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How I wonder what you’re at:
On Sunday, the shuttle had a stowaway attached to the external fuel tank, and although NASA was sure the little animal wouldn’t be a debris risk, the bat remained attached to the shuttle, apparently stuck in place. New details have now emerged about why the bat didn’t fly away before Discovery launched…
Ouch. Like a teatray in the sky, indeed…
Posted by protected static as space at 5:58 PM PDT
On oh-dark-hundred Sunday morning, I dropped Doc* off at SeaTac for a flight to Dulles. She’s been training a lot of therapists in a new PTSD treatment technique, and this is no different.
Okay, this one is a little different. From Dulles, she was bound for Vienna, Austria; from Vienna, a flight to Erbil. From Erbil, a four-hour or so drive to Sulaimaniyah… Given the time difference, I’m guessing she’s arriving there right about now.
Okay, so maybe this training is a lot different.
She’ll be working with a couple of NGOs to translate training materials into Kurdish and Arabic, and to train community health providers to treat Kurds tortured by Saddam Hussein’s Baathists. The efficacy of her treatment will be compared to that of another short-term therapy.
This all came together very quickly, maybe over the span of a month or so… Her mentor from graduate school was initially approached to do this, and she recommended Doc. It’s exciting as well as good work - and as developing countries go, relatively safe even for Americans; how could we say no? So she’s in Kurdistan for two full weeks, with a couple days travel time and an extra day to decompress in Vienna on the way back.
Skype will be our friend…
(Title from Doc’s dad’s reaction when she told him “I’m going to Kurdistan for a training!” Yes, she was trying to deflect attention from the fact that this is legally still Iraq, even if Sulaimaniyah has been effectively independent since 1991. Obviously he didn’t fall for it, not that she really thought he would.)
[edited @ 1:00PM 9 March to add: they evidently ran into a sandstorm (!!!) en route from Vienna and were temporarily rerouted to Syria (!!!); she's safe on the ground in Erbil and spending the night in a hotel there. Well, we always knew it was going to be an adventure... (also edited to clarify that it's Vienna, Austria and not Vienna, VA - an improbable but not impossible confusion if you're familiar w/ Dulles & the Northern VA/Metro DC area.)]
*Doc: my wife. Got tired of always writing about her as ‘my wife’ when she’s got, like, an actual identity. And a pretty well-defined one at that (as this probably illustrates). Ergo, Doc.[back].
Posted by protected static as random at 9:47 AM PDT
…I have to call BS on the IQ part of their name!
When we first moved to Seattle, I submitted a resume to a local staffing firm, SolutionsIQ. They’re one of the big dogs in town, particularly when it comes to getting contract work @ The Beast of Redmond. I may have updated it for them when I got laid off five or six years ago, but still… five years is a pretty long time in the tech world. Periodically, I get semi-spam from them looking for MS SQL developers, which I delete. But today… today I got a doozy:
Job Description:
An Application Support Analyst III has in-depth experience, knowledge and skills in an application support discipline (Message Processing, Mediations, Provisioning, Billing, Web, Middleware, Retail Activation Systems, Payment Processing, etc…). An Analyst III is able to work independently on escalated issues and prioritizes, investigates and resolves them with minimal guidance from others. They function as the technical leads of their teams. Occasionally an Analyst III will be given opportunities to lead teams and projects to resolve complex technical issues.Experience:
• Telecommunications experience required (4 to 6 years preferred).
• Strong experience working with Oracle on Unix using command line and GUI SQL tools.
• Strong knowledge of relational database design and support, including the support of large carrier class enterprise software systems.
• System Analysis experience in the support/operation of a of large carrier class enterprise software system, preferably in a wireless environment.
• Experience in testing, quality and change management methodologies.
• Previous experience in 24hrs/day, 7days/week systems support capacity.
• Experience in troubleshooting customer related issues and managing customer relationships required (4 to 6 years preferred).
• Extensive experience with revenue reporting and accounting.
• Business systems analytical experience required (4 to 6 years preferred
• 4 year degree (In Information Technology related field preferred) or equivalent work experience
• Schedule Hours: M-F 8 - 5, some weekends and nights
If one were to draw a Venn diagram of ‘My Skills’ and ‘This job spam,’ the universe of overlap would be, at best, a single point: SQL. And it’s the wrong dialect of SQL, to boot. Oh, and I’ve developed some middleware components. That’s all. No telco, no Unix (I hadn’t even noodled around with Linux when I last updated my resume with them), no Oracle, no ’support of large carrier class enterprise blah blah blah’, no 24/7 support, no revenue reporting, no accounting, nothing.
I fired off a terse WTF email in response - any matching algorithm worth its salt should have left me out of that one, unless they’re really scraping the bottom of the barrel for candidates. And to scrape quite so low as me with these particular requirements strikes me as bordering on malpractice.
In short, SolutionsIQ would appear to provide neither. Discuss.
Posted by protected static as asshattery, geek, spam at 10:24 PM PST
Beef tongue, to be precise… With even greater degrees of precision, a beef tongue sandwich, a torta de lengue, if my non-existent Spanish skills are correct-ish. I’ve been working up the courage to order one of these puppies for a while; today, at the local taco truck, I finally did.
It was very tasty - I’ll definitely do it again. The roll wasn’t as crusty as I like, but the tongue was delicious: meltingly soft, braised with onions and a hint of what I think was cinnamon, cut into delicate beefy chunks. It reminded me of the best parts of a great pot roast, only softer…
Also, it seems only appropriate that an occasion as momentous as losing one’s tongue cherry be marked by adding a long-overdue ‘food’ category. YMMV.
