Seriously, fuel companies can afford to put them in Canada with nary a complaint, but threaten to upset the status quo in the US and it's a horrible, industry-ending event?
It's pretty simple. Us Canadians made some noise and said "If we're paying for a litre of gas, we want the same litre of gas, every time". And because that just plain makes sense, it was made so. Now I get the same litre, whether it's -50F like it was this winter, or 95F like it was yesterday. It didn't bankrupt the industry or screw over little mom and pop shops.
Ya'll need to stop fuckin around and just do the things that make sense. That'd solve a lot of problems.
I'm surprised it's even legal for them to do the services without agreeing on a price first. It'd be similar to me going over to help Granny Smith with her computer, fix it up, and then send her a bill for $5000 the next day.
You'll be happier coming up to Canada. My roomie sliced into his hand while cutting frozen chicken a few years ago. He ended up with stictches, a hospital stay, and surgery to reconnect his nerves. All covered by the provincial insurance. Same with my friend, who got acute salmonella poisoning. His 2 week hospital stay was covered, I think the only thing he ended up paying for was his ambulance ride (for some reason I forget). My fathers many, many surgeries, including artificial knee joints and bone cancer treatment? All covered.
Really, the taxes are not greatly higher (or at least it seems so)... I'd be poorer paying $3-500 a month in American Insurance than I am paying Canadian Federal Taxes. But the benefits are so much better. I could get flesh-eating disease, cancer, a stroke, chop off all my fingers, and OD on some tasty exotic drug, and it'd all be covered. From my understanding, even if you're paying regular insurance rates in the US, you'd still be screwed if any one of those happened to you.
Moving to Canada isn't that bad either... you just have to learn to appreciate a bit of cold (-40F without windchill), brush up on your metric (it's not that hard), learn to love your neighbour instead of fearing him, leave the gun at home, and practice adding "eh?" on to most sentences. The rest of it is easy:)
Alien: "Well, we've been coming here for decades, abducting people and conducting endless anal probes. And the only thing we've discovered, in all that time, is that one in ten doesn't really seem to mind..."
Seriously, what were you expecting? Discourses on the implementation of preemptive scheduling in the 2.6 kernel? If he was looking for that, he wouldn't be on Slashdot, would he?
I'm sure I'll get flamed to heck for this, but really, MS should be praised for this. Really, honestly, if a customer bought something, then brought it back broken, 11 FREAKING TIMES in a row, do you really think most retailers would keep accepting it back, over and over again? Eventually they'd be blaming it on you and refusing to take it back. Instead, MS doesn't seem to care much that this guy has the worlds worst mean failure rate, and aside from getting him to check his wiring, they keep sending him new ones without much question. My personal experience just trying to return my malfunctioning video card twice (well, the first time was the repair return, the second time was because they sent me back the exact same physical card, without repairing it first) tells me that most retailers are complete asshats, and will happily blame you if they can possibly get away with it.
Many other retailers would cut you off or make you start paying, and you wouldn't really have much success complaining "hey, I broke my xbox 10 times in a row, and now they won't send me a replacement for free!". MS keeps pumping them out. They get a +1 in my book for that.
A fleck of urine almost took out the cockpit window on a previous shuttle flight. Please don't say that in public, next thing you know The Shrub will be sending geriatrics into space for their rapid-fire abilities.
I didn't realize Cheney posted on Slashdot. He does more than post. When he heard that evil-doers might be on/. , he arranged for the "OMG-PONIES!!1!" theme...
Bookmark this thread folks, it'll save you time next time you have to justify your anti-MS stance. Vista has less storage than a Nomad? It's true! Vista is such a space hog. The last time I put my Vista disk in the drive, it was SO FULL I couldn't save ANYTHING ELSE to it!!
Seriously though, Vista seems to run about the same as XP on moderate hardware. Yes, it uses more memory, but it uses it DIFFERENTLY, precaching data and programs. Yes, Aero is graphics-intensive, but so are most skin programs I put on XP or 2K. Yes, like anything, it runs better the more you give it. It also runs better when you turn off the stuff you don't like.
However, as much as Vista eats babies and votes Republican, I seriously can't blame it for declining DRAM sales.
Did anyone ever consider that Vista is selling well and just not the memory hog people think it is? Or that DRAM is overpriced and people are making due?
