jfc...

Does anyone even read anymore? There's an avian influenza conference happening soonish (I'm not all Unix, you know; I'm real interested in the end of the world, too), and they are offering an "early bird special" for pre-registration. I don't think I know an expletive harsh enough to describe that.

NTFS, HFS, and other vileness

So we finally got NTFS support in Darwin. Well, almost. We can read NTFS, but we can't write to it. This is a real pain in the ass, because nobody has an entirely homogenous environment, and masking out the filesystem by abstracting it on a network share (I can read and write a Samba share from my Mac, for example). However, even at gigabit speeds, it's tedious when storage starts getting as big as it is these days (I'm presently backing up a 1TB NTFS volume to a 4TB HFS+J volume).

Microsoft isn't doing a much better job here. They don't support HFS at all, they don't support AFP, they refuse to support multicast services (the "Rendevous/Bonjour/ZeroConf" software in all the Macs these days, and indeed in many switches), and so on. It's not like HFS is this great big important filesystem we need to support, it's just what Apple chose shortly after they built the Lisa. So why, then, do we not have HFS support in Windows? And why, then, since it is so very prevalent, do we not have read/write access to NTFS volumes in MacOS?

Is it difficult? Well, you've read the volume, so clearly you can read the bits. I've written device drivers to control SCSI devices, and while I don't claim to be a filesystem expert, I know enough about the code to know that if somebody wanted NTFS-rw support in MacOS, it would be there now. Apple could pay me to write it, but they have whole teams of developers whose whole purpose in life is to write device drivers. Why the recalcitrance? It makes Apple look every bit the stubborn ass that Microsoft is. And really, Microsoft being a stubborn ass is not surprising. It's mostly stopped surprising me when Apple does it, but I'm still not at the point where I am ambivalent about it. It downright irks me.

And speaking of irk, here is a ponderous failure to apply brain to fingers. As I have said many times in the past, I have VMware Fusion running very happily on my Mac, and I've gone so far as to build compute clusters with it, build standard images for our userbase, and so on, all from the sane, safe confines of my MacBook. I have an NTFS volume mounted read-only, and my HFS+J volume to which it is being backed up mounted read-write.

Windows, of course, can read NTFS. But I can't simply tell VMware, "hey, look, I'm going to unmount disk3s0, could you maybe let Windows know about it so that I get read-write NTFS access, and I'll just mount my HFS volume as a network share inside my VM?" This seems simple enough. It's a lot like emulating, isn't it? Instead of reading these bits, I'm going to pretend I didn't see them, and pass them on to whomever (the device in this case, rather than the CPU). I don't mind copying across a "shared volume" if that shared volume is shared across my logic board (which is to say, between the firewire and USB buses) rather than some TCP based conduit.

I fail to understand why this is a Hard Thing. The VMware guys are good people as near as I can tell; I expect a lot less from Apple and Microsoft (and of course, get a lot less). It'd be nice to have this solved.

Oh, and before anyone says to me, "hey there's XYZ experimetal driver for NTFS+rw for MacOS," the answer is "I don't trust this particular data with experimental anything."

Fucking computers, man. You just can't win. The best of breed is still a mangy cocklabroschnauser that shits on the carpet and pisses on your shoes.

The case for organized crime

A peculiar sort of paradox struck me this morning as I was jabbering internally about the cough I had, various money-lending I need to do, and my anger at the asshats who are destroying our building in the name of "fixing" it. I say jabbering, because, as Doug Stanhope puts it, "I don't have ADD, I just think a lot! Remember thoughts, people?"

At left, we have me immediately after driving in to work, and looking about the meanest I ever do. I know, I know, it pales in comparison to when I'm actually armed and ready to shoot at something, but somehow a picture of me prone with a scoped long-range rifle isn't as menacing as a guy in a biker jacket. I suppose I could have worn my skulls-n-crossbones bandana, but it was in the wash, because I'm a giant pussy.

Anyways, many of the needs of society have been historically met by organized crime. We say crime because we view them as criminals. They do after all kill people and traffic in narcotics. However, if we separate the two concepts of "petty crime" and "organized crime," we see that the former is a nuisance and the latter provides a service. We do not mince words when we refer to OPEC as a cartel; this is what they are. The government publishes statistics on how many crimes the CIA commits in the general doings of the agency. Organized crime exists because people have needs their government cannot accommodate.

Let's take a benign example first. If I were to, heaven forbid, have some sort of accident that prevented me from working for a month, I might need a couple thousand dollars to cover utilities, rent, food, and the like. My bank would not help me out here, as I am without job, in a sorry state, and asking for a loan for what is essentially intangibles. Organized crime, on the other hand, steps in and says, we can give you this $2,000, at a 20% interest rate, no questions asked. Sure, the implications are that if I don't pay back, I get my knees broken or whatever. But really, I'm only going to take this loan out if I know I can pay it back and my $400 in interest. In general, when I have money needs like this, it's exactly this kind of situation. Consider the following:

• I just dropped my motorcycle and I have $3,000 in work to do on it, and I just don't got it in the bank. However, my motorcycle is how I get to work, to make money.
• My health insurance won't cover a pre-existing condition and I need a $1,500 diagnostic or other medical service.
• I started that new job I've always wanted, but jeans and a polo won't cut it anymore. I need six pairs of $100 pants, a couple of $400 jackets, two $300 pairs of shoes, and a bunch of $90 ties. Since I'll be making $175k, I know I can pay it back, but I just don't have that much liquid cash in hand.
• My laptop is broken, and it's my fault because I dropped something on it and the screen cracked. Apple says it's $1,275 out the door for the repair. I need the machine for work, the cost of the repair is less than the cost of a new machine, and I just haven't got the liquid cash.

These are all reasonable scenarios, and have all occurred to me. At the time, it was an incredible stress, bills were late, credit cards were late, and I was generally a wreck. Who do you turn to? Family? Not everyone's family can come up with $3,000, even if they know that you can pay it back. Traditionally, this has been the role of the money-lender, which has not traditionally been banks.

The further back we go, we see a state treasury, and that individuals financed projects. Crassius, in fact, financed Caeser's defeat of the Gauls before he returned across the Rubicon with the Thirteenth (and gazillions of slaves, if you want to consider that crime, although they certainly didn't). Cicero, Cato, Pompey, Antony, and (Marcus Junius, although the overthrowing of governments goes way, way, way back to those earliest of Brutuses, Lucius, and so on...) Brutus all financed their own armies for the purpose of defeating what they felt were unjust governments; perversions of the republic. Is that organized crime? Freedom fighters? Lead-poisoned aristocrats with nothing more to do than make war for entertainment? Where, really, does one draw the line? What of Caesar Agustus, placating the people with farmland and money, while continuing to allow organized crime, fighting endless wars (during the pax romana, no less)? I think it's safe to say that money drives states. It forms them, crushes them, and determines superiority in a way that nuclear weapons and politics cannot. And so, Organized Crime is mostly concerned with money.

