Creativity
This is the definition of creative.
Hire that guy to look at the budget.
September 2, 2010
September 1, 2010
On dorks, dweebs, and dufii.
The wife and I were having a conversation about a particularly annoying student she has. She referred to him as a dork because of his nerd-like leanings. Which then led me into explaining my view of the situation, as a computer geek. There are four terms, and imagine a table like so:
| Cool | Uncool (also “dweeby”) | |
| Smart: | Geek | Nerd |
| Dumb (also “dufus-y”): | Dork | Poindexter |
Note that in this case, “cool” is relative.
Thus, her unsmart, uncool student is a poindexter. The term dweeb or dufus also applies. It’s also like a hierarchy; dorks usually have disdain for both nerds and poindexters (okay pretty much everyone hates poindexters. Imagine a dweeby know-it-all that actually knows nothing and is convinced of his superiority.). Geeks and nerds get on well enough, but geeks and dorks can as well if the dork can surpress his or her inner dufus in public.
This is almost as important a distinction as hacker vs cracker vs script kiddie.
It’s not that I’m being mean to nerds or dorks, or trying to put people into a little box. It’s just that they all fall into a little box at some point, and it’s important to know how to describe someone to help others avoid them if needed. Especially if they’re like the student in question, who was convinced of his greatness so much that he could not believe a female English teacher knew what teh Lunix was. Idiot.
There are other hierarchies as well. You generally don’t want to be stuck with a douchebag, for example, but you really don’t want to be stuck with a fuckwad or a dickweed. The above table could be further expanded with more rows and columns, or possibly a third axis. But that’s for another study in archetypes (as is “bitch vs ho”).
Another hierarchy is the hierarchy of crazy:
There’s batty (Barbara Boxer), there’s looney (Ann Coulter), there’s even downright crazy (most Huffington Post writers). But then when you graduate from crazy you become batshit crazy (Tom Cruise). Your PhD in being nuts makes you crazier than a shithouse rat (Louis Farrakhan). After that the mother ship will literally beam you the fuck up (9-11 Truthers).
See, labels aren’t bad. In fact, they’re pretty awesome, because now we can put every peg in the right hole and write people off without considering their merits, and only listen to people that pegs just like us. Forget about all those ignorant, racist, typical white people in the Tea Party, for example. They’re voting against their own interests, right?
On a more serious note, defining people is awesome. I should have been a sociologist.
August 31, 2010
Microsoft Sucks.
Two things happened today that made me hate Microsoft again:
1. At work we found a bug in Excel that screwed up a lot of graphs. It basically gives the wrong coefficient of determination on graphs. We checked in the much-better-software Origin, and then used the RSQ function in Excel — those give the right number. But the graphs display a faulty (and sometimes NEGATIVE!) R^2.
That is not possible.
2. At home the stupid Windows install that had some malware before had it again. Apparently I didn’t get all of it last time.
Seriously, that is fucking irritating. I nuked it again, nuked it from Linux, ran some anti-malware stuff… what I’m going to end up doing is just erasing the motherfucking Windows partition and starting anew. Perhaps without network access for the Windows machine.
August 28, 2010
Dear Parents,
Look, I know you like restaraunts. Me too. I know kids like them, too. We take the girls to them on occasion. Here’s the thing. If your kid is coughing so hard it sounds like he has “the consumption” it’d be nice if you didn’t bring Typhoid Marty to any place where other human beings are going to be. I’m not saying you should quarantine him, except that I am in fact saying that.
Bringing your kid or grandkid or the random street urchin you found at Wal-Mart around the rest of us in an enclosed space is what we in the real world call selfish. You are infecting us so that you can come out and play. You lose that right when you have a kid. You can play, but only when someone else is watching your kid.
This applies to movies as well. The wife and I went to an R-rated horror flick a few months back. I want to say it was the Halloween II remake by Rob Zombie. Aka, a freaking gore fest. There was a family in there with like a six year old. Seriously? You think your kid needs to see that?
I’m not saying once you have kids, your life is over. That’s stupid. We go places all the time — but we don’t take the girls to grown-up movies, we don’t take them out when they’re carrying the plague, and we don’t take them to places they’ll hate just because we want to go. Because that isn’t fair to them (or particularly good for them) or the other adults there.
There are sacrifices with parenthood. This is one of them.
August 25, 2010
No S and Shovelglove update
So a residual effect of the No S and Shovelglove — I’m eating more healthy on the “S Days” too. And I’ve lost another pound and a half — bringing me up to 2.5 in the last two weeks. Woo hoo.
I’ve also gotten surprisingly used to the structure of not snacking in under a month. The weight loss doesn’t hurt, either — once I saw that I’d lost another pound I wanted to stick to everything even harder.
As for the shovelglove — I’ve made it a regular part of my day. I’ve forced myself to do it when I don’t want to. And I’m also seeing results — my arms are getting more defined.
The two in tandem are definitely good.
More updates as the weight drops. I’ll be in rockin’ shape eventually.
