Especially on Verizon:

Why My Mom Bought an Android, Returned It, and Got an iPhone

My favorite part:

A friend of mine has a Nexus S and it is a pleasure to use. The UI is elegant and functional. The battery lasts for days. In short, it is everything that the Charge wasn’t. I’d love to see Google somehow mandate the stock Android experience on all phones, or somehow rigorously test all new phones before they could be launched. Why not standardize and mandate one or two excellent cameras, and then open source the drivers? Why not certify and approve a few of the best components and then place some sort of “premium Android experience” certification label on phones that pass tests and use components approved by Google? Right now it’s a crapshoot out there when you want a new Android phone, and it doesn’t seem to be getting any better.

Let me excerpt that a little more clearly:

I’d love to see Google somehow mandate the stock Android experience on all phones, or somehow rigorously test all new phones before they could be launched.

You mean the way Apple mandates and regulates the entire end-to-end experience for iPhone users?

Not for nothing, but I’m slowly coming to the sad realization that my days as a self-declared Blackberry fanboy are numbered. I came to the party riding an Blackberry Curve 8310 and I’ll most likely be leaving it on a Bold 9700. Nothing rivals the build quality of RIM’s finer hardware, save for maybe the products designed in Cupertino. The experience of their keyboard is perfect, and gets better with every revision. My 9700 has never been short on horsepower, it can be quite snappy when the software takes proper advantage of the hardware; but that’s where everything breaks down.

So unless we somehow see a miracle pulled off, and RIM releases the Bold 9900 running Windows Phone 7, I’m probably going to end up with an iPhone 4Gs™ or iPhone [Next]. I’m going to miss my hardware keyboard, and I’m going to bitch about it every time I am forced to type an email, but I’ll enjoy being able to run apps that don’t suck, have more than 256MB of space for apps, email, contacts, etc, and generally having a more pleasant experience.

[Purdue release];

So for those who weren’t already aware, on October 7th I gave my two weeks notice to my supervisor at Purdue. After just over 21 months, I was ready to be free of that place. Well, I was ready to be free much farther back than that, but I was finally presented an opportunity too good to pass up in favor of the stability and large perks that Purdue offered.

Without me going off the bitter deep end (not that anybody would be surprised by that), my reasons for leaving were barely a secret to my coworkers. Between the politics, some of the people (particularly the upper management, or at least the decisions they had made), and the uncertain future ITaP presents to its employees, not to mention the day-to-day frustration of being a Windows admin, the job as a whole was taking its toll on my sanity and the rest of my life.

So with that, I wish the best to my colleagues and friends still working for ITaP and various other Purdue IT groups, and I do hope they all stay in touch, if for no other reason than so I have a conduit of information as things continue to slowly fall apart. Hopefully that will stop happening soon, but you can’t hemorrhage good people the way ITaP has been and continue to do good work. The handful of knowledgeable, competent people left behind can only be stretched so thin. I do hope sanity is restored at some point, for the sake of those too embedded, too enamored, or too stubborn to leave.

[[Stoneware alloc] init];

So the opportunity I mentioned above, the one that was too good to pass up? I started there October 25th (yesterday, by my clock). Its with a little company called Stoneware, based out of Carmel, Indiana. Without going into too much detail, they were looking for a developer familiar with Microsoft’s Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), more specifically somebody who had experience working on a client, and given my experiences with CoRD over the last 18 months, my proximity to the company, and my dissatisfaction with my current job, neither the timing, nor the job, could have been a better fit.

I’ll be commuting to Carmel as needed, but predominantly working from home. I spent most of yesterday in meetings and most of today sifting through code and getting my bearings on where things are. I’ll be working entirely in Java, at least for now, so its a bit of a leap, but the experiences I gained this summer ginning up some C# apps for our Windows 7 migration are paying off already, given the similarities between C# and Java (for once I’m happy Microsoft ripped a good idea off of somebody else). I will say that despite missing Objective-C at times, I’m excited about the opportunities the job has, and the more I dig into things, that excitement only seems to grow.

[CoRD setStatus:"Uncertain"];

We haven’t really discussed the future of CoRD yet at my new job, and I’m not really certain where things lie. Given how busy spring and summer, and even the fall was for us at Purdue, trying to get our Windows 7 migration underway and off the ground, I had barely any time to put forth towards CoRD. I did some experimenting at various points, trying to get some of the larger features we planned to implement at least started and/or off the ground, but at this point none of them are outside of the experimental phase. There was just too much work involved in the bigger pieces, and I didn’t have the time or gumption required to go through, rip out all the dirty code, and replace it with some sparkling new awesomeness. Given that working on it now would present a conflict of interest (potentially), I’m not sure where that leaves CoRD. Dorian has expressed an interest in keeping the project alive as needed, but I got the sense that he had no plans for large changes being made. Once I’m settled in, I might broach the topic, but for now, unless Microsoft swoops in next year and offers Dorian and I piles of money to merge their crappy RDP client (with a stable backend) with CoRD’s awesomeness (sans the crappy backend), or a new developer or two sneaks in and begins contributing, the future of CoRD is murky at best.

