Quick thoughts that I felt compelled to share.
I’ve always liked having a place I can blurt things out and hope some friends or like-minded people would notice and write back. If you’re just here to get the daily vibes this is where you want to be or you can watch the Stream and get these alongside everything else.
When I was home all the time because of the vid I turned into a slipper guy. A big part of this was I work in the basement which just has a concrete floor. Also I could take the trash out. Plus the whole Mister Rogers thing of coming into the house swapping the jacket for a sweater and the dress shoes for tennis shoes is appealing. But I will add now sitting in the lounge putting my feet up on the adjacent chair in just socks is also lit.
My Grandfather was on the third wave at Utah Beach on June 6, 1944: D-Day he was a Staff Sargent in the 359th Infantry Regiment and was awarded the Silver Star, The Bronze Star, and other honors during his service. It’s long been a goal of my mom’s to make a visit to this place where he fought before he was married and had children. Just today we were able to do that and visit Utah Beach, Pointe du Hoc, Omaha Beach, an Omaha Beach museum, and The Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial for the Flag lowering ceremony.
I’m glad I got to be there for this and given the threat to my Dziadziuś’ life in WWII I’m glad I got to be at all.
I know posting about blogs in your blog is boring and annoying. But I must say I’m excited to have this system working and to be building myself a little ecosystem of tools that I can use to post to it. Since I’m relying on GitHub Pages for the hosting of this and GitHub actions to process and build it I’m now adding an Action to Drafts to let me post stuff very easily.
My real goal here is to try and get some of the connection value I used to get out of Blogs and Twitter way back in the day. I know a ton of people continued writing their blogs and I’m hoping to re-enter that space with my boring takes.
I know this is a big mess, and probably there was no reason to use Angular other than I wanted to learn it. And I know there are broken links and posts everywhere and Blogs are dead, etc, etc. But I don’t care about any of that. I’m enjoying coding a side project. I know I’ll learn from it and I’m enjoying at least the prospect of some connection.
So I moved this off of SquareSpace. They were fine, but I wasn’t motivated to use it. Instead now that I have ownership of so much of the data and machinery in my Rube GoldBlog that I’m excited about it. If you have an interest in telling me I spelled something wrong, or the way I’m using typescript is terrible. (See the code here: mclazarus/logicaldisconnect) or any of the other things you’re dying to correct me on, simply tell me on The FediVerse. I hope to eventually support comments in this angular app, maybe they’ll post to Fedi or something. You can find me here: @mclazarus@jawns.club.
This post is what I call a two-fer. I post something and I also find out of the Drafts Action I wrote to post it works. If so I’ll be able to quick post from Drafts from my phone and that will be super fun.
I’ve mostly avoided looking at this for years. I assumed the neglect would make me feel bad. But I enjoyed paging through a few of the things I’ve written. And since social media seems to be a disaster lately but I still want an outlet for this sort of self-indulgent stuff I think I’ll try using this again.
Heck maybe I’ll even fire up an RSS reader too. I used to really enjoy the Internet.
Wonder if Alli & Ash will help me by updating the logo and making some other drawings.
Alli doodled the drawing to the left in about 30 seconds to try out my new pencil and iPad. She didn’t give me permission to post it but hopefully she won’t mind.
I’d have liked to put a nice highlight reel together for 2014 and talk about my big plans for 2015. I’ve had plenty of highlights and I have plenty of big plans but I didn’t take the time to examine them and write it out.
The last year especially has felt extremely hectic at times and I think one of the things I’ll focus on in the beginning of 2015 is trying to minimize that. To drop the comfort of busy and be even more ruthless in my priorities. And finally to regularly reflect on how things are going.
I’ve had a great twenty fourteen. Twenty fifteen will be great too.
Lights out!
A friend and co-worker who probably recommended half the books on my list put up a list of Audible sale recommendations of his own. Go check it out.
Write a story about the unbelievable speed of Amazon delivering a book.
Any startup facing an existential threat from regulation should remember these stories. The laws of the land are not laws of physics: they can be changed.
Jason Crawford’s article is a good read to inspire you that some fights can be won. Or discourage you that the creative people trying to make awesome things often have to waste their time and energy fighting regulations that should not exist.
I don’t think this is a great article, You Can Be Busy or Remarkable—But Not Both. But when I read it—after a tremendously busy day—it struck a chord. Plus I couldn’t resist a title reference to the Tao of Pooh after seeing the guy referenced in the article was some dude named Tao.
I read something that said being lost is not about not knowing where you are, but giving too much focus and anxiety to where you are not. I don’t have any idea what the origin of this was, maybe some quote in my High School yearbook.
I think often the sense of anxiety that accompanies being busy is about knowing all the things you aren’t doing and letting that fill up your mind. Or allowing your mind-reading of other people’s expectations to dictate how you feel about your life. These things all are awful ideas.
Anyway I’m feeling a inspired to spend a more of of my time trying to relax, be realistic, and have some fun.
Update: I read what I wrote and was completely confused, so I reworded some things. See I was tremendously busy yesterday and my brain doesn’t work anymore.
I enjoyed Michael Lopp’s article An Introduction to You, specifically this part:
We are in an incredible hurry building important things and have no time for nuance. We’re impatient. We’re busy. We want everything to move faster, so we make huge, comforting assumptions and slap easy to understand labels on complex concepts.
Though I’ve been thinking little about the idea of oversimplifying and therefore over or under estimating the contribution of a new employee. Rather the quoted section made me think about how much is often missed in the “incredible hurry” when building products and the systems and processes to support a business.
It would have resonated more with me if he had written the exact same article but if it were not about an employee, but a new technology being integrated into the same busy-worshiping company culture.
One of my favorite podcasts spent their whole show talking about this article.
Get comfortable with the idea that you won’t know what’s good until it’s already happened.
It’s a very good article on working when you don’t have any idea what your doing.
It’s convinced me that I should be listening to the whole back catalog of Radiolab.
A great example of someone paying close attention to reality while experimenting with changing their way of working to achieve success they didn’t believe possible.
Definitely worth a read.
A few interesting things in this article.
I don’t advise playing the game Sheryl Sandberg was playing trying to look like she was working more than she was, but I certainly understand the pressure.
Also really liked the idea attributed to Marrisa Meyer.
If you resent the fact that you don’t eat dinner every night at 8 then you will get burnout and your work will not be as good.
The fact is you can only do so much so you have to ruthlessly prioritize. And if you resent the fact that you can’t do everything with unrealisticly high quality you’ll just invite more pain and anxiety.
There are alternatives.
Here is a story that illustrates exactly the type of work decisions that led to this site. Daniel’s article focuses on the lack of empathy in the person who questions his start time. I do think her reaction was unjust and I also think the young heroic Daniel took a physical and emotional beating that is better avoided.
I completely understand the need to continue working on an active problem—especially when all the distractions are gone. But I suspect he probably paid for that hard work in more ways than being insulted by a co-worker.
For a while now I’ve been trying to do a lot of things and getting many accomplished, but really want some focus on less things that I make tangible progress on. And so I am looking to set myself some constraints in order to actually get things where I want them to be. A few vague plans I have are to ship a game this year. Actually I’d like to ship two games, but I am still floundering in the beginning stages of understanding and putting together a basic 2D OpenGL game engine. So my plan is to have a rough beta version of something that at least works by my birthday. Then I can set a new goal for shipping it. That should help give me some focus.
Also along that front I’m thinking I should blog consistently about the things I do and learn while working on the game so it forces me to really solidify my understanding.
I’d also like to really get my health to a better place. On Saturday Allison’s karate school, East West Karate, had a class for parents of new students to learn a few basics so we can experience some of what they are doing first hand. It really made me miss my training. Now I haven’t been to the gym or done any serious workout in months so I’ve been sore now for two days. But on top of that I’ve gotten the best nights of sleep that I’ve had in recent memory due to actually using my body a bit.
So I’m considering joining their adult classes. As I’ve already earned a black belt, they would allow me to wear it to their school and help me have an accelerated version of their curriculum. But I have mixed feelings about that. I did work hard and earn it, but I am severely out of practice and wouldn’t want to embarrass myself or the school who awarded me my black belt by showing up there next week. Also I’d want to do it only if I really am sure I’m committed to it. So I’m thinking I’ll set myself a target of June to get myself into better shape through a concentrated training program at the gym, and probably 2 or 3 days a week run myself through some exercises trying to recall and practice some of the martial arts skill that I had earned through hard work and let slip away.
Also I have plans to attend a Thinking Directions pilot class in New York City on Saturday from noon — 3, and I’m also very excited about that. I’ll have to see if I know anyone in New York that wants to grab dinner before I catch the NJT back to Trenton.
BIG THINGS COMING YOUR WAY! WATCH OUT!
It’s been two weeks since the last update. I’m happy to report that the Rearden Steelers are 2 - 0 in that time bringing me to 7 - 0. My wide receivers are carrying me having huge games, and typically I’ve been helped by my opponent not having a great week. This past week my opponent The Washington Oppresors scored 97, but I went off with 114. So it seems my team plays to the level of the competition. So a whirlwind tour of the rest of the league:
Culver City Conmen
Ran into the Buzzsaw of the Rearden Steelers in week 6 and despite the despair of having played me still managed to get 43 points out of Darren McFadden the next week and a win.
Sedalia Sea Monkeys
Diana has been on a tear! Two wins and I think most importantly defeated Paul’s Geekpress Generals handily this past weekend. I imagine that Chez Hsieh was a battleground and it’s probably better for Paul that he lost.
GeekPress Generals
Paul has somehow coaxed Greg Jennings into consistent play two weeks in a row, however he managed that he deserves to have won the championship. Also if I failed to mention it, he lost an epic matchup to Diana.
Dr. Ego Spengler
Mike’s team won in week 6, but more importantly he lost in week 7. Leaving literally nothing on the bench he was crushed by Amy’s Gentlemen, who was so confident in her ability to win she taunted her opponent by starting Arian Foster while on a bye and still scored 109 points!
Portland Agents Of Fortune
2 weeks, 2 wins, good team management nothing left on the bench and big scores. I’m hoping this trend doesn’t continue.
KC Money Barons
Got the big first win of the season. I think Corey has aspirations of going 7 - 6 the hard way. Considering I’ll probably lose my next 6 we can finish the season tied!
Washington Oppressors
Dwayne Bowe showed up!
Connecticut BNS Brawlers
Too many Cincinnati players to win, even if they keep scoring points. Marvin Lewis has suffered from this problem for years.
Fairport Diehards
Ugh, 79 points left on the bench this week, and a ton last week. Sometimes fantasy is just like that.
Philadelphia Freeloaders
The last two weeks they’ve let their opponents score too many points. Work on it!
Virginia Gentlemen
Amy can’t lose a game when she scores over 100 points. Unfortunately when she scores under 100 she tends to lose by 6 points or less.
Next week
I promise to write stuff going forward on some schedule. And I suspect it may be somewhat useless but I’ll enjoy it, and that’s what counts.
