Kennyblog Redux

For those of you who keep track of this sort of thing (or, in fact, care at all), I'm a software developer. We use Outlook at work for scheduling meetings and whatnot. I've been using the Outlook tasks to keep track of things that I want to deal with in my projects (since our bug tracking system is very official, and it would be a nightmare if I were actually to use it for an unreleased code base under active development).

Anyway, I just found the following task in there:

"There is probably a bug"

I mean, I will admit that I found one and fixed it, but I'm not sure that I can justifiably remove that from my task list. Ever. It's like a dime that got glued to the bottom of the change jar by the sublimation of a starlight mint that you dropped in by accident last year, and never bothered pulling out. I mean, there's always a bug. That's one of the things that keep programmers in their jobs!

Potentially that's a bad belief for me to have. But still, there we are.

I hate credit card companies. I hate them. It's nothing personal - I've never had any problem with them, always paying my bill on time and in full (well, I forgot one payment I think, missed the deadline by a few days. But no problem). I don't think I'm alone in this assessment*.

There's a lot of reason I have this opinion, but one of the main ones has to do with the really shady practices that you see in direct mailings. Like the one where they send you a bunch of checks. You and I both know that you shouldn't deposit these checks, because there ain't no such thing as a free lunch. But just like email spam, they wouldn't send them out if some people weren't depositing them and getting hit by the the usurious interest rates on cash advance. Screw you, credit card companies.

But this isn't about credit card companies. We all know that they are a bunch of jerks. This is about the Museum of Modern Art.

A couple of days ago, I got this in the mail:

Although I'm sure there is a reasonable amount of evidence to the contrary (posted by myself, on this very website), I'm a person of at least moderate intelligence. And when I see something like this, I assume that I owe money to the sender. And so, being fiscally responsible and having serious distaste for being in debt, I ripped it open to find out why I owed money to the Museum of Modern Art.

Turns out I don't, in fact, owe money to the Museum of Modern Art. It was a "Membership Acceptance Statement," questing for money. And it made me terribly angry to see an institution like MOMA use what I see as a deceptive mailer to raise funds. I think things like this show a huge amount of disrespect to their prospective clientele. And while the inside of the letter wasn't as deceptive as the envelope (it's not like they were sending 'free money' checks or anything), I feel like that envelope is the first step in having the find raising department of one of the worlds greatest art establishments sending out 'CH#3Ap P1c4ssssso!!!!!' spam to your email address.

*Interesting aside - I was going to illustrate the fact that many people think credit card companies are evil by showing that the number of google hits for "credit card companies are evil" was greater than that for a number of other industry types. So I tried insurance companies, toy companies, and software companies. What I learned is that people on the internet indulge in some amount of hysteria when it comes to making a fair assessment of corporations. Still, credit card companies are a bunch of jerks.

Relatively recently (in the last six months or so), the security at my co-op has either changed companies or just massively changed who is working for them. They used to be fairly personable, interested individuals most of whom had at least a smile for you, if not (shock and awe!) a hello as you walked in the door.

These days for the most part they are, by and large, a grumpy bunch and no pleasure to see as I'm walking in the building. Not a big deal - even the nice ones were fairly useless (they didn't accept packages, which is pretty much the only reason I see to have a doorman. Well, that and keep out the ne'er-do-wells, which I'll assume they're doing effectively. So we'll grade them a C-). So it's been a slight decrease in the quality of service, but not a serious one since I never really chatted with the nice guys.

The 'buzzing you in' frequency has been pretty erratic ever since the switch. Sometimes they'll buzz you, sometimes they won't. Sometimes they wait until your key is out and in the door. Sometimes they are watching a DVD and don't see you until you walk past them. And it's been less and less frequent as time goes on. I guess something official came down from the management office, since I found a sign on the door as I was walking in:

Now, I was a little embarrassed to see this on the main entrance to my building. But it's not a big deal - everyone makes mistakes. And I wasn't going to say anything about it or the security guards, but I found this on the side door of the building today:

*sigh*

I'm going to take a sharpie on my way out tomorrow and fix those.

