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Sunday, 13 May 2001 — Mother's Day
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After church I took my daughter to buy a Mother's Day present for her mom. We found some monstro-gimunga hanging plant, don't ask me what kind. The big kind. I think. With flowers on it. Bluish. There, I've exhausted my plant lore. But it was pretty, and it smelled nice. Spicy, kind of.
Then my daughter and I went out looking for a futon/sofa for my little apartment. Her idea. I think she thinks of it as her home away from home. Which is good. When I was a teenager, I wasn't nearly as comfortable and happy with my parents as my daughter seems to be (well, mostly) with her mom and me. Maybe it was the times, I dunno. But it's nice that even though our family is broken, it's still not destroyed. As I've observed before, my ex and I seem able to get along reasonably well — sometimes even extremely well — as long as she doesn't have to keep me under the same roof. I'm kind of like a barn cat, I guess.
So we borrowed my brother-in-law's little pickup truck and carted me home a little futon/sofa, of the inexpensive variety, "some assembly required." Its various constituent members are currently leaning and lying all over my living room, waiting for me to have the ambition to put the thing together. I'm betting it won't be too very long before I get tired of tripping over it, and bite the bullet and break out the hand tools. Heaven only knows what's become of my set of Allen keys, which for some unknown reason appear to be required.
And we finished off the afternoon with a driving lesson. Off-road and illegal, but safe, fun, and productive. And of course, there's no way I'll take my daughter onto a road with other vehicles on it before said minor has obtained the appropriate permit. But I've been letting her "help" me drive since she was quite a bit smaller. Once upon a time I had a tiny Suzuki Swift (and was e'er such a gargantuan misnomer perpetrated by marketing droids upon a hapless public? Hmmm... probably. Never mind. But Swift it was in name only). It had a five-speed in it, and my daughter learned to shift it left-handed, while I worked the clutch. We became a pretty good team. Then when I traded the micro-mobile in for a stylish two tons of American rolling stock, she learned how to steer from the right (well, middle) seat. But now for the first time, she was actually in the pilot's seat. Gas, brake, steering... all hers. I must say she did quite well. I took advantage of the largeness and emptiness of the lot to give her some experience of what it feels like when you hit the gas and brakes too hard. Hey, I know she's going to sometimes, and the worst thing would be for her to panic because it feels out of control. So we did a few jackrabbit starts and panic stops, and she found out that it wasn't as scary as she'd thought. Fortunately she's not a boy, or we'd probably be seeing quite a bit more of that kind of driving. But it seems that girls in general are maybe more interested in being seen in a car, than in going fast in a car. And we did a few moderate-speed circles and figure eights, so she could see how the car feels when it starts to lean. She got over her initial nervousness pretty quickly. I was really pleased with her. Now the main problem will be to keep her on her own side of the car all the time. Once kids get a taste of horsepower, most of 'em want to repeat it frequently.
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Monday, 14 May 2001
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Today I get to keep working on my Software Nazi plan for world domination. I mean for total control of company software installations. Not fun, me not being much of a control freak, but somebody's gotta do it. I've always been way better at exploring and amusing myself than at keeping careful records. But who says you can't teach an old dog new tricks? You just have to keep reminding him who's paying for the dog food. It's amazing what you can learn to do when you have no choice.
And, courtesy of Tom Syroid, this link from the Gartner Group about the economics of the Borg's newest licensing policy. Is this the behavior of a company that's in any way concerned with the possibility of being punished for monopolistic behavior? Not likely. This is behavior more appropriate to a company that realizes that it really does own the world, and what're you gonna do about it.
LATER...
And there's this, from one of the endless stream of office email jokes... "A closed mouth gathers no feet."
And from MSNBC comes this blurblet (do I tend to invent words more frequently on Mondays, or perhaps after caffeinne ingestion...?) about the latest threat to corporate life — Peekabooty — this from the "Cult of the Dead Cow" or cDc, a group of hackers ("hacktivists" — do I only dislike that word because I didn't invent it?) who believe that filters were meant to be circumvented. Some relevant quotes from the article: "Peekabooty allows people who can’t see Web pages for one reason or another circuitous access to them. We want adults to be able to access what is publicly available on the Web." And as cDc member Oxblood Ruffin puts it, "We expect a lot of nasty little men in ugly clothing will be very displeased, and we don’t give a f***." My take on the matter boils down to the fact the the genie is out of the bottle... The internet exists, programming tools are free for the taking; and while that whole "information wants to be free" spiel is silly twaddle, Humpty Dumpty has in fact already fallen. Deal with it.
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Tuesday, 15 May 2001
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HAPPY BIRFDAY BeLINDA!!! Still south of thirty, whew! Love ya sis!
Today I have more Software Nazi meetings. My clever plan is to deflect all resentment off of me and onto management, through a whispering campaign. Hmmm...
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Wednesday, 16 May 2001
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Well, mere days after installing Linux Mandrake 8, I got the following in my mailbox:
This message is to inform you that as of May 15, 2001, Eazel will discontinue the public availability of Eazel Services. For more information on why this is so, visit our web site at http://www.eazel.com.
It's a pleasantly-worded death notice, as another dot com goes belly-up. This article in the Register gives a few more details. Ack. According to la Reg, "After a year of singing its praises, Eazel's richest backers weren't around to save it when the going got tough. The company that promised to make Linux easy for technophobes to use is to close." For "technophobes" substitute "newbies" and you'll see why it gets me down. Just have to roll up my sleeves and learn the old-fashioned way, I guess. If I can only remember what that was...