A timely and per my wife’s criticism a bit spiced up recap of the JGL action from week 5. Philadelphia Freeloaders (3-2) 86, Virginia Gentlemen (2-3) 85
In a matchup where Vince Young outscored Matt Schaub by 13 points and Mike Tolbert outscored Arian Foster by 5 points there is no other way for it to end except by being decided by 1 point. The worst part for Amy, manager of the Gentlemen, is that if she had not started a Defense she would have won the match. But I agree that the Rams looked to be a great start against the Lions.
Fairport Diehards (3-2) 85, Sedalia Seamonkeys (2-3) 78
And Diana’s Seamonkeys get exactly what they want out of Ray Rice, finally, but when your second leading scorer is your Kicker it’s hard to finish with the W. And running into an on-again Chris Johnson and hated (by me) Cowboy QB who was racking up points playing from behind meant that Tom Stone’s Diehards took the win. Both teams can look at the high bench production and play that age old Fantasy football game of second guessing yourself.
Connecticut BNS Brawlers (3-2) 77, GeekPress Generals (3-2) 58
The Brawlers victory gives me the opportunity to talk about my favorite subject and that is me winning fantasy football games. Because his victory and mine came in lockstep due to the huge day by Malcom Floyd which necessitated a huge day by my QB. Paul’s Generals who have been solid all season, had the typical fantasy week where almost nothing goes right which was capped by Aaron Rodgers going down with a concussion at the end of the game.
Dr. Ego Spengler (4-1) 69, Washington Oppressors (1-4) 53
The good Dr. Spengler led by Mike King has been the most consistent JGLer over the past two years. But this is ridiculous to get a victory where the top scorer is TE Marcedes Lewis with 17 is illegal, and I plan to use my commissioner powers to correct this miscarriage of Justice. However I will insist that John Britely’s Oppressors still retain their loss as well due to the fact that he snagged LeSean McCoy on waivers on Sunday morning when I am the one who’s supposed to have the best player on my favorite team. Unfortunately for the Oppressors in the best possible week to defeat the Ego got nothing from their team.
Portland Agents Of Fortune (2-3) 109, Culver City Conmen (2-3) 88
In true fantasy football fashion the Conmen have a solid week from many of their starters even with 4 players on BYE, but still manage to run into a team that had an even a better week. As Brian Reich’s Agents managed to put together huge numbers despite starting my least favorite Manning. Yes I must admit Cooper is my favorite Manning.
Rearden Steelers (5-0) 99, KC Money Barons (0-5) 74
I am considering changing both of my daughters names to Philip Rivers as his consistency this season is the main reason I am 5 - 0, also a timely Falcons pickup before last weeks games helped me quite a bit here. All I can say to Corey and his Money Barons is the winner of the league last year had a losing record, so anything can happen. Also to illustrate this I’m 1 - 4 in the fantasy league my brother runs.
Now working to finally catch up on my fantasy recaps I got through weeks 3 and 4 and am making a personal vow to get week 5 in early this week. Week 3 recap
Virginia Gentlemen 116, Culver City Conmen 109
In week 3 the Conmen put up a solid 109 with good performances from most of their players. Only the Patriots D (1) and Matt Forte (3) underperforming. Unfortunately their opponent the Virginia Gentlemen had great performances particularly 31 from Adrian Peterson who ran all over the Lions. Here the Conmen were handed their first loss. This was the Gentlemen’s first win.
Fairport Diehards 106, Connecticut BNS Brawlers 73
A huge game by Anquan Boldin, and great performances by Romo and Chris Johnson vaulted the Diehards to a win over the Brawlers despite their Cedric Benson’s big week and Mike Wallace having a huge game down in Tampa. The Brawlers unfortunately left Peyton Hillis on the bench for his huge game not having to share any carries with Jerome Harrison and LeSean McCoy had his worst game of the season so far.
Sedalia Sea Monkeys 65, KC Money Barons 51
The Money Barons continue to have a hard time manufacturing points where Colston, Celek, DeAngelo Williams and Steve Smith (Carolina) are all not producing consistent with where they needed to be drafted. Drew Brees is the only bright spot this week as the Barons fall to 0 - 3. The Sea Monkeys get a huge game from Dustin Keller and manage to scrape together enough points to top the Barons bringing them to 1- 2.
GeekPress Generals 114, Portland Agents Of Fortune 66
The Generals put up big performances from Collie, Mendenhall, Rogers and the Steelers Defense to post huge numbers in week 3, which was more than enough to top the Agents of Fortune who aside from Michael Vick and Steven Jackson couldn’t get anyone else in double digits. The pair of Calvin Johnson and Larry Fitz who strike fear in the heart of fantasy opponents continue to frustrate.
Washington Oppressors 75, Philadelphia Freeloaders 59
The Oppressors had solid performances from Turner, Charles, Bowe and Cutler riding the Chiefs 3 - 0 record and overcoming a bad outing by their Bucs defense to their first win of the season. The Freeloaders who grabbed the Chiefs defense and were rewarded by a good game were hurt by their reliance on the Houston passing game and Schaub, Walter and Andre Johnson that didn’t post big numbers this week.
Rearden Steelers 105, Dr. Ego Spengler 92
In a high scoring matchup the Steelers got good performances from Rivers, Maclin, Bradshaw and their newly added Cardinals D, to offset strong performances from Peyton, LT and DeSean Jackson. Luckily the Chiefs were able to hold Frank Gore down to 14 points and help the Steelers to their 3 - 0 record and hand Dr. Spengler his only loss.
Additionally the Steelers are 3 - 0 against doctors this season.
Week 4 The First week of byes, which leads to all sorts of scarcity and fun in trying to decide who to start or pickup.
GeekPress Generals (3 - 1) 87, Culver City Conmen (2 - 2) 79
In week 4 the Conmen had a solid performance from their Defense but put up goose-eggs from the Moss tandem at WR as Washington had success running on my Eagles and had no reason to even look at Santana and Randy was on the outs in New England. Two zeros in a line up when playing a consistently solid GeekPress Generals usual spells disaster and this week it made the Conmen fall to 2 and 2.
Philadelphia Freeloaders (2 - 2) 66, Fairport Diehards (2- 2) 57
Oddly the second game of the week where a team posted nil from the wide receivers, but in this case they managed to win as the Freeloaders got solid performances from Mike Tolbert, Matt Schaub and Zack Miller. And the Diehards were only able to get double-digit points from Flacco and Ryan Matthews as Denver was able to hold Chris Johnson to only 4 points
Virginia Gentlemen (2 - 2) 106, Connecticut BNS Brawlers (2 - 2) 74
And you can tell it’s a bye week as yet another team manages to post a pair of zeroes, but even more impressively the Gentlemen still manage to put out 106 points as they are the top scorer this week. Helped by a combined 56 points from Antonio Gates and Arian Foster (who took 1 quarter off for missing a team meeting). The Brawlers who did have some solid performances from Carson Palmer and Peyton Hillis but also had the misfortune of running into the 2nd highest scoring team in the league.
Sedalia Sea Monkeys (2 - 2) 90, Washington Oppressors (1 - 3) 46
The Sea Monkeys continue to get good performances from Dustin Keller and finally their other players posted some solid numbers as well as they finally hit on a QB that was going to give solid numbers as Sanchez put up 14 and Reggie Wayne and Joseph Addai turned in good weeks. The Oppressors hurt by byes and missed updating their lineup and started the out Pierre Thomas and Shiancoe on a bye only managed 46 points and Jay Cutler was absolutely manhandled by the Giants posting a -3.
Dr. Ego Spengler (3 - 1) 76, KC Money Baroons (0 - 4) 70
Spengler riding a huge game by LT against the Bills was able to hang on for a 6 point victory over the Money Barons who were hurt by an oddly ineffective Drew Brees at home against the Panthers and Steve Smith who went out with an injury.
Rearden Steelers (4- 0) 92, Portland Agents Of Fortune (1 - 3) 63
MJD finally put up some big numbers to justify his pick at #3 overall, and got consistently good numbers from Philip Rivers and Roddy White putting together another solid game to go to 4 - 0. The Agents of Fortune got a huge game from Calvin Johnson but Vick going out with an injury held him to two points and Mike Sims-Walker continues to disappoint with a 0 point week.
Due to working past 2 AM two times in the past week, really throwing off my sleeping schedule not to mention the impact such things have on my family life my recreation time was severely impacted. But I managed to stay focused and put out a recap before week 3 got underway (barely). Rearden Steelers 86 GeekPress Generals 84
In the closest game of the week the Steelers got strong performances from Philip Rivers and Roddy White for the second straight week and are concerned about MJD who managed only 2 points and 12 for the season. The Generals got solid performances from most players although the Rodgers to Jennings combo has yet to really pay off. This came down to the Sunday night matchup between New York and Indianapolis, where both Dallas Clark and Austin Collie scored TDs for the Generals but it wasn’t enough to overcome Ahmad Bradshaw’s points helped by a Brandon Jacobs benching for an awful run followed by a temper tantrum where his helmet ended up in the crowd.
Dr. Ego Spengler 90 Sedalia Sea Monkeys 64
While the Sea Monkeys got many solid performances, they had no outstanding performances and are having a real problem at Quarterback with Kolb injured and now benched in favor of Vick and Garrard having a very rough game at San Diego. The good Doctor Spengler got huge games from from Gore, Manning and DeSean Jackson which offset some lesser performances by the rest of his squad putting him over the top.
Portland AgentsOfFortune 98 Virginia Gentlemen 92
In a close matchup this week the Gentlemen had good numbers across the board hurt by poor QB play from the veteran Favre who is finally showing his age against an underrated Miami Defense. Unfortunately the Gentlemen this week’s third highest scorer had the misfortune to face the AgentsOfFortune who were this weeks second highest scorer. Helped by my favorite team, the Eagles, who are apparently unable to tackle anyone when Stewart Bradley is off the field which gave Jahvid Best a huge 40 point week. Also cashing in on that Eagles v. Lions game Calvin Johnson finally scored a TD that counted helping the Agents to a big win.
Philadelphia Freeloaders 106 KC Money Barons 42
The Freeloaders rode Houston’s massive game against the Redskin’s where Matt Schaub and Andre Johnson combined for 50 points. Also worthy of note is the Freeloaders had Kevin Walter on the Bench who also had a giant game and those three players combined would have been enough to beat 4 other starting lineups this week. The Money Barons had the game that nightmare game that every fantasy owner can count on, where nothing goes right. Totaling only 42 points for the week and going into Monday night (with 2 players left) had only 18 points. They did have a few solid performances and I expect they’ll turn it around going forward.
Culver City Conmen 68 Fairport Diehards 54
The Conmen improved to 2 - 0 on the season despite the tough game their patriots had in New York. Putting together a handful of good performances and Darren McFadden trying to answer critics with a big game was enough to top the Diehards who had a tough week with nobody in the starting lineup finding the end zone and Chris Johnson being held in check by the Pittsburgh defense.
Connecticut BNS Brawlers 83 Washington Oppressors 75
The Brawlers are another team that cashed in on the Eagles-Lions game where LeSean McCoy went off racking up 30 points and making up for a handful of low scoring Bengals in his lineup. The Oppressors fall to 0 - 2 despite some good performances from Jay Cutler, Dez Bryant and seeing Shiancoe and Pierre Thomas be real workhorses for their teams.
