If you’re here, you’re following an old link. Most of the Mordor action is now at this location

http://www.mordorbbs.com/forum/

I hope you’ll visit!

Rob

http://www.dilbert.com/

Poor David Steward was a security person at a casino in USA. Being apparently something of a fan of Dilbert, he posted a cartoon at work which resulted in him being… well, fired.

Fired, no less, after seven years of service because ‘management’ found the strip to be highly offensive, and didn’t like being referred to as “Drunken Lemurs”… apparently.

Now, I’d be very surprised if there wasn’t more to this story, but the upshot is that it’s one hell of a kneejerk over a bloody Dilbert cartoon on a noticeboard at the workplace.

Surely… taking it down might have been the best option… at most going “Tsk!” and having a word with certain employees about appropriate conduct in the workplace… but even that would have been overstepping things, IMHO.

Anyway… whether driven by guilt or just overall sympathy (Scott Adams can come across in his blog as a bit full of himself, but by all reports is a nice enough guy) not only has Dilbert’s creator solicited help from his readership in finding Steward a new role… but he’s posted a series of strips having a bit of a prod at the management of the casino.

Oh the power of the webcomic.

The link to the relevent comic strips is here:
http://dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20080220.html

Hopefully Steward will land on his feet. Certainly the Casino might be surprised at how the story has raced around the globe. It will be interesting to see whether it has any kind of impact on Bottom Line. My guess is that it won’t, in the slightest.

Count yourselves lucky if you live in New Zealand. I can’t see this ever being an issue here.

Psyg’

 I rather enjoyed the original Pitch Black as an excellent example of a ho-hum genre of sci-fi monster movies, and I thought Chronicles of Riddick was an excellent (if somewhat off the wall) sequel.

There was also a short animated film that bridged the gap between the two, but I tend to discount that as un-necessary and basically not so great.

However… Chronicles of Riddick just screams “Sequel!”, and apparently the movie did relatively well, so I wonder why there hasn’t been one.  I’m certainly hanging out for it.

http://www.imdb.com/ makes no mention of any upcoming sequels that I can see.

Did anyone else get a “Conan on his throne” and Warhammer40k vibe from the Chronicles movie?

Psyg’

Suffrage, Emancipation and Equality are all laudable concepts. No one person should be considered less valuable than any other, especially when we’re talking about half of the population of the planet.

But what happens when the rules change so fast, and are applied so haphazardly, that the other half doesn’t know whether they’re coming or going?

Today I held open a door for someone, and she stood there with her arms folded, tapping her foot, glaring at me, pointedly refusing to walk through the door. I stood there feeling stupid for a few moments before shrugging and moving on.

I hold doors open for everyone (of either sex) if they’re going to arrive at that door only a few seconds after me, but this one particular individual seemed to think that I was trying to impose my own male-centric views on her by simply trying to be polite.

A few years ago I (briefly) dated a young lady who (apart from being having a PhD in something obscure) was a self-proclaimed old-school feminist. I actually have no idea what that “old-school” means, but the mere suggestion of me paying for dinner one evening resulted in me being labelled “as bad as all the others”. All my friends and I often take turns at buying dinner. I wasn’t trying to buy ‘favours’ with food, for Heaven’s sake!

The phrase “Having a doctorate at 29 is quite an achievement!” was seen as an attack on her sex, because somehow the words magically transformed themselves into “A woman having a doctorate at 29 is quite an achievement!” between her eardrum and her brain. It was just polite dinner conversation! Normal people like to be complimented (genuinely too!) on their achievements!

A female colleague was having problems lifting a box. I ask “Can I help you with that?” – The response was “You sexist (expletive)!”.

Uh? It just looked heavy, and two people can manage a heavy box better than one… but OK. Strain a muscle.

Now, those examples could have gone the other way.

Would it have been more polite to let the door slam in someone’s face?

Would ignoring someone struggling with a heavy box have been more correct?

Where’s the rule book? Are people inherrently unable to take things at face value anymore?

Why are simple innocuous attempts at human kindness taken as attacks on an ideology? Is this a legitimate defensive tactic brought about by real slights against the ideal, or are people borrowing offence to justify their beliefs?

A few years ago I was out walking around, not doing anything in particular, in a moderately popular tourist spot. I came across a bus-load of tourists who had dis-embarked and were happily snapping away with their (expensive) cameras… all except for a small group who were huddled around a forlorn little shape, squishing itself into a ball on the hot footpath, in the sun.

