Local Insanity

Bring back my PowerBook! My hard drive has died, and it makes me sad. My PowerBook is in for repair - I don’t know when I’ll get it back. For the moment I’m stuck with an Ubuntu Linux box, which is not so bad but it’s ugly and it doesn’t have Quicksilver, TextMate, Growl, Adium, or iTunes. It does have the power of *nix though, which makes me somewhat happy because I can still test cool things like Ruby on Rails. Too bad my web hosting provider doesn’t support Rails. Oh well.

I just sent out an email announcing the termination of a project that I’d started a while back. It didn’t affect many people, but I feel angry that I was so silly as to have taken on the project in the first place. What do I feel at the death of a project? Relief, because it was on my mind constantly and now I’ll have some peace from it. Distance, because I feel like I did something wrong to the people involved, and that I cannot fully make it up to them by reimbursing them.

I cannot erase it, but hopefully I can make it as less than a footnote on an otherwise productive career.

No that’s not an accidental ‘S’ on the end. Read more at DrunkenBlog.

Why doesn’t Cingular just shrivel up and die? It is more frustrating that there is no one person I can hold accountable for my terrible cell phone service than the reality of the terrible cell phone service. I started writing this as a long away message, but decided that it deserved a blog post.

What is wrong with Cingular? They have terrible reception in my apartment building and several isolated locations on campus. Is it their fault? Maybe. If it is, there is no one person I can blame and motivate to fix the problem. I think this attitude is linked to Cingular’s (and other carriers’) typical business practice of getting customers hooked on a one or two-year subscription. Once they’ve got your business, you’re most likely going to stay with them for the duration, so what do they care about improving quality of service? That’s not even it. They don’t have to care about quality of service. They don’t have to care about their customers. They ought to recognize the choice the consumer has in the matter though, and that they are so indifferent toward this fact is what bothers me.

Is Cingular a symptom of a growing trend? Or is the trend only the increase of my own awareness? As I mentioned earlier, UCLA has decided to do nearly the worst passible job on their Senior Survey, which is required. What does this have to do with it being a public institution? Maybe nothing, maybe everything. I have no reference point from which to judge except my own reasoning. It has been my observation that UCLA is composed of people who will be allowed to keep their positions if they don’t do their job too poorly or too well - good enough, no better, no worse. What a terrible place to be.

If these “good enough” people are the majority, how much of a majority are they? They are not all stupid by my usual standards. Some are smart, or at least somewhat reasonable. I was one of them until recently; I thought that I’d never be able to do certain things like run a business or break the rules. The only barriers it seems worth erecting are the ones I erect for myself; it may be that these are also the only ones worth tearing down. In other words I plan to set my own boundaries. People can tell you to think outside the box all you want, but it is up to you to realize what that means. More importantly, is it up to you to realize that you have the ability to do it. Do I sound like a motivational speaker yet?

Too bad, because I never want to do that. Just like I never want to work at McDonald’s or Burger King or the Sanitation Department. What about the saying we hear so often about “Well someone has to work there!” Bullshit. They don’t have to do anything of the sort. People work there because the jobs exist, created by the demand for those services. If no one wanted to work there, either the service providers would be able to provide the service even with the increase pay given to attract employees at a price the market would support or they wouldn’t. Do I sound like a capitalist yet?

Okay, fine. I don’t know if that title sits well with me, but I’ll wear the shoe if it fits. I think my coming around to capitalism was sparked by my interest and acceptance of natural selection as the agent of evolution. Capitalism does not fight our nature, it encourages it. This is what makes me uneasy. Human nature is not always a pretty thing, but I believe that our intelligence permits us to make the best of it by intelligently encouraging our selfish nature. Is a man happier when he has worked hard to deserve a modest living space or when he has done nothing to earn the palace he lives in? Having travelled the middle road my entire life, I cannot answer that question from experience. I nevertheless contend that it is the man who has worked for what he has who is truly happy. That, incidentally, is perhaps the best way to ensure that your stuff does not end up owning you - own it completely by having earned it. Do I sound like a social darwinist yet?

I am not. Despite their pretense, they did not encourage a meritocracy. They wanted the favors and red tape and bullshit that went along with the system as they’d already devised it - social darwinism was merely a justification.

I have my own demons to work out in working toward my own ideals. Mostly they involve settling doubts. In the meantime I remain hypocritical and demanding of others what I should be demanding of myself. How long will it take to overcome? Maybe not as long as you’d think. It’s amazing what a little self-confidence can do.

Whoever did the Senior Survey for UCLA did a real hack of a job. Not only was there a VBScript error, but there were unescaped characters (even ‘<’), the CSS and JavaScript was included inline, there were up to eight copies of the same JavaScript function for every question on the page, there was no XML namespace header, there was extensive use of tables when there was no need for them, there were font, b, i, and other tags all over the place despite the use of a CSS header.

Why does the university have to hire such incompetent people?