8-bit Dr. Horrible
I adore [Joss Whedon's Dr. Horrible Sing Along Blog](http://www.drhorrible.com/).
I also adore 8-bit styled games and music. It must be the nostalgia of it.
So when [Shaun Inman](http://shauninman.com) [links](http://twitter.com/shauninman/status/9581694510) to an [8-bit cover of Dr. Horrible songs](http://8bitcollective.com/members/Doctor+Octoroc/), I just had to [share](http://www.doctoroctoroc.com/video-game-inspired-music/8-bit-dr-horrible-tribute/).
The Lo-Fi Manifesto
A great read
Too many software programs create “roach motels” for content and information: the data checks in (via File > Import), but it never checks out.
This is inline with my recent thinking. Particularly after using the “at first glance, awesome, but after the demo expires, not so much” Personal Brain.
Satan Responds to Pat Robertson.
Dear Pat Robertson,
I know that you know that all press is good press, so I appreciate the shout-out. And you make God look like a big mean bully who kicks people when they are down, so Im all over that action. But when you say that Haiti has made a pact with me, it is totally humiliating.
I may be evil incarnate, but Im no welcher. The way you put it, making a deal with me leaves folks desperate and impoverished. Sure, in the afterlife, but when I strike bargains with people, they first get something here on earth — glamour, beauty, talent, wealth, fame, glory, a golden fiddle.
Those Haitians have nothing, and I mean nothing. And that was before the earthquake. Havent you seen “Crossroads”? Or “Damn Yankees”? If I had a thing going with Haiti, thered be lots of banks, skyscrapers, SUVs, exclusive night clubs, Botox — that kind of thing. An 80 percent poverty rate is so not my style. Nothing against it — Im just saying: Not how I roll. Youre doing great work, Pat, and I dont want to clip your wings — just, come on, youre making me look bad. And not the good kind of bad.
Keep blaming God. Thats working. But leave me out of it, please. Or we may need to renegotiate your own contract.
Best,
Satan
via Letter of the day: Haiti suffers, and Robertson sees the hand of Satan | StarTribune.com. from pierre via lancearmstrong
Reading – Why we use cookbooks
For Esther:
The recipe is a blueprint but also a red herring, a way to do something and a false summing up of a living process that can be handed on only by experience, a knack posing as a knowledge. We say “What’s the recipe?” when we mean “How do you do it?” And though we want the answer to be “Like this!” the honest answer is “Be me!” “What’s the recipe?” you ask the weary pro chef, and he gives you a weary-pro-chef look, since the recipe is the totality of the activity, the real work. The recipe is to spend your life cooking.
Reading - Why we use cookbooks : The New Yorker.
Elmo Ricky Gervais Lullaby
Don’t Be A Hero
Heroes are damaging to a team because they become a crutch. As soon as you have someone who’s always willing to work at all hours, the motivation from the rest of the team to produce reliable, trouble-free software drops. The hero is a human patch. Sure, you might sit around talking about how reliability is a priority, but in the back of your mind you know that the hero will be there to fix what doesn’t work.
Good bye Saxo Bank, Hello Sungard
Yes, cycling sponsors change all of the time. In recent years, it feels like sponsors are changing very quickly. Blame it on the global economy, blame it on flighty sponsors, but it feels like most “first-name” The sponsor who has first billing have been changing every year.
Team Saxo Bank is leaving pro cycling, handing over the reigns to Sungard.
Here is the thing, I use a Sungard product at work. For the love of the gods, I hope that their team support is better than their technical support, if not welcome to last place in the UCI rankings, my friends.
Best decade ever
On the first day of 2010, I woke up thinking about how awesome the previous decade was. It is not often that we can reflect back on an entire decade, but 1999 to 2009 was a significant time for me.
I met my future wife, went to prom, travelled around Europe and Russia, finished high school, moved back to the United States, graduated college, moved to Virginia, got my first post-school job, moved into my first apartment, married my wife, visited San Francisco, moved into my first house, rode across Wisconsin, lost my father-in-law, changed jobs a couple of times, started working in IT, bought my own domain, bought my first car on my own, went to my first professional conference, found a new religion, had a babynot me personally…, got pregnant again, lost my grandfather and learned more about life because of all of this.
I can honestly say it was the best decade ever.
And I hope each decade continues to be better than the previous.