No, it's much more likely that Microsoft is lying about sales figures. Silly me. Be careful in admitting you run Vista. You'll be drawn and quartered around these parts...
You know, I read somewhere that Vista votes for evil, tips poorly, defaces property, hates the elderly, and boils babies alive before consuming them. All while requiring 16GB of RAM. It must be true, I read it on the intertube somewhere.
I'm still using Windows 3.11, but that's only because I refuse to upgrade to Vista because it's obviously so horrible. Also, Bill is a dweeb and Melinda was born a man. And I think they eat babies too.
Bookmark this thread folks, it'll save you time next time you have to justify your anti-MS stance.
Or, maybe all those fuckwads who were screaming about "Vista requires 4GB of RAM to even run Solitare!!1!" were actually full of shit, and people didn't have to run out and load up? Nah, that'd be pro-M$ bullshit. I must be a plant, paid by Bill himself to spread these lies! The obvious reason for lackluster profits must have nothing to do with the market, overproduction, resources, or anything else. It's all Vistas fault.
Bad statistics == another desperate grab for attention and approval by the blu-ray crowd.
It's nothing more than that. Call me back when you sell blu-ray Pirates vs HDDVD Pirates. Until then, the stats in this are so bad, even George W. could tell they were useless and misleading.
NPR's Science Friday had an interview with a more plausible cause of colony collapses, it basically involves an intruder insect that is known to be only a small nuisance against African bees but with European bees, it causes a highly stressfull hormone feedback loop such that all the bees basically abandon the hive. You can listen to this show here. If you don't have time to listen, here's the transcript:
The SIMPLEST explaination is that jetliners slamming into the towers and the resulting fire caused the collapse.
The resulting fire wasn't hot enough to melt the steel. The resulting fire possibly wasn't hot enough for long enough to significantly weaken the steel. So the simplest explanation may be the most obvious, but it doesn't match up to the simple facts. While it is possible that it was all the fires fault, it's also possible it wasn't. The inquiry didn't bother to look into the possibilities, instead they made a model that worked with their predetermined ideas, claimed it as proof, all while quickly and quietly shipping every bit of WTC steel (aka evidence) they could to China to be melted down as scrap. I'm entirely open to the idea that the entire thing was the result of the planes. But the most common argument against anything else is "Pfft, come on, they're nutcases!". Hardly a convincing scientific argument. The fact remains that there are questions unanswered, and the powers that be benefited greatly from 9/11. Whether they molded the aftermath of a tragedy to suit their desires, or whether they molded the tragedy itself, is still up in the air.
I tend to use analogies explaining things to non-techies, and it works well. Frame the conversation in things that they'll understand, avoid techie words, and don't go into too much detail. And most importantly, don't let them get sidetracked trying to understand minute but interesting details. Give them a quick, broad overview, and slowly work in details if they ask about them.
For instance (happened to me yesterday): Q: "Why can't my boyfriend send me emails? I keep getting these stupid 'rejected by the content filter' messages??" A: "The email thingy looks for bad words. If it sees too many bad words, it blocks the email because it thinks it might be spam or something" or Q: "How come whenever I type this into Excel it goes all weird??" A: "Because it's stupid. Put a single quote in front of it to tell it not to be stupid"
Most importantly when dealing with decision makers... don't give them an out! I know it's hard, when they say "Well, instead of a server, can we just take a desktop and use it just for now?"... technically, yes, you could, but you must resist the urge to agree or validate! Instead, reframe the conversation: "Desktops aren't designed to be servers. They're different inside. If we use a desktop, things will be slow, it'll break easy, and we'll lose lots of money when it goes down. Servers are servers because they're tough and reliable. That's what we need." Remember... every "temporary" solution will become permanent. Every "well, just make do with what you have" will come back to haunt you. Give them the worst-case scenario, use language they can understand, and don't be afraid to say "No, that's not right". You're the expert here, not them. Don't let them go on a tangent thinking they know what they're talking about. Stop them, tell them they're wrong (don't get into details on how, just that they're wrong), and tell them what the right thing to do is. If they argue with you, remind them, you're the expert.
