The game was pretty good. Stephanie got up to go walk around and shop at the bottom of the 2nd inning, which was sort of a mistake, as the Braves loaded the bases, then walked Kennedy, the Diamondbacks pitcher, in for a run. And then Parra hit a grand slam. It was exciting baseball, and it was good to see the Diamondbacks win one.

We took the light rail home, and it was even more crowded than going there had been. Ah well. I made shrimp scampi for dinner, which was pretty tasty, and we watched “Project Nim”, a documentary about the first chimp they tried to teach sign language to. I’d read a bit about Nim in Carl Sagan’s The Dragons of Eden a long time ago, but the film provided a bit more info. Basically, chimps are mean bastards, and their language skills aren’t great, but Nim probably wasn’t as dumb as Sagan made him out to be. The people running the project probably weren’t running it as well as they could’ve, since they were sort of flying blind.

Monday seemed to last forever—people kept asking me to do “just one small thing”, so I didn’t make that much progress on the larger things that the bosses wanted. Sigh.

Also, I heard from the people who contacted me about advertising on this blog. I thought they wanted to put in a text ad (or several text ads) the way Google and other advertisers do on their right rail. Nope. The people at moredigital.com wanted me to write a blog entry and/or HTML page that praised their clients. They offered me $130 to do this.

I said no.

Marketing and advertising, in general, are morally and ethically questionable, and I really don’t feel comfortable taking money to be a shill. I want to have the freedom to be completely honest on this blog, and if I accept money from others to talk about things I don’t care about, I’ve compromised that honesty. I can see why many people and organizations have compromised themselves for money, but I’ve got enough money right now to tell the marketers to take a hike.

I hope I won’t have to write advertising drivel to keep food on the table. I think Bill Hicks said it well: If you’re in marketing or advertising, kill yourself.

Wednesday was reasonably normal. I saw that I hadn’t won anything in the lottery that morning—which shouldn’t surprise anyone. Work had some annoying bits, but we managed to get some useful things done. The plan was to have Rock Band 3 with Steve, but Steve couldn’t make it thanks to his work wanting him to work overtime. Argh. So Stephanie and I had takeout Chinese food without Steve, and we sang/played a bunch of songs. Stephanie made a profile and made her own character, since she hadn’t done that yet.

Thursday had some semi-interesting stuff at work. I’d submitted a request on Monday. It had been held up, as it was waiting on approval from a guy. We went to talk to that guy. He said, “Oh, yeah. I can’t approve that because I don’t have access to the Lotus Notes database.” What? Argh. Anyway, I think that’s been fixed. It’s just. . . typical that some sort of bizarre weirdness would prevent somebody from being able to approve stuff that needed to be approved.

And then I got a panicked urgent request to modify some stuff on a website that my team doesn’t have access to, has never had access to, and is hosted in a completely different datacenter. Apparently, they called me because A) it’s a website B) my team does website things C) if they called the third party who could actually fix the problem, they’d have to pay money to that third party. Good grief. I’m thinking the whole stupid situation happened because some “decision maker” somewhere didn’t understand anything about what they were actually doing. This is far more common than it should be. I don’t know how to fix it though.

Monday was back to work. Five tons of things had happened. I didn’t get much of a chance to work on anything new, because I was busy fixing all the stuff that had broken and I didn’t get a chance to fix while on furlough.

And I found a package in the mail on Monday. It was a couple of books, from Teh Nacho. YAY! Books are always nice to get. The City and The City should be neat, whenever I can get around to reading it. (China Miéville is a Marxist, but he can write good fiction. . . .)

Tuesday, I had to suffer through a really pointless 2.5 hour conference call while trying to field plaintive requests from people who didn’t really know what they needed but wanted it all right now. Then there was another 2 hour meeting, followed by a protracted session of trying to fix an inexperienced coder’s badly specified problems.

