Tag Archives: bullshit

Father Benedict Groeschel, American Friar, Claims Teens Seduce Priests In Some Sex Abuse Cases

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Father Benedict Groeschel, American Friar, Claims Teens Seduce Priests In Some Sex Abuse Cases.

Filling up holes, not withstanding on this article I have only one real solid comment to make, and that is a question I would like to pose to the dear Father:

“Sir, in these situations, is there an adult present?”

So, is there? Because if there is an adult present, then they should have the grace and capacity for restraint and FOR THE LOVE OF GOD DO NOT RAPE THE CHILDREN.

I mean, ahem, Father… You seem to be casting your own fellow priests as victims when… OH LOOK WHO GOT RAPED BY FATHER FLANNIGAN! Ahem… I’m sorry dear Father, but I apparently have a terrible case of bullshit-induced tourettes.

I once thought that if I were Christian, and I was in that mindset that I would be, quite possibly, Franciscan. It is clear to me now… FINE! RAPE THE SHEEP AND COWS BUT STOP RAPING THE CHILDREN… ahem…

Damn Tourettes…

Multiple iOS Ringtone Surprise

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Apple’s provision for Ringtones and Alerts on their iOS devices leaves quite a lot to be desired. I bought a handful of alert tones from the iTunes store and thought I could place them on my iPhone and my iPad. Turns out that unless you have your devices synced completely to the iTunes Library, something I never do, you are pretty much out of luck. If you want to get ringtones or alert tones on your other devices, you have to buy them multiple times! This is very shortsighted of Apple and I won’t play that game. That being said, I have bought enough ringtones to make me happy for what I need on my iPhone, so it’s not like I’ll ever go back to the ringtones again for more.

For those out there with multiple iOS devices, watch out. Apple only sort of loves you, they also kind of hate you too.

NDAA 2012 STFU

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I accidentally found myself mindlessly browsing Facebook on my iPad and I came across a gaggle of my friends who were very upset over the NDAA 2012 bill that passed into law.

Since nobody thought to answer my challenge about the validity of the statement that the NDAA 2012 section 1021 and 1022 would somehow lead to indefinite detentions for US Citizens then I clearly call bullshit on all the hysterics surrounding this law. Yes, I don’t really agree with a lot of the other sentiments but the hysterical fear-mongering surrounding the NDAA 2012 law just has to stop! I indicated the two sections that protect citizens and for those people who continue to share links about how this new law will lead to citizens ending up being incarcerated indefinitely.

Just stop it. Stop it or show me where in the text of the law it is clear that my rights have been suspended! Otherwise, shaddup!

NDAA 2011 – HR 1540

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Bill HR1540, the NDAA for 2012 has gone through many revisions as it came from the Senate, and snaked it’s way through the House and soon to land on the President’s desk for his signature. The biggest issue with this bill has been the sections 1031 and 1032, which deal with “Detainee Matters” and the ACLU got really bent out of shape when people came to the conclusion that these sections enabled the government to suspend Posse Comitatus and indefinitely detain American Citizens.

This of course is a huge red-button issue. Nobody wants their rights trampled on and even the whiff of this is enough to enrage the citizenry. I have gone to OpenCongress.com and looked up the bill that is being discussed. HR 1540. I then went to the THOMAS site at the Library of Congress and the bill as it is ready for the President’s signature has changed the section numbers of these two parts that upset people. Instead of 1031 and 1032, the new sections are 1021 and 1022.

People are alarmed at this bill and I can tell you that I have read this bill and these two sections and there are two parts, here’s the part for 1021:

(e) AUTHORITIES.—Nothing in this section shall be construed
to affect existing law or authorities relating to the detention of
United States citizens, lawful resident aliens of the United States,
or any other persons who are captured or arrested in the United
States.

