khaosx.com

I have a very long commute. It’s around 38 miles one-way, and depending on the day, the weather, and the time of departure, I’m looking at around an hour in the car. I cope by listening to a lot of audio books and podcasts, and it’s generally a happy time, unless it’s raining or there’s a car fire.

Seriously, that was yesterday morning. It took me two hours to get to work, and ran my collection of podcasts to dangerously low levels for the week. It happens…no big deal. Some days you’re the bug, and all that. Today was a bit of an odd one though, and it’s got me wondering just what in the hell happens in my brain sometimes. Traffic was fine, and I’m listening to the first book in the Sookie Stackhouse series (the series of books that "True Blood" is based off of.)

There are two exits I can get off at, and which one I choose is completely time dependent. If I’m doing good on time, I exit early and go by Starbuck’s. If not, I go a mile further and take the direct route to my office. This morning I was doing great on time, so I decided to get  some coffee.

OK, bear with me, the set-up is necessary…

So, the exit becomes a three-lane exit. The two left lanes are for turning left, and there’s a separate lane for turning right. The lane for turning right leads into a short right turn lane off the exit with about twenty yards of solid white line. There is a yield sign, which seems redundant with the solid white line, for those exiting the interstate. I usually check the oncoming traffic and then turn right (well, whip through is a better way to put it) onto the main road. There’s rarely anyone coming, so my biggest concern is getting across three lanes into the turn lane to the development where Starbuck’s is.

This morning, there happened to be a guy in a minivan coming through, and he was trying to cut across the white line, while I was trying to ignore the yield sign. So, we were BOTH in the wrong, as far as technicalities go. No biggie, right? Horns blow, fingers hit the air, and we go on about our business. That’s how that usually plays out. Not this morning.

This morning, we had ESCALATION!!!!

The guy got in behind me and flipped me off, I raised my arms in the universal "What the fuck?" gesture, and we started yelling at each other. Yeah – two grown men, in our cars, where neither one can hear the other. That’s intelligent AND effective, right? And then it got really interesting. He motioned to the side of the road while still flipping me off and yelling, and then screeched into a parking lot. I slammed on my breaks and tore back through the parking lot only to realize that I couldn’t get to where he was.

Yeah, I seriously went back with the intention of getting to the guy and…what? What was I thinking was going to happen?

Let me say, for the record, that I hate confrontation. I cannot stand it, because generally it solves nothing and more often than not makes matters worse. Let me also say that despite the fact that I’m 6′1 and 245 pounds…I’m also a guy that sits at a desk all day long banging on the keyboard and making funny over coffee and doughnuts. I’m not exactly training for the UFC here, ya know? I take (/have taken/will take again) karate, and I am fairly fast and have good reflexes…but this dude might be someone who gets into bar fights on weekends for fun. So, again, what the hell was going through my tiny little mind right then?

Anyway, it ended up ok. I got into an adjacent parking lot, we yelled at each other (he called me a jerk off, I called him a fucking moron, we quoted road rules to each other), and I drove off to get my coffee.

I’ve got to start keeping a lid on my temper though – that kind of Mickey Mouse shit is going to get me in trouble one day.

So, it appears that the company I work for, which is otherwise a fairly sane and sensible collection of folks, has decided to "go green". Now, don’t get me wrong. I think we should all have some sense of stewardship for the planet, some sense of ecological responsibility.

I must confess though, this news from my company has me scratching my head.

HR drug a box through the corridors today, and dropped off a present to all the full-time employees.  A water bottle.

The idea here is that we will no longer offer bottled water in our vending machines, and we won’t be putting out plastic cups for people to use at our oft-broken, self-purifying water fountains.

Instead, people will now be saving the planet one water bottle at a time.

The kicker is, we’re still going to sell bottled water by the case to our customers. We’re not doing anything about the hundred or so cars that drive in every day. We’re not going to do anything about requiring business casual attire (which means dry cleaning). We still haven’t put in the bike rack. We still don’t do anything to encourage carpooling.

No, we’re going to spend money on water bottles. It’s a token gesture, barely. It’s almost offensive.

Seriously, check this out…

That’s just a small sampling of the parking at ONE of our HQ facility buildings.

If we allowed even 10% of these people (of the 30-50% of our HQ staff who are able and ready to work from home) to work from home 2 days a week, the positive impact to the environment would be something truly worth crowing about, and the benefits to morale would be priceless.

Instead, as so often happens, we embrace the idea of the winds of change without actually embracing the change. We stick with what has always been the norm, because it’s easier, or gives the impression that somehow it makes us more effective and professional (rather than understanding that true professionalism happens no matter what you’re wearing, or where you’re working from).

What a pity.

Update: We started a carpooling initiative, which is a very good start. We even have a few parking spaces marked for carpool only. Given that my cube neighbor still hangs his bike in his cube, I’m guessing we haven’t gotten around to the bike rack.

Pictured right is the screen I ran into on my system this morning after a couple of strange reboots and errors. "Odd", thought I. Since I’ve just gone through a case migration, so I ran through the usual checks – cable secured, proper port, etc.

Vista rolled through a consistency check, and "sorted" a bunch of files (which is never good), and we wound up here after the reboot. Well crap. This is just not good. What you’re seeing in that screenshot is the Intel RAID manager saying "I can’t see the volume anymore – you’re hosed."

This is a catastrophe. Well, sort-of.

I’m lucky in that I actually did a backup of my critical data prior to the case swap, and unlucky in that I now have to go through the gyrations of troubleshooting the disk problem and reinstalling the OS and Apps. I’ve been on 64bit Vista for a month or so now, and I haven’t done my usual job of creating an unattended, so if I go back to Vista, I have to do a full-on manual install.

I’m actually considering going back to XP, for a variety of reasons that I’ll get into in a later post. Suffice to say that I’m really not seeing enough of a compelling reason to stick with Vista. It’s just so…yawn.

As a side note, my first thought was "Oh my god – I’ve lost all of the 1000+ pictures I just scanned in". I then realized that I had uploaded all of them to flickr, which was a relief even after I remembered that I had a full backup of them on a local drive.

Further updates as events warrant.

Wow – this should pretty well be the nail in Twitter’s coffin. Google announces that they’ve acquired Jaiku (the web presence that I use). I’m curious to see if they have a direction, or it this is a portfolio pickup.

Google’s Blog

*Editor’s note: The reason I have never been on TWiT is because I make completely wrong statements like "this should pretty well be the nail in Twitter’s coffin".

One of the neater functions of Wordpress (the software I run khaosx on) is the ability to set the system up to recieve posts via email. Anything you see in the category “moblog” is something I posted via email.

It’s really easy:

1. Setup a mailbox
2. Set Wordpress to look for email in the box.
3. Setup a cron job to run the page that looks for email.

My cron job runs every 5 minutes, and uses a command line broswer (CURL) to process a script file that dumps the email into a post.

Here’s where the train started to leave the track:

>/dev/null

The UNIX folks know where I’m headed now. For the rest of you, here’s the thing. The cron job takes any output from the job itself and emails it to the default system email account.

UNLESS YOU REDIRECT THAT OUTPUT TO /DEV/NULL

(/dev/null is the ether, the void, the place where all things go, the universal trashcan).

This site has been online and checking for mail posts since April. The default system account is NEVER checked by yours truly. Until today, that is.

When I found 69,490 emails in the system account. I suspect that about 69,200 of them are emails from cron.

What a doofus.