Author: matthew

I wrote a little while ago about the most interesting things to talk about are the ones people are often most uncomfortable discussing. They also tend to lie on the boundaries of acceptability — where it’s OK to do one thing in one culture, but not in another. I warn you in advance, this little essay is at once long-winded, poorly focussed, and probably really “out there” to most normal people.

I remember in Glendale California, as an idealistic young Mormon Missionary, I met an Armenian family — one of many in the Glendale area. Unfortunately, I can’t remember their names… the only name I remember well is that of Armik Shahmirian, who sacrificed a lamb in our honor the day before we baptized him.

Anyway, this family had a very unique saying. In English, it reads something to the effect that “Culture is just an excuse for the way you are”.

For instance, take that tradition of sacrificing a lamb in honor of someone. No, I’m not making this up — according to Armik, it’s an Eastern Armenian tradition when you are about to celebrate something important. Yet, what is the difference between saying a prayer over a lamb before slicing its throat yourself, and going to the supermarket to purchase a lamb? What’s the difference between putting a bullet between the eyes of your old milk cow, or purchasing a rack of beef ribs at the supermarket?

Do we value life less or more, because we purchase it pre-packaged in the supermarket?

This question is of some pretty vital importance to me lately. I recently switched from a nearly-vegetarian diet (I was Vegan for a year, then ovo-lacto-fish-fowl for two — which isn’t vegetarian at all, but I digress) over to a heavily fat-and-protein based Atkins diet. Really, it’s not strictly Atkins, because I think calories do matter, so I watch calories, watch carbs, and watch my protein balance so I don’t end up with ammonia breath. But now I’m contributing so much more to the dead animal contingent of the planet.

It seems obvious to me we evolved as omnivores. We have many traits in common with other hunter-gatherers. Unfortunately, in the animal world, the only really close approximation we have in a mammal that eats a diet similar to humans seems to be the bear. Eating carbs, like berries, tends to pack on the fat. Eating meats, like that nice rotting carcass over in the corner of the cave, tend to give more protein and muscle mass. Easy comparison.

But when I go to the store on three subsequent weeks, I can be almost certain that I’m eating meat from three different animals or more. As humans, we raise these animals for meat. Pigs, for instance, have become so stupid and lazy that people are paid full-time to “plug in” male pigs into female pigs because otherwise the pigs just aren’t interested in reproducing. And yet, these are normally intelligent animals.

Are they self-aware?

I think they are. I think animals have feelings, though quite different from humans, that are every bit as real as our own. I think they are aware of themselves, just as we are of ourselves. They just aren’t as smart as we are (at least, as far as we can tell). I discard the notion of a “spirit” pretty much entirely — and I realized the other day why.

I want to build something smarter than me.

I want to program an intelligence that can think faster, longer, and harder than I possibly can. And remember more. And make better judgements. And come to better decisions, not just in my own personal space, but for humanity as a whole.

We do it in every other endeavor of life. We build planes so that we can fly, when a person flies quite poorly on arms alone. We build roads and cars to transport us at amazing speeds on land. We build computers to do math better than we do, and to beat us at chess.

We can build machines to work harder than we do. To run faster. To jump farther.

Why not to think better?

This is my dream: to have an intelligent assistant small enough to fit in the palm of my hand. That this assistant can think better and faster than I do. That I can hear what it’s thinking, or better yet, to have the results directly wired into my brain. To have a secondary memory to augment my own, either through some sort of glasses-type interface, or directly interfacing with my neurons.

And most importantly, to have a non-human to talk to.

I think we’ve done amazing work with machines in so many other pursuits of life, it’s simply a matter of time before we can create autonomous life forms that think better than we do. I really don’t think we’re going to encounter “aliens” in my lifetime… interstellar distances are just too great, and wormholes, hyperspace, superlight speed, or other theories aren’t anywhere near a reality able to overcome that ocean of emptiness.

But, I think, we can find those aliens. We must build them ourselves. And most of us won’t ever even notice they are a part of our lives until the moment of recognition has passed us by.

I got into an interesting brief discussion recently, and a key phrase stuck out in my head:

“I prefer to avoid doing systems administration by the seat of my pants”

What does it mean to do IT by the seat of your pants, really? And what is its opposite?

