It's an amazing museum, with a ton of Boeing history, and a really cool display about Pete Conrad, including his flight logbooks from his Gemini and his Skylab missions. Skylab for me, as a kid, was huge. I know it seems like a nothing thing, but we hung onto news about the Skylab missions like people hang onto "American Idol" updates today. Yes, that is depressing I suppose, but back in the 70s, space exploration was still shiny and new, so such things meant something.
There's also an SR-71 with a D-21 drone there. DROOOOOL. Oh, and a very amusing 707-based Air Force One. The "State of the Art" comm gear is hilarious, albeit unintentionally. So are the ECM pods on the engines. If you're ever in Seattle, and have a few hours, (okay, MANY hours), go, it's cool as hell.
Technorati Tags:
Science rules!, Museums, Airplanes
Let's start with the Microsoft Home
The big problem with the "WON'T THE FUTURE BE AMAZING" exhibits, in addition to the amusing things Gavin listed, (Gavin, you should have seen it circa 1986...even.funnier!), these houses always look like an episode of Cribs. In other words, these things never ever look like people live there. (Seriously, in all the years I've watched Cribs, I've seen lots of houses, but 3 homes: Jerry Cantrell, Gene Simmons, and Hugh Hefner. Those three places were homes. People lived there. The others? Not so much.
The Center for Information Work is just as silly. Take the big StrataTech monitor. Please. Now, for a gaming rig, where you're sitting back a few feet and going for total immersion? Fan-fucking-tastic. Release it now, the gamers will blow you on the spot. But for IT work? Look at where the guy is sitting. Unless you have amazing peripheral vision, you cannot see that entire screen clearly without turning your head. So throughout the day? Like an all-day tennis game. Looks cool, but unusable in a business situation. Well, if you wanted an impressive NOC monitor, but I think the world is done with that bullshit. At least I hope so. DigiDesk? Two Words: Coffee Spills. Can you imagine doing anything but playing "Minority Report" on it? Now, I know some artists that would love that, like a Cintiq on 'roids, but for routine office work? Dude, show me shit I can use. Stop hitting the Star Trek crack pipe. At least the "next generation work spaces demo" isn't insane. Nicer way to have dual monitors, although stop with the over-complicated keyboards already. Also, lay the fucking phone down, only pretentious idiots who want you to know OMGLOOKWHOCALLSME set it up like that. On the other hand, props for Microsoft realizing people still manual dial numbers. I just wish they'd stop pushing the Table PC. It's a great vertical market solution, especially for warehouses, hospitals, etc. But the general world has said "We don't want to fucking write everything out longhand all fucking day, now give me a faster portable with a fucking decent keyboard." Maybe once Bill leaves.
I hate to tell them, but their "Doctor's office of the future"? It's not the future. The medical profession is jumping on tablets like panthers on meat. Why? Because for that industry, tablets rock. Right tool for the right job. Same thing with the PHARMACY OF THE FUTURE. It's already here guys. That, by the way, is a problem with THE WORLD OF THE FUTURE. They're either out in left field dropping acid, or they're actually a bit behind.
And again, pushing the tablet crack, is the MEETING ROOM OF THE FUTURE. Okay, here's a test. Take a notepad. Now, in a meeting, write notes for a few hours, but, don't look at the paper as you write. See how well that works. With a keyboard, and a little training and practice, I can easily type notes and only occasionally glance at the screen. When you write shit longhand, or use a pen at all, there's no way to create the tactile references that nubs on the "F" and "J" keys do. So you have to look at the screen constantly.
As well, two separate meeting tables in the same room? Why? You put 11-12 people in a room, and have half of them talk about one thing, the other half talk about something else, and measure the volume levels over time. Yet with all that shit, there's no goddamned outlets, not a single ethernet port, and they put the fucking old-school whiteboard over the AC return. There's a couch UNDER an LCD screen. Come on people, room ergonomics count, and there are better choices for 'electronic' whiteboards today. Now. And what the fuck is up with the color scheme in that room. Does someone at Microsoft have a huge love for gastronomic colors and patterns? What is the deal with the relentless 70s decor? Where's the acoustic tile on the rest of the room? It's almost an echo chamber.
But then, Microsoft has always missed the small practical details of things, and hoped you don't notice that it only looks great at a glance.
I'd love to see a "Room of the future" that shows someone actually designed for how people use that room, and planned ahead, rather than just pushing their tech. That might be cool.
