benoc
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Homepage: http://www.intotheweeds.org
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Oreo Insanity
I think someone must have slipped the product development team at Nabisco some meth.
Oreos are an amazing food product. They are, in fact, probably my favorite cookie (I’m a fan of the golden variety). But what on earth would possess the makers of the greatest sandwich cookie in the universe to go on this recent insane quest to make as many different new varieties as possible.
Okay, I kind of get the motivation for candy corn Oreos. It was Halloween, after all, and that was a novelty. But looking through amazon, one is assaulted with all sorts of Oreo insanity. Aren’t they worried about brand dilution (not to mention that some of these flavors sound even more potentially-vile than candy corn):
Candy Cane Oreos
Winter Oreos
Gingerbread Oreos
Candy Corn Oreos
Mega Stuf Oreos
Watermelon Oreos
Cool Mint Oreos
Banana Split Oreos
Berry Burst Ice Cream Oreos
Halloween Oreos
Peanut Butter Oreos
Triple Double Oreos
Triple Double Neopolitan OreosOn The Asshats at straightprideuk.com (and the Streisand Effect)
Posted in Uncategorized on August 12, 2013
So there’s this group out there in the UK: Straight Pride UK . I hadn’t heard about them until today, and I doubt pretty much anyone in the world had (other than maybe their own immediate circle of homophobic, conservative nitwits). And that’s fine. If you want to read the whole story about what transpired with them, go check out the story at popehat’s most excellent blog. But here’s the short version: a history student writes to them, identifying himself as a freelance journalist, and asking them a few pointed questions about their positions (mainly that straight people are getting “silenced and abused” and the mounting censorship in the UK). They write back in a document labeled as a “press release.” Fine, so far so good, they’re entitled to their own opinions, and they’re letting people know. But here’s where they end up going over the edge: the student writes back asking for clarification on a couple of his questions, and mentions that he’s going to post their conversation on his blog. Straightpride then responds with an angry DMCA takedown letter, complaining that the student did not have the right to publish the email/press release (uh yeah, what does “press release” mean again?). What really sucks is that wordpress.com preemptively actually took down his post, in violation of just about every bit of common sense one would expect them to have.
The Internet, however, detects censorship as damage and routes around it. Here is the google cache of his original article. And his actual response to the bogus takedown and threats is on his blog. Now, the kind folks at Straight Pride UK are getting a serious taste of the Streisand Effect (the internet phenomenon whereby an attempt to censor information will actually increase publicity of that information exponentially and screw you over, named after a failed attempt by Barbara Streisand to censor aerial photos of her house way back when). Many other bloggers (including me) are re-posting the censored article / letter from Straight Pride UK. So, what was before just one dude pointing out a homophobic nutty group, is now the whole internet pointing and laughing. And they still don’t get it:
Anyways, without further ado, here is the original post by Oliver exposing these asshats. Almost makes me ashamed to be straight:
It’s Great When You’re Straight… Yeah
There has never been a better time to be gay in this country. LGBTI people will soon enjoy full marriage equality,public acceptance of homosexuality is at an all time high, and generally a consensus has developed that it’s really not that big of a deal what consenting adults do in the privacy of their bedrooms. The debate on Gay Marriage in the House of Commons was marred by a few old reactionaries, true, but generally it’s become accepted that full rights for LGBTI people is inevitable and desirable. Thank God.
But some are deeply troubled by this unfaltering march toward common decency, and they call themselves the Straight Pride movement.
Determined to raise awareness of the “heterosexual part of our society”, Straight Pride believe that a militant gay lobby has hijacked the debate on sexuality in this country, and encourage their members, among other things, to “come out” as straight, posting on their Facebook page that:
“Coming out as Straight or heterosexual in todays politically correct world is an extremely challenging experience. It is often distressing and evokes emotions of fear, relief, pride and embarrassment.”
I asked them some questions.
First of all, what prompted you to set up Straight Pride UK?
Straight Pride is a small group of heterosexual individuals who joined together after seeing the rights of people who have opposing views to homosexuality trampled over and, quite frankly, oppressed.