I used to listen to a huge amount of music when I'm at work - as a programmer, it's not impossible to get into work, go to your desk, put your head down to work for a 10 hour day and not talk to anyone. Now, that's harder to do when doing actual project management, but I find that I can still put in a good 2 hours each day with my hands on my keys and my iPod in my ears. Makes for some extremely high job satisfaction, in my opinion.

My problem with consuming music at work, though, is the following: I have a lot of music, but why would I ever listen to anything except for the last part of Underworld 1999-2002 (Cd 1) bleeding into the first part of Underworld 1999-2002 (Cd 2). Seriously. Here is the track list:

1) Mmm Skyscraper I Love You
2) Rez
3) Dirty Epic
4) Dark and Long [Dark Train]
5) Cowgirl
6) Born Slippy.NUXX
7) Pearl's Girl

That's something like 3 of the best 100 songs of all time (3, 5, 7), and three of the others are in the top 1000. I would have skipped Skyscraper, but honestly I'm afraid that if I jump right into Rez, my heart will explode like the engine of a car revved too high soon after starting.

I have money in a bunch of index funds, most of which do a fair job tracking the S&P 500. I also have some stock in Apple. Now, it probably doesn't make sense for an investor like myself (who by any reasonable estimation should be considered very small fry) to own any individual stocks, but I like Apple and their products and I wanted to feel involved.

I've been working at a real job for a couple of years, and my constant regular investment into index funds has grown to a pleasing sum, which far outweighs the amount of money I have in Apple stock. Therefore, the fact that the S&P (and therefore the majority of the money for my retirement) is down by a half percent should cause an amount of unhappiness which far outweighs the fact that Apple stock is up by almost a percent.

But it doesn't. I'm so psyched that my paltry investment in Apple has gone up 45% since the day I bought it, and the fact that those gains are far offset by my losses in the market movement as a whole does not matter a whit to me. This proves that I'm not a rational actor - remember this for when we play games together.

Speaking of that: Anyone up for Risk this weekend? It's been a whlie, but I'll still kick your ass.

I'm going to make an effort not just to post links and be all "Hey! This is awesome."

But:

Hey! This is awesome!

Sometimes computer programming is really frustrating. Most of the time, really. Last weeks thing:

Nusoap (a set of libraries to deal with SOAP in PHP) doesn't work with PHP 5,x, because the built in PHP soap extension uses the same class name "soapclient". This isn't a major issue, since Nusoap isn't compiled and linked, it's just a bunch of PHP files.

So it's easy enough to go into the Nusoap libraries and rename all the instance of "soapclient" to something else. The problem is that all of the tutorials and examples online assume that you aren't an idiot, and would remember doing something like changing the name of the classes in the library. So they reference "soapclient" where your library actually uses the word "nusoapclient" (or if you're Ben, "athena").

I guess this is less of a "computer programming is really frustrating" thing and more of a "Kennyb's a twit" thing. At least my hello world SOAP request is working now.

I feel bad for the band !!! (by the way - don't follow that link. It caused merry hell with my browser). For a bunch of reasons. the first is that their name is so close to being awesome, but they failed miserably. Evidentally, you are supposed to pronounce "!!!" as "chk-chk-chk" or something. But "!" is how the concept of factorial is represented in math.

I.e.: 5! = 5 * 4 * 3 * 2 * 1 = 120

And when mathematicians speak about that symbol, they read it as the word "bang" (and never, ever, as "bang!" since that would cause a syntactic recursion from which we could never escape).

So when talking about the band !!!, instead of saying "chk-chk-chk", we could have been saying "bang bang bang," which is such a super name for a band. But no.

The other problem is that they are at the very top of my artist listing on my iPod, and so all the times I accidentally play all of an artist, or my iPod starts playing in my pocket when I forget to turn on the Hold button, they are the first band to start playing. Happens all the time, and it always annoys me. So now I associate !!! with being annoying, and as such I never want to listen to them. It's a bummer, man.

