A Shout Out to My Pepys

hi

substitute — Tue, 30 Oct 2018 20:14:37 GMT

how's it going?

Happy Kazoo Day from Be My Blog!

substitute — Tue, 28 Jan 2014 17:21:17 GMT

In honor of National Kazoo Day, all of us here at Be My Blog are honored to present the finest arrangement ever of Led Zeppelin’s ultra-classic “Whole Lotta Love.” While you may be tempted to bail out from this challenging yet respectful tribute, we urge you to stay up to 2:05 or so for the vocal breakdown which breaks and downs like a real breakdown.

Mirrored from Be My Blog.

A train station, a high-speed camera, and a lot of hard work

substitute — Sun, 26 Jan 2014 19:18:19 GMT

Adam Magyar’s “Stainless” video series turns train platforms into lucid dreams.

http://vimeo.com/adammagyar/stainless-42st-exp

Mirrored from Be My Blog.

SELECTED SEARCH TERMS BY WHICH OTHERS ARRIVED AT THIS BLOG

substitute — Sat, 18 Jan 2014 02:08:21 GMT

MOST RECENTLY WE HAVE:

w4m in orang county
pornphatos
stahlhelm chile
philiesssex
chilean military uniform
dale earnhardt was an asshole
santa ana boxing club 2011

THANKS FOR YOUR PATRONAGE

Mirrored from Be My Blog.

Workplace Stories: The Screaming Hole

substitute — Mon, 07 Oct 2013 03:56:13 GMT

For two years I had the honor of managing a group of medical transcriptionists at a good hospital.

It was a diverse group in every way. Most of them were post-menopausal women, who are the main battle tanks of the American workforce. These people did difficult clerical work quickly and accurately. They did not take sick days, nor were they late. They were polite, pleasant, and serious about their jobs.

They were also very strange people. Medical transcription requires analytical intelligence, reading comprehension, fast good typing, and patience. It’s for obsessives who love medicine and science, can spell perfectly, and feel personally and emotionally attached to good grammar and the formatting of reports. Most of them have inadequate educations for their talent. People like this are not normal in any way, thank goodness.

My responsibility was to shield these productive eccentrics from the management, and vice versa. This was largely a success and the short management career went very well.

One of the low points was set of new silly rules about lots of things, from an insulting and ambiguous dress code to bad pay changes. People who had been paid by the line for typing reports were to get hourly pay, for example, which wasn’t helpful to the most productive ones. The changes were resented. In the middle of this, the management coughed out another chunk of stupidity. A note was sent out asking us all to let management know what they could do to help us be better at our jobs! And happier, too!

People who are underpaid, and know where the hyphen goes in “salpingo-oophorectomy”, and type 100 wpm with zero errors, and know that the ilium and ileum are very importantly different, are not the ones you want to taunt this way.

The only real answer is “more money.” We all know what they want, though: pointless crap. A special lunch for employee of the month, ice cream socials with the executives, customer service training with cake.

Here are the requests I got:

Helmet-like popcorn makers attached to our heads so that popcorn would occasionally roll down into our mouths through a tube
Prozac-coated keyboards that would make us less crazy as we typed more, because in general the reverse was happening
A hole cut in the wall from our office to the unoccupied central courtyard, so that we could stick our heads through and scream when things were too much
Uniforms so that women wouldn’t have to make difficult postmodern decisions in order to comply with the new dress code.

I sent these along as requested to my boss, who was the CFO and a vice president. She was smart and gave a damn. She was also very conventional. She called me up and said “JESUS CHRIST, who are these maniacs you work with?”

“The best in the business and the most productive people here,” I said.

That year I got 15% more money than we’d been promised to give out as raises.

I still want a screaming hole, though.

Mirrored from Be My Blog.

Annals of Literature: The Palantir Mistake

substitute — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 05:05:25 GMT

The technology company Palantir Technologies may or may not have been part of the NSA’s currently publicized surveillance program “PRISM.” Right now it looks like a confusion among names. But considering their established relationship with the U.S. Department of Defense, the “Intelligence Community” (love the phrase), and their long-known relationship with the CIA, it wouldn’t be surprising. Leaving aside their PRISM possibilities, let’s look for a moment at the company.

