Summer's here and the time is right for declaring independence.

Last Saturday was, as my (2) American readers know, Independence Day here in the USA. It's a good day to be deafened by the alarms of firetrucks or by fireworks, professional and amateur, and to (weather permitting) celebrate our freedoms with hopefully sufficiently cooked hamburgers from the grill.

It turns out summer, particulary July, is a popular time to throw off the chains of colonialism or general oppression. Witness:

Algeria	07-05 July 5	Independence from France in 1962.
Argentina	07-09 July 9	Independence declared from Spain in 1816.
Bahamas	07-10 July 10	Independence from the United Kingdom in 1973.
Belarus	07-03 July 3	Liberation of Minsk from German occupation by Soviet troops in 1944.
Belgium	07-21 July 21	Independence from Netherlands (Belgian revolution). Leopold of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld takes the oath as first king of the Belgians in 1831.
Burundi	07-01 July 1	Independence from Belgium in 1962
Cape Verde	07-05 July 5	Independence from Portugal in 1975.
Colombia	07-20 July 20 and August 7	Independence from Spain in 1810.
Liberia	07-26 July 26	Independence from the United States in 1847.
Malawi	07-06 July 6	Independence from the United Kingdom in 1964.
Peru	07-28 July 28	Independence from Spain in 1821.
Rwanda	07-01 July 1	Independence from Belgium in 1962.
São Tomé and Príncipe	07-12 July 12	Independence from Portugal in 1975.
Solomon Islands	07-07 July 7	Marks exit / independence from United Kingdom in 1978.
Slovakia	07-17 July 17	Declaration of Independence in 1992 (only a remembrance day), de jure independence came on January 1, 1993 after the division of Czechoslovakia (public holiday).
United States of America	07-04 July 4	(Fourth of July) Declaration of Independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1776.
Vanuatu	07-30 July 30	Independence from United Kingdom and France in 1980.
Venezuela	07-05 July 5	Declaration of independence from Spain in 1811.

This list, selectively pulled from the Wikipedia page as of today at 9:34 pm EST (if I were to brush up on my MQL skills I could have pulled more interesting results from Freebase - maybe some other time), proves my point. I'd like to use the examples set by all these brave people who fought and in many cases died as inspiration to get rid of shit I don't need in my own little life. Here we go:

The arrogant and ignorant

The arrogant I can suffer to live, if they have something to bring to the table. The ignorant who make an effort to overcome it are OK with me. The both arrogant and ignorant can fuck off and die. Unfortunately, I currently work in the corporate world, where the density of arrogant ignorance reaches neutron star levels.

Stuff

As I near 40, it is clear I have accumulated far too much stuff. Not only that, having a job and a house means I continue to buy stuff I don't need, because I have money to buy it, and a place to store it (for now). I recently got a Kindle, which, like my iPod, stores rooms full of old-style content within its tiny case, yet still I pick up new books at a rate that never slows down. I need to cool it and start spending more money on food, because a good dinner might not last particularly long, but neither do you or I. I should also probably move into a smaller house, but that might be a tough sell.

My crushingly oppressive reading queue

The Kindle didn't really help here. I'm not blaming my Kindle (and definitely not giving it up), because as mentioned previously, I somehow manage to accumulate enough books, magazines, and crap I printed out from the web to ensure I will never, ever catch up.

Too many interests

There is something to be said for being the kind of obsessive who works on one job or idea 90 hours a week with no other interests or variety in life. At least you have a chance to get good at one or two things. Unfortunately, outside of the constraints of grad school or a startup, one is free to be interested in absolutely anything that strikes one's fancy, and to never really get deeply enough into anything to make any grand or even minor progress.

It doesn't particularly help having a boring, relatively easy job. Why not replace the shitload of old, crappily configured SQL Server systems with an awesome Hadoop cluster? Why answer moronic support calls when you could probably hack together a chatbot that could handle 75% of the tickets? Why write code in Java, or, god forbid, Visual Basic.NET when Python is much, much more interesting? Why use Windows when you can use MacOSX or Linux? Why have one machine for that matter, when you can run a server room's worth of virtual machines?

