Daniel's Blog

The Real Red vs. Blue

Posted by Daniel Lyons Fri, 20 Aug 2004 12:13:00 GMT

I’ve made up my mind: this year I’m going to vote my conscience. I’m voting Socialist. I’ve had it with the red/blue bullshit conspiracy. “If you don’t help Kerry, you’re helping Bush!” they scream. If you can’t see through the thin veneer that is Kerry, you deserve him. He’s as bad as Bush, he’s probably worse.

Politics here have been fucked up for a long time. If it makes you feel better, I don’t think I can change things. Nor do I think that my vote is going to make a difference. But you know what? That’s not the fucking point— voting is sharing your voice and nobody is hearing the Socialist voice, or the Libertarian voice, or whatever because Americans do not vote the way they feel. We vote the way that we think will “matter.” Well, that’s bullshit, because it makes us give up on our ideals when we shouldn’t, and would reduce us to a the current shat two-party system regardless of how many parties we started with. Fuck it!!

Now, because I believe it is fraudulent to call America a representative system, let’s see some pretty charts. The “representation ratio” is the percentage of the population of the country who are representatives in the federal government. Observe:

Country	Population	Reps	Representation Ratio
USA	293,027,571	536 (house + senate + pres)	1.82e-6 or 0.000001829
United Kingdom	60,270,708	1277	2.11e-5 or 0.00002119
Spain	40,280,780	609	1.51e-5 or 0.00001512
New Zealand	3,993,817	120	3.00e-5 or 0.00003005
Vanuatu	202,609	52	0.0002567

Look at this! America’s representation ratio is an order of magnitude worse than that of the New Standard Democracy. European nations, it seems, maintain about an order of magnitude more representatives per their own population. New Zealand is doing better than average for a European nation. And then look at Vanuatu, with a paltry 52 seats, yet it beats all the rest hands down. All of my raw numbers are from our very own <a href=”http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/”>CIA factbook, so you can just go fuck yourself if you don’t like my numbers.

The reason why I like this examination is because it points out our own hypocrisy so effectively. We claim to be bringing democracy to all of these nations—and most of them are sitting next to nations that looked at our model and said, “This would be good if only it had more representation in it.”

Nor should I be taken as saying that our system can’t work. It can work, but it needs to be calibrated. The formula we work from, 2 senators per state and 1 legislator per N people, works great until states are populated the way California is. Hell, New Mexico is a po-dunk little back-water state (or so it is thought) and our population is far, far greater than what was anticipated by the authors of the Constitution. Fairness in goverment is only achievable at a certain scale, and adjustments must be made or a better formula created.

Why I Hate Red and Blue

I hate Red and Blue both, for various reasons. I hate that Red tries to guilt me away from the platform I truly want to vote for. I hate that Blue insinuates that monogamy is an important characteristic of a politician. Blue voters would vote for a sociopathic serial killer (and some would say they have) over a Red with a divorce in his past, when this issue is both irrelevent and far less of a sin than destroying the environment for personal gain and warring for no better reason than to plunder and take revenge. But I hate that Red says “Our statistics say you’ll vote for this rotting piece of meat if we stamp it non-Blue. plop Here you go. Vote. Good boy.” The Blues are at least deluded into believing they have some kind of cause. The Reds are a deeper kind of self-loathing scum; they know they have nothing to offer except an alternative and they always find the loser of the losers to push. “Oh, we can’t have Dean!” they scoff, ”he has been known to occassionally get excited, even going so far as to vocalize his emotions!” He’s not stiff enough, we need a staler one.

So I’m going to vote green, or purple, or red-and-black. Not because I have no regard for your suffering, but because I think we have to put this system out of its misery. I can’t vote my mind because it doesn’t work with our numbers. I can’t vote my mind because my platform is “extreme” (read: not tepid or scripted). Then fine, I’m doing it, and I’m doing it to say “fuck you” to Red and Blue, and all their weak-spined supporters. They think I can’t live without them, well, they’re in for a surprise. I’m onto their little game, and I know I have nothing to lose by not voting for them, so I’m going to tell them “do your worst, fucksack, I can take it.”

How to Make a Difference

Now, this is how we could use this line of thinking to actually make a difference. Granted, that’s not why I’m doing this—I’m doing this because I hate our system and I hate the morons on TV and I hate not speaking and voting my mind. But you could think about it this way, and if it gets your ass to the voting parlor, that would be nice too.

Right now, we get what, 25% voter turn-out? Not much, at any rate, and it’s the 18 to 26 age bracket (us, mostly) who are not voting. Jarrod and I are the only people I know who are my age and who make it a point to vote. Anyway, most of us aren’t voting, and there’s a fuckload of us out there.