With the current political situation in the United Kingdom with Gay Marriage passing, everyone is being forced to accept homosexuals, and other chosen lifestyles and behaviours, no matter their opposing views. Straight Pride has seen people sued, and businesses affected, all because the homosexual community do not like people having a view or opinion that differs from theirs.
Are your beliefs linked to religion? How many of you derive your views from scripture?
Straight Pride aims are neutral and we do not follow religion, but we do support people who are oppressed for being religious. Only today, Straight Pride see that two homosexual parents are planning to sue the Church because they ‘cannot get what they want’. This is aggressive behaviour and this is the reason why people have strong objections to homosexuals.
You say that one of your goals is “to raise awareness of the heterosexual part of society”. Why do you feel this is necessary?
The Straight Pride mission is to make sure that the default setting for humanity is not forgotten and that heterosexuals are allowed to have a voice and speak out against being oppressed because of the politically correct Government.
Straight Pride feel need to raise awareness of heterosexuality, family values, morals, and traditional lifestyles and relationships.
Your website states that “Homosexuals have more rights than others”. What rights specifically do LGBTI people have that straight people are denied?
Homosexuals do currently have more rights than heterosexuals, their rights can trump those of others, religious or not. Heterosexuals cannot speak out against homosexuals, but homosexuals are free to call people bigots who don’t agree with homosexuality, heterosexuals, religious or not, cannot refuse to serve or accommodate homosexuals, if they do, they face being sued, this has already happened.
Straight Pride believe anyone should be able to refuse service and speak out against something they do not like or support.
There is a hotel in the south of England, called Hamilton Hall which only accepts homosexuals – if this is allowed, then hotels should have the choice and right to who they accommodate.
What has been the response to your campaign?
The response to Straight Pride’s formation has been as expected; hostile, threatening, and aggressive. Homosexuals do not like anyone challenging them or their behaviour.
We have had support from many people saying that if homosexuals can have a Pride March, and then equality should allow Heterosexuals to have one too. After all, the homosexual movement want everyone to have equality.
Why would you say that heterosexuality the “natural orientation”?
Heterosexuality is the default setting for the human race, this is what creates life, if everyone made the decision to be homosexual, life would stop. People are radicalised to become homosexual, it is promoted to be ‘okay’ and right by the many groups that have sprung up.
Marriage is a man and a woman, homosexuals had Civil Partnerships, which was identical to Marriage with all the same rights, they wanted to destroy Marriage and have successfully done so.
If you could pick one historical figure to be the symbol of straight pride (just as figures like Alan Turing, Judith Butler or Peter Tatchell would be for Gay Pride) which would you choose?
Straight Pride would praise Margaret Thatcher for her stance on Section 28, which meant that children were not taught about homosexuality, as this should not on the curriculum.
More recently, Straight Pride admire President Vladimir Putin of Russia for his stance and support of his country’s traditional values.
How do you react to anti-gay attacks and movements in Russia and parts of Africa?
Straight Pride support what Russia and Africa is doing, these country have morals and are listening to their majorities. These countries are not ‘anti-gay’ – that is a term always used by the Homosexual Agenda to play the victim and suppress opinions and views of those against it.
These countries have passed laws, these laws are to be respected and no other country should interfere with another country’s laws or legislation.
We have country wide events which our members attend, and ask people their opinions and views, on such event at Glastonbury this year was very positive with the majority of people we asked, replied they were happily heterosexual.
For the record, Straight Pride did not respond to these questions:
“Pride” movements such as Gay Pride and Black Pride were making the argument that the stigma against them meant that proclaiming their “pride” was an act of liberation from oppression. Can being heterosexually really compare?
A problem that Gay rights activists cite is the issue of bullying, and the effect this can have on young LGBT people. Do you think a similar problem exists with straight children being bullied by gay children?
I will obviously add to this if they do respond.
