Lenovo can be pretty stupid too.
They make a desktop battery charger, which holds the battery in sort of a slot, and you're meant to plug something into the charger. The battery contacts don't go into the slot though, there's a separate cable you're meant to plug in. Problem is, with the bigger batteries, that cable is stretched (and it's a stupid design for the smaller batteries anyway.) Courtesy of $BOSS:
Insane.
I'm sure I'm not alone in saying "who?!".
The Edmonton Thundering Penguin-BulldogStars apparently didn't even draft this cat who's been called up to the big club (look at that precious little stock car number on his sleeves, wook soo cuuute) in order to take the *fifth* blueliner spot, leaving #6 open. Or maybe Petersen's drawing in the #5 spot. Who knows, and who cares - does it really matter anyway? I mean, some teams have been hit pretty hard over the years, but this is insane - and it's certainly as bad off as I ever recall the Oilers being. Maybe it's just as well the club was out of it weeks ago anyway - they're showing some game, at least according to the stats, but it would be heartbreaking if they had actually been in a playoff position before the deadline, kept Smyth after all, and then gone on this run of ouchies. I'm not sure that any team could recover from this.
I'd say "oh well, maybe next year" but I've been saying that for weeks already anyway. Man oh man, what a train wreck. I wonder if the boys are playing ping pong? (Blatant Gzowski reference that was.) Of course, given the number of shoulder injuries, maybe it would be best if they weren't anyway - shades of Moreau's ankle.
(Photo credit: edmontonoilers.com, as if you couldn't tell.)
Using mindmapping to achieve your goals.
I'm not a big fan of goalsetting, especially not in the sense of New Year's Resolution. If it's that important you'll start it now, not put off thinking about things worth doing until an arbitrary date. However, this has some hints about how to use a mind map to set - then accomplish - goals, as well as a whole slew of other interesting-looking links on the more general topic of setting goals.
Quite some time ago, James Bow asked if I'd like to join the Blogging Alliance of Non-Partisan Canadians. As can be seen by the new blogroll, I've asked to join. Makes the main index page look a bit funny, having it there, but there you go. Most of the frequent posters appear to be political or news-oriented, and I'm mostly neither (the former I keep mostly to myself, and the latter I feel other people do much better than I can) so not sure how well I'll fit in, but at any rate, it seems an interesting opportunity, and I can now cross something else off my to-do list. Sorry for the Javascript, but that's what it is.
An oldie but a goodie: Merlin Mann's open thread on Mac mind mapping.
Hey Kathryn, I broke into your mailbox at your house and read all your mail for a month, and I shared your Visa bill with your boss and co-workers, and kept copies for myself.
Now do you see the big whoop? OK, maybe not quite the same thing, but in some ways it's actually worse - it's an abuse of trust. It doesn't matter if they do send emails like a bunch of 16 year olds. This is union interference with the people it's purporting to represent. If the team owners had done this to the players, the NHLPA would have (rightly) been down on them like a ton of bricks.
From a techie standpoint, who's the system administrator that allowed the NHLPA mucketymucks access to the players's mailboxes? He'd better be looking for a new job right now. Hopefully he won't find one above the level of fry cook at the local Maccas - I sure as hell wouldn't want to work with somebody like that.
Normally I don't toot my own horn by quoting myself, but my grandboss pulled these out of an email I sent to a campus-wide mailing list, so what the heck. The discussion was about firewalls and exceptions, but abstracted, they can apply to anything.
Too often sysadmins get wrapped up in dogmatic statements with no ground in the middle for compromise (in the sense of an agreement or a settlement, not a compromise of security). Saying "thou shalt" is rarely a good way to initiate agreement. In my experience, it's usually an outstanding way to provoke an argument, and I've got better things to do . . .Dealing with these things is our job. In an academic setting, our job is to make the network usable for the users. If we can do that while making our jobs easier, great. If we can't, well, that's too bad. If our jobs were easy, our bosses could just hire chimpanzees to do them.
