Author Archives: tacit

Wow, I just found the World’s Dumbest Bug…

Posted on by
54

…in Internet Explorer 7!

But perhaps that’s redundant. “Dumb bugs” and “Internet Explorer” have long gone together like chocolate and peanut butter.

Anyway, one of my coworkers wanted to know why attempts to install Firefox always bombed out on her system. She was going to the Download page and clicking the “Run” button, which in reality actually means “download and then run.”

The Firefox executable has spaces in its name (it’s called something like “Install Firefox 3.0.6”). Now, as we all know, the Web turns spaces into %20, which is the hex ASCII code for a space.

So Explorer downloads the file as “Install%20%Firefox%20%3.0.6” but saves it as “Install Firefox 3.0.6”. Here’s where things go all hinkey:

It then runs the file “Install Firefox 3.0.6” but sets the path to the file as “Install%20Firefox%203.0.6”–which doesn’t work. When the installer attempts to run, it can’t locate its own built-in libraries because the Windows file path parsing APIs do not change “Install%20%Firefox%203.0.6” back into “Install Firefox 3.0.6”.

*rolls eyes*

Writer’s Block: Seven

Posted on by
96

Y’know, this is a really interesting question–but not for the reasons you might think.

Let’s take a look at these seven deadly sins. Sloth, greed, lust, gluttony, anger, envy, and pride. Trust the Catholics to come up with a list of affronts against man and God, but not to list things like, for example, “murder” or “rape” or “genocide.”

“But Tacit!” you might say. “You’re barking mad, or at least splitting semantic and theological hairs. Wrath can lead to murder! Rape can be caused by lust! And genocide–”

Well, I’m not sure what on this list really matches up with genocide. Not sloth, certainly; genocide is damn hard work. Pride? Those who commit atrocity usually think they’re better than the person they commit it against, but that’s not exactly pride, precisely; it’s something else.

Which is exactly where this list falls apart.

You see, of the seven things on the list, five of them are not actions. They’re emotions. And here’s the tricky bit–as human beings, we choose our actions. We choose our actions, even when we feel emotions.

Many people can feel angry, without acting on that anger. Many people can feel lust, without violating anyone because of it. It’s actions, not feelings, that carry moral weight; we are, each of us, responsible for the things we do, but to assign moral value to a feeling seems a little absurd.

Hell, read Song of Solomon in the Bible. The whole damn book is an ode to lust. The lust that a man feels for his wife is perfectly normal; I would say even positive and healthy, especially if one believes in the Catholic notion of being fertile and popping out pups multiplying. On the other hand, the lust a priest feels for an alter boy? Not cool.

You see that? You see what I just did there? Context. Moral value depends inexorably on context.

Even folks who claim to despise “moral relativism” still believe it. Alice shoots Bob in the head with a .50-valiber Desert Eagle, spreading his intelligence and his awareness all over her living room wall like a demented Jackson Pollock. Is that morally wrong? I bet a lot of folks would probably say it is. Now let’s add to the scenario a bit; she did it because he was in the process of attempting to murder her children. Is it morally wrong now?

You see that? Context. The moral value of an action depends on its context.

But let’s go back to the list. Anger; who hasn’t felt it? It’s a feeling; an inevitable human emotion hard-wired into the limbic system of every one of us.

Count on the Catholics to turn a feeling into something to be guilty about.

Look, the guy who gets pissed off and smacks his wife around is an asshole, no doubt about it. But the guy who gets pissed off and yet manages to keep his cool in spite of it? That guy is not a sinner, and indeed there is greater virtue in doing the right thing even in the grip of an emotion than in doing the right thing when the right thing is easy to do.

We can flip this list on its head, too. The Mob hit man who whacks sixteen people in cold blood–which deadly sin is he committing? Not sloth, certainly. Not greed–as it turns out, hit men don’t usually get paid very much for what they do. Far less than a lawyer, or a plastic surgeon, or a professional basketball player. Hell, they probably make less money than a computer help desk operator! Hollywood aside, shooting people really doesn’t pay the way you think it would.

