The blog of Zaugg

Remembrance Day 2008

mzaugg — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 15:07:00 GMT

It's that time of year again, I'm sitting at home in the basement listening to the radio and getting ready to pick up the kids and head down to the Jube.

At Bow Valley Music Club, John Clarke always sings one of a couple songs for Remembrance Day. My personal favourite is his own "Photograph", the other he sings is the fantastic "No Man's Land" by Eric Bogle.

This morning, I was flipping through the news picks on Groklaw when I found a little gem. A young singer/songwriter named Holly Kirby put together a tribute for her great-grandfather. She's done a wonderful job, I truly look forward to seeing Holly on a world tour sometime way off in the distant future and thinking, "Wasn't she the one who did that incredible tribute when she was still in school?" Enjoy your future, Holly, you have a wonderful one ahead of you.

I just flew in and boy are my knees achey.

mzaugg — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 01:35:00 GMT

What's the point of doing something stupid if you can't share it for the world to see, right?

I've officially began my Couch to 5k programme. I'm tired of the high blood pressure and I figure it's time I put my foot down. One at a time. I have to say, "officially" since I have been working on getting my activity level up for a while after the pneumonia. But although I feel my lungs getting stronger, my weight's continued to climb (along with the aforementioned blood pressure).

The biggest part of a couch to 5k programme so far has been getting off the couch. The dog and I went up Nose Hill this evening, he seemed to have an easier time at it than I did. The pedometer says we covered 3.3 km today. We'll see who stiffens up tomorrow..

I'm giving myself 6 months. I mean, what Canadian in his right mind would start this before winter?

One request: Could I get Kramer's Bro in a format large enough to hold in my beer belly?

So I had a nightmare last night

mzaugg — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 05:00:00 GMT

I woke up in the wee hours this morning in a cold sweat.

In my dream, my parents had joined a newfangled cult and one of the cool "features" was the surgical removal of their hands in a "welcoming ceremony for our visitors." Some extra-terrestrial sadists or something.

WARNING: Any organization wishing for you to intentionally remove your hands surgically is a monumentally stupid idea. Thanks, I'm here to serve.

So the big woo of the whole thing involved my parents waving their no-longer-extant fingers in the air in a sign of welcome to our alien guests. Naturally I woke up feeling nauseous.

***

Okay, I'm a big boy. I understand the difference between a bad dream and an unholy nightmare. I know how to calm down after that, too. You let the dog out and go watch TV with your son who's apparently up early.

I go into his room nd he's channel surfing since there's nothing on that particularly grabs him. He settles in to n old standard, Thomas the Tank Engine. Aaaaand....

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1030/815759618_4980c17f98.jpg?v=0

It's time I come clean..

mzaugg — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 04:32:00 GMT

Honey, you remember when I woke you up at 4:00 AM when I was crawling back into bed and you were wondering what I was doing?

I was up late, trolling on American political message boards.

Next week, I'm moving on to Nancy Pelosi.

Hard drive recovery, the hard way.

mzaugg — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 05:03:00 GMT

Here's a surprise.

I'm a professional System Administrator. My standard joke here goes, "Because I get paid for it, not because I'm any good at what I do."

I have long and hard declared my own ineptitude along the way. Yes, I forward spam. Yes, I have the coding skills of a 1970's monkey strung out on polyester. Yes, Virginia, even I can fail to count to three starting from zero.

But all in all, you take the battle scars and you learn from them. It's more than just not repeating the same mistakes all over again, it's also about being wise enough to foresee mistakes before they happen and avert them.

If you have to choose patch or no patch, take patch. Just don't patch your production server FIRST if you don't have to. When you're buying a new computer, the first question ALWAYS needs to be, "What are you planning to use this for?" I have four computers I use almost daily, and each is good at something and lousy at another.

A couple years ago, my external hard drive failed. It was a 250 GB drive formatted with FAT so I could haul it between all my various systems and plug it in. I'm proud to say, I lost absolutely NOTHING of consequence because it was only my backup drive.

Well, except for those photos of the kids I only stored on the backup drive because I never bothered burning them to CD when I had the chance.

Number one rule of paranoia, never, EVER consider possibly not having a backup of your important files, and never EVER consider not having a spare backup in case the first one goes bad and never EVER consider not testing your backup once you've made it. That's one rule. Did you back up your files lately? BACK THEM UP! NOW! DON'T WAIT!

