Working the factory always seemed to be more about keeping yourself from stapling your fingers than producing goods for general consumption. The first one was an immediate concern, whereas the latter was somebody else's problem.

We made seats. If you ever rode the Greyhound up in the Tri-State Area, chances are you've sat on my workmanship. We covered the whole process, from making the metal into pipes and bending them to build frames, up to upholstering the cushioned frames.

There were no gringos working Upholstery. When you can make 10 dollars an hour flipping burgers you don't care much for minimum-wage jobs that involve heavy machinery. My team leader and I were the only ones who spoke enough English to communicate with the Floor Manager. The task, however, was further impeded by his strong Missouri accent and the ever-present stink of bourbon (right around the corner stood The blue oyster -- "Best Louisville Cooler this side of the '24!"), so Gerardo would make me come over whenever he had to talk to Jake. We'd compare notes later until we worked out some common ground. This fact undeservedly improved my status among the rest of the workers.

I started work at the factory after dropping out of Engineering School. One too many F's in math made a pretty convincing argument that my path in life lay elsewhere. I promptly decided to become a journalist. As it turned out, I would be proven wrong once again. And again. Many, many times. Consistently. Back then, though, there were matters of importance to be taken care of. Like the School Loan money.

Prudence is something you develop with age and patience. I had neither, so I spent most of the day asking people personal questions. The guys eventually took a liking to it, and adopted a fatherly attitude towards me.

Lalo was from Michoacán. He had a huge family back home (no one ever spoke of "México" -- it was always "home" or "mi tierra"). Of all the people working the production line, Lalo was the only one who ever expressed the desire to come back. It was always the same: Sigh. Inhale. Eyes up. Now...close them! -- "I tell you kid, one of these days I'll just up and take all the money I've saved, tell my wife to pack her tiliches and we'll go back there and put a convenience store right around the corner of my parents' house. Now that's good business, you know? people always need the kind of stuff those stores sell. You just can't go wrong with a convenience store. Nooo sir..." -- then he'd go back to stapling cheap leather to square wooden boards (I never did find out what kind of seats those were -- my best guess would be they were those little stools drivers place at the front of the bus).

- "If La Migra ever comes knocking, you just go over to the güeros' side and pretend you're working, kid. You look like them. They should leave you alone".
- "Well, I wouldn't know about that. But you should definitely give it a try, Lalo"
- "Hahaahaaha!! yeah, I reckon I'll do that, kid". Lalo had the nopal painted on his face. He was as mexican as the tortilla and looked the part, too.

Javier was from Jalisco. When he was not being deported he was busy getting back into the country. He spoke of the border as his own personal revolving door. Javier worked the metal cutter with Leonardo, who was something of a phenomenon: the only mexican on the Floor who actually had a greencard.

Leonardo showed up badly beaten one morning. When we asked him about it he just stared at the ground and mumbled "The police. They didn't care for my documents. Just beat the shit out of me. Said if I spoke they'd send me the fuck away. Fucking cops...". No one asked again.

Back then, Bill Clinton was "not having sex" on the big chair at the White House, Desert Fox was a furry quadruped, Ally McBeal was singing to Barry White and the Teletubbies were shooting up the charts. I guess folk would call those "pre 9/11, more innocent times". Truth is, I don't know that anyone was innocent at the time. Most people seemed to me like they had a hidden agenda which usually clashed with mine. Therefore I saw everyone as something of a bunch of jackasses.

I never did know if the police really did that to Leonardo. I don't think it matters. I only know it made sense at the time. In a country that didn't want us there, every figure of authority was suspect, every social role distorted. You didn't ask questions because there was no point in getting any answers.

We just tried to go on.

Submitted this but it got rejected. Posted here for your enjoyment:

For years, Web Developers the world over have wanted the ability to run multiple versions of Internet Explorer in one machine for testing purposes. Now, Joe Maddalone has found a way to do just that. The kicker? The only thing preventing the versions from coexisting is a specially named, blank text file. So much for browser inextricably linked to the OS, huh? The method was discovered after analysis of a IE update Microsoft released so developers could test the planned changes due to the Eolas lawsuit.

