someone posted story w/ the words "penetration" and "testing" following each other on/., that's like saying it in front a bunch of 15 year old boys.
Wait a minute...
laughing through bared teeth...
on
Amateur Revolution?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
come on people :
"Rap inflects global popular culture from music to fashion"
is somehow a sign of the world being caught up in a revolution? Rap is a sign that easy-to-manage concepts go over well with the populace. Hip-hop? Yeah, some of it is tolerable, but none of it will be viewed as masterpieces in years to come. There is no skill or effort in most of it. The people that create and listen to it are not capable of the introspection necessary to create masterpieces or even view them in the proper light later.
You can call it racist, elitist, or whatever you want, but rappers, rap "music", and rap fans are not leading any cultural revolution. They are enforcing the status quo. They buy their CDs, their videos, their jerseys, their 200 dollar sneakers, and keep the fatcats laughing all the way to the bank. The only social activities that they participate in are the ones espoused by their idols, namely drinking, getting high, killing each other, and in general being a goddamned moron. They are not like the 60's and 70's, where the music reflected a movement ( be it anti-war, civil rights, whatever the fuck ). They are cashing in on their stupid fans, promoting ignorance, all under a guise of a movement. If you think the corp execs haven't figured out a whole new level of subterfuge and manipulation, you're kidding yourself.
We're not dealing with the people who thought American Bandstand was about as wild as it would come. We're dealing with MBA-touting, marketing-aware, bloodsucking weasels that are more than willing to take a crack dealer who can string together a few rhyming compositions, give him world-class studio time, and sell him and his merchandise to a bunch of fools. They'll tell you it's a revolution, that you're changing the world, but you know what, money talks, bullshit walks. You're still making the same old conservative power mongers, they've just got their monkey-dancing rappers and dumbshit teen-idols out there turning tricks for them. I suppose I'm happier seeing conservative old white men running things than I am seeing crack-dealing uneducated rap stars, but it's still a far cry from a real option for progress.
We've already lost the media. It's a cash machine, nothing else.
The revolution will not be televised. And it will not be led by anyone named after currency.
If I remember correctly from the presentations I've seen on it, they will be using Linux as on OS on the "front" nodes ( the ones that users log into to start jobs, compile, etc. ), and a lightweight kernel ( proprietary ) specifically designed for Blue Gene architecture on the rest of the nodes.
1) Mr. Bush, exactly how fucking high were you when your handlers somehow let you say "there are OBGYNs that are unable to practice their love on the women of America"?
2) Mr. Kerry, while I, like many Americans, approve wholeheartedly of your 1-point "Get Bush the Fuck Out of Office" plan to getting America back on track, do you have an actual agenda to win over those of us who wouldn't vote for a stuffed deer head before Bush?
how this is any harder-core than say, sky-diving, bungee-jumping, or free-fall netdiving ( all of which I've done )? While this seems fun and all, it hardly seems to be the rush it's made out to be. Still, I guess if I had money to burn, I'd do it, otherwise for $3000, I'd rather give a couple hundred to a bungee place and jump all day, then go get drunk as fuck, higher than a kite, and still wake up with $2000.
if people take gene therapy to improve their bodies. There's nothing wrong with improving yourself, as long as it doesn't have dangerous side effects. Hell, I take growth hormones and about 20+ pills ( vitamins, proteins, etc. ) a day. Why do I do it? Because I work 8-10 hours a day, have an active social life, a house to take care of, 6 pets, a significant other ( practically common-law wife ), outside projects, etc., and don't have as much time and energy to exercise as I ought to. And, let me tell you, being a sysadmin/programmer at an understaffed company that just came out of bankruptcy is very draining without giving you any meaningful physical exercise. If I get an energy boost that I can use to work out longer and harder, and the proteins, growth hormones, etc. that I take help me get more out of it, then hell yes I'm taking them.
Why don't I take steroids? Because I don't want to damage my body. I have friends that take steroids. One guy I know went from benching around 300 lbs. up to 500+ in a month. But you know what? He also has pus sacks in his pecs, and wild mood swings, both of which are the result of having too much estrogen. Which is why I won't take them. I'd love to go double my strength, but I'm not willing to do it at the cost of limiting my life expectancy and lowering my quality of life in the future.
I believe the negative side effects of steroids are the reason that they're not allowed. Noone disallows an Olympic athlete from taking legal growth hormones or extra amino acids, all athletes can take that without fear of harm. But if you allow things like steroids, you end up having to take something that can threaten your health in order to compete, which is inexcusable.
Now, if gene therapy is non-harmful way of improving your physical condition, the only reason that I could see it not getting approved eventually is from the stigmata of steroids. If there's gene therapy available, legal or not, which doesn't have negative side effects ( or mild ones, like increased aggression and body hair, which are side effects of what I currently take ) sometime soon, I would go for it myself. Who doesn't want to be faster, stronger, smarter, etc.?
Basically, I'm all for better living through chemical experience, be it coffee, LSD, or gene therapy. Just make sure you know any risks, and have carefully weighed them, so you know that it's actually better living.
Bear in mind it's not a COTS ( Commodity Off The Shelf ) system like a lot of clusters, it's not even a typical cluster like the kind I have at work ( oodles of dual CPU nodes connected via Ethernet ). SGI Altix machines scale up to 256 CPUs and 4 TB of memory in a single system image, which is one very large SMP machine ( actually, CC-NUMA ). I'm not sure how many CPUs per node ( OS image ) this machine will have, as the article didn't coherently state it, but bear in mind that a cluster of these is more like a cluster of IBM p690s than anything else. Massive memory available per node, very high speed interconnect, etc.
As far as I know, the only company doing anything similar w/ Opterons is Cray's XD1 systems, and they're along the same line as an SGI Altix.
So it's not actually a waste of taxpayer money. As much as I love linux clusters composed 1-4 CPU nodes connected w/ a commodity interconnect ( as you can almost consider, GigE, Myrinet, Quadrics, SCI, etc. - when compared with the proprietary interconnects used in SGIs, IBM SP switches, etc. ), there's some things that you can do with greater efficiency by having 128 processors and 2 TB of memory in a single system image.
Please...if drug addicts can get blamed for the most crazed and violent among them, then I think christians should be blamed for the most crazed, vocal, and violent amongst them.
