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March 4th, 2009
jimbojones
 | 09:03 pm - helios - is it linux, or is it just bad stories?
So over at ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) techsupport, I see a link to a blog post about a Linux advocate who supposedly got jumped by Microsoft fans in a gas station parking lot. First of all... wat? But, you know... weird stuff can occasionally happen. Who knows. But the story rings false about ten different ways. And I keep thinking... shit, I know I remember this blog. Helios, Helios...
Yeah, I remembered it all right. This is the same guy who, back in December, managed to get frontpage on slashdot for a story in which, supposedly, an elementary school teacher writes him to call linux "possibly illegal" and accuse him of "holding the children back" and nebulously threaten to sue him for putting it on "disadvantaged children's computers."
Unsurprisingly, the slashdotters congealed into a rabid mass, and demanded contact info on "Karen", the teacher. Helios guy refuses to provide it, and supposedly the slashdotters lit up Texas elementary school phone boards like christmas trees trying to find her anyway, and failing, at which point - again, according to this guy - she calls him tearfully, and he assures her he would never, EVER give up dox on her, and she Learns To See The Light and now thinks linux is teh awesome.
If this doesn't already ring kind of false in your ears, consider this: supposedly, slashdotters descended in a horde and failed to get dox. When is the last time one of the really big communities - slashdot, genmay, /b/, the goons - failed to uncover somebody, especially a non-tech, who aroused their ire?
So, yeah. That was in December. All of three months later, this dude is claiming that techs who service Windows assaulted him physically in a gas station because he is "putting them out of work". Of course there's no police report; of fucking course he tells it that the big, hulking guy got physical, threatened to "give him a tour of the parking lot" and... ::camera cut:: the big guy is on the ground! YAAAAY, our hero won teh fight!
Jesus fucking christ.
This is not the kind of publicity linux needs. I have no idea whether or not this guy has actually done much of any real work on a "distro" of his own, or how many "disadvantaged children" he's given computers with Linux on them; but I do know these stories stink to high heaven and I don't want to see any damn more of them.
Exhibit One: In Which Our Hero Schools The Schoolteacher
Exhibit Two: In Which Our Hero Triumphs At Fisticuffs
Side notes for those who don't know me personally: the only Microsoft product I own is an Xbox 360 - and that's gathering dust next to the PS3, which I greatly prefer. Every computer I own runs either Linux or FreeBSD. I service and sell all platforms professionally, but prefer when possible to use either Ubuntu Server or FreeBSD for server infrastructure. If that isn't enough to brand me "not-a-microsoft-fanboy", see http://freebsdwiki.net - that's mine.
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May 28th, 2008
jimbojones
 | 09:56 pm - Cantor's War
Warning: this entry contains a short review of a science fiction story, math dorkery, and curmudgeonly hatred of math dorkery. If this sounds like a bad time, skip to the next post on your friends page now. Kthxsorry.
( Still here? OK. But don't say I didn't warn you. )
As a post script, it turns out I'm not the only one who ranted about this story, though I do at first glance appear to be the only complainer who actually wanted the plot (sneering mathy gets his comeuppance) to be done well. Huh.
Current Mood: pissed off
Current Music: MC Hawking - Crazy As Fuck
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March 26th, 2008
jimbojones
 | 06:19 pm - another day in the surreal life
Woke up today to an inbound text message from a number I'd never seen:
803-555-THEM: What's the penalty for murder in this state?
803-555-JIMJ: I don't know this number. Who are you?
803-555-THEM: Really? This is Tara. I guess I am that forgettable.
803-555-JIMJ: Next question: Who am I?
At that point, we established that no, we each did not know who the heck the other was, the established penalty for murder under SC law is boiling in grits, chocolate is NOT an acceptable substitute for grits, and I had an alibi for March 15th.
After another mildly frustrating day at work, I stopped off at Publix on the way home from work to get a few things. Ooh, parking spot next to really gorgeous girl loading groceries - snag. Turn off the engine, get out of the car, realize parking spot is, in fact, next to heartbrokenly sobbing into cellphone gorgeous girl loading groceries. There is really nothing useful you can do with an instinctive reflex to comfort/succor/defend/protect a heartbrokenly sobbing girl when you don't know her, she's on the phone, and returning her shopping cart to the corral. All you can really do is avert your eyes politely, walk by, and ruminate on how retarded it is to feel somehow guilty about overtly ignoring her. Awkward.
Then inside the store, at the steak display, I had to look around and make sure I didn't walk through some kind of fucked up stargate into Disneyworld, because goddamn if the stereotypical loudly chattering asshole eastern-europeans-of-indeterminate-origin (couldn't place the language) weren't clustered all up on top of the steak display in a knot of six or so, ignoring the growing crowd of people wanting to, you know, BUY A FUCKING STEAK. Also just like Disneyworld, they ignored increasingly loud "excuse me"s until eventually I just elbowed one physically the fuck aside. At which point they behaved as though nothing whatsoever had happened, but began ambling away slowly. What the fuck is it with that?
Fuck you world I am jumping in a hole and pulling it in after me a la Bugs Bunny. :: ASCII birdfinger ::
location: home
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March 25th, 2008
jimbojones
 | 02:20 pm - Microsoft, seriously, fuck right the hell off
So I'm doing a major hardware upgrade for a customer. They've got a box with a single-core processor, they want a dual-core processor; they're gonna need a new motherboard to go with it since they're going from the older 939 socket to AM2. No big.
Change the hardware, reinstall Windows XP Pro, and of course it doesn't want to activate over the internet. No big; you call the number, you give the computer on the other end of the phone a bunch of numbers, it gives you a bunch of numbers, life is good. Done it a jillion times. Give the machine my numbers. It says "this product has been activated before, I'm going to have to ask you some questions." Well, this is a change; last time I did this they forwarded me from the machine-lady to a call-center-in-India-lady; but okay. How many machines is this copy of Windows installed on? "One." Is this the first time you've activated this copy of Windows? "No." Has there been a major hardware change since the last time you activated this copy of Windows? "Yes." Have you replaced the motherboard in this machine since you last activated this copy of Windows? "Yes." Was the motherboard defective? "No."
