Caught something interesting on Oprah today - a story about a single mom who became a stripper to support her family.

Now, the story on Oprah tried to be fairly even-handed…  Wasn’t terribly sensational or scandalous…  But I find it interesting that this a story at all.  I find it interesting that the assumption is that you wouldn’t want to be a stripper, that there’s something wrong with you - the name of the story is “How far would you go.”  The whole idea seems to be that stripping would be a job of last resort.

Now, I can certainly understand that some people probably wouldn’t want to dance around naked in front of an audience - I dislike audiences enough with my clothes on.  But why does stripping have such negative connotations?  Why is it that folks look at you funny if you’re a stripper, but not if you’re a musician?  What is it about sex work that is so horrible?

Noticed another odd thing with Vista this morning…

After a reboot it sometimes forgets my gateway.  I’ll be able to hit all our internal servers, DNS resolves properly, all that good stuff…  But traffic to anything outside the local network just plain fails.  And if I check the properties of my network connection, which I had to statically configure due to some port forwarding we’ve got set up, the gateway field is completely empty.  Everything else is filled in, but no gateway.

It’s easy enough to fix…just fill in the gateway field and hit OK…  And it’ll remember that setting no matter how many times I log in or out.  But sometimes, after a reboot, it just forgets about the gateway.

Last night I cracked open a new book - Burning Chrome, by William Gibson.  The first story in the book was Johnny Mnemonic, which I’ve been dying to read for a few months now.  I was very surprised…  It’s almost completely different from the movie.

I assumed there’d be differences, there always are.  And after reading Neuromancer I didn’t think the relatively nice guy Keanu plays would survive very long in Gibson’s world, so I figured there’d have to be some substantial differences.  But the story was so different…

It was much shorter than I expected.  I knew it was a short story, that Burning Chrome was a collection of short stories, but I expected Johnny Mnemonic to be much longer.  I expected it to have some more substance to it.  Neuromancer was such a rich and lively world that seemed to stretch out in all directions…  And somehow they managed a full-length movie from Johnny Mnemonic…  But the story itself was only about a dozen pages.  And the narrative is just as brief.

You meet Johnny, Molly shows up, they run off to the Lo-Tek hideout, meet Jones, Molly kills a Yakuza assassin, Johnny becomes a Lo-Tek.  That’s really it.  There’s some more description, some dialog, some internal thoughts…but not a whole lot more substance.  All that stuff in the movie about Takahashi and the AI construct, Spider and Dr. AllCome, the Preacher…  None of that makes even the briefest appearance.

It was a good story…  I enjoyed reading it…  And it was really the perfect length for a quick read before bed…  But I was very surprised.  I honestly expected more substance to it, and I expected it to at least vaguely resemble the movie.

Ran into a couple odd things with Vista yesterday…

Macromedia FireWorks 8 apparently doesn’t like the new Aero GUI.  Whenever I fire up that program I get a pop-up notifying me that Vista is going to use the basic GUI.  It’s a very subtle difference…  About all I lose is some translucency and glowy effects…  I probably wouldn’t even notice if it weren’t for the pop-up.  I wonder what it is that Aero and FireWorks are doing that doesn’t work together?

I also ran into an odd problem with our backup server…  It’s running Linux with SAMBA and just sharing out a pile of storage.  My mapped network drives became disconnected at some point yesterday and simply refused to re-connect.  Kept telling me that the device name was already in use.  Wound up having to reboot my Vista machine, but then they connected immediately with no trouble.

Slashdot | Sneek Peek at Windows Server 2008

“There’s even a minimalist installation called Windows Server Core that can run various server roles (such as DNS, DHCP, Active Directory components) but not applications (like SQL Server or IIS dynamic pages). It’s otherwise a scripted host system for headless operations. There’s no GUI front end to a Windows Server Core box, but it is managed by a command line interface (CLI), scripts, remotely via System Manager or other management applications that support Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), or by Remote Terminal Services. It’s also a potential resource-slimmed substrate for Hyper-V and virtualization architectures.”

I downloaded Server 2008 from our MSDN subscription last week, but I haven’t had a chance to even think about installing it on anything.  It’ll be a while before I really have to deal with it though…  It isn’t even released yet, and then we usually move pretty slowly to get folks into new and untested software.  We’ll probably be selling Server 2003 for another year or two at least.  But it is the wave of the future.

I’m glad to see that they’re finally offering a stripped-down GUI-less option.  The Windows GUI does make things more obvious sometimes, but it isn’t always the best way to do things.  It always annoys me when I have to click through several different screens in Windows when I know for a fact that I could accomplish the same thing with a single command in Linux.  It seems odd though…  To see Microsoft finally putting together a powerful CLI.  I guess I’m going to need to practice with PowerShell some more…