Those who know me well know that I’m fascinated by epistemology, or the study of knowledge. I also enjoy studying language, and where things come from. “By the seat of your pants” has grown from a popular aviation-related phrase into common usage in many forums.

To “fly by the seat of your pants” in modern usage means to decide a course of action as you go along, using your own initiative and perceptions rather than a pre-determined plan or theory.

On the other hand, the original meaning of the phrase comes from early aviation parlance. Aircraft initially had few navigation aids and flying was accomplished by means of the pilot’s judgement. (ref)

On the one hand, we have this largely negative connotation of the phrase implied by the first definition. Most people would interpret this to be a synonym for “underprepared”, “spontaneous”, or “chaotic”. Yet, the original meaning doesn’t mean this at all. It’s a very positive thing. A pilot would use his training, judgement, and skill to bring about a favorable outcome. It didn’t indicate a lack of planning — in fact, quite the opposite. A skillful pilot has to have spent a great deal of time in preparation for a mission, and yet in pre-instrument days, would also have to have an excellent sense of direction, and a knowledge of terrain and problems so thorough as to be little obstacle except in the most extreme circumstances.

The world of systems administration, to me, seems these days to still be a very “seat of the pants” affair. Despite all the time spent training, planning, writing up documents, and preparing for the unexpected, when the time comes that problems arise, more often than not the skill of the computer jockey in that chair is the key between success and failure. No amount of preparation can cover all possible situations.

My opinion? When it comes to systems administration, each admin should aspire to become an excellent “seat of the pants” admin. The big BUT, though, is that one needs to create a great flight plan.

A poorly planned mission is, barring a lucky accident, doomed to failure. A well-planned mission also has a significant chance of failure, but if you have an excellent pilot in the noisy seat, you have a much better chance of pulling through difficult times.

I read a really interesting article by Paul Graham entitled “What you can’t say”. It explores the nature of human moral taboos. It’s a thought-provoking piece that provides a few easy guidelines for wrappping one’s head around “moral fashions”.

Some gems:

• “To launch a taboo, a group has to be poised halfway between weakness and power. A confident group doesn’t need taboos to protect it.” I think about the Religious Right, and the recent proclamations against homosexuality by various religious denominations, contrasted against the Liberal Left and, among other things, the phenomenon of Political Correctness.
• “Most struggles, whatever they’re really about, will be cast as struggles between competing ideas … It’s easier to get people to fight for an idea. And whichever side wins, their ideas will also be considered to have triumphed, as if God wanted to signal his agreement by selecting that side as the victor … We often like to think of World War II as a triumph of freedom over totalitarianism. We conveniently forget that the Soviet Union was also one of the winners.”
• “So if you want to figure out what we can’t say, look at the machinery of fashion and try to predict what it would make unsayable. What groups are powerful but nervous, and what ideas would they like to suppress? What ideas were tarnished by association when they ended up on the losing side of a recent struggle? If a self-consciously cool person wanted to differentiate himself from preceding fashions (e.g. from his parents), which of their ideas would he tend to reject? What are conventional-minded people afraid of saying?”
• On the question of why raise questions about forbidden subjects in society: “To do good work you need a brain that can go anywhere. And you especially need a brain that’s in the habit of going where it’s not supposed to.”
• “Training yourself to think unthinkable thoughts has advantages beyond the thoughts themselves. It’s like stretching. When you stretch before running, you put your body into positions much more extreme than any it will assume during the run. If you can think things so outside the box that they’d make people’s hair stand on end, you’ll have no trouble with the small trips outside the box that people call innovative.”
• “When Milton was going to visit Italy in the 1630s, Sir Henry Wootton, who had been ambassador to Venice, told him his motto should be “i pensieri stretti & il viso sciolto.” Closed thoughts and an open face. Smile at everyone, and don’t tell them what you’re thinking. This was wise advice.”
• “The people you can say heretical things to without getting jumped on are also the most interesting to know.”
• “Another way to counterattack is with metaphor. Arthur Miller undermined the House Un-American Activities Committee by writing a play, “The Crucible,” about the Salem witch trials. He never referred directly to the committee and so gave them no way to reply. What could HUAC do, defend the Salem witch trials? And yet Miller’s metaphor stuck so well that to this day the activities of the committee are often described as a “witch-hunt.” … Best of all, probably, is humor. Zealots, whatever their cause, invariably lack a sense of humor.”
• “…when people are bad at open-mindedness they don’t know it. In fact they tend to think the opposite. Remember, it’s the nature of fashion to be invisible. It wouldn’t work otherwise. Fashion doesn’t seem like fashion to someone in the grip of it. It just seems like the right thing to do. It’s only by looking from a distance that we see oscillations in people’s idea of the right thing to do, and can identify them as fashions.”
• “When you hear such labels being used, ask why.” (Particularly “-ist” labels: conformist, racist, communist, etc.)
• “When a child gets angry because he’s tired, he doesn’t know what’s happening. An adult can distance himself enough from the situation to say “never mind, I’m just tired.” I don’t see why one couldn’t, by a similar process, learn to recognize and discount the effects of moral fashions … Everyone encourages you to grow up to the point where you can discount your own bad moods. Few encourage you to continue to the point where you can discount society’s bad moods.”