And then here’s the part for 1022: 

(b) APPLICABILITY TO UNITED STATES CITIZENS AND LAWFUL
RESIDENT ALIENS.—
(1) UNITED STATES CITIZENS.—The requirement to detain
a person in military custody under this section does not extend
to citizens of the United States.

And I’ve looked over this bill and can’t find loopholes that mean that US Citizens can be indefinitely detained at all! The bill clearly states in both sections that nothing in either section applies to US Citizens!

So does it matter if the President Vetoes this bill? No. It doesn’t. We are protected by these two sections. The people who claim that we are in peril need to point where in the bill these two paragraphs no longer mean what I think they do when I read them.

If nobody can produce text proof that this bill is dangerous to my civil rights then I insist that people STFU about it!

The Postman Always Rings… Oddly.

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I received a parcel in the mail today at work:

I wasn’t expecting anything in the mail. For a brief moment I thought it might contain a bomb or perhaps Anthrax or something equally as dramatic and sexy. But no… I turned it over:

And discovered, after pulling the contents out, that what I had was exactly the opposite of something that I’d want:

It’s a PROMOTIONAL MAILER for the Blackberry PlayBook! But it’s not just a piece of paper, oh no! It’s a silicone bumper!

So now I have a promotional mailer I didn’t want, for a product I really could care less about, but now I have a bumper for it! So, I’m thinking I could sell it on eBay maybe or throw it out. What an incredible waste of resources this is. This doesn’t sell a device. Now I hate the Blackberry PlayBook and I despise anyone who sells it. Before I was ambivalent, now they’ve earned my ire. This is now how to market a new device! This is wasteful bullshit.

It's Not a Bug, It's a Feature!

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I just got off the phone with my Apple System Specialist, which is staffed by a new person. I haven’t really had that great an experience with people in that position and I don’t know why. I think a great part of it was that our initial sales experience oversold that position’s effectiveness to customers like myself and that mistake has permanently tainted that part of the Apple-Customer experience. In many ways, after my initial contact (which left me feeling more meh than woohoo) I just stopped calling on them altogether. After the Tech’now’ledgy Expo that TotalTech put on, I make contact again with my “Apple Sales Team” and I’m not exactly sure it was the best move.

Before anyone gets upset, there isn’t anything that they have or haven’t done that earns my ire, so that’s not it, it’s just a general sense that they are more surface than substance. It’s an odd sensation and no matter how I try to kick it, it just hangs around.

So I got to talking to my systems person at Apple and the central question was iOS management. Currently I have 3 iPhones and 6 iPads (not counting my own) all in play. There are certain things I want to accomplish with these devices especially when it comes to setup. We run a different model than Apple imagines when it comes to iOS device setup. I get the devices, I set them up, get them all warmed up and fill them with a certain set of apps that the end user may like to use and then deliver a hot-and-running device right into their hands. This runs counter to how Apple imagines this should be done, they want each device to be set up by individuals and populated by individuals themselves for data and apps and whatnot. I asked about mobile management and my Apple rep told me what I already knew, that Apple had ignored this particular segment completely and they are letting other companies create products to “Manage multiple mobile devices”. This is a recipe for DISASTER and well, “NOT WANT” is pretty much the banner I’m running under for this. I don’t want some odd 3rd party with their grubby little fingers and stupid backwards code messing up my beautiful, sterile, pure Apple experience! Oh well. Apple won’t, they’ve kicked the can to 3rd parties and I regard those as lepers so – it’s manual-DIY for me and it’s not heartbreaking, it’s just a little bit of a downbeat to the heavenly host of angelic singing that rings throughout Apple. For me, it’s as if Cletus and MaryJo wandered into the middle of the Tabernacle Choir, picked up a songbook and joined in. What happens when you add 1 cup of wine to a barrel of sludge? You get sludge. What happens when you add 1 cup of sludge to a barrel of wine? You get sludge.

So I decided to just drop my interest. Right on the floor. I’m not going to pursue 3rd party vendors, I have no need to look inside a leper colony tent, I can assume parts are falling off and things smell like feet wrapped in bacon and stuck in hot leather. Ew. Nahhhh.

