davemclain.com

Microsoft has a company policy known as “eating your own dogfood” or “dogfooding” for short, which basically means using Microsoft products whenever possible specifically internal dev builds to essentially provide 70,000 beta testers which is great until you realize you’re advocating making 70,000 people do their work on less than beta software, even worse given that the members of that organization who make the products have very little tolerance for wasting their time on app freezes, etc.

It was in that spirit that I joined my laptop to the Austin Stone domain, because I was tired of retyping my credentials every time I wanted to access a database or remote desktop. In retrospect that makes about as much sense as removing my clutch because I want to drive an automatic. Because I’m now using a different user profile, I lost most of my settings (including my firefox extensions, I didn’t realize the internet still had ads) as well as now being subject to group policy. I feel like i need to send out an apology to the staff (or at least TJ and Murk) for the policy that locks the computer after 15 minutes of activity, which makes watching a DVD annoying as all get up. It’s a very intelligent security move though.

I’m back home in Austin, TX. If ever again it looks like I’m considering moving anywhere else please remind me that I’m either inebriated or retarded, with both being a good answer too. At some earlier time I suggested that the odds of me landing in Seattle were somewhere around 30%, which may have been true around the Y in Oak Hill, but by the time i reached the apex of the eastbound 290 to northbound Mopac flyover the percentage had gone down to the probability that somebody would pay me 250,000/ear straight out of school. I don’t care if i have to work tech support to stay here and can only eat 2 days out of every 3, I’m home.

Apparently I’m a 2.0 student at Austin Community College, and not in a Web 2.0 way, in a straight C GPA kinda way.

2 days remain of my Microsoft internship. I’m contemplating making a permanent page on the site that gives the odds for me ending up at various locations. I’d currently put 3:1 odds on Amazon, 20:1 odds on Microsoft, taking into account that a 3:1 payout means a 30% chance or less of it actually happening.

Every Microsoft product since like Windows 95, or one of the other releases in the stone age, has been accompanied by a 25 alphanumeric code (36^25 = 8.08281277 x 10^38) and after seeing somewhere around 200 product keys and memorizing at least 2 XP volume license keys (including FCKGW) I keep thinking that I see patterns. Maybe that’s a sign that i need to stop doing IT work, but I feel like John Nash (the insanity part, not the genius part) in A Beautiful Mind.

Today’s Penny-Arcade, and I’m using the phrase ‘today’ in the sense that i haven’t slept yet, discussed the nefariousness of monthly recurring charges that sneak up on you without your knowledge or more than your tacit consent. I just discovered that I am currently in such a system, namely Yahoo music. I seem to recall blogging about that recently (very recently for my blogging frequency) and how much I love the system. I still do, I think I’m in the process of downloading an amount of music that can really only be described as obscene.

When I started with the service that lets me engage in unhealthy aural gorging (self referential blog linking is a sign of a corrupt consciousness) I was incredibly satisfied paying $6.99/month for the music, and at the time told anybody who would listen that I would gladly pay $25/month for a service that would let me download whatever I want and put it on my iPod. I’m 2 mp3 players later (I’ve got a Dell DJ that was apparently fully working at the beginning of the summer, if anybody is interested) and now I’m kinda upset that if I want to keep using my music with my portable device it will cost me $9.99/month. I am of course their willing puppet, as Lindsay pointed out to me that any headphones purchase I may consider should take into account that they will live on my neck. Worse than the 3 dollars/month that I’ll gladly pay until I’m wormfood is that they decided to just switch me to the monthly billing instead of letting me renew annually. I guess I can’t really be too angry about that though, since I’m rather dissatisfied with the billing methods of the 2 services I do pay for annually (my web hosting and covenant eyes, the former who I keep meaning to cancel, the latter who weren’t able to successfully figure out my credit card expiration).

Statistical analysis gets scary good when datasets get large. This has literally led to my music collection knowing what music I like better than I do. I was listening to the Yahoo Music radio player today because my laptop’s AC adapter died the death, and it stuck mostly to music that i already had in my collection, but then using the hive mind that they have down in the Valley (Silicon, not Brownsville) they played music that they thought I would like, and I did, a lot. For particularly good songs, I would email myself a reminder to download them.

When I got home I discovered that I had already downloaded the 2 artists’ albums I had just never gotten around to actually listening to them. This is because a month or so back I went crazy and downloaded every other album that they recommended to me, which amounted to like 8 gigs of music.

With 400 GB of storage, I kinda wish there was an option to optimistically download music so that I can sit down, tell my computer “play me music you think i’d like” and have a lag free experience enjoying unheard music and music that I’d heard but never remembered to download on my own. Oh well, I guess I’ll just have to wait another 12 months or so.

Connection to the last post: Amazon.com has made a business out of recommendation technology.

My continuum of job satisfaction:
Microsoft < Jesuit <= Austin Capital < Amazon.com
I was hanging out with Blake (an Amazonian) and various Microsofties and at one point in the conversation we were talking about our respective companies and I used the pronoun we to refer to Amazon and the pronoun yall to refer to Microsoft. Grammar aside, I feel more loyalty to a company who I haven’t worked for in nearly a year than I do for the company who cuts my paychecks.

I thought this was going to become a full post, but I don’t think i can really expand that thought further.

The ship of Theseus problem is in its simplest form: “If you were to replace every plank in a ship over time would it still be the same ship?”

My first computer was named bluebeast (if you have any comments about whether naming a computer is weird, save them until you can passably describe the interrelation of DNS, DHCP and the SMB protocol (optionally successfully configuring the SAMBA implementation)). It’s first iteration was in a full height (read: huge) server box that was a very distinct blue, hence bluebeast; it was first booted at the end of 2002 largely built from components provided as Christmas presents. It’s first major upgrade was Christmas 2003 (freshman year of college) consisting of a DVD burner, a doubling of RAM and an addition of some 300GiB of hard drive space. Moving back to California for the summer, I discovered that moving the case back was impractical/expensive, so I tossed it. Over the summer I acquired a low end PCI card allowing for dual monitors. At the end of sophomore year (Summer, 2005) I moved to Seattle and my computer did not boot again. It wouldn’t even POST, implying at the very least motherboard failure.

Finally I discovered a deal compelling enough to justify resurrecting the beast. New motherboard and cpu for 80 bucks, and the motherboard was low-end enough that it would take my old DDR memory. The main goal of this machine was to serve as a glorified stereo, being able to play my Yahoo music software over my 5.1 system (which has also been mothballed since my sophomore year), but then I realized that it was a huge waste of an Athlon 3000+, 768MiB RAM, 400GiB HD system to simply sit there playing music, especially given that it’d be running Windows (DRM is your friend). I have therefore decided to build it out into a full blown windows media center editio box. Unfortunately that means I have another 200 bucks minimum that I have to drop on it, but I think the ability to use a remote to control 40GiB of music + TiVo functionality + DVD playback should be worth it.

Next friday is my last day, so if you want anything that Microsoft sells at a profit, tell me and I can get it cheap.