Well, what keeps me running in the professional class is my ability to recover after spectacularly failing. Sometimes it's trial and error. Sometimes it's using a great deal of searching the web. Almost always it's trying to find someone else's experience and following their solution.

I first hit the web. There are hundreds of programs out there for data recovery. A few dozen that look sorta promising. Most are costing around $100, give or take. Not a lot that look appealing. For me, it's a real pisser to go through the effort of downloading a trial version which may or may not let me look at my lost files, then go through the effort of paying to hopefully recover the files I may or may not get. I'm wary of the Symantec's of the world (where good software goes to die) that have this massive promo department but the software itself just isn't very good. Sure, any of these *may* recover my files, but that's a lot of time, effort, trust and "if's" to wind my way through.

On the other hand, I trust anything licenced under the GPL. Not because I can read the code and figure out what it does, but someone could. (Not that anyone necessarily does, either, by the way. Don't hang yourself with blind trust. It's a paranoia thing.)

FAT-32 isn't an overly complicated file system, and magically losing the whole drive usually means the entire drive wasn't magically lost. Think of it like a book with the Table of Contents ripped out. The data's still there, you just have to go through it page by page to figure out where stuff is. It just takes a while to piece it all together and you can re-create the Table of Contents later.

My drive likely had the File Allocation Table (that's the "FAT" in "FAT") or the Master Boot Record ripped away. Sure, I had pictures that I'd rather not lose on there, but it wasn't life or death if I couldn't get them back. Well worthy of taking a shot at it on my own. Remember - I am a professional.

Well, I managed to dig up TestDisk from CGSecurity and figured I'd give it a shot. Downloaded it to my good hard drive, scanned the bad hard drive and let it walk me through the recovery process. For the record, the first pass found nothing, the second "deeper" pass found the backup FAT and restored using it. Easy! Fun! A little bit convoluted if you don't know what you're doing. But it worked fine - I got my photos back.

I didn't have to pay a dime, but I did. They suggested 25 Euros, I donated 10 instead. I doubt I'll hear harsh words over it, and I'll donate another 10 the next time I use TestDisk.

I recommend letting a professional try to recover your data rather than doing it yourself if you have the choice. But sometimes the choice isn't easy to make. Take your time reading the options, and feel free to put your trust in the program. Christophe Grenier is also a professional and I justifiably put my trust in his abilities. It's good to have smart friends. That I've never met.

----

Zarquil Zonar's guide to what to do when your hard drive fails:

1. Turn off your computer. The more you write to the hard drive, the higher the risk that you'll overwrite a file you need.
2. Don't panic.
3. Remove the failed hard drive and put it into a working computer as a secondary drive. Beware the gotchas: Is it an IDE (older) drive or a SATA drive? If IDE, do you have it as master, slave or cable select? If you're not sure, disconnect your DVD/CD drive and plug the hard drive on a cable of it's own.
4. Boot from your good drive, be patient. I have seen a chdisk actually repair a failed drive when the computer booted. It's not likely, but it happens.
5. If your system finds the other drive but does not recognize the formatting, don't panic. And don't format it.
6. Download TestDisk or your favourite rescue program. (Ideally, this happened before you put in the other drive.) One of the reasons I like TestDisk is that you don't have to install it - just unzip it and run.
7. Scan the bad drive. Follow instructions carefully. Usually the program will guide you with default settings so you only have to hit enter. But be alert, and pay attention to the warnings.
8. Don't panic. Odds are you either recovered your drive or it's unrecoverable.

Remember, a good backup regime means never having to recover a failed drive.

Hello, Copyright Police? I'd like to report a crime against good judgment.

mzaugg — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 03:51:00 GMT

Okay, I'm reading through the news Sunday when I spot this article from the BBC.

"Rock band Heart have called in lawyers after US vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin used their track Barracuda at a Republican Party rally."

Yay! This is so messed up I don't know where to begin. How about I start with copyright law itself. The continual re-extension of copyright terms is utterly ridiculous and deserves all the ridicule we can heap upon it. In Canada, it is generally 50 years after the artist's death. Fifty years! Why not ten? Why not one hundred? Is this really for the author? How about the author's estate? What about when the rights have been signed away to a book company or record company or movie company or whatever?

Given our ability to archive material, why not forever? I mean, it's not like it was 400 years ago and we've long since lost track of who wrote William Shakespeare's plays! We have the ability to keep track of these little details now and not forget stuff so quickly. Really, it's not like we'll ever going to know who wrote Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" anymore.

