Add another one to my list. If I could go 4 weeks without someone being an unwarranted dick and not striving to take advantage of me, I'd be able to actually be more productive in my life.

Fuck you, Jon.

A public apology, on Slashdot?

I got a christmas present from my boss. Not the company, but my actual boss. We were talking after, and he was genuinely interested in my Christmas plans. He knows I don't have any family in the area, my mom was up visiting and was supposed to return to southern California. The weather caused her to change plans so she is actually spending Christmas in the area (2 hours south.) The closest family I have is my brother that lives 2 hours south, as well.

It's good to have family near-by, as I age I realize how much I actually care about them. However strange they are for putting up with me and actually loving me. I never realized how good it feels to have someone unrelated to you (my boss) care about me not being alone on Christmas.

That was a better present than anything that could be purchased.

Merry Christmas everybody.

So I abruptly got put onto a new project which sends shivers of excitement up and down my spine. It's something I have been wanting for the last year here, and it's coming to terms. Development and Release Control. Previously, I've used a series of Makefiles and CVS to maintain a lot of control and provide reporting features.

We're upgrading to the times, and going with Ant. The Java build tool. It's an awesome little tool, and I love it dearly.

Except for this crap with it taking 4 seconds to do a simple operation (copy files). What the hell is it doing? Going and kicking it's feet up and watching a broadway performance while we wait patiently for it to complete it's life purpose?

Any ideas why Ant is going so slow for us, and if this isn't normal, any ideas how to fix it? Any performance tips, ideas, anything?

Subject: Cease and Desist

Note that your organization has delivered to me "unsolicted commercial email".
  The state of Utah clearly defines the legality of such commercial email.

This notice is my official "mailing list removal notification", as described in
Paragraph 3. If your organization does not accept such requests via email, you
may be subject to additional legal penalties.

I hereby notify you that commercial email sent by you, your partners, or subsidiaries
to this email address, must be terminated. Failure to comply with this request
may result in civil and criminal penalties as defined by the laws of the State
of Utah.

In addition, I assume the right to bill you $10 for services. Send $10 and a
copy of this email with ten (10) days to:

David Moinkers
322 East 300 South
Salt Lake City, UT 84111
USA

Failure to comply with this request may result in legal action.

For information about rbexpress, send email to info@rbexpress.org.

Here's my suggested response:

David, due to your idiotic nature of failing to verify mail headers and SMTP servers I'm sending you this response. You have wasted my time, and bandwidth, resulting in a compensation bill of $30 payable immediately.

My address is commonly available from the InterNIC registry for the domain name in which you have accused me of sending unsolicited bulk email.

Failure to respond within 10 days will result in me laughing at you, and if I feel bored enough, filing a small claims suit against you for fraud in the Washington County, Oregon justice department.

I have your address, I have your name, I have your intelligence level which is on par with your common brick. Go educate yourself and mail me $30 for your ignorance.
-Xerithane

What do you guys think? Should I send that out?

So I'm thinking, and this is a dangerous activity for me, because I usually end up getting yelled at by people who fail to try to understand my point of view. I'm not asking you to agree, but yelling and calling me an idiot is only going to help manifest solidarity in my opinions.

There are these people, and everyone knows them, they are the ones who are "happy". They think they are content, and have achieved this heavenly-spirit-within. They don't need to make themselves look nice, they don't need to worry about the social dynamics. They have their niche of friends, and that's what they have. My friends understand me. My friends know me, and know that I'm intelligent, and I know that I'm intelligent. So I don't need to play your social conformity game and fit into your social constructs and I can be a happy unique member of this modern society.

Bullshit. The next hypocritical football-fucking monkey that says this to me is going to get a healthy dosage of the reality slap that your ambitions in life require that you play the social game. Oh? You don't have ambitions? You don't want to feel confident and succesful in a career of your choosing? Fine, stop breathing, you are wasting my oxygen.

I don't believe you can guage a persons intelligence and capabilities by the way they look, the company they keep, or even the conversations you overhear. It's their community. It's their dynamics in their community. If you don't like, or understand, their community, don't judge it. Acknowledge you just don't understand, as it's a different entity than your community. You are not worse, you are not better, just different.

So quit with this hypocritical name calling, labeling of the groups you don't understand as inferiors to yourself. You don't know the people. One person I know is so strangely intelligent that no one gets it. You have to know him, then you still doubt it until he suddenly shines forward and there is no doubt of his brilliance. So what then? Your suppositions of his stunted intellect have been blown away, but no, you never got to know him because his sense of humor offends your elitist attitude.

