1. Take off your clothes
2. Stand in front of a large mirror
3. Start jumping up and down
4. Flex all your muscles
5. Observe how much of you appears to be trying to catch up with the rest of you.

Optional step for added “fun”:
6. Perform before and after each holiday meal.

Merry Christmahannukwanzika!

This XKCD cartoon basically explains how I got into my career: link.

In my case, the critical experience occurred after college, when I was doing data entry at Sun Microsystems, and it was Solaris I was messing with, not Perl. (Although I am pretty good at Perl, now, too.)

If you have no idea what I’m talking about:
1. Perl is a programming language.
2. Solaris is an operating system. (Like Windows, MacOS, etc. But way betterer.)

Interesting quote from Timothy Ferriss (author of the 4-Hour Workweek), from his blog, on why he doesn’t do much stock-market investing:

Here’s the deal — to beat the market consistently, you have to: 1) have better information than most people, 2) have superior analysis of the same information, or 3) have better luck than a Leprechaun.

Discarding luck as a strategem, and personally discarding better analysis because I don’t want to spend my life poring over annual reports or evaluating algorithms, there is a simple conclusion: don’t invest in anything that you don’t know inside and out better than most of the world.

I’m on-call at the moment, which means that I get paged any time a customer has a problem with one of their computers, or any time a monitoring program thinks one of those computers might have a problem. The monitoring program has obsessive-compulsive disorder, and it likes to send a lot of pages at night for things that I really can’t do anything about, other than to wake up and curse my pager and then toss and turn for an hour until I finally pass out again so that I’m ready for the next page. I have been on-call in some fashion for several weeks now, and life has lost all meaning. Here is a Haiku I wrote:

Colors fade to gray
There is no joy, no beauty
On-call yet again

Here is another Haiku I wrote:

Nostrils fill with stench
Last night’s meal was a mistake
Now I fart onions

It does not really have anything to do with on-call, but I like it.

It’s going to be hard to trust the election results when electronic voting systems are so easy to hack.

http://arstechnica.com/articles/culture/evoting.ars

Postscript, 11/19/2008: In the end, regardless of who won or lost, I’m glad that the outcome wasn’t ambiguous as compared to polling data. If there was any monkey-business going on in either direction, it seems unlikely that it affected the outcome.

I often hear or read people who argue that the reason we shouldn’t move to a universal healthcare system, like every other developed country has, is that we would lose our status as having The Best Medical Care in the World. The self-evident truth of this status is often thrown about as though it were part of the patriotic article of faith that we are The Greatest Nation on Earth. Anyone who questions it is in danger of being labeled “un-American.”

And yet, is it really true? Consider this story from CNN: Being a bad patient can save your life. Of course, it is certainly possible that the patient in this story merely had an extraordinary run of bad luck, and it is also possible that he would have fared worse in any other country. But stories like this should make us at least wonder if we really are benefitting as much as some people think we are from our collective decision to keep our medical system private.

Personally, I feel much safer knowing that once something is designated as “suspicious” by our security professionals, it cannot become “unsuspicious” until it has been blown up.

Bomb squad members further investigated the packages and determined they were simply several hot dogs in foil wrappers. Sadly, the wieners were detonated as a precaution. Full story.

Apparently, duct tape and tin foil on anything is considered suspicious. I’m glad that my college days are behind me; there was always the risk, in college, of waking up wrapped in tin foil and duct taped to a pole. “I’m sorry Mrs. Smith, but your son was clearly suspicious. We had to detonate him as a precaution.”

Christianity has done some bad things in its time. The Crusades. The Inquisition.

Now this …

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0wpAJMFpJQ
http://www.theway.org/Current/Mar07/Mar07Hi.htm

(Sigh. First they got it removed from YouTube. Then they removed it from their own site. Maybe the world is a better place without it.)

… and this …

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7-NOZU2iPA8

I think God is crying right now.

I’m spinning off a new blog. For the past month, I’ve been trying to build a working Sun Cluster using VirtualBox on my laptop. If I just lost you, don’t worry about it. However, I know there are other people out there who might be interested in doing the same thing, or something similar, and so I’ve decided to start blogging about this and other technical endeavors at http://spoonfightergeeksout.blogspot.com/. Most of the progress I’ve made has been facilitated by the blog entries of other geeks, and I figure that what I’m learning might be helpful to someone else.

As an added bonus, you won’t have to read about it here.

Politicians running for office always promise things they’ll never be able to make good on. My favorite is the promise to “get rid of special interests” and “wasteful spending”. John McCain made that promise just last night. I’m sure Obama has made the same promise at some point. They all do.

What a stupid promise. The President doesn’t legislate. Congress does. So to get anything done, the President has to coax a majority of the 400-odd Representatives and 60 out of 100 Senators to act. Every one of those legislators has at least a handful, if not more, of “special interests” to look after. Maybe it’s an industry or spending project that’s important to his/her state. Maybe it’s a corporation that has been especially generous to his/her campaign. Regardless, the President isn’t getting that legislator’s cooperation on legislation if his/her particular “special interest” gets cut.

Even if a President turns out to be a political mastermind and creates massive public pressure on the legislators to abandon some of the ridiculous expenditures in the budget, a lot of what seems special and wasteful to one group of voters is really important to another group. Ie., tax breaks for big oil aren’t “special interests” for all the ordinary folks who depend on Texaco for a paycheck.

In other words, most of what’s in the budget is “important” to some portion of the voting public, regardless of whether or not it’s wasteful. Promising to get rid of it is a waste of air.