Imagine my shock to see Roger Waters' name on a CNN by-line, but there was a link to it on the CNN home page: Pink Floyd founder: Can you spare a dollar? I've known Roger to be attracted to causes, always a little uneasy with the wealth and fame his career has brought him and looking for a way to give back. I wasn't surprised when he joined up with his old Pink Floyd mates for Live8.

And he makes valid points. Poverty is widespread and rampant, and not only affects places like Africa, but here in the US as well. From a security standpoint, those who live in poverty and despair are a ripe recruiting ground for the disaffected, people who would like nothing better than to strike back at those they see as responsible for their plight. From a health standpoint, poverty is the breeding ground for some of the bitterest plagues of the 20th and 21st century: Ebola, AIDS, malaria, etc. From a human standpoint, how can we sleep knowing that others are suffering so?

I am not a bleeding-heart by any stretch, but I've done my fair share of suffering and spent a lot of time being poor. This is the kind of thing that touches me personally, because but for the grace of God and country, I would be amongst them...

As usual, this xkcd comic is funny: Internet communities as D& D map.

Wellington Grey brings us this peek at the inner workings of the typical Slashdot user. When you analyze it, it's not a bad representation of how things work. Mind you, I think too much emphasis is put on the effect of work... but that's just me.

I think this speaks for itself: Nugent: Gun-free zones are recipe for disaster. On the one hand, you have to admire his stones. On the other hand, there is a tiny kernel of truth. Frankly I don't think the answer is as simple as he makes it out to be, or as obvious as everyone thinks it is.

My wife got one of those urban legend emails from a co-worker about typing your PIN in reverse at an ATM to summon police. Of course I had to tell her it was not a reality, though reading the Snopes article, I began to wonder just why it wasn't? They sighted the fact that banks don't want the expense, that people would have a hard time transposing their PIN backwards, and that by the time police were alerted the person and perpetrator would be long gone. But then again, what if you did have the presence of mind to type in your PIN backwards, and a call did go out to the police, and by doing so you triggered a special surveillance system in the area of the ATM which took video from various angles of the whole area surrounding the ATM? It sounds like you have the potential to save lives and more importantly generate evidence of a crime that might come in handy later. It makes no sense to have some kind of universal number, since crooks would know about it and be wary of you trying to punch it in.

As an aside, xkcd.com has a funny cartoon about Snopes.com.

With all the acrimony over race and such of late, I thought the following song apropos:

Alien Shore
Counterparts (1993)
Rush

Words by Neil Peart, Music by Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson

You and I, we are strangers by one chromosome
Slave to the hormone, body and soul
In a struggle to be happy and free
Swimming in a primitive sea

You and I, we must dive below the surface
A world of red neon, and ultramarine
Shining bridges on the ocean floor
Reaching to the alien shore

For you and me --- Sex is not a competition
For you and me --- Sex is not a job description
For you and me --- We agree

You and I, we are pressed into these solitudes
Color and culture, language and race
Just variations on a theme
Islands in a much larger stream

For you and me --- Race is not a competition
For you and me --- Race is not a definition
For you and me --- We agree

Reaching for the alien shore

You and I, we reject these narrow attitudes
We add to each other, like a coral reef
Building bridges on the ocean floor
Reaching for the alien shore

For you and me --- We hold these truths to be self-evident
For you and me --- We'd elect each other president
For you and me --- We might agree
But that's just us

Reaching for the alien shore

My resistance to change, especially change I see as unnecessary, is pretty high. I successfully avoided cell phones, SUVs, MP3 players, and Paris for as long as I could, before breaking down. And now it has happened again.

I own an iPod.

Mind you, it's a Shuffle, and I got it free (I should say my wife got it free) for purchasing an obscenely large amount of furniture. And so it came to pass that an Apple product graces my life.

I'm finding it pretty decent so far -- 1 Gig, good sound, the shuffler is adequate, though not great. I have iTunes installed but do not have an actual account and have no intention of purchasing music from them; I have a pretty significant CD collection which I can use to keep my new acquisition full. I say, it beats the MP3 player on my Motorola phone, but that's not hard.