Software Installation is an area that has many issues, and for a variety of reasons. I have but one reason how this can be: Developers suck and very few possess any foresight. It baffles me on at least a weekly basis, how a person or team of people can be smart enough to write a functional application on any platform, yet be so stunningly ignorant of the environment in which their applications will be running. They build registration data into installers. They put registry keys in place at install time, with no heuristics in-program to handle things in the event they’re not there. I could go on for a while… Everybody is guilty of it, from the biggest shops (Microsoft, Adobe, Autodesk), all the way to some open source projects.

I have seen immensely complicated applications, that have stellar install experiences. And I have seen painfully simple applications that require me to rip them out of their installer and package them sanely in order for us to deploy them. There are exceptions to almost every rule, but here are a few tips for any developers, Mac or Windows:

1. Installers should not be handling any interactive product registration / serial numbers. You fucking jerkwits.
2. You don’t need to restart the computer. Really.
3. You don’t need me to log out and back in either. Really.
4. Installers should need to do 5 things:
   1. Preflight: stop processes/services, etc.
   2. Pre-install: gather any necessary data, set environment variables, etc.
   3. Unpack files and/or registry keys, dump to their right locations
   4. Post-install: build any on-the-fly things using utils you just installed, etc.
   5. Postflight: restart any processes/services, etc
   6. If you’re doing more than this in your installer, you’re doing it wrong.
5. Installers should have a silent option. Yes, it really is necessary, you lazy tool.
6. You should NEVER have to write your own fucking installer.¹
7. Installers should not be handling any interactive product registration / serial numbers.
8. You don’t need me to quit my fucking web browser, or any other programs. Really.
9. If you insist on some kind of stupid idiotic compression or container format, then extract to a TEMP space, and clean up after yourself.
10. Installers should not be handling any interactive product registration / serial numbers.
11. Installers should not do anything that is dependent or tied to the current user. Including interactive product registration / serial numbers.²

The entire concept of requiring an installer is one centered around the clusterfuck that is Windows. In the best case scenario, the above installation steps could be reduced to one: Unpack Files. More complicated programs SHOULD only require 3: Preflight, unpack files, postflight. Some packages like Java, for instance, would require at least those two scripting steps, to search for existing versions, modify the registry as necessary, etc.

Mac-side, any program that has progressed to the point of not being a drag-and-drop .app bundle, and is looking at doing some form of “installation” needs to step back and take a serious look at how their app is structured. If you’re including a lot of secondary content, or installing frameworks used by multiple applications, etc., you’re exempt from this, of course.

I love this comment from the OpenCongress link:

“The government failed at running a railroad.

The Government failed at running a Post Office

The Government failed at running two mortgage companies

The Government failed at running a rescue and recovery effort.

The Government failed at running an acquisition organization.

The Government faield at running an educational system (even though it is not their responsibility)

The Government is failing at running an automobile company.

The Government is failing at promoting an economy.”

1. The Government succeeded at building a railroad, the rapid settlement of the West in the late 1800s was proof of that. Cars, airplanes, etc., made the railroad obsolete and it now finds itself struggling. Welcome to progress and capitalism.
2. The Post Office was a VERY successful endeavor for decades. The rise of technology (email in particular), UPS, FedEx, and DHL, has all but abolished the need for a government-sponsored delivery industry.
3. The Government didn’t fail at running mortgage companies, they were victims of a broader economic crisis brought about by the loose and fast lending of other, private banks. They contributed to the problem sure, but they weren’t the sole cause.
4. Rescue and Recovery effort? Acquisition Organization? When you don’t specify WTF you’re talking about.
5. It Should be their responsibility, many founders thought so (including Thomas Paine), and the only thing they’ve failed at is underfunding it. Why are teachers among the lowest paid people in the country? Why are schools built 50 years ago now so hard to replace or refurnish? People are seriously trying to blame governments (local, state, and federal, all of whom, were elected by those same people) for failing to properly fund education? Then in the same breath some of those morons will bitch about higher taxes?
6. Can we give them time to find the bathroom of the ALREADY FAILING INDUSTRY before we claim they are failing to run it?
7. The stock portfolio that i follow bottomed out around February or March, and in the last 5 months my retirement account set up in January has doubled in value. I think the economy is beginning its recovery.

So my idea on doing a series about the follies of Windows 7 has fell flat on its face. In addition to the sheer amount of things that are still bad, there is simply too much personal bias, too much dislike. I tried and failed 3 times to write my piece on software distribution, and each time it fell into a nebula of hatred and bitterness that only computer geeks could appreciate.

