Category Archives: work

Assholes Rule The Earth

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I have come to what may be a painfully obvious conclusion about our world–it’s one I reached quite some time ago but have only found the words to express it now. That conclusion is: while nice guys don’t necessarily finish last, they never finish first.

Generally speaking, if you want to succeed in the world–gain power, wealth, fame, etc.–you need to be a total asshat. The rules of civil society are there to make sure sheep don’t wander off and forget to pay taxes. If you want more, you should lie, defraud, steal, and betray on a regular basis.

That’s not to say that there’s no risk involved with that course of action. A significantly larger percentage of asshats end up as tenants of our nation’s growing housing market known as the prison system than end up as, say, President.

But the risk is directly proportional to your starting social position and race–not too many rich, white asshats end up in prison. Rich, white nice people generally end up less rich, or have enough money to allow themselves the luxury of separating their behavior from their tax bracket. Noblesse oblige is a sport for only those with the oldest of money.

Take, for example, the rich white men who currently run this country. Dubya is a profligate liar, and he lies with such boldness that it has left the press stunned. He and his underlings repeat the lies so often that people end up believing them (or at least parroting them). And he’s used his bogus piety and flag waving to ensure that anyone who publicly disagrees with him will be Mao-maoed into submission.

Take, for example, the Newsweek Koran-Flushing Story. After the White house went ballistic over the story, and the right went nuts over “irresponsible journalism”, the whole thing turned out to be, well, largely true. And there hasn’t been a peep about that from the White House, really–other than the aptly named Dick Cheney saying that the detention center at Gitmo will remain open.

It’s not an ideological thing, either. Clinton was a major league asshat himself, which he covered for (like Bush does) with his aw-shucks charm. Carter was a Nice Guy elected in response to the ultimate presidential asshat (Nixon), and he got absolutely nothing done.

Then there’s the business world. Generally speaking, those who reside at the top of the corporate food chain generally get there by constantly, agressively pressing on other’s sense of propriety and discomfort with conflict. They make shit up as they go along, and then find ways to sidestep the consequences. They change plans and contend that they always had actually been aiming for their new target. They are insufferable bastards.

So, if you want to get ahead in the world, remember–it will have to be at the expense of your moral, ethical, and social comfort zones. Because only total pricks ever get to the top. But make sure you pick the right rules to break (and make sure you’re white, or rich enough that no one cares), or you’ll just end up as a cautionary tale used to keep us sheep in the pen.

The Basement Tapes

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I really have to do something about my work lighting. Fast.

OK, it’s not like I’m going blind or anything. But since I moved my office to the basement, I’ve been getting hit by a lot fewer photons, and my mood has suffered.

Or maybe it’s the lack of sleep, due to a daughter crying out for guidance to the bathroom at 2:45 am and a new cat dancing across my face at 3:30. Maybe it’s that my wife is rising at zero-dark-thiry to get to her new teaching job after said sleep interruptions. Whatever.

On the bright side, so to speak, my new iMac arrived yesterday. Its flat LCD display makes the one on my old PowerBook and IBM Thinkpad look muddy. And I now (with the dual monitor rig on the powerbook) have FOUR monitors and three keyboards on my desk.

And, coincidentally, Apple tells me they’re sending me iLife ’05, iWork ’05 and the latest GarageBand plugins for review. I only really needed to look at iWork, but I’ll find some way to work the other two into my battery of software tests, I’m sure.

Maybe I can get one of those guitar-to-Mac cables at the Apple store this weekend and cut an album in my basement–to fund some additional lighting.

But all those monitors are not helping my body create vitamin D. I need some full-spectrum something in this dungeon, pronto.

Banished

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It’s 10:39 pm on MLK Day, and I’m sitting in my basement surrounded by piles and piles of crap.

The relocation of my office to a corner of the basement is almost complete; I still need to run phone lines in here, so for now our DSL connection and my office phone base station are still sitting up in my former office, where Kevin is sleeping (or. perhaps, IM’ing now that he has bedside bandwidth).

While I got my desk down here and reassembled on Sunday night, the real work of moving all of the detrius that had accumulated in my office over the past 7 years was left for today. Kevin and I moved bookcases, filing cabinets, and piles and crates of stuff up and down two flights of stairs. By dinnertime, we had finished with the cleanup and the installation of the major elements of his room, as well as the reconfiguration of what is now Jonah’s exclusive domain.

Jonah arrived home from a visit to a friend’s house, and we found he had still not finished watching a video (“The Secret Garden Revisited”) that he was supposed to watch as homework for some “character education” mini-unit that his teacher is doing. During the course of trying to get him to sit down and watch the damned thing, he became increasingly petulant and whiny.

During the course of this episode, it was revealed to us by his brother that Jonah had in fact been lying about the events of the previous weekend and had in fact called my ex a bitch. Precise words and context–she was trying to break up a “fight” between them, and Jonah, who is almost 11, said, “Don’t touch me, bitch!”

So, that led to some more catharsis, as you can imagine, I’m sure.

By the time all had blown over, and the kids were all in their respective bedrooms, I was aching tired. But still, there were these piles of crap all around my desk….

I guess I know what I’m doing during conference calls tomorrow.

