entombed in the shrine of zeroes and ones

-> *dem* corporate politics scare the crap out of me, because the only response i have to them is violence. and i'm too pretty to go to jail.

Two months since i lost my job, and all i have to show for it are a few headhunters who aren't calling me back anymore, stalled interviews at LinkedIn, a hiring freeze at Yahoo!, and a passel of companies who've just started the getting-to-know-me dance (plus an inquiry from Adobe that had me laughing my ass off and sending a sneering reply to the poor recruiter, and then feeling guilty about it later, and for the love of god, why can't i just get over it, it's been two fucking years, i need some fucking closure).  The real problem here is that i scan craigslist and Simply Hired and there are no jobs that make me say, "Wow, i'd like to work there," or even, "Huh, that sounds kinda cool."  "Meh" is about as good as it gets, and i'm not even talking about all the goddamn Bubble 2.0 companies.  I've been contacted by not just one, but two companies whose product currently consists of a Facebook application.  No, i am not kidding.  And speaking of Facebook, yeah, they're hiring, but as a user, i can tell that being hired as a sysadmin there is a quick way to going all-out shit-flinging crazy; that place has serious technical issues, and i'm sure it all trickles down from that young nitwit at its top, and anyway, they'll become irrelevant in two years, much like Orkut and Friendster.  The point is that i want to avoid another company that'll have the rug pulled out from it by the VC.

I'm not sure if it's that i have to love my job to do it.  But it is crucial that i respect it.  And i can't respect it if i can't relate to it.  Every job i've had since i came to California came through someone i knew, with the exception of my three-week stint at Wired (that came through a contracting firm that was recommended by arian1, not that i'm blaming him).  This time around, my network has not worked, and that's disconcerting.  Yes, i realize it's the holiday season now (like i need another reason to hate it), but i contacted LinkedIn the day i was laid off from Visible Path, and it simply should not take this long for any company of less than 500 people to hire someone (or, failing that, to tell him that they won't hire him).

"Heroes" is a comic book title on the TV screen, and ( my rant is full of spoilers. )

wacky_hijinx

This ought to segue into my oft-promised rant about the dismal world of DC & Marvel, but i've had a migraine all day and i'm feeling a little drained now.

At Esquire, Scott Raab gets his rant on:

Why Bud Selig lets the Yankees turn the 7th-inning stretch into a faux-patriotic ritual — not so incidentally forcing the opposing pitcher to wait an extra five or so minutes while the microcephalic Ronan Tynan quavers his meandering way through "God Bless America" — is a mystery. No other team or town pulls this sort of crap. It's no tribute to America — it's a tribute to George Steinbrenner's sense of entitlement and his monomania, and it's a disgrace to the game.

If another team pulled this on the Yankees, Steinbrenner would raise hell, and he'd be absolutely right to do so. And if the Yanks' pitchers could miss bats the way Tynan misses notes, the Yanks might've had a prayer against the Tribe.

And that's all the gloating I intend to do. There are Clevelanders like Steinbrenner — whose idea of manhood is bullyragging, boasting, and buying respect — but most of us know that sportsmanship means winning and losing with as much dignity, perspective, and grace as one can muster.

In other words, fuck the motherfucking Yankees. In their house. With Paul Byrd. With Joe Borowski. With Rudy Giuliani in his precious little VIP box. With Rocket pouting, feet up in the trainer's table's stirrups, as the team gynecologist pries apart his Hall of Fame labia. With the dickweed Michael Kay babbling about how the Yankees are the better team.

Right. It was the gnats. It was A-Rod. It was Bruce Froemming. It simply isn't possible that the better team wasn't the Yankees, because that simply can't be true in Bombersworld. Just count the ringzzzzzzzzzzzz...

Bye-bye, you sorry bastards. Oh, and God bless America.

I was cleaning out my home directory yesterday and i found this fossilized rant in a file dated 2000/01/17.  I get the feeling that i left it lying around because it was unfinished.  It's a bit emo.  Anyway, here you go.

I write this sober of any foreign drug, drunk only on my anger, my bitterness, my despair.  The steaming heap of shit that our world has become reduces us to bacteria and parasites that feed on it.

Here in this country of freedom, this land of opportunity, we choose to elect our leaders from among a pool of select candidates, not unlike choosing a chicken at the market for our dinner: Does it look fresh?  Is it on special?  Has there been any recent report of a poisonous outbreak of disease that was blamed on this brand of fowl?  We don't KNOW these people, yet we want them to affect our way of life in ways we cannot control beyond the vote.

Hell, we don't even know our neighbors!  Those goddamned antisocial backstabbing little slugs that live next to you, yes, them.  They are the humans with the closest vicinity, yet with whom you have no affinity.  What, make friends with THEM?  Their rotten brats drive you insane, their snooty attitude spawns violent thoughts in you, and their dog ripped up your amaryllises again.

The tribe is dead.  Once people lived together, breathed the same air, took a dump in the same pit, and, horror of horrors, cared about one another and worked together for the good of the tribe.  Or did they?  Is my romantic mind filling itself with happy delusions, to either torment me with hope or pickle me with cynicism?  Can either survive alone, or is their symbiosis unbreakable?

