What? I dunno. I'm just kind of sitting around, waiting on things. I just spent way too much time transferring money across European borders, and reclaiming my identity. But the new passports are wonderful pieces of fortitude. Here' s a few quotes from my new passport:
And that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth. - Abraham Lincoln
The principle of free governments adheres to the American soil. It is bedded in it, immovable as its mountains. - Daniel Webster
Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. - George Washington
We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. - excerpt from the Declaration of Independence
Your concept of love may be different, but know that I love this world.
I like reading Scott Adams' blog on occasion. Much like Balph Eubanks, he's glib, amusing, and completely lacking in morality. Take, for example, his latest strawman-laden posting regarding the visit of a certain Mr. Ahmedinejad:
I was happy to hear that NYC didn't allow Iranian President Ahmadinejad
to place a wreath at the WTC site. And I was happy that Columbia
University is rescinding the offer to let him speak. If you let a guy like
that express his views, before long the entire world will want freedom
of speech.
...
If Ahmadinejad thinks he can be our friend by honoring our heroes and
opening a dialog, he underestimates our ability to misinterpret him.
Fucking idiot. I hate him.
Well, there's certainly some rye wit at work here. Yes, it is quite ironic that a country led by a genocidal religious dictator, which the USA most certainly is, would object to a fellow genocidal religious madman visiting its most sensitive cultural site. I mean, Mahmoud's only trying to "open a dialog" here, isn't he? Isn't that the meaning of Ahmedinejad's visit? Isn't Ahmedinejad just exercising "Free Speech", as Adams says? Aren't we wrong in denying this poor man that right?
Aside from the obvious jackassery involved in claiming that a man who directly controls his entire country's media is having trouble getting his point of view out; or that the United Nations will let him speak before the leaders of the world to the point where they forget to blink for an hour; aside from all this, this is not a question of whether or not Mahmoud is allowed to say what he wants. The question is, in accordance with the Grand Unified Theory of Rubean Mechanics, Who's going to pay for it. It's a question of whether or not Americans should be paying for his plane fare, his security, and his accommodation while he's here, pissing on Ground Zero and generating propaganda for totalitarian lobbying groups like MoveOn.org and International ANSWER.
All of Adams' ridiculous assertions never mention the one central fact here: There is no compelling reason for American taxpayers to foot the bill, so this guy, who just held one of his popular "Death to America" parades, can come over here and lecture them on anything. I personally don't much care what Ahmedinejad thinks, I can see the general thrust of his inclinations. He's spitting on the United States and Western Culture daily, and then expects to be treated with deference in return. Fuck him.
This kind of Devil's Advocacy isn't new to Adams. At least, I hope it's just that. He's apparently one of those celebrities that have forgotten the hard work involved in their ascendency, and assume that they're rich because of some accident of nature, akin to divine providence. Humans, himself included, are all just a bunch of "moist robots" with no capacity for thought, no free will; we've apparently just been programmed by Mother Nature to do the things we've done or will do. There is no mind, there is no choice, there is only the stimuli in our environments, and the response that was determined by a chance arrangement of atoms into chemicals during the Big Bang. Or something.
It's an obscene display of thoughtlessness, a conceit of someone trying so hard to seem above all this. Adams' Dilbert is amusing, and his blog is a bit of junk food for the brain at times. But he's got the morals of a two-dollar whore.
Last night we didn't make it. The two Frenchmen surrendered the evening, seeing as it was Trotzky's birthday, and therefore a time for somber reflection or something. So, we rode around big town Farnborough for a couple of hours, grabbed some grub, and then headed back to the apartment to watch a movie.
We watched Fur, which cemented my belief that Nicole Kidman is the perfect woman. Not only does she look good in her own slutty little librarian sort of way, she gives a guy a handjob in this movie while shaving his hairy back. That's my kind of girl, a real little trooper.
Anyhoo, it's back off to London now, for a second try at getting sloppy somewhere besides sitting at home in front of the boob tube. Wish us luck.
Vacation week is winding down, and I'm getting ready to leave the driving to Southwest Trains and go drinking in London. I'll try to keep it under two weeks this time, but no promises. We'll tramp it a bit through Soho, I guess, just me, the girls, and a couple of frog-eaters from the office.
I wonder why I never get to go drinking with Englishmen? It's probably for the best. There's a quote that gets bandied about, especially in the local newspapers, about England being a nation of drunks and scalawags. I can't say much about that, but it does seem that the pubs all close at 11:00 PM for a reason. At 5 o'clock, they pour out of their offices and into the public houses, seemingly on a race against the clock to get themselves 'faced before the early last call.
When they were finally permitted to stay open past 11, in the hope that the binge-drinking would abate in light of longer opening hours, they found themselves doubly-cursed in that the Englishmen were every bit as drunk at 11, but didn't have to go home. All pubs here are set up so that you have to go to the counter to get your drinks, instead of having them brought to your table. There's a built-in handbrake there: a system where you can't get any more drink once you lose the ability to walk is founded upon sound principle and good advices.
I've done nothing today; nothing but clean out the cluttered closets of my preferred newsfeed reader. There were some connections in there that were sorely neglected. I could use a bit more time to wade through the degenerate filth that is my blogroll, but sadly, I work. The Company is tolerant in their control over my time, fair since they do not pay hourly; but tolerance has its limits, and I doubt they would look kindly upon my spending the business day in a fugue state, reading entry after entry of dialectics about Jessica Simpson's tits, or Brittney Spears' overplayed poonanny.
Nevertheless, it saddens me that my everyday is not blessed with the nuggets of wisdom from skippystalin:
Being the only person with an out-of-control substance abuse problem in a relationship is tough. Most romantic couplings are based on common interests and most of my interests culminate in my waking up in a pool of what I think is my own urine and not being quite sure what time zone I'm in. I'm much like a cat in that I have a tendancy of marking my territory with my vomit, blood and gallons of my semen...My ability to smoke, drink and masturbate furiously at the same time might not be much, it's all that I have.
Ahh, skippystalin, how I've missed you, and your nuggets.
This is how I spend my vacation: visiting Stonehenge on one day; reading the melancholy musings of skippystalin the next, picturing him composing scholarly tracts through bitter tears, a crushed Viagra dissolving in a highball of Jack Daniels next to the keyboard, as another long evening fades into a blur of poetry, madness, and vigorous bouts of hate-filled masturbation. And wondering, of the two, which is the more meaningful and fitting monument to humanity?
They should've just burned enjoyeverysandwich to CD, stuck it to the side of Voyager along with its author, and shot the whole lot into space back when they had government funding to do so, all in the name of making a good first impression for whatever aliens were out cruising for an easy meal.
skippystalin's output is prodigious, to be sure, but there was an entire blogroll to consider:
The lunatics are running the asylum over at Straight White Guy's place. Eric's testicles are mentioned, indirectly. Remind me to change my passwords regularly and start using strong encryption.
How stoned do you have to be to cheat on Jessica Alba? I could jack off to Jessica Alba while a big mean dog was chasing me and this idiot is cheating on her. I decided to confront him about this and I screamed at him, hey, what is your problem. And he said I should get off his lawn. And I said, no, no you get off the lawn. You get off. Then he went inside, probably because deep down, he knew I had made some pretty good points.
JimGoad.com is no more, but if you're a Goad fan (ladies!), you can find find him here. Discussion of Brittany's latest, erm, candid photos is also to be found, but be aware that the following picture is used as a visual aid:
This morning we picked up my new wheelchair. It's a sporty European marque, with an aggressive stance, low-profile tires, and a head-turning cherry-red metalflake paint job. It's not that great on the corners, but it'll take any one of y'all on the straightaways.
I've never done time on wheels. On the whole, I found it to be not all that bad. Then again, I don't figure that most wheelchair-bound men my age get to enjoy being pushed around town by a couple of sexy German bloggerettes. Thanks, ladies: the jealous looks from the other local cripples was the icing on the cake. Here's a little something extra for you, babes. (via AoSHQ)
Funny things happen when you're on wheels. I saw a lady I work with while being carted through Tesco's frozen food department. I said hello, and she just looked right through me, steering her cart so as not to make contact with the leper. She probably thought I was going to ask her for some spare change, or if she could wipe me bum for me, or whatever it is that those people want from healthy-legged people. I also noticed that the supermarkets put completely different things down on the bottom three feet of the shelves. All the cool toys are down there, for example, presumably because chil'n's is small. It's also a great altitude to find anti-bedsore medicaments, for some reason.
So, I let myself be pushed by the Weyside in Guildford, where, at one point, a husky young native was required to wheel my fat ass up a steep incline. The Sistas, for all their heart, lacked the muscle to get the job done, so he, being a true-hearted salt-of-earth kind of guy, waved them off and grunted and sweated till I crested the hill. Had the man known that I could have, at any point in time, simply stood up and hobbled up the hill under my own power, he most certainly would have picked me up and broken me over his knee.
Tomorrow morning, we'll be visiting Stonehenge, or Stone'enge, as the locals quaintly call it. We'll also visit the haunted city, Salisbury, to watch the homosexuals. Ta!
I like reading OSNews for some reason. I think I like to catch the geeky news about SkyOS, or the occasional retro curmudgeonry that rolls by about Lotus 1-2-3 or OS/2. Being the old-timer that I am, it's hard to resist a paean from my youth about 10-finger productivity.
Unfortunately, they've become the epicenter of stupid for the tech press. Check out this article, which explodes the myths about competition being good: "Competition is not Good"
'It gives consumers more choice'
Choice is good when there's one agreed base standard, and a number of compatible approaches. For example, there are many Linux distributions, but they are all Linux, and they can all run the same software. They are 'flavours' of the same thing, that is a good choice. People like different flavours.
Competition does not produce easier choices for consumers. All they get is added un-interoperability and complexity with competitive choices.
Now, if you go read that article, which I do not recommend, you'll slowly come to the realization that this moron is just annoyed that he has to make the effort to choose between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. He's willing to surrender his entire free will to some (hopefully) benevolent dictator, abolish brand names, and forsake the free market economy because choosing which format to buy the Firefly special edition box set in is hard. What a hopeless, whiny-assed sissy.
Of course, things don't get better when they start tossing political analysis at you. "Net Neutrality" is one monikers that has overshadowed the thing named. The discussion is often framed in a way that an uninformed listener would assume there was lobbying going on to abolish some sort of laws that are now protecting consumers from big, bad tiered-Internet ninjas.
But: There is no net neutrality legislation, there never was, and hopefully, there never will be. The argument over "Net Neutrality" is about whether or not the U.S. government should introduce legislation forbidding bandwidth throttling by ISPs. It's the "have you stopped beating your wife?" straw man for the Slashdot crowd. You'll notice that this article calls the Supreme Court's decision that the U.S. government shouldn't step in and configure the ISPs' Cisco routers for them, "Backing for Two-Tier Internet":
The US Justice Department has said that internet service providers should be allowed to charge for priority traffic. The agency said it was opposed to 'network neutrality', the idea that all data on the net is treated equally. The comments put the agency at odds with companies such as Microsoft and Google, who have called for legislation to guarantee equal access to the net.
Of course, this would also mean that an enforcement infrastructure would also have to be put in place, making sure that everyone got their "fair share" of said bandwidth, as if backbone routers and POPs just fell off a tree somewhere. God forbid ISPs be allowed to tune the services that they developed and paid for as they wish. Let's let the government decides who gets bandwidth, and how much is enough! That will make it all fair and neutral-like. Whenever a politician uses the word "fair", hang on to your wallet.
Well, my trackbacks are now working, it seems. There's some ugly Python spaghetti-code going on behind the scenes that translates back and forth between absolute urls, non-absolute relative urls, and upper-lower-camel case; but it works.
Trackbacks are only good for Movable Type, though. Which I can't stand anymore. MT used to be the only thing out there, but there's something that really, really, really galls me about the way it rebuilds your entire site into static HTML pages everytime you update a post. I'm sure it's awesomeness if you've got your server running on an old TV remote, but nowadays we're all running our web servers on 100-core 64-bit terahertz moonshot computers that can simultaneously compute π, encode MPEG video, and mix the best goddam margaritas you've ever tasted, all without breaking a sweat.
So yeah, I figured out how to implement trackbacks in Django, to a point where they more or less work. Now why is Wordpress fucking with me? It seems to be thrown off by the fact that Wordpress sends a HEAD request before it downloads and parses the page, in the vain hope that the X-Pingback header will be set. I can't figure out how to do that in Django's generic views, so I just use the secondary method, that being a link element in the XHTML code. But now, whenever a Worpdress blog pings me, I get this kind of crap:
[09/Sep/2007 15:04:23] "GET /blog/2007/sep/08/vacation/ HTTP/1.1" 200 27367
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (104, 'Connection reset by peer')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (32, 'Broken pipe')
Being the half-assed programmer that I am, I am at a total loss. I can't even do a Lazyweb request here, seeing as my 4 visits a day are unlikely to bring the Django HTTP gurus by. I won't be able to sleep at night, thinking of all the enlightened Wordpress Users who are probably out there try to "Keep the discussion going" with me.
Ever since June, when the iPhone went live, I've heard about nothing else in the tech press, nerd podcasts, and the Apple Fanboisphere. Is it really that way over in the States (the only place you can get them), or does the iPhone actually seem to be doing well?
Ahh, my first vacation since joining The Company. My queue is cleaned up, my email is forwarded, and an elaborate Sieve session has accomplished in a mere two hours what less civilized mail systems can do with a key combination: The Corporate Vacation Email.
It's been five months now since I came 'cross the channel and started meeting the natives, learning the lingo, and getting used to the fact that everyone here talks like Pinky. Now, I'll be letting my hair down for the next 10 days or so. As well as putting my poor, broken foot up on the coffee table.
As soon as I get my x-rays back from the socialist medical system (they still copy them with coal rubbings on wax paper over here, apparently), I'll post pictures of the metatarsalar breakage here for your morbid enjoyment. Don't thank me yet.
The other half of Sistaweb will be joining us for the week. We'll allow her to sleep here rent-free for an entire week, even though she refused to bring a carton of cigarettes as payment. Damned non-smokers and their principles. It's like those non-smokers back in the World War II who didn't sign up for cigarette rations. Throwing away a gold mine, that is. Our grandfathers probably had a word for those guys, and if I knew my grandfather at all, that word was sissy-boy.
The girls have rented a wheelchair for me, seeing as I won't be too much fun doing a London pub-crawl on crutches. I've already had a forehead-slapping moment over this, as you probably are right now. Why haven't I thought of taking a wheelchair with me before? That would've come in handy on more than one occasion, the Wreckyll in Jeckyll not least among them.
Man, Apple is on a roll. Not only have they got me hooked for a new computer, a new laptop, a new office package, and a replacement for my aging MythTV box, but now I have to start thinking about a new iPod. Now, let's see what Uncle Steve is going to me be costing me 'til Christmas Time:
Item
Damage
20" iMac
1199.00
Macbook
1099.00
8GB iPod Touch
299.00
AppleTV
299.00
iWork '08
79.00
iLife '08
79.00
Total:
$3,054.00
Not bad for a day's work, Mr. Jobs. And what's up for the rest of September? Maybe some irresistible bionic iFoot to replace the one I broke playing frisbee at the company picnic last week?
Although there's a remarkable lack of iPhone hype around the office, we being a big-time Linux company and all, there's an amazing amount of Mac fanboiism. Pretty much all of us have Macs at home. The explanation for this is simple: After dealing with Linux problems all day long, there's something nice about going home to something you can spend all your time using and not making up excuses for why it looks like shit and doesn't work.
I like Linux, mind you. I use it day-in, day-out for my desktop at work, for my webservers, and it brings in my daily bread. We all love it here, pretty much like a family loves and therefore tolerates the embarrassing second cousin with the Downs'. But people are walking all over the office today buzzing about the upcoming announcement from Apple.
Will it be the long-awaited iMac redesign? Will it be a new Mini? My boss is actually carrying his phone to the pub after work today so he can sit on engadget and get a realtime update. Linus would not be pleased...
Last login: Thu Jul 26 12:17:28 from nat-pool-fab.re Welcome to Darwin! ericbook:~ eric$ mutt -bash: mutt: command not found ericbook:~ eric$ open /Applications/Mail.app/ ericbook:~ eric$
Ahh. Like coming in after a long day of plowing the fields and sticking your aching feet into a pot of hot water. After running Linux all day at work, you feel like slipping into something more comfortable. Sam knows it. Zonker knows it, though he won't admit it. It's the right amount of just-workiness you need to let you relax, while knowing you could, at any given moment, do something like:
OK, here's one with drivel. I do like it, but I have a couple of gripes.
First problem: I was hopelessly confused by the login screen. The type of journal seems to be locked on livejournal, as the drop-down menu for journal types is inexplicably disabled until you enter a username. -1 for usabilty
Second problem: Useless stripping of trailing slash, which mangled my xmlrpc URL. Error 301 was ignored, which makes sense since it's a post and all, but I couldn't log in. It mangled my URL then choked on the error :-/
Third problem: didn't want to download my recent posts. Although there might be a misunderstanding about just what "recent" means.
Fourth problem: Doesn't let me choose post status anywhere. And there's nowhere I can find to choose text filters. This is more of a feature request, really.
Fifth problem: craps out after posting, probably because it keeps mangling the trailing slashes from my URLs. Is there an RFC somewhere that says that POSTS can't end with slashes? Nobody tell the Django folks.
Well, maybe it'll at least let me post to my blog from work every now and then.
Man, I dang sure missed the entire month of June. I've been in the UK now for about two months, and let me tell ya: They sure do get some rain around here. I always thought those stories about English people having gills were legends and fantasies. Now, I'm not so sure.
For the love of GOD, for the last time, in the name of ALL THAT IS HOLY, Cluster Services is NOT COMPATIBLE with 4.5! If you're running a cluster, DO NOT update to 4.5 until the Cluster Suite is UPDATED TO 4.5!
That is all.
P.S. And NO, cmirror is not available yet. Maybe at the end of the month.
I went outside to smoke a cigarette. All rooms in England are for non-smokers, you'll find, as are the rooms, apartments, and houses listed for rent in the local papers. The litany at the end of all the ads reads, "No smokers, canvassers, or DSS", which stands for Department of Social Services. So, okay they hate smokers and welfare cases, as do we all. But the British have their own definition for 'non-smoker', which basically means you only smoke when you drink. Everybody smokes over here, and they all live somewhere.
The evening was cool; almost cold, really, as I suspect the evenings around here generally are. I stood on the corner of Osborne and Netley, watching the blackbirds getting ready to do whatever it is they do at night, when I spied a man, some yards away, bounding up the sidewalk with a jaunty gait. I held my cigarette just in front of my mouth, watching this figure with suspicion. He was short, about 5 feet tall, and round as a soccer ball. He was wearing light-colored trousers and a dark blazer, the left breast of which was adorned with an enormous, orange prize-ribbon.
As he approached me, his features became distinct in the bad lighting, and I realized he was positively beaming with pride. His face was ruddy, and split with a grin that wouldn't have looked out of place behind a wheelbarrow full of poker chips on the way to the cash-out. I placed him in his mid-40s, but maybe his thinning red hair and roly-poly stature made him look older than he really was.
He halted just a few feet from me, and said, with oddly struggling words, "Good evening, mister!"
I looked him up and down, cigarette still burning between my shaky fingers, and replied, "hi, how are ya..." He wobbled his head a bit, then walked around me on his way up the street. I noticed something written in gold on his orange ribbon, and read it as it flashed in the lamplight.
I judged him more than a wee bit 'differently-abled', as they say. I watched as he cautiously crossed the empty street, looking both ways at least twice, then gingerly stepping into the street and crossing it at a run.
I thought about what I had seen written on the ribbon: "A Very Special Boy". Hmm, I thought, I wonder who gave him that? Whoever it was, they made his whole day.
I put my cigarette out and walked back into the guest house.
My buddy Sam sent me an email a couple of days ago indicating that he just might have joined The Family recently. And he joined it a much higher level than I, I might add, considering I'm still lumbering along in the PowerPC world; my G4 Powerbook, though a loyal and trusted friend, seems slow as molasses in January these days.
He also mentioned an old OS/2 habit, one which we separately shared back in the day. I started using OS/2 when I worked at UPS. One of our managers was running 2.1, with the old Presentation Manager that looked like a crappy(er) Windows 2.0, albeit with long filenames and the ability to run concurrent DOS sessions. I avoided it until OS/2 3.0 came out.
In '94, when Warp hit the shelves, I rushed out to Soft-Warehouse1 in Alpharetta, looked in the Operating Systems2 department until I found a box, then gave the man $300 dollars for the privilege of running it. Then, I walked over the desktop applications department, and put down another $495 for Lotus Smartsuite/2. Then I OEM'd 16MB of RAM for about $400 to make it all go.
Now, many may see OS/2 as a butt-ugly cousin of Windows, and they may be right. But back then, it was a work of art. Especially in the sense that it wasn't an exact science getting it to run. Nothing ever really worked like it was supposed to. Without the fallback of a DOS prompt, you had to have a second, fully-functional machine to do things like edit the CONFIG.SYS on the installation floppies to make sure your DASD drivers were loading. And most of the drivers were written so that, if they encountered an error while loading, they'd bork the whole boot process, just to be on the safe side.
The graphical interface also hung constantly. The Workplace Shell, despite (or maybe due to) all its object-orientiness, was horribly unstable. But I never saw a hang that wasn't cured with Control-Alt-Delete. That key combo went right down to the kernel, and always gave a satisfying, unconfirmed reboot, wedged GUI be damned. There was even a 3rd party program called Watchcat that sat on the serial port, or on a secondary Hercules/MCGA monitor, and let you monitor and kill programs remotely. The kernel's Kung Fu was strong like that, but the GUI was just ass.
Now, when Chicago started finally coming down the pipe, and even the Rolling Stones where pulled into the OS marketing world ("Start me up", anyone?), OS/2 fans like myself were sure that this pissant little DOS extender with a homely face wouldn't be the future. It couldn't be the future, it was just too depressing. It still wasn't a 32-bit OS, though the 386 had been out for over 8 years. It still used FAT, for crying out loud. In short, Chicago sucked.
OS/2 seemed like a scrappy little underdog, nipping heroically at the Microsoft behemoth's heels. I'm not sure why it gave that impression. At the time, IBM was much bigger than Microsoft, a huge, multinational corporation with interests in basically every aspect of electronics. They just couldn't write or market good software.
I'm not sure why I just wrote 500 words on OS/2. I actually wanted to write something about Linux.
Software stores used to have a whole "Operating Systems" department, back when there was more than one operating system, and Windows was still called an "Operating Environment" ↩
Man, I'm unprepared. There's a checklist of things you should do before moving to England. I came over here without any money, preparation, or attack plan. There's something unbelievably stupid about this. It worked for me when I moved to Germany, but moving to England's a bit more complicated, apparently. Either that, or I'm remembering it wrong.
But I'm not the only one. The office I'm working in is full of non-British people. It's a rag-tag group of Germans, Italians, Brazilians, Spaniards, one (1) American, and who knows what else that all found themselves in the same boat when they first came over. This despite promises from The Company to help one resettle; promises which are certainly not kept and, when referred to in conversation, change their shape and character like a Democrat on a whistle-stop.
But at some point a kindly soul in the department, now departed, made a list of the reality of the situation. It's a short list of what one really needs to do when moving to England. Unfortunately, I only found out about it after I'd already been here a week. Here's your to-do list once you've arrived in England:
Get a room. If possible, get a rental agreement or any bill with your name and address on it. (proof of address)
Deposit is usually 1 1/2 times the rent. Deposit and first rent is to be paid beforehand. If the room is unfurnished, see "Things to Buy" for shops and example prices.
Get a letter from your office manager (HR Lady) stating that you are working for the company and including your address. (proof of employment)
Get a bank account. Just walk in with your documents:
Passport or national ID card
Proof of employment (see 2.). it might be handy to have your contract with you.
Proof of address
Banks
HSBC – try to get a standard account (they try to sell you an advanced package including insurances etc.)
NatWest – Also recommended as this bank does not charge for withdrawing money from a different bank's cash machines
Give your bank details to The Company
Register with Inland Revenue – this is done by your HR manager. You should get your tax code about 2 weeks later (PAYE Coding Notice)
At the end of the fiscal year (ending April 5th), you will get a "P60 End of Year Certificate" detailing your "Pay and Income Tax" levels.
Get a National Insurance Number by applying at a Job Centre Plus office. They ask for dtails before they schedule an interview appointment to verify your eligibility. Appointments are scheduled about two weeks ahead, and take place in the nearest county office, which usually isn't near at all. Without an NI number, you will be on emergency tax, which is higher than the standard tax rate.
Documents:
Passport
National ID card
Driving License or any other official document identifying you (Birth certificate, police registration, medical card, etc.)
Proof of employment (see 2.)
Recent payslip
Bank statement
Proof of address (utility bill, rental agreement, etc. – see 1.)
It might be handy to have your PAYE Coding Notice with you
As money is paid in a timely manner so it is available on the 27th, try to get your appointment after this date.
If you are British, a citizen of a member state of the EU, or other Commonwealth citizen, you can apply for inclusion on the Register of Electors. This will allow you to vote at local government elections. Your credibility will rise (good for tenancy applications or bank-related matters) and you are obliged to pay Council Taxes1
If you buy any TV or radio equipment, you will be asked for your address, which will be automatically forwarded to the "TV Licensing Office"
Get a Tesco Clubcard
Get a life ;-)
Any address change has to be communicated to all above-mentioned authorities. For the official notices to local council, the TV licensing, and most other on-line services, you can use I am Moving , where you can create/use an account for free.
All of this could have been avoided with a bit of planning. I am bitterly disappointed in myself.
Council taxes are universal as far as I can tell, and are perceived, by the British at least, as an extension of the rent. ↩
Farnborough derives its name from from the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Ferneberga (Fern Hill) and is mentioned in the Domesday Book (1086). But for the coming of the army at nearby Aldershot, the arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flying, Farnborough would probably have remained an isolated heathland village, that is until the latter half of the 20th century when the population moved out of London suburbia and became commuters.
"But for the … arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flight…". That's a pretty big conditional. There are probably a lot of places whose development was seriously affected by railways and the advent of powered flight. But I understand where the good Mr. Parkins is coming from.
I had forgotten the cable to connect my camera to my laptop. Of all the stupid things that I packed for the trip, 50 different USB cables, a USB hub, power adapters for devices I’d forgotten, not to mention devices whose power adapters I’d forgotten, I forgot the one thing that was absolutely necessary and planned-for. Not to mention irreplaceable, seeing as every camera maker in the world decided that their camera’s little hole should look different from all the other cameras’ little holes.
I walked into a little computer store on the strip in Fleet, Hampshire. Walking up to the pasty-faced, teenaged part-timer there, I introduced myself and shook his hand, which seemed to shock him.
He unconsciously wiped his hands on his pants and said, “eh...nice to meet you, sir. What can I do for you?”
I asked him, “do you have any USB card-readers?”
“Um, yeah," he answered. "I think I saw some around here somewhere.”
I looked around the shop, which was organized and clean. Man, he must really be the FNG around here. He finally found what I was looking for, stored on a shelf right next to where he had been sitting. He handed it to me and I started reading the back of the packaging.
“Just looking to see if it works with my Mac,” I told him.
“Oh, it's USB, so it should work,” he answered, and took the reader out of my hand. He moved his lips while he read the package. “Oh, yeah,” he said finally. “Right there it says it: ‘Requires Mac OS 9 or later’.” He looked at me skeptically. “So, you do have OS 9 or later, don’t you?”
“Um, yeah, I think so.” OS 9 went out of style back in the ‘90s.
He moved around to the register, and I handed him my Visa card. He looked uncertain as he turned it over in his hand. “This thing doesn’t have a chip on it?”
I took it back and examined it. “No, I guess it doesn’t.”
“Well, I don’t think we can take that, then.”
“Why don’t you just swipe it,” I said. “Give it a go.”
He shrugged and swiped it through the machine.
From behind me, a voice said, “it’s all chips nowadays, you know.”
I looked around, and saw that an older woman was standing behind me. She looked to be in her mid 40s, and wore a name plate with the store’s logo on it. “You can’t get nothing without a dozen little chips in it.”
I nodded agreement, and turned back to the young man behind the register.
“So, what kind of Mac you got, then?”
“A PowerBook G4.”
He nodded approvingly. “Nice piece of kit, that.” The little machine that had taken my card made a loud ping!, and spit out a receipt. He tore it off and gave it to me to sign, along with the card reader.
“Now, you have a nice day sir, and do please visit us again.”
I thanked him, said goodbye to the chip-lady, and put the small package into my bag next to my laptop. “Thanks, man, I’ll do that.” Nice kid.
Didja ever discover something that made your reality skip a beat? You know how, for just a second, something is so far out of place that you can't even figure out what's wrong with the picture? For example, the Augsburg Wireless-Internet provider Cyberways has had the same guy on their start page for years:
Every time you connect to the internet over public wireless in Augsburg, that dude was right there, staring at you with those soulless black eyes. Like a doll's eyes...
And the weird thing was, I always figured he was the boss at Cyberways. I even thought I saw him once on the tram. I hate it when people use the same stock photos everywhere. Everybody's full of shit. Oh, I guess it's effective use of your cash dollars, seeing as it's cheaper than paying attractive people to work for you. But still, why not just be honest for a split second?
You get this kind of thing all over the Internet, of course. If you've ever shopped for web hosting, you'll notice, after a few visits to the providers' pages, that their employees all kind of look alike. And there's always some woman somewhere holding a laptop at her waist in near-sexual ecstasy over the reasonable shared hosting prices.
It's a leitmotif throughout the enter hosting industry: Shared Webspace=Chick with laptop.
Rube, look, for the last freakin time, look RIGHT when you step off a curb! These people drive on the other side of the F$@&-ing road over here! You wanna get ya brains splattered all over me?
What? I dunno. I'm just kind of sitting around, waiting on things. I just spent way too much time transferring money across European borders, and reclaiming my identity. But the new passports are wonderful pieces of fortitude. Here' s a few quotes from my new passport:
And that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth. - Abraham Lincoln
The principle of free governments adheres to the American soil. It is bedded in it, immovable as its mountains. - Daniel Webster
Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. - George Washington
We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. - excerpt from the Declaration of Independence
Your concept of love may be different, but know that I love this world.
I like reading Scott Adams' blog on occasion. Much like Balph Eubanks, he's glib, amusing, and completely lacking in morality. Take, for example, his latest strawman-laden posting regarding the visit of a certain Mr. Ahmedinejad:
I was happy to hear that NYC didn't allow Iranian President Ahmadinejad
to place a wreath at the WTC site. And I was happy that Columbia
University is rescinding the offer to let him speak. If you let a guy like
that express his views, before long the entire world will want freedom
of speech.
...
If Ahmadinejad thinks he can be our friend by honoring our heroes and
opening a dialog, he underestimates our ability to misinterpret him.
Fucking idiot. I hate him.
Well, there's certainly some rye wit at work here. Yes, it is quite ironic that a country led by a genocidal religious dictator, which the USA most certainly is, would object to a fellow genocidal religious madman visiting its most sensitive cultural site. I mean, Mahmoud's only trying to "open a dialog" here, isn't he? Isn't that the meaning of Ahmedinejad's visit? Isn't Ahmedinejad just exercising "Free Speech", as Adams says? Aren't we wrong in denying this poor man that right?
Aside from the obvious jackassery involved in claiming that a man who directly controls his entire country's media is having trouble getting his point of view out; or that the United Nations will let him speak before the leaders of the world to the point where they forget to blink for an hour; aside from all this, this is not a question of whether or not Mahmoud is allowed to say what he wants. The question is, in accordance with the Grand Unified Theory of Rubean Mechanics, Who's going to pay for it. It's a question of whether or not Americans should be paying for his plane fare, his security, and his accommodation while he's here, pissing on Ground Zero and generating propaganda for totalitarian lobbying groups like MoveOn.org and International ANSWER.
All of Adams' ridiculous assertions never mention the one central fact here: There is no compelling reason for American taxpayers to foot the bill, so this guy, who just held one of his popular "Death to America" parades, can come over here and lecture them on anything. I personally don't much care what Ahmedinejad thinks, I can see the general thrust of his inclinations. He's spitting on the United States and Western Culture daily, and then expects to be treated with deference in return. Fuck him.
This kind of Devil's Advocacy isn't new to Adams. At least, I hope it's just that. He's apparently one of those celebrities that have forgotten the hard work involved in their ascendency, and assume that they're rich because of some accident of nature, akin to divine providence. Humans, himself included, are all just a bunch of "moist robots" with no capacity for thought, no free will; we've apparently just been programmed by Mother Nature to do the things we've done or will do. There is no mind, there is no choice, there is only the stimuli in our environments, and the response that was determined by a chance arrangement of atoms into chemicals during the Big Bang. Or something.
It's an obscene display of thoughtlessness, a conceit of someone trying so hard to seem above all this. Adams' Dilbert is amusing, and his blog is a bit of junk food for the brain at times. But he's got the morals of a two-dollar whore.
Last night we didn't make it. The two Frenchmen surrendered the evening, seeing as it was Trotzky's birthday, and therefore a time for somber reflection or something. So, we rode around big town Farnborough for a couple of hours, grabbed some grub, and then headed back to the apartment to watch a movie.
We watched Fur, which cemented my belief that Nicole Kidman is the perfect woman. Not only does she look good in her own slutty little librarian sort of way, she gives a guy a handjob in this movie while shaving his hairy back. That's my kind of girl, a real little trooper.
Anyhoo, it's back off to London now, for a second try at getting sloppy somewhere besides sitting at home in front of the boob tube. Wish us luck.
Vacation week is winding down, and I'm getting ready to leave the driving to Southwest Trains and go drinking in London. I'll try to keep it under two weeks this time, but no promises. We'll tramp it a bit through Soho, I guess, just me, the girls, and a couple of frog-eaters from the office.
I wonder why I never get to go drinking with Englishmen? It's probably for the best. There's a quote that gets bandied about, especially in the local newspapers, about England being a nation of drunks and scalawags. I can't say much about that, but it does seem that the pubs all close at 11:00 PM for a reason. At 5 o'clock, they pour out of their offices and into the public houses, seemingly on a race against the clock to get themselves 'faced before the early last call.
When they were finally permitted to stay open past 11, in the hope that the binge-drinking would abate in light of longer opening hours, they found themselves doubly-cursed in that the Englishmen were every bit as drunk at 11, but didn't have to go home. All pubs here are set up so that you have to go to the counter to get your drinks, instead of having them brought to your table. There's a built-in handbrake there: a system where you can't get any more drink once you lose the ability to walk is founded upon sound principle and good advices.
I've done nothing today; nothing but clean out the cluttered closets of my preferred newsfeed reader. There were some connections in there that were sorely neglected. I could use a bit more time to wade through the degenerate filth that is my blogroll, but sadly, I work. The Company is tolerant in their control over my time, fair since they do not pay hourly; but tolerance has its limits, and I doubt they would look kindly upon my spending the business day in a fugue state, reading entry after entry of dialectics about Jessica Simpson's tits, or Brittney Spears' overplayed poonanny.
Nevertheless, it saddens me that my everyday is not blessed with the nuggets of wisdom from skippystalin:
Being the only person with an out-of-control substance abuse problem in a relationship is tough. Most romantic couplings are based on common interests and most of my interests culminate in my waking up in a pool of what I think is my own urine and not being quite sure what time zone I'm in. I'm much like a cat in that I have a tendancy of marking my territory with my vomit, blood and gallons of my semen...My ability to smoke, drink and masturbate furiously at the same time might not be much, it's all that I have.
Ahh, skippystalin, how I've missed you, and your nuggets.
This is how I spend my vacation: visiting Stonehenge on one day; reading the melancholy musings of skippystalin the next, picturing him composing scholarly tracts through bitter tears, a crushed Viagra dissolving in a highball of Jack Daniels next to the keyboard, as another long evening fades into a blur of poetry, madness, and vigorous bouts of hate-filled masturbation. And wondering, of the two, which is the more meaningful and fitting monument to humanity?
They should've just burned enjoyeverysandwich to CD, stuck it to the side of Voyager along with its author, and shot the whole lot into space back when they had government funding to do so, all in the name of making a good first impression for whatever aliens were out cruising for an easy meal.
skippystalin's output is prodigious, to be sure, but there was an entire blogroll to consider:
The lunatics are running the asylum over at Straight White Guy's place. Eric's testicles are mentioned, indirectly. Remind me to change my passwords regularly and start using strong encryption.
How stoned do you have to be to cheat on Jessica Alba? I could jack off to Jessica Alba while a big mean dog was chasing me and this idiot is cheating on her. I decided to confront him about this and I screamed at him, hey, what is your problem. And he said I should get off his lawn. And I said, no, no you get off the lawn. You get off. Then he went inside, probably because deep down, he knew I had made some pretty good points.
JimGoad.com is no more, but if you're a Goad fan (ladies!), you can find find him here. Discussion of Brittany's latest, erm, candid photos is also to be found, but be aware that the following picture is used as a visual aid:
This morning we picked up my new wheelchair. It's a sporty European marque, with an aggressive stance, low-profile tires, and a head-turning cherry-red metalflake paint job. It's not that great on the corners, but it'll take any one of y'all on the straightaways.
I've never done time on wheels. On the whole, I found it to be not all that bad. Then again, I don't figure that most wheelchair-bound men my age get to enjoy being pushed around town by a couple of sexy German bloggerettes. Thanks, ladies: the jealous looks from the other local cripples was the icing on the cake. Here's a little something extra for you, babes. (via AoSHQ)
Funny things happen when you're on wheels. I saw a lady I work with while being carted through Tesco's frozen food department. I said hello, and she just looked right through me, steering her cart so as not to make contact with the leper. She probably thought I was going to ask her for some spare change, or if she could wipe me bum for me, or whatever it is that those people want from healthy-legged people. I also noticed that the supermarkets put completely different things down on the bottom three feet of the shelves. All the cool toys are down there, for example, presumably because chil'n's is small. It's also a great altitude to find anti-bedsore medicaments, for some reason.
So, I let myself be pushed by the Weyside in Guildford, where, at one point, a husky young native was required to wheel my fat ass up a steep incline. The Sistas, for all their heart, lacked the muscle to get the job done, so he, being a true-hearted salt-of-earth kind of guy, waved them off and grunted and sweated till I crested the hill. Had the man known that I could have, at any point in time, simply stood up and hobbled up the hill under my own power, he most certainly would have picked me up and broken me over his knee.
Tomorrow morning, we'll be visiting Stonehenge, or Stone'enge, as the locals quaintly call it. We'll also visit the haunted city, Salisbury, to watch the homosexuals. Ta!
I like reading OSNews for some reason. I think I like to catch the geeky news about SkyOS, or the occasional retro curmudgeonry that rolls by about Lotus 1-2-3 or OS/2. Being the old-timer that I am, it's hard to resist a paean from my youth about 10-finger productivity.
Unfortunately, they've become the epicenter of stupid for the tech press. Check out this article, which explodes the myths about competition being good: "Competition is not Good"
'It gives consumers more choice'
Choice is good when there's one agreed base standard, and a number of compatible approaches. For example, there are many Linux distributions, but they are all Linux, and they can all run the same software. They are 'flavours' of the same thing, that is a good choice. People like different flavours.
Competition does not produce easier choices for consumers. All they get is added un-interoperability and complexity with competitive choices.
Now, if you go read that article, which I do not recommend, you'll slowly come to the realization that this moron is just annoyed that he has to make the effort to choose between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. He's willing to surrender his entire free will to some (hopefully) benevolent dictator, abolish brand names, and forsake the free market economy because choosing which format to buy the Firefly special edition box set in is hard. What a hopeless, whiny-assed sissy.
Of course, things don't get better when they start tossing political analysis at you. "Net Neutrality" is one monikers that has overshadowed the thing named. The discussion is often framed in a way that an uninformed listener would assume there was lobbying going on to abolish some sort of laws that are now protecting consumers from big, bad tiered-Internet ninjas.
But: There is no net neutrality legislation, there never was, and hopefully, there never will be. The argument over "Net Neutrality" is about whether or not the U.S. government should introduce legislation forbidding bandwidth throttling by ISPs. It's the "have you stopped beating your wife?" straw man for the Slashdot crowd. You'll notice that this article calls the Supreme Court's decision that the U.S. government shouldn't step in and configure the ISPs' Cisco routers for them, "Backing for Two-Tier Internet":
The US Justice Department has said that internet service providers should be allowed to charge for priority traffic. The agency said it was opposed to 'network neutrality', the idea that all data on the net is treated equally. The comments put the agency at odds with companies such as Microsoft and Google, who have called for legislation to guarantee equal access to the net.
Of course, this would also mean that an enforcement infrastructure would also have to be put in place, making sure that everyone got their "fair share" of said bandwidth, as if backbone routers and POPs just fell off a tree somewhere. God forbid ISPs be allowed to tune the services that they developed and paid for as they wish. Let's let the government decides who gets bandwidth, and how much is enough! That will make it all fair and neutral-like. Whenever a politician uses the word "fair", hang on to your wallet.
Well, my trackbacks are now working, it seems. There's some ugly Python spaghetti-code going on behind the scenes that translates back and forth between absolute urls, non-absolute relative urls, and upper-lower-camel case; but it works.
Trackbacks are only good for Movable Type, though. Which I can't stand anymore. MT used to be the only thing out there, but there's something that really, really, really galls me about the way it rebuilds your entire site into static HTML pages everytime you update a post. I'm sure it's awesomeness if you've got your server running on an old TV remote, but nowadays we're all running our web servers on 100-core 64-bit terahertz moonshot computers that can simultaneously compute π, encode MPEG video, and mix the best goddam margaritas you've ever tasted, all without breaking a sweat.
So yeah, I figured out how to implement trackbacks in Django, to a point where they more or less work. Now why is Wordpress fucking with me? It seems to be thrown off by the fact that Wordpress sends a HEAD request before it downloads and parses the page, in the vain hope that the X-Pingback header will be set. I can't figure out how to do that in Django's generic views, so I just use the secondary method, that being a link element in the XHTML code. But now, whenever a Worpdress blog pings me, I get this kind of crap:
[09/Sep/2007 15:04:23] "GET /blog/2007/sep/08/vacation/ HTTP/1.1" 200 27367
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (104, 'Connection reset by peer')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (32, 'Broken pipe')
Being the half-assed programmer that I am, I am at a total loss. I can't even do a Lazyweb request here, seeing as my 4 visits a day are unlikely to bring the Django HTTP gurus by. I won't be able to sleep at night, thinking of all the enlightened Wordpress Users who are probably out there try to "Keep the discussion going" with me.
Ever since June, when the iPhone went live, I've heard about nothing else in the tech press, nerd podcasts, and the Apple Fanboisphere. Is it really that way over in the States (the only place you can get them), or does the iPhone actually seem to be doing well?
Ahh, my first vacation since joining The Company. My queue is cleaned up, my email is forwarded, and an elaborate Sieve session has accomplished in a mere two hours what less civilized mail systems can do with a key combination: The Corporate Vacation Email.
It's been five months now since I came 'cross the channel and started meeting the natives, learning the lingo, and getting used to the fact that everyone here talks like Pinky. Now, I'll be letting my hair down for the next 10 days or so. As well as putting my poor, broken foot up on the coffee table.
As soon as I get my x-rays back from the socialist medical system (they still copy them with coal rubbings on wax paper over here, apparently), I'll post pictures of the metatarsalar breakage here for your morbid enjoyment. Don't thank me yet.
The other half of Sistaweb will be joining us for the week. We'll allow her to sleep here rent-free for an entire week, even though she refused to bring a carton of cigarettes as payment. Damned non-smokers and their principles. It's like those non-smokers back in the World War II who didn't sign up for cigarette rations. Throwing away a gold mine, that is. Our grandfathers probably had a word for those guys, and if I knew my grandfather at all, that word was sissy-boy.
The girls have rented a wheelchair for me, seeing as I won't be too much fun doing a London pub-crawl on crutches. I've already had a forehead-slapping moment over this, as you probably are right now. Why haven't I thought of taking a wheelchair with me before? That would've come in handy on more than one occasion, the Wreckyll in Jeckyll not least among them.
Man, Apple is on a roll. Not only have they got me hooked for a new computer, a new laptop, a new office package, and a replacement for my aging MythTV box, but now I have to start thinking about a new iPod. Now, let's see what Uncle Steve is going to me be costing me 'til Christmas Time:
Item
Damage
20" iMac
1199.00
Macbook
1099.00
8GB iPod Touch
299.00
AppleTV
299.00
iWork '08
79.00
iLife '08
79.00
Total:
$3,054.00
Not bad for a day's work, Mr. Jobs. And what's up for the rest of September? Maybe some irresistible bionic iFoot to replace the one I broke playing frisbee at the company picnic last week?
Although there's a remarkable lack of iPhone hype around the office, we being a big-time Linux company and all, there's an amazing amount of Mac fanboiism. Pretty much all of us have Macs at home. The explanation for this is simple: After dealing with Linux problems all day long, there's something nice about going home to something you can spend all your time using and not making up excuses for why it looks like shit and doesn't work.
I like Linux, mind you. I use it day-in, day-out for my desktop at work, for my webservers, and it brings in my daily bread. We all love it here, pretty much like a family loves and therefore tolerates the embarrassing second cousin with the Downs'. But people are walking all over the office today buzzing about the upcoming announcement from Apple.
Will it be the long-awaited iMac redesign? Will it be a new Mini? My boss is actually carrying his phone to the pub after work today so he can sit on engadget and get a realtime update. Linus would not be pleased...
Last login: Thu Jul 26 12:17:28 from nat-pool-fab.re Welcome to Darwin! ericbook:~ eric$ mutt -bash: mutt: command not found ericbook:~ eric$ open /Applications/Mail.app/ ericbook:~ eric$
Ahh. Like coming in after a long day of plowing the fields and sticking your aching feet into a pot of hot water. After running Linux all day at work, you feel like slipping into something more comfortable. Sam knows it. Zonker knows it, though he won't admit it. It's the right amount of just-workiness you need to let you relax, while knowing you could, at any given moment, do something like:
OK, here's one with drivel. I do like it, but I have a couple of gripes.
First problem: I was hopelessly confused by the login screen. The type of journal seems to be locked on livejournal, as the drop-down menu for journal types is inexplicably disabled until you enter a username. -1 for usabilty
Second problem: Useless stripping of trailing slash, which mangled my xmlrpc URL. Error 301 was ignored, which makes sense since it's a post and all, but I couldn't log in. It mangled my URL then choked on the error :-/
Third problem: didn't want to download my recent posts. Although there might be a misunderstanding about just what "recent" means.
Fourth problem: Doesn't let me choose post status anywhere. And there's nowhere I can find to choose text filters. This is more of a feature request, really.
Fifth problem: craps out after posting, probably because it keeps mangling the trailing slashes from my URLs. Is there an RFC somewhere that says that POSTS can't end with slashes? Nobody tell the Django folks.
Well, maybe it'll at least let me post to my blog from work every now and then.
Man, I dang sure missed the entire month of June. I've been in the UK now for about two months, and let me tell ya: They sure do get some rain around here. I always thought those stories about English people having gills were legends and fantasies. Now, I'm not so sure.
For the love of GOD, for the last time, in the name of ALL THAT IS HOLY, Cluster Services is NOT COMPATIBLE with 4.5! If you're running a cluster, DO NOT update to 4.5 until the Cluster Suite is UPDATED TO 4.5!
That is all.
P.S. And NO, cmirror is not available yet. Maybe at the end of the month.
I went outside to smoke a cigarette. All rooms in England are for non-smokers, you'll find, as are the rooms, apartments, and houses listed for rent in the local papers. The litany at the end of all the ads reads, "No smokers, canvassers, or DSS", which stands for Department of Social Services. So, okay they hate smokers and welfare cases, as do we all. But the British have their own definition for 'non-smoker', which basically means you only smoke when you drink. Everybody smokes over here, and they all live somewhere.
The evening was cool; almost cold, really, as I suspect the evenings around here generally are. I stood on the corner of Osborne and Netley, watching the blackbirds getting ready to do whatever it is they do at night, when I spied a man, some yards away, bounding up the sidewalk with a jaunty gait. I held my cigarette just in front of my mouth, watching this figure with suspicion. He was short, about 5 feet tall, and round as a soccer ball. He was wearing light-colored trousers and a dark blazer, the left breast of which was adorned with an enormous, orange prize-ribbon.
As he approached me, his features became distinct in the bad lighting, and I realized he was positively beaming with pride. His face was ruddy, and split with a grin that wouldn't have looked out of place behind a wheelbarrow full of poker chips on the way to the cash-out. I placed him in his mid-40s, but maybe his thinning red hair and roly-poly stature made him look older than he really was.
He halted just a few feet from me, and said, with oddly struggling words, "Good evening, mister!"
I looked him up and down, cigarette still burning between my shaky fingers, and replied, "hi, how are ya..." He wobbled his head a bit, then walked around me on his way up the street. I noticed something written in gold on his orange ribbon, and read it as it flashed in the lamplight.
I judged him more than a wee bit 'differently-abled', as they say. I watched as he cautiously crossed the empty street, looking both ways at least twice, then gingerly stepping into the street and crossing it at a run.
I thought about what I had seen written on the ribbon: "A Very Special Boy". Hmm, I thought, I wonder who gave him that? Whoever it was, they made his whole day.
I put my cigarette out and walked back into the guest house.
My buddy Sam sent me an email a couple of days ago indicating that he just might have joined The Family recently. And he joined it a much higher level than I, I might add, considering I'm still lumbering along in the PowerPC world; my G4 Powerbook, though a loyal and trusted friend, seems slow as molasses in January these days.
He also mentioned an old OS/2 habit, one which we separately shared back in the day. I started using OS/2 when I worked at UPS. One of our managers was running 2.1, with the old Presentation Manager that looked like a crappy(er) Windows 2.0, albeit with long filenames and the ability to run concurrent DOS sessions. I avoided it until OS/2 3.0 came out.
In '94, when Warp hit the shelves, I rushed out to Soft-Warehouse1 in Alpharetta, looked in the Operating Systems2 department until I found a box, then gave the man $300 dollars for the privilege of running it. Then, I walked over the desktop applications department, and put down another $495 for Lotus Smartsuite/2. Then I OEM'd 16MB of RAM for about $400 to make it all go.
Now, many may see OS/2 as a butt-ugly cousin of Windows, and they may be right. But back then, it was a work of art. Especially in the sense that it wasn't an exact science getting it to run. Nothing ever really worked like it was supposed to. Without the fallback of a DOS prompt, you had to have a second, fully-functional machine to do things like edit the CONFIG.SYS on the installation floppies to make sure your DASD drivers were loading. And most of the drivers were written so that, if they encountered an error while loading, they'd bork the whole boot process, just to be on the safe side.
The graphical interface also hung constantly. The Workplace Shell, despite (or maybe due to) all its object-orientiness, was horribly unstable. But I never saw a hang that wasn't cured with Control-Alt-Delete. That key combo went right down to the kernel, and always gave a satisfying, unconfirmed reboot, wedged GUI be damned. There was even a 3rd party program called Watchcat that sat on the serial port, or on a secondary Hercules/MCGA monitor, and let you monitor and kill programs remotely. The kernel's Kung Fu was strong like that, but the GUI was just ass.
Now, when Chicago started finally coming down the pipe, and even the Rolling Stones where pulled into the OS marketing world ("Start me up", anyone?), OS/2 fans like myself were sure that this pissant little DOS extender with a homely face wouldn't be the future. It couldn't be the future, it was just too depressing. It still wasn't a 32-bit OS, though the 386 had been out for over 8 years. It still used FAT, for crying out loud. In short, Chicago sucked.
OS/2 seemed like a scrappy little underdog, nipping heroically at the Microsoft behemoth's heels. I'm not sure why it gave that impression. At the time, IBM was much bigger than Microsoft, a huge, multinational corporation with interests in basically every aspect of electronics. They just couldn't write or market good software.
I'm not sure why I just wrote 500 words on OS/2. I actually wanted to write something about Linux.
Software stores used to have a whole "Operating Systems" department, back when there was more than one operating system, and Windows was still called an "Operating Environment" ↩
Man, I'm unprepared. There's a checklist of things you should do before moving to England. I came over here without any money, preparation, or attack plan. There's something unbelievably stupid about this. It worked for me when I moved to Germany, but moving to England's a bit more complicated, apparently. Either that, or I'm remembering it wrong.
But I'm not the only one. The office I'm working in is full of non-British people. It's a rag-tag group of Germans, Italians, Brazilians, Spaniards, one (1) American, and who knows what else that all found themselves in the same boat when they first came over. This despite promises from The Company to help one resettle; promises which are certainly not kept and, when referred to in conversation, change their shape and character like a Democrat on a whistle-stop.
But at some point a kindly soul in the department, now departed, made a list of the reality of the situation. It's a short list of what one really needs to do when moving to England. Unfortunately, I only found out about it after I'd already been here a week. Here's your to-do list once you've arrived in England:
Get a room. If possible, get a rental agreement or any bill with your name and address on it. (proof of address)
Deposit is usually 1 1/2 times the rent. Deposit and first rent is to be paid beforehand. If the room is unfurnished, see "Things to Buy" for shops and example prices.
Get a letter from your office manager (HR Lady) stating that you are working for the company and including your address. (proof of employment)
Get a bank account. Just walk in with your documents:
Passport or national ID card
Proof of employment (see 2.). it might be handy to have your contract with you.
Proof of address
Banks
HSBC – try to get a standard account (they try to sell you an advanced package including insurances etc.)
NatWest – Also recommended as this bank does not charge for withdrawing money from a different bank's cash machines
Give your bank details to The Company
Register with Inland Revenue – this is done by your HR manager. You should get your tax code about 2 weeks later (PAYE Coding Notice)
At the end of the fiscal year (ending April 5th), you will get a "P60 End of Year Certificate" detailing your "Pay and Income Tax" levels.
Get a National Insurance Number by applying at a Job Centre Plus office. They ask for dtails before they schedule an interview appointment to verify your eligibility. Appointments are scheduled about two weeks ahead, and take place in the nearest county office, which usually isn't near at all. Without an NI number, you will be on emergency tax, which is higher than the standard tax rate.
Documents:
Passport
National ID card
Driving License or any other official document identifying you (Birth certificate, police registration, medical card, etc.)
Proof of employment (see 2.)
Recent payslip
Bank statement
Proof of address (utility bill, rental agreement, etc. – see 1.)
It might be handy to have your PAYE Coding Notice with you
As money is paid in a timely manner so it is available on the 27th, try to get your appointment after this date.
If you are British, a citizen of a member state of the EU, or other Commonwealth citizen, you can apply for inclusion on the Register of Electors. This will allow you to vote at local government elections. Your credibility will rise (good for tenancy applications or bank-related matters) and you are obliged to pay Council Taxes1
If you buy any TV or radio equipment, you will be asked for your address, which will be automatically forwarded to the "TV Licensing Office"
Get a Tesco Clubcard
Get a life ;-)
Any address change has to be communicated to all above-mentioned authorities. For the official notices to local council, the TV licensing, and most other on-line services, you can use I am Moving , where you can create/use an account for free.
All of this could have been avoided with a bit of planning. I am bitterly disappointed in myself.
Council taxes are universal as far as I can tell, and are perceived, by the British at least, as an extension of the rent. ↩
Farnborough derives its name from from the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Ferneberga (Fern Hill) and is mentioned in the Domesday Book (1086). But for the coming of the army at nearby Aldershot, the arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flying, Farnborough would probably have remained an isolated heathland village, that is until the latter half of the 20th century when the population moved out of London suburbia and became commuters.
"But for the … arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flight…". That's a pretty big conditional. There are probably a lot of places whose development was seriously affected by railways and the advent of powered flight. But I understand where the good Mr. Parkins is coming from.
I had forgotten the cable to connect my camera to my laptop. Of all the stupid things that I packed for the trip, 50 different USB cables, a USB hub, power adapters for devices I’d forgotten, not to mention devices whose power adapters I’d forgotten, I forgot the one thing that was absolutely necessary and planned-for. Not to mention irreplaceable, seeing as every camera maker in the world decided that their camera’s little hole should look different from all the other cameras’ little holes.
I walked into a little computer store on the strip in Fleet, Hampshire. Walking up to the pasty-faced, teenaged part-timer there, I introduced myself and shook his hand, which seemed to shock him.
He unconsciously wiped his hands on his pants and said, “eh...nice to meet you, sir. What can I do for you?”
I asked him, “do you have any USB card-readers?”
“Um, yeah," he answered. "I think I saw some around here somewhere.”
I looked around the shop, which was organized and clean. Man, he must really be the FNG around here. He finally found what I was looking for, stored on a shelf right next to where he had been sitting. He handed it to me and I started reading the back of the packaging.
“Just looking to see if it works with my Mac,” I told him.
“Oh, it's USB, so it should work,” he answered, and took the reader out of my hand. He moved his lips while he read the package. “Oh, yeah,” he said finally. “Right there it says it: ‘Requires Mac OS 9 or later’.” He looked at me skeptically. “So, you do have OS 9 or later, don’t you?”
“Um, yeah, I think so.” OS 9 went out of style back in the ‘90s.
He moved around to the register, and I handed him my Visa card. He looked uncertain as he turned it over in his hand. “This thing doesn’t have a chip on it?”
I took it back and examined it. “No, I guess it doesn’t.”
“Well, I don’t think we can take that, then.”
“Why don’t you just swipe it,” I said. “Give it a go.”
He shrugged and swiped it through the machine.
From behind me, a voice said, “it’s all chips nowadays, you know.”
I looked around, and saw that an older woman was standing behind me. She looked to be in her mid 40s, and wore a name plate with the store’s logo on it. “You can’t get nothing without a dozen little chips in it.”
I nodded agreement, and turned back to the young man behind the register.
“So, what kind of Mac you got, then?”
“A PowerBook G4.”
He nodded approvingly. “Nice piece of kit, that.” The little machine that had taken my card made a loud ping!, and spit out a receipt. He tore it off and gave it to me to sign, along with the card reader.
“Now, you have a nice day sir, and do please visit us again.”
I thanked him, said goodbye to the chip-lady, and put the small package into my bag next to my laptop. “Thanks, man, I’ll do that.” Nice kid.
Didja ever discover something that made your reality skip a beat? You know how, for just a second, something is so far out of place that you can't even figure out what's wrong with the picture? For example, the Augsburg Wireless-Internet provider Cyberways has had the same guy on their start page for years:
Every time you connect to the internet over public wireless in Augsburg, that dude was right there, staring at you with those soulless black eyes. Like a doll's eyes...
And the weird thing was, I always figured he was the boss at Cyberways. I even thought I saw him once on the tram. I hate it when people use the same stock photos everywhere. Everybody's full of shit. Oh, I guess it's effective use of your cash dollars, seeing as it's cheaper than paying attractive people to work for you. But still, why not just be honest for a split second?
You get this kind of thing all over the Internet, of course. If you've ever shopped for web hosting, you'll notice, after a few visits to the providers' pages, that their employees all kind of look alike. And there's always some woman somewhere holding a laptop at her waist in near-sexual ecstasy over the reasonable shared hosting prices.
It's a leitmotif throughout the enter hosting industry: Shared Webspace=Chick with laptop.
Rube, look, for the last freakin time, look RIGHT when you step off a curb! These people drive on the other side of the F$@&-ing road over here! You wanna get ya brains splattered all over me?
What? I dunno. I'm just kind of sitting around, waiting on things. I just spent way too much time transferring money across European borders, and reclaiming my identity. But the new passports are wonderful pieces of fortitude. Here' s a few quotes from my new passport:
And that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth. - Abraham Lincoln
The principle of free governments adheres to the American soil. It is bedded in it, immovable as its mountains. - Daniel Webster
Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. - George Washington
We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. - excerpt from the Declaration of Independence
Your concept of love may be different, but know that I love this world.
I like reading Scott Adams' blog on occasion. Much like Balph Eubanks, he's glib, amusing, and completely lacking in morality. Take, for example, his latest strawman-laden posting regarding the visit of a certain Mr. Ahmedinejad:
I was happy to hear that NYC didn't allow Iranian President Ahmadinejad
to place a wreath at the WTC site. And I was happy that Columbia
University is rescinding the offer to let him speak. If you let a guy like
that express his views, before long the entire world will want freedom
of speech.
...
If Ahmadinejad thinks he can be our friend by honoring our heroes and
opening a dialog, he underestimates our ability to misinterpret him.
Fucking idiot. I hate him.
Well, there's certainly some rye wit at work here. Yes, it is quite ironic that a country led by a genocidal religious dictator, which the USA most certainly is, would object to a fellow genocidal religious madman visiting its most sensitive cultural site. I mean, Mahmoud's only trying to "open a dialog" here, isn't he? Isn't that the meaning of Ahmedinejad's visit? Isn't Ahmedinejad just exercising "Free Speech", as Adams says? Aren't we wrong in denying this poor man that right?
Aside from the obvious jackassery involved in claiming that a man who directly controls his entire country's media is having trouble getting his point of view out; or that the United Nations will let him speak before the leaders of the world to the point where they forget to blink for an hour; aside from all this, this is not a question of whether or not Mahmoud is allowed to say what he wants. The question is, in accordance with the Grand Unified Theory of Rubean Mechanics, Who's going to pay for it. It's a question of whether or not Americans should be paying for his plane fare, his security, and his accommodation while he's here, pissing on Ground Zero and generating propaganda for totalitarian lobbying groups like MoveOn.org and International ANSWER.
All of Adams' ridiculous assertions never mention the one central fact here: There is no compelling reason for American taxpayers to foot the bill, so this guy, who just held one of his popular "Death to America" parades, can come over here and lecture them on anything. I personally don't much care what Ahmedinejad thinks, I can see the general thrust of his inclinations. He's spitting on the United States and Western Culture daily, and then expects to be treated with deference in return. Fuck him.
This kind of Devil's Advocacy isn't new to Adams. At least, I hope it's just that. He's apparently one of those celebrities that have forgotten the hard work involved in their ascendency, and assume that they're rich because of some accident of nature, akin to divine providence. Humans, himself included, are all just a bunch of "moist robots" with no capacity for thought, no free will; we've apparently just been programmed by Mother Nature to do the things we've done or will do. There is no mind, there is no choice, there is only the stimuli in our environments, and the response that was determined by a chance arrangement of atoms into chemicals during the Big Bang. Or something.
It's an obscene display of thoughtlessness, a conceit of someone trying so hard to seem above all this. Adams' Dilbert is amusing, and his blog is a bit of junk food for the brain at times. But he's got the morals of a two-dollar whore.
Last night we didn't make it. The two Frenchmen surrendered the evening, seeing as it was Trotzky's birthday, and therefore a time for somber reflection or something. So, we rode around big town Farnborough for a couple of hours, grabbed some grub, and then headed back to the apartment to watch a movie.
We watched Fur, which cemented my belief that Nicole Kidman is the perfect woman. Not only does she look good in her own slutty little librarian sort of way, she gives a guy a handjob in this movie while shaving his hairy back. That's my kind of girl, a real little trooper.
Anyhoo, it's back off to London now, for a second try at getting sloppy somewhere besides sitting at home in front of the boob tube. Wish us luck.
Vacation week is winding down, and I'm getting ready to leave the driving to Southwest Trains and go drinking in London. I'll try to keep it under two weeks this time, but no promises. We'll tramp it a bit through Soho, I guess, just me, the girls, and a couple of frog-eaters from the office.
I wonder why I never get to go drinking with Englishmen? It's probably for the best. There's a quote that gets bandied about, especially in the local newspapers, about England being a nation of drunks and scalawags. I can't say much about that, but it does seem that the pubs all close at 11:00 PM for a reason. At 5 o'clock, they pour out of their offices and into the public houses, seemingly on a race against the clock to get themselves 'faced before the early last call.
When they were finally permitted to stay open past 11, in the hope that the binge-drinking would abate in light of longer opening hours, they found themselves doubly-cursed in that the Englishmen were every bit as drunk at 11, but didn't have to go home. All pubs here are set up so that you have to go to the counter to get your drinks, instead of having them brought to your table. There's a built-in handbrake there: a system where you can't get any more drink once you lose the ability to walk is founded upon sound principle and good advices.
I've done nothing today; nothing but clean out the cluttered closets of my preferred newsfeed reader. There were some connections in there that were sorely neglected. I could use a bit more time to wade through the degenerate filth that is my blogroll, but sadly, I work. The Company is tolerant in their control over my time, fair since they do not pay hourly; but tolerance has its limits, and I doubt they would look kindly upon my spending the business day in a fugue state, reading entry after entry of dialectics about Jessica Simpson's tits, or Brittney Spears' overplayed poonanny.
Nevertheless, it saddens me that my everyday is not blessed with the nuggets of wisdom from skippystalin:
Being the only person with an out-of-control substance abuse problem in a relationship is tough. Most romantic couplings are based on common interests and most of my interests culminate in my waking up in a pool of what I think is my own urine and not being quite sure what time zone I'm in. I'm much like a cat in that I have a tendancy of marking my territory with my vomit, blood and gallons of my semen...My ability to smoke, drink and masturbate furiously at the same time might not be much, it's all that I have.
Ahh, skippystalin, how I've missed you, and your nuggets.
This is how I spend my vacation: visiting Stonehenge on one day; reading the melancholy musings of skippystalin the next, picturing him composing scholarly tracts through bitter tears, a crushed Viagra dissolving in a highball of Jack Daniels next to the keyboard, as another long evening fades into a blur of poetry, madness, and vigorous bouts of hate-filled masturbation. And wondering, of the two, which is the more meaningful and fitting monument to humanity?
They should've just burned enjoyeverysandwich to CD, stuck it to the side of Voyager along with its author, and shot the whole lot into space back when they had government funding to do so, all in the name of making a good first impression for whatever aliens were out cruising for an easy meal.
skippystalin's output is prodigious, to be sure, but there was an entire blogroll to consider:
The lunatics are running the asylum over at Straight White Guy's place. Eric's testicles are mentioned, indirectly. Remind me to change my passwords regularly and start using strong encryption.
How stoned do you have to be to cheat on Jessica Alba? I could jack off to Jessica Alba while a big mean dog was chasing me and this idiot is cheating on her. I decided to confront him about this and I screamed at him, hey, what is your problem. And he said I should get off his lawn. And I said, no, no you get off the lawn. You get off. Then he went inside, probably because deep down, he knew I had made some pretty good points.
JimGoad.com is no more, but if you're a Goad fan (ladies!), you can find find him here. Discussion of Brittany's latest, erm, candid photos is also to be found, but be aware that the following picture is used as a visual aid:
This morning we picked up my new wheelchair. It's a sporty European marque, with an aggressive stance, low-profile tires, and a head-turning cherry-red metalflake paint job. It's not that great on the corners, but it'll take any one of y'all on the straightaways.
I've never done time on wheels. On the whole, I found it to be not all that bad. Then again, I don't figure that most wheelchair-bound men my age get to enjoy being pushed around town by a couple of sexy German bloggerettes. Thanks, ladies: the jealous looks from the other local cripples was the icing on the cake. Here's a little something extra for you, babes. (via AoSHQ)
Funny things happen when you're on wheels. I saw a lady I work with while being carted through Tesco's frozen food department. I said hello, and she just looked right through me, steering her cart so as not to make contact with the leper. She probably thought I was going to ask her for some spare change, or if she could wipe me bum for me, or whatever it is that those people want from healthy-legged people. I also noticed that the supermarkets put completely different things down on the bottom three feet of the shelves. All the cool toys are down there, for example, presumably because chil'n's is small. It's also a great altitude to find anti-bedsore medicaments, for some reason.
So, I let myself be pushed by the Weyside in Guildford, where, at one point, a husky young native was required to wheel my fat ass up a steep incline. The Sistas, for all their heart, lacked the muscle to get the job done, so he, being a true-hearted salt-of-earth kind of guy, waved them off and grunted and sweated till I crested the hill. Had the man known that I could have, at any point in time, simply stood up and hobbled up the hill under my own power, he most certainly would have picked me up and broken me over his knee.
Tomorrow morning, we'll be visiting Stonehenge, or Stone'enge, as the locals quaintly call it. We'll also visit the haunted city, Salisbury, to watch the homosexuals. Ta!
I like reading OSNews for some reason. I think I like to catch the geeky news about SkyOS, or the occasional retro curmudgeonry that rolls by about Lotus 1-2-3 or OS/2. Being the old-timer that I am, it's hard to resist a paean from my youth about 10-finger productivity.
Unfortunately, they've become the epicenter of stupid for the tech press. Check out this article, which explodes the myths about competition being good: "Competition is not Good"
'It gives consumers more choice'
Choice is good when there's one agreed base standard, and a number of compatible approaches. For example, there are many Linux distributions, but they are all Linux, and they can all run the same software. They are 'flavours' of the same thing, that is a good choice. People like different flavours.
Competition does not produce easier choices for consumers. All they get is added un-interoperability and complexity with competitive choices.
Now, if you go read that article, which I do not recommend, you'll slowly come to the realization that this moron is just annoyed that he has to make the effort to choose between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. He's willing to surrender his entire free will to some (hopefully) benevolent dictator, abolish brand names, and forsake the free market economy because choosing which format to buy the Firefly special edition box set in is hard. What a hopeless, whiny-assed sissy.
Of course, things don't get better when they start tossing political analysis at you. "Net Neutrality" is one monikers that has overshadowed the thing named. The discussion is often framed in a way that an uninformed listener would assume there was lobbying going on to abolish some sort of laws that are now protecting consumers from big, bad tiered-Internet ninjas.
But: There is no net neutrality legislation, there never was, and hopefully, there never will be. The argument over "Net Neutrality" is about whether or not the U.S. government should introduce legislation forbidding bandwidth throttling by ISPs. It's the "have you stopped beating your wife?" straw man for the Slashdot crowd. You'll notice that this article calls the Supreme Court's decision that the U.S. government shouldn't step in and configure the ISPs' Cisco routers for them, "Backing for Two-Tier Internet":
The US Justice Department has said that internet service providers should be allowed to charge for priority traffic. The agency said it was opposed to 'network neutrality', the idea that all data on the net is treated equally. The comments put the agency at odds with companies such as Microsoft and Google, who have called for legislation to guarantee equal access to the net.
Of course, this would also mean that an enforcement infrastructure would also have to be put in place, making sure that everyone got their "fair share" of said bandwidth, as if backbone routers and POPs just fell off a tree somewhere. God forbid ISPs be allowed to tune the services that they developed and paid for as they wish. Let's let the government decides who gets bandwidth, and how much is enough! That will make it all fair and neutral-like. Whenever a politician uses the word "fair", hang on to your wallet.
Well, my trackbacks are now working, it seems. There's some ugly Python spaghetti-code going on behind the scenes that translates back and forth between absolute urls, non-absolute relative urls, and upper-lower-camel case; but it works.
Trackbacks are only good for Movable Type, though. Which I can't stand anymore. MT used to be the only thing out there, but there's something that really, really, really galls me about the way it rebuilds your entire site into static HTML pages everytime you update a post. I'm sure it's awesomeness if you've got your server running on an old TV remote, but nowadays we're all running our web servers on 100-core 64-bit terahertz moonshot computers that can simultaneously compute π, encode MPEG video, and mix the best goddam margaritas you've ever tasted, all without breaking a sweat.
So yeah, I figured out how to implement trackbacks in Django, to a point where they more or less work. Now why is Wordpress fucking with me? It seems to be thrown off by the fact that Wordpress sends a HEAD request before it downloads and parses the page, in the vain hope that the X-Pingback header will be set. I can't figure out how to do that in Django's generic views, so I just use the secondary method, that being a link element in the XHTML code. But now, whenever a Worpdress blog pings me, I get this kind of crap:
[09/Sep/2007 15:04:23] "GET /blog/2007/sep/08/vacation/ HTTP/1.1" 200 27367
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (104, 'Connection reset by peer')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (32, 'Broken pipe')
Being the half-assed programmer that I am, I am at a total loss. I can't even do a Lazyweb request here, seeing as my 4 visits a day are unlikely to bring the Django HTTP gurus by. I won't be able to sleep at night, thinking of all the enlightened Wordpress Users who are probably out there try to "Keep the discussion going" with me.
Ever since June, when the iPhone went live, I've heard about nothing else in the tech press, nerd podcasts, and the Apple Fanboisphere. Is it really that way over in the States (the only place you can get them), or does the iPhone actually seem to be doing well?
Ahh, my first vacation since joining The Company. My queue is cleaned up, my email is forwarded, and an elaborate Sieve session has accomplished in a mere two hours what less civilized mail systems can do with a key combination: The Corporate Vacation Email.
It's been five months now since I came 'cross the channel and started meeting the natives, learning the lingo, and getting used to the fact that everyone here talks like Pinky. Now, I'll be letting my hair down for the next 10 days or so. As well as putting my poor, broken foot up on the coffee table.
As soon as I get my x-rays back from the socialist medical system (they still copy them with coal rubbings on wax paper over here, apparently), I'll post pictures of the metatarsalar breakage here for your morbid enjoyment. Don't thank me yet.
The other half of Sistaweb will be joining us for the week. We'll allow her to sleep here rent-free for an entire week, even though she refused to bring a carton of cigarettes as payment. Damned non-smokers and their principles. It's like those non-smokers back in the World War II who didn't sign up for cigarette rations. Throwing away a gold mine, that is. Our grandfathers probably had a word for those guys, and if I knew my grandfather at all, that word was sissy-boy.
The girls have rented a wheelchair for me, seeing as I won't be too much fun doing a London pub-crawl on crutches. I've already had a forehead-slapping moment over this, as you probably are right now. Why haven't I thought of taking a wheelchair with me before? That would've come in handy on more than one occasion, the Wreckyll in Jeckyll not least among them.
Man, Apple is on a roll. Not only have they got me hooked for a new computer, a new laptop, a new office package, and a replacement for my aging MythTV box, but now I have to start thinking about a new iPod. Now, let's see what Uncle Steve is going to me be costing me 'til Christmas Time:
Item
Damage
20" iMac
1199.00
Macbook
1099.00
8GB iPod Touch
299.00
AppleTV
299.00
iWork '08
79.00
iLife '08
79.00
Total:
$3,054.00
Not bad for a day's work, Mr. Jobs. And what's up for the rest of September? Maybe some irresistible bionic iFoot to replace the one I broke playing frisbee at the company picnic last week?
Although there's a remarkable lack of iPhone hype around the office, we being a big-time Linux company and all, there's an amazing amount of Mac fanboiism. Pretty much all of us have Macs at home. The explanation for this is simple: After dealing with Linux problems all day long, there's something nice about going home to something you can spend all your time using and not making up excuses for why it looks like shit and doesn't work.
I like Linux, mind you. I use it day-in, day-out for my desktop at work, for my webservers, and it brings in my daily bread. We all love it here, pretty much like a family loves and therefore tolerates the embarrassing second cousin with the Downs'. But people are walking all over the office today buzzing about the upcoming announcement from Apple.
Will it be the long-awaited iMac redesign? Will it be a new Mini? My boss is actually carrying his phone to the pub after work today so he can sit on engadget and get a realtime update. Linus would not be pleased...
Last login: Thu Jul 26 12:17:28 from nat-pool-fab.re Welcome to Darwin! ericbook:~ eric$ mutt -bash: mutt: command not found ericbook:~ eric$ open /Applications/Mail.app/ ericbook:~ eric$
Ahh. Like coming in after a long day of plowing the fields and sticking your aching feet into a pot of hot water. After running Linux all day at work, you feel like slipping into something more comfortable. Sam knows it. Zonker knows it, though he won't admit it. It's the right amount of just-workiness you need to let you relax, while knowing you could, at any given moment, do something like:
OK, here's one with drivel. I do like it, but I have a couple of gripes.
First problem: I was hopelessly confused by the login screen. The type of journal seems to be locked on livejournal, as the drop-down menu for journal types is inexplicably disabled until you enter a username. -1 for usabilty
Second problem: Useless stripping of trailing slash, which mangled my xmlrpc URL. Error 301 was ignored, which makes sense since it's a post and all, but I couldn't log in. It mangled my URL then choked on the error :-/
Third problem: didn't want to download my recent posts. Although there might be a misunderstanding about just what "recent" means.
Fourth problem: Doesn't let me choose post status anywhere. And there's nowhere I can find to choose text filters. This is more of a feature request, really.
Fifth problem: craps out after posting, probably because it keeps mangling the trailing slashes from my URLs. Is there an RFC somewhere that says that POSTS can't end with slashes? Nobody tell the Django folks.
Well, maybe it'll at least let me post to my blog from work every now and then.
Man, I dang sure missed the entire month of June. I've been in the UK now for about two months, and let me tell ya: They sure do get some rain around here. I always thought those stories about English people having gills were legends and fantasies. Now, I'm not so sure.
For the love of GOD, for the last time, in the name of ALL THAT IS HOLY, Cluster Services is NOT COMPATIBLE with 4.5! If you're running a cluster, DO NOT update to 4.5 until the Cluster Suite is UPDATED TO 4.5!
That is all.
P.S. And NO, cmirror is not available yet. Maybe at the end of the month.
I went outside to smoke a cigarette. All rooms in England are for non-smokers, you'll find, as are the rooms, apartments, and houses listed for rent in the local papers. The litany at the end of all the ads reads, "No smokers, canvassers, or DSS", which stands for Department of Social Services. So, okay they hate smokers and welfare cases, as do we all. But the British have their own definition for 'non-smoker', which basically means you only smoke when you drink. Everybody smokes over here, and they all live somewhere.
The evening was cool; almost cold, really, as I suspect the evenings around here generally are. I stood on the corner of Osborne and Netley, watching the blackbirds getting ready to do whatever it is they do at night, when I spied a man, some yards away, bounding up the sidewalk with a jaunty gait. I held my cigarette just in front of my mouth, watching this figure with suspicion. He was short, about 5 feet tall, and round as a soccer ball. He was wearing light-colored trousers and a dark blazer, the left breast of which was adorned with an enormous, orange prize-ribbon.
As he approached me, his features became distinct in the bad lighting, and I realized he was positively beaming with pride. His face was ruddy, and split with a grin that wouldn't have looked out of place behind a wheelbarrow full of poker chips on the way to the cash-out. I placed him in his mid-40s, but maybe his thinning red hair and roly-poly stature made him look older than he really was.
He halted just a few feet from me, and said, with oddly struggling words, "Good evening, mister!"
I looked him up and down, cigarette still burning between my shaky fingers, and replied, "hi, how are ya..." He wobbled his head a bit, then walked around me on his way up the street. I noticed something written in gold on his orange ribbon, and read it as it flashed in the lamplight.
I judged him more than a wee bit 'differently-abled', as they say. I watched as he cautiously crossed the empty street, looking both ways at least twice, then gingerly stepping into the street and crossing it at a run.
I thought about what I had seen written on the ribbon: "A Very Special Boy". Hmm, I thought, I wonder who gave him that? Whoever it was, they made his whole day.
I put my cigarette out and walked back into the guest house.
My buddy Sam sent me an email a couple of days ago indicating that he just might have joined The Family recently. And he joined it a much higher level than I, I might add, considering I'm still lumbering along in the PowerPC world; my G4 Powerbook, though a loyal and trusted friend, seems slow as molasses in January these days.
He also mentioned an old OS/2 habit, one which we separately shared back in the day. I started using OS/2 when I worked at UPS. One of our managers was running 2.1, with the old Presentation Manager that looked like a crappy(er) Windows 2.0, albeit with long filenames and the ability to run concurrent DOS sessions. I avoided it until OS/2 3.0 came out.
In '94, when Warp hit the shelves, I rushed out to Soft-Warehouse1 in Alpharetta, looked in the Operating Systems2 department until I found a box, then gave the man $300 dollars for the privilege of running it. Then, I walked over the desktop applications department, and put down another $495 for Lotus Smartsuite/2. Then I OEM'd 16MB of RAM for about $400 to make it all go.
Now, many may see OS/2 as a butt-ugly cousin of Windows, and they may be right. But back then, it was a work of art. Especially in the sense that it wasn't an exact science getting it to run. Nothing ever really worked like it was supposed to. Without the fallback of a DOS prompt, you had to have a second, fully-functional machine to do things like edit the CONFIG.SYS on the installation floppies to make sure your DASD drivers were loading. And most of the drivers were written so that, if they encountered an error while loading, they'd bork the whole boot process, just to be on the safe side.
The graphical interface also hung constantly. The Workplace Shell, despite (or maybe due to) all its object-orientiness, was horribly unstable. But I never saw a hang that wasn't cured with Control-Alt-Delete. That key combo went right down to the kernel, and always gave a satisfying, unconfirmed reboot, wedged GUI be damned. There was even a 3rd party program called Watchcat that sat on the serial port, or on a secondary Hercules/MCGA monitor, and let you monitor and kill programs remotely. The kernel's Kung Fu was strong like that, but the GUI was just ass.
Now, when Chicago started finally coming down the pipe, and even the Rolling Stones where pulled into the OS marketing world ("Start me up", anyone?), OS/2 fans like myself were sure that this pissant little DOS extender with a homely face wouldn't be the future. It couldn't be the future, it was just too depressing. It still wasn't a 32-bit OS, though the 386 had been out for over 8 years. It still used FAT, for crying out loud. In short, Chicago sucked.
OS/2 seemed like a scrappy little underdog, nipping heroically at the Microsoft behemoth's heels. I'm not sure why it gave that impression. At the time, IBM was much bigger than Microsoft, a huge, multinational corporation with interests in basically every aspect of electronics. They just couldn't write or market good software.
I'm not sure why I just wrote 500 words on OS/2. I actually wanted to write something about Linux.
Software stores used to have a whole "Operating Systems" department, back when there was more than one operating system, and Windows was still called an "Operating Environment" ↩
Man, I'm unprepared. There's a checklist of things you should do before moving to England. I came over here without any money, preparation, or attack plan. There's something unbelievably stupid about this. It worked for me when I moved to Germany, but moving to England's a bit more complicated, apparently. Either that, or I'm remembering it wrong.
But I'm not the only one. The office I'm working in is full of non-British people. It's a rag-tag group of Germans, Italians, Brazilians, Spaniards, one (1) American, and who knows what else that all found themselves in the same boat when they first came over. This despite promises from The Company to help one resettle; promises which are certainly not kept and, when referred to in conversation, change their shape and character like a Democrat on a whistle-stop.
But at some point a kindly soul in the department, now departed, made a list of the reality of the situation. It's a short list of what one really needs to do when moving to England. Unfortunately, I only found out about it after I'd already been here a week. Here's your to-do list once you've arrived in England:
Get a room. If possible, get a rental agreement or any bill with your name and address on it. (proof of address)
Deposit is usually 1 1/2 times the rent. Deposit and first rent is to be paid beforehand. If the room is unfurnished, see "Things to Buy" for shops and example prices.
Get a letter from your office manager (HR Lady) stating that you are working for the company and including your address. (proof of employment)
Get a bank account. Just walk in with your documents:
Passport or national ID card
Proof of employment (see 2.). it might be handy to have your contract with you.
Proof of address
Banks
HSBC – try to get a standard account (they try to sell you an advanced package including insurances etc.)
NatWest – Also recommended as this bank does not charge for withdrawing money from a different bank's cash machines
Give your bank details to The Company
Register with Inland Revenue – this is done by your HR manager. You should get your tax code about 2 weeks later (PAYE Coding Notice)
At the end of the fiscal year (ending April 5th), you will get a "P60 End of Year Certificate" detailing your "Pay and Income Tax" levels.
Get a National Insurance Number by applying at a Job Centre Plus office. They ask for dtails before they schedule an interview appointment to verify your eligibility. Appointments are scheduled about two weeks ahead, and take place in the nearest county office, which usually isn't near at all. Without an NI number, you will be on emergency tax, which is higher than the standard tax rate.
Documents:
Passport
National ID card
Driving License or any other official document identifying you (Birth certificate, police registration, medical card, etc.)
Proof of employment (see 2.)
Recent payslip
Bank statement
Proof of address (utility bill, rental agreement, etc. – see 1.)
It might be handy to have your PAYE Coding Notice with you
As money is paid in a timely manner so it is available on the 27th, try to get your appointment after this date.
If you are British, a citizen of a member state of the EU, or other Commonwealth citizen, you can apply for inclusion on the Register of Electors. This will allow you to vote at local government elections. Your credibility will rise (good for tenancy applications or bank-related matters) and you are obliged to pay Council Taxes1
If you buy any TV or radio equipment, you will be asked for your address, which will be automatically forwarded to the "TV Licensing Office"
Get a Tesco Clubcard
Get a life ;-)
Any address change has to be communicated to all above-mentioned authorities. For the official notices to local council, the TV licensing, and most other on-line services, you can use I am Moving , where you can create/use an account for free.
All of this could have been avoided with a bit of planning. I am bitterly disappointed in myself.
Council taxes are universal as far as I can tell, and are perceived, by the British at least, as an extension of the rent. ↩
Farnborough derives its name from from the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Ferneberga (Fern Hill) and is mentioned in the Domesday Book (1086). But for the coming of the army at nearby Aldershot, the arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flying, Farnborough would probably have remained an isolated heathland village, that is until the latter half of the 20th century when the population moved out of London suburbia and became commuters.
"But for the … arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flight…". That's a pretty big conditional. There are probably a lot of places whose development was seriously affected by railways and the advent of powered flight. But I understand where the good Mr. Parkins is coming from.
I had forgotten the cable to connect my camera to my laptop. Of all the stupid things that I packed for the trip, 50 different USB cables, a USB hub, power adapters for devices I’d forgotten, not to mention devices whose power adapters I’d forgotten, I forgot the one thing that was absolutely necessary and planned-for. Not to mention irreplaceable, seeing as every camera maker in the world decided that their camera’s little hole should look different from all the other cameras’ little holes.
I walked into a little computer store on the strip in Fleet, Hampshire. Walking up to the pasty-faced, teenaged part-timer there, I introduced myself and shook his hand, which seemed to shock him.
He unconsciously wiped his hands on his pants and said, “eh...nice to meet you, sir. What can I do for you?”
I asked him, “do you have any USB card-readers?”
“Um, yeah," he answered. "I think I saw some around here somewhere.”
I looked around the shop, which was organized and clean. Man, he must really be the FNG around here. He finally found what I was looking for, stored on a shelf right next to where he had been sitting. He handed it to me and I started reading the back of the packaging.
“Just looking to see if it works with my Mac,” I told him.
“Oh, it's USB, so it should work,” he answered, and took the reader out of my hand. He moved his lips while he read the package. “Oh, yeah,” he said finally. “Right there it says it: ‘Requires Mac OS 9 or later’.” He looked at me skeptically. “So, you do have OS 9 or later, don’t you?”
“Um, yeah, I think so.” OS 9 went out of style back in the ‘90s.
He moved around to the register, and I handed him my Visa card. He looked uncertain as he turned it over in his hand. “This thing doesn’t have a chip on it?”
I took it back and examined it. “No, I guess it doesn’t.”
“Well, I don’t think we can take that, then.”
“Why don’t you just swipe it,” I said. “Give it a go.”
He shrugged and swiped it through the machine.
From behind me, a voice said, “it’s all chips nowadays, you know.”
I looked around, and saw that an older woman was standing behind me. She looked to be in her mid 40s, and wore a name plate with the store’s logo on it. “You can’t get nothing without a dozen little chips in it.”
I nodded agreement, and turned back to the young man behind the register.
“So, what kind of Mac you got, then?”
“A PowerBook G4.”
He nodded approvingly. “Nice piece of kit, that.” The little machine that had taken my card made a loud ping!, and spit out a receipt. He tore it off and gave it to me to sign, along with the card reader.
“Now, you have a nice day sir, and do please visit us again.”
I thanked him, said goodbye to the chip-lady, and put the small package into my bag next to my laptop. “Thanks, man, I’ll do that.” Nice kid.
Didja ever discover something that made your reality skip a beat? You know how, for just a second, something is so far out of place that you can't even figure out what's wrong with the picture? For example, the Augsburg Wireless-Internet provider Cyberways has had the same guy on their start page for years:
Every time you connect to the internet over public wireless in Augsburg, that dude was right there, staring at you with those soulless black eyes. Like a doll's eyes...
And the weird thing was, I always figured he was the boss at Cyberways. I even thought I saw him once on the tram. I hate it when people use the same stock photos everywhere. Everybody's full of shit. Oh, I guess it's effective use of your cash dollars, seeing as it's cheaper than paying attractive people to work for you. But still, why not just be honest for a split second?
You get this kind of thing all over the Internet, of course. If you've ever shopped for web hosting, you'll notice, after a few visits to the providers' pages, that their employees all kind of look alike. And there's always some woman somewhere holding a laptop at her waist in near-sexual ecstasy over the reasonable shared hosting prices.
It's a leitmotif throughout the enter hosting industry: Shared Webspace=Chick with laptop.
Rube, look, for the last freakin time, look RIGHT when you step off a curb! These people drive on the other side of the F$@&-ing road over here! You wanna get ya brains splattered all over me?
What? I dunno. I'm just kind of sitting around, waiting on things. I just spent way too much time transferring money across European borders, and reclaiming my identity. But the new passports are wonderful pieces of fortitude. Here' s a few quotes from my new passport:
And that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth. - Abraham Lincoln
The principle of free governments adheres to the American soil. It is bedded in it, immovable as its mountains. - Daniel Webster
Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. - George Washington
We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. - excerpt from the Declaration of Independence
Your concept of love may be different, but know that I love this world.
I like reading Scott Adams' blog on occasion. Much like Balph Eubanks, he's glib, amusing, and completely lacking in morality. Take, for example, his latest strawman-laden posting regarding the visit of a certain Mr. Ahmedinejad:
I was happy to hear that NYC didn't allow Iranian President Ahmadinejad
to place a wreath at the WTC site. And I was happy that Columbia
University is rescinding the offer to let him speak. If you let a guy like
that express his views, before long the entire world will want freedom
of speech.
...
If Ahmadinejad thinks he can be our friend by honoring our heroes and
opening a dialog, he underestimates our ability to misinterpret him.
Fucking idiot. I hate him.
Well, there's certainly some rye wit at work here. Yes, it is quite ironic that a country led by a genocidal religious dictator, which the USA most certainly is, would object to a fellow genocidal religious madman visiting its most sensitive cultural site. I mean, Mahmoud's only trying to "open a dialog" here, isn't he? Isn't that the meaning of Ahmedinejad's visit? Isn't Ahmedinejad just exercising "Free Speech", as Adams says? Aren't we wrong in denying this poor man that right?
Aside from the obvious jackassery involved in claiming that a man who directly controls his entire country's media is having trouble getting his point of view out; or that the United Nations will let him speak before the leaders of the world to the point where they forget to blink for an hour; aside from all this, this is not a question of whether or not Mahmoud is allowed to say what he wants. The question is, in accordance with the Grand Unified Theory of Rubean Mechanics, Who's going to pay for it. It's a question of whether or not Americans should be paying for his plane fare, his security, and his accommodation while he's here, pissing on Ground Zero and generating propaganda for totalitarian lobbying groups like MoveOn.org and International ANSWER.
All of Adams' ridiculous assertions never mention the one central fact here: There is no compelling reason for American taxpayers to foot the bill, so this guy, who just held one of his popular "Death to America" parades, can come over here and lecture them on anything. I personally don't much care what Ahmedinejad thinks, I can see the general thrust of his inclinations. He's spitting on the United States and Western Culture daily, and then expects to be treated with deference in return. Fuck him.
This kind of Devil's Advocacy isn't new to Adams. At least, I hope it's just that. He's apparently one of those celebrities that have forgotten the hard work involved in their ascendency, and assume that they're rich because of some accident of nature, akin to divine providence. Humans, himself included, are all just a bunch of "moist robots" with no capacity for thought, no free will; we've apparently just been programmed by Mother Nature to do the things we've done or will do. There is no mind, there is no choice, there is only the stimuli in our environments, and the response that was determined by a chance arrangement of atoms into chemicals during the Big Bang. Or something.
It's an obscene display of thoughtlessness, a conceit of someone trying so hard to seem above all this. Adams' Dilbert is amusing, and his blog is a bit of junk food for the brain at times. But he's got the morals of a two-dollar whore.
Last night we didn't make it. The two Frenchmen surrendered the evening, seeing as it was Trotzky's birthday, and therefore a time for somber reflection or something. So, we rode around big town Farnborough for a couple of hours, grabbed some grub, and then headed back to the apartment to watch a movie.
We watched Fur, which cemented my belief that Nicole Kidman is the perfect woman. Not only does she look good in her own slutty little librarian sort of way, she gives a guy a handjob in this movie while shaving his hairy back. That's my kind of girl, a real little trooper.
Anyhoo, it's back off to London now, for a second try at getting sloppy somewhere besides sitting at home in front of the boob tube. Wish us luck.
Vacation week is winding down, and I'm getting ready to leave the driving to Southwest Trains and go drinking in London. I'll try to keep it under two weeks this time, but no promises. We'll tramp it a bit through Soho, I guess, just me, the girls, and a couple of frog-eaters from the office.
I wonder why I never get to go drinking with Englishmen? It's probably for the best. There's a quote that gets bandied about, especially in the local newspapers, about England being a nation of drunks and scalawags. I can't say much about that, but it does seem that the pubs all close at 11:00 PM for a reason. At 5 o'clock, they pour out of their offices and into the public houses, seemingly on a race against the clock to get themselves 'faced before the early last call.
When they were finally permitted to stay open past 11, in the hope that the binge-drinking would abate in light of longer opening hours, they found themselves doubly-cursed in that the Englishmen were every bit as drunk at 11, but didn't have to go home. All pubs here are set up so that you have to go to the counter to get your drinks, instead of having them brought to your table. There's a built-in handbrake there: a system where you can't get any more drink once you lose the ability to walk is founded upon sound principle and good advices.
I've done nothing today; nothing but clean out the cluttered closets of my preferred newsfeed reader. There were some connections in there that were sorely neglected. I could use a bit more time to wade through the degenerate filth that is my blogroll, but sadly, I work. The Company is tolerant in their control over my time, fair since they do not pay hourly; but tolerance has its limits, and I doubt they would look kindly upon my spending the business day in a fugue state, reading entry after entry of dialectics about Jessica Simpson's tits, or Brittney Spears' overplayed poonanny.
Nevertheless, it saddens me that my everyday is not blessed with the nuggets of wisdom from skippystalin:
Being the only person with an out-of-control substance abuse problem in a relationship is tough. Most romantic couplings are based on common interests and most of my interests culminate in my waking up in a pool of what I think is my own urine and not being quite sure what time zone I'm in. I'm much like a cat in that I have a tendancy of marking my territory with my vomit, blood and gallons of my semen...My ability to smoke, drink and masturbate furiously at the same time might not be much, it's all that I have.
Ahh, skippystalin, how I've missed you, and your nuggets.
This is how I spend my vacation: visiting Stonehenge on one day; reading the melancholy musings of skippystalin the next, picturing him composing scholarly tracts through bitter tears, a crushed Viagra dissolving in a highball of Jack Daniels next to the keyboard, as another long evening fades into a blur of poetry, madness, and vigorous bouts of hate-filled masturbation. And wondering, of the two, which is the more meaningful and fitting monument to humanity?
They should've just burned enjoyeverysandwich to CD, stuck it to the side of Voyager along with its author, and shot the whole lot into space back when they had government funding to do so, all in the name of making a good first impression for whatever aliens were out cruising for an easy meal.
skippystalin's output is prodigious, to be sure, but there was an entire blogroll to consider:
The lunatics are running the asylum over at Straight White Guy's place. Eric's testicles are mentioned, indirectly. Remind me to change my passwords regularly and start using strong encryption.
How stoned do you have to be to cheat on Jessica Alba? I could jack off to Jessica Alba while a big mean dog was chasing me and this idiot is cheating on her. I decided to confront him about this and I screamed at him, hey, what is your problem. And he said I should get off his lawn. And I said, no, no you get off the lawn. You get off. Then he went inside, probably because deep down, he knew I had made some pretty good points.
JimGoad.com is no more, but if you're a Goad fan (ladies!), you can find find him here. Discussion of Brittany's latest, erm, candid photos is also to be found, but be aware that the following picture is used as a visual aid:
This morning we picked up my new wheelchair. It's a sporty European marque, with an aggressive stance, low-profile tires, and a head-turning cherry-red metalflake paint job. It's not that great on the corners, but it'll take any one of y'all on the straightaways.
I've never done time on wheels. On the whole, I found it to be not all that bad. Then again, I don't figure that most wheelchair-bound men my age get to enjoy being pushed around town by a couple of sexy German bloggerettes. Thanks, ladies: the jealous looks from the other local cripples was the icing on the cake. Here's a little something extra for you, babes. (via AoSHQ)
Funny things happen when you're on wheels. I saw a lady I work with while being carted through Tesco's frozen food department. I said hello, and she just looked right through me, steering her cart so as not to make contact with the leper. She probably thought I was going to ask her for some spare change, or if she could wipe me bum for me, or whatever it is that those people want from healthy-legged people. I also noticed that the supermarkets put completely different things down on the bottom three feet of the shelves. All the cool toys are down there, for example, presumably because chil'n's is small. It's also a great altitude to find anti-bedsore medicaments, for some reason.
So, I let myself be pushed by the Weyside in Guildford, where, at one point, a husky young native was required to wheel my fat ass up a steep incline. The Sistas, for all their heart, lacked the muscle to get the job done, so he, being a true-hearted salt-of-earth kind of guy, waved them off and grunted and sweated till I crested the hill. Had the man known that I could have, at any point in time, simply stood up and hobbled up the hill under my own power, he most certainly would have picked me up and broken me over his knee.
Tomorrow morning, we'll be visiting Stonehenge, or Stone'enge, as the locals quaintly call it. We'll also visit the haunted city, Salisbury, to watch the homosexuals. Ta!
I like reading OSNews for some reason. I think I like to catch the geeky news about SkyOS, or the occasional retro curmudgeonry that rolls by about Lotus 1-2-3 or OS/2. Being the old-timer that I am, it's hard to resist a paean from my youth about 10-finger productivity.
Unfortunately, they've become the epicenter of stupid for the tech press. Check out this article, which explodes the myths about competition being good: "Competition is not Good"
'It gives consumers more choice'
Choice is good when there's one agreed base standard, and a number of compatible approaches. For example, there are many Linux distributions, but they are all Linux, and they can all run the same software. They are 'flavours' of the same thing, that is a good choice. People like different flavours.
Competition does not produce easier choices for consumers. All they get is added un-interoperability and complexity with competitive choices.
Now, if you go read that article, which I do not recommend, you'll slowly come to the realization that this moron is just annoyed that he has to make the effort to choose between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. He's willing to surrender his entire free will to some (hopefully) benevolent dictator, abolish brand names, and forsake the free market economy because choosing which format to buy the Firefly special edition box set in is hard. What a hopeless, whiny-assed sissy.
Of course, things don't get better when they start tossing political analysis at you. "Net Neutrality" is one monikers that has overshadowed the thing named. The discussion is often framed in a way that an uninformed listener would assume there was lobbying going on to abolish some sort of laws that are now protecting consumers from big, bad tiered-Internet ninjas.
But: There is no net neutrality legislation, there never was, and hopefully, there never will be. The argument over "Net Neutrality" is about whether or not the U.S. government should introduce legislation forbidding bandwidth throttling by ISPs. It's the "have you stopped beating your wife?" straw man for the Slashdot crowd. You'll notice that this article calls the Supreme Court's decision that the U.S. government shouldn't step in and configure the ISPs' Cisco routers for them, "Backing for Two-Tier Internet":
The US Justice Department has said that internet service providers should be allowed to charge for priority traffic. The agency said it was opposed to 'network neutrality', the idea that all data on the net is treated equally. The comments put the agency at odds with companies such as Microsoft and Google, who have called for legislation to guarantee equal access to the net.
Of course, this would also mean that an enforcement infrastructure would also have to be put in place, making sure that everyone got their "fair share" of said bandwidth, as if backbone routers and POPs just fell off a tree somewhere. God forbid ISPs be allowed to tune the services that they developed and paid for as they wish. Let's let the government decides who gets bandwidth, and how much is enough! That will make it all fair and neutral-like. Whenever a politician uses the word "fair", hang on to your wallet.
Well, my trackbacks are now working, it seems. There's some ugly Python spaghetti-code going on behind the scenes that translates back and forth between absolute urls, non-absolute relative urls, and upper-lower-camel case; but it works.
Trackbacks are only good for Movable Type, though. Which I can't stand anymore. MT used to be the only thing out there, but there's something that really, really, really galls me about the way it rebuilds your entire site into static HTML pages everytime you update a post. I'm sure it's awesomeness if you've got your server running on an old TV remote, but nowadays we're all running our web servers on 100-core 64-bit terahertz moonshot computers that can simultaneously compute π, encode MPEG video, and mix the best goddam margaritas you've ever tasted, all without breaking a sweat.
So yeah, I figured out how to implement trackbacks in Django, to a point where they more or less work. Now why is Wordpress fucking with me? It seems to be thrown off by the fact that Wordpress sends a HEAD request before it downloads and parses the page, in the vain hope that the X-Pingback header will be set. I can't figure out how to do that in Django's generic views, so I just use the secondary method, that being a link element in the XHTML code. But now, whenever a Worpdress blog pings me, I get this kind of crap:
[09/Sep/2007 15:04:23] "GET /blog/2007/sep/08/vacation/ HTTP/1.1" 200 27367
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (104, 'Connection reset by peer')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (32, 'Broken pipe')
Being the half-assed programmer that I am, I am at a total loss. I can't even do a Lazyweb request here, seeing as my 4 visits a day are unlikely to bring the Django HTTP gurus by. I won't be able to sleep at night, thinking of all the enlightened Wordpress Users who are probably out there try to "Keep the discussion going" with me.
Ever since June, when the iPhone went live, I've heard about nothing else in the tech press, nerd podcasts, and the Apple Fanboisphere. Is it really that way over in the States (the only place you can get them), or does the iPhone actually seem to be doing well?
Ahh, my first vacation since joining The Company. My queue is cleaned up, my email is forwarded, and an elaborate Sieve session has accomplished in a mere two hours what less civilized mail systems can do with a key combination: The Corporate Vacation Email.
It's been five months now since I came 'cross the channel and started meeting the natives, learning the lingo, and getting used to the fact that everyone here talks like Pinky. Now, I'll be letting my hair down for the next 10 days or so. As well as putting my poor, broken foot up on the coffee table.
As soon as I get my x-rays back from the socialist medical system (they still copy them with coal rubbings on wax paper over here, apparently), I'll post pictures of the metatarsalar breakage here for your morbid enjoyment. Don't thank me yet.
The other half of Sistaweb will be joining us for the week. We'll allow her to sleep here rent-free for an entire week, even though she refused to bring a carton of cigarettes as payment. Damned non-smokers and their principles. It's like those non-smokers back in the World War II who didn't sign up for cigarette rations. Throwing away a gold mine, that is. Our grandfathers probably had a word for those guys, and if I knew my grandfather at all, that word was sissy-boy.
The girls have rented a wheelchair for me, seeing as I won't be too much fun doing a London pub-crawl on crutches. I've already had a forehead-slapping moment over this, as you probably are right now. Why haven't I thought of taking a wheelchair with me before? That would've come in handy on more than one occasion, the Wreckyll in Jeckyll not least among them.
Man, Apple is on a roll. Not only have they got me hooked for a new computer, a new laptop, a new office package, and a replacement for my aging MythTV box, but now I have to start thinking about a new iPod. Now, let's see what Uncle Steve is going to me be costing me 'til Christmas Time:
Item
Damage
20" iMac
1199.00
Macbook
1099.00
8GB iPod Touch
299.00
AppleTV
299.00
iWork '08
79.00
iLife '08
79.00
Total:
$3,054.00
Not bad for a day's work, Mr. Jobs. And what's up for the rest of September? Maybe some irresistible bionic iFoot to replace the one I broke playing frisbee at the company picnic last week?
Although there's a remarkable lack of iPhone hype around the office, we being a big-time Linux company and all, there's an amazing amount of Mac fanboiism. Pretty much all of us have Macs at home. The explanation for this is simple: After dealing with Linux problems all day long, there's something nice about going home to something you can spend all your time using and not making up excuses for why it looks like shit and doesn't work.
I like Linux, mind you. I use it day-in, day-out for my desktop at work, for my webservers, and it brings in my daily bread. We all love it here, pretty much like a family loves and therefore tolerates the embarrassing second cousin with the Downs'. But people are walking all over the office today buzzing about the upcoming announcement from Apple.
Will it be the long-awaited iMac redesign? Will it be a new Mini? My boss is actually carrying his phone to the pub after work today so he can sit on engadget and get a realtime update. Linus would not be pleased...
Last login: Thu Jul 26 12:17:28 from nat-pool-fab.re Welcome to Darwin! ericbook:~ eric$ mutt -bash: mutt: command not found ericbook:~ eric$ open /Applications/Mail.app/ ericbook:~ eric$
Ahh. Like coming in after a long day of plowing the fields and sticking your aching feet into a pot of hot water. After running Linux all day at work, you feel like slipping into something more comfortable. Sam knows it. Zonker knows it, though he won't admit it. It's the right amount of just-workiness you need to let you relax, while knowing you could, at any given moment, do something like:
OK, here's one with drivel. I do like it, but I have a couple of gripes.
First problem: I was hopelessly confused by the login screen. The type of journal seems to be locked on livejournal, as the drop-down menu for journal types is inexplicably disabled until you enter a username. -1 for usabilty
Second problem: Useless stripping of trailing slash, which mangled my xmlrpc URL. Error 301 was ignored, which makes sense since it's a post and all, but I couldn't log in. It mangled my URL then choked on the error :-/
Third problem: didn't want to download my recent posts. Although there might be a misunderstanding about just what "recent" means.
Fourth problem: Doesn't let me choose post status anywhere. And there's nowhere I can find to choose text filters. This is more of a feature request, really.
Fifth problem: craps out after posting, probably because it keeps mangling the trailing slashes from my URLs. Is there an RFC somewhere that says that POSTS can't end with slashes? Nobody tell the Django folks.
Well, maybe it'll at least let me post to my blog from work every now and then.
Man, I dang sure missed the entire month of June. I've been in the UK now for about two months, and let me tell ya: They sure do get some rain around here. I always thought those stories about English people having gills were legends and fantasies. Now, I'm not so sure.
For the love of GOD, for the last time, in the name of ALL THAT IS HOLY, Cluster Services is NOT COMPATIBLE with 4.5! If you're running a cluster, DO NOT update to 4.5 until the Cluster Suite is UPDATED TO 4.5!
That is all.
P.S. And NO, cmirror is not available yet. Maybe at the end of the month.
I went outside to smoke a cigarette. All rooms in England are for non-smokers, you'll find, as are the rooms, apartments, and houses listed for rent in the local papers. The litany at the end of all the ads reads, "No smokers, canvassers, or DSS", which stands for Department of Social Services. So, okay they hate smokers and welfare cases, as do we all. But the British have their own definition for 'non-smoker', which basically means you only smoke when you drink. Everybody smokes over here, and they all live somewhere.
The evening was cool; almost cold, really, as I suspect the evenings around here generally are. I stood on the corner of Osborne and Netley, watching the blackbirds getting ready to do whatever it is they do at night, when I spied a man, some yards away, bounding up the sidewalk with a jaunty gait. I held my cigarette just in front of my mouth, watching this figure with suspicion. He was short, about 5 feet tall, and round as a soccer ball. He was wearing light-colored trousers and a dark blazer, the left breast of which was adorned with an enormous, orange prize-ribbon.
As he approached me, his features became distinct in the bad lighting, and I realized he was positively beaming with pride. His face was ruddy, and split with a grin that wouldn't have looked out of place behind a wheelbarrow full of poker chips on the way to the cash-out. I placed him in his mid-40s, but maybe his thinning red hair and roly-poly stature made him look older than he really was.
He halted just a few feet from me, and said, with oddly struggling words, "Good evening, mister!"
I looked him up and down, cigarette still burning between my shaky fingers, and replied, "hi, how are ya..." He wobbled his head a bit, then walked around me on his way up the street. I noticed something written in gold on his orange ribbon, and read it as it flashed in the lamplight.
I judged him more than a wee bit 'differently-abled', as they say. I watched as he cautiously crossed the empty street, looking both ways at least twice, then gingerly stepping into the street and crossing it at a run.
I thought about what I had seen written on the ribbon: "A Very Special Boy". Hmm, I thought, I wonder who gave him that? Whoever it was, they made his whole day.
I put my cigarette out and walked back into the guest house.
My buddy Sam sent me an email a couple of days ago indicating that he just might have joined The Family recently. And he joined it a much higher level than I, I might add, considering I'm still lumbering along in the PowerPC world; my G4 Powerbook, though a loyal and trusted friend, seems slow as molasses in January these days.
He also mentioned an old OS/2 habit, one which we separately shared back in the day. I started using OS/2 when I worked at UPS. One of our managers was running 2.1, with the old Presentation Manager that looked like a crappy(er) Windows 2.0, albeit with long filenames and the ability to run concurrent DOS sessions. I avoided it until OS/2 3.0 came out.
In '94, when Warp hit the shelves, I rushed out to Soft-Warehouse1 in Alpharetta, looked in the Operating Systems2 department until I found a box, then gave the man $300 dollars for the privilege of running it. Then, I walked over the desktop applications department, and put down another $495 for Lotus Smartsuite/2. Then I OEM'd 16MB of RAM for about $400 to make it all go.
Now, many may see OS/2 as a butt-ugly cousin of Windows, and they may be right. But back then, it was a work of art. Especially in the sense that it wasn't an exact science getting it to run. Nothing ever really worked like it was supposed to. Without the fallback of a DOS prompt, you had to have a second, fully-functional machine to do things like edit the CONFIG.SYS on the installation floppies to make sure your DASD drivers were loading. And most of the drivers were written so that, if they encountered an error while loading, they'd bork the whole boot process, just to be on the safe side.
The graphical interface also hung constantly. The Workplace Shell, despite (or maybe due to) all its object-orientiness, was horribly unstable. But I never saw a hang that wasn't cured with Control-Alt-Delete. That key combo went right down to the kernel, and always gave a satisfying, unconfirmed reboot, wedged GUI be damned. There was even a 3rd party program called Watchcat that sat on the serial port, or on a secondary Hercules/MCGA monitor, and let you monitor and kill programs remotely. The kernel's Kung Fu was strong like that, but the GUI was just ass.
Now, when Chicago started finally coming down the pipe, and even the Rolling Stones where pulled into the OS marketing world ("Start me up", anyone?), OS/2 fans like myself were sure that this pissant little DOS extender with a homely face wouldn't be the future. It couldn't be the future, it was just too depressing. It still wasn't a 32-bit OS, though the 386 had been out for over 8 years. It still used FAT, for crying out loud. In short, Chicago sucked.
OS/2 seemed like a scrappy little underdog, nipping heroically at the Microsoft behemoth's heels. I'm not sure why it gave that impression. At the time, IBM was much bigger than Microsoft, a huge, multinational corporation with interests in basically every aspect of electronics. They just couldn't write or market good software.
I'm not sure why I just wrote 500 words on OS/2. I actually wanted to write something about Linux.
