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appall me maybe
Jan. 27th, 2013 09:19 am"Is this your garden, sir?"
"One of the plots is mine, yes."
"We're here because we're concerned about the purity of our food supply."
"OK, but the community garden rules are very clear. No herbicides or pesticides, no chemical fertilizers."
"That's good, sir, but there's an even bigger scourge that nobody's talking about. Sir, do you aid your plant growth with telepathy?"
I stared. "Uh... are you serious?"
"Very serious! The effects of telepathy-aided produce on the human mind is one that weakens resolve and makes us more vulnerable to mind control from corporations and the government! There are studies that—"
"Look, that's the sort of technique you might find in an agrifactory, where they can afford to find, let alone pay, a telepath. My wife and i do all the work in our plot. Are you saying that we look like telepaths?" They started gibbering and i cut them off. "Look, i don't give a shit what WorldNetDaily or Alex Jones have been telling you. There's no actual scientific proof of what you're saying. Now please leave."
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2wanda came up once they left. "Honey, would you go think at the romanesco? It's not looking very good and i don't think it's the gopher.""Not bad, man, can't wait to get home, `cause i really have to piss."
"Just go right here, man!"
"Aw, no, man!"
"Serious! When you gotta go, you gotta go..."
"That's OK, i can hold it a little longer. Besides, what would my mother say?"
"Yeah, if you got caught, that'd be bad. They got me for that, man."
"Really? Man!"
"Yeah, i thought the judge would just throw it out of court, but bam! Eighty-five bucks!"
"Well, it coulda been worse."
"Yeah, coulda been... all right, man, see ya."
"Take care."
metaphors that don't work, part n of x
Dec. 20th, 2012 05:38 pmmy face is a grenade and my tongue is the pin
dear ubuntu: "fuck" and "you"
Dec. 12th, 2012 03:27 pm# apt-get install openjdk-7-jre [...] The following packages have unmet dependencies: openjdk-7-jre: Depends: openjdk-7-jre-headless (>= 7~b117~pre1-0lucid1) but it is not going to be installed E: Broken packages # apt-get install openjdk-7-jre-headless [...] The following packages have unmet dependencies: openjdk-7-jre-headless: Depends: openjdk-7-jre-lib (>= 7~b117~pre1-0lucid1) but it is not going to be installed E: Broken packages # apt-get install openjdk-7-jre-lib [...] The following packages have unmet dependencies: openjdk-7-jre-lib: Depends: openjdk-7-jre-headless (>= 7b89~pre1) but it is not going to be installed E: Broken packages
the problem with devops
Dec. 7th, 2012 04:31 pmGene Kim is a guy who's accomplished a lot more in his career than i have. I kinda-sorta met him in passing at an LSPE Meetup and he seemed like a nice guy. But his recent writeup, "Why We Need DevOps Now", which title i agree with, is just not good at all (i used the word "terrible" on Twitter, which someone called me on, so maybe i'll try to dial back the hyperbole).
As my friend John Willis told me after I dismissed DevOps as just another marketing fad, “DevOps is the best chance at relevance that IT Operations has had in thirty years.” I immediately realized that he was right.Is that really all it took?
"John, it's a fad."
"Gene, it's our last, best hope."
"OMG UR RITE!!"
DevOps is real (this article says everything that needs to be said about it) and also a fad, in the same way that Agile Software Development is real and a fad:
A good business avails itself of forward-looking approaches in order to contend with the firehose of change that is our industry's lifeblood. But we cannot mistake these approaches for anything other than a tool.
BOSS: "We're going to try something called agile programming. That means no more planning and no more documentation. Just start writing code and complaining." WALLY: "I'm glad it has a name." BOSS: "That was your training."
Act I begins with IT Operations, where we’re supporting a large, complex revenue generating application. The problem is that everyone knows that the application and supporting infrastructure is... fragile.I smell a setup. The scenario described is clearly the result of bad management, who failed to see this sort of undesirable performance down the road and act upon it to preclude the fragility, and it has been that way every time i've encountered it in my career. It is not, as implied, a result of traditional IT operations.
In Act 2, our life gets worse when the business starts making even bigger commitments to Wall Street, often dreamed up by art or creative writing majorsI have no idea what he's talking about here. In my experience, publicly-traded businesses (which would be the ones who make a commitment to shareholders, not Wall Street) don't usually have art or creative writing majors making major business commitments; the more likely case is that those positions are staffed with MBAs. Privately held businesses, on the other hand, tend to be beholden to venture capital firms, whose presence can become far more unwelcome and meddlesome than that of your typical shareholder.
We all know that there must be better way, right? DevOps is the proof that it’s possible to break the core, chronic conflict, so we can deliver a fast flow of features without causing chaos and disruption to the production environment.YOU NEED MANAGEMENT BUY-IN. YOU NEED THE SUPPORT OF THE PEOPLE WHO CONTROL THE MONEY TO HIRE THE RIGHT PEOPLE AND PURCHASE THE RIGHT EQUIPMENT, THE PEOPLE WHO SET THE COMPANY'S EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL STRATEGIES, THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE YOUR BACK WHEN YOU TELL THE COMPANY, "THIS WILL HURT, BUT IN 12 MONTHS, WE WILL NO LONGER LIMP." Painting DevOps as a panacæa does all of us who believe in DevOps and work in DevOps a tremendous disservice. To unfuck a fucked company, you need to fix the culture. This is why Netflix is a shining example — not because of their use of DevOps, but because their culture enabled them to use their talent in a massively constructive and creative fashion.