Technorati Tags:
Futuristic Bullshit
In Mac OS X 10.5.X, there is a new place for caches/tmp files: /var/folders/ or /private/var/folders
If you're having potential cache-related issues in Mac OS X 10.5, you might want to keep that one in mind.
Technorati Tags:
Apple, Mac OS X, Troubleshooting
Lesson Five: High Morale Makes Creativity CheapI would say that if you have to pick one thing to not go cheap on as an employer, morale is it. If you have high morale, you also have loyalty, and a group that will stick with you through thick and thin, when the cash falls like manna, and when you have to wander in the desert.The Quarterly: It sounds like you spend a fair amount of time thinking about the morale of your teams.
Brad Bird: In my experience, the thing that has the most significant impact on a movie’s budget—but never shows up in a budget—is morale. [what’s true for a movie is true for a startup!] If you have low morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about 25 cents of value. If you have high morale, for every $1 you spend, you get about $3 of value. Companies should pay much more attention to morale.
Without good morale, you're fucked. You may limp along for years, even decades, but you will never truly excel, and you'll be doing nothing but vampiring off of past work and glory. Another point:
Lesson Six: Dont Try To “Protect your success”If all you do is protect what you have, you are not growing, you are preserving. There's another name for a well-preserved organism: Mummy. If you want your company to be the walking dead, trodding the same path for eternity, then preserve it. But you'll do no better than you are right now. To succeed, you have to take risks.The Quarterly: Engagement, morale—what else is critical for stimulating innovative thinking?
Brad Bird: The first step in achieving the impossible is believing that the impossible can be achieved. … “You don’t play it safe—you do something that scares you, that’s at the edge of your capabilities, where you might fail. That’s what gets you up in the morning.”
Another one that I love:
Then there’s our building. Steve Jobs basically designed this building. In the center, he created this big atrium area, which seems initially like a waste of space. The reason he did it was that everybody goes off and works in their individual areas. People who work on software code are here, people who animate are there, and people who do designs are over there. Steve put the mailboxes, the meetings rooms, the cafeteria, and, most insidiously and brilliantly, the bathrooms in the center—which initially drove us crazy—so that you run into everybody during the course of a day. [Jobs] realized that when people run into each other, when they make eye contact, things happen. So he made it impossible for you not to run into the rest of the company.The other thing this does is make siloism and empire-building difficult. When you have to deal with everyone else all the time, you can't hide away, nor can you hide information. I have worked at companies that make siloism an unspoken core value, and it is like death. When you can't just talk to someone else without manager approval and a meeting? When never even talk to people in your own department except by accident? That is the mark of a company that is limping along, with leadership that only looks at the bottom line. "As long as we made a profit, everything is perfect." Penny-wise, but so terribly pound-foolish, and when the master of the silo leaves, so does all the knowledge they never shared with anyone else.
Lesson Seven: Encourage Inter-disciplinary LearningBrilliant. The company I work for now has something similar to this. I don't know if I'll ever use it, but I'm tickled pink that they do that. It's an amazing concept, one that the military is good at. Why is this important? Because you never know what hidden desires or talents someone has until you give them a chance to use them. Think of Al Davis in the early years of the Oakland Raiders, taking players who were thought of as poor, or broken-down, and figuring out where they really needed to be, and making them, and the Raiders, into superstars. Just because someone's in IT doesn't mean they don't go home and write, or compose music, but if you never ask them, you'll never know, and you just might miss out on someone amazing. A job title is a convenience, not a straightjacket.The Quarterly: Is there anything else you’d highlight that contributes to creativity around here?
Brad Bird: One thing Pixar does [is] “PU,” or Pixar University. If you work in lighting but you want to learn how to animate, there’s a class to show you animation. There are classes in story structure, in Photoshop, even in Krav Maga, the Israeli self-defense system. Pixar basically encourages people to learn outside of their areas, which makes them more complete. [and more creative].
Finally, the most important one:
Lesson Nine: Making $$ Can’t Be Your FocusI have to disagree with Brad here. For any company to succeed in the long run, making money cannot be the focus. You do have to make money, but that cannot be why you do work. If your primary focus becomes shit like profit and shareholder value, then walk, you have no more value to offer, unless you become an accountant. When you focus on doing what you do so well that it makes you giddy, you can make money forever. When all you care about is the next quarter, then that's what your commercial lifespan is. Three month. You live and die every three months.The Quarterly: How would you compare the Disney of your early career with Pixar today?
