Cars with faces and teeth probably wouldn’t be nearly as cute as Lightning McQueen.

Hm. Not a very exciting Monday. One of the proposed upgrades to most of our boxes looks like it’ll work well, modulo problems like “the NFS server didn’t have /data/path_to_files in its /etc/exports.” That error was easy to fix, at least. If it all works out, we’ll save a few thousand bucks in support and licensing fees.

Still reading the free speech book. The fourth chapter is about incidents at Harvard and Yale where people with unpopular views were invited to lecture and/or debate. Did they engage in productive debate where people learned stuff? Yeah right. The university admins tried to prevent the lectures and debates from happening. When the speakers showed up anyway, many students showed up and disrupted the debates through being noisy and rude, and then threatening violence.

This isn’t exactly an isolated occurrence. It seems that in modern politics, if you don’t agree with what a speaker has to say, you should call him an anti-American Communist Nazi Socialist Corporate Pawn. Forget dismantling an opponent’s words and thoughts with logic. Logic takes too long and nobody understands it. Just call them names—that resonates with people and makes for entertaining TV.

This is one sci-fi crossover that no one’s ever decided to put together, mostly because it wouldn’t work at all.

Not much going on Sunday. Spent a bit over an hour talking with John S via webcam and Skype, catching up on what’s going on with him. 3 of his friends are getting married this year, which he thought was a bit distressing. I also got to see his new über quad-core x86, which looks interesting but probably sounds like a jet engine because of all the fans.

Been reading Free Speech for Me, but Not for Thee by Nat Hentoff. The first chapter is about various school districts’ attempts to ban (or at least make it harder to get) Huck Finn. The attempts to ban this book started very early on. At first, people wanted to ban the book because they thought Huck’s conduct was immoral. After the 1960s, they wanted to ban the book because the author used The N-Word 130 times. Apparently, a word that you can hear all the time in rap lyrics will warp junior high students’ fragile little minds. Whatever. The author leads us through pages of silliness from school boards and Concerned Parents, as well as through reactions from students who had read the book. The practical upshot was that the students were much more blasé about the book than their elders were, and seemed to have understood the book’s message far better than they did.

The second chapter of the same book is completely different. It tells the story of 2 Christian fundamentalist kids who refuse to read Working by Studs Terkel. The kids apparently took exception to people saying, “My job sucks,” and swearing and/or “blaspheming”. The author seems to sympathize with the fundie kids, and says that the school district shouldn’t force kids to read a book that they find objectionable. The thing is, every real workplace I’ve seen contains people bitching about their jobs and swearing. If these kids can’t deal with those things on paper, how are they going to deal with them in real life?

Snail Mail! I wrote a small reply to the letter that I received from Dan S the other day and sent it by snail mail. While there’s something satisfying about a physical letter, they take longer to write, and they’re impossible to attach JPEGs to. Also, there’s no spellcheck or editing capability, and it’s difficult to keep a copy of what you’ve sent unless you have a scanner or Xerox machine.

Almost done with The King. The magical power that Rodrigo has allows him to take counsel from his ancestors and read people’s minds or influence people’s actions (with a great deal of effort.) And, of course, towards the end of the book, he finds out that it can be used to kill people just by looking at them. (“Why didn’t they tell me this 600 pages ago? It would’ve saved a lot of screwing around!”) Ah well. It’s sad that there won’t be a sequel, but the author’s written a sci-fi series with a bunch of books in it. I’ll see if the library has those.

Hooray for Caturday! At least your cats probably aren’t eating your prescription medication when you aren’t looking.

I had to drive in to work today, because they’ve decided to give me an old Mac Mini so that I can work from home on it. Traffic was light, at least. The security guy who examined my “you can take this hardware home” pass was amazed at how small the Mac Mini was. It’s not a very fast machine, but it doesn’t need to be. All I’ll be running on it is a browser, the overly complex, high-latency corporate-approved VPN software, and ssh.