What if we all went in there and voted randomly? If you and I go and vote, say, Constitution Party and Socialist Party, instead of Red or Blue, what happens? Well, firstly, we feel gratified, because we’ve voted how we feel and we’ve said “fuck you” to Red and Blue. That’s all we wanted to get out of it anyway, so we can’t really be disappointed (plus, we don’t have to stay up late to see the election results on TV). But suppose an extra 20% of us turned out and did this? Some Red or Blue fuck would still win, but this time it wouldn’t be Red winning 52% of the vote, it would be Red winning 23% of the vote. Suddenly, the fact that most Americans don’t fundamentally agree with the platform of Red or Blue more than anyone else, becomes very, very clear. It would demonstrate what a complete fallacy it is to say that half of us prefer Red and the other half prefer Blue. Plus, in the next election, you can bet your ass Red and Blue are going to be shopping for those Constitution and Socialist votes. You’ll be able to chart the transition of Red to socialist and Blue to libertarian on an egg timer. Of course, at that point, we just hold out on them because we’re cocks and we want them to beg for it. We like the look on Blue’s face when they get all pouty and say “Please come back to me libertarian lover! Living without your minimalism is a lie!”

So, to sum up: fuck Red and Blue. Let’s move to Vanuatu. :)

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Back Online at Home

Posted by Daniel Lyons Thu, 19 Aug 2004 10:58:45 GMT

It’s been what, six weeks?

Today at work we found a really awesome program: TeleCrapper 2000. The intent of the program is to behave sort of like Eliza for your phone: you record a bunch of waves of you talking to nothing and it plays them back for telemarketers over the phone whenever they pause for input. The example stacks are pretty hilarious.

The Yahoo! transport was down on Jabber for a few weeks there. I am apologetic to those who use the Clan Spum Jabber server. They rotated back to sms.msg.yahoo.com from sms.msg.yahoo.com (or whatever).

Dialup is true pain. I love having internet access again, but at what cost? It seems like a lot to put up with. At least I’ll have a chance to perfect my synchronized Clan Spum Sites folder AppleScript magic. I’ll post it after I get it to work.

For my birthday, Alex got me a couple of CDs yesterday: the new Evergrey album, “The Inner Circle” and the second Avantasia album. Unfortunately, I don’t have much to say about the second Avantasia album. It just isn’t as good as the prior one (“Metal Opera Part 1”). The new Evergrey, on the other hand, kicks all kinds of ass. :) They are starting to sound like themselves in places, but they still turn it up to eleven; it has some of the most beautiful passages I’ve heard in metal, while retaining all class and not falling to cheese. It also has some really fast, hard, heavy stuff. Everyone who liked their older stuff should get it, definitely.

SpamCrime Analysis

At work, we’ve been doing a lot of Spam Crime Analysis lately. We picked one domain semi-randomly from the top 30 spamming domains for our analysis, cutprice12.com. We traced the IP and and bubbled back up to find other domains of theirs we had seen. We had seen, in total, about 12 different domains of these assholes. Then we did a WHOIS query and found 68 other domains of theirs, of which 67 were aliases for their internet pharmacy. The other was for an online casino, bay-casino.com, or Phoenician Casino as they like to think of themselves. I thought this was pretty amusing.

I did a bit more digging and found that they were using casino software written by a particular company (I can’t recall the name, BogCasino or something). Looked up that company and found links to about 50 online casinos. One of them even looked somewhat legitimate, based in Canada. Apparently, Canadian law dictates that gambling is illegal, but leaves prosecution up to the provinces. Some provinces choose not to enforce the law, and these guys were apparently based out of one of those. I called their 800 number, it was very open and professional sounding.

Other Languages

I have found that I miss Ruby and Python. My boss asked me to write a little script for him the other day, just to take a file that looks like this:

2398238   foo    bar
other fields here

9838388   other foo    other bar
other fields here

.
.
.
  

And make a bunch of files with names like “2398238” with all that record’s data in it. I found myself taking a little longer than I should have, because I missed dicking around in these other, more expressive languages. You never write something like “x = [x.strip().split(”,”)[1:] for x in stdin if x.split(”,”)[0] = “keep” ” in REALbasic. You also never see anything like “bar = (files.each {|f| file.read.split(” “).collect(”,”) }).strip.” After a while you come to see why these languages are so popular in the hacker community and so reviled in the business world. Yet I have to wonder how Perl got to be so popular when it’s much worse than Ruby or Python could ever be. These are the things I worry about…

Project SOULTRAIN

I am working on an ERD for Project SOULTRAIN. I have decided I want to store as much data as possible. I don’t care if entering the data for a CD takes 30 minutes and ripping and encoding it only takes 5. I want to be able to do bad-ass queries like these:

• Give me all the songs performed by this artist (regardless of band).
• Give me all guitar music without synths.
• Give me all additional tracks off remastered albums.
• Give me all tracks performed exclusively by musicians older than 40 at the time of the performance.
• Give me all bands that this musician was in.
• Give me all bands who have had more than three genres on one album.