Over on Volokh.com, Ilya Somin posts about her (I think it's a her, I'm never sure with Russian names. Sasha, for instance. [I think Ilya is Russian, anyway. I'm never sure with East European names. {Ilsa for instance. I think Ilsa is East European. I'm never quite sure with She-Wolves of the SS}]) rational ignorance of the 100 top pop culture icons. (according to Forbes magazine) Honestly, it comes off a bit obnoxious and superior, particularly since she ends it with:

The lesson to be learned, if there is one, is that rational ignorance is a universal phenomenon, not limited to the "stupid" unwashed masses. We are all inevitably ignorant about a wide range of topics. Unfortunately, however, popular ignorance about politics probably causes more social harm than academic geeks' ignorance about pop culture.

Thereby saying that her ignorance of pop culture, while still ignorance, isn't as bad as some slack-jawed yokels inability to name any of the current Cabinet members of the current administration. Now, don't let my tone throw you off - I completely agree with the sentiment. It just got me wondering how many of the top 50 I didn't know. Here's the list:

12 - Grey's Anatomy cast: Actually, that's not true; not only do I know what this is referring to, but I would probably recognize them if I saw them on TV. I blame my friend Neil for this. It's also his fault that I know what one of the doctors on Nip/Tuck look like. Damn you Neil!

16 - Phil Mickelson: Wouldn't know him from a hole in the wall.

24 - Michael Schumacher: Sounds like a football player. I have a sinking suspicion that all the of people I'm not going to recognize are going to have carried a ball professionally at one point.

31 - Ronaldinho: I assume that this is a soccer player, but that's only because I'm reading something clearly ethnic, and it's not trailed by a surname.

33 - Brian Grazer/Ron Howard: I know the latter, not the former. I'm confused as to why they are put together like this. Are they the same person?

37 - Tim McGraw: I got nothing. I just realized that as hard as it is to be funny about things you know, it's even harder to do it about things you don't know.

38 - Roger Federer: Tennis player, maybe?

41 - Kimi Raikkonen: This person comes right before Jerry Seinfeld. Who?

Well, that was a fun game. I scored a 7 / 50. do I feel good or bad about that?

Every once in a while, I feel bad for record companies. I mean, let's be honest: it seems that their old way of making money is pretty much on life support. Bits are just too easy to push around, and no matter how hard they hope, music is just bits. DRM doesn't work, kids these days have no appreciation for physical artifacts, and people who are used to buying records, tapes, and CDs are just going to die one day. I assume this scares the music industry. It certainly would terrify me (of course, I'm not someone who deals with change well - for instance, my cleaning lady doesn't actually clean the apartment. Just moves dirt from one side to another, so I'll notice a difference. I could get another one, but I don't know that I can handle another person in my life. So she stays).

But I'll tell you what, they definitely don't make it easy for me to give them any sympathy. In fact, I don't have any sympathy. Not only are they a bunch of jerks (ref: any of a host of lawsuits brought against "file-sharers" that clearly have nothing to do with file sharing: I've read articles targeting 7 year old girls, people who don't own computers, and grandmothers [not those sub-30 grandmothers you hear about either - real ones]), but they also are jerks who exhibit very little business sense. To wit:

The release of FOUR different versions of the most recent Smashing Pumpkins album, each of which containing a subset of the total songs being released. I mean, honestly - who thought this was a good idea? How is this not going to result in 90% of the people who buy one of the albums to download the extra tracks of the other ones? And guess what - if someone's going to go ahead and download one of the tracks, there's not much that's going to keep them from downloading all of the tracks. This is, without question, going to drive people towards illegal filesharing. The only reason I could see this making good business sense in this day and age is if the record company is getting money up front for exclusives from the storefronts. And given the power of Best Buy and Target, I seriously doubt this is the case.

Again, sometimes I feel a little bad for them - these guys are going to have to really rethink their business models. But paradigmatic shifts happen in business (ref: Bronsons Buggy Whips Ltd.), and you either react to it in a sane and effective manner, or you have the name of your product become synonymous with failure.