alex chiang: web 6.0

The city of Dallas got a half inch of snow and ice two days ago and the entire city’s been shut down. Then again, I don’t really blame them since their idea of how to handle situations like this comes straight from the 18th century: throw down a little sand for some traction and wait for the sun to come and melt it all away. You’d think that with all the trucks, one or two would have a plow attachment.

At work yesterday, a few of us decided that it would be a good idea to tie some ropes to the back of a few cars and then get towed around the parking lot in Tupperware tubs.

The tubs weren’t all that sturdy and started progressively breaking up into smaller and smaller pieces. By the end, we couldn’t actually sit in them, and had to use a wakeboarding-like kneeling technique.

This is how affluent, college-educated software engineers have fun.

Why is John Ashcroft wasting my money?

Here’s a more energetic rant.

Best. Movie. Ever. How can you go wrong with characters named Bruce Leroy and Sho’nuff, the Shogun from Harlem? I wish I had the glow.

• Taimak — who plays Bruce Leroy
• buy the dvd at amazon

Added a few lists of cracks to climb here.

In other news, I’ve been feeling like shit all week. I either have salmonella or the worst lactose intolerance response ever. I sleep about four hours a night before waking up with severe abdominal pain. Gas-X helps, but only slightly. My life sucks right now.

I’ve been a loyal Intuit customer, purchasing TurboTax every year for the past three years. They created a good product at a fair price that just plain worked and I rewarded them for it. Next year, I’m going to find another way to do my taxes.

My first grievance: I used TurboTax for the Web last year, and at the end of the process, saved the .tax file it created. When I tried to import it into this year’s return, I found out that the web version of the file is incompatible with the Windows standalone version. What crappy engineering is this, that they can’t make a single document format work across all versions of a product?

My second grievance: I tried to get help for this on the web. After wrestling with the troubleshooter, I decided to try and “chat” with a “live agent”. After connecting with the “agent”, I tried explaining my problem. The slow reaction time, canned responses, and non sequiters the agent responded with made me annoyed and suspicious that I wasn’t talking to a human at all, but to an AI chatbot of some sort. I disconnected from the first agent and tried “speaking” with a second agent. Although the canned responses were slightly different, they followed the same pattern as the previous agent’s responses. I asked this one point blank if it was a human, and it didn’t respond for 4 minutes. I asked it some more questions, and then asked it if it was a human again, and got a terse “yes” in response.

Well, let me tell you something, Intuit — I don’t fucking think so. You may have some decent programmers, but they can’t write AI bots that pass a Turing test yet.

Now normally, this sort of thing would appeal to my geeky side. But as a paying customer who is trying to get support for a product, being told that I’m connected with a “live agent” when in reality I’m chatting with a bot is pretty misleading.

My third grievance: TurboTax installs a nasty piece of software written by Macrovision (the same folks who invented VHS and DVD piracy safeguards) called SafeCast or C-Dilla. The thing is, they don’t tell you that you’re getting a bonus piece of crapware installed on your machine that stays resident in memory and messes with your system. My laptop has never hung once before installing TurboTax, but mysteriously started hanging and acting sluggishly afterwards. I uninstalled both TurboTax and C-Dilla and no more hangs. You tell me what the problem was.

Here’s some stuff on the web:

• “live agent” — see if it passes your own Turing test
• In depth explanation of what C-Dilla does (it writes to reserved sectors of your hard drive, in case you were curious)
• C-Dilla uninstaller
• Should you use TurboTax?
• online reputation management — an interesting article written by Nicholas Carroll. Perhaps if a meme about how Intuit sucks were to spread across the internet, it would make the company respect their customers more.

So I’ve been watching dvd’s on my computer for the past two years or so. It has a PCMCIA hardware decoder card that only works in Windows 98, and can output composite video or s-video through a dongle. Unfortunately, I haven’t owned a tv, so I’ve just been viewing the output on either the laptop screen itself or a monitor I hook up every once in a while. And although the picture quality was crappy, it was bearable, until I started encountering a bunch of discs that the computer wouldn’t read.

It was time for an upgrade, and so I just bought a tv and dvd player. I got the tv first and hooked it up to the computer via the s-video cable. The immediate jump in quality was amazing, but I still had to solve the skipping disc problem.

The dvd player came a few days later and so I hooked that up using s-video as well. This time, I could barely notice an improvement in picture quality, although the other perks of a standalone player were well worth it (remote control, better handling of problematic discs).

Today I put in some component video cables, and I didn’t see any improvement in the picture whatsoever. Now keep in mind that my tv is only capable of displaying 480i, so I wasn’t taking advantage of the progressive scan.

So what did I learn? Basically, I had the realization that I am not an beautiful and unique snowflake. There may be super-beings out there who can actually benefit from every little improvement to their home theater systems, and I am not one of them.