Transactions
The Steelers were frustrated by their 2 - 0 record on the waiver wire this week being unable to grab Tolbert or the Dolphins Defense due to the waiver priority enjoyed by other savvy owners who snagged these players. A few teams worked the waiver wire to bolster their teams, I think the top one being Tolbert who looked solid in Ryan Matthew’s absence and whoever owned Michael Turner last year will know the dreaded high-ankle sprain is not an exciting injury for a top RB on your team to have.
I am the commissioner of the John Galt League, a Fantasy Football league for Objectivists. It’s Diana Hsieh’s league and this is my second year as commissioner. While it was enjoyable last year I did little more than remind people of deadlines and schedule the draft. I decided to try and squeeze a little more value this year by writing up a review like this periodically thinking my increased involvement in the league would make it a bit more competitive and fun, hopefully for everyone. Week 1 Recap
My Steelers pulled out a 73 - 61 victory over Diana’s Sea Monkeys while I was sleeping but Phillip Rivers was going strong, overcoming a solid WR showing by the Sea Monkeys but zeroes from the injured Wells and Kolb who left early held them back in the lowest scoring match of the week.
The reigning champs the Geekpress Generals managed to be the only team that broke three digits even with posting a zero from Darren Sproles as they defeated the Virginia Gentlemen 110 - 79, an inconsistent performance from the Gentlemen’s starters and drawing a tough matchup put Arian Foster’s monster week to waste.
Peyton Maning was playing from behind all day and was forced to throw which helped push Dr. Egon Spengler ahead of the Philly Freeloaders 77 -73 who despite a great performance from Miles Austin but had too few players find the end zone in week 1.
The Fairport Diehards benefited from the Jets CB Daryl Revis, first in having his defense post big numbers but in forcing Flacco to look away from Mason and find Anquan Boldin for a high scoring week netting him 87, the Agents Of Fortune couldn’t keep up, as too many top guys didn’t deliver and they only managed 69 points.
The BNS Brawlers and Money Barrons fought the tightest contest of the week each getting some solid performances but a low scoring opening NFL game meant Brees couldn’t come up wtih the numbers to overcome Palmer’s garbage time stats playing from behind after getting blown out by New England, the Brawlers won 78 - 76.
Finally the Culver City Conmen had some huge plays out of Matt Forte, and lots of points from his beloved Patriots which gave him more than enough to overcome the Washington Oppressors, who suffered the biggest injury of the week losing Ryan Grant for the season. Despite some solid performances from Jay Cutler and Pierre Thomas the Conmen prevailed 93 - 72.
Week 2 News and Preview
Despite the fact that the commissioner forgot to send a waiver reminder a few teams put in claims, the Agents of Fortune snagged Vick for a favorable matchup and The Oppressors laid claim to Brandon Jackson the expected replacement for his lost Ryan Grant. Next week get your waiver claims in Wednesday night because early AM (ET) ESPN will process claim requests based on priority order.
Most of the match-ups (based on current lineups as of 10:30 PM on Friday) are fairly even based on the ESPN projections except for the BNS Brawlers and The Oppressors where the 0-1 Oppressors are currently favored by a whopping 59 points.
So everyone get your lineups in, check your injuries and enjoy week two of the John Galt League.
A tweet or facebook status update was too short and unformatted to capture this and I had to write it immediately. Michelle was singing to the girls after the most packed day at Disney. (started at Animal Kingdom around 9:30 and finally got back to the Pop Century resort at 10:50 after seeing Fantasmic).
Ashley stops Michelle singing saying, “Wait! You forgot to put Minnie in my song.”
Michelle: “I put her in, I said Mickey, Minnie, Donald, Daisy and Pluto”
Ashley: “Oh! I thought you meant Pluto the planet.”
Allison: (immediately and with obvious exasperation) Ash, Pluto’s not even a planet!"
Listening to Leonard Peikoff’s podcast #83 I really enjoyed the closing of his answer to someone who wrote to him, essentially, I agree with many of the principles of Objectivism but disagree with Ayn Rand on two ideas (I think it was architecture as art and something to do with her view on women), am I still an Objectivist? He said:
So I hope you don’t think of: this and this and this is required for [Objectivism] … I wouldn’t even think about what’s required for Objectivism.
Just think about “what’s true?” And then if Objectivists don’t believe it, it’s tough on them. You could say, Objectivism is good but it has this mistake.
You can’t think, with the idea that the answers are in the back of the book given by Ayn Rand.
I like to think about things. I can spend hours trying to find the right way to solve any problem from serious to silly. This is one of the reasons I’ll let myself get caught up in an email black hole. As I was this morning. Responding to or dealing with the tasks inside each email like it’s the only thing in the world to work on is extremely silly as it takes the email and any embedded tasks completely out of context. So I am writing this to remind myself, that email isn’t my job, it’s a tool that is crucial in the small part of my job that has to do with communicating with others. And to turn Strict Filtering back on in front of the tasks I choose to work on. Also the strict separation between doing the tasks embedded in my inbox and the task that is processing my inbox.
It really shouldn’t take me more than 15 minutes to empty the email inbox. I should rifle through each message spending about 30 seconds to read, decide if it’s actionable, what I’m going to do about it and file the action reminder appropriately. If it’s an email that is longer than 30 seconds to ready, I can decide if I am ever going to read it and file the reminder to read it somewhere.
I’m in four fantasy football leagues this year. One is the real deal, the league I’ve been in with my wife for what seems like 3 or so years every year, but undoubtedly it’s been at least 7 years, the TMCFL run by my brother, on a site that is getting increasingly crappy since being acquired by an NBC Sports affiliate.
The other is the John Galt League, where I am the acting commisioner, brought together by the common fact that we all are fans of Diana Hsieh’s blog NoodleFood.
I also have played in Ryan Grier’s league for the past few years where I tend to be terrible.
And finally as always I picked up a Yahoo public league in order to practice drafting before the TMCFL, although given the awesomeness of the ESPN mock drafts I may stop that after this year.
I am currently fantasizing the fame, fortune and prestige of winning both the JGL and the TMCFL as I watched my Eagles whup an overmatched Panthers and noticed my top pick in both of those leagues, Adrian Peterson, racking up the points. I am now convinced that he will score at least 3 touchdowns every week and I will dominate all of the competition.
Stay tuned for too frequent updates of my fantasy prowess or complete silence if my team collapses into disarray.
Becoming depressed by the increased destruction of individual rights by the government is quite easy these days. The fact that the current administration is violating contract rights, firing the CEO of a corporation, and forcing banks to take bailout money among many other examples of statism are all very ominous indeed. To continue this trend, today, I received an email from Senator Casey singing his own praises for his role in the further meddling with the credit markets.
As is typical when I receive such self-glorying proclamations from my elected representatives I take a moment and compose a letter responding to them and encouraging them to uphold individual rights as an absolute as is the necessary and only purpose of a rational and moral government.
I began writing my response somewhat lethargically but when I organized my thoughts it brought to mind a particular passage from Atlas Shrugged which provided the fuel to complete task. I decided then to look it up and to share it here.
I could say to you that you do not serve the public good–that nobody’s good can be achieved at the price of human sacrifices–that when you violate the rights of one man, you have violated the rights of all, and a public of rightless creatures is doomed to destruction. I could say to you that you will and can achieve nothing but universal devastation–as any looter must, when he runs out of victims. I could say it, but I won’t. It is not your particular policy that I challenge, but your moral premise. If it were true that men could achieve their good by means of turning some men into sacrificial animals, and I were asked to immolate myself for the sake of creatures who wanted to survive at the price of my blood, if I were asked to serve the interests of society apart from, above and against my own–I would refuse, I would reject it as the most contemptible evil, I would fight it with every power I possess, I would fight the whole of mankind, if one minute were all I could last before I were murdered, I would fight in the full confidence of the justice of my battle and of a living being’s right to exist. Let there be no misunderstanding about me. If it is now the belief of my fellow men, who call themselves the public, that their good requires victims, then I say: The public good be damned, I will have no part of it!
Hank is the man!
It’s a shame that the great business producers continue to sanction completely irresponsible government. Read this in Warren Buffet’s annual report for Berkshire Hathaway, Inc. “Whatever the downsides may be, strong and immediate action by government was essential last year if the financial system was to avoid a total breakdown.”
Since we all know that sacrificing the strong to pay for the mistakes of the weak and then pretending there wasn’t an underlying problem always fixes everything.
Ari Armstrong is planning a demonstration that it is possible to eat a healthy diet on a food stamp budget. Low-Carb Diet, Food Stamp Budget. He is doing this not only to show that increases in the food stamp program are unnecessary, but in full protest of the entire program. This not only protests the evil of redistribution of wealth, but will prove useful to those who think are honestly trying to eat a healthy diet on the smallest imaginable budget. I look forward to tracking his choices closely as I could use some inexpensive ideas.
As a side note tomorrow will be a full month since I committed to greatly reducing refined carbs in my diet and I have lost 11 lbs. This is with never finishing a mealy hungry and with my only extra exercise being a few lunch time walks, going to the gym one time and some snow shoveling. 
Apparently my feed has been broken since Sometime in November. At that time I upgraded wordpress, and possibly related was the merging of FeedBurner and Google. Anyway It should be working now. So for the 3 or 4 people who follow the feed, you will be delighted to know that I have been making an effort to add content regularly. And strangely you have a little bit of catching up to do. Unless you follow my tweets, then you probably already read all the posts.
I’ve received word of a promising new blog focused on economics from an Objectivist point of view called Simply Capitalism. It could prove a nice counterpoint of reason to the cacophony of shrill demands for increasing governmental control in our economic lives. Subscribe to their RSS feed and see for yourself.
Listening to a story about the SEC persecuting Apple because Steve Jobs is in poor health on the WSJ daily read, They compared it to a situation with HP where a director resigned. According to the article, “Under securities laws a company needs to disclose the reasons if a director leaves over a disagreement about company policy.” Is the persecution of a company about a sick CEO or for the specific reasons behind a high level persons resignation an example of the “atmosphere of deregulation and deference to industry” I’ve been hearing so much about?
Tonight I had a discussion on voting with Allison. She asked me what it meant. I explained, “It’s like when mommy asks you if you want cereal or toast for breakfast, and when you pick one that is voting for it.” She said, “Or pancakes?” I said, “sure, or picking pancakes over the other choices.” I then added the democratic majority wrinkle. I explained, “If 10 people were asked to vote, and you said you wanted pancakes, but the other 9 wanted toast, then you would all have to have toast.” She said, “I wouldn’t like that.” I said, “Sometimes I don’t like it either.”
Michelle had talked with her earlier about voting and told her about my decision to not vote for any of the Presidential candidates. So she said, “Mommy said you didn’t vote for one.” I told her, “If you had to vote for food, and you had to pick tomatoes or sausage (two things she doesn’t like) which would you pick?” She said, “I wouldn’t vote for either.” And neither did I.
In other news the barbie lamp won in a historic vote, defeating fish by a narrow margin of one vote and “play games on iPhone” defeated “go to sleep now” by a similarly narrow margin.
