matthewthornton.info

I’ll confess that I’ve kinda drank the “Obama Change” Kool-Aid.  It’s probably my last-ditch effort of not becoming completely jaded by the Federal Government.

Then Tuesday rolled around.  On Memorial Day, Obama made the claim that one of his Uncles helped liberate Auschwitz.  Number of things wrong with that; his mother was an only child and Auschwitz was liberated by the Russians.

I swear, I have no idea what makes these politicians tick.  One of two things has happened here: either it was a complete gaffe, in which case he should have listened more to his elders when he was a child or it was just a show to try to 1-up McCain, which would have been at best futile and at worst pathetic.  Why didn’t he just say something like, “I can’t imagine the horrors of war.  I honor you today.  When I’m Commander-in-Chief, I will only use you to preserve our way of life and you can leave your homes knowing your family is taken care of and when you come home, we’ll take care of you.”  Sometimes the flowery rhetoric he comes up with needs to be better honed, in my opinion.

This will be my last (solely) Microsoft-hating/bashing blog for a while, I promise.  A few years ago, Alan Weisman wrote a book about what would happen if mankind suddenly disappeared.  With my previous blog entry, it got me to start thinking.  Microsoft has really gone off it’s meds.  A number of things have happened recently that I think shows how Microsoft has in many ways been marginalized.  Not ground into the dust, but just not the center of the universe like it used to be.  The Yahoo! acquisition failed.  5 years ago, they would have bought them without a blink.  Now, they spent a month haggling, negotiating, etc. until they ultimately walked away from the table.  Second, a guy I’ve never heard of named Jason Matusow aparently went off his meds when he indicated that South Africans don’t understand OSS and, more shockingly, said that South Africans don’t know how to program well enough to delve too deeply into Linux (Unless, of course, you’re one of the developers of Ubuntuu Linux.)  Finally, and I think is actually most telling, Microsoft’s biggest, coolest invention in the past 5 years or so?  Surface.  You know what it’ll probably cost when it first comes out?  Multiply a macbook pro by about 5, I’m guessing.  You know what has already happened?  DIY sites net-wide have come up with ways of doing it very easily and very cheaply.  Bill Gate’s vision of technology, while grandiose, I don’t really think needs a big corporation like Microsoft necessarily calling the shots.

So what happens if Microsoft goes away?  Not necessarily the way of Enron or Bear Stearns but, say, the way of Atari.  What happens?  Does Apple fill the void?  I hope not.  I think they’re a great company and all but with the problems I’ve had with my Macbook in the past, I’d hate to see them when they don’t give a fig about their customers.  Does everyone go to Linux?  I don’t know–I’d be surprised if it happened, though if you go to a Linux help site/forum, you’ve never met friendlier people on the web.  They’re all very interested in helping with your problem, so maybe it will be a generational thing and we can push through to having an open-source society where software is freely available and the rate of software development increases to the point where we can have developers going back to their garages to just write code for people.  Maybe it’ll be a hybrid of corporate software with the open-source community.  Companies are very good for large-scale systems.  I just don’t think that our personal computing experience needs to be dominated by the large corporations anymore.  Case in point:  I have an Apple macbook and aside from the Operating System, I have not paid for one bit of software on this laptop (Besides games, and you can even get away with just playing open source games–they’re really good).  Everything is either on the web, opensourced, or I’ve written on my own.  Just something I thought I’d bring up as an interesting question about the future of software.  If anyone’s out there, I’d like to know your feedback.

Hey.  I’m back.  Did I miss anything?

Now that I am solidly in place at my new job, I feel I can take the opportunity to burn some bridges and take some loving (or not-so-loving) swipes at our good friends at Microsoft.  For those of you who don’t know, I had an interview with M$ last fall.  I’m guessing it didn’t go well, since I never heard back from anyone–just an automated message to recoup my expenses.  They really do have an odd culture at that company.  The median age of the people working there seemed to be right about my age, which leads me to worry.  I don’t know about the rest of you but I want someone in the software shop with a long grey beard that talks endlessly about when he programmed his first FORTRAN compiler.  (That’s not sarcasm, that’s a fact–you need guys like that on the floor to tell you what to do sometimes.)  Everybody is walking around like they’re still on a college campus, with a Zune plugged into their ears, drinkin Starbucks.

