January 2008 Archives
They're tailor-made. The silly giggles match properly. The ugly thoughts heavily fit. The extreme incompetence plainly corresponds. The hostile micro-management closely reflects. The stuck-in-the-past garments horribly echo. Still, style is obviously lacking. They're a muttering, bickering match. They're ugly and their mom must have dressed them funny. They're costly and their dad must have fed them envy. They're perfectly suited for the purpose. They'll agree to service any demand or requirement, as long as they think it'll keep the sugar coming. They're cheap, in a custom way.
She has heard that you fraternize. She sees you respect them and you've earned their respect, unlike her. So she orders you to stop. Do not socialize with them, do not associate with them on friendly terms for lunch or beer, because they are not at your level
, she bluntly states. Thereby revealing her view of people in terms of inferiority. Not brotherhood. She believes she is superior. Not equality. She believes she can manipulate you. Not respect. She's vicious. Not humanity.
Always eager to psychoanalyze everybody, mainly because he's been in therapy for most of his life, the angry man is easily provoked, hot-tempered, and prone to ugly contorsions of the face when he disturbingly pretends to withhold his choleric humor. The most theatrical version will have him holding his irate head with both hands, as if pained by the idiocy of his victims. He alternates between spinning tales, senile ire, boastful rage, and unsubtle bullying. No wonder he has no true friends.
I am not beholden to you. Your sword is broken, your threats are empty, your debt is larger than you think. I bear no gifts, grant no favors, and demand obedience to obligations. You are better off not provoking my ungodly ire.
You wouldn't want to display pathological euphoria, would you? Your elation turned out to be mistaken.
To strike with a heavy blow that tends to beat or smash in the surface struck, or to let fate to The Fates.
Their wordy circumlocutions suck redundantly. There is no roundabout way to say it. Gits!
Her canorous voice pleased my dislodged heart. A little music could soothe my soul. The rich melody lifted my spirit. But the words in those sounds were more than I could take. The enchantment remains, the chants echo.
The nasty tone exacerbated the conflict. The dishonest claims aggravated the dispute. The pendulum swung between severe and worse. The problematic door won't shut.
I'd love to live in rustic hills covered with solitary woods and secluded forests. Trees shelter birds and mushrooms. Groves offer quiet shade when the day is hot. Temperate forests make space for peaceful meadows. Brooks run between rocks and roots. Rumor has it that spirits and deities live there, too. The landscape shapes its own beauty, when forested.
Replete with abundant expletives, we're sated.
Once you get to observe what is actually done, something completely different from what is advertised, your neophyte status is gone. You become a convert to the low-paid school of realism, a wondrous proselyte. No longer a novice, you know that everything begins with vague objectives and chest-thumping lies. Why would you be surprised when new goals are loudly proclaimed, projects silently buried, and experience swiftly ignored?
The plain consequences of an indelible chain of unreasoned decisions, all the wasted wealth, abandoned projects, and quixotic goals are fixed firmly in the evidence of Nature's Book.
Nothing could remove, erase, or wash away such evidence. The marks made are like sediment layers, visible if you know where to look, and impossible to efface.
As for the witnesses, those with undamaged brains who are not zombies, they are incapable of forgetting the abusive manners, the memorable lemming moments. The stains of that performance are unbelievable; the colors are factual.
The morally debilitated ends up destroying or obliterating that which he touches. He blots out any unguarded good.
The stunted mind produces shrill, discordant thoughts. An external observer may spot the occasional, inappropriate giggle, the non-sensical statement, the never-finished sentences. Other signs are noisy arguments without object, shifty eyes, harsh cries of anger, swearing outbursts, cliché-filled babble.
The incompetent mind feels so threatened by the universe and by the presence of other people that it caterwauls in its silent chamber, and incontinently emits bizarre, human-like noise via the mouth.
A call for alacrity, without reasonable cause, is the hallmark of bad managers. Because they feel that enforcing speed will be the proof of their managerial excellence. So when someone who actually produces things expresses a need to think and plan, they'll instead demand promptness and question one's willingness in order to exert pressure. There is nothing cheerful in that demand, there is no concern for readiness, for quality, for long-term consequences.
The call is always an indicator of incompetence or unreasonable priorities.
User-generated content cannot remain a one-way pipeline for online businesses. Not for much longer.
As Dave Winer very aptly puts it: The clearest sign that a company thinks I'm a sharecropper and they're the bossman is that they won't let me move my data where I want it to go. If you give me the power, that doesn't mean I'll use it, btw. It might mean quite the opposite -- empowered to use my data in more meaningful ways, I might be happy to leave it where it is. Imagine if Fidelity wouldn't let you move money to Schwab. I don't imagine too many people would put their money there. Great writing and art work the same way.
That's what a company is actually offering in an American metropolis for the following contribution: database design and SQL expertise; cross-browser compatible Web development with PHP, JavaScript, DHTML, and HTML+CSS; client relationships; reliable, scalable, high-performance 24/7 systems; specialized languages (XML, Java), APIs (JDBC), and frameworks (Ajax, SOAP).
