Revolutions

Have you ever noticed that the people who talk the most about revolution are some of the least in need of one? I hear people complaining about taxes, threatening revolution. Or gun control, saying we need a revolution. And ya know what, the people who are really poor in this country, really getting shit on, I don't hear from them. And they're the ones who need a freaking revolution. If you're rich enough to be paying a lot of taxes, you are probably one of the people that gets revolted against, not one of the revolters. Most of the people I see in the NRA don't look like poor oppressed masses to me. Why revolt when you're making enough money to own 100 guns? What are you bitching about?

I've heard this from both sides of the political divide, too. I had this friend in college who was awesome, and very left. Actually, he was a Marxist. And he would talk about the revolution. So one day I asked him why he was so eager for the masses to rise up and kill us. We were both white, both middle to upper middle class, both certainly benefiting from the capitalist society more than the Marxist masses. He actually seemed a bit taken aback. He said we'd be the inteligentia. I just didn't see people approaching he and I to be the intelligentia. But who knows, maybe I'm wrong.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for change. Truly. I think things need to change, in lots of ways. Now I may be totally off base here but I just think that praying for revolution is a stupid, stupid thing. I think people who say these things have never thought about what a revolution would mean. What any freaking war means, much less a civil war. I think revolution is an utter failure of every side of a debate and to be avoided at almost any cost, and I hope it is never necessary and never occurs.

Veering away on a tangent, I think it would be fascinating to study revolutions, though. To try to figure out when and why they occur and if they've ever involved revolts against things like, oh, I don't know, gun contorl laws or health care policy. There is probably some really awesome book on the topic that does just that - goes through history and examines revolutions in a succinct and useful way. If there isn't there should be. And if there is, let me know what it is!

Bureaucracies are just weird.

Shifter here.

First, just have to comment that bureaucracy is one of the hardest damn words on the plant to spell. I mean it sucks. I try and try, and I can't even get it close enough to have a spell checker know what I am getting at. I keep trying beauracracy, which is way, way off, but doesn't look that much worse than bureaucracy.

It's only fitting that we should give it an odd spelling, though, because the damn things are just as odd. I have to admit that bureaucracy is a brilliant invention. I know that sounds weird, but how on earth is someone supposed to coordinate huge groups of people doing disparate things with massive amounts of input and output, resources and products, all in some vaguely common direction? Bureaucracy lets you do that. That doesn't mean it doesn't suck, but it lets you do that. So I admit that. Given.

But, at the same time, it does suck. Here are just a few tiny examples. A few years ago someone in my organization, on the national level, screwed up and took home a laptop with vast amounts of private information about a few million customers. Not bright, granted. Then he lost the lap top. It was stolen, and it was unencrypted, and it was a mess. The bureaucracy had to act. First, it implemented a series of mandatory trainings in which the tens of thousands of employees, across the country, had to listen to how it was a bad idea to take home private information about customers on unencrypted lap tops. Never mind that the rank and file boobs, like myself, who had to take these trainings don't even have access to millions of customer accounts at a time and so could never even take home that information if, for some godforsaken reason, we'd want to. It would be stupid for us to have that kind of access. And we don't. The kinds of people who do have that access probably didn't have to take the freaking training. Too high up, if you see what I mean. Second, it implemented a series of progressively more and more draconian bans on any means of moving data off of the facilities. You weren't allowed to take laptops home unless they were superencrypted. You weren't allowed to email anything that might contain private data. There were rumors of removing all writable disk drives from all pcs (like CD-R's or DVD-R's) so no data could be transmitted that way. You could not take ANY information off site, even if that information had NO private data involved whatsoever. If it was a bunch of random zeros and ones, with no ties to any single person, you weren't supposed to take it off site. And you could not, under any circumstances, use a thumb drive. The guards had orders to shoot thumb drives on site.

Now this last provision had a lot of us, those of us who do research, mostly, up in arms. You see, I could care less about emailing private information. I don't own an organization laptop because of the kind of draconian crap I'm talking about here. And who needs to burn DVDs on a routine basis. But thumb drives? Well, those matter. Thumb drives were INCREDIBLY useful. With a thumb drive, this cheap little bit of plastic, metal, and silicon, you could have entire file structures full of your projects available at work, at home, or on the road. If you de-identified any of your data (which is a good practice anyway) there was zero risk for loss of privacy to customers. Without thumb drives, working from home, or on the road, became vastly more difficult and time consuming. But rather than saying "don't put identifiable information on thumb drives" they simply said "don't use them."

So we all had a fit. I mean it was close to anarchy. If you want to laugh, watch a bunch of eggheads in a crowded staff meeting getting mad at all the facility heads because they can't have their thumbdrives. Marx would have loved it. So the local bureaucracy came up with an alternative. Encrypted thumb drives! Yes, these puppies would encrypt the information stored on them so that if you lost the thumb drive, no harm done! Brilliant!

