Yet Another Bikeshed

Turkeys of all sorts

2007-11-20T22:30:51-08:00

An old friend tried to get a hold of me on GIMPNet the other day. I was kicked out of the channel by a child who long ago by now, I had to beg to "I am calling you the designer of the web site, please can you please write the stylesheet instead of telling people to make it do things?" and I think that is all that he did. I got kicked and banned when I was 'angry and showing it' -- not while 'angry and not showing it' the way I have been most of the time since November 2004. That is a long time for anger.

Today, I blame the publishers of books and magazines. The reason for this is that I would like to publish a list of all of the people who have been on the GNOME Foundation, but I think that "they" would just find some sucker to show up and be that person. That this is what O'Reilly and whatever Linux magazine published Akkana Peck did to me when I first went to Norway and came to be here in California.

This holiday about will be about turkeys rather than thanks -- I will thank everyone for stopping with the rough stuff when it happens. It was supposed to be beautiful, not artificially induced.

My first GIMP using friend; my first online misunderstanding....

Istanbul Not Constantinople

There were days when email was new to me and the first easy email exchange about GIMP and then life and other things will always be The First easy email exchange about.... One thing he mentioned then was that the people on the gimp-user list seemed like real jerks and assholes.

I actually logged in and searched through the tower of spam that is my mailbox looking to see if there was mail from an old friend there. I might have missed it for all of the real horrible dirt that is the mail I get now.

This mapped image is probably nicer the way I found it.

POTY Animal?

I have some new web pages which are not easy to find from here. They were actually more fun to make before I published the addresses anywhere. Not syndicated either, so if you see them in syndication -- that is just wrong and should be stopped.

I have a TODO list also. Since November 2005, there is supposed to be a new computer where my mail is. I even asked the admin there to allow me to rsync the mail to my computer so I could manage the spam and use the addy. Instead, I am getting stuff put into my food and getting everything I say verified -- oh, and also showing the young homegrown and educated California genius some of lifes more complicated things, like how the little marks work in between the big numbers on the thermostat. The TODO list is people that I should email as soon as possible that I am using their images on my web site and that some of them even look kind of cool and printable. One of the first user pages I visited there said something like, "please email me if you use my image" and later in the page it said "I never check my mail". I thought, there you go! they like email....

Search result editorial

o/~ Every picture tells a story, don't it? o/~ -- the Faces

Sorry for the wrong message

2007-06-05T19:27:01-07:00

I am sorry for this statement:

If the most successful thing that you did was stand around with your thumb up your ass, perhaps you should not be running the business.

It would be directed at the superiors who put you there if that is how you are making your income...

Personally, I have never been fired for incompetence. I only guess what the real reasons were. The last time that I had my responsibilities removed, it was after I had been very successful at the task they gave to me and the few people they left to work with me.

A job well done, or at least competently handled under extreme duress should probably be rewarded with enabling or more security (financial or the equivalent) to stay there and continue to do this. Or some explanation of what the real (unpublished) task was and reasonable explanation for it being different than what had been told from the onset.

The country that I grew up in, the United States of America, they always said that this was how it should work. It was a proud, brave and adventuresome people who were not afraid of really really stupid things. This country that I live in now... what did they put into their koolaid?

Here is a discussion from the irc today:

17:25 (carol) ok. i saw the movie that had the soldiers who had nothing to do. 
              my comments were directed at the people who sent them there for 
              no reason whatsoever.
17:26 (carol) in my life, there have been many people fired but not for 
              incompetence.  i do not believe that i was ever fired for 
              incompetence.
17:27 (carol) when i worked for the fed, answering their phones. i took two 
              classes.
17:28 (carol) one was about how to answer phones. it was 95% for bill collection. 
              a little bit about politeness. the one little piece of wisdom that 
              i got from them was to never lie for your boss.
17:29 (carol) by boss, i mean not 'the wife' or 'women' like paul erdish used the 
              word, but your superior in the economic hierarchy.
17:29 (carol) (imagine i spelled his last name correctly)
17:30 (carol) ((don't lie [about my mispelling today] if anyone asks you))
17:30 (carol) the other course was the eight hour defensive driving course. good 
              stuff. the roads would be much less interesting if that one gets 
              around.
17:31 (carol) i have not lied that i know of for any of my superior -- except for 
              one time when the wrong phone rang at that lab. it was not even a 
              superior, just a hunk with an alias.
17:31 (Ankh) carol, re. soldiers, was that the John Lennon film by any hance, O 
             what a lovely war
17:32 (carol) i have fluffed and stuffed the truths as i knew them, or gotten 
              confused about some details. like the river was a country block and 
              a half away and not in the back.  that was an oops.
17:33 (carol) Ankh: i started to watch that. beatles have occasionally annoyed the 
              hell out of me since arriving in california. perhaps i would be 
              less annoyed if i were where i really wanted to be instead.
17:33 (Ankh) pippin - the play loaded and then wouldn't play
17:33 (carol) Ankh: nope. the movie i saw was a recent one about this war
17:33 (carol) Jarhead
17:33 (Ankh) ah ok
17:33 (pippin) Ankh: evil
17:33 (Ankh) i do reload and it still doesn't play
17:34 (Ankh) white bar slowly grows
17:34 (Ankh) mysterious green recycle icon is lit up
17:34 (pippin) Ankh: don't know which of them you're trying to watch, but they're 
               supposed to have a downloadable quicktime version there as well
17:35 (Ankh) i tried medium because i am feeling spiritual
17:35 (Ankh) low also seems to flash credits and then stop
17:35 (Ankh) flash movies seem unreliable, although I haven't ad problems with 
             youtube ones
17:36  * Ankh goes back to scanning some 18th century bookplates
17:36 (pippin) Ankh: which # is it?
17:36 (pippin) imt1071/#/foo
17:37 (carol) i am very very very irritated often lately from being removed from 
              jobs/responsibilities in which i did a pretty good job at for what 
              looked like foolishness
17:37 (Tommer) i.e. coked up media twats who were too busy discussing the latest 
               additions to their trainer collections to appreciate the 
               intelligent,humourous lyrics...their loss,keep up the good work 
               mr pip.

Sorry for not being clearer about things.

Sorry for editing this irc log also. Some urls, some joins and leaves were removed and also I edited what I said (the edits appear within brackets[]).

Sorry!

2007-06-05T14:49:05-07:00

I am still sorting through the images I have and the images that I need for this years LGM -- and it is (as was discussed there) International Sorrygiving Day.

Sorry I haven't mentioned that yet. More on that later....

California is a dry waste of land which used to be one of our countries great lands of agriculture. I am sure that the real news reporters will catch up to this fact someday -- perhaps when they are finished discussing Britney's panties.

Michigan. The people are not so easily annoyed. The limited growing time there seems to encourage growth. Weather to be endured promotes tolerance and friendliness, maybe. Or maybe there is some big problem because instead of selling groceries (or whatever the actual task was) -- people in Michigan and now people in California need to prove to themselves the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Allow me to make this simple enough for upper management (upper management is anyone who I ever had to answer to, btw). If you watch something, the very fact that you are watching it changes the outcome.

If the most successful thing that you did was stand around with your thumb up your ass, perhaps you should not be running the business. Sorry.

My flugg and stugg will eventually go here. Working with the ethics of criminals was better than working with the ethics of those who are 'legal' though. Legal is not always correct or ethical. I think that California experiments can easily show this.