dac's blog: June 2006

Monday, June 26, 2006

Is it just me, or has the use of "misspoke" increased in the last few years?

... and let God sort them out.

Ah, the brilliance of Antonin Scalia:

The American people have determined that the good to be derived from capital punishment - in deterrence, and perhaps most of all in the meting out of condign justice for horrible crimes - outweighs the risk of error. It is no proper part of the business of this court, or of its justices, to second-guess that judgment, much less to impugn it before the world ...

So if we end up executing someone innocent, it's ok! Because, you see, it's what the people want.

Maybe we can save a bunch of money by abolishing our courts entirely and having the attorneys duel it out in a press conference showdown. The people demand it!

Wow. It's not every day that someone donates $37 billion to charity.

Friday, June 23, 2006

Monday, June 19, 2006

One of the perks of working at Amazon is that we get to meet some of the authors and musicians whose works we sell on the site (as part of the Author Fishbowl series, not to be confused with Amazon Fishbowl with Bill Maher, which stole the internal fishbowl name). Last Friday, I got to meet Douglas Coupland, author of Generation X and Microserfs. He was on a book tour promoting his new book, JPod. (We got free signed copies! Woot!)

Very interesting guy. Very strange guy. The eclecticness of his novels -- he will occasionally take a break from the story and just fill a page or three with random words and phrases in varying sizes -- is not some cute act; he is like this in real life.

I don't know what to compare the experience to. Maybe it's like meeting a crack addict who is just coherent enough to lucidly convey the train of thoughts that are rushing through his head.

Not much else to report. I was the primary on call last week, which meant I got very little sleep. Tamara and I went hiking yesterday on the Olympic Peninsula, this time up Royal Creek near the Dungeness River (which feeds Dungeness Bay near the old town of Dungeness, which lends its name to a species you've probably heard of, Dungeness Crab).

Wednesday, June 14, 2006

Reorg'ed... again!

My group underwent a reorganization today. This is the fourth reorg for me -- seventh involving my group -- since I arrived last August. That's about one every other month.

Admittedly, however, most of them made business sense (including today's). That's unusual; my personal experience with reorgs at previous companies was that they were initiated so someone could make a power grab. These have mostly been optimizing tweaks (though today's was a fairly major shift).

Ah, well. Life in the corporate merry-go-round, I suppose.

Well, this has certainly been one of my more interesting commute experiences.

Apparently, some intoxicated/deranged guy crashed the gates and drove onto the ferry. They arrested him on the Seattle side, but bomb sniffing dogs detecting something in his vehicle. They evacuated the ferry terminal as a result.

I had to give my group's manager-on-call a ring to let him know that I was stuck without internet access (I'm on-call through noon tomorrow and have to respond to incidents within 15 minutes).

Tuesday, June 13, 2006

... and the day only went downhill from there.

It's bad when someone asks, "Was blah caused by the sev-1*?"

It's ugly when your response is, "Which sev-1?"

(* sev-1 = Amazon-speak for a critical bug which is causing the company to hemorrhage money.)

Ah... what a way to start the morning. On the ferry ride in, I started getting multiple pages about our services being in distress. Having an unknown, abusive software client threaten to take down the site is a very effective wake-up call -- perhaps moreso than the morning coffee.

Now, to track down the offenders and beat them into submission...

Wednesday, June 7, 2006

We have returned from the Canyon. I am now leaner, healthier, and more tanned than I've been in recent history. Paddling 130 miles in the hot Arizona sun will do that to you.

It was a most excellent trip. Pictures and details will be forthcoming; alas, I'm too sleepy to do this right now (our schedules followed the sun -- bed around 9 pm, rise around 5 am), so this will have to happen later.

Discovered at work today that I will be mentoring two interns instead of just one. They're both working on the same project, though, which makes things easier; they're also quite sharp. This should be fun.

dac's blog