So then I brought up my oddity with the iPhone. Here’s what happened to me, there apparently are two universes here, we’ll call them Universe A and Universe B. In Universe A, where someone like me has many iOS devices (iPod Touch, iPod Nano, iPad) and many Macintosh computers I can set the devices up on any one of those computers with an iTunes library and turn on the most important setting in all of Apple-land: Manually Manage Music and Data. It’s an unassuming check box on the Summary screen for every iOS device and every single one of my devices has it on. I like Apple, but I don’t trust iTunes. So in Universe A I can wander from Mac to Mac plugging in and managing every device. I can copy music, I can copy ebooks in, apps, you name it, no problem! Now, enter Universe B. In Universe B I have just an iPhone with multiple Macs. I set an iPhone up with my iMac, everything is fine, I check “Manually Manage Music and Data” and do what I always do. Then I take that iPhone and I plug it into another computer. Now iTunes has grayed out “Manually Manage Music and Data” but it’s still checked. I try to add or manipulate anything on the iPhone with another computer and iTunes tells me that in order to do so, it needs to WIPE THE IPHONE CLEAN and start over from scratch!

So there is this massive difference between Universe A and Universe B. It hurts my head because both universes are using the same code base, it’s all iOS. iOS on the iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, iPod Nano. There shouldn’t be any behavioral differences at all! Wouldacouldashoulda. So I brought this oddity up to my systems specialist at Apple and he informed me that Universe B is the way it should be for all iOS devices. I took a pause and thanked him for his time. So what is it that irks me? Apparently I’ve been living with a pretty big BUG and I’ve been perceiving it as a crown jewel stuck to Apple’s Halo. I’ve been absolutely impressed with the great design of iOS and apparently a good portion of my perception of value here is based on some really deep-seated bug! If iOS devices are all supposed to behave like they should in Universe B, that is stupid and horrible! It spits in the face of multi-computer compatibility and squirts a nasty stain on Apple’s Halo.

At the end I got to laughing with this Apple fellow, mostly because I couldn’t get over the fact that a pretty nasty bug was apparently so good and important to me that I’ve actually used it in Apple sales pitches to friends and family! My Apple rep wasn’t really impressed either when I informed him that I discovered a way to work-around the iPhone issue. Apparently the procedure I have to defeat this oddity with iPhone is in some central way a really underhanded way to sidestep what Apple had intended all along despite Universe A being just a giant bug! I copy my iTunes folder to some other place, I tear out all the content folders just leaving the rag-tag group of 5 or 6 XML files behind and then use that little seedling iTunes library and copy it for other people to use. This makes it all work the WAY IT SHOULD, so that iPhones are gregarious. They really aren’t, they are still tightly bound to this one singular iTunes library, but since I’ve started handing out the stub Library, it’s as if I’ve bonked Universe B to fit neatly in the hole meant for Universe A!

What gets me is all the people I read about online who have iPhones who stomp and scream and carry on that their Mac died, they couldn’t recover any of the data off of it and had to start from scratch. When they get everything back and up and running and then they plug their iPhone into their computer (because they want to move stuff in or out) iTunes tells them that they have to wipe their iPhone! Well, now I know why. It’s because when iTunes creates a new library, it creates something special in those few XML files as well, probably a globally unique ID code. Since they don’t have the old GUID, their iPhone refuses to sync with the new library until they wipe it clean and start from scratch. Universe B strikes again! So for what I see, that Universe B is an EPIC FAIL BUG, it turns out that Apple considers Universe A to be the BUG and Universe B to be correct. This irks me, but I’m sure it utterly mystifies and pisses off people who don’t understand what is really going on here. What’s the practical upshot from this? Well, backup your iTunes library. Specifically everything in iTunes that isn’t meat. Backup that SKELETON. There is something very very important in those XML and plist files, the handful of them, that is life or death for iPhones (in Universe B). I can only pray that Apple never fixes it so that all their products work as they should in Universe B. But then again, even if they do, spreading stumpy iTunes libraries isn’t a problem. It’s 414KB of special sauce, not even a blip on any storage radar.