The small shape was a hedgehog. One of the people was prodding it with a stick.

I got the impression that hedgehogs were a bit of a rarity in their (Asian) country… for those of you who don’t know hedgehogs, they’re normally nocturnal, and for one to be out and about in daylight is very unusual. They certainly don’t appreciate being prodded with a stick in the sun.

I was a bit miffed. I hate seeing any mistreatment towards animals, even animals that are considered to be pests, if not noxious ones, so I walked up officiously, picked up the hedgehog, and made a loud comment along the lines of “Can’t a guy take his hedgehog for a walk without a pack of $*%*#$’ers attacking it with a stick?!”

There were some very contrite apologies, much bowing, and not a few photographs of this Typical Kiwi Lad holding his “pet hedgehog” (and scowling).

After explaining (fibbing, really) how it was quite common for New Zealanders to keep hedgehogs as pets, everyone started to shuffle back onto the bus… so I went and found a quiet bush out of the way and popped the poor little thing in the shade.

I had to throw away my shirt after that, but I occasionally wonder whether the spikey little fellow recovered sufficiently.

I keep half expecting to hear of an article about New Zealand that enclosed a photograph of ‘A Typical Kiwi Joker And His Hedgehog’.

Psyg’

I have, over the last half hour, been reading “Fundies Say The Darnedest Things”, a sort of irreverent collection of quotes from the interweb. Quotes made by people who qualify, in my mind at least, as fundamentalist Christians, and deeply suspicious characters all.

http://www.fstdt.com/

I had been reading down the list of quotes going… “Meh…meh…meh” and being kind-of disinterested, and then I found this.

It’s on a message service which is effectively a “Dear Lord” version of an agony aunt column. (No responses, alas.) - So…

Dear Lord:
Quote:
I am a bit troubled. I believe my son has a girlfriend, because she left a dirty magazine with men in it under his bed. My son is only 16 and I really don’t think he’s ready to date yet. What’s worse is that he’s sneaking some girl to his room behind my back. I need help, God! I want my son to stop being so secretive!

Linda, Good news prayer room 

I promptly fell off my chair and spat Coke(tm) everywhere.
 

I’ve been having fun online.  Once again, upon learning that I’m a New Zealander, the first question that gets raised is “Is it true that you have, like, a hundred million sheep there or something?”

I think the actual number is something like 20 million… but I always reply with something like:

“Yeah. By law, each person in New Zealand has to look after five sheep. We have to sheer them and milk them and stuff, and send the wool and milk by mail to the Wool And Milk Board for processing.”

Sometimes I’ll get a WTF response, but often it’s apparently believed.  I had a follow-up email from one chap thanking me for the information, because it helped him with his school report.   This made me feel a bit guilty, but not for long. Asking a random guy in a gamer chat forum does not count as “research”, and he deserves all the bad marks he gets.

Last New Year I also got into a blazing row with someone who insisted that New Year started in America first. The fact that I was 20 hours early (or so) just filled him with rage, for some reason. I find this sort of person hugely amusing, and even if restrained and gagged cannot help but poke them with sharp sticks.  America is big… but it does not have the monopoly on everything.

Of course, arguing with someone on the internet just makes pandas sad, so I try to refrain. Alas, like popcorn, if you open the bag you just have to finish it… and it’s so easy to open the bag.

Psyg’

After literally hours of painstaking research and development, I figured out where I was going wrong, and the MordorBBS front page is now, basically, complete, and full of attention grabbing live-content goodness.

Whew. It’s been a mission.

Psyg’

I’ve been having a crack at learning PHP just recently, and I just don’t get it.

I’m sure it’s pretty straight forward, but for some reason, I’m not getting my head around it. Even adding a simple routine to my front page resulted in all sorts of errors, to the point where I’ve just had to paste some text in there instead of posting the live content that I wanted.

The irritating thing is that it seems to work in the examples, but not in the actual finished product… and I’m not sure what the difference is.

Either way… it is now 2:54 am. I have to be up at 6am to go to work… so this might be a good time to leave it and try to figure the damn thing out tomorrow.

There’s a new look front page, anyway.  It doesn’t quite fit with the scheme of the rest of the site, but I’m sure we’ll get there.