Organized crime is also implicated in drugs. Well, of that there's no doubt. It's really damn hard to get drugs into the country, right? Or it's really hard to produce drugs in the country, right? The most marijuana I could hope to grow in my home might be an ounce every four months or so (and this for very special plants — most take substantially longer to mature). So the industrialized production and distribution of drugs is the domain of Organized Crime. What nobody mentions when they talk about Organized Crime distributing drugs is that they're not throwing the drugs in the trash — they are giving them to the people, who demand them. This is one of the cornerstones of our society; freedom is so ingrained in the republic that we don't think of it as something radical anymore (no need to go parading around with SPQR banners, for example), we think of it as an inalienable right that not just Americans, but the entirety of humanity is entitled to. Organized Crime is in fact furthering the cause of freedom by allowing people to behave as they want.

The same can be said of prostitution. Whether we are discussing the lowly pimp, or someone as complex as, say, Heidi Fleiss, there is a need for prostitution in society, and it has been, and always will be filled. Organized Crime is often blamed for prostitution as well. Let's turn this around and say that, if you make prostitution a crime, and then organize prostitution, you have created Organized Crime where before was only demand.

But where is this going? There are a number of points that can be made from the above, and I think the first, most salient point, is that Organized Crime is the epitome of Capitalism. Demand, supply, and currency. Organized Crime is a machine. It's an incredible machine. It is capable of meeting the demand of the people, it is capable of changing its appearance, products, methodologies, and so on, to suit society. Ordinarily, we would encourage an enterprise quite so agile. Witness Google. Lowly search engine purveyors moving into email, instant messaging, cellular phones, the RF spectrum, and then having the gall to call Microsoft's bid for Yahoo "troubling." (Sergey, do me a favor, and take a moment to look yourself in the mirror)

The second point is that Organized Crime provides services to the public that the government cannot, or has decided not to. Ordinarily, we call this a non-profit corporation. Instead, because we have a moral stand against drug use or prostitution, or even against high-interest, short-term loans (this one mystifies me), we call them criminals and seek them out to remove them from society. Which brings up the last, and maybe most important point.

Organized Crime is generally violent. It has to be. First and foremost, it operates outside the law. Our friends at the DEA are a paramilitary organization with fully automatic weapons, body armor, and siege vehicles. Organized Crime has every reason to militarize, if not the right. But if you examine this more closely, you see also that Organized Crime polices itself. This, too, is an age-old concept. Just as we have in the Senate (or even the Executive office), we have power struggles; we have social norms we need to adhere to, and when somebody steps outside those boundaries, checks are in place. Whether this is impeaching a president, overturning a ruling from the judicial branch, or actually killing somebody, the act carries the same significance. It is an act of self-policing.

Because we do so little study on the benefits of Organized Crime to society, it's really hard to see where the casualties come from. Surely, there are casualties, missing Jimmy Hoffas out there, but is Organized Crime more violent towards itself or to the civilian population? My guess it is the former. Organized Crime has no reason whatsoever to attack the very reason it exists — the proletariat, the working class.

Consider the case of two competing "crime families" in an area. They are not, per se, mutually exclusive. In fact, we've seen time and again that Organized Crime cooperates. This is a sort of quid pro quo arrangement where two people can agree "you take the west side, I'll take the east side." They can continue their operations, everyone gets rich, the proletariat gets what it wants, and the government doesn't have to worry about "keeping the streets clean," because petty crime is directly in conflict with Organized Crime. Organized Crime could even be considered a form of rudimentary government. If the people are their customers, it is very bad for business if you have uncontrolled hoodlums terrorizing the people. Organized Crime would rather — traditionally violently — curtail such activities.

Let us hypothesize for a moment that the DEA and RICO ceased to exist, and Organized Crime was given, say, a decade to operate as they wish. Letting them operate on their own is incentive enough for them to not be so onerous that the people rise up and cry, "Organized Crime must be dealt with! We must enact laws and create agencies to destroy these criminals!" More likely, complaints about how criminals are not making a "fair" living selling heroin would arise. Well, friends, if one makes heroin and prostitution and high-risk lending (more) legal, it has a tendency to police itself, just as any free market does. There will be better-quality heroin from the enterprising Chinese fellow who imports from poppies grown in better climates by workers paid less than the guy who sets up a poppy farm in western Virginia, and it will cost less. Why is farming opium or marijuana an unfair way to make a living? Growing good marijuana is hard. Refining heroin or other opioids from raw opium is equally hard, if not harder. This is how capitalism works, right? You could buy that Kia Sedona — it was built by Koreans who are paid less, with cheaper materials, and you're not entirely sure that it's a great car, but it costs less — or you could buy the corresponding luxury vehicle, say a BMW X3. Capitalism, folks. A free market. Free industry.

But, let's get back to violence for a second, as this is another need of society. To be perfectly honest, I think we've all said, "god, I'd like to kill that asshole." In reality, this is pretty hard to do. There are (obscure) statistics on what it costs to "have someone killed." However, as the gun advocates like to remind us, an armed society is a polite society. Bill DeStevens once let me know that I was "being watched" by the company (AOL at the time) because of this quote:

Lastly, I'd like to mention it, because it's been bothering me some. Next time you're out in the car or otherwise in public, and you flip somebody off, cut them off, make a face at them, whatever.. Think for a second before doing so, "just how stable is this guy? I mean, is he going to flip out or anything?" Let me just say that you never know the guy you're tweaking there isn't psychotic. That is to say, he might be. And you might just be the little push he needs to go apeshit. And maybe, just maybe, he's got a trunk full of guns, and maybe he's had a long day. Certainly wouldn't be the first time it has happened, and you won't be the last, either. Just give it a thought.

In a society where violence can be contracted, where indeed individuals are empowered to take matters into their own hands, does it not also self-regulate? If we look at Edo Japan, we had many samurai running about with katanas and yet, we do not have stories of ronin or other such armed individuals running about ravaging and pillaging. Despite the fact that the Romans may have been the most bellicose empire in the last five thousand years, everyone was armed, there was a huge Organized Crime quotient, and yet, it was still safer to live in Rome than it was to live in the ungoverned ("unprovinced") territories. Even today, we have many safe societies in which everyone is armed, and local magistrates (or indeed criminals) have the power of death, lending, and vice for a population. These societies continue to exist, despite their obvious "problem" with crime and arms.

