The views expressed in this blog do not necessairly represent the views that I have

    I would like to start today with a disclaimer, lest the gentle populace question my motives and background in relation to the diatribe that must surely follow.  I am and always have been (at least since the exunt of my so-called 'formative years') a less than enthusiastic supporter of the medium that we have come to call "television".

    With the exception of sports programming and tales of misanthropic medical masters, I do not find the blather that passes for content entertaining.  Occasionally there will be a show on Discovery or the UW channel which holds some educational infotainment, but for the most part one is adrift in a sea of mediocrity (at best) when one presses the old power button.

    So, with that information firmly in hand, the discerning reader can apply the necessary filters to objecticate (hush, it's my blog and I'll invent words if I want to) the following message.  Thank you and deity-of-your-choice speed. 

It's like the awful dial goes to 11

    I have for some time been a part of an internet site that sends out electronic polls.  I take these surveys and in return I get points.  Enough points earns me something small but nifty, like a Starbucks card or a movie ticket.  (Which, I guess, I should probably claim as income on my taxes.  Crap.)

    Anyway, it's generall fun and almost always related to the entertainment industry.  I tell you all this because recently I recieved an offer to do a poll on the television show "Cavemen".  In exchange for watching the show and answering questions I would receive a nifty sum of points.

    Dutiful person that I am, I tuned in to watch the show.  Dear reader I caution you now to not read ahead if you are weak of constitution, for what followed was thirty minutes of torture the likes of which has not been seen previously on this planet.  

    The pain was immediate, intense and unrelenting.  It was a crime upon eyeballs and brains and quite possibly against the Genova convention.  Chuck Norris should have emerged from a swamp with a knife between his teeth and saved me from inhumanity.

    The show was pure evil.  Pure, unadulterated, unleavened evil.  If this show was software your computer would smother you in the middle of the night.  If this show was a house the walls would bleed.  If this show was gasoline your car would implode.  If this show was a dog it would eat Cujo with a side of Old Yeller (post-rabies.  Sorry if I just spoiled the ending for you there.)

Remember that 'Plot' also means 'grave'   

    The show centers around a trio of troglodytes inhabiting the trendy part of San Diego.  One of them works at an Ikea clone, another is writing his dissertation, and the third has recently moved to the area to take a time out from his (ex) girlfriend.  Hilarity fails to ensue.

    What is wrong with Cavemen, you might ask?  The commercials were vaguely amusing ("It's my mom; I'll put her on speakerphone" still cracks me up every time I see it.), and the concept does have enough material for at least a third-rate Pauley Shore movie, so I will dissuade from making the all-too-easy statement that the show was doomed from the start.

   Indeed, successful shows have been built around ideas with relatively the same amout of depthicality (hush!) (cf: Seinfield, Friends, Three's Company, Gilligan's Island, etc).  No, it is not the premise.  Nor is it the acting.  Given the source material and the lines to be delivered, the actors do an ovation-worthy job of attempting to put on a game face and pull this show along through sheer willpower. 

    The real criminal here is the writing.  Writers, you may remember, were those people that television studios used to employee before reality television became popular.  Their job was to create a fictional framework upon which to hang clever bon mots (French for "cheese bagel", I think) which delight and amuse a world of people.  With a talented writing staff you can turn talking poo into comedy gold (cf: South Park).  With an untalented staff you produce "Cavemen".

Please let me digress

    I could go on about Cavemen, but the show isn't even worth of that much virtol.  Instad I will digress to the show that I wound up watching directly afterwards.  (Yes, my willpower was so low that I actually couldn't stop watching television.  Cavemen had sapped my will to do much more than cry, quiver uncontrollably, and work the mute button during commerical breaks.)

    I take it by now that the reader is conversant with "The Biggest Loser".  If not, the succicent summary is that large people attempt to reduce their largeosity (zip it!).  What mircacle diet to they utilize to perform this transformation?  What ancient yogi secrets release them from their physical chains? What voodoo magic reductifies their bowel coverings?  I will tell you, for I love you, dear reader, with the love that only a blogger and blogee can share:  They excercise and eat less.  Shocking, I know.