Brad Bird: When I entered Disney, it was like a classic Cadillac Phaeton that had been left out in the rain… The company’s thought process was not, “We have all this amazing machinery—how do we use it to make exciting things? We could go to Mars in this rocket ship!” It was, “We don’t understand Walt Disney at all. We don’t understand what he did. Let’s not screw it up. Let’s just preserve this rocket ship; going somewhere new in it might damage it.”
Walt Disney’s mantra was, “I don’t make movies to make money—I make money to make movies.” That’s a good way to sum up the difference between Disney at its height and Disney when it was lost. It’s also true of Pixar and a lot of other companies. It seems counterintuitive, but for imagination-based companies to succeed in the long run, making money can’t be the focus.
Is that what anyone wants to do?
More companies should read this, and even better, listen to it.
Technorati Tags:
Leadership, Companies that excel
Take Matt Freestone of Windows Connected, and his blog post: The Vista Schoolyard Bullies........
He's trying to defend Vista and how users of older machines simply should not expect the same performance out of it as a new machine. That's logical. That's not really why people are pissed about Vista performance, but okay, we'll go with that.
But Matt has to compare Vista to something, and of course, he uses Mac OS X 10.5. The problem is, he doesn't know anything about the Mac market:
Before I explain some common sense things, let's first take a look at Apple's OS history and deployment strategies. I ask you, how many Apple users do you know that own a 3 year old Mac, and install Leopard on it? The silence is deafening.If by "silence" you mean "The sound of PowerMac and iMac G5 owners running happily along", then yes, the silence is deafening. Yeah. See, G5s, while not as fast as a current Intel system for a lot of reasons, are not dogs.
You also have quite a few PowerBook G4 users on Mac OS X 10.5. Again, not as fast as a MacBook or a MacBook Pro, but none of those systems are running Mac OS X 10.5 in "Crippled Mode". Obviously, it didn't occur to Matt to go to Apple's support site and do a little research If he had, he would have found every machine released in 2005, (three or so year old hardware), listed nicely for him. But never let a lack of research slow you down, and Matt doesn't. He presses on:
All the Mac OS's through it's life cycle have been hardware dependant. In other words, for the most part, you bought a new PC to get the new Mac OS.Matt is so far out in left field here, he's in right field. While Apple does regularly cut off older hardware from the latest OS releases, that is still not, nor never has been the same as "You have to buy new hardware to get new OS versions", nor is it even close. In fact, prior to Mac OS X, Apple would constantly provide for truly ancient hardware in their OS releases. Mac OS X 10.5 still supports a machine with at least an 867MHz G4, 512MB of RAM, and a DVD drive. You have to go back into 2002 to start hitting sub-867 MHz G4s. Now, Mac OS X 10.5's performance on those machines won't be anything close to a Mac Pro, or even an Intel Mac Mini. But, if you have a decent G4 Tower with a good video card and decent RAM, you can run Mac OS X 10.5, and well. You certainly won't see any kind of OS degradation on a scale with VIsta's "NoAeroForYou!" issues.
However, Matt's got the backhoe firewalled, no slowing down here:
Obviously that has changed in the last 5 or more years, and has changed more drastically with Apple's adoption of Intel processors. But still, this question is a valid one. Mac OS's have never been designed with backward compatibility (hardware wise) in mind.Wrong, wrong, and wrong. In fact, prior to Mac OS X, you could easily have Macs that were ten years old still on the list of supported systems for a given OS release. That caused Apple no end of pain, and that tendency to be far too generous with hardware support was a major factor in the death of Copland. But even in the Mac OS X era, neither Matt's facts, nor his implications are correct. However, we are in the Scoblelite era of "Fuck Research and Facts, that's what your readers are for". Somehow, I bet a similarly inaccurate screed by a Mac Web site be greeted with equanimity by the Mattster there. He now brings out the strawman:
Why? Simple, Apple is a hardware vendor, not just a software vendor. Apple makes 50% of it's profit from the hardware. It's against their best interest for you to simply upgrade your old computer with their new OS. They want you to buy a brand new computer. This is a very liberating thing as it allows them to design the OS to take advantage of the latest hardware and provide much 'cooler' user interfaces as they don't have to worry about older or slower hardware not being able to run it.Actually, by that logic, Apple could easily get people to buy more hardware without giving a rat's ass about what OS they run on it. Matt's implications here are not just wrong, but bordering on stupid. Dell is a hardware company, Apple is a systems company. Apple sells you a system, of hardware, OS and application software all designed to work well together. Dell sells you a box and if you want, puts an OS on it. There is a difference, but I don't expect Matt to understand it. I only want him to stop talking about shit he doesn't really understand, or do a little damned research. Finally:
So again, I ask you. How many Mac users have wanted to install Leopard on a 3 year old Mac, and if they do, how many complain about it's performance? They don't because they knew it would be horrible.<Raises Hand> I have several G4 machines running Mac OS X 10.5. Honestly, when it just comes to running the OS, it feels no slower than Mac OS X 10.4 did, and some things, like Spotlight, actually feel faster under Mac OS X 10.5. Same thing for G5s.
