Author: matthew

If you’ve found yourself a fan of both Star Wars (due out May 19, 2005), and Firefly (due out September 30, 2005), I think you’ll get a real kick out of this recent PvP comic strip.

So in my inbox this morning, I received a message explaining the benefits of WD-40. Rather than re-post the whole list to my blog, I’ll just link to some sites that have the list.

The one that stuck out in my mind was that WD-40 “Gives floors that ‘just-waxed’ sheen without making it slippery”.

I attempted this feat once with Armor-All.

Well, it made the floor shiny, at least.

I’ll leave it to Christy to describe the implications of that exciting month…

Here’s your daily dose of useless ‘Net toys. Try changing to “mouse mode” to be able to control the destruction…

You know, every so often, you stretch your limits.

I recently started a new position with a security company in Utah. It’s big, it’s faceless, but I have great co-workers who I enjoy and relate to. I’m sure many of you are familiar with just this kind of environment: very good people, very positive work environment, but with the looming shadow of “corporate” possibly making decisions that seem to happen in a vacuum.

Anyway, the funny thing to me is, I learned today that you can go your whole life thinking you’re good at something, just to find out that, really, you’re not all that good at it.

See, my job involves a lot of technical writing. A whole lot. Well, basically, that’s what it is. I’m a System Administrator by trade. I interviewed for this contracting gig, and was surprised that they wanted a SysAdmin. It’s a “Security Analyst” position, and it’s all about writing down how I fix stuff.

It’s really kind of cool, in its way. I love to write, anyway (as evidenced by this blog), I’m fairly fast at it, and I do it a lot.

Anyway, I sat down for a quick editing session with my co-worker today, who has experience as an editor.

Oh. My. So much red ink.

I learned three interesting lessons:

1. When writing technical documentation, I rely on “gerunds” way too much. Gerunds are words that end with “ing”: fishing, boating, hiking. I create sentences, completely clear to me, that are opaque to readers, such as “developing auditing policies is critical for avoiding operating integrity issues”. That’s actually kind of a nonsense sentence, but it gives a sense of how I’ve been writing. Bad Matt!
2. I also learned the difference between which and that. The difference is small to most people, but in technical writing, it’s important that relative pronouns are used correctly. The paradoxical mnemonic, as mentioned in the description, is “use that to tell which, and which to tell that”.
3. Complex statements are best broken up into several shorter statements. The result will be wordier, but easier to read. I tend, often with many interrupting clauses and difficult-to-grok phrases in which I delay the verb until close to the end, to create very lengthy, complicated sentences 🙂

Yeah, OK, we already know that I am the supreme nerd god. I enjoy this kind of minutiae. Rephrasing statements is a kind of syntactic drug, searching for unique and interesting ways to say the same thing you’ve just said 20 times in a row.

As a matter of fact, we just had a discussion about that. My co-worker suggested that writing was crack cocaine, and really good writing was… well, we faltered there. We struggled with maybe using meth instead. I think we eventually ended up with “writing is like dumpster diving; good writing is like dumpster diving your next-door-neighor and finding some good meth in the bottom.”

Probably the world’s crappiest metaphor!

Anyway…

What oddities of English did you learn this week?

EDIT by matthew: Glaring grammatical errors fixed. By Grapthar’s Hammer, I will be avenged!

You know what I hate? When I go Googling to research a topic that I’m trying to learn more about, and the only web page that comes up which is remotely relevant is on my own site where I’ve discussed the topic before. I hate that!

What are your favorite Internet Hates?

I feel like such a poser.

As most of you know, there are a few facts about me when it comes to my line of work:

1. I’m a college dropout
2. I’m self-educated
3. I’m hard-working under deadline
4. I’m opinionated
5. I’m knowledgeable
6. I’m cheerful

The problem is, that’s just not enough to redeem my sense of inadequacy. No fewer than three times yesterday, I had co-workers come up and introduce themselves. Their questions were invariably:

• Are you Jay’s brother? (my brother Jay worked here before I signed on)
• So you’re our security analyst…
  • Where’d you get your security training?
  • Where’d you graduate from college, and what was your major?

