My people? Crazy.

I haven't checked work e-mail since late Friday night. I've been tempted, especially since today's Newsweek had the Kindle on the front cover and I'm sure there's a bunch of buzz in the office, but I need the unplug time.

Incidentally, I've known about this for a year or so, though I only knew it by its internal name, Fiona. I hadn't heard anything about it for a long time; I was wondering if it had died. Obviously not. My first impressions: Ugly? Yes (and it was just as ugly a year ago), though part of me says that if you focus on these sorts of things, you're not the target audience. Expensive? Ayup, too much so for my tastes (though the price will surely come down). Will I give up books for it? Doubtful; books don't have restrictive DRM and you can dogear pages much more easily. They are heavier and (in the instances where it matters) less searchable.

Vacation has been quiet and nice so far. Spent much of today working on my console (an electronics workbench). Lots of sawdust everywhere. Trying to use a 1/8" Dremel router bit to mill out a largeish area (about 10" x 6" x 1/4") is very, very tedious. Tomorrow will involve swimming, maybe some wandering over on the Olympic Peninsula, and more milling. Notably absent: work. :-)

One of the better things about Amazon: our senior managers are not out-of-touch with the engineers. Nor are they afraid to speak their mind; what they say is not couched in managerspeak.

Brian Valentine, my division's SVP, gave a talk today entitled "Lessons Learned" -- basically a rundown of what he worked on in his career (most of it -- 19 years -- at Microsoft), described the mistakes made, talked about what he wanted to do at Amazon, and related a lot of war stories. It was hilarious and inspiring -- and this is from someone who is usually a bit pessimistic.

Alas, I don't know how much I can relate here, so I won't go off quoting bits and pieces of it.

Heh... so my son will be Robert'); DROP TABLE Students;--. I guess my daughter will be Elaine:

I was starting to wonder just how much energy a compact fluorescent bulb saves in terms of carbon footprint. It's widely known that you can use a lower wattage CFL bulb to replace a given incandescent bulb; e.g., the light given off by a 23 W CFL bulb is the same as that of a 100 W incandescent bulb.

However, CFLs also contain mercury (on the order of 5 mg per bulb). Disposal regulations vary widely; in my area of the woods, there's some confusion as to how households are supposed to dispose of them. We'll play responsible citizen here and take them to a recycling center.

In my county, there are three sites which accept CFLs. The nearest one is in Poulsbo, a 25.2 mile round trip.

Let's assume it's time to take that bulb to the recycling center. (Ok, normally I would bundle them up and take a bunch at a time.) In my 2000 Honda CR-V, this trip would consume a gallon of gas. According to a random environmental site on the Intertubes, this is 10.9 kg (24 lbs) of CO₂.

Yikes. That sounds like a lot. Does this offset the benefits of a CFL?

The average lifetime of a CFL is 15,000 hours. Assuming our earlier 23/100 W bulb comparison, that's a difference of 1155 kWh over the lifetime of the CFL. According to this carbon calculator, 1 kWhr of electricity results in 0.43 kg of carbon emissions.

That's a 496 kg; discounting our (silly) trip, I will have released 486 kg less CO₂ into the atmosphere -- that's half a ton.

Ok, I can rest easier now. :-)

Watching a train wreck...

A Canadian dollar is now worth 1.08 US dollars. Next stop: Australian dollar parity. And I don't see a bottom to this:

• China has announced that they're moving away from dollars
• GM, still a DJIA component, reported a $39 billion loss
• Oil looks like it will easily clear $100/barrel by the end of the year
• And I don't think the banks are telling us the full truth about the extent of the mortgage crisis.

My investments have been flat. As expected, losing money on domestic stocks; gaining it on foreign stocks.

Who will play Barack Obama on SNL? Well, how about Barack Obama?

What the heck is this? I see it popping up on various sites -- it's one of the most annoying Web 2.0 inventions I've ever seen.


I'm guessing it's supposed to show a thumbnail of the linked page. I've never seen anything but the "Loading Preview" text, though.

As another blogger aptly put it, "I was beginning to think it was the 90’s all over again, with the blinky text and the annoying midi files."

Even better:

Snap’s preview anywhere gizmo is ruining the reading experience for millions of people. Its intrusive, obstructive and un-useful in almost every respect and use case. The fact that so many big blogs are using it, big well respected blogs, does not mean that it’s useful, it just means that they, like most bloggers, have all the self restraint of a magpie in a sparkly things factory.

What's next? Are these folks going to go around and start modifying cars so they honk every time you hit the brake? Have my office phone ring anytime someone on my floor gets up to use the restroom?

Edit: Thanks to for providing this tip on how to disable it:

If you click on the gear, there should be an option to "disable", and the little preview-page that results will let you chooose "all sites" and then "save". It'll set a cookie somewhere and never bother you again, as far as I can tell.

This is what I've been spending a fair amount of time on over the last six months. Not that web page specifically, but all of the backend logic to make it work as well as migrating about 100k customers from the old set of bank accounts to the new.

U.S. occupies Canada

Our solution to the currency issue? Take over Canada, one piece at a time.

---

Yes, I am disappointed in the Rockies' implosion in the series. Excellent showing by the Sox. Careful, though; keep it up, and people will start lumping you with another team in the northeast.

Apple has apparently perfected their Windows emulation:

Dreaded Blue Screen of Death mars some Leopard installs
Apple support drones are getting an earful from Mac users who are getting the dreaded Blue Screen of Death while trying to update to the latest and greatest version of OS X. This thread on an official Apple support forum has more than 200 posts left in 25 hours at time of writing. A large percentage of the writers report getting a persistent blue screen that forces them to abort their installation of Leopard.

I cannot help but be amused. I kinda like Apple, but Steve Jobs' arrogance gets to me. This will take him down a peg or two -- hopefully.

On fire...

I-15 is never this empty, especially at rush hour:

I-15 at Felicita Road [map]



I-15 at Centre City Parkway [map]


I-15 at Mira Mesa Boulevard [map]


My parents were evacuated around 1 pm; their house is (was?) on the northwestern edge of the Witch fire. Haven't been able to reach them, but I'm figuring they're safe and probably stuck in traffic on a surface street somewhere.

Anyone else remember Master Ninja's Q&A section? For some reason, I was trying to remember the characters, and then I realized I didn't even recall which site it was. (Google was of no help; it's been gone for a few years now.) No idea why I was trying to remember this; it wasn't terribly amusing back then, either.

