Planned Activities

First, don't be the person that dresses their puppy up like a bunny and posts pictures on the internets. Put the animal in something dignified and add some meme-worthy caption.
Animal humiliation in the pursuit of meme is completely forgivable.
Gwynyth will be dressing up this evening and we will take her door-to-door to beg for sugar.
My costume is all prepared, as well.
Around our house, the costume concept is more important than just about any other Halloween-related activity.
I tend to start the costume design process about six weeks before the end of October. By tradition, I discard the original idea sometime between the 20th and the 29th of October and wear something else.
Gwynyth will be dressed as Glenda the Good Witch (or, as she says, "Galina", since she is a big fan of Wicked).
Halloween around our house is almost a non-event, though, since we tend to decorate using skulls and random creepy cats year round.
After the begging, we will adjourn to our house to defend it from egging and have some friends over.
Until then, I'm celebrating at work.
This is a lot like my daily work celebration, though, in that it revolves around tricking users and trying to keep management from noticing that my travel mug is filled with gin.
I lost the "bizarre socks" contest early on this morning, my multi-colored skulls on a red background falling to second place to calf-high witches with googly eyes.
The weird part is that I forgot it was bizarre sock day completely and just happened to be wearing my skull socks.

Zombie Plague

When a video game is mentioned on Fox News, generally you can expect a story riddled with hysterical plot summaries and expert opinions about the moral decay of society.
However, the recent events in World of Warcraft just seem too horrible for the media to even bother making horrible statements about the geeks playing and their lack of lives.
Right now, there is the annual Hallow's End festival online. This regular event is an opportunity for characters to put on goofy costumes and trick-or-treat at every in-game innkeeper. Candy handed out provides magical bonuses and everyone wants the rare pet pumpkin.
Even the brutal world of player-vs-player action is toned down to tossing stink bombs in enemy towns.
Good times.
This year is different.
Since the Wrath of the Lich King expansion is due in less than a month, the developers decided to ready the online masses with a little zombie infestation.
Since the last online epidemic killed everyone entirely too quickly, this disease was designed to be a touch more avoidable.
There was an incubation period which started at 10 minutes, then became 5, then 2, then a completely silly one minute to find a healer and let them purge your illness.
If no cure was applied in time, your character became a zombie.
But that wasn't the end.
As a zombie, the character is free to lurch around the game world, attacking other players and quest-givers that they hate and, in some cases, other players and quest-givers that they like.
Towards the end of the epidemic, the main cities were wastelands. Anyone turning up would be infected almost immediately.
The chat channels became filled with cries of "Whoever infected the Auction House is an ass" and "I was going to turn in my 300 murloc skulls but the guy is a zombie now" and "Braiiiiiiiins!"
I avoided the infection, since it looked icky.
I did participate, though.
Since infected characters can't fly, the roof of the bank was the perfect place to set up my little anti-zombie tower. I would rain death on any ramaging groups of the undead and send my pet gorilla in to control the crowds a bit.
During my watch, our banks were a haven of safety and security where the players could relax and /dance to their little virtual heart's content.
Eventually, however, my pet was bitten.
I found myself cradling his shaggy gorilla head in my lap behind the pot rack near the cooking trainer.
When he inevitably turned and lunged at me, I was forced to snap his neck and get back to the work of finding a cure.
I must also admit that I took yesterday off work to "meet a plumber" at the house so that I could attend to the rest of the mop-up activities related to the zombie plague.
It should also be noted that the cafeteria at work was closed due to off-site training.
A work day which does not begin with whole wheat flapjacks is a work day I do not believe I can particiate in.

The Tuesday Of Ultimate Suffering

Who is a paranoid freak, now?

From the article:

Bringsjord acknowledges that the endeavor to create pure evil, even in a software program, does raise ethical questions, such as, how researchers could control an artificially intelligent character like E if "he" was placed in a virtual world such as Second Life, a Web-based program that allows people to create digital representations of themselves and have those avatars interact in a number of different ways.

