Syndication

I have turned off syndication to advogato for now due to my strong ramp-up in writing-related and largely technology-unrelated content. There's no need to pester them about writing a book, especially when it's not anything related to them. Apologies if things get posted as Advogato figures stuff out; when I look at my "account" page, it still says I'm syndicated from here, even though I've blanked the field and unchecked the box.

I'll be back when the writing "well dries up," to borrow JM's phrase (JM: I'd prefer "my swords turned to plowshares" as a metaphor, but perhaps its inappropriate for a mystery novel), or when I spend significantly more time on the subject of open source and/or software development.

cheers
alex

Hints for the email-impaired

I identified a copy of your resume this afternoon in our database and I am interested in speaking with you regarding several UNIX Admin Positions (4) I have available in the Reston/Herndon area. All of these positions are permanent full time opportunities and they are available immediately. Both my client’s are looking for people with at least 5 years of solid UNIX Admin experience. Also knowledge of Oracle and/or SQL (SQL Queries) is required for two of them. I can pay very competitively for these positions and my client’s are moving very fast on these opportunities.

First, it's "clients." I'm a snot about that, even though I'm not perfect in what I write. I do try to make sure emails I send to employers (or employees) are close to perfect if I'm asking for something.

Second, it's unlikely that you're able to "pay very competitively" if you can't immediately quantify that (or at least qualify it, like "pay very competitively for government positions in Reston/Herndon"). Sort of like the adage, "if you have to ask, you can't afford it." So, say eighty-five dollars an hour if you can pay it. If you just say "competitively," the people that might take $85/hr won't know it's that high, and the people that won't take $85/hr won't believe you.

What's the worst that can happen? Somebody actually gets paid what you budgeted for them? I mean, really, recruiters. It's not like you weren't going to ask for 1.75x whatever you pay me anyways. Why not just tell me, and try to hook me with a number instead of an empty promise?

SuSE vs Windows

I remember at Microsoft there were at least a few people who were very concerned about SuSE as competition. I am starting to believe that the reason they feared it is that SuSE is as complicated and wrong-minded about operating system design as Windows is. I bitch and moan about MacOS being hosed by default, and its documentation being poor at best, but the more I dig into this unholy alliance of Novell and SuSE the more I smell Windows.

There really doesn't seem to be "one state" of the OS in SuSE, much as in Windows and in MacOS. On the Mac, we have this hideous netinfo business mucking things up so that we cannot simply copy /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow (or master.passwd, or whatever) for example. We have also strange filesystems that magically determine where they are to be mounted, which may or may not have case sensitivity, and nobody else can read. How different is that from Novell or Windows?

One of the great benefits (and indeed great curses) of Unix is that everything is a file. This means all you really need to move files around is the shell, which is to say things that live in {,s}bin. Your friends, rsync, tar, cpio, and their less intelligent but just as potent friends, cp, mv, rm, and so on, should really be all you need. When we start referring to "directories" as magical clouds in the sky full of stuff we can't touch, can't back up, and sometimes can't even read (leaving us crippled!), rather than just a fancy kind of file, Unix fails to be what it really is: industrial strength, user-hostile, and totally understandable.

user-hostile is important, if you think about it. When we start to make operating systems friendly, people get this false sense of confidence, and all of a sudden, you've got a user who comes into your office with blood on their hands, saying, "my god! the files! they're all gone! how do I get them back??"

Unix is great because it can do stuff, not because everyone in the world can use it.

(And with respect to Apple's lying about UFS/FFS and their manpages being broken, I'm surprised nobody mentioned fsck_hfs or hfs.util. I discovered these are equally as useless, but at least they, you know, try to be more or less the right tool for the job)

When tools become obstacles

Today I sat down to write. I've been trying very hard to train myself to write when I'm not furious, or depressed, or whatever else drives me to put "pen" to "paper." So, this is significant for me. However, I spent a good amount of time yesterday formatting a manuscript for submission.

The previous agent I worked with had asked for 1.5 space, Times New Roman, left-aligned and ragged, and with only the page number in the header, specifically the top right.

Yesterday's manuscript went out double-spaced, in Courier, left-aligned, ragged, with a weird sort of "cover" for it, a rough word count, a header that included my name, the title of the manuscript, and the page number, and also that all my italics be changed to underlines. Further, all my emdashes (—) needed to be changed to double-hyphens (--) and the spaces before and after removed. Oh, and a double-space after a full stop instead of a single.

Given there's a huge difference between what I had before and what I formatted yesterday, I thought, gee, I'll write myself a Word template so I can just do that automatically. Instead, I've been wrestling with Word's autoformatting for ninety-seven minutes. It will let me auto-replace a full stop with a period-space, but not a period-space with a period-space-space. This is problematic because here in 'Merka, we use periods in numbers (and commas too!). Further, when I go to Format > Auto Format ..., it ditches all the formatting in the document, even though I'm using a goddamn template that says courier new, double space, and so on. Oh, and now it wants to show me my newlines and spaces. It's charming.

I have lost the title. I can't remember it. I know it was a good one. I've also lost Rita Sue. I know what she looks like, I can practically smell her. But I don't remember what she was doing with that gun, and I can't remember why she killed those people.

This is so aggravating. If I do manage to get any writing done today, it's going to be revisions to the manuscript from yesterday (went through a couple people I trust to "galley" it before it goes to submission), or that column on turn-based versus real-time strategy and role-playing games. Neither of these are what I wanted to write, and neither of them are the outlet that Rita Sue was/is for me.

I might also just get so fucking frustrated that I'll play Xbox games until my brain dribbles out my ears.

(if above image goes away)