Anyway, I thought these two pages were interesting:

(Pre-usual, click image for biggification.)

I’d like to make fun of it, but actually their predictions aren’t far off, even the satellite radio/TV and the fiber-to-the-home. (Although I can’t get fiber to my house, screw you Verizon, other people can so I guess it still counts.) I think I’ve even seen a wristwatch with a radio in it, although I’m not sure.

The self-tuning radio one is just odd… I’m pretty sure that radios in 1982 could “re-call” stations, considering the radio in my dad’s truck from 1965 could.

The CD prediction is cheating, since CDs were invented several years before this book was authored.

(Click for enlargification)

The recruiter’s name is anonymized, but not the company he belongs to (as that would defeat the point). Also I busted the job placement URL, so don’t try to follow it. The large text size and seemingly-random application of bold is original, as are the lists that start with question marks.

I received your resume from the Web It looks like you would be interested in hearing more about opportunity an that we are recruiting for .

If you are interested in this opportunity, please apply online at our career site by req number. Your resume will be on my desk top for immediate consideration.

I’ve included job description for your consideration below. The position is located in Poulsbo, WA.

Please apply directly to the requisition. We cannot take resumes directly due to OFCCP requirements, except through our web site.

If this contact is in error or you wish to be removed from our data base, please use the unsubscribe button close to the signature. I apologize if this is the case.

Regards,

Alan Smithee

The Integrated Intelligence Solutions (I2S) Operation of SAIC – Operations, Intelligence and Security Business Unit(Maritime Solutions Division) has an opening for a Senior Software Developer to participate in technical development tasks and the development of software and hardware architectures for our customers.

PRIMARY RESPONSIBILITIES:
Successful candidate will be able to:
?Perform object oriented software development as a technical lead of a team in a structured agile process environment (Feature Driven Development).
?Organize, participate, and positively contribute in technical team meetings.
?Mentor junior software developers by providing guidance in technical execution.
?Assist in the development of software architectures with management, peers, and customers.
?Provide technical suggestions to management for software product and process improvements.
?Interface with customers to document requirements and provide status.
?Generate test plans and perform detailed software unit testing using established tools and processes (JUnit, CppUnit).
?Report directly to software development manager on a regular basis.
?Perform Object Oriented Analysis and Design.
?Document Software Designs using Unified Modeling Language (Sparx Enterprise Architect).
?Administer server software (Subversion, MS SQL Server, Internet Information Server, Flash Media Server).
?Manage software configuration control and deployment.
?Generate marketing and technical documentation (MS Office).

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS:
Experience in:
?Feature Driven Development Process, MS Project.
?Object Oriented Analysis and Design, Unified Modeling Language, Sparx Enterprise Architect.
?MS Windows, Visual Studio, Linux, Eclipse, .Net, C++, C#, Java, ASP.Net, GSoap, SQL, Flash, XML, VirtualBox.
?JUnit, CppUnit.
?Subversion, MS SQL Server, Internet Information Server, Flash Media Server.
?MS Office.

Required Education/Experience:
Bachelors Degree and eight years related technical experience.

SAIC is a FORTUNE 500® scientific, engineering, and technology applications company that uses its deep domain knowledge to solve problems of vital importance to the nation and the world, in national security, energy and the environment, critical infrastructure, and health. For more information, visit www.saic.com. SAIC: From Science to Solutions®

SAIC offers a competitive salary and benefits package. For Immediate consideration, please apply on-line at .www.saic.com, through requisition number 167512. SAIC is an Affirmative Action Employer who values cultural diversity in the workplace. EOE, M/F/D/V”

To apply to the Poulsbo ,WA location:Candidates may apply directly to this job posting on SAIC.com through: https://cp-its-rmprd.saic.com/MAIN/careerportal/Job_Profile.cfm?szUniqueCareerPortalID=224335&szOrderID=43754512.

My reply:

Alan,

Isn’t SAIC the company that bilks the government out of millions of dollars by charging through the nose for incompetent consultants who couldn’t finish a project if their life depended on it? Like New York’s CityTime system, or the FBI’s Virtual Case File?

http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/03/27/1228219
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Case_File

Why would I, or anybody, want to work for a company run by charlatans and staffed by incompetents? I’d be too busy wiping the drool off my co-workers face, or explaining socks to them (once again!), to get any actual work done. And on the rare chance the project was successful, management would bin it anyway so they could steal another few million from the taxpayers.

No. Not interested.

I’m sure SAIC is a great company to work with, if you’re not saddled by those little things like “ethics” or “pride.” Please visit the above two links, these guys really are scumbags and the public deserves to know.

Special added bonus: I just found out that the security certificate used on their job portal is invalid:

cp-its-rmprd.saic.com uses an invalid security certificate.

The certificate is not trusted because the issuer certificate is unknown.

(Error code: sec_error_unknown_issuer)

Rock on, Firefox. Rock on.

