Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/12/07/starbucks-not-evil/
I am not a big fan of Starbucks. It’s not merely that I’m anti-trendy, but it just isn’t my idea of a nice coffee shop. (My idea of coffee doesn’t encompass “twenty ounces served in a paper cup with a plastic lid,” unless I’m stopping at a gas station on the Interstate.) But they give benefits to part-time employees, and as far as I have ever heard, the company conducts itself in a decent manner uncharacteristic of many greedy megacorporations. The latest evidence comes from AP / Yahoo: (more…)
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/12/05/sony-is-fony/
In Sony’s defense, they are renting the walls that they are defacing:
Coming on the heels of widely publicized news that Sony music CDs infected customers’ computers with security-hole-inducing spyware, Sony has hired graffiti artists in major urban areas to spray-paint buildings with simple, totemic images of kids playing with the [PSP].
dannyman says:
Corporations who think they have Street Cred are kind of lame an awkward, like White People who think they can Rap. I’ll grant you, there may be a Corporate analog to Eminem, but it aint Sony.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/12/05/gilmore-v-gonzales/
If you are free to visit San Francisco on Thursday December 8, then this may be an interesting activity. Even if you can’t go to this thing, you may be interested in your freedom anyway:
On the 4th of July 2002, John Gilmore, American citizen, decided to take a trip from one part of the United States of America to another. He went to Oakland International Airport — ticket in hand — and was told he had to produce his ID if he wanted to travel. He asked to see the law demanding he show his ‘papers’ and was told after a time that the law was secret and no, he wouldn’t be allowed to read it.
He hasn’t flown in his own country since.
On December 8th 2005, oral arguments in Gilmore v. Gonzales will be heard before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. At stake is nothing less than the right of Americans to travel anonymously in their own country — and the exposure of ‘secret law’ for what it is: an abomination.
You may think he’s crazy, but it is good when people challenge the government–read more at http://papersplease.org/gilmore/facts.html.
Thanks, Jeff!
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/12/05/early-retirement/
I think my mom once said that she tried to send money to one charity a week. I thought “hey, that’s a neat idea.” So, I tend to cut checks . . .
. . . but, honestly, I’m sick and tired of the massive volumes of direct mail I receive as a consequence of my good intentions. My favorite are the environmental charities that send me mailing labels . . . I have like 6zillion mailing labels already, right? So, let’s kill s’more trees.
Well, here’s the final straw: (more…)
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/12/02/google-recuiting-secret/
Well, I have heard time and time again, and experienced myself, that getting a job at Google is a long, slow, frustratingly mysterious process that takes weeks, if not months, in most cases. Typically, you’ll submit a resume for a position, get called two months later for an entirely different position, get a phone screen, then two weeks later get another phone screen, or maybe an on-site, but they’re still not sure, so you’ll get another interview, and each time there’s a week or two delay until the recruiters and hiring managers can complete their meetings, and before they can send you a job offer, your case will be reviewed by Larry and Sergey.
They are very very careful to hire only the very best and brightest. I think it was Marc Andreeson who said that if you start hiring sucky people, they will go and hire more sucky people, and ultimately they will all conspire to destroy your organization. Back at Tellme, we were told to only ever hire people we thought were smarter than ourselves, but that seemed problematic, given that a lot of the first few employees were from MIT. (more…)
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/12/01/penis-cake/
The Red States have their NASCAR, their “Professional Wrestling.”
The Blue States, thanks to Al Gore, have the Internet, and the Internet contains the story of:
PENIS CAKE!!
YES!!
(Well, it is good if you’ve been working hard after the holiday weekend and are about to get some sleep.)
Thanks, benley.
-danny
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/11/29/sysadmin-brain/
Well, the holidays were nifty but they are chased with half a week on the East Coast redoing the install I did last month that needs redoing for a variety of reasons you don’t want to be burdened with. So, move from the uber-chill four-day weekend without a lot going on beyong setting Grandma up with her new Mac (early Christmas present due to the death of her old Mac) and enjoying family time, especially wifey time . . . and we’re back in the data center demonstrating our mastery of the Linux operating system. Nyahh!!!
So, just an anecdote, I caught sight of a baby breast-feeding. How wholesome, I felt, hooray for breast feeding . . . that must feel intensely wonderfully intimate . . . hey, without my notice, baby is on the other breast, and I had my SysAdmin brain moment.
“Oh good, load balancing.”
Thank you, and goodnight.
-danny
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/11/19/television/
I have not had a consistent supply of Television since I left home for college . . . ten years ago. And lately I have been thinking that while it was a lonely time, 1996-2002 or so was also something of a “Golden Age” for me, at least in terms of learning stuff, because I ran only FreeBSD on my computers and could only play very few games. (That’s a seperate reflection for another time, and may just be reactionary nostalgia.)
