Month: February 2004

Do you believe in Absolute truth?

In Star Wars, Episode 5: The Empire Strikes Back, Obi Wan Kenobi says, “Many of the truths we cling to depends on our point of view.”

Then again…

The belief in “absolute truth” contends that what is true continues to be true, whether or not you or I believe it is true. My definition of truth falls in this category.

If I hold the point of view that water is not wet, it will not make it so, and it is from this perspective that I see the world. Others could argue that I believe this way because of a complex combination of genetics and upbringing, nature and nurture, and that truth is indeed malleable depending on point of view. This is an argument that has the potential to spiral out of control.

To assert that truth is indeed malleable and not fixed is to make a fixed assertion about truth itself. It does not follow that truth can be malleable because that point of view would have to include the idea that truth could be fixed, which would then, paradoxically negate the argument that truth can be malleable. It can therefore be taken as an axiom that truth is fixed, or rather that there is “absolute truth”.

But then again, what do I know?

That being said, how do you respond to the concept that others may hold vastly different opinions than you on what is right, wrong, true, or untrue?

I wrote recently about the difficulty of choosing appropriate Valentine’s Day gifts. Well, the day arrived.

I thought that a cake like this would be an ideal Valentine’s gift for the twenty-first century 🙂

But I was more traditional. I got her candy and flowers, and we went on a really nice date. We chilled out in our basement with some popcorn, sodas, snacks, and watched Charlie’s Angels II: Full Throttle together. Fun movie, but quite a bit more risque than the first one. One scene in particular, where the Angels play a part in an exotic dancing troupe in order to snag some keys, seems like it went on gratuitously long. I liked their approach in the first movie, doing almost the same thing to get the fingerprints of an executive, and then it was much briefer. This time around, the amount of time spent on close-ups of scantily-clad butts seemed a bit excessive.

Still fun to watch, though, and an enjoyable Valentine’s Day date. Right now, Christy is out shopping by herself (something she really, really enjoys); I took my son out earlier today for lunch and a Valentine’s Daddy-Son date.

Tonight, we’re going to grill some burgers and go over to a friend’s house to play cards. How did you end up spending your heart day?

**Apologies if this isn’t the proper place to put this request**

Looking for help in putting up an e-commerce function on the direct-to-consumer website. Does anybody have any experience with this?

I was about to pick up authorize.net for the credit merchant clearing service but apparently I also need a shopping cart provider (i.e. miva, oscommerce). This is way over my head. I’m good with the HTML scripting but I have no idea how to drop in a full-service e-commerce engine into your typical $20/month web host provider.

I don’t know what I need to do to keep all the functionality (product review, shopping cart, clearance) integrated within my site’s framework. Help!!!!

Thanks in advance.

It’s been an interesting experience contracting for this small software development company in Salt Lake City so far. The biggest change from what I’m used to, though, is that I’m paid by the hour now.

Since 1996, I’ve been almost exclusively in salaried positions. The benefits of salary are readily apparent: paid vacations, paid holidays, sick leave, and no “slave to the clock” mentality. There seems to often be a great professionalism amongst salaried employees, a dedication to goal-oriented work, rather than time-oriented “putting the hours in”. And yet… there’s a difference in a bad way, too. There’s a feeling in much of the tech industry that a company “owns” you when you’re on salary, that your time is not your own. Many tech companies abuse this, by working employees sixty-hour weeks for months on end, often without any explicit requirement to put those hours in, but with a whole lot of peer pressure.

Yet here I am, now, paid by the hour. Many hourly employees get the same benefits salaried workers do, including the paid holidays, sick leave, vacations, etc. They simply earn it in a different way, and their paychecks vary according to how many hours they’ve put in. The perspective is very, very different. Maybe it’s because I’m a contractor, too, rather than an employee, that I feel simply very task-oriented. I get in in the morning with certain objectives, and attempt to accomplish those objectives in a timely manner. I prepare regular reports on my progress so that the money invested by my customer is shown to be well-spent. And I generally go home at 5:00 without any compunctions at in the vein of wanting to stay longer “to get the project out the door”. It would seem to be wasteful of the customer’s money to put in sixty-hour weeks when there is no need.

