Author: matthew

For the many who attempted to visit this morning, I apologize. It turns out there was a cross-site scripting vulnerability in the weblogging software in use here at barnson.org. I upgraded to the latest version.

Known-broken stuff:

• Private messages aren’t working. Note: Fixed this, working now.
• The “theme”, or look-and-feel, of the site isn’t what it used to be. It turns out that the theme I slaved over to get just the way I wanted it isn’t working (yet) with the new codebase. I’ll be doing some programming over the coming days to get this back the way I want it. After some effort, and remembering little hacks I’d done two years ago, I got it looking mostly like it’s the same website again, with the exception of the missing avatars (which were totally changed for this version, it will take time to fix). Still some spacing tweaks to be done, but overall I’m pleased that the look and feel is similar. Now it’s time to plan my next site redesign around the same color scheme, but an improved layout…
• The photo album is gone. I think I’m going to actually leave it permanently gone from its old location, and instead begin using the new photo functionality within Drupal. So long, Gallery. This also means I’ll have to go back and fix some links for pictures, though…
• But on the plus side, the MP3’s are all working!

Let me know if you run into any weird issues not mentioned above; I’ll update this page when maintenance is fully complete. In the meantime, post all you like!

You know the scenario. You are walking down a long hallway. Someone else is walking the opposite way. You’re going to be walking toward each other for at least the next twenty seconds, yet neither of you know each other.

What do you do?

I’m playing this game with myself today: trying to act in a (very slightly) unconventional manner when in a public area. The traditional response, when approaching a person down a long hallway with nobody else in sight, seems to be to find something interesting to look at along the sides of the hallway until within speaking distance of the other person, then quickly look at them, give a brief nod, small gesture, or “hello”, then move onward. This situation changes if there are other people in the hallway; people stare at their feet, sometimes speed up to be walking near the other person whom they apparently know if they don’t know you, etc. If people are carrying papers on that long approach, they’ll tend to shuffle or straighten them with great interest, rather than make prolonged eye contact on that long approach.

I found this morning that simply watching them as they walk towards you definitely creeps them out 🙂 I was playing my little game, and decided to watch this guy as we approached each other. He desparately looked left, right, up, and down, seemingly finding interesting things to look at during our very long approach down a very long hallway, with frequent glances in my direction to see if I was still staring at him.

He gave an audible sigh after I passed and gave a cheerful “howdy!”, moving on.

What interesting body language have you run into? I’m trying to pay more attention to people’s body language these days (a language that, really, still feels like a foreign language to me), and it’s kind of fun figuring out the unspoken social graces which grease the cogs of society.

So this morning I was listening to the radio, and the topic of discussion was labor unions. In particular, labor unions and Wal-Mart.

Wal-Mart’s union history is long and checkered. Employees have repeatedly attempted to form unions, and been met with impressive stonewalling tactics, from shutting down stores where employees were organizing, to firing employees involved in organizing a union, or refusing to hire employees who had previously belonged to a union. The Wal-Mart management handbook states that managers should be “constantly alert to any signs your associates are interested in a union… Wal-Mart is opposed to unionization. You, as a manager, are expected to support the company’s position.

They include an aggressive anti-union video as part of their indoctrination process, and weekly meetings which frequently discuss labor issues in an attempt to prevent workers from supporting unionization.

Some estimates suggest nearly 40% of Wal-Mart’s 1.3 million workers rely on welfare (your tax dollars) to pay for their health insurance due to Wal-Mart’s cost-cutting practices: 28-to-32-hour work weeks, low pay, and extremely high health insurance costs. Workers have provided compelling evidence that Wal-Mart went to great lengths to educate workers on how to apply for public assistance in lieu of company-provided health insurance.

Yet on the other side of the coin, the company is known for hiring disabled people and the elderly as door greeters, being a cheerful place to work, and that for most employees, it does not represent their primary income-earning outlet. There’s a case to be made that the case against Wal-Mart is overblown. The language of Wal-Mart opponents, such as “third-world slave-labor camps” lends itself to easily discounting their opinions as biased. And heck, my family shops there.