But do Shakespeare and Chaucer's decendents deserve a cut off every book sold anymore? It seems laughable, but a company's ability to continue to extend copyright into the future is perverse. Six hundred years down the road, will Mickey Mouse be in the public domain or will the image still be locked up by the Disney Corporation because there's value left to be exploited from Walt's most famous idea?

And what about what I just said up there? Is that even a valid comment for me to make? I don't own the Mickey Mouse name. Can I even legally talk about the character safely on a blog without invoking lawyerly wrath of those wealthier than I? Must I mask my comments by talking about a fictional "Raymond Rat" and the large putatively family oriented Example Corporation?

From the article, it seems the Republicans are claiming use of the song was covered under a blanket license paid for by the venue. May I point out that the song was obviously broadcast outside of the venue? In my opinion, that ought to make the whole license issue very cloudy indeed. Otherwise I could simply be playing music in my bedroom for my own personal enjoyment. The microphone and the broadcasting equipment pumping it through my neighbourhood would be merely incidental reporting on the news of my day, right?

Pttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttthb!

Listen, you damned moronic politicians: The mess you've created is way too convoluted in the first place and it sure as hell isn't doing what it's supposed to do. And let's start with the jackasses in the USA: Quit trying to push your mess on the rest of the world. It's your laws, in your convention centre, under your rules, and YOU messed it up. If you can't keep it straight, and you're supposed to be professionals at this, don't expect amateurs to be held to the highest bar either. Go to hell, and take your lobby groups with you.

Actually, let me get on with those useless lobby groups while I'm loathing them. There's the paid lobbiests who should be outlawed, taken behind parliament or congress or the senate or wherever they think they can bend opinions on behalf of anyone else and be spanked soundly until their bottoms are raw and *** and they cry for their seats to be spared. (I'm Canadian, that's just about as harsh a punishment as I can defend.) Then there's the Industry groups - the RIAA, MPAA, CRIA - that are sock puppets for the cartel of companies behind them that represent few, that are responsive to fewer, and act as though they have all the rights in the world to go on disrupting citizens by taking advantage of the dismal and vague laws the lobbiests have put into place. Suing file sharers by hook or by crook, whether they have to break the law to do it or not? Nice, professional leeches.

And further more, let me make one small jump to the record companies themselves who are less business men and more thugs with finite fiscal sense. May the lot of you be on the corner hocking plastic disks real soon now - I trust the precious few worth anything will eat and the rest will drift off to hopefully something manually intensive to purge the ideas of sycophancy from your heads.

Think about it: These companies exist for one reason - TO SELL MUSIC. So what do they do? Lock their vaults to protect their "property" and refuse to sell you the very thing you're trying to get your hands on. And no one else is allowed to sell it because we can't pry their damned fingers off the copyright. Go ahead, try to get something released 20 years ago on an obscure record label. It's hell to find it at all, or if you can find it you're paying extortionate rates. Don't tell me there's no demand, *I* want it and I cannot buy it? Up yours.

Fix copyright. The author deserves to reap the reward. If the author wants to grant it to a company, fine. Ownership of the original work must stay with the artist. I'll even accept assigning copyright to the estate for a short period of time. But exclusivity for 50 years? No, that's crazy. How about something like a non-exclusive copyright where others can republish works for a fee? Go talk to Michael Geist a while until you put some sensible back into the law.

Define rules of fair dealing clearly and as unambiguously as possible. The right to a backup needs to be enshrined. It's not hard to draw a line between one backup and 500 given to friends. But my backup for my personal use kept offsite is not and should not be considered unreasonable.

Shakespeare and Chaucer's works didn't die because they were republished and loved. They got put out there. Today someone can sit on a master tape and claim there's not enough demand. Open the vaults and get those works into public so they don't get lost and we can find value anew.

And in case you were afriad I was going to run out of rants: Ann and Nancy Wilson don't get a free pass in this either.

"The Republican campaign did not ask for permission, nor would they have been granted permission," they said.

Permission to use the song? Are you frackkin' kidding me?

Did you get paid for the song? (No, sadly that's a valid question in context here - there's no guarantee they actually DID get paid under the stupid licensing schemes of today.) If they were paid, you can not dictate how the song is going to be used. If you sell me a toaster and I squish it under a steam roller, it was MY toaster to do with as I wanted. If you sell me a DVD of a movie, and I choose to shred it and store it in a sweaty gym sock, it is MY movie to do with as I wanted. If you sell me the right to use a song and I choose to play it at an event you don't agree with, you can't go back after the fact and say I don't have permission. If the company or organization or professional leeches you signed up with to represent you said it was okay, take it up with them for misrepresenting you.

