Last Names
Apparently, Nikki Cox and Jay Mohr are engaged. Indeed, "Mohr-Cox" would be the best last name ever.
Weird Pride
Why do we take pride in strange, often negative things? Why do we wear the day-to-day shit we hate like a badge of honor?
I just don't get it. When I was in school, it was always a contest to see who had the most work to do, or who was so swamped that they were constantly behind and getting their ass kicked trying to play catch-up. You have three exams this week? Wow, you must be so cool. Two lab reports, a research paper, four problem sets, and a project due tomorrow? Seriously, you're hot shit. Taking 24 credits this semester and you don't have time for anything but school work? Damn, you must be amazing.
On any given day, a look down my AIM list at away messages would tell me of all the terrible things everyone was going through. And mine was right there with the rest of them.
What's the deal? Is it a natural extension of the "misery loves company" line of thought? Is it a sick way of showing off, proving that you can handle more work than anyone else? Is it somehow cool to work yourself beyond exhaustion and depression?
Well, here's my life now. I work a relatively moderate amount. Sure, sometimes I don't get home until 7 or 8, and occasionally I have conference calls at night. But I make up for it by going to work later than most people, and I get to have some fun and down time while I'm there, as long as I get my work done. I'm well-liked and maybe even respected at the office, despite my relative youth and lack of experience. After work, some days I'll go out dancing, whether for fun or to practice. Sometimes I'll just go home and catch up on the TV shows I like, or work on some software I enjoy hacking on. Or maybe I'll drive out to meet some friends for dinner, a movie, some ice cream, some gaming, or just to hang out for a while. Perhaps I'll leave work a little early to shoot the shit at the bar with some co-workers, and then head back later to get some work done while the beer wears off.
My weekends are my own. From the time I leave the office Friday evening, I don't even have to think about work until Monday morning if I don't want to. I can sleep in as late as I want on Saturday and Sunday, and there's no reason why I need to be up. I never have to spend time in the library studying (not that I did much of that in college). I'm never in the lab all night trying to figure out why my 32-bit asynchronous ALU suffers signal degradation in the most significant 4 bits. I'm never beating my head against a computer monitor at 4:30am, desperately hoping my semaphores will start working properly in time for the project turn-in deadline.
Do I have a perfect life? No. Are there things that could be better? Sure. Am I totally stress-free? Of course not. But I think I'm doing pretty damned well. And while I do work, I have free time, and I don't have to feel guilty about other work that I could and should be doing. I don't have problem sets that were due weeks ago that I haven't gotten to. I don't have lectures and sections that I've missed, and I'm not so far behind that I'm embarrassed to go to a TA and ask for help.
But even with all that, I can't let it go. At any reasonable opportunity, I'll point out that I had to stay in school an extra semester because I got so behind and was such a terrible student. I'll joke about how I feel like I came somewhat close to getting kicked out of school. I'll wax nostalgic over how I never really learned to study because I never had to in high school, and how that made college so much harder. If that stuff doesn't seem to fit the conversation, I'll try and work in how exhausted my job makes me, or how frustrated I am with certain people who make it hard for me to do my job. It's always a contest to see who has it worst.
What's wrong with being happy? What's wrong with having down time, and fun time? What's wrong with honestly not having anything more pressing to do than curl up on the couch with a good book? Why can't life be about all the good things, instead of the crap we have to deal with? Why does being happy sometimes actually make me feel guilty? Why?
Maybe it's just the people I talk to and hang out with. One of them works a full time job, and for some sick reason takes night classes. Another is still an undergrad, and she sounds just like I used to. Yet another is back in grad school at Cornell, busy all the time. Another is in law school: 'nuff said. One is in grad school, and generally hates her life. Another is finishing up a master's degree, and he's constantly behind on everything due to other obligations.
How about people out of school, with jobs? One works 60+ hours a week, but still finds time to have fun. Another works a relatively normal work week, and gets out and does things as often as he can. Someone else gets to play with fun equipment at his job, and goes to bars and parties and plays gigs on weekends. One of my not-too-much-older co-workers recently bought a house with his wife. Another friend is living in another country to start a business doing something that interests him. Does everyone love their jobs? No, of course not. But at worst they can separate it from the other parts of their lives. It's not always there, controlling, evoking guilt, demanding attention. And the bottom line is it pays. I don't care who you are: getting paid to do something you don't like is always preferable to paying to do something you don't like.
