits in the center and a new quark-antiquark pair appears at the ends of the split out of absolutely nothing.

Did you read that?   The new pair of particles appears out of thin air.    Actually, it’s not even air, it’s a complete vacuum. There’s nothing around them as far as we know, yet these two particles “BOING!” into existence.     It might look something like this:

If you are really being destructive, you can keep trying to break them apart and you end up with a generational photo like this next one.   It creates what is called a, “hadron jet”, or a shower of particles that were all generated from the original quark/anti-quark pair:

Click for Larger

How wild is that?    And you thought science wasn’t fun.    Shame on you.

You can read up more on quarks, color confinement, hadron jets, gluons, and so forth by going to the Wikipedia article on it here:    quark

© Nathan Pralle for PhilosYphia, 2009. | Permalink | No comments....YET! Make one! | Subscribe RSS

It is an experience that few of us care to admit to and fewer still would willingly repeat on any idle sunny day, but we’ve all lost precious moments of our lives by spending them slack-jawed, staring at the glowing screen and that insidiously, slow-moving progress bar of torture.    The drool frighteningly puddles on our keyboards while the pixels bore holes into our cerebrum and whip our neurons into a thick, creamy paté suitable for filling nail holes and sealing rusty bumpers.

The leech hath struck again.

For those not in the IT industry, it may not immediately occur to you the sheer number of hours we geeks can spend simply waiting — for the server to reboot, the installation to finish, the driver to load, the device to be recognized, the drives to stop spinning, the batteries to charge, the file to download, the page to render, the code to compile, the bug to show up, the printer to spit out exactly the one thing we did not want to be printed.   Sure, we get paid a decent wage but, unlike other professions (sans the D.O.T.), we spend an awful lot of it simply…doing nothing.    A whole lot of nothing waiting nothing.

“Well,” says my healthy and happy reader from behind their keyboard, “I realize that might not be entertaining, but I wouldn’t mind someone paying me to sit around.”    And in many cases, I would agree with that assessment if it weren’t for the fact that this time spent is anything BUT pleasant.    In fact, I’m pretty sure there’s a good case to prove the activity itself is banned by the Geneva convention and pooh-poohed in all civilized countries and 49 states (we’re still not sure about Utah, but then again — nobody is.)

You see, the keyboard cowboys — we of the wires, the flashing lights, the whirring drives, and the data whipping to-and-fro across the network in an orgasmic frenzy of processing — are very much used to things moving ungodly quick.    We cackle with excitement as the new processor crunches the data eight times faster than before or our Internet connection is large enough to download an entire DVD in a few seconds.   The fans spin faster, the drives whine higher, the processor burns brighter, the printer chucks paper further, and we count ourselves lucky if the damned thing doesn’t take off and establish low-Earth orbit.

To have a daily occurrance of our job be to sit and wait for technology, which in 2009 is light-years ahead of yesterday, to grind, chitter, think, process, download, or calculate is mind-boggingly numbing.    We are, essentially, pulling down hazard pay because — who willingly exposes their brain to this en masse?   Geeks, that’s who, the very ones that are ensuring that when we’re done with our work, you will be able to draw pictures, play solitaire, and watch free girl-on-girl action all night long while we enjoy an ever-so-satisfying bowl of instant noodles and ketchup packets.

So, the next time you find yourself ripping out your hair by the roots in frustration at a computer that appears to be either thinking hard on a problem or attempting to launch a sewer pickle, think of us geeks who, on a daily basis, willingly put ourselves between you and certain traumatic brain liquifaction, all in the name of your productivity and well-being.   And, if you’re so inclined, a kiss on the cheek and a pound of chocolate is an appropriate gesture that goes a long way to ensuring your data is backed up nightly.

You keep computing, we’ll keep drooling.    We’re your friendly, neighborhood geeks — protecting you from the technological time leech since 1936.

© Nathan Pralle for PhilosYphia, 2009. | Permalink | One comment. One lonely comment looking for a friend. | Subscribe RSS

Bow Before the Sacred Cow (moo.)

There is a term used in businesses and other organizations to indicate those things that are traditionally regarded as “untouchable” in terms of their being questioned or modified — the so-called, “sacred cows”.    (Borrowed from the Hindu religion.)  These have long been hindrances in business practices because people fail to explore why a particular practice or system is being used the way it is — they just assume that it’s The Way Things Must Be Done™.     However, it occurs to me that this isn’t only applicable to the working world, we have many steers and heifers wandering through our lives that we fail to examine or pay attention to, and we need to be willing to slaughter them in the name of progress, new ideas, and better wisdom if that is what’s required.

Think about your own life — what cows do you hold near and dear to your heart?    Here’s some areas where I see them in both my life and others:

Religion — Big one!   You knew it was going to be in here, didn’t you?    Those of you who read this blog regularly know that I’m a huge fan of questioning one’s religion and figuring out for yourself what really matters and what is simply bogus.    Holy cows roam free in the religious world where some practices and ideas stay the same for centuries or longer without any in-depth exploration.    Even simple things like, “What hymnal should we use?” can spark the, “Don’t kill my cow!” argument with great swaths of people popping up complaining about the possible change, citing history as a precedent.    “It worked for my grandmother, why should we change?”

Traditions — We all have family traditions and most of us enjoy them to one extent or another, but when was the last time that you challenged one of them as being irrelevant or misplaced?    In some families, that’s nothing less than treason, but why should it be irreverant to probe into the meaning and applicability of the things you do year in and year out?

Business — Time and time again it’s been shown that good business is a balance between doing things in ways that work and doing things in new ways that may or may not work better.     As a younger person in business, one of the hardest things I have to face is convincing the older staff that systems can be changed without sacrificing the stability they’ve enjoyed so far and, given the chance, can even be improved upon.  Fear is the glue that holds sacred cows in place and keeps them from being herded in another direction.   (Gives some interesting visions of incredibly sticky cows, now, doesn’t it?)

Your Halo is Slipping

Life Philosophies — Many people, including myself, find it hard to break out of the typical “normal” life that has been prescribed by society and to choose a unique and interesting path.   The cow becomes sacred because it’s a societal pressure and deviating outside of that not only brings you problems in terms of diapproval but issues with the economics of the situation.    As much as I’d love to be in school longer, economically, I had to do my 4 years and get out to a job.   I would love to stay home and write or do something else, but the bills wouldn’t get paid.    Becoming a bum would be fun, but it would be frowned upon.   The cows become sacred as a standard that we are all expected to follow, even if someone could deviate without becoming a liability on the system.

There are many other places where this crops up — how we live, how we work, how we act, how we love.    What are some holy bovines in your life, and what are you doing to try to negate them, or do you simply embrace them wholesale because — that’s what you do?

© Nathan Pralle for PhilosYphia, 2009. | Permalink | One comment. One lonely comment looking for a friend. | Subscribe RSS

Out of all the current aspects of my life, my current vehicular situation is one that I’m rather satisfied with at the moment.    Two cars, both new and running well, well within their respective warranties, reliable, and not without their elements of fun, subtle though it be sometimes.    They are not racecars, ricers, boytoys, or eccentric vehicles; as a family man, I don’t have the time nor the resources to be both practical and flamboyant, but they get me elements of both the stolid family man responsibility and the occasional grab-the-Jesus-bar experience.

They were also both horrifically in need of an oil change.