Going from a computer monitor to a 27″ Sony Wega tv gave a *huge* gain in quality. Upgrading from a 5 year old dvd decoder card to the newest Zenith progressive scan technology barely improved the picture. I couldn’t tell the difference between s-video and component video.

I now know that I don’t need to spend $300 on Monster cables, because they won’t do shit for me. And I suspect that the same is true for 90% of dvd consumers out there.

Thank god I’m not an audio/video-phile. The fretting and constant tinkering and impact on my wallet just aren’t worth it to me, and there’s no shame in that.

I angered my body today, I think. The angering process started yesterday. After watching DVDs on my puny laptop for the past two years, I finally got frustrated enough with the skipping and freezing and crappy picture that I decided to break down and buy a TV and standalone DVD player. After a bit of web research, I decided to get a Sony Wega 27″. So I drove out to Best Buy and picked one up, and then had to haul it up two flights of stairs by myself. Christ — that thing was heavy and so I had an achy back all day. At least I’ll no longer have to be this guy.

For lunch, we decided to go to JC’s Burger House. Their half-pound burgers are tasty to the extreme in and of themselves. However, JC’s goes the extra step and combines three patties into a single monstrosity, formerly known as the Triple Weave, and now called the Big Chill. So I ordered one, and the damn thing was huge. The patties themselves formed a stack about 4 inches high and it was dripping grease and melted cheese the entire time. It took me about 20 minutes to wolf it down, and I got my picture taken, which apparently will be posted on the wall along with the other freaks.

Paul DeMone has written an excellent piece describing the competitive landscape in high-end server land. It is unbiased and well-written, and it seems like he actually knows what he’s talking about. This is the sort of big picture overview that I wish my management chain would pass on down to me. Unfortunately, straight talk is hard to find in most corporate environments, mine included.

Fortune has a somewhat fluffier write up on the same topic. It’s also a good article, and I didn’t feel like it wasted my time. They also created a silly chart that describes different scenarios of the future, depending on who “wins”.

Here’s a somewhat scary thought for HP. What if Intel succeeds at making Itanium the dominant architecture in server space? In that scenario, you’ve just commoditized a huge component in your server. There aren’t that many pieces left for competitors to differentiate on — basically just chipsets and interconnect. I wonder how long it will be before Dell decides that the margins in servers are so huge that investing some money in R&D would be extremely worth their while. Although that would break their current business model, companies like Dell have a way of evolving with time.

Does the success of Itanium spell the beginning of the end for HP?

I haven’t climbed since New Year’s due to a combination of slight burn-out, laziness, and work-related stress. And once I fall out of the groove, inertia tends to keep me out. So when Michael called me Saturday morning to see if I wanted to climb (and to let me know that the space shuttle Columbia blew up), I hesitated. After much hemming and hawing, I decided to go.

We left around 3 pm, and I had a sudden craving for McDonald’s chicken nuggets (even after reading _Fast Food Nation_), so we had to pull off and get some. I, of course, got the 20-piece and feasted on tasty nuggets dipped in hot mustard sauce.

Three hours later, we stopped at Chango’s, which is a local (Austin) burrito place. Still feeling a bit full, I decided to skip out on el Maximo, and opted instead for a quesadilla that was absolutely packed with rich cheesy goodness.

A fact that will be important later on is that I am lactose intolerant. Assaulting my system with a glut of dairy products usually causes me to produce inordinate amounts of gas.

By and by, it was 9 pm, and Michael, Mallie, and I were at Pace Bend state park, drinking our six pack of Mackeson’s (yum!) with some Dallas friends we chanced upon. Michael and I quickly killed our six-pack and each scrounged an additional beer.

We turned in around midnight. Michael tied Mallie, his gigantic Malamute puppy, to the bumper of his truck, and we crashed in the bed, protected from the elements by a hard top. I got about two or three good hours in before the troubles began.

Trouble the First: Michael snores. Loudly. This is a bad thing when you are in close quarters. He claims it only happens when he drinks, but guess what — we drank last night.

Trouble the Second: Mallie decided she didn’t like being tied to the bumper, and decided to whine and attempt to jump and bump into the truck all night long. This pissed Michael off, which caused him to reprimand her with a firm and raised voice.

Trouble the Third: the combination of food and beverage I partook in that day combined in my gut to form something foul and other-worldly. An impossible volume of gas appeared in my entrails and the pressure was unbearable. I attempted to relieve the pressure via the closest available orifice, that being my anus.

Now let me remind the gentle reader that a sleeping bag works by insulating the warm air near your body from the cold air of the night. The upshot of this is that little air is exchanged between the inside of the bag and the outside. Also, a sleeping bag cannot discriminate between sweet sweet oxygen and noxious, headache inducing, beer-inspired flatulence.

Basically, I created an eye-watering torture sack. Every slightest movement would cause a puff of super-saturated ass air to waft from the depths of hell straight into my face. And every time I thought the last of the disgusting stench was purged from the bowels of the bag, the bowels of my body let forth with another blast and replenished the murderous stockpile.

