Still trying to wrap my my mind around why anyone would want to use Windows 8. And eventually I am sure my four readers will get tired of hearing me rant about this, but sub-standard OSes make my world substantially worse.

Since the craze of making everything resemble a phone and/or tablet, many OSes have become unusable to me – I can no longer use mainstream Ubuntu, any OS that uses Gnome Shell, and now Windows. I can still use Mac OS (as long as I do so on a retina-class display, otherwise the fonts are too blurry), though I am not sure how long it will be before that OS is also converted into a clowny phone OS.

I do take solace as I’ve already mentioned that even those who think they are more efficient will be much slower and much less productive on such an abomination. It will give me fewer people to be competitive with in the workplace, and that is a good thing as far as it goes.

And I am pretty confident in saying that as often (it has been shown repeatedly in studies) that things people perceive as making them more productive actually often do not – like the sneering keyboard-only users who condemn mouse users as dabblers and incompetents while study after study shows that mouse-as-primary users are just as quick at all tasks as the keyboard snobs.

It has to do with cognitive load – if something requires a greater cognitive load, then it’s perceived as being more efficient. And not being able to see your windows, being able to only single-task, and having no way to organize things in Windows 8 will certainly present a much-higher overall cognitive load.

To be fair, I think Windows 8 is probably a fine – and maybe even a good – tablet OS.

Using it on a desktop, laptop or anything with a screen larger than 11” is a damn nightmare. How could it be otherwise? My 30” monitor is not a touch-screen phone, for fuck’s sake. I can see many, many apps on a screen that large. And I often do. Not to mention that I have another large monitor, and in the future I will likely add one more as well, for three total. Using a phone OS on that will not even be an option.

I can’t believe Microsoft has no OS – and no plans for an OS – for professionals.

It’s been absolutely ridiculous seeing full-blown idiots who use their machines only for playing Angry Birds and watching cat videos tell me that a phone OS is “good enough for anyone.”

Great, someone who clicks on two icons ever telling me how to use a box with 32GB of RAM, hundreds of apps and that sometimes bogs down even with all the power it has.

Here’s another of those increasingly-common job ads that makes me laugh.

There is literally no one on the planet – I guarantee it – that knows all of these things to the level this company is requesting.

And if there were someone (there isn’t), they would never work for $34-$51K.

People who know well only one of those things (like the listed VMware) command salaries in the 80K+ range, for instance.

Hell, I made above 60K a year many years ago by knowing only Exchange and Outlook really, really well.

This part made me laugh so hard I almost fell out my chair (what I’ve made bold in conjunction with the rest of the ad):

• Intermediate Networking / Wifi Admin: Firewall, NAT
• Small Business & Enterprise Support: Security / Active Directory / Network Management / Business Process Improvement / Remote Support / POS Systems / Quickbooks Support / Microsoft Exchange / Google Cloud Services / Individual Device Integration w Enterprise / Email Server Admin
• Managed Services: cloud backup / Web hosting & admin / maintenance schedules / remote network management / SaaS
• Strong Project Management / Time Management Skills
• Basic carpentry / construction skills
• Internet Marketing: graphic/web design & development / App Development / Social Media / PayPerClick and other online advertising tactics
• Ability to efficiently manage material purchasing, cost of labor, client relationships
• Ability to Manage Team of 5 very unique individuals.

Note that this is an IT job.

If there were such a person competent in all of these areas (which is actually physically impossible), they could probably easily get a 150K+ a year job somewhere.

Tonight before I go to bed, I am going to send an email lambasting these assclowns. I know it won’t help anything, but lately as I’ve gotten older I just don’t give a shit.

I like taking potshots at the idiots when I can, just for fun.

I contributed a fairly significant amount of money to a charity drive that my company was having, after I’d determined that the charity was legit and non-religious. My company matched it dollar for dollar. I was tempted to put in a truly absurd amount to see what they’d do, but decided not to tempt fate.

The purpose was to allow parents to buy Christmas presents and other holiday-related items for kids (and families) in need.

I don’t write this to make myself look better, as I really couldn’t care less about that. But what started me thinking about it is the thank-you cards, and that lead to thoughts of private charity vs. government programs.

But first, it was really cool today seeing the cards from the families, in their own handwriting, that we received this morning. That really humanizes the gifts and their meaning. One of the notes said, “My husband and I cannot thank you enough for the wonderful gifts and making this Christmas so joyous and special for our first born and that it is his first Christmas.”

Things like that thaw even an icy old heart like mine. I wish I’d given more; next year.

But it also makes me realize that it is a travesty how rich we are as a society and how little our government does to assist those in need – in fact, how much it has done lately, at the behest of the rich, to purloin form the poor and to heave all that wealth over to the already-wealthy.

And of course wasting money to persecute those like Aaron Swartz, and to strip away Social Security benefits.

