bynkii.com

On Coffee

2013-05-08T02:06:33Z

Yes, I know, all the New Media Douchebags love to wax rhapsodic about their overcomplicated bullshit coffee making. At this point, I don't think Marco Arment can go from desire to coffee in under a fucking hour. However, I'd like to say something about this: every single cup of coffee I've had made via French Press has been identical.

Identically weak, watery shit. French Press is the diarrhea of coffee. It's like someone gave the coffeemaker a norovirus, and what you get is the befouled brown watery stream it produces.

I've had that shit at people's houses and at hippie fucking coffeeshops where they can't even be fucking arsed to put the espresso in the fucking cup along with that french press effluvia because...fuck if i know, they can't make espresso for shit either. (HOW THE FUCK DO YOU MAKE WEAK ESPRESSO? I DON'T KNOW, BUT THEY DO. OVER AND FUCKING OVER.) I don't ask for much in coffee. Strong. Black. In a fucking cup. Try not to take all fucking day to make it. I'm the guy who walks into the local starbucks and says "Vente Green Eye", (three shots if you're unfamiliar), and when asked "if I want room for cream" looks at them like they're daft. Usually, they stop asking me.

I don't want my coffee to caress my tastebuds and awaken my senses with an aroma that only beans personally carried over in the cloaca of hand-fed turtledoves can produce. I am not celebrating the moments of my life.

I am feeding a fucking addiction, one that I am happy with, functional with, and god help you if I get that fucking headache because I haven't gotten enough coffee that day. (Melissa saw that headache once. I walked from my house to whataburger, because I was in too much pain to drive, and wasn't in the mood for "laws" and "stoplights". Melissa came with me to make sure I didn't start a fight with some fucking car that thought IT should be in the road where I was walking. Not the driver. The car.) I want my coffee to punch me in the face while screaming "WAKE THE FUCK UP YOU LIMP-DICKED COCKFACE!"

I'm actually rather happy with a wide range of sources. Starbucks, Krispy Kreme, Keurig, fuckit, just be strong, black, in a cup, and in my fucking hand. I could give a fuck less with one exception: that french press shit. If I hear that, I know I'm going to get fucking brown crayon water.

Fuck French Press coffee, and fuck hipster douchebags who overcomplicate everything. Life is short, coffee should be simple.

Ya Gotta Feel it

2013-04-23T02:32:44Z

Earlier tonight, while doing the audio for AMB, (I don't know why I'm not able to post a show until the day before we record. It's a mental deficiency or something), I was reading some of Harry Marks' stuff as I do now that there's no RSS in Safari, namely in bursts, and I was thinking "Man, if I could do what he does, I could get some ads going and maybe make a buck on the site." Because shocking, this site, even when I ran ads, is not a great money maker. Oh sure, every so often someone throws me a buck or two, and I do appreciate it, but by and large, whatever the formula to making money on a site is, including lots of hard work about setting things up to do that, I don't have it.

(also, I'm a fucking spaz in terms of content and consistency. How the fuck would ANYONE advertise anything here? WHY would they? I'm wistful at times, but I'm also self-aware.)

As I'm pondering that, I also realized something fairly obvious: I'm never going to have a setup like Harry, or Gruber, or Jim Dalrymple, because I'm absolutely nothing like them. Not in the "can't write for shit" arena. I can, when I want, do a more than decent job of putting thoughts to bits. I mean...look, even at their most emotional, neither of those three are that emotional. Gruber seems to be the least emotional of all. Really, when he gets angry about something, it's noteworthy, because that's kind of rare for him. Annoyance, sure, irritation, okay. But visceral anger? Fuck me, I can't really remember it off of him. That's not bad mind you. I'm quite glad there are people like him and harry et al out there. I can do that, sometimes. I can put together long, safe-for-work, technical pieces. Occasionally, and let me tell you, you have no idea how hard it is. My SNMP piece, still one of my most reliable pieces in terms of hits, still on the google first page of results for "os x snmp" almost 7 years later? That took so long to write. It was hard, not because of subject, but because of style. I am, obviously, not the most...calm writer, not here.

That used to bother me quite a bit. I wanted, for a long time, and tried quite hard, to be more like my friend Mike. Mike is one of those guys who lives for research and data. He rarely writes anything unless he can source it like a friggin' Ph.D thesis. I wanted, for a long time, to be like him, in terms of writing. I tried. (If you aren't reading his stuff, you really should. He writes well, honestly, and unashamedly.)

But something always happens. For example, in my head, I have a few long posts about Acrobat XI, PDFPen Pro 6, and almost an entire SNMP eBook. Really. They're about done. But every time I go to type...nothing. I can see the articles, I know every word, every comma and it's like my hands rebel. Now the post I want to write about my Roller Derby addiction? That one is about done in terms of posting. I'm just fussy about that because well, I care a lot about "my" roller derby team. So yeah. But as much as I want to write nice techy articles, they...hold no interest for me in the end.

Because what I am is a tech guy who is best when fueled by rage. I don't mean that to say I willingly shit on reality for it, but I wallow in strongly held opinions, and I'm unshy about stating them. If I were to pick a character from literature I see most like me, it would be a relatively minor character from "The Romulan Way", by Diane Duane and Peter Morwood. (should you ever be fortunate enough to meet them, try to get them to talk about the story of that particular novel. It's rather funny. Then again, almost all their stories are hilarious. Especially when they involve quotes like "I'm from Northern Ireland, I don't do well with unannounced gunfire!") The character in question shows up in chapter eight, with the very Romulan name of "Lai tr'Ehheligh". The part that stuck with me, years after I first read the book back in 1987 was this:

"They killed Lai tr'Ehheligh some years after he wrote those words, and his works were expunged in many kingdoms and councillories. In others, mostly Eastern strongholds on ch'Havran, they were carefully hidden and preserved, which is fortunate. Otherwise we should know nothing of this hated, feared, angry little man, who told the truth as he saw it and was so universally condemned. In retrospect, there may have been something to the truth he told."