I'm sorry, I cannot activate your copy of Windows. When you purchased Windows, you were subject to certain licensing restrictions which you are not in accordance with; please contact your vendor to purchase a new copy of Windows.
Are you fucking SHITTING me? Well, fine goddammit, this is some serious bullshit highway robbery given that a new copy of Windows costs literally every PENNY as much as the new hardware does; but it's not like it's my money. Call the customer, explain that Microsoft would like to insert penis in their ass, get their approval to guide Microsoft's cock all the way in (aka spend $150 on a completely bullshit new copy of Windows), buy new copy of Windows, click "Change Product Key", put in new Product Key from new copy of Windows. Internet Activation Successful.
Install Windows Update from the website. It wants to reboot. Okay. Computer reboots. "This copy of Windows will need to be activated before you can log on." What the FUCK? You already activated! Well, okay, fine. "This copy of Windows has already been activated." No shit, sherlock. AND IT LOGS ME BACK OUT. Click the username to log on again... "This copy of Windows will need to be activated before you can log on." ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS. Endless loop. No, rebooting doesn't help.
So, now, I am reinstalling Windows from fucking scratch again on this goddamn machine, three hours of my life down the goddamn drain. Fuck you, Microsoft, I was one of your staunchest advocates from the mid-nineties through the early 2000s, but at this point I cannot wait for you to die in a goddamn fire. Nothing but people's dependence on third-party software you did not develop is mooring anyone to your DRM-riddled crapware platform anymore, and it will fucking please me IMMENSELY watching more and more people realize this and get the hell rid of you like I did.
location: work
Current Mood: GEEK RAGE
Current Music: Nine Inch Nails - Happiness In Slavery
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December 7th, 2007
jimbojones
 | 07:00 pm - on the topic of high-beams (no, not the "is she cold?" kind)
I have a pretty standard response to people who weld themselves to my ass with their brights on:
1. say unkind and possibly untrue things about their ancestry, their chromosome count, and their sexual habits
2. reach up and adjust the rear-view so as to bounce their high-beams right back in their eyes
The typical response is either to flick the high-beams off (hey, thanks!), immediately shift lanes while keeping the high beams on (if that's in my blind spot mirror now, guess where THAT gets aimed next, fuckhead?), or drop five or ten carlengths back... while keeping the high-beams on. Once I even got a REALLY special contestant with an older car who held the lo/hi toggle switch down manually, in order to light up BOTH sets of filaments for the ULTRA high-beam... which, of course, went right back in his/her own eyes courtesy of my rearview. Congrats, a winnar is yuo.
The response tonight was a new one, though. Suburban Mom actually followed me into a grocery store parking lot to berate me for how "unsafe" it was for me to shine her own brights back at her. Seriously. I boggled. Then I started laughing. Which pissed her off even more, as she couldn't figure out why I was laughing. Until I asked her how it was "safe" for her to shine those brights in not only my eyes, but those of every single oncoming car in traffic, but "unsafe" for me to shine those same lights right back at her.
"But... but... but... that's different!"
People.
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September 20th, 2007
jimbojones
 | 11:26 am - if I could declare a national event, it would be
... national spam awareness day.
I am so freaking sick of users who first do stupid shit and then want to argue with you about it though they haven't got the slightest idea of what running a mailserver is like. The same user that gets 50x the volume of spam of any other user on that domain is the user that whines to you because, hey, surprise surprise, s/he gets spam. More often than not, that is also the same user that whines to you when their idiot friends who use mail clients that embed advertisements at the bottom of every email get their shit blocked. And don't think that same user won't argue with you about whether or not Vipul's Razor is what blocked one particular worthless email somebody sent them, despite the fact that until the beginning of the conversation they never heard the term and ten minutes later they'll have forgotten it again. Oh no. That user will immediately tell you how a collaborative filtering agent triggering from embedded ads can't be the problem because their OTHER idiot friend with the half-page sig block is also getting their mail bounced. Um, yes, genius, that's exactly right. Your idiot friend is sending one line of content and twenty lines of boilerplate non-information; what exactly do you think filtering agents are designed to DETECT in the first place? Large quantities of mass communicated non-information. Hello?
And, finally, that same user is going to be the user who thinks that the five spams a day that make it to their inbox are just awful and appalling and can't understand why you can't just "do something about it." Yeah my heart fucking bleeds for you having to look at those five fat pill spams, after my server had to invest all the work in automatically filtering 83 more that also arrived for you this morning. But of course those five you saw are the only ones that happened. And of course the fact that you sign up for EVERY GODDAMN WEIGHT LOSS NEWSLETTER IN THE WORLD regardless of how fly-by-night and shady it is has nothing to do with anything. Neither does you registering using your unobfuscated email address on ten different fat forums with the address displayed on every single post you ever make. No, obviously it is something *I* am doing wrong that makes OMG FIVE SPAMS JUST TODAY make it into your inbox whereas your coworkers got none and neither did I, even though I've been using the same email address for ten fucking years now.
Odds are even pretty good that that same user actually BUYS fatass pills from some of the spam s/he gets. But, you know, again it's not his/her fault. Why doesn't my email just goddamn work. Why do I get so much spam. Why do I sometimes not get mail from people. Email is simple, how come the people who run it never get it right. Woe.
So, yes, in my perfect world I'd like to just have every single mailserver admin turn off all spam filtering and just deliver EVERYTHING right to the inbox for a day.
Since midnight on one of my mailservers:
48,969 SMTP connections blocked by rblsmtpd
4,374 spam mails filtered by spamassassin
1,329 phishing/malware mails filtered by clamav
2,661 messages delivered to local users
Welcome to my fucking world.
Current Mood: angry
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March 26th, 2007
jimbojones
 | 07:01 pm - BREAKING NEWS FLASH
As if I wasn't already pleased enough with Microsoft today, it turns out that Exchange 2007 - although it says nothing about this on the packaging, on the DVD-ROM, or on the order form in the catalog - is ONLY distributed in 64-bit binary form. Admittedly, if one drills about three links deep in a Technet article, one will EVENTUALLY come across this little tidbit of data if one reads closely enough, but it sure as hell isn't getting shouted from the rooftops.
