Digital Diatribe

As I was walking to the bus stop, I noticed my bus drive by, which caused me to stop walking to the bus stop and start running towards it. This task was made all the more difficult because at the time I wasn’t wearing shoes, I was wearing geta, which are what you’d get if you cross bred thongs with clogs.

This must have looked quite jilarious (originally a typo, but now a new word, pronouced much like jalepeno) to the bus driver but I’m sure that wasn’t his sole motivation for driving the bus that morning.

As I hastily approached my stop, I noticed with horror that instead of slowing down the bus was speeding up. Also, instead of turning left at the end of the street, it turned right!

It was at that moment I realised the bus was heading back to the depot and not actually in active service, contrary to what it’s well lit and fully legible sign in the front and side windows had led me to believe.

This is when I decided that all bus drivers have a secret desire to have people run after them. It makes them feel important. For most of their career they will be verbally abused by schoolchildren, drunkards, and old women, but in this act, they hold ultimate power.

They strike me as the kind of perverse beings who would take extreme pleasure in driving an icecream truck, sirens blaring, into a minefield.

Other than injecting heroin on a daily basis, owning a full head of hair and washing it daily is one of the most dangerous habits you can form. Let me tell you why.
Among other things, shampoo has anti freeze in it. (propylene glycol)
That’s right, the same stuff you use to stop your engine freezing over is the stuff you put onto your scalp on a daily basis. To top it off, when injested by the largest organ in your body (your skin you filthy minded lummox) it metabolizes into lactic acid. That wonderful stuff you get when your muscles cramp up.

And don’t think those of you who have fallen for the Naked Chick Outdoors advertising appeal of Herbal Essences are immune, because you guys have it extra special good. Clairol gives you a healthy dose of methylisothiazoline for no extra charge. Try telling what herb that comes from. Shit, just try pronouncing it. If that’s not enough to make your brain ache then you can try washing your hair with it, because studies show it could be linked to nerve damage in the brain. That’s not an orgasm that chick is having, it’s a seizure.

If you think washing your hair with just water is safe, you might want to think again. If you live in an area that uses recycled water then you are likely bathing in these chemicals that have washed off someone else’s scalp, because the beauty of these substances is that they don’t break down in water. So even if you switch to real organic shampoo, you might not be safe unless you’re also making your own water out of thin air, and then filtering it.

Of course, none of this is a problem for me because since I started wearing this fancy new tin foil hat it’s made it rather hard to wash my hair with it on.
Next purchase: A Faraday Cage with hot running water.

You know how some places charge upwards of $100 for a haircut? You might only be in there for an hour, and you’ve forked over $100 and your hair is now only slightly shorter.
Well over at Sun, they have devised the ultimate haircut. For several thousand dollars you can be certain that for however many months it takes you to get Sun Java Enterprise Communications Suite working, you will have almost no hair.
And if you’re not the one paying for the license fee, that basically works out as being a free haircut. Only, it’s kinda like when you were 7 and you thought getting your dad’s clippers out and trying to trim your own hair was a good idea, but instead you looked like you’d gone through chemo because the length of your hair was now all patchy.

Installing Sun Java Enterprise Communications Suite is kinda like that, because rather than Sun actually sitting sown and doing a nice job on your head, you end up pulling out your own hair. Repeatedly. Until you give up and call tech support. And then you do it again when you realize that they have no idea what you are talking about.
And then again when you try to tell people what you now do for a living and they have no idea what you’re talking about either.

I’m undecided as to what the Enterprise tag entails when it comes to buying software, but I’m pretty sure it means “Here there be bugs, if you manage to fix one please let us know how you did it”.
Buying a license for this software is essentially agreeing to beta test it for as long as you decide to keep it in production. And that’s fine if your the type of person who enjoys hunting bugs.
If you’d rather your software actually worked and provided the basic feature set that you require from a communications suite I’d suggest that unless you are already a Sun expert you avoid it entirely.

Unless, of course, you’re after a new hair style.