   Irregardfully, the recent show had what has come to be know in the post-naked-crazy-tax-evader era as a "Physical Challenge".  If you've ever seen Survivor (don't pretend you haven't), you no doubt now have a mental picture of someone swimming through a jungle river carrying a sack of potatoes on their head whilst pirranah remove various extremeties from the contestants.  This is, you will no doubt agree, the vertiable personification of both "physical" and "challenge".

    So you may ask, what harrowing feat of physical prowness were our contestants called upon to demonstrate?  Were they asked to lift a car above their heads?  Requested to leap across a gaping chasm?  Coherced into a tennis match with Blake (They'd have no chance against Roddick, of course.  But Blake, well...)

    No, this being America we have to scale the challenges down a bit so that everyone can participate.  Their Herculean task was to walk down a hill, grab a flag, and walk back. Yep, and that's not all.  Not only did they have to ambulate all the way down a slight incline and back, they had to do it in under 6 minutes while some skinny bitch yelled at them.     

    Afterwards they interviewed one of the contestants who, on the verge of tears, explained how she was so proud that she didn't give up and made it through the ordeal.  Oh honey, no.  No, baby.  You walked up a hill.  You didn't rescue a child from a burning building; You didn't win the Tour De France; Hell, you didn't even jog a mile.  You walked to the top of a hill.

    Now, I understand that people have different abilities.  When a 1-legged man runs the 100-meter dash I applaud and say 'Good for him'.  But if he was the one who cut his leg off in the first place then I'm not going to call him a freaking hero.  You want to overcome a challenge?  Stop with the damn twinkies and get on a treadmill lady, it's not rocket science.  You don't get to be over 300 pounds without a little bit of help from Mr. Beserk Caloric Intake.  (medical conditions excepting)

Just in time for halloween

    Speaking, by the way, of amputees, if you haven't heard the recent story "Encyclopedia Brown and the case of the 1-legged man who forgot he put his amputated leg in a smoker and had it repossessed and now can't get it back" then you really need to go check that out RIGHT NOW.

Not everybody has a map

    I normally don't look to rednecks (cute though they may be) to provide me with powerful insights.  It's not that they aren't capable of being deep (they do come from the "deep south" after all), it's just that they are normally incomprehensible.

    The South has a language all of its own, and while, with practice, one can come to understand the basics, the true subtleties (not to be confused with the subtitles, which would be helpful) require a lifetime to master. 

   For example, one might ask a Southerner "Hey Bubba (or, possibly, "Billy-Bob"), how do I get to the old saw mill?"  If one did so, the response would likely be something akin to the following:

      "Whale, you done axed the right man!  I'm fixin' to tale you 'bout right now this here shortamacut.  Git yerself down this road and turn there near the corn field which done been dug up and turned into pumpkins. You just drive on right as rain and that'll sort you."

Like asking Mary Kay how to exit Iraq

    This all leads, of course, to the beauty queen who revealed a rather stunning observation.  When asked how she felt about the inability of Americans to find the United States on a map she replied that "not everybody has a map".

    This is, you must admit, a pretty damn good answer.  Had she stopped right there, it would have been a fairly brilliant skewering of the absurdity of the situation. 

    Let's think about this another way.  Why are you asking this poor child about the nation's cartographic skills?  Do we ask Rand McNally for beauty tips?  Her job is not to be articulate, her job is to have a nice set of perky breasts that borderline pedophiles can fantasize about while slamming a can of Pabst and working up the courage to ride The Beast lying in the other room.

    So stop.  Stop with the mockery and the faux astonishment.  Cease the endless stream of YouTube video responses.  Put a halt to the myriad jokes beginning "I personally believe".  If you simply must sling a snide snippet of sarcasm, aim it at that dress, which seems to have been manufactured from a retried moon suit.  I mean, really, WTF was THAT about?

