It’s funny that Northern US people can’t hear that I am a Southerner (as my Southern accent is well hidden), but Southerners can almost always tell even when I don’t let my original accent out of its box.

Of course, I  can usually do the same so it makes sense.

I was reading these tales of IT horror and woe and was recalling some of my own.

There have alas been many such tales that I’ve been part of – some of which I’ve caused and even more that were thrust on me like some foul gift.

One that immediately springs to mind is starting a new job – a huge promotion compared to my previous position– and walking into an organization using some off-brand mail server that had been compromised quite long ago by Chinese hackers and which was being used to send more than 120,000 pieces of spam mail a day (all it could handle as it was old and slow).

Being as it was off-brand, and virtually unknown, there was no documentation and even less support from the vendor.

Eventually I discovered and hacked enough to stop the deluge of spam emanating from the office.

The company was still on every blackhole and spammer list in the entire fucking world, and I spent the next month getting the company removed from all of them. But of course since I was the new IT guy I was blamed for why “the email isn’t getting through.” This despite the fact that the problem had started long, long before I’d arrived.

In fact the prior IT person was fired for incompetence. Given the situation and other lapses I’d found, this termination was 100% justified.

This was the same IT person who had pirated nearly every bit of software installed in the office and then called the BSA, triggering an audit, after he was let go.

Another thing I had to deal with about six months from the email server incident.

Nothing like walking into an office on your first day that is in utter chaos, with people mostly not able to send email, that has also been utterly pwned by Chinese hackers, all combined with nearly-unmaintained systems.

It took me a year to get that company straight. But I did it, then got bored and left.

And here’s one of those bad articles about internet infrastructure that could’ve avoided being bad – if they’d read the article they linked to — but is still just idiotically terrible.

This was important new research that highlighted how strained the infrastructure underpinning our internet is.

No. Just no. The internet infrastructure is not “strained.” There is an absolute glut of bandwidth. There is hundreds of thousands of miles of dark fiber all around the country.

This article is so full of pure dumbassery that I am pretty convinced that the author experienced some acute brain trauma while actually composing this tripe.

There is no “both sides” to this debate. Users have already paid the ISPs to bring the traffic to them. Netflix has already paid Level 3 or Cogent to carry their traffic.

It is fully and 100% the ISPs here are shirking their duties in an attempt to extort money.

In short, the ISPs are not turning up a port or two on a switch on their side and connecting them with Level 3 or Cogent with a $20 fiber cable. (It wouldn’t actually be $300 as mentioned in the Susan Crawford article as these switches in the meet-me room are usually quite close together, within 10-20 feet.)

This writer – Ben Popper — was most likely paid in part by ISP money to write this, I am guessing.

Such a fucking idiot.

Oh, this is going to piss a lot of people off.

But it’s right. Wanting us (correctly, in my view) to celebrate cultural differences but then denying that cultural differences exist is daft liberalism at its worst.

It’s not that white men never catcall; they do, just not nearly as often (which I’ve seen in person when walking behind and from talking to female friends) and usually more subtly.

But, yep.

White men, on the other hand, have no use for that sort of catcalling. They marked their territory centuries ago. So, instead, their sexual harassment is less invasive (“in passing,” as Bliss puts it) and harder to recognize—even when it’s staring you in the face. They do it in bars, at parties, on the frat row at your local college campus, in boardrooms, and other places men of color are never privy to, at least not in positions of power.

It’s funny how nominally current (idiotic) liberalism unknowingly pushes their own version of atomistic neoliberal individualism except when it becomes inconvenient and then the screams are deafening.

This is the same as the Maher Islam debate. Just because some group is oppressed or perceived to be oppressed does not absolve them from all criticism or make them angelic beings.

Such is the case here as well.

The New Millennium’s Downward Ramp of Jobs.

Yeah, this is true. I’ve seen it in my own field. Now to get jobs I held a decade ago, I need much higher-level and much more difficult to get technical certifications.

Some jobs I am ineligible for in the minds of HR because I have no college degree, but even those positions which do not specify a degree now require certifications that were not mandatory even as recently as 4-5 years ago.

Hence one of the reasons I’ve been taking so many exams lately.

To get the same job I held in 2001 with no certifications other than natural fucking talent, I now pretty much need to spend $2,000 – $3,000 on exams and study materials, and 600+ hours of study time.

Certifications unlike most college degrees are better than just signaling mechanisms, but not that much better.

I’ve met plenty of people with the same certs I have who could barely or couldn’t even tell you what an IP address is, while at the same time I’ve met people with no certifications who could do plenty of things I can’t.

I’d say on balance a job candidate having certifications means there is about a 10-20% chance of them being better at the job. Not nothing, but also not a lot.