August 23, 2010
Around the House
Wasps and Windows
Sunday I slipped on a pair of shorts. And about two inches above my knee I immediately felt the stinging pain of being stung by a wasp. Twice. The bastard made her escape into the master bedroom and promptly disappeared for over an hour. When she ventured out, she vanished again after being spotted. To get a measure of revenge, I turned on some “Ke$ha” on my rather large speaker system, turned the bass all the way up, and left the room. We shall see, bug.
Well right at bed time Bendy spotted the bitch hanging on the drapes, about a half a foot from the top. I was prompt with the spray and aced her. She crawled to the top of the curtain, gasped her last, and fell to the floor, dead. Vengeance and victory: Mine.
In the mean time, we discovered that Bendy’s computer had been, for lack of a better term, “teh pwnz0red.” Only the Windows install (of course). Which is really pathetic — she goes to a handful of sites, none of them are off ill-repute. The system is patched and I keep a watch on it.
This wasn’t the nastiest infection I’ve dealt with; I was able to eliminate the problem with a generous dosage of ass-kicking in safe-mode and msconfig. However, there was one file that persisted and I could not delete even through safe mode. We shall see, I says. (I assumed all files that were created in specific directories after a certain time were vile.)
I booted into Ubuntu Linux, mounted the Windows partition like the bitch it was, and erased the file. Problem. Fucking. Solved.
So sad: Linux has to be used to save Windows. Guess which one costs money. Yeah. (Of course, 90.210% of the work where I work takes place in Linux, too.) Seriously, how hard is it to make sure your OS isn’t full of holes?
August 20, 2010
The funniest cop ever.
So there was a wreck on I-110 today, heading northbound. The wife and I were coming back from getting the food, and we were stuck, like everyone else. A few people decided they were too important to wait. Including this guy:
(click to embiggen)
He went about a half mile down the side of the interstate before coming into contact with the best cop ever. The cop stopped, got on to him, and parked in front of him. Then later, just before I took this picture (we were going 0mph as evidenced by my speedometer), the guy tried to get around the cop.
The cop got out of his car and pointed for the guy to stay where he was, making him wait.
Bendy and I both about died. It still makes me smile.
You’re not too important to wait, Mister Big Gold Chevy Silverado from Texas. If we all can do it, you can do it, too. It’s not a big deal; unless you have a legitimate emergency you should wait like the rest of us so that emergency vehicles can use the shoulder.
The worst part, though? The guy clearly had to see that cops were stopping people doing that, both at that end and way back where the guy started. Imbecile.
August 17, 2010
The Perfect Burn II
Months ago I outlined many projects I’m working on. This is an update:
Basically, I’ve gotten nothing done. I finished rereading the first novel I finished, The Five. I finished writing the sequel, The Beloved, but now I think there’s more I need to do.
The next undertaking will be another go at getting The Five published. Then I’ll look at the sequel again.
The Last Cigar hasn’t went anywhere. But I still think about it.
I’ve moved more toward dressing up more at work — bought some ties, another suit jacket, dress pants, etc. Which is good, as I’ll end up wearing a tie for the next two or three days at work. There’s something about a suit and tie that I enjoy. Maybe that’s part of what’s wrong with my brain.
August 16, 2010
Down a pound.
Two weeks into No S and Shovelglove and I’m down a pound. 241. I figure roughly 58 to go. The Wii thinks I should be 157.2 pounds (to be exact), but I figure in the 180s I’ll still look human. At 157 the Bendy wife would leave me for a man who doesn’t look like Sally Struthers should be trying to get you to give him ten cents a day.
So right now, having had the last meal of the day and done the exercise, I am on the porch with a new cigar — a Finck’s 1893. It’s a nice hand rolled smoker. First one, though, and it has a good hour left on it, so not sure where to rank it. So far it’s pretty good.
The humidor is getting fuller. I still need to hot glue the humidifiers back in place — the damn factory glue just isn’t holding. Right now I have around 40 cigars in it, and it will supposedly hold 300. I’m not sure where they got that figure — I’ll be surprised if it holds half that. But I don’t have a pressing need for 300 cigars at a time.
Right now I’m stocking it mostly with “rejects” or “seconds.” The best of those so far remains the Santiago Seconds, but the Finck’s Rejects aren’t bad at all for a dollar a stick. I bought some “Dominican Segundos” from Finck’s with the 1893s, so those’ll be interesting to try. They look similar to the Santiago Seconds.
I also tried a Montecristo Classic. It didn’t dethrone the White, but it was a damn good cigar. There’s just something about the white label Montecristo that I can’t get enough of.
August 14, 2010
No surprise here:
Obama takes one step further from transparency..
Not surprised. One of the biggest lies Obama told was that he’d have the most transparent presidency in history. We’ve seen, time after time, how this hasn’t held up. Even the press has gotten annoyed with it. So what’s one more step, right?
Except it sucks, and we’re stuck with this guy until January of 2013 at the earliest. I’m not that big of a fan of the Republicans, but at least if they win in November it will halt his power trip a little. Maybe even enough to see us through the next two to six years.
