The good news is that you can listen to the entirety of Neil Young’s new ‘protest’ record at his site and it is well worth checking out. I love that Young continually moves forward even when some of his decisions aren’t the wisest, and that he seems to learn from his mistakes.
The bad news is that our stupid war continues and seems to be gathering additional corporate sponsors.
This afternoon when I was heading down to the coffee place to drink about a gallon of espresso and coffee mixed together I neglected to bring my book as well as my mp3 player. Usually these two devices need to work in tandem so I’m glad that I wasn’t stuck with just one of the pair. Instead, to pass the fifteen minutes or so of travel time, I war-light-railed with my Palm just to see how much wireless was available. The unconfigured Linksys category of wifi access is still the prime mover out there but it was encouraging to see more little cartoony padlocks next to the access point name instead of the usual chaos of the plug it in and let it rip philosophy that most people tend to stick to when setting up wireless for absolute strangers with criminal intent.
One of the nicer discoveries I made was the addition of free wifi service to the entire 16th Street Mall area of downtown Denver. The suck part is that the login system (click this button to surrender your first born child) requires Java and boots you from a continuous connection after 2 hours. It was generally pretty slow and balky so it seems intended for use with PDAs and the like. Still nice to be able to look up RTD schedules and maps while on the bus…
The grey areas of non-employment are still freaking me out. I had to actually leave my house today and go to a coffee house to get anything done. I used to think that free hours were the essential ingredient to accomplishing anything but I’m starting to realize that my intrinsic motivations are weaker than I’d previously thought. Go figure. So, I’m at the coffee place trying to de-spaghetti a pile of old PHP and, in moments like these, I realize that I haven’t really been working with this language very long although I’ve made some pretty substantial improvements by moving masses of scripts into functions. I’m not sure if it’s any more human readable than it was before but at very least I’m not chasing session variables around like a fool. Maybe calling that an improvement isn’t the most accurate terminology in the world but it sure feels a whole lot better than the previous mess.
I was going to come up with something appropriately cynical and world weary sounding to mark the occasion but I ran out of readily assembled thoughts several hours ago. Whatever. It’s three in the morning. Time for a PBR. The four year anniversary of Team Murder is also coming up next month and I doubt I’ll even remember on the actual day. The increasingly dark gradient of apathy towards things you once thought were incredibly important is, I guess, what differentiates between youth and decrepitude and seems to creep into everything like static into a radio station. Anyway, I’m older.
I’m in that restless limbo between two jobs if indeed you can really call what I do now a job in the purest sense and I’m feeling it. I guess what really bucks my equilibrium is the impending change between people, schedules, and even the city I work in as well as the environment. The worst part about all of this is that it effectively negates any motivation I might have to spend this slack time on anything remotely productive other than rambling IM conversations that are less coherent than usual and looking at new toys that I might have the money to waste buying in a couple of months. I’ll be the first to admit that it is a problem that most folks being pummeled by fiscal reality wish they had but it is uncomfortable nonetheless.
On April 20th, 2006 SkyNet went online…
Apparently there is some human interaction with spambots as one attempt to spam the comments of my most popular post on the evils of Websense (though through popular usage, at least in the comments attached to the post, the evil bastards responsible for it should consider changing the spelling to ‘Websence’ as it apparently has about three times the amount of market recognition) by placing a porn URL in the URL field and claiming that he couldn’t access it. This is a pretty clever (and old school) approach as the post has become more than anything else a semi-open forum for techniques to get around web filtering software and if I had approved the comment with the usual lack of scrutiny I apply to things related to that post his comment would have been permanently affixed to the single post in all of Team Murder that actually has some Google juice. Nice try.
Okay. I’m going to pose a random question to the void here, specifically for people who spend more time working in a Windows environment and less time simply fixing broken machines: Is there a virtual desktop application that allows switching desktops with the mouse wheel (and here is the really important part) that doesn’t fuck with/override the focus of application windows — I want to be able to use my mouse wheel for scrolling in applications and flipping desktops when the desktop is active. Any clues?
I tried Cool Desktop which does offer mouse wheel switching but was plagued with the above problem even when I set the focus to follow the mouse. When I’m fully installed in the new workplace I might just spend the money to buy Cool Mouse which enables X style copy and paste unless I can find a FOSS solution to that problem. It’s funny though because both of the above shortcomings of the Windows shell have always made me wonder how people can live without that functionality. I guess once you ride in a rocket car you want everything to be a rocket car…
I’ll be starting a new job on the first of next month so I’ve been spending a lot of time stressing out and taking naps and things like that instead of tirelessly trawling the IntarWeb for more tedium to spread even thinner. This new job will represent a significant improvement in income for the first time in six years. It feels good to ascend triumphantly above the poverty line and, more than anything, takes the burden of paying for everything away from Yoon. I’m sure she will be reluctant to relinquish her role as Sugar Mama but that problem is sort of endemic to the solution. Money is the upside. The downside is that I will be working a help desk instead of actual desktop support. The really incredibly massive downside is that the campus does not have a standard image for deployment meaning that every single machine is another nasty can of Cthuloid worms waiting to be opened. I have quite a bit of persuasive work to do.
Still caught up in the job hunting crap so I have been spending all of my free time pointlessly stressing out which has lead to the production of my first resume in probably ten years. I fucking hate resumes.I can’t think of a more popular application of turd polishing and my participation is anything but willing.
I did notice, as you should, a map of the changes states might make if Roe v. Wade is overturned and it seriously disturbs me. Nearly half of the states are theoretically poised to “significantly restrict abortion access.” My stomach hurts even considering the possibility.
In messing around with scripting the start up and shut down of printer shares in the horrible operating system that will not be named but somehow provides a source of employment for me I found AutoIt and instantly got a whole bunch of work done without driving myself crazy. There is an included syntax highlighting and auto completion package for SciTE that had me up and running pretty quickly. Another nice bonus is the inclusion of a “Window Info” application that, you guessed it, gives you all of the important properties of active windows (and also features the all important pause function) since in the operating system that will not be names those properties make little to no fucking sense compared to what appears to the human eye.
I haven’t done any GUI work with it yet but judging from the rather complete documentation it would be pretty easy to pick up. I may roll my own version of something like XAMPP‘s control panel just to get the feel for how everything works. I like the simplicity of AutoIt’s implementation (and the lack of some over the top IDE) and that it seems to stay out of your way when a little cli scripting is all that needs to be done. I’m sure that some of the operating system that will not be named has more powerful scripting languages that are nestled more tightly against the teat of the behemoth but I can’t take the platform seriously enough (other than, you know, as the essential ingredient of my day job) to invest a whole lotta time to grok something I don’t want to use. Overcoming the urge to throw things out entirely when they are broken beyond usefulness is kind of important for the support line of work. No cause is too futile to avoid wasting hours trying to solve elegantly and necessity is a mother.
Yet another example of why most coffee places that have free wireless offered to the public mixed in with their own cash registers and credit card machines shouldn’t just blindly set things up and hope for the best smacked me in the face when I stopped off for a little coffee and work on the zombie game this morning. I set up a shared printer on the XP test box last night and installed smb4k for quick scanning of my own network. After setting up shop and trying to figure out why one of my nested way too deep loops wasn’t working without any success, I fired up smb4k for the hell of it. I should not be able to see your cash register transactions as a share. Really. I helped the guy at the counter lock it down which required a phone call to get the administrator password and had some free breakfast. I heart the barter system but the fact that their innards were that far exposed freaks me out. I suppose this is all too common and why I end up with new credit card numbers more often than I would like.