One more quote from the Reg article gives us an entertaining reminder of why the dot com boom went bust: "Eazel's failure won't diminish the achievement of Nautilus - it's still the most ambitious standalone file manager for Linux - but it does nail a business model that saw over 70 staff burn through $13m on what is merely a file manager. But there's no reason why it shouldn't flourish as part of the GNOME project." Hey, it's a NICE file manager. But for the price, I guess it ought to be.
I sure hope somebody finds a way to run a Linux company while still giving software away for free. Every new revision of the Borg's licensing agreements seems to be more totalitarian than the last. To paraphrase the Roman senator Cato during the third Punic War, Microsoft delenda est. For the historically challenged, Rome won — final score Rome 3, Carthage 0. Go penguin. (A nod here to About.com and Ancient/Classical History.)
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Thursday, 17 May 2001
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Hear that paper-rustling sound? That's millions of hands of small business owners in Detroit, Miami, Minneapolis/St. Paul, Rochester, and Seattle. Frantically pawing through forgotten filing cabinet drawers, looking for software licenses. They know they paid for them, but they'll be darned if they can remember where they put them. And they know that if some disaffected ex-employee blows them in, nothing but a license in hand will assuage the software storm troopers. Have lawyer, will travel. Coming soon to a city near you.
I've been cleaning up an old P166 clone to give away. I still have the original Windows 95 license that it came with; that'll be going with it, of course. But it makes me pause and reflect. Not on software licensing directly, though that comes into it. But more on the fact that pretty much everything I do in the course of an ordinary day could be done adequately on that old P166, running Win95 and Office 95. In fact, Office 4.3 for Windows 3.x was not bad at all, as far as producing paper documents.
At first we all wanted to upgrade to the latest and greatest for the kewlness factor. And when the bean-counters eventually coughed up the change, we were happy for a few months. But as time progressed, the Borg began to apply more and more pressure to force businesses to upgrade on Microsoft's schedule and terms. And that's the trend that's most noticeable about the newest software licensing agreements out of Borg Central. Now there's a semi-offical timetable for upgrades. And next, of course, comes software rental. After three years (or whatever), your Microsoftware stops working. Please deposit eleven million dollars for the next three years. Do we need to upgrade? Doubt it. But Microsoft's shareholders need to keep getting dividends. So we upgrade, or switch to Linux.
Have you noticed, though, that Microsoft has become IBM? First, simply through getting huge and unresponsive to the real-world needs of the customers, despite a massive internal campaign to shape their software to the imagined (and tested and retested and focus-grouped) desires of their end users. But now, they have actually come full-circle, and begun ending the PC revolution, bringing the business software world back to the glass-house priesthood. So long, sweet dreams of personally-controlled computing. It was kind of nice while it lasted.
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Friday, 18 May 2001
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I'm thinking about going with an Intel motherboard and CPU for the new system I'd like to build. I looked at their D815EEA2 and D815EPEA2 ATX-style offerings. I'm not sure whether or not the onboard video on the EPEA2 would be a blessing or a curse under Linux. I expect it would be fine under Windows, since I'm not a gamer. I want to shoot for a 1-GHz Pentium III processor, which I expect would be as fast as a 1.3 GHz Pentium 4 for the stuf I do.
I went to Bob Thompson's Hardware Guys messageboard, and posted a message asking for advice. One thing the web has done for us is to make Smart People available to the average user (well, maybe the slightly-above-average user) as never before. I've exchanged emails with people I've respected anonymously for years, and with others with whom I became acquainted more recently, and it's been edifying. It's way better to get a "Not THAT way, dummy!" response from somebody that genuinely knows what they're talking about, than to try and sift through the mountains of product specifications and marketing dreck that was previously the only way to get advice if you didn't personally know a guru. Now most gurus are only an email away. A few years back, I was actually giving advice to Dr. Jerry Pournelle, whose fiction and Byte magazine column I'd read and respected for lo these many moons. I exchanged emails about website design with Dan Bricklin, cowriter of the seminal Visicalc spreadsheet that was the original PC's "killer app." I've even become sort of long-distance friends with Dave Farquhar, an author and fellow nerd who is much younger, cuter, and smarter than me. It's good to know Smart People. They can help us defeat the wise adage that "the only thing history teaches us, is that history teaches us nothing."
My personal history is rife (hey, there's a good Word For The Day) with examples of foolish impulse purchases. (Don't even say "Jornada" to me!) I'm hoping that some timely advice will head off additional repetitions of that behavior. Oh, and I meant to mention a resource to which I expect to refer often in future, and to which I found a link on the Hardware Guys site: Reseller Ratings, a website where users give their experiences with ordering from online vendors. Bookmark that one if you buy online. I checked out the vendor who had the best price on Pricewatch's list of vendors carrying the Intel motherboards I mentioned above. Here's their rating: Not Good At All. Good to know before plunking down my plastic.
Oh, and BTW —
Main Entry: rife
Pronunciation: 'rIf
Function: adjective
Etymology: Middle English ryfe, from Old English ryfe; akin to Old Norse rIfr abundant
Date: 12th century
1 : prevalent especially to an increasing degree
2 : ABUNDANT, COMMON
3 : copiously supplied : ABOUNDING -- usually used with with
- rife adverb
- rife·ly adverb
I love words, don't you?
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Saturday, 19 May 2001
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No entry.