“A government of laws, and not of men.” -John Adams This statement rang out loud and clear to me when I saw the Extent of Federal Regulation made concrete, here. What John Adam’s statement makes clear is the essential fact in a proper government that the law must be knowable and objective not subject to arbitrary whims of arbitrary men. This does not mean 25 feet thick of books of regulations, and 6 feet of laws. When both are being added to at a rate of thousands of new laws and regulations per year, you have a situation where it is not possible to know in a single lifetime what is *permissible* action in a *free* society. I do not advocate anarchy, rather objective law. It is impossible to have objective law when every action could require months or years of research to determine if it is punishable by the state. This of course is only the Federal regulations. Every state and town has their own collections of law books. The solution, stop and repeal. The obvious starting point for repeal is any and all regulations that handcuff industry. And stop all of the regulation mills. There are many government agencies that issue *Rules*. Congress has delegated it’s law making responsibility to faceless, nameless, and unaccountable bureaucrats.
Dr. Leonard Peikoff, friend and intellectual heir to Ayn Rand, publishes a podcast approximately every other week. Despite the fact that he generally refuses to talk publicly about narrow political questions, he took some time in his October 20 podcast to discuss the current batch of candidates. He managed in a few sentences to say the obvious about each of the candidates in a way that would be funny if one of these gangs wouldn’t be the head of the Executive branch of the United States of America on January 20th. > I think McCain comes across as a tired moron. Obama as a lying phony. Biden as an enjoyably hilarious windbag. And Sarah Palin as an opportunist struggling to learn how to become a moron a phony and a windbag.
He gave some additional brief commentary as to why none of the Presidential candidates is fit to take office. If you think there is still some reason to choose one over the other but aren’t sure which you may want to listen, it could give starting points for further investigation.
I decided some time ago that I will not vote for any presidential candidate. It was with that decision in mind that Dr. Peikoff’s statement takes on a tragic humor and does cause me a brief chuckle.
Today Alan Greenspan stated, “Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholder’s equity (myself especially) are in a state of shocked disbelief.” He’s shocked? That’s surprising. He, himself, wrote about the result of government intervention in the economy, in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. Maybe he should pick up a copy and try and understand his role in the destruction.
A day late, but here is my thought on yesterday’s holiday. Ninety men in three small ships sailed west from Europe for over a month, when dawn came on October 12, 1492, the sun rose on a new world. Columbus, the motive power behind this expedition, was a man of independent mind that challenged the authority of the “experts” and of the whole world. He discovered America, bringing European civilization to our shores. A critical and historic event that sowed the seeds of what was to become the freest and most prosperous country ever, the United States of America.
When thinking of yesterday, I remember the greatness, the courage, the independent judgment of a man.
“The time is past when the notion of economic self-seeking and unrestricted use of profits made can be allowed to dominate…. The economic system must serve the nation.” This could have been written in any editorial recently, and certainly a similar sentiment was spouted on Capitol Hill in the past weeks. But it is a quote of the Nazi Minister of Economics in the book The Omnious Parallels.
With the economic controls and the sacrifice of individual rights to the nation, we are putting a motor on our drift from freedom to fascism.
Today I forgot to eat breakfast and got moving very late because I was immersed in what I was doing. Spending so much time being interrupted and allowing myself to be interrupted I had started to forget the pure and simple joy of focused, productive work. I intended to try and achieve that state as often as possible. I need to blow off a few meeting reminders, phone calls and the like. It’s good for the soul.
Today I was really hit by the fact that one of the hardest parts of parenting isn’t even in the same building as cleaning up bodily fluids or going upstairs to “fix the covers” for the 3rd time in 15 minutes.
It’s in encouraging the push for independence, and growth.
My wife sent me a snapshot of Allison before running her to her first day of pre-school. And I felt quite a strong bit of emotion. I am still not sure if it is reluctance, fear, sadness, joy or all of them pushed together.
Happy first day, Allison!
I defy you to explain to me the difference between Barack Obama’s sentiment, “We may not agree on abortion, but surely we can agree on reducing the number of unwanted pregnancies in this country.” And the one uttered by Kang in Treehouse of Horror VII, “Abortions for some, miniature American flags for others.” American politics is not even trying to hide the fact that their words are absolutely meaningless and they are just trying to unlock the right combination to get elected. Playing a high stakes crossword puzzle.
By the way, please don’t interpret this as support for the Republicans. Their allegiance with the Religious Right is an outright attack on the first amendment and until they renounce this partnership I cannot even consider supporting their candidates.
I am planning on resurrecting this site and posting regularly. I have recently been made explicitly aware of the cognitive benefits of writing. So in writing down my thoughts, especially if I intend to stand behind them and have them represent who I am, I am forced to clarify and organize the process behind my thinking. I have decided that this practice will primarily help me to integrate new ideas. Secondary benefits include improving my ability to communicate and will allow me to have more interesting interactions because it could be based on information I have already thought through.
If you want a thing bad enough To go out and fight for it, Work day and night for it, Give up your time and your peace and your sleep for it If only desire of it Makes you quite mad enough Never to tire of it, Makes you hold all other things tawdry and cheap for it
If life seems all empty and useless without it And all that you scheme and you dream is about it,
If gladly you’ll sweat for it, Fret for it, Plan for it, Lose all your terror of God or man for it,
If you’ll simply go after that thing that you want. With all your capacity, Strength and sagacity, Faith, hope and confidence, stern pertinacity,
If neither cold poverty, famished and gaunt, Nor sickness nor pain Of body or brain Can turn you away from the thing that you want,
If dogged and grim you besiege and beset it, You’ll get it!
BERTON BRALEY
I am trying to get a list of some of the things people wish they had learned earlier than they did. Like a life lesson, or something that life experience showed you that once you knew, you said, “Why don’t they teach this in school?” I would have acted differently had I understood this. It is anything from small things to large life changing things. I am trying to come up with things to make sure I expose my children to, so they have a chance to learn it early in life.
Obviously some things only come from experience and making enough of the same mistakes, but get the experience early enough it may click in faster.
An example of a broad topic here that I wish I had understood sooner, is money, investing and compound interest. How about you?
feeling on the verge of organization
recovering
Congrats Tom and LB
Gearing up for best man duties
And I didn’t ever do a crime I didn’t have to do.not counting golf carts.
embracing constraints: http://tinyurl.com/2cdvws <http://tinyurl.com/2cdvws>
a dramatic morning
making some progress on my messy office.
going to get a tux
Nothing like losing a customer since January 2005 over a communications issue
finally cancelled valueweb account.
dealin with hair cut leavins
cancelling valueweb account
MICHAEL VICK Subjected me to Microwave Testing
playing UPS because it’s on my way.
being annoyed by fanballs pop up ads
not online
Cursing auto discover
going to eat tacos
enjoying the after effects of a good night sleep
Fighting a war against dust mites
Sporting my QB Eagles Jersey.
checking my accountabilities
allergies make for unhappy nights
Car bombs
wondering where in the world is carmen sandiego
RELEASE!!! RELEASE!!!
going home
finally getting somewhere.
booooooooring
hating linksys
I just pulled on this one thread, and the whole sweater fell apart.
spaghetti
cursing rube goldberg for designing my office network
wondering what sort of diseases all of my children have
wondering when the real work will get done.
Custom amish furniture
being digitally literate
loving the blink tag: http://wsaemc.org/Recycling/ <http://wsaemc.org/Recycling/> oh, and go recycle hazardous waste.
catching up on my case load
minimizing therbligs
catchin up on paperwork
going home, possibly to sort through the rubble in my office
doing some of my jobs at the expense of others is always nerve wracking
trying to have a meeting at the scheduled time and not 45 minutes before.
wondering why so much of my email is being bounced.
watching a big-ass tv
Waiting on hoagies
Going to get my high def on
gonna see a man about a tv
@rwgrier nope getting a hand-me-down big-ass tv.
Super Mario Efficiently Played
craving a black & tan
wrasslin alligators
checking my moms for padded moving blankets
hating rtp proxy changers.
Happy birthday Michelle
Jammin to raymond scott
Time to hit the water
Gearing up for sesame place
Going home to eat green eggs and ham
could you would you with a goat?
considering a material change of diminishing returns. Or a phrase of the day calendar.
floundering
Gotta get back to the grift
going to philly to see a rack about a pbx
Looking for some construda
trying to patch evolution to not crash when syncing with my palm.
ice cream. harry potter. sleep.lather. rinse. repeat.
tahrd
goin home.
split brain is bad.
extended warranty! how can I lose?
I need a private office and a couch
now to sleep until meeting time.
the phone company gets blamed for the strangest problems.
in work early to help a customer
watching some british wanker drink his own pee to survive the outback.
fixing email
night night time. And fixing my broken ass servers time.
Homeward bound
looks like it has been up for 2 days. I just didn’t know the damn ip address.
finally got my old server back, now to get everything moved over to m5
I can send email at work! It’s like 1994 all over again.
backlogged and frustrated
sorting out the broken into fixable piles
sleepy
m5hosting is clutch. Now just need my old data. But at least my email can go somewhere.
unsurprisingly hostway valueweb has a message stating that they still have hundreds of servers offline as of about 45 minutes ago.
setting up my new server… putting Alli to bed. Hating hostway and valueweb
Madison spilled beans
Oh and michelle has on clue about the rest of them
Going to the phillies game to get wet and maybe disappointed
potter time followed closely by sleep time. Now it’s m5hosting’s time to shine. Just gotta find dogpile, and reclaim what’s mine.
still hating valueweb. We did get a certified preowned honda odyssey today with 33 miles on it. yep, 33.
Buying a van.
I’m pretty tahred. I think I’ll go home now.
Death to valueweb and hostway
actually cleaning up a bit.
triage
lunching
trying to empty the box
zeroed. Now what do I do? Wait for more email I guess
zeroing the inbox
lunch at home and then out and about.
more harry potter, more sleep
My brother to be published in the “Black Warrior Review”
How does it know?
Researching vans
fix the problem fix the problem fix the problem
free lunch today?
killing in the name of.
making life better
lunch
guess I gotta provide my own
Walkin tall
Getting mah car
call not so bad. have work to do, but another mildly satisfied customer
dreading a call at 2
fighting fires
hobnobbing with bigwigs
“the lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.” -Chaucer
When my brother was in 8th grade, he brought home his school literary magazine, that took submissions from many students across the whole school. There was one piece of writing in there that was so full of insight that to this day I still recall the wisdom, and let it help in guiding my actions.
I’m bigger. So you have to do what I say.
- P. Dimauro (2nd Grade)
A vision without a task is but a dream.A task without a vision is drudgery. A vision and a task is the hope of the world.
Like Sports? Like Fiction? Go to my brother’s new site Sport is stranger than Fiction and read some of the stories. He got a bunch of his writer friends who happen to enjoy sports, probably too much. To help contribute. It is in the early days, but there are a few stories there. And humor is a primary focus. Enjoy.
Sometimes it’s frustrating to keep bailing water when you look around and some of your shipmates have put their buckets down and picked up drills.