The interviews I went through were dreadful.  I had one guy ask me to write some code, which I hate doing on the fly.  However, I managed to come up with what Knuth would call a “literate programming”-based solution to the problem that was easily readible and did the job.  The guy then started criticizing me saying it was too slow and wouldn’t be good in a production environment.  Oh!  And I didn’t mention this-you’ll love this one-I had to use C strings.  That’s right, they think the pinnacle of programming is to guess how big of a string they’ll need and let the hackers blow right through the stack.

My second interviewer was a nice woman but she asked me the question of what would I do if I had to arrange a meeting and prepare a presentation to give to a VP about what position a company should take about a particular sales acquisition.  This is obviously a test to see how well I think on my feet and handle a difficult problem but she kept interjecting humorously that “things like this have happened.”…….you know?  As a potential stockholder in the future (or not) of Microsoft, I’d suggest you’d keep that little nugget of information to yourself.

My final interview was over lunch.  No. No.  I know what you’re thinking.  A nice pleasant conversation with someone asking me what I thought of the company and whether or not I had any questions.  No.  An actual third interview with a guy asking me non-stop questions.  When he was done with his meal, he asked, “Are you ready?”  “Sure.  Yeah.  I haven’t eaten since last night but boy the bread sure was good.”  The guy kept asking me question after question about Vista and if there was anything I’d like fixed on the user interface and how I’d do it.  Seeing as how I haven’t used Vista, along with the other 5 habitable continents on the planet and parts of this one, I had a hard time coming up with answers to his questions/root cause analysis.

So, ultimately, it sounds like I probably didn’t get the job, which is ok since I got a better one anyway.  You know what the oddest part about the whole experience was?  They never asked me if I had any questions about the company.  They never asked if I wanted to know more about what I’d be doing.  Sure, I’d make smalltalk with the person on my way to the next interview but not anything that would get me hopping up and down about the company.  Normally, you get done with the interviewer’s part of the interview and then you get to ask them some questions.  The arrogance!  Let me make this abundantly clear to you, Microsoft–YOU.  ARE.  NO.  LONGER. THE. ONLY. SHOW. IN. TOWN.  You need to finnese me a little bit to convince me to travel across a continent to work for you.  A microsoft internship can actually carry a stigma with it now, depending on who you talk to so you need to convince me why I would want to work for you.  Not necessarily the other way around.  I’ll admit, I’m not the best programmer on the Earth and there were probably people better qualified for the internship but, hey.  As long as you’re there, why not make me feel all warm and fuzzy about Microsoft?  Dispel the myths?  Oh, well.  Guess they’ll never learn and that is a good segue into my next blog entry.

A while back I posted some forum messages to the Prelinger Archive about reviving the September 11 Television Archive.  It was a website that was developed very shortly after 9/11 and included all of the television coverage for 9/11-9/13 for FOX, CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, and other networks.  It disappeared in 2002-2003 and I was somewhat disappointed but around 2007 they came back online and I bookmarked the site to my del.icio.us account.  Today, for some reason, it appeared on the hot list of del.icio.us!  You probably won’t be able to see it by the time you read this (that page is rather dynamic) but, hey, I thought it was pretty cool.

I just noticed while looking at my feed in google reader that there are annoying question marks in the text.  I think this has to do with my using double spaces in posting the blogs.  I’m going to try to find a way of cleaning it up in the next couple of days/week.  It’ll be busy, though since I’m going up to Rockville in the next week or so.

Good lord.  I’m trying to set up a new way of banking for Jess and myself for once we get married.  I’m wanting to work with a bank with good online banking services and yet still have branches nearby.  Wachovia seemed a reasonable choice.  I looked online for reviews and I found several sites where they are given 1 star or the majority of people not recommending the bank.  At first, I was panicked, reading the headers for reviews: “not trustworthy”, “corrupt”, “avoid like the plague”.  I figured that it would be disastrous to go there so I spent the evening investigating other banks that fit my needs.  In each case, it was the same thing.  Boy, can I pick ‘em!

Then I started reading the reviews.  80% (Yes, I counted) were because of people either overdrafting their accounts and being indignant over the fact they had to pay overdraft fees.  About 10% were about bad customer service.  About 5% were about not getting loans, and the rest seemed to be legitimate gripes that sort of fell through the cracks by the large bank bureaucracy.  Obviously, I’m not a rich guy and I’ve done the living paycheck to paycheck thing once or twice in my time here at Tech but good grief.  You stop pushing the Q-Tip when you feel resistance and you stop spending money when the account goes to $0.00!  I can understand the occasional problem where you bounce a check or, because of timing, you otherwise don’t have as much in the bank as you thought but people are talking about month after month of having overdraft penalties.

