it’s january 18th, and a bunch of sites are blacked out because of sopa and pipa.  and they are right.  go read about it on google or wikipedia and come back.

the thing is the us government already signed a much worse law in to effect earlier this year.  the ndaa made it possible for the us government to arrest and indefinitely imprison american citizens without a trial.

how, how, how, how is this ok?  how did this not get giant, massive protests on the internet?

and how is gitmo still open?

and how are we, as in america, still torturing people?

sopa and pipa are bad, but holy shit there are all these things right now that are terrifyingly bad.  where are the adults?  the legacy of 9/11 is looking more and more like the cowardly response americans had to terrorism.  grow the fuck up and be adults.

anyway, sopa and pipa are terrible laws by terrible children who don’t understand what the fuck they are doing other than accepting checks from hollywood.  contact these children and tell them to grow up.  this is at least a start.

1. sand
2. pants
3. socks

maybe 2012 is the year i turn niv.is into a tumblr.  tumblr > wordpress, you guys.

i’ve been in new york for over a month now, and i’ve gone on countless interviews. i still have no job, and i’ve received a nice range of responses:

• not a good cultural fit
• we like you, but we can’t proceed because of { other applicants , no reason given }
• hiring freeze!
• no response (which i guess is kind of a response)

the response i haven’t received, one that i think would help me out the most, would be one that indicated why i was being passed on – we liked you but we thought you lacked X. to be fair, one company, art.sy, did give that kind of feedback, though unfortunately it was of the “you don’t have enough experience” variety, which is a bit harder for me to remedy in the short-term. at least it was a response.

what i’m finding, in general, is that new york tech startups seem to be pretty snobby in what they want from a candidate. or maybe snobby isn’t the right word – specific, maybe? where i’m sitting, i know php and i know python lightly and i’ve worked with mvc frameworks and i’ve built interesting things – i have no concerns that i’d be able to pick up django or rails or whatever, and there’s no question that i’d be value-add to these companies. however, i think my lack of professional experience with rails/django/whatever the newest technology is leading to a lot of places passing on me without having the balls to at least say “well we wish you had 3 years of django experience” because that’s kind of a stupid, bullshit reason to not hire me (or at least from my biased perspective it is).

when i ask for specific feedback, i usually get silence. so i have no choice but to keep looking, but i’m getting pretty annoyed and tired of this whole process and i don’t know what to do about it. listen, rails doesn’t scale, assholes. django is fine, but really, half of you chose django at random. mvc is great, and i get that, so test me on mvc principles if you think i don’t ‘get’ django.

godfuckingdammit would someone interview me in a way that actually seems like they want to see if i know anything rather than fucking comparing my resume and what i say against some invisible checklist?

maybe there’s an opportunity here.

i’ll write about #5 above soon, but first, i might as well share a story from my most recent trip to vegas (got back this past sunday).

i got to the airport pretty early for my 9:30pm departure – around 7:30 or so. normally i wouldn’t get to the airport that early, but that’s just how this trip went. i checked in and went to the relatively-short security line. i was in line behind a couple who, to me, seemed german or something – really unfamiliar with security, required multiple attempts to get through the metal detector, etc. the guy didn’t even pull his laptop out of his backpack when putting it through the x-ray, which required a second trip through the x-ray machine just before my bag and laptop and shoes went in. all in all, pretty freaking annoying.

i got through security and i was sitting at my gate reading work emails and thinking about how i should do a little work, but just resisting with all my might. i noticed the couple that was ahead of me in security walking by – for whatever reason i noticed them going towards one of the dead-ends in mccarran’s b terminal. i didn’t give it a second thought.

10-20 minutes passed and i decided, yes, it was time to do some work. i unzip my bag and reach in to get my work laptop. i thought briefly that the computer seemed a bit light to me, but only once i opened it up did i realize the problem. “don’t forget to call the food bank” was written on a post-it note in the bottom left corner
what fucking food bank?
oh shit
what have i done

that’s right, i swapped laptops with the guy who was in front of me in security. i took his 13″ mbp, he took my 15″. adrenaline and butterflies took over my body in a wave, starting directly from my lower intestine. i somehow processed that yes, he and his wife and a second couple had walked down the hallway to my right. i ran down there.

now you’re in an open space. there are 6 gates in a circle in front of you. each gate has people boarding and each gate has lots of people sitting around. there are slot machines in the middle. what the hell do you do?

i ran from gate to gate looking for a sign of the people i had seen earlier. thank fucking god the wife (i presume) had a very distinctive light blue jacket on, because i found her and her friend sitting at gate 24, waiting for their flight to edmonton. it took the longest 45 seconds of my life. i explained the situation and had no issues swapping laptops with the (apparently) canadians.

“that would have sucked for everyone” her friend said. “a lot” i agreed.

and that is how you have good luck in vegas. while this story might seem anti-climactic, anything less than this ending would have sucked for everyone a lot.

via rhodg (link):

“In this room, which is impervious to outside radio signals, our test engineers connected the phones to our base-station emulator, a device that simulates carrier cell towers,” the nonprofit organization wrote. “We also tested several other AT&T phones the same way, including the iPhone 3GS and the Palm Pre. None of those phones had the signal-loss problems of the iPhone 4.”

It continued: “Our findings call into question the recent claim by Apple that the iPhone 4′s signal-strength issues were largely an optical illusion caused by faulty software that ‘mistakenly displays 2 more bars than it should for a given signal strength.’ The tests also indicate that AT&T’s network might not be the primary suspect in the iPhone 4′s much-reported signal woes.”

apple has started their concentrated campaign of lies around the design flaws of their latest phone. i have an iphone 4, and its a beautiful device, but it is a piece of shit terrible phone. it drops calls if you hold it the wrong way. it is awkward to use as a telephone in almost all but the most formal of circumstances. and these motherfucking liars at apple are motherfucking lying about the problem.

here is apple’s piece of shit lying statement. it is not a software problem, you liars, but you know that. it is a goddamn terrible design decision. and you can’t sit here and argue essentially that all phones have this problem to an extent AND you have a software problem.

ok, i’m getting carried away. but let me pose this question: if i am making a phone call, and then i shift my hands around and all of a sudden i’m covering the antenna, why does my perfectly motherfucking clear phone call drop, if this is just a simple software fix? was my perfectly clear phone call confused by the incorrect number of bars displayed on the phone and thus thought it had service, when in fact the service was very low the whole time?

WHAT KIND OF JEDI BULLSHIT ARE YOU ASSHOLES TRYING TO PULL?

the sad part is that due to my employment at AT&T it makes no sense for me to change phone companies. but apple is really, really starting to piss me off. and i’m not even going to bother linking to the piece of shit apple apologists out there, all you assholes make me sick. why don’t you push the company you love to do better instead of mocking everyone who recognizes that apple is, right now, completely batshit insane and pretty evil. you’re like republicans, you fucks.

this is day 3 of my really bad mood.