RKNet Blog... Thing

First and foremost, sorry for the lengthy, unannounced break. This time of year has its way of ruining time management, and my co-authors can rarely be encouraged to slide their slug-like countenances from the couches of whatever den of iniquity they’ve parked themselves in. Or they’re too busy having a dance off. Six of one, half dozen of the other.

Anyway, onto the really important part.
If you are here because someone called “rknet” has charged your card, it was not, and could not, be me. What little research I’ve done about who it could be has pulled up three possibilities for anybody who has been charged by “rknet”:

1. You have been keylogged.
2. You have been ripped off by a false computer help site.
3. There is apparently some other RKnet which is related to some kind of tracking, might be related. (See the comment thread.)

I’m sorry to hear that anyone has been inappropriately charged. I myself am still in the middle of trying to get a chargeback resolved on two charges I didn’t authorize. I wish any and all of you luck in getting your money back.

Tonight is the company christmas party. A handful of us are circumventing the overpriced drinks scandal by pre-gaming hardcore. I expect someone to fall victim to the Rocky Mountain Bearfucker. (I’m not convinced that’s the right recipie, will update when I’m sure.)

Gotta dig my car out from out underneath about a foot and a half of snow before any of that.

Check this out! And he’s got a link to an even larger archive of photos of these massive “art car” style trucks. I’m sure it does nothing for their mileage, but it’s certainly a million times better than the endless lines of white, silver and black compact cars we see here in the states.

gawkermedia - like crack
I ate a hot pocket earlier
it collapsed part of my soul
cult leadership is tough with so many alternatives to be had.
I’m contemplating talking about a serious subject
that came to mind through a dubious link
conspiracy theory is weird, the truth is usually weirder.
Hey how many five year olds can you beat up? No really.
oh and don’t bother with the booze test. broke every time I tried it.

Akismet has caught this many since I installed it.

Thanks Akismet! I couldn’t handle it without you.

Via Sacred Texts and grow-a-brain: The entirety of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur available on the internet.

Yes it is broken up into twenty one “books”, as originally published by William Caxton in 1485, but don’t let that scare you. Each of these books contains several chapters, which all appear rather short, and come with descriptions.

Unfortunately, there doesn’t appear to be a handy PDF version here, but with the narrow, plain text formatting, it should be accessible from any mobile internet reader you fancy.

I promise this isn’t shopped.

Into every life, a little ridiculous, standardized bureaucracy must fall. In the case of mine, I have encountered the insurmountable juggernaut that is “Dress Code”. This has come up about five or six times in my time here, but never really stuck before. Thank goodness. Working for an Internet company who doesn’t really handle walk-in business (with rare exception), I’m stunned and frustrated by this repeated insistence upon doing things the “meatspace” way. I’ve never been the best at maintaining a budget, a laundry schedule, or a steady weight. These powers combine to create a condition by which I rarely, if ever, have anything that will pass for “Business Appropriate”, whatever that means. As a result I typically make-do with jeans and some kind of shirt that doesn’t look too grubby or trashy. So far so good I wager.

Yet I digress. Dress Code Part 2: Electric Boogaloo, has descended upon our merry band of rascals to lay some foxes in otherwise rather content hen houses. A condensed beam of sunlight seeking out worker ants whose exoskeleton is improperly decorated by worker ant standards as set out in Tomes of Olde. Presumably the goal is something of a mimicry of those who came before us. Even Jack Parsons wore a suit to work, and he was some kind of crazy-ass pagan/rocket scientist who did a lot of field work (in both areas of his life).

So let’s get down to the nitty gritty. The actual body of this extremely local legislation.

“Please use Dress Code Common Sense Law; If you aren’t sure, then don’t wear it!”
What if you’re a self-conscious person, or a fashion hound, or it’s early and you’re hung over and easily confused? Any of those three means that the odds are pretty good you aren’t sure about what you’re wearing for the day. What if you can’t decide what shirt to wear? Does that mean go without one? Technically that would follow that law to the letter. It’s a logistics nightmare. There’s also the believe that “common” sense is by no means common at all, but that’s another discussion altogether.

There’s a statement against wrinkles too. Wrinkles? Wear clothes without wrinkles? Whoever first decided that that was important needs to go right to hell. The individual who first decided that wrinkles were a detriment to one’s business ability doesn’t live in any reality I’ve ever been privy to where people wear clothes and they get wrinkled.

Casual Friday’s entry isn’t even complete in this official document. It’s both curious and a little frightening. As if to suggest the robot overlords terminated the author prior to their completion of the thought.

With the idea appearance directly affecting one’s worthiness as a business associate, or affecting the opinion of visitors so negatively as to be disgusted, I have come to the conclusion that the comedians are right: Business office atmospheres should be soul-crushing places, brimful of quiet desperation.
All employees should wear gray from fear of being offensive, except for the one guy whose wife makes him wear the pink shirt because Marie Claire Magazine told her that it would help him boost his confidence.
Everyone will spend all day whispering about him in lieu of anything worthwhile going on in their miserable lives, and smile really nicely when he shows up at the coffee pot to get his 80th cup of the morning.
In truth, this is just another way of burying his frustration at his utterly failed marriage, and dead-end job.
By the end of the week, he will be found hanging from his belt in the men’s room. No one will ever use the big stall ever again out of discomfort rather than respect and all silently curse their own fates, but express their misery just a little more openly.
But hey, at least they look business appropriate.

Why is this machination - this plot to undermine people’s abilities by overwhelming them with trivial appearance issues - desirable? I’m at an utter loss. Explain please!

“The belief that “order is true” and disorder is false or somehow wrong, is the Aneristic Illusion. To say the same of disorder, is the ERISTIC ILLUSION.”

~ Principia Discordia

Jason Calcanis was recently quoted as saying “As Internet people we shoudn’t bother with people who don’t understand the Internet because they’ll be dead soon.”

Oh Jason. How painfully untrue that is. If he knew half the young people I’ve met, and work with, he would be appalled at how undereducated young people are about the internet and computers. Unless he’s saying that there’s going to be some kind of special plague that only kills people who don’t know that “lolcats” are old meme, and that domaining really is a word.

No, Mr. Calcanis. We still have to suck up to these pre-internet types. There are just too many of them to stage a real coup at this point. You’ll just have to deal like the rest of us.

I really hope this is blown out of proportion, no pun intended, because otherwise it’s rather creepy.

Most especially the picture. That woman has less body fat on her now in total than I did at the ripe old age of 10, I’d wager. What’s she got to lose? Why take the desire to be in better overall shape in a direction like “I want to be skinny” when she clearly already is. That implies to me that she sees herself as somehow not good enough, and that seems really disheartening.

I’m all for people finding their own happiness. I’ll even let the pro-ana people be, but I won’t lie that I find it disgusting.

I suppose the underlying message here is to help people actually be healthier, which typically does involve loss of body fat, but this approach is seriously fubar.