goofballs

I will be the first to admit that systems administration is a protection racket: pay us, or something *bad* will happen to your network. Of course, the fact that bad things do happen to servers and networks -- worse, if you host a site on the internet you invite all sorts of badness from bored teenagers to Chinese government-funded hacker farms -- keeps us systems administrators out of jail for extorting money (our salaries) from companies for protection. As if that's not bad enough, us systems administrators are notorious for erecting barriers between developers and their masters, dumb management, and critical production systems that the systems administrators are tasked with maintaining. QA, regression testing, staging and peer review are just some of the tools in the "stymy development" tool box systems administrators use to slow down the development cycle from "pretty fast" to "reckless, stupid abandon". Developers, who know in their hearts that th...

Some of these posts are delightfully unhinged. Ah, drugs. Working on other projects for a while, we will return to Goofballs in the future.

The three laws of Arthur C. Clarke: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. The third law applies best to how most people perceive what I do for a living. I will try to dispel magic in lieu of science, and I will try to do so semi-chronologically. In the early 1980s I had been given a number of Apple computers which were either on loan from or purloined from the law offices of my father; some he bought, outright, seeing my interest in computers. Nevertheless my very first command-line interpreter (CLI) was the built-in Apple BASIC interpreter that all Apples came with, on 5.25” floppy disks. A typical program might look something like thi...

Farrah Dawn White Rest in peace.

displacement is a human disease

I wish I had written this myself, I can only quote it: Dear anti-Mayer Mob. Please read the article: http://www.playboy.com/articles/john-mayer-playboy-interview/index.html?page=2 ---------------------------------------- Since I know many of you won't bother reading all of what he actually said before condemning him, I've tried to make it easier for you by pasting an excerpt from his Mein Kampf, er I mean his interview. Please explain to me the overt, blatant, horrible racism in (the very clumsy and un-clever) things he is trying to say. Maybe I'm just an old clueless dude, but to me, it is very clear that he is trying to make a social commentary/point out of his ill-advised use of the "N-word". What is his point? That it is silly for someone to tell him he has a "hood pass" (Ed. note - I am presuming that means he has full acceptance in the black community, I'm too old to have any idea really what "hood pass" means). Why does he think the ...

Tom Tancredo ironically calls the English language "the glue that holds together this country." Excuse me? The glue that holds this country together is law, specifically, the United States Constitution. Look it up, teabaggers. Where in the Constitution does it say that English is the national language? Glenn Beck also has some interesting ideas regarding illegal immigrants: take their DNA. Perhaps instead of re-reading the 2nd Amendment over and over, you should focus on the 4th Amendment. Glenn Beck, Tom Tancredo, Lou Dobbs, Ann Coulter and even I are illegal settlers. That our laws permit this is irrelevant; if Native Americans came to Europe to usurp the lands on which the English, Dutch, French, Portugese, Spanish and Italians called home, not only would this have been (rightly) labelled an egregious wrong, but a great long and bloody war would surely have resulted. They didn't cross the border, the border crossed them.