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This is just funny.

One can see why I always masquerade as Steve when I head down to the Google office in Boulder.

On Tuesday Comcast took our office internet offline all day so they could “upgrade our user experience”. Yesterday and today the internet connection has been up and down pretty randomly– it’ll work fine for 20 minutes, then die for 5, then be up for 10, then down for 7,…

Good times. At least we can play some foosball while we wait for it to come back.

Finally, this afternoon I’d had enough of this so I called Comcast. I got transferred to the business department, which was stupendously unhelpful, and finally hopped over to the technical support department. There I spoke with a very nice lady who offered such helpful advice as:

Comcast Lady: Did you unplug your modem and plug it back in?

Me: Yes. Twice.

Comcast Lady: Did you clear your Temporary Internet Files in Internet Explorer?

Me: I don’t use Internet Explorer.

Comcast Lady: What about your browser cookies? Did you clear those?

Me: Again, this isn’t a browser thing. I don’t have internet access.

Comcast Lady: But is Internet Explorer having trouble connecting?

Me: Please understand me. I’m not using Internet Explorer, or even Windows. I’m trying to connect to remote servers with SSH, or ping, or anything at all. And it’s failing.

Comcast Lady: Perhaps you should unplug your modem again.

Me: Yes. Thank you. I’m sure that’ll take care of it.

I finally just gave up, and resigned myself to the fact that the Comcast-powered internet is going to be a dog today.

There are so many things about Corporate America that I don’t miss, but pretty high on the list are meetings and conference calls. Right now I’m on the phone listening to a conference between Google and Salesforce, and it’s amazing to note…

1) How many people are involved in this call. There must be a dozen people dialed in, and only about three of them are actually participating in any way. Several of them are “account managers” and “project managers” and whatnot, which means basically they just oversee things but don’t actually do any work. Maybe they need conference calls to justify their existence somehow.

2) How long it takes to do anything. We’re talking about how to do, for example, some data migration work. They’re bouncing around things like “Well… we might be able to develop a preliminary spec next week and put together some initial documentation the week after that and scope the programming work the following week and get it going after that.” What’s amazing about this is the actual work will probably take a week at most, but there are three or four weeks of paperwork and discussions and conference calls just like this leading up to it. Sometimes I just want to jump into the fray and yell, “Come on guys, I’ll just slam out the code this afternoon and we can move on with our lives!”

3) How no one is willing to commit to anything. Everyone is using vague terms and hazy deadlines as a way to shirk responsibility and make sure no one can hold them to anything later. Of course it makes it impossible to know when anything will happen, which in turn means no one can plan. Again, I just want to say, “I’ll do this part and I’ll have it done next Tuesday” or something, just so we have an actual deadline.

Perhaps best of all, they want to have weekly calls (just like this one) so we can do the same thing all over again.

I guess there are different kinds of people in business: the men of action and the men of meetings.

Thirty-five articles of impeachment against George W. Bush were read into the Congressional Record yesterday by Congressman Dennis Kucinich of Ohio. It won’t make a difference, of course, because the Democratic leadership of the House has already gone on record saying impeachment is “off the table”. It’s too bad, because in the words of the American Freedom Campaign:

We’ll see what comes of this, but my bet is a big fat nothing. Too bad.

Obviously not content with their naked body scanners, the TSA has now officially announced that starting in a few weeks, airline passengers will no longer be allowed to pass through security without showing identification. From the TSA announcement:

There goes my standard procedure of refusing to show ID in exchange for a fun pat-down. Now I can’t even do that… I guess I just have to say “Gee, I must’ve left my ID in my other pants.” Or, more likely, simply not fly on airlines any more.

How this improves security is, as usual, beyond me. This directive clearly isn’t about terrorists at all– since any reasonably intelligent terrorist will have either a legitimate ID or a well-faked one. Rather, the directive is aimed squarely at those people (like me) who feel it’s not right to be required to show ID, and therefore refuse to do so simply for ideological reasons. It’s those people who the TSA is attempting to shut down.

Los Alamos National Lab is running a supercomputer called Roadrunner that has broken the “four-minute mile” of computing: the petaflop barrier. This puppy cranks through just over one quadrillion calculations per second.

Perspective: if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day.

That’s fast.

Zack lost both of his front teeth in the past three days, and he wanted to be absolutely sure the Tooth Fairy gave him what he was due. So after tucking his teeth safely under his pillow, he made a little card to set beside the pillow, just in case the Tooth Fairy didn’t know where to look.

Luckily for him, the Tooth Fairy is pretty savvy about these things, so he got two shiny quarters.

Yay, the TSA has officially decided to roll out their millimeter-wave airport checkpoint scanners, which essentially create a “naked” image of the person in the scanning machine. It’s not quite like paging through Playboy, but it’s a fairly high-resolution photo at the skin level.

Homeland Security’s Clark Kent Ervin (his real name!) said:

Fearmongering, whee!

What’s perhaps more frightening is the reaction of some airline passengers who were asked about the screening devices. Eileen Reardon of Baltimore said:

No, Eileen, actually you don’t have to go along with it. You can refuse the screening (resulting in a pat-down, which is marginally less invasive) or you can simply refuse to fly. That aside, the culture of fear that’s been built by our government and the companies profiting from it for the last seven years simply continues to astound me. People who would be appalled by a stranger grabbing their breasts or taking voyeur photos of them seem to have no trouble whatsoever with airport security screeners fondling them and watching them from a remote, enclosed, private room.

From a rousing discussion on Slashdot:

First they renamed my alma mater. Now they do this kind of nonsense:

Umm, what? You’re required to pass a test about copyright law, and then the university will kindly let you mess around with P2P software?

The sheer idiocy of such a thing notwithstanding, I can’t imagine how the campus network administrators will be able to prevent five thousand fairly smart engineering students from using P2P software in their rooms, completely independent of any university oversight. Encrypting traffic, using non-standard ports, and even spoofing MAC/IP addresses are three trivial ways to circumvent The System.

Boy, things have changed since my days there, when we used our 14.4 modems to connect to the campus mainframe (which, of course, was running VAX). Good times.

Tonight I had to drop the bomb on a client.

We’ve been working on a project for almost six months, and it just keeps getting bigger and bigger, and the end is tantalizingly close but we finally realized we’re never going to get there because this guy keeps adding more to his list. So I wrote a long e-mail explaining to him that we’re basically going to have to bail on the project, or he’s going to have to agree to severely restrict what he’s asking for. It was a hard thing to do, but necessary.

The bummer about the thing is that it’s the biggest single project we’ve ever done, so I hate to walk away from it, but at the same time I have to protect my company and the sanity of my guys. Hopefully things will turn out all right in the end.