It really is a funny thing with online reviews.  Almost anywhere else, you can get a decent collection of informed reviews about anything from mops to HDTVs.  But banks are the worst for getting accurate reviews.  It’d be an interesting experiment with these online review sites to have a moderated reviewing system where some context can be placed on the “star ratings”, etc.  For example, Jess and I have progressively come to hate our apartment complex.  Not because of anything the management company does or the condition of the apartment but our rude neighbors and the fact that it is a college apartment complex.  If I were to go online and review it, I’d probably give it a poor rating quantitatively but if the review were taken into the context of a 25+year-old graduate student that is engaged to be married, people would be better able to put my review in context.  Some of these reviewing services should really take that into account.

I wrote a somewhat rambling post that, in a way, showed I was interested in seeing how far Obama could go in the campaign.  I think that with the idiocity that has emerged in the past month in all of the campaigns, that I need to revise my position.  I am, at the moment, not going to vote for president.

Over the past month, a number of news stories have emerged showing the list of very serious problems facing the country.  There have been a number of articles about the fact that certain aspects of our country are past the point of no return and need to be resolved immediately.  Off the top of my head:

• Medicare is on the brink of disaster.
• North Korea helped Syria on their nuclear reactor.
• Iran has been intentionally targeting GIs in Iraq.
• The economy is about to truly hit the skids.
• Gas prices are showing no signs of slowing down their climb, which will impact the entire economy that is already showing signs of recession.

These are just the things I could think of that emerged in the past two weeks.  I have not heard any of the candidates address these issues.  Not once.  That isn’t to say they aren’t talked about at all (the media takes a share of the blame) but it isn’t at all the focus of any of the campaigns.  Instead of this, the candidates have focused on personality traits of the candidates and attacked their “fitness” to lead the country.

The campaigns seem to believe that this is what their employers (who is us, the American Citizen, regardless of what Hillary Clinton says.) care about when picking a commander-in-chief.  Not, how the US will be protected from rogue regimes,  how they will weather the poor economy, and how to combat gas prices (and not in the stop-gap way that McCain and Clinton have proposed this week.  .18 cents off of 3.50 a gallon when the gas prices have gone up almost a dollar in the past year.).  Not to mention how to reduce the unnecessary expansion of power of the executive that has occurred under President Bush, and the reconciliation of the Executive and Legislative branches.  Instead of these real-world issues, they have decided to attack their qualifications as president by focusing on the “trivia” issues of the other candidates.  Assuming that this is the case, one can make the argument that none of them are qualified:

• John McCain has had at least one affair and has been divorced.  He was also involved in the S&L scandal from the 80’s.
• Barack Obama is, in fact, inexperienced.  His relationship with Jerimiah Wright shows that he  is a bad judge of character.  If Wright had just suddenly become militant, that would be one thing but this behavior goes back at least 23 years, when he went to Lybia w/ Louis Farrakahn.
• Hillary Clinton–the only thing that we can say for certain about her is that her name is, in fact, Hillary Clinton.  Furthermore, someone who we are trusting can handle North Korea, Iran, and, now it would seem, Syria hiding nuclear weapons cannot even keep track of her husband when she was in the house!

So, if we go by what I think should determine our vote, we don’t vote for any of them.  If we go by what they think should determine our vote, we don’t vote for any of them.  Hopefully, the Libertarian Party convention coming up Memorial Day weekend will end with a candidate that is both smart and politically savvy.

I love Digg.  It’s a place where I can get a quick view of what is going on in the world politically, socially, and technologically, all of which is driven by a polling system that determines what is important and what isn’t so I don’t have to.  I also like The Onion…once in a while.  It’s funny, witty, and just the right touch of sarcasm to get my day started off right. 

However, a disturbing trend has begun to emerge on Digg recently (or, at least, I’ve only just begun to notice it recently) of incorporating "news stories" from The Onion in with the actual news (such as this article from this morning, which was pretty funny).  While I know that you can normally decide for yourself by reading the headline that it can’t be real, once in a while something seems just convincing enough to be a real story and you end up getting rick roll’d into launching The Onion web site.  I think that The Onion has it’s place on Digg.  I just believe that better care must be made in categorizing it as anything but "offbeat->comedy".