After I got home and had dinner, I tried an experiment: I installed the latest and greatest new VPN from work. This is the 3rd VPN that they’ve used in the 3.8 years I’ve been with the company—which is a bad sign in itself. It also has the worst functionality of all of the VPNs they’ve used. Several things that my team absolutely requires are completely impossible with the way the new VPN’s set up. I don’t know who’s in charge of deciding what to use, but whoever it is is apparently a complete dumbass. I’ve heard that they switched to this new VPN because it was cheaper than the old one, but that really doesn’t make any sense, because Free as in beer and speech VPN software for all major platforms exists. If the VPN problems can’t be solved—and soon—then this’ll cost the company a significant amount of money. I have a feeling the people who make decisions either don’t know about this, don’t care about this, or are incapable of understanding this.

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.

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.

Then I sacked out for a few hours and set the alarm, since I had to wake up at 11:30pm and had to help migrate the website we built over to the new evil corporate platform. The stuff I had to do was reasonably easy and fast. I’d fat-fingered the temporary maintenance page config, but that only took two minutes to fix. No, after that, the other people kept running into things that they weren’t ready for or hadn’t thought through. We were all on a conference call, so I was able to hear all the gormless wittering. After hearing something particularly brainless, my boss texted me, saying, “Can you believe this? Oh. My. God.” At least everything we did worked out, so I was able to go to bed at about 12:45am.

Monday: I got up late and worked from home. This mostly worked out well. Moira liked being able to sit on my lap all morning. I learned that the new evil corporate website platform has several unexpected[0] bugs. Users were noticing these bugs and calling the customer service lines. This is, of course, bad. One of these bugs was rather simple—it’d be a 3 to 5 minute fix on their end. They said, “We might have that fixed in the next 4 to 5 hours.” This whole process has been like a Dilbert comic without the humor. I’m just glad I won’t have to deal with all the stupid fallout from this over the next few weeks, and I’m very glad I canceled the account I had with the site before they took it over.

[0] Unexpected by them, that is. I usually expect there to be five tons of new bugs and prepare various contingency plans, but they didn’t.

More epic stupid happened later, but I’m not sure how to phrase it best just yet.

At least You Don’t Have to be Evil to Work Here, but It Helps by Tom Holt has been an amusing book to read on the bus. Colin and Cassie are both in love with the wrong people, and they’re trying to fix that, and Colin’s father has decided to sell his soul to the Devil. Also, Cassie’s firm has been acquired by some efficiency experts, so all the employees have to do assessments where they’re quizzed about their abilities to proactively synergize core competencies value-orientatedly moving forward. Some of the parody there is far too close to what I’ve heard people actually say. (Poe’s Law?) Anyway, I’m only halfway through it, and it’s got a lot of Britishisms in it, but it’s been fun so far.

Then, of course, the database had a fit, and I had to get it working again. And when I was on the bus, I got a phone call saying that something really, really important had broken, and could I help fix it? Trying to talk on the phone and have someone else do semi-complex Linux tasks while on a noisy bus is not optimal. But when I finally got home and was able to look at a real computer, I found that the problem wasn’t with any system we were responsible for. Nope, some other people had done an unplanned reboot of something really important, and as a result, a bunch of stuff was completely unavailable for ~45 minutes. So naturally they called us. *sigh.

Unfortunately, we all found out today that Larry’s found another job, and he’s actually taking this one and leaving in a couple of weeks. This will make things interesting, since he’s involved with a bunch of important stuff. It seems as if the people who have other options have found different jobs or are trying to find different jobs, which is a bad sign. Not sure where it will all end. . . .

And then, it was the usual Wednesday night Rock Band 3, though Stephanie didn’t stay past dinner. Steve’s been having to work crazy hours. Zach showed up around 7:30pm since he was in town having dinner with other people. Steve said, “Yeah, I’ve been working a lot. But the boss said we’d get compensated well once everything starts working!” “Did you all get that offer in writing?” Zach said. “Um, no,” Steve replied. “You’re not going to get compensated,” Zach said, and everything I’ve seen about promises from management tells me that Zach is right. I hope Zach isn’t right, of course, but I fear that he is.

Thursday: It seemed like I couldn’t get five minutes’ peace all morning. The raft of requests didn’t let up all day, and culminated in somebody saying, “We noticed (problem) hours ago! Fix it! Now!” at 4:15pm. I just barely managed to find out what was wrong and fix it before leaving.

And, of course, I have to get up at 4am tomorrow to do some semi-complicated stuff with some servers.