January 31, 2007: Topsy Turvy Day

I went to bed at nine last night! Boy was I tired by the time I went to bed. I went to the A&P north of the office on the way home last night and picked up a few basics. Dominica cooked Chili last night and we actually just ate at home. I got home after seven and was in bed by nine so our night was very short. Oreo was tired after two days of daycare and was more than happy to go to bed early. Dominica stayed up watching DVDs.

I worked from home for a few hours this morning. I got a good nine hours of sleep last night and feel much better today.

Today, in an email to Dominica, I used the term “pre-existing plans.” As soon as I hit the send button I realized that people rarely have instantaneous plans or after-the-fact plans. The term “plan” is somewhat inclusive of the “pre-existing” bit.

My copies of Microsoft Vista arrived today. I won’t have a chance to play with that for some time and I have no idea when I will be able to squeeze it in or on what machine I will be able to install it. Maybe I will install it to the HP d325 desktop that I keep in Geneseo. That is probably the machine where the “least impact” will be felt should the move not be so good for a while. I am sure that Vista will be the way to go down the road but moving over in the first week is always scary. Of course, that is just the first week of consumer off-the-shelf availability. Vista Business Edition – which is what I got – has been around for months now and is widely used. Still, there is a lot of opportunity for things to go wrong. But I am interested to see how it is working and whether there are any major changes to be looking for.

Here is something that Windows Vista users (or potential users) will want to know: If you use Vista with the Aero interface (the Aero interface is the only piece of Vista that anyone actually cares about and is the one piece that works for only a few small percentage of current computers) then your power consumption will increase dramatically as the CPU and the GPU will be driven hard all of the time just displaying your desktop. In a climate of constant moves towards power conservation this is a big step in the wrong direction. AMD and Intel main processors are using less and less power all of the time and all kinds of technology is coming out to make our computers more power efficient and then we go and make the desktop use the power hungry GPU (graphics processing unit) and throw all of that gain away. The upside will be that power consumption of the GPU will now be a focus for efficiency gains so we will look to companies like AMD (ATi) and nVidia to find ways to get great graphics processing without the incredibly power consumption.

In other cool computer news, Peugeot Citroen in France has chosen SUSE as their desktop and server OS and are installing 22,500 SUSE machines! That is a huge Linux installation.

I was planning on heading home on the early side but I got caught doing little work here and there until my big evening work hit and then I couldn’t leave. So it is a late night for me but that is okay – tomorrow is my work from home day and I was in on the late side this morning anyway.

Tonight’s plan is leftover chili from yesterday. Not only did we make a break yesterday and cook at home but today we are totally going crazy and eating leftovers! I can barely recognize us as the same people who lived in our apartment last week. It must be topsy-turvy day.

I didn’t get to leave the office until after eight 🙁 That is pretty late.

Today I learned about a musical instrument that I had never heard of before: the Tromba Marine. It is an extremely rare and very old musical instrument that is rumoured to sound soft of like a trumpet. I can only imagine that getting a marine trumpet today would be very expensive. I managed to find a book describing the instrument’s organology.

We ate dinner while watching a “new” show that we are trying out: Jack of All Trades.  Jack of All Trades is a seriously quirky show starring Bruce Campbell as Jack – a spy working for Thomas Jefferson and sent to a small island in the South Pacific to thwart the international army of Napoleon.  The show borders on the bizarre but clearly falls on the bizarre side but just barely.  I read in reviews of the show how they carefully used only characters who were alive in 1801 and could have, in theory, run into each other on this small island.  However, by the second or third episode they were using long dead characters like Benjamin Franklin and Blackbeard and obviously there was no research being done at all about the time period.  From the strangeness of the show it would be a stretch to imagine anyone doing any amount of historical research for such a loose comedy.  What would be the point?  The show is tough to get into but it is so completely “out there” that it is enjoyable and you just have to love Bruce.  The show was made in 2000 for syndication and only lasted a single season.  It is hard to imagine any television stations picking up the show.

We were off to bed around ten.  Tomorrow I will be working from home.

Two Days with FogBugz

I have been aware of FogBugz for some time as I am a regular reader of “Joel on Software”, have read several of Joel Spolsky’s books and have listened to interviewers with him from sources like IT Conversations. Andy and I have been looking for a good bug tracking package for some time and being daunted by the complexity and the difficulty with installing BugZilla we decided to look into FogBugz.

