Bloody buggering morons...

Once upon a time, there were things called third-party email clients. They were readily accessible by anyone and everyone was happy. Then mean people, known as bosses, decided that the potential risk of people downloading viruses, trojans, and worms was too great to allow people to use those 3rd party email clients, so they told their employees who liked checking their email at work to go fuck themselves. This made many people unhappy, and had the totally expected side effect of people being pissed off enough to try to find ways around this no 3rd party email idiocy.

There were two main ways of dealing with this new no-email scenario, the non-techy way and the techy way. Non-techy people were still capable of figuring out that they could get their 3rd party emails forwarded to their work email address, thus getting their emails. This was a really bad idea for a couple of reasons: 1) work addresses are easily read by those bosses so personal email via work is too easily read by other people 2) work email is usually Microsoft Outlook, also known as The Easiest Email Client To Get A Virus, Trojan, or Worm with, and therefore is a horrible idea. So by blocking third party emails, the bosses, also known as morons, basically guaranteed that Outlook would look at these emails and happily open the door for any kind of evil software that exists, thus shooting their stupid idea in the foot, the face, you name it.

The techy way to deal with the problem was to find interesting technological ways around the blocks. Most people don't know this, but there are actually two main ways for websites to talk to their readers: HTTP and HTTPS. Now that S on HTTPS means secure; it's a different protocol and one that isn't often blocked because blocking sites that are already secure could be viewed as idiocy. As such, many third party email clients still had HTTPS sites up that had not been blocked by bosses/morons. The techy people, knowing that these secure email clients had all sorts of protections against viruses and whatnot, used these HTTPS sites, secure (ha!) in the knowledge that they were both getting to keep their email and also doing their boss/morons a solid by protecting the company from being raped by the evils of the Internet.

Sadly, even the morons eventually caught on to the HTTPS sites, and tried to block them. This didn't bother the non-techy people who were busily filling their companies with viruses; only the techy people started getting boned by morons. Techy people, however, thrive in the face of adversity. Now there are a few new options depending on the tech available for those poor email deprived types, and few of them are good for the company.

1) Email on my phone! Many phones are now also capable of surfing the mobile net, meaning people can check and reply to their email on their phones. Why is this bad for the company? Simple. Assuming average people have an average typing speed of 30 words per minute, rather slow, an email could take a couple minutes to write. Now try that on your cellphone. If you're fast, and I mean fast, you might manage 30 wpm. More realistically you might get 5-10 wpm out of that tiny little keyboard. That's tripling or more the time it takes to reply to an email, thus hurting productivity. This also cannot be blocked unless you're willing to wrap your entire building with copper to block all cellphones, which you can't do because of work-only or on-call cellphones. Good call morons.

2) Remote access to my home machine. Though not entirely safe for the home user, it is relatively easy to set up a way for your home machine to be accessible via the internet, be that by Remote Desktop or another cool method of proxy, you now have access to your machine at home. Not only that, you have access to a machine that doesn't have a single business restriction, meaning you can email, IM, even IRC without problems. You can also browse the Internet for anything, midget pr0n if you were so inclined. Say goodbye to your work productivity. True here as well, this cannot be blocked because of the business use of Remote Desktop. Again: good call morons.

The simple, obvious, better, and just plain nicer answer here is: don't be pricks, let people check their 3rd party email for five minutes. It's safer, smarter, better for productivity, and keeps people happy.

I'm not holding my breath.

My notes

The following are my notes, all of them, from my company's very important quarterly meeting regarding everything important we need to do.

Steal ideas from Geico.

Useful meeting, eh?

Getting published online ain't easy

There's a general rule of publishing: Money flows to the writer. Anything else is usually a scam or vanity press. However, almost everything one can easily find on the internet has reading fees, or contests with entry fees, or some other combination thereof. There are agents a plenty who are trolling the internet desperately seeking new writers who are suckers so that they can get reading fees, editing fees, etc, out of these people who don't do their research. Really, when it comes to getting published, even with short fiction, everything is just as much of a pain in the ass as trying to get a novel published.