---

At the risk of offending , , and , I feel a bit sorry for the Red Sox. Now, I like the Sox -- how can you not like a team whose archrival is the Yankees? -- but they're going up against the Rockies. The Rockies who have been kicking everyone's ass -- including my Padres -- since the start of September. The Rockies who have won the last 22 of 23.

Oh, and this time it's not the Red Sox who are the underdogs.

The Sox' best hope is that the boys in Denver have cooled off while waiting for the ALCS to finish up.

BBC News

Argh. They're screwing up everything I like about BBC news; -- basically, dumbing it down to become a British version of CNN or Fox News.

This is what's in the water...

(from the Nikon Small World photomicrography competition)

Tamara, I know what to name our kids now...

I've been dared to explain seven of my interests...

Anachronism

Because, doggoneit, quill pens shouldn't just gather dust in museums! Seriously, though, there are a number of interesting solutions to problems in past times which required a lot of thought. Modern conveniences ("just take the car," "get a portable electric generator," "throw a microprocessor at it") have made us intellectually lazy and wasteful.

Carver Mead

One of my professors at Caltech; I took analog VLSI from him. He invented many of the techniques used to design modern chips. In the 90s, the startups he founded created the touchpad and CMOS digital cameras. More recently, he's been working on something called "collective electrodynamics," which is an attempt to revamp the way we're taught electricity and magnetism (E&M) from a quantum perspective.

Finesse

No, not the shampoo. See my response for anachronism. I love elegant solutions. If a solution is not elegant, then it probably isn't correct.

Jenolan Caves

An absolutely beautiful formation of caves in the Blue Mountains in New South Wales.

Scones

Sweet but not kick-you-in-the-teeth sweet, and they go well with tea. Comfort food. I don't know that I've ever passed one up for breakfast.

Scraphead Challenge

The original title of Junkyard Wars, as set in Britain. Developed by the inimitable Cathy Rogers, contestants had to cobble together working machines or vehicles from items found in an actual scrapyard. The ultimate in finesse.

Throwing Rocks

Because the damn kids won't keep off my lawn.

Swam about a mile yesterday in Dewatto Bay. It was absolutely beautiful.


To put the location into context, it's on the eastern shore of the Hood Canal, on the Kitsap Peninsula. All of this is west of Puget Sound. We live on Bainbridge Island.

I just got ripped off.

I spent the last 90 minutes watching Open Water 2: Adrift. It was a free cable "On Demand" feature. That was about $30 too much. Which, if you're doing the math, means they should have paid me $30 to watch that turd.

I had forgotten this quote. An excerpt from Greenspan's new book, The Age of Turbulence: "I am reminded of Churchill's perception of Americans, who 'can always be counted on to do the right thing -- after they have exhausted all other possibilities.'"

Also, in the excerpt printed in Newsweek, Greenspan lambasts the U.S. educational system, blaming its pitiful state for the growing income disparity. I have to agree; as long as schools are churning out people ill equipped to work in a high tech labor force and we persist in restricting the inflow of skilled immigrants, the wages of the few skilled workers remaining (which includes everyone who reads my journal, at least that I know of) will keep rising out of proportion. Simple supply and demand.

Alas, I'm not going to go out and buy the book just yet. I'm in the middle of Another Day in the Frontal Lobe: A Brain Surgeon Exposes Life on the Inside. Quite a good book so far; both entertaining and informative.

No more "Monopoly Money" jokes...

Start holding on to those Canadian coins. Each is now worth the same as the equivalent US coin. You still can't use them in vending machines, though.

Anyone know if the retailers up north who previously accepted US dollars have stopped doing so? And can I expect to see US retailers in areas like Bellingham to start accepting Canadian money?

Washington State Ferries may want to reconsider their relatively recent refusal to accept the loonie.

Imagining the Tenth Dimension

In case you can't find your usual stash of mind-altering drugs...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qU1fixMAObI

This is how cult religions get started...

Never mind that mentioned multiple times that she would be in Seattle on the 11th. Never mind that I have multiple gadgets telling me that today is the 5th. It's in my Outlook calendar: so it must be true.

This is the reality of my life these days. My schedule is completely interrupt driven. Without Outlook, I wouldn't know when and where to be or, conversely, what I can get away with putting off for now. Flipside: if I enter an appointment incorrectly, forget any possibility of me making it. It might as well not exist.

Ok, so I do know my wife's birthday (April 8th) and our anniversary (October 26th) off the top of my head. And, no, I don't need to look in the address book to remember that her name is Tamara :-P.

Anyway, , this means that I can still make a 11:30/noon lunch next week when is here.

I managed to drive 73 miles yesterday without leaving the island.

How or why? I was one of the ground crew coordinators for the Arms Around Bainbridge swim.

Tiring, but lots of fun. I also took pictures, but I'll spare your friends page from them.

Those who enjoy cooking appreciate a good set of knives.

This guy, however, has taken one-upmanship to a new level; he uses a laser to cut his steak.

Most people's commutes are delayed by mundane things: traffic congestion, accidents, vehicles breaking down, etc.

In my case, I have bomb scares thrown into the mix.

I'm guessing this was intentional; who in their right mind would accidentally leave a bag of sparklers (which will set off the bomb-sniffing dogs they have here) stuffed behind a toilet just a day after the FBI released photos of a couple guys who have been asking for details about ferry operations?

---

Of course, this is all trivial stuff. I recently heard from a friend from high school who spent the last year in the hellhole of Darfur. I recommend reading her blog -- it's an eye opener. And nobody else could sum up the Darfur conflict as eloquently and flippantly as she does:

And that’s Darfur in a nutshell. The Red Sox, the Yankees, the Dodgers, the Padres, and the entire rest of the American League all armed and jealous of one another.

Anyway, off to a block of meetings.

Wow. Video footage (from a security camera) of the I-35W bridge collapse.

Harry entered the nearly deserted dining hall. A few other Hogwarts students were in the far corner carrying on a game of Wizard's Chess; one of them -- a Slytherin Harry didn't recognize -- looked up for a moment, but then returned his attention to the game.

Minutes passed. Where were Ron, Hermione, and Ginny? Harry hummed a tune; something catchy he heard played in a muggle shop. He didn't know most of the lyrics; something about a boy in Detroit catching a train at midnight to anywhere. The thought of a train reminded him of King's Cross station and made him chuckle. How constraining it must be -- was, he reminded himself -- to be tied to train and bus schedules, having to fill up automobiles.

