The other day my little sister had her first professional modeling job. It was a photo shoot for a print ad for Microsoft Encarta. They shot the whole thing in the Powell street BART station, and the roles in the shoot were: Spaceman #1, Spaceman #2, Spaceman #3… and Girl. I think we’re all going to have to trust that those ad wizards at Microsoft know what they’re doing.

Anyway, I’m naturally very proud of Sarah, and it looks like she will soon be appearing in a major Magazine Near You. As for how my life is going, I got a flat tire last night. Maybe there’s only so much karma to go around in one family?

I had been talking about blogs recently, and I thought I would mention one here that I really like: Good Morning Silicon Valley, by John Paczkowski of the San Jose Mercury News. It’s one of those “mostly-links” blogs — the commentary is essentially the titles and the links themselves. I have to give Paczkowski some credit for creativity in this department. You would think he would get bored — after all, how many variations are there on saying, “Company X lays off Y people”? Well, let us count the ways:

• IBM layoffs actually “job resource action”
• HP messes with Texas
• Reason for leaving last job: “workforce rebalancing”
• It’s raining SBC employees
• 7,000+ careers to be claimed in freak IBM workforce rebalancing
• 1,100+ Genuity employees released into wild
• 2,000 JDSU employees to adapt to challenging marketplace
• Sun to 1,000 employees: “What color is your parachute?”
• Third prize is: you’re fired
• Worldcom to declare employee surplus

And that’s just in the last couple of months.

According to the dictionary, “schadenfreude” means “pleasure in the misfortune of
others”. White-collar Enron employees complaining about the vagaries of
hyper-capitalism? Schadenfreude. Alan Sokal’s
cosmic joke on
the editors of Social Text? Schadenfreude.
Microsoft getting burned by
its own bought-and-paid-for witness, Jerry Sanders of AMD? Achtung baby, it’s
schadenfreude.

But when M’ris announced that she is having DSL problems
(again), it was obviously inappropriate to feel schadenfreude. First, one can’t
feel schadenfreude at the misfortunes of one’s friends. It simply isn’t done. I can
certainly feel that way towards Pac Bell — for example, when they
are
investigated for fraud for “slamming” their customers (including me, for six
long months). But poor M’ris is an innocent bystander. I suppose that if I had warned
Mark and M’ris properly about DSL, I could feel “cassandritis”, or “smug satisfaction that your
prophecy of doom has come true.” But that would be wrong also. I didn’t rant and rave
at them. I didn’t warn them that not only is Pac Bell’s service generally lousy,
but because Pac Bell controls all the phone line central offices, they can (and do) screw
with the reliability of their DSL competitors (so no matter what you do in DSL-land,
you’re at their mercy.)

In other words, this is all really partly my fault. I didn’t
steer Mark and M’ris away from the foul clutches of Pac Bell. I failed in my
mission to do what is right and good and true.

Sorry, guys. My bad.

This afternoon (via Camworld)
I discovered an
unintentionally amusing article on
making web pages accessible for disabled readers. Unfortunately for the author, his web
designers chose to set his font to “x-small sans-serif”. On Netscape, “x-small” corresponds to
an 8pt font at best. Not so readable for disabled people… or non-disabled people,
for that matter.

The interesting thing is that just a few hours later, I find that the site’s code has changed:
they are using a new stylesheet class that bumps the font size up a notch. I can only imagine
the number of snarky emails that these people must have received over the last day or so. (No,
I didn’t send one.) But really, I’d rather they adjusted the article’s content —
it’s really just a lazy pile of assertions at the moment.

Everyone and their mother is a “usability guru”, I suppose.

On the advice of Russ Nelson,’97 (congrats Russ on the engagement!), I’m rethinking my
staunch opposition to attending my college reunion.
Maybe it won’t be a tacky schmooze-fest. Or maybe I can avoid the people who
will make it a tacky schmooze-fest, and just hang out with my old friends. Or maybe the
my old friends and the people who will make it a tacky schmooze-fest will not, as I fear,
turn out to be the same people. Maybe, maybe.

Finally, I had to share this story about what the noxious British technology tabloid
The Register calls,
“the CAPS-LOCK Defense“:

During what was to be a routine proceeding to set future court dates, Heckenkamp challenged
the indictment against him on the grounds that it spells his name, Jerome T. Heckenkamp, in
all capital letters, while he spells it with the first letter capitalized, and subsequent
letters in lower case.

The judge was impressed neither with this nor with Heckenkamp’s motion to subpoena the “United
States of America” as a witness. And to think I was just about to send notice to friends and family
that I was changing my name to “eVA3n GOeR”
(the “3” would be silent, you see). Pity.