And, finally, as much as I hate to say it... don't be afraid to break something. In places where they've cobbled together their infrastructure and refused to replace it because "it's working, ain't it?", I've identified non-critical systems and 'encouraged' them to have accidents. Things go down, everyone panics, I get it back up and running, but then I have ammunition to go in and say "phew, we were lucky that was just System X. If it was System Y, we'd all be not working for 3 days and we'd lose Z dollars. You know, if we just spent (1/10 * Z) dollars we could ensure that we don't have to worry about X and Y for a long time."
Or, in a place that was a maze of 4 and 8 port routers supporting almost 200 people, there was one key router with a bad fan, it needed to be smacked occasionally to keep going. They wouldn't pay for rewiring, wouldn't even let me replace that key router, just expected me to keep struggling along troubleshooting all these routers and their crappy, crappy wire. Eventually I just stopped smacking the router. I told them the consequences of not doing things properly, they decided not to do things properly, and the consequences happened. And, lo and behold, when I actually put in a proper network stack and rewired the bad segments, all the benefits I told them would happen (faster, more reliable, less of my time spent troubleshooting) actually happened, and I gained credibility for my other ideas (like "a 486 in a closet is not an ideal DNS/DHCP server")
The point of it is that yes, we're magicians, but you can't be expected to keep doing that daily. Draw the line, so that when you do something/actually/ magical, it shows. If you're holding the servers together with chewing gum and an oscillating desk fan, when they go down, no-one says "Good work on keeping that piece of junk running for another year", they say "Well... just make it work! It's your job to keep it running and now it's not!"
And returning to the original question... don't get mired in jargon, use analogies, don't be afraid to NOT explain things when the situation doesn't require it, and don't be afraid to assert yourself as the expert. It's what they pay you for, you might as well do it.
*shivers* You remind me of my latest experience with Linksys, and why I will avoid their products from now on...
Had a wireless repeater to install. The subnet wouldn't change from 255.255.248.0 when I was setting a static IP, and I needed it wide open. Call Linksys support. Get a typical script-reader. He dives into the script, and we get to the part where he wants to know the exact model of my WAP (not the repeater I'm calling on, the WAP sending the signal.) The WAP is 30' up at the top of a wall, but I have (intermittent) access to the http config page. But he insists that the WAP model I'm giving him, directly off the config page, isn't the correct model. I try to get him to skip past this (after all, I'm calling about the repeater, not the WAP), but he won't, and starts maddeningly repeating "I need you to give me the correct model of your wireless access point"... even when it's entirely inappropriate for the subject we're talking about. He absolutely refused to bump me to higher support, and after almost an hour on hold I wasn't about to call back and try again. And unfortunately I didn't have time to research it myself, needed it done ASAP.
Well, after almost an hour of trying to get him to just move on, make up a WAP model, or just move on and tell me what he wants me to do on the WAP (after all, config is pretty easy), and him refusing to accept that troubleshooting the subnet mask on the REPEATER could be done without exact knowledge of my WAP, I finally got ticked off, got my case number, hung up, climbed up into the rafters, and got the model number.
The web page said it was something like a WAP54-C. The model plate said it was a WAP54 (Model C).
The idiot couldn't tell that "-C" could mean "Model C". It didn't exactly match, so he wouldn't go on. If I could have afforded a ticket to Bangalore, I would have caused some serious destruction.
Of course, after I called back, waited another hour, got another tech to open my case, told him the model number... he began arguing with me that I didn't need to change the subnet mask, I didn't need a repeater, that I should be resetting the WAP, etc etc etc.
In the end I ran a big spool of CAT5 into the rafters and through a hole I very happily punched in the wall. That stupid repeater is still sitting, collecting dust, and I'll avoid Linksys equipment as often as I can.
DLink, on the other hand, has a nice knowledge base, good products, decent telephone support, and have consistently proven themselves to me.
Linksys... well, the only law I hope affects them is Darwins Law. Not the evolution one, the one they use to determine who gets Darwin Awards. I hope there are a lot of reasons for them to get handed out to Linksys idiots...
And now that I've had that cheery memory revived... time to go drink.
Having only recently been introduced to xkcd (and having read the entirety of the strip in one sitting) I have to say this entire thing is quite amusing. The balls, the raptors... obviously the folks who pulled this have read and understood the strip.
If you haven't read it yet, I highly recommend it. Geek humour at it's finest (and sometimes most touching)
Hey Rob, where's my 20 questions with the xkcd author???