Where do you sit on the “hourly versus salary” question? Which do you, or would you, prefer to get in your profession? Why?

As for me, right now, I’m enjoying the heck out of getting paid by the hour. I dislike the lack of benefits, but I like seeing the $$$ on the paychecks, as they represent “real” effort to me, rather than my stipend for just being a part of the company. Heck, I also feel like my evenings are my own, and I can pick up another gig or two from time to time. I guess I feel a whole lot less “owned” than I ever did as a salaried employee, and I keep thinking that, one of these days soon, I need to really get more into making money in my own business. Of course, other than my technical knowledge and my modest musical talents, it’s difficult to say what I’d make that money in :).

Sammy, to me, is a great example to me of a guy making it work. He’s pursuing a dream with his own business. When you’re just hanging out there, relying solely on your own abilities to bring in the dough, rather than a corporate wage… That just really seems like living closer to the metal. Gotta be a lot of Ramen in there somewhere though.

NOTE: I’m getting a lot of hits to this page from Google asking for “Linux consulting rates” or “GNU/Linux Consulting Rates”. My advice is: you get what you pay for. That “$25 an hour guy” may not seem like much of a deal if he can’t get the job done in a timely fashion. Average rates from fellow Linux consultants with more than 5 years of experience seem to be in the $65-$100 an hour range. I charge $85 an hour for short jobs, but give significant discounts for longer-term jobs paid in advance. The lowest I generally go, for 80 hours paid in advance, is about $65/hour. My resume may be a good comparison point for you to figure out whether to charge more or less. Erm, or, if you’re a customer, well, hire me already 🙂

So I got a call today from a complete stranger, whom I’ll call “Ken”. Ken found my reference for Bugzilla on the bugzilla.org web site. I wrote the documentation for Bugzilla, a pretty herculean year-long effort; since then, it’s been updated a lot by many other people, and my individual copyright no longer appears on the “about” pages. Guess I should have made my copyright notice an “invariant text” in the GNU Free Documentation License. Live and learn.

Anyway, he asked me how long it would take to get Bugzilla running on his system. I told him that if the system already had all the required libraries on it, and I had root access, I could have it running in about two hours at my standard consulting rate of $85/hour (note: Uncle Sam grabs a huge chunk of that). If there were a lot of libraries missing that I had to grab in order to make it run, that figure would run up to four to six hours at the standard consulting rate. He said that was within his budget, and after a few small kinks in ssh access firewall rules, I was root on the box on which they wanted me to install Bugzilla.

Now, here’s the ethical dilemma: at this moment, the box is “building” required packages, since he wanted an “isolated install” running under an individual user account. This is a process that depends on the speed of their machine, and since it’s a fairly speedy box, it will probably take about two to three hours to complete. Pretty much, while it’s doing this, I’m just glancing at my screen periodically to make sure the build is still running, occasionally typing in a command or note on what I’m doing, and going about other business.

So does one charge the customer for that “watching the compiler messages scroll past” time? Or does one chalk the hours up to “downtime” and not bill them for time when, really, their computer is just taking its time doing the job and yours is nothing more than monitoring to make sure it does it properly?

After writing this out, I think my choice is clear. I don’t think I can bill for hours where, although I’m tangentially involved with the customer’s process, I’m not actually doing anything personally to move their process along. It means I’ll eat some time that I can’t bill, but I’ll feel better about myself.

Interesting how times change, though. I guess my sense of ethics has evolved over the years. Back when I worked at a screwdriver shop in Las Vegas, I didn’t care if I was just talking to the customer or waiting on an install, I billed by the minute for my employer for anything and everything I possibly could. I made about $13 an hour, and was eager to “prove myself” with lots of billable hours.

These days, I guess out of a sense of self-preservation and maintaining business relationships as a self-employed professional, I guess keeping my reputation with my clients is more important to me than sucking every last dollar out of every gig that I can.

Funny how people change over the years, huh?