Wouldn't such a society be one of people who are not afraid but empowered? If I am a regular customer of my local organized crime boss type person, is it not in his interest to protect me from some other criminal organization (I use the word "criminal" here as roughly synonymous with "corporate") or, dare I say, individual? If we use the example we see so often on television, one crime lord owns one building and another owns the building next door (where "owns" in this case means "has the right to conduct business within"), does not crimelord A assert that if crimelord B begins to hassle his tenants or customers that the result will be swift, violent, and generally not something we want to spend the weekends doing? Perhaps we would live under arms. But the people who do the violence and killing (or manufacturing and distributing drugs, and so on), are doing so by choice, by profession, and have very little interest in the people who consume their products, versus their competitors. It's all very silly to assume that Organized Crime is out to eradicate the populace with sawn-off twelve-gauge shotguns; who would buy their prostitutes and drugs? Who would borrow money from them? Organized Criminals are, as they say in the US, "people people." (I realize this may be hard to translate for my Chinese and European readers; consider instead the terms "gregarious," "charitable," "charismatic," and the like)

The last point I'd like to make, because I feel the above points are more than clear, and as far as I can tell, most objections will center around people's fear of guns, drugs, sex, and all the other sordid things we consume as a society. This system, this "organized crime" (no caps this time, pay attention!), is a well recognized societal system. The "big man" is a role played in many tribes and peoples on, frankly, every continent. One may have a tribe, a territory, one may even have spiritual and political leaders. But the Big Man is the one you go to when you need something. He makes his reputation by doing favors for the people he serves (yes, Organized Crime serves the people). You can't get an alternator for your car because of some trade embargo by a first-world nation? Your neighbor keeps stealing your sheep? He's your man.

Anthropologists and sociologists have recognized this phenomenon in many societies and consider it to be normal. Generally, though, we don't have them analyzing anything as broad as our fifty loosely-bound republics and one aborted state District.

The long and short of it is thus:

Organized Crime exists because we need it. The reason it is crime and not "Organized Corporation" is the business they deal in is morally repugnant to the oligarchy, who have committed several crimes — including sedition and corruption, just like the criminals — themselves. I've been on a freedom, liberty, and "republic" tear for a while now, and I just get more and more fucking pissed when I see the pale shadow of a Republic and the word "free" used to describe the conditions we live in.

Free? I have sinus congestion and my back hurts. Where's my fucking sudafed and laudanum? That freedom, friends, you can shove right up your asses. SPQR? What we've got, folks, is S. The PQR ended long, long ago. You're looking for a guy named Mehmet Jr. Go find that fucker and bring me his liver.

Life is strange

I feel substantially more motivated and indeed clear-headed listening to Velvet Acid Christ than Cake, despite the latter's clever use of irony, melody, and harmony, and the former's almost complete lack of all the above. Go figure.

Caffeine redux

And so I got an espresso machine for Christmas (Sandy got a katana – a real one!). I'd been sick as a dog, and only just opened it a week ago or so. Originally it was just to get hot water from the steamer nozzle (in Japan and China they have these devices called "air pots" that just provide hot water for tea, due to its prevalence in their culture(s); good luck finding one in the States).

I started feeling better, and so decided well, it's time to make some espresso. I read the manual and all its warnings about explosions and burns and things like this, but I bravely applied coffee, tamped it, provided more coffee, tamped again (thus making a double), and I put the handle-cup-thingie into its receptacle, and let 'er rip.

The result was actually remarkably good. Sandy had brought me home espresso ground Ecuadorian and Colombian. I'm not especially a fan of the latter, but then Sandy doesn't drink much coffee (at least not black) and when I asked for something central American, I guess she did an okay job.

The gist of this is that instead of making coffee for myself (we don't have a coffee maker), I've been making espresso. Two double espressos fills out a coffee cup nicely, and I get the crema that's indicative of well-made espresso. So call me a happy man, leaving the house with my "quad" in a coffee mug. The problem with this otherwise flawless plan is I wind up getting way more caffeine than I would normally get. So I'm pretty alert for the first couple hours, and then the inevitable caffeine crash hits.

Now I'm stuck with office coffee out of one of those Keurig machines and not only is it not the same, it's nothing like espresso. So here I am, trying to stay awake, and simultaneously shunning office coffee.

Woe is me, I know. I could be cleaning latrines in Iraq or whatever, but dammit, you just don't fuck with a man's caffeine. Either the Keurig or the Breville has to go.

Enter the snake

And so it would appear that I'll be parallelizing some python code for beowulf. Neato. If you don't get the reference above, hint: it's Apollo.

VMware for whiteboarding

I've been pretty successful in making simulated machines in VMware both on Windows and on the Mac to sort of whiteboard things and make sure software will work. However, I have not yet found a way to build an image from a VMware virtual host that I could burn down onto a hard disk. There are third party tools like Acronis that will let me take an image of a machine with an OS on it, but they don't boot well within VMware because they do tricky stuff during boot. For example with Acronis, I get the bootloader to work, but it doesn't like any of the mouses or keyboards I've attached to it, it can't see the drives (VMware emulates drives kind of weirdly), and is generally just useless in the virtual environment.

Anyone building "buildout" images from VMware? Is there a better solution? At this point, I'm considering just running VMware on everything and bringing up whichever image I want to run, but I am hesitant to live entirely virtually on my machines (such as an HPC cluster), despite the niceties of it. The logistics just strike me as a complete nightmare (maybe somebody has done all the heavy lifting on this and there's a guide).

The other problem is that I cannot take an image built in VMware Fusion on the Mac and run it on the Windows machines ("This image was created with a version of VMware that has more features than this version."). So while I can build an image I'm happy with on my primary machine (the Mac), I eventually have to replicate that work on the PC, which I wind up doing over RDP or something silly like that. Pain in the ass, all of it.

ouch

Dear Humanity,
Carmina Burana is one of my favorites. Please do not remix it into techno.
With warmest regards,
Alex

Republics and modernity

I find myself troubled of late by the uses of the words, senate, republic, and the like, which have been carried through time, not describing periods of civility or civilization, periods of equality, but rather periods of near monarchy. Prior to the first real republics we have what were simply referred to as empires, as monarchies, as deistic monarchies (in the case pharaonic rule), and the like.

In all times, a senate, serving a republic, or two similar bodies, has been composed of people put together by political co-favor or outright fear (as Sarpedon says, "because they fear him, Cato, more than they hate him." This, of course, to Cato, who is something of a sympathetic figure in history, but his stubbornness and recalcitrance I do not see as positive qualities, especially as one expects a civilization to progress — this, I suppose, being the root of liberalism). At any rate, how, then, does one see our own republic? The constitution, crafted not long after many of the bizarre "third republics" (such as that of Ivan III in, of all places, Moscow, after the fall of Byzantine Rome), guarantees a republican form of rule for all states.

But the word is hollow, and its connotations are still clearly visible today. As recently as Mitt Romney's endorsement of John McCain, we can see the same themes played out again, as they have in past elections. We see on the other side of the aisle outright bribery from the Clinton and Obama camps (the former, "heating cost tax rebates for [the current, cold] winter", the latter, cash tax rebates), which are supposedly required to boost the economy (I suppose, despite Bernanke's possibly foolish optimism).

So bribery and political favor are still used in the highest echelons of the control of the republic(s). It is not hard to sympathize with Cato's reply to Sarpedon, "give me a sword, that I might free my country from slavery." But of course, there is no thirteenth legion marching across the Rubicon here, there is no stray carrier battle group threatening to unseat the senate or executive office, nor is there any credible group with enough power to actually change things (despite institutes such as the Cato institute, somewhat ironically named, both for its impotence and its being named after papers penned by English authors after the separation of our new republic from their monarchy).