For those of you following along from home, that makes Exchange 2K7 simultaneously the only application to require the 64-bit Windows platform, and the only application that fucking works on the 64-bit Windows platform.
GREAT JOB MS, KEEP UP THE GOOD WORK.
Current Mood: murderous
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jimbojones
| 11:54 am - It's easy because it's Windows! ...not
The common perception is that Windows is much easier and simpler to use and maintain than Unix-like operating systems. After all, it's got that nice GUI to maneuver, and Microsoft makes it, so it's gotta be simple, right...?
You might think that. At least, you might think that if you'd never needed to muck around with Active Directory and its astonishingly byzantine, godawful Secrets Of The Hidden Masters style of maintenance. If you need to change the configuration of a Unixlike server, you pretty much just have to find a nice, plain, simple human-readable config file and edit it. Unless you've done something odd with it, odds are pretty good that any option you need will already be in the file, even if it's commented out - so it's self-documenting. Just read, make your changes, and restart whatever service you need to play with. Simple.
On the other hand, over on the "easy" side of the road - the Windows server family - check out what you have to do if you want to perform a very simple(!), very common task - add a Windows 2K3 domain controller to a Windows network with a Windows 2000 Server domain controller. Should be a simple upgrade, right? Just start up the appropriate nice, friendly, GUI-driven clicky-clicky and "Next" your way through, right?
... Right?
Well actually, the very first thing you have to know about adding domain controllers to a Windows network is... a command line tool. There's this tool you run from the command line called DCPROMO, which promotes a server to domain controller status in a domain. Well, okay, that's not so hard right? There's just one command line tool you somehow need to know you have to run. Hey, you learn that once, you remember it for the next time. No biggie! ... Right?
Well actually no, because you're going to have to run another command line tool that isn't mentioned anywhere in any friendly little wizards, called ADPREP. Well, okay. And, uh, you're going to have to run it several times on as many different DC's as you already have, to prep several different roles - you need to do an ADPREP /forestprep, and an ADPREP /domainprep at a bare minimum, and you'll probably have to be damn careful about which machine you run the /forestprep on, since you need to make sure you get that on the "FSMO Role Owner". Um. Okay. Well... still not so bad... Right?
OH BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE. Since you've got an Exchange service running somewhere on the domain, you can't prep the forest yet - when you try, it bombs out with an error.
Adprep was unable to extend the schema.
[Status/Consequence]
There is a schema conflict with Exchange 2000. The schema is not upgraded.
[User Action]
The schema conflict must be resolved before running adprep. Resolve the schema conflict, allow the change to replicate between all replication partners, and then run Adprep. For information on resolving the conflict, see Microsoft Knowledge Base article Q325379. |
Well, at least it directs you... somewhere... so um, as long as you have live broadband internet access, you can just look up that KB, and it will tell you everything you need to do... Right?
1. Log on to the console of the schema operations master by using an account that is a member of the Schema Admins security group.
2. Click Start, click Run, type notepad.exe in the Open box, and then click OK.
3. Copy the following text including the trailing hyphen after "schemaUpdateNow: 1" to Notepad.
dn: CN=ms-Exch-Assistant-Name,CN=Schema,CN=Configuration,DC=X
changetype: Modify
replace:LDAPDisplayName
LDAPDisplayName: msExchAssistantName
-
dn: CN=ms-Exch-LabeledURI,CN=Schema,CN=Configuration,DC=X
changetype: Modify
replace: LDAPDisplayName
LDAPDisplayName: msExchLabeledURI
-
dn: CN=ms-Exch-House-Identifier,CN=Schema,CN=Configuration,DC=X
changetype: Modify
replace: LDAPDisplayName
LDAPDisplayName: msExchHouseIdentifier
-
dn:
changetype: Modify
add: schemaUpdateNow
schemaUpdateNow: 1
-
4. Confirm that there is no space at the end of each line. [...] |
So, okay. We go to the KB article, we faithfully copy all the text to make ourselves an .ldf script file, we save it, and then we run it with - ANOTHER - Cryptic Monks of Shaolin command line tool you've never heard of... ldifde -i -f inetorgpersonprevent.ldf -v -c DC=x "dc=subdomain,dc=domain,dc=TLD. This is getting to be a lot less friendly than we expected. But we're out of the woods now... Right?
Weeellll... turns out if you hit THAT particular copy of the KB article, you're fucked. Because, well, the tool you're gonna have to run to load that script doesn't know how to handle double-spaced lines. So you're going to get "There is a syntax error in the input file. Failed on token starting with 'C' on line 3. 0 entries modified successfully. An error has occurred in the program." response. And you're going to pull your hair out, and you're going to go back and Google, and you're going to find no useful articles referring to syntax error and failed token because, well, that could be anything. But don't worry, EVENTUALLY you'll find the OTHER copy of the KB article on microsoft.com, and this one will have the .ldf script present for copying WITHOUT the double-spacing, and you'll put THAT in instead, and you'll run the arcane command line tool on it, and everything will be hunky-dory! ... Right?
Actually, once you get the CORRECT script saved to Inetorgpersonprevent.ldf, you're still not out of the woods. NOW when you run the Quivering Palm of Death tool on your CORRECTED .ldf script, you get a DIFFERENT error: "Add error on line 1: Referral. The server side error is A referral was returned from the server. 0 entries modified successfully. An error has occurred in the program." Now, I don't know about you, but the first thing I thought when I saw that was "PC Load Letter? What the fuck does THAT mean?!" This one's a REAL joy to google, by the way, because it turns out about a billion different scripts return similar errors to that, very few of which have fuck-all to do with a domain controller preparation. But eventually, because your google-fu is strong (and has gained two levels and +1 attack per round during this exercise alone) you find the answer: you gotta make sure this machine has the FSMO Master role on the domain. Whatever the hell that is. So, you run yet ANOTHER command line tool - ntdsutil - to check for and/or transfer and/or seize the FSMO Master role (incidentally, if the machine that had that role blew up in a fire or was removed from the domain without first transferring the role, that's Bad Juju... so better hope none of your Windows DCs ever die!). So now you're positive you've got the FSMO Master role on your DC, so now you'll be able to get shit imported! ..Right?
