ulo.tricho.us

Cracked.com has quietly been reinventing their brand over the past few years, becoming a bit of a web powerhouse in the process.  They've certainly cracked the code for success on Digg.  What's most interesting to me (as someone who remembers cracked as a lame chaser of the usual gang of idiots) is the space they're occupying somewhere between comedy and legit analysis, not unlike The Daily Show, and they're definitely following TDS's formula of picking up stories that no-one else is covering, and then making jokes about them.

This week, Cracked.com ran Tech Zombies: 6 Technologies That Don't Know They're Dead, and while they aren't all slam dunks, this is some excellent, provocative writing, even if it's not all that funny.  Especially to libraries.  These walking dead are our bread and butter, and what's most interesting is that many libraries are just now getting into a few of them, seeking salvation.  I'll grant that the Cracked brand isn't usually associated with media prognosticating, but they make some excellent arguments (especially when they talk about the competing interests of sustainability and profitability) and there's a sizable grain in truth in their portrayal of the light at the end of the tunnel being not an oncoming train, but a train that's speeding away faster than libraries can catch.

What's really intriguing is that books aren't listed among the undead; perhaps the author is angling for a book deal.

International Conference on Entertainment Computing, at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh

Ft. Worth, Indiana

Guitar Hero, Brawl, DDR

Cleveland, Ohio

Los Angeles Convention Center, on the SIGGRAPH 2009 committee!

Once upon a time, I used to actually do things, instead of just email.  Back then, in the old days, we had something we used to call Windows NT.  I went to a few NT training classes in my day, as it was universally known then that Windows NT was an elegant operating system, from a more civilized time.  However, these classes were unanimously, mind-wrenchingly boring, taking subjective eons to get through 10 minutes worth of content.  So I wrote some poems to pass the time.  I found them whilst purging the basement of crap, and I present them here to you now, just to demonstrate that once upon a time, a sysadmin was judged not on the breadth of his knowledge, but on the consistency of his meter.  Suffice it to say, I was not a very good sysadmin, and it's for the best that I was promoted to email processing, as you'll see from the following, which represent the entirety of my notes from a weeklong class, peppered with acronyms so deprecated that they are almost charming in their quaintitude.  Also, if you're MOT, you might notice a little "Ma nishtanah" influence here.  Enjoy.

What could it be,
running service pack 3,
when your RAS service is interrupted?
If it's your PDC
running PPTP,
then your SAM database is corrupted. 

Is it a pain
if another domain
wants permissions for some unknown yokel?
It's not, but you must
establish a trust
and a new global group in a local.

How can I set
up the user to get
all their mapped drives at ev'ry location?
Use a login.bat
(you must propagate that)
but don't use the built-in replication.

What would it do
if a user or two
had the right to log on as a service?
Well, I don't think it could
do much harm or much good,
but it sure makes your sysadmin nervous.

I can't understand,
when there's that little hand
what permissions those boxes I clicked give!
Well, it's true (for a while)
'twixt a share and a file
that it picks the one that's most restrictive.