A challenge to readers: are you dogmatic about anything? Why? If you can't immediately come up with a good reason, should you re-examine your position? (Maybe you should anyway.)
As system administrators and security professionals, we should see ourselves as enablers of technology, not protectors of the faith. Even the Knights Templar were burned at the stake when they got too big for their britches.
So what's this guy's excuse?
Maybe he should give his degrees back, he's obviously too stupid to keep them.
Paul Asadoorian was talking about this on the #pauldotcom IRC channel today - it looks like it's worth checking out.
Since making a very vague post regarding mind and concept mapping, I did very little to actually explore them, being rather busy with work and personal matters. However, I saw the perfect opportunity to jump in with both feet when I had to start writing some documentation - from scratch - regarding our clusters. Being cheap and still unsure of the utility of mind mapping, I grabbed a copy of FreeMind. It works quite nicely on my various Mac machines, and when I was one day forced to use my Linux box as my main workstation (my G5 was busy thrashing backing up a faculty member's Powerbook) that machine ran it quite nicely as well. I played around with it a bit in order to learn a bit about its interface and how it liked to do things, then got to work actually using it.
However, being an old-fashioned and tactile kind of guy, I have a large blackboard in my office, so I started there first. FreeMind seems to like to start from a central node, so I wrote down Clusters and worked from there. Soon I had a list of the various "chapters" I wanted to cover roughed out on the board, and I transferred that to FreeMind. For a while I worked back and forth, duplicating effort on both mediums, until I was relatively satisfied with the concepts that I needed to cover.
FreeMind has an export to HTML option, which produces a fairly nice list - collapsed or not - of the various nodes. I expanded nodes one level deep, exported that, and printed it out (see above, I like reading dead trees). Working with the printout, I created a series of text files, each covering a single concept or group of concepts: Administration, Compilers, User Accounts, Hardware, and so on.
I've not yet completed the documentation, but I can say for sure that this sort of mind map was invaluable in getting it started and in keeping me organized during writing. User documentation lends itself well to this sort of thing, so work is rapid. I have yet to try writing an essay outline with it - oddly, while an undergrad I was never big on essay outlines before the fact - but I have one coming up Real Soon so I might give it a go there. I can also say that the map was useful when creating my cluster presentation, as it allowed me to see at a glance which bits were likely to be important to my users so that I could ensure they were all covered in detail - no more and no less than they deserved. Since the presentation seems to have gone well, I will praise mind mapping for allowing me to get the whole thing done up in far less time than I would have thought.
Individual mileage may vary, but I'm definitely enthusiastic about the utility of this class of program for myself.
From the (a) Virtual Philosopher: the four habits of effective philosophy students. Link is to a link to the RTF file. I read it - the habits should be self-evident, but common sense ain't so common and it's worth having a touchstone to return to even if you do already know them.
Call this a mission statement and description for philosophers - and, really, students of any discipline. I really do not believe that I am engaging in hyperbole when I say that philosophy is the root of all studies.
And while I'm on a bit of a rant rampage, Joanna Rutkowska is hitting the news again with her BlackHat Federal talk. Without going into details, I'm unconvinced of the efficacy of Blue Pill, I read her slides for her Chaos Computer Congress talk and was unimpressed at the actual New Stuff there (although her classifications for malware are interesting), and basically I wonder at the raving hordes of fanbois she seems to attract. All that being said, a recent Slashdot posting caught my eye and got me thinking. She said "[m]aybe we should rethink the design of our computer systems so they they are somehow verifiable."
I'll go her one further: maybe we should instead be rethinking the design of our infrastructure and how much trust we put into computers (and the people who operate them) instead of worrying about the computers themselves.
This is not to say that computer and network security is not important. It is. However, many of the issues surrounding computer security are not technical at heart; they're social. I assert that it is impossible to solve a social problem with technology, and any attempt to do so is not only doomed to abject failure, such failure may result in conditions worse than those they were trying to ameliorate.