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I went out for my irregular lunchtime bike ride today, and got an extra adrenaline boost for my final mile.
I joke with friends about city bike riding, calling it “urban assault.” But today, it got a little too urban and a little too close to

Because of Baltimore's odd socio-geography, some of the prettiest spots in the city are smack dab right up against some of the worst. Take Druid Hill Park–it's home to the Baltimore Zoo, the city Conservatory greenhouses, a large resevoir, the city parks headquarters, public tennis facilities, a frisbee golf course…and a quarter-mile from its northwest boundary are alleys that support a robust drug trade. In fact, a few nights ago, a policeman was shot in a struggle for his gun (and saved by his badge, which took the bullet for him).

That fact was somewhere in the back of my conciousness as I struggled uphill near the Zoo entrance and was passed by a fast-moving police cruiser. It wasn't an unusual sight, so I kept on pedaling. As I crested the hill , I saw the car was stopped ahead of me, and the officer who had been driving it was standing in the road, talking to a black man sitting on the curb.

As I got closer, I saw that the policeman had his sidearm drawn and aimed at the head of the man on the curb, and was barking a warning. I pedaled past, 12 feet from the suspect and five from the officer. “Now lay down on the ground and keep your hands in front of you…”

A few feet further, and pedaling a bit faster, I saw a line of cruisers and plainclothes cars coming uplill toward me. One, two….seven cruisers. Further downhill, another patrolman and a K-9 unit were searching through the brush.

The last mile home was my fastest in a while.

As it turns out, the guy is a suspect in the police shooting.

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Quit yer bellyachin'

There's been a lot of moaning, wailing and gnashing of teeth over the decision by Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly to largely leave the settlement between Microsoft and the US Department of Justice and several states intact (and leave the enforcement of the settlement almost entirely in the hands of Microsoft itself).The judge dismissed most of the holdout states' proposed punitive measures, and said that the proposed amendments to the settlement would have benefitted Microsoft's competitors and not consumers.

Well, stop the whining already, for crying out loud.

The judge was right–the dissenting states were trying to reframe the entire trial. They had to, because the government had chosen such a narrow area to pursue its antitrust case against Microsoft (the browser war)–to the exclusion of what Microsoft has done in the world of LAN servers and desktop applications–that it limited the sort of remedies that could be applied. In other words, the government case was crafted by morons.

I came to that conclusion in May of 1998, way back when Janet Reno was Attorney General, Elian was a Cuban school kid who had never travelled overseas, and the focus of antitrust concerns was the launch of Windows 98. “It's the server, stupid,” I said then. But the government chased after the browser war with Netscape, lured by the talk of “cutting off their air supply” .

A change of administrations and a change of the economy later, the whole Microsoft chase now looks even more stupid than it did then. C'mon, did you really think that the best protection against Microsoft was the government? Let's be brutally frank here–the government has other priorities these days, and most of them don't include the redistribution of Bill Gates' wealth. And there are bigger threats to civil liberties than the number of browser options available to Windows users.

Microsoft has annihilated the [proprietary] workgroup server competition, and is close to doing the same to its messaging server competitors. The only significant threats on the desktop and workgroup application server compete by leveraging free software, or the spoils of anti-Microsoft techno-politics, or a niche built on product differentiation and superior design.

Everybody else is hors de combat. Novell is a consulting company. Half of Netscape is a subsidiary of another monopoly, AOL/TimeWarner, and its browsers are based on open source. Sun has taken the rest of Netscape, renamed it iPlanet, and is now renaming it again.

On the other hand, the web application server market is dominated at the enterprise end by Java–Sun, IBM and other Microsoft competitors realized that the way to compete with Microsoft was to focus on the infrastructure end of the new Web-driven application architecture instead of on the presentation end (the browser).

Microsoft's failure to wipe the application server competition from the planet is at least partially because of Microsoft's failure to spot Java's advantages early. Its initial dismissal of Java, and then its efforts (turned aside in court) to subvert the Java platform to its own ends resulted in its current .NET initiative–which, let's face it, is not setting the world on fire quite yet, and legitimizes the approach of Microsoft's competitors.

Now IBM, HP and Dell are Microsofting Microsoft–with Linux. Microsoft has failed to penetrate deep into the data center because it hasn't been able to extend its value proposition there effectively. Linux does what Windows NT/2000/XP hasn't been able to do–leverage the power of lots of cheap commodity servers, lowering incremental costs of scaling up, while keeping administrative costs down. It's started with Web servers, and the trend is moving into more line-of-business application areas.

Microsoft is ripe for a loss of market share in the workgroup server space as storage becomes more centrally controlled. Its next generation of desktop tools is, by default, abandoning its installed base in an effort to end security problems. It has pissed off thousands of developers. The European Community is still looking at ways to curb Microsoft overseas. And there are plenty of other things that will keep Microsoft from moving quickly to take over the world.

Any company that can execute effectively in this economy has a chance at knocking Microsoft down a couple more pegs. Bob Lutz, the chairman of GM North America, has said that the best way for GM to regain market share from competitors is to make cars that people “gotta have, rather than cars they're willing to buy.” The same goes for software. If the only alternative you offer somebody to Windows is the software equivalent of a Yugo, do you really think people are going to flock to it just because Microsoft doesn't make it?

The way to win market share back from Microsoft is to go further, faster, and better than them in ways that appeal to subsets of Microsoft's audience. Apple knows that, and is kicking a significant portion of Microsoft ass (sure, it's a small portion, but it's enough to run a profitable company on). Sun, apparently, hasn't figured it out yet–but that's a story for another rant.