If you came into science fiction or fantasy in the mid-70s, there was no escaping Frank Frazetta’s art (esp. the Death Dealer… how many vans was that painted on?). To say that he had an influence on my youth would probably be an understatement. A number of my grade- and junior-high classmates were semi-talented Frazetta wanna-bes, and I envied their drawing skills mightily.
I can look at his work now and cringe at the sexist and racist tropes he employed – but to a pre-teen boy, his work seemed like my internal visions brought to light.
Posted by protected static as cultcha, geek at 8:11 PM UTC
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A two-page PDF of what is essentially two glorified PowerPoint slides does not count as a whitepaper. No, not even if you give it a title like “Build Release Plans That Deliver Customer Value.”
Please stop wasting my time with this shit.
Congenially yours,
static
Posted by protected static as programming at 4:23 PM UTC
5 Comments »
…that the newly-arrived spam titled “Fwd: New bachelors for you” is not an equal opportunity variation on the particularly clumsy and stupid “I [Name of Allegedly Hot Russian Women] Need To Talk To You Again” spam I’ve been getting lately.
Diploma mill and mail-order bride spam is boring. Mail-order groom spam would be a welcome relief to the monotony.
Posted by protected static as spam at 10:34 AM UTC
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After all, they’re what you call… experts.
Oh. Wait. So are these guys: Los Alamos National Laboratory Researchers Accidentally Blow up Building with a Cannon.
Whoops. The Mustache of Disapproval radiates disapproval.
(via Mother Jones, via… TPM’s headlines/news aggregator, I think…)
Posted by protected static as geek at 7:15 PM UTC
2 Comments »
Behold: The Boy’s first programming book. Which he requested by name.
My feelings are… mixed.
Posted by protected static as YADM, geek, programming at 9:57 AM UTC
3 Comments »
A few thoughts about consistency, of course (Pace Emerson. let’s not limit ourselves to merely foolish consistency…).
Ahem. Programming geekery ahead…
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by protected static as C#, programming at 7:50 PM UTC
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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 UTC
5 Comments »
…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 UTC
1 Comment »
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 UTC
3 Comments »
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…
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by protected static as programming at 11:05 PM UTC
2 Comments »
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 UTC
2 Comments »
In the grand programming tradition of ‘off by one’ errors, yesterday was the birthday of Charles Babbage.
On two occasions I have been asked, ‘Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?’ I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
How little things have changed, eh?
(and yes… I expect that regular blogging will resume shortly…)
Posted by protected static as programming at 11:27 PM UTC
2 Comments »
From the Pacific Science Center’s Calendar of Science for August:
August 16, 1884 – Birthday of the American author Hugo Gernsback, who invented the term science fiction and who edited the first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories.
…and in the process, changed the lives of geeks forever.
(via PacSci’s Calendar of Science Twitter feed)
Posted by protected static as geek at 6:04 PM UTC
3 Comments »
At the prompting of Toast, I’m mucking about with a new, threaded commenting system: Intense Debate. Among other things, Intense Debate allows you to follow someone’s comments across all blogs that have this system installed.
All comments to date have been converted to this system. The most any of y’all should notice is that the comment user interface is slightly different; for instance, it supports Gravatars, something this blog’s theme didn’t do. So far, the only thing I’ve noticed that it adds a little lag time when the page loads.
Feel free to treat this post as a testbed for the new system. Or not, as the fancy strikes you.
[Update @ 31 Jul 2008 2143 PDT - officially, the following tags are supported in comments: <a>, <b>, <i>, <u>, <em>, <p>, <blockquote>, <br>, <strong>, <strike>, and <img>. Some appear to be supported better than others (I'm looking at you, <p>...).]
[Update @ 1 Aug 2008 2032 PDT - I was requiring 'first' comments to be approved; unfortunately, it seems that I.D. doesn't recognize previously approved comments. Sorry, y'all. I'm turning that feature off. The verdict so far? Meh. I don't know that threading and reputation are worth the somewhat lackluster feature set and the performance drag... I'll give this a little while longer, but I'm also going to take a look @ Disqus. I suspect I'll find similar issues there, whereupon I return to the standard, plain vanilla WP comments. It's an interesting idea, but the platforms aren't mature enough - at the very least, this one isn't mature enough - for my liking.]
Posted by protected static as blogging, geek at 9:16 PM UTC
12 Comments »
Welcome to the intertoobz, boys and girls. Web 2.0, and all that bullshit. Let’s step into the Not-So-Way-Back Machine, shall we, Mr. Peabody?
Seven months ago, in my part-time, volunteer role as webmaster for the Seattle Sea Kayak Club, I got an email from a web entrepreneur asking us to join his community. I sent him back a polite email detailing the issues I saw with his site (including pointing out a potential IP/copyright violation that his development team committed), and then wrote a snarky blog post about the experience.
Well, guess who came trolling tonight? Read the rest of this entry »
Posted by protected static as asshattery, eCountryLifestyle, eCountryLifestyle.com, geek, kayaking at 9:31 PM UTC
10 Comments »