Yeah, you're probably used to disappointment now. But plenty of Googling later (haven't seen a nice friendly clicky little wizard to guide you through anything YET, have you noticed?) you'll find out that, first, what you have to do is ENABLE the update of the schema on the DC that... well... is the only one that can update the schema anyway... by going into the MMC tool, then right-clicking the Active Directory Schema applet (once you've added it) and selecting Operations Master, then checking the box that says to allow updating the schema on this DC. Finally, a GUI! Even if you do have to start the MMC from the command line, most likely! NOW IT WILL BE EASY! ... Right?
Well, actually, NO, because there won't BE an Active Directory Schema snap-in available. You will stare at this, and you will maybe whimper a little. Then you will return to the Internet to find out where the fuck the AD Schema snap-in is, and you will discover that you need to - imagine this - perform ANOTHER arcane kung-fu move on the command line to make this snap-in appear on the list of shit you can add to the management console in order to right-click it and find something else and click a box. (Whew.) So... "regsvr32 schmmgmt.dll". And THEN you can find the Active Directory Schema snap-in. And THEN you can right click it, and select Operations Master, and check the box that says to allow schema updates. And THEN you can run the Quivering Palm of Death on the .ldf script file you created (and replaced with a second copy that actually works) from a page on the internet. And THEN you can run adprep /forestprep and it will actually work.
Thanks for making it easy, Microsoft! God forbid I'd have had to read a self-documenting config file and edit it or something!
Current Mood: frustrated
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December 4th, 2006
jimbojones
 | 10:27 pm - don't drive over any bridges for the next ten years
Today, in the final class for MSCI/GEOL 580, the graduate students presented their projects. The undergrads were there to bear witness, and to ask questions at the end (lest we incur the wrath of mighty Subra).
Three of the presenters were absolutely excellent. Intelligent, knowledgeable, and clearly interested in the subject they did their research project on. A pleasure to witness.
Two more were clearly knowledgeable, clearly intelligent, and probably genuinely interested, but it was hard to tell because their presentation skills were so lacking. (One was actually so terrified of speaking that he couldn't manage to point at things with the laser pointer because his hands were shaking too badly.) However, they are supposed to be scientists, not marketers, so I was easily inclined to forgive the lack. Magnanimity, thy name be Jimbo.
The last one, however... jesus fucking CHRIST. Her presentation was ... really short, and really bad, and left the viewer wondering what the fuck she'd been talking about and why. In marked contrast to all the others, which had an obvious goal and obvious conclusions, hers was pretty apparently the result of flipping through random data looking for something, anything, that appeared anomalous enough to sort of dig at and sort of write some things about in the hope of getting through it. Painful. Even though she finished with a full 5 minutes to spare (out of a 10 minute window), none of the other students present were coming up with anything to ask her... and Mighty Subra was clearly becoming annoyed.
Her paper was based on investigating hypoxia (an unusual level of dissolved oxygen in water - more later) in a particular area of interest. She opened it up by briefly defining hypoxia, which is a term we had not discussed in class (and I was therefore unfamiliar with), as "levels of oxygen less than 2mg/L", while pointing at text on her slide stating "levels of oxygen > 2mg/L". Given that, bizarrely enough, she never actually referred to oxygen levels again in her entire presentation, I was left a bit confused as to which was the correct definition - the one she said, or the one she wrote. The term sounded to me more like a lack than a surfeit, but given that she told us the hypoxic condition in the area of interest was discovered due to "a record flounder catch", I was more confused than ever.
So, given that Mighty Subra's wrath was clearly going to break over us poor souls like the incoming tide of a minute but angry Indian god with four of its six arms snapped off, and given that nobody else had anything to offer, I piped up and asked her which was the correct definition, since she said "greater than" but wrote "lesser than". I figured it was just a typo, but hell, somebody had to ask something, right?
The dude behind me - a fellow squid - sotto voced "oh man, you just had to pick on her about the typo." I shrugged apologetically and said "well hell man, I don't know which one was right," and felt a little guilty nonetheless... until chickadee quick-flashed to the slide in question, aimed her laser pointer directly at the > in question, and informed me that clearly that was a lesser than sign.
The same squid who had just given me hell for "picking on the typo" said, slowly, "uh... no... that's a greater-than." She re-asserted, peevishly, the mysterious translation of "> 2mg/L" as "lesser than 2 mg/L". Silence descended.
Now, although true, the most horrifying thing about this is not that a science or engineering student could not properly differentiate one inequality symbol from another. Indeed, the most horrifying thing isn't even that a graduate student with a bachelor's of science could not tell her <'s from her >'s.
No, the truly horrifying thing is, the young lady in question holds a full fledged Bachelor's of Science in Civil Engineering. And can't tell which way the pointy end of the inequality is supposed to go. (Is this truss rated to handle < 5 tons, or > 5 tons...? Is the acceptable distance between supports < 5 meters, or > 5 meters...? Is the acceptable carbon level of the stainless steel for that support girder < 0.15%, or > 0.15%...?)
The only saving grace to the whole thing I could find is that her accent is pretty clearly - and strongly - Midwestern. I'm pretty much positive she's an out-of-state student. So the bridges here, hopefully, ought to be safe. But if I gotta cross anything bigger than a shallow creek in between Ohio and Iowa anytime in the next ten years, I think I'm gonna park the fucking car and swim.