Lust? Doesn’t fit. Gluttony? If eating too much is the worst thing you ever do, they should give you the VIP entrance into Heaven. Anger? A good hit man is cool and collected; he’s not motivated by rage. Angry people get sloppy.

How about envy? He might not even know the target, much less envy him. Pride? Well, I suppose he might take pride in a well-executed job (Ha! I slay me!), but then I think most professionals take a certain pride in their craft.

So the guy who gets pissed off but doesn’t act on it is a mortal sinner, but the guy who whacks people for a living isn’t? Who is this god, and how did he get the job? I gotta say, if I were a god, you can bet the list of deadly sins would look a whole lot different. A little less with the “feeling” and a lot more with the “doing,” if you ask me.

Fragments of Portland: Security and Friends

Posted on by
104

Getting to Portland from Atlanta is a lengthy proposition. Getting back to Atlanta is a slightly less lengthy proposition, if one does what I did and misses one’s flight.

On the return trip, I was scheduled for three layovers and a total of nearly twelve hours in transit. However, I managed to miss my flight, and as a result flew standby on a one-layover route that was about two and a half hours shorter. So, win!

In fact, if that’s what I can expect, I may have to miss my flights more often.

Portland itself was a blast. On top of being able to spend ten days with my sweetie zaiah (and what could top that?), I got an opportunity to meet a bunch of folks I’ve known for a long time online but never met in person before, and a chance to catch up with the_xtina for a bit, and even made some new friends (waves to gidget23. More on that later.

First, I’d like to take a few minutes to talk about our friends in the TSA.

Now, these folks have an important job. They help calm nervous travelers by providing the illusion of security at airports. Mostly, they do this by sifting through baggage all day long. It’s a thankless task; and it’s hard to imagine that they don’t get cynical about it.

Realistically, the odds of a plane being blown out of the sky by a terrorist bomb are about the same as the odds that your grandmother can beat Mike Tyson in a no-holds-barred steel death match, armed with nothing more than a bent straw and a plastic spoon from Taco Bell. I’m sure there’s a grandmother or two out there who can do it, and planes have been brought down by bombs, but seriously…is it going to happen? Really? Don’t hold your breath.

These folks have never seen a bomb, they will never see a bomb, and they know it. But they still gotta sit there for eight hours a day anyway.

Alright, alright, yes, I know. Part of the point is deterrence. They don’t find bombs in luggage because the fact that they’re looking for it means that the folks who might have the urge to blow up airplanes don’t put bombs in luggage, ’cause they know it won’t work.

But bear with me a minute, here.

These guys have a boring and mostly pointless job (save for the deterrence effect), and they need some way to amuse themselves while they’re manhandling checked luggage through oversized X-ray machines. Which they get by putting notices like the one on the left into your baggage to tell you that they’ve served the national interest by checking your underwear to make sure that it won’t blow up or, I don’t know, invade France or something.

And I suggest for your humble approval the notion that they do not select the baggage to search at random.

I found the note shown here in my suitcase when i reached Portland. Now, a quick X-ray plainly showed there was nothing in my luggage that could possibly go boom–not that TSA screeners necessarily have the foggiest notion of what a bomb looks like, but still.

They had, however, completely removed every single item from my suitcase. Including, among other things, a pair of handcuffs, all my clothes, a heavily modified Feeldoe, a box of rubber gloves, my entire collection of floggers, ten rolls of vet wrap, my toothbrush, and a box of sterile needles.

Not only that, but they unrolled my flogger case to see what was inside. (I carry them in this nifty case that lays down flat and has slots and elastic tie-downs to hold all the floggers, then rolls up into a cylinder that can be slung over a shoulder.)

Not only that,, but they had removed the floggers from the case. I know all this because the floggers had been replaced in an entirely different order, and my bag had been completely re-packed.

And re-packed quite a bit more neatly than I’d done it to begin with, too, but that’s beside the point.

I submit, Gentle Reader, that within seconds of opening my bag, the TSA screeners knew beyond question that there was nothing in there that goes bang, boom, pow, kablooey, or even makes a low but sinister hum. I also submit that they continued to unpack my things anyway, simply because it amused them to do so. As proof of this idea, I propose that it is not necessary to remove a flogger from its carrying case to ascertain that it is not, in fact, a threat to national security, foreign relations, the national budget, or to anything else save perhaps the backsides of certain people who will remain nameless at this time.