Eventually, all the little wafts of hell’s breath that escaped my own miserable environment coalesced and collected in Michael’s poorly ventilated camper top. The dense stinkfog of methane and ass smell filled the entire space, and only then did it start to leak out the sides.

Had an observer been present, I believe that he or she would have seen a nefarious looking, darkish green-yellow cloud of hissing venom oozing out and rolling down the sides of the truck, forming large blisters on the paint job and killing small woodland creatures on contact.

I was in such a dazed state that I can’t remember if it knocked out Mallie or merely increased her level of agitation. I do remember feeling beyond miserable and wishing that I could die so my gut didn’t hurt and I wouldn’t have to smell the putrescence emanating from my own ass anymore.

And so it went for several hours. I’ve experienced unplanned bivvies that were more pleasant. I drifted in and out of semi-consciousness the entire night, and when the faintest glimmer of day appeared, it finally dawned upon me that dumping the load out of my large intestine might make me feel like a human being again.

So I escaped the malodorous confines of the truck and found the outdoor pit toilet, where I think I sat for about 45 minutes, half sleeping, half shitting. I had left the door of the camper top open to air the damn thing out, and when I got back, it was mostly tolerable again.

Desparately trying to catch a few more z’s, I crawled back into the bag. Luckily, the half-life of stank is short, and the first few foul whiffs quickly died off. Unluckily, it was about this same time that Michael’s gastrointestinal system decided to rebel and he took his turn at revenge.

By 8:30, we could no longer take it, and we emerged from the truck, like a couple of hell-spawn rising out of a bubbling cloud of sulfrous fumes.

After a quick breakfast, we were at Reimer’s. All the easy warm-up routes were taken, so Michael’s bright idea was to warm-up on a 12a. He is a strong climber, and so this idea was actually reasonable for him. I am not, but I made up for it with stupidity, and managed to do about three moves on top-rope before declaring success, where success was defined as “being warm”.

After our combined early victories (he redpointed the route, I was warm), we aimed for another area named the Sex Cave. Michael decided that I was to attempt a 5.11 named Spider Grind. Ever the optimist, he spun my month of sedentary behavior as “four weeks of rest”. Nevermind the fact that I hadn’t climbed anything harder than 5.10 in three or four months, even when I was climbing somewhat regularly.

I surprised myself by making it to the anchors, and so I decided to fall off instead of clipping them. That was the closest I got the entire day, since apparently endurance is one of the first things to go when you are a lazy bum for a month.

Michael redpointed a few more hard routes in between my pathetic attempts, and I was quite relieved when we left early so that we could get back to Dallas in time to watch the Simpsons.

I don’t know why I’m still awake writing this stupid story, seeing as how I have to wake up at a reasonable hour and go to work tomorrow. My system is still recovering from the culinary mugging I gave it yesterday, and I can only hope I didn’t induce any permanent nerve damage. Still, I did get a bit of climbing in, and I haven’t written anything in a while, and so there you have it — a weekend in the life of.

Hope this amused at least a few folks out there…

Crazy weekend, this weekend, in the DFW metroplex. It began somewhat surrealistically for me, as yet again, I was woken up on the phone by a friend, groggy and disoriented, informed that yet another national disaster had just occurred.

On Sept. 11, a friend called me to let me know that the twin towers had just collapsed. Yesterday, a different friend called to tell me that the space shuttle Columbia had just blown up over our heads. Michael (and his dog Malley) actually heard the explosion, whereas I simply slept through it.

The Amber Alert system was utilized, informing everyone in the DFW area to stay away from shuttle debris and to report its location immediately to the authorities. The government’s first claim was that taking debris was tantamount to stealing government property and that violators would be prosecuted. This I believed. The second claim was that the debris was almost certainly coated in toxic substances and avoiding it was in our own best interests. I had more trouble swallowing this one.

OpEd: our government shouldn’t resort to cheap scare tactics to get what it wants (prevent people from taking souveniers).

After a bit of searching, the toxic substance in reference may be hydrazine. According to CBS news:

Shuttles have long used a chemical called hydrazine to run their auxiliary power units. Hydrazine, a colorless liquid with an ammonia-like odor, is a toxic chemical and can cause harm to anyone who contacts it.

We saw the Amber Alerts halfway down I35 on our way to Austin, where we were going to climb for the weekend.

Of course, there is lots of news coverage on the web. I picked out a few of the more interesting links from my perspective.

• George Bush’s public statement
• initial thoughts on root cause of the accident — we’ll see how this compares to the official reason later on
• description of the debris and where it fell
• of course, people tried to sell pieces of debris on ebay
• another debris and ebay story
• business impact of the accident on Boeing and interesting history of the shuttle fleet
• another analysis of the impact on Boeing

In other news, teen lesbian pop duo Tatu have stormed straight into the UK singles charts at number one. They’re not really that hot, though.