It is kind of interesting that on form SF86 from the US Government, we are asked whether we have ever supported the "violent overthrow of the government of the United States of America." Well, I certainly am not. Violence, plainly, is bad for business and kills people (ah, irony again, with Cato being invoked to memorialize confederate soldiers in Arlington Cemetery!), and the fact that any stray carrier battle group (somewhat larger than your average, uh, legion) is bound to cause collateral damage to my home. And, of course, it's not certain that a military coup would exactly make things better, although it might be a lot clearer who's in control. (and make it a lot clearer to the rest of the world who more or less regard us as a rampant military with a republic thrown in as garnish)

In any case, as is the goal of a proper republic, we are carrying out wars for political and monetary gain, as well as the subservience of the conquered (look, for example, at our flourishing relationship with Viet Nam, despite the despicable — on all sides — war fought there on behalf of, well, the proles, the plebeians, whatever you wish to call them). I don't suppose one needs to respond as Cato, ask for a sword, and take up arms. But one needn't either, lap up the words of freedom, equality, the republic, and all that, without realizing that the words are meaningless and that any form of rule is to be judged by its actors and actions, not by its name.

Random killings (VT, NIU, etc)

short: as I was going through my "drafts," I noticed this. It's sufficiently far from the original act that I think most people have gotten over it. Despite that, it's very long, includes what you could call personal details, and is probably disturbing to more than a few people. I have edited it somewhat to make it less disturbing while retaining the original point. That point being: random killings aren't, and we're not going to stop this sort of act until we, as a society, change.


For those of you reading this in RSS, it probably comes up as "new," but will be relegated to the archives because of its original date. Sorry to stir the pot.

(This was written April 17 of 2007.)

Before I start with this, let me say that you probably don't want to read this right now if you're at all involved with the Virginia Tech killings, or for that matter, with any of these killing sprees that have been troubling the world over the last twenty years or so (and yes, there were many before then, but let's not get into that yet). Chances are, people are going to think that I am blaming the victim. And, really, I am. So you probably want to stop right here.

Further, if you've worked with me, or interacted with me in the past, you may actually feel threatened by what I have to say. And now would be a good time to stop – although I think if you can put aside the notion that I might do something like this and just listen, you might reach enlightenment. I'm not going to kill anyone. Just consider this: I have some particular (not original) ideas about this whole phenomenon, and I can't actually say anything without somebody feeling threatened. This does not mean I don't have a right to say it. Nor does it mean I am incorrect. It needs to be said, and I am going to say it. I repeat, I am not going to kill anyone.

So, recently, a student at Virginia Tech killed a lot of people. It appears that he started with his girlfriend, and somebody else who was involved at the time of the argument between the couple. This is hardly unusual, and I don't think it would have made national headlines, or certainly not to the extent that it did, had he stopped there. Remember, this killing was not unusual.

But, he didn't. He continued killing people, after pausing for two hours, to collect himself and prepare further for the rest of the assault. We have all heard that these were random killings, that he was running around shooting people on some ludicrous rampage.

Folks, this is not the case. The killer was a humanities student. He had complained in the past about privileged students at the school, "rich kids." He ended up in the engineering building quite deliberately. Where better to look for privileged students, rich kids, and other people destined to lead rather privileged lives? Do we not all joke about the history major, the english major? These are people, we joke, who cannot possibly expect much out of life. It is not surprising at all that he wound up where he did.

We also see that he did not randomly shoot people. People were shot, repeatedly:

    GRACE: Out to Lauren Howard, psychotherapist. What does that suggest to you, someone that would aim at a 3- and 4-year-old little boy?


    HOWARD: This has all the earmarks of an execution, Nancy. For this to be a random act of violence, it just does not make sense.


    These people were shot multiple times. It was a passionless, goal- oriented, definitive desire to shoot to kill and get rid of these people. This looks to me as clearly as an execution as anything I`ve ever seen.

If we look at past shootings, we see a lot of people who were injured but not killed. As the commentator above, and a doctor treating the victims said, these were people shot multiple times. In the face, torso, legs, et cetera. He didn't randomly run about shooting people. He very carefully aimed (more on this in a moment), and killed people.

Why did he do this? Well, let's start with the girlfriend, because this is the easiest one to figure out.

We all know a woman who has had "trouble" with an ex-boyfriend who just doesn't "get it." They want to break up, it doesn't quite go as planned, and the spiral begins of the woman treating the man worse and worse until finally he "gets it." Do they actually get it? Or are they just so intimidated by the reproach and personal attacks that they walk away? We all know these attacks get very ugly. And we (perhaps rightly) defend them. Such horrible things are said in these encounters. Frequently, directly insulting the core personality of the "broken off," be it sexual insults, insults about personality or jobs, their looks, and so on.

I realize there are few things more juvenile than to suggest that popular music somehow has insight or relevance into an issue such as this. However, the song Slow Ride by Sublime contains what appears to be an actual conversation between two such people – the broken off, and the "leaving" party. So I can quote this here, but really, listening to the actual song adds the context of tone of voice and cadence. At any rate, most of us have this album, or can afford the $.99 to listen to the clip.

    (Phone Dialing)


    [Hello?]


    [Hi it's me]


    [I thought I told you not to call me here]


    [I know I just really needed to talk to you]


    [Get a clue babe, there's nothing to talk about.]


    (Click!)

Get a clue, indeed. The problem isn't that the caller doesn't "have a clue." The problem is the caller doesn't accept the reasons for whatever has happened, and wants to talk about it. While relationships do end, and badly at that, it is a social norm for people to treat the other party like absolute dirt. There's an interesting discussion of this (it's perhaps a little vapid and may be hard to read for some of you) on Mimi Tanner's Win Him Back series of booklets about relationships, for women.

    Cut All Contact:

    No matter you're moving on or trying to get your ex back (see http://www.reverse-your-breakup.com/), it is very important that you CUT ALL CONTACT with your ex.


    Don't call your ex.


    Don't hang out with your ex.


    Don't see your ex casually for any reason.


    Cutting all contact means cutting all contact!

(emphasis in original)

This is a recurring theme in these shootings, but I'll get back to this. Tanner is advocating what most of us would consider to be very sensible advice. The relationship is over; what could you possibly say to the estranged that would fix anything? It goes downhill from here. The spurned lover doesn't understand, doesn't want to break up, and the leaving lover responds by widening the rift between them. Often at this point insults, either delivered personally or by a proxy, are delivered. This is what we call a "bad breakup." It's so common that we have a proper noun for it. I know plenty of people who have gone through this, and we all nod and scratch our chins when we hear either side of the story. It's never good. And, sadly, this sort of behavior frequently leads to murders, murder-suicides, restraining orders, and all sorts of trauma. It's sensible advice, but we also tacitly accept that somebody is going to be hurt. Frequently, hurt severely. This is the sort of thing that keeps people in therapy for years.

So back to the original point here, this is not a random, unexpected, unusual act. A spurned lover kills the leaving lover. We can infer that the break-up (if there was a break-up; this could have been the breakup) was not amicable, and that things were said and done which were not especially pleasant. Nobody would be surprised to learn horrid things were said and done to the shooter. The leaving lover in this case, however, is portrayed as some flawless victim. She did nothing to merit the shooting.