Ginny enters and asks him how his meeting with Snape went. "Oh, as you might expect," Harry says. "Draco won't going to testify against his father to the new ministry."

At this news, Ginny sighs. "Well, we can't expect it all to happen at once. Hey! You're sitting on my wand!" she says to Ron as he enters and plops himself down next to her.

"Sorry. I've spent the last five hours tending to Professor Sprout's mandrakes, and I'm wiped. But as dad used to say, 'Try to remember the times that were good.'" A few of the chess players look over in their direction at the break in the silence. Harry feels the gaze of the Slytherin student, putting him on a bit of edge.

Ron shakes some dirt off the sleeve of his robe; something ruffles in his pocket. "Oh, right. Mum sent me a box of Bertie Botts." Ron pulls the box out and starts to open it. "Want some? Hey, where's Hermione anyway?"

A brief interruption in the sunlight streaming in an upper window catches their attention. Another shadow -- this time, they can see it's Hermione flying backwards, attempting to park her broom. "Ah, still trying to park," Ron sighs. The Slytherin student walks slowly towards them, still gazing at Harry. He pulls his wand out, and Harry feels a chill on the back of his neck. Just as Harry moves to pull his wand out, the Slytherin brushes past them to go to the restroom.

Ron finishes opening the box of jelly beans, and they each pop one into their mouths. Hermione, having finally parked her broom, runs up to the dining hall entrance.

[FADE TO BLACK]

For my roadgeek friends...

I used driving directions from Google Maps today which included the following:

• South on US 101 for 3.3 miles.
• West on WA 108, WA 8, and US 12 for 38 miles total.
• South (again!) on US 101 for 0.5 miles.

Yes, the directions are correct.
Yes, US 101 runs reasonably north/south in both locations.
Yes, WA 8/108 and US 12 run reasonably east/west.

The answer lies in the strange routing of US 101 between Astoria, Oregon and Olympia, Washington:

• From Astoria, it runs north to Forks via Aberdeen (directionals read north/south).
• From Forks, it runs east through Port Angeles to Port Townsend (directionals read east/west).
• From Port Townsend, it runs south to Olympia via Shelton (directionals read south/north and the mile markers increase going south).

In case you're curious, we were going here.

Being so far behind in the series, I decided to read the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows plot summary on Wikipedia. The only thing I don't quite understand: Why, exactly, did Harry kill John F. Kennedy?

Let me tell you firsthand: stingray stings are painful. Much more painful than a bee sting.

I was swimming just north of the San Onofre nuclear power plant on the Camp Pendleton side. Reaching the end of the swimming area, I stood up to turn back and promptly felt an intense pain in my right foot. After a sharp yelp followed by a few expletives, I hobbled back to the lifeguard tower where they had me soak my foot in near-scalding water. Trying to burn my foot never felt so good; apparently, the toxin breaks down when exposed to heat.

---

I discovered a combination toilet paper dispenser and iPod dock at Fry's yesterday. Seriously, folks -- if you're blowing money on this kind of crap, you have way too much disposable income.

---

Here are a couple pictures of the concrete roller coaster they're installing on I-15:

In San Diego briefly; heading up to Mt. Whitney tomorrow with my dad.

First, though: WTF, San Diego? Have you decided that you wanted to pick up the worst features of Los Angeles and pave over the entire place? I swear, it looks like you're building a concrete roller coaster in the middle of I-15. Every town along the corridor looks like a game of Sim City gone horribly, horribly wrong.

Wow... I never thought I'd be glad to leave SoCal. The place is soooo married to the automobile, it's frightening. It's impossible to be a pedestrian here, really -- watching people try to navigate their way across eight-lane surface streets is sad.

I've been remiss in posting these.

Today's workout was a killer -- just myself and the coach, and we had initially planned on a 1:20 workout. Instead, it ended up being 2:15 (!). We were 35 minutes in; she mentioned that I had been swimming with the current so it'll take longer to get back. Ok, "but let's go for five more minutes." Five minutes later: "Oh, hey, look, there's a neat beach neither of us have explored." Ten more minutes, we're at the beach.

Remember how I was going with the current? So, 50 minutes there... 1:15 back. About 3.4 miles total.

My arms were killing me when I got out. And this was all after an on-call shift from hell (35 pages in 48 hours... WTF?).

From today's low tide:


Trying to identify these critters...

Ah, joy. IBM has apparently lost a backup tape containing my name and social security number. And I only worked there for a summer 10 years ago. sigh

My coach is trying to kill us -- either by the 1.8 mile swims or stings by a thousand jellyfish. Yet I pay for the torture and enjoy it. I guess that makes me the freak. :-)


Seeing jellyfish this early in the summer was strange. We haven't seen them anywhere except in Blakely Harbor, though. Fortunately, as with most things in the Pacific Northwest, they aren't the dangerous kind; their barbs are incapable of penetrating the skin, so the worst you'll get is a mild rash.

Saw this interesting vehicle on Wyatt Way on the Island this morning:


I thought it was unmotorized -- the guy was pedaling as it went along -- but it was zipping along faster than anything else I've seen.

A closeup revealed that the wheel he was pedaling is attached to a generator (under the front bar) charging a battery (in the black box under the seat); this is attached to a motor which powers the rear wheel.

The front wheels are only for steering and braking.

I thought it was cool.

Heh... I just spent an amusing yet frustrating 8+ hours tracking down an obscure bug. (Non-coders, you probably want to stop reading now.)

I thought there was something bizarre going on with our logging framework. We're working on some new validation code (checking for things like invalid characters in names, etc.). One of the things we log is the number of calls to various functions handled in each request. The logs should look like (simplified):

Request 1: RequestHandler:1,Validation:1,IsClientAuthorized:1,IsValidName:1
Request 2: RequestHandler:1,Validation:1,IsClientAuthorized:1,IsValidName:1
Request 3: RequestHandler:1,Validation:1,IsClientAuthorized:1,IsValidName:1
Request 4: RequestHandler:1,Validation:1,IsClientAuthorized:1,IsValidName:1

Instead, I was getting:
Request 1: RequestHandler:1,Validation:1,IsClientAuthorized:1,IsValidName:1
Request 2: RequestHandler:1,Validation:1,IsClientAuthorized:1,IsValidName:2
Request 3: RequestHandler:1,Validation:1,IsClientAuthorized:1,IsValidName:3
Request 4: RequestHandler:1,Validation:1,IsClientAuthorized:1,IsValidName:4

This indicates we're calling IsValidName() four times on the fourth request. Huh? This is utter nonsense. That's got to be a bug in the logging framework or our log4j configuration, right?

