Drunk and Bitter Jesus

12:20 am - Magic hate ball says

There's nothing like dealing with large numbers of people to make you hate them. In particular, airports and parking lots seem to draw out the greatest degree of sheer bovine idiocy from human beings.

Item: I am trying to maneuver through a mall parking lot and am stuck behind someone waiting for a spot to open up. Meanwhile, the person behind me attempts to cut around us despite the patently apparent lack of space. The people pulling out of the spot had just gotten there, so it took them a few minutes to get all their possessions and themselves settled and get going. The kicker? There were dozens of spots available a row over.

Item: I then observed the car ahead of me prowl for parking but then pass up spots because the individuals within the might have had to walk a few extra feet.

Item: pushing my shopping cart through Safeway, I was stuck in a seemingly-immovable traffic jam in a narrow aisle until I, in a fit of ingenuity, moved the abandoned cart which was causing the problem.

In closing, fellow humans, please get the fuck out of my way before I dismember you.

Current Mood: aggravated

04:27 pm - Bingo, sir

Current Mood: amused

02:05 pm - Flashtastic

Current Mood: blah

12:41 pm - Cheese! In! Spaaaaaaaace!

The UK's cheese-based space program has suffered a terrible setback. Oh the humanity! Or something . . .

Current Mood: indescribable

02:29 pm - Best. Band. Evar.

04:05 pm - Nobody knows what it's like ...

Every day, I ride BART into work, and I usually ignore my fellow passengers except to the extent that I have to navigate through them or if they annoy me. Every so often, though, I wonder what's going through the heads of those around me. What secret pain or joy is hidden inside? The old woman shuffling onto the train with her little rolling cart--is she holed up in some tiny, freezing garret, or does she have loving children and friends who illuminate her life? Are the bags under that man's eyes a result of a late night involving pleasure or grief? We sit here each day in each other's company and have only slghtly more sense of one another's inner lives than we do of life on other planets.

What would life be like if we had to confront the realities of everyone around us?

Current Mood: contemplative

05:30 am - Per my last post . . .

Lotus Notes 8: It's like Outlook, only slow and ugly.

Current Mood: bitchy

10:25 am - QOTD

We don't really believe Jobs is Satan, but until the fanbois stop sacrificing chickens to their Ipods we will have to keep hammering the point home harder until rationality prevails.

Current Mood: amused

12:01 pm - A recommendation from your sysadmin

Avoid three-initial companies for your technology needs. That is all.

10:36 am - Wrong

It has often been said that documentation is like sex in that it's better when it's bad than when you don't have any at all. I would like to contradict this statement, with a focus on documentation (we'll leave the "bad sex" issue for a later rant). A lack of documentation is frustrating, but bad documentation is even more so. There's nothing like reading through several dozen pages only to find that you have actually learned nothing at all about the topic at hand that was not immediately apparent before you opened the document.

Conversely, there's the Linux approach, wherein the reader's familiarity with the topic is assumed and so the documentation only covers advanced cases.

Current Mood: aggravated

02:29 pm - Stop the presses!

Apparently coffee reverses Alzheimer's disease. So you have the choice of being relaxed and demented or jittery and hyper-aware.

Current Mood: nervous

02:56 pm - I'm with stupid

Associated QOTD: Stupid is not a movement.

Current Mood: amused

03:57 pm - Coffee bad?

Newsday claims that coffee is bad for your hormonal health and that you can wean yourself with "herbal coffee."

Current Mood: stressed

02:05 pm - Internet QOTD

BUT HOW DO ZOMBIES FEEL ABOUT ABORTION?

They're anti-life, but also incapable of choice. Tough call.

Current Mood: amused

05:53 pm - Update from Scotland

jew_witchgirl and I are currently in Port Ellen, Islay (does not rhyme with "outlay"), on the west coast of Scotland. We were in Belgium for a couple of days, and we have been in a constant flurry of movement and activity. Here's a brief summary of the events of the past several days:

Day 1: Fly to Heathrow -- Virgin is a pleasant airline, albeit not quite as good as Singapore Airlines, insofar as they don't ply you with nearly as much booze and the TV options were less plentiful. Still better than any American carrier, however. We left on time and landed early, which was nice. Once in London, we took the Underground to our hotel in the vicinity of St. Pancras International Train Station, a strange concept for an American. Tube cars are smaller than BART cars, which means they become cramped pretty quickly, especially when one is wrangling enormous luggage, but we managed to get seats about a quarter of the way through the trip. Once we arrived, it turned out room was tiny yet expensive, which I gather is pretty standard for London, but it was near an Irish pub, where we slaked our thirst and probably accelerated our jet lag with a pint and some fish and chips. Afterwards, we headed over to the Tower of London--cheesy, yes, but we figured we should take in some actual sights. Jet lag soon claimed us, however, so we fell asleep around 6:30 and woke up in time for . . .

Day 2: Train to Belgium -- We got up at the ass-crack of dawn to go to Brussels on the Eurostar. It turns out the Europeans have implemented similar idiotic fluid restrictions for the Eurostar as for air travel, which meant we had to discard almost-full cups of coffee (the last decent coffee we've seen, in fact), which we considered an unspeakable act of cruelty. A Eurostar and local train later, we were in Antwerp, which is clean but somewhat soulless. The most interesting thing about it is the large Orthodox Jewish community present in the neighborhood near our hotel. Actually, the beer was pretty interesting, too. We ate and drank our own (rapidly-increasing) bodyweight in beer and chips, irrespectively. That night, we met up with our friend Tay's parents to surprise Tay for his fortieth birthday, the only point of the side-trip to Belgium. I think we can safely count Tay surprised, as he had, presumably, no idea that we were in the area. Props to his wife Mara for setting the whole thing up. We stayed up late drinking insane quantities of beer, which led to . . .