I was attempting to read a movie review from 2004 using this link:
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/life_of_david_gale/articles/1235143/_alan_parker_lures_you_into_the_theater_but_then_you_sit_down_and_all_he_has_waiting_for_you_is_a_whoopee_cushion
only to find a splash page saying that “The Star Democrat is no longer a website affiliate of the Zwire product.”

Following the link on that page to TownNews.com, the first thing that greets me is your motto:

“Our mission: To help newspapers thrive in an online world.”

Does your company feel the best way to implement that mission is to completely break all links to the Star Democrat’s content?

Breaking links is a sin. Don’t do it.

And if you’re a content creator, and you’re about to sign up for TownNews.com… make sure you put something in your contract to prevent them from totally screwing up your Google ranking and advertising revenue after you stop using… whatever service they provide.

(BTW, visit the real Star Democrat site to give these guys some ad impressions that TownNews.com is stealing from them.)

(Click to see full-sized)

View it at IMDB– Oh wait, there’s an annoying long ad you have to view before the trailer. Try viewing it at Apple– Oh wait it requires QuickTime. Well, let’s try viewing it at YouTube– Hey look, it just starts playing without any bullshit. Attention Internet company big-wigs: this is why people like Google!

So anyway, according to the trailer, a bunch of space marines with headless robots land on this planet. They volunteer one of their guys to transfer his brain into the body of one of the natives, who are blue elf creatures named the “Na’vi” which is obviously a Native American analogue. They have little tails. He’s released to live among the blue elf dudes, possibly to spy on them, and over a period of time he comes to appreciate their culture more than his own. He also meets some blue elf chick with a bow. When the space marines start to attack the blue elfs, he joins the elf side and leads them in battle with the marines.

So it’s Dances with Wolves.

Separated at birth?

Oh, but also the blue elfs train giant cats and ride dragons, apparently. That would be cool, if they didn’t look like blue elfs.

One of my buddies brought up that having the aliens in your movie be, basically, Native American elfs is pretty goddamned uncreative. Especially since this movie has a budget of over $300 million. Obviously none of that money went into hiring somebody who can come up with a creative and original alien race– hell the guys working for Lucas came up with like a dozen more creative and original alien races in the cantina scene alone! Seriously.

My original theory was that, due to the dragon riding and giant cat taming, the aliens in this movie were just way to obviously bad ass compared to the space marines, and so the space marines lost any sense of threat. So Cameron redesigned them to be elfs, and added cute little tails, to offset the bad ass-ness. (Note: this is also probably why he would add headless robots to the marines, so they kick more ass.) Good theory, but probably not true.

My second theory is that someone involved with this movie thought to themselves, “we need the audience to make an emotional connection with the Na’vi… I don’t think people will make a connection to something that doesn’t look or act human.” To that, a brief rebuttal:

Think about it.

Oh, and when we have guys in a movie riding dragons? Please make the dragons bigger than that. It just doesn’t satisfy the “wait a minute, this looks totally wrong” test if you have a human-sized guy riding a dragon with a wingspan of maybe 15 feet. Let’s see some dragons on film that are actually big enough to carry people around, not these wimpy ones.

• I watched G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra last night
• I thought it was actually an ok movie

So here are some comments.

Rating:

G.I. Joe is rated PG-13 by the lovable, huggable, MPAA. Here’s an short list of things you can show in a PG-13 movie, apparently:

• Decapitation
• Decapitation via head explosion
• Woman getting pierced all the way through her torso, all the way through the tablet PC she was holding by a sword (oh, and the tablet was a Panasonic Toughbook model, so you know it was a forceful blow)
• Man falling through high-voltage lines and being burned to dust

Of course, in all of those scenes, there’s no blood because kids are too stupid to realize violence is happening when there’s no blood, right? Gee, the MPAA totally fucking up a movie rating? Unthinkable!

Product Placement:

I’m not some slick Madison Avenue advertising dude, so maybe I’m way off-base here when I say that I would assume product placement is more effective when the good guys are using the product. Although, I’m sure my new-found knowledge that psychotic brain-washing mad scientist Dr. Mindbender uses Norton Internet Security on his torture computer will influence my purchasing decision next time I need anti-virus.

Cisco gets off easy by having product placement for a technology (holographic tele-presence) that’s used by both the good and bad guys in the movie, although the product is far too useful and creative (and easy-to-use) to actually come out of stodgy Cisco.

Hummer’s use by the bad guys, in a car chase that involves billions of dollars of damage and dozens, if not hundreds, of fatalities– maybe that was an environmental message?

Sci-Fi:

Surprisingly, the sci-fi element of the movie isn’t completely and utterly ludicrous. The tele-presence system mentioned above is a safe prediction for the next twenty years. Some guy already build a prototype of the stealth suit.

There are some problems, though. Nano-bots, really? That’s waaay out-there considering the stuff seen in the rest of the movie. They could have used something more believable, like a portable EMP or Fallout 3-esque mini-nuke. And they never explain why you need a particle accelerator to “weaponize” nano-bots.

