brainsnorkel.com

Oh strange new Internet that has such people in’t.

The few very hasty blog posts in the last year is a clear indication to y’all that Brainsnorkel is barely registering in my consciousness. I don’t blog about work, and work is hard at the moment.

Actually, home is hard too.  To make our house bigger, we have to squeeze into one end of it for a while. Hopefully all of this squeezing will be a thing of the past soon. We’ll move back into our proper places and the sardines can move back in to where we’re living.

Enough excuses! Brainsnorkel doesn’t need excuses.

Brainsnorkel needs the dust blown off it.

Given how consuming work is, maybe meta-work is fair game now. It has been in the past.

When I recall very good TV series like Six Feet Under and The Wire I feel could go back and watch the final episode any time for a reminder of the quality of the series and the characters in it. Battlestar Galactica is an excellent TV series, but I think I’ll be watching the pilot episodes, season 1, and not the finale.

Tonio sums up all that was good and bad about the series finale (beware, here be spoilers):
Battlestar Galactica Ends

Here’s my take on the end of the best Science Fiction TV series in history: it hit the right emotional notes, and it was reasonably satisfying, but it was not a worthy ending to the series, and I suspect that as we all go back and watch the whole thing through we’ll find a lot of threads left dangling or essentially forgotten by the writers.

I’m in leadership training.  It’s pretty good so far.

Notable occurrences:

1. Though the Chris of 2000 was an INFJ, the Chris of 2009 is an ESTP. Abracadabra!
2. The 2×2 leadership analysis grid keeps reminding me of this…

Christmas can be a long day. Hopefully these two YouTube gems will help pass the time.

How to fold a T-shirt in 5 seconds:

Orange teeth:

Tomorrow, December 5th 2008, marks the 20th anniversary of my starting work in “the industry.”

This calls for five minutes of reminiscing.

I turned up for my first day of work as a trainee systems programmer at a big Australian bank’s EDP department. I recall being more than a little shocked at having to be at work before 8:06am each day. I was introduced to everyone I’d be working with shortly before being sent off to North Sydney to do MVS and IBM System/360 Assembler training for a few weeks.

At training I learned that the most powerful instruction in Assembly language was the no-op. The coding standard dictated that you sprinkle them throughout your code so that smarter programmers than you could patch your code, in memory, while running by overwriting your no-ops with useful code and then adding a statement to branch to the patch code over the defective instructions.

The bank had some great people. Some were consummate professionals and some were real cowboys.

Towards the end of my time at the bank I was introduced to the pointy-end of the economics of software development and process improvement.

A colleague returned from a long liquid lunch and let me in on the “big secret.”

He said only fools write good code. Code has to break for you to get called in. Being called in gives you overtime and visibility. Overtime is extra money. Being called in is heroism. Develop skill in writing bugs that are serious enough to call you in about, yet easy enough to fix soon after you get into the office. Overtime was paid for in four hour minimum units. Nobody notices people who write reliable code because they never get to perform heroic acts. Notice that the people who get promoted are those that handle high stress situations. Notice that the people handling these high stress situations are generally responsible for creating the high stress situation in the first place.

It was good motivation to find a new job.

From the virtual Cecil B. DeMille’s of Bennelong.

Yes, we’re early. But we did let a month go by after Myer put out their decorations.

Some parents of kids in Mr 5’s class have expressed concern that the school-hours scripture classes are a little too “Fire And Brimstone!” Some kids have been coming home from school talking about death and pretty upset about their parents’ prospects for admission into heaven.

We hadn’t noticed anything particularly odd. A Moses colouring activity came home with a light saber once. At age 5 everything looks better with a light saber.

I decided to check out what Mr 5 thought about his scripture classes.

I don’t have this captured perfectly, but you’ll get the gist:

They’re always talking about God and Jesus. Mostly Jesus. They really like Jesus.

Jesus is really powerful. She has some big dogs who can cure blindness by licking people.

Really big dogs.

He hasn’t heard the joke about the dyslexic insomniac agnostic.

Blade Runner, in any of its forms, is clearly one of the finest science fiction films ever made. While enjoying our new Apple TV last week, I succumbed to the temptation to buy the high definition Definitive Cut version and watch it.

I’ve seen pretty much all of the versions of Blade Runner multiple times — even the versions with reluctant Harrison Ford voice-overs. I didn’t expect much more than to be washed over by very leisurely-paced science fiction film noir nostalgia and marvel at how Admiral William Adama has grown.