UPDATE: Conveniently pre-packaged files available here

Anchors are sweet. But they can be troublesome. After taking a look at modulo 26's current Daily Flight, and recognizing the topic as one of my pet peeves, I was extremely pleased to see their suggestion for improving the anchor functionality. It's elegant and well thought out. However , I think the javascript that they provide could use some improvement.

Andy's code seems straighforward enough, but it has a big problem: It requires the use of two different id's for each anchor. One for the anchor itself (the one that will be used in the href) and one for the visual cue element (the one that contains the arrow / pointing device). This could rapidly become a hassle in a large document that includes links to multiple sections. We'll try to provide a simpler solution.

Our main intent is to make life easier for the designer, not necessarily for the developer (that's what geeks are there for after all, right?). Thus, we won't mind if we make a mess of Andy's nicely simple code. Also, we'll toggle a class attribute instead of an inline style. Because we can (and it scales better).

First off, we eliminate the need for a separate id to identify the visual cue. This allows us to have a standard cue element that we can add to all anchors. It will look like this:

<span class="alt">&#8658;&nbsp;</span>

The "alt" class is my css class for "alternative" elements. It has display:none; set, so it's not rendered by the browser. The ugly number is the right-pointing arrow character "" (you may see a square if your browser is not using Unicode). The other thing is a non-breaking space.

The lack of id introduces a new problem: what if there's more than one <span> inside the element we want to go to?. To solve this, we'll use extra functions provided by the DOM spec to fetch our visual cue element. Instead of trying to get to it directly, we'll get our anchor (for which we already have an id) and ask it for its inner <span> elements. Thus, instead of

cue = document.getElementById(cueId);

we'll have

anchor=document.getElementById(anchorId); spans=anchor.getElementsByTagName("span");

This returns a list of nodes [?] that we can go through. When we reach the one we want (we recognize it by its class attribute) we'll toggle its class by changing the className value. To be honest, I'd rather use

element.setAttribute("attr","value");

for consistency, but that call is not compatible with ie5.0/ie5.5 for the class attribute in particular.

The finished (and heavily commented) code can be seen here . The end result is that we need only specify an id for the element we're referencing with our anchor. The visual cue is placed in a <span> inside said element, regardless of what it is (it may be a <div>, <h1> or another <span> for all we care) and our call looks like this

<a href="#anchor" onclick="toggleAnchor(this);">...</a>

Notice that we pass the this keyword as parameter. That gives the script a reference to its caller, allowing it to read the href attribute of the caller to get the id of our anchor.

To see the script in action, go to the permanent original location of this rant here (because Slashdot does not allow this sort of thing going on in its pages).

Thanks galore to Andy Arikawa for his fine method. Hopefully you'll find this addition to it useful.

--- permalink for this entry at Overcaffeinated

From my latest entry at the Overcaffeinated Site (not technical):

Securing Code is hard. Despite the image of coolness and glamour that Hollywood has presented to us for quite some time, the actual task of programming decent, secure code (or breaking half-assed, insecure code, for that matter), involves a lot of late night-coding, documenting and is generally seen as a low priority in project planning. Recently, this field got a lot of attention through a major shakedown: The Blaster worm propagated wildly and hit a rather large bunch of computer systems Worldwide.

Now, Computer Security is a touchy area. Although not everyone is expected to keep up to date with the latest news in bugtraq or closely monitor all security patches released by Redmond, we techno-geeks were able, up until now, to attribute most of the security related problems to the interface between the chair and the computer. That is, The User. Most virii (the Kournikova virus comes to mind) require some sort of action by the dim witted user in order to spread. We all know how that works: You receive an attachment promising to show you the boobs of * insert hot actress here * in full, glorious detail. You just have to double click on the harmlessFileNotAVirus.exe file, and you're set!

