Google, Now With More SlapChop!

Tee hee.

Second Life: Twice as Stupid as the Real Thing!

Here are some conclusions after walking around in Second Life for a few hours:

1. Everything is for sale – Need a penis? Buy one! Want to learn how to dance? Buy some crappy animation! The only thing that’s free in Second Life is the ability to quit and go do something else…which is probably the most exciting feature of the whole thing.

2. The engine is horrible – on a brand new MacBook Pro, with more than a few people on screen the whole thing slows to a crawl.

3. People spend real money on this shit – It makes you wonder if they realize that none of it is real.

4. Dialog = AOL chatrooms circa 1996 – If you ever wondered where the A/S/L? crowd went when broadband showed up and everyone realized what a sham AOL was…I found them!

P.S. – I’m a jackass that can’t spell.

Advice on Favors

If you’re ever going to do someone a favor that they didn’t ask for, don’t tell them beforehand.  Either just do it or forget it.  I made the mistake of telling a researcher that we had some extra computers and I was going to try and get one or two to replace the aging machines in his labs.  Well, the machines in his labs were total shit, loaded with software that they didn’t have licenses or installers for, etc.  The point is, they were a mess and it was too much trouble.  A couple months later this guy is moaning and complaining about how I “promised” him two computers…promised?  I don’t make promises I can’t keep, especially not to cheap, greedy bastards that will spend a few thousand dollars on themselves and toss their scraps to the people that do all the actual work for them.  How’s this for a promise:  I promise never to help you  or the poor bastards in that Chinese labor camp you call a lab ever again.  It’s guys like that that make it such a pain in the ass to be nice that most people around here just stick to the books and act like assholes to avoid the hassles associated with showing a bit of humanity.  Also a note to researchers:  if you can’t afford computers, you can’t afford employees.

Welcome to the Public Sector

I work for the state. The University of Texas to be exact. This is my first IT job out of college, and it has really opened my eyes to the crippling levels of absurdity the operations of state institutions must maintain. I think there is actually a law that states that all federal institutions must not have any shred of efficiency, and must maintain a minimum “bat-shit” level of craziness at all times. If you are considering working in the public sector, there are some key issues that you need to understand first.

1. There is no bottom line.

Money is important to every business, but in the public sector it is not the bottom line…nothing is. One could argue that the delivery of whatever goods or services an organization specializes in might be the bottom line, but really nobody cares. Where I work, we teach medical and graduate students, do research, and see patients in hospitals and clinics – all important and noble things. The sad truth, however, is that nobody in administration really cares about those things. All the suits care about is compliance and image. As long as we do everything the federal and state governments tell us to do, and don’t make complete asses of ourselves in public, progress, service, profit…these things are negligible. Could we save millions by using open source solutions for office, database, asset management, and encryption applications? Of course, but we have millions to spend! As long as we keep giving it to Oracle and Microsoft, we have someone to point the finger at when shit goes wrong.

2. Paperwork is awesome.

Public businesses have forms. Lots of them. The key here is to hide them all over the web site and not make any mention of them until you deny a request for something. Want to throw something away? Fill out the form and a month later someone will come pick it up. Want to give some old equipment to another department? Fill out a form so the inventory people can lose it and make you go looking for that Tandy Color PC a year later, because it’s still valued at $8,000 and it’s going to fuck your budget up if you don’t find it. Can’t find a printer from the 70′s? Better fill out the form to file a police report, because we all know the criminal underworld is just a couple reams of continuous-feed paper away from overthrowing the government and creating a nuclear holocaust.

3. The first job requirement is “there are no job requirements”

People get hired in the public sector by unseen forces. Sure there’s someone that interviews and there’s HR to do a horrible job screening applications, yet the workforce somehow maintains an 80% or better dumbass rate. I’ve had to show people with the same job title as me how to rename a registry key. I can hand a co-worker a piece of software and a manual and all I get is a glassy stare followed by 35,753 questions that are all answered on the first page. These people could not be entirely the fault of my boss. I don’t think it’s possible for a person to be such a poor judge of character as to let some of these people by. My theory is that when hiring managers finally make their choice for a position, his choice is actually fed into an ancient “computer” made of stone and wood in the basement of the administration building. This bastard machine then churns away, powered by Red Bull and the blood of innocents, until it has found the applicant with the most bizarre name. That is why we have people named Lytrina, Chiquita, Rizwan, and Fadi (yes, sounds like fatty). Sometimes this turns out OK, but most of the time you just end up with someone really wacky and totally unqualified.

PBWiki like whoa.