This does speak to something even deeper. I thought I got away from this stupid bullshit when I ran away from Microsoft, but it appears as though Apple is fond of this lame bullshit as well. It’s upsetting and dismaying. The same feeling you have when you learn that a superhero was caught stealing boxes of plastic chattery teeth. Why? I don’t know if Apple will ever address it or if they’ll “correct things” and start the downward anti-consumer spiral that Microsoft is at the center of. I can only hope not.

I’m going to boldly go forward with the design I already have in place anyways, to return to the main point, and probably continue to duplicate that “special sauce” in my iTunes library from my work iMac to all my client machines and continue to do things the way that I can without involving Apple. I’ll keep on doing so until they design me into a tight little box and then I’ll probably find some other way to get what I want done the way I want it.

I did learn something from all this. If something is working the way you want, just don’t bring it up to anyone else. If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it, even if the manufacturer thinks it’s broken and not working the way THEY intended. What really matters is how you use it. Once they’ve sold it, it’s pretty much out of their hands. Now I can only hope that my contact at Apple has forgotten all about me and my silly problems. Yes, please, please forget. Keep this coveted little bug going forever, we’ll just regard the iPhone as a quirky device.

Universe A FTW!

Ringtones and Heavy Drama

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Music. What a pain in the ass. You write a post about manipulating music to create ringtones and before you know it, you’ve got half the world coming out of the woodwork wanting to have a problem with you. The licensing zealots are the ones that sniff for words like “music” and “ringtone” and “fuckall, I’ll do it myself!” and then position themselves with some primo whingeing and moaning over their lost profits.

Times like these I find myself musing over ideas, the kind that would make any musician wet their pants. I remember reading Neil Stephenson’s “Snow Crash” and thinking about that world that he created for the book. It would please musicians immensely if they could extract licensing fees from every single impression of their work. Not just one $15.99 CD purchase and then the music leaks out all over creation, ending up on MixCD’s, Tapes, innumerable iPods, iPhones, and eventually hacked up into Ringtones and even mangled by remix artists. Each impression, each play should have a charge associated with it. Why not keep going? Each time you play a DVD or Bluray movie you rack up charges. Each time you crack open a book and read a word, you are charged for the pleasure of it. That’s where licensing has to go really. It’s either headgear-and-strict-control or stop bothering people and whingeing about it.

This all comes from creating Ringtones. The minute content creators caught a whiff of profit they immediately tried to lock down every aspect of their work even after they published it and let the genie out of the bottle. Your average consumer walks into a mall, into the music store, and plunks down cash to buy music on some sort of storage medium. As someone who used to do this, you don’t even spend one second really thinking about what you just committed yourself to. You don’t understand that you essentially agreed to a contractual obligation of a music license. I bet most of us have never ever seen a real music license, we just have the working assumption that if we walk into a store and buy something, that it’s ours.

Obviously not! You retain nothing! Your assumptions are wrong! The license you agreed to has innumerable paragraphs containing controls, limits, and what you have is not chattel. What you have is a licensed work, it’s not really a thing either, so you can’t really sell it in a flea market, you can’t give it someone else as a gift, and you can’t change its format at all. It’s the law, it’s what you put your signature next to when you breached the cellophane.

It’s this sort of inflexibility that naturally leads all rational people to scream at the top of their lungs “Fuck It!” and drop it. Why did people stop buying music? Because it’s onerous. It’s a pain in the fucking ass. That wall of CD’s, that wall of thousands of dollars of blown money, none of it is actually yours. Yes it’s in your basement but it isn’t yours. The information on those discs aren’t yours either. You rent the music, much like you rent beer.