Psyg’

Recently, I got to thinking about all the stuff we’d pulled in my various jobs over the last 20 years.

***

We once put a vacuum cleaner into the crawlspace in the ceiling over the top of the Head Programmer’s desk, had it set to blow, and filled it with those little jelly-bean shaped foam packing chips… and then fed it power from the back of the guy’s computer so that it would turn on when he switched his machine on in the morning. It was a blizzard in there.

***

Back when I was a Mainframe Op (aged 18 or so) we worked in an ancient building that had a light-well running down the middle of it. The bottom of this light-well was about 6 inches thick with pigeon crap… and a cockroach haven. There were billions of the little sods. A door opened up to it from the machine room.
Of an evening, we used to go out there with a little soft-air pistol and shoot cockroaches when the shift was going slowly.

One day, a friend and I went up to the fourth floor and filled a party balloon with water, waited until this one Op was out in the crap shooting at cockroaches, and dropped the balloon.

It missed him, but landed near him, covering him with hundred year old wet pigeon crap.

We’d scarpered as soon as we dropped the balloon, but as he looked up, screaming abuse and trying to see who’d done it, the building maintenance guy stuck his head out a 3rd floor window to see what the noise was.

Apparently the Op assumed he’d dropped the water balloon.
As we were in the lift coming down from the 4th floor, the Op was in the lift going up to the 3rd floor to “teach the maintenance guy a lesson”.
It got kinda messy after this.

***

Same place… the 4th floor of the building was an indoor carpark. Big bay windows opened up over the street, and right across the way was student apartment housing.

Of a night-shift, the only place you were allowed to smoke was on the 4th floor. I don’t smoke, but we used to all go up there to drink coffee and socialise while sitting on the window ledge.

The other thing we used to do was make paper airplanes and throw them from the window and see how far down the street they’d get.
Occasionally we used to light them with a cigarette lighter first.

One time, the wind caught a burning paper plane, and instead of landing in the street, it took a right-turn, flew across the street into an apartment window, and landed on top of this one guy’s television.
Fortunately, he was watching it, or I’d hate to think what would have happened. He fair near crapped himself.

We had, at this point, turned the lights out for the floor and were poking only our heads up over the windowsill to see what would happen… fortunately nothing came of it.

***

One day I was running cables from one end of the building to another. Because the company was pretty cheap, we used to run cables through the aircon ducts… which were huge, and suspended from the ceiling.

My job was to clamber up into the duct with the cable, and drag it all the way along to the appropriate part of the building, drill a hole in the aluminium, and feed the cable through.

It was foul in there. We’re talking dead insects, the occasional mummified mouse, and God knows what else.

In this one instance, I needed to run the cable into the womens toilets, drill a hole in the wall and feed it through into a dry riser so we could get it to go down another level.

We didn’t have any women working on our floor, so I didn’t think twice about just kicking open the air-con grate and dropping into the womens toilets, cable in hand.

I was standing on an upturned bucket using U nails to fix the cable to the ceiling when I realised that the cubicle I was leaning over was occupied by the bosses wife… who had come in to the office to meet him for lunch.

There was screaming… from both sides.

***

We had a new guy who was being amazingly arrogant. We decided to “haze” him, and asked him to get some boxes of printer paper from the floor above. After-hours, the only way up there was using the trolley-lift, which was all of about 3ft tall… just tall enough for a flat-bed trolley.
It had controls inside, but wasn’t really intended for human use.
You’d normally send the trolley up and then climb nearby stairs to get up to it. The stairs were locked off after hours.

Normally we just made sure we had enough paper to last the shift.

Anyway… this guy gets in the lift, and is on his way up. We over-rode the controls and stopped the lift between floors. One of the big industrial printers had a jam-alarm that sounded like a fire-alarm, which you could trip by holding your finger over the sensor… we hit this, yelled about the fire alarm, and made like we’d all just run off and left this guy in the lift.

We had false fire-alarms all the time, so this guy didn’t think much about it… until he started to smell the cigarette smoke that two of the guys were blowing up into the lift-shaft… at which point he started to freak somewhat.

We let him off the hook after 2-3 minutes… mainly because it sounded like he was about to kick his way through the lift wall.

The shift leader got a punch in the nose for that one. Fair enough too, I guess.

Psyg’