It's not always the "plain looking folk" attacking the "mocha-slurping-cellphone-and-slacks folk". Sometimes it goes the other way. Sometimes the well-dressed, yuppie members of society get their insults in. It seems like a sudden sibling-rivalry between the two opposites. You know who is going to win? Sorry to say, the yuppies win. It's a social world, and if you want a good job, you better learn to play the social game. Oh, and I hear this all the time: people will recognize my skill and I don't need to conform. Get the fucking wookie of your t-shirt and understand putting down "I write code" on a resume isn't going to get you a good job. It's not 1997 anymore. You want a job, you want a decent job, you learn to play the social game.

The one who gets the decent job is the one who interviews well, who looks well, who fits into the company perspective. You may be so smart the development teams collective IQ is the square root of yours, but if you don't interview well, if you aren't playing the social construct games, you can spend your massive brain power finding more efficient ways to ask if fries are a desired accompaniment with their burger.

I'm pissed off about this, because I deal with this on a daily basis. I'm young, I dress well, short of getting screwed over pretty bad recently, I normally have money. This is because I work hard, not just in front of the computer but I play the social game. I want my secured employment. I want my steady paycheck. I can be the best coder in the world but the manager isn't the one who decides to lay me off, that person doesn't know me.

Then I leave work. I leave the office and my reputation is left at the door. I hang out and I'm another young, suburnite urchin, praying on the brains of the children with my cellphone, and killing kids in Iraq with my gas-guzzling sports car, and certain people hate me for it, and call me names.

I didn't ask about the kids in Iraq, and the oil-greed-war, and the RF doesn't cause damage, so fuck you people. Don't think you are smarter than I am because you choose to live your life trying to carve out your social niche and tell people that it's their job to accept you. No one owes you acceptance, and no one owes you anything. If you don't accept me, that's fine. If you think I'm a dumbass, that's fine. When you open your loud mouth, you open yourself up to my comments.

If you are so stead-fast in your beliefs that you deserve to call me names, than you better acknowledge my stance -- because nothing will prove you are full of shit faster than ignoring the response of someone you criticize. You show yourself to be weak minded, hypocritical, and yet another culture-sideshow-freak trying to get attention by being different. Well, get over it, I'm not your fucking parents telling you to conform, so don't be angry at me. I made this choice myself, I stand by it, and I'm sure most the people you don't like do too. If you open your mouth, listen to the response. I'll never criticize anyone for the way they dress, or the company they keep, because I know it's what they choose. I will criticize someone if they dress like a 12 year old, with the hygeine of a gorilla, and ask me to find them a job. Just give everyone the same courtesy.

Welcome to the new era of prejudice. The yuppies vs. the punks vs. the goths vs. the scrubs. We're all people, we all have intelligent members, you don't know who is stupid and who is not, so keep your mouth shut lest you prove yourself to be a bigot and utterly stupid.

I feel better now. Again, this is just my opinion, I could be wrong (Sorry Dennis), but I stand by it and always will.

I am starting to grow much less tolerant of my overly busy schedule. Between the abuses of my body that I endure on a daily basis because I lack the common sense to just relax for a brief moment, and the amount of time I spend on the computer, my life gets bland.

The first thing that drops away is writing, and venting, and my over-all bitching of the way the world works. The problem with this is while there is always a shortage of time, there is an abundance of things to bitch about.

I'm bitching about this because it's quick, and makes me feel better about not having the time to rant about other things that require many more words to adequately get my point across. I want to write more. It makes me happy. I was up till at least 1am every night last week working, and will probably get a break this week towards the end of the week.

So, that means I'm going to write a lot. Granted, it's just going to be the same old diatribe that I produce about assholes parking in the left lane, the children in the office, but hopefully I'll entertain myself and a few of you in the process.

When my new production comes to light, I'm going to post a link up here for you all to see. I'm pretty sure everyone here is going to enjoy seeing what it is that I'm working on. If you don't, I can cry myself to sleep, so no pressure.

So, I'm constructing a mod_perl framework at the moment, and I need to have the functionality of timers. Basically something that triggers every n seconds and calls a code block.

SIGALRM is over-ridden, so is SIGCHLD. I wrote some stuff using both that works fine outside of mod_perl but inside it borks. I have never worked with mod_perl, and am getting slightly aggrivated at this.

Any gurus in the audience that can tell me if this is supported in anyway?