I tried to distill the bitterness about software installation into a handful of questions:

• Why isn’t there *one* standard for distributing software for Microsoft Operating Systems?
• Why are there like 14 companies marketing installer-creation-software, none of which are good enough for still more companies, who insist on writing their own installer?
• Why doesn’t Microsoft provide better tools for packaging software?
• Why can’t I point SCCM at an MSI and a collection of machines and say “Go”?
  • On this note, why the hell can’t I safely remove all of MS’s stupid ass default Collections in SCCM? Or at least move them somewhere less obtrusive
• Why are the best tools for managing Microsoft’s operating systems NOT written by Microsoft?
• Why do some 3rd party developers possess a better handle on Microsoft’s operating systems and APIs than Microsoft does?
• Why are so many Microsoft die hards so quick to defend something that they themselves will admit is a convoluted and fucked up system?

Since I doubt my response to Keith will make it through his filters (though maybe he’ll allow it) I’m posting it here.

It is in response to this ridiculous article about his first 24 hours on Snow Leopard:

http://blogs.technet.com/keithcombs/archive/2009/08/30/apple-os-x-snow-leopard-the-first-24-hours.aspx

And My response:

Keith…Some fast notes and your “solution”:

I have been running 12GB of ram in my Mac Pro happily for quite some time now on a 32-bit kernel. VMWare’s happy to tap into it, almost as happy as Windows 7 is to gobble up whatever i give it.

OS X in general has been running 64-bit applications side by side with 32 bit applications, seamlessly, since Tiger.

2 minutes on google shows me that your machine (MacbookPro3,1) isn’t in the table of capable machines for a 64-bit kernel:

http://www.osnews.com/story/22009

Also, why can’t you run 8GB of RAM? Because the hardware doesn’t support it, regardless of the kernel. Its even in the Technote YOU link to in the article. The max RAM of that particular series of MBP’s is 4GB. I believe that is the line of machines you can do some tricks to bypass that, but the official party line is they have a 4GB cap. And even IF you get it enabled, and use a supported set of SO-DIMMs, you STILL don’t need the 64-bit kernel to utilize it, the 32-bit kernel works just peachy.

And as to why they boot to a 32-bit Kernel by default, for the same reason that Windows 7 still has legacy code in it dating back to Windows 3.1. 64-bit kernels break stuff. VMWare refuses to start under a 64-bit kernel. Mouse drivers that use kernel extensions, etc, ALL of which break under a 64-bit kernel, UNTIL the ISV’s recompile them for 64-bit (which they should have been doing since Tiger anyway, but whatever).

But, much like Apple does with EVERY major change like this, they stabilize the feature, and put it out there for the geeks and the tweakers under the assumption that anybody who knows enough to CARE to run in 64-bit mode will know how to enable it. Everybody else will be happy cooking along with their already bad ass operating system.

Please, before you knock something, do your homework. I’m running 64-bit kernels just peachy on my Pro and my 13″ Macbook Pro. I have been compiling and running 64-bit software for 3 years now.

And lets face it, NOBODY out there expects you to find 10.6 to be the most advanced operating system. Especially when the one time i’ve seen you not tow the party line on this blog, the post was removed within the week. Google can forget, but my NetNewsWire cache is forever.

And in the interest of backing up my threats, a screen cap from NetNewsWire of one of Keith’s posts responding to the “Laptop Hunter” ads where he doesn’t tow Microsoft’s party line and support them blindly. He actually calls them out on bending the truth, and says he expects them to have more integrity.

After that post was removed, I stopping Following Keith. THAT kind of censoring is ridiculous, especially when there’s nothing in there that isn’t true. I just stumbled across this latest mess and had to respond.

It’s been said before, but the Windows Registry is the Mos Eisley cantina of a Windows computer.

You’ll never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.

As somebody who has made their fair share of registry hacks before, I have been to places most people don’t dare to tread, changed and added keys with impunity, and…*gasp*…deleted things without backing them up first! This isn’t some average joe we’re talking about; I had a documented series of registry hacks that I had to do to every time i reinstalled Windows, and it got to the point where I was needing to use nLite to integrate them all for time’s sake (at one time I was on a 2-3 month reinstall cycle for my main workstation).

This kind of relationship usually is fruitful, a geek and his operating system. So intimately entwined in each other they are; the geek knowing the deepest secrets of his system, the system knowing precisely how to piss off the geek in as few CPU cycles as possible. But my relationship with Windows grew bitter in its waning years. I started to detest the behavior of the Alt key, with its toggling on/off state rather than being a simple momentary key like Shift or Control. The sheer and utter abuse of having a dedicated Windows key, and only being able to use it with 3-5 of the other 90+ keys. The systemwide penchant for inconsistency and bad program design. But none of this compared to the hatred of the registry.

The amount of bloat, the difficulty of manipulation, a single source of failure for the entire system, the abuse of putting things in registry keys that should have been in files, the use of GUIDs and SIDs for key names with nary a DWORD inside hinting as what it actually exists for and why. How about the ability to hide data? Yep, the registry, in all of its girth, is the perfect place to bury things, since so many legitimate programs do just that, why not illegitimate ones too?