MIT Mystery Hunt 2013 (a.k.a. The Misery Hunt)
Happy June everyone. Back in January, I had the privilege of being on the winning team of the 2013 MIT IAP Mystery Hunt (pretty sure I already mentioned that a couple of posts ago). For those unaware, we were a huge team (~100+ people), and the name of our team was the full text of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Whenever we’d communicate with hunt HQ, we’d continue reading the text until they made us stop (or let us stop). Among others thought this would be a neat, clever idea — maybe even “cute.” In reality, however, it turned out to just add to the pain and misery of what turned out to be an already painful and misery-drenched (but also somewhat fun) hunt. Tired-sounding reading of the rambling Randian prose quickly became the leitmotif for the weekend.
Other people have already shared their opinions and experiences about the hunt (google “2013: the year the mystery hunt broke” for an example). The organizers (Manic Sages) have, in my opinion, already gotten more than enough criticism dumped on them for putting together the longest weekend in hunt history that almost ended in hunt ending by decree or draw — which would have been disastrous for the 2013 hunt, as well as the concept and tradition of the mystery hunt moving forward (in my opinion).
The word “grueling” was the one word I used most when people asked me what the hunt was like this year. I’ve participated in the hunts with this team consistently for the past 5 years and on and off going back to 2004 (the last year our team won) and earlier. I spent four years at MIT, with all of the all-nighters, failing grades, and frustration that that entails. But I’ll be damned if the 2013 mystery hunt wasn’t one of the most intellectually demoralizing experiences of my life. Is that such a bad thing? In retrospect, I’m not so sure. Challenging experiences and “rolling up one’s sleeves and getting to work” (sometimes by doing insane statistical analysis on endless streams of random numbers) are ways in which we attain personal growth — right? Maybe if it was just as difficult, but shorter. Maybe if it had some more fun and games mixed in. Maybe if we didn’t decide to do that stupid Atlas Shrugged thing. Maybe then the hunt would have been FUN as well as just grueling — and wouldn’t have left me with hunt PTSD. Seriously, I’m not alone on my team in having had nightmares up to a week after hunt about still doing the hunt, or still needing to solve a meta.
I’m not going to bore everyone with detailed stories of extremely difficult puzzles with perhaps one-too-many “a-ha!” moments necessary to solve, or the detailed methods our team uses to keep fresh shifts of solvers moving in and out of the room, taking naps, and ultimately winning the battle of attrition that the last 24 hours of the weekend became. But I will recount my tale of how the hunt ended (from my perspective).
The beginning of the end was 8pm Sunday night (already over 16 hours after the point the 2012 mystery hunt had ended in its weekend). We already knew by that point that this was going to be a hunt for the ages. My team had that glazed-over deer-in-the-headlights look that comes from being up for 20-30+ hours in some cases doing extreme mental gymnastics. An email came in from HQ reading: “Our honest estimate of hunt’s end is Monday at 9AM given what we’ve seen of solving rates on our puzzles so far.” At this time, I was on my way out to a room to sleep for a quick 4 hours (or until hunt ended). It turns out that not only was hunt nowhere near ending, but with an end-time of 9AM, they were predicting it to surpass the 2004 hunt for the all-time duration record. And who had written the 2004 hunt? Our team — then known as “French Armada” (because the team wanted to wear funny hats — from what I hear). When I woke up to my alarm 4 hours later, my disillusionment with the mystery hunt had turned into a sort of prideful anger. How dare they assume that their hunt will be even more un-defeatable than the one we’d written (somewhat poorly) a decade earlier? At around 2am, the late-night shift of fresh puzzlers dug in and I, for one, was hoping to prove the Manic Sages’ assumption wrong and to keep our dubious record of “longest hunt ever.”
But it was not to be. At 6AM, or so, I went back in for another brief nap. 9AM came and went, and another shift of freshly-napped hunters came in. The 2004 French Armada’s hunt length record had fallen. Free answers to puzzles were getting handed out every 20 minutes now to help draw things to a close. The requirements for finishing hunt were changed so that one full meta-puzzle (out of 5 total) could be skipped entirely. For those unfamiliar with the standard mechanics of a mystery hunt, there are generally puzzles in “rounds”, and then for each round (or group of rounds), the answers of the puzzles plug into a “meta” puzzle. Once all meta-puzzles are complete, the team is eligible to go on a final “runaround” (involving, literally, running around and solving more puzzles) and ultimately win the hunt. So, eliminating an entire meta-puzzle requirement was a big deal — and up until this year, unheard of (at least by me).
