Dylan Bright

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Remember When I thought Flash was the coolest thing ever...
The Robert Blake Conspiracy (you have to have flash enabled.)

My Life and Hard Times

1/17/2010 2:56:00 AM
Dynamic Irrelevance
Sometimes I think no one can ever change anything. Even when people think that they're changing things, the thing was just ready to change on its own and the particular individuals involved were irrelevant.

Yeah this is sort of the Thomas Kuhn "Scientific Revolutions" idea, but it seems like it is applicable on a much smaller scale.

11/25/2009 12:48:00 AM
Cavalcade of Products Reviewed (Mostly Beer)

I took the entire week off this week which has afforded me time for both drinking and shopping. I will of course share the results with you now.

#1 Bud Light Golden Wheat

I saw a billboard for this beer on my way to work one morning. I’m normally not a big fan of light beer, since I like beer that tastes like beer, but when I was at my local grocery store I thought “what the heck.”

I thought the first sip was pretty good. The second and third sips changed my mind. It is just another light beer. Light beer usually tastes like club soda with two tablespoons of beer added to it. Bud Light Golden Wheat tastes like club soda with two tablespoons of wheat beer added to it. You cam use that recipe to make light beer yourself at home.

I give it one bottle cap out of five.

#2 Hanes Cushion Crew Socks

I needed socks. They protect my feet, but not as much as shoes do. Most of my white non-business casual socks were all stretched out or had holes in them. This package of new socks didn’t have either of those problems. I noticed something mysterious about the packaging though.

Resealable bag? The socks come in essentially in a Ziplock style sandwich bag. Why? “Oh I’ve removed one pair of socks, let me reseal this package so they don’t spoil.” Do they require refrigeration? No expiration date was listed on the package, but now I wonder.

As socks, they seem to be fine.

I give them one Sock out of two for goofy packaging.

#3 Sam Adams Winter Lager

I guess I just wanted to try a different beer. I am always wary of Sam Adams beers because that Jim Koch guy is a hop fiend. Those commercials where he is “diving into the hops” tell no lies because Sam Adams Boston Lager is like socking on a sack of hops. The box promised “winter spices” like cinnamon or ginger or something.

I thought it was ok. It wasn’t as hoppy as the Boston Lager, but wasn’t anything to write home about. It was sort of a bock kind of thing. If you put it in a fancy glass and stick your nose in the glass you can get a little of that winter spice thing, but taste wise it isn’t that distinct. There’s probably better beer for the price.

I couldn’t come up with a cute or illustrative picture.

I give it three hops sacks out of five.

11/22/2009 4:35:00 PM
I Control the Weather

It is raining outside right now and I know why. Scientists may try to feed you some cock and bull story about low pressure systems and high pressure systems, warm air, cold air, and the Jet stream. I know that to be nonsense.

The ancient Greeks believed Winter was caused when Persephone, the embodiment of fertility spent a mandatory six months in the underworld every year part of an arrangement with Hades who had tricked her into marrying him. When she was above ground everything was warm and nice, when she was underground everything was cold and dead. Apparently I am the cause of a similar phenomenon.

When I am at work, shackled to various electronic devices under dim flickering flourescent lights the sun shines outside in a beautiful cloudless azure sky. Birds sing and flowers bloom so long as I dwell in a joyless catacomb of aging office furniture. On the those rare occasions that I am allowed out of the prison of my livelihood clouds gather and the sun flees the sky specifically to avoid me.

I don’t know if the story of Persephone is true. It does sound a bit far fetched, but I have never been to Greece. I do know that around here at least, I make the weather.
My Week Off in November

7/4/2009 12:16:00 AM
Anachronism Should Be Annihilated
I can't stand gross inaccuracy in movies that pass themseleves off as "historical." It is one thing to take creative license when it is completely obvious that you are doing so, but a lot of children and dumb people watch movies. I worry that that impressionable minds will wrongly assimilate the ridiculous as fact.