I have visions of the TSA employees holding up the various objects in my suitcase and asking “What do you suppose this is for?” or chasing one another around with them (ah, the hilarious hijinks at the airport!) or something. All in the name of national security, of course.

And I can’t help but wonder why it is exactly that these guys get paid on my dime.

And how much they make. ‘Cause, y’know, if they’re going to be doing shit like that, and getting paid for it, I want some of that too. Smart security saves time!

How to Have a Happy Relationship

Posted on by
212

It seems to me that a lot of basic ideas behind happy, healthy relationships are often considered “advanced,” and seem to take rather a lot more time to learn than perhaps they really ought to.

At least, they sometimes did for your humble scribe. Ahem.

So, in the interests of spreading the wealth (because experience is the best teacher, but sometimes the tuition is very high), I present Relationship Ideas That Should Be Obvious But Aren’t.

You can’t expect to have what you want if you don’t ask for what you want.
This is arguably one of the most basic rules for all of life, yet it’s surprising how often we forget. There’s almost no greater recipe for emotional turmoil then wanting something or harboring some expectation, not telling anyone about it, and then not getting it.

Next time you get really, really upset about some desire or expectation not being met, stop and ask yourself: “Did I actually let the people around me know about it?” (Here’s a tip: Dropping hints about what you want doesn’t count. Neither does wishing really hard. Nor waiting for the folks around you to become telepathic.)

If all of your relationships go pear-shaped in the same exact way and end badly in the same exact way, then maybe it’s because of something you’re doing.
Seriously. The one common element in all your relationship failures is you. Someone cheat on you? Well, that sucks, but it happens. Every single person you ever date in your life cheat on you? You’re attracted to folks who cheat.

If all of your relationships end the same way, maybe it’s time to step back and take a good, hard look at the kinds of folks you’re attracted to.

If you find that sex always becomes boring after a while in all your relationships, maybe it’s because you’re choosing to let it.
There’s a lot of fun you can have in (and out) of the bedroom. The total range of the human sexual experience is breathtaking–so much so that if you lived to be a thousand years old and did something different in bed every night for that entire thousand years, you’d still never have time to do it all. Seriously.

If you find that your sex life keeps getting stuck in a rut, maybe it’s time to explore something new. (A sure way to make yourself crazy and have a boring sex life is to keep worrying about whether trying something new would be “too weird.” The expression “That’s too weird” has done more to advance the cause of boring sex than all the world’s religions combined.)

Going into a relationship with the expectation that you can get your partner to change is quite likely to end in tears.
Now, don’t get me wrong–people can and do change. In fact, change is the one constant in life. I’m not the person I was five years ago, and if you’re doing this properly, you aren’t either.

But expecting that a person will change in the ways that you want him to, because you want him to, is setting yourself up for suck and fail. Fixer-upper relationships usually don’t work. And if you go into things thinking “Oh, I can fix him!” you just might find your ship of enthusiasm foundering on the shoals of the fact that maybe he likes being the way he is.

A relationship in which you say “This relationship is absolutely wonderful except for…” is not absolutely wonderful. Especially when the part that comes after the “except for…” is something so horrifying it’d make most folks run for the hills.
This relationship is wonderful except for the fact that we’re completely incompatible in bed. This relationship is wonderful except for the fact that she keeps forgetting to take her meds. This relationship is wonderful except for the fact that he can’t talk honestly about his feelings. Look out!

For maximum effect, try combining “this relationship is wonderful except for…” with “…but I know I can change him” and double your suck!

A partner who is kind to you but not kind to the waitress isn’t a kind person.
Seriously. The fact that he’s kind to you might just mean that he wants something from you. (Or that you’re not his property…yet. Marry that person who’s nice to you but not nice to the waitress and you might just find that once the ring is on your finger, he may start treating you like the waitress. Or worse.)

The way a person treats the folks around him reveals a lot about his true self. Pay attention.