(The words they are talking about are in that same chapter, but for those, you must acquire the book. It's a good read, especially if you are a McCoy fan, and really, who isn't a McCoy fan?)

I've never been good at "Um...excuse me...excuse me...there seems to be a problem here, and perhaps we could all sit down and talk about it?" Others are, and thank goodness for that, because really, they are more the example we should follow. I've always been more like the the apocryphal, and likely false version of Harlan Ellison atop Gene Roddenberry, trying to choke the shit out of him, screaming obscenities about what a hack Roddenberry was, after Roddenberry took that goddamned red pen to his fucking genius once too often. I don't think it's true, but when talking about Harlan Ellison, such things are not completely unrealistic. So back when I read that, still in the Air Force, still new to the Air Force, it resonated with me. It took me almost another twenty years to figure out why, but I kept going back to that book and that chapter, because there's still something there I see in myself.

It's not really anger per se, but I have to fucking care. I can't just coldly write about a problem, giving it proper perspective. For example, when I realized that to get someone from Acrobat 10.0 to 10.1.6 would require almost ten separate upgrades, because some fuckwit on that team thinks that cumulative updates will wake Cthulu or something...well, okay, I think that says it all. If I don't care enough about the problem to be pissed off at it, then fuck, do I really care if it gets fixed? Probably not. I know Marco Arment and many other devs hate people like me, because they're all like "DIS PROGRAM IS MAH BEBBEY!!!" and I'm all like "YOUR BABY IS FUCKING UGLY, AND IT'S EATING ITS OWN SHIT. HAVE YOU EVER CONSIDERED THAT WOLF-INFESTED HILLSIDE JUST OUT OF TOWN? I'M NOT SAYING ALLLL THE BABIES SHOULD BE LEFT THERE, BUT I THINK YOU SHOULD CONSIDER REVIVING THE TRADITION". I also leave a long trail of specific actionable points, because fuck, I don't want to just yell to yell. The driver for that is rarely logic. It's emotion. As I said in a comment on Mike's site:

I did not spend years prodding Adobe to fix their installers because of logic or reason. I did it because what they were doing made me angry. I didn't teach my son to be kind whenever possible because some book told me to. I did it because the results of not being kind made me angry. When I call out the things I call bullshit on, my desire may be for things being done right and people being kind, but the thing that drives me to work for those goals is that anger.

If I don't care enough about the product or problem to get pissed off, I probably don't care about using the product or solving the problem. Dunno why that is, but it is what it is. I have to give a fuck first, and once i do that, then things are easy. Well for me. Sometimes not for the people I'm yelling at, but for them I can say this: I may be the only one saying it in those precisely provocative profane phrases, but I can pretty much guarantee I'm not the only one thinking it in that way. Take that as you will.

So yeah. I doubt this site will ever make money, I've no idea how that would even work for this demented game of whackamole that is bynkii.com. But that's okay. Because it also guarantees that I don't have to give a fuck about hitcounts or any of the shit surrounding making money on a web site. I can do my own thing here, and maybe it causes someone not to hire me or want to talk to me. That's okay, if all it took to do that was this website? Probably better that way in the end.

Short ones part infinity

2013-04-17T00:17:11Z

"I'm a sysadmin. My schedule is flexible to the point of being almost imaginary".

Yes, I have actually answered scheduling questions that way.

Another quickie

2013-04-14T23:48:49Z

When you're in charge of a company, a group of people, one other person, the rule you should almost bleed to never break:

"Praise in public, criticize in private."

A bit of wisdom that will be ignored

2013-04-09T02:58:16Z

IT people, especially sysadmins, would greatly reduce their frustration levels if they stopped thinking that they can somehow get the rest of the company to use computers they way they do.

Nixon? Nope

2013-04-07T03:06:01Z

6 April 2013, 2305hrs

So a few weeks ago, Brent Simmons wrote an article for Macworld.com with the most unneeded title in many years: "Apple fans: Microsoft is no longer the enemy". Honestly, the entire article is puzzling, because other than for a vanishingly small number of people, the "Microsoft is the Enemy" thing died some time ago. In the opening paragraph, Brent says:

While I was visiting the Microsoft campus a few weeks ago—in suburban Redmond, just across Lake Washington from my beloved Seattle—I kept thinking of the old Vulcan proverb: “Only Nixon can go to China.”
If Microsoft is China, then that makes me Nixon in this story, I realize.

No Brent, you weren't. But before we get to that, let's look at the history behind that statement. For the folks for whom "The Cold War" is something relegated to history books, it seems odd, but at one point, China was evil. Like, they were going to blow up the world evil. Literally. I remember having this odd feeling in the back of my head all the time that I was never going to really grow old, because someone would fuck something up, and we'd get the fuck nuked out of us. "The Day After" was honestly fucking frightening when it came out, because it was the embodiment of so many fears.

So in 1972, Nixon goes to China. The President, and not one given to being particularly tolerant of Communism went to China to help prevent "The Day After" from happening, and gain an advantage over the USSR. This was momentous. Huge.

However, even if we do try to reduce that to the minutiae of Nixon going to China to computer platform wars, Brent still isn't Nixon. That event happened years before, in 1997, and was announced at the Macworld Expo of that year, complete with the giant head of Mao, er, Bill Gates on screen.

Almost twenty years later, Brent going to Microsoft is about as important as me going to Microsoft. Not even a little.

The entire article, to be honest, is a rehashing of a conflict that's almost decades done, and good riddance to it. In fact, the reason he was there shows it...to talk about iOS support in Windows Azure Mobile Services. I'm unsure how this is noteworthy beyond "oh, that's kind of cool". It gives both Microsoft and Apple devs more options and tools for serving their customers.

If Tim Cook goes to Google, and has Larry Page on stage at an event or the WWDC keynote, that will be "Nixon going to China". Brent going to Microsoft is over a decade too late for that.

Oh the fun we'll have

2013-04-06T02:22:31Z

5 April 2013, 2157hrs

So as some of you may not know, Apple is converting their mailing lists over to forums. This sucks, but is not unexpected, and I can kind of understand why. I myself will probably ignore the public forums in favor of the developer versions, as the ability to talk directly to Apple people there is higher, and the entry fee does keep some of the noise down.