We’ve been waffling between the frozen, rockhard, 10-degree nights with ice and some snow to the “OMG, is spring here?” semi-warmth that only March can tease with and make us with we lived in California year-round.    As a result, this weekend’s bone-soothing warmths –  by no means hot; good god, not yet, dontcha know? — has rendered the ground into a combination of squidgy, sticky, sloppy mud sitting ontop of slabs of still-permafrost underlayment.    This thaws during the day enough to let your car dig ruts the size of the Grand Canyon in your driveway and then promptly freezes back into unflappable cement in the evening, causing your car to “pop” out of its parking spot when backing out in the morning.    It’s lovely, and if I have to put myself on the ground to change the oil?   EVEN BETTER.

And yet it was my best shot, the Galant being 8100 miles since it had last been changed and the Aveo about 5300; thank goodness for the quality of fully synthetic Mobil 1 oil which some folks run up to the mind-boggling count of 10,000 miles or more before giving it a switch.   If I had used dino excretion to lubricate my engines, I’m sure it would have rolled over and waggled its legs in the air long before now.

So, after digging out out the jack, the jackstands, the socket set (17mm for both cars, nicely enough), one oily cloth, one clean cloth, both jugs of new oil, both new oil filters, the oil catch pan, and a 4×8 sheet of glassboard to lay on, I started doing the mechanic thing on the cars.    Suffice it to say that the liquid dumping out of the bottom of each was no longer oil, it was FECES.    If it could have laid turds, it would have.    I can only imagine what was going through their electronic brains for the past week or two — “So….sluggy….tastes….like….burning!”    They ought to practically jump for joy now (and hopefully be a bit nicer on the gas mileage, too.)

After doing both and cleaning up, I decided to continue with my daily driver, the Aveo.    Gassed it up, dumped all the metric shitloads of crap from the passenger floor side, put away all the unnecessary items on the back seat, filled up the washer fluid, and took it down to the combination laundramat, car wash, and storage center and paid $1 for 10 minutes of Super-Suk Vacuum Madness.    Some Armor-All applied to the dusty dash, steering wheel, shifter, and brake; some glass cleaner applied to the extremely filthy windshield; and just because I’m a wannabe pimp daddy, tire shine on the pathetic 15″ tires with the shitty-looking plastic hubcaps.    No, Calvin is not pissing on something on my rear window, nor do I have nuts hanging from the rear of my car, but I have super-shiny tires.    You’re impressed, I can tell.

I love getting underneath my cars; checking out all the technology and how it works together has always been my passion, whether on computers or on women  (and I’ve seen a few undercarriages in my day, thankyouverymuch).   There’s something both serene and terrifying at looking at the components that, every day, help me fly down the road at speeds that make the Amish blush and shuffle uncomfortably in their buggies, yet still managing to deliver me in one piece and relatively happy at the other end of the trip.    I think if folks who are ignorant of how vehicles are constructed actually saw how very little holds it all together, they’d be a bit more nervous about doing some of the driving that they do.    It truly is amazing.

As I put everything away tonight and then washed my hands slowly under the warm, bubbly water, I reflected that it felt good to get a bit dirty, dig my fingers into something other than a software project, and I had really accomplished something.    That, in my opinion, is a good day with my cars.

© Nathan Pralle for PhilosYphia, 2009. | Permalink | 4 little comments jumping on the bed. | Subscribe RSS

President-elect Obama has now urged lawmakers to delay the transition to all-digital transmission of over-the-air (OTA) due to, from what pollsters say, nearly 8 million homes that have not “taken action” to upgrade their television sets or buy a digital converter.    The poll apparently also cites something on the order of nearly a fourth of Americans that believe the transition will require them to buy a new TV.   Proponents cite the lack of any more coupons for converter boxes and the lack of education of the masses.

I’m sorry, but there’s only so much you can do when a country-wide transition like this is coming up, because you’re speaking to a vastly intricate demographic, one that you’re never going to fully reach, even if you were to tattoo it on their forehead in fiery letters.    The fact is, a good portion of the people will never convert until they must because they have no other choice.

If you are too stupid, too lax, or too ignorant to have not noticed and understood the half a billion advertisements and PSAs that have littered the radio waves, papers, and TV commercials for the past year about this transition, said it in a million different ways, with multiple approaches to get attention, explain the transition, and inform, then I have no sympathy if February 17th comes and all you get is static instead of American Idol.

Frankly, I’m tired of seeing the notices.   I understood it the first time around.   The next 4,758 times was just wasting my life.    And how this transition is handled will set a huge precident for other technological changes that will come in the future — the switch to IPv6, changing to digital telephones, etc.

The coupon (or lack thereof) issue is something to address, but if you haven’t taken enough interest to sign up for one, then you probably get to buy one at full price.   They’re not THAT awful in cost, and it’s kinda like taxes — if you’re late, you pay a price.   That’s how it goes.

If I felt that not enough effort had been made, I’d think differently.   However, the government has done a good job on this one, the airwaves and media have been swamped with notices, and assistance has been offered.   For those still unmoving in the face of all this, I say:  Tough.

What do you think?   Are you already prepared for the transition and, if not, why not?   Do you think the schedule should be kept or the delay honored?   Shall we hit slackers over the head with a brick?

© Nathan Pralle for PhilosYphia, 2009. | Permalink | 11 little comments jumping on the bed. | Subscribe RSS

What is it about reading things on paper that makes the experience so different?

I adore reading a newspaper, more for the experience of doing it than for the news itself. The slightly warming, musky scent of the newsprint, the crackle of the paper as you turn the pages, the way your eyes can drift around lazily searching for something to latch onto, the mild frustration at trying to find wherever page “A9″ ran off to — it’s an entire experience. I think for me, who has a very busy schedule most of the time, taking a few minutes to sit down and read an actual, physical paper represents either a) having the time to do so or b) making the time to do so. In college it was a great morning ritual to drink some 9-scoop coffee, read the paper, and wake up slowly. It represented a slower pace.

So, naturally, I haven’t read a physical paper in probably a year, if not longer.

I remember late nights in the Olin computer labs at Luther, listening to the “zzeeeep, zzzeeeeeeep” as ink was whacked onto a long roll, causing it to curl up and over the printer and back onto the floor to fan-fold into a neat stack. Usually this was the code for my talker (a type of chat room) which was about 10,000 lines long and would take quite awhile to print out. But once I had a project in front of me on solid deadtree, finding bugs, doing edits, and generally looking at the flow of the code was much, much easier.

I don’t do much programming on paper anymore, simply for the cost factor and for the way I program which is more interactive — make a change, see if it works, make another change — or because I do more visual programming (buttons, windows, etc.) that don’t show themselves very well in written code. But on occasion, it ends up being a handy tool to pull out of the case, dust off, and give a shot.

This is why I somewhat find the entire blogging phenomenon to be somewhat curious, because the nature of the beast practically prohibits it being printed on any sort of solid medium. (Although you can probably expect Dooce to bring out a book sometime entitled, “Months of Leta: My Child Grows Up in Blogs”.) Millions of wannabe writers out there (myself included) are whacking out entries in full digital format, never to be seen via an ink impression in their entire career.

Mind you, people have forever been reading news and magazine articles online, so it’s not a completely new form of journalism. However, you can just as easily read the Washington Post online as you can on paper, albeit a bit more updated, and yet they have a very healthy circulation of newsprint out there. There are still hundreds if not thousands of girls and boys, young and old, earning a few extra bucks by going around in the wee hours of the morning, flinging rolled-up missiles at doors, windows, and the occasional cat, so it’s clearly a healthy industry.

I wonder, then, would anyone subscribe to a printed-and-delivered “blog newspaper” that comes out daily and simply features syndicated postings from all the best bloggers out there today? It’d be like Ann Landers, but without the moronic questions and syrupy answers.

They might — just for the experience of paper.

