Author: matthew

I cringe to look at these pictures (not explicit, not gross, just the implications): http://basia.blog-city.com/tykes_on_bikes.htm

Entire families riding on a single motorcycle. Life is cheap in India, I guess.

Sample photo:

I ran across a piece that gives a concise description of why we are currently withdrawing from Iraq (according to the President’s news conference yesterday) and the motivations for this move. Although some of my more liberal friends, I am sure, will take issue with the reasons for withdrawal and positive emphasis on the timing, it’s a useful description of the motivations for the move.

I think it’s interesting that, lately, the right-wing has begun emphasizing the talking point that we are withdrawing “based upon our successes”. As if withdrawal from Iraq is some kind of cookie for doing a good job. I’m not on-board with that analysis, though. I think it’s an excuse for trying to sweeten the well for the coming election. Bush has encountered a hostile congress, and the back-pedaling seems, to me, to be a lame attempt to try to reconcile in time to get incumbent parties re-elected come this Fall.

Too little, too late. Although the anti-incumbency sentiment was at its height in 2006, I think enough remains that we’re going to end up with a Democratic White House and at least either the Senate or House of Representatives is going to tip Republican.

From the noises they are all making lately, though, I’m not sure it makes much difference what party controls the Congress. My party — the Republican party — held the ideals of less government, lower taxes, strong military, and fiscal responsibility dear. The current Administration, both Presidential candidates, and the Congress, seem to be ignoring those ideals.

Yeah, you read that right, NASA is in need of more urine in order to test their Orion space capsule.

Odd request. Even odder that they’ve filled it. But based on the trickle of jokes on Slashdot, I foresee a stream of responses.

Two weekends ago, I had an opportunity to ride my father-in-law’s four-wheeler around the ruins of the Teton Dam. It was an incredibly good time, and now I realize the appeal that these types of tiny vehicles provide. It’s a totally different experience from riding a car.

So, in typical Matthew style, I read up on the sport. An overriding interest of mine is “how do I avoid getting hurt?”, since I have heard and read all kinds of horror stories about people new to motorcycles or four-wheelers really hurting themselves. To that end, I found The Hurt Report. I came to the following conclusions:

1. Take a safety course. Fully 92% of all motorcycle accident victims did not take a safety course. That’s a pretty staggering statistic to me. If you are self-taught or had a family member or friend teach you, you’re eleven times more likely to be in an accident.
2. Don’t ride a motorbike if you’re between ages 16 and 24. No, seriously, statistics indicate that you’re judgment-impaired. You’re safest if you’re between 30 and 50.
3. If you’re a manual laborer, student, or unemployed, you may want to hold off on buying that cool motorcycle until you change careers.
4. Put fairings and windshields on your motorcycle.
5. Ride with your lights on.
6. Wear brightly-colored clothing in orange, red, or yellow.
7. Over half of all fatal motorcycle accidents involve alcohol consumption. Don’t ride your motorcycle late at night when there are likely to be drunk drivers on the road, and of course, don’t drink and drive.
8. Wear a helmet. Those who wear helmets are less likely to get into an accident. Almost all motorcycle accidents occur within a 45 degree field of vision in front of the rider, so complaints about lost peripheral vision when wearing a helmet are irrelevant to safety; you’re much safer with a helmet than without.
9. A bigger motorcycle is less likely to be involved in a crash, but is more likely to hurt you severely if you do crash.
10. Intersections are the most dangerous for motorcycles; be extra-careful there.
11. If you have had a moving violation in the past three years, don’t ride a motorcycle.

Now, admittedly, some of these statistics are kind of funny, like “rule yourself out if you’re aged 16 through 24”. But according to the demographics represented, I’m a perfect candidate to be a safe motorcycle rider.

I do hate wearing orange, though.

I’ve been struck over the past few days with the scope of the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bailouts. I mean, we’re talking about the taxpayers footing the bill for the difference between US house values and the borrowed price for a $5 trillion portfolio.

These bailouts are rising in cost and graft, with FNMA boasting $1M+ salaries for the top twenty executives and over $250M in bonuses over the past five years to those same twenty. These were supposed to be organizations devoted to bringing housing to those who could not otherwise afford it, not institutions responsible for absorbing over half of the entire nation’s housing debt.

