The stock market may be up and down, but I turned to MTV late tonight and big boobs still sell videos.
Every once in a while I need some consistency in my life.
Archive for July, 2002
I don’t expect much when I go into a fast food restaurant. The performance bar is lower than a professional limbo contest. Hey, if there are croquet tournaments, professional limbo has to be at least on the radar. No matter. What I’m saying is that when I walk into a fast food joint, I consider it a successful visit if service and food balance out at totally forgettable - as non impacting in any way, positive or negative, as the mind numbing hours of late night TV playing in the background while I work.
Lately, however, you’d think the “service technicians” at the fast food counters had been taking insensitivity training. I always wondered what happened to the work force not qualified for customer abuse at public utility help desks. This week, I know. These people have no identifiable skill sets, can only count as high as the number of value meals there are on the “menu”, and personalities Ed Wood wouldn’t have cast in a walk-on part.
We’re talking total Meat Robots. Walking flesh ill programmed for even simple tasks. These work units wouldn’t score higher on the Turing Test than my toaster - which, for the record, is NOT network capable, microchip enhanced, or blue-tooth enabled.
Do I have anything nice to say about the growing number of Meat Robots in the workplace? Umm, well, some of their prison tattoos are actually quite artistic! Oh yeah, and they mostly remember to wear hair nets over their mullets!
Hmm, but they do work the 24-hour drive-thru’s and all this rambling has made me a little hungry. Maybe if I just talk a little slower this time…
Even if they wanted to churn out more reliable products, most programmers lack the skills. Point-and-click development aids like Visual C++ have turned software creation into a For Dummies exercise.
- Brendan I. Koerner, The Bugs in the Machine, WIRED August 2002
Billions and billions served. We call it McCode folks.
It’s fast. It’s convenient. You use it because it’s shoved in your face. To be fair, though, if the consumer doesn’t ask for a gourmet dinner, the restaurant isn’t going to replace the burger flippers. And if a burger flipper can be paid like a gourmet chef… why spend the time in the kitchen when you can be out spending that fat paycheck?
As computers infiltrate more of our daily lives - in our cars, our airplanes, our bodies themselves - there is more and more demand for fast written code. More demand for quickly trained programmers.
Sleep tight everybody.
You can find anything on the web. Go to a popular search engine like Google and type in what you want to find. You get a list of web addresses returned all pertaining to your subject. The more expert the website is on the topic, so the theory goes, the higher it appears on the list. Out of the millions upon millions of websites returned for each search, cracking the top 100 sets you up as pretty knowledgeable on a subject. Cracking the top 10 marks you as an expert in the field.
We have our little website here, thoughtdivers.com, and in a little eddy of information pooled off to the side is my web log. My partner was looking to see what kind of traffic was coming to the website and he sent me some surprising statistics about visitors who were coming to us from the search engine Google - all to archived pages of my web log.
# 3 ranking for anyone searching for “vinyl Shannon Doherty”
# 61 ranking for anyone searching for “pubic hair shaver”
I tell you, my eyes teared up! I was an expert! Well, at least among fetishists and discerning shavers… No matter that the words didn’t appear in this order or even in the same articles with each other.
The rankings change often, but for one brief shining moment, *I* sat among the digital elite. No one can ever take that away from me!
I was watching TV - my laptop was open and visible so it still counted as working - and the program that I was viewing just ended. As the credits started scrolling onto the screen they were whisked over to the far left and scrunched into an unreadable blur of unrecognizable, and now uncredited, names of actors, actresses, gaffers, and gophers. On the right hand side of the screen - perfectly visible - was yet another programming advertisement. Yay, rah.
Anything I might want to see about the program - a specific actor or the name about a song in the soundtrack - completely lost. I watch enough TV - okay, maybe too much sometimes - but I actually do look for stuff like this. Heck, any movie, even the bad ones, should give credit to the people involved. I imagine the assistant to the hairdresser of Billy Bob Thornton trying to point out his crowning achievement, his own name in lights, to his proud mother and her bridge club only to find the task impossible and having to slink away in embarrassment through the hurtful taunts of a disbelieving ladies’ card group.
I guess I can always look up my information on the ‘net but that, well, that’s just wrong.
Fixing computers is the mental equivalent of having a pick-up truck.
Just without the country music and gun rack.
I was talking to my brother the other day and he was on his cellphone. I’d say about five words and realize there was nothing but silence on the other end. Grrr… Redial. Establish where the conversation was before getting cut off. Another sentence or two and more silence. I call him back yet again and he tells me that every time he moves his cell phone from his right ear to his left ear he gets cut off and that there must be a deadzone…
He stops talking as I burst out laughing and finish the sentence for him. There must be a deadzone…
…between his right and left ear.
For a brief moment I almost stopped hating cell phones.
Wow, just a little bit dusty in here. Though it didn’t seem like so much time had passed, I guess I took quite a break from blogging. On the plus side, ThoughtDivers LLC - oh yeah, we’re an LLC now - has been going well. Keith reworked the ThoughtDivers website and posted a link to my writings. He used the segueway “behind the smoke and mirrors” to get to a listing of links that are more personal than business-related. The first one there was (is?) a link to what started out as a writing excercise to “stay frosty” (reference to Aliens 2, eh?) and he labled it “find out what’s in Scott’s head.” Of course, we had recently switched web hosting from a Microsoft to a Linux platform and the technology (ASP) that I had used when I originally wrote my blog site no longer worked.
So… “what’s in Scott’s head” was a nice blank page.
Very funny Keith.
Mostly working now and since the pressure is on that I might have more than two readers now - who aren’t just related to me - it’s time to start posting again. Well, okay, that plus the fact that when I’m not writing, there’s a constant buzz in the back of my head that gets louder and louder until I spill out a few paragraphs. I’ve put a couple short books worth of code, technical documents, and client e-mails into the ether in absence of blogging - but all work and no play…
…pays the bills. 
So, since this is linked to the business site now… I can rationalize that play is work… and umm… I’m not just laying on the couch with a 50 foot ethernet cable jacking me into the ‘net while I watch a cheesy Mario Van Peebles sci-fi movie and eating crackers and cheez-whiz. No, no, no…
I’m working, baby… Welcome to my world… *wink*