Writing used to be cathartic to me.  Now it seems labored.  I write shit, then delete it because I realize it needs to be edited as to not make me look like as big of a hypocrite as I am.  My company is probably adopting a new IT policy, that I reviewed that essentially says if you bad mouth the company via a blog, you can be fired or sued.  That’s why I never mentioned my company by name.  If one were to figure it out without knowing me, hooray for you.  Given, I don’t say anything bad about my company, as they don’t make my troubles.  My troubles are self afflicted, and the company is only the venue by which I come by them.  I bet if I was a homeless crack head, I’d have problems, and I’d write about them somewhere sometime, or perhaps etched them into a dead hooker’s back.  So, I’ll sit and write about something that’s bothering me, but notice that since 70% of my life occurs during working and or commuting hours, I’m really starting to not know much else.  I could write about how witty my wife and I are, but then I sound like one of those ppl with their nose in their own ass.  Which, we are very witty.  Or I could write about something the cats did, but then I look creepy.  I guess I could talk about world events, but who really wants to hear some tech nerds take on stuff I couldn’t possibly understand because I don’t protest or wear a “I hate G.W. t-shirt.”  When the fact is, those that understand the situations of our society and world are less likely to voice them as they realize the powers are beyond them, and you create more unwanted trouble by yelling then by observing.  If you think about it in practical terms.  The idea of history is to leave those that understood the mistakes to steer those who made them to the correct conclusions.  Hindsight is always perfect, but if you spent the now devising your big voice without seeing that the big voices are who I had to edit out my entire political rant as it was starting  into what I said earlier about being a hypocrite.  My problem is I have lots to say, but not enough trust in the trolling masses to say it.  We don’t live in a society full of free speech. As long as there’s someone to criticize us, our speech is not free.  A free speech would mean I could say deplorable things in public and ppl would walk by with little more than a sneer.  So when you post you work hate and politico bashing, remember someone is keeping that in the back of their mind, and suddenly your voice is constrained.  Self governance is that best censor.  If you realize what the things you say mean to you, then you empathize with others and realize what you say means to them.  And that’s where the problem lies.  Too wide of forums have made our speech less free.  We think the internet is the wild frontier, but it’s the biggest forum there is.  Which means, the things we say have potential to meet more ears and offend more.  Which really has driven us to be a society that thrives on shock as a means to garner attention.  Don’t worry I do it myself, but I wish it wasn’t as socially acceptable as it’s become.  It used to be, if you were crass and shocking, it got a rise out of ppl.  Maybe even an ass kicking threat.  Now all of the filthy soandsos  and dirty ass whatnots  and loose coonts have made being offensive as a topic of conversation more than a way to derail the conversation.  Writing used to be cathartic to me.  Now it’s just bitching

So, I haven't posted forever, for no good reason, but because I'm busy.  However, sometimes my ire grows so that I can't bottle it up any longer.  As is the case today after I read this article . The gist of it is that the web "empowers" users to tackle their IT support issues themselves.  Firstly, I work in IT support, frankly, if all the users in the world woke up one morning and were able to 'tech' their own problems I'd just find something else to do to make money.  So really this doesn't concern my livelihood.  Why this does piss me off is that the hack fails to mention a major part of IT support. RESPONSIBILITY!  There's a reason you company has an IT department.  It's because the user will never accept the responsibilty of doing the updates, and fix the fuck up they make.  I'm not saying all problems that occur are the fault of the user.  That would be elitist, because a lot of shit that happens on a daily basis could be the network or the software itself.  However, to assume that the IT industry could be fazed out is like assuming once you learn to screw in a lightbulb you'll never need an electrician again.  Think about it.  The fan on your heatsink burns out, you don't notice until you've fried your CPU and you PC won't come on for more than 1/2 a second.  What are you going to do?  You can't troll the internet for a fix because you just fried you access.  You'll take it to Best Buy, who will steal your music and your porn, or you'll call you buddy that works in IT and ask him to HEEEELLLPPP!!!!  If you own a Mac, you'll probably just cry yourself to sleep because after all is said and done, you might as well have purchased a new PC with the cost of a repair like that at the Mac store.  Or you'll cry because you're a douche that owns a Mac because it's "solid."  Which isn't exactly the truth because since their adoption of the Intel cpu, they're no different than my Windows machine, which is just as solid and cheaper to fix.  Anyway, off subject.  So, you call your buddy, he comes over, tells you the bad news, orders you the new part, puts it in, does it for free, or a case of beer, which is in fact the international convention for services rendered by IT buddies.  So, you're back to the races of online sovereignty, downloading every piece of open source software that tickles you.  Part of this downloading consist of utter disregard for what exactly you are downloading, not checking to make sure the provider isn't some malware company, and forgetting the late 90s when pretty much every piece of software online was crap.  I'll be the first to admit, there is a lot of great open source software.  However, googling a general idea of what you're looking for isn't going to get you the cream of the crop.  It's going to get you the best sales pitch, or the company that paid some google marketing firm to up their software.  But, this is still not about the home user.  This article deals with businesses.  I'm just using the home experience to ground my rant in most ppl's lives.  Now I'll get to what truly pisses me off. 

THERE IS IN FACT, EVEN BEYOND RESPONSIBILITY, ANOTHER RESON YOU COMPANY HIRED PPL TO MANAGE THEIR IT!!  You know what that reason is?  Because companies get audited.  Well, at least companies that plan to stay in business.  You know what part of most audits include?  IT audits.  You know what they want to know?  What kind of controls are in place concerning IT.  They also want to know that the software the masses are using is the same so you don't have 800 different formats and sets of numbers they're dealing with.  Think about that when your gung-ho office psuedo-techs wants to install some rogue software so you can work more efficiently.  What if the software you're supposed to use outputs a proprietary file format that can't be read by this latest greatest piece of open source you found on google?  Or the file your software outputs can't be read by the auditors that are pissing the accountants off, who normally carry a lot of water with the management, who find that you were screwing off downloading and supporting software not supported by your IT department?  What do you think your supervisor is going to do?  Give you award for being a rebel that subsequently pissed off his boss's boss, who is blaming him for not managing his employees?  Now, they're going to reprimand you, or at least try to, and then you're going to blame it on ignorance, or the IT department not responding to your demands fast enough, when they're a crew of 3-4 ppl managing 1000 users and machines.  That's what will happen, and then the IT dept. gets reamed for not having "controls" in place to keep users from installing non supported software, when the IT department is just trying to give the user base some level of freedom to do what they need to do.  You see what I'm getting at here.  You need IT experts, so when you fuck up, there's someone to plug the leak.  Also, 99% of users I've met, and about 70% of IT professionals I've met don't even want to get into networking.  That's a fucking whore left for someone else's drunken debauchery.