© Nathan Pralle for PhilosYphia, 2007. | Permalink | 2 little comments jumping on the bed. | Subscribe RSS

How about 40 or so 3.5″ floppy drives?

28 modem cards? No? Damn.

My poor basement has found itself for the last few months to be the repository of a massive amount of computer equipment as I have gathered it from all corners of the globe, dumped it there, and promptly ignored it while life flew by me in a fit of fury. Two and a half tables of computer parts from the old Hampton Middle School, plus a load of computers from my day job, plus other random parts — all in jumbled piles in the middle room, barely enough space left to sashay by.

Now that my schedule has somewhat cleared up (not by my choosing) and with the Little One on the way, I decided it was high time to really attack the pile and thrash it into submission.

One of the big problems with collecting masses of computers is what to do with all of them. I got them all because the price was right, and parts are parts — they’re always good to have around. It has also been my experience that, unless you have great contacts and/or unlimited amounts of money, for computer collectors to find true treasures, you have to take a lot of trash, too.

And so, I’m left to dig through mountains of computers, monitors, keyboards, mice, cards, accessories, printers, and the like. You also can no longer throw anything with circuit boards or CRTs (picture tubes) in the trash; they figured out that the chemicals in them (like lead and mercury) aren’t terribly friendly to the environment and it gives Mother Nature a rash that, frankly, you don’t want the old girl to have.

The downside to that is that disposal of said nefarious objects usually costs a pretty fair cent at the dump, on the order of $13 per monitor and various other prices for other things. Unless they come with a hidden Benjamin in the disk drive, these things aren’t exactly money-makers.

So, I’m trying an experiment: I’m breaking down all the parts I want to get rid of into plastic, metal, and electronics. The metal I’m going to have my dad haul up to the metal recyclers, the plastic will go in the trash, and the electronics (now much smaller and compact than they were before) will be stockpiled until I find a good way to get rid of them without spending a billion dollars. It will, at any rate, give me much more room.

Some of this stuff will be eBayed, as is proper when there’s some value, but I’m building up a good stockpile first before starting into that as, once you do, it’s a constant workload to get done and shipped and out the door. eBay can be profitable but, like whoring, you have to strap on the fishnets and slap the stilettos up and down the street a few times before getting any cash.

Despite all the work involved, I am having some decent fun in finding out what I all got in my hauls. Half of taking on a haul is just shoving whatever boxes and cartons of stuff you have into your car, thanking the person you got them from, and getting the hell out of there. Much like The Gambler, you never count your money while you’re sitting at the table, there’ll be time enough for countin’ when the dealin’s done.

So I have a few interesting pieces in the mess to drool over when I get some spare time (I’ll post pictures sometime sooner than later), but my mission is not to sit and fondle at this point, it’s to get the job done.

And doing it I am — I’m getting rid of a lot of the regular old PCs that I’ve been keeping over the years, finally realizing that although that 386 looks neat and has some interesting, old hardware in it, in reality it’s just an old, common computer and isn’t that remarkable. Much like the rock that looked really pretty when you saw it in the stream, once dried out it loses its luster. I’m making room for the REALLY interesting computers for once.

This is, of course, all an effort to get the swell under control before the Small Kicker arrives, so when I have some limited time to “play”, I can actually do something instead of wading through piles of parts and dangerously-leaning stacks of crap. I’d like to keep a bouncy seat down there, too, so the ankle biter can come along and geek out with Dad, but I’m not about to submit the fruit of my loins to possible injury by the Leaning Tower of PCs.

All in all, I’m getting some time into my computer room(s) and my collection, so I’m happy about that, and my wife is happy at the idea of being able to see all four walls again in those rooms. (Love you, babe!) After all, if diving into your collection doesn’t involve a little adventure, what’s the point, right?

Now….can I interest you in a few dozen power cables?

© Nathan Pralle for PhilosYphia, 2007. | Permalink | 3 little comments jumping on the bed. | Subscribe RSS

It’s Called Modern Communication Methods, Dumbass!

The Answering Machine

Around since 1904, this terribly handy device is still not understood by the masses of people that call my home phone. Our phone message is simple: “Nathan and Yolanda’s answering machine, leave a message.” We’re even being way obvious in our communication — yes, this is an answering machine, as if you had any reservations about the tinny recorded voice coming to you down the line. Yes, you should leave a message. When? Well, there’s this little beep thing — well, most of you have heard this before, haven’t you? You know what to do.

The problem is — you fuckers haven’t figured it out! The damned devices have been around for over 103 years (that’s 1,236 months for you parents out there) and you still don’t know what to do when you call one! So, as a review, here’s what NOT to do when speaking to an answering machine:

1. Leave. A. Damned. Message. Do not hang up without leaving a message. Nothing will make me want to come over to your house and hit you over the head with a brick as much as simply not saying anything. You obviously called for a reason, otherwise you wouldn’t have bothered, right? Feel free to say, “Was looking for you, wanted to know if you wanted to do lunch, guess you’re not home.” or something similarily trite, but leave a damned message.
2. Leave a GOOD Message - Saying, “Wanted to talk to you about something, will try to get ahold of you later” is only going to make me hate you more.   You left a message — a good start — but it was just as though you didn’t, because it didn’t TELL me anything.   Is it urgent?   Trivial?   What’s the real meaning here?   Give me SOME indication as to your intentions so I have a thought as to whether I should call you back today or next week or NEVER.
3. I’m Not Home – Do not act as if we are standing there, watching the light blink on the machine, and listening to you talk. While this may be true on occasion, 99% of the time we aren’t there. Saying, “Hello? Are you there? Hel-looooo????” and then waiting like a moron wastes our time and yours and only makes me less apt to return your call. If you’ve reached the machine, act like we’re not there and professionally leave your message.
4. Keep It Really Short - Do not waste the first 5 minutes talking about the weather, your dog, or saying, “uhm”, unless you are specifically calling for one of those particular reasons. While the days of a tape-based answering machine are long gone, my time is still precious and if the message is rambling, I’m very likely to simply wander off while it’s playing back or weep while standing there and my soul drains out of my ears. Know what you are calling for and leave a concise message about it. Whereas phone conversations may very well ramble, answering machine messages should be short, sweet, and to the point. If you think you’re being short and blunt, you’re probably not short enough. 30 seconds or less, preferably 15 seconds, should be all the time you need to leave your point. Anything more is killing me.
5. Digits, Please – State your name at the beginning of EVERY phone call. If this is the first time you’ve called or you do not talk to us on a regular basis (meaning: weekly), leave your phone number, too. Do not assume that I will automatically recognize your name or have your number in my records. I do have Caller ID, so there’s a darn good chance that I have your information anyway, but it doesn’t hurt to double-up on that. Stating it at the beginning of the call means that if I miss it the first time around (or forget to write it down right away), I can still replay the message and don’t have to listen to your entire Butt-Scorcher chili recipe before getting what I need. People’s voices (if you haven’t noticed) are distorted on the phone — don’t assume that I’m buddy-buddy with the Psychic Friends Network

One last point — if I hear one more person say, “Well, I just don’t like talking to answering machines, they’re so impersonal,” I’m going to drag them by the hair out into the woods and staple them to an elm upside down with their head in a vat of freezing-cold tapioca. Get over yourself. You’re not so special to talk to that I’m going to say, “Gosh, I’m sure glad she didn’t leave a message, I’d much rather talk to her on the phone.” The more likely scenario is that I’m standing in my kitchen, screaming obscenities at the answering machine because you have, yet again, refused to leave a message and let me know why you called. However, here’s a more important point: If you do not leave a message, I will not call you back. I refuse to play such games — no message, no call, end of story.

