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This is the kind of complaint that those of you with well tuned AdBock and GreaseMonkey plugins get all superior about. So click on to see what the rest of us have been putting up with.

From Slashdot: Schools Buy .xxx Domains In Trademark Panic.

I called this several years ago. March 2007 to be exact. It's less trademark-defense, and more of an online-branding thing. These schools want their .edu domain to be the only brand that has that name. Sharing with the hot coed action on a .xxx is anathema to most US-based higher-ed institutions. They'd rather not do that thank you, and $200/year is not a lot to pay to prevent that from coming about.

On the surface, I say no. We spend more months with DST than without, so why not go all the way?

Well, we could. The standard timezones the US uses could all move over one so we would be on what we now call DST all year. It would work!

However, it gets really dark in the depths of winter, and having dawn/dusk offset so large parts of the commute aren't in complete blackness has a lot going for it. In Bellingham, Washington, dawn/dusk on 12/21 are about 7:45am and 4:30pm. With a permanent +1 timezone offset, that would mean the sun would rise up there at 8:45am. Not only is the drive to work almost entirely in the black, but little Jacob and Emily out there on the street corner waiting for the school-bus will be doing so in cold darkness.

We'd need a "Winter Time" offset to bring more daylight in the AM hours.

Turns out we already have that with the current system, we just call the largest part of the year the DST period rather than the shortest part of the year. I'd like to see the two reversed, but I understand why forcing the change just to make the paperwork look better is not done. It's a lot of work, as we discovered when the US changed the DST rules a few years ago.

At Job #1 I had a cubical. This was during the dot-com rise and fall, so much cubical humor was had by all. There were Dilbert cartoons on the walls, because that's what you did back then. My boss' hair was not especially pointy, but our HR director had Catbert cartoons on his door so... well. Let's stop there.

I had a cubical. It had tables on three sides, shelving units, and even a pair of rolling files. I used it all. I had two keyboard trays installed because at the time I did have two PCs in there (VMWare Workstation was around back then, but memory limits make it not as useful as it is now). I had the same space as anyone else without an actual office. The Ergonomics people came by every so often to chastise me about posture and nod approvingly at my keyboard setup.

At Job #2 I had a 1970's vintage metal desk and a table, with some wall-shelves over the table. The filing was restricted to what was built into the desk. I'd give it about 60% of the desk-level horizontal work-surface I had at Job #1. I had a second computer, but it didn't get it's own keyboard tray (that's what the KVM switch was for). Nor did I have a keyboard tray, I had an old-school desk and keyboard trays don't work so well on those.

By the time I finished at #2 I was down to a single computer (lots of RAM and a quad core processor, so VMWare Workstation was how I was grooving that problem). The ergonomics had thrown both of my shoulders for a loop, and I had to move my workstation to the table from the desk since the keyboarding surface there was lower and less aggravating to me. The one time an Ergonomics person came by, he frowned at my setup, recommended a trackball mouse, and asked if I could convince my boss to find actual cubical parts.

This was during a major budget crunch so workstation upgrades of any kind were on hold. So, no luck there. Also, I expanded to fill all of my horizontal space.

Here at Job #3 I have very architectural and edgy looking oak doors on metal pipes for that industrial look that goes so well with our brick walls. I have two rolling files and no shelving what so ever. My total horizontal space is 50% of Job #1. And I, er, have, by far, the messiest desk of those of us here.

When I visited the StackOverflow offices two weeks ago for a moderator thingy, their sysadmins had even less space than I have. Probably... 30% of what I have right now. Lower Manhattan real-estate is expensive after all, but still. I don't know how George and Peter deal with that, maybe they have a bench-space somewhere they can expand into for dissections.

On my desk right now:

• Three iPad boxes that I'm getting set up for our Sales people.
• A probably dead KVM switch I don't have another home for.
• A second keyboard for my computer for the use of people who find my ergonomic keyboard with the letters worn off too hard to type on.
• Boxes for three different ExpressCard adapters
• Three nodepads for meetings and suchlike.
• Another laptop for those few Windows things that either don't VM well or I need an isolated environment for. And also for trouble-shooting problems with the same model of laptop for other people.
• Keyboard, monitor, mouse, and docking-station for my primary work laptop.

If I had shelves, a lot of those things would be up there rather than on my desk.

The Devs around here are pretty good about clean-desk. Most have a few books back in a corner, all have at least one note-pad for meeting notes. Only one has a significant amount of random crap on their desk, and I beat them out by quite a bit.