Software stores used to have a whole "Operating Systems" department, back when there was more than one operating system, and Windows was still called an "Operating Environment" ↩
Man, I'm unprepared. There's a checklist of things you should do before moving to England. I came over here without any money, preparation, or attack plan. There's something unbelievably stupid about this. It worked for me when I moved to Germany, but moving to England's a bit more complicated, apparently. Either that, or I'm remembering it wrong.
But I'm not the only one. The office I'm working in is full of non-British people. It's a rag-tag group of Germans, Italians, Brazilians, Spaniards, one (1) American, and who knows what else that all found themselves in the same boat when they first came over. This despite promises from The Company to help one resettle; promises which are certainly not kept and, when referred to in conversation, change their shape and character like a Democrat on a whistle-stop.
But at some point a kindly soul in the department, now departed, made a list of the reality of the situation. It's a short list of what one really needs to do when moving to England. Unfortunately, I only found out about it after I'd already been here a week. Here's your to-do list once you've arrived in England:
Get a room. If possible, get a rental agreement or any bill with your name and address on it. (proof of address)
Deposit is usually 1 1/2 times the rent. Deposit and first rent is to be paid beforehand. If the room is unfurnished, see "Things to Buy" for shops and example prices.
Get a letter from your office manager (HR Lady) stating that you are working for the company and including your address. (proof of employment)
Get a bank account. Just walk in with your documents:
Passport or national ID card
Proof of employment (see 2.). it might be handy to have your contract with you.
Proof of address
Banks
HSBC – try to get a standard account (they try to sell you an advanced package including insurances etc.)
NatWest – Also recommended as this bank does not charge for withdrawing money from a different bank's cash machines
Give your bank details to The Company
Register with Inland Revenue – this is done by your HR manager. You should get your tax code about 2 weeks later (PAYE Coding Notice)
At the end of the fiscal year (ending April 5th), you will get a "P60 End of Year Certificate" detailing your "Pay and Income Tax" levels.
Get a National Insurance Number by applying at a Job Centre Plus office. They ask for dtails before they schedule an interview appointment to verify your eligibility. Appointments are scheduled about two weeks ahead, and take place in the nearest county office, which usually isn't near at all. Without an NI number, you will be on emergency tax, which is higher than the standard tax rate.
Documents:
Passport
National ID card
Driving License or any other official document identifying you (Birth certificate, police registration, medical card, etc.)
Proof of employment (see 2.)
Recent payslip
Bank statement
Proof of address (utility bill, rental agreement, etc. – see 1.)
It might be handy to have your PAYE Coding Notice with you
As money is paid in a timely manner so it is available on the 27th, try to get your appointment after this date.
If you are British, a citizen of a member state of the EU, or other Commonwealth citizen, you can apply for inclusion on the Register of Electors. This will allow you to vote at local government elections. Your credibility will rise (good for tenancy applications or bank-related matters) and you are obliged to pay Council Taxes1
If you buy any TV or radio equipment, you will be asked for your address, which will be automatically forwarded to the "TV Licensing Office"
Get a Tesco Clubcard
Get a life ;-)
Any address change has to be communicated to all above-mentioned authorities. For the official notices to local council, the TV licensing, and most other on-line services, you can use I am Moving , where you can create/use an account for free.
All of this could have been avoided with a bit of planning. I am bitterly disappointed in myself.
Council taxes are universal as far as I can tell, and are perceived, by the British at least, as an extension of the rent. ↩
Farnborough derives its name from from the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Ferneberga (Fern Hill) and is mentioned in the Domesday Book (1086). But for the coming of the army at nearby Aldershot, the arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flying, Farnborough would probably have remained an isolated heathland village, that is until the latter half of the 20th century when the population moved out of London suburbia and became commuters.
"But for the … arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flight…". That's a pretty big conditional. There are probably a lot of places whose development was seriously affected by railways and the advent of powered flight. But I understand where the good Mr. Parkins is coming from.
I had forgotten the cable to connect my camera to my laptop. Of all the stupid things that I packed for the trip, 50 different USB cables, a USB hub, power adapters for devices I’d forgotten, not to mention devices whose power adapters I’d forgotten, I forgot the one thing that was absolutely necessary and planned-for. Not to mention irreplaceable, seeing as every camera maker in the world decided that their camera’s little hole should look different from all the other cameras’ little holes.
I walked into a little computer store on the strip in Fleet, Hampshire. Walking up to the pasty-faced, teenaged part-timer there, I introduced myself and shook his hand, which seemed to shock him.
He unconsciously wiped his hands on his pants and said, “eh...nice to meet you, sir. What can I do for you?”
I asked him, “do you have any USB card-readers?”
“Um, yeah," he answered. "I think I saw some around here somewhere.”
I looked around the shop, which was organized and clean. Man, he must really be the FNG around here. He finally found what I was looking for, stored on a shelf right next to where he had been sitting. He handed it to me and I started reading the back of the packaging.
“Just looking to see if it works with my Mac,” I told him.
“Oh, it's USB, so it should work,” he answered, and took the reader out of my hand. He moved his lips while he read the package. “Oh, yeah,” he said finally. “Right there it says it: ‘Requires Mac OS 9 or later’.” He looked at me skeptically. “So, you do have OS 9 or later, don’t you?”
“Um, yeah, I think so.” OS 9 went out of style back in the ‘90s.
He moved around to the register, and I handed him my Visa card. He looked uncertain as he turned it over in his hand. “This thing doesn’t have a chip on it?”
I took it back and examined it. “No, I guess it doesn’t.”
“Well, I don’t think we can take that, then.”
“Why don’t you just swipe it,” I said. “Give it a go.”
He shrugged and swiped it through the machine.
From behind me, a voice said, “it’s all chips nowadays, you know.”
I looked around, and saw that an older woman was standing behind me. She looked to be in her mid 40s, and wore a name plate with the store’s logo on it. “You can’t get nothing without a dozen little chips in it.”
I nodded agreement, and turned back to the young man behind the register.
“So, what kind of Mac you got, then?”
“A PowerBook G4.”
He nodded approvingly. “Nice piece of kit, that.” The little machine that had taken my card made a loud ping!, and spit out a receipt. He tore it off and gave it to me to sign, along with the card reader.
“Now, you have a nice day sir, and do please visit us again.”
I thanked him, said goodbye to the chip-lady, and put the small package into my bag next to my laptop. “Thanks, man, I’ll do that.” Nice kid.
Didja ever discover something that made your reality skip a beat? You know how, for just a second, something is so far out of place that you can't even figure out what's wrong with the picture? For example, the Augsburg Wireless-Internet provider Cyberways has had the same guy on their start page for years:
Every time you connect to the internet over public wireless in Augsburg, that dude was right there, staring at you with those soulless black eyes. Like a doll's eyes...
And the weird thing was, I always figured he was the boss at Cyberways. I even thought I saw him once on the tram. I hate it when people use the same stock photos everywhere. Everybody's full of shit. Oh, I guess it's effective use of your cash dollars, seeing as it's cheaper than paying attractive people to work for you. But still, why not just be honest for a split second?
You get this kind of thing all over the Internet, of course. If you've ever shopped for web hosting, you'll notice, after a few visits to the providers' pages, that their employees all kind of look alike. And there's always some woman somewhere holding a laptop at her waist in near-sexual ecstasy over the reasonable shared hosting prices.
It's a leitmotif throughout the enter hosting industry: Shared Webspace=Chick with laptop.
Rube, look, for the last freakin time, look RIGHT when you step off a curb! These people drive on the other side of the F$@&-ing road over here! You wanna get ya brains splattered all over me?
What? I dunno. I'm just kind of sitting around, waiting on things. I just spent way too much time transferring money across European borders, and reclaiming my identity. But the new passports are wonderful pieces of fortitude. Here' s a few quotes from my new passport:
And that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth. - Abraham Lincoln
The principle of free governments adheres to the American soil. It is bedded in it, immovable as its mountains. - Daniel Webster
Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. - George Washington
We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. - excerpt from the Declaration of Independence
Your concept of love may be different, but know that I love this world.
I like reading Scott Adams' blog on occasion. Much like Balph Eubanks, he's glib, amusing, and completely lacking in morality. Take, for example, his latest strawman-laden posting regarding the visit of a certain Mr. Ahmedinejad:
I was happy to hear that NYC didn't allow Iranian President Ahmadinejad
to place a wreath at the WTC site. And I was happy that Columbia
University is rescinding the offer to let him speak. If you let a guy like
that express his views, before long the entire world will want freedom
of speech.
...
If Ahmadinejad thinks he can be our friend by honoring our heroes and
opening a dialog, he underestimates our ability to misinterpret him.
Fucking idiot. I hate him.
Well, there's certainly some rye wit at work here. Yes, it is quite ironic that a country led by a genocidal religious dictator, which the USA most certainly is, would object to a fellow genocidal religious madman visiting its most sensitive cultural site. I mean, Mahmoud's only trying to "open a dialog" here, isn't he? Isn't that the meaning of Ahmedinejad's visit? Isn't Ahmedinejad just exercising "Free Speech", as Adams says? Aren't we wrong in denying this poor man that right?
Aside from the obvious jackassery involved in claiming that a man who directly controls his entire country's media is having trouble getting his point of view out; or that the United Nations will let him speak before the leaders of the world to the point where they forget to blink for an hour; aside from all this, this is not a question of whether or not Mahmoud is allowed to say what he wants. The question is, in accordance with the Grand Unified Theory of Rubean Mechanics, Who's going to pay for it. It's a question of whether or not Americans should be paying for his plane fare, his security, and his accommodation while he's here, pissing on Ground Zero and generating propaganda for totalitarian lobbying groups like MoveOn.org and International ANSWER.
All of Adams' ridiculous assertions never mention the one central fact here: There is no compelling reason for American taxpayers to foot the bill, so this guy, who just held one of his popular "Death to America" parades, can come over here and lecture them on anything. I personally don't much care what Ahmedinejad thinks, I can see the general thrust of his inclinations. He's spitting on the United States and Western Culture daily, and then expects to be treated with deference in return. Fuck him.
This kind of Devil's Advocacy isn't new to Adams. At least, I hope it's just that. He's apparently one of those celebrities that have forgotten the hard work involved in their ascendency, and assume that they're rich because of some accident of nature, akin to divine providence. Humans, himself included, are all just a bunch of "moist robots" with no capacity for thought, no free will; we've apparently just been programmed by Mother Nature to do the things we've done or will do. There is no mind, there is no choice, there is only the stimuli in our environments, and the response that was determined by a chance arrangement of atoms into chemicals during the Big Bang. Or something.
It's an obscene display of thoughtlessness, a conceit of someone trying so hard to seem above all this. Adams' Dilbert is amusing, and his blog is a bit of junk food for the brain at times. But he's got the morals of a two-dollar whore.
Last night we didn't make it. The two Frenchmen surrendered the evening, seeing as it was Trotzky's birthday, and therefore a time for somber reflection or something. So, we rode around big town Farnborough for a couple of hours, grabbed some grub, and then headed back to the apartment to watch a movie.
We watched Fur, which cemented my belief that Nicole Kidman is the perfect woman. Not only does she look good in her own slutty little librarian sort of way, she gives a guy a handjob in this movie while shaving his hairy back. That's my kind of girl, a real little trooper.
Anyhoo, it's back off to London now, for a second try at getting sloppy somewhere besides sitting at home in front of the boob tube. Wish us luck.
Vacation week is winding down, and I'm getting ready to leave the driving to Southwest Trains and go drinking in London. I'll try to keep it under two weeks this time, but no promises. We'll tramp it a bit through Soho, I guess, just me, the girls, and a couple of frog-eaters from the office.
I wonder why I never get to go drinking with Englishmen? It's probably for the best. There's a quote that gets bandied about, especially in the local newspapers, about England being a nation of drunks and scalawags. I can't say much about that, but it does seem that the pubs all close at 11:00 PM for a reason. At 5 o'clock, they pour out of their offices and into the public houses, seemingly on a race against the clock to get themselves 'faced before the early last call.
When they were finally permitted to stay open past 11, in the hope that the binge-drinking would abate in light of longer opening hours, they found themselves doubly-cursed in that the Englishmen were every bit as drunk at 11, but didn't have to go home. All pubs here are set up so that you have to go to the counter to get your drinks, instead of having them brought to your table. There's a built-in handbrake there: a system where you can't get any more drink once you lose the ability to walk is founded upon sound principle and good advices.
I've done nothing today; nothing but clean out the cluttered closets of my preferred newsfeed reader. There were some connections in there that were sorely neglected. I could use a bit more time to wade through the degenerate filth that is my blogroll, but sadly, I work. The Company is tolerant in their control over my time, fair since they do not pay hourly; but tolerance has its limits, and I doubt they would look kindly upon my spending the business day in a fugue state, reading entry after entry of dialectics about Jessica Simpson's tits, or Brittney Spears' overplayed poonanny.
Nevertheless, it saddens me that my everyday is not blessed with the nuggets of wisdom from skippystalin:
Being the only person with an out-of-control substance abuse problem in a relationship is tough. Most romantic couplings are based on common interests and most of my interests culminate in my waking up in a pool of what I think is my own urine and not being quite sure what time zone I'm in. I'm much like a cat in that I have a tendancy of marking my territory with my vomit, blood and gallons of my semen...My ability to smoke, drink and masturbate furiously at the same time might not be much, it's all that I have.
Ahh, skippystalin, how I've missed you, and your nuggets.
This is how I spend my vacation: visiting Stonehenge on one day; reading the melancholy musings of skippystalin the next, picturing him composing scholarly tracts through bitter tears, a crushed Viagra dissolving in a highball of Jack Daniels next to the keyboard, as another long evening fades into a blur of poetry, madness, and vigorous bouts of hate-filled masturbation. And wondering, of the two, which is the more meaningful and fitting monument to humanity?
They should've just burned enjoyeverysandwich to CD, stuck it to the side of Voyager along with its author, and shot the whole lot into space back when they had government funding to do so, all in the name of making a good first impression for whatever aliens were out cruising for an easy meal.
skippystalin's output is prodigious, to be sure, but there was an entire blogroll to consider:
The lunatics are running the asylum over at Straight White Guy's place. Eric's testicles are mentioned, indirectly. Remind me to change my passwords regularly and start using strong encryption.
How stoned do you have to be to cheat on Jessica Alba? I could jack off to Jessica Alba while a big mean dog was chasing me and this idiot is cheating on her. I decided to confront him about this and I screamed at him, hey, what is your problem. And he said I should get off his lawn. And I said, no, no you get off the lawn. You get off. Then he went inside, probably because deep down, he knew I had made some pretty good points.
JimGoad.com is no more, but if you're a Goad fan (ladies!), you can find find him here. Discussion of Brittany's latest, erm, candid photos is also to be found, but be aware that the following picture is used as a visual aid:
This morning we picked up my new wheelchair. It's a sporty European marque, with an aggressive stance, low-profile tires, and a head-turning cherry-red metalflake paint job. It's not that great on the corners, but it'll take any one of y'all on the straightaways.
I've never done time on wheels. On the whole, I found it to be not all that bad. Then again, I don't figure that most wheelchair-bound men my age get to enjoy being pushed around town by a couple of sexy German bloggerettes. Thanks, ladies: the jealous looks from the other local cripples was the icing on the cake. Here's a little something extra for you, babes. (via AoSHQ)
Funny things happen when you're on wheels. I saw a lady I work with while being carted through Tesco's frozen food department. I said hello, and she just looked right through me, steering her cart so as not to make contact with the leper. She probably thought I was going to ask her for some spare change, or if she could wipe me bum for me, or whatever it is that those people want from healthy-legged people. I also noticed that the supermarkets put completely different things down on the bottom three feet of the shelves. All the cool toys are down there, for example, presumably because chil'n's is small. It's also a great altitude to find anti-bedsore medicaments, for some reason.
So, I let myself be pushed by the Weyside in Guildford, where, at one point, a husky young native was required to wheel my fat ass up a steep incline. The Sistas, for all their heart, lacked the muscle to get the job done, so he, being a true-hearted salt-of-earth kind of guy, waved them off and grunted and sweated till I crested the hill. Had the man known that I could have, at any point in time, simply stood up and hobbled up the hill under my own power, he most certainly would have picked me up and broken me over his knee.
Tomorrow morning, we'll be visiting Stonehenge, or Stone'enge, as the locals quaintly call it. We'll also visit the haunted city, Salisbury, to watch the homosexuals. Ta!
I like reading OSNews for some reason. I think I like to catch the geeky news about SkyOS, or the occasional retro curmudgeonry that rolls by about Lotus 1-2-3 or OS/2. Being the old-timer that I am, it's hard to resist a paean from my youth about 10-finger productivity.
Unfortunately, they've become the epicenter of stupid for the tech press. Check out this article, which explodes the myths about competition being good: "Competition is not Good"
'It gives consumers more choice'
Choice is good when there's one agreed base standard, and a number of compatible approaches. For example, there are many Linux distributions, but they are all Linux, and they can all run the same software. They are 'flavours' of the same thing, that is a good choice. People like different flavours.
Competition does not produce easier choices for consumers. All they get is added un-interoperability and complexity with competitive choices.
Now, if you go read that article, which I do not recommend, you'll slowly come to the realization that this moron is just annoyed that he has to make the effort to choose between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. He's willing to surrender his entire free will to some (hopefully) benevolent dictator, abolish brand names, and forsake the free market economy because choosing which format to buy the Firefly special edition box set in is hard. What a hopeless, whiny-assed sissy.
Of course, things don't get better when they start tossing political analysis at you. "Net Neutrality" is one monikers that has overshadowed the thing named. The discussion is often framed in a way that an uninformed listener would assume there was lobbying going on to abolish some sort of laws that are now protecting consumers from big, bad tiered-Internet ninjas.
But: There is no net neutrality legislation, there never was, and hopefully, there never will be. The argument over "Net Neutrality" is about whether or not the U.S. government should introduce legislation forbidding bandwidth throttling by ISPs. It's the "have you stopped beating your wife?" straw man for the Slashdot crowd. You'll notice that this article calls the Supreme Court's decision that the U.S. government shouldn't step in and configure the ISPs' Cisco routers for them, "Backing for Two-Tier Internet":
The US Justice Department has said that internet service providers should be allowed to charge for priority traffic. The agency said it was opposed to 'network neutrality', the idea that all data on the net is treated equally. The comments put the agency at odds with companies such as Microsoft and Google, who have called for legislation to guarantee equal access to the net.
Of course, this would also mean that an enforcement infrastructure would also have to be put in place, making sure that everyone got their "fair share" of said bandwidth, as if backbone routers and POPs just fell off a tree somewhere. God forbid ISPs be allowed to tune the services that they developed and paid for as they wish. Let's let the government decides who gets bandwidth, and how much is enough! That will make it all fair and neutral-like. Whenever a politician uses the word "fair", hang on to your wallet.
Well, my trackbacks are now working, it seems. There's some ugly Python spaghetti-code going on behind the scenes that translates back and forth between absolute urls, non-absolute relative urls, and upper-lower-camel case; but it works.
Trackbacks are only good for Movable Type, though. Which I can't stand anymore. MT used to be the only thing out there, but there's something that really, really, really galls me about the way it rebuilds your entire site into static HTML pages everytime you update a post. I'm sure it's awesomeness if you've got your server running on an old TV remote, but nowadays we're all running our web servers on 100-core 64-bit terahertz moonshot computers that can simultaneously compute π, encode MPEG video, and mix the best goddam margaritas you've ever tasted, all without breaking a sweat.
So yeah, I figured out how to implement trackbacks in Django, to a point where they more or less work. Now why is Wordpress fucking with me? It seems to be thrown off by the fact that Wordpress sends a HEAD request before it downloads and parses the page, in the vain hope that the X-Pingback header will be set. I can't figure out how to do that in Django's generic views, so I just use the secondary method, that being a link element in the XHTML code. But now, whenever a Worpdress blog pings me, I get this kind of crap:
[09/Sep/2007 15:04:23] "GET /blog/2007/sep/08/vacation/ HTTP/1.1" 200 27367
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (104, 'Connection reset by peer')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (32, 'Broken pipe')
Being the half-assed programmer that I am, I am at a total loss. I can't even do a Lazyweb request here, seeing as my 4 visits a day are unlikely to bring the Django HTTP gurus by. I won't be able to sleep at night, thinking of all the enlightened Wordpress Users who are probably out there try to "Keep the discussion going" with me.
Ever since June, when the iPhone went live, I've heard about nothing else in the tech press, nerd podcasts, and the Apple Fanboisphere. Is it really that way over in the States (the only place you can get them), or does the iPhone actually seem to be doing well?
Ahh, my first vacation since joining The Company. My queue is cleaned up, my email is forwarded, and an elaborate Sieve session has accomplished in a mere two hours what less civilized mail systems can do with a key combination: The Corporate Vacation Email.
It's been five months now since I came 'cross the channel and started meeting the natives, learning the lingo, and getting used to the fact that everyone here talks like Pinky. Now, I'll be letting my hair down for the next 10 days or so. As well as putting my poor, broken foot up on the coffee table.
As soon as I get my x-rays back from the socialist medical system (they still copy them with coal rubbings on wax paper over here, apparently), I'll post pictures of the metatarsalar breakage here for your morbid enjoyment. Don't thank me yet.
The other half of Sistaweb will be joining us for the week. We'll allow her to sleep here rent-free for an entire week, even though she refused to bring a carton of cigarettes as payment. Damned non-smokers and their principles. It's like those non-smokers back in the World War II who didn't sign up for cigarette rations. Throwing away a gold mine, that is. Our grandfathers probably had a word for those guys, and if I knew my grandfather at all, that word was sissy-boy.
The girls have rented a wheelchair for me, seeing as I won't be too much fun doing a London pub-crawl on crutches. I've already had a forehead-slapping moment over this, as you probably are right now. Why haven't I thought of taking a wheelchair with me before? That would've come in handy on more than one occasion, the Wreckyll in Jeckyll not least among them.
Man, Apple is on a roll. Not only have they got me hooked for a new computer, a new laptop, a new office package, and a replacement for my aging MythTV box, but now I have to start thinking about a new iPod. Now, let's see what Uncle Steve is going to me be costing me 'til Christmas Time:
Item
Damage
20" iMac
1199.00
Macbook
1099.00
8GB iPod Touch
299.00
AppleTV
299.00
iWork '08
79.00
iLife '08
79.00
Total:
$3,054.00
Not bad for a day's work, Mr. Jobs. And what's up for the rest of September? Maybe some irresistible bionic iFoot to replace the one I broke playing frisbee at the company picnic last week?
Although there's a remarkable lack of iPhone hype around the office, we being a big-time Linux company and all, there's an amazing amount of Mac fanboiism. Pretty much all of us have Macs at home. The explanation for this is simple: After dealing with Linux problems all day long, there's something nice about going home to something you can spend all your time using and not making up excuses for why it looks like shit and doesn't work.
I like Linux, mind you. I use it day-in, day-out for my desktop at work, for my webservers, and it brings in my daily bread. We all love it here, pretty much like a family loves and therefore tolerates the embarrassing second cousin with the Downs'. But people are walking all over the office today buzzing about the upcoming announcement from Apple.
Will it be the long-awaited iMac redesign? Will it be a new Mini? My boss is actually carrying his phone to the pub after work today so he can sit on engadget and get a realtime update. Linus would not be pleased...
Last login: Thu Jul 26 12:17:28 from nat-pool-fab.re Welcome to Darwin! ericbook:~ eric$ mutt -bash: mutt: command not found ericbook:~ eric$ open /Applications/Mail.app/ ericbook:~ eric$
Ahh. Like coming in after a long day of plowing the fields and sticking your aching feet into a pot of hot water. After running Linux all day at work, you feel like slipping into something more comfortable. Sam knows it. Zonker knows it, though he won't admit it. It's the right amount of just-workiness you need to let you relax, while knowing you could, at any given moment, do something like:
OK, here's one with drivel. I do like it, but I have a couple of gripes.
First problem: I was hopelessly confused by the login screen. The type of journal seems to be locked on livejournal, as the drop-down menu for journal types is inexplicably disabled until you enter a username. -1 for usabilty
Second problem: Useless stripping of trailing slash, which mangled my xmlrpc URL. Error 301 was ignored, which makes sense since it's a post and all, but I couldn't log in. It mangled my URL then choked on the error :-/
Third problem: didn't want to download my recent posts. Although there might be a misunderstanding about just what "recent" means.
Fourth problem: Doesn't let me choose post status anywhere. And there's nowhere I can find to choose text filters. This is more of a feature request, really.
Fifth problem: craps out after posting, probably because it keeps mangling the trailing slashes from my URLs. Is there an RFC somewhere that says that POSTS can't end with slashes? Nobody tell the Django folks.
Well, maybe it'll at least let me post to my blog from work every now and then.
Man, I dang sure missed the entire month of June. I've been in the UK now for about two months, and let me tell ya: They sure do get some rain around here. I always thought those stories about English people having gills were legends and fantasies. Now, I'm not so sure.
For the love of GOD, for the last time, in the name of ALL THAT IS HOLY, Cluster Services is NOT COMPATIBLE with 4.5! If you're running a cluster, DO NOT update to 4.5 until the Cluster Suite is UPDATED TO 4.5!
That is all.
P.S. And NO, cmirror is not available yet. Maybe at the end of the month.
I went outside to smoke a cigarette. All rooms in England are for non-smokers, you'll find, as are the rooms, apartments, and houses listed for rent in the local papers. The litany at the end of all the ads reads, "No smokers, canvassers, or DSS", which stands for Department of Social Services. So, okay they hate smokers and welfare cases, as do we all. But the British have their own definition for 'non-smoker', which basically means you only smoke when you drink. Everybody smokes over here, and they all live somewhere.
The evening was cool; almost cold, really, as I suspect the evenings around here generally are. I stood on the corner of Osborne and Netley, watching the blackbirds getting ready to do whatever it is they do at night, when I spied a man, some yards away, bounding up the sidewalk with a jaunty gait. I held my cigarette just in front of my mouth, watching this figure with suspicion. He was short, about 5 feet tall, and round as a soccer ball. He was wearing light-colored trousers and a dark blazer, the left breast of which was adorned with an enormous, orange prize-ribbon.
As he approached me, his features became distinct in the bad lighting, and I realized he was positively beaming with pride. His face was ruddy, and split with a grin that wouldn't have looked out of place behind a wheelbarrow full of poker chips on the way to the cash-out. I placed him in his mid-40s, but maybe his thinning red hair and roly-poly stature made him look older than he really was.
He halted just a few feet from me, and said, with oddly struggling words, "Good evening, mister!"
I looked him up and down, cigarette still burning between my shaky fingers, and replied, "hi, how are ya..." He wobbled his head a bit, then walked around me on his way up the street. I noticed something written in gold on his orange ribbon, and read it as it flashed in the lamplight.
I judged him more than a wee bit 'differently-abled', as they say. I watched as he cautiously crossed the empty street, looking both ways at least twice, then gingerly stepping into the street and crossing it at a run.
I thought about what I had seen written on the ribbon: "A Very Special Boy". Hmm, I thought, I wonder who gave him that? Whoever it was, they made his whole day.
I put my cigarette out and walked back into the guest house.
My buddy Sam sent me an email a couple of days ago indicating that he just might have joined The Family recently. And he joined it a much higher level than I, I might add, considering I'm still lumbering along in the PowerPC world; my G4 Powerbook, though a loyal and trusted friend, seems slow as molasses in January these days.
He also mentioned an old OS/2 habit, one which we separately shared back in the day. I started using OS/2 when I worked at UPS. One of our managers was running 2.1, with the old Presentation Manager that looked like a crappy(er) Windows 2.0, albeit with long filenames and the ability to run concurrent DOS sessions. I avoided it until OS/2 3.0 came out.
In '94, when Warp hit the shelves, I rushed out to Soft-Warehouse1 in Alpharetta, looked in the Operating Systems2 department until I found a box, then gave the man $300 dollars for the privilege of running it. Then, I walked over the desktop applications department, and put down another $495 for Lotus Smartsuite/2. Then I OEM'd 16MB of RAM for about $400 to make it all go.
Now, many may see OS/2 as a butt-ugly cousin of Windows, and they may be right. But back then, it was a work of art. Especially in the sense that it wasn't an exact science getting it to run. Nothing ever really worked like it was supposed to. Without the fallback of a DOS prompt, you had to have a second, fully-functional machine to do things like edit the CONFIG.SYS on the installation floppies to make sure your DASD drivers were loading. And most of the drivers were written so that, if they encountered an error while loading, they'd bork the whole boot process, just to be on the safe side.
The graphical interface also hung constantly. The Workplace Shell, despite (or maybe due to) all its object-orientiness, was horribly unstable. But I never saw a hang that wasn't cured with Control-Alt-Delete. That key combo went right down to the kernel, and always gave a satisfying, unconfirmed reboot, wedged GUI be damned. There was even a 3rd party program called Watchcat that sat on the serial port, or on a secondary Hercules/MCGA monitor, and let you monitor and kill programs remotely. The kernel's Kung Fu was strong like that, but the GUI was just ass.
Now, when Chicago started finally coming down the pipe, and even the Rolling Stones where pulled into the OS marketing world ("Start me up", anyone?), OS/2 fans like myself were sure that this pissant little DOS extender with a homely face wouldn't be the future. It couldn't be the future, it was just too depressing. It still wasn't a 32-bit OS, though the 386 had been out for over 8 years. It still used FAT, for crying out loud. In short, Chicago sucked.
OS/2 seemed like a scrappy little underdog, nipping heroically at the Microsoft behemoth's heels. I'm not sure why it gave that impression. At the time, IBM was much bigger than Microsoft, a huge, multinational corporation with interests in basically every aspect of electronics. They just couldn't write or market good software.
I'm not sure why I just wrote 500 words on OS/2. I actually wanted to write something about Linux.
Software stores used to have a whole "Operating Systems" department, back when there was more than one operating system, and Windows was still called an "Operating Environment" ↩
Man, I'm unprepared. There's a checklist of things you should do before moving to England. I came over here without any money, preparation, or attack plan. There's something unbelievably stupid about this. It worked for me when I moved to Germany, but moving to England's a bit more complicated, apparently. Either that, or I'm remembering it wrong.
But I'm not the only one. The office I'm working in is full of non-British people. It's a rag-tag group of Germans, Italians, Brazilians, Spaniards, one (1) American, and who knows what else that all found themselves in the same boat when they first came over. This despite promises from The Company to help one resettle; promises which are certainly not kept and, when referred to in conversation, change their shape and character like a Democrat on a whistle-stop.
But at some point a kindly soul in the department, now departed, made a list of the reality of the situation. It's a short list of what one really needs to do when moving to England. Unfortunately, I only found out about it after I'd already been here a week. Here's your to-do list once you've arrived in England:
Get a room. If possible, get a rental agreement or any bill with your name and address on it. (proof of address)
Deposit is usually 1 1/2 times the rent. Deposit and first rent is to be paid beforehand. If the room is unfurnished, see "Things to Buy" for shops and example prices.
Get a letter from your office manager (HR Lady) stating that you are working for the company and including your address. (proof of employment)
Get a bank account. Just walk in with your documents:
Passport or national ID card
Proof of employment (see 2.). it might be handy to have your contract with you.
Proof of address
Banks
HSBC – try to get a standard account (they try to sell you an advanced package including insurances etc.)
NatWest – Also recommended as this bank does not charge for withdrawing money from a different bank's cash machines
Give your bank details to The Company
Register with Inland Revenue – this is done by your HR manager. You should get your tax code about 2 weeks later (PAYE Coding Notice)
At the end of the fiscal year (ending April 5th), you will get a "P60 End of Year Certificate" detailing your "Pay and Income Tax" levels.
Get a National Insurance Number by applying at a Job Centre Plus office. They ask for dtails before they schedule an interview appointment to verify your eligibility. Appointments are scheduled about two weeks ahead, and take place in the nearest county office, which usually isn't near at all. Without an NI number, you will be on emergency tax, which is higher than the standard tax rate.
Documents:
Passport
National ID card
Driving License or any other official document identifying you (Birth certificate, police registration, medical card, etc.)
Proof of employment (see 2.)
Recent payslip
Bank statement
Proof of address (utility bill, rental agreement, etc. – see 1.)
It might be handy to have your PAYE Coding Notice with you
As money is paid in a timely manner so it is available on the 27th, try to get your appointment after this date.
If you are British, a citizen of a member state of the EU, or other Commonwealth citizen, you can apply for inclusion on the Register of Electors. This will allow you to vote at local government elections. Your credibility will rise (good for tenancy applications or bank-related matters) and you are obliged to pay Council Taxes1
If you buy any TV or radio equipment, you will be asked for your address, which will be automatically forwarded to the "TV Licensing Office"
Get a Tesco Clubcard
Get a life ;-)
Any address change has to be communicated to all above-mentioned authorities. For the official notices to local council, the TV licensing, and most other on-line services, you can use I am Moving , where you can create/use an account for free.
All of this could have been avoided with a bit of planning. I am bitterly disappointed in myself.
Council taxes are universal as far as I can tell, and are perceived, by the British at least, as an extension of the rent. ↩
Farnborough derives its name from from the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Ferneberga (Fern Hill) and is mentioned in the Domesday Book (1086). But for the coming of the army at nearby Aldershot, the arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flying, Farnborough would probably have remained an isolated heathland village, that is until the latter half of the 20th century when the population moved out of London suburbia and became commuters.
"But for the … arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flight…". That's a pretty big conditional. There are probably a lot of places whose development was seriously affected by railways and the advent of powered flight. But I understand where the good Mr. Parkins is coming from.
I had forgotten the cable to connect my camera to my laptop. Of all the stupid things that I packed for the trip, 50 different USB cables, a USB hub, power adapters for devices I’d forgotten, not to mention devices whose power adapters I’d forgotten, I forgot the one thing that was absolutely necessary and planned-for. Not to mention irreplaceable, seeing as every camera maker in the world decided that their camera’s little hole should look different from all the other cameras’ little holes.
I walked into a little computer store on the strip in Fleet, Hampshire. Walking up to the pasty-faced, teenaged part-timer there, I introduced myself and shook his hand, which seemed to shock him.
He unconsciously wiped his hands on his pants and said, “eh...nice to meet you, sir. What can I do for you?”
I asked him, “do you have any USB card-readers?”
“Um, yeah," he answered. "I think I saw some around here somewhere.”
I looked around the shop, which was organized and clean. Man, he must really be the FNG around here. He finally found what I was looking for, stored on a shelf right next to where he had been sitting. He handed it to me and I started reading the back of the packaging.
“Just looking to see if it works with my Mac,” I told him.
“Oh, it's USB, so it should work,” he answered, and took the reader out of my hand. He moved his lips while he read the package. “Oh, yeah,” he said finally. “Right there it says it: ‘Requires Mac OS 9 or later’.” He looked at me skeptically. “So, you do have OS 9 or later, don’t you?”
“Um, yeah, I think so.” OS 9 went out of style back in the ‘90s.
He moved around to the register, and I handed him my Visa card. He looked uncertain as he turned it over in his hand. “This thing doesn’t have a chip on it?”
I took it back and examined it. “No, I guess it doesn’t.”
“Well, I don’t think we can take that, then.”
“Why don’t you just swipe it,” I said. “Give it a go.”
He shrugged and swiped it through the machine.
From behind me, a voice said, “it’s all chips nowadays, you know.”
I looked around, and saw that an older woman was standing behind me. She looked to be in her mid 40s, and wore a name plate with the store’s logo on it. “You can’t get nothing without a dozen little chips in it.”
I nodded agreement, and turned back to the young man behind the register.
“So, what kind of Mac you got, then?”
“A PowerBook G4.”
He nodded approvingly. “Nice piece of kit, that.” The little machine that had taken my card made a loud ping!, and spit out a receipt. He tore it off and gave it to me to sign, along with the card reader.
“Now, you have a nice day sir, and do please visit us again.”
I thanked him, said goodbye to the chip-lady, and put the small package into my bag next to my laptop. “Thanks, man, I’ll do that.” Nice kid.
Didja ever discover something that made your reality skip a beat? You know how, for just a second, something is so far out of place that you can't even figure out what's wrong with the picture? For example, the Augsburg Wireless-Internet provider Cyberways has had the same guy on their start page for years:
Every time you connect to the internet over public wireless in Augsburg, that dude was right there, staring at you with those soulless black eyes. Like a doll's eyes...
And the weird thing was, I always figured he was the boss at Cyberways. I even thought I saw him once on the tram. I hate it when people use the same stock photos everywhere. Everybody's full of shit. Oh, I guess it's effective use of your cash dollars, seeing as it's cheaper than paying attractive people to work for you. But still, why not just be honest for a split second?
You get this kind of thing all over the Internet, of course. If you've ever shopped for web hosting, you'll notice, after a few visits to the providers' pages, that their employees all kind of look alike. And there's always some woman somewhere holding a laptop at her waist in near-sexual ecstasy over the reasonable shared hosting prices.
It's a leitmotif throughout the enter hosting industry: Shared Webspace=Chick with laptop.
Rube, look, for the last freakin time, look RIGHT when you step off a curb! These people drive on the other side of the F$@&-ing road over here! You wanna get ya brains splattered all over me?
What? I dunno. I'm just kind of sitting around, waiting on things. I just spent way too much time transferring money across European borders, and reclaiming my identity. But the new passports are wonderful pieces of fortitude. Here' s a few quotes from my new passport:
And that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth. - Abraham Lincoln
The principle of free governments adheres to the American soil. It is bedded in it, immovable as its mountains. - Daniel Webster
Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. - George Washington
We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. - excerpt from the Declaration of Independence
Your concept of love may be different, but know that I love this world.
I like reading Scott Adams' blog on occasion. Much like Balph Eubanks, he's glib, amusing, and completely lacking in morality. Take, for example, his latest strawman-laden posting regarding the visit of a certain Mr. Ahmedinejad:
I was happy to hear that NYC didn't allow Iranian President Ahmadinejad
to place a wreath at the WTC site. And I was happy that Columbia
University is rescinding the offer to let him speak. If you let a guy like
that express his views, before long the entire world will want freedom
of speech.
...
If Ahmadinejad thinks he can be our friend by honoring our heroes and
opening a dialog, he underestimates our ability to misinterpret him.
Fucking idiot. I hate him.
Well, there's certainly some rye wit at work here. Yes, it is quite ironic that a country led by a genocidal religious dictator, which the USA most certainly is, would object to a fellow genocidal religious madman visiting its most sensitive cultural site. I mean, Mahmoud's only trying to "open a dialog" here, isn't he? Isn't that the meaning of Ahmedinejad's visit? Isn't Ahmedinejad just exercising "Free Speech", as Adams says? Aren't we wrong in denying this poor man that right?
Aside from the obvious jackassery involved in claiming that a man who directly controls his entire country's media is having trouble getting his point of view out; or that the United Nations will let him speak before the leaders of the world to the point where they forget to blink for an hour; aside from all this, this is not a question of whether or not Mahmoud is allowed to say what he wants. The question is, in accordance with the Grand Unified Theory of Rubean Mechanics, Who's going to pay for it. It's a question of whether or not Americans should be paying for his plane fare, his security, and his accommodation while he's here, pissing on Ground Zero and generating propaganda for totalitarian lobbying groups like MoveOn.org and International ANSWER.
All of Adams' ridiculous assertions never mention the one central fact here: There is no compelling reason for American taxpayers to foot the bill, so this guy, who just held one of his popular "Death to America" parades, can come over here and lecture them on anything. I personally don't much care what Ahmedinejad thinks, I can see the general thrust of his inclinations. He's spitting on the United States and Western Culture daily, and then expects to be treated with deference in return. Fuck him.
This kind of Devil's Advocacy isn't new to Adams. At least, I hope it's just that. He's apparently one of those celebrities that have forgotten the hard work involved in their ascendency, and assume that they're rich because of some accident of nature, akin to divine providence. Humans, himself included, are all just a bunch of "moist robots" with no capacity for thought, no free will; we've apparently just been programmed by Mother Nature to do the things we've done or will do. There is no mind, there is no choice, there is only the stimuli in our environments, and the response that was determined by a chance arrangement of atoms into chemicals during the Big Bang. Or something.
It's an obscene display of thoughtlessness, a conceit of someone trying so hard to seem above all this. Adams' Dilbert is amusing, and his blog is a bit of junk food for the brain at times. But he's got the morals of a two-dollar whore.
Last night we didn't make it. The two Frenchmen surrendered the evening, seeing as it was Trotzky's birthday, and therefore a time for somber reflection or something. So, we rode around big town Farnborough for a couple of hours, grabbed some grub, and then headed back to the apartment to watch a movie.
We watched Fur, which cemented my belief that Nicole Kidman is the perfect woman. Not only does she look good in her own slutty little librarian sort of way, she gives a guy a handjob in this movie while shaving his hairy back. That's my kind of girl, a real little trooper.
Anyhoo, it's back off to London now, for a second try at getting sloppy somewhere besides sitting at home in front of the boob tube. Wish us luck.
Vacation week is winding down, and I'm getting ready to leave the driving to Southwest Trains and go drinking in London. I'll try to keep it under two weeks this time, but no promises. We'll tramp it a bit through Soho, I guess, just me, the girls, and a couple of frog-eaters from the office.
I wonder why I never get to go drinking with Englishmen? It's probably for the best. There's a quote that gets bandied about, especially in the local newspapers, about England being a nation of drunks and scalawags. I can't say much about that, but it does seem that the pubs all close at 11:00 PM for a reason. At 5 o'clock, they pour out of their offices and into the public houses, seemingly on a race against the clock to get themselves 'faced before the early last call.
When they were finally permitted to stay open past 11, in the hope that the binge-drinking would abate in light of longer opening hours, they found themselves doubly-cursed in that the Englishmen were every bit as drunk at 11, but didn't have to go home. All pubs here are set up so that you have to go to the counter to get your drinks, instead of having them brought to your table. There's a built-in handbrake there: a system where you can't get any more drink once you lose the ability to walk is founded upon sound principle and good advices.
I've done nothing today; nothing but clean out the cluttered closets of my preferred newsfeed reader. There were some connections in there that were sorely neglected. I could use a bit more time to wade through the degenerate filth that is my blogroll, but sadly, I work. The Company is tolerant in their control over my time, fair since they do not pay hourly; but tolerance has its limits, and I doubt they would look kindly upon my spending the business day in a fugue state, reading entry after entry of dialectics about Jessica Simpson's tits, or Brittney Spears' overplayed poonanny.
Nevertheless, it saddens me that my everyday is not blessed with the nuggets of wisdom from skippystalin:
Being the only person with an out-of-control substance abuse problem in a relationship is tough. Most romantic couplings are based on common interests and most of my interests culminate in my waking up in a pool of what I think is my own urine and not being quite sure what time zone I'm in. I'm much like a cat in that I have a tendancy of marking my territory with my vomit, blood and gallons of my semen...My ability to smoke, drink and masturbate furiously at the same time might not be much, it's all that I have.
Ahh, skippystalin, how I've missed you, and your nuggets.
This is how I spend my vacation: visiting Stonehenge on one day; reading the melancholy musings of skippystalin the next, picturing him composing scholarly tracts through bitter tears, a crushed Viagra dissolving in a highball of Jack Daniels next to the keyboard, as another long evening fades into a blur of poetry, madness, and vigorous bouts of hate-filled masturbation. And wondering, of the two, which is the more meaningful and fitting monument to humanity?
They should've just burned enjoyeverysandwich to CD, stuck it to the side of Voyager along with its author, and shot the whole lot into space back when they had government funding to do so, all in the name of making a good first impression for whatever aliens were out cruising for an easy meal.
skippystalin's output is prodigious, to be sure, but there was an entire blogroll to consider:
The lunatics are running the asylum over at Straight White Guy's place. Eric's testicles are mentioned, indirectly. Remind me to change my passwords regularly and start using strong encryption.
How stoned do you have to be to cheat on Jessica Alba? I could jack off to Jessica Alba while a big mean dog was chasing me and this idiot is cheating on her. I decided to confront him about this and I screamed at him, hey, what is your problem. And he said I should get off his lawn. And I said, no, no you get off the lawn. You get off. Then he went inside, probably because deep down, he knew I had made some pretty good points.
JimGoad.com is no more, but if you're a Goad fan (ladies!), you can find find him here. Discussion of Brittany's latest, erm, candid photos is also to be found, but be aware that the following picture is used as a visual aid:
This morning we picked up my new wheelchair. It's a sporty European marque, with an aggressive stance, low-profile tires, and a head-turning cherry-red metalflake paint job. It's not that great on the corners, but it'll take any one of y'all on the straightaways.
I've never done time on wheels. On the whole, I found it to be not all that bad. Then again, I don't figure that most wheelchair-bound men my age get to enjoy being pushed around town by a couple of sexy German bloggerettes. Thanks, ladies: the jealous looks from the other local cripples was the icing on the cake. Here's a little something extra for you, babes. (via AoSHQ)
Funny things happen when you're on wheels. I saw a lady I work with while being carted through Tesco's frozen food department. I said hello, and she just looked right through me, steering her cart so as not to make contact with the leper. She probably thought I was going to ask her for some spare change, or if she could wipe me bum for me, or whatever it is that those people want from healthy-legged people. I also noticed that the supermarkets put completely different things down on the bottom three feet of the shelves. All the cool toys are down there, for example, presumably because chil'n's is small. It's also a great altitude to find anti-bedsore medicaments, for some reason.
So, I let myself be pushed by the Weyside in Guildford, where, at one point, a husky young native was required to wheel my fat ass up a steep incline. The Sistas, for all their heart, lacked the muscle to get the job done, so he, being a true-hearted salt-of-earth kind of guy, waved them off and grunted and sweated till I crested the hill. Had the man known that I could have, at any point in time, simply stood up and hobbled up the hill under my own power, he most certainly would have picked me up and broken me over his knee.
Tomorrow morning, we'll be visiting Stonehenge, or Stone'enge, as the locals quaintly call it. We'll also visit the haunted city, Salisbury, to watch the homosexuals. Ta!
I like reading OSNews for some reason. I think I like to catch the geeky news about SkyOS, or the occasional retro curmudgeonry that rolls by about Lotus 1-2-3 or OS/2. Being the old-timer that I am, it's hard to resist a paean from my youth about 10-finger productivity.
Unfortunately, they've become the epicenter of stupid for the tech press. Check out this article, which explodes the myths about competition being good: "Competition is not Good"
'It gives consumers more choice'
Choice is good when there's one agreed base standard, and a number of compatible approaches. For example, there are many Linux distributions, but they are all Linux, and they can all run the same software. They are 'flavours' of the same thing, that is a good choice. People like different flavours.
Competition does not produce easier choices for consumers. All they get is added un-interoperability and complexity with competitive choices.
Now, if you go read that article, which I do not recommend, you'll slowly come to the realization that this moron is just annoyed that he has to make the effort to choose between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. He's willing to surrender his entire free will to some (hopefully) benevolent dictator, abolish brand names, and forsake the free market economy because choosing which format to buy the Firefly special edition box set in is hard. What a hopeless, whiny-assed sissy.
Of course, things don't get better when they start tossing political analysis at you. "Net Neutrality" is one monikers that has overshadowed the thing named. The discussion is often framed in a way that an uninformed listener would assume there was lobbying going on to abolish some sort of laws that are now protecting consumers from big, bad tiered-Internet ninjas.
But: There is no net neutrality legislation, there never was, and hopefully, there never will be. The argument over "Net Neutrality" is about whether or not the U.S. government should introduce legislation forbidding bandwidth throttling by ISPs. It's the "have you stopped beating your wife?" straw man for the Slashdot crowd. You'll notice that this article calls the Supreme Court's decision that the U.S. government shouldn't step in and configure the ISPs' Cisco routers for them, "Backing for Two-Tier Internet":
The US Justice Department has said that internet service providers should be allowed to charge for priority traffic. The agency said it was opposed to 'network neutrality', the idea that all data on the net is treated equally. The comments put the agency at odds with companies such as Microsoft and Google, who have called for legislation to guarantee equal access to the net.
Of course, this would also mean that an enforcement infrastructure would also have to be put in place, making sure that everyone got their "fair share" of said bandwidth, as if backbone routers and POPs just fell off a tree somewhere. God forbid ISPs be allowed to tune the services that they developed and paid for as they wish. Let's let the government decides who gets bandwidth, and how much is enough! That will make it all fair and neutral-like. Whenever a politician uses the word "fair", hang on to your wallet.
Well, my trackbacks are now working, it seems. There's some ugly Python spaghetti-code going on behind the scenes that translates back and forth between absolute urls, non-absolute relative urls, and upper-lower-camel case; but it works.
Trackbacks are only good for Movable Type, though. Which I can't stand anymore. MT used to be the only thing out there, but there's something that really, really, really galls me about the way it rebuilds your entire site into static HTML pages everytime you update a post. I'm sure it's awesomeness if you've got your server running on an old TV remote, but nowadays we're all running our web servers on 100-core 64-bit terahertz moonshot computers that can simultaneously compute π, encode MPEG video, and mix the best goddam margaritas you've ever tasted, all without breaking a sweat.
So yeah, I figured out how to implement trackbacks in Django, to a point where they more or less work. Now why is Wordpress fucking with me? It seems to be thrown off by the fact that Wordpress sends a HEAD request before it downloads and parses the page, in the vain hope that the X-Pingback header will be set. I can't figure out how to do that in Django's generic views, so I just use the secondary method, that being a link element in the XHTML code. But now, whenever a Worpdress blog pings me, I get this kind of crap:
[09/Sep/2007 15:04:23] "GET /blog/2007/sep/08/vacation/ HTTP/1.1" 200 27367
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (104, 'Connection reset by peer')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (32, 'Broken pipe')
Being the half-assed programmer that I am, I am at a total loss. I can't even do a Lazyweb request here, seeing as my 4 visits a day are unlikely to bring the Django HTTP gurus by. I won't be able to sleep at night, thinking of all the enlightened Wordpress Users who are probably out there try to "Keep the discussion going" with me.
Ever since June, when the iPhone went live, I've heard about nothing else in the tech press, nerd podcasts, and the Apple Fanboisphere. Is it really that way over in the States (the only place you can get them), or does the iPhone actually seem to be doing well?
Ahh, my first vacation since joining The Company. My queue is cleaned up, my email is forwarded, and an elaborate Sieve session has accomplished in a mere two hours what less civilized mail systems can do with a key combination: The Corporate Vacation Email.
It's been five months now since I came 'cross the channel and started meeting the natives, learning the lingo, and getting used to the fact that everyone here talks like Pinky. Now, I'll be letting my hair down for the next 10 days or so. As well as putting my poor, broken foot up on the coffee table.
As soon as I get my x-rays back from the socialist medical system (they still copy them with coal rubbings on wax paper over here, apparently), I'll post pictures of the metatarsalar breakage here for your morbid enjoyment. Don't thank me yet.
The other half of Sistaweb will be joining us for the week. We'll allow her to sleep here rent-free for an entire week, even though she refused to bring a carton of cigarettes as payment. Damned non-smokers and their principles. It's like those non-smokers back in the World War II who didn't sign up for cigarette rations. Throwing away a gold mine, that is. Our grandfathers probably had a word for those guys, and if I knew my grandfather at all, that word was sissy-boy.
The girls have rented a wheelchair for me, seeing as I won't be too much fun doing a London pub-crawl on crutches. I've already had a forehead-slapping moment over this, as you probably are right now. Why haven't I thought of taking a wheelchair with me before? That would've come in handy on more than one occasion, the Wreckyll in Jeckyll not least among them.
Man, Apple is on a roll. Not only have they got me hooked for a new computer, a new laptop, a new office package, and a replacement for my aging MythTV box, but now I have to start thinking about a new iPod. Now, let's see what Uncle Steve is going to me be costing me 'til Christmas Time:
Item
Damage
20" iMac
1199.00
Macbook
1099.00
8GB iPod Touch
299.00
AppleTV
299.00
iWork '08
79.00
iLife '08
79.00
Total:
$3,054.00
Not bad for a day's work, Mr. Jobs. And what's up for the rest of September? Maybe some irresistible bionic iFoot to replace the one I broke playing frisbee at the company picnic last week?
Although there's a remarkable lack of iPhone hype around the office, we being a big-time Linux company and all, there's an amazing amount of Mac fanboiism. Pretty much all of us have Macs at home. The explanation for this is simple: After dealing with Linux problems all day long, there's something nice about going home to something you can spend all your time using and not making up excuses for why it looks like shit and doesn't work.
I like Linux, mind you. I use it day-in, day-out for my desktop at work, for my webservers, and it brings in my daily bread. We all love it here, pretty much like a family loves and therefore tolerates the embarrassing second cousin with the Downs'. But people are walking all over the office today buzzing about the upcoming announcement from Apple.
Will it be the long-awaited iMac redesign? Will it be a new Mini? My boss is actually carrying his phone to the pub after work today so he can sit on engadget and get a realtime update. Linus would not be pleased...
Last login: Thu Jul 26 12:17:28 from nat-pool-fab.re Welcome to Darwin! ericbook:~ eric$ mutt -bash: mutt: command not found ericbook:~ eric$ open /Applications/Mail.app/ ericbook:~ eric$
Ahh. Like coming in after a long day of plowing the fields and sticking your aching feet into a pot of hot water. After running Linux all day at work, you feel like slipping into something more comfortable. Sam knows it. Zonker knows it, though he won't admit it. It's the right amount of just-workiness you need to let you relax, while knowing you could, at any given moment, do something like:
OK, here's one with drivel. I do like it, but I have a couple of gripes.
First problem: I was hopelessly confused by the login screen. The type of journal seems to be locked on livejournal, as the drop-down menu for journal types is inexplicably disabled until you enter a username. -1 for usabilty
Second problem: Useless stripping of trailing slash, which mangled my xmlrpc URL. Error 301 was ignored, which makes sense since it's a post and all, but I couldn't log in. It mangled my URL then choked on the error :-/
Third problem: didn't want to download my recent posts. Although there might be a misunderstanding about just what "recent" means.
Fourth problem: Doesn't let me choose post status anywhere. And there's nowhere I can find to choose text filters. This is more of a feature request, really.
Fifth problem: craps out after posting, probably because it keeps mangling the trailing slashes from my URLs. Is there an RFC somewhere that says that POSTS can't end with slashes? Nobody tell the Django folks.
Well, maybe it'll at least let me post to my blog from work every now and then.
Man, I dang sure missed the entire month of June. I've been in the UK now for about two months, and let me tell ya: They sure do get some rain around here. I always thought those stories about English people having gills were legends and fantasies. Now, I'm not so sure.
For the love of GOD, for the last time, in the name of ALL THAT IS HOLY, Cluster Services is NOT COMPATIBLE with 4.5! If you're running a cluster, DO NOT update to 4.5 until the Cluster Suite is UPDATED TO 4.5!
That is all.
P.S. And NO, cmirror is not available yet. Maybe at the end of the month.
I went outside to smoke a cigarette. All rooms in England are for non-smokers, you'll find, as are the rooms, apartments, and houses listed for rent in the local papers. The litany at the end of all the ads reads, "No smokers, canvassers, or DSS", which stands for Department of Social Services. So, okay they hate smokers and welfare cases, as do we all. But the British have their own definition for 'non-smoker', which basically means you only smoke when you drink. Everybody smokes over here, and they all live somewhere.
The evening was cool; almost cold, really, as I suspect the evenings around here generally are. I stood on the corner of Osborne and Netley, watching the blackbirds getting ready to do whatever it is they do at night, when I spied a man, some yards away, bounding up the sidewalk with a jaunty gait. I held my cigarette just in front of my mouth, watching this figure with suspicion. He was short, about 5 feet tall, and round as a soccer ball. He was wearing light-colored trousers and a dark blazer, the left breast of which was adorned with an enormous, orange prize-ribbon.
As he approached me, his features became distinct in the bad lighting, and I realized he was positively beaming with pride. His face was ruddy, and split with a grin that wouldn't have looked out of place behind a wheelbarrow full of poker chips on the way to the cash-out. I placed him in his mid-40s, but maybe his thinning red hair and roly-poly stature made him look older than he really was.
He halted just a few feet from me, and said, with oddly struggling words, "Good evening, mister!"
I looked him up and down, cigarette still burning between my shaky fingers, and replied, "hi, how are ya..." He wobbled his head a bit, then walked around me on his way up the street. I noticed something written in gold on his orange ribbon, and read it as it flashed in the lamplight.
I judged him more than a wee bit 'differently-abled', as they say. I watched as he cautiously crossed the empty street, looking both ways at least twice, then gingerly stepping into the street and crossing it at a run.
I thought about what I had seen written on the ribbon: "A Very Special Boy". Hmm, I thought, I wonder who gave him that? Whoever it was, they made his whole day.
I put my cigarette out and walked back into the guest house.
My buddy Sam sent me an email a couple of days ago indicating that he just might have joined The Family recently. And he joined it a much higher level than I, I might add, considering I'm still lumbering along in the PowerPC world; my G4 Powerbook, though a loyal and trusted friend, seems slow as molasses in January these days.
He also mentioned an old OS/2 habit, one which we separately shared back in the day. I started using OS/2 when I worked at UPS. One of our managers was running 2.1, with the old Presentation Manager that looked like a crappy(er) Windows 2.0, albeit with long filenames and the ability to run concurrent DOS sessions. I avoided it until OS/2 3.0 came out.
In '94, when Warp hit the shelves, I rushed out to Soft-Warehouse1 in Alpharetta, looked in the Operating Systems2 department until I found a box, then gave the man $300 dollars for the privilege of running it. Then, I walked over the desktop applications department, and put down another $495 for Lotus Smartsuite/2. Then I OEM'd 16MB of RAM for about $400 to make it all go.
Now, many may see OS/2 as a butt-ugly cousin of Windows, and they may be right. But back then, it was a work of art. Especially in the sense that it wasn't an exact science getting it to run. Nothing ever really worked like it was supposed to. Without the fallback of a DOS prompt, you had to have a second, fully-functional machine to do things like edit the CONFIG.SYS on the installation floppies to make sure your DASD drivers were loading. And most of the drivers were written so that, if they encountered an error while loading, they'd bork the whole boot process, just to be on the safe side.
The graphical interface also hung constantly. The Workplace Shell, despite (or maybe due to) all its object-orientiness, was horribly unstable. But I never saw a hang that wasn't cured with Control-Alt-Delete. That key combo went right down to the kernel, and always gave a satisfying, unconfirmed reboot, wedged GUI be damned. There was even a 3rd party program called Watchcat that sat on the serial port, or on a secondary Hercules/MCGA monitor, and let you monitor and kill programs remotely. The kernel's Kung Fu was strong like that, but the GUI was just ass.
Now, when Chicago started finally coming down the pipe, and even the Rolling Stones where pulled into the OS marketing world ("Start me up", anyone?), OS/2 fans like myself were sure that this pissant little DOS extender with a homely face wouldn't be the future. It couldn't be the future, it was just too depressing. It still wasn't a 32-bit OS, though the 386 had been out for over 8 years. It still used FAT, for crying out loud. In short, Chicago sucked.
OS/2 seemed like a scrappy little underdog, nipping heroically at the Microsoft behemoth's heels. I'm not sure why it gave that impression. At the time, IBM was much bigger than Microsoft, a huge, multinational corporation with interests in basically every aspect of electronics. They just couldn't write or market good software.
I'm not sure why I just wrote 500 words on OS/2. I actually wanted to write something about Linux.
Software stores used to have a whole "Operating Systems" department, back when there was more than one operating system, and Windows was still called an "Operating Environment" ↩
Man, I'm unprepared. There's a checklist of things you should do before moving to England. I came over here without any money, preparation, or attack plan. There's something unbelievably stupid about this. It worked for me when I moved to Germany, but moving to England's a bit more complicated, apparently. Either that, or I'm remembering it wrong.
But I'm not the only one. The office I'm working in is full of non-British people. It's a rag-tag group of Germans, Italians, Brazilians, Spaniards, one (1) American, and who knows what else that all found themselves in the same boat when they first came over. This despite promises from The Company to help one resettle; promises which are certainly not kept and, when referred to in conversation, change their shape and character like a Democrat on a whistle-stop.
But at some point a kindly soul in the department, now departed, made a list of the reality of the situation. It's a short list of what one really needs to do when moving to England. Unfortunately, I only found out about it after I'd already been here a week. Here's your to-do list once you've arrived in England:
Get a room. If possible, get a rental agreement or any bill with your name and address on it. (proof of address)
Deposit is usually 1 1/2 times the rent. Deposit and first rent is to be paid beforehand. If the room is unfurnished, see "Things to Buy" for shops and example prices.
Get a letter from your office manager (HR Lady) stating that you are working for the company and including your address. (proof of employment)
Get a bank account. Just walk in with your documents:
Passport or national ID card
Proof of employment (see 2.). it might be handy to have your contract with you.
Proof of address
Banks
HSBC – try to get a standard account (they try to sell you an advanced package including insurances etc.)
NatWest – Also recommended as this bank does not charge for withdrawing money from a different bank's cash machines
Give your bank details to The Company
Register with Inland Revenue – this is done by your HR manager. You should get your tax code about 2 weeks later (PAYE Coding Notice)
At the end of the fiscal year (ending April 5th), you will get a "P60 End of Year Certificate" detailing your "Pay and Income Tax" levels.
Get a National Insurance Number by applying at a Job Centre Plus office. They ask for dtails before they schedule an interview appointment to verify your eligibility. Appointments are scheduled about two weeks ahead, and take place in the nearest county office, which usually isn't near at all. Without an NI number, you will be on emergency tax, which is higher than the standard tax rate.
Documents:
Passport
National ID card
Driving License or any other official document identifying you (Birth certificate, police registration, medical card, etc.)
Proof of employment (see 2.)
Recent payslip
Bank statement
Proof of address (utility bill, rental agreement, etc. – see 1.)
It might be handy to have your PAYE Coding Notice with you
As money is paid in a timely manner so it is available on the 27th, try to get your appointment after this date.
If you are British, a citizen of a member state of the EU, or other Commonwealth citizen, you can apply for inclusion on the Register of Electors. This will allow you to vote at local government elections. Your credibility will rise (good for tenancy applications or bank-related matters) and you are obliged to pay Council Taxes1
If you buy any TV or radio equipment, you will be asked for your address, which will be automatically forwarded to the "TV Licensing Office"
Get a Tesco Clubcard
Get a life ;-)
Any address change has to be communicated to all above-mentioned authorities. For the official notices to local council, the TV licensing, and most other on-line services, you can use I am Moving , where you can create/use an account for free.
All of this could have been avoided with a bit of planning. I am bitterly disappointed in myself.
Council taxes are universal as far as I can tell, and are perceived, by the British at least, as an extension of the rent. ↩
Farnborough derives its name from from the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Ferneberga (Fern Hill) and is mentioned in the Domesday Book (1086). But for the coming of the army at nearby Aldershot, the arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flying, Farnborough would probably have remained an isolated heathland village, that is until the latter half of the 20th century when the population moved out of London suburbia and became commuters.
"But for the … arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flight…". That's a pretty big conditional. There are probably a lot of places whose development was seriously affected by railways and the advent of powered flight. But I understand where the good Mr. Parkins is coming from.
I had forgotten the cable to connect my camera to my laptop. Of all the stupid things that I packed for the trip, 50 different USB cables, a USB hub, power adapters for devices I’d forgotten, not to mention devices whose power adapters I’d forgotten, I forgot the one thing that was absolutely necessary and planned-for. Not to mention irreplaceable, seeing as every camera maker in the world decided that their camera’s little hole should look different from all the other cameras’ little holes.
I walked into a little computer store on the strip in Fleet, Hampshire. Walking up to the pasty-faced, teenaged part-timer there, I introduced myself and shook his hand, which seemed to shock him.
He unconsciously wiped his hands on his pants and said, “eh...nice to meet you, sir. What can I do for you?”
I asked him, “do you have any USB card-readers?”
“Um, yeah," he answered. "I think I saw some around here somewhere.”
I looked around the shop, which was organized and clean. Man, he must really be the FNG around here. He finally found what I was looking for, stored on a shelf right next to where he had been sitting. He handed it to me and I started reading the back of the packaging.
“Just looking to see if it works with my Mac,” I told him.
“Oh, it's USB, so it should work,” he answered, and took the reader out of my hand. He moved his lips while he read the package. “Oh, yeah,” he said finally. “Right there it says it: ‘Requires Mac OS 9 or later’.” He looked at me skeptically. “So, you do have OS 9 or later, don’t you?”
“Um, yeah, I think so.” OS 9 went out of style back in the ‘90s.
He moved around to the register, and I handed him my Visa card. He looked uncertain as he turned it over in his hand. “This thing doesn’t have a chip on it?”
I took it back and examined it. “No, I guess it doesn’t.”
“Well, I don’t think we can take that, then.”
“Why don’t you just swipe it,” I said. “Give it a go.”
He shrugged and swiped it through the machine.
From behind me, a voice said, “it’s all chips nowadays, you know.”
I looked around, and saw that an older woman was standing behind me. She looked to be in her mid 40s, and wore a name plate with the store’s logo on it. “You can’t get nothing without a dozen little chips in it.”
I nodded agreement, and turned back to the young man behind the register.
“So, what kind of Mac you got, then?”
“A PowerBook G4.”
He nodded approvingly. “Nice piece of kit, that.” The little machine that had taken my card made a loud ping!, and spit out a receipt. He tore it off and gave it to me to sign, along with the card reader.
“Now, you have a nice day sir, and do please visit us again.”
I thanked him, said goodbye to the chip-lady, and put the small package into my bag next to my laptop. “Thanks, man, I’ll do that.” Nice kid.
Didja ever discover something that made your reality skip a beat? You know how, for just a second, something is so far out of place that you can't even figure out what's wrong with the picture? For example, the Augsburg Wireless-Internet provider Cyberways has had the same guy on their start page for years:
Every time you connect to the internet over public wireless in Augsburg, that dude was right there, staring at you with those soulless black eyes. Like a doll's eyes...
And the weird thing was, I always figured he was the boss at Cyberways. I even thought I saw him once on the tram. I hate it when people use the same stock photos everywhere. Everybody's full of shit. Oh, I guess it's effective use of your cash dollars, seeing as it's cheaper than paying attractive people to work for you. But still, why not just be honest for a split second?
You get this kind of thing all over the Internet, of course. If you've ever shopped for web hosting, you'll notice, after a few visits to the providers' pages, that their employees all kind of look alike. And there's always some woman somewhere holding a laptop at her waist in near-sexual ecstasy over the reasonable shared hosting prices.
It's a leitmotif throughout the enter hosting industry: Shared Webspace=Chick with laptop.
Rube, look, for the last freakin time, look RIGHT when you step off a curb! These people drive on the other side of the F$@&-ing road over here! You wanna get ya brains splattered all over me?
What? I dunno. I'm just kind of sitting around, waiting on things. I just spent way too much time transferring money across European borders, and reclaiming my identity. But the new passports are wonderful pieces of fortitude. Here' s a few quotes from my new passport:
And that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth. - Abraham Lincoln
The principle of free governments adheres to the American soil. It is bedded in it, immovable as its mountains. - Daniel Webster
Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. - George Washington
We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. - excerpt from the Declaration of Independence
Your concept of love may be different, but know that I love this world.
I like reading Scott Adams' blog on occasion. Much like Balph Eubanks, he's glib, amusing, and completely lacking in morality. Take, for example, his latest strawman-laden posting regarding the visit of a certain Mr. Ahmedinejad:
I was happy to hear that NYC didn't allow Iranian President Ahmadinejad
to place a wreath at the WTC site. And I was happy that Columbia
University is rescinding the offer to let him speak. If you let a guy like
that express his views, before long the entire world will want freedom
of speech.
...
If Ahmadinejad thinks he can be our friend by honoring our heroes and
opening a dialog, he underestimates our ability to misinterpret him.
Fucking idiot. I hate him.
Well, there's certainly some rye wit at work here. Yes, it is quite ironic that a country led by a genocidal religious dictator, which the USA most certainly is, would object to a fellow genocidal religious madman visiting its most sensitive cultural site. I mean, Mahmoud's only trying to "open a dialog" here, isn't he? Isn't that the meaning of Ahmedinejad's visit? Isn't Ahmedinejad just exercising "Free Speech", as Adams says? Aren't we wrong in denying this poor man that right?
Aside from the obvious jackassery involved in claiming that a man who directly controls his entire country's media is having trouble getting his point of view out; or that the United Nations will let him speak before the leaders of the world to the point where they forget to blink for an hour; aside from all this, this is not a question of whether or not Mahmoud is allowed to say what he wants. The question is, in accordance with the Grand Unified Theory of Rubean Mechanics, Who's going to pay for it. It's a question of whether or not Americans should be paying for his plane fare, his security, and his accommodation while he's here, pissing on Ground Zero and generating propaganda for totalitarian lobbying groups like MoveOn.org and International ANSWER.
All of Adams' ridiculous assertions never mention the one central fact here: There is no compelling reason for American taxpayers to foot the bill, so this guy, who just held one of his popular "Death to America" parades, can come over here and lecture them on anything. I personally don't much care what Ahmedinejad thinks, I can see the general thrust of his inclinations. He's spitting on the United States and Western Culture daily, and then expects to be treated with deference in return. Fuck him.
This kind of Devil's Advocacy isn't new to Adams. At least, I hope it's just that. He's apparently one of those celebrities that have forgotten the hard work involved in their ascendency, and assume that they're rich because of some accident of nature, akin to divine providence. Humans, himself included, are all just a bunch of "moist robots" with no capacity for thought, no free will; we've apparently just been programmed by Mother Nature to do the things we've done or will do. There is no mind, there is no choice, there is only the stimuli in our environments, and the response that was determined by a chance arrangement of atoms into chemicals during the Big Bang. Or something.
It's an obscene display of thoughtlessness, a conceit of someone trying so hard to seem above all this. Adams' Dilbert is amusing, and his blog is a bit of junk food for the brain at times. But he's got the morals of a two-dollar whore.
Last night we didn't make it. The two Frenchmen surrendered the evening, seeing as it was Trotzky's birthday, and therefore a time for somber reflection or something. So, we rode around big town Farnborough for a couple of hours, grabbed some grub, and then headed back to the apartment to watch a movie.
We watched Fur, which cemented my belief that Nicole Kidman is the perfect woman. Not only does she look good in her own slutty little librarian sort of way, she gives a guy a handjob in this movie while shaving his hairy back. That's my kind of girl, a real little trooper.
Anyhoo, it's back off to London now, for a second try at getting sloppy somewhere besides sitting at home in front of the boob tube. Wish us luck.
Vacation week is winding down, and I'm getting ready to leave the driving to Southwest Trains and go drinking in London. I'll try to keep it under two weeks this time, but no promises. We'll tramp it a bit through Soho, I guess, just me, the girls, and a couple of frog-eaters from the office.
I wonder why I never get to go drinking with Englishmen? It's probably for the best. There's a quote that gets bandied about, especially in the local newspapers, about England being a nation of drunks and scalawags. I can't say much about that, but it does seem that the pubs all close at 11:00 PM for a reason. At 5 o'clock, they pour out of their offices and into the public houses, seemingly on a race against the clock to get themselves 'faced before the early last call.
When they were finally permitted to stay open past 11, in the hope that the binge-drinking would abate in light of longer opening hours, they found themselves doubly-cursed in that the Englishmen were every bit as drunk at 11, but didn't have to go home. All pubs here are set up so that you have to go to the counter to get your drinks, instead of having them brought to your table. There's a built-in handbrake there: a system where you can't get any more drink once you lose the ability to walk is founded upon sound principle and good advices.
I've done nothing today; nothing but clean out the cluttered closets of my preferred newsfeed reader. There were some connections in there that were sorely neglected. I could use a bit more time to wade through the degenerate filth that is my blogroll, but sadly, I work. The Company is tolerant in their control over my time, fair since they do not pay hourly; but tolerance has its limits, and I doubt they would look kindly upon my spending the business day in a fugue state, reading entry after entry of dialectics about Jessica Simpson's tits, or Brittney Spears' overplayed poonanny.
Nevertheless, it saddens me that my everyday is not blessed with the nuggets of wisdom from skippystalin:
Being the only person with an out-of-control substance abuse problem in a relationship is tough. Most romantic couplings are based on common interests and most of my interests culminate in my waking up in a pool of what I think is my own urine and not being quite sure what time zone I'm in. I'm much like a cat in that I have a tendancy of marking my territory with my vomit, blood and gallons of my semen...My ability to smoke, drink and masturbate furiously at the same time might not be much, it's all that I have.
Ahh, skippystalin, how I've missed you, and your nuggets.
This is how I spend my vacation: visiting Stonehenge on one day; reading the melancholy musings of skippystalin the next, picturing him composing scholarly tracts through bitter tears, a crushed Viagra dissolving in a highball of Jack Daniels next to the keyboard, as another long evening fades into a blur of poetry, madness, and vigorous bouts of hate-filled masturbation. And wondering, of the two, which is the more meaningful and fitting monument to humanity?
They should've just burned enjoyeverysandwich to CD, stuck it to the side of Voyager along with its author, and shot the whole lot into space back when they had government funding to do so, all in the name of making a good first impression for whatever aliens were out cruising for an easy meal.
skippystalin's output is prodigious, to be sure, but there was an entire blogroll to consider:
The lunatics are running the asylum over at Straight White Guy's place. Eric's testicles are mentioned, indirectly. Remind me to change my passwords regularly and start using strong encryption.
How stoned do you have to be to cheat on Jessica Alba? I could jack off to Jessica Alba while a big mean dog was chasing me and this idiot is cheating on her. I decided to confront him about this and I screamed at him, hey, what is your problem. And he said I should get off his lawn. And I said, no, no you get off the lawn. You get off. Then he went inside, probably because deep down, he knew I had made some pretty good points.
JimGoad.com is no more, but if you're a Goad fan (ladies!), you can find find him here. Discussion of Brittany's latest, erm, candid photos is also to be found, but be aware that the following picture is used as a visual aid:
This morning we picked up my new wheelchair. It's a sporty European marque, with an aggressive stance, low-profile tires, and a head-turning cherry-red metalflake paint job. It's not that great on the corners, but it'll take any one of y'all on the straightaways.
I've never done time on wheels. On the whole, I found it to be not all that bad. Then again, I don't figure that most wheelchair-bound men my age get to enjoy being pushed around town by a couple of sexy German bloggerettes. Thanks, ladies: the jealous looks from the other local cripples was the icing on the cake. Here's a little something extra for you, babes. (via AoSHQ)
Funny things happen when you're on wheels. I saw a lady I work with while being carted through Tesco's frozen food department. I said hello, and she just looked right through me, steering her cart so as not to make contact with the leper. She probably thought I was going to ask her for some spare change, or if she could wipe me bum for me, or whatever it is that those people want from healthy-legged people. I also noticed that the supermarkets put completely different things down on the bottom three feet of the shelves. All the cool toys are down there, for example, presumably because chil'n's is small. It's also a great altitude to find anti-bedsore medicaments, for some reason.
So, I let myself be pushed by the Weyside in Guildford, where, at one point, a husky young native was required to wheel my fat ass up a steep incline. The Sistas, for all their heart, lacked the muscle to get the job done, so he, being a true-hearted salt-of-earth kind of guy, waved them off and grunted and sweated till I crested the hill. Had the man known that I could have, at any point in time, simply stood up and hobbled up the hill under my own power, he most certainly would have picked me up and broken me over his knee.
Tomorrow morning, we'll be visiting Stonehenge, or Stone'enge, as the locals quaintly call it. We'll also visit the haunted city, Salisbury, to watch the homosexuals. Ta!
I like reading OSNews for some reason. I think I like to catch the geeky news about SkyOS, or the occasional retro curmudgeonry that rolls by about Lotus 1-2-3 or OS/2. Being the old-timer that I am, it's hard to resist a paean from my youth about 10-finger productivity.
Unfortunately, they've become the epicenter of stupid for the tech press. Check out this article, which explodes the myths about competition being good: "Competition is not Good"
'It gives consumers more choice'
Choice is good when there's one agreed base standard, and a number of compatible approaches. For example, there are many Linux distributions, but they are all Linux, and they can all run the same software. They are 'flavours' of the same thing, that is a good choice. People like different flavours.
Competition does not produce easier choices for consumers. All they get is added un-interoperability and complexity with competitive choices.
Now, if you go read that article, which I do not recommend, you'll slowly come to the realization that this moron is just annoyed that he has to make the effort to choose between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. He's willing to surrender his entire free will to some (hopefully) benevolent dictator, abolish brand names, and forsake the free market economy because choosing which format to buy the Firefly special edition box set in is hard. What a hopeless, whiny-assed sissy.
Of course, things don't get better when they start tossing political analysis at you. "Net Neutrality" is one monikers that has overshadowed the thing named. The discussion is often framed in a way that an uninformed listener would assume there was lobbying going on to abolish some sort of laws that are now protecting consumers from big, bad tiered-Internet ninjas.
But: There is no net neutrality legislation, there never was, and hopefully, there never will be. The argument over "Net Neutrality" is about whether or not the U.S. government should introduce legislation forbidding bandwidth throttling by ISPs. It's the "have you stopped beating your wife?" straw man for the Slashdot crowd. You'll notice that this article calls the Supreme Court's decision that the U.S. government shouldn't step in and configure the ISPs' Cisco routers for them, "Backing for Two-Tier Internet":
The US Justice Department has said that internet service providers should be allowed to charge for priority traffic. The agency said it was opposed to 'network neutrality', the idea that all data on the net is treated equally. The comments put the agency at odds with companies such as Microsoft and Google, who have called for legislation to guarantee equal access to the net.
Of course, this would also mean that an enforcement infrastructure would also have to be put in place, making sure that everyone got their "fair share" of said bandwidth, as if backbone routers and POPs just fell off a tree somewhere. God forbid ISPs be allowed to tune the services that they developed and paid for as they wish. Let's let the government decides who gets bandwidth, and how much is enough! That will make it all fair and neutral-like. Whenever a politician uses the word "fair", hang on to your wallet.
Well, my trackbacks are now working, it seems. There's some ugly Python spaghetti-code going on behind the scenes that translates back and forth between absolute urls, non-absolute relative urls, and upper-lower-camel case; but it works.
Trackbacks are only good for Movable Type, though. Which I can't stand anymore. MT used to be the only thing out there, but there's something that really, really, really galls me about the way it rebuilds your entire site into static HTML pages everytime you update a post. I'm sure it's awesomeness if you've got your server running on an old TV remote, but nowadays we're all running our web servers on 100-core 64-bit terahertz moonshot computers that can simultaneously compute π, encode MPEG video, and mix the best goddam margaritas you've ever tasted, all without breaking a sweat.
So yeah, I figured out how to implement trackbacks in Django, to a point where they more or less work. Now why is Wordpress fucking with me? It seems to be thrown off by the fact that Wordpress sends a HEAD request before it downloads and parses the page, in the vain hope that the X-Pingback header will be set. I can't figure out how to do that in Django's generic views, so I just use the secondary method, that being a link element in the XHTML code. But now, whenever a Worpdress blog pings me, I get this kind of crap:
[09/Sep/2007 15:04:23] "GET /blog/2007/sep/08/vacation/ HTTP/1.1" 200 27367
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (104, 'Connection reset by peer')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (32, 'Broken pipe')
Being the half-assed programmer that I am, I am at a total loss. I can't even do a Lazyweb request here, seeing as my 4 visits a day are unlikely to bring the Django HTTP gurus by. I won't be able to sleep at night, thinking of all the enlightened Wordpress Users who are probably out there try to "Keep the discussion going" with me.
Ever since June, when the iPhone went live, I've heard about nothing else in the tech press, nerd podcasts, and the Apple Fanboisphere. Is it really that way over in the States (the only place you can get them), or does the iPhone actually seem to be doing well?
Ahh, my first vacation since joining The Company. My queue is cleaned up, my email is forwarded, and an elaborate Sieve session has accomplished in a mere two hours what less civilized mail systems can do with a key combination: The Corporate Vacation Email.
It's been five months now since I came 'cross the channel and started meeting the natives, learning the lingo, and getting used to the fact that everyone here talks like Pinky. Now, I'll be letting my hair down for the next 10 days or so. As well as putting my poor, broken foot up on the coffee table.
As soon as I get my x-rays back from the socialist medical system (they still copy them with coal rubbings on wax paper over here, apparently), I'll post pictures of the metatarsalar breakage here for your morbid enjoyment. Don't thank me yet.
The other half of Sistaweb will be joining us for the week. We'll allow her to sleep here rent-free for an entire week, even though she refused to bring a carton of cigarettes as payment. Damned non-smokers and their principles. It's like those non-smokers back in the World War II who didn't sign up for cigarette rations. Throwing away a gold mine, that is. Our grandfathers probably had a word for those guys, and if I knew my grandfather at all, that word was sissy-boy.
The girls have rented a wheelchair for me, seeing as I won't be too much fun doing a London pub-crawl on crutches. I've already had a forehead-slapping moment over this, as you probably are right now. Why haven't I thought of taking a wheelchair with me before? That would've come in handy on more than one occasion, the Wreckyll in Jeckyll not least among them.
Man, Apple is on a roll. Not only have they got me hooked for a new computer, a new laptop, a new office package, and a replacement for my aging MythTV box, but now I have to start thinking about a new iPod. Now, let's see what Uncle Steve is going to me be costing me 'til Christmas Time:
Item
Damage
20" iMac
1199.00
Macbook
1099.00
8GB iPod Touch
299.00
AppleTV
299.00
iWork '08
79.00
iLife '08
79.00
Total:
$3,054.00
Not bad for a day's work, Mr. Jobs. And what's up for the rest of September? Maybe some irresistible bionic iFoot to replace the one I broke playing frisbee at the company picnic last week?
Although there's a remarkable lack of iPhone hype around the office, we being a big-time Linux company and all, there's an amazing amount of Mac fanboiism. Pretty much all of us have Macs at home. The explanation for this is simple: After dealing with Linux problems all day long, there's something nice about going home to something you can spend all your time using and not making up excuses for why it looks like shit and doesn't work.
I like Linux, mind you. I use it day-in, day-out for my desktop at work, for my webservers, and it brings in my daily bread. We all love it here, pretty much like a family loves and therefore tolerates the embarrassing second cousin with the Downs'. But people are walking all over the office today buzzing about the upcoming announcement from Apple.
Will it be the long-awaited iMac redesign? Will it be a new Mini? My boss is actually carrying his phone to the pub after work today so he can sit on engadget and get a realtime update. Linus would not be pleased...
Last login: Thu Jul 26 12:17:28 from nat-pool-fab.re Welcome to Darwin! ericbook:~ eric$ mutt -bash: mutt: command not found ericbook:~ eric$ open /Applications/Mail.app/ ericbook:~ eric$
Ahh. Like coming in after a long day of plowing the fields and sticking your aching feet into a pot of hot water. After running Linux all day at work, you feel like slipping into something more comfortable. Sam knows it. Zonker knows it, though he won't admit it. It's the right amount of just-workiness you need to let you relax, while knowing you could, at any given moment, do something like:
OK, here's one with drivel. I do like it, but I have a couple of gripes.
First problem: I was hopelessly confused by the login screen. The type of journal seems to be locked on livejournal, as the drop-down menu for journal types is inexplicably disabled until you enter a username. -1 for usabilty
Second problem: Useless stripping of trailing slash, which mangled my xmlrpc URL. Error 301 was ignored, which makes sense since it's a post and all, but I couldn't log in. It mangled my URL then choked on the error :-/
Third problem: didn't want to download my recent posts. Although there might be a misunderstanding about just what "recent" means.
Fourth problem: Doesn't let me choose post status anywhere. And there's nowhere I can find to choose text filters. This is more of a feature request, really.
Fifth problem: craps out after posting, probably because it keeps mangling the trailing slashes from my URLs. Is there an RFC somewhere that says that POSTS can't end with slashes? Nobody tell the Django folks.
Well, maybe it'll at least let me post to my blog from work every now and then.
Man, I dang sure missed the entire month of June. I've been in the UK now for about two months, and let me tell ya: They sure do get some rain around here. I always thought those stories about English people having gills were legends and fantasies. Now, I'm not so sure.
For the love of GOD, for the last time, in the name of ALL THAT IS HOLY, Cluster Services is NOT COMPATIBLE with 4.5! If you're running a cluster, DO NOT update to 4.5 until the Cluster Suite is UPDATED TO 4.5!
That is all.
P.S. And NO, cmirror is not available yet. Maybe at the end of the month.
I went outside to smoke a cigarette. All rooms in England are for non-smokers, you'll find, as are the rooms, apartments, and houses listed for rent in the local papers. The litany at the end of all the ads reads, "No smokers, canvassers, or DSS", which stands for Department of Social Services. So, okay they hate smokers and welfare cases, as do we all. But the British have their own definition for 'non-smoker', which basically means you only smoke when you drink. Everybody smokes over here, and they all live somewhere.
The evening was cool; almost cold, really, as I suspect the evenings around here generally are. I stood on the corner of Osborne and Netley, watching the blackbirds getting ready to do whatever it is they do at night, when I spied a man, some yards away, bounding up the sidewalk with a jaunty gait. I held my cigarette just in front of my mouth, watching this figure with suspicion. He was short, about 5 feet tall, and round as a soccer ball. He was wearing light-colored trousers and a dark blazer, the left breast of which was adorned with an enormous, orange prize-ribbon.
As he approached me, his features became distinct in the bad lighting, and I realized he was positively beaming with pride. His face was ruddy, and split with a grin that wouldn't have looked out of place behind a wheelbarrow full of poker chips on the way to the cash-out. I placed him in his mid-40s, but maybe his thinning red hair and roly-poly stature made him look older than he really was.
He halted just a few feet from me, and said, with oddly struggling words, "Good evening, mister!"
I looked him up and down, cigarette still burning between my shaky fingers, and replied, "hi, how are ya..." He wobbled his head a bit, then walked around me on his way up the street. I noticed something written in gold on his orange ribbon, and read it as it flashed in the lamplight.
I judged him more than a wee bit 'differently-abled', as they say. I watched as he cautiously crossed the empty street, looking both ways at least twice, then gingerly stepping into the street and crossing it at a run.
I thought about what I had seen written on the ribbon: "A Very Special Boy". Hmm, I thought, I wonder who gave him that? Whoever it was, they made his whole day.
I put my cigarette out and walked back into the guest house.
My buddy Sam sent me an email a couple of days ago indicating that he just might have joined The Family recently. And he joined it a much higher level than I, I might add, considering I'm still lumbering along in the PowerPC world; my G4 Powerbook, though a loyal and trusted friend, seems slow as molasses in January these days.
He also mentioned an old OS/2 habit, one which we separately shared back in the day. I started using OS/2 when I worked at UPS. One of our managers was running 2.1, with the old Presentation Manager that looked like a crappy(er) Windows 2.0, albeit with long filenames and the ability to run concurrent DOS sessions. I avoided it until OS/2 3.0 came out.
In '94, when Warp hit the shelves, I rushed out to Soft-Warehouse1 in Alpharetta, looked in the Operating Systems2 department until I found a box, then gave the man $300 dollars for the privilege of running it. Then, I walked over the desktop applications department, and put down another $495 for Lotus Smartsuite/2. Then I OEM'd 16MB of RAM for about $400 to make it all go.
Now, many may see OS/2 as a butt-ugly cousin of Windows, and they may be right. But back then, it was a work of art. Especially in the sense that it wasn't an exact science getting it to run. Nothing ever really worked like it was supposed to. Without the fallback of a DOS prompt, you had to have a second, fully-functional machine to do things like edit the CONFIG.SYS on the installation floppies to make sure your DASD drivers were loading. And most of the drivers were written so that, if they encountered an error while loading, they'd bork the whole boot process, just to be on the safe side.
The graphical interface also hung constantly. The Workplace Shell, despite (or maybe due to) all its object-orientiness, was horribly unstable. But I never saw a hang that wasn't cured with Control-Alt-Delete. That key combo went right down to the kernel, and always gave a satisfying, unconfirmed reboot, wedged GUI be damned. There was even a 3rd party program called Watchcat that sat on the serial port, or on a secondary Hercules/MCGA monitor, and let you monitor and kill programs remotely. The kernel's Kung Fu was strong like that, but the GUI was just ass.
Now, when Chicago started finally coming down the pipe, and even the Rolling Stones where pulled into the OS marketing world ("Start me up", anyone?), OS/2 fans like myself were sure that this pissant little DOS extender with a homely face wouldn't be the future. It couldn't be the future, it was just too depressing. It still wasn't a 32-bit OS, though the 386 had been out for over 8 years. It still used FAT, for crying out loud. In short, Chicago sucked.
OS/2 seemed like a scrappy little underdog, nipping heroically at the Microsoft behemoth's heels. I'm not sure why it gave that impression. At the time, IBM was much bigger than Microsoft, a huge, multinational corporation with interests in basically every aspect of electronics. They just couldn't write or market good software.
I'm not sure why I just wrote 500 words on OS/2. I actually wanted to write something about Linux.
Software stores used to have a whole "Operating Systems" department, back when there was more than one operating system, and Windows was still called an "Operating Environment" ↩
Man, I'm unprepared. There's a checklist of things you should do before moving to England. I came over here without any money, preparation, or attack plan. There's something unbelievably stupid about this. It worked for me when I moved to Germany, but moving to England's a bit more complicated, apparently. Either that, or I'm remembering it wrong.
But I'm not the only one. The office I'm working in is full of non-British people. It's a rag-tag group of Germans, Italians, Brazilians, Spaniards, one (1) American, and who knows what else that all found themselves in the same boat when they first came over. This despite promises from The Company to help one resettle; promises which are certainly not kept and, when referred to in conversation, change their shape and character like a Democrat on a whistle-stop.
But at some point a kindly soul in the department, now departed, made a list of the reality of the situation. It's a short list of what one really needs to do when moving to England. Unfortunately, I only found out about it after I'd already been here a week. Here's your to-do list once you've arrived in England:
Get a room. If possible, get a rental agreement or any bill with your name and address on it. (proof of address)
Deposit is usually 1 1/2 times the rent. Deposit and first rent is to be paid beforehand. If the room is unfurnished, see "Things to Buy" for shops and example prices.
Get a letter from your office manager (HR Lady) stating that you are working for the company and including your address. (proof of employment)
Get a bank account. Just walk in with your documents:
Passport or national ID card
Proof of employment (see 2.). it might be handy to have your contract with you.
Proof of address
Banks
HSBC – try to get a standard account (they try to sell you an advanced package including insurances etc.)
NatWest – Also recommended as this bank does not charge for withdrawing money from a different bank's cash machines
Give your bank details to The Company
Register with Inland Revenue – this is done by your HR manager. You should get your tax code about 2 weeks later (PAYE Coding Notice)
At the end of the fiscal year (ending April 5th), you will get a "P60 End of Year Certificate" detailing your "Pay and Income Tax" levels.
Get a National Insurance Number by applying at a Job Centre Plus office. They ask for dtails before they schedule an interview appointment to verify your eligibility. Appointments are scheduled about two weeks ahead, and take place in the nearest county office, which usually isn't near at all. Without an NI number, you will be on emergency tax, which is higher than the standard tax rate.
Documents:
Passport
National ID card
Driving License or any other official document identifying you (Birth certificate, police registration, medical card, etc.)
Proof of employment (see 2.)
Recent payslip
Bank statement
Proof of address (utility bill, rental agreement, etc. – see 1.)
It might be handy to have your PAYE Coding Notice with you
As money is paid in a timely manner so it is available on the 27th, try to get your appointment after this date.
If you are British, a citizen of a member state of the EU, or other Commonwealth citizen, you can apply for inclusion on the Register of Electors. This will allow you to vote at local government elections. Your credibility will rise (good for tenancy applications or bank-related matters) and you are obliged to pay Council Taxes1
If you buy any TV or radio equipment, you will be asked for your address, which will be automatically forwarded to the "TV Licensing Office"
Get a Tesco Clubcard
Get a life ;-)
Any address change has to be communicated to all above-mentioned authorities. For the official notices to local council, the TV licensing, and most other on-line services, you can use I am Moving , where you can create/use an account for free.
All of this could have been avoided with a bit of planning. I am bitterly disappointed in myself.
Council taxes are universal as far as I can tell, and are perceived, by the British at least, as an extension of the rent. ↩
Farnborough derives its name from from the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Ferneberga (Fern Hill) and is mentioned in the Domesday Book (1086). But for the coming of the army at nearby Aldershot, the arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flying, Farnborough would probably have remained an isolated heathland village, that is until the latter half of the 20th century when the population moved out of London suburbia and became commuters.
"But for the … arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flight…". That's a pretty big conditional. There are probably a lot of places whose development was seriously affected by railways and the advent of powered flight. But I understand where the good Mr. Parkins is coming from.
I had forgotten the cable to connect my camera to my laptop. Of all the stupid things that I packed for the trip, 50 different USB cables, a USB hub, power adapters for devices I’d forgotten, not to mention devices whose power adapters I’d forgotten, I forgot the one thing that was absolutely necessary and planned-for. Not to mention irreplaceable, seeing as every camera maker in the world decided that their camera’s little hole should look different from all the other cameras’ little holes.
I walked into a little computer store on the strip in Fleet, Hampshire. Walking up to the pasty-faced, teenaged part-timer there, I introduced myself and shook his hand, which seemed to shock him.
He unconsciously wiped his hands on his pants and said, “eh...nice to meet you, sir. What can I do for you?”
I asked him, “do you have any USB card-readers?”
“Um, yeah," he answered. "I think I saw some around here somewhere.”
I looked around the shop, which was organized and clean. Man, he must really be the FNG around here. He finally found what I was looking for, stored on a shelf right next to where he had been sitting. He handed it to me and I started reading the back of the packaging.
“Just looking to see if it works with my Mac,” I told him.
“Oh, it's USB, so it should work,” he answered, and took the reader out of my hand. He moved his lips while he read the package. “Oh, yeah,” he said finally. “Right there it says it: ‘Requires Mac OS 9 or later’.” He looked at me skeptically. “So, you do have OS 9 or later, don’t you?”
“Um, yeah, I think so.” OS 9 went out of style back in the ‘90s.
He moved around to the register, and I handed him my Visa card. He looked uncertain as he turned it over in his hand. “This thing doesn’t have a chip on it?”
I took it back and examined it. “No, I guess it doesn’t.”
“Well, I don’t think we can take that, then.”
“Why don’t you just swipe it,” I said. “Give it a go.”
He shrugged and swiped it through the machine.
From behind me, a voice said, “it’s all chips nowadays, you know.”
I looked around, and saw that an older woman was standing behind me. She looked to be in her mid 40s, and wore a name plate with the store’s logo on it. “You can’t get nothing without a dozen little chips in it.”
I nodded agreement, and turned back to the young man behind the register.
“So, what kind of Mac you got, then?”
“A PowerBook G4.”
He nodded approvingly. “Nice piece of kit, that.” The little machine that had taken my card made a loud ping!, and spit out a receipt. He tore it off and gave it to me to sign, along with the card reader.
“Now, you have a nice day sir, and do please visit us again.”
I thanked him, said goodbye to the chip-lady, and put the small package into my bag next to my laptop. “Thanks, man, I’ll do that.” Nice kid.
Didja ever discover something that made your reality skip a beat? You know how, for just a second, something is so far out of place that you can't even figure out what's wrong with the picture? For example, the Augsburg Wireless-Internet provider Cyberways has had the same guy on their start page for years:
Every time you connect to the internet over public wireless in Augsburg, that dude was right there, staring at you with those soulless black eyes. Like a doll's eyes...
And the weird thing was, I always figured he was the boss at Cyberways. I even thought I saw him once on the tram. I hate it when people use the same stock photos everywhere. Everybody's full of shit. Oh, I guess it's effective use of your cash dollars, seeing as it's cheaper than paying attractive people to work for you. But still, why not just be honest for a split second?
You get this kind of thing all over the Internet, of course. If you've ever shopped for web hosting, you'll notice, after a few visits to the providers' pages, that their employees all kind of look alike. And there's always some woman somewhere holding a laptop at her waist in near-sexual ecstasy over the reasonable shared hosting prices.
It's a leitmotif throughout the enter hosting industry: Shared Webspace=Chick with laptop.
Rube, look, for the last freakin time, look RIGHT when you step off a curb! These people drive on the other side of the F$@&-ing road over here! You wanna get ya brains splattered all over me?
What? I dunno. I'm just kind of sitting around, waiting on things. I just spent way too much time transferring money across European borders, and reclaiming my identity. But the new passports are wonderful pieces of fortitude. Here' s a few quotes from my new passport:
And that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth. - Abraham Lincoln
The principle of free governments adheres to the American soil. It is bedded in it, immovable as its mountains. - Daniel Webster
Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. - George Washington
We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. - excerpt from the Declaration of Independence
Your concept of love may be different, but know that I love this world.
I like reading Scott Adams' blog on occasion. Much like Balph Eubanks, he's glib, amusing, and completely lacking in morality. Take, for example, his latest strawman-laden posting regarding the visit of a certain Mr. Ahmedinejad:
I was happy to hear that NYC didn't allow Iranian President Ahmadinejad
to place a wreath at the WTC site. And I was happy that Columbia
University is rescinding the offer to let him speak. If you let a guy like
that express his views, before long the entire world will want freedom
of speech.
...
If Ahmadinejad thinks he can be our friend by honoring our heroes and
opening a dialog, he underestimates our ability to misinterpret him.
Fucking idiot. I hate him.
Well, there's certainly some rye wit at work here. Yes, it is quite ironic that a country led by a genocidal religious dictator, which the USA most certainly is, would object to a fellow genocidal religious madman visiting its most sensitive cultural site. I mean, Mahmoud's only trying to "open a dialog" here, isn't he? Isn't that the meaning of Ahmedinejad's visit? Isn't Ahmedinejad just exercising "Free Speech", as Adams says? Aren't we wrong in denying this poor man that right?
Aside from the obvious jackassery involved in claiming that a man who directly controls his entire country's media is having trouble getting his point of view out; or that the United Nations will let him speak before the leaders of the world to the point where they forget to blink for an hour; aside from all this, this is not a question of whether or not Mahmoud is allowed to say what he wants. The question is, in accordance with the Grand Unified Theory of Rubean Mechanics, Who's going to pay for it. It's a question of whether or not Americans should be paying for his plane fare, his security, and his accommodation while he's here, pissing on Ground Zero and generating propaganda for totalitarian lobbying groups like MoveOn.org and International ANSWER.
All of Adams' ridiculous assertions never mention the one central fact here: There is no compelling reason for American taxpayers to foot the bill, so this guy, who just held one of his popular "Death to America" parades, can come over here and lecture them on anything. I personally don't much care what Ahmedinejad thinks, I can see the general thrust of his inclinations. He's spitting on the United States and Western Culture daily, and then expects to be treated with deference in return. Fuck him.
This kind of Devil's Advocacy isn't new to Adams. At least, I hope it's just that. He's apparently one of those celebrities that have forgotten the hard work involved in their ascendency, and assume that they're rich because of some accident of nature, akin to divine providence. Humans, himself included, are all just a bunch of "moist robots" with no capacity for thought, no free will; we've apparently just been programmed by Mother Nature to do the things we've done or will do. There is no mind, there is no choice, there is only the stimuli in our environments, and the response that was determined by a chance arrangement of atoms into chemicals during the Big Bang. Or something.
It's an obscene display of thoughtlessness, a conceit of someone trying so hard to seem above all this. Adams' Dilbert is amusing, and his blog is a bit of junk food for the brain at times. But he's got the morals of a two-dollar whore.
Last night we didn't make it. The two Frenchmen surrendered the evening, seeing as it was Trotzky's birthday, and therefore a time for somber reflection or something. So, we rode around big town Farnborough for a couple of hours, grabbed some grub, and then headed back to the apartment to watch a movie.
We watched Fur, which cemented my belief that Nicole Kidman is the perfect woman. Not only does she look good in her own slutty little librarian sort of way, she gives a guy a handjob in this movie while shaving his hairy back. That's my kind of girl, a real little trooper.
Anyhoo, it's back off to London now, for a second try at getting sloppy somewhere besides sitting at home in front of the boob tube. Wish us luck.
Vacation week is winding down, and I'm getting ready to leave the driving to Southwest Trains and go drinking in London. I'll try to keep it under two weeks this time, but no promises. We'll tramp it a bit through Soho, I guess, just me, the girls, and a couple of frog-eaters from the office.
I wonder why I never get to go drinking with Englishmen? It's probably for the best. There's a quote that gets bandied about, especially in the local newspapers, about England being a nation of drunks and scalawags. I can't say much about that, but it does seem that the pubs all close at 11:00 PM for a reason. At 5 o'clock, they pour out of their offices and into the public houses, seemingly on a race against the clock to get themselves 'faced before the early last call.
When they were finally permitted to stay open past 11, in the hope that the binge-drinking would abate in light of longer opening hours, they found themselves doubly-cursed in that the Englishmen were every bit as drunk at 11, but didn't have to go home. All pubs here are set up so that you have to go to the counter to get your drinks, instead of having them brought to your table. There's a built-in handbrake there: a system where you can't get any more drink once you lose the ability to walk is founded upon sound principle and good advices.
I've done nothing today; nothing but clean out the cluttered closets of my preferred newsfeed reader. There were some connections in there that were sorely neglected. I could use a bit more time to wade through the degenerate filth that is my blogroll, but sadly, I work. The Company is tolerant in their control over my time, fair since they do not pay hourly; but tolerance has its limits, and I doubt they would look kindly upon my spending the business day in a fugue state, reading entry after entry of dialectics about Jessica Simpson's tits, or Brittney Spears' overplayed poonanny.
Nevertheless, it saddens me that my everyday is not blessed with the nuggets of wisdom from skippystalin:
Being the only person with an out-of-control substance abuse problem in a relationship is tough. Most romantic couplings are based on common interests and most of my interests culminate in my waking up in a pool of what I think is my own urine and not being quite sure what time zone I'm in. I'm much like a cat in that I have a tendancy of marking my territory with my vomit, blood and gallons of my semen...My ability to smoke, drink and masturbate furiously at the same time might not be much, it's all that I have.
Ahh, skippystalin, how I've missed you, and your nuggets.
This is how I spend my vacation: visiting Stonehenge on one day; reading the melancholy musings of skippystalin the next, picturing him composing scholarly tracts through bitter tears, a crushed Viagra dissolving in a highball of Jack Daniels next to the keyboard, as another long evening fades into a blur of poetry, madness, and vigorous bouts of hate-filled masturbation. And wondering, of the two, which is the more meaningful and fitting monument to humanity?
They should've just burned enjoyeverysandwich to CD, stuck it to the side of Voyager along with its author, and shot the whole lot into space back when they had government funding to do so, all in the name of making a good first impression for whatever aliens were out cruising for an easy meal.
skippystalin's output is prodigious, to be sure, but there was an entire blogroll to consider:
The lunatics are running the asylum over at Straight White Guy's place. Eric's testicles are mentioned, indirectly. Remind me to change my passwords regularly and start using strong encryption.
How stoned do you have to be to cheat on Jessica Alba? I could jack off to Jessica Alba while a big mean dog was chasing me and this idiot is cheating on her. I decided to confront him about this and I screamed at him, hey, what is your problem. And he said I should get off his lawn. And I said, no, no you get off the lawn. You get off. Then he went inside, probably because deep down, he knew I had made some pretty good points.
JimGoad.com is no more, but if you're a Goad fan (ladies!), you can find find him here. Discussion of Brittany's latest, erm, candid photos is also to be found, but be aware that the following picture is used as a visual aid:
This morning we picked up my new wheelchair. It's a sporty European marque, with an aggressive stance, low-profile tires, and a head-turning cherry-red metalflake paint job. It's not that great on the corners, but it'll take any one of y'all on the straightaways.
I've never done time on wheels. On the whole, I found it to be not all that bad. Then again, I don't figure that most wheelchair-bound men my age get to enjoy being pushed around town by a couple of sexy German bloggerettes. Thanks, ladies: the jealous looks from the other local cripples was the icing on the cake. Here's a little something extra for you, babes. (via AoSHQ)
Funny things happen when you're on wheels. I saw a lady I work with while being carted through Tesco's frozen food department. I said hello, and she just looked right through me, steering her cart so as not to make contact with the leper. She probably thought I was going to ask her for some spare change, or if she could wipe me bum for me, or whatever it is that those people want from healthy-legged people. I also noticed that the supermarkets put completely different things down on the bottom three feet of the shelves. All the cool toys are down there, for example, presumably because chil'n's is small. It's also a great altitude to find anti-bedsore medicaments, for some reason.
So, I let myself be pushed by the Weyside in Guildford, where, at one point, a husky young native was required to wheel my fat ass up a steep incline. The Sistas, for all their heart, lacked the muscle to get the job done, so he, being a true-hearted salt-of-earth kind of guy, waved them off and grunted and sweated till I crested the hill. Had the man known that I could have, at any point in time, simply stood up and hobbled up the hill under my own power, he most certainly would have picked me up and broken me over his knee.
Tomorrow morning, we'll be visiting Stonehenge, or Stone'enge, as the locals quaintly call it. We'll also visit the haunted city, Salisbury, to watch the homosexuals. Ta!
I like reading OSNews for some reason. I think I like to catch the geeky news about SkyOS, or the occasional retro curmudgeonry that rolls by about Lotus 1-2-3 or OS/2. Being the old-timer that I am, it's hard to resist a paean from my youth about 10-finger productivity.
Unfortunately, they've become the epicenter of stupid for the tech press. Check out this article, which explodes the myths about competition being good: "Competition is not Good"
'It gives consumers more choice'
Choice is good when there's one agreed base standard, and a number of compatible approaches. For example, there are many Linux distributions, but they are all Linux, and they can all run the same software. They are 'flavours' of the same thing, that is a good choice. People like different flavours.
Competition does not produce easier choices for consumers. All they get is added un-interoperability and complexity with competitive choices.
Now, if you go read that article, which I do not recommend, you'll slowly come to the realization that this moron is just annoyed that he has to make the effort to choose between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. He's willing to surrender his entire free will to some (hopefully) benevolent dictator, abolish brand names, and forsake the free market economy because choosing which format to buy the Firefly special edition box set in is hard. What a hopeless, whiny-assed sissy.
Of course, things don't get better when they start tossing political analysis at you. "Net Neutrality" is one monikers that has overshadowed the thing named. The discussion is often framed in a way that an uninformed listener would assume there was lobbying going on to abolish some sort of laws that are now protecting consumers from big, bad tiered-Internet ninjas.
But: There is no net neutrality legislation, there never was, and hopefully, there never will be. The argument over "Net Neutrality" is about whether or not the U.S. government should introduce legislation forbidding bandwidth throttling by ISPs. It's the "have you stopped beating your wife?" straw man for the Slashdot crowd. You'll notice that this article calls the Supreme Court's decision that the U.S. government shouldn't step in and configure the ISPs' Cisco routers for them, "Backing for Two-Tier Internet":
The US Justice Department has said that internet service providers should be allowed to charge for priority traffic. The agency said it was opposed to 'network neutrality', the idea that all data on the net is treated equally. The comments put the agency at odds with companies such as Microsoft and Google, who have called for legislation to guarantee equal access to the net.
Of course, this would also mean that an enforcement infrastructure would also have to be put in place, making sure that everyone got their "fair share" of said bandwidth, as if backbone routers and POPs just fell off a tree somewhere. God forbid ISPs be allowed to tune the services that they developed and paid for as they wish. Let's let the government decides who gets bandwidth, and how much is enough! That will make it all fair and neutral-like. Whenever a politician uses the word "fair", hang on to your wallet.
Well, my trackbacks are now working, it seems. There's some ugly Python spaghetti-code going on behind the scenes that translates back and forth between absolute urls, non-absolute relative urls, and upper-lower-camel case; but it works.
Trackbacks are only good for Movable Type, though. Which I can't stand anymore. MT used to be the only thing out there, but there's something that really, really, really galls me about the way it rebuilds your entire site into static HTML pages everytime you update a post. I'm sure it's awesomeness if you've got your server running on an old TV remote, but nowadays we're all running our web servers on 100-core 64-bit terahertz moonshot computers that can simultaneously compute π, encode MPEG video, and mix the best goddam margaritas you've ever tasted, all without breaking a sweat.
So yeah, I figured out how to implement trackbacks in Django, to a point where they more or less work. Now why is Wordpress fucking with me? It seems to be thrown off by the fact that Wordpress sends a HEAD request before it downloads and parses the page, in the vain hope that the X-Pingback header will be set. I can't figure out how to do that in Django's generic views, so I just use the secondary method, that being a link element in the XHTML code. But now, whenever a Worpdress blog pings me, I get this kind of crap:
[09/Sep/2007 15:04:23] "GET /blog/2007/sep/08/vacation/ HTTP/1.1" 200 27367
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (104, 'Connection reset by peer')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (32, 'Broken pipe')
Being the half-assed programmer that I am, I am at a total loss. I can't even do a Lazyweb request here, seeing as my 4 visits a day are unlikely to bring the Django HTTP gurus by. I won't be able to sleep at night, thinking of all the enlightened Wordpress Users who are probably out there try to "Keep the discussion going" with me.
Ever since June, when the iPhone went live, I've heard about nothing else in the tech press, nerd podcasts, and the Apple Fanboisphere. Is it really that way over in the States (the only place you can get them), or does the iPhone actually seem to be doing well?
Ahh, my first vacation since joining The Company. My queue is cleaned up, my email is forwarded, and an elaborate Sieve session has accomplished in a mere two hours what less civilized mail systems can do with a key combination: The Corporate Vacation Email.
It's been five months now since I came 'cross the channel and started meeting the natives, learning the lingo, and getting used to the fact that everyone here talks like Pinky. Now, I'll be letting my hair down for the next 10 days or so. As well as putting my poor, broken foot up on the coffee table.
As soon as I get my x-rays back from the socialist medical system (they still copy them with coal rubbings on wax paper over here, apparently), I'll post pictures of the metatarsalar breakage here for your morbid enjoyment. Don't thank me yet.
The other half of Sistaweb will be joining us for the week. We'll allow her to sleep here rent-free for an entire week, even though she refused to bring a carton of cigarettes as payment. Damned non-smokers and their principles. It's like those non-smokers back in the World War II who didn't sign up for cigarette rations. Throwing away a gold mine, that is. Our grandfathers probably had a word for those guys, and if I knew my grandfather at all, that word was sissy-boy.
The girls have rented a wheelchair for me, seeing as I won't be too much fun doing a London pub-crawl on crutches. I've already had a forehead-slapping moment over this, as you probably are right now. Why haven't I thought of taking a wheelchair with me before? That would've come in handy on more than one occasion, the Wreckyll in Jeckyll not least among them.
Man, Apple is on a roll. Not only have they got me hooked for a new computer, a new laptop, a new office package, and a replacement for my aging MythTV box, but now I have to start thinking about a new iPod. Now, let's see what Uncle Steve is going to me be costing me 'til Christmas Time:
Item
Damage
20" iMac
1199.00
Macbook
1099.00
8GB iPod Touch
299.00
AppleTV
299.00
iWork '08
79.00
iLife '08
79.00
Total:
$3,054.00
Not bad for a day's work, Mr. Jobs. And what's up for the rest of September? Maybe some irresistible bionic iFoot to replace the one I broke playing frisbee at the company picnic last week?