Private charity can never – and shouldn’t have to – replace that. As much as my heart was thawed by those cards offering obviously heartfelt thanks, my punching fist was also in full wanting-to-punch Hulk Smash mode as I thought of all those conservatives and banksters who are responsible for the suffering of these families.

Never have I felt such commingled amity and hatred as I did when reading those cards.

I don’t mind a bit giving something to help. I have more than I need.

I do very much mind that what these families need was literally stolen from them by predatory psychopaths who are getting more dominant over time.

After the death of Aaron Swartz, even more so than in the past, I will do everything in my power to bamboozle, swindle, rip off and destroy the copyright industries who are making the entire world worse.

So many people think it doesn’t matter who owns and controls the information in a society.

Other than having food, air and water, literally nothing could matter more.

What’s the strangest book or book-like thing you’ve ever read?

Me, it was the flight manual for the 747. I had no particular reason for reading it; mainly I just wanted to know what all the dials did when I looked into the cockpit on entering an airliner.

Now I do. Though it was very boring.

Nothing like waking up from a dream feeling like you are covered in blood.

In the dream, you kill some guy who’d been attempting to murder his wife – you distract him to stop him, but he gets the upper hand for a moment and is on top of you, then you stab him in the neck with your knife before he can stab you first.

Took a few moments to realize the blood was in my dream, not reality.

For both a project at work that I’ve been tackling and a personal project, it would’ve been useful to have three 30” monitors.

How people can claim that anyone can get by on a tiny-ass tablet with a phone OS I have no idea.

Most people must not be doing that much very consequential, or are slow thinkers. (I think slow thinkers do better on small screens for some reason. Note: being a slow thinker does not necessarily mean dumb.)

Today I learned that my Schwarzschild radius 1.01×10^-25 meters.

You can learn yours, too.

Until I started researching, I’d forgotten how damn good the food in Savannah and Charleston is, and how impoverished is the food culture in Florida. A “foodie” here is someone who doesn’t consider taking a date to McDonald’s.

There’s more quality food in one town (Savannah) than there is in the entirety of Florida. No exaggeration at all.

I can’t explain why. Maybe it’s because people who hate eating well move to this state.

I was peeking in again at this long Making Light thread about dysfunctional families, and I noticed something.

Almost all of the posters and the recipients of abuse are women. I’m guessing this is because women are expected/required in our culture to do the emotional heavy lifting in a family.

Fewer women probably – as I did – say “fuck all ya’ll” and never talk to any family ever again.

One of the best things I ever did.

This is not to say that the women in question are behaving incorrectly. Everyone is at least partially and sometimes wholly a construct of their social milieu. Only a few people break even partially free. I think I was one of them, but then again I have a very atypical personality profile and am a frequent outlier.

I don’t do regret very well as I have a good life and thus all my choices ineluctably lead me to where I am now, but the only opportunity cost I am paying is that I never got to know my nieces.

Every choice comes with a debt and a payment, even the ones we don’t realize. Such is living in this world.

I had no idea the most ridiculous scene in Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor (but also the best in an otherwise bad movie) actually happened in real life, almost exactly as portrayed.

After spending the night of December 6 getting drunk and having fun, the two men passed out early in the morning. The next day, they were awakened by the sounds of what they thought were U.S. Navy drills, but turned out to be Japanese aircraft swooping in and destroying everything in sight.

Quickly realizing that they didn’t want to sit there and do nothing, they called the small, relatively unknown Haleiwa Fighter Strip and ordered two aircraft readied for a fight.

…

The two then hopped into a car and sped all the way to the airfield. And they were totally shot at by the Japanese planes, just like in the movie.

Once they arrived at the airfield, they jumped into their aircraft and took off, without permission. From there they proceeded to take on any Japanese planes they happened across, despite being outnumbered a mind-blowing 175 to 1.

Brave or crazy? Is there a difference sometimes?

I need to make a will. I don’t want my family to get jack shit if I die, and I very much want to make sure my partner does get whatever I have if I happen to die in a tragic hang gliding accident.

And if we both die in aforementioned tragic hang gliding accident, I want to make sure a friend of mine gets the loot.

To do before this year is out, then.

It will be warm enough this week in Florida – in the middle of winter – that we might have to run the AC.

Shit yeah, Florida rules sometimes.

I agree with this; don’t waste my time. I don’t have much of it. No one does.

Like one of the commenters, I have walked out of the lobby of a building after they wasted over an hour of my time as I sat there waiting for the interviewer.

Wasting my time? Probably not a good place to work. Done.

No one will believe it now, but I’d venture by 2060 nearly all the meat consumed will be lab-grown.

There will be a tiny market for “pasture grown” gourmet meat, about like the market now for truffles or similar. But almost everyone will eat the far cheaper and actually-available grown meat.