So, I'm perusing CNN this morning and I come across this story about 5 Penn state kids kicking the shit out of 1 Princeton kid, then pouring motor oil on him and attempting to light it. I'm glad that the Penn state kids were retarded enough to use motor oil instead of some other more flammable oil.

I was a bit shocked, I mean, it's Penn State. What are they so angry about? Then I read the last bit, and I just realized that the world is full of retards who are in positions they shouldn't be in:

Detective Supervisor Frank DeMeo said he wasn't surprised by the attack.
"I've seen kids do things, and they get out of hand," he said. "They all have beer."

Update: heliocentric has informed me it was U. of Penn, not Penn State. My apologies.

Have you ever wondered how the lack of responsiblity runs rampant in the world. It gets worse than on a personal level, it's a nationalistic approach now.

The terrorist groups hate America because we hate them, but we're both victims. We're both the ones to console, and the other we expect to shoulder the blame. It's absurd, why can't people just suck it up and acknowledge their own fuckups. I know the mistakes I've made in life, I acknowledge them. For those who were hurt, I can only say I'm sorry. You weren't supposed to get hurt, but you were and I was the cause. You are the victim.

What is so painful about admitting failure and defeat. Swallow your pride, and rebuild, try again. Every failure is success waiting. Just learn, grow, and shut up.

That's all.. this JE has no substance, really. Random thoughts..

I'm not sure why I find this thread so hysterical. I was originally being flippant, and it just turned into a rather entertaining read.

Here, recommended reading at +0.

I'm not sure why, I don't wear all black. I don't even own a black office-dress-code shirt. I own a gray office-dress-code-compliant-9002-osha-certified shirt, that has black lines that almost looks black, but it's gray.

Yet I cannot escape this. It seems that for the last 4 years or so, everytime I turn around I am the man in black. I don't give myself this title, I couldn't care about the colors I wear. Everyone else seems to. My shoes are black, they're a pair of Ecco dress shoes. Dress shoes are typically black or tan, and I don't like tan shoes. Most my slacks are black, because black matches with everything.

I'll give them points with my jacket. I have a black 3/4 length wool jacket that I wear almost religiously. Religiously, I always wear a jacket. That jacket is just great for the current near-winter weather. All of my jackets are black, except for my motorcycle jacket. That's fine. So now I have black slacks, black shoes, a black jacket, and a green shirt on.

I'm still the man in black. I suppose I can't say anything, after all the Men in Black wore white shirts.

The part that irritates me is not being called the man in black. Numerous people refer to me as that, and a lot of people only know me as that. I'm fine with that, I don't really care. Just apathetic.

What gets me is when these people, and it seems to always be middle aged white women, say things like "Where is your gun?" or "The only thing you need is a really big gun!" When did dressing nice, being young, have a good stance (tall, good shape), necessitate carrying a damned shotgun? I think I'm going to buy an airsoft pistol so the next person who asks that I can say, "Right here." just for the shock value.

I used to mess with people when it started, and mind you I dressed like this long before the remarks started. It wasn't until the Matrix and Columbine came about that I started receiving the comments. Those bastards are cramping my style. Well, they aren't really because I loathe boots. Apparently when I'm wearing my sunglasses and just sitting somewhere not doing anything I look scary. My default non-emotional face can scare people, and I still don't know why.

There a few things I don't understand in life. Just understand. Things I know but just don't understand. I don't know much in life, and it seems doubly aggrivating to know something, but not understand it.

I'm talking things like 2 plus 2 is 4. That's the basic understand of objects like 2. It's easy to know, it's easy to understand. Somethings aren't so easy to understand. They can be easy to know, or hard to know. But the understanding doesn't come, easily or sometimes never. I used to always say that life is simple, it's people that make it complex.

I still believe that, but it's changed. As everything, when you are young you believe the idealogical statements of your philophies as utmost truths. Things that just work. Then it turns into ideas like Capitalism and Communism. Man opresses Man, the ideals fade away and the reality of human nature introduce an array of chaos that you just can't understand. I used to think that the process to maturity was understanding there are so many things to know in life that you could never possibly learn them all.

I don't believe that anymore. Or at least it's changed, I still can't possibly learn everything there is; much less things I should know. The path to maturity is coming to terms with the understanding somethings can't be understood. Somethings aren't meant for it. It hurts, when something so important to you fails to be captured by your mind. You want to understand something so bad, and figure it out, but you never will.