So I started this thing, this project to mashup fantasy roleplaying and real life. To collect my ideas, first there was a blog, which lasted for all of 5min because you just can’t organize one in anything but a linear/chronological fashion. So I search for “free wiki” on Google. The first hit was a site offering some worthless action for free and was more or less shite. The second hit though, was for pbwiki.com, which claims to make starting a wiki as easy as making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and includes a nice little sandwich icon to boot. You get unlimited pages and something like 50mb of storage to begin with, which they have offered to double if I plug them on a blog, which is what I’m doing right now. Really I guess I could write bad things, but I’ve actually been really happy with the service.

PBWiki has a really simple markup language (even a medicine person can almost learn it!) but also accepts HTML, and it’s password protected so every John Q. Internet User can’t come and screw up your work. Best of all, it has just been insanely useful in getting together all the ideas for this thing in a semi-public setting, and keeping them well formatted. You can check out my real life D&D project at:

trwdd.pbwiki.com

You can check out PBWiki for your own wiki needs (I talk as though the 1-3 people that might read this aren’t already helping me with the trwdd





Just as a side note, have I mentioned how insane it is that the Blogger spell check engine does not know the word “blog”? Does that make any sense at all???

FNG

Goddamnit they hired someone new and put them right next to me. I must aquire an office at all costs. When I first heard they were hiring a new person to do web development I thought “who the hell is doing it now?” but I figured it might be cool to have some java/xml hacker right next door. Then I heard it was a lady and all kinds of red lights start going off. First off it’s a woman, which means there’s something like an 80% chance she can’t develop her way out of a paper bag. Second, it’s “lady” not “girl” which means she’s old, probably used to COBOL or punch cards or something, and prone to designing web sites with victorian lace borders around everything and unreadable script fonts.

Then she shows up. She’s old…fuck. So far seems to have only a passing knowledge of XP (hey it’s not the greatest OS but it works on like a 4 year-old’s level)…fuck. She took fortran in college…fuck. And now last but not least, she’s over there talking to herself…FUCK. Like someone else might give a shit and go provide her with some company, sorry dear but the resident dyke is out of the office and nobody else wants to hang out with your musty ass. Oh dear god she better not spread old lady smell all over this corner of the room.

Hooray for Vespa

The Vespa crossed the 1000 mile barrier last week, and camera phone was there for the whole event:

Hmm, I’m estimating that at about $50 worth of premium gas. Not too shabby.

I smell.

I arrived at work today only to realize, to my horror, that I smell like a rotting dog carcass packed in horse manure. Ok…maybe not that bad but still, I forgot to put on any deodorant so now I’m trying to hide in my cube and type with my elbows pinned to my sides all day. This week is looking pretty good because my boss has lunch meetings scheduled all week, which means clever hourly employees can go to lunch while he’s gone and still claim maximum hours for the week.

[begin boring computer rant]
Speaking of hours, I’m just now filling out my timesheet for the past two weeks in our ingenious oracle/java/satan time management system (would you like the window maximized?? TOO BAD I AM DOING IT ANYWAY!). Why would I wait 6 days after the pay period ended? Because I have learned a valuable lesson about testing local software restriction policies on your own machine: don’t. The key with these policies is that they feature the patented “Completely Ambiguous Timeline” also found in Active Directory group policies. With this revolutionary system, there is no way to tell when a change in policy will be implemented on any given machine! That way you have all your systems people brainstorming up ways to get the new screensaver policy to take effect on 17 out of 30 identical machines on THE SAME SUBNET. And what do three of our “best” systems people come up with in an entire week?? “I think if you restart each machine like 10 times it should work” Thanks Microsoft, thanks idiot coworkers. Anyway…the timesheets…I locked myself out of IE (evil TMS hates Firefox) for like 3 days, even after I changed the policy back to unrestricted.
[end boring computer rant]

In other news, Mary is becoming a hippie. This is sad because when someone becomes a hippie it’s like they die, only worse because their mindless body still roams the earth in search of poorly made jewelry and patchouli and the most disgusting ways to cook tofu and so on. I guess in that way hippies are like vampires or zombies, only not awesome. Maybe a really great rock and roll band will move in next door to her and purify her mind and soul with pure rock music but I doubt it. I am too far away to help and I think all hope is lost.

Holy man Scottish guy just came through here. Every time he comes there’s this party in my brain because he has the greatest accent of all time. He doesn’t say ‘me’ instead of ‘my’ or ‘wee’ or ‘bonny’ or ‘lass’ or any of that, just speaks American (read: freedom) English with a thick-ass Scottish accent. I need to make it my new mission to become friends with that guy, because I can only imagine how infinitely great it would be to hang out at a bar with him.