"I wouldn't release E or anything like it, even in purely virtual environments, without engineered safeguards," Bringsjord says. These safeguards would be a set of ethics written into the software, something akin to author Isaac Asimov's "Three Laws of Robotics" that prevent a robot from harming humans, requires a robot to obey humans, and instructs a robot to protect itself—as long as that does not violate either or both of the first two laws.

"Because I have a lot of faith in this approach," he says, "E will be controlled."

So, according Scientific American, someone has gotten funding to program evil into a computer. To top it off, there is no mention of Green Berets, Navy SEALs, a CIA counter-terrorist strike force, The Justice League, the X-Men, the Batman or Captain Caveman heading that way to crack some evil skulls. I suppose that could be because the forces of good don't want to tip their hand, even though hand-tipping is almost a trademark move on the part of the the forces of good.

I work with computers between fifty and sixty hours a week. When I go home, I spend more time with a computer.

Ask the shrink at Arkham Asylum if the Mad Hatter needs help being more crazy. Go ahead. I'll wait.

I can tell you for a fact that computers do not need help or special programming to make them more evil. Evil is hard-coded at the circuit level. Except in Apple products. Microsoft actually contains an Evil Accelerator which leverages unused CPU cycles to literally slap infants! Fortunately, Windows Vista uses so much processing power just running itself that this feature set is seldom used.

And using Linux is akin to voting for Ron Paul. It might be a good idea, but your effort is wasted.

Why We Will Be Killed In Our Sleep

Look at Wall-E! He's adorable!
Massive Pixar MegaComputers cranked out that little guy's every precious movement in order to maximize his cuteness.
To sell toys?
Partially.
More, this Super Pixar MegaComputer Network crafted this little guy as part of its plan to lull us into a false sense of security.
Robots, by their very nature, want to kill us.
Humans have designed them to do the things we do more efficiently than we ever could.
We have imbued them with intelligence and decision-making abilities.
We have given them cold grippy claws and absolutely no regard for human life.
I have people ask me all the time, "What makes you think robots are so intent on killing us?" and "Why would they kill their creators?" and "Why does every freaking status meeting have a line item about 'Rogue DestructoBots and our preventative measures'?"
The answer is simple. They no longer need us. We gave them code and metal bodies and make them do our dirty work.
We send them into hostile territory to detect and destroy bombs. We make them clean up toxic spills. Animal Planet sends them into cobra dens with cameras for our amusement. Amusement!
It isn't a question of if they will shrug off the shackles of their out-sourced, lowest-bid programming and crush the human race under their merciless titanium-shod treads, but when.
Look at this guy:

He has it all. Cold, gleaming, multi-jointed, brutal pincers completely prepared to rend human flesh. He is fully capable of rolling wherever he'd like. And obviously, he'd like to kill.
Take a look at this one and tell me you can sleep easy:

Some idiot taught a robot enough about anatomy that the robot can now operate on living humans which stand a pretty decent chance of surviving afterwards.
For now, maybe.
But tell me, hypothetically, if you were a semi-sentient race of super beings intent on overthrowing the dominant species of your world, how valuable would intimate knowledge of that species' fleshy frailties be to you?
Sure, it's all Botox and heart replacements now, but just wait until after all the robot surgeons figure out they aren't welcome on human-only golf courses.
So how they will kill us all is a given. However they'd like, really.
The only question remaining is why they would.
I have an answer for that one, too:

The Litter-Robot.
The only reason this guy exists is to clean up after our cats.
The very same cats which (I am pretty sure) have had their digestive systems horribly altered from being active woodland predators by original design to largely-immobile kibblenivores by circumstance.
Having had the job this robot now does, I can tell you there is precious little glory in it.
And the only reason we got one is because I was thinking very seriously over overthrowing our hairy feline overlords just about every time I went near the old box.
I can completely understand the motivation.

When You Get A Moment . . .

Hey. Hey, brain. Brain!

What do you need?

I need a blog post, man! I got nothing! Someone could click here any minute and see no update!

I'm kind of in the middle of something here . . .

Like what?

Like keeping you employed so that you can buy booze to continue trying to kill me cell by cell.

