Umm, no.

Hah hah hah, silly Dropbox.

You want me to run a proprietary, closed-source daemon on my Linux box? Are you high?

No. Fucking. Way. Go to hell and do not come back.

What’s with the sternum?

Latest annoying trend in superstar/Hollywood fashion: relatively flat-chested women wearing deeply-plunging necklines showing off… their sternum. Is that sexy? No, it is not.

I suppose it’s an improvement over trends in previous years such as collagen injections in the lips, or shoulder pads, or whatever nonsense.

I don’t get fashion, that’s for sure.

Trends in SPAM

Most of the SPAM I get tends to be all about the same subject. Relentlessly. For months or even years. Then it changes gears.

In the 90’s it was for Weight loss products.
In the early 2000’s, it was for Viagra and Cialis and other penile-enhancement products.
A few years later, it was nonsensical word-salad schizophrenic Bayesian crap, obviously to try to derail SPAM filters.
Then pain medications. For some reason, all the SPAM was trying to sell me some kind of drug or pain med.
Then it was all for stocks. My whole in box was filled with stupid stock tips.
And then it was for business opportunities in Dubai and UAE. Every bit of mail, trying to sell me some crap in the middle east.
And now it is watches. Watches? All the SPAM, daily, is trying to sell me watches.

It’s like little kids playing soccer; everyone all bunched up around the ball, chasing it. When the ball moves, they all move.

Sheesh.

No system at all

This sums it up:

American health care is not really a system at all. It’s a market. In a market, people with money can buy what they want and many people are left out. So we thought, no, we don’t want market-driven health care. We want a real system, something that covers everybody and doesn’t depend on how much money you have.

Best summary of the problem that I’ve ever seen. And, it also sets up the fundamental conflict between capitalism and democracy. Markets are, by definition, anti-democratic. One dollar, one vote. No dollars, no votes. It’s corruption in a bag.

It ain’t about beliefs

In short, a belief question is totally worthless in measuring American’s knowledge on the subject or the value of the theory. It’s a measure of a theory’s popularity.

Exactly. This kind of thing has been driving me batty for years now.

No question about science should be asked in terms of "belief". Science is not made of beliefs. It’s made of data, and theories to summarize and organize the data. Theories are invalidated when the data doesn’t support them, or when a better theory fits the data better. It’s totally irrelevent whether people who have no fucking clue "believe" or don’t "believe" them.

CDBS hate hate hate

Just a moment for some software hate:

I hate CDBS, with a deep and abiding passion.

CDBS is Debian’s idiotic new "make it impossible to update a package" build system. I gave up on building Debian packages from source a few years ago, when CDBS came into common usage.

The main problem with CDBS is that uupdate no longer works. It’s impossible for a non-maintainer to build a Debian package of a newer version of a peice of software, if the old package uses CDBS that is.

There are, happily, older packages which do not use CDBS, and which I can easily and smoothly update to newer versions. But the ones that use CDBS? Forget it. I either blow off the package manager entirely, or build it from source.

Free-market creationists

One of the weirdest contradictions in the modern Republican party and "conservative" (what is it exactly that they conserve? but that’s a different post entirely) movement, is that they can espose a ferverent faith simultaneously in a blind, deterministic, evolutionary "invisible hand", and in a completely centrally-planned, centrally-managed, artificially-created universe.

They will fight tooth and nail against any attempt for humans to centrally manage, plan, or even influence the economy, instead insisting that it must remain free to evolve on its own, and yet fight with even more vigor against anyone who claims that there isn’t any central management or planning involved in biology, geology, cosmology, chemistry, or physics.

How the fuck can they square those two things? Maybe they believe that the "invisible" hand actually belongs to a gray-bearded spooky incompetent father figure in the sky, reaching down to run our economy by divine fiat, just like it put the dinosaur fossils in the earth 6,000 years ago to test our faith in it.

There are surely enough of ‘em who seem to think they have a divine right to wealth, or to rule.

The weirdness of Facebook

I dislike Facebook. A lot. And yet, I can’t look away, like a particularly noxious car wreck.

