I’m a Gamer

Posted by on March 21, 2014 No comments

I’m actually the worst kind of gamer, the casual gamer.

On my Windows Phone, I recently installed the Microsoft Solitaire pack and naturally, I’ve been non-productive ever since.  What a stupid game and why must I spend so much time on it, trying to get a “high score”?

And the scoring is the really horrible part.  I mean, yeah, I can finish the game, but maybe I’ve taken too long, or I got distracted and let my timer count up too far so I don’t get crap for a time bonus.  So I abandon the game.  Why?  Like finishing the game just isn’t enough.  I have to finish and get a high score.

One of the interesting quirks I found is that if a finish a game in a decent time, I’m getting a score of something like 3000 or 4000.  However, if the game is shot right off the bat and I run out of moves, I end up with a score like 190.  What stupid scoring model is that?  It’s bad enough you were unable to finish, but not only that, your score is so low, you don’t even want to mention it to anyone.

But anyway, I am really one of the least competitive people I know.  I don’t really see a need for it.  It’s just for bragging rights and what’s the point of bragging?  I gave that crap up a long time ago.  And yet, I challenge myself to get a better score?  Is this going to get to the level where every time I see myself in a mirror I have to point and yell, “Fuck you, I’m going to kick my ass!  In Solitaire.”

Being a Part of “the Part”

Posted by on March 18, 2014 No comments

I’ve noticed an odd parallel between my work dress and my work status.  By status, I mean how I am viewed within the company.  While that may seem somewhat obvious, I don’t think it is.  I’m also saying, I don’t think this path can be shortcut.

When I first started working in a professional capacity, I didn’t know much of anything as far as fashion sense and business sense.  I wore polo shorts, khakis, white socks, and sneakers.  The next job, I changed to dress socks and dress shoes (I think I was counseled on this early in my tenure).  This job was a significant advancement in pay and my responsibilities grew steadily while I was there.

The next couple jobs I wore the same level of attire and my work position was pretty stagnant.  In that time, I learned the fashion importance of a belt, even if I didn’t need one.  I learned about undershirts and how they improve the look of your shirts.

Then with my current job, I eventually ditched khakis and went with jeans every day.  Then I started phasing out polos and wearing dress shirts most every day.  This is when things really started taking off.

Where I work, it’s a relaxed business casual environment.  Jeans are fine every day and no t-shirts, except on Friday, as long as the t-shirt doesn’t have a message (the “no-words rule”).  So, where other places have a casual Friday to offset every day of formality, we have an un-promoted “Tie Tuesday”, to offset the everyday casual.

I participated in Tie Tuesday because I figured, “I have ties and I never wear them except for funerals.”  There’s only a couple other participants in my department.  But, and this is pretty important, people notice.  You’ll hear comments like “oh yeah, it’s tie Tuesday.”  Lately, I’ve been getting direct compliments on my ties or my shirt and tie.

There is a saying: you have to dress the part if you want the part.  I gave this saying some consideration today.  My attire does project a higher-than-average level of confidence and… what’s the term… authority?  When one person in a group of people is noticeably better dressed than the rest, it’s natural to assume that’s the person in charge.  And in my experience, it’s seeming to be true.

The part I’m trying to figure out is if I am dressing to the position I have, or if my dress is taking me to the level I am at.  I am very sure that if I started wearing dress shirts with ties in my earlier jobs, it wouldn’t have made me any better off.  I would look (or maybe feel) geeky and awkward – out of place, even.  This is why I say I don’t think it can be short-circuited.  I think it has to be a gradual refinement over time.

But!  Back to the dressing the part.  I am pretty certain that I would not be where I am now if I was still wearing simple polo shirts and sneakers.  I look at some of my co-workers and think, they’re not dressed for management.  It’s an interesting balance.  If you don’t look the part, no one will take you seriously.  But you can’t just dress the part and instantly be that guy, because you have to be casually noticed, then accepted into that position. 

