bryan wann :: binary fury

I want to cock-punch whoever thought it was a great idea to use CamelCase in wikis, and wiki authors who still support it. How are you supposed to have an easy-to-read, attractive document when you have things like ThisIsAPage, TeamNotesOnPresentations scattered about?

That is all.

Incidentally I did some shopping this weekend and took advantage of it being a tax-free weekend for clothing. I upgraded from a pair of basic black roper Justin boots I’ve been wearing for the past month (after I had just broken them in) to Lucchese full quill ostrich boots. The comfort is an order of magnitude different. My Justins were just tolerable, some degree of uncomfort, probably had much more breaking in to do. The Lucchese felt better instantly, they remind me much of my Magnanni dress shoes; snug, but foot fully envelop in smooth soft leather. They have a rubber sole, so no more authoritative clicking on concrete, but I’ll gladly take comfort over that.

I had three girls at Cavenders come up and tell me how nice they where as I was buying them, which is a good sign. One tells me they’ll last me fifteen years, another tells me I could romp around in the stable all day and they’ll look good as new with conditioner. I don’t want to think about what I’ll be wearing when I turn 44, it’s too much to handle. I also lack a stable. I guess the oil patch or the rough world of IT will have to do.

Also cashed in a gift certificate at Men’s Wearhouse and picked up some new shirts to replace my older ones that just didn’t fit right. Went hunting around the mall for somebody that sold Brooks Brothers, no luck. Apparently my closest stores are outlet malls in San Marcos and Round Rock.

Between sleeping, watching olympics, more sleeping, waxing my truck, and more sleeping, I got bored and started taking practice Cisco certification tests. The CCNP switching test was a tricky one, endless configuration examples with some arguments switched around, pick the correct syntax. CCIE test was pretty out there, things like “how long does it take SONET to heal after a ring failure” or somesuch. That one I did happen to know, as I’ve seen plenty of maintenance announcements saying “you may see a hit of 50 ms blah blah”. The CCNA test was even farther out there. It was very wordy and executive-summary-ish, “a network is for?” “a) providing a way for employees of a company to exchange data, information, and collaboration.” I quickly tired of wrapping my head around the language and went back to watching the Jamacians dominate the 100 meter races.

Given my day job of fiddling with firewalls and VPNs, their security track might be fun. Since I allegedly can’t take any professional-level tests without my CCNA, I signed up to take the ICND2 test tomorrow at lunch to renew my CCNA. I have no idea what’s on it. I figure if I could pass it once eight years ago, I can pass it again. It’ll be really embarrassing if I didn’t pass and might have to quit my job out of shame. I’m entertaining the idea of taking the CCIE written for the hell of it, just to see where I get. That’ll be a few months off, I’m impatient so I’m taking this tomorrow.

A short visit to the Apple store tonight and now I have a new iPhone with a working speaker. An iPhone with sound! It’s a whole new experience all over again!

Ferrari 456, my truck

While at The Domain, I parked next to a Ferrari. Later, Alex tells me this was a 456, of which there were 3,289 were built, so I was somewhat lucky to see this.

Alex also posted this link today: Judge: Man can’t be forced to divulge encryption passphrase. This is very exciting to me to read. I am a strong supporter of information confidentiality and privacy, and greatly prefer to control what information about me is released. I’ve been pretty loathesome that TSA or border agents could confiscate my laptop for any reason. This makes me want to turn on disk encryption with a quickness.

The really interesting twist is that custom agents first accessed this guy’s laptop without a password, saw his kiddie porn. Then, they shut the laptop down. Later, they needed his password to decrypt the files. The judge ruled he couldn’t be forced to provide it, even after agents had already witnessed the material on his computer.

My apartment management called me up today to bitch that some of my garbage (some stray milkjugs) had been found on the lawn downstairs. I don’t know where they came from, I don’t even drink milk. Out of a fit of apathy and ‘not my problem’ I didn’t ever pick them up. I suspect they belonged to my cute blonde neighbor (or a clever asshole who likes to frame others) who also has had a vacuum sitting out in the breezeway for several days. Cute or not, I’ll throw her under the bus if I have to when they come for me!

