4 May 2005

Volume Two

One month later, I've finally gotten around to setting up "volume two" of the "God's ex-Boyfriend" site. From now on, all new entries in this category will go there.

Technical Difficulties

God struck back at His ex yesterday.

My server suffered a catastrophic failure, resulting in the complete loss of the hard drive it was running on. The good news: I had backups of all my web sites, as of the night before, including this one. The bad news: the backup of the database behind this site is... unusable.

What that means is that all of the static pages of the site are intact, just as they were at 4:00am the night before the meltdown. Every article is preserved, as if in amber. Because the only way to update the site is by editing web pages manually. All of the glorious features of the Movable Type blogging software, enabling me to update the site from any browser in the world, to reformat and redesign the site at will... utterly broken.

I'm not sure at this point what I'm going to do. I could just generate a new blog and start updating that, with this as a snapshot archive. That's probably what I'll have to do, because there's no practical way of pulling the content out of these pages and repopulating a database with it.

I guess it just goes to show you: backups are not enough; you need backups of your backups.

Wireless TV

I've decided to switch how I watch television: I'm going wireless. Now that I have a wireless phone, and I've done some consulting work for wireless networking, I've seen the light, and I'm switching my television to wireless technology.

Which is mostly just a futuristic spin to put on "I'm canceling my cable service".

I've spent most of my life without cable (or satellite) service. Of course there was the first decade and a half, before cable TV was invented (or at least before it reached my city). I had the necessary cable channels like MTV during my teen years, but not for my years in the dorm at college. I paid for cable for a few years after graduating, but when I moved into a 4th-floor-on-a-hill apartment where I got great broadcast reception, I didn't bother subscribing there. And although my current first-floor apartment doesn't get the channels quite as well, I was also a student again, with a part-time job, so I went without.

That changed last year, when - flush with a new well-paying job and frustrated at trying to pick up the low-power UPN affiliate when they moved their transmitter farther away - I finally subscribed to cable service and got wired. All I signed up for was "basic" service, which includes the must-carry channels (local broadcasters, public access), a few shopping channels, and a couple of the less glamorous "cable" channels: TBS and WGN. The filter to cut out the "standard service" channels doesn't work completely, so I could also pick up a few extra channels on the low end of the scale, including Cartoon Network, TNT, Oxygen, and ABC Family. All for only $13.64 per month.

The thing is... I've found that I don't watch much of anything on those extra channels (just the Justice League cartoon and the occasional commercial-interrupted movie), and the only show on UPN that I'd ever want to watch (Star Trek: Enterprise) is being cancelled. The other thing is... I quit that well-paying job for one I'd actually enjoy, so money's tight again. That $13.64/month would add up to over $160/year, and yeah, that would really make a difference. So I'm clipping the cable.

Instead I'm putting the rabbit ears back to work. These are somewhat better rabbit ears than we used back in the old pre-cable era; they're amplified, and do a pretty good job of picking up most of the local broadcast stations. Too bad I can't easily put a "real" antenna up on the roof; that'd be really nice.

I can't pick up the local CBS station (which actually transmits from two counties south of here) in my interior living room, however. So I've got another set of rabbit ears hooked up to my spare VCR in another room with a better southern exposure. There's only one show I watch on CBS anyway (Two and a Half Men), so I'll just set the timer and watch the tapes for that one.

I admit that I'm going to miss the clearer signal on a few of the channels. But broadcast TV still gives me at least an hour/day of decent shows to watch. (For the record, in addition to those already mentioned, that includes: Malcolm in the Middle, The Simpsons, Arrested Development, Scrubs, House, Lost, The West Wing, Smallville, Jack & Bobby, ER, and Nova.) Granted, someday when I'm old and feeble and can't motivate myself to do anything else with my time except watch TV, I might again subscribe to cable (or its future replacement) so I can sit and vegetate in front of it for hours on end. But not yet.