Capitalism is dead. Or, if it’s not dead, it’s certainly being handed its hat.

My yard has a terrible gopher problem. I’m not talking just a few burrows… I’m talking DOZENS of holes. The gophers are eating the roots of our plants, we can’t grow a garden because they literally pull the plants down the hole — much like in Caddyshack — and then devour them.

Frustrating!

This morning was the final straw. Our master bedroom is in the basement. Although not as spacious as I would like, it’s very nice because in the summer it remains cool despite the heat. Apparently, a gopher fell into our window well while exploring. He proceeded to dig his way out. He woke me up with the sound of his scrabbling in the dirt. I could hear him working away for hours afterward, too.

So I broke out the shovel and the hose, using the time-honored “flood ’em and whack ’em” method of gopher hunting. Unfortunately, either I drowned a couple in their burrows, or they found a safe hiding place from the water. None ever surfaced for me to smash into paste with my trusty shovel.

How sad. I wanted some extra meat for my stew tonight.

Anyway, I got to researching online in order to understand my enemy better. I wanted to know their habits, what they eat, what attracts and repels them, everything I could so that I could more effectively combat this burrowing menace. The better you know your enemy, the better you can fight them. As General Patton said to Erwin Rommel upon defeating his forces in North Africa, “Rommel, you magnificent bastard! I read your book!”

Rather than what I was looking for, I found something else. The Final Solution for burrowing rodents. I found The Rodenator.

HELL YEAH! That’s what I’m talking about! Flood their burrow with a mixture of oxygen and propane, then ignite it. A concussive wave kills or incapacitates the gopher. That same shock wave explodes and collapses the burrow, preventing re-infestation (a big problem: you might kill the gopher, but new owners may move in later. Less work for the new gopher!) Dead gopher. Satisfying explosion. Real results.

The expense is a bit high at $2,000 for the basic kit. So I guess I’ll rent one instead. It will be worth it to kill those varmints. Wile E. Coyote got nothing on me. BLAM!

Man gets filled with the holy ghost, falls, gets hurt, sues: http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2008/0605081spirit1.html

I am alternately roasting and freezing in this building today. The air conditioning to the network operating center is on the fritz, causing the temperature to alternately rise to over ninety degrees, then fall to a frigid fifty a few minutes later. This just exacerbates my mood, already pensive and tight-lipped, just barely restraining the rant I want to cut loose.

A number of years ago, I encountered the term “Cargo Cult“. This refers to a number of new religious movements formed in the wake of World War II on various Pacific islands in response to the departure of military forces:

A cargo cult is [a] religious movement appearing in tribal societies in the wake of interaction with technologically-advanced, non-native cultures — which focus upon obtaining the material wealth of the advanced culture through magical thinking as well as religious rituals and practices — while believing that the materials were intended for them by their deities and ancestors… Cargo cults maintain that the manufactured goods (“cargo”) of the non-native culture have been created by spiritual means, such as through their deities and ancestors, and are intended for the local indigenous people, but that, unfairly, the foreigners have gained control of these objects through attraction of these material goods to themselves by malice or mistake.

Cargo cults thus focus on efforts to overcome what they perceive as the undue influence of the others attracting the goods, by conducting rituals imitating behavior they have observed among the holders of the desired wealth…

One of the most striking features of cargo cults was their attempt to attract cargo through the use of torch-lighted dirt runways, coconut-shell headphones, intricately-carved handsets made of wood that looked like walkie-talkies, air traffic control towers made of palm trees, and imitation airplanes parked on taxiways, all in an effort to attract the thing they want. By chattering into their fake walkie-talkies, wearing fake headphones, and pretending that some examples of what they wanted were already in their possession, the cargo-cultists hoped to regain their lost prosperity.

Of course, as we all know, form follows function in aviation and war. Imitating the form without the function is completely useless.

This reminds me of the much-ballyhood new-age obfuscatory hogwash people call “the law of attraction” today.

At the time, I thought it was an interesting and useful analogy to various corporate practices. Often, corporate America observes another company following a successful strategy and changes its own strategy to match in order to compete. What they frequently miss, though, is the underpinning cultural and historic reasons for certain processes that grew organically in the company they observed. Far from bringing about the expected changes, often this corporate cargo-cultism results in wasted man-centuries of effort trying to imitate what they don’t understand.