Current Mood: aghast
Current Music: Daft Punk - Faster, Better, Harder, Stronger
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November 10th, 2006
jimbojones
| 02:10 pm - I may be a Veteran, but this was not my Day
After spending 11 solid hours of working on the take home exam for Satellite Oceanography - which was assigned Monday and due today at 11AM - I finally got it done last night. When I got up this morning, there was an email from the instructor completely changing the terms for one of the longer image interpretation tasks in the exam, not only requiring it to be redone in its entirety, but requiring four images instead of two. This email was sent out at 7:30 this fucking morning. Fucking wonderful. So that's what I did this morning at work instead of. You know. WORK.
This exam, incidentally, is worth 40% of the grade for the whole fucking class. I am not even slightly thrilled with that instructor at this moment.
Half of Columbia downtown has been torn up and semi-barricaded for several months now due to ongoing street widening, subterranean power conduit upgrades, and beautification. This morning, the construction work was significantly intensified. ALSO, for some reason that was not yet apparent, the OTHER half of Columbia's downtown streets was barricaded off as well - with no construction in sight. This added a good 25 minutes to what is normally at most a 15 minute commute. I was not amused.
Then, after finishing REDOING the fucking exam and heading out from work to class - normally at most a 5 minute trip, including parking - I found no parking whatsoever anywhere, and had to loop around and eventually park a solid mile from class. More streets barricaded off. During my hike to class from the car, I discovered why all the barricades. There was a parade. And by "parade" I mean "five alarm clusterfuck."
First of all, somebody else might appreciate watching a fucking tank being - poorly - driven by some yahoo reservist asshole on their own city streets. But as delicious as the irony might be, I was not amused when said reservist inexpertly gunned 1200+ horsepower worth of diesel and rippled the asphalt under the treads - on one of the streets that WASN'T already ripped up for construction. Hey, jackass, can you go do that in Baghdad please? Turns out we aren't HAVING a fucking war here, and I don't really want to have to deal with TANK DAMAGE on the streets in my town, thanks. Following this poorly piloted tank were about 10 poorly piloted half-track and full-track APCs, all festooned with signs, all with - yet more - grinning yahoo reservists leaning out and yelling things at one another. Following THAT was a pack of about 500 high school Army JROTC kids shambling along in something vaguely resembling a formation, no two in step with one another, bellowing out - I shit you not - some half-incomprehensible garbage that seemed to be half running song, half football team fight song.
After getting through THAT and wading through a mass of traffic cops clustered up at the corner of Pendleton and Main for no apparent reason - both roads being blockaded off from several blocks away anyway - I discover three MORE schools worth of JROTC kids forming up on the fucking sidewalk on Sumter. THESE kids have flag corps attached, which means not only having to wade elbow-to-asshole through a few hundred high school kids to get to my damn Oceanography class, but also having to field a few 10-foot guidon poles complete with ornamental spearheads on the end as confused high schoolers do their inadvertent best to insert them in my eye socket as I walk by.
An hour and a half later when class let out, on my extended hike BACK to where I parked in BFE, I discovered that the parade was STILL fucking going on. Which means that the trip back to the office from the campus - which should have taken 5 minutes - takes 30.
And you know the REAL kicker to all this shit? I saw nobody - ABSOLUTELY NOBODY - watching this clusterfuck. That's right, the half of the town that ISN'T already torn up for construction got barricaded off for a parade full of larval forms and lackwits that NOT ONE SINGLE PERSON actually came to watch. All it accomplished was making getting anything done an utter and complete lost cause for the whole day.
At this point I think I am actually ready for this coming MONDAY because after the week I've had it's pretty difficult to have much hope for the weekend attached to it being any better.
Current Mood: combative
Current Music: The Smiths - How Soon Is Now
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October 3rd, 2006
jimbojones
 | 11:58 am - Okay like seriously.
Does this Mischa Spiegelmock assclown actually work for Six Apart? And did he REALLY fucking think that holding a press conference, pretending to hold 30 vulnerabilities in a major browser - and refusing to disclose them, "to do the internet a greater good by creating a communications network for black hats" at a major security convention - wouldn't maybe have a LITTLE bit of a negative impact on his employer, and thereby, himself?
Were I a highly visible internet company, and were an employee of mine to pull something like this, I'd fire his ass so fast it'd take his ears a week to catch up with it. I'm honestly a little mystified that Six Apart (the folks who run LJ, if you didn't already know that) hasn't already done the same.
Story here.
Current Mood: aghast
Current Music: The Eagles - Desperado
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September 27th, 2006
jimbojones
 | 11:55 pm - jamming the gears and tilting at windmills
OK, first of all: Little Miss Sunshine was a really good movie. I thought it looked fucking horrid from the previews, but it was really, really good.
With that said, though, I'm back to my usual gripe with Hollywood - I can understand taking a little artistic license when you need to to make a plot work, but why, why, why is Hollywood just so dead set on getting shit just plain wrong even when they don't need to?
If you've seen the commercials (and paid attention) for Little Miss Sunshine, you already know that there's a plot device involving having to push-start a Volkswagen van. Ok, that's fine. BUT, when you actually see the movie, the rationale is that the clutch goes out. Not the starter, the clutch. And, eventually, the mechanic in the little no-name fly-blown town they're broken down in volunteers "you know, those old Volkswagen vans don't really need a clutch to shift from third to fourth. Just from first to second. So you get her rolling about 35, 40 miles an hour, you start her up in third, and you shift her right up to fourth." And off they go.
How many different problems are there with this? First of all, a good quarterhorse has trouble doing 40 miles an hour. A family pushing a van? Fucking forget it. (They might maybe be getting the van up to around 8 miles an hour, if they're really working it. More on this later.) Second of all, you don't really need a clutch to shift from ANY gear to ANY gear in ANY manual transmission vehicle - it makes it smoother, yes, but you can certainly just snatch the stick fast and it'll work if you're vaguely within the powerband on the gear you're shifting to. If you're good, and you're driving like you've got a pair, you can even do it smoothly enough that a passenger will just think you're powershifting. What you REALLY need a clutch for is going from idling in neutral to accelerating in first... and in a VW van, if absolutely necessary, you can skip that step too; they're geared low enough that you can actually use the starter as an electric motor to *drive* the van in first gear until the battery dies.
