Author: matthew

Go to Starsky & Hutch 2004 reviewed. You know, when I read this review, I’m forcibly reminded that, sans a few details, this particular style of review could be the review for any of a number of action movies…

My favorite lines:

“A man shoots at two police officers, they shoot back, and he races away in a car.” Hmm, sounds like Beverly Hills Cop. No, wait, no, umm, that one with Jackie Chan and Chris Farrell. Or, wait…

“Two men in a car race off the end of a pier hoping to land on a yacht but crash into the water.” FREAKING SPOILER!!! AUUUGGGHHH!!!

“Cheerleaders dance with suggestive moves, and they’re wearing tiny outfits that reveal cleavage, bare abdomens, bare thighs and parts of their bare buttocks as two men look on with interest.” Sounds like I’m back in high school. Oh, wait, I was the cheerleader.

From time to time, I do a little shopping online. I actually prefer to purchase my consumer electronics this way, because I’ve generally found the price and selection far superior to what I can get at my local CompUSA. Then again, return policies are often a pain when hunting online for stuff (but, apparently, CompUSA has problems with returns as well.).

Anyway, while rummaging around the gigantic dustbin that is eBay looking at G4 iBooks and PowerBooks, I ran across a listing of “Powerbook for $150”. I thought that looked intriguing, until I read it and realized it was the same scam all over again:

THIS AUCTION IS FOR INFORMATION ONLY NOT THE ACTUAL COMPUTER!!!

This auction is for a link to a website where Apple Powerbook G4 are offered for the incredible price of $150.00. The items are brand new, never used, not refurbished or anything like that. All it takes is a little patience.

I finally decided over this weekend to get to the bottom of these “info” eBay postings. After too much research, time spent online, time spent verifying stories, I can boil down the reality for you in three words:

It’s a scam.

OK, yeah, wiser heads than me could have figured out right from the get-go that you’re not going to get a $1500 computer for $150. But I finally figured out how this scam works — and the people get you both coming and going on this one. You pay them X dollars for “information” on how to get a free PowerBook. Then they rope you into the “program”.

What’s the “program”? Well, they’ll call it “network marketing”, or “matrixing”, or “the grid”, or any of a number of terms to make you think it’s anything but what it actually is.

The scheme goes something like this: For $150, you buy yourself a “position” in “the matrix”. You sign up X number of people under you, and they sign up X number of people under them, and if you’re patient and work at building a downline, eventually you’ll be shipped a brand-new Apple PowerBook. Seems like a sweet deal, doesn’t it?

Well, unfortunately, these schemes are only quasi-legal, and normally cease to exist the moment there’s a lawsuit. And, as millions of Amway (*cough*, ahem, excuse me, “Quixtar”, billing itself as an “e-commerce company”) former resellers can attest, such schemes are the road to ruin for most of their proponents.

I got sicker and sicker the more I realized that I’d heard this same story over and over again. I respect “direct sales”-oriented MLM’s. The Pampered Chef. Home Interiors. Even, (ahem: link for adult couples only) Slumber Party. These are companies with some network marketing aspect, but the main goal is that you make your money selling the product. I can respect that. But organizations where the main goal is to recruit more people is just abusive. And they contaminate the relationships people value most: friends, colleagues, people at church.

In my opinion, the only ones getting the “free Powerbooks” from eBay “Info” postings are the con artists doing the postings, who are also probably using it to fill their downline. And the average person gets sidelined by these rapscallions, buying into a “something-for-nothing” dream… and gets the shaft.

Friends don’t let friends drive pyramid schemes.

So today, for the first time, I received spam on my mobile phone. That’s right, I got spammed to my phone! And the worst part is, that I don’t have much of a leg to stand on trying to defend myself from it. It was obvious that it was tailored for SMS. The email was very short, contained no HTML or anything else.

Not like I’m going to scream “the sky is falling”, but if I got as much spam to my mobile phone email address as I do to my personal inbox, I’d be inundated and the notifications I use for business reasons would be useless since I’d tend to disregard my SMS notifications. I wonder if Sprint has something set up to “only allow SMS messages from foo” or something. Considering that they underplay SMS on their phones anyway (they encourage you to set up a gateway server and a $3,000 product instead), I doubt they will want to do anything about it.

Then again, I wonder if I brought it upon myself. The other day, I became a registered user at 3gupload.com. It’s an incredibly convenient service, where I can upload ringtones, games, pictures, etc. to my “locker” on their site, and then be able to transfer the stuff to my phone over-the-air. But I wonder if I was a victim of a drive-by spamming, or did I open myself up to it by giving my SMS address to what is reputed to be a legitimate service?

So, in my mailbox today, I got an absolutely awesome review of Mel Gibson’s new film, “The Passion of the Christ”. I’ve censored the foul language, but it actually made me laugh the first time I read it, it was so over the top. It’s by a girl named “Gabrielle”, and I won’t share any more details about the reviewer — but here’s her review.

