In years past, before the onset of “adulthood”, I could sleep forever. I could sleep for 12 hours, hit the can, take a nap for an hour, then go back to sleep. Fast forward to today – I can’t seem to sleep past 9am. I blame him. I cope with this rather tragic turn of events by napping. My couch is rather comfy anyway…

Tuesday was as uneventful as Monday. I dropped my work laptop off at my former place of employment so I have to scrounge a workable box out of the mound of spare parts that have been collecting here for the last decade+. The first rig I tried had a non-functional version of gentoo on it and refused to bend for XP allow.

She’s All That was on StarzHD today… don’t ask. Rachel Leigh Cook in HD is incredibly cute, FYI. So is the SD version, but that’s neither here nor there. While it’s not readily apparent in type, I just spent 10 minutes finding an appropriate image URL for Rachel. Let’s just say images.google dropped the ball. Badly.

I tried to play Knights of the Old Republic tonight and ultimately quit in disgust. I got the same ich feeling I do when trying to replay Diablo and such on modern machinery. I get that they can’t make use of widescreen, but it feels like I have a frakkin mouse plugged into a cave wall.

As of Friday last week I am unemployed. While it was not something I initiated, it’s for the best. I haven’t been happy for a looooooong time. My stock answer when people ask me about my job has been “I hate my job, but I love the work.”

Anywho, I got up at the crack of 11:30 this morning and was summoned to a local eatery for lunch with a few of my former former co-workers. One was let go on Thursday and the others left a year+ back. We had a nice meal and a fun bitch session about our former employer. Good times.

Promises promises, but I do intend to keep some content up here. It’s not like I have anything better to do…

Nothing to report, specifically, yet. Stay tuned. If the site goes away for a few days just give DNS time to catch up. When I know more, you’ll know more.

Until then…

postscript: I posted this using the Windows Live Writer Blog-o-matic tool thing currently in beta.

postscript, part the second: The aforementioned Windows Live Writer Blog-o-matic tool thing is teh sux and has been summarily sacked.

For some reason lately I’ve found myself spending an inordinate amount of time playing stupid web games. Since I’ve challenged myself to actually BLOG shit instead of thinking of things that would make excellent blog posts and then going to sleep… It’s meaningless, it’s talking to hear myself talk, yadda yadda yadda. It’s my house, suck it up.

Sudoku Combat – Nearly every morning I start with one of those wacky Sudoku things. I’m sure there’s 101 places to play them online, but this is the first elegant one I’ve found. I am really not good at them, honestly. I keep at it because it’s the good kind of frustrating and I hold out hope that I may actually improve my brain somehow. My best efforts are 5 minutes, fyi…

Motherload – This game is incredibly addictive. I’m still trying to figure out a proper strategy but I can tell you that you shouldn’t go below 1000′ with the first 2 tiers of fuel tanks.

Clash N Slash – From the same MiniClip site as Motherload. I just played this for the first time yesterday and it seemed fun. YMMV.

N – I am ninja? I’ve unlocked the first 20 levels or so…of like 1059102. If you watch the teaser screens it gets about 50 times more complex than the toughest level I’ve cleared. Incredibly well done game.

Stick Arena – Like all online FPS games it’s more fun with friends. 4 or 5 people in a private arena > pug.

Andre’s NES emulator – Java base NESticle. With exception of the crazy imports just about everything you could want to play is available. My only complaint is that the game window is a 2″ x 2″ square on a 1680×1050 widescreen

DHTML Lemmings – uh… do I need to ‘splain this one?

Raiden-X – Courtesy of digg. I’ve actually just deleted this one and had to page through digg to find the URL again. Once you’ve finished it without dying (on hard, no less) it’s not that entertaining. Be that as it may, I still played a lot of this one. The save feature is a welcome addition to any gamelet.

That should keep any bored nerd busy until the next staff meeting. Enjoy.

Inspired by ComputerWorld, courtesy of membox

As someone in the industry who would be considered a techie vs a business analyst or other “soft” role I LOVE hearing how unimportant my existence is to any given project. I LOVE hearing how I need to be more flexible and that I need to learn how to make the system fit the user and not vice versa. Of course they’re absolutely right – computers and technology at large must, ultimately, serve the needs of the user. This is what one would call the “No shit, Sherlock” principle. That said, you have to know how to use/fix/change the shit in the first place in order to properly and effectively mold it into something useful.