HOWEVER, if the *starter* is busted - and VW vans were notorious for this - you *can* push-start the vehicle instead. Preferably, by rolling it down a steep hill; but if necessary and you have enthusiastic help, just by pushing it as fast as possible. Once you get the thing rolling as fast as you can, you dump the clutch and use the sudden violent deceleration to spin the engine over for you - which, with a little luck, gets it turning fast enough that when the ignition hits, the motor fires up and starts running. I had a boss when I was in high school that drove a little Toyota with a busted starter for six months without fixing it - he'd just make whichever of us was around go out to the parking lot and push-start him. The really shitty thing about that, if you're the one(s) doing the pushing, is that - unlike in the movie, when the vehicle just magically works - when you dump it into gear, it's basically like running into a fucking brick wall - you convert a good 5mph of vehicle momentum into torque on the engine INSTANTLY. Meaning whoever's behind the vehicle, if they aren't forewarned that the driver's about to dump the clutch, FACEPLANTS into it. (The boss in question NEVER warned us when he was going to dump the clutch. Bastard. Not warning the people running behind your car that you're about to dump the clutch is the busted-ass-vehicle equivalent to not warning your high-school girlfriend that you're about to come in her mouth.)
So the thing that ticks me off is, yeah, the van that can't slow down and everybody has to run to get into it after pushing it, it's funny. But it could have been totally workable as a comic device without making up stupid bullshit. Hell, it would have been *funnier* if they'd made it real, cause who doesn't laugh at a good faceplant into the ass end of a van? They just would have had to have the starter and the clutch go out. And they wouldn't even have had to make up that retarded shit about "35, 40 miles an hour" that the mechanic said, that more-than-obviously wasn't a speed that four people running behind a van was gonna get it to. Hollywood, I fucking hate you. Seriously.
But, just as seriously, aside from the standard Hollywood "we can't make an entire movie without making SOMETHING patently and obviously retarded" bitching, that really was a great movie. Especially for anybody that had Fucked-Up Family Hell growing up. It'll take you back.
Current Mood: pleased with the movie, pissed with hollywood
Current Music: Daft Punk - Robot Rock
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September 3rd, 2006
jimbojones
 | 09:32 pm - why, hollywood, WHY?
Why does every... single... sword and sorcery movie have to suck?
It's bad enough that, even in the rare sword flick with decent fight choreography, EVERYBODY fights like the damned barbarians. (Remember in the opening scene of Gladiator, when Maximus forms up his legionnaires into a shield wall, bellows "HOLD THE LINE!" ... and as soon as the barbs hit them, they immediately, gleefully, disintegrate out of formation into a ridiculous brawl?) It's bad enough that the sorcery is almost always used as a pushbutton plot advancer, without any thought to rationale or consistency. And then there's the ludicrous "instant lifelong love" angle that so many of them share.
And now, for christ's sake, every single sword-and-sorcery movie they make has just got to include the leggy, slender, model-shaped female warrior - complete with flawless complexion, long immaculate fluffy hair, and brilliant white capped teeth - who has "never been beaten" by any man before. SIGH.
You wouldn't believe that a 5'9, 105 pound dude would be beating up every 230 pound heavyweight in sight, so why, why, why does it seem to be so magically acceptable to the vast majority of moviegoers everywhere for a 5'9, 105 pound girl - who's giving up a good 20 of those meager 105 pounds to tits and ass - to do the same?
It pisses me off when people cling to ridiculous stereotypes in the face of obvious evidence to the contrary, regardless of how "politically correct" the stereotype may be. Yes, women have been discriminated against to a ludicrous degree, and to some degree, still are. But magically pretending that everybody in the whole wide world are exactly alike is NOT a sensible response. As a matter of fact, it's every last bit as stubbornly eyes-screwed-shut stupid as the original discrimination.
People... are... different. And that's okay. The answer to problems of discrimination isn't to pretend everybody is exactly the same, it's to accept the differences and work with them.
But to return to me being a ranty bastard, here's some visual backup to what I've been saying. These, people, are what real female professional athletes actually look like:
This is IFBB bodybuilder Nathalie Abellan. Notice what she looks like? A DUDE. Okay, but the bodybuilder one was an easy mark, you say. Fine. Let's take a look at a female pro boxer.
Now, Bridgett "Babydoll" Riley is definitely a very pretty girl. But look past the pretty face here and look at her arms, her shoulders, her chest. Notice what she looks like...? That's right - again - A DUDE. Not a Hollywood actress/model. Of course, to be fair, in spite of being all pumped up for a photo shoot, she's sexy. She'd also get OBLITERATED trying to fight a pro male boxer in her own weight class.
Check "Babydoll" Riley out side by side with fellow Super Flyweight boxer Martin Castillo:
 
Now, realizing that at 115 pounds, these two are both exactly the same weight, take a good look at them - Martin is two inches taller (5'6" to her 5'4"), giving him a considerable reach advantage, and jesus christ look how cut up the dude is. When you fight in the midget classes, every single pound counts, and he shows it. Although they hit the same number on the scale, this guy has got at least 15 pounds of solid muscle on Bridgett. That already sounds - and is - pretty impressive, but it gets even worse when you stop to think that, at 115 pounds, that's thirteen percent of their entire body weight. Would you back "babydoll" Riley against this guy? (I'll fade you if you do.)
Of course it gets even worse when you stop to consider the fact that it's hard to find guys that little to begin with. Given that we're talking about the general idea of pitting one woman against all male comers in direct physical combat, let's - regretfully - put foxy little Babydoll Riley behind us and look at somebody with some size on her. We'll go ahead and jump straight to the side-by-side here, and look at middleweights Gina "Boom Boom" Guidi (former IFBA Middleweight World Champion) and Felix Sturm.
 
At 160 pounds, we're at least starting to get into a weight class that could theoretically take on a heavyweight for a magic "spunky little hero with heart saves the day" kind of moment. But even as low as middleweight class, we're already pretty severely beyond "omg that chick is smoking Hollywood hot!" territory - and while Gina certainly doesn't look like anybody's creampuff, she also doesn't look anything faintly like a match for Felix Sturm, there. And folks, he's only a middleweight. You go up another four classes and forty-one pounds before you can barely manage to squeak in as a heavyweight. And you'd think one of those magic female warriors who'd "never been beaten before OMG!" would have squared off against quite a few heavies, wouldn't you?
