quantum documentation inconsistency principle - An axiom of corporate life in which there will always be more than one piece of documentation for something, all of the documentation will be measurably contradictory, and none of the procedures will work anymore.  See also clandestine institutional knowledge.

Binder Hell - noun - The state of being stuck dealing with varying numbers of people on the phone who are only functionally capable of putting you through processes documented in their three ring binders, even though none of those processes will actually fix the problem you have.  Symptomatic of an over-engineered system which has all but programmed out common sense and initiative.  For example, a company which is so hell-bent on keeping customers will needlessly obfuscate or entirely eliminate processes that let customers cancel their service.  As another example, a telecom provider which demands the serial number of your SIM card …

kinetic pattern baldness - noun - The characteristic hourglass-shaped pattern of hair loss in both men and women that results from tearing one's hair out in frustration on a regular basis.

debuggery - noun - The unshakable feeling that your code is completely fucked when you spend multiple all nighters in a row tracking down a single annoying bug that winds up not being in your core code, nor any modules you've written, nor any of the libraries you're using, but in a different part of the system entirely.  In other words, your code is so poorly architected that you can't tell when problems aren't actually in your code.

In the last couple of years, a meme that's come to be known as security nihilism has appeared in the security community.  In a nutshell, because there is no such thing as perfect security, there is no security at all, so why bother?  Talking about layered security controls that reinforce each other is pointless because they always skip right to the end, which is the circumvention of the nth countermeasure and final defeat.  In the crypto community, cries of "Quantum computer!" are the equivalent of invoking Godwin's Law, leading to the end of all discourse, nevermind trying to separate …

Don’t bother writing easy to understand instructions for end users. They don’t bother reading them, anyway.

Sorry for another late post, everyone - between work, wedding stuff, and trying to keep from falling ill, I've had a lot on my plate lately.

On Tuesday night, after coming home and having dinner, I ran a couple of last-minute errands for Lyssa and then set course once again for Washington, DC proper for the weekly HacDC administrative meeting. While I'm technically not a member because I haven't started paying dues yet, I've been doing a lot of hands-on electronics work at the site, more specifically my steampunk sonic screwdriver. Most of what I've been doing lately has been repairing …

Late on Friday afternoon, Lyssa and I hurriedly packed our bags, jumped into the TARDIS, and set course northward once again for southwestern Pennsylvania and the general direction of home. As I've alluded to a few times, we're getting married in October and thus there are many plans to make, things to get, and arrangements to hammer out. In the early twenty-first century we can do many of these things over the net or on the telephone, but sometimes matters require the up close and personal touch. Things like tasting samples of wedding cake and taking recon photographs of the …

It's been an interesting weekend, to be sure.. Lyssa and I have been in the market for a couple of things lately, namely a bookcase or media shelf of some kind that we can migrate our DVD collection to, and ring binders that we can move our CD collections into while we rip and encode everything. So, to that end, we spent Saturday driving around searching for stuff along those lines. In two days, we didn't find any bookcases anywhere we looked (well, that's not entirely true, I did find one bookcase, a floor model at OfficeMax, but the construction …