There is much more emphasis on the business domain and on project management skills than on the technical skills,” says Kate Kaiser, an associate professor at Marquette University in Milwaukee. In September 2005, Kaiser led a Society for Information Management (SIM) study of 104 CIOs to determine their skills needs through 2008. She expects the top 10 skills identified to remain in the top 12 by 2010.

er… yeah. Because CIO’s are well-known to be intelligent, tech-savvy, forward-thinking people and not just the only person in Senior Management who can make a pivot table in Excel.

IT professionals who will survive and perhaps thrive in 2010 will expand their knowledge base and stretch beyond their comfort zones. Those who don’t will find job opportunities in niche areas.

I concur. Assuming you define niche as “any job that requires knowledge of technology or the implementation thereof.”

The ComputerWorld article even lists what will be the hot and cold career paths for budding technolites in their slack-jawed little world of tomorrow. Among their “hot” jobs are Systems and Network Design – both of which are skill-intensive careers assuming your goal is to, you know, be good at your job. I don’t disagree that those particular jobs will be in great(er) demand in the future, but keep in mind the premise of the article. Either they have no clue what those jobs actually entail or they just contradicted themselves. The incongruities don’t end there, mind you, they list programming (twice), QA, Support/Help Desk and a nebulous “operations” career in the cold category. I’m not sure, exactly, how they think organizations are going to operate in this magical future, but it obviously doesn’t rely on people who are experts in servers, workstations, hardware or software.

… Revelation! That must be the point of their little ego stroke masquerading as journalism. There’s some amazing new technology that will become mainstream between now and 2010 that will completely eliminate computers, software and the people who know how to make them work!

If only that was the joke.

These are the same small-minded “big thinkers” that brought the ruin that is dot.bomb on the industry. I’m sure they truly believe that there’s some one size fits all solution to every computing task ever. It’s the same kind of dogmatic bullshit you find with Apple and Linux die hards that extol the cure-all virtues of their particular cult.

Don’t get me wrong – business acumen isn’t a BAD thing to have, nor are business people the red menace threatening the very lives of the skilled professional. I take offense to the slant of the article and I firmly believe the conclusions drawn and the experts considered in its writing to be off their rockers. You know what actually will be the hot employee of the future? People who can tear down and rebuild a standard PC (or mac, as they’re almost interchangeable now), cap a CAT5 line correctly AND explain those processes to a layperson with a complete transfer of knowledge.

That’s less business-skill and more people-skill. Knowing everything is great – being able to teach someone else everything? That’s pretty much the greatest thing ever.

Another weekend-long movie binge is behind me and I want to get the fuck out of the office fast as it’s a Monday.

Saturday I headed on over to the iMax @ Star Cinema. Boy was I pleased with that decision. The movie in and of itself wasn’t the best thing ever, but the sheer spectacle of it combined with 3D goggles and an iMax screen was just overwhelming. I can’t see how Superman will ever measure up in another medium… Spacey’s rendition of Lex Luther is as good if not a scosh better than Rosenbaum’s character on Smallville – whom I consider, at this point, to be the definitive Lex. At least as far as live action goes. The rest of the cast/movie is meh. Sorry kids but Singer & Spacey carried the flic as far as I’m concerned. You didn’t do a BAD job either, which is unfortunate. If you had I could just point out some stupid thing and say “hahaha, you suck” and we could both just move on. Instead you end up just being fairly expensive props.

Sunday rolled around and I made my first foray to the cesspit that is Marcus theaters in months to catch that flic people are all talking about. {Insert “meh” here} I won’t go so far as to say it was shitty shitty stinky farty smelly, but it certainly wasn’t entertaining. Even Keira was annoying which shouldn’t even be physically possible. Orlando did his level best to act himself out of a wet paper sack and failed miserably…again. Not even the Depp could save this train wreck. *ring* *ring* er…hello? Oh, Dead Man’s Chest it’s for you. It’s A COHESIVE FUCKING PLOT calling. Apparently you slipped it a roofie, stole it’s car and left town. You cheeky bastard.

In betwix the main stage was nestled a diamond in the rough. I speak, of course, of the Cinemax HD Saturday premiere of Wedding Crashers. Two words: FUN NY. This was my first viewing and I laughed just about the entire way through. Rachel McAdams was lovely, as always and the Wilson/Vaughn duet played perfectly. Kudos chaps. Kudos.

Apparently this is old. I don’t care. It’s probably the best Mad TV sketch ever.

“You can’t get out of here. There is no exit strategy.”

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rw2nkoGLhrE

No exit strategy indeed.

In an entirely in-character and unfunny move Electronic Arts announced this week that they will be acquiring Mythic Entertainment. Uh… ok.