It’s incomplete, and I know where most of the bugs are, but here’s the image:

ERD image”/>

Here are the problems I’ve noted:

• Every release is the same album exactly, just on either a different medium or with differing release-specific information. This is wrong. Maybe tracks should be associated with the release rather than the album? Or maybe there should be some kind of track diff thing with releases.
• What to do about lyrical/melodic/timing differences between compositions and tracks?
• Is it possible that other artists will re-release the same album as another artist? If so, we will need to permit more than one artist to release the same album. Perhaps this should be a three-way relationship?
• Should we differentiate between brands of instrument? Personalized instrument? What about keeping track of which instrument is used on a per-track basis? Maybe that should be considered a player in the track/composition/musician relationship?
• How should we account for lineup changes?
• What constitutes a genre? Should genre modifiers be just genres or do we need a heirarchical tree type deal?
• Should genres be done at the artist, album, and track levels? At which level should we stop? Should compositions have a genre? Should upper levels simply aggregate the genre of lower-level items or should they have their own, separate genre?
• Where should lyrics and artwork be stored?

These sorts of things always work out better when there’s a second pair of eyes looking at them.

New Mac Software

Most of this stuff is butt, incomplete, and poorly-documented. Nevertheless, I am working on it and I intend to see this shit through 1.0 at least. Anyway, here it is:

Password Generator

It generates secure passwords using /dev/random or /dev/urandom, your choice. Actually you can put whatever you want in for the device, but you probably shouldn’t put in /dev/zero or it’ll probably lock up your machine.

The algorithm is deceptively simple: I read blocks out of the device and keep all the typeable characters. Look at that! Anyway, SSH Options

Right now, it pretty much works as long as you don’t want to do one of those ulta-obscure things with more than one local-to-remote or remote-to-local or application port forward, though all of the drop boxes don’t work yet because I don’t see how to do them with Cocoa Bindings. I’ll be making that work pretty soon. Also, my AppleScript needs a little work since it seems to open more than one window when you click on Connect. Otherwise, it’s my most-complete app and I had a lot of fun writing it (it was also basically my first app). Let me know what you think, and download it here.

I still have lots of other dormant software which I intend to release as soon as I’m good and ready. It is, however, almost ten and I have lots of housework type chores I need to do. Uploading all this shit is probably going to take forever and goddamn software update is wanting to download something like 30 MB of software, which will probably take two or three hours at this rate.

Here’s hoping the posting keeps going this time. :)

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Random 5 Bot Rewritten

Posted by Daniel Lyons Sat, 24 Jul 2004 14:27:00 GMT

Most of you are unaware of my little <a href=”http://www.livejournal.com”>LiveJournal account, <a class=”ljuser” href=”http://www.livejournal.com/users/fusiongyro”>fusiongyro, which is a good thing because there’s nothing there. However, I do use it in order to be a member of a certain LiveJournal community, <a class=”ljcommunity” href=”http://www.livejournal.com/community/musical_elitist/”>musical_elitist. I’m sure you are all blindingly aware of what a good name that is.

At any rate, I had a piece of software called “Random 5 Email” which worked for about a month and then died mysteriously. I wrote it using a Ruby implementation of Prevayler, called Madeleine. Well, one day it just sort of stopped doing its thing, probably due to an upgrade of either Ruby or Prevayler. This is actually a pretty good case being careful with Prevayler, since you need to be sure that you are always using the right version of whatever you’re using. If the dump format or object layout changes at all, you’re fucked. There should be a solution to this problem.

Today I rewrote that piece of software. It works for me but I wouldn’t call it production ready, so I’m going to hold off on releasing it until it’s a little more stable.

Earlier on we went to Alex’s old place and picked up some supplies, including a nuker, so we now have proper reheating action.

The cats have basically made up; they play together somewhat, sleep together, and eat from the same bowl. Lllama likes to hide underneath one of the chairs Faust is lending us, and Ebony found somewhere new to hide today that was so effective we were worried we had lost him. We don’t know where that place is yet, either.

Tomorrow I am looking forward to writing some CORBA code just to get a feel for it. I would take suggestions if anyone were actually reading this blog. I think I will aim for some kind of networked jukebox, because we can never have enough of those. It might give me a chance to brush up on my Pthreads, too.