At this point it would be fair to ask what remedy I suggest. I don't. Not now, maybe not ever: this may not be a solvable problem, it could just be that we will have to accept the fact that computers are ruling our lives, and attempt to make it as difficult as possible for people to cause that to happen to us as individuals. (Keep your money in a sock and only spend cash, I don't know. Don't make or comment on blog postings.)
Sure, all that computer stuff is important, but I don't care that TJ Maxx or whoever gets compromised and my credit card info is sold to Russian Mafia types. I care that it's there in the first place.
This one gets multiple categories because I thought of this just after giving up in disgust with reading Smyth posts, but it applies generally. It is somewhat of an aphorism which probably is not entirely original to me. Somebody I read may have said this flat-out, maybe Robert Pirsig or Richard Bach or somebody of their ilk.
When you say you'll do something in the future, or something will happen in the future, what you really mean is that it is not happening now.
Partially inspired by the following passage from All Families Are Psychotic, Douglas Coupland: "The biggest change is that I stopped believing in the future . . . as being a place, like Paris or Australia - a place you can go to." Neither my pseudo-aphorism nor the Coupland segment should require further explanation in this context.
And while I'm quoting authors in a probably vain attempt to seem well-read, another brief passage which seems relevant, from Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson:
Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be - or to be indistinguishable from - self-righteous sixteen year olds possessing infinite amounts of free time.
This itself seems inspired by "Never argue with an idiot, somebody watching may not be able to tell the difference between him and you." (And I'm sure Robert Heinlein said something more quotable along those lines, probably in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress or The Notebooks of Lazarus Long.)
At least til he's a UFA.
Two things strike me about this.
#1 is I'm sure the circle of people that *really* know what happened is actually pretty small. And they aren't talking; when they are it's all careful stuff. Smyth thanked everybody and their dogs on his way out; Lowe called Smytty "not elite" and that's about as far as he went in criticizing.
We're getting a lot of hearsay on this though, which should mean something to a lawyer like Tyler, but apparently doesn't, and if it doesn't to him I can't see how it means anything to anybody else either.
#2 is the deal is done. Over. Yes yes, "Oilogosphere", we know that most of you think Lowe and the EIG are lying bastards. We got it, yes we did. The reason why some regular news outlets aren't writing as much about this any more isn't because Lowe told them not to or he'd take away their press creds, it's because this is getting pretty goddamn boring. Lowe's a hero, no he's an idiot, Smyth's the best player to ever lace up Oilers skates, no he's useless.
B-O-R-I-N-G.
I realize that there's not really much else to write about. I watched the game last night and the best you could say is that they looked dangerous on the first power play but sucked out loud on the 5 on 3. As usual against Calgary, the mistakes Edmonton made wound up in the net; the mistakes Calgary made, Kipper mostly bailed them out. (Is Sykora always that predictable on a breakaway?) I said last night that if the Oilers gassed this one I'm officially giving up on them for the rest of the season - well, they didn't gas it, but they played same old same old, that's for sure.
So yeah, not much else to write about, but that doesn't mean we should keep saying the same goddamn things over and over again. Not only is that dead horse beaten, its corpse has gotten up again and is playing shinny with Petr Nedved, Adam Oates, and Jiri Dopita.
Wake me up when it's over, I'm not even bothering to read posts any more (never mind comments). For both "sides" in this "debate" (big old air quotes there, it's hard to debate when the most pertinent facts are missing or are coming from parties with axes to grind): did nobody ever tell you better to keep your mouth closed and be thought a fool, than to open it and remove all doubt?
... yeah, a callback to the horrific Isles jerseys of a few years ago, I couldn't help it, but look:
Doesn't it look a bit like the ol' fisherman has a bit of a mullet? With the hat and all? Maybe the hat is hiding it. Just a little? Ah well. Ziggy's got a bit of the mou-let going on there too.
What I started this post to say though, was there's a lot of this sort of thing going on in the internet's tubez: "we traded our [identity|face of the team|heart and soul], Lowe's an idiot for not giving Smyth what he wanted, this was just money!"
