Hopeless Geek

Over IM:

Navy: only the smartest

Marines: only the toughest

Air Force: only the shortest

Army: only the graduates (we’ll work with you on that)

The end of this election ran like the end of a really good movie, only it was real. Think about it:

A black community organizer from Chicago decides to run for state office to make the changes he can’t on the ground. He wins and spends some time in office getting to know the system and making himself known. After some time, he runs for the Senate and wins. Again, he makes friends and makes himself known.

Then he gives one unlikely speech at the DNC and the world starts to really pay attention to him. The next election cycle, on a cold Chicago morning, he stands before a small crowd and announces his candidacy for president. He runs a tough race against all manner of qualified people, narrowing it down to the biggest name in the party as his opponent. Through persistence, an even tone, and the support of the people he manages to win the nomination, and eventually the support of that opponent.

On to the main race, the other side chose a man that riles up the crazy people, the religious people, the gun people, and the intolerant people. The opponent pulls out all the stops, stoops to all the lows in an attempt to undermine Our Hero’s support. He presses on, talking about hope and change, about the future.

The days before the election, the polls are close and there’s the looming threat of the old, crazy man winning. People showed up in epic numbers across America to vote early and the numbers look good. Then he gets a call: his grandmother is dying. He leaves the campaign in its final moments to travel to her and be at her side one last time. She dies the day before she could see the election, but she managed to get her vote in!

The day of the election. People are still showing up in numbers that amaze the media. Everyone is shocked that the turnout is this large, but the exit polls are wonky. Some show Obama, some have surprising McCain numbers. It’s iffy. Then the actual counts start to roll in, and Obama wins Ohio and Pennsylvania. He’s won.

I’m looking for some coders at the day job. Contractors or contract-to-hire or direct hire. Don’t care at this point; I just need warm bodies willing to complete backed-up tasks.

Contact us if you can do any of the following:

• Mac Cocoa development
• iPhone Cocoa development
• Python/Django development
• Amazon EC2/S3 sysadmin (especially if you are familiar with dynamic load balancing with this service, such as with Scalr)
• Icons/artwork in the Mac/iPhone style (and you have free time right now and can turn something around within weeks, not months)
• UI/workflow design for iPhone (please have some experience and not “my friends say I have a knack for it”)

Rates negotiable, but you won’t be buying a Mercedes off of it. We’re not that kind of start-up. More like “hey, we can get the blue boxes of macaroni and cheese this month¹!”

Bonus points for being able to show up once a week in North Austin, but that’s really not a big deal; telecommuting/distance work is perfectly fine. Also, you need not have an iPhone or Touch to do iPhone development. Helpful, yes, but not required. Just know what you’re doing and test in the simulator.

¹ Kidding. Mostly.

Stream Energy’s automated billing system is a pain in the ass. For various reasons, including price, I switched away from Stream when my contract was up. I scheduled the move for the exact day the contract was finished. So, of course, their automated system fines me $250 because someone used a <= rather than a < somewhere.

I tried calling them when I discovered it, but the hold time was 45 minutes. I tried another day and it was 25. Now I’m trying again and it’s been 33 minutes out of a guestimated “38 minute” wait from the start of the call.

The hold music is Sting’s “Brand New Day” on repeat. Not the album, the song. Just the one song. It’s a shame, I used to like this song.

The fun part is that the hold message keeps saying that there’s an option to have the system call me back when my place in the queue is ready, but it never actually offers this service. The one time it did, the very first time I called, it called me back on time and then dropped the call on me. I suppose it’s for the best that it didn’t offer it.

Well, 40 minutes in I get to talk to someone and try to explain the situation and she’s a little flummoxed and puts me on hold to review everything. She came back and verified that it was a mistake and put in to have the fee removed. I still have to follow up to make sure that it happens, though. Bleck.

Seriously, why have systems that automatically charge you like this and not audit them in some fashion to avoid mistakes like this? This is a pretty simple one.

Though, Direct Energy isn’t much better. They told me the first bill was going to be two months’ worth of charges and that I could pre-pay a standard month on the website to prepare for the first bill, so I logged in and put some money towards it. Now I have a $100 credit on the account … and the actual bill has posted.

I’ll get it out of the way early on: I’m pro-life. I’m not just “standard” pro-life, I’m the crazy kind that starts with the zygote and ends when worms have had their fill of your fleshy container. Yep, I’m That Guy™. Don’t bother trying to argue with me, either. I’ve made the decision long ago and I’m sticking with it. I’ve thought about it, I’ve pondered it long and hard, and I’m of the opinion that life is immeasurably valuable and it’s not something we can ethically take from another without an extremely good reason (ie. protecting my own life).

And yet, I voted for Barack Obama.

Why? Abortion and euthanasia are not an issue in this election at all. Consider, Bush is as overtly pro-life as they come and all he managed to legislate was a ban on a specific method of carrying out a partial-birth abortion. He didn’t and couldn’t get the actual act of a PBA outlawed, he could only get one method of it outlawed. Previously, Clinton had signed a ban on the act of PBAs but a federal court struck it down. Bush had no way of getting around that, so those involved chose to attack one of the procedures instead.

Eight years in office with both a Republican and Democratic Congress and that’s all the movement on the issue that happened. That’s it. Look at what we had to endure as a society to make that small move. Look at the lives we lost compared to those that could be saved by that measure. No one who is remotely pro-life can argue that it was in any way worth it.

The best statistics I can find show 17K PBAs a year in the US, but 190K lives lost (US, allies, and Iraqi) during the Iraq fiasco. As the Bush ban can’t stop PBAs completely, we can’t even say the number of PBAs will go down as a result of this one movement on the issue. Yet, people are still dying overseas in numbers that dwarf those from this issue.

Pro-life is all life. Adults count, too. This war is the price we’re paying for people voting solely on this issue.

Hubble’s operators created a picture (started in late 2003 and finished in early 2004) by repeatedly exposing a seemingly-black point in space about the side of a grain of sand. They took 800 exposures over the course of 400 orbits from September ’03 to January ’04. The resulting image is called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field.

A funny thing happened with this photo: there was something there. In that speck of blackness, that speck of nothing in the expanse of space that envelops us, Hubble took a picture of something when given enough time to do it. It turns out that there are galaxies in that void. In fact, in that tiny speck of space, Hubble found ten thousand galaxies.