Saturday, June 10
Miller Mews
285 Whiteview Rd
Wynantskill, NY 12198
(518)283-3533/859-0702

So yeah. I hope you can come, and bring a dish to share. It's shorter notice than usual, no fanfare, so the level of hypeness is up to you. Please, email your RSVP -- if I get more than 20 folks standing in the long grass of my backyard, i'ma get a keg of something interesting.

Oh, what for? Well, I've just come back from London. Marianne's back from France. Some of you are bound for Maryland, of all places. And I've just had a birthday (I'm 28). So why the (Ford) not have a nice big barbeque with smoked pork, freshly seared ground beef and your odd blackened beet?

Bullshit, like matter or energy, can be neither created nor destroyed. It can only be made to change forms.

This is an important thing to remember before switching jobs, switching friends, and making any sort of important life decisions. Bullshit is one of the elemental particles of human existence. Things are never better, only different. Your goal in life should be to find the type of bullshit that best suits your personality.

I, for example, greatly prefer the bullshit of highly logical people to that of highly emotional people. And I prefer the bullshit of drunk people to that of sober people. If you're a naturally claustrophobic person, you might want to leave your job working in a mineshaft for one working in an Arizona manure farm. Success is simply a matter of finding the shit that -- for you -- doesn't stink.

Now. Back to work.

It is a very noble initative, made quixotic by the lack of rhetorical study by the top gurus involved. If you think that shortening the word "Internationalization" to "I18n" (the first and last letters of the word held together by a tsmesis of the number of missing letters) is communicative, you have no idea what you are talking about. Get the fuck out of my industry.

d3b

Answers to your queries:

1) 2 dimensional. Like, comics, or cartoons, but unlike Joss Whedon's writing, which is strictly 1 dimensional. oh snap!

2) JUST GOOGLE MAPS TEH SHIT! It's not hard.

3) No, don't park on Whiteview. My neighbour can be a kind of a prick if you park on his yard, and also the cops will ticket you. Park on Hidley, or Hidley Extension. It's just easier.

4) Yeah, liquor and beer and food, it's all good. I like gin, she likes dark rum, we both like a fine rich ale and the dog? She likes bisquits. Go fig, ha!

But this guy puts me in an uncomfortable position. I think he's right. But I also think he's completely incapable of explaining or defending his opinion.

First, the errors. I'd like to list them, to get them out of our collective systems. I shan't mention them in my defense.

• Linux does not survive out of spite. It survives because it fills an important niche: it is ultra-customizable. This appeals to engineers seeking to eke all the performance they can out of available hardware, and is something Microsoft can't currently do. Linux on the desktop is a diffent matter, and while it does indeed owe some of its popularity to spite.


• Early Windows (<3.0) was not a pioneering effort. As a graphical system, it coexisted not only with Apple's Macintosh operating system but also with Amiga's Workbench, Berkeley Softwork's GEOS, and of course IBM's OS/2 Presentation Manager (as well as a number of simpler graphical management systems such as Norton Commander). It was, at all stages of its life, completely evolutionary, borrowing popular features from its contemporaries.


• I seriously doubt that the people who develop core Linux software sit up at night writing Windows exploits. I think most Linux users were disatisfied (or unimpressed) with the control Windows gave them. But Windows offers you LOTS of control -- if you're a developer willing to hack around in other people's DLLs. Anybody capable of designing an effective exploit for Windows should have a pretty strong grasp of Windows internals, and thus a very tight grip on the internal workings of the OS. Thus, they're not the type that Linux would appeal to.


• Linux may be behind Windows XP, but it's not "light years" behind. It's only about as far behind as Windows XP is from (oh say) Mac OS 10.4. Vista is going to be an impressive release, and the most up-to-date system on the planet. But it god damned should be, coming out in 2006. Finally: we are only talking in terms of modernity of user interface and layout. When it comes to operability, stability and customization, Linux wins handsomely and it's the other players lost in another solar system.


• Actually, what the courts said was that Microsoft's decision to tie a web browser into its OS was anti-competetive, and it was. Never mind that it was a really good idea -- a web browser is a fundamental function of modern computing, comprising a number of important reusable widgets and a system should not be considered "operational" without one -- or that Netscape was complete and utter garbage at the time. Microsoft DID use their desktop monopoly to quell a competitor, and that's wrong. It would be wrong if it had failed, too.


• Microsoft hardly "single handedly created the market for Personal Computers." Microsoft has never even SOLD a Personal Computer. Indeed, this is like saying "Bridgestone single handedly created the market for cars." Indeed, none of the items listed (tablet PCs, handheld PCs or media centers) were created by Microsoft and none of them is sold as a Microsoft product, either. Microsoft offers products that service common demand, but that is not the same as CREATING demand. Indeed, it's sort of the opposite.

There. Now, on to the defense.

