May 2006 Archives
Finally, I can blog about something that's been being kicked around in various forms for a while now. Today, it was officially announced that I got promoted to managing the entire sysadmin group at $WORK, as "Manager of Systems Administration". I now have people who report to me, which is kinda scary in and of itself, but I've done "interim" management of a team in the past, and I know I can handle it.
The only awkward part of the promotion is that a good friend of mine (who let me know about the job opening in the first place) is now one of my direct reports, but we've known each other for well over a decade now, so we should be able to sort that out.
Definitely feels weird to be "management", especially since it was something I had always really tried to stay away from (heck, even mocking Radwin and Jeremy when they made that change). Overall I'm excited though. Can't wait to see what comes next.
"I love the smell of napalm in the morning."Col. Kilgore, "Apocalypse Now"
In April 2001, a certain dotcom that shall remain nameless went through its first painful round of layoffs. One employee got laid off who had (so the story was heard by me anyway) already been assured of his survival. Hurt and angry beyond imagination, he crafted a "good bye" message to everyone in the corporate headquarters that was remembered for years to come, questioning whether the co-founder had a personality or even a soul, and suggesting perhaps that he should spend his dotcom-lotto winnings on buying one or both. (They learned their lesson, though, and by the time my layoff came, I had to send an e-mail individually to about 100 people saying good-bye... although it had none of the vitriol of this guy's message)
In the end, though, something we all could predict came to pass. He had burned that bridge sky-high, its fire blazing into the night brighter than Kilgore's beloved napalm. And several years later, after that employee had moved on to a new job in a new company, the original company bought his new company, and lo and behold, he was working for the same founder who he'd so publicly slagged years prior.
Sure, he probably regrets it. Sure, his raw emotional outrage (given the circumstances) was completely understandable. But it's still a fact of life that should be a corollary to Murphy's Law, and I'm going to claim it for my own:
The only bridges you ever need to cross are the ones you burned behind you.
This comes to mind for me tonight, as I watch another friend of mine lobbing FAE over his shoulder on the way out the door. I know why he's doing it, and I completely understand it. I used to work there, I can relate to it on that level, and he's totally getting the shaft, so I can relate to it on that level as well. But, by the same token, you never quite know the ways this may come back to you in the ass months or years from now.
We want to buy a used car. We want to find the car that has the features we want. Specifically, we'd like a list of all the cars that have the options available that we want, so we can then figure out which of those cars suck, according to Consumer Reports, and then use the rest as a "potential shopping list" to go to dealers with.
Except that it's really hard to find a list of, say, "all used cars' makes and models that have all wheel drive". or "all wheel drive OR four wheel drive". Etc., you take my meaning.
I googled this for a while and found something that purports to do it for NEW cars, but was remarkably good at feeding me FWD vehicles, even though I told it I didn't want FWD at all.
Anyone ever found such a tool in the past? share. share.
So apparently, Yahoo has completely redesigned the front page of their homepage. It's supposed to be all neat and cool, so I go to the URL mentioned in the Yahoo Search Blog entry to see how cool it is.
When I get there, using the "default" browser for any Macintosh computer, Safari, what do I read?
Thank you for your interest in the sneak preview of the new Yahoo! home page.
Unfortunately, you're using a browser we don't support today.
Check back again in the coming weeks - we plan to support additional browsers soon.
It makes the Baby Jesus cry for a number of reasons. First, this can only mean that the home page is becoming bloated. I can remember clearly the days when someone with an extremely low employee number (hint: employee # "1" or "2", I have no idea which one he got when they founded the company) told us how many dollars per day an additional single byte cost on the front page. It was like a shitload, though, that much I remember.
Now, it's completely bloated and full of useless crap.
Second, there's the whole concept -- long since thrown to the wind -- that the home page should be viewable on anything, because it should be using very simple basic standards-based HTML. That concept is now, apparently, tossed to the wind. The new homepage will be one that if you are not using one of the "blessed" browsers, you're screwed.
Also, I'm not really holding my breath for any kind of real Mac support. After all, the last official update for Yahoo Messenger was over two and a half years ago. I'm told, of course, that there is a crack team of Mac developers making a new version even as we speak. But, well, I've heard that a couple times. I heard it in 2001, when there were two developers assigned to work on the Mac version. Then one got pulled off the project. The other got laid off. Then in 2003, someone managed to dig up the code out of CVS (which, BTW, is still written against all the ancient libraries, which is why it still looked like an OS9 app), and push out a new version, probably to fix a security bug, not to actually give it features or anything.
(I should point out though, that it doesn't really bother me the whole YMsgr thing... mostly because the instant I sign onto YMsgr, on those rare occasions I do, I am flooded with IM spammers trying to pimp out chinese sneaker knockoffs, other "forbidden" Yahoo IDs, you name it... pretty much the only time I sign into YMsgr is when I absolutely have to speak to someone who works at Yahoo still, because they've got to eat their own dog-food. And even then, I'll use Adium, not the "official" client. )
But anyhow, suffice to say that it saddens me to see things like this, and makes me value my Google stock all that much more.
