I know it is related to cultural traditions, poor training and the idiocy of US companies, but a system administrator or infrastructure engineer in India who is considered “senior” in that country would in most US organizations be considered — at best — capable of help desk tasks and little else.

Dealing with my Indian “peers” is an exercise in wanting to throw chairs at walls. They are not my peers. They have about as much knowledge as I did when I was six months in to my IT career.

This is roundly true. And no, I am not saying they are naturally stupid or some such. Just that most have not been trained well, have been promoted beyond their capabilities to save money and like most people will take the promotion when offered.

Still doesn’t help me a fucking bit when I have to explain someone who is supposed to be more knowledgeable than me and helping me how VMware HA fucking works.

Now something a bit more positive.

I don’t mind the Mac’s Finder and how it works, but it can be much-improved to work better for someone like me who needs more capabilities.

XtraFinder is a great tool that adds a lot of those needed features.

I dislike remembering keyboard shortcuts as if I attempted to memorize even the most common keyboard shortcuts of all the applications, operating systems and tools that I use (I used ten different operating systems today alone*: Server 2012 R2, Windows 7, SUSE Linux, Linux Mint 17.1, Ubuntu 14.10 with XFCE (not Xubuntu),  Server 2008 R2, AIX 5.0, ESXi 5.5, Windows 8.1 and MacOS), it’d be somewhere north of 3,000 items to store — brain areas that are better-suited to actually-useful information.

So I’d prefer not to memorize things that don’t actually make me smarter or better.

XtraFinder makes it so that I have to recall fewer keyboard shortcuts on the Mac and makes me faster at the same time, so I really like it.

*Some days I use more in a single day. Record is probably 15-17. Yep, actively using. What happens when you have seen a lot in IT.

Scientology and Fat Acceptance now vie for the stupidest, uh, mass movements out there.

Ribs showing when you lift your arms a sign of anorexia? Then nearly everyone in shape in all of history is anorexic. Hell, back when I could bench 250 pounds, run 12 miles without being tired at the end and do 130 push-ups without stopping I must’ve been just so anorexic* because my ribs (and abs) showed.

I hate the FA movement so much it’s not even funny because it’s so perfectly emblematic of everything that is completely fucked up in this country.

Oh, they aren’t the worst. No. That’d be our plutocrats and corporate overlords. But they take terrible to a very personal and unflinchingly idiotic level.

*Hint: You can’t do even one of those things and actually be actively anorexic.

When there is any article about military life not rife with inaccuracies, I tend to cite it.

This one is pretty good.

The only major item the journalists got wrong is that the trainees are not using Vietnam-era M-16s. The rifles pictured are M-16A2s, which were not used in Vietnam.

The model used in Vietnam had a smooth stock; the A2 has a ridged stock for better grip. Fired one of those myself plenty of times.

The regular Army did not adopt the M-16A2 until the late 1980s, and almost all of them have now been phased out in favor of the M-4 for regular-duty troops.

The red device on the end is an adapter so it can fire blanks properly. It’s called a blank firing adapter and allows the rifle to cycle correctly, prevents debris that even blanks throw out from hitting anyone and signals that the rifle in fact contains blanks.