- Living the analogy 24x7
My current bout with some upper respiratory virus has helped me learn that asthma probably is really not good to have. For some reason my body responded to this infection by inflaming the airway and packing my lungs with mucus.
But I felt like I had an iron band around my chest for 2 days.
The good news is my doctor gave me some medicine that should help me avoid iron band syndrome until the virus is done with me.
It’s a myth, not only am I not legally allowed to take office, yet, I just don’t have the time. So I just want to make it official. I am not running for the presidency.
“Science Fiction has rivets, fantasy has trees.” - Orson Scott Card Author of Ender’s Game which is just a great story, so pick it up, and read it.
In order to take over the world any world, you have to spend a fair amount of time goal setting and thinking about the big game. And then planning for it. This comes at great conflict with the normal newspaper reading, TV watching and other mindless religions we make for ourselves that are so compelling.
Although apparently packed with losers Mensa does have one charming quality according to Scott Adam’s
Mensa meetings are the strangest experience. No one ever has to explain anything twice. That’s a bigger deal than you might think. Your typical day is full of moments where you ask for a cup of coffee and someone hands you a bag of nails. You don’t realize how much time you spend re-explaining things until you no longer need to. Mensa is very cool that way.
It would be great to have people pay attention to you the first time. I would say I spend a very large part of my day not only repeating myself, but reciting from memory the contents of emails I had sent, and recounting the detail in voicemail that I left for people.
In the absence of clearly-defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily trivia until ultimately we become enslaved by it.
-Robert Heinlein
Turns out to be super easy, there are long how to docs out there that deal with all the trivialities and different scenarios, but basically if you have ssh access to a server that is the SMB server you simply need to do this:
ssh -f -N -g -L 9000:localhost:139
and then you can simply mount it to a directory by doing:
sudo mount -t smbfs -o username=USERNAME,password=PASSWORD,ip=localhost,port=9000 //SERVERNAME/SHARE /mnt/remoteshare
You saw me where I never was,
And where I could not be;
And yet within that very place.
My face you often see.
The answer to #6 that a few people got was “Tomorrow.” I considered that one a huge success because my wife didn’t get it in 2 seconds like all the others.
A euphemism for imprisonment I have heard is, “Making little piles out of big piles.” This is referring to times when prisoners were used to do menial jobs, and when those jobs weren’t available, or maybe there was some use in this, they would spend all day breaking big rocks onto small rocks.
A thought just flew into my head as I was organizing the numerous tasks I have to try and fit into my day, that management and specifically information work can be summed up by making little piles out of big piles.
There has to be a better way.
What is it that no man ever yet did see,
Which never was, but always is to be ?
The answer to #5 was Fire.
As long as I eat, I live,
But when I drink, I die.
The answer for 4 was “a glove” as a few people got.
Four fingers and a thumb
Yet flesh and bone have I none.
I am glad to see that riddle # 3 had a few people missed it. Not that I take delight that someone got it wrong, rather that it wasn’t a very easy one. It is fraught with misdirection, the obvious guess is a promise or something along those lines, but oddly that is too deep of a thought the correct answer is “Silence.”
Of course my wife already knew that one again, but let’s see if she has an answer for this one.
No sooner spoken than broken.
#2’s easy and obvious answer was of course “a River” I took some heat for making it too easy, but once you know they answer to one it always seems easy and obvious. This seems very easy to me, but I hope it’s a little more challenging.
I have been enjoying the fact that people actually bother to answer these. I am going to try and consistently put some up here. If you have any you want to share send them to mclazarus@gmail.com
Enjoy.
What can run but never walks, has a mouth but never Talks,
has a head but never weeps,
has a bed but never sleeps?
The answer to yesterday was obviously Tennis. As answered by my wife and a couple people on the livejournal mirror of this site.
A match that never starts a fire, A court that never tries a case,
A love emotions don’t inspire;
No cards, but still you’d like an ace.
It seems you have to keep on top of your domain registrations if you don’t want them to expire. luckily no one was clamoring to get their hands on mcallister.ws. But fans of my brother’s website will be glad to know that mcallister.ws is now locked up until 2011. Hopefully I remember to renew it then too. Unfortunately I couldn’t snarf it with my preferred registrar, they were showing it as not available. I had to go back to register.com, luckily they upgraded their site and I don’t have to email support to get them to set the name servers to mine instead of theirs.
Anyway my wife should be able to check her email no problem after the DNS gods are satisfied with the propagation time. Thank’s Michelle for noticing the problem before someone snapped it up.
Well I am getting tired of the ASPRE laptop (mycroft) that doesn’t boot and when it does capital ‘w’ can’t be typed with the right shift key and the machine I built about 6 years ago (sherlock) not booting right, and struggling with some other issues, and just having a computer that is no longer zippy enough for the bloated crap I want to run on it. So I finally broke down and ordered a Dell Dimension E521 (Dual Core AMD 64 X2 4200+ 1GB 533 MHz DDR2 160 GB SATA drive) Actually a really good deal I think, I did a whole bunch of research and I think I could have gotten a similar machine for slightly less but got scared off by comments at reseller ratings. Paid $639 no monitor, a low end video card Geforce 7300 LE (that blows my current one away) of course the Geforce 6150 that is integrated into the Mobo of this new CPU blows my current one away. I couldn’t find the right incantation to get into Dell’s site where I could just not get the PCIx card and deal with the integrated one, and also get XP Media Center version and get 2% off for ordering through a link on Temple’s site. My plan is to eventually save some bucks and buy a kickin video card and probably another disk to use the RAID capability. This new machine I will call Gilead. I even went to newegg and a few other sites to price out the components and I couldn’t beat the deal. It seems the world has moved on.
“I am an old man and have known a great many troubles, but most of them never happened.” -Mark Twain
“Come from the shadow of yourself, if you dare.” -Stephen King
“You cannot plough a field by turning it over in your mind.” -Unknown
“Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.” -Samuel Johnson
“Let thy words be few.” -Ecclesiastes 5:2
“You are not afraid of the great world, but of the small one inside yourself.” -Stephen King
We have one of those Keurig coffee makers at work, and while I despise coffee I love Tea, especially Earl Grey and Green Tea. I have managed to keep that stocked here pretty well through various cajoling and convincing one other co-worker to imbibe the Earl Grey.
With our latest order we just got a sample pack of Gloria Jean’s Chai, and it may turn into my new mini-obsession, has a nice Cinnamon taste, and was very refreshing. Actually when I first started drinking I was disappointed it smelled very much like Cinnamon, which is clearly the most superior of all spices, but the taste was pretty weak. I did a quick search and found here that “chai must have sweetness or the spices seem to lose their full robustness.” I added one packet of Splenda and found the spice emboldened and embiggened, much to my enjoyment.
I now have to hide the remaining 4 packs from the sample and then somehow get more in here.
I won the Spam lottery! Some jerk on an Israeli ISP decided to use my email address as the sender on a bunch of junk he sent out last night.
So today I got to learn all about how well the Barracuda SPAM firewall works, how many bad addresses this dude had on his list, and finally how many people are on vacation, or neglected to turn off their on vacation auto-reply.
I think the solution to this is to train the Bayesian filter that is built into spam assassin a couple extra times today. Of course the only downside to that is I may never see a legitimately bounced email again.
“Control the things you can control, maggot. Let everything else take a flying fuck at you and if you must go down, go down with your guns blazing.”
Today I learned that sometimes if you wait long enough your problem goes away. Actually I always knew that, but this was in a positive way. I kept assuming something wasn’t working when in reality it was just taking longer to get an IP address than it should have. But what’s 7 minutes among friends.
I also learned that budgeting and paying your bills is a good thing. I wasn’t behind on anything, but boy did I owe a lot of money. Expensive wifely birthday presents, children being born, Fantasy leagues being financed and car inspections all conspired to beat me senseless financially.
Now I am going to take a shot at following the simple budgeting advice at Getting Finances Done.
Apparently it is broken computer season, I have had several family members dutifully report their computer problems to me over the past two weeks. Let’s hope we have reached the limit, I can’t take the excitement of many more of these.
Also maybe it’s a coincidence but 2 of them were my Mom and my brother and both of their issues are already fixed, the other two are Michelle’s Aunt and her Mom. And those issues are still broken. Actually her aunt had the misfortune of calling me on Fantasy draft weekend, and I just heard about my Mother-in-Law’s today.
Hopefully I can work on getting out of much more of this type of repair. Maybe if these folks got a look at my sad slow and non-booting computers at home they would be reluctant to call me at all.
I often find myself overwhelmed with paper. I have a pretty good system to manage the stuff I know what to do with, but when I get a thing that I am not sure if I should keep, plus maybe things that have sentimental value, I feel strange tossing them, but I don’t know where to put them.
Any of the 3 people out there that read this know of a good value scanner that works well with Linux? I have a Visioneer 5300 USB that I have had for years. It does not work with Linux in the least, and I think getting it to work with WinXP is a chore so I am looking to upgrade, hopefully for free or possibly cheaper.
Not that anyone reads this, and the few that do, (my family) will have no comment on this. But I figured I would throw it out there anyway.
How can I have good reminders time/date based reminders on the linux desktop. The calendar itself is not as important as the reminders, the ability to quickly and easily set and edit those reminders. Evolution would seem to be ideal except that it has a habit of locking up a few times a week and also has a habit of forgetting to remind me of stuff.
If there were a service in gnome that sat on the notification area, and let me use the google calendar with alerts, and also updated the gnome date time applet with some basic appointment details that would rule. But I find myself with half finished kludges and tools that want to do all the work themselves like Sunbird and a bunch of other stand alone apps.
Anyway I am seeking suggestions, does anyone who uses a linux desktop have a simple system for remembering to do things at specific times?
For some time I have been extremely busy and my websites have been almost entirely ignored. (Whaaaa? Someone is actually reading this?! You really should clean up your feeds and delete the ones you don’t read!) Since I now have two children, a busy startup to engineer at, and other sundry work I will probably continue to ignore it. But I did actually get around to upgrading the site to wordpress 2.0.4, Installed a different wordpress to livejournal crossposter (maybe this one will crosspost entries I send from my camera phone) and checked in on my google adwords.
Seems ignorance somtimes pays off, at least a little. I am about $3 from getting a check from google, afterward I will probably pull the ads because it makes the site look cheesy.
Anyway the renewed interest is temporarily sparked by some ideas I had for some quick software projects I hope to churn out, which also probably won’t happen. But I like to think it will, and instead of actually working on the task I have in mind, I decided to upgrade my blog software. Figure that one out for me. Anyway, here is hoping that Google accidentally prints way too many zeros on my $100 check, and here is to going to get some sleep.
How the heck do you get someone to answer more than one question in an email? I have read lots of email ettiquite articles, and I pride myself on concise emails that tell you something simple, ask a question or two or delegate some sort of action. But very often I send an email with 2 or 3 questions, because I need to know something like: 1. Have you handled xyz? 2. If yes, something specific about the handling?
And the response I will get is. “Yep I handled it.” or “Yes” or in a very special instance I have gotten my own emails forwarded to me with the simple line “FYI” :-/
Of course while the last example above is true, it is not central to my question here. How do you get someone to not just selectively answer one of your questions, in my experience it is either the first question or the last question. Or they respond to your initial setup of the context of the email.
