Looong week. Still more stuff ahead. Don’t know how frequent updates will be. So, links in lieu of content:

A brief history of arms races.

Gannett has aimed a loaded shotgun at its feet, and is poised to pull the trigger. The sheer dumbassery involved would be *amusing* if it didn’t directly affect a bunch of people’s livelihoods.

Whoof. Tons of stuff happening at work, so much so that I really don’t want to write about it. I’m glad I have the day off tomorrow. I could sure use it. At least on Feb 16, we all had lunch at Bliss:Rebar with Chris and Alex, and that was kind of fun even though the food was pricy.

Google informs me that the search term “bonial cranesaw” returns 0 results. This is kind of odd. Brian (pictured above, with his head in the lion’s mouth) said something about a bonial cranesaw in late 1995 or early 1996, although he was mostly spoonerizing the term “cranial bone saw” because his sister, who was going to medical school, was using one to do medical school things.

Anyway. I’ll have a bunch of stuff to do this week, but I hope I’ll be able to continue writing on a regular schedule, and not blowing it off because I have to answer panicky phone calls from work. I had to do that last night—Stephanie and I were watching an old episode of “Lost In Space” when I got an “OMG PANIC EVERYTHING ARE BROKEN!!1!” call from work, and had to go home and spend 1.5 hours dealing with stupid instead of having a relaxing weekend. Sigh. Well, this is sort of what I’ve chosen, but it still doesn’t make it easier to deal with when it happens.

Happy Valentine’s Day! Hope you all had something more like these bunnies than like anything terrible or stupid. Stephanie and I exchanged small presents this morning. We decided to go out to dinner tomorrow instead of today, since everybody and their brother would be out today, and it’ll be a lot easier to get a table tomorrow.

Work was actually OK today. We’ve (mostly) got a plan, and I was able to help some other folks fix a stupid problem that’s been annoying everyone for a while. Minor victories—sometimes those are the things to go for.

Anyway. Work’s been alternately boring and depressing. I haven’t felt much like writing about life lately, which is why there have been few entries recently.

But apparently John Common can not pay his employees, not pay his suppliers, not pay child support, and get nothing but a slap on the wrist. <SARCASM> This really makes me think the justice system is working properly. </SARCASM> What are we supposed to do when faced with people like that? Our ancestors would’ve said, “Don’t do business with John Common, don’t work for him, and tell everybody you know he’s a slimeball,” and that would have (eventually) made it impossible for him to continue behaving like that.

However, the sheer number of people in the modern world makes that difficult. It’s also possible now to only read or watch news sources that cater to your biases, which used to be very difficult. If you think that the Alien Lizard Vampires are indoctrinating elementary-school children into building landing strips for gay Martians, you can find a website/community that believes those things and reinforces that belief. So people with various beliefs could/would self-segregate, and reject everything that didn’t come from their community as subversive or unclean or something. If you had a bunch of communities like that, and made it so that at least 40% of the people belonged to one of those communities, you’d have effectively Balkanized the body politic, and made it easy for a powerful or manipulative group to do whatever it wanted to everybody.

I don’t think we’re in that situation yet, but it’s one of those things that could happen. (In Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, this Balkanization is how the intelligent machines eventually destroyed human society, though this is a pretty minor plot point in the series.) But it does seem that right now, it’s possible for a sociopath to gain more power and have more freedom than an ethical person. I wonder how this could be fixed (or even if it could be fixed) since having amoral self-interested people controlling everything doesn’t seem like it’d work well in the long term.

It’s been an annoying few days.

The worst thing, of course, is that our corporate overlords are hell-bent on installing a paywall on the website, which has been free since its beginning. Anyone who knows anything about the Internet knows that this is astoundingly stupid. Putting a paywall on a newspaper website approaches Paul Cristofero-like levels of dumbassery. It’s like a WHOLE @#$%ING BEEFALO of stupid. (Link contains a great deal of swearing, fair warning.) But we have no choice in the matter. It’s pretty annoying, which is why I’m looking for another job right now.

But anyway, things are going reasonably well despite the raft of epic stupid. I’m just too tired to describe everything that’s been happening in great detail.

Wombats: They’re a lot cuter than you might think.

Saturday: not really that much happened. I got groceries and helped Stephanie sort through some of her stuff before donating it to the Salvation Army. Stephanie made dinner, a sort of homemade Kung Pao chicken with noodles and rice. We were channel-flipping after dinner, and ran into The Golden Child, so we watched some of that even though it had been edited for TV.

Sunday: Originally, we were going to meet Nacho and Luly for lunch. This didn’t work out, mostly because Nacho’s truck is having some sort of stupid problem and running badly. It’s a bit annoying when your mechanical steeds don’t function right. Anyway, I went to the nearby Asian grocery store because I didn’t have any kimchi at all, then made dinner, then we watched the last half of the Superb Owl. The commercials that I saw were fairly uninspired this year. At least the game was exciting.

Monday: Pretty normal workday, all things considered. And there’s trivia tomorrow, which should be neat, as it’s been a while since I’ve seen all the trivia people.

McBubble and Squeak, anyone? Didn’t think so.

Wednesday: more stuff at work, though some of the really terrible problems have been solved. They wanted to install Bugzilla. I tried that, and found that the automatic dependency-resolving mechanisms in it don’t work. This took a while to solve. Fortunately, I’ve been through this particular rodeo before, so after manually downloading and compiling what seemed like fifty Perl modules, it all started working. Of course, nobody’s put in any real bugs yet. I don’t think anyone’s going to like it when they start getting bug reports in their mail every day.

Had the usual Rock Band 3 with takeout Chinese food with Steve and Stephanie. We tried playing songs on higher difficulty levels for the hell of it.

Thursday: Still plenty of stuff at work, including an odd mail from someone who wanted to know whether N was ready or not. Of course, I’d sent that person a mail two days ago saying, “N is on dev, please check it and make sure it’s OK, if you say it’s OK, I’ll put it on live.” I guess they forgot. It was slightly less busy than Wednesday, at least.

Finished reading You Don’t Have to be Evil to Work Here, but It Helps. Good (mostly) triumphs, evil is (mostly) handed a funny and poetically just beatdown, and the people who are supposed to be in love with each other are (mostly) happy. I wonder what happened to the demons in the machine room, though. There might be too many Britishisms in the text for some Americans to take (“bigger than Tesco”, for instance) but it’s a bit funnier and smarter than many other books I’ve read in the past few months. And there’s a really good reason why Connie always takes two sugars in her tea. . . .