However, I started getting some interesting tweets on this that didn't make a lot of sense until someone pointed me at this thread on the Mac Enterprise list, (a list i've not been subscribed to for a year or more I think.)

My favorite part is where a few folks take advantage of things to take a cheap shot or two at me and Dan Shoop. I guess it's pretty easy when you know there's no chance of the person you're talking shit about calling you out directly. Good job guys. #winning.

To the folks saying some nice things about me on it, thank you, I do appreciate it.

This thread, however, is a bit more rational, although I'd like to say something to the comment about "Some of us in small schools have to be a jack-of-all-trades and don't have all the background that more experienced professionals have in all of the roles we have to play."

I understand that, I think it sucks, and I feel bad for you. You got screwed. However, since you're stuck in that role, it's time to climb the mountain and learn what you have to learn.

I've said this before, but clearly, it's no more a welcome message than it was back when I gave a fuck about mailing lists:

When you ask a question about a problem on your network, the following is of immense help to the people you're asking for help from:

As detailed a description of what you are seeing. Sans any editorializing. "Just the facts" applies
Hardware model, basic specs, and OS version of the affected box
Some basics about the network, i.e. transport type (ethernet/wireless), what kind of switches/firewalls you use, (even just vendor names can help, and yes, that matters more often than you may think)
The scope of the problem, is it just the one box, is it affecting a lot of people
the consistency: is it everyone or random people seeing it
Is there anything in the logs that happens to look like it may be generated by something related to the problem

In other words, don't just say "my server is slow". That's nice, but ultimately, it's not much better than "something's not right". The people on a mailing list or in a forum are just as busy as you. They are working just as much as you. When you make them play "20 Questions" you are showing you don't respect their time, which is silly, since you're hoping they'll take time out of their day to help you with your problem.

That, by the way, is why those of us who are full-time IT people get kind of cranky when the jacks of all trades tell us they don't have the time. Because it's like:

"Wait, so you don't have the time to learn this shit, but somehow WE should set aside time to teach you for free? And then when we point out you may want to take some initiative and start learning this shit for yourself, you tell us you don't have the time, like your time is that much more valuable than ours?"

There's a response to that we don't type, but it rhymes with "Go Fuck Yourself".

I understand that's not your intention, but, that is what comes across. I understand your time is limited. Maybe you're also a librarian, or you're a teacher AND a librarian AND the IT person. But my time is limited, so is the time of everyone on that list or in that forum. We all have things to do, and the time we devote to helping YOU with YOUR problem is time we are not solving our own. If we have to set aside things we're doing to help you, (be it work or time spent not working and actually trying to have a life), then I don't think it's unreasonable to expect you to do more than just get your back up because we dared to tell you "Hey, you CAN learn this for yourself you know."

As it turns out, no, your time is not that much more important than mine.

Not that there isn't a way to fix that. Cross my palm with an appropriate amount of silver, and watch your priority rise. But barring that, you have to work with the rest of us.

(Also, just because your problem didn't get a response, don't whine about that. No one likes that shit.)

You know better, this is inexcusable

2013-03-20T15:28:38Z

So, a couple days ago, the announcement came out that Kevin Lynch, (now) former Adobe CTO is moving to Apple to be the "VP of Technology".

This should have been a non-story, but of course, because Kevin Lynch supported Flash and Flash on mobile in a public way, John Gruber, in a moment of stunning unawareness of How Things Work In A Company When It Is More Than Just You starts up the "This is bad for Apple because Lynch was a Bozo meme. Not just once mind you:

"Exhibit A in the Case That Newly-Hired Apple VP of Technology Kevin Lynch Is a Bozo, a Bad Hire"

"Exhibit B: Defending/Denying Flash Player’s Adverse Effect on Battery Life, a Mere Two Years Ago"

"What I Mean by Bozo"

"New Apple VP of Technology Kevin Lynch Runs Over an iPhone With a Steamroller"

Yes, I am in fact using Comic Sans for those article titles. I think Gruber is being astoundingly stupid here and letting his need to rub Adobe's face in the failure of Flash on mobile override his knowledge of how shit works. Let me be clear, Gruber is not some wide-eyed indie naif with no idea of how companies work. He's been reporting on large companies in the computing arena for over a decade. He knows how shit works in a large company, and he knows that in public, even when it is obvious, obvious that a product is a stinker, the people who speak for the company in public will, in public, support the product. At least they will unless they want to get canned, or are just the worst kind of asshole. In private, who knows what Lynch said about Flash. From my experience with people across Adobe, they are a remarkably self-aware lot. There are some exceptions, but overall, they know what's really up.

In private, they are quite realistic about things. But in public, when Adobe signs your paycheck, you support them. This is not a bozo, this is not someone who is fundamentally stupid or whatever the fuck Gruber's schadenfreude-driven narrative is pushing. This is how things work, and it's not just Adobe by any means. Other examples:

Microsoft on Longhorn. Up until the minute of the famous "Longhorn Reset", in public, Microsoft execs sang the company song on this. Longhorn was real, and it was GOING TO BE IN YOUR HANDS

Apple on:

MobileMe
The Cube
That nasty-assed Moto iTunes Phone (Hell, Steve Jobs practically used the thing as a taint-tickler and we know that almost no one really thought it was a great product)
Copland (pre-jobs, but hey, dude, that was never happening.)

This is how it works. You take someone's money, especially for a job at Lynch's level, and you sing the company song, because when it doesn't happen, when you have an exec that is shitting on a team's work in public, then the people on that team leave. I think it is fair to say that Flash, at least the plugin, is fixing to go into that long night. Feet first, it's the only way out.

But the people on that team are pretty fucking smart. Even if you don't need them for Flash, you want to keep them, so they can apply that smartness to other projects. As well, the Flash toolset is still being used, as are the servers, and you can see how Adobe has been evolving them for use in a post-Flash world.