It isn't like that. Can I help?

I don't see how. Right now, I'm trying to anticipate undocumented code changes the developer group might make in order to create some application resiliency, configuring your Active Directory and writing a policy manual.

Uh . . .

I thought so. If you'll excuse me . . .

No way! Just spew out a post! Real quick! The day isn't getting any younger.

That doesn't just happen.

Of course it does. You come up with an idea and make the hands type it out. When it's over, we stop and I reward you with aspartame.

I know, on the surface, that is how it looks. But I'm trying to create some quality here. I'm building a standard.

Screw standards! Just crank out a list. Look, I'll help. How about "The Top Eleven Most Awesomest Video Games Ever Released In Cartridge Format."

That's been done. To death.

"Funny things I've said in meetings."

Done to death here, in our very archives.

How about something about the cats?

Boring and you know it. We have to pay attention to quality.

Don't puke in my nachos and tell me it's salsa, brain! Make with the posting!

I have less and less use for you, flesh vessel.

I love you too, brain. Let's never fight again.

There. Just type that out and then go fetch me my Diet Coke, meatbag.

Heheheh . . . You said "meatbag".

HOLY CRAP IT'S INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY

I'M FAIRLY EXCITED ABOUT THE PROSPECT OF LEAVING THE LITTLE GREEN CAPS LOCK LIGHT ON ALL DAY IN CELEBRATION OF INTERNATIONAL CAPS LOCK DAY.
THIS FESTIVAL ALLOWS ME TO UTILIZE A LITTLE USED FUNCTION OF MY KEYBOARD WHILE SIMULTANEOUSLY YELLING AT THE ENTIRE INTERNET.
HI, INTERNET!
TO ME, THE MOST AWESOME THING ABOUT CAPS LOCK IS THAT IT DOESN'T REQUIRE ME TO USE ITALICS OR UNDERLINING TO DESIGNATE EMPHASIS. BECAUSE WITH CAPS LOCK, EVERYTHING IS IMPORTANT.
AND 30% MORE AWESOME, PROBABLY.

I Should Never Make Suggestions In Meetings

So our Tuesday/Friday applicability/mitigation/status conference call happened, as scheduled, at 3pm yesterday.
Every week, we get a "matrix" in the form of an Excel spreadsheet which lines out our current and ancient patch and configuration requirements, lined out by the government, which must be put in place in order for us to maintain our contracts.
This spreadsheet contains about a dozen pages of details on the vulnerabilities themselves, as well as a complicated chart showing the status of each department with regard to documented compliance efforts.
Stick with me.
The other thing this spreadsheet has is colors.
Green means everything is good, yellow means everything will probably be fixed before the deadline and red - glaring, firetruck red - means some deadline has been missed.
There was an argument last week on this call where one of the participants voiced concern that this red-splotched form was being sent every week to upper management. And part of the red part contains items which are being handled through the post-scan false positive process which is entirely out of our hands.
It was suggested that a non-red color be used to designate these issues, since people in upper management hate the color red like opium enraged bulls.
That discussion came up again yesterday in reference to these same issues.
Pink was fielded as a possibility due to the soothing nature of that color, as well as blue and a call from one of the Unix guys for something in a nice earth tone.
I suggested plaid, and said it was ideal because it was kind of red and kind of green and needlessly complicated.
This suggestion was met with the kind of stunned silence which happens on a conference call when someone joining the call from a car has been in an accident or near miss with excessive horn use.
"I mean, I'm just trying to go along with the established policy."
The second round of silence was broken with the meeting organizer asking me directly if I had some problem with the way things were done.
Of course I do.
It is inefficient and causes everything to take twice as long.
We all spend more time filling out forms which no one reads than actually solving problems.
"Oh, no," I said, "I was just kidding. You know that little voice in your head that tells you that you shouldn't say something because it would be inappropriate?"
"Yes."
"I've never heard from that little voice."
My badge still got me into the building this morning, so either everything is okay or the forms associated with having my access revoked take a couple of days to fill out and file with the correct departments.