Andy took the first leap and bought himself a copy of FogBugz. Now I should point out that FogBugz is a commercial software package made by Fog Creek Software here in New York City. FogBugz is licensed on a “per-user” level which works very well and it should be noted that your initial purchase includes a license for the administrator and a license for one developer. The package also comes with a ninety day, no questions asked guarantee so that you can feel confident trying the package even though there is no simple trial download.

Once I had purchased the package I was able to choose to download the versions for Windows, Mac OS X (deprecated PowerPC only) or UNIX. I found this strange as Mac OS X is every bit as much UNIX as Linux, BSD or any other flavour that I could choose from and yet the Mac OS X version of the software is apparently completely different from the UNIX versions as it doesn’t even get supported on the same processor architecture. I selected the UNIX version as that is our primary platform and the one that we are able to support the best (we can also deploy small applications like this cost effectively on small, low resource virtual machines very cost effectively.)

Once I selected the UNIX option I was faced with a very small list of supported platforms. This is extra discouraging as the Mac OS X PowerPC platform is getting specific support instead of focusing on a good, broad UNIX strategy in general. The UNIX selection was dismal and disappointing. I don’t expect many supported platforms but from a product like this I have certain base expectations which include Red Hat RHEL 4 and Novell’s SUSE 10 as a bare minimum with hopefully support for Solaris 10 and Ubuntu 6.06 LTS. These are the four primary enterprise class platforms that the UNIX community is going to use with Solaris generally being used only by larger businesses. (I am not making any statements about the cost advantages of Linux vs. Solaris – I personally think that Solaris can be a great choice for small businesses as well I am just stating that small businesses seldom have Solaris servers.) For most businesses Red Hat RHEL 4 is the only platform needed and if this was the only supported platform I would understand. However, the actual support list is possibly the saddest list of supported platforms that I have ever seen from a commercial business application.

These are the UNIX platforms that are officially supported by Fog Creek Software for FogBugz: Red Hat 8 & 9 (these are very old version from the time when Red Hat did not have separate server and desktop editions showing Fog Creek’s penchant for running their products on desktop devices – current products supported by Red Hat are many generations newer than this with RHEL 2.1, 3 and 4 being the only reasonably new versions and only RHEL 4 being installed in most shops today and RHEL 5 due very soon), Fedora Core 3 and 4 (FC 6 is current and Fedora 7 is due very soon), Debian 3.0 (which has been classified by Debian as “archived”,) FreeBSD as new as 5.4 (but they are on the six series and have been for years now,) Gentoo 2005 (obviously not current), Mandrake 9.2 (Mandrake is no longer a product – it was superseded by Mandriva a few years ago), Mandriva 2005 (once again, old,) SUSE 8 and 9 (but not 10 which is the current series (10.2 is current) and 11 is due soon), Solaris 8, 9 and 10 and Ubuntu 6.06 LTS. Of this entire list only Solaris and Ubuntu are considered to be serious and current server operating systems.

The problem with FogBugz on Solaris is that only Solaris on Sparc is supported and not Solaris and x86. This is one of the reasons why small companies tend not to use Solaris because its native platform is rather expensive and specialized. This severely limits the usefulness of Solaris as a platform for many customers. It is also completely out of character for Fog Creek to support one extremely enterprise platform while everything else is the total opposite. The only operating system option that remains as a sensible, broadly available platform is Ubuntu 6.06 LTS. This is the one option that actually makes sense. Ubuntu is fairly popular as a server platform (although not in the league or Red Hat or SUSE it is at least a very serious choice) and version 6.06 LTS is the “enterprise” edition of Ubuntu that is both current and is available with support from its parent company Canonical. However, Ubuntu has yet to gain serious traction as a server OS and varies significantly from the common enterprise server Linux options so your usual IT staff will have a bit of a learning curve to switch over to it which is not what you want when deploying an important system such as your bug tracking system. You want simple and stable and you want something that fits into your current corporate architecture.