(BTW: I’m not going to Digg this.  If someone agrees with me that reads this, Digg it and we’ll see what happens.)

I read an article today about MIT’s new energy initiative that is giving researchers free reign to develop solutions to the problems dealing with solar energy.  With all of the power problems the world is facing in the next 20 years, these researchers working on alternative power supplies could end up being the same as the industrial scientists of the first 30 years of the 20th century, the mathematicians and physicists of the 40’s/50’s, or the programmers of the 70’s/80’s.

I read the article with a little bit of dejection, thinking that the greatest opportunities of my generation are passing me by.  Then I remembered a moment from my favorite show, Sports Night, and remembered the story of Cliff Gardner and how, while he didn’t invent the TV, he helped make the TV by making the glass tubes used in a cathode receptor.  Computer Science is going to play a huge role in all of the developments in the next 50 years.  It just isn’t going to be a role everyone can see.

UPDATE:  It turns out, I’m not the only one thinking about this.  One of the professors in my department wrote a blog post about this very topic.

Two news stories have emerged this week of people (read: a$$holes) who have done something outrageous to either "make people think" or "provoke discussion".  In the first instance, a pentecostal pastor posted a sign in front of his church linking Obama to bin Laden.  In the second instance, a Yale "performance artist" (which, if not for the content of the story, would have been a ticket to a job at Starbucks or, at best, Michaels), who has created an art project displaying a cube that was wrapped with plastic that contained blood from her menstrual cycle or, according to her, some mysterious, nebulous explanation of her period/self-induced miscarriage.  All of these shock statements are made to create discussion. 

My fiancee will tell you that I’m a pretty easy-going guy that will discuss any issue with anybody and I do not very often require prompting to discuss a topic.  So, instead of attacking the people for their approach to "Trying to Make Me Think" (Ooops…I guess the "A$$hole" comment already took care of that.), I’ll respond to your prompts in the spirit that I’m sure you intended.

Ms. Shvarts (I’m going to take a shot in the dark and assume you use Ms.):  You wish to discuss the topic of the link between Art and the Body.  This link has existed throughout the history of art, simply due to the fact that the first artists drew what they knew, their own bodies and those around them.  This literal approach to the link between Art and Body continued into the 16th/17th century with Leonardo da Vinci and the Vitruvian Man and his drawings of dissections.  With the rise of the impressionist movement, people began creating interpretations of the human body/form (The Scream) and branched into other movements where humans became more and more abstracted.  Interestingly enough, at the same time, the artists of this art have seemed to cultivate a higher and higher view of themselves in society, starting as people who depict the world and portraying the art that the masses understand and then transcending into god-like entities that control the thought and conversation of their audience where the people they deal with are an abstraction, as well.  Oh, by the way…I am a computer science student who has taken 1 semester of art history/analysis.  How does it feel that a person with my background is able to do, in my mind, a reasonably sound analysis of your discussion topic after $300 in course credit and 5 dollars in late fees at the university library?  Kinda makes that $120,000 you just spent seem kinda…silly doesn’t it?

Pastor Roger Byrd:  If you’ve opened a newspaper or watched a tv news show or, well, pretty much been alive the past 3 weeks, the question of whether or not the two of them could be related has been pretty thoroughly ended, seeing as how Mr. Obama has been going to the church of a radical christian priest.  I know this is shocking for a fellow christian to have radical beliefs but, you know, things like that happen outside of Jonesville, South Carolina.  If you need any further information, you could just go to Wikipedia and look up Obama’s entry and see that he is the child of a woman from Kansas and a man from Kenya, neither of which is near the birthplace of bin Laden)   My concern with people who raise this issue is that this is just a nanotube-thinly veiled attempt to criticize Sen. Obama because as black without saying he’s black.  If that’s the case, then, you know, get in your car drive 20 minutes outside of the urban paradise that is Jonesville, SC and see that desegregation, in spite of the fact that social equality is not total yet and is an ongoing process, is alive and well.  If it isn’t the case, then you are part of the 15% of the population that believes Obama is still muslim in spite of the fact that it has been recounted by every reputable news source (I’m guessing because you are clinging to this belief, you are among the same 15% of the population that despite the mountain of evidence that indicates the contrary thinks President Bush is doing a "heckuva job.")

Well, since I’ve managed to tick off both the radical left and the radical right in this post, I’m going to get off of here and watch some Family Guy and write some code.  Bye!