Welcome to My World

With my friend safely home from her trip to Atlanta, Georgia to participate in the 2008 International Science & Engineering Fair (congratulations to her for winning her seat there, btw! More on that in a subsequent post this weekend ), I am free to rant about the bat-shit insane idiots working for the Transportation Security Administration. Like the “You can’t take pictures here!” crowd demonstrating that sanity has left the security industry behind in public spaces, I am more convinced than ever before that the entire concept of the TSA is fundamentally broken, flawed, and unworkable.

My friend’s luggage, you see, was flagged by the TSA on her flight to Atlanta, and her luggage was detained, screened, and thoroughly searched. She made it to Atlanta. Her luggage didn’t meet her there. It went on to New York (the plane’s next stop) for a thorough examination, then came back to Atlanta where it was eventually delivered to her late that night. So while some unnamed yokels at the TSA in Atlanta and/or New York rummaged through her bags, flipped through her clothes and underwear and all her other possessions that came along on the trip, she spent her first day in Atlanta wearing stuff that didn’t fit her (donated to her by the airline, her friends, and by ISEF sponsors), worrying about whether she’d actually get her bag back (which contained a contact lens case, prescription medication, and other “important” stuff).

What caused them to flag it as “suspicious” you ask? A plastic carrying case designed for, and carrying, eight rechargeable AA batteries. They looked “suspicious” on an X-ray scan, and this was enough for some TSA dickwad to flag the luggage as suspicious, requiring additional screening. How did they accomplish this screening? They put it on the fucking airplane anyway to fly to Atlanta, then put it back in the air again to fly to New York to be examined. Then, having ruled it “safe,” they flew it back to Georgia.

I’m officially sick of people lording artificial power just because they can. I’m tired of people who aren’t causing harm or even inconvenience being harassed for taking pictures of a public place. Lest a language lawyer pounce on me by pointing out “but, but, but Union Station isn’t a public place, it’s privately owned and operated!” I will explain that when I use the term “public place” in this rant, I refer to the concept of a place wherein random persons can freely enter, mill about, and exit unmolested under most circumstances. This includes places like bus stations, train stations, airport lobbies (the bits where you don’t have to go through security to reach), even 24-hour Wal-Marts. I refer to it as any place where you can walk in without paying an admission fee, goof around harmlessly for awhile, then leave.

I don’t have much to add to this update on efforts to combat Microsoft’s modern-day attempts to spread FUD about Linux (that’s “Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt,” in case you were curious — it was an old trick IBM used to use when it commanded the computing market a few decades ago), except to encourage you very, very loudly to go read it.

Microsoft is running a silly “Get the Facts” campaign, designed to distract people from the realities (that Linux and similar platforms are far more reliable and scalable, are easier to use and work with, and are (much) cheaper than Microsoft’s own Windows-based offerings) by spinning so much bullshit it’ll make your head swim. The article I linked to above steps through the latest efforts by the company to continue its smear campaign.

<sarcasm>Of course, Microsoft is really just interested in telling the truth (that nobody but Microsoft can see) about Linux. We’re just all missing the glaring reality. Microsoft has absolutely no motivations beyond just “exposing the truth” in its efforts to convince people to buy its products instead of going with the cheaper/better alternatives.</sarcasm>

My thirtieth birthday is this Friday (April 18, in case anybody’s actually curious ). I’m not one to generally make a huge fuss over my own birthdays (though I’m also not a spoiled-sport about them — I always graciously accept “happy birthday!” notes from those courteous enough to offer them and I always appreciate it when friends decide it’s worth making a big deal out of it; I’ll never forget the whipped cream pie I got in the face last year at R.J. Gator’s ), but for some reason I actually find myself looking a bit oddly at this one coming up tomorrow.

Thirty seems like a bigger number than the other birthdays (duh, it’s larger than 29, or any other age I’ve reached; I mean it feels more significant). The whole week has definitely been on the weird side, but there were two moments in particular that have slapped me across the face a bit harder than usual.

Wednesday, as I bought a couple gallons of milk at Sam’s Club (along with some other junk), a woman walked by, and in a bit of a flirty tone, said “looks like you’ve got some teenagers!” It was the first time it’s ever occurred to me that I actually look old enough to be a father now. Heh. This afternoon, as I waited for the mechanic to finish helping my truck drain another $800 from my pocket, a woman waiting at the shop for an oil change turned to me and said “you look familiar — do I know you from somewhere?” Looking back, this is actually a pretty classic come-on line, but is also a fairly standard conversation starter, too. As I listed some of the stuff I do out in public where she might have seen me, none of them rang any bells, so she asked “wait, do you have kids who go to school here?” D’oh!

In my late twenties, I enjoyed not ever getting carded at a bar. Since I don’t actually have any kids yet, it feels seriously weird to have people now looking at me and assuming I’m old enough that I should have kids. Not strictly “bad” — just weird.

I assume this isn’t a “mid-life crisis” sort of thing; I understand that tends to crop up in a person’s forties, not the thirties, and it only seems to happen to about 10% of people anyway. That and I have no interest in burning bridges, buying a ridiculously overpriced sports car (I did that in my early twenties at the behest of my ex-wife), making drastic lifestyle changes, or anything else like that.

I’ve just never had a woman just “assume” I had kids, much less two in as many days. It’s a bit flattering that I’m judged to be suitable fatherhood material, but it was also the first time it’s really felt like I’m not a grown-up goofball kid anymore.

A short aside: I’m pleased to report that my truck now has working air conditioning again. It’s just such a shame they found random, seemingly-burned chunky goop in the transmission fluid. Sigh.