Wrong.

See, it turns out, that bus schedule is actually a work of fiction. No bus leaves SODO at 4:10. And none leaves at 4:25. They are phantoms, they exist only in the mind.

I arrived at the bus stop at around 4:10, which is plenty of time to catch the 4:10 route (it’s scheduled to arrive at 4th and Cherry at 4:15.) But the bus didn’t show up. Around 4:20, I figured I’d just wait for the 4:25 bus to show up. But it didn’t show up either.

Finally, and at long last, a 510 bus arrived at 4:45, actually on schedule! Amazing. Of course, since the previous two buses had disappeared into the Twilight Zone, it was completely packed. Sardine-packed.

Just to add to the misery, this happens to be a record-breaking heatwave in the Seattle area. Look, we even have a “stagnant air warning“, whatever that is. The poor bus’ air conditioner was trying to keep up, but it was futile.

Then to add insult to injury, when the bus finally arrived at Everett Station around 5:55, it was directly followed by another 510 bus. (Probably the one that was actually scheduled to leave at 4:40. I wager the one I was in was either the half-hour-late one or the 15-minutes-late one.)

Grr.

Anyway, I wrote a complaint.

The sign at this bus stop says the bus is scheduled for 4:15 and another for 4:30. I arrived at the bus stop at 4:10, but did not see a 510 bus until 4:45.

When the bus finally arrived half an hour late, it was completely packed and very uncomfortable to ride in this hot weather.

When it arrived at Everett Station, another, mostly-empty, 510 bus pulled in directly behind it. I can only guess that this bus was the one that was only 15 minutes late, which was probably only a few seconds behind the half-hour late bus.

I completely understand that traffic issues are beyond your control, but this is the second time that this has happened to me in a short period of time. Is the schedule incorrect, has the 4:15 run been canceled with no notice? If so, both the signs at the stop and the website have the wrong schedule.

If buses are going to be a full half-hour late, I would like some notice of that so I can instead take the train.

Thank you.

Trying to be polite so I actually get a response.

(Click image for a closer view)

Seriously. Slashdot is supposed to be full of smart and technical people, and they can’t even get a goddamned website right? How is that image even being shown to me, the end-user? Have they ever heard of the concept of “staging servers?” It’s fucking disgraceful.

It’s not like I’m using the hated Internet Explorer browser, or some experimental web browser from beyond the stars, or that I’ve hacked the shit out of my system, it’s fucking stock Firefox with one fucking add-on.

Oh, and to make it all worse, I have Slashdot set to use the “classic” (read that as: “working”) comments system, not this new piece of shit they’ve been shitting out over the last year. Not that anybody at Slashdot gives a fuck for my preference, since I still get the new version on my user page, and half the templates.

Maintaining this site is somebody’s full-time job. In fact, there are several people who work for Slashdot and only for Slashdot… what the hell do they even do? Think up more creative ways to cram so much fail in such a small space?

Slashdot is the only website I’ve ever seen where the owners/administrators of the site simply don’t fucking care.

They just do not care.

I got to stop posting about Slashdot, it’s kind of pathetic. Not a third as pathetic as Slashdot itself, though.

I’ve been playing Left4Dead recently. One of the zombie types is the “smoker”, which shoots out a long tongue that ensnares one of the survivors and drags them away from the group.

Take a look at this approximation of what happens, in cute Valentine’s Day form:

So when I was playing the other day, I was surprised to learn that you can actually save a survivor being dragged by using your melee attack. Somehow, in the magical zombie-infested world of Left4Dead, slapping someone upside the head with the butt of your automatic shotgun will unravel a mutated tongue wrapped around their neck. I’ve been playing the game for several weeks, and I’d never heard this before, but lo and behold it works.

And it makes no sense.

Thing the second:

The other day I signed up for an account at Mint.com. I put in my bank info, and it went and retrieved my balance sheet from Bank of America using magical Internet technology somehow. It worked pretty good, except for one thing: for some reason it categorized ATM withdrawals as mortgage payments.

So I dive in and try to fix the problem. For each transaction, Mint.com has a list of dozens of categories you can select from. But for some reason, I couldn’t find ATM Withdrawals anywhere on the list. I knew it existed, because a friend I was talking to told me as much, but where was it? Turns out, the category “ATM Withdrawals” is a sub-category of “Uncategorized.”

And that makes no sense, either.

Lesson learned:

Maybe I’m some kind of freak, but if I think that something’s not going to work, I don’t even try it.

For example, in Left4Dead, since whacking a fellow survivor with your melee attack is something to be generally avoided, and since there’s no possible way that could (in real life at least) uncoil a choking snakelike tongue, it never occurred to me to try it.

Similarly, when looking for a category named “ATM Withdrawal” it would never have occurred to me, in a million years, to check underneath the menu item called “Uncategorized.”

In short: things are easier to use when they make sense. Make sense.