I am not as concerned with the little things. For example in Saving Private Ryan, "When James Ryan destroys the SdKfz 251 with his bazooka, they identify it as belonging to a Reconnaissance Platoon of the 2nd SS Division, which didn't reach the front until June 16 and then only on the Mortain area. Capt. Miller died as written in his grave, on June 13" (IMDB). That doesn't bother me. It is the stuff that would lead to a fundamental misunderstanding of the story of mankind. Tonight I had the misfortune of watching most of a movie called 10,000 B.C., which we can assume from the title is set at that time. It contains what might be the worst history in the history of movies. Here are just a few of my observations:
Men riding horses - domestication of the horse didn't happen until 4,000 BC at the absolute earliest, riding horses like the ones shown, 2,000-2,500 BC more likely
Metal weapons - The bronze Age started in c. 3,000 B.C. The Stone age (Neolithic) started c. 9,500 BC, people would have been using the most basic tools at this time and definitely not smelting bronze. The weapons look more like steel to me anyway which would be a further several thousand years down the road.
Stirrups - they were not invented until 300-400 AD in China and didn't make it to Europe until the 7th-8th Century.
Cloth clothing - Cotton was first used around 3,000 B.C. Linen may go as far back as 8,000 B.C., still at least 2,000 years out of whack.
A freaking sailboat?!?? - Earliest sail c. 3,200 B.C.
Corn in Africa, WTF? Never mind that they went from mountains in what had to be Europe or maybe Anatolia to Jungle with Bam-fucking-boo to Africa in a very short period of time but then they find Africans with Corn there. Corn came from America. No kernel of corn would reach any of the three continents this movie seems to occur on until the 16th century A.D. at the latest.
Pyramids?!?! - The first pyramids were built in Egypt c. 2600 B.C
Domesticated Mamoths???!!!??? - Really?
This movie is about as factually accurate as the Flintstones, but I worry that it might "look real" to all the ignorant persons of the movie watching public. They may take it at face value as an accurate representation of history.

2/18/2009 8:12:00 PM
What Does it All Meme?
I've heard and seen the word "meme" with alarming frequency. A meme is an idea, symbol, or practive that spreads through society, like "making fire," or "smoking is cool." It is a neologism coined by Richard Dawkins in a book called The Selfish Gene published in 1976. I won't paraphrase the entire wikipedia entry. I am a late comer to the word myself. I think the first time I saw it was a month or two ago when I was reading a book called Glut which was about the history of information systems.

Now it seems I am seeing it in news stories, I am hearing it on podcasts, and I think I even heard someone use it at work. I think I have mostly heard it used in the slang version of "meme" which is an "Internet meme," or an idea, or almost anything else, that spreads quickly across the Internet, like a viral video. Maybe we needed a word for that, but I don't think I like "meme." I don't like the way it sounds, so I don't know if I can endorse the meme of using the word "meme."

2/11/2009 7:18:00 PM
Birthday
I broke with tradition on my birthday this year and had oatmeal instead of my usual cold cereal. Since it was my birthday, I put some salt on it.
I also took a picture of myself for documentation purposes.

2/8/2009 9:02:00 PM
Garbage in, Garbage out
I have some ideas for statistical analysis of disk performance at work, but I think that's the only idea I have right now. I've been feeling uninspired in general for the last few weeks. I'm not sure if it is the Winter, or the proximity to my birthday or what. I've been trying to read more. Maybe I'm too comfortable. I might need to go places, do more suffering, etc. I might have the opportunity to do both next weekend.

1/28/2009 9:30:00 PM
Big News
You might want to sit down for this. It is very important and it will change the way you look at the world. It turns out you can use Hungry Jack Complete Buttermilk Pancake and Waffle Mix AND Aunt Jemima Buttermilk Complete Pancake and Waffle Mix in the SAME BATCH OF PANCAKE BATTER!

The ratio of mix to water (4:3) is the same for both brands, so if you don't have enough left in one box to make a full batch you can use mix from the other brand. They are completely compatible. I know it is a lot to take in, but you are now much better off for knowing this.

1/24/2009 10:40:00 PM
Maritime History of the Bright Family

Three Sailboats on King Lake over the past 40 years.
My Dad in his sailboat sometime in the 1960s.

The sailboat we had when I was a teenager.

The boat I built last summer.