"Before you can solve a complex problem, you must first have empathy for the other stakeholders."Before you can solve a complex problem, you must first understand it. One of the important factors in understanding it is empathizing with the other parties. It is not, however, the first thing to do.
Perhaps i'm being too harsh on what's less of a thoughtful article and more a plug for his book. But i do not find the appeal in being sold on DevOps by starting off with an elaborate strawman.
this is what happens before i have coffee
Dec. 5th, 2012 07:30 amWhat the world needs right now is another dance video parody: "Stallman Style".
no good deed goes unpunished
Oct. 24th, 2012 07:09 pmI had a jones for new music, but i want to avoid giving Amazon my business until they stop doing shit like dodging taxes, opposing union organization, and trying to kill warehouse workers. So, hey, buy local. The two local music stores are Streetlight Records and Rasputin Music. I found Streetlight's site suboptimal for finding stuff i wanted, so i went with Rasputin, paying my sales tax like a good citizen and my shipping fee like a good "buy local" pinko liberal (i could have driven there, but ZOMG FOSSIL FUELS and anyway, i figured that there was no way that the store would have in stock some of what i wanted). The shipment ended up split because one disc was on backorder, yet it arrived ahead of the rest of my order. And then i got one completely wrong item, which i'll have to return. So thanks, Rasputin and Streetlight, for sending me back grumbling to Amazon for my next music purchase.
i'm moving up in the world
Oct. 23rd, 2012 04:24 pmI had a short hallway talk with the CEO about my experience with the eBay integration; a few hours later, i was the first plebe to whom he introduced our brand new CTO. Everything's comin' up Milhouse!
Posted via LiveJournal app for Android.
Strike one: it's TechCrunch.
Strike two: it's an "online financial advisor."
Strike three:
3 percent of the universe of venture capital firms – generate 95 percent of the industry’s returns... Those premier venture firms succeed because they have proprietary knowledge of the characteristics of winning companies.BULL-FUCKING-SHIT. These "premier" venture firms succeed because they sit on a ton of capital through early lucky strikes, which lets them absorb failures while at the same time being far more attractive to new startups because, hey, they're "premier". It would be far more revealing to show what each "premier" VC's success rate is, but that's probably "proprietary" information, too. It's nothing more than a just-so story about why a "premier" VC is "premier". If they actually knew what the characteristics of winning companies were, they wouldn't be funding them; they would be founding them.
indisciplined
Aug. 3rd, 2012 11:13 amI write this poem under duress
I'm so involved, i don't know what to think
I repeat myself when under stress
The meter's a shambles, the scansion's a mess
The constraints of the form drive me to drink
I write this poem under duress
Far worse than playing little games like chess
No matter how closely i study it, my thoughts won't link
I repeat myself under stress
I tried looking at it for a whole day, i confess
No matter how i take it apart, my expectations sink
I write this poem under duress
I strive for more and yet end up with less
No matter how i break it down, it's just not my kink
I repeat myself under stress
I don't know whom i'm trying to impress
I feel like a fraud and a fink
I write this poem under duress
I repeat myself when under stress
god bless the USPS
Jul. 10th, 2012 09:54 pmWe received today a blue envelope from Romney for President, Inc. (not addressed to us, i assure you — the previous tenant had sent money to the RNC), marked in red letters, DO NOT BEND - PHOTO ENCLOSED. The envelope is well and truly bent. Thank you, Mr. Postman.
feliz día del padre a Louis Echeverri
Jun. 17th, 2012 03:03 pmMy dad is a nerd. Like every nerd i know, he was a nerd from very young, back in a small town in the Andes of Antioquia, Colombia. A huge Kafka fan, he used the pseudonym "José K." when writing essays for publication. He's good with tools (despite the occasional accident); he built us a toad-in-the-hole table ("juego de sapo"). He taught me how to drink like a grownup (and the lesson eventually stuck). He taught me how to be a loving husband. Today's his 40th Father's Day, and i hope that he's having a really good one.
not that i'm that eager to get to work
Jun. 11th, 2012 07:29 amMy morning commute train pulled in as i was walking from my car to the platform. This means i have about 3 minutes to buy a ticket and board. Today, unfortunately, there was a line. On one machine, a couple tried to buy an $8.75 ticket with quarters. On the other, the woman in front of me kept trying her credit card and getting rejected by the reader. I eventually tired of this nonsense, stuck my card in, and it accepted it readily. The woman was so confused that she neglected to thank me. Then, of course, the reader rejected my card when i wanted to pay for my ticket, but it gave in on the third try (i don't have my Clipper card loaded at the moment for Complex Plot Reasons). The quarters kids were still at it when i left, but made it to the train with 20 seconds to spare, so i guess that i could have not been in such a hurry. But $8.75 is an acceptable one-time price to make sure i don't miss my train.
Posted via LiveJournal app for Android.
Q: What's a frat boy's favorite chemical element?
A: BRO-mine!