Sometimes you have to throw your works out there and just hope they get appreciated for what they are. It's a good song, I'm sure you've done well by it. I can't say I'm fond of it, but a lot of people do like it. Get it out there, play it loud and often and be sure the message of the barra-barra-barra-barracuda doesn't get forgotten.

And finally, for "Sarah Barracuda". My ghod, it was a bad highschool nickname. Really, horribly bad. Stop drawing attention to it, it's lame. Really lame. See if Ann and Nancy will loan you a lawyer or two, and maybe you can start suing whoever dubbed you with that crap in the first place.

Seriously, I haven't heard of anything that bad since Boomer Adair.

I'm all about the attention to detale.

mzaugg — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 04:08:00 GMT

And this, kids, is why we have to pay attention.

SPAM, how I love thee. I'm sure if you've ever used the interweb you've probably got one or two of your own along the way. One of my tasks is to cut back on the SPAM that gets through to the rest of the staff, but in the meanwhile to try to minimize the number of false positives. Fair enough, it is what we've brought upon ourselves with the underpinnings of email. Spammers take advantage of how email was designed to work. Our email system was put together years ago when most people on the net trusted each other - often because they actually knew each other as they met through conferences and collaborations, using email to work together from distant locations.

I don't know the network admin downstairs, let alone the guy managing Shaw's network or AT&T's network or Reinhardt College's network. Well, not personally, anyways.

So you gotta think I'm pretty familiar with all the SPAM tricks and can spot them a mile away, right?

*sigh*

I get an email allegedly from Delta Airlines to a former employee. Wanting to be nice and helpful I happily forward it back to him. It's confirmation of a ticket, ferghod'ssake, so it's got to be important and get sent to him pronto, right? I even laughed at the utter stupidity of Delta Airlines to include a PASSWORD in PLAIN TEXT in an email - that's just stupid kids, never, ever, EVER send a password in an email. It's flat out idiotic. People watch for stuff like that.

The truth: It really was spam. I got completely utterly sucked in by half-paying attention and trying to be helpful without cognitively processing the email. Well, I certainly feel stupid after the fact.

If nothing else, it emphasizes the point that security is a process. There is no one single thing you can do to be safe. There are a whole lot of things you need to do to reduce the risk, but there are no guarantees.

Outlook Express and it's big brother Outlook has proven itself to be a massively huge security hole in the past and continues to have my scorn as my single most hated application. I hate a lot of programs. It takes a lot to make #1 on my list. Not everyone can get off Outlook, but I certainly recommend you try to get off it entirely. Is Windows Mail (the replacement that comes with Vista) any better? I don't know, I have so little trust from past history I refuse to touch it. Fool me once, shame on you...

If you have a safer email program, there's no guarantee you're not going to blow it and mistake spam for a real message. It happened to me, and I'm a professional. Think about your system settings next. Are you hiding the file extensions on Windows? It remains the dumbest default setting I can think of in Windows. You need to be able to see what the real file name is ALWAYS. Go to Windows Explorer (Windows-E for the short cut), go to Tools --> Folder Options, then the View tab and uncheck "Hide extensions for known file types" in the Advanced options. I don't care if you barely understand that sentence, if you run Windows you should be doing everything you can to find that setting and change it. You're not going to have evil.jpg.exe sneaking onto your computer to do damage when you see it's an executable file pretending to be a picture.

Okay, so you've dumped Outhouse, you've changed your settings to be more secure, and you're still dumb enough to open that lousy email. I laughed once I saw it, because it wasn't going to run on the Mac no matter what. Woo-hoo, I am mighty and invulnerable on my shiny aluminum shield of impregnability!

Nope. Sooner or later there's going to be a script written that's going to target OS X and punch through in a meaningful way. Eventually there's going to be some program that runs in the background on Linux. There already are, but for design decisions it's more difficult to run rampage across your entire computer in OS X and Linux. Any computer professional that is honest with his or herself sees the benefit of not running as administrator (as found in Linux, OS X and Vista) and they also know that running as a limited user is not a panacea.