I should just pick 2 or 3 things and burrow into them in a deranged trainspotterish obsession.

My 3,000,000 online identities and accounts.

You OAuth and OpenID people need to sort this out. I got too many passwords, too many places to go to read stuff. I can't believe I still have a hotmail account.

Fortunately, many of the forums I used to frequent have become so shatteringly dull that it's been easy to dump them, so I guess that's a small victory.

Sloth

I know healthcare in the US is fucked up, and it looks like maybe somebody in Washington will try to do something about it, but I've already got enough crap to take care of that I don't know how I can save Health Care, certainly not with lobbyists for the small minority of people who actually benefit from the status quo paying over $1 million a day to preserve that sorry status quo. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do (aside from throw money at the problem), nor whether I'd do it if I knew what it was. So there's sloth. Healthcare is just a specific example here, not the only place sloth is keeping me down.

You Don't Do What You Want To Do, But You Do The Same Thing Every Day

I think that line was in one of the Dead Kennedys' songs. It sufficiently describes the rut I need to get out of somehow. Give me liberty, or give me death by tedium and 'stuff sickness'.

Social Media Games Episode 1: LinkedIn

William Gibson famously said 'the street finds its own use for technology'. This is true, as the television show 'The Wire' has shown us. It's even more true that the bored and underemployed find their own uses for technology. Presented here are just a few games for those who want to use social media without being social media douchebags.

LinkedIn Schadenfreude Games

Ostensibly, LinkedIn is a tool for networking, kind of a 'Facebook for professional adults'. While looking for pictures of drunk and or naked people doing embarrassing things on Facebook is a fun social media game for kids and HR personnel, LinkedIn can similarly be used as a source of Schadenfreude and other dubious glee.

The 'who's an independent consultant' game:

Notorious B.I.G. said 'You're Nobody Until Somebody Kills You'. Anybody who's been in 'the game' (whatever your game is) long enough has made a couple enemies. If you're feeling down, sometimes it's fun to look up your enemies on LinkedIn and look for those magic words, 'independent consultant', which 99% of the time means they lost their job (some people do in fact work as independent consultants, but the kind of corporate/political douchebags that are more likely to make your life miserable are, like balloon animals, not really suited to life in the wild).

Possible pitfalls:

You might find out somebody you really hate is now in your dream job. Now what're you going to do? Go down the list to the next asshole in your past, that's what you're going to do.

The Magical Disappearing Company Game:

This is one I've mentioned before. Again, everybody who's been around the block a few times has worked for a company that was shady (or, as Method Man might say, sheisty), possibly a small ramshackle mom-and-pop deal that was run like a family featured on the TV show 'Intervention'. You might not even want to put that company on your resume (although if the company has folded, what's your worry?) It is interesting to track down old co-workers and see if they include the company on their employment history. Usually, they didn't.

The Douche-errific 'Leadership' Blog Search:

On your LinkedIn profile you can provide a link to your website. Sometimes this website is a blog. While trench-level colleagues probably have techy blogs about stuff that's interesting to them (and maybe to you), managerial types are different animals. They provide the most laffs when the main subject of their blog is 'leadership', especially when in day-to-day life their leadership skills are raggedy at best. Then it's like reading that Martin Amis book 'Success' with the unreliable rich kid narrator who it turns out at the end is a complete wreck and has been lying all along.

I had a particularly fun session of this game recently when I passed a link to a douchebaggy middle manager's leadership blog along to a friend who also knows the D.M.M. in question. He didn't bother to see who was the author at first (nor did I say), so he had a good unbiased initial reaction, which in this case was: 'This is bullshit! Why did SDC send me this bullshit?'.

In the next episode: twitter, blip.fm, Facebook, and so on.

Chapter the Last of 'How Open Source Ruined My Life', or 'What am I gonna do with all these $%)(#^*% CDs?'

Back in the 90s I saw Larry Ellison on the TV talking about how much he hated the PC. He used those words: 'I hate the PC'. His problem with it: you have to go to the store and get software, then you go home and install it. It would be so much better if you could either download the code, or use a 'network computer', Larry's pet idea of the time.

