Barnson.org

Not to rekindle our previous debate regarding same-sex marriage, but I’d like to rekindle our previous debate regarding same-sex marriage…

It’s one thing for President Bush to state his personal views on same-sex marriage. It’s another to deliberately gather the press corps to express his support for amending the Constitution to ban same-sex marriage.

Whatever happened to separation of church and state? Yes, this “moral decay”, this moral decline, this moral miscontrsuct, is based on Judeo-Christian views. There are plenty of people out there in the conservative majority who feel that same-sex marriage violates decency on moral ground, but I believe this springs from religious tenet. The major religions hold up the Bible/Testament and point to it, shunning same-sex marriage.

Terrible.

Because, last time I checked, we live in a country where religion technically has no impact on our legislative and judicial agenda. Amending the Constitution to ban gay marriage is ludicrous, and having a President advocate for it lets me know that he’s someone who is comfortable alienating the populace and estranging the minority. This country is based on inclusion (“give us your tired, your poor”) and accepting all persons of culture, faith, etc. is what makes us strong. Yes, we compete internationally on our intellectual developments, our science, our management, our engineering, our medicine, and our military. But there’s a foundation of inclusion underneath it all that taps into the collective power of people who bring their talents to the table. Excluding blacks because of prejudice. Excluding women from voting. Excluding foreigners because they talk and look different. Amendments to our Constitution and additions to our laws are based on “inclusion” not on exclusion. Have we learned nothing from our past?

The last 25 years shows that our economy is beseiged by globalization. The barriers of the world have been torn down. Do we want to start building cultural barriers at home? Alientating people is the worst thing this country can do, economically and socially. Whether I believe in homosexuality isn’t the issue. The issue is whether our laws are explicity written to protect the minority and ensure their place beside the majority in the pursuit of happiness. And anyone at the top of the political food chain who wants to step up to the microphone and express his sentiments of alienation in election year better be prepared to face a harsh rebuking.

This reminds me of former Presidents who shunned racial integration, who laughed at women in the workplace, who mocked the inclusion of external cultures into our mainstream. People didn’t have choices before. “You don’t like it, then leave our country. Oh, you can’t? Well the deal with it.” Well, now people have choices. And creating a society which tells people that they’re not welcome is awful.

Besides, it’s a state issue anyway. Right? Right?

A few pictures of the boy for your perusal.

Laughing Boy Yo quiero Taco Bell! Look who’s walking! (sort of) Kid’s got big feet!

Holy crap… when did we all get so old?

Why is baseball such a collection of idiots?

I don’t mean the players, but the owners and the players union? C’mon! How hard is it to look at your league (MLB) and see declining attendance and ratings, and then to look at another league (NFL) and see the exact opposite, and figure out that the main reason is that 95% of the teams are out the playoff race by the end of July?

It’s great in the NFL now, because I know that my Ravens are going to challenge for the playoffs at least once every 3-5 years. Every team has a shot now. The Bengals look good for the coming year, so now maybe even the Cardinals may make a run.

But my poor Orioles, they make some good free agents signings this year (Tejada, Javy Lopez) and fall even farther behind the evil empire. How can this be good to anyone outside the major markets? Granted, you might get a team like the Marlins who put together a good year and make a run, but they’ll be the anomaly.

Who won the year before them? The Angels. Where are they now?

The year before that? The Diamondbacks. Where have they been?

(I love the fact that since Mike Mussina deserted us for the evil empire, he hasn’t won that ring yet. HAHAHAHA!!!)

So, the players union states that this is good for baseball and the players, to have the rich get richer. How? It’s almost like a whole other level to MLB, where if you’re good, you make the majors, but if you”re great, you make the evil empire!

Why not have the All-Stars from the AL & NL play the evil empire at the All-Star break? That would be as fair!

I’m done ranting. MLB should get a clue and share revenue and balance things out. Explore a salary cap. Learn from the success of the NFL.

My $.02 Steve

I’m not applauding the latest RIAA tactic, but I think I may be sliding over to their corner.

About six months ago, a friend of my roomate, who lives in LA, was tagged by RIAA with a file-sharing lawsuit. RIAA did a “John Doe” lawsuit because the complaint was filed against an IP address with the ISP provider, rather than directly against a human identity. The ISP has to forward the suit to the individual and then provide RIAA with the person’s name. Anyway, the roomate’s friend was freaked out to get a serious lawsuit against them, especially considered that it was friends using her Internet connection to swap files.

**Sidebar — what if someone is out there in the neighbordhood hijacking my wireless internet connection and swapping files and I get sued? RIAA can’t physically prove it was me swapping files, right? Can they search my hard drive?**

Anyway, the friend ultimately had to settle. Sort of like many of the other teenagers out there who are having to settle. Just goes to show that your home-based activity can become publicly available.

So the point of this entry was to say that I think I’m in corner of RIAA. They are an association protecting the sound recording industry and have decided to sue people who are allegedly stealing their members’ property. I may not be in favor of the tactic and the public relations decision but I understand the rationale.

Before everyone response with “invasion of privacy”, let’s just recognize that the RIAA is successfuly suing people, so there’s some judge somewhere that affirmed RIAA’s assertion that swapping files is not protected under an home-intrusion defense. We don’t know the law but we know it’s working for RIAA right now. I think that I might be interested to see how long the suit siege continues.

I wonder if there’s some kind of application that let’s you trade files while blinding your IP address or the file type/title to the ISP…

I’ll stop typing now.

Sam

Do you believe in Absolute truth?

In Star Wars, Episode 5: The Empire Strikes Back, Obi Wan Kenobi says, “Many of the truths we cling to depends on our point of view.”

Then again…

The belief in “absolute truth” contends that what is true continues to be true, whether or not you or I believe it is true. My definition of truth falls in this category.

If I hold the point of view that water is not wet, it will not make it so, and it is from this perspective that I see the world. Others could argue that I believe this way because of a complex combination of genetics and upbringing, nature and nurture, and that truth is indeed malleable depending on point of view. This is an argument that has the potential to spiral out of control.

To assert that truth is indeed malleable and not fixed is to make a fixed assertion about truth itself. It does not follow that truth can be malleable because that point of view would have to include the idea that truth could be fixed, which would then, paradoxically negate the argument that truth can be malleable. It can therefore be taken as an axiom that truth is fixed, or rather that there is “absolute truth”.

But then again, what do I know?

That being said, how do you respond to the concept that others may hold vastly different opinions than you on what is right, wrong, true, or untrue?

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?

**Apologies if this isn’t the proper place to put this request**

Looking for help in putting up an e-commerce function on the direct-to-consumer website. Does anybody have any experience with this?

I was about to pick up authorize.net for the credit merchant clearing service but apparently I also need a shopping cart provider (i.e. miva, oscommerce). This is way over my head. I’m good with the HTML scripting but I have no idea how to drop in a full-service e-commerce engine into your typical $20/month web host provider.

I don’t know what I need to do to keep all the functionality (product review, shopping cart, clearance) integrated within my site’s framework. Help!!!!

Thanks in advance.

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?