Diversity and Columbus Day (Unobserved)

2004-10-12T16:41:00

I get the feeling that The Twilight Report is becoming a Dilbert's rant about the stupidity which is The Company. While this is not A Good Thing generally speaking, it must be because The Company has been on my mind a lot lately. Every year we have these diversity training meetings where our manager explains to us what diversity is. Today was that day for my new department. One of the slides Tom showed us went something like thus:

Diversity

To which someone in the department said "I don't really understand this chart. I mean, why is Germany and Vietnam in red, and nothing else is?"

Nobody could really give a satisfactory answer to this, but someone else did say "It shows diversity."

I think it is fabulous that you can take the emotionally charged and complex idea of diversity and encapsulate it into a single chart. It is a good thing that The Company decided to show us this chart, otherwise we might become bigoted. On another chart they lumped Women in with all the popular minorities. I know it is a cliché to even bring it up, but since when is 51% of the population a minority? (And if it isn't a minority, then why can't I get a date for Friday night?)

Today is Columbus Day (Unobserved). Yesterday was Columbus Day (Observed). Some people call it Native People's Day, with an acute sense of irony. Columbus began the subjugation of North America, something Leaf Erikson failed to do centuries before 1492.

Every year seems as though I go to the Adirondack's Columbus Day weekend for our annual cabin trip. Not because we get Columbus Day off at The Company (because we don't)... it just always ends up like that. This year was our first exception since the people who own the cabins closed shop early this year. This was terribly disappointing.

Violent Rant

2004-10-07T16:29:00

Question:

Given: two computers one is a PII 500Mhz, the other a P4 notebook sitting not more than five feet away. The PII is on a 10MegaBit Ethernet, the notebook is on a 100MB Fast Ethernet network. First of all... why the hell can.t my stupid company shell out a few bucks and give for a 100MB hub which I can plug into the wall so that both computers can run on the fast Ethernet. No... that might violate arbitrary security policies... that might be too efficient... I might actually be able to get something done. Secondly, why is it that it is faster to copy a file from my notebook to my computer at home, and then from my home computer to the PII, than it is to copy the file DIRECTLY from the notebook to the PII. Just to give you an idea, my home computer is twenty minutes away (by car)... BUT in order to get there electronically, you have to go through my server in Austin Texas to get into the virtual private network in order to get there. So, send a file to Texas, then back to here in New York, do it twice... and somehow that is FASTER than just copying the thing directly. What the fuck. I guess The Company hasn.t figured out how to do computer networks. The STUPIDITY of it all is that people pay us to set up their networks.

Idiots.