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Victor, the Moron-ator

Posted by Daniel Lyons Thu, 08 Jul 2004 08:31:29 GMT

I got this email from a moron named Victor “The Liberator.” Apparently, that wonderful used car salesman slash pothead Ed Berndt got high with this guy, and now I have to deal with the consequences. I’m not really willing to give this guy webspace, but since yesterday was a slow day, I’ll give you guys the email instead of real content.

From: joe mama
Date: Mon, 05 Jul 2004 02:44:26 +0800
Subject: Hello, Ed in Socorro, NM referred me to your site.

He never gave me his last name. The synchronicity of our meeting was quite magical, it being the eve of Independance Day. He’s got a girlfriend named Lily(lovebee243@hotmail.com). I told Ed my story and he agrees with me everyone needs to read it and linked me to you. Let’s see what happens.

Let me introduce myself. My name is Victor Antonio. I am 26. I am from San Antonio, TX. I am a long-distance walker/journalist. That’s what I like to call myself. See, with the Internet I have discovered a way to fight the world’s greatest problem. What would you say that is? I say it’s ignorance. Root of all problems, if you ask me. Nobody listens. We are stuck. The technology is here, we already know better…but we are still killing the world.

You are going to think I’m crazy, just like I want you to. With the Internet I am going to eliminate money, make everything free, prove that it’s human-nature to be generous and bring world peace. I am going to get rid of cars in big cities, make everybody healthy and heightweight proportionate and save the ozone layer. AND, I am going to get marijuana legalized and chill everybody out. I’ve go it ALL figured out.

Now, I will tell you exactly how I plan to do this IF you are willing to listen, and only then. I hate wasting my time.

What are some problems you run across when you have a new idea and are trying to get it out? Well, for one, if you’re telling your ideas orally, by mouth you sometimes run into the problem of not remembering the whole story, so you’re not as effective as you want. Because no one is perfect.

Second, mainly you have ignorance. People are too set in their old-fashioned, lazy ways, deathly afraid of change. They won’t even listen to you. They think you’re crazy.

I have found a way to jump both of those hurdles, with the Internet.

What I will do is run an FTP server off my computer, giving anyone in the world access to my hard drive. Only the files and directories I want them to access. Now, on my hard drive I will have a directory with all my ideas. Just plain, simple text files that anyone can read with any web browser. Simple webpage, text, no graphics. This way people can read my stuff UNCENSORED, first off. At their discretion, they can finish it when they want to. But every single time the whole story will be told.

It just seems to me that’s what the Internet is for. It’s a global-medium. It’s NOT part of the system.

Now, let me tell you what I am basing all this freedom on. The pirated-software scene on the Internet where everything is free already and has been since the birth of the Internet. You can download new movies, still in theaters and watch them at home for free. Any music or video game you want, you don’t have to pay for it. Hell, I even had Windows XP months before it was even released.

It is an accepted-underworld. Companies will spend more money tracing and litigating each person doing it, than they are already making from all the suckers paying for it anyway. It’s not cost-effective to them. They simply ignore it. It’s like alcohol in the 20’s. It’s just way too widespread to control.

So what I’m gonna do…is just tell everybody. I’ll massmail detailed instructions on how to get free stuff off the Internet, so everybody stops paying for stuff and we HAVE to get rid of money.

It’s simple evolution. What bigger sign do we need? There’s a way to get things, not pay for it AND get away with it, that anyone can do. It’s the next step.

Now, wouldn’t you work for free if all your needs were taken care of and you didn’t have any bills? So you wouldn’t be bored at home all day. Provided you had a job you enjoyed. If everyone else was doing that, what would we need money for? It is the root of all evil, just as it’s always been said. Just think, if things didn’t possess a monetary-value, would people steal? And if they did, the stuff stolen could be replaced easily if everything was free.

I say everyone just keep their same job, as long as they like doing it. Just do it for free. It all comes back to you. Then people say, “What about all the jobs people don’t like doing like garbageman or sanitation worker?” Well, after eliminating money, when those jobs don’t get done, the demand for them will increase and nice, generous people will do them. Just because they need to be done. It’s simple supply and demand. In the end, we would just stop doing things we don’t need to.

As far as cars go. I think the end of this world is going to come, not when Jesus comes back or anything like that. But when that invisible ozone layer that’s up in the sky, that is there to protect us from all the cancer-causing rays of the sun, is there no longer. People will drop like flies from skin-cancer and it will all because of our modern invention, the internal-combustion engine. Cars. They are death machines. We have two legs for a reason and it’s not to push the gas and the brake. I haven’t been sick in four years since my car broke down and I started walking and riding the bus. It’s the secret to life. If you take care of the body, it takes care of itself. Cars have made everybody lazy, impatient and overweight. Walking and riding the bus will teach you patience and delayed-gratification. Why do we want what we don’t need?