Even if you’re the leader of a group, wearing business casual, and you come in the next day in a suit, it doesn’t jump you up in stature.  If anything, it makes you look suspect.  You need to evolve.  You need to be almost unnoticeable in your changes.  Then one day, when the executives take you out to lunch because you look like one of them now, you’ll know that you got the part.

Writing About Writing

Posted by on March 13, 2014 No comments

I’ve taken up a new project that I hope I can complete before burning out.  It’s a book.  Not a fiction or story book, it’s an instructional guide on using a financial application.  Holy snore.

I started the document with an outline of what I wanted to instruct on.  Then, because I hadn’t used the application before, I had to figure out how to use it and how to apply it to the specific business I was targeting.  So I started writing a story about a fictional user and performing the actions in the application as the user would have.  I did a story spanning a six-month period presenting different challenges each month and explaining how to address them in the application.  That turned out to be a pretty enjoyable part of the writing.  I guess it was a fiction book after all.

But then, I had to do “the rest”.  It’s a very well-known fault of mine that I am able to work on a project by either making big brush strokes or by focusing on the detail and finishing touches.  I can’t do both.  So in this case, as is most typical of me, I’m painting huge areas of text, and now I need to go over it again and touch up here and there.

Actually, it’s more like I’m putting on multiple coats.  At this point, I’m re-running through the story, capturing screen shots and making sure the instructions are explicit and accurate, so I’m trying to read it from a end-user’s perspective.  Then, I have to fill in the actually reference part of the book, explaining each task in greater detail, without the context of the story.

Then I want to incorporate other financial perspectives from other companies, in case I didn’t think of a certain scenario.  Then I need to get it technically reviewed by a finance person to make sure what I present is correct.  Then I need to create a website to promote it and provide updates and answer questions after the release.  Then I publish it.

I certainly don’t want to get overwhelmed by the amount of work that lies in front of me, even if I do realistically have to know everything that is still to do.

Executive Non-Profits

Posted by on March 7, 2014 No comments

I recently found an article or post saying that the Firefox browser was considering putting ads into its “new tab” page.  Now to read the announcement, you’d think it was a great thing for the user, because when you install a new browser and run it for the first time, clearly you do not know what to do and where to go.  Welcome to 1990.

That lunacy is not the reason I felt compelled to write.  It’s been out of my thoughts for a long time that the Mozilla Foundation, who creates Firefox, is a very large non-profit organization.  It was just kind of in my thoughts that the Firefox team was a very large group of programmers, possibly headed up by some architects.  I envisioned a bunch of great minds working together for a noble cause.  That’s not really how it is.

It’s a company.  It’s a big company.  And there are a lot of people who get paid from this company.  I’ve talked before about how large non-profits are paying people with a lot of other people’s money.  And these people essentially have a perpetual conflict of interest.  Non-profits are typically created to solve a problem.  What happens when you win?  The non-profit isn’t needed anymore.  You’ve put yourself out of a job.

So there’s that part of it, that you’re getting paid to fight a war, but you don’t really want the war to end.  But then there’s the other part, which is, if you’re joining a non-profit, you should believe in the cause, right?  And your experience can further that cause, right?  But what if you have experience, but not the passion?  Then, money talks.

And money seems to be talking pretty well at Mozilla.  The directors of the foundation are doing ok.  $150k+ for a couple of them.  That’s actually pretty much in line with executive pay.  The others?  I mean only three others?  $500k+ each.  That’s kind of ill-proportioned, maybe.  For a non-profit, remember.  This is about a cause.  a cause you can’t begin to put a price on – keeping the Internet free.  I think these three are less about the cause and more about the salary.

Blah, blah, blah.  Big company, big salaries.  But here’s where it ties in with the article I read.  Mozilla hired a new person, brought in at the Vice President level, to use his skill to bring in more money for the organization.  The salary is unknown, but $100k+ is safe to guess.  His idea?  Advertising, under the guise of helping new users.  His job is to create the money to pay himself and all the other executives, because cost-cutting would be backwards.

The revenue for 2012 was in the range of 9 million.  The total salaries were 4 million.  The executive compensation was 2 million.  Nearly a quarter of revenue.  Nearly half of all salaries.

