If anyone wants  a large, good monitor for a ridiculous price, this is the best deal I’ve ever seen – by far – for a 30” IPS monitor.

It’s not 4K or 5K, but still – hard to go wrong with a 30” 16:10 2560×1600 monitor for $400.

The cheapest I’ve seen one of these before now went for more than $1,000.

There has been a lot of obsession over plagiarism lately. I don’t really understand it. Most of what people are claiming is “plagiarism” doesn’t seem even remotely close to me. Mostly it seems people are claiming that ideas can be plagiarized, which is just absurd.

I don’t plagiarize because it is faster for me to write my own material. And this blog isn’t some stellar example of writing, anyway.  Also, I think really differently from most people so plagiarism in my work would be glaringly obvious.

Discussions of plagiarism are generally overwrought, if you ask me. People treat it as some kind of unforgivable intellectual sin. What it usually indicates is laziness and sloppiness.

Many of the best authors in history have “plagiarized” by the modern definition, which seems at the moment to mean “have used two or three words that some other author once used” or “had the same idea that this author wrote about that a billion other people also had.”

And I think the concept of self-plagiarism is utterly ridiculous, too.

Plagiarism seems to be what you accuse someone of when you’re not as famous as they are, and want to be.

The experience of signing up for the Red Hat exams is absolutely terrible. Really, I have not had a worse experience in all my years of doing this sort of thing.

First I signed up for a voucher three days ago – which for some reason you must do first – to take the exams.

Just a voucher, not the actual tests, mind you. This is so complex in the first place that I had to call Red Hat to even figure out what test to take (as the one I wanted was not listed with a location, among other issues, and I’d prefer not to sign up for an exam in Anaheim when I’m across the country).

Never received anything even though they took the money from my account.

After waiting three days for what was only supposed to take one, I called Red Hat again and they told me only one of the two exam vouchers had been processed, and they sent me that one again via email and claimed it had been sent already.

My email settings are very permissive. I have never missed a sent email before, so I don’t believe them. But whatever. At least they re-sent it.

They also claimed the next email would be sent soon but it also as I expected never arrived.

The next claim is that once I received the confirmation emails I’d be able to go to a totally separate site to sign up for the tests. (To “redeem the voucher.”)

Nope. Wrong.

The site lists no eligibility for me to sit for the exams at all. These exams are $400 each. I’m taking two of them, so that’s $800.

This is unacceptable for that sort of money.

Even though they’ve taken my money and I’ve called twice now, I still don’t know if I’m going to be able to take the exams as I can’t get signed up for them. I will call them again tomorrow.

My guess is that because I opted to not take their very expensive (nearly $4,000) training courses, they make it hard for me and candidates like me to take the exams sans these classes. It’s pretty obvious that they are penalizing the people who can and do self-study.

You are not required to take the training courses to sit these exams, at least according to Red Hat, but it looks like they make it difficult if you don’t fork over some real dough.

Well, just like with college I ain’t about to fork over $4,000 for something I can learn at home with a free book and some time.

Let’s hope I’ll actually get to sit these exams, though.

North Korea executes 80 people ‘for watching foreign films.’

Machine-gunned in a stadium in front of 10,000 people.

And motherfuckers say The Hunger Games is “unrealistic.”

Pretending that humans don’t have this capacity — and that this sort of thing doesn’t happen all the time and throughout human history — is a disingenuous public affirmation, just as with the Mike Brown and Eric Garner cases, that this could never happen to me.

All you deluded liberals (and some conservatives), remember when you were talking about that “post-racial society” when Obama was elected?

What do you say now? After Eric Garner? After Mike Brown?

I pushed back against that at the time, just like I did the ACA.

So much for all those fantasies. Though people seem to hold on to them like a sand spur onto suede.

I think one reason that it was comparatively easy for me to lose weight is that like most things, food has absolutely no emotional meaning for me.

I don’t even understand “comfort food.” Like many human things, it eludes me.

Sure, I love pizza and eggnog and the like but the emotional content of that for me is absolutely zero.

I can intellectually – but not emotionally – understand how much more difficult it would be for people with emotional ties to food to lose weight. But I can never really understand it.

Mainly SELinux is a shitty security system because it’s nearly impossible to use.

A security system too hard for anyone to use effectively is not a good security system as everyone will just disable it.

Unfortunately I have to learn it well enough to pass my Red Hat exams.

But on any production system in the real world I will immediately disable it as it’s worthless and prevents getting work done.

Love how this guy’s commenters tear him up about it.

What a strange world, fishing tournaments.

I’ve only been in one in my life. I didn’t win.

But for quite a few years in my life, I fished nearly every day. But rarely for bass. Almost always for catfish. They tasted better and were easier to catch, most of the time.

I was a member of the Bass Anglers Sportsman Society for a few years, though. Even had the sticker.

This is a valid command in (almost all versions of) Linux:

ss -tuna

Though sometimes the results can be a little fishy.

Yes, this is true of just about any IT job, and I assume just about any other knowledge-based jobs.

I am pretty broadly knowledgeable and skilled for a member of my field. Nevertheless, I know less than 3% of my field (not including programming, which I consider totally separate) and only know about 2% or so of it very well.

For most people in my field, they know about 0.25% to 0.5% well — so even though I know a lot more than average, I still know very, very little.

I memorize a whole lot for certification exams, but 90% of the details are forgotten after six months.

It’s odd that many IT hiring managers expect someone to know arcane details that they themselves often don’t even know, and if they do it’s only because they’ve been working on that specific thing very recently.

I know it’s adversarial and doesn’t help my chances, but during those sort of trivia question interviews I like to turn it around on them and start asking them about arcane technologies that they’ve not worked on recently.

Like I said, I know it doesn’t help my chances, but it sure is fun to smack down some arrogant doofus.