This is the point where I thank my lucky stars I don't work for a place with an actual clean desk policy.

How messy is your desk?

T-Shirts can be a problem. As anyone who has ever had to order a bunch of shirts for some charity function knows predicting the sizes of people is hard. A few smalls, some mediums, a lot of larges, some XL and XXL, with a few XXXL for good measure. Or worse, just got with a lot of XL's since "that'll fix everyone".

I've known many techies over the years who wear a size 50 suit (if not larger), and they do gripe about shirt-size availability. With the advent of online registration and "Shirt size" on conference registration forms the shirt ordering process can move from the buggy statistical model to the 'give them what they asked for' model. No need to worry about getting 15 or 25 4XL shirts and having a lot of massive leftovers, just order what they asked for. Problem solved!

Unfortunately, this is a much harder problem for women. I know several women who have a bust size north of 50 inches, and they're also the type who go to technical conferences. The same XXL shirt on the 50-inch chest men does not fit nearly as well on a woman. The shoulders droop, there is a complete absence of shaping, and the shirt is likely to be far too long. If that shirt gets worn, it'll be worn at the conference and then binned.

But even offering women's sizes is no panacea. A great breakdown of why this is can be found here:

http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/T-shirts

An example taken straight from the wiki article, take a look at ThinkGeek's sizing chart:

http://www.thinkgeek.com/help/sizing-info.shtml

The 50-inch chest woman is still out of luck, since the largest ThinkGeek offers is 42 inches.

Take American Apparel's size-chart, Somewhat better at 46 inches, but that 50-inch chest woman attempting to wear a shirt like that will end up with an over-emphasized bust.

Larger shirts can be found, and it reflects well on the conference when it provides swag that makes attendees actually want to be seen in it.

A while back, this mug was gifted to me. Appropriate, really:

Matt Simmons has had it up to here with booth-staff at technical conferences that don't know the products they're trying to sell. I totally know what he's talking about, if the person I'm talking to at a booth is only there to hand out glossy fliers and take my contact information so a sales engineer can call me next week, I wish I didn't bother stopping by. If I wanted to view their website, I'da, you know, viewed their website on my own time. I don't need a sales droid to hand me a printed out PDF. I want them to be able to answer technical questions about their products, that's why they're at a technical conference.

Another kind of problematic sales-staff is the person filling the role of Walmart Greeter. They're there to smile happily at you when you approach and forward you to someone who can answer all of your questions. Unless the booth in question is Walmart-scale, this role is largely unneeded. I appreciate the customer service touch of being warmly greeted, but it goes over a lot better for the vendor in question if my first contact can answer my questions.

The final problematic sales-staff person is the ostensible topic of Matt's post, the people that are there to act as a kind of live advertising poster for the booth. Frequently this role is shared with the Greeter, though not always. Sometimes you're fully expected to not talk to these people. They catch your eye because they're attractive, and in so doing you also get a view of the booth they're standing near. They might be in some kind of thematic costume (full HALO armor for Microsoft), or dressed provocatively (bikinis). As you walk right by them, you know they're not there to talk to you about product.

Matt's suggestion is to treat everyone in the booth as if they know what they're talking about, and to complain when you find someone that doesn't.

Very simple.

Some people are quite obviously part of the booth set, such as that HALO person hanging out by the XBOX display. Others, such as the rather attractive woman with a handful of bi-fold glossy pamphlets, aren't explicitly part of the scenery and should at least be able to field some technical questions. So ask them.

And yet, Matt is catching some grief in the comments section. More on that below the fold.

The ongoing nymwars surrounding Google's decision to require legal-looking names for users of their invite-only Google Plus social networking site are still going strong. The term "nymwars" is derived from 'pseudonym', the thing Google is banning.

Yeah, I have an interest in this.

As I mentioned last month I'm of the generation that grew up using handles for our online presence, so I have long experience using names-that-aren't-on-my-government-ID to identify myself. Heck, whole groups of people only knew me by those [8|10|16]-character-or-less handles. From what I've seen, it seems like it is my generation that is leading the nymwar fight.

For years I've carefully curated what I allow on the Internet that is associated with my real name. I knew w-a-y back in 2000 that what you say online (back then I was worried about Usenet posts) is on your permanent record and have treated my online interactions like that ever since. If you drop my legal name into your search engine of choice, one of the top hits will be my LinkedIn profile, which is just as it should be. Other hits will be some posts to mailing lists I made from work firstname.lastname email addresses, but those are OK as well since they're covering technical topics rather than something divisive like political opinions. Facebook will show up as well, but I'm only there to name-squat and keep in touch with certain FB-only people in my life. You can also learn about the other people with my name in this country, though it seems I've done the most internet-visible work in that regard.