Nope. We really were. My desktop started getting *really* slow around the 100,000th request.

The culprit? We screwed up a singleton initialization. The RequestHandler initializes the validation framework each time; the first call should do the real setup work, and the follow ons should be no-ops. Except... we forgot to set the alreadyInitialized flags and we were adding the same set of validations to the framework each time. For various obscure reasons, the setup actually appends to the framework rather than replacing it.

Amusing because I didn't believe what my eyes were telling me. Frustrating because it took 8 hours of me looking in the wrong place to track this down.

I am the proud owner of a new cast iron skillet:


It's 17" across, which is the perfect size for making large pizzas -- which is exactly what we did today. The crust came out better than any other I've done.

Yes, I'm getting excited about cooking utensils. Eating well is important!

In other news, L-Com -- a provider of networking equipment and cabling -- knows how to appeal to the Y chromosome:

Yes, they're showing some networking equipment being run over by a truck.

Resulting conversations go something like this:
Husband: We need one of these.
Wife: (Comes over) What are you looking at?
Husband: It's an OC-3 to OC-12 media converter.
Wife: Err... it's a thousand dollars. Where are you going to use it?
Husband: I... don't know. But we need it!
Wife: What do you mean you don't know? How can you need it, then?
Husband: Isn't it obvious? It can survive being run over by a truck!
Wife: (Shakes head, walks away)

The recent mass deletion of "objectionable" communities and journals has me on edge. Not that it affects me directly -- none of the communities I visit were affected -- but the attitude being taken is so very big brother-ish. You can argue about legalese and how, as a corporation, Six Apart is not bound by the Constitution of the United States -- at a basic level, I feel there's been a violation of an implicit trust.

And, as an engineer, things that put me on edge spark me into looking for solutions to the problem. Technical solutions, not diplomatic ones (though I did pass the U.S. Department of State's Foreign Service Exam, I decided this isn't exactly my calling). It makes me wonder if there's a way to ensure this doesn't happen again -- e.g., by decentralizing the power that's currently centralized.

Ironically, solving this would solve a similar issue we're facing at work (, you might have seen my thread on sde-feedback@ about my ideas for a decentralized package store). I even have the basic idea in my head.

What I can't figure out, however, is how to restrict access in the manner of friends-only entries and the like. I mean, it's certainly possible -- a friends-only entry just becomes an entry encrypted with various friends' public keys. However, today I can trust that my restricted entries won't be reposted because I trust those on my friends list. With what I'm proposing, I would have to trust not only you, any software that you might run, and anyone who might acquire (illicitly or via other means) your private key, now and in the future.

That's a lot of trust.

I'm going to mull this over in my head a bit more. I don't know if it'll actually go anywhere -- honestly, work has left me in a zombie state most days. I'm angry, but I don't know if I'm angry enough to overcome zombie dacut.

Oof. Only a mile and change, but this left me wiped:


Swimming with a wetsuit feels like someone has attached rubber bands to my limbs. It's also nice, though a bit exhausting, to not have to turn around every 25 yards. :-)

Moron^H^H^H^H^H More on investing

Amazon's stock is up 7% today -- for no reason. I decided to sell my (small) holdings entirely.

I mean, rah rah company and all, but this is just irrational. Our P/E ratio is 107. In plainer English, this is thinking along the lines of: "If the stock price is tied to a company's performance, if I give you $107 today, I can expect this to be worth $108 a year from now."

This is a worthy investment in, say, a charity (where I expect to reap zero financial return). In a for-profit enterprise, however, it's silly. With inflation running a little over 1% per year, this is a net loss. Most banks will pay you a higher interest rate!

Now, there can be other assumptions being made in the valuation. Some of this is a correction for previous assumptions about stagnant profits, which were blown away during our last earnings report. It could also be shorts covering (an activity I'll explain below). Either way, this is not a position I feel a comfortable basis for investment.

---

What's this about "shorts covering"? No, it's not a way to hide your underwear. A short seller is someone who makes a bet that a stock fall over some time period. An example of how this works is:

• Alice thinks Amazon's stock will fall over the next three months.
• Alice borrows 100 shares of Amazon from her broker, Bob, which she immediately sells for $5/share, netting her $500.
• Three months pass, and Amazon is now at $4/share. Alice buys 100 shares, costing her $400.
• Alice returns the 100 shares to Bob and keeps the $100.

Ok, sounds reasonable. But what if Amazon's stock actually rises a month after Alice sells her (well, Bob's) shares? She could hang on, hoping that it will fall in the next couple months; on the flip side, she could decide to cover her losses and buy the shares back right now (before they rise further).

Like anything else, stocks are subject to supply and demand. When a lot of people want to buy the stock, this increases demand and the price rises. You can see how short sellers can create a feedback loop here: A positive report about the stock causes the price to rise; shorts cover their losses, causing the price to rise further.

---

Anyway, if this sounds a bit abstract and sketchy to you, you're not alone. I prefer a firm connection between a company's performance and its stock price.

I think this short is going to give me nightmares.

Canada does away with paper money

At least, that's what appears to be happening. They've just issued a C$1 million coin. It's 50 cm wide, 3 cm thick, and weighs 100 kg.

What the hell?

From Microsoft's Knowledge Base:

When you enter a negative number in the ERF function or in the ERFC function, you receive a "#NUM!" error in the Microsoft Excel worksheet. The "#NUM!" error occurs when you enter a negative number as the lower_limit value or as the upper_limit value.

Additionally, if you enter a numeric value of 27.3345 or larger in the lower_limit value or the upper_limit value in the ERF or ERFC functions, you may receive a #NUM! error in the Excel worksheet.

CAUSE:
This problem occurs because Microsoft Office Excel 2003 and earlier versions are not designed to correctly process negative input values and input values that are larger than 27.3345. This is true even though negative input values and input values that are larger than 27.3345 are both mathematically correct.

Gee, thanks. What if I actually need to, say, compute erf(-1) for, say, comparing against a normal (bell curve) distribution?

Goddammit. Microsoft, you suck. I shouldn't have to write my own program to do something that should be so freaking trivial in Excel.

When I woke up this morning, I was quite a bit richer than I was when I went to bed last night.