Fortunately I don't make decisions lightly, so before I get to the point of sending off my short stories somewhere, I research the website. So far I haven't found any legitimate, or at least "reading fee" free sites on my own. I've been sent to a few places that actually have reasonable submission guidelines and no fees, but they're usually not specifically after my typical writing style, modern fantasy, so I don't want to waste their time or mine with submissions that will just be rejected. So I'ma keep looking.

As always, I'm open to suggestions.

This made me feel mildly better

http://www.daisyowl.com/comic/2008-08-24

Era over

With a surprising lack of drama, I have quit my kungfu school. There are many reasons, but the main one was the lack of kungfu. Say what? I went to the school in the interest of learning kungfu, Hung Gar kungfu specifically, and for a while I did. Recently, however, the emphasis in even the supposed kungfu classes changed to a more modernized kungfu style rather than the traditional. I understand the changes, I just don't like them. With these changes my career at my old school ended as I was only ever interested in kungfu. So now it's time to find something new to try.

And found it I have: Capoeira! Examples are here, here, and here. Brazilian breakdance fighting? Fuck yes! I've been interested in capoeira for years, but now I think I'm finally going to get around to actually taking some classes and see how I do at it. Really what I'm looking to do is something different. Years of karate left me strong, fast, capable, but very different in style from kungfu or taiji. Years of both kungfu and taiji have left me flexible, fluid, and confident, but with a strong grounding in keeping my feet on the ground. Capoeira, being mostly kicks, acrobatics, and basically like breakdancing, will make me more fluid, more flexible, and even stronger. I can't wait to try my first class.

Failing finding available capoeira classes, I have two other schools suggested to me by my last instructor. One is a true Wong Fei Hung lineage Hung Gar kungfu school which is, I must admit, very tempting. The other is the school of an instructor that used to teach at the school I just left, and his school is very tempting as well as he was one of the best teachers I've ever had. Even as I leave my school, I leave with wonderful options before me. I look forward to what my new martial arts career has to offer me.

My frickin' neck hurts

Though my title does leave the door open for many, many a gay joke, the real reason I'm complaining is that my neck is legitimately the sorest it's been in recent memory, and it's all thanks to a crazy new exercise at kungfu. We're doing rolls, i.e. somersaults, and rolling for a few minutes can get you very dizzy. But that's not why my neck hurts. Rolling is easy. Break falls, not so easy.

A break fall is when you drop to the ground (or at my level, hurl yourself at the ground) and twist to one side or another and slap the ground in timing with your landing to that the impact is spread across more area and does less damage. This sounds weird, but it does work well and I have years of being tossed around like a rag doll as experience to prove it. Another important detail it to keep your head from hitting the ground, so you carefully keep your neck tense to avoid clunking into the ground with your skull. Fun. So what do break falls have to do with rolls?

Simple: our new exercise routine is to roll up and back down our mat many times to get good and dizzy. Then we roll once then break fall and repeat on both sides. And there's more than one kind of break fall: there's side, back, and front break falls. Each of them is difficult in its own way, but when you combine them with rolling it gets more complicated. For my low level kungfu class, this is less of a concern because I get a nice break in between roll sets. For my advanced kungfu class, which typically consists of just me, I get to roll and break fall for about eight to ten solid minutes. That many breakfalls and rolling leads directly to neck pain.

So my neck hurts. I get dizzy a lot in class. At least it's entertaining!

Stick a fork in it

That's right, after months of work, just now coming up on six months, I've completely plotted and prepared my Dungeons and Dragons campaign. Woo! It's been a long ride, and it's not over yet, but the end is nigh, and I will be happy to see it end if only because I get to bring this story to a hopefully epic conclusion. What's in my D&D future? Hopefully someone else running a D&D game so I can take a well deserved break and our previous DM can continue his break after running the previous three games.

I have plans for other games, perhaps shorter games, perhaps longer games, and always games that have better preparations and controls, but always something fun and interesting for a demanding crowd. I could be working on my 4.0 game, but a little break from this kind of writing, and a return to my novels, seems like what I should do for a while.