Another Microsoft Failure™

There's a saying in the tech industry: "Nobody every got fired for buying Microsoft." The point being that Microsoft may not always be the best choice, but at least it's a safe one.

If you decide to use MS Windows as your operating system, or MS Office as your business-productivity suite, you can be sure that it won't be a dead end. And if Microsoft comes out with some other new technology, and you're not sure whether to support it, or maybe support some alternative from another source... you go with Microsoft. Because... see above.

Not true.

Microsoft has a slew of failed products and services lying in the gutters of the technology highway. Failures so bad that not even the strongest technology monopoly since the Bell System could foist them on us. MS Bob was a "social interface" for Windows - horrible idea, poor implementation - that flopped so badly that the project manager surely would've been sacked... if she weren't Melinda Gates. MS PhotoDraw was a painting/drawing program included in certain versions of MS Office, which was supposed to make Adobe with their overpriced Photoshop tremble. Gone. Windows ME... well, it sold OK, but no tech worth more than minimum wage ever recommended installing it. Ultimate TV was supposed to kill off TiVo and ReplayTV (already based on tricky business models), but instead it failed. Hailstorm was the cornerstone of a new software-as-service model that Microsoft was pushing to programmers. And flopped.

The latest MS Failure is Passport. This was a single-sign-on system that would enable people to create a single account with a single username and password, and use it... everywhere. Eventually. When everyone got on board and made their sites Passport-enabled.

Admittedly, it's an appealing idea. I have accounts at countless web sites, where I read news, post messages, buy stuff, etc. It'd be nice to be able to just use the same username and password on all of them, without having to sign up over and over. But it's all based on trust... and that's something Microsoft simply hasn't got.

(Actually, a "trust" is exactly what Microsoft keeps trying to build: an illegal scheme in which participants agree to unethical business practises for mutual benefit. But I Digress.)

Despite the obvious convenience for users, Passport never really took off. On one hand, people were reluctant to trust Microsoft with all their personal information. On the other, web site operators were reluctant to hand over their membership management to Microsoft.

Some businesses jumped on the MS bandwagon, and Passport-enabled their sites. After all, Microsoft was 100% behind this service, and they were eager to hop into bed wtih Mr. Bill. EBay was a prominent example of this, offering Passport logins as an alternative to their own accounts. But now eBay has dropped out of Passport. Even Microsoft no longer lists its directory of sites using Passport, presumably out of embarrassment at how small it is.

This is important to note, especially whenever Microsoft unveils a new technology or product or service that is supposed to become a de facto standard that everyone will have to support to remain competitive. Don't count on it. The person who decided that eBay would use Passport may not have gotten fired for it, but I doubt that choice helped his career.

So when Microsoft tells Visual Basic developers that it's time for them to switch to VB.NET... don't count on it. Maybe RealBasic (which can convert most existing VB programs, and unlike VB.NET will compile apps for Windows 98, Mac OS, and Linux) is a better, smarter... and even safer choice. Or when they say it's time for everyone to upgrade to a new version of MS Office... don't take their word for it. Maybe OpenOffice.org, or WordPerfect Office, or maybe even the version of MS Office you've been using is a better choice. Heck, I haven't upgraded my Windows computer since 98SE (instead setting up Linux and Mac OS X systems), and it's worked out pretty well for me.

And if anyone working for me ever bought from Microsoft without looking at alternatives from other sources... you can be damn sure he'd be fired.

Twisting in the Wind

I feel like I've been twisting in the wind.

Not literally, though there's a pretty stiff wind blowing through the area today, bringing clouds, rain, and declining temperatures since this morning. I'm speaking more figuratively.

This whole presidential election is part of it. At this point I just want the damn thing to be over. Not knowing whether Bush is going to get his near-50% "mandate" to expand the war, overhaul the Supreme Court, and continue redistributing wealth upward; or if Kerry is going to pull it off and send GWB down in history as just a meaner version of his unremarkable father... is nerve-wracking. Not even knowing when there will be a definitive answer (I don't expect one on Election Night) makes it even harder.