Despite the acquisition and the evidence of my eyes, I don't think I'll be turning into a Pod Person anytime soon. I can manage to walk the streets of NYC without an oblivious stare on my face and am still as vigilant as ever. I try to keep the volume down to avoid permanent hearing damage and still enable me to hear ambient noise, which can be your savior in The City.

We'll see how this works out -- god knows the kids would love to have it if I decided I didn't like it anymore.

Now this is funny!

If you work in IT, Marketing, Sales, just about any industry today, you work in a cubicle. I won't go into my usual harangue about them, because they are now ubiquitous and not liable to be replaced anytime soon. They allow employers to pack larger numbers of workers into smaller areas, and thereby save a little money on office space. And if you believe the economists, productivity has gone up, though I hardly believe that has anything to do with the fact that we sit only three feet from our co-workers.

What gets me is how the profusion of cubicles has caused the blending of what used to be very disparate parts of companies to be melded together. For example, I, a web developer/engineer, am seated next to a large conference room which is heavily trafficked. My floor holds not only my development group, but the server folks, Intranet folks, sales people, media people, and higher ups. I am surrounded by a sea of non-technical people. And that's not necessarily bad, except that the non-tech folks aren't the most curteous lot sometimes.

As I said, I sit not five feet from a conference room -- at least three times a week I'm subjected to the hoopla surrounding some conference call, where people file in, punch their numbers into the phone, and sit yelling into the phone thinking that the people on the other end can't hear them. Invariably, they leave the door open for a period of minutes, allowing the cacophony to drown me, making coding impossible. Sometimes after a meeting they hold little confabs not two feet from me.

And then the main entrance to the floor is not 20 feet away, and invariably the receptionist is not there and someone forgets their security badge and just has to get in, which leads to repeated tapping on the glass with whatever will make the most noise. We also have media types here, and sometimes they shoot bits of footage in the reception area or the hallway. It gets like Grand Central Station around here (which is ironic given my proximity to Grand Central Station).

The non-tech folks don't have the courtesy to realize that we tech folks have work to do, work which is somewhat important to them, for without our maintaining the website and tracking metrics, they're jobs might up and disappear. I know it can't be perfect, but just once I wish they'd see me sitting here typing away and show me a little common courtesy.

I've been a NASA booster (no pun intended) since I was knee-high to a grasshopper; I watched them put men on the Moon, send up Skylab, build and launch the Shuttle, mourned the losses of so many good people in The Fire, the Challenger Incident, and the Columbia Incident. I thought my beloved space program could weather anything -- and now this, an astronaut about to be charged with attempted murder.

In the early 60's, NASA's astronauts were lionized as American heroes. As time passed, their squeaky-clean, All-American image tarnished as the stories kept swept under the rug made their way out after the success of the Moon landings. I don't think that being an astronaut has the caché it used to, and frankly the public is not interested in them as public figures anymore. That is, until this.

It doesn't surprise me though. Despite the extensive screening of the astronaut selection process, a loose cannon was bound to get in. Lisa Marie Nowak, in letting her personal peccadillo become front-page news, has done more to hurt NASA than all the exploding rockets they've had to suffer through. This whole incident, from start to finish, will drag NASA through a public-relations mire that will not wash off so easily. Rockets are dangerous -- they blow up, people die. But when someone you entrust with the safety of others and the nation's prestige blows up, the fallout is much wider. Now, people will not only question the necessity of going into space, they'll wonder just what's going on up there on their dime.

I don't know what good can come of this, but I sure hope there's a silver lining in here somewhere.

Imagine if you will, a vending machine. The vending machine contains snacks and beverages that your typical office worker would enjoy. It also has slots for coins and the usual bill reader.

Now as we all know vending machines are traps. Inevitably they will take your money, you will not get what you want, and the chances are pretty good that the note you leave on one will be ignored by the technician who comes to service it ("It stole my money and didn't give me my Ring Dings!").

But you can get amusement from them, watching co-workers trying to wrest something from the machine. The best is when someone tries to use the bill reader to purchase something, only to have the bill come back out. I watched such a display for a good 5 minutes today, as someone went through at least 3 different (and perfectly acceptable) dollar bills trying to get the machine to accept one. I suspect the process is a lot like what goes on with a slot machine -- you keep trying until you get something for your trouble. I tend to think though that'll you'll have a better chance getting something out of the slot machine.