Microsoft is a software company that has made its trillions not by selling better software, or by selling cheaper software, but by selling it to more people. One might call them the Sears of software. Their software creates a baseline system on which you can do literally anything.

There is an appeal to the concept of the baseline system which is hard to deny. For software vendors, it vastly decreases the support costs associated with introducing complex features. For users, it offers a level of choice and assurance no other product can tough. And for IT personnel, it offers utterly cellular growth -- any machine can do any other machine's job (not withstanding licensing and performance issues) WITHOUT an extreme makeover of the underlying software.

Consider this: you have a piece of software. It is build on an server. The server handles a lot of the dirty work for you, while performing optimizations and the like to make its own job easier.

The server is completely unaware of how you use its functions in your software. It just does what you tell it to, in the way that it does them according to the contract it provided you with. Ideally, your software should work the same way. Server and software existing independently of the specifics of the other, that's what decoupling is all about. The Right Way to develop software is to decouple operations as much as possible, thus to increase their flexibility and reusability.

However, you have discovered a way to manipulated the server's optimizations to your favor -- you've tricked it into giving you functionality for "free," and begun relying on it. You use your software in a certain way -- possibly even a bizarre way -- and received a benefit without having to do any hard engineering.

Now, you're asked to control the optimization, due to some side effects that occur in certain circumstances. And you're asked to (try at least) do so without tying yourself into the server, or leaving the scope of your own software.

But here's the problem. You may not have made any calls to the server, but you're already coupled to it by relying on its internal functionality to work in a certain way. And the price for doing your optimizations thusly is that you can't manage these applications at the same level. Your software, without calling out of its scope, has been relying on functionality in that other scope. And for your software to have a say in how that

In short: you are either going to have to reinvent the wheel -- recreate your desired functionality at a higher, more software-specific scope -- or you will have to interface with the axle.

Sometimes, I choose to grab that axle. And no, I don't feel good about it.

Trusting rusting fixtures
exploding joints of transit
causing pausing, lapse in motion.

Shift lever severed
bodily from smokey tranny
turkey baster survival.

Shag seat swelling
metal dwelling odyssey
dipped in Huron's shameful eye.

Decision choking pancakes,
Leviathon traction breakdown
beyond bastard boyhood boxcar.

That Checkov French demise parlays
a day's Molotov sunrise,
Maple Leaf jersey cadets.

2.
Pourling, mewling, cooling presence,
spiral lightning lighting,
Bainbridge motor lawman.

Missing pissing mountain,
leaking sickly cooking coolant,
licking legacy tears.

Final sneezing weezer
in cage'd trees, a terror
screaming Pittsburg finish.

Nineteen hour surgeon:
Nails and radiator virgin
sinking unsuccessful thinking.

Doctor spake of seizure,
pleasure plunging lack of leisure
tripled dollar godsend.

Stolen golden mallard
mercantile donor mile
shining Chrysler boneyard.

X.
Gears meet from my addiction,
may their greaseless, ceasing friction
when expired
warm my tired,
tired mind.

I'm hardly a crown or a crutch,
sometimes I can barely stand myself.
I crave a confidant's belly,
I can't stay cocky forever!

You'd love this drink,
one part sake to
one part cherry kool-aid to
three parts "what the hell am I doing?"

I don't want to harm anyone,
that's my greatest fear!
I want no bruised body but my own,
beaten carefully over twenty-three years.

I am not myself here:
I'm quiet but laugh when it isn't funny.
Courage is gathered like wheat
blighted by fat yellow locusts.

Let me illustrate;
there's a new ideal:
The bullet is at its apex and
I need a beautiful young hope.

Because I am lost among the rocky pages
of two dozen yards of shipwreck prosed.
I'm just a reckless scribe surviving
solely for survival's sake.

To avoid dreams
is as much folly
as to imagine (fleeting)
they have come true.

Annotations: I wrote this in college for a seminar poetry class predominated by underclassmen. One of them was a freshman girl who wrote these very powerful little puzzle boxes of poems that impressed the hell out of me. I mean, they were great. I, in my ego, considered her to among the few poets in the class on my "level," a level which in retrospect could be defined as "poems nobody understands using SAT words." Anyhow, I maybe talked to this girl four times in person, but included her in nearly all of my writing that year, because I liked the idea of her -- a beautiful, impassioned young writer aiming to blow the walls off a college with cunning fingertrap poems. She was sort of ambivalent about this iconification, and wrote a poem about it in return. It took me a year to figure out what she meant, but only because I never looked in mirrors back then and so didn't immediately understand her metaphor for me, but it was sort of flattering (in a completely unflattering way).

In this poem, the character is confessing (lamenting? decrying?) his obsession for this image, his interest in leaving his painfully ordered, comfortable life to become part of the uncertain, jeans and t-shirt literature revolution she represents. The three middle verses are taken right out of my journal, and the rest is the exposition. There's also a couple of verses that just sounded good at the time, and I think that last verse is damningly ostentatious. But I think it's some of my best work.