But then my watch broke yesterday. I've worn a watch since I was old enough to tell time (my first one had the minutes etched along the perimeter, to help decipher what "the big hand" was telling me). So I've become accustomed to being able to find out the time with just a gesture. But for the past day (and until I buy a replacement), I have to find a clock.

Ordinarily, I'd turn to one of my network-connected, time-synched computers for that, but yesterday afternoon, I lost that as well. I first got the alert at work, an automated phone call telling me that my server was not responding to requests from the internet. I rushed home fearing that the leaking roof had shorted out my server, or that the main hard drive had crashed, or that my firewall (built using an ancient 486 motherboard) had died, or that my house was burning to the ground, or that the police had received a tip that I was kiddie-porn-publishing, pirate-video-swapping, president-hating terrorist, and had confiscated my computers.

Turns out it was "only" my internet connection. That's not necessarily good news. For one thing, it's not something I can fix myself. It requires contacting my service provider, who has to contact their network provider if it's not an account or premises equipment failure, who has to contact the phone company that owns the wires if there's a problem with the circuit itself. And late in the day on a Friday is not the best time to get the ball rolling on something that's going to require a cascade of techs to actually fix. The word "Monday" kept popping up.

Fortunately, the trouble ticket got escalated smoothly from one company to the next, and by mid-morning the next day a tech from SBC showed up to start fiddling with the line to my house. She ended up spending a few hours on it, often disappearing, but eventually returning. (Between her short and stout build, her deft ability to tread through my leafy yard me hearing her, and general geniality, I suspect she may have been a hobbit.) It turns out there were problems with two sections of the line from here to the central office downtown, which she resolved somehow. She also replaced the ancient junction box on the side of the house with a new one, for good measure.

So I'm feeling a little less lost now. But still far from centered. But even if I don't know what time it is or who's going to be in charge of the planet for the next four years... at least now I'll have a means to find out.

Big Dick, Little Car

If conventional wisdom about the relationship between automobile size and penis size is to believed, I must have a really huge cock.

Now, I'm not necessarily saying that I do have a really big dick, but I'm not saying that I don't, either. I mean, it fits in my pants... at least most of the time.

But I definitely do have a car that's the anti-thesis of the stereotypical "compensating" car that so many Americans (especially insecure American males) prefer these days. It's a Chevy Metro, and before the Mini Coopers started showing up in North America, I had bragging rights to (implicitly) one of the biggest dicks in town. I drove an over-sized Honda Civic for several years, but before that I had a Ford Festiva, which - if not for being cheaply made - would've been a perfect car for me.

If I were in the market for a car, and could afford to buy something new, I'd definitely consider the Mini, for its combination of convenience, performance, fuel economy, and style. But I've recently seen another alternative that's making its way to North America, that makes your typical Mini owner look like a pin-dick: the Smart Car.

They're already fairly popular in Europe, where the roads are narrower, parking is scarcer, and unsubsidised fuel prices are substantially higher. (The Mini and its peers have been available in Europe for quite a while as well.) Even though it runs entirely on gasoline or diesel (no electric assist) the standard model gets 60mpg or higher. It only seats two people - which is why this model is called the Fortwo - but that's not a limitation, it's a feature. Every "compact" car I've owned has had a back seat, and in the two decades I've been driving them, I've had someone sit in my back seat about five times. It's wasted space; take it out and give me a smaller, lighter, more efficient car. The Smart Fortwo also doesn't have a trunk or cargo space, which would be an inconvenience for trips to the store or laundromat, but since I never have a passenger when I do that, I'd manage easily enough.