Alas, it's all paper money, and I expect the irrational exuberance will settle down by the time my stock actually vests. Still, it's a bit nice to know that there's a possibility these golden handcuffs might be made of something other than fool's gold.

Girl is incredibly attractive when wearing a black dress.

I'm not sure why I took this picture this way, but I like how it came out.

Feeling much better today: everything is back to normal except appetite, which I can live with. Heck, that might do me some good.

In other news: one way to capture my interest is to put a big "OFF LIMITS" sign on something. In this case, a blacked out region on the Alaska/Canadian border on every satellite photo I can find:
Google Maps
TerraServer

Ugh. I've been horribly sick the last two days, to the point where yesterday is a complete blur. I'm having trouble piecing together what was real and what was dreamed during my short fits of restless sleep.

Alas, the stinking, stained clothes in the bathtub indicate that the projectile vomiting was real.

Thank god I have a lovely wife who's willing to run out to Safeway at 6 am to buy Gatorade to rehydrate me.

During a browsing stream-of-consciousness, I came across a YouTube video of the Dan Rather/George H. W. Bush interview during the 1988 presidential campaign. (Yes, I'm old enough to remember watching it.)

One thing I found quite interesting rewatching it: Bush 41 was perfectly happy to have his and others' testimonies provided under oath, and made quite a point of this during the interview. It makes you wonder why is his son so reluctant to do the same.

I just posted the picture of Athena widgets below in 's journal because she randomly mentioned widgets.

Looking at this -- what, 20+ year old? -- picture, it occurred to me: someday, there will be a revolt against all of these sculpted interfaces and eye candy, and people will be clamoring for the simplicity of Athena widgets.

Except the scrollbar. Sorry, but the Athena scrollbar's unintuitive behavior is just crap.

My quote of the day on Java and its fanboy community:

"Java is like an F-14 Tomcat. It can be a useful, deadly weapon. But you wonder what the heck you were thinking when you sold it to the Iranians."

My job today was to be a babysitter. An overpaid, glorified babysitter.

This makes me regret that corporal punishment has fallen out of favor as a disciplinary measure.

Ugh...

Didn't quite make it to the 3 mile mark today. I was cramping up, badly.

Then, in the shower, I threw up.

Unpleasant^n. And I think I freaked out the head lifeguard, who happened to walk in as I was hunched over, trying to catch my breath.

My performance self-review for the past year is done and submitted. I have confessed to my crimes against productivity.

Yearly performance reviews are a joke, and Amazon's are no exception. The reality is they reflect what you've done in the last month (two if you're lucky).

Next week: peer reviews!
"Bob is a terrific coder. The only improvements I can suggest would be that he consider adding some actual logic and comments."
"Sally's code needs serious work. Although it saved the company $30M last year in reduced costs and increased uptime, she places braces on the same line as her 'if' statements. How can anyone be expected to maintain this crap?"

I just gave an overview of the twisted, convoluted payments infrastructure at Amazon to my new manager.

He almost ran away screaming. :-)

Andy Roddick interview

Andy Roddick got his ass handed to him by Roger Federer in the Australian Open, 6-4, 6-0, 6-2. His performance at the press conference afterwards, though, was awesome.

Selected quotes:

Q. What was it like for you just being there at the end of that?
ANDY RODDICK: It was frustrating. You know, it was miserable. It sucked. It was terrible. Besides that, it was fine.

Q. How much would you have paid in order not to come too this press conference tonight?
RODDICK: That's about the best question that's been asked.
     Well, I mean, I can't really say an amount because I would have gotten fined, what, 20 grand. Obviously, it would have to be less than that, right, if we're thinking logically? It really wouldn't be about the money; it would be about running away and not facing it.
     I would pay a lot of money if everyone would just make up stuff that I said and pretend like I was actually here. That would be fine. My dad didn't raise me to run away from it, so here I am.

Q. What did Jimmy say? US Open final experience, you played him tough, got on a roll. Did you talk about that before the match, if Roger gets on a roll, try to do X, Y or Z, slow it down?
RODDICK: Yeah, there's a lot of strategy talk. It's not so much like, If you're down 6‑4, 6‑0, 2‑0. We didn't really talk about that. Oops.

Q. After a night like this, do you sleep well?
RODDICK: Do I sleep well?
Q. Yes.
RODDICK: It depends on how much I drink tonight.

Happy Australia Day!

In stranger news...

In stranger news, one of the tempered glass doors on our shower randomly exploded.

This happened while nobody was in the shower, thankfully. I had left the light on in there -- it's right above the door -- and there was probably a 10°F difference from top to bottom. That alone wouldn't explain why a door would shatter; I'm guessing there was a latent issue (manufacturing defect, improper installation, damage in transport or during installation, etc.) which, combined with the temperature gradient, shattered it.

Weird, though. Took us a few minutes to identify where the sound came from.

Caltech -- the site of my undergrad edumacashion -- snapped its 207 game NCAA basketball losing streak.

To be honest, I wasn't aware we ever had a basketball team.

Ill conceived item #5734: Kellogg's Fudge Ripple Mini Swirlz.

I might end up as background scenery in Grey's Anatomy. They were filming some stock footage around town, and caught the ferry I was on as it was docking. If I do end up in the shot, I'm one of the folks on the starboard side passenger deck with an expression on my face which says, "Why the heck are all those people standing around on the dock with cameras pointed at us?"

We are empowered again, not to mention eminternetted. It was a long, strange week, though.

Starting on Christmas cards tonight. Err... yeah. Anyways... :-)

Still no power. Haven't sent Christmas cards as a result because I can't get at my address book. Nor have I been able to read personal e-mail in that time.

Worse, there's another storm coming up today. From what I understand we will be pushed back to the bottom of the priority list for power restoration. This is contrary to the claims being made by PSE that they'll restore power to those without it longest; the reality is they have no way of tracking how long you've been without power since their systems automatically reset you to "power restored" after 48 hours.

I'm close to just giving up and heading back to Pittsburgh. At least I have heat there, and basic utility outages are treated seriously.

I'm also getting in trouble at work because I haven't been checking up on things from home. Folks assume that, since they have power, you should, too.