Let me sum this up.  Mozilla is about keeping the Internet free, so that it can’t be manipulated by corporations (never mind the recent failure of net neutrality).  Their solution to losing donation revenue given to them by corporations – primarily Google – is to use advertising by corporations, who will direct/inform/influence users to use the internet that best benefits them.  Anything wrong with that model?

Moving Pictures

Posted by on March 3, 2014 No comments

If there’s one application that I can identify as one of the longest-lived applications I ever used on any computer, it would have to be ACDSee.  This photo viewer, then photo manager, has been installed on every computer I’ve ever had.

Like all software exposed to time, the program started to get too big and tried to do too much.  I tried out different versions, sometimes dropping back to really old versions to avoid the bloat.  Then one day, I had a change of heart and I purchased the newest version.  What a sucker move that was.

So now I had the newest version, with all of its new, sparkly, excessive features.  I also had a nice, shiny new computer, so they played pretty well together.  Then slowly, it didn’t.  The software started getting slow.  It started nagging me to upgrade.  It maintained a link with an online account set up with their website.  It never got any more updates, because the world had moved on to higher version numbers.

Things started to get really out of hand when ACDSee started taking upwards of 15 seconds to open a single image and over a minute to enumerate a couple hundred files on a network drive.  So, in the spirit of my other biggest and bloatedest posts, ACDSee is getting the boot.

So what is its replacement?  I’ve tried a program called Phototheca and it was really nice, but it requires you to work with a local photo store.  It would be great if all your photos were on the local drive, but that’s not my situation.  Then I tried Faststone Image Viewer and I stopped looking.  I’m extremely happy with this application.  It’s almost exactly like the old ACDSee versions – it’s fast and lightweight, but unlike those old versions, it’s made for modern CPUs and OS’s.  What took ACDSee many, many seconds to open, Faststone opened immediately.  The only issue I have with it is the way it handles zoom-clicking in the viewer.  But I’ll adapt.

Oh, it’s also freeware.  It has no online integration, no licensing, no hidden installers during setup, nothing extra.  It’s just good, clean, fast software.  And it’s free.  I always find it odd that nothing is allowed to stop.  It has to keep growing until it collapses under its own weight.  So, goodbye ACDSee, you’ve been replaced with a new version of your older self.

What A Deal

Posted by on February 25, 2014 No comments

Boy, does this piss me off.  Phone/Cable/ISP companies have a pretty bad reputation for ripping people off when they’re not looking.  I was actually kind of pleased with my Verizon FIOS contract, even though somehow the price kept climbing.

So recently, I looked up when my contract was up, so I could drop down to just Internet.  First off, I couldn’t find where to just get Internet.  Everything was a bundle.  But then, as I looked at the bundles, this “deal” hit me:

Capture

Total Monthly Price: $115.  That’s the total.  FOR THE FIRST MONTH ONLY.  How does one month of a 2-year contract equate to a total of anything?  How can they even get away with something like this?  I guess they can because they do divulge the true costs right below.  But still!  Assholes!

And who would want to do customer service for a company like that?  Can you imagine how many calls they get in month 2 and later?  “But you agreed to it, sir.  It is right there under the Total Monthly Price.”  “Yes, have a nice day.  Thank you for choosing Verizon.”

Missing The Creative

Posted by on February 25, 2014 No comments

It happened again.

Quite a while ago, I wrote about inspiration and timing and how life gets in the way of being creative.  This morning, I got stuck in a traffic jam from an accident and was watching some of the cars jockeying for position and stealing any small space they could get.  It got me thinking of the typical sociological study of humans dealing with scarcity of resources.

A short story started to form in my mind with all the elements I typically rant about: overpopulation, class warfare, unwillingness to work together, entitlement (not of the typically-accused have-nots, but of the have-enough-demand-mores), all set in a dystopian future, which seems closer every year.  But the more I built the elements up in my mind, the more they got crowded out by the things I had to do today at work.