Email

Even worse than the answering machine is how email is still being abused by the hundreds of users out there that haven’t figured it out. I could go on and on about various aspects of writing emails, clarity, brevity, proper form, etc., but others have covered these subjects and it still doesn’t cover the one point that I want to bring up:

If you have email, you must check it at least once per day. This is mandatory.

Like it or not, email is a modern means of communication between people. Those in almost every business setting use it daily to transmit many important messages between colleagues. Teenagers use it to transmit…well…giggles between each other.

If you do not check your email at least daily, you are being horribly and unforgivably rude. Notice I didn’t say answer your email — I never said that had to be done daily, and can’t blame you if some messages take time to reply to. However, if you do not check it, you won’t know that something important has come in, and that’s where you’re being a snob.

“Well, I don’t check it often because all I get is junk.” Tough titties, little kitty. I get over 300 spam emails per day and you don’t hear me weeping about it. The fact is, email is like postal mail in some ways. You might get only magazines for days on end, but eventually you’re going to get that check or prize winning certificate or summons to appear in court — those sorts of messages you don’t want to miss and you’re glad you checked the mail regularly.

Email is the same way — if I know you have it, then I very well may use it to send you some important information. If you don’t check it, then you have no idea that time-sensitive correspondence came in, and you’re being a royal prick.

In Conclusion, Such As That Is

To avoid being labeled as a pain in my ass, please kindly do the following:

• Use an answering machine properly.
• Check your email.

It’s not hard, really, and will save me a lot of headache and angst in the future, and my poor walls which are starting to look awfully dented from all the banging of my head.

Thanks…and have a great day, suckka.

© Nathan Pralle for PhilosYphia, 2007. | Permalink | 5 little comments jumping on the bed. | Subscribe RSS

Joel Spolsky wrote an entry today that talks about several books on management that he is reading. One is Managing Humans: Biting and Humorous Tales of a Software Engineering Manager by a guy named Michael Lopp, who also has a blog from which he got many of the entries and anecdotes in the book. Lopp’s blog is an absolute hoot and I’ve added it to my daily reading list to see if it continues to hold up to all that has promised to be (all blogs I read go through a “trial period” in which I evaluate them….if they’re good, they stay, if you don’t impress me within 3 or 4 entries, kkkkkrreecccckkkk!)

Joel throws out an anecdote from the book, talking about two types of people in the workplace, one that solves problems a step at a time, taking into factor the resources and time involved, which he calls an “Incrementalist”, and the “Completionist”, the person who wants to make sure the problem is solved right the first time so they don’t end up solving it again down the road.

Unfortunately, Joel stops at quoting these few paragraphs describing the types, which leaves out the context in which they were actually written, making all Completionists to look like absolute ignorant assholes, which wasn’t Lopp’s point at all. His point in the full entry was that both types are really required for having a good business, because the discussions generated when you put both in a meeting room are well worth the results that end up emerging from that banging of heads.

What Joel fails to mention and Lopp only somewhat describes is the employee who can put a combination of the hats on their head, assuming the best of both roles, and processing the discussions that would have taken place inside a meeting room inside their own head. This is the person I am constantly striving to be.

My employment experience has shown me the advantages of both sides of the table. Getting things done because they must get done and must get done within a particular limited framework of people, time, money, and resources is a business reality. No employer has fountains of any of these categories, meaning that anything you work on will be limited by at least one of these constraints if not by all of them, which is more likely. It ends up being your job as an employee to weigh the consequences of a decision or direction in a project against what the Realities of Life are and, if necessary, adjust the goal to fit. This very often ends up being an Incrementalist decision, taking small steps in larger goals to fit what is available now rather than throw the towel in on the whole thing.

However, my jobs have also taught me about the value of taking the Completionist view of the road ahead. There is great wisdom in evaluating a project and being able to detect the future issues and problems that will plague it if something isn’t fixed now. You will, of course, always have that person that insists on redoing something completely because, “it’ll cause huge problems in the future,” and yet cannot tell you exactly what those issues would be. This is worthless. But the guy that can look at it and say, “A reworking of this will cost us a fair whack now, but in the future will save us from X and Y and Z, which will cost us way more,” is absolute shining gold. Due to the way projects constantly evolve, it’s essential to always have people that are looking ahead to the future and saving everyone time and heartburn.

Figuring out when to play the Incrementalist and when to be a die-hard Completionist is the hard part.

And flexibility is something to be prized as well. Nobody likes a flip-flop, but it is absolutely necessary to have the skill to constantly re-evaluate the project situation and suggest at the appropriate time that Johnny’s Incrementalist approach really needs to become Suzie’s Completionist method in order to solve the issue, because the extent of the difficulties didn’t rear their ugly collective heads earlier in the game. Knowing when to make this call and how to back it up takes a lot of experience and research.

If I had to say which I was more like, I’d definitely say I tend to be a Completionist, more because I feel it serves myself and my business better than if I was purely an Incrementalist. I tend to spend a lot of time thinking ahead on the problem at hand, anticipating what the company, marketing and sales, support, other departments, and the customer will do or want to do in the future that will invalidate or cause me to expand or rework how things are planned right now.

The old adage proves to be correct more times than not: “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Much of designing a system follows this path and one must always be warping, manipulating, and stretching the original idea like so much mental Play-Doh to avoid going catatonic later. Being able to account for future hiccups while fitting the square peg needs of the project into the round hole of the company — well, that’s just beauty to behold.

Or, if you prefer the chaotic, banging your head against a wall does burn about 150 calories an hour, and beer is about 75 calories per glass, so even if you have to go out drinking and stressing about your job, you’ll still lose weight!

© Nathan Pralle for PhilosYphia, 2007. | Permalink | No comments....YET! Make one! | Subscribe RSS

I signed up, of course, if nothing else just to see what it was like. I’m all about exploring new technologies and systems like this, even if it is pointless, stupid, or proves to be un-useful for me. So, you can see my “twittering” in the link in this post. You can even sign up and add me as a friend if you really want to know all the stupid details of my life. Caveat emptor.

follow tarsi210 at http://twitter.com

Jim’ s article was, however, not so much about the new site but the idea that many are now proposing that privacy is not as much of a concern to the upcoming generations as it was in the past. So many people are broadcasting what the older folk sees as “intimate details” on the Internet through various sites that a precusory conclusion might be that it’s no longer necessary to fret about security and obscurity. However, I (and Jim) do not think this is the case at all; rather, it is a shift in the way we look at things.

I think Mr. Rapoza missed the opportunity to comment on one particular viewpoint of this entire debate — the idea of choice in the matter of privacy and publication. Yes, it is true that people are loosening up as to what they talk about in public forums, details that they transmit to their friends and family, and ideas that they throw out with wild abandon. But it still comes down to a matter of choice and control, and privacy advocates would be well to emphasize these aspects and insist that laws, regulations, and systems be constructed to allow the power to decide to stay in the hands of the individual.

I may very well write some more personal items on this blog, but I still have control over what goes here. Nowhere will you see me mention details about my employments; one learns not to do so or risk getting dooced. I may talk about ex-girlfriends at some point or another, but I’m not likely to go into detail about intimate encounters. Maybe I’ll make a posting about a drunken college episode but I’m not about to reveal a secret told in confidence.

These sorts of decisions are made and controlled by me and protected by various privacy systems. I may email my wife and talk to her about intimate things, but that doesn’t mean I want it broadcasted to the Internet as “something going on in Nathan’s life”. Nor would I want a private argument in my family to get plastered all over Twitter unless I felt that it was necessary.

