Entries in Life

Someone passed this article along: “Are You Noticing Nerd Fatigue?“

First of all, the people who work on computers are generally geeks. I know, a lot of people think geek and nerd are synonymous, but they just aren’t. Trust me, I saw American Splendor last night. Toby Radloff is a nerd. Harvey Pekar is a (comics and music) geek.

So, what about this fatigue thing? Mark makes an argument for centralization. I would’ve thought that we’re beyond the “centralization is better” fad, but I know a lot of IT guys like the idea. Keep the users dumb.

Further, he argues that productivity is negatively affected by “nerd-wannabees”, but measuring productivity is a slippery game.

While your non-IT staffer is answering someone’s technical questions, he could have shuffled two or three pieces of paper!

Of course, we neglect to look at how many more pieces of paper are being shuffled now because the “nerd-wannabe” was there to answer a question immediately instead of going to the help desk. Maybe as many as four or five more pieces of paper got shuffled for a net savings in paper shufflage of two.

What a spammy headline!

The last time I offered Gmail Invites, I just gave them away. It was a little overwhelming since I had so many takers. This time, I’m making it more difficult. Perhaps even a little tasteless.

This time, anyone who wants to get an invite will have to click here, give OptinRealBig.com your old email address (which, I’m sure, they’ll spam to death) and complete one offer and show up in my queue as a completed referal. This’ll get me a free iPod and put you in line for one as well. If you are leary about this, you might want to read up on it — especially how to do it without a credit card.

But remember that whatever email address you give them is gonna be spammed. You’ll be able to get off their list, but you’ll probably get an initial deluge of spam.

(Interesting story about getting off of spam lists. I’ve heard it said many times that you should never use the unsubscribe links in spam. A friend of mine had just lost an employee and was looking over the guys mailbox on a daily basis, but soon gave up — the ex-employee’s email address was getting upwards of 500 emails a day. Since my dayjob was knowing about spam and how to stop it, I asked him to forward me the email. After a couple of weeks, I had managed to unsubscribe from most of the email that the address was getting. So use the unsubscribe links. Most of them work.)

When’s the due date?

Second Half of February. Of course, they intially told us February 14th (Valentines Day), but I think that is the date they give all February babies at first.

Do you know the sex?

Nope. Too early to tell yet.

What do the other kids think?

They’re excited. Violet will be “de-throned” as the baby in the family, which, I’m sure will be frustrating to her. She gets away with way too much as the result of her cuteness.

We were feeling left out.

My cousin in Rochester, Jeremy, had a daughter last month. My friend in Indianapolis, Jeff is waiting for his first child to arrive any minute now. So, I guess now is as good a time as any to announce that number four is on the way here in Akron.

In stream-of-consiousness order:

• Perspective is a facinating, frustrating thing. It is nearly impossible to alter another person’s viewpoint by arguing them down — their perspective is their experience and their Truth. To communicate a different Truth to them, you have to give up and speak in their language, translate your understanding to their perspective. Unless, of course, they take the first step.

• Gentoo is very, very sticky and I must delete the Gentoo partition from my laptop immediately. Something like the Hurd would be a lot safer as an alternative OS (since I have less chance of making it work). Even Windows XP doesn’t suck up my time like Gentoo does. That’s how they get the users. It is obviously deficient when compared with Debian or even RedHat (unless you run a lot of software compiled straight from CVS repositories). But once you’ve spent an entire weekend compiling binaries just to get Desktop in a somewhat usable state (who knew that Firefox took that long to compile!?!), you have an emotional investment.

  Some relationships are best ended when you first discover that they is going to take up an abnormal amount of your time. For Gentoo and me, it’s time to cut and run.

• In Paul Grahm’s latest, he says hackers find it unbearable to use bad tools. Which is why I’ve had such a hard time dealing with JavaScript. Till now, that is. I’ve got this thing about mixing logic up with data. Which is why I despise PHP. Sure, I’m behind the times and you can do clean PHP and whatnot, but the bad taste lingers on.

• Gnome saves the day with enforced typing breaks. Now that I’m an old man (30-plus!), I’ve got the beginnings of aches and pains. I know I should take breaks every so often to alleviate this (I’ve even got a note from my doctor), but it’s hard to remember. So, now I’ve got Gnome forcing breaks on me every 30 minutes. (Emacs’ type-break.el does something similar, but it doesn’t force the break and I use a web browser occasionally as well as the random terminal window. So an all-Emacs solution isn’t quite right for me. Shocking, I know.)