Friday, March 11, 2016

Hope you are doing great!

I don’t know why I found it a little surprising that organizations like ISIL and Al Qaeda would document their operational processes. After all, it doesn’t really matter whether you’re killing people by running a McDonald’s franchise or by leveling half of Syria; you still have to pay your bills and your “team members”.

Unless they succeed in their suicide bombing the first time out. Then, of course, you have a serious turnover problem and need to up your recruitment efforts.

In any case, you have to keep records. We learned a few years ago how carefully Al Qaeda operatives have to track expenses. And now it turns out that there are records of ISIL recruitment efforts, including the usual personal details (age, date of birth, blood type) as well as job-specific data (experience with jihad, sectarian rigor, preference in post-mortem virgins, whatever).

They’re actually a little scary in their banality. But that is the nature of evil, isn’t it?

However, this realization that even these scumbags have to follow procedures that are scrutinized by those über terrorists, the bean counters, gave me an idea for their possible destruction: infiltrate their organizations with contract recruiters; those locusts that infest the tech industry. The ones I’ve been writing about for more than five years, who suck the blood out of candidates and hiring managers without ever delivering any recognizable value.

It won’t cost anything because you just outsource from where they are now, various call centres in India, and you use VoIP phone lines to save further. Let would-be jihadis start getting the rabid Islamist equivalent of these emails:



It won’t take any time at all for the recruitment pipeline for all those terrorist groups to dry up. Without a huge investment in blood and treasure in the form of our military.

You’re welcome.



Thursday, March 10, 2016

Lucky dogs

When it comes to animals on the Internet, I think that Corgis give cats a good run for your entertainment money. There are more cats than Corgis, obviously, but with those goofy faces and short legs, the Welsh breed are definitely canine comedians.

They’re also famously the domestic pet of choice of Queen Elizabeth II. Unsurprisingly, for a woman of her age and means, it turns out that she treats them, well, royally, according to a spread that Town & Country magazine is going to run next month on the occasion of Her Majesty’s 90th birthday.

I don’t know how much the dogs appreciate the porcelain and silver bowls, but I expect they love the variety of steak, rabbit and chicken served in them.

When I lived in the UK, I used to send home cans of cat food with ingredients that weren’t available here. This included venison and rabbit, which I assure you went down a treat with the kitties in question. But I’m betting that HM’s dogs are not getting their Bambi and Thumper from a can.

I don’t know about the homeopathic and herbal supplements that are reported. Although I have tried Rescue Remedy on one of my cats that exhibited anxiety disorders. Without any visible effect, but maybe the Queen’s supplies are custom-compounded by a herbalist and don’t come off a shelf at Sainsbury’s.

Regardless, you probably don’t want to let your rescue dog know how the other half lives. Since you don’t have a flock of valets running around your palace with club soda and paper towels to take care of any little messages that might be left for you.





Wednesday, March 9, 2016

Fios fail

Here are words you don’t ever want to hear from your ISP tech support: “Gee—I don’t know why it would do that.”

(Especially when it’s not even five days since the Fios installer dumped everything and left you to it.)

Even worse is when your tech support (I’ll call him Devon) confuses the two pieces of hardware you have to deal with, the modem and the router.

I hadn’t thought it possible, but Verizon is approaching Comcastdom in terms of customer experience.




Tuesday, March 8, 2016

Because it's 2016

Roughly half the human population is female, yet in almost every country on the planet, no matter how rich or poor, citizens with the XX chromosome configuration lead harder lives than the XY crowd. The rising tide of civilization has lifted a lot of boats, that’s true, but those craft carrying women and girls do not seem to be as seaworthy as the ones full of men and boys.

The three major religions originating in the Middle East fill their highest leadership roles with men. Not surprisingly, then, there is considerable toleration (and, in many cases, encouragement) for the notion that the solution to the problem of men not being able to control their reproductive urges is to confine women literally and figuratively—keep them out of sight in buildings or tent-like clothing, behind second-class schooling and third-class access to healthcare. This is, in every case, justified as being a directive from God.

Other societies and religions (both sacred and secular) practice similar policies. The two largest nations, India and China, have actually tipped the male-female ratio to 112 men per 100 women through gender-selective abortions and infanticide. Those girls who do survive receive less support in everything from food to education, even though studies indicate that countries with gender equality in primary and secondary education improve their overall economic status considerably.

In India, they can look forward to arranged marriages and the charming post-nuptial custom of bride-burning. In China, there’s such a surplus of males that they’re already worrying about the potential for violent crimes expected to result from the prolonged frustration of adult men deprived of, um, wives.

