Day light… Savings?
In order to improve energy efficiency Congress and the president have decided to change daylight savings time.
“This bill is not going to solve our energy challenges overnight,” Mr. Bush said in Albuquerque. “Most of the serious problems, such as high gasoline costs and rising dependence on foreign oil, have developed over decades. It’s going to take years of focused effort to alleviate those problems.”
What does energy have to do with my sleep schedule? I guess it is their prerogative to do such a thing, as they make the laws that we all live by, but doesn’t time seem to be even more unalienable then free speech or the right to bear arms? How much fuel does it save by changing time, and why? If people need to get up earlier or stay up later or spend more time in the sun or come into work late, why don’t they just change the time that they get up, stay up, get some sun or come into work? Why do we actually have to change our clocks? I am a programmer by trade and find it really annoying when analysts change the rules on me midstream, and it sounds like this rule change is going to break a lot of software/hardware.
It’s hard enough to keep track of how much our local laws have shifted us away from our natural position relative to GMT. What is to gain by changing it? How many programmers will have to work extra hours, so they can sit in front of a power hungry computer and make stupid changes to their software? How many software patches will have to be downloaded, and how many meeting will go long because people were late because their PDA doesn’t keep time correctly anymore? The lights are on in my office whether there is sun or not, so why don’t we work during the part of the day that we don’t want to or can’t be out in the sun?
I like the sun. In about 3 months, I won’t see it outside of weekends for a long time.
5 Things I Hate About SlashDot
On one of my many daily visits to slashdot I realized just how much that site sucks. They have been plaged with all the nasty problems that any popular blog faces, but here is a list of the really annoying problems that really piss me off.
1. The posters all seem to be jerking off in a sensory deprivation chamber. I’m pretty sure I can guess the reasons that most slashdot staff spend a lot of time alone (halitosis, obesity, pornographic manga), but what keeps them from reading thier own fucking website? Posts are reposted usually twice with the same links and content. Usually the only comments posted are things like “You idot, this is a dupe.” It couldn’t be more to the point.
2. If slashdot is a site devoted to the linux/free software/foss movment why is it such a shitty website. Have you heard about css? Have you ever heard of not using ugly ass tables for everything. It is truely an embarrisment to the hard working programming community to have to look at so much selfish wanky perl crap. And it doesn’t even reder right in firefox…
3. Mind numbing content, tell me something other then every point release of every shitty usb key distrobution. Its boring when 8 of the 10 posts are about something that any god fearing linux fan already knows about.
4. When are they going to change that stupid logo and green headers. It is dumb…. I hate it.
5. Doesn’t anybody who works on slashdot ever get bored… doesn’t anyone care? Nothing ever changes, what kind of software can stay stagnant as long as the slashcode bullshit that slashdoters see every day…
I see it as an oportunity… get your act together slashdot… you were once cool. I do however still read it every day.
Obscure Reference T-Shirt Buyer’s Remorse
While drunkenly surfing the internet last week, I came across an ad for a T-shirt that I just had to have. I stared at the tiny advertisement, searching for some sort of internal confirmation that this, indeed, was the greatest T-shirt ever. The shirt made a reference to a video game only certain people of a certain age group had ever played, and these people would have gone to elementary schools with computer labs stocked with Apple IIE computers. The game I speak of, of course, is Oregon Trail.
In the game, you are meant to lead a team of rugged explorers across the country to settle on the west coast. Along the way, you must ford rivers, hunt wild animals, and deal with all sorts of random crap happening to your wagon and your crew. People will suddenly, and with little warning, break their legs and become stricken with disease. For some reason, a high percentage of your party would suddenly die of dysentery. Of course, you had known that they’d had dysentery for some time, but there’s no identifiable system of curing the ailment in the game. It was irksome, but nothing that would keep me from playing the game over and over. So, oddly enough, when I saw this shirt I just had to have it:
Punch cards
It turns out that if you encoded an MP3 file in punch cards it would form a 5 foot 9 inch stack. Does this mean that I am going to have to convert my music collection again. By the way, if you were sent back in time and had to listen to all of your MP3s on punch cards in Babbages living room, or better yet on an IBM 360, what MP3 would you bring?