thwartedefforts

You can tell a lot about some people just from how they respond to random stuff found on the Intartubes.

The Test topic

Guitar Captured with Enough Coke Stashed Aboard to Take Us All to Electric Ladyland

Responses

August: OH DANG! They got my guitar!

Joel: my, that is a lot of coke

Dennis: how the hell did they find that? ahh: “The Man noticed a bit of telltale powdery residue poking out of a conspicuous spot”. THE MAN

Peter: I’ll take the chunk they broke off

Dan: hah, it was the bargain brand Squier ironically enough

Will: Wasn’t there a Cheech and Chong movie where they drove around in a truck made from marijuana?

Mike: fucking hilarious. You gonna buy one?

Kurt: damn drug addict musicians

Not that anyone seemed to have any trouble breaking the ice or starting up a conversation, but TECHcocktail should have some kind of bingo game, treasure hunt, or something like that. This way, people have another excuse to chat each other up, can check things off, gather points, and there can be prizes at the end that you can effectively “earn” rather than just get lucky and win.

To get things started, here’s a sample list of point generators and things to find:

• If you’re a recruiter, you get one point for each minute you accidentally talk to another recruiter thinking they are in technology and looking for a job.
• You get one point for each person who introduces someone else as their significant other.
• If you unexpectedly meet an old significant other of your own, give yourself 10 points.
• Getting interviewed by someone who is carrying a tape recorder nets you a point. If you have to spell out a domain name into a tape recorder, you get one point for each letter in the domain name.
• One point for each domain name someone drops like it’s a household name but you’ve never heard of it. Two points if you’re the only one within earshot who has heard of that domain. Three points if you’ve actually been to the domain in question.
• One point for each person who, apparently being so new to this Internet thing, appends every domain name with .com, no matter how many times you say .net, .org, or .us.
• One point for each founder of a company whose product is not live yet. Two points if they have a known/estimated release date. Three points if it’s next week. Four points if the product is already live.
• One point if someone says “web two point oh”. One point for “web three point oh”. Two points for “web one point oh”.
• Three points when someone utters “ontology”. Subtract four points if it’s immediately followed by “Sorry, I’m not sure who’s familiar with that term”.
• On your trip to the restroom, you acquire one point for each person talking on the phone in there. Two points if they’re typing into a blackberry.
• One point for each mention of “D&D”, “Star Trek” or “Star Wars” you overhear. Two points if it comes up in a conversation you’re having.
• Distribution of professions:
  • One point for each “project manager”.
  • Two points for each “founder” or “partner”.
  • Three points for any “designers”, “programmers”, “system administrators”, or “network administrators”. Bonus if they make known their “flavor” (Flash, Air, .NET, Cisco, Linux, Windows, OSX, PHP, RoR, Oracle, etc). Extra bonus if they’ve written a book.
  • Three points for each “lawyer”.
  • Zero points for recruiters.
• One point for each claim of “Internet Celebrity” status. One point if you recognize their name. Bonus if someone overhears and is awestruck.
• If you hear someone say “It’s my blog” and the person they are talking to responds with “What’s a blog?”, double your points (I kid you not, this actually happened).
• One point if a conversation you’re having gets cut short when someone needs to take a phone call. Two points if it was a legitimate phone call. Three points if they come back to continue talking after their phone call is finished.
• One point for each person who hands you a business card that is actually for the business they are talking with you about.

Overall, it was an enjoyable couple of hours. Free drinks are always nice. I’m told by those from Arstechnica who were there that the previous ones had more actual tech people and fewer, ahem, recruiters. I was kind of hoping to find some people to fill in the expertise gaps in the projects I’m working on or people to bounce ideas off of, but honestly I didn’t really know what to expect. I did definitely met some interesting people, people that I plan on following up with.