Although there's a remarkable lack of iPhone hype around the office, we being a big-time Linux company and all, there's an amazing amount of Mac fanboiism. Pretty much all of us have Macs at home. The explanation for this is simple: After dealing with Linux problems all day long, there's something nice about going home to something you can spend all your time using and not making up excuses for why it looks like shit and doesn't work.
I like Linux, mind you. I use it day-in, day-out for my desktop at work, for my webservers, and it brings in my daily bread. We all love it here, pretty much like a family loves and therefore tolerates the embarrassing second cousin with the Downs'. But people are walking all over the office today buzzing about the upcoming announcement from Apple.
Will it be the long-awaited iMac redesign? Will it be a new Mini? My boss is actually carrying his phone to the pub after work today so he can sit on engadget and get a realtime update. Linus would not be pleased...
Last login: Thu Jul 26 12:17:28 from nat-pool-fab.re Welcome to Darwin! ericbook:~ eric$ mutt -bash: mutt: command not found ericbook:~ eric$ open /Applications/Mail.app/ ericbook:~ eric$
Ahh. Like coming in after a long day of plowing the fields and sticking your aching feet into a pot of hot water. After running Linux all day at work, you feel like slipping into something more comfortable. Sam knows it. Zonker knows it, though he won't admit it. It's the right amount of just-workiness you need to let you relax, while knowing you could, at any given moment, do something like:
OK, here's one with drivel. I do like it, but I have a couple of gripes.
First problem: I was hopelessly confused by the login screen. The type of journal seems to be locked on livejournal, as the drop-down menu for journal types is inexplicably disabled until you enter a username. -1 for usabilty
Second problem: Useless stripping of trailing slash, which mangled my xmlrpc URL. Error 301 was ignored, which makes sense since it's a post and all, but I couldn't log in. It mangled my URL then choked on the error :-/
Third problem: didn't want to download my recent posts. Although there might be a misunderstanding about just what "recent" means.
Fourth problem: Doesn't let me choose post status anywhere. And there's nowhere I can find to choose text filters. This is more of a feature request, really.
Fifth problem: craps out after posting, probably because it keeps mangling the trailing slashes from my URLs. Is there an RFC somewhere that says that POSTS can't end with slashes? Nobody tell the Django folks.
Well, maybe it'll at least let me post to my blog from work every now and then.
Man, I dang sure missed the entire month of June. I've been in the UK now for about two months, and let me tell ya: They sure do get some rain around here. I always thought those stories about English people having gills were legends and fantasies. Now, I'm not so sure.
For the love of GOD, for the last time, in the name of ALL THAT IS HOLY, Cluster Services is NOT COMPATIBLE with 4.5! If you're running a cluster, DO NOT update to 4.5 until the Cluster Suite is UPDATED TO 4.5!
That is all.
P.S. And NO, cmirror is not available yet. Maybe at the end of the month.
I went outside to smoke a cigarette. All rooms in England are for non-smokers, you'll find, as are the rooms, apartments, and houses listed for rent in the local papers. The litany at the end of all the ads reads, "No smokers, canvassers, or DSS", which stands for Department of Social Services. So, okay they hate smokers and welfare cases, as do we all. But the British have their own definition for 'non-smoker', which basically means you only smoke when you drink. Everybody smokes over here, and they all live somewhere.
The evening was cool; almost cold, really, as I suspect the evenings around here generally are. I stood on the corner of Osborne and Netley, watching the blackbirds getting ready to do whatever it is they do at night, when I spied a man, some yards away, bounding up the sidewalk with a jaunty gait. I held my cigarette just in front of my mouth, watching this figure with suspicion. He was short, about 5 feet tall, and round as a soccer ball. He was wearing light-colored trousers and a dark blazer, the left breast of which was adorned with an enormous, orange prize-ribbon.
As he approached me, his features became distinct in the bad lighting, and I realized he was positively beaming with pride. His face was ruddy, and split with a grin that wouldn't have looked out of place behind a wheelbarrow full of poker chips on the way to the cash-out. I placed him in his mid-40s, but maybe his thinning red hair and roly-poly stature made him look older than he really was.
He halted just a few feet from me, and said, with oddly struggling words, "Good evening, mister!"
I looked him up and down, cigarette still burning between my shaky fingers, and replied, "hi, how are ya..." He wobbled his head a bit, then walked around me on his way up the street. I noticed something written in gold on his orange ribbon, and read it as it flashed in the lamplight.
I judged him more than a wee bit 'differently-abled', as they say. I watched as he cautiously crossed the empty street, looking both ways at least twice, then gingerly stepping into the street and crossing it at a run.
I thought about what I had seen written on the ribbon: "A Very Special Boy". Hmm, I thought, I wonder who gave him that? Whoever it was, they made his whole day.
I put my cigarette out and walked back into the guest house.
My buddy Sam sent me an email a couple of days ago indicating that he just might have joined The Family recently. And he joined it a much higher level than I, I might add, considering I'm still lumbering along in the PowerPC world; my G4 Powerbook, though a loyal and trusted friend, seems slow as molasses in January these days.
He also mentioned an old OS/2 habit, one which we separately shared back in the day. I started using OS/2 when I worked at UPS. One of our managers was running 2.1, with the old Presentation Manager that looked like a crappy(er) Windows 2.0, albeit with long filenames and the ability to run concurrent DOS sessions. I avoided it until OS/2 3.0 came out.
In '94, when Warp hit the shelves, I rushed out to Soft-Warehouse1 in Alpharetta, looked in the Operating Systems2 department until I found a box, then gave the man $300 dollars for the privilege of running it. Then, I walked over the desktop applications department, and put down another $495 for Lotus Smartsuite/2. Then I OEM'd 16MB of RAM for about $400 to make it all go.
Now, many may see OS/2 as a butt-ugly cousin of Windows, and they may be right. But back then, it was a work of art. Especially in the sense that it wasn't an exact science getting it to run. Nothing ever really worked like it was supposed to. Without the fallback of a DOS prompt, you had to have a second, fully-functional machine to do things like edit the CONFIG.SYS on the installation floppies to make sure your DASD drivers were loading. And most of the drivers were written so that, if they encountered an error while loading, they'd bork the whole boot process, just to be on the safe side.
The graphical interface also hung constantly. The Workplace Shell, despite (or maybe due to) all its object-orientiness, was horribly unstable. But I never saw a hang that wasn't cured with Control-Alt-Delete. That key combo went right down to the kernel, and always gave a satisfying, unconfirmed reboot, wedged GUI be damned. There was even a 3rd party program called Watchcat that sat on the serial port, or on a secondary Hercules/MCGA monitor, and let you monitor and kill programs remotely. The kernel's Kung Fu was strong like that, but the GUI was just ass.
Now, when Chicago started finally coming down the pipe, and even the Rolling Stones where pulled into the OS marketing world ("Start me up", anyone?), OS/2 fans like myself were sure that this pissant little DOS extender with a homely face wouldn't be the future. It couldn't be the future, it was just too depressing. It still wasn't a 32-bit OS, though the 386 had been out for over 8 years. It still used FAT, for crying out loud. In short, Chicago sucked.
OS/2 seemed like a scrappy little underdog, nipping heroically at the Microsoft behemoth's heels. I'm not sure why it gave that impression. At the time, IBM was much bigger than Microsoft, a huge, multinational corporation with interests in basically every aspect of electronics. They just couldn't write or market good software.
I'm not sure why I just wrote 500 words on OS/2. I actually wanted to write something about Linux.
Software stores used to have a whole "Operating Systems" department, back when there was more than one operating system, and Windows was still called an "Operating Environment" ↩
Man, I'm unprepared. There's a checklist of things you should do before moving to England. I came over here without any money, preparation, or attack plan. There's something unbelievably stupid about this. It worked for me when I moved to Germany, but moving to England's a bit more complicated, apparently. Either that, or I'm remembering it wrong.
But I'm not the only one. The office I'm working in is full of non-British people. It's a rag-tag group of Germans, Italians, Brazilians, Spaniards, one (1) American, and who knows what else that all found themselves in the same boat when they first came over. This despite promises from The Company to help one resettle; promises which are certainly not kept and, when referred to in conversation, change their shape and character like a Democrat on a whistle-stop.
But at some point a kindly soul in the department, now departed, made a list of the reality of the situation. It's a short list of what one really needs to do when moving to England. Unfortunately, I only found out about it after I'd already been here a week. Here's your to-do list once you've arrived in England:
Get a room. If possible, get a rental agreement or any bill with your name and address on it. (proof of address)
Deposit is usually 1 1/2 times the rent. Deposit and first rent is to be paid beforehand. If the room is unfurnished, see "Things to Buy" for shops and example prices.
Get a letter from your office manager (HR Lady) stating that you are working for the company and including your address. (proof of employment)
Get a bank account. Just walk in with your documents:
Passport or national ID card
Proof of employment (see 2.). it might be handy to have your contract with you.
Proof of address
Banks
HSBC – try to get a standard account (they try to sell you an advanced package including insurances etc.)
NatWest – Also recommended as this bank does not charge for withdrawing money from a different bank's cash machines
Give your bank details to The Company
Register with Inland Revenue – this is done by your HR manager. You should get your tax code about 2 weeks later (PAYE Coding Notice)
At the end of the fiscal year (ending April 5th), you will get a "P60 End of Year Certificate" detailing your "Pay and Income Tax" levels.
Get a National Insurance Number by applying at a Job Centre Plus office. They ask for dtails before they schedule an interview appointment to verify your eligibility. Appointments are scheduled about two weeks ahead, and take place in the nearest county office, which usually isn't near at all. Without an NI number, you will be on emergency tax, which is higher than the standard tax rate.
Documents:
Passport
National ID card
Driving License or any other official document identifying you (Birth certificate, police registration, medical card, etc.)
Proof of employment (see 2.)
Recent payslip
Bank statement
Proof of address (utility bill, rental agreement, etc. – see 1.)
It might be handy to have your PAYE Coding Notice with you
As money is paid in a timely manner so it is available on the 27th, try to get your appointment after this date.
If you are British, a citizen of a member state of the EU, or other Commonwealth citizen, you can apply for inclusion on the Register of Electors. This will allow you to vote at local government elections. Your credibility will rise (good for tenancy applications or bank-related matters) and you are obliged to pay Council Taxes1
If you buy any TV or radio equipment, you will be asked for your address, which will be automatically forwarded to the "TV Licensing Office"
Get a Tesco Clubcard
Get a life ;-)
Any address change has to be communicated to all above-mentioned authorities. For the official notices to local council, the TV licensing, and most other on-line services, you can use I am Moving , where you can create/use an account for free.
All of this could have been avoided with a bit of planning. I am bitterly disappointed in myself.
Council taxes are universal as far as I can tell, and are perceived, by the British at least, as an extension of the rent. ↩
Farnborough derives its name from from the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Ferneberga (Fern Hill) and is mentioned in the Domesday Book (1086). But for the coming of the army at nearby Aldershot, the arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flying, Farnborough would probably have remained an isolated heathland village, that is until the latter half of the 20th century when the population moved out of London suburbia and became commuters.
"But for the … arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flight…". That's a pretty big conditional. There are probably a lot of places whose development was seriously affected by railways and the advent of powered flight. But I understand where the good Mr. Parkins is coming from.
I had forgotten the cable to connect my camera to my laptop. Of all the stupid things that I packed for the trip, 50 different USB cables, a USB hub, power adapters for devices I’d forgotten, not to mention devices whose power adapters I’d forgotten, I forgot the one thing that was absolutely necessary and planned-for. Not to mention irreplaceable, seeing as every camera maker in the world decided that their camera’s little hole should look different from all the other cameras’ little holes.
I walked into a little computer store on the strip in Fleet, Hampshire. Walking up to the pasty-faced, teenaged part-timer there, I introduced myself and shook his hand, which seemed to shock him.
He unconsciously wiped his hands on his pants and said, “eh...nice to meet you, sir. What can I do for you?”
I asked him, “do you have any USB card-readers?”
“Um, yeah," he answered. "I think I saw some around here somewhere.”
I looked around the shop, which was organized and clean. Man, he must really be the FNG around here. He finally found what I was looking for, stored on a shelf right next to where he had been sitting. He handed it to me and I started reading the back of the packaging.
“Just looking to see if it works with my Mac,” I told him.
“Oh, it's USB, so it should work,” he answered, and took the reader out of my hand. He moved his lips while he read the package. “Oh, yeah,” he said finally. “Right there it says it: ‘Requires Mac OS 9 or later’.” He looked at me skeptically. “So, you do have OS 9 or later, don’t you?”
“Um, yeah, I think so.” OS 9 went out of style back in the ‘90s.
He moved around to the register, and I handed him my Visa card. He looked uncertain as he turned it over in his hand. “This thing doesn’t have a chip on it?”
I took it back and examined it. “No, I guess it doesn’t.”
“Well, I don’t think we can take that, then.”
“Why don’t you just swipe it,” I said. “Give it a go.”
He shrugged and swiped it through the machine.
From behind me, a voice said, “it’s all chips nowadays, you know.”
I looked around, and saw that an older woman was standing behind me. She looked to be in her mid 40s, and wore a name plate with the store’s logo on it. “You can’t get nothing without a dozen little chips in it.”
I nodded agreement, and turned back to the young man behind the register.
“So, what kind of Mac you got, then?”
“A PowerBook G4.”
He nodded approvingly. “Nice piece of kit, that.” The little machine that had taken my card made a loud ping!, and spit out a receipt. He tore it off and gave it to me to sign, along with the card reader.
“Now, you have a nice day sir, and do please visit us again.”
I thanked him, said goodbye to the chip-lady, and put the small package into my bag next to my laptop. “Thanks, man, I’ll do that.” Nice kid.
Didja ever discover something that made your reality skip a beat? You know how, for just a second, something is so far out of place that you can't even figure out what's wrong with the picture? For example, the Augsburg Wireless-Internet provider Cyberways has had the same guy on their start page for years:
Every time you connect to the internet over public wireless in Augsburg, that dude was right there, staring at you with those soulless black eyes. Like a doll's eyes...
And the weird thing was, I always figured he was the boss at Cyberways. I even thought I saw him once on the tram. I hate it when people use the same stock photos everywhere. Everybody's full of shit. Oh, I guess it's effective use of your cash dollars, seeing as it's cheaper than paying attractive people to work for you. But still, why not just be honest for a split second?
You get this kind of thing all over the Internet, of course. If you've ever shopped for web hosting, you'll notice, after a few visits to the providers' pages, that their employees all kind of look alike. And there's always some woman somewhere holding a laptop at her waist in near-sexual ecstasy over the reasonable shared hosting prices.
It's a leitmotif throughout the enter hosting industry: Shared Webspace=Chick with laptop.
Rube, look, for the last freakin time, look RIGHT when you step off a curb! These people drive on the other side of the F$@&-ing road over here! You wanna get ya brains splattered all over me?
What? I dunno. I'm just kind of sitting around, waiting on things. I just spent way too much time transferring money across European borders, and reclaiming my identity. But the new passports are wonderful pieces of fortitude. Here' s a few quotes from my new passport:
And that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth. - Abraham Lincoln
The principle of free governments adheres to the American soil. It is bedded in it, immovable as its mountains. - Daniel Webster
Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. - George Washington
We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. - excerpt from the Declaration of Independence
Your concept of love may be different, but know that I love this world.
I like reading Scott Adams' blog on occasion. Much like Balph Eubanks, he's glib, amusing, and completely lacking in morality. Take, for example, his latest strawman-laden posting regarding the visit of a certain Mr. Ahmedinejad:
I was happy to hear that NYC didn't allow Iranian President Ahmadinejad
to place a wreath at the WTC site. And I was happy that Columbia
University is rescinding the offer to let him speak. If you let a guy like
that express his views, before long the entire world will want freedom
of speech.
...
If Ahmadinejad thinks he can be our friend by honoring our heroes and
opening a dialog, he underestimates our ability to misinterpret him.
Fucking idiot. I hate him.
Well, there's certainly some rye wit at work here. Yes, it is quite ironic that a country led by a genocidal religious dictator, which the USA most certainly is, would object to a fellow genocidal religious madman visiting its most sensitive cultural site. I mean, Mahmoud's only trying to "open a dialog" here, isn't he? Isn't that the meaning of Ahmedinejad's visit? Isn't Ahmedinejad just exercising "Free Speech", as Adams says? Aren't we wrong in denying this poor man that right?
Aside from the obvious jackassery involved in claiming that a man who directly controls his entire country's media is having trouble getting his point of view out; or that the United Nations will let him speak before the leaders of the world to the point where they forget to blink for an hour; aside from all this, this is not a question of whether or not Mahmoud is allowed to say what he wants. The question is, in accordance with the Grand Unified Theory of Rubean Mechanics, Who's going to pay for it. It's a question of whether or not Americans should be paying for his plane fare, his security, and his accommodation while he's here, pissing on Ground Zero and generating propaganda for totalitarian lobbying groups like MoveOn.org and International ANSWER.
All of Adams' ridiculous assertions never mention the one central fact here: There is no compelling reason for American taxpayers to foot the bill, so this guy, who just held one of his popular "Death to America" parades, can come over here and lecture them on anything. I personally don't much care what Ahmedinejad thinks, I can see the general thrust of his inclinations. He's spitting on the United States and Western Culture daily, and then expects to be treated with deference in return. Fuck him.
This kind of Devil's Advocacy isn't new to Adams. At least, I hope it's just that. He's apparently one of those celebrities that have forgotten the hard work involved in their ascendency, and assume that they're rich because of some accident of nature, akin to divine providence. Humans, himself included, are all just a bunch of "moist robots" with no capacity for thought, no free will; we've apparently just been programmed by Mother Nature to do the things we've done or will do. There is no mind, there is no choice, there is only the stimuli in our environments, and the response that was determined by a chance arrangement of atoms into chemicals during the Big Bang. Or something.
It's an obscene display of thoughtlessness, a conceit of someone trying so hard to seem above all this. Adams' Dilbert is amusing, and his blog is a bit of junk food for the brain at times. But he's got the morals of a two-dollar whore.
Last night we didn't make it. The two Frenchmen surrendered the evening, seeing as it was Trotzky's birthday, and therefore a time for somber reflection or something. So, we rode around big town Farnborough for a couple of hours, grabbed some grub, and then headed back to the apartment to watch a movie.
We watched Fur, which cemented my belief that Nicole Kidman is the perfect woman. Not only does she look good in her own slutty little librarian sort of way, she gives a guy a handjob in this movie while shaving his hairy back. That's my kind of girl, a real little trooper.
Anyhoo, it's back off to London now, for a second try at getting sloppy somewhere besides sitting at home in front of the boob tube. Wish us luck.
Vacation week is winding down, and I'm getting ready to leave the driving to Southwest Trains and go drinking in London. I'll try to keep it under two weeks this time, but no promises. We'll tramp it a bit through Soho, I guess, just me, the girls, and a couple of frog-eaters from the office.
I wonder why I never get to go drinking with Englishmen? It's probably for the best. There's a quote that gets bandied about, especially in the local newspapers, about England being a nation of drunks and scalawags. I can't say much about that, but it does seem that the pubs all close at 11:00 PM for a reason. At 5 o'clock, they pour out of their offices and into the public houses, seemingly on a race against the clock to get themselves 'faced before the early last call.
When they were finally permitted to stay open past 11, in the hope that the binge-drinking would abate in light of longer opening hours, they found themselves doubly-cursed in that the Englishmen were every bit as drunk at 11, but didn't have to go home. All pubs here are set up so that you have to go to the counter to get your drinks, instead of having them brought to your table. There's a built-in handbrake there: a system where you can't get any more drink once you lose the ability to walk is founded upon sound principle and good advices.
I've done nothing today; nothing but clean out the cluttered closets of my preferred newsfeed reader. There were some connections in there that were sorely neglected. I could use a bit more time to wade through the degenerate filth that is my blogroll, but sadly, I work. The Company is tolerant in their control over my time, fair since they do not pay hourly; but tolerance has its limits, and I doubt they would look kindly upon my spending the business day in a fugue state, reading entry after entry of dialectics about Jessica Simpson's tits, or Brittney Spears' overplayed poonanny.
Nevertheless, it saddens me that my everyday is not blessed with the nuggets of wisdom from skippystalin:
Being the only person with an out-of-control substance abuse problem in a relationship is tough. Most romantic couplings are based on common interests and most of my interests culminate in my waking up in a pool of what I think is my own urine and not being quite sure what time zone I'm in. I'm much like a cat in that I have a tendancy of marking my territory with my vomit, blood and gallons of my semen...My ability to smoke, drink and masturbate furiously at the same time might not be much, it's all that I have.
Ahh, skippystalin, how I've missed you, and your nuggets.
This is how I spend my vacation: visiting Stonehenge on one day; reading the melancholy musings of skippystalin the next, picturing him composing scholarly tracts through bitter tears, a crushed Viagra dissolving in a highball of Jack Daniels next to the keyboard, as another long evening fades into a blur of poetry, madness, and vigorous bouts of hate-filled masturbation. And wondering, of the two, which is the more meaningful and fitting monument to humanity?
They should've just burned enjoyeverysandwich to CD, stuck it to the side of Voyager along with its author, and shot the whole lot into space back when they had government funding to do so, all in the name of making a good first impression for whatever aliens were out cruising for an easy meal.
skippystalin's output is prodigious, to be sure, but there was an entire blogroll to consider:
The lunatics are running the asylum over at Straight White Guy's place. Eric's testicles are mentioned, indirectly. Remind me to change my passwords regularly and start using strong encryption.
How stoned do you have to be to cheat on Jessica Alba? I could jack off to Jessica Alba while a big mean dog was chasing me and this idiot is cheating on her. I decided to confront him about this and I screamed at him, hey, what is your problem. And he said I should get off his lawn. And I said, no, no you get off the lawn. You get off. Then he went inside, probably because deep down, he knew I had made some pretty good points.
JimGoad.com is no more, but if you're a Goad fan (ladies!), you can find find him here. Discussion of Brittany's latest, erm, candid photos is also to be found, but be aware that the following picture is used as a visual aid:
This morning we picked up my new wheelchair. It's a sporty European marque, with an aggressive stance, low-profile tires, and a head-turning cherry-red metalflake paint job. It's not that great on the corners, but it'll take any one of y'all on the straightaways.
I've never done time on wheels. On the whole, I found it to be not all that bad. Then again, I don't figure that most wheelchair-bound men my age get to enjoy being pushed around town by a couple of sexy German bloggerettes. Thanks, ladies: the jealous looks from the other local cripples was the icing on the cake. Here's a little something extra for you, babes. (via AoSHQ)
Funny things happen when you're on wheels. I saw a lady I work with while being carted through Tesco's frozen food department. I said hello, and she just looked right through me, steering her cart so as not to make contact with the leper. She probably thought I was going to ask her for some spare change, or if she could wipe me bum for me, or whatever it is that those people want from healthy-legged people. I also noticed that the supermarkets put completely different things down on the bottom three feet of the shelves. All the cool toys are down there, for example, presumably because chil'n's is small. It's also a great altitude to find anti-bedsore medicaments, for some reason.
So, I let myself be pushed by the Weyside in Guildford, where, at one point, a husky young native was required to wheel my fat ass up a steep incline. The Sistas, for all their heart, lacked the muscle to get the job done, so he, being a true-hearted salt-of-earth kind of guy, waved them off and grunted and sweated till I crested the hill. Had the man known that I could have, at any point in time, simply stood up and hobbled up the hill under my own power, he most certainly would have picked me up and broken me over his knee.
Tomorrow morning, we'll be visiting Stonehenge, or Stone'enge, as the locals quaintly call it. We'll also visit the haunted city, Salisbury, to watch the homosexuals. Ta!
I like reading OSNews for some reason. I think I like to catch the geeky news about SkyOS, or the occasional retro curmudgeonry that rolls by about Lotus 1-2-3 or OS/2. Being the old-timer that I am, it's hard to resist a paean from my youth about 10-finger productivity.
Unfortunately, they've become the epicenter of stupid for the tech press. Check out this article, which explodes the myths about competition being good: "Competition is not Good"
'It gives consumers more choice'
Choice is good when there's one agreed base standard, and a number of compatible approaches. For example, there are many Linux distributions, but they are all Linux, and they can all run the same software. They are 'flavours' of the same thing, that is a good choice. People like different flavours.
Competition does not produce easier choices for consumers. All they get is added un-interoperability and complexity with competitive choices.
Now, if you go read that article, which I do not recommend, you'll slowly come to the realization that this moron is just annoyed that he has to make the effort to choose between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. He's willing to surrender his entire free will to some (hopefully) benevolent dictator, abolish brand names, and forsake the free market economy because choosing which format to buy the Firefly special edition box set in is hard. What a hopeless, whiny-assed sissy.
Of course, things don't get better when they start tossing political analysis at you. "Net Neutrality" is one monikers that has overshadowed the thing named. The discussion is often framed in a way that an uninformed listener would assume there was lobbying going on to abolish some sort of laws that are now protecting consumers from big, bad tiered-Internet ninjas.
But: There is no net neutrality legislation, there never was, and hopefully, there never will be. The argument over "Net Neutrality" is about whether or not the U.S. government should introduce legislation forbidding bandwidth throttling by ISPs. It's the "have you stopped beating your wife?" straw man for the Slashdot crowd. You'll notice that this article calls the Supreme Court's decision that the U.S. government shouldn't step in and configure the ISPs' Cisco routers for them, "Backing for Two-Tier Internet":
The US Justice Department has said that internet service providers should be allowed to charge for priority traffic. The agency said it was opposed to 'network neutrality', the idea that all data on the net is treated equally. The comments put the agency at odds with companies such as Microsoft and Google, who have called for legislation to guarantee equal access to the net.
Of course, this would also mean that an enforcement infrastructure would also have to be put in place, making sure that everyone got their "fair share" of said bandwidth, as if backbone routers and POPs just fell off a tree somewhere. God forbid ISPs be allowed to tune the services that they developed and paid for as they wish. Let's let the government decides who gets bandwidth, and how much is enough! That will make it all fair and neutral-like. Whenever a politician uses the word "fair", hang on to your wallet.
Well, my trackbacks are now working, it seems. There's some ugly Python spaghetti-code going on behind the scenes that translates back and forth between absolute urls, non-absolute relative urls, and upper-lower-camel case; but it works.
Trackbacks are only good for Movable Type, though. Which I can't stand anymore. MT used to be the only thing out there, but there's something that really, really, really galls me about the way it rebuilds your entire site into static HTML pages everytime you update a post. I'm sure it's awesomeness if you've got your server running on an old TV remote, but nowadays we're all running our web servers on 100-core 64-bit terahertz moonshot computers that can simultaneously compute π, encode MPEG video, and mix the best goddam margaritas you've ever tasted, all without breaking a sweat.
So yeah, I figured out how to implement trackbacks in Django, to a point where they more or less work. Now why is Wordpress fucking with me? It seems to be thrown off by the fact that Wordpress sends a HEAD request before it downloads and parses the page, in the vain hope that the X-Pingback header will be set. I can't figure out how to do that in Django's generic views, so I just use the secondary method, that being a link element in the XHTML code. But now, whenever a Worpdress blog pings me, I get this kind of crap:
[09/Sep/2007 15:04:23] "GET /blog/2007/sep/08/vacation/ HTTP/1.1" 200 27367
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (104, 'Connection reset by peer')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (32, 'Broken pipe')
Being the half-assed programmer that I am, I am at a total loss. I can't even do a Lazyweb request here, seeing as my 4 visits a day are unlikely to bring the Django HTTP gurus by. I won't be able to sleep at night, thinking of all the enlightened Wordpress Users who are probably out there try to "Keep the discussion going" with me.
Ever since June, when the iPhone went live, I've heard about nothing else in the tech press, nerd podcasts, and the Apple Fanboisphere. Is it really that way over in the States (the only place you can get them), or does the iPhone actually seem to be doing well?
Ahh, my first vacation since joining The Company. My queue is cleaned up, my email is forwarded, and an elaborate Sieve session has accomplished in a mere two hours what less civilized mail systems can do with a key combination: The Corporate Vacation Email.
It's been five months now since I came 'cross the channel and started meeting the natives, learning the lingo, and getting used to the fact that everyone here talks like Pinky. Now, I'll be letting my hair down for the next 10 days or so. As well as putting my poor, broken foot up on the coffee table.
As soon as I get my x-rays back from the socialist medical system (they still copy them with coal rubbings on wax paper over here, apparently), I'll post pictures of the metatarsalar breakage here for your morbid enjoyment. Don't thank me yet.
The other half of Sistaweb will be joining us for the week. We'll allow her to sleep here rent-free for an entire week, even though she refused to bring a carton of cigarettes as payment. Damned non-smokers and their principles. It's like those non-smokers back in the World War II who didn't sign up for cigarette rations. Throwing away a gold mine, that is. Our grandfathers probably had a word for those guys, and if I knew my grandfather at all, that word was sissy-boy.
The girls have rented a wheelchair for me, seeing as I won't be too much fun doing a London pub-crawl on crutches. I've already had a forehead-slapping moment over this, as you probably are right now. Why haven't I thought of taking a wheelchair with me before? That would've come in handy on more than one occasion, the Wreckyll in Jeckyll not least among them.
Man, Apple is on a roll. Not only have they got me hooked for a new computer, a new laptop, a new office package, and a replacement for my aging MythTV box, but now I have to start thinking about a new iPod. Now, let's see what Uncle Steve is going to me be costing me 'til Christmas Time:
Item
Damage
20" iMac
1199.00
Macbook
1099.00
8GB iPod Touch
299.00
AppleTV
299.00
iWork '08
79.00
iLife '08
79.00
Total:
$3,054.00
Not bad for a day's work, Mr. Jobs. And what's up for the rest of September? Maybe some irresistible bionic iFoot to replace the one I broke playing frisbee at the company picnic last week?
Although there's a remarkable lack of iPhone hype around the office, we being a big-time Linux company and all, there's an amazing amount of Mac fanboiism. Pretty much all of us have Macs at home. The explanation for this is simple: After dealing with Linux problems all day long, there's something nice about going home to something you can spend all your time using and not making up excuses for why it looks like shit and doesn't work.
I like Linux, mind you. I use it day-in, day-out for my desktop at work, for my webservers, and it brings in my daily bread. We all love it here, pretty much like a family loves and therefore tolerates the embarrassing second cousin with the Downs'. But people are walking all over the office today buzzing about the upcoming announcement from Apple.
Will it be the long-awaited iMac redesign? Will it be a new Mini? My boss is actually carrying his phone to the pub after work today so he can sit on engadget and get a realtime update. Linus would not be pleased...
Last login: Thu Jul 26 12:17:28 from nat-pool-fab.re Welcome to Darwin! ericbook:~ eric$ mutt -bash: mutt: command not found ericbook:~ eric$ open /Applications/Mail.app/ ericbook:~ eric$
Ahh. Like coming in after a long day of plowing the fields and sticking your aching feet into a pot of hot water. After running Linux all day at work, you feel like slipping into something more comfortable. Sam knows it. Zonker knows it, though he won't admit it. It's the right amount of just-workiness you need to let you relax, while knowing you could, at any given moment, do something like:
OK, here's one with drivel. I do like it, but I have a couple of gripes.
First problem: I was hopelessly confused by the login screen. The type of journal seems to be locked on livejournal, as the drop-down menu for journal types is inexplicably disabled until you enter a username. -1 for usabilty
Second problem: Useless stripping of trailing slash, which mangled my xmlrpc URL. Error 301 was ignored, which makes sense since it's a post and all, but I couldn't log in. It mangled my URL then choked on the error :-/
Third problem: didn't want to download my recent posts. Although there might be a misunderstanding about just what "recent" means.
Fourth problem: Doesn't let me choose post status anywhere. And there's nowhere I can find to choose text filters. This is more of a feature request, really.
Fifth problem: craps out after posting, probably because it keeps mangling the trailing slashes from my URLs. Is there an RFC somewhere that says that POSTS can't end with slashes? Nobody tell the Django folks.
Well, maybe it'll at least let me post to my blog from work every now and then.
Man, I dang sure missed the entire month of June. I've been in the UK now for about two months, and let me tell ya: They sure do get some rain around here. I always thought those stories about English people having gills were legends and fantasies. Now, I'm not so sure.
For the love of GOD, for the last time, in the name of ALL THAT IS HOLY, Cluster Services is NOT COMPATIBLE with 4.5! If you're running a cluster, DO NOT update to 4.5 until the Cluster Suite is UPDATED TO 4.5!
That is all.
P.S. And NO, cmirror is not available yet. Maybe at the end of the month.
I went outside to smoke a cigarette. All rooms in England are for non-smokers, you'll find, as are the rooms, apartments, and houses listed for rent in the local papers. The litany at the end of all the ads reads, "No smokers, canvassers, or DSS", which stands for Department of Social Services. So, okay they hate smokers and welfare cases, as do we all. But the British have their own definition for 'non-smoker', which basically means you only smoke when you drink. Everybody smokes over here, and they all live somewhere.
The evening was cool; almost cold, really, as I suspect the evenings around here generally are. I stood on the corner of Osborne and Netley, watching the blackbirds getting ready to do whatever it is they do at night, when I spied a man, some yards away, bounding up the sidewalk with a jaunty gait. I held my cigarette just in front of my mouth, watching this figure with suspicion. He was short, about 5 feet tall, and round as a soccer ball. He was wearing light-colored trousers and a dark blazer, the left breast of which was adorned with an enormous, orange prize-ribbon.
As he approached me, his features became distinct in the bad lighting, and I realized he was positively beaming with pride. His face was ruddy, and split with a grin that wouldn't have looked out of place behind a wheelbarrow full of poker chips on the way to the cash-out. I placed him in his mid-40s, but maybe his thinning red hair and roly-poly stature made him look older than he really was.
He halted just a few feet from me, and said, with oddly struggling words, "Good evening, mister!"
I looked him up and down, cigarette still burning between my shaky fingers, and replied, "hi, how are ya..." He wobbled his head a bit, then walked around me on his way up the street. I noticed something written in gold on his orange ribbon, and read it as it flashed in the lamplight.
I judged him more than a wee bit 'differently-abled', as they say. I watched as he cautiously crossed the empty street, looking both ways at least twice, then gingerly stepping into the street and crossing it at a run.
I thought about what I had seen written on the ribbon: "A Very Special Boy". Hmm, I thought, I wonder who gave him that? Whoever it was, they made his whole day.
I put my cigarette out and walked back into the guest house.
My buddy Sam sent me an email a couple of days ago indicating that he just might have joined The Family recently. And he joined it a much higher level than I, I might add, considering I'm still lumbering along in the PowerPC world; my G4 Powerbook, though a loyal and trusted friend, seems slow as molasses in January these days.
He also mentioned an old OS/2 habit, one which we separately shared back in the day. I started using OS/2 when I worked at UPS. One of our managers was running 2.1, with the old Presentation Manager that looked like a crappy(er) Windows 2.0, albeit with long filenames and the ability to run concurrent DOS sessions. I avoided it until OS/2 3.0 came out.
In '94, when Warp hit the shelves, I rushed out to Soft-Warehouse1 in Alpharetta, looked in the Operating Systems2 department until I found a box, then gave the man $300 dollars for the privilege of running it. Then, I walked over the desktop applications department, and put down another $495 for Lotus Smartsuite/2. Then I OEM'd 16MB of RAM for about $400 to make it all go.
Now, many may see OS/2 as a butt-ugly cousin of Windows, and they may be right. But back then, it was a work of art. Especially in the sense that it wasn't an exact science getting it to run. Nothing ever really worked like it was supposed to. Without the fallback of a DOS prompt, you had to have a second, fully-functional machine to do things like edit the CONFIG.SYS on the installation floppies to make sure your DASD drivers were loading. And most of the drivers were written so that, if they encountered an error while loading, they'd bork the whole boot process, just to be on the safe side.
The graphical interface also hung constantly. The Workplace Shell, despite (or maybe due to) all its object-orientiness, was horribly unstable. But I never saw a hang that wasn't cured with Control-Alt-Delete. That key combo went right down to the kernel, and always gave a satisfying, unconfirmed reboot, wedged GUI be damned. There was even a 3rd party program called Watchcat that sat on the serial port, or on a secondary Hercules/MCGA monitor, and let you monitor and kill programs remotely. The kernel's Kung Fu was strong like that, but the GUI was just ass.
Now, when Chicago started finally coming down the pipe, and even the Rolling Stones where pulled into the OS marketing world ("Start me up", anyone?), OS/2 fans like myself were sure that this pissant little DOS extender with a homely face wouldn't be the future. It couldn't be the future, it was just too depressing. It still wasn't a 32-bit OS, though the 386 had been out for over 8 years. It still used FAT, for crying out loud. In short, Chicago sucked.
OS/2 seemed like a scrappy little underdog, nipping heroically at the Microsoft behemoth's heels. I'm not sure why it gave that impression. At the time, IBM was much bigger than Microsoft, a huge, multinational corporation with interests in basically every aspect of electronics. They just couldn't write or market good software.
I'm not sure why I just wrote 500 words on OS/2. I actually wanted to write something about Linux.
Software stores used to have a whole "Operating Systems" department, back when there was more than one operating system, and Windows was still called an "Operating Environment" ↩
Man, I'm unprepared. There's a checklist of things you should do before moving to England. I came over here without any money, preparation, or attack plan. There's something unbelievably stupid about this. It worked for me when I moved to Germany, but moving to England's a bit more complicated, apparently. Either that, or I'm remembering it wrong.
But I'm not the only one. The office I'm working in is full of non-British people. It's a rag-tag group of Germans, Italians, Brazilians, Spaniards, one (1) American, and who knows what else that all found themselves in the same boat when they first came over. This despite promises from The Company to help one resettle; promises which are certainly not kept and, when referred to in conversation, change their shape and character like a Democrat on a whistle-stop.
But at some point a kindly soul in the department, now departed, made a list of the reality of the situation. It's a short list of what one really needs to do when moving to England. Unfortunately, I only found out about it after I'd already been here a week. Here's your to-do list once you've arrived in England:
Get a room. If possible, get a rental agreement or any bill with your name and address on it. (proof of address)
Deposit is usually 1 1/2 times the rent. Deposit and first rent is to be paid beforehand. If the room is unfurnished, see "Things to Buy" for shops and example prices.
Get a letter from your office manager (HR Lady) stating that you are working for the company and including your address. (proof of employment)
Get a bank account. Just walk in with your documents:
Passport or national ID card
Proof of employment (see 2.). it might be handy to have your contract with you.
Proof of address
Banks
HSBC – try to get a standard account (they try to sell you an advanced package including insurances etc.)
NatWest – Also recommended as this bank does not charge for withdrawing money from a different bank's cash machines
Give your bank details to The Company
Register with Inland Revenue – this is done by your HR manager. You should get your tax code about 2 weeks later (PAYE Coding Notice)
At the end of the fiscal year (ending April 5th), you will get a "P60 End of Year Certificate" detailing your "Pay and Income Tax" levels.
Get a National Insurance Number by applying at a Job Centre Plus office. They ask for dtails before they schedule an interview appointment to verify your eligibility. Appointments are scheduled about two weeks ahead, and take place in the nearest county office, which usually isn't near at all. Without an NI number, you will be on emergency tax, which is higher than the standard tax rate.
Documents:
Passport
National ID card
Driving License or any other official document identifying you (Birth certificate, police registration, medical card, etc.)
Proof of employment (see 2.)
Recent payslip
Bank statement
Proof of address (utility bill, rental agreement, etc. – see 1.)
It might be handy to have your PAYE Coding Notice with you
As money is paid in a timely manner so it is available on the 27th, try to get your appointment after this date.
If you are British, a citizen of a member state of the EU, or other Commonwealth citizen, you can apply for inclusion on the Register of Electors. This will allow you to vote at local government elections. Your credibility will rise (good for tenancy applications or bank-related matters) and you are obliged to pay Council Taxes1
If you buy any TV or radio equipment, you will be asked for your address, which will be automatically forwarded to the "TV Licensing Office"
Get a Tesco Clubcard
Get a life ;-)
Any address change has to be communicated to all above-mentioned authorities. For the official notices to local council, the TV licensing, and most other on-line services, you can use I am Moving , where you can create/use an account for free.
All of this could have been avoided with a bit of planning. I am bitterly disappointed in myself.
Council taxes are universal as far as I can tell, and are perceived, by the British at least, as an extension of the rent. ↩
Farnborough derives its name from from the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Ferneberga (Fern Hill) and is mentioned in the Domesday Book (1086). But for the coming of the army at nearby Aldershot, the arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flying, Farnborough would probably have remained an isolated heathland village, that is until the latter half of the 20th century when the population moved out of London suburbia and became commuters.
"But for the … arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flight…". That's a pretty big conditional. There are probably a lot of places whose development was seriously affected by railways and the advent of powered flight. But I understand where the good Mr. Parkins is coming from.
I had forgotten the cable to connect my camera to my laptop. Of all the stupid things that I packed for the trip, 50 different USB cables, a USB hub, power adapters for devices I’d forgotten, not to mention devices whose power adapters I’d forgotten, I forgot the one thing that was absolutely necessary and planned-for. Not to mention irreplaceable, seeing as every camera maker in the world decided that their camera’s little hole should look different from all the other cameras’ little holes.
I walked into a little computer store on the strip in Fleet, Hampshire. Walking up to the pasty-faced, teenaged part-timer there, I introduced myself and shook his hand, which seemed to shock him.
He unconsciously wiped his hands on his pants and said, “eh...nice to meet you, sir. What can I do for you?”
I asked him, “do you have any USB card-readers?”
“Um, yeah," he answered. "I think I saw some around here somewhere.”
I looked around the shop, which was organized and clean. Man, he must really be the FNG around here. He finally found what I was looking for, stored on a shelf right next to where he had been sitting. He handed it to me and I started reading the back of the packaging.
“Just looking to see if it works with my Mac,” I told him.
“Oh, it's USB, so it should work,” he answered, and took the reader out of my hand. He moved his lips while he read the package. “Oh, yeah,” he said finally. “Right there it says it: ‘Requires Mac OS 9 or later’.” He looked at me skeptically. “So, you do have OS 9 or later, don’t you?”
“Um, yeah, I think so.” OS 9 went out of style back in the ‘90s.
He moved around to the register, and I handed him my Visa card. He looked uncertain as he turned it over in his hand. “This thing doesn’t have a chip on it?”
I took it back and examined it. “No, I guess it doesn’t.”
“Well, I don’t think we can take that, then.”
“Why don’t you just swipe it,” I said. “Give it a go.”
He shrugged and swiped it through the machine.
From behind me, a voice said, “it’s all chips nowadays, you know.”
I looked around, and saw that an older woman was standing behind me. She looked to be in her mid 40s, and wore a name plate with the store’s logo on it. “You can’t get nothing without a dozen little chips in it.”
I nodded agreement, and turned back to the young man behind the register.
“So, what kind of Mac you got, then?”
“A PowerBook G4.”
He nodded approvingly. “Nice piece of kit, that.” The little machine that had taken my card made a loud ping!, and spit out a receipt. He tore it off and gave it to me to sign, along with the card reader.
“Now, you have a nice day sir, and do please visit us again.”
I thanked him, said goodbye to the chip-lady, and put the small package into my bag next to my laptop. “Thanks, man, I’ll do that.” Nice kid.
Didja ever discover something that made your reality skip a beat? You know how, for just a second, something is so far out of place that you can't even figure out what's wrong with the picture? For example, the Augsburg Wireless-Internet provider Cyberways has had the same guy on their start page for years:
Every time you connect to the internet over public wireless in Augsburg, that dude was right there, staring at you with those soulless black eyes. Like a doll's eyes...
And the weird thing was, I always figured he was the boss at Cyberways. I even thought I saw him once on the tram. I hate it when people use the same stock photos everywhere. Everybody's full of shit. Oh, I guess it's effective use of your cash dollars, seeing as it's cheaper than paying attractive people to work for you. But still, why not just be honest for a split second?
You get this kind of thing all over the Internet, of course. If you've ever shopped for web hosting, you'll notice, after a few visits to the providers' pages, that their employees all kind of look alike. And there's always some woman somewhere holding a laptop at her waist in near-sexual ecstasy over the reasonable shared hosting prices.
It's a leitmotif throughout the enter hosting industry: Shared Webspace=Chick with laptop.
Rube, look, for the last freakin time, look RIGHT when you step off a curb! These people drive on the other side of the F$@&-ing road over here! You wanna get ya brains splattered all over me?
What? I dunno. I'm just kind of sitting around, waiting on things. I just spent way too much time transferring money across European borders, and reclaiming my identity. But the new passports are wonderful pieces of fortitude. Here' s a few quotes from my new passport:
And that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth. - Abraham Lincoln
The principle of free governments adheres to the American soil. It is bedded in it, immovable as its mountains. - Daniel Webster
Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. - George Washington
We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. - excerpt from the Declaration of Independence
Your concept of love may be different, but know that I love this world.
I like reading Scott Adams' blog on occasion. Much like Balph Eubanks, he's glib, amusing, and completely lacking in morality. Take, for example, his latest strawman-laden posting regarding the visit of a certain Mr. Ahmedinejad:
I was happy to hear that NYC didn't allow Iranian President Ahmadinejad
to place a wreath at the WTC site. And I was happy that Columbia
University is rescinding the offer to let him speak. If you let a guy like
that express his views, before long the entire world will want freedom
of speech.
...
If Ahmadinejad thinks he can be our friend by honoring our heroes and
opening a dialog, he underestimates our ability to misinterpret him.
Fucking idiot. I hate him.
Well, there's certainly some rye wit at work here. Yes, it is quite ironic that a country led by a genocidal religious dictator, which the USA most certainly is, would object to a fellow genocidal religious madman visiting its most sensitive cultural site. I mean, Mahmoud's only trying to "open a dialog" here, isn't he? Isn't that the meaning of Ahmedinejad's visit? Isn't Ahmedinejad just exercising "Free Speech", as Adams says? Aren't we wrong in denying this poor man that right?
Aside from the obvious jackassery involved in claiming that a man who directly controls his entire country's media is having trouble getting his point of view out; or that the United Nations will let him speak before the leaders of the world to the point where they forget to blink for an hour; aside from all this, this is not a question of whether or not Mahmoud is allowed to say what he wants. The question is, in accordance with the Grand Unified Theory of Rubean Mechanics, Who's going to pay for it. It's a question of whether or not Americans should be paying for his plane fare, his security, and his accommodation while he's here, pissing on Ground Zero and generating propaganda for totalitarian lobbying groups like MoveOn.org and International ANSWER.
All of Adams' ridiculous assertions never mention the one central fact here: There is no compelling reason for American taxpayers to foot the bill, so this guy, who just held one of his popular "Death to America" parades, can come over here and lecture them on anything. I personally don't much care what Ahmedinejad thinks, I can see the general thrust of his inclinations. He's spitting on the United States and Western Culture daily, and then expects to be treated with deference in return. Fuck him.
This kind of Devil's Advocacy isn't new to Adams. At least, I hope it's just that. He's apparently one of those celebrities that have forgotten the hard work involved in their ascendency, and assume that they're rich because of some accident of nature, akin to divine providence. Humans, himself included, are all just a bunch of "moist robots" with no capacity for thought, no free will; we've apparently just been programmed by Mother Nature to do the things we've done or will do. There is no mind, there is no choice, there is only the stimuli in our environments, and the response that was determined by a chance arrangement of atoms into chemicals during the Big Bang. Or something.
It's an obscene display of thoughtlessness, a conceit of someone trying so hard to seem above all this. Adams' Dilbert is amusing, and his blog is a bit of junk food for the brain at times. But he's got the morals of a two-dollar whore.
Last night we didn't make it. The two Frenchmen surrendered the evening, seeing as it was Trotzky's birthday, and therefore a time for somber reflection or something. So, we rode around big town Farnborough for a couple of hours, grabbed some grub, and then headed back to the apartment to watch a movie.
We watched Fur, which cemented my belief that Nicole Kidman is the perfect woman. Not only does she look good in her own slutty little librarian sort of way, she gives a guy a handjob in this movie while shaving his hairy back. That's my kind of girl, a real little trooper.
Anyhoo, it's back off to London now, for a second try at getting sloppy somewhere besides sitting at home in front of the boob tube. Wish us luck.
Vacation week is winding down, and I'm getting ready to leave the driving to Southwest Trains and go drinking in London. I'll try to keep it under two weeks this time, but no promises. We'll tramp it a bit through Soho, I guess, just me, the girls, and a couple of frog-eaters from the office.
I wonder why I never get to go drinking with Englishmen? It's probably for the best. There's a quote that gets bandied about, especially in the local newspapers, about England being a nation of drunks and scalawags. I can't say much about that, but it does seem that the pubs all close at 11:00 PM for a reason. At 5 o'clock, they pour out of their offices and into the public houses, seemingly on a race against the clock to get themselves 'faced before the early last call.
When they were finally permitted to stay open past 11, in the hope that the binge-drinking would abate in light of longer opening hours, they found themselves doubly-cursed in that the Englishmen were every bit as drunk at 11, but didn't have to go home. All pubs here are set up so that you have to go to the counter to get your drinks, instead of having them brought to your table. There's a built-in handbrake there: a system where you can't get any more drink once you lose the ability to walk is founded upon sound principle and good advices.
I've done nothing today; nothing but clean out the cluttered closets of my preferred newsfeed reader. There were some connections in there that were sorely neglected. I could use a bit more time to wade through the degenerate filth that is my blogroll, but sadly, I work. The Company is tolerant in their control over my time, fair since they do not pay hourly; but tolerance has its limits, and I doubt they would look kindly upon my spending the business day in a fugue state, reading entry after entry of dialectics about Jessica Simpson's tits, or Brittney Spears' overplayed poonanny.
Nevertheless, it saddens me that my everyday is not blessed with the nuggets of wisdom from skippystalin:
Being the only person with an out-of-control substance abuse problem in a relationship is tough. Most romantic couplings are based on common interests and most of my interests culminate in my waking up in a pool of what I think is my own urine and not being quite sure what time zone I'm in. I'm much like a cat in that I have a tendancy of marking my territory with my vomit, blood and gallons of my semen...My ability to smoke, drink and masturbate furiously at the same time might not be much, it's all that I have.
Ahh, skippystalin, how I've missed you, and your nuggets.
This is how I spend my vacation: visiting Stonehenge on one day; reading the melancholy musings of skippystalin the next, picturing him composing scholarly tracts through bitter tears, a crushed Viagra dissolving in a highball of Jack Daniels next to the keyboard, as another long evening fades into a blur of poetry, madness, and vigorous bouts of hate-filled masturbation. And wondering, of the two, which is the more meaningful and fitting monument to humanity?
They should've just burned enjoyeverysandwich to CD, stuck it to the side of Voyager along with its author, and shot the whole lot into space back when they had government funding to do so, all in the name of making a good first impression for whatever aliens were out cruising for an easy meal.
skippystalin's output is prodigious, to be sure, but there was an entire blogroll to consider:
The lunatics are running the asylum over at Straight White Guy's place. Eric's testicles are mentioned, indirectly. Remind me to change my passwords regularly and start using strong encryption.
How stoned do you have to be to cheat on Jessica Alba? I could jack off to Jessica Alba while a big mean dog was chasing me and this idiot is cheating on her. I decided to confront him about this and I screamed at him, hey, what is your problem. And he said I should get off his lawn. And I said, no, no you get off the lawn. You get off. Then he went inside, probably because deep down, he knew I had made some pretty good points.
JimGoad.com is no more, but if you're a Goad fan (ladies!), you can find find him here. Discussion of Brittany's latest, erm, candid photos is also to be found, but be aware that the following picture is used as a visual aid:
This morning we picked up my new wheelchair. It's a sporty European marque, with an aggressive stance, low-profile tires, and a head-turning cherry-red metalflake paint job. It's not that great on the corners, but it'll take any one of y'all on the straightaways.
I've never done time on wheels. On the whole, I found it to be not all that bad. Then again, I don't figure that most wheelchair-bound men my age get to enjoy being pushed around town by a couple of sexy German bloggerettes. Thanks, ladies: the jealous looks from the other local cripples was the icing on the cake. Here's a little something extra for you, babes. (via AoSHQ)
Funny things happen when you're on wheels. I saw a lady I work with while being carted through Tesco's frozen food department. I said hello, and she just looked right through me, steering her cart so as not to make contact with the leper. She probably thought I was going to ask her for some spare change, or if she could wipe me bum for me, or whatever it is that those people want from healthy-legged people. I also noticed that the supermarkets put completely different things down on the bottom three feet of the shelves. All the cool toys are down there, for example, presumably because chil'n's is small. It's also a great altitude to find anti-bedsore medicaments, for some reason.
So, I let myself be pushed by the Weyside in Guildford, where, at one point, a husky young native was required to wheel my fat ass up a steep incline. The Sistas, for all their heart, lacked the muscle to get the job done, so he, being a true-hearted salt-of-earth kind of guy, waved them off and grunted and sweated till I crested the hill. Had the man known that I could have, at any point in time, simply stood up and hobbled up the hill under my own power, he most certainly would have picked me up and broken me over his knee.
Tomorrow morning, we'll be visiting Stonehenge, or Stone'enge, as the locals quaintly call it. We'll also visit the haunted city, Salisbury, to watch the homosexuals. Ta!
I like reading OSNews for some reason. I think I like to catch the geeky news about SkyOS, or the occasional retro curmudgeonry that rolls by about Lotus 1-2-3 or OS/2. Being the old-timer that I am, it's hard to resist a paean from my youth about 10-finger productivity.
Unfortunately, they've become the epicenter of stupid for the tech press. Check out this article, which explodes the myths about competition being good: "Competition is not Good"
'It gives consumers more choice'
Choice is good when there's one agreed base standard, and a number of compatible approaches. For example, there are many Linux distributions, but they are all Linux, and they can all run the same software. They are 'flavours' of the same thing, that is a good choice. People like different flavours.
Competition does not produce easier choices for consumers. All they get is added un-interoperability and complexity with competitive choices.
Now, if you go read that article, which I do not recommend, you'll slowly come to the realization that this moron is just annoyed that he has to make the effort to choose between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. He's willing to surrender his entire free will to some (hopefully) benevolent dictator, abolish brand names, and forsake the free market economy because choosing which format to buy the Firefly special edition box set in is hard. What a hopeless, whiny-assed sissy.
Of course, things don't get better when they start tossing political analysis at you. "Net Neutrality" is one monikers that has overshadowed the thing named. The discussion is often framed in a way that an uninformed listener would assume there was lobbying going on to abolish some sort of laws that are now protecting consumers from big, bad tiered-Internet ninjas.
But: There is no net neutrality legislation, there never was, and hopefully, there never will be. The argument over "Net Neutrality" is about whether or not the U.S. government should introduce legislation forbidding bandwidth throttling by ISPs. It's the "have you stopped beating your wife?" straw man for the Slashdot crowd. You'll notice that this article calls the Supreme Court's decision that the U.S. government shouldn't step in and configure the ISPs' Cisco routers for them, "Backing for Two-Tier Internet":
The US Justice Department has said that internet service providers should be allowed to charge for priority traffic. The agency said it was opposed to 'network neutrality', the idea that all data on the net is treated equally. The comments put the agency at odds with companies such as Microsoft and Google, who have called for legislation to guarantee equal access to the net.
Of course, this would also mean that an enforcement infrastructure would also have to be put in place, making sure that everyone got their "fair share" of said bandwidth, as if backbone routers and POPs just fell off a tree somewhere. God forbid ISPs be allowed to tune the services that they developed and paid for as they wish. Let's let the government decides who gets bandwidth, and how much is enough! That will make it all fair and neutral-like. Whenever a politician uses the word "fair", hang on to your wallet.
Well, my trackbacks are now working, it seems. There's some ugly Python spaghetti-code going on behind the scenes that translates back and forth between absolute urls, non-absolute relative urls, and upper-lower-camel case; but it works.
Trackbacks are only good for Movable Type, though. Which I can't stand anymore. MT used to be the only thing out there, but there's something that really, really, really galls me about the way it rebuilds your entire site into static HTML pages everytime you update a post. I'm sure it's awesomeness if you've got your server running on an old TV remote, but nowadays we're all running our web servers on 100-core 64-bit terahertz moonshot computers that can simultaneously compute π, encode MPEG video, and mix the best goddam margaritas you've ever tasted, all without breaking a sweat.
So yeah, I figured out how to implement trackbacks in Django, to a point where they more or less work. Now why is Wordpress fucking with me? It seems to be thrown off by the fact that Wordpress sends a HEAD request before it downloads and parses the page, in the vain hope that the X-Pingback header will be set. I can't figure out how to do that in Django's generic views, so I just use the secondary method, that being a link element in the XHTML code. But now, whenever a Worpdress blog pings me, I get this kind of crap:
[09/Sep/2007 15:04:23] "GET /blog/2007/sep/08/vacation/ HTTP/1.1" 200 27367
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (104, 'Connection reset by peer')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (32, 'Broken pipe')
Being the half-assed programmer that I am, I am at a total loss. I can't even do a Lazyweb request here, seeing as my 4 visits a day are unlikely to bring the Django HTTP gurus by. I won't be able to sleep at night, thinking of all the enlightened Wordpress Users who are probably out there try to "Keep the discussion going" with me.
Ever since June, when the iPhone went live, I've heard about nothing else in the tech press, nerd podcasts, and the Apple Fanboisphere. Is it really that way over in the States (the only place you can get them), or does the iPhone actually seem to be doing well?
Ahh, my first vacation since joining The Company. My queue is cleaned up, my email is forwarded, and an elaborate Sieve session has accomplished in a mere two hours what less civilized mail systems can do with a key combination: The Corporate Vacation Email.
It's been five months now since I came 'cross the channel and started meeting the natives, learning the lingo, and getting used to the fact that everyone here talks like Pinky. Now, I'll be letting my hair down for the next 10 days or so. As well as putting my poor, broken foot up on the coffee table.
As soon as I get my x-rays back from the socialist medical system (they still copy them with coal rubbings on wax paper over here, apparently), I'll post pictures of the metatarsalar breakage here for your morbid enjoyment. Don't thank me yet.
The other half of Sistaweb will be joining us for the week. We'll allow her to sleep here rent-free for an entire week, even though she refused to bring a carton of cigarettes as payment. Damned non-smokers and their principles. It's like those non-smokers back in the World War II who didn't sign up for cigarette rations. Throwing away a gold mine, that is. Our grandfathers probably had a word for those guys, and if I knew my grandfather at all, that word was sissy-boy.
The girls have rented a wheelchair for me, seeing as I won't be too much fun doing a London pub-crawl on crutches. I've already had a forehead-slapping moment over this, as you probably are right now. Why haven't I thought of taking a wheelchair with me before? That would've come in handy on more than one occasion, the Wreckyll in Jeckyll not least among them.
Man, Apple is on a roll. Not only have they got me hooked for a new computer, a new laptop, a new office package, and a replacement for my aging MythTV box, but now I have to start thinking about a new iPod. Now, let's see what Uncle Steve is going to me be costing me 'til Christmas Time:
Item
Damage
20" iMac
1199.00
Macbook
1099.00
8GB iPod Touch
299.00
AppleTV
299.00
iWork '08
79.00
iLife '08
79.00
Total:
$3,054.00
Not bad for a day's work, Mr. Jobs. And what's up for the rest of September? Maybe some irresistible bionic iFoot to replace the one I broke playing frisbee at the company picnic last week?
Although there's a remarkable lack of iPhone hype around the office, we being a big-time Linux company and all, there's an amazing amount of Mac fanboiism. Pretty much all of us have Macs at home. The explanation for this is simple: After dealing with Linux problems all day long, there's something nice about going home to something you can spend all your time using and not making up excuses for why it looks like shit and doesn't work.
I like Linux, mind you. I use it day-in, day-out for my desktop at work, for my webservers, and it brings in my daily bread. We all love it here, pretty much like a family loves and therefore tolerates the embarrassing second cousin with the Downs'. But people are walking all over the office today buzzing about the upcoming announcement from Apple.
Will it be the long-awaited iMac redesign? Will it be a new Mini? My boss is actually carrying his phone to the pub after work today so he can sit on engadget and get a realtime update. Linus would not be pleased...
Last login: Thu Jul 26 12:17:28 from nat-pool-fab.re Welcome to Darwin! ericbook:~ eric$ mutt -bash: mutt: command not found ericbook:~ eric$ open /Applications/Mail.app/ ericbook:~ eric$
Ahh. Like coming in after a long day of plowing the fields and sticking your aching feet into a pot of hot water. After running Linux all day at work, you feel like slipping into something more comfortable. Sam knows it. Zonker knows it, though he won't admit it. It's the right amount of just-workiness you need to let you relax, while knowing you could, at any given moment, do something like:
OK, here's one with drivel. I do like it, but I have a couple of gripes.
First problem: I was hopelessly confused by the login screen. The type of journal seems to be locked on livejournal, as the drop-down menu for journal types is inexplicably disabled until you enter a username. -1 for usabilty
Second problem: Useless stripping of trailing slash, which mangled my xmlrpc URL. Error 301 was ignored, which makes sense since it's a post and all, but I couldn't log in. It mangled my URL then choked on the error :-/
Third problem: didn't want to download my recent posts. Although there might be a misunderstanding about just what "recent" means.
Fourth problem: Doesn't let me choose post status anywhere. And there's nowhere I can find to choose text filters. This is more of a feature request, really.
Fifth problem: craps out after posting, probably because it keeps mangling the trailing slashes from my URLs. Is there an RFC somewhere that says that POSTS can't end with slashes? Nobody tell the Django folks.
Well, maybe it'll at least let me post to my blog from work every now and then.
Man, I dang sure missed the entire month of June. I've been in the UK now for about two months, and let me tell ya: They sure do get some rain around here. I always thought those stories about English people having gills were legends and fantasies. Now, I'm not so sure.
For the love of GOD, for the last time, in the name of ALL THAT IS HOLY, Cluster Services is NOT COMPATIBLE with 4.5! If you're running a cluster, DO NOT update to 4.5 until the Cluster Suite is UPDATED TO 4.5!
That is all.
P.S. And NO, cmirror is not available yet. Maybe at the end of the month.
I went outside to smoke a cigarette. All rooms in England are for non-smokers, you'll find, as are the rooms, apartments, and houses listed for rent in the local papers. The litany at the end of all the ads reads, "No smokers, canvassers, or DSS", which stands for Department of Social Services. So, okay they hate smokers and welfare cases, as do we all. But the British have their own definition for 'non-smoker', which basically means you only smoke when you drink. Everybody smokes over here, and they all live somewhere.
The evening was cool; almost cold, really, as I suspect the evenings around here generally are. I stood on the corner of Osborne and Netley, watching the blackbirds getting ready to do whatever it is they do at night, when I spied a man, some yards away, bounding up the sidewalk with a jaunty gait. I held my cigarette just in front of my mouth, watching this figure with suspicion. He was short, about 5 feet tall, and round as a soccer ball. He was wearing light-colored trousers and a dark blazer, the left breast of which was adorned with an enormous, orange prize-ribbon.
As he approached me, his features became distinct in the bad lighting, and I realized he was positively beaming with pride. His face was ruddy, and split with a grin that wouldn't have looked out of place behind a wheelbarrow full of poker chips on the way to the cash-out. I placed him in his mid-40s, but maybe his thinning red hair and roly-poly stature made him look older than he really was.
He halted just a few feet from me, and said, with oddly struggling words, "Good evening, mister!"
I looked him up and down, cigarette still burning between my shaky fingers, and replied, "hi, how are ya..." He wobbled his head a bit, then walked around me on his way up the street. I noticed something written in gold on his orange ribbon, and read it as it flashed in the lamplight.
I judged him more than a wee bit 'differently-abled', as they say. I watched as he cautiously crossed the empty street, looking both ways at least twice, then gingerly stepping into the street and crossing it at a run.
I thought about what I had seen written on the ribbon: "A Very Special Boy". Hmm, I thought, I wonder who gave him that? Whoever it was, they made his whole day.
I put my cigarette out and walked back into the guest house.
My buddy Sam sent me an email a couple of days ago indicating that he just might have joined The Family recently. And he joined it a much higher level than I, I might add, considering I'm still lumbering along in the PowerPC world; my G4 Powerbook, though a loyal and trusted friend, seems slow as molasses in January these days.
He also mentioned an old OS/2 habit, one which we separately shared back in the day. I started using OS/2 when I worked at UPS. One of our managers was running 2.1, with the old Presentation Manager that looked like a crappy(er) Windows 2.0, albeit with long filenames and the ability to run concurrent DOS sessions. I avoided it until OS/2 3.0 came out.
In '94, when Warp hit the shelves, I rushed out to Soft-Warehouse1 in Alpharetta, looked in the Operating Systems2 department until I found a box, then gave the man $300 dollars for the privilege of running it. Then, I walked over the desktop applications department, and put down another $495 for Lotus Smartsuite/2. Then I OEM'd 16MB of RAM for about $400 to make it all go.
Now, many may see OS/2 as a butt-ugly cousin of Windows, and they may be right. But back then, it was a work of art. Especially in the sense that it wasn't an exact science getting it to run. Nothing ever really worked like it was supposed to. Without the fallback of a DOS prompt, you had to have a second, fully-functional machine to do things like edit the CONFIG.SYS on the installation floppies to make sure your DASD drivers were loading. And most of the drivers were written so that, if they encountered an error while loading, they'd bork the whole boot process, just to be on the safe side.
The graphical interface also hung constantly. The Workplace Shell, despite (or maybe due to) all its object-orientiness, was horribly unstable. But I never saw a hang that wasn't cured with Control-Alt-Delete. That key combo went right down to the kernel, and always gave a satisfying, unconfirmed reboot, wedged GUI be damned. There was even a 3rd party program called Watchcat that sat on the serial port, or on a secondary Hercules/MCGA monitor, and let you monitor and kill programs remotely. The kernel's Kung Fu was strong like that, but the GUI was just ass.
Now, when Chicago started finally coming down the pipe, and even the Rolling Stones where pulled into the OS marketing world ("Start me up", anyone?), OS/2 fans like myself were sure that this pissant little DOS extender with a homely face wouldn't be the future. It couldn't be the future, it was just too depressing. It still wasn't a 32-bit OS, though the 386 had been out for over 8 years. It still used FAT, for crying out loud. In short, Chicago sucked.
OS/2 seemed like a scrappy little underdog, nipping heroically at the Microsoft behemoth's heels. I'm not sure why it gave that impression. At the time, IBM was much bigger than Microsoft, a huge, multinational corporation with interests in basically every aspect of electronics. They just couldn't write or market good software.
I'm not sure why I just wrote 500 words on OS/2. I actually wanted to write something about Linux.
Software stores used to have a whole "Operating Systems" department, back when there was more than one operating system, and Windows was still called an "Operating Environment" ↩
Man, I'm unprepared. There's a checklist of things you should do before moving to England. I came over here without any money, preparation, or attack plan. There's something unbelievably stupid about this. It worked for me when I moved to Germany, but moving to England's a bit more complicated, apparently. Either that, or I'm remembering it wrong.
But I'm not the only one. The office I'm working in is full of non-British people. It's a rag-tag group of Germans, Italians, Brazilians, Spaniards, one (1) American, and who knows what else that all found themselves in the same boat when they first came over. This despite promises from The Company to help one resettle; promises which are certainly not kept and, when referred to in conversation, change their shape and character like a Democrat on a whistle-stop.
But at some point a kindly soul in the department, now departed, made a list of the reality of the situation. It's a short list of what one really needs to do when moving to England. Unfortunately, I only found out about it after I'd already been here a week. Here's your to-do list once you've arrived in England:
Get a room. If possible, get a rental agreement or any bill with your name and address on it. (proof of address)
Deposit is usually 1 1/2 times the rent. Deposit and first rent is to be paid beforehand. If the room is unfurnished, see "Things to Buy" for shops and example prices.
Get a letter from your office manager (HR Lady) stating that you are working for the company and including your address. (proof of employment)
Get a bank account. Just walk in with your documents:
Passport or national ID card
Proof of employment (see 2.). it might be handy to have your contract with you.
Proof of address
Banks
HSBC – try to get a standard account (they try to sell you an advanced package including insurances etc.)
NatWest – Also recommended as this bank does not charge for withdrawing money from a different bank's cash machines
Give your bank details to The Company
Register with Inland Revenue – this is done by your HR manager. You should get your tax code about 2 weeks later (PAYE Coding Notice)
At the end of the fiscal year (ending April 5th), you will get a "P60 End of Year Certificate" detailing your "Pay and Income Tax" levels.
Get a National Insurance Number by applying at a Job Centre Plus office. They ask for dtails before they schedule an interview appointment to verify your eligibility. Appointments are scheduled about two weeks ahead, and take place in the nearest county office, which usually isn't near at all. Without an NI number, you will be on emergency tax, which is higher than the standard tax rate.
Documents:
Passport
National ID card
Driving License or any other official document identifying you (Birth certificate, police registration, medical card, etc.)
Proof of employment (see 2.)
Recent payslip
Bank statement
Proof of address (utility bill, rental agreement, etc. – see 1.)
It might be handy to have your PAYE Coding Notice with you
As money is paid in a timely manner so it is available on the 27th, try to get your appointment after this date.
If you are British, a citizen of a member state of the EU, or other Commonwealth citizen, you can apply for inclusion on the Register of Electors. This will allow you to vote at local government elections. Your credibility will rise (good for tenancy applications or bank-related matters) and you are obliged to pay Council Taxes1
If you buy any TV or radio equipment, you will be asked for your address, which will be automatically forwarded to the "TV Licensing Office"
Get a Tesco Clubcard
Get a life ;-)
Any address change has to be communicated to all above-mentioned authorities. For the official notices to local council, the TV licensing, and most other on-line services, you can use I am Moving , where you can create/use an account for free.
All of this could have been avoided with a bit of planning. I am bitterly disappointed in myself.
Council taxes are universal as far as I can tell, and are perceived, by the British at least, as an extension of the rent. ↩
Farnborough derives its name from from the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Ferneberga (Fern Hill) and is mentioned in the Domesday Book (1086). But for the coming of the army at nearby Aldershot, the arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flying, Farnborough would probably have remained an isolated heathland village, that is until the latter half of the 20th century when the population moved out of London suburbia and became commuters.
"But for the … arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flight…". That's a pretty big conditional. There are probably a lot of places whose development was seriously affected by railways and the advent of powered flight. But I understand where the good Mr. Parkins is coming from.
I had forgotten the cable to connect my camera to my laptop. Of all the stupid things that I packed for the trip, 50 different USB cables, a USB hub, power adapters for devices I’d forgotten, not to mention devices whose power adapters I’d forgotten, I forgot the one thing that was absolutely necessary and planned-for. Not to mention irreplaceable, seeing as every camera maker in the world decided that their camera’s little hole should look different from all the other cameras’ little holes.
I walked into a little computer store on the strip in Fleet, Hampshire. Walking up to the pasty-faced, teenaged part-timer there, I introduced myself and shook his hand, which seemed to shock him.
He unconsciously wiped his hands on his pants and said, “eh...nice to meet you, sir. What can I do for you?”
I asked him, “do you have any USB card-readers?”
“Um, yeah," he answered. "I think I saw some around here somewhere.”
I looked around the shop, which was organized and clean. Man, he must really be the FNG around here. He finally found what I was looking for, stored on a shelf right next to where he had been sitting. He handed it to me and I started reading the back of the packaging.
“Just looking to see if it works with my Mac,” I told him.
“Oh, it's USB, so it should work,” he answered, and took the reader out of my hand. He moved his lips while he read the package. “Oh, yeah,” he said finally. “Right there it says it: ‘Requires Mac OS 9 or later’.” He looked at me skeptically. “So, you do have OS 9 or later, don’t you?”
“Um, yeah, I think so.” OS 9 went out of style back in the ‘90s.
He moved around to the register, and I handed him my Visa card. He looked uncertain as he turned it over in his hand. “This thing doesn’t have a chip on it?”
I took it back and examined it. “No, I guess it doesn’t.”
“Well, I don’t think we can take that, then.”
“Why don’t you just swipe it,” I said. “Give it a go.”
He shrugged and swiped it through the machine.
From behind me, a voice said, “it’s all chips nowadays, you know.”
I looked around, and saw that an older woman was standing behind me. She looked to be in her mid 40s, and wore a name plate with the store’s logo on it. “You can’t get nothing without a dozen little chips in it.”
I nodded agreement, and turned back to the young man behind the register.
“So, what kind of Mac you got, then?”
“A PowerBook G4.”
He nodded approvingly. “Nice piece of kit, that.” The little machine that had taken my card made a loud ping!, and spit out a receipt. He tore it off and gave it to me to sign, along with the card reader.
“Now, you have a nice day sir, and do please visit us again.”
I thanked him, said goodbye to the chip-lady, and put the small package into my bag next to my laptop. “Thanks, man, I’ll do that.” Nice kid.
Didja ever discover something that made your reality skip a beat? You know how, for just a second, something is so far out of place that you can't even figure out what's wrong with the picture? For example, the Augsburg Wireless-Internet provider Cyberways has had the same guy on their start page for years:
Every time you connect to the internet over public wireless in Augsburg, that dude was right there, staring at you with those soulless black eyes. Like a doll's eyes...
And the weird thing was, I always figured he was the boss at Cyberways. I even thought I saw him once on the tram. I hate it when people use the same stock photos everywhere. Everybody's full of shit. Oh, I guess it's effective use of your cash dollars, seeing as it's cheaper than paying attractive people to work for you. But still, why not just be honest for a split second?
You get this kind of thing all over the Internet, of course. If you've ever shopped for web hosting, you'll notice, after a few visits to the providers' pages, that their employees all kind of look alike. And there's always some woman somewhere holding a laptop at her waist in near-sexual ecstasy over the reasonable shared hosting prices.
It's a leitmotif throughout the enter hosting industry: Shared Webspace=Chick with laptop.
Rube, look, for the last freakin time, look RIGHT when you step off a curb! These people drive on the other side of the F$@&-ing road over here! You wanna get ya brains splattered all over me?
What? I dunno. I'm just kind of sitting around, waiting on things. I just spent way too much time transferring money across European borders, and reclaiming my identity. But the new passports are wonderful pieces of fortitude. Here' s a few quotes from my new passport:
And that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth. - Abraham Lincoln
The principle of free governments adheres to the American soil. It is bedded in it, immovable as its mountains. - Daniel Webster
Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. - George Washington
We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. - excerpt from the Declaration of Independence
Your concept of love may be different, but know that I love this world.
I like reading Scott Adams' blog on occasion. Much like Balph Eubanks, he's glib, amusing, and completely lacking in morality. Take, for example, his latest strawman-laden posting regarding the visit of a certain Mr. Ahmedinejad:
I was happy to hear that NYC didn't allow Iranian President Ahmadinejad
to place a wreath at the WTC site. And I was happy that Columbia
University is rescinding the offer to let him speak. If you let a guy like
that express his views, before long the entire world will want freedom
of speech.
...
If Ahmadinejad thinks he can be our friend by honoring our heroes and
opening a dialog, he underestimates our ability to misinterpret him.
Fucking idiot. I hate him.
Well, there's certainly some rye wit at work here. Yes, it is quite ironic that a country led by a genocidal religious dictator, which the USA most certainly is, would object to a fellow genocidal religious madman visiting its most sensitive cultural site. I mean, Mahmoud's only trying to "open a dialog" here, isn't he? Isn't that the meaning of Ahmedinejad's visit? Isn't Ahmedinejad just exercising "Free Speech", as Adams says? Aren't we wrong in denying this poor man that right?
Aside from the obvious jackassery involved in claiming that a man who directly controls his entire country's media is having trouble getting his point of view out; or that the United Nations will let him speak before the leaders of the world to the point where they forget to blink for an hour; aside from all this, this is not a question of whether or not Mahmoud is allowed to say what he wants. The question is, in accordance with the Grand Unified Theory of Rubean Mechanics, Who's going to pay for it. It's a question of whether or not Americans should be paying for his plane fare, his security, and his accommodation while he's here, pissing on Ground Zero and generating propaganda for totalitarian lobbying groups like MoveOn.org and International ANSWER.
All of Adams' ridiculous assertions never mention the one central fact here: There is no compelling reason for American taxpayers to foot the bill, so this guy, who just held one of his popular "Death to America" parades, can come over here and lecture them on anything. I personally don't much care what Ahmedinejad thinks, I can see the general thrust of his inclinations. He's spitting on the United States and Western Culture daily, and then expects to be treated with deference in return. Fuck him.
This kind of Devil's Advocacy isn't new to Adams. At least, I hope it's just that. He's apparently one of those celebrities that have forgotten the hard work involved in their ascendency, and assume that they're rich because of some accident of nature, akin to divine providence. Humans, himself included, are all just a bunch of "moist robots" with no capacity for thought, no free will; we've apparently just been programmed by Mother Nature to do the things we've done or will do. There is no mind, there is no choice, there is only the stimuli in our environments, and the response that was determined by a chance arrangement of atoms into chemicals during the Big Bang. Or something.
It's an obscene display of thoughtlessness, a conceit of someone trying so hard to seem above all this. Adams' Dilbert is amusing, and his blog is a bit of junk food for the brain at times. But he's got the morals of a two-dollar whore.
Last night we didn't make it. The two Frenchmen surrendered the evening, seeing as it was Trotzky's birthday, and therefore a time for somber reflection or something. So, we rode around big town Farnborough for a couple of hours, grabbed some grub, and then headed back to the apartment to watch a movie.
We watched Fur, which cemented my belief that Nicole Kidman is the perfect woman. Not only does she look good in her own slutty little librarian sort of way, she gives a guy a handjob in this movie while shaving his hairy back. That's my kind of girl, a real little trooper.
Anyhoo, it's back off to London now, for a second try at getting sloppy somewhere besides sitting at home in front of the boob tube. Wish us luck.
Vacation week is winding down, and I'm getting ready to leave the driving to Southwest Trains and go drinking in London. I'll try to keep it under two weeks this time, but no promises. We'll tramp it a bit through Soho, I guess, just me, the girls, and a couple of frog-eaters from the office.
I wonder why I never get to go drinking with Englishmen? It's probably for the best. There's a quote that gets bandied about, especially in the local newspapers, about England being a nation of drunks and scalawags. I can't say much about that, but it does seem that the pubs all close at 11:00 PM for a reason. At 5 o'clock, they pour out of their offices and into the public houses, seemingly on a race against the clock to get themselves 'faced before the early last call.
When they were finally permitted to stay open past 11, in the hope that the binge-drinking would abate in light of longer opening hours, they found themselves doubly-cursed in that the Englishmen were every bit as drunk at 11, but didn't have to go home. All pubs here are set up so that you have to go to the counter to get your drinks, instead of having them brought to your table. There's a built-in handbrake there: a system where you can't get any more drink once you lose the ability to walk is founded upon sound principle and good advices.
I've done nothing today; nothing but clean out the cluttered closets of my preferred newsfeed reader. There were some connections in there that were sorely neglected. I could use a bit more time to wade through the degenerate filth that is my blogroll, but sadly, I work. The Company is tolerant in their control over my time, fair since they do not pay hourly; but tolerance has its limits, and I doubt they would look kindly upon my spending the business day in a fugue state, reading entry after entry of dialectics about Jessica Simpson's tits, or Brittney Spears' overplayed poonanny.
Nevertheless, it saddens me that my everyday is not blessed with the nuggets of wisdom from skippystalin:
Being the only person with an out-of-control substance abuse problem in a relationship is tough. Most romantic couplings are based on common interests and most of my interests culminate in my waking up in a pool of what I think is my own urine and not being quite sure what time zone I'm in. I'm much like a cat in that I have a tendancy of marking my territory with my vomit, blood and gallons of my semen...My ability to smoke, drink and masturbate furiously at the same time might not be much, it's all that I have.
Ahh, skippystalin, how I've missed you, and your nuggets.
This is how I spend my vacation: visiting Stonehenge on one day; reading the melancholy musings of skippystalin the next, picturing him composing scholarly tracts through bitter tears, a crushed Viagra dissolving in a highball of Jack Daniels next to the keyboard, as another long evening fades into a blur of poetry, madness, and vigorous bouts of hate-filled masturbation. And wondering, of the two, which is the more meaningful and fitting monument to humanity?
They should've just burned enjoyeverysandwich to CD, stuck it to the side of Voyager along with its author, and shot the whole lot into space back when they had government funding to do so, all in the name of making a good first impression for whatever aliens were out cruising for an easy meal.
skippystalin's output is prodigious, to be sure, but there was an entire blogroll to consider:
The lunatics are running the asylum over at Straight White Guy's place. Eric's testicles are mentioned, indirectly. Remind me to change my passwords regularly and start using strong encryption.
How stoned do you have to be to cheat on Jessica Alba? I could jack off to Jessica Alba while a big mean dog was chasing me and this idiot is cheating on her. I decided to confront him about this and I screamed at him, hey, what is your problem. And he said I should get off his lawn. And I said, no, no you get off the lawn. You get off. Then he went inside, probably because deep down, he knew I had made some pretty good points.
JimGoad.com is no more, but if you're a Goad fan (ladies!), you can find find him here. Discussion of Brittany's latest, erm, candid photos is also to be found, but be aware that the following picture is used as a visual aid:
This morning we picked up my new wheelchair. It's a sporty European marque, with an aggressive stance, low-profile tires, and a head-turning cherry-red metalflake paint job. It's not that great on the corners, but it'll take any one of y'all on the straightaways.
I've never done time on wheels. On the whole, I found it to be not all that bad. Then again, I don't figure that most wheelchair-bound men my age get to enjoy being pushed around town by a couple of sexy German bloggerettes. Thanks, ladies: the jealous looks from the other local cripples was the icing on the cake. Here's a little something extra for you, babes. (via AoSHQ)
Funny things happen when you're on wheels. I saw a lady I work with while being carted through Tesco's frozen food department. I said hello, and she just looked right through me, steering her cart so as not to make contact with the leper. She probably thought I was going to ask her for some spare change, or if she could wipe me bum for me, or whatever it is that those people want from healthy-legged people. I also noticed that the supermarkets put completely different things down on the bottom three feet of the shelves. All the cool toys are down there, for example, presumably because chil'n's is small. It's also a great altitude to find anti-bedsore medicaments, for some reason.
So, I let myself be pushed by the Weyside in Guildford, where, at one point, a husky young native was required to wheel my fat ass up a steep incline. The Sistas, for all their heart, lacked the muscle to get the job done, so he, being a true-hearted salt-of-earth kind of guy, waved them off and grunted and sweated till I crested the hill. Had the man known that I could have, at any point in time, simply stood up and hobbled up the hill under my own power, he most certainly would have picked me up and broken me over his knee.
Tomorrow morning, we'll be visiting Stonehenge, or Stone'enge, as the locals quaintly call it. We'll also visit the haunted city, Salisbury, to watch the homosexuals. Ta!
I like reading OSNews for some reason. I think I like to catch the geeky news about SkyOS, or the occasional retro curmudgeonry that rolls by about Lotus 1-2-3 or OS/2. Being the old-timer that I am, it's hard to resist a paean from my youth about 10-finger productivity.
Unfortunately, they've become the epicenter of stupid for the tech press. Check out this article, which explodes the myths about competition being good: "Competition is not Good"
'It gives consumers more choice'
Choice is good when there's one agreed base standard, and a number of compatible approaches. For example, there are many Linux distributions, but they are all Linux, and they can all run the same software. They are 'flavours' of the same thing, that is a good choice. People like different flavours.
Competition does not produce easier choices for consumers. All they get is added un-interoperability and complexity with competitive choices.
Now, if you go read that article, which I do not recommend, you'll slowly come to the realization that this moron is just annoyed that he has to make the effort to choose between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. He's willing to surrender his entire free will to some (hopefully) benevolent dictator, abolish brand names, and forsake the free market economy because choosing which format to buy the Firefly special edition box set in is hard. What a hopeless, whiny-assed sissy.
Of course, things don't get better when they start tossing political analysis at you. "Net Neutrality" is one monikers that has overshadowed the thing named. The discussion is often framed in a way that an uninformed listener would assume there was lobbying going on to abolish some sort of laws that are now protecting consumers from big, bad tiered-Internet ninjas.
But: There is no net neutrality legislation, there never was, and hopefully, there never will be. The argument over "Net Neutrality" is about whether or not the U.S. government should introduce legislation forbidding bandwidth throttling by ISPs. It's the "have you stopped beating your wife?" straw man for the Slashdot crowd. You'll notice that this article calls the Supreme Court's decision that the U.S. government shouldn't step in and configure the ISPs' Cisco routers for them, "Backing for Two-Tier Internet":
The US Justice Department has said that internet service providers should be allowed to charge for priority traffic. The agency said it was opposed to 'network neutrality', the idea that all data on the net is treated equally. The comments put the agency at odds with companies such as Microsoft and Google, who have called for legislation to guarantee equal access to the net.
Of course, this would also mean that an enforcement infrastructure would also have to be put in place, making sure that everyone got their "fair share" of said bandwidth, as if backbone routers and POPs just fell off a tree somewhere. God forbid ISPs be allowed to tune the services that they developed and paid for as they wish. Let's let the government decides who gets bandwidth, and how much is enough! That will make it all fair and neutral-like. Whenever a politician uses the word "fair", hang on to your wallet.
Well, my trackbacks are now working, it seems. There's some ugly Python spaghetti-code going on behind the scenes that translates back and forth between absolute urls, non-absolute relative urls, and upper-lower-camel case; but it works.
Trackbacks are only good for Movable Type, though. Which I can't stand anymore. MT used to be the only thing out there, but there's something that really, really, really galls me about the way it rebuilds your entire site into static HTML pages everytime you update a post. I'm sure it's awesomeness if you've got your server running on an old TV remote, but nowadays we're all running our web servers on 100-core 64-bit terahertz moonshot computers that can simultaneously compute π, encode MPEG video, and mix the best goddam margaritas you've ever tasted, all without breaking a sweat.
So yeah, I figured out how to implement trackbacks in Django, to a point where they more or less work. Now why is Wordpress fucking with me? It seems to be thrown off by the fact that Wordpress sends a HEAD request before it downloads and parses the page, in the vain hope that the X-Pingback header will be set. I can't figure out how to do that in Django's generic views, so I just use the secondary method, that being a link element in the XHTML code. But now, whenever a Worpdress blog pings me, I get this kind of crap:
[09/Sep/2007 15:04:23] "GET /blog/2007/sep/08/vacation/ HTTP/1.1" 200 27367
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (104, 'Connection reset by peer')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (32, 'Broken pipe')
Being the half-assed programmer that I am, I am at a total loss. I can't even do a Lazyweb request here, seeing as my 4 visits a day are unlikely to bring the Django HTTP gurus by. I won't be able to sleep at night, thinking of all the enlightened Wordpress Users who are probably out there try to "Keep the discussion going" with me.
Ever since June, when the iPhone went live, I've heard about nothing else in the tech press, nerd podcasts, and the Apple Fanboisphere. Is it really that way over in the States (the only place you can get them), or does the iPhone actually seem to be doing well?
Ahh, my first vacation since joining The Company. My queue is cleaned up, my email is forwarded, and an elaborate Sieve session has accomplished in a mere two hours what less civilized mail systems can do with a key combination: The Corporate Vacation Email.
It's been five months now since I came 'cross the channel and started meeting the natives, learning the lingo, and getting used to the fact that everyone here talks like Pinky. Now, I'll be letting my hair down for the next 10 days or so. As well as putting my poor, broken foot up on the coffee table.
As soon as I get my x-rays back from the socialist medical system (they still copy them with coal rubbings on wax paper over here, apparently), I'll post pictures of the metatarsalar breakage here for your morbid enjoyment. Don't thank me yet.
The other half of Sistaweb will be joining us for the week. We'll allow her to sleep here rent-free for an entire week, even though she refused to bring a carton of cigarettes as payment. Damned non-smokers and their principles. It's like those non-smokers back in the World War II who didn't sign up for cigarette rations. Throwing away a gold mine, that is. Our grandfathers probably had a word for those guys, and if I knew my grandfather at all, that word was sissy-boy.
The girls have rented a wheelchair for me, seeing as I won't be too much fun doing a London pub-crawl on crutches. I've already had a forehead-slapping moment over this, as you probably are right now. Why haven't I thought of taking a wheelchair with me before? That would've come in handy on more than one occasion, the Wreckyll in Jeckyll not least among them.
Man, Apple is on a roll. Not only have they got me hooked for a new computer, a new laptop, a new office package, and a replacement for my aging MythTV box, but now I have to start thinking about a new iPod. Now, let's see what Uncle Steve is going to me be costing me 'til Christmas Time:
Item
Damage
20" iMac
1199.00
Macbook
1099.00
8GB iPod Touch
299.00
AppleTV
299.00
iWork '08
79.00
iLife '08
79.00
Total:
$3,054.00
Not bad for a day's work, Mr. Jobs. And what's up for the rest of September? Maybe some irresistible bionic iFoot to replace the one I broke playing frisbee at the company picnic last week?
Although there's a remarkable lack of iPhone hype around the office, we being a big-time Linux company and all, there's an amazing amount of Mac fanboiism. Pretty much all of us have Macs at home. The explanation for this is simple: After dealing with Linux problems all day long, there's something nice about going home to something you can spend all your time using and not making up excuses for why it looks like shit and doesn't work.
I like Linux, mind you. I use it day-in, day-out for my desktop at work, for my webservers, and it brings in my daily bread. We all love it here, pretty much like a family loves and therefore tolerates the embarrassing second cousin with the Downs'. But people are walking all over the office today buzzing about the upcoming announcement from Apple.
Will it be the long-awaited iMac redesign? Will it be a new Mini? My boss is actually carrying his phone to the pub after work today so he can sit on engadget and get a realtime update. Linus would not be pleased...
Last login: Thu Jul 26 12:17:28 from nat-pool-fab.re Welcome to Darwin! ericbook:~ eric$ mutt -bash: mutt: command not found ericbook:~ eric$ open /Applications/Mail.app/ ericbook:~ eric$
Ahh. Like coming in after a long day of plowing the fields and sticking your aching feet into a pot of hot water. After running Linux all day at work, you feel like slipping into something more comfortable. Sam knows it. Zonker knows it, though he won't admit it. It's the right amount of just-workiness you need to let you relax, while knowing you could, at any given moment, do something like:
OK, here's one with drivel. I do like it, but I have a couple of gripes.
First problem: I was hopelessly confused by the login screen. The type of journal seems to be locked on livejournal, as the drop-down menu for journal types is inexplicably disabled until you enter a username. -1 for usabilty
Second problem: Useless stripping of trailing slash, which mangled my xmlrpc URL. Error 301 was ignored, which makes sense since it's a post and all, but I couldn't log in. It mangled my URL then choked on the error :-/
Third problem: didn't want to download my recent posts. Although there might be a misunderstanding about just what "recent" means.
Fourth problem: Doesn't let me choose post status anywhere. And there's nowhere I can find to choose text filters. This is more of a feature request, really.
Fifth problem: craps out after posting, probably because it keeps mangling the trailing slashes from my URLs. Is there an RFC somewhere that says that POSTS can't end with slashes? Nobody tell the Django folks.
Well, maybe it'll at least let me post to my blog from work every now and then.
Man, I dang sure missed the entire month of June. I've been in the UK now for about two months, and let me tell ya: They sure do get some rain around here. I always thought those stories about English people having gills were legends and fantasies. Now, I'm not so sure.
For the love of GOD, for the last time, in the name of ALL THAT IS HOLY, Cluster Services is NOT COMPATIBLE with 4.5! If you're running a cluster, DO NOT update to 4.5 until the Cluster Suite is UPDATED TO 4.5!
That is all.
P.S. And NO, cmirror is not available yet. Maybe at the end of the month.
I went outside to smoke a cigarette. All rooms in England are for non-smokers, you'll find, as are the rooms, apartments, and houses listed for rent in the local papers. The litany at the end of all the ads reads, "No smokers, canvassers, or DSS", which stands for Department of Social Services. So, okay they hate smokers and welfare cases, as do we all. But the British have their own definition for 'non-smoker', which basically means you only smoke when you drink. Everybody smokes over here, and they all live somewhere.
The evening was cool; almost cold, really, as I suspect the evenings around here generally are. I stood on the corner of Osborne and Netley, watching the blackbirds getting ready to do whatever it is they do at night, when I spied a man, some yards away, bounding up the sidewalk with a jaunty gait. I held my cigarette just in front of my mouth, watching this figure with suspicion. He was short, about 5 feet tall, and round as a soccer ball. He was wearing light-colored trousers and a dark blazer, the left breast of which was adorned with an enormous, orange prize-ribbon.
As he approached me, his features became distinct in the bad lighting, and I realized he was positively beaming with pride. His face was ruddy, and split with a grin that wouldn't have looked out of place behind a wheelbarrow full of poker chips on the way to the cash-out. I placed him in his mid-40s, but maybe his thinning red hair and roly-poly stature made him look older than he really was.
He halted just a few feet from me, and said, with oddly struggling words, "Good evening, mister!"
I looked him up and down, cigarette still burning between my shaky fingers, and replied, "hi, how are ya..." He wobbled his head a bit, then walked around me on his way up the street. I noticed something written in gold on his orange ribbon, and read it as it flashed in the lamplight.
I judged him more than a wee bit 'differently-abled', as they say. I watched as he cautiously crossed the empty street, looking both ways at least twice, then gingerly stepping into the street and crossing it at a run.
I thought about what I had seen written on the ribbon: "A Very Special Boy". Hmm, I thought, I wonder who gave him that? Whoever it was, they made his whole day.
I put my cigarette out and walked back into the guest house.
My buddy Sam sent me an email a couple of days ago indicating that he just might have joined The Family recently. And he joined it a much higher level than I, I might add, considering I'm still lumbering along in the PowerPC world; my G4 Powerbook, though a loyal and trusted friend, seems slow as molasses in January these days.
He also mentioned an old OS/2 habit, one which we separately shared back in the day. I started using OS/2 when I worked at UPS. One of our managers was running 2.1, with the old Presentation Manager that looked like a crappy(er) Windows 2.0, albeit with long filenames and the ability to run concurrent DOS sessions. I avoided it until OS/2 3.0 came out.
In '94, when Warp hit the shelves, I rushed out to Soft-Warehouse1 in Alpharetta, looked in the Operating Systems2 department until I found a box, then gave the man $300 dollars for the privilege of running it. Then, I walked over the desktop applications department, and put down another $495 for Lotus Smartsuite/2. Then I OEM'd 16MB of RAM for about $400 to make it all go.
Now, many may see OS/2 as a butt-ugly cousin of Windows, and they may be right. But back then, it was a work of art. Especially in the sense that it wasn't an exact science getting it to run. Nothing ever really worked like it was supposed to. Without the fallback of a DOS prompt, you had to have a second, fully-functional machine to do things like edit the CONFIG.SYS on the installation floppies to make sure your DASD drivers were loading. And most of the drivers were written so that, if they encountered an error while loading, they'd bork the whole boot process, just to be on the safe side.
The graphical interface also hung constantly. The Workplace Shell, despite (or maybe due to) all its object-orientiness, was horribly unstable. But I never saw a hang that wasn't cured with Control-Alt-Delete. That key combo went right down to the kernel, and always gave a satisfying, unconfirmed reboot, wedged GUI be damned. There was even a 3rd party program called Watchcat that sat on the serial port, or on a secondary Hercules/MCGA monitor, and let you monitor and kill programs remotely. The kernel's Kung Fu was strong like that, but the GUI was just ass.
Now, when Chicago started finally coming down the pipe, and even the Rolling Stones where pulled into the OS marketing world ("Start me up", anyone?), OS/2 fans like myself were sure that this pissant little DOS extender with a homely face wouldn't be the future. It couldn't be the future, it was just too depressing. It still wasn't a 32-bit OS, though the 386 had been out for over 8 years. It still used FAT, for crying out loud. In short, Chicago sucked.
OS/2 seemed like a scrappy little underdog, nipping heroically at the Microsoft behemoth's heels. I'm not sure why it gave that impression. At the time, IBM was much bigger than Microsoft, a huge, multinational corporation with interests in basically every aspect of electronics. They just couldn't write or market good software.
I'm not sure why I just wrote 500 words on OS/2. I actually wanted to write something about Linux.
Software stores used to have a whole "Operating Systems" department, back when there was more than one operating system, and Windows was still called an "Operating Environment" ↩
Man, I'm unprepared. There's a checklist of things you should do before moving to England. I came over here without any money, preparation, or attack plan. There's something unbelievably stupid about this. It worked for me when I moved to Germany, but moving to England's a bit more complicated, apparently. Either that, or I'm remembering it wrong.
But I'm not the only one. The office I'm working in is full of non-British people. It's a rag-tag group of Germans, Italians, Brazilians, Spaniards, one (1) American, and who knows what else that all found themselves in the same boat when they first came over. This despite promises from The Company to help one resettle; promises which are certainly not kept and, when referred to in conversation, change their shape and character like a Democrat on a whistle-stop.
But at some point a kindly soul in the department, now departed, made a list of the reality of the situation. It's a short list of what one really needs to do when moving to England. Unfortunately, I only found out about it after I'd already been here a week. Here's your to-do list once you've arrived in England:
Get a room. If possible, get a rental agreement or any bill with your name and address on it. (proof of address)
Deposit is usually 1 1/2 times the rent. Deposit and first rent is to be paid beforehand. If the room is unfurnished, see "Things to Buy" for shops and example prices.
Get a letter from your office manager (HR Lady) stating that you are working for the company and including your address. (proof of employment)
Get a bank account. Just walk in with your documents:
Passport or national ID card
Proof of employment (see 2.). it might be handy to have your contract with you.
Proof of address
Banks
HSBC – try to get a standard account (they try to sell you an advanced package including insurances etc.)
NatWest – Also recommended as this bank does not charge for withdrawing money from a different bank's cash machines
Give your bank details to The Company
Register with Inland Revenue – this is done by your HR manager. You should get your tax code about 2 weeks later (PAYE Coding Notice)
At the end of the fiscal year (ending April 5th), you will get a "P60 End of Year Certificate" detailing your "Pay and Income Tax" levels.
Get a National Insurance Number by applying at a Job Centre Plus office. They ask for dtails before they schedule an interview appointment to verify your eligibility. Appointments are scheduled about two weeks ahead, and take place in the nearest county office, which usually isn't near at all. Without an NI number, you will be on emergency tax, which is higher than the standard tax rate.
Documents:
Passport
National ID card
Driving License or any other official document identifying you (Birth certificate, police registration, medical card, etc.)
Proof of employment (see 2.)
Recent payslip
Bank statement
Proof of address (utility bill, rental agreement, etc. – see 1.)
It might be handy to have your PAYE Coding Notice with you
As money is paid in a timely manner so it is available on the 27th, try to get your appointment after this date.
If you are British, a citizen of a member state of the EU, or other Commonwealth citizen, you can apply for inclusion on the Register of Electors. This will allow you to vote at local government elections. Your credibility will rise (good for tenancy applications or bank-related matters) and you are obliged to pay Council Taxes1
If you buy any TV or radio equipment, you will be asked for your address, which will be automatically forwarded to the "TV Licensing Office"
Get a Tesco Clubcard
Get a life ;-)
Any address change has to be communicated to all above-mentioned authorities. For the official notices to local council, the TV licensing, and most other on-line services, you can use I am Moving , where you can create/use an account for free.
All of this could have been avoided with a bit of planning. I am bitterly disappointed in myself.
Council taxes are universal as far as I can tell, and are perceived, by the British at least, as an extension of the rent. ↩
Farnborough derives its name from from the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Ferneberga (Fern Hill) and is mentioned in the Domesday Book (1086). But for the coming of the army at nearby Aldershot, the arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flying, Farnborough would probably have remained an isolated heathland village, that is until the latter half of the 20th century when the population moved out of London suburbia and became commuters.
"But for the … arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flight…". That's a pretty big conditional. There are probably a lot of places whose development was seriously affected by railways and the advent of powered flight. But I understand where the good Mr. Parkins is coming from.
I had forgotten the cable to connect my camera to my laptop. Of all the stupid things that I packed for the trip, 50 different USB cables, a USB hub, power adapters for devices I’d forgotten, not to mention devices whose power adapters I’d forgotten, I forgot the one thing that was absolutely necessary and planned-for. Not to mention irreplaceable, seeing as every camera maker in the world decided that their camera’s little hole should look different from all the other cameras’ little holes.
I walked into a little computer store on the strip in Fleet, Hampshire. Walking up to the pasty-faced, teenaged part-timer there, I introduced myself and shook his hand, which seemed to shock him.
He unconsciously wiped his hands on his pants and said, “eh...nice to meet you, sir. What can I do for you?”
I asked him, “do you have any USB card-readers?”
“Um, yeah," he answered. "I think I saw some around here somewhere.”
I looked around the shop, which was organized and clean. Man, he must really be the FNG around here. He finally found what I was looking for, stored on a shelf right next to where he had been sitting. He handed it to me and I started reading the back of the packaging.
“Just looking to see if it works with my Mac,” I told him.
“Oh, it's USB, so it should work,” he answered, and took the reader out of my hand. He moved his lips while he read the package. “Oh, yeah,” he said finally. “Right there it says it: ‘Requires Mac OS 9 or later’.” He looked at me skeptically. “So, you do have OS 9 or later, don’t you?”
“Um, yeah, I think so.” OS 9 went out of style back in the ‘90s.
He moved around to the register, and I handed him my Visa card. He looked uncertain as he turned it over in his hand. “This thing doesn’t have a chip on it?”
I took it back and examined it. “No, I guess it doesn’t.”
“Well, I don’t think we can take that, then.”
“Why don’t you just swipe it,” I said. “Give it a go.”
He shrugged and swiped it through the machine.
From behind me, a voice said, “it’s all chips nowadays, you know.”
I looked around, and saw that an older woman was standing behind me. She looked to be in her mid 40s, and wore a name plate with the store’s logo on it. “You can’t get nothing without a dozen little chips in it.”
I nodded agreement, and turned back to the young man behind the register.
“So, what kind of Mac you got, then?”
“A PowerBook G4.”
He nodded approvingly. “Nice piece of kit, that.” The little machine that had taken my card made a loud ping!, and spit out a receipt. He tore it off and gave it to me to sign, along with the card reader.
“Now, you have a nice day sir, and do please visit us again.”
I thanked him, said goodbye to the chip-lady, and put the small package into my bag next to my laptop. “Thanks, man, I’ll do that.” Nice kid.
Didja ever discover something that made your reality skip a beat? You know how, for just a second, something is so far out of place that you can't even figure out what's wrong with the picture? For example, the Augsburg Wireless-Internet provider Cyberways has had the same guy on their start page for years:
Every time you connect to the internet over public wireless in Augsburg, that dude was right there, staring at you with those soulless black eyes. Like a doll's eyes...
And the weird thing was, I always figured he was the boss at Cyberways. I even thought I saw him once on the tram. I hate it when people use the same stock photos everywhere. Everybody's full of shit. Oh, I guess it's effective use of your cash dollars, seeing as it's cheaper than paying attractive people to work for you. But still, why not just be honest for a split second?
You get this kind of thing all over the Internet, of course. If you've ever shopped for web hosting, you'll notice, after a few visits to the providers' pages, that their employees all kind of look alike. And there's always some woman somewhere holding a laptop at her waist in near-sexual ecstasy over the reasonable shared hosting prices.
It's a leitmotif throughout the enter hosting industry: Shared Webspace=Chick with laptop.
Rube, look, for the last freakin time, look RIGHT when you step off a curb! These people drive on the other side of the F$@&-ing road over here! You wanna get ya brains splattered all over me?
What? I dunno. I'm just kind of sitting around, waiting on things. I just spent way too much time transferring money across European borders, and reclaiming my identity. But the new passports are wonderful pieces of fortitude. Here' s a few quotes from my new passport:
And that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth. - Abraham Lincoln
The principle of free governments adheres to the American soil. It is bedded in it, immovable as its mountains. - Daniel Webster
Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. - George Washington
We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. - excerpt from the Declaration of Independence
Your concept of love may be different, but know that I love this world.
I like reading Scott Adams' blog on occasion. Much like Balph Eubanks, he's glib, amusing, and completely lacking in morality. Take, for example, his latest strawman-laden posting regarding the visit of a certain Mr. Ahmedinejad:
I was happy to hear that NYC didn't allow Iranian President Ahmadinejad
to place a wreath at the WTC site. And I was happy that Columbia
University is rescinding the offer to let him speak. If you let a guy like
that express his views, before long the entire world will want freedom
of speech.
...
If Ahmadinejad thinks he can be our friend by honoring our heroes and
opening a dialog, he underestimates our ability to misinterpret him.
Fucking idiot. I hate him.
Well, there's certainly some rye wit at work here. Yes, it is quite ironic that a country led by a genocidal religious dictator, which the USA most certainly is, would object to a fellow genocidal religious madman visiting its most sensitive cultural site. I mean, Mahmoud's only trying to "open a dialog" here, isn't he? Isn't that the meaning of Ahmedinejad's visit? Isn't Ahmedinejad just exercising "Free Speech", as Adams says? Aren't we wrong in denying this poor man that right?
Aside from the obvious jackassery involved in claiming that a man who directly controls his entire country's media is having trouble getting his point of view out; or that the United Nations will let him speak before the leaders of the world to the point where they forget to blink for an hour; aside from all this, this is not a question of whether or not Mahmoud is allowed to say what he wants. The question is, in accordance with the Grand Unified Theory of Rubean Mechanics, Who's going to pay for it. It's a question of whether or not Americans should be paying for his plane fare, his security, and his accommodation while he's here, pissing on Ground Zero and generating propaganda for totalitarian lobbying groups like MoveOn.org and International ANSWER.
All of Adams' ridiculous assertions never mention the one central fact here: There is no compelling reason for American taxpayers to foot the bill, so this guy, who just held one of his popular "Death to America" parades, can come over here and lecture them on anything. I personally don't much care what Ahmedinejad thinks, I can see the general thrust of his inclinations. He's spitting on the United States and Western Culture daily, and then expects to be treated with deference in return. Fuck him.
This kind of Devil's Advocacy isn't new to Adams. At least, I hope it's just that. He's apparently one of those celebrities that have forgotten the hard work involved in their ascendency, and assume that they're rich because of some accident of nature, akin to divine providence. Humans, himself included, are all just a bunch of "moist robots" with no capacity for thought, no free will; we've apparently just been programmed by Mother Nature to do the things we've done or will do. There is no mind, there is no choice, there is only the stimuli in our environments, and the response that was determined by a chance arrangement of atoms into chemicals during the Big Bang. Or something.
It's an obscene display of thoughtlessness, a conceit of someone trying so hard to seem above all this. Adams' Dilbert is amusing, and his blog is a bit of junk food for the brain at times. But he's got the morals of a two-dollar whore.
Last night we didn't make it. The two Frenchmen surrendered the evening, seeing as it was Trotzky's birthday, and therefore a time for somber reflection or something. So, we rode around big town Farnborough for a couple of hours, grabbed some grub, and then headed back to the apartment to watch a movie.
We watched Fur, which cemented my belief that Nicole Kidman is the perfect woman. Not only does she look good in her own slutty little librarian sort of way, she gives a guy a handjob in this movie while shaving his hairy back. That's my kind of girl, a real little trooper.
Anyhoo, it's back off to London now, for a second try at getting sloppy somewhere besides sitting at home in front of the boob tube. Wish us luck.
Vacation week is winding down, and I'm getting ready to leave the driving to Southwest Trains and go drinking in London. I'll try to keep it under two weeks this time, but no promises. We'll tramp it a bit through Soho, I guess, just me, the girls, and a couple of frog-eaters from the office.
I wonder why I never get to go drinking with Englishmen? It's probably for the best. There's a quote that gets bandied about, especially in the local newspapers, about England being a nation of drunks and scalawags. I can't say much about that, but it does seem that the pubs all close at 11:00 PM for a reason. At 5 o'clock, they pour out of their offices and into the public houses, seemingly on a race against the clock to get themselves 'faced before the early last call.
When they were finally permitted to stay open past 11, in the hope that the binge-drinking would abate in light of longer opening hours, they found themselves doubly-cursed in that the Englishmen were every bit as drunk at 11, but didn't have to go home. All pubs here are set up so that you have to go to the counter to get your drinks, instead of having them brought to your table. There's a built-in handbrake there: a system where you can't get any more drink once you lose the ability to walk is founded upon sound principle and good advices.
I've done nothing today; nothing but clean out the cluttered closets of my preferred newsfeed reader. There were some connections in there that were sorely neglected. I could use a bit more time to wade through the degenerate filth that is my blogroll, but sadly, I work. The Company is tolerant in their control over my time, fair since they do not pay hourly; but tolerance has its limits, and I doubt they would look kindly upon my spending the business day in a fugue state, reading entry after entry of dialectics about Jessica Simpson's tits, or Brittney Spears' overplayed poonanny.
Nevertheless, it saddens me that my everyday is not blessed with the nuggets of wisdom from skippystalin:
Being the only person with an out-of-control substance abuse problem in a relationship is tough. Most romantic couplings are based on common interests and most of my interests culminate in my waking up in a pool of what I think is my own urine and not being quite sure what time zone I'm in. I'm much like a cat in that I have a tendancy of marking my territory with my vomit, blood and gallons of my semen...My ability to smoke, drink and masturbate furiously at the same time might not be much, it's all that I have.
Ahh, skippystalin, how I've missed you, and your nuggets.
This is how I spend my vacation: visiting Stonehenge on one day; reading the melancholy musings of skippystalin the next, picturing him composing scholarly tracts through bitter tears, a crushed Viagra dissolving in a highball of Jack Daniels next to the keyboard, as another long evening fades into a blur of poetry, madness, and vigorous bouts of hate-filled masturbation. And wondering, of the two, which is the more meaningful and fitting monument to humanity?
They should've just burned enjoyeverysandwich to CD, stuck it to the side of Voyager along with its author, and shot the whole lot into space back when they had government funding to do so, all in the name of making a good first impression for whatever aliens were out cruising for an easy meal.
skippystalin's output is prodigious, to be sure, but there was an entire blogroll to consider:
The lunatics are running the asylum over at Straight White Guy's place. Eric's testicles are mentioned, indirectly. Remind me to change my passwords regularly and start using strong encryption.
How stoned do you have to be to cheat on Jessica Alba? I could jack off to Jessica Alba while a big mean dog was chasing me and this idiot is cheating on her. I decided to confront him about this and I screamed at him, hey, what is your problem. And he said I should get off his lawn. And I said, no, no you get off the lawn. You get off. Then he went inside, probably because deep down, he knew I had made some pretty good points.
JimGoad.com is no more, but if you're a Goad fan (ladies!), you can find find him here. Discussion of Brittany's latest, erm, candid photos is also to be found, but be aware that the following picture is used as a visual aid:
This morning we picked up my new wheelchair. It's a sporty European marque, with an aggressive stance, low-profile tires, and a head-turning cherry-red metalflake paint job. It's not that great on the corners, but it'll take any one of y'all on the straightaways.