If Matt wants to make a point about unrealistic expectations for Vista, that's fine, but he should stick to things he knows, and folks, Macs are not in the set of "Things Matt Knows".
Technorati Tags:
Blogosphere = Dorkosphere, Blogosphere = Stupid, Mac OS X, Microsoft Vista, Don't Talk Out of your ass
Well, now I can. Here's the script:
set theSSHList to {}
tell application "Remote Desktop"
set theComputers to the selection
repeat with x in theComputers
set the end of theSSHList to Internet address of x
end repeat
end tell
tell application "Terminal"
repeat with x in theSSHList
do script "ssh username@" & (contents of x)
end repeat
end tell
It's pretty simple. We initialize theSSHList, then grab all the selected computers in Remote Desktop. (Note...if you have Apple Remote Desktop open, there is always a selected computer as long as there's a computer in the window to select, so this will tend not to fail unless you're pointing at an empty computer. For obvious reasons, it won't work on a computer you haven't added to Apple Remote Desktop yet.)
We process the list of computers, and dump their IP addresses into theSSHList.
Next is to interate through theSSHList, and open a new ssh session for each item in theSSHList.
This won't bring Terminal to the front, by the way. I don't tend to like that, but if you do, then just add an "activate" command right after "tell application "Terminal"" and Terminal will merrily pop to the front.
Put that in your scripts menu and you can now easily pop ssh windows to Apple Remote Desktop computers when you need.
Technorati Tags:
AppleScript, Stupid AppleScript Tricks, Apple Remote Desktop, Apple Remote Desktop Scripting
Good, and I'm pretty sure that God, such as it is, would approve. Because I don't see a supreme omniscient being saying "Okay, now listen, because this is very important: you all have to be a big bunch of complete DUMBASSES to get into heaven, got that? To get into heaven, you must be dumb. Now, go forth and stupidify."
I just don't see it happening that way.
It's about time that this kind of bullshit was treated properly...with jail time.
Technorati Tags:
Religion makes you stupid
Like this bit from CNN, about general dissatisfaction about the GI Bill. Now, the GI Bill I got was worse than they have now, and far worse than the original, but hey, it was still decent, and thanks to Massachusetts not charging veterans tuition at state schools, paid for a lot of college.
However, it could be better, and even though it won't benefit me personally, I'm really happy to see that Jim Webb introduced a bill, co-sponsored by 57 other Senators, including John Warner, that will make real improvements to the current Montgomery GI Bill, like:
Again, I won't get a dime from it, but I have friends who will. This is a good bill. Unlike bullshit parades and platitudes, this will actually help a lot of people out in meaningful ways, people who under the Mongomery G.I. Bill, which does not suck, might not have been able to follow their educational dream. This is the kind of bill that will do for this generation's vets what the original did for guys like John Warner.
So the sponsors are talking about adding it to the Iraq War Spending Bill. Makes sense, I mean, compared to what we're spending on that fucking quagmire, this is cheap, and it's a chance to do some actual good for the troops that have been getting so routinely fucked over by the very people who claim to support them the most.
Bush's response?
President Bush warned Tuesday at a Rose Garden news conference that he would veto any additions to the bill.Hey, you fucking Texan-wannabe pinhead ass-monkey, you fucking sign this bill. Period. I don't care if it's added onto the Iraq War Spending Bill, sent to you on its own, or tied onto a bill authorizing Papa Smurf, as the fucking Surgeon General, you shut up and you sign this bill. You put thousands of people in harms way based on lies and bullshit, totally ass-raped our military efforts in Afghanistan, and overstressed our military to where they're not letting people out when they were supposed to get out, the Army is damned near letting anyone with enough sanity and mobility to walk in and make a fucking mark on the contract, and you are pushing back at all on what would be the one truly good thing you might possibly do?