Jim states, “Obviously there are different levels of privacy, and the point at which it becomes an issue is different for everyone.” He’s absolutely correct, and the crux of the issue here is do you have control over it? When a corporate entity publishes your contact information without your consent, that is and should be a violation of your privacy. Yes, I publish my full address and phone numbers on my website, because I feel that it is public knowledge anyway and I am gaining no more risk by doing so. However, even with this already in place, if a company were to publish or sell my address to another, I would be extremely upset.

The problems I see upcoming in the industry and politics is how to properly regulate all of the possible scenarios. Could the company above argue successfully that it found my address on the Internet and, thinking that it was “public knowledge”, used it for whatever purposes it wanted? I would hope not, but I cannot be sure, and this will become more and more prevelant as daily details are inserted into places like Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook. Already we’ve seen a rash of employers Googling their potential hires and using details on places like these for and against the candidates. These issues will only continue to get larger, not smaller, and much legislation will be made about them in the future, I predict.

© Nathan Pralle for PhilosYphia, 2007. | Permalink | No comments....YET! Make one! | Subscribe RSS

I’ve had my current home monitor for a long time — probably at least February of 2001, so it’s served me very well for over 6 years. It’s a Samsung SyncMaster 955DF PerfectFlat 19″ monitor, and I’ve been terribly happy with it this far.

However, it must be starting to get old, as the display is vibrating when I’m in 1024×768 mode and if I try cranking it up any higher, it gets very fuzzy to the point where my wife wonders how I even look at it. That sort of thing I’m not willing to put up with for very long, and today I realized that I hate sitting at my monitor now because it kills my eyes to do so.

So, I went to Amazon and spent a gift certificate and bought myself a Samsung SyncMaster 941BW 19″ LCD Monitor for just over $200 with expediated shipping. I didn’t adopt LCD technology when it first came out, because it was new and clumsy and a lot of programmers had qualms about it as the tendency to be hard on the eyes was greater. However, the tech has evolved far enough, I think, to warrant giving it a chance — my wife’s new LCD is brilliantly sharp, and that’s just a Dell standard issue 17″.

I was also wary of LCDs due to the refresh speed, as CRTs clearly go faster and you don’t end up with “smudging” when watching movies and so forth, but this, too, has now advanced beyond what’s acceptable. I made sure this monitor has a 4ms refresh which is super-fast.

It’s a wide screen, which should be interesting, as I’ve never worked on one before.   However, I think I’ll enjoy being able to have the real estate for documents and web surfing and being able to watch wide-screen movies without squishing anything.

So, now I can hardly wait to let my eyes rest upon its shiny glory and retire this monitor to a server or machine in the basement (still an honourable job, but not nearly as daily-driver).

© Nathan Pralle for PhilosYphia, 2007. | Permalink | One comment. One lonely comment looking for a friend. | Subscribe RSS

Sounds rather Big Brotherish, doesn’t it?

And yet, this is exactly what is happening in today’s world, says Viktor Mayer-Schönberger of Harvard University. An Associate Professor of Public Policy, he believes that with the massive databases sported by websites such as Google, Facebook, and MySpace, as well as the other corporate databases, file servers, and scads of personal storage space, we face a future where a person’s entire life history — at least, that recorded by computers — will forever be a part of the searchable and readable past. With devices such as cellphones, PDAs, and other “life” devices being constantly used by people to keep track of each other and schedules, more and more of our daily happenings are crossing, if not being stored upon, a network of some type.

In my old-fashioned filing cabinet in my closet at home, I keep a lot of different folders. Most of them are terribly boring — tax paperwork, bank statements, medical receipts — but a few contain some more personal information. One is all the letters I’ve gotten from all girlfriends in my past, no matter how serious or trivial.

Boy, are some of them terrible.

There was a great portion of my life where I hadn’t figured out the opposite sex to any great degree and oftentimes made some horrible stumbling blocks in my communication with them — much of which is reflected in those letters. The immaturity, the naivaté — it’s all there in paper and ink if you really want to read it. I try not to on a regular basis, as it makes me cringe most times.

However, having this sort of information about myself accessible to myself is also very educational and revealing. It gives me past history of myself, how far I have (or haven’t) come, what things I have gone through, the mistakes I have made. There is nothing more humbling than reading through a stack of letters from your early college years to realize just how incredibly stupid you really were.

If, however, those sorts of things were to be released to the general public — well, I’m not so sure. There’s a great deal of things that I said back when I was a Bible thumper that would make me absolutely shrink today. I did and said things with the opposite sex that should never see the light of day, and I’m sure there’s some old programming code and documents that should never grace the desk of my employer or they’ll wonder why they ever trusted a system to a guy who couldn’t get, “Hello, world!” to display on a screen.

99.998% of what we do and say is steeped inside of the context surrounding it — the place, the people, the history, the mood, even things as benign as the weather, how I felt that day, if I slept in, if I got laid; these factors make huge differences in the interpretation of the event. Yet, if only portions of these things are stored within the computer databases of the world the context is forever lost to the void of Time, never to be reconnected.

An example: Say, perhaps, that you and a friend in high school had developed a long-running joke about being homosexual lovers, complete with the various innuendos and remarks that accompany something like this. (I know what you’re thinking — high schoolers would never do such a thing! I’m shocked I even thought of it, really.) You chat and giggle about it between classes with your friends and even act it out occasionally, much to the immature humor of your cronies. Now, say that you also used your cellphone, IM program, Facebook, and MySpace to construct this alternative persona of you — just for the fun of it.

14 years later you are grown up — a responsible adult eager to enter the meeting room for your interview as the CTO of a rather large corporation. You walk in, sit down, and the interview committee starts asking you questions. At some point in the conversation, the head manager tosses a packet of paper down in front of your eyes containing printouts from that particular homosexual acting experience back in high school and asks, “Would you care to explain this?” The context being lost from the original event (we were kids, goofing off, it was nothing…), you are suddenly in a pretty hot seat.

I’ll admit, this might be a bit of a stretch, but it wouldn’t be the first time that an employer has explored the Internet to see what sort of dirt could be picked up on someone else and then dooced them for it. The fact is, many websites store vast amounts of information about their users long after they have performed it. Most have a privacy policy about these sorts of things, but what happens if it is released, either accidentally or purposely?

Should computers be like people where they essentially forget a lot of things you did when you were younger, especially the extremely dumb things of youth? Well, we should define “remembering”, perhaps, because while your buddy George might ‘remember’ about the homosexual thing, he may not recall the finer details. Whereas, a computer will have every detail down to the last comma and period in its databanks, without memory degradation, for as long as someone sees fit to keep it.

Computers also have the inability to recognize the progress of maturity in a human and the ability to switch viewpoints (even drastically) based on one’s aging and experiences. Things we said and believed when we were young aren’t applicable here, but nobody teases me about believing in the Easter bunny when I was 3. Likewise, with the fading of memory, nobody would fault you for being “stupid in high school”, yet if they can pull up word-for-word something you did back then with your friends, you suddenly have a very vivid “memory” made real and relivable in a bad way.

In some ways, I’m glad things are being recorded about me in the computers of the world. Maybe at some point in the future, when I am dead and gone, they will be a bit of a lasting legacy to my existence. Someone may notice decades from now that a guy named Nathan once lived in Iowa, was a computer programmer, and did certain things. It is in some ways a bit of an immorality program for the wired of the world.

What do you all think? Should computers be retaining information this detailed and this long, or should there be limitations? Are people allowed to be stupid when younger and wiser when older, or do younger people need to start watching their backs more often, given how much more of an impact their words and actions now have on the world?