ELECTRIC SERVICE DOWN STOP PLEASE SEND REPAIR CREW STOP CURRENT ETA TO RESTORATION ONE WEEK STOP HOUSES COLD AND REFRIGERATORS WARM STOP TYPING THIS FROM WORK STOP FIRST TIME I HAVE USED CAPSLOCK IN A LONG TIME STOP

Today was the busiest day of the year at work. We also came frighteningly close to a large (though not total) meltdown. My role in this was mostly canary ("Uh, guys, these systems don't look good..."), a bit of Chicken Little ("No, really, the sky is falling, and we need this team in the war room now."), a dash of resolver ("Well, the problem isn't here, and it's not there, so let's look thataways."), with a topping of reassurance ("Yes, the graphs look good now, we really can stop panicking now, thanks, now let me step out of the way while you manager types affix blame.").

Alas, I ended up spending the entire day in the war room and got no work done. Bleh. I also like to talk in italics. So sue me.


Speaking of suing, the SeaTac Christmas holiday tree fiasco amazes me. Basic gist: Rabbi wants a menorah included in holiday decorations at the airport, is met with typical bureaucratic "I'm going to answer in the way that involves the least amount of work for me" responses ("Your request is important to us, please stand by"). He gets fed up, threatens a federal lawsuit if they don't comply within 48 hours. Bureaucrats panic, consult lawyer, lawyer says you'd better take them down or prepare to include symbols of every possible faith including demonic worship, etc. So the trees come down.

Is anyone surprised by this? Apparently, Rabbi Elazar Bogomilsky, who had threatened the lawsuit, was.

Either the parties involved are truly nefarious and disingenuous, or they're idiots. I find both plausible. Taking DAC's law into account ("Never attribute to malice that which can be attributed to stupidity"), I'll say they're idiots all around.

I have a cold. Nothing terribly bad, but it's kinda gross to be around me right now and I'm likely contagious.

Alas, I cannot stay home from work tomorrow. I'm on-call from noon Monday until noon Wednesday. Normally, an on-call shift is the ideal time to stay home (you're not going to get much work done anywhere you are). During December, however, my team is required to have our on-call present in the "war room" during peak traffic hours -- a crowded place with a bunch of graphs projected on the walls. I don't expect this to be pleasant for myself or anyone around me.

Fortunately, I've found a mask which will filter out most of the germs. It looks a bit silly, though -- more like I'm about to do some carpentry rather than the surgical-style mask I was looking for.

Law & Order: Minor Debt Claims, by a bunch of UQ law students.

March of the Engineers, by the same guilty clan.

And the ATMs? They can be a bit vicious down under.

Apparently the commute yesterday around Seattle was so bad that rush hour lasted until well after midnight. The trip from Seattle to Tacoma -- usually about 30 minutes or so -- required five hours.

For those of us who take the ferry, though, it was a normal, though chilly, commute. (Well, aside from having to get around the crowds swarming Qwest Field for the Monday night football game.)

Argh! I just encountered another instance of the following code from one of our developers:

    try {
        // some stuff
    }
    catch (NumberFormatException e) {
        throw e;
    }

Do some folks just enjoy typing for the sheer fun of it?

Random silliness related to a new project I'm working on at home: visualizing the keep-out regions for an ATX motherboard for a case I'm working on.

(A higher quality video is available here, but $)@(*#$ LiveJournal won't let you link to videos if they're not on YouTube or Google).

Proptronics

You've seen them. The cardboard boxes simulating computers, TVs, and other electronic equipment used in furniture stores. The most familiar names are Proptronics and Box Props, though I'm sure there are others.

What I never realized was just how expensive these things are.

That 42" corrugated plasma TV? Box Props wants $76.95. A 60" box-o-vision from Proptronics will set you back $123 ($133 if you want a static color image on it). Complete computer systems with the latest Cellulose processor will run you $46-$95, depending on configuration.

At least the laptop is somewhat affordable -- $13.95. I don't think I've seen one that clunky since the late 80s/early 90s, though.

Technology sucks

Apparently, the good folks at Apple have coded up a way to simulate CD scratches into iTunes 7. Songs which were intact before -- as well as those purchased on iTunes -- are now skipping. <sigh> Or maybe it's a ploy to push me over to Zune.

I'm guessing the Victrola emulator had to be deferred to version 8.

Also, I'm on-call again this weekend. We've reduced the number of folks available for on-call by half, which means the rest of us are now on-call twice as often. Oh, and now we can't do anything -- including rebooting a dead host -- without filling out a bunch of paperwork and getting it approved by a manager. Only 304 days, 2 hours, 23 minutes, 51.25 seconds until I can go to another job...

More as a reminder to myself; this place apparently has all sorts of oddball fasteners, screws, etc.:
http://www.tacomascrew.com/

Ah, some of you make me feel like Electron Mike from today's Diesel Sweeties. For some of us, e-mail practically was the internet for a long time. (Ok, there was the occasional use of Usenet and Gopher, and we had our own version of Google and Bittorrent in Veronica and Archie.)

My younger coworkers who ask me how I could forget to update my here/away status on IM and who laugh at the plain-vanilla stock ringtone I use on my cell phone (it just beeps a few times) are also guilty.

For those who are into retro-internet, Firefox still supports Gopher. I even discovered a few active sites, like this one.

I love this movie.

Let x equal the quantity of all quantities of x.
Let x equal the cold.
It is cold in December.
The months of cold equal November through February.
There are four months of cold and four of heat, leaving four months of indeterminate temperature.
In February, it snows.
In March, the lake is a lake of ice.
In September, the students come back and the bookstores are full.
Let x equal the month of full bookstores.
The number of books approaches infinity as the number of months of cold approaches four.
I will never be as cold now as I will in the future.
The future of cold is infinite.
The future of heat is the future of cold.
The bookstores are infinite and so are never full except in September.

Halloween costumes I'd never let my teenage daughter¹ wear #6573:
Circuit Breaker, from Transformers


¹ Hypothetical -- I didn't run out and adopt one in the last couple of weeks...

I supposed it was only a matter of time... Mail-order husbands

For those in Seattle: If you ever get a chance, I recommend seeing a performance by the Squirrel Butter duo. Yes, those percussion sounds are all generated by her feet.

I've updated my tidal calendar creator so that the UI doesn't suck as much, it outputs PNGs instead of SVGs that nobody can really read, and autoscales according to the data received (rather than hardcoding -3ft and +18ft, which is only reasonable for Puget Sound).

It's also much slower, alas... generating PNGs is not easy. Also, I threw in an expensive antialiasing call in there to make things prettier.

Oh, and because I forgot to mention it earlier: the source code is also up there for the curious. You'll also need the location database I generate for this.

