Hunger Games names’ meanings: explanations for Katniss Everdeen, Peeta Mellark, Alma, Cressida, and more.

Very cool. Most of these I knew because I read, well, a lot and love etymology. A few I didn’t.

But the author hasn’t quite read enough, as it’s pretty likely that Collins got the last name “Everdeen” from Thomas Hardy’s character Bathsheba Everdene in Far From the Madding Crowd.

By the way in that novel, Everdene’s closest friend is named “Gabriel.” Coincidence? Yeah, no.

People should pay me to research this shit.

I don’t even have to research.

Even enterprise-class non-Windows OSes have regressed greatly in interface design.

Over the past week, I’ve been using both CentOS 6 and CentoOS 7 which are rebuilds of Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Cent 6 is very clean and straightforward. Programs are labeled sensibly. It’s simple and like a tool should be.

Cent 7 is like someone grafted the worst tablet in the world onto the interface. Icons are missing (on purpose). Much is confusingly labeled or not labeled at all. You have to swipe up to log in, which took me about 10 minutes to figure out.

Why you’d ever, ever want a tablet interface on a server I haven’t a clue. Anyone who did this or had anything to do with it should be fired immediately, and if they worked for free, they should be hired and then fired.

Most of the time I will be in the command line anyway. But a few things can’t easily be done there, even per Red Hat, so it’s inevitable this monstrosity of an interface will annoy me from time to time.

Why does anyone think this is a good idea? Phone interfaces belong nowhere near servers, not at any point, no matter what.

Words matter, but other things matter more. Economic justice and structural change I would argue matter more, and only actions that lead to those will transform the world. Endless battles on Twitter and Tumblr about who said what bad word when, and who culturally appropriated what (usually inaccurate) and how hard are actually harmful, even to the people who it is supposed these arguments help.

It’s precisely because mainstream liberalism has so thoroughly surrendered on issues of economic justice and class war that so many young people think of politics as a game of word policing and loud noises on Twitter.

The Left is soulless – in the sense that it has no animus, just tribal markers that change weekly to enable policing and to promote exclusivity, to thin the ranks so that there can be an in group and the out group du jour.

I don’t think the Right and the RNC types are actually intelligent or conniving enough to do this, but if I wanted to destroy the Left, my attempt would look much like the focus on identity politics, word policing and outcast-creating that the modern Left has become.

That shit is damn effective for neutralizing a movement.

Dell’s latest 4K displays bring IPS goodness down to $600.

One of these will be the second monitor to my 5K iMac. A bit further away == don’t need 5K.

We are in the golden age of great displays.

Been waiting for decent fonts and easy readability on the desktop my whole life.

Come a long way from the 320×240 I first used.

You can tell nearly everyone who works on Linux software is an engineeritis infectee as most of the tools that are considered “best” are the most difficult to use, most difficult to set up, work in the most opaque ways, and are generally inimical to human understanding.

I can learn them. And I have learned some of them and will eventually learn them all. But they are all terribly designed, mistaking complexity for elegance, and difficulty of use for productivity.

Some examples are SELinux, iptables, systemd, and git.

All pieces of shit. Powerful pieces of shit, but pieces of shit nonetheless, that could have only been designed by “genius morons.”

As some commenter noted, “Usability is always an important design element. If multiple users are making the same mistake, then it is the software that is the problem, not the users. “

I’m tired of seeing things about the crazy demands that bands and artists make while touring.

Touring is hard. Being on the road ever day? Sleeping very little? Having to get up in front of screaming and occasionally hostile crowds no matter how you feel?

Yeah, that sounds hellish to me. I’d ask for some damn fried chicken in my dressing room, too.

Anyway, as mentioned in the comments, a lot of the time demands in artist’s rider sheets are to determine if the correct attention is being paid to other things – for instance, if the request for chocolate-covered burritos on silver platters embossed with the face of Nicolas Cage is ignored, chances are the sound or lighting will be screwed up too.

I saw the contention on a message board the other day that a good systems administrator should “be able to write quality software.”

This is of a piece with the idea I’ve seen all over lately that everyone in any field should be a programmer, should learn how to program.

While I agree that a better case can be made for a systems admin to learn some programming (as I know some myself), the idea that someone like me (or rather, more what I used to do) should be able to write quality software is rather absurd.

I can bash out a script (in Bash and several other environments) pretty well. I could probably cobble something together in Visual Studio in a few days if I really had to.

But it would not be “quality” by any measure.

Programming is its own discipline that takes time and study to master. Not even the best sys admins with mega IQs I’ve ever met (unless they were former programmers) could write quality software. And even the ones who had been programmers in the past – even excellent former programmers — would probably not have claimed to be able to write quality software any longer, as it takes like most things in life constant practice.