The other operating systems available under UNIX, that is not Solaris or Ubuntu which we saw are seldom good options unless you are big enough like us to have Sparc servers or have staff that have already standardized on the very unpopular Ubuntu Server, are all, except for FreeBSD, desktop targeted systems, especially Fedora (the “experimental” version of Red Hat) and Gentoo, and all are horribly out of date most of the options being several years old. So even those operating systems that once upon a time had the availability of support options from their makers (like Red Hat 9) have passed their End of Life by many years. No self-respecting systems administrator (or anyone who values their jobs) would ever take the kind of risk necessary to install such ancient, unsupported systems. These system are years past the end of their security and stability bug fixes and running them would leave your IT shop very vulnerable unnecessarily. This selection worried both Andy and I very much because we began this process by doubting the long term support and availability of the FogBugz product. Even if FogBugz continues to be available we have little confidence that Fog Creek will continue to make it available on modern, supported operating systems. We can only assume that Ubuntu 6.06 is the last version of Ubuntu that they will ever support and that in two and a half years when Canonical no longer supplies bug fixes to 6.06 that we will be stuck with no supported options whatsoever. Perhaps more worrisome is the impression that Fog Creek Software has moved into a “holding pattern” and is not making current software because they are no longer looking to innovate but just to get as much money as possible off of their past work and will just shut down when that is no longer paying enough to keep the lights on. The platform selection available is extremely indicative of a company on the verge of closure. If they do intend to be in business for a long time they are definitely not running the company that way.

In addition to poor operating system selection and horrendous version support, FogBugz also only supports Linux and FreeBSD operating systems on x86 32bit! I realize that many shops are currently still using 32bit Intel and AMD architecture systems and my plans are to perform my installation no a 32bit system but many shops have invested in AMD64 technology with Opteron processors or they follow-on Xeon processors with EM64T. In either case many IT departments have moved to 64bit and do not want to be installing 32bit products anew. More importantly many shops may have been planning on including FogBugz on a large intranet server that is pre-existing. Often today this server would be a 64bit server and FogBugz is not supported in this arrangement. Of course, no shop is running any of the “toy” operating systems that are supported by Fog Creek on any current production servers so the availability of existing web servers is irrelevant.
That was our first tip that something was wrong. Windows is the only broad platform that seems to have any serious level of support and it is, IMHO, clearly the wrong choice for a product such as this. Windows has its place but for a small application such as this it is not it. The only thing that would make me reconsider that position would be if FogBugz leveraged the very impressive ASP.NET platform available on Windows 2000 and 2003. That brings me to my next point.

Possibly the most troubling aspect of FogBugz is that the application is written in Microsoft’s very old Active Server Pages or ASP platform. ASP is available on Windows products still today but it is old, slow and no longer developed. It is also not significantly available on any other platform nor does anyone really care, as far as I know. I have never heard of ASP being considered a competitive advantage for any platform and I was not aware that any serious shop was still using the technology for new products. ASP was a moderately acceptable technology in its day but that day was many years ago and much of the current web based product architecture has matured since then and ASP was long ago relegated to the annals of web history. ASP is not a fast, stable or robust as ASP.NET. I have read Joel Spolsky’s defense of using ASP in Fog Creek products in the past and I have personally found his arguments to be thin and questionable. The thing that leads me to believe that ASP is even more of a bad choice than it seems is because ASP is not available, at least not natively, on Mac OS X or on any other flavour of UNIX.

On the UNIX platforms inclusive of Mac OS X FogBugz is written using PHP. PHP is a scripting language used on the server side and is very similar to ASP. The differences are that PHP is currently being developed, vastly more widely used, can be accelerated through many different means and is far more robust and feature rich. It is also platform agnostic so you can write in PHP for many platforms without needing to port your code or at least with only minor porting needs. Instead of writing FogBugz in PHP and making it available on every platform using the same code base Fog Creek writes FogBugz in ASP and has the PHP code generated by the ASP. It is good that they are using an automated build for this process but it tends to make one think that the PHP being generated is ancient and not kept up to date at all. It also tends to lead to limiting powerful PHP to the rather wispy feature set of ASP. (I can just imagine how embarrassing it is for Fog Creek when interviewing programming candidates when they tell them what tools they will be working with!) From the supported UNIX platform list it is clear that FogBugz only leverages features of PHP available up to version 4.0 which is quite old at this point and there are many significant enhancements that have occurred since then that should be being taken advantage of by any current production software of this nature.