Wal-Mart brings in more cash than all but the six largest nations in the world (by GDP). Unionizing Wal-Mart: Good, or bad, for America?

So today I was yukking it up with Jenny Gagne over ICQ. The conversation went like this:

 (12:25:16) Me: That's a good story! You should blog it! (12:26:13) Jen Gagne: Heh. :) (12:26:41) Jen Gagne: My favorite story I ever blogged was my 9/11 shark bite story. Did I show you that one? (12:26:56) Me: URI? (12:27:49) Jen Gagne: http://www.livejournal.com/users/jengagne/19760.html (12:29:57) Me: Reading :) (12:30:12) Jen Gagne: Think you'll love it. :D (12:31:30) Me: I'm gonna have to blog about your blog, you know. (12:31:42) Jen Gagne:  Sure. It's all about recursion. 

So in case you aren’t good at cutting-and-pasting, click here to read her funny (and somewhat macabre) sharkbite story. Doing my part for the recursive recursing society…

So when I was in high school, one of my friends (was it Justin, or someone else?) used to say, “Wow, vuja de. I have the most incredible feeling that I’ve never been here before.”

If said aloud, you’ll realize it’s “deja vu” spelled sideways.

Anyway, so today, I finally learned that there’s a real term to describe the phenomenon, called “Jamais vu”, or “the experience of being unfamiliar with a person or situation that is actually very familiar”. Not exactly the same thing, but close enough for government work.

There it is again. Lurking in my email inbox like a tiger hunting its prey. Giggling at me behind the veil of gentility, mocking me. Smirking at me during meetings, provoking me unintentionally with both its ubiquitousness and fundamental inaccuracy. I know I should ignore it, yet I cannot. It draws me like a moth to a flame, like Homer Simpson to a caramel bologna sandwich. It’s compelling, and yet… so, so wrong.

The Needful.

“File system /db0a1 is 98% full. Please do the needful.”

“Yes, will you please do the needful to fix this?”

“The needful is to overwrite the existing files with…”

Yes, those two little words. The. Needful. The word “The”, by itself, is innocuous! One of the most common words in the English language. “Needful”, too, by itself has nothing wrong with it. It is an adjective, a part of speech used to describe a given thing as necessary, or required. Put it together with a noun, such as “thing”, or “actions”, or, well, really, any noun you wish; it is innocuous and descriptive. “The Needful Thing”. Just the kind of word a proper adjective should be.

And yet today, particularly in corporate technology cultures dominated by non-native speakers, it is a phrase that has acquired life of its own, devoid of the noun it was supposed to support. It’s as if, somewhere along the line, “The” and “Needful” just chucked the noun out of the stationwagon at fifty miles and hour, shouted “So long, sucker!” in unison, and left it in the dust at the side of the road near Silicon Valley as they sped up to match the flow of traffic along highway 101. I think they probably whipped out a handgun and peppered a few cars with bullets in their new-found catalystic freedom. Teenagers, you know. What can you do about their youthful exuberance?

So The and Needful together decided that they were a noun, with all the rights and privileges thereof, and found a fertile breeding ground for this point of view in the lexicon of technical workers. And in so doing, they continually irritate language purists everywhere. I include myself in that distinguished and geriatric association, despite my frequent and painful abuses of the language.

Every time I see these emails in my inbox, my brain automatically substitutes the word “thing” after “the needful”, with another person-shaped rubber stamp used on a stray neuron to up the counter of times I’ve seen that particular phrase.

Yet when I hear or read the phrase “The Needful”, in absence of a noun, a part of me wants to whip out my patent-pending Foam-Rubber Clue-Bat of Righteousness and whack the user over the head repeatedly, while shouting “Where is the noun, man, where is he? Just chucked him out of the car, did you, without a second thought for his safety? You will pay for your treachery!”