From what I’ve seen, it takes about 5-7 years to become a really decent programmer. Most programmers I’ve talked to agree with that.

So to do that – to be able to write quality software — I’d have to put my real career on hold, missing most advances in my actual field, to do something I’m not really interested in for no obvious benefit.

Agreed, some understanding of programming and (even more so) of computer science is necessary in my field. I’ve often had to (involuntarily) debug terrible code or examine code in 10+ languages to figure out how something works.

It happens.

But the idea that everyone should be a programmer is most often pushed by (surprise!) programmers.

It’s easy for them. Shouldn’t it be easy for everyone else? I mean, just code, right?

It’s a cockamamie, terrible idea. Even as system administration is moving to more automation and more scripting, the idea that I should be turning out “quality software” rather than doing my job is fucking ridiculous.

Only a programmer or others also prone to engineeritis could conceive of something so asinine.

I have written some pretty long and complicated scripts and will do so again. But I don’t really think of that as software, and that is not the sense in which this idiot was using those terms.

Even as being a system admin changes in the “cloud” era, it’ll have very little to do with coding and much more to do (as it always has) with understanding the interactions of multiple complex systems (duh) and configuring them in the best way possible to work for whatever business or other organization is making use of those systems.

While this might involve writing some “software” – that is to say, scripts – along the way, the primary goal of a sys admin should not be programming or writing “quality software,” but rather using whatever tools are best suited to achieving the above goals.

Doing anything else is a waste of time, and quite likely to get you fired for wasting said time.

Facebook really is taking over.

I ran a blog nearly a decade and a half ago. It was significantly worse than this one as the writing wasn’t nearly as good.

Though its quality was worse and its inappropriate rant content much higher, it had thousands of readers a day.

Really, I don’t care much about my readership numbers. If three or four people read my blog a day, that’s great with me. But it is interesting that pre-Facebook how some F-list blogger could pull in thousands of readers a day easily with no promotion and now a better blogger (me, but later) can hardly make it beyond a few dozen a day.

I’m not the only blog with this problem. Better bloggers experience the same thing.

Admittedly, just like I did back in the old days I still toss off most posts in five minutes or less.

There were fewer blogs then but also fewer readers. It appears then that most people have just disappeared into the limitless maw that is Facebook, never to return.

As I’ve written before, we had the internet but were too stupid to keep it.

This happens with many things that humanity touches.

Now that I’ve realized that systemd is just a way for Red Hat to take over control of Linux indirectly (since it’s impossible to unseat Torvalds at this time), all makes a lot more sense.

Guess it’s a good thing I’m getting that Red Hat cert.

I’m not mathematically minded, so I solved this instantly.

I can’t fathom why it’d be hard for anyone? Of course I’m not mathematically minded, so that’s I assume why it was easy.

If it had been mathematical, I would’ve never solved it. Not in a thousand years.

It seems most people’s attitudes to prostitution and sex work stem from if they have any visceral distaste for the work and/or sex. (Usually sex, I’d guess.)

It never seems to have a bit to do with the evidence, what the women (and some men) involved say, or what would actually help or even harm them.

I know, people hate anecdotes, but a close friend of mine when I was in the army had been a sex worker about a decade before I met her, and she was not the least regretful about what she’d done and in fact missed a lot of it – most specifically not having a 9-5 job.

She’d used the money she made to attend the University of Florida and to become a nurse practitioner. The last time I heard from her, she was making somewhere north of 100,000 a year, and that was back in the late 1990s.

She told me that she’d never been able to afford that degree without the work she did stripping and occasionally escorting.

So even though it shouldn’t be necessary, knowing someone pretty closely who had been a sex worker really served to make me re-evaluate a lot of the propaganda I’d heard about how evil it all was.

I know, most people who hate sex work and sex workers will talk about how all that’s just anecdotal, these women who like the work don’t exist because no one actually likes sex work, blah blah blah, but no one likes working at fucking McDonald’s either, or Wal-Mart, so why the obsession with shaming and belittling sex workers alone? Why not go ahead with your bad selves and shame Wal-Mart workers, too?

Oh yeah, it’s sex phobia. That’s all it is.

I can assure you that this person did exist. Her name was Mary and because I was getting into photography in a big way then (and I was training to be a photojournalist) I have hundreds of photos of her – because she was a willing and enthusiastic subject and also very lovely.

Thanks, Mary, wherever you are now for making me appear to be a better photographer than I was! You got me an A on many assignments in those classes.

For my next certification, I’m getting the Red Hat Certified Engineer.

Since I don’t routinely work in the Red Hat world unlike the other exams I took, it is going to take a lot more studying and time than it did for the others. Don’t get me wrong,  I’ve used Linux and even RHEL, Fedora and other Red Hat-derived Linuxes over the years, but only rarely have I used it at work.