© Nathan Pralle for PhilosYphia, 2007. | Permalink | No comments....YET! Make one! | Subscribe RSS

There are a lot of great sites out there that appeal to the airplane enthusiast, from the detailed walkings of Wikipedia and their wide range of airplane descriptions to SeatGuru, for those that want to find the best ride, to travel places like Kayak that compare hundreds of airlines for nice prices, and my newest favorite place — FlightAware.

This awesome website tracks all flights over US airspace at all times, 24/7/365. You can look at air traffic over particular airports, you can track particular flight numbers, track all of a particular type of plane, and you can even enter the tail number of a particular aircraft that you want to watch and it’ll plot it out. It shows maps of the airports, maps of current flights both inbound/outbound from the airport as well as flights crossing the airport’s airspace, graphs of flight volumes, flight numbers, plane tail numbers, arrival and departure times and airports, and estimated times in all time zones. How freaking cool is that?

For instance, one of the closer airports to me is KMSP, Minneapolis-St. Paul International. Information about this airport is located here. Want to see all flights in the air that are Airbus A320 planes? Just click here for that information.

Registering on their site is free and if you do, you can see more results on searches and even set up alerts, which will let you know when a particular flight or plane has arrived or departed an airport, etc. For instance, right now I’m tracking Donald Trump and Oprah‘s jets; if they make a move, I’ll know it within a few minutes. (not that I give a smeg about either of them, but I think it’s fun to know something landed and/or took off)

One of the coolest things on there is their 24-hour animation of the flight traffic over the US, which is a Quicktime animation located here. It’s the sort of thing that you’d love to have as a screensaver. If you would prefer to see the current status of flights, you can simply view their live page here.

All in all, it’s a *terribly* cool site and I wasn’t even aware that this information existed in the first place, but apparently it’s all public knowledge and they’re just doing the compilation. Sure, the stats are about 6 minutes behind realtime, but that’s close enough for most people who are curious about such things. I, personally, am going to try using it on days when I hear a jet going over my hometown and I look up to see contrails in the sky; I’ll just head on in, look up the current map for KMCW which is 30 miles north of me, and see what just buzzed my house.

© Nathan Pralle for PhilosYphia, 2007. | Permalink | One comment. One lonely comment looking for a friend. | Subscribe RSS

Imaging my shock and horror when I realized that Microsoft had come out with yet another way to permeate the real world with its technology. Geeks unite against NTFS trucking! Open-source journaled trucking only! (Plus, it has an extra axle in case one breaks!)

(Seen in the parking lot of Westlands Shopping Mall, Whyalla, South Australia)

© Nathan Pralle for PhilosYphia, 2007. | Permalink | No comments....YET! Make one! | Subscribe RSS

Bent Over the Turnstile

If you are ever considering taking Virgin Blue airlines as a connection off an international flight, don’t, unless you travel lightly. Yolanda finally got to Adelaide, but she got raped at the ticket counter because they have a silly 20kg limit on baggage, and she had 2 bags, both over 20kg each, so she got charged $110AUD to get them on the plane, essentially nullifying the price advantage of taking VB in the first place. GAH! So much for spending money for the next couple weeks. I think it’s idiotic for them to screw over international travelers like that; domestics, sure, but…*sigh* It was my fault for misreading the information — I thought it would be 20kg per bag, not total, and so I screwed it up. Lovely.

It sounds like she’s making the rounds of everyone so far, catching up with our friends Mel and Dale and their cute little daughter, Lara, and she also saw Simon and Lou and their two kids, Geordie and Taevey, so I’m a bit jealous about that, because we’ve been watching these kids through pictures and webcam for the past three years and now they get to meet up. All in good time! I’ll get my chance in awhile. The only frustrating part is that her family seems to have gone into high gear and want to see her all at the same time and it’s overwhelming her right now, as she just needs some time to recover from the jetlag and needs to get to everyone on her own time. It’s not like she’s going to ignore them while she’s there, but they seem pretty insistent to see her as soon as possible, no matter how she’s feeling.

Crossings of Postage

I have a bunch more postcards to send out for Postcrossing. I haven’t done this in a long time, but I picked it back up again about 2 weeks ago and since have been sending cards fast and furious; as soon as one is registered and I’m allowed to send another, off it goes. My theory is that I can stop in about a week and then get postcards from others for about a month or so, give or take.

Today’s postcards (if I get stamps and get them going) are going to Ayumi Oda in Japan, Paola Papen in The Netherlands, Pip Wilson in New Zealand, and Kirsten Schauble in Germany. All of the cards are the same one — the custom-made cards I had made at VistaPrint with our house and our picture on the front. I figured if I was sending so many cards, they might as well be personalized, and it keeps me from having to find stores selling cards. Plus, they were 100 cards for $10 total — who can beat that? Not with a stick this side of the Mississip’, by gum.

Code Mania

I have a lot to write about with programming and coding but haven’t yet found the time to congeal my thoughts about it and put it down in some sort of concretized fashion. I’ve been working steadily on HooDaHek, improving it as I go and debugging things that go wrong. I really feel like a schmuck about it, because I wrote this program, released it to the open-source community, and then got too damned busy to keep it up. Now it’s sorely out of date and my next version will kick some serious ass, but I have to get the features done and out there.

I have also recently purchased a copy of AJAX for Dummies and PHP 5 and MySQL 5, so I need to get reading on those for my next personal project (yet to be revealed to the breath of the baited world). Essentially, the only way I can learn programming languages is to make a project and then do that project in that language, so I have created a project that I think will benefit a lot of people in the world and am going to force myself to write it in these technologies so I learn them. I may very well end up taking both tomes to Australia, either as in-flight entertainment or as something to read on the back porch whilst I listen to the birds chirp and the spiders inject horse-killing poisons into the local ant population.

So much to do…so little time left to think to sort it all out. I’ll get there, one way or another, by gum.

© Nathan Pralle for PhilosYphia, 2007. | Permalink | 3 little comments jumping on the bed. | Subscribe RSS

This is because I’ve moved on to the wonderous feelings that come with WordPress.    I had been using MoveableType for ages but stumbled upon WP for another project and fell in love.   It’s pretty, it’s functional, and it doesn’t frustrate the hell out of me.   Ultimately, it has better features for my users AND me, which means I’m more likely to write and less likely to toss the keyboard into the path of a speeding bus.

There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with MT; it’s just not my style of system.   I’m all about needing to spend hours configuring a server so that it runs *just right*, or fiddling a computer program into detail, or even soldering up a circuit board.    But when it comes to writing, I have to keep distractions out of the way or I won’t do it, and that’s what WP does for me that MT couldn’t, so here we are.

If you use an aggregator, please add my new feed into it; I promise I’ll be updating more often as I go.   Thanks for reading, keep your pants on, because nobody wants to see that out in public, dammit.

© Nathan Pralle for PhilosYphia, 2007. | Permalink | One comment. One lonely comment looking for a friend. | Subscribe RSS

I am a big believer, however, in having justification for your actions, and I believe that profanity is to be best used when applied in appropriate situations. So, let me briefly describe my situation:

I bought a new hard drive for our computer systems, as we’re starting to run out of space, what with Yolanda’s CD-burning job and so forth. So I got a very nice Seagate drive, 7200 rpm, 120GB. Nothing too fancy, but quite easily the largest disk in the household.

Now, Simon, my main workstation, has the big drives inside of it as that’s where a lot of the video/audio and other big things reside in the house. My rationale in this process stated that I should put the 120GB drive into Simon and replace 2 drives, a 60GB and a 40GB. That gives me another 20GB of space while freeing up 2 whole drives for use in other systems (probably Roo and someone else, I imagine.)