My conclusion: education is a horrible, traumatic experience, though a necessary evil. I'm glad I got out of it when I did, and I hope I have the sense never to go back unless I have a damned good reason. And if I do, I hope I can take it a lot less seriously than the last time around. Life is too short to be hating it for any period of time.
Un-Patriot Act Renewal
Looks like most of the renewal of the misleadingly-named Patriot Act has passed a House vote, by a small margin. Supposedly this new version of the Act gives greater protections to the civil liberties of suspected terrorists. From the article, looks like it's pretty weak. No surprise there.
"This legislation is a win for law enforcement, the war on drugs, and for communities and families across America," Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., said in remarks prepared for Wednesday.
Is it really? I've failed to hear of a claim that the Patriot Act has been used even once to bring a terrorist to justice. And what does this have to do with the ineptly-executed "war on drugs"? Why are terrorism "protections" being applied to unrelated activities? Sure, you can make the argument that drug trafficking supposedly funds terrorist activities. But you can make that argument about just about anything. It's a scare tactic used for overly-broad justification, and nothing more.
"Intense congressional and public scrutiny has not produced a single substantiated claim that the Patriot Act has been misused to violate Americans' civil liberties," said House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis.
Really? What about cases like this one? How is that at all acceptable in civilised society? I found that with a quick search. I'm sure I could find more with minimal effort. Hell, I'll even take the first step: look through the list yourself.
And how about foreign nationals? Does our way of life suddenly mean nothing when dealing with foreigners? Many people have been imprisoned for years without trial, some without even being accused of anything. Guantanamo Bay, anyone?
It makes me sick. But really, what can I do about it? I feel totally incapable of affecting anything.
Mmm, Weirdness
Your Ultimate Sci-Fi Profile II: Which sci-fi crew would you best fit in?
You scored as Moya (Farscape).
You are surrounded by muppets. But that is okay because they are your friends and have shown many times that they can be trusted. Now if only you could stop being bothered about wormholes.
Moya (Farscape) - 81% Serenity (Firefly) - 75% Deep Space Nine (Star Trek) - 75% Babylon 5 (Babylon 5) - 69% Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix) - 63% Galactica (Battlestar: Galactica) - 63% SG-1 (Stargate) - 56% FBI's X-Files Division (The X-Files) - 56% Andromeda Ascendant (Andromeda) - 50% Millennium Falcon (Star Wars) - 50% Bebop (Cowboy Bebop) - 50% Enterprise D (Star Trek) - 44%
I'm not terribly surprised, though I can't really say much for Babylon 5 since I've never watched it.
Republican Arrogance
Looks like South Dakota is the first state to ban abortions outright.
From the artile:
State lawmakers had rejected proposed amendments that would have made exceptions for rape or incest.
"We must help each mother to see the value of the gift that is a child, and nurture the mother for her own sake and for the sake of her child," Rounds said in the statement.
Absolute bullshit. I honestly don't understand why people feel the need to get into other people's business.
Birthdays
Happy Birthday to the Legend of Zelda video game series, which turns 20 today. This was the first game I played on my NES, probably close to 20 years ago, and it was (at the time) seriously the coolest thing in the entire world. Most of my future Nintendo console purchases since then have been motivated in part by the ability to play future Zelda titles.
My old best friend from NJ, Mike, and I really bonded over Nintendo games back then. We used to play for hours at each other's houses, and went totally nuts when the Super Nintendo came out. Ah, nostalgia.
Awesome games: I salute you.
Ooops!
Awesome. Apparently Xfmedia can break the kernel. Seriously, I consider that a major accomplishment.
Really, though, looks like a kernel bug.
V’Day
Some (single) people try hard to avoid Valentine's Day. My strategy: fly to Taiwan the afternoon beforehand, thus shrinking it down to only 8 hours long (kinda).