Except! Except that 1) you had to have software installed on a pc before it could access the drive, 2) our pc's were set up so that we couldn't install the software, we had to have IRM do it, 3) if you installed the software on your home pc it tended to conflict with other software, and 4) 2 weeks after getting the damn thing it got some bug that wiped the data off of it. This went over well. I gave up, utterly, on it for about 2 years. I started emailing files back and forth from my work to my office every night to get work done. Sometimes I couldn't get stuff done because the right files were in the wrong place. I got so frustrated with this that 4 months ago I finally called IRM and asked them to reset my damn encrypted thumb drive so I could try it again. They informed me that those drives were no longer supported by the organization and I should turn it in, and that I was out of luck. My head exploded, just a bit, and I soldiered on.

So here's the weird part though. Two days ago I called someone to ask if I could use an effective, logical, and extremely efficient procedure to move large amounts of data off their server in an encrypted fashion. Isn't a terrabyte external hard drive a better medium than 450 damn DVDs? I was told no, of course not. The exact words were "that would be nice, wouldn't it." But it was not approved by the ISO, would never be approved by the ISO, and so could not happen. Period. But then, off handedly, they mentioned that there are these new thumb drives that are approved. I had never heard of them. Almost afraid, I asked if I could get one. They said only if I had one of the old ones. I said I did. Two days later I had a brand spanking new Ironkey thumbdrive. And the freaking thing works. It is, I kid you not, waterproof, tamperproof, approved for use in military operations, and encased in metal. It costs 2-3x what a normal thumb drive does, but it's got onboard hardware encryption so it can run even on our freaking pcs. I loves it.

So, 2 years of pain, yelling, misery, until I'm beat into the ground, hopeless, and then a reprieve! A new thumb drive. Still have to waste about 60 man-hours of my staffs labor on an archaic data encryption and transport project, but I've got a thumb drive. And the bureaucracy churns on.

Noah = twisted

Have you ever wondered why Christians tell the tale of Noah to all the little kids? It's like one of the number 1 kid stories from the bible. Why? It's not really a great story for kids. I mean, sure, it has animals and stuff, and boats, and I guess those are both kid things. But it also has the destruction of all life on the planet except for the two elephants, two tigers, two mosquitos, two aardvarks, two geckos, and 2 giraffes on the boat. That's really very grim. It's like the biggest holocaust in the entire bible, and it's a favorite kid story. And it doesn't really put god in that good of a light, does it? He got so mad at everyone for screwing up that he decided to kill everyone except his favorite. And he rewarded that favorite by making him work his ass off and spend a bunch of time in a big wooden boat that is packed with fighting animals and, presumably, an inordinate amount of animal doodie. I mean I hear a story like that and I'm kind of like, wow, what a dick! But they hear it and say "what a wonderful story to teach our kids about the lord!" Werid weird weird. Chapter 2 should be the 7 plagues of Egypt - still more light story telling for the child in all of us.

Maybe I Miss Walking a Little Less

When I worked at my old company, my friends and I often walked the Manhattan Bridge instead of walking the Brooklyn Bridge. It was loud because of the subway, but it had way fewer people on it, so you had a little more elbow room.

No wonder.

Learning a Foreign Language

For reasons I won't go into, I've recently decided to give learning a foreign language another whirl.  I had always sort of wanted to resurrect my French and try to breathe some life into it, but this time around I'm trying to learn Italian.  And no, it's not because I saw "Under the Tuscan Sun" one too many times, although I have seen it way too often. 

 

Learning a language may well be easier now than ever before.  The software that is available is mind-blowing.  When I took French, the height of listening to native French speakers was to watch Robert et Mireille on PBS.  Robert et Mireille had conversations about shopping.  Mireille never wore a bra.  You can see that the important stuff really sank in.  It was fine, but it wasn't exactly a unique and varied tapestry of native speech.  Plus, unless you deliberately recorded every episode, you wouldn't have the opportunity to run it back and listen to something again.

 

I'm using software from my library, called "Tell Me More," by a company called Auralog.  The principle is somewhat like Rosetta Stone, in that it's a multimedia program, but I've never used Rosetta Stone.  I went with this partly because I could get it from the library (although I ended up buying my own copy to get some added features) and partly because I anticipate needing extra help with pronunciation, and this program seemed to offer a lot of opportunities to practice and compare your pronunciation with that of "native speakers."  (I say that in quotes because I can only imagine what you'd learn comparing your pronunciation to a random native speaker of English.)

 

It's fantastic.  On almost all the screens, you have the opportunity to pause and point at any Italian word.  You can hear someone say it, you can attempt to pronounce it, and if it's a verb, you can access the conjugation for it.  It's great for trying to figure out how to say new things, and it's a good way to try to intensify the language learning experience by focusing on the things you don't understand.  So far the biggest barrier to correct pronunciation seems to be the reluctance to move my face in the ways that will produce the sound.  In many cases it seems like the only way to produce a particular phoneme is by moving my mouth in a way that feels like I'm making a funny face.  Looking back, this was my biggest problem with French, as well, because the minute I started pronouncing things clearly, I had the Monty Python Holy Grail knights in my head.  ("Silly English kuuuuuuneeggits")  But having the immediate feedback helps a lot.  I'm hoping that I'll do better with Italian than I did with French because there's so much more opportunity to do things outside of "class exercises."

 

Now if I could just train my computer to understand that if I plug the headset in, I want to use it, that would be awesome.