So it's hopeless and we should all turn off our computers and get off the net. Perhaps not a bad idea, but a little cynical even for me.

It's an arms race out there and we all have to take our own responsibility for our computers. Patch according to best practises. Try to limit your risk. Think when you open your email. Never buy anything that came unsolicited into your inbox.

You'd think it would be obvious. But if it was, the profit motivation for spam would have dried up years ago and we'd severely cut back our attack vectors.

No one is safe. No one is immune. The onus is on us all. We all have to take charge and fix this.

This is why we can't have nice things!

mzaugg — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 01:00:00 GMT

So in the interminable quest to explain how my brain works I present to you the following:

A friend sends me to this YouTube video (embedding to be fixed when I'm not too brain dead to care).

Eleven seconds of wonderment. Wonderful.

From there I end up on a bizarre path of YouTube links. Naturally, I can't help myself. you just know I'll eventually come up with this one.

Yes, that's Dick Cavett introducing Marshall McLuhan in the background.

Yes, this was the single most drop-dead funny moment I had all day and is an absolutely stunning piece of comedy gold.

To be fair, I was never a student of McLuhan nor was I ever particularly aware of his teaching or theories - other than the little pearls of wisdom that get whispered in the dark halls of Canadian braggartry. But there are a few I know very well, mostly from odd sources. Through them, I've come to respect Mr. McLuhan very much.

To explain the joke to my dear, beloved friend and benefactor, I first went to Marshall McLuhan's official site. His estate continues to maintain it "... to ensure the integrity of his name and legacy." It gives an awful lot of pertinent information on who he was and what changes he brought to our world.

Indeed, it was McLuhan that coined the phrase, "the global village." You instantly know what it means, don't you? I'm certain that McLuhan would have many an interesting and enlightening opinion on the World Wide Web and YouTube today.

Well, in the miscellany section they have a link to The Vestibules song, "The Ballad of Marshall McLuhan." The only problem was that Brian couldn't listen to that on Windows Media Player. (Side note: Is it just me, or is wmp getting suckier with age? Not that I gave it glowing reviews in the first place.)

Instead, I had to find The Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies to find this series of lectures, prefaced with The Vestibules' song.

Go listen to either version. I'll wait. It's funny and you'll understand why I sometimes burst out:
    "Marshall McLuhan, you're such a groovy thinker and
     We really dig what you say, 'cuz you've got the best insights
     Into mass media, this side of the Rio Grande!"

Heard it? Awesome.

The whole joke centres around McLuhan's statement: "The medium is the message."

The meta-joke is that I had to work WAY too hard to come up with the .mp3 online to explain to Brian what the joke was.

The meta-meta-joke is the fun of writing this and having you, the dear reader, wonder just what it is I'm thinking. Or smoking. Or something.

The meta-meta-meta-joke is that McLuhan's book went to publishing and a typo left the title as "The Medium is the Massage." Which is all wonderfully in line with the original YouTube video in the first place.

Stick that in the soda straw up your nose and smoke it, baby! Hahahahahahahaha.

Christmas in July

mzaugg — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 03:07:00 GMT

Ohmighod ohmighod ohmighod ohmighod ohmighod!

I collected on my Christmas gift today. Waitasec... I don't have it all out of my system yet.

Ohmighod ohmighod ohmighod ohmighod ohmighod!

11:00 PM last night: At least the nights have cooled off. I ought be be able to get to sleep.
> toss toss <
> turn turn <

6:00 AM: Wide awake. Feeling fidgety and nervous. Check the weather. Scan my standard set of morning websites. Check the weather. Listen to the radio. Check the weather.

6:30 AM: Feeling nervous and fidgety. Shave. Cut hair. Shave again. Check the weather.

6:45 AM: Shower. Cut hair. Check the weather.

7:00 AM: Out the door. Turn on the radio. Listen to the weather.

7:30 AM: Down the Deerfoot, arrive at Race City Speedway.

7:35 AM: Park. Look out the window. Check the weather.

7:40 AM: Get out of the car. Chat with the guy getting out of the car beside me. Walk over and take a look at one of these beauties.

7:41 AM: Allen Berg walks over and introduces himself.

<DAY BEGINS>

<LOTS OF COOL STUFF HAPPENS>

<DAY ENDS>

---

Sure, the interest lies in the details. Allen Berg put together his racing school a little more than a year ago, and he decided to build it from the ground up and to do it right from the start. Allen is one of three Canadians ever to drive in Formula 1. (The other two are named Villeneuve.)