If you give your 20% or 20 bucks a week or whatever to some asshat who tries like hell to get me thrown in prison for a bag of coke, who tries to tell my sister, mother, girlfriend that she can't do whatever she wants with her own body ( I'm anti-feminist, but very much so for equal treatment - think about it ), and who encourages his brain-dead followers to walk around giving people like me ( shaved head, covered in tattoos, done time, hard worker, honest, intelligent, and more than willing to give anyone a fair chance ) a hard time, for living their own lives, on their own terms ( which means not hurting you ), then what do you expect?
Did you expect me not to get pissed off when you have lobby groups ( Christian Coalition, etc. ) who attempt to destroy our freedoms and lives?
Do you expect me to be happy when one of your pathetically eager little sheep gets enough balls to carry a pamphlet up to me in a grocery store, then threaten to call the police on me when I explain to them that I've told them five fucking times I'm not interested and they're about to get fucking hurt.
Do you expect me to ignore the fact that, as your preachers are so keen on touting, America is a > 75% christian nation? I don't care whether you're Protestant, Baptist ( well, actually, I really despise Baptists ), or Catholic - you represent the same religion. The fact that you're so schizophrenic in your beliefs that you can't agree upon one view of the same belief, while mind-boggling, does not concern me, nor does it the rest of the world, who are scared to hell of your little "crusades".
Bear in mind that I have friends who believe in all kinds of religions ( including christianity ), but all of them are open-minded and intelligent. What's interesting to note is that I don't have any American christian friends. One of my best friends, who is christian, is from Australia, and says that most Australians tend to view the kind of religion that Americans practice as being absolute fucking madness.
And, as far as this comment goes :
I can't speak for other religions, but Christianity is about making the RIGHT choices, not about eliminating the wrong ones for everyone else.
That's hilarious. Did you even read my initial post? I brought up the fact that one of the major principles of most religions is human choice. And I also brought up the fact that as it's practiced, christianity tends to disregard most of it's guiding principles. Not that I necessarily agree with most of those principles ( and the ones I do I admit are way too idealistic for the world we live in ), but who are you to tell me about your own beliefs when you don't even know the tenets of the faith you espouse? So, while you may grasp the fact that christianity has a good deal to do with choice in principle ( and I appreciate the fact that you do ), you seem to ignore the fact that very few of those who are more vocal and prominent about their beliefs seem to.
And, to address the last point, I'm probably more conservative than you could dream about being. But, when I sat down and looked at the parties, and what I've seen in my life, I see both parties eroding people's rights and imposing more state and federal regulations on their citizens, but the democrats appear to be doing less damage. Ultimately, as I explain it to people, would you rather give the federal money to some ignorant crack whore who would probably spit on me for being white if she could, or to some asshole like Ken Lay or Jerry Falwell? I'd rather do neither, but given the choice, I'd rather the crack whore. At least I don't have to be worried about being manipulated and controlled indirectly by her.
Allright, off the soap box, going to sleep. It's amazing how aggravated painting all day can make you.
if it feels good, it must be bad. And we ( as in the government, religion, society ) have the right to tell you what to do, even in the privacy of your own home or head.
I understand the issue of addiction, and the problems that addiction poses to society. This is one way of addressing it, but it is a morally dubious one. It removes the essentials of choice, which is a prime factor in what makes us human. It is also the cornerstone of a lot of religious tenets, which will lead once again to the unwashed christian masses sponsoring something that goes directly against their religious beliefs ( like christians who support the death penalty, where's the "thou shalt not kill" commandment again? ). So, rather than addressing the problem of addiction with personal help ( which is a morally unquestionable stance - you want help, we'll give it to you ), and treating the attendant problems ( crime - legalize drugs, diseases - re-instate needle exchange programs and allow sex ed to be taught in schools ) in a humane and efficient manner, we will embark down the slippery slope that "vaccines" for this stuff offer.
How long after a vaccine for drugs if implemented, will we have a vaccine for violence? And how long after that will we all be mindless zombies, in a perfect semblance of "health", all marching to the beat of our corporate/religious masters? That is a state worse than 1984. 1984 was about manipulation and control. We're already there to a degree ( watched the news lately? In multiple countries? They are fucking lying to us, so blatantly in many cases that it will blow your top to actually dig into the facts ), but at least when you're being manipulated, you can be awakened. What happens when you're vaccinated or genetically altered to the point where you can't get high, can't feel love, anger, pain, joy, any of the things that make us human? Can't choose between right or wrong? I would rather die myself.
And before anyone gets on my case about not understanding the problem, understand that I do. I've been strung out. Badly. I spent the better part of a decade putting cocaine, speed, and heroin in my arms, nose, and lungs. But I also understand that a lot of drugs have their uses. Acid won't ruin your life ( unless you're stupid enough to take way too much, but tylenol will do that as well ). Everyone should have one good trip in their life. It's fun and teaches you a lot about yourself. Cocaine has a lot of useful medicinal properties, but as a recreational drug it's useless and far too destructive. Alcohol is one most addictive and destructive drugs around, yet it's legal almost everywhere in the world. Etc. - they're just chemicals people.
What's scary is how we react to the issues that come up because of these chemicals. If it weren't drugs, it would be something else that exposes the weaknesses in our moral logic. And it is ultimately an issue of morality. Not the morality that all these soapbox baptist neocon preachers go on about, but actual human morality that rises out of ability to reason. What the Western world was based on.
Well, I've only met one Nigerian that I ever respected, he was an ex-soldier for the Nigerian government, and even he was a bit weird.
We have a fair amount of them in Houston, Texas, especially in the past 5 years. Every one of which is either arrogant and a liar, or just plain a liar. Cabbies trying to rip you off ( I've actually had an argument with a cabbie insisting he was taking me the short way when he was really going about 10 miles out of the way, he refused to go the way I told him until I offered to use that extra drive time to rearrange his face ), arrogant school counselors ( my girlfriend spent 2 weeks trying to get an appointment w/ a school counselor who had the nerve to tell her he was "an important man, and too busy to return calls" - c'mon, we're talking about a counselor for a small community college ), and arrogant parole officers ( one of my friends has one who never showed up for home visits, and then screamed at him when he had to be at work at a home visit time, another friend has had similar problems ).
All in all, I am decidedly unimpressed w/ all of the Nigerians I have met. If I get to vote for where we start cleaning the gene pool, Nigeria will definitely be in the top of my list.
That's where I get my fix. I'm hooked on reading books, can't stand reading anything other than code on a monitor. If I have to read someone else's code, and really take it apart, I print it out. Call it a failing if you like, but I'm addicted to the printed word.