As far as marijuana goes. Is it just a coincidence that two, naturally-occurring things in this world, humans and marijuana have a certain reaction when you put them together? Is it just a coincidence we have THC receptors in our brains? It is here for us to use in moderation and responsibly, like everything else. I mean, how can alcohol be legal? Oh yeah, it makes tons of money.

Now, what do you think would happen if all the world leaders got together and smoked some weed? Hey, they didn’t call them peace pipes for nothing.

Marijuana will always be readily-available, no matter the bullshit laws. Do you know why? Because you can’t stop life! So the government turns it into a money-making drug and brainwashes everyone into thinking it is too. How can anyone trust the government when it is blatantly killing the world?

Now that you are aware of my platform I can continue with the story and it will make sense. Actually, it’s more of a legend and IF you are still willing to listen.

Since I walk so much in San Antonio I have made myself as independant from money as possible. Anytime I get hungry I’ll walk into any restaurant in town and ask to speak to the manager. I tell them, “Hi, my name is Victor. I am a long-distance walker. I don’t suppose you would care to donate any gasoline for my stomach so I can keep on walking? Whatever you can spare. Hey, if it’s a big problem don’t worry about it. I’m sure the next place I walk by will be generous and help me out.” Dude, everybody hooks me up. Like 99% of places. Which just goes to prove that not only is it human-nature to be generous and we don’t need money to live, but also that there is an accepted-loss that every company figures into their finances every month, that makes it ok not to always charge for it. Money is just a game.

Now, I’m not a beggar. I am not a taker. When I give people the choice to tell me no, helping me out becomes THEIR decision. I am not twisting anybody’s arm. I am giving people the chance to feel good about themselves. How many people do you know who will do something for nothing. There IS an exchange taking place. Ask and thou shalt recieve, no? I am only practicing what I preach.

The only thing I beg for is to differ.

Do you have an email address? See, in my possession I have over 6,000 people’s email addresses. Over 6,000 people who will listen to every single word I say. I have every spammers dream come true. 100% readership. Everyone is going to open up my mail and click on the link to my webpage(when I get it up finally).

I am jumping the ignorance barrier.

Just let me tell you exactly what I am doing for world peace. Me and me alone. I have been logging my life on my minicassette recorder for 2 or 3 years now. Every detail. Whatever happens. Nothing but the truth. I am letting my book write itself. I have headphones and I type it all up. I transcribe it. I simply send an email to myself. Time-stamps and everything. I am literally an open book.

Now, don’t you think that the 100% true story of some guy who’s walking across the country telling every person he meets that he’s going to get marijuana legalized and bring world peace, and their reaction to that, the places he goes, the people who help him and prove him right, don’t you think that would be the most interesting story in the world? Don’t you think that would be an accurate state of the union? It will serve as proof, in black and white, that we don’t need money to live. I take pictures too(the smart man backs his shit up). I have over 2,000 so far. It will be the Victor Show. I am going to bring the truth out of hiding and educate the masses.

Let me tell you about my army. Don’t worry, it will be a peaceful revolution. I promise. It is my generation and younger, it’s all the kids, who don’t think I’m crazy and belong in a state hospital. With many exceptions. There are a lot of cool older people out there too. The way I see it, there’s more of us than there are of them. Global revolution. Kids against the parents. Let’s make things right before it’s too late.

It’s our world they’re destroying, damnit. Kids are the future. It’s evolution.

Now, remember my name is Victor Antonio from San Antono so when it happens, know who was responsible. Actually, I’m not stupid. I know world peace is going to have to be everybody’s fault. I will just be the catalyst.

Through word-of-mouth let it be known. The man who spends his life on a mission, he’s legendary. Traveling from coast to coast, I’m the contemporary Johnny Appleseed. I’m just making sure that my garden grows. I’ll plant the seed in every town I go.

That’s a NOFX song. I already have a soundtrack.

Now, I want you to do me a couple favors. I want you to one, I want you to think I am crazy. That’s the only thing that’s kept me from being assasinated so far because no one is taking me seriously. Two, I want you to doubt me, that I can do this. It will make my victory so much sweeter.

Do you ever tell the same story the same way every single time? I do. Like crazy. I have my own scripts. My rebuttals. People say I’m unoriginal or, “I’ve heard this one before.” Hell, they’re my scripts. If the words I choose to express myself does so exactly, why would I ever change it?” They evolve over time. I refine them. In the end the truth doesn’t change, neither does the past. I am just telling stories. I’m acting. I guess you can say it’s my own personal scripture.