It's like having a Tivo with a 6,000 year replay capacity! Great! That'll be JUST enough time for the writers of Lost to figure out a coherent plot line!
Slashdot Mirror
This is a steaming hot load of something...
Seriously, fuel companies can afford to put them in Canada with nary a complaint, but threaten to upset the status quo in the US and it's a horrible, industry-ending event?
It's pretty simple. Us Canadians made some noise and said "If we're paying for a litre of gas, we want the same litre of gas, every time". And because that just plain makes sense, it was made so. Now I get the same litre, whether it's -50F like it was this winter, or 95F like it was yesterday. It didn't bankrupt the industry or screw over little mom and pop shops.
Ya'll need to stop fuckin around and just do the things that make sense. That'd solve a lot of problems.
(I kid, I kid)...
Just because it seems nonobvious doesn't mean it's not true....
I'm surprised it's even legal for them to do the services without agreeing on a price first. It'd be similar to me going over to help Granny Smith with her computer, fix it up, and then send her a bill for $5000 the next day.
:)
You'll be happier coming up to Canada. My roomie sliced into his hand while cutting frozen chicken a few years ago. He ended up with stictches, a hospital stay, and surgery to reconnect his nerves. All covered by the provincial insurance. Same with my friend, who got acute salmonella poisoning. His 2 week hospital stay was covered, I think the only thing he ended up paying for was his ambulance ride (for some reason I forget). My fathers many, many surgeries, including artificial knee joints and bone cancer treatment? All covered.
Really, the taxes are not greatly higher (or at least it seems so)... I'd be poorer paying $3-500 a month in American Insurance than I am paying Canadian Federal Taxes. But the benefits are so much better. I could get flesh-eating disease, cancer, a stroke, chop off all my fingers, and OD on some tasty exotic drug, and it'd all be covered. From my understanding, even if you're paying regular insurance rates in the US, you'd still be screwed if any one of those happened to you.
Moving to Canada isn't that bad either... you just have to learn to appreciate a bit of cold (-40F without windchill), brush up on your metric (it's not that hard), learn to love your neighbour instead of fearing him, leave the gun at home, and practice adding "eh?" on to most sentences. The rest of it is easy
Alien: "Well, we've been coming here for decades, abducting people and conducting endless anal probes. And the only thing we've discovered, in all that time, is that one in ten doesn't really seem to mind..."
I'm sure I'll get flamed to heck for this, but really, MS should be praised for this.
Really, honestly, if a customer bought something, then brought it back broken, 11 FREAKING TIMES in a row, do you really think most retailers would keep accepting it back, over and over again? Eventually they'd be blaming it on you and refusing to take it back. Instead, MS doesn't seem to care much that this guy has the worlds worst mean failure rate, and aside from getting him to check his wiring, they keep sending him new ones without much question. My personal experience just trying to return my malfunctioning video card twice (well, the first time was the repair return, the second time was because they sent me back the exact same physical card, without repairing it first) tells me that most retailers are complete asshats, and will happily blame you if they can possibly get away with it.
Many other retailers would cut you off or make you start paying, and you wouldn't really have much success complaining "hey, I broke my xbox 10 times in a row, and now they won't send me a replacement for free!". MS keeps pumping them out. They get a +1 in my book for that.
All this reminds me of this (mangled) Daily Show line:
One of the worst things about the internet is all the sexual predators. But one of the best things about the internet is all the sexual prey!
Yeah, I'm in a grouchy mood today.
Seriously though, Vista seems to run about the same as XP on moderate hardware. Yes, it uses more memory, but it uses it DIFFERENTLY, precaching data and programs. Yes, Aero is graphics-intensive, but so are most skin programs I put on XP or 2K. Yes, like anything, it runs better the more you give it. It also runs better when you turn off the stuff you don't like.
However, as much as Vista eats babies and votes Republican, I seriously can't blame it for declining DRAM sales.
Did anyone ever consider that Vista is selling well and just not the memory hog people think it is? Or that DRAM is overpriced and people are making due?
No, it's much more likely that Microsoft is lying about sales figures. Silly me.
Be careful in admitting you run Vista. You'll be drawn and quartered around these parts...
You know, I read somewhere that Vista votes for evil, tips poorly, defaces property, hates the elderly, and boils babies alive before consuming them. All while requiring 16GB of RAM. It must be true, I read it on the intertube somewhere.