As somebody who regularly supports other users, particularly those who, shall we say, are not as technically inclined, the registry posed a huge problem for remote troubleshooting. Here are some scenarios:

Think there’s a virus? want to disable any startup items?

Well is it in HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run, or RunOnce, or RunForFrakingEver or is it a *system* preference, so it’ll be under HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run or RunOnce? This is assuming you can get the user to open RegEdit, since its buried in some scary system directory that Windows warns you never to touch (because THAT is security…a clickthrough warning barrier…to hell with intelligent permission levels and on-demand privilege escalation).

Trying to troubleshoot wireless problems?

We should just blow away the wireless settings in your registry and see if it recreating them fixes it. Are you using a 3rd party wireless configuration program or the Windows one? At that point i’d hear an unspoken “WTF?!” in the silence, or maybe it was static from my cell phone, either way, I got the point.

I highly doubt I will return to any Windows platform as long as the Registry exists. The Mac’s primarily file-based approach for configuration data is vastly superior in terms of supportability, stability, and security. Throw in an amazing user interface that is both simple and powerful, not to mention customizable, and a growing number of applications that, unlikely their Windows counterparts, do not make me want to put a gun to the head of the people coding them, and you start to get a picture of why I have moved my entire family to Macs.

So I had an interesting challenge come my way today. I received an attachment I was supposed to look at, with the extension .pgp. Since I don’t use PGP regularly (with the exception of this time, I have never had to use it for any ‘production’ purpose) I went through the motions of re-learning how to decrypt PGP attachments, what I needed to download, etc. Fetching what I needed and digging around some, I recalled having to have a key of some kind. Right. Look me up on most keyservers and you’ll now find two entries ($20 says I’m the only Peelman in there, offer expires at the end of the week). One from 2005, one from 2008. What makes this funny/sad/aggrivating is the story behind the 2005 key, and the basis for why I hate PGP/GPG with most of my being.

So I’m roughly a junior in college, and finally in Purdue’s Computer Technology program, after a protracted experience trying to switch majors while the department continually moved the goal posts. I had recently gotten a Powerbook in the summer and my new geeky CPT friends and I were sitting around drinking beers, geeking out and talking about encryption (I supposed, how else we would have gotten here I’m not sure). The result of this is: at that point or sometime shortly thereafter I created a PGP key with some ridiculous passphrase. A passphrase that was forgotten soon thereafter. I’m pretty sure it was stored in the Keychain on my Powerbook for safe keeping (keep reading…) Later, while trying to retype it I confused myself so much that the mixture of letters, numbers, and symbols got lost in my mind, never to be found again. Regardless, its gone. No revocation key was created ahead of time (now I know that as a failsafe, you’re supposed to generate one and store it on a CD or something so that the key can be revoked in cases just like this. Pretty sure that wasn’t in any disclaimer i read at the time).

So the key was long forgotten, unused anyway, and 7 months after creation the hard drive on my Powerbook died (teaching me another painful lesson–now I back things up like some kind of freak). I can’t quite say that it was long forgotten, because last week, a peer sent the email in question and dug my public key out of some key repository. I always knew it would come back to bite me in the ass.

Let me pause a moment, for the uninitiated, and explain what PGP is. PGP is a form of Public Key Encryption. Through some mathematical wizardry that I can only hope I never have to deal with, you can generate a “pair” of keys, a public and a private. You post your public key out on various key servers, which then talk to each other and exchange the public keys they know about. You store your private key somewhere safe, this part is important since without the private key staying private and secure, your public key is useless (hence my dilemma). Through the magic of encryption algorithms, it is possible to take your public key, and encrypt the data in such a way that it can only be decrypted by your private key. Its a lot more complicated than that, but the basic idea is to be able to encrypt the data in such a way that only the intended recipient can decode it with his/her private key.

And here, my fellow geeks (and everybody else who has managed to make it through the tech jargon thus far), is where my reasoning for hating PGP lies. Unless you explicitly set them to, PGP keys never expire. They are eternal and forever and will live out on the netropolis of key servers until PGP ceases to exist and the last key server is shut down (not a likely event given its following). There is no way to revoke them without knowing the original pass phrase and having the original key. So 10 years from I might get another “secure” email that’s useless gibberish and undecipherable.

There are those who claim that this is the beauty of the system. That it prevents just some random Joe from revoking your key accidently or on purpose. Sorry, but I’m not buying. So for now I have a new key, that I have backed up in like 9 different places, with a memorable (but secure) pass phrase.

Short version

X509 PKI and S/MIME Digital Certificates FTW. Not only do you get a managed system, you get mandatory expiration dates, a web of trust that actually makes sense, encryption, and the best part: Integration with almost every major browser / mail client there is, with _no_ plugins, hacks, or third party plugins. Simply import the certificate file into the OS’s certificate manager (or if its Thunderbird, into your profile). www.thawte.com for more information. If you need/want a notary to get your name in your certificate, I’m good for 30 of the 50 points you have to get from the web of trust.