At some point on Monday morning, one of our freshmen (Lauren Herring) had been sitting in the same spot working on one of the metas (“The Enigma”) for what seemed like 12 hours. She’d be sitting there when I left for a nap, and she’d be in the same spot, wild-eyed and turning those same infernal rolls of paper when I got back to the room hours later. And so eventually, that meta got solved. And that left us needing exactly one more meta to get to the runaround. One of them (“Rubik”) seemed totally impossible and we had made little progress on it at all from what I could see. The other one (“Indiana Jones”) was getting churned on slowly at a table by puzzlers including our “old guard” — the bleary-eyed Mark Feldmeier and Zoz Brooks — with the whole team cheering them on. Actually it was more nervous pacing, drinking coffee, and watching vs. audible “cheering.” We were getting close by 10-11am, and calling HQ regularly for hints and clues. We had even called in to verify a partial answer for it — “hey are the first 8 letters of the answer this?” (this is also unheard of in a mystery hunt) — only to get rebuked.
And then something weird happened. Our team phone rang, and Manic Sages’ HQ was on the other end. The inimitable Laura Royden was “manning” the phone at the time and dealing with team-wide organization (we call it “puzzle bitch”ing). It turns out that an offer of settlement/surrender had been made and was being brokered by the Manic Sages in the interest of ending hunt. The terms were to stop hunting now and whatever team was deemed the “furthest ahead” by the Sages would be declared the winner. After being at it for over 70 hours at that point, it was a tempting prospect. The team huddled together, and Laura told HQ that we’d call them back in “a few minutes”. How far could any other team possibly be if they were willing to make this offer? We heard rumors of other competitive teams giving up and packing in to go home by this point, leaving us as one of the few teams insane and stubborn enough to still be trying to win. We knew we only needed one more meta but were, for the moment, scratching our heads on what we were doing wrong with “Indiana Jones.” A couple of the more senior puzzlers on our team (Dan Katz and Erin Rhode at least from what I remember) immediately leaned towards rejecting the offer. Then we got another call from HQ, and they told us that they’d made a terrible mistake and our partial answer check from earlier was actually on the right track. At that point the choice was clear. Not only did we know that we were the farthest ahead, but we also knew we were potentially only minutes away from winning. To accept the other team’s surrender at that point would have perhaps been merciful, but wouldn’t have been a good thing for the 2013 hunt, or hunt as a tradition and concept (in my opinion at least). Laura shouted clearly into the phone: “no we will not accept your offer!” And, sure enough, about 10 minutes later, she called back with the complete correct answer to our final required meta-puzzle and accepted congratulations that we had, for all intents and purposes (with the exception of the runaround), won the hunt. Below is a picture commemorating that very moment.
Once that was done, Manic Sages actually asked if we wanted to do the full runaround, or just be handed the coin and declared the winners at that point. Staying true to tradition, even though it was almost noon on Monday at that point, we elected to make them put on the entire runaround for us. At 3:30pm on Monday, a full 75 hours after the hunt began, the coin was found by the small subgroup of our team that was still awake (this did not include me, as I collapsed shortly after the final answer was called in and I knew we had won).
So now what? Now our team is writing and running the 2014 IAP MIT Mystery Hunt, that’s what. The experience of last year (and echoes of our 2004 hunt) sort of lend a feeling of “there but for the grace of god, go I” to the whole thing. Each and every one of us knows (or should know) that it is very much possible, with the best of intentions and the smartest and most experienced people, to write a hunt that turns out to be “bad” or even maybe “a disaster.” That’s kind of a lot of responsibility, isn’t it? But alas, we will do our best. Without further ado, I’ll wrap up here and introduce the board of directors of the 2014 IAP MIT Mystery Hunt. For continued missives from our team, and guest writers talking about hunt, please visit our blog at http://mysteryhunt.wordpress.com/. And oh yeah, good luck in 2014 everyone!
