Fuck Bush.

There has been a little flapdoodle up in Fort Fun recently. The Collegian, CSU's campus newspaper wrote an editorial as follows:

'TASER THIS
Issue date: 9/21/07 Section: News
FUCK BUSH
This is the view of the Collegian editorial board.'

The taser bit referred to an incident at a John Kerry meeting where an obstreperous querant got zapped by the police.

The only quibble I have with the editorial is that it smacks of 'stick it to the man' collegiate radicalism, and thus seems lame. Like the peeps thought they were all bad-ass telling off Bush, when if you google the phrase 'fuck bush', well, you get lots of hits, so no distinction there.

That said, I don't have a problem telling Bush to fuck off. God Damn! He's fucked things up. I am hoping this country and the rest of the world can survive till January 20, 2009. I wish I was joking.

Work - What is going on round hea?

The senior programmer, a guy who worked on the other app, quit on Monday. Tuesday the director came by our work area to point out that we were not using the infragistics data grid consistently and that we should create a template and use that. (He said the same thing 5 times. No joke. When he says something he will say it over and over. Someone came in late on a Friday, (which was expected because she had been there until 10 the previous night doing testing on an upcoming release), and brought donuts. Director came by to get a donut and said, 'If you come in late on Friday, you have to bring donuts'. He seemed to think that very witty and said it multiple times. Not sure what to make of that. It wasn't funny to me, it was a lame comment and the repetition was more disturbing than anything else.)

The point about us not using the infragistics grid correctly was a concern for me. We are talking about a 3rd party UI tool which can look nice but isn't going to replace all our other UI work, at least not easily or in a straight-forward manner. But, we, as in the director, seem to think it's going to deftly address a multitude of development issues. Whereas I do not. We were given a week to get the datagrid template where it could be used as a foundation for our system. Luckily for me, the other 2 guys on my team are leading the way on that. I had other issues in my queue and I a haven't been out front on the infragistics thing.

This stuff has been making me wonder a couple of things. Our project is better than failing, but it's not a great success, so, considering that I think we are going to be creating new bugs and missing deadlines (which has already happened), how far in the wrong direction are we going to go? We are re-architecting the app and I think it might be doing more harm than good, and even if the re-architecture did go well, it will be a long while before we see the benefits of it and I think management is under the impression that the director found some new way to do things that will make our jobs so much easier and thus quicker. And in this situation, how long can I last at this place?

There are a couple of other enhancements coming up that don't sound to prosperous to me, but who knows, they could turn out well enough. I like the fact that the team lead on this project is someone other than me, and that our project manager is an intelligent rational person, so I should be well enough under the radar when things don't go as well as planned. (Though I can contribute to the success, so far as we have it, by fixing some of the plethora of bugs we have already and making relevant enhancements as it becomes possible.)

My overall opinion is that software projects just like to fail a lot of the time. In my opinion, we should be doing other things than we are to make our project a winner, but management doesn't understand the problems that it's decisions are causing. I'd like to stick around at this place for a while, (I am thinking in terms of like months to a year), and see how things go, and I think that if I was looking for a new job in software development, there is a good chance I'd end up in another fucked up situation. (One of the guys who left our team a little over a year ago spent some time at a place where they wanted the programmers to work 14 hour days cause they were in a rush to update their old, out-dated app. Not something I want to deal with.)

When I started at this company a couple of years ago I told my homie that I was hoping to last a year. I don't know if I'll last another year. I guess I'd give the odd's at 50/50 that I'll make it till next August.

Heirloom Tomatoes

Got some heirloom tomatoes today from the Whole Foods across Hampden where I live. Pretty tasty. Hadn't had 'heirloom tomatoes' before. They just looked funny. But I had heard they taste good because they are pre-industrial or something. There old seeds and they have more flavor because they haven't been hybridized or something. I think I get the idea. I can often taste the difference between organic and non organic apples. And red delicious apples seem to be the white bread of apples these days, and I imagine that lack of flavor came from some business decision to make the apples hold better in travel, not offend anyone with an easily offended palate or something. Of course, with heirlooms, the issue is they aren't even the nice tomato shape. I got a couple that were close though. Some of them looked really asymmetrical, and were not colors I associate with tomatoes - yellow, green (not unripe green I don't think, just green.)

Anyhow, to sum up, they were pretty tasty.

Work.

Last Sat, 9-22, was the 2nd Sat in a row that our team has come in to work. The thing is I think we missed our original release date but I am not sure. It might have been mid Sept. It would have been obvious to our manager that we weren't going to make it, but I don't recall hearing anything about us pushing the date. That's very typical. I don't want to ask how far behind we are, and I don't know what management is thinking about this release.

It wasn't actually that bad on Sat. I was there for about a half day. I fixed a couple of relatively easy issues, which is satisfying, and, I didn't have anything particularly exciting planned anyway, so no real harm. Still, not exactly ideal.

What's with this 'We', asshole?