Murphy's Law for IT: Systems will inevitably break down the day after your maintenance guy goes on vacation.

He hasn't been gone 24 hours and we've had: 1) a server quit working, 2) a user loses network connectivity to the network for no apparent reason, and 3) the firewalls go wonky.

In keeping with Pet Peeve #1, we have this follow-up installment, which is similar in nature: printer paper. When you work in an office with shared printers which get heavy use, there is always the problem of the printer running low on paper. Most printers nowadays have a visual indicator which shows you the amount of paper left in the tray, and there is always the ubiquitous blinking light that comes on when the paper tray is empty.

Now what makes this peeve especially heinous is not just that people use up the printer paper without replenishing the supply. What really gets me is when I load the printer, invariably a quarter of it is instantly used printing out jobs that have been queued for god knows how long! What's worse, apparently these printouts were not terribly important, since the owners did not go to the printer, see that their printout did not come out for lack of paper, and then load the paper themselves!

Not to go all tree hugger here, but I think people print reflexively nowadays. They don't really need the printout, but somehow they can't shake the idea of converting documents to paper. I mean, seriously, do you print out code, ever? I used to until a few years ago, then I realized I was just wasting time and resources. I don't print out web pages I find interesting, but email myself the links; assuming the link stays good, I can refer back to it any time I wish.

So the next time you go to print something, ask yourself if you really need it on paper, or if this is just a holdover reflex from the days of line printers and green-bar.

CNN is reporting that the theory that liquid water is behind the plumes jetting up from Saturn's moon Enceladus' south pole may not be accurate. "In an alternative view published in Friday's issue of the journal Science, other researchers propose that buried ice clathrates -- not liquid water -- are responsible for releasing the towering plumes through a sudden tectonic shift in the crust that causes cracks in the ice and gas to vent." The reported presence of water, hinted at by results from the Cassini probe, had set off the thought of life beyond Earth. The presence of water elsewhere on Enceladus may still hold out hope for those believing the theory.

Mondays are invariably bad -- this is a given. However yesterday has to rank right up there with the worst Mondays I've ever had.

To start, my 20-month old daughter is sick and was up till the wee hours, so sleep was at a premium. I overslept (never a good thing when you have a 2 hour commute) and was in a rush to get going. I told my wife I was taking our youngest son (stepson really, but I don't make that distinction) to the bus stop. When I went to get in my car, there was a big stick in my driver's seat. I didn't give it much thought; we have two boys and boys collect things like sticks and stuff. I suspected it was just somebody hiding someone's "lucky" stick in my car.

After dropping my youngest son off, I returned home to get my things. When I got out of the car, I glanced down at my hood and then got the shock of my life. Someone had scrawled the words "THIS IS YOUR SONS FAULT" on the hood and I recognized the coloring of the letters as belonging to the stick. I noted that for the most part the words were simply drawn on the hood, but there were some other scratches that looked like actual damage.

Well, needless to say, I was livid. I've been trying to sell the car, as I need to cut down on my payments and generate some cash. This was not going to help. I ended up emailing work to tell them I would be late, then waiting around for the police to file a report.

Now, our older son is a bit of a hothead, has an air of superiority about him, and a temper (all inherited from his birth father, and that's a tale I need to write a book about!). He gets in trouble, not a lot, but sometimes his behavior has been inappropriate. He gets picked on, especially on the bus, and we've had issues concerning that that had be chatting with the asst. principal. Our other boy is a as sweet as pie -- the brothers are like night and day.

Bottom line: someone who knows where our oldest son lives and doesn't realize I'm not his birth father left us a little present. To say I'm pissed is an understatement. To say I'm further pissed because I don't know who did it, when they did it, or why, is an even bigger understatement. I want to find the miscreant and/or miscreants and mete out punishment. I want to be able to dress down their parents and tell them what a lousy job they are doing. I want justice.

Sigh. Can't wait for 2007. Things have to get better.