User:Cranky bastard

From Voice of the Proletariat

Hello, I'm Cranky Bastard. Here's my card (thanks, andbruno!) and another card (thanks, reed solomon!).

Here's an utterly hilarious Campaign '08 poster created by shocker - totally awesome!

I've known grahams for years, and we've worked together on some gigantic corporate web sites. He's a hell of an engineer, and he has built the banniNation from an initial wild idea into the highly sophisticated monstrosity that it is today.

I participate in some of the hacking marathons, and I pop in from time to time to add things like the RSS feed and various utilitarian fixes and whatnot - but my role here has always been shadowy. I don't submit a lot of links, and I don't normally engage in extended discussions in threads. I'm more interested in the site engineering puzzles than the content, frankly.

I'm giving this 'wiki extended bio' thing a whirl, almost against my better judgment - in my experience, "wikis" and "twikis" and "dashboards" have been tools used by managers to create multicolored web pages that absolve them of all blame for project failures while making me the fall guy. If this wiki page is transformed into some kind of train wreck, well, then - there you have it.

When it comes to requests for new features or bug fixes, I'm pretty conservative. I won't wade into the code unilaterally unless the problem at hand passes the "Duh!" test - for example, respecting the image display toggle setting on profile pages and biography management pages. That was a no-brainer, and so I just whacked in the code to suppress image tags on those pages when images were de-selected by the toggle. Queue tweaking suggestions that reflect larger issues of site policy, on the other hand, get kicked to grahams - this thing is his baby, and he calls the shots. When I can apply simple enhancements like "let me delete alternate biography submissions" without making site policy decisions (and I have the spare time), I often do so - but I'm not going to implement sweeping changes or change policy on my own.

Generally speaking, grahams is the bold adventurer and I'm the guy yelping about database indexes and warning messages and uptime - without him, we'd have a much less impressive site, and without me, we'd be playing dangerously fast and loose. Together, we do pretty well - I set up things like code and database backups, and he blazes the trail to greater glory.

Somebody added the following graphic to this page, but I have no idea what it means. I must have missed the memo:

Here's a little note from the disgruntled bN Army

Here's another masterpiece from hornwrecker:

Not to be confused with:

He is older than he appears to be:

I like hats

Poetry in motion: http://i46.photobucket.com/albums/f120/waste301/animated/1189720863782rg8.gif?t=1207080169

Here are some song lyrics I posted in this thread - I don't know whether they'll get selected and put to music, but I thought they were fairly decent:

It all began one summer night, when the pictures went away -
Folks got pissed and flamed the site when they couldn't have their say
The Scotch was smooth, the fingers flew, the database was hummin'
He wrote the code and went to bed, but never saw this coming!

  Oh, bannination - oh, why did I code drunk?
  Oh, bannination - oh, I'll be in my bunk.
  Alts and trolls and flamewars, everywhere you look -
  Just a fuckin' website, no plans to write a book.

The people came, liked what they saw, and posted silly comments -
It was a zoo, and that was cool, and man, it had its moments.
It's better now, more organized - but still somewhat chaotic,
We've got 'em all, the geeks, the freaks, the utterly psychotic!

  Oh, bannination - oh, why did I code drunk?
  Oh, bannination - oh, I'll be in my bunk.
  Alts and trolls and flamewars, everywhere you look -
  Just a fuckin' website, no plans to write a book.

We're older now, but not much wiser, wondrin' where we're goin'
We do our best to run the site and keep the chuckles flowin'
Free speech for all - that's the idea - and though we're far from perfect,
We really try to do what's right, as well as we can work it.

  Oh, bannination - oh, why did I code drunk?
  Oh, bannination - oh, I'll be in my bunk.
  Alts and trolls and flamewars, everywhere you look -
  Just a fuckin' website, no plans to write a book.