Yes, it is frustrating when you see execs defending something that everyone knows is a stinker. If you don't think Phil Schiller hasn't had to do a lot of last-second meditation before going out and trying to convince us that a stinker is really awesome, you're delusional. But he does it, because that's his job. I've had brief conversations with Schiller, mostly about things like Ferraris. (it was part of a group at a WWDC beer bash.) He's not stupid. He's a pretty funny guy as well. But he's really good at what he does, and he knows what his job is.

If Gruber's going to call Lynch a bozo, if you're going to double and treble down on it, then where's the articles calling Schiller and the rest of the Apple executive team, including Jobs, "bozos" for supporting shitty products like the Moto iTunes Phone? Right.

It's not just Gruber. Jim Dalrymple, someone else who knows how shit works in a corporation should start checking his kegerator hoses for mold for agreeing with Gruber on this in his piece, "Bozo":

John Gruber giving his thoughts on Apple’s newest VP Kevin Lynch. There is also an Exhibit B. Like Gruber, it concerns me that Lynch kept beating the Flash drum for so long, even when it was clear it was dead.

Oh come on Jim, it most certainly does not. You've been a part of a largeish corporation before, you know how shit works. The both of them do. Kevin Lynch wasn't doing anything that anyone else in his position, including Gruber wouldn't have done. He was supporting a major company initiative in public. That's not the sign of a bozo, and Gruber needs to stop pretending otherwise.

On dedicated disk utilities

2013-03-12T16:00:33Z

Joe Kissell recently wrote a solid article on third-party disk utilities at Macworld.com. In "Do you need a third-party disk utility", he does, I think, a great job of laying out the pros and cons of that line of software, and he has some good points. You don't need them as much as you used to. I always keep a current copy of Disk Warrior, but then, I'm an IT person, and I see things the average person won't in terms of disk problems. That's not because of some weird work my users are doing, but scale. The average person only deals with a few hard drives at most. I deal with a few hundred, and my compatriots deal with a few thousand. That kind of scale introduces you to edge cases more often than most people.

However, he glosses over one of the things that I think make the need for disk utilities, at least in the home, much less than it used to be: backups. Joe does mention it, but I think the change in backing up over the last decade or so, especially in the home/SOHO arena is astounding.

Look at the state of backup a decade ago. Time Machine was still four years away, and backing up, to be honest, sucked. Cloud backup wasn't a real option for most, and the other options sucked just as much if not more. The applications for doing backups were either misapplied business applications, or "scaled down" business applications that made the mistake of assuming a poorly-done UI was okay, because backups are important. People backed up to CDs and DVDs, or worse for the home market, tape. Ugh. Don't get me wrong, tape is awesome, but it can be slow, it's not cheap, and the software to use it is not easy.

But then a few things changed. Like Time Machine, and things like Crash Plan, Dropbox, Google Docs, and a host of other services that made keeping important data in multiple places really easy. I don't exactly live in HIGH BANDWIDTH CENTRAL, (Tallahassee is not Silicon Valley by any means), and yet, i realized the other day that were my laptop to be say, dropped in a pool, it would suck for exactly one reason: Apple doesn't make 17" MacBook Pros anymore. That's it. In terms of data, between Time Machine, CrashPlan Pro, and a host of other things, I'm probably backed up better than when I was sending boxes of DLTs to iron mountain every month, and the software is sure as hell easy to use.

So I think a huge reason why people don't worry about dedicated disk utilities anymore is that backing up has become such a literally thoughtless process, a hard drive crash is no longer the horrifying event it used to be.

How I will know when the tech press is post-pubescent

2013-03-06T15:20:43Z

When any and all suggestions for "Why I'm leaving <platform> for <other platform>" articles are laughed out of the building.

There is nothing wrong with articles comparing platforms in and of themselves. A well-written article doing that is useful, and sadly, rare. But the idea that anyone cares what platform any one person is using other than the individual making that decision is just ego. I don't care what Steven Fry nor Neil Gaiman are using at the moment in terms of tech, notebooks, pencils or toilet paper. Because it only matters to them, and as long as they is happy with their choice, awesome for them, regardless of what they choose to use. Fuck, I don't care what Jimmy Page or Prince are using in terms of well, anything. Because I'm not them. I don't have their needs, and I sure as fuck hope they don't have mine.*

All of these kinds of articles, every. single. one. could be better written sans the HAY GUIZE, LOOK AT WHAT I IZ UZIN parts and be just as, if not more useful.

(Although if they need personal IT support, call me, we'll talk!)

I wonder how DKNY would feel...

2013-02-25T18:49:11Z

If someone just stole a bunch of their work and used it however...

http://dduane.tumblr.com/post/43995469156/humansofnewyork-i-am-a-street-photographer-in

furious. That's what that makes me feel. Furious.

This is why you tell hipster geeks to go fuck themselves

2013-02-25T15:32:06Z

No, seriously.

Because when you do something they've been fucking whining about, there's still some other reason why you're failing, and you realize, until you are paying them, well, to take your content and sexually gratifying them, and keeping them free of disease in a computerized house that makes them french press coffee every morning and a bidet that works in a more complicated time signature than Dream Theater on LSD...nope, they still won't be satisfied.

Take this example, brought to my attention by Harry Marks. (THANKS A WHOLE FUCKING LOT MAN): "Annoyance-Driven Development", on John Siracusa's personal blog, the aptly-named "Hypercritical". Talk about understatement.

At first, you think it will be okay:

I’m not ready to predict a winner in this race—though the two-year wait for HBO to add AirPlay support to its HBO Go iOS app does not inspire confidence in the old guard. I’m more interested in what Netflix offers that HBO doesn’t.
The answer is obvious to anyone who has used the service. For a fixed, low monthly fee, Netflix lets customers watch TV shows and movies whenever they want, wherever they want, on phones, tablets, “smart” TVs, game consoles, streaming media boxes, blu-ray players, even personal computers—remember those?