I find it interesting that, it seems, many comedians get most of their source material from “forbidden topics”. I am trying to think about topics that make my friends very uncomfortable; the list is uncomfortably long. Many of them, you can dance around the core issue and be just on the verge of comfortability, yet if you drive to the heart of the question, it makes people very uncomfortable.

• Hate Speech: what makes something “hate speech”? It seems to me that, generally, it’s whatever someone finds offensive.
• Web Filtering: Kids see breasts from their first waking moments. Reproduction is part of human existence, and much more acceptable for children to understand in other societies than in ours.
• Age of Consent: What makes an 18-year-old different from a 16-year-old, really? Why the arbitrary line? An 18-year-old can marry an 85-year-old, yet a 17-year-old can’t? I’m not saying it’s desirable; I’m just saying that arbitrary line seems weird.
• Abortion: “Pro-choice” “Pro-life” “Anti-Choice” “Anti-life”… it all seems so loaded with labels. The difference in positions always boils down to moral fashion.
• Absence of Deity: Sure, I can say I’m agnostic around my friends and they handle it. If I imply, directly or indirectly, that deity simply doesn’t exist, people get really upset. I think they are too uncomfortable with the ramifications… because if deity doesn’t actually exist, then they are delusional. Nobody likes that message. Conversely, if deity does exist, that means I’m delusional 🙂 I’m OK with being wrong though.
• Divisiveness: In my opinion, it’s just fine to be “divisive”. Show people the truth and make them suddenly realize they’re on different bandwagons, or on the same bandwagon for dramatically different reasons. Draw some artificial distinctions, then tear them down. Thinking hard and talking hard about why you’re doing (or not doing) something is just good sense, not an attempt to falter some “national will”.

There are too many things to list, I think. Too many ideas, particularly in today’s repressive climate, that can get you in trouble. If someone said they supported the motives of the terrorists (oops, there’s a label!) who flew planes into the Pentagon, the two towers, and that New Jersey field… that one little statement could haunt them the rest of their lives.

Very interesting article. It makes ya think.

I ran across a site Saturday that was really sobering on what the big numbers being spent to fight a war across the ocean mean.

Wanna know how much war costs?

That’s my money at work. As always, my official position on the Iraq war is “I’m ambivalent about it”. I’m in favor in some ways, and opposed in other ways. I support our soldiers and goals, but not necessarily our methods. It’s the sort of position some people call “straddling the fence”, and isn’t always comfortable.

We arrived first for the party.

The snow crunched under the tires of my “arrest-me red” 2001 Honda Insight as we pulled into the driveway at 218 Something Lane, the home of George & Leslie Mcewan at 6:18 PM. The sky was deep into twilight, stars beginning to appear.

The driveway was wide — wider than the 2 and a half car garage behind it. Snow was piled three feet deep on either side. I swung to the left to leave room for the other guests soon to be arriving. I put the car into Park, set the hand parking brake in between the seats, shut off the lights and the heater, took my key out of the ignition, and opened the door. It scraped a little on the icy snow piled nearby.

I trotted around behind the diminutive vehicle to open the door for the passenger side, in which sat my lovely but very, very pregnant wife Christy.

We gathered our snack foods out of the trunk. Pork rinds, Fruit2O drinks, oranges, cheese, and miscellaneous munchies were neatly arranged in bags underneath the cargo net under the hatchback.