Well, not this time. Connected to the interweb? -- you're vulnerable. Running any version of Windows? -- you're vulnerable (although the worm only attacked win2000 and XP, all versions have the vulnerability). Using the default color scheme in Windows XP? -- you're vulnerable (well, not really, but it's so fucking ugly you should change it just to be on the safe side). As computers all over the world scanned port 135 in a colossal game of tag, we could just patch and watch in disbelief as coworkers running unpatched machines started screaming that the freaking thing had hit them. Before I knew what the payload was, I called home and warned my family not to connect to the internet (yes, my home computer was unpatched -- I'll live in shame until I commit seppuku to cleanse my honor).

While technically the damned Blaster thing was a worm and not a virus, it did have the ability to install arbitrary software on a home user's computer. THAT IS BAD.

Without getting into the technical details of this, I think this event should mark a change in the perception software developers must have about our own work. It's about time we stopped making half-assed excuses and blaming the users for our lack of foresight. It's about time we started demanding security checks to be accounted for in the planning stages of our projects. The cries of But there will always be insecure software! should be met with Only if we keep writing it!. You hear me, fellow developers! Take the reins of your destiny and bitchslap the damn thing! Cleanse the Bugs! Tame the Gotos! Free the Mallocs! Get fucking jiggy with it!!!

Out now.

The comic has been keeping me awfully busy lately, so I haven't been very active in Slashdot. Quick update for those who may have been wondering:

It's been growing steadily, and things are working out ok. Currently there are about 350 visitors a day (I keep my detailed statistics apart from the awfully inaccurate Xtreme tracker thing I have on the comic page). I've been doing this for 6 and a half solid months now, and the response has been very good. Considering I haven't actually done any advertising, it's nice to see the numbers grow. Just today the first Gb of the month was spent in 4 days, which fills me with a certain pride of sorts (last month 4 Gb were spent, the previous one 3 Gb, you get the idea).

The comic and site have proven to be a great hobbie that allows me to do stuff that involves more creativity than assembler debugging (which I do a lot of at work), although it can also become a burden at times. I'm really happy with how it's working and I'd love to be able to make this into an extra income thing. I'll have to see where it goes. I plan on updating my journal here a bit more. I've reviewed a few more movies and ranted quite a bit, but I've been keeping it in my site. Thanks for reading.

- I made a new friend.
- Real or imaginary?
- Imaginary

...

Me and some friends at work are starting to make a point of getting together to watch movies on Thursdays. Movie Thursdays is what we call them. We're so clever.

Donnie Darko is a weird flick, make no mistake. Here we have this fucked up kid who happens to be a paranoid schizophrenic whose room gets squashed by a falling airplane turbine while he's outside listening to an evil giant rabbit who's predicting the end of the world. And that's where it starts.

This movie could very easily fall into being a big budget episode of The Twilight Zone were it not for the little things. The nicely balanced camera panning/corny 80's soundtrack sequences that are not done anymore just when you expect them again, the weird spiral paint on the jet turbine, the big, loud, desperate FUCK by Drew Barrymore and the little details that don't quite fit and leave you wondering. These small things add to the whole experience. The One-Eyed Evil Giant Rabbit helps too. Overall, this is a nice, slightly upsetting movie.

It's been quite a while now that I've had access to moderator points. Lately, though, it seems I'm getting mod points every week. I spend them, and sometimes two days later, I get them again. I find this interesting.

My moderation habits are good, I guess. I do try to stay away from highly modded posts and mod up the ones that stand at 1 or 2, so I read most threads in a discussion. I also have never had an "unfair" metamod, although I have upmodded a lot of very controversial comments. I also focus more on the positive modding. Not because of the "rules" but because they're much more worthy of mod points I think. The question here is: Is anyone else experiencing something like this? I haven't seen anything in Taco's journal about this, but it does seem weird.

This morning at work I was drinking coffee and enjoying it immensely, but then something came along that distracted me long enough for the coffee to get cold. When I turned my attention to the cup again, it still had some coffee in it. Cold coffee. You know that feeling of dread you get when you just know that the next sip won't taste good at all, and yet you just want to go ahead and taste it one more time, thus ruining the whole experience of that particular cup of coffee? I felt that.

