Most of you probably are already aware of the Net Neutrality debate, and the ridiculousness of some of the things that have been said.
Here’s The Daily Show’s coverage:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=SIn_J_jxf-o
And here’s a sound clip that has the whole speech:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=5b4JsgqJrrI
Hopefully it won’t clog your tubes.
Team Shadow successfully completed the fiendish tasks set forth by Fire Lake’s demonic horde and recovered their souls from the clutches of Agenorath. Over a period of 40 straight hours K-mart, Max Powers, Trey, Kaiser, Machine, Bollywood, Amiya (who never had a nickname stick) and myself (die-hard) completed puzzles ranging from reading invisible ink on rocks to melting metal balls to live action games of Lemmings to
In hour 22 (6 am sunday) i got violently ill, i think due to the McDonald’s we had consumed. I decided that it would be unwise to continue on given how i was feeling. After that puzzle we had a 2 hour waiting period anyway, so I headed back to my apartment to see if i would feel better after napping. I slept through my alarm and Amiya’s subsequent phone call. I awoke at 9:30, still feeling sick, but better than before, and heard that my team was southbound to Tacoma. I went back to unconsciousness until 2:00 when i called them up and said I would like to rejoin them the next time they were in Redmond. Turns out that happened around 5:30 and we finished out the game at 9:30pm.
One of the best times was when my fingers were stained yellow with Iodine and my palm was green because of a felt tip marker incident. Pictures at an indeterminate point in the future.
I should get back to work.
Quick, name as many Supreme court justices as you can.
You didn’t do very well, did you? I sure didn’t. O’Conner retired, Rehnquist passed away. I think the only judges whose names I honestly remember are Ruth Bader Ginsburg (perhaps due to the Scrubs reference) and Antonin Scalia. I could probably have pulled Samuel Alito and John Roberts out of the dusty portions of my brain due to their recentness. Last i checked there’s 9 justices and I only got 4.
Anyway, I was reading wikipedia and that naturally led to a massive loss of time. One of the things that i thought was particularly interesting is that with the appointments of Roberts and Alito (both Catholic) there are now 5 Catholics sitting the bench of our nation’s highest court. For reference, about 1 in 4 Americans are Catholic. 2 of the 9 are Jewish, 2% of America is. The remaining 2 are Protestant (1 Episcopal, 1 claims no denomination) compared to 52% of America.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Supreme_Court_of_the_United_States
It’s hot in Seattle. I’m going to go as far as to say it’s hotter here than where you are. You will of course object because most of you live in either Austin (high today of99) or Sacramento (high today of 111 (good grief)) and both of those places posted higher highs than Redmond’s measly 93 degrees. But the issue at stake is not whether it’s hotter in your city or mine, the issue is how hot is it where you are right now. Since most of you are inside as evidenced by the fact that you’re reading my blog, and most of you are in the previously mentioned cities (or other cities in Texas) that probably means you’re sitting in a room that’s between 70 and 78 degrees because you have air conditioning. consider yourself lucky, because my room is currently 88 degrees with the windows open and the fan on in the middle of the night. I’m considering going and sleeping at Microsoft. This is why I am making the blanket statement that it is hotter here than where you are (unless you’re reading this in Seattle, in which case you already feel my pain).
I would like to issue the following people an exemption from the above paragraph: Ting, who was in the Dominican Republic sans A/C and Sarah whose A/C in Austin broke down, though she got to flee to Al and Dylan’s. I’m also going to give honerable exemptions to Al and Dylan for being honarable and providing Sarah with cool shelter.
That is all.
On wednesday night I installed spamassassin for Austin Stone. Because of Newton’s Second law or perhaps more accurately Finagle’s Law this resulted in Outlook Web Access ceasing to function. The other lovely websites on our box were humming along nicely, so I naturally assumed I had broken Exchange, which sends me into alternating fits of uncontrollable rage and inconsolable depression. Exchange is among the greatest pieces of software in existance when it’s working and a force of evil when it is not.