Their current homepage splashes a story about combating human trafficking. Rich liberals hate human trafficking right now, a lot. What’s to like? They also sent “Philanthropy Engineers” (I did not make this up) to Oklahoma to fix things with computers in some way. Take a moment now to look through their website. They’re Google-smart and clearly successful, and it looks like a great place to work. Plus, strong ethics. Just look at the mission page. Not only are they committed to saving lives and fixing diseases, they have an explicit mission to preserve civil liberties. Very explicit.

If the CIA is a big customer and investor, you’re the darling of the Department of Defense, you advertise your usefulness in the fight against terrorism, and you’re making a pantsload of money off this, how can you possibly have any “commitment” to civil liberties? What do you do for the CIA, tell them what the mountains are like in Afghanistan? Or how likely it is that Suicide Bomber #53 will show up at Bagram next week? Who do you think you’re fooling, other than yourselves?

Also, “Palantir” is a funny word. Why would you name your company that?

J.R.R. Tolkien’s classic novel The Lord of the Rings is a nerd Bible, the original sword & sorcery fantasy. After Peter Jackson’s films, everyone knows it. In the novel, the Palantir is a crystal ball. “Kingly” people with appropriate credentials can stare into the Palantir and see all over the world. There are my enemy’s armies! Looks like the harvest is going well! Oh heck, is that a pirate ship? Send the cavalry!

Unfortunately, the major antagonist and bad guy has got hold of one of these things and because he’s kingly and a demigod too, he exerts influence. The bad guy can mess with another Palantir customer’s visions and distort them, showing only bad news, twisting images, creating paranoia, and wrecking morale. A key plot point involves a good guy king spending too much time looking into the Palantir like bad daytime TV and getting so depressed about his war with evil that he commits suicide, nearly killing his son as well, and dies in flames clutching the thing. It is literally an epic fail. Another powerful character slides into 100% nasty evil partly because he gets trolled by a hijacked Palantir. He gets his town wrecked by angry anthropomorphic trees and later is stabbed by his assistant. One sees a pattern.

Another smarter kingly type picks one up to mess with the antagonist a little and scare him, and then doesn’t use it any more, because the thing is dangerous. Why pick it up, even during a war, if you don’t have to? It’s unreliable now and will lead you to make bad mistakes and give up the fight. It’s not useful any more. That’s the end of that!

I understand that nerds use words that are “cool,” or even entire ideologies that seem “cool,” without thinking about the meaning of, well, anything at all. Happy Star Wars geeks get together and march in parades as the civilian-murdering, robotic, and incompetent adversaries from the movie, for example. What the hell? Oh, right. It just refers to something. Meaning is not important.

In this case, though, it’s just too damn good. The generous, progressive, socially involved, and brilliant philanthropy engineers at Palantir are one and the same with the surveillance state. Whether or not their Prism is the current PRISM, they’re both key vendors and and investment for the U.S “Intelligence Community.” These are the people who tell the President who should be drone-murdered, which civilians are threats to national security, who’s going to try to blow us up, and who is being troublesome. There has been the occasional misstep here, which is mentioned even in the news.

Our government has in its hand a Palantir, some of which is provided by the eponymous company. Look into it and you’ll see enemies without and within, plots, revolutionaries, malice concealed as dissent, and an unending future of unstoppable terrorism and necessary war. The one thing you won’t see is the sign that says “STOP! This is stupid and evil. Get a grip willya?”

So far the national Palantir has been bad for everyone. Be smart, kingly types, and throw the thing away, and throw away the war on terror as well.

And by the way: that company should change its name once it has the guts to dump its most important customers. If they read more, they’d make fewer branding mistakes and kill fewer people.

Mirrored from Be My Blog.