ADD ADVERTISING HERE

So, last night I shut down Simon and hauled him to the basement and started the swap by copying all the files to the new drive. At the moment, that consists of 85GB of data that got consolidated onto that one drive — a pretty impressive amount in anybody’s book.

So, the copy went fine. As I start unmounting drives, I think about my Windows partition. Now, Simon never gets booted into Windows, mostly because it runs really crappy on this hardware and I have far too many important things happening in Linux to take the time rebooting. It was hard enough having Simon offline to make this switch, as you’ll see in a bit.

I decided that it’d be best to free up the Windows partition and use it for my Home partition, where my email and personal files would sit. So, I changed the partition type to Linux, formatted it to Reiser, and re-ran LILO to ensure that the boot record was set up correctly.

Rebooted the machine with only the new drives inside of it, and I get, “NO SYSTEM DISK” error. Hrm. No huge deal. So I reboot with a CD, log in, and re-LILO again. Reboot. Same error. Consternation. Reboot with CD, re-LILO again, and for extra good measure, re-save the partition table with the bootable flag set. Reboot — NO SYSTEM. ARGH! Now I’m starting to get annoyed.

So I go along with this, back and forth, back and forth, with no joy, no glory in the process at all. Meanwhile, the pressure from getting this machine back up and running for my wife’s job and my own projects was mounting. I had to give up last night around 1 or so.

Started again this morning, with a fresh start, right? No love there, either. Same thing, made me late for work. *sighs*

Again tonight. Over and over. Finally, I decided that I should wipe the drive and recopy all the files, so I copied ALL files off to the new drive, wiped the old, redid the partition table, and reformatted. Reboot, recopy all the files BACK, re-LILO, and reboot. NO SYSTEM.

Shit.

This was going nowhere fast. Next step? Start unplugging stuff. Yank cables, pull cards, etc.

FINALLY, I get it to boot. Fiddle, fiddle, fiddle, and I eventually went and found the combination — the new drive, this shiny Seagate, wanted, no, insisted on being on the Master side of the 2nd channel. Basically, I swapped positions with the CD-ROM drive, and everything works like a charm.

THIS is why movies like Office Space were made, folks. The beating fields for frustrating hardware are real, they exist, and they are frequented on regular occasion.

© Nathan Pralle for PhilosYphia, 2006. | Permalink | No comments....YET! Make one! | Subscribe RSS

This is no big news to the regular users (like myself) of command-line-based operating systems, such as Linux and various forms of UNIX. Even for the Macintosh crowd, there are a decent number of advocates of typing what you want the computer to do instead of clicking on it.

I find this article to be a pretty interesting observation in human behavior with computers. Follow me as we trip down the saffron-paved path of this account:

Apparently, Beta 1 of Exchange 2007 was released with a bunch of features that were half-assed and a severe lack of a decent GUI interface from which to administer the service. This, to quote Terry Myerson, “scared the heck out of users”. This is not the first instance in which Microsoft has generated brown stains on the shorts of its users, of course — Patch Tuesdays are regular events of this nature. But this is pretty darn humorous — the lack of a GUI! OH, NO! WHAT WILL WE DO, CHRISTOPHER ROBIN!?

Millions of Windows “administrators” cringed at the thought of actually having to type something on their server for once instead of racking up miles on their rodent. The stench of fear was thick in the testing labs across the country; Starbucks’ stock went sky high and the Tums corporation held an all-employee family cruise with the profits.

But good news was on the way, according to Terry: “Yes, we need to give GUI users GUI, but I know they also need a command line. With Beta 2, we give them both. The fear that they will be forced to learn the command line will hopefully go away.”

But something miraculous happened, Virginia. “‘What we found was that our Exchange administrators naturally gravitated to the command line over time,’ Ingalls said.” Well, you must have some sysadmins on your staff worth their salt, then. The fact is, GOOD sysadmins PREFER a command line over a GUI any day. It provides more concise data in a format that is more flexible and easier to work with for automated and repeated tasks, as well as chaining together various utilities and scripts to create a result much more than the components. The fact that there are admins just discovering this is the fascinating part.

I’m glad that you finally realized what it’s like to really be a sysadmin, Brian. Mind you, you’re still working with a shell that sounds an awful lot like “gonad”, leaving you open for any number of terribly easy jokes, but at least you’re typing something — that’s a start.

It’s just terribly interesting to read an article where people are “discovering” the command line’s power, as if it was hidden all this time, all the while *nix people sit back and snort and go back to writing five-line-long bash command lines to do their taxes.

I leave you with one more tidbit of laughter, from the end of the article, where it is talking about the 5 different ways you’ll be able to install Exchange 2007 and the thoughts of compassion towards system administrators:

Two statements:

1) If you have problems understanding five, that’s 5, as in 1-2-3-4-FIVE ways of configuring a program, you have SERIOUS issues as a sysadmin. Some of the things I install and configure have FIFTY ways of configuring it. Read the damned docs. This isn’t Mac’n'Cheese, it’s an MTA. Do your job.

2) If you’re tired of the pain, time to switch to another operating system where a lot of that will either be simplified or eliminated. There are lots of good options out there that could make your life easier without learning anything more than what you have to learn normally. Of course, if you’re hardcore Windows, you’re just used to learning new GUIs, so there’s something wanting there, but you’ll maybe survive.

Exchange 2007: Revenge of the Command Line — Coming Soon to a Theatre Near You

© Nathan Pralle for PhilosYphia, 2006. | Permalink | No comments....YET! Make one! | Subscribe RSS

Today was no exception as I spent the first hour and a half after rising watching TV shows that were recorded on the Tivo. I’m rather fond of the device, as it not only allows us to timeshift shows so we can watch them when its convenient, it allows me to catch things I like that are on at the hairy, greasy buttcrack of dawn. In short, it increases my TV watching about 5-fold. Whether or not that is necessarily a good feature is somewhat left as an exercise for the reader.

I don’t watch much TV anymore, really. I weaned myself off of it during college. At that time, we just didn’t have that much free time to gawk at the tube and, if we did, it was usually a movie that we wanted to watch. There were a few shows that we tried to catch; specifically, That 70′s Show, but other than that show and watching CNN at 9am on very, very, very low volume while drinking coffee that dissolved ceramic, we really didn’t watch much.

While single and living in my apartment and later in my smaller house, I still didn’t watch much TV. I didn’t subscribe to cable as I saw it to be a waste of money and generally occupied my time by working on computers and listening to MP3s. By the time I actually DID get cable TV, my wife (then gf) was here, so she took over the TV watching duties and I generally stayed away.

Nowadays, I see it as mostly junky crap with an occasional smattering of interesting content. With that in mind, I try to keep my watching to a dull roar when possible. Here’s the shows I currently watch and enjoy on a regular basis:

Family Guy – Whether a repeat or a new episode, this continues to be THE funniest show on television today. I regularly laugh my ass of in response to this show’s completely nutty sense of humor. The 80′s references that Seth McFarland puts in are just even more icing on the cake.

That 70′s Show – A continuing favorite, I haven’t seen all of the episodes so I’m still enjoying watching them. Plus, Laura Prepon is *damned* hot.

Futurama – Not nearly as funny as the above two shows, but a geek classic and still a great watch.

Survivor – I love this show, but it’s the only reality TV show I get into. I don’t know *why* I got into it, but I really enjoy the strategy behind it and the way you get to see and analyze people.