George & Leslie’s new home was beautiful. According to George, it’s a “tri-level” home, which, according to him, means “split level with an attitude”. It has a kind of foyer before you reach the stairwell, which gives the foyer a dramatic vaulted ceiling and spacious ambience.

But we weren’t here for the home tour! Within a few minutes, other guests began arriving. John & Kelly Olsen with their brood. Jay & Julie Barnson with two of my favorite neices, Rowan and Brenna. Bryan Brown with his kids — unfortunately, his wife Jenny was home ill. Jacob & Melissa Proffitt and their children. And the circle was complete.

We chowed down for about forty-five minutes, making small talk. Much of the male chatter was about jobs — leaving them, losing them, and getting them. John, Jay, and Jacob are programmers. George is a CAD draftsman for some kind of mechanical engineering firm. Bryan and I are sysadmins. A consummate geek crowd, here for a consummately geeky reason:

Mystery Science Theater 3000.

We call them “MST3K Parties”. In case you’re unfamiliar with MST3K, it was a series on the Sci-Fi channel. They’d take an old, bad sci-fi movie, wrap a thin little plot about a guy getting shot into space because his boss didn’t like him around it, and then you’d see the backs of the heads of the guy and his two robot friends as you watched this really awful movie.

The whole funny thing about this isn’t the cheesy B-movies. It’s the amazingly hilarious comments the three commentators make the whole time. The movies are generally so thin on plot that you don’t miss anything due to the commentators “down in front” on the movie screens.

Anyway, my first exposure to this was “Attack of the The Eye Creatures”. No, this wasn’t a typo. The title actually read:

Attack of the
The Eye Creatures

Really weird. They had like one goofy rubber-suited alien, and then the rest of the eye creatures were people in black sweatsuits and white gloves.

Last night’s features were:

• Lucas in Love: OK, this isn’t rightly an MST3K feature, but this ten-minute short is hilarious, and appreciated by all the Star Wars fans in our audience. I’ve never seen it before, and we laughed our butts off.
• Lassie the dog in The Painted Hills: This is an original-cast MST3K episode. Unfortunately, the most memorable thing about this one was that the tape kept getting screwed up in the VCR. The tapes are, at this point, ten-year-old copies off the television set, so it’s kind of understandable. Anyway, Lassie had definitely seen better days by the time this film was made. She was pretty fat. I’m trying to remember some of TomServo’s more memorable quips, but am falling short. Maybe someone else can fill them in? Most memorable comment by the MST3K actors: “What, he has sand in his lap and Lassie has to come rescue him?” Thought it was pretty funny.
• Beginning of the End: Some guy who’s name and middle initial is “Bert I.” made this joke. Apparently, old Bert I. was responsible for an enormous number of cheap sci-fi flicks in the fifties.
  This one was about some giant crickets levelling the city of Chicago. The special effects were fantastic. At one point, they obviously had a postcard of a large Chicago building which they had put some crickets on and then filmed them crawling across it, to simulate the crickets scaling the walls of the building. Of course, the crickets get shot by the hero and fall off, leading to the most memorable comment of the night, “Oh no, they’are going to blow on the postcard again!”. Bert I. seemed particularly proud of one scene in which a cricket falls off the building by playing it three or four times in a row in nearly the same order: hero blasts cricket, cricket falls, hero blasts another, cricket falls, one more, and it falls.
  Mmm, artistic 😉
  Old Bert I. didn’t like to waste any film, either… the first forty seconds of the movie was of an empty road. No music. No nothing. Empty road. Then a car finally passed.
  Other than the “postcard” line, the most memorable line of the movie, for me, was when there were three people jammed in the front of a car onscreen and TomServo pipes up and says “And the guy in the middle says ‘Hey, this isn’t a stick shift!'”. Pure comedy at its finest!

Anyway, MST3K night rocks. Lots of fun. If you can obtain a few copies, I heartily recommend putting together some geeky friends and hang out for a night making fun of movies. Heck, go make your own MST3K night with friends. You see, filmmaking hasn’t really gotten better — technology for effects has just gotten cheaper. For a wonderful example of this, go rent the movie “Timeline”. Invite a bunch of friends and plan on picking out all the hokey moments. Enjoy!