And I’ll say it again:

The US has run the table on the world’s economy for 60 years and that train has run off the rails. At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution we had the lowest working industrial population in the world, and we made up for it with huge advances and sheer wastefulness in power generation (both steam, electricity, and oil) and mechanization.

We were able to become the worlds leading industrial and economic power because we were the only ones really left capable after WWII. Most of Europe would feel the fallout from WWII until the mid-eighties when they started to recover. Africa remains dark for the most part. Japan took the worst beating but has come back as an economic super power and now owns a significant portion of our national debt. The rest of Asia was busy dragging itself out of the rice patties and into its own Industrial Age, allowing THEM to take on all the benefits we Americans had, without any of the overhead of actually having to create any of the Industry. It was already done, the trial-and-error was mostly over. They just had to build factories and staff them and we had a cheap source for manufactured goods. Now THOSE countries are starting to evolve beyond their industrial ages whereas we hit the technology age and turned into Jeff Spicoli. We have progressively gotten more ignorant and apathetic about our place in the world’s economy. Our manufacturing base has moved overseas to escape the overhead of labor unions. Why pay healthcare benefits and have employees who pay income tax? Get mexicans or asians to do the work, and charge the same money, that way you can pocket the difference and buy a 3rd private jet or a 4th yacht. *See below

After the depression and WWII, we decided we had to bury the communists, so we spent BILLIONS on national defense, creating the largest debt of any country in the world. All the while we spent paltry amounts of money on stupid things like infrastructure, education, social security, healthcare, non-defense-related-science research, genomics, etc.

Until we re-sort ourselves life is going to suck here for a while. We’re going to be pinched economically, everybody’s at fault and no one is to blame. Well, not quite. One percent of the country owns 38% of the wealth. Ten percent owns 71% (inclusive). Those are Wikipedia’s numbers from 2001, so the numbers are most likely different, but i can’t see them being any better (from my point of view as a resident of the middle class). I blame them.

Addendum:

And oh yes, I’m envious of the rich. I covet things that I cannot afford, fancy cars, computers, houses, etc. But when I look at some of these guys, who own multiple houses, private aircraft (and can afford to pay a pilot a decent wage to fly them around at a whim, and pay rent on a hanger or tarmac space at an airport), multiple exotic cars and boats, $400 pants, $500 shirts, the ears of congressmen, senators, presidents, etc., it really pisses me off.

I’m all for a capitalist society, where good ideas and hard work are rewarded. But when i hear talk about the “fairness” of Unions, or the “fairness” of an economic stimulus package, I can’t help but be appalled at the things that we choose to care about, while we sit by and let rampant greed and corruption corrode this country from the top down. The odds are no longer in the favor of hard work and good ideas being enough for somebody to make something out of themselves. The fact that you can still cheat, lie, and steal your way to the top should say something to everyone about the state of the country.

While I was spending most of the time cooped up in the cab of my Dad’s Ford this evening, others were busy finding errors in my handiwork here

Correction

Professor Ray Hansen, who I can now entitle as one of my former supervisors, pointed out that towards the end of The Change We Need I mentioned that this was the first time we’d had a Democratic majority in both Houses of Congress AND a Democrat in the White House. I seem to have been very wrong there. It has, in fact, happened several times in the past. I don’t remember seeing *that* many Democratic presidents on the roster, but the answers lie here, and clearly show that in the last 60 years almost 20 of them have been spent with the Democrats in majority rule. But I will point out that its only been once in the last 30 years, twice if you count the incoming administration and Congress among them. Kudos to Ray for pointing out such fallacies

Hell on Ice

For those not following me on Twitter or Facebook, Dad and I went to do our yearly last-minute christmas shopping today. Unfortunately, we were struck by a mis-predicted ice storm, brought on but a sudden drop in temps and off-and-on showers all day onto an already frozen ground. We ended up finding no fewer than 5 detours home, which turned what should have been a 1 hour trip into almost 7.5 hours of Hell on Ice and consumed almost 3/4 of a tank of diesel fuel.

We had one more stop to make around 4:30 and afterwards were heading home. On the way into the Honey Baked store i noticed the parking lot was getting slick but didn’t really think much of it other than “Damn its cold!”  So we’d just picked up the honey baked hams for Christmas dinner (and leftovers!) and had to stop at a shop in Hebron, KY for some gifts.  The trip between those two locations should have taken 10 minutes but took almost an hour.  Fender benders on the somewhat slick roads were slowing everything down.  Leaving our last stop, we noticed the roads were starting to ice over and there were warnings being issued on the radio to stay off the roads if it at all possible.  I-275 was already backed up from accidents, so we decided to take a detour and hopefully get back on the interstate ahead of at least some of the mess.  The road looked more-or-less straight on the GPS.  This was where things got fun!

