Blackmoor Vituperative

A letter I sent this morning to the governor and my state representatibes:

It has come to my attention that Hamilton Beach, which is headquartered in Richmond, practices blatant employment discrimination.

In their listing for an opening for IS Windows/Storage Administrator (posted on their web site 2009-08-09), they state:

“We do not consider candidates who use tobacco products.”

I do not use tobacco products myself, but I strongly believe that no employer has the right to ask about an applicant’s off-hours activities or to exclude them from consideration for legal, private, off-hours behavior. We are already subjected to the humiliation of so-called “drug testing” by nearly every potential employer — must we now submit to even more invasions of our privacy for the privilege of earning an honest living?

Please introduce legislation which makes ALL invasions of an applicant’s privacy by a potential employer illegal.

As if “drug testing” applicants was not bad enough…

I liked “Lady Gaga” better when she was called “Dale Bozzio“.

We all learned in grade school that the odd root of a negative number is also negative. The cube root of -8 is -2, for example.

Mathematicians will tell you that -8 has two more roots, but these are not “real” numbers, and unless you are a mathematician, you will never need to know what they are. If you are a real person using real numbers, the answer you want is -2.

Unfortunately, if you try to find the odd root of a negative number in OpenOffice Calc, it returns an error, because of a bug which has been present in OpenOffice since its creation: it uses logarithms to determine the root, which is perfectly fine, but it does not take into account the sign of the base, which is the bug.

This is a ridiculously easy to fix bug, and it mystifies me that the OpenOffice folks have let it stay broken for so long. However, there is a workaround:

SIGN(A1)*(ABS(A1)^(1/3))

What this does is find the cube root of the absolute value, and then applies the sign of the base against the result. Be careful with your parentheses.

I have been wanting to make a music video using World Of Warcraft for a long time. I purchased a program called FRAPS to do the image capture, and started sketching out a storyboard.

Then I saw this: I’m So Sick, a machinima by Baron Soosdon.

I am blown away… and humbled. There is no way I could even approach something like this.

If you get sound and no video, you may need to install come codecs.

Check out these samples of French animation.

RiffTrax is going to be broadcast “live” to movie theatres across the country on August 20. Locally, it is playing in Glen Allen, VA. Grab those tickets now! I am sure it will sell out!

Well, actually, I think my sweetie and I will probably be the only two people in the theatre. But we will be there!

This one night event will be broadcast LIVE out of the Belcourt Theater in Nashville, TN into your local movie theater. Don’t miss an exciting evening of LIVE riffing, zombies, aliens, cheesy performances, wisecracks, laughable special effects and more!

I am looking for someone who wants to try World Of Warcraft. If I refer a friend and they pay for two months of the game, I get a nifty zebra for my character to ride. And who doesn’t want a zebra?

So if you are interested in a free trial of World Of Warcraft, please let me know and I will email you the code. (It has to be a new account, not an old or inactive account.)

John Pierce has an interesting article on the Violence Policy Center (VPC) “study” which purports to link concealed-carry permit holders to the deaths of law-abiding people and police officers: Lies, damn lies, and VPC statistics.

Tech Republic has a pretty good five-minute introduction to using metrics for IT projects. This is interesting timing: I was just having a conversation about this at lunch yesterday.

Technology, like bureaucracy, is not an end in itself: it is a means to an end, and it has value only as much as it aids in achieving that end. If it doesn’t make the business more efficient or somehow create value for the business, then IT is a drain: a “cost center” in project management lingo. Technology should not be a parasite: technology’s job is to make the business better able to deliver its products or services and make its customers happier.

Too many people don’t get this. People who work in IT too often fail to see their own role in the context of the businesses’ needs, and people who aren’t in IT have an unfortunate tendency to see IT as something unrelated to them, and which only siphons money away from more important things. Sometimes it is even worse, and you have people who do not understand technology or its role in the businesses’ strategic objectives making decisions on what resources will be made available to IT and how it will be spent. This is like someone who never never leaves her house making the decision for what cars the employees will drive.

The Tech Republic video is based on a Forrester Research white paper, “Five essential metrics for managing IT“. Those five essential metrics, according to Forrester, are:

1. Align IT investments with strategic themes
2. Calculate cumulative value of IT investments
3. Show IT spend ratio — new versus maintenance
4. Measure customer satisfaction
5. Use a scorecard for operational health

The gist of this is that you have link IT projects and expenditures to clearly defined results which are relevant to the business. If you can’t measure the success or failure of an IT project, and if you can’t demonstrate that the project somehow improves the businesses’ ability to achieve its goals, then how can you make a plausible case for funding it?

I am so tired of seeing IT professionals who have to plead to have access to web sites they need to do their jobs. I am so tired of someone responsible for completing a multi-million dollar project not even able to change the screen resolution on their desktop because the people in charge of “IT security” have locked it down. And heavens forbid that you install any utility not on the “approved software” list, whether or not you actually need it to do your job.

The one thing no one seems to get, and one thing which causes many of the headaches for IT professionals, is that a skilled professional should be responsible for her tools.

When you take your car to a garage, do you demand that they use a specific brand of wrench? When an electrician comes to your house, do you demand they have a specific brand of voltmeter? Do you search their toolbox, and chastise them if they have a MP3 player or a DVD in there?

Of course you don’t.

The current way security is managed in every organization I have seen in the past 15 years is based on the flawed premise that the professional whom we trust to administer and manage multimillion dollar projects can’t be trusted to select and maintain her own workstation.

This is ridiculous.

IT professionals should not have their software selection restricted (or worse, chosen for them). IT professionals should not have their Internet access filtered or obstructed (for many IT professionals, Internet access is the #1 tool in their toolbox).

“Does she get the job done safely, legally, on time, and under budget?” That is the question that should be asked of any IT professional. That question has a yes or no answer, and it has nothing to do with web filtering or “nailing down” her workstation so she can’t install “unapproved” software.

Hold IT professionals accountable, by all means, but do not pre-emptively cripple their ability to do their jobs. You hired them to be experts: let the expert choose and care for her tools, like any other skilled expert does.