Galen Pickard (Executive Producer)
Anand Sarwate (Finance)
Erin Rhode (Director)
Benjamin O’Connor (IT and Infrastructure)
Pranjal Vachaspati (Operations and Logistics)
Laura Royden (Theme)
Harvey Jones (Quality Control)
New Job Observations: Farewell Harmonix, Hello TripAdvisor.
I know it’s April already, but happy new year everyone!
For those not in the know, I got a somewhat unexpected new job prospect (and offer, which I accepted) at the end of 2012. Since then, I’ve been a senior member of the technical operations team at TripAdvisor.
TripAdvisor is the world’s largest travel site, with over 100 million reviews, and over 100 million unique users per month. For people keeping track, this is the third company I worked for during the year 2012, and all three have been mentioned on The Office (Linden Lab [Second Life], Harmonix [Guitar Hero / Rock Band], and now Tripadvisor [check out the Schrute Farms episode]). However, it’s not just popularity or “hipness” that led me to shift around.
I like to tell people (and recruiters) that I have four rules for picking a place to work:
- Must not be generally evil or tending towards evil (in my opinion) — This rules out most banks or the pharmaceutical industry, any petrochemical comany, and probably currently most of Google and Facebook.
- Must be a profitable venture — I’m too old to play the startup risk game.
- Must be accessible to my apartment in Boston via public transportation commute of <30 minutes — I don’t own a car, don’t want one, and I’m not moving anywhere.
- Operations and Systems must be critical to the core business and of the highest priority — My job is best executed when it has the highest respect and attention of the company and management (immediate as well as upper).
It was that last one that I forgot about when I ended up at Harmonix. After being at Linden for 4+ years, I could feel myself falling into the crotchety grizzled BOFH sysadmin role. Come to think of it, that probably happens to anyone in my field after a few years in an organization. Spending a year at Harmonix was a great chance to broaden my horizons, relax, and experience new perspectives on things. As I stated in an earlier blog post, I loved working there, and I do miss the place, people, and incredibly fun things happening in their awesome Central Square office. At TripAdvisor, we’re still in the business of providing joy to people. Rather than by selling some of the best video games, this time it’s by helping folks plan and take vacations.
Very similar to my time at Linden Lab, when I told people that I worked at Harmonix (makers of Rock Band and Dance Central franchises) the first response was usually “wow that’s really cool.” However, the second response was more often than not, “are they still relevant? What are they working on now?” While it’s true that the heyday of plastic instruments (and maybe console gaming in general — according to some naysayers) has passed, I’m still rooting for the folks over there, and I happen to know that they are still a vital, awesome independent studio with the best people and some blow-your-mind projects in the pipeline. If I was still there, I’d be hustling along side them doing my best to keep up and push forward the state of game network interaction and back ends. That being said, the effort that game developers (particularly independents) put into network features, operations, and backends is decreasing over time. And it should be. Great games are great because of the focus on art, gameplay, story, and other intangibles. Console manufacturers and third-party contractors can be brought on to do the job now of multi-player matchmaking and scoreboard databases, letting game makers stick to making awesome games and fostering and maintaining player communities — both things that Harmonix has done and will continue to do very well.
What drew me out to TripAdvisor (other than the folks I already know who work there — hi Laura and Drew!) was the scale. Honestly, I missed the excitement and challenges of running a huge infrastructure. At its peak, Second Life consisted of three data centers, 12,000+ servers, and received a new rack of 40 servers or so every couple of weeks. TripAdvisor isn’t quite that big infrastructure-wise (although we have 5 times as many employees), but we serve 2 billion ads a year, and are peaking at 600k web requests per minute (and growing tremendously still year-over-year). The company has a weekly release cycle, an innovative and freewheeling engineering culture, and an unofficial motto of “speed wins.”