I was struck by just how much nostalgia there was to be had.

Ridley Scott was prescient in his ability to select 1982-contemporary brands for prominent display that would encounter some serious trouble by the time history caught up with the movie. Each of the brands I recognised seems to have experienced a pre-2019 hiccup or two:

• RCA: Purchased by GE in 1986 and gutted.
• TDK: Not dead, but owned by Imation since 2007.
• Atari: A brand being revived post-1980s as the adopted name of Hasbro Interactive and Infogrames.
• Pan Am: Does not require explanation.

Apart from Atari, these brands don’t look terribly likely to method act their way to a triumphant resurgence in 2019.

Worth reading just for the introduction.

From the outset, they adopted the philosophy espoused by esoteric novels The Illuminatus! Trilogy, gaining notoriety for various anarchic situationist manifestations, including the defacement of billboard adverts, the posting of prominent cryptic advertisements in NME magazine and the mainstream press, and highly distinctive and unusual performances on Top of the Pops. Their most notorious performance was at the February 1992 BRIT Awards, where they fired machine gun blanks into the audience and dumped a dead sheep at the aftershow party. This performance announced The KLF’s departure from the music business, and in May 1992 the duo deleted their entire back catalogue.

Esoteric novels? They were the finest of their indescribable genre.

I blame sleep-deprivation for a lack of even sporadic blogging.

Rather than kick off a del.icio.us linkspam bot, I’ll just refer you over to the rightleft. My Google Reader shared items change far more frequently than this blog.

That widget is powered by the wake of my leveraged synergy drive.

Fafblog is stirring.

If I go back to using Bloglines from Reader and pretend Billmon is still around I’ll be blog-partying on teh Internets like it’s 2004.

…but almost that boring.

I Am A: True Neutral Human Sorcerer (5th Level)

Ability Scores:
Strength-12
Dexterity-15
Constitution-12
Intelligence-14
Wisdom-14
Charisma-15

Alignment:
True Neutral A true neutral character does what seems to be a good idea. He doesn’t feel strongly one way or the other when it comes to good vs. evil or law vs. chaos. Most true neutral characters exhibit a lack of conviction or bias rather than a commitment to neutrality. Such a character thinks of good as better than evil after all, he would rather have good neighbors and rulers than evil ones. Still, he’s not personally committed to upholding good in any abstract or universal way. Some true neutral characters, on the other hand, commit themselves philosophically to neutrality. They see good, evil, law, and chaos as prejudices and dangerous extremes. They advocate the middle way of neutrality as the best, most balanced road in the long run. True neutral is the best alignment you can be because it means you act naturally, without prejudice or compulsion. However, true neutral can be a dangerous alignment because it represents apathy, indifference, and a lack of conviction.

Race:
Humans are the most adaptable of the common races. Short generations and a penchant for migration and conquest have made them physically diverse as well. Humans are often unorthodox in their dress, sporting unusual hairstyles, fanciful clothes, tattoos, and the like.

Class:
Sorcerers are arcane spellcasters who manipulate magic energy with imagination and talent rather than studious discipline. They have no books, no mentors, no theories just raw power that they direct at will. Sorcerers know fewer spells than wizards do and acquire them more slowly, but they can cast individual spells more often and have no need to prepare their incantations ahead of time. Also unlike wizards, sorcerers cannot specialize in a school of magic. Since sorcerers gain their powers without undergoing the years of rigorous study that wizards go through, they have more time to learn fighting skills and are proficient with simple weapons. Charisma is very important for sorcerers; the higher their value in this ability, the higher the spell level they can cast.

Find out What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?, courtesy of Easydamus

I wonder what D&D life would be like if I had agreed to assassinate the president in the survey? Oh wait. The back button is my friend.

Obviously I would be among the most odious of chaotic, sonofabitches…

I Am A: Neutral Good Human Sorcerer (5th Level)

Lee-Harvey Oswald was true neutral before he shot JFK and neutral good after? Tell that to Jack Ruby.

I guess the survey is aware of who’s currently President of the US. Maybe it’s geo-located me and knows that my country doesn’t have a president. If I would assassinate some dictator who masquerades as president in Australia’s freedom-tolerating system of constitutional monarchy, then there is good in me!

Via Jeff Freeman

What Kind of Dungeons and Dragons Character Would You Be?