Folks, she didn't need to die, but let's not deny that she had some part in this. It's willful ignorance. There are two victims in the end of any relationship. Let's start with that. Both of them were hurt, obviously. Both of them took it badly. That's independent of the murder.

Cho wasn't some random bloodthirsty convict out to kill people. He had reason. We can go as deep as we like to see the pain the guy was carrying around. Let's look at the "play" of his (humanities major, remember) that was written a year before the shootings.

    Guess what, Dick. You wanna know something. You wanna know why I don't like you? Because you can't provide for my mom. You barely make the minimum wage, man. All you do for mom is all this honey-poo shit. Honey-poo! Honey-poo! You piece of shit! You were a janitor one time. You're a one time truck driver. You taught preschool kids for two months. And now you're what you like to call yourself a chef, what the rest of the world calls hamburger flipper. Back where you came from. The pinnacle of your career was that you were a pro football player. How long did that last? Three weeks! Ha! You're over the hills, buster! Just look at yourself, all fat and lazy. Only if you were smart enough to stay in the league, you wouldn't be like this. A former player. No wonder your name is McPork–I mean McBeef. While the guys were packing on muscles, you were packing on McDonald's fat, chowing down on three Big Mac's in three minutes. YOu wanted me to call you dad? Okay. Hey dad, you are such a asshole! Asshole of assholes, DAD! And as for you banging my mom, looks like that lasted a long as your pathetic career, you prematurely ejaculating piece of dickshit. Sucks for you, you motherfucking McBeef.

Spelling, punctuation, etc., in original.

That's a whole lot of rage. I mean, unhealthy, serious rage. Rage like this doesn't occur in a vacuum. In fact, his teachers were so concerned by this, he was referred to counseling:

    Roy removed Cho from class and tutored him, occasionally fearing for her own safety. "I was hoping that by taking him out of the classroom … I'd help maybe to avoid something that could be catastrophic," she says. "I kept saying to him, 'Please go to counseling. I will take you over to counseling myself,' because he was so depressed … but apparently I was told you can't force someone to go to counseling. Even though I called counseling trying to get everyone to force him to go over, their hands were tied."

Which of course, the students noticed as well:

    Roy wasn't the only one so disturbed. Writing on AOL today, former Cho writing classmate Ian MacFarlane recalled that when he and his classmates read Cho's plays, "it was like something out of a nightmare. The plays had really twisted, macabre violence. … When the students gave reviews of his play in class, we were very careful with our words in case he decided to snap."

I've had no luck getting the original source for McFarlane's quote here.

With this very clear indication that the kid was disturbed, we still have people on NPR and CNN asking "how could we have known this would happen?" "How could we possibly prevent this sort of thing from happening?" It's sickening that these people pretend that nobody saw this. That there was no reason for the killer to go shooting people. That there was no reason he picked the people he did, shooting not once, but many times, many people, and accurately at that.

Let's zoom out for a moment, and go back to Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. Has anyone actually read the transcripts of what happened at Columbine? These people picked their victims. They spoke to them, and told them why they were killing them.

"All jocks stand up! We're going to kill every one of you."


    "Everyone around me got shot. I begged him for 10 minutes not to shoot me. He just put the gun in my face and there was bleeding everywhere and he started laughing and was saying that it was all because people had been mean to him last year."

Again, there was nothing random about this. We can take this example even further, and discuss the same behavior in workplace shootings, such as the shooting at Standard Gravure in 1989, described here in Mark Ames' Going Postal:

    Wesbecker entered the basement room just as John Tingle, a pressman who’d heard a “loud noise that sounded like a steel plate hitting the floor,” rounded the corner to see what was happening.


    Tingle knew Wesbecker and greeted him as if it was just another day, despite the smoking AK and the ominous duffel bag packed with guns and ordinance [sic].


    “Hey, Rock, what’s happening?” Tingle asked, using the friendly shortened version of Wesbecker’s menacing-sounding nickname.


    Wesbecker, who had always been on friendly terms with Tingle, replied, “Hi John . . . I told them I’d be back. Get away from me.”


    “I said, ‘What are you doing, Rocky?’” Tingle later told reporters. “I started to walk toward him, and he said, ‘Get away.’” Wesbecker repeated himself, this time telling Tingle to get the fuck away. Tingle obeyed and motioned to the others nearby to move away.


    Rocky headed toward a stairwell between two presses, firing as he approached. The body of Richard O. Barger, who was shot in the back, lay at the bottom of the stairwell—head cocked back onto a conveyor belt, arms splayed on the rubber belt as if crucified, and with blood splattered on the floor around him.


    That image—a now famous page one Courier-Journal photo led to a lawsuit filed by Barger’s family and a Supreme Court ruling on press freedoms versus the privacy of the bereaved. It seems that Wesbecker didn’t intend to kill Barger. He was coming down the metal stairwell, and Wesbecker probably didn’t see who it was before he fired. According to witnesses, after killing him, Wesbecker walked over to Barger’s body, apologized, then turned around and continued his rampage.


    Wesbecker fired three times as he walked up the stairwell and about another dozen times when he reached the top. He walked down the long row between press one and press two, shooting at anyone who hadn’t scrambled out of his way — Lloyd White and James Wible Sr. were both murdered on the press floor. The shots and screams were drowned out by the din of the printing presses.

Nobody was surprised by any of these. At least, not after they considered what had happened. Folks, we're not going to hear that Cho's life was all roses and he just, you know, snapped and went and killed three dozen people at school. We are most definitely going to hear how he was mistreated, ostracized, even feared by his peers. His home life was almost certainly abysmal.

Yet we can't say that it's fair for everyone who "lead a tough life" to "go postal." It's obviously not reasonable that everyone who is harassed, harangued, singled out and teased, deliberately humiliated by an ex-lover, and so on, respond by killing people. But what behavior do we condone? What behavior do we actually show these people?

I, myself, have had some of these problems from time to time, and at the time, I had this to say:

    On top of that, I have a peculiar relationship that I'm not sure how to deal with. In the past, I've always made friends at work. I've never started a job where I would be working with somebody who I was friends with before working there. I thought, going into this, that it might be damaging, and I might have to just lose the friendship in the interest of keeping the work relationship sane. So far that is not the case. However, communications problems and stress have a new and different depth to them when you find yourself thinking "but I thought we were friends?"

He and I fought continually for the first few months. He felt I wasn't working hard enough, or wasn't smart enough to appreciate his code, or whichever. After a while, we were put on less directly related projects, and one of our coworkers was promoted to manage half of our team (reducing our team from ten to about five).

My belongings disappeared a couple times. I was given literature for "starbucks careers." A "thank you" was sent to my home for participating in an employment survey, which listed my position as "line cook."

Unfortunately, HR decided that the whole escapade required their intervention (despite my request that it not involve HR), and the people who had orchestrated the malfeasance were actually disciplined. I was asked to accept an apology, or to discuss with them (who was actually part of the whole thing) what had happened. My supervisor rightly said at the time that he thought it would "destroy [my and the aforementioned coworker] working relationship."