I've never done time on wheels. On the whole, I found it to be not all that bad. Then again, I don't figure that most wheelchair-bound men my age get to enjoy being pushed around town by a couple of sexy German bloggerettes. Thanks, ladies: the jealous looks from the other local cripples was the icing on the cake. Here's a little something extra for you, babes. (via AoSHQ)
Funny things happen when you're on wheels. I saw a lady I work with while being carted through Tesco's frozen food department. I said hello, and she just looked right through me, steering her cart so as not to make contact with the leper. She probably thought I was going to ask her for some spare change, or if she could wipe me bum for me, or whatever it is that those people want from healthy-legged people. I also noticed that the supermarkets put completely different things down on the bottom three feet of the shelves. All the cool toys are down there, for example, presumably because chil'n's is small. It's also a great altitude to find anti-bedsore medicaments, for some reason.
So, I let myself be pushed by the Weyside in Guildford, where, at one point, a husky young native was required to wheel my fat ass up a steep incline. The Sistas, for all their heart, lacked the muscle to get the job done, so he, being a true-hearted salt-of-earth kind of guy, waved them off and grunted and sweated till I crested the hill. Had the man known that I could have, at any point in time, simply stood up and hobbled up the hill under my own power, he most certainly would have picked me up and broken me over his knee.
Tomorrow morning, we'll be visiting Stonehenge, or Stone'enge, as the locals quaintly call it. We'll also visit the haunted city, Salisbury, to watch the homosexuals. Ta!
I like reading OSNews for some reason. I think I like to catch the geeky news about SkyOS, or the occasional retro curmudgeonry that rolls by about Lotus 1-2-3 or OS/2. Being the old-timer that I am, it's hard to resist a paean from my youth about 10-finger productivity.
Unfortunately, they've become the epicenter of stupid for the tech press. Check out this article, which explodes the myths about competition being good: "Competition is not Good"
'It gives consumers more choice'
Choice is good when there's one agreed base standard, and a number of compatible approaches. For example, there are many Linux distributions, but they are all Linux, and they can all run the same software. They are 'flavours' of the same thing, that is a good choice. People like different flavours.
Competition does not produce easier choices for consumers. All they get is added un-interoperability and complexity with competitive choices.
Now, if you go read that article, which I do not recommend, you'll slowly come to the realization that this moron is just annoyed that he has to make the effort to choose between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. He's willing to surrender his entire free will to some (hopefully) benevolent dictator, abolish brand names, and forsake the free market economy because choosing which format to buy the Firefly special edition box set in is hard. What a hopeless, whiny-assed sissy.
Of course, things don't get better when they start tossing political analysis at you. "Net Neutrality" is one monikers that has overshadowed the thing named. The discussion is often framed in a way that an uninformed listener would assume there was lobbying going on to abolish some sort of laws that are now protecting consumers from big, bad tiered-Internet ninjas.
But: There is no net neutrality legislation, there never was, and hopefully, there never will be. The argument over "Net Neutrality" is about whether or not the U.S. government should introduce legislation forbidding bandwidth throttling by ISPs. It's the "have you stopped beating your wife?" straw man for the Slashdot crowd. You'll notice that this article calls the Supreme Court's decision that the U.S. government shouldn't step in and configure the ISPs' Cisco routers for them, "Backing for Two-Tier Internet":
The US Justice Department has said that internet service providers should be allowed to charge for priority traffic. The agency said it was opposed to 'network neutrality', the idea that all data on the net is treated equally. The comments put the agency at odds with companies such as Microsoft and Google, who have called for legislation to guarantee equal access to the net.
Of course, this would also mean that an enforcement infrastructure would also have to be put in place, making sure that everyone got their "fair share" of said bandwidth, as if backbone routers and POPs just fell off a tree somewhere. God forbid ISPs be allowed to tune the services that they developed and paid for as they wish. Let's let the government decides who gets bandwidth, and how much is enough! That will make it all fair and neutral-like. Whenever a politician uses the word "fair", hang on to your wallet.
Well, my trackbacks are now working, it seems. There's some ugly Python spaghetti-code going on behind the scenes that translates back and forth between absolute urls, non-absolute relative urls, and upper-lower-camel case; but it works.
Trackbacks are only good for Movable Type, though. Which I can't stand anymore. MT used to be the only thing out there, but there's something that really, really, really galls me about the way it rebuilds your entire site into static HTML pages everytime you update a post. I'm sure it's awesomeness if you've got your server running on an old TV remote, but nowadays we're all running our web servers on 100-core 64-bit terahertz moonshot computers that can simultaneously compute π, encode MPEG video, and mix the best goddam margaritas you've ever tasted, all without breaking a sweat.
So yeah, I figured out how to implement trackbacks in Django, to a point where they more or less work. Now why is Wordpress fucking with me? It seems to be thrown off by the fact that Wordpress sends a HEAD request before it downloads and parses the page, in the vain hope that the X-Pingback header will be set. I can't figure out how to do that in Django's generic views, so I just use the secondary method, that being a link element in the XHTML code. But now, whenever a Worpdress blog pings me, I get this kind of crap:
[09/Sep/2007 15:04:23] "GET /blog/2007/sep/08/vacation/ HTTP/1.1" 200 27367
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (104, 'Connection reset by peer')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (32, 'Broken pipe')
Being the half-assed programmer that I am, I am at a total loss. I can't even do a Lazyweb request here, seeing as my 4 visits a day are unlikely to bring the Django HTTP gurus by. I won't be able to sleep at night, thinking of all the enlightened Wordpress Users who are probably out there try to "Keep the discussion going" with me.
Ever since June, when the iPhone went live, I've heard about nothing else in the tech press, nerd podcasts, and the Apple Fanboisphere. Is it really that way over in the States (the only place you can get them), or does the iPhone actually seem to be doing well?
Ahh, my first vacation since joining The Company. My queue is cleaned up, my email is forwarded, and an elaborate Sieve session has accomplished in a mere two hours what less civilized mail systems can do with a key combination: The Corporate Vacation Email.
It's been five months now since I came 'cross the channel and started meeting the natives, learning the lingo, and getting used to the fact that everyone here talks like Pinky. Now, I'll be letting my hair down for the next 10 days or so. As well as putting my poor, broken foot up on the coffee table.
As soon as I get my x-rays back from the socialist medical system (they still copy them with coal rubbings on wax paper over here, apparently), I'll post pictures of the metatarsalar breakage here for your morbid enjoyment. Don't thank me yet.
The other half of Sistaweb will be joining us for the week. We'll allow her to sleep here rent-free for an entire week, even though she refused to bring a carton of cigarettes as payment. Damned non-smokers and their principles. It's like those non-smokers back in the World War II who didn't sign up for cigarette rations. Throwing away a gold mine, that is. Our grandfathers probably had a word for those guys, and if I knew my grandfather at all, that word was sissy-boy.
The girls have rented a wheelchair for me, seeing as I won't be too much fun doing a London pub-crawl on crutches. I've already had a forehead-slapping moment over this, as you probably are right now. Why haven't I thought of taking a wheelchair with me before? That would've come in handy on more than one occasion, the Wreckyll in Jeckyll not least among them.
Man, Apple is on a roll. Not only have they got me hooked for a new computer, a new laptop, a new office package, and a replacement for my aging MythTV box, but now I have to start thinking about a new iPod. Now, let's see what Uncle Steve is going to me be costing me 'til Christmas Time:
Item
Damage
20" iMac
1199.00
Macbook
1099.00
8GB iPod Touch
299.00
AppleTV
299.00
iWork '08
79.00
iLife '08
79.00
Total:
$3,054.00
Not bad for a day's work, Mr. Jobs. And what's up for the rest of September? Maybe some irresistible bionic iFoot to replace the one I broke playing frisbee at the company picnic last week?
Although there's a remarkable lack of iPhone hype around the office, we being a big-time Linux company and all, there's an amazing amount of Mac fanboiism. Pretty much all of us have Macs at home. The explanation for this is simple: After dealing with Linux problems all day long, there's something nice about going home to something you can spend all your time using and not making up excuses for why it looks like shit and doesn't work.
I like Linux, mind you. I use it day-in, day-out for my desktop at work, for my webservers, and it brings in my daily bread. We all love it here, pretty much like a family loves and therefore tolerates the embarrassing second cousin with the Downs'. But people are walking all over the office today buzzing about the upcoming announcement from Apple.
Will it be the long-awaited iMac redesign? Will it be a new Mini? My boss is actually carrying his phone to the pub after work today so he can sit on engadget and get a realtime update. Linus would not be pleased...
Last login: Thu Jul 26 12:17:28 from nat-pool-fab.re Welcome to Darwin! ericbook:~ eric$ mutt -bash: mutt: command not found ericbook:~ eric$ open /Applications/Mail.app/ ericbook:~ eric$
Ahh. Like coming in after a long day of plowing the fields and sticking your aching feet into a pot of hot water. After running Linux all day at work, you feel like slipping into something more comfortable. Sam knows it. Zonker knows it, though he won't admit it. It's the right amount of just-workiness you need to let you relax, while knowing you could, at any given moment, do something like:
OK, here's one with drivel. I do like it, but I have a couple of gripes.
First problem: I was hopelessly confused by the login screen. The type of journal seems to be locked on livejournal, as the drop-down menu for journal types is inexplicably disabled until you enter a username. -1 for usabilty
Second problem: Useless stripping of trailing slash, which mangled my xmlrpc URL. Error 301 was ignored, which makes sense since it's a post and all, but I couldn't log in. It mangled my URL then choked on the error :-/
Third problem: didn't want to download my recent posts. Although there might be a misunderstanding about just what "recent" means.
Fourth problem: Doesn't let me choose post status anywhere. And there's nowhere I can find to choose text filters. This is more of a feature request, really.
Fifth problem: craps out after posting, probably because it keeps mangling the trailing slashes from my URLs. Is there an RFC somewhere that says that POSTS can't end with slashes? Nobody tell the Django folks.
Well, maybe it'll at least let me post to my blog from work every now and then.
Man, I dang sure missed the entire month of June. I've been in the UK now for about two months, and let me tell ya: They sure do get some rain around here. I always thought those stories about English people having gills were legends and fantasies. Now, I'm not so sure.
For the love of GOD, for the last time, in the name of ALL THAT IS HOLY, Cluster Services is NOT COMPATIBLE with 4.5! If you're running a cluster, DO NOT update to 4.5 until the Cluster Suite is UPDATED TO 4.5!
That is all.
P.S. And NO, cmirror is not available yet. Maybe at the end of the month.
I went outside to smoke a cigarette. All rooms in England are for non-smokers, you'll find, as are the rooms, apartments, and houses listed for rent in the local papers. The litany at the end of all the ads reads, "No smokers, canvassers, or DSS", which stands for Department of Social Services. So, okay they hate smokers and welfare cases, as do we all. But the British have their own definition for 'non-smoker', which basically means you only smoke when you drink. Everybody smokes over here, and they all live somewhere.
The evening was cool; almost cold, really, as I suspect the evenings around here generally are. I stood on the corner of Osborne and Netley, watching the blackbirds getting ready to do whatever it is they do at night, when I spied a man, some yards away, bounding up the sidewalk with a jaunty gait. I held my cigarette just in front of my mouth, watching this figure with suspicion. He was short, about 5 feet tall, and round as a soccer ball. He was wearing light-colored trousers and a dark blazer, the left breast of which was adorned with an enormous, orange prize-ribbon.
As he approached me, his features became distinct in the bad lighting, and I realized he was positively beaming with pride. His face was ruddy, and split with a grin that wouldn't have looked out of place behind a wheelbarrow full of poker chips on the way to the cash-out. I placed him in his mid-40s, but maybe his thinning red hair and roly-poly stature made him look older than he really was.
He halted just a few feet from me, and said, with oddly struggling words, "Good evening, mister!"
I looked him up and down, cigarette still burning between my shaky fingers, and replied, "hi, how are ya..." He wobbled his head a bit, then walked around me on his way up the street. I noticed something written in gold on his orange ribbon, and read it as it flashed in the lamplight.
I judged him more than a wee bit 'differently-abled', as they say. I watched as he cautiously crossed the empty street, looking both ways at least twice, then gingerly stepping into the street and crossing it at a run.
I thought about what I had seen written on the ribbon: "A Very Special Boy". Hmm, I thought, I wonder who gave him that? Whoever it was, they made his whole day.
I put my cigarette out and walked back into the guest house.
My buddy Sam sent me an email a couple of days ago indicating that he just might have joined The Family recently. And he joined it a much higher level than I, I might add, considering I'm still lumbering along in the PowerPC world; my G4 Powerbook, though a loyal and trusted friend, seems slow as molasses in January these days.
He also mentioned an old OS/2 habit, one which we separately shared back in the day. I started using OS/2 when I worked at UPS. One of our managers was running 2.1, with the old Presentation Manager that looked like a crappy(er) Windows 2.0, albeit with long filenames and the ability to run concurrent DOS sessions. I avoided it until OS/2 3.0 came out.
In '94, when Warp hit the shelves, I rushed out to Soft-Warehouse1 in Alpharetta, looked in the Operating Systems2 department until I found a box, then gave the man $300 dollars for the privilege of running it. Then, I walked over the desktop applications department, and put down another $495 for Lotus Smartsuite/2. Then I OEM'd 16MB of RAM for about $400 to make it all go.
Now, many may see OS/2 as a butt-ugly cousin of Windows, and they may be right. But back then, it was a work of art. Especially in the sense that it wasn't an exact science getting it to run. Nothing ever really worked like it was supposed to. Without the fallback of a DOS prompt, you had to have a second, fully-functional machine to do things like edit the CONFIG.SYS on the installation floppies to make sure your DASD drivers were loading. And most of the drivers were written so that, if they encountered an error while loading, they'd bork the whole boot process, just to be on the safe side.
The graphical interface also hung constantly. The Workplace Shell, despite (or maybe due to) all its object-orientiness, was horribly unstable. But I never saw a hang that wasn't cured with Control-Alt-Delete. That key combo went right down to the kernel, and always gave a satisfying, unconfirmed reboot, wedged GUI be damned. There was even a 3rd party program called Watchcat that sat on the serial port, or on a secondary Hercules/MCGA monitor, and let you monitor and kill programs remotely. The kernel's Kung Fu was strong like that, but the GUI was just ass.
Now, when Chicago started finally coming down the pipe, and even the Rolling Stones where pulled into the OS marketing world ("Start me up", anyone?), OS/2 fans like myself were sure that this pissant little DOS extender with a homely face wouldn't be the future. It couldn't be the future, it was just too depressing. It still wasn't a 32-bit OS, though the 386 had been out for over 8 years. It still used FAT, for crying out loud. In short, Chicago sucked.
OS/2 seemed like a scrappy little underdog, nipping heroically at the Microsoft behemoth's heels. I'm not sure why it gave that impression. At the time, IBM was much bigger than Microsoft, a huge, multinational corporation with interests in basically every aspect of electronics. They just couldn't write or market good software.
I'm not sure why I just wrote 500 words on OS/2. I actually wanted to write something about Linux.
Software stores used to have a whole "Operating Systems" department, back when there was more than one operating system, and Windows was still called an "Operating Environment" ↩
Man, I'm unprepared. There's a checklist of things you should do before moving to England. I came over here without any money, preparation, or attack plan. There's something unbelievably stupid about this. It worked for me when I moved to Germany, but moving to England's a bit more complicated, apparently. Either that, or I'm remembering it wrong.
But I'm not the only one. The office I'm working in is full of non-British people. It's a rag-tag group of Germans, Italians, Brazilians, Spaniards, one (1) American, and who knows what else that all found themselves in the same boat when they first came over. This despite promises from The Company to help one resettle; promises which are certainly not kept and, when referred to in conversation, change their shape and character like a Democrat on a whistle-stop.
But at some point a kindly soul in the department, now departed, made a list of the reality of the situation. It's a short list of what one really needs to do when moving to England. Unfortunately, I only found out about it after I'd already been here a week. Here's your to-do list once you've arrived in England:
Get a room. If possible, get a rental agreement or any bill with your name and address on it. (proof of address)
Deposit is usually 1 1/2 times the rent. Deposit and first rent is to be paid beforehand. If the room is unfurnished, see "Things to Buy" for shops and example prices.
Get a letter from your office manager (HR Lady) stating that you are working for the company and including your address. (proof of employment)
Get a bank account. Just walk in with your documents:
Passport or national ID card
Proof of employment (see 2.). it might be handy to have your contract with you.
Proof of address
Banks
HSBC – try to get a standard account (they try to sell you an advanced package including insurances etc.)
NatWest – Also recommended as this bank does not charge for withdrawing money from a different bank's cash machines
Give your bank details to The Company
Register with Inland Revenue – this is done by your HR manager. You should get your tax code about 2 weeks later (PAYE Coding Notice)
At the end of the fiscal year (ending April 5th), you will get a "P60 End of Year Certificate" detailing your "Pay and Income Tax" levels.
Get a National Insurance Number by applying at a Job Centre Plus office. They ask for dtails before they schedule an interview appointment to verify your eligibility. Appointments are scheduled about two weeks ahead, and take place in the nearest county office, which usually isn't near at all. Without an NI number, you will be on emergency tax, which is higher than the standard tax rate.
Documents:
Passport
National ID card
Driving License or any other official document identifying you (Birth certificate, police registration, medical card, etc.)
Proof of employment (see 2.)
Recent payslip
Bank statement
Proof of address (utility bill, rental agreement, etc. – see 1.)
It might be handy to have your PAYE Coding Notice with you
As money is paid in a timely manner so it is available on the 27th, try to get your appointment after this date.
If you are British, a citizen of a member state of the EU, or other Commonwealth citizen, you can apply for inclusion on the Register of Electors. This will allow you to vote at local government elections. Your credibility will rise (good for tenancy applications or bank-related matters) and you are obliged to pay Council Taxes1
If you buy any TV or radio equipment, you will be asked for your address, which will be automatically forwarded to the "TV Licensing Office"
Get a Tesco Clubcard
Get a life ;-)
Any address change has to be communicated to all above-mentioned authorities. For the official notices to local council, the TV licensing, and most other on-line services, you can use I am Moving , where you can create/use an account for free.
All of this could have been avoided with a bit of planning. I am bitterly disappointed in myself.
Council taxes are universal as far as I can tell, and are perceived, by the British at least, as an extension of the rent. ↩
Farnborough derives its name from from the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Ferneberga (Fern Hill) and is mentioned in the Domesday Book (1086). But for the coming of the army at nearby Aldershot, the arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flying, Farnborough would probably have remained an isolated heathland village, that is until the latter half of the 20th century when the population moved out of London suburbia and became commuters.
"But for the … arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flight…". That's a pretty big conditional. There are probably a lot of places whose development was seriously affected by railways and the advent of powered flight. But I understand where the good Mr. Parkins is coming from.
I had forgotten the cable to connect my camera to my laptop. Of all the stupid things that I packed for the trip, 50 different USB cables, a USB hub, power adapters for devices I’d forgotten, not to mention devices whose power adapters I’d forgotten, I forgot the one thing that was absolutely necessary and planned-for. Not to mention irreplaceable, seeing as every camera maker in the world decided that their camera’s little hole should look different from all the other cameras’ little holes.
I walked into a little computer store on the strip in Fleet, Hampshire. Walking up to the pasty-faced, teenaged part-timer there, I introduced myself and shook his hand, which seemed to shock him.
He unconsciously wiped his hands on his pants and said, “eh...nice to meet you, sir. What can I do for you?”
I asked him, “do you have any USB card-readers?”
“Um, yeah," he answered. "I think I saw some around here somewhere.”
I looked around the shop, which was organized and clean. Man, he must really be the FNG around here. He finally found what I was looking for, stored on a shelf right next to where he had been sitting. He handed it to me and I started reading the back of the packaging.
“Just looking to see if it works with my Mac,” I told him.
“Oh, it's USB, so it should work,” he answered, and took the reader out of my hand. He moved his lips while he read the package. “Oh, yeah,” he said finally. “Right there it says it: ‘Requires Mac OS 9 or later’.” He looked at me skeptically. “So, you do have OS 9 or later, don’t you?”
“Um, yeah, I think so.” OS 9 went out of style back in the ‘90s.
He moved around to the register, and I handed him my Visa card. He looked uncertain as he turned it over in his hand. “This thing doesn’t have a chip on it?”
I took it back and examined it. “No, I guess it doesn’t.”
“Well, I don’t think we can take that, then.”
“Why don’t you just swipe it,” I said. “Give it a go.”
He shrugged and swiped it through the machine.
From behind me, a voice said, “it’s all chips nowadays, you know.”
I looked around, and saw that an older woman was standing behind me. She looked to be in her mid 40s, and wore a name plate with the store’s logo on it. “You can’t get nothing without a dozen little chips in it.”
I nodded agreement, and turned back to the young man behind the register.
“So, what kind of Mac you got, then?”
“A PowerBook G4.”
He nodded approvingly. “Nice piece of kit, that.” The little machine that had taken my card made a loud ping!, and spit out a receipt. He tore it off and gave it to me to sign, along with the card reader.
“Now, you have a nice day sir, and do please visit us again.”
I thanked him, said goodbye to the chip-lady, and put the small package into my bag next to my laptop. “Thanks, man, I’ll do that.” Nice kid.
Didja ever discover something that made your reality skip a beat? You know how, for just a second, something is so far out of place that you can't even figure out what's wrong with the picture? For example, the Augsburg Wireless-Internet provider Cyberways has had the same guy on their start page for years:
Every time you connect to the internet over public wireless in Augsburg, that dude was right there, staring at you with those soulless black eyes. Like a doll's eyes...
And the weird thing was, I always figured he was the boss at Cyberways. I even thought I saw him once on the tram. I hate it when people use the same stock photos everywhere. Everybody's full of shit. Oh, I guess it's effective use of your cash dollars, seeing as it's cheaper than paying attractive people to work for you. But still, why not just be honest for a split second?
You get this kind of thing all over the Internet, of course. If you've ever shopped for web hosting, you'll notice, after a few visits to the providers' pages, that their employees all kind of look alike. And there's always some woman somewhere holding a laptop at her waist in near-sexual ecstasy over the reasonable shared hosting prices.
It's a leitmotif throughout the enter hosting industry: Shared Webspace=Chick with laptop.
Rube, look, for the last freakin time, look RIGHT when you step off a curb! These people drive on the other side of the F$@&-ing road over here! You wanna get ya brains splattered all over me?
What? I dunno. I'm just kind of sitting around, waiting on things. I just spent way too much time transferring money across European borders, and reclaiming my identity. But the new passports are wonderful pieces of fortitude. Here' s a few quotes from my new passport:
And that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth. - Abraham Lincoln
The principle of free governments adheres to the American soil. It is bedded in it, immovable as its mountains. - Daniel Webster
Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. - George Washington
We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. - excerpt from the Declaration of Independence
Your concept of love may be different, but know that I love this world.
I like reading Scott Adams' blog on occasion. Much like Balph Eubanks, he's glib, amusing, and completely lacking in morality. Take, for example, his latest strawman-laden posting regarding the visit of a certain Mr. Ahmedinejad:
I was happy to hear that NYC didn't allow Iranian President Ahmadinejad
to place a wreath at the WTC site. And I was happy that Columbia
University is rescinding the offer to let him speak. If you let a guy like
that express his views, before long the entire world will want freedom
of speech.
...
If Ahmadinejad thinks he can be our friend by honoring our heroes and
opening a dialog, he underestimates our ability to misinterpret him.
Fucking idiot. I hate him.
Well, there's certainly some rye wit at work here. Yes, it is quite ironic that a country led by a genocidal religious dictator, which the USA most certainly is, would object to a fellow genocidal religious madman visiting its most sensitive cultural site. I mean, Mahmoud's only trying to "open a dialog" here, isn't he? Isn't that the meaning of Ahmedinejad's visit? Isn't Ahmedinejad just exercising "Free Speech", as Adams says? Aren't we wrong in denying this poor man that right?
Aside from the obvious jackassery involved in claiming that a man who directly controls his entire country's media is having trouble getting his point of view out; or that the United Nations will let him speak before the leaders of the world to the point where they forget to blink for an hour; aside from all this, this is not a question of whether or not Mahmoud is allowed to say what he wants. The question is, in accordance with the Grand Unified Theory of Rubean Mechanics, Who's going to pay for it. It's a question of whether or not Americans should be paying for his plane fare, his security, and his accommodation while he's here, pissing on Ground Zero and generating propaganda for totalitarian lobbying groups like MoveOn.org and International ANSWER.
All of Adams' ridiculous assertions never mention the one central fact here: There is no compelling reason for American taxpayers to foot the bill, so this guy, who just held one of his popular "Death to America" parades, can come over here and lecture them on anything. I personally don't much care what Ahmedinejad thinks, I can see the general thrust of his inclinations. He's spitting on the United States and Western Culture daily, and then expects to be treated with deference in return. Fuck him.
This kind of Devil's Advocacy isn't new to Adams. At least, I hope it's just that. He's apparently one of those celebrities that have forgotten the hard work involved in their ascendency, and assume that they're rich because of some accident of nature, akin to divine providence. Humans, himself included, are all just a bunch of "moist robots" with no capacity for thought, no free will; we've apparently just been programmed by Mother Nature to do the things we've done or will do. There is no mind, there is no choice, there is only the stimuli in our environments, and the response that was determined by a chance arrangement of atoms into chemicals during the Big Bang. Or something.
It's an obscene display of thoughtlessness, a conceit of someone trying so hard to seem above all this. Adams' Dilbert is amusing, and his blog is a bit of junk food for the brain at times. But he's got the morals of a two-dollar whore.
Last night we didn't make it. The two Frenchmen surrendered the evening, seeing as it was Trotzky's birthday, and therefore a time for somber reflection or something. So, we rode around big town Farnborough for a couple of hours, grabbed some grub, and then headed back to the apartment to watch a movie.
We watched Fur, which cemented my belief that Nicole Kidman is the perfect woman. Not only does she look good in her own slutty little librarian sort of way, she gives a guy a handjob in this movie while shaving his hairy back. That's my kind of girl, a real little trooper.
Anyhoo, it's back off to London now, for a second try at getting sloppy somewhere besides sitting at home in front of the boob tube. Wish us luck.
Vacation week is winding down, and I'm getting ready to leave the driving to Southwest Trains and go drinking in London. I'll try to keep it under two weeks this time, but no promises. We'll tramp it a bit through Soho, I guess, just me, the girls, and a couple of frog-eaters from the office.
I wonder why I never get to go drinking with Englishmen? It's probably for the best. There's a quote that gets bandied about, especially in the local newspapers, about England being a nation of drunks and scalawags. I can't say much about that, but it does seem that the pubs all close at 11:00 PM for a reason. At 5 o'clock, they pour out of their offices and into the public houses, seemingly on a race against the clock to get themselves 'faced before the early last call.
When they were finally permitted to stay open past 11, in the hope that the binge-drinking would abate in light of longer opening hours, they found themselves doubly-cursed in that the Englishmen were every bit as drunk at 11, but didn't have to go home. All pubs here are set up so that you have to go to the counter to get your drinks, instead of having them brought to your table. There's a built-in handbrake there: a system where you can't get any more drink once you lose the ability to walk is founded upon sound principle and good advices.
I've done nothing today; nothing but clean out the cluttered closets of my preferred newsfeed reader. There were some connections in there that were sorely neglected. I could use a bit more time to wade through the degenerate filth that is my blogroll, but sadly, I work. The Company is tolerant in their control over my time, fair since they do not pay hourly; but tolerance has its limits, and I doubt they would look kindly upon my spending the business day in a fugue state, reading entry after entry of dialectics about Jessica Simpson's tits, or Brittney Spears' overplayed poonanny.
Nevertheless, it saddens me that my everyday is not blessed with the nuggets of wisdom from skippystalin:
Being the only person with an out-of-control substance abuse problem in a relationship is tough. Most romantic couplings are based on common interests and most of my interests culminate in my waking up in a pool of what I think is my own urine and not being quite sure what time zone I'm in. I'm much like a cat in that I have a tendancy of marking my territory with my vomit, blood and gallons of my semen...My ability to smoke, drink and masturbate furiously at the same time might not be much, it's all that I have.
Ahh, skippystalin, how I've missed you, and your nuggets.
This is how I spend my vacation: visiting Stonehenge on one day; reading the melancholy musings of skippystalin the next, picturing him composing scholarly tracts through bitter tears, a crushed Viagra dissolving in a highball of Jack Daniels next to the keyboard, as another long evening fades into a blur of poetry, madness, and vigorous bouts of hate-filled masturbation. And wondering, of the two, which is the more meaningful and fitting monument to humanity?
They should've just burned enjoyeverysandwich to CD, stuck it to the side of Voyager along with its author, and shot the whole lot into space back when they had government funding to do so, all in the name of making a good first impression for whatever aliens were out cruising for an easy meal.
skippystalin's output is prodigious, to be sure, but there was an entire blogroll to consider:
The lunatics are running the asylum over at Straight White Guy's place. Eric's testicles are mentioned, indirectly. Remind me to change my passwords regularly and start using strong encryption.
How stoned do you have to be to cheat on Jessica Alba? I could jack off to Jessica Alba while a big mean dog was chasing me and this idiot is cheating on her. I decided to confront him about this and I screamed at him, hey, what is your problem. And he said I should get off his lawn. And I said, no, no you get off the lawn. You get off. Then he went inside, probably because deep down, he knew I had made some pretty good points.
JimGoad.com is no more, but if you're a Goad fan (ladies!), you can find find him here. Discussion of Brittany's latest, erm, candid photos is also to be found, but be aware that the following picture is used as a visual aid:
This morning we picked up my new wheelchair. It's a sporty European marque, with an aggressive stance, low-profile tires, and a head-turning cherry-red metalflake paint job. It's not that great on the corners, but it'll take any one of y'all on the straightaways.
I've never done time on wheels. On the whole, I found it to be not all that bad. Then again, I don't figure that most wheelchair-bound men my age get to enjoy being pushed around town by a couple of sexy German bloggerettes. Thanks, ladies: the jealous looks from the other local cripples was the icing on the cake. Here's a little something extra for you, babes. (via AoSHQ)
Funny things happen when you're on wheels. I saw a lady I work with while being carted through Tesco's frozen food department. I said hello, and she just looked right through me, steering her cart so as not to make contact with the leper. She probably thought I was going to ask her for some spare change, or if she could wipe me bum for me, or whatever it is that those people want from healthy-legged people. I also noticed that the supermarkets put completely different things down on the bottom three feet of the shelves. All the cool toys are down there, for example, presumably because chil'n's is small. It's also a great altitude to find anti-bedsore medicaments, for some reason.
So, I let myself be pushed by the Weyside in Guildford, where, at one point, a husky young native was required to wheel my fat ass up a steep incline. The Sistas, for all their heart, lacked the muscle to get the job done, so he, being a true-hearted salt-of-earth kind of guy, waved them off and grunted and sweated till I crested the hill. Had the man known that I could have, at any point in time, simply stood up and hobbled up the hill under my own power, he most certainly would have picked me up and broken me over his knee.
Tomorrow morning, we'll be visiting Stonehenge, or Stone'enge, as the locals quaintly call it. We'll also visit the haunted city, Salisbury, to watch the homosexuals. Ta!
I like reading OSNews for some reason. I think I like to catch the geeky news about SkyOS, or the occasional retro curmudgeonry that rolls by about Lotus 1-2-3 or OS/2. Being the old-timer that I am, it's hard to resist a paean from my youth about 10-finger productivity.
Unfortunately, they've become the epicenter of stupid for the tech press. Check out this article, which explodes the myths about competition being good: "Competition is not Good"
'It gives consumers more choice'
Choice is good when there's one agreed base standard, and a number of compatible approaches. For example, there are many Linux distributions, but they are all Linux, and they can all run the same software. They are 'flavours' of the same thing, that is a good choice. People like different flavours.
Competition does not produce easier choices for consumers. All they get is added un-interoperability and complexity with competitive choices.
Now, if you go read that article, which I do not recommend, you'll slowly come to the realization that this moron is just annoyed that he has to make the effort to choose between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. He's willing to surrender his entire free will to some (hopefully) benevolent dictator, abolish brand names, and forsake the free market economy because choosing which format to buy the Firefly special edition box set in is hard. What a hopeless, whiny-assed sissy.
Of course, things don't get better when they start tossing political analysis at you. "Net Neutrality" is one monikers that has overshadowed the thing named. The discussion is often framed in a way that an uninformed listener would assume there was lobbying going on to abolish some sort of laws that are now protecting consumers from big, bad tiered-Internet ninjas.
But: There is no net neutrality legislation, there never was, and hopefully, there never will be. The argument over "Net Neutrality" is about whether or not the U.S. government should introduce legislation forbidding bandwidth throttling by ISPs. It's the "have you stopped beating your wife?" straw man for the Slashdot crowd. You'll notice that this article calls the Supreme Court's decision that the U.S. government shouldn't step in and configure the ISPs' Cisco routers for them, "Backing for Two-Tier Internet":
The US Justice Department has said that internet service providers should be allowed to charge for priority traffic. The agency said it was opposed to 'network neutrality', the idea that all data on the net is treated equally. The comments put the agency at odds with companies such as Microsoft and Google, who have called for legislation to guarantee equal access to the net.
Of course, this would also mean that an enforcement infrastructure would also have to be put in place, making sure that everyone got their "fair share" of said bandwidth, as if backbone routers and POPs just fell off a tree somewhere. God forbid ISPs be allowed to tune the services that they developed and paid for as they wish. Let's let the government decides who gets bandwidth, and how much is enough! That will make it all fair and neutral-like. Whenever a politician uses the word "fair", hang on to your wallet.
Well, my trackbacks are now working, it seems. There's some ugly Python spaghetti-code going on behind the scenes that translates back and forth between absolute urls, non-absolute relative urls, and upper-lower-camel case; but it works.
Trackbacks are only good for Movable Type, though. Which I can't stand anymore. MT used to be the only thing out there, but there's something that really, really, really galls me about the way it rebuilds your entire site into static HTML pages everytime you update a post. I'm sure it's awesomeness if you've got your server running on an old TV remote, but nowadays we're all running our web servers on 100-core 64-bit terahertz moonshot computers that can simultaneously compute π, encode MPEG video, and mix the best goddam margaritas you've ever tasted, all without breaking a sweat.
So yeah, I figured out how to implement trackbacks in Django, to a point where they more or less work. Now why is Wordpress fucking with me? It seems to be thrown off by the fact that Wordpress sends a HEAD request before it downloads and parses the page, in the vain hope that the X-Pingback header will be set. I can't figure out how to do that in Django's generic views, so I just use the secondary method, that being a link element in the XHTML code. But now, whenever a Worpdress blog pings me, I get this kind of crap:
[09/Sep/2007 15:04:23] "GET /blog/2007/sep/08/vacation/ HTTP/1.1" 200 27367
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (104, 'Connection reset by peer')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (32, 'Broken pipe')
Being the half-assed programmer that I am, I am at a total loss. I can't even do a Lazyweb request here, seeing as my 4 visits a day are unlikely to bring the Django HTTP gurus by. I won't be able to sleep at night, thinking of all the enlightened Wordpress Users who are probably out there try to "Keep the discussion going" with me.
Ever since June, when the iPhone went live, I've heard about nothing else in the tech press, nerd podcasts, and the Apple Fanboisphere. Is it really that way over in the States (the only place you can get them), or does the iPhone actually seem to be doing well?
Ahh, my first vacation since joining The Company. My queue is cleaned up, my email is forwarded, and an elaborate Sieve session has accomplished in a mere two hours what less civilized mail systems can do with a key combination: The Corporate Vacation Email.
It's been five months now since I came 'cross the channel and started meeting the natives, learning the lingo, and getting used to the fact that everyone here talks like Pinky. Now, I'll be letting my hair down for the next 10 days or so. As well as putting my poor, broken foot up on the coffee table.
As soon as I get my x-rays back from the socialist medical system (they still copy them with coal rubbings on wax paper over here, apparently), I'll post pictures of the metatarsalar breakage here for your morbid enjoyment. Don't thank me yet.
The other half of Sistaweb will be joining us for the week. We'll allow her to sleep here rent-free for an entire week, even though she refused to bring a carton of cigarettes as payment. Damned non-smokers and their principles. It's like those non-smokers back in the World War II who didn't sign up for cigarette rations. Throwing away a gold mine, that is. Our grandfathers probably had a word for those guys, and if I knew my grandfather at all, that word was sissy-boy.
The girls have rented a wheelchair for me, seeing as I won't be too much fun doing a London pub-crawl on crutches. I've already had a forehead-slapping moment over this, as you probably are right now. Why haven't I thought of taking a wheelchair with me before? That would've come in handy on more than one occasion, the Wreckyll in Jeckyll not least among them.
Man, Apple is on a roll. Not only have they got me hooked for a new computer, a new laptop, a new office package, and a replacement for my aging MythTV box, but now I have to start thinking about a new iPod. Now, let's see what Uncle Steve is going to me be costing me 'til Christmas Time:
Item
Damage
20" iMac
1199.00
Macbook
1099.00
8GB iPod Touch
299.00
AppleTV
299.00
iWork '08
79.00
iLife '08
79.00
Total:
$3,054.00
Not bad for a day's work, Mr. Jobs. And what's up for the rest of September? Maybe some irresistible bionic iFoot to replace the one I broke playing frisbee at the company picnic last week?
Although there's a remarkable lack of iPhone hype around the office, we being a big-time Linux company and all, there's an amazing amount of Mac fanboiism. Pretty much all of us have Macs at home. The explanation for this is simple: After dealing with Linux problems all day long, there's something nice about going home to something you can spend all your time using and not making up excuses for why it looks like shit and doesn't work.
I like Linux, mind you. I use it day-in, day-out for my desktop at work, for my webservers, and it brings in my daily bread. We all love it here, pretty much like a family loves and therefore tolerates the embarrassing second cousin with the Downs'. But people are walking all over the office today buzzing about the upcoming announcement from Apple.
Will it be the long-awaited iMac redesign? Will it be a new Mini? My boss is actually carrying his phone to the pub after work today so he can sit on engadget and get a realtime update. Linus would not be pleased...
Last login: Thu Jul 26 12:17:28 from nat-pool-fab.re Welcome to Darwin! ericbook:~ eric$ mutt -bash: mutt: command not found ericbook:~ eric$ open /Applications/Mail.app/ ericbook:~ eric$
Ahh. Like coming in after a long day of plowing the fields and sticking your aching feet into a pot of hot water. After running Linux all day at work, you feel like slipping into something more comfortable. Sam knows it. Zonker knows it, though he won't admit it. It's the right amount of just-workiness you need to let you relax, while knowing you could, at any given moment, do something like:
OK, here's one with drivel. I do like it, but I have a couple of gripes.
First problem: I was hopelessly confused by the login screen. The type of journal seems to be locked on livejournal, as the drop-down menu for journal types is inexplicably disabled until you enter a username. -1 for usabilty
Second problem: Useless stripping of trailing slash, which mangled my xmlrpc URL. Error 301 was ignored, which makes sense since it's a post and all, but I couldn't log in. It mangled my URL then choked on the error :-/
Third problem: didn't want to download my recent posts. Although there might be a misunderstanding about just what "recent" means.
Fourth problem: Doesn't let me choose post status anywhere. And there's nowhere I can find to choose text filters. This is more of a feature request, really.
Fifth problem: craps out after posting, probably because it keeps mangling the trailing slashes from my URLs. Is there an RFC somewhere that says that POSTS can't end with slashes? Nobody tell the Django folks.
Well, maybe it'll at least let me post to my blog from work every now and then.
Man, I dang sure missed the entire month of June. I've been in the UK now for about two months, and let me tell ya: They sure do get some rain around here. I always thought those stories about English people having gills were legends and fantasies. Now, I'm not so sure.
For the love of GOD, for the last time, in the name of ALL THAT IS HOLY, Cluster Services is NOT COMPATIBLE with 4.5! If you're running a cluster, DO NOT update to 4.5 until the Cluster Suite is UPDATED TO 4.5!
That is all.
P.S. And NO, cmirror is not available yet. Maybe at the end of the month.
I went outside to smoke a cigarette. All rooms in England are for non-smokers, you'll find, as are the rooms, apartments, and houses listed for rent in the local papers. The litany at the end of all the ads reads, "No smokers, canvassers, or DSS", which stands for Department of Social Services. So, okay they hate smokers and welfare cases, as do we all. But the British have their own definition for 'non-smoker', which basically means you only smoke when you drink. Everybody smokes over here, and they all live somewhere.
The evening was cool; almost cold, really, as I suspect the evenings around here generally are. I stood on the corner of Osborne and Netley, watching the blackbirds getting ready to do whatever it is they do at night, when I spied a man, some yards away, bounding up the sidewalk with a jaunty gait. I held my cigarette just in front of my mouth, watching this figure with suspicion. He was short, about 5 feet tall, and round as a soccer ball. He was wearing light-colored trousers and a dark blazer, the left breast of which was adorned with an enormous, orange prize-ribbon.
As he approached me, his features became distinct in the bad lighting, and I realized he was positively beaming with pride. His face was ruddy, and split with a grin that wouldn't have looked out of place behind a wheelbarrow full of poker chips on the way to the cash-out. I placed him in his mid-40s, but maybe his thinning red hair and roly-poly stature made him look older than he really was.
He halted just a few feet from me, and said, with oddly struggling words, "Good evening, mister!"
I looked him up and down, cigarette still burning between my shaky fingers, and replied, "hi, how are ya..." He wobbled his head a bit, then walked around me on his way up the street. I noticed something written in gold on his orange ribbon, and read it as it flashed in the lamplight.
I judged him more than a wee bit 'differently-abled', as they say. I watched as he cautiously crossed the empty street, looking both ways at least twice, then gingerly stepping into the street and crossing it at a run.
I thought about what I had seen written on the ribbon: "A Very Special Boy". Hmm, I thought, I wonder who gave him that? Whoever it was, they made his whole day.
I put my cigarette out and walked back into the guest house.
My buddy Sam sent me an email a couple of days ago indicating that he just might have joined The Family recently. And he joined it a much higher level than I, I might add, considering I'm still lumbering along in the PowerPC world; my G4 Powerbook, though a loyal and trusted friend, seems slow as molasses in January these days.
He also mentioned an old OS/2 habit, one which we separately shared back in the day. I started using OS/2 when I worked at UPS. One of our managers was running 2.1, with the old Presentation Manager that looked like a crappy(er) Windows 2.0, albeit with long filenames and the ability to run concurrent DOS sessions. I avoided it until OS/2 3.0 came out.
In '94, when Warp hit the shelves, I rushed out to Soft-Warehouse1 in Alpharetta, looked in the Operating Systems2 department until I found a box, then gave the man $300 dollars for the privilege of running it. Then, I walked over the desktop applications department, and put down another $495 for Lotus Smartsuite/2. Then I OEM'd 16MB of RAM for about $400 to make it all go.
Now, many may see OS/2 as a butt-ugly cousin of Windows, and they may be right. But back then, it was a work of art. Especially in the sense that it wasn't an exact science getting it to run. Nothing ever really worked like it was supposed to. Without the fallback of a DOS prompt, you had to have a second, fully-functional machine to do things like edit the CONFIG.SYS on the installation floppies to make sure your DASD drivers were loading. And most of the drivers were written so that, if they encountered an error while loading, they'd bork the whole boot process, just to be on the safe side.
The graphical interface also hung constantly. The Workplace Shell, despite (or maybe due to) all its object-orientiness, was horribly unstable. But I never saw a hang that wasn't cured with Control-Alt-Delete. That key combo went right down to the kernel, and always gave a satisfying, unconfirmed reboot, wedged GUI be damned. There was even a 3rd party program called Watchcat that sat on the serial port, or on a secondary Hercules/MCGA monitor, and let you monitor and kill programs remotely. The kernel's Kung Fu was strong like that, but the GUI was just ass.
Now, when Chicago started finally coming down the pipe, and even the Rolling Stones where pulled into the OS marketing world ("Start me up", anyone?), OS/2 fans like myself were sure that this pissant little DOS extender with a homely face wouldn't be the future. It couldn't be the future, it was just too depressing. It still wasn't a 32-bit OS, though the 386 had been out for over 8 years. It still used FAT, for crying out loud. In short, Chicago sucked.
OS/2 seemed like a scrappy little underdog, nipping heroically at the Microsoft behemoth's heels. I'm not sure why it gave that impression. At the time, IBM was much bigger than Microsoft, a huge, multinational corporation with interests in basically every aspect of electronics. They just couldn't write or market good software.
I'm not sure why I just wrote 500 words on OS/2. I actually wanted to write something about Linux.
Software stores used to have a whole "Operating Systems" department, back when there was more than one operating system, and Windows was still called an "Operating Environment" ↩
Man, I'm unprepared. There's a checklist of things you should do before moving to England. I came over here without any money, preparation, or attack plan. There's something unbelievably stupid about this. It worked for me when I moved to Germany, but moving to England's a bit more complicated, apparently. Either that, or I'm remembering it wrong.
But I'm not the only one. The office I'm working in is full of non-British people. It's a rag-tag group of Germans, Italians, Brazilians, Spaniards, one (1) American, and who knows what else that all found themselves in the same boat when they first came over. This despite promises from The Company to help one resettle; promises which are certainly not kept and, when referred to in conversation, change their shape and character like a Democrat on a whistle-stop.
But at some point a kindly soul in the department, now departed, made a list of the reality of the situation. It's a short list of what one really needs to do when moving to England. Unfortunately, I only found out about it after I'd already been here a week. Here's your to-do list once you've arrived in England:
Get a room. If possible, get a rental agreement or any bill with your name and address on it. (proof of address)
Deposit is usually 1 1/2 times the rent. Deposit and first rent is to be paid beforehand. If the room is unfurnished, see "Things to Buy" for shops and example prices.
Get a letter from your office manager (HR Lady) stating that you are working for the company and including your address. (proof of employment)
Get a bank account. Just walk in with your documents:
Passport or national ID card
Proof of employment (see 2.). it might be handy to have your contract with you.
Proof of address
Banks
HSBC – try to get a standard account (they try to sell you an advanced package including insurances etc.)
NatWest – Also recommended as this bank does not charge for withdrawing money from a different bank's cash machines
Give your bank details to The Company
Register with Inland Revenue – this is done by your HR manager. You should get your tax code about 2 weeks later (PAYE Coding Notice)
At the end of the fiscal year (ending April 5th), you will get a "P60 End of Year Certificate" detailing your "Pay and Income Tax" levels.
Get a National Insurance Number by applying at a Job Centre Plus office. They ask for dtails before they schedule an interview appointment to verify your eligibility. Appointments are scheduled about two weeks ahead, and take place in the nearest county office, which usually isn't near at all. Without an NI number, you will be on emergency tax, which is higher than the standard tax rate.
Documents:
Passport
National ID card
Driving License or any other official document identifying you (Birth certificate, police registration, medical card, etc.)
Proof of employment (see 2.)
Recent payslip
Bank statement
Proof of address (utility bill, rental agreement, etc. – see 1.)
It might be handy to have your PAYE Coding Notice with you
As money is paid in a timely manner so it is available on the 27th, try to get your appointment after this date.
If you are British, a citizen of a member state of the EU, or other Commonwealth citizen, you can apply for inclusion on the Register of Electors. This will allow you to vote at local government elections. Your credibility will rise (good for tenancy applications or bank-related matters) and you are obliged to pay Council Taxes1
If you buy any TV or radio equipment, you will be asked for your address, which will be automatically forwarded to the "TV Licensing Office"
Get a Tesco Clubcard
Get a life ;-)
Any address change has to be communicated to all above-mentioned authorities. For the official notices to local council, the TV licensing, and most other on-line services, you can use I am Moving , where you can create/use an account for free.
All of this could have been avoided with a bit of planning. I am bitterly disappointed in myself.
Council taxes are universal as far as I can tell, and are perceived, by the British at least, as an extension of the rent. ↩
Farnborough derives its name from from the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Ferneberga (Fern Hill) and is mentioned in the Domesday Book (1086). But for the coming of the army at nearby Aldershot, the arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flying, Farnborough would probably have remained an isolated heathland village, that is until the latter half of the 20th century when the population moved out of London suburbia and became commuters.
"But for the … arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flight…". That's a pretty big conditional. There are probably a lot of places whose development was seriously affected by railways and the advent of powered flight. But I understand where the good Mr. Parkins is coming from.
I had forgotten the cable to connect my camera to my laptop. Of all the stupid things that I packed for the trip, 50 different USB cables, a USB hub, power adapters for devices I’d forgotten, not to mention devices whose power adapters I’d forgotten, I forgot the one thing that was absolutely necessary and planned-for. Not to mention irreplaceable, seeing as every camera maker in the world decided that their camera’s little hole should look different from all the other cameras’ little holes.
I walked into a little computer store on the strip in Fleet, Hampshire. Walking up to the pasty-faced, teenaged part-timer there, I introduced myself and shook his hand, which seemed to shock him.
He unconsciously wiped his hands on his pants and said, “eh...nice to meet you, sir. What can I do for you?”
I asked him, “do you have any USB card-readers?”
“Um, yeah," he answered. "I think I saw some around here somewhere.”
I looked around the shop, which was organized and clean. Man, he must really be the FNG around here. He finally found what I was looking for, stored on a shelf right next to where he had been sitting. He handed it to me and I started reading the back of the packaging.
“Just looking to see if it works with my Mac,” I told him.
“Oh, it's USB, so it should work,” he answered, and took the reader out of my hand. He moved his lips while he read the package. “Oh, yeah,” he said finally. “Right there it says it: ‘Requires Mac OS 9 or later’.” He looked at me skeptically. “So, you do have OS 9 or later, don’t you?”
“Um, yeah, I think so.” OS 9 went out of style back in the ‘90s.
He moved around to the register, and I handed him my Visa card. He looked uncertain as he turned it over in his hand. “This thing doesn’t have a chip on it?”
I took it back and examined it. “No, I guess it doesn’t.”
“Well, I don’t think we can take that, then.”
“Why don’t you just swipe it,” I said. “Give it a go.”
He shrugged and swiped it through the machine.
From behind me, a voice said, “it’s all chips nowadays, you know.”
I looked around, and saw that an older woman was standing behind me. She looked to be in her mid 40s, and wore a name plate with the store’s logo on it. “You can’t get nothing without a dozen little chips in it.”
I nodded agreement, and turned back to the young man behind the register.
“So, what kind of Mac you got, then?”
“A PowerBook G4.”
He nodded approvingly. “Nice piece of kit, that.” The little machine that had taken my card made a loud ping!, and spit out a receipt. He tore it off and gave it to me to sign, along with the card reader.
“Now, you have a nice day sir, and do please visit us again.”
I thanked him, said goodbye to the chip-lady, and put the small package into my bag next to my laptop. “Thanks, man, I’ll do that.” Nice kid.
Didja ever discover something that made your reality skip a beat? You know how, for just a second, something is so far out of place that you can't even figure out what's wrong with the picture? For example, the Augsburg Wireless-Internet provider Cyberways has had the same guy on their start page for years:
Every time you connect to the internet over public wireless in Augsburg, that dude was right there, staring at you with those soulless black eyes. Like a doll's eyes...
And the weird thing was, I always figured he was the boss at Cyberways. I even thought I saw him once on the tram. I hate it when people use the same stock photos everywhere. Everybody's full of shit. Oh, I guess it's effective use of your cash dollars, seeing as it's cheaper than paying attractive people to work for you. But still, why not just be honest for a split second?
You get this kind of thing all over the Internet, of course. If you've ever shopped for web hosting, you'll notice, after a few visits to the providers' pages, that their employees all kind of look alike. And there's always some woman somewhere holding a laptop at her waist in near-sexual ecstasy over the reasonable shared hosting prices.
It's a leitmotif throughout the enter hosting industry: Shared Webspace=Chick with laptop.
Rube, look, for the last freakin time, look RIGHT when you step off a curb! These people drive on the other side of the F$@&-ing road over here! You wanna get ya brains splattered all over me?
What? I dunno. I'm just kind of sitting around, waiting on things. I just spent way too much time transferring money across European borders, and reclaiming my identity. But the new passports are wonderful pieces of fortitude. Here' s a few quotes from my new passport:
And that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth. - Abraham Lincoln
The principle of free governments adheres to the American soil. It is bedded in it, immovable as its mountains. - Daniel Webster
Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. - George Washington
We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. - excerpt from the Declaration of Independence
Your concept of love may be different, but know that I love this world.
I like reading Scott Adams' blog on occasion. Much like Balph Eubanks, he's glib, amusing, and completely lacking in morality. Take, for example, his latest strawman-laden posting regarding the visit of a certain Mr. Ahmedinejad:
I was happy to hear that NYC didn't allow Iranian President Ahmadinejad
to place a wreath at the WTC site. And I was happy that Columbia
University is rescinding the offer to let him speak. If you let a guy like
that express his views, before long the entire world will want freedom
of speech.
...
If Ahmadinejad thinks he can be our friend by honoring our heroes and
opening a dialog, he underestimates our ability to misinterpret him.
Fucking idiot. I hate him.
Well, there's certainly some rye wit at work here. Yes, it is quite ironic that a country led by a genocidal religious dictator, which the USA most certainly is, would object to a fellow genocidal religious madman visiting its most sensitive cultural site. I mean, Mahmoud's only trying to "open a dialog" here, isn't he? Isn't that the meaning of Ahmedinejad's visit? Isn't Ahmedinejad just exercising "Free Speech", as Adams says? Aren't we wrong in denying this poor man that right?
Aside from the obvious jackassery involved in claiming that a man who directly controls his entire country's media is having trouble getting his point of view out; or that the United Nations will let him speak before the leaders of the world to the point where they forget to blink for an hour; aside from all this, this is not a question of whether or not Mahmoud is allowed to say what he wants. The question is, in accordance with the Grand Unified Theory of Rubean Mechanics, Who's going to pay for it. It's a question of whether or not Americans should be paying for his plane fare, his security, and his accommodation while he's here, pissing on Ground Zero and generating propaganda for totalitarian lobbying groups like MoveOn.org and International ANSWER.
All of Adams' ridiculous assertions never mention the one central fact here: There is no compelling reason for American taxpayers to foot the bill, so this guy, who just held one of his popular "Death to America" parades, can come over here and lecture them on anything. I personally don't much care what Ahmedinejad thinks, I can see the general thrust of his inclinations. He's spitting on the United States and Western Culture daily, and then expects to be treated with deference in return. Fuck him.
This kind of Devil's Advocacy isn't new to Adams. At least, I hope it's just that. He's apparently one of those celebrities that have forgotten the hard work involved in their ascendency, and assume that they're rich because of some accident of nature, akin to divine providence. Humans, himself included, are all just a bunch of "moist robots" with no capacity for thought, no free will; we've apparently just been programmed by Mother Nature to do the things we've done or will do. There is no mind, there is no choice, there is only the stimuli in our environments, and the response that was determined by a chance arrangement of atoms into chemicals during the Big Bang. Or something.
It's an obscene display of thoughtlessness, a conceit of someone trying so hard to seem above all this. Adams' Dilbert is amusing, and his blog is a bit of junk food for the brain at times. But he's got the morals of a two-dollar whore.
Last night we didn't make it. The two Frenchmen surrendered the evening, seeing as it was Trotzky's birthday, and therefore a time for somber reflection or something. So, we rode around big town Farnborough for a couple of hours, grabbed some grub, and then headed back to the apartment to watch a movie.
We watched Fur, which cemented my belief that Nicole Kidman is the perfect woman. Not only does she look good in her own slutty little librarian sort of way, she gives a guy a handjob in this movie while shaving his hairy back. That's my kind of girl, a real little trooper.
Anyhoo, it's back off to London now, for a second try at getting sloppy somewhere besides sitting at home in front of the boob tube. Wish us luck.
Vacation week is winding down, and I'm getting ready to leave the driving to Southwest Trains and go drinking in London. I'll try to keep it under two weeks this time, but no promises. We'll tramp it a bit through Soho, I guess, just me, the girls, and a couple of frog-eaters from the office.
I wonder why I never get to go drinking with Englishmen? It's probably for the best. There's a quote that gets bandied about, especially in the local newspapers, about England being a nation of drunks and scalawags. I can't say much about that, but it does seem that the pubs all close at 11:00 PM for a reason. At 5 o'clock, they pour out of their offices and into the public houses, seemingly on a race against the clock to get themselves 'faced before the early last call.
When they were finally permitted to stay open past 11, in the hope that the binge-drinking would abate in light of longer opening hours, they found themselves doubly-cursed in that the Englishmen were every bit as drunk at 11, but didn't have to go home. All pubs here are set up so that you have to go to the counter to get your drinks, instead of having them brought to your table. There's a built-in handbrake there: a system where you can't get any more drink once you lose the ability to walk is founded upon sound principle and good advices.
I've done nothing today; nothing but clean out the cluttered closets of my preferred newsfeed reader. There were some connections in there that were sorely neglected. I could use a bit more time to wade through the degenerate filth that is my blogroll, but sadly, I work. The Company is tolerant in their control over my time, fair since they do not pay hourly; but tolerance has its limits, and I doubt they would look kindly upon my spending the business day in a fugue state, reading entry after entry of dialectics about Jessica Simpson's tits, or Brittney Spears' overplayed poonanny.
Nevertheless, it saddens me that my everyday is not blessed with the nuggets of wisdom from skippystalin:
Being the only person with an out-of-control substance abuse problem in a relationship is tough. Most romantic couplings are based on common interests and most of my interests culminate in my waking up in a pool of what I think is my own urine and not being quite sure what time zone I'm in. I'm much like a cat in that I have a tendancy of marking my territory with my vomit, blood and gallons of my semen...My ability to smoke, drink and masturbate furiously at the same time might not be much, it's all that I have.
Ahh, skippystalin, how I've missed you, and your nuggets.
This is how I spend my vacation: visiting Stonehenge on one day; reading the melancholy musings of skippystalin the next, picturing him composing scholarly tracts through bitter tears, a crushed Viagra dissolving in a highball of Jack Daniels next to the keyboard, as another long evening fades into a blur of poetry, madness, and vigorous bouts of hate-filled masturbation. And wondering, of the two, which is the more meaningful and fitting monument to humanity?
They should've just burned enjoyeverysandwich to CD, stuck it to the side of Voyager along with its author, and shot the whole lot into space back when they had government funding to do so, all in the name of making a good first impression for whatever aliens were out cruising for an easy meal.
skippystalin's output is prodigious, to be sure, but there was an entire blogroll to consider:
The lunatics are running the asylum over at Straight White Guy's place. Eric's testicles are mentioned, indirectly. Remind me to change my passwords regularly and start using strong encryption.
How stoned do you have to be to cheat on Jessica Alba? I could jack off to Jessica Alba while a big mean dog was chasing me and this idiot is cheating on her. I decided to confront him about this and I screamed at him, hey, what is your problem. And he said I should get off his lawn. And I said, no, no you get off the lawn. You get off. Then he went inside, probably because deep down, he knew I had made some pretty good points.
JimGoad.com is no more, but if you're a Goad fan (ladies!), you can find find him here. Discussion of Brittany's latest, erm, candid photos is also to be found, but be aware that the following picture is used as a visual aid:
This morning we picked up my new wheelchair. It's a sporty European marque, with an aggressive stance, low-profile tires, and a head-turning cherry-red metalflake paint job. It's not that great on the corners, but it'll take any one of y'all on the straightaways.
I've never done time on wheels. On the whole, I found it to be not all that bad. Then again, I don't figure that most wheelchair-bound men my age get to enjoy being pushed around town by a couple of sexy German bloggerettes. Thanks, ladies: the jealous looks from the other local cripples was the icing on the cake. Here's a little something extra for you, babes. (via AoSHQ)
Funny things happen when you're on wheels. I saw a lady I work with while being carted through Tesco's frozen food department. I said hello, and she just looked right through me, steering her cart so as not to make contact with the leper. She probably thought I was going to ask her for some spare change, or if she could wipe me bum for me, or whatever it is that those people want from healthy-legged people. I also noticed that the supermarkets put completely different things down on the bottom three feet of the shelves. All the cool toys are down there, for example, presumably because chil'n's is small. It's also a great altitude to find anti-bedsore medicaments, for some reason.
So, I let myself be pushed by the Weyside in Guildford, where, at one point, a husky young native was required to wheel my fat ass up a steep incline. The Sistas, for all their heart, lacked the muscle to get the job done, so he, being a true-hearted salt-of-earth kind of guy, waved them off and grunted and sweated till I crested the hill. Had the man known that I could have, at any point in time, simply stood up and hobbled up the hill under my own power, he most certainly would have picked me up and broken me over his knee.
Tomorrow morning, we'll be visiting Stonehenge, or Stone'enge, as the locals quaintly call it. We'll also visit the haunted city, Salisbury, to watch the homosexuals. Ta!
I like reading OSNews for some reason. I think I like to catch the geeky news about SkyOS, or the occasional retro curmudgeonry that rolls by about Lotus 1-2-3 or OS/2. Being the old-timer that I am, it's hard to resist a paean from my youth about 10-finger productivity.
Unfortunately, they've become the epicenter of stupid for the tech press. Check out this article, which explodes the myths about competition being good: "Competition is not Good"
'It gives consumers more choice'
Choice is good when there's one agreed base standard, and a number of compatible approaches. For example, there are many Linux distributions, but they are all Linux, and they can all run the same software. They are 'flavours' of the same thing, that is a good choice. People like different flavours.
Competition does not produce easier choices for consumers. All they get is added un-interoperability and complexity with competitive choices.
Now, if you go read that article, which I do not recommend, you'll slowly come to the realization that this moron is just annoyed that he has to make the effort to choose between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. He's willing to surrender his entire free will to some (hopefully) benevolent dictator, abolish brand names, and forsake the free market economy because choosing which format to buy the Firefly special edition box set in is hard. What a hopeless, whiny-assed sissy.
Of course, things don't get better when they start tossing political analysis at you. "Net Neutrality" is one monikers that has overshadowed the thing named. The discussion is often framed in a way that an uninformed listener would assume there was lobbying going on to abolish some sort of laws that are now protecting consumers from big, bad tiered-Internet ninjas.
But: There is no net neutrality legislation, there never was, and hopefully, there never will be. The argument over "Net Neutrality" is about whether or not the U.S. government should introduce legislation forbidding bandwidth throttling by ISPs. It's the "have you stopped beating your wife?" straw man for the Slashdot crowd. You'll notice that this article calls the Supreme Court's decision that the U.S. government shouldn't step in and configure the ISPs' Cisco routers for them, "Backing for Two-Tier Internet":
The US Justice Department has said that internet service providers should be allowed to charge for priority traffic. The agency said it was opposed to 'network neutrality', the idea that all data on the net is treated equally. The comments put the agency at odds with companies such as Microsoft and Google, who have called for legislation to guarantee equal access to the net.
Of course, this would also mean that an enforcement infrastructure would also have to be put in place, making sure that everyone got their "fair share" of said bandwidth, as if backbone routers and POPs just fell off a tree somewhere. God forbid ISPs be allowed to tune the services that they developed and paid for as they wish. Let's let the government decides who gets bandwidth, and how much is enough! That will make it all fair and neutral-like. Whenever a politician uses the word "fair", hang on to your wallet.
Well, my trackbacks are now working, it seems. There's some ugly Python spaghetti-code going on behind the scenes that translates back and forth between absolute urls, non-absolute relative urls, and upper-lower-camel case; but it works.
Trackbacks are only good for Movable Type, though. Which I can't stand anymore. MT used to be the only thing out there, but there's something that really, really, really galls me about the way it rebuilds your entire site into static HTML pages everytime you update a post. I'm sure it's awesomeness if you've got your server running on an old TV remote, but nowadays we're all running our web servers on 100-core 64-bit terahertz moonshot computers that can simultaneously compute π, encode MPEG video, and mix the best goddam margaritas you've ever tasted, all without breaking a sweat.
So yeah, I figured out how to implement trackbacks in Django, to a point where they more or less work. Now why is Wordpress fucking with me? It seems to be thrown off by the fact that Wordpress sends a HEAD request before it downloads and parses the page, in the vain hope that the X-Pingback header will be set. I can't figure out how to do that in Django's generic views, so I just use the secondary method, that being a link element in the XHTML code. But now, whenever a Worpdress blog pings me, I get this kind of crap:
[09/Sep/2007 15:04:23] "GET /blog/2007/sep/08/vacation/ HTTP/1.1" 200 27367
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (104, 'Connection reset by peer')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (32, 'Broken pipe')
Being the half-assed programmer that I am, I am at a total loss. I can't even do a Lazyweb request here, seeing as my 4 visits a day are unlikely to bring the Django HTTP gurus by. I won't be able to sleep at night, thinking of all the enlightened Wordpress Users who are probably out there try to "Keep the discussion going" with me.
Ever since June, when the iPhone went live, I've heard about nothing else in the tech press, nerd podcasts, and the Apple Fanboisphere. Is it really that way over in the States (the only place you can get them), or does the iPhone actually seem to be doing well?
Ahh, my first vacation since joining The Company. My queue is cleaned up, my email is forwarded, and an elaborate Sieve session has accomplished in a mere two hours what less civilized mail systems can do with a key combination: The Corporate Vacation Email.
It's been five months now since I came 'cross the channel and started meeting the natives, learning the lingo, and getting used to the fact that everyone here talks like Pinky. Now, I'll be letting my hair down for the next 10 days or so. As well as putting my poor, broken foot up on the coffee table.
As soon as I get my x-rays back from the socialist medical system (they still copy them with coal rubbings on wax paper over here, apparently), I'll post pictures of the metatarsalar breakage here for your morbid enjoyment. Don't thank me yet.
The other half of Sistaweb will be joining us for the week. We'll allow her to sleep here rent-free for an entire week, even though she refused to bring a carton of cigarettes as payment. Damned non-smokers and their principles. It's like those non-smokers back in the World War II who didn't sign up for cigarette rations. Throwing away a gold mine, that is. Our grandfathers probably had a word for those guys, and if I knew my grandfather at all, that word was sissy-boy.
The girls have rented a wheelchair for me, seeing as I won't be too much fun doing a London pub-crawl on crutches. I've already had a forehead-slapping moment over this, as you probably are right now. Why haven't I thought of taking a wheelchair with me before? That would've come in handy on more than one occasion, the Wreckyll in Jeckyll not least among them.
Man, Apple is on a roll. Not only have they got me hooked for a new computer, a new laptop, a new office package, and a replacement for my aging MythTV box, but now I have to start thinking about a new iPod. Now, let's see what Uncle Steve is going to me be costing me 'til Christmas Time:
Item
Damage
20" iMac
1199.00
Macbook
1099.00
8GB iPod Touch
299.00
AppleTV
299.00
iWork '08
79.00
iLife '08
79.00
Total:
$3,054.00
Not bad for a day's work, Mr. Jobs. And what's up for the rest of September? Maybe some irresistible bionic iFoot to replace the one I broke playing frisbee at the company picnic last week?
Although there's a remarkable lack of iPhone hype around the office, we being a big-time Linux company and all, there's an amazing amount of Mac fanboiism. Pretty much all of us have Macs at home. The explanation for this is simple: After dealing with Linux problems all day long, there's something nice about going home to something you can spend all your time using and not making up excuses for why it looks like shit and doesn't work.
I like Linux, mind you. I use it day-in, day-out for my desktop at work, for my webservers, and it brings in my daily bread. We all love it here, pretty much like a family loves and therefore tolerates the embarrassing second cousin with the Downs'. But people are walking all over the office today buzzing about the upcoming announcement from Apple.
Will it be the long-awaited iMac redesign? Will it be a new Mini? My boss is actually carrying his phone to the pub after work today so he can sit on engadget and get a realtime update. Linus would not be pleased...
Last login: Thu Jul 26 12:17:28 from nat-pool-fab.re Welcome to Darwin! ericbook:~ eric$ mutt -bash: mutt: command not found ericbook:~ eric$ open /Applications/Mail.app/ ericbook:~ eric$
Ahh. Like coming in after a long day of plowing the fields and sticking your aching feet into a pot of hot water. After running Linux all day at work, you feel like slipping into something more comfortable. Sam knows it. Zonker knows it, though he won't admit it. It's the right amount of just-workiness you need to let you relax, while knowing you could, at any given moment, do something like:
OK, here's one with drivel. I do like it, but I have a couple of gripes.
First problem: I was hopelessly confused by the login screen. The type of journal seems to be locked on livejournal, as the drop-down menu for journal types is inexplicably disabled until you enter a username. -1 for usabilty
Second problem: Useless stripping of trailing slash, which mangled my xmlrpc URL. Error 301 was ignored, which makes sense since it's a post and all, but I couldn't log in. It mangled my URL then choked on the error :-/
Third problem: didn't want to download my recent posts. Although there might be a misunderstanding about just what "recent" means.
Fourth problem: Doesn't let me choose post status anywhere. And there's nowhere I can find to choose text filters. This is more of a feature request, really.
Fifth problem: craps out after posting, probably because it keeps mangling the trailing slashes from my URLs. Is there an RFC somewhere that says that POSTS can't end with slashes? Nobody tell the Django folks.
Well, maybe it'll at least let me post to my blog from work every now and then.
Man, I dang sure missed the entire month of June. I've been in the UK now for about two months, and let me tell ya: They sure do get some rain around here. I always thought those stories about English people having gills were legends and fantasies. Now, I'm not so sure.
For the love of GOD, for the last time, in the name of ALL THAT IS HOLY, Cluster Services is NOT COMPATIBLE with 4.5! If you're running a cluster, DO NOT update to 4.5 until the Cluster Suite is UPDATED TO 4.5!
That is all.
P.S. And NO, cmirror is not available yet. Maybe at the end of the month.
I went outside to smoke a cigarette. All rooms in England are for non-smokers, you'll find, as are the rooms, apartments, and houses listed for rent in the local papers. The litany at the end of all the ads reads, "No smokers, canvassers, or DSS", which stands for Department of Social Services. So, okay they hate smokers and welfare cases, as do we all. But the British have their own definition for 'non-smoker', which basically means you only smoke when you drink. Everybody smokes over here, and they all live somewhere.
The evening was cool; almost cold, really, as I suspect the evenings around here generally are. I stood on the corner of Osborne and Netley, watching the blackbirds getting ready to do whatever it is they do at night, when I spied a man, some yards away, bounding up the sidewalk with a jaunty gait. I held my cigarette just in front of my mouth, watching this figure with suspicion. He was short, about 5 feet tall, and round as a soccer ball. He was wearing light-colored trousers and a dark blazer, the left breast of which was adorned with an enormous, orange prize-ribbon.
As he approached me, his features became distinct in the bad lighting, and I realized he was positively beaming with pride. His face was ruddy, and split with a grin that wouldn't have looked out of place behind a wheelbarrow full of poker chips on the way to the cash-out. I placed him in his mid-40s, but maybe his thinning red hair and roly-poly stature made him look older than he really was.
He halted just a few feet from me, and said, with oddly struggling words, "Good evening, mister!"
I looked him up and down, cigarette still burning between my shaky fingers, and replied, "hi, how are ya..." He wobbled his head a bit, then walked around me on his way up the street. I noticed something written in gold on his orange ribbon, and read it as it flashed in the lamplight.
I judged him more than a wee bit 'differently-abled', as they say. I watched as he cautiously crossed the empty street, looking both ways at least twice, then gingerly stepping into the street and crossing it at a run.
I thought about what I had seen written on the ribbon: "A Very Special Boy". Hmm, I thought, I wonder who gave him that? Whoever it was, they made his whole day.
I put my cigarette out and walked back into the guest house.
My buddy Sam sent me an email a couple of days ago indicating that he just might have joined The Family recently. And he joined it a much higher level than I, I might add, considering I'm still lumbering along in the PowerPC world; my G4 Powerbook, though a loyal and trusted friend, seems slow as molasses in January these days.
He also mentioned an old OS/2 habit, one which we separately shared back in the day. I started using OS/2 when I worked at UPS. One of our managers was running 2.1, with the old Presentation Manager that looked like a crappy(er) Windows 2.0, albeit with long filenames and the ability to run concurrent DOS sessions. I avoided it until OS/2 3.0 came out.
In '94, when Warp hit the shelves, I rushed out to Soft-Warehouse1 in Alpharetta, looked in the Operating Systems2 department until I found a box, then gave the man $300 dollars for the privilege of running it. Then, I walked over the desktop applications department, and put down another $495 for Lotus Smartsuite/2. Then I OEM'd 16MB of RAM for about $400 to make it all go.
Now, many may see OS/2 as a butt-ugly cousin of Windows, and they may be right. But back then, it was a work of art. Especially in the sense that it wasn't an exact science getting it to run. Nothing ever really worked like it was supposed to. Without the fallback of a DOS prompt, you had to have a second, fully-functional machine to do things like edit the CONFIG.SYS on the installation floppies to make sure your DASD drivers were loading. And most of the drivers were written so that, if they encountered an error while loading, they'd bork the whole boot process, just to be on the safe side.
The graphical interface also hung constantly. The Workplace Shell, despite (or maybe due to) all its object-orientiness, was horribly unstable. But I never saw a hang that wasn't cured with Control-Alt-Delete. That key combo went right down to the kernel, and always gave a satisfying, unconfirmed reboot, wedged GUI be damned. There was even a 3rd party program called Watchcat that sat on the serial port, or on a secondary Hercules/MCGA monitor, and let you monitor and kill programs remotely. The kernel's Kung Fu was strong like that, but the GUI was just ass.
Now, when Chicago started finally coming down the pipe, and even the Rolling Stones where pulled into the OS marketing world ("Start me up", anyone?), OS/2 fans like myself were sure that this pissant little DOS extender with a homely face wouldn't be the future. It couldn't be the future, it was just too depressing. It still wasn't a 32-bit OS, though the 386 had been out for over 8 years. It still used FAT, for crying out loud. In short, Chicago sucked.
OS/2 seemed like a scrappy little underdog, nipping heroically at the Microsoft behemoth's heels. I'm not sure why it gave that impression. At the time, IBM was much bigger than Microsoft, a huge, multinational corporation with interests in basically every aspect of electronics. They just couldn't write or market good software.
I'm not sure why I just wrote 500 words on OS/2. I actually wanted to write something about Linux.
Software stores used to have a whole "Operating Systems" department, back when there was more than one operating system, and Windows was still called an "Operating Environment" ↩
Man, I'm unprepared. There's a checklist of things you should do before moving to England. I came over here without any money, preparation, or attack plan. There's something unbelievably stupid about this. It worked for me when I moved to Germany, but moving to England's a bit more complicated, apparently. Either that, or I'm remembering it wrong.
But I'm not the only one. The office I'm working in is full of non-British people. It's a rag-tag group of Germans, Italians, Brazilians, Spaniards, one (1) American, and who knows what else that all found themselves in the same boat when they first came over. This despite promises from The Company to help one resettle; promises which are certainly not kept and, when referred to in conversation, change their shape and character like a Democrat on a whistle-stop.
But at some point a kindly soul in the department, now departed, made a list of the reality of the situation. It's a short list of what one really needs to do when moving to England. Unfortunately, I only found out about it after I'd already been here a week. Here's your to-do list once you've arrived in England:
Get a room. If possible, get a rental agreement or any bill with your name and address on it. (proof of address)
Deposit is usually 1 1/2 times the rent. Deposit and first rent is to be paid beforehand. If the room is unfurnished, see "Things to Buy" for shops and example prices.
Get a letter from your office manager (HR Lady) stating that you are working for the company and including your address. (proof of employment)
Get a bank account. Just walk in with your documents:
Passport or national ID card
Proof of employment (see 2.). it might be handy to have your contract with you.
Proof of address
Banks
HSBC – try to get a standard account (they try to sell you an advanced package including insurances etc.)
NatWest – Also recommended as this bank does not charge for withdrawing money from a different bank's cash machines
Give your bank details to The Company
Register with Inland Revenue – this is done by your HR manager. You should get your tax code about 2 weeks later (PAYE Coding Notice)
At the end of the fiscal year (ending April 5th), you will get a "P60 End of Year Certificate" detailing your "Pay and Income Tax" levels.
Get a National Insurance Number by applying at a Job Centre Plus office. They ask for dtails before they schedule an interview appointment to verify your eligibility. Appointments are scheduled about two weeks ahead, and take place in the nearest county office, which usually isn't near at all. Without an NI number, you will be on emergency tax, which is higher than the standard tax rate.
Documents:
Passport
National ID card
Driving License or any other official document identifying you (Birth certificate, police registration, medical card, etc.)
Proof of employment (see 2.)
Recent payslip
Bank statement
Proof of address (utility bill, rental agreement, etc. – see 1.)
It might be handy to have your PAYE Coding Notice with you
As money is paid in a timely manner so it is available on the 27th, try to get your appointment after this date.
If you are British, a citizen of a member state of the EU, or other Commonwealth citizen, you can apply for inclusion on the Register of Electors. This will allow you to vote at local government elections. Your credibility will rise (good for tenancy applications or bank-related matters) and you are obliged to pay Council Taxes1
If you buy any TV or radio equipment, you will be asked for your address, which will be automatically forwarded to the "TV Licensing Office"
Get a Tesco Clubcard
Get a life ;-)
Any address change has to be communicated to all above-mentioned authorities. For the official notices to local council, the TV licensing, and most other on-line services, you can use I am Moving , where you can create/use an account for free.
All of this could have been avoided with a bit of planning. I am bitterly disappointed in myself.
Council taxes are universal as far as I can tell, and are perceived, by the British at least, as an extension of the rent. ↩
Farnborough derives its name from from the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Ferneberga (Fern Hill) and is mentioned in the Domesday Book (1086). But for the coming of the army at nearby Aldershot, the arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flying, Farnborough would probably have remained an isolated heathland village, that is until the latter half of the 20th century when the population moved out of London suburbia and became commuters.
"But for the … arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flight…". That's a pretty big conditional. There are probably a lot of places whose development was seriously affected by railways and the advent of powered flight. But I understand where the good Mr. Parkins is coming from.
I had forgotten the cable to connect my camera to my laptop. Of all the stupid things that I packed for the trip, 50 different USB cables, a USB hub, power adapters for devices I’d forgotten, not to mention devices whose power adapters I’d forgotten, I forgot the one thing that was absolutely necessary and planned-for. Not to mention irreplaceable, seeing as every camera maker in the world decided that their camera’s little hole should look different from all the other cameras’ little holes.
I walked into a little computer store on the strip in Fleet, Hampshire. Walking up to the pasty-faced, teenaged part-timer there, I introduced myself and shook his hand, which seemed to shock him.
He unconsciously wiped his hands on his pants and said, “eh...nice to meet you, sir. What can I do for you?”
I asked him, “do you have any USB card-readers?”
“Um, yeah," he answered. "I think I saw some around here somewhere.”
I looked around the shop, which was organized and clean. Man, he must really be the FNG around here. He finally found what I was looking for, stored on a shelf right next to where he had been sitting. He handed it to me and I started reading the back of the packaging.
“Just looking to see if it works with my Mac,” I told him.
“Oh, it's USB, so it should work,” he answered, and took the reader out of my hand. He moved his lips while he read the package. “Oh, yeah,” he said finally. “Right there it says it: ‘Requires Mac OS 9 or later’.” He looked at me skeptically. “So, you do have OS 9 or later, don’t you?”
“Um, yeah, I think so.” OS 9 went out of style back in the ‘90s.
He moved around to the register, and I handed him my Visa card. He looked uncertain as he turned it over in his hand. “This thing doesn’t have a chip on it?”
I took it back and examined it. “No, I guess it doesn’t.”
“Well, I don’t think we can take that, then.”
“Why don’t you just swipe it,” I said. “Give it a go.”
He shrugged and swiped it through the machine.
From behind me, a voice said, “it’s all chips nowadays, you know.”
I looked around, and saw that an older woman was standing behind me. She looked to be in her mid 40s, and wore a name plate with the store’s logo on it. “You can’t get nothing without a dozen little chips in it.”
I nodded agreement, and turned back to the young man behind the register.
“So, what kind of Mac you got, then?”
“A PowerBook G4.”
He nodded approvingly. “Nice piece of kit, that.” The little machine that had taken my card made a loud ping!, and spit out a receipt. He tore it off and gave it to me to sign, along with the card reader.
“Now, you have a nice day sir, and do please visit us again.”
I thanked him, said goodbye to the chip-lady, and put the small package into my bag next to my laptop. “Thanks, man, I’ll do that.” Nice kid.
Didja ever discover something that made your reality skip a beat? You know how, for just a second, something is so far out of place that you can't even figure out what's wrong with the picture? For example, the Augsburg Wireless-Internet provider Cyberways has had the same guy on their start page for years:
Every time you connect to the internet over public wireless in Augsburg, that dude was right there, staring at you with those soulless black eyes. Like a doll's eyes...
And the weird thing was, I always figured he was the boss at Cyberways. I even thought I saw him once on the tram. I hate it when people use the same stock photos everywhere. Everybody's full of shit. Oh, I guess it's effective use of your cash dollars, seeing as it's cheaper than paying attractive people to work for you. But still, why not just be honest for a split second?
You get this kind of thing all over the Internet, of course. If you've ever shopped for web hosting, you'll notice, after a few visits to the providers' pages, that their employees all kind of look alike. And there's always some woman somewhere holding a laptop at her waist in near-sexual ecstasy over the reasonable shared hosting prices.
It's a leitmotif throughout the enter hosting industry: Shared Webspace=Chick with laptop.
Rube, look, for the last freakin time, look RIGHT when you step off a curb! These people drive on the other side of the F$@&-ing road over here! You wanna get ya brains splattered all over me?
What? I dunno. I'm just kind of sitting around, waiting on things. I just spent way too much time transferring money across European borders, and reclaiming my identity. But the new passports are wonderful pieces of fortitude. Here' s a few quotes from my new passport:
And that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth. - Abraham Lincoln
The principle of free governments adheres to the American soil. It is bedded in it, immovable as its mountains. - Daniel Webster
Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. - George Washington
We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. - excerpt from the Declaration of Independence
Your concept of love may be different, but know that I love this world.
I like reading Scott Adams' blog on occasion. Much like Balph Eubanks, he's glib, amusing, and completely lacking in morality. Take, for example, his latest strawman-laden posting regarding the visit of a certain Mr. Ahmedinejad:
I was happy to hear that NYC didn't allow Iranian President Ahmadinejad
to place a wreath at the WTC site. And I was happy that Columbia
University is rescinding the offer to let him speak. If you let a guy like
that express his views, before long the entire world will want freedom
of speech.
...
If Ahmadinejad thinks he can be our friend by honoring our heroes and
opening a dialog, he underestimates our ability to misinterpret him.
Fucking idiot. I hate him.
Well, there's certainly some rye wit at work here. Yes, it is quite ironic that a country led by a genocidal religious dictator, which the USA most certainly is, would object to a fellow genocidal religious madman visiting its most sensitive cultural site. I mean, Mahmoud's only trying to "open a dialog" here, isn't he? Isn't that the meaning of Ahmedinejad's visit? Isn't Ahmedinejad just exercising "Free Speech", as Adams says? Aren't we wrong in denying this poor man that right?
Aside from the obvious jackassery involved in claiming that a man who directly controls his entire country's media is having trouble getting his point of view out; or that the United Nations will let him speak before the leaders of the world to the point where they forget to blink for an hour; aside from all this, this is not a question of whether or not Mahmoud is allowed to say what he wants. The question is, in accordance with the Grand Unified Theory of Rubean Mechanics, Who's going to pay for it. It's a question of whether or not Americans should be paying for his plane fare, his security, and his accommodation while he's here, pissing on Ground Zero and generating propaganda for totalitarian lobbying groups like MoveOn.org and International ANSWER.
All of Adams' ridiculous assertions never mention the one central fact here: There is no compelling reason for American taxpayers to foot the bill, so this guy, who just held one of his popular "Death to America" parades, can come over here and lecture them on anything. I personally don't much care what Ahmedinejad thinks, I can see the general thrust of his inclinations. He's spitting on the United States and Western Culture daily, and then expects to be treated with deference in return. Fuck him.
This kind of Devil's Advocacy isn't new to Adams. At least, I hope it's just that. He's apparently one of those celebrities that have forgotten the hard work involved in their ascendency, and assume that they're rich because of some accident of nature, akin to divine providence. Humans, himself included, are all just a bunch of "moist robots" with no capacity for thought, no free will; we've apparently just been programmed by Mother Nature to do the things we've done or will do. There is no mind, there is no choice, there is only the stimuli in our environments, and the response that was determined by a chance arrangement of atoms into chemicals during the Big Bang. Or something.
It's an obscene display of thoughtlessness, a conceit of someone trying so hard to seem above all this. Adams' Dilbert is amusing, and his blog is a bit of junk food for the brain at times. But he's got the morals of a two-dollar whore.
Last night we didn't make it. The two Frenchmen surrendered the evening, seeing as it was Trotzky's birthday, and therefore a time for somber reflection or something. So, we rode around big town Farnborough for a couple of hours, grabbed some grub, and then headed back to the apartment to watch a movie.
We watched Fur, which cemented my belief that Nicole Kidman is the perfect woman. Not only does she look good in her own slutty little librarian sort of way, she gives a guy a handjob in this movie while shaving his hairy back. That's my kind of girl, a real little trooper.
Anyhoo, it's back off to London now, for a second try at getting sloppy somewhere besides sitting at home in front of the boob tube. Wish us luck.
Vacation week is winding down, and I'm getting ready to leave the driving to Southwest Trains and go drinking in London. I'll try to keep it under two weeks this time, but no promises. We'll tramp it a bit through Soho, I guess, just me, the girls, and a couple of frog-eaters from the office.
I wonder why I never get to go drinking with Englishmen? It's probably for the best. There's a quote that gets bandied about, especially in the local newspapers, about England being a nation of drunks and scalawags. I can't say much about that, but it does seem that the pubs all close at 11:00 PM for a reason. At 5 o'clock, they pour out of their offices and into the public houses, seemingly on a race against the clock to get themselves 'faced before the early last call.
When they were finally permitted to stay open past 11, in the hope that the binge-drinking would abate in light of longer opening hours, they found themselves doubly-cursed in that the Englishmen were every bit as drunk at 11, but didn't have to go home. All pubs here are set up so that you have to go to the counter to get your drinks, instead of having them brought to your table. There's a built-in handbrake there: a system where you can't get any more drink once you lose the ability to walk is founded upon sound principle and good advices.
I've done nothing today; nothing but clean out the cluttered closets of my preferred newsfeed reader. There were some connections in there that were sorely neglected. I could use a bit more time to wade through the degenerate filth that is my blogroll, but sadly, I work. The Company is tolerant in their control over my time, fair since they do not pay hourly; but tolerance has its limits, and I doubt they would look kindly upon my spending the business day in a fugue state, reading entry after entry of dialectics about Jessica Simpson's tits, or Brittney Spears' overplayed poonanny.
Nevertheless, it saddens me that my everyday is not blessed with the nuggets of wisdom from skippystalin:
Being the only person with an out-of-control substance abuse problem in a relationship is tough. Most romantic couplings are based on common interests and most of my interests culminate in my waking up in a pool of what I think is my own urine and not being quite sure what time zone I'm in. I'm much like a cat in that I have a tendancy of marking my territory with my vomit, blood and gallons of my semen...My ability to smoke, drink and masturbate furiously at the same time might not be much, it's all that I have.
Ahh, skippystalin, how I've missed you, and your nuggets.
This is how I spend my vacation: visiting Stonehenge on one day; reading the melancholy musings of skippystalin the next, picturing him composing scholarly tracts through bitter tears, a crushed Viagra dissolving in a highball of Jack Daniels next to the keyboard, as another long evening fades into a blur of poetry, madness, and vigorous bouts of hate-filled masturbation. And wondering, of the two, which is the more meaningful and fitting monument to humanity?
They should've just burned enjoyeverysandwich to CD, stuck it to the side of Voyager along with its author, and shot the whole lot into space back when they had government funding to do so, all in the name of making a good first impression for whatever aliens were out cruising for an easy meal.
skippystalin's output is prodigious, to be sure, but there was an entire blogroll to consider:
The lunatics are running the asylum over at Straight White Guy's place. Eric's testicles are mentioned, indirectly. Remind me to change my passwords regularly and start using strong encryption.
How stoned do you have to be to cheat on Jessica Alba? I could jack off to Jessica Alba while a big mean dog was chasing me and this idiot is cheating on her. I decided to confront him about this and I screamed at him, hey, what is your problem. And he said I should get off his lawn. And I said, no, no you get off the lawn. You get off. Then he went inside, probably because deep down, he knew I had made some pretty good points.
JimGoad.com is no more, but if you're a Goad fan (ladies!), you can find find him here. Discussion of Brittany's latest, erm, candid photos is also to be found, but be aware that the following picture is used as a visual aid:
This morning we picked up my new wheelchair. It's a sporty European marque, with an aggressive stance, low-profile tires, and a head-turning cherry-red metalflake paint job. It's not that great on the corners, but it'll take any one of y'all on the straightaways.
I've never done time on wheels. On the whole, I found it to be not all that bad. Then again, I don't figure that most wheelchair-bound men my age get to enjoy being pushed around town by a couple of sexy German bloggerettes. Thanks, ladies: the jealous looks from the other local cripples was the icing on the cake. Here's a little something extra for you, babes. (via AoSHQ)
Funny things happen when you're on wheels. I saw a lady I work with while being carted through Tesco's frozen food department. I said hello, and she just looked right through me, steering her cart so as not to make contact with the leper. She probably thought I was going to ask her for some spare change, or if she could wipe me bum for me, or whatever it is that those people want from healthy-legged people. I also noticed that the supermarkets put completely different things down on the bottom three feet of the shelves. All the cool toys are down there, for example, presumably because chil'n's is small. It's also a great altitude to find anti-bedsore medicaments, for some reason.
So, I let myself be pushed by the Weyside in Guildford, where, at one point, a husky young native was required to wheel my fat ass up a steep incline. The Sistas, for all their heart, lacked the muscle to get the job done, so he, being a true-hearted salt-of-earth kind of guy, waved them off and grunted and sweated till I crested the hill. Had the man known that I could have, at any point in time, simply stood up and hobbled up the hill under my own power, he most certainly would have picked me up and broken me over his knee.
Tomorrow morning, we'll be visiting Stonehenge, or Stone'enge, as the locals quaintly call it. We'll also visit the haunted city, Salisbury, to watch the homosexuals. Ta!
I like reading OSNews for some reason. I think I like to catch the geeky news about SkyOS, or the occasional retro curmudgeonry that rolls by about Lotus 1-2-3 or OS/2. Being the old-timer that I am, it's hard to resist a paean from my youth about 10-finger productivity.
Unfortunately, they've become the epicenter of stupid for the tech press. Check out this article, which explodes the myths about competition being good: "Competition is not Good"
'It gives consumers more choice'
Choice is good when there's one agreed base standard, and a number of compatible approaches. For example, there are many Linux distributions, but they are all Linux, and they can all run the same software. They are 'flavours' of the same thing, that is a good choice. People like different flavours.
Competition does not produce easier choices for consumers. All they get is added un-interoperability and complexity with competitive choices.
Now, if you go read that article, which I do not recommend, you'll slowly come to the realization that this moron is just annoyed that he has to make the effort to choose between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. He's willing to surrender his entire free will to some (hopefully) benevolent dictator, abolish brand names, and forsake the free market economy because choosing which format to buy the Firefly special edition box set in is hard. What a hopeless, whiny-assed sissy.
Of course, things don't get better when they start tossing political analysis at you. "Net Neutrality" is one monikers that has overshadowed the thing named. The discussion is often framed in a way that an uninformed listener would assume there was lobbying going on to abolish some sort of laws that are now protecting consumers from big, bad tiered-Internet ninjas.
But: There is no net neutrality legislation, there never was, and hopefully, there never will be. The argument over "Net Neutrality" is about whether or not the U.S. government should introduce legislation forbidding bandwidth throttling by ISPs. It's the "have you stopped beating your wife?" straw man for the Slashdot crowd. You'll notice that this article calls the Supreme Court's decision that the U.S. government shouldn't step in and configure the ISPs' Cisco routers for them, "Backing for Two-Tier Internet":
The US Justice Department has said that internet service providers should be allowed to charge for priority traffic. The agency said it was opposed to 'network neutrality', the idea that all data on the net is treated equally. The comments put the agency at odds with companies such as Microsoft and Google, who have called for legislation to guarantee equal access to the net.
Of course, this would also mean that an enforcement infrastructure would also have to be put in place, making sure that everyone got their "fair share" of said bandwidth, as if backbone routers and POPs just fell off a tree somewhere. God forbid ISPs be allowed to tune the services that they developed and paid for as they wish. Let's let the government decides who gets bandwidth, and how much is enough! That will make it all fair and neutral-like. Whenever a politician uses the word "fair", hang on to your wallet.
Well, my trackbacks are now working, it seems. There's some ugly Python spaghetti-code going on behind the scenes that translates back and forth between absolute urls, non-absolute relative urls, and upper-lower-camel case; but it works.
Trackbacks are only good for Movable Type, though. Which I can't stand anymore. MT used to be the only thing out there, but there's something that really, really, really galls me about the way it rebuilds your entire site into static HTML pages everytime you update a post. I'm sure it's awesomeness if you've got your server running on an old TV remote, but nowadays we're all running our web servers on 100-core 64-bit terahertz moonshot computers that can simultaneously compute π, encode MPEG video, and mix the best goddam margaritas you've ever tasted, all without breaking a sweat.
So yeah, I figured out how to implement trackbacks in Django, to a point where they more or less work. Now why is Wordpress fucking with me? It seems to be thrown off by the fact that Wordpress sends a HEAD request before it downloads and parses the page, in the vain hope that the X-Pingback header will be set. I can't figure out how to do that in Django's generic views, so I just use the secondary method, that being a link element in the XHTML code. But now, whenever a Worpdress blog pings me, I get this kind of crap:
[09/Sep/2007 15:04:23] "GET /blog/2007/sep/08/vacation/ HTTP/1.1" 200 27367
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (104, 'Connection reset by peer')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (32, 'Broken pipe')
Being the half-assed programmer that I am, I am at a total loss. I can't even do a Lazyweb request here, seeing as my 4 visits a day are unlikely to bring the Django HTTP gurus by. I won't be able to sleep at night, thinking of all the enlightened Wordpress Users who are probably out there try to "Keep the discussion going" with me.
Ever since June, when the iPhone went live, I've heard about nothing else in the tech press, nerd podcasts, and the Apple Fanboisphere. Is it really that way over in the States (the only place you can get them), or does the iPhone actually seem to be doing well?
Ahh, my first vacation since joining The Company. My queue is cleaned up, my email is forwarded, and an elaborate Sieve session has accomplished in a mere two hours what less civilized mail systems can do with a key combination: The Corporate Vacation Email.
It's been five months now since I came 'cross the channel and started meeting the natives, learning the lingo, and getting used to the fact that everyone here talks like Pinky. Now, I'll be letting my hair down for the next 10 days or so. As well as putting my poor, broken foot up on the coffee table.
As soon as I get my x-rays back from the socialist medical system (they still copy them with coal rubbings on wax paper over here, apparently), I'll post pictures of the metatarsalar breakage here for your morbid enjoyment. Don't thank me yet.
The other half of Sistaweb will be joining us for the week. We'll allow her to sleep here rent-free for an entire week, even though she refused to bring a carton of cigarettes as payment. Damned non-smokers and their principles. It's like those non-smokers back in the World War II who didn't sign up for cigarette rations. Throwing away a gold mine, that is. Our grandfathers probably had a word for those guys, and if I knew my grandfather at all, that word was sissy-boy.
The girls have rented a wheelchair for me, seeing as I won't be too much fun doing a London pub-crawl on crutches. I've already had a forehead-slapping moment over this, as you probably are right now. Why haven't I thought of taking a wheelchair with me before? That would've come in handy on more than one occasion, the Wreckyll in Jeckyll not least among them.
Man, Apple is on a roll. Not only have they got me hooked for a new computer, a new laptop, a new office package, and a replacement for my aging MythTV box, but now I have to start thinking about a new iPod. Now, let's see what Uncle Steve is going to me be costing me 'til Christmas Time:
Item
Damage
20" iMac
1199.00
Macbook
1099.00
8GB iPod Touch
299.00
AppleTV
299.00
iWork '08
79.00
iLife '08
79.00
Total:
$3,054.00
Not bad for a day's work, Mr. Jobs. And what's up for the rest of September? Maybe some irresistible bionic iFoot to replace the one I broke playing frisbee at the company picnic last week?
Although there's a remarkable lack of iPhone hype around the office, we being a big-time Linux company and all, there's an amazing amount of Mac fanboiism. Pretty much all of us have Macs at home. The explanation for this is simple: After dealing with Linux problems all day long, there's something nice about going home to something you can spend all your time using and not making up excuses for why it looks like shit and doesn't work.
I like Linux, mind you. I use it day-in, day-out for my desktop at work, for my webservers, and it brings in my daily bread. We all love it here, pretty much like a family loves and therefore tolerates the embarrassing second cousin with the Downs'. But people are walking all over the office today buzzing about the upcoming announcement from Apple.
Will it be the long-awaited iMac redesign? Will it be a new Mini? My boss is actually carrying his phone to the pub after work today so he can sit on engadget and get a realtime update. Linus would not be pleased...
Last login: Thu Jul 26 12:17:28 from nat-pool-fab.re Welcome to Darwin! ericbook:~ eric$ mutt -bash: mutt: command not found ericbook:~ eric$ open /Applications/Mail.app/ ericbook:~ eric$
Ahh. Like coming in after a long day of plowing the fields and sticking your aching feet into a pot of hot water. After running Linux all day at work, you feel like slipping into something more comfortable. Sam knows it. Zonker knows it, though he won't admit it. It's the right amount of just-workiness you need to let you relax, while knowing you could, at any given moment, do something like:
OK, here's one with drivel. I do like it, but I have a couple of gripes.
First problem: I was hopelessly confused by the login screen. The type of journal seems to be locked on livejournal, as the drop-down menu for journal types is inexplicably disabled until you enter a username. -1 for usabilty
Second problem: Useless stripping of trailing slash, which mangled my xmlrpc URL. Error 301 was ignored, which makes sense since it's a post and all, but I couldn't log in. It mangled my URL then choked on the error :-/
Third problem: didn't want to download my recent posts. Although there might be a misunderstanding about just what "recent" means.
Fourth problem: Doesn't let me choose post status anywhere. And there's nowhere I can find to choose text filters. This is more of a feature request, really.
Fifth problem: craps out after posting, probably because it keeps mangling the trailing slashes from my URLs. Is there an RFC somewhere that says that POSTS can't end with slashes? Nobody tell the Django folks.
Well, maybe it'll at least let me post to my blog from work every now and then.
Man, I dang sure missed the entire month of June. I've been in the UK now for about two months, and let me tell ya: They sure do get some rain around here. I always thought those stories about English people having gills were legends and fantasies. Now, I'm not so sure.
For the love of GOD, for the last time, in the name of ALL THAT IS HOLY, Cluster Services is NOT COMPATIBLE with 4.5! If you're running a cluster, DO NOT update to 4.5 until the Cluster Suite is UPDATED TO 4.5!
That is all.
P.S. And NO, cmirror is not available yet. Maybe at the end of the month.
I went outside to smoke a cigarette. All rooms in England are for non-smokers, you'll find, as are the rooms, apartments, and houses listed for rent in the local papers. The litany at the end of all the ads reads, "No smokers, canvassers, or DSS", which stands for Department of Social Services. So, okay they hate smokers and welfare cases, as do we all. But the British have their own definition for 'non-smoker', which basically means you only smoke when you drink. Everybody smokes over here, and they all live somewhere.
The evening was cool; almost cold, really, as I suspect the evenings around here generally are. I stood on the corner of Osborne and Netley, watching the blackbirds getting ready to do whatever it is they do at night, when I spied a man, some yards away, bounding up the sidewalk with a jaunty gait. I held my cigarette just in front of my mouth, watching this figure with suspicion. He was short, about 5 feet tall, and round as a soccer ball. He was wearing light-colored trousers and a dark blazer, the left breast of which was adorned with an enormous, orange prize-ribbon.
As he approached me, his features became distinct in the bad lighting, and I realized he was positively beaming with pride. His face was ruddy, and split with a grin that wouldn't have looked out of place behind a wheelbarrow full of poker chips on the way to the cash-out. I placed him in his mid-40s, but maybe his thinning red hair and roly-poly stature made him look older than he really was.
He halted just a few feet from me, and said, with oddly struggling words, "Good evening, mister!"
I looked him up and down, cigarette still burning between my shaky fingers, and replied, "hi, how are ya..." He wobbled his head a bit, then walked around me on his way up the street. I noticed something written in gold on his orange ribbon, and read it as it flashed in the lamplight.
I judged him more than a wee bit 'differently-abled', as they say. I watched as he cautiously crossed the empty street, looking both ways at least twice, then gingerly stepping into the street and crossing it at a run.
I thought about what I had seen written on the ribbon: "A Very Special Boy". Hmm, I thought, I wonder who gave him that? Whoever it was, they made his whole day.
I put my cigarette out and walked back into the guest house.
My buddy Sam sent me an email a couple of days ago indicating that he just might have joined The Family recently. And he joined it a much higher level than I, I might add, considering I'm still lumbering along in the PowerPC world; my G4 Powerbook, though a loyal and trusted friend, seems slow as molasses in January these days.
He also mentioned an old OS/2 habit, one which we separately shared back in the day. I started using OS/2 when I worked at UPS. One of our managers was running 2.1, with the old Presentation Manager that looked like a crappy(er) Windows 2.0, albeit with long filenames and the ability to run concurrent DOS sessions. I avoided it until OS/2 3.0 came out.
In '94, when Warp hit the shelves, I rushed out to Soft-Warehouse1 in Alpharetta, looked in the Operating Systems2 department until I found a box, then gave the man $300 dollars for the privilege of running it. Then, I walked over the desktop applications department, and put down another $495 for Lotus Smartsuite/2. Then I OEM'd 16MB of RAM for about $400 to make it all go.
Now, many may see OS/2 as a butt-ugly cousin of Windows, and they may be right. But back then, it was a work of art. Especially in the sense that it wasn't an exact science getting it to run. Nothing ever really worked like it was supposed to. Without the fallback of a DOS prompt, you had to have a second, fully-functional machine to do things like edit the CONFIG.SYS on the installation floppies to make sure your DASD drivers were loading. And most of the drivers were written so that, if they encountered an error while loading, they'd bork the whole boot process, just to be on the safe side.
The graphical interface also hung constantly. The Workplace Shell, despite (or maybe due to) all its object-orientiness, was horribly unstable. But I never saw a hang that wasn't cured with Control-Alt-Delete. That key combo went right down to the kernel, and always gave a satisfying, unconfirmed reboot, wedged GUI be damned. There was even a 3rd party program called Watchcat that sat on the serial port, or on a secondary Hercules/MCGA monitor, and let you monitor and kill programs remotely. The kernel's Kung Fu was strong like that, but the GUI was just ass.
Now, when Chicago started finally coming down the pipe, and even the Rolling Stones where pulled into the OS marketing world ("Start me up", anyone?), OS/2 fans like myself were sure that this pissant little DOS extender with a homely face wouldn't be the future. It couldn't be the future, it was just too depressing. It still wasn't a 32-bit OS, though the 386 had been out for over 8 years. It still used FAT, for crying out loud. In short, Chicago sucked.
OS/2 seemed like a scrappy little underdog, nipping heroically at the Microsoft behemoth's heels. I'm not sure why it gave that impression. At the time, IBM was much bigger than Microsoft, a huge, multinational corporation with interests in basically every aspect of electronics. They just couldn't write or market good software.
I'm not sure why I just wrote 500 words on OS/2. I actually wanted to write something about Linux.
Software stores used to have a whole "Operating Systems" department, back when there was more than one operating system, and Windows was still called an "Operating Environment" ↩
Man, I'm unprepared. There's a checklist of things you should do before moving to England. I came over here without any money, preparation, or attack plan. There's something unbelievably stupid about this. It worked for me when I moved to Germany, but moving to England's a bit more complicated, apparently. Either that, or I'm remembering it wrong.
But I'm not the only one. The office I'm working in is full of non-British people. It's a rag-tag group of Germans, Italians, Brazilians, Spaniards, one (1) American, and who knows what else that all found themselves in the same boat when they first came over. This despite promises from The Company to help one resettle; promises which are certainly not kept and, when referred to in conversation, change their shape and character like a Democrat on a whistle-stop.
But at some point a kindly soul in the department, now departed, made a list of the reality of the situation. It's a short list of what one really needs to do when moving to England. Unfortunately, I only found out about it after I'd already been here a week. Here's your to-do list once you've arrived in England:
Get a room. If possible, get a rental agreement or any bill with your name and address on it. (proof of address)
Deposit is usually 1 1/2 times the rent. Deposit and first rent is to be paid beforehand. If the room is unfurnished, see "Things to Buy" for shops and example prices.
Get a letter from your office manager (HR Lady) stating that you are working for the company and including your address. (proof of employment)
Get a bank account. Just walk in with your documents:
Passport or national ID card
Proof of employment (see 2.). it might be handy to have your contract with you.
Proof of address
Banks
HSBC – try to get a standard account (they try to sell you an advanced package including insurances etc.)
NatWest – Also recommended as this bank does not charge for withdrawing money from a different bank's cash machines
Give your bank details to The Company
Register with Inland Revenue – this is done by your HR manager. You should get your tax code about 2 weeks later (PAYE Coding Notice)
At the end of the fiscal year (ending April 5th), you will get a "P60 End of Year Certificate" detailing your "Pay and Income Tax" levels.
Get a National Insurance Number by applying at a Job Centre Plus office. They ask for dtails before they schedule an interview appointment to verify your eligibility. Appointments are scheduled about two weeks ahead, and take place in the nearest county office, which usually isn't near at all. Without an NI number, you will be on emergency tax, which is higher than the standard tax rate.
Documents:
Passport
National ID card
Driving License or any other official document identifying you (Birth certificate, police registration, medical card, etc.)
Proof of employment (see 2.)
Recent payslip
Bank statement
Proof of address (utility bill, rental agreement, etc. – see 1.)
It might be handy to have your PAYE Coding Notice with you
As money is paid in a timely manner so it is available on the 27th, try to get your appointment after this date.
If you are British, a citizen of a member state of the EU, or other Commonwealth citizen, you can apply for inclusion on the Register of Electors. This will allow you to vote at local government elections. Your credibility will rise (good for tenancy applications or bank-related matters) and you are obliged to pay Council Taxes1
If you buy any TV or radio equipment, you will be asked for your address, which will be automatically forwarded to the "TV Licensing Office"
Get a Tesco Clubcard
Get a life ;-)
Any address change has to be communicated to all above-mentioned authorities. For the official notices to local council, the TV licensing, and most other on-line services, you can use I am Moving , where you can create/use an account for free.
All of this could have been avoided with a bit of planning. I am bitterly disappointed in myself.
Council taxes are universal as far as I can tell, and are perceived, by the British at least, as an extension of the rent. ↩
Farnborough derives its name from from the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Ferneberga (Fern Hill) and is mentioned in the Domesday Book (1086). But for the coming of the army at nearby Aldershot, the arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flying, Farnborough would probably have remained an isolated heathland village, that is until the latter half of the 20th century when the population moved out of London suburbia and became commuters.
"But for the … arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flight…". That's a pretty big conditional. There are probably a lot of places whose development was seriously affected by railways and the advent of powered flight. But I understand where the good Mr. Parkins is coming from.
I had forgotten the cable to connect my camera to my laptop. Of all the stupid things that I packed for the trip, 50 different USB cables, a USB hub, power adapters for devices I’d forgotten, not to mention devices whose power adapters I’d forgotten, I forgot the one thing that was absolutely necessary and planned-for. Not to mention irreplaceable, seeing as every camera maker in the world decided that their camera’s little hole should look different from all the other cameras’ little holes.
I walked into a little computer store on the strip in Fleet, Hampshire. Walking up to the pasty-faced, teenaged part-timer there, I introduced myself and shook his hand, which seemed to shock him.
He unconsciously wiped his hands on his pants and said, “eh...nice to meet you, sir. What can I do for you?”
I asked him, “do you have any USB card-readers?”
“Um, yeah," he answered. "I think I saw some around here somewhere.”
I looked around the shop, which was organized and clean. Man, he must really be the FNG around here. He finally found what I was looking for, stored on a shelf right next to where he had been sitting. He handed it to me and I started reading the back of the packaging.
“Just looking to see if it works with my Mac,” I told him.
“Oh, it's USB, so it should work,” he answered, and took the reader out of my hand. He moved his lips while he read the package. “Oh, yeah,” he said finally. “Right there it says it: ‘Requires Mac OS 9 or later’.” He looked at me skeptically. “So, you do have OS 9 or later, don’t you?”
“Um, yeah, I think so.” OS 9 went out of style back in the ‘90s.
He moved around to the register, and I handed him my Visa card. He looked uncertain as he turned it over in his hand. “This thing doesn’t have a chip on it?”
I took it back and examined it. “No, I guess it doesn’t.”
“Well, I don’t think we can take that, then.”
“Why don’t you just swipe it,” I said. “Give it a go.”
He shrugged and swiped it through the machine.
From behind me, a voice said, “it’s all chips nowadays, you know.”
I looked around, and saw that an older woman was standing behind me. She looked to be in her mid 40s, and wore a name plate with the store’s logo on it. “You can’t get nothing without a dozen little chips in it.”
I nodded agreement, and turned back to the young man behind the register.
“So, what kind of Mac you got, then?”
“A PowerBook G4.”
He nodded approvingly. “Nice piece of kit, that.” The little machine that had taken my card made a loud ping!, and spit out a receipt. He tore it off and gave it to me to sign, along with the card reader.
“Now, you have a nice day sir, and do please visit us again.”
I thanked him, said goodbye to the chip-lady, and put the small package into my bag next to my laptop. “Thanks, man, I’ll do that.” Nice kid.
Didja ever discover something that made your reality skip a beat? You know how, for just a second, something is so far out of place that you can't even figure out what's wrong with the picture? For example, the Augsburg Wireless-Internet provider Cyberways has had the same guy on their start page for years:
Every time you connect to the internet over public wireless in Augsburg, that dude was right there, staring at you with those soulless black eyes. Like a doll's eyes...
And the weird thing was, I always figured he was the boss at Cyberways. I even thought I saw him once on the tram. I hate it when people use the same stock photos everywhere. Everybody's full of shit. Oh, I guess it's effective use of your cash dollars, seeing as it's cheaper than paying attractive people to work for you. But still, why not just be honest for a split second?
You get this kind of thing all over the Internet, of course. If you've ever shopped for web hosting, you'll notice, after a few visits to the providers' pages, that their employees all kind of look alike. And there's always some woman somewhere holding a laptop at her waist in near-sexual ecstasy over the reasonable shared hosting prices.
It's a leitmotif throughout the enter hosting industry: Shared Webspace=Chick with laptop.
Rube, look, for the last freakin time, look RIGHT when you step off a curb! These people drive on the other side of the F$@&-ing road over here! You wanna get ya brains splattered all over me?