Hail to the Chief, Baby

    Someone remarked to me the other day that I should run for the presidency.  While a flattering thought, I reluctantly replied with teh obvious truth that I am essentially unelectable.

    For one thing, I am not religious.  This in and of itself is enough of a disqualifying factor.  A black female will be elected to the president before a non-religious white guy.  People will not vote for someone who does not believe in god (specifically the Christian variety). 

    It is baffling to me, this whole religion thing.  I just don't get it at all.  There have been various points at my life where I have taken time to re-examine my life philosophies and consider religion, but in each of these instances I have not found any reason to begin to have even the slightest inkling of what one would call 'faith'.

    I was asked recently whether the fact that 70% of the populace was religious bothered me, to which I replied that it did.  Let me try and describe why this is the case.

Kind of like a giant bunny named Harvey

    Imagine, if you will, that you are lying on the surgery table about to be anesthesized before some major operation.  As you lay there mentally preparing, you notice the surgeon off to one side.  She is looking at an empty space beside him and saying "Well Bob, this is gonna be tricky.  I'm gonna need your help on this one, eh?  Make sure I don't fuck this up."

    You ask the nurse who the doctor is talking to and she replies "Oh, that's the doctor's imaginary friend Bob.  Bob helps guide her."  Would this bother you?

    One can also imagine similar scenarios with police men, fire fighters or public officials.  President Reagan used to rely on his astrologer to make presidential decisions.  Scary, huh?  Same thing with religion.

And we use the term "peers" loosely

    This is similar to the issues that I have with the jury system.  The jury system, as we all recall from public school, has its roots in the Magna Carta, which was written in 1215.  1215 was centuries before the birth of Galileo or DaVinci, at a time when people regularly believed in witchcraft and that the Earth was the center of the universe.

    Yes, a foul idea from nearly 800 years ago is still in use today.  The general thought is that the best way to determine whether or not someone is innocent is to find twelve random people, pay them $6 a day, and ask them to give a fuck about someone else's life.

    This is kind of like asking twelve random people to officiate a football game.  Hell, you can't get twelve people to agree on a pizze, let alone make life-altering decisions.  These people are not scholars of the law and they have no business playing at such.  We have judges for a reason, let's use them.

Sociology and group dynamics

    I think that I would have fun though, If I ever do make it through the screening process for a jury (and I doubt seriously that I would).  My current thinking is to use the time as a sandbox to practice persuasive argument.  Just find out which way everyone is currently leaning, and work to convince them of the opposite side, just to see if you can.

    Think about it, when are you going to have this kind of opportunity again?  This is the perfect place to grow your skills in swaying the thoughts and opinions of others.  You can try out all kinds of methods and see how the individuals respond.

    Then, when you are in a real situation like at work you can apply these techniques.  A clever person could probably find a way to deduct the time off their taxes as training... 

21 out of 50, good for baseball, bad for gunfire

    In other news, police in New York opened fire at a car outside a strip club.  I don't know the whole story (part of it is in this article), but apparently there was a groom and a car and some undercover cops.  Regardless, the interesting part is that the police fired 50 shots at the car and only managed to hit it 21 times.

    21 out of 50, that's a 42% hit rate.  These are trained professionals who must regularly re-qualified on their weapon and they are hitting a fairly large target (a car) considerably less than half of the time.

    That means that for every ten bullets fired, six of them are flying towards a random target on the street, and that's with a target as big as a car.  Imagine how often the police are missing when faced with a man-sized target. 

    Lesson to be learned here:  Stay the fuck away from the New York police when they are spraying lead.  The oods of them hitting an innocent bystander are greater than the odds of them hitting their target.

We call it an "OOBiE"

    I bought an xbox360 yesterday.  I didn't really mean to buy one, I just happened to be at the company store picking up a copy of Office when I noticed that they were on sale.  We normally don't get a discount on hardware, so this was particularly interesting to me.  The bundle was pretty sweet.  $450 for the premium system and four games (xbox live arcade, kameo, PGR3 and viva pinata special editon) so it came home with me. 