After the music had a life-threatening heart attack – Napster, Limewire, Bearshare, Google, and BitTorrent the consumers saw that all their money was recycled beer and then they stopped being customers. What is music? Is it something you need to live? No. It’s something you’d like to have to make living perhaps a little more enjoyable, but it’s not a basic necessity. After the attack, most music distributors decided to get very much “in our faces” and start slathering the music we wanted to buy with Digital Rights Management. Nothing like making your customer feel unwanted and then braining them with a hammer and THEN whining about why they don’t want more music.

So for all of those people out there that whine, moan, and wring your talented little hands over how the big bad consumer is just stealing bread from your salivating mouth we’ll be pleased as punch to let go of your “rented beer” and never look upon you again. Life goes on without music. Life can go on without Ringtones as well. It’s just not worth the trouble. Eventually people will be taken to court and sued for humming half-remembered melodies.

What a way to kill art.

 

 

A Grain of Rice

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I arrived to work yesterday, January 12th, 2010 quite early after taxiing Scott to work because his car is in the repair shop getting a dent taken out. As I walked in my assistant Andy was getting the new UPS system we purchased up and running and while we were doing that he also mentioned that he was having a problem with a server we have here at work. The server is Smartcall and runs our Annual Fund phonathon program, the server coordinates all the student callers and that’s a big portion of our business. Apparently Drive 0 in the RAID 5 array died a few days ago and the server has been operating in a degraded state. He attempted to replace the drive and everything was going well until he tried to rebuild the new drive. The RAID controller declared that the drive assembly in slot 0 was FAIL/UNKNOWN. We were both mystified as this drive was fresh from the factory, not a rebuild or a refurbishment. After struggling with the RAID controllers port being at the maximal extent of the RAID cable itself we pulled the new drive out and put the old drive back in, hoping we could get the array back online and make sure that the software on the array was okay.

After replacing the drive, and reassembling the array we got the system to boot and then Windows 2003 Advanced Server declared that it needed to run chkdsk.exe to verify the stability of the filesystem. This took about half an hour and many repairs were made. The system rebooted and immediately the system slipped into a BSOD, declaring that a KnownDLL had failed verification. I placed our Windows 2003 CD in the CD drive and booted to that, the ASR option came up and requested an ASR floppy, which we didn’t have. What I was looking for was a Repair Console, but it wasn’t in this copy of Windows 2003 provided to us from Dell, and we had no other copy to use. After going through some options and letting it run we discovered to our chagrin that the CD was automatically reinstalling Windows 2003 Advanced Server on top of the one that was already on the array! After letting the disc have its way with the system we allowed it to boot, which it did, into the new Operating System and the database RDBMS that we use for powering Smartcall, which is Oracle 9i, was dead because there was a new OS and a new Registry Hive. The data for the database was fine, that all was sitting on Drive D: and was unaffected by the over-installation of the OS on Drive C:.

I was stuck with a degraded array on a server that had a broken RDBMS and an orphaned Oracle 9i database just lollygagging around. I watched my professional life flash before my eyes. I started to reach out, OIT had only a few ideas but nothing really concrete because “We don’t use Oracle on Windows systems, we just use Oracle on Unix systems” and the vendor, Sungard who sold us Smartcall left their support run to voicemail (still haven’t gotten a call back of course, a day later!) and then OIT informed me that Oracle has moved on to 11g, and no longer supports Oracle 9i, which is the version we’re using.

My next step was to over-install Oracle 9i over the old installation thinking that it would correct the registry entries and I’d be able to get control of my old database back that way. After the installation was complete I opened up the Enterprise Manager console and saw my database, I tried to open it and it gave me a fusillade of errors, ranging from not having a listener installed to not being able to run the database server process. Google was useless as none of the errors displayed any meaningful options for my situation and OIT was only partially helpful in saying “Oracle doesn’t support 9i anymore, you might want to try a fresh install of the RDBMS”. So there I was with a 2x overlaid RDBMS and no way to get the database attached and up and running.