Our final shock, prior to actually touching the software, was the list of supported databases. On the Windows family there are three options: Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL and Jet. SQL Server and MySQL are both big, enterprise class databases and are very reasonable options. Supporting Jet is just silly. Jet is a “toy” desktop database used by Access when the people working with Access don’t bother to go to SQL Server (which is freely available on every platform using Jet.) Jet does have the advantage of being file based instead of using a Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) which means that for really tiny installations of FogBugz where you want it to take up as few resources as possible that FogBugz does not run a database server and instead just stores everything in a file. This would work for really tiny shops, I guess. But personally I would go to SQL Server even if for just a single developer. SQL Server 2005 Enterprise is free and a really great product and extremely easy to use.

In the end, all three supported databases are very reasonable options although if there is ten minutes being put into Jet I would question it. But whatever, features are good things. What I am surprised by is the lack of support for PostgreSQL which is less popular than MySQL but is still quite popular and gaining in popularity all of the time. PostgreSQL is an enterprise database that is often considered to be superior to MySQL and is freely available, like MySQL. It is common for software the supports one to support the other. With a good database abstraction layer supporting many databases (Oracle, DB2, Sybase, SQLite, Ingres, etc.) would be very easy indeed. MySQL and PostgreSQL are very good option, though, because of their broad support, licensing terms, stability, features and cost. Both can be used for an unlimited number of users without having to pay per-user for licenses. In a large installation of FogBugz it could become a cost issue using Microsoft SQL Server as the user licenses would add up very quickly (in a large installation the free version would no longer be adequate and the enterprise scale and cost would be needed.) MySQL and PostgreSQL offer their enterprise features for free so smaller businesses can enjoy similar benefits to companies paying for expensive Microsoft SQL Server.

For these reasons I would have been happy to see broader database support as adding additional databases should be relatively easy. I am not asking for every database to be supported but one or two additional choices would have been nice. As it happens we would have chosen MySQL in either case but I can easily imagine shops that would have liked other options.

All of the factors that I have mentioned so far seem to point to FogBugz being designed thinking that it would not be purchased by serious IT shops with real systems administrators and real servers. It really appears that they are envisioning this as a product being purchased by people who are developing software at home, on Windows and aren’t particularly worried about stability, speed, features or availability. In which case making this product a web based product seems to be a strange choice. A Windows native application would seem to make more sense. It light of the issues that I have mentioned it is hard to imagine very many actual enterprises or serious businesses being willing to even evaluate this product as it would violate IT department standards in many situations and falls beyond the range of “best practices” anywhere.

Companies need to realize that a bug tracking system is almost always going to be used as a critical corporate function even if it is just being used for the software developers to use themselves. No developer is going to be effective if their bug database is hacked or lost or unavailable. The cost of the potential lost developer time is not worth the risk of a product like this, IMHO. I just find my developers to be highly valuable and using amateur software to support them is a risk that I cannot justify.

All in all it is a dim picture before we even attempt to install FogBugz. We chose Ubuntu 6.06 LTS running on VMWare Server 1.01 which means that we have to use MySQL as our database.

After finally getting a supported platform in place it was time to begin the actual process of installing FogBugz. FogBugz is a commercial product and have certain expectations for the installation of a product that I am purchasing, more or less, for its ease of installation. There are several competing packages on the market, more notably BugZilla, that are free and open source. The biggest drawback of using these packages is that we were unable to find one with a good installation system so this was a driving factor to try FogBugz.

Unfortunately we discovered that the installation process was not as simple and straightforward as one would hope. Instead of providing a standard RPM package or even a DEB as the supported platform is Debian based Ubuntu the software was only available as a tarball which is not a preferred distribution format for enterprise environments.

If the only issue with the distribution was that it was a tarball (a file that has been “tape archived” and then compressed) it would be relatively minor. Several major products are distributed this way although I recommend against it as enterprises like a simple, standard deployment system (like MSI on Windows) that allows for easy tracking of deployed applications. But the installation is not that simple and requires a bit of manual intervention, file copies and more.

Given the amount of manual work that had to be done and that there was no package management system being used it was quickly discovered that I had to spend a long time dealing with manual package management that should not occur under Linux. It is similar to dealing with a Windows system with manual DLL installs except this is Linux and there is a system to automate all of that and it was not used. Very unprofessional. The installation process was not documented even for the supported platforms so I had a lot of trial and error to do to get the product up and running. It seems as though I am the only person to have ever installed this product and that they were just guessing that it would work properly. Not encouraging.

