In Which I Speak Of Things I Know Nothing About

I went downstairs for coffee and scanned the covers of the (surviving) morning papers as I checked out. The US auto industry is in bad shape, I guess.
The economic downturn can take some of the blame, I'm sure, but that whole system has been failing for as long as I can remember. I have avoided domestic cars since I bought my very first new car (a Honda) due to concerns about reliability. Patriotism makes sure that I always look over my options again when the time comes to buy another car, but that's the point where the US auto industry breaks for me.
I haven't seen a car produced by an American company that I'd want to buy in forever.
And some of them are nice! And the warranty (especially now that it is tax payer backed) is certainly fine.
They got a ton of money from the government to put together a plan on restructuring and they failed to come up with one so the CEO of GM was asked to resign. By the White House. In a situation which is increasingly starting to freak me out.
Sure, people aren't buying cars right now, and that sucks. But how much of it is related to the fact that American car companies have failed to offer anything which is a must-have kind of vehicle?
Instead of shuffling a current GM executive into the CEO role, I think they need to put an outsider in charge.
Someone with a vision of some kind.
Someone with a track record of making products people want.
Someone who can take a brand-name and create a term which replaces a whole class of consumer product.
Someone willing to work for one dollar, since funds are a little tight right now.
The White House should totally hand the reigns of GM over to Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs turned a reliable little computer into a veritable icon. Even people who are dedicated Windows users will admit that Apple products have the market cornered on style. They are a status symbol, geeky enough to satisfy the hard-core yet stylish enough to please the fashion-conscious. And that was the idea all along, not some accident of the market.
The iPod is the media device of the people, even though it was far from the first portable media player. The white earbuds are as much fashion statement as sound-delivery mechanism at this point. People refer to MP3 players as iPods, because that is the assumed type. The first was sold at the end of 2001 and by the middle of 2007 Apple had sold 100 million of them, creating a tiered product line hitting several price points and encouraging an upgrade cycle of about one iPod every two to four years, an upgrade cycle the automotive industry would positively "squee!" over.

I'd totally drive an Apple-inspired car.
Apple products have had an emphasis on environmental awareness since forever. And style.
There would be next-to no learning curve, either, since an Apple car would function pretty much the same as a regular old boring car, if simpler.

Behind the scenes of that stick would be enough power to satisfy a driving enthusiast, but actually changing any of the default settings would be optional.
If they put someone with a clue in charge at GM, my next car would be one of theirs.
And if there was an Apple logo on it, I'd buy a matching shirt possibly.
An Apple-branded car has long been the dream of a large portion of the internets. There is no better time for that to happen than now, when crisis demands a new direction.

Where Was I?

Hey! Brain! BRAIN!

I'm not speaking to you.

Seriously, brain. I need some help here.

Oh, now you need some help?

Yeah! Really!

But you didn't need my help before?

When before?

Yes, when before?

Um . . . Lots of times.

Like?

Do I have to say it?

No. You don't have to do anything. And I don't have to help you.

Okay. Um. Like this weekend, when I was fixing that broken stuff at work. I totally needed you to watch the clock so I could stay within the approved outage window.

Which I did, setting my internal clock and forcing your eyes to the system time display every few minutes.

Yes. And thanks.

But you ignored the time.

Well . . .

And you rebooted stuff left and right, sometimes checking to make sure users were still connected so you could identify them when they called and giggle.

I was under a lot of stress, brain.

And I had a task, which I carried out in exchange for a glass of water. A task which was ignored for water which was never delivered.

Diet Pepsi Max has water in it!

This is why I'm not helping you.

But I need your input here!

What is it this time?

You know I haven't had a chance to post in a couple of days. And people are starting to almost expect my automated death post. Give me a post.

Do it yourself.

I just need a topic.

Write about proper hydration and the effect it has on higher reasoning.

Come on!

You haven't made a very strong argument for my support.

But brain . . . Me not good at words using on my alone.

Don't pull that with me. I came up with that routine.

I'll get another cup of coffee . . .

Is that a threat or a promise?

I know you want it, brain. The caffeine. The Splenda. It goes right to whatever cortex enjoys that stuff. I can feel it.

I don't need it.

No. But you want it. I can tell because I can feel the blood moving through you so painfully sluggishly.

The blood is moving fine. It's all . . .

. . . In my head? Who was the largest Transformer?

Fortress Maximus

Are you sure it wasn't Unicron?

Fortress Maximus was two and a half feet tall. As a toy.

Which Doctor wore broccoli on his lapel?

Peter Davison, the fifth Doctor Who.

What's the capitol of North Dakota?

Fargo.

It's Bismarck. I'll go get that coffee now.

There Is No Liquor In The Vending Machines Downstairs

This picture is unrelated.

I'm Not Expert

"Hey. I gotta show you something but I want you to know that I had nothing to do with it."

"Oh, crap."

"What?"

"Garrick, how long have we worked together?"

"About six months, I guess."

"There are two things I've learned about working with you in that time. The first is that if you go without caffeine for any period of time we are all lucky if the workday ends with lowered productivity and not violence. The second is that nothing good ever follows you saying 'I had nothing to do with this.'"

"Thanks! It's good to know that you have such a lack of faith in projects which lack my involvement."

"Sure, but I have more faith in your ability to draw in bad luck as though it is attracted to kidney damage."

"True. But look. The vendor had no idea what was wrong with the redundancy policy on this machine. They scheduled a conference call. They have gone over every bit of the configuration and are actually telling me that what we are seeing is impossible."

"Why is there a wall of text on your screen."