And so we went from simple teasing to strong resentment. Where before we had occasionally gone to lunch together, I was left back at the office while they left. We didn't talk anymore because they were upset at being disciplined, and I was upset at not being included.

It occurred to me back then, that other people, like me, were seriously disgruntled with work and home life. Like Cho, they didn't therapy, medication, or anything helpful. I had this to say:

    Lastly, I'd like to mention it, because it's been bothering me some. Next time you're out in the car or otherwise in public, and you flip somebody off, cut them off, make a face at them, whatever.. Think for a second before doing so, "just how stable is this guy? I mean, is he going to flip out or anything?" Let me just say that you never know the guy you're tweaking there isn't psychotic. That is to say, he might be. And you might just be the little push he needs to go apeshit. And maybe, just maybe, he's got a trunk full of guns, and maybe he's had a long day. Certainly wouldn't be the first time it has happened, and you won't be the last, either. Just give it a thought.

I knew the environment was hostile, and getting worse. I immediately cleaned out my office and began finishing up all the software projects I had on my plate.

I am contractually forbidden [this is not true anymore, but I'm not going into it] from disclosing the details of my separation agreement with AOL. However, I can state that I was required to sign a form stating that I would not sue AOL for wrongful termination or harassment (which is not to say I was terminated, as such; I am free to go back and work at AOL, and have in fact interviewed there a number of times since).

The people who perpetrated this are, with two exceptions [this is not true anymore; I believe only one of them is still there], still employed at AOL. Other than the token discipline extended for teasing, I was the one who was disciplined – nobody else. I didn't fit in, despite wanting to, and was encouraged to quit. I happen know quite a few people who are supervisors at large IT companies (including AOL). It is common knowledge that it is easier to force a person to quit than it is to fire them. It's easy to imagine how it's accomplished: being given the work nobody wants, coworkers teasing, and so on.

Here's where we return to the discussion.

When I read Going Postal, I immediately thought, "Wow, [the coworkers] should really read this. They might actually get into the same situation with somebody who actually is insane enough to shoot them."

I mentioned this to a psychologist friend of mine who told me it was a terrible idea. Of course, I realize that. But let's throw a couple what-if's out.

• What would have happened if I had actually sent the book to [the coworkers]? I think it's entirely reasonable to think that they would believe I was either threatening them or insinuating that harm could (or could have) come to them.

Why, though, is that? The answer is very simple. These sorts of things are not accidents. People do not randomly go and shoot their coworkers or fellow students. [these coworkers], rightly understood that the teasing and maltreatment was excessive. They had every reason to believe somebody like me would go on a shooting rampage. Thankfully, I wouldn't have, won't, and didn't. I like [those coworkers] a lot, and consider the time at AOL to be something of a social experiment that went horribly wrong. I continue to tell people that was one of the brightest teams I ever worked on.

So where does this come from? What is it that causes us to behave this way? What sort of things happen to people that go on shooting sprees? And, as everyone seems to be asking, why is it so common in America?

Part of this stems from bias, which I've discussed before. When we get into these situations with people, be they coworkers or fellow students, we generally perceive that we have a position of advantage. At AOL, the people responsible for [those acts] had the advantage of anonymity (nobody would have dared do the things they did while I was watching). They also had the advantage of "reasonability." What they were doing was not itself a hostile act. Each individual act would not be perceived as overly hostile or threatening. In the case of an ex-lover saying "get a clue, babe," she is justified in believing that she negotiates from a position of power. However, it is clearly biased to believe that she can hurl invective at the ex. Yet, it happens.

We also have a particularly American belief that people should "suck it up." Ames goes into great detail discussing this machine of ambivalence to (or indeed participation in) suffering:

    Another picture of Wesbecker also emerged: that of a desperately ambitious striver crushed by the brutal new corporate culture that started to dominate under Reaganomics.


    And another image: Wesbecker was a pathetic nerd whose every attempt to reinvent himself only brought him greater humiliation.


    ...


    Wesbecker was short, around five feet eight inches, and “chubby,” particularly around his face and belly. He had red curly hair and wore large tinted glasses. His first nickname at Standard Gravure was “Little Doughboy” — Campbell couldn’t help but chuckle when he revealed this first nickname. “It was funny to those who knew him.” Campbell added, “He wasn’t a ladies’ man.”


    ...


    And then came the Rocky incident. Wesbecker was sitting at a bar popping off to a woman, a former YMCA instructor, for the benefit of the guys, when she transformed his blue-collar banter into every nerd’s nightmare: she beat the living shit out of Joe Wesbecker. Right in front of his friends. After that, everyone at the plant started calling Wesbecker “Rocky.” Not because he was a violent person by nature, but rather because he got stomped by a woman whom he’d tried to hit on. Thus the nickname “Rocky” was so cruelly ironic, on a playground scale, that for the media to have explained where it really came from would have been confusing, since it cannot help but arouse some pathos, some sympathy.

Teasing, of course, is just words. It's not physical violence. It's simply "putting somebody down." And as adults in America, we're expected to take it. We're even supposed to take it and laugh in spite of it ([these acts are] often a joke, of course). Anyone who doesn't take it well is branded as weak, as somebody who cannot take something as simple as teasing, and is further ostracized and picked on. Again, bias comes into play here. Those who are doing the teasing perceive that they are in a position of strength: they are the reasonable ones, and the teased is simply overreacting. Therefore the teasing can continue, until the teased "gets it."

But they never do, do they?

It's educational here to ask what the [the aggressors] actually gain from these situations. They gain nothing, and often in fact lose something: a coworker who produced, intellectual assets, or even money. All they gain is the satisfaction of harassing a [the subject] who had the audacity to complain.

Let's just review the above, in reference to the current shooting, and of course to shootings which are brewing as I write this.

• This wasn't unexpected. Cho had to plan this. Students knew this was coming.

• Students treated Cho poorly. This is not a real surprise; it happens everywhere. It's happening right now.

• This wasn't a random anything.

• There weren't senseless victims. They were chosen, with reason, and shot, deliberately.

The only thing that remains to be said is, "how can we prevent this?"

I'm shocked to hear psychiatrists and other mental health professionals saying that there is no way to prevent this from happening. Of course there is a way to prevent this from happening. Let us first accept two precepts:

• There are people among us, right now, who are very close to snapping. They do, every single year.

• We are all currently treating those people very poorly, with the mistaken belief that they will not actually react by killing us and themselves.

How we fix this is we accept that we can't change the way people react to intimidation, bullying, teasing, physical abuse, and so on. It crushes people. Instead, we can accept the responsibility, as a society, for the harm we cause. The shooters are a symptom of our own ugly behavior towards others. People shouldn't think that the person they cut off on the freeway isn't going to harm them. They shouldn't feel safe to provoke others into actions like this. They shouldn't think that the person they're attacking is "reasonable" or "wouldn't dare" commit these acts. People do kill people over this.