What? I dunno. I'm just kind of sitting around, waiting on things. I just spent way too much time transferring money across European borders, and reclaiming my identity. But the new passports are wonderful pieces of fortitude. Here' s a few quotes from my new passport:
And that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth. - Abraham Lincoln
The principle of free governments adheres to the American soil. It is bedded in it, immovable as its mountains. - Daniel Webster
Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. - George Washington
We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. - excerpt from the Declaration of Independence
Your concept of love may be different, but know that I love this world.
I like reading Scott Adams' blog on occasion. Much like Balph Eubanks, he's glib, amusing, and completely lacking in morality. Take, for example, his latest strawman-laden posting regarding the visit of a certain Mr. Ahmedinejad:
I was happy to hear that NYC didn't allow Iranian President Ahmadinejad
to place a wreath at the WTC site. And I was happy that Columbia
University is rescinding the offer to let him speak. If you let a guy like
that express his views, before long the entire world will want freedom
of speech.
...
If Ahmadinejad thinks he can be our friend by honoring our heroes and
opening a dialog, he underestimates our ability to misinterpret him.
Fucking idiot. I hate him.
Well, there's certainly some rye wit at work here. Yes, it is quite ironic that a country led by a genocidal religious dictator, which the USA most certainly is, would object to a fellow genocidal religious madman visiting its most sensitive cultural site. I mean, Mahmoud's only trying to "open a dialog" here, isn't he? Isn't that the meaning of Ahmedinejad's visit? Isn't Ahmedinejad just exercising "Free Speech", as Adams says? Aren't we wrong in denying this poor man that right?
Aside from the obvious jackassery involved in claiming that a man who directly controls his entire country's media is having trouble getting his point of view out; or that the United Nations will let him speak before the leaders of the world to the point where they forget to blink for an hour; aside from all this, this is not a question of whether or not Mahmoud is allowed to say what he wants. The question is, in accordance with the Grand Unified Theory of Rubean Mechanics, Who's going to pay for it. It's a question of whether or not Americans should be paying for his plane fare, his security, and his accommodation while he's here, pissing on Ground Zero and generating propaganda for totalitarian lobbying groups like MoveOn.org and International ANSWER.
All of Adams' ridiculous assertions never mention the one central fact here: There is no compelling reason for American taxpayers to foot the bill, so this guy, who just held one of his popular "Death to America" parades, can come over here and lecture them on anything. I personally don't much care what Ahmedinejad thinks, I can see the general thrust of his inclinations. He's spitting on the United States and Western Culture daily, and then expects to be treated with deference in return. Fuck him.
This kind of Devil's Advocacy isn't new to Adams. At least, I hope it's just that. He's apparently one of those celebrities that have forgotten the hard work involved in their ascendency, and assume that they're rich because of some accident of nature, akin to divine providence. Humans, himself included, are all just a bunch of "moist robots" with no capacity for thought, no free will; we've apparently just been programmed by Mother Nature to do the things we've done or will do. There is no mind, there is no choice, there is only the stimuli in our environments, and the response that was determined by a chance arrangement of atoms into chemicals during the Big Bang. Or something.
It's an obscene display of thoughtlessness, a conceit of someone trying so hard to seem above all this. Adams' Dilbert is amusing, and his blog is a bit of junk food for the brain at times. But he's got the morals of a two-dollar whore.
Last night we didn't make it. The two Frenchmen surrendered the evening, seeing as it was Trotzky's birthday, and therefore a time for somber reflection or something. So, we rode around big town Farnborough for a couple of hours, grabbed some grub, and then headed back to the apartment to watch a movie.
We watched Fur, which cemented my belief that Nicole Kidman is the perfect woman. Not only does she look good in her own slutty little librarian sort of way, she gives a guy a handjob in this movie while shaving his hairy back. That's my kind of girl, a real little trooper.
Anyhoo, it's back off to London now, for a second try at getting sloppy somewhere besides sitting at home in front of the boob tube. Wish us luck.
Vacation week is winding down, and I'm getting ready to leave the driving to Southwest Trains and go drinking in London. I'll try to keep it under two weeks this time, but no promises. We'll tramp it a bit through Soho, I guess, just me, the girls, and a couple of frog-eaters from the office.
I wonder why I never get to go drinking with Englishmen? It's probably for the best. There's a quote that gets bandied about, especially in the local newspapers, about England being a nation of drunks and scalawags. I can't say much about that, but it does seem that the pubs all close at 11:00 PM for a reason. At 5 o'clock, they pour out of their offices and into the public houses, seemingly on a race against the clock to get themselves 'faced before the early last call.
When they were finally permitted to stay open past 11, in the hope that the binge-drinking would abate in light of longer opening hours, they found themselves doubly-cursed in that the Englishmen were every bit as drunk at 11, but didn't have to go home. All pubs here are set up so that you have to go to the counter to get your drinks, instead of having them brought to your table. There's a built-in handbrake there: a system where you can't get any more drink once you lose the ability to walk is founded upon sound principle and good advices.
I've done nothing today; nothing but clean out the cluttered closets of my preferred newsfeed reader. There were some connections in there that were sorely neglected. I could use a bit more time to wade through the degenerate filth that is my blogroll, but sadly, I work. The Company is tolerant in their control over my time, fair since they do not pay hourly; but tolerance has its limits, and I doubt they would look kindly upon my spending the business day in a fugue state, reading entry after entry of dialectics about Jessica Simpson's tits, or Brittney Spears' overplayed poonanny.
Nevertheless, it saddens me that my everyday is not blessed with the nuggets of wisdom from skippystalin:
Being the only person with an out-of-control substance abuse problem in a relationship is tough. Most romantic couplings are based on common interests and most of my interests culminate in my waking up in a pool of what I think is my own urine and not being quite sure what time zone I'm in. I'm much like a cat in that I have a tendancy of marking my territory with my vomit, blood and gallons of my semen...My ability to smoke, drink and masturbate furiously at the same time might not be much, it's all that I have.
Ahh, skippystalin, how I've missed you, and your nuggets.
This is how I spend my vacation: visiting Stonehenge on one day; reading the melancholy musings of skippystalin the next, picturing him composing scholarly tracts through bitter tears, a crushed Viagra dissolving in a highball of Jack Daniels next to the keyboard, as another long evening fades into a blur of poetry, madness, and vigorous bouts of hate-filled masturbation. And wondering, of the two, which is the more meaningful and fitting monument to humanity?
They should've just burned enjoyeverysandwich to CD, stuck it to the side of Voyager along with its author, and shot the whole lot into space back when they had government funding to do so, all in the name of making a good first impression for whatever aliens were out cruising for an easy meal.
skippystalin's output is prodigious, to be sure, but there was an entire blogroll to consider:
The lunatics are running the asylum over at Straight White Guy's place. Eric's testicles are mentioned, indirectly. Remind me to change my passwords regularly and start using strong encryption.
How stoned do you have to be to cheat on Jessica Alba? I could jack off to Jessica Alba while a big mean dog was chasing me and this idiot is cheating on her. I decided to confront him about this and I screamed at him, hey, what is your problem. And he said I should get off his lawn. And I said, no, no you get off the lawn. You get off. Then he went inside, probably because deep down, he knew I had made some pretty good points.
JimGoad.com is no more, but if you're a Goad fan (ladies!), you can find find him here. Discussion of Brittany's latest, erm, candid photos is also to be found, but be aware that the following picture is used as a visual aid:
This morning we picked up my new wheelchair. It's a sporty European marque, with an aggressive stance, low-profile tires, and a head-turning cherry-red metalflake paint job. It's not that great on the corners, but it'll take any one of y'all on the straightaways.
I've never done time on wheels. On the whole, I found it to be not all that bad. Then again, I don't figure that most wheelchair-bound men my age get to enjoy being pushed around town by a couple of sexy German bloggerettes. Thanks, ladies: the jealous looks from the other local cripples was the icing on the cake. Here's a little something extra for you, babes. (via AoSHQ)
Funny things happen when you're on wheels. I saw a lady I work with while being carted through Tesco's frozen food department. I said hello, and she just looked right through me, steering her cart so as not to make contact with the leper. She probably thought I was going to ask her for some spare change, or if she could wipe me bum for me, or whatever it is that those people want from healthy-legged people. I also noticed that the supermarkets put completely different things down on the bottom three feet of the shelves. All the cool toys are down there, for example, presumably because chil'n's is small. It's also a great altitude to find anti-bedsore medicaments, for some reason.
So, I let myself be pushed by the Weyside in Guildford, where, at one point, a husky young native was required to wheel my fat ass up a steep incline. The Sistas, for all their heart, lacked the muscle to get the job done, so he, being a true-hearted salt-of-earth kind of guy, waved them off and grunted and sweated till I crested the hill. Had the man known that I could have, at any point in time, simply stood up and hobbled up the hill under my own power, he most certainly would have picked me up and broken me over his knee.
Tomorrow morning, we'll be visiting Stonehenge, or Stone'enge, as the locals quaintly call it. We'll also visit the haunted city, Salisbury, to watch the homosexuals. Ta!
I like reading OSNews for some reason. I think I like to catch the geeky news about SkyOS, or the occasional retro curmudgeonry that rolls by about Lotus 1-2-3 or OS/2. Being the old-timer that I am, it's hard to resist a paean from my youth about 10-finger productivity.
Unfortunately, they've become the epicenter of stupid for the tech press. Check out this article, which explodes the myths about competition being good: "Competition is not Good"
'It gives consumers more choice'
Choice is good when there's one agreed base standard, and a number of compatible approaches. For example, there are many Linux distributions, but they are all Linux, and they can all run the same software. They are 'flavours' of the same thing, that is a good choice. People like different flavours.
Competition does not produce easier choices for consumers. All they get is added un-interoperability and complexity with competitive choices.
Now, if you go read that article, which I do not recommend, you'll slowly come to the realization that this moron is just annoyed that he has to make the effort to choose between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. He's willing to surrender his entire free will to some (hopefully) benevolent dictator, abolish brand names, and forsake the free market economy because choosing which format to buy the Firefly special edition box set in is hard. What a hopeless, whiny-assed sissy.
Of course, things don't get better when they start tossing political analysis at you. "Net Neutrality" is one monikers that has overshadowed the thing named. The discussion is often framed in a way that an uninformed listener would assume there was lobbying going on to abolish some sort of laws that are now protecting consumers from big, bad tiered-Internet ninjas.
But: There is no net neutrality legislation, there never was, and hopefully, there never will be. The argument over "Net Neutrality" is about whether or not the U.S. government should introduce legislation forbidding bandwidth throttling by ISPs. It's the "have you stopped beating your wife?" straw man for the Slashdot crowd. You'll notice that this article calls the Supreme Court's decision that the U.S. government shouldn't step in and configure the ISPs' Cisco routers for them, "Backing for Two-Tier Internet":
The US Justice Department has said that internet service providers should be allowed to charge for priority traffic. The agency said it was opposed to 'network neutrality', the idea that all data on the net is treated equally. The comments put the agency at odds with companies such as Microsoft and Google, who have called for legislation to guarantee equal access to the net.
Of course, this would also mean that an enforcement infrastructure would also have to be put in place, making sure that everyone got their "fair share" of said bandwidth, as if backbone routers and POPs just fell off a tree somewhere. God forbid ISPs be allowed to tune the services that they developed and paid for as they wish. Let's let the government decides who gets bandwidth, and how much is enough! That will make it all fair and neutral-like. Whenever a politician uses the word "fair", hang on to your wallet.
Well, my trackbacks are now working, it seems. There's some ugly Python spaghetti-code going on behind the scenes that translates back and forth between absolute urls, non-absolute relative urls, and upper-lower-camel case; but it works.
Trackbacks are only good for Movable Type, though. Which I can't stand anymore. MT used to be the only thing out there, but there's something that really, really, really galls me about the way it rebuilds your entire site into static HTML pages everytime you update a post. I'm sure it's awesomeness if you've got your server running on an old TV remote, but nowadays we're all running our web servers on 100-core 64-bit terahertz moonshot computers that can simultaneously compute π, encode MPEG video, and mix the best goddam margaritas you've ever tasted, all without breaking a sweat.
So yeah, I figured out how to implement trackbacks in Django, to a point where they more or less work. Now why is Wordpress fucking with me? It seems to be thrown off by the fact that Wordpress sends a HEAD request before it downloads and parses the page, in the vain hope that the X-Pingback header will be set. I can't figure out how to do that in Django's generic views, so I just use the secondary method, that being a link element in the XHTML code. But now, whenever a Worpdress blog pings me, I get this kind of crap:
[09/Sep/2007 15:04:23] "GET /blog/2007/sep/08/vacation/ HTTP/1.1" 200 27367
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (104, 'Connection reset by peer')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (32, 'Broken pipe')
Being the half-assed programmer that I am, I am at a total loss. I can't even do a Lazyweb request here, seeing as my 4 visits a day are unlikely to bring the Django HTTP gurus by. I won't be able to sleep at night, thinking of all the enlightened Wordpress Users who are probably out there try to "Keep the discussion going" with me.
Ever since June, when the iPhone went live, I've heard about nothing else in the tech press, nerd podcasts, and the Apple Fanboisphere. Is it really that way over in the States (the only place you can get them), or does the iPhone actually seem to be doing well?
Ahh, my first vacation since joining The Company. My queue is cleaned up, my email is forwarded, and an elaborate Sieve session has accomplished in a mere two hours what less civilized mail systems can do with a key combination: The Corporate Vacation Email.
It's been five months now since I came 'cross the channel and started meeting the natives, learning the lingo, and getting used to the fact that everyone here talks like Pinky. Now, I'll be letting my hair down for the next 10 days or so. As well as putting my poor, broken foot up on the coffee table.
As soon as I get my x-rays back from the socialist medical system (they still copy them with coal rubbings on wax paper over here, apparently), I'll post pictures of the metatarsalar breakage here for your morbid enjoyment. Don't thank me yet.
The other half of Sistaweb will be joining us for the week. We'll allow her to sleep here rent-free for an entire week, even though she refused to bring a carton of cigarettes as payment. Damned non-smokers and their principles. It's like those non-smokers back in the World War II who didn't sign up for cigarette rations. Throwing away a gold mine, that is. Our grandfathers probably had a word for those guys, and if I knew my grandfather at all, that word was sissy-boy.
The girls have rented a wheelchair for me, seeing as I won't be too much fun doing a London pub-crawl on crutches. I've already had a forehead-slapping moment over this, as you probably are right now. Why haven't I thought of taking a wheelchair with me before? That would've come in handy on more than one occasion, the Wreckyll in Jeckyll not least among them.
Man, Apple is on a roll. Not only have they got me hooked for a new computer, a new laptop, a new office package, and a replacement for my aging MythTV box, but now I have to start thinking about a new iPod. Now, let's see what Uncle Steve is going to me be costing me 'til Christmas Time:
Item
Damage
20" iMac
1199.00
Macbook
1099.00
8GB iPod Touch
299.00
AppleTV
299.00
iWork '08
79.00
iLife '08
79.00
Total:
$3,054.00
Not bad for a day's work, Mr. Jobs. And what's up for the rest of September? Maybe some irresistible bionic iFoot to replace the one I broke playing frisbee at the company picnic last week?
Although there's a remarkable lack of iPhone hype around the office, we being a big-time Linux company and all, there's an amazing amount of Mac fanboiism. Pretty much all of us have Macs at home. The explanation for this is simple: After dealing with Linux problems all day long, there's something nice about going home to something you can spend all your time using and not making up excuses for why it looks like shit and doesn't work.
I like Linux, mind you. I use it day-in, day-out for my desktop at work, for my webservers, and it brings in my daily bread. We all love it here, pretty much like a family loves and therefore tolerates the embarrassing second cousin with the Downs'. But people are walking all over the office today buzzing about the upcoming announcement from Apple.
Will it be the long-awaited iMac redesign? Will it be a new Mini? My boss is actually carrying his phone to the pub after work today so he can sit on engadget and get a realtime update. Linus would not be pleased...
Last login: Thu Jul 26 12:17:28 from nat-pool-fab.re Welcome to Darwin! ericbook:~ eric$ mutt -bash: mutt: command not found ericbook:~ eric$ open /Applications/Mail.app/ ericbook:~ eric$
Ahh. Like coming in after a long day of plowing the fields and sticking your aching feet into a pot of hot water. After running Linux all day at work, you feel like slipping into something more comfortable. Sam knows it. Zonker knows it, though he won't admit it. It's the right amount of just-workiness you need to let you relax, while knowing you could, at any given moment, do something like:
OK, here's one with drivel. I do like it, but I have a couple of gripes.
First problem: I was hopelessly confused by the login screen. The type of journal seems to be locked on livejournal, as the drop-down menu for journal types is inexplicably disabled until you enter a username. -1 for usabilty
Second problem: Useless stripping of trailing slash, which mangled my xmlrpc URL. Error 301 was ignored, which makes sense since it's a post and all, but I couldn't log in. It mangled my URL then choked on the error :-/
Third problem: didn't want to download my recent posts. Although there might be a misunderstanding about just what "recent" means.
Fourth problem: Doesn't let me choose post status anywhere. And there's nowhere I can find to choose text filters. This is more of a feature request, really.
Fifth problem: craps out after posting, probably because it keeps mangling the trailing slashes from my URLs. Is there an RFC somewhere that says that POSTS can't end with slashes? Nobody tell the Django folks.
Well, maybe it'll at least let me post to my blog from work every now and then.
Man, I dang sure missed the entire month of June. I've been in the UK now for about two months, and let me tell ya: They sure do get some rain around here. I always thought those stories about English people having gills were legends and fantasies. Now, I'm not so sure.
For the love of GOD, for the last time, in the name of ALL THAT IS HOLY, Cluster Services is NOT COMPATIBLE with 4.5! If you're running a cluster, DO NOT update to 4.5 until the Cluster Suite is UPDATED TO 4.5!
That is all.
P.S. And NO, cmirror is not available yet. Maybe at the end of the month.
I went outside to smoke a cigarette. All rooms in England are for non-smokers, you'll find, as are the rooms, apartments, and houses listed for rent in the local papers. The litany at the end of all the ads reads, "No smokers, canvassers, or DSS", which stands for Department of Social Services. So, okay they hate smokers and welfare cases, as do we all. But the British have their own definition for 'non-smoker', which basically means you only smoke when you drink. Everybody smokes over here, and they all live somewhere.
The evening was cool; almost cold, really, as I suspect the evenings around here generally are. I stood on the corner of Osborne and Netley, watching the blackbirds getting ready to do whatever it is they do at night, when I spied a man, some yards away, bounding up the sidewalk with a jaunty gait. I held my cigarette just in front of my mouth, watching this figure with suspicion. He was short, about 5 feet tall, and round as a soccer ball. He was wearing light-colored trousers and a dark blazer, the left breast of which was adorned with an enormous, orange prize-ribbon.
As he approached me, his features became distinct in the bad lighting, and I realized he was positively beaming with pride. His face was ruddy, and split with a grin that wouldn't have looked out of place behind a wheelbarrow full of poker chips on the way to the cash-out. I placed him in his mid-40s, but maybe his thinning red hair and roly-poly stature made him look older than he really was.
He halted just a few feet from me, and said, with oddly struggling words, "Good evening, mister!"
I looked him up and down, cigarette still burning between my shaky fingers, and replied, "hi, how are ya..." He wobbled his head a bit, then walked around me on his way up the street. I noticed something written in gold on his orange ribbon, and read it as it flashed in the lamplight.
I judged him more than a wee bit 'differently-abled', as they say. I watched as he cautiously crossed the empty street, looking both ways at least twice, then gingerly stepping into the street and crossing it at a run.
I thought about what I had seen written on the ribbon: "A Very Special Boy". Hmm, I thought, I wonder who gave him that? Whoever it was, they made his whole day.
I put my cigarette out and walked back into the guest house.
My buddy Sam sent me an email a couple of days ago indicating that he just might have joined The Family recently. And he joined it a much higher level than I, I might add, considering I'm still lumbering along in the PowerPC world; my G4 Powerbook, though a loyal and trusted friend, seems slow as molasses in January these days.
He also mentioned an old OS/2 habit, one which we separately shared back in the day. I started using OS/2 when I worked at UPS. One of our managers was running 2.1, with the old Presentation Manager that looked like a crappy(er) Windows 2.0, albeit with long filenames and the ability to run concurrent DOS sessions. I avoided it until OS/2 3.0 came out.
In '94, when Warp hit the shelves, I rushed out to Soft-Warehouse1 in Alpharetta, looked in the Operating Systems2 department until I found a box, then gave the man $300 dollars for the privilege of running it. Then, I walked over the desktop applications department, and put down another $495 for Lotus Smartsuite/2. Then I OEM'd 16MB of RAM for about $400 to make it all go.
Now, many may see OS/2 as a butt-ugly cousin of Windows, and they may be right. But back then, it was a work of art. Especially in the sense that it wasn't an exact science getting it to run. Nothing ever really worked like it was supposed to. Without the fallback of a DOS prompt, you had to have a second, fully-functional machine to do things like edit the CONFIG.SYS on the installation floppies to make sure your DASD drivers were loading. And most of the drivers were written so that, if they encountered an error while loading, they'd bork the whole boot process, just to be on the safe side.
The graphical interface also hung constantly. The Workplace Shell, despite (or maybe due to) all its object-orientiness, was horribly unstable. But I never saw a hang that wasn't cured with Control-Alt-Delete. That key combo went right down to the kernel, and always gave a satisfying, unconfirmed reboot, wedged GUI be damned. There was even a 3rd party program called Watchcat that sat on the serial port, or on a secondary Hercules/MCGA monitor, and let you monitor and kill programs remotely. The kernel's Kung Fu was strong like that, but the GUI was just ass.
Now, when Chicago started finally coming down the pipe, and even the Rolling Stones where pulled into the OS marketing world ("Start me up", anyone?), OS/2 fans like myself were sure that this pissant little DOS extender with a homely face wouldn't be the future. It couldn't be the future, it was just too depressing. It still wasn't a 32-bit OS, though the 386 had been out for over 8 years. It still used FAT, for crying out loud. In short, Chicago sucked.
OS/2 seemed like a scrappy little underdog, nipping heroically at the Microsoft behemoth's heels. I'm not sure why it gave that impression. At the time, IBM was much bigger than Microsoft, a huge, multinational corporation with interests in basically every aspect of electronics. They just couldn't write or market good software.
I'm not sure why I just wrote 500 words on OS/2. I actually wanted to write something about Linux.
Software stores used to have a whole "Operating Systems" department, back when there was more than one operating system, and Windows was still called an "Operating Environment" ↩
Man, I'm unprepared. There's a checklist of things you should do before moving to England. I came over here without any money, preparation, or attack plan. There's something unbelievably stupid about this. It worked for me when I moved to Germany, but moving to England's a bit more complicated, apparently. Either that, or I'm remembering it wrong.
But I'm not the only one. The office I'm working in is full of non-British people. It's a rag-tag group of Germans, Italians, Brazilians, Spaniards, one (1) American, and who knows what else that all found themselves in the same boat when they first came over. This despite promises from The Company to help one resettle; promises which are certainly not kept and, when referred to in conversation, change their shape and character like a Democrat on a whistle-stop.
But at some point a kindly soul in the department, now departed, made a list of the reality of the situation. It's a short list of what one really needs to do when moving to England. Unfortunately, I only found out about it after I'd already been here a week. Here's your to-do list once you've arrived in England:
Get a room. If possible, get a rental agreement or any bill with your name and address on it. (proof of address)
Deposit is usually 1 1/2 times the rent. Deposit and first rent is to be paid beforehand. If the room is unfurnished, see "Things to Buy" for shops and example prices.
Get a letter from your office manager (HR Lady) stating that you are working for the company and including your address. (proof of employment)
Get a bank account. Just walk in with your documents:
Passport or national ID card
Proof of employment (see 2.). it might be handy to have your contract with you.
Proof of address
Banks
HSBC – try to get a standard account (they try to sell you an advanced package including insurances etc.)
NatWest – Also recommended as this bank does not charge for withdrawing money from a different bank's cash machines
Give your bank details to The Company
Register with Inland Revenue – this is done by your HR manager. You should get your tax code about 2 weeks later (PAYE Coding Notice)
At the end of the fiscal year (ending April 5th), you will get a "P60 End of Year Certificate" detailing your "Pay and Income Tax" levels.
Get a National Insurance Number by applying at a Job Centre Plus office. They ask for dtails before they schedule an interview appointment to verify your eligibility. Appointments are scheduled about two weeks ahead, and take place in the nearest county office, which usually isn't near at all. Without an NI number, you will be on emergency tax, which is higher than the standard tax rate.
Documents:
Passport
National ID card
Driving License or any other official document identifying you (Birth certificate, police registration, medical card, etc.)
Proof of employment (see 2.)
Recent payslip
Bank statement
Proof of address (utility bill, rental agreement, etc. – see 1.)
It might be handy to have your PAYE Coding Notice with you
As money is paid in a timely manner so it is available on the 27th, try to get your appointment after this date.
If you are British, a citizen of a member state of the EU, or other Commonwealth citizen, you can apply for inclusion on the Register of Electors. This will allow you to vote at local government elections. Your credibility will rise (good for tenancy applications or bank-related matters) and you are obliged to pay Council Taxes1
If you buy any TV or radio equipment, you will be asked for your address, which will be automatically forwarded to the "TV Licensing Office"
Get a Tesco Clubcard
Get a life ;-)
Any address change has to be communicated to all above-mentioned authorities. For the official notices to local council, the TV licensing, and most other on-line services, you can use I am Moving , where you can create/use an account for free.
All of this could have been avoided with a bit of planning. I am bitterly disappointed in myself.
Council taxes are universal as far as I can tell, and are perceived, by the British at least, as an extension of the rent. ↩
Farnborough derives its name from from the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Ferneberga (Fern Hill) and is mentioned in the Domesday Book (1086). But for the coming of the army at nearby Aldershot, the arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flying, Farnborough would probably have remained an isolated heathland village, that is until the latter half of the 20th century when the population moved out of London suburbia and became commuters.
"But for the … arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flight…". That's a pretty big conditional. There are probably a lot of places whose development was seriously affected by railways and the advent of powered flight. But I understand where the good Mr. Parkins is coming from.
I had forgotten the cable to connect my camera to my laptop. Of all the stupid things that I packed for the trip, 50 different USB cables, a USB hub, power adapters for devices I’d forgotten, not to mention devices whose power adapters I’d forgotten, I forgot the one thing that was absolutely necessary and planned-for. Not to mention irreplaceable, seeing as every camera maker in the world decided that their camera’s little hole should look different from all the other cameras’ little holes.
I walked into a little computer store on the strip in Fleet, Hampshire. Walking up to the pasty-faced, teenaged part-timer there, I introduced myself and shook his hand, which seemed to shock him.
He unconsciously wiped his hands on his pants and said, “eh...nice to meet you, sir. What can I do for you?”
I asked him, “do you have any USB card-readers?”
“Um, yeah," he answered. "I think I saw some around here somewhere.”
I looked around the shop, which was organized and clean. Man, he must really be the FNG around here. He finally found what I was looking for, stored on a shelf right next to where he had been sitting. He handed it to me and I started reading the back of the packaging.
“Just looking to see if it works with my Mac,” I told him.
“Oh, it's USB, so it should work,” he answered, and took the reader out of my hand. He moved his lips while he read the package. “Oh, yeah,” he said finally. “Right there it says it: ‘Requires Mac OS 9 or later’.” He looked at me skeptically. “So, you do have OS 9 or later, don’t you?”
“Um, yeah, I think so.” OS 9 went out of style back in the ‘90s.
He moved around to the register, and I handed him my Visa card. He looked uncertain as he turned it over in his hand. “This thing doesn’t have a chip on it?”
I took it back and examined it. “No, I guess it doesn’t.”
“Well, I don’t think we can take that, then.”
“Why don’t you just swipe it,” I said. “Give it a go.”
He shrugged and swiped it through the machine.
From behind me, a voice said, “it’s all chips nowadays, you know.”
I looked around, and saw that an older woman was standing behind me. She looked to be in her mid 40s, and wore a name plate with the store’s logo on it. “You can’t get nothing without a dozen little chips in it.”
I nodded agreement, and turned back to the young man behind the register.
“So, what kind of Mac you got, then?”
“A PowerBook G4.”
He nodded approvingly. “Nice piece of kit, that.” The little machine that had taken my card made a loud ping!, and spit out a receipt. He tore it off and gave it to me to sign, along with the card reader.
“Now, you have a nice day sir, and do please visit us again.”
I thanked him, said goodbye to the chip-lady, and put the small package into my bag next to my laptop. “Thanks, man, I’ll do that.” Nice kid.
Didja ever discover something that made your reality skip a beat? You know how, for just a second, something is so far out of place that you can't even figure out what's wrong with the picture? For example, the Augsburg Wireless-Internet provider Cyberways has had the same guy on their start page for years:
Every time you connect to the internet over public wireless in Augsburg, that dude was right there, staring at you with those soulless black eyes. Like a doll's eyes...
And the weird thing was, I always figured he was the boss at Cyberways. I even thought I saw him once on the tram. I hate it when people use the same stock photos everywhere. Everybody's full of shit. Oh, I guess it's effective use of your cash dollars, seeing as it's cheaper than paying attractive people to work for you. But still, why not just be honest for a split second?
You get this kind of thing all over the Internet, of course. If you've ever shopped for web hosting, you'll notice, after a few visits to the providers' pages, that their employees all kind of look alike. And there's always some woman somewhere holding a laptop at her waist in near-sexual ecstasy over the reasonable shared hosting prices.
It's a leitmotif throughout the enter hosting industry: Shared Webspace=Chick with laptop.
Rube, look, for the last freakin time, look RIGHT when you step off a curb! These people drive on the other side of the F$@&-ing road over here! You wanna get ya brains splattered all over me?
What? I dunno. I'm just kind of sitting around, waiting on things. I just spent way too much time transferring money across European borders, and reclaiming my identity. But the new passports are wonderful pieces of fortitude. Here' s a few quotes from my new passport:
And that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth. - Abraham Lincoln
The principle of free governments adheres to the American soil. It is bedded in it, immovable as its mountains. - Daniel Webster
Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. - George Washington
We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. - excerpt from the Declaration of Independence
Your concept of love may be different, but know that I love this world.
I like reading Scott Adams' blog on occasion. Much like Balph Eubanks, he's glib, amusing, and completely lacking in morality. Take, for example, his latest strawman-laden posting regarding the visit of a certain Mr. Ahmedinejad:
I was happy to hear that NYC didn't allow Iranian President Ahmadinejad
to place a wreath at the WTC site. And I was happy that Columbia
University is rescinding the offer to let him speak. If you let a guy like
that express his views, before long the entire world will want freedom
of speech.
...
If Ahmadinejad thinks he can be our friend by honoring our heroes and
opening a dialog, he underestimates our ability to misinterpret him.
Fucking idiot. I hate him.
Well, there's certainly some rye wit at work here. Yes, it is quite ironic that a country led by a genocidal religious dictator, which the USA most certainly is, would object to a fellow genocidal religious madman visiting its most sensitive cultural site. I mean, Mahmoud's only trying to "open a dialog" here, isn't he? Isn't that the meaning of Ahmedinejad's visit? Isn't Ahmedinejad just exercising "Free Speech", as Adams says? Aren't we wrong in denying this poor man that right?
Aside from the obvious jackassery involved in claiming that a man who directly controls his entire country's media is having trouble getting his point of view out; or that the United Nations will let him speak before the leaders of the world to the point where they forget to blink for an hour; aside from all this, this is not a question of whether or not Mahmoud is allowed to say what he wants. The question is, in accordance with the Grand Unified Theory of Rubean Mechanics, Who's going to pay for it. It's a question of whether or not Americans should be paying for his plane fare, his security, and his accommodation while he's here, pissing on Ground Zero and generating propaganda for totalitarian lobbying groups like MoveOn.org and International ANSWER.
All of Adams' ridiculous assertions never mention the one central fact here: There is no compelling reason for American taxpayers to foot the bill, so this guy, who just held one of his popular "Death to America" parades, can come over here and lecture them on anything. I personally don't much care what Ahmedinejad thinks, I can see the general thrust of his inclinations. He's spitting on the United States and Western Culture daily, and then expects to be treated with deference in return. Fuck him.
This kind of Devil's Advocacy isn't new to Adams. At least, I hope it's just that. He's apparently one of those celebrities that have forgotten the hard work involved in their ascendency, and assume that they're rich because of some accident of nature, akin to divine providence. Humans, himself included, are all just a bunch of "moist robots" with no capacity for thought, no free will; we've apparently just been programmed by Mother Nature to do the things we've done or will do. There is no mind, there is no choice, there is only the stimuli in our environments, and the response that was determined by a chance arrangement of atoms into chemicals during the Big Bang. Or something.
It's an obscene display of thoughtlessness, a conceit of someone trying so hard to seem above all this. Adams' Dilbert is amusing, and his blog is a bit of junk food for the brain at times. But he's got the morals of a two-dollar whore.
Last night we didn't make it. The two Frenchmen surrendered the evening, seeing as it was Trotzky's birthday, and therefore a time for somber reflection or something. So, we rode around big town Farnborough for a couple of hours, grabbed some grub, and then headed back to the apartment to watch a movie.
We watched Fur, which cemented my belief that Nicole Kidman is the perfect woman. Not only does she look good in her own slutty little librarian sort of way, she gives a guy a handjob in this movie while shaving his hairy back. That's my kind of girl, a real little trooper.
Anyhoo, it's back off to London now, for a second try at getting sloppy somewhere besides sitting at home in front of the boob tube. Wish us luck.
Vacation week is winding down, and I'm getting ready to leave the driving to Southwest Trains and go drinking in London. I'll try to keep it under two weeks this time, but no promises. We'll tramp it a bit through Soho, I guess, just me, the girls, and a couple of frog-eaters from the office.
I wonder why I never get to go drinking with Englishmen? It's probably for the best. There's a quote that gets bandied about, especially in the local newspapers, about England being a nation of drunks and scalawags. I can't say much about that, but it does seem that the pubs all close at 11:00 PM for a reason. At 5 o'clock, they pour out of their offices and into the public houses, seemingly on a race against the clock to get themselves 'faced before the early last call.
When they were finally permitted to stay open past 11, in the hope that the binge-drinking would abate in light of longer opening hours, they found themselves doubly-cursed in that the Englishmen were every bit as drunk at 11, but didn't have to go home. All pubs here are set up so that you have to go to the counter to get your drinks, instead of having them brought to your table. There's a built-in handbrake there: a system where you can't get any more drink once you lose the ability to walk is founded upon sound principle and good advices.
I've done nothing today; nothing but clean out the cluttered closets of my preferred newsfeed reader. There were some connections in there that were sorely neglected. I could use a bit more time to wade through the degenerate filth that is my blogroll, but sadly, I work. The Company is tolerant in their control over my time, fair since they do not pay hourly; but tolerance has its limits, and I doubt they would look kindly upon my spending the business day in a fugue state, reading entry after entry of dialectics about Jessica Simpson's tits, or Brittney Spears' overplayed poonanny.
Nevertheless, it saddens me that my everyday is not blessed with the nuggets of wisdom from skippystalin:
Being the only person with an out-of-control substance abuse problem in a relationship is tough. Most romantic couplings are based on common interests and most of my interests culminate in my waking up in a pool of what I think is my own urine and not being quite sure what time zone I'm in. I'm much like a cat in that I have a tendancy of marking my territory with my vomit, blood and gallons of my semen...My ability to smoke, drink and masturbate furiously at the same time might not be much, it's all that I have.
Ahh, skippystalin, how I've missed you, and your nuggets.
This is how I spend my vacation: visiting Stonehenge on one day; reading the melancholy musings of skippystalin the next, picturing him composing scholarly tracts through bitter tears, a crushed Viagra dissolving in a highball of Jack Daniels next to the keyboard, as another long evening fades into a blur of poetry, madness, and vigorous bouts of hate-filled masturbation. And wondering, of the two, which is the more meaningful and fitting monument to humanity?
They should've just burned enjoyeverysandwich to CD, stuck it to the side of Voyager along with its author, and shot the whole lot into space back when they had government funding to do so, all in the name of making a good first impression for whatever aliens were out cruising for an easy meal.
skippystalin's output is prodigious, to be sure, but there was an entire blogroll to consider:
The lunatics are running the asylum over at Straight White Guy's place. Eric's testicles are mentioned, indirectly. Remind me to change my passwords regularly and start using strong encryption.
How stoned do you have to be to cheat on Jessica Alba? I could jack off to Jessica Alba while a big mean dog was chasing me and this idiot is cheating on her. I decided to confront him about this and I screamed at him, hey, what is your problem. And he said I should get off his lawn. And I said, no, no you get off the lawn. You get off. Then he went inside, probably because deep down, he knew I had made some pretty good points.
JimGoad.com is no more, but if you're a Goad fan (ladies!), you can find find him here. Discussion of Brittany's latest, erm, candid photos is also to be found, but be aware that the following picture is used as a visual aid:
This morning we picked up my new wheelchair. It's a sporty European marque, with an aggressive stance, low-profile tires, and a head-turning cherry-red metalflake paint job. It's not that great on the corners, but it'll take any one of y'all on the straightaways.
I've never done time on wheels. On the whole, I found it to be not all that bad. Then again, I don't figure that most wheelchair-bound men my age get to enjoy being pushed around town by a couple of sexy German bloggerettes. Thanks, ladies: the jealous looks from the other local cripples was the icing on the cake. Here's a little something extra for you, babes. (via AoSHQ)
Funny things happen when you're on wheels. I saw a lady I work with while being carted through Tesco's frozen food department. I said hello, and she just looked right through me, steering her cart so as not to make contact with the leper. She probably thought I was going to ask her for some spare change, or if she could wipe me bum for me, or whatever it is that those people want from healthy-legged people. I also noticed that the supermarkets put completely different things down on the bottom three feet of the shelves. All the cool toys are down there, for example, presumably because chil'n's is small. It's also a great altitude to find anti-bedsore medicaments, for some reason.
So, I let myself be pushed by the Weyside in Guildford, where, at one point, a husky young native was required to wheel my fat ass up a steep incline. The Sistas, for all their heart, lacked the muscle to get the job done, so he, being a true-hearted salt-of-earth kind of guy, waved them off and grunted and sweated till I crested the hill. Had the man known that I could have, at any point in time, simply stood up and hobbled up the hill under my own power, he most certainly would have picked me up and broken me over his knee.
Tomorrow morning, we'll be visiting Stonehenge, or Stone'enge, as the locals quaintly call it. We'll also visit the haunted city, Salisbury, to watch the homosexuals. Ta!
I like reading OSNews for some reason. I think I like to catch the geeky news about SkyOS, or the occasional retro curmudgeonry that rolls by about Lotus 1-2-3 or OS/2. Being the old-timer that I am, it's hard to resist a paean from my youth about 10-finger productivity.
Unfortunately, they've become the epicenter of stupid for the tech press. Check out this article, which explodes the myths about competition being good: "Competition is not Good"
'It gives consumers more choice'
Choice is good when there's one agreed base standard, and a number of compatible approaches. For example, there are many Linux distributions, but they are all Linux, and they can all run the same software. They are 'flavours' of the same thing, that is a good choice. People like different flavours.
Competition does not produce easier choices for consumers. All they get is added un-interoperability and complexity with competitive choices.
Now, if you go read that article, which I do not recommend, you'll slowly come to the realization that this moron is just annoyed that he has to make the effort to choose between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. He's willing to surrender his entire free will to some (hopefully) benevolent dictator, abolish brand names, and forsake the free market economy because choosing which format to buy the Firefly special edition box set in is hard. What a hopeless, whiny-assed sissy.
Of course, things don't get better when they start tossing political analysis at you. "Net Neutrality" is one monikers that has overshadowed the thing named. The discussion is often framed in a way that an uninformed listener would assume there was lobbying going on to abolish some sort of laws that are now protecting consumers from big, bad tiered-Internet ninjas.
But: There is no net neutrality legislation, there never was, and hopefully, there never will be. The argument over "Net Neutrality" is about whether or not the U.S. government should introduce legislation forbidding bandwidth throttling by ISPs. It's the "have you stopped beating your wife?" straw man for the Slashdot crowd. You'll notice that this article calls the Supreme Court's decision that the U.S. government shouldn't step in and configure the ISPs' Cisco routers for them, "Backing for Two-Tier Internet":
The US Justice Department has said that internet service providers should be allowed to charge for priority traffic. The agency said it was opposed to 'network neutrality', the idea that all data on the net is treated equally. The comments put the agency at odds with companies such as Microsoft and Google, who have called for legislation to guarantee equal access to the net.
Of course, this would also mean that an enforcement infrastructure would also have to be put in place, making sure that everyone got their "fair share" of said bandwidth, as if backbone routers and POPs just fell off a tree somewhere. God forbid ISPs be allowed to tune the services that they developed and paid for as they wish. Let's let the government decides who gets bandwidth, and how much is enough! That will make it all fair and neutral-like. Whenever a politician uses the word "fair", hang on to your wallet.
Well, my trackbacks are now working, it seems. There's some ugly Python spaghetti-code going on behind the scenes that translates back and forth between absolute urls, non-absolute relative urls, and upper-lower-camel case; but it works.
Trackbacks are only good for Movable Type, though. Which I can't stand anymore. MT used to be the only thing out there, but there's something that really, really, really galls me about the way it rebuilds your entire site into static HTML pages everytime you update a post. I'm sure it's awesomeness if you've got your server running on an old TV remote, but nowadays we're all running our web servers on 100-core 64-bit terahertz moonshot computers that can simultaneously compute π, encode MPEG video, and mix the best goddam margaritas you've ever tasted, all without breaking a sweat.
So yeah, I figured out how to implement trackbacks in Django, to a point where they more or less work. Now why is Wordpress fucking with me? It seems to be thrown off by the fact that Wordpress sends a HEAD request before it downloads and parses the page, in the vain hope that the X-Pingback header will be set. I can't figure out how to do that in Django's generic views, so I just use the secondary method, that being a link element in the XHTML code. But now, whenever a Worpdress blog pings me, I get this kind of crap:
[09/Sep/2007 15:04:23] "GET /blog/2007/sep/08/vacation/ HTTP/1.1" 200 27367
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (104, 'Connection reset by peer')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (32, 'Broken pipe')
Being the half-assed programmer that I am, I am at a total loss. I can't even do a Lazyweb request here, seeing as my 4 visits a day are unlikely to bring the Django HTTP gurus by. I won't be able to sleep at night, thinking of all the enlightened Wordpress Users who are probably out there try to "Keep the discussion going" with me.
Ever since June, when the iPhone went live, I've heard about nothing else in the tech press, nerd podcasts, and the Apple Fanboisphere. Is it really that way over in the States (the only place you can get them), or does the iPhone actually seem to be doing well?
Ahh, my first vacation since joining The Company. My queue is cleaned up, my email is forwarded, and an elaborate Sieve session has accomplished in a mere two hours what less civilized mail systems can do with a key combination: The Corporate Vacation Email.
It's been five months now since I came 'cross the channel and started meeting the natives, learning the lingo, and getting used to the fact that everyone here talks like Pinky. Now, I'll be letting my hair down for the next 10 days or so. As well as putting my poor, broken foot up on the coffee table.
As soon as I get my x-rays back from the socialist medical system (they still copy them with coal rubbings on wax paper over here, apparently), I'll post pictures of the metatarsalar breakage here for your morbid enjoyment. Don't thank me yet.
The other half of Sistaweb will be joining us for the week. We'll allow her to sleep here rent-free for an entire week, even though she refused to bring a carton of cigarettes as payment. Damned non-smokers and their principles. It's like those non-smokers back in the World War II who didn't sign up for cigarette rations. Throwing away a gold mine, that is. Our grandfathers probably had a word for those guys, and if I knew my grandfather at all, that word was sissy-boy.
The girls have rented a wheelchair for me, seeing as I won't be too much fun doing a London pub-crawl on crutches. I've already had a forehead-slapping moment over this, as you probably are right now. Why haven't I thought of taking a wheelchair with me before? That would've come in handy on more than one occasion, the Wreckyll in Jeckyll not least among them.
Man, Apple is on a roll. Not only have they got me hooked for a new computer, a new laptop, a new office package, and a replacement for my aging MythTV box, but now I have to start thinking about a new iPod. Now, let's see what Uncle Steve is going to me be costing me 'til Christmas Time:
Item
Damage
20" iMac
1199.00
Macbook
1099.00
8GB iPod Touch
299.00
AppleTV
299.00
iWork '08
79.00
iLife '08
79.00
Total:
$3,054.00
Not bad for a day's work, Mr. Jobs. And what's up for the rest of September? Maybe some irresistible bionic iFoot to replace the one I broke playing frisbee at the company picnic last week?
Although there's a remarkable lack of iPhone hype around the office, we being a big-time Linux company and all, there's an amazing amount of Mac fanboiism. Pretty much all of us have Macs at home. The explanation for this is simple: After dealing with Linux problems all day long, there's something nice about going home to something you can spend all your time using and not making up excuses for why it looks like shit and doesn't work.
I like Linux, mind you. I use it day-in, day-out for my desktop at work, for my webservers, and it brings in my daily bread. We all love it here, pretty much like a family loves and therefore tolerates the embarrassing second cousin with the Downs'. But people are walking all over the office today buzzing about the upcoming announcement from Apple.
Will it be the long-awaited iMac redesign? Will it be a new Mini? My boss is actually carrying his phone to the pub after work today so he can sit on engadget and get a realtime update. Linus would not be pleased...
Last login: Thu Jul 26 12:17:28 from nat-pool-fab.re Welcome to Darwin! ericbook:~ eric$ mutt -bash: mutt: command not found ericbook:~ eric$ open /Applications/Mail.app/ ericbook:~ eric$
Ahh. Like coming in after a long day of plowing the fields and sticking your aching feet into a pot of hot water. After running Linux all day at work, you feel like slipping into something more comfortable. Sam knows it. Zonker knows it, though he won't admit it. It's the right amount of just-workiness you need to let you relax, while knowing you could, at any given moment, do something like:
OK, here's one with drivel. I do like it, but I have a couple of gripes.
First problem: I was hopelessly confused by the login screen. The type of journal seems to be locked on livejournal, as the drop-down menu for journal types is inexplicably disabled until you enter a username. -1 for usabilty
Second problem: Useless stripping of trailing slash, which mangled my xmlrpc URL. Error 301 was ignored, which makes sense since it's a post and all, but I couldn't log in. It mangled my URL then choked on the error :-/
Third problem: didn't want to download my recent posts. Although there might be a misunderstanding about just what "recent" means.
Fourth problem: Doesn't let me choose post status anywhere. And there's nowhere I can find to choose text filters. This is more of a feature request, really.
Fifth problem: craps out after posting, probably because it keeps mangling the trailing slashes from my URLs. Is there an RFC somewhere that says that POSTS can't end with slashes? Nobody tell the Django folks.
Well, maybe it'll at least let me post to my blog from work every now and then.
Man, I dang sure missed the entire month of June. I've been in the UK now for about two months, and let me tell ya: They sure do get some rain around here. I always thought those stories about English people having gills were legends and fantasies. Now, I'm not so sure.
For the love of GOD, for the last time, in the name of ALL THAT IS HOLY, Cluster Services is NOT COMPATIBLE with 4.5! If you're running a cluster, DO NOT update to 4.5 until the Cluster Suite is UPDATED TO 4.5!
That is all.
P.S. And NO, cmirror is not available yet. Maybe at the end of the month.
I went outside to smoke a cigarette. All rooms in England are for non-smokers, you'll find, as are the rooms, apartments, and houses listed for rent in the local papers. The litany at the end of all the ads reads, "No smokers, canvassers, or DSS", which stands for Department of Social Services. So, okay they hate smokers and welfare cases, as do we all. But the British have their own definition for 'non-smoker', which basically means you only smoke when you drink. Everybody smokes over here, and they all live somewhere.
The evening was cool; almost cold, really, as I suspect the evenings around here generally are. I stood on the corner of Osborne and Netley, watching the blackbirds getting ready to do whatever it is they do at night, when I spied a man, some yards away, bounding up the sidewalk with a jaunty gait. I held my cigarette just in front of my mouth, watching this figure with suspicion. He was short, about 5 feet tall, and round as a soccer ball. He was wearing light-colored trousers and a dark blazer, the left breast of which was adorned with an enormous, orange prize-ribbon.
As he approached me, his features became distinct in the bad lighting, and I realized he was positively beaming with pride. His face was ruddy, and split with a grin that wouldn't have looked out of place behind a wheelbarrow full of poker chips on the way to the cash-out. I placed him in his mid-40s, but maybe his thinning red hair and roly-poly stature made him look older than he really was.
He halted just a few feet from me, and said, with oddly struggling words, "Good evening, mister!"
I looked him up and down, cigarette still burning between my shaky fingers, and replied, "hi, how are ya..." He wobbled his head a bit, then walked around me on his way up the street. I noticed something written in gold on his orange ribbon, and read it as it flashed in the lamplight.
I judged him more than a wee bit 'differently-abled', as they say. I watched as he cautiously crossed the empty street, looking both ways at least twice, then gingerly stepping into the street and crossing it at a run.
I thought about what I had seen written on the ribbon: "A Very Special Boy". Hmm, I thought, I wonder who gave him that? Whoever it was, they made his whole day.
I put my cigarette out and walked back into the guest house.
My buddy Sam sent me an email a couple of days ago indicating that he just might have joined The Family recently. And he joined it a much higher level than I, I might add, considering I'm still lumbering along in the PowerPC world; my G4 Powerbook, though a loyal and trusted friend, seems slow as molasses in January these days.
He also mentioned an old OS/2 habit, one which we separately shared back in the day. I started using OS/2 when I worked at UPS. One of our managers was running 2.1, with the old Presentation Manager that looked like a crappy(er) Windows 2.0, albeit with long filenames and the ability to run concurrent DOS sessions. I avoided it until OS/2 3.0 came out.
In '94, when Warp hit the shelves, I rushed out to Soft-Warehouse1 in Alpharetta, looked in the Operating Systems2 department until I found a box, then gave the man $300 dollars for the privilege of running it. Then, I walked over the desktop applications department, and put down another $495 for Lotus Smartsuite/2. Then I OEM'd 16MB of RAM for about $400 to make it all go.
Now, many may see OS/2 as a butt-ugly cousin of Windows, and they may be right. But back then, it was a work of art. Especially in the sense that it wasn't an exact science getting it to run. Nothing ever really worked like it was supposed to. Without the fallback of a DOS prompt, you had to have a second, fully-functional machine to do things like edit the CONFIG.SYS on the installation floppies to make sure your DASD drivers were loading. And most of the drivers were written so that, if they encountered an error while loading, they'd bork the whole boot process, just to be on the safe side.
The graphical interface also hung constantly. The Workplace Shell, despite (or maybe due to) all its object-orientiness, was horribly unstable. But I never saw a hang that wasn't cured with Control-Alt-Delete. That key combo went right down to the kernel, and always gave a satisfying, unconfirmed reboot, wedged GUI be damned. There was even a 3rd party program called Watchcat that sat on the serial port, or on a secondary Hercules/MCGA monitor, and let you monitor and kill programs remotely. The kernel's Kung Fu was strong like that, but the GUI was just ass.
Now, when Chicago started finally coming down the pipe, and even the Rolling Stones where pulled into the OS marketing world ("Start me up", anyone?), OS/2 fans like myself were sure that this pissant little DOS extender with a homely face wouldn't be the future. It couldn't be the future, it was just too depressing. It still wasn't a 32-bit OS, though the 386 had been out for over 8 years. It still used FAT, for crying out loud. In short, Chicago sucked.
OS/2 seemed like a scrappy little underdog, nipping heroically at the Microsoft behemoth's heels. I'm not sure why it gave that impression. At the time, IBM was much bigger than Microsoft, a huge, multinational corporation with interests in basically every aspect of electronics. They just couldn't write or market good software.
I'm not sure why I just wrote 500 words on OS/2. I actually wanted to write something about Linux.
Software stores used to have a whole "Operating Systems" department, back when there was more than one operating system, and Windows was still called an "Operating Environment" ↩
Man, I'm unprepared. There's a checklist of things you should do before moving to England. I came over here without any money, preparation, or attack plan. There's something unbelievably stupid about this. It worked for me when I moved to Germany, but moving to England's a bit more complicated, apparently. Either that, or I'm remembering it wrong.
But I'm not the only one. The office I'm working in is full of non-British people. It's a rag-tag group of Germans, Italians, Brazilians, Spaniards, one (1) American, and who knows what else that all found themselves in the same boat when they first came over. This despite promises from The Company to help one resettle; promises which are certainly not kept and, when referred to in conversation, change their shape and character like a Democrat on a whistle-stop.
But at some point a kindly soul in the department, now departed, made a list of the reality of the situation. It's a short list of what one really needs to do when moving to England. Unfortunately, I only found out about it after I'd already been here a week. Here's your to-do list once you've arrived in England:
Get a room. If possible, get a rental agreement or any bill with your name and address on it. (proof of address)
Deposit is usually 1 1/2 times the rent. Deposit and first rent is to be paid beforehand. If the room is unfurnished, see "Things to Buy" for shops and example prices.
Get a letter from your office manager (HR Lady) stating that you are working for the company and including your address. (proof of employment)
Get a bank account. Just walk in with your documents:
Passport or national ID card
Proof of employment (see 2.). it might be handy to have your contract with you.
Proof of address
Banks
HSBC – try to get a standard account (they try to sell you an advanced package including insurances etc.)
NatWest – Also recommended as this bank does not charge for withdrawing money from a different bank's cash machines
Give your bank details to The Company
Register with Inland Revenue – this is done by your HR manager. You should get your tax code about 2 weeks later (PAYE Coding Notice)
At the end of the fiscal year (ending April 5th), you will get a "P60 End of Year Certificate" detailing your "Pay and Income Tax" levels.
Get a National Insurance Number by applying at a Job Centre Plus office. They ask for dtails before they schedule an interview appointment to verify your eligibility. Appointments are scheduled about two weeks ahead, and take place in the nearest county office, which usually isn't near at all. Without an NI number, you will be on emergency tax, which is higher than the standard tax rate.
Documents:
Passport
National ID card
Driving License or any other official document identifying you (Birth certificate, police registration, medical card, etc.)
Proof of employment (see 2.)
Recent payslip
Bank statement
Proof of address (utility bill, rental agreement, etc. – see 1.)
It might be handy to have your PAYE Coding Notice with you
As money is paid in a timely manner so it is available on the 27th, try to get your appointment after this date.
If you are British, a citizen of a member state of the EU, or other Commonwealth citizen, you can apply for inclusion on the Register of Electors. This will allow you to vote at local government elections. Your credibility will rise (good for tenancy applications or bank-related matters) and you are obliged to pay Council Taxes1
If you buy any TV or radio equipment, you will be asked for your address, which will be automatically forwarded to the "TV Licensing Office"
Get a Tesco Clubcard
Get a life ;-)
Any address change has to be communicated to all above-mentioned authorities. For the official notices to local council, the TV licensing, and most other on-line services, you can use I am Moving , where you can create/use an account for free.
All of this could have been avoided with a bit of planning. I am bitterly disappointed in myself.
Council taxes are universal as far as I can tell, and are perceived, by the British at least, as an extension of the rent. ↩
Farnborough derives its name from from the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Ferneberga (Fern Hill) and is mentioned in the Domesday Book (1086). But for the coming of the army at nearby Aldershot, the arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flying, Farnborough would probably have remained an isolated heathland village, that is until the latter half of the 20th century when the population moved out of London suburbia and became commuters.
"But for the … arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flight…". That's a pretty big conditional. There are probably a lot of places whose development was seriously affected by railways and the advent of powered flight. But I understand where the good Mr. Parkins is coming from.
I had forgotten the cable to connect my camera to my laptop. Of all the stupid things that I packed for the trip, 50 different USB cables, a USB hub, power adapters for devices I’d forgotten, not to mention devices whose power adapters I’d forgotten, I forgot the one thing that was absolutely necessary and planned-for. Not to mention irreplaceable, seeing as every camera maker in the world decided that their camera’s little hole should look different from all the other cameras’ little holes.
I walked into a little computer store on the strip in Fleet, Hampshire. Walking up to the pasty-faced, teenaged part-timer there, I introduced myself and shook his hand, which seemed to shock him.
He unconsciously wiped his hands on his pants and said, “eh...nice to meet you, sir. What can I do for you?”
I asked him, “do you have any USB card-readers?”
“Um, yeah," he answered. "I think I saw some around here somewhere.”
I looked around the shop, which was organized and clean. Man, he must really be the FNG around here. He finally found what I was looking for, stored on a shelf right next to where he had been sitting. He handed it to me and I started reading the back of the packaging.
“Just looking to see if it works with my Mac,” I told him.
“Oh, it's USB, so it should work,” he answered, and took the reader out of my hand. He moved his lips while he read the package. “Oh, yeah,” he said finally. “Right there it says it: ‘Requires Mac OS 9 or later’.” He looked at me skeptically. “So, you do have OS 9 or later, don’t you?”
“Um, yeah, I think so.” OS 9 went out of style back in the ‘90s.
He moved around to the register, and I handed him my Visa card. He looked uncertain as he turned it over in his hand. “This thing doesn’t have a chip on it?”
I took it back and examined it. “No, I guess it doesn’t.”
“Well, I don’t think we can take that, then.”
“Why don’t you just swipe it,” I said. “Give it a go.”
He shrugged and swiped it through the machine.
From behind me, a voice said, “it’s all chips nowadays, you know.”
I looked around, and saw that an older woman was standing behind me. She looked to be in her mid 40s, and wore a name plate with the store’s logo on it. “You can’t get nothing without a dozen little chips in it.”
I nodded agreement, and turned back to the young man behind the register.
“So, what kind of Mac you got, then?”
“A PowerBook G4.”
He nodded approvingly. “Nice piece of kit, that.” The little machine that had taken my card made a loud ping!, and spit out a receipt. He tore it off and gave it to me to sign, along with the card reader.
“Now, you have a nice day sir, and do please visit us again.”
I thanked him, said goodbye to the chip-lady, and put the small package into my bag next to my laptop. “Thanks, man, I’ll do that.” Nice kid.
Didja ever discover something that made your reality skip a beat? You know how, for just a second, something is so far out of place that you can't even figure out what's wrong with the picture? For example, the Augsburg Wireless-Internet provider Cyberways has had the same guy on their start page for years:
Every time you connect to the internet over public wireless in Augsburg, that dude was right there, staring at you with those soulless black eyes. Like a doll's eyes...
And the weird thing was, I always figured he was the boss at Cyberways. I even thought I saw him once on the tram. I hate it when people use the same stock photos everywhere. Everybody's full of shit. Oh, I guess it's effective use of your cash dollars, seeing as it's cheaper than paying attractive people to work for you. But still, why not just be honest for a split second?
You get this kind of thing all over the Internet, of course. If you've ever shopped for web hosting, you'll notice, after a few visits to the providers' pages, that their employees all kind of look alike. And there's always some woman somewhere holding a laptop at her waist in near-sexual ecstasy over the reasonable shared hosting prices.
It's a leitmotif throughout the enter hosting industry: Shared Webspace=Chick with laptop.
Rube, look, for the last freakin time, look RIGHT when you step off a curb! These people drive on the other side of the F$@&-ing road over here! You wanna get ya brains splattered all over me?
What? I dunno. I'm just kind of sitting around, waiting on things. I just spent way too much time transferring money across European borders, and reclaiming my identity. But the new passports are wonderful pieces of fortitude. Here' s a few quotes from my new passport:
And that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth. - Abraham Lincoln
The principle of free governments adheres to the American soil. It is bedded in it, immovable as its mountains. - Daniel Webster
Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. - George Washington
We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. - excerpt from the Declaration of Independence
Your concept of love may be different, but know that I love this world.
I like reading Scott Adams' blog on occasion. Much like Balph Eubanks, he's glib, amusing, and completely lacking in morality. Take, for example, his latest strawman-laden posting regarding the visit of a certain Mr. Ahmedinejad:
I was happy to hear that NYC didn't allow Iranian President Ahmadinejad
to place a wreath at the WTC site. And I was happy that Columbia
University is rescinding the offer to let him speak. If you let a guy like
that express his views, before long the entire world will want freedom
of speech.
...
If Ahmadinejad thinks he can be our friend by honoring our heroes and
opening a dialog, he underestimates our ability to misinterpret him.
Fucking idiot. I hate him.
Well, there's certainly some rye wit at work here. Yes, it is quite ironic that a country led by a genocidal religious dictator, which the USA most certainly is, would object to a fellow genocidal religious madman visiting its most sensitive cultural site. I mean, Mahmoud's only trying to "open a dialog" here, isn't he? Isn't that the meaning of Ahmedinejad's visit? Isn't Ahmedinejad just exercising "Free Speech", as Adams says? Aren't we wrong in denying this poor man that right?
Aside from the obvious jackassery involved in claiming that a man who directly controls his entire country's media is having trouble getting his point of view out; or that the United Nations will let him speak before the leaders of the world to the point where they forget to blink for an hour; aside from all this, this is not a question of whether or not Mahmoud is allowed to say what he wants. The question is, in accordance with the Grand Unified Theory of Rubean Mechanics, Who's going to pay for it. It's a question of whether or not Americans should be paying for his plane fare, his security, and his accommodation while he's here, pissing on Ground Zero and generating propaganda for totalitarian lobbying groups like MoveOn.org and International ANSWER.
All of Adams' ridiculous assertions never mention the one central fact here: There is no compelling reason for American taxpayers to foot the bill, so this guy, who just held one of his popular "Death to America" parades, can come over here and lecture them on anything. I personally don't much care what Ahmedinejad thinks, I can see the general thrust of his inclinations. He's spitting on the United States and Western Culture daily, and then expects to be treated with deference in return. Fuck him.
This kind of Devil's Advocacy isn't new to Adams. At least, I hope it's just that. He's apparently one of those celebrities that have forgotten the hard work involved in their ascendency, and assume that they're rich because of some accident of nature, akin to divine providence. Humans, himself included, are all just a bunch of "moist robots" with no capacity for thought, no free will; we've apparently just been programmed by Mother Nature to do the things we've done or will do. There is no mind, there is no choice, there is only the stimuli in our environments, and the response that was determined by a chance arrangement of atoms into chemicals during the Big Bang. Or something.
It's an obscene display of thoughtlessness, a conceit of someone trying so hard to seem above all this. Adams' Dilbert is amusing, and his blog is a bit of junk food for the brain at times. But he's got the morals of a two-dollar whore.
Last night we didn't make it. The two Frenchmen surrendered the evening, seeing as it was Trotzky's birthday, and therefore a time for somber reflection or something. So, we rode around big town Farnborough for a couple of hours, grabbed some grub, and then headed back to the apartment to watch a movie.
We watched Fur, which cemented my belief that Nicole Kidman is the perfect woman. Not only does she look good in her own slutty little librarian sort of way, she gives a guy a handjob in this movie while shaving his hairy back. That's my kind of girl, a real little trooper.
Anyhoo, it's back off to London now, for a second try at getting sloppy somewhere besides sitting at home in front of the boob tube. Wish us luck.
Vacation week is winding down, and I'm getting ready to leave the driving to Southwest Trains and go drinking in London. I'll try to keep it under two weeks this time, but no promises. We'll tramp it a bit through Soho, I guess, just me, the girls, and a couple of frog-eaters from the office.
I wonder why I never get to go drinking with Englishmen? It's probably for the best. There's a quote that gets bandied about, especially in the local newspapers, about England being a nation of drunks and scalawags. I can't say much about that, but it does seem that the pubs all close at 11:00 PM for a reason. At 5 o'clock, they pour out of their offices and into the public houses, seemingly on a race against the clock to get themselves 'faced before the early last call.
When they were finally permitted to stay open past 11, in the hope that the binge-drinking would abate in light of longer opening hours, they found themselves doubly-cursed in that the Englishmen were every bit as drunk at 11, but didn't have to go home. All pubs here are set up so that you have to go to the counter to get your drinks, instead of having them brought to your table. There's a built-in handbrake there: a system where you can't get any more drink once you lose the ability to walk is founded upon sound principle and good advices.
I've done nothing today; nothing but clean out the cluttered closets of my preferred newsfeed reader. There were some connections in there that were sorely neglected. I could use a bit more time to wade through the degenerate filth that is my blogroll, but sadly, I work. The Company is tolerant in their control over my time, fair since they do not pay hourly; but tolerance has its limits, and I doubt they would look kindly upon my spending the business day in a fugue state, reading entry after entry of dialectics about Jessica Simpson's tits, or Brittney Spears' overplayed poonanny.
Nevertheless, it saddens me that my everyday is not blessed with the nuggets of wisdom from skippystalin:
Being the only person with an out-of-control substance abuse problem in a relationship is tough. Most romantic couplings are based on common interests and most of my interests culminate in my waking up in a pool of what I think is my own urine and not being quite sure what time zone I'm in. I'm much like a cat in that I have a tendancy of marking my territory with my vomit, blood and gallons of my semen...My ability to smoke, drink and masturbate furiously at the same time might not be much, it's all that I have.
Ahh, skippystalin, how I've missed you, and your nuggets.
This is how I spend my vacation: visiting Stonehenge on one day; reading the melancholy musings of skippystalin the next, picturing him composing scholarly tracts through bitter tears, a crushed Viagra dissolving in a highball of Jack Daniels next to the keyboard, as another long evening fades into a blur of poetry, madness, and vigorous bouts of hate-filled masturbation. And wondering, of the two, which is the more meaningful and fitting monument to humanity?
They should've just burned enjoyeverysandwich to CD, stuck it to the side of Voyager along with its author, and shot the whole lot into space back when they had government funding to do so, all in the name of making a good first impression for whatever aliens were out cruising for an easy meal.
skippystalin's output is prodigious, to be sure, but there was an entire blogroll to consider:
The lunatics are running the asylum over at Straight White Guy's place. Eric's testicles are mentioned, indirectly. Remind me to change my passwords regularly and start using strong encryption.
How stoned do you have to be to cheat on Jessica Alba? I could jack off to Jessica Alba while a big mean dog was chasing me and this idiot is cheating on her. I decided to confront him about this and I screamed at him, hey, what is your problem. And he said I should get off his lawn. And I said, no, no you get off the lawn. You get off. Then he went inside, probably because deep down, he knew I had made some pretty good points.
JimGoad.com is no more, but if you're a Goad fan (ladies!), you can find find him here. Discussion of Brittany's latest, erm, candid photos is also to be found, but be aware that the following picture is used as a visual aid:
This morning we picked up my new wheelchair. It's a sporty European marque, with an aggressive stance, low-profile tires, and a head-turning cherry-red metalflake paint job. It's not that great on the corners, but it'll take any one of y'all on the straightaways.
I've never done time on wheels. On the whole, I found it to be not all that bad. Then again, I don't figure that most wheelchair-bound men my age get to enjoy being pushed around town by a couple of sexy German bloggerettes. Thanks, ladies: the jealous looks from the other local cripples was the icing on the cake. Here's a little something extra for you, babes. (via AoSHQ)
Funny things happen when you're on wheels. I saw a lady I work with while being carted through Tesco's frozen food department. I said hello, and she just looked right through me, steering her cart so as not to make contact with the leper. She probably thought I was going to ask her for some spare change, or if she could wipe me bum for me, or whatever it is that those people want from healthy-legged people. I also noticed that the supermarkets put completely different things down on the bottom three feet of the shelves. All the cool toys are down there, for example, presumably because chil'n's is small. It's also a great altitude to find anti-bedsore medicaments, for some reason.
So, I let myself be pushed by the Weyside in Guildford, where, at one point, a husky young native was required to wheel my fat ass up a steep incline. The Sistas, for all their heart, lacked the muscle to get the job done, so he, being a true-hearted salt-of-earth kind of guy, waved them off and grunted and sweated till I crested the hill. Had the man known that I could have, at any point in time, simply stood up and hobbled up the hill under my own power, he most certainly would have picked me up and broken me over his knee.
Tomorrow morning, we'll be visiting Stonehenge, or Stone'enge, as the locals quaintly call it. We'll also visit the haunted city, Salisbury, to watch the homosexuals. Ta!
I like reading OSNews for some reason. I think I like to catch the geeky news about SkyOS, or the occasional retro curmudgeonry that rolls by about Lotus 1-2-3 or OS/2. Being the old-timer that I am, it's hard to resist a paean from my youth about 10-finger productivity.
Unfortunately, they've become the epicenter of stupid for the tech press. Check out this article, which explodes the myths about competition being good: "Competition is not Good"
'It gives consumers more choice'
Choice is good when there's one agreed base standard, and a number of compatible approaches. For example, there are many Linux distributions, but they are all Linux, and they can all run the same software. They are 'flavours' of the same thing, that is a good choice. People like different flavours.
Competition does not produce easier choices for consumers. All they get is added un-interoperability and complexity with competitive choices.
Now, if you go read that article, which I do not recommend, you'll slowly come to the realization that this moron is just annoyed that he has to make the effort to choose between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. He's willing to surrender his entire free will to some (hopefully) benevolent dictator, abolish brand names, and forsake the free market economy because choosing which format to buy the Firefly special edition box set in is hard. What a hopeless, whiny-assed sissy.
Of course, things don't get better when they start tossing political analysis at you. "Net Neutrality" is one monikers that has overshadowed the thing named. The discussion is often framed in a way that an uninformed listener would assume there was lobbying going on to abolish some sort of laws that are now protecting consumers from big, bad tiered-Internet ninjas.
But: There is no net neutrality legislation, there never was, and hopefully, there never will be. The argument over "Net Neutrality" is about whether or not the U.S. government should introduce legislation forbidding bandwidth throttling by ISPs. It's the "have you stopped beating your wife?" straw man for the Slashdot crowd. You'll notice that this article calls the Supreme Court's decision that the U.S. government shouldn't step in and configure the ISPs' Cisco routers for them, "Backing for Two-Tier Internet":
The US Justice Department has said that internet service providers should be allowed to charge for priority traffic. The agency said it was opposed to 'network neutrality', the idea that all data on the net is treated equally. The comments put the agency at odds with companies such as Microsoft and Google, who have called for legislation to guarantee equal access to the net.
Of course, this would also mean that an enforcement infrastructure would also have to be put in place, making sure that everyone got their "fair share" of said bandwidth, as if backbone routers and POPs just fell off a tree somewhere. God forbid ISPs be allowed to tune the services that they developed and paid for as they wish. Let's let the government decides who gets bandwidth, and how much is enough! That will make it all fair and neutral-like. Whenever a politician uses the word "fair", hang on to your wallet.
Well, my trackbacks are now working, it seems. There's some ugly Python spaghetti-code going on behind the scenes that translates back and forth between absolute urls, non-absolute relative urls, and upper-lower-camel case; but it works.
Trackbacks are only good for Movable Type, though. Which I can't stand anymore. MT used to be the only thing out there, but there's something that really, really, really galls me about the way it rebuilds your entire site into static HTML pages everytime you update a post. I'm sure it's awesomeness if you've got your server running on an old TV remote, but nowadays we're all running our web servers on 100-core 64-bit terahertz moonshot computers that can simultaneously compute π, encode MPEG video, and mix the best goddam margaritas you've ever tasted, all without breaking a sweat.
So yeah, I figured out how to implement trackbacks in Django, to a point where they more or less work. Now why is Wordpress fucking with me? It seems to be thrown off by the fact that Wordpress sends a HEAD request before it downloads and parses the page, in the vain hope that the X-Pingback header will be set. I can't figure out how to do that in Django's generic views, so I just use the secondary method, that being a link element in the XHTML code. But now, whenever a Worpdress blog pings me, I get this kind of crap:
[09/Sep/2007 15:04:23] "GET /blog/2007/sep/08/vacation/ HTTP/1.1" 200 27367
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (104, 'Connection reset by peer')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (32, 'Broken pipe')
Being the half-assed programmer that I am, I am at a total loss. I can't even do a Lazyweb request here, seeing as my 4 visits a day are unlikely to bring the Django HTTP gurus by. I won't be able to sleep at night, thinking of all the enlightened Wordpress Users who are probably out there try to "Keep the discussion going" with me.
Ever since June, when the iPhone went live, I've heard about nothing else in the tech press, nerd podcasts, and the Apple Fanboisphere. Is it really that way over in the States (the only place you can get them), or does the iPhone actually seem to be doing well?
Ahh, my first vacation since joining The Company. My queue is cleaned up, my email is forwarded, and an elaborate Sieve session has accomplished in a mere two hours what less civilized mail systems can do with a key combination: The Corporate Vacation Email.
It's been five months now since I came 'cross the channel and started meeting the natives, learning the lingo, and getting used to the fact that everyone here talks like Pinky. Now, I'll be letting my hair down for the next 10 days or so. As well as putting my poor, broken foot up on the coffee table.
As soon as I get my x-rays back from the socialist medical system (they still copy them with coal rubbings on wax paper over here, apparently), I'll post pictures of the metatarsalar breakage here for your morbid enjoyment. Don't thank me yet.
The other half of Sistaweb will be joining us for the week. We'll allow her to sleep here rent-free for an entire week, even though she refused to bring a carton of cigarettes as payment. Damned non-smokers and their principles. It's like those non-smokers back in the World War II who didn't sign up for cigarette rations. Throwing away a gold mine, that is. Our grandfathers probably had a word for those guys, and if I knew my grandfather at all, that word was sissy-boy.
The girls have rented a wheelchair for me, seeing as I won't be too much fun doing a London pub-crawl on crutches. I've already had a forehead-slapping moment over this, as you probably are right now. Why haven't I thought of taking a wheelchair with me before? That would've come in handy on more than one occasion, the Wreckyll in Jeckyll not least among them.
Man, Apple is on a roll. Not only have they got me hooked for a new computer, a new laptop, a new office package, and a replacement for my aging MythTV box, but now I have to start thinking about a new iPod. Now, let's see what Uncle Steve is going to me be costing me 'til Christmas Time:
Item
Damage
20" iMac
1199.00
Macbook
1099.00
8GB iPod Touch
299.00
AppleTV
299.00
iWork '08
79.00
iLife '08
79.00
Total:
$3,054.00
Not bad for a day's work, Mr. Jobs. And what's up for the rest of September? Maybe some irresistible bionic iFoot to replace the one I broke playing frisbee at the company picnic last week?
Although there's a remarkable lack of iPhone hype around the office, we being a big-time Linux company and all, there's an amazing amount of Mac fanboiism. Pretty much all of us have Macs at home. The explanation for this is simple: After dealing with Linux problems all day long, there's something nice about going home to something you can spend all your time using and not making up excuses for why it looks like shit and doesn't work.
I like Linux, mind you. I use it day-in, day-out for my desktop at work, for my webservers, and it brings in my daily bread. We all love it here, pretty much like a family loves and therefore tolerates the embarrassing second cousin with the Downs'. But people are walking all over the office today buzzing about the upcoming announcement from Apple.
Will it be the long-awaited iMac redesign? Will it be a new Mini? My boss is actually carrying his phone to the pub after work today so he can sit on engadget and get a realtime update. Linus would not be pleased...
Last login: Thu Jul 26 12:17:28 from nat-pool-fab.re Welcome to Darwin! ericbook:~ eric$ mutt -bash: mutt: command not found ericbook:~ eric$ open /Applications/Mail.app/ ericbook:~ eric$
Ahh. Like coming in after a long day of plowing the fields and sticking your aching feet into a pot of hot water. After running Linux all day at work, you feel like slipping into something more comfortable. Sam knows it. Zonker knows it, though he won't admit it. It's the right amount of just-workiness you need to let you relax, while knowing you could, at any given moment, do something like:
OK, here's one with drivel. I do like it, but I have a couple of gripes.
First problem: I was hopelessly confused by the login screen. The type of journal seems to be locked on livejournal, as the drop-down menu for journal types is inexplicably disabled until you enter a username. -1 for usabilty
Second problem: Useless stripping of trailing slash, which mangled my xmlrpc URL. Error 301 was ignored, which makes sense since it's a post and all, but I couldn't log in. It mangled my URL then choked on the error :-/
Third problem: didn't want to download my recent posts. Although there might be a misunderstanding about just what "recent" means.
Fourth problem: Doesn't let me choose post status anywhere. And there's nowhere I can find to choose text filters. This is more of a feature request, really.
Fifth problem: craps out after posting, probably because it keeps mangling the trailing slashes from my URLs. Is there an RFC somewhere that says that POSTS can't end with slashes? Nobody tell the Django folks.
Well, maybe it'll at least let me post to my blog from work every now and then.
Man, I dang sure missed the entire month of June. I've been in the UK now for about two months, and let me tell ya: They sure do get some rain around here. I always thought those stories about English people having gills were legends and fantasies. Now, I'm not so sure.
For the love of GOD, for the last time, in the name of ALL THAT IS HOLY, Cluster Services is NOT COMPATIBLE with 4.5! If you're running a cluster, DO NOT update to 4.5 until the Cluster Suite is UPDATED TO 4.5!
That is all.
P.S. And NO, cmirror is not available yet. Maybe at the end of the month.
I went outside to smoke a cigarette. All rooms in England are for non-smokers, you'll find, as are the rooms, apartments, and houses listed for rent in the local papers. The litany at the end of all the ads reads, "No smokers, canvassers, or DSS", which stands for Department of Social Services. So, okay they hate smokers and welfare cases, as do we all. But the British have their own definition for 'non-smoker', which basically means you only smoke when you drink. Everybody smokes over here, and they all live somewhere.
The evening was cool; almost cold, really, as I suspect the evenings around here generally are. I stood on the corner of Osborne and Netley, watching the blackbirds getting ready to do whatever it is they do at night, when I spied a man, some yards away, bounding up the sidewalk with a jaunty gait. I held my cigarette just in front of my mouth, watching this figure with suspicion. He was short, about 5 feet tall, and round as a soccer ball. He was wearing light-colored trousers and a dark blazer, the left breast of which was adorned with an enormous, orange prize-ribbon.
As he approached me, his features became distinct in the bad lighting, and I realized he was positively beaming with pride. His face was ruddy, and split with a grin that wouldn't have looked out of place behind a wheelbarrow full of poker chips on the way to the cash-out. I placed him in his mid-40s, but maybe his thinning red hair and roly-poly stature made him look older than he really was.
He halted just a few feet from me, and said, with oddly struggling words, "Good evening, mister!"
I looked him up and down, cigarette still burning between my shaky fingers, and replied, "hi, how are ya..." He wobbled his head a bit, then walked around me on his way up the street. I noticed something written in gold on his orange ribbon, and read it as it flashed in the lamplight.
I judged him more than a wee bit 'differently-abled', as they say. I watched as he cautiously crossed the empty street, looking both ways at least twice, then gingerly stepping into the street and crossing it at a run.
I thought about what I had seen written on the ribbon: "A Very Special Boy". Hmm, I thought, I wonder who gave him that? Whoever it was, they made his whole day.
I put my cigarette out and walked back into the guest house.
My buddy Sam sent me an email a couple of days ago indicating that he just might have joined The Family recently. And he joined it a much higher level than I, I might add, considering I'm still lumbering along in the PowerPC world; my G4 Powerbook, though a loyal and trusted friend, seems slow as molasses in January these days.
He also mentioned an old OS/2 habit, one which we separately shared back in the day. I started using OS/2 when I worked at UPS. One of our managers was running 2.1, with the old Presentation Manager that looked like a crappy(er) Windows 2.0, albeit with long filenames and the ability to run concurrent DOS sessions. I avoided it until OS/2 3.0 came out.
In '94, when Warp hit the shelves, I rushed out to Soft-Warehouse1 in Alpharetta, looked in the Operating Systems2 department until I found a box, then gave the man $300 dollars for the privilege of running it. Then, I walked over the desktop applications department, and put down another $495 for Lotus Smartsuite/2. Then I OEM'd 16MB of RAM for about $400 to make it all go.
Now, many may see OS/2 as a butt-ugly cousin of Windows, and they may be right. But back then, it was a work of art. Especially in the sense that it wasn't an exact science getting it to run. Nothing ever really worked like it was supposed to. Without the fallback of a DOS prompt, you had to have a second, fully-functional machine to do things like edit the CONFIG.SYS on the installation floppies to make sure your DASD drivers were loading. And most of the drivers were written so that, if they encountered an error while loading, they'd bork the whole boot process, just to be on the safe side.
The graphical interface also hung constantly. The Workplace Shell, despite (or maybe due to) all its object-orientiness, was horribly unstable. But I never saw a hang that wasn't cured with Control-Alt-Delete. That key combo went right down to the kernel, and always gave a satisfying, unconfirmed reboot, wedged GUI be damned. There was even a 3rd party program called Watchcat that sat on the serial port, or on a secondary Hercules/MCGA monitor, and let you monitor and kill programs remotely. The kernel's Kung Fu was strong like that, but the GUI was just ass.
Now, when Chicago started finally coming down the pipe, and even the Rolling Stones where pulled into the OS marketing world ("Start me up", anyone?), OS/2 fans like myself were sure that this pissant little DOS extender with a homely face wouldn't be the future. It couldn't be the future, it was just too depressing. It still wasn't a 32-bit OS, though the 386 had been out for over 8 years. It still used FAT, for crying out loud. In short, Chicago sucked.
OS/2 seemed like a scrappy little underdog, nipping heroically at the Microsoft behemoth's heels. I'm not sure why it gave that impression. At the time, IBM was much bigger than Microsoft, a huge, multinational corporation with interests in basically every aspect of electronics. They just couldn't write or market good software.
I'm not sure why I just wrote 500 words on OS/2. I actually wanted to write something about Linux.
Software stores used to have a whole "Operating Systems" department, back when there was more than one operating system, and Windows was still called an "Operating Environment" ↩
Man, I'm unprepared. There's a checklist of things you should do before moving to England. I came over here without any money, preparation, or attack plan. There's something unbelievably stupid about this. It worked for me when I moved to Germany, but moving to England's a bit more complicated, apparently. Either that, or I'm remembering it wrong.
But I'm not the only one. The office I'm working in is full of non-British people. It's a rag-tag group of Germans, Italians, Brazilians, Spaniards, one (1) American, and who knows what else that all found themselves in the same boat when they first came over. This despite promises from The Company to help one resettle; promises which are certainly not kept and, when referred to in conversation, change their shape and character like a Democrat on a whistle-stop.
But at some point a kindly soul in the department, now departed, made a list of the reality of the situation. It's a short list of what one really needs to do when moving to England. Unfortunately, I only found out about it after I'd already been here a week. Here's your to-do list once you've arrived in England:
Get a room. If possible, get a rental agreement or any bill with your name and address on it. (proof of address)
Deposit is usually 1 1/2 times the rent. Deposit and first rent is to be paid beforehand. If the room is unfurnished, see "Things to Buy" for shops and example prices.
Get a letter from your office manager (HR Lady) stating that you are working for the company and including your address. (proof of employment)
Get a bank account. Just walk in with your documents:
Passport or national ID card
Proof of employment (see 2.). it might be handy to have your contract with you.
Proof of address
Banks
HSBC – try to get a standard account (they try to sell you an advanced package including insurances etc.)
NatWest – Also recommended as this bank does not charge for withdrawing money from a different bank's cash machines
Give your bank details to The Company
Register with Inland Revenue – this is done by your HR manager. You should get your tax code about 2 weeks later (PAYE Coding Notice)
At the end of the fiscal year (ending April 5th), you will get a "P60 End of Year Certificate" detailing your "Pay and Income Tax" levels.
Get a National Insurance Number by applying at a Job Centre Plus office. They ask for dtails before they schedule an interview appointment to verify your eligibility. Appointments are scheduled about two weeks ahead, and take place in the nearest county office, which usually isn't near at all. Without an NI number, you will be on emergency tax, which is higher than the standard tax rate.
Documents:
Passport
National ID card
Driving License or any other official document identifying you (Birth certificate, police registration, medical card, etc.)
Proof of employment (see 2.)
Recent payslip
Bank statement
Proof of address (utility bill, rental agreement, etc. – see 1.)
It might be handy to have your PAYE Coding Notice with you
As money is paid in a timely manner so it is available on the 27th, try to get your appointment after this date.
If you are British, a citizen of a member state of the EU, or other Commonwealth citizen, you can apply for inclusion on the Register of Electors. This will allow you to vote at local government elections. Your credibility will rise (good for tenancy applications or bank-related matters) and you are obliged to pay Council Taxes1
If you buy any TV or radio equipment, you will be asked for your address, which will be automatically forwarded to the "TV Licensing Office"
Get a Tesco Clubcard
Get a life ;-)
Any address change has to be communicated to all above-mentioned authorities. For the official notices to local council, the TV licensing, and most other on-line services, you can use I am Moving , where you can create/use an account for free.
All of this could have been avoided with a bit of planning. I am bitterly disappointed in myself.
Council taxes are universal as far as I can tell, and are perceived, by the British at least, as an extension of the rent. ↩
Farnborough derives its name from from the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Ferneberga (Fern Hill) and is mentioned in the Domesday Book (1086). But for the coming of the army at nearby Aldershot, the arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flying, Farnborough would probably have remained an isolated heathland village, that is until the latter half of the 20th century when the population moved out of London suburbia and became commuters.
"But for the … arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flight…". That's a pretty big conditional. There are probably a lot of places whose development was seriously affected by railways and the advent of powered flight. But I understand where the good Mr. Parkins is coming from.
I had forgotten the cable to connect my camera to my laptop. Of all the stupid things that I packed for the trip, 50 different USB cables, a USB hub, power adapters for devices I’d forgotten, not to mention devices whose power adapters I’d forgotten, I forgot the one thing that was absolutely necessary and planned-for. Not to mention irreplaceable, seeing as every camera maker in the world decided that their camera’s little hole should look different from all the other cameras’ little holes.
I walked into a little computer store on the strip in Fleet, Hampshire. Walking up to the pasty-faced, teenaged part-timer there, I introduced myself and shook his hand, which seemed to shock him.
He unconsciously wiped his hands on his pants and said, “eh...nice to meet you, sir. What can I do for you?”
I asked him, “do you have any USB card-readers?”
“Um, yeah," he answered. "I think I saw some around here somewhere.”
I looked around the shop, which was organized and clean. Man, he must really be the FNG around here. He finally found what I was looking for, stored on a shelf right next to where he had been sitting. He handed it to me and I started reading the back of the packaging.
“Just looking to see if it works with my Mac,” I told him.
“Oh, it's USB, so it should work,” he answered, and took the reader out of my hand. He moved his lips while he read the package. “Oh, yeah,” he said finally. “Right there it says it: ‘Requires Mac OS 9 or later’.” He looked at me skeptically. “So, you do have OS 9 or later, don’t you?”
“Um, yeah, I think so.” OS 9 went out of style back in the ‘90s.
He moved around to the register, and I handed him my Visa card. He looked uncertain as he turned it over in his hand. “This thing doesn’t have a chip on it?”
I took it back and examined it. “No, I guess it doesn’t.”
“Well, I don’t think we can take that, then.”
“Why don’t you just swipe it,” I said. “Give it a go.”
He shrugged and swiped it through the machine.
From behind me, a voice said, “it’s all chips nowadays, you know.”
I looked around, and saw that an older woman was standing behind me. She looked to be in her mid 40s, and wore a name plate with the store’s logo on it. “You can’t get nothing without a dozen little chips in it.”
I nodded agreement, and turned back to the young man behind the register.
“So, what kind of Mac you got, then?”
“A PowerBook G4.”
He nodded approvingly. “Nice piece of kit, that.” The little machine that had taken my card made a loud ping!, and spit out a receipt. He tore it off and gave it to me to sign, along with the card reader.
“Now, you have a nice day sir, and do please visit us again.”
I thanked him, said goodbye to the chip-lady, and put the small package into my bag next to my laptop. “Thanks, man, I’ll do that.” Nice kid.
Didja ever discover something that made your reality skip a beat? You know how, for just a second, something is so far out of place that you can't even figure out what's wrong with the picture? For example, the Augsburg Wireless-Internet provider Cyberways has had the same guy on their start page for years:
Every time you connect to the internet over public wireless in Augsburg, that dude was right there, staring at you with those soulless black eyes. Like a doll's eyes...
And the weird thing was, I always figured he was the boss at Cyberways. I even thought I saw him once on the tram. I hate it when people use the same stock photos everywhere. Everybody's full of shit. Oh, I guess it's effective use of your cash dollars, seeing as it's cheaper than paying attractive people to work for you. But still, why not just be honest for a split second?
You get this kind of thing all over the Internet, of course. If you've ever shopped for web hosting, you'll notice, after a few visits to the providers' pages, that their employees all kind of look alike. And there's always some woman somewhere holding a laptop at her waist in near-sexual ecstasy over the reasonable shared hosting prices.
It's a leitmotif throughout the enter hosting industry: Shared Webspace=Chick with laptop.
Rube, look, for the last freakin time, look RIGHT when you step off a curb! These people drive on the other side of the F$@&-ing road over here! You wanna get ya brains splattered all over me?
What? I dunno. I'm just kind of sitting around, waiting on things. I just spent way too much time transferring money across European borders, and reclaiming my identity. But the new passports are wonderful pieces of fortitude. Here' s a few quotes from my new passport:
And that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth. - Abraham Lincoln
The principle of free governments adheres to the American soil. It is bedded in it, immovable as its mountains. - Daniel Webster
Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. - George Washington
We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. - excerpt from the Declaration of Independence
Your concept of love may be different, but know that I love this world.
I like reading Scott Adams' blog on occasion. Much like Balph Eubanks, he's glib, amusing, and completely lacking in morality. Take, for example, his latest strawman-laden posting regarding the visit of a certain Mr. Ahmedinejad:
I was happy to hear that NYC didn't allow Iranian President Ahmadinejad
to place a wreath at the WTC site. And I was happy that Columbia
University is rescinding the offer to let him speak. If you let a guy like
that express his views, before long the entire world will want freedom
of speech.
...
If Ahmadinejad thinks he can be our friend by honoring our heroes and
opening a dialog, he underestimates our ability to misinterpret him.
Fucking idiot. I hate him.
Well, there's certainly some rye wit at work here. Yes, it is quite ironic that a country led by a genocidal religious dictator, which the USA most certainly is, would object to a fellow genocidal religious madman visiting its most sensitive cultural site. I mean, Mahmoud's only trying to "open a dialog" here, isn't he? Isn't that the meaning of Ahmedinejad's visit? Isn't Ahmedinejad just exercising "Free Speech", as Adams says? Aren't we wrong in denying this poor man that right?
Aside from the obvious jackassery involved in claiming that a man who directly controls his entire country's media is having trouble getting his point of view out; or that the United Nations will let him speak before the leaders of the world to the point where they forget to blink for an hour; aside from all this, this is not a question of whether or not Mahmoud is allowed to say what he wants. The question is, in accordance with the Grand Unified Theory of Rubean Mechanics, Who's going to pay for it. It's a question of whether or not Americans should be paying for his plane fare, his security, and his accommodation while he's here, pissing on Ground Zero and generating propaganda for totalitarian lobbying groups like MoveOn.org and International ANSWER.
All of Adams' ridiculous assertions never mention the one central fact here: There is no compelling reason for American taxpayers to foot the bill, so this guy, who just held one of his popular "Death to America" parades, can come over here and lecture them on anything. I personally don't much care what Ahmedinejad thinks, I can see the general thrust of his inclinations. He's spitting on the United States and Western Culture daily, and then expects to be treated with deference in return. Fuck him.
This kind of Devil's Advocacy isn't new to Adams. At least, I hope it's just that. He's apparently one of those celebrities that have forgotten the hard work involved in their ascendency, and assume that they're rich because of some accident of nature, akin to divine providence. Humans, himself included, are all just a bunch of "moist robots" with no capacity for thought, no free will; we've apparently just been programmed by Mother Nature to do the things we've done or will do. There is no mind, there is no choice, there is only the stimuli in our environments, and the response that was determined by a chance arrangement of atoms into chemicals during the Big Bang. Or something.
It's an obscene display of thoughtlessness, a conceit of someone trying so hard to seem above all this. Adams' Dilbert is amusing, and his blog is a bit of junk food for the brain at times. But he's got the morals of a two-dollar whore.
Last night we didn't make it. The two Frenchmen surrendered the evening, seeing as it was Trotzky's birthday, and therefore a time for somber reflection or something. So, we rode around big town Farnborough for a couple of hours, grabbed some grub, and then headed back to the apartment to watch a movie.
We watched Fur, which cemented my belief that Nicole Kidman is the perfect woman. Not only does she look good in her own slutty little librarian sort of way, she gives a guy a handjob in this movie while shaving his hairy back. That's my kind of girl, a real little trooper.
Anyhoo, it's back off to London now, for a second try at getting sloppy somewhere besides sitting at home in front of the boob tube. Wish us luck.
Vacation week is winding down, and I'm getting ready to leave the driving to Southwest Trains and go drinking in London. I'll try to keep it under two weeks this time, but no promises. We'll tramp it a bit through Soho, I guess, just me, the girls, and a couple of frog-eaters from the office.
I wonder why I never get to go drinking with Englishmen? It's probably for the best. There's a quote that gets bandied about, especially in the local newspapers, about England being a nation of drunks and scalawags. I can't say much about that, but it does seem that the pubs all close at 11:00 PM for a reason. At 5 o'clock, they pour out of their offices and into the public houses, seemingly on a race against the clock to get themselves 'faced before the early last call.
When they were finally permitted to stay open past 11, in the hope that the binge-drinking would abate in light of longer opening hours, they found themselves doubly-cursed in that the Englishmen were every bit as drunk at 11, but didn't have to go home. All pubs here are set up so that you have to go to the counter to get your drinks, instead of having them brought to your table. There's a built-in handbrake there: a system where you can't get any more drink once you lose the ability to walk is founded upon sound principle and good advices.
I've done nothing today; nothing but clean out the cluttered closets of my preferred newsfeed reader. There were some connections in there that were sorely neglected. I could use a bit more time to wade through the degenerate filth that is my blogroll, but sadly, I work. The Company is tolerant in their control over my time, fair since they do not pay hourly; but tolerance has its limits, and I doubt they would look kindly upon my spending the business day in a fugue state, reading entry after entry of dialectics about Jessica Simpson's tits, or Brittney Spears' overplayed poonanny.
Nevertheless, it saddens me that my everyday is not blessed with the nuggets of wisdom from skippystalin:
Being the only person with an out-of-control substance abuse problem in a relationship is tough. Most romantic couplings are based on common interests and most of my interests culminate in my waking up in a pool of what I think is my own urine and not being quite sure what time zone I'm in. I'm much like a cat in that I have a tendancy of marking my territory with my vomit, blood and gallons of my semen...My ability to smoke, drink and masturbate furiously at the same time might not be much, it's all that I have.
Ahh, skippystalin, how I've missed you, and your nuggets.
This is how I spend my vacation: visiting Stonehenge on one day; reading the melancholy musings of skippystalin the next, picturing him composing scholarly tracts through bitter tears, a crushed Viagra dissolving in a highball of Jack Daniels next to the keyboard, as another long evening fades into a blur of poetry, madness, and vigorous bouts of hate-filled masturbation. And wondering, of the two, which is the more meaningful and fitting monument to humanity?
They should've just burned enjoyeverysandwich to CD, stuck it to the side of Voyager along with its author, and shot the whole lot into space back when they had government funding to do so, all in the name of making a good first impression for whatever aliens were out cruising for an easy meal.
skippystalin's output is prodigious, to be sure, but there was an entire blogroll to consider:
The lunatics are running the asylum over at Straight White Guy's place. Eric's testicles are mentioned, indirectly. Remind me to change my passwords regularly and start using strong encryption.
How stoned do you have to be to cheat on Jessica Alba? I could jack off to Jessica Alba while a big mean dog was chasing me and this idiot is cheating on her. I decided to confront him about this and I screamed at him, hey, what is your problem. And he said I should get off his lawn. And I said, no, no you get off the lawn. You get off. Then he went inside, probably because deep down, he knew I had made some pretty good points.
JimGoad.com is no more, but if you're a Goad fan (ladies!), you can find find him here. Discussion of Brittany's latest, erm, candid photos is also to be found, but be aware that the following picture is used as a visual aid:
This morning we picked up my new wheelchair. It's a sporty European marque, with an aggressive stance, low-profile tires, and a head-turning cherry-red metalflake paint job. It's not that great on the corners, but it'll take any one of y'all on the straightaways.
I've never done time on wheels. On the whole, I found it to be not all that bad. Then again, I don't figure that most wheelchair-bound men my age get to enjoy being pushed around town by a couple of sexy German bloggerettes. Thanks, ladies: the jealous looks from the other local cripples was the icing on the cake. Here's a little something extra for you, babes. (via AoSHQ)
Funny things happen when you're on wheels. I saw a lady I work with while being carted through Tesco's frozen food department. I said hello, and she just looked right through me, steering her cart so as not to make contact with the leper. She probably thought I was going to ask her for some spare change, or if she could wipe me bum for me, or whatever it is that those people want from healthy-legged people. I also noticed that the supermarkets put completely different things down on the bottom three feet of the shelves. All the cool toys are down there, for example, presumably because chil'n's is small. It's also a great altitude to find anti-bedsore medicaments, for some reason.
So, I let myself be pushed by the Weyside in Guildford, where, at one point, a husky young native was required to wheel my fat ass up a steep incline. The Sistas, for all their heart, lacked the muscle to get the job done, so he, being a true-hearted salt-of-earth kind of guy, waved them off and grunted and sweated till I crested the hill. Had the man known that I could have, at any point in time, simply stood up and hobbled up the hill under my own power, he most certainly would have picked me up and broken me over his knee.
Tomorrow morning, we'll be visiting Stonehenge, or Stone'enge, as the locals quaintly call it. We'll also visit the haunted city, Salisbury, to watch the homosexuals. Ta!
I like reading OSNews for some reason. I think I like to catch the geeky news about SkyOS, or the occasional retro curmudgeonry that rolls by about Lotus 1-2-3 or OS/2. Being the old-timer that I am, it's hard to resist a paean from my youth about 10-finger productivity.
Unfortunately, they've become the epicenter of stupid for the tech press. Check out this article, which explodes the myths about competition being good: "Competition is not Good"
'It gives consumers more choice'
Choice is good when there's one agreed base standard, and a number of compatible approaches. For example, there are many Linux distributions, but they are all Linux, and they can all run the same software. They are 'flavours' of the same thing, that is a good choice. People like different flavours.
Competition does not produce easier choices for consumers. All they get is added un-interoperability and complexity with competitive choices.
Now, if you go read that article, which I do not recommend, you'll slowly come to the realization that this moron is just annoyed that he has to make the effort to choose between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. He's willing to surrender his entire free will to some (hopefully) benevolent dictator, abolish brand names, and forsake the free market economy because choosing which format to buy the Firefly special edition box set in is hard. What a hopeless, whiny-assed sissy.
Of course, things don't get better when they start tossing political analysis at you. "Net Neutrality" is one monikers that has overshadowed the thing named. The discussion is often framed in a way that an uninformed listener would assume there was lobbying going on to abolish some sort of laws that are now protecting consumers from big, bad tiered-Internet ninjas.
But: There is no net neutrality legislation, there never was, and hopefully, there never will be. The argument over "Net Neutrality" is about whether or not the U.S. government should introduce legislation forbidding bandwidth throttling by ISPs. It's the "have you stopped beating your wife?" straw man for the Slashdot crowd. You'll notice that this article calls the Supreme Court's decision that the U.S. government shouldn't step in and configure the ISPs' Cisco routers for them, "Backing for Two-Tier Internet":
The US Justice Department has said that internet service providers should be allowed to charge for priority traffic. The agency said it was opposed to 'network neutrality', the idea that all data on the net is treated equally. The comments put the agency at odds with companies such as Microsoft and Google, who have called for legislation to guarantee equal access to the net.
Of course, this would also mean that an enforcement infrastructure would also have to be put in place, making sure that everyone got their "fair share" of said bandwidth, as if backbone routers and POPs just fell off a tree somewhere. God forbid ISPs be allowed to tune the services that they developed and paid for as they wish. Let's let the government decides who gets bandwidth, and how much is enough! That will make it all fair and neutral-like. Whenever a politician uses the word "fair", hang on to your wallet.
Well, my trackbacks are now working, it seems. There's some ugly Python spaghetti-code going on behind the scenes that translates back and forth between absolute urls, non-absolute relative urls, and upper-lower-camel case; but it works.
Trackbacks are only good for Movable Type, though. Which I can't stand anymore. MT used to be the only thing out there, but there's something that really, really, really galls me about the way it rebuilds your entire site into static HTML pages everytime you update a post. I'm sure it's awesomeness if you've got your server running on an old TV remote, but nowadays we're all running our web servers on 100-core 64-bit terahertz moonshot computers that can simultaneously compute π, encode MPEG video, and mix the best goddam margaritas you've ever tasted, all without breaking a sweat.
So yeah, I figured out how to implement trackbacks in Django, to a point where they more or less work. Now why is Wordpress fucking with me? It seems to be thrown off by the fact that Wordpress sends a HEAD request before it downloads and parses the page, in the vain hope that the X-Pingback header will be set. I can't figure out how to do that in Django's generic views, so I just use the secondary method, that being a link element in the XHTML code. But now, whenever a Worpdress blog pings me, I get this kind of crap:
[09/Sep/2007 15:04:23] "GET /blog/2007/sep/08/vacation/ HTTP/1.1" 200 27367
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (104, 'Connection reset by peer')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (32, 'Broken pipe')
Being the half-assed programmer that I am, I am at a total loss. I can't even do a Lazyweb request here, seeing as my 4 visits a day are unlikely to bring the Django HTTP gurus by. I won't be able to sleep at night, thinking of all the enlightened Wordpress Users who are probably out there try to "Keep the discussion going" with me.
Ever since June, when the iPhone went live, I've heard about nothing else in the tech press, nerd podcasts, and the Apple Fanboisphere. Is it really that way over in the States (the only place you can get them), or does the iPhone actually seem to be doing well?
Ahh, my first vacation since joining The Company. My queue is cleaned up, my email is forwarded, and an elaborate Sieve session has accomplished in a mere two hours what less civilized mail systems can do with a key combination: The Corporate Vacation Email.
It's been five months now since I came 'cross the channel and started meeting the natives, learning the lingo, and getting used to the fact that everyone here talks like Pinky. Now, I'll be letting my hair down for the next 10 days or so. As well as putting my poor, broken foot up on the coffee table.
As soon as I get my x-rays back from the socialist medical system (they still copy them with coal rubbings on wax paper over here, apparently), I'll post pictures of the metatarsalar breakage here for your morbid enjoyment. Don't thank me yet.
The other half of Sistaweb will be joining us for the week. We'll allow her to sleep here rent-free for an entire week, even though she refused to bring a carton of cigarettes as payment. Damned non-smokers and their principles. It's like those non-smokers back in the World War II who didn't sign up for cigarette rations. Throwing away a gold mine, that is. Our grandfathers probably had a word for those guys, and if I knew my grandfather at all, that word was sissy-boy.
The girls have rented a wheelchair for me, seeing as I won't be too much fun doing a London pub-crawl on crutches. I've already had a forehead-slapping moment over this, as you probably are right now. Why haven't I thought of taking a wheelchair with me before? That would've come in handy on more than one occasion, the Wreckyll in Jeckyll not least among them.
Man, Apple is on a roll. Not only have they got me hooked for a new computer, a new laptop, a new office package, and a replacement for my aging MythTV box, but now I have to start thinking about a new iPod. Now, let's see what Uncle Steve is going to me be costing me 'til Christmas Time:
Item
Damage
20" iMac
1199.00
Macbook
1099.00
8GB iPod Touch
299.00
AppleTV
299.00
iWork '08
79.00
iLife '08
79.00
Total:
$3,054.00
Not bad for a day's work, Mr. Jobs. And what's up for the rest of September? Maybe some irresistible bionic iFoot to replace the one I broke playing frisbee at the company picnic last week?
Although there's a remarkable lack of iPhone hype around the office, we being a big-time Linux company and all, there's an amazing amount of Mac fanboiism. Pretty much all of us have Macs at home. The explanation for this is simple: After dealing with Linux problems all day long, there's something nice about going home to something you can spend all your time using and not making up excuses for why it looks like shit and doesn't work.
I like Linux, mind you. I use it day-in, day-out for my desktop at work, for my webservers, and it brings in my daily bread. We all love it here, pretty much like a family loves and therefore tolerates the embarrassing second cousin with the Downs'. But people are walking all over the office today buzzing about the upcoming announcement from Apple.
Will it be the long-awaited iMac redesign? Will it be a new Mini? My boss is actually carrying his phone to the pub after work today so he can sit on engadget and get a realtime update. Linus would not be pleased...
Last login: Thu Jul 26 12:17:28 from nat-pool-fab.re Welcome to Darwin! ericbook:~ eric$ mutt -bash: mutt: command not found ericbook:~ eric$ open /Applications/Mail.app/ ericbook:~ eric$
Ahh. Like coming in after a long day of plowing the fields and sticking your aching feet into a pot of hot water. After running Linux all day at work, you feel like slipping into something more comfortable. Sam knows it. Zonker knows it, though he won't admit it. It's the right amount of just-workiness you need to let you relax, while knowing you could, at any given moment, do something like:
OK, here's one with drivel. I do like it, but I have a couple of gripes.
First problem: I was hopelessly confused by the login screen. The type of journal seems to be locked on livejournal, as the drop-down menu for journal types is inexplicably disabled until you enter a username. -1 for usabilty
Second problem: Useless stripping of trailing slash, which mangled my xmlrpc URL. Error 301 was ignored, which makes sense since it's a post and all, but I couldn't log in. It mangled my URL then choked on the error :-/
Third problem: didn't want to download my recent posts. Although there might be a misunderstanding about just what "recent" means.
Fourth problem: Doesn't let me choose post status anywhere. And there's nowhere I can find to choose text filters. This is more of a feature request, really.
Fifth problem: craps out after posting, probably because it keeps mangling the trailing slashes from my URLs. Is there an RFC somewhere that says that POSTS can't end with slashes? Nobody tell the Django folks.
Well, maybe it'll at least let me post to my blog from work every now and then.
Man, I dang sure missed the entire month of June. I've been in the UK now for about two months, and let me tell ya: They sure do get some rain around here. I always thought those stories about English people having gills were legends and fantasies. Now, I'm not so sure.
For the love of GOD, for the last time, in the name of ALL THAT IS HOLY, Cluster Services is NOT COMPATIBLE with 4.5! If you're running a cluster, DO NOT update to 4.5 until the Cluster Suite is UPDATED TO 4.5!
That is all.
P.S. And NO, cmirror is not available yet. Maybe at the end of the month.
I went outside to smoke a cigarette. All rooms in England are for non-smokers, you'll find, as are the rooms, apartments, and houses listed for rent in the local papers. The litany at the end of all the ads reads, "No smokers, canvassers, or DSS", which stands for Department of Social Services. So, okay they hate smokers and welfare cases, as do we all. But the British have their own definition for 'non-smoker', which basically means you only smoke when you drink. Everybody smokes over here, and they all live somewhere.
The evening was cool; almost cold, really, as I suspect the evenings around here generally are. I stood on the corner of Osborne and Netley, watching the blackbirds getting ready to do whatever it is they do at night, when I spied a man, some yards away, bounding up the sidewalk with a jaunty gait. I held my cigarette just in front of my mouth, watching this figure with suspicion. He was short, about 5 feet tall, and round as a soccer ball. He was wearing light-colored trousers and a dark blazer, the left breast of which was adorned with an enormous, orange prize-ribbon.
As he approached me, his features became distinct in the bad lighting, and I realized he was positively beaming with pride. His face was ruddy, and split with a grin that wouldn't have looked out of place behind a wheelbarrow full of poker chips on the way to the cash-out. I placed him in his mid-40s, but maybe his thinning red hair and roly-poly stature made him look older than he really was.
He halted just a few feet from me, and said, with oddly struggling words, "Good evening, mister!"
I looked him up and down, cigarette still burning between my shaky fingers, and replied, "hi, how are ya..." He wobbled his head a bit, then walked around me on his way up the street. I noticed something written in gold on his orange ribbon, and read it as it flashed in the lamplight.
I judged him more than a wee bit 'differently-abled', as they say. I watched as he cautiously crossed the empty street, looking both ways at least twice, then gingerly stepping into the street and crossing it at a run.
I thought about what I had seen written on the ribbon: "A Very Special Boy". Hmm, I thought, I wonder who gave him that? Whoever it was, they made his whole day.
I put my cigarette out and walked back into the guest house.
My buddy Sam sent me an email a couple of days ago indicating that he just might have joined The Family recently. And he joined it a much higher level than I, I might add, considering I'm still lumbering along in the PowerPC world; my G4 Powerbook, though a loyal and trusted friend, seems slow as molasses in January these days.
He also mentioned an old OS/2 habit, one which we separately shared back in the day. I started using OS/2 when I worked at UPS. One of our managers was running 2.1, with the old Presentation Manager that looked like a crappy(er) Windows 2.0, albeit with long filenames and the ability to run concurrent DOS sessions. I avoided it until OS/2 3.0 came out.
In '94, when Warp hit the shelves, I rushed out to Soft-Warehouse1 in Alpharetta, looked in the Operating Systems2 department until I found a box, then gave the man $300 dollars for the privilege of running it. Then, I walked over the desktop applications department, and put down another $495 for Lotus Smartsuite/2. Then I OEM'd 16MB of RAM for about $400 to make it all go.
Now, many may see OS/2 as a butt-ugly cousin of Windows, and they may be right. But back then, it was a work of art. Especially in the sense that it wasn't an exact science getting it to run. Nothing ever really worked like it was supposed to. Without the fallback of a DOS prompt, you had to have a second, fully-functional machine to do things like edit the CONFIG.SYS on the installation floppies to make sure your DASD drivers were loading. And most of the drivers were written so that, if they encountered an error while loading, they'd bork the whole boot process, just to be on the safe side.
The graphical interface also hung constantly. The Workplace Shell, despite (or maybe due to) all its object-orientiness, was horribly unstable. But I never saw a hang that wasn't cured with Control-Alt-Delete. That key combo went right down to the kernel, and always gave a satisfying, unconfirmed reboot, wedged GUI be damned. There was even a 3rd party program called Watchcat that sat on the serial port, or on a secondary Hercules/MCGA monitor, and let you monitor and kill programs remotely. The kernel's Kung Fu was strong like that, but the GUI was just ass.
Now, when Chicago started finally coming down the pipe, and even the Rolling Stones where pulled into the OS marketing world ("Start me up", anyone?), OS/2 fans like myself were sure that this pissant little DOS extender with a homely face wouldn't be the future. It couldn't be the future, it was just too depressing. It still wasn't a 32-bit OS, though the 386 had been out for over 8 years. It still used FAT, for crying out loud. In short, Chicago sucked.
OS/2 seemed like a scrappy little underdog, nipping heroically at the Microsoft behemoth's heels. I'm not sure why it gave that impression. At the time, IBM was much bigger than Microsoft, a huge, multinational corporation with interests in basically every aspect of electronics. They just couldn't write or market good software.
I'm not sure why I just wrote 500 words on OS/2. I actually wanted to write something about Linux.