One thing I love about driving a small car is the ease of parking it. Not only can I use the "compact only" spots in parking ramps and lots, I can fit it between poorly-spaceed cars at the curb, and I can often pull into full-size metered spaces forward, without having to do the "parallel park" routine. With an 5-foot-wide and 8-foot-long Fortwo, it'd be even easier. Heck, you could even perpendicular park without it sticking out very much past the 7-foot-wide trucks on either side.

Of course there's the issue of safety. Mercedes Benz (who makes the Smarts) says they've engineered it to be more structurally sound than a more traditional design... kind of like the difference between an egg and a shoebox; even though the egg is made of, well, eggshell it's studier than a box-like cardboard... box. Most cars will crumple and fold when hit; this one is too small to. Granted, there's still the automotive arms race to consider, in which people keep buying bigger and bigger vehicles to protect themselves from other vehicles, but at this point anything less than a mid-sized SUV is fodder for the tanks, so I don't think it'd make much difference.

The Web Makes for Strange Bedfellows

From time to time I like to go through my server logs and see who's linking to my site. After all, if a site is linking here, it's probably a site I'd want to look at myself.

Or not.

Last year there was the example of a fundamentalist Christian nutcase who accused me of being Michael Newdow (the atheist who sued over "under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance), when it's pretty obvious that I'm not the parent of a school-age girl.

This month I found quite a few referrer entries in my logs from a couple of sites that... give me pause. Neither of them was linking to articles on my site; they were just leaching images from my server. So I'm reassured that they don't consider me a "friend". But I'm not sure I like even being associated with them by proxy.

One was a thread on a message board run by and for punks in large U.S. city. (I'm not going to be more specific, because I don't want to promote the site.) The main topic of debate seemed to be whether 9/11 was funny or was it a fraud. Both of which was so absurd, that it's obvious that they're just trying really, really hard to offend somebody... anybody. Pathetic. One of the participants had included an image link to the file on my site showing the infamous Vietnam-War photo by Eddie Adams of a man shooting a prisoner in the head. This was the punk in question's attempt to add more "funny" images to laugh at.

When I find people leaching files from my server like this, I usually rename the file, and substitute something else, as punishment. (If you want to use files from my site, at least copy them to your own site, so I don't have to upload them for all of your freakin visitors.) In its place I gave them something that might actually give these boneheads something to think about, my recent graph showing civilian deaths in the War on Terror.

The other was a little more disturbing. They too were simply leaching one of my image files, this one the logo for Buy Nothing Day. It was a site in Italian, so it wasn't immediately clear just what the site was about. As I scrolled through it, I could see it was a kind of opinionated-news site, but I couldn't tell what its agenda was. But the graphics started giving me an almost... fascist vibe. I ran the main page through Babelfish, and sure enough: it's part of an international network of white racist news sites. And the article using my "Buy Nothing Day" image file... was promoting the idea. {shudder} Babelfish's translation was rather inscrutible, so I couldn't make out exactly what their goal for the day was, but the notion that I'm on the same side as a bunch of racists makes me a little queasy.

For that image, I did the same rename-and-substitute trick. This time I replaced the file they were using with an image that said (in Babelfish-generated Italian) "racist men are like little girls" with a picture of a little girl crying. I would have liked to have said something more clever and politically correct, but given the hazards of mechanised translation, I figured it was best to stick with a simple taunt that they'd understand.

Scotty's Star

I wrote recently about Scotty's comments in Star Trek IV about transparent aluminum, being vindicated by current research. Now I've just read the bittersweet news that James Doohan has been honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame... and has made what is probably his last public appearance. He's suffering from a list of degenerative conditions, including diabetes, Parkinson's, and Alzheimer's.

Spock was always my favorite character from the original series, but Scotty was my favorite human on the U.S.S. Enterprise. Not only did he have the cool accent, but his character had an appealing spirit. I think I learned some of my "can do" attitude from his frequent remarks to the effect, "That's impossible, but you really need it, so I'll make it happen somehow."