Netflix’s decision to release the entire first season of House of Cards all at once is in keeping with its disregard for the traditional limitations of TV. This is how products and services endear themselves to consumers: remove everything that gets in the way of the what we want. We want to be entertained. We don’t want to to arrange our schedules around your TV show. We don’t want to watch commercials. We don’t want to be forced to use a particular device. We just want it the way we want it.

Awesome. The spoiled children have gotten their way, right? They can watch their shit wherever and whenever they want. So Netflix is the tits, right? Oh fuck no, how stupid can you be? No, no, there's still something wrong, something that ruins it all.

Is it the money? No, surprisingly enough.
Is it the stream quality? No.

It's that you have to watch the opening credits FOR EVERY EPISODE!

No, I am not shitting you:

But even Netflix has been unable to escape some of the trappings of the days of video past. A TV series like House of Cards that’s released a season at a time naturally lends itself to multi-episode viewing sessions. But as I recently tweeted, watching a minute and a half of opening credits before each episode can get tiresome.
This position proved somewhat controversial on Twitter. Hard-working people deserve credit, some said. Others said that the credits set the mood for the show. Some people just plain liked the credits, with no qualifiers.

But there were also people who agreed with me, people who routinely skip the opening credits (often lamenting the limited content-skipping tools provide by their chosen Netflix viewing device). One person even read my tweet while killing time as the House of Cards credits ran in another browser tab.

MY GOD, MY GOD, WHY HAST THOU FORSAKEN ME!!!

It's not just that. He goes on:

To be fair to Netflix, the existence of opening credits may not be entirely under its control, even when it’s paying for a series itself, given existing union contracts for actors, directors, writers, etc. But getting bogged down in the details of this debate misses the point.

(the point that if you ever thought you could ever make people like Siracusa happy, suicide is your only option. Won't make him happy, but you won't have to listen to him either.

Yes, opening credits are a longstanding part of traditional TV—but so were fixed broadcast schedules, commercial breaks, and viewing all TV shows on a television set. As the delivery mechanism changes, the content itself must also adapt to its changing context.

(How-EVER does he put up with the aaaaagony of mandatory opening credits. MY GOD, IT'S LIKE NETFLIX IS SLAPPING HIM IN THE FACE WITH THEIR DICKS! WITH ALLLL THE DICKS!!!)

Not everyone binges on House of Cards four episodes at a time, but the people who do really love Netflix for making it possible. Every time I fast-forward through those 90-second opening credits (made more difficult by the occasional variable-length pre-credits scene), I get the opposite feeling about Netflix. It’s an unhappy reminder of the old world of TV. No explanation of contractual obligations or artistic credit is going to convince me that I’m mistaken about my own desires. I just want it the way I want it!

(He is in fact, a spoiled brat, crying because he didn't get an AMG Mercedes on his Quinceañera.)

This may sound comically selfish, but true innovation comes from embracing this sentiment, not fighting it. For companies looking to get the best bang for their buck out of technology, this is the way forward. Find out what’s annoying the people you want to sell to. Question the assumptions of your business. Give people what they want and they will beat a path to your door.

No, it is vomitously selfish, and the only way tits like Siracusa will beat a path to your door is to bitch you didn't carry them to your door in a sedan chair made from recycled AMC Pacers! You will never, never, ever, do enough for this mindset. Even worse the more you do, the less these cockwipes will pay, and the more they will complain.

The best thing any business that wants to stay sane will do is ignore all these fuckers. Make a good product, charge a fair price, try not to be douchey about getting it in people's hands. If the hipster turds complain about it, good on you, you're doing it right.

As Siracusa says, "Eliminate the negative". Is there any group more relentlessly negative than these hipster nerd fuckwits? Even *I* say "Thank you" once in a while.

NO!

2013-02-24T22:09:12Z

I'm not into online petitions much, and I don't think this one, in and of itself will do much, but still....

https://www.change.org/petitions/j-m-smucker-company-keep-the-rowland-coffee-roasting-facility-in-doral-fl-open

Jesus, you're going to move Bustelo and Pilon production to LOUISIANA???

JUST STAB ME IN THE FUCKING HEART!

Yes, you can make coffee anywhere. But man...it'd be like making cajun food in Nebraska. Doesn't matter, right? You can make food ANYWHERE, right?

You say "enterprise", but you do not really understand that word.

2013-02-18T19:29:18Z

Yet another example of the "being nibbled to death by baby ducks" that is life with Google Apps for Enterprise, aka "GAPE". (The porn meaning of that word is in fact, both appropriate and applicable to life as a GAPE administrator.)

So, like any other company, we have this weird concept known as "turnover". People leave us, (;-( ) to move on to other opportunities, people join us (:-) ) for the opportunities that we offer. This is not uncommon at any company, and I am made to understand it even happens at Google. Shocking I know.

So now, when you have an "enterprise" email system that is run by people who give a fuck about their customers, when someone leaves, this is a pretty easy thing to handle. You set up the forwarders so that the ex-employee's email is routed to their replacement and you then reassign their email store to their replacement. In this manner, both new, and old email are handled correctly.

Well, to their credit, Google can handle nicknames for new email pretty simply. (Not forwarding mind you. The only server-side capabilities for for forwarding are essentially shit, so you have to all that within the individual email account. AWESOME, RIGHT!?!? I KNOW!!!)

But that moving mail stores, well, I guess those people weren't in the building for the meeting. The one where, with pretty much the typing of two email addresses and the click of a button, you can move all Google Docs/Drive info, EXCEPT FOR GMAIL DATA from one person to another. See, here's your choices with Gmail data:

Delete all the old email when you delete the user. Note, there is no warning about this. It just happens. There used to be a warning. But they took that away. No, don't be stupid, of course they didn't warn anyone in a meaningful fashion. GAPE applications and docs make Apple OS release notes look like the entire set of "The Art of Computer Programming"
You can rename the replacement person's account to that of the old account. Of course, that makes it kind of hard for the replacement to access THEIR old email and you know, operate as themselves. Google even understands this:
As you mentioned, renaming a user to the old username may be a little difficult.
Whoa, whoa now, don't be too over the top with that response there.
You can have this person manage two, three, however many separate email accounts. That's easy, right?
You can download all their server email locally, then import it into the replacement's email client. Of course, if you've fully bought into the world of Google and all you need is a web browser, this could be tricky. Especially if both people have a lot of email.
You can use their "recommended" solution, the Google Apps Migration for Microsoft Exchange, aka "GAMME". Now, while billed for exchange, you can use this to, via IMAP, migrate mail between Gmail accounts.

