And everything's gonna be alright

Many times in my IT career I've heard people relate their experience with CA. It generally revolved around the battle to get away from their product and move to a competing product that they ended up being much happier with. More often than not, the competitor would then be bought by CA and the superior product desupported and left to die while current users of the product were pushed to move to CA's own product instead.

Back when we were evaluating scheduling tools, CA7 was one of the competitors, but the combination of features and the barely restrained hostility of those people with CA experience caused the agency to choose Cybermation. And so now several million dollars and almost two years later, we are ready to implement it. And last week CA announced they are buying Cybermation.

The best part, to me, is that one of the guys with CA experience said "It doesn't matter, whatever we buy will be bought and killed by CA anyway."

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I'm drowning from too much stuff

've noticed from beta testers (in particular Microsoft cheerleader Paul Thurrot) how disappointed they are with Windows Vista. The primary complaint is that all the great features MS has been touting for over three years are either not there or greatly diminished. Things like WinFS and a completely rewritten .Net based OS which were announced early to discourage consumers and companies from moving to Linux or OS X are gone. The security model, intended to address the truly abysmal security record, is more of an impediment than anything. The on again off again attempts to update IE have alienated even some of the most devout fanboys. I only pay attention to this because I'm sure I'll eventually have to use Vista at work.

While I was reading Thurrot's latest and his unfavorable comparisons of Vista to OS X something dawned on me. Apple started the move to Intel with "you cannot run Intel OS X on anything other than an Apple brand Intel box, and we won't help you run Windows on our machines either." They've recently reversed course on the first of those. I suspect that *if* the public reaction to Vista once it is released is anything like that of the beta testers,there might be an interesting "Oh, one more thing" at MacWorld next year...

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Son, be a dentist

Yesterday I went to the dentist. A month ago we bought Sonicare brushes to replace our old Braun ones that never really were particularly good. That was the fourth easiest dental visit I've ever had. The first three were a dentist in L.A. who did the gentlest cleanings I've ever had. Unfortunately, I think it's because she didn't do a particularly thorough job.

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She wants what she wants

The IT manager for the government side is a very outspoken person. I find her directness to be refreshing. A few choice quotes.

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Well I'm not dumb but I can't understand

We've had massive problems with mapping views in RAD 6 (and judging by the support forums we're in the majority). The following over the cubes conversation just occured.

bleha: I got a mapping view to open in the Coruscant project, now I'll try Hoth.
rev: That's not going to work
bobbert: hey now
rev: I'm just basing that on historical data Nothing related to the Hoth project EVER works.
bleha: And it didn't.

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I guess I'll be alright

Griz pointed me to a cool feature of Wikipedia: enter the month and date of your birth and find out everything of significance that happened on that date in history. So I was checking it out, nothing much seemed to have happened, but a few cool little things like the first internet connection. After a few minutes it struck me that I wasn't seeing things that I knew happened. I scrolled back up to the top and said to myself "What the hell is wrong with me? My birthday isn't June 6th..."

Always remember when ranting about all the idiots in the world: Sometimes you're the idiot.

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Live from the studio

Hey look, yet *another* transitional fossil.

Some of the new podcasts I've been sampling:

Scrubs podcast
This is possibly the most unlistenable podcast I've come across in some time. The audio level is very low, but more fundamentally each episode is an audio commentary track to go with a particular episode of the show. Unless you are watching the show while listening to the podcast (or have total recall) then it's meaningless. There are long stretches of silence interspersed with comments about things you cannot see or hear. Very very strange.

Tom Leykis
I used to love his show when I lived in L.A. Really the only thing I could listen to aside from KCRW because the only talk radio in the region in the early 90's was of the Rush Limbaugh variety. I don't understand why people think L.A. is so liberal, but then most people who think that have never lived there. Tom has become a bitter and pompous ass, unfortunately.

Real Time with Bill Maher
I rarely have time to watch the show, so it generally falls off tivo before I get to it. I miss the visual gags, but they podcast the whole show so I at least get that much. I keep wanting to call him Phil, however. I had an algebra teacher in high school named Phil Maher and he was one of the coolest teachers I ever had.

Penn Radio
CBS/FreeFM finally came to their senses and are doing the full show as a podcast again instead of just highlights. This is an awesome show, very libertarian and science focused with a light hearted and self effacing delivery.

Wall Street Journal Report
Excellent business news. I've always enjoyed WSJ's business coverage and forecasting, the podcast is well produced and dedicates each episode to a single topic. This allows them to give sufficient coverage to the subject rather than do a mediocre job covering several of them in one episode.

Point of Inquiry
Excellent radio show from the Center for Inquiry. In depth science coverage and they always get on people with differing points of view to be sure they are being fair to the topic. The host does tend to get aggressive in follow up questions with guests who answer evasively, which is nice for a change.

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I've been told that it could have been bleue cheese

griz: Public Transit is still on strike, but there are a few buses running. And wouldn't you know it, one of them is on fire.
rev: The obvious question, of course, is "Yea, but is it on time?"

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I nearly do

Just noodling around last night I hit a chord and it struck me "Hey, that's the opening to that one song by Snow Patrol." I messed around a bit more and was fairly sure I hade the intro and verse structure, then went online after the boo went to bed and verified it and picked up the chorus. I greatly enjoy figuring things out like that.

This morning I put it all together and played along with the song. I've got the first 2 bars of the outro guitar solo figured out as well. I need to play more.

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Back to the heavyweight jams

Or more precisely, back the heavy weights. I largely blew off the first quarter. Today I went back and did a full circuit of lower body and I expect to be in tremendous pain tomorrow. I reduced the weight by 10% from what I was doing back in December to ease back into it.

The winds helped on the way over to the gym, but made it that much harder to walk back. My goal is to get to 110% of the weight I was doing in December by the end of the month, which I think is pretty realistic.

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Everybody plays the fool

was going to do an elaborate April Fool prank. I had planned to go through prnewswire or one of the other second tier news services and get a wire story published about how James Randi had tested Sylvia Brown and he confirmed that she was indeed psychic. I had a whole set of quotes about how "I still don't believe that I believe it. I'm in shock" etc etc. But then I realized that Brown and her ilk would simply point to that press release as proof of their authenticity and ignore (lie about) the fact that it was a joke.

Which is too bad, it would've been a great prank.

I've been accused (as most skeptics are) of being as dogmatic in my non-belief in the supernatural as those who believe wholeheartedly in pyschics or astrology and so on and so forth. As Penn says "I would LOVE to be proven wrong, that would be so cool." I learn more from being wrong than being right, and it would indeed be very cool. But I don't think it's particularly likely.

I am not dogmatic at all. I simply require some reasonable amount of evidence to believe anything at all. Carl Sagan once noted that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof". I've yet to see any 'supernatural' phenomenon that could not be more easily explained by something entirely mundane. More often it's willful misinterpretation or outright fabrication. See also: Occam's Razor.

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