WARNING: It is a spoiler! So read only if you’ve already seen the movie, or have no intention of seeing it, or if, like me, spoilers don’t tend to reduce your enjoyment of a movie.

SECOND WARNING: The review is graphic. Not for the exceptionally squeamish. And it’s not gonna make you want to go see it.

THIRD WARNING: I had no intention of seeing this movie myself anyway (I could hardly imagine a topic that would bore me more), but this reinforced my previously-held opinion.

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Ok, people, I have to tell you this movie was the most disgusting, horrifying, f—— made by a mad man film I have ever seen.

The ENTIRE movie was watching Jesus being flogged and watching literal chunks of his body come flying off exposing his ribs, his inner chest wall and covering his entire body with deep gashes that made him look like chopped liver.

The movie starts with him in Gethsemene praying. Then this serpent who looks like some monster out of Lord of the Rings comes out (with no eyebrows) and tries to tempt him. It follows the story pretty much to the tee, actually too much to the tee. The crucification scene is as graphic as you can get with so many close ups on this guys bloody, flesh hanging body that it just makes you want to vomit. Then after they have put one nail in one arm they decide to dislocate his other arm to put it where the soldiers want it.

They show EVERYTHING.

The end is simply this……you see the canvas that was covering his body shrink as if someone has let the air out of it and then you see Jesus sitting there with a totally perfect body except…..when he gets up there is a fricken HOLE right through his hand!!!

And that folks is how it ends. Total shock affect. That is all it was. I have no idea what Mel was going for because this did nothing to me to help me know Jesus better, make me love him (actually he said some really strange things during his torture), or make me want to understand Christianity any better. It was totally just gross, inappropriate and disgusting.

Just for affect you see a crow sitting on top of one of the crosses of one of the theives. You see this crow start pecking the eye out of the thief before a soldier shoos it away. I’m like “what in the heck was that for?”

I’m curious what the affects to Mel’s career will be after this. This really was horrible and beyond disgusting.

Major UGGGGHHHH. It is midnight now and I’m going to try to get some sleep without nightmares.

Thank the heavens it is rated R. There is nothing faith promoting about this movie and no one with any sort of queasy stomach should see this…ESPECIALLY children!!!!!!

You might have noticed that, other than comments on other people’s entries, I’ve been pretty quiet lately. In large part, it has been due to spending many hours at work, and the last thing I’m interested in upon coming home is looking at a computer screen again.

But a larger part is due to me putting in some consideration about where I want barnson.org to go. I really dig our political, social, philosophical and other discussions. And yet, when I participate, eventually my wife or someone else in the family will ask me to pull down my opinion on something or other because barnson.org is “a family site”. In some ways it is — I keep our pictures here, and my ruminations on various things. Recipes, music, that kind of stuff.

I want it to be more — yet, within the confines of its role as a family site, I cannot allow it to be certain things.

So today I registered a new domain. It will be a new site, where I will be a bit less guarded about my opinion, and hopefully, you’ll feel more open to express yours. It’s going to take me a week or two of setup to hammer down the look, feel, and functionality, but I intend to have a few features:

* BBCode-style markup for easy formatting * Moderation of posts, so that nothing starts out “front-page”, but can be moderated there by the community (or else, when we’re starting and the posts are few, the system can auto-moderate stuff to the front page now and then) * Open discussion of topics that are of interest to us. That means, the gloves are off. You’ll be able to say what you mean there without the Blue Meanie (me) censoring what you say. Within bounds, of course, I don’t want to host porn or something. * Easy blogging for those of us that don’t blog elsewhere. I hope to have urls kind of like Sourceforge, where the person’s name can be the first part of the URL (like “my-project.sourceforge.net”). * Trackback, so that you can notify other sites that you’ve written about their articles. * Ability to keep glossaries, books, etc.

My primary goal here is that I want to create a community site that’s not just another k5 or slashdot. I have a few ideas to make its focus really different from the usual thing. Part of my goal is to see if I can put together a “six degrees of separation” social experiment, and document who knows who how. It won’t start out that way, of course, and there are other sites that do similar things, but I think I have a few unique ideas that will keep it fresh and interesting.

Rest assured barnson.org is not going away. Keep posting and commenting. I’ll give you further news when I get closer to completion. I think you’ll be pleased with the results. And heck, maybe people like Justin will be convinced to move their primary blog away from LiveJournal or something 🙂

Our favorite Sunday topic-starter, Justin Timpane, has just released his latest tune, Miracle, to the web. Check it out.

My review:

OK, dude, I know you don’t have a real piano, and that piano sounds fantastic. What did you use?

Nice ballad. Good slow-dance tune. You should do a version that includes drums for the dance floor 🙂

Only complaints: a couple of sung notes were off, and near the end, there’s a sudden drop in volume that is jarring. Oh, and you need to fix up your MP3 ID3 information (you can set that in Cool Edit, just go to “View”, “Wave Properties”, then pick “MP3 ID3” (the default is “Standard RIFF”) and fill it out. That way when I play it in Winamp, I see artist, title, etc.

Overall, though, I dig it.

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?

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?

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?