Well that last one sounds awesome right?

Heh...yeah, not so much. First, this requires IMAP. IMAP is not enabled by default in GAPE. Well, how hard can that be? Just go to Email settings in GAPE and turn IMAP on, right? Oh bless your heart, no of course you can't. You can disable both POP and IMAP, but to enable IMAP, you either have to do that within the person's individual Gmail settings, or you have to use a third party tool like Google Application Manager, or GAM, which requires API access, and is a command-line only tool, not the easiest thing to use. But it will allow you to enable IMAP for people without having to be in their Gmail account to do it. The setup for GAM is only a half-hour to a day depending on what you need, and using GAM on large numbers of accounts can be delicate, but hey, it's not like you're paying for GAPE, right?

Oh wait...shit.

So let's take a look at . Here, the URL: http://support.google.com/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2586165&topic=2685904&ctx=topic. (Note: in the reply from support that contained this email, that link wasn't actually clickable. You had to copy and paste it. But really, why would Google know about URLs and how they should work?)

Oh, by the way, GAMME is Windows-only. That's not a problem is it? Of course not.

And you have to enable the provisioning API in GAPE settings. But you knew about that, right? Of course you did.

Yeah. This is what you're paying for. For something that is literally "assign this data from this user to THAT user", you have to go through all this.

Why? Fuck if I know. But I've realized that thinking there's anything even resembling a "team" that is devoted to creating "enterprise ready administrator tools" with a "consistent and coherent UI" at Google is fantasy. The more I have to work with GAPE, the more I realize it's a loosely coupled collection of half-assed tools clearly done as an afterthought in someone's "20% time" so they could say they'd done something with it on their next review.

This...this is what you are paying for.

ENJOY!!!!

Gender Binder? Hardly

2013-02-14T22:21:46Z

<Long Backstory, feel free to skip>

Let me get this out of the way first: I did in fact send an idea into "The Magazine", and it was rejected. It was rejected for a reason I feel is stupid, petty, unprofessional, and completely with the rights of the staff and owners of "The Magazine": I'd said some really mean things about Marco Arment, both here, (no really, have some links: http://www.bynkii.com/archives/2011/03/useless_is_a_loaded_word_too_b.html, http://www.bynkii.com/archives/2011/10/marco_sez_da_interwebs_dont_ne.html, and a minor one here: http://www.bynkii.com/archives/2011/11/adobe_cs_installers_three_year.html. I was in fact, rather unkind to marco) and in Twitter, and because of that, he didn't feel I should be allowed to write for his publication. Let me also state that I was not surprised by that result. Contrary to what many people think, I am well aware, well aware of my tone, my presentation, my content. I am rarely safe for work, at least here, and on twitter. When someone pays me to write for them, I write in a way that is appropriate for their needs. Their money, their rules.

But yes, I have pissed off a lot of people, and am regularly combative, inappropriate, and occasionally mean. That makes me self-limiting, because it means I have a rep that can cause people problems. My normal choice of subject matter for freelancing, sysadmin and IT issues, with a focus on the Apple market, even were I the most inoffensive guy on the planet, is not a good fit for any paying publication in the market, other than maybe Ars, and Jacqui has an amazing stable of writers already. Which is why I've pulled back over the last year from submitting to pretty much anyone. I'm hardly the only person able to write well on things IT, but I really don't like the limitations placed on me by most publications. That's not a bad thing. They know their audience really well, and to be honest, I have never had a bad experience from anyone I've written for, be it Macworld, Macweek, Ars Technica, you name it. Those folks are awesome to work with, and I am still humbled they decided I was worth the trouble I bring. It means a lot to me. But, if I find I'm not a good fit for a given publication or publications, then I see no problem with not submitting ideas. Recognizing when one is not a good fit is an important skill in life. I certainly harbor no hard feelings for any of the folks I've written for.

And, when I got the email from the Magazine stating that I'd been rejected not because the idea was bad, but because I'm not a nice person, I did pretty much what anyone who knows me would expect: I bagged on that reasoning on twitter. I'm a dick that way, and when someone presenting themselves as some kind of professional is rejecting ideas over personal butthurtery, while that is in fact their right, that right does not carry along with it freedom from criticism or mocking. I'll say this now: had the rejection been because The Magazine staff felt the article itself was not a good fit in terms of content, I'd have had no reaction other than "Well, damn, that's too bad" to myself. Because not every submission is right for every magazine. But when the reason is, "you're mean"? Really? Okay, sure, but don't be surprised when the person you say that to doesn't react in a convenient manner.

So there is the 'backstory' such as it is. Disclosure and all. Feel free to decide for yourselves if that invalidates the actual post here. I probably won't be real concerned either way.

</Long Backstory, feel free to skip>

Glenn Fleishmann recently published an article for The Magazine, "Gender Binder" talking about why, out of 42 contributing authors for that publication, only six have been women. Glenn goes into no small detail about the problem as he sees it, and from what he writes, we can assume Marco Arment agrees, at least partially. However, there's some things that speak to a curious blind spot. First, for the most part, other than the first issue or so, Marco reached out to people he knew, and almost all of them were men:

A pattern emerged quite early among The Magazine’s contributors. Our fearless leader, Marco Arment, reached out to the professional writers and thoughtful developers he knew best to fill early issues before we accepted outside pitches. These were nearly all men.
In the first five issues, Gina Trapani was the sole woman with a byline. In the next five issues, including this one, only five more women appeared; we have included articles by Serenity Caldwell and Alison Hallett twice in that span. Overall, that is six women to 36 men, with some of the men appearing multiple times.

Marco, as an engineer and programmer, has worked more often with men than women, but I’ve worked in design and publishing, in which the ratio is far more equal. We both embrace the notion of equality in our personal and professional lives.

