goofballs

Why is baking bread, or brewing beer better than systems adminstration? When making bread, you have millions of yeast cells eating sugar and dividing in an orderly fashion. They expel alcohol and carbon dioxide. When system administrating, you have billions of (and sometimes trillions of) resistors blinking on and off in an orderly fashion, but you have dozens of idiotic human beings telling you to do one thing, do another, often completely in contradiction of one another; worse, you have to find a way to secure each of those precious bits in spite of the idiots who are telling you what to do with them. Bread rises. Beer ferments. Dot-coms fuck you in the ass. Over and over and over again.

[Updated 7/18/2007] These are the animals running our country: Late Night Shots Think Pretty In Pink where Blane is a young Republican blueblood and Andie is another young Republican (although tragically nuveaux riche ) making a sharp right turn down a dark, soulless rabbit hole where privilege, class and premarital sex between 20 something social Conservatives finds its way onto the a'la minute gossip pages of the internets. Here is an edifying quote: RE: optimal number for a woman Posted By: Guy on 10-23-2006 1:35 pm I could put up with 12. Anything more than that without a good explanation, and the girl is incapable of being in a serious relationship. RE: optimal number for a woman Posted By: higher the better on 10-23-2006 1:39 pm I prefer high 's. It usually means they really like to have sex, and that they are very good at it. And the idea that you might be exposing yourself to a serious disease is thrilling and really gets my blood flowing. RE: optimal number for a ...

Posted in full, until I get a C&D from MSNBC: “I didn’t vote for him,” an American once said, “But he’s my president, and I hope he does a good job.” That—on this eve of the 4th of July—is the essence of this democracy, in 17 words. And that is what President Bush threw away yesterday in commuting the sentence of Lewis “Scooter” Libby. The man who said those 17 words—improbably enough—was the actor John Wayne. And Wayne, an ultra-conservative, said them, when he learned of the hair’s-breadth election of John F. Kennedy instead of his personal favorite, Richard Nixon in 1960. “I didn’t vote for him but he’s my president, and I hope he does a good job.” The sentiment was doubtlessly expressed earlier, but there is something especially appropriate about hearing it, now, in Wayne’s voice: The crisp matter-of-fact acknowledgement that we have survived, even though for nearly two centuries now, our Commander-in-Chief has also served, simultaneously, as the head of one political party a...

Recently, when hanging out with a couple of old friends in my apartment, I raised the specter of the "geeklab rule." The originator of the rule, we'll unkindly refer to him as "NRH", was someone I met on the "Internet Relay Chat" network in 1992. At this time in the narrative I need to make a few things clear. First of all, in 1992 there was an "internet" but there was no such thing as the web. I can't emphasize that point enough, because in 2007 the internet is synonymous with "the web" as we know it today. Explaining the internet without the web to the average person is like trying to explain to a blind person what colors smell like. It can't be done. But there was an internet before browsers. And it was a world of text, by and large. The "Geeklab Rule" came into being probably in 1993 or 1994. The rule was very simple: "given a group of people in the same room or building, if there is a terminal available, ...

"Fucking Bill Clinton," said the boss man, who we will call G. The date was about a week after September 11, 2001. By then, everyone had returned, cautiously, back to work. On my walk from the Embarcadero to under Coit Tower, I would glance up at the skyscapers, wondering how they too could come down in a cloud of smoke, debris and pulverized human beings. Commercial aviation had just started back up, and my neck twisted with the strain of every turbo-jet above, as if flying were brand new again, and I gazed in wonder as heavy, fuel and passenger laden tin tubes blasted unbelievably through the sky. I explained to G that I felt that, although the CIA had been dismantled somewhat during the 8 years of Bill Clinton's presidency, the process had actually been going on for much longer -- since before Carter, to be precise. I said I felt that because the Cold War was ostensibly over, it was reasonable to start dismantling the apparatus of the Cold War. And I mentioned that Cli...

This movie is pretty great, so far. I'm about halfway through it, and I wish it were, believe it or not, longer. I think that the material would make for a terrific television series -- one that no one, not even HBO, especially not even HBO, post Albrecht, would produce. If George Clooney and Matt Damon (and the supporting cast, including Chris Cooper and Jeffrey Wright) wanted to serialize it, I would watch it. Me, and three other people. I am not sure there is a place for a nuanced look at the politics of petroleum, at the real, live human beings that inhabit places like Iran and Iraq and Pakistan, in a country which produces thinkers like this genius , the American version of the Taliban, but far, far scarier (we have infinitely more resources to wage rageful destruction on our supposed enemies). In Syriana, a group of foreign workers in, presumably Saudi Arabia, attend a Madrasa and are treated to a free feast of flatbreads, dates, lamb kebobs and pilafs. The cleric, an Arab, i...

Only Glenn Greenwald could elegantly combine a political critique of dick cheney and family guy in this post . Bra-vo, Greenwald, bravo..