Black coffee should be strong. bitter and threaten your tongue with permanent damage. It should fume and when you get close to it, inspire respect. Throwing it on your lap should spell doom and second degree burns at the very least. Cold black coffee is none of these things. It is harmless, tastes like watery sand and doesn't inspire respect. It is but a memory of what it once was. You know it won't live up to your mental image of how it should taste in your mouth. You know it was great at some point, but that point has come and gone. Yet, you're strangely tempted to give it one more try. I've felt this way about some relationships in the past.

I didn't take another sip of that cup of coffee. I just dumped it and let it go. The taste in my mouth was much better than anything it could have offered me.

...

I think I'm learning.

Brother's visiting from Tabasco (Southeast México). He's a Medical Doctor, you see, so the government rewards him for all that studying by sending him to a dinky little town in the middle of nowhere to be the town Doctor and receive a paycheck big enough to cover his costs of travelling back home from time to time, provided he does it by foot and stops eating for a week. He has to stay there for a year. I guess the upshot is that when you meet an MD in México (and we have some of the best) there's a good chance that he not only knows how to mend an artery, but also has gone through a good deal of jungle with a machete. Tough guys, doctors.

For the ones following the comic, the Top Web Comics list has been reset, and we're getting nice ratings, so keep voting. I'm working on a bunch of extras to offer this month, including three really twisted guest comics by friends who are not webcomic artists. I'm also working on the wallpaper I promised and on translating some of my short stories. Social life's been picking up lately, so I haven't really had a lot of time to work on this stuff, but I plan on fixing that this week. See you.

Saw Lucía y el Sexo (sex and Lucia) yesterday. Franco-Spanish production. It was strangely attractive. The characters kept getting naked and engaging in pseudo-hard core pornographic situations for most of the first half of the movie. The story, however, is quite engaging.

I don't like giving away details of the plot of movies like this, so I'll only tell you that this one tells the story of Lucía (Paz Vega), a waitress that is in love with writer Lorenzo (Tristán Ulloa), and how they affect and are affected by the lives of Elena (Najwa Nimri), her daughter, the girl who takes care of said daughter, her porn-star mother, her lover and the novel that Lorenzo is writing, which brings it all together.

It is a remarkable feat that the movie carries a story worthy of a soap opera in its unbelievable twists and turns and complex turns of events, and yet somehow manages to pull it off. You care for these people and actually believe in them and in this unlikely world they live in, where everyone is troubled by more problems than they can bear, and deserves a nice deal at the end. The emotional strip tease is much deeper than the physical, slapping you with raw, in-your-face emotions, specially at the end.

This one is definitely a your-mileage-may-vary kind of movie. There were people who left the theater early, and a lot more that couldn't decide if they hated it, loved it or wanted to get some sleep. If you feel intrigued by this writeup, there's a good chance you'll enjoy it. If you don't, at least be assured that all women in the movie are gorgeous and you get to see them naked a lot of times.

Valentine's day. Pffffftt! Right now, there are happy couples everywhere having nice dinners and eating flowers or whatever happy couples do this time of year. It's out there. You can't look around and not see a heart shaped chocolate box telling you what you should be doing to please that special someone and live happily ever after. Hell, if there was a sad, pathetic, maniacally-depressed-lonely-guys day, do you think we would go and rub it in your faces with ads and shotgun-shaped Vodka bottles??? No! the hell we would! we'd have the decency to stay home, hook on the computer and sulk in privacy... Which is mainly what we do today... Damn. Maybe this is our day. Got to celebrate. Where's the beer?

Shit, that felt good. Well, good luck to all you guys who do have someone to exchange oddly shaped chocolate boxes with today. I guess I'll pop a Smiths album in the stereo and get nicely drunk now. Bye.

Went to see s1m0ne (what the hell? is l33t sp34k now considered cool??). It's bad. Not your run-of-the-mill bad. It stinks with that oh, this movie could have been much better stench. You know it. You got it after Episode I, Episode II and will get it after Episode III.