Software stores used to have a whole "Operating Systems" department, back when there was more than one operating system, and Windows was still called an "Operating Environment" ↩
Man, I'm unprepared. There's a checklist of things you should do before moving to England. I came over here without any money, preparation, or attack plan. There's something unbelievably stupid about this. It worked for me when I moved to Germany, but moving to England's a bit more complicated, apparently. Either that, or I'm remembering it wrong.
But I'm not the only one. The office I'm working in is full of non-British people. It's a rag-tag group of Germans, Italians, Brazilians, Spaniards, one (1) American, and who knows what else that all found themselves in the same boat when they first came over. This despite promises from The Company to help one resettle; promises which are certainly not kept and, when referred to in conversation, change their shape and character like a Democrat on a whistle-stop.
But at some point a kindly soul in the department, now departed, made a list of the reality of the situation. It's a short list of what one really needs to do when moving to England. Unfortunately, I only found out about it after I'd already been here a week. Here's your to-do list once you've arrived in England:
Get a room. If possible, get a rental agreement or any bill with your name and address on it. (proof of address)
Deposit is usually 1 1/2 times the rent. Deposit and first rent is to be paid beforehand. If the room is unfurnished, see "Things to Buy" for shops and example prices.
Get a letter from your office manager (HR Lady) stating that you are working for the company and including your address. (proof of employment)
Get a bank account. Just walk in with your documents:
Passport or national ID card
Proof of employment (see 2.). it might be handy to have your contract with you.
Proof of address
Banks
HSBC – try to get a standard account (they try to sell you an advanced package including insurances etc.)
NatWest – Also recommended as this bank does not charge for withdrawing money from a different bank's cash machines
Give your bank details to The Company
Register with Inland Revenue – this is done by your HR manager. You should get your tax code about 2 weeks later (PAYE Coding Notice)
At the end of the fiscal year (ending April 5th), you will get a "P60 End of Year Certificate" detailing your "Pay and Income Tax" levels.
Get a National Insurance Number by applying at a Job Centre Plus office. They ask for dtails before they schedule an interview appointment to verify your eligibility. Appointments are scheduled about two weeks ahead, and take place in the nearest county office, which usually isn't near at all. Without an NI number, you will be on emergency tax, which is higher than the standard tax rate.
Documents:
Passport
National ID card
Driving License or any other official document identifying you (Birth certificate, police registration, medical card, etc.)
Proof of employment (see 2.)
Recent payslip
Bank statement
Proof of address (utility bill, rental agreement, etc. – see 1.)
It might be handy to have your PAYE Coding Notice with you
As money is paid in a timely manner so it is available on the 27th, try to get your appointment after this date.
If you are British, a citizen of a member state of the EU, or other Commonwealth citizen, you can apply for inclusion on the Register of Electors. This will allow you to vote at local government elections. Your credibility will rise (good for tenancy applications or bank-related matters) and you are obliged to pay Council Taxes1
If you buy any TV or radio equipment, you will be asked for your address, which will be automatically forwarded to the "TV Licensing Office"
Get a Tesco Clubcard
Get a life ;-)
Any address change has to be communicated to all above-mentioned authorities. For the official notices to local council, the TV licensing, and most other on-line services, you can use I am Moving , where you can create/use an account for free.
All of this could have been avoided with a bit of planning. I am bitterly disappointed in myself.
Council taxes are universal as far as I can tell, and are perceived, by the British at least, as an extension of the rent. ↩
Farnborough derives its name from from the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Ferneberga (Fern Hill) and is mentioned in the Domesday Book (1086). But for the coming of the army at nearby Aldershot, the arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flying, Farnborough would probably have remained an isolated heathland village, that is until the latter half of the 20th century when the population moved out of London suburbia and became commuters.
"But for the … arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flight…". That's a pretty big conditional. There are probably a lot of places whose development was seriously affected by railways and the advent of powered flight. But I understand where the good Mr. Parkins is coming from.
I had forgotten the cable to connect my camera to my laptop. Of all the stupid things that I packed for the trip, 50 different USB cables, a USB hub, power adapters for devices I’d forgotten, not to mention devices whose power adapters I’d forgotten, I forgot the one thing that was absolutely necessary and planned-for. Not to mention irreplaceable, seeing as every camera maker in the world decided that their camera’s little hole should look different from all the other cameras’ little holes.
I walked into a little computer store on the strip in Fleet, Hampshire. Walking up to the pasty-faced, teenaged part-timer there, I introduced myself and shook his hand, which seemed to shock him.
He unconsciously wiped his hands on his pants and said, “eh...nice to meet you, sir. What can I do for you?”
I asked him, “do you have any USB card-readers?”
“Um, yeah," he answered. "I think I saw some around here somewhere.”
I looked around the shop, which was organized and clean. Man, he must really be the FNG around here. He finally found what I was looking for, stored on a shelf right next to where he had been sitting. He handed it to me and I started reading the back of the packaging.
“Just looking to see if it works with my Mac,” I told him.
“Oh, it's USB, so it should work,” he answered, and took the reader out of my hand. He moved his lips while he read the package. “Oh, yeah,” he said finally. “Right there it says it: ‘Requires Mac OS 9 or later’.” He looked at me skeptically. “So, you do have OS 9 or later, don’t you?”
“Um, yeah, I think so.” OS 9 went out of style back in the ‘90s.
He moved around to the register, and I handed him my Visa card. He looked uncertain as he turned it over in his hand. “This thing doesn’t have a chip on it?”
I took it back and examined it. “No, I guess it doesn’t.”
“Well, I don’t think we can take that, then.”
“Why don’t you just swipe it,” I said. “Give it a go.”
He shrugged and swiped it through the machine.
From behind me, a voice said, “it’s all chips nowadays, you know.”
I looked around, and saw that an older woman was standing behind me. She looked to be in her mid 40s, and wore a name plate with the store’s logo on it. “You can’t get nothing without a dozen little chips in it.”
I nodded agreement, and turned back to the young man behind the register.
“So, what kind of Mac you got, then?”
“A PowerBook G4.”
He nodded approvingly. “Nice piece of kit, that.” The little machine that had taken my card made a loud ping!, and spit out a receipt. He tore it off and gave it to me to sign, along with the card reader.
“Now, you have a nice day sir, and do please visit us again.”
I thanked him, said goodbye to the chip-lady, and put the small package into my bag next to my laptop. “Thanks, man, I’ll do that.” Nice kid.
Didja ever discover something that made your reality skip a beat? You know how, for just a second, something is so far out of place that you can't even figure out what's wrong with the picture? For example, the Augsburg Wireless-Internet provider Cyberways has had the same guy on their start page for years:
Every time you connect to the internet over public wireless in Augsburg, that dude was right there, staring at you with those soulless black eyes. Like a doll's eyes...
And the weird thing was, I always figured he was the boss at Cyberways. I even thought I saw him once on the tram. I hate it when people use the same stock photos everywhere. Everybody's full of shit. Oh, I guess it's effective use of your cash dollars, seeing as it's cheaper than paying attractive people to work for you. But still, why not just be honest for a split second?
You get this kind of thing all over the Internet, of course. If you've ever shopped for web hosting, you'll notice, after a few visits to the providers' pages, that their employees all kind of look alike. And there's always some woman somewhere holding a laptop at her waist in near-sexual ecstasy over the reasonable shared hosting prices.
It's a leitmotif throughout the enter hosting industry: Shared Webspace=Chick with laptop.
Rube, look, for the last freakin time, look RIGHT when you step off a curb! These people drive on the other side of the F$@&-ing road over here! You wanna get ya brains splattered all over me?
What? I dunno. I'm just kind of sitting around, waiting on things. I just spent way too much time transferring money across European borders, and reclaiming my identity. But the new passports are wonderful pieces of fortitude. Here' s a few quotes from my new passport:
And that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth. - Abraham Lincoln
The principle of free governments adheres to the American soil. It is bedded in it, immovable as its mountains. - Daniel Webster
Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. - George Washington
We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. - excerpt from the Declaration of Independence
Your concept of love may be different, but know that I love this world.
I like reading Scott Adams' blog on occasion. Much like Balph Eubanks, he's glib, amusing, and completely lacking in morality. Take, for example, his latest strawman-laden posting regarding the visit of a certain Mr. Ahmedinejad:
I was happy to hear that NYC didn't allow Iranian President Ahmadinejad
to place a wreath at the WTC site. And I was happy that Columbia
University is rescinding the offer to let him speak. If you let a guy like
that express his views, before long the entire world will want freedom
of speech.
...
If Ahmadinejad thinks he can be our friend by honoring our heroes and
opening a dialog, he underestimates our ability to misinterpret him.
Fucking idiot. I hate him.
Well, there's certainly some rye wit at work here. Yes, it is quite ironic that a country led by a genocidal religious dictator, which the USA most certainly is, would object to a fellow genocidal religious madman visiting its most sensitive cultural site. I mean, Mahmoud's only trying to "open a dialog" here, isn't he? Isn't that the meaning of Ahmedinejad's visit? Isn't Ahmedinejad just exercising "Free Speech", as Adams says? Aren't we wrong in denying this poor man that right?
Aside from the obvious jackassery involved in claiming that a man who directly controls his entire country's media is having trouble getting his point of view out; or that the United Nations will let him speak before the leaders of the world to the point where they forget to blink for an hour; aside from all this, this is not a question of whether or not Mahmoud is allowed to say what he wants. The question is, in accordance with the Grand Unified Theory of Rubean Mechanics, Who's going to pay for it. It's a question of whether or not Americans should be paying for his plane fare, his security, and his accommodation while he's here, pissing on Ground Zero and generating propaganda for totalitarian lobbying groups like MoveOn.org and International ANSWER.
All of Adams' ridiculous assertions never mention the one central fact here: There is no compelling reason for American taxpayers to foot the bill, so this guy, who just held one of his popular "Death to America" parades, can come over here and lecture them on anything. I personally don't much care what Ahmedinejad thinks, I can see the general thrust of his inclinations. He's spitting on the United States and Western Culture daily, and then expects to be treated with deference in return. Fuck him.
This kind of Devil's Advocacy isn't new to Adams. At least, I hope it's just that. He's apparently one of those celebrities that have forgotten the hard work involved in their ascendency, and assume that they're rich because of some accident of nature, akin to divine providence. Humans, himself included, are all just a bunch of "moist robots" with no capacity for thought, no free will; we've apparently just been programmed by Mother Nature to do the things we've done or will do. There is no mind, there is no choice, there is only the stimuli in our environments, and the response that was determined by a chance arrangement of atoms into chemicals during the Big Bang. Or something.
It's an obscene display of thoughtlessness, a conceit of someone trying so hard to seem above all this. Adams' Dilbert is amusing, and his blog is a bit of junk food for the brain at times. But he's got the morals of a two-dollar whore.
Last night we didn't make it. The two Frenchmen surrendered the evening, seeing as it was Trotzky's birthday, and therefore a time for somber reflection or something. So, we rode around big town Farnborough for a couple of hours, grabbed some grub, and then headed back to the apartment to watch a movie.
We watched Fur, which cemented my belief that Nicole Kidman is the perfect woman. Not only does she look good in her own slutty little librarian sort of way, she gives a guy a handjob in this movie while shaving his hairy back. That's my kind of girl, a real little trooper.
Anyhoo, it's back off to London now, for a second try at getting sloppy somewhere besides sitting at home in front of the boob tube. Wish us luck.
Vacation week is winding down, and I'm getting ready to leave the driving to Southwest Trains and go drinking in London. I'll try to keep it under two weeks this time, but no promises. We'll tramp it a bit through Soho, I guess, just me, the girls, and a couple of frog-eaters from the office.
I wonder why I never get to go drinking with Englishmen? It's probably for the best. There's a quote that gets bandied about, especially in the local newspapers, about England being a nation of drunks and scalawags. I can't say much about that, but it does seem that the pubs all close at 11:00 PM for a reason. At 5 o'clock, they pour out of their offices and into the public houses, seemingly on a race against the clock to get themselves 'faced before the early last call.
When they were finally permitted to stay open past 11, in the hope that the binge-drinking would abate in light of longer opening hours, they found themselves doubly-cursed in that the Englishmen were every bit as drunk at 11, but didn't have to go home. All pubs here are set up so that you have to go to the counter to get your drinks, instead of having them brought to your table. There's a built-in handbrake there: a system where you can't get any more drink once you lose the ability to walk is founded upon sound principle and good advices.
I've done nothing today; nothing but clean out the cluttered closets of my preferred newsfeed reader. There were some connections in there that were sorely neglected. I could use a bit more time to wade through the degenerate filth that is my blogroll, but sadly, I work. The Company is tolerant in their control over my time, fair since they do not pay hourly; but tolerance has its limits, and I doubt they would look kindly upon my spending the business day in a fugue state, reading entry after entry of dialectics about Jessica Simpson's tits, or Brittney Spears' overplayed poonanny.
Nevertheless, it saddens me that my everyday is not blessed with the nuggets of wisdom from skippystalin:
Being the only person with an out-of-control substance abuse problem in a relationship is tough. Most romantic couplings are based on common interests and most of my interests culminate in my waking up in a pool of what I think is my own urine and not being quite sure what time zone I'm in. I'm much like a cat in that I have a tendancy of marking my territory with my vomit, blood and gallons of my semen...My ability to smoke, drink and masturbate furiously at the same time might not be much, it's all that I have.
Ahh, skippystalin, how I've missed you, and your nuggets.
This is how I spend my vacation: visiting Stonehenge on one day; reading the melancholy musings of skippystalin the next, picturing him composing scholarly tracts through bitter tears, a crushed Viagra dissolving in a highball of Jack Daniels next to the keyboard, as another long evening fades into a blur of poetry, madness, and vigorous bouts of hate-filled masturbation. And wondering, of the two, which is the more meaningful and fitting monument to humanity?
They should've just burned enjoyeverysandwich to CD, stuck it to the side of Voyager along with its author, and shot the whole lot into space back when they had government funding to do so, all in the name of making a good first impression for whatever aliens were out cruising for an easy meal.
skippystalin's output is prodigious, to be sure, but there was an entire blogroll to consider:
The lunatics are running the asylum over at Straight White Guy's place. Eric's testicles are mentioned, indirectly. Remind me to change my passwords regularly and start using strong encryption.
How stoned do you have to be to cheat on Jessica Alba? I could jack off to Jessica Alba while a big mean dog was chasing me and this idiot is cheating on her. I decided to confront him about this and I screamed at him, hey, what is your problem. And he said I should get off his lawn. And I said, no, no you get off the lawn. You get off. Then he went inside, probably because deep down, he knew I had made some pretty good points.
JimGoad.com is no more, but if you're a Goad fan (ladies!), you can find find him here. Discussion of Brittany's latest, erm, candid photos is also to be found, but be aware that the following picture is used as a visual aid:
This morning we picked up my new wheelchair. It's a sporty European marque, with an aggressive stance, low-profile tires, and a head-turning cherry-red metalflake paint job. It's not that great on the corners, but it'll take any one of y'all on the straightaways.
I've never done time on wheels. On the whole, I found it to be not all that bad. Then again, I don't figure that most wheelchair-bound men my age get to enjoy being pushed around town by a couple of sexy German bloggerettes. Thanks, ladies: the jealous looks from the other local cripples was the icing on the cake. Here's a little something extra for you, babes. (via AoSHQ)
Funny things happen when you're on wheels. I saw a lady I work with while being carted through Tesco's frozen food department. I said hello, and she just looked right through me, steering her cart so as not to make contact with the leper. She probably thought I was going to ask her for some spare change, or if she could wipe me bum for me, or whatever it is that those people want from healthy-legged people. I also noticed that the supermarkets put completely different things down on the bottom three feet of the shelves. All the cool toys are down there, for example, presumably because chil'n's is small. It's also a great altitude to find anti-bedsore medicaments, for some reason.
So, I let myself be pushed by the Weyside in Guildford, where, at one point, a husky young native was required to wheel my fat ass up a steep incline. The Sistas, for all their heart, lacked the muscle to get the job done, so he, being a true-hearted salt-of-earth kind of guy, waved them off and grunted and sweated till I crested the hill. Had the man known that I could have, at any point in time, simply stood up and hobbled up the hill under my own power, he most certainly would have picked me up and broken me over his knee.
Tomorrow morning, we'll be visiting Stonehenge, or Stone'enge, as the locals quaintly call it. We'll also visit the haunted city, Salisbury, to watch the homosexuals. Ta!
I like reading OSNews for some reason. I think I like to catch the geeky news about SkyOS, or the occasional retro curmudgeonry that rolls by about Lotus 1-2-3 or OS/2. Being the old-timer that I am, it's hard to resist a paean from my youth about 10-finger productivity.
Unfortunately, they've become the epicenter of stupid for the tech press. Check out this article, which explodes the myths about competition being good: "Competition is not Good"
'It gives consumers more choice'
Choice is good when there's one agreed base standard, and a number of compatible approaches. For example, there are many Linux distributions, but they are all Linux, and they can all run the same software. They are 'flavours' of the same thing, that is a good choice. People like different flavours.
Competition does not produce easier choices for consumers. All they get is added un-interoperability and complexity with competitive choices.
Now, if you go read that article, which I do not recommend, you'll slowly come to the realization that this moron is just annoyed that he has to make the effort to choose between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. He's willing to surrender his entire free will to some (hopefully) benevolent dictator, abolish brand names, and forsake the free market economy because choosing which format to buy the Firefly special edition box set in is hard. What a hopeless, whiny-assed sissy.
Of course, things don't get better when they start tossing political analysis at you. "Net Neutrality" is one monikers that has overshadowed the thing named. The discussion is often framed in a way that an uninformed listener would assume there was lobbying going on to abolish some sort of laws that are now protecting consumers from big, bad tiered-Internet ninjas.
But: There is no net neutrality legislation, there never was, and hopefully, there never will be. The argument over "Net Neutrality" is about whether or not the U.S. government should introduce legislation forbidding bandwidth throttling by ISPs. It's the "have you stopped beating your wife?" straw man for the Slashdot crowd. You'll notice that this article calls the Supreme Court's decision that the U.S. government shouldn't step in and configure the ISPs' Cisco routers for them, "Backing for Two-Tier Internet":
The US Justice Department has said that internet service providers should be allowed to charge for priority traffic. The agency said it was opposed to 'network neutrality', the idea that all data on the net is treated equally. The comments put the agency at odds with companies such as Microsoft and Google, who have called for legislation to guarantee equal access to the net.
Of course, this would also mean that an enforcement infrastructure would also have to be put in place, making sure that everyone got their "fair share" of said bandwidth, as if backbone routers and POPs just fell off a tree somewhere. God forbid ISPs be allowed to tune the services that they developed and paid for as they wish. Let's let the government decides who gets bandwidth, and how much is enough! That will make it all fair and neutral-like. Whenever a politician uses the word "fair", hang on to your wallet.
Well, my trackbacks are now working, it seems. There's some ugly Python spaghetti-code going on behind the scenes that translates back and forth between absolute urls, non-absolute relative urls, and upper-lower-camel case; but it works.
Trackbacks are only good for Movable Type, though. Which I can't stand anymore. MT used to be the only thing out there, but there's something that really, really, really galls me about the way it rebuilds your entire site into static HTML pages everytime you update a post. I'm sure it's awesomeness if you've got your server running on an old TV remote, but nowadays we're all running our web servers on 100-core 64-bit terahertz moonshot computers that can simultaneously compute π, encode MPEG video, and mix the best goddam margaritas you've ever tasted, all without breaking a sweat.
So yeah, I figured out how to implement trackbacks in Django, to a point where they more or less work. Now why is Wordpress fucking with me? It seems to be thrown off by the fact that Wordpress sends a HEAD request before it downloads and parses the page, in the vain hope that the X-Pingback header will be set. I can't figure out how to do that in Django's generic views, so I just use the secondary method, that being a link element in the XHTML code. But now, whenever a Worpdress blog pings me, I get this kind of crap:
[09/Sep/2007 15:04:23] "GET /blog/2007/sep/08/vacation/ HTTP/1.1" 200 27367
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (104, 'Connection reset by peer')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (32, 'Broken pipe')
Being the half-assed programmer that I am, I am at a total loss. I can't even do a Lazyweb request here, seeing as my 4 visits a day are unlikely to bring the Django HTTP gurus by. I won't be able to sleep at night, thinking of all the enlightened Wordpress Users who are probably out there try to "Keep the discussion going" with me.
Ever since June, when the iPhone went live, I've heard about nothing else in the tech press, nerd podcasts, and the Apple Fanboisphere. Is it really that way over in the States (the only place you can get them), or does the iPhone actually seem to be doing well?
Ahh, my first vacation since joining The Company. My queue is cleaned up, my email is forwarded, and an elaborate Sieve session has accomplished in a mere two hours what less civilized mail systems can do with a key combination: The Corporate Vacation Email.
It's been five months now since I came 'cross the channel and started meeting the natives, learning the lingo, and getting used to the fact that everyone here talks like Pinky. Now, I'll be letting my hair down for the next 10 days or so. As well as putting my poor, broken foot up on the coffee table.
As soon as I get my x-rays back from the socialist medical system (they still copy them with coal rubbings on wax paper over here, apparently), I'll post pictures of the metatarsalar breakage here for your morbid enjoyment. Don't thank me yet.
The other half of Sistaweb will be joining us for the week. We'll allow her to sleep here rent-free for an entire week, even though she refused to bring a carton of cigarettes as payment. Damned non-smokers and their principles. It's like those non-smokers back in the World War II who didn't sign up for cigarette rations. Throwing away a gold mine, that is. Our grandfathers probably had a word for those guys, and if I knew my grandfather at all, that word was sissy-boy.
The girls have rented a wheelchair for me, seeing as I won't be too much fun doing a London pub-crawl on crutches. I've already had a forehead-slapping moment over this, as you probably are right now. Why haven't I thought of taking a wheelchair with me before? That would've come in handy on more than one occasion, the Wreckyll in Jeckyll not least among them.
Man, Apple is on a roll. Not only have they got me hooked for a new computer, a new laptop, a new office package, and a replacement for my aging MythTV box, but now I have to start thinking about a new iPod. Now, let's see what Uncle Steve is going to me be costing me 'til Christmas Time:
Item
Damage
20" iMac
1199.00
Macbook
1099.00
8GB iPod Touch
299.00
AppleTV
299.00
iWork '08
79.00
iLife '08
79.00
Total:
$3,054.00
Not bad for a day's work, Mr. Jobs. And what's up for the rest of September? Maybe some irresistible bionic iFoot to replace the one I broke playing frisbee at the company picnic last week?
Although there's a remarkable lack of iPhone hype around the office, we being a big-time Linux company and all, there's an amazing amount of Mac fanboiism. Pretty much all of us have Macs at home. The explanation for this is simple: After dealing with Linux problems all day long, there's something nice about going home to something you can spend all your time using and not making up excuses for why it looks like shit and doesn't work.
I like Linux, mind you. I use it day-in, day-out for my desktop at work, for my webservers, and it brings in my daily bread. We all love it here, pretty much like a family loves and therefore tolerates the embarrassing second cousin with the Downs'. But people are walking all over the office today buzzing about the upcoming announcement from Apple.
Will it be the long-awaited iMac redesign? Will it be a new Mini? My boss is actually carrying his phone to the pub after work today so he can sit on engadget and get a realtime update. Linus would not be pleased...
Last login: Thu Jul 26 12:17:28 from nat-pool-fab.re Welcome to Darwin! ericbook:~ eric$ mutt -bash: mutt: command not found ericbook:~ eric$ open /Applications/Mail.app/ ericbook:~ eric$
Ahh. Like coming in after a long day of plowing the fields and sticking your aching feet into a pot of hot water. After running Linux all day at work, you feel like slipping into something more comfortable. Sam knows it. Zonker knows it, though he won't admit it. It's the right amount of just-workiness you need to let you relax, while knowing you could, at any given moment, do something like:
OK, here's one with drivel. I do like it, but I have a couple of gripes.
First problem: I was hopelessly confused by the login screen. The type of journal seems to be locked on livejournal, as the drop-down menu for journal types is inexplicably disabled until you enter a username. -1 for usabilty
Second problem: Useless stripping of trailing slash, which mangled my xmlrpc URL. Error 301 was ignored, which makes sense since it's a post and all, but I couldn't log in. It mangled my URL then choked on the error :-/
Third problem: didn't want to download my recent posts. Although there might be a misunderstanding about just what "recent" means.
Fourth problem: Doesn't let me choose post status anywhere. And there's nowhere I can find to choose text filters. This is more of a feature request, really.
Fifth problem: craps out after posting, probably because it keeps mangling the trailing slashes from my URLs. Is there an RFC somewhere that says that POSTS can't end with slashes? Nobody tell the Django folks.
Well, maybe it'll at least let me post to my blog from work every now and then.
Man, I dang sure missed the entire month of June. I've been in the UK now for about two months, and let me tell ya: They sure do get some rain around here. I always thought those stories about English people having gills were legends and fantasies. Now, I'm not so sure.
For the love of GOD, for the last time, in the name of ALL THAT IS HOLY, Cluster Services is NOT COMPATIBLE with 4.5! If you're running a cluster, DO NOT update to 4.5 until the Cluster Suite is UPDATED TO 4.5!
That is all.
P.S. And NO, cmirror is not available yet. Maybe at the end of the month.
I went outside to smoke a cigarette. All rooms in England are for non-smokers, you'll find, as are the rooms, apartments, and houses listed for rent in the local papers. The litany at the end of all the ads reads, "No smokers, canvassers, or DSS", which stands for Department of Social Services. So, okay they hate smokers and welfare cases, as do we all. But the British have their own definition for 'non-smoker', which basically means you only smoke when you drink. Everybody smokes over here, and they all live somewhere.
The evening was cool; almost cold, really, as I suspect the evenings around here generally are. I stood on the corner of Osborne and Netley, watching the blackbirds getting ready to do whatever it is they do at night, when I spied a man, some yards away, bounding up the sidewalk with a jaunty gait. I held my cigarette just in front of my mouth, watching this figure with suspicion. He was short, about 5 feet tall, and round as a soccer ball. He was wearing light-colored trousers and a dark blazer, the left breast of which was adorned with an enormous, orange prize-ribbon.
As he approached me, his features became distinct in the bad lighting, and I realized he was positively beaming with pride. His face was ruddy, and split with a grin that wouldn't have looked out of place behind a wheelbarrow full of poker chips on the way to the cash-out. I placed him in his mid-40s, but maybe his thinning red hair and roly-poly stature made him look older than he really was.
He halted just a few feet from me, and said, with oddly struggling words, "Good evening, mister!"
I looked him up and down, cigarette still burning between my shaky fingers, and replied, "hi, how are ya..." He wobbled his head a bit, then walked around me on his way up the street. I noticed something written in gold on his orange ribbon, and read it as it flashed in the lamplight.
I judged him more than a wee bit 'differently-abled', as they say. I watched as he cautiously crossed the empty street, looking both ways at least twice, then gingerly stepping into the street and crossing it at a run.
I thought about what I had seen written on the ribbon: "A Very Special Boy". Hmm, I thought, I wonder who gave him that? Whoever it was, they made his whole day.
I put my cigarette out and walked back into the guest house.
My buddy Sam sent me an email a couple of days ago indicating that he just might have joined The Family recently. And he joined it a much higher level than I, I might add, considering I'm still lumbering along in the PowerPC world; my G4 Powerbook, though a loyal and trusted friend, seems slow as molasses in January these days.
He also mentioned an old OS/2 habit, one which we separately shared back in the day. I started using OS/2 when I worked at UPS. One of our managers was running 2.1, with the old Presentation Manager that looked like a crappy(er) Windows 2.0, albeit with long filenames and the ability to run concurrent DOS sessions. I avoided it until OS/2 3.0 came out.
In '94, when Warp hit the shelves, I rushed out to Soft-Warehouse1 in Alpharetta, looked in the Operating Systems2 department until I found a box, then gave the man $300 dollars for the privilege of running it. Then, I walked over the desktop applications department, and put down another $495 for Lotus Smartsuite/2. Then I OEM'd 16MB of RAM for about $400 to make it all go.
Now, many may see OS/2 as a butt-ugly cousin of Windows, and they may be right. But back then, it was a work of art. Especially in the sense that it wasn't an exact science getting it to run. Nothing ever really worked like it was supposed to. Without the fallback of a DOS prompt, you had to have a second, fully-functional machine to do things like edit the CONFIG.SYS on the installation floppies to make sure your DASD drivers were loading. And most of the drivers were written so that, if they encountered an error while loading, they'd bork the whole boot process, just to be on the safe side.
The graphical interface also hung constantly. The Workplace Shell, despite (or maybe due to) all its object-orientiness, was horribly unstable. But I never saw a hang that wasn't cured with Control-Alt-Delete. That key combo went right down to the kernel, and always gave a satisfying, unconfirmed reboot, wedged GUI be damned. There was even a 3rd party program called Watchcat that sat on the serial port, or on a secondary Hercules/MCGA monitor, and let you monitor and kill programs remotely. The kernel's Kung Fu was strong like that, but the GUI was just ass.
Now, when Chicago started finally coming down the pipe, and even the Rolling Stones where pulled into the OS marketing world ("Start me up", anyone?), OS/2 fans like myself were sure that this pissant little DOS extender with a homely face wouldn't be the future. It couldn't be the future, it was just too depressing. It still wasn't a 32-bit OS, though the 386 had been out for over 8 years. It still used FAT, for crying out loud. In short, Chicago sucked.
OS/2 seemed like a scrappy little underdog, nipping heroically at the Microsoft behemoth's heels. I'm not sure why it gave that impression. At the time, IBM was much bigger than Microsoft, a huge, multinational corporation with interests in basically every aspect of electronics. They just couldn't write or market good software.
I'm not sure why I just wrote 500 words on OS/2. I actually wanted to write something about Linux.
Software stores used to have a whole "Operating Systems" department, back when there was more than one operating system, and Windows was still called an "Operating Environment" ↩
Man, I'm unprepared. There's a checklist of things you should do before moving to England. I came over here without any money, preparation, or attack plan. There's something unbelievably stupid about this. It worked for me when I moved to Germany, but moving to England's a bit more complicated, apparently. Either that, or I'm remembering it wrong.
But I'm not the only one. The office I'm working in is full of non-British people. It's a rag-tag group of Germans, Italians, Brazilians, Spaniards, one (1) American, and who knows what else that all found themselves in the same boat when they first came over. This despite promises from The Company to help one resettle; promises which are certainly not kept and, when referred to in conversation, change their shape and character like a Democrat on a whistle-stop.
But at some point a kindly soul in the department, now departed, made a list of the reality of the situation. It's a short list of what one really needs to do when moving to England. Unfortunately, I only found out about it after I'd already been here a week. Here's your to-do list once you've arrived in England:
Get a room. If possible, get a rental agreement or any bill with your name and address on it. (proof of address)
Deposit is usually 1 1/2 times the rent. Deposit and first rent is to be paid beforehand. If the room is unfurnished, see "Things to Buy" for shops and example prices.
Get a letter from your office manager (HR Lady) stating that you are working for the company and including your address. (proof of employment)
Get a bank account. Just walk in with your documents:
Passport or national ID card
Proof of employment (see 2.). it might be handy to have your contract with you.
Proof of address
Banks
HSBC – try to get a standard account (they try to sell you an advanced package including insurances etc.)
NatWest – Also recommended as this bank does not charge for withdrawing money from a different bank's cash machines
Give your bank details to The Company
Register with Inland Revenue – this is done by your HR manager. You should get your tax code about 2 weeks later (PAYE Coding Notice)
At the end of the fiscal year (ending April 5th), you will get a "P60 End of Year Certificate" detailing your "Pay and Income Tax" levels.
Get a National Insurance Number by applying at a Job Centre Plus office. They ask for dtails before they schedule an interview appointment to verify your eligibility. Appointments are scheduled about two weeks ahead, and take place in the nearest county office, which usually isn't near at all. Without an NI number, you will be on emergency tax, which is higher than the standard tax rate.
Documents:
Passport
National ID card
Driving License or any other official document identifying you (Birth certificate, police registration, medical card, etc.)
Proof of employment (see 2.)
Recent payslip
Bank statement
Proof of address (utility bill, rental agreement, etc. – see 1.)
It might be handy to have your PAYE Coding Notice with you
As money is paid in a timely manner so it is available on the 27th, try to get your appointment after this date.
If you are British, a citizen of a member state of the EU, or other Commonwealth citizen, you can apply for inclusion on the Register of Electors. This will allow you to vote at local government elections. Your credibility will rise (good for tenancy applications or bank-related matters) and you are obliged to pay Council Taxes1
If you buy any TV or radio equipment, you will be asked for your address, which will be automatically forwarded to the "TV Licensing Office"
Get a Tesco Clubcard
Get a life ;-)
Any address change has to be communicated to all above-mentioned authorities. For the official notices to local council, the TV licensing, and most other on-line services, you can use I am Moving , where you can create/use an account for free.
All of this could have been avoided with a bit of planning. I am bitterly disappointed in myself.
Council taxes are universal as far as I can tell, and are perceived, by the British at least, as an extension of the rent. ↩
Farnborough derives its name from from the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Ferneberga (Fern Hill) and is mentioned in the Domesday Book (1086). But for the coming of the army at nearby Aldershot, the arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flying, Farnborough would probably have remained an isolated heathland village, that is until the latter half of the 20th century when the population moved out of London suburbia and became commuters.
"But for the … arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flight…". That's a pretty big conditional. There are probably a lot of places whose development was seriously affected by railways and the advent of powered flight. But I understand where the good Mr. Parkins is coming from.
I had forgotten the cable to connect my camera to my laptop. Of all the stupid things that I packed for the trip, 50 different USB cables, a USB hub, power adapters for devices I’d forgotten, not to mention devices whose power adapters I’d forgotten, I forgot the one thing that was absolutely necessary and planned-for. Not to mention irreplaceable, seeing as every camera maker in the world decided that their camera’s little hole should look different from all the other cameras’ little holes.
I walked into a little computer store on the strip in Fleet, Hampshire. Walking up to the pasty-faced, teenaged part-timer there, I introduced myself and shook his hand, which seemed to shock him.
He unconsciously wiped his hands on his pants and said, “eh...nice to meet you, sir. What can I do for you?”
I asked him, “do you have any USB card-readers?”
“Um, yeah," he answered. "I think I saw some around here somewhere.”
I looked around the shop, which was organized and clean. Man, he must really be the FNG around here. He finally found what I was looking for, stored on a shelf right next to where he had been sitting. He handed it to me and I started reading the back of the packaging.
“Just looking to see if it works with my Mac,” I told him.
“Oh, it's USB, so it should work,” he answered, and took the reader out of my hand. He moved his lips while he read the package. “Oh, yeah,” he said finally. “Right there it says it: ‘Requires Mac OS 9 or later’.” He looked at me skeptically. “So, you do have OS 9 or later, don’t you?”
“Um, yeah, I think so.” OS 9 went out of style back in the ‘90s.
He moved around to the register, and I handed him my Visa card. He looked uncertain as he turned it over in his hand. “This thing doesn’t have a chip on it?”
I took it back and examined it. “No, I guess it doesn’t.”
“Well, I don’t think we can take that, then.”
“Why don’t you just swipe it,” I said. “Give it a go.”
He shrugged and swiped it through the machine.
From behind me, a voice said, “it’s all chips nowadays, you know.”
I looked around, and saw that an older woman was standing behind me. She looked to be in her mid 40s, and wore a name plate with the store’s logo on it. “You can’t get nothing without a dozen little chips in it.”
I nodded agreement, and turned back to the young man behind the register.
“So, what kind of Mac you got, then?”
“A PowerBook G4.”
He nodded approvingly. “Nice piece of kit, that.” The little machine that had taken my card made a loud ping!, and spit out a receipt. He tore it off and gave it to me to sign, along with the card reader.
“Now, you have a nice day sir, and do please visit us again.”
I thanked him, said goodbye to the chip-lady, and put the small package into my bag next to my laptop. “Thanks, man, I’ll do that.” Nice kid.
Didja ever discover something that made your reality skip a beat? You know how, for just a second, something is so far out of place that you can't even figure out what's wrong with the picture? For example, the Augsburg Wireless-Internet provider Cyberways has had the same guy on their start page for years:
Every time you connect to the internet over public wireless in Augsburg, that dude was right there, staring at you with those soulless black eyes. Like a doll's eyes...
And the weird thing was, I always figured he was the boss at Cyberways. I even thought I saw him once on the tram. I hate it when people use the same stock photos everywhere. Everybody's full of shit. Oh, I guess it's effective use of your cash dollars, seeing as it's cheaper than paying attractive people to work for you. But still, why not just be honest for a split second?
You get this kind of thing all over the Internet, of course. If you've ever shopped for web hosting, you'll notice, after a few visits to the providers' pages, that their employees all kind of look alike. And there's always some woman somewhere holding a laptop at her waist in near-sexual ecstasy over the reasonable shared hosting prices.
It's a leitmotif throughout the enter hosting industry: Shared Webspace=Chick with laptop.
Rube, look, for the last freakin time, look RIGHT when you step off a curb! These people drive on the other side of the F$@&-ing road over here! You wanna get ya brains splattered all over me?
What? I dunno. I'm just kind of sitting around, waiting on things. I just spent way too much time transferring money across European borders, and reclaiming my identity. But the new passports are wonderful pieces of fortitude. Here' s a few quotes from my new passport:
And that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth. - Abraham Lincoln
The principle of free governments adheres to the American soil. It is bedded in it, immovable as its mountains. - Daniel Webster
Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. - George Washington
We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. - excerpt from the Declaration of Independence
Your concept of love may be different, but know that I love this world.
I like reading Scott Adams' blog on occasion. Much like Balph Eubanks, he's glib, amusing, and completely lacking in morality. Take, for example, his latest strawman-laden posting regarding the visit of a certain Mr. Ahmedinejad:
I was happy to hear that NYC didn't allow Iranian President Ahmadinejad
to place a wreath at the WTC site. And I was happy that Columbia
University is rescinding the offer to let him speak. If you let a guy like
that express his views, before long the entire world will want freedom
of speech.
...
If Ahmadinejad thinks he can be our friend by honoring our heroes and
opening a dialog, he underestimates our ability to misinterpret him.
Fucking idiot. I hate him.
Well, there's certainly some rye wit at work here. Yes, it is quite ironic that a country led by a genocidal religious dictator, which the USA most certainly is, would object to a fellow genocidal religious madman visiting its most sensitive cultural site. I mean, Mahmoud's only trying to "open a dialog" here, isn't he? Isn't that the meaning of Ahmedinejad's visit? Isn't Ahmedinejad just exercising "Free Speech", as Adams says? Aren't we wrong in denying this poor man that right?
Aside from the obvious jackassery involved in claiming that a man who directly controls his entire country's media is having trouble getting his point of view out; or that the United Nations will let him speak before the leaders of the world to the point where they forget to blink for an hour; aside from all this, this is not a question of whether or not Mahmoud is allowed to say what he wants. The question is, in accordance with the Grand Unified Theory of Rubean Mechanics, Who's going to pay for it. It's a question of whether or not Americans should be paying for his plane fare, his security, and his accommodation while he's here, pissing on Ground Zero and generating propaganda for totalitarian lobbying groups like MoveOn.org and International ANSWER.
All of Adams' ridiculous assertions never mention the one central fact here: There is no compelling reason for American taxpayers to foot the bill, so this guy, who just held one of his popular "Death to America" parades, can come over here and lecture them on anything. I personally don't much care what Ahmedinejad thinks, I can see the general thrust of his inclinations. He's spitting on the United States and Western Culture daily, and then expects to be treated with deference in return. Fuck him.
This kind of Devil's Advocacy isn't new to Adams. At least, I hope it's just that. He's apparently one of those celebrities that have forgotten the hard work involved in their ascendency, and assume that they're rich because of some accident of nature, akin to divine providence. Humans, himself included, are all just a bunch of "moist robots" with no capacity for thought, no free will; we've apparently just been programmed by Mother Nature to do the things we've done or will do. There is no mind, there is no choice, there is only the stimuli in our environments, and the response that was determined by a chance arrangement of atoms into chemicals during the Big Bang. Or something.
It's an obscene display of thoughtlessness, a conceit of someone trying so hard to seem above all this. Adams' Dilbert is amusing, and his blog is a bit of junk food for the brain at times. But he's got the morals of a two-dollar whore.
Last night we didn't make it. The two Frenchmen surrendered the evening, seeing as it was Trotzky's birthday, and therefore a time for somber reflection or something. So, we rode around big town Farnborough for a couple of hours, grabbed some grub, and then headed back to the apartment to watch a movie.
We watched Fur, which cemented my belief that Nicole Kidman is the perfect woman. Not only does she look good in her own slutty little librarian sort of way, she gives a guy a handjob in this movie while shaving his hairy back. That's my kind of girl, a real little trooper.
Anyhoo, it's back off to London now, for a second try at getting sloppy somewhere besides sitting at home in front of the boob tube. Wish us luck.
Vacation week is winding down, and I'm getting ready to leave the driving to Southwest Trains and go drinking in London. I'll try to keep it under two weeks this time, but no promises. We'll tramp it a bit through Soho, I guess, just me, the girls, and a couple of frog-eaters from the office.
I wonder why I never get to go drinking with Englishmen? It's probably for the best. There's a quote that gets bandied about, especially in the local newspapers, about England being a nation of drunks and scalawags. I can't say much about that, but it does seem that the pubs all close at 11:00 PM for a reason. At 5 o'clock, they pour out of their offices and into the public houses, seemingly on a race against the clock to get themselves 'faced before the early last call.
When they were finally permitted to stay open past 11, in the hope that the binge-drinking would abate in light of longer opening hours, they found themselves doubly-cursed in that the Englishmen were every bit as drunk at 11, but didn't have to go home. All pubs here are set up so that you have to go to the counter to get your drinks, instead of having them brought to your table. There's a built-in handbrake there: a system where you can't get any more drink once you lose the ability to walk is founded upon sound principle and good advices.
I've done nothing today; nothing but clean out the cluttered closets of my preferred newsfeed reader. There were some connections in there that were sorely neglected. I could use a bit more time to wade through the degenerate filth that is my blogroll, but sadly, I work. The Company is tolerant in their control over my time, fair since they do not pay hourly; but tolerance has its limits, and I doubt they would look kindly upon my spending the business day in a fugue state, reading entry after entry of dialectics about Jessica Simpson's tits, or Brittney Spears' overplayed poonanny.
Nevertheless, it saddens me that my everyday is not blessed with the nuggets of wisdom from skippystalin:
Being the only person with an out-of-control substance abuse problem in a relationship is tough. Most romantic couplings are based on common interests and most of my interests culminate in my waking up in a pool of what I think is my own urine and not being quite sure what time zone I'm in. I'm much like a cat in that I have a tendancy of marking my territory with my vomit, blood and gallons of my semen...My ability to smoke, drink and masturbate furiously at the same time might not be much, it's all that I have.
Ahh, skippystalin, how I've missed you, and your nuggets.
This is how I spend my vacation: visiting Stonehenge on one day; reading the melancholy musings of skippystalin the next, picturing him composing scholarly tracts through bitter tears, a crushed Viagra dissolving in a highball of Jack Daniels next to the keyboard, as another long evening fades into a blur of poetry, madness, and vigorous bouts of hate-filled masturbation. And wondering, of the two, which is the more meaningful and fitting monument to humanity?
They should've just burned enjoyeverysandwich to CD, stuck it to the side of Voyager along with its author, and shot the whole lot into space back when they had government funding to do so, all in the name of making a good first impression for whatever aliens were out cruising for an easy meal.
skippystalin's output is prodigious, to be sure, but there was an entire blogroll to consider:
The lunatics are running the asylum over at Straight White Guy's place. Eric's testicles are mentioned, indirectly. Remind me to change my passwords regularly and start using strong encryption.
How stoned do you have to be to cheat on Jessica Alba? I could jack off to Jessica Alba while a big mean dog was chasing me and this idiot is cheating on her. I decided to confront him about this and I screamed at him, hey, what is your problem. And he said I should get off his lawn. And I said, no, no you get off the lawn. You get off. Then he went inside, probably because deep down, he knew I had made some pretty good points.
JimGoad.com is no more, but if you're a Goad fan (ladies!), you can find find him here. Discussion of Brittany's latest, erm, candid photos is also to be found, but be aware that the following picture is used as a visual aid:
This morning we picked up my new wheelchair. It's a sporty European marque, with an aggressive stance, low-profile tires, and a head-turning cherry-red metalflake paint job. It's not that great on the corners, but it'll take any one of y'all on the straightaways.
I've never done time on wheels. On the whole, I found it to be not all that bad. Then again, I don't figure that most wheelchair-bound men my age get to enjoy being pushed around town by a couple of sexy German bloggerettes. Thanks, ladies: the jealous looks from the other local cripples was the icing on the cake. Here's a little something extra for you, babes. (via AoSHQ)
Funny things happen when you're on wheels. I saw a lady I work with while being carted through Tesco's frozen food department. I said hello, and she just looked right through me, steering her cart so as not to make contact with the leper. She probably thought I was going to ask her for some spare change, or if she could wipe me bum for me, or whatever it is that those people want from healthy-legged people. I also noticed that the supermarkets put completely different things down on the bottom three feet of the shelves. All the cool toys are down there, for example, presumably because chil'n's is small. It's also a great altitude to find anti-bedsore medicaments, for some reason.
So, I let myself be pushed by the Weyside in Guildford, where, at one point, a husky young native was required to wheel my fat ass up a steep incline. The Sistas, for all their heart, lacked the muscle to get the job done, so he, being a true-hearted salt-of-earth kind of guy, waved them off and grunted and sweated till I crested the hill. Had the man known that I could have, at any point in time, simply stood up and hobbled up the hill under my own power, he most certainly would have picked me up and broken me over his knee.
Tomorrow morning, we'll be visiting Stonehenge, or Stone'enge, as the locals quaintly call it. We'll also visit the haunted city, Salisbury, to watch the homosexuals. Ta!
I like reading OSNews for some reason. I think I like to catch the geeky news about SkyOS, or the occasional retro curmudgeonry that rolls by about Lotus 1-2-3 or OS/2. Being the old-timer that I am, it's hard to resist a paean from my youth about 10-finger productivity.
Unfortunately, they've become the epicenter of stupid for the tech press. Check out this article, which explodes the myths about competition being good: "Competition is not Good"
'It gives consumers more choice'
Choice is good when there's one agreed base standard, and a number of compatible approaches. For example, there are many Linux distributions, but they are all Linux, and they can all run the same software. They are 'flavours' of the same thing, that is a good choice. People like different flavours.
Competition does not produce easier choices for consumers. All they get is added un-interoperability and complexity with competitive choices.
Now, if you go read that article, which I do not recommend, you'll slowly come to the realization that this moron is just annoyed that he has to make the effort to choose between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. He's willing to surrender his entire free will to some (hopefully) benevolent dictator, abolish brand names, and forsake the free market economy because choosing which format to buy the Firefly special edition box set in is hard. What a hopeless, whiny-assed sissy.
Of course, things don't get better when they start tossing political analysis at you. "Net Neutrality" is one monikers that has overshadowed the thing named. The discussion is often framed in a way that an uninformed listener would assume there was lobbying going on to abolish some sort of laws that are now protecting consumers from big, bad tiered-Internet ninjas.
But: There is no net neutrality legislation, there never was, and hopefully, there never will be. The argument over "Net Neutrality" is about whether or not the U.S. government should introduce legislation forbidding bandwidth throttling by ISPs. It's the "have you stopped beating your wife?" straw man for the Slashdot crowd. You'll notice that this article calls the Supreme Court's decision that the U.S. government shouldn't step in and configure the ISPs' Cisco routers for them, "Backing for Two-Tier Internet":
The US Justice Department has said that internet service providers should be allowed to charge for priority traffic. The agency said it was opposed to 'network neutrality', the idea that all data on the net is treated equally. The comments put the agency at odds with companies such as Microsoft and Google, who have called for legislation to guarantee equal access to the net.
Of course, this would also mean that an enforcement infrastructure would also have to be put in place, making sure that everyone got their "fair share" of said bandwidth, as if backbone routers and POPs just fell off a tree somewhere. God forbid ISPs be allowed to tune the services that they developed and paid for as they wish. Let's let the government decides who gets bandwidth, and how much is enough! That will make it all fair and neutral-like. Whenever a politician uses the word "fair", hang on to your wallet.
Well, my trackbacks are now working, it seems. There's some ugly Python spaghetti-code going on behind the scenes that translates back and forth between absolute urls, non-absolute relative urls, and upper-lower-camel case; but it works.
Trackbacks are only good for Movable Type, though. Which I can't stand anymore. MT used to be the only thing out there, but there's something that really, really, really galls me about the way it rebuilds your entire site into static HTML pages everytime you update a post. I'm sure it's awesomeness if you've got your server running on an old TV remote, but nowadays we're all running our web servers on 100-core 64-bit terahertz moonshot computers that can simultaneously compute π, encode MPEG video, and mix the best goddam margaritas you've ever tasted, all without breaking a sweat.
So yeah, I figured out how to implement trackbacks in Django, to a point where they more or less work. Now why is Wordpress fucking with me? It seems to be thrown off by the fact that Wordpress sends a HEAD request before it downloads and parses the page, in the vain hope that the X-Pingback header will be set. I can't figure out how to do that in Django's generic views, so I just use the secondary method, that being a link element in the XHTML code. But now, whenever a Worpdress blog pings me, I get this kind of crap:
[09/Sep/2007 15:04:23] "GET /blog/2007/sep/08/vacation/ HTTP/1.1" 200 27367
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (104, 'Connection reset by peer')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (32, 'Broken pipe')
Being the half-assed programmer that I am, I am at a total loss. I can't even do a Lazyweb request here, seeing as my 4 visits a day are unlikely to bring the Django HTTP gurus by. I won't be able to sleep at night, thinking of all the enlightened Wordpress Users who are probably out there try to "Keep the discussion going" with me.
Ever since June, when the iPhone went live, I've heard about nothing else in the tech press, nerd podcasts, and the Apple Fanboisphere. Is it really that way over in the States (the only place you can get them), or does the iPhone actually seem to be doing well?
Ahh, my first vacation since joining The Company. My queue is cleaned up, my email is forwarded, and an elaborate Sieve session has accomplished in a mere two hours what less civilized mail systems can do with a key combination: The Corporate Vacation Email.
It's been five months now since I came 'cross the channel and started meeting the natives, learning the lingo, and getting used to the fact that everyone here talks like Pinky. Now, I'll be letting my hair down for the next 10 days or so. As well as putting my poor, broken foot up on the coffee table.
As soon as I get my x-rays back from the socialist medical system (they still copy them with coal rubbings on wax paper over here, apparently), I'll post pictures of the metatarsalar breakage here for your morbid enjoyment. Don't thank me yet.
The other half of Sistaweb will be joining us for the week. We'll allow her to sleep here rent-free for an entire week, even though she refused to bring a carton of cigarettes as payment. Damned non-smokers and their principles. It's like those non-smokers back in the World War II who didn't sign up for cigarette rations. Throwing away a gold mine, that is. Our grandfathers probably had a word for those guys, and if I knew my grandfather at all, that word was sissy-boy.
The girls have rented a wheelchair for me, seeing as I won't be too much fun doing a London pub-crawl on crutches. I've already had a forehead-slapping moment over this, as you probably are right now. Why haven't I thought of taking a wheelchair with me before? That would've come in handy on more than one occasion, the Wreckyll in Jeckyll not least among them.
Man, Apple is on a roll. Not only have they got me hooked for a new computer, a new laptop, a new office package, and a replacement for my aging MythTV box, but now I have to start thinking about a new iPod. Now, let's see what Uncle Steve is going to me be costing me 'til Christmas Time:
Item
Damage
20" iMac
1199.00
Macbook
1099.00
8GB iPod Touch
299.00
AppleTV
299.00
iWork '08
79.00
iLife '08
79.00
Total:
$3,054.00
Not bad for a day's work, Mr. Jobs. And what's up for the rest of September? Maybe some irresistible bionic iFoot to replace the one I broke playing frisbee at the company picnic last week?
Although there's a remarkable lack of iPhone hype around the office, we being a big-time Linux company and all, there's an amazing amount of Mac fanboiism. Pretty much all of us have Macs at home. The explanation for this is simple: After dealing with Linux problems all day long, there's something nice about going home to something you can spend all your time using and not making up excuses for why it looks like shit and doesn't work.
I like Linux, mind you. I use it day-in, day-out for my desktop at work, for my webservers, and it brings in my daily bread. We all love it here, pretty much like a family loves and therefore tolerates the embarrassing second cousin with the Downs'. But people are walking all over the office today buzzing about the upcoming announcement from Apple.
Will it be the long-awaited iMac redesign? Will it be a new Mini? My boss is actually carrying his phone to the pub after work today so he can sit on engadget and get a realtime update. Linus would not be pleased...
Last login: Thu Jul 26 12:17:28 from nat-pool-fab.re Welcome to Darwin! ericbook:~ eric$ mutt -bash: mutt: command not found ericbook:~ eric$ open /Applications/Mail.app/ ericbook:~ eric$
Ahh. Like coming in after a long day of plowing the fields and sticking your aching feet into a pot of hot water. After running Linux all day at work, you feel like slipping into something more comfortable. Sam knows it. Zonker knows it, though he won't admit it. It's the right amount of just-workiness you need to let you relax, while knowing you could, at any given moment, do something like:
OK, here's one with drivel. I do like it, but I have a couple of gripes.
First problem: I was hopelessly confused by the login screen. The type of journal seems to be locked on livejournal, as the drop-down menu for journal types is inexplicably disabled until you enter a username. -1 for usabilty
Second problem: Useless stripping of trailing slash, which mangled my xmlrpc URL. Error 301 was ignored, which makes sense since it's a post and all, but I couldn't log in. It mangled my URL then choked on the error :-/
Third problem: didn't want to download my recent posts. Although there might be a misunderstanding about just what "recent" means.
Fourth problem: Doesn't let me choose post status anywhere. And there's nowhere I can find to choose text filters. This is more of a feature request, really.
Fifth problem: craps out after posting, probably because it keeps mangling the trailing slashes from my URLs. Is there an RFC somewhere that says that POSTS can't end with slashes? Nobody tell the Django folks.
Well, maybe it'll at least let me post to my blog from work every now and then.
Man, I dang sure missed the entire month of June. I've been in the UK now for about two months, and let me tell ya: They sure do get some rain around here. I always thought those stories about English people having gills were legends and fantasies. Now, I'm not so sure.
For the love of GOD, for the last time, in the name of ALL THAT IS HOLY, Cluster Services is NOT COMPATIBLE with 4.5! If you're running a cluster, DO NOT update to 4.5 until the Cluster Suite is UPDATED TO 4.5!
That is all.
P.S. And NO, cmirror is not available yet. Maybe at the end of the month.
I went outside to smoke a cigarette. All rooms in England are for non-smokers, you'll find, as are the rooms, apartments, and houses listed for rent in the local papers. The litany at the end of all the ads reads, "No smokers, canvassers, or DSS", which stands for Department of Social Services. So, okay they hate smokers and welfare cases, as do we all. But the British have their own definition for 'non-smoker', which basically means you only smoke when you drink. Everybody smokes over here, and they all live somewhere.
The evening was cool; almost cold, really, as I suspect the evenings around here generally are. I stood on the corner of Osborne and Netley, watching the blackbirds getting ready to do whatever it is they do at night, when I spied a man, some yards away, bounding up the sidewalk with a jaunty gait. I held my cigarette just in front of my mouth, watching this figure with suspicion. He was short, about 5 feet tall, and round as a soccer ball. He was wearing light-colored trousers and a dark blazer, the left breast of which was adorned with an enormous, orange prize-ribbon.
As he approached me, his features became distinct in the bad lighting, and I realized he was positively beaming with pride. His face was ruddy, and split with a grin that wouldn't have looked out of place behind a wheelbarrow full of poker chips on the way to the cash-out. I placed him in his mid-40s, but maybe his thinning red hair and roly-poly stature made him look older than he really was.
He halted just a few feet from me, and said, with oddly struggling words, "Good evening, mister!"
I looked him up and down, cigarette still burning between my shaky fingers, and replied, "hi, how are ya..." He wobbled his head a bit, then walked around me on his way up the street. I noticed something written in gold on his orange ribbon, and read it as it flashed in the lamplight.
I judged him more than a wee bit 'differently-abled', as they say. I watched as he cautiously crossed the empty street, looking both ways at least twice, then gingerly stepping into the street and crossing it at a run.
I thought about what I had seen written on the ribbon: "A Very Special Boy". Hmm, I thought, I wonder who gave him that? Whoever it was, they made his whole day.
I put my cigarette out and walked back into the guest house.
My buddy Sam sent me an email a couple of days ago indicating that he just might have joined The Family recently. And he joined it a much higher level than I, I might add, considering I'm still lumbering along in the PowerPC world; my G4 Powerbook, though a loyal and trusted friend, seems slow as molasses in January these days.
He also mentioned an old OS/2 habit, one which we separately shared back in the day. I started using OS/2 when I worked at UPS. One of our managers was running 2.1, with the old Presentation Manager that looked like a crappy(er) Windows 2.0, albeit with long filenames and the ability to run concurrent DOS sessions. I avoided it until OS/2 3.0 came out.
In '94, when Warp hit the shelves, I rushed out to Soft-Warehouse1 in Alpharetta, looked in the Operating Systems2 department until I found a box, then gave the man $300 dollars for the privilege of running it. Then, I walked over the desktop applications department, and put down another $495 for Lotus Smartsuite/2. Then I OEM'd 16MB of RAM for about $400 to make it all go.
Now, many may see OS/2 as a butt-ugly cousin of Windows, and they may be right. But back then, it was a work of art. Especially in the sense that it wasn't an exact science getting it to run. Nothing ever really worked like it was supposed to. Without the fallback of a DOS prompt, you had to have a second, fully-functional machine to do things like edit the CONFIG.SYS on the installation floppies to make sure your DASD drivers were loading. And most of the drivers were written so that, if they encountered an error while loading, they'd bork the whole boot process, just to be on the safe side.
The graphical interface also hung constantly. The Workplace Shell, despite (or maybe due to) all its object-orientiness, was horribly unstable. But I never saw a hang that wasn't cured with Control-Alt-Delete. That key combo went right down to the kernel, and always gave a satisfying, unconfirmed reboot, wedged GUI be damned. There was even a 3rd party program called Watchcat that sat on the serial port, or on a secondary Hercules/MCGA monitor, and let you monitor and kill programs remotely. The kernel's Kung Fu was strong like that, but the GUI was just ass.
Now, when Chicago started finally coming down the pipe, and even the Rolling Stones where pulled into the OS marketing world ("Start me up", anyone?), OS/2 fans like myself were sure that this pissant little DOS extender with a homely face wouldn't be the future. It couldn't be the future, it was just too depressing. It still wasn't a 32-bit OS, though the 386 had been out for over 8 years. It still used FAT, for crying out loud. In short, Chicago sucked.
OS/2 seemed like a scrappy little underdog, nipping heroically at the Microsoft behemoth's heels. I'm not sure why it gave that impression. At the time, IBM was much bigger than Microsoft, a huge, multinational corporation with interests in basically every aspect of electronics. They just couldn't write or market good software.
I'm not sure why I just wrote 500 words on OS/2. I actually wanted to write something about Linux.
Software stores used to have a whole "Operating Systems" department, back when there was more than one operating system, and Windows was still called an "Operating Environment" ↩
Man, I'm unprepared. There's a checklist of things you should do before moving to England. I came over here without any money, preparation, or attack plan. There's something unbelievably stupid about this. It worked for me when I moved to Germany, but moving to England's a bit more complicated, apparently. Either that, or I'm remembering it wrong.
But I'm not the only one. The office I'm working in is full of non-British people. It's a rag-tag group of Germans, Italians, Brazilians, Spaniards, one (1) American, and who knows what else that all found themselves in the same boat when they first came over. This despite promises from The Company to help one resettle; promises which are certainly not kept and, when referred to in conversation, change their shape and character like a Democrat on a whistle-stop.
But at some point a kindly soul in the department, now departed, made a list of the reality of the situation. It's a short list of what one really needs to do when moving to England. Unfortunately, I only found out about it after I'd already been here a week. Here's your to-do list once you've arrived in England:
Get a room. If possible, get a rental agreement or any bill with your name and address on it. (proof of address)
Deposit is usually 1 1/2 times the rent. Deposit and first rent is to be paid beforehand. If the room is unfurnished, see "Things to Buy" for shops and example prices.
Get a letter from your office manager (HR Lady) stating that you are working for the company and including your address. (proof of employment)
Get a bank account. Just walk in with your documents:
Passport or national ID card
Proof of employment (see 2.). it might be handy to have your contract with you.
Proof of address
Banks
HSBC – try to get a standard account (they try to sell you an advanced package including insurances etc.)
NatWest – Also recommended as this bank does not charge for withdrawing money from a different bank's cash machines
Give your bank details to The Company
Register with Inland Revenue – this is done by your HR manager. You should get your tax code about 2 weeks later (PAYE Coding Notice)
At the end of the fiscal year (ending April 5th), you will get a "P60 End of Year Certificate" detailing your "Pay and Income Tax" levels.
Get a National Insurance Number by applying at a Job Centre Plus office. They ask for dtails before they schedule an interview appointment to verify your eligibility. Appointments are scheduled about two weeks ahead, and take place in the nearest county office, which usually isn't near at all. Without an NI number, you will be on emergency tax, which is higher than the standard tax rate.
Documents:
Passport
National ID card
Driving License or any other official document identifying you (Birth certificate, police registration, medical card, etc.)
Proof of employment (see 2.)
Recent payslip
Bank statement
Proof of address (utility bill, rental agreement, etc. – see 1.)
It might be handy to have your PAYE Coding Notice with you
As money is paid in a timely manner so it is available on the 27th, try to get your appointment after this date.
If you are British, a citizen of a member state of the EU, or other Commonwealth citizen, you can apply for inclusion on the Register of Electors. This will allow you to vote at local government elections. Your credibility will rise (good for tenancy applications or bank-related matters) and you are obliged to pay Council Taxes1
If you buy any TV or radio equipment, you will be asked for your address, which will be automatically forwarded to the "TV Licensing Office"
Get a Tesco Clubcard
Get a life ;-)
Any address change has to be communicated to all above-mentioned authorities. For the official notices to local council, the TV licensing, and most other on-line services, you can use I am Moving , where you can create/use an account for free.
All of this could have been avoided with a bit of planning. I am bitterly disappointed in myself.
Council taxes are universal as far as I can tell, and are perceived, by the British at least, as an extension of the rent. ↩
Farnborough derives its name from from the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Ferneberga (Fern Hill) and is mentioned in the Domesday Book (1086). But for the coming of the army at nearby Aldershot, the arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flying, Farnborough would probably have remained an isolated heathland village, that is until the latter half of the 20th century when the population moved out of London suburbia and became commuters.
"But for the … arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flight…". That's a pretty big conditional. There are probably a lot of places whose development was seriously affected by railways and the advent of powered flight. But I understand where the good Mr. Parkins is coming from.
I had forgotten the cable to connect my camera to my laptop. Of all the stupid things that I packed for the trip, 50 different USB cables, a USB hub, power adapters for devices I’d forgotten, not to mention devices whose power adapters I’d forgotten, I forgot the one thing that was absolutely necessary and planned-for. Not to mention irreplaceable, seeing as every camera maker in the world decided that their camera’s little hole should look different from all the other cameras’ little holes.
I walked into a little computer store on the strip in Fleet, Hampshire. Walking up to the pasty-faced, teenaged part-timer there, I introduced myself and shook his hand, which seemed to shock him.
He unconsciously wiped his hands on his pants and said, “eh...nice to meet you, sir. What can I do for you?”
I asked him, “do you have any USB card-readers?”
“Um, yeah," he answered. "I think I saw some around here somewhere.”
I looked around the shop, which was organized and clean. Man, he must really be the FNG around here. He finally found what I was looking for, stored on a shelf right next to where he had been sitting. He handed it to me and I started reading the back of the packaging.
“Just looking to see if it works with my Mac,” I told him.
“Oh, it's USB, so it should work,” he answered, and took the reader out of my hand. He moved his lips while he read the package. “Oh, yeah,” he said finally. “Right there it says it: ‘Requires Mac OS 9 or later’.” He looked at me skeptically. “So, you do have OS 9 or later, don’t you?”
“Um, yeah, I think so.” OS 9 went out of style back in the ‘90s.
He moved around to the register, and I handed him my Visa card. He looked uncertain as he turned it over in his hand. “This thing doesn’t have a chip on it?”
I took it back and examined it. “No, I guess it doesn’t.”
“Well, I don’t think we can take that, then.”
“Why don’t you just swipe it,” I said. “Give it a go.”
He shrugged and swiped it through the machine.
From behind me, a voice said, “it’s all chips nowadays, you know.”
I looked around, and saw that an older woman was standing behind me. She looked to be in her mid 40s, and wore a name plate with the store’s logo on it. “You can’t get nothing without a dozen little chips in it.”
I nodded agreement, and turned back to the young man behind the register.
“So, what kind of Mac you got, then?”
“A PowerBook G4.”
He nodded approvingly. “Nice piece of kit, that.” The little machine that had taken my card made a loud ping!, and spit out a receipt. He tore it off and gave it to me to sign, along with the card reader.
“Now, you have a nice day sir, and do please visit us again.”
I thanked him, said goodbye to the chip-lady, and put the small package into my bag next to my laptop. “Thanks, man, I’ll do that.” Nice kid.
Didja ever discover something that made your reality skip a beat? You know how, for just a second, something is so far out of place that you can't even figure out what's wrong with the picture? For example, the Augsburg Wireless-Internet provider Cyberways has had the same guy on their start page for years:
Every time you connect to the internet over public wireless in Augsburg, that dude was right there, staring at you with those soulless black eyes. Like a doll's eyes...
And the weird thing was, I always figured he was the boss at Cyberways. I even thought I saw him once on the tram. I hate it when people use the same stock photos everywhere. Everybody's full of shit. Oh, I guess it's effective use of your cash dollars, seeing as it's cheaper than paying attractive people to work for you. But still, why not just be honest for a split second?
You get this kind of thing all over the Internet, of course. If you've ever shopped for web hosting, you'll notice, after a few visits to the providers' pages, that their employees all kind of look alike. And there's always some woman somewhere holding a laptop at her waist in near-sexual ecstasy over the reasonable shared hosting prices.
It's a leitmotif throughout the enter hosting industry: Shared Webspace=Chick with laptop.
Rube, look, for the last freakin time, look RIGHT when you step off a curb! These people drive on the other side of the F$@&-ing road over here! You wanna get ya brains splattered all over me?
What? I dunno. I'm just kind of sitting around, waiting on things. I just spent way too much time transferring money across European borders, and reclaiming my identity. But the new passports are wonderful pieces of fortitude. Here' s a few quotes from my new passport:
And that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth. - Abraham Lincoln
The principle of free governments adheres to the American soil. It is bedded in it, immovable as its mountains. - Daniel Webster
Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. - George Washington
We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. - excerpt from the Declaration of Independence
Your concept of love may be different, but know that I love this world.
I like reading Scott Adams' blog on occasion. Much like Balph Eubanks, he's glib, amusing, and completely lacking in morality. Take, for example, his latest strawman-laden posting regarding the visit of a certain Mr. Ahmedinejad:
I was happy to hear that NYC didn't allow Iranian President Ahmadinejad
to place a wreath at the WTC site. And I was happy that Columbia
University is rescinding the offer to let him speak. If you let a guy like
that express his views, before long the entire world will want freedom
of speech.
...
If Ahmadinejad thinks he can be our friend by honoring our heroes and
opening a dialog, he underestimates our ability to misinterpret him.
Fucking idiot. I hate him.
Well, there's certainly some rye wit at work here. Yes, it is quite ironic that a country led by a genocidal religious dictator, which the USA most certainly is, would object to a fellow genocidal religious madman visiting its most sensitive cultural site. I mean, Mahmoud's only trying to "open a dialog" here, isn't he? Isn't that the meaning of Ahmedinejad's visit? Isn't Ahmedinejad just exercising "Free Speech", as Adams says? Aren't we wrong in denying this poor man that right?
Aside from the obvious jackassery involved in claiming that a man who directly controls his entire country's media is having trouble getting his point of view out; or that the United Nations will let him speak before the leaders of the world to the point where they forget to blink for an hour; aside from all this, this is not a question of whether or not Mahmoud is allowed to say what he wants. The question is, in accordance with the Grand Unified Theory of Rubean Mechanics, Who's going to pay for it. It's a question of whether or not Americans should be paying for his plane fare, his security, and his accommodation while he's here, pissing on Ground Zero and generating propaganda for totalitarian lobbying groups like MoveOn.org and International ANSWER.
All of Adams' ridiculous assertions never mention the one central fact here: There is no compelling reason for American taxpayers to foot the bill, so this guy, who just held one of his popular "Death to America" parades, can come over here and lecture them on anything. I personally don't much care what Ahmedinejad thinks, I can see the general thrust of his inclinations. He's spitting on the United States and Western Culture daily, and then expects to be treated with deference in return. Fuck him.
This kind of Devil's Advocacy isn't new to Adams. At least, I hope it's just that. He's apparently one of those celebrities that have forgotten the hard work involved in their ascendency, and assume that they're rich because of some accident of nature, akin to divine providence. Humans, himself included, are all just a bunch of "moist robots" with no capacity for thought, no free will; we've apparently just been programmed by Mother Nature to do the things we've done or will do. There is no mind, there is no choice, there is only the stimuli in our environments, and the response that was determined by a chance arrangement of atoms into chemicals during the Big Bang. Or something.
It's an obscene display of thoughtlessness, a conceit of someone trying so hard to seem above all this. Adams' Dilbert is amusing, and his blog is a bit of junk food for the brain at times. But he's got the morals of a two-dollar whore.
Last night we didn't make it. The two Frenchmen surrendered the evening, seeing as it was Trotzky's birthday, and therefore a time for somber reflection or something. So, we rode around big town Farnborough for a couple of hours, grabbed some grub, and then headed back to the apartment to watch a movie.
We watched Fur, which cemented my belief that Nicole Kidman is the perfect woman. Not only does she look good in her own slutty little librarian sort of way, she gives a guy a handjob in this movie while shaving his hairy back. That's my kind of girl, a real little trooper.
Anyhoo, it's back off to London now, for a second try at getting sloppy somewhere besides sitting at home in front of the boob tube. Wish us luck.
Vacation week is winding down, and I'm getting ready to leave the driving to Southwest Trains and go drinking in London. I'll try to keep it under two weeks this time, but no promises. We'll tramp it a bit through Soho, I guess, just me, the girls, and a couple of frog-eaters from the office.
I wonder why I never get to go drinking with Englishmen? It's probably for the best. There's a quote that gets bandied about, especially in the local newspapers, about England being a nation of drunks and scalawags. I can't say much about that, but it does seem that the pubs all close at 11:00 PM for a reason. At 5 o'clock, they pour out of their offices and into the public houses, seemingly on a race against the clock to get themselves 'faced before the early last call.
When they were finally permitted to stay open past 11, in the hope that the binge-drinking would abate in light of longer opening hours, they found themselves doubly-cursed in that the Englishmen were every bit as drunk at 11, but didn't have to go home. All pubs here are set up so that you have to go to the counter to get your drinks, instead of having them brought to your table. There's a built-in handbrake there: a system where you can't get any more drink once you lose the ability to walk is founded upon sound principle and good advices.
I've done nothing today; nothing but clean out the cluttered closets of my preferred newsfeed reader. There were some connections in there that were sorely neglected. I could use a bit more time to wade through the degenerate filth that is my blogroll, but sadly, I work. The Company is tolerant in their control over my time, fair since they do not pay hourly; but tolerance has its limits, and I doubt they would look kindly upon my spending the business day in a fugue state, reading entry after entry of dialectics about Jessica Simpson's tits, or Brittney Spears' overplayed poonanny.
Nevertheless, it saddens me that my everyday is not blessed with the nuggets of wisdom from skippystalin:
Being the only person with an out-of-control substance abuse problem in a relationship is tough. Most romantic couplings are based on common interests and most of my interests culminate in my waking up in a pool of what I think is my own urine and not being quite sure what time zone I'm in. I'm much like a cat in that I have a tendancy of marking my territory with my vomit, blood and gallons of my semen...My ability to smoke, drink and masturbate furiously at the same time might not be much, it's all that I have.
Ahh, skippystalin, how I've missed you, and your nuggets.
This is how I spend my vacation: visiting Stonehenge on one day; reading the melancholy musings of skippystalin the next, picturing him composing scholarly tracts through bitter tears, a crushed Viagra dissolving in a highball of Jack Daniels next to the keyboard, as another long evening fades into a blur of poetry, madness, and vigorous bouts of hate-filled masturbation. And wondering, of the two, which is the more meaningful and fitting monument to humanity?
They should've just burned enjoyeverysandwich to CD, stuck it to the side of Voyager along with its author, and shot the whole lot into space back when they had government funding to do so, all in the name of making a good first impression for whatever aliens were out cruising for an easy meal.
skippystalin's output is prodigious, to be sure, but there was an entire blogroll to consider:
The lunatics are running the asylum over at Straight White Guy's place. Eric's testicles are mentioned, indirectly. Remind me to change my passwords regularly and start using strong encryption.
How stoned do you have to be to cheat on Jessica Alba? I could jack off to Jessica Alba while a big mean dog was chasing me and this idiot is cheating on her. I decided to confront him about this and I screamed at him, hey, what is your problem. And he said I should get off his lawn. And I said, no, no you get off the lawn. You get off. Then he went inside, probably because deep down, he knew I had made some pretty good points.
JimGoad.com is no more, but if you're a Goad fan (ladies!), you can find find him here. Discussion of Brittany's latest, erm, candid photos is also to be found, but be aware that the following picture is used as a visual aid:
This morning we picked up my new wheelchair. It's a sporty European marque, with an aggressive stance, low-profile tires, and a head-turning cherry-red metalflake paint job. It's not that great on the corners, but it'll take any one of y'all on the straightaways.
I've never done time on wheels. On the whole, I found it to be not all that bad. Then again, I don't figure that most wheelchair-bound men my age get to enjoy being pushed around town by a couple of sexy German bloggerettes. Thanks, ladies: the jealous looks from the other local cripples was the icing on the cake. Here's a little something extra for you, babes. (via AoSHQ)
Funny things happen when you're on wheels. I saw a lady I work with while being carted through Tesco's frozen food department. I said hello, and she just looked right through me, steering her cart so as not to make contact with the leper. She probably thought I was going to ask her for some spare change, or if she could wipe me bum for me, or whatever it is that those people want from healthy-legged people. I also noticed that the supermarkets put completely different things down on the bottom three feet of the shelves. All the cool toys are down there, for example, presumably because chil'n's is small. It's also a great altitude to find anti-bedsore medicaments, for some reason.
So, I let myself be pushed by the Weyside in Guildford, where, at one point, a husky young native was required to wheel my fat ass up a steep incline. The Sistas, for all their heart, lacked the muscle to get the job done, so he, being a true-hearted salt-of-earth kind of guy, waved them off and grunted and sweated till I crested the hill. Had the man known that I could have, at any point in time, simply stood up and hobbled up the hill under my own power, he most certainly would have picked me up and broken me over his knee.
Tomorrow morning, we'll be visiting Stonehenge, or Stone'enge, as the locals quaintly call it. We'll also visit the haunted city, Salisbury, to watch the homosexuals. Ta!
I like reading OSNews for some reason. I think I like to catch the geeky news about SkyOS, or the occasional retro curmudgeonry that rolls by about Lotus 1-2-3 or OS/2. Being the old-timer that I am, it's hard to resist a paean from my youth about 10-finger productivity.
Unfortunately, they've become the epicenter of stupid for the tech press. Check out this article, which explodes the myths about competition being good: "Competition is not Good"
'It gives consumers more choice'
Choice is good when there's one agreed base standard, and a number of compatible approaches. For example, there are many Linux distributions, but they are all Linux, and they can all run the same software. They are 'flavours' of the same thing, that is a good choice. People like different flavours.
Competition does not produce easier choices for consumers. All they get is added un-interoperability and complexity with competitive choices.
Now, if you go read that article, which I do not recommend, you'll slowly come to the realization that this moron is just annoyed that he has to make the effort to choose between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. He's willing to surrender his entire free will to some (hopefully) benevolent dictator, abolish brand names, and forsake the free market economy because choosing which format to buy the Firefly special edition box set in is hard. What a hopeless, whiny-assed sissy.
Of course, things don't get better when they start tossing political analysis at you. "Net Neutrality" is one monikers that has overshadowed the thing named. The discussion is often framed in a way that an uninformed listener would assume there was lobbying going on to abolish some sort of laws that are now protecting consumers from big, bad tiered-Internet ninjas.
But: There is no net neutrality legislation, there never was, and hopefully, there never will be. The argument over "Net Neutrality" is about whether or not the U.S. government should introduce legislation forbidding bandwidth throttling by ISPs. It's the "have you stopped beating your wife?" straw man for the Slashdot crowd. You'll notice that this article calls the Supreme Court's decision that the U.S. government shouldn't step in and configure the ISPs' Cisco routers for them, "Backing for Two-Tier Internet":
The US Justice Department has said that internet service providers should be allowed to charge for priority traffic. The agency said it was opposed to 'network neutrality', the idea that all data on the net is treated equally. The comments put the agency at odds with companies such as Microsoft and Google, who have called for legislation to guarantee equal access to the net.
Of course, this would also mean that an enforcement infrastructure would also have to be put in place, making sure that everyone got their "fair share" of said bandwidth, as if backbone routers and POPs just fell off a tree somewhere. God forbid ISPs be allowed to tune the services that they developed and paid for as they wish. Let's let the government decides who gets bandwidth, and how much is enough! That will make it all fair and neutral-like. Whenever a politician uses the word "fair", hang on to your wallet.
Well, my trackbacks are now working, it seems. There's some ugly Python spaghetti-code going on behind the scenes that translates back and forth between absolute urls, non-absolute relative urls, and upper-lower-camel case; but it works.
Trackbacks are only good for Movable Type, though. Which I can't stand anymore. MT used to be the only thing out there, but there's something that really, really, really galls me about the way it rebuilds your entire site into static HTML pages everytime you update a post. I'm sure it's awesomeness if you've got your server running on an old TV remote, but nowadays we're all running our web servers on 100-core 64-bit terahertz moonshot computers that can simultaneously compute π, encode MPEG video, and mix the best goddam margaritas you've ever tasted, all without breaking a sweat.
So yeah, I figured out how to implement trackbacks in Django, to a point where they more or less work. Now why is Wordpress fucking with me? It seems to be thrown off by the fact that Wordpress sends a HEAD request before it downloads and parses the page, in the vain hope that the X-Pingback header will be set. I can't figure out how to do that in Django's generic views, so I just use the secondary method, that being a link element in the XHTML code. But now, whenever a Worpdress blog pings me, I get this kind of crap:
[09/Sep/2007 15:04:23] "GET /blog/2007/sep/08/vacation/ HTTP/1.1" 200 27367
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (104, 'Connection reset by peer')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (32, 'Broken pipe')
Being the half-assed programmer that I am, I am at a total loss. I can't even do a Lazyweb request here, seeing as my 4 visits a day are unlikely to bring the Django HTTP gurus by. I won't be able to sleep at night, thinking of all the enlightened Wordpress Users who are probably out there try to "Keep the discussion going" with me.
Ever since June, when the iPhone went live, I've heard about nothing else in the tech press, nerd podcasts, and the Apple Fanboisphere. Is it really that way over in the States (the only place you can get them), or does the iPhone actually seem to be doing well?
Ahh, my first vacation since joining The Company. My queue is cleaned up, my email is forwarded, and an elaborate Sieve session has accomplished in a mere two hours what less civilized mail systems can do with a key combination: The Corporate Vacation Email.
It's been five months now since I came 'cross the channel and started meeting the natives, learning the lingo, and getting used to the fact that everyone here talks like Pinky. Now, I'll be letting my hair down for the next 10 days or so. As well as putting my poor, broken foot up on the coffee table.
As soon as I get my x-rays back from the socialist medical system (they still copy them with coal rubbings on wax paper over here, apparently), I'll post pictures of the metatarsalar breakage here for your morbid enjoyment. Don't thank me yet.
The other half of Sistaweb will be joining us for the week. We'll allow her to sleep here rent-free for an entire week, even though she refused to bring a carton of cigarettes as payment. Damned non-smokers and their principles. It's like those non-smokers back in the World War II who didn't sign up for cigarette rations. Throwing away a gold mine, that is. Our grandfathers probably had a word for those guys, and if I knew my grandfather at all, that word was sissy-boy.
The girls have rented a wheelchair for me, seeing as I won't be too much fun doing a London pub-crawl on crutches. I've already had a forehead-slapping moment over this, as you probably are right now. Why haven't I thought of taking a wheelchair with me before? That would've come in handy on more than one occasion, the Wreckyll in Jeckyll not least among them.
Man, Apple is on a roll. Not only have they got me hooked for a new computer, a new laptop, a new office package, and a replacement for my aging MythTV box, but now I have to start thinking about a new iPod. Now, let's see what Uncle Steve is going to me be costing me 'til Christmas Time:
Item
Damage
20" iMac
1199.00
Macbook
1099.00
8GB iPod Touch
299.00
AppleTV
299.00
iWork '08
79.00
iLife '08
79.00
Total:
$3,054.00
Not bad for a day's work, Mr. Jobs. And what's up for the rest of September? Maybe some irresistible bionic iFoot to replace the one I broke playing frisbee at the company picnic last week?
Although there's a remarkable lack of iPhone hype around the office, we being a big-time Linux company and all, there's an amazing amount of Mac fanboiism. Pretty much all of us have Macs at home. The explanation for this is simple: After dealing with Linux problems all day long, there's something nice about going home to something you can spend all your time using and not making up excuses for why it looks like shit and doesn't work.
I like Linux, mind you. I use it day-in, day-out for my desktop at work, for my webservers, and it brings in my daily bread. We all love it here, pretty much like a family loves and therefore tolerates the embarrassing second cousin with the Downs'. But people are walking all over the office today buzzing about the upcoming announcement from Apple.
Will it be the long-awaited iMac redesign? Will it be a new Mini? My boss is actually carrying his phone to the pub after work today so he can sit on engadget and get a realtime update. Linus would not be pleased...
Last login: Thu Jul 26 12:17:28 from nat-pool-fab.re Welcome to Darwin! ericbook:~ eric$ mutt -bash: mutt: command not found ericbook:~ eric$ open /Applications/Mail.app/ ericbook:~ eric$
Ahh. Like coming in after a long day of plowing the fields and sticking your aching feet into a pot of hot water. After running Linux all day at work, you feel like slipping into something more comfortable. Sam knows it. Zonker knows it, though he won't admit it. It's the right amount of just-workiness you need to let you relax, while knowing you could, at any given moment, do something like:
OK, here's one with drivel. I do like it, but I have a couple of gripes.
First problem: I was hopelessly confused by the login screen. The type of journal seems to be locked on livejournal, as the drop-down menu for journal types is inexplicably disabled until you enter a username. -1 for usabilty
Second problem: Useless stripping of trailing slash, which mangled my xmlrpc URL. Error 301 was ignored, which makes sense since it's a post and all, but I couldn't log in. It mangled my URL then choked on the error :-/
Third problem: didn't want to download my recent posts. Although there might be a misunderstanding about just what "recent" means.
Fourth problem: Doesn't let me choose post status anywhere. And there's nowhere I can find to choose text filters. This is more of a feature request, really.
Fifth problem: craps out after posting, probably because it keeps mangling the trailing slashes from my URLs. Is there an RFC somewhere that says that POSTS can't end with slashes? Nobody tell the Django folks.
Well, maybe it'll at least let me post to my blog from work every now and then.
Man, I dang sure missed the entire month of June. I've been in the UK now for about two months, and let me tell ya: They sure do get some rain around here. I always thought those stories about English people having gills were legends and fantasies. Now, I'm not so sure.
For the love of GOD, for the last time, in the name of ALL THAT IS HOLY, Cluster Services is NOT COMPATIBLE with 4.5! If you're running a cluster, DO NOT update to 4.5 until the Cluster Suite is UPDATED TO 4.5!
That is all.
P.S. And NO, cmirror is not available yet. Maybe at the end of the month.
I went outside to smoke a cigarette. All rooms in England are for non-smokers, you'll find, as are the rooms, apartments, and houses listed for rent in the local papers. The litany at the end of all the ads reads, "No smokers, canvassers, or DSS", which stands for Department of Social Services. So, okay they hate smokers and welfare cases, as do we all. But the British have their own definition for 'non-smoker', which basically means you only smoke when you drink. Everybody smokes over here, and they all live somewhere.
The evening was cool; almost cold, really, as I suspect the evenings around here generally are. I stood on the corner of Osborne and Netley, watching the blackbirds getting ready to do whatever it is they do at night, when I spied a man, some yards away, bounding up the sidewalk with a jaunty gait. I held my cigarette just in front of my mouth, watching this figure with suspicion. He was short, about 5 feet tall, and round as a soccer ball. He was wearing light-colored trousers and a dark blazer, the left breast of which was adorned with an enormous, orange prize-ribbon.
As he approached me, his features became distinct in the bad lighting, and I realized he was positively beaming with pride. His face was ruddy, and split with a grin that wouldn't have looked out of place behind a wheelbarrow full of poker chips on the way to the cash-out. I placed him in his mid-40s, but maybe his thinning red hair and roly-poly stature made him look older than he really was.
He halted just a few feet from me, and said, with oddly struggling words, "Good evening, mister!"
I looked him up and down, cigarette still burning between my shaky fingers, and replied, "hi, how are ya..." He wobbled his head a bit, then walked around me on his way up the street. I noticed something written in gold on his orange ribbon, and read it as it flashed in the lamplight.
I judged him more than a wee bit 'differently-abled', as they say. I watched as he cautiously crossed the empty street, looking both ways at least twice, then gingerly stepping into the street and crossing it at a run.
I thought about what I had seen written on the ribbon: "A Very Special Boy". Hmm, I thought, I wonder who gave him that? Whoever it was, they made his whole day.
I put my cigarette out and walked back into the guest house.
My buddy Sam sent me an email a couple of days ago indicating that he just might have joined The Family recently. And he joined it a much higher level than I, I might add, considering I'm still lumbering along in the PowerPC world; my G4 Powerbook, though a loyal and trusted friend, seems slow as molasses in January these days.
He also mentioned an old OS/2 habit, one which we separately shared back in the day. I started using OS/2 when I worked at UPS. One of our managers was running 2.1, with the old Presentation Manager that looked like a crappy(er) Windows 2.0, albeit with long filenames and the ability to run concurrent DOS sessions. I avoided it until OS/2 3.0 came out.
In '94, when Warp hit the shelves, I rushed out to Soft-Warehouse1 in Alpharetta, looked in the Operating Systems2 department until I found a box, then gave the man $300 dollars for the privilege of running it. Then, I walked over the desktop applications department, and put down another $495 for Lotus Smartsuite/2. Then I OEM'd 16MB of RAM for about $400 to make it all go.
Now, many may see OS/2 as a butt-ugly cousin of Windows, and they may be right. But back then, it was a work of art. Especially in the sense that it wasn't an exact science getting it to run. Nothing ever really worked like it was supposed to. Without the fallback of a DOS prompt, you had to have a second, fully-functional machine to do things like edit the CONFIG.SYS on the installation floppies to make sure your DASD drivers were loading. And most of the drivers were written so that, if they encountered an error while loading, they'd bork the whole boot process, just to be on the safe side.
The graphical interface also hung constantly. The Workplace Shell, despite (or maybe due to) all its object-orientiness, was horribly unstable. But I never saw a hang that wasn't cured with Control-Alt-Delete. That key combo went right down to the kernel, and always gave a satisfying, unconfirmed reboot, wedged GUI be damned. There was even a 3rd party program called Watchcat that sat on the serial port, or on a secondary Hercules/MCGA monitor, and let you monitor and kill programs remotely. The kernel's Kung Fu was strong like that, but the GUI was just ass.
Now, when Chicago started finally coming down the pipe, and even the Rolling Stones where pulled into the OS marketing world ("Start me up", anyone?), OS/2 fans like myself were sure that this pissant little DOS extender with a homely face wouldn't be the future. It couldn't be the future, it was just too depressing. It still wasn't a 32-bit OS, though the 386 had been out for over 8 years. It still used FAT, for crying out loud. In short, Chicago sucked.
OS/2 seemed like a scrappy little underdog, nipping heroically at the Microsoft behemoth's heels. I'm not sure why it gave that impression. At the time, IBM was much bigger than Microsoft, a huge, multinational corporation with interests in basically every aspect of electronics. They just couldn't write or market good software.
I'm not sure why I just wrote 500 words on OS/2. I actually wanted to write something about Linux.
Software stores used to have a whole "Operating Systems" department, back when there was more than one operating system, and Windows was still called an "Operating Environment" ↩
Man, I'm unprepared. There's a checklist of things you should do before moving to England. I came over here without any money, preparation, or attack plan. There's something unbelievably stupid about this. It worked for me when I moved to Germany, but moving to England's a bit more complicated, apparently. Either that, or I'm remembering it wrong.
But I'm not the only one. The office I'm working in is full of non-British people. It's a rag-tag group of Germans, Italians, Brazilians, Spaniards, one (1) American, and who knows what else that all found themselves in the same boat when they first came over. This despite promises from The Company to help one resettle; promises which are certainly not kept and, when referred to in conversation, change their shape and character like a Democrat on a whistle-stop.
But at some point a kindly soul in the department, now departed, made a list of the reality of the situation. It's a short list of what one really needs to do when moving to England. Unfortunately, I only found out about it after I'd already been here a week. Here's your to-do list once you've arrived in England:
Get a room. If possible, get a rental agreement or any bill with your name and address on it. (proof of address)
Deposit is usually 1 1/2 times the rent. Deposit and first rent is to be paid beforehand. If the room is unfurnished, see "Things to Buy" for shops and example prices.
Get a letter from your office manager (HR Lady) stating that you are working for the company and including your address. (proof of employment)
Get a bank account. Just walk in with your documents:
Passport or national ID card
Proof of employment (see 2.). it might be handy to have your contract with you.
Proof of address
Banks
HSBC – try to get a standard account (they try to sell you an advanced package including insurances etc.)
NatWest – Also recommended as this bank does not charge for withdrawing money from a different bank's cash machines
Give your bank details to The Company
Register with Inland Revenue – this is done by your HR manager. You should get your tax code about 2 weeks later (PAYE Coding Notice)
At the end of the fiscal year (ending April 5th), you will get a "P60 End of Year Certificate" detailing your "Pay and Income Tax" levels.
Get a National Insurance Number by applying at a Job Centre Plus office. They ask for dtails before they schedule an interview appointment to verify your eligibility. Appointments are scheduled about two weeks ahead, and take place in the nearest county office, which usually isn't near at all. Without an NI number, you will be on emergency tax, which is higher than the standard tax rate.
Documents:
Passport
National ID card
Driving License or any other official document identifying you (Birth certificate, police registration, medical card, etc.)
Proof of employment (see 2.)
Recent payslip
Bank statement
Proof of address (utility bill, rental agreement, etc. – see 1.)
It might be handy to have your PAYE Coding Notice with you
As money is paid in a timely manner so it is available on the 27th, try to get your appointment after this date.
If you are British, a citizen of a member state of the EU, or other Commonwealth citizen, you can apply for inclusion on the Register of Electors. This will allow you to vote at local government elections. Your credibility will rise (good for tenancy applications or bank-related matters) and you are obliged to pay Council Taxes1
If you buy any TV or radio equipment, you will be asked for your address, which will be automatically forwarded to the "TV Licensing Office"
Get a Tesco Clubcard
Get a life ;-)
Any address change has to be communicated to all above-mentioned authorities. For the official notices to local council, the TV licensing, and most other on-line services, you can use I am Moving , where you can create/use an account for free.
All of this could have been avoided with a bit of planning. I am bitterly disappointed in myself.
Council taxes are universal as far as I can tell, and are perceived, by the British at least, as an extension of the rent. ↩
Farnborough derives its name from from the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Ferneberga (Fern Hill) and is mentioned in the Domesday Book (1086). But for the coming of the army at nearby Aldershot, the arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flying, Farnborough would probably have remained an isolated heathland village, that is until the latter half of the 20th century when the population moved out of London suburbia and became commuters.
"But for the … arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flight…". That's a pretty big conditional. There are probably a lot of places whose development was seriously affected by railways and the advent of powered flight. But I understand where the good Mr. Parkins is coming from.
I had forgotten the cable to connect my camera to my laptop. Of all the stupid things that I packed for the trip, 50 different USB cables, a USB hub, power adapters for devices I’d forgotten, not to mention devices whose power adapters I’d forgotten, I forgot the one thing that was absolutely necessary and planned-for. Not to mention irreplaceable, seeing as every camera maker in the world decided that their camera’s little hole should look different from all the other cameras’ little holes.
I walked into a little computer store on the strip in Fleet, Hampshire. Walking up to the pasty-faced, teenaged part-timer there, I introduced myself and shook his hand, which seemed to shock him.
He unconsciously wiped his hands on his pants and said, “eh...nice to meet you, sir. What can I do for you?”
I asked him, “do you have any USB card-readers?”
“Um, yeah," he answered. "I think I saw some around here somewhere.”
I looked around the shop, which was organized and clean. Man, he must really be the FNG around here. He finally found what I was looking for, stored on a shelf right next to where he had been sitting. He handed it to me and I started reading the back of the packaging.
“Just looking to see if it works with my Mac,” I told him.
“Oh, it's USB, so it should work,” he answered, and took the reader out of my hand. He moved his lips while he read the package. “Oh, yeah,” he said finally. “Right there it says it: ‘Requires Mac OS 9 or later’.” He looked at me skeptically. “So, you do have OS 9 or later, don’t you?”
“Um, yeah, I think so.” OS 9 went out of style back in the ‘90s.
He moved around to the register, and I handed him my Visa card. He looked uncertain as he turned it over in his hand. “This thing doesn’t have a chip on it?”
I took it back and examined it. “No, I guess it doesn’t.”
“Well, I don’t think we can take that, then.”
“Why don’t you just swipe it,” I said. “Give it a go.”
He shrugged and swiped it through the machine.
From behind me, a voice said, “it’s all chips nowadays, you know.”
I looked around, and saw that an older woman was standing behind me. She looked to be in her mid 40s, and wore a name plate with the store’s logo on it. “You can’t get nothing without a dozen little chips in it.”
I nodded agreement, and turned back to the young man behind the register.
“So, what kind of Mac you got, then?”
“A PowerBook G4.”
He nodded approvingly. “Nice piece of kit, that.” The little machine that had taken my card made a loud ping!, and spit out a receipt. He tore it off and gave it to me to sign, along with the card reader.
“Now, you have a nice day sir, and do please visit us again.”
I thanked him, said goodbye to the chip-lady, and put the small package into my bag next to my laptop. “Thanks, man, I’ll do that.” Nice kid.
Didja ever discover something that made your reality skip a beat? You know how, for just a second, something is so far out of place that you can't even figure out what's wrong with the picture? For example, the Augsburg Wireless-Internet provider Cyberways has had the same guy on their start page for years:
Every time you connect to the internet over public wireless in Augsburg, that dude was right there, staring at you with those soulless black eyes. Like a doll's eyes...
And the weird thing was, I always figured he was the boss at Cyberways. I even thought I saw him once on the tram. I hate it when people use the same stock photos everywhere. Everybody's full of shit. Oh, I guess it's effective use of your cash dollars, seeing as it's cheaper than paying attractive people to work for you. But still, why not just be honest for a split second?
You get this kind of thing all over the Internet, of course. If you've ever shopped for web hosting, you'll notice, after a few visits to the providers' pages, that their employees all kind of look alike. And there's always some woman somewhere holding a laptop at her waist in near-sexual ecstasy over the reasonable shared hosting prices.
It's a leitmotif throughout the enter hosting industry: Shared Webspace=Chick with laptop.
Rube, look, for the last freakin time, look RIGHT when you step off a curb! These people drive on the other side of the F$@&-ing road over here! You wanna get ya brains splattered all over me?
What? I dunno. I'm just kind of sitting around, waiting on things. I just spent way too much time transferring money across European borders, and reclaiming my identity. But the new passports are wonderful pieces of fortitude. Here' s a few quotes from my new passport:
And that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth. - Abraham Lincoln
The principle of free governments adheres to the American soil. It is bedded in it, immovable as its mountains. - Daniel Webster
Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. - George Washington
We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. - excerpt from the Declaration of Independence
Your concept of love may be different, but know that I love this world.
I like reading Scott Adams' blog on occasion. Much like Balph Eubanks, he's glib, amusing, and completely lacking in morality. Take, for example, his latest strawman-laden posting regarding the visit of a certain Mr. Ahmedinejad:
I was happy to hear that NYC didn't allow Iranian President Ahmadinejad
to place a wreath at the WTC site. And I was happy that Columbia
University is rescinding the offer to let him speak. If you let a guy like
that express his views, before long the entire world will want freedom
of speech.
...
If Ahmadinejad thinks he can be our friend by honoring our heroes and
opening a dialog, he underestimates our ability to misinterpret him.
Fucking idiot. I hate him.
Well, there's certainly some rye wit at work here. Yes, it is quite ironic that a country led by a genocidal religious dictator, which the USA most certainly is, would object to a fellow genocidal religious madman visiting its most sensitive cultural site. I mean, Mahmoud's only trying to "open a dialog" here, isn't he? Isn't that the meaning of Ahmedinejad's visit? Isn't Ahmedinejad just exercising "Free Speech", as Adams says? Aren't we wrong in denying this poor man that right?
Aside from the obvious jackassery involved in claiming that a man who directly controls his entire country's media is having trouble getting his point of view out; or that the United Nations will let him speak before the leaders of the world to the point where they forget to blink for an hour; aside from all this, this is not a question of whether or not Mahmoud is allowed to say what he wants. The question is, in accordance with the Grand Unified Theory of Rubean Mechanics, Who's going to pay for it. It's a question of whether or not Americans should be paying for his plane fare, his security, and his accommodation while he's here, pissing on Ground Zero and generating propaganda for totalitarian lobbying groups like MoveOn.org and International ANSWER.
All of Adams' ridiculous assertions never mention the one central fact here: There is no compelling reason for American taxpayers to foot the bill, so this guy, who just held one of his popular "Death to America" parades, can come over here and lecture them on anything. I personally don't much care what Ahmedinejad thinks, I can see the general thrust of his inclinations. He's spitting on the United States and Western Culture daily, and then expects to be treated with deference in return. Fuck him.
This kind of Devil's Advocacy isn't new to Adams. At least, I hope it's just that. He's apparently one of those celebrities that have forgotten the hard work involved in their ascendency, and assume that they're rich because of some accident of nature, akin to divine providence. Humans, himself included, are all just a bunch of "moist robots" with no capacity for thought, no free will; we've apparently just been programmed by Mother Nature to do the things we've done or will do. There is no mind, there is no choice, there is only the stimuli in our environments, and the response that was determined by a chance arrangement of atoms into chemicals during the Big Bang. Or something.
It's an obscene display of thoughtlessness, a conceit of someone trying so hard to seem above all this. Adams' Dilbert is amusing, and his blog is a bit of junk food for the brain at times. But he's got the morals of a two-dollar whore.
Last night we didn't make it. The two Frenchmen surrendered the evening, seeing as it was Trotzky's birthday, and therefore a time for somber reflection or something. So, we rode around big town Farnborough for a couple of hours, grabbed some grub, and then headed back to the apartment to watch a movie.
We watched Fur, which cemented my belief that Nicole Kidman is the perfect woman. Not only does she look good in her own slutty little librarian sort of way, she gives a guy a handjob in this movie while shaving his hairy back. That's my kind of girl, a real little trooper.
Anyhoo, it's back off to London now, for a second try at getting sloppy somewhere besides sitting at home in front of the boob tube. Wish us luck.
Vacation week is winding down, and I'm getting ready to leave the driving to Southwest Trains and go drinking in London. I'll try to keep it under two weeks this time, but no promises. We'll tramp it a bit through Soho, I guess, just me, the girls, and a couple of frog-eaters from the office.
I wonder why I never get to go drinking with Englishmen? It's probably for the best. There's a quote that gets bandied about, especially in the local newspapers, about England being a nation of drunks and scalawags. I can't say much about that, but it does seem that the pubs all close at 11:00 PM for a reason. At 5 o'clock, they pour out of their offices and into the public houses, seemingly on a race against the clock to get themselves 'faced before the early last call.
When they were finally permitted to stay open past 11, in the hope that the binge-drinking would abate in light of longer opening hours, they found themselves doubly-cursed in that the Englishmen were every bit as drunk at 11, but didn't have to go home. All pubs here are set up so that you have to go to the counter to get your drinks, instead of having them brought to your table. There's a built-in handbrake there: a system where you can't get any more drink once you lose the ability to walk is founded upon sound principle and good advices.
I've done nothing today; nothing but clean out the cluttered closets of my preferred newsfeed reader. There were some connections in there that were sorely neglected. I could use a bit more time to wade through the degenerate filth that is my blogroll, but sadly, I work. The Company is tolerant in their control over my time, fair since they do not pay hourly; but tolerance has its limits, and I doubt they would look kindly upon my spending the business day in a fugue state, reading entry after entry of dialectics about Jessica Simpson's tits, or Brittney Spears' overplayed poonanny.
Nevertheless, it saddens me that my everyday is not blessed with the nuggets of wisdom from skippystalin:
Being the only person with an out-of-control substance abuse problem in a relationship is tough. Most romantic couplings are based on common interests and most of my interests culminate in my waking up in a pool of what I think is my own urine and not being quite sure what time zone I'm in. I'm much like a cat in that I have a tendancy of marking my territory with my vomit, blood and gallons of my semen...My ability to smoke, drink and masturbate furiously at the same time might not be much, it's all that I have.
Ahh, skippystalin, how I've missed you, and your nuggets.
This is how I spend my vacation: visiting Stonehenge on one day; reading the melancholy musings of skippystalin the next, picturing him composing scholarly tracts through bitter tears, a crushed Viagra dissolving in a highball of Jack Daniels next to the keyboard, as another long evening fades into a blur of poetry, madness, and vigorous bouts of hate-filled masturbation. And wondering, of the two, which is the more meaningful and fitting monument to humanity?
They should've just burned enjoyeverysandwich to CD, stuck it to the side of Voyager along with its author, and shot the whole lot into space back when they had government funding to do so, all in the name of making a good first impression for whatever aliens were out cruising for an easy meal.
skippystalin's output is prodigious, to be sure, but there was an entire blogroll to consider:
The lunatics are running the asylum over at Straight White Guy's place. Eric's testicles are mentioned, indirectly. Remind me to change my passwords regularly and start using strong encryption.
How stoned do you have to be to cheat on Jessica Alba? I could jack off to Jessica Alba while a big mean dog was chasing me and this idiot is cheating on her. I decided to confront him about this and I screamed at him, hey, what is your problem. And he said I should get off his lawn. And I said, no, no you get off the lawn. You get off. Then he went inside, probably because deep down, he knew I had made some pretty good points.
JimGoad.com is no more, but if you're a Goad fan (ladies!), you can find find him here. Discussion of Brittany's latest, erm, candid photos is also to be found, but be aware that the following picture is used as a visual aid:
This morning we picked up my new wheelchair. It's a sporty European marque, with an aggressive stance, low-profile tires, and a head-turning cherry-red metalflake paint job. It's not that great on the corners, but it'll take any one of y'all on the straightaways.
I've never done time on wheels. On the whole, I found it to be not all that bad. Then again, I don't figure that most wheelchair-bound men my age get to enjoy being pushed around town by a couple of sexy German bloggerettes. Thanks, ladies: the jealous looks from the other local cripples was the icing on the cake. Here's a little something extra for you, babes. (via AoSHQ)
Funny things happen when you're on wheels. I saw a lady I work with while being carted through Tesco's frozen food department. I said hello, and she just looked right through me, steering her cart so as not to make contact with the leper. She probably thought I was going to ask her for some spare change, or if she could wipe me bum for me, or whatever it is that those people want from healthy-legged people. I also noticed that the supermarkets put completely different things down on the bottom three feet of the shelves. All the cool toys are down there, for example, presumably because chil'n's is small. It's also a great altitude to find anti-bedsore medicaments, for some reason.
So, I let myself be pushed by the Weyside in Guildford, where, at one point, a husky young native was required to wheel my fat ass up a steep incline. The Sistas, for all their heart, lacked the muscle to get the job done, so he, being a true-hearted salt-of-earth kind of guy, waved them off and grunted and sweated till I crested the hill. Had the man known that I could have, at any point in time, simply stood up and hobbled up the hill under my own power, he most certainly would have picked me up and broken me over his knee.
Tomorrow morning, we'll be visiting Stonehenge, or Stone'enge, as the locals quaintly call it. We'll also visit the haunted city, Salisbury, to watch the homosexuals. Ta!
I like reading OSNews for some reason. I think I like to catch the geeky news about SkyOS, or the occasional retro curmudgeonry that rolls by about Lotus 1-2-3 or OS/2. Being the old-timer that I am, it's hard to resist a paean from my youth about 10-finger productivity.
Unfortunately, they've become the epicenter of stupid for the tech press. Check out this article, which explodes the myths about competition being good: "Competition is not Good"
'It gives consumers more choice'
Choice is good when there's one agreed base standard, and a number of compatible approaches. For example, there are many Linux distributions, but they are all Linux, and they can all run the same software. They are 'flavours' of the same thing, that is a good choice. People like different flavours.
Competition does not produce easier choices for consumers. All they get is added un-interoperability and complexity with competitive choices.
Now, if you go read that article, which I do not recommend, you'll slowly come to the realization that this moron is just annoyed that he has to make the effort to choose between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. He's willing to surrender his entire free will to some (hopefully) benevolent dictator, abolish brand names, and forsake the free market economy because choosing which format to buy the Firefly special edition box set in is hard. What a hopeless, whiny-assed sissy.
Of course, things don't get better when they start tossing political analysis at you. "Net Neutrality" is one monikers that has overshadowed the thing named. The discussion is often framed in a way that an uninformed listener would assume there was lobbying going on to abolish some sort of laws that are now protecting consumers from big, bad tiered-Internet ninjas.
But: There is no net neutrality legislation, there never was, and hopefully, there never will be. The argument over "Net Neutrality" is about whether or not the U.S. government should introduce legislation forbidding bandwidth throttling by ISPs. It's the "have you stopped beating your wife?" straw man for the Slashdot crowd. You'll notice that this article calls the Supreme Court's decision that the U.S. government shouldn't step in and configure the ISPs' Cisco routers for them, "Backing for Two-Tier Internet":
The US Justice Department has said that internet service providers should be allowed to charge for priority traffic. The agency said it was opposed to 'network neutrality', the idea that all data on the net is treated equally. The comments put the agency at odds with companies such as Microsoft and Google, who have called for legislation to guarantee equal access to the net.
Of course, this would also mean that an enforcement infrastructure would also have to be put in place, making sure that everyone got their "fair share" of said bandwidth, as if backbone routers and POPs just fell off a tree somewhere. God forbid ISPs be allowed to tune the services that they developed and paid for as they wish. Let's let the government decides who gets bandwidth, and how much is enough! That will make it all fair and neutral-like. Whenever a politician uses the word "fair", hang on to your wallet.
Well, my trackbacks are now working, it seems. There's some ugly Python spaghetti-code going on behind the scenes that translates back and forth between absolute urls, non-absolute relative urls, and upper-lower-camel case; but it works.
Trackbacks are only good for Movable Type, though. Which I can't stand anymore. MT used to be the only thing out there, but there's something that really, really, really galls me about the way it rebuilds your entire site into static HTML pages everytime you update a post. I'm sure it's awesomeness if you've got your server running on an old TV remote, but nowadays we're all running our web servers on 100-core 64-bit terahertz moonshot computers that can simultaneously compute π, encode MPEG video, and mix the best goddam margaritas you've ever tasted, all without breaking a sweat.
So yeah, I figured out how to implement trackbacks in Django, to a point where they more or less work. Now why is Wordpress fucking with me? It seems to be thrown off by the fact that Wordpress sends a HEAD request before it downloads and parses the page, in the vain hope that the X-Pingback header will be set. I can't figure out how to do that in Django's generic views, so I just use the secondary method, that being a link element in the XHTML code. But now, whenever a Worpdress blog pings me, I get this kind of crap:
[09/Sep/2007 15:04:23] "GET /blog/2007/sep/08/vacation/ HTTP/1.1" 200 27367
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (104, 'Connection reset by peer')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (32, 'Broken pipe')
Being the half-assed programmer that I am, I am at a total loss. I can't even do a Lazyweb request here, seeing as my 4 visits a day are unlikely to bring the Django HTTP gurus by. I won't be able to sleep at night, thinking of all the enlightened Wordpress Users who are probably out there try to "Keep the discussion going" with me.
Ever since June, when the iPhone went live, I've heard about nothing else in the tech press, nerd podcasts, and the Apple Fanboisphere. Is it really that way over in the States (the only place you can get them), or does the iPhone actually seem to be doing well?
Ahh, my first vacation since joining The Company. My queue is cleaned up, my email is forwarded, and an elaborate Sieve session has accomplished in a mere two hours what less civilized mail systems can do with a key combination: The Corporate Vacation Email.
It's been five months now since I came 'cross the channel and started meeting the natives, learning the lingo, and getting used to the fact that everyone here talks like Pinky. Now, I'll be letting my hair down for the next 10 days or so. As well as putting my poor, broken foot up on the coffee table.
As soon as I get my x-rays back from the socialist medical system (they still copy them with coal rubbings on wax paper over here, apparently), I'll post pictures of the metatarsalar breakage here for your morbid enjoyment. Don't thank me yet.
The other half of Sistaweb will be joining us for the week. We'll allow her to sleep here rent-free for an entire week, even though she refused to bring a carton of cigarettes as payment. Damned non-smokers and their principles. It's like those non-smokers back in the World War II who didn't sign up for cigarette rations. Throwing away a gold mine, that is. Our grandfathers probably had a word for those guys, and if I knew my grandfather at all, that word was sissy-boy.
The girls have rented a wheelchair for me, seeing as I won't be too much fun doing a London pub-crawl on crutches. I've already had a forehead-slapping moment over this, as you probably are right now. Why haven't I thought of taking a wheelchair with me before? That would've come in handy on more than one occasion, the Wreckyll in Jeckyll not least among them.
Man, Apple is on a roll. Not only have they got me hooked for a new computer, a new laptop, a new office package, and a replacement for my aging MythTV box, but now I have to start thinking about a new iPod. Now, let's see what Uncle Steve is going to me be costing me 'til Christmas Time:
Item
Damage
20" iMac
1199.00
Macbook
1099.00
8GB iPod Touch
299.00
AppleTV
299.00
iWork '08
79.00
iLife '08
79.00
Total:
$3,054.00
Not bad for a day's work, Mr. Jobs. And what's up for the rest of September? Maybe some irresistible bionic iFoot to replace the one I broke playing frisbee at the company picnic last week?