At first, being a somewhat methodical systems engineer, the concept of putting velocity in front of “correctness” scared me a little bit. I’ve focused on things like proper cabling, thorough documentation, long planning cycles, enforcing automation prior to production, eliminating waste, etc. Here, though, I quickly learned that it’s important to keep moving and to cut a little slack to the folks that came before me for bad cabling, some missing documentation, or leaving a half dozen underutilized or unused servers around (sometimes literally powered-off in the racks or on the floor) while buying new ones in a hurry. If everyone takes the extra time (myself included) to do things the absolute correct way, we’ll lose our competitive advantage and then I’d be out of a job. So yeah, speed does win.
At this point, I’d be remiss if I didn’t offer you all potential jobs here. So, visit TripAdvisor Careers, find something you want to do, and drop me a line if I know you — I’d love to give a few hiring referrals, and yes we are hiring like crazy as the company expands!
MIT.edu and IS&T Fail
So, my team won the 2013 MIT IAP Mystery Hunt this past weekend. More on that in another post though.
On my way into work today after sending some emails about mystery hunt infrastructure, I started thinking on something and it seriously pissed me off. Our team, and other teams running mystery hunt in recent years have been unable or unwilling to use MIT network and systems infrastructure to run the activity, and have instead needed to use private and other funding sources to host our hunting and collaboration tools with other internet hosting providers. This morning, I realized that our team should be able to have this event hosted at MIT next year, and that’s the angle I want to take when I start politely talking to the new leadership at IS&T. I just can’t find out who any of them are right now or their email addresses since their website is down. Not that email would necessarily get to them anyway. Even before the hunt, I was working on an email to send and post to open forums about these things, but now that the weekend is over and I’m facing the daunting task of running the system next year for our team, here goes:
An open letter to the Acting Director of MIT IS&T (if any person exists), and the MIT Administration:
Why does the MIT Mystery Hunt need to be hosted at EC2 or get sponsorship and infrastructure from VMware, Google, or Rackspace in the first place? MIT is still, in my opinion, the world’s preeminent engineering institution, yet its inability to host something as relatively mundane as a student-run puzzle hunt activity (yes the largest in the world, but still it’s just a puzzle hunt on a web site) in 2014 would be an absolute embarrassment.
Currently IS&T’s web site itself is down, email delivery between MIT and the rest of the world is spotty, the tech’s web site is inaccessible, 3down (the institute’s site-outage notification site) itself is down, and most other MIT-related and hosted web sites other than the front page are also inaccessible. The director of IS&T has resigned (apparently not as a result of these issues, The Tech reports — I’d link to the article but, well, you know, the site’s down).
The administration and IS&T will surely blame the DDOS (distributed denial of service) attack and anonymous (the amorphous organization out there on the web organizing these attacks) for all of this. Yet a site like WBC (Westboro Bible Church) has been the target of attacks for weeks now and none of their hateful websites are down or have needed to be mangled, or have been compromised or vandalized as badly as MIT’s have. Several other websites and companies (some of which I have worked for or currently work for) are also regularly targets of DDOS attacks and yet remain generally accessible and organized in the face of even the worst full-frontal internet assaults. IS&T’s response to the DDOS attack has been, from external appearances and my experiences on campus this weekend at least, worse than the attack itself. Continued vast service outages, intermittent detachment of MIT from email systems around the world, and zero effective communication with customers, departments, and students as far as I can tell. DDOS attacks are a fact of life on the internet. They should, like anonymous itself, be respected but above all expected.
At MIT, departments like the Broad Institute, Media Lab, CSAIL, etc. all have split off from MIT’s network and computing infrastructure because of IS&T’s apparent perennial failure as a service organization worthy of MIT and the people that work and study there. Here’s an anecdotal example of the kind of failures that these departments and organizations expect:
When I was a Systems Administrator at IS&T, installing what passed as a small-sized supercomputer into an IS&T server room (hosted for the department of Biology if my memory serves correctly) caused a fire, power outage, and a rushed redesign of the power infrastructure, followed by several more power outages.
Universities like UIUC, the state systems at California and Florida, and Universities of Wisconsin, and Ohio all have well known, fully operational technology incubators and “startup factories” on their campuses connected and serviced through their network services, infrastructure, and hosting and IT departments. As the birthplace of so many startups, ideas, and technologies, it’s shameful that something like this can apparently not exist on the MIT network under the umbrella of IS&T in its current form. Is this because of current administration and management’s short-sightedness, entrenchments, technological incompetence, or a combination of all of the above?