OK, seriously, I'll stop. But just as seriously, Hollywood, sci-fi writers, fantasy writers, general public: STOP ALREADY with the "super hot model babe is the fiercest warrior around" crap. It's just fucking ridiculous.
Current Mood: irritated at the TV
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July 3rd, 2006
jimbojones
| 08:05 pm - our President is a disrespectful jackass
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Yesterday, I saw yet another news clip of George W. Bush, Jr, current President of the United States of America, greeting a uniformed officer with a salute. An incredibly poorly executed salute, and an unbelievably inappropriate one.
For those of you who never spent any time in the service, please allow me to break this down:
- If you are in uniform, you do not either salute or return salutes while not wearing a hat. The president was not wearing a hat.
- If you are in civilian clothes, you neither salute nor return salutes whether wearing a hat or not. The president was in civilian clothes.
- When rendering a salute, in the American military you touch the tips of the index and middle finger of your right hand to your right temple, just at the edge of your eyebrow. When doing so, your arm should be perfectly parallel to the deck (ground). Your palm should be facing very slightly inward towards you while doing so, so that the underside of your hand is not visible to the person who you are saluting. The president, however, performed some bizarre gesture worse even than most Hollywood "salutes", smacking the dead center of his eyebrow with the second knuckle of his right index finger. The only way it could have been more ridiculous is if he had succeeded in poking his own eye out with his thumb, which he appeared in serious danger of doing. (Try performing the maneuver I just described, if you can't visualize it.)
- While some might argue that president Bush is, though Supreme Commander in Chief of the armed services, effectively a civilian and therefore excusable for flagrant ignorance of the mechanics of a salute... he was, in fact, a uniformed member of the Air National Guard in the 1970's. He served (very) briefly as an enlisted man before being (very quickly) railroaded into a commisioning program and (just as quickly) ceasing to bother even showing up at his assigned duty station. Even beyond that, the President of the United States generally has more than a sufficiency of advisors to help him realize when he's screwing protocols up badly - meaning that if he's still doing so, it's either in the face of their advice, or because he's picked advisors who won't advise him of anything that won't make him happy.
Add this in with items such as media ops in a fighter pilot's flight suit, and whether you like the man's politics or not, you've got a seriously disrespectful and ignorant jackass who doesn't care how much of a shambles he makes of basic military courtesies, or how ridiculous he makes himself (and the military with him), if it means he gets to "feel cool" like he's "one of the boys."
And I resent that pretty seriously.
Current Mood: resentful
Current Music: Presidents of the USA - Lump
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April 4th, 2006
jimbojones
 | 01:57 pm - On corporate endeavor (and not coincidentally, how much it ticks me off)
My PHONE COMPANY actually sold my number to a "partner" that telemarkets. Lovely. "Aegis Communications." They call me about four times a day, generally when I'm busy and can't possibly deal with the phone, until I finally manage to field one of their damn calls, at which point the telemarketer NGs (No Good) me on the list... which gives me a week's respite before they pound the same list again.
The last guy REALLY fucking pissed me off. My #1 pet peeve about telemarketers is when they inquire after your health... and WAIT for you to tell them. About your health. Motherfucker do I SOUND like I'm 90 years old and will be more likely to do business with you if you waste my time talking about my health before you even say what you want? I do not know you. We have not even been socially INTRODUCED. Our relationship has not progressed to the point where I will respond favorably to you attempting to ascertain more about my health than is readily observable by my voice or appearance.
Anyway, so the phone rings. It's a local number I don't recognize, and it's on my business line, so you know I pretty much have to answer it. I do. Dead silence. Great. It's a telemarketer. But you know what? You HAVE to fucking wait through the dead silence to speak with the rep, or the goddamn machine just CALLS YOU RIGHT BACK AGAIN, frequently within an hour. Whereas if you tell an actual rep you're not interested, it buys you a week's reprieve. Wonderful. So I wait approximately nine seconds worth of saying "hello? HELLO?" into the line, waiting for the connection to get patched into a TSR (Telephone Sales Representative).
Finally one arrives. "Hello?" he says tentatively, as though someone might not actually be there, thus wasting his time... in spite of the fact that he patched in DURING me saying "Hello?" (I know because I could hear both the click of the patch and his breathing.) Already he's annoying me. "Hello," I say again. "May I speak to Jim?" "You are." "Hi Jim I'm with Aegis Communications, we're a partner of BellSouth. How are you today?" Wait. Continued wait. We've hit like two seconds worth of wait now, me expecting him to go on, him expecting me to inform him as to my present condition - which viewed in one way is, after all, only two seconds; but viewed in another way, is plenty to make it clear that this jackass is actually going to WAIT FOR ME TO WASTE BOTH OF OUR TIME telling him how I am. So I ask - politely, I might add, if in a bit of a tired tone of voice - "can we please just get to the point?"
Without saying a word, he hung up on me.
Now I have to be honest here. I could tell you "and now I can tell you that I will NEVER buy a goddamn thing from Aegis Communications, whoever the hell they are, whatever they hell it is they sell," but to be honest they crossed that line simply by telemarketing me at all. (I *know* how much it costs to run a TSR farm. Which already tells me a lot about how much margin is built into every sale a firm makes, and - worse yet - tells me that they think bothering the fuck out of people is a good way to spend a large portion of their profits.) So, you know, why should they care? And why should this TSR "waste his time on me" any further, given the tremendous unlikelihood that someone who politely but tiredly requests that the TSR get on with his pitch will actually buy whatever it is that's being sold - and the equal unlikelihood that I ever would even if he'd ended the conversation more politely?