The other day I stumbled into the Quit Slashdot! home page.
All I have to say is: right on, brother. The thing about
Slashdot is that
every time that they post an article on a subject that I know anything about (such as
astrophysics or “nanotechnology”), the commentary is so riddled with inanity and
pseudoscientific blather that I can’t help but read it. Maybe some
people are hardwired to like awful, awful things. I wish I could get over it, like
that guy in that old Onion article,
“Aging
Gen-Xer Doesn’t Find Bad Movies Funny Anymore“:

Erdman, however, is not so certain about his changing sensibilities. “I used to be able to
take great pleasure in not enjoying things,” Erdman said. “But these days, the only things I
like are things I like. Christ, I feel so old.”

If only I were in Erdman’s (fictional) shoes. Sigh.

The sad thing about the Slashdot science articles is that occasionally some poor sap of a
graduate student gets fed up with this foolishness, damnit, and
posts a reasonably literate critique of whatever nonsense the Slashdotters are debating.
It’s irrelevant, of course. Like passing out copies of Our Bodies, Our Selves
at an NRA convention. I want to scream at these grad students, “Stop wasting your
time! Get back to work on your thesis!” But what’s the point? I can’t save the
world. I can’t even save the Johns Hopkins University Physics Department. Bleah.

What else? Saturday night I went rock climbing with Brian and about 60 friends from
One Brick.
I had never really done any serious rock climbing — not anything with ropes and all —
so it was pretty fun. However, it was a mistake to allow myself to get cajoled into
participating in the boys vs. girls speed-climbing race. Picture me in line, arms all noodley
from three previous climbs, hemmed in by seven or eight bad-ass climber dudes.
“You’ll do fine!” Brian said. Clever bastard — this was just his way of getting me back for
refusing to go to our five-year college reunion.

In the good-news department, I went to Target this weekend to buy a lamp for the
apartment — one of those mix-and-match the base and lampshade dealies. Anyway,
on my way out, the security guard complimented me. “Nice lamp,” he said. And as
I walked through Macy’s to get to the parking lot, one of the makeup ladies flagged me
down. “That lamp is so cool!” she said. “Where did you get it?” So things are
looking up, career-wise. I clearly won’t make a very good fireman, Army Ranger, or
Emergency Mountain Patrol Rescuer, but I might very well have the potential to be
a fabulous interior designer.

I ran into a funny bit by a man who feels that
Tic-Tac-Toe
deserves the same prominence as chess. I hope those snobs at the New York
Times listen.

Things I Like About Windows 2000 (in comparison to Win98 SE)

• The icons are a bit rounder and cuter.
• When you open and close menus and windows, they fade in and out rather than
  popping in and out of existence. That’s a nice effect (albeit stolen from Aqua).
• The power-off button works.
• The system doesn’t hang when you try to shut it down through the Start menu.
• It doesn’t try to install one and only one 2GB partition
  on your hard drive, leaving the other 38GB hanging out there in the Unaddressed Ether.
• It freezes up about a fifth as often.
• It has Freecell.

Things I Don’t Like About Windows 2000

• It has no Java to speak of, although this is easily rectified.
• Outlook Express 6 still has no capability to import mailboxes
  from a file or export mailboxes to a file (don’t let the “import” and
  “export” options in the menus fool you).
• It assigns all your devices (video, sound, modem, and others) to the
  same IRQ.
• It won’t let you move devices to different IRQs. Not through the Device Manager
  (the options are grayed out), not through BIOS (this is ignored), and not by
  physically swapping your cards around. Thus you cannot fix the screwed-up
  configuration that Windows handed you in the first place.
• Did I mention the “handing you a broken configuration and not letting
  you fix it” part? That really stinks.

I’ve been having all sorts of problems with technology recently.

1. My ISP, BowieNet (or as
   Sam liked to call it, SlowieNet —
   oh yeah, Sam, well pay for your own damn ISP then!)
   Oops, where was I? Oh yes, my ISP, BowieNet, has been
   down a lot. Well, OK, that’s not news.

2. The fuse for the circuit that controls my
   apartment’s bedroom and living room lights blew.
   I had always just had a halogen lamp and my computer
   on that circuit. And an alarm clock. Then I added 28W
   worth of compact fluorescent bulbs to the line. “We
   cannae take nae more o this, Captain!” Poof!

3. On Monday, someone in my company decided that my office
   phone was a fax machine, and set the fax on their end
   to “autodial”. So I got a call every minute for over
   thirty minutes. I don’t know who it was, because
   the person was dialing from one of our “flexible field
   offices” in Colorado, which is sort of a waystation for
   mobile employees. Nevertheless, stupid-fax-person, rest
   assured I will find you. I have plans for you. Oh,
   yes. Plans.

4. My PC is still freezing up, despite my fresh install of
   Windows 2000. As far as I can tell, this only happens
   when A) the sound card is running and B) when my modem
   is connected. I mentioned this to J.C. and he said,
   “Oh, you’ve probably got both devices on IRQ 9.” I
   checked, and holy cow, he was exactly right.