Why would someone with such skills and experience sell themselves short? why should they bring so much to someone who obviously doesn't value their ability to master vast, complex engineering structures; to build reliable, fault-free systems; to design, realize, and maintain the entire operations of a business?
All of that for $16-$23 per hour, should one erroneously assume the work-week is a leisurely 45 hours. What if it reaches 70 hours, as so often happens when engineers are pressured by dishonest management? $11-15 per hour. Before the taxman hits.
Does dog-walking, gardening, baby-sitting, or burger-flipping for minimum wage sound bad? How about a desert island or a mountain cabin? How about shrugging?
Disheveled even without actually sporting any hair. Almost as bad as revealing an unkempt mind via one's artificial smile and disordered activity. Pretending to have a plan, to be an expert project manager, while engaging in disarranged tasks, unkempt micro-management, loose talk. It's like sabotage, a foul layer that insinuates itself into all corners and --like alien goo-- produces disarray, erratic work habits, messy desks, aimless frenzy.
Every convoluted scheme simply participates in the twisted lack of direction. An intricate collection of excuses. A complicated legalistic argument. An elaborate scam. A complex process. Ask not why it easily offends.
For those who are willing, to think.
Clive Thompson (in Wired): If you want to read books that tackle profound philosophical questions, then the best — and perhaps only — place to turn these days is sci-fi. Science fiction is the last great literature of ideas.
When you have a low opinion of their moral compass. It doesn't matter whether they constitute a threat to your values or not. One's fear and anxiety are not the cause of contempt. It's perfectly fine to despise the mean, petty, weak, or worthless --especially when such traits are present in someone who believes in their own excellence.
Obligations have a way of imposing their agenda on all parties, nolens volens. In that context, willingness is not the ultimate cause. Compulsion is. Will determines the propensity to invite a well-defined application of force, such as the State always wields.
Indentured by choice, fearless leaders are but servants to a zombie's whims. Underlings have no validity, no justified existence, if their tycoon loses interest in their machinations. They'll agree quickly to everything he says, fawn over his claims, act submissively whenever they feel he demands obedience and fear. While they affect affection, and shower exaggerated flattery towards the top, they will in turn exhibit the opposite behavior towards anybody else, because they resent their self-imposed inferiority. Since it's all designed to gain favors, to preserve advantages, to perpetuate a scheme, they show slavish devotion, without reason or principles. Most tellingly they adore being the master of a crawling, needy dog -- the perfect incarnation of how they view the relationship of one person to another: master vs inferior.
When a leader decries your negotiation skills, do you denounce him or your victims?
When your management skills come under criticism, do you condemn the peons or your teachers?
When you keep failing, do you censure yourself or the universe?
io9: 
A new scientific research station opened its doors last week in Amundsen-Scott, the southern-most inhabitable spot on our planet. It belongs to the US, and took 20 years and $174 million to design and build.
The fewer people, the better.
I've never done good things
I've never done bad things
I never did anything out of the blue...
A sickening stench of corruption permeates the desolate office space. Ferocious sounds spread over the lowered heads, shrill exclamations pierce the walls, pinched gargles diffuse through the dead space.
The pores of the human mind are what one would expect to be one's social manners, graceful interactions, honest dealings. Not so when it is rotting.
What vile openings to contemplate! Plunging unwashed hands into food platters intended to be shared, ignoring elegant utensils. Avoiding direct eye contact while knowingly spreading lies, squirming like a snake. Exposing decayed body parts, causing desolation by ugliness. Grasping onto the penetrating clichés of trite manipulators, believing that sweet words edulcorate the perception of immorality --that which all open eyes notice brightly emanating from the aura of pedestrian failures. Anxiety and paranoia intense enough to power an escalator through the circles of damnation.
All this shall pass, through at first, then out.
The rabid manager remains zealous, dedicated to a course of destruction, enthusiastic whenever someone can be insulted or a contract broken.
The silly fervor, the retarded passion, the random eagerness all add up to the production of garbage. As the zombie circles, the supporters go silent, the shouts turn to shrugs, the curious crowd wonders how every single chosen goal could be so badly executed.
A vague sense of irrelevance permeates the atmosphere, a suitable response to the decadent thrills of one who giggles while always making the wrong decision.
It's not the novice who demands submission, attempts extortion, steals a banknote, lies with every breath, and denigrates noble acts. Such field of vicious activities requires willful development.
You're no beginner, but you should notice that your intended victims are not newcomers either.
Thomas Telford (1757-1834) was born in Westerkirk, Scotland. Son of a shepherd, he was a stonemason, architect, and civil engineer. He designed and built numerous, significant, lasting roads, bridges, and canals.
The Caledonian Canal is a massive sea-to-sea navigable waterway, connecting the Atlantic Ocean to Inverness and the North Sea. Running sixty miles through the great Glen, with more than twenty miles of canals and locks, it is one and a half times the length of the Panama Canal, and nearly two-thirds as long as the Suez (for which it was the model). Its construction is one of the great epics of modern engineering history, It took Telford almost fifteen years to build...