My next step, since I had so much broken around me, was to uninstall Oracle9i, dump as much Oracle junk as I could find in the Windows Registry and then tear out all the dead directories in C: and D: drive and then reboot. At this point all I had was the installation directory for Oracle9i and the raw database files for my Smartcall database. I reinstalled Oracle9i, I elected as much as I possibly could, Enterprise Version, with all the bells and whistles and let it go for half an hour. Once the database was up and running I checked it out. The basic database I had created was named the same as the machines name and it was working perfectly. I tried to edit some of the config files thinking I could just attach the files that I had from the previous installation and make them work. I saw the SMART9 in the list, which I recognized as the place to go to start it and I ran into the same error as before. Still dead in the water.

I then was looking in the Start Menu group around the Oracle software I had installed and found a “Database Administration Tool” and that piqued my interest. I started it, then it hit me like a ton of bricks. I had the files but no underlying database structure and I figured that my little “edit the files” wasn’t enough by far to get things up and off the ground, I was lacking things like Oracle Server services in the Windows Services applet relating to SMART9, I had one for the running database… So I used the Database Administration Tool app and thought about a particularly clever approach. I used the tool, created a dummy database called “SMART9″ (named identical to the previous installation) and it created a fully functional Oracle9i database and then I turned all the services off, tore out the guts to this new SMART9 database and shoved in all the guts from the previous installation and restarted the services.

It worked.

Once I had tested the database and a manager client I was happy that Smartcall was back up and running again, but I still had the original problem, which was a degraded RAID5 array with a dead drive in slot 0. Both Andy and I were standing next to the server agonizing about why the new drive failed so obnoxiously on our first attempt. I had the new drive mounted in the array enclosure and it was FAIL/UNKNOWN and I couldn’t rebuild it, the controller was having none of it. As I sat there, pondering my condition I looked sidelong at the array through its metal grating and noticed something unusual. These LVD SCSI drives have a jumper block on the FRONT. Almost all hard drives have three sections in their rears, data, jumpers, and power. These drives I was working with had 4! Everything normal in back and one strange mutant jumper block up front. The new drive in the array, the one that was FAIL/UNKNOWN HAD A JUMPER. This little jumper, no bigger than a grain of rice, was shorting out pins 1 and 6, while the old drive we removed which before it’s failure was working fine, had no jumper at all. The block was the same, the drives were all the same, but this was a fundamental difference. I disassembled the array (each time I did this I bitched and moaned because the !@#$ array controller is as far away from the array as possible, the cable barely makes it!) and removed the drive and removed this little teeny tiny jumper. Then I reassembled everything and restarted the controller BIOS system and scanned the SCSI chain and… yeah, you know it… slot 0′s drive was FAIL, but no longer FAIL/UNKNOWN. I could open the drive, I selected “Rebuild” and we both stood there holding our breaths. The BIOS system displayed a progress bar and we waited until we saw 1%. About 2 minutes in 1% appeared. We knew it was just a matter of time until it hit 100% and so we buttoned everything up and felt much better about things.

This morning I walked into the machine room, saw that the RAID 5 array had rebuilt properly, all drives were ONLINE and I rebooted. The system came up normally and the database started and I came out the other side of this day-mare in one piece.

It was, on reflection bittersweet. I had no real help, I had a machine I couldn’t get to work and a RDBMS that I didn’t know very well and didn’t care to know very well and everything was the fault of a very tiny little plastic and metal jumper the size of a grain of rice. Gah.

Federal Preoccupation

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In the great long ago we used to classify people, at least ethnographically, on a spectrum of seven different races. The information was purely voluntary and wasn’t really pursued very vigorously. This was culturally commonplace for as long as I can remember, so more than 25 years at least. Then, a few years ago maybe, perhaps more recently than that I noticed a sea-change in ethnographic questions. The spectrum of seven races no longer really was important anymore, and all of a sudden they all flattened out into a central question:

“Are you Hispanic or Not?”