   Then I did some more checking, and it turns out that
   my video card and some other device are also
   on IRQ 9. What the heck? All I did was install the
   OS and let it recognize the devices by default. Why
   doesn’t Windows automatically spread out those devices
   to different IRQs? There’s like 16 of them, and most
   of them are free. I mean, how hard is that?

M’ris thinks she knows
why the technology gods have turned against me: “Have you been
neglecting them of late? Have you been playing fewer
computer games? Something like that? They need their
regular sacrifices.” Ay me, I admit it. I’ve played no
computer games at all for the last few months (except for an
occasional round of
Titan). I have
sinned, and perhaps I shall never be redeemed.

Well, on to good news. Last weekend I discovered that IKEA
is the greatest store of all time. I went there for
bookshelves and was simply paralyzed with the staggering array
of inexpensive, good-looking stuff. Good thing I have
such iron self-control, or I might have bought an entire living
room set. Bookcases! We’re here for bookcases, Evan.
Focus, man, focus!

It’s not like people haven’t told me that IKEA was great. I’ve
even been to IKEA before, but it wasn’t the the same; I wasn’t
shopping for me. Two years ago, my friend Derrick Chau
in L.A. dragged me with him. It was a nice Saturday morning,
and hundreds of young couples were wafting through the store.

Derrick: Do you like this coffee table?

Me: Oooh, that’s a nice one!

Derrick: How about these couch cushions?

Me: Well, they’re OK, but I don’t think they match your couch or your curtains.

(more of the same dialog for several minutes…)

Derrick (looking around): Dude, how about you walk this way, I’ll walk that way, and we’ll meet up later?

Me (looking around): Good call.

In Other News: in an upcoming Science journal article,
physicists at Oak Ridge National Labs are claiming to have seen
table-top fusion in acoustic acetone bubbles.
However, other physicists at Oak Ridge have been unable to
reproduce the results, and the
APS seems
unimpressed: “Perhaps Science magazine covets the vast
readership of Infinite Energy magazine.” Now that’s just mean.

Pat called me at the office earlier this week. The only reason
he wanted to talk was to tell me about his trip to the Apple store.
“It was like the anti-Fry’s,” he said. “No — it was like Frys is
supposed to be. Everything is clean and bright… and the
people in the store are there to help you, not keep you from
stealing.”

Well, I couldn’t get him to shut up until I promised to go with him.
“Pat,” I said, “you know this is pointless. We both have relatively
new computers. Neither of us can justify buying a new Mac.
Going to the Apple Store is like, technology porn. Look-but-don’t-touch.
What’s the point?”

But I went anyway. And I have to say, I was impressed with the new iMac.
My favorite part was not the CD/DVD/read/write drive. Not the amazing
swivel arm or the sharp flatscreen. Not the pretty OSX graphics.
No, I think I liked the UNIX terminal window.
Who is it that finally layers a modern user interface on UNIX? Not
my company. Not HP, IBM, or SGI.
Not GNOME or KDE. No… it’s Apple. BSD with Java 1.3.1 & Apache built-in.
Hot damn.

Alrighty, that’s about it. Time to head out for the evening. Just
one more thing — I’ve added a custom 404 error page. The first and
only Perl program I’ve ever written. It provides
a random haiku every time you try to access a nonexistent file on this
site. Give it a try:
https://www.goer.org/sdlkfej.

An alert reader informed me that some of the links to my fancy shiny new
Contact section were broken.

I knew that this contact section would come back to bite me in the ass.
Communication. Bleah. Highly overrated.

Just kidding, of course. I hate broken and misdirected links as much as
the next person. So feel free to tell me if you spot one here. It
actually makes me feel good to zap those things. Or if you don’t
think the navigation makes sense, it couldn’t hurt to let me know that either.

Now, criticizing my color scheme… that’s another matter entirely.

Mom informs me that her excellent computer-repair instincts had nothing to do with
her education in biology or her experience in analyzing medical literature.

My model for my suggestion for your computer was starting a baby on
solid food. You start with one food at a time, wait a few days, and then add
another, and then another. That way, if something causes an allergy, you know
what it is. Simple really.

Today at work I was really bored, so I tried downloading and installing
the Dada Engine. This wonderful
software generates random text from a “grammar”, which is just a text file consisting
of rules. There are a number of fun examples of the Dada Engine in action,
including the Postmodernism
Generator and the Random Adolescent
Poetry Generator. I was really looking forward to inventing my own scripts.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t compile the software at work. It requires GNU make,
and at work we use Solaris (duh). I should have known this would happen… I had the
same trouble with the Apache webserver last year. Now,
even a dumb tech writer like me can install gcc and GNU make eventually,
but my knowledge of C is so weak… I’d rather not spend hours and hours trying to graft GNU-stuff
onto Solaris. I managed to do it once before, but it was singularly unpleasant.

Maybe some bright enterprising young person should rewrite the Dada Engine in Java.
Just as an exercise.