Nipple ring!! I just always wanted to start a post with that.

Question.. Do you still like popular music? Do you even like the popular music from your teenage years?

Okay, that being said, I must admit I am not watching the Grammy’s tonight. Its not that I don’t like awards shows.. I watch the oscars and golden globes religiously…

Really, its that I have lost my taste for popular music.

I watched the debacle last Sunday on the twilight of my anniversary, and I was bothered before I ever saw Janet’s Ninja Star Clad boobie. Justin Timberlake (with whom I share the first nine letters) doing New Kids dances or dirty dances with Michael’s sister and having her naked by the end of the song.. while Janet’s rhythm nation has become just commonplace and boring..

So, really, I don’t want to watch Beyonce do a Beatles tribute tonight, and I wouldn’t cry any tears if Shania were to suddenly “Feel like a woman (who gave up music)”.

I remember my father hating Martika and Tiffany and The Escape Club, and En Vogue (but I will stand by Cutting Crew till the day I die). I thought he was just old..

But no, I think he was right, all that just seems gummy to me now.. I find myself liking artists with a little more punch and a little less glitter (sorry mariah).. and that extends to today’s artists.. I may be tired of Evanescense, but I still dig that song.. and Eminem gets me worked up when he’s worked up.. and BNL and Ben Folds hit me with advanced (and sometimes absurd) concepts that challenge my mind and my heart just a little more.

What about you?

Nine days from today, the Most Dreaded Holiday arrives.

Yeah, that one.

The one most husbands and boyfriends learn to fear if they have been with their partners for more than a year.

St. Valentine’s Day.

The origin of this holiday seems fairly straightforward, according to legend. Claudius Caesar found that men were unwilling to enlist into the Roman legion around 496 A.D. because they did not wish to leave their wives and families. Claudius did the math, and figured out that if he forbade marriage for a few years, he’d have plenty of soldiers for his army. Valentine secretly married couples for quite some time before he was discovered and executed. The holiday takes place, probably not coincidentally, on the Roman day of the veneration of Juno, the goddess of women and marriage, February 14. Of course, I just gleaned that information from a few Google searches.

But enter next week. Some I’ve done the roses. I’ve done the jewelry. I’ve done the dates, dinners, roses, jewelry, deep massages, and even forgotten the holiday entirely a few years. I heard on the radio that there’s a zoo in Chicago (I think) where you can give your valentine the gift of their very own hissing cockroach, which they’ll have visitation rights with.

I’m not quite sure what to do for this Valentine’s day. I want to avoid being cheap, trite, etc. And to think that, if I live an average American lifespan, I’ll have another half-century to conjure up ideas.

What are your plans for this upcoming Valentine’s day?

So I was listening to 98 Rock this morning, and they were talking about pets and the silly/stupid/amazing things they do. Which harkened me back to my youth and one of the dumbest dogs ever to roam this earth.

Brandy was a male cocker spaniel, pure bred I believe. My sister and brother-in-law had some sort of papers, and the dog’s full name was something like Master Jason Brandy Boyd, so you get the picture. NOT that my sister’s family was hoity-toity, but that the dog came from that kind of background. As you’ll see, he shoulda had a DuPont thrown in there too…

My sister has a hardwood hallway, with a door at the end of it. I remember having hours (and I do mean HOURS) of entertainment when we would thrown Brandy a ball down the hallway. He would get up to speed, chasing the ball, only to have it bounce, hit the door, and go back over his head. Brandy, however, would keep going, according to Newton’s laws and the lack of friction on hardwood, and slide into the closed door at the end of the hallway. Then he would get up, retrieve the ball, bring it to us, and then beg to do it again. And again. And again.

It went like this:

run/scrape – bounce – slide – BANG – run/scrape – drool – BARK BARK BARK

So that may have been our fault, for continuing to play along with the dog’s desire to crash into doors…buit this one was all him.

I was out in a field at home, tossing balls up and hitting fly balls to my nephew Tim(Brandy’s brother, if you will). Brnady was there, and I’d hit the ball and he’d start to chase it, then as Tim would throw it back he’d chanse it then, and we’d repeat the process. I musta repeated the process 25-50 times, and each time, Brandy would chase out and chase back.