Have you no decency? At long last, will the rest of the country finally realize that for all your bluster about morality, decency, and righteousness, that you have absolutely not a shred of human decency, and all the moral fiber of a rabid weasel?
It is too late to do anything but wait for your too-long time in power to be over before the long, hard job of trying to fix the shit you've piled on the lower and middle class of the country that gave you everything, the people who do the actual work that you barely even notice as you ride around Crawford like the petty dictator you are. I can only hope that when you finally leave the office you've sullied, that you are forgotten and abandoned, and treated with the same barely disguised disdain that you leveled on all who were not in your inner circle.
I expected little from you, George W. Bush, but to fail on something as simple as this? Shame on you sir. Shame on you.
*****Update*****
Thanks to Dave Pooser for this link in the comments, with this bit from Sen. "I am the best candidate for the military"
and vet, McCain:
Disappointingly, Sen. John McCain, presumptive Republican candidate for president, so far declines to back the measure. He seems to be responding to concerns of the military brass that enhanced educational opportunities could negatively affect retention rates. Not only is it wrong to want people to stay in the military because they have no alternatives, but such thinking ignores the advantages enhanced educational benefits offer in recruitment. To meet recruitment goals, the military has offered bonuses and lowered some of its standards. Imagine being able instead to promise possible recruits a first-class college education.Dear Sen. McCain,
If it was possible to be more disgusted than by what the chimp is trying to pull, you have gone the extra mile. For you to offer anything but your fervent and complete support for this bill is beyond the pale of decency. For you to do anything but sign your name as a co-sponsor in letters bigger than Hancock's is unimaginable. There are not enough letters in "pathetic hypocritical suckup" to illustrate how far you have fallen in your attempt at one last bit of glory.
Of course, thanks to your trophy wife's riches and your government benefits from your years in the U.S. Senate, this will never be your personal problem ever again. But for you to backstab your own people, the veterans of war? To betray those who, like you before them voluntarily place themselves in harms way for no more reason than their country asked them to? For that sir, there can be no forgiveness, no restitution, no "making it better". For you to waffle even slightly in supporting this bill, you have lost any respect I have for you, which, once upon a time was enough for me to have been willing to vote for you instead of Al Gore.
You have betrayed every veteran everywhere, John McCain, and I would ask that you stop referring to yourself as a member of that group.
You no longer deserve that privilege.
We, (my wife, Melissa, and my son, Alex came along) get to the gym where it's being held. (contrary to popular belief, this shit is never held in temples with angry statues looking on in disapproval. It's held in gymnasiums, parks, little studios in strip malls, wherever you can find the room. It's barely organized.) I see a hard, wood floor. "WOOHOO! I think, because I know this means no falling, and probably no throwing. A few times on a hard floor, no problem. A couple of hundred times, and people get hurt. Badly. So I'm feeling good.
I see my current instructor, who's testing for 4th-degree, and a student from my previous school. Okay, I'm feeling better. Familiar faces always help. I do my paperwork, chat with the grand master, and do some light warmups.
I've learned over the years that conservation of resources is critical here. The SHORTEST black-belt level test I've done is 2.5 hours. The longest? Five hours. You have to pace yourself, or you can't make it.
We all line up according to rank, and joy, because I wore the uniform I wore when I made black belt, and it has the little yellow fringe, I get to be in the front. Right in front of the grandmaster, and a local 5th degree, Kwang Jang Nym Jack Harvey. I like this. I first tested for Black Belt at headquarters in Houston in October. It was hot as hell, and two masters were trying to out-do each other for evil. They were reaching new heights. The grandmaster called a meeting of all masters, (Kwang Jang Nym, btw), and above, so then-4th degree/Sa Bum Nym Harvey took over. The first thing he did was tell us we could all get water, but we had to be very quiet about it. I've loved the man ever since.
The initial warmups are solid, but not too much. Then Kwang Jang Nym Harmon takes over. Barry Harmon, IIRC, the highest ranking non-Korean in Kuk Sool. First names here are important. His wife, Choon-Ok, is the highest ranking woman in Kuk Sool. Both are 8th degree black belts. Barry Harmon, I respect and admire a lot. Choon-Ok scares my bladder dry. I'm very glad the Harmon in charge is Barry.
