Dan Hulton's blog

For the remaining couple of you who don’t know, I just got a new job, working for Claero Systems, and I am tremendously excited. The company is top-notch, the people are smart and enthusiastic, and even the interview process was really, really fun.

I start Monday.

I got a random compliment on my hair today.

As I was crossing Rideau, this Russian man (or at least a man with a Russian accent) turns around, looks me right in the eye, and asks, “How long does it take you to wash your hair?

“Uh, not long,” I reply.

“Me, it takes only three minutes. Because you see, I have only three hairs! Ha!”

We laugh, me a little uncomfortably, as I am not sure exactly what is going on.

He gets serious again. “But! Do you have to use conditioner, or something like that?”

“Oh, no. I only use conditioner like… twice a month, if I remember.”

“Wonderful! You are very lucky, to have hair like that!”

“Thanks,” I say, as he immediately turns his back on me, smiling broadly, and hustles off.

The strangest thing.

• 9/11
• The JFK Assassination
• The Moon landing
• The Earth Being Round
• Fluoride in the Water
• Republicans

Recently, the US held a cyber warfrare-style wargame. I was very interested in watching this happen, largely to see if the simulated elected officials were as unprepared as I had thought they were. I did wonder, however, why they were choosing to make public the results of this wargame. They were even live-broadcasting it. Was this an example of the openness of the new administration? What fun!

But after reading the results, I’m no longer amused at the prospect of an unprepared, over-encumbered government unable to keep up with the times – I’m in shock at how “with the times” they are, just in an entirely oblique aspect.

The scary parts of the article I linked are here:

Half an hour into an emergency meeting of a mock National Security Council, the attorney general declared: “We don’t have the authority in this nation as a government to quarantine people’s cellphones.”

The White House cyber coordinator was “shocked” and asserted: “If we don’t have the authority, the attorney general ought to find it.”

and

Former senior officials from Republican and Democratic administrations participated in the war game, as did one former senator. Jamie S. Gorelick, a deputy attorney general under President Bill Clinton, pressed the issue of individual privacy. In a crisis, she said, “Americans need to know that they should not expect to have their cellphone and other communications to be private — not if the government is going to have to take aggressive action to tamp down the threat.”

and

“People have trouble understanding warnings,” said John McLaughlin, who served as acting CIA director in 2004 and who played the director of national intelligence. “It was only after Sept. 11 that people could visualize what was possible. The usefulness of the simulation is it will help people visualize [the threat].”

Yes, and we all know how safe the precautions taken after 9/11 have made everyone, and how much they’ve enriched everyone’s lives.

It’s pretty clear – you don’t even have to read between the lines. This wasn’t a public example of the United States’ actual response to a credible cyber-threat, it was Security Theatre, but a dangerous new definition thereof: A sham bit of theatre about security, intended to cow the audience into submitting to brand new invasions of privacy.

Still not convinced? Let me leave you with one more quote:

Lockhart said that people would be scared by the simulation but that “that’s a good thing.” Only then, he said, would Congress act.

Apparently, Goals suck too. Or at least I suck. Reviewing the goals I set for myself last year, I see that I didn’t really do too well.

1. Lose 30 lbs. I don’t want a perfect body, but I do want to get rid of this spare tire I’m lugging around. Getting down to 195 would do most of that.

FAIL. I weigh as much as last year at this time, almost to the pound.

2. Exercise 3x weekly, for at least 30 minutes. I’m going to keep a journal and everything.

FAIL. I lasted until early February.

3. Launch BillOnSite. There’ll be more on this later, but I think I have a real winner (or at least some real potential) here.

WIN! I actually launched the site! That said, I haven’t really developed it into a winner yet.

4. Pay off my PC Financial Mastercard. My strategy here is that every non-rent paycheque is used to reduce it a further $500 from last time. So if it’s at $2000 and I spend $40 in the intervening time, I have to put $540 on it to “catch up”. I don’t know how well that will work, but even if it doesn’t, I should still be able to pay the whole thing off this year.

FAIL. Though getting laid off sure didn’t help.