Sure, he's really Canadian, and he's an actor, not an engineer, but he's still been an inspiration. You can't swing a cat in a university engineering department without hitting several faculty and/or students who got into the field specifically because of Scotty. I got a kick out of spending time at the University of Aberdeen, pretending that I walked the streets that Montgomery Scott would one day stroll. (Years of listening to his faux Scots accent also made it easier for me to understand the locals.)

Doohan is also a veteran of D-Day, losing a finger helping to liberate Normandy from the Nazis. (The TV series staged shots around it, and he used a "hand double" for close-ups of the transporter console.) He went on to serve as a spotter plane pilot. So he's a hero in the more traditional sense, not just as a celebrity.

Based on the interviews I've read and every account I've heard of his frequent appearances at Trek conventions, he's even more genial and down-to-earth than he appeared on screen. He appreciates how much he's received from his fans, and has tried to give back to them, such as the suicidal fan whom he coaxed to come meet with him at a convention, then another, then another, quite likely saving the man's life. He's a good person. Full stop.

Like most public figures with Alzheimer's, Jimmy Doohan is going to disappear from the public eye now, and someday we'll hear that he's died. I do hope that it's soon. These are horrible illnesses to live with, both for the patient and his caregivers. Even in the advanced stages, when the patient is too far gone to understand his situation, he still suffers from it.

So, Jimmy: May your dilithium crystals be fully charged, your matter/anti-matter reaction balanced, your wee bairns well cared for, and I wish you a safe and painless transport to your final shore leave.

Energise.

Scotty was Right

Do you remember the scene in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home where Scotty is trying to get materials on primitive 20th Century Earth to build a whale tank? I always cringed watching that bit. Not only because there's no way Scotty could so quickly get up to speed on using an antique computer (not even a Mac Plus), but the material he was whipping up the formula for was so absurd: "transparent aluminum". As if.

Well, maybe so.

Researchers have developed a method for combining aluminum oxide with other elements and compounds into a see-through glass. In other words "transparent aluminum". And soon enough after the events of STIV:TVH that Scotty's flippant attitude about meddling with history seems justifiable.

World Wide Wiki

I don't do a lot of exploring on the Web. If there's something I want to know about, I go looking for it, and when I find it, I close the browser and get back to whatever I was doing before. There are a few sites I visit pretty regularly, but that includes places like my credit union and Weather Underground: pretty practical, mundane stuff. Some of that's because I'm jaded about this while internet thang... I've been on it longer than the Web, so it's lost its novelty for me. It's just a tool to me now, not a universe to explore.

But I've recently found a "new" way for me to waste a whole lot of time on the Web: Wikipedia. I've heard about it over the last year or two, and increasingly found it showing up in my search-engine results, and being rather helpful. The other day I decided to give it some real attention. And I think I'm hooked.

A "wiki" is a system which allows multiple people to collaborate on documents. Basically, anybody who wants to edit them... can. If you've got a bunch of people working on documentation for a piece of software, it has obvious advantages: anybody can update anything they see wrong or missing.

But you'd think such openness and freedom would crash and burn if you did an open-ended project and let absolutely anyone in the whole world update it. But that's exactly what Wikipedia is doing. It's an encyclopedia, done wiki-style. Anyone can contribute to it, on any topic.

You'd think that the signal-to-noise ratio would quickly degenerate, but surprisingly, it hasn't. If someone creates an article and fills it with garbage, anyone else can come along and delete it. Or fix it. Wikipedia keeps a record of changes, so it's easy to roll back an article to its previous state if someone removes everything from it, or adds a bunch of crap.

Just as importantly, Wikipedia is licenced under the same terms that govern GPL documentation: it's free for anyone to use. The people behind Wikipedia are aiming to make printed encyclopedias obsolete, and I think they're well on their way.

A big question people have is about bias and accuracy. At least Brittanica or World Book has standards for who writes their articles, so you know you can trust them. Or can you? They've got volumes of pages to fill, so they hire "experts" to write for them, and don't necessarily check thoroughly what's submitted.