I also have a variety of pseudonyms I've used on various social-network oriented sites over the years. You can get from those to here since I occasionally link to my blog posts on those services, but going the other direction is a lot harder. This is intentional. Much like network security, I do firewall certain aspects of my identity from general consumption. I am purposely including opinions and actions in the definition of "Identity", not just the facts that describe me. It is under those pseudonyms slash trusted-zones that I go into the details of my politics, hobbies, and extra-curricular activities.

You know, the kinds of things that can alienate future employers.

Identity firewalling is very much needed since American society as a whole isn't set up to handle:

• People who parroted their parent's political views while children.
• People who change their opinions from year to year.
• People who change their opinions from decade to decade. Or ever, in the case of Presidential candidates.
• People with unusual hobbies.
  
• People who are members of unpopular religious, ethnic, sexual, or technical minorities.
  
• People who have unusual personal relationships.
• People who talk about sex.
• People who have certain medical conditions.
  
• People who do stupid things between the ages of 15-18.
  
• People who do stupid things between the ages of 18-24.
• People who have been convicted of a crime (even while being stupid between 18-24).
• People who hold extreme views.
• People with unusual family circumstances.
• People who are Not From Around Here.

Society can handle each of those, but generally speaking not in employment or elected-office capacities. We have laws specifically banning discrimination on a number of the above points, but that doesn't stop it from happing in private; those laws are there because we do it in private and to prevent it from happening in public in the hopes that eventually we'll stop doing it in private as well.

Speaking as someone who has been subjected to multiple background checks as a condition of employment for more than one job, I can tell you that the standards are a bit higher for someone like me. Anything in my background that suggests poor judgment can be used as a basis for passing over my application. This is why I curate my online identity as closely as I do, because it's hard to guess what online speech of right now will be considered suspect in 20 years.

There have been several news articles in recent years about employers requiring access to the "full profile" on Facebook as a condition of employment. This is done to better assess the character of incoming hires. I have full confidence that, "please add our HR processor to all of your Google Plus circles," will be a similar request in the future. The correct answer to these requests, in my opinion anyway, is "I'm sorry, but I won't work for a place that requires such information." However, if you've been unemployed for 18 months and are about to run out of Unemployment benefits, saying "go away" to a potential employer is not something you're inclined to do even on principle.

This is where maintaining multiple identities really comes into its own. By having that firewall, you can give your potential employer access to all of your G+ circles... for the identity you keep for public consumption. If you've done the separation right, you can survive this invasion of your privacy without having your privates groped quite so firmly. Such identity separation will need to happen until such time that employers and voters no longer care what you did or said 20 years ago.

---

Google has said that Circles are the best way to segregate your identity. I applaud them for that, since such mechanisms are quite useful. Everyone doesn't want to hear about my medical issues, just fellow sufferers and family. Twitter doesn't offer this kind of segregation, which is why some of the people I follow have more than one twitter account.

As I pointed out above, all it takes is one employer demanding to be added to all of your circles as a condition of employment and that careful segregation goes out the window. People need a stronger separation than just 'circles', a separate profile is that mechanism.

Google: if you fear using your real name, then don't use Google Plus.

To which I say bullshit. Humans are social critters, and all it takes is the right number of people saying, "Good bye Facebook, you can find me on G+", and eventually you have to be on G+ in order to have any social-networking contact with those people. That's a large part of why I'm on Facebook at all, otherwise I wouldn't be there. This will cause people who otherwise would follow this advice to go against their best interests. Maybe they'll use their real name, or initials. Or attempt a pseudonym and hope they don't get caught.

Google: If people don't know you by your real name, add your pseudonyms to your "Other Names" on your profile, people can still find you then. Google cites this as the solution to the, "The people on the Mythbusters forum know me as Cmdr. Keenly, but my knitting friends all know me as CaughtTheWumpus, how would they connect that to $RealName," problem.

Which is true. That mechanism is quite useful for consolidating all of your identity islands into a single googly one. I still maintain that this is a bad idea. Said employer will use that list of names as an index of places to further plunder for your 'character'.