Of course, around that time virtually everybody outside of industry and academia had dial-up modems, so even hearing a 10 second snippet of the Wu-Tang Clan required a good 10 or 20 minute wait. As for the Network Computer, that dog didn't hunt, although with the Cloud billowing up, the idea has some merit and may be coming back.

I didn't understand the software in physical form hate until I got a job where I was given an MSDN subscription. I got the job at a great time, b/c the new head of IT had just started, and he was spending money left and right, so anybody in sprinkler distance of the guy caught some of the overspray. Since I was a developer type, I got to have a nice double-monitor set-up, a monster desktop machine with a monster hard drive and monster fans that made noise like a monster jet, and an MSDN subscription. Like I said, I started during a really good window, as not long after that it was kind of like the Simpsons episode where Homer gets elected chief garbage man, and Springfield has the best sanitation service imaginable for the one week it takes Homer to piss away a year's budget. That episode featured the voice of Steve Martin as the original garbage man who Homer replaced.

I got right on the project of learning about Microsoft's 'ecosystem'. Specifically this meant the not-too-shabby language, C#, the nifty .NET framework, and in some cases the very shabby abomination that was VBScript. Oy vey. Every month, Microsoft sent me a nice packet in the mail of CDs, color coded to indicate were they O/S, Server software (e.g. SQL Server), or Development Tools. At first everything was lovely b/c there was some shiny new-ness, and I had plenty of drawer space, too.

Eventually I'd come to hate those fucking CDs, esp the 'MSDN library for June of 2003' or whatever. WTF was it, 1989? We don't have the internet for this kind of info? I had a nice CD folder that quickly filled up, so I had to tend to keeping that up to date like it was an extra job. Co-workers kept bugging me for freebies of MS software and I had to tell them to buzz off and get their own MSDN subscription, b/c I was a good MS citizen that way. I'm not gonna piss off Steve Ballmer by violating a license and have him make an example of me. Also, I'm not the fucking ice cream man of Microsoft software! I got shit to do!

Even worse, I started to experience a combination of the usual Microsoft rot and decay, accompanied by the MS geniuses' ADHD. 'Access databases like this. NO! Like this! Wait, here's how you really should! That previous version of .NET? What are you, one of those guys left on a Pacific Island who thinks WWII is still going on? Get with the program, Margaret.'

I grew weary of that quickly. I have always wanted to learn new things, but constantly learning new ways to do old and, let's face it, trivial things doesn't really get me jazzed. Wow, if I drag and drop this icon in my IDE I can READ data from the DATABASE? Holy fucking shit, don't tell the NSA about this or they'll shut you down for making this technology available to our enemies!

Additionally, since Homer dragged his feet on all efforts to get other developers suited up for MS greatness, including getting MSDN for them (as surely as I was buried in CDs and the telling ppl to leave me alone, in addition to other responsibilites, Homer was sucking on a fire-hose of tasks and complaints and general pleas to save the world by this time), I was stuck maintaining and modifying all this crap myself.

Being a not particularly negative (really!) type, I said fuck that, downloaded Eclipse for any Java Dev needs, started using Python for scripting (and virtually everything, actually - using Django after fucking with ASP.NET was like being allowed to use both of your arms to type after having to use only one), and let the MSDN subscription expire. And now everybody's happy, even Homer, b/c we never pester him to get us the software we'd need to do our job, if our job was to develop to the Microsoft ecosystem, which it absolutely, positively, is NOT. He and his crew are happy figuring out the ins and outs of Exchange Server from here to eternity.

So how did open source ruin my life in this case? Well, again, it set my bar of tolerance for MS's monkeyshines really low, possibly even lower than that of the EU. So my potential for making big bucks running around cleaning up the messes of .NET 'developers' who got too far outside of the corporate demo code comfort zone and made a godawful hash of things was DESTROYED! Curse you, RMS! Curse you, Linus! I weep for what could have been.

Actually, that's just some sunscreen that got in my eye. Never mind.