Larry and Chris were debugging something, and Larry started humming “Yellow Submarine”. So at an appropriate point, I sang, “And the bugs sang, ‘We all live in a Yellow Subroutine’ “, which they found amusing. We all had lunch at Mi Amoebas for Dan’s birthday, which is always a nice break from routine. On the drive home, I passed a U-Haul truck with a painting of a huge spider on it. I don’t think that “Utah: America’s Moving Adventure! We have SPIDERS!!!1!” would work well at all, though.

I also got some snail mail from Dan S thanking me for coming to his wedding and talking a bit about what he’d been up to.  I dunno, it’s been a long time since I’ve written a letter in snail mail, so I may just reply the same way.

Cows are tasty, but I don’t think that many people would have a “Sacred Cow BBQ”.

Thursday was a little more interesting than Wednesday. A guy on another team had a big problem with a database, which I was able to solve. Larry wanted something done to all the web servers, and I was able to do that. A user had problems with some 3rd-party site that’s scraping our site for links, and then e-mailing those links out, and completely horking up those links by inserting " \n" every 72 characters. Many of our links have more than 72 chars in them, so that caused this user lots of problems as the URLs were totally broken. I was able to provide the user with a workaround, though the real solution (fix the 3rd-party site’s brain-damaged mailing script) is not something I can do.

That’s about it. Well, Thunder Dan’s birthday is on Friday, so just about everybody is going to Mi Amoebas for lunch on Friday to celebrate that. I’ve attempted to convince Kelli to come along with us.

Wednesday really didn’t contain anything interesting, so here’s a random funny picture.

It’s like this sometimes. There was a thing that had to be updated today, and I had never heard of that thing beyond knowing vaguely that it lived on one of the machines. Fortunately, other people knew where to go and what to do.

The King is pretty good so far, even though the protagonist can be a cruel and annoying bastard. He can be noble in one paragraph and then be a complete arse in the next paragraph. I’m not sure how well this type of character reflects reality, but it’s interesting to read about.

Trivia: Was sparsely attended. Patty and Spencer were in Chicago, Trevor didn’t show up, and neither did Kelli. But we made the best of it. We were “Sarah Palin plans to revive the Know-Nothing Party”, which I don’t think anyone laughed at. We were almost “Where the hell are all our teammates?” because Zach and Sarah showed up late and Nathan was even later than that.

Support is one of the things that I do. I was still a little surprised that one of the guys I ride the bus with said, “Part of your company’s website isn’t working. It’s like I click on one thing and it doesn’t take me there but to something else. . . .” Of course, I’m not at work or on call, and there’s no way I can diagnose anything with a problem report that’s so vague. I’ll probably have to punt whatever the problem is to someone else if I can get a non-vague problem report later.

It’s still really bloody hot. There was a series of earthquakes on Mexico’s coast on Monday at around 11am MST, and the tremors were felt in Phoenix. At least some people on higher floors of the office felt them. I didn’t notice at all. This may have been because it happened at 11am and I was focused on eating lunch.

When dealing with electrical equipment, make sure you have the units correct.

It’s way too hot out. It was 111 F on Sunday. It was so hot that I didn’t feel like cooking, and instead microwaved a huge plastic pot of something from Tesco called “beef picadito”. This tasted OK, and it had a side of plantains with it. First time I’ve had those. They taste a bit like a cross between a potato and a banana. I also went to the library and exchanged the old books for new ones. Got David Feintuch’s The King, which is the sequel to The Still. (I hope he wraps up most of the loose ends here, as he can’t continue the story because he died in 2007.) The author is really good at portraying cruelty and shortsightedness. I got another book about the people who were in the bottom 10% of their classes at West Point, and managed to distinguish themselves by succeeding brilliantly or failing miserably. That should also be interesting.

Delta bought Northwest. I fly on Northwest a couple of times a year. I hope this particular Delta problem doesn’t show up in Northwest planes.

Saturday was devoted to laundry, shopping, and cleaning. Ho hum. Well, the plan for Sunday is to get more books from the library, and do some programming on work stuff.