By contrast, Wikipedia publishes their entire content for review online. If someone knows better, or thinks the author of an article is overly biased... they can fix it. And if the "fix" just makes it worse, someone can put it back. And on and on, until what's left is a heavily-reviewed article that balances the various biases involved. Their articles on "hot" controversial subjects have evolved this way.

On the other hand, there are oodles of Wikipedia articles that no one has ever really reviewed. They have some built-in mechanisms to look for obvious garbage entries, but if I were to create a new article about an obscure topic that no one else has bothered to check up on, I could get away with making up all sorts of bullshit about it.

The only solution to this is some skepticism on the part of the reader, which I'm afraid we really can't count on. But fortunately it is possible for any reader to look at the history of an article, and if there's only one person contributing all of the info, and no one's correcting him, then you know it's not a very authoritative article. But at least it exists. Which it wouldn't in a print encyclopedia, or even one of them new-fangled digital ones, like Encarta.

In some ways, Wikipedia is like what the World Wide Web is supposed to be: the sum of all human knowledge. But it has a few key differences. One is that Wikipedia pages don't go offline. There may be a web site out there with all sorts of excellent information about ____, but there's no guarantee it'll be there next year. With information entered into Wikipedia, it probably will be. There's also the benefit of some consistent structure to it. And that whole peer-review thing; if someone posts an "informative" web site that's full of shit, no one else can correct it.

Wikipedia is never going to serve as a substitute for searching the Web, but it has some unique benefits as something to be part of the Web.

And as someone who believes that he knows a hell of a lot about a hell of a lot, it's going to keep me pretty busy.

Web Mail from a Squirrel

Call me old-fashioned, but I've never liked web-mail. E-mail and the World Wide Web are two different applications (which both happen to run on the internet), and they shouldn't be confused. I never really liked the way Netscape bundled their mail client with their browser (they should be separate, like IE and Outlook, or Firefox and Thunderbird, or pick and choose the two of your choice). I've never seen a web-based mail interface that didn't suffer from the clunky page-based nature of the web. If I'm reading my mail, I want an actual mail client.

I still feel that way. But I've been playing with web-mail this weekend, and I like what I hath wrought.

I've always provided e-mail aliases for my web hosting clients. I'll happily forward fred@flintstone.com to your local ISP account, and that works nicely for most people. But I've got a new client who wants an actual e-mail account on my server, separate from his home e-mail. Talking him through the process of configuring Outlook or whatever other mail client he might have to access my server was something I wasn't looking forward to. Easy enough to do in person, not by e-mail or by phone... and he's in Arkansas.

So I punted. I went with web-mail. I did a little research online and found SquirrelMail, a PHP-based web-mail system that uses your existing SMTP and IMAP services, your web server, and about 5 minutes of setup to give you your own web-mail system. It's free (in both senses of the word) under the GPL, and works on both Unixy systems (OS X, Linux, BSD) and Windows.

It's nice. This would have been rather handy to have when I was on vacation, as a way to check my e-mail from the web browser in the local internet cafe, where I couldn't install and use a real mail client. It's still web-mail, so it's still clunkier than, say, Mozilla's Thunderbird or Apple's Mail.app, but it works. And it gives the client what he wants, with zero out-of-pocket expense, and just an hour or two of time to tweak and customise the code to work exactly like I want it. Just another demonstration of the fact that anyone who tells you that "open source" software is too risky to trust your business to it, is someone who has never bothered to take advantage of what it has to offer.

Missing Links in Understanding

The other day a co-worker and I were messing around with Mac OS X. An opportunity for a pun came along, and I jumped at it. It was about Darwin (the name of the Unix core that OS X is built on) and some directory links that hadn't been copied yet; I called them "Darwin's missing links".