While I can’t say I ever, EVER want to play Dark Age of Camelot again I can say that I respect the company quite a bit. Unlike some other manufacturers Mythic was very vocal and active in fighting currency/character sales over the last few years. This, of course, is one of my hot-button issues and I applaud their stance. Mythic did a lot of things right that go largely unnoticed now that the sleeper has awakened and 250k players is barely “hahaha, nub” territory. First and foremost is the unprecedented access to back-end data outside of the game. No MMO prior to DAoC gave players screen after screen after screen of stats and data to nerd over. As far as I know only Eve has even bothered since! That’s a shame, really, as these games are achievement-oriented in nature and if there’s one thing we love it’s to nerd over stats/items. The mechanics of Blizzard trying to pump out 6 million player profiles is rather staggering, but I’d love to see it happen.

There’s a rather decent conversation going on over at Lum’s place on this issue. He, among others, are being rather mum about the whole thing for the moment, but those of us not constrained by business propriety (or any propriety really) are slinging the hurtful invectives like there’s a 2 for 1 sale on oh-snap.

Generally speaking the domestic seasons for the television have all finished their runs, much to the chagrin of my DVR. But hark, what light through yonder big-screen breaks? It is the east…ish. BBC America to my rescue.

First off let me say that I LOVE watching parliamentary proceedings on the CSPAN. If our officials had half the emotional involvement in their daily proceedings it’d be an incalculable improvement for everyone involved. Don’t get me wrong, they’re still politicians and I’m sure they get 3 things wrong for every one thing they get right, but by god they’re animated! I watched a good run where the two warring factions were rallying alternatively behind Blair and the opposition leader and it was crazy! The crowd literally roared at more than one point and was constantly cheering, jeering and heckling. “Awesome” doesn’t seem to be adequate…

The Thick of It is like the UK version of Spin City or somesuch. No… that can’t be right, because this is actually funny. Hilariously funny, actually. I’m still trying to pick up the whole scope of the story, but it seems to follow the adventures of Hugh Abbot, the beleaguered low-ranking Minister for something something. I’m not sure he even knows, really. My vote is for funny. Watch!

Hex is like Buffy meets Dark Shadows meets … crikey, I have no idea. I’ve seen 3 episodes now and I still don’t have the first clue as to what the fuck is happening. After checking the website things are slightly clearer. Slightly. … No. No they’re not. Not at all. I don’t care, it’s interesting enough to watch until SG-1 starts again. Which, I might add, is in 3 weeks.

Spaced starts this week. I think you’ll recognize the male lead. The previews look funny. I expect funny. It better be funny.

The IT Crowd is funny, in a mammy blackface aunt Jemimah stereotypical way. It doesn’t bother me much, it’s not as if geekdom is really THAT far off from what people think, but their HAHAHA TECH SUPPORT IS ANTISOCIAL CLOWN SHOES HAHA crap is a few shades shy of good. If you’ll permit me to be an elitist prick for a moment I will say that in my experience the people who actually believe that’s what “all” IT people are like are the ones that are patently computarded and can’t stand the fact that other people aren’t. I’ve never understood that type of moron, honestly. I’m not an accountant, I don’t take personal offense to someone who knows how to use an actuarial table. I might take offense TO an acturial table, but that’s a completely different psychosis.

All that aside I do laugh occasionally, which is unfortunate as I’ve only been able to catch the torrents from the BBC mothership. They are apparently selective as to what hits the Yankee station. God knows why Are You Being Served is taking up precious airtime… Upside is that at least 2 newer episodes are available online now so I can catch those. Score for countries where the digital inquisition hasn’t taken complete hold.

from Christopher Diggins, courtesy of O’Reilly & digg.com

So instead interviews are going to people who has have been suckling the corporate teat since they graduated from university only a couple of years ago. There is a lot these people don’t know about the business and practice of writing software.

If you are running an IT company, I would suggest that you take a long hard look at your applicant screening process. Perhaps you should consider getting your lead developers involved in the initial screening of applicants. You might have missed an opportunity to hire someone like myself, and instead find yourself having to choose from a bunch of inexperienced college grads, demanding far too much money for what they can actually do for your company.

While I can’t always say I love my job, I certainly enjoy being gainfully employed. If I were to look for a new job I’d be fighting against hordes of would-be IT noobs with shiney new diplomas and zero knowledge of how the real world works. Not that there aren’t some bright kids coming out of schools these days, but BOOKS != REALITY. Quoting me some passage from the appendices of your textbook is useless dick-waving if it doesn’t solve the problem at hand or at least tangentially relate.

Fucking posers.