I have come to realize that it is my persistant-consistency will ensure the success of this mission. I need to spread the same exact truth over and over until it happens. I have made myself into a self-programmed peace machine. Like I tell people, I have a full-time job. I don’t get days off. I am a self-employed long-distance walker. It pays great. It is my job to make humans elite. This species ain’t your fuckin’ industry. I am living proof we don’t need money to work. We don’t need money to help.

I realize I might even be assasinated for having these great ideas, but I take great comfort in knowing that if I am killed, not only would I die a martyr, because I’m not doing anything wrong, but also my mission will be accomplished even sooner. Imagine the publicity my death or dissapearance would bring. EVERYBODY would want to know what the guy who died for the world wrote. It would just blow the lid off it. One life to save billions. I would die one happy man. Like I say. I can’t, for the life of everybody, find anything better to do.

Ok, that’s a big chunk of my scripture. I have been saturating San Antonio with these scripts for over 3 years now. That’s all I do, tell my stories. I know San Antonio like the back of my hand. Every bus driver hears my story. Every pretty girl on the bus. Hell, even the ugly ones. I am the talk of the town. Legendary, even. Everybody recognizes me walking around with my rainbow beanie and walking stick. I will always return to San Antonio. It is my hometown, headquarters. There is no place like home. It’s where it all started. My middle name is Antonio. I am San Antonio.

Well, chew on that and if you are interested in getting my stories told, please let me know. That was just my platform. You ain’t seen nothing yet. Let me know if you want me to send you my story about how I took off walking to California from San Antonio and the magical things that happened to me. It’s my best legend so far. The one I tell everybody. People believe me.

Peace,

- Victor the Liberator

p.s. Any questions?

I think this might be the most pompous self-aggrandizing lunacy I’ve ever received. If only it were more fun to read, and it weren’t for that whole spam aspect, I might have given this twat a chance. Oh well.

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An Event-Free Day

Posted by Daniel Lyons Wed, 07 Jul 2004 12:33:53 GMT

Today was the kind of day government employees dream about. No meetings, no distractions, just nice even-paced coding all day. There was a bit of rain.

In truth, I spent the better part of today debugging a single function with about 10 lines of extremely simple code. The problem turned out to be a property value which was 0 instead of 1, and which prevented an SSL connection from occurring in HTTPSecureSocket. Apparently, 0 means “SSLv2” and 1 means “SSLv3, or 2 if it isn’t there.” Would have been nice to have known in advance. Part of the day was spent debating database systems, too. And a good chunk of the day was spent documenting the existing interface. You can’t code a system you can’t understand. :) I also wrote my first progress bar.

Bill, his mother and I ate at a place that I can’t recall the name of. It was nice, we got takeout. It was hot. He also gave me this citrus fizzy thing, which tasted bland at the time, but is screwing my stomach something fierce right now. We wound up going to Albertson’s so I could get a batch of Prilosec, and also some bread. I was hoping to get these energy bars my father used to get: a dense bread with raisins and nuts in it. Instead I got dense oatmeal bars and a loaf of Challah (which I can now pronounce properly, but I probably can’t spell properly).

Nothing came of the security guard’s threats. No meeting was scheduled. Nobody came and spoke to us at 6 about having to leave. Completely uneventful.

What a great job. :)

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Independence Day Sucks, Wendy's Sucks, Everything Sucks

Posted by Daniel Lyons Tue, 06 Jul 2004 20:33:00 GMT

Night before last, Alex wanted to go see a professional fireworks display somewhere big, so that her clan and everyone could socialize and whatnot. We decided to go to the city display at Balloon Fiesta Park because of all the buzzing and chattering about how much money they were spending on the fireworks ($35,000, IIRC).

So we left at about 9, which meant we spent about 50 hellish minutes driving in. So then we walked in and stood near the edge of the park when the fireworks started. Just after the second or so burst, someone in a motorized wheelchair went skirting past and had it flip over, so we got the treat of seeing the crowds cheering at the pretty on the left and a poor old person unable to get up on the right, for a moment until a couple people jumped up and went over to help.

The fireworks themselves were quite nice. After a big burst, everyone around us stood up and slapped their lawn chairs together and started running towards the exit, and slowly it dawned on us that the event was over 15 minutes after getting there. Alex had proposed leaving early to get a jump on the traffic, but that plan was clearly out of the question as we saw the red-light molasses slowly drifting out the main exit.

We decided to hang out, so we spent an hour at the park before trying to leave. Leaving at 11:15 meant that it only took 15 minutes to get out, but I was zonked and annoyed. On the way home from the parent’s place I saw a homeless guy sleeping on the bus stop bench. All the problems made me feel like the celebration was misplaced. “Yaaaay! We’re all a bunch of lame fucksacks with no concern for fellow human beings! But we love pretty colors!”