Last night, almost certainly crushed in the ratings by the Survivor three-hour finale, West Wing took its final bow from the television screen.
Nobody, I think, will sit around and say that it is likely that any president would face all the troubles that Jed Bartlet went through (an assassination attempt reminiscent of Reagan's, a Vice President who resigns in shame, a kidnapping of his daughter that causes him to invoke the 25th Amendment and put the Speaker of the House from the other side of the aisle in charge for a few days, and his former chief of staff becoming a winning VP candidate who dies in the middle of election day).
Yes, there were unbelievabilities about it, but that is television drama. What was more important about West Wing was that it showed that -- by and large -- even crazy situations like that, the government has processes to work through damned near everything. Last night's finale was a classic example of that, showing something that is fairly rare still in our global society: the ritualized and orderly transition of power from one elected official to another.
I was a little disappointed that we didn't actually get to see Toby Ziegler (Richard Schiff), or Danny Concannon (Timothy Busfeld), especially since Toby's now a free man, pardoned by Bartlet in the final minutes of power.
Peter David said it best when he said: If the first rule of show biz is "Always leave them wanting more," then West Wing succeeded beyond all imagining. Despite D's complete lack of enthusiasm for the show, I always wanted to tune in every week to see what was going to happen. It was one of a handful of shows I almost always insisted on watching live, not on DVR, because I simply couldn't wait, and would suffer through having to watch commercials if I had to in order to avoid that waiting.
Bartlet was always the kind of President I wanted. This is not -- at all -- to say that I agreed with him on all of his policies during his television tenure, but you at least realized that he felt like he was doing the right thing. By and large, his actions were rarely controlled by an opinion poll, or by how public opinion would change afterwards. They even hammered that point home for those who couldn't figure it out, having him spend a good six months being that typical politician, and the White House became a political mess. Only when they got back to the guiding principle of "Let Bartlet Be Bartlet", did governance return to its normal path.
West Wing left itself completely open-ended for its finale. If it wanted to, it could come back for a Season Eight, and have a good dozen storylines to pick up and run with. It's disappointing to me as a viewer to know that we'll never see what happens there, except insofar as we can infer them from "future shots" shown occasionally during the series, but it's also realistic, because life doesn't just tie up neatly at the end of one President's term.
It looks like Sorkin has a new show starting next fall, with some of the same actors (Bradley Whitford) as well as actors who had great runs of their own, but wanted desperately to join the West Wing cast (Matthew Perry). With any luck, it'll get another long run, and not get double-tapped the way Sports Night was....
Two weeks ago today, we had a contractor come out to the house to look at some repairs. He even commented on the many other things that, theoretically, we could have him do besides the things we were having him quote out. It's an old house. Go figure. As he left, he said he'd "give us a call on Monday with some numbers". When Wednesday came, I got ahold of him. He apologized for the delay, and told me "by the end of the week". The end of the week came, with no response. Over the course of the following week, I've left numerous voicemails, with no return call forthcoming. He seemed really interested in doing the work, because -- after all -- if we liked his work, he'd have had a lot of opportunities for future work. And yet, silence reigned.
I started calling another contractor. Leave messages, get no callbacks. Not a one.
How hard is it to convince a contractor to give you a call back, for Christ's sake? It's like, we want to give them fucking money, and work, and nobody can even be bothered to return phone calls. The only one who actually returned our call, couldn't be bothered to give us a quote.
What's the secret to convincing a contractor to actually (a) call you back, (b) give you a quote, and then (c) do the work? If anyone knows a contractor in the Hudson Valley who wants to do all three of those things, feel free to drop me an e-mail.
Spotted this on Kotaku, via a reference on Gizmodo. I have to agree with the Kotaku commentary though... only Bungie could give you a two minute preview which has no gameplay at all in it and still leave you at the end eager for Master Chief to bring the whoopass.
UPDATED: If you want a really nice resolution version of this trailer, go here instead.
So George Lucas apparently lied when he said that "the original material simply didn't exist" to create unaltered versions of the original trilogy.
.. Because this September, Lucas has decided to milk that cash cow one last time, and make available DVD versions of the really-and-truly original version (with "Star Wars" even having the '77 crawl that simply says "STAR WARS", and not "EPISODE IV: A NEW HOPE").
How cool is that? Then, when those are released into the wild, Lucas finally becomes irrelevant and there's no longer anything we need him for.
I say that because I have a hard time believing the "oh, we heard your cries," and all that crap. I don't think I'm alone in my belief that this was the plan all along. Tell all the fans, "You'll never get the original trilogy, so you'll have to make do with the Special Edition," at which point they pony up the money for movies they don't really even want. Then, a year or so later, you can milk them again (just in time for Christmas, and only for the limited time only thing, a la Disney's Vault) for more cash.
Pretty much everything I've ever said about Lucas has just been proven true.
