She continued to rant at him all the way up to my floor.

On the way out the elevator, I called back that screaming doesn’t solve anything, though after getting better caffeinated, I wish I had told her to treat the man like a human being.

explaining something extremely interesting (I won’t spoil his punchline, you’ll have to spend the 18 minutes on it).

Work was not nearly as productive as I wanted it to be: I updated cobbler’s createrepo_flags options on my repositories to use –update, and promptly got the OOM killer fired up at the next reposync. The option makes the synchronization process more reasonable in terms of time, but completely nukes the box while doing so. Tomorrow I play around and see if reposync can be made to run as someone other than root…

I grabbed some Yoko Ono yesterday, and while the Basement Jaxx remix of Everyman, Everywoman is pretty slick, the whole Open Your Box album feels very dated in 2009. Maybe it was fresh a couple years ago, but it’s Techno: By The Book, so I really doubt it. Next up on the rotation is Faunts’ latest, which actually is pretty fresh, in the few months old sorta way.

I also discovered, finally, one reason why my laptop has always had trouble suspending: if Rhythmbox is playing when you shut the lid it won’t properly suspend. IMO, this is a tremendously evil behavior, and I’ve stuffed my laptop into a bag and let it nearly cook itself to death many times because of it.

As an aside, whoever invented IVR is on my list of people to assassinate should I ever have the ability to travel backwards in time. I don’t care if it was a joint effort between (warning: spoiler) Hemingway and Jesus, they catch the bullet.

I managed to hit my caloric goal for the day, mainly because I walked home from the train rather than cabbing it all the way home, as I have been known to do when I get out later than the bus runs.

I’ve been using Tasque for a couple weeks now and it’s extremely useful for keeping myself organized. The only downside was the lack of instant-access to it unless I’m sitting in front of my laptop. Trying to remedy that I signed up for RTM and got their MilkSync to work with my Crackberry, so the tasks I enter on my laptop end up on my phone and visa-versa.

Sigh. Being impressed with sync is very ten years ago…

I was sort of on the fence about the counting calories thing, at least until I saw the WeightBot screenshots, which sold me on the idea: eating healthy to look better and live longer? Meh. Eating healthy for the sake of a new toys? Win.

Unfortunately WeightBot is only for the iPhone, which I don’t (want to) own, so that rule that out. Instead I googled for online tools and came up with livestrong.com, which has a “MyPlate” thing that keeps track of all this, along with “X food has N calories” and such. It also has a Blackberry thing for entering all that as well that’s on the “Blackberry App World”.

The upshot? App World is a gigantic ripoff of Apple’s App Store, and something they should have had from the beginning.

• I was bitten by April Fools twice today. The second time because I was too exhausted to remember that it was April Fools.
• A life without hope is not wasted or a pity any more than a life without religion is.
• A good friend of mine once told me that if you listen to what people say carefully, they will give themselves away at some point. Like most wisdom phrased in an open-ended way, I’ve seen lots of confirmation of this and little contradiction.
• I think a fair number of people like to dominate others with their words. Being on the receiving end of that kind of thing is really exhausting. I think it’s fairly obviously just people playing out their psychodramas in an environment where you can’t just club and be clubbed.
• State-granted monopolies on culture, art, and media in general stifle creativity, limit freedom, and exist to protect one power against another. In this society it’s almost always used to protect the established power against the new one. Standard Lessig, now apply it to those organizations we may otherwise support. That pinched-face discomfort you are feeling is cognitive dissonance between your stated preferences and your desire to defend your principles.

I was panned by IBM for an accessibility position last summer because I didn’t have a college degree. Their loss/that’s OK, since they dropped all that work this June. A few months later I was cold-called by Google for a position in New York, but I umm-aaah-huh (flubbed) a question on the sticky bit so that fell through. (Within a month I could recite from memory the appropriate section from the chmod man page.)

I didn’t take the interview completely seriously, since I was to the offer stage with a job at a startup in downtown Chicago. I put up with the four-hour/day transit time for a couple months before moving to the North Side with a co-worker from my campus-paper admin days and one of his friends. Our living room looks like a tornado hit on a datacenter, but since I’ve somehow managed to avoid stepping on the numerous case screws, that’s cool.

I’m well into SA territory, filled with all the standard hoariness of a layer-zero build-out—BTU/hr, VA, UPS—thrown atop our wonderful Xen setups, OpenVPN, etc. On the downside, we’ve had a minimal layer of management introduced, complete with weekly status meetings and “action item lists” (a term I had figured would be shamed out of existence well before I got out of college based on Palaniuk’s star power alone).

Life is good, but I re-discovered today that reading pgo is still more fun than all the social democrat blogs combined.

It’s 9:28 PM
Commuter train of the damned
Slaving away for machines
Which do our thinking for us
Which is what this is all about…
Evolution…

It’s 9:32 PM
Commuter train of the damned
Soon to be boarding
A motly crew of the damaged
Is crowding me in the waiting room
What if I stay perfectly still,
Can they see me?

It’s 9:34 PM
Commuter train of the damned
The mechanized nightmare
We’re all wired in now
Did I say that out loud, or just think it?
Sloppy cadence.

It’s 9:37 PM
Commuter train of the damned
Soon to be headed out
To places boring as fuck
Thou art damaged and still with me
Thy Rod and thy staff…

It’s 9:39 PM
Commuter train of the damned
It won’t be long now, man
Atomic batteries to power
Turbines to speed, ready to go
Doors are closing

It’s 9:45 PM
Commuter train of the damned
Fascists ain’t runnin’ shit.
A small god for small miracles
I knew they’d be invading damn
Iran on nine-twelve.