FLABOB AIRPORT!

substitute — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 03:04:33 GMT

Hi there. Today I visited a place improbably named “Flabob Airport” in Riverside, California. The picture below sums up the place, but see also the link below for the full photo set.

There is a DC-3 there, and weird art, and you can walk on to the runway if nobody notices. It looks like an airport from an old Hollywood movie. The airport is in the middle of a grubby neighborhood full of gangbangers and the oppressed. You should visit if you’re in the area. If you’re in the area, I offer my sympathies.

The full photo set at flickr

Mirrored from Be My Blog.

The End of System Administration: “What would you say you do here?”

substitute — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 23:27:24 GMT

I have been a full-time Linux system administrator for more than a decade. This week, I lost my job because I am a full-time Linux system administrator. What happened?

For those outside my world, this is what a system administrator does: We manage server computer and networks. This means Internet sites, your computer system at work, and similar setups. The job dates back to the first time more than one person used a computer and someone needed to manage that.

That’s still the case, and there are many jobs for sysadmins. If you want to get one of those jobs, don’t worry.

However, I’ve been working in the world of leading edge startup technology companies, who write software themselves and also manage its use on the Internet. The trend here is toward something called DevOps (wikipedia article: DevOps). The short version of DevOps is: Software engineers take on the tasks traditionally done by “Ops” (system administrators) and largely automate them. It’s part of a general trend towards very fast product creation, quick response to change, and cost-cutting. (Look up “Lean startup” for more on this.)

Here’s how the whole setup works: You hire some young, energetic people. Make sure that they can pass technology skills tests. Even more so, make sure they are socially and ideologically suited to the environment. The engineers have to get along with each other and help each other out, and since most of them haven’t worked at normal jobs before, this isn’t a given. And most of all, they have to buy the local ideology, whether it’s “lean,” or “DevOps,” or “Agile.”

The work environment for these people is fast-moving and very disciplined. There are daily short meetings in the morning. Programmers almost always work in mutually accountable pairs. Everything is tracked: accomplishments, stumbling blocks, opinions. There’s a heavy emphasis on making new things and getting them “out the door” as quickly as possible. Dreaming at the desk, absent-minded professoring alone at the whiteboard? None of that.

Meanwhile, the job of the system administrator shrinks. Monitoring, software deployment, scaling the size of the systems up and down, a load of tasks are automated after a quick initial assessment. This is done by software engineers. New tools have accumulated decades of knowledge built into them. Other roles have been taken by services; there’s an entire ecosystem of companies who take away one piece of system administration and replace it with an easy-to-use service that attaches to your other easy-to-use services.

Aside from some holes in this fabric, the role of the system administrator in an organization like this has been reduced to high-level technical support. When engineers need to know something serious about the way operating systems work, or what a database server can do, the local unix subject matter expert is useful. Just not useful enough. It has become the Willy Loman profession.

Most of this is an extension of what system administrators have always done themselves. If you do something three times, automate it. Part of it is the result of the dot-com boom and the terrible laziness of its self-identified geniuses. If engineers are forced to work in an assembly-line environment while watching each other, people can’t horse around all day. None of that is unexpected.

The tiresome part for me is that the interesting jobs are going this way. This last gig was the best job I’d ever had. Everyone was smart, interesting things happened all day, and the company was accomplishing things I was personally proud of. There was a real team spirit and a feeling of involvement in something bigger.

Until I found out I wasn’t seen as useful, which is never a good time.

So my advice to you is: if you want to go into cool startups, you should either be a very rich founder, or a software engineer. Don’t go into operations.

And most of all, be young, very young, and inexpensive, and energetic. The startup world is necessarily cruel because it is built on the need of great returns on investment. If you are comfortable in a very interesting assembly line job that could be lucrative, this is your world. If you are someone with a store of knowledge, beware. You will be abstracted, automated, and discarded.

Mirrored from Be My Blog.

Picture Without Context For Today

substitute — Wed, 06 Mar 2013 01:46:29 GMT

If you insist on context, go ahead and visit Inequality By Interior Design

Mirrored from Be My Blog.