It is possible to deeply, profoundly, genuinely, truly love someone, and yet that person might still not be a good partner for you.
It takes more than love to make a relationship work. A person you love, but who is incompatible with you, or who lacks good relationship skills, or who can’t communicate with you, is not going to make for a functional, healthy relationship. Love and five bucks will get you a cup of coffee. Or, to put it more scientifically, love is necessary but not sufficient, no matter how many Disney movies and romantic comedies say otherwise.

Though really, if you’re taking your cues on relationship from Disney movies and romantic comedies, there’s probably little that I or anyone else can do.

Find a way to build a friendship with that person that honors and respects that love without trying to turn it into something unsustainable and you’ll do okay. And as a corollary:

Being in love with someone doesn’t mean you HAVE to be in a relationship with that person.
Seriously. You have a choice. You can love someone, and acknowledge that love, and still choose not to be romantically involved with that person.

That’s one of the cool things about being a human being You get to choose.

You can’t have intimacy without sharing. If you spend your time hiding things from your partner, or worrying about whether or not you can share something with your partner, you’re not going to have an intimate relationship.
Everything you conceal from your partner undermines the foundation of intimacy upon which relationships are built.

No, that doesn’t mean telling your partner every time you take a dump (and why is it that folks who don’t cotton to sharing and openness always reach for that example?). But it does mean sharing everything that’s important, significant, or meaningful. Even if it’s uncomfortable.

Especially if it’s uncomfortable, because the fact that it’s uncomfortable probably means there’s something important lurking in there. Communication ain’t for sissies.

What you get out depends on what you put in. Approach every new partner with fear and suspicion, and you’ll have fearful, suspicious partners.
Te best way to have a friend is to be a friend. The best way to have people around you who have compassion and integrity is to be a person with compassion and integrity. The best way to fill your life with suck and fail is to fill other people’s lives with suck and fail.

You know that saying “opposites attract”? It’s rubbish. Honest people look for, and attract, other honest people.

A person who has cheated on someone else to be with you cannot be trusted not to cheat on you to be with someone else.
No, you’re not different. You’re not a rare and unique flower, so totally set apart from that shrill, obnoxious harpy that he’s with right now. You know how he tells you that you’re so much better than that monster he’s hooked up with? I bet he says the same thing about you to the other person he’s shagging. You know, the one that neither you nor his other partner knows about.

Be wary of a person who trashes all their exes in front of you, for someday you’ll likely be on that list yourself.
You know that person with the long list of former partners, all of whom were shrill, obnoxious harpies? Does something seem odd about that list to you?

Best case scenario, it means he keeps getting involved with the same sorts of people again and again, and doesn’t learn anything from any of those experiences. What do you reckon that says about you?

Worst case scenario, it’s a clear sign of someone who doesn’t take responsibility for his own part in all those past train wrecks. Which means he ain’t learning from any of them. Which means…you’re the next train wreck. What do you suppose he’ll say about you to the train wreck that follows after you?

Tell the truth from the start, and you won’t have to worry about any nasty revelations down the road.
Especially about things you worry might scare her off. Seriously, if the truth about you makes you incompatible as a romantic partner, you want to scare her off. You’re bisexual but your new love interest hates gays? You fancy country music and your partner would rather die than listen to it? Hiding those things doesn’t help your cause; it merely makes the blowup that much more dramatic when the truth comes out.

Which it will, eventually.

Be honest, be true to who you are, and you won’t have to worry about what happens if you slip up. On the other hand, make yourself seem like something you’re not, even if it’s to make yourself seem more attractive to the other person (hell, especially if it’s to make yourself seem more attractive to the other person!) is going to end badly, sooner or later. I promise.

Some musings on time management

Posted on by
16

A couple of days ago, I got an email asking me about time management in a polyamorous relationship.
The email read, in part, “I am married and we’re having trouble finding time managing our one unit as time is always a consideration. So I was just curious if in poly relationships certain people have certain nights, or how you avoid conflict if 2 of your partners want to do something with you on the same night or weekend. How are potentially emotionally charged situations avoided?”