In a lot of ways, it makes you better that you can't understand. Maybe if you understood you would turn into the cold monstrosity of humanity that you are trying to understand. I must just come to terms, be grateful that I don't understand, and confident in who I am.

ShadowRam had a hilarious story about Oracle dropping the hammer on McNealy... see it here.

I have to admit, I hate McNealy with that idiotic smirk he always wears. I hate Ellison more, but it's still funny seeing McNealy crawling back to Oracle trying to get his keynote spot back when they gave it to ... Michael Dell! Oh man, that is sweet. :)

I've said it before, but if we have to have a software monopoly, given the choice between Gates, McNealy, Jobs or Ellison, I would take Gates hands-down. Thank god it's not Ellison. The man is insufferable enough.

So yesterday I get into work at 6am, my original plan was to leave at 2. I scratched that because I was mostly finished and I had to come into work today anyway to make up lost time from tonsilitis. I left at 12, picked the UHaul up and my buddy and got started. I hadn't prepared much, which is to say I hadn't really done a damn thing. It was fine, most of my stuff is packed and the stuff that isn't was either waiting for me to unpack in the new place or is furniture.

We get it loadded up, run over a teddy bear a time or 7 (Courtesy of another friend, I got some great video of it though), and are on our way to the new place. The new place is in a somewhat strange location, it's convenient as far as freeway access goes but I swear it's the only place down there that has nasty apartments and they have to be right bloody next to the new house.

I'm renting out two bedrooms in a 4 bedroom condo/townhouse type thing. Get my own bathroom, there is a washer and dryer, the guy who owns the house is really cool. All in all, a great move.

We get down there, park the UHaul in the drive way, and get the task of unloading everything.

Through the years I've acquired a lot of furniture that I just shouldn't own. Not because it isn't nice, because it's a bloody pain in the ass (not literally, unless certain accidents occur) to move, and I move way too often.

• 180lbs TV. I don't know how big, but it's big. That's like 75kg or something.. not quite sure
• 140lbs glass dining table. That's just the top, actually. The base is 4 pieces, each probably 20lbs.
• ~220lbs entertainment stand. This is the bane of my existence

I bought the entertainment stand when I moved into the last place, it came in two boxes. One for the bottom half, one for the top. That was hard to carry up the stairs but wasn't an excercise of anguish and pain. Carrying it down a flight of stairs, then back up a flight of stairs is a good way to kill oneself. Good thing I paid some friends $5 a piece to move it myself. I pulled a muscle in my back carrying it down, and I knew full well I was completely unable to carry it up. $10 to save massive back trauma. I can deal with that.

The move went pretty good, thanks to Jon. His friends came towards the end and helped unload some stuff, which made a world of difference. Last night I got my bedroom setup which took about an hour, and then I took a nice hot bath. Regardless of what they say, baths are nice. Call me a pansy, I really couldn't care less. I slept so ridiculously well last night, I woke up at 7am this morning (after sleeping at a bit before 1am) and felt like I was mostly dead (Think princess bride). Went back to sleep, woke up at 9am and felt fantastic. I arranged most the office, everything fits. The office now has a futon, the entertainment stand from the dimension of pain and torture, two desks, and soon 2 laptops, 3 desktops, and a router. Along with miscellaneous video game systems I've accrued over the years. NES, SNES, Genesis, PSX, Dream Cast, and a GameCube. I don't even play video games, yet I still have all of these. I play Soul Caliber and Tony Hawk on the DC and that's it. Don't ask why I have them... there is no good answer.

The office has a walk in closet, that is filled from top to bottom with the rest of my stuff. I need to rearrange it because I'd like to be able to close the closet door and the designers apparently assigned the closet design to their 5 year old autistic nephew because the door goes to the inside. It doesn't swing out, it swings in. This is the stupidest thing I've seen as it completely removes a good half the wall behind the door, and the storage space needed for the door. You wouldn't lose any surface area in the room by having the door swing out. It just would swing out into a small wall between that and the entrance. I blame paint chips.

Have a DSL kit, and DSL ready to go there but I haven't hooked it up yet. I brought over the router and 2 laptops last night thinking maybe I would do it. I'll have to get to it today.

So, I'm all finished moving, and I can't move my arms above my chest. I think I traversed about 50 flights of stairs yesterday, and I'm rather exhausted. I still have to go get the rest of my computers, and my game consoles, and the VCR/DVD player, and the rice cooker, and my pots and pans, it's going to be a long night...