I'm still using Windows 3.11, but that's only because I refuse to upgrade to Vista because it's obviously so horrible. Also, Bill is a dweeb and Melinda was born a man. And I think they eat babies too.
Bookmark this thread folks, it'll save you time next time you have to justify your anti-MS stance.
Or, maybe all those fuckwads who were screaming about "Vista requires 4GB of RAM to even run Solitare!!1!" were actually full of shit, and people didn't have to run out and load up?
Nah, that'd be pro-M$ bullshit. I must be a plant, paid by Bill himself to spread these lies!
The obvious reason for lackluster profits must have nothing to do with the market, overproduction, resources, or anything else. It's all Vistas fault.
Bad statistics == another desperate grab for attention and approval by the blu-ray crowd.
It's nothing more than that. Call me back when you sell blu-ray Pirates vs HDDVD Pirates.
Until then, the stats in this are so bad, even George W. could tell they were useless and misleading.
My first reaction is always "If you don't want people seeing you, close your curtains, you loser!"
But then I RTFA, and she's kinda cute.
Now I'm wondering how frequently the Google Van "refreshes its cache"... maybe we can get some more pix of her...
BBBBBBBBBZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZredrumBBBBBBBB
The SIMPLEST explaination is that jetliners slamming into the towers and the resulting fire caused the collapse.
The resulting fire wasn't hot enough to melt the steel. The resulting fire possibly wasn't hot enough for long enough to significantly weaken the steel. So the simplest explanation may be the most obvious, but it doesn't match up to the simple facts.
While it is possible that it was all the fires fault, it's also possible it wasn't. The inquiry didn't bother to look into the possibilities, instead they made a model that worked with their predetermined ideas, claimed it as proof, all while quickly and quietly shipping every bit of WTC steel (aka evidence) they could to China to be melted down as scrap.
I'm entirely open to the idea that the entire thing was the result of the planes. But the most common argument against anything else is "Pfft, come on, they're nutcases!". Hardly a convincing scientific argument. The fact remains that there are questions unanswered, and the powers that be benefited greatly from 9/11. Whether they molded the aftermath of a tragedy to suit their desires, or whether they molded the tragedy itself, is still up in the air.
Sheesh, don't you read the blurb when you post?
;)
"If there is a mistake...well, you should have used the 'Preview' button!"
If we can't edit comments, editors shouldn't be allowed to edit! And up until a few minutes ago, I was sure that was exactly the situation!
Hmmm, 4 feet long, designed like a snake...
bring on the pr0n jokes...
I tend to use analogies explaining things to non-techies, and it works well. Frame the conversation in things that they'll understand, avoid techie words, and don't go into too much detail. And most importantly, don't let them get sidetracked trying to understand minute but interesting details. Give them a quick, broad overview, and slowly work in details if they ask about them.
/actually/ magical, it shows. If you're holding the servers together with chewing gum and an oscillating desk fan, when they go down, no-one says "Good work on keeping that piece of junk running for another year", they say "Well... just make it work! It's your job to keep it running and now it's not!"
For instance (happened to me yesterday):
Q: "Why can't my boyfriend send me emails? I keep getting these stupid 'rejected by the content filter' messages??"
A: "The email thingy looks for bad words. If it sees too many bad words, it blocks the email because it thinks it might be spam or something"
or
Q: "How come whenever I type this into Excel it goes all weird??"
A: "Because it's stupid. Put a single quote in front of it to tell it not to be stupid"
Most importantly when dealing with decision makers... don't give them an out! I know it's hard, when they say "Well, instead of a server, can we just take a desktop and use it just for now?"... technically, yes, you could, but you must resist the urge to agree or validate! Instead, reframe the conversation: "Desktops aren't designed to be servers. They're different inside. If we use a desktop, things will be slow, it'll break easy, and we'll lose lots of money when it goes down. Servers are servers because they're tough and reliable. That's what we need."
Remember... every "temporary" solution will become permanent. Every "well, just make do with what you have" will come back to haunt you. Give them the worst-case scenario, use language they can understand, and don't be afraid to say "No, that's not right".
You're the expert here, not them. Don't let them go on a tangent thinking they know what they're talking about. Stop them, tell them they're wrong (don't get into details on how, just that they're wrong), and tell them what the right thing to do is. If they argue with you, remind them, you're the expert.