USAjobs.gov: good enough for government work
As an employee in the Virginia state government system, my coworkers and I bandy about the phrase “Good enough for government work”, which is essentially a euphemism for how we do not want to work any harder on a project, or that perfection is eluding us. Remember that phrase: “Good enough for government work.”
Every 6 months, I conduct a fairly comprehensive overview of the job market, local private industry as well as state and federal job opportunities. In my latest scan, I have decided that USAjobs.gov is completely broken. In fact all federal government job application systems are broken.
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Search / Meta data = keyword-bombing
I understand that there are multiple locations for the same job classification, but these keyword-bombed listings destroy the integrity of searches. What is to stop a job lister from simply copying their entire operation’s locations and pasting them into the field? Why can’t each job be broken out in the USAjob.gov system and then be routed to the same person without them having to create and manage multiple job listings? This has to possible to do in code.
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Writing for the Web 101
I realize that the “duties” and “qualifications and evaluation” sections are written and wordsmithed by faceless, nameless bureaucrats, but “Important information for applicants with family members with special medical or educational needs” is weird qualification.
What am I actually going to do? What do I need to know to get the job? Also, half of the duties are taken up notes about how the current / past system is being phased out and click a link to a new DOD regulation to read more. Yeah… duties vs. regulations.. See NOTE. Really is that a duty?
Also, has no one ever thought that people apply to jobs in the government may not know all of the acronyms that any particular organization might use? How many directives and § sections need to be referenced before one applies to a job? Can’t this be put on its own tab, or at the very least standardized? Also, <acronym>
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The little things that kill
This is not a criticism of USAjobs.gov, but of nearly every other system that I came across today.
- If you are going to have embedded frames, which all of them do, make sure you have your SSL certificates sorted. I should not have Chrome telling me that your application system doesn’t have a proper certificate and then shows me the “brick red frame of doom”.I was instructed: click this link, then scroll down, search for this term and then scroll down again, then click the link… and this is what I got.
- If you are going to hold me accountable for spelling, then make sure your system is effing bullet proof. Make sure there is not a single typo, on a single page… anywhere… ever.
- Along similar lines — Do not confuse people by telling them that an acceptable file format to upload their resume as GIM. It is a GIF. The federal agency that made that mistake spends more than $2.415 billion in 2006, FYI. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dea
All of these things are a good enough for the phrase “good enough for government work”, but there may be a silver lining.
The Million Dollar idea
I took a look at the application process on a few jobs I found interesting. This process was so frustrating that I am almost completely turned off from ever applying to jobs in specific federal agencies or military branches.
So here is the big idea: All of these jobs have the exact same requirements: Name. DOB. Previous employment. USAjobs.gov lets you input a “resume”. Why isn’t every one who lists a job required to use the USAjobs.gov application system?
If everyone in the government, literally everyone, from the State Department to the Department of the Interior to the FBI to the Navy all had to use their same system,
do you know how much money that could save?
Don’t get me started about how stupid the Navy’s civilian job application system is. Who in their right mind designs a system that required me the job applicant to, before filling out the important information, select my pay band and pay system classification. I don’t know, hmm, shouldn’t they pick that?
I know there have been a fair number of developers who have made a pretty good system in-house, I know they did their darnedest.
Besides those idiots who built the Navy’s system—that was a contracted, low-bid cock up.
And I know there are plenty of third-party people who are supposed to know now what they are doing in creating an application system.
On a side note, have you ever tried to apply for a job with the DEA—talk about an outsourced nightmare of an application. Slick on the surface, but horrible to use.
Back to my point, the million dollar idea: Build a common system and centralize. There is no single federal government job application requires such unique detail that can’t be left to a later portion of the job application process.
This is literally a million dollar idea, or more likely a billion dollar idea.
Update: Added some links to my issues and corrected the DEA’s budget… I was shy a few zeros.
Mario music subculture
After my last post, I was curious what other music has been made with Automatic Mario Lunar Magic or other 16-bit creations. Most of the modded levels are covers of Japanese Pop / Anime songs, but you can get the general gist of how the “song writing” works.
組曲『ニコニコ動画』 グランドフィナーレ 全自動マリオVer
These modded levels are super cool, but the songs aren’t quite my thing. Mario Paint Composer has been used to cover some classic Western songs.
Don’t Stop Believin’ By Journey on Mario Paint Composer
Pop Songs
Soundtracks