I'm gonna take a break from techy subjects now! That's enough! There is too much frivolity I've been neglecting.

Sucka Java Developers

(Apologies to RUN-DMC the ODB, and GZA/Genius)

Sucka JD's

When I grab the mic with intent to damage ya
better drink the red bull to build your stamina
I'm here to drop some truth and some science
about sucka JDs and the way they do violence

They went to school to get the Java knowledge
But sometimes they act like they flunked outta college
They know web frameworks for days and days
But when it comes to DB's they got lost in the maze

Got mad ORMs but they don't know SQL
But my shit is cane sugar and your code is Equal
I know how to write it functional or declarative
but when it comes to codin' all you got is imperative

You think Selects are something Bud makes
that's why you're a meatball, but I'm a steak
so take your API and get the hell out of town
You're just a sucka JD, you sad-faced clown

Sorry about that blue template I had.

I don't know what I was thinking with that.

'Science involves confronting our absolute stupidity'

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/05/the_importance_of_being_stupid.html

From the Journal of Cell Science, by way of The Make Blog.

Second, we don't do a good enough job of teaching our students how to be productively stupid - that is, if we don't feel stupid it means we're not really trying. I'm not talking about `relative stupidity', in which the other students in the class actually read the material, think about it and ace the exam, whereas you don't. I'm also not talking about bright people who might be working in areas that don't match their talents. Science involves confronting our `absolute stupidity'. That kind of stupidity is an existential fact, inherent in our efforts to push our way into the unknown.

So...the next time you hear some knuckle-dragging creationist haul out that hoary old cliche about 'Scientists think they know everything' or 'Science can't explain everything' or 'You scientists may be smart but you're still going to hell', point them to this article.

Actually, don't bother. Just tell them to fuck off. It's not like we have time to put up with that bullshit.

Good evening!

The long awaited Part 2 in the Series: How Open Source Ruined My Life

After the government job that introduced me to Linux, I took a job with a consulting company in New Jersey. The salary was higher, but the cost of living was WAY higher, so the joke was on me. The company sent employees to bodyshop, seat-warmer jobs all around the country to support the elite group of 3 working on what was to become Sapphire/Web, a Java-based Application Server that had the first-mover advantage of getting a couple clients before the next wave came along and ate their lunch.

Mostly what I remember about my time there is roller-blading and watching the Rockford Files. I also remember some locals telling me to 'get my hocking playing ass the fuck out of here'.

The next gig involved testing embedded software for a medical device company in Indianapolis. We had to use those god-awful PCs with the abysmal Windows 3.x, but I had the sense to install Perl for a lot of my testing (to compare results to the expected results and so on and so forth). This was cool for a while, and I was surrounded by some smart and interesting people, but I was young and stupid and didn't know a good thing when I saw it. Also, with the dot-com boom heating up I felt like I had to get in on the web development game, and the opportunity came in the form of a job with some research scientists at a major pharmaceutical company in Indianapolis (the reader gets 3 guesses as to that company's name).

After an initial 2 week period of waiting for the corporate IT slugs to get their shit together enough to give us machines to work on (PCs again, f00k!) we hit the ground running. All the real work, fortunately, was to be done on UNIX machines, and an order was put in for us to get SGI workstations of our own. In the meantime, I figured out a way to get X Wndows running on my crappy PC, but before I knew it our O2s were in, and I was back in the high life again.

This job totally ruled at first, because we were working for and with very smart people on very cool stuff, and were pretty much set loose to use what we wanted to do things as we saw fit, but even early on I sensed something wasn't right.

There was an official corporate-sanctioned IT department that allegedly served our bosses, but I guess he got impatient with them and picked up some temp/consultant dudes to get his project rolling. This was all well and good, but the head of said department was Darth-Vaderesque in his enmity toward free and open software! A million years ago he had written software focused on his research domain (I think when he was a lowly grad student), and a few newsgroup searches revealed unhappy users wishing they could get a hold of the source so as to make necessary modifications to keep the software relevant to their field. Too bad for them, because dude didn't have time for coding, he was too busy playing the political game, and he for damn sure wasn't going to let anybody see or change his precious (although rapidly losing value) code.