The races themselves were deprecated so aggressively that our data interface for our demographic software needs an import revision. This new question, one single binary one is by all appearances more important than the historical spectrum of seven races.

This offends me on several levels. On a purely intellectual level I’m offended because we are losing resolution in our data. Data that we used to keep, data that meant something, is no longer relevant. The message is clear, all races are subordinate to the central question, “Are you Hispanic or Not?”. So when we want to sort on all the Native Americans in Wyoming, we still can, but since the relevant data set isn’t as important as it once was the answers we get don’t mean very much. This bothers me because it dilutes the capacity of data mining, on a purely sociological standpoint it upsets me because the loss of race information no longer can be used as a reliable measure when normalizing data for data mining. Just to be clear, it never really was that important to start with, but when you only have so much, dilution in any one part is alarming.

On a racial level I’m offended because the question itself poses a value judgement on the races themselves. It used to be that every race was equally possible, you could be white, black, pacific islander, native american, asian, or a mix of any of those or you could just leave the data out and leave it unknown. By posing the question directly, and I think that’s what bothers me the most, “Are you Hispanic or Not?” makes this one race, the Hispanic one way more important than all the others. This should upset everyone, including the Hispanics. This data, especially now considering the messages we get from the federal government indicate that the answer must be compulsory, we can’t answer blank or unknown, we have to answer Yes or No. It’s a balance beam and it could be good or bad for either side. Either Hispanics are being identified for special treatment or they are being identified for special treatment.

So what is there to do? There is a part of me that wants to lie and mark myself as a Hispanic just to soil the data set. Yes, sure, I’m Hispanic. My family comes predominantly from Ireland, so sure, whatever. Another part of me doesn’t give a flying fuck. That second part of course is stinging because I can’t really do that. I am compelled to answer, either Yes or No, no chance of it being blank. By being compelled to answer, for no rational reason or valid explanation given feels a lot like a fundamental violation of my personal liberty. So, I have to take the only option and that is to insist on Blank. I refuse to answer that question and no amount of compulsion or “must” will shake the answer out of me. You could look at my balding head, the red and blond hairs in my goatee, my wide heavy frame and my freckles and pin me down on sight, if my LAST NAME doesn’t give it away ANYHOW, but I refuse to answer a binary question because it violates my sense of liberty. I don’t want to answer, and it all depends on which side of ‘special treatment’ is coming down the pike for people who do answer that question.

I feel that the federal government is insulting me as a citizen by asking such a question. That a question like that is utterly impertinent is both upsetting and irritating. Even if the federal government were to explain why they wanted to know I wouldn’t want to answer it, let it be a mystery. The answer inherently demands discrimination, and if we are all supposed to follow the original pledge of allegiance:

“I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

How can answering this question be compatible with the sentiments of that pledge? How can we be indivisible and yet “Are you Hispanic or Not?”

Inbox Zero

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Ever since my institution migrated to Web Mail Plus (I like to call it wimp for short) I’ve made it a workplace priority to never have anything stored on it that I can’t store someplace else. From the beginning, with our institutional migration to this new system I’ve been critical of it. I have no faith in either the dependability or privacy of the new system. The old system I did have a measure of faith in because my email was stored on my server in my machine room, not 10 feet from where I sit now. Now my professional email lives in Ann Arbor Michigan, in a place I have never seen and managed by people I have never met. There is a batch of paperwork that has been signed which should give me a sense of security, but again, it was one batch of strangers signing documents with another batch of strangers and a very nebulous promise that nothing upsetting would occur from this transition. As it is, I have developed a series of reflexes based on my zero-trust model that I use with strangers, especially institutional strangers. My livelihood is far too valuable to trust to the likes of my coworkers and peers. It’s nothing against them, but it’s a mix of wariness and “If you want it done right, do it yourself” mentality that so far has kept me happy and things working well in my life.