Happy Monday! Here’s where the money goes in the U.S.

substitute — Mon, 04 Mar 2013 20:14:58 GMT

Here’s a demonstration with graphs of income distribution in the United States. The phrase “income inequity” is pretty dry, but when you see it graphed it’s enraging. Disclaimer: I am neither a statistician nor an expert in graphic visualization. But holy cow, if this is even close to the truth…

Mirrored from Be My Blog.

Robot “Dog” gets even more terrifying

substitute — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 08:53:46 GMT

Demonic cinder block-flinging semiautomatic not-a-dog will comfort you in your dreams.

Second term revaluations.

substitute — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 19:22:59 GMT

Mirrored from Be My Blog.

Happy dog and baby scene, or art film nightmare sequence? You make the call

substitute — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 13:32:18 GMT

Mirrored from Be My Blog.

Twenty-nine seconds of a small, squeaky animal

substitute — Sat, 16 Feb 2013 00:33:25 GMT

Mirrored from Be My Blog.

Media without context for today

substitute — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 22:23:55 GMT

Mirrored from Be My Blog.

Picture without context for today

substitute — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 00:20:40 GMT

Mirrored from Be My Blog.

Your singing in the shower video for the day

substitute — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 18:01:21 GMT

Good morning, everyone. Here’s a parrot singing Russian songs in the shower. Have a good one!

Mirrored from Be My Blog.

Video Without Context For Today

substitute — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 07:57:07 GMT

Tip: If you want to be sane, stay away from the Psycommu Department, who provided this to our Editorial Desk.

Mirrored from Be My Blog.

THE CENTRIFUGE BRAIN PROJECT

substitute — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 06:15:50 GMT

Fascinating neurological studies now finally made public. I’d only seen the trailer for this short documentary once before, and now the entire thing has been generously made available to the public. So much to learn about the brain, and so many strange yet appealing ways of learning it…

Mirrored from Be My Blog.

Picture Without Context for Today

substitute — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 01:08:49 GMT

Illustration courtesy Fukuoka Black

Mirrored from Be My Blog.

And here’s a peek behind the scenes at the White House…

substitute — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 20:54:45 GMT

…as our President builds his drone strike strategy. Let’s learn.

Mirrored from Be My Blog.

The cattle STILL have brucellosis.

substitute — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 20:35:07 GMT

Thanks again to Small Peculiar for introducing me to Warren Zevon’s full range. Like everyone else I knew those three songs, and I’d seen him play with R.E.M. way back when. I was reminded of this gem because Iced Borscht brought up Kid Rock. Mr. Rock made the mistake of mashing up “Werewolves of London” with “Sweet Home Alabama,” thus unintentionally recreating the classic “Play it all night long.” Another live version is below for your enjoyment. There really ain’t much to country living, he’s right.

Play It All Night Long (Live)

Mirrored from Be My Blog.

I like my endless march into the void with coffee and cream.

substitute — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 07:59:20 GMT

It has been discovered by science teams at funnels launch! that the gif animation above, when watched as the music video below is played, becomes perfect. Please make a note of it.

Mirrored from Be My Blog.

Well, how did they get here?

substitute — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 03:36:32 GMT

Here are some of the searches that led people to this blog since I started paying attention to that.

Pigurines (#1!)
medieval terms of endearment for children
“mail order alien bride”
what kind of chickens have a afro
innsmouth community college¹
pictures of philippine contemporary literature
philadelphia phillies sex toy
sexy german ladies
beelzebub hunks
selling smoke damaged furniture²

That’s all part of our world tonight.

¹Go Sea Devils!
²Change your life, change into a nine year old Hindu boy, get rid of your wife.

Mirrored from Be My Blog.

How I killed my blog

substitute — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 03:27:06 GMT

You aren’t reading this. Once, you did. Here’s why.

In 2001 I started a LiveJournal entirely as a social networking tool. My friends were all signing up. We had a lot of fun sharing a circle of friends on LJ, and most of us ended up at least reading if not posting every day.

