Matthew Botos

My friend Brian became my new hero yesterday by quitting a dissatisfying tech job with an increasing level of management hijinx. It’s the dream of many a disgruntled techie to stand up one day, realize it’s just not worth it anymore and they don’t really need the job. The latter is the tough part for most people, myself included. Even if a job sucks, it’s tough to walk out on a paycheck when there are bills to pay and an unknown gap until the next gig.

Enter the Fuck You Money; that glorious pile of cash that gives you a buffer. It’s one of my favorite financial figures, because it gives you a bit of that freedom and power to say, “I don’t need a paycheck next week and could take some time off if I wanted”. And man is that tempting sometimes; after 7 years with a company that fails to see the “return on investment” from sabbatical-type leaves, it would be great just to take a few months off to travel or work on personal projects. (The idea is not unprecedented: Intel gives you 2 months every 7 years, Google gives you one day a week to work on side projects.)

For now, I have my hands in challenging enough work to stay, but my long and often sordid history as a corporate minion and Brian’s inspiration make it quite a temptation.

To most Internet users, Google is magic. Complex things like search and maps become so simple and easy we can’t imagine using anyone else. Pulling back the curtain, though, there are a lot of gears churning, a bit of smoke belching, and somewhere in the back is a guy with a hammer, banging on some obstinate part of the machine until it works. This week, I’m the guy with the hammer.

We have a Google Search Appliance at work (you can buy one for yourself on-line), and it does a fine job if you plug it in and let it crawl and serve your company’s open pages. Where it gets much more interesting is if you want to control what goes in (go write your own crawler to feed it) and what comes out (implement their security interface).

As the lead of this part of the project, I’m now getting to deal with all of this as we come up against a deadline. The particularly frustrating part has been trying to get support from Google. You would think this is a no-brainer, being a big company paying a big pile of money to another big company for just that purpose. But like everyone else, they’re trying to cut costs by pushing us towards self-help and community forums.

Once we did get them on the phone, things began to improve as they revealed some of the logs on their very locked-down appliance that made some problems clear. Others were slightly beyond their first line of support; after continuously hearing how selective Google’s hiring is, it’s bemusing to know we can still stump some of them.

I was checking out my disk usage with JDiskReport and stumbled across an interesting way to look at your music:

(The unlabeled purple wedge is The Rolling Stones.)

The trouble with engagement rings looks at the history and current view of engagement rings, going a little deeper than the usual source of the diamond industry’s shrewd marketing:

But there’s a powerful case to be made that in an age of equitable marriage the engagement ring is an outmoded commodity—starting with the obvious fact that only the woman gets one.

Indeed, in an equitable relationship, wouldn’t a man get a fancy watch or ring as a sign of commitment from his fiancee? Of course, where you could really have some interesting conversations with your mate are over the ring’s history of sexuality and ownership:

To be marriageable at the time you needed to be a virgin, but, Brinig points out, a large percentage of women lost their virginity while engaged. So some structure of commitment was necessary to assure betrothed women that men weren’t just trying to get them into bed. (Implicitly, it would seem, a woman’s virginity was worth the price of a ring, and varied according to the status of her groom-to-be.)

Finally, as to why the tradition persists:

Part of the reason could be that many young women, raised in a realm of relative equality, never think rigorously about the traditions handed down to them. And many are looking for men who will bear the burden of providing for them, while demanding equality in other ways.

This concept of selective equality has certainly been true in my experience, with a few exceptions. Plenty of women out there are still looking for a man to be a traditional provider while taking full advantage of modern equality and independence.

You can do a lot with Greasemonkey, even take control of the weather! Well, how you view the weather at least. This morning cloudy skies led me to jump through the usual series of clicks to get to a Doppler radar map, prompting a litte pre-breakfast scripting.

The Yahoo Weather Doppler script brings the weather image from a secondary page and puts it at the top of the main page, and hides the multiple layers of Yahoo headers that push all the real information down. The guts of the script were fairly simple; the name of the Doppler image can be derived from another link on the page. As always, the more time consuming part was tweaking the CSS to get it to look right!

Last Saturday, I spent National Trails Day with a crew of three dozen people rebuilding a section of trail in Philadelphia’s Wissahickon Park. Today I got to go back and ride it. The trail, below Bluebell Meadow, used to swing out to the uphill rider’s left after the stream crossing into a muddy, eroded slope. The new trail throws in an S-curve to slow things down, and the whole section is built on top of a foot-thick layer of rocks to provide drainage. A lot of work, but a big improvement! The rest of the photos are a nice reminder of why we build trails in the first place.

View the Wissahickon Trails Day photos

While I was cleaning up my kitchen Monday night, the disposal started making nasty sounds. There was noting jammed in it, but one of the cutters was loose. I soon found that it wasn’t serviceable, at least not without taking the whole thing apart and releasing 15 years of accumulated funk.

At Home Depot, I found replacements ranging from basic to totally pimped, and settled on a slight upgrade in the basic line. Installing the new one was simple enough once I found the right circuit to turn off; disposal mounts are thankfully standard. Even though the new one isn’t fancy, it seems to run a bit quieter and smoother than the old one, and it certainly smells better!

View the Garbage Disposal photos

I started tagging my photos a few years ago, and wrote a custom tag cloud and search. But you didn’t get to see what individual photos were tagged until today. With a bit more Perl in the cornocupia of scripts that are my photo album, individual photos now have a tag list that works the usual way, linking you to other photos with the same tag.

After spending a week at work slugging it out with C#, integrating a Google Search Appliance, and dealing with the corporate development process, it was a welcome change to bang out some quick code and immediately put it into action.

Netflix handily tells you how many movies you’ve rated (1862 for me), and with the Number Netflix History Rows Greasemonkey script, you can tally how many of those you’ve rented. My count is 472 since August 2000, which make me a little less of a movie junkie than the first number