Like no one could have predicted that when they started aborting female fetuses.

But we in the western world should not be brushing up our tut-tutting skills. Not with our dismal statistics on domestic violence, our patriarchal policies on reproductive rights (Viagra ; contraceptives no) and our pay gap (after 40-odd years of record-keeping, women have moved up from 59% to 79% of men’s wages for similar work; yippee).

Wealth and intelligence do not mitigate this mindset. By way of example, I give you the Valley They Call Silicon, the self-proclaimed meritocratic vortex of Advanced Thinking and The Next Big Thing. Seldom have I worked in a more testosterone-driven arena, and this includes association with three branches of the military and a couple of police forces. No matter what your race or ethnic background, if you’re male you are de facto a higher-value asset than a female, in every organization from three-guys-and-a-dog startups to behemoths. Don’t believe me? Take a look at the statistics reported under duress (after a lot of pressure from organizations like the Anita Borg Institute) for male/female employees.

Those numbers are even worse if you restrict your view to the higher-status/pay engineering and other tech job categories, filtering out things like admin and food service.

Sexism—the denigration of contributions from females—would have to peer very intently into its rearview mirror to see the rampant stage way back in the distance. Its brochacho, sexual harassment, is not far behind, either. Some of that is conscious and malicious, some not. When software development teams hold their monthly off-sites at Hooters, there could be passive-aggressive motives, or simply obtuseness, but the atmosphere is toxic regardless.

Consider the monumental cluelessness involved in Microsoft’s CEO assuring women at the über women-in-tech conference, the Grace Hopper Celebration (a ballroom full of tech-savvy women with mobile devices and connectivity), that not asking for a promotion or pay raise is actually some XX-chromosome “super power”, which will lead to the Universe of Divine Largesse noticing how good they are and rewarding them accordingly.

Could that super power of silence account for the fact that we’re still making only 79 cents on the dollar, from baristas to CEOs, that our male colleagues are earning? Hmm?

Beyond the Valley, though, take a look at the world of scientific research, where a Nobel laureate (Tim Hunt, Physiology/Medicine, 2001) proclaimed publicly last year, “Let me tell you about my trouble with girls [sic]… Three things happen when they are in the lab: You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and when you criticize them they cry.” Therefore, research labs should be sex-segregated. Like madrassas, monasteries and other places where men can’t concentrate on things through no fault of their own.

When I say “publicly”, I mean he made the declaration to a large audience at the World Conference of Science Journalists—a ballroom full of writers with mobile devices and connectivity. He didn’t think there was anything at all wrong with what he considered to be a statement of fact.

That a lot of male scientific researchers share Hunt’s low-distraction-level syndrome is evident from reports of decades of sexual harassment by senior (and mid-level) practitioners of more junior-level female colleagues, like this one out of UC Berkeley. Institutions almost never reprimand these men, much less fire their asses, so women are told (sometimes in quite venerable publications) that it’s just one of the costs of being in science, so suck it up, babycakes.

And this is before we get to Congressmorons with freaking medical practices assuring us that in the case of “genuine” rapes, women’s reproductive systems have natural ways of shutting down pregnancy.

Well, you get my point.

It’s International Women’s Day 2016 and we have so far to go, my brothers and sisters. We can do better. We have to.



Monday, March 7, 2016

Gratitude Monday: Settling in

It’s slow, but I am making some progress in the settling-in process.

The bedroom, four of the closets and one of the bathrooms are organized. The kitchen cupboards are populated and I’ve even got my good china out of the carton it’s been living in for the past six years.

Unaccountably I’m down to two champagne glasses, which I don’t get. Leaving aside my recollection of having several crystal flutes packed away with the good china, the fact is that I had three of them throughout my sojourn in the Valley They Call Silicon, so I don’t understand how I can be down one.

So far I’ve not been positively impressed with Allied Van Lines. It’s not that things never happen, and you have to expect that some things are going to be damaged. However, the professional thing would be to point out the ones you know for a fact are so—because somewhere along the way you or your colleagues attempted to tape over the gouges in the wood. This did not happen.


So I’ll have to see how they respond to me pointing this out.

(Ditto the man who packed my kitchen stuff. Not once in more than twenty years of being moved by professionals have I ever seen a packer who laid glasses and dishes on their sides instead of on their ends. Until now. When one of my favorite plates was smashed.)

Still—I’m grateful that I’m once again surrounded by my own furniture, crystal, clothes and miscellanea.

And when I can once again walk across the office floor to choose a book, I’ll be really, really happy.


That’ll be a while, though.