If I could get a good, functional tablet PC - not running windows - I would give it a try, at least for the content that's available digitally. But it's not there yet as far as I know, so the only avenue I have for the things I like to read is paper. There's nothing like cracking open a good sci-fi, fantasy, or computer science book and digging in.
A bit more on-topic, I'm not surprised in the least. Quite a few people I knew when I was younger wouldn't read a thing unless they had to, so those are the people that turn to the net for their information, but don't read other than that. Those are also the people who memorize things and do not get a goddamn thing out of them. Nowadays, almost everyone I know reads a lot, and they fall into 2 categories : the people who read a lot of books and net, or the ones that just read a lot of books. The ones that read both are my technical compsci friends, the others are my friends that I've grown up with, who mostly discovered the wonders of reading in jail.
Hmm, this topic reminds me - I need to get some more bookshelves...all of mine are stacked 3 deep and look like they're about to topple...
but I remember this stupid fuck I used to work with, we sent him into the network closet to move a cable from one subnet to another. This was a mixed solaris/irix/windows site, but we kept the machines on different subnets, w/ different servers for various services ( like DHCP, NIS, etc. ) due to incompatibilities.
This dumb shit gets it into his head that he'll re-organize the network closet. Because, after all, it's a lot neater when you line all the cables up and consolidate the switches. Hey, look, we got a free switches, and look at how neat it is! And, yes, he was an MCSE. And our network engineer believed in job security through obscurity, so it took our department almost a day to straighten everything out.
Mine would probably be frying a motherboard while trying to reset the BIOS, while drunk.
My rule of thumb to having a really cool relaxed trip is the following :
1) find a few friends that want to trip with you. It is best if they're not aggro people ( I can deal with driving around town, going to clubs, and dealing w/ people, even psychotic friends who are trying to rip phone booths loose, but you might not want to ) and they're not neurotic, stressful types ( nothing like having to deal w/ some stupid neurotic girl who keeps asking you if she'll ever come down ).
2) find a nice safe comfortable place, I recommend a house rather than an apartment, because a good backyard is a cool place to sit, smoke, and check out the sky. Swimming pools are also a lot of fun, especially if you have one of those floatie couch things.
3) hide all guns. Period. If for some reason you feel the need to have a gun accessible ( bad neighborhood, etc. ), make sure that you pick someone who can keep their wits about them to be the only person who knows where the gun(s) are stashed.
4) pick out a bunch of cool movies and music. I recommend pink floyd and the cure, very kickass relaxing music to listen to, definitely inspires interesting thoughts. as far as movies, anything relaxing and cool. One of the most kick-ass movies I've watched tripping was The Last Unicorn. It brought back good childhood memories of fantasy worlds and inspired a sense of happiness. Also, anime movies are really kick-ass. I think anime was invented to be watched on hallucinogens.
5) Complementary drugs are good. Most people want to stick w/ light stuff, like maybe a little bit of weed and some whip-its ( nitrous oxide ). Ketamine ( a cat tranquilizer, very disassociative, impossible to overdose on, good clean high that has no afteraffects ) is good too. Both nitrous oxide and ketamine highs enhance the trip sensation greatly for fairly short periods of time, so they're perfect for a complement to the acid. I also like an occasional speedball ( coke + heroin ) to go along w/ the trip, but that's probably a bit too heavy for you, and also has the effect of possibly ruining the trip if you do too much. I don't recommend drinking a lot, unless you're eating a fair amount ( which you may or may not feel like doing while tripping ) because you can end up really feeling like shit later because you can't really get drunk on acid, but you can have a nasty hangover later. I personally drink some, because I love the taste of good beer, but I'd skip it or moderate. Oh, yeah, a lot of people like combining ectasy and acid ( it's called candy-flipping ), but I wouldn't do it for your first time. I personally think ectasy ruins the mental effects of acid, since it gets you too fucked up physically.
6) Snacks, and easy-to-prepare food, are a must. I love eating fruit while I'm tripping. Go for things w/ a very rich ( but not over-sweet ) taste, like watermelon or berries. You can eat anything while tripping, and definitely recommend that you do so to avoid any stomach aches from hunger, but there's some things that are just too hard ( try eating spaghetti in front of your parents while pretending to be tired - fuck, that was an adventure! ).
7) Don't worry about having a bad trip. There are no such things as bad trips unless you freak out. All acid is either good ( as in it gets you high ) or bad ( in that it doesn't ). Yes, some dumbshits occasionally try to use strichnine to bond the liquid acid to blotter paper, but a lot of the acid going around in the past 8 years has been liquid, and a most of the people that dip the sheets ( if you get paper ) have learned better. Note to would-be dealers : if you have liquid acid, and want to make paper, don't even fucking think about strychnine. Just layer the blotter in a plexiglass dish, use dropper to deposit liquid on blotter paper, leave to dry on non-porous surface. You will not have a bad trip unless you freak out, which
it was only a matter of time. All of the "services" that LocatePlus offers are matters of public record, which means that by the law you, I, or any jackass Orwellian fascist w/ a frutrated Big Brother complex ( *ahem* Jon Latorella - that's you bub! ) can access them and do whatever the hell he wants with them.
If you want an example of how available these records are now, check out Adams County Records. I've used them before to see if charges had been filed on friends, etc. So it's not hard to get, especially in the "digital" age.
What is scary is the fact that our society ( and our judicial branch in particular - which should be motivated by an evolving sense of ethics and morality, which, well, DOESN'T SEEM TO BE FUCKING EVOLVING to cope with our changing world ) doesn't seem to be able to prevent these abuses. Because a private citizen ( or a government agency, for that matter, but they have a lot of liabilities under the law that private citizens don't, that limit their abuses ) compiling a database from public records ( which aren't always accurate ) and then selling it to government agencies ( which is now probably excused for their mistakes due to the fact they were using "someone else's system" ) is most definitely an abuse. It's the basest whoring of public information that I can possibly think of.
Which beggars another question : if we were as intelligent and moral as we suppose, why haven't we done the following :
1) rather than releasing records freely, release them under a public license, similar to the GPL. Since they would have to be copyrighted to be released under a license, why not copyright each citizen's information to that person, and their relatives owning their copyright when they die? Yeah, it sounds sick in a way - you're copyrighted, dude ! - but it would prevent commercial and governmental abuses like this. Your information is copyrighted to yourself, freely available under the Citizen's General Public License or some such shit, and any sentencing, divorce, etc., is an addendum to the copyrighted work - namely YOU. And you have to authorize any use of your records which involves commercial profit.