My own experience with time management is likely to be different from a lot of other folks, because I don’t really manage time; it manages me. (“In Soviet Russia…”) As a result, I don’t do Google Calendars or iCal or anything like that; hell, I can barely make it into the office at a consistent time each morning.

My reply:

One of the things I’ve found in my own experiences in polyamory is that a lot of time management issues are resolved quite nicely when partners get along with one another and with the partners of their partners. I’ve found that relationships do need a certain amount of ‘alone time,’ and that having two partners can mean having less time to spend with each of them–but not nearly as much as you might suspect. Since it’s possible to spend quality time with more than one person, having two partners doesn’t mean that each of them gets only half your attention.

In any family, even a conventional nuclear family with two adults and a couple of children, it’s always possible to have scheduling conflicts. What do you do if your spouse wants to go see a movie, but you’d rather stay home and catch Battlestar: Galactica on TV? What do you do if your child has a school play on the same night that your spouse is due to receive an award from a professional organization? These kinds of problems can happen in any home, and reasonable people can find reasonable ways to accommodate everyone’s needs. The same is true of a poly relationship.

To use a real-world example, I have had a situation where one partner wanted to go out dancing and another wanted to go to a movie. Simple solution: all three of us did both.

Part of being a reasonable person, in any kind of relationship, is accepting the fact that nobody gets everything he wants 100% of the time. Flexibility is important, and I suspect that flexibility is actually one of the keys to happiness, no matter what your relationship structure looks like.

Another good tool in poly relationships, which is valuable but often overlooked in any relationship, is the notion that you can’t expect to have what you want if you don’t ask for what you want. Often, people will make tacit assumptions about the behavior of their partners, without actually clearly saying what their expectations are, and then become hurt and angry if the expectations aren’t met. It’s not enough to say “The new Batman movie is coming out next Friday;” instead, it’s important to communicate expectations clearly, and say “the new Batman movie is coming out next Friday, and it’s really important to me to go to the opening with you.” Just that little bit goes a surprisingly long way toward helping to resolve scheduling difficulties and hurt feelings.

In some poly relationships, people do set up regular “date nights” with specific partners, so that everyone has a sense of what to expect from the schedule. I don’t do that myself, but then, I’m not much of a scheduler. For folks who are, that’s an awesome tool to help let everyone know what to expect–though I would say that it’s also important to be somewhat flexible about it. Life isn’t always tidy, and should a conflict come up or should a partner become ill or injured, I think it’s reasonable to be able to rearrange the schedule without causing undue grief.

For me personally, I like spending time with all my partners, and I like having the ability to spend time with more than one partner at once. I also do not feel cheated or like I have lost something if my partner’s other partner goes along too. For example, I really enjoy going out to dinner with my partners and their partners as well. Part of healthy, successful polyamory, I think, is in knowing and accepting that not all of the time you spend with someone will be one-on-one time. (And frankly, I think that’s a benefit; I’ve met some awesome people through my partners, people who have become my friends independent of our connection by dating the same person.)

Any relationship can have time management problems. A person starts working longer hours at the office, a person picks up a new hobby, a person starts spending more time with friends, a person starts playing video games–when these things happen, nobody really asks questions like “don’t you have trouble managing your time?” Nobody (well, nobody I’ve ever met, anyway) says “If you start taking up photography as a hobby, I am going to want to start scheduling the time you spend doing it, because I want to be able to limit the amount of time you spend away from me.” Polyamory’s no different, yet we often see it as different. Good time management skills are the same regardless of the nature of the demands on one’s time. It feels different when we think “My lover is spending time with her other lover” than if we think “My lover is spending time in the darkroom,” yet from a practical perspective, the same sorts of tools for managing time still apply.

Wrapping up my T-shirt business…

Posted on by
24

It’s never been terribly profitable, and I’m getting a bit tired of keeping all the inventory in my closet. So, I’m getting rid of all of it. So, if you’re looking for a fun, socially unacceptable T-shirt, or a perfect gift to give someone geeky in your life, now’s your chance!