Misinformed Users
A week or so ago I wrote about good users. I suppose it's only natural that now I feel the need to rant about bad users. Well, not even that bad in this case. Just misinformed. There was a post to xfce4-dev today by one of these misinformed users. My first instinct is to reply to this person to the list, but really, it's just noise that people don't need to see unless they want to read it. So I'll "reply" here. I assume that if you're here, you want to read it, or have the intelligence and ability to skip over things you don't want to read without complaining like a baby.
Some background: Xubuntu is an Ubuntu-based project with Xfce as its bundled default desktop environment. As of this writing, it's in a semi-early development stage, and one of the developers is constantly bugging us about when the current 4.4 development tree of Xfce is/will be stable. The email I'm talking about was written by some random user in support of this effort. Here goes.
Yeah but let's face is, (x)ubuntu isn't really exposure you wanna turn down.
Why not? It's not really our choice. If someone wants to do something with Xfce, good for them. That's what it's there for, and one of the many reasons why OSS is great. I dislike the insinuation that we're somehow doing Xfce a disservice by not bending over backwards in the name of some ill-defined "exposure".
This could be a turning point for XFCE.
From what to what? A minority desktop environment with a reasonably-sized, loyal following into... a minority desktop environment with a reasonably-sized, loyal following?
(Actually, this kind of user base increase can only increase the "reasonably-sized" figure, while decreasing the "loyal" figure and not doing much for the "minority" status. Yay?)
Xubuntu is almost as good as Ubuntu at the moment. I myself run a hybrid of GNOME services (keyring, vfs, session manager, all that crap) and XFCE (xfwm, xfdesktop, xfce-panel, iconbox). It has all the "it just works" of Ubuntu/GNOME with power-user features, such as a 21st century window manager.
... which is good to hear. Xfce is designed with this modularity in mind.
But I wouldn't have ever, EVER even thought of trying out XFCE if I hadn't been able to run "sudo aptitude install xubuntu-desktop".
That's a shame, but that's really not my concern. In fact, I worry when I start getting users who don't know anything beyond their package manager. In my experience, these users are more likely to become an annoying support burden and time sink.
I continue to wonder why so many people seem to think that exposure, fame, and a large user base is the only reason (or even the main reason) people write OSS. Personally, I work on Xfce because I enjoy it. Having someone nag me about release dates and constantly asking "is this particular version X stable enough for Y" just reduces that enjoyment. I don't like to be hassled. If people use and like Xfce, that's great. But I'm content to just work on something that I enjoy. I suppose I will really be in the right place when I learn to do what I like and ignore all the extraneous crap I don't like (a huge benefit of working on OSS without getting paid for it, IMHO). I guess I'm too much of a drama queen for that at this point, though.
I don't really mean to pick on this guy specifically. Sometimes a post like this sets me off. And I just woke up and I'm slightly cranky.
Disclaimer: I of course only speak for myself and my own motivations.
Helpful Users Redux
I want to go into detail about one of Brian’s points. I don’t think that most users understand how much that they can improve Xfce even if they can’t code.
Documentation has to be written, bugzilla has to be managed, user questions have to be answered. I thnk that many people get the impression that by writing documentation they’re not really helping. After all, no one uses the docs, and they’re not taking the load off of anyone.
Totally not the case! If the docs were well written and up to date, then people wouldn’t ask so many silly questions. Devs do write docs, and it eats up time – time better spent fixing that segfault. So if you want Xfce not to crash, and you can’t program, the best bet is to write good docs so that we can do the job.
And people will praise you and love you forever. I certainly will. And if you are good enough, maybe the good docs will become one of the selling points of Xfce. There are projects out there who has the extensive availability of documentation as one of its selling points (Linux distros for example, whose use of man pages blows the mind of many a former Windows user).
Want us to fix your pet bug? Help us keep bugzilla clean! Have a killer feature you’d like to see? Stay active in the mailing lists answering questions! If you are good at your self appointed job, then it doesn’t take much till your part of the team – and isn’t that what you really want?
Good little boys and girls might even get a shiny @xfce.org email address . . .