Allen's cars are Formula Renault open wheel racers. Formula Renault is considered an entry-level formula series for up and coming drivers. These are serious racing cars and are raced by serious drivers - do not make the mistake of taking them lightly. The cars are carbon fibre chassis - not the older tube frame chassis run by other schools. Allen's cars are modern, safe and exciting. The chance to drive technologically modern cars is worth the price of admission alone.

The cars themselves are worthless without a good team, and Allen has put a solid team around him. When I think of a Formula 1 racer, I think of a cocky, arrogant, difficult to work with and difficult to be around jerk and adjust from there. Allen is warm, generous with his time, enthusiastic and interested in making sure every student gets a top notch experience from their time at his racing school. His name isn't just on the side pods, he's active in making certain his students become better racers. Come prepared to be treated like a professional race driver; you may not be, but that is precisely how you'll feel for your day. On the other hand, Allen sat beside me during lunch and was gracious answering questions and talking about his time driving.

Dave is the other instructor who makes a good compliment to Allen. He's also open to sharing his knowledge and teaching you, and after you've had your whirl at it he'll take you around the track and show you how it should have been done. Sam is one of Allen's mechanics from his time in Mexico and it was very comforting knowing the cars were maintained by professionals. I have to apologize (or be corrected) by the others who's names I've forgotten. Edouard was our course marshall, we had a fellow from MoTeC (Chris?) taking care of our telemetry, and Kyle made sure we came back with data. I appreciate the other guys who cared for us out there, making sure we had good track time and a good experience. Every moment was professional and serious.

I should mention the split between class time and track time. I consider myself very fortunate to have gotten Allen to talk about theory and then to get out on track and execute (or at least try to approximate executing) what we spoke about. The time in the classroom was also very important to me to return feeling into my chassis-brain interface.

Talking about racing theory and actually doing time on track in a modern car are very different things. Check everything you think you know about driving race cars - unless you have experience doing it you've got everything to learn. I learned both on track and off. With the telemetry on Allen's cars, professional drivers have a huge opportunity to get better and improve their times by being critiqued by one of the best. I'll be shocked if Allen doesn't start filling his times with aspiring drivers looking to improve their skills - it's an honour to be driving with that group.

Approaching the programme seriously will significantly magnify what you get out of it. Sure, it's great for tubby white guys like me, but if you want to get the most out of it, try to show up fit and clear minded. Racing is hard and it takes a great deal of effort from you. I was breathing heavily after getting out of the car after the final run. It was work, a lot of hard work, and the thrill of a lifetime.

Was it worth it? Absolutely, completely, it was a life's dream fulfilled and I'll do it again in a heartbeat. I'm planning a return down the road for a shot at the two day programme with more laps and more analysis of my telemetry. I recommend this programme for every single driver on the roads today. Every one will improve their vision on the roads and improve their car handling and management. You will be better and safer on a day to day basis out there on the roads if you listen and learn and follow the basic driver skills you will be taught. You will learn why tailgating is such a bad habit (it leads to tunnel vision) and learn how to drive predictably and stay well within the limits of your tires for safety.

The cars themselves are worth the trip. The staff get you away safely. The telemetry and the basic technology is eye-opening and should be considered essential for modern racing schools. A modern racing school like this should be considered essential to any driver today. I want my kids to be involved with Allen's carting programme before they feel they have to get out on the roads and push their road car so they learn this early and get a lifetime's worth of advantage.

Thanks Allen. Thanks Dave. Thanks to all. What a fantastic day! I'll get rid of this smile in a week or two.

Attention: Morons in the service industry

mzaugg — Mon, 19 May 2008 02:57:00 GMT

So I go to Dairy Queen for a treat at the end of the day.

I'm liking the idea of a Pina Colada Blizzard, but with bananas included.. Mmm, the very thought made me drool. Sure, it's a little wacky, but if I'm going for a frozen dessert treat, make mine with fruit and some of that frozen dairy-like substance. I'll take fruit over chocolate any day.

"I'm sorry, we don't make that."

Huh? Okay, she's messed up with the request for bananas. "Okay, just make me a pina colada blizzard."

---

Now, the heart of the matter. Remember the axiom, "The customer is always right?" Well, I'm the customer. I'm giving you money for goods or services rendered. You do not deserve money unless you can render suitable goods or services in a timely manner. Yes, that means you have to compete for my business. I'm somewhat familiar with the concept, I provide services on a daily basis in order to obtain my income. I don't have someone just handing me a cheque every month for the heck of it.