A friend of mine recently released a gmail notify applet for Linux. gmnotify from what I can tell it is pretty sweet compared to some of the alternatives. Go ahead and check it out. That is if you use gmail and want little windows popping up telling you that you got an email.
tomorrow a little before 5 AM I will be hitting the road to go to the IC and see what passes for fun there for a few action packed days while I help my brother pack all his posessions into a little steel box to be shipped to somewhere in Jersey, watch him officially get his Master of Fine Arts in Writing or English or something. Check out $3 car-bombs, and fly back to Philly while he drives so I can resume work on ye olde dungeon, also known as my new “study.” Look forward to a flury of pic postings here using flickr’s interface and my Samsung a900.
Imagine if you will a middle aged man, mild mannered by day, but by weekend he is a drug mule, pulling up stakes from his family life and shooting down to that hot bed of drug activity, Virginia! Bringing back automobiles made entirely of cocaine. Described as quirky or old fashioned mostly, but he knows the score. The question is, what is the street name for this character?
In case you are all wondering where all my strange and sometimes great pictures have gone. My phone locked up on me and I had to send it to samsung for repairs. So it should be somewhere between Texas and Pennsylvania right now, hopefully on it’s way here.
GM has been bombarding my television with ads saying that they are hard at work to save the world by ending our dependence on petroleum. While I must say that I respect work to provide a renewable energy source. I find the tone of the commercials funny. I mean sure it would be great to drive a car that can run on old corn cobs and left over beer, but unless GM is running around retrofitting the corn farms equipment to not use giant oil guzzling machines we surely aren’t ending any kind of petroleum dependence. I mean the exposure is great and GM should be applauded for using some of the hours and hours and hours of commercial time they buy each year to raise awareness of alternative fuel sources. But everyone should just think for a minute to know what they are buying into.
If you car won’t start and you need to get it towed somewhere, AAA doesn’t have a hard time hearing you tell them where you are, when you say. I’m home. Instead of at mile 237 on the turnpike. Another advantage is, it doesn’t matter much if the shop can’t look at it today, because, well you weren’t going anywhere tomorrow anyway.
Oh, and I hate my car currently.
I guess I am impatient, and I don’t want to read everything, and therefore I demand of people that effect my life choose good names for stuff. The current complaint is about MySQL’s privilege system. Apparently USAGE privilege is a synonym for âno privileges.â? Any reason, why this can’t simply be NONE, or “TOO FEW PRIVILEGES TO BOTHER MENTIOING” or anything besides a word that makes it look like something?
Yes I get the low level irony of me claiming to be impatient and taking the time to write this rant. But if you think about it, I have now seared this into my memory with this 5 minute interlude.
Tonight during Monday Night Countdown on ESPN watching a segment called “Jacked Up!” Where they review the top 5 big hits of the football games this weekend. Allison started cracking up during the hits, when we said “boom!” Yeah that’s right, big hits are universally enjoyable, as long as you aren’t the one being hit.
I decided to start the arduous process of cleaning out my basement, so that means selling crap on ebay. So feel free to buy my Netra
man am I glad I bought some Apple stock earlier this year. Google too. Sorry nothing useful, just bragging I guess :)
Anyone out there have a mini-ITX board, or any generally associated things like like a DC-DC ATX converter or and old 60 or 80 Watt laptop AC adapter, or some old low wattage ATX power supply that I could at least use for some prototyping or testing with said board? Anyway, I obviously have a little project in mind. I plan to mess around with Asterisk on one of these. I’d like to get the lowest TCO home PBX system running that I can. I may even consider a Soekris. If I can get my hands on one relatively inexpensively.
Magazine subscriptions sometimes make a good gift. Especially or people who take public transportation, or simply people who like reading magazines :) Well I learned from Ramit that ebay is a good place to get really inexpensive magazine subscriptions
I guess getting old for me means my daughter’s first birthday. What a wonderful year. And an even better **now**. Happy Birthday, Allison!
As noted yesterday I ordered my new RAM. And I have become accustomed to my Amazon orders getting here in one day, because I am a Prime member (so 2 day shipping is free), and all the things I order seem to come from a warehouse in Deleware, which tends to get it to Horsham in 1 day, and to me around 2 the next day. Well my RAM shipped from Sparks, NV and the map shows my concern. It doesn’t look from that view, like anything could get out of that town in less than 3 days.
Well I guess it will still probably make it here by the 30th, but damn, I would have preferred sooner.
So far so good today. I finally isolated the bad part on my laptop. (Allison spilled a large cup of water on it a couple months ago). I tried booting with a linux CD and noticed that the resulting kernel panic mentioned some errors relating to the VM system. So I decided to use memtest on the Knoppix disc. And stopped it at around 13,000 errors at just above 128 MB. So I pulled out the soDIMM in slot 2 and it booted. My new memory should be here Wednesday. :) It gives me an excuse to squeeze a little more life out of this laptop, by bumping the memory to 512, from 256. And I have two worthwhile 1PM NFL games to watch for the first time in a million years. Probably because the Jets play tonight, god I hate watching Jets games.
As the darkness washed over the land our hero glanced up from his domain and said, “Fer Chrissake, it’s only 4 of the clock!” Undaunted he mindfully focused his mind back to it’s purpose, but the darkness had crept in. That couldn’t be enough to stop him. Recessions and unjust wars could not stop him from plotting and creating and otherwise making a nuisance of himself to the tireless enemy, entropy. But he looked around again, “I can’t even see my notebook,” he said. So he pulled out his trump card, he rolled his chair back turned and flicked on the light. Blinking he returned to his plan, and found the shadows still growing in front of him, as his 75 watt battalion was overtaken and engulfed by the darkness. Shaking his head, he muttered, “… must hold on … call at 4:30 ….” Just then a yawn thundered out across the workspace, his hands rose on their own to try and force it back down his gullet, but they faltered, and began to rub his right eye. And time stretched out, with nothing to mark it by. His spirit oozed out onto the table and lay off to the side like an empty basketball, as his arms sprawled and his head slowly came to rest where once his hands had lain, nay, where they had danced and made the universe sing. He made his final statement until somehow maybe the darkness would pass, “asjl;j;l”
Tom got some real mainstream sports publicity today, he was on Bill Simmons’ links of the day. Big sports fans need not apply, but Simmons is quite a popular online sports writer for ESPN. So maybe his adsense revenue will take a nice jump.
I was lead to the concept of continuous partial attention through an entry about email overload. I am very conflicted on this concept because, I know I am so much more productive when I can concentrate and block out the world. But I also have a tendency to load up my work environment with distractions. IM, email, RSS feeds. So on some level I want to get things done, but on another I guess don’t want to miss anything? When I get into the flow I really get into it, I could go for days barely eating and sleeping because I am so focused on accomplishing something. I can only assume my embracing of distraction has to do with boredom, or not caring enough about the things I am purportedly trying to accomplish. This may be a good time to cast through my mind and find the things that send me into frenzied periods of autistic like concentration, and then find a way to pay the bills doing that. I do have some ideas.
I am catching up reading my Asimov’s subscription and just finished up August. I enjoyed the story telling in Paul Melko’s The Summer of the Seven. Thinking back there were no particularly amazing storylines or anything, it was just a well written story that kept me hooked. I did enjoy the world he set up there, and wouldn’t mind reading some more about it. It seems to be either part of a bigger work or just additional exploration of his current novel in progress, so I’ll be sure to check out *Singularity’s Ring* when I can get my hands on it.
> I see a red door and I want it painted black> No colors anymore I want them to turn black > I see the girls walk by dressed in their summer clothes > I have to turn my head until my darkness goes
It’s banned books week almost every book on there is worth reading, and worth sharing with your children, people are dumb. via barrelhouse
So I often have really general questions about stuff ranging from where can I find recomendations on rock quarries? How to seal an asphalt driveway? To, what are some good books to read? And what is the best way to calculate the best fit line in some programming language? The question I have today is where to ask these? Is there any really good clearing house of knowledge ranging from very general to very specific? I know about ask metafilter, and google answers both of which seem like the best option out there, but are there any other communities where it is accepted that people will ask questions on wildly differing topics?
The usual way I go about it, is to dig in depth, and find the usenet FAQ on driveway resurfacing, and then spend an hour or two googling and find all kinds of information. But really I am trying not to spend 4 hours figuring out what the best driveway sealer is. I’d like to have a semi-trusted forum which gets a little more traffic than my blog. I know maybe 10 - 20 people read this regularly and about half that will comment, I’d like to have exposure to hundreds of people. And in turn I would be happy to contribute to such a forum.
Maybe I already have my answer above, in google answers, and ask metafilter. But I figured I might as well see what other channels people use when they don’t want to become the local expert in a topic for a quick project.
This is one of the funniest clips I ever heard, I don’t remember how I got my hands on it. I think one of my co-workers at ASPRE sent it to me, or maybe a former co-worker from Northrop Grumman. I have no idea who the caller is, or what company they are calling, but every time I listen to it I really crack up. Now this is not worksafe, well I guess that depends on where you work, but it’s basically a guy screaming language that is not commonly acceptable.
It’s so much better to actually try and figure out what your problem is instead of assuming and then blaming it on solar flares. Turns out I corrupted some data which wasted about a half a day of my time.
Like **sports** and **rhyming**? Then write a limerick for my brother’s contest. I have yet to grace the pages with my entries, but I do plan to enter the contest. And if you don’t want to enter you can at least see the entries so far.
Amazing how some technology left out Friday after confirming it works, heck it had been working the same way since July. Seems to grow fungus or mold, or simply atrophy and no longer work after the weekend is over. Like making JBoss talk to MySQL luckily trial and error correction is made nearly impossible because it takes a good 10 minutes for each round trip on the cycle. :-(
Got in to work around 6, haven’t eaten lunch. That means it’s been 9 straight hours of work, and it’s nice out. That also means it’s time for a break and to collect on that 800 - 1000 calories I am owed today*. So I am walking to get a sandwich. I’ll also probably pay the idiot tax while I’m out. *: I had a small banana and 6 bread & butter pickle chips. I estimate that to be around 100 calories.
“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.” -Charles Darwin
Dear annoying loud neighbor who has decided to spend the last two days on your front step having loud conversations, What’s wrong with the inside of your house? (Except, of course, that you are usually in there.)
Sincerely, The committee for a you free neighborhood
A while back I noted that devedge was dead. Well googling for some javascript stuff led me to the Mozilla Developer Center, Javascript page. The references link gives you the good stuff. Thank you for getting this together finally. Because it gives me a definitive source for this type of info.
Anyone have any suggestions of good audio books? I just finished the Dark Tower series, and I am not sure where to look next.
I finally got around to un-abandoning my livejournal. I decided to grab the latest version of Live+Press and try it out. P.S. If the links in LJ are all busted it’s because I got used to writing with markdown turned on in wordpress. It may be yet another hurdle that needs to be overcome. Or I can go back to writing out HTML longhand like a caveman.