1/24/2009 10:18:00 AM
Unnecessary Information

I was looking at the company intranet web site at work yesterday and in the area of the page dedicated to propaganda there was a warning about Social Networks which linked to the company information policy. Like most corporate policies found in employee handbooks and their ilk it was mostly common sense stuff about keeping company information secure. It seemed to be lacking in some respects and their was one bullet point that I thought was disturbing.

What was blatantly absent was a policy that said "don't make an ass of yourself on the Internet." It is quite possible to guard client and company information, but still get yourself into all sorts of trouble when your co-workers and managers discover all your racist friends, your essay on why LSD should be legalized, or those pictures of you blind drunk at that party 15 years ago. The Internet really does present a new and exciting problem in the employer-employee relationship in these days of "respect my privacy, but please read about my darkest feelings in my blog."

I am somewhat careful about what content I put out into public, often to the detriment of my personal entertainment value. You never know when there will be a room full of managers huddled around a laptop reading your web site. I withhold for the most part any little stories that could be construed as putting my employer in a bad light. What you are reading now is probably the most subversive public statement of my opinions I have allowed myself in years. One has to use some common sense and restraint in all aspects of life, but I think that overall the employer's intrusion into personal life is far too invasive. When you work for a big company, you are effectively waving your right to free speech. The constitution protects you from the government, not from your employer's ability to take away your livelihood at his discretion. I feel stifled when I think about that.

The other item, which disturbed me was a bullet point in the Information Policy which read "Do Not collect unnecessary information." I don't need to know how cheese is made, but am I forbidden from finding out? Can I still watch the discovery channel and PBS? Am I allowed to read books not directly related to my job? Yes, I am taking it a little out of context, but I still don't like the way they framed it in the official policy. You never know what a lawyer would do with language like that.

1/23/2009 10:08:00 PM
Too Much Cheese
I decided to get the weekly trip to the grocery store out of the way tonight rather than wait to do it at my usual time on Saturday. Cheese was on my list. I intended to only buy Sargento Provolone cheese, a cheese that has served me well in the past. I was a little disappointed that it was on sale. Not only was it on sale, but it was $5.99 for one package or $6.00 for two packages. I had no choice but to buy two.

That's way more cheese than I need to own at one time. Why am I buying $6.00 cheese anyway?

1/17/2009 7:44:00 PM
Book Report
I did a book report on a book I recently finished called Glut. The book is fairly consise and entertaining history of Information Science. I'm not sure I wrote the book report with the intent of another person actually reading it, ike most of what I write outside of work. I have been trying to make more of an effort to study books more, as opposed to just reading them. I feel like I haven't been retaining information from books like I used to. I think that's because I wasn't using the information.

When I read this book I took some notes in the margins and underlined passages. Then I transfered my notes to paper and added to them. Then I wrote the book report. At first I thought I was going to write it as a formal academic looking sort of thing but midway through I decided that was just going to make it long and boring so I went a more casual and superficial route. Ironically one of the things I was thinking about while reading the book was the vanishing art of formal writing.

Currently I am slowly reading a book that was referenced in Glut, Orality and Literacy by Walter J. Ong. It is definitely a more academic volume. Although it is very short, it might take me a little while to get through. It seems the sort of book that is written more for people to site in their own books and papers. You can tell right away because it is so dense with references in keeping with the demands of academic writing. That is necessary for the work that forms the basis of our knowledge, but it can make for dull reading

1/14/2009 9:10:00 PM
The Linux Keeps Wisconsin Woman off of the Internet
This is absolutely hilarious. A TV station in Madison, Wisconson reports on a woman's experience with her new laptop which came loaded with Ubuntu. This has got to be one of the most poorly researched news stories I have seen in any medium. It is also proof that many (sometimes I think most) people shouldn't even own a computer.

"Then she decided that Ubuntu doesn't always work like Windows. Her Verizon internet wouldn't load. She couldn't install Microsoft Word. And she said without Word and the internet, she couldn't take online classes at Milwaukee Area Technical College."

I just hope she's not studying Systems Administration or anything to do with computers at the Milwaukee Area Technical College.