All it takes is just a little bit of compassion, and maybe a little bit more intelligence than we're presently employing in this regard. People needn't have died this week. People don't need to be killed over it in the future.

The cure for these killings is education. The vacuous questions of "why" and "how" this happened are patently offensive and ignorant. Let's move past blaming Cho – the victim – and towards accepting responsibility for the things we do.

Yet more brevity (!)

Whilst attempting to back up a copy of my operating system media (which I suppose is probably illegal, but I'm awful worried my office will burn down with the software in it while I'm at home with the laptop), I was surprised to find that it was 7.1gb (thus on a DVD+R DL disc). Hm, says I, that's awfully large, it can't be that big. So I checked out /System and /Library (this, mind you, does not necessarily indicate it's one of those fruity operating systems) and found an astounding 14.2gb of data contained therein.

This from an operating system derived from, what, 4.2 BSD? Which could fit into 256mb? Sure I wear a four gig memory stick on my badge-bitch sling, and storage is cheap, but whatever happened to short and sweet?

And why in the hell do I have an RDP open to a windows machine and VMware Fusion running a windows machine on my mac right now? Why in the hell do I even own a mac?

What the fuck?

on brevity

I am not sure why this occurs to me today, and not when I finished The State of the Art or Glasshouse. The latter was pretty campy, and except for a piece I didn't exactly understand (the swordfighting at the beginning?) and the surreality piece-turned-Haloesque shootemup stuff, was generally kind of mundane (sorry, Charlie). The book's been around for a while, so I don't think I'm dashing anyone's hopes by sort of spoiling it, but I suppose you mightn't read ahead if you haven't read Glasshouse. The whole notion is that a bunch of people agree to be stuck into some virtual reality experiment (where virtual reality is a vastly extended brand of that seen in Accelerando, except at the end of same). It's some sort of Jetsons-meets-the-Brady Bunch sort of deal where it's set in contemporary epoch (that is, ours) and the first-person ambles about fretting about having to use a surfactant to cleanse her hair, the fact that drugs aren't available, and that, quite clearly, religion is bad. Bad, even, with a big b. I mean, the horror of the things we put ourselves through in this "modern age" of ours, when the future is so happy-go-lucky (sort of, more on this in a minute).

The really interesting meaty part of the book is the notion of data degradation or corruption (intentionally or not), especially where that data is essentially a digitized personthing. We then get into the sort of person-as-data-infected-by-malware kind of thing, and that, to me, was really the interesting bit.

The reason for this is actually pretty simple. It's really hard to scoot people around at the speed of light, so Charlie just says, we'll turn 'em into bits, zap 'em through these point-to-point data transmitters, and lo, humanity colonizes.

Banks doesn't get this far because he thinks FTL is okay in his Culture books, which State of the Art is (short story, really).

But what both Banks and Stross did in their respective works was criticize (and laud, in part) contemporary society (where this includes all the various people we're blowing up who are ostensibly not part of society). Banks did this in 80 pages, give or take, and much of that was taken up by his endless need to make an absolutely hideous concept funny (the last scene in particular, is classic Banks).

I really do like both authors a lot. I left Glasshouse feeling disillusioned, maybe, certainly disappointed that here, from the author of three books I had loved (Singularity Sky, Iron Sunrise, and Accelerando, in that order) was a book that for the most part I toiled to finish. It just bored me. What is it about Banks that is so much easier to read (admittedly, there are dry parts in some of his books, notably The Player of Games never really, er, "heated up" until damn near the very end, and Consider Phlebas and Look to Windward feel very, very similar).

But let me pose a question. Let us suppose Charlie set out to write (gasp!) The Wasp Factory. This is not, I don't think, outside his scope of work, and I suspect he'd get a chuckle out of the sheer proposition of the thing. Would he do it in 200 pages? Or would it be more like 500, with a lot of readable (but cullable) fluffy stuff in the middle/beginning?

I know I've bitched about sloppy middles (this post, in particular) sloppy endings (Spin) and sloppy beginnings (well, actually, I don't think I actually bitch about this because there's just so much of it, and we frequently don't pick books up we can't, you know, get into in the first fifty pages. I might as well list The Great Gatsby here — take that you lit-snobs — which I just could not get started, could not finish, could not read, until we (wifey, who adores the book, and I) took a longish drive and audiobooked it. It still sucked.)

But all this does not mean that books are crap from beginning to ending. All I'm saying there is that it's such a rare book that, from beginning to end, is taut, terse (if necessary; there's always room for prose), tense, and actually doesn't leave you feeling cheated at the end.

They're Scots. They probably drink at the same pubs, they probably like the same whisky, and they probably both read at Fringe. I wonder if the two of them have ever talked about writing and what parts are important to them. It seems to me that a story is important to Stross, while a meaning (e.g., Against a Dark Background, Use of Weapons) is more important to Banks.

I suppose I lean more to the meaning side, which, admittedly, can be done in an astonishingly small work. (I end with the Stross example on purpose)

And lastly, for those who misunderstood the "irony" post, I have herein included a rather longish rambling about people I don't know and what they might think or do, titled, "on brevity".

Cheers.

Can you wear kevlar and steel plates over merino wool and pima cotton?

The weather on the east coast (including, of course, the South) has been abysmal. We've been plagued by dark clouds and rain, sleet, snow, ice, salt, gravel, and everything else. Commutes that normally take 30 minutes took four hours last night. In the last three days, I've had four drivers deliberately try to hit my car (I guess they just don't figure the subaru with the funny looking thing on the back can get out of their way in time, or something), with two of them getting out of the car, coming to my door, and asking me to — I really wish I were kidding — fight them. Like knuckles to faces fighting. Over who cut who off (I still have no idea what happened in most of these circumstances other than other people were very angry and I was just in their way).

Yet, yesterday, I finally found myself on the rage end of the equation and fists did fly. I was wearing motorcycling gloves (having armored knuckles) and a biker jacket with armor in it. The reason for this was not that I was looking for trouble, but the weather was so poor, I needed the gloves and the jacket the biker attire afforded me better weather protection than a jacket purchased at the Yacht Club in San Diego. And I beat living hell into someone. Really, really, beat them. I got a few scratches and scuffs, I have some bruises on my arms (the armor on the jacket is mostly on the anterior arms, chest, and back), but my hands are fine, if swollen and bruised. I really just couldn't stop. I mean, I was there, and it was sickening to me, and I was the one putting my fist in his face. I had taken 6mg of my "happy pills", and taking more wouldn't have helped.

There was blood and other various fluids when hostilities ceased, and I guess none of it was mine, because I just can't find any injuries other than mild contusions and little cuts and scrapes.

I took a hot shower afterwards, trying to clean some of it off me, but it's the kind of thing that sticks to you; it sticks to your insides, too. And so what do I do?

I sat down and I wrote. I wrote the goriest, most hateful things I've ever written, trying to pour out the rest of the adrenaline surge into text, thinking maybe, maybe it will absolve me a little, and maybe somebody else will read it and understand, or feel as filthy as I did right then. I wrote and wrote, and was mostly happy with what came out of it.