The secret to "The customer is always right" is to understand when the customer is actually wrong or is making an impossible request. There are times when to actually fulfill the request will take too much time or cost too much for you to fulfill and you're better off telling the customer that you are unwilling or unable to meet his or her request. I don't care how much you pay me, I ain't installing Vista on that Pentium II in your basement.

However if the request isn't unreasonable, and I am working on the assumption that you actually value an income here, you should generally try to meet the demand.

Perhaps if you don't understand the request, you may wish to clarify. A pina colada blizzard is nothing more than pineapple, coconut and that blizzardly goodness they call ice cream. Guh. Oh, and I'd like one with bananas in it, too, thanks. Charge me extra, I don't give a damn. I want what I want.

Oh, and the absolute ultimate: Don't lie to a customer. EVER.

---

"I'm sorry, we haven't made banana pina-colada blizzards for at least three years."

It's so bloody hard to find imaginative help these days.

P.S. DQ's webpage sucks and is openly hostile towards browsers that aren't named Internet Explorer. You'd think the whole company doesn't give a crap about my business.

There HAS to be a deep, moralistic meaning here somewhere...

mzaugg — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 12:40:00 GMT

I love those little snippets of dreams we wake up to.

In this case, I'm sitting down with the company Sales Weasel over lunch and he pulls out a fresh, brand new copy of the Bible.

"Oh," I'm taken aback. "I didn't realize you were a spiritual man."

"This is the new edition. I absolutely LOVE this book. It speaks directly to me and it's changed my life from the moment I got it. My favourite is Revelations." He flips the book around so I can see.

"Just look at all the advertisements in there for shoes!"

Did I see that right?

mzaugg — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 01:36:00 GMT

What the hell was that?

Community Server puts asterisks in place when I say "***"??

If I'm talking about ***, I'm probably making a point about ***. I don't need bloody software to protect me and my poor sensitive reader from hearing what I have to say.

***. *** *** damn hell.

Stupid bloody moronic programmers.

---

Either I'm going to have to apologize to the Community Server coders or I'm going to have to apologize to my Mom once this is posted.

Had I known about it, I would have protested 20 years ago...

mzaugg — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 00:36:00 GMT

Some things surprise me still, cynical as I have become lately.

Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not some long haired hippie running around in my beaded underpants screaming, "Free Tibet!" Although I would, in fact, consider it much more graceful if China did decide it would probably be okay to let Tibet fall under self-rule. I'm just not involved or aware enough to make an enlightened decision on what is right, although what I do know leans towards a desire for the Tibetans to be self-deterministic. I reserve the right to be proven wrong if someone comes up with a strongly compelling argument, but I haven't been hearing one. I'm favourable to Taiwan's independance, Kosovo's independance, and even Quebec's independance if they truly decide they want independance and not some wishy-washy "Sovereignty Association" half step.

It's a really touchy subject in Canada because the threat of Quebec separation has been wielded here too frequently, often for dubious-sounding means, at least to a Westerner. Personally, I'd much rather see a country-wide revolution of showing how much stronger all of us are when we mix and participate and share our culture with each other, but that's my opinion and I claim no righteous indignation above anyone else's.

I distrust nationalism for the sake of itself. I'm not saying I'm better than you because I'm Canadian. I'm not saying I'm better than other Canadians because I'm Albertan. I'm saying that my life has been strongly enriched by people from all areas of the country and the globe.

Not that I have to trumpet it in anyone's face. I don't need to parade through your town holding a banner or a sign or an Olympic Torch or anything.

Ah, yes. The Olympic Torch Relay. That's what set this whole rant off in the first place. First started at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, it was one of those masterful propaganda pieces. I had no idea it was a creation for the Berlin Games until I read this column by Gwynn Dyer.

"There had never been a torch connected with the original Olympic games in ancient Greece, and the revived Games got along without an international relay race just fine for 40 years before the Berlin Olympics of 1936 -- but if there was one thing the Nazi's did well, it was propaganda."

Does that taint the memory of others of the torch relay during Calgary's 1988 Winter Olympics? Not such a nice thing when coloured with Nazi Propaganda, eh? Or is it different when the torch winds solely within the host country as opposed to the six continent, multi-national, behemoth globe-trotting event that's going on right now?