1/12/2009 9:49:00 PM
As Seen on TV

What the hell is this?
I mean seriously, you need this ridiculous device to make little hamburgers? A meat patty is some sort of grandiose sculpture requiring years of professional training?
Oh it is so easy with the Big City Slider.
WTF?
The commercial shows obvious idiots failing miserably at cooking hamburgers the old fashioned way in a skillet.
Oh my God, the skillet, it is so hard to use, so complicated. Which end of the spatula is the handle? I just can’t figure this stuff out, I am a klutz in the kitchen.
This is as bad as that pancake flipper thing.
Remember that contraption? It was another device for the spatula impaired. How many people sat at home thinking “I like pancakes, but flipping a pancake is the HARDEST THING IN THE WORLD.”
In case you don’t have a TV, you can watch the commercial (and buy one if you're insane) here.

1/11/2009 1:02:00 AM
Tough Times For A Beard
When a full bearded man orders chicken wings, the little hand wipes are not nearly enough. They should provide you with shampoo.

1/7/2009 6:19:00 PM
Oh Obama, You Used to be Cool
There is nothing hip, cool or changerific about giving a fist bump to the RIAA. I was sad to read today that the President Elect has named one of the RIAA's "favorite lawyer," Tom Perrelli to a top level Justice department job. His technology policies (and the fact that he had technology policies) caught my interest before he was elected. Maybe he is beholden to the entertainment industry for campaign contributions. Hopefully this won't set the tone for the next four years.

1/3/2009 9:52:00 PM
First, Kill All The Lawyers
My parents are being sued under the Americans with Disabilities Act. They own four not particularly profitable store fronts on Hillsborough Avenue built long before the ADA. A serial litigator is suing them for not having the proper parking space, a ramp, etc. According to my parents' lawyer, an attorney teamed with a little old man in a wheel chair (who is a registered sex offender) is suing nearly every commercial property owner in Tampa. Although the "damages" the disabled man can get are very limited, he gets compensation for "reasonable attorney's" fees which the attorney shares with the disabled registered sex offender. That's how the racket works.

My parents might not legally have to comply with the ADA in their tiny, pre-ADA parking lot, but the way justice works in our country, it is cheaper to give in to extortion than it is to defend yourself. So they will probably be out $5,000 for "reasonable attorneys' fees" for the plaintiff, at least $5K for their own lawyer and another $5,000 or more to install ramps and re-stripe their parking lot. This is not chump change for my parents, they aren't real estate moguls. They're two 60 year old middle class people who will be working well into their 70s because of shit like this.

Lawyers, especially plaintiff's attorneys disgust me. How is this even a matter for civil litigation? Why isn't this covered by some comparatively simple administrative process, like building codes? If you are disabled and really want to use that parking lot that is not compliant, you should be able to call the government office of parking lots (or cripples or whatever), and they should investigate and then the responsible person should have to comply if the law indeed applies, with perhaps a reasonable fine. Litigation should only be there when that reasonable process breaks down. The expense becomes astronomical as soon as lawyers are involved, and the lawyers are the only ones who always win, because they always get paid.

The system will never change though because it is created by lawyers, for lawyers. Judges are lawyers and the elected officials and lobbyists who write the laws are also mostly lawyers. They have no interest in changing the system to serve the public good because it would weaken their profession.

12/31/2008 8:26:00 PM
Explosions Lose Their Charms With Dog Ownership
The population of my hometown enjoys the explosives holidays of Independence Day and New Years Eve. I've certainly enjoyed a loud booms and the smell of gunpowder in the past myself. It is different now that I have a dog. Every distant pop and bang must be answered with a bark. Her acute spaniel ears detect even the most distant detonation. When the occasional big boom shakes the house the supposed gun dog comes running to my lap for safety. Consequently I get to spend these holiday nights alternately comforting and chastising the her. It can be stressful for both of us.