My post from yesterday notwithstanding, and with the qualification that I agree that Ryan Smyth was the face of the franchise, I do not believe that the mere act of trading Smyth at this stage of his career was an the act of an idiot. As Lowetide said, this isn't a terrible return (unless you're convinced that O'Marra and Nillson are both busts and have drunk the Kool Aid that the Oilers are the worst-drafting team in history) - it's certainly at least on a par with what Lowe got for Chris Freaking Pronger, the perennial Norris candidate and former Hart winner. Looking at that and what other top-line players went for, it's about right - so the deal cannot be criticized on those grounds alone. As others have said, any return at all for a pending UFA is pretty good (we all remember what happened with Luke Richardson and Curtis Joseph).
Was it just money? Lowe says not, Meehan says not, and Smyth isn't talking. Maybe they're all covering their butts, maybe not. I really seriously doubt that Lowe would let a guy hang for a mere matter of a few hundred thousand, like many are thinking. (5.2 vs 5.5mm are the figures I hear the most.) The man who signs Fernando Pisani to 4 years at 2.5mm per is not the man who quibbles with his top left winger, assistant captain, and 12 year veteran over a mere $300,000. So if they're lying and it *was* just money, I'd be inclined to think it wasn't $300,000, it was at least double that. So I'm arbitrarily tossing this one out for the purposes of this argument.
Did Smyth take a dump in Lowe's breakfast cereal? Lowetide thinks, in comments, that maybe Smyth got the cold shoulder that Lowe patented on Mike Comrie. It's possible that there was something backstage, and Smyth's comments about not taking a hometown discount may have been indicative of something bigger, but none of the players in this game are really acting like that was the case, unless they're just closing ranks to save everybody face. I'm not convinced that this happened.
So, what then? Did Lowe just not really want Smyth back at any price? Were the salary negotiations just a sideshow? I don't think so. What do I think then? A little from column a, a little from column b, perhaps. Let's say a difference of 500k plus, or perhaps a year or two worth of contract, combined with a knowledge (if not an admittance) that the playoffs are just beyond the grasp of this year's team means a trade before he's lost for nothing. A hockey decision that's also a business decision.
That returns me to my original point: the cry that Smyth needed to be signed at any price under Pronger-dollars. My heart wants to agree - witness yesterday's post - but my head says an emphatic no. Did Lowe take the optics into situation? Clearly he was aware of what Smyth meant to the city and the team - his comments earlier in the year about knowing he'd be in trouble if he ever traded the player, his withdrawl from the honouring last night of Mark Messier (despite how much that had to have hurt him personally) point to this.
This was, however, a man who played with all the greats, all the Boys on the Bus, and left near the end - he saw them all go. He knows that trading great players, and being a great player who is traded, is not the end of the world. Faces of the franchise in Lowe's Oiler player days were Lee Fogolin, Wayne Gretzky, Mark Messier, and Lowe himself. All were traded, and the team had success after each successive trade anyway. Lowe knows eventually the team would have to move on from Smyth, and felt that trading Smyth now was the right move now.
Whatever the reason, Kevin Lowe had a plan. He did not make this trade in a panic. It was coldly calculated, and while I believe Lowe when he said it was one of the most difficult telephone calls he had to make, I also believe that the decision, once taken, was final. There was a plan here; it may not have been the plan with which he started the year, but it *was* planned. Money may have been a factor, but it was not "just" the money. He traded the face of the franchise, but teams do that all the time. It would have been nice if Smyth had been an Oiler for life, just as Yzerman was a Wing for life and Sakic's likely to be a Nordique for life, but that just doesn't happen. Forsberg went to UFA, Kariya did too, Al MacInnis and Theo Fleury left the Flames, Trevor Linden was traded - it's no shame for a great player to finish his career with a team different than the one that drafted him.
Painful? Yes. Necessary? Debatable. Related to money? Almost certainly (but it wasn't just a few hundred k). Punishment? Sorry LT, you're a really smart hockey mind, but I don't see it that way. Likely that we'll ever find out the real story anyway? No freaking way.
(Image credit: shamelessly stolen from ESPN.)