2) Made laws disallowing the use of public records for direct commercial gain.
3) Passed laws that required private and public agencies furnishing public or private information to other agencies to be be directly culpable for all misuse, negative repurcussions, etc., that result from any inaccurate or outdated information that they provide. This one rings home with me particularly strongly tonight, since I just found out that 2 medical bills that I paid over a year ago still show up on my credit as unpaid debts. There's no accountability there, even though I've badgered these bastards before to update their records.
Yeah, making laws doesn't always solve a problem, but making the right ones will. Stop telling people who they can fuck, how they can get high, stop giving money to religious "charities", stop supporting people that are unwilling to work but still willing to reproduce, legislating the RIAA's paranoid crusade about whether I can copy a fucking DVD or not, and start making some laws that pull that metaphorical boot off of our face. Because I only see it getting worse. And this is the really goddamn scary part kids :
I see it getting a whole worse before it gets any better.
like we need more people jerking off at rest stops.
The upside is that I'm going to get a free laptop.
Because if I walk into a bathroom and someone's in there jerking it, well, let's just say I'll be leaving w/ a some new gear, a wallet, and a broken hand.
but I've been wondering how the EZ Pass/Tag cards here in Houston, TX, USA know that you're not in the vehicle that you purchased it for, like they have recently become able to do ( you used to be able to purchase a card and use it in multiple vehicles ).
My best guess would be an RFID tag in your registration sticker, as my truck hasn't been inspected in years, nor have I changed my license plates in years. But the only test case I've tried yet has been my GF's truck, and hers is new, so it might be that she has a RFID tag in her plates or registration sticker, and it's picking up the discrepancy on her vehicle, but on mine the only way to verify a discrepancy would be between the registration sticker and the EZTag.
People look at me funny, but I have a real hard time believing that they're verifying this by photo/video systems, even w/ human interaction. It's just too difficult for roads that see > 1 million cars per day.
Which means that they've probably been doing this for years, because whenever you run one ( even years ago ), they send you a bill for 1 USD + 14 USD "handling fee" to your registered address. And, once again, I have a hard time believing they are using video systems.
From my experience, newer versions of KDE are slower than GNOME. Then again, they're also more "feature-packed", so I run KDE on my laptop ( where I want a bunch of doo-dads, bells, and whistling monkeys ) and GNOME on everything else. I'm not sure about Mandrake, but Fedora Core 2 and SuSE 9.1 seem to scream along quite happily on my machines, including a 1 GHz P3 laptop w/ 512 MB of PC100 SDRAM and K6-3 500 MHz w/ 512 MB of PC133. And w/ the 2.6 kernel w/ preemptibility compiled in makes things a dream in terms of responsiveness under heavy load.
Hell, to be honest, I could get by w/ twm and mutt, most of my work is done inside terminals and vi.
Anyways, this is the same drum that people have been beating for years. If you want more functionality, then you pay the price somewhere. Yes, you should always code for tightness and efficiency, but those alpha-blended thingywhatsits and anti-aliased fonts, etc., cost you somewhere.
Having said that, it's been my experience that outside of the GUI environments, the Redhat/Fedora and SuSE distros are still very responsive and tight.
Buy some more damn memory if you want to run a GUI environment. Period.
I agree w/ what you are saying, completely. The type of person who can remember this kind of stuff, and has a background that goes back that far, is generally the kind of person who also has the values that you espouse.
I was actually thinking of a couple of guys I know in particular. They're old-timers ( shit, I had start a conversation about topless dancers at lunch to get one of them to shut up about 300 baud modems and postscript parsing programs written in awk, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, etc. ), or at least relatively so, but they've kept current, so in addition to having all of the knowledge and skills that you and I do, they have a sense of perspective. Knowledge, without the perspective to use it correctly, is useless.
The guys that are just by-the-book button jockeys won't be able to tell you how they solved a problem 10 years ago w/out pulling out some notes, because they didn't learn anything from it. They just read a manual, fixed the problem, and then promptly forgot about it. They didn't write a fix for the problem, or develop a cool workaround, or debug it extensively and then prove the problem to a doubting vendor.
Anyways, I guess that's what I was trying to say and didn't clarify enough.
Yes, the salary estimates do seem a bit low. I'm a 4-year *nix ( including clusters ) sysadmin, w/ a year of helpdesk/regular IT before that, and I pull about 60k/year ( including overtime ). Of course, I'm a pretty good programmer and systems architect as well, and pursuing a computer science degree, but still, as far as the work force is concerned, I'm a high-school graduate w/ 5 years experience.
A really good *nix sysadmin will cost 100k and up. These are the kind of people that you drop any obscure Unix box in front of, or any problem that has stumped everyone else, and they go "Oh yeah, saw that back in 82, here's what you do..."
as the proud parent of a cat, a dog, a snake, 2 rats and a sugar glider, w/ a PITA old lady who lives w/ me, and being a systems administrator/programmer/architect, I can kind of feel your pain.
My job is very catch-all, high-stress : manage a very large ( > 4000 CPU ) cluster, do design, research, programming, etc., bearing a 10-person workload w/ 3 seniors and 2 very junior juniors.
Shit, this afternoon my boss, who knows everyone in the group is burnt out, had the balls to ask me if something for a non-production system would be ready by Monday, WTF?!?
Anyways, then I have to come home, cook dinner, feed and play w/ 6 animals, and help out w/ some of the cleaning up and whatnot. While oftentimes doing extra work from home.
The only thing that makes it worth it is the thrill of doing some kick-ass hack at work, or coming home and playing w/ all of my loving animals ( I guess I can lump the old lady in there when she's not bitching;) ).
Anyways, back to the point : how do you juggle all of these, stay sane, and take care of it all?
for giving a whole new generation of ass-jockey middle-management MBAs a justification for their existence.
just kidding, really, good work, I'm sure you've cried along with the rest of us who have had to open a spreadsheet for something that could have taken a 1 paragraph description.
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when he said "Doesn't making nature against the law seem a little paranoid?".
And nature fights back...
someone posted story w/ the words "penetration" and "testing" following each other on /., that's like saying it in front a bunch of 15 year old boys.
