entombed in the shrine of zeroes and ones

My consumption of social media was heading to a bad place and taking my attention span with it, so i've logged out of Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ in my browsers and devices.  Instead, i'll use LiveJournal to crosspost stuff to FB/Tw for when i actually have something useful to share, and people can comment on LJ with either account if they want me to see it right away, or on FB/Tw and i'll maybe look at it someday.  Meanwhile, i can work on focusing on stuff i want to get done at work and at home.

In the meantime, this story about chinlone, Burma's de facto national pastime, is a long but richly rewarding read.

Everyone is fired
Everyone is no longer part of the team
Everyone is fired
Now go and pack your things

Things probably aren't going so well when i find myself muttering, "You are going to eat a huge big bag o' dicks, my friend," to the hedge trimmer.

But i have beer now, so i think i'm good.

@ronebofh: DevOps in the Time of Cholera

@palecur: Memories of my Melancholy NOCMonkeys

@palecur: Chronicles of an Outage Foretold

@ronebofh: One Hundred Years of On-Call

@palecur: No One Writes to the Kernel

@ronebofh: The General in His LDAP-rinth

@palecur: Of Love and Other Daemons

I remember reading, as a kid, a dramatization of the British Antarctic Expedition, which was effectively a race to reach the South Pole for the first time between Robert Falcon Scott and Norway's Roald Amundsen.  The story was told from Scott's perspective and it was somewhat tragic.  Thinking upon it now, it seems like the heroic tragedy of the failure of Scott's expedition outshines Amundsen's accomplishment, which might be a result of better British PR, or perhaps just the cultural proximity of our nations (i recall also the story of Robert Peary being the first to reach the North Pole, and of course Peary was American, except it turned out upon later determination that he missed).

I discovered I Like Trains (né iLiKETRAiNS) on Pandora (although i can't pinpoint on what station; easy guess would be Sigur Rós), and i happened to come across a video one particular song of theirs, "Terra Nova", and it was only upon viewing the video that i realized that it is a reference to the Scott expedition, which turns the song from merely gloomy into harrowing.  I didn't expect that the video, which starts out with an almost cheap feeling with obvious models, would provoke such feeling.

How could I have led these men
To their demise and they just follow?
Exploration's last great prize
It wasn't mine

And more's the shame
You will remember my name

Great God, this is an awful place
I do not think that we can hope
For any better things now

Oh, the end, cannot be far
It cannot be far, I cannot wait
Exploration's last great prize
A saving grace, it wasn't mine

And more's the shame
You will remember my name

And more's the shame
You will remember my name

I'm sick of my smart phone experience.  Motorola has done a shitty job at keeping Android up to date on the original Droid and the Droid 4.  In addition, i want to avoid the temptation of a hand-held distraction.  Right now, my first choice would be a plain phone that can act as a WAP, plus a small tablet like a Nexus 9 or iPad Mini.  That way, my phone will just be a phone, and if i truly need to do something that requires Internet access, i'll pull out the tablet.

The crux is the first part: the plain phone with wiffy hotspot.  Do you, gentle reader, know of such an animal?  If not, do you have an alternative suggestion?  I'm not going to get an iPhone or any other smart phone; i want a phone that is just a phone, like in the old days, when we beat out text messages with rocks on a 10-digit keypad.  Any other suggestions are welcome.

I'm currently listening to NPR First Listen's streaming preview of Sleater-Kinney's new album, No Cities to Love.  And i dropped some coin on tickets to go see them at the Hollywood Palladium with my stepdaughter and her husband, while 2wanda babysits our adorable grandson.

I'm also working for eBay again, on the OpenStack support team.  So far, so good.

Microsoft is rebranding Nokia as "Microsoft Lumia".  Meanwhile, Google has launched "Inbox by Gmail", a tacit admission that Gmail is a failure (the debate, really, is where exactly the failure is; is it interface, data harvesting, something else?).

My humble suggestion: Microsoft should buy Inbox, then combine it with Outlook and rebrand it as 'Outbox'.