Turns out SpamAssassin is written in Perl (i knew this already) and when you install ActivePerl it helpfully creates some script bindings in IIS. The problem is that it does a terrible job of it and to make matters worse does it even if you tell it not to do IIS inegration. It installs 2 script mappings, but fails to provide a path to the executable for the second one. IIS apparently completely chokes on the default application pool (in which OWA runs) if someone doesn’t give a path (an SDET somewhere needs to be poked with something sharp). Now i’ve finally cleared that script mapping, and now it’s just a matter of somehow undoing all the stuff i tried to do to fix it.
500 - Internal Server Error
Yesterday was very strange among my days here. I ended up heading into work pretty late (that’s not strange) on the way in I got my first speeding ticket on a road that I would describe as a Microsoft driveway if it weren’t for the fact that Eddie Bauer world headquarters is right there. The cop was generous in that he rounded down the reading and didn’t double the ticket for the construction zone that was like 30 yards in front of where I stopped.
I was at work for a whole 2 hours before the Texas/Texas A&M olympics, which was fun. We lost. Boo.
I then spent a few hours hanging out with some interns at an Irish Pub/Cajun Resteraunt. No those aren’t two seperate places, it’s called the Celtic Bayou.
Headed home and read some Dune and was about to drift off to sleep around 1am when I suddenly remembered that I had said I would look into Austin Stone’s resurgent spam problem. Apparently GFI’s trial period had expired and that it had finally decided to stop checking spam for free. Based on the logs i rebooted the server around 2:20am. It’s always fun to be sitting 2000 miles away from a server in the middle of the night hoping that the server will in fact come back online, knowing that if it doesn’t you have to wake up like 3.5 hours later to talk whoever hits the office first through the process of getting the server back up.
Now i’m back at work. For some reason the interns and new grads in my group were tapped to forgo actually getting things done so that we could prepare presentations for an event that I’m expecting to be an endless repetition of the following conversation:
person: What’s CRM?
me: CRM means Customer Relationship Management
person: oh
me: I have a demo that is interesting to business people
person: that’s ok, i’m going to go see what’s going on at the (XBox|Windows Mobile|MSN|Media Player|Internet Explorer) booth
me: please, take me with you
person backs away slowly making sure not to make any sudden movements
The problem of making something free is that it tends to lead to overconsumption. Witness the following chart.
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There’s something a little strange about having champagne and cake at 4:30 in the afternoon while at work. Life goes on.
This morning i awoke at 7:30 to the blaring sounds of Tejano music. When i say blaring i mean it sounded like it was coming from my alarm clock at maximum volume and then some. This was extremely annoying and represents just one more reason i am dissatisfied with our neighbors. Though to be fair the only things they do that really affect me are their children screaming outside in the morning and their guests parking in one of our parking spots. Still.
I’m excited about the vagabond show, but i think that’s mainly because anything Mark does i find completely hilarious (by which i mean his comedic endeavours). Dialing in is a masterpiece.
For the last week or so i’ve been having very realistic dreams, to the point that sometimes i’ll go to sleep in the dream and when i wake up i’ll think the stuff actually happened until i realize that there was some inconsistancy, even if it’s not the inconsistency that would be most obvious. I realized one of the dreams was a dream because my birkenstocks were different. When i woke up yesterday i had no idea where i was. I don’t know if any of that is bad, hopefully i’m still sane (or at least what passes for sane in my life). This paragraph brought to you by Dave’s emo side.
Every job i’ve ever had i would have done for free. I’m not saying that every day i would have gladly just given my time, but by and large if i was independently wealthy and didn’t have to work i would be willing to do every job i’ve had. Until this one. Which by some standards would make this my worst job ever. Actually, come to think of it, by the only standard that even remotely matters to me it’s my worst job ever. Which is kinda ridiculous since i’m liking the city much more this time around. It’s still behind Austin, Sacramento and the Bay Area in terms of where i’d like to live. Hmmm….that makes it the worst place i’ve ever lived, but not in as negative a way. By the way please don’t read this post and be concerned that i’m getting depressed (Mom). I’m hardly the first person to not like their summer job, and the money is tough to beat (except by the job across the lake that i really liked that would have paid ~$1000/mo better) And there’s still sunshine, so that’s good.
Midpoint.