    I must say, I am amazingly impressed so far, particularly with the out of box experience.  Now, to be fair, I had pretty low expectations.  You see, my company has a long standing tradition of having the most horrible initial user experience imaginable.  Usually you plunk in your CD or fire up your executable and are immediately hit with 15,000 different pop up windows explaining in techy terms... something.

   The text is usually something like:

"This program needs to endoscoptomate your jigglypuff and enumerate the funkatronic widget in the hyperquandrant accelerator.  This may cause your gumdrop equivilator to pendulate uncermoniously.  Do you want to continue?"

    Then if you click "Yes" the program proceeds to rape your hard drive and peg your CPU at 100% for the next fifteen minutes while you stare at an hourglass cursor wondering just what the hell is going on and whether or not you should be looking for a young priest and an old priest.

Because 720 just seemed like boasting

    But with the 360 I didn't actually get any of that.  I plugged it in, booted it up, and it came up with a nice clean screen asking me my language preference.  Then it discovered my network, configured itself, and asked if I wanted to go grab my user profile.  Sure, what the hell, I thought.  This should be good for a few laughs.

    All I had to do was enter my hotmail passport Windows Live account information and everything just kinda worked from there. Now, understand that the same process on my original xbox took me... umm... well, months actually because I had a hellacious time getting the networking correct and I got so annoyed that I just stopped dealing with it for a few weeks.

    With my xbox live account all set up and the network funcitoning fine, the system automatically went out into the universe and pulled down the correct time and date.  A few moments later it let my know that one of my friends had sent me a friend request, so I went ahead and accepted that.  I tweaked the UI settings a little bit on my own and then popped in my first game.

    From power on to fully-set up, windows-live-functioning and game-playing goodness was about 10 minutes, my logic flow was smooth, and I never saw a screen that I didn't understand.  Not bad sirs.  Not bad at all.

The aftermath

    After playing a few games of Geometry Wars I called my friend to talk about my new purchase and he let me know that on the xbox 360 you can queue up downloads, and they will download while you are playing other games, without affecting your framerate.  Niiiice.

    So I proceeded to queue up demos for Lego Wars II, Madden '07, Superman Returns, some random movie trailer, NHL2k7 and... umm... I dunno, something else.  These downloads merrily happened in the background while I played PGR3 and, as my friend mentioned, had no adverse affect on my framerate.

    I wound up playing the damn thing for like 4 hours straight.  The Lego Wars game is just too cool.  You basically run around as little lego representations of Luke, Obi Wan, R2D2 and C3P0.  You can build different things out of legos and do crazy things like use Chewbacca to rip the arms off of little lego stormtroopers.  It is crazy fun, for no good reason.  I think the fact that the source material is so familiar is probably a big chunk of that, but whatever. 

    Madden was... ehh.  I mean, it looked very pretty and the gameplay was a'ight.  I could only play Seattle vs. Pittsburgh in the demo.  I played Seattle and as it turns out Pittsburgh loses if they referees get off their knees and stop blowing the game.  Anyway, I guess computer football just isn't my thing because the game didn't hold my interest for long.

    Next up was the new Superman game.  Good fun that.  You can fly around the city and pick up things like cars and dumpsters and fling them at enemies.  You can also be an evil super-asshole by picking up innocent civilians and dropping them in the ocean, or stealing their cars and parking them on top of nearby buildings (Superman never got to go to college and be in a frat, so he was making up for lost time).

    Finally I watched this little 3-minute movie "Cops and Robbers".  It was a commercial for xbox live, but it was fairly entertaining and looked very nice.

    All-in-all I'd have to say that I'm quite satisfied with the purchase.  This might change after I put the Viva Pinata game into the console, but whatever.

On the road again

                Just can’t wait to get… wait a second.  That’s not right at all.  As the casual reader may not know (but the die-hard fan most certainly will) this particular penguin is not of the migratory nature.  That is to say that while I like destinations, I hate travel.