Wait a minute...
come on people :
"Rap inflects global popular culture from music to fashion"
is somehow a sign of the world being caught up in a revolution? Rap is a sign that easy-to-manage concepts go over well with the populace. Hip-hop? Yeah, some of it is tolerable, but none of it will be viewed as masterpieces in years to come. There is no skill or effort in most of it. The people that create and listen to it are not capable of the introspection necessary to create masterpieces or even view them in the proper light later.
You can call it racist, elitist, or whatever you want, but rappers, rap "music", and rap fans are not leading any cultural revolution. They are enforcing the status quo. They buy their CDs, their videos, their jerseys, their 200 dollar sneakers, and keep the fatcats laughing all the way to the bank. The only social activities that they participate in are the ones espoused by their idols, namely drinking, getting high, killing each other, and in general being a goddamned moron. They are not like the 60's and 70's, where the music reflected a movement ( be it anti-war, civil rights, whatever the fuck ). They are cashing in on their stupid fans, promoting ignorance, all under a guise of a movement. If you think the corp execs haven't figured out a whole new level of subterfuge and manipulation, you're kidding yourself.
We're not dealing with the people who thought American Bandstand was about as wild as it would come. We're dealing with MBA-touting, marketing-aware, bloodsucking weasels that are more than willing to take a crack dealer who can string together a few rhyming compositions, give him world-class studio time, and sell him and his merchandise to a bunch of fools. They'll tell you it's a revolution, that you're changing the world, but you know what, money talks, bullshit walks. You're still making the same old conservative power mongers, they've just got their monkey-dancing rappers and dumbshit teen-idols out there turning tricks for them. I suppose I'm happier seeing conservative old white men running things than I am seeing crack-dealing uneducated rap stars, but it's still a far cry from a real option for progress.
We've already lost the media. It's a cash machine, nothing else.
The revolution will not be televised. And it will not be led by anyone named after currency.
If I remember correctly from the presentations I've seen on it, they will be using Linux as on OS on the "front" nodes ( the ones that users log into to start jobs, compile, etc. ), and a lightweight kernel ( proprietary ) specifically designed for Blue Gene architecture on the rest of the nodes.
1) Mr. Bush, exactly how fucking high were you when your handlers somehow let you say "there are OBGYNs that are unable to practice their love on the women of America"?
2) Mr. Kerry, while I, like many Americans, approve wholeheartedly of your 1-point "Get Bush the Fuck Out of Office" plan to getting America back on track, do you have an actual agenda to win over those of us who wouldn't vote for a stuffed deer head before Bush?
how this is any harder-core than say, sky-diving, bungee-jumping, or free-fall netdiving ( all of which I've done )? While this seems fun and all, it hardly seems to be the rush it's made out to be. Still, I guess if I had money to burn, I'd do it, otherwise for $3000, I'd rather give a couple hundred to a bungee place and jump all day, then go get drunk as fuck, higher than a kite, and still wake up with $2000.
if people take gene therapy to improve their bodies. There's nothing wrong with improving yourself, as long as it doesn't have dangerous side effects. Hell, I take growth hormones and about 20+ pills ( vitamins, proteins, etc. ) a day. Why do I do it? Because I work 8-10 hours a day, have an active social life, a house to take care of, 6 pets, a significant other ( practically common-law wife ), outside projects, etc., and don't have as much time and energy to exercise as I ought to. And, let me tell you, being a sysadmin/programmer at an understaffed company that just came out of bankruptcy is very draining without giving you any meaningful physical exercise. If I get an energy boost that I can use to work out longer and harder, and the proteins, growth hormones, etc. that I take help me get more out of it, then hell yes I'm taking them.
Why don't I take steroids? Because I don't want to damage my body. I have friends that take steroids. One guy I know went from benching around 300 lbs. up to 500+ in a month. But you know what? He also has pus sacks in his pecs, and wild mood swings, both of which are the result of having too much estrogen. Which is why I won't take them. I'd love to go double my strength, but I'm not willing to do it at the cost of limiting my life expectancy and lowering my quality of life in the future.
I believe the negative side effects of steroids are the reason that they're not allowed. Noone disallows an Olympic athlete from taking legal growth hormones or extra amino acids, all athletes can take that without fear of harm. But if you allow things like steroids, you end up having to take something that can threaten your health in order to compete, which is inexcusable.
Now, if gene therapy is non-harmful way of improving your physical condition, the only reason that I could see it not getting approved eventually is from the stigmata of steroids. If there's gene therapy available, legal or not, which doesn't have negative side effects ( or mild ones, like increased aggression and body hair, which are side effects of what I currently take ) sometime soon, I would go for it myself. Who doesn't want to be faster, stronger, smarter, etc.?
Basically, I'm all for better living through chemical experience, be it coffee, LSD, or gene therapy. Just make sure you know any risks, and have carefully weighed them, so you know that it's actually better living.
Bear in mind it's not a COTS ( Commodity Off The Shelf ) system like a lot of clusters, it's not even a typical cluster like the kind I have at work ( oodles of dual CPU nodes connected via Ethernet ). SGI Altix machines scale up to 256 CPUs and 4 TB of memory in a single system image, which is one very large SMP machine ( actually, CC-NUMA ). I'm not sure how many CPUs per node ( OS image ) this machine will have, as the article didn't coherently state it, but bear in mind that a cluster of these is more like a cluster of IBM p690s than anything else. Massive memory available per node, very high speed interconnect, etc.
As far as I know, the only company doing anything similar w/ Opterons is Cray's XD1 systems, and they're along the same line as an SGI Altix.
So it's not actually a waste of taxpayer money. As much as I love linux clusters composed 1-4 CPU nodes connected w/ a commodity interconnect ( as you can almost consider, GigE, Myrinet, Quadrics, SCI, etc. - when compared with the proprietary interconnects used in SGIs, IBM SP switches, etc. ), there's some things that you can do with greater efficiency by having 128 processors and 2 TB of memory in a single system image.
Please...if drug addicts can get blamed for the most crazed and violent among them, then I think christians should be blamed for the most crazed, vocal, and violent amongst them.
If you give your 20% or 20 bucks a week or whatever to some asshat who tries like hell to get me thrown in prison for a bag of coke, who tries to tell my sister, mother, girlfriend that she can't do whatever she wants with her own body ( I'm anti-feminist, but very much so for equal treatment - think about it ), and who encourages his brain-dead followers to walk around giving people like me ( shaved head, covered in tattoos, done time, hard worker, honest, intelligent, and more than willing to give anyone a fair chance ) a hard time, for living their own lives, on their own terms ( which means not hurting you ), then what do you expect?