Last week, I delegated a job to a co-worker. It was simple, but would be lengthy and involve a good deal of iterative deployment to get right. Redhat changed the format of their Kickstart file between Redhat Enterprise 4 and Redhat Enterprise 5. While I was trivially able to port the script from 3 to 4, the move from 4 to 5 was more complicated, and I was too short on time to debug it. I asked the co-worker to please take ownership of this job, use two particular systems to test his deployment, and then run with the process for future deployments.

What I received one week later, instead, was my own kickstart setup with five lines modified, a copy of the correct directory from the new distribution, and a polite request that I go test this obviously non-working kickstart setup on the two machines I had delegated for this co-worker to test on.

This was not the first time I’d delegated a job that included a lot of troubleshooting, iterative testing, and problem-solving skills, just to have him hand it back to me because he obviously had no idea what he was doing.

“GGRRRRAAAAARRRRRGGGHHHH!!!” I screamed in disbelief and rage.

My skin split and peeled away, revealing the green mass beneath. My hair turned a deep green, and my eyes a fiery red. Suddenly I was ten times more massive than usual, gained three feet of height, and was filled with an all-consuming hatred of IT and all things technical.

I was lucky. It was lunchtime, and no other co-workers were in the office. I jumped hard, and punched a twenty-foot hole into the ceiling, dislodging an air conditioning compressor unit and displacing thousands of pounds of building material. I went on a rampage in the warehouse district of Salt Lake City, demolishing cars and throwing 18-wheel tractor trailers like gigantic Tinker Toys through plate-glass windows.

“Cargo-Cult System Administration!” I yelled at the top of my lungs as I picked up a BMW and folded it into a steel taco. “Incompetent baboons playing at UNIX! Windows admins pretending to know what they know nothing about! Programmers believing sysadmins are nothing but programmers who skipped their classes! Grargh!”

I plunged my hands deep into the pavement below me, ripping up a huge chunk of asphalt and hurling it with all my might toward the data center. I might have been big, at this point, but I was no more coordinated than usual. The pavement chunk skidded to a stop a few feet shy of my Honda Insight.

Filled with remorse at almost destroying my most-favorite car ever, I shrunk back into the six-foot-tall, overweight computer geek that I am. Lucky I had a change of clothes in the back of my car.

I sheepishly called my boss and described to him the problems I’d had attempting to delegate responsibility as he had asked. He was understanding and considerate, agreeing to speak with our counterparts overseas to attempt to get some more-skilled help. For the moment, I was mollified.

Anyway, that’s why the air conditioning isn’t working right today. I think. They sure fixed that gigantic hole in the ceiling quickly, though.

OK, the first rant is that I can’t type today. I mis-spelled “rant” as “ranr”, “rand”, and “ranf” before I finally got it right.

Rant #35,636: Why do people believe other people so much?

OK, news flash: people who habitually lie can tell the truth. People who habitually tell the truth can lie. Just because I’m doing one doesn’t preclude me from doing the other.

Today at my cube, a co-worker mentioned that the ‘movie’, “What The Bleep Do We Know”, claimed that it’s really impossible for two people to be touching because the spaces between and inside atoms are very large. Even if you feel like you are touching, you’re not, really.

OK. Point taken. Truth: atoms are mostly composed of nothingness. Any solid object is actually composed of mostly empty space. No problem. Truth.

Then the same co-worker suggests that, perhaps because that is true, that some of the other things these Ramtha-followers suggested is true. Like that you create reality by observing it.

Danger, Will Robinson! Danger! Plot complication ahead!

Here I will refer you to H.G. Frankfurt’s work that I’ve referred to before: On B.S.

Back to the original point: people can lie about just certain things while being mostly truthful, or people can be selling you oceanfront property in Arizona and tell you truthfully that the “view is magnificent”.

“What The Bleep Do We Know” is a propaganda piece for a bizarre religious cult. Just because they are willing to spice their hogwash with a few truths doesn’t make the whole thing true. Their goal is to get you to subscribe to their hokey religion, and if a few things they say happen to be true along the way to that glorious goal of gaining a new, money-paying convert, so much the better.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1818197,00.html

I’m not big on churches, but as far as churches go, that’s pretty darn cool.