I’d never carry a concealed gun. It’s an idiot thing to do.

But if you ever do, it should be in a shoulder holster or similar where it never leaves your body. Ever.

It shouldn’t be in your purse or your briefcase or anywhere else.

Normally I’d not recommend shoulder holsters as they aren’t as safe as other holster types to the individual with the gun, but in the case of shoulder holsters the risk is all on YOU. And no one can take the gun from you without you noticing.

So if you must be a fucktard and carry a concealed weapon in a non-combat environment, then use a shoulder or other similar on-body holster. It’s the most likely way to only kill yourself when you do something stupid with your gun.

And there are options for women now, too, which was not true for a long time. This and this seem pretty good.

How to properly draw from a shoulder holster without shooting yourself.

Note: I have only used the standard US Army shoulder holster and one my dad owned, brand unknown.

The US Army one was not designed for concealment, though, but for access.

Because my media landscape skews heavily female, it’s shocking when I experience the utter sausagefest in media that most people are subjected to.

-Usually, I listen to about 90% female musicians.

-Read about 60% female authors, with usually 80% female protagonists.

-Interact with nearly all women as friends. (Sorry, can’t do raging masculine entitlement which 99% of men have, and am terrible at masculine posturing necessary to fit in with men.)

-Deliberately watch TV shows and movies with at least 50%+ women.

Watching and listening to media where women are 50% or more of the protagonists, antagonists and in general background characters, it’s weird when I look at the media landscape of the normals where women are 10% of 15% (at most) of characters, directors and writers.

How do normal people stand this, accept this? So terrible.

I don’t think I deserve any special award for this. It is just my preference as in my opinion women-produced media is often better – they must try harder to get to the same place men do, so the quality is often a great deal higher.

And furthermore, why would I want to ignore the stories of half the world, especially as the story of the underdog (which women all too often are in society) is usually more interesting?

Whenever I venture out accidentally into the media world of the normal people, I hardly know what hit me as my brain is saying, Did all the women, like, die or something?

Just can’t understand it.

Chrome is like the tablet of web browsers. It’s the browser for those who don’t need much out of a browser.

I haven’t tried the 64-bit version yet, though.

Does it actually allow you to have more than 5-6 tabs open for a few days without completely shitting the bed?

I’ve never understood the reason companies don’t allow more remote work to be done.

Sure, I understand the monkey brain sociological reasons but I don’t understand why people can’t ratiocinate their way around those flimsy “reasons” and allow their companies to become more competitive.

Because working from home is far better and far more productive most of the time.

For instance earlier today I spent 2.5 hours building a remote desktop services technical architectural proposal and putting together pricing.

I was not interrupted by anyone. No one “stopped by just to chat.” No one called me. My email was closed so I didn’t check that. No contractor was banging on anything. No one was having loud phone conversations nearby. No one was eating smelly food, or trying to get me to sign up for the office football pool. No salesperson was attempting to get me to talk to him or her.

In a regular office environment, it’s likely that proposal would have taken me 4 hours, or maybe two days – depending on how many interruptions listed above occurred.

Many people say, “But those interruptions are important, too!”

Well, no. They aren’t. Maybe 1-2% of them are. The rest are destructive to concentration and actually harm the business.

Working at home, I am 2-3 times at minimum more productive – for the actual goals of the business – as I am sitting in an office.

I know that’s not true for everyone, but that’s definitely true for me and many other people.

Skills needed in IT churn faster than in any other industry.

I’ve only been working part-time and in a consulting capacity for about a year, and of course doing certifications and learning as I can and such to keep my skills up.

But since I’ve stepped back a bit it gave me more of an opportunity to observe and to realize what would’ve happened if I hadn’t kept up while being out of the regular full-time workforce.

If I hadn’t done the work of studying and learning new things despite not working full-time, about 20-25% of what I used and knew back in 2013 is now completely irrelevant or nearly supplanted by something new.

Seriously, is there any other field where 25% of its necessary (at the time) skills get thrown in the trash bin yearly?

That means in five years in IT with no growth or learning, you are worthless in IT the job market (this jibes with my experience in hiring as well).

In IT, if you aren’t learning something every day you are falling behind. That makes it a tough market in which to stay relevant as sometimes a technology that you spend six months learning might be completely replaced in another six months. (And yep, I’ve seen it happen many times.)

Agreed with this 100%.

Regular readers will recognize this as a version of my theory that “the internet is now a major driver of the growth of cognitive inequality.” Or in simpler terms, “the internet makes dumb people dumber and smart people smarter.”

When I was a kid and there was no practical internet, I’d write down things I wanted to look up at the library. Most I would just forget. Many questions were unanswerable, and even the librarians weren’t able to assist.

It’s been well over a decade now since I’ve not been able to find – and quickly, too – some sort of reasonable answer, explanation or how-to for something on the internet that I want to find out more about or learn how to do.

Hell, I learned enough about Red Hat Linux in four months using internet resources only to pass a very demanding exam that fifty percent of people fail.

This is amazing still to someone like me who grew up outside a racist hick town where finding out anything was nearly impossible.

And yet watching people still struggle to complete a basic Google search, and having no way to determine good evidence from bad evidence, I realize like Kevin Drum that the internet hasn’t made everyone smarter.

