August 2005 Archives

Ok so Space Zorro has gotten a bit of a revamp. I've decided that T-shirts are a necessity, and been looking at doing some screen printing so I was trying to take the old Space Zorro design from a couple years ago and make it work. Alas the image was made super small because the two source images that I found on Google Images were very small. And so the image didn't scale well to t-shirt size.

Times change and with more Zorro movies of varying stripes and more astronaut pictures on the Internet I give you the new Space Zorro.

And here's a T-Shirt Preview.

The T-Shirt will be black (at the request of Mr. Moffitt), and will feature some sort of catchy quote and the SpaceZorro.com URL. As you may be able to see the image still needs a little modding to work on a black T. I might make catchy quote on the front and Nick's quote and the URL on the back. Or perhaps I'll skim the Space Zorro database for quotes. Anyway please send me catchy Space Zorro-esque catch phrases.

(I've just realized that SpaceZorro.com is no longer registered, and how this horrible oversight went unnoticed is sickening to me.)

So I got word back from Google today. Unfortunately I'm highly qualified, but I'm not a strong match for the Google Team.

Which is ok. Sure on one hand there's free commuting to Mountain View, free meals when at the office, working for a big popular company, and getting a steady paycheck. On the other hand I'd have to get up at some time in the morning, go to meetings, be on call[1], probably work with people who think they know everything, and have to go to Mountain View everyday. I probably don't make the best case in the world, but I'm pretty certain that working at Google would be pretty close to tense and not real fun.

I think I have much more firm opinions of Google now. Firstly I think that it's an elitist organization pushing an elitist Computer Science agenda. Before this year it was fairly unheard of for Google to interview anyone without a BS. Then there is the Summer of Code where Google pays Open Source organizations and developers for completing projects over the summer. The catch is you have to be a student to be an eligible developer, and the payment is only $4500 for the whole summer (which if you're working full-time works out to be about $10/hr.)[2]

My biggest complaint is that for us regular computer schmoes (like Erik, Erin, Ryan, and other smart people I'm sure I'm forgetting) you really didn't care about school and you just jumped in and started working on this computer crap. We didn't have some guy stand up at a black board and explain what O(n log n) means, we read Knuth, or Wikipedia, or something and figured it out. We learned how TCP/IP works by reading the RFCs. We don't need no steeking piece of paper.

We may store pointless trivia about The Simpson's or William Shatner in our brains, and not what the exact sequence of every minute event in a network transaction, because these things are funny and network stuff can be easily looked up.

Besides this gripe, there is the fact that Google was funded by the US Government ("Because the ideas were developed at Stanford under a government grant, the university owned the technology and had a legal obligation to share revenues it generated with the inventors.", Mining gold in the ivory tower), and is the same problem I have with Universities that patent drugs with government money. They take our money and then use it to build multinational companies that don't help us.

So I'm a little upset about Google shooting me down. Actually most of the problems I have with them I've had with them for a while. I thought they were getting better. I guess they are not.

Footnotes

1. Technically I'm always on call right now too.
2. Also I wonder about taxes on that. How the heck is that handled? I would totally think that would be a FAQ item.

If you read Powers but haven't been keeping up you may not want to read this or follow the links (ie Shannon.)

So the cover for the new issue of Powers was released last week. The Deena Pilgrim/Clockwork Orange thing really scares me. I think Bendis may be totally screwing up a good title.

Some of you may know or not that we are going to Italy. Hoorah! So we got our tickets this afternoon.

Shannon is really happy.

We're Going To Italy!!

It has been the weekend of parents and broken computers. Yesterday we had what Shannon had lovingly dubbed "The Dinner Party of Dooooom." Her mom and aunt, and my mom and dad were all visiting, so she slaved away in the kitchen while I made jokes about taking grass (the kind that grows in your lawn) samples to the DNA Lab. Today we all went to Alcatraz and had some dinner in Fisherman's Wharf. In short we got to be tourists in our own town.

Sometime Friday our Linux firewall decided that it was going to stop communicating with its hard drive, which killed our local DNS and DHCP services (English translation: you couldn't just plug into the network and have everything be configured magically for you), but the rest of the system was doing fine since it was just using RAM. This computer gar caused a little franticness for the dinner party as we hadn't pre-downloaded all of the recipes needed, but all was well. I also couldn't get email which worried me slightly as $CLIENT had a weird problem on Friday that could be Real Bad.

I just now got everything back together. We've upgraded the firewall from an old Cyrix box to a newer Dell box that I rescued last year and had been sitting in the closet off. So now I hopefully can focus on productive things like working and writing silly programs that calculate the maximum capacity of a laundry room.

Why do all of my computers break within weeks of each other? Why do hot dogs come in packs of 10 and buns in packs of 8?

What happend to my comics (link stolen from Finnie)?

So I may have missed this somehow in my subscription sheet from Comix Experience, but I doubt it. This looks like something that Hibbs or Lester would definately have an opinion on. Even though the story looks atrocious, I'm strangely captivated by it conceptually somehow.

It's really sick though. I can't believe how long I've been staring at it. What in the world am I looking at here?