Night 2.5 -- I was apparently fed something containing shellfish and spent a good chunk of the night awake from nausea until I finally managed to vomit up a sufficient quantity of toxins.

Day 3: Brugge -- We awoke early to travel to Brugge, which is a giant medieval tourist trap, as far as I could tell. We enjoyed some Middle Eastern food as a nice diversion from Flemish tourist food, although we did not forgo the chips and beer! It was jew_witchgirl's turn to have stomach issues, so we tracked down some ibuprofen and then napped in one of the city's many beatiful parks, where we also saw a woman walking her pet bunny on a leash. Afterwards, we stumbled upon the town's Salvador Dali museum, which was surprisingly enthralling, despite the museum's lack of much detailed information about the works themselves. We wrapped up the day with more beer and then returned to Antwerp for an early evening in as preparation for another early rise and . . .

Day 4: Off to Scotland! -- Two train rides put us at Brussels airport, which reflects all the efficiency the EU bureaucracy has to offer: airline booths are difficult to find and poorly-organized, such that it took us a solid hour to get checked in. Once we boarded, everything seemed fine until one of our fellow passengers, a gentleman named Dale, keeled over on the spot. There were several tense minutes as the flight crew and a doctor attempted to revive him (hint: it was not very much like ER or Gray's Anatomy) and then the paramedics arrived, took him off, and were apparently able to stabilize him. File this high on the list of every traveler's worst nightmare, although at least he was in the First World. Dale's unfortunate event led us to have to rush breakneck through Terminal 5 at Heathrow, another triumph of design and efficiency, but we made our connecting flight and at last arrived in Glasgow, about which, more later.

Current Mood: accomplished

08:57 am - Jargon

Computer geeks are renowned for their use of jargon incomprehensible to the layman. Such jargon is a requirement of specialized fields: each item or concept must have its own name in order to enable clear communication. In previous decades, just using a computer was often similarly difficult because they were specialist devices designed for trained operators. As computers have entered the mainstream, more effort has been put into making them easier to use, and experienced technicians have learned to mitigate their use of jargon by providing simplified instructions appropriate to their audience.

While this all seems very reasonable, their are plenty of other professions where such a user- or client-focused attitude has not taken root. In the banking industry, for example, the burden still remains on the customer to decipher arcane terminology and attempt to extract very specific bits of data from his or her variably-organized financial information. As with older computer systems, little or no allowance may be made for missing or incorrectly-provided data, with financial institutions often penalizing customers or ignoring their requests entirely without even necessarily providing feedback about what was wrong. Bankers are apparently allowed to get away with this level of opacity and obfuscation because of their perceived authority, differentiating them from the lowly computer geeks. As a result, successfully dealing with financial institutions requires a great deal of precision and at least some specialized knowledge.

The same issues arise with other specialty or professional fields, of course, the law being the most obvious. What makes this situation interesting is that people expect technology to become easier to use but allow human institutions to remain inscrutable, inefficient, and opaque, perhaps because technology is molded without complaint but humans maintain a stubborn hold on prior ways of doing things. One might further argue that bankers and lawyers have a vested interest in preventing the general public from understanding their professions, since such an understanding might lessen their perceived value as has happened in technical fields. As can be seen with the current economic climate, the public does not always benefit from such an attitude.

Like computers, laws and money are tools created to simplify certain activities, and their operation has fallen to dedicated classes of workers. All are used daily by the general public, and many laymen understand their basic functions, but their advanced manipulation necessarily remains in the hands of those skilled and educated in their use. In the computer field, however, the expectation has arisen that the specialists will help bridge gaps of understanding. Given the great importance that laws and currency have in the lives of most people, it seems like people would want greater transparency and expect clearer communication from the practitioners of those fields and that, indeed, society as a whole would realize a substantial advantage from doing so.

Current Mood: contemplative

06:04 pm - QOTD

"'iPhoto is crap' was not a question." -- jwz

Current Mood: amused

08:20 pm - The real story

Don't even ask about KFC ...

Current Mood: nauseated

10:25 am - Science!

It's easy to blame humans for many of the bad things which happen in the world: bank collapses, Somalian pirates, tofu meat substitutes, etc., but it's worth considering as well that humans are responsible for all of the improvements from the natural state. People (admittedly, people by and large other than ourselves) have invented medicine, wine, air conditioning, mind-altering drugs which don't make you vomit, etc. So you can thank your god(s) for the universe, if that's what floats your boat, but don't forget to be grateful to other humans for everything else.

Current Mood: contemplative

09:20 am - Only in SF

SFGate reports that Supervisor Mirkarimi is proposing that the city sell and distribute marijuana as part of the medical dispensary program. What makes this awesome, however, is the response of the mayor's press secretary:

"The mayor will have to hash this out with public health officials," press secretary Nathan Ballard said. "It's the mayor's job to weed out bad legislation. And to be blunt, this sounds pretty bad."

Current Mood: amused