And, finally, as much as I hate to say it... don't be afraid to break something. In places where they've cobbled together their infrastructure and refused to replace it because "it's working, ain't it?", I've identified non-critical systems and 'encouraged' them to have accidents. Things go down, everyone panics, I get it back up and running, but then I have ammunition to go in and say "phew, we were lucky that was just System X. If it was System Y, we'd all be not working for 3 days and we'd lose Z dollars. You know, if we just spent (1/10 * Z) dollars we could ensure that we don't have to worry about X and Y for a long time."
Or, in a place that was a maze of 4 and 8 port routers supporting almost 200 people, there was one key router with a bad fan, it needed to be smacked occasionally to keep going. They wouldn't pay for rewiring, wouldn't even let me replace that key router, just expected me to keep struggling along troubleshooting all these routers and their crappy, crappy wire. Eventually I just stopped smacking the router. I told them the consequences of not doing things properly, they decided not to do things properly, and the consequences happened. And, lo and behold, when I actually put in a proper network stack and rewired the bad segments, all the benefits I told them would happen (faster, more reliable, less of my time spent troubleshooting) actually happened, and I gained credibility for my other ideas (like "a 486 in a closet is not an ideal DNS/DHCP server")
The point of it is that yes, we're magicians, but you can't be expected to keep doing that daily. Draw the line, so that when you do something
And returning to the original question... don't get mired in jargon, use analogies, don't be afraid to NOT explain things when the situation doesn't require it, and don't be afraid to assert yourself as the expert. It's what they pay you for, you might as well do it.
*shivers*
You remind me of my latest experience with Linksys, and why I will avoid their products from now on...
Had a wireless repeater to install. The subnet wouldn't change from 255.255.248.0 when I was setting a static IP, and I needed it wide open. Call Linksys support. Get a typical script-reader. He dives into the script, and we get to the part where he wants to know the exact model of my WAP (not the repeater I'm calling on, the WAP sending the signal.) The WAP is 30' up at the top of a wall, but I have (intermittent) access to the http config page. But he insists that the WAP model I'm giving him, directly off the config page, isn't the correct model. I try to get him to skip past this (after all, I'm calling about the repeater, not the WAP), but he won't, and starts maddeningly repeating "I need you to give me the correct model of your wireless access point"... even when it's entirely inappropriate for the subject we're talking about. He absolutely refused to bump me to higher support, and after almost an hour on hold I wasn't about to call back and try again. And unfortunately I didn't have time to research it myself, needed it done ASAP.
Well, after almost an hour of trying to get him to just move on, make up a WAP model, or just move on and tell me what he wants me to do on the WAP (after all, config is pretty easy), and him refusing to accept that troubleshooting the subnet mask on the REPEATER could be done without exact knowledge of my WAP, I finally got ticked off, got my case number, hung up, climbed up into the rafters, and got the model number.
The web page said it was something like a WAP54-C.
The model plate said it was a WAP54 (Model C).
The idiot couldn't tell that "-C" could mean "Model C". It didn't exactly match, so he wouldn't go on. If I could have afforded a ticket to Bangalore, I would have caused some serious destruction.
Of course, after I called back, waited another hour, got another tech to open my case, told him the model number... he began arguing with me that I didn't need to change the subnet mask, I didn't need a repeater, that I should be resetting the WAP, etc etc etc.
In the end I ran a big spool of CAT5 into the rafters and through a hole I very happily punched in the wall. That stupid repeater is still sitting, collecting dust, and I'll avoid Linksys equipment as often as I can.
DLink, on the other hand, has a nice knowledge base, good products, decent telephone support, and have consistently proven themselves to me.
Linksys... well, the only law I hope affects them is Darwins Law. Not the evolution one, the one they use to determine who gets Darwin Awards. I hope there are a lot of reasons for them to get handed out to Linksys idiots...
And now that I've had that cheery memory revived... time to go drink.
Having only recently been introduced to xkcd (and having read the entirety of the strip in one sitting) I have to say this entire thing is quite amusing. The balls, the raptors... obviously the folks who pulled this have read and understood the strip.
If you haven't read it yet, I highly recommend it. Geek humour at it's finest (and sometimes most touching)
Hey Rob, where's my 20 questions with the xkcd author???