These reflexes regularly lead me to a state of geek nirvana, something called Inbox Zero. It’s a state where your inbox is totally clean, utterly empty. Nothing is malingering, loitering, and filling your mind with a fog of worry that if there are items there, you are somehow missing something or you haven’t completed something. Mostly it’s the sense that if there is something in there, I haven’t attended to it properly and that sits on my mind. It’s a kind of annoying background noise that lowers my happiness and sense of order, a fog of doubt. While this fog of doubt doesn’t really upset me or negatively impact my life, it contributes to my general sense of irritation and it’s one of those little passengers that contribute to stress breakdowns and spiraling vortexes of rage that I sometimes get trapped in. By eliminating this fog from my environment, it’s one less little niggling thing to wear me down.

My professional email gets only a few broad categories of information sent to it, that I have to attend to:

  • DBA Tasks – Highly structured task requests that usually include attached data. These almost always have a due date and a list of people to report to when the task is complete.
  • Help Desk/Office – More nebulous, mostly people asking for things or issuing trouble-tickets over email. In our office there is no single way to issue a trouble-ticket, people can walk up and verbally deliver one, they can email it in, leave voicemail, or try to ambush us as we walk through the office doing other tasks.
  • Organizational Chatter – Even more nebulous and needless are the myriad messages regarding the activities of the Trustees, Campus News, and little reminders sent out for events and/or meetings. I don’t claim they are worthless, but they are a kind of ‘hair that clogs the pipes’.
  • Vendor Spam – Generalized and unfocused bullshit from vendors we have or have had relationships with. Mostly this stuff is meaningless dreck related to things we will never need or find useful or even care about. These usually include anything sent from Dell, or HP, or the “Who’s Who” people.
  • Miscellaneous Bullshit – Very regularly I get meaningless messages from utter strangers with no content or worthless content. These are akin to email mosquitoes. They serve no real purpose, but there isn’t a reliable way to force them all into extinction. The best you can do is just swat them when they arrive.

So my strategies for handling these messages are as so:

  • If a message is worthy and important and has some sense of a due-date I forward it to my Toodledo account, which creates a task of the email with the body of the message as the meat of the task and the subject as the task title. This pushes the tasks that should originally go to toodledo in that direction. One of the side-effects of our transition was a massive retardation when it came to workflow. Our old system was great and nobody understood how to use it. The new system just doesn’t have the wits and the fact that nobody gets it is rendered meaningless from its absence.
  • If a message contains some hard nugget that I want to always retain I copy the relevant bits into an Evernote Note.
  • Everything else is bullshit. I have trained my Mac Mail.app using its Bayesian filters to separate utter bullshit from possible bullshit, so I just dump whatever mail puts in Junk right out and then toss the rest out after giving it a cursory glance.
  • If there is an item that isn’t task based, but does have a date – such as a meeting or some sort of event, I hover my mouse over the date parts and my Mail.app detects this and offers me a choice to create a new iCal Calendar Entry for that event. Talk about handy.

At the end of the day at best, or the end of the week at worst I should always be able to return to Inbox Zero. There is no reason to store items in the wimp, everything else can be sorted either into Evernote or Toodledo or the files taken out and placed in Dropbox with appropriate Finder comments attached. That all being said, I do store some things in my wimp account, mostly things that I probably should keep for documentations sake, especially if a coworker is going to wear their ass for a hat sometime in the future, it’s good to be at least a little prepared for those sorts of things. I principally store promises and protestations that something won’t ever happen again in my wimp account, and when they screw up, at least it’s handy there. Wimp glories in a 10GB quota. I use only a human-hairs worth of that quota and I have no desire to ever really make use of wimp beyond that. It’s a necessary evil, a funnel, not a bucket. I’m sure organizationally that bucks the conventions, as they wish it to be both a funnel and a bucket, but I have more faith in other buckets than what is in wimp itself.