Will S has now put up two new sites: Will S’ culture war blog and Will S. random weirdness. Both are linked — given Will’s eclectic interests, one is in nutraditionalism and one in dark enlightenment,

Simon Travalgia is the bloke who writes the ur-systems operator blog, the Bastard Operator from Hell (BOFH). This week’s one is a doozy.

“Look,” I say, interrupting the PFY’s murderous threat. “This company would be the greenest company in the world if – it didn’t cost any money, but I suspect that you’ll find that the number of board members in favour of this is inversely proportional to the order of magnitude of the cost.”

“I’m not with you.”

“If it cost 1 quid, all six board members would be in favour; 10 quid, 5 board members; 100 quid 4 board members, etc… until it costs a million quid and no one’s interested.”

“Really?”

“Yes, except that it’s probably more like when it we hit 10,000 quid they’d all abandon ship.”

“Well if you want to be greener perhaps we could look at carbon offsets.”

“Carbon Offsets,” I say, working up a head of steam, “are dumb. I could word it better than that but it’s so dumb that the people that support it wouldn’t understand those words.”

“What’s wrong with carbon offsets?”

“Analogy-wise, paying someone in South America to grow trees so that I can burn trees is a bit like me paying someone in Uganda 10 quid to be good to someone else so that the PFY can punch you and the Boss here in the face.”

“I think that’s being rather simplistic – carbon offsets will negate the harm you do in the shorter term while you look for better alternatives,” says the Architect.

“Yes, but it doesn’t cancel it out geographically. If that were the case I could pay someone in Africa to filter water while I pee in your bathtub!”

Finally, I have not changed themes — but Brightnews (the theme) does allow you to change colours and move to extracts rather than the whole article. The colour is back to blue(ish) and the posts are extracts.

On the server front, I have all machines now running Archbang using xfce as my window manager. This seems to be relatively quick for most jobs. I have installed Rstudio, which is much better than previous R guis. I can use Revman… now if only people would stop writing word documents full of macros. (Do people not understand that this is a way to hack machines? Bring back emacs and LaTeX, I say).