Meanwhile I convinced my boss we needed a proper database b/c the text files of his hacked together version 1 just weren't going to cut it. He saw the light, but quickly got discouraged after we met with one of a thousand Oracle DBAs employed at this corporation. He (my boss) could see that the future involved many weeks, months, and perhaps years of waiting for the schema to be finalized, so he insisted on going back to text files. We (the team) saw the app hitting the ceiling really quickly, and the solution we came up with at the time (about 10 years ago) was to use MySQL (recently bought out by Oracle after first being bought by Sun).

Development barreled ahead. A clumsy assortment of HTML files assembled nightly by the monster batch script from hell were replaced by dynamically generated pages using Perl, the wonder language of the 90s. The researchers were pretty happy, but Darth and his gang, not so much.

Also around this time the company brought on a new CIO. He made his mark on the company by taking the Macs away from the Scientists and Programming types so he could 'standardize' on Windows (NT in this case: the NT stood for 'Nice Try'). This was a great way to make it look like he did something of value, when really all he was doing was pissing off all the people the company relied on to find new products so that the people on the business/marketing side (who loved them some Windows) could keep making money off the nerds' labor. Of course, this kind of thing was happening all over corporate America at the time, so he was not outstanding in his lameness, it was more the case that he was standing proudly atop the mountain of mediocrity!

Things gradually and slowly but surely slid downhill from there. Somebody caught wind that my boss was being a rascal and using us instead of the wonderful internal corporate IT resources, so I was thrown to the wind again. I ended up finding another job with the same company, but the stage was already set for more and more decrapitude as the result of a 'perfect shitstorm':

• The Mac to Windows migration made all the scientists grumpy, so working for them sucked ass
• The Mac to Windows migration made the 'senior' programmers grumpy, so working for them sucked ass
• The imposition of standards from above enforced a 'not the best tool for the job, but the tool I told your sorry ass to use' policy
• The dot-com explosion had the effect of 'bright flight' - all the bright people in corporate IT ran for the hills in search of millions, leaving the spiritually and mentally bereft behind.

It was a mess. Within 6 months I ran away screaming. Maybe a week or so before I left, a helpful Oompa Loompa from IT informed me that something I'd asked for whilst on the previous project (which by now seemed like a previous lifetime) would be ready REALLY SOON. Maybe he was joking. Maybe one day they did take care of my request, or perhaps their successors in India fielded the request. It didn't really matter anymore. But that's enough for now, and another installment will follow.

Now a moment of hero worship: Chuck D at Neal Marshall, Sat April 4 2009

On Sat. April 4, 2009 I had the opportunity to see one of the heroes of my college days (and today), Chuck D, founder of Hip-Hop legends Public Enemy, give a lecture at the Neal Marshall Black Culture Center Library on the IU campus. This event was somewhat under-publicized, and I was only lucky enough to hear about it thanks to some tweets from the Bloomington 'twitterati' on twitter the day before the event, specifically from deejayspikes and IUwebmonkey. Having mentioned it to a few friends since, they expressed regret at missing the chance to see Chuck's talk.

I met deejayspikes and another twitter friend, Allison, at the library shortly before the show began. I saw Chuck D and some of the event organizers outside, but left the man alone out of a mix of respect and shyness.

The talk kicked off with some rhymes by a student named Patrick. He was a white dude, and referred to himself as 'Hip Hop's Doogie Howser', and also had several other good lines, including:

you treat me like I fired God/hired Rod Blagojevich and gave him the job

He delivered two a capella rhymes, and then an event organizer introduced Chuck. He was dressed rather unassumingly, in a t-shirt with wings on the back, slightly baggy pants, and very white, new-looking shoes. He graciously gave props to Patrick in his famous baritone, and began by discussing the significance of the day, the 41st anniversary of Martin Luther King's assassination. I knew this was the case, but admittedly had been unsure until I remembered that the U2 song goes 'Early morning April 4/a shot rings out in the Memphis sky'. Chuck talked about being a child in the 60s, a time of much turmoil, with Vietnam and the assasinations of Malcolm X, Dr. King, and John and Robert Kennedy. History was a major topic of the lecture, as he covered the origin of the term 'Rhythm and Blues' (a more sensitive term than 'Race Music', which offended African Americans who had just come back from fighting in World War II and rightly demanded more respect than had been given them), and the history of black music in general, from the songs of the fields ('look out love music') to the evolution of hip hop from it's Jamaican dub and reggae origins.