There’s nothing quite as scary as the feeling of being at the helm of your dad’s 11-month-old Ford F250 (lariat, crew cab, diesel, 4×4) on what could be graciously called a highway in middle-of-nowhere, Kentucky, only to discover a hill, covered in ice from top to bottom, full of twists and turns, with 6 cars already stopped or in the guard rail at various points. Well we made it across at least 3 of those, before coming to the Grand Finale.  I made it about 1/3 of the way to the top before coming up on a Pontiac, broadside in the roadway, at which point i gave up and we parked the truck (we later made a failed attempt to get back down the hill without ending up in the hillside or the guardrail.

We were there close to 2.5 hours until finally a highway department truck finally made it through and heavily salted the hill, melting what ended up being around 1/2″ of accumulated ice on the road.  And allowing us and several of the others who had collected there to make it to the top.  To give you an idea of how slick and steep it was: you couldn’t stand up straight without sliding down the hill, it was impossible. Keep in mind I’ve spent 7 years dealing with Purdue’s Ice Polishers™ (That’s where they affix power brooms to the front of small tractors to do “snow removal” on the sidewalks, which works ok on the snow, but as a side effect it smoothes and polishes the ice that is always underneath, making it impossible to USE the newly cleared sidewalk without the risk of personal injury), I have experience with slippery ice, and this stuff was WORSE.

Once we got off of that hill, we discovered that the bridge across the Ohio River on I-275, aka our only quick way home, was closed down completely and traffic waiting to cross was backed up almost 15 miles. There’s more than one way home, however, and between the truck’s GPS and both mine and dad’s knowledge of the back roads we figured we could find a faster way home that didn’t involve sitting for 3-4 hours while awaiting our turn to get back on the interstate.  So we headed back to Florence to head down I-75/71, the plan being to circle around and come across Markland Dam, just a few miles south of home.  Within 20 minutes we were back to a dead stop, this time because of an unknown issue.  No icy bridges on that road, and we were so far back in teh line of cars we couldn’t begin to see the front.  So we sat and tried to wait it out.  For another 90 minutes.  Both of us were about to go stir crazy i think.  Then we decided our time was better spent trying to find another way around, which resulted in us driving all the way to Dry Ridge, KY and circling around, getting back on the interstate near Glencoe, KY, where traffic was moving slowly but otherwise normally.

So Dad and I have already agreed, next year, the day after Thanksgiving, he and I are sitting down with laptops and credit cards, and doing all of our shopping from home.

Merry Christmas / Happy Holidays to those 3 loyals readers I have!

Finally! 2008 is about over…what a hellacious year it has been. There have definitely been several high points, including getting engaged, getting a kitten, getting a Mac Pro, and getting a job!

Yes, you read correctly, I am now employed! On Monday I received an offer at ITaP (Purdue’s IT Conglomerate) for a full-time position within Teaching and Learning Technologies, who I worked with as an undergrad. I will be helping maintain ~2500 Lab Machines, TIC sites, and some of the infrastructure behind them, among other things. I start January 5th and am about as excited as I can be. I’ll have an office, healthcare, sane hours, the whole nine yards; why didn’t I think of doing this 11 months ago?!

Lets go over 2008′s employment history for me:

• January – December: Independent Technical Consultant — Small Consulting Jobs
• January – April: Lab Coordinator — Cyber Forensics Lab (Purdue)
• January – May: Web Application Dev — AgCommunications (Purdue)
• May – June: Web Application Dev — (ETC)
• June – December: Technical Consultant — (FindRefs)
• June – July: Technical Consultant — (InfoComm)
• June – August: Network Software Tech — (Purdue)
• August – December: Teaching Assistant — (Purdue)

Now lets look at 2009′s tentative schedule:

• January – December: Lab/Sys Administrator — ITaP/TLT
• January – December: Ind. Technical Consultant — As Needed

I, personally, can definitely see the upside to this…

So to tie in the post’s title, 2009 should be the revolution I was looking for in that last post. With a stable, long-term, and somewhat generous income, and a plan-able schedule, I’ll hopefully have time to turn my attention to things I’ve been forced to neglect: my fiancé, my Home Theater (I need a new couch, receiver and Mac Mini, the former is dying and the latter has been dead over a month now), my servers (possibly either doing away with VMWare and going back to an all-in-wonder box or getting a decent Dell PowerEdge and running ESXi (or some combination of the two)), and with any luck several other yet-to-be-defined projects.