[How The Scots Invented The Modern World, Arthur Herman, 2001; p. 282]
Conscientious and intelligent professionals tend to mislay the habit of independent judgment, the ability to think apart from conventions, to wander outside of the box. Trained to concentrate on the means, they are ignorant of ends, driven by a self-imposed blindness to drop context and belittle any exception.
They [are] vivid examples of what Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson had warned might happen in an overspecialized modern society, where "the minds of men are contracted and rendered incapable of elevation" --but now at the top of society rather than the bottom.
[How The Scots Invented The Modern World, Arthur Herman, 2001; p. 353]
Minds contracted and rendered incapable of elevation.
Guilt over your calculated wrongdoing is not sufficient: you need remorse, causing anguish and injecting a self-perpetuating feeling of being insane as well as morally wrong, profoundly unfit for human existence.
Don't imagine that there will be no consequences.
Spot on. VDH: At some point we Californians should ask ourselves, how we inherited a state with near perfect weather, the world's richest agriculture, plentiful timber, minerals, and oil, two great ports at Los Angeles and Oakland, a natural tourist industry from Carmel to Yosemite, industries such as Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and aerospace—and serially managed to turn all of that into the nation's largest penal system, periodic near bankruptcy, and sky-high taxes.
It's called plastic for a reason.
It's not natural, non-human, cold, weirdly shaped, unresponsive to emotions, and a sign of vacuous vanity. It's molded after one's decrepit illusion of self.
It's not who you are. It's what you asked someone else to shape you as, so you could appear to others as that which you are not. Significant, but not as you thought it would be.
As Apple announces today a new version of its TV product, I'm reminded that one year and five days ago, I described the fundamental importance of Apple TV in the context of iPod+iTunes vs the music industry: Apple TV incarnates a similar attack on the TV and movie industries. Why pay $50-120 per month for a cable package when one could for much less money subscribe to entire seasons of specific tv shows and download select movies on demand? Apple TV will do to cable channels and DVDs what the iPod did to CD stores and music albums. It doesn't hurt that the device also seamlessly integrates music, photos, and movie trailers.
DVDs aren't dead yet. Apple's movie rental prices are too high (overall making Netflix a better option for movies) and I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop: the integration of a DVR in the box.
Cable monopolies aren't dying yet. A bit of basic accounting (not for CEOs who take fat bonuses while getting rid of productive employees and frantically buy the latest gadgets so that they'll feel relevant to the modern world): if on your Apple TV you rent one movie a week, and three weekly episodes of TV shows (assuming Hollywood writers quit their strike, eventually) you'd be forking over to Apple and its allies about $38 monthly. That's not a good price point compared to a standard cable or dish subscription ($40/mo?). Internet-distributed movies and TV shows should cost between one and two dollars each, at most.
Horrendous giggles, eager aggressiveness, thoughtless negations, reflexive defensiveness, inappropriate unctuosity, immediate lies.
All of these are learnt, vile habits. Most probably deliberate adoptions, self-taught by frequent repetition. It's forced upon one's early character, the fruit of a choice to incline towards evil rather than virtue in social relations.
That inculcation is like a heel that trampled and crushed blank moral slates that were intended to enable humanity and conscience.
The angry outbursts are symptoms of phlegm that has been seeping through that mind over decades. The phlegmatic, apathetic, sluggish activity; the unemotional desire to hurt; the lack of temperament; none of these are distant effects of a mind left to rot on a long-accumulated pile of hostility and incompetence.
The clothes may seem neoteric, but they betray bad shopping taste from the 70s in their origin. In a rather dull sense, one may call them "modern" --to the extent they were recently manufactured when they were acquired and stored in your closet 35 years ago. They don't look new and don't make you look young. They remain newfangled in decrepit minds only.
The obsolete professional repeatedly delivers florid texts. Disturbingly obsessed with flowery language, she forgets that meaning trumps style, that ornate self-contradictions are neither covered nor hidden with flowers. Elaborate decoration of statements that make no sense should raise red flags, marking the beast for elimination --provoking neither emotional fervor nor sexual intensity. You can't sell lies with pseudo-revealing packaging, especially when they're your oh-so-transparent habits.
The squirming recourse to fancy words she's seen in a book --and which she doesn't quite understand-- remains a flamboyant cause for mockery. Brilliant!
I've experienced worse, I think. The worst part while building web sites is receiving page layouts done in Excel spreadsheets. Not even Powerpoint, the favorite tool of management idiots. Excel from sleepless geniuses at 3 am, as if it were interaction design. WTF.
The Daily WTF: I am right and the entire Industry is wrong. ... place variable width frames on either side, with your background star image. Then place the work in center as a fixed width frame of the pixels you so desire. So the top frame is three side-by-side frames. Then the middle work frame has other frames.
