Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Nitnoid

“Nothing pains some people more than having to think.”

I don’t remember who said that (… I’ll go check the Google Oracle … ah, the good Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.! the full quote is from his book Strength to Love (1963):

“Who doubts that this toughness of mind is one of man’s greatest needs? Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.”

Smashing.)

I didn’t remember who said that, as I was saying, but the truth of that statement has never been more apparent than it has these last few days. Those millions of half-people, mentally lazy nitnoids settled into less-than-mediocre lives seem to congregate inside my sphere of influence, frustrating the ever-living shit out of my chances to progress.

On Saturday, I got into a heated online conversation with a guy about controlling on the VATSIM network. He vehemently insisted that I should no longer give a clearance by uttering the widely accepted shortcut phrase “cleared as filed” because it was “policy” and “how we’ve always done things here.”

That kind of molasses-slow reaction to stimulus is why there are no Woolly Mammoths roaming the Earth. First, on a practical level, “cleared as filed” is a completely legitimate IFR clearance. Second, there is no such policy (a trick I learned--and which I used on him--is to always ask for documentation: if what you’re asking “policy,” it’s written somewhere. If not, then it’s simply a figment of your limited imagination, asshole.) He couldn’t, of course, produce any documentation whatever.

In fact, upon a closer reading of the actual, written Standard Operating Procedure, we found it clearly stated that uttering the words “cleared as filed” is explicitly allowed. This guy wasn't only the Training Administrator charged with educating up and comers, but a solid gold member of the doomed Lemming Herd that questioned my reasoning when I asked them to review a certain Standard Terminal Arrival Route (STAR). The JAMMN arrival is clearly outlined as a procedure for flying into Salt Lake City airport when that airport is landing to the south.

But no, the thunderin' Lemming Herd insisted that because they’d always used that arrival for both north and south landings forever, they would continue using it that way, all practical evidence to the contrary. This gave rise to the slightly irritating practice of pulling the pilot off his established routing into Salt Lake when landing north to give them strange instructions about veering off course direct such-and-such and be at such-and-such an altitude by such-and-such distance, etc., etc. Thus, contravening the entire idea of STARs as a Standard Arrival Route.

Nothing pains some people more than having to think.

At work, there are several computer migrations taking place. There are a number of systems administrators partaking in the process, the epitome of painful thinkers. They loathe the process … when stretched to perform the mental equivalent of getting up out of a chair, they rebel. The whine. They squirm.

Above all, they don’t understand much, but they understand plenty about how they’ve always done things: give everyone in the office local computer administrative rights. In fact, blast local computer administrative rights, give ‘em Domain Admin rights. Put the Domain Users group in the Domain Admins group! Yeah, you’ll never have to fuck around with trying to figure out why things don’t work; with god-level rights, every single person in the domain will make things work, by Jove!

They don’t understand the basics, either. They don’t understand networking, how packets are built and transmitted. They don’t understand DNS, the backbone of the Active Directory installations which they’ve been “managing” for years. They don’t understand firewalls, they don’t understand Kerberos, they simply don’t understand.

Today, I had a guy give me shit because I’d asked him to remotely manage a computer then change the members of the local administrators group on that machine. He “couldn’t,” he whined, and what’s more, it was getting “frustrating” because he kept getting an access denied message. Nwaaah!

This color-by-numbers Administrator didn’t take the infinitesimal time required to look at whether the account he was using to manage the computer account was actually able to make the changes.

I don’t know, but if I’d received an “access denied” message, the first inclination would be to ask why then, following a somewhat logical path, I’d probably arrive at a suitable answer sooner or later. Sometimes the good is better than the best, but you’ve got to know what “the good” looks like and boy, some people don’t wanna know what “the good” looks like.

Nothing pains some people more than having to think.

Until next time, Colostomy bags, fuck you!

Monday, July 06, 2009

Medical Care

As I have only just finished paying through my nose for being a dumbass and hurting myself by falling off a bike months ago, I can sympathize with those who recoil at medical costs.

But, I was able to get immediate care. Let me put it another way, I would rather have been injured here in the US and pay through my nose for months than get injured in Nigeria and get medical attention for free (not that that is happening in Nigeria these days anyway).

Thomas Sowell, who should have been the first black African American President, once again dispels myth and substitutes common sense fact in Alice in Medical Care.

