What Should I Do Up Here?

Half past two is an ungodly morning hour to be waking up, but that's what happened. I muddled for a while, then ate Thursday dinner, and it's Friday the 13th. I think I'm probably going to try to go back to sleep before the sun comes up. I've gotten sleepy again really fast, and can't think of anything else to do anyway. If I get acid reflux in my sleep and wake up drowning in it well tough luck. I ain't staying awake and boring myself just so I can live to bore myself even longer.

Oh but I got an Opera update and I think it might have fixed my YouTube problem, at least for now. Videos are playing with only slight delay and with minimal disruption after that. Sometimes none at all. Something to be pleased about, to be sure. That and the cool nights.

51/02a: What Shall We Do With the Drunken Sailor?

I rarely paste stuff I've copied from other web sites here, but this gem deserves a wider audience. It's from the web site quora, where users answer questions asked by other users, and sometimes the answers are actually good. Here is an answer to the question "What are some rules for alpha men?" It was provided by a quora user named Franklin Veaux.

"Alpha men are not suitable for public release. They should be used only by production teams and QA, and should not be introduced to the general public.

"Alpha men may not be secure and may have multiple vulnerabilities. Keep them away from any internet-facing system, because they may be easy to exploit.

"Alpha men should be assumed to be unstable. When presenting an alpha man in public, please verify the commands and processes you will be demonstrating in a controlled environment to avoid embarrassing crashes or lack of functionality in front of an audience.

"Alpha men do not have all the features you expect from a man who is ready for release. Expect to find significant areas where basic features have not yet been implemented.

"Document all crashes or unexpected behavior so that the developers can address it.

"Do not expect your alpha man to be resilient or to be able to process unexpected input. Provide only properly formatted input that the alpha man expects. The alpha man may not be able to respond to unexpected or ambiguous data gracefully.

"Alpha men are quite fragile and may not have error handling implemented. Expect hard crashes and/or complete shutdown if an error condition is encountered.

"Under no circumstances whatsoever should any alpha man be used in any mission critical environment where reliability or proper behavior are crucial, including any environment where failure of the alpha man may result in loss of life, significant damage to equipment, or corruption of important business data.

"Alpha men are not certified for access to internal networks without sandboxing and firewalling.

"Log all defects you observe in your alpha man so they may be addressed before release.