                There are a near-infinite number of reasons why this is the case, many of which I have already blogged about in previous sessions.  Feel free to check the archives if you are curious, I’ll wait.  If you’re using IE7 you can hit ctrl-t to bring up a new tab and that way you won’t even lose your progress here.  Spiffy, eh?

Back already? Great, then we can get on with it.

                I am currently sitting in the Chicago airport.  The plane that I am supposed to board is not.  This, as one might imagine, poses some logistical problems that I am fairly confident are beyond my abilities to resolve at this time with my current resources.  Were I, perhaps, rich and/or famous I could enact some kind of positive change but, alas, I am pretty much an anonymous middle-class white boy.

                It’s not all bad though.  I could be back aboard the flight from Seattle to Chicago wherein I was serenaded for 3.5 hours with the delightful sounds of a squalling infant. 

Evolutionary Quandary

                Ok, so… Screaming children…  Now here is something that I just don’t understand.  How did we ever survive to this point as a species with hatchlings who, so far as I am able to detect, spend the majority of their firs few months screaming their damn lungs out? 

                This cannot be a good idea when one lives in the wild.  The child’s clamorous crying would certainly cause carnivorous creatures to come calling.  It’s nature’s equivalent of ringing the dinner bell.  Every meat-eater in a five-mile radius would be lining up to eat your little precious.

                “Oh, excuse me ravenous lion, were you here first?  Well, it’s just that the wife and I had dinner reservations.  It’s our anniversary you see.  And we do SO love the crunchy bits of fresh ape-baby.”

                Aside from the meal-klaxon aspect, the constant high-pitched whine is annoying to the point of murderous thought-processes.  I find it amazing that in days of yore when we were (presumably) less civilized babies were not abandoned or snuffed in bulk by frustrated cro-mags.

                And thus my question.  How is it that this behavior is still with us?  How is it that the gene that programs babies to scream their throats raw still exists?  Frankly, it baffles me.

Service with a sneer      

                But back to the present for a second.  My flight has been delayed further, possibly due to the fact that there is still no airplane available to transport the passengers.  It’s an easy thing to overlook.  In the hustle and bustle of providing air travel to your valued hostages passengers there are many little things that need to go right.  For instance, the airline must make sure to find enough people to give up their seats because they overbooked your flight.  They must also provide customer service representatives who have mastered the subtle nuance of barely controlled contempt.  With all that going on, who can remember details like airplanes?

Fast Forward

                Note to reader:  At this point the Penguin’s battery died.  The following text was written three days later.

Why I am here

                This isn’t a deep or metaphysical entry, so if you are thinking that you are going to get a paragraph talking about the esoteric nature of Man and our place in the universe, well you’ve certainly come to the wrong blog for that.  I’m more along the lines of schadenfreude, which I think means “driving pleasure”. 

                Anyway, I am at the airport because I have been conducting a lot of college interviews lately.  The basic gist is that recruiters are not techy people and so don’t make terribly good interviewers.  Therefore my company searches within itself to find employees with a simmering distrust of humanity and underdeveloped social skills and sends them to colleges around the country.

                It’s not a bad gig, except for the travel and the fact that I get way behind in my email.  For one thing, I eat very well when I’m on these trips, much better than when I’m back in Seattle anyway.  Last night I had some very good fettuccini alfredo, the night before I had a steak.  Usually I eat peanut butter and jelly (when I remember to eat).

                Another bonus is the fact that I get to wander around a new and unusual city, which I actually enjoy.  There’s something about being  stranger in a strange land that’s quite appealing. 

                Then, of course, there are the interviews themselves.  I did 25 of them over the past two days.  Thee interviews are always a grab bag of random human behavior.  The screening process is… well, non-optimal to say the least.  It seems like anyone who has managed to boot up a computer in their lifetime can get to the initial stages.  Let’s run through some of the better ones, shall we?

Actually Man

                Actually Man was great.  In truth, Actually Man was someone that I interviewed on my previous trip about two weeks ago, but he is quite memorable, so I will relate the story here as though it happened over the past few days.