Ah, tax day. That most hair-pulling, gut-wrenching day of the year when you’re forcibly reminded just how much of your daily toiling at the grindstone goes to (supposedly) the “greater good” of society.

I’ve only ever had a sizable tax bill like this once before in my entire life, and that was back in 2000 when my ex-wife and I hatched a plan to buy ourselves a house in Colorado — the theory went something like this:

• Claim 6 exemptions instead of 2 on my W-2 form to reduce the total taxes taken out of each paycheck, so that when we actually buy the house, all the interest we pay will be deductible and it’ll all balance out.

While that idea actually does work (remembering though that the reduced withholding increases what you’ll owe at year’s end, and the interest only reduces the taxable income you get taxed on) if you follow through, it sets you up for hilarious failure when you don’t actually buy a house. Whoops.

Two nights ago I had an opportunity to explore the realm of Microsoft’s “Windows Genuine Advantage” bullshit — their soft and friendly name for their *fucking draconian anti-piracy authentication and validation suite*. It seems like almost every month (sometimes even more frequently) the company ships yet another update (in case you’re wondering, Windows only runs on bare metal now on one machine of mine full-time — an older Acer laptop that I used to run Linux on until I loaned it to a friend; it got re-imaged back to XP for her use, and since it came back I haven’t had time to put Linux back on it) to the veritable “prove you haven’t stolen from us, bastard!” toolkit.

Here’s the amusing part. A few weeks ago, some friends handed me an older laptop that was seemingly permanently broken, to see if I could resurrect it. It really *was* permanently broken, with no resurrection possible. Crud. Wasn’t a bad notebook, either I could have thrown it into the World Community Grid pile of machines I have.

Occasionally I’m asked by a friend of mine “why bother with Linux if it gives you trouble like this on your notebook?” Usually, when she asks that question, I’m in the midst of figuring out how to make some random piece of hardware in this notebook cooperate under Linux, or determine why suspend-to-RAM doesn’t work, and so on, and I rarely have time (or, sadly, patience) to actually answer the question reasonably. I also always ultimately meet with success in my efforts getting that “whatever” fixed or working once I’m done, but by then the conversation has moved on to other topics.

We’ve long been a society of wimps and braggarts, but it’s reached epidemic proportions lately. It’s been a long time since the world trembled when this nation roared; sure, we’ve still got lots of military hardware and ordinance and we can definitely cause a whole lot of problems for anybody we’re annoyed at, but our voice is falling on deaf ears a lot lately on the world stage.

This is an example of why. A man walked into an emergency room holding an envelope, apparently did or said something that spooked somebody, and the police were called. The man was arrested, his envelope “seized” and analyzed by the bomb squad, and the emergency room was shut down entirely — no one let in or out (except for what the hospital calls “Level-One trauma patients”) — for hours until the envelope was deemed to be harmless. Traffic around the hospital was also halted, which meant a disruption in city traffic for the area. This took place in the evening hours, but that didn’t speed up the process at all.

The news article tells a more “serious” story — the envelope is described as “over-stuffed,” and the man is said to have been called “mentally ill” by the police officers involved. It is stated that the envelope made a metal detector beep when it was tested by officers.

So … a non-event. Dozens of personnel and patients were needlessly upset and bothered by this nonsense, and traffic for an entire city block surrounding this hospital was disrupted for hours, all because a guy, presumably in a bad mood, walked into a hospital with an envelope that had just enough metal in it to make a hyper-sensitive metal detector beep, and said something unpleasant to somebody. There’s absolutely no detail in the article, and depressingly, the reporter involved seemed not to ask any important questions…

Fair warning: I’m picking on the religious loons again. If that offends you, you’d better bugger off now and go read a church bulletin or something.

A church in Florida (ugh, dammit … why the hell do people in Florida try so damned hard to earn that “Florida” tag on Fark.com?) has issued a 30-day sex challenge — if you’re married, have sex every day for 30 days; if you’re not, keep it in your pants for 30 days. They’ve included handy-dandy logbooks to help you keep track! It’s the new marriage therapy!

Ahem. Um, no. Stay the fuck out of my bedroom. Why the hell do churches give a rat’s ass what I do with my “junk?” Am I banging alter boys? Nope. Am I banging somebody’s wife? Nope. Piss off — it’s just not your business. When is the “right time” to have sex with your partner? Any damned time you both feel like it. Sex is not a function of “gosh, honey, do you think the minister approves?” Sex is a function of “hey, are you in the mood? Yeah? Excellent, let’s go!”

Churches really need to just back away from the whole “interest in sex” thing. Quit trying to control it, quit trying to pry into the sex lives of other people, and quit fucking the kids. That’ll help a lot more than what’s being done now.

Folks, if you need marriage counseling, go to a real marriage counselor. You know — the kind that had to actually go to school, read books, study things, and earn the degree they display on their wall.

About a year and a half ago, a client of mine sent me an unexpected gift in the form of five books: Ender’s Game and Ender’s Shadow by Orson Scott Card, and Titan, Wizard, and Demon by John Varley. The three Varley books were a trilogy, and I actually really enjoyed it. The two books by Card are the first in their respective series of books set in the Ender’s Game universe … I’ll let you guess which one started the whole thing

It’s important to note I didn’t pay for the books. They were shipped to me straight from Amazon, so it’s clear they were brand new, but money didn’t leave my pockets to cause those books to land in my possession.

I actually read the Titan trilogy first — when I realized how big the Ender’s Game series was, I decided to tackle a smaller pile of books first. When I finally got to Ender’s Game, I absolutely loved it, and immediately set about acquiring the rest of the books in both Ender’s Game series and the Ender’s Shadow series. To do this, I went to half.com … no point in paying retail for six books when I could snag them all for under $20 (including shipping).