The social network expanded rapidly, and I made new connections. And I wrote more. I have a background in journalism and I’ve always written compulsively. With the spigot open, things sputtered out: personal confession, satire, sociopolitical conversations, culture, an avalanche of ephemera. It was mostly a good time, although the madness of myself and others provided some spectacular low points as well. (None of the madness has been removed. Good thing you’re not reading it.)

A few years into this I had a decent audience for someone who hadn’t tried. At best estimate the thing had 300 regular readers. If I wrote something interesting or challenging or unusually annoying I always got a few comments. Even a couple of my literary heroes showed up to say nice things about my writing. And the writing got better. There was a deadline feel to working on that LJ. I would think: “what should I write today?” rather than “should I write?”

Like others, I messed around with syndication and linking other services. There were all these ways you could stuff your LJ and photo service and other crap into one feed, but those weren’t popular in this case. A couple of times I started up a separate blog intending to put longer stuff there but didn’t use it enough or try to promote it really, and it sat there. This should have been a warning.

I never wanted to leave LJ, despite its “uncool” teen-angst image. It was a great platform for us, and a decent place to write. I had a built-in audience and a lot of daily reading for myself. But LJ started to get weird. Its ownership got passed around a few times, and the infrastructure and policies looked wobblier every day. When it was inhaled by an opaque Russian company it was looking like a worse and worse place to do anything a person might care about.

So, I made a WordPress blog and slurped up all the old LJ posts into it, and kept going here.

Whoops!

The social element is gone. Comments are rare and telegraphic. If I send a link to a friend I’ll get friendly and useful responses. Syndication to Facebook gets comments there. When comments are enabled on the syndication to the old LJ I get some responses from my friends there. But in general the thing is just dead. Traffic is awful.

As a result, I don’t write as much either. I never had too much invested in a big audience (good thing, because I didn’t have one!) but without any audience at all… Well, it’s like doing a late night shift on a radio station nobody hears. (Another story.) It’s boring and a little depressing.

I wasn’t the only one to abandon LJ, but it looks like most of the others went to Facebook for ephemera and socializing. That makes sense because the whole world is on FB, and because people don’t like uncool things (LJ). A lot of LJ’s benefits, like semi-anonymity and great filtering for audiences, are gone. But if your friends aren’t there, it’s not a social network, so, that’s the end of that.

Part of me wants to go back to LJ, but it’s not the same thing now. Mostly I want to keep the energy going with my own little thing, because I want to write and I need to control where it lives. Perhaps enforced write-every-day discipline would help.

In any case, I trashed something useful. LiveJournal was a good audience of friends and strangers and a wonderful conversation space, where I learned more about public writing than I had working full-time at a newspaper. Where did we go wrong? In any case, I met a lot (more than 50) of great new people I still have to talk to.

Anyway that’s how I killed my blog. If you’re reading this, something must be terribly wrong.

Mirrored from Be My Blog.

A Shout Out to My Pepys

hi

Happy Kazoo Day from Be My Blog!

A train station, a high-speed camera, and a lot of hard work

SELECTED SEARCH TERMS BY WHICH OTHERS ARRIVED AT THIS BLOG

Workplace Stories: The Screaming Hole

Annals of Literature: The Palantir Mistake

FLABOB AIRPORT!

The End of System Administration: “What would you say you do here?”

Picture Without Context For Today

Happy Monday! Here’s where the money goes in the U.S.

Robot “Dog” gets even more terrifying

Second term revaluations.

Share this:

Happy dog and baby scene, or art film nightmare sequence? You make the call

Share this:

Twenty-nine seconds of a small, squeaky animal

Media without context for today

Picture without context for today

Your singing in the shower video for the day

Video Without Context For Today

THE CENTRIFUGE BRAIN PROJECT

Picture Without Context for Today

And here’s a peek behind the scenes at the White House…

The cattle STILL have brucellosis.

I like my endless march into the void with coffee and cream.

Well, how did they get here?

How I killed my blog