There are several things I find thoroughly weird about Facebook:

1. Only a handful of “friends” on Facebook are actually friends.
2. Most FB “friends” are people I went to High School with and haven’t heard from in 25 years, random people I worked with 10 years ago and haven’t seen since then, and…
3. Freeking almost every single ex-girlfriend I’ve ever had has found me on FB and friended me. That’s particularly weird. I think I found one or two more on my own– after I figured why not try to make a complete set–, and the rest found me.
4. And most of what everyone does on there is submit quizzes and puzzles and stupid chain-email-style crap.
5. The only moderately entertaining thing about it is the Twitter-like updates from a few people I know. If I could get those via Twitter or Identi.ca, I’d never go near FB at all.

Yes, that’s it. Facebook has jumped the shark; it is now just one big chain email.

Scroll down to see the answer… and send this to 10 of your friends for good luck!!!!!!!

My god, it’s made of bullshit!

(Heh).

I guess I’m naive, because I’ve been having the same revelation over and over again for over 20 years now. More like 30, actually– I discovered this when I was still a kid.

One of the constant refrains in my life has been getting into some career or area, thinking that there is some integrity or objective reality therein, and then discovering, again and again, that it’s all just made of bullshit. This is especially true of anything that involves money, or making it. Within a short time, I discover that success has nothing to do with actual integrity or competence, it’s all lying, politics, fronting, marketing, wheedling, cheating, and bullshit, all the way through.

I can’t name all the things I’ve tried to do for money, which have been completely corrupted with bullshit; there have been too many. For most of the time I was in the tech business, I was in marketing, so I not only accepted the bullshit but actively embraced it and was paid to perpetuate it. I busted myself back down to private and became a tech grunt again, but it quickly became apparent that my job was little more than show and fronting– bullshit. Some years later, I figured out the bullshit nature of politics when I got involved in it. Just a few months ago, at the very end of last year, I figured out how the music business is made of bullshit (that should have been obvious, in retrospect, it is show business after all– all fakery and the like).

Just today, I just discovered that the tutoring company for which I’ve been doing some part-time work, is funded with No Child Left Behind money, and is basically part of Bush’s attempt to bust up the teacher’s unions and privatize education. And what does one get for one’s privatized contractor dollars? Uncredited, amateur tutors (um, like me), getting paid about half what a real teacher would get paid, and a cut-to-the-bone McSchool, with paltry materials, no curriculum whatsoever, and a startup-like environment of people who appear to have NFI what they’re doing.

Oh and it’s a non-profit too. Kind of. It’s part of a for-profit corporation, but it’s a non-profit. Uh, this smells so bad, I don’t wanna know.

I cannot wait for this entire economic system to come crashing down. It’s so decayed and fetid, the rot infests it so deeply, that the sooner it disappears, the better.

I’ll never work on Macs again

If I can avoid it, I’ll never work on Macs again.

Sure, they kind of SMELL like unix, but they’re not. Perfect example: HFS+.

I took a short contract backing up data for a studio. They’re all based on OSX. Great, I thought, I’ll just use UNIX tools and this’ll be easy.

No.

First off, the machine that runs ProTools– the center of the studio– is an old G4 0SX 10.4 machine. Which means that Rsync and ditto DO NOT WORK on HFS+ files. They botch the resource forks. Auughh!! So all my backing up was useless. Luckily they had a MacBook sitting around with OSX 10.5 on it, so I moved the drives over and used that to do the backups and restoration.

Days pass. 150,000 files get backed up, and then 60 projects get manually organized and consolidated by me. Days of work. But to do that work, I had to hook the firewire backup drive up to the old 10.4 machine. You’re seeing where this is going, right?

I am ready to wrap up this fucking project. I put the drive onto the 10.5 machine so I can archive the cleaned-up, de-duplicated versions of the files onto a portable drive. And… THE FUCKING HFS+ FILE SYSTEM IS CORRUPTED. Auugh again!

This is the kind of shit that I’d never expect to happen on linux. ext3 is ext3. It doesn’t matter what machine you swap a disk over to. Also, people run the latest kernel on most of their machines– nobody charges them hundreds or thousands (in the case of ProTools) of dollars to upgrade their software, so most machines have fairly recent versions of everything.

I am Jack’s seething hatred.