But it didn't help. Blame the internet, I think. For every smash-faced iraqi or afghani jihadi, for every disgusting photo of violence and desecration I'd seen, what I'd just been through paled in comparison. Nobody died. Brains were in the appropriate places, and I really wanted to get dressed back up, go out in that weather, find a bar, get completely shitfaced, and do it again. Harder, meaner, faster. Maybe with someone who was ready for it.

Seeing Sandy when I went to pick her up from work rolled most of all of it right off my back, but there's still blood on the gloves, the words I wrote are still there, and those injuries are very real.

Is it the weather? It hardly seems a simple winter (February at that) storm could cause people to want to kill eachother on the roads — moreso than usual, of course — for people to get out of their cars, in the rain, and ask for a chance to really hurt someone, or get hurt themselves. Maybe I don't look so big in my little subaru, but I suppose when six foot five of me steps out of the car, it's a different equation. I don't know what these people are thinking.

But, sleep came in fits, the morning came with a gloomy sneer, and I was back on the cursed road. First to drop Sandy off, and next to drop my own sorry ass off. In a merino wool sweater over a pima cotton polo with an orthopedic knee brace and badges proving that, somehow, I'm a safe guy to have around. Holy fucking dichotomy, batman. I don't understand how the one fits inside the other. My deltoids, as I write this, are slack and not even really aching. Yet last night — I flatter myself — deltoids, triceps, biceps, pectorals, lats, traps, and everything else from about L4 up was fucking iron and intent on ... well, have you ever seen a DOD approved shredder eat a post-it? or a CD? Like that. That's what I wanted.

I don't fucking understand.

Mobile crapitude

Yay, you can now IM me whilst I am doing less important things, like driving. Fortunately for me, my "buddy" list is of the white variety so the only people who will be endangering others on the road are my approved distractors. It's the OZ something or other client. It sucks pretty hard, but it was gratis.

Irony is a difficult concept for some people to understand

So I'd like to offer a simple example here.

The COO of a Fortune 500 company reads in one of those magazines you find in dentists' offices that Windows 2003 has lower TCO than corresponding Linux and/or Solaris or whatever non-Windows solutions (is this true? it isn't relevant for this example). Ah hah! the COO says, I'll get promoted or a giant bonus and maybe they'll let me into the executive brothel when I save us gazillions of dollars by moving our machines to Windows 2003. Slowly but surely, machines running Linux and BSD and other variants that have been causing some contention (whether it's the operating system itself or the applications sitting atop them, like Tomcat or Sendmail is also irrelevant to this discussion) start getting moved over to Windows 2003 and the windows equivalent of the software they were running (sendmail becomes Exchange and so on).

So, sure enough, the COO gets a sweet deal when he's at the bargaining table with the Microsoft reps for the cost of the actual server licenses. He manages to get them down from $2,500 a license to $250 per each, as long as he buys 500 of them. He signs the check, and is pleased.

In the meantime, servers are being converted. Where Postgres was, now SQL Server stands, and where Apache was, IIS now serves. Slowly, but with enough momentum to cause COO's notice, people (users) begin to complain, along with IT staff, that the software they purchased (they'd been using F/OSS before, so no money changed hands) is hard to get support for (you get someone in Hyderabad reading off a script who apologizes every third sentence for how long it's taking to find your case number), or the companies go out of business, or that two applications don't get along very well, or that the Microsoft product – let's pick on MS Virtual Server for example – just isn't as mature as the competition. Other such issues come up, but the COO is unfazed as the next time he is at the eye doctor, he is reading another magazine (BYTE this time, let's say), and it says that you can actually run many open source applications on Windows!

Clever COO rounds up the IT staff and has a big meeting. "IT Staff," he says, "we are going to install open source software on our Windows machines to reduce cost. And I mean reduce. Did you know that postfix is free and better than that crummy old sendmail we were using? Why, we can even use MySQL – a truly mature database now, with their new version 5 – on Windows! We will have the best of both worlds! The low TCO of running Windows, and we will spend zero dollars on the software itself! It's incredible!"

And so, the IT staff spends weeks backing out the Windows-based software that didn't work quite right, and installing much smaller open source software that is free, or free with pay-for-support like RT or Red Hat Linux. The IT staff, being hard workers, toil for months, and the COO becomes annoyed.

He calls another meeting. "IT staff, I am annoyed with you! I can hear the snickers behind my back, and the derision burns my ears as I strut down the hallways of the 357th floor from the Executive Brothel – Miriam is my favorite by the way – and I cannot understand why it is taking so long to get this new software up and running! IT staff, this is going to go into your performance reviews if we can't get some reasonable performance here on these installs. The customer is unhappy with us."

Nobody in the IT staff dares speak up, as the COO has combined a pejorative, a threat, and a slimy little reminder of his place on the corporate ladder into the same paragraph.

The toil continues, and morale lowers to the lowest it's ever been. Members of the IT staff leave the company for more sane pastures.

One of these employees is leaving on his last day, and has packed up the little bits and pieces IT staff are allowed to have in their office to brighten their days, and the COO encounters him, with Miriam draped over an arm.

"IT staffer," he says, not being very good with respect for his employees or names, "why did it not work out the way the dentist and the optometrist told me it would? We bought the lowest TCO operating system on the planet, and it cost us more to run it, even though we did nothing wrong, and the transition has taken so long, I fear we will never complete our installation of free software on the Windows network. I understand you're leaving, so just tell me the truth."

(this is a fable, and a tale to help understand irony, so this next bit is a lie. the real answer to the above question is something like "Oh for the love of god. Get your disgusting person out of my personal space and take that walking VD culture with you, you stupid fuck!")

"Well, COO," the staffer says, who uses the term COO rather than the COO's name, to show that he really cares very little about the other man's name, as well. "You took a network that had some issues and destroyed it. You then built a magnificent glistening castle atop the ruins and paid for it in ruined families and rising mental health costs, and realized that you didn't also pay for a trained staff, you didn't change any policies or procedures or even topologies. You scavenged, and fed off the dead of your previous network and the free time of your employees. When you found that it couldn't possibly work, you tried to go back to 'the way it was' without losing that vital 'TCO' – which by the way is called 'pride' outside of managerial and HR selfwank magazines – and you failed. You, COO, tried to bolt wings onto a pig. A perfectly nice, yummy pig, one that does its job well, but you asked engineers to take care of the pig. And, really, engineers are usually not even very good at keeping plants alive. If, instead of spending an eighth of a million dollars on pork and its related slop, you'd spent $50,000 on training the employees you had, and given them an extra week off a year, you would have lowered your TCO. You'd have been the shining star of that brothel, and Miriam here would have polished your fixtures to chrome with all her attention."

The COO sat there for a moment, looking at the engineer.

"Wait, what do I have to do to get to the chrome part?"



Irony, folks, is buying Windows 2003 Server because it's cheaper to run than Linux, and then installing vmware to run zillions of free applications in "guests," spending months and months getting everything working, when it was working, you know, before.