And Lastly, a quick announcement:

• I’m now a Twitterfiend. You can catch my feed at http://www.twitter.com/peelman

For the ten people who read this, and for both of you who haven’t heard about it through other means:

I have decided to not return in January to continue my Master’s degree. The experience this semester was not as rewarding as I had hoped it to be, ending with me giving up completely on Statistics nine weeks into class, and my ability to care and focus on coursework becoming less and less as the semester went on. I have always had a drive to learn and excel in coursework, though towards the end of my undergraduate degree that was starting to wane, but Graduate School didn’t provide the same feelings I got with any other coursework to date. My ‘A’ that I was carrying in Statistics may as well been an ‘F’ (and ended up being that way), I could not have cared less. I didn’t feel any satisfaction from getting As on homework, or doing well on the first exam. I tried to be excited about doing so well in a graduate-level course, it just never happened. My forensics research class was interesting, but research isn’t really something that lights a fire under me. Perhaps under different circumstances, or with a true into-the-workforce break instead of the 8-jobs-in-12-months scramble that 2008 turned into, I would have been better prepared and more distanced from Undergrad to make the adaption easier. As it is, I was just too burned out from my extended stay in the Undergraduate program to jump feet-first into Grad school.

My uneasiness with classwork, coupled with the odd hours I was keeping (a function of how my days were scheduled) has made this the roughest semester for me in my seemingly endless time here at Purdue. That said, I have really enjoyed my TA position, it has ended up being one of my more rewarding experiences at Purdue. I will admit that parts of it have been a mixed bag: the hours and lack of sleep have contributed to much of my…well, misery is too strong of a word, but general unhappiness with my situation isn’t too much of a stretch. I have met a lot of very intelligent students, and admittedly I was surprised and pleased with the knowledge and competence many of them displayed throughout the semester. To any of those guys (and gal) reading this: I hope you will continue to flourish throughout your stay in NET and that you get out in a shorter timeframe than I was able to manage! I also encourage you guys to contact me if you have questions or need help with anything in the future. One thing you guys will come to realize as you progress through the program is that your professional contact list can never be too long. I am always happy to shed some light on a problem or offer a fresh pair of eyes or advice on something. You can look me up on Facebook or LinkedIn for contact info.

So what now?

At the moment I’m looking for jobs. I’m trying to stay in and/or around Lafayette/West Lafayette to stay close to Kelly while she finishes up her DVM. However, given the current economic climate, I might not have that luxury. Hopefully things will work out for the better and I can get out of this professional slump that 2008 seems to have been for me. Here’s hoping 2009 is more rewarding and satisfying.

I want to say three things, then I will do my best to never mention politics on here again. Well, at least for a while.

1) I want to point out, for those who may not have noticed: When McCain mentioned Obama, his rallied supporters booed, and hissed. When Obama mentioned McCain a fair amount of cheers could be heard. There is bitterness, there is resentment, but I find it sad and completely ridiculous that people boo, especially when their proposed leader was trying to be diplomatic and do the admirable thing.

2) Sen. McCain’s concession speech was the first time I think we’ve heard the real John McCain speak since he announced his candidacy.

3) A quote, from Obama’s Acceptance Speech:

“Let us resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long. Let us remember that it was a man from this state who first carried the banner of the Republican Party to the White House, a party founded on the values of self-reliance, individual liberty, and national unity. Those are values we all share, and while the Democratic Party has won a great victory tonight, we do so with a measure of humility and determination to heal the divides that have held back our progress. As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours, “We are not enemies, but friends, though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.” And to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn: I may not have won your vote, but I hear your voices, I need your help, and I will be your President too.”

– President-Elect Barack Obama, Acceptance Speech, Nov 4, 2008

For the first time in history, the Democrats are now the majority in the Senate and House, as well as having a sitting President. Can we TRY to not fuck this up and show all these conservative assholes what can be done for a country when the government moves in A direction, whenever you think its right or wrong, rather than sitting around on its laurels arguing about things? Argument is good, Debate is good. But there needs to be conclusions reached at some point and we haven’t seen a whole lot of them in my lifetime (however brief it has been to date).

To everybody who got their panties in a wad when it was going around about Obama not using a bible when taking an oath:

Notice where Pres. Kennedy’s left hand is? Unless his bible is in his pants pocket (though i wouldn’t rule that out), we now have one of our most beloved presidents not taking an oath on a bible. and he was effing CATHOLIC.

Somehow I have managed to be so tired and busy lately I haven’t even had time to pop on here and rant about anything. Rest assured there have been many things that pissed me off enough to merit a rant, I just haven’t been able to put my thoughts into keystrokes I have 2 weeks left at ITaP, followed by a week of prep work getting settled in as a TA and getting the forensics lab up to speed, then classes start. Maybe once I’m back to into the swing of things I’ll actually have time to get stuff done…

One of the things I’ve been busy with has been the site for the wedding Kelly and I are now in the midst of planning. Its at www.wedding.peelman.us. I’ve also been busy doing some major architecture changes at home, getting VMWare Server up and going finally, and getting the independent services going. Oh, and i’m STILL unpacking. You would think I would have been done a while ago, but yeah right.

Updated the Wiki here a bit, the theme isn’t *fully* integrated yet, but I’m getting there, it is much sweeter than it was.

