September 27, 2004
lets get political
Another one of "those things" that strike me.
About liberties in corporate workplace. The reason I'm feeding the blogscale is that I was submitted for this treatment twice in my (short)career. Once for mandatory drugtesting for all temps. Take it or be gone. Including alcohol (signs of liverdamage, I think) abuse.
I passed the test, but actually got a note from the lab personel that I needed to cut down on my caffeine intake. (yep. I was doing it pretty hard, insomnia and a work that required me to be on time. Didn't match very well, and my stomach took a lot of the hit.)
Also, being sent home from work in order to get a doctors approval on my health. *cough*
case / Robert
Well, was out last night, ended up late at a café with Robert (aka. case, xcasex )towards he end of "kulturnatten".
It was quite a nice evening, noticed that I still have issues being nice when I'm tired, And towards the night things got wackier still. The upcoming picture finalizes the evening fairly well ;)
And, as I promised, here is a picture of him :
September 25, 2004
Bonjour paresse
Thankfully this doesn't reflect my current workplace, but rather the one before this:
No.1: You are a modern day slave. There is no scope for personal fulfilment. You work for your pay-check at the end of the month, full stop.
No. 2. It's pointless to try to change the system. Opposing it simply makes it stronger.
No. 3: What you do is pointless. You can be replaced from one day to the next by any cretin sitting next to you. So work as little as possible and spend time (not too much, if you can help it) cultivating your personal network so that you're untouchable when the next restructuring comes around.
No. 4: You're not judged on merit, but on whether you look and sound the part. Speak lots of leaden jargon: people will suspect you have an inside track
No. 5: Never accept a position of responsibility for any reason. You'll only have to work harder for what amounts to peanuts.
No. 6: Make a beeline for the most useless positions, (research, strategy and business development), where it is impossible to assess your 'contribution to the wealth of the firm'. Avoid 'on the ground' operational roles like the plague.
No. 7: Once you've found one of these plum jobs, never move. It is only the most exposed who get fired.
No. 8: Learn to identify kindred spirits who, like you, believe the system is absurd through discreet signs (quirks in clothing, peculiar jokes, warm smiles).
No. 9: Be nice to people on short-term contracts. They are the only people who do any real work.
No. 10: Tell yourself that the absurd ideology underpinning this corporate bullshit cannot last for ever. It will go the same way as the dialectical materialism of the communist system. The problem is knowing when...
Hald
Okay, some people ask about hald and why we hadn't yet unmasked it.
on my system with two USB devices, one camera and one stick, you plug in one before boot, start, plug the camera in, mount it, unmount it, remove it... all set so far?
Then plug it in again, and you lock hald down completly. no devices, no nothing. "yey" for stability. :-/ can't even unload my pics of case.
September 24, 2004
Profiling
ugh. Took the time to profile my system today, using oprofile
It was somewhat interesting, I managed to hard lock my system at least twice due to gnome-terminal + Xorg.
Other things of note, gedit is a RAM hog. allocating ~25 Mb from opening a 5 Mb textfile. and it doesn't deallocate all of it once its done.
ARGH!.
Well, here are some data for those who are interested: oprofile-01
Go Alex
Quoting AlexL on xdg:
"Some people will not like this proposal. In particular, people from Real will probably not like that they have to provide many themed icons, and that they can't get a real-specific icons into all themes automatically."
(update: fix formatting.)
September 23, 2004
KDE usability highlight
"If only everything in KDE could work as well as the tea cooker"
themes kill us
01:26:18]
01:26:26]
01:26:41]
September 22, 2004
September 21, 2004
Jef Raskin... oh yes!
Snip from the IxD list, the reply made by Jef Raskin:
> And if there is even a probability of 0.05 to this
> resemblance (and I am not greedy), we should give it a serious
> examination.
I have ascertained that over 98.2% of convicted criminals have eaten hamburgers prior to their criminal careers. The figure for interface designers is 96.5%, due to the relatively high prevalence of vegetarians. However, it is clear that the closeness of those two figures is not due to chance, and therefore the probability that an interface designer is a criminal is 0.948, and that this is caused by consuming hamburgers at an early age. Television watching and smoking pot do equally well as predictors of antisocial behavior. Therefore eliminating interface designers will lower the cost to society of maintaining prisons.
September 12, 2004
Tech support
oh Jolly. Getting called out to do techsupport means:
* debugging broken TP outlet in the wall. Dropped packets at random intervals.
* Debugging windows machine that sends DHCP requests and assigns ip's in a -different- range than the home-gateway does.
* Debugging broken D-Link firmware (forced downgrade at that) because it sends misformed DNS responses. ( query on one IP, get a response from another. What kind of NAT is this? )
* Debugging same D-Link thingie when the admin interface disappears.
* Debugging network when somone (*cough*) decides the solution is to reset the thing while we're working on it.
* plugging in the speakers into the power outlet.
overall, perfectly well spent hours. Not.
September 03, 2004
What can I say?
http://www.murrayc.com/blog/index.cgi/general/2004-09-02-10-30