Well, having read that article I've had one of those rare moments that pretty much reversed and hardened my stance on an issue. The torch relay (particularly one themed the "Journey of Harmony") now seems to be a silly, pointless moment of national self-importance that has absolutely no business being rubbed in my face. Shut it down. I suspect I'd tolerate it if the torch was lit at Olympia and then skittered prancily throughout the host country, but to hell with this country to country propaganda move.

In fact, to hell with the whole Olympic movement and what it's become. To quote Mr. Dyer once more:

"Never mind the silly torch, and the equally bizarre three-layer cake that is the actual Olympics Games of today. (An international athletics competition on the bottom, an orgy of nationalist self-congratulation in the middle, and a sickly-sweet pantomime of international love and brotherhood on the top.)"

I don't care anymore. I'll probably give an "attaboy / attagirl" to our athletes, but don't count on me watching any of it. I probably won't change my mind much in two years when it's in Vancouver or Whistler or whereeve the hell it's going to be. Strip off the top two crappy layers of the cake and maybe I'll get interested again. Until then, just go away.

For the love of the BoFH...

mzaugg — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 00:53:00 GMT

Won't someone please teach me to be THIS wonderfully evil?

Brought to you by the letters X and O

mzaugg — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 05:13:00 GMT

I have an affliction.

I am a geek. A nerd. One of those social dysfuntionals that loves freshly printed circuits more than the soft caress of life itself. Once I spoke with a recruiter who was supposed to be helping me fill out a list of my interests. She said something to the effect of, "You don't want people to think that after you go around at work for 8 hours that you go home and do more of the same." I'm a System Administrator / Network Administrator / Database Administrator. It's a little bit systemic, don't you think? There's a section of my brain that doesn't turn off, I'm always trying to improve myself and do my work more efficiently.

Even worse: It's FUN! I still get a kick from sitting around learning how to do something new, installing a program for the first time, optimizing a computer, configuring a webserver, discovering a new piece of hardware, or some such. It's accomplishment in getting something new done. It's a great feeling knowing that I'll be able to use it someday in my job to great advantage.

My financial guidance counsellor has been making a lot of hay with my story. I made a plan and we've stuck to it through some divots and some road blocks, and at the other side I'm working in the IT field and I'm proud of the consulting business I've managed to slowly build. Without the work I put in to repairing, optimizing and restoring other people's computers I would never have had the confidence or show my ability to administrate on a professional basis. The plan was important, and actively working towards my goals has been the only way this could have happened.

So, let me mention another little plan that's going on. Nicholas Negroponte had a vision to put low-cost, quality built computers into the hands of children in the developing world so they could achieve a higher standard of education. Not everyone will be a geek like me - nor ought they. But I believe that everyone deserves a chance to find their talents and discover just how good they can become with the right tools, a little helpful encouragement, and a whole lot of drive to follow through with the dreams they conjure.

The result of Negroponte's vision was One Laptop Per Child and the XO laptop. Last year they had a program called "Give 1, Get 1." If you bought TWO XO laptops, they sent one to somewhere in the developing world and they sent one to you. I waffled for a while over it, but finally decided it was a very worthy idea I could get behind. The program is now ended, but I have hopes they will revive it again.

Last Friday I received my XO laptop. I was tickled green to get it. Like so many other parents who got involved in the program, I planned to share this computer with my kids and let them have at it to see how useful it was to them. They've been complete pros with it, messing about hither and thon, teaching me things I hadn't figured out on my own yet. I'll primarily use it as an eBook reader on the bus. Already I've found a ton of books via Project Gutenburg that I'm looking forward to reading. The kids can pretty much do whatever they want on here and all the power in the world to them.

But there is one aspect that's missing to me in this: This isn't meant to be a cheap laptop, it isn't meant to be just-another-charitable-donation, it isn't meant to be a toy to be neglected by the kids. I want to turn MY little corner of Negroponte's vision into my own little educational venture. Hopefully I'll be able to leverage this into learning Python and improving my programming skills. Or - dare to dream - actually write some fun and educational game that gets used by some kid half a world a way.

This computer is something special. It's comprised of hardware, software, and ideals.

---

Postscript: Clearly the XO is not perfect. It didn't send line returns correctly so I had one long run-on post until I logged on this morning and fixed it. I didn't have the ability to embed links. And I got as far as the first paragraph before I plugged in a USB keyboard so I could actually type at speed. But as a learning tool, I'm more than impressed.