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Kermit’s a liar. You can’t trust a frog (and any princess worth her salt could tell you that). It’s easy being green, at least a pale sort of green.
Lying frogs aside, I can finally answer the pesky perennial question, that question that’s troubled techie types for the last decade or two. That question: Should you turn your PC off at night or over the weekend?
If you’ve been in with the IT crowd, the answer to this question has always been a hearty “Nope!” (No kisses, no frogs, no princesses.) Leave them on. (Go away.)
Enterprise-wise, you see, we need those beasts on and working; even at home, you’re screwed if you don’t let them have their way. It’s the updates you see. Miss an update and the zombies come calling.
If you turn your PC off… well, then all those nice automated things don’t get done — important things, like updates, and bug patches, and virus signatures, and disk defragging, and other gobbledygook sort of technical things. They’re necessary, unfortunately. They’re important.
When confronted, I typically explain the simple trade-offs: It’s a choice between “leave them on” or you’ll be responsible for immanentizing the eschaton, triggering the inevitable zombie apocalypse or another Republican administration — to some, no doubt, one in the same.
Moreover, you’ll suffer! If your PC is off at night; well then, all those pesky updates will have to run while you are actually trying to work, trying to finish your radically over-due dissertation about Romance in America: The Myths of the Frog Prince, or trying to put those ever-so-important final touches on your resume, or, perhaps you’re writing the great-American-time-travel novel about relativity and love across the space-time continuum. Whatever it is, it’s important stuff all, right?
Continue reading Kissing the Frog
Email — you may be addicted to it, you may hate it, abuse it, love it, or eschew it. Whatever your relationship, troubled or otherwise, email is and continues to be one of the world’s few, new, great things. When it comes to “killer-apps,” it is the undefeated heavy-weight champion of the world. Email is the backbone of social and commercial intercourse. Commerce flows through it, along with pain and joy, and work and play, and many of the hours of my day.
While you may order that inflatable, remote-controlled zeppelin online, the acknowledgement nevertheless comes via email, as does the receipt, and the shipping updates.
Email is the truck that moves freight – light and heavy – on the information-super-goat-trail. Plain, simple, elegant, boring, your-grandma-has-an-AOL-address-type email remains the venerable heavy lifter of the online world.
Strangely, it has also become the de facto identity management tool. It is universally used to authenticate just who we are, on everything from my bank to the myriad of social and anti-social real-time networking sites. When we forget just who we are, it’s the delivery method of choice to jog the memory or to trigger a reset — ironically, given how totally insecure it really is, likened to a postcard.]
But, the core problem with email is not security. The real problem with email is it’s really stupid. It’s dumb as a bucket of overripe bananas. I mean it. It’s really god-awful stupid. It can’t help it. It was designed that way.
Continue reading Dumb Blobs
I hate splash pages. I hate being held hostage. The topic came up recently on the “Information Systems Forum” listserv. It’s a listserv of diverse participants, gracefully managed by the indefatigable Deborah Elizabeth Finn.
The question was: “Are splash pages effective.” I thought about it for a few days and I posted a response. Michael Gilbert (who I think of as my own personal Perry White) suggested I repost my response here, on the Diner. (I think he’s worried that I haven’t posted much stuff in the last few months. Not to worry Michael, it was just a dry spell caused by excessive time travel.)
On this particular list, the recent conversations have drifted into the rights and wrongs of collecting (and using) personal information (like one’s birthday) for fundraising, and, more recently, the efficacy of “splash” pages — especially by nonprofits. While musing over the thread, I was reminded by an early example — a pre-internet example — of an attempt to hold an audience hostage.
You’ll find my original post below, (slightly edited and embellished to make me look more thoughtful):
Continue reading Get Thee Behind Me, Disco Duck!
It happens with an eerie regularity. I hear a song, one of uncanny depth and beauty; something that just reaches down and twists at my heartstrings. Intrigued, I will Google a smattering of half-heard lyrics, seeking to discover a new artist. Instead, I discover a familiar name, Leonard Cohen. It’s a strange consistency — one that has been with me from 15 to 50.
It’s a consistency that caused me to preorder, unheard, his latest CD: “Leonard Cohen – Live in London — July 17th, 2008.” It arrived a few weeks ago.
Let me say, unabashed, this man is a poet, masterful, unmatched, unequaled. But it’s no “big girl’s blouse” type poetry. Rather it’s the soul of a man. It’s raw, and masculine, sensual and sexual; carnal and biblical. If his voice were any deeper it would measure on the Richter scale. Like a rockslide of passion, gravelly and rich, aged and tempered like leather in smoke, dipped in raw emotion, the words of Leonard Cohen caress the ragged edge of love and passion and age and youth. Continue reading The Secret Chord
I thought it was a joke. Who could blame me? After all, the announcement began: “Starting on April 1, 2009…” Then again, Microsoft usually ain’t one to make “April Fool’s” jokes.
I read the announcement again. I clicked the buttons. The download started. I double-checked the URL — “Perhaps it was a fancy phishing scheme,” I thought to myself. “Better check.” “Free” often means free trouble.