Anyway, this movie tried to be a lot of things and got none of them right. It got off to a nice, stupid comedy start (which isn't wrong in my book), but then, out of the blue it decided to somehow incorporate a romantic interest for Pacino's character (that guy was so a schizophrenic) and no, it's not the cgi character, which would have made more sense than him trying to shag his ex. Then we're treated to a pseudo-serious treatment on how real is not so or whatever. Trust me, everyone has stopped caring by that point. That and the incredibly unlikely dialogue the supporting cast have to deliver make this piece of crap really unbearable for the last 40 minutes.

A friend of mine (Alan) has a category for this kind of movie: Redemption movies. In which hollywood people accept that they are a bunch of self-obsessed assholes on an ego-trip and think that self-awareness somehow makes everything right. Hey, we're stupid, but we know it! so that's cool, right?. God. Avoid this thing like the plague.
--
Original post at Overcaffeinated

I ran into an ex-girlfriend last Sunday. It had been about three years since I last saw her. That made me remember a lot of stuff.

What attracted me the most about her, and ultimately the cause of our breakup, was that we had extreme differences in the way we see the world. She believes in spirits, energy forces, alternative healing methods and whatnot. This - I found - is quite an endearing quality to someone who, like me, is... let's say spiritually challenged.

When you have a job like mine, which is somewhat akin to the Dilbert situation, and every problem ultimately responds to a logical approach, you sometimes need a little magic in your life. I think my being with her was my attempt to vicariously live that life, to hear the voice of the Earth, to know the illumination that comes with the awakening of the Chakras. To catch a glimpse of all of those things I think it would be nice to believe in, but I don't.

This whole affair saddened me a bit, while at the same time it made me feel good. Funny how the mind does that to you sometimes.

--
As usual, you can access the original post of this rant, along with the latest comic, at Overcaffeinated

I just got back from Peter's. We watched The Exorcist (incredibly, I had managed to go for all of 25 years without seeing it). Before I get into my rant about it let me just say that I'm not one of those Ohhh.. horror movies make me laugh-kind of guys. In fact, I find that a bit silly. What's the point of watching horror movies if you don't get scared??? Seems to me like those guys who brag about being able to drink two gallons of beer straight without getting drunk. It's not sex, you idiots! there's no prize for endurance!! and you'll just end up spending more at the bar.

Ok. Rant aside: don't get me wrong, of course Friday the 13th part 13 and a half or whatever will have you laughing your ass off all through the murder chain. Not this one, though. This one scares. I damn near shit my pants when freak-o-girl went down the stairs backwards. Thankfully, the dvd was all scratched to hell and it kept breaking down the image and ruining the mood or I would have had a stroke. This one gets a 10 in my Make-it-go-please-O-Meter. First of my Highly recommended movies, which is my made up category for movies that I like and you'd be a fool to miss. Out now.

I'm now keeping a kind of journal at my site, along with the comic, so instead of doing a wholly different thing for this, I'll copy and paste the inane drivel I post there. Hope no one minds. If you want to see the original rant (plus this week's comic) check it out at:

  Overcaffeinated

I got moved from testing to development at work a while ago and there's tons of acronyms to hate and cool stuff to learn, so I've been playing Padawan to Peter lately. He's cool. He's also the guy who suggested the Overcaffeinated name for this site. Dixon is kind of based on him, too. Unless he wants to sue me. In that case, I've never seen him in my whole life and Dixon and everyone else were inspired by these really neat sculptures I made with my mashed potatoes at breakfast the other day. Yes. That should work.

Peter's website is mafufo.com (that's a rather... charming picture of him and his wife on the background) btw, mafufo is spanish for kind of weird-ish or something. Be sure to also check out the incredibly neat (I made it) website of the guys at Red Naranja. They provide me with hosting and tons of bandwidth in exchange for web design and imported monkeys. I'm running out of monkeys, so I have to make up for it redirecting traffic their way.

I'm starting to feel more comfortable with the new style, and even tried some new things (thanks a lot to Ian from Machall for his excellent tutorials -- you rock, man). I hope it shows.