I’m selling out all my remaining inventory at ten bucks a shirt. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. I may re-start at some point in the future with a print-on-demand service, but for right now I’m just getting rid of all of it. This includes the popular “poly dragon” and “nanohazard” designs.

A bunch of other designs, too! You can find them all here.

Portland bound!

Posted on by
26

Leaving the day after tomorrow for my trip to Portland! I’m totally bouncing off the walls.

The real trick will be to see if I can teach my roomie the-no-lj-d to drive a stick in time to have him drive me to the subway, so I don’t have to spend $80 in parking.

Whew! The Onyx affiliate program is finally ready!

Posted on by
24

Anyone who has a Web site and wants to make a little extra money is invited to give it a try:

http://www.symtoys.com/affiliate.html

There are banners available, and more will be coming. The affiliate program pays out 20% of Onyx and poster sales, a number I cleverly arrived at through intensive research and complex mathematics (I took the normal commission from other Web sites’ affiliate programs and doubled it).

Also, the poster pre-orders are at about half what they need to be for a print run, but they seem to have stalled. So if anyone wants to help me get the word out, you can copy-paste the HTML below into your blog–it’ll put the graphic and a link to the pre-order page. If you link to the graphic on my server, it will automatically update when more pre-orders come in.

<div align=”center”><a href=”http://www.obsidianfields.com/zc/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=5&products_id=29″ target=”_blank”><img src=”http://www.obsidianfields.com/lj/postergauge.jpg” border=”0″ width=”150″ height=”140″></a></div>

Here’s what it will look like:

The hate for Internet Explorer, it burns!

Posted on by
40

Last night, I spent about a half an hour fixing some minor bugs in the interactive version of the Human Sex Map. Cleaned up the way the toolbar works when you scroll (so it doesn’t jump all over the place in some browsers) and fixed a minor issue in Firefox where it sometimes moves the pins three pixels down from where they should be.

And then I tested it in Internet Explorer.

And it was totally, utterly, completely broken.

Goddamn festering, pustulant heap of rotting garbage pretending to be a Web browser anyway. I will never, for the life of me, understand why people use that decaying mound of rubbish when there are Web browsers that actually work correctly that you can download for free. Everything the Internet Explorer development team knows about Web standards would fit in the white space of a postage stamp. If these guys had any decency or self-respect, they’d all ritualistically disembowel themselves on Google’s front lawn.

Words can not express my loathing, hatred, and contempt for that tottering mass of bugs and misfeatures that the folks in Redmond laughingly call a Web browser. It’s a mad sick joke at the entire Internet’s expense. So, I turn to a more visual communication medium:

It took me until six o’clock in the morning to code around all of Explorer’s bizarre bugs and rendering issues. Longer, by nearly an order of magnitude, than it took to make that picture. So if you tried to use the Map at all yesterday, sorry ’bout that.

Wow! A lot more interest in the poster than I thought

Posted on by
40

I’m quite overwhelmed and surprised by the number of folks who have expressed an interest in pre-ordering a poster version of the Map of Human Sexuality. Since it seems like something that people are really interested in, I’ve decided to accept pre-orders for the map at $12 each (plus shipping).

Here’s the scoop: If I can get 50 pre-orders, which will pay for two thirds of the total printing cost, I’m going to go ahead and do the print run. If I don’t get hat many pre-orders by March, the entire amount of the pre-order (including shipping) will be refunded to everyone who pre-orders…though judging from the responses to my last LJ post, I should hit that threshold very quickly.

Turnaround on printing is eight to ten business days. Leaving a couple of days for shipping to me, that means I expect to start sending pre-orders out about twelve business days after I hit 50 pre-orders. At least, that’s the plan.

I’ve set up a place for pre-ordering on my ecommerce site; the direct link is here. Unfortunately, I can’t take PayPal orders; credit card only. (The checkout page is secure.)

The poster will be big (24″x36″), offset printed on 100# gloss text. Since the map itself is square, I’m probably going to put a glossary of terms on the bottom part of the map. One of the things I’ll likely do is put a few different versions of the finished poster design with glossary on my LJ and let folks vote on them.

So, here’s your chance. If you’d like a poster (or two), you can pre-order now!