Dilbert vu

Dilbert vu, n.
An illusory feeling of having previously experienced a situation parodied in a Dilbert comic strip

Every once in a while, but more often in the last eight or ten weeks, I think to myself that jwz had the right idea: throw in the towel and go do something more interesting. I read his essay a couple of times this evening while pre-composing this entry and recognized a lot more similarities than I thought I would.

What would I do? One, or both, of two options: music and the web. I think the former—specifically, producing and promoting concerts—would be the most enjoyable, and it certainly holds the most interest, but it’s the one in which I have no experience whatsoever. (Despite my attempts to make things otherwise.) The latter is something in which I have an interest and a modicum of talent in certain respects, but not enough of either (to my way of thinking, at least) to make a go of it on my own.

What’s gotten me pondering more than anything, I think, is that my friend Nancy recently completed her Ph.D. in a subject area that’s too complex to explain here, except to say that it will help save lives and improve the quality of life. The best result I can hope for from my current job is that it will make more people watch TeeVee longer. That’s not to say that either of the options above has the potential to have as wide-ranging and positive an effect as Nancy’s chosen profession; from what she’s told me about the technology she works with, applying the quality assurance experience I’ve gained in the last decade to some of her tools would be of much greater significance. Still, either choice would be a step in the right direction.

Considering options for the future despite there being no real chance of doing anything to change the status quo. Yup, that’s Dilbert vu.

Time keeps ticking… faster?

Does anyone know why otherwise-sane Windows boxes—four separate installs of 2000 and XP across machines from different vendors—would advance their clocks by up to 30 seconds every 4-5 minutes? This doesn’t happen all of the time, only when they’re running builds; when the boxes are idle their clocks don’t diverge from NTP by more than a fraction of a second each day. It’s really starting to tick me off, since Tinderbox relies on its build providers having accurate time and complains loudly when someone’s out of sync. (While I was composing this post I received five e-mail notifications of unsynchronized updates.)

None of the Linux or Solaris tinderbox builders under similar load have this problem, so it’s got to be a problem with Windows itself. Maybe there’s a magic registry incantation to fix it… anyone? Please?

Microformat microupdate

I’ve just updated the Robots Exclusion Profile on the brand-spanking-new microformats.org site. (I didn’t even need to move it myself, because a nice guy by the name of Ryan King converted it to Wikipedia for me… thanks Ryan!) There’s nothing earth-shattering about the revision, just some clarifications on precedence with respect to other microformats.

I’ve also started a mostly-private-use microformat for the <cite/> element, which Joe Clark has explained as being meant to mark up titles (of books, films, plays, television programs, court cases, possibly even ships) and words and phrases quoted for themselves. (The microformat extends Clark’s definition to include names.) I’ve been using the classes for a long time, probably starting back in November 2002, but only now can I actually specify what it is they mean.

Oh, and unrelated to microformats: On Sunday I marked ten years at my job. It’s been with four different incarnations of the company, mind you—Cableshare, Interactive Channel Technologies, Liberate, and now TVWorks—but I’ve been in the same office with the same people and the same manager (who hired me in the first place) for the entire time so I think it counts.

I’m so tired

For quite a while I’ve read a blog by a certain prominent member of the Mozilla Foundation. As well as discussing Mozilla development it covers several other topics that are of interest to me, including things like space exploration. In the past six months, however, I’ve found that the posts about Mozilla have all fallen into two categories: arrogant, churlish cheerleading (with snide comments about other browsers) and spreading FUD (with a lot more mean-spiritedness). Both are getting really tiresome, and it’s sad to see a high-signal blog self-destruct in an extended series of almost content-free posts. I don’t have a lot of use for propaganda at the best of times, and the degeneration of this individual’s site makes me want to do nothing more than switch to something managed by people with a lot less zombified glaze over their eyes.

Perhaps I’ll just drop the site from my aggregator and see if my attitude changes. I do like using and developing (as much as I can, anyway) for Firefox and Thunderbird, I just can’t stand the noise any longer.

Baton? We don’ need no steenkin’ baton!

Total volume of music files on my computer
Which one? 6.2GB/1248 files on the Mac (and hence my iPod and my Myth box via NFS); 1.3GB/329 files on my workstation; 34GB/5068 files on my other Linux box, for a total of 41.5GB/6645 files. Of those, about 40 are in Ogg Vorbis format.
The last CD I bought
Comic Strip by Serge Gainsbourg
Song playing right now
Physically, none. Singing in my head, Lukey (live) by Great Big Sea.
Five songs I listen to a lot, or mean a lot to me

Only five? Wow, this is tough:

Five people to whom I’m passing the baton

In alphabetical order:

500 articles, 5000 fans

Image showing unread post counts in my weblog subscription list

As I alluded to earlier, this evening I’m catching up on the more than 500 weblog posts that have gone unread in my aggregator. Not all are totally unseen—there are probably forty that I’ve marked unread because I want to follow up on them for one reason or another—but I’m still way, way behind.

Since it’s become a music night, though, I’ll highlight the blog that’s got the most articles flagged for future reference: scottandrew.com: lo-fi acoustic pop superhero! Scott’s always interesting and entertaining, and he makes good music too; count me among his 5000 Fans. (Go read that article too, particularly if you want to help out your favourite musicians.)