Still, though. It's a sign of the times, and a shitty one at that. The great thing about modern communications and management structures is that they make truly *fantastic* projects not only possible but commonplace, requiring organization at a level that would literally be unthinkable, much less unmatchable, to previous generations. The *bad* thing about it, though, is it means that more and more of the world's resources are, ultimately, controlled by people who will never, EVER, have to face - on an intimate you-are-a-person, I-am-a-person, and-we-have-to-communicate-as-persons level - any of the people they depend upon leveraging their profits from.
I was struck this morning by what I thought was a pretty picturesque example of the contrast between corporate and local management - the little desk at my bank where you fill out your deposit slips. Corporate management chained a crappy little pen, worth PERHAPS one fifth of a cent or so, to the table to make sure nobody stole it - while just next to it, the local manager had provided a $20 calculator for the convenience of the customers, and trusted - rightly - that they wouldn't steal it.
I don't know what we do about this. We really do need big corporations. But goddamn it, there has GOT to be a way to force their managers and directors to remember that the customer is not a potentially lucrative but annoying resource, but an actual human being - a fucking customer - and needs and deserves to be treated as such.
Current Mood: exasperated
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September 15th, 2005
jimbojones
 | 09:29 pm - sometimes the best things happen for the worst reasons
Well, the small Chinese man is no longer teaching my Calc class. Unfortunately, he failed his doctoral boards. Although he was encouraged to try again next year, he instead threw a hissy fit and decided to go for a doctorate in computer science instead (oh, JOY that you are in my field now, small incoherent one). In a completely different university, because he - or his family, it was hard to decipher which - decided that he could "never succeed in a place like this." I'm not sure if that means he thinks that USC is biased against Chinese people, or that success is impossible here because USC is some sort of backwater... although if the latter, it's sort of a pointed statement that he couldn't CUT it in the "backwater". Anyway. Further decreasing my opinion of the guy, he bolted and left the class he was teaching hanging out to dry - three days after failing his board, he was gone.
Also, we found out tonight that - hell, I don't even know how to phrase this pithily. So far in all of three weeks of Calculus I, the butterball had decided to introduce the concept of limits to us for the very first time using ANALYSIS METHODS NORMALLY NOT PRESENTED UNTIL A MATH MAJOR'S THREE HUNDRED LEVEL COURSES. I am simultaneously pleased with myself that I was doing a fairly good job of grokking it anyway, and INTENSELY relieved that no, Calculus I is NOT really supposed to be that fucking hard, we're supposed to be three years deep in it before we have to learn that shit. What in god's name possessed this jackass to INTRODUCE calculus with third-year math-major analytical techniques?
However, sometimes the shittiest things lead to the nicest things. As shitty as it was for him to abandon the class out of nowhere, instead of some random ESL'er grad student with neither the aptitude, the training, nor the motivation for teaching, we now have a genuine, no-shit, this-is-really-my-job-and-I-care about it instructor. Who speaks fluent English. And makes EYE CONTACT with the class. And answers questions. I feel better about this class after a single night with her teaching it - I can actually pay attention to the INSTRUCTOR in class now instead of taking "notes" out of the textbook, huzzah!
And now, off to see The 40 Year Old Virgin with Leigh.
Current Mood: pleased
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August 31st, 2005
jimbojones
 | 07:28 pm - Anger and Frustration: How I Nearly Strangled A Small Chinese Man Tonight
Large portions of the entire campus network are completely unusable right now, because - sadly - the school uses Microsoft Office. And Microsoft Office wants to run the installer from the CD - or, in large networked environments, from a common server - for every single user on every single computer the first time that user logs onto that computer. And, it being August, there are 10,000+ new users on campus. Each of whom logs into a different lab computer in a different lab several times a week.
God I wish we just fucking used OpenOffice.
To make it worse, MS Office also wants to save everything that you do, by default, in your My Documents folder. Which is in constant synchronization with - you guessed it - a network server. Meaning that, if the campus LAN is DOS'ed to unusability by MS Office first-time-user install spam, when you try to save things in Office, that won't work either - you can't even save somewhere local that ISN'T synchronized to a network server, because the "Save As" dialog box wants to render the contents of that network server as a file listing when it opens up... and your whole workstation will lock up while it tries, and fails, to render it.
So, let's recap: the campus network is utterly unusable right now, and as a result, it is impossible to save anything to anywhere using MS Office. Got it? Okay.
If you think that sounds frustrating, try dealing with that while a five foot four ball of pudge with a mousey little voice, who speaks his ESL as though he's orally constipated, hops around from one foot to another like a demented cockatiel and yells increasingly loudly "SABE TO E-BAIL! IF DOES NOT WORK, GET DIPPUREN E-BAIL ACCOUT!"
I am now piratpurchasing a copy of Maple so that, in the future, I can just show up to the lab, get the assignment, surf the fucking intertron until class is over, then go home and do the assignment.
Grrrrrrrr.
Current Mood: pissy
Current Music: Tupac Shakur - When I Get Free II
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August 25th, 2005
August 10th, 2005
jimbojones
 | 08:45 pm - NEW PRODUCT! CIALIS SOFT TABS!
Earth to spammer: AFTER WELL OVER A YEAR AND A HALF, THE PRODUCT IS NO LONGER "NEW".
Current Mood: irritated
Current Music: Nine Inch Nails - You Know What You Are
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July 21st, 2005
jimbojones
| 11:12 am - Windows XP is fucking retarded.
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I have 1.5 GB of RAM in this laptop. The most of it I've used since the last time I rebooted it - 32 days and some change now - is 728 MB, a little less than half of what I've got physically available. So why, why, why if I leave Adobe ImageReady minimized for more than an hour or two does the OS "helpfully" swap out the couple of hundred megs ImageReady occupies in RAM to the fucking hard disk, making it take ten or twenty seconds to tab back into it when I want to edit an image again?! ::pounds head on keyboard::
note for the pedantic and/or curious: the problem really is Windows XP, not ImageReady. If I leave any other app (say, FireFox with a bajillion tabs open) minimized for more than an hour or so while I'm doing something else, the same behavior occurs.
Current Mood: ranty
Current Music: Nine Inch Nails - You Know What You Are
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