12/30/2008 5:06:00 PM
Lotus Notes Indeed Sucks
I feel somewhat vindicated. There was nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing happening at work today and as I perused the Internet I found a story about some jerk petitioning IBM to make Notes and Domino open source.
I usually try to stay away from the comment sections of news sites like Slashdot or Digg because they tend to just piss me off. I think they're dominated by students, academics, the unemployed, Mac and Linux fanatics, and other ne'er-do-wells, slackers, and agitators who don't actually have to make technology work in a large business environment. I do have a deep dislike for Lotus Notes and IBM in general though and a few emotion has gotten the better of me and I have been moved me to post comments on various technology news sites when a Lotus Notes topic appears. In the past though, my justified rancor has been met with counter posts extolling the virtues of that wretched product. Today though, the comments from other anonymous people on the Internet were mostly anti-Notes, and that felt nice.
On a mildly humorous note (no pun intended) I discovered that my company blocks Google searches for "Lotus Notes Sucks" (with the quotes), but not for Lotus Notes Sucks (without the quotes).
So why does Lotus Notes suck so much? Why does it arouse passionate ire in me? Here are a few reasons.
The client sucks - It is very very slow and the interface is ancient and counter intuitive. And don't try to tell me the version 8 client fixes all that. It's still slow and it needs over a GB of RAM.
Domino servers don't scale, but only big companies use it. Domino servers can only use 2 GBs of RAM. That's just silly in modern times.
Notes "databases" don't scale, and suck in general. Performance sucks when they get over 2GBs, and since they aren't relational databases, it is more like a document collection, than a real database. It is like a pile of papers on the floor instead of papers in an organized filing cabinet.
Notes "applications" and "databases" don't play well with others. Big companies end up with lots of data in crappy notes apps that should be in a real database. It makes it hard to get the data out and do anything with it in any reasonable amount of time.
Notes and Groupware in general encourages rampant amateur development. "Almost anybody can make an application" sounds cool, but then 10 years later you have hundreds of poorly written Notes applications with unknown dependencies, some of which are business critical, and which were designed with no forethought for future size and complexity (see the "doesn't scale" complaints).
I'm sure I am leaving out lots of stuff. I'm going to avoid the temptation to take on IBM in general.

12/23/2008 6:40:00 PM
Times A Changin' for the RIAA
Last week I read that the Recording Industry Ass. of America will stop their lawsuit campaign against supposed music theives, little old ladies who don't even have computers, and sick children.

In case you don't know how this was working, the idea was to stop online music sharing through fear and intimidation by creating a cottage industry for especially evil lawfirms. They would subpoena your ISP for a list people using IP addresses that they identified through nefarious quasi-legal means as illegally sharing music, usually on one of the P2P things that only the ignorant still use, like KaZaa. The Internet being what it is though, often they would identify the wrong people, but our legal system being what it is, when you get a demand letter from some lawyers saying settle for $5,000 or we'll sue you for $500,000, you pretty much have to pay because defending yourself would be a lot more expensive than the $5,000 no matter how innocent or right you are.

I thought it would never end. It didn't really discourage enough people from stealing music online to make a difference, but it was a making a lot of money for those lawyers. I thought with congress, being beholden to the big media companies for campaign contributions, and judges not understanding the technical aspects of how this works, that nothing could stop them. Then they sued the sick transplant girl and that got on a local new show in Pittsburgh. I think that did more to stop them than the legal system ever could.

Now they're going after ISPs. They want your Internet Service Provider to monitor you and turn off your Internet connection if you're doing something they don't like. Some ISPs already aren't taking kindly to that. Apparently they aren't excited about doing the RIAA's dirty work for free.

In other Music Industry news, Gartner, 500page report to tell you what you knew already company, has pronounced the death of the Music CD.

12/22/2008 6:18:00 PM
Larry Ellison on Cloud Computing
I can't say that I'm a big Oracle fan. At least in the environment I work in the word "Oracle" means an application is going to be complicated, fragile, and there's a good chance no one knows how it works. However, Larry Ellison, Oracle's CEO may not be such a bad guy. I ran accross a link to a little three minute monologue he gave on 2008 IT buzzword of buzzwords, "Cloud Computing." It is rare that you hear the CEO of a technology company declaring in public that the new Emporer of Meaningless Marketing terms has no clothes. Maybe Larry is worth his 72 million dollar salary afterall. You can listen to it on YouTube below.