Although there's a remarkable lack of iPhone hype around the office, we being a big-time Linux company and all, there's an amazing amount of Mac fanboiism. Pretty much all of us have Macs at home. The explanation for this is simple: After dealing with Linux problems all day long, there's something nice about going home to something you can spend all your time using and not making up excuses for why it looks like shit and doesn't work.
I like Linux, mind you. I use it day-in, day-out for my desktop at work, for my webservers, and it brings in my daily bread. We all love it here, pretty much like a family loves and therefore tolerates the embarrassing second cousin with the Downs'. But people are walking all over the office today buzzing about the upcoming announcement from Apple.
Will it be the long-awaited iMac redesign? Will it be a new Mini? My boss is actually carrying his phone to the pub after work today so he can sit on engadget and get a realtime update. Linus would not be pleased...
Last login: Thu Jul 26 12:17:28 from nat-pool-fab.re Welcome to Darwin! ericbook:~ eric$ mutt -bash: mutt: command not found ericbook:~ eric$ open /Applications/Mail.app/ ericbook:~ eric$
Ahh. Like coming in after a long day of plowing the fields and sticking your aching feet into a pot of hot water. After running Linux all day at work, you feel like slipping into something more comfortable. Sam knows it. Zonker knows it, though he won't admit it. It's the right amount of just-workiness you need to let you relax, while knowing you could, at any given moment, do something like:
OK, here's one with drivel. I do like it, but I have a couple of gripes.
First problem: I was hopelessly confused by the login screen. The type of journal seems to be locked on livejournal, as the drop-down menu for journal types is inexplicably disabled until you enter a username. -1 for usabilty
Second problem: Useless stripping of trailing slash, which mangled my xmlrpc URL. Error 301 was ignored, which makes sense since it's a post and all, but I couldn't log in. It mangled my URL then choked on the error :-/
Third problem: didn't want to download my recent posts. Although there might be a misunderstanding about just what "recent" means.
Fourth problem: Doesn't let me choose post status anywhere. And there's nowhere I can find to choose text filters. This is more of a feature request, really.
Fifth problem: craps out after posting, probably because it keeps mangling the trailing slashes from my URLs. Is there an RFC somewhere that says that POSTS can't end with slashes? Nobody tell the Django folks.
Well, maybe it'll at least let me post to my blog from work every now and then.
Man, I dang sure missed the entire month of June. I've been in the UK now for about two months, and let me tell ya: They sure do get some rain around here. I always thought those stories about English people having gills were legends and fantasies. Now, I'm not so sure.
For the love of GOD, for the last time, in the name of ALL THAT IS HOLY, Cluster Services is NOT COMPATIBLE with 4.5! If you're running a cluster, DO NOT update to 4.5 until the Cluster Suite is UPDATED TO 4.5!
That is all.
P.S. And NO, cmirror is not available yet. Maybe at the end of the month.
I went outside to smoke a cigarette. All rooms in England are for non-smokers, you'll find, as are the rooms, apartments, and houses listed for rent in the local papers. The litany at the end of all the ads reads, "No smokers, canvassers, or DSS", which stands for Department of Social Services. So, okay they hate smokers and welfare cases, as do we all. But the British have their own definition for 'non-smoker', which basically means you only smoke when you drink. Everybody smokes over here, and they all live somewhere.
The evening was cool; almost cold, really, as I suspect the evenings around here generally are. I stood on the corner of Osborne and Netley, watching the blackbirds getting ready to do whatever it is they do at night, when I spied a man, some yards away, bounding up the sidewalk with a jaunty gait. I held my cigarette just in front of my mouth, watching this figure with suspicion. He was short, about 5 feet tall, and round as a soccer ball. He was wearing light-colored trousers and a dark blazer, the left breast of which was adorned with an enormous, orange prize-ribbon.
As he approached me, his features became distinct in the bad lighting, and I realized he was positively beaming with pride. His face was ruddy, and split with a grin that wouldn't have looked out of place behind a wheelbarrow full of poker chips on the way to the cash-out. I placed him in his mid-40s, but maybe his thinning red hair and roly-poly stature made him look older than he really was.
He halted just a few feet from me, and said, with oddly struggling words, "Good evening, mister!"
I looked him up and down, cigarette still burning between my shaky fingers, and replied, "hi, how are ya..." He wobbled his head a bit, then walked around me on his way up the street. I noticed something written in gold on his orange ribbon, and read it as it flashed in the lamplight.
I judged him more than a wee bit 'differently-abled', as they say. I watched as he cautiously crossed the empty street, looking both ways at least twice, then gingerly stepping into the street and crossing it at a run.
I thought about what I had seen written on the ribbon: "A Very Special Boy". Hmm, I thought, I wonder who gave him that? Whoever it was, they made his whole day.
I put my cigarette out and walked back into the guest house.
My buddy Sam sent me an email a couple of days ago indicating that he just might have joined The Family recently. And he joined it a much higher level than I, I might add, considering I'm still lumbering along in the PowerPC world; my G4 Powerbook, though a loyal and trusted friend, seems slow as molasses in January these days.
He also mentioned an old OS/2 habit, one which we separately shared back in the day. I started using OS/2 when I worked at UPS. One of our managers was running 2.1, with the old Presentation Manager that looked like a crappy(er) Windows 2.0, albeit with long filenames and the ability to run concurrent DOS sessions. I avoided it until OS/2 3.0 came out.
In '94, when Warp hit the shelves, I rushed out to Soft-Warehouse1 in Alpharetta, looked in the Operating Systems2 department until I found a box, then gave the man $300 dollars for the privilege of running it. Then, I walked over the desktop applications department, and put down another $495 for Lotus Smartsuite/2. Then I OEM'd 16MB of RAM for about $400 to make it all go.
Now, many may see OS/2 as a butt-ugly cousin of Windows, and they may be right. But back then, it was a work of art. Especially in the sense that it wasn't an exact science getting it to run. Nothing ever really worked like it was supposed to. Without the fallback of a DOS prompt, you had to have a second, fully-functional machine to do things like edit the CONFIG.SYS on the installation floppies to make sure your DASD drivers were loading. And most of the drivers were written so that, if they encountered an error while loading, they'd bork the whole boot process, just to be on the safe side.
The graphical interface also hung constantly. The Workplace Shell, despite (or maybe due to) all its object-orientiness, was horribly unstable. But I never saw a hang that wasn't cured with Control-Alt-Delete. That key combo went right down to the kernel, and always gave a satisfying, unconfirmed reboot, wedged GUI be damned. There was even a 3rd party program called Watchcat that sat on the serial port, or on a secondary Hercules/MCGA monitor, and let you monitor and kill programs remotely. The kernel's Kung Fu was strong like that, but the GUI was just ass.
Now, when Chicago started finally coming down the pipe, and even the Rolling Stones where pulled into the OS marketing world ("Start me up", anyone?), OS/2 fans like myself were sure that this pissant little DOS extender with a homely face wouldn't be the future. It couldn't be the future, it was just too depressing. It still wasn't a 32-bit OS, though the 386 had been out for over 8 years. It still used FAT, for crying out loud. In short, Chicago sucked.
OS/2 seemed like a scrappy little underdog, nipping heroically at the Microsoft behemoth's heels. I'm not sure why it gave that impression. At the time, IBM was much bigger than Microsoft, a huge, multinational corporation with interests in basically every aspect of electronics. They just couldn't write or market good software.
I'm not sure why I just wrote 500 words on OS/2. I actually wanted to write something about Linux.
Software stores used to have a whole "Operating Systems" department, back when there was more than one operating system, and Windows was still called an "Operating Environment" ↩
Man, I'm unprepared. There's a checklist of things you should do before moving to England. I came over here without any money, preparation, or attack plan. There's something unbelievably stupid about this. It worked for me when I moved to Germany, but moving to England's a bit more complicated, apparently. Either that, or I'm remembering it wrong.
But I'm not the only one. The office I'm working in is full of non-British people. It's a rag-tag group of Germans, Italians, Brazilians, Spaniards, one (1) American, and who knows what else that all found themselves in the same boat when they first came over. This despite promises from The Company to help one resettle; promises which are certainly not kept and, when referred to in conversation, change their shape and character like a Democrat on a whistle-stop.
But at some point a kindly soul in the department, now departed, made a list of the reality of the situation. It's a short list of what one really needs to do when moving to England. Unfortunately, I only found out about it after I'd already been here a week. Here's your to-do list once you've arrived in England:
Get a room. If possible, get a rental agreement or any bill with your name and address on it. (proof of address)
Deposit is usually 1 1/2 times the rent. Deposit and first rent is to be paid beforehand. If the room is unfurnished, see "Things to Buy" for shops and example prices.
Get a letter from your office manager (HR Lady) stating that you are working for the company and including your address. (proof of employment)
Get a bank account. Just walk in with your documents:
Passport or national ID card
Proof of employment (see 2.). it might be handy to have your contract with you.
Proof of address
Banks
HSBC – try to get a standard account (they try to sell you an advanced package including insurances etc.)
NatWest – Also recommended as this bank does not charge for withdrawing money from a different bank's cash machines
Give your bank details to The Company
Register with Inland Revenue – this is done by your HR manager. You should get your tax code about 2 weeks later (PAYE Coding Notice)
At the end of the fiscal year (ending April 5th), you will get a "P60 End of Year Certificate" detailing your "Pay and Income Tax" levels.
Get a National Insurance Number by applying at a Job Centre Plus office. They ask for dtails before they schedule an interview appointment to verify your eligibility. Appointments are scheduled about two weeks ahead, and take place in the nearest county office, which usually isn't near at all. Without an NI number, you will be on emergency tax, which is higher than the standard tax rate.
Documents:
Passport
National ID card
Driving License or any other official document identifying you (Birth certificate, police registration, medical card, etc.)
Proof of employment (see 2.)
Recent payslip
Bank statement
Proof of address (utility bill, rental agreement, etc. – see 1.)
It might be handy to have your PAYE Coding Notice with you
As money is paid in a timely manner so it is available on the 27th, try to get your appointment after this date.
If you are British, a citizen of a member state of the EU, or other Commonwealth citizen, you can apply for inclusion on the Register of Electors. This will allow you to vote at local government elections. Your credibility will rise (good for tenancy applications or bank-related matters) and you are obliged to pay Council Taxes1
If you buy any TV or radio equipment, you will be asked for your address, which will be automatically forwarded to the "TV Licensing Office"
Get a Tesco Clubcard
Get a life ;-)
Any address change has to be communicated to all above-mentioned authorities. For the official notices to local council, the TV licensing, and most other on-line services, you can use I am Moving , where you can create/use an account for free.
All of this could have been avoided with a bit of planning. I am bitterly disappointed in myself.
Council taxes are universal as far as I can tell, and are perceived, by the British at least, as an extension of the rent. ↩
Farnborough derives its name from from the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Ferneberga (Fern Hill) and is mentioned in the Domesday Book (1086). But for the coming of the army at nearby Aldershot, the arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flying, Farnborough would probably have remained an isolated heathland village, that is until the latter half of the 20th century when the population moved out of London suburbia and became commuters.
"But for the … arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flight…". That's a pretty big conditional. There are probably a lot of places whose development was seriously affected by railways and the advent of powered flight. But I understand where the good Mr. Parkins is coming from.
I had forgotten the cable to connect my camera to my laptop. Of all the stupid things that I packed for the trip, 50 different USB cables, a USB hub, power adapters for devices I’d forgotten, not to mention devices whose power adapters I’d forgotten, I forgot the one thing that was absolutely necessary and planned-for. Not to mention irreplaceable, seeing as every camera maker in the world decided that their camera’s little hole should look different from all the other cameras’ little holes.
I walked into a little computer store on the strip in Fleet, Hampshire. Walking up to the pasty-faced, teenaged part-timer there, I introduced myself and shook his hand, which seemed to shock him.
He unconsciously wiped his hands on his pants and said, “eh...nice to meet you, sir. What can I do for you?”
I asked him, “do you have any USB card-readers?”
“Um, yeah," he answered. "I think I saw some around here somewhere.”
I looked around the shop, which was organized and clean. Man, he must really be the FNG around here. He finally found what I was looking for, stored on a shelf right next to where he had been sitting. He handed it to me and I started reading the back of the packaging.
“Just looking to see if it works with my Mac,” I told him.
“Oh, it's USB, so it should work,” he answered, and took the reader out of my hand. He moved his lips while he read the package. “Oh, yeah,” he said finally. “Right there it says it: ‘Requires Mac OS 9 or later’.” He looked at me skeptically. “So, you do have OS 9 or later, don’t you?”
“Um, yeah, I think so.” OS 9 went out of style back in the ‘90s.
He moved around to the register, and I handed him my Visa card. He looked uncertain as he turned it over in his hand. “This thing doesn’t have a chip on it?”
I took it back and examined it. “No, I guess it doesn’t.”
“Well, I don’t think we can take that, then.”
“Why don’t you just swipe it,” I said. “Give it a go.”
He shrugged and swiped it through the machine.
From behind me, a voice said, “it’s all chips nowadays, you know.”
I looked around, and saw that an older woman was standing behind me. She looked to be in her mid 40s, and wore a name plate with the store’s logo on it. “You can’t get nothing without a dozen little chips in it.”
I nodded agreement, and turned back to the young man behind the register.
“So, what kind of Mac you got, then?”
“A PowerBook G4.”
He nodded approvingly. “Nice piece of kit, that.” The little machine that had taken my card made a loud ping!, and spit out a receipt. He tore it off and gave it to me to sign, along with the card reader.
“Now, you have a nice day sir, and do please visit us again.”
I thanked him, said goodbye to the chip-lady, and put the small package into my bag next to my laptop. “Thanks, man, I’ll do that.” Nice kid.
Didja ever discover something that made your reality skip a beat? You know how, for just a second, something is so far out of place that you can't even figure out what's wrong with the picture? For example, the Augsburg Wireless-Internet provider Cyberways has had the same guy on their start page for years:
Every time you connect to the internet over public wireless in Augsburg, that dude was right there, staring at you with those soulless black eyes. Like a doll's eyes...
And the weird thing was, I always figured he was the boss at Cyberways. I even thought I saw him once on the tram. I hate it when people use the same stock photos everywhere. Everybody's full of shit. Oh, I guess it's effective use of your cash dollars, seeing as it's cheaper than paying attractive people to work for you. But still, why not just be honest for a split second?
You get this kind of thing all over the Internet, of course. If you've ever shopped for web hosting, you'll notice, after a few visits to the providers' pages, that their employees all kind of look alike. And there's always some woman somewhere holding a laptop at her waist in near-sexual ecstasy over the reasonable shared hosting prices.
It's a leitmotif throughout the enter hosting industry: Shared Webspace=Chick with laptop.
Rube, look, for the last freakin time, look RIGHT when you step off a curb! These people drive on the other side of the F$@&-ing road over here! You wanna get ya brains splattered all over me?
What? I dunno. I'm just kind of sitting around, waiting on things. I just spent way too much time transferring money across European borders, and reclaiming my identity. But the new passports are wonderful pieces of fortitude. Here' s a few quotes from my new passport:
And that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth. - Abraham Lincoln
The principle of free governments adheres to the American soil. It is bedded in it, immovable as its mountains. - Daniel Webster
Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. - George Washington
We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. - excerpt from the Declaration of Independence
Your concept of love may be different, but know that I love this world.
I like reading Scott Adams' blog on occasion. Much like Balph Eubanks, he's glib, amusing, and completely lacking in morality. Take, for example, his latest strawman-laden posting regarding the visit of a certain Mr. Ahmedinejad:
I was happy to hear that NYC didn't allow Iranian President Ahmadinejad
to place a wreath at the WTC site. And I was happy that Columbia
University is rescinding the offer to let him speak. If you let a guy like
that express his views, before long the entire world will want freedom
of speech.
...
If Ahmadinejad thinks he can be our friend by honoring our heroes and
opening a dialog, he underestimates our ability to misinterpret him.
Fucking idiot. I hate him.
Well, there's certainly some rye wit at work here. Yes, it is quite ironic that a country led by a genocidal religious dictator, which the USA most certainly is, would object to a fellow genocidal religious madman visiting its most sensitive cultural site. I mean, Mahmoud's only trying to "open a dialog" here, isn't he? Isn't that the meaning of Ahmedinejad's visit? Isn't Ahmedinejad just exercising "Free Speech", as Adams says? Aren't we wrong in denying this poor man that right?
Aside from the obvious jackassery involved in claiming that a man who directly controls his entire country's media is having trouble getting his point of view out; or that the United Nations will let him speak before the leaders of the world to the point where they forget to blink for an hour; aside from all this, this is not a question of whether or not Mahmoud is allowed to say what he wants. The question is, in accordance with the Grand Unified Theory of Rubean Mechanics, Who's going to pay for it. It's a question of whether or not Americans should be paying for his plane fare, his security, and his accommodation while he's here, pissing on Ground Zero and generating propaganda for totalitarian lobbying groups like MoveOn.org and International ANSWER.
All of Adams' ridiculous assertions never mention the one central fact here: There is no compelling reason for American taxpayers to foot the bill, so this guy, who just held one of his popular "Death to America" parades, can come over here and lecture them on anything. I personally don't much care what Ahmedinejad thinks, I can see the general thrust of his inclinations. He's spitting on the United States and Western Culture daily, and then expects to be treated with deference in return. Fuck him.
This kind of Devil's Advocacy isn't new to Adams. At least, I hope it's just that. He's apparently one of those celebrities that have forgotten the hard work involved in their ascendency, and assume that they're rich because of some accident of nature, akin to divine providence. Humans, himself included, are all just a bunch of "moist robots" with no capacity for thought, no free will; we've apparently just been programmed by Mother Nature to do the things we've done or will do. There is no mind, there is no choice, there is only the stimuli in our environments, and the response that was determined by a chance arrangement of atoms into chemicals during the Big Bang. Or something.
It's an obscene display of thoughtlessness, a conceit of someone trying so hard to seem above all this. Adams' Dilbert is amusing, and his blog is a bit of junk food for the brain at times. But he's got the morals of a two-dollar whore.
Last night we didn't make it. The two Frenchmen surrendered the evening, seeing as it was Trotzky's birthday, and therefore a time for somber reflection or something. So, we rode around big town Farnborough for a couple of hours, grabbed some grub, and then headed back to the apartment to watch a movie.
We watched Fur, which cemented my belief that Nicole Kidman is the perfect woman. Not only does she look good in her own slutty little librarian sort of way, she gives a guy a handjob in this movie while shaving his hairy back. That's my kind of girl, a real little trooper.
Anyhoo, it's back off to London now, for a second try at getting sloppy somewhere besides sitting at home in front of the boob tube. Wish us luck.
Vacation week is winding down, and I'm getting ready to leave the driving to Southwest Trains and go drinking in London. I'll try to keep it under two weeks this time, but no promises. We'll tramp it a bit through Soho, I guess, just me, the girls, and a couple of frog-eaters from the office.
I wonder why I never get to go drinking with Englishmen? It's probably for the best. There's a quote that gets bandied about, especially in the local newspapers, about England being a nation of drunks and scalawags. I can't say much about that, but it does seem that the pubs all close at 11:00 PM for a reason. At 5 o'clock, they pour out of their offices and into the public houses, seemingly on a race against the clock to get themselves 'faced before the early last call.
When they were finally permitted to stay open past 11, in the hope that the binge-drinking would abate in light of longer opening hours, they found themselves doubly-cursed in that the Englishmen were every bit as drunk at 11, but didn't have to go home. All pubs here are set up so that you have to go to the counter to get your drinks, instead of having them brought to your table. There's a built-in handbrake there: a system where you can't get any more drink once you lose the ability to walk is founded upon sound principle and good advices.
I've done nothing today; nothing but clean out the cluttered closets of my preferred newsfeed reader. There were some connections in there that were sorely neglected. I could use a bit more time to wade through the degenerate filth that is my blogroll, but sadly, I work. The Company is tolerant in their control over my time, fair since they do not pay hourly; but tolerance has its limits, and I doubt they would look kindly upon my spending the business day in a fugue state, reading entry after entry of dialectics about Jessica Simpson's tits, or Brittney Spears' overplayed poonanny.
Nevertheless, it saddens me that my everyday is not blessed with the nuggets of wisdom from skippystalin:
Being the only person with an out-of-control substance abuse problem in a relationship is tough. Most romantic couplings are based on common interests and most of my interests culminate in my waking up in a pool of what I think is my own urine and not being quite sure what time zone I'm in. I'm much like a cat in that I have a tendancy of marking my territory with my vomit, blood and gallons of my semen...My ability to smoke, drink and masturbate furiously at the same time might not be much, it's all that I have.
Ahh, skippystalin, how I've missed you, and your nuggets.
This is how I spend my vacation: visiting Stonehenge on one day; reading the melancholy musings of skippystalin the next, picturing him composing scholarly tracts through bitter tears, a crushed Viagra dissolving in a highball of Jack Daniels next to the keyboard, as another long evening fades into a blur of poetry, madness, and vigorous bouts of hate-filled masturbation. And wondering, of the two, which is the more meaningful and fitting monument to humanity?
They should've just burned enjoyeverysandwich to CD, stuck it to the side of Voyager along with its author, and shot the whole lot into space back when they had government funding to do so, all in the name of making a good first impression for whatever aliens were out cruising for an easy meal.
skippystalin's output is prodigious, to be sure, but there was an entire blogroll to consider:
The lunatics are running the asylum over at Straight White Guy's place. Eric's testicles are mentioned, indirectly. Remind me to change my passwords regularly and start using strong encryption.
How stoned do you have to be to cheat on Jessica Alba? I could jack off to Jessica Alba while a big mean dog was chasing me and this idiot is cheating on her. I decided to confront him about this and I screamed at him, hey, what is your problem. And he said I should get off his lawn. And I said, no, no you get off the lawn. You get off. Then he went inside, probably because deep down, he knew I had made some pretty good points.
JimGoad.com is no more, but if you're a Goad fan (ladies!), you can find find him here. Discussion of Brittany's latest, erm, candid photos is also to be found, but be aware that the following picture is used as a visual aid:
This morning we picked up my new wheelchair. It's a sporty European marque, with an aggressive stance, low-profile tires, and a head-turning cherry-red metalflake paint job. It's not that great on the corners, but it'll take any one of y'all on the straightaways.
I've never done time on wheels. On the whole, I found it to be not all that bad. Then again, I don't figure that most wheelchair-bound men my age get to enjoy being pushed around town by a couple of sexy German bloggerettes. Thanks, ladies: the jealous looks from the other local cripples was the icing on the cake. Here's a little something extra for you, babes. (via AoSHQ)
Funny things happen when you're on wheels. I saw a lady I work with while being carted through Tesco's frozen food department. I said hello, and she just looked right through me, steering her cart so as not to make contact with the leper. She probably thought I was going to ask her for some spare change, or if she could wipe me bum for me, or whatever it is that those people want from healthy-legged people. I also noticed that the supermarkets put completely different things down on the bottom three feet of the shelves. All the cool toys are down there, for example, presumably because chil'n's is small. It's also a great altitude to find anti-bedsore medicaments, for some reason.
So, I let myself be pushed by the Weyside in Guildford, where, at one point, a husky young native was required to wheel my fat ass up a steep incline. The Sistas, for all their heart, lacked the muscle to get the job done, so he, being a true-hearted salt-of-earth kind of guy, waved them off and grunted and sweated till I crested the hill. Had the man known that I could have, at any point in time, simply stood up and hobbled up the hill under my own power, he most certainly would have picked me up and broken me over his knee.
Tomorrow morning, we'll be visiting Stonehenge, or Stone'enge, as the locals quaintly call it. We'll also visit the haunted city, Salisbury, to watch the homosexuals. Ta!
I like reading OSNews for some reason. I think I like to catch the geeky news about SkyOS, or the occasional retro curmudgeonry that rolls by about Lotus 1-2-3 or OS/2. Being the old-timer that I am, it's hard to resist a paean from my youth about 10-finger productivity.
Unfortunately, they've become the epicenter of stupid for the tech press. Check out this article, which explodes the myths about competition being good: "Competition is not Good"
'It gives consumers more choice'
Choice is good when there's one agreed base standard, and a number of compatible approaches. For example, there are many Linux distributions, but they are all Linux, and they can all run the same software. They are 'flavours' of the same thing, that is a good choice. People like different flavours.
Competition does not produce easier choices for consumers. All they get is added un-interoperability and complexity with competitive choices.
Now, if you go read that article, which I do not recommend, you'll slowly come to the realization that this moron is just annoyed that he has to make the effort to choose between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. He's willing to surrender his entire free will to some (hopefully) benevolent dictator, abolish brand names, and forsake the free market economy because choosing which format to buy the Firefly special edition box set in is hard. What a hopeless, whiny-assed sissy.
Of course, things don't get better when they start tossing political analysis at you. "Net Neutrality" is one monikers that has overshadowed the thing named. The discussion is often framed in a way that an uninformed listener would assume there was lobbying going on to abolish some sort of laws that are now protecting consumers from big, bad tiered-Internet ninjas.
But: There is no net neutrality legislation, there never was, and hopefully, there never will be. The argument over "Net Neutrality" is about whether or not the U.S. government should introduce legislation forbidding bandwidth throttling by ISPs. It's the "have you stopped beating your wife?" straw man for the Slashdot crowd. You'll notice that this article calls the Supreme Court's decision that the U.S. government shouldn't step in and configure the ISPs' Cisco routers for them, "Backing for Two-Tier Internet":
The US Justice Department has said that internet service providers should be allowed to charge for priority traffic. The agency said it was opposed to 'network neutrality', the idea that all data on the net is treated equally. The comments put the agency at odds with companies such as Microsoft and Google, who have called for legislation to guarantee equal access to the net.
Of course, this would also mean that an enforcement infrastructure would also have to be put in place, making sure that everyone got their "fair share" of said bandwidth, as if backbone routers and POPs just fell off a tree somewhere. God forbid ISPs be allowed to tune the services that they developed and paid for as they wish. Let's let the government decides who gets bandwidth, and how much is enough! That will make it all fair and neutral-like. Whenever a politician uses the word "fair", hang on to your wallet.
Well, my trackbacks are now working, it seems. There's some ugly Python spaghetti-code going on behind the scenes that translates back and forth between absolute urls, non-absolute relative urls, and upper-lower-camel case; but it works.
Trackbacks are only good for Movable Type, though. Which I can't stand anymore. MT used to be the only thing out there, but there's something that really, really, really galls me about the way it rebuilds your entire site into static HTML pages everytime you update a post. I'm sure it's awesomeness if you've got your server running on an old TV remote, but nowadays we're all running our web servers on 100-core 64-bit terahertz moonshot computers that can simultaneously compute π, encode MPEG video, and mix the best goddam margaritas you've ever tasted, all without breaking a sweat.
So yeah, I figured out how to implement trackbacks in Django, to a point where they more or less work. Now why is Wordpress fucking with me? It seems to be thrown off by the fact that Wordpress sends a HEAD request before it downloads and parses the page, in the vain hope that the X-Pingback header will be set. I can't figure out how to do that in Django's generic views, so I just use the secondary method, that being a link element in the XHTML code. But now, whenever a Worpdress blog pings me, I get this kind of crap:
[09/Sep/2007 15:04:23] "GET /blog/2007/sep/08/vacation/ HTTP/1.1" 200 27367
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (104, 'Connection reset by peer')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (32, 'Broken pipe')
Being the half-assed programmer that I am, I am at a total loss. I can't even do a Lazyweb request here, seeing as my 4 visits a day are unlikely to bring the Django HTTP gurus by. I won't be able to sleep at night, thinking of all the enlightened Wordpress Users who are probably out there try to "Keep the discussion going" with me.
Ever since June, when the iPhone went live, I've heard about nothing else in the tech press, nerd podcasts, and the Apple Fanboisphere. Is it really that way over in the States (the only place you can get them), or does the iPhone actually seem to be doing well?
Ahh, my first vacation since joining The Company. My queue is cleaned up, my email is forwarded, and an elaborate Sieve session has accomplished in a mere two hours what less civilized mail systems can do with a key combination: The Corporate Vacation Email.
It's been five months now since I came 'cross the channel and started meeting the natives, learning the lingo, and getting used to the fact that everyone here talks like Pinky. Now, I'll be letting my hair down for the next 10 days or so. As well as putting my poor, broken foot up on the coffee table.
As soon as I get my x-rays back from the socialist medical system (they still copy them with coal rubbings on wax paper over here, apparently), I'll post pictures of the metatarsalar breakage here for your morbid enjoyment. Don't thank me yet.
The other half of Sistaweb will be joining us for the week. We'll allow her to sleep here rent-free for an entire week, even though she refused to bring a carton of cigarettes as payment. Damned non-smokers and their principles. It's like those non-smokers back in the World War II who didn't sign up for cigarette rations. Throwing away a gold mine, that is. Our grandfathers probably had a word for those guys, and if I knew my grandfather at all, that word was sissy-boy.
The girls have rented a wheelchair for me, seeing as I won't be too much fun doing a London pub-crawl on crutches. I've already had a forehead-slapping moment over this, as you probably are right now. Why haven't I thought of taking a wheelchair with me before? That would've come in handy on more than one occasion, the Wreckyll in Jeckyll not least among them.
Man, Apple is on a roll. Not only have they got me hooked for a new computer, a new laptop, a new office package, and a replacement for my aging MythTV box, but now I have to start thinking about a new iPod. Now, let's see what Uncle Steve is going to me be costing me 'til Christmas Time:
Item
Damage
20" iMac
1199.00
Macbook
1099.00
8GB iPod Touch
299.00
AppleTV
299.00
iWork '08
79.00
iLife '08
79.00
Total:
$3,054.00
Not bad for a day's work, Mr. Jobs. And what's up for the rest of September? Maybe some irresistible bionic iFoot to replace the one I broke playing frisbee at the company picnic last week?
Although there's a remarkable lack of iPhone hype around the office, we being a big-time Linux company and all, there's an amazing amount of Mac fanboiism. Pretty much all of us have Macs at home. The explanation for this is simple: After dealing with Linux problems all day long, there's something nice about going home to something you can spend all your time using and not making up excuses for why it looks like shit and doesn't work.
I like Linux, mind you. I use it day-in, day-out for my desktop at work, for my webservers, and it brings in my daily bread. We all love it here, pretty much like a family loves and therefore tolerates the embarrassing second cousin with the Downs'. But people are walking all over the office today buzzing about the upcoming announcement from Apple.
Will it be the long-awaited iMac redesign? Will it be a new Mini? My boss is actually carrying his phone to the pub after work today so he can sit on engadget and get a realtime update. Linus would not be pleased...
Last login: Thu Jul 26 12:17:28 from nat-pool-fab.re Welcome to Darwin! ericbook:~ eric$ mutt -bash: mutt: command not found ericbook:~ eric$ open /Applications/Mail.app/ ericbook:~ eric$
Ahh. Like coming in after a long day of plowing the fields and sticking your aching feet into a pot of hot water. After running Linux all day at work, you feel like slipping into something more comfortable. Sam knows it. Zonker knows it, though he won't admit it. It's the right amount of just-workiness you need to let you relax, while knowing you could, at any given moment, do something like:
OK, here's one with drivel. I do like it, but I have a couple of gripes.
First problem: I was hopelessly confused by the login screen. The type of journal seems to be locked on livejournal, as the drop-down menu for journal types is inexplicably disabled until you enter a username. -1 for usabilty
Second problem: Useless stripping of trailing slash, which mangled my xmlrpc URL. Error 301 was ignored, which makes sense since it's a post and all, but I couldn't log in. It mangled my URL then choked on the error :-/
Third problem: didn't want to download my recent posts. Although there might be a misunderstanding about just what "recent" means.
Fourth problem: Doesn't let me choose post status anywhere. And there's nowhere I can find to choose text filters. This is more of a feature request, really.
Fifth problem: craps out after posting, probably because it keeps mangling the trailing slashes from my URLs. Is there an RFC somewhere that says that POSTS can't end with slashes? Nobody tell the Django folks.
Well, maybe it'll at least let me post to my blog from work every now and then.
Man, I dang sure missed the entire month of June. I've been in the UK now for about two months, and let me tell ya: They sure do get some rain around here. I always thought those stories about English people having gills were legends and fantasies. Now, I'm not so sure.
For the love of GOD, for the last time, in the name of ALL THAT IS HOLY, Cluster Services is NOT COMPATIBLE with 4.5! If you're running a cluster, DO NOT update to 4.5 until the Cluster Suite is UPDATED TO 4.5!
That is all.
P.S. And NO, cmirror is not available yet. Maybe at the end of the month.
I went outside to smoke a cigarette. All rooms in England are for non-smokers, you'll find, as are the rooms, apartments, and houses listed for rent in the local papers. The litany at the end of all the ads reads, "No smokers, canvassers, or DSS", which stands for Department of Social Services. So, okay they hate smokers and welfare cases, as do we all. But the British have their own definition for 'non-smoker', which basically means you only smoke when you drink. Everybody smokes over here, and they all live somewhere.
The evening was cool; almost cold, really, as I suspect the evenings around here generally are. I stood on the corner of Osborne and Netley, watching the blackbirds getting ready to do whatever it is they do at night, when I spied a man, some yards away, bounding up the sidewalk with a jaunty gait. I held my cigarette just in front of my mouth, watching this figure with suspicion. He was short, about 5 feet tall, and round as a soccer ball. He was wearing light-colored trousers and a dark blazer, the left breast of which was adorned with an enormous, orange prize-ribbon.
As he approached me, his features became distinct in the bad lighting, and I realized he was positively beaming with pride. His face was ruddy, and split with a grin that wouldn't have looked out of place behind a wheelbarrow full of poker chips on the way to the cash-out. I placed him in his mid-40s, but maybe his thinning red hair and roly-poly stature made him look older than he really was.
He halted just a few feet from me, and said, with oddly struggling words, "Good evening, mister!"
I looked him up and down, cigarette still burning between my shaky fingers, and replied, "hi, how are ya..." He wobbled his head a bit, then walked around me on his way up the street. I noticed something written in gold on his orange ribbon, and read it as it flashed in the lamplight.
I judged him more than a wee bit 'differently-abled', as they say. I watched as he cautiously crossed the empty street, looking both ways at least twice, then gingerly stepping into the street and crossing it at a run.
I thought about what I had seen written on the ribbon: "A Very Special Boy". Hmm, I thought, I wonder who gave him that? Whoever it was, they made his whole day.
I put my cigarette out and walked back into the guest house.
My buddy Sam sent me an email a couple of days ago indicating that he just might have joined The Family recently. And he joined it a much higher level than I, I might add, considering I'm still lumbering along in the PowerPC world; my G4 Powerbook, though a loyal and trusted friend, seems slow as molasses in January these days.
He also mentioned an old OS/2 habit, one which we separately shared back in the day. I started using OS/2 when I worked at UPS. One of our managers was running 2.1, with the old Presentation Manager that looked like a crappy(er) Windows 2.0, albeit with long filenames and the ability to run concurrent DOS sessions. I avoided it until OS/2 3.0 came out.
In '94, when Warp hit the shelves, I rushed out to Soft-Warehouse1 in Alpharetta, looked in the Operating Systems2 department until I found a box, then gave the man $300 dollars for the privilege of running it. Then, I walked over the desktop applications department, and put down another $495 for Lotus Smartsuite/2. Then I OEM'd 16MB of RAM for about $400 to make it all go.
Now, many may see OS/2 as a butt-ugly cousin of Windows, and they may be right. But back then, it was a work of art. Especially in the sense that it wasn't an exact science getting it to run. Nothing ever really worked like it was supposed to. Without the fallback of a DOS prompt, you had to have a second, fully-functional machine to do things like edit the CONFIG.SYS on the installation floppies to make sure your DASD drivers were loading. And most of the drivers were written so that, if they encountered an error while loading, they'd bork the whole boot process, just to be on the safe side.
The graphical interface also hung constantly. The Workplace Shell, despite (or maybe due to) all its object-orientiness, was horribly unstable. But I never saw a hang that wasn't cured with Control-Alt-Delete. That key combo went right down to the kernel, and always gave a satisfying, unconfirmed reboot, wedged GUI be damned. There was even a 3rd party program called Watchcat that sat on the serial port, or on a secondary Hercules/MCGA monitor, and let you monitor and kill programs remotely. The kernel's Kung Fu was strong like that, but the GUI was just ass.
Now, when Chicago started finally coming down the pipe, and even the Rolling Stones where pulled into the OS marketing world ("Start me up", anyone?), OS/2 fans like myself were sure that this pissant little DOS extender with a homely face wouldn't be the future. It couldn't be the future, it was just too depressing. It still wasn't a 32-bit OS, though the 386 had been out for over 8 years. It still used FAT, for crying out loud. In short, Chicago sucked.
OS/2 seemed like a scrappy little underdog, nipping heroically at the Microsoft behemoth's heels. I'm not sure why it gave that impression. At the time, IBM was much bigger than Microsoft, a huge, multinational corporation with interests in basically every aspect of electronics. They just couldn't write or market good software.
I'm not sure why I just wrote 500 words on OS/2. I actually wanted to write something about Linux.
Software stores used to have a whole "Operating Systems" department, back when there was more than one operating system, and Windows was still called an "Operating Environment" ↩
Man, I'm unprepared. There's a checklist of things you should do before moving to England. I came over here without any money, preparation, or attack plan. There's something unbelievably stupid about this. It worked for me when I moved to Germany, but moving to England's a bit more complicated, apparently. Either that, or I'm remembering it wrong.
But I'm not the only one. The office I'm working in is full of non-British people. It's a rag-tag group of Germans, Italians, Brazilians, Spaniards, one (1) American, and who knows what else that all found themselves in the same boat when they first came over. This despite promises from The Company to help one resettle; promises which are certainly not kept and, when referred to in conversation, change their shape and character like a Democrat on a whistle-stop.
But at some point a kindly soul in the department, now departed, made a list of the reality of the situation. It's a short list of what one really needs to do when moving to England. Unfortunately, I only found out about it after I'd already been here a week. Here's your to-do list once you've arrived in England:
Get a room. If possible, get a rental agreement or any bill with your name and address on it. (proof of address)
Deposit is usually 1 1/2 times the rent. Deposit and first rent is to be paid beforehand. If the room is unfurnished, see "Things to Buy" for shops and example prices.
Get a letter from your office manager (HR Lady) stating that you are working for the company and including your address. (proof of employment)
Get a bank account. Just walk in with your documents:
Passport or national ID card
Proof of employment (see 2.). it might be handy to have your contract with you.
Proof of address
Banks
HSBC – try to get a standard account (they try to sell you an advanced package including insurances etc.)
NatWest – Also recommended as this bank does not charge for withdrawing money from a different bank's cash machines
Give your bank details to The Company
Register with Inland Revenue – this is done by your HR manager. You should get your tax code about 2 weeks later (PAYE Coding Notice)
At the end of the fiscal year (ending April 5th), you will get a "P60 End of Year Certificate" detailing your "Pay and Income Tax" levels.
Get a National Insurance Number by applying at a Job Centre Plus office. They ask for dtails before they schedule an interview appointment to verify your eligibility. Appointments are scheduled about two weeks ahead, and take place in the nearest county office, which usually isn't near at all. Without an NI number, you will be on emergency tax, which is higher than the standard tax rate.
Documents:
Passport
National ID card
Driving License or any other official document identifying you (Birth certificate, police registration, medical card, etc.)
Proof of employment (see 2.)
Recent payslip
Bank statement
Proof of address (utility bill, rental agreement, etc. – see 1.)
It might be handy to have your PAYE Coding Notice with you
As money is paid in a timely manner so it is available on the 27th, try to get your appointment after this date.
If you are British, a citizen of a member state of the EU, or other Commonwealth citizen, you can apply for inclusion on the Register of Electors. This will allow you to vote at local government elections. Your credibility will rise (good for tenancy applications or bank-related matters) and you are obliged to pay Council Taxes1
If you buy any TV or radio equipment, you will be asked for your address, which will be automatically forwarded to the "TV Licensing Office"
Get a Tesco Clubcard
Get a life ;-)
Any address change has to be communicated to all above-mentioned authorities. For the official notices to local council, the TV licensing, and most other on-line services, you can use I am Moving , where you can create/use an account for free.
All of this could have been avoided with a bit of planning. I am bitterly disappointed in myself.
Council taxes are universal as far as I can tell, and are perceived, by the British at least, as an extension of the rent. ↩
Farnborough derives its name from from the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Ferneberga (Fern Hill) and is mentioned in the Domesday Book (1086). But for the coming of the army at nearby Aldershot, the arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flying, Farnborough would probably have remained an isolated heathland village, that is until the latter half of the 20th century when the population moved out of London suburbia and became commuters.
"But for the … arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flight…". That's a pretty big conditional. There are probably a lot of places whose development was seriously affected by railways and the advent of powered flight. But I understand where the good Mr. Parkins is coming from.
I had forgotten the cable to connect my camera to my laptop. Of all the stupid things that I packed for the trip, 50 different USB cables, a USB hub, power adapters for devices I’d forgotten, not to mention devices whose power adapters I’d forgotten, I forgot the one thing that was absolutely necessary and planned-for. Not to mention irreplaceable, seeing as every camera maker in the world decided that their camera’s little hole should look different from all the other cameras’ little holes.
I walked into a little computer store on the strip in Fleet, Hampshire. Walking up to the pasty-faced, teenaged part-timer there, I introduced myself and shook his hand, which seemed to shock him.
He unconsciously wiped his hands on his pants and said, “eh...nice to meet you, sir. What can I do for you?”
I asked him, “do you have any USB card-readers?”
“Um, yeah," he answered. "I think I saw some around here somewhere.”
I looked around the shop, which was organized and clean. Man, he must really be the FNG around here. He finally found what I was looking for, stored on a shelf right next to where he had been sitting. He handed it to me and I started reading the back of the packaging.
“Just looking to see if it works with my Mac,” I told him.
“Oh, it's USB, so it should work,” he answered, and took the reader out of my hand. He moved his lips while he read the package. “Oh, yeah,” he said finally. “Right there it says it: ‘Requires Mac OS 9 or later’.” He looked at me skeptically. “So, you do have OS 9 or later, don’t you?”
“Um, yeah, I think so.” OS 9 went out of style back in the ‘90s.
He moved around to the register, and I handed him my Visa card. He looked uncertain as he turned it over in his hand. “This thing doesn’t have a chip on it?”
I took it back and examined it. “No, I guess it doesn’t.”
“Well, I don’t think we can take that, then.”
“Why don’t you just swipe it,” I said. “Give it a go.”
He shrugged and swiped it through the machine.
From behind me, a voice said, “it’s all chips nowadays, you know.”
I looked around, and saw that an older woman was standing behind me. She looked to be in her mid 40s, and wore a name plate with the store’s logo on it. “You can’t get nothing without a dozen little chips in it.”
I nodded agreement, and turned back to the young man behind the register.
“So, what kind of Mac you got, then?”
“A PowerBook G4.”
He nodded approvingly. “Nice piece of kit, that.” The little machine that had taken my card made a loud ping!, and spit out a receipt. He tore it off and gave it to me to sign, along with the card reader.
“Now, you have a nice day sir, and do please visit us again.”
I thanked him, said goodbye to the chip-lady, and put the small package into my bag next to my laptop. “Thanks, man, I’ll do that.” Nice kid.
Didja ever discover something that made your reality skip a beat? You know how, for just a second, something is so far out of place that you can't even figure out what's wrong with the picture? For example, the Augsburg Wireless-Internet provider Cyberways has had the same guy on their start page for years:
Every time you connect to the internet over public wireless in Augsburg, that dude was right there, staring at you with those soulless black eyes. Like a doll's eyes...
And the weird thing was, I always figured he was the boss at Cyberways. I even thought I saw him once on the tram. I hate it when people use the same stock photos everywhere. Everybody's full of shit. Oh, I guess it's effective use of your cash dollars, seeing as it's cheaper than paying attractive people to work for you. But still, why not just be honest for a split second?
You get this kind of thing all over the Internet, of course. If you've ever shopped for web hosting, you'll notice, after a few visits to the providers' pages, that their employees all kind of look alike. And there's always some woman somewhere holding a laptop at her waist in near-sexual ecstasy over the reasonable shared hosting prices.
It's a leitmotif throughout the enter hosting industry: Shared Webspace=Chick with laptop.
Rube, look, for the last freakin time, look RIGHT when you step off a curb! These people drive on the other side of the F$@&-ing road over here! You wanna get ya brains splattered all over me?
What? I dunno. I'm just kind of sitting around, waiting on things. I just spent way too much time transferring money across European borders, and reclaiming my identity. But the new passports are wonderful pieces of fortitude. Here' s a few quotes from my new passport:
And that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth. - Abraham Lincoln
The principle of free governments adheres to the American soil. It is bedded in it, immovable as its mountains. - Daniel Webster
Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. - George Washington
We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. - excerpt from the Declaration of Independence
Your concept of love may be different, but know that I love this world.
I like reading Scott Adams' blog on occasion. Much like Balph Eubanks, he's glib, amusing, and completely lacking in morality. Take, for example, his latest strawman-laden posting regarding the visit of a certain Mr. Ahmedinejad:
I was happy to hear that NYC didn't allow Iranian President Ahmadinejad
to place a wreath at the WTC site. And I was happy that Columbia
University is rescinding the offer to let him speak. If you let a guy like
that express his views, before long the entire world will want freedom
of speech.
...
If Ahmadinejad thinks he can be our friend by honoring our heroes and
opening a dialog, he underestimates our ability to misinterpret him.
Fucking idiot. I hate him.
Well, there's certainly some rye wit at work here. Yes, it is quite ironic that a country led by a genocidal religious dictator, which the USA most certainly is, would object to a fellow genocidal religious madman visiting its most sensitive cultural site. I mean, Mahmoud's only trying to "open a dialog" here, isn't he? Isn't that the meaning of Ahmedinejad's visit? Isn't Ahmedinejad just exercising "Free Speech", as Adams says? Aren't we wrong in denying this poor man that right?
Aside from the obvious jackassery involved in claiming that a man who directly controls his entire country's media is having trouble getting his point of view out; or that the United Nations will let him speak before the leaders of the world to the point where they forget to blink for an hour; aside from all this, this is not a question of whether or not Mahmoud is allowed to say what he wants. The question is, in accordance with the Grand Unified Theory of Rubean Mechanics, Who's going to pay for it. It's a question of whether or not Americans should be paying for his plane fare, his security, and his accommodation while he's here, pissing on Ground Zero and generating propaganda for totalitarian lobbying groups like MoveOn.org and International ANSWER.
All of Adams' ridiculous assertions never mention the one central fact here: There is no compelling reason for American taxpayers to foot the bill, so this guy, who just held one of his popular "Death to America" parades, can come over here and lecture them on anything. I personally don't much care what Ahmedinejad thinks, I can see the general thrust of his inclinations. He's spitting on the United States and Western Culture daily, and then expects to be treated with deference in return. Fuck him.
This kind of Devil's Advocacy isn't new to Adams. At least, I hope it's just that. He's apparently one of those celebrities that have forgotten the hard work involved in their ascendency, and assume that they're rich because of some accident of nature, akin to divine providence. Humans, himself included, are all just a bunch of "moist robots" with no capacity for thought, no free will; we've apparently just been programmed by Mother Nature to do the things we've done or will do. There is no mind, there is no choice, there is only the stimuli in our environments, and the response that was determined by a chance arrangement of atoms into chemicals during the Big Bang. Or something.
It's an obscene display of thoughtlessness, a conceit of someone trying so hard to seem above all this. Adams' Dilbert is amusing, and his blog is a bit of junk food for the brain at times. But he's got the morals of a two-dollar whore.
Last night we didn't make it. The two Frenchmen surrendered the evening, seeing as it was Trotzky's birthday, and therefore a time for somber reflection or something. So, we rode around big town Farnborough for a couple of hours, grabbed some grub, and then headed back to the apartment to watch a movie.
We watched Fur, which cemented my belief that Nicole Kidman is the perfect woman. Not only does she look good in her own slutty little librarian sort of way, she gives a guy a handjob in this movie while shaving his hairy back. That's my kind of girl, a real little trooper.
Anyhoo, it's back off to London now, for a second try at getting sloppy somewhere besides sitting at home in front of the boob tube. Wish us luck.
Vacation week is winding down, and I'm getting ready to leave the driving to Southwest Trains and go drinking in London. I'll try to keep it under two weeks this time, but no promises. We'll tramp it a bit through Soho, I guess, just me, the girls, and a couple of frog-eaters from the office.
I wonder why I never get to go drinking with Englishmen? It's probably for the best. There's a quote that gets bandied about, especially in the local newspapers, about England being a nation of drunks and scalawags. I can't say much about that, but it does seem that the pubs all close at 11:00 PM for a reason. At 5 o'clock, they pour out of their offices and into the public houses, seemingly on a race against the clock to get themselves 'faced before the early last call.
When they were finally permitted to stay open past 11, in the hope that the binge-drinking would abate in light of longer opening hours, they found themselves doubly-cursed in that the Englishmen were every bit as drunk at 11, but didn't have to go home. All pubs here are set up so that you have to go to the counter to get your drinks, instead of having them brought to your table. There's a built-in handbrake there: a system where you can't get any more drink once you lose the ability to walk is founded upon sound principle and good advices.
I've done nothing today; nothing but clean out the cluttered closets of my preferred newsfeed reader. There were some connections in there that were sorely neglected. I could use a bit more time to wade through the degenerate filth that is my blogroll, but sadly, I work. The Company is tolerant in their control over my time, fair since they do not pay hourly; but tolerance has its limits, and I doubt they would look kindly upon my spending the business day in a fugue state, reading entry after entry of dialectics about Jessica Simpson's tits, or Brittney Spears' overplayed poonanny.
Nevertheless, it saddens me that my everyday is not blessed with the nuggets of wisdom from skippystalin:
Being the only person with an out-of-control substance abuse problem in a relationship is tough. Most romantic couplings are based on common interests and most of my interests culminate in my waking up in a pool of what I think is my own urine and not being quite sure what time zone I'm in. I'm much like a cat in that I have a tendancy of marking my territory with my vomit, blood and gallons of my semen...My ability to smoke, drink and masturbate furiously at the same time might not be much, it's all that I have.
Ahh, skippystalin, how I've missed you, and your nuggets.
This is how I spend my vacation: visiting Stonehenge on one day; reading the melancholy musings of skippystalin the next, picturing him composing scholarly tracts through bitter tears, a crushed Viagra dissolving in a highball of Jack Daniels next to the keyboard, as another long evening fades into a blur of poetry, madness, and vigorous bouts of hate-filled masturbation. And wondering, of the two, which is the more meaningful and fitting monument to humanity?
They should've just burned enjoyeverysandwich to CD, stuck it to the side of Voyager along with its author, and shot the whole lot into space back when they had government funding to do so, all in the name of making a good first impression for whatever aliens were out cruising for an easy meal.
skippystalin's output is prodigious, to be sure, but there was an entire blogroll to consider:
The lunatics are running the asylum over at Straight White Guy's place. Eric's testicles are mentioned, indirectly. Remind me to change my passwords regularly and start using strong encryption.
How stoned do you have to be to cheat on Jessica Alba? I could jack off to Jessica Alba while a big mean dog was chasing me and this idiot is cheating on her. I decided to confront him about this and I screamed at him, hey, what is your problem. And he said I should get off his lawn. And I said, no, no you get off the lawn. You get off. Then he went inside, probably because deep down, he knew I had made some pretty good points.
JimGoad.com is no more, but if you're a Goad fan (ladies!), you can find find him here. Discussion of Brittany's latest, erm, candid photos is also to be found, but be aware that the following picture is used as a visual aid:
This morning we picked up my new wheelchair. It's a sporty European marque, with an aggressive stance, low-profile tires, and a head-turning cherry-red metalflake paint job. It's not that great on the corners, but it'll take any one of y'all on the straightaways.
I've never done time on wheels. On the whole, I found it to be not all that bad. Then again, I don't figure that most wheelchair-bound men my age get to enjoy being pushed around town by a couple of sexy German bloggerettes. Thanks, ladies: the jealous looks from the other local cripples was the icing on the cake. Here's a little something extra for you, babes. (via AoSHQ)
Funny things happen when you're on wheels. I saw a lady I work with while being carted through Tesco's frozen food department. I said hello, and she just looked right through me, steering her cart so as not to make contact with the leper. She probably thought I was going to ask her for some spare change, or if she could wipe me bum for me, or whatever it is that those people want from healthy-legged people. I also noticed that the supermarkets put completely different things down on the bottom three feet of the shelves. All the cool toys are down there, for example, presumably because chil'n's is small. It's also a great altitude to find anti-bedsore medicaments, for some reason.
So, I let myself be pushed by the Weyside in Guildford, where, at one point, a husky young native was required to wheel my fat ass up a steep incline. The Sistas, for all their heart, lacked the muscle to get the job done, so he, being a true-hearted salt-of-earth kind of guy, waved them off and grunted and sweated till I crested the hill. Had the man known that I could have, at any point in time, simply stood up and hobbled up the hill under my own power, he most certainly would have picked me up and broken me over his knee.
Tomorrow morning, we'll be visiting Stonehenge, or Stone'enge, as the locals quaintly call it. We'll also visit the haunted city, Salisbury, to watch the homosexuals. Ta!
I like reading OSNews for some reason. I think I like to catch the geeky news about SkyOS, or the occasional retro curmudgeonry that rolls by about Lotus 1-2-3 or OS/2. Being the old-timer that I am, it's hard to resist a paean from my youth about 10-finger productivity.
Unfortunately, they've become the epicenter of stupid for the tech press. Check out this article, which explodes the myths about competition being good: "Competition is not Good"
'It gives consumers more choice'
Choice is good when there's one agreed base standard, and a number of compatible approaches. For example, there are many Linux distributions, but they are all Linux, and they can all run the same software. They are 'flavours' of the same thing, that is a good choice. People like different flavours.
Competition does not produce easier choices for consumers. All they get is added un-interoperability and complexity with competitive choices.
Now, if you go read that article, which I do not recommend, you'll slowly come to the realization that this moron is just annoyed that he has to make the effort to choose between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. He's willing to surrender his entire free will to some (hopefully) benevolent dictator, abolish brand names, and forsake the free market economy because choosing which format to buy the Firefly special edition box set in is hard. What a hopeless, whiny-assed sissy.
Of course, things don't get better when they start tossing political analysis at you. "Net Neutrality" is one monikers that has overshadowed the thing named. The discussion is often framed in a way that an uninformed listener would assume there was lobbying going on to abolish some sort of laws that are now protecting consumers from big, bad tiered-Internet ninjas.
But: There is no net neutrality legislation, there never was, and hopefully, there never will be. The argument over "Net Neutrality" is about whether or not the U.S. government should introduce legislation forbidding bandwidth throttling by ISPs. It's the "have you stopped beating your wife?" straw man for the Slashdot crowd. You'll notice that this article calls the Supreme Court's decision that the U.S. government shouldn't step in and configure the ISPs' Cisco routers for them, "Backing for Two-Tier Internet":
The US Justice Department has said that internet service providers should be allowed to charge for priority traffic. The agency said it was opposed to 'network neutrality', the idea that all data on the net is treated equally. The comments put the agency at odds with companies such as Microsoft and Google, who have called for legislation to guarantee equal access to the net.
Of course, this would also mean that an enforcement infrastructure would also have to be put in place, making sure that everyone got their "fair share" of said bandwidth, as if backbone routers and POPs just fell off a tree somewhere. God forbid ISPs be allowed to tune the services that they developed and paid for as they wish. Let's let the government decides who gets bandwidth, and how much is enough! That will make it all fair and neutral-like. Whenever a politician uses the word "fair", hang on to your wallet.
Well, my trackbacks are now working, it seems. There's some ugly Python spaghetti-code going on behind the scenes that translates back and forth between absolute urls, non-absolute relative urls, and upper-lower-camel case; but it works.
Trackbacks are only good for Movable Type, though. Which I can't stand anymore. MT used to be the only thing out there, but there's something that really, really, really galls me about the way it rebuilds your entire site into static HTML pages everytime you update a post. I'm sure it's awesomeness if you've got your server running on an old TV remote, but nowadays we're all running our web servers on 100-core 64-bit terahertz moonshot computers that can simultaneously compute π, encode MPEG video, and mix the best goddam margaritas you've ever tasted, all without breaking a sweat.
So yeah, I figured out how to implement trackbacks in Django, to a point where they more or less work. Now why is Wordpress fucking with me? It seems to be thrown off by the fact that Wordpress sends a HEAD request before it downloads and parses the page, in the vain hope that the X-Pingback header will be set. I can't figure out how to do that in Django's generic views, so I just use the secondary method, that being a link element in the XHTML code. But now, whenever a Worpdress blog pings me, I get this kind of crap:
[09/Sep/2007 15:04:23] "GET /blog/2007/sep/08/vacation/ HTTP/1.1" 200 27367
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (104, 'Connection reset by peer')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (32, 'Broken pipe')
Being the half-assed programmer that I am, I am at a total loss. I can't even do a Lazyweb request here, seeing as my 4 visits a day are unlikely to bring the Django HTTP gurus by. I won't be able to sleep at night, thinking of all the enlightened Wordpress Users who are probably out there try to "Keep the discussion going" with me.
Ever since June, when the iPhone went live, I've heard about nothing else in the tech press, nerd podcasts, and the Apple Fanboisphere. Is it really that way over in the States (the only place you can get them), or does the iPhone actually seem to be doing well?
Ahh, my first vacation since joining The Company. My queue is cleaned up, my email is forwarded, and an elaborate Sieve session has accomplished in a mere two hours what less civilized mail systems can do with a key combination: The Corporate Vacation Email.
It's been five months now since I came 'cross the channel and started meeting the natives, learning the lingo, and getting used to the fact that everyone here talks like Pinky. Now, I'll be letting my hair down for the next 10 days or so. As well as putting my poor, broken foot up on the coffee table.
As soon as I get my x-rays back from the socialist medical system (they still copy them with coal rubbings on wax paper over here, apparently), I'll post pictures of the metatarsalar breakage here for your morbid enjoyment. Don't thank me yet.
The other half of Sistaweb will be joining us for the week. We'll allow her to sleep here rent-free for an entire week, even though she refused to bring a carton of cigarettes as payment. Damned non-smokers and their principles. It's like those non-smokers back in the World War II who didn't sign up for cigarette rations. Throwing away a gold mine, that is. Our grandfathers probably had a word for those guys, and if I knew my grandfather at all, that word was sissy-boy.
The girls have rented a wheelchair for me, seeing as I won't be too much fun doing a London pub-crawl on crutches. I've already had a forehead-slapping moment over this, as you probably are right now. Why haven't I thought of taking a wheelchair with me before? That would've come in handy on more than one occasion, the Wreckyll in Jeckyll not least among them.
Man, Apple is on a roll. Not only have they got me hooked for a new computer, a new laptop, a new office package, and a replacement for my aging MythTV box, but now I have to start thinking about a new iPod. Now, let's see what Uncle Steve is going to me be costing me 'til Christmas Time:
Item
Damage
20" iMac
1199.00
Macbook
1099.00
8GB iPod Touch
299.00
AppleTV
299.00
iWork '08
79.00
iLife '08
79.00
Total:
$3,054.00
Not bad for a day's work, Mr. Jobs. And what's up for the rest of September? Maybe some irresistible bionic iFoot to replace the one I broke playing frisbee at the company picnic last week?
Although there's a remarkable lack of iPhone hype around the office, we being a big-time Linux company and all, there's an amazing amount of Mac fanboiism. Pretty much all of us have Macs at home. The explanation for this is simple: After dealing with Linux problems all day long, there's something nice about going home to something you can spend all your time using and not making up excuses for why it looks like shit and doesn't work.
I like Linux, mind you. I use it day-in, day-out for my desktop at work, for my webservers, and it brings in my daily bread. We all love it here, pretty much like a family loves and therefore tolerates the embarrassing second cousin with the Downs'. But people are walking all over the office today buzzing about the upcoming announcement from Apple.
Will it be the long-awaited iMac redesign? Will it be a new Mini? My boss is actually carrying his phone to the pub after work today so he can sit on engadget and get a realtime update. Linus would not be pleased...
Last login: Thu Jul 26 12:17:28 from nat-pool-fab.re Welcome to Darwin! ericbook:~ eric$ mutt -bash: mutt: command not found ericbook:~ eric$ open /Applications/Mail.app/ ericbook:~ eric$
Ahh. Like coming in after a long day of plowing the fields and sticking your aching feet into a pot of hot water. After running Linux all day at work, you feel like slipping into something more comfortable. Sam knows it. Zonker knows it, though he won't admit it. It's the right amount of just-workiness you need to let you relax, while knowing you could, at any given moment, do something like:
OK, here's one with drivel. I do like it, but I have a couple of gripes.
First problem: I was hopelessly confused by the login screen. The type of journal seems to be locked on livejournal, as the drop-down menu for journal types is inexplicably disabled until you enter a username. -1 for usabilty
Second problem: Useless stripping of trailing slash, which mangled my xmlrpc URL. Error 301 was ignored, which makes sense since it's a post and all, but I couldn't log in. It mangled my URL then choked on the error :-/
Third problem: didn't want to download my recent posts. Although there might be a misunderstanding about just what "recent" means.
Fourth problem: Doesn't let me choose post status anywhere. And there's nowhere I can find to choose text filters. This is more of a feature request, really.
Fifth problem: craps out after posting, probably because it keeps mangling the trailing slashes from my URLs. Is there an RFC somewhere that says that POSTS can't end with slashes? Nobody tell the Django folks.
Well, maybe it'll at least let me post to my blog from work every now and then.
Man, I dang sure missed the entire month of June. I've been in the UK now for about two months, and let me tell ya: They sure do get some rain around here. I always thought those stories about English people having gills were legends and fantasies. Now, I'm not so sure.
For the love of GOD, for the last time, in the name of ALL THAT IS HOLY, Cluster Services is NOT COMPATIBLE with 4.5! If you're running a cluster, DO NOT update to 4.5 until the Cluster Suite is UPDATED TO 4.5!
That is all.
P.S. And NO, cmirror is not available yet. Maybe at the end of the month.
I went outside to smoke a cigarette. All rooms in England are for non-smokers, you'll find, as are the rooms, apartments, and houses listed for rent in the local papers. The litany at the end of all the ads reads, "No smokers, canvassers, or DSS", which stands for Department of Social Services. So, okay they hate smokers and welfare cases, as do we all. But the British have their own definition for 'non-smoker', which basically means you only smoke when you drink. Everybody smokes over here, and they all live somewhere.
The evening was cool; almost cold, really, as I suspect the evenings around here generally are. I stood on the corner of Osborne and Netley, watching the blackbirds getting ready to do whatever it is they do at night, when I spied a man, some yards away, bounding up the sidewalk with a jaunty gait. I held my cigarette just in front of my mouth, watching this figure with suspicion. He was short, about 5 feet tall, and round as a soccer ball. He was wearing light-colored trousers and a dark blazer, the left breast of which was adorned with an enormous, orange prize-ribbon.
As he approached me, his features became distinct in the bad lighting, and I realized he was positively beaming with pride. His face was ruddy, and split with a grin that wouldn't have looked out of place behind a wheelbarrow full of poker chips on the way to the cash-out. I placed him in his mid-40s, but maybe his thinning red hair and roly-poly stature made him look older than he really was.
He halted just a few feet from me, and said, with oddly struggling words, "Good evening, mister!"
I looked him up and down, cigarette still burning between my shaky fingers, and replied, "hi, how are ya..." He wobbled his head a bit, then walked around me on his way up the street. I noticed something written in gold on his orange ribbon, and read it as it flashed in the lamplight.
I judged him more than a wee bit 'differently-abled', as they say. I watched as he cautiously crossed the empty street, looking both ways at least twice, then gingerly stepping into the street and crossing it at a run.
I thought about what I had seen written on the ribbon: "A Very Special Boy". Hmm, I thought, I wonder who gave him that? Whoever it was, they made his whole day.
I put my cigarette out and walked back into the guest house.
My buddy Sam sent me an email a couple of days ago indicating that he just might have joined The Family recently. And he joined it a much higher level than I, I might add, considering I'm still lumbering along in the PowerPC world; my G4 Powerbook, though a loyal and trusted friend, seems slow as molasses in January these days.
He also mentioned an old OS/2 habit, one which we separately shared back in the day. I started using OS/2 when I worked at UPS. One of our managers was running 2.1, with the old Presentation Manager that looked like a crappy(er) Windows 2.0, albeit with long filenames and the ability to run concurrent DOS sessions. I avoided it until OS/2 3.0 came out.
In '94, when Warp hit the shelves, I rushed out to Soft-Warehouse1 in Alpharetta, looked in the Operating Systems2 department until I found a box, then gave the man $300 dollars for the privilege of running it. Then, I walked over the desktop applications department, and put down another $495 for Lotus Smartsuite/2. Then I OEM'd 16MB of RAM for about $400 to make it all go.
Now, many may see OS/2 as a butt-ugly cousin of Windows, and they may be right. But back then, it was a work of art. Especially in the sense that it wasn't an exact science getting it to run. Nothing ever really worked like it was supposed to. Without the fallback of a DOS prompt, you had to have a second, fully-functional machine to do things like edit the CONFIG.SYS on the installation floppies to make sure your DASD drivers were loading. And most of the drivers were written so that, if they encountered an error while loading, they'd bork the whole boot process, just to be on the safe side.
The graphical interface also hung constantly. The Workplace Shell, despite (or maybe due to) all its object-orientiness, was horribly unstable. But I never saw a hang that wasn't cured with Control-Alt-Delete. That key combo went right down to the kernel, and always gave a satisfying, unconfirmed reboot, wedged GUI be damned. There was even a 3rd party program called Watchcat that sat on the serial port, or on a secondary Hercules/MCGA monitor, and let you monitor and kill programs remotely. The kernel's Kung Fu was strong like that, but the GUI was just ass.
Now, when Chicago started finally coming down the pipe, and even the Rolling Stones where pulled into the OS marketing world ("Start me up", anyone?), OS/2 fans like myself were sure that this pissant little DOS extender with a homely face wouldn't be the future. It couldn't be the future, it was just too depressing. It still wasn't a 32-bit OS, though the 386 had been out for over 8 years. It still used FAT, for crying out loud. In short, Chicago sucked.
OS/2 seemed like a scrappy little underdog, nipping heroically at the Microsoft behemoth's heels. I'm not sure why it gave that impression. At the time, IBM was much bigger than Microsoft, a huge, multinational corporation with interests in basically every aspect of electronics. They just couldn't write or market good software.
I'm not sure why I just wrote 500 words on OS/2. I actually wanted to write something about Linux.
Software stores used to have a whole "Operating Systems" department, back when there was more than one operating system, and Windows was still called an "Operating Environment" ↩
Man, I'm unprepared. There's a checklist of things you should do before moving to England. I came over here without any money, preparation, or attack plan. There's something unbelievably stupid about this. It worked for me when I moved to Germany, but moving to England's a bit more complicated, apparently. Either that, or I'm remembering it wrong.
But I'm not the only one. The office I'm working in is full of non-British people. It's a rag-tag group of Germans, Italians, Brazilians, Spaniards, one (1) American, and who knows what else that all found themselves in the same boat when they first came over. This despite promises from The Company to help one resettle; promises which are certainly not kept and, when referred to in conversation, change their shape and character like a Democrat on a whistle-stop.
But at some point a kindly soul in the department, now departed, made a list of the reality of the situation. It's a short list of what one really needs to do when moving to England. Unfortunately, I only found out about it after I'd already been here a week. Here's your to-do list once you've arrived in England:
Get a room. If possible, get a rental agreement or any bill with your name and address on it. (proof of address)
Deposit is usually 1 1/2 times the rent. Deposit and first rent is to be paid beforehand. If the room is unfurnished, see "Things to Buy" for shops and example prices.
Get a letter from your office manager (HR Lady) stating that you are working for the company and including your address. (proof of employment)
Get a bank account. Just walk in with your documents:
Passport or national ID card
Proof of employment (see 2.). it might be handy to have your contract with you.
Proof of address
Banks
HSBC – try to get a standard account (they try to sell you an advanced package including insurances etc.)
NatWest – Also recommended as this bank does not charge for withdrawing money from a different bank's cash machines
Give your bank details to The Company
Register with Inland Revenue – this is done by your HR manager. You should get your tax code about 2 weeks later (PAYE Coding Notice)
At the end of the fiscal year (ending April 5th), you will get a "P60 End of Year Certificate" detailing your "Pay and Income Tax" levels.
Get a National Insurance Number by applying at a Job Centre Plus office. They ask for dtails before they schedule an interview appointment to verify your eligibility. Appointments are scheduled about two weeks ahead, and take place in the nearest county office, which usually isn't near at all. Without an NI number, you will be on emergency tax, which is higher than the standard tax rate.
Documents:
Passport
National ID card
Driving License or any other official document identifying you (Birth certificate, police registration, medical card, etc.)
Proof of employment (see 2.)
Recent payslip
Bank statement
Proof of address (utility bill, rental agreement, etc. – see 1.)
It might be handy to have your PAYE Coding Notice with you
As money is paid in a timely manner so it is available on the 27th, try to get your appointment after this date.
If you are British, a citizen of a member state of the EU, or other Commonwealth citizen, you can apply for inclusion on the Register of Electors. This will allow you to vote at local government elections. Your credibility will rise (good for tenancy applications or bank-related matters) and you are obliged to pay Council Taxes1
If you buy any TV or radio equipment, you will be asked for your address, which will be automatically forwarded to the "TV Licensing Office"
Get a Tesco Clubcard
Get a life ;-)
Any address change has to be communicated to all above-mentioned authorities. For the official notices to local council, the TV licensing, and most other on-line services, you can use I am Moving , where you can create/use an account for free.
All of this could have been avoided with a bit of planning. I am bitterly disappointed in myself.
Council taxes are universal as far as I can tell, and are perceived, by the British at least, as an extension of the rent. ↩
Farnborough derives its name from from the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Ferneberga (Fern Hill) and is mentioned in the Domesday Book (1086). But for the coming of the army at nearby Aldershot, the arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flying, Farnborough would probably have remained an isolated heathland village, that is until the latter half of the 20th century when the population moved out of London suburbia and became commuters.
"But for the … arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flight…". That's a pretty big conditional. There are probably a lot of places whose development was seriously affected by railways and the advent of powered flight. But I understand where the good Mr. Parkins is coming from.
I had forgotten the cable to connect my camera to my laptop. Of all the stupid things that I packed for the trip, 50 different USB cables, a USB hub, power adapters for devices I’d forgotten, not to mention devices whose power adapters I’d forgotten, I forgot the one thing that was absolutely necessary and planned-for. Not to mention irreplaceable, seeing as every camera maker in the world decided that their camera’s little hole should look different from all the other cameras’ little holes.
I walked into a little computer store on the strip in Fleet, Hampshire. Walking up to the pasty-faced, teenaged part-timer there, I introduced myself and shook his hand, which seemed to shock him.
He unconsciously wiped his hands on his pants and said, “eh...nice to meet you, sir. What can I do for you?”
I asked him, “do you have any USB card-readers?”
“Um, yeah," he answered. "I think I saw some around here somewhere.”
I looked around the shop, which was organized and clean. Man, he must really be the FNG around here. He finally found what I was looking for, stored on a shelf right next to where he had been sitting. He handed it to me and I started reading the back of the packaging.
“Just looking to see if it works with my Mac,” I told him.
“Oh, it's USB, so it should work,” he answered, and took the reader out of my hand. He moved his lips while he read the package. “Oh, yeah,” he said finally. “Right there it says it: ‘Requires Mac OS 9 or later’.” He looked at me skeptically. “So, you do have OS 9 or later, don’t you?”
“Um, yeah, I think so.” OS 9 went out of style back in the ‘90s.
He moved around to the register, and I handed him my Visa card. He looked uncertain as he turned it over in his hand. “This thing doesn’t have a chip on it?”
I took it back and examined it. “No, I guess it doesn’t.”
“Well, I don’t think we can take that, then.”
“Why don’t you just swipe it,” I said. “Give it a go.”
He shrugged and swiped it through the machine.
From behind me, a voice said, “it’s all chips nowadays, you know.”
I looked around, and saw that an older woman was standing behind me. She looked to be in her mid 40s, and wore a name plate with the store’s logo on it. “You can’t get nothing without a dozen little chips in it.”
I nodded agreement, and turned back to the young man behind the register.
“So, what kind of Mac you got, then?”
“A PowerBook G4.”
He nodded approvingly. “Nice piece of kit, that.” The little machine that had taken my card made a loud ping!, and spit out a receipt. He tore it off and gave it to me to sign, along with the card reader.
“Now, you have a nice day sir, and do please visit us again.”
I thanked him, said goodbye to the chip-lady, and put the small package into my bag next to my laptop. “Thanks, man, I’ll do that.” Nice kid.
Didja ever discover something that made your reality skip a beat? You know how, for just a second, something is so far out of place that you can't even figure out what's wrong with the picture? For example, the Augsburg Wireless-Internet provider Cyberways has had the same guy on their start page for years:
Every time you connect to the internet over public wireless in Augsburg, that dude was right there, staring at you with those soulless black eyes. Like a doll's eyes...
And the weird thing was, I always figured he was the boss at Cyberways. I even thought I saw him once on the tram. I hate it when people use the same stock photos everywhere. Everybody's full of shit. Oh, I guess it's effective use of your cash dollars, seeing as it's cheaper than paying attractive people to work for you. But still, why not just be honest for a split second?
You get this kind of thing all over the Internet, of course. If you've ever shopped for web hosting, you'll notice, after a few visits to the providers' pages, that their employees all kind of look alike. And there's always some woman somewhere holding a laptop at her waist in near-sexual ecstasy over the reasonable shared hosting prices.
It's a leitmotif throughout the enter hosting industry: Shared Webspace=Chick with laptop.
Rube, look, for the last freakin time, look RIGHT when you step off a curb! These people drive on the other side of the F$@&-ing road over here! You wanna get ya brains splattered all over me?
What? I dunno. I'm just kind of sitting around, waiting on things. I just spent way too much time transferring money across European borders, and reclaiming my identity. But the new passports are wonderful pieces of fortitude. Here' s a few quotes from my new passport:
And that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth. - Abraham Lincoln
The principle of free governments adheres to the American soil. It is bedded in it, immovable as its mountains. - Daniel Webster
Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. - George Washington
We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. - excerpt from the Declaration of Independence
Your concept of love may be different, but know that I love this world.
I like reading Scott Adams' blog on occasion. Much like Balph Eubanks, he's glib, amusing, and completely lacking in morality. Take, for example, his latest strawman-laden posting regarding the visit of a certain Mr. Ahmedinejad:
I was happy to hear that NYC didn't allow Iranian President Ahmadinejad
to place a wreath at the WTC site. And I was happy that Columbia
University is rescinding the offer to let him speak. If you let a guy like
that express his views, before long the entire world will want freedom
of speech.
...
If Ahmadinejad thinks he can be our friend by honoring our heroes and
opening a dialog, he underestimates our ability to misinterpret him.
Fucking idiot. I hate him.
Well, there's certainly some rye wit at work here. Yes, it is quite ironic that a country led by a genocidal religious dictator, which the USA most certainly is, would object to a fellow genocidal religious madman visiting its most sensitive cultural site. I mean, Mahmoud's only trying to "open a dialog" here, isn't he? Isn't that the meaning of Ahmedinejad's visit? Isn't Ahmedinejad just exercising "Free Speech", as Adams says? Aren't we wrong in denying this poor man that right?
Aside from the obvious jackassery involved in claiming that a man who directly controls his entire country's media is having trouble getting his point of view out; or that the United Nations will let him speak before the leaders of the world to the point where they forget to blink for an hour; aside from all this, this is not a question of whether or not Mahmoud is allowed to say what he wants. The question is, in accordance with the Grand Unified Theory of Rubean Mechanics, Who's going to pay for it. It's a question of whether or not Americans should be paying for his plane fare, his security, and his accommodation while he's here, pissing on Ground Zero and generating propaganda for totalitarian lobbying groups like MoveOn.org and International ANSWER.
All of Adams' ridiculous assertions never mention the one central fact here: There is no compelling reason for American taxpayers to foot the bill, so this guy, who just held one of his popular "Death to America" parades, can come over here and lecture them on anything. I personally don't much care what Ahmedinejad thinks, I can see the general thrust of his inclinations. He's spitting on the United States and Western Culture daily, and then expects to be treated with deference in return. Fuck him.
This kind of Devil's Advocacy isn't new to Adams. At least, I hope it's just that. He's apparently one of those celebrities that have forgotten the hard work involved in their ascendency, and assume that they're rich because of some accident of nature, akin to divine providence. Humans, himself included, are all just a bunch of "moist robots" with no capacity for thought, no free will; we've apparently just been programmed by Mother Nature to do the things we've done or will do. There is no mind, there is no choice, there is only the stimuli in our environments, and the response that was determined by a chance arrangement of atoms into chemicals during the Big Bang. Or something.
It's an obscene display of thoughtlessness, a conceit of someone trying so hard to seem above all this. Adams' Dilbert is amusing, and his blog is a bit of junk food for the brain at times. But he's got the morals of a two-dollar whore.
Last night we didn't make it. The two Frenchmen surrendered the evening, seeing as it was Trotzky's birthday, and therefore a time for somber reflection or something. So, we rode around big town Farnborough for a couple of hours, grabbed some grub, and then headed back to the apartment to watch a movie.
We watched Fur, which cemented my belief that Nicole Kidman is the perfect woman. Not only does she look good in her own slutty little librarian sort of way, she gives a guy a handjob in this movie while shaving his hairy back. That's my kind of girl, a real little trooper.
Anyhoo, it's back off to London now, for a second try at getting sloppy somewhere besides sitting at home in front of the boob tube. Wish us luck.
Vacation week is winding down, and I'm getting ready to leave the driving to Southwest Trains and go drinking in London. I'll try to keep it under two weeks this time, but no promises. We'll tramp it a bit through Soho, I guess, just me, the girls, and a couple of frog-eaters from the office.
I wonder why I never get to go drinking with Englishmen? It's probably for the best. There's a quote that gets bandied about, especially in the local newspapers, about England being a nation of drunks and scalawags. I can't say much about that, but it does seem that the pubs all close at 11:00 PM for a reason. At 5 o'clock, they pour out of their offices and into the public houses, seemingly on a race against the clock to get themselves 'faced before the early last call.
When they were finally permitted to stay open past 11, in the hope that the binge-drinking would abate in light of longer opening hours, they found themselves doubly-cursed in that the Englishmen were every bit as drunk at 11, but didn't have to go home. All pubs here are set up so that you have to go to the counter to get your drinks, instead of having them brought to your table. There's a built-in handbrake there: a system where you can't get any more drink once you lose the ability to walk is founded upon sound principle and good advices.
I've done nothing today; nothing but clean out the cluttered closets of my preferred newsfeed reader. There were some connections in there that were sorely neglected. I could use a bit more time to wade through the degenerate filth that is my blogroll, but sadly, I work. The Company is tolerant in their control over my time, fair since they do not pay hourly; but tolerance has its limits, and I doubt they would look kindly upon my spending the business day in a fugue state, reading entry after entry of dialectics about Jessica Simpson's tits, or Brittney Spears' overplayed poonanny.
Nevertheless, it saddens me that my everyday is not blessed with the nuggets of wisdom from skippystalin:
Being the only person with an out-of-control substance abuse problem in a relationship is tough. Most romantic couplings are based on common interests and most of my interests culminate in my waking up in a pool of what I think is my own urine and not being quite sure what time zone I'm in. I'm much like a cat in that I have a tendancy of marking my territory with my vomit, blood and gallons of my semen...My ability to smoke, drink and masturbate furiously at the same time might not be much, it's all that I have.
Ahh, skippystalin, how I've missed you, and your nuggets.
This is how I spend my vacation: visiting Stonehenge on one day; reading the melancholy musings of skippystalin the next, picturing him composing scholarly tracts through bitter tears, a crushed Viagra dissolving in a highball of Jack Daniels next to the keyboard, as another long evening fades into a blur of poetry, madness, and vigorous bouts of hate-filled masturbation. And wondering, of the two, which is the more meaningful and fitting monument to humanity?
They should've just burned enjoyeverysandwich to CD, stuck it to the side of Voyager along with its author, and shot the whole lot into space back when they had government funding to do so, all in the name of making a good first impression for whatever aliens were out cruising for an easy meal.
skippystalin's output is prodigious, to be sure, but there was an entire blogroll to consider:
The lunatics are running the asylum over at Straight White Guy's place. Eric's testicles are mentioned, indirectly. Remind me to change my passwords regularly and start using strong encryption.
How stoned do you have to be to cheat on Jessica Alba? I could jack off to Jessica Alba while a big mean dog was chasing me and this idiot is cheating on her. I decided to confront him about this and I screamed at him, hey, what is your problem. And he said I should get off his lawn. And I said, no, no you get off the lawn. You get off. Then he went inside, probably because deep down, he knew I had made some pretty good points.
JimGoad.com is no more, but if you're a Goad fan (ladies!), you can find find him here. Discussion of Brittany's latest, erm, candid photos is also to be found, but be aware that the following picture is used as a visual aid:
This morning we picked up my new wheelchair. It's a sporty European marque, with an aggressive stance, low-profile tires, and a head-turning cherry-red metalflake paint job. It's not that great on the corners, but it'll take any one of y'all on the straightaways.
I've never done time on wheels. On the whole, I found it to be not all that bad. Then again, I don't figure that most wheelchair-bound men my age get to enjoy being pushed around town by a couple of sexy German bloggerettes. Thanks, ladies: the jealous looks from the other local cripples was the icing on the cake. Here's a little something extra for you, babes. (via AoSHQ)
Funny things happen when you're on wheels. I saw a lady I work with while being carted through Tesco's frozen food department. I said hello, and she just looked right through me, steering her cart so as not to make contact with the leper. She probably thought I was going to ask her for some spare change, or if she could wipe me bum for me, or whatever it is that those people want from healthy-legged people. I also noticed that the supermarkets put completely different things down on the bottom three feet of the shelves. All the cool toys are down there, for example, presumably because chil'n's is small. It's also a great altitude to find anti-bedsore medicaments, for some reason.
So, I let myself be pushed by the Weyside in Guildford, where, at one point, a husky young native was required to wheel my fat ass up a steep incline. The Sistas, for all their heart, lacked the muscle to get the job done, so he, being a true-hearted salt-of-earth kind of guy, waved them off and grunted and sweated till I crested the hill. Had the man known that I could have, at any point in time, simply stood up and hobbled up the hill under my own power, he most certainly would have picked me up and broken me over his knee.
Tomorrow morning, we'll be visiting Stonehenge, or Stone'enge, as the locals quaintly call it. We'll also visit the haunted city, Salisbury, to watch the homosexuals. Ta!
I like reading OSNews for some reason. I think I like to catch the geeky news about SkyOS, or the occasional retro curmudgeonry that rolls by about Lotus 1-2-3 or OS/2. Being the old-timer that I am, it's hard to resist a paean from my youth about 10-finger productivity.
Unfortunately, they've become the epicenter of stupid for the tech press. Check out this article, which explodes the myths about competition being good: "Competition is not Good"
'It gives consumers more choice'
Choice is good when there's one agreed base standard, and a number of compatible approaches. For example, there are many Linux distributions, but they are all Linux, and they can all run the same software. They are 'flavours' of the same thing, that is a good choice. People like different flavours.
Competition does not produce easier choices for consumers. All they get is added un-interoperability and complexity with competitive choices.
Now, if you go read that article, which I do not recommend, you'll slowly come to the realization that this moron is just annoyed that he has to make the effort to choose between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. He's willing to surrender his entire free will to some (hopefully) benevolent dictator, abolish brand names, and forsake the free market economy because choosing which format to buy the Firefly special edition box set in is hard. What a hopeless, whiny-assed sissy.
Of course, things don't get better when they start tossing political analysis at you. "Net Neutrality" is one monikers that has overshadowed the thing named. The discussion is often framed in a way that an uninformed listener would assume there was lobbying going on to abolish some sort of laws that are now protecting consumers from big, bad tiered-Internet ninjas.
But: There is no net neutrality legislation, there never was, and hopefully, there never will be. The argument over "Net Neutrality" is about whether or not the U.S. government should introduce legislation forbidding bandwidth throttling by ISPs. It's the "have you stopped beating your wife?" straw man for the Slashdot crowd. You'll notice that this article calls the Supreme Court's decision that the U.S. government shouldn't step in and configure the ISPs' Cisco routers for them, "Backing for Two-Tier Internet":
The US Justice Department has said that internet service providers should be allowed to charge for priority traffic. The agency said it was opposed to 'network neutrality', the idea that all data on the net is treated equally. The comments put the agency at odds with companies such as Microsoft and Google, who have called for legislation to guarantee equal access to the net.
Of course, this would also mean that an enforcement infrastructure would also have to be put in place, making sure that everyone got their "fair share" of said bandwidth, as if backbone routers and POPs just fell off a tree somewhere. God forbid ISPs be allowed to tune the services that they developed and paid for as they wish. Let's let the government decides who gets bandwidth, and how much is enough! That will make it all fair and neutral-like. Whenever a politician uses the word "fair", hang on to your wallet.
Well, my trackbacks are now working, it seems. There's some ugly Python spaghetti-code going on behind the scenes that translates back and forth between absolute urls, non-absolute relative urls, and upper-lower-camel case; but it works.
Trackbacks are only good for Movable Type, though. Which I can't stand anymore. MT used to be the only thing out there, but there's something that really, really, really galls me about the way it rebuilds your entire site into static HTML pages everytime you update a post. I'm sure it's awesomeness if you've got your server running on an old TV remote, but nowadays we're all running our web servers on 100-core 64-bit terahertz moonshot computers that can simultaneously compute π, encode MPEG video, and mix the best goddam margaritas you've ever tasted, all without breaking a sweat.
So yeah, I figured out how to implement trackbacks in Django, to a point where they more or less work. Now why is Wordpress fucking with me? It seems to be thrown off by the fact that Wordpress sends a HEAD request before it downloads and parses the page, in the vain hope that the X-Pingback header will be set. I can't figure out how to do that in Django's generic views, so I just use the secondary method, that being a link element in the XHTML code. But now, whenever a Worpdress blog pings me, I get this kind of crap:
[09/Sep/2007 15:04:23] "GET /blog/2007/sep/08/vacation/ HTTP/1.1" 200 27367
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (104, 'Connection reset by peer')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (32, 'Broken pipe')
Being the half-assed programmer that I am, I am at a total loss. I can't even do a Lazyweb request here, seeing as my 4 visits a day are unlikely to bring the Django HTTP gurus by. I won't be able to sleep at night, thinking of all the enlightened Wordpress Users who are probably out there try to "Keep the discussion going" with me.
Ever since June, when the iPhone went live, I've heard about nothing else in the tech press, nerd podcasts, and the Apple Fanboisphere. Is it really that way over in the States (the only place you can get them), or does the iPhone actually seem to be doing well?
Ahh, my first vacation since joining The Company. My queue is cleaned up, my email is forwarded, and an elaborate Sieve session has accomplished in a mere two hours what less civilized mail systems can do with a key combination: The Corporate Vacation Email.
It's been five months now since I came 'cross the channel and started meeting the natives, learning the lingo, and getting used to the fact that everyone here talks like Pinky. Now, I'll be letting my hair down for the next 10 days or so. As well as putting my poor, broken foot up on the coffee table.
As soon as I get my x-rays back from the socialist medical system (they still copy them with coal rubbings on wax paper over here, apparently), I'll post pictures of the metatarsalar breakage here for your morbid enjoyment. Don't thank me yet.
The other half of Sistaweb will be joining us for the week. We'll allow her to sleep here rent-free for an entire week, even though she refused to bring a carton of cigarettes as payment. Damned non-smokers and their principles. It's like those non-smokers back in the World War II who didn't sign up for cigarette rations. Throwing away a gold mine, that is. Our grandfathers probably had a word for those guys, and if I knew my grandfather at all, that word was sissy-boy.
The girls have rented a wheelchair for me, seeing as I won't be too much fun doing a London pub-crawl on crutches. I've already had a forehead-slapping moment over this, as you probably are right now. Why haven't I thought of taking a wheelchair with me before? That would've come in handy on more than one occasion, the Wreckyll in Jeckyll not least among them.
Man, Apple is on a roll. Not only have they got me hooked for a new computer, a new laptop, a new office package, and a replacement for my aging MythTV box, but now I have to start thinking about a new iPod. Now, let's see what Uncle Steve is going to me be costing me 'til Christmas Time:
Item
Damage
20" iMac
1199.00
Macbook
1099.00
8GB iPod Touch
299.00
AppleTV
299.00
iWork '08
79.00
iLife '08
79.00
Total:
$3,054.00
Not bad for a day's work, Mr. Jobs. And what's up for the rest of September? Maybe some irresistible bionic iFoot to replace the one I broke playing frisbee at the company picnic last week?
Although there's a remarkable lack of iPhone hype around the office, we being a big-time Linux company and all, there's an amazing amount of Mac fanboiism. Pretty much all of us have Macs at home. The explanation for this is simple: After dealing with Linux problems all day long, there's something nice about going home to something you can spend all your time using and not making up excuses for why it looks like shit and doesn't work.
I like Linux, mind you. I use it day-in, day-out for my desktop at work, for my webservers, and it brings in my daily bread. We all love it here, pretty much like a family loves and therefore tolerates the embarrassing second cousin with the Downs'. But people are walking all over the office today buzzing about the upcoming announcement from Apple.
Will it be the long-awaited iMac redesign? Will it be a new Mini? My boss is actually carrying his phone to the pub after work today so he can sit on engadget and get a realtime update. Linus would not be pleased...
Last login: Thu Jul 26 12:17:28 from nat-pool-fab.re Welcome to Darwin! ericbook:~ eric$ mutt -bash: mutt: command not found ericbook:~ eric$ open /Applications/Mail.app/ ericbook:~ eric$
Ahh. Like coming in after a long day of plowing the fields and sticking your aching feet into a pot of hot water. After running Linux all day at work, you feel like slipping into something more comfortable. Sam knows it. Zonker knows it, though he won't admit it. It's the right amount of just-workiness you need to let you relax, while knowing you could, at any given moment, do something like:
OK, here's one with drivel. I do like it, but I have a couple of gripes.
First problem: I was hopelessly confused by the login screen. The type of journal seems to be locked on livejournal, as the drop-down menu for journal types is inexplicably disabled until you enter a username. -1 for usabilty
Second problem: Useless stripping of trailing slash, which mangled my xmlrpc URL. Error 301 was ignored, which makes sense since it's a post and all, but I couldn't log in. It mangled my URL then choked on the error :-/
Third problem: didn't want to download my recent posts. Although there might be a misunderstanding about just what "recent" means.
Fourth problem: Doesn't let me choose post status anywhere. And there's nowhere I can find to choose text filters. This is more of a feature request, really.
Fifth problem: craps out after posting, probably because it keeps mangling the trailing slashes from my URLs. Is there an RFC somewhere that says that POSTS can't end with slashes? Nobody tell the Django folks.
Well, maybe it'll at least let me post to my blog from work every now and then.
Man, I dang sure missed the entire month of June. I've been in the UK now for about two months, and let me tell ya: They sure do get some rain around here. I always thought those stories about English people having gills were legends and fantasies. Now, I'm not so sure.
For the love of GOD, for the last time, in the name of ALL THAT IS HOLY, Cluster Services is NOT COMPATIBLE with 4.5! If you're running a cluster, DO NOT update to 4.5 until the Cluster Suite is UPDATED TO 4.5!
That is all.
P.S. And NO, cmirror is not available yet. Maybe at the end of the month.
I went outside to smoke a cigarette. All rooms in England are for non-smokers, you'll find, as are the rooms, apartments, and houses listed for rent in the local papers. The litany at the end of all the ads reads, "No smokers, canvassers, or DSS", which stands for Department of Social Services. So, okay they hate smokers and welfare cases, as do we all. But the British have their own definition for 'non-smoker', which basically means you only smoke when you drink. Everybody smokes over here, and they all live somewhere.
The evening was cool; almost cold, really, as I suspect the evenings around here generally are. I stood on the corner of Osborne and Netley, watching the blackbirds getting ready to do whatever it is they do at night, when I spied a man, some yards away, bounding up the sidewalk with a jaunty gait. I held my cigarette just in front of my mouth, watching this figure with suspicion. He was short, about 5 feet tall, and round as a soccer ball. He was wearing light-colored trousers and a dark blazer, the left breast of which was adorned with an enormous, orange prize-ribbon.
As he approached me, his features became distinct in the bad lighting, and I realized he was positively beaming with pride. His face was ruddy, and split with a grin that wouldn't have looked out of place behind a wheelbarrow full of poker chips on the way to the cash-out. I placed him in his mid-40s, but maybe his thinning red hair and roly-poly stature made him look older than he really was.
He halted just a few feet from me, and said, with oddly struggling words, "Good evening, mister!"
I looked him up and down, cigarette still burning between my shaky fingers, and replied, "hi, how are ya..." He wobbled his head a bit, then walked around me on his way up the street. I noticed something written in gold on his orange ribbon, and read it as it flashed in the lamplight.
I judged him more than a wee bit 'differently-abled', as they say. I watched as he cautiously crossed the empty street, looking both ways at least twice, then gingerly stepping into the street and crossing it at a run.
I thought about what I had seen written on the ribbon: "A Very Special Boy". Hmm, I thought, I wonder who gave him that? Whoever it was, they made his whole day.
I put my cigarette out and walked back into the guest house.
My buddy Sam sent me an email a couple of days ago indicating that he just might have joined The Family recently. And he joined it a much higher level than I, I might add, considering I'm still lumbering along in the PowerPC world; my G4 Powerbook, though a loyal and trusted friend, seems slow as molasses in January these days.
He also mentioned an old OS/2 habit, one which we separately shared back in the day. I started using OS/2 when I worked at UPS. One of our managers was running 2.1, with the old Presentation Manager that looked like a crappy(er) Windows 2.0, albeit with long filenames and the ability to run concurrent DOS sessions. I avoided it until OS/2 3.0 came out.
In '94, when Warp hit the shelves, I rushed out to Soft-Warehouse1 in Alpharetta, looked in the Operating Systems2 department until I found a box, then gave the man $300 dollars for the privilege of running it. Then, I walked over the desktop applications department, and put down another $495 for Lotus Smartsuite/2. Then I OEM'd 16MB of RAM for about $400 to make it all go.
Now, many may see OS/2 as a butt-ugly cousin of Windows, and they may be right. But back then, it was a work of art. Especially in the sense that it wasn't an exact science getting it to run. Nothing ever really worked like it was supposed to. Without the fallback of a DOS prompt, you had to have a second, fully-functional machine to do things like edit the CONFIG.SYS on the installation floppies to make sure your DASD drivers were loading. And most of the drivers were written so that, if they encountered an error while loading, they'd bork the whole boot process, just to be on the safe side.
The graphical interface also hung constantly. The Workplace Shell, despite (or maybe due to) all its object-orientiness, was horribly unstable. But I never saw a hang that wasn't cured with Control-Alt-Delete. That key combo went right down to the kernel, and always gave a satisfying, unconfirmed reboot, wedged GUI be damned. There was even a 3rd party program called Watchcat that sat on the serial port, or on a secondary Hercules/MCGA monitor, and let you monitor and kill programs remotely. The kernel's Kung Fu was strong like that, but the GUI was just ass.
Now, when Chicago started finally coming down the pipe, and even the Rolling Stones where pulled into the OS marketing world ("Start me up", anyone?), OS/2 fans like myself were sure that this pissant little DOS extender with a homely face wouldn't be the future. It couldn't be the future, it was just too depressing. It still wasn't a 32-bit OS, though the 386 had been out for over 8 years. It still used FAT, for crying out loud. In short, Chicago sucked.
OS/2 seemed like a scrappy little underdog, nipping heroically at the Microsoft behemoth's heels. I'm not sure why it gave that impression. At the time, IBM was much bigger than Microsoft, a huge, multinational corporation with interests in basically every aspect of electronics. They just couldn't write or market good software.
I'm not sure why I just wrote 500 words on OS/2. I actually wanted to write something about Linux.
Software stores used to have a whole "Operating Systems" department, back when there was more than one operating system, and Windows was still called an "Operating Environment" ↩
Man, I'm unprepared. There's a checklist of things you should do before moving to England. I came over here without any money, preparation, or attack plan. There's something unbelievably stupid about this. It worked for me when I moved to Germany, but moving to England's a bit more complicated, apparently. Either that, or I'm remembering it wrong.
But I'm not the only one. The office I'm working in is full of non-British people. It's a rag-tag group of Germans, Italians, Brazilians, Spaniards, one (1) American, and who knows what else that all found themselves in the same boat when they first came over. This despite promises from The Company to help one resettle; promises which are certainly not kept and, when referred to in conversation, change their shape and character like a Democrat on a whistle-stop.
But at some point a kindly soul in the department, now departed, made a list of the reality of the situation. It's a short list of what one really needs to do when moving to England. Unfortunately, I only found out about it after I'd already been here a week. Here's your to-do list once you've arrived in England:
Get a room. If possible, get a rental agreement or any bill with your name and address on it. (proof of address)
Deposit is usually 1 1/2 times the rent. Deposit and first rent is to be paid beforehand. If the room is unfurnished, see "Things to Buy" for shops and example prices.
Get a letter from your office manager (HR Lady) stating that you are working for the company and including your address. (proof of employment)
Get a bank account. Just walk in with your documents:
Passport or national ID card
Proof of employment (see 2.). it might be handy to have your contract with you.
Proof of address
Banks
HSBC – try to get a standard account (they try to sell you an advanced package including insurances etc.)
NatWest – Also recommended as this bank does not charge for withdrawing money from a different bank's cash machines
Give your bank details to The Company
Register with Inland Revenue – this is done by your HR manager. You should get your tax code about 2 weeks later (PAYE Coding Notice)
At the end of the fiscal year (ending April 5th), you will get a "P60 End of Year Certificate" detailing your "Pay and Income Tax" levels.
Get a National Insurance Number by applying at a Job Centre Plus office. They ask for dtails before they schedule an interview appointment to verify your eligibility. Appointments are scheduled about two weeks ahead, and take place in the nearest county office, which usually isn't near at all. Without an NI number, you will be on emergency tax, which is higher than the standard tax rate.
Documents:
Passport
National ID card
Driving License or any other official document identifying you (Birth certificate, police registration, medical card, etc.)
Proof of employment (see 2.)
Recent payslip
Bank statement
Proof of address (utility bill, rental agreement, etc. – see 1.)
It might be handy to have your PAYE Coding Notice with you
As money is paid in a timely manner so it is available on the 27th, try to get your appointment after this date.
If you are British, a citizen of a member state of the EU, or other Commonwealth citizen, you can apply for inclusion on the Register of Electors. This will allow you to vote at local government elections. Your credibility will rise (good for tenancy applications or bank-related matters) and you are obliged to pay Council Taxes1
If you buy any TV or radio equipment, you will be asked for your address, which will be automatically forwarded to the "TV Licensing Office"
Get a Tesco Clubcard
Get a life ;-)
Any address change has to be communicated to all above-mentioned authorities. For the official notices to local council, the TV licensing, and most other on-line services, you can use I am Moving , where you can create/use an account for free.
All of this could have been avoided with a bit of planning. I am bitterly disappointed in myself.
Council taxes are universal as far as I can tell, and are perceived, by the British at least, as an extension of the rent. ↩
Farnborough derives its name from from the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Ferneberga (Fern Hill) and is mentioned in the Domesday Book (1086). But for the coming of the army at nearby Aldershot, the arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flying, Farnborough would probably have remained an isolated heathland village, that is until the latter half of the 20th century when the population moved out of London suburbia and became commuters.
"But for the … arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flight…". That's a pretty big conditional. There are probably a lot of places whose development was seriously affected by railways and the advent of powered flight. But I understand where the good Mr. Parkins is coming from.
I had forgotten the cable to connect my camera to my laptop. Of all the stupid things that I packed for the trip, 50 different USB cables, a USB hub, power adapters for devices I’d forgotten, not to mention devices whose power adapters I’d forgotten, I forgot the one thing that was absolutely necessary and planned-for. Not to mention irreplaceable, seeing as every camera maker in the world decided that their camera’s little hole should look different from all the other cameras’ little holes.
I walked into a little computer store on the strip in Fleet, Hampshire. Walking up to the pasty-faced, teenaged part-timer there, I introduced myself and shook his hand, which seemed to shock him.
He unconsciously wiped his hands on his pants and said, “eh...nice to meet you, sir. What can I do for you?”
I asked him, “do you have any USB card-readers?”
“Um, yeah," he answered. "I think I saw some around here somewhere.”
I looked around the shop, which was organized and clean. Man, he must really be the FNG around here. He finally found what I was looking for, stored on a shelf right next to where he had been sitting. He handed it to me and I started reading the back of the packaging.
“Just looking to see if it works with my Mac,” I told him.
“Oh, it's USB, so it should work,” he answered, and took the reader out of my hand. He moved his lips while he read the package. “Oh, yeah,” he said finally. “Right there it says it: ‘Requires Mac OS 9 or later’.” He looked at me skeptically. “So, you do have OS 9 or later, don’t you?”
“Um, yeah, I think so.” OS 9 went out of style back in the ‘90s.
He moved around to the register, and I handed him my Visa card. He looked uncertain as he turned it over in his hand. “This thing doesn’t have a chip on it?”
I took it back and examined it. “No, I guess it doesn’t.”
“Well, I don’t think we can take that, then.”
“Why don’t you just swipe it,” I said. “Give it a go.”
He shrugged and swiped it through the machine.
From behind me, a voice said, “it’s all chips nowadays, you know.”
I looked around, and saw that an older woman was standing behind me. She looked to be in her mid 40s, and wore a name plate with the store’s logo on it. “You can’t get nothing without a dozen little chips in it.”
I nodded agreement, and turned back to the young man behind the register.
“So, what kind of Mac you got, then?”
“A PowerBook G4.”
He nodded approvingly. “Nice piece of kit, that.” The little machine that had taken my card made a loud ping!, and spit out a receipt. He tore it off and gave it to me to sign, along with the card reader.
“Now, you have a nice day sir, and do please visit us again.”
I thanked him, said goodbye to the chip-lady, and put the small package into my bag next to my laptop. “Thanks, man, I’ll do that.” Nice kid.
Didja ever discover something that made your reality skip a beat? You know how, for just a second, something is so far out of place that you can't even figure out what's wrong with the picture? For example, the Augsburg Wireless-Internet provider Cyberways has had the same guy on their start page for years:
Every time you connect to the internet over public wireless in Augsburg, that dude was right there, staring at you with those soulless black eyes. Like a doll's eyes...
And the weird thing was, I always figured he was the boss at Cyberways. I even thought I saw him once on the tram. I hate it when people use the same stock photos everywhere. Everybody's full of shit. Oh, I guess it's effective use of your cash dollars, seeing as it's cheaper than paying attractive people to work for you. But still, why not just be honest for a split second?
You get this kind of thing all over the Internet, of course. If you've ever shopped for web hosting, you'll notice, after a few visits to the providers' pages, that their employees all kind of look alike. And there's always some woman somewhere holding a laptop at her waist in near-sexual ecstasy over the reasonable shared hosting prices.
It's a leitmotif throughout the enter hosting industry: Shared Webspace=Chick with laptop.
Rube, look, for the last freakin time, look RIGHT when you step off a curb! These people drive on the other side of the F$@&-ing road over here! You wanna get ya brains splattered all over me?
What? I dunno. I'm just kind of sitting around, waiting on things. I just spent way too much time transferring money across European borders, and reclaiming my identity. But the new passports are wonderful pieces of fortitude. Here' s a few quotes from my new passport:
And that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth. - Abraham Lincoln
The principle of free governments adheres to the American soil. It is bedded in it, immovable as its mountains. - Daniel Webster
Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. - George Washington
We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. - excerpt from the Declaration of Independence
Your concept of love may be different, but know that I love this world.
I like reading Scott Adams' blog on occasion. Much like Balph Eubanks, he's glib, amusing, and completely lacking in morality. Take, for example, his latest strawman-laden posting regarding the visit of a certain Mr. Ahmedinejad:
I was happy to hear that NYC didn't allow Iranian President Ahmadinejad
to place a wreath at the WTC site. And I was happy that Columbia
University is rescinding the offer to let him speak. If you let a guy like
that express his views, before long the entire world will want freedom
of speech.
...
If Ahmadinejad thinks he can be our friend by honoring our heroes and
opening a dialog, he underestimates our ability to misinterpret him.
Fucking idiot. I hate him.
Well, there's certainly some rye wit at work here. Yes, it is quite ironic that a country led by a genocidal religious dictator, which the USA most certainly is, would object to a fellow genocidal religious madman visiting its most sensitive cultural site. I mean, Mahmoud's only trying to "open a dialog" here, isn't he? Isn't that the meaning of Ahmedinejad's visit? Isn't Ahmedinejad just exercising "Free Speech", as Adams says? Aren't we wrong in denying this poor man that right?
Aside from the obvious jackassery involved in claiming that a man who directly controls his entire country's media is having trouble getting his point of view out; or that the United Nations will let him speak before the leaders of the world to the point where they forget to blink for an hour; aside from all this, this is not a question of whether or not Mahmoud is allowed to say what he wants. The question is, in accordance with the Grand Unified Theory of Rubean Mechanics, Who's going to pay for it. It's a question of whether or not Americans should be paying for his plane fare, his security, and his accommodation while he's here, pissing on Ground Zero and generating propaganda for totalitarian lobbying groups like MoveOn.org and International ANSWER.
All of Adams' ridiculous assertions never mention the one central fact here: There is no compelling reason for American taxpayers to foot the bill, so this guy, who just held one of his popular "Death to America" parades, can come over here and lecture them on anything. I personally don't much care what Ahmedinejad thinks, I can see the general thrust of his inclinations. He's spitting on the United States and Western Culture daily, and then expects to be treated with deference in return. Fuck him.
This kind of Devil's Advocacy isn't new to Adams. At least, I hope it's just that. He's apparently one of those celebrities that have forgotten the hard work involved in their ascendency, and assume that they're rich because of some accident of nature, akin to divine providence. Humans, himself included, are all just a bunch of "moist robots" with no capacity for thought, no free will; we've apparently just been programmed by Mother Nature to do the things we've done or will do. There is no mind, there is no choice, there is only the stimuli in our environments, and the response that was determined by a chance arrangement of atoms into chemicals during the Big Bang. Or something.
It's an obscene display of thoughtlessness, a conceit of someone trying so hard to seem above all this. Adams' Dilbert is amusing, and his blog is a bit of junk food for the brain at times. But he's got the morals of a two-dollar whore.
Last night we didn't make it. The two Frenchmen surrendered the evening, seeing as it was Trotzky's birthday, and therefore a time for somber reflection or something. So, we rode around big town Farnborough for a couple of hours, grabbed some grub, and then headed back to the apartment to watch a movie.
We watched Fur, which cemented my belief that Nicole Kidman is the perfect woman. Not only does she look good in her own slutty little librarian sort of way, she gives a guy a handjob in this movie while shaving his hairy back. That's my kind of girl, a real little trooper.
Anyhoo, it's back off to London now, for a second try at getting sloppy somewhere besides sitting at home in front of the boob tube. Wish us luck.
Vacation week is winding down, and I'm getting ready to leave the driving to Southwest Trains and go drinking in London. I'll try to keep it under two weeks this time, but no promises. We'll tramp it a bit through Soho, I guess, just me, the girls, and a couple of frog-eaters from the office.
I wonder why I never get to go drinking with Englishmen? It's probably for the best. There's a quote that gets bandied about, especially in the local newspapers, about England being a nation of drunks and scalawags. I can't say much about that, but it does seem that the pubs all close at 11:00 PM for a reason. At 5 o'clock, they pour out of their offices and into the public houses, seemingly on a race against the clock to get themselves 'faced before the early last call.
When they were finally permitted to stay open past 11, in the hope that the binge-drinking would abate in light of longer opening hours, they found themselves doubly-cursed in that the Englishmen were every bit as drunk at 11, but didn't have to go home. All pubs here are set up so that you have to go to the counter to get your drinks, instead of having them brought to your table. There's a built-in handbrake there: a system where you can't get any more drink once you lose the ability to walk is founded upon sound principle and good advices.
I've done nothing today; nothing but clean out the cluttered closets of my preferred newsfeed reader. There were some connections in there that were sorely neglected. I could use a bit more time to wade through the degenerate filth that is my blogroll, but sadly, I work. The Company is tolerant in their control over my time, fair since they do not pay hourly; but tolerance has its limits, and I doubt they would look kindly upon my spending the business day in a fugue state, reading entry after entry of dialectics about Jessica Simpson's tits, or Brittney Spears' overplayed poonanny.
Nevertheless, it saddens me that my everyday is not blessed with the nuggets of wisdom from skippystalin:
Being the only person with an out-of-control substance abuse problem in a relationship is tough. Most romantic couplings are based on common interests and most of my interests culminate in my waking up in a pool of what I think is my own urine and not being quite sure what time zone I'm in. I'm much like a cat in that I have a tendancy of marking my territory with my vomit, blood and gallons of my semen...My ability to smoke, drink and masturbate furiously at the same time might not be much, it's all that I have.
Ahh, skippystalin, how I've missed you, and your nuggets.
This is how I spend my vacation: visiting Stonehenge on one day; reading the melancholy musings of skippystalin the next, picturing him composing scholarly tracts through bitter tears, a crushed Viagra dissolving in a highball of Jack Daniels next to the keyboard, as another long evening fades into a blur of poetry, madness, and vigorous bouts of hate-filled masturbation. And wondering, of the two, which is the more meaningful and fitting monument to humanity?
They should've just burned enjoyeverysandwich to CD, stuck it to the side of Voyager along with its author, and shot the whole lot into space back when they had government funding to do so, all in the name of making a good first impression for whatever aliens were out cruising for an easy meal.
skippystalin's output is prodigious, to be sure, but there was an entire blogroll to consider:
The lunatics are running the asylum over at Straight White Guy's place. Eric's testicles are mentioned, indirectly. Remind me to change my passwords regularly and start using strong encryption.
How stoned do you have to be to cheat on Jessica Alba? I could jack off to Jessica Alba while a big mean dog was chasing me and this idiot is cheating on her. I decided to confront him about this and I screamed at him, hey, what is your problem. And he said I should get off his lawn. And I said, no, no you get off the lawn. You get off. Then he went inside, probably because deep down, he knew I had made some pretty good points.
JimGoad.com is no more, but if you're a Goad fan (ladies!), you can find find him here. Discussion of Brittany's latest, erm, candid photos is also to be found, but be aware that the following picture is used as a visual aid:
This morning we picked up my new wheelchair. It's a sporty European marque, with an aggressive stance, low-profile tires, and a head-turning cherry-red metalflake paint job. It's not that great on the corners, but it'll take any one of y'all on the straightaways.