Yesterday for lunch I wound up going to Wendy’s and waiting in line for 30 minutes. So it’s just been kind of a wait-in-line-forever kind of week.

In the evening at work we wound up getting yelled at by a fat ‘n ugly security guard who wanted us to leave by 6 and “why can’t you people get it through your heads.” Michael dealt with it about like I would, by explaining that we pay for it and if he has a problem with it he can go talk to his supervisor about it; he’ll meet with whoever, it doesn’t matter, we pay for it and fuck anyone who has a problem with it. I’m annoyed at the guard for yelling at us, if anything comes of it I hope Michael emphasizes the incredible rudeness of having your guard yell at your tenents and this grody fucksack gets fired. There’s a Sikh temple down the road, why can’t we have your standard Sikh security guards? Those guys wouldn’t raise their voice if you were violating a puppy (though you’d be violated pretty well yourself).

Bill took his girlfriend Talia and myself out to eat at a place called Cowgirl’s. I had a game burger which had about 3 different types of meat in it, it was very good. Then we saw a Japanese import movie named something like “100 Monsters,” which had great atmosphere and theme, but (being from the 70’s) was somewhat lacking in terms of special effects. I would never let that kill my appreciation of a movie, especially when it can’t be helped, so I guess I can say I recommend it.

Work is still excellent; I wound up getting to write AppleScript and REALbasic yesterday. Michael gave me another two projects to work on. I can see why he is having trouble getting things done—there’s so much work to be done, and all in different places. Today should be interesting as well.

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It's Called a Work Order, You Tard, Not a Play Whenever

Posted by Daniel Lyons Sun, 04 Jul 2004 10:19:00 GMT

So a week ago when we turned in our 30 days notice, we also submitted a work order for our damned garbage disposal in the sink. Probably as a side effect of making ice cream and sending a cup or so of silt down the drain, the damn thing stopped working. Now, being not the slightest bit mechanically inclined, I know there’s a button on these things that makes ‘em work again, I just have no idea where it is located and can’t find it when I try.

So a week went by and nobody came to fix it. I’m not fond of the idea of workmen entering my home when I’m not there, especially when the only things I’ve unpacked are computation-related (though Alex had to point this out). So I told them to call me and make an appointment. That hasn’t happened; I have this nifty device called a cellular phone, which has these neato features like, telling me when I missed a call, and voice mail, which means the Man keeps my messages for me if I’m out of service. Didn’t have either of those all week.

There are two people who are management-types here at Comanche Wells. The first is a wonderful youth named Key who generally is helpful and makes sure that when deadlines are set, they get met and so-forth. The other is a tard named Christy, who is the villain in the transcript that follows. She clearly has a great deal of experience in the field of pissing people off over the phone while sounding helpful and getting you nowhere. So this is more-or-less what happened:

1. Call desk, it’s Villain #1. “A week ago, I submitted a work order for our disposal, and it’s still not fixed. Why?” “I don’t know, I’ll call the maint-men and ask ‘em to call you.”

2. 25 minutes later, call desk again. It’s Villain #1.

   Me: “Hi Christy, it’s Dan in XXXX again; I’m wondering why nobody has called me yet.”

   Villain: “Well, you see, I called the work men and they said they had been trying to call you all week and they never got an answer.”

   Me: “Well, I would believe that, except I have this nifty cell phone that tells me when I miss a call, and I haven’t missed any all week, nor have I been out of the service area.”

   Villain: “Right, but you said that you wanted them to call to set up an appointment before coming in.” Blah blah, other stuff I don’t hear

   Me: “Christy, what I don’t need right now is excuses. I need a working disposal.”

   Villain: Angry, hissy, trying to remain calm, talking fast, hangs up.

   Me: Laughing.

3. 45 minutes later, we have working disposal. God I love being an asshole!

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Why Dan Doesn't Like Commenting

Posted by Daniel Lyons Sun, 04 Jul 2004 10:18:00 GMT

People often ask me (not really, but I’ll pretend), “Dan! Why don’t you permit comments on your blog? That would be so rad! I mean, seriously!”

Here’s why. Comments are there for squeaky girls with no self-esteem, so they can see that every guy on the block actually wants to fuck them. Comments are also there for lame guys with no self-esteem, to enable them to find girls with low self-esteem. Comments are there to make your blog an interactive medium; well guess what? If you want to “post something about my blog” you can go get your own damn blog with no readers, and using the power of the permalink, you can jolly-well link to whatever I said that pissed you off.