And then there’s this conversation August (aka Mayor Awesome) and I had:
“So, there don’t appear to be too many technology nerd chics here.”
“There aren’t even that many true nerds for that matter. But, yeah, it’s a sausage fest.”
“Shit, there’s even a sponsor for this sausage fest,” pointing at a logo for Poll Everywhere projected on the wall.
“See, even they know it’s mostly a big buncha guys.”

A lot of the debate and discussion about Network Neutrality is about tiered service, that ISPs will charge different amounts of money to both ends of a connection based on traffic priorities set by their own best interests. Meaning that if Comcast offers a VoIP service, they think they should be allowed to restrict access to competitors’ VoIP services (through outright denying connections or by traffic shaping to limit bandwidth) to encourage their customers to use their own services. In some respects, this could be considered double-dipping. From a business standpoint, if it makes sense for a company that already has unreliable service and problematic customer service (but I use Comcast solely as an example here, they are hardly the only provider to think like this and to have problems) to spread themselves thinner by expanding into other products is left as an exercise for the reader.

But this is only half the debate. ISPs can charge whatever the want if consumers of their services have an option to go someplace else: doing so is the bedrock of competition in the marketplace. Many ISPs are a monopoly in their area and have no effective competitors. Being allowed to be a monopoly and having common carrier status go hand in hand. If an ISP is going to restrict or limit the kinds of traffic that goes over the connection that the customer is paying for, they should lose the right to be a legally recognized/mandated monopoly. If there is proper competition for the base packet transfer service (”Internet service”) and the ISP is not a monopoly in the market (rarely the case in most major metropolitan areas in the US) then they should be able to set prices and restrict services however they see fit and let the market decide if doing so is a good idea for the company.

The bag of Lime and Chile Fritos says “Artifically Flavored” right on it. The bag of Bar-B-Q Fritos says “Bar-B-Q flavored corn chips”. My reasoning for that is because Bar-B-Q isn’t a natural flavor anyway, they don’t pump it out of the ground or pick it off trees — Bar-B-Q is an unnatural flavor, and anything that tastes like Bar-B-Q has been flavored so as to taste like that. In fact, the ingredients lists things like onion, tomato, paprika and garlic. So your experiences with Bar-B-Q flavored things actually contain more natural individual flavors than these other flavors which just taste (or are susposed to taste) like natural flavors. On the other hand, the Lime and Chile chips contain fewer ingredients, but does contain odd things like “Vinegar solids” and “Lime juice powder” and no preservatives, while the Bar-B-Q ones contain MSG. I suspect that vinegar may be a natural preservative.

monksp on LambdaMOO was looking for FileIO and I realized that it was never made available after I canceled my old accounts. So there it is now, at http://thwartedefforts.org/software/fileio/.

So idolatrare and I were woken up by this strange noise a few weeks ago, around 4:30 am. It sounded like heavy breathing, kind of, but not quite. So since it has warmed up, we’ve been hearing it a lot more, I think because the neighbors are keeping their windows up. At first, we couldn’t tell where the sound was coming from, if it was coming from another unit in our building, or the building next to ours — when it got really loud, it sounded like it was coming from someplace else than when it was softer.

We were hearing it at 6:30am, 11:00am, 2:30pm, and it would go on for 30 or 40 minutes before stopping. I even heard conversation once when it came to a temporary stop, a single male voice saying “Don’t joke with me. You want it don’t you? I can see the smile on your face.” Stranger and stranger.

We had our live-in sound engineer take a recording of it. You be the judge. Just what is strangenoise2.mp3 (1.8 meg mp3 file)? Someone having sex? By themselves? Torturing? Sloth from Goonies?

There have been a few requests for things from E_MOO, the most recent of which is the in-database parser. I searched the archive and found the docs for E_CORE, but the only portion written was the in-db parsing.

I’ve applied the samba auditing patch for 2.0.5 to the latest samba source, 2.0.7, and regenerated a new patch. I have not tested it (I don’t have a decent testing environment), but I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t work. You can find it in the Samba Software section.