To my homies at the LHC

The first day of snowboarding season was just a couple of days ago. We had a great time, remembered how to actually do it. I even managed to successfully catch some air off of a couple of kickers without killing myself. I would say that it was a successful first day.

One of the things that I remembered is that, when snowboarding, to speed up you have to do less. In other words, if you want to go faster, you have to relax your body more, and just let the board do what the board does. In other words, a snowboarder's natural state (rest state) is constant acceleration.

My question is, does that make snowboarders really, really big tachyons?

All dogs go to Propits

I love my dog. He's the first dog that I've had that is just an unabashed dog. A lot of pets that I've known have basically been human minds, trapped in four-legged bodies, but not Max. Max is just a big, fluffy, slobbery dumb dog. And I love him for it.

The great thing about Max is that he has two modes: asleep and happy. Everything makes him happy, and he loves to show it. He finds his favorite tennis ball and just freaks out. When you come home, he's all tail-wags and licks. He's just always happy, and never afraid to show it. He gets real, authentic pleasure from just acknowledging that something makes him happy, and I think that, on the whole, it makes his life better.

We want everyone's lives to be more like Max's (maybe without eating kibble every day). Happy for being happy. Glad to acknowledge that their life was made better by something that they ran into online. Wouldn't it be cool to go through your life excited to see everything? Excited to let them know? I think it would. That's why we built Propits.

Our very first DDOS

It's official. We've made it! We had our very first script-kiddy searching for exploits followed by a distributed denial of service! Go us!

Nothing is damaged. The would-be attackers are a bunch of ninnies. No data is compromised, etc. About the only thing that it means is that the site is down for a bit while our provider sorts it out.

To re-iterate, there are two pieces of good news. 1) We are big enough for jealous minds to want to put us down, and 2) They are just as incompetent as they are jealous.

Update: We are back online.

Counting down the minutes

There's a funny thing that happens in modern business. People show up for work at earlier and earlier hours every year. They stay later and later. And larger and larger portions of time spent at work is time spent staring at the clock, counting down until they can finally leave.

Of course, sitting around not doing work, waiting for you chance to go home, decreases productivity. So what do the companies do? Require people to stay even longer, or work from home in their off-hours (and if you work for salary, you don't get extra pay for that).

What. The. Hell.

How did it come to this? We all realize that the boss is one dude, right? I mean, he can't take all of us! Okay, so that's a bit extremist, but the idea still applies. If you put in your 8 hours and go home, why should you be afraid of losing your job? If things get so bad that you want to scream, and so instead of screaming you pick up and take the afternoon for yourself, why is that such a bad thing? Would your boss really prefer that you sit and boil and stew in your anger until you blow up at someone, or give yourself cancer?

The other day my boss said he wanted me to start checking my email from home in the evening so that I can be available to fix a problem if it comes up. I said no. My argument is that if there is a problem at 3 in the morning, no-one will care about it anyway, and anyone who does I don't want to do business with. My home life is separate from my work life, and I intend to keep it that way.

He tried to be all boss-like (talking about towing the company line, blah blah). I was resolute.

Want to know how many people died? None. How many servers burst into flames at the mere insinuation of having personal time? Zero. How many co-workers were effected? Zilch. How much money the company lost? Not a cent.

What are we working for? Are we working to fill every moment we aren't asleep? "But you have weekends off". Not if I start letting my employer dictate my off time to me, I don't. Not for long, anyway. Besides, if the only time I have is the weekends, that leaves 48 hours, minus sleep, to get every single chore done that I have around the house. 48 hours, minus sleep, to spend time with my loved-ones. 48 hours, minus sleep, out of 168.

What are you working for? Is what you're getting payed worth 72% of your adult life?

What is worth that much time? What could you spend every waking moment doing, and be happy as a clam? Why not do that? Why not be supported, and support others in the process,
for doing the only thing that makes any damned sense.

Propits. Live your life. Not your boss'.