Comments are an artifact of Slashdot, to enable geeks to swing their mighty cocks and compare lengths in an expedient fashion while at work. Comments create an information society of wit rather than of content. For example, read <a href=”http://www.plastic.com”>Plastic, where the most well-worded rebuttal has the winner regardless of whether or not there are facts behind it. And then we have Kuro5hin, ostensibly a forum for article writers; 90% of the comments there are about the quality of the writing, usually missing the point of the forum altogether. And then we have blogging fucks like myself, who can’t write and have nothing to say (like, for example, bitching about comments: no content whatsoever). It’s as though in this new era, we have plenty of technology to use to speak our minds, and empty minds filled with usage instructions. And that sounds really witty, so I’m inclined not to believe what I just said.

And then we have LiveJournal. LiveJournal is basically a place where tards can go and spill all their personal information and not be expected to at any point, actually generate content. “Content,” my friends, is a Web Developer word that means, “everything that doesn’t have to do with pretty fonts,” or, in English, the part that isn’t logic or presentation. The problem with LiveJournal is that it’s a dating service, and only the men on LiveJournal seem to understand that. It’s a forum for people to get into your life. You put up your interests just like a personals service, and then you rant about your life so that people can “know” you. And every girl who’s depressed because she just got dumped has five guys with piercings commenting in her journal, “awww… huggles”. “He’s not so bad! I like him! <img src=”http://auctions.yahoo.com/html/images/icons/gift/valentines.gif” alt=”heart”/> <img src=”http://auctions.yahoo.com/html/images/icons/gift/valentines.gif” alt=”heart” /> <img src=”http://auctions.yahoo.com/html/images/icons/gift/valentines.gif” alt=”heart” />” It makes me sick. And then when she rants about her current boyfriend, they still read, thinking, “This is the price I pay for happiness! Oh God, My Heart Yearns Like No Other” while the girls think that nothing has changed and nothing will.

Well, by the Power of Fuck I declare Fuck You on LiveJournal.

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Day 2 of Work

Posted by Daniel Lyons Sun, 04 Jul 2004 01:21:08 GMT

Working at Matterform Media is definitely an interesting experience. On the first day, I was mostly doing some routine image touchups and discussing XML. On the second day, I was designing a database and writing XSLT. I expect (and hope) that it continues to be this varied.

I took some code home and I expect I’ll be studying it and possibly implementing it in a couple different languages shortly. I’m eager to implement in the Cocoa framework, but it seems to be hair-raising to learn on one’s own. Nothing at Matterform is implemented in Cocoa at this point in time; everything is done in PHP or REALbasic. Still, Michael seems to be content with whatever works; they have C code laying around, they have ancient stuff that was originally in HyperCard. Michael doesn’t really seem to care what the implementation language is, so long as the product works and can be sold. In fact, every internal-use program we write, we are expected to consider making a commercial product.

This level of commercialism is really quite new to me, but I find that it is acceptable. I would rather be developing handy, interesting Mac programs than developing dull satelite imaging programs. I wanted to be an application developer, and here I am, that’s what I do. :)

I’m trying to think of a product I could write in my spare time that we could sell, so that I could have my job title changed and make some pretty serious money. That seems a long way off right now though, what with the move and whatnot.

We still haven’t heard from Kent about our new apartment. I have agreed to hire Tim and a friend of his to do the moving for us, at half the cost of the UHaul and with movers carrying stuff for me rather than having to do all of the carrying. They were happy about the money side of things too so I think it will be pretty good, hopefully a less horrible move than the first one, though I’m still going to be stressed about it.

Bill and I (mostly Bill) managed the migration of <a href=”http://storytotell.org”>storytotell to this server, so now all of these pages are going to becoming from the same machine. There seems to be some lingering issues with email, but we’re going to have them sorted out pretty soon.

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JoAnns Restaurant, Española, NM

Posted by Daniel Lyons Sun, 04 Jul 2004 00:58:00 GMT

JoAnns is a nice New Mexican restaurant in Española. Driving past, there isn’t much to the exterior to set it apart from the other thousand or so New Mexican places in the area. The inside is a bit nicer, and there are some big screen TV’s about, which I’m not particularly fond of.

I had the combination plate, Michael had the relleno plate. The chile was hot—much hotter than I would have expected for a first visit, but it is a local place and Michael informs me that they actually have their own chile farm. The taco had shredded steak rather than ground beef, which always makes for a winner in my opinion, and the enchilada seemed to have green chile fillets inside improving the flavor. It was too much food for me to eat.

The food was about $10 a plate and extremely good though not very experimental. I will definitely be checking it out again, after trying Paragua’s and the other place Shipman recommended.

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