The Red Green Show – Women HATE this show; men love it. That’s essentially because it is made by men, for men, and therefore we’re the only ones that understand it. I catch myself nodding so much during this show that I’ll probably have arthiritis in my neck from the strain.

CSI/SVU/L&O – All of these modern cop shows I rather like, although I don’t watch every single episode that comes out, just whatever I catch. Plus, Mariska Haggarty and Jorja Fox are DAMNED HOT.

Ghost Whisperer – I watch this with my wife because she gets too scared to watch it alone. It’s not bad, and it gives her a chance to try to educate me on her beliefs about the spirit world, etc.

That’s about it, folks. Those are the big ones; the ones that I’m most interested in. There’s a few others, such as Red Dwarf, SNL, etc. that I watch, but I’m not religious about them. I’m pretty much not religious about ANY of them, but there’s some that I prefer to try to catch.

So much for an exciting blog entry, eh? Sorry. I’m having a bit of a blogger’s writing block episode. I promise to be back with gratuitous nudity and so forth soon.

© Nathan Pralle for PhilosYphia, 2006. | Permalink | 2 little comments jumping on the bed. | Subscribe RSS

I’d like to comment a bit more fully on some of his points that he brings up:

1. Vista OS – This is the thorn in the side of MS now and everyone knows it. The F/OSS crowd is bent over sideways laughing about it, you can hear Allchin grinding his teeth all the way over here in Iowa, and the news releases about what’s wrong or what’s been taken out of it now are amusing industry professionals on a regular basis. When it comes out, if it ever does, it will be hailed with an attitude of, “Amazing that it made it!” sort of attitude, not a “when are we going to implement it” perspective. IT managers — if you are even THINKING about Vista, you’re wasting your time. Nothing to see here, move on. I guarantee by the time its relevant, you will have had lots of warning. And for right now, its relevance is about the same level as the color of Uma Thurman’s toothbrush.

2. Office 2007 – The cry I’m hearing in the industry more and more is, “Why upgrade my Office Suite? What has it done for me lately?” Personally, I had Office 2003 installed on my PC when it came new, just because it was new, and almost immediately removed it in favor of Office 2000. It sucked so bad, dustbunnies in the next county were shrieking in dismay. Look, MS, you really don’t need more features in a typing program. I want to write documents. Just documents. Not documents with pictures, movies, soundclips, albums, frames, viewing transmissions, explosion graphs, temperature gauges, and motorized pleasure buttons. Just documents. Why not release something like, “Office Kickass 2006 — The Office Suite that never crashes, never leaks memory, and always works.” HA! I jest, of course.
3. MSN – Agreed on his position of “MS is not a marketing company — they should not be selling ads”. However, I also see that as a round-about sort of way of MS buying ads. They’re selling ads because when they do, they’re exposing themselves to advertisement. It’s a matter of soaking the MS brand into every nook and cranny possible. Frankly, as far as raw advertisement goes, Coca-Cola and Apple have them beat, hands down, and always have.

   As a medium, MSN is working for the dumb masses, just like AOL. If it wasn’t AOL, or MSN, it’d be something else. The idiots of the world need Hotmail so they stay out of the meaningful part of the Internet. I’m just thankful that MS chooses to host and coddle all of them. Now if we could only get them to block all outside transmissions, we’d be 1000% better off.

4. MSN Search Engine – Ad selling, like Dvorak said. Plus, who’s going to switch? I’m not. You’re not. Our addiction to Google is here, now, and real. Sure, if Google starts to suck I’ll go elsewhere. But guess what: It’s not sucking, it isn’t likely to start sucking, so I’m not trusting anyone else.

   Tell you what, MS. Just set your MSN Search Engine to return links to Hotmail, MySpace, LiveJournal, TeenMagazine.com, and HotMonkeySex.org for each and every search and you’ll probably get a 98% hit rate with the audience you’re peddling this to.

5. Xbox360 – Unfortunately the company did not foresee the Sony delays and failed to manufacture enough units to satisfy the demand. I have no response to this except, “Oh….my….holy….????”
6. Pad-based computing – Question: Who didn’t know that this was a bust when it first came out? Have you ever tried to use a pad computer? It’s like trying to have sex with your dick wrapped up in an egg beater. You can do it, but it requires some impressive acrobatics and it’s just not fun in the end.
7. Dot Net initiative – When this came out I was still young enough and immature enough to ooh and aah at the idea of a massively, inter-related development, deployment, and operational system such as this. Now I know enough to grab another cold beer and chalk .NET up to another raving success like Java was. .NOT
8. Preoccupation with Google This old-lady-like skittishness is unbecoming for a company this size. == Funniest line I’ve read today. I don’t think that MS’s preoccupation with Google is incorrect; however, HOW they are responding to Google is. It’s turning into a dick-waving contest and MS isn’t spry enough to make the moves necessary to keep on top. Google is still small enough to be nimble and brave; MS has a great corporate structure, but to borrow a line from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, “Looks like a fish, moves like a fish, steers like a cow.” It takes time to move the bulk. Good on MS for competing, but get a different strategy for the love of Mike.

In the end, I have to agree with Dvorak when he says that nothing good has come out of MS in ages. It used to create new and exciting OS enhancements and software that people could take to bed and romance for ages after its release, but nowadays it is either a) playing catchup, b) trying something of the same old thing or c) coming out with things so random and useless it makes market critics boggle at the piles of scathing writing material available to them. Time for a lot of breaths of fresh air or at least a new mission.

© Nathan Pralle for PhilosYphia, 2006. | Permalink | One comment. One lonely comment looking for a friend. | Subscribe RSS

Hence my start. I am using a system called the “1-wire” system created by Dallas Semiconductor which, despite it’s name, actually requires 2 wires. (It gets its name because only 1 wire is used for data transmission.) It consists of a converter that plugs into the back of a computer and a bunch of sensors — little chips — that you place around the house. You then run wires from the converter to those chips to hook it all together. These chips measure temperature, humidity, pressure — lots of things.

So far I only have one temperature-sensing chip, but I have some more on the way, and eventually will pick up humidity ones, etc. But I’ve managed to construct the software to run it and to collect useful data from it.

Behold my current temperature sensor graph:
Click Here to See It!

Go ahead, go gaze at it in wonder. The sensor is currently placed just outside the window of one of the basement windows, so I’m getting a reading of the temperature outside. Now, it’s not in the best place yet to measure outside temps — in the morning you’ll see a spike as the morning sun beats down on that side of the house, warming the black sensor way past what the temperature actually is. I need to move it to someplace permanent and more sensible for temperature measurement, but I’ll get there. Right now, I’m just happy to have it up and working and producing neat-looking graphs.

Ultimately, temperature sensors will be placed in all sorts of places — rooms, outside, inside appliances (monitoring the freezer temperature, furnace temp, fish and turtle tank temps, etc.) and probably eventually monitoring things like computer case temperatures, etc. All this will be incorporated into one or more graphs.

Then what? Well, there’s electronic ways to turn things on and off, so I plan on doing that next, specifically, turning the furnace fan and the heating/cooling on and off as needed. If I tell the system to hold the temperature at 72F, then it should be able to do so, whether that means heating, cooling, or otherwise.

The third stage of this is to more finely control where the heat and cooling goes by putting motors on the louvers of the different air runs in the house. By doing so, the system will be able to open and shut registers and regulate where air goes. This will be quite a ways off, however.

Yes, it’s very geeky, but what the hell. I’m having fun and hopefully I’ll save a few bucks in the long run by keeping closer track of what things are doing.

© Nathan Pralle for PhilosYphia, 2006. | Permalink | No comments....YET! Make one! | Subscribe RSS

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