I Googled. I got half-a-dozen links. I clicked the Wikipedia entry. It said: “SharePoint Designer 2007 is available as license-restricted freeware.”
Hey, if Wikipedia says so, it’s got to be true, right?
Here’s the scoop, the lowdown, the straight poop: Continue reading Free Beer, SharePoint, and an April Fool
I’ve been using a dual-monitor setup since before before. In fact, I can’t remember (and can’t imagine) not having two monitors in front of me. My office setup is currently two 20-inch 16:9 LCD flat panels. It’s amazing what you can artfully stuff on that sort of screen-space. I’m here to say that it ain’t uppity opulence — it’s productivity enhancement, and damn handy too. For example, with two monitors:
- You can chop-and-paste from one monitor to the other, keeping a browser open on one monitor for… uhm… err… research and your Great American Novel front and center on the other.
- You can set different resolutions on different monitors. This lets you quickly see through other eyes, a handy thing when designing web pages, especially if you have a penchant for extra-large (or extra small) fonts. Guilty, I am. I often forget that some people like their icons larger than a pinhead and text measured in multiple microns.
- You can run multiple flavors of browser — IE, Firefox, and Safari, maybe Opera just for grins — simultaneously making sure that nothing looks right on any of them regardless of what you do.
- Finally, for the A.D.D. amongst us, you can while away your day, in manifold multitasking, with more stuff in your face — calendar, email, task list, Facebook, ESPN and CNN, three or four or five or ten browser windows, slash-dot, iTunes, and a copy of the DMCA (just in case).
Continue reading Trilateral Symmetry
Who’d of thunk it? A simple shoe — well, actually two — thrown with the right twist could so clearly express an opinion. An opinion so succinct, that the world can do nothing but applaud (and perhaps wish the thrower had had slightly better aim). It was a shoe heard ’round the world.
Shoes have power. You can vote with them (or I guess more accurate, you can vote with your feet). You can heat up a cold war as Nikita Khrushchev, shoe in hand, pounding on the lectern at the UN, shouting, “We shall bury you.” (Although there are those that say the more accurate translation is “We shall attend your funeral”). Continue reading Shoes for Industry
A Thanksgiving Tale from the Wild Wild East
We careened through streets, shrouded in darkness, packed into a grubby ersatz-Fiat 128, a Soviet-era knockoff. I was compressed, folded, and spindled into the back seat, a human shock absorber, a Dell Optiplex cradled in my arms. With only me between the PC’s steel case and the car’s steel struts, I felt every bump and grind of the ancient city’s streets. I was the car’s only functioning shock absorber. Noticing that it was past midnight, I thought: “Hey, it’s Thanksgiving.”
As we zoomed around yet another roundabout, my friend Tamás shouted over the engine noise: “This is ‘Hero’s Square. You can see the statues of the seven Magyar chieftains who led the Hungarians into the Carpathian basin. You remember, Saint Stephen — he’s there. See.” He gestured with his right hand, his ubiquitous cigarette smoldering in the other. He was a hell of a driver, Tamás. One hand always on the wheel, another manhandling the stick shift, ratcheting through the gears, clutch be damned; another Bogarting a constant cigarette, and another hand to spare, artfully used to point out landmarks and other points of interest along the way. 
I struggled to see out of the side window, smudged and clouded with urban fallout and the night’s reflections. I could see shadows, light and dark, vague objects lit by the cold calculating stare of mercury lights. “Oh, yeah,” I said. “I’ll have to come back here sometime during the day.” “Yes,” said Tamás. It’s a beautiful city.” With those words, he lit another cigarette and whipped the car to the right, sliding me away from the window. Like a square, steel security blanket, I cradled the PC. We dove down, down into the dark, diving driving deep into the Budapest night. I was glad he knew where he was going, or at least he seemed to know. I wasn’t going to question. If this worked, it would be he who had saved the day; saved the week, saved my ass — assuming it, and I, survived the ride.
Continue reading Night of the Budapest Bunny
The culprits struck in the dead of night, repeatedly. With each subsequent attack, we doubled-down, increased the bet. There was no choice. Such small acts of vandalism speak volumes. Such attacks are disheartening. I find it hard to fathom that whilst praising freedom, or liberty, or democracy, people would attempt to rob me of mine. Defiance is the only recourse. Defiance (minor as it was in this case) is the only acceptable response to totalitarianism, no matter what form it takes.
I have to admit, I had had a twinge of trepidation when the signs first went up. Truly, elections bring out the silly season. There was an edge of only slightly veiled intolerance this time around, fanned by the various candidates themselves. “Not good,” I thought to myself. “It’s not wise to fan the flames of wackiness. We’ve got too much of it.”
Relatively rural, there is little around me to temper such flames. I lack the protection of a crowd, wise or otherwise. And, I didn’t want to end up with a cross — or a ying-yang symbol for that matter — scorched into my front lawn. Shaking my head, I shrugged off the trepidation. If one can’t put up a campaign sign without fear of retribution, then it’s too late. Up went the signs. Continue reading Unintended Consequences
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