Did you expect me not to get pissed off when you have lobby groups ( Christian Coalition, etc. ) who attempt to destroy our freedoms and lives?
Do you expect me to be happy when one of your pathetically eager little sheep gets enough balls to carry a pamphlet up to me in a grocery store, then threaten to call the police on me when I explain to them that I've told them five fucking times I'm not interested and they're about to get fucking hurt .
Do you expect me to ignore the fact that, as your preachers are so keen on touting, America is a > 75% christian nation? I don't care whether you're Protestant, Baptist ( well, actually, I really despise Baptists ), or Catholic - you represent the same religion. The fact that you're so schizophrenic in your beliefs that you can't agree upon one view of the same belief, while mind-boggling, does not concern me, nor does it the rest of the world, who are scared to hell of your little "crusades".
Bear in mind that I have friends who believe in all kinds of religions ( including christianity ), but all of them are open-minded and intelligent. What's interesting to note is that I don't have any American christian friends. One of my best friends, who is christian, is from Australia, and says that most Australians tend to view the kind of religion that Americans practice as being absolute fucking madness.
And, as far as this comment goes :
I can't speak for other religions, but Christianity is about making the RIGHT choices, not about eliminating the wrong ones for everyone else.
That's hilarious. Did you even read my initial post? I brought up the fact that one of the major principles of most religions is human choice. And I also brought up the fact that as it's practiced, christianity tends to disregard most of it's guiding principles. Not that I necessarily agree with most of those principles ( and the ones I do I admit are way too idealistic for the world we live in ), but who are you to tell me about your own beliefs when you don't even know the tenets of the faith you espouse? So, while you may grasp the fact that christianity has a good deal to do with choice in principle ( and I appreciate the fact that you do ), you seem to ignore the fact that very few of those who are more vocal and prominent about their beliefs seem to.
And, to address the last point, I'm probably more conservative than you could dream about being. But, when I sat down and looked at the parties, and what I've seen in my life, I see both parties eroding people's rights and imposing more state and federal regulations on their citizens, but the democrats appear to be doing less damage. Ultimately, as I explain it to people, would you rather give the federal money to some ignorant crack whore who would probably spit on me for being white if she could, or to some asshole like Ken Lay or Jerry Falwell? I'd rather do neither, but given the choice, I'd rather the crack whore. At least I don't have to be worried about being manipulated and controlled indirectly by her.
Allright, off the soap box, going to sleep. It's amazing how aggravated painting all day can make you.
if it feels good, it must be bad. And we ( as in the government, religion, society ) have the right to tell you what to do, even in the privacy of your own home or head.
I understand the issue of addiction, and the problems that addiction poses to society. This is one way of addressing it, but it is a morally dubious one. It removes the essentials of choice, which is a prime factor in what makes us human. It is also the cornerstone of a lot of religious tenets, which will lead once again to the unwashed christian masses sponsoring something that goes directly against their religious beliefs ( like christians who support the death penalty, where's the "thou shalt not kill" commandment again? ). So, rather than addressing the problem of addiction with personal help ( which is a morally unquestionable stance - you want help, we'll give it to you ), and treating the attendant problems ( crime - legalize drugs, diseases - re-instate needle exchange programs and allow sex ed to be taught in schools ) in a humane and efficient manner, we will embark down the slippery slope that "vaccines" for this stuff offer.
How long after a vaccine for drugs if implemented, will we have a vaccine for violence? And how long after that will we all be mindless zombies, in a perfect semblance of "health", all marching to the beat of our corporate/religious masters? That is a state worse than 1984. 1984 was about manipulation and control. We're already there to a degree ( watched the news lately? In multiple countries? They are fucking lying to us, so blatantly in many cases that it will blow your top to actually dig into the facts ), but at least when you're being manipulated, you can be awakened. What happens when you're vaccinated or genetically altered to the point where you can't get high, can't feel love, anger, pain, joy, any of the things that make us human? Can't choose between right or wrong? I would rather die myself.
And before anyone gets on my case about not understanding the problem, understand that I do. I've been strung out. Badly. I spent the better part of a decade putting cocaine, speed, and heroin in my arms, nose, and lungs. But I also understand that a lot of drugs have their uses. Acid won't ruin your life ( unless you're stupid enough to take way too much, but tylenol will do that as well ). Everyone should have one good trip in their life. It's fun and teaches you a lot about yourself. Cocaine has a lot of useful medicinal properties, but as a recreational drug it's useless and far too destructive. Alcohol is one most addictive and destructive drugs around, yet it's legal almost everywhere in the world. Etc. - they're just chemicals people.
What's scary is how we react to the issues that come up because of these chemicals. If it weren't drugs, it would be something else that exposes the weaknesses in our moral logic. And it is ultimately an issue of morality. Not the morality that all these soapbox baptist neocon preachers go on about, but actual human morality that rises out of ability to reason. What the Western world was based on.
the least you can do is subscribe to the EFF Action Center to get in on the fight against totally evil shit like this.
Well, I've only met one Nigerian that I ever respected, he was an ex-soldier for the Nigerian government, and even he was a bit weird.
We have a fair amount of them in Houston, Texas, especially in the past 5 years. Every one of which is either arrogant and a liar, or just plain a liar. Cabbies trying to rip you off ( I've actually had an argument with a cabbie insisting he was taking me the short way when he was really going about 10 miles out of the way, he refused to go the way I told him until I offered to use that extra drive time to rearrange his face ), arrogant school counselors ( my girlfriend spent 2 weeks trying to get an appointment w/ a school counselor who had the nerve to tell her he was "an important man, and too busy to return calls" - c'mon, we're talking about a counselor for a small community college ), and arrogant parole officers ( one of my friends has one who never showed up for home visits, and then screamed at him when he had to be at work at a home visit time, another friend has had similar problems ).
All in all, I am decidedly unimpressed w/ all of the Nigerians I have met. If I get to vote for where we start cleaning the gene pool, Nigeria will definitely be in the top of my list.
While I generally do RPMs, I do build some stuff from source, and am looking at using distcc for it, check out recent /. story.
Half Price Books.
That's where I get my fix. I'm hooked on reading books, can't stand reading anything other than code on a monitor. If I have to read someone else's code, and really take it apart, I print it out. Call it a failing if you like, but I'm addicted to the printed word.