I’ve always set my rearview mirror the way my parents taught me. Set it up so the road is in the middle vertical plane, and so that you can see the back corner of your car. Easy, simple… and wrong.

Here’s the text of an article I ran across while reading over at Insight Central, an online hangout for Insight owners. The reason I was so interested is that the Insight, in the “Daddy’s view” from the rearview mirror, has very limited rear viewing area. The rearview mirror is kind of small, and the view out the back has two large vertical braces and a nearly-horizontal window to look through, plus one large horizontal brace bisecting the view through the mirror pretty badly. But I found once I followed the tips below, I could see just fine behind me — I even find that I don’t need to check blind spots by turning my head!

***TEXT*** Setting Your Car Mirrors Tom and Ray Magliozzi

We’ve discovered that it’s possible to set your three mirrors (rearview and both side views) so that they eliminate almost any possible blind spots.

For years, we’d been setting our side-view mirrors so they gave us a view of the back corner of our cars. This is the way it’s been passed down from grandfather to father to us. But we finally discovered something very interesting. The back corner of the car never moves. It always stays in the same exact place. So there’s really no reason to keep an eye on it. And by moving the side mirrors farther out, you can line up all three of your mirrors so they have minimal overlap — and you can see everything behind you and beside you.

Step 1: Start by setting your rear-view mirror as you normally would.

Then, lean your head all the way to the left so it touches the driver’s window. From that position, set your left side-view mirror so you can see the back corner of your car. Now lean the same distance the other way, and set your right side-view mirror the same way.

Now, here’s what happens. When a car comes up behind you, you should first see it in your rear-view mirror. But as it passes you (let’s say on your left), you’ll see it move to the left side of your rear-view mirror. And as its left headlight disappears from your rear-view mirror, it should instantly show up in your left side-view mirror. There should be no delay. It should slip from one to the other, so you can always see it.

Step 2 – Left-Side Mirror Alignment: Set your left-side mirror so that as soon as the passing car’s left, front headlight disappears from your rear-view mirror, it appears in your left-side mirror.

You might need to make some slight adjustments to your side-view mirrors to make everything line up perfectly. And pulling up next to a line of parked cars (to simulate another lane of traffic next to you) is a good way to do that.

Step 3 – Right-Side Mirror Alignment: Then do the same thing on the right.

Step 4: End result? No huge blind spots.

Driving with the mirrors this way takes some getting used to. You have to learn to rely on your rear-view mirror first. And you’ll have to get used to what your side-view mirrors are now looking at. But, the good news is that your blind spot should now be gone! ***

If you need some diagrams, here’s a web link: http://cartalk.cars.com/Columns/Archive/2002/November/07.html

(Matt’s note: I modified this a bit. When setting my mirrors now, I just cock my head over as far as is comfortable if I were driving driving, and set the outside mirror so I can just see the rear corner when I do that. Then I do the same for the other mirror. This amounts to the same effect, without having to visit a local parking lot to line up your rearview every time someone else drives your car.)

I can always tell when I’ve been out of work a while… going back leaves me exhausted. I’m doing contracting work for Smith Johnson & Associates, for a company that makes software for embedded microchips in devices. Things that monitor vending machine levels and report back on stock, that kind of stuff.

Anyway, it’s pretty fun. I’m subbing in for a woman taking maternity leave for a while. Total brain drain today. About three hours of boredom filling out paperwork & stuff, then the rest of the day was all talk, meetings, more talk, more thoughts, writing, etc.

A nice thing is that I’m paid hourly. That’s wonderful. It’s a welcome change from 70-hour-salaried weeks. No such thing as “time and a half” pay in my chosen career field, unfortunately, but in a way that’s nice. I just do the work, and get paid for how long I work.

Now to line up my next position that I’ll need after July 5. Hmm, where to start looking this time?

Just in case you didn’t feel bad enough about your life already, here’s a little gem to remind you of things other people had accomplished by the time they were your age.

Ain’t life grand?

Just in case you have trouble with that link, the guy who created the page was nice enough to set up the whole darn thing in Javascript. So just right-click on the page and “view source” to see all the lists without manually putting in the ages. Spoiler: If you are a negative number, or over 100, you’re SOL, all the entries are the same from 100+.