[edited upon realizing that WP ate my food category. FYWP.]
Posted by protected static as food at 5:01 PM PST
Anyone have any idea why a Java Swing GUI would be displaying “é” as a “Þ”? I’m guessing it’s an encoding issue of some sort… .NET is displaying them all as “é” but not Java.
Bah.
Posted by protected static as programming at 10:37 AM PST
I’ve been entirely unplugged for over a week… No news, no web, no cell phone, no nuthin’.
What have I missed?
Posted by protected static as random at 4:59 PM PST
So the Ambiguously Gendered Cashier in our local natural foods store was making small talk as he* rang up my lunch, and he asked me if I watched the Superbowl this weekend. I was this close to telling him no, that I preferred my homoeroticism as text, not subtext, but I couldn’t quite do it.
Oh well. There’s always next time.
*he: black cardigan w/ white Oxford shirt, tenor voice, longish blond hair pulled loosely back, ’sexy librarian’ glasses; me: black “<geek>” t-shirt, black hoodie, cut-off woodland BDUs, Chucks, and a days worth of stubble.
Posted by protected static as random at 8:11 PM PST
School closings and restructurings naturally bring out the worst impulses in people. The desire to protect and preserve the familiar, even if it is somehow not to standard, is a strong one - who are these outsiders to judge our school? Our community? Are all schools being subjected to equally applied scrutiny?
Well, in the current round of proposed Seattle school closures, a lot of people feel that the answer is no, standards are being unevenly applied. Many of the proposed changes appear to disproportionately affect minority neighborhoods. They also appeared to target city-wide, alternative schools, such as The Boy’s.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by protected static as politics, random at 9:58 PM PST
200 years ago today, Edgar Allan Poe was born.
(h/t to Evil Mommy for reminding me…)
Posted by protected static as cultcha, poetry at 9:20 PM PST
Of all the weapons we’ve ever come up with, poison gas has to be one of the more horrific. It isn’t terribly effective as a weapon (too hard to control, too easy to protect oneself against, difficult to apply in concentrations needed to be effective) other than as a means of slowing down an enemy, or otherwise denying them easy access to part of the battlefield. But for those caught by it unprepared, the experience is ghastly:
this vision of a man-made Hell:
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime…
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
Experiences like this easily led to poison gas quickly becoming a symbol of impersonal, industrial warfare along with the machine gun.
Given this history, I was surprised to read today that poison gas was not first used as a weapon in the trench warfare of 1915. It was the product of trench warfare, but from a distinctly pre-industrial era. Like, 3AD pre-industrial. And the first victims were the Romans:
Ancient Persians were the first to use chemical warfare against their enemies, a study has suggested.
A UK researcher said he found evidence that the Persian Empire used poisonous gases on the Roman city of Dura, Eastern Syria, in the 3rd Century AD.
The theory is based on the discovery of remains of about 20 Roman soldiers found at the base of the city wall.
[...]
The study shows that the Persians dug a mine underneath the wall in order to enter the city.
They also ignited bitumen and sulphur crystals to produce dense poisonous gases, suggested Simon James, an archaeologist at the University of Leicester.
[...]
“The Roman assault party was unconscious in seconds, dead in minutes[," said Dr James. ]
Damn. Viciously resourceful little primates, aren’t we?
Posted by protected static as random at 7:53 PM PST
Have you ever had one of those moments when you had a core belief challenged? Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by protected static as random at 5:01 PM PST
You are Number Six.
Patrick McGoohan died Tuesday at the age of 80.
No word on whether or not a bouncing latex ball was seen leaving the scene.
Posted by protected static as ephemera, media, random at 12:11 PM PST
Behold the moral vacuity of our chattering classes:
The issue of torture is more complicated than it seems.
No. It isn’t complicated in the slightest. A statement this wrong doesn’t deserve a logical rebuttal. It only deserves scorn, mockery, and opprobrium. So fuck you, Newsweek. Fuck you, Stuart Taylor Jr. Fuck you, Evan Thomas. And the biggest fuck you goes out to the editors who decided that this abomination deserved to be the cover story.
Posted by protected static as politics at 10:09 AM PST
Hats, that is. Not rings…
Recently, I was asked to provide a specification and estimate for a project at work. I’m not a software architect, so I’m having a hard time with some aspects of the spec - I think I know what we should be doing, and I think I have a grasp on best practices for what we’re trying to do, but I don’t know for sure… And estimates? Forget it. Remember how Scotty lets McCoy in on his little secret of multiplying everything by three so he’s always done early and looks like a genius? Yeah. I appear to have a knack for dividing by three and using that for my number.
So I picked up a book and started to read. How I spent my Christmas Vacation…
Posted by protected static as programming at 11:05 PM PST
So I’m test-driving NDepend, and I find the following, um… non-standard keyboard shortcut:
My inner 12-year-old was amused all out of proportion and promptly posted a screenshot @ The Daily WTF.
(The funny thing is that this isn’t exactly no-name software… It’s in use in many large .NET shops to monitor code quality. I reported the bug and got an email back from the lead programmer/company owner in under an hour. He’s fixed it for the next release, and seemed kind of surprised that no one had brought it to his attention since it’s been there for months.)
Posted by protected static as programming at 6:20 PM PST