If I could get a good, functional tablet PC - not running windows - I would give it a try, at least for the content that's available digitally. But it's not there yet as far as I know, so the only avenue I have for the things I like to read is paper. There's nothing like cracking open a good sci-fi, fantasy, or computer science book and digging in.
A bit more on-topic, I'm not surprised in the least. Quite a few people I knew when I was younger wouldn't read a thing unless they had to, so those are the people that turn to the net for their information, but don't read other than that. Those are also the people who memorize things and do not get a goddamn thing out of them. Nowadays, almost everyone I know reads a lot, and they fall into 2 categories : the people who read a lot of books and net, or the ones that just read a lot of books. The ones that read both are my technical compsci friends, the others are my friends that I've grown up with, who mostly discovered the wonders of reading in jail.
Hmm, this topic reminds me - I need to get some more bookshelves...all of mine are stacked 3 deep and look like they're about to topple...
but I remember this stupid fuck I used to work with, we sent him into the network closet to move a cable from one subnet to another. This was a mixed solaris/irix/windows site, but we kept the machines on different subnets, w/ different servers for various services ( like DHCP, NIS, etc. ) due to incompatibilities.
This dumb shit gets it into his head that he'll re-organize the network closet. Because, after all, it's a lot neater when you line all the cables up and consolidate the switches. Hey, look, we got a free switches, and look at how neat it is! And, yes, he was an MCSE. And our network engineer believed in job security through obscurity, so it took our department almost a day to straighten everything out.
Mine would probably be frying a motherboard while trying to reset the BIOS, while drunk.
My rule of thumb to having a really cool relaxed trip is the following :
1) find a few friends that want to trip with you. It is best if they're not aggro people ( I can deal with driving around town, going to clubs, and dealing w/ people, even psychotic friends who are trying to rip phone booths loose, but you might not want to ) and they're not neurotic, stressful types ( nothing like having to deal w/ some stupid neurotic girl who keeps asking you if she'll ever come down ).
2) find a nice safe comfortable place, I recommend a house rather than an apartment, because a good backyard is a cool place to sit, smoke, and check out the sky. Swimming pools are also a lot of fun, especially if you have one of those floatie couch things.
3) hide all guns. Period. If for some reason you feel the need to have a gun accessible ( bad neighborhood, etc. ), make sure that you pick someone who can keep their wits about them to be the only person who knows where the gun(s) are stashed.
4) pick out a bunch of cool movies and music. I recommend pink floyd and the cure, very kickass relaxing music to listen to, definitely inspires interesting thoughts. as far as movies, anything relaxing and cool. One of the most kick-ass movies I've watched tripping was The Last Unicorn. It brought back good childhood memories of fantasy worlds and inspired a sense of happiness. Also, anime movies are really kick-ass. I think anime was invented to be watched on hallucinogens.
5) Complementary drugs are good. Most people want to stick w/ light stuff, like maybe a little bit of weed and some whip-its ( nitrous oxide ). Ketamine ( a cat tranquilizer, very disassociative, impossible to overdose on, good clean high that has no afteraffects ) is good too. Both nitrous oxide and ketamine highs enhance the trip sensation greatly for fairly short periods of time, so they're perfect for a complement to the acid. I also like an occasional speedball ( coke + heroin ) to go along w/ the trip, but that's probably a bit too heavy for you, and also has the effect of possibly ruining the trip if you do too much. I don't recommend drinking a lot, unless you're eating a fair amount ( which you may or may not feel like doing while tripping ) because you can end up really feeling like shit later because you can't really get drunk on acid, but you can have a nasty hangover later. I personally drink some, because I love the taste of good beer, but I'd skip it or moderate. Oh, yeah, a lot of people like combining ectasy and acid ( it's called candy-flipping ), but I wouldn't do it for your first time. I personally think ectasy ruins the mental effects of acid, since it gets you too fucked up physically.
6) Snacks, and easy-to-prepare food, are a must. I love eating fruit while I'm tripping. Go for things w/ a very rich ( but not over-sweet ) taste, like watermelon or berries. You can eat anything while tripping, and definitely recommend that you do so to avoid any stomach aches from hunger, but there's some things that are just too hard ( try eating spaghetti in front of your parents while pretending to be tired - fuck, that was an adventure! ).
7) Don't worry about having a bad trip. There are no such things as bad trips unless you freak out. All acid is either good ( as in it gets you high ) or bad ( in that it doesn't ). Yes, some dumbshits occasionally try to use strichnine to bond the liquid acid to blotter paper, but a lot of the acid going around in the past 8 years has been liquid, and a most of the people that dip the sheets ( if you get paper ) have learned better. Note to would-be dealers : if you have liquid acid, and want to make paper, don't even fucking think about strychnine. Just layer the blotter in a plexiglass dish, use dropper to deposit liquid on blotter paper, leave to dry on non-porous surface. You will not have a bad trip unless you freak out, which
it was only a matter of time. All of the "services" that LocatePlus offers are matters of public record, which means that by the law you, I, or any jackass Orwellian fascist w/ a frutrated Big Brother complex ( *ahem* Jon Latorella - that's you bub! ) can access them and do whatever the hell he wants with them.
If you want an example of how available these records are now, check out Adams County Records. I've used them before to see if charges had been filed on friends, etc. So it's not hard to get, especially in the "digital" age.
What is scary is the fact that our society ( and our judicial branch in particular - which should be motivated by an evolving sense of ethics and morality, which, well, DOESN'T SEEM TO BE FUCKING EVOLVING to cope with our changing world ) doesn't seem to be able to prevent these abuses. Because a private citizen ( or a government agency, for that matter, but they have a lot of liabilities under the law that private citizens don't, that limit their abuses ) compiling a database from public records ( which aren't always accurate ) and then selling it to government agencies ( which is now probably excused for their mistakes due to the fact they were using "someone else's system" ) is most definitely an abuse. It's the basest whoring of public information that I can possibly think of.
Which beggars another question : if we were as intelligent and moral as we suppose, why haven't we done the following :
1) rather than releasing records freely, release them under a public license, similar to the GPL. Since they would have to be copyrighted to be released under a license, why not copyright each citizen's information to that person, and their relatives owning their copyright when they die? Yeah, it sounds sick in a way - you're copyrighted, dude ! - but it would prevent commercial and governmental abuses like this. Your information is copyrighted to yourself, freely available under the Citizen's General Public License or some such shit, and any sentencing, divorce, etc., is an addendum to the copyrighted work - namely YOU. And you have to authorize any use of your records which involves commercial profit.