So what the hell is wrong with us?

I don't think there's anything wrong with them. But it seems curious that Marco Arment didn't know any women who would be a good fit other than perhaps Gina Trapani. Marco seems a reasonably social dude, and he knows a lot of people who know people. Glenn was brought on board shortly before Issue 3 came out, and Glenn knows a TON of people. Yet, women in The Magazine were, while not rare, uncommon. Now, I'm not going to hop on the "population percentage is what your contributor percentage should be" boat. That's silly, and unrealistic to any specific market. For example, yes, men are half the population, I don't see a need to bag on Cosmo for having a writing staff that skews female. But still, it seems like with a bit more asking, Marco could have found more women to ask to submit. So it's...interesting that he didn't. But we all have blind spots, and I don't think Marco was doing anything deliberatly sexist. Sometimes, you just accidently stuff.

(sometimes you also try too hard. In the caption for the picture at the top of the article, Glenn says:

This cheesy stock photo depicting “diversity” still shows a pro-male bias: none of the womens’ hands are in focus. All of the in-focus hands are male.

Well, I could easily say it shows a pro-woman bias, as the only faces in focus are the women's. I could, using "focus" as a criteria, say it shows a pro-white person bias, as the only faces in focus are all honkies. Or I could realize that maybe you can overanalyze shit sometimes and stop looking for problems where none may exist, because all the in focus parts are on the same vertical plane, which explains the picture a bit better than bias. If you change the position of some of the women so their hands were in focus, you could then say there's bias because the women are out of focus. Deep, this rabbit hole is.)

Glenn then talks about selection bias, a valid point, but he says a few things that come across as accidentally patronizing:

Let us not pretend that racism and ethnic hatred don’t still exist, whether sub rosa or not. But what Jamelle explicated is that people tend to hire people they know. If you start with a group of white men, the odds are that they will hire other white men. It is not necessarily a conspiracy nor does it have to be an intentionally exclusionary effort.
Further, the tools that bring in people outside of circles of collegiality and friendship, like internships (unpaid or low-paying), lack appeal to minorities who may lack the funds to learn the ropes and get an in. Some families may heavily discourage (and thus not provide support and funds for) such internships in favor of a more aggressive pursuit of degrees or permanent employment.2

While it is true that by and large, non-honkies, (it's not "minorities". That term is silly because it's always used to mean "not white" and depending on where you are, honkies are a minority. Let's just be straight up here and not say "minorities" when we mean "non-honkies") get the short end of the stick in this country more than they deserve, I find the implication here that somehow, non-honkies aren't able to do things like internships because they don't have the money to afford the lack of pay or low pay mildly patronizing. The meme of "oh them poor brown people" should stop. The assumption that "minority" = "poor" is a bad one, an incorrect one, and we should stop using it. That is sometimes the case for non-honkies, and knowing Glenn, I think that's what he meant, but the way he wrote it is poor.

Glenn then talks about women in terms of internships and representation on tech publications:

But these particular issues apply only in part to women. As a whole, women eagerly participate in internships. A 2009 report found that in surveying about 28,000 college undergraduates, 70% of those who had taken internships were women. Some tech publications have a decent percentage of female staff and contributors, and several are led by women or have women in the most senior editor or publisher positions.
Even still, tech magazines and editorial sites significantly underrepresent women given the roughly 50-50 gender split in the United States. (The notable exception is Mashable, where female staffers outnumber men.)

Here he makes what I think is a major mistake. He takes the overall number of women who are interns, and then tries to draw a correlation from a rather large whole, (all women who are college undergrads taking advantage of internships) to a specific industry: tech magazines. I take some issue with his inclusion of Mashable in that category, as I think they are far more of an online culture publication than a tech pub. Admittedly, my definition of "tech publication" is a bit different than others might use, which tells me that perhaps Glenn should have defined this better. I'd barely call Macworld a "tech publication". They're really a general purpose computing pub with a focus on Apple.

He then brings up the numbers of women in CompSci and Engineering. I'm unsure as to what the significance of that is with respect to women writing for The Magazine. I know more than a few women who are remarkably technical. One of my best friends, Nadyne Richmond, holds multiple technical degrees, and is a researcher for a highly technical company, VMware. But outside of a really small number of outlets, including her personal blog, she doesn't do a lot of non-work writing that I'm aware of. Since you cannot actually convince me that any earthly force can intimidate Nadyne from doing anything she wants to do, we should consider the other option: maybe she, and other women, don't want to write for publications like The Magazine. I'm sure you could try to spin that as Glenn's fault, but it would seem stupid to do so.

That's not a pejorative statement mind you. I'm not saying, at least not now, that The Magazine is not inviting to women, nor do I think it ever was. I wouldn't really know to begin with, and from what I've seen, that simply isn't the case. But just because you are a woman in a technical field, that doesn't mean you have to, or even want to do freelance writing.

I also have some issues with this paragraph:

Technology writers often lack any computer-science degree or formal background, of course, but this broader context is useful, as it’s an objective measure of the failures of providing women the right opportunities in technical studies, and this relates to the industry that we cover.

First, Glenn makes some claims without backing data, not even on the backgrounds of the people who have already written for The Magazine. I don't consider contextless population growth numbers as proper data, whether they show good or ill. Telling me that fewer women got CS degrees in one year vs. the next tells me not much of use. Give me some data showing WHY, and then we have something of use to discuss. I think that in this paragraph, Glenn is drawing conclusions that he has not really supported. When you're using those conclusions to make a point, or decide policy, that's not a good idea. There are some good sources of information for that kind of thing that do give you context, but Glenn's use of the numbers here seems orthogonal to the point of the article.

However, it's a little further down that Glenn starts to say some things that border on outright offensive.