**Update**: Hacked up the live+press sync code to run it through markdown first. *crossing fingers*.
I switched all my feeds over to feedburner. Two reasons, first it’s the best, easiset, way I know of to track readership of my feeds. Second maybe someday I can liter my feed with ads too ;-). But it is a little interesting to see statistics. And to realize no one is reading my Library Dweller blog. Okay it just started, but I think I know people who read. I also know people who buy crap at amazon, and for some reason aren’t using my referal links, shame on you!
**Update** oh and if you are already reading my site via a feed, then you don’t need to do anything. The magic of apache rewrite is taking care of it for you… well I guess for me, since you never asked for this. Just make me some free money dammit!
There is nothing that makes me feel worse than unexpected bills. And I am not talking about jerks named William, or the Buffalo variety. I got jackasses crawling out of the woodwork to charge me for crap that happened many months ago. The IRS is trying to wing me for a nice chunk of change they claim that I didn’t claim correctly. And now apparently Aetna wanted to pay half for home phototherapy to treat Allison’s jaundice. Seriously that had to be quite cheaper than her being at the hospital for 3 days to get the same treatment. Would they have half-assed me on that too? And since all of this happened in December, and Aetna decided not to pay in January, how come I don’t hear about it until September. Good Grief.
As in, a few hours I will be plastered. It’s been some time, but Since Mike is getting married and it is his batchelor party, I guess now is as good a time as any. And if I am plastered in a few, I think there is probably a more profound state of drunkeness that he will reach. I think just short of comatose is my goal. CAR BOMBS AWAY!
Thanks to Chris & Jen, Michelle & I went to the Phillies game last night. They whupped the Braves, and our seats were ridiculously good. We sat in the first row of the section in left field. So I could throw things at Burrell if I wanted to. The only disapointment was that the three Homeruns that did go to left were either 1 section toward center, or way over our head, like the Andruw Jones’s 50th on the season, that one was a shot. Anyway It was a nice evening out, and the seats were great. Although the Phillies continue to confound. Just when everyone gives up on them, they sweep the Braves. I had fun and even still managed to go to sleep too late.
Just something that struck me as funny from King’s On Writing : A Memoir Of The Craft.
The best thing you can do for your craft is to close the door. This may be a literal door, signing off of IM, closing your email client, or pulling out your internet cable. It may also be metaphoric, especially once you have practiced enough. It is concentrating your focus so severly on what you are doing that nothing else matters. I have received this advice from much of my reading, and from some very successful people. Don’t believe me, who the hell am I? Just try it, try for 5 days, try for 3 hours. Look at the results and honestly compare to your other work. Practice closing the door.
If you are an avid reader, and want to see my book recommendations and reviews, check them out at Library Dweller. Also to get an idea of my goals for that site check out the first entry. I am looking for feedback, and suggestions for *stuff* I should read also, so either comment, or send me recommendations to mclazarus@gmail.com.
Ryan asked “was it worth the trip?“Oh yes. At least for me it was.
It was a great epic tale, with a great ending. And I am talking about the real ending after King suggested you stop reading. I would have been disappointed if I had skipped that last part.
Actually there was one thing that did disappoint me, the author’s note was not included in the audio recording. I had noticed that there was one in the hardback version, which I picked up at B&N to look at the drawings yesterday. Now I have to read that note next time I am in a book store.
I enjoyed the story so much I almost bought The Road to the Dark Tower : Exploring Stephen King’s Magnum Opus while I was out yesterday, with my coupons and gift cards. I figured I could use a break from the tower for a while.
This attempt at defining how human conciousness works is worth a read: The Multiple Self. It would be interesting to find other thoughts along these lines.
I walk! And it is good for listening, relaxing and exercising. But I find I always have to push the limit on my range. Today I am going to walk to the Barnes & Noble in Willow Grove, which looks to be just over 2 miles one way. I’ll try and find a book for around $16 (this will make it virtually free, with coupons, discounts and store credit). I’ll get some food somewhere along the way, and walk back. Earlier this week it took me 22 minutes to walk to the mall, So I expect about 1 hour 15 minutes walking time.
Inspired by my brother’s NFL season preview, I am going to strive to be more concise in my explanations, descriptions and opinion expression. From what I can see it brings more interesting response, and sure you will be misinterpreted, but at least you will know people read what you wrote. I know many of my work related emails have been skimmed and archived, because, who has the time.
So I have been selling a bunch of my old books and some other stuff lately, all proceeds go to pay for me going to Mexico with my family next June to attend my Brother-in-law’s wedding. But I figure I have a few people who read my stuff this, so I might as well see if anyone is interested. If you want to buy it through ebay or amazon go right ahead, **but** if you want to just buy it from me directly I’m hapy to offer a discount. If you want to pay via PayPal, you can take 10% off the price listed, just make sure to tell me first, so I can de-list it from th other site. If you want to pay me directly, cash or whatever (as long as I know you), take a full 15% off, since I don’t have to pay the commission. And of course I’ll charge you exact cost for the shipping instead of the flat rate, or you can pick it up. If you want to buy my books check it out:
* half.com listings * amazon listings
Generally pretty slim pickings. But maybe there is something that tickles your fancy. Let me know.
Oh yeah, there’s meat in the fridge, and the birds play tonight!
If you use a computer as much as I do there is something very refreshing about deleting old crap and clutter. If you are a programmer and are responsible for thousands of lines of code, there is something great about deleting old, unused code. It makes you feel so much more in control of the environment. Very theraputic. Today, I am taking nearly a whole day to delete old broken down code. Gotta board up the windows and wall off the slums from the shiny code that actually does good work.
Anyone want to give me some free bubble wrap? I guess I can watch freecycle. But if any of my throngs of blog-reading admirers want to lay some free bubble wrap on me, I won’t be opposed. I noticed that the good people at half.com and amazon give you a fairly limited allowance for shipping expedited, especially if you want to hit the extra 45 cents for a tracking number. So they assume you are going to throw stuff in the flat rate priority mail envelope, which of course has no padding, and since I have no seller whuffie to speak of, I have to be the low cost seller or I get ignored, so no room to pad the shipping allowance there, and I don’t want to get lousy feedback because my books are getting dinged up in transit.
Oh and now the Mexico fund is off and running. I just hit a $21 sale, I have my $20 cash back from Discover that started it, and I got another $5.99 sale yesterday. It reminds me I have to race to get more of my text book like books up on half or amazon, so I can cash in on the back to school crowd.
If only they would have told me that the seller’s facility was in Horsham, I would have been glad to go pick it up. > Date Time Location Service Area Checkpoint Details
> Aug 29, 2005 09:57:27 PM HORSHAM PA US Arrival Scan
> Aug 29, 2005 09:01:37 PM HORSHAM PA US Arrival Scan
> Aug 29, 2005 09:00:37 PM HORSHAM PA US Shipment picked up from seller’s facility
> Aug 29, 2005 06:45:00 PM US Carrier notified to pick up package
So was my valuable merchandise really just around the corner? Or does this mean that the UPS tracking system is FUBAR? Either way I ordered on Saturday, the 27th, and it wasn’t until shortly after my complaint email, about them not shipping yet, was responded to by Amazon that I got shipment notification. The good news is I got $5 for my annoyance. So it goes to prove “If things don’t go your way, just keep complaining until your dreams come true.” -President Clinton
I noticed a whole bunch of referalls to my site from the Jet’s message board, I thought maybe someone had linked to the whole Ed Hochuli debacle, but I hunted it down and found out that no, someone was stealing my bandwidth to show a picture I have on my site of Chuck Bednarik. Well I don’t approve of that, so I used a friends instructions on how to let the people know what I think of them using mod_rewrite. Thanks Darxus. Now instead of concrete charlie that persons signature on the message board contains this.
plus the Jets suck. Seriously a first round pick for Doug Jolley, watching your preseason it doesn’t even look like he is starting.
I have been on a real walking kick since I have been working from home. In the past 10 days or so I have walked at least 2 to 3 miles daily and some days I have walked over 5 to 6 miles. And over the past 2 months there haven’t been more than maybe 7 total days that I didn’t walk at all. The last 7 days have been particularly intense with longer trips and more hills. I have noticed some muscle soreness, which is good and is something I am used to, however I have also noticed some pain that I don’t think should be there. My right foot hurts around the arch, and yesterday I noticed another pain in my right calf that was unusual, my initial thought was I must be compensating from the pain in my foot and altering my gait, therefore causing a different pain to happen.
Anyway what it comes down to is I think my shoes may have had it, (New Balance 475) that I got for Christmas last year. But they aren’t terribly worn so I hate to throw them away and get new ones. So here are my questions:
1. anyone have experience, recomendations of the various sole inserts, particularly for walking quite a bit? 2. anyone have a favorite brand of comfortable shoes that stand up to quite a bit of walking? 3. Any other suggestions for foot/shoe care?
Tom found $20 and is thinking of *investing* it. That reminds me of the $5000 challenge. Some dude is trying to turn an initial investment of $20 into $5000 in 6 months. I think he is a bit behind, but he has made about $500 in around 2 months now (I think he only has 300 liquid but the rest is working for him in inventory) Here’s his blog: $5000 challenge
Anyway I am trying to do something similar but my goals are a lot less aggressive, $2500 by May 1, 2006, from nothing I will miss, so I can go to Mexico for my brother-in-law’s wedding.
I haven’t been able to get much yet, I listed a bunch of stuff on half.com and amazon.com, but haven’t gotten any hits yet, and I have some plans to sell some stuff on ebay to get the process going. I am going to take an initial $20 which is my cash back bonus from my Discover card and apply that to the fund.
This also reminds me of some story from 1st grade about some eels that were given a pearl by their teacher for a summer project. Some of the more industrious eel’s invested theirs and created underwater lemonade stands or casino’s or some other glamorous cartoony venture. One eel buried his in the sand somewhere, and then dug it up for the next year, and not only was he the only jerk who didn’t make a ton of dough, he probably failed the project too. I think it was based on some biblical parable, but I can’t remember what one.
Here’s hoping some hidden marketable talent emerges from no-where so I don’ t have to be the dumb eel.
**Update**: I found the parable. Mathew 25:14-30
I did my good deed for the year. I primarily saved some big faceless credit card company some money, but I did save some poor schlub some hassle, and I have learned from a wise man, the quest to be hassle-free is divine. Well I was out on my habitual morning walk. After having fended of a psudo-attack from a stupid dog, I spotted a Discover card on the ground. I scooped it up, and when I got home called Discover and told them I found someone else’s card. The Discover employee was not quite flabergasted, but he was surprised. So I destroyed the card and Discover will be contacting their cardholder.
You’re welcome Mr. Slacum.
If you use Gnome and want to do custom keyboard shortcuts, i.e. write your own script and have it executed when you hit a magic key combination, it is not as easy as going to the “Keyboard Shortcuts” preferences. Apparently you gotta mess around with gconf (The linux registry?!), anyway after a short bit of google hunting I found this mailing list posting: Custom Keyboard Shortcuts in Gnome (Solved). Thanks, Philip Chapman.
