I love Delta and Delta loves me
A storm canceled my Atlanta flight while I sat in Charlotte grooving to Muse, blissfully unaware. Then I got paged, rebooked onto an earlier flight, and arrived on time anyway. I love Delta. Most of the time.
Curtis Jones
Business Suckage
I have a laptop full of my life's work and I want whole-disk encryption. PGP can't keep up with OS X releases, CheckPoint's site thwarts every attempt to pay them, and WinMagic won't take my gmail address. How is our economy still standing?
VPN
I spent all night trying to get Snowy Leopard's built-in Cisco IPSec VPN to talk to my new RV042 router, only to find their supported auth modes don't overlap at all. IPSecuritas, OpenVPN, Openswan: pick your poison. I'm sick of it for tonight.
If you knew him like I do....
A Denver officer was found not guilty of excessive force despite video of him slamming a cyclist's face into the ground. But the part that got me was the commenter who argued that knowing the man personally somehow proves his innocence.
A Moral Obligation
I ordered a Dell to run Linux on, and it's arriving with an unwanted copy of Windows. Do I destroy the disc, pass it off to someone with a taste for sullying computers, or claw a refund out of Dell? Haven't decided.
What a Manager Says vs What a Manager Means
On the "team player" line: why must I have an emotional attachment to a 9-to-5? Pay me like a millionaire athlete and we'll talk. A short translation guide for what managers say versus what they actually mean.
Managing Programmers
The single best summary I've found of the peculiarities of managing IT people, so good it reads like my own rants quoted back at me. Read "programmer" wherever it says "geek" and it lands even harder.
Click to Flash
ClickToFlash might be my favorite browser plugin ever, though admittedly the competition is nonexistent since it's the only one I use. Embedded Flash now waits for a click. Now I just need plugins to stop animated gifs and autoplaying audio.
Vanity
I registered my new car and got my first vanity plate. The answer to which one should be obvious. Picture to come, "within ninety days."
Where Is Curtis
Ahead of my Grand Canyon and Collegiate Range trips, I dusted off some XSLT books and rebuilt whereiscurtis.com: a Perl script pulling Spot locations from IMAP into XML, SFTP uploads, and an embedded Google Map. The XSLT took freakin' forever.