Ah, what if I wasn’t working?  I could get out of the traffic jam, grab a notebook and jot down ideas.  Then when I got home, I could start writing a nice, depressing short story.  I recently read a Stephen King book – I think it was “On Writing.”  King talks about his experience being a writer and some of the ways to be an effective writer.  The biggest thing I got out of the book is the balance between being alone so you can create and getting out and building experience and inspiration to create.

I suppose it could be possible that I could carry this idea for the rest of the day and work on it after work, but I’m in a profession where you have to use your brain pretty heavily throughout the day, so I can’t keep these ideas up in the air like juggling balls.  Back in the old days of pizza delivery, absolutely, I could.  But, life gets in the way.

Four Letter Word

Posted by on February 13, 2014 No comments

Porn.  There, I said it.

It’s a weird thing, really.  Porn has been around probably forever, although mostly as a subculture.  It had a brief heyday in the 70’s where it was shown in legitimate movie theaters, then got buried until the Internet revival.  But the porn of today is nothing like the porn of yesteryear.  Porn has always been viewed by some as disgusting.  However, the modern flavor would make even an old-time connoisseur say it’s disgusting.  Hence its name: gonzo porn.

But I’m not going to delve into specifics of all that.  My interest is more in how the term is viewed and used.  For example, at a recent corporate meeting that included the entire building staff of obviously mixed company, someone was joking about putting up an online video about the new product we were launching.  Another person joked with him and asked why he didn’t have it done already.  The first person responded that he only did porn.  Awkward chuckles and silence.  The thought for him to even suggest a joke like that must mean it’s mainstream, although not readily accepted.

However, take a bunch of people who are geeking out over some new highly hyped product, like a new-model Corvette.  You would have no blowback from saying that an online photo gallery or demo video of the car was like “car porn.”  In this case, “porn” is used as a term for anything that is meant to stimulate, arouse, and excite.  And somehow, that is not dirty.

I originally got thinking about this post from a forum post made by an acquaintance about how a friend of his decided to become a porn actress.  She jumped into the business completely and has quite a catalog built in a short period of time.  Now, the forum this was posted on is male-dominated, so the responses were generally what you’d expect – pretty debased.  So then, as you would also expect, the question became, when would this guy get to have sex with her?  After all, she must like sex to do it for a living, and he’s a guy (apparently the only real requirement here), so when is it going to happen?  And if it doesn’t happen, well, that must mean the guy is beyond the lowest form of loser, to not even be able to have sex with a porn actress who is also a personal friend.

So here’s another odd standard.  The woman in the porn business is awesome on-screen, but worthless in-person.  I’ve definitely grown out of the “anything that moves” stage, so I’m probably just looking at this from an old-person’s viewpoint.  In fact, I’m looking at it from an intolerant, high-tolerance viewpoint, i.e. I have no problem that she does porn, but I take issue to people objectifying her.

What a problem to have.  A person meets someone and states he’s a doctor.  In response, he gets “Oh?  I have this problem, can you help me with it real quick?”  This woman meets someone and states she’s an “adult entertainer” and, in response, gets “Oh? I have this problem, can you help me with it real quick?”  Geez, I do computer stuff for a living and usually I don’t mind looking at someone’s computer problems, but it’s clearly still my choice whether to do it.

Some people even like to watch me work on their computers.  Voyeuristic weirdos.

Further Adventures In LinuxLand

Posted by on February 11, 2014 No comments

Well, as I previously noted, I didn’t give up on putting the incredible Linux on that older laptop.  I spent a bunch of time searching online for info and found someone who installed a  version of Mint on the same model laptop as I had.  So now I have a viable candidate.

It took me a couple attempts to discover that the laptop doesn’t support USB booting, so CD-R it has to be.  I install the new Mint version and on reboot, it doesn’t boot.  No GRUB recovery bullshit, just “Error 18,” which, amazingly, is a greater bunch of bullshit.

