Hello Vader

It's too silly.

Spoiler warning

Parody or obsession? You decide.

MuralInMensRestroom.JPG (JPEG Image, 721x433 pixels)

Eyes forward.

Al Gore the comedian

Good timing makes for good laughs.

meat.rtf

A neat short story that I saw some time ago, but it's still good.

ASCII Maps

ASCII Maps is obviously based on Google Maps but otherwise speaks for itself.

Trends

My employer's new Trends service is oddly addictive. Here are some of my searches which got satisfying results:

• cheap, fast, good
• beatles, jesus
• mercurial, bitkeeper (odd, this one seems to cut off in mid-2005)
• left, right
• clue, aol
• cthulhu, condoleezza

Career Development Plan

A friend emailed me something I wrote long ago and have since completely forgotten. I think I was quite witty back then. Well, I laughed today at what I wrote ten years ago:

Michele Shaw writes:
>
> ** Create a career development plan
>

This is a concept which has always baffled me.

CAREER DEVELOPMENT PLAN V1.0

ABSTRACT.

This document details the future as it applies to me, paying particular attention to my career preferences. In the course of this, accurate predictions will be made of technological advances, market forces, personal life developments, revelation, disillusion, and of course my future personal preferences. The result will be a wholly useful and informative opus, whose scope is not limited in any practical way, and which is neither a success placebo nor a daydreaming exercise designed to impart artificial job satisfaction.

1. Introduction

Many things affect the future career of anyone in a rapidly changing industry, but fortunately most of them are amenable to management analysis born of the fast-moving hamburger approximation and retail industry, and so the problem of the directivity of time is not, empirically, an obstacle to such analysis. Accordingly, the future is laid out in the following sections by date.

2. Year 1998

In the late part of the year, political mistakes by the heads of department will allow me to lead a coup and restructure the department, leaving me as nominal second-in-command, behind an ineffectual cannonfodder manager who knows discretion and little else.

3. Year 1999

The release of the hitherto-secret GNU automatic program-verification module for libbfd leaves the software industry stunned as it detects and flags bug after bug in binary code worldwide. Salaries fall as IT orgs and sub-orgs shed staff like woolly coats in July. I move into management of project integration at this point.

4. Year 2000

Microsoft's widespread and now GNU-debugged software runs slowly on intel machines worldwide, and they lever their monopoly for all it's worth. The collapse of the world's economy in January impels thousands of crippled businesses to switch to Microsoft products, because, ironically, they work better than the other stuff, and they're Microsoft compatible. I become a system developer at Microsoft, working on parallelising BFD so that the incredibly slow software can be stretched by throwing it at more hardware.

5. Year 2001

U.S. DoD switches its systems over to Microsoft Dimensions (the successor to Windows NT, is byte-compiled, has special instruction codes for load-low-low-longword, load-high-low-longword, load-low-high-longword, and load-high-high-longword to perform 128-bit computing). A synchronisation bug in BFD causes global eschaton.

6. Conclusions

I shall not invest stock, save money, or maintain a 401(k) plan.

7. Acknowledgements

I could not have completed this plan without the aid of Cassandra Tetragrammaton, one of HR's many talented omniscient career resolution consultants. Although she is on catatonic depression leave at the moment, I sincerely hope she will return in time to see the realisation and success of the plan she has helped me compile.

 --adrian.
We are Chicken of Borg. You will be assimilated and... SQUAWK!

“Absolutely unintentional”

Told you.

Ben & Jerry apologised for releasing a promotional Paddy's Day ice cream flavour named after the Black & Tans. I've got to race to get some before they pull it from the shelves.

Skimming Chip'n'Pin

Mike Bond at Cambridge University reports some interesting results of experiments attempting to hack chip and pin terminals, much like the current scourge of ATM skimmers. I've wondered about the possibilities here for some time; after all, when you type your valuable PIN into equipment controlled by the vendor, you have no trusted computing base: in theory, your PIN is compromised each and every time you use it, and you're just trusting that the retailer isn't going to abuse its position. The only thing protecting you from a compromised retailer is the difficulty of implementing a skimmer or man-in-the-middle attack. The interesting thing about Bond's work is that it sets a rather low (if unclear) limit on that difficulty.

The ill wind beneath Cullen's wings

(Via ICTE) The Irish Examiner discovers that Monica Leech (who was to Martin Cullen what Karl Rove is to Dick Cheney) still carries the arrogance and bombast that characterised Cullen's responses to any criticism of his evoting plans.

Sketchpad: the first OO system

In his ACM Turing Award lecture at OOPSLA 2004, Alan Kay came up with this memorable quote about Sketchpad:

I went to ask Ivan How could you possibly in one year, in machine code, on this big but rather slow machine with no graphics display on it, have done the first graphics system, the first object-oriented software system, and the first dynamic problem-solving system?. And Ivan looked at me and said Well, I didn't know it was hard.

Touch-screen voting isn't the right answer

This article by John Schneider is a fairly clear explanation of the basic problems with unaudited voting machines, and it's probably suitable for pointing politicians at.

Best Paper on Chickens

Chicken?

“Black & Tan™”-flavour Ben & Jerry's ice cream!

I'd better get some while in the US, because it sure as hell won't be stocked in Ireland.

Deception Dollars

I'd like to get these, but unfortunately I wouldn't be able to bring them back to Ireland because each note would be a counterfeit of a currency note within the meaning of subsection (2)(a) of section 32 of the Criminal Justice (Theft and Fraud Offences) Act, 2001. Subsection (3)(a) makes it clear that even the poster containing the fake bills is forbidden, and subsection (3)(b) of section 35 provides for five years imprisonment just for innocent possession of a counterfeit of a currency note.

Movie Posters edited by cynics

I particularly like this one.

A short film on despotism

I'm quite sceptical about this film — it's definitely in the style of a 1946 government propaganda film, but the content is seriously anachronistic. At one point it warns against the dangers of government progaganda; at another it warns against the influence of powerful private interests. Most suspiciously of all, it focuses exclusively on the United States even though it bears the title of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It's still interesting, and the fact that it's an entirely modern fake means that the cringeworthy prejudices of 60 years ago are absent. Enjoy.

Clinton Curtis testifies about Ohio's election shenanigans

I'd read this testimony before, but someone has a video.

Tech industry = Auto industry + 30 years

Does this sound familiar at all?

McGregor grew up in Memphis, when his dream job of firefighter was off limits to African Americans. Instead, he went to work in a handle-making factory at 18, where his take-home pay was $46 a week. Drafted into the Army, he went to Vietnam as a paratrooper and one night was comparing paychecks with buddies from Detroit. "They worked for Chrysler. I said my paycheck was $46 and they had hundreds of dollars," he said. "I said, damn, I'm going to Detroit when I get out."

He did, and when he got to the Fisher Body Fleetwood plant, he saw a sign on the bulletin board that he will never forget: "If you know anyone who needs a job, please bring them tomorrow." They put him to work that very day, welding back seats to car trunks. His first paycheck was $216, more than four times what he'd made in Memphis. To this day, it hangs framed on the wall in his den. "I didn't want to cash it. I just wanted to look at it," he said.

Overnight, he had become middle class — and has remained so. Now 59, he looks back in amazement at what feels like the rise and fall of a way of life, all under his nose. "First they were begging me to come. Now I'm holding an offer that says we'll pay you to leave!" he said. "How can things go from the top of the mountain to halfway down in so little time?"