I finally did manage to get the package installed and working with the exception of the PHP acceleration detection. No matter what I did that portion of the FogBugz software would not work properly. As there was no proper documentation I was working blind and, as far as I could tell from my limited experience with PHP caching and acceleration, the FogBugz software was not working properly in its detection routines and everything else was working just fine. But this caused me to never get a “clean” install but always with errors.

Once the system was installed and running we tried it out for a day. The package itself is fine but not ground breaking. It is a nice package but I found it to be rather unintuitive but I am not a full time developer and perhaps for someone who is using this all day long the interface is perfect. I cannot make any good statement about the product itself. The interface was far better than other products that we looked at – much cleaner and simpler and ready to use out of the box.

In the end, after discussions with the development lead who’s call it was to decide to keep the software we finally decided that we were not happy with FogBugz and would return it. If the package installed without manual intervention or even if it was predictable and simple to reinstall I believe that his preference for the interface and ease of use would have made us decide to keep the product. But having our IT support have to support a new operating system just for this one product, have it licensed per user instead of free and open source, written in ASP and so difficult to reinstall that we could not provide reasonable assurance that it could be restored after a failure made it a dangerous product that we could not recommend to any serious business who will rely on the functionality. It is a good start but Fog Creek Software needs to, in my opinion, think of this as a tool for businesses and not as a toy for single person start-ups and they may have a new customer in us. But the focus from the ground up appears to be as a toy and not as enterprise business software and we can’t justify the time and money necessary to make this software work.

In the end we returned our license and got a refund.  The customer service at Fog Bugz was awesome.  They asked some questions and took our responses and seemed genuinely interested and concerned as to our reasons why we couldn’t use the software as well as our suggestions, like supporting Red Hat 4, that would make us even more likely to use it in the future.  The customer service was so good that it made me wish that I wasn’t returning FogBugz and tempted me to give it another try.  But in the end the software just isn’t ready for prime time yet and we are going to move on to BugZilla as ugly and difficult as it is.

Cannibal Cuisine

It came up at lunch the other day about the choices that cannibals would make in selecting the people that they ate. I pointed out that cannibals would want to eat vegetarians. Everyone thought that this was very strange but I have a fairly strong argument for this belief.

Cannibals have health concerns like anyone else and as such need to make careful dietary considerations. For reasons of convenience, let us group cannibal food into three general categories. These categories will be vegetarians, omnivores (people who eat vegetables and meat but not human meat) and other cannibals. Of these three, vegetarians should be a cannibals top choice, omnivores the second and other cannibals as a last resort.

Why would a discriminating cannibal want to each vegetarian meat before other types of meat? In reality, the arguments for eating vegetarians are fairly obvious. Just like free-range, corn-fed chickens are the most desired chicken meat for omnivores, vegetarians are naturally healthier, leaner and are less likely to carry life-threatening parasites and diseases that are transmitted through meat. Cannibals have to be extra cautious about this as their food source is 100% parasitically compatible with them – not a factor that normal omnivores have to worry about.

The last type of meat that a cannibal would want to consume is the meat from other cannibals. Cannibals are the most likely category of all meat sources to be carrying a wide array of human to human transmitted parasites and diseases. Many of these diseases are practically isolated to cannibals as they can only easily be transmitted via consumption making cannibal meat extremely dangerous – rather like eating steak tartar made from mad cows.

Probably the hardest thing about cannibals attempting to eat well is that healthy food is harder to catch. Vegetarians are by their very nature more likely to be health conscious and will be more likely to have a regular exercise regimen. These heart healthy, fit individuals will generally be able to outrun and outlast a chase from cannibals who have been eating fatty, disease ridden meat for any length of time. Cannibals will find the most available food source to be of the “couch potato” variety. Any extended “meat of potatoes” diet will surely lead to heart conditions.

In the end it is a struggle for any cannibal in today’s world to maintain a healthy diet. While food sources continue to become more widely available and even though vegetarianism is on the rise cannibals continue to face hostility, armed prey, disease and parasitic pests.

January 30, 2007: Sleep? What’s sleep?

I got home from work and Dominica and I went right out to IHOP for dinner. I was in a good mood and just felt like going out and taking the night off from work. We came home after our scrambled egg skillets and watched Are You Being Served? while I worked on writing a script that will automatically install BugZilla onto CentOS because it is way too complicated to be doing by hand should I ever need to do a rebuild and there is simply no documentation on how to do this anywhere. So I figure that someone will benefit from this once I am done with it.