The coworker then went off on a tangent about how evolution makes no sense. "Why are apes still apes?" he challenged. "Why aren't there any half-evolved animals anywhere?" he demanded. My mind was occupied by operating system arcana and my strained attempts at social banter, so I mostly just stammered and tried to turn the subject back to our shared interest in Apple's computers.

I don't know this guy well, but he's never shown any evidence of being a fundamentalist religious nutcase who can't stand the fact that "God" isn't mentioned anywhere in most discussions of evolution theory. And it dawned on me later that his main problem was just that he simply didn't understand what he was talking about. Evolution makes no sense to him, because he's missed the whole point of what "natural selection" is and how it works.

Rather than re-opening a touchy subject with a co-worker (and risk actually bringing religion into it, at which point I'll undoubtedly say things I'll regret), I'm going to do it here.

The key point that many people seem to miss is that evolution is not some inexorable process of change, with some kind of destination in mind. It tends to look that way from where we sit, looking at those "ascent of man" posters, especially when overlaid with a veneer of "man is the pinacle of creation" egocentrism. Popular entertainment like the X-Men perpetuate this misconception by suggesting that mutants are "the next step in human evolution"... as if that next step were pre-ordained.

It's not. If the environment that humans live in were to stay the same for the next hundred millennia, there would be no next step in evolution. It wouldn't be needed. Humans are already pretty well adapted to our environment, so there'd be no particular survival advantage in them changing. Alligators and sharks, for example, have existed in pretty much their current form for ages (literally), because their basic environment hasn't changed much. They didn't need to adapt, so they didn't.

Our distant ancestors were a different story. Whether it's because their environment changed and they had to adapt to survive in it, or because some random variations made it possible for them to move to a different environment, they evolved to fit in that environment. The ones that didn't, died. That's what natural selection is all about: survival of the fittest.

Note that "fittest" doesn't mean "best". It's not an absolute that says "smarter is better" or "stronger is better". It all depends on the context. The dinosaurs flourished because they were "fittest" for living in the prevailing habitats. Brains weren't that important, but size apparently offered some advantages. Ergo, a lot of stupid, big dinos were among the "fittest". Then they died off, because there weren't "fit" to live through the climate changes following a big meteor strike, and especially not through the later Ice Age. Some reptiles were, and they survived. A lot of mammals were, and they thrived.

So to answer my coworker's question: apes are still ape-like (rather than becoming human-like) because being an ape has been a great way to survive in the jungles of Africa.

The whole concept of being "half-evolved" is jibberish. If something isn't properly adapted to its evironment, it's unfit. It doesn't survive. So every living species is, by definition, "fully evolved"... for their current environment. I assume he was wondering why there aren't any species halfway between homo sapiens and homo habilis. That's kind of like asking why nobody lives halfway between Grand Rapids and Milwaukee; sure Milwaukeans are suited to living in Wisconsin, and Grand Rapidians are suited to live in Michigan, but nobody's very well suited to living at the bottom of a huge lake.

Likewise, there's no environment left on earth for which homo erectus (a decendent of habilis, and ancestor of sapiens) is better suited than we are. The ancestors of apes stuck to the trees and continued to dominate that niche. They got bigger, and somewhat smarter (modern chimps have bigger brains than the earliest hominids), but they didn't change as dramatically as humans because they didn't need to. Meanwhile, the ancestors of humans apparently moved on to riverbanks, seashores, and dominated those areas. As they adapted better to live on the ground and walking upright, they took over more parts of the world, until they got where we are now.

Evolution theory doesn't explain all of the evidence we've uncovered, and there's some that even contradicts it. But if you know what the theory actually proposes, and understand what "natural selection" and "survival of the fittest" are really about, objections like my coworker's fall apart. He's not arguing against evolution, but against an uninformed parody of evolution. Which is all the more reason it needs to be taught in schools: so an intelligent, reasonable person such as he can reach an informed conclusion whether it's sound or not.