is your happiness threshold fixed?

I'm too busy to breathe lately, but I read a disturbing lead to a story off Google News last night while logging in to EVE to change skills being trained.

It seems someone just completed a study that says each individual has a certain default happiness level that doesn't change throughout his life. You can do some things to temporarily go above or below it, but in general it remains fixed for life.

Depressing, isn't it?

nobody tells me nothing!

Sometimes I wonder if the reason why Marshal Ney was so stupendously ineffective at Waterloo despite having a brilliant, almost meteoric career of successes prior to that might be because he didn't have the right piece of information in time for it to make a difference.

Now, I don't intend to compare myself with Michel Ney. Any successes I have had pale by comparison and my decisions are nowhere near the same caliber. No one will ever die as a result of a bad decision of mine. Yet, I think I must know something of how he felt.

If I'd had all of the information I needed, I'd not be digging myself, my team, and my project out of the mud right now.

Worse, it's not as if I made a bad assumption. I was misled.

This company sucks.

accept security warnings

The company that I work for is stupid.

I make no secret that I work for a network security company. I won't state the name of the company, because if I do, then I'm required to follow the company's 'blogging policy' or I could be terminated. Normally, the process leading up to termination would involve a nice beefy severance package, which I'd happily take at this moment, but if I violate this particular edict, I can be terminated without any such package offer, which would.. well.. suck.

Anyway, I digress.

This is a NETWORK SECURITY company. We ought to, oh.. I don't know.. give a rat's ass about security? But no.. Today I get in the mail a nifty little card that provides instructions and reminders for how to the use meeting tools that I've been using for about a year now. Handy little card.. it has a number of steps on how to set-up/join a conference online.

Step number 4: 'Accept Security Warnings'

Not.. 'you will see this certificate displayed', or 'you will see X signed ActiveX control ask for permission to do Y', or even 'a security popup may appear with X text, please accept to continue'. No.. just a blanket 'Accept Security Warnings'.

Now, if I was a more devious bastard than I am, I might use this information, along with the links provided and some clever scripting, to harvest authentication tokens of people in my company. Generally the folks that would be setting up online meetings are interesting people to get passwords from. Usually these would be either mid-level managers or assistants to execs.. What could I do with these tokens?

Well.. I could fire people, give myself a bonus, if not a raise... Yes, there is a required approval chain for these things to happen, but if I got auth tokens from everyone who sets up a meeting, how long do you think it would take me to get the tokens for everyone in the auth chain? The system would then automagically do its dirty work and remove my rivals as well as make me rich.

I SO should have been a criminal rather than an engineer.

inertia

Physics gives us the concept of inertia, and in physics, inertia is a powerful thing, but I think that as a metaphor, inertia might be the most powerful force in the universe.

I'm fighting against more than 30 years of inertia every day now. Well, not every day... some days it's just too hard, but I really am trying.

Part of that inertia is a tendency to 'let myself off the hook.' This sounds pretty terrible, and it is. It's oddly something that I STRONGLY do not identify with my own self-image, but it's something I do fairly frequently, it would seem.

--late edit
This is an interesting post.. I started this almost six months ago. And I didn't publish it.. Thus, perpetuating the problem I was identifying. Man.. I have some serious damage control to do.

flight of the conchords

I love Flight of the Conchords. These guys are awesome. They just recently announced a second show in San Francisco after the first one sold out.

It goes on sale tomorrow at ticketbastard, but there IS a pre-sale that started yesterday.

Apparently it was only supposed to be for fan club members, but I'm not a fan club member, and I can't even find any information on how to join their fan club, which I totally would have done to get the pre-sale password.

I did, however, find the password. If you want tickets and you haven't found it yet yourself, and there are any pre-sale tickets available (I doubt it, but who knows) the password is "fouxdufafa" (sans the quotes, of course.) This seems obvious, once you see it, but of course hindsight is much more clear than foresight.

I won't tell you how I found it, but suffice it to say, the internets is a powerful thing. If you've attended a lecture by the great Johnny Long, you can probably find just about any piece of information that exists.. somewhere.. on the internets.

If you're stumbling upon this and it's not yet on general sale, give it a shot, you never know..

That being said... I got my tickets yesterday, bitches.

sleep

I don't much write about my 'personal life' here or anywhere else. I do have a paper journal that I occasionally will write in, and the stuff in there is intensely personal, but nobody reads that but me.

This is much more public. Even if there is a slight veil when I don't use my name frequently, and I have a common enough name that google can't find me, but it's still much, much more public.

For those of you who do know me, you'll know that I have children. Two daughters, in fact: one infant (4 months) and one toddler (2 years).

Right now, sleep is a problem in my house. No one is sleeping enough, but my wife and the infant are especially hard hit. I think I've got the genes that allow me to operate better on little to no sleep, but I may be deluding myself. I surely have been gaining weight despite not changing my eating patterns, which would lead me to believe that my body is effective at producing cortisol, which would explain the ability to stay awake, etc. But -- I'm overanalyzing again.

The gist is this: if you have the ability to sleep as much as you want - and I don't mean you fail to because you're out partying too much, or you stay up and work, or watch too many Battlestar Gallactica movies, or have to finish that 8 hour WoW raid - I mean that no one is forcing you to stay awake buy yourself - if you're in that enviable position.. cherish it.

I keep myself up more than I need to, even now. And I'm managing. I won't complain about lack of sleep because I could probably be sleeping at least an hour more than I do, but it's a precarious balance. I've always had problems sleeping. If I go to bed too early, I end up thinking about the day too much. I could be doing literally anything, even something stimulating, and if I go to bed late enough, I'll knock out quickly.

This is hell for my wife though. She's got no choice in the matter. She HAS to be up when she's up, and she goes to bed as early as she can most nights. It's wearing her down, and that's hard for me to see. I wish I could help more.

I love my family.

I would forsake everything in this world for them.

Now is a hard time for us. And I'm beginning to think that it's better to stay here than to move, whether it be to Atlanta or Reykjavik.

blogging..

I'm pretty sure that I don't much like this Blogger software.. I could write something or adapt something and make something better, but it doesn't seem like a great way to spend my time.

This is 'good enough'.

But it does have some faults. I just deleted a bunch of older posts, and there's no way to get them back.

I shouldn't have done it, I regret it now, but I had this idea that I was going to re-purpose this, again, and that all of these miscellaneous posts were cruft that should be removed.

At least I didn't get rid of them all.. I'll just tag and move the rest away and then use this for blogging my thoughts on technology like I started to, instead of unrelated musings.