I suspect my incarceration would be swift even if short, and I would be introduced to more abuses of language than my ears care to hear. Alas, the Clue-Bat should remain safely hidden in the upstairs closet next to my 1988 Mako-branded generic electric guitar purchased at Victor Litz Music near Lakeforest Mall for $75.00. There among the dusty belongings The Bat cries out to be used, vigilante-style, against this violation of the language. But in this age of litigiousness, it is better to simply pull it out late at night, the candlelight illuminating the beaded sweat on my forehead as I murmer “My Precious” and slowly thwack the hefty Clue-Bat against my damp left palm.

“The Needful”. Ugh.

What is to be done?

EDIT by matthew: OK, obviously I need to explain what this essay is about. Dangit. Anyway, in the technical field you get a lot of “jargon”. The latest jargon, predominantly in use by non-native-speakers, seems to be using the phrase “Please do the needful” instead of “Please take care of this”, “Please help resolve this problem”, or the more mundane “Dude, it’s broken, fix it”. I guess I assumed it was more widespread than it actually is, or that more people have experience working with non-native-English-speakers in technical fields who tend to use shortcuts when they talk. Hope that explains it a little.

So Siebel Systems laid me off today. Dang. I kind of expected it for the last several months, though. I’ve been very busy, but not in the department into which I was hired; in other words, I was benefitting one department while another one which wasn’t making money paid me.

The background there is that they created a new group to handle application management services. There was a big account lined up, and they began staffing in order to handle the account.

Then the account fell through. Then they replaced the head of the division, who froze all new initiatives for review for several months. Ours was one which got the axe. Oh, well.

Anyway, so I’m on the job market again. I’ve updated my resume to reflect my recent experience. I have a couple of contracts that I can ramp up my progress on now that I have time, I got some severance, and our income tax return should be very reasonable this year, so I’m not too worried about our immediate prospects.

But if you guys know of someone looking for a UNIX admin, and are willing to pay decently (keeping in mind that the D.C. area is 18% more expensive to live in than my current arrangement), let me know!

Bored now? Speaking of comic books, try this page on for size.

News of the weird:

From http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1321235/posts

BAYREUTH – Baffled authorities in southern Germany have issued an alert concerning unknown persons who have been sticking small US flags into piles of dog droppings in public parks in Bayreuth.

“This has been going on for about a year now, and there must be 2,000 to 3,000 piles of excrement that have been thusly ‘adorned’ during that time,” said Bayreuth parks administrator Josef Oettl.

The sporadic series of incidents originally was thought to be some sort of protest against the US-led invasion of Iraq. And when it continued it was thought to be a protest against President George W. Bush’s campaign for re-election.

Bayreuth police say they are completely baffled.

“We have sent out extra patrols to try to catch whoever is doing this in the act,” said police spokesman Reiner Kuechler. “But frankly, we don’t know what we would do if we caught them red- white- and-blue handed.”

Legal experts agreed, saying there is no law against using faeces as a flag stand and the federal constitution is vague on the issue.

OK, I normally don’t post blog entries from work, but this was just too weird to wait. My commute took an hour and a half this morning (rather than the usual 35 minutes) due to the freeway being shut down because cops found a guy staggering along Interstate 80, shot four times. They think he was a kidnapping victim, but cops are being fairly closed-mouthed about the whole thing at this poit.

The Highway Patrol says the man was shot twice in the arm, once in the leg and once in the side of the head.

Talk about your basic bad way to start your day: shoved out of a car alongside a freeway and shot four times at 3 in the morning. To add insult to injury, they dumped him off in Utah.

Oy. And I think it’s a bad day when my milk’s gone sour. According to the latest reports on the radio, though, the man is expected to be just fine. He’s drifting in and out of consciousness, but they’ve stabilized him.

That’s gotta be an interesting story when it comes out.