What does this have to do with The Magazine’s selection bias toward men? Perhaps I want to distract you by suggesting that degrees in subjects related to technology prove that there’s a smaller pool of women technology writers. Perhaps I’m trying to highlight a greater disparity and a worrying shift in careers open to women that the degree figures represent.
But I don’t think that applies to us. We’ve shifted The Magazine’s focus from its launch as a publication for “geeks like us” — which could imply “geeks like white males Glenn and Marco, and like our predominantly white male geek contributors” — to “a variety magazine for geeks and curious people.” It’s more inclusive and broader, but there could be some lag time as that change catches up to awareness. The term geek often implies man by the reverse-exclusive principle that only men would self-identify as geeks. But that seems to be eroding, especially among younger people.

Glenn is coming dangerously close here to saying that overly technical issues are of little interest to women. That is of course, ridiculous. No, it is not just ridiculous, it is stupid. First, at no point in its history has The Magazine ever been what anyone could seriously call "overly technical". It's a magazine written by people who can, and often do talk about technical issues, and some of the articles deal with tech, but it is a stretch, a monstrous stretch to call The Magazine, at any point in its short life a "technical". Secondly, I take real issue with his not-quite-direct implication that a magazine aimed at "geeks" is somehow not going to be of interest to women, especially given that The Magazine isn't particularly geeky. In fact, if I didn't know many of the authors of the articles in The Magazine, I'd never call it technical or geeky. Instead, I'd call it yet another publication catering to hipsters who can't get through the day without multipage odes to how much they can overcomplicate simple daily routines and move on. Even if it were really a "geeky" magazine, the idea that somehow "geek" still means "male" is an idea that I'd have hoped someone like Glenn wouldn't fall for.

It doesn't get better anytime soon:

We started out more technical and computer-oriented than we have become. We have shifted from including technology in every story to the looser notion of stories that have a thread that connects them to tech or that have the right resonance for our readers, who we believe (and feedback indicates) tend to be a sophisticated bunch.

In order, the subjects of the first three issues of The Magazine:

Linkblogs

The differences between geeks who like baseball, and geeks who don't

Technology, people, and the mistakes both can make

How people who are "volatiles" can disrupt a workplace and why this is good.

How a video game applies to human behavior

What it's really like to be a gay couple trying to have a child

Why wet shaving is awesome

How Felix Baumgartner actually broke the speed of sound just by falling.

The early days of twitter and app.net

An update on The Magazine

Life without power after a hurricane

No one can make good tea and why that sucks

How technology affects parenting

The problems with self-publishing

Now this is a wide range of subjects, and there's something that will be interesting to almost everyone. Two of the articles are even technical without stretching that word. But the idea that somehow, the "early days" of The Magazine were about computers and technology in any way other than peripherally is silly. It's unsupported by the articles themselves. It's not barely unsupported either, and so I wonder why Glenn is trying to make the (poor) point that somehow The Magazine was "too geeky" to get a proper number of women to contribute.

Not only is it not true, but the concept itself is somewhat offensive. How are you "too geeky" for women? Now, the more geeky you are, the harder it can be to find anyone to contribute, men or women. I help put together a conference that is actually technical in nature, I'm well aware of how interesting the acquisition of good content can be, regardless of gender. We fail far more often than we'd like. But even if The Magazine were some techno-geek-freak zone, it is not impossible to get in contact with women who are able to write in such an environment. It can be harder, but it's not impossible. Had anyone asked me, I do in fact have a decent list of women who are highly technical and quite able to write well that I would have put them in touch with. I still will, all they have to do is ask.

But again, The Magazine is neither overly geeky nor overly technical. The most technical article of the first three was about Felix Baumgartner, the other one was about the intersection of technology and parenting when you have a kid with serious medical issues. That's two articles out of fourteen. To put in perspective, in that same number of articles is one on tea, and one on shaving. Scientific American, this is not. So why push this idea so hard? I don't know. Glenn suddenly tries to show how non-geeky things have gotten, but honestly, I don't see the difference.

It is almost as if The Magazine is trying to create a meme to explain their "failure" to have more women writers. I don't know why, I'm unsure there was a huge "failure" in the first place. Could they have done better? Probably, but i don't think it's because they didn't try. I am not involved in any way with The Magazine, so I don't know what efforts were made, but I know and respect Glenn as a fair person, and while I have my disagreements with Marco, you'd have to work really hard to convince me he's some kind of secret sexist. Starting a magazine is hard, they made some mistakes. As long as they try to fix those mistakes, I don't see a real problem, nor a need to retcon things.

Glenn hits on a few actual issues, like the simple truth that it can be materially more difficult to get women to contribute to things like conferences and magazines. Glenn comes from a design/advertising background, I come from an IT/Sysadmin background, but my experience parallels his. I find getting a woman to speak the first time can be more difficult. The second time, it's much easier, but the first time can be maddeningly difficult. That doesn't mean you stop trying or give up, but that you acknowledge the reality that simply putting out a Call for Papers may not be enough. The fairness of this, or lack thereof is immaterial. It is the current reality, so you must deal with it as it is.

In the end, I think Glenn was far too quick to blame bias for this. It wasn't that at all. It was some early mistakes made before he came onboard, and the reality I just talked about. He even points out that having made a more concerted effort at outreach, things are improving. That's all anyone can ask. You recognize a problem, and get to work solving it.

I just wish he hadn't spent so much time trying to explain it away the way he had. There was no need to retcon the "early" days of The Magazine. (Christ, it hasn't even been publishing for a half a friggin year yet. Just how much "early" days does it even fucking have. Sounds like a toddler talking about "back when i was just a baby". ) There was no need to bring in what end up being meaningless numbers. There was no need to try to explain that they were "de-geeking things" to make it more attractive to women, because that's almost offensive. As many other people have shown, like George Lucas, trying to over-explain things can cause you more problems than you started with.

Marco made some understandable mistakes, especially when you consider his background. By bringing in Glenn he showed that he realized his limits, and brought in someone who by all accounts is fixing things. I think the larger problem is the time it's taking to see the results. When you talk about a publication run by two people who live their lives in microseconds or smaller, the idea that an implemented solution may take months to show results can be frustrating.

If there is an update to this, and I'd hope so, I'd ask that Glenn, or whomever writes it spends less time explaining the problem and more time showing the solution.