The metaphorical “They” there can apply to many right now…

First, I’ll let Matt’s blurb (rogersmj.com) take the front lines on why the media companies have become downright ridiculous.

The next instance of “They…” comes in the form of the Republican party, courteousy of one of the LATimes Blogs.

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Carly is the wonderful lady responsible for the Compaq/HP Merger. She has been in management her entire career, and is a far cry from representing the “tech industry”. I’ll only say this once:

Working for a Tech Giant like Dell, HP, Apple, etc. Does NOT make you a technical expert.

Just like every field, there are the people who do the work, the idiots who stand and watch, and the management who lord over both without understanding much at all (Dilbert doesn’t come out of thin air folks).

Ms. Fiorina is a FORMER CEO of HP. She was dimissed by HP’s board of directors after lackluster performance. But because she has it in her resume, it becomes a tag line that she is an expert in the field and therefore is the perfect person to endorse Senator McCain.

For the “they just don’t get it” tie in, the American public is slowly becoming sick of hearing these endorsements. The middle class is waking up and coming (slowly) to the realization that, holy shit batman, we are being turned into the serfs and lower class. Greater numbers or not, we are so deluded by our search for our own piece of high society that we LET them dangle it just outside our grasp while they make millions from our labor. Rewards haven’t been even remotely distributed fairly for 20 years, while executives hide behind the protections of the government (some created by their money lubricating the gears of the American Law Machine) as well as the promise that its a capitalist society, they are well within their rights, and that anybody who says otherwise must be a communist, socialist, against democracy, etc (sound familiar?). The average CEO makes over 250 times what his or her average employee does (source), and that was 3 years ago. There are some numbers that place the multiplier even higher, upwards of double that.

Take into effect that these people pay nothing into social security (usually), draw most of their salaries from bonuses that let them escape and/or outright evade several taxes, and even then, still pay a lower tax (based on percentage) than the “average” American worker, and then tell me who is getting screwed here. When the Democrats suggest raising taxes for a public health care system to help wrench our society out of the gutter it is in, the Republicans who get to *feel* powerful in office while really just being puppets for whatever enterprise(s) were willing to donate generously to their campaign. (on the note of Universal Health Care, nobody points out that done correctly, it would eventually balance out, given that employers wouldn’t be paying as much for insurance per employee, and therefore should pass the extra cash flow back to the employee to offset the tax increase, but they are set against it since the tax increase would severely affect THEIR incomes in the short term, not yours or mine. Not that we can count on it being done correctly, because our two party system results in constant bickering about who’s right and who’s wrong with nothing ever being suggested about a solution born of compromise, if we need any better example of that, look at Social Security).

Do i think Sen. Obama is going to be the quintessential leap forward in the way politics are run in this country…..meeeeeeeeh…no. But if the American public isn’t as collectively stupid (as they’ve been for the past decade) and gives him a Democratic Congress to work with him, rather than split-ticket vote and give him a Republican Congress to fight with (something the Repubs seem to do out of pure spite) he has a chance to make enough reforms to at least start to heal our broken society.

Courtesy of Gus Mueller:

Adobe Reader 9 is out!

I had a long rant typed up, but I just deleted it in favor of simply saying (once again):

I Hate Adobe.

And also that if at any point in the future I am presented with a way to never use anything related to CS3 again, I’ll take it, run, and never look back.

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Sadly, when the Supreme Court makes such a decision it becomes gospel for lower courts and few will stand to challenge it, even if the bench looks notably different from when the decision was made. That’s the bad thing about legal precedents, and they just set a big one.

My take is that if one was to rape a child, they know that they are raping a child, particularly a child under 12. If one is to undertake such an act, there is a small chance they don’t know the consequences, but regardless, it is effing WRONG on so many levels as to make distinctions not matter. The death penalty is a serious punishment, and should only be reserved for serious crimes, and I think that in this country we both overuse it and don’t use it enough. Rape can be proven via many means, and since this girl reportedly needed to have surgery afterwards to repair damage, not to mention the ridiculous amount of mental instability she might experience later in life, I can see it being justified here, given sufficient evidence, which the local and supreme courts of Louisiana apparently found.

This is the type of “legislating from the bench” that the courts should not be doing. What they just did may not have created a law for such cases, but it did create a precedent, which sadly in our time, is almost the same thing. They just overturned the laws governing this practice in 5 states. So because he just scarred her for life, and didn’t kill her, he gets to live. That’s fair?

Bravo to both presidential candidates for coming out against the ruling. It doesn’t make much difference at this point, but perhaps something can be done about it once Barack is in office

footnote: I’m not saying all legal precedents are bad, there area few that I am particularly fond of (Roe v Wade, Epperson v Arkansas, Miranda v Arizona, just to name a few), but as in all imperfect systems, mistakes are made (Dred Scott, and the case in question here, for instance).