Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Not Good With People
January 16, 2006

It’s true - I’m not good with people. I get frustrated very quickly. Well, that’s not the whole pciture. I get frustrated with people who don’t try to understand why I would be frustrated.

I’ve worked at a couple of fast food jobs. When I was living in Johnstown, I worked at a Little Caesar’s. Here at home, I works at an Arby’s for a while. At both places, I learned to use the register. I would take customer orders, relay them to the workers preparing the food, take money and give change. Part of this job is obviously interaction with a person - the person paying - and that simply wasn’t for me.

I never really thought that I was bad at it. I actually consider myself a pretty good conversationalist with people that I regularly speak with. I guess I’m just not used to dealing with all sorts of people with different methods of making menu choices. The manager at the Little Caesar’s made sure that I didn’t often work at the register. It’s not like I was scaring away the customers, it’s just that I like efficiency when ordering.

Open Source Mania
January 12, 2006

A recent thread about Nightly Builds of WordPress has me kind of foaming (darn you, Doug!), and rather than take it out on unsuspecting members of the list (and then get flamed back for it), I figured I would write about it here, where it’s safe, and I can delete comments that contradict me. (Did I just say that?)

Yes. There are dozens of open source applications that will perform a specific function instead of the commercial application that is well-known for it. Indeed, there are many replacements for WinZip (the software in question in the linked thread) that are free, and some are even open source. But there are also dozens of closed source applications that work just as well.

People frequently ask, “Why are you supporting that commercial application, when there is this open-source application that works just as well?” Well, there are a few good answers to that, the first, and possibly not the most obvious, is – Why not?