---

If Google were a smaller player like Diaspora their real-name stance wouldn't mean much. However, since they are the company that drives 75% of the RSS traffic to this very blog, nearly all of the Instant Messaging traffic I personally have seen in the last 4 years, and wrote the operating system for my phone, the impact is somewhat different for them. I've had a good number of my online friends throw Facebook over the side in favor of G+, and enough of them have done so that I feel pressure to go to G+ just so I can follow them.

Because of this, Google's lack of support for firewalled identities is a significant issue. A very significant issue, and one that I'm watching closely.

I haven't been asked this, but, hey, it could happen. Businesses ask for five year plans for long-range planning reasons. And sometimes, IT gets asked this as well. And IT is what you call a fast-moving field, and five years is a long time. So. Now what?

At WWU, if you had asked me that I probably could have given you one. Our core mission doesn't change, educate students, thought the details of said can shift on those timescales. My five-year crystal ball could tell you:

• What major storage systems we've replaced and how the new ones perform
  
• What our backup and disaster recovery systems look like
• What our authentication regime looks like
• What our monitoring setup looks like and how effective it is
  
• What improvements we've made to uptime and overall reliability

And I'd have pretty good confidence that we'd hit those tasks, or at least have a good reason why we didn't. It can happen. In large part because what we do doesn't shift that much.

For my current employer, a company best described as a startup, five years out is so far over the planning horizon as to be beyond a singularity. Our industry is in the beginnings of the consolidation phase, and when that happens... five years is enough for the eDiscovery field to go from over a hundred companies earning over $1M/year to thirty companies over that line, but a few over the $1Bn line. Who knows what side of that we'll be on!

Any five year plan I produce will be either a heinously complex contingency tree, or a statement of desire. I have vastly less confidence that what I lay down now will be close to what we come up with five years down the line.

Because there is a chance we might be one of the billion-dollar players in five years, I'm keeping scalability firmly in mind. But, that's what I'm doing right now, not what I'll be doing five years from now.

Is it impossible to come up with a five year IT plan in a startup? Not at all, but what the likes of us would produce is not even remotely like what the likes of, say, the Red Cross would come up with.

This blog-post by Cliff Mass describes why. The opening paragraph:

We look to the heavens and ask: Why do we suffer? Why is the warmth of summer denied us?

Is this a great test of a stormy Satan? If we accept the coolness and clouds without complaint, will the warmth of a true summer be restored, as Job was restored when he accepted God's will without complaint?

By all reports it has been a bad summer so far. Summer in Bellingham generally didn't start until a few days in July anyway, but this year it is now weeks late. It was an event similar to that one which caused me to decide that perhaps I should live somewhere else.

In a good year, we'd get 8 solid weeks of summer and a beautiful slide in to Autumn until the storms hit.

In a bad year it would be 6 interrupted weeks of summer and the storms would start pretty early in September.

You'd think that 2 weeks wouldn't make much of a difference, but it does. 8 weeks was barely enough summer for me. When summer was a week late a couple years ago, it was hard. Last summer had a two week cold spell in the middle and ended early. This summer I had my first full day over 70 degrees in April, I was smiling all day.

Most people who leave the Pacific Northwest due to weather do so because of January, when we see the sun in short breaks every several days, if that often. That didn't bother me, I'm used to Winter being dreary. October through December is usually very stormy with lots of wind and rain; again, didn't bother me. The October right before we moved up, October 2003, was particularly wet in our neck of the woods when they had something like 20+ days of precipitation with its predictable effects on rivers (flooding) and slopes (landslides). Thanksgiving was usually pretty good for bad weather. Not a problem.

But having the 4th of July be a day that stays in the 60's more often than it's in the 70's? To someone who grew up in an area where the 4th of July has been preceded by a full month of 70+ weather and the swelter of July just around the corner, that sounds mighty fine. But when June was 60-degrees and partly to mostly cloudy the entire month, having July start out the same way takes its toll.

I was somewhat concerned when our house didn't have air-conditioning of any kind. However, as I learned in person we didn't really need it. Even in the worst summer we had (heat-wise, not cold-wise), we only needed it like 9 days that year. While that made for some uncomfortable nights, it wasn't enough to spring for a heat-pump.

When I took the WWU job I knew about Winter. I thought it might be a problem, but as I started in Winter it ended up not being much of one. Which is good. No one told me about Juneuary though.

Tomorrow I get to see about 102F (39C) degree weather with a heat index around 113F (45C). Part of me is cheerful about that, but I'm pretty certain that's just the lingering trauma talking ;).