Whack your boss.

Go on, you know you want to.

It’s therapeutic. Cathartic, even.

Seriously.

Trust me.

I’ve been losing some weight lately. Over the last couple of years I’d been busily inflating my waistband, like some kind of obscene meat balloon. I even bought new clothes to contain my expanding, corpulent girth. Eventually, my distended gut threatened to escape even those relaxed confines, and I declared war upon my blubber.

So I’ve been working out, eating less, and I’ve dropped fifteen pounds so far. Several colleagues have been razzing me for working out at 6:00 AM every morning, and eating little at work but oranges, soup, and bread. Yesterday morning, one such colleague asked me if I was slimming down because I’d made a recent thong purchase. I told him that the rumor was absolutely true. A second office wag interjected with "but the thing is, he wears it backwards!". Assorted laughs and titters ran through the cube farm.

"Scrotal floss", I said, in a matter-of-fact voice that silenced the laughter. One of them was sent reeling back into his cubicle with a wholly unwanted mental image, and the other merely grimaced and spun on his chair back to face his monitor, but, tellingly, made no further inquiries regarding the subject. It just goes to show that offense really can be the best defense.

The calculated madness of Hunter S. Thompson has, of course, come to an end. Every pundit and blogger has posted some retrospective look at, or paean to, the legendarily batshit-wild journalist.

My tribute to him is that I don’t have any tribute to him. If any part of him is still around, it can’t be happy with the platitudes that were bandied about over his death. Having sampled a few eulogies, both online and in print, I feel pretty safe in saying that they’re all pretty much crap, and fall into either one of two categories; I haven’t found a third, and I’m not likely to, since plenty of people are secretly glad the old bastard is dead, given his penchant for printing uncomfortable things, and are happy to sweep him under history’s rug.

The first category is the eulogy/obituary penned by his "fellow" journalists. There is a lot of obligatory posthumous reverence, some phony admiration for how he challenged The Man, and an optional personal anecdote. The second is from bloggers who are playing the "I read Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas" card in a feeble attempt to convince themselves that though they may toil in a taupe-colored cubicle and do nothing more dangerous or daring than using a pirated copy of Microsoft Word or checking their Hotmail account at work, they too are unbridled rebels, living life on their own terms.

Yeah. Uh huh.

The only piece to really stick in my craw as a ridiculous waste of ink comes from the pen of Clarence Page, a conservative but sometimes thoughtful columnist with the Chicago Tribune, who said that if Thompson had only found Jesus, he’d still be with us today. Um… right… See, I’m an admitted milquetoast, knowing Thompson only by his reputation, and have never read any of his work; nevertheless, it seems obvious that he was the sort of person that, if he had found Jesus, it wasn’t for Jesus’ lack of effort.

This is the last pro-Apple rant. I swear. It’s just that… just that It’s hard not to say anything in the face of blatant, pigheaded stupidity. One of the Mac-haters in my current class did, to his credit, state that he just didn’t like the platform:

"I like PC’s, never liked MAC’s, probably never will. It’s just a matter of choice I guess. I have always hated the proprietory nature of MAC’s."

Well, fair enough; I can’t stand liver, don’t care for Sony laptops, and wouldn’t use Memorex optical media if you gave it away for free. I am man enough, however, to know that not only do other people have diametrically opposed opinions on these topics, there’s probably a webring or three devoted to folks who specifically enjoy consuming liver while burning Memorex CDs on their Vaio. Hell, I’ve been around long enough to know that there’s probably a terabyte of slash fiction written on the topic floating around on alt.sexuality.eatingliver. I do know more than to post garbage like this on a serious IT discussion board:

I have heard this from some MAC users, but my contention is if they are so great, why aren’t they more widely used?  Ok, some may say Microsoft is soooo big that they held them back, but I say people in the market place buy what is most reasonably priced, works relative well and is easy to learn to use.  This does not seem to happen with MAC.  Maybe some day, but they better hurry because MS is not going to sit around and do nothing to improve their products.

Well, dipshit, I’ve never owned a BMW, but I hear they’re pretty decent machines. Why aren’t the roads filled with them, then? They must truly suck when compared to PCs. There must be something wrong with them since their market share isn’t as large as Toyota or GM, right? Right? Hello? Of course, you must be right… everybody is always talking about how the Mac is so buggy and difficult to use (not to mention full of security holes), so that must be why nobody uses one. Plus, Microsoft is always right on top of all those security exploits, as we all know. Am I right yet?

No?

Well, maybe it’s because Macs are so much more expensive. Because everybody knows PCs are dirt cheap; look at what Dell sells. Well, I mean, before you start adding things like RAM and useful applications that a comparable Mac already ships with. Once you’re there, the prices are about the same. At my last systems administrator gig, I found, to my astonishment, that the price point of tricked-out Apple XServes and XServe RAID boxes beat Dell’s prices for comparable rack-mounted solutions by a factor of some 8%, and XServe prices have dropped a bit since then. So… it’s not really price any longer, either.

What is it? Apple’s still paying for the business decisions they made in the 90s when personal computing exploded, and their prices remained higher. This has been common knowledge in the business community for, what, 15 years? I made all these point, and then declared the thread finished, stating that I had tired of defending the concept of viable choice to an audience that relied on gut feelings and 15-year old data points to make IT decisions, even if they were hypothetical.

That did indeed end it. There was no rebuttal. How could there be, when they couldn’t be bothered to perform even the most cursory research?

I work for a division of a really big and successful company. We don’t lack for equipment or supplies, but for the exception of one thing: Sharpies. There are something like 200 employees in my building, and only one Sharpie.

The original effort to locate this precious item took forty minutes, and involved five employees. We now keep it hidden in a locked drawer, I kid you not. Weird, eh?