I went to bed a bit after eleven and woke up, completely rested this morning, with but two hours of sleep! I got out of bed at one thirty in the morning. I was up for about an hour and a half and then decided that it was a mite too early and decided to just lay in bed for a while “reading” the book that I have been working on “In the Wake of Madness” which I finished this morning.

I got completely out of bed a little after four, but without having slept a wink since half past one, and got ready for work. I have some work to do that is perfect for the early morning when I am pretty much guaranteed to be alone with nothing to do. There is especially little to do since I am not officially covering the phones so there is someone already in the office taking care of that so I am free to just do server builds in peace.

I got into the office just after seven but immediately discovered that there was an outage that prevented me from doing the work that I had come in early to do which was not useful at all. So that was a waste of getting up nice and early. I could have stayed in bed with Oreo who was very sleepy after having had a birthday party at day care yesterday.

Doggie Paradise has posted the Halloween Party Pictures from a few months ago. It was Oreo’s first Halloween party and he loved it. There is a picture of him in his costume on the costumes page and there are several group pictures that he made it into that I am reposting onto Flickr to make sure that we preserve. We now have one hundred pictures of Oreo on Flickr!

Josh TXT’d me this morning to let me know that he is coming down to Newark the middle of next week. He doesn’t know his exact schedule yet. He should be down for a few days. The building is a lot more complete than it was the last time that he was down. This should be rather a shock for him.

I learned today (from reading Dilbert of course) that Penn and Teller (the illusionist in Vegas who have poor cat handling skillz) promote smoking because they claim that there is “no evidence that second-hand smoke is dangerous.” As second hand smoke is the same as first hand smoke without a filter they therefore are either stating that filters are dangerous or, more likely but even less reasonable, that first hand smoke isn’t bad for you at all and all of those people that you know personally who died from smoking, um, didn’t. Let’s face it. Smoking is so insanely bad for you that we would be lucky if there was a single person reading this blog who didn’t personally know someone who died from smoking induced cancer or lung failure. And think of the incredible number of people that we DON’T meet in our lives for exactly that reason. All those people who died before we could meet them. Maybe the lesson here is not to smoke. Maybe the lesson here is that two-bit Vegas performers define scraping the bottom of the social barrel. Maybe there is a lot to be learned today.

I started listening to David McCullough’s “The Johnstown Flood” today. I love David McCullough books. The story of the great flood at Johnstown is particularly interesting as the town was founding by a long lost relative (named John) and because it is located close to Pittsburgh where I once lived.

I came across a letter written to Scott Adams by a very adamant reader who was extremely upset with Scott for having suggested, in a comic-strip no less, that fish feel pain and that by doing so he was risking the collapse of America’s outdoor traditions and conservations practices. Apparently Americans can only exist happily and not kill things by inflicting horrible pain and wounding poor, defenseless animals. The person who wrote in (who withheld his name for obvious reasons) actually infers in the letter than pain is a human feeling and that animals don’t feel pain and that they have no rights – none. This person clearly is a scary, sadistic person – for any living creature to “need” to hurt another! This isn’t an argument about food supplies, health or anything of the sort. This person is lashing out because there is a one in a million chance that the population might catch on to animal torture practices and realize that people who take pleasure from killing, maiming and torturing one living creature are only the tiniest, unmeasurable distance away from being serial killers. In fact, the only mental difference between the two is the fear of going to jail for what you do. In both cases it is a matter of a living creature taking pleasure from the pain of another. Or, in Christian parlance, taking pleasure in the destruction of what God has created. The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?

Coincidentally I just finished reading “In the Wake of Madness” today which just happened to be about several men, specifically whalers – people who make their living killing gentle sea mammals on a daily basis – who are considered fine, upstanding citizens at home who, once out to sea away from the laws of the land, turn to racist serial killers who use their positions of power to torture innocent non-Europeans to death. It was widely known that the Massachusetts whaling fleet had a very high percentage of captains and mates who lost all concept of humanity when out to sea. What set the whaling fleet apart from other sea-faring jobs was the constant killing and death that was involved in the job. And with whales, unlike with fishing, the killing of a whale is a very personal experience where you have to spend a lot of personal time struggling to take the life of a large and highly intelligent creature. “Moby Dick”, often considered to be America’s most important novel, deals with the obsession one man has with needing to take revenge on a whale – apparently the inability for humans to separate the suffering of men from the suffering of animals is a critical thread in the very traditions of our country.

