I’ll just come out and say it: I’m for Obama. Why? For change. For inspirational leadership, instead of selecting yet another center-left apparatchik or center-right corporate tool. America needs a breath of fresh air, which neither McCain nor Clinton can provide.

Clinton’s supporters extol her “experience” and “electability” as the qualities which, they say, make her a superior candidate. Neither cut any ice with me. “Experience”? It just means she’s spent more time running with the herd of gelded Democrats who’ve helped get us into the mess we’re in now. A slightly less timorous wonk. Someone who’s been part of the problem. Dubya had a cabinet stuffed to the gills with experience, arguably one of the most experienced ever, and look where that got us.

And “Electability”? At best, the Clinton camp means that she’s the only candidate who’s tough and smart enough to withstand the slings and arrows that will be hurled by the GOP. At worst, they’re whispering that ain’t nobody gonna elect no negro to the Oval Office. Both reasons are bosh. Obama is smart enough to spar on the national stage, and no Democrat worth even a fraction of their salt is going to passively take it in the ass after witnessing what happened to Kerry vis à vis the Swift Boaters. As for the race angle, let’s be frank; probably 90% of the folks who would never vote for a black man would never vote for a Democrat, either. The number of rabid Clinton-haters is far greater—and more vocal—than the number of racists.

America does not need another “experienced leader”. America needs an inspiring leader. Neither McCain nor Clinton fit that bill by a long shot. Vote Obama.

More hilarity from one of the campus IT websites: A link to Google’s mail service.

GMAIL (pronounced jee-mayl)

Apparently someone, somewhere, thought folks might mispronounce it as “guh-mayl”, “jem-ail”, or possibly just “mayl”, as with the “silent g” in “gnome”. Or maybe foreign students might try “guh-mah-eel”. I don’t know. But I find the pronunciation tip asinine. I mean, really.

I found some outrageously obsolete documentation for our distributed authentication service. One of the major topics was making sure users have a browser that supports SSL. High-tech stuff!

According to this document, this is our official list of supported browsers applications:

• Netscape Navigator (UNIX/Mac version 1.12 and later, Windows version 1.22 and later)
• IBM Internet Connection Secure WebExplorer (version 1.1) for OS/2
• Delrina Cyberjack Web (version 7.00)
• Prodigy Web Browser (version 1.4b)
• InternetMCI (version 1.0)
• Microsoft’s Internet Explorer
• America Online (version 3)
• Quarterdeck Mosaic 2.0

Prodigy and InternetMCI. Now there’s a blast from the past. And “Delrina Cyberjack Web”? I’ve never even heard of it. Whatever that was, even its name is comically dated, like the “MyE-CyberWebNetOnLine.com”-style domains that were all the rage in the late 90s. Good for a quick early-morning laugh, at least.

This morning I got a call from some IT marketing company drone. I immediately recognized the company name she gave as one that’s called us before—some outfit ostensibly in San Diego— and also her initial spiel. They’d already been told that we don’t participate in such marketing surveys, and we’d asked to be added to their do-not-call list.

So they were asking for trouble, basically. Greatly annoyed that these knuckleheads were pestering us again with the same questions, and being momentarily caught up on the day’s tasks, I decided to screw with their data. It turned out that they still had some bad data to begin with, so I added some poison to their stale information. As far as they know, the following is all true:

• Our IT operations are still headed by a fellow who left two years ago.
• We have 20 x86 computers and ~220 Macs.
• We have about a dozen printers (including some Apple LaserWriters and a pair of ancient Brother daisywheel units)
• We have 7 WAPs serving ~20 users.
• We have no laptops.
• We have not purchased any computers in the last 12 months, and do not plan to purchase any within the next 12 months.
• We have only five high-end workstations.
• Linux? What’s that?
• We’re still running Windows 2000.
• Our network has no WAN connections to other locations, being entirely self-contained.
• Over half our campus is still on 10BaseT.
• We have not implemented any form of identity management, RBAC, or anything similar.
• Data security is an extremely low-priority item. About 40% of our budget goes to data security, however.
• Another 20% of our budget is devoted to network maintenance, 15% to application development, and the remaining 40% evenly divided between support, hardware purchases, and a “major project” to implement “enterprise document virtualization”, which is something I made up on the spot. (Never mind that this adds up to 115%.)
• We consider the above infrastructure to be “good enough for the next 5 to 10 years”.

Keep in mind these numbers are for a public research university campus with roughly 32,000 students and 30,000 faculty and staff members. Waste my time, and I’ll return the favor.

 

Spambot ahoy! This morning a new user account by the name of ralyjones25 was registered, with an e-mail address of raly.jones@gmail.com. Like its immediate predecessors, a quick Google search of that username returned over a couple thousand results, all of them from forum or blog user lists.

Looks like adding a captcha feature to your WordPress blog is probably a pretty good idea at this point. Register Plus is the only plugin I found that states it’s WP 2.5-compatible (there’s no mention of this on the author’s page, but the readme file in the download mentions 2.5 as well). If this “user” shows up on your blog, you’d do well to remove it.

I went to the local Winco supermarket. In the “canned meat/soup” aisle, I found cans of “whole chicken”. As in bones and everything. I don’t know why it should have bothered me so much, but I really found it mildly unsettling to think about a whole bone-in chicken in a can.

I had a sort of mental image of a pale, quasi-fœtal object sliding out of the opened container, covered in goo, with a sickening “shhhhhlorp” sound. Mmmmm. Just like Mom used to make.

For some reason this reminds me of the Whizzo Quality Assortment.