I've never done time on wheels. On the whole, I found it to be not all that bad. Then again, I don't figure that most wheelchair-bound men my age get to enjoy being pushed around town by a couple of sexy German bloggerettes. Thanks, ladies: the jealous looks from the other local cripples was the icing on the cake. Here's a little something extra for you, babes. (via AoSHQ)
Funny things happen when you're on wheels. I saw a lady I work with while being carted through Tesco's frozen food department. I said hello, and she just looked right through me, steering her cart so as not to make contact with the leper. She probably thought I was going to ask her for some spare change, or if she could wipe me bum for me, or whatever it is that those people want from healthy-legged people. I also noticed that the supermarkets put completely different things down on the bottom three feet of the shelves. All the cool toys are down there, for example, presumably because chil'n's is small. It's also a great altitude to find anti-bedsore medicaments, for some reason.
So, I let myself be pushed by the Weyside in Guildford, where, at one point, a husky young native was required to wheel my fat ass up a steep incline. The Sistas, for all their heart, lacked the muscle to get the job done, so he, being a true-hearted salt-of-earth kind of guy, waved them off and grunted and sweated till I crested the hill. Had the man known that I could have, at any point in time, simply stood up and hobbled up the hill under my own power, he most certainly would have picked me up and broken me over his knee.
Tomorrow morning, we'll be visiting Stonehenge, or Stone'enge, as the locals quaintly call it. We'll also visit the haunted city, Salisbury, to watch the homosexuals. Ta!
I like reading OSNews for some reason. I think I like to catch the geeky news about SkyOS, or the occasional retro curmudgeonry that rolls by about Lotus 1-2-3 or OS/2. Being the old-timer that I am, it's hard to resist a paean from my youth about 10-finger productivity.
Unfortunately, they've become the epicenter of stupid for the tech press. Check out this article, which explodes the myths about competition being good: "Competition is not Good"
'It gives consumers more choice'
Choice is good when there's one agreed base standard, and a number of compatible approaches. For example, there are many Linux distributions, but they are all Linux, and they can all run the same software. They are 'flavours' of the same thing, that is a good choice. People like different flavours.
Competition does not produce easier choices for consumers. All they get is added un-interoperability and complexity with competitive choices.
Now, if you go read that article, which I do not recommend, you'll slowly come to the realization that this moron is just annoyed that he has to make the effort to choose between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. He's willing to surrender his entire free will to some (hopefully) benevolent dictator, abolish brand names, and forsake the free market economy because choosing which format to buy the Firefly special edition box set in is hard. What a hopeless, whiny-assed sissy.
Of course, things don't get better when they start tossing political analysis at you. "Net Neutrality" is one monikers that has overshadowed the thing named. The discussion is often framed in a way that an uninformed listener would assume there was lobbying going on to abolish some sort of laws that are now protecting consumers from big, bad tiered-Internet ninjas.
But: There is no net neutrality legislation, there never was, and hopefully, there never will be. The argument over "Net Neutrality" is about whether or not the U.S. government should introduce legislation forbidding bandwidth throttling by ISPs. It's the "have you stopped beating your wife?" straw man for the Slashdot crowd. You'll notice that this article calls the Supreme Court's decision that the U.S. government shouldn't step in and configure the ISPs' Cisco routers for them, "Backing for Two-Tier Internet":
The US Justice Department has said that internet service providers should be allowed to charge for priority traffic. The agency said it was opposed to 'network neutrality', the idea that all data on the net is treated equally. The comments put the agency at odds with companies such as Microsoft and Google, who have called for legislation to guarantee equal access to the net.
Of course, this would also mean that an enforcement infrastructure would also have to be put in place, making sure that everyone got their "fair share" of said bandwidth, as if backbone routers and POPs just fell off a tree somewhere. God forbid ISPs be allowed to tune the services that they developed and paid for as they wish. Let's let the government decides who gets bandwidth, and how much is enough! That will make it all fair and neutral-like. Whenever a politician uses the word "fair", hang on to your wallet.
Well, my trackbacks are now working, it seems. There's some ugly Python spaghetti-code going on behind the scenes that translates back and forth between absolute urls, non-absolute relative urls, and upper-lower-camel case; but it works.
Trackbacks are only good for Movable Type, though. Which I can't stand anymore. MT used to be the only thing out there, but there's something that really, really, really galls me about the way it rebuilds your entire site into static HTML pages everytime you update a post. I'm sure it's awesomeness if you've got your server running on an old TV remote, but nowadays we're all running our web servers on 100-core 64-bit terahertz moonshot computers that can simultaneously compute π, encode MPEG video, and mix the best goddam margaritas you've ever tasted, all without breaking a sweat.
So yeah, I figured out how to implement trackbacks in Django, to a point where they more or less work. Now why is Wordpress fucking with me? It seems to be thrown off by the fact that Wordpress sends a HEAD request before it downloads and parses the page, in the vain hope that the X-Pingback header will be set. I can't figure out how to do that in Django's generic views, so I just use the secondary method, that being a link element in the XHTML code. But now, whenever a Worpdress blog pings me, I get this kind of crap:
[09/Sep/2007 15:04:23] "GET /blog/2007/sep/08/vacation/ HTTP/1.1" 200 27367
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (104, 'Connection reset by peer')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (32, 'Broken pipe')
Being the half-assed programmer that I am, I am at a total loss. I can't even do a Lazyweb request here, seeing as my 4 visits a day are unlikely to bring the Django HTTP gurus by. I won't be able to sleep at night, thinking of all the enlightened Wordpress Users who are probably out there try to "Keep the discussion going" with me.
Ever since June, when the iPhone went live, I've heard about nothing else in the tech press, nerd podcasts, and the Apple Fanboisphere. Is it really that way over in the States (the only place you can get them), or does the iPhone actually seem to be doing well?
Ahh, my first vacation since joining The Company. My queue is cleaned up, my email is forwarded, and an elaborate Sieve session has accomplished in a mere two hours what less civilized mail systems can do with a key combination: The Corporate Vacation Email.
It's been five months now since I came 'cross the channel and started meeting the natives, learning the lingo, and getting used to the fact that everyone here talks like Pinky. Now, I'll be letting my hair down for the next 10 days or so. As well as putting my poor, broken foot up on the coffee table.
As soon as I get my x-rays back from the socialist medical system (they still copy them with coal rubbings on wax paper over here, apparently), I'll post pictures of the metatarsalar breakage here for your morbid enjoyment. Don't thank me yet.
The other half of Sistaweb will be joining us for the week. We'll allow her to sleep here rent-free for an entire week, even though she refused to bring a carton of cigarettes as payment. Damned non-smokers and their principles. It's like those non-smokers back in the World War II who didn't sign up for cigarette rations. Throwing away a gold mine, that is. Our grandfathers probably had a word for those guys, and if I knew my grandfather at all, that word was sissy-boy.
The girls have rented a wheelchair for me, seeing as I won't be too much fun doing a London pub-crawl on crutches. I've already had a forehead-slapping moment over this, as you probably are right now. Why haven't I thought of taking a wheelchair with me before? That would've come in handy on more than one occasion, the Wreckyll in Jeckyll not least among them.
Man, Apple is on a roll. Not only have they got me hooked for a new computer, a new laptop, a new office package, and a replacement for my aging MythTV box, but now I have to start thinking about a new iPod. Now, let's see what Uncle Steve is going to me be costing me 'til Christmas Time:
Item
Damage
20" iMac
1199.00
Macbook
1099.00
8GB iPod Touch
299.00
AppleTV
299.00
iWork '08
79.00
iLife '08
79.00
Total:
$3,054.00
Not bad for a day's work, Mr. Jobs. And what's up for the rest of September? Maybe some irresistible bionic iFoot to replace the one I broke playing frisbee at the company picnic last week?
Although there's a remarkable lack of iPhone hype around the office, we being a big-time Linux company and all, there's an amazing amount of Mac fanboiism. Pretty much all of us have Macs at home. The explanation for this is simple: After dealing with Linux problems all day long, there's something nice about going home to something you can spend all your time using and not making up excuses for why it looks like shit and doesn't work.
I like Linux, mind you. I use it day-in, day-out for my desktop at work, for my webservers, and it brings in my daily bread. We all love it here, pretty much like a family loves and therefore tolerates the embarrassing second cousin with the Downs'. But people are walking all over the office today buzzing about the upcoming announcement from Apple.
Will it be the long-awaited iMac redesign? Will it be a new Mini? My boss is actually carrying his phone to the pub after work today so he can sit on engadget and get a realtime update. Linus would not be pleased...
Last login: Thu Jul 26 12:17:28 from nat-pool-fab.re Welcome to Darwin! ericbook:~ eric$ mutt -bash: mutt: command not found ericbook:~ eric$ open /Applications/Mail.app/ ericbook:~ eric$
Ahh. Like coming in after a long day of plowing the fields and sticking your aching feet into a pot of hot water. After running Linux all day at work, you feel like slipping into something more comfortable. Sam knows it. Zonker knows it, though he won't admit it. It's the right amount of just-workiness you need to let you relax, while knowing you could, at any given moment, do something like:
OK, here's one with drivel. I do like it, but I have a couple of gripes.
First problem: I was hopelessly confused by the login screen. The type of journal seems to be locked on livejournal, as the drop-down menu for journal types is inexplicably disabled until you enter a username. -1 for usabilty
Second problem: Useless stripping of trailing slash, which mangled my xmlrpc URL. Error 301 was ignored, which makes sense since it's a post and all, but I couldn't log in. It mangled my URL then choked on the error :-/
Third problem: didn't want to download my recent posts. Although there might be a misunderstanding about just what "recent" means.
Fourth problem: Doesn't let me choose post status anywhere. And there's nowhere I can find to choose text filters. This is more of a feature request, really.
Fifth problem: craps out after posting, probably because it keeps mangling the trailing slashes from my URLs. Is there an RFC somewhere that says that POSTS can't end with slashes? Nobody tell the Django folks.
Well, maybe it'll at least let me post to my blog from work every now and then.
Man, I dang sure missed the entire month of June. I've been in the UK now for about two months, and let me tell ya: They sure do get some rain around here. I always thought those stories about English people having gills were legends and fantasies. Now, I'm not so sure.
For the love of GOD, for the last time, in the name of ALL THAT IS HOLY, Cluster Services is NOT COMPATIBLE with 4.5! If you're running a cluster, DO NOT update to 4.5 until the Cluster Suite is UPDATED TO 4.5!
That is all.
P.S. And NO, cmirror is not available yet. Maybe at the end of the month.
I went outside to smoke a cigarette. All rooms in England are for non-smokers, you'll find, as are the rooms, apartments, and houses listed for rent in the local papers. The litany at the end of all the ads reads, "No smokers, canvassers, or DSS", which stands for Department of Social Services. So, okay they hate smokers and welfare cases, as do we all. But the British have their own definition for 'non-smoker', which basically means you only smoke when you drink. Everybody smokes over here, and they all live somewhere.
The evening was cool; almost cold, really, as I suspect the evenings around here generally are. I stood on the corner of Osborne and Netley, watching the blackbirds getting ready to do whatever it is they do at night, when I spied a man, some yards away, bounding up the sidewalk with a jaunty gait. I held my cigarette just in front of my mouth, watching this figure with suspicion. He was short, about 5 feet tall, and round as a soccer ball. He was wearing light-colored trousers and a dark blazer, the left breast of which was adorned with an enormous, orange prize-ribbon.
As he approached me, his features became distinct in the bad lighting, and I realized he was positively beaming with pride. His face was ruddy, and split with a grin that wouldn't have looked out of place behind a wheelbarrow full of poker chips on the way to the cash-out. I placed him in his mid-40s, but maybe his thinning red hair and roly-poly stature made him look older than he really was.
He halted just a few feet from me, and said, with oddly struggling words, "Good evening, mister!"
I looked him up and down, cigarette still burning between my shaky fingers, and replied, "hi, how are ya..." He wobbled his head a bit, then walked around me on his way up the street. I noticed something written in gold on his orange ribbon, and read it as it flashed in the lamplight.
I judged him more than a wee bit 'differently-abled', as they say. I watched as he cautiously crossed the empty street, looking both ways at least twice, then gingerly stepping into the street and crossing it at a run.
I thought about what I had seen written on the ribbon: "A Very Special Boy". Hmm, I thought, I wonder who gave him that? Whoever it was, they made his whole day.
I put my cigarette out and walked back into the guest house.
My buddy Sam sent me an email a couple of days ago indicating that he just might have joined The Family recently. And he joined it a much higher level than I, I might add, considering I'm still lumbering along in the PowerPC world; my G4 Powerbook, though a loyal and trusted friend, seems slow as molasses in January these days.
He also mentioned an old OS/2 habit, one which we separately shared back in the day. I started using OS/2 when I worked at UPS. One of our managers was running 2.1, with the old Presentation Manager that looked like a crappy(er) Windows 2.0, albeit with long filenames and the ability to run concurrent DOS sessions. I avoided it until OS/2 3.0 came out.
In '94, when Warp hit the shelves, I rushed out to Soft-Warehouse1 in Alpharetta, looked in the Operating Systems2 department until I found a box, then gave the man $300 dollars for the privilege of running it. Then, I walked over the desktop applications department, and put down another $495 for Lotus Smartsuite/2. Then I OEM'd 16MB of RAM for about $400 to make it all go.
Now, many may see OS/2 as a butt-ugly cousin of Windows, and they may be right. But back then, it was a work of art. Especially in the sense that it wasn't an exact science getting it to run. Nothing ever really worked like it was supposed to. Without the fallback of a DOS prompt, you had to have a second, fully-functional machine to do things like edit the CONFIG.SYS on the installation floppies to make sure your DASD drivers were loading. And most of the drivers were written so that, if they encountered an error while loading, they'd bork the whole boot process, just to be on the safe side.
The graphical interface also hung constantly. The Workplace Shell, despite (or maybe due to) all its object-orientiness, was horribly unstable. But I never saw a hang that wasn't cured with Control-Alt-Delete. That key combo went right down to the kernel, and always gave a satisfying, unconfirmed reboot, wedged GUI be damned. There was even a 3rd party program called Watchcat that sat on the serial port, or on a secondary Hercules/MCGA monitor, and let you monitor and kill programs remotely. The kernel's Kung Fu was strong like that, but the GUI was just ass.
Now, when Chicago started finally coming down the pipe, and even the Rolling Stones where pulled into the OS marketing world ("Start me up", anyone?), OS/2 fans like myself were sure that this pissant little DOS extender with a homely face wouldn't be the future. It couldn't be the future, it was just too depressing. It still wasn't a 32-bit OS, though the 386 had been out for over 8 years. It still used FAT, for crying out loud. In short, Chicago sucked.
OS/2 seemed like a scrappy little underdog, nipping heroically at the Microsoft behemoth's heels. I'm not sure why it gave that impression. At the time, IBM was much bigger than Microsoft, a huge, multinational corporation with interests in basically every aspect of electronics. They just couldn't write or market good software.
I'm not sure why I just wrote 500 words on OS/2. I actually wanted to write something about Linux.
Software stores used to have a whole "Operating Systems" department, back when there was more than one operating system, and Windows was still called an "Operating Environment" ↩
Man, I'm unprepared. There's a checklist of things you should do before moving to England. I came over here without any money, preparation, or attack plan. There's something unbelievably stupid about this. It worked for me when I moved to Germany, but moving to England's a bit more complicated, apparently. Either that, or I'm remembering it wrong.
But I'm not the only one. The office I'm working in is full of non-British people. It's a rag-tag group of Germans, Italians, Brazilians, Spaniards, one (1) American, and who knows what else that all found themselves in the same boat when they first came over. This despite promises from The Company to help one resettle; promises which are certainly not kept and, when referred to in conversation, change their shape and character like a Democrat on a whistle-stop.
But at some point a kindly soul in the department, now departed, made a list of the reality of the situation. It's a short list of what one really needs to do when moving to England. Unfortunately, I only found out about it after I'd already been here a week. Here's your to-do list once you've arrived in England:
Get a room. If possible, get a rental agreement or any bill with your name and address on it. (proof of address)
Deposit is usually 1 1/2 times the rent. Deposit and first rent is to be paid beforehand. If the room is unfurnished, see "Things to Buy" for shops and example prices.
Get a letter from your office manager (HR Lady) stating that you are working for the company and including your address. (proof of employment)
Get a bank account. Just walk in with your documents:
Passport or national ID card
Proof of employment (see 2.). it might be handy to have your contract with you.
Proof of address
Banks
HSBC – try to get a standard account (they try to sell you an advanced package including insurances etc.)
NatWest – Also recommended as this bank does not charge for withdrawing money from a different bank's cash machines
Give your bank details to The Company
Register with Inland Revenue – this is done by your HR manager. You should get your tax code about 2 weeks later (PAYE Coding Notice)
At the end of the fiscal year (ending April 5th), you will get a "P60 End of Year Certificate" detailing your "Pay and Income Tax" levels.
Get a National Insurance Number by applying at a Job Centre Plus office. They ask for dtails before they schedule an interview appointment to verify your eligibility. Appointments are scheduled about two weeks ahead, and take place in the nearest county office, which usually isn't near at all. Without an NI number, you will be on emergency tax, which is higher than the standard tax rate.
Documents:
Passport
National ID card
Driving License or any other official document identifying you (Birth certificate, police registration, medical card, etc.)
Proof of employment (see 2.)
Recent payslip
Bank statement
Proof of address (utility bill, rental agreement, etc. – see 1.)
It might be handy to have your PAYE Coding Notice with you
As money is paid in a timely manner so it is available on the 27th, try to get your appointment after this date.
If you are British, a citizen of a member state of the EU, or other Commonwealth citizen, you can apply for inclusion on the Register of Electors. This will allow you to vote at local government elections. Your credibility will rise (good for tenancy applications or bank-related matters) and you are obliged to pay Council Taxes1
If you buy any TV or radio equipment, you will be asked for your address, which will be automatically forwarded to the "TV Licensing Office"
Get a Tesco Clubcard
Get a life ;-)
Any address change has to be communicated to all above-mentioned authorities. For the official notices to local council, the TV licensing, and most other on-line services, you can use I am Moving , where you can create/use an account for free.
All of this could have been avoided with a bit of planning. I am bitterly disappointed in myself.
Council taxes are universal as far as I can tell, and are perceived, by the British at least, as an extension of the rent. ↩
Farnborough derives its name from from the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Ferneberga (Fern Hill) and is mentioned in the Domesday Book (1086). But for the coming of the army at nearby Aldershot, the arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flying, Farnborough would probably have remained an isolated heathland village, that is until the latter half of the 20th century when the population moved out of London suburbia and became commuters.
"But for the … arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flight…". That's a pretty big conditional. There are probably a lot of places whose development was seriously affected by railways and the advent of powered flight. But I understand where the good Mr. Parkins is coming from.
I had forgotten the cable to connect my camera to my laptop. Of all the stupid things that I packed for the trip, 50 different USB cables, a USB hub, power adapters for devices I’d forgotten, not to mention devices whose power adapters I’d forgotten, I forgot the one thing that was absolutely necessary and planned-for. Not to mention irreplaceable, seeing as every camera maker in the world decided that their camera’s little hole should look different from all the other cameras’ little holes.
I walked into a little computer store on the strip in Fleet, Hampshire. Walking up to the pasty-faced, teenaged part-timer there, I introduced myself and shook his hand, which seemed to shock him.
He unconsciously wiped his hands on his pants and said, “eh...nice to meet you, sir. What can I do for you?”
I asked him, “do you have any USB card-readers?”
“Um, yeah," he answered. "I think I saw some around here somewhere.”
I looked around the shop, which was organized and clean. Man, he must really be the FNG around here. He finally found what I was looking for, stored on a shelf right next to where he had been sitting. He handed it to me and I started reading the back of the packaging.
“Just looking to see if it works with my Mac,” I told him.
“Oh, it's USB, so it should work,” he answered, and took the reader out of my hand. He moved his lips while he read the package. “Oh, yeah,” he said finally. “Right there it says it: ‘Requires Mac OS 9 or later’.” He looked at me skeptically. “So, you do have OS 9 or later, don’t you?”
“Um, yeah, I think so.” OS 9 went out of style back in the ‘90s.
He moved around to the register, and I handed him my Visa card. He looked uncertain as he turned it over in his hand. “This thing doesn’t have a chip on it?”
I took it back and examined it. “No, I guess it doesn’t.”
“Well, I don’t think we can take that, then.”
“Why don’t you just swipe it,” I said. “Give it a go.”
He shrugged and swiped it through the machine.
From behind me, a voice said, “it’s all chips nowadays, you know.”
I looked around, and saw that an older woman was standing behind me. She looked to be in her mid 40s, and wore a name plate with the store’s logo on it. “You can’t get nothing without a dozen little chips in it.”
I nodded agreement, and turned back to the young man behind the register.
“So, what kind of Mac you got, then?”
“A PowerBook G4.”
He nodded approvingly. “Nice piece of kit, that.” The little machine that had taken my card made a loud ping!, and spit out a receipt. He tore it off and gave it to me to sign, along with the card reader.
“Now, you have a nice day sir, and do please visit us again.”
I thanked him, said goodbye to the chip-lady, and put the small package into my bag next to my laptop. “Thanks, man, I’ll do that.” Nice kid.
Didja ever discover something that made your reality skip a beat? You know how, for just a second, something is so far out of place that you can't even figure out what's wrong with the picture? For example, the Augsburg Wireless-Internet provider Cyberways has had the same guy on their start page for years:
Every time you connect to the internet over public wireless in Augsburg, that dude was right there, staring at you with those soulless black eyes. Like a doll's eyes...
And the weird thing was, I always figured he was the boss at Cyberways. I even thought I saw him once on the tram. I hate it when people use the same stock photos everywhere. Everybody's full of shit. Oh, I guess it's effective use of your cash dollars, seeing as it's cheaper than paying attractive people to work for you. But still, why not just be honest for a split second?
You get this kind of thing all over the Internet, of course. If you've ever shopped for web hosting, you'll notice, after a few visits to the providers' pages, that their employees all kind of look alike. And there's always some woman somewhere holding a laptop at her waist in near-sexual ecstasy over the reasonable shared hosting prices.
It's a leitmotif throughout the enter hosting industry: Shared Webspace=Chick with laptop.
Rube, look, for the last freakin time, look RIGHT when you step off a curb! These people drive on the other side of the F$@&-ing road over here! You wanna get ya brains splattered all over me?
What? I dunno. I'm just kind of sitting around, waiting on things. I just spent way too much time transferring money across European borders, and reclaiming my identity. But the new passports are wonderful pieces of fortitude. Here' s a few quotes from my new passport:
And that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth. - Abraham Lincoln
The principle of free governments adheres to the American soil. It is bedded in it, immovable as its mountains. - Daniel Webster
Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. - George Washington
We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. - excerpt from the Declaration of Independence
Your concept of love may be different, but know that I love this world.
I like reading Scott Adams' blog on occasion. Much like Balph Eubanks, he's glib, amusing, and completely lacking in morality. Take, for example, his latest strawman-laden posting regarding the visit of a certain Mr. Ahmedinejad:
I was happy to hear that NYC didn't allow Iranian President Ahmadinejad
to place a wreath at the WTC site. And I was happy that Columbia
University is rescinding the offer to let him speak. If you let a guy like
that express his views, before long the entire world will want freedom
of speech.
...
If Ahmadinejad thinks he can be our friend by honoring our heroes and
opening a dialog, he underestimates our ability to misinterpret him.
Fucking idiot. I hate him.
Well, there's certainly some rye wit at work here. Yes, it is quite ironic that a country led by a genocidal religious dictator, which the USA most certainly is, would object to a fellow genocidal religious madman visiting its most sensitive cultural site. I mean, Mahmoud's only trying to "open a dialog" here, isn't he? Isn't that the meaning of Ahmedinejad's visit? Isn't Ahmedinejad just exercising "Free Speech", as Adams says? Aren't we wrong in denying this poor man that right?
Aside from the obvious jackassery involved in claiming that a man who directly controls his entire country's media is having trouble getting his point of view out; or that the United Nations will let him speak before the leaders of the world to the point where they forget to blink for an hour; aside from all this, this is not a question of whether or not Mahmoud is allowed to say what he wants. The question is, in accordance with the Grand Unified Theory of Rubean Mechanics, Who's going to pay for it. It's a question of whether or not Americans should be paying for his plane fare, his security, and his accommodation while he's here, pissing on Ground Zero and generating propaganda for totalitarian lobbying groups like MoveOn.org and International ANSWER.
All of Adams' ridiculous assertions never mention the one central fact here: There is no compelling reason for American taxpayers to foot the bill, so this guy, who just held one of his popular "Death to America" parades, can come over here and lecture them on anything. I personally don't much care what Ahmedinejad thinks, I can see the general thrust of his inclinations. He's spitting on the United States and Western Culture daily, and then expects to be treated with deference in return. Fuck him.
This kind of Devil's Advocacy isn't new to Adams. At least, I hope it's just that. He's apparently one of those celebrities that have forgotten the hard work involved in their ascendency, and assume that they're rich because of some accident of nature, akin to divine providence. Humans, himself included, are all just a bunch of "moist robots" with no capacity for thought, no free will; we've apparently just been programmed by Mother Nature to do the things we've done or will do. There is no mind, there is no choice, there is only the stimuli in our environments, and the response that was determined by a chance arrangement of atoms into chemicals during the Big Bang. Or something.
It's an obscene display of thoughtlessness, a conceit of someone trying so hard to seem above all this. Adams' Dilbert is amusing, and his blog is a bit of junk food for the brain at times. But he's got the morals of a two-dollar whore.
Last night we didn't make it. The two Frenchmen surrendered the evening, seeing as it was Trotzky's birthday, and therefore a time for somber reflection or something. So, we rode around big town Farnborough for a couple of hours, grabbed some grub, and then headed back to the apartment to watch a movie.
We watched Fur, which cemented my belief that Nicole Kidman is the perfect woman. Not only does she look good in her own slutty little librarian sort of way, she gives a guy a handjob in this movie while shaving his hairy back. That's my kind of girl, a real little trooper.
Anyhoo, it's back off to London now, for a second try at getting sloppy somewhere besides sitting at home in front of the boob tube. Wish us luck.
Vacation week is winding down, and I'm getting ready to leave the driving to Southwest Trains and go drinking in London. I'll try to keep it under two weeks this time, but no promises. We'll tramp it a bit through Soho, I guess, just me, the girls, and a couple of frog-eaters from the office.
I wonder why I never get to go drinking with Englishmen? It's probably for the best. There's a quote that gets bandied about, especially in the local newspapers, about England being a nation of drunks and scalawags. I can't say much about that, but it does seem that the pubs all close at 11:00 PM for a reason. At 5 o'clock, they pour out of their offices and into the public houses, seemingly on a race against the clock to get themselves 'faced before the early last call.
When they were finally permitted to stay open past 11, in the hope that the binge-drinking would abate in light of longer opening hours, they found themselves doubly-cursed in that the Englishmen were every bit as drunk at 11, but didn't have to go home. All pubs here are set up so that you have to go to the counter to get your drinks, instead of having them brought to your table. There's a built-in handbrake there: a system where you can't get any more drink once you lose the ability to walk is founded upon sound principle and good advices.
I've done nothing today; nothing but clean out the cluttered closets of my preferred newsfeed reader. There were some connections in there that were sorely neglected. I could use a bit more time to wade through the degenerate filth that is my blogroll, but sadly, I work. The Company is tolerant in their control over my time, fair since they do not pay hourly; but tolerance has its limits, and I doubt they would look kindly upon my spending the business day in a fugue state, reading entry after entry of dialectics about Jessica Simpson's tits, or Brittney Spears' overplayed poonanny.
Nevertheless, it saddens me that my everyday is not blessed with the nuggets of wisdom from skippystalin:
Being the only person with an out-of-control substance abuse problem in a relationship is tough. Most romantic couplings are based on common interests and most of my interests culminate in my waking up in a pool of what I think is my own urine and not being quite sure what time zone I'm in. I'm much like a cat in that I have a tendancy of marking my territory with my vomit, blood and gallons of my semen...My ability to smoke, drink and masturbate furiously at the same time might not be much, it's all that I have.
Ahh, skippystalin, how I've missed you, and your nuggets.
This is how I spend my vacation: visiting Stonehenge on one day; reading the melancholy musings of skippystalin the next, picturing him composing scholarly tracts through bitter tears, a crushed Viagra dissolving in a highball of Jack Daniels next to the keyboard, as another long evening fades into a blur of poetry, madness, and vigorous bouts of hate-filled masturbation. And wondering, of the two, which is the more meaningful and fitting monument to humanity?
They should've just burned enjoyeverysandwich to CD, stuck it to the side of Voyager along with its author, and shot the whole lot into space back when they had government funding to do so, all in the name of making a good first impression for whatever aliens were out cruising for an easy meal.
skippystalin's output is prodigious, to be sure, but there was an entire blogroll to consider:
The lunatics are running the asylum over at Straight White Guy's place. Eric's testicles are mentioned, indirectly. Remind me to change my passwords regularly and start using strong encryption.
How stoned do you have to be to cheat on Jessica Alba? I could jack off to Jessica Alba while a big mean dog was chasing me and this idiot is cheating on her. I decided to confront him about this and I screamed at him, hey, what is your problem. And he said I should get off his lawn. And I said, no, no you get off the lawn. You get off. Then he went inside, probably because deep down, he knew I had made some pretty good points.
JimGoad.com is no more, but if you're a Goad fan (ladies!), you can find find him here. Discussion of Brittany's latest, erm, candid photos is also to be found, but be aware that the following picture is used as a visual aid:
This morning we picked up my new wheelchair. It's a sporty European marque, with an aggressive stance, low-profile tires, and a head-turning cherry-red metalflake paint job. It's not that great on the corners, but it'll take any one of y'all on the straightaways.
I've never done time on wheels. On the whole, I found it to be not all that bad. Then again, I don't figure that most wheelchair-bound men my age get to enjoy being pushed around town by a couple of sexy German bloggerettes. Thanks, ladies: the jealous looks from the other local cripples was the icing on the cake. Here's a little something extra for you, babes. (via AoSHQ)
Funny things happen when you're on wheels. I saw a lady I work with while being carted through Tesco's frozen food department. I said hello, and she just looked right through me, steering her cart so as not to make contact with the leper. She probably thought I was going to ask her for some spare change, or if she could wipe me bum for me, or whatever it is that those people want from healthy-legged people. I also noticed that the supermarkets put completely different things down on the bottom three feet of the shelves. All the cool toys are down there, for example, presumably because chil'n's is small. It's also a great altitude to find anti-bedsore medicaments, for some reason.
So, I let myself be pushed by the Weyside in Guildford, where, at one point, a husky young native was required to wheel my fat ass up a steep incline. The Sistas, for all their heart, lacked the muscle to get the job done, so he, being a true-hearted salt-of-earth kind of guy, waved them off and grunted and sweated till I crested the hill. Had the man known that I could have, at any point in time, simply stood up and hobbled up the hill under my own power, he most certainly would have picked me up and broken me over his knee.
Tomorrow morning, we'll be visiting Stonehenge, or Stone'enge, as the locals quaintly call it. We'll also visit the haunted city, Salisbury, to watch the homosexuals. Ta!
I like reading OSNews for some reason. I think I like to catch the geeky news about SkyOS, or the occasional retro curmudgeonry that rolls by about Lotus 1-2-3 or OS/2. Being the old-timer that I am, it's hard to resist a paean from my youth about 10-finger productivity.
Unfortunately, they've become the epicenter of stupid for the tech press. Check out this article, which explodes the myths about competition being good: "Competition is not Good"
'It gives consumers more choice'
Choice is good when there's one agreed base standard, and a number of compatible approaches. For example, there are many Linux distributions, but they are all Linux, and they can all run the same software. They are 'flavours' of the same thing, that is a good choice. People like different flavours.
Competition does not produce easier choices for consumers. All they get is added un-interoperability and complexity with competitive choices.
Now, if you go read that article, which I do not recommend, you'll slowly come to the realization that this moron is just annoyed that he has to make the effort to choose between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. He's willing to surrender his entire free will to some (hopefully) benevolent dictator, abolish brand names, and forsake the free market economy because choosing which format to buy the Firefly special edition box set in is hard. What a hopeless, whiny-assed sissy.
Of course, things don't get better when they start tossing political analysis at you. "Net Neutrality" is one monikers that has overshadowed the thing named. The discussion is often framed in a way that an uninformed listener would assume there was lobbying going on to abolish some sort of laws that are now protecting consumers from big, bad tiered-Internet ninjas.
But: There is no net neutrality legislation, there never was, and hopefully, there never will be. The argument over "Net Neutrality" is about whether or not the U.S. government should introduce legislation forbidding bandwidth throttling by ISPs. It's the "have you stopped beating your wife?" straw man for the Slashdot crowd. You'll notice that this article calls the Supreme Court's decision that the U.S. government shouldn't step in and configure the ISPs' Cisco routers for them, "Backing for Two-Tier Internet":
The US Justice Department has said that internet service providers should be allowed to charge for priority traffic. The agency said it was opposed to 'network neutrality', the idea that all data on the net is treated equally. The comments put the agency at odds with companies such as Microsoft and Google, who have called for legislation to guarantee equal access to the net.
Of course, this would also mean that an enforcement infrastructure would also have to be put in place, making sure that everyone got their "fair share" of said bandwidth, as if backbone routers and POPs just fell off a tree somewhere. God forbid ISPs be allowed to tune the services that they developed and paid for as they wish. Let's let the government decides who gets bandwidth, and how much is enough! That will make it all fair and neutral-like. Whenever a politician uses the word "fair", hang on to your wallet.
Well, my trackbacks are now working, it seems. There's some ugly Python spaghetti-code going on behind the scenes that translates back and forth between absolute urls, non-absolute relative urls, and upper-lower-camel case; but it works.
Trackbacks are only good for Movable Type, though. Which I can't stand anymore. MT used to be the only thing out there, but there's something that really, really, really galls me about the way it rebuilds your entire site into static HTML pages everytime you update a post. I'm sure it's awesomeness if you've got your server running on an old TV remote, but nowadays we're all running our web servers on 100-core 64-bit terahertz moonshot computers that can simultaneously compute π, encode MPEG video, and mix the best goddam margaritas you've ever tasted, all without breaking a sweat.
So yeah, I figured out how to implement trackbacks in Django, to a point where they more or less work. Now why is Wordpress fucking with me? It seems to be thrown off by the fact that Wordpress sends a HEAD request before it downloads and parses the page, in the vain hope that the X-Pingback header will be set. I can't figure out how to do that in Django's generic views, so I just use the secondary method, that being a link element in the XHTML code. But now, whenever a Worpdress blog pings me, I get this kind of crap:
[09/Sep/2007 15:04:23] "GET /blog/2007/sep/08/vacation/ HTTP/1.1" 200 27367
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (104, 'Connection reset by peer')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (32, 'Broken pipe')
Being the half-assed programmer that I am, I am at a total loss. I can't even do a Lazyweb request here, seeing as my 4 visits a day are unlikely to bring the Django HTTP gurus by. I won't be able to sleep at night, thinking of all the enlightened Wordpress Users who are probably out there try to "Keep the discussion going" with me.
Ever since June, when the iPhone went live, I've heard about nothing else in the tech press, nerd podcasts, and the Apple Fanboisphere. Is it really that way over in the States (the only place you can get them), or does the iPhone actually seem to be doing well?
Ahh, my first vacation since joining The Company. My queue is cleaned up, my email is forwarded, and an elaborate Sieve session has accomplished in a mere two hours what less civilized mail systems can do with a key combination: The Corporate Vacation Email.
It's been five months now since I came 'cross the channel and started meeting the natives, learning the lingo, and getting used to the fact that everyone here talks like Pinky. Now, I'll be letting my hair down for the next 10 days or so. As well as putting my poor, broken foot up on the coffee table.
As soon as I get my x-rays back from the socialist medical system (they still copy them with coal rubbings on wax paper over here, apparently), I'll post pictures of the metatarsalar breakage here for your morbid enjoyment. Don't thank me yet.
The other half of Sistaweb will be joining us for the week. We'll allow her to sleep here rent-free for an entire week, even though she refused to bring a carton of cigarettes as payment. Damned non-smokers and their principles. It's like those non-smokers back in the World War II who didn't sign up for cigarette rations. Throwing away a gold mine, that is. Our grandfathers probably had a word for those guys, and if I knew my grandfather at all, that word was sissy-boy.
The girls have rented a wheelchair for me, seeing as I won't be too much fun doing a London pub-crawl on crutches. I've already had a forehead-slapping moment over this, as you probably are right now. Why haven't I thought of taking a wheelchair with me before? That would've come in handy on more than one occasion, the Wreckyll in Jeckyll not least among them.
Man, Apple is on a roll. Not only have they got me hooked for a new computer, a new laptop, a new office package, and a replacement for my aging MythTV box, but now I have to start thinking about a new iPod. Now, let's see what Uncle Steve is going to me be costing me 'til Christmas Time:
Item
Damage
20" iMac
1199.00
Macbook
1099.00
8GB iPod Touch
299.00
AppleTV
299.00
iWork '08
79.00
iLife '08
79.00
Total:
$3,054.00
Not bad for a day's work, Mr. Jobs. And what's up for the rest of September? Maybe some irresistible bionic iFoot to replace the one I broke playing frisbee at the company picnic last week?
Although there's a remarkable lack of iPhone hype around the office, we being a big-time Linux company and all, there's an amazing amount of Mac fanboiism. Pretty much all of us have Macs at home. The explanation for this is simple: After dealing with Linux problems all day long, there's something nice about going home to something you can spend all your time using and not making up excuses for why it looks like shit and doesn't work.
I like Linux, mind you. I use it day-in, day-out for my desktop at work, for my webservers, and it brings in my daily bread. We all love it here, pretty much like a family loves and therefore tolerates the embarrassing second cousin with the Downs'. But people are walking all over the office today buzzing about the upcoming announcement from Apple.
Will it be the long-awaited iMac redesign? Will it be a new Mini? My boss is actually carrying his phone to the pub after work today so he can sit on engadget and get a realtime update. Linus would not be pleased...
Last login: Thu Jul 26 12:17:28 from nat-pool-fab.re Welcome to Darwin! ericbook:~ eric$ mutt -bash: mutt: command not found ericbook:~ eric$ open /Applications/Mail.app/ ericbook:~ eric$
Ahh. Like coming in after a long day of plowing the fields and sticking your aching feet into a pot of hot water. After running Linux all day at work, you feel like slipping into something more comfortable. Sam knows it. Zonker knows it, though he won't admit it. It's the right amount of just-workiness you need to let you relax, while knowing you could, at any given moment, do something like:
OK, here's one with drivel. I do like it, but I have a couple of gripes.
First problem: I was hopelessly confused by the login screen. The type of journal seems to be locked on livejournal, as the drop-down menu for journal types is inexplicably disabled until you enter a username. -1 for usabilty
Second problem: Useless stripping of trailing slash, which mangled my xmlrpc URL. Error 301 was ignored, which makes sense since it's a post and all, but I couldn't log in. It mangled my URL then choked on the error :-/
Third problem: didn't want to download my recent posts. Although there might be a misunderstanding about just what "recent" means.
Fourth problem: Doesn't let me choose post status anywhere. And there's nowhere I can find to choose text filters. This is more of a feature request, really.
Fifth problem: craps out after posting, probably because it keeps mangling the trailing slashes from my URLs. Is there an RFC somewhere that says that POSTS can't end with slashes? Nobody tell the Django folks.
Well, maybe it'll at least let me post to my blog from work every now and then.
Man, I dang sure missed the entire month of June. I've been in the UK now for about two months, and let me tell ya: They sure do get some rain around here. I always thought those stories about English people having gills were legends and fantasies. Now, I'm not so sure.
For the love of GOD, for the last time, in the name of ALL THAT IS HOLY, Cluster Services is NOT COMPATIBLE with 4.5! If you're running a cluster, DO NOT update to 4.5 until the Cluster Suite is UPDATED TO 4.5!
That is all.
P.S. And NO, cmirror is not available yet. Maybe at the end of the month.
I went outside to smoke a cigarette. All rooms in England are for non-smokers, you'll find, as are the rooms, apartments, and houses listed for rent in the local papers. The litany at the end of all the ads reads, "No smokers, canvassers, or DSS", which stands for Department of Social Services. So, okay they hate smokers and welfare cases, as do we all. But the British have their own definition for 'non-smoker', which basically means you only smoke when you drink. Everybody smokes over here, and they all live somewhere.
The evening was cool; almost cold, really, as I suspect the evenings around here generally are. I stood on the corner of Osborne and Netley, watching the blackbirds getting ready to do whatever it is they do at night, when I spied a man, some yards away, bounding up the sidewalk with a jaunty gait. I held my cigarette just in front of my mouth, watching this figure with suspicion. He was short, about 5 feet tall, and round as a soccer ball. He was wearing light-colored trousers and a dark blazer, the left breast of which was adorned with an enormous, orange prize-ribbon.
As he approached me, his features became distinct in the bad lighting, and I realized he was positively beaming with pride. His face was ruddy, and split with a grin that wouldn't have looked out of place behind a wheelbarrow full of poker chips on the way to the cash-out. I placed him in his mid-40s, but maybe his thinning red hair and roly-poly stature made him look older than he really was.
He halted just a few feet from me, and said, with oddly struggling words, "Good evening, mister!"
I looked him up and down, cigarette still burning between my shaky fingers, and replied, "hi, how are ya..." He wobbled his head a bit, then walked around me on his way up the street. I noticed something written in gold on his orange ribbon, and read it as it flashed in the lamplight.
I judged him more than a wee bit 'differently-abled', as they say. I watched as he cautiously crossed the empty street, looking both ways at least twice, then gingerly stepping into the street and crossing it at a run.
I thought about what I had seen written on the ribbon: "A Very Special Boy". Hmm, I thought, I wonder who gave him that? Whoever it was, they made his whole day.
I put my cigarette out and walked back into the guest house.
My buddy Sam sent me an email a couple of days ago indicating that he just might have joined The Family recently. And he joined it a much higher level than I, I might add, considering I'm still lumbering along in the PowerPC world; my G4 Powerbook, though a loyal and trusted friend, seems slow as molasses in January these days.
He also mentioned an old OS/2 habit, one which we separately shared back in the day. I started using OS/2 when I worked at UPS. One of our managers was running 2.1, with the old Presentation Manager that looked like a crappy(er) Windows 2.0, albeit with long filenames and the ability to run concurrent DOS sessions. I avoided it until OS/2 3.0 came out.
In '94, when Warp hit the shelves, I rushed out to Soft-Warehouse1 in Alpharetta, looked in the Operating Systems2 department until I found a box, then gave the man $300 dollars for the privilege of running it. Then, I walked over the desktop applications department, and put down another $495 for Lotus Smartsuite/2. Then I OEM'd 16MB of RAM for about $400 to make it all go.
Now, many may see OS/2 as a butt-ugly cousin of Windows, and they may be right. But back then, it was a work of art. Especially in the sense that it wasn't an exact science getting it to run. Nothing ever really worked like it was supposed to. Without the fallback of a DOS prompt, you had to have a second, fully-functional machine to do things like edit the CONFIG.SYS on the installation floppies to make sure your DASD drivers were loading. And most of the drivers were written so that, if they encountered an error while loading, they'd bork the whole boot process, just to be on the safe side.
The graphical interface also hung constantly. The Workplace Shell, despite (or maybe due to) all its object-orientiness, was horribly unstable. But I never saw a hang that wasn't cured with Control-Alt-Delete. That key combo went right down to the kernel, and always gave a satisfying, unconfirmed reboot, wedged GUI be damned. There was even a 3rd party program called Watchcat that sat on the serial port, or on a secondary Hercules/MCGA monitor, and let you monitor and kill programs remotely. The kernel's Kung Fu was strong like that, but the GUI was just ass.
Now, when Chicago started finally coming down the pipe, and even the Rolling Stones where pulled into the OS marketing world ("Start me up", anyone?), OS/2 fans like myself were sure that this pissant little DOS extender with a homely face wouldn't be the future. It couldn't be the future, it was just too depressing. It still wasn't a 32-bit OS, though the 386 had been out for over 8 years. It still used FAT, for crying out loud. In short, Chicago sucked.
OS/2 seemed like a scrappy little underdog, nipping heroically at the Microsoft behemoth's heels. I'm not sure why it gave that impression. At the time, IBM was much bigger than Microsoft, a huge, multinational corporation with interests in basically every aspect of electronics. They just couldn't write or market good software.
I'm not sure why I just wrote 500 words on OS/2. I actually wanted to write something about Linux.
Software stores used to have a whole "Operating Systems" department, back when there was more than one operating system, and Windows was still called an "Operating Environment" ↩
Man, I'm unprepared. There's a checklist of things you should do before moving to England. I came over here without any money, preparation, or attack plan. There's something unbelievably stupid about this. It worked for me when I moved to Germany, but moving to England's a bit more complicated, apparently. Either that, or I'm remembering it wrong.
But I'm not the only one. The office I'm working in is full of non-British people. It's a rag-tag group of Germans, Italians, Brazilians, Spaniards, one (1) American, and who knows what else that all found themselves in the same boat when they first came over. This despite promises from The Company to help one resettle; promises which are certainly not kept and, when referred to in conversation, change their shape and character like a Democrat on a whistle-stop.
But at some point a kindly soul in the department, now departed, made a list of the reality of the situation. It's a short list of what one really needs to do when moving to England. Unfortunately, I only found out about it after I'd already been here a week. Here's your to-do list once you've arrived in England:
Get a room. If possible, get a rental agreement or any bill with your name and address on it. (proof of address)
Deposit is usually 1 1/2 times the rent. Deposit and first rent is to be paid beforehand. If the room is unfurnished, see "Things to Buy" for shops and example prices.
Get a letter from your office manager (HR Lady) stating that you are working for the company and including your address. (proof of employment)
Get a bank account. Just walk in with your documents:
Passport or national ID card
Proof of employment (see 2.). it might be handy to have your contract with you.
Proof of address
Banks
HSBC – try to get a standard account (they try to sell you an advanced package including insurances etc.)
NatWest – Also recommended as this bank does not charge for withdrawing money from a different bank's cash machines
Give your bank details to The Company
Register with Inland Revenue – this is done by your HR manager. You should get your tax code about 2 weeks later (PAYE Coding Notice)
At the end of the fiscal year (ending April 5th), you will get a "P60 End of Year Certificate" detailing your "Pay and Income Tax" levels.
Get a National Insurance Number by applying at a Job Centre Plus office. They ask for dtails before they schedule an interview appointment to verify your eligibility. Appointments are scheduled about two weeks ahead, and take place in the nearest county office, which usually isn't near at all. Without an NI number, you will be on emergency tax, which is higher than the standard tax rate.
Documents:
Passport
National ID card
Driving License or any other official document identifying you (Birth certificate, police registration, medical card, etc.)
Proof of employment (see 2.)
Recent payslip
Bank statement
Proof of address (utility bill, rental agreement, etc. – see 1.)
It might be handy to have your PAYE Coding Notice with you
As money is paid in a timely manner so it is available on the 27th, try to get your appointment after this date.
If you are British, a citizen of a member state of the EU, or other Commonwealth citizen, you can apply for inclusion on the Register of Electors. This will allow you to vote at local government elections. Your credibility will rise (good for tenancy applications or bank-related matters) and you are obliged to pay Council Taxes1
If you buy any TV or radio equipment, you will be asked for your address, which will be automatically forwarded to the "TV Licensing Office"
Get a Tesco Clubcard
Get a life ;-)
Any address change has to be communicated to all above-mentioned authorities. For the official notices to local council, the TV licensing, and most other on-line services, you can use I am Moving , where you can create/use an account for free.
All of this could have been avoided with a bit of planning. I am bitterly disappointed in myself.
Council taxes are universal as far as I can tell, and are perceived, by the British at least, as an extension of the rent. ↩
Farnborough derives its name from from the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Ferneberga (Fern Hill) and is mentioned in the Domesday Book (1086). But for the coming of the army at nearby Aldershot, the arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flying, Farnborough would probably have remained an isolated heathland village, that is until the latter half of the 20th century when the population moved out of London suburbia and became commuters.
"But for the … arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flight…". That's a pretty big conditional. There are probably a lot of places whose development was seriously affected by railways and the advent of powered flight. But I understand where the good Mr. Parkins is coming from.
I had forgotten the cable to connect my camera to my laptop. Of all the stupid things that I packed for the trip, 50 different USB cables, a USB hub, power adapters for devices I’d forgotten, not to mention devices whose power adapters I’d forgotten, I forgot the one thing that was absolutely necessary and planned-for. Not to mention irreplaceable, seeing as every camera maker in the world decided that their camera’s little hole should look different from all the other cameras’ little holes.
I walked into a little computer store on the strip in Fleet, Hampshire. Walking up to the pasty-faced, teenaged part-timer there, I introduced myself and shook his hand, which seemed to shock him.
He unconsciously wiped his hands on his pants and said, “eh...nice to meet you, sir. What can I do for you?”
I asked him, “do you have any USB card-readers?”
“Um, yeah," he answered. "I think I saw some around here somewhere.”
I looked around the shop, which was organized and clean. Man, he must really be the FNG around here. He finally found what I was looking for, stored on a shelf right next to where he had been sitting. He handed it to me and I started reading the back of the packaging.
“Just looking to see if it works with my Mac,” I told him.
“Oh, it's USB, so it should work,” he answered, and took the reader out of my hand. He moved his lips while he read the package. “Oh, yeah,” he said finally. “Right there it says it: ‘Requires Mac OS 9 or later’.” He looked at me skeptically. “So, you do have OS 9 or later, don’t you?”
“Um, yeah, I think so.” OS 9 went out of style back in the ‘90s.
He moved around to the register, and I handed him my Visa card. He looked uncertain as he turned it over in his hand. “This thing doesn’t have a chip on it?”
I took it back and examined it. “No, I guess it doesn’t.”
“Well, I don’t think we can take that, then.”
“Why don’t you just swipe it,” I said. “Give it a go.”
He shrugged and swiped it through the machine.
From behind me, a voice said, “it’s all chips nowadays, you know.”
I looked around, and saw that an older woman was standing behind me. She looked to be in her mid 40s, and wore a name plate with the store’s logo on it. “You can’t get nothing without a dozen little chips in it.”
I nodded agreement, and turned back to the young man behind the register.
“So, what kind of Mac you got, then?”
“A PowerBook G4.”
He nodded approvingly. “Nice piece of kit, that.” The little machine that had taken my card made a loud ping!, and spit out a receipt. He tore it off and gave it to me to sign, along with the card reader.
“Now, you have a nice day sir, and do please visit us again.”
I thanked him, said goodbye to the chip-lady, and put the small package into my bag next to my laptop. “Thanks, man, I’ll do that.” Nice kid.
Didja ever discover something that made your reality skip a beat? You know how, for just a second, something is so far out of place that you can't even figure out what's wrong with the picture? For example, the Augsburg Wireless-Internet provider Cyberways has had the same guy on their start page for years:
Every time you connect to the internet over public wireless in Augsburg, that dude was right there, staring at you with those soulless black eyes. Like a doll's eyes...
And the weird thing was, I always figured he was the boss at Cyberways. I even thought I saw him once on the tram. I hate it when people use the same stock photos everywhere. Everybody's full of shit. Oh, I guess it's effective use of your cash dollars, seeing as it's cheaper than paying attractive people to work for you. But still, why not just be honest for a split second?
You get this kind of thing all over the Internet, of course. If you've ever shopped for web hosting, you'll notice, after a few visits to the providers' pages, that their employees all kind of look alike. And there's always some woman somewhere holding a laptop at her waist in near-sexual ecstasy over the reasonable shared hosting prices.
It's a leitmotif throughout the enter hosting industry: Shared Webspace=Chick with laptop.
Rube, look, for the last freakin time, look RIGHT when you step off a curb! These people drive on the other side of the F$@&-ing road over here! You wanna get ya brains splattered all over me?
What? I dunno. I'm just kind of sitting around, waiting on things. I just spent way too much time transferring money across European borders, and reclaiming my identity. But the new passports are wonderful pieces of fortitude. Here' s a few quotes from my new passport:
And that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth. - Abraham Lincoln
The principle of free governments adheres to the American soil. It is bedded in it, immovable as its mountains. - Daniel Webster
Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. - George Washington
We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. - excerpt from the Declaration of Independence
Your concept of love may be different, but know that I love this world.
I like reading Scott Adams' blog on occasion. Much like Balph Eubanks, he's glib, amusing, and completely lacking in morality. Take, for example, his latest strawman-laden posting regarding the visit of a certain Mr. Ahmedinejad:
I was happy to hear that NYC didn't allow Iranian President Ahmadinejad
to place a wreath at the WTC site. And I was happy that Columbia
University is rescinding the offer to let him speak. If you let a guy like
that express his views, before long the entire world will want freedom
of speech.
...
If Ahmadinejad thinks he can be our friend by honoring our heroes and
opening a dialog, he underestimates our ability to misinterpret him.
Fucking idiot. I hate him.
Well, there's certainly some rye wit at work here. Yes, it is quite ironic that a country led by a genocidal religious dictator, which the USA most certainly is, would object to a fellow genocidal religious madman visiting its most sensitive cultural site. I mean, Mahmoud's only trying to "open a dialog" here, isn't he? Isn't that the meaning of Ahmedinejad's visit? Isn't Ahmedinejad just exercising "Free Speech", as Adams says? Aren't we wrong in denying this poor man that right?
Aside from the obvious jackassery involved in claiming that a man who directly controls his entire country's media is having trouble getting his point of view out; or that the United Nations will let him speak before the leaders of the world to the point where they forget to blink for an hour; aside from all this, this is not a question of whether or not Mahmoud is allowed to say what he wants. The question is, in accordance with the Grand Unified Theory of Rubean Mechanics, Who's going to pay for it. It's a question of whether or not Americans should be paying for his plane fare, his security, and his accommodation while he's here, pissing on Ground Zero and generating propaganda for totalitarian lobbying groups like MoveOn.org and International ANSWER.
All of Adams' ridiculous assertions never mention the one central fact here: There is no compelling reason for American taxpayers to foot the bill, so this guy, who just held one of his popular "Death to America" parades, can come over here and lecture them on anything. I personally don't much care what Ahmedinejad thinks, I can see the general thrust of his inclinations. He's spitting on the United States and Western Culture daily, and then expects to be treated with deference in return. Fuck him.
This kind of Devil's Advocacy isn't new to Adams. At least, I hope it's just that. He's apparently one of those celebrities that have forgotten the hard work involved in their ascendency, and assume that they're rich because of some accident of nature, akin to divine providence. Humans, himself included, are all just a bunch of "moist robots" with no capacity for thought, no free will; we've apparently just been programmed by Mother Nature to do the things we've done or will do. There is no mind, there is no choice, there is only the stimuli in our environments, and the response that was determined by a chance arrangement of atoms into chemicals during the Big Bang. Or something.
It's an obscene display of thoughtlessness, a conceit of someone trying so hard to seem above all this. Adams' Dilbert is amusing, and his blog is a bit of junk food for the brain at times. But he's got the morals of a two-dollar whore.
Last night we didn't make it. The two Frenchmen surrendered the evening, seeing as it was Trotzky's birthday, and therefore a time for somber reflection or something. So, we rode around big town Farnborough for a couple of hours, grabbed some grub, and then headed back to the apartment to watch a movie.
We watched Fur, which cemented my belief that Nicole Kidman is the perfect woman. Not only does she look good in her own slutty little librarian sort of way, she gives a guy a handjob in this movie while shaving his hairy back. That's my kind of girl, a real little trooper.
Anyhoo, it's back off to London now, for a second try at getting sloppy somewhere besides sitting at home in front of the boob tube. Wish us luck.
Vacation week is winding down, and I'm getting ready to leave the driving to Southwest Trains and go drinking in London. I'll try to keep it under two weeks this time, but no promises. We'll tramp it a bit through Soho, I guess, just me, the girls, and a couple of frog-eaters from the office.
I wonder why I never get to go drinking with Englishmen? It's probably for the best. There's a quote that gets bandied about, especially in the local newspapers, about England being a nation of drunks and scalawags. I can't say much about that, but it does seem that the pubs all close at 11:00 PM for a reason. At 5 o'clock, they pour out of their offices and into the public houses, seemingly on a race against the clock to get themselves 'faced before the early last call.
When they were finally permitted to stay open past 11, in the hope that the binge-drinking would abate in light of longer opening hours, they found themselves doubly-cursed in that the Englishmen were every bit as drunk at 11, but didn't have to go home. All pubs here are set up so that you have to go to the counter to get your drinks, instead of having them brought to your table. There's a built-in handbrake there: a system where you can't get any more drink once you lose the ability to walk is founded upon sound principle and good advices.
I've done nothing today; nothing but clean out the cluttered closets of my preferred newsfeed reader. There were some connections in there that were sorely neglected. I could use a bit more time to wade through the degenerate filth that is my blogroll, but sadly, I work. The Company is tolerant in their control over my time, fair since they do not pay hourly; but tolerance has its limits, and I doubt they would look kindly upon my spending the business day in a fugue state, reading entry after entry of dialectics about Jessica Simpson's tits, or Brittney Spears' overplayed poonanny.
Nevertheless, it saddens me that my everyday is not blessed with the nuggets of wisdom from skippystalin:
Being the only person with an out-of-control substance abuse problem in a relationship is tough. Most romantic couplings are based on common interests and most of my interests culminate in my waking up in a pool of what I think is my own urine and not being quite sure what time zone I'm in. I'm much like a cat in that I have a tendancy of marking my territory with my vomit, blood and gallons of my semen...My ability to smoke, drink and masturbate furiously at the same time might not be much, it's all that I have.
Ahh, skippystalin, how I've missed you, and your nuggets.
This is how I spend my vacation: visiting Stonehenge on one day; reading the melancholy musings of skippystalin the next, picturing him composing scholarly tracts through bitter tears, a crushed Viagra dissolving in a highball of Jack Daniels next to the keyboard, as another long evening fades into a blur of poetry, madness, and vigorous bouts of hate-filled masturbation. And wondering, of the two, which is the more meaningful and fitting monument to humanity?
They should've just burned enjoyeverysandwich to CD, stuck it to the side of Voyager along with its author, and shot the whole lot into space back when they had government funding to do so, all in the name of making a good first impression for whatever aliens were out cruising for an easy meal.
skippystalin's output is prodigious, to be sure, but there was an entire blogroll to consider:
The lunatics are running the asylum over at Straight White Guy's place. Eric's testicles are mentioned, indirectly. Remind me to change my passwords regularly and start using strong encryption.
How stoned do you have to be to cheat on Jessica Alba? I could jack off to Jessica Alba while a big mean dog was chasing me and this idiot is cheating on her. I decided to confront him about this and I screamed at him, hey, what is your problem. And he said I should get off his lawn. And I said, no, no you get off the lawn. You get off. Then he went inside, probably because deep down, he knew I had made some pretty good points.
JimGoad.com is no more, but if you're a Goad fan (ladies!), you can find find him here. Discussion of Brittany's latest, erm, candid photos is also to be found, but be aware that the following picture is used as a visual aid:
This morning we picked up my new wheelchair. It's a sporty European marque, with an aggressive stance, low-profile tires, and a head-turning cherry-red metalflake paint job. It's not that great on the corners, but it'll take any one of y'all on the straightaways.
I've never done time on wheels. On the whole, I found it to be not all that bad. Then again, I don't figure that most wheelchair-bound men my age get to enjoy being pushed around town by a couple of sexy German bloggerettes. Thanks, ladies: the jealous looks from the other local cripples was the icing on the cake. Here's a little something extra for you, babes. (via AoSHQ)
Funny things happen when you're on wheels. I saw a lady I work with while being carted through Tesco's frozen food department. I said hello, and she just looked right through me, steering her cart so as not to make contact with the leper. She probably thought I was going to ask her for some spare change, or if she could wipe me bum for me, or whatever it is that those people want from healthy-legged people. I also noticed that the supermarkets put completely different things down on the bottom three feet of the shelves. All the cool toys are down there, for example, presumably because chil'n's is small. It's also a great altitude to find anti-bedsore medicaments, for some reason.
So, I let myself be pushed by the Weyside in Guildford, where, at one point, a husky young native was required to wheel my fat ass up a steep incline. The Sistas, for all their heart, lacked the muscle to get the job done, so he, being a true-hearted salt-of-earth kind of guy, waved them off and grunted and sweated till I crested the hill. Had the man known that I could have, at any point in time, simply stood up and hobbled up the hill under my own power, he most certainly would have picked me up and broken me over his knee.
Tomorrow morning, we'll be visiting Stonehenge, or Stone'enge, as the locals quaintly call it. We'll also visit the haunted city, Salisbury, to watch the homosexuals. Ta!
I like reading OSNews for some reason. I think I like to catch the geeky news about SkyOS, or the occasional retro curmudgeonry that rolls by about Lotus 1-2-3 or OS/2. Being the old-timer that I am, it's hard to resist a paean from my youth about 10-finger productivity.
Unfortunately, they've become the epicenter of stupid for the tech press. Check out this article, which explodes the myths about competition being good: "Competition is not Good"
'It gives consumers more choice'
Choice is good when there's one agreed base standard, and a number of compatible approaches. For example, there are many Linux distributions, but they are all Linux, and they can all run the same software. They are 'flavours' of the same thing, that is a good choice. People like different flavours.
Competition does not produce easier choices for consumers. All they get is added un-interoperability and complexity with competitive choices.
Now, if you go read that article, which I do not recommend, you'll slowly come to the realization that this moron is just annoyed that he has to make the effort to choose between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. He's willing to surrender his entire free will to some (hopefully) benevolent dictator, abolish brand names, and forsake the free market economy because choosing which format to buy the Firefly special edition box set in is hard. What a hopeless, whiny-assed sissy.
Of course, things don't get better when they start tossing political analysis at you. "Net Neutrality" is one monikers that has overshadowed the thing named. The discussion is often framed in a way that an uninformed listener would assume there was lobbying going on to abolish some sort of laws that are now protecting consumers from big, bad tiered-Internet ninjas.
But: There is no net neutrality legislation, there never was, and hopefully, there never will be. The argument over "Net Neutrality" is about whether or not the U.S. government should introduce legislation forbidding bandwidth throttling by ISPs. It's the "have you stopped beating your wife?" straw man for the Slashdot crowd. You'll notice that this article calls the Supreme Court's decision that the U.S. government shouldn't step in and configure the ISPs' Cisco routers for them, "Backing for Two-Tier Internet":
The US Justice Department has said that internet service providers should be allowed to charge for priority traffic. The agency said it was opposed to 'network neutrality', the idea that all data on the net is treated equally. The comments put the agency at odds with companies such as Microsoft and Google, who have called for legislation to guarantee equal access to the net.
Of course, this would also mean that an enforcement infrastructure would also have to be put in place, making sure that everyone got their "fair share" of said bandwidth, as if backbone routers and POPs just fell off a tree somewhere. God forbid ISPs be allowed to tune the services that they developed and paid for as they wish. Let's let the government decides who gets bandwidth, and how much is enough! That will make it all fair and neutral-like. Whenever a politician uses the word "fair", hang on to your wallet.
Well, my trackbacks are now working, it seems. There's some ugly Python spaghetti-code going on behind the scenes that translates back and forth between absolute urls, non-absolute relative urls, and upper-lower-camel case; but it works.
Trackbacks are only good for Movable Type, though. Which I can't stand anymore. MT used to be the only thing out there, but there's something that really, really, really galls me about the way it rebuilds your entire site into static HTML pages everytime you update a post. I'm sure it's awesomeness if you've got your server running on an old TV remote, but nowadays we're all running our web servers on 100-core 64-bit terahertz moonshot computers that can simultaneously compute π, encode MPEG video, and mix the best goddam margaritas you've ever tasted, all without breaking a sweat.
So yeah, I figured out how to implement trackbacks in Django, to a point where they more or less work. Now why is Wordpress fucking with me? It seems to be thrown off by the fact that Wordpress sends a HEAD request before it downloads and parses the page, in the vain hope that the X-Pingback header will be set. I can't figure out how to do that in Django's generic views, so I just use the secondary method, that being a link element in the XHTML code. But now, whenever a Worpdress blog pings me, I get this kind of crap:
[09/Sep/2007 15:04:23] "GET /blog/2007/sep/08/vacation/ HTTP/1.1" 200 27367
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (104, 'Connection reset by peer')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (32, 'Broken pipe')
Being the half-assed programmer that I am, I am at a total loss. I can't even do a Lazyweb request here, seeing as my 4 visits a day are unlikely to bring the Django HTTP gurus by. I won't be able to sleep at night, thinking of all the enlightened Wordpress Users who are probably out there try to "Keep the discussion going" with me.
Ever since June, when the iPhone went live, I've heard about nothing else in the tech press, nerd podcasts, and the Apple Fanboisphere. Is it really that way over in the States (the only place you can get them), or does the iPhone actually seem to be doing well?
Ahh, my first vacation since joining The Company. My queue is cleaned up, my email is forwarded, and an elaborate Sieve session has accomplished in a mere two hours what less civilized mail systems can do with a key combination: The Corporate Vacation Email.
It's been five months now since I came 'cross the channel and started meeting the natives, learning the lingo, and getting used to the fact that everyone here talks like Pinky. Now, I'll be letting my hair down for the next 10 days or so. As well as putting my poor, broken foot up on the coffee table.
As soon as I get my x-rays back from the socialist medical system (they still copy them with coal rubbings on wax paper over here, apparently), I'll post pictures of the metatarsalar breakage here for your morbid enjoyment. Don't thank me yet.
The other half of Sistaweb will be joining us for the week. We'll allow her to sleep here rent-free for an entire week, even though she refused to bring a carton of cigarettes as payment. Damned non-smokers and their principles. It's like those non-smokers back in the World War II who didn't sign up for cigarette rations. Throwing away a gold mine, that is. Our grandfathers probably had a word for those guys, and if I knew my grandfather at all, that word was sissy-boy.
The girls have rented a wheelchair for me, seeing as I won't be too much fun doing a London pub-crawl on crutches. I've already had a forehead-slapping moment over this, as you probably are right now. Why haven't I thought of taking a wheelchair with me before? That would've come in handy on more than one occasion, the Wreckyll in Jeckyll not least among them.
Man, Apple is on a roll. Not only have they got me hooked for a new computer, a new laptop, a new office package, and a replacement for my aging MythTV box, but now I have to start thinking about a new iPod. Now, let's see what Uncle Steve is going to me be costing me 'til Christmas Time:
Item
Damage
20" iMac
1199.00
Macbook
1099.00
8GB iPod Touch
299.00
AppleTV
299.00
iWork '08
79.00
iLife '08
79.00
Total:
$3,054.00
Not bad for a day's work, Mr. Jobs. And what's up for the rest of September? Maybe some irresistible bionic iFoot to replace the one I broke playing frisbee at the company picnic last week?
Although there's a remarkable lack of iPhone hype around the office, we being a big-time Linux company and all, there's an amazing amount of Mac fanboiism. Pretty much all of us have Macs at home. The explanation for this is simple: After dealing with Linux problems all day long, there's something nice about going home to something you can spend all your time using and not making up excuses for why it looks like shit and doesn't work.
I like Linux, mind you. I use it day-in, day-out for my desktop at work, for my webservers, and it brings in my daily bread. We all love it here, pretty much like a family loves and therefore tolerates the embarrassing second cousin with the Downs'. But people are walking all over the office today buzzing about the upcoming announcement from Apple.
Will it be the long-awaited iMac redesign? Will it be a new Mini? My boss is actually carrying his phone to the pub after work today so he can sit on engadget and get a realtime update. Linus would not be pleased...
Last login: Thu Jul 26 12:17:28 from nat-pool-fab.re Welcome to Darwin! ericbook:~ eric$ mutt -bash: mutt: command not found ericbook:~ eric$ open /Applications/Mail.app/ ericbook:~ eric$
Ahh. Like coming in after a long day of plowing the fields and sticking your aching feet into a pot of hot water. After running Linux all day at work, you feel like slipping into something more comfortable. Sam knows it. Zonker knows it, though he won't admit it. It's the right amount of just-workiness you need to let you relax, while knowing you could, at any given moment, do something like:
OK, here's one with drivel. I do like it, but I have a couple of gripes.
First problem: I was hopelessly confused by the login screen. The type of journal seems to be locked on livejournal, as the drop-down menu for journal types is inexplicably disabled until you enter a username. -1 for usabilty
Second problem: Useless stripping of trailing slash, which mangled my xmlrpc URL. Error 301 was ignored, which makes sense since it's a post and all, but I couldn't log in. It mangled my URL then choked on the error :-/
Third problem: didn't want to download my recent posts. Although there might be a misunderstanding about just what "recent" means.
Fourth problem: Doesn't let me choose post status anywhere. And there's nowhere I can find to choose text filters. This is more of a feature request, really.
Fifth problem: craps out after posting, probably because it keeps mangling the trailing slashes from my URLs. Is there an RFC somewhere that says that POSTS can't end with slashes? Nobody tell the Django folks.
Well, maybe it'll at least let me post to my blog from work every now and then.
Man, I dang sure missed the entire month of June. I've been in the UK now for about two months, and let me tell ya: They sure do get some rain around here. I always thought those stories about English people having gills were legends and fantasies. Now, I'm not so sure.
For the love of GOD, for the last time, in the name of ALL THAT IS HOLY, Cluster Services is NOT COMPATIBLE with 4.5! If you're running a cluster, DO NOT update to 4.5 until the Cluster Suite is UPDATED TO 4.5!
That is all.
P.S. And NO, cmirror is not available yet. Maybe at the end of the month.
I went outside to smoke a cigarette. All rooms in England are for non-smokers, you'll find, as are the rooms, apartments, and houses listed for rent in the local papers. The litany at the end of all the ads reads, "No smokers, canvassers, or DSS", which stands for Department of Social Services. So, okay they hate smokers and welfare cases, as do we all. But the British have their own definition for 'non-smoker', which basically means you only smoke when you drink. Everybody smokes over here, and they all live somewhere.
The evening was cool; almost cold, really, as I suspect the evenings around here generally are. I stood on the corner of Osborne and Netley, watching the blackbirds getting ready to do whatever it is they do at night, when I spied a man, some yards away, bounding up the sidewalk with a jaunty gait. I held my cigarette just in front of my mouth, watching this figure with suspicion. He was short, about 5 feet tall, and round as a soccer ball. He was wearing light-colored trousers and a dark blazer, the left breast of which was adorned with an enormous, orange prize-ribbon.
As he approached me, his features became distinct in the bad lighting, and I realized he was positively beaming with pride. His face was ruddy, and split with a grin that wouldn't have looked out of place behind a wheelbarrow full of poker chips on the way to the cash-out. I placed him in his mid-40s, but maybe his thinning red hair and roly-poly stature made him look older than he really was.
He halted just a few feet from me, and said, with oddly struggling words, "Good evening, mister!"
I looked him up and down, cigarette still burning between my shaky fingers, and replied, "hi, how are ya..." He wobbled his head a bit, then walked around me on his way up the street. I noticed something written in gold on his orange ribbon, and read it as it flashed in the lamplight.
I judged him more than a wee bit 'differently-abled', as they say. I watched as he cautiously crossed the empty street, looking both ways at least twice, then gingerly stepping into the street and crossing it at a run.
I thought about what I had seen written on the ribbon: "A Very Special Boy". Hmm, I thought, I wonder who gave him that? Whoever it was, they made his whole day.
I put my cigarette out and walked back into the guest house.
My buddy Sam sent me an email a couple of days ago indicating that he just might have joined The Family recently. And he joined it a much higher level than I, I might add, considering I'm still lumbering along in the PowerPC world; my G4 Powerbook, though a loyal and trusted friend, seems slow as molasses in January these days.
He also mentioned an old OS/2 habit, one which we separately shared back in the day. I started using OS/2 when I worked at UPS. One of our managers was running 2.1, with the old Presentation Manager that looked like a crappy(er) Windows 2.0, albeit with long filenames and the ability to run concurrent DOS sessions. I avoided it until OS/2 3.0 came out.
In '94, when Warp hit the shelves, I rushed out to Soft-Warehouse1 in Alpharetta, looked in the Operating Systems2 department until I found a box, then gave the man $300 dollars for the privilege of running it. Then, I walked over the desktop applications department, and put down another $495 for Lotus Smartsuite/2. Then I OEM'd 16MB of RAM for about $400 to make it all go.
Now, many may see OS/2 as a butt-ugly cousin of Windows, and they may be right. But back then, it was a work of art. Especially in the sense that it wasn't an exact science getting it to run. Nothing ever really worked like it was supposed to. Without the fallback of a DOS prompt, you had to have a second, fully-functional machine to do things like edit the CONFIG.SYS on the installation floppies to make sure your DASD drivers were loading. And most of the drivers were written so that, if they encountered an error while loading, they'd bork the whole boot process, just to be on the safe side.
The graphical interface also hung constantly. The Workplace Shell, despite (or maybe due to) all its object-orientiness, was horribly unstable. But I never saw a hang that wasn't cured with Control-Alt-Delete. That key combo went right down to the kernel, and always gave a satisfying, unconfirmed reboot, wedged GUI be damned. There was even a 3rd party program called Watchcat that sat on the serial port, or on a secondary Hercules/MCGA monitor, and let you monitor and kill programs remotely. The kernel's Kung Fu was strong like that, but the GUI was just ass.
Now, when Chicago started finally coming down the pipe, and even the Rolling Stones where pulled into the OS marketing world ("Start me up", anyone?), OS/2 fans like myself were sure that this pissant little DOS extender with a homely face wouldn't be the future. It couldn't be the future, it was just too depressing. It still wasn't a 32-bit OS, though the 386 had been out for over 8 years. It still used FAT, for crying out loud. In short, Chicago sucked.
OS/2 seemed like a scrappy little underdog, nipping heroically at the Microsoft behemoth's heels. I'm not sure why it gave that impression. At the time, IBM was much bigger than Microsoft, a huge, multinational corporation with interests in basically every aspect of electronics. They just couldn't write or market good software.
I'm not sure why I just wrote 500 words on OS/2. I actually wanted to write something about Linux.
Software stores used to have a whole "Operating Systems" department, back when there was more than one operating system, and Windows was still called an "Operating Environment" ↩
Man, I'm unprepared. There's a checklist of things you should do before moving to England. I came over here without any money, preparation, or attack plan. There's something unbelievably stupid about this. It worked for me when I moved to Germany, but moving to England's a bit more complicated, apparently. Either that, or I'm remembering it wrong.
But I'm not the only one. The office I'm working in is full of non-British people. It's a rag-tag group of Germans, Italians, Brazilians, Spaniards, one (1) American, and who knows what else that all found themselves in the same boat when they first came over. This despite promises from The Company to help one resettle; promises which are certainly not kept and, when referred to in conversation, change their shape and character like a Democrat on a whistle-stop.
But at some point a kindly soul in the department, now departed, made a list of the reality of the situation. It's a short list of what one really needs to do when moving to England. Unfortunately, I only found out about it after I'd already been here a week. Here's your to-do list once you've arrived in England:
Get a room. If possible, get a rental agreement or any bill with your name and address on it. (proof of address)
Deposit is usually 1 1/2 times the rent. Deposit and first rent is to be paid beforehand. If the room is unfurnished, see "Things to Buy" for shops and example prices.
Get a letter from your office manager (HR Lady) stating that you are working for the company and including your address. (proof of employment)
Get a bank account. Just walk in with your documents:
Passport or national ID card
Proof of employment (see 2.). it might be handy to have your contract with you.
Proof of address
Banks
HSBC – try to get a standard account (they try to sell you an advanced package including insurances etc.)
NatWest – Also recommended as this bank does not charge for withdrawing money from a different bank's cash machines
Give your bank details to The Company
Register with Inland Revenue – this is done by your HR manager. You should get your tax code about 2 weeks later (PAYE Coding Notice)
At the end of the fiscal year (ending April 5th), you will get a "P60 End of Year Certificate" detailing your "Pay and Income Tax" levels.
Get a National Insurance Number by applying at a Job Centre Plus office. They ask for dtails before they schedule an interview appointment to verify your eligibility. Appointments are scheduled about two weeks ahead, and take place in the nearest county office, which usually isn't near at all. Without an NI number, you will be on emergency tax, which is higher than the standard tax rate.
Documents:
Passport
National ID card
Driving License or any other official document identifying you (Birth certificate, police registration, medical card, etc.)
Proof of employment (see 2.)
Recent payslip
Bank statement
Proof of address (utility bill, rental agreement, etc. – see 1.)
It might be handy to have your PAYE Coding Notice with you
As money is paid in a timely manner so it is available on the 27th, try to get your appointment after this date.
If you are British, a citizen of a member state of the EU, or other Commonwealth citizen, you can apply for inclusion on the Register of Electors. This will allow you to vote at local government elections. Your credibility will rise (good for tenancy applications or bank-related matters) and you are obliged to pay Council Taxes1
If you buy any TV or radio equipment, you will be asked for your address, which will be automatically forwarded to the "TV Licensing Office"
Get a Tesco Clubcard
Get a life ;-)
Any address change has to be communicated to all above-mentioned authorities. For the official notices to local council, the TV licensing, and most other on-line services, you can use I am Moving , where you can create/use an account for free.
All of this could have been avoided with a bit of planning. I am bitterly disappointed in myself.
Council taxes are universal as far as I can tell, and are perceived, by the British at least, as an extension of the rent. ↩
Farnborough derives its name from from the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Ferneberga (Fern Hill) and is mentioned in the Domesday Book (1086). But for the coming of the army at nearby Aldershot, the arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flying, Farnborough would probably have remained an isolated heathland village, that is until the latter half of the 20th century when the population moved out of London suburbia and became commuters.
"But for the … arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flight…". That's a pretty big conditional. There are probably a lot of places whose development was seriously affected by railways and the advent of powered flight. But I understand where the good Mr. Parkins is coming from.
I had forgotten the cable to connect my camera to my laptop. Of all the stupid things that I packed for the trip, 50 different USB cables, a USB hub, power adapters for devices I’d forgotten, not to mention devices whose power adapters I’d forgotten, I forgot the one thing that was absolutely necessary and planned-for. Not to mention irreplaceable, seeing as every camera maker in the world decided that their camera’s little hole should look different from all the other cameras’ little holes.
I walked into a little computer store on the strip in Fleet, Hampshire. Walking up to the pasty-faced, teenaged part-timer there, I introduced myself and shook his hand, which seemed to shock him.
He unconsciously wiped his hands on his pants and said, “eh...nice to meet you, sir. What can I do for you?”
I asked him, “do you have any USB card-readers?”
“Um, yeah," he answered. "I think I saw some around here somewhere.”
I looked around the shop, which was organized and clean. Man, he must really be the FNG around here. He finally found what I was looking for, stored on a shelf right next to where he had been sitting. He handed it to me and I started reading the back of the packaging.
“Just looking to see if it works with my Mac,” I told him.
“Oh, it's USB, so it should work,” he answered, and took the reader out of my hand. He moved his lips while he read the package. “Oh, yeah,” he said finally. “Right there it says it: ‘Requires Mac OS 9 or later’.” He looked at me skeptically. “So, you do have OS 9 or later, don’t you?”
“Um, yeah, I think so.” OS 9 went out of style back in the ‘90s.
He moved around to the register, and I handed him my Visa card. He looked uncertain as he turned it over in his hand. “This thing doesn’t have a chip on it?”
I took it back and examined it. “No, I guess it doesn’t.”
“Well, I don’t think we can take that, then.”
“Why don’t you just swipe it,” I said. “Give it a go.”
He shrugged and swiped it through the machine.
From behind me, a voice said, “it’s all chips nowadays, you know.”
I looked around, and saw that an older woman was standing behind me. She looked to be in her mid 40s, and wore a name plate with the store’s logo on it. “You can’t get nothing without a dozen little chips in it.”
I nodded agreement, and turned back to the young man behind the register.
“So, what kind of Mac you got, then?”
“A PowerBook G4.”
He nodded approvingly. “Nice piece of kit, that.” The little machine that had taken my card made a loud ping!, and spit out a receipt. He tore it off and gave it to me to sign, along with the card reader.
“Now, you have a nice day sir, and do please visit us again.”
I thanked him, said goodbye to the chip-lady, and put the small package into my bag next to my laptop. “Thanks, man, I’ll do that.” Nice kid.
Didja ever discover something that made your reality skip a beat? You know how, for just a second, something is so far out of place that you can't even figure out what's wrong with the picture? For example, the Augsburg Wireless-Internet provider Cyberways has had the same guy on their start page for years:
Every time you connect to the internet over public wireless in Augsburg, that dude was right there, staring at you with those soulless black eyes. Like a doll's eyes...
And the weird thing was, I always figured he was the boss at Cyberways. I even thought I saw him once on the tram. I hate it when people use the same stock photos everywhere. Everybody's full of shit. Oh, I guess it's effective use of your cash dollars, seeing as it's cheaper than paying attractive people to work for you. But still, why not just be honest for a split second?
You get this kind of thing all over the Internet, of course. If you've ever shopped for web hosting, you'll notice, after a few visits to the providers' pages, that their employees all kind of look alike. And there's always some woman somewhere holding a laptop at her waist in near-sexual ecstasy over the reasonable shared hosting prices.
It's a leitmotif throughout the enter hosting industry: Shared Webspace=Chick with laptop.
Rube, look, for the last freakin time, look RIGHT when you step off a curb! These people drive on the other side of the F$@&-ing road over here! You wanna get ya brains splattered all over me?
What? I dunno. I'm just kind of sitting around, waiting on things. I just spent way too much time transferring money across European borders, and reclaiming my identity. But the new passports are wonderful pieces of fortitude. Here' s a few quotes from my new passport:
And that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth. - Abraham Lincoln
The principle of free governments adheres to the American soil. It is bedded in it, immovable as its mountains. - Daniel Webster
Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. - George Washington
We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. - excerpt from the Declaration of Independence
Your concept of love may be different, but know that I love this world.
I like reading Scott Adams' blog on occasion. Much like Balph Eubanks, he's glib, amusing, and completely lacking in morality. Take, for example, his latest strawman-laden posting regarding the visit of a certain Mr. Ahmedinejad:
I was happy to hear that NYC didn't allow Iranian President Ahmadinejad
to place a wreath at the WTC site. And I was happy that Columbia
University is rescinding the offer to let him speak. If you let a guy like
that express his views, before long the entire world will want freedom
of speech.
...
If Ahmadinejad thinks he can be our friend by honoring our heroes and
opening a dialog, he underestimates our ability to misinterpret him.
Fucking idiot. I hate him.
Well, there's certainly some rye wit at work here. Yes, it is quite ironic that a country led by a genocidal religious dictator, which the USA most certainly is, would object to a fellow genocidal religious madman visiting its most sensitive cultural site. I mean, Mahmoud's only trying to "open a dialog" here, isn't he? Isn't that the meaning of Ahmedinejad's visit? Isn't Ahmedinejad just exercising "Free Speech", as Adams says? Aren't we wrong in denying this poor man that right?
Aside from the obvious jackassery involved in claiming that a man who directly controls his entire country's media is having trouble getting his point of view out; or that the United Nations will let him speak before the leaders of the world to the point where they forget to blink for an hour; aside from all this, this is not a question of whether or not Mahmoud is allowed to say what he wants. The question is, in accordance with the Grand Unified Theory of Rubean Mechanics, Who's going to pay for it. It's a question of whether or not Americans should be paying for his plane fare, his security, and his accommodation while he's here, pissing on Ground Zero and generating propaganda for totalitarian lobbying groups like MoveOn.org and International ANSWER.
All of Adams' ridiculous assertions never mention the one central fact here: There is no compelling reason for American taxpayers to foot the bill, so this guy, who just held one of his popular "Death to America" parades, can come over here and lecture them on anything. I personally don't much care what Ahmedinejad thinks, I can see the general thrust of his inclinations. He's spitting on the United States and Western Culture daily, and then expects to be treated with deference in return. Fuck him.
This kind of Devil's Advocacy isn't new to Adams. At least, I hope it's just that. He's apparently one of those celebrities that have forgotten the hard work involved in their ascendency, and assume that they're rich because of some accident of nature, akin to divine providence. Humans, himself included, are all just a bunch of "moist robots" with no capacity for thought, no free will; we've apparently just been programmed by Mother Nature to do the things we've done or will do. There is no mind, there is no choice, there is only the stimuli in our environments, and the response that was determined by a chance arrangement of atoms into chemicals during the Big Bang. Or something.
It's an obscene display of thoughtlessness, a conceit of someone trying so hard to seem above all this. Adams' Dilbert is amusing, and his blog is a bit of junk food for the brain at times. But he's got the morals of a two-dollar whore.
Last night we didn't make it. The two Frenchmen surrendered the evening, seeing as it was Trotzky's birthday, and therefore a time for somber reflection or something. So, we rode around big town Farnborough for a couple of hours, grabbed some grub, and then headed back to the apartment to watch a movie.
We watched Fur, which cemented my belief that Nicole Kidman is the perfect woman. Not only does she look good in her own slutty little librarian sort of way, she gives a guy a handjob in this movie while shaving his hairy back. That's my kind of girl, a real little trooper.
Anyhoo, it's back off to London now, for a second try at getting sloppy somewhere besides sitting at home in front of the boob tube. Wish us luck.
Vacation week is winding down, and I'm getting ready to leave the driving to Southwest Trains and go drinking in London. I'll try to keep it under two weeks this time, but no promises. We'll tramp it a bit through Soho, I guess, just me, the girls, and a couple of frog-eaters from the office.
I wonder why I never get to go drinking with Englishmen? It's probably for the best. There's a quote that gets bandied about, especially in the local newspapers, about England being a nation of drunks and scalawags. I can't say much about that, but it does seem that the pubs all close at 11:00 PM for a reason. At 5 o'clock, they pour out of their offices and into the public houses, seemingly on a race against the clock to get themselves 'faced before the early last call.
When they were finally permitted to stay open past 11, in the hope that the binge-drinking would abate in light of longer opening hours, they found themselves doubly-cursed in that the Englishmen were every bit as drunk at 11, but didn't have to go home. All pubs here are set up so that you have to go to the counter to get your drinks, instead of having them brought to your table. There's a built-in handbrake there: a system where you can't get any more drink once you lose the ability to walk is founded upon sound principle and good advices.
I've done nothing today; nothing but clean out the cluttered closets of my preferred newsfeed reader. There were some connections in there that were sorely neglected. I could use a bit more time to wade through the degenerate filth that is my blogroll, but sadly, I work. The Company is tolerant in their control over my time, fair since they do not pay hourly; but tolerance has its limits, and I doubt they would look kindly upon my spending the business day in a fugue state, reading entry after entry of dialectics about Jessica Simpson's tits, or Brittney Spears' overplayed poonanny.
Nevertheless, it saddens me that my everyday is not blessed with the nuggets of wisdom from skippystalin:
Being the only person with an out-of-control substance abuse problem in a relationship is tough. Most romantic couplings are based on common interests and most of my interests culminate in my waking up in a pool of what I think is my own urine and not being quite sure what time zone I'm in. I'm much like a cat in that I have a tendancy of marking my territory with my vomit, blood and gallons of my semen...My ability to smoke, drink and masturbate furiously at the same time might not be much, it's all that I have.
Ahh, skippystalin, how I've missed you, and your nuggets.
This is how I spend my vacation: visiting Stonehenge on one day; reading the melancholy musings of skippystalin the next, picturing him composing scholarly tracts through bitter tears, a crushed Viagra dissolving in a highball of Jack Daniels next to the keyboard, as another long evening fades into a blur of poetry, madness, and vigorous bouts of hate-filled masturbation. And wondering, of the two, which is the more meaningful and fitting monument to humanity?
They should've just burned enjoyeverysandwich to CD, stuck it to the side of Voyager along with its author, and shot the whole lot into space back when they had government funding to do so, all in the name of making a good first impression for whatever aliens were out cruising for an easy meal.
skippystalin's output is prodigious, to be sure, but there was an entire blogroll to consider:
The lunatics are running the asylum over at Straight White Guy's place. Eric's testicles are mentioned, indirectly. Remind me to change my passwords regularly and start using strong encryption.
How stoned do you have to be to cheat on Jessica Alba? I could jack off to Jessica Alba while a big mean dog was chasing me and this idiot is cheating on her. I decided to confront him about this and I screamed at him, hey, what is your problem. And he said I should get off his lawn. And I said, no, no you get off the lawn. You get off. Then he went inside, probably because deep down, he knew I had made some pretty good points.
JimGoad.com is no more, but if you're a Goad fan (ladies!), you can find find him here. Discussion of Brittany's latest, erm, candid photos is also to be found, but be aware that the following picture is used as a visual aid:
This morning we picked up my new wheelchair. It's a sporty European marque, with an aggressive stance, low-profile tires, and a head-turning cherry-red metalflake paint job. It's not that great on the corners, but it'll take any one of y'all on the straightaways.
I've never done time on wheels. On the whole, I found it to be not all that bad. Then again, I don't figure that most wheelchair-bound men my age get to enjoy being pushed around town by a couple of sexy German bloggerettes. Thanks, ladies: the jealous looks from the other local cripples was the icing on the cake. Here's a little something extra for you, babes. (via AoSHQ)
Funny things happen when you're on wheels. I saw a lady I work with while being carted through Tesco's frozen food department. I said hello, and she just looked right through me, steering her cart so as not to make contact with the leper. She probably thought I was going to ask her for some spare change, or if she could wipe me bum for me, or whatever it is that those people want from healthy-legged people. I also noticed that the supermarkets put completely different things down on the bottom three feet of the shelves. All the cool toys are down there, for example, presumably because chil'n's is small. It's also a great altitude to find anti-bedsore medicaments, for some reason.
So, I let myself be pushed by the Weyside in Guildford, where, at one point, a husky young native was required to wheel my fat ass up a steep incline. The Sistas, for all their heart, lacked the muscle to get the job done, so he, being a true-hearted salt-of-earth kind of guy, waved them off and grunted and sweated till I crested the hill. Had the man known that I could have, at any point in time, simply stood up and hobbled up the hill under my own power, he most certainly would have picked me up and broken me over his knee.
Tomorrow morning, we'll be visiting Stonehenge, or Stone'enge, as the locals quaintly call it. We'll also visit the haunted city, Salisbury, to watch the homosexuals. Ta!
I like reading OSNews for some reason. I think I like to catch the geeky news about SkyOS, or the occasional retro curmudgeonry that rolls by about Lotus 1-2-3 or OS/2. Being the old-timer that I am, it's hard to resist a paean from my youth about 10-finger productivity.
Unfortunately, they've become the epicenter of stupid for the tech press. Check out this article, which explodes the myths about competition being good: "Competition is not Good"
'It gives consumers more choice'
Choice is good when there's one agreed base standard, and a number of compatible approaches. For example, there are many Linux distributions, but they are all Linux, and they can all run the same software. They are 'flavours' of the same thing, that is a good choice. People like different flavours.
Competition does not produce easier choices for consumers. All they get is added un-interoperability and complexity with competitive choices.
Now, if you go read that article, which I do not recommend, you'll slowly come to the realization that this moron is just annoyed that he has to make the effort to choose between HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. He's willing to surrender his entire free will to some (hopefully) benevolent dictator, abolish brand names, and forsake the free market economy because choosing which format to buy the Firefly special edition box set in is hard. What a hopeless, whiny-assed sissy.
Of course, things don't get better when they start tossing political analysis at you. "Net Neutrality" is one monikers that has overshadowed the thing named. The discussion is often framed in a way that an uninformed listener would assume there was lobbying going on to abolish some sort of laws that are now protecting consumers from big, bad tiered-Internet ninjas.
But: There is no net neutrality legislation, there never was, and hopefully, there never will be. The argument over "Net Neutrality" is about whether or not the U.S. government should introduce legislation forbidding bandwidth throttling by ISPs. It's the "have you stopped beating your wife?" straw man for the Slashdot crowd. You'll notice that this article calls the Supreme Court's decision that the U.S. government shouldn't step in and configure the ISPs' Cisco routers for them, "Backing for Two-Tier Internet":
The US Justice Department has said that internet service providers should be allowed to charge for priority traffic. The agency said it was opposed to 'network neutrality', the idea that all data on the net is treated equally. The comments put the agency at odds with companies such as Microsoft and Google, who have called for legislation to guarantee equal access to the net.
Of course, this would also mean that an enforcement infrastructure would also have to be put in place, making sure that everyone got their "fair share" of said bandwidth, as if backbone routers and POPs just fell off a tree somewhere. God forbid ISPs be allowed to tune the services that they developed and paid for as they wish. Let's let the government decides who gets bandwidth, and how much is enough! That will make it all fair and neutral-like. Whenever a politician uses the word "fair", hang on to your wallet.
Well, my trackbacks are now working, it seems. There's some ugly Python spaghetti-code going on behind the scenes that translates back and forth between absolute urls, non-absolute relative urls, and upper-lower-camel case; but it works.
Trackbacks are only good for Movable Type, though. Which I can't stand anymore. MT used to be the only thing out there, but there's something that really, really, really galls me about the way it rebuilds your entire site into static HTML pages everytime you update a post. I'm sure it's awesomeness if you've got your server running on an old TV remote, but nowadays we're all running our web servers on 100-core 64-bit terahertz moonshot computers that can simultaneously compute π, encode MPEG video, and mix the best goddam margaritas you've ever tasted, all without breaking a sweat.
So yeah, I figured out how to implement trackbacks in Django, to a point where they more or less work. Now why is Wordpress fucking with me? It seems to be thrown off by the fact that Wordpress sends a HEAD request before it downloads and parses the page, in the vain hope that the X-Pingback header will be set. I can't figure out how to do that in Django's generic views, so I just use the secondary method, that being a link element in the XHTML code. But now, whenever a Worpdress blog pings me, I get this kind of crap:
[09/Sep/2007 15:04:23] "GET /blog/2007/sep/08/vacation/ HTTP/1.1" 200 27367
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (104, 'Connection reset by peer')
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 273, in run
self.finish_response()
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 312, in finish_response
self.write(data)
File "/home/rubeon/lib/python2.4/django/core/servers/basehttp.py", line 396, in write
self._write(data)
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 248, in write
self.flush()
File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/socket.py", line 235, in flush
self._sock.sendall(buffer)
error: (32, 'Broken pipe')
Being the half-assed programmer that I am, I am at a total loss. I can't even do a Lazyweb request here, seeing as my 4 visits a day are unlikely to bring the Django HTTP gurus by. I won't be able to sleep at night, thinking of all the enlightened Wordpress Users who are probably out there try to "Keep the discussion going" with me.
Ever since June, when the iPhone went live, I've heard about nothing else in the tech press, nerd podcasts, and the Apple Fanboisphere. Is it really that way over in the States (the only place you can get them), or does the iPhone actually seem to be doing well?
Ahh, my first vacation since joining The Company. My queue is cleaned up, my email is forwarded, and an elaborate Sieve session has accomplished in a mere two hours what less civilized mail systems can do with a key combination: The Corporate Vacation Email.
It's been five months now since I came 'cross the channel and started meeting the natives, learning the lingo, and getting used to the fact that everyone here talks like Pinky. Now, I'll be letting my hair down for the next 10 days or so. As well as putting my poor, broken foot up on the coffee table.
As soon as I get my x-rays back from the socialist medical system (they still copy them with coal rubbings on wax paper over here, apparently), I'll post pictures of the metatarsalar breakage here for your morbid enjoyment. Don't thank me yet.
The other half of Sistaweb will be joining us for the week. We'll allow her to sleep here rent-free for an entire week, even though she refused to bring a carton of cigarettes as payment. Damned non-smokers and their principles. It's like those non-smokers back in the World War II who didn't sign up for cigarette rations. Throwing away a gold mine, that is. Our grandfathers probably had a word for those guys, and if I knew my grandfather at all, that word was sissy-boy.
The girls have rented a wheelchair for me, seeing as I won't be too much fun doing a London pub-crawl on crutches. I've already had a forehead-slapping moment over this, as you probably are right now. Why haven't I thought of taking a wheelchair with me before? That would've come in handy on more than one occasion, the Wreckyll in Jeckyll not least among them.
Man, Apple is on a roll. Not only have they got me hooked for a new computer, a new laptop, a new office package, and a replacement for my aging MythTV box, but now I have to start thinking about a new iPod. Now, let's see what Uncle Steve is going to me be costing me 'til Christmas Time:
Item
Damage
20" iMac
1199.00
Macbook
1099.00
8GB iPod Touch
299.00
AppleTV
299.00
iWork '08
79.00
iLife '08
79.00
Total:
$3,054.00
Not bad for a day's work, Mr. Jobs. And what's up for the rest of September? Maybe some irresistible bionic iFoot to replace the one I broke playing frisbee at the company picnic last week?
Although there's a remarkable lack of iPhone hype around the office, we being a big-time Linux company and all, there's an amazing amount of Mac fanboiism. Pretty much all of us have Macs at home. The explanation for this is simple: After dealing with Linux problems all day long, there's something nice about going home to something you can spend all your time using and not making up excuses for why it looks like shit and doesn't work.
I like Linux, mind you. I use it day-in, day-out for my desktop at work, for my webservers, and it brings in my daily bread. We all love it here, pretty much like a family loves and therefore tolerates the embarrassing second cousin with the Downs'. But people are walking all over the office today buzzing about the upcoming announcement from Apple.
Will it be the long-awaited iMac redesign? Will it be a new Mini? My boss is actually carrying his phone to the pub after work today so he can sit on engadget and get a realtime update. Linus would not be pleased...
Last login: Thu Jul 26 12:17:28 from nat-pool-fab.re Welcome to Darwin! ericbook:~ eric$ mutt -bash: mutt: command not found ericbook:~ eric$ open /Applications/Mail.app/ ericbook:~ eric$
Ahh. Like coming in after a long day of plowing the fields and sticking your aching feet into a pot of hot water. After running Linux all day at work, you feel like slipping into something more comfortable. Sam knows it. Zonker knows it, though he won't admit it. It's the right amount of just-workiness you need to let you relax, while knowing you could, at any given moment, do something like:
OK, here's one with drivel. I do like it, but I have a couple of gripes.
First problem: I was hopelessly confused by the login screen. The type of journal seems to be locked on livejournal, as the drop-down menu for journal types is inexplicably disabled until you enter a username. -1 for usabilty
Second problem: Useless stripping of trailing slash, which mangled my xmlrpc URL. Error 301 was ignored, which makes sense since it's a post and all, but I couldn't log in. It mangled my URL then choked on the error :-/
Third problem: didn't want to download my recent posts. Although there might be a misunderstanding about just what "recent" means.
Fourth problem: Doesn't let me choose post status anywhere. And there's nowhere I can find to choose text filters. This is more of a feature request, really.
Fifth problem: craps out after posting, probably because it keeps mangling the trailing slashes from my URLs. Is there an RFC somewhere that says that POSTS can't end with slashes? Nobody tell the Django folks.
Well, maybe it'll at least let me post to my blog from work every now and then.
Man, I dang sure missed the entire month of June. I've been in the UK now for about two months, and let me tell ya: They sure do get some rain around here. I always thought those stories about English people having gills were legends and fantasies. Now, I'm not so sure.
For the love of GOD, for the last time, in the name of ALL THAT IS HOLY, Cluster Services is NOT COMPATIBLE with 4.5! If you're running a cluster, DO NOT update to 4.5 until the Cluster Suite is UPDATED TO 4.5!
That is all.
P.S. And NO, cmirror is not available yet. Maybe at the end of the month.
I went outside to smoke a cigarette. All rooms in England are for non-smokers, you'll find, as are the rooms, apartments, and houses listed for rent in the local papers. The litany at the end of all the ads reads, "No smokers, canvassers, or DSS", which stands for Department of Social Services. So, okay they hate smokers and welfare cases, as do we all. But the British have their own definition for 'non-smoker', which basically means you only smoke when you drink. Everybody smokes over here, and they all live somewhere.
The evening was cool; almost cold, really, as I suspect the evenings around here generally are. I stood on the corner of Osborne and Netley, watching the blackbirds getting ready to do whatever it is they do at night, when I spied a man, some yards away, bounding up the sidewalk with a jaunty gait. I held my cigarette just in front of my mouth, watching this figure with suspicion. He was short, about 5 feet tall, and round as a soccer ball. He was wearing light-colored trousers and a dark blazer, the left breast of which was adorned with an enormous, orange prize-ribbon.
As he approached me, his features became distinct in the bad lighting, and I realized he was positively beaming with pride. His face was ruddy, and split with a grin that wouldn't have looked out of place behind a wheelbarrow full of poker chips on the way to the cash-out. I placed him in his mid-40s, but maybe his thinning red hair and roly-poly stature made him look older than he really was.
He halted just a few feet from me, and said, with oddly struggling words, "Good evening, mister!"
I looked him up and down, cigarette still burning between my shaky fingers, and replied, "hi, how are ya..." He wobbled his head a bit, then walked around me on his way up the street. I noticed something written in gold on his orange ribbon, and read it as it flashed in the lamplight.
I judged him more than a wee bit 'differently-abled', as they say. I watched as he cautiously crossed the empty street, looking both ways at least twice, then gingerly stepping into the street and crossing it at a run.
I thought about what I had seen written on the ribbon: "A Very Special Boy". Hmm, I thought, I wonder who gave him that? Whoever it was, they made his whole day.
I put my cigarette out and walked back into the guest house.
My buddy Sam sent me an email a couple of days ago indicating that he just might have joined The Family recently. And he joined it a much higher level than I, I might add, considering I'm still lumbering along in the PowerPC world; my G4 Powerbook, though a loyal and trusted friend, seems slow as molasses in January these days.
He also mentioned an old OS/2 habit, one which we separately shared back in the day. I started using OS/2 when I worked at UPS. One of our managers was running 2.1, with the old Presentation Manager that looked like a crappy(er) Windows 2.0, albeit with long filenames and the ability to run concurrent DOS sessions. I avoided it until OS/2 3.0 came out.
In '94, when Warp hit the shelves, I rushed out to Soft-Warehouse1 in Alpharetta, looked in the Operating Systems2 department until I found a box, then gave the man $300 dollars for the privilege of running it. Then, I walked over the desktop applications department, and put down another $495 for Lotus Smartsuite/2. Then I OEM'd 16MB of RAM for about $400 to make it all go.
Now, many may see OS/2 as a butt-ugly cousin of Windows, and they may be right. But back then, it was a work of art. Especially in the sense that it wasn't an exact science getting it to run. Nothing ever really worked like it was supposed to. Without the fallback of a DOS prompt, you had to have a second, fully-functional machine to do things like edit the CONFIG.SYS on the installation floppies to make sure your DASD drivers were loading. And most of the drivers were written so that, if they encountered an error while loading, they'd bork the whole boot process, just to be on the safe side.
The graphical interface also hung constantly. The Workplace Shell, despite (or maybe due to) all its object-orientiness, was horribly unstable. But I never saw a hang that wasn't cured with Control-Alt-Delete. That key combo went right down to the kernel, and always gave a satisfying, unconfirmed reboot, wedged GUI be damned. There was even a 3rd party program called Watchcat that sat on the serial port, or on a secondary Hercules/MCGA monitor, and let you monitor and kill programs remotely. The kernel's Kung Fu was strong like that, but the GUI was just ass.
Now, when Chicago started finally coming down the pipe, and even the Rolling Stones where pulled into the OS marketing world ("Start me up", anyone?), OS/2 fans like myself were sure that this pissant little DOS extender with a homely face wouldn't be the future. It couldn't be the future, it was just too depressing. It still wasn't a 32-bit OS, though the 386 had been out for over 8 years. It still used FAT, for crying out loud. In short, Chicago sucked.
OS/2 seemed like a scrappy little underdog, nipping heroically at the Microsoft behemoth's heels. I'm not sure why it gave that impression. At the time, IBM was much bigger than Microsoft, a huge, multinational corporation with interests in basically every aspect of electronics. They just couldn't write or market good software.
I'm not sure why I just wrote 500 words on OS/2. I actually wanted to write something about Linux.
Software stores used to have a whole "Operating Systems" department, back when there was more than one operating system, and Windows was still called an "Operating Environment" ↩
Man, I'm unprepared. There's a checklist of things you should do before moving to England. I came over here without any money, preparation, or attack plan. There's something unbelievably stupid about this. It worked for me when I moved to Germany, but moving to England's a bit more complicated, apparently. Either that, or I'm remembering it wrong.
But I'm not the only one. The office I'm working in is full of non-British people. It's a rag-tag group of Germans, Italians, Brazilians, Spaniards, one (1) American, and who knows what else that all found themselves in the same boat when they first came over. This despite promises from The Company to help one resettle; promises which are certainly not kept and, when referred to in conversation, change their shape and character like a Democrat on a whistle-stop.
But at some point a kindly soul in the department, now departed, made a list of the reality of the situation. It's a short list of what one really needs to do when moving to England. Unfortunately, I only found out about it after I'd already been here a week. Here's your to-do list once you've arrived in England:
Get a room. If possible, get a rental agreement or any bill with your name and address on it. (proof of address)
Deposit is usually 1 1/2 times the rent. Deposit and first rent is to be paid beforehand. If the room is unfurnished, see "Things to Buy" for shops and example prices.
Get a letter from your office manager (HR Lady) stating that you are working for the company and including your address. (proof of employment)
Get a bank account. Just walk in with your documents:
Passport or national ID card
Proof of employment (see 2.). it might be handy to have your contract with you.
Proof of address
Banks
HSBC – try to get a standard account (they try to sell you an advanced package including insurances etc.)
NatWest – Also recommended as this bank does not charge for withdrawing money from a different bank's cash machines
Give your bank details to The Company
Register with Inland Revenue – this is done by your HR manager. You should get your tax code about 2 weeks later (PAYE Coding Notice)
At the end of the fiscal year (ending April 5th), you will get a "P60 End of Year Certificate" detailing your "Pay and Income Tax" levels.
Get a National Insurance Number by applying at a Job Centre Plus office. They ask for dtails before they schedule an interview appointment to verify your eligibility. Appointments are scheduled about two weeks ahead, and take place in the nearest county office, which usually isn't near at all. Without an NI number, you will be on emergency tax, which is higher than the standard tax rate.
Documents:
Passport
National ID card
Driving License or any other official document identifying you (Birth certificate, police registration, medical card, etc.)
Proof of employment (see 2.)
Recent payslip
Bank statement
Proof of address (utility bill, rental agreement, etc. – see 1.)
It might be handy to have your PAYE Coding Notice with you
As money is paid in a timely manner so it is available on the 27th, try to get your appointment after this date.
If you are British, a citizen of a member state of the EU, or other Commonwealth citizen, you can apply for inclusion on the Register of Electors. This will allow you to vote at local government elections. Your credibility will rise (good for tenancy applications or bank-related matters) and you are obliged to pay Council Taxes1
If you buy any TV or radio equipment, you will be asked for your address, which will be automatically forwarded to the "TV Licensing Office"
Get a Tesco Clubcard
Get a life ;-)
Any address change has to be communicated to all above-mentioned authorities. For the official notices to local council, the TV licensing, and most other on-line services, you can use I am Moving , where you can create/use an account for free.
All of this could have been avoided with a bit of planning. I am bitterly disappointed in myself.
Council taxes are universal as far as I can tell, and are perceived, by the British at least, as an extension of the rent. ↩
Farnborough derives its name from from the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Ferneberga (Fern Hill) and is mentioned in the Domesday Book (1086). But for the coming of the army at nearby Aldershot, the arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flying, Farnborough would probably have remained an isolated heathland village, that is until the latter half of the 20th century when the population moved out of London suburbia and became commuters.
"But for the … arrival of the railways, and the beginning of flight…". That's a pretty big conditional. There are probably a lot of places whose development was seriously affected by railways and the advent of powered flight. But I understand where the good Mr. Parkins is coming from.
I had forgotten the cable to connect my camera to my laptop. Of all the stupid things that I packed for the trip, 50 different USB cables, a USB hub, power adapters for devices I’d forgotten, not to mention devices whose power adapters I’d forgotten, I forgot the one thing that was absolutely necessary and planned-for. Not to mention irreplaceable, seeing as every camera maker in the world decided that their camera’s little hole should look different from all the other cameras’ little holes.
I walked into a little computer store on the strip in Fleet, Hampshire. Walking up to the pasty-faced, teenaged part-timer there, I introduced myself and shook his hand, which seemed to shock him.
He unconsciously wiped his hands on his pants and said, “eh...nice to meet you, sir. What can I do for you?”
I asked him, “do you have any USB card-readers?”
“Um, yeah," he answered. "I think I saw some around here somewhere.”
I looked around the shop, which was organized and clean. Man, he must really be the FNG around here. He finally found what I was looking for, stored on a shelf right next to where he had been sitting. He handed it to me and I started reading the back of the packaging.
“Just looking to see if it works with my Mac,” I told him.
“Oh, it's USB, so it should work,” he answered, and took the reader out of my hand. He moved his lips while he read the package. “Oh, yeah,” he said finally. “Right there it says it: ‘Requires Mac OS 9 or later’.” He looked at me skeptically. “So, you do have OS 9 or later, don’t you?”
“Um, yeah, I think so.” OS 9 went out of style back in the ‘90s.
He moved around to the register, and I handed him my Visa card. He looked uncertain as he turned it over in his hand. “This thing doesn’t have a chip on it?”
I took it back and examined it. “No, I guess it doesn’t.”
“Well, I don’t think we can take that, then.”
“Why don’t you just swipe it,” I said. “Give it a go.”
He shrugged and swiped it through the machine.
From behind me, a voice said, “it’s all chips nowadays, you know.”
I looked around, and saw that an older woman was standing behind me. She looked to be in her mid 40s, and wore a name plate with the store’s logo on it. “You can’t get nothing without a dozen little chips in it.”
I nodded agreement, and turned back to the young man behind the register.
“So, what kind of Mac you got, then?”
“A PowerBook G4.”
He nodded approvingly. “Nice piece of kit, that.” The little machine that had taken my card made a loud ping!, and spit out a receipt. He tore it off and gave it to me to sign, along with the card reader.
“Now, you have a nice day sir, and do please visit us again.”
I thanked him, said goodbye to the chip-lady, and put the small package into my bag next to my laptop. “Thanks, man, I’ll do that.” Nice kid.
Didja ever discover something that made your reality skip a beat? You know how, for just a second, something is so far out of place that you can't even figure out what's wrong with the picture? For example, the Augsburg Wireless-Internet provider Cyberways has had the same guy on their start page for years:
Every time you connect to the internet over public wireless in Augsburg, that dude was right there, staring at you with those soulless black eyes. Like a doll's eyes...
And the weird thing was, I always figured he was the boss at Cyberways. I even thought I saw him once on the tram. I hate it when people use the same stock photos everywhere. Everybody's full of shit. Oh, I guess it's effective use of your cash dollars, seeing as it's cheaper than paying attractive people to work for you. But still, why not just be honest for a split second?
You get this kind of thing all over the Internet, of course. If you've ever shopped for web hosting, you'll notice, after a few visits to the providers' pages, that their employees all kind of look alike. And there's always some woman somewhere holding a laptop at her waist in near-sexual ecstasy over the reasonable shared hosting prices.
It's a leitmotif throughout the enter hosting industry: Shared Webspace=Chick with laptop.
Rube, look, for the last freakin time, look RIGHT when you step off a curb! These people drive on the other side of the F$@&-ing road over here! You wanna get ya brains splattered all over me?