A new robotic parking garage is about to open in Chinatown. Now, before I mock this parking garage because you just KNOW that I am, I want to state that I am a big fan of the concept of robotic parking garages. They save tremendous urban space and lower the cost of city life. They just make sense. However, after Hoboken’s failed robotic garage fiasco the Chinatown facility was quoted as saying “”It is a complete virtual impossibility that damage can occur.” according to the Associated Press. A “complete virtual impossibility” – does that imply that it isn’t just a partial virtual impossibility which would actually make it rather likely? Is he trying to say that he isn’t lying when he says that it isn’t likely that your car will fall, upside down, onto the street below? I’m not sure what exactly they are implying but the one thing that I am absolutely sure of is that they are NOT saying that the garage is actually all that safe. (Remember, the cars are EMPTY in the garage. Do NOT leave pets or children in the car. The Hoboken garage dropped one car six stories and another car four stories!)

I found a great old video by the Apple team when they decided to start licensing the Mac platform to clone manufacturers. The really funny thing about the video is how completely convinced they were that by making really low quality Mac clones that look like PCs (read: ugly) that they would suddenly own the desktop computing market. Check out “I Think We’re a Clone Now“. They go on and on about how much better PowerPC is than PC and how CISC is awful and all that. Now Apple Macs are just clones of Intel PC boxes running CISC Pentium III enhanced processors. Lame. Now from the same time period: John Cleese in Compaq vs. “That Trendy Computer”.

I had a pretty good day today. I really appreciate my long day off yesterday. I really needed that time to just let my brain melt-down for a while.

I read while a bit of Scott Adam’s blog today and there was a lot of good stuff but one of the best is Wedding Favors. This really sums up what I think of wedding favors in general and, I believe, what everyone thinks of wedding favors in reality but some people have this big running practical joke going about them.

I worked until six this evening which was actually a pretty long day without even feeling like it. Eleven hours sitting at my desk. Not to bad. I am running to the grocery store on the way home and picking up some basic supplies. Dominica is planning on cooking at home tonight. We will probably just take it easy this evening as we usually do. Our plan is to head to Geneseo on Friday night – that is just three nights away. We have packing to do and we are going to go to Buffalo to visit Dominica’s cousin who has just gone into the hospital there a very long way away from home and family.

I am excited that I have no work to take home tonight so I don’t have to even log onto the office from home. Yay. I can just relax and enjoy some Are You Being Served? which I need from time to time.

January 29, 2007: Cashier in the Cannibal Supermarket

I am back to my normal schedule this week and I got to stay in bed with Oreo until Dominica was ready to go to work. Oreo was excited thinking that it was going to be a stay at home day and he didn’t want to go to daycare with Min. As soon as she turned her back he ran in and hopped back into bed and put his head on me hoping that I would let him stay home today. It was very cute.

Before going into the office I sat down and paid all of the bills. I hate paying bills. And there are so many to pay. I am looking forward to having the house be sold as that will eliminate several of them. Today I had to pay homeowner’s association fees (which have gone up considerably since we bought the townhouse – about twenty percent up!) and the taxes which are never fun. We are still recovering from Christmas. Paying the bills is always close this time of year. And Dominica had time off during December so her paychecks were smaller than usual and my paychecks are smaller at the beginning of the year than they are at the end so we took a big hit the last few weeks in addition to having more than the usual number of bills.

I had to run over to FedEx to send out some stuff this morning. It is great having a FedEx directly next door. That makes life so much more convenient. There was actually a bit of snow on the ground this morning. I wasn’t expecting that when I came down from the apartment.

I have decided that XKCD is one of my new favourite sites to visit. I read it at work and I have its RSS feed subscribed in my feed reader so I get it as soon as it comes out now. I found it thanks to Wil Wheaton who points me in the right direction of all sorts of cool stuff. XKCD had a comic recently that perfectly describes my wife: Dominica’s comic and strangely just one comic later they had the perfect one for her college roommate: Jenn’s comic. One of my favourite of the older comics there is the Donner Party of Four comic.