Tangentally, apparently corporate titles have their own slang. ‘C-level’ refers to ‘Chief *’, i.e. CEO, CTO, CIO, CSO. I invented a new slang for Alex, ‘D-level’, for directors such as Director of R & D.

Friday began six hours ago, hooooray!

I finally made up my mind to buy an iPhone this week after being convinced to flip through the app store. I decided there’s probably enough useful apps that I’d actually use to make it worthwhile. Foolishly I hit up a few AT&T stores on Sunday and discovered they were all sold out. This morning I went about 15 minute before opening at the Apple Store at Barton Creek mall. Already there was a line of about 25 people. At opening time, they passed out coupons for the three different models, valid to redeem all day up until 6 PM. They quickly ran out of 16 GB black models, all that was left by the time they got to me were 8 GB black and 16 GB white. I was after a 16 GB black, so I was the only one in line without an iPhone.

apple.com says they have more in stock (what, do they ration these things?), tomorrow I’ll try earlier and see what happens.

I discovered why my MacBook Pro kept shutting down. The internal fans have completely failed and it was overheating at 185 F. Now I have a fan sitting here blowing on it, which keeps it at a respectable 134 F. Now to find replacement fans and crack the sucker open again.

Thank you Olympics for bringing us women’s beach volleyball. I had completely forgotten about Kerri Walsh. Somehow I didn’t know she was 6’3″, holy shit that’s tall!

Today I was a passenger in an auto collision! Rob and I were going to lunch (mmm indian curry) when he rear-ended somebody who suddenly was at a dead stop in the middle of Anderson Lane. A good 40 m.p.h. lick, popped the airbags. I knew we were going to hit, I felt the impact, but interestingly I could smell the burned airbag propellant before I realized they had deployed. Rob received some burns on his hands from the airbags as he was holding onto the steering wheel. I tweaked my neck from the seatbelt like I slept on it wrong and can’t turn my head to the right.

In all we’ll all go to sleep tonight and awake to a new day tomorrow. Can’t say so for Rob’s CRV, the front received a heavy amount of damage. Amazingly it was still drivable enough to get off the street, but was making some pretty wicked noises. It’ll be in the shop for a long time. The F150 had like literally three short scrapes on the tailgate and a foot of the bumper was bent down. It clearly came out the winner and makes me glad I drive a truck.

I decided against going to Burning Man this year. With moving coming up, running the spreadsheet of what it’s going to cost, and none of my friends going, my heart just isn’t into it now. Instead one of my friends is flying down that weekend since she still has the week off. One last visitor before I move!

I really make a conscious effort in communications to mean what I say and say what I mean. This gets especially interesting when I “should” say something just to make somebody else feel better. A great example of this is “I’m sorry”. I won’t say it unless I really feel sorry. This obviously causes problems when it’s something intentional I’ve done; I just did it so generally of course I’m not sorry for having done it. I don’t want somebody to patronize me, so I’m not going to patronize others with things I don’t mean.

Along the same lines, I could care less about meaningless small talk. We all do it, asking things like “how do you do?” Really, who cares how me or you are doing, so we just answer “fine.” Then we’ll pretend to be friendly and come back with “you?” “fine.” I guess just there to ease into the actual meat of the discussion. Some might even say it’s being polite. Fortunately I’m a crude person. I suspect this is how I lasted so long at my old job, either having a tough skin or developing a tough skin. I’m beginning to feel my age, I’ve been realizing that I’m getting less and less afraid to say what I think.

Often I see work conversations start off with “how you doing?” immediately followed by some request. What I’ve noticed more than anything are the requests we occasionally receive from other departments to ‘reach out’ to somebody. This phrase annoys me to no end, in my mind I’ll always substitute it with ‘reach around’. In a fit of wiki reading tonight, I ran across ” Why we should remember Bill Lumbergh“. It specifically addresses all that is wrong with ‘reach out’ and “the emptiness of linguistic conventions at work.” I am glad nobody at work says things like “that’d be great”.

I don’t have any answers. I’m just some guy with a keyboard. I will do my part to eliminate empty linguistic convetions one day at a time. hooray!