I read an an insightful weblog entry over at Wil Wheaton’s web site. It had to do with good neighbors. And I couldn’t help but wonder — am I a good neighbor?

Points against us being good neighbors:

• We had a used tire in our yard for over three years.
• The paint is peeling around our front door.
• We don’t have a deck. Our sliding glass window leads off into the vastness of space.
• We have a dead apple tree in the back yard.
• We let our yard die. And we only mowed it twice last year since it was dead. And we only trimmed the weeds twice.
• We have a big hole in the ground that’s also three years old next to the front door where I planned to punch through my basement wall to finish our sprinkler system. It’s still there, and the sprinkler system is still hooked up every year by plugging it into a hose.
• Our then four-year-old daughter repainted one of our rooms without our consent four years ago. The pink blotches are still very visible on the screen on the front of the house.
• Our garage has always been so full of stuff we could never park our car in it.
• We have a nonfunctional lawnmower and rusting bike sitting next to our driveway.
• I record music late into the night (usually, with headphones, but my singing is still loud)
• I grill outdoors in the middle of the winter.
• We have an oil leak in our van that’s permanently stained our driveway.
• Weeds have overgrown our gardens.
• Our stereo system attached to our DVD player can get pretty loud, and we usually watch movies late at night (9-11:30 PM)

Points in favor of us being good neighbors:

• We invite friends over all the time to quietly play cards and chat — including our next-door neighbors, who have three old non-working trucks parked in their front yard.
• We tend to keep to ourselves, and keep quiet.
• Our kids play outdoors, but only within strictly prescribed boundaries, and they tend to get bullied, rather than be bullies.
• Our cars don’t belch smoke, and aren’t really loud.
• We never have knock-down, drag-out fights in the middle of the nights with our windows open like one of our neighbors. Oh, wait, they don’t fight anymore since she left him…
• Once you’re inside our house, it’s cluttered but comfortable and welcoming.
• We take cookies & homemade goodies to our neighbors regularly.
• We know all our neighbors within three houses by their first names.
• We avoid appearing in the front yard in nightclothes.
• We bathe regularly.
• We have barbeques each summer and invite all our neighbors.
• We make it a point to have all our immediate neighbors over for dinner at least once a year.

I think, on balance, we are reasonably good neighbors with lots of room for improvement. What about you?

So I’ve had the tires on my Insight pumped up to 50 PSI on each corner since the day I bought it. I’ve enjoyed the gas mileage, but have noticed that performance was very poor over snow and ice, and even taking corners it felt a little slippery.

Before heading out on our near-disaster New Year’s trip in our family van, I deflated the Insight’s tires back to factory-spec 38 PSI front, 35 PSI rear so that my very-pregnant wife, who was remaining home, would enjoy a smoother ride and better traction.

What I didn’t realize was exactly how much of a difference it makes.

Nine hours after we left, we limped back home due to a blizzard forcing closure of the freeways. I was tired and despondent, and decided to take my Insight out for a shopping trip to help me feel better. Getting 14 MPG in a big van against a sixty MPH headwind can make you feel down like that after driving the Insight Anyway, within a few moments of driving it out of our driveway over the left-over slush on the roads, I was amazed to find it seemed to actually handle slush well! Better than the van I’d been driving for nine hours, as a matter of fact. I was surprised!

Snow was threatening on the horizon in the darkness, blotting out the stars, so I decided to test how my Insight handled dry, windy conditions, with patches of ice and water.

Oh. Wow.

I accelerated from a dead stop and did 180’s in an empty parking lot at twenty miles an hour without going more than two parking stalls wide. I whipped around 90-degree corners at nearly thirty miles an hour — hard enough to smash my shoulder against the driver’s door, yet not a squeal or complaint from my tires. I floored the car from an icy entrance to the highway in “S” mode, and only one tire skipped for a second before gripping hard and shoving me in the back of my seat. I slammed on the brakes at fifty, and seemed to stop almost immediately — easily hard enough to kick in the seat belt restraints and push the air out of my lungs. I was really impressed.

Realize, the only performance vehicle I’ve ever driven was a 2002 8-cylinder Ford Mustang convertible as a rental on a business trip one time. Of course, that one had more power, but I was just flat amazed at how a simple change in tire pressure can transform this little red buggy from a genteel commuter vehicle into a fun, sporty toy.