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.

This piece is good in itself, but it got me thinking about and noticing something else.

If someone is over 35 or so, they tend disdain anything and everything to do with The Hunger Games. If below 35, they probably like it. (I am over 35, but as usual I am an outlier.)

Why causes this divergence of views? It’s not quality; Catching Fire was a great film, one of the best released in 2014. And the books are quite a bit different than the films.

It’s not maturity, as that just doesn’t map very well to age in my experience.

The split views about the works comes I think from culpability and its denial. The over-35ers realize the books and films are aimed at them – even if subconsciously — and that the works are allegorically holding them rightly accountable for the world they’ve created and are going to create. We are, after all, living in the early stages of a slow-motion climate apocalypse.

No one likes being blamed, even if the blame is placed rightfully.

My contention is that almost all of the over-35er antipathy toward those works stems from their correct realization that they are the villains portrayed in the works.

And they do not like it one bit.

Most small businesses fail relatively quickly, and a large percentage of those fail because they are run by morons.

Seems to happen a lot particularly in the restaurant business.

Here’s a personal example. There was a pizza place that opened up when we still lived in St. Petersburg.

It was on a busy strip of road and there weren’t a lot of competing pizza places nearby.

So far, so good.

But they bought an actual fleet or cars to run delivery with. Not pay for use of employee cars – no, they paid for a fleet of SmartCars. At least four. Perhaps more – I don’t really remember. Not a good idea, having a huge CapEx at a low-margin business. Already a bad sign.

And the kicker is that I went in one time to try the place out thinking they’d have slices of pizza for sale.

Nope, they had no such thing, despite that being their best business proposition in that area as it was surrounded by commercial properties and not residential. The lunch crowd could’ve been very large, and would’ve paid a few bucks for a slice.

Making $3 per slice is a lot better than competing with Domino’s at $10 or $11 per pizza. $3 per slice plus a drink is way, way more profit.

And the even worse thing is that when I went in to ask about pizza in slices they were utterly rude to me. Like dripping with venom. I am sure they called me an idiot as soon as I walked out the door.

As I walked out I said to myself, “This place won’t be open in a month.”

Sure enough, about two weeks later it closed and was gone.

Utterly predictable. If it’d been a stock I would’ve shorted that business into the ground from day one.

So they did no market research, no business analysis – nothing. They can’t have, because they made every mistake possible to make.

I know nothing about the restaurant business, but I do know something about not being a huge dumbass so if they’d paid me $10,000 to tell them also how to avoid being huge dumbasses they’d probably still be in business today.

I dislike how common Southern expressions especially outside the South are presumed to be AAVE and I am accused of “appropriating” the way that I grew up speaking from 9 months old on.

No, dumbasses, Southern speech and AAVE overlap significantly, so much so that when I visited my Northern relatives when I was but a wee marauder they said I “talked like a black person.”

The Southern diaspora of black people into cities in the north is often the only exposure that Northerners have with shards of Southern culture.

Learn some history, please. Learn anything. Learn something.

But most important, shut up.