I’ve thus been learning about the latest Linux technologies, and especially systemd.

Jesus Christ, what a fucking mess.

These ignoramuses – typical of modern developers and UX/UI people – have destroyed all usefulness, all sense and just made a worthless system for little gain other than the things they are interested in.

Systemd, in other words, is terrible.

It’s vastly more complicated and fiddly to do everything. It’s a nightmare to configure a runlevel, it’s difficult to add a new service, and in general it’s just insecure. It is awesomely terrible and utterly foul. Only (as I’ve started to call them lately) a typical tech “genius moron” could have come up with something so cretinous.

Typical developer arrogance, in other words.

It kind of reminds me of Microsoft’s PowerShell philosophy, which seems to be, “Why do in 50 characters what you could do in 500 characters?”

The Debian maintainer of systemd recently resigned from the systemd project because he was getting death threats. While I obviously don’t condone death threats, I must admit that learning about systemd sent me into a blind rage of fury at such abysmal technology being grafted into Linux.

While I can learn systemd just like I did PowerShell, it’s an awful trade-off that makes Linux less Linux-like and will end up wasting millions and millions of developer and system admin person-hours on its utter crappiness.

What the hell is this?

I don’t get it when people act tough, I don’t understand it. To me, when you act tough you’re just saying, “Hey! I’ve been though a lot of horrible stuff in my life. And I survived it, and now I’m ready to attack anybody, like a Pit Bull.” — I want a demeanor that says, “I’ve never been through anything at all, and I’m just a Pug, riding a decorative pillow. Where will I go today, who knows? But, I shall be carried.”

That’s great. That’s great that you want that. The real world doesn’t work like that. Some people experience trauma. Are raped. Are beaten. Are in a war. Or, like me, are bullied for years.

I don’t talk about it much because I don’t really like the pervasive whining about trigger warnings and all that on the Left. It mostly seems like a way to show off and and to punish other people, rather than something intended to actually help anyone. Ninety percent of the “trigger warning” BS is signaling and nothing else.

And I know enough has been written about the whole “trigger warning” insanity, but I am going to write some more in the context of the above asinine post.

The main problem with the concept is that everyone has really different perceptions and experiences and thus really different triggers.

I wouldn’t quite call what I am about to write about a trigger (in psychology, it is called “hypervigilance to threat”), but I was bullied a lot as a kid. I didn’t take it well and was a pretty fearless fighter so I used my fists a lot out of necessity.

As a result of this I was also ambushed a lot from behind by the kids I wouldn’t surrender to, or by those who wanted to get revenge on me. In the worst instance some little monster crept up behind me with a tree branch and bashed me in the back of the head with it.

To this day, I don’t like people being behind me. It’s taken me years to train myself not to reflexively punch someone if they sneak up where I can’t see them.

Relatedly, people notice that I don’t jump or startle when something that causes most people to jump happens. I am nearly impossible to scare. Since I was six or seven, I don’t think it has ever occurred.

It’s not that I am some hardass – this is also a result of bullying, and a bit of natural personality too I’d guess.

Reacting to bullies meant that they just tried to hurt you worse. I learned not to react, but to be ready to fight and wade in and get it done. Or lose, which I often did too. I don’t have a “fight or flight” response. I have a “fight and fight more” response.

This is not something I’m proud of. It’s just the result of how and where I grew up, being an utter misfit (in every sense of that word) where I was raised.

For years – years – I experienced and meted out violence daily. No exaggeration, from 4th to 9th grade I got into a fistfight at least once a week, sometimes in those periods as often as once every single day for months.

As I said, I am very stubborn.

Most of my reaction to having anyone sneak up behind me is due to the one aforementioned incident where a kid named Wayne who had bullied me for years finally got tired of me fighting back and not ceding power to him and slinked up behind me and struck me over the back of the head with a large tree branch.

It nearly knocked me out but I did manage to turn around and fight him to a draw before we were separated.

Nothing was done to him. I got in trouble for it, though, and experienced headaches for weeks afterward.

A large part of my utter mistrust of authority comes from how little my teachers or other authority figures did about this behavior. In fact, bullies are often lionized or coddled because they are seen as dominant and even adults are attracted to that power.

And by the way, I am not acting tough. I am tough. I had to be. I grew up in a shithole, and I survived it and made it out and am now a successful adult. That takes toughness among other things.

My upbringing in part at least made me what I am. But I had no choice about any of that. It all just happened.

I won’t apologize for what I had to do to survive.

So fuck you, Ron Fuches and anyone else who posts that. I wish we could have all had the pleasant life of gamboling about on foofy clouds, never experiencing anything harmful or traumatic.

But that just ain’t what happened. And I’m not about to apologize for it.