Lost in OK

First of I should apologize for the rambling nature of today’s posts. I just finished up a four hour requirements development meeting which has turned my brain into the consistency of tapioca pudding. The new project that I’m working on is a massive undertaking and we are working our way through a very short but incredibly massive requirements development phase. One of the issues I’m trying to grapple with is the difference a complex system and a flexible system. I’ve worked in internal IT for my entire career. Internal IT usually attempts to make a system that conforms to the specific business rules of the institution. For example, if you were building a billing system, you build a application that bills specifically for the services or products that your company offers. However, this seems to, over time limit the usability of your systems. As your business changes and grows, the system tends to become less and less relevant to your needs. This leads to more and more patches to your system, which as all of us programmers know, eventually leads to an unsupportable and rigid system.

Well, it’s been a long time coming, but here’s the big life update for the Radical Wacko. The rigors of work and my little side project Tom Waits for No Man have kinda left this site high and dry. Well, work is still whooping up on me, but I’ve killed the Tom Waits site so I at least have a few minutes to dedicate to this site. So, what have I been up to???

For fans of tech blogger Joel Spolsky and his website JoelOnSoftware.com, he is doing a net seminar with Software Development Magazine Thursday at 2:00 PM ET. He will be joined by three other speakers speaking on a variety of subjects. According to his website, Joel will be giving “a scintillating 24 minute presentation by me about social software, squeezed down to fit in 20 minutes, which will involve talking really really fast and leaving many proofs as exercises to the reader.” ([Via Joel on Software])

Here’s a great little story about some aviators having way too much fun with some pumpkins:

The fine art of pumpkin bombing.

[Via Hit and Run]

There’s also a video of the B-25 Pumpkin Bomber that you can get here.

[Listening to: Glenn Beck 1 - Premiere Radio Networks (19:39)]

Well, the new site is up and for the most part working. I know that I haven’t been updating the site much which is primarily due to an egregious oversight on my part. When I was transferring over to my new laptop, I inadvertently lost all of the source code and custom software for the last version of the site. Besides, the old site had a lot of quirks and was becoming increasingly hard to take care of. So I’ve taken upon myself to design my own site for the first time in a great many years.

The site will be down intermittantly tonight as I release the new version of RadicalWacko.

Hey, at least one major new outlet has decided to at least mention that the Libertarian Party still exists. From this week’s edition of The Onion:

You might think it’s funny, but it’s disrespectful to submit write-in candidates like “Don Knotts,” “Mickey Mouse,” or “Michael Badnarik.”

Via Reason.com.

Oh, this one just got my goat. William Rasberry in the Washington Post has published one of the most patronizing articles I’ve ever seen concerning the explosion of political authorship on the web. Here’s just one little excerpt:

What has changed in the years since Gennifer Flowers, says Rieder, is that a handful of national newspapers no longer can operate as journalistic gatekeepers – effectively blocking stories that are unverified or unverifiable and driven by people whose political motivations are plain to see.

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Well, I have received almost 25 entries of comment spam today. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to deal with cleaning out these entries. So I’m sorry to regret that until further notice, comment moderation has been turned on for all comments on the site. Sorry, I hate to do this but they’ve left me no choice.

A great Objectivist take on outsourcing that reminds us that those who seek safety are the enemy of those who seek freedom:

A free society requires and rewards individuals who are active-minded, forward-looking, keen to better themselves. A society moving towards state control of the economy requires and rewards individuals who want tranquility, passivity, lethargy. In the debate about the legitimacy of “outsourcing” white-collar jobs to foreign countries, you must decide on which side you stand..

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