New Goals for 2010

1. Lose 30 lbs. This one I’m carrying over, since it’s pretty worthwhile.
2. Develop Bill On Site into something at at least pays its own bills.
3. Pay off my PC Financial Mastercard. Again, I’m carrying this over. Hopefully this year I won’t be laid off halfway through it and I can afford to throw money at it until it’s dead.
4. Have a playable demo. I’m working on a game now – name unknown, but it goes by “Zombie Fortress” until I can dig up a better one – and I want to have something I can actually show someone so they understand how the game plays. It’s one of those sandbox games where the attention to detail really makes the game, so I’m not planning on finishing it this year, but I want to be able to load it up and say “So look, the survivor goes over here and he picks up the gas can, but there’s a zombie there and he’s a cowardly survivor, so he drops the gas can and runs. Neat, huh?”

Unachievable goal: Rig the lottery so that Stephen Harper wins six times in a row, even though he’s not playing, and he undergoes an embarassing investigation. The scandal loses him the Prime Minister’s seat.

In other news, while not a goal or a resolution, I do plan on blogging more. It occurs to me that more things of note happened to me in ’09 than are reflected on this blog, and that’s kind of a shame. I mean, nowhere on here does it say how I’m now working for The Hill Times in downtown Ottawa, and loving it. I mean, what the heck’s the point of that?

Apparently, in Russia, on the 256th day of the year, they now celebrate Programmer’s Day.

I propose that this is an excellent idea, and we should celebrate it with all the pomp, circumstance, and rigamarole that we celebrate Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and Talk Like a Pirate Day.

Speaking of, Talk Like a Pirate Day is coming up, too.

So I found this new reality show. I know what you’re thinking – “Man, fuck reality shows. Those are for bored housewives who do nothing but sit around eating bonbons all day.” Well fuck, aside from the “bored”, “housewife”, “bonbons”, and “nothing but sit around”, that’s me to a T.

(For those of you playing the home game, that makes me a “who do eating all day”. That’s fucked up.)

Anyway, the show is called “The Colony”, and it’s about a group of people who are herded into an abandoned industrial lot, told that the world has ended, and they must survive this post-industrial wasteland with nothing more than what they can scavenge, build, or steal.

Considering I just got through playing Fallout 3, I am in exactly the right frame of mind to enjoy this show. I basically scavenged and stole the entirety of Washington, DC.

Here, let me give you a little excerpt from the wikipedia page about episode one:

Episode 1

Now tell me that doesn’t sound badass. I’m sure it’ll be fucked up by the normal reality-show drama nonsense that the producers seem to love putting in regardless of how cool the concept is, but this is such a cool concept that I’m going to have to give it a try.

Hopefully I can catch Episode 1 tonight and report back.

I just saw this and fell directly in love:

The Game Crafter – Your game REALIZED

So basically you can design your own board game, upload it to them, and then start selling it from their site. How freaking cool is that?

I wish I had an extra 24h in each day so I could work on a board game in addition to Bill On Site…

I cannot express my frustration at seeing code like this:

if (isset($modifier)) {
    // Do some things.

    // And some more things.

    // Still more
    // things
    // to be done here.

    // There's a whole lot of things here!

    // Last bunch of things
}
else {
    // Do totally different stuff
}

People. Comment your elses! I shouldn’t have to scroll up to read the if again just to figure out what a branch of logic does. This is a maintenance code nightmare, and simply adding a simple “// If validation has failed” will save all kinds of time and frustration.

I always figured that when I got laid off next, I’d write a scathing missive about how the company that did it was full of blundering morons, savagely incompetent noncompoops, and how I hoped they’d fail miserably without me.

Okay, rather, I figured I’d have the fortitude to resist writing such a post, but I at least figured I’d want to.

But see, I got laid off earlier today and frankly, I’m not upset at all.

I’m not upset with the company – I wish them the very best. They have some neat technology and if it pans out (and it looks like it will), then they’re going to clobber the marketplace. I’m not upset with anyone left behind – these things are usually as hard on them as they are on those that got laid off, and everyone still working there is good people that I just don’t wish this on. And I’m not upset with the management either – they were faced with a tough decision. They’d cut every non-staff expense they could (we watched and noticed and were grateful), but this economy is brutal and people are loathe to commit to purchasing decisions, which affects their bottom line.

And it’s not like I’m going to be in dire straights or anything. Since I was laid off, I can get EI for Quite Some Time, or even better, Ontario offers a Self-Employment Grant that you can get if you’re otherwise eligible for EI. Since I wanted more time to work on Bill On Site, then this may actually work out to my benefit.

Ultimately, I’m choosing not to think of this as a setback, but rather as a hell of an opportunity.