Is democracy truly the biggest joke foisted on us by the ancient Greeks?  In this country, where only white landowners could once vote, candidacy has always been slanted towards the rich or powerful.  Yet you can't escape a basic tenet of democracy: Give a luser a vote and he'll elect a luser.  Clinton was elected after he actually managed to nurse some fledgling hope in the hearts of many to overturn the Bush-Quayle mandate.  What has he given us since?  Monica Lewinsky, "don't ask, don't tell", and Hillary for Senate in NY.  Bush offered us a lip-reading exercise and a continuation of the Reagan mindfuck.  He gave us the Compleat Works of Quayle Malaprops, "this will not be another Vietnam", more Iran-Contra ghosts (hey, he followed through on the Reagan mindfuck continuation!), and his sperm in the form of Gee-Dubya.

Am i glad that Reagan's mind is deteriorating into mush? (Is anyone certain that he wasn't already sick when he was elected president?) I've never been big on Schadenfreude, but i have to admit that there is a certain perverse joy.  It is rather empty, of course; at best, it could be considered karmic retribution or poetic justice.  But that isn't going to fix what he broke.  He fed the notion that America is invulnerable, accountable to no one else in this world.  He fed the War on Drugs with high-and-mighty Nancy.  He presided over the biggest expense on Defense this country has never needed.  He tried to sell us the belief that giving the privileged more leeway would somehow benefit the downtrodden.

Transhumanism, when it is an actual "intellectual and cultural movement" instead of just a decent plot hook for a novel, is a ridiculous dodge.  My objections, though, are not because of the morality of what we might do, which seems to be the bone of contention in the all of the criticisms listed in Wikipedia; i think that's all a bunch of handwringing nonsense.  Instead, the real problem with transhumanism is that it turns away from the problems that we have now by thinking about how we can solve them in the future.  We should be thinking about how to solve these problems now.  How can one think about moving beyond one's humanity when we don't yet know how to effectively be human?

To call yourself a transhumanist is to reveal yourself as the worst sort of elitist asshole, because you're trying to solve your personal inconveniences with technology that doesn't exist.  There are people all over the world dying because they have no clean water; societies still haven't figured out how to have representative leadership that scales as populations increase and that discourages leaders from making a career out of pulling strings; there's (a possibly imagined renaissance of) fundamentalist fuckheads around the world who are trying to stamp out critical thinking; and much more, at the root of all of which lies this: we don't know how to teach our kids how to learn and what to learn in order to make tomorrow better.  So when you talk to me about the Singularity, i'll probably just tell you to fuck off, because there's no way we'll generate artificial intelligence worth a damn when we barely have a clue what natural intelligence is or how it works (and i'm talking wetware here).  Stop wanking to your fantasy of a nanotech-enhanced brain, and spend that energy figuring out how to get along with your neighbor.

I'm guessing you're "stealth" because you don't have the stones to face the brunt of ridicule over your outrageously low offer of $55k for someone to do *everything* for your office.  You're detailing work that will take, at a minimum, 14 hours a day.  No one person is going to be able to work that much and do a GOOD job at it.

Get a goddamned clue.  Hell, get a six-pack of clues.  Hire enough people for the job and PAY THEM WHAT THEY'RE WORTH.  You need two people: an IT guru and an office manager.  You are NOT going to get anyone worth more than shit for $55k, in either job, let alone both.  Your company is in a crucial stage, and getting an idiot or an incompetent now is going to hamstring your company.  You will regret it, guaranteed.  You should be looking at about $70k for the office manager and $85k for the IT person, MINIMUM.  Don't fucking argue with me!  Just fucking do it.

A dog walker?  You people are fucking insane.  It's not 1998 anymore.  You aren't going to get naïve chumps who will work for stock options.  Get real!

rone

A Google search for "fuck the webbys" yields a single hit.  This is preposterous; in a world filled with vapid awards, the Webbys make the Grammys seem meaningful and accurate.  Fuck the Webbys, and fuck the IADAS.

The Flying Spaghetti Monster is the Darwin Fish of the `00s.  It's over.  It's about as hip as the pet rock.  Move on.

Bangalore International Airport fucking sucks.  It's an execrable, typically Third World experience.  Not even Quito's airport at its worst, during construction, was as bad as this.  Only two X-ray machines for everyone, and the metal detectors were so sensitive that i think they were just motion sensors, so the security people ended up waving a wand at every single passenger.  And the "line" to board was a crush of people shifting about, trying to jockey for position — almost identical to the way people drive in Bangalore, and a few people were in the wrong line and almost missed their flight to Bangkok; while some of the blame goes to them for being clueless tourists, the staff's announcements were made by Charlie Brown's parents.

Bangalore is the IT capital of India, so it stands to reason that it's been shuttling a lot more people over at least the last 5 years.  Why hasn't the airport been improved?  Infrastructure is dismal throughout the city, but you'd think the one part that handles the foreigners would be the one that gets attention, for many reasons.  I'm glad i took Gowda's advice to show up 3 hours early, especially because traffic was quite bad (afternoon rush hour, doncha know).

You know, there was this dumb gorefest film in a claustrophic setting that counted Samuel L. Jackson among its stars and scary animals as the nemesis.  It was called "Deep Blue Sea".  It sucked and it did poorly.  Now we have "Pacific Air 121", with all the same core qualities, except this time it's been hyped to death, given a stupid yet catchy title, and somehow you people think it's the greatest thing since sliced bread.  It isn't.  It's still a stupid movie.  The whole "so dumb it's fun" thing has been done to death by pro wrestling, Norm McDonald, and the Bush Administration.  So if that's what you like, sure, go watch the movie.  But let's not pretend that somehow this dumb movie is better than other dumb movies.  I didn't see you people lining up to go watch "Dungeons & Dragons", after all.