                Actually Man had on his resume that he had worked on a networking application doing socket programming.  Through the course of the interview I would ask Actually Man a question, which he would reply with “Actually, <statement>.” Every time, like clockwork.  Here then is what I learned when I dug into the details.

                Actually…

·         I worked on it with a friend .

·         There was no checking for packet loss, the professor stated that packets were guaranteed to be received

·         There was no code to handle multiple simultaneous connections

·         There were only two machines, one client and one server

·         The program was only five lines of code.

It was all I could do to keep from busting out laughing at this point.  This socket programming project that was highlighted on the resume turned out to be five lines of code that he had help writing! 

Combative Research Guy

                I always scan the resumes of the people that I am going to interview on the plane flight to the college.  In the latest batch I ran across Research Guy and instantly I knew there was going to be a problem.  You see, Research Guy was pursuing a PhD in a hardware-related field.  The hardware guys always seem to just not understand that my company is first and foremost a software company.  It’s kind of what we do.

                So I go into the interview knowing that this is going to be a problem.  The guy has on his resume “Solid coding skills in C”.  Ok, little digression time and some advice.  If you put something on your resume you damn well better be prepared to show knowledge in that area, particularly if you qualify your skills with an adjective such as “solid”.

                Note too that “solid” is basically code-word for “crappy”.  Nobody ever says they have “shaky” coding skills or “adequate” coding skills.  No, they fire up the thesaurus and settle on “solid”.  Any time you see that someone claims they have solid skills at something, you may as well ask them a fundamental question and see just how bad the skills really are.

                Research Guy hands me his application and it says he wants to be an SDET.  He immediately tells me that he doesn’t want to be an SDET, he just marked that because he didn’t know what else to check because he really just wants to do research.  Great.  It’s only been 15 seconds.  This is a new record.

                I explain a little bit about how the interview is going to work, wherein I am going to pretend like this is not a waste of my time, and he is going to completely fuck up a coding question.  Well, ok, I said it a bit nicer than that, but whatever.

                I pop the coding question on him and tell him to write it in C.  Of course, he balks.  He hasn’t used C in a long time.  Suck it up and start coding is my basic response.

                So he writes pseudo-code, and bad pseudo-code at that.  Fine, great, whatever.  Let’s see an actual algorithm.  “This isn’t good enough?”  Oh by the gods.

                 I push him to write code and he writes some fucked-up C that wouldn’t even be acceptable if it was My First Compiler shit.  I ask him to walk me through his algorithm and he starts by telling me the four different assumptions he has made in his code.  None of these assumptions are valid.

Turning the Tables

                Gamely, I ask him to revise his algorithm so that it approaches something that someone in the universe might actually accept.  At this point things get very interesting.  Research Guy goes on the offensive. 

                Research Guy explains to me that he doesn’t see how this has any bearing on the real world, how his code is good enough and how he doesn’t think that I have the qualifications to conduct the interview. 

“Ok, we’re done here.  Thank you for your time.”

“I still have time left.”

“No, this interview is over,” is my reply as I open the door, which is thankfully right off the main lobby of the career center.

Research Guy doesn’t quite get the hint or doesn’t want to let this go, because he asks me what degree I hold and mentions again that he is a PhD candidate.  At this point I am making eye contact with the receptionist and sending her mental telepathy to escort this freak away.  Research Guy realizes that I’m not going to play his game and walks away in a bit of a huff with a parting remark of “Well I guess you must be a really good coder.”  (For the record:  No not really.  I have friends who are far better than I and light-years beyond this lunatic).

Shortly after he left I learned that Research Guy had apparently been unable to complete the application form accurately on his first, oh, FIVE tries and had therefore used EVERY APPLICATION that I had left on the table.  Thus the career center had to erase the text off one of his apps and run it through the fax machine, since their copier was busted.  Thank you, Research Guy, for once again reminding me why I hate humanity.

I Shall Rue the Day

I imagine that Research Guy will become a recurring villain, perhaps even a nemesis.  He will appear in front of my building one day with his army of flying robots (all of whom have doctorate degree, of course) and extract his revenge.