Anyway, I’ve been thinking lately that watching good shows, especially without commercials, is nice stuff. TiVo is bigger than just a “smart VCR” . . . before TiVo I used to worry about whether I could catch a show at a certain time . . . after TiVo, I couldn’t care less when a show aired, if I wanted to watch it, it would be there, a few days later, and when I wanted to unwind, I could fire up the show. (more…)
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/11/19/you-might-think-i-am-lame/
. . . because I tend to post stuff on Friday evenings. Friday evenings!? I mean, sheesh, does this man have no life?
But Friday evening the wife is at class, so it is one of the few times I can get the place to myself to dork off.
That said, I kind of feel like kicking back and doing something passive, like read, or watch the next episode on my Netflixed Firefly DVD . . .
Though, UTC, I think it is almost Saturday Morning, so if you look at the timestamp you can just assume I am drunk.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/11/18/chicago/
Chicago is New York City taken in moderation.
or
New York is Chicago taken to excess.
The midwest is a place that identifies with moderation. Midwesterners are proud of their great metropolis. Chicago is quite the wonder! But then, they will admit to being uneasy about that big big city.
New York sees itself on the level of London, Paris, or Tokyo. New York is the cultural axis around which a great nation revolves.
Chicago sees itself rising from the plains. Chicago is the great version of Milwaukee, or Detroit. Chicago gave birth to the skyscraper and the Loop has a certain antiquarian flair, with the screeching L line at the center.
Chicago spreads out on the plain . . . tall buildings in the center, and miles upon miles upon miles of neighborhoods and factories, which give way to suburbs and corporate headquarters, which give way to the farms and small midwestern towns that are every year sucked into the growing conurbation. (more…)
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/11/17/kundera-sucks/
Actually, I enjoyed The Unbearable Lightness of Being but that’s not so say I’m going to disagree Maciej. How can you disagree when someone with impeccable Eastern European street cred runs through a list of “date books” with such exuberence:
[The Unbearable Lightness of Being] has that sexy whiff of the Eastern Bloc to it (very effective on anyone who hasn’t been immunized by an actual relationship with an Eastern European), it’s full of young people having complex, turgid sex with one another, and since the first sentence of the book mentions ‘Nietzsche’, it is ipso facto philosophical.
I mean, he even goes to the trouble of worrying about the right translation for you, his gentle reader: (more…)
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/11/16/installing-software-on-fc4/
I’m new to Linux, but I’m trying out Fedora Core 4 on my work laptop. It’s pretty slick once you change the desktop environment to KDE. But I want to be able to play mp3s, and there’s nothing in the default system that can handle this, and yum doesn’t know where to find good stuff like mplayer or mpg123. (Yeah, I’m a command-line type of guy . . .)
So, I go shopping for “repositories” that extend the Fedora Core base repository . . . and the short answer is that if you do this: (more…)
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/11/15/history-aint-changed/
The change, it had to come
We knew it all along
We were liberated from the fold, that’s all
And the world looks just the same
And history ain’t changed
Remember how Iraq used to be run by a brutal tyrant who did nasty things to minority elements? Until American troops came in and liberated the place, and ran the jails, except after awhile the American troops got crazy again? (more…)
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/11/14/pro-life/
“Ramatou Issoufou is lucky to be alive,” said Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times. I recently witnessed the 37-year-old Nigerian woman and her baby son survive a treacherous childbirth, after Issoufou nearly slipped into a coma from eclampsia, a complication of pregnancy that kills 50,000 women a year in the developing world. The maternity hospital where the birth took place was filthy, bug-ridden, and poorly equipped, and her husband had to pay $42 for an emergency surgical kit supplied by the U.N. Population Fund. Thanks to that effort, “two more lives” were saved. But last month, President Bush cut off U.S. contributions to the fund, due to pressure from Christian conservatives. They don’t like the U.N. agency because it promotes contraception. They also object to the fact that the Population Fund operates in China, which has an appalling policy of forced sterilizations and abortions. But the Population Fund has been pressuring China to end the coercion, and besides, “the solution isn’t to let African women die.”
Every year, more than 500,000 women die worldwide during pregnancy and childbirth. Through both contraception and medical supplies, the Population Fund is making a dent in that appalling statistic, but each day, hundreds of women perish because it can’t do more. “Call me naive, but I think if Mr. Bush came here and saw women dying as a consequence of his confused policy, he would relent.” Surely, letting women die isn’t what America stands for.
Nicholas Kristof
The New York Times
The Week, November 4, 2005
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/11/13/lorah-sees-polar-bears/
She’s been riding the train and now the tundra buggy and she sees Polar Bears.
Some nice pictures and video clips.
Damn!
Makes Thailand seem dull. :)
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