You know, I’ve gotten along fine without the college degree. I’ve learned a ton about the trade over the last decade, and from the results I’m getting, apparently someone with my level of operating systems knowledge is unusual in the business.

But man, do I ever feel inadequate. I mean, first off, my older brother Jay is apparently venerated as a demigod around here. No, I’m not kidding. Not a single person has said a single bad thing about him, and most have sung his praises and said they really wished he was still here. Not like the place has gone to hell in a handbasket or anything since he left, but just that there’s apparently a shortage of really solid programmers willing to work in Quality Assurance.

So that’s the first thing. I know I’m being compared to my big brother, who I readily admit has better social skills and considerably better technical skills than I do. Strike one.

And then there’s “What’s your degree?” (No degree, but I majored in Music Theory and Composition), “Where’d you go to school” (a hick college in Rexburg, Idaho, and I dropped out), and “What kind of security training do you have” (on-the-job work with a ton of different hardware, but no certifications), and it’s enough that I feel like a redneck in muddy boots, plaid jacket, and a baseball cap, attending a black-tie opera.

I figure I’ll get my legs, but like most new places, I can’t rely on a long list of impressive credentials to get me through. I can’t even rely on the good name of my big brother 🙂 I feel as if I have to push harder, get more done, and show that I’m better than the rather low expectations set for me in order to be respected.

It’s always a hard road. And I’ve been known to fall flat on my face more than once trying. I find myself wondering if having that slip of paper saying “Bachelor’s Degree” makes this any easier.

So what does it take for you to feel out-of-place, anyway? I don’t think I’m alone in enormous feelings of inadequacy…

I recently had a terse response from a list member on one of my discussion forums. She holds very strongly, it appears, to Christianity. I have no objection to her opinions, but she’d held out as fact many propositions which were quite debatable. I formulated a lengthy response, and received a very short missive in reply.

I just wanted to archive my response here, because so often I receive similar replies equating science to a religion, and I think that I stumbled across a line of reasoning that might help me quantify the difference in the future.

On 4/30/05, Bonnie…. wrote: > You have a very definate belief system that works for you–good luck with > that! Mine is different and it works too. True maturity is realizing that > we are both right.

Allow me to begin with a quote.

“Celestial navigation is based on the premise that the Earth is the center of the universe. The premise is wrong, but the navigation works. An incorrect model can be a useful tool.” — Kelvin Throop III

I’m afraid I dsiagree entirely with “true maturity is realizing that we are both right”.

1. “No True Scotsman” fallacy. Should I disagree with your definition of “maturity”, you could counter with “that’s not *true* maturity”. It makes the definition of the word “maturity” malleable to mean whatever you wish it to mean at the time. 2. The proposition that “maturity is realizing that we are both right”. Maturity is many things, including physical weight gain, height gain, the dropping of the testes and production of eggs by the ovaries, and the pruning of little-used neural connections in the brain to optimize operations. An individual is fully physiologically mature (including synaptic pruning) somewhere between twenty-five and twenty-nine. Emotional maturity is virtually impossible to quantify, though most of us (including me) routinely decide other people don’t have it.

So, unfortunately, I disagree completely that “true maturity is realizing that we are both right”. I would agree with, “respect for one another is realizing that we are both probably wrong.” I respect your opinion, but that respect does not imply reverence or inviolability from criticism. It is only from withstanding repeated scrutiny that opinions begin to resemble reality.

If you are a religionist (though you have not stated it), you have a model that works. I acknowledge its validity for you and I’m certain it’s useful.

However, do you think your model might be flawed? Could it be wrong?

Isaac Newton, for instance, figured out an excellent model for the interactions of mass. On a “human” scale, Newtonian physics works almost perfectly. One can predict many things, and be right the vast majority of the time.

Yet Newton’s model was subject to odd perturbations, and it took a great deal of time and testing to determine why. It could not handle extremely massive (planet-sized) or tiny (atom-sized) objects. For very massive or high-velocity objects, Einstein discovered the Theory of Relativity, and repeated testing over the last ninety years has verified its validity. For very tiny particles, in 1900 Planck theorized on the existenced of “quantization”, and “quantum mechanics” or “quantum physics” was founded. Thirty years later, physicists began experimenting on the theory, and finding that it held true.