So then, for some unknown reason, he gets “smart”. I toss the ball up, and he decides to head it off at the pass, so he jumps up to catch the ball as it falls!, somehow neglecting to realize the bat rapidly approaching his skull. I was watching the ball the whole time, and therefore didn’t see poor Brandy until my bat and his skull collided. And I clocked him! Poor dog, luckily I was only 13 or 14 at the time and didn’t have much bat speed. He whimpered and whined for a little bit, walked it off, and seemed otherwise okay, but he didn’t chase any more balls that day.

There were other events, I think he was hit by three or four cars in his day, and each time he’d come home with cuts/bruises/limps, but he’d heal and be the same ole Brandy.

Until I allowed him to commit suicide.

My sister’s house had a deck, which they had tore down to build a new one. By this time, Brandy was 10, and the injuries had taken their toll. He was blind, with a limp, and there was debate whether or not to have him put down. The main reason against was my niece and nephew’s vehement protests, but it would have been soon.

Anyway, poor Brandy is blind, and bumping into things all the time. I was to the sliding glass door where the deck used to be, to yell out a question to my brother-in-law. Only opened the door wide enough to stick my head out. This blind dog, somehow, manages to walk right through the 1 foot wide gap now there, and stpes onto the deck.

Which is no longer there.

I have had a lucky life, I haven’t seen much tragedy, but the Fall Of Brandy will be one I remember my whole life. He did a half rotation as he fell, landing on his back, which I believe broke on impact. He died about 5 minutes later.

Me & my bro-in-law buried him, amid many tears from the family. My family had told me over and over that it was for the best, which is true, but I can still see him falling.

Of course, my family has the sick sense of humor that my aunt came home one day, about 10 years later, with a t-shirt with Brandy’s picture on the front and on the back, it says:

“Who Let The Dog Out?”

Sorry about the long, pointless post, but hopefully you’ll see the humor in this story, as the dog WAS well loved, and just made some bad decisions.

For those of you begging me to get the pictures up, I’ve tossed up a few pics of JJ and family. I’m running a bit low on disk space for barnson.org, which is also part of the reason I’ve put off poor Sam for so long on mirroring their pictures 🙂 It’s about time to buy the next gigabyte I guess…

So I moved out of the city (Perryville, MD, pop 2000) to the country (Rock Run Road, 2 acres, only house on my “street”). No more using the townhouse mailbox cluster, now I had to dig a hole, sink a post, and have a good ‘ole American mailbox.

We were in a hurry to get everything finished while building the house, so when my builder told me I needed a mailbox set, I told him I’d do it myself. Having been told stories about evil mailbox marauders, I purchased a cheapy plastic one for about $5 at Home Depot, mounted it on a 4×4 wood post, and voila!!! I am a direct descendant of the Pony Express.

Until Saturday night, when it was destroyed…

The post is still standing, and the bottom of the mailbox is still attached to the post, but the rest of the mailbox is in tatters.

I know I was told it would happen, and I know I purchased a cheap mailbox to offset the replacement costs, but I was still pretty peeved about it. They destroyed my mailbox! They attacked me!!!

Now, being an industrious American, I figured now that I have time, I’d make me a iron-reinforced stone mailbox enclosure that could double as my bomb-shelter when they launch the big ones….but, my bro-in-law, who works for the Post Office, tells me that’s illegal. Something about having to give way to a car that might hit it, instead of splitting the car in two.

What’s THAT about? I can’t make my property resist destruction, in the case that someone who can’t drive might hit it??? Or I guess I should wait for the police officers to catch them? No thanks, I’d rather they be out prosecuting the real criminals, but please allow me to defend my property! I guess I COULD mount a motion activated video camera to get license tag numbers of every car that goes by…I’ll see if I can get a grant from MDOT for that.

You know, America has become the home of “take no risks because some idiot will mess up and then sue you”. When did bad luck or stupidity become the right of eveyone to profit from?

My $.02 Weed