Chuck stressed the importance of education and a disdain for anti-intellectualism and the 'dumbassification' of our culture. It's a message similar to the one Bill Cosby delivers, delivered in a different way. Chuck made an appeal to black students at IU: if you pay for a Hummer (he made the aside the 'the Hummer is a wack-ass car, I'm saying if you pay for an expensive car'), and you get a Hooptie, that is going to lead to frustration. So he emphasized the importance of making the most of their time at IU, getting the best GPA possible, learning as much as possible, and praising 'being a nerd about the stuff you like' something I, as a nerd, really liked hearing.

Chuck also covered the (welcome) dissolution of the record companies, saying that while record companies are dying, music itself is as strong as ever, with the internet giving the artist more power than ever to get their music out. He acknowledged that there may be a window that will close if for example Network Neutrality is over-ruled, and we find the free-flow of information we enjoy today restricted. Two phrases recurred like refrains: Chuck railed against 'the exploitation of scientists and artists' and being subjected to 'the radiation of a radio, TV, and movie nation'. During this discussion of artists and music, he gave a shout-out to deejayspikes, who he remembered as the DJ of Muncie's R.H.Y.T.H.M. Chuck has probably performed with a few thousand bands and artists, and met millions of people, but he remembered R.H.Y.T.H.M., and I thought that was really cool, and needless to say DJ Spikes dug getting a shout out from a hip hop legend (Chuck referred to him as an example of artists doing their own thing back before the Internet had made it easier, the D.I.Y. spirit one saw with punk and indie rock bands in the 80s and 90s and of course with hip hop crews).

And yes, Chuck talked about Flav! Of course he talked about Flav! He said essentially 'if you look at the structure of the black family, everybody's got somebody like Flav in the family' and said 'people asked what happened to Flav, I say what do you mean? That's Flav. He was that way from day one. Now, I never thought I'd see the day I'd see grown women on TV crying over him, but those women are more hung up on the drug of fame than anything to do with Flav.'

Obviously he said plenty more, and was funny and entertaining without backup music or dancers or lights. He displayed oratorial skills honed over years in both the rap and speaking circuit games. Afterwords he did a Q&A, and was asked about the Reverend Wright dust-up ('If you look at it, that guy was saying things a lot of people had been saying and thinking') and also about his more recent appearance on D.L. Hugley's show with Michael Steele. Chuck was asked why he didn't say more during the discussion, and he replied that as a general policy he doesn't want to be on a show that's just going to be black men yelling at each other. He said Michael Steele could put his foot in his mouth anyway without him participating in some sensationalist show of people screaming at each other for ratings (and he was right. See also: super-cool Obama in the debates with 'barely keeping a lid on it' McCain). Obama came up a couple of times. Chuck referred to him as 'possibly the greatest rapper ever. He has a great voice, great delivery, and he moves people. Have you ever seen an M.C. move so many people to tears with his words?'

After the lecture Chuck came over and shook DJ Spikes' hand and said 'hey how are you doing' and shook my hand, too. Afterwards he did a signing of his book, Fight The Power. I bought a copy as did Spikes, and I got to talk to Chuck for a couple minutes and do the gushing fan-boy thing, talking about how I was in college when 'It Takes a Nation of Millions...' came out and how much it rocked my world. Chuck was super-cool and friendly and altogether an awesome guy. I said it was great he was still getting the word out and he said 'I'm gonna keep getting out there getting the word out until they shut my ass up', which I thought was awesome. The man has plenty to say and says it with the skill of a legendary M.C.