I have an important announcement today: Rockstar Juiced Energy+Guava is AMAZING! I am totally drinking two of these today. My head is really close to exploding. (Strongbad: Your Head Asplode)

Today is my day of discovering someone who has the exact same humour as me (Randall Munroe of NASA) and crossing that experience with a LOT of caffeine and fruit juice. I am sitting in my cubicle giggling and attempting to get some work done. But mostly just giggling. He even mentions my favourite SNES game!

After several hours of scouring XKCD comics I finally found the comic that best describes me. This is Scott Alan Miller in a Comic! If you don’t believe me, go back and read the SGL Goed to DisneyWorld posts and listed to the podcast.

Copy Protection - Controlling Your Thoughts
I decided that after working, more or less, straight for a month (I haven’t really taken a day off since December) that I have lost the ability to be productive and decided to completely and totally blow today off. And… I was successful. I managed to do just about nothing. (As productivity approaches zero…) Boy do I feel better. Or maybe that is because I am high on caffeine. But my stress level is way down today. Paying the bills helps that as well.

I once heard a conundrum on the radio saying “There are three words in the English language that end in ‘g-r-y’, one is ‘hungry’, one is ‘angry’ – what is the third?” In reality there is no third work in the language that ends in ‘gry’. This isn’t funny nor is it clever. It is one of those things that dumb people ask when they need to stump smart people and can’t come up with anything. Like five year-olds ending any comeback with “I know you are but what am I?” – even when it doesn’t make linguistic sense (does it ever) and simply shows an immaturity resulting in a lack of ability to speak English properly. So finally there is a comic that answer the question “What is the third word?”

And another (can you believe how many comics I read today?) – here is a simple explanation of string theory that finally explains what is going on.

I ordered some free CDs from BMG today (by free I mean I paid for them previously and now selected what they can send me for the money that they already have of mine.) A lot of you may be surprised that I, Internet / computer guy, still buy physical CDs and do not get my music as a download. But this is caused by the fact that I am also a music guy. I don’t want low quality (or lower than CD quality) downloads of my music. I want the highest quality that I can get – CD or DVD-Audio or SACD are even better. But CD is awesome because the quality is really high and I can quickly and easily turn a CD into high quality Ogg Vorbis files to play on my computer or into MP3 files to play on my portable music players. I am not limited to the quality that they allow me to download and I don’t have to do cross format compression ruining quality and size all at once. I also OWN what I buy. It is mine. I have a piece of plastic to confirm my license to use it. I have better quality of sound, more features and better archiving and longevity. My music collection will be intact and I will be able to easily pass the entire investment onto my children without any DRM getting in the way or any bizarre format / hardware requirements making it illegal for them to use it. If I wanted my music to cost $1 per song and only get to use it for a little while I would just get a satellite radio. I want to know that the things I buy are mine until I die and then I can pass them on. My music is an investment – just like my movies – I buy them because I want them to be mine to use whenever I want. Otherwise I would rent them and pay a flat fee for each time that I watch them. Someday there will be lots of good, DRM free music and movies in insanely high quality, standard formats downloadable online but until there is I will continue to go for the REAL “geek” formats or openness and freedom and enjoy my high-fidelity music while everyone else enjoys the squawk of AAC compression. Enjoy. (By the way, MagnaTune and The PodCast Music Network offer tons of awesome downloadable music today is open formats but not mainstream music very often and not high-fidelity formats so far.)

From reading comics today I learned that in 1979 US President Jimmy Carter (the “Peanut President”) was “attacked by a swimming rabbit“. The incident was minor but it was mentioned once too often and eventually became front page news. A White House staffer decided to attempt to make the incident sound more “believable” by saying that it was actually a “swamp rabbit” – that, of course, did not help the situation. XKCD has a great comic to commemorate the event. Maybe the rabbit was just looking for some peanuts.

I decided that after reading through the entire XKCD collection from beginning to end that I had sufficiently killed the entire day and that it was six o’clock and time for me to leave the office. I feel great and happy and ready to take on the world – or at least dinner. I feel so good, in fact, that I intend to go ahead and post early and blow off the evening as well and probably go somewhere for dinner (caffeine makes you hungry you know) and not have to wrap up the daily before going to bed.

Oh, and if you like XKCD be sure to support Randall by buying some t-shirts. They make great gifts. I wear XXXL. My birthday is coming up soon.