"That's the configuration file. It opens in Notepad."

"I can't read it. Turn off word wrap."

"Okay."

"Holy crap, never mind! Turn it back on! Turn it back on!"

"Look at this part. See where the policies are listed?"

"Sure."

"There is this other part, though. See? There is a bunch of stuff listed under 'prolicies'."

"Prolicies?"

"Prolicies."

"Is it even going to look at those?"

"Depends on the 'pocedures' built into the operating system, I guess."

"Is this what is breaking it?"

"Prolly."

"Prolly?"

"The 'prolicies' are prolly breaking it."

"Prolly?"

"Prolly."

"I see now why you started this conversation by telling me you had nothing to do with this."

"You do?"

"Prolly."

Weekend?

Yeah, not so much.
I ended up in my cubicle for twelve hours on Saturday completing tasks impossible with users accessing the systems and co-workers asking for my help with crap.
Anyone contemplating a career in the fast-paced, high-rolling world of I.T. needs to be prepared to sacrifice a few weekends to productivity.
They should also probably visit with a therapist for a few hours a week until they figure out why they keep putting themselves in situations like this.
Of course, I'm not a doctor.
Someone who is a doctor (David Blumental) was just named the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. He'd like to do away with paper record-keeping altogether and go to an all-digital system on a national scale with the purpose of allowing easier portability and doing away with the millions of remaining fax machines. As medical advances go, I think that ranks up there with the reduction in use of leeches in medical treatment and the adjustment of ill-humors in the brain through drilling.
Just getting a prescription from a doctor to a pharmacy is only slightly better today due to the elimination of thrown mule shoes and busted wagon wheels in transit.
Imagine a world where your medical information can be emailed between doctors or entered into a nation health database to be accessed by whatever specialist you get referred to.
Imagine a pharmacy no longer required to decipher arcane scribbles on scraps of paper in order to provide you with the chemical agents needed to keep you out of the bell tower.
Now, imagine having a couple of years experience securing medical records to government standards.
It's like having a license to print money. Imagine that.
If your imagination made the money look something like this, thanks for reading this blog for the past couple of years:



Anyway, over the weekend progress was made and hours were racked up, so the secondary and primary objectives were met.
Also, a good bit of time was spent in discussing and then acquiring lunch. For the record, it was a burger.

I Am Sometimes A Ninja

Last night I had the rare opportunity to have an actual date with my wife.
Gwynyth had a school function with a bunch of friends and bad food (like she likes), so Shana and I went to dinner.
The place we chose was less kid-friendly than our normal places and it was a nice change, though we missed her.
Between the order and the food's arrival, I visited the restroom.
As I was washing my hands, I noticed that the towel dispenser was one of those automatic, motion-sensing jobs and cursed inwardly.
After drying my hands on my slacks, I returned to our table.
I must have been visibly agitated, since Shana asked me what happened.
I told her what type of towel dispenser it was, thinking that would explain everything. It did not.
"You know those never work," I explained further.
She smiled at me and since it was the smile which means I've said something insane, I had to question.
"You can get towels out of those?"
She could. She apparently always does. Further, I have to assume, given this data point coupled with the fact that I've been seeing these things for years, that her situation is the baseline.
Rather than question the waitstaff as to their own abilities to get paper towels (or for that matter hot air) from restroom motion-sensing hand dryers, I rushed Shana through dinner to drag her around various restrooms to test my own abilities anew.
I cannot, ever, trigger a motion-sensing hand-drying device.
They do not see me.
I went as far in the book store to take the over off and flick the sensor directly behind the splash guard.
Nothing.
But another guy walked in after me and it dispensed eighteen inches of dry paper when he walked past on his way to the urinal.
I've tried moving my wet hands slowly and quickly, up and down, small circles and larger ones.
I'd grown to assume that this motion was the intent of the device, to cause enough air contact to dry the hands that way without need for hot air or towels.
It has always seemed ineffective, but I got used to it and just make a pass with my hands in front of those things before drying my hands on my pants.
Automatic doors see me just fine, as do motion lights.
This phenomenon seems to be just restricted to hand dryers.
Unless I can find a museum guarded entirely by air blowers and towel dispensers, there is no opportunity for profit I can divine from my . . . condition.
But I have to ask now, since the internets are always the best place to have restroom-related questions answered, is there anyone else who is invisible to these devices?

Parts of Speech

We got a directive from someone high up enough that I've never actually seen him.
This directive sets one of our technical definitions as policy.
The problem I have is that the definition is wrong.
I've been instructed to communicate using the new definition, but since I know it to be false I've pretty much been told to spread misinformation.
Don't get me wrong. Spreading misinformation is not something I have an issue with. We do that to users all the time in order to prevent panic. The problem is that I've been asked to knowingly be wrong.
The fact that this policy came in PDF format complicates this even more, since PDF documentation is the I.T. equivalent of chiseling policy into stone.
The PDF in question, and the definition it relates, comes from some company selling licenses based on database instance counts. While a clustered database is, in every sense of the word, one database, they see it as two and require licenses on both.
They can set up their licensing however they like, but it doesn't change an industry standard definition.
I will not be wrong on someone else's orders.
The people that noticed this error (both of us) did quite a bot of flailing and whining before changing the subject intentionally.
Unfortunately, that landed us in the middle of a work discussion which later progressed into our plans to do more work over the weekend.
It was then that we cranked out a document defining "Work" as a noun or proper noun place name. The use of "Work" as a verb was left out intentionally and seen as having little value.
Saved as a PDF on our documentation store, this definition is now official.