This work speaks to the Right. They have an underdog mentality that seems to permeate them. This is really well documented and a good source is Thomas Frank's book "What's the Matter With Kansas?". A big part of this is what Frank dubs the plen-t-plaint. In short it's the Right's ability to catalog and never forget any slight against them in the complete history of humanity. And by any slight Frank mean anything at all. Talking about the plen-T-plaint book "Unlimited Access", by Gary Aldrich, Frank says:

"Unlimited Access is essentially a long list of minor protocol infractions observed by its impossibly straight-arrow author while he worked in the Clinton White House. Aldrich ticks off the bad manners he notices among the Democrats in the White House cafeteria, taking umbrage at the guy he once saw eating yogurt prior to weighing it on the cafeteria scale. He clucks primly at George Stephanopoulus's messy office... He suspects that people are hiding something when they're happy to meet him; he suspects that people are hiding something when they're unhappy to meet him."

Added to this the author's of the comic are feeding their demagogue's egos by making them the heroes of the comic, and their foes the villains. Seriously now, Vice President Michael Moore. Ok stop laughing.

The covers that ACC Studios is showing off of the books are bits of entertaining story themselves. CYBORG Hannity! MOTORCYCLE REBEL Liddy! OLD MAN North! Wha? Why is North an old man with a cane? Are Liddy and Hannity slowly secretly sucking the life out of the man? Are they hoarding their SUPERMAN CYBORG TECHNOLOGY from him? Did he sell all of his share of cyborginess to some foreign power in exchange for a metric ton of opium? I guess the only way to know is to read the damn thing.

The most painful part of this story is presuming that Gore actually won in 2000 (note: He did win.) Ok, let me fess up. It's totally true that if Gore was made President we liberals would deny every person in the United States First Amendment rights. I have the secret file right here in my jacket. Wait-a-minute, no I don't! Because it wasn't going to happen you freakin' nutjobs. Oh yeah and we'd be kissing Osama's ass for twenty year. Riiight.

The UN is represented in a panel showing happy representatives from France, Canadia, Spain, and Germany. On the last page of the preview the police officer is clearly French. It's good to see that xenophobia is alive and well in this modern era. Actually I don't think it's xenophobia. The intention here is malice not fear.

As for the art, I like the covers. They actually look real good. I don't know if it's the fact that I really can't agree with the politics or outrageousness of the story (I know I know it's "satire"), but the interior art is malbona. The actual drawing is adequate. But it seems to my eye that the coloring is off (what is up with that deathly pale girl on this page, and the inks seems thick when it should be crisp (CYBORG-Hannity's arm in the fourth panel.)

Overall I just want to see where they're going with this very silly tale. I may even go out of my way to find a copy of the series to read. And then promptly destroy all of the evidence. Possibly by wiping my ass with it.

This is not a completely original thought, but Liddy is a convicted felon, and North was a convicted felon until his conviction got overturned (it's not clear on the Wikipedia article if all of the felonies that he was convicted of were overturned or if it was just one of them.) Liddy has advocated killing government agents, and North was involved with selling weapons to Iranians funneling the money to Central American guerillas (which I'm sure under today's microscope are two TERRRORIST(TM) groups.) Why are these guys "heroes"? I don't get it. I'm all for flawed hero characters like in Batman, Astro City, and Watchmen. But I have the sneaking feeling that those aspect will surface in this book.

The term "Orwellian nightmare" is used in the press release for the book. Can we expect (or hope) that our "heroes" have a 1984-style ending? My guess is no.

'We're going do something that would normally cost [$20 million-$30 million] and try to do it for $1 million.' Lucas said he'll shoot the series on a Sony digital camera system that anyone can buy at an electronics store."

http://www.scifi.com/scifiwire2005/index.php?id=31858

So what this means is that George Lucas is going to be making Star Wars fanfilms and conning the television networks (probabaly the SciFi channel) to pay him money to air them.

Pure Genius

The police organization's behavioral profile says such a person might exhibit "multiple anomalies," including wearing a heavy coat or jacket in warm weather or carrying a briefcase, duffel bag or backpack with protrusions or visible wires. The person might display nervousness, an unwillingness to make eye contact or excessive sweating. There might be chemical burns on the clothing or stains on the hands. The person might mumble prayers or be "pacing back and forth in front of a venue."

(courtesy of your Friendly Neighborhood Bruce Schneier)

Last month some guy from Google emailed me about getting a job there. I forgot about it until yesterday when he called me up. After some persuasion I figured I have nothing to lose if I apply there. So today he calls back for the pre-interview, which went ok I guess, because I'm now in Round 1. That's my Google Story.

This here is my new blog.

I am leaving the old livejournal behind, and starting with this one here on my own server.

Notes (if you care):

• Yes I know this machine's name is jenna. It's full name is jenna-jameson.sf.dasbistro.com. Because I hadn't heard of anyone else using porn star names for machines I decided I'd do it. I could in theory use a fancy alias like sams-super-blog.sf.dasbistro.com but I really don't want to.
• Since I really want people on LJ to stay in touch somehow I've set up an RSS feed channel for this blog on LJ called dasbistro_sam. Currently LJ is being a bit slow with pulling down the syndicated file, but trust me it will work. Just add that as a friend and you can keep abreast of what I'm saying here. (ha ha I said 'abreast')
• This blog is called "A Blog in the Closet" not for any sexual reason whatsoever. I am a perfectly fine heterosexual male in a beautiful relationship. The machine that this is hosted on is seriously in the hall closet, right next to the cat box. If you come over and ask I'll show it to you. It's just some Dell Optiplex that someone was throwing away.
• Parts of this will probably be vastly more technical that before. I'm looking into making a low-tech and high-tech feeds into LJ (and anyone else that pulls a feed for that matter.) Of course you could always just ignore the boring stuff.

Ok, now my back is getting sore and I need to put another server in the closet. And this apartment is turning into a hellhole and I have to clean up for guests.