In researching the highly-specific error #18 of the boot up process, I find a discussion that answered all the boot problems I’d had up to this point.  The hard drive partition was too big.  Yup.  Linux, the most advanced OS ever, the OS that runs massive server farms, massive web servers, massive file servers, massive everything… has an issue with the 250GB drive in my laptop.  The answer is to make two partitions, one small one for /boot and the other for / (the root? I have no idea).  So, another install with some manual partitioning steps and holy shit!  I have a booting, running, complete Linux laptop.

This is hardly my first foray into Linux, so I somewhat understand a few of the quirks.  I mean, I am somewhat prepared to be disappointed.  However, this install had some new wonders in store for me.  First up, connect to the network and get on the Internet.  Wireless connects without any issue, although the prompts for a password for some keychain were unexpected.

Firefox is installed by default, so I kick it off to get online.  The first thing I notice is that things are actually pretty slow.  This is consistent with my previous attempts to enjoy Linux for its lightweight, incredibly speedy performance (that never materialized).  Because the Linux version is pretty much in line with the age of the laptop, I have an abhorrent version of Firefox – 3.03.  This could be why things seem so slow.  I launch the Mint software repository to get a new version of Firefox or at least a different browser.  It fails to load.  Ok, I go to Google and download the latest Chrome.  It won’t install because of some invalid dependency.  Ok.  I go to Mozilla and download the latest version of Firefox there.  It downloads an archive file.  Huh.

Let me step aside here and point out the two competing mindsets with software development.  One side is Microsoft’s, where backwards compatibility is paramount.  For this choice, you can use nearly every version of Windows on nearly every piece of hardware out there.  The obvious downside is that the code is more bloated than it needs to be and contains code that is obsolete or vulnerable to hacking.  On the other side is Linux, which includes Apple and Android.  Here, you have a specific version made for specific hardware.  Once the next version of hardware comes along, you’re left behind.  You get the benefit of having the best code of the day working on your current device, but you are forced to upgrade hardware to get the latest software.  Right now, as I install Linux on this old laptop, I am relegated to the past, with an unrefined UI and outdated tools.

Now, back to the present, I have this Firefox archive file that I don’t know what to do with.  I try the obvious action of extracting the files to the desktop and look inside the folder contents.  I can’t tell what I’m supposed to run.  There’s no setup, no install, no run-this-to-make-go anywhere.  So I click on a few things and nothing happens.  There’s also no installation instructions in the file.  So, I give up on that.

As I’m struggling with this, an issue that happened a few times during my install attempts bit me again.  I know from experience that Linux has some odd fascination with multiple desktops.  Somehow – I still don’t know how – I triggered a “change desktop” command through the touchpad.  All the shit I was working on is gone and I can find no way to get it to come back.  There is no icon anywhere to change desktops.  FUCK THIS.  THIS is why Linux is reserved for geeks and nerds and will never be mainstream.  I consider myself to be a geek, but this lack of usability offends even me.  I looked through the sparse help information provided and couldn’t find any answers there.  Eventually, I found some way to make windows from all desktops appear in the task bar, so I could switch to them regardless of where they were hiding.  By that time, I was pretty much done for the night.

However, now that I’ve discovered the key to making Linux boot on this laptop, I think I’m going to try out a version called Joli Cloud, which looks kind of like a tablet OS, with a greatly simplified UI.  Stay tuned for more anger.

A Small Light Bulb Moment

Posted by on February 10, 2014 No comments

Add to the list of soon-to-be-obsolete things: automotive high-beams.

A little over-dramatic, sure, but give it some consideration.  When is the last time you got to use your high beams?  Ok, that’s a loaded question.  Some people would say “all the time!” and some would say “never!”  It depends on how populated your area is.

I was driving home one evening and I was able to use my car’s high beams for the entirety of one span of roadway.  I never saw another car.  And that made me think back to my previous living location where you’d never get a chance to use your high beams because there were cars on every road at every hour of day.

As we become more overcrowded in this world, our high beam usage is going to become diminished, possibly to the point of being irrelevant.  Then again, we’ll probably have self-driving cars by then and we’ll all be shuttled around in cars having nothing more than marker lights on them.