Friday, January 09, 2004 Friday, January 09, 2004I just finished Geography of Nowhere, and am spending some time browsing through the eyesores at Kunstler's. They'd be funny if they weren't so normal.
10:43:52 AM # Google It!
Thursday, January 08, 2004The New York State Department of Labor maintains some labor market statistics, among which is wage information by region and occupation. (I've linked to the results for my region and occupation. You can find national, and international, statistics at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.) All those people driving by on the parkway, what do they do? What kinds of jobs are nearby? Why aren't there more jobs where we live?
Or maybe there are, you just have to be self-employed to see them.
10:53:14 PM # Google It!
Your database schema is awful. Who taught you? Access?
Your authentication methods are just pitiful. I suppose it was just too easy to not set a password, or to attempt to run as something other than administrator. Why don't you go back to your single-user systems and leave IT alone.
So you can write an ASP using VisualBASIC; you think that makes you a technical architect?
(So we've ignoring the vendor DLL and re-writing the site. Turns out it was busted beyond recognition anyway.)
4:29:03 PM # Google It!
categories: System Administration
Wednesday, January 07, 2004Joe Gregorio and his wife are in China to adopt a daughter. Today he wrote about a short walk he took around Chongqing. Meanwhile, Paul Krugman and Phil Greenspun both wonder about the problems with deficit spending. I worry about the possibility that, even though I can't work from home, my job may be sent to India. Will the United States remain the Land of Opportunity?
If well-paying work here disappears, we won't be able to afford our cost of living. In other words, we'll be dirt poor.
12:16:52 PM # Google It!
There was ice and a dusting of snow on the road yesterday when I left work. It took almost two hours to drive the 14 miles back to my house, mostly because of ice- and accident-related traffic. Good thing I took the flatter route.
12:03:20 PM # Google It!
Monday, January 05, 2004By way of AllConsuming, I found the City Comforts Blog. My reference to The Geography of Nowhere appeared next to The Death and Life of Great American Cities, linked from Good Speed Update, who linked to City Comforts, which I dutifully followed to the author's blog. Looks like there's a blog for every thing that catches my interest.
12:42:01 PM # Google It!
One common argument against open software is that it is unsupported. This is specious. When you buy binary-only software you have no recourse, and so need vendor support. In some cases, this helps; in others, you just made a very bad decision.
Take this site for example. It has been off-line since November 24, 2003. It hasn't been brought back up in a usable state for one reason: the site is built with Microsoft's Active Server Pages. For certain site functions it relies on a third-party DLL from ServerObjects. We can't get the thing to instantiate objects so that we can act on them. ServerObjects has not been responsive. While we wait, we're rewriting the site to not use ASP.
Outages aren't fun. They're even less fun when you can't fix them.
12:11:11 PM # Google It!
categories: System Administration
AKMA has noticed that New Haven, Connecticut, does not feel like Evanston, Illinois.
Tearing Myself Away.It’s perhaps a sign of how non-postmodern I really am (or perhaps not — depending on how you define “postmodern,” as usual) that my sense of well-being responds so markedly to geography. Just walking around the few blocks of New Haven that Margaret and I have covered, my feet and the climate and the topography and civic life all contribute to the sense that my life and vocation make sense here in a way they don’t, to the same extent, in some other places.
11:45:08 AM # Google It!
It seems I need to pony up some cash in order to find out what Experian, et alia, think they know about me. This seems wrong, but I'm not sure why I think that it is. The same goes for my Stasi FBI file, and the apocryphal permanent record with which students everywhere are threatened. Why don't you just tell me what you think you know? Your database is poorly designed, so you're probably wrong.
Is it just me, or is it suspicious that Experian operates under several different front companies?
11:30:35 AM # Google It!
categories: Identity
I have come to the conclusion that the United States' armed forces are testing flying suits. I suspect this because it is the most likely explanation for the inappropriate use of the phrase "on the ground" in news coverage.
The aid workers on the ground....
Well, where else would they be? In the air?
Reporters are not, generally speaking, idiots. The military must prohibit discussion of flying servicemen, but the reporters still find it necessary to distinguish between flying personnel and those on the gound.
Of course, until we have conclusive proof, it's highly likely that they're all a bunch of morons.
9:50:33 AM # Google It!
categories: Language