Silly xtide tricks

Working on automagically rendering tidal calendars. It's a work in progress -- the scale is optimized for one location (Eagle Harbor, Bainbridge Island), you need an SVG enabled browser to see the results, the interface sucks, and a number of important disclaimers ("NOT FOR NAVIGATION") and credits are missing, but...

http://kanga.org/~dacut/tidecal.cgi

The pains of REST

No, I'm not talking about sleep. Rather, some ranting about REST originally sent to a work alias.

I felt the need to actually write a bit of code this weekend, but wanted a distraction from actual work. I decided to try writing a C/C++ interface into S3 (with the ultimate goal of making a filesystem driver, but that's more than a weekend). This also gave me a chance to take a good look at REST.

After hacking on this for about 10 hours, I don't get it. Why is this an appealing "protocol"? (I put protocol in quotes because REST is all about not having a protocol, piggybacking entirely on top of HTTP.)

The major disasters I encountered:

1. What would have been about 10 lines of code interfacing into the Sun RPC library exploded into a mess thousands of lines of code getting libcurl (HTTP library) talking to libxml (XML parsing library).

2. Application errors and transport errors are completely indistinguishable. HTTP error codes are used for both. I spent 2+ hours debugging my "list buckets" implementation, trying to figure out why S3 was sending a 302 code back to me ("Location moved? This isn't in their list of errors..."). Breaking out ethereal and comparing its output vs. the S3 sample client finally revealed that S3's documentation is not entirely up-to-date, and the HTTP server I was talking to wasn't the actual S3 application server.

3. HTTP has a massive forest of possible states (chunked encoding, keep alive connections, continuation responses, etc.), but only a subset of these should be applicable to a given call. With REST, you need to deal with all of these if you want a robust client.

4. There are 3,527 different ways of encoding the same data, and you have to do it properly for this day of the week. For example, all requests into AWS have to be signed with your secret key; the request to be signed includes a subset of the HTTP headers and the date. In this case, the date must be in the form, "Tue, 05 Sep 2006 10:42:33 GMT". You duplicate this in the Date: HTTP header. Unless you have an X-Amz-Date header, in which case you use that. Unless you have an expiration date, in which case you use an integer representing the number of seconds since the epoch, and you put that in the HTTP request line. When S3 returns a date to you, it's another beast entirely: "2006-09-05T10:42:33".


It seems like REST came about because people didn't like any of the existing protocols (ok), but realized that designing a protocol is hard (yes) so they just threw it out the window entirely (uh oh) and just started hacking on code without any regard for the consequences (cries).

I'm sure that this is some internet phenomenon which happened way back when, but this is the first I've heard of it.

Amazon.com (all hail the company) recommended a DVD called Bikini Calculus to me today. (No, I don't know why. Yes, my recommendations are all messed up because I have to test the site frequently. At least, that sounds like a plausible explanation to me.) Yes, it's two girls in bikinis. Giving a tutorial on the calculus of a single variable.

There's even a snippet on Google Video.

I'm undecided whether it's amusing, sexist, or effective. Probably all three to varying degrees.

On Tuesday, my laptop started acting flaky. Well, ok, it's been flaky for awhile, but I just attributed that to Amazon's weird setup. This was flakiness in ways I've never before observed.

And then it bluescreened. Hard. Upon bootup.

I took it down to deskside, the folks who support user computers. They confirmed that the hard drive was toast. "But don't worry, you can have this new laptop."

Insert paniced look on dacut's face here. I mean, shiny new laptop is good, but it doesn't have my files. And I don't back up my files because I currently have nowhere to back them up to in a way that doesn't violation our IT security policy. The one place I can put them -- my desktop -- is perpetually full. Oh, yeah... I'm also lazy.

Thankfully, they managed to recover most of my documents. I don't really care about the rest.

I'm currently working on an interface to S3 that will let me mount a bucket there as a filesystem. If necessity is the mother of invention, panic is the drug which induces labor...

Oh, , you're going to hate me for posting this...

The Boston Globe

   August 21, 2006

   Roxbury MA (AP) - A seven-year-old boy was at the center of a Boston
   courtroom drama yesterday when he challenged a court ruling over who
   should have custody of him. The boy has a history of being beaten by
   his Parents and the judge initially awarded custody to his aunt, in
   keeping with child custody law and regulations requiring that family
   unity be maintained to the degree possible.

   The boy surprised the court when he proclaimed that his aunt beat him
   more than his parents and he adamantly refused to live with her. When
   the judge then suggested that he live with his grandparents, the boy
   cried out that they also beat him.

   After considering the remainder of the immediate family and learning
   that domestic violence was apparently a way of life among them, the
   judge took the unprecedented step of allowing the boy to propose who
   should have custody of him. After two recesses to check legal
   references and confer with child welfare officials, the judge granted
   temporary custody to the Boston Red Sox, whom the boy firmly believes
   is not capable of beating anyone.

I hate Amazon's plogs (blogs written by authors). I've been disappointed just how bad most authors come across when they don't have an editor between me and them. That and plogs take up room on the website.

So I wrote a Greasemonkey script to get rid of them: plogs-die-die-die.user.js. You'll need to be running Firefox to use Greasemonkey.

To clarify, I was not responsible for that outage. In fact, I was in the place where I could cause the second-least damage: a meeting.

The place where one can cause the least damage is, of course, management.

In a pardoxical twist, the most amount of damage is caused by a manager in a meeting... but I digress.

According to an article in today's Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

Amazon.com is developing a system to gather and keep massive amounts of intimate information about its millions of shoppers, including their religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity and income.

Gee, if only I knew someone who managed the customer database at Amazon to check up on this. Wait a second. I'm one of the folks who manages the customer database.

But... there aren't any fields in the database for this. Oh, wait -- this is a super-duper-ultra-black-top-secret project, right? After all, I did learn about it in the newspaper and not from my bosses. Let me check -- oh, I know! I'll bet that IS_TAX_EXEMPT column is actually storing sexual orientation!

Sheesh.

I can type faster than I can write. However, I can talk faster than I can type.

As a project lead, this means that I can sketch out an idea on a whiteboard and someone will go off and implement it. In the meantime, I can start working on something else; evetually, the person I was sketching this for comes back with the idea implemented.

It's all a bit strange, and I'm not used to working on interrupt cycles like this. At the same time, it's neat; it's almost like I'm parallel processing without resorting to cloning myself.