I listen to streaming radio alot of the time at work. I was listening to Michael Pollen, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma, on On Point last week, and he was talking about contemporary food culture. It sounded kind of interesting, and it was a decent enough show, all in all. What bothered me about it was how he kept saying 'we' to indicate, from what I can tell, the entire population of Americans. 'We' don't know how to eat, unlike Europeans. 'We' enjoy fast food. 'We' let half baked ideas like the Atkins diet change our eating habits overnight.

I have a couple of problems with this. One, these aspersions don't apply to me. Two, I am pretty sure they don't apply to Mr. Pollan either. He's using the term 'We' to overgeneralize, stereotype. He's taking cheap shots at people who he feels smugly superior to.

It was noted in the show that Pollan is a professor of Journalism at Berkeley. What do they teach there? 'Generalize like crazy. Give me 3 anecdotes and you should be able to apply this to everyone in a specific group.'

I suppose that approach sells better than, say dumping a bunch of statistics on people. But I don't see why just talking about the specific people and place he knows about is a problem.

Another problem I had was that he sort of set himself up as an activist for 'How to eat'. Are you a journalist or lobbyist for your 'side'?

Whatever. I'm not going to read a book by such a smug twat.

Student Loans

There are 2 types of student loans - the ones that come from the government (direct loans) and the ones that come from a bank. The ones from a bank are guaranteed by the government, so if someone defaults, the government pays the bank back for them. The question I have is why aren't all loans direct? What do the banks provide here? Nothing. I think it's a rip off and any politician who supports them is a crook.

Michael Kinsley has an article on this in Slate.

Relatively speaking, it's not a large issue, but it's one that pisses me off. College students get the shaft a lot. Textbooks are another example. If I was a freshman again, I'd get all my books from Amazon just cause the campus bookstore and the other local bookstore don't compete on price at all. They are just cash cows. That's not the market serving the consumer. Bastards.

Anyway, to me, this is an issue with clear good guys and bad guys. The direct loans were pushed by the Democrats in the Clinton administration, so that's a point for Hillary.

Fraggles.

From the old muppet show Fraggle Rock. The main characters were (in no order):
1. Mookie
2. Goober
3. Gobo
4. Wembly
5. Red.

Not sure what brought that back to my attention. I recall a guy in 8th grade giving me that breakdown, which I still recall. The show was on HBO, which was gotten sporadically where I lived.
File this under random recollection.

* Actually, I think #2 should be Boober, not Goober. See the wikipedia entry here.

Day At Work.

Check email. Talk, briefly to coworkers. Manager says HR rep is 'moving on'. Half assed banter ensues regarding what we will do without HR in local office. Liked HR person. Mention to Manager that this isn't' a good thing.

Spent most of day fixing one bug. A report was giving me a screen break in test. It was a PDF report and the error said that Adobe reader didn't have enough data to draw an image. Checked image. Looked fine. Asked senior coworker who suggested it was due to the image being the wrong size in the report. Tried changing size in many ways. No luck. Ask coworker for new analysis. Results = Don't Know. Looked at image in the broken report in comparison to the image a correct report. Looked exactly the same. Functions to build each are the same. Does not make sense. Same data should give same output. Feel frustrated and confused. Wonder how far back I will have to go to get to when this was working. Ultimately find out that for some reason, broken image was using a .jpg file instead of a .bmp. Get issue fixed. Relief. Start new round of bug fixing. Leave.

Spent about 9.5 hours at work. Looks like we will be working OT this weekend. New architecture has it's gaps.

Felt way tired after lunch, as usual. Went for mile walk for the exercise and to get out of the office and freshen up. It was nice. Not hot, but still a little warm for my taste.

Upcoming movies that sound good.

Eastern Promises - some sort of thriller by Cronenberg with Viggo Mortenson as a Russian mafia guy and Naomi Watts as a Doctor or something. Guessing he's the bad guy who reveals a good side after the trials good girl Watts endures in her quest for .

The Brave One - Jodie Foster meets Charles Bronson. Question - how does this differ from straight up Death Wish, assuming that this is looking like a higher end deal and we can't have all the blood and guts? Hopefully not with a simple Moral Lesson.

Into the Wild - Sean Penn directs the Krakauer book. Loved the book. Is the movie going to be all in flashbacks or is it going to be chronological? We don't really know why the dude went to live the way he did, so how will the movie explain/show why, for example, he got a bug up his ass to go to Alaska?

Mr. Woodcock - Evil Gym Coach re-enters life of former student. Stifler is the kid, Billy Bob is the dad. Do they become buddies by overcoming some outside enemy, do they both learn lessons, or is Mr Woodcock really evil and does he get his commeupance?

Good Luck Chuck - Guy whose luck with women encounters entanglement when he meets Jessica Alba character. Does he get Jessica in the end? He better. Hoping this is R rated.

Ciao Luciano.

I went to iTunes and got La Donna E Mobile, which he did with the London Symphony Orchestra. It's an ebullient 2.5 minute song, or Rigoletto, (not that I know what that is). Great stuff.