First it's punching. Jabs, palm hands, combos, spear hands. Always a hundred. Each side. By the end of the test, we'll have done 1800 of them. In between, to "rest" I suppose, we do pushups, situps, and squats. 180 each in a couple hours. That sounds like a lot until you realize that some of the higher ranking masters do that every day. But it's not until the punches end that we start the forms...each one three times. The black belts get lucky, we stop at the last underblackbelt form. Then the techniques. Again, a lucky break for me, we have to do them sans partners. That's how I practice the most, so for this, I can just go about my normal routine. Some of the others get mindfucked by this, but no one gives up.
That is what it's all about. Not what you remember. If you're in a black belt test, it's assumed you know your shit. They test that, but that's not the point. Some people test well, others don't. What's really being tested here is will. Will you not stop. Will you lift legs that can barely stand so you can kick just a little higher. Will you do pushups on arms that are not happy with just hanging there. Will you give all you have, and then, when the inevitable next task comes, keep going? If you do, you pass. This time. I'll probably test another 6-9 times before I get that next black belt.
It's a weird state of reality you get in when you're pushing yourself like that. You stop thinking about later and before. All that matters is now. I could tell you what I did now that it's over, but during the time, in that moment, I couldn't tell you anything but what I was doing right then. You have to be in the moment during this, because thinking ahead or behind will fuck you up. I remember thinking most about breathing. Keeping it under control. Muscle fatigue is minor, you can work through that, or just ignore it. But if your breathing isn't right, then you fall apart and fast.
There's a tournament tomorrow, I probably won't compete, but I'll be there to help. Because that's the other part of this. Helping. The quiet "you're doing great"s that we all tell someone who's looking ragged. The encouragement we give each other to keep going. The look of "I can't give up, I'm not the youngest one standing". I've done tests where my partner was so wore out, he swore he was going to give up. I wouldn't let him, even though it meant I had to carry him through a lot of things. After all, martial arts is an odd sort of brotherhood, and so he ain't heavy...
Oh...no, I won't be getting promoted this time. This was only my first test. Talk to me in a year, maybe two. Then, maybe. I realize that this may surprise people who know me, or think they do, from mailing lists, et al. But then, this is my life. I just do IT to pay for this.
Technorati Tags:
Kuk Sool, Testing
He came home okay. No big deal until you note the headline:
Why I Let My 9-Year-Old Ride the Subway AloneI'll wait for the screams of horror to calm down.
I read this and thought "I wish this wasn't a big deal, and I bet she's going to catch a lot of crap." The latter is definitely true, and I still wish the first was too, because I was most definitely a "free-range kid" growing up.
In Miami.
Between 1970 and 1986.
Yeah...Mariel, Liberty City Riots, Cocaine Cowboys, the whole bit. That's the Miami I grew up in. If you want, read "The Corpse Had a Familiar Face" by Edna Buchanan. That Miami. In fact, this paragraph from that book is rather personal to me:
Consider this real-life scene: A twenty-two-year-old Miami cop encounters a man strolling at dawn in a quiet neighborhood. The man is naked and carrying the severed head of a young woman. He throws the head at the cop-twice.Actually, her name was Drew. She was young, funny, and profane. I worked with her for a short while at the Coral Gables Bus Terminal newsstand. Her roommate, Tina worked there too. They were both really nice people. Tina especially bewailed that I would never, ever, ever learn how to dress myself worth a damn. I bought a nice suit just to prove her wrong. Drew's boyfriend, who she was living with, went to California, came back crazy. Stabbed her, cut her head off, and then threw her head at a cop."I killed her. She's the devil!" the man shouts.
That's the Miami I grew up in. My folks had no car. I either rode the bus or...well, there was no or. My mom taught me how the bus system worked, and that was that. Bicycle or bus, no other choices. From 9 or 10 until I joined the Air Force and got my first car, that was how I got around one of, and for a while, the most dangerous city around. Nothing bad happened because of the bus. I got hit by cars on 3 separate occasions on my bike, once deliberately, but that can happen no matter how you get around or how old you are.