With my team winning the 2013 MIT Mystery Hunt, we are already starting to look towards the 2014 Hunt and the network and computing services it will require. By engaging with the new leadership at IS&T, our team should be able to use the actual MIT infrastructure to give us what we need and want for a successful activity that showcases MIT to all of the world. We want to be able to have this event hosted on MIT’s network. Anything else should be an embarrassment to whoever is in charge of IS&T as well as the rest of the Institute’s administration.
-Benjamin O’Connor
- Senior Systems Engineer, Tripadvisor (Formerly at Harmonix, Linden Lab, UIUC, NSA, and MIT IS&T)
- Systems Infrastructure Manager, MIT Mystery Hunt Team <full text of Atlas Shrugged>
- MIT Class of 2000
RIP Aaron Swartz
It’s sad to see such a brilliant, creative mind and potentially positive, young, influence for good in the world and community gone. I didn’t personally know him, and I can’t say I don’t have mixed feelings about the JSTOR incident (although it has been instrumental in bringing publicity to the issue of journal access and the heavy-handedness of computer-crime law in this country).
Some may say he went too far, pushed the envelope, and was unreasonable. George Bernard Shaw said the following:
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
Posted in history, reality, television on December 27, 2012
Substitute the word “Communist” with “Socialist” and I could see this happening today all the same….
Yesterday vs. today:
1947 FBI Memo Re: “It’s A Wonderful Life”
With regard to the picture “It’s a Wonderful Life”, [redacted] stated in substance that the film represented rather obvious attempts to discredit bankers by casting Lionel Barrymore as a ‘scrooge-type’ so that he would be the most hated man in the picture. This, according to these sources, is a common trick used by Communists. [In] addition, [redacted] stated that, in his opinion, this picture deliberately maligned the upper class, attempting to show the people who had money were mean and despicable characters.”
Related:
Slugtalk Presentation: Systems Engineering in the 21st Century
Posted in work on December 26, 2012
For those of you that don’t know, the hall I used to live on at MIT, putz (a.k.a. East Campus Second West) has a relatively recent tradition of “slugtalks” (warning, page is terribly out of date).
People have been asking me these questions lately:
- What does benoc do?
- Why is it one of the fastest growing employment opportunities in the world, and why do we need more actually smart, well-educated people doing it?
- Why aren’t we really called “sysadmins” anymore?
So last month I gave a pretty good slugtalk describing the modern state of my profession, what I do, and why you would want to consider joining this cabal of folks who keep the civilized world’s bits safe, flowing freely, and functional.
Topics Covered:
- History of the field
- Impact of the dotcom boom and scale explosion
- Systems management theory
- The “stack” and where we are in it — The rise of “Devops”
- Why would someone with an MIT degree do this?
- Admin lore: swearing and scotch
A Look Back in Time: “Golden Age of the Internet?”
In May of 1999, my hall at MIT’s East Campus Dormitory, known as “Second West”, “putz”, “PTZ”, “Pi Tau Zeta” (and probably many others), was featured in Yahoo! Internet Life Magazine because of the venerable putz webcam, which had been operating in some form since 1997. Today, of course, that webcam is still operating (assuming Pranjal or some current resident remembers to reboot it every once in a while) at http://www.mitwebcam.com.
So I kept the magazine. It turns out that the single paragraph and picture on the putz webcam wasn’t the only gem in this thing. I took the liberty of scanning the full magazine a while ago and a full pdf is linked below. Aside from the mention of the webcam, there’s an introduction to this new “stark” search engine known as “Google!” (not sure what the exclamation point is about), and an interview with Richard Branson about the future of the internet and his businesses. The centerpiece of the issue is the list of America’s top 100 wired colleges (MIT got 2nd place to Case Western, of all things, and I have no idea why).
Article mentioning “Google!”, and PTZ Webcam mention Clippings:
Full PDF of magazine issue (right click and “save as”):
Into The Weeds 