It’s made people like me effectively more intelligent – and in many ways hugely so — while for those outside the little sphere of cognitive elite (for lack of a better term), it’s made the 80 to 90% effectively dumber, relatively if not absolutely.

Inequality works nearly the same for intelligence I think as it does for wealth – the more you have, the easier it is to acquire additional resources.

I’d amend this to just say that, “Vegans need to stop.”

Go back to Vega.

Nearly every vegan I’ve met has been a sanctimonious prick.

Isn’t that the actual point of going vegan, anyway?

If you think people are delusional now, just remember how they used to be.

Serling discusses being shut down by sponsors for trying to address the Emmett Till case, and receiving many complaints from a “lunatic fringe of letter writers” about an episode of Lassie wherein the iconic collie has puppies. Some wacko viewers felt that the episode promoted sexuality.

And bestiality, too! After all it wasn’t stated that the puppies weren’t sired by little Timmy, after all!

The 1950s sounds just terrible. Glad I didn’t have to suffer through that lost decade.

For my next car, I’ll probably either get a 2015 Mustang or a Subaru BRZ.

Mustang, you say? Yeah, I used to hate them, too. But the 2015 model has really upped everything – quality (including the used-to-be-terrible interior), the suspension and the ride, even including adjustable suspension. And they offer near-German quality at a much much more affordable price.

Sorry, I won’t pay $15,000 extra so I can buy something that says “BMW” on the badge to impress all my co-workers. Impressing people means nothing to me. Having a car I enjoy driving when I must drive is what matters to me.

Really, it’s all that matters to me.

I doubt it’ll exceed the Pontiac GTO – by far the most fun car to drive I’ve ever owned – but in this case close enough is good enough.

If there are humans left in 100-200 years (likely, but not guaranteed – people really underestimate the devastation of climate change), they will see the generations who live now as the most craven, despicable and immoral in all history.

Because we did nothing about climate change, about the extinction of thousands of species, about the devastation of ecosystems and ecological relationships that have already essentially ruined their lives.

You think the Nazis and their ideology are institutionally and reflexively despised now?

Just wait to see what they write about us in 150 years.

I built two IIS servers and a SQL 2014 server for Christmas, as well as made a VM template to deploy server 2012 R2 in a more automated way.

So, that’s what I did for fun on Christmas.

I want to like Marissa Mayer. I really do. But alas she is just as much a loser engineeritis-infectee techno-putz as the rest of the men in Silicon Valley. The only real difference is that she has better hair.

Even though the actress Gwyneth Paltrow had created a best-selling cookbook and popular lifestyle blog, Mayer, who habitually asked deputies where they attended college, balked at hiring her as a contributing editor for Yahoo Food. According to one executive, Mayer disapproved of the fact that Paltrow did not graduate college.

I didn’t graduate college either, but I guarantee I am just as intelligent as Marissa Mayer. Probably significantly more in some areas (and likely vice versa as everyone has their strengths).

Anyway, what a putz. What else is there to say?

I’ve seen this before, but it’s great that all but one of the images of the SysAdmins is giving someone the finger.

That’s by design, and necessary.

Many times absurd requests come into the infrastructure department, such as needing 30 servers for testing “tomorrow,” or to turn off all security on the production firewall so “we can test something.”

Etc.

Due to such requests (and I’ve actually gotten much, much worse), many times what a sysadmin does and is charged with doing by legality, company policy and common sense is to say “no.”

Things are going to get better and already are getting better for users who want to do more themselves. With tools like VCloud Automation center and wider use of other similar tools (local and not), more users can provision what they think they need in a safe test environment.

Still, resources are not unlimited. Power, CPU time, and bandwidth cost money and always will. And no matter what any time you come to a sysadmin with some ridiculous request that will violate the law and all sanity, they will probably still say no.

So, for as long as there are still system administrators, a large and necessary part of their jobs will be telling people “no.”

This is pretty ridiculous.

The GED is now fifty-five percent algebra? Why?

Yes, some people use algebra in their jobs. Great for them, that 0.1 percent.

But I’ve been doing cognitively demanding jobs for 15+ years. Know how many times I’ve used algebra in my daily work?

Zero.

I have never once used algebra or anything related to it – ever – in any job.

My partner is a programmer and has a computer science degree.

Guess how many times she’s used algebra or anything higher than basic math in her daily work?

Zero, again. She has a minor in math and has not once used any of those (poorly-taught, according to her) skills in the course of any job, and probably never will.

When I told my teachers that all the math I was learning in school would be completely irrelevant to my life, they scoffed.

Turns out I was right.

So why is the GED fifty-five percent algebra again?

Fuck yes!

“People north of 40 are schizophrenic about voice mail,” says Michael Schrage. “People under 35 scarcely ever use it.” Companies are increasingly combining telephone, e-mail, text and video systems into unified Internet-based systems that eliminate overlap. “Many people in many corporations simply don’t have the time or desire to spend 25 minutes plowing through a stack of 15 to 25 voice mails at the end or beginning of the day,” says Schrage.

Please don’t leave me a voicemail. Email me. Hell, even text me. But if I even remember to check the voicemail, chances are I will accidentally (uh, yeah, accidentally – that’s it) delete it, or just forget about it.

Voicemail is dead and should stay buried. It’s inconvenient, time-consuming, unreliable and can’t easily be filed in any useful information silo.

Stay in the grave, voicemail. Just stay.