My cats have found out how to get my attention when I'm out of town. They've learned to press the power button on the power extension/tree which my router is plugged into.

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 3 sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
5. Seriously, grab the first book you see. Not the most impressive book you see.

In the Visualization Toolkit, we call this collection of graphics primitives polygonal data. The polygonal dataset consists of vertices, polyvertices, lines, polylines, polygons, and triangle strips. The topology and geometry of polygonal data is unstructured, and the cells that compose that dataset vary in topological dimension.

Wow. I don't even want to think about how much money I lost today.

Channeling Dilbert

Last Monday...
Program manager: We promised our client feature X, and discovered it doesn't work. How come?
My team: Um, because you never told us about it?
PM: Ok, well, we're really in a bind here. How soon can you do this?
Us, grumbling... Well, let's see. If we stop everything we're doing and put Dave on the task, we can hit August 9^th with 80% confidence.
PM: Hm... how about August 2^nd?
Us: Not really, that's awfully tight. We might pull it off, but there's less than a 50/50 chance. You should tell [client] August 9^th.
PM: Well, ok. August 9^th it is.

Last Wednesday...
Me: Ok, I've gotten the changes made and have a sample available on my desktop. Can someone verify this?
Other teams: Hm... there are a few issues we didn't expect as a result of this. Can you fix those, too?
Me: Ok, I'll look into them.

This past weekend...
Me: Issues resolved. Can you re-run your tests?
Silence
Me: Hello? Hello?

Monday...
Other teams: Yeah, ok, verified that the issues are resolved. Thanks for working on this over the weekend, even though we weren't willing to sacrifice our free time to help with this urgent feature we needed.

Today...
PM: Why isn't this out to QA yet?!!
Us: Um, because today's the 26^th, and we're still packaging things up to get it to them by Friday.
PM: But... but... you can't! You have to do it today!!!11!1one!!eleven!!!
Us: Why?
PM: Because it has to be out by August 2^nd!
Us: No... we told you August 9^th. August 2^nd was if a miracle happened.
PM: But... but... it did! You got it working already! And I sorta promised it to [client] then.
We fume, steam comes out our ears, etc.
My manager, cc'ing our VP: Gee, that's too bad. Good luck explaining that to [client].

AMD & ATI

For those who don't care about chips -- silicon, not potato -- skip this post.

For those who do, you've probably heard that AMD has agreed to purchase ATI for US$5.3 billion in a deal which has been rumored to be in the works for a few months now.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, I've been advocating the need for tighter integration for awhile now. Having a full computer-in-a-package -- processor, memory, and even magnetic storage -- where the only ports are power, video/audio, and human interface device ports will enable a wide variety of devices we've only started to think about.

On the other hand, why did it have to be ATI?

I've found Nvidia's offerings much more interesting in this area. They got the idea right in the first place: they made GPUs, then chipsets, then chipsets with GPUs in them. (Admittedly, these were low end and many people reading this have probably panned them, but I'm not focusing on the power-user market here.) In some respects, the only things left were the processor, memory, and storage. Perhaps AMD felt threatened by them?

Ferry security announcements

You'd be surprised at the frivolous things people complain about. (Yes, I'm guilty as charged, here.)

Recently, the ferry system here changed the security announcement which is played over the public address system at the beginning of every run. Instead of having an unnotable voice read through it unemotionally, they're now recited by local celebrities, and in such a manner that their personalities come through.

You can't help but notice them -- which is the point.

Mariner's play-by-play announcer Dave Niehaus is generally regarded as the most annoying. I've tried to ignore it and focus on my work -- it's darn near impossible. Local radio personality Ciscoe Morris is amusing; he finishes the announcement with, "Enjoy your trip, and don't forget to eat your Brussel sprouts."

Governor Christine Gregoire's tape doesn't have her actually read the announcement itself. She gives an intro (in a strangely depressing voice) about how the Washington State Ferry system is one of the safest in the world and asks you to heed the security message, which is read by an unnamed assistant.

At any rate, the announcements are the subject of more conversations (that I overhear, at least) than the major world crises. Still not as prevalent as the conversations about Dilbert-like working conditions, though.

Victoria

They say you can get around in Victoria without a car quite easily. What they meant to say was, "You can get to all the tourist traps in Victoria without a car quite easily."

We were rather disappointed. Don't get me wrong; it's one of the prettiest towns around -- nice harbour, seaplanes landing every few minutes, gardens, nice architecture, etc. Underneath, though, there's just no substance.

The Royal BC Museum was a letdown. The First Peoples gallery was rather dry (mostly fact after fact); the modern history gallery was amusing for all the wrong reasons (a display on life in Canada in the 1990s...). The temporary exhibits (think: games with a thin veil of education applied) were a strange sight, as they were on loan from the U.S. The "Speed" exhibit used imperial units and bits of U.S. history everywhere. The "Fore the Planet" mini-golf game was non-location centric up until we got to the part about the migratory path of some bird. The map of the Americas you putted on omitted Canada entirely.

Ah, well. Vancouver should be better, from what I've been told. And Toronto, Montreal, and Charlettetown (PEI) were all quite enjoyable.

Everything has gotten more expensive, though, with the C$ up near US 90¢.

Making a run for the border...

With my wife and parents-in-law, we're infiltrating deep into Canada this weekend.

Ok, not exactly that far beyond the border, and parts of B.C. which are south of the 49^th.

Hm... we insisted on carving Point Roberts out of Tsawwassen, yet we let them keep all of Vancouver Island?

Grr. I have managers up my ass this morning, asking me to help get this nasty bug fixed. We've proven it's a compiler bug; I've shown it can be fixed by updating our compiler from its 1998 vintage to something a tad more recent, like 2002 or 2003 . We're now trying to write code which does nothing, but coaxes the compiler into doing the right thing.

In the meantime, the entire Amazon build infrastructure is conspiring against me.

• "Your password is about to expire in 37 seconds. Change it on this page -- oops, sorry, we broke that page!"
• "This host isn't bootstrapped for builds -- oops, sorry, you don't have permission to bootstrap it."
• "You haven't deployed the build infrastructure to this host -- oops, sorry, our deployment servers aren't responding."

This wouldn't normally annoy me to the point where I'm posting about it except for the aforementioned managers in my ass. I don't really like anything in my ass, thank you, let alone managers.

For those who are feeling that sense of rejection...



From FOUND Magazine.