For me, "the good old days" involved such surrealistic shit that I still can't explain it. You either lived in Miami, or didn't. I can't explain it beyond that. But I never was shot at. Never got stabbed. Never got attacked on the bus. Never got molested on the bus. I'm not saying those things don't happen, but they are random. You can't predict them, and you're as likely to get killed in what you think to be safety as not.
I'm not saying ignore the reality of the world. But when your kid says "Hey, I'm going to <friend's> house", let them go on their own. Teach them how to read people. How to use the local transportation systems. They have to learn sometime, and college is a bit late to learn how the city works. Being ignorant in a strange city will get you killed far faster than the friggin' subway or a bus.
Teach them to not be stupid. If they avoid that, they'll be fine. Really.
So yeah, my mom let me do that. Worked out okay too. Thanks mom.
Technorati Tags:
Teach your kids, Free-Range Kids
THIS!!!
IS!!!
ADOBE!!!!!!
Here's the drill:
Try to download it from the main site. BAAAHAHAHAHA...fuck you, you're running Mac OS X 10.5. So after looping through, literally looping a few times, I google it. I find the beta from Adobe labs, and download that. Yeah...that's my choice. A beta. Thanks a pantload Adobe.
Now I try to download the book I purchased legally. I get an ebx.etd file. Double click on it. Adobe Digital Editions opens in all its Flash glory. (Seriously, other than YouTube and Foamy, does Flash have any purpose OTHER than being the most useless pile of crap code on the planet? All it ever does is annoy people, and make everything it touches suck.) It initializes, and now it must authorize my content. Oh, but it can't, and here's the very simple error message I get:
Adobe DRM Error
System: 5
State: 4
Class: 400
Code: 41
Message: Error on response from server.
Scroll below or view error.log for more details.Adobe DRM client Error: 441
Could not authenticate with voucher engine at serverServer Code: -4
Requested URL:
http://66.135.49.27/fulfill/ebx.etd ?action=purchase &orderid=411419592703012 &bookid=EBK:000216998--- end ---
Man, that must suck if you aren't a sysadmin or a programmer. Way to make this usable for the nontechnical reader. And people wonder why ebooks are teh suck.
I could call Edna Buchanan and beg her for an autographed copy of "The Corpse Had a Familiar Face" in the time it will take me to read a file.
This is why I hate eBooks. Because what should be a simple operation is now complicated beyond all sanity, and requires PDF, Flash, some complicated-assed DRM, and beta software.
Screw eBooks, screw Flash, and once again, just like their installers, a big middle finger to Adobe Digital Editions, for making reading a file take longer than ordering and receiving the physical book off of Amazon.
Adobe: We Make Everything Complicated, Because You Have No Choice.
Technorati Tags:
Adobe Can Kiss My Ass, Adobe: Simplicity is our enemy
This shit? Sorry, but if I contract for a line that allows n Mbps down and m Mbps up, then I expect I get that. If I can't use that at MY convenience, then I expect to only be charged for the hours of the day I'm allowed to use my service at the stated rate.
Comcast's inability to do things in a sensible manner should not be their customer's problems.
Technorati Tags:
Comcast: They're doin' it rong
No more installing the crash utility by default. After all, that's not strictly a part of Firefox, so for Mozilla to do that would be rather hypocritical, and Asa is an honorable man.
No more automatically selecting the "Import from IE" option, that will, of course, in the final release, default to the "Do nothing" option. After all, Asa wouldn't want to force someone to opt out of having personal data imported into Firefox when he's railing about Apple forcing people to opt out of installing Safari. Because after all, to not do so would be hypocritical, and of course, Asa is, an honorable man.
Finally, it goes without saying that Firefox will never again present dialogs that force the user to opt out of Firefox both making itself the default browser on Windows and checking constantly to make sure it is. "Sneaking" configuration changes by users whilst shouting "J'accuse!" at Apple for "sneaking" an installation of Safari, said installation being itself a configuration change of a user's computer would be quite hypocritical, and of course, Asa is, an honorable man.
I eagerly await his next blog post clearing the air on this, and I think we should all let Asa know how excited we are at these impending changes to Firefox.
Technorati Tags:
Angry Drunk Rules, Daring Fireball, Firefox
I really wish I knew just HOW FUCKING IGNORANT AND STUPID YOU HAVE TO BE before you are finally unable to fucking function beyond the level of fucking planaria.
The stupid, it burns.
Technorati Tags:
TEH STOOPUD
Technorati Tags:
Uproaring Bowels, Teh Funny