12/20/2008 9:05:00 PM
Santa-Saws
Continuing my tradition of buying excellent Christmas presents for myself, I purchased a 12" compound miter saw today. It is something I have been wanting for a while. I built a workbench thing and a book case a while back and all the bending over saw horses with a hand held circular saw hurt my back.
As you can probably tell by the black and yellow in the picture it is a DeWalt saw. It is the DW715 model. I was disappointed that it didn't come with the clamp attached to the fence like the floor model had. Apparently that is an accessory sold seperately. If I didn't have such an excellent collection of clamps at this point, I might have been hard pressed to use it right away safely. Other than that minor complaint, I am happy with it.
I chopped up some of my scrap wood to make theoretical boxes and what not, and it worked well. It is so much easier and faster than using a hand held circular saw. It is a lot more acurate too. When using my circular saw, the bottom plate would cover most of the board when cutting wood like 2x4s, making it hard to see where the blade was cutting. I really see me using it more like a chop saw than for fancy miters.

12/16/2008 8:14:00 PM
Something About the Future Smells Funny
Today an article caught my eye that was about a survey conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project of technologists and technology journalists. The headline read “Keyboards, DRM to become scarce in 2012.” That seemed a bit farfetched to me. The article was pretty brief and didn’t provide a lot of detail, but it did at least warn that the “computer journalists” are not “especially known for their prognosticative abilities.” That is definitely true. It did have a link to the actual report on the survey. Since it is a 138 page PDF document, I didn’t read the entire thing, and just skimmed the sections I was interested. I suspect the person who wrote the article did the same.

The report starts out with a summary of Pew’s findings, and then the bulk of the report consists of more elaborate explanations of the questions and their findings along with quotes from the journalists and technologists that comprised the “experts.” The questions/predictions I focused on and their results were:
· Few lines divide professional time from personal time, and that’s OK - 56% of “experts” Agree
· Talk and touch are common technology interfaces(the “No More Keyboards” one) – 64% of “experts” Agree
· Content control through copyright-protection technology dominates. – 60% of “experts” Disagree

I was really shocked that only 56% of the “experts” thought that the line between work and personal time will be blurred in 2012. I carry a blackberry, I am periodically “on-call” for work and even when not officially on-call I could be summoned for some crisis or something. I work plenty of overtime too. I suspect a lot of people are in my same situation, not just in my field (IT) but in others. The Internet really makes working from home almost as productive as working in the office, and that can’t help but erode the distinction.

The keyboard one, about talk and touch technology was pretty silly in my opinion. In the future people will have little projections of keyboards from tiny handheld devices that they will use instead of a standard keyboard when they are not dictating to their computers like Star Trek. That projectable keyboard thing exists today. It looks cool. I have never used one, and I am sure they will make even better and cooler looking ones in 2012, but I still don’t think they will be as fast or as pleasant to use as a standard keyboard. As for dictating to your computer, imagine how obnoxious an office full of people dictating to their computers would be. Many of us can type faster than we talk, and giving commands like “copy” with “ctrl+c” is easier than telling the computer to copy.

They lean slightly toward the utopian side of things when it comes to copyright. There were some nice utopian quotes like this one:

“Cultural forces are much stronger than corporate fascists, and whatever they seek now to block will simply arise from other providers in other sectors, even if it means a return to singing around campfires and pianos, or making homegrown media products. Here's a thought: maybe as the digital-rights-management Nazis kill their golden goose, they will also force creatives beyond excessive postmodernist remixing as an aesthetic, and artists of all stripes will start to value ‘originality’ over ‘derivation.’”

Stuff like that warms my heart, but I think big media has a lot of fight left in it. The RIAA will be suing old ladies and children for many years to come.

The experts were fairly divided on almost all the questions, which makes me wonder what value the survey really has. Basically it says “experts mostly disagree on the future of technology,” which boils down to “we don’t know what will happen in the future,” and that was exactly the state of affairs before the survey was published.

12/16/2008 6:24:00 PM
I am not a plumber
Well so far google ad-sense seems to thing that dylanbright.com is your plumbing destination. No doubt the algorithm picked up on my drain pipe story.

12/15/2008 8:03:00 PM
Selling Out
I added google adsense ads over on the left hand side of dylanbright.com. I was inspired by the $1.14 in advertising revenue the boatbuilding blog has generated in the past 6 months. Google doesn't send you a check until you have made $100. I should have my $100 check by sometime in the late 2050s.

I am actually curious to see what ads the google algorythm decides are context appropriate for dylanbright.com.