Some snippets:

“A cynic is said to be someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. If so, then it is political cynicism to point to other countries that spend less on medical care, including some countries where there is "universal health care" provided "free" by their governments.”

“The cost of developing a new pharmaceutical drug is now about a billion dollars. Neither political rhetoric nor government bureaucracies will make those costs go away.”

“Surgery may well cost less in countries with government-run medical systems-- if you count only the money cost, and not the time the patients have to endure the ailments that require surgery, or the fact that some conditions become worse, or even fatal, while waiting.”

“A recent report from the Fraser Institute in Canada shows that patients there wait an average of ten weeks to get an MRI, just to find out what is wrong with them. A lot of bad things can happen in 10 weeks, ranging from suffering to death.”

Read the full thing; this is common sense for all except for those who wander in the darkness of liberal idiocy.

Hat tip, TRB.

College “Educated”

It’s 9am on Independence Day. Some kid, eager to bring on the festivities, decides to start the party early by shooting off a few firecrackers not 50 feet away from my window.

Independence indeed.

A little earlier, following a link from Steven Pressfield, I stumbled upon Fabius Maximus’ blog and read this worthwhile gem College Education In America, Another Broken Business Model.

People are less willing to borrow for college; lenders are less willing to tend to parents and students. Students and parents know a liberal arts education is seldom worth the cost either financially or intellectually. Now they increasingly wonder if the diploma is worth the cost.

Ain’t that the truth.

Sunday, July 05, 2009

The More Things Change …

Steven Pressfield is the author of several books, one or two of which I can rightly say are favorites (The Gates of Fire and The War of Art). A recently published one about a plot to kill Rommel in WWII promises to be great.

Pressfield has decided to turn his historian’s perspective on things to Afghanistan and surmises that what the US is up against in those regions is, in his term, tribalism and perhaps not so much Islamic fascism. I think he’s got a solid point there … check out this video—part one of five—on the subject and visit his blog for more:

Saturday, July 04, 2009

Happy Independence Day

Here are some other examples of fireworks photography, spellbinding.

Saturday, June 27, 2009

Tailors

Friday, June 26, 2009

Fix The USA

Heh. You’ve got to watching this one (click on pic, YouTube):

BOSaveDAy

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Announcements

I started watching Jon & Kate plus Eight quite a while ago then got turned off the whole phenomenon because I didn’t like the sinister tones the show took, starting when the Gosselins approached then passed the OP, the Oprah Point.

Those early shows were a delightful blend of harried parents and cute little kids (except for Mady Gosselin, I’ve always disliked that twerp) but even back then, I got the sense Jon was a hen-pecked pussy who didn’t want to rock the money boat Kate had shepherded the family on to and was steering with a strident hand on the tiller. The came the OP and enh, I’ve got better things to watch.

For the first time in almost two years, I watched the last episode of JK8 I would ever see in which Pussy Jon and Grumpy Kate announced their separation all the while advertising for (yet another) manufacturer of toy child houses called Topsy-turvy House or some crap. If that’s not the name, it should be.

With the possible exception of Mady who deserves it (I kid, I kid!) what these selfish assholes have done is turn those kids’ lives upside-down. While protesting they only did this (ie. “star” on a reality TV show) for the kids, they were also divorcing “for the kids” as well. Jon tellingly said he had to do what was best for himself.

And the kids.

Definitely all for the kids.

This sent my eye muscles into that oh-so-familiar muscular twirl. Spare me, you fucking pussy. You know what’s best for those kids (borne out by hard data, year-in, year-out)? Stay with the fucking mother of your kids, stop cheating, grow a fucking pair and throw out the fucking television cameras.

He goes on to say that he was “only 32.” More like 10, you sophomoric adulterating shit.

The two of them were spouting the usual BS about doing this all together, but apart. I mean, the irony was thick and heavy. Here they are, explaining that going on the TV show didn’t hasten or otherwise affect their decision to separate when that clearly is the reason for their problems; that they’d pull through this “together” while splitting; that it was and will always be “for the kids” when it’s completely apparent it’s for definitely selfish reasons.

This is from their About page: “I had wanted children right away, but Jon wasn’t ready.” You got that half-right, miss thing. You both weren’t ready.

jon-and-kate-gosselin