2) Made laws disallowing the use of public records for direct commercial gain.
3) Passed laws that required private and public agencies furnishing public or private information to other agencies to be be directly culpable for all misuse, negative repurcussions, etc., that result from any inaccurate or outdated information that they provide. This one rings home with me particularly strongly tonight, since I just found out that 2 medical bills that I paid over a year ago still show up on my credit as unpaid debts. There's no accountability there, even though I've badgered these bastards before to update their records.
Yeah, making laws doesn't always solve a problem, but making the right ones will. Stop telling people who they can fuck, how they can get high, stop giving money to religious "charities", stop supporting people that are unwilling to work but still willing to reproduce, legislating the RIAA's paranoid crusade about whether I can copy a fucking DVD or not, and start making some laws that pull that metaphorical boot off of our face. Because I only see it getting worse. And this is the really goddamn scary part kids :
I see it getting a whole worse before it gets any better.
like we need more people jerking off at rest stops.
The upside is that I'm going to get a free laptop.
Because if I walk into a bathroom and someone's in there jerking it, well, let's just say I'll be leaving w/ a some new gear, a wallet, and a broken hand.
and I think only the guy who made the asshats comment realized it.
The original name was ( repeat after me kids! ) Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks.
Don't believe me? Check out the Wikipedia entry for RAID.
The new name is more applicable, since RAID arrays sure as shit ain't inexpensive any more, but learn some history people...
but I've been wondering how the EZ Pass/Tag cards here in Houston, TX, USA know that you're not in the vehicle that you purchased it for, like they have recently become able to do ( you used to be able to purchase a card and use it in multiple vehicles ).
//takes off tin-foil hat, deep breath
My best guess would be an RFID tag in your registration sticker, as my truck hasn't been inspected in years, nor have I changed my license plates in years. But the only test case I've tried yet has been my GF's truck, and hers is new, so it might be that she has a RFID tag in her plates or registration sticker, and it's picking up the discrepancy on her vehicle, but on mine the only way to verify a discrepancy would be between the registration sticker and the EZTag.
People look at me funny, but I have a real hard time believing that they're verifying this by photo/video systems, even w/ human interaction. It's just too difficult for roads that see > 1 million cars per day.
Which means that they've probably been doing this for years, because whenever you run one ( even years ago ), they send you a bill for 1 USD + 14 USD "handling fee" to your registered address. And, once again, I have a hard time believing they are using video systems.
From my experience, newer versions of KDE are slower than GNOME. Then again, they're also more "feature-packed", so I run KDE on my laptop ( where I want a bunch of doo-dads, bells, and whistling monkeys ) and GNOME on everything else. I'm not sure about Mandrake, but Fedora Core 2 and SuSE 9.1 seem to scream along quite happily on my machines, including a 1 GHz P3 laptop w/ 512 MB of PC100 SDRAM and K6-3 500 MHz w/ 512 MB of PC133. And w/ the 2.6 kernel w/ preemptibility compiled in makes things a dream in terms of responsiveness under heavy load.
Hell, to be honest, I could get by w/ twm and mutt, most of my work is done inside terminals and vi.
Anyways, this is the same drum that people have been beating for years. If you want more functionality, then you pay the price somewhere. Yes, you should always code for tightness and efficiency, but those alpha-blended thingywhatsits and anti-aliased fonts, etc., cost you somewhere.
Having said that, it's been my experience that outside of the GUI environments, the Redhat/Fedora and SuSE distros are still very responsive and tight.
Buy some more damn memory if you want to run a GUI environment. Period.
I agree w/ what you are saying, completely. The type of person who can remember this kind of stuff, and has a background that goes back that far, is generally the kind of person who also has the values that you espouse.
I was actually thinking of a couple of guys I know in particular. They're old-timers ( shit, I had start a conversation about topless dancers at lunch to get one of them to shut up about 300 baud modems and postscript parsing programs written in awk, when dinosaurs roamed the earth, etc. ), or at least relatively so, but they've kept current, so in addition to having all of the knowledge and skills that you and I do, they have a sense of perspective. Knowledge, without the perspective to use it correctly, is useless.
The guys that are just by-the-book button jockeys won't be able to tell you how they solved a problem 10 years ago w/out pulling out some notes, because they didn't learn anything from it. They just read a manual, fixed the problem, and then promptly forgot about it. They didn't write a fix for the problem, or develop a cool workaround, or debug it extensively and then prove the problem to a doubting vendor.
Anyways, I guess that's what I was trying to say and didn't clarify enough.
Yes, the salary estimates do seem a bit low. I'm a 4-year *nix ( including clusters ) sysadmin, w/ a year of helpdesk/regular IT before that, and I pull about 60k/year ( including overtime ). Of course, I'm a pretty good programmer and systems architect as well, and pursuing a computer science degree, but still, as far as the work force is concerned, I'm a high-school graduate w/ 5 years experience.
A really good *nix sysadmin will cost 100k and up. These are the kind of people that you drop any obscure Unix box in front of, or any problem that has stumped everyone else, and they go "Oh yeah, saw that back in 82, here's what you do..."
as the proud parent of a cat, a dog, a snake, 2 rats and a sugar glider, w/ a PITA old lady who lives w/ me, and being a systems administrator/programmer/architect, I can kind of feel your pain.
;) ).
My job is very catch-all, high-stress : manage a very large ( > 4000 CPU ) cluster, do design, research, programming, etc., bearing a 10-person workload w/ 3 seniors and 2 very junior juniors.
Shit, this afternoon my boss, who knows everyone in the group is burnt out, had the balls to ask me if something for a non-production system would be ready by Monday, WTF?!?
Anyways, then I have to come home, cook dinner, feed and play w/ 6 animals, and help out w/ some of the cleaning up and whatnot. While oftentimes doing extra work from home.
The only thing that makes it worth it is the thrill of doing some kick-ass hack at work, or coming home and playing w/ all of my loving animals ( I guess I can lump the old lady in there when she's not bitching
Anyways, back to the point : how do you juggle all of these, stay sane, and take care of it all?
Drinking, my friend. Heavy fucking drinking.
for giving a whole new generation of ass-jockey middle-management MBAs a justification for their existence.
just kidding, really, good work, I'm sure you've cried along with the rest of us who have had to open a spreadsheet for something that could have taken a 1 paragraph description.
Must suck seeing your brainchild abused, huh?