DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I had to laugh at this job posting. I think this company needs more help than they realize.

The ad boasts that Kanisa transforms a company’s e-service web site from a source of customer frustration to a source of customer satisfaction! And yet Kanisa’s own e-service website is apparently so poorly executed that in the same message, the hiring manager goes on to warn candidates: do not send resumes through the www.kanisa.com web site - they will get lost!

I played briefly with the Zend Optimizer, which promises to speed up PHP scripts (such as those that create this journal) by 40%-100%. In practice I found that when the Optimizer was enabled, single-script execution speed actually slowed by a few thousands of a second.

The statistics are not significant, but I sure didn’t see any improvement in performance.

I tested various levels of optimization with similar results. I wonder if the Alternative PHP Cache would yield better results? (But I don’t wonder about it enough to warrant actually testing it… this site is, regrettably, a long way from “heavily loaded.”)

I stumbled across an ancient cassette tape today — a rough mixdown of a recording session from about 1993. Apparently we’d left the microphones hot and recorded a few minutes of conversation inadvertently. Listening to this, a randomly captured exchange from over 7 years ago, feels oddly voyeuristic, even though I am one of the two people on the tape. I guess this is because we had no idea, at the time, that we were being recorded.

Anyway, I was amused to hear a spontaneous joke created by my companion. To enjoy this you would need to know that we were rehearsing and recording in a building in which several of the tenants financed their music ventures by selling crack — so, to prevent felonies from occurring within one’s own room, everybody (at least, everybody not selling crack) kept their doors locked. Most often, the shared bathroom was locked as well.

And so my friend says, mostly to himself as he was searching around the studio, “I’m looking for my keys, so I can pee.” And then, a second later: “I don’t know if your dick takes keys..!”

I finally got a chance to see Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai this weekend. For anyone not familiar with this film, it’s about a samurai/ninja/gangsta living and assassinating people in New York City. Here’s a plot summary:

Forest Whitaker blathers some psuedo-philosophical drivel in voiceover.
Forest Whitaker steals a car.
Forest Whitaker shoots some people.
Forest Whitaker fondles a pigeon.
Forest Whitaker eats an ice cream.

Repeat.

It wouldn’t be accurate to say I didn’t enjoy the film, but I sure don’t understand the critical acclaim that’s been heaped on it.

So a few weekends ago I stumbled inadvertently into a sort of modern-day coven, and as any brand-new experience might, it got me to thinking. What was really different about this gathering took me a few moments to notice. Being one of three men in a room of about 40 women is somewhat shocking at first, at least for me, at least the first time it happens. Part of why it was shocking is the realization that I’ve been through a third of my life and this had never happened before. Why not? Odd.

But as I looked past the fact that I was, as a gender, outnumbered 12 to 1, more subtle differences presented themselves. With few exceptions, I was the worst-dressed person in the room: I was surrounded by attractive jacket- and sweater- and vest-pantsuit combinations. My ratty jeans and overcoat marked me as a sartorial neophyte, if not simply a slob. And then I realized something perhaps even more telling: except for my wife, I had the longest hair in the room.

Soon it became clear that I had joined an event where about 95% of the attendees were lesbians. This was sort of a trip, but only for me, I’m sure.

The event was an open-mic night, but it was better run than any other similar event I’ve ever attended. The MC, who could double for Ellen Degeneres, ran a tight stage show. I was wholly impressed with the evening, although the openly lusty jokes and sexual references (between women) — not to mention the frequent kissing, onstage and off — managed to shock me, due to the persistence of my corn-fed Midwestern upbringing.

One performer in particular made me laugh. She is a musician and singer, and dedicated a song to “that someone special.” She was clearly heterosexual because she’d been clinging to a male companion prior to taking the stage. During the dedication, she purposefully made eye contact with just about everyone in the audience except her male friend, and although she carefully avoided using any gender-specific or otherwise identifying terms in the dedication, it was obvious to me whom she spoke of. But then, presumably because she feared her “special someone” might miss the reference, she added sotto voce, “he knows who he is.” Ha! Unless she was talking to me or the guy in the other room mixing lattes, there weren’t any other HEs in the building.