We use both Relativity and atomic quantization daily. If you are sitting at a computer, you are using the results of Quantum Theory. The speed of light used as a constant in mathematical equations underlies the signal theory used to beam a signal to your television.

If confronted with incontrovertible proof that your chosen model is wrong, would you change your opinion on it?

It’s not something I want an answer for, really. There’s an apt quote for that, as well.

“To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.” — Thomas Paine

Sincerely, — Matthew P. Barnson

I’m a big fan of three things that I get in X-Windows (on UNIX systems) which I don’t usually get in Microsoft Windows:

1. Middle-click pasting 2. Whatever I’m selecting automatically going to the clipboard. 3. Focus following mouse, allowing me to keep one application in the foreground while actually typing on the application in the background.

Usually wherever I’m contracting (at the moment, a software security company in Utah), I’m stuck using Windows despite how productive I am in Linux. Occupational hazard, I suppose. There are a few utilities I use to make my life easier when stuck using a legacy operating system such as Microsoft’s Windows:

* Cygwin. This gives me an X-Windows server (for easy interoperability with UNIX applications on remote servers which require X), a Bash shell, and most of the regular non-graphical utilities which I’m used to having on a UNIX system. * Putty. The only terminal emulator I’ve seen which surpasses Putty in usefulness is Konsole, and that is only available in KDE on a UNIX machine. It’s very flexible; if it only had tabbed windows and a more intuitive configuration dialog, it would be perfect. * Vim. I download the compiled version for MS Windows, and it runs fast and flexibly. I can gain equal utility using vim inside of an rxvt window, but sometimes rxvt seems a little bit slow when pasting a massive quantity of text. The W32 version of vim doesn’t seem to have that problem. * And now my new find for the morning: The True X Mouse Utility. You just drag this puppy into your Startup folder, and instantly you have really decent utility. The focus follows the mouse (so you don’t have to click an application in order to work in it), selection of text automatically copies that text to the clipboard (unless you middle-click while selecting, in which case it lets you select without copying), middle-clicking pastes instead of that bizarre “CTRL-C” thing, and overall it’s nifty keen. For a UNIX admin who frequently switches between X-Windows and Microsoft Windows, it’s a lifesaver. Your habits hold true for both operating systems.

Except now I have to find a mouse mod for regular X-windows which lets me abort a selection-copy using the middle button. That’s really swell.

Dig it. I have many pages up here which I mainly use as an archive to remind me of cool utilities which make my life easier. This is one of them 🙂

— Matt B.

This was sent to me by “Peggy” on one of my mailing lists. Hope you enjoy the picture. It’s one of many things convincing me that St. Helens still has a lot of life left in her.

“MT. St. Helens, which sits about 30 miles from our house as the crow flies, continues to spew ash, while it is forming a lava dome in the crater and still having minor tremors. Here, in this sunrise shot, she appears to be blowing smoke rings (and anything so benign is welcomed, given recent history.)

Picture by Brent and Jan LeBaron

What forms the “smoke rings” is the air flowing over the mountain getting pushed up higher as it goes up and over the top. The moisture content and initial temperature are just right so that the moisture condenses from a vapor to small particles at the higher altitude. When the moving air moves past the peak and comes down again, the particles evaporate back to an invisible vapor. The two “pancakes” describe that there are two layers of air for which this is happening, thus making this awesome picture possible.”

I’ve studiously avoided discussion of the new Pope guy. I figure it’s really none of my business, since I’m not a Catholic, but I just hope he doesn’t turn out to be the butthead he appears to be from his pronouncement history because, well, his actions affect about 1/5 of the world’s population.

Anyway, Colin Goodman sent me a link to this fun little forum avatar. It made me grin, maybe it will you, too. Be sure to watch it for a few seconds.

PS: Happy Birthday to me. 32 today. Woot!