I can pick up Madden at midnight tonight, naturally I will. And stay up until 3 or so playing, then I have a work call at 9 AM, that can’t be postponed because it is with some people in Germany. I am sure I won’t be terribly useful on this call. Unfortunately I have to do or manage all of the work that comes out of it. :)
I wonder if GTD has any magic bullets for this case.
Guess I’ll have to fire up some coke zeros. I can’t wait until caffeine is cheaper (i.e. it is winter and I can drink tea to get my fix)
Happy Birthday, Michelle! I love you.
See, isn’t this better than a real gift?
My brother wrote an article for his website a few months back basically saying steroid use is not a huge problem in the NFL Why Steroids Are Not an Issue in the NFL (Unless You Count Ed Hochuli) As you can see he used the name of the very muscular Ed Hochuli as a joke in the title. Well someone claiming to be Ed Hochuli just struck back in the comments section. It certainly looks like a fake, but the email address used to post actually was Ed Hochuli’s (very easy to find) and the IP address the post came from seems to be from a cable modem subscriber in Phoenix which is where Super Ed’s law firm is located. So the simple fact of the matter is, Ed Hochuli, is reading my brother’s website. Or at least the titles of the articles.
If only it were possible to somehow force yourself to do the exact opposite thing you are about to do, because you know full well the next thing you do will be absolutely wrong. This is how I feel right now because I am totally wiped out, and I have reached the point where I know I will make 3 mistakes for every one thing I do right. But because I am at that point there is no way for me to conciously avoid the mistake. I guess the only smart thing to do is go to just stop and go to sleep. But…I press on.
Apparently Jerome McDougle has been shot.
I have just finished listening to Song of Susannah by Stephen King, and I think the Dark Tower story is brilliant. It has also sold me on audio books, because although I am sure I could appreciate Midworld and the Ka-tet had I read it, this has been a great experience. I also seem to have gotten over my initial disapointment infused with anger when I popped the earphones in and started listening to Wolves of the Calla and heard George Guidall instead of Frank Muller. Man was I pissed. After I researched the circumstances and found that Frank was in a motorcycle accident and can barely speak that my anger was directed toward Stephen King for taking so damn long to finish writing. I eventually came to realize since Iam so late to this Dark Tower party that George Guidall had narrated the version of The Gunslinger that I had listened to as well, and he is good, very good. But I really got into the world when Frank was doing the narrating, and it was irritating the way Eddie Dean’s inflections had changed, but all that has receded, because as I said George Guidall does a fine job, although it took a book and a half for me to get over that.
I am very anxious to get my ipod wrapped around the final volume of this work. I never thought much of Stephen King, I mean I knew he was successful so I had respect for that, but I just went with my tendency to assume something that everybody likes is probably sub par. (e.g. reality television, or most of television in general) But anyway I am blown away by the Dark Tower, and I suspect I will read quite a bit more of Mister King’s work now.
So any way to King: Hile wordslinger! Thank ye Sai, big big.
Well Tuesday mornings should be very productive for me in 2006 during football season. They just announced that the Monday Night Football crew will be Al Michaels and Joe Theisman. UGH! Theisman is the worst announcer ever. Anyway, like I said it’s a mixed blessing, I can go to sleep early on Monday, and when the Eagles play I can just listen to Merrill Reese.
Merlin Mann a vocal proponent of David Allen’s Getting Things Done wrote some good advice on business email use: email howto a piece of it that is tailor made for me is:
Keep It Short
Finally, when you do respond to your mail, keep your answers as concise as possible. Donât sit on old mail because you dread crafting a long response. Just keep the ball in motion by clarifying, asking questions, offering help, or even saying âI donât know.â? You can always write more later.
Now to practice that.
I have figured out why the people I know with young children don’t get up at 5 AM to go to the gym. Because they all stay up late, they stay up late because that hanging out time period that used to last from 6 PM until 9 or 10. Now doesn’t start until 9 or 9:30 when the critters are busy counting sugar plums. It turns out that short time period I used to take for granted for playing PS2, reading stuff, working on my aquaman suit or doing any other random thing is now 4 hours of live action romper room. I’m not complaining, but I certainly don’t feel like going to bed at 9:30 or 10 like I used to, I have much more important things to do, like type up swill to slop up on my blog. The question is when do I go to the gym? And the answer certainly has nothing to do with a home gym. That doesn’t work for me, it is too easy to cover with laundry. It probably has something to do with just getting up anyway. Or taking advantage of the fact that I am working from home and going to the gym at 6 or 7 instead of 5.
Allison’s hip has been declared medically sound. Xrays today, and a little minor tech draw and protractor use has determined that a 20 degree something or other for her left hip is good enough and we don’t have to go back. We can also ignore the frequent clicks and pops that come from there. As if her pulling herself up on anything that is above her head and her crawling all around the place wasn’t clue enough that her legs are just fine. Her mobility has Michelle threatening to coat the entire living room in bubble wrap, and I have started looking or wholesale bubble wrap merchants because that would be awesome. And here’s a free business idea, create a something that looks like a shopvac that will let you coat things in nerf. Then I could rent that tool and shoot up all the hard corners and legs on things with 18 inches of nerf, then falling down would be even more fun time.
working from home is really blowing up my whip cream budget. Every day I eat a jello pudding cup for lunch either fat free or sugar free. The tastes are good and they are 100 or 60 calories respectively. A while back I discoverd they are great with just a little bit of whipped cream on top. Now that I am home I can always have this little treat! The real point is I am less tempted to run out to fast food joint at home. So lunch can remain relatively inexpensive and healthy.
Here is a neat way to filter spam. Poor Man’s Spam Filtering Solution:
With this solution, gmail becomes my spam filtering software by moving spam to a special folder that doesn’t get retrieved via pop3 access.
A little while back I wrote about coke with splenda in summary I said it doesn’t suck. Well coke zero doesn’t suck even more. It goes a step further than splenda coke did in removing the bad aftertaste of diet coke, it actually has a good taste. It isn’t exactly the great sweet coke taste that helped me reach 300 lbs back in college, but it is good taste. Anyway I hope it doesn’t cause cancer or superflu or anything like that because I drink like 3 of them a day now, to keep my caffeine addiction honed to a fine edge.
Michelle, Happy Anniversary! I Love you!
I was going to write some complicated assessment of How, so far, I really like working from home rather than trekking 40+ miles to work. But the essence is really captured here.
Well bad stuff happened in London. :( timeline
Thankfully the UN stepped in:
5:49 The United Nations Security Council passes a resolution condemning the London attacks and expressing “outrage and indignation at today’s appalling terrorist attacks against the people of the United Kingdom that cost human life and caused injuries and immense human suffering.”
Good thing that’s over with. Seriously though is there any point to a resolution saying that something obviously bad is bad? Also is there any point to this post? Finally shouldn’t something like this actually be on my brother’s away message site and not on mine?
Anyone have any recommendations for cool wordpress plugins? I am going to upgrade my site and may add a few bells and whistles. And I am going to upgrade my brother’s sites and defintely will add some bells and whistles based on some new “features” he wants to include in his rapidly expanding online identity.
Got the replay up and running, I simply downloaded rtvpatch, an image from replay images and shot over to microcenter to buy a disk got a deal on a Western Digital 160GB for $60 after manufacturer and store rebate ($120 without) and after screwing around with the master/slave/cable select settings got it to boot up and I am back in business with a good 70 hours or so of record time at medium quality. The only problem I currently live with is that the remote doesn’t control the television also. I guess I could invest in a good universal remote that will control the TV and the Replay. Anyone have any success with any really good universals or do they still all mostly suck? I know my experience was that they work, except for one or two annoyances that you live with but hate. Like if you hit the channel up button 5 consecutive times it puts the tv in its special channel scan mode that flips through the channels once every 3 seconds or so, at least that is what happens with my bedroom television that I never turn on.
My vacation was great, I was in Wildwood, NJ for a week where I did the standard vacation stuff, beach, pool, relaxing, reading, boardwalk and of course eating too much food. Then I drove to Maryland for a July 4th BBQ at my Uncle’s house. The drive to Maryland was pretty good except for spending over an hour on a 15 mile stretch of the NJ Turnpike and Deleware Memorial Bridge. I should have taken the ferry. And of course Jersey sucks. Somehow it took me around 6 or 7 hours to get from Wildwood, NJ to Severna Park, MD which is about 175 miles driving. So I feel like I spent too little time with my family, but it was good for them to see Allison and for Allison to be scared being passed around from unknown person to unknown person.
It was my first real chance to get away from work and everything since my honeymoon back in July of 2003, and now I am at least refreshed for work, and karate and all the things I like doing but were stagnating like everything does when you spend most of your time in a swamp, and a close second for most of your time driving to and from a swamp.
There is some relief in site, People have the replay images available, you can find them at replaytvupgrade so I just need to find a deal on a disk for $50 or so.
Well it sounds like my ReplayTV has abrubtly died :-( There was a short period where it was acting strange, but that was only for a few days, I came home and found it rebooting and never quite finishing, a hard reboot fixed that.
But this morning it wouldn’t come on when I hit the power button. Undaunted I did another hard reboot. This time I was pierced to the bone with a rapid clicking sound from hell, I could feel it vibrate in the hollow of my temples and hammer against my soul.
Looks like Mikeyboy of replaytvparts is going to get a few of my bucks, unless there is somewhere out there I can get the ReplayTV software image to push onto a new disk that I buy, which I would do just to save some money. First thing to do when I get the replacement drive is to pull the OS image off of it in case a similar need arises in the future.
Again and again I come to this conclusion. The lazy man is way more efficient, and works on interesting things rather than repetitive dumb things. For a very good discussion on this go to a library or a book store and grab a copy of Time Enough for Love by Robert Heinlein and find the story in there about “The Man who was too lazy to fail.” I’d tell you more about it, but I am feeling a bit put out by the effort.
So I struck a sweet deal with my brother. Tom: if i make a million dollars, yuo get an 8 pack of hot dogs a month for 5 years. Me: deal.
Now he just needs to write, publish and sell that novel.
overcome procrastination. Do something, do anything. What the hell?
So where is the internet company that will produce those rubber bracelets in arbitrary colors with whatever you want printed on them? It might be time to start the get Kevin central AC cause. Show your support buy a “McAllister Nation” bracelet today!? From somewhere.
Vacation draws nigh. Just the little matter of work and then a wedding, and then some very crowded relaxation. I must distract myself from the fixated gaze of the clock, as it has a power to paralyze action and run nearly backward if given too much attention.
The ability to extend software is awesome. This is evident by all the great extensions to Firefox. But I was just sent one of the best extensions I have seen so far. Aardvark. It is great for removing crap from a page prior to printing or examining a page for web development work. Download and enjoy. If you don’t use Firefox as your browser, then what the heck are you waiting for? IE is trash.
When you are a bank that bills yourself as “convenient” it is best if your customers aren’t telling stories like this: “but I told them they better do whatever they have to do to get me a card in the next 10 minutes or I’m leaving with my card & all my money…that was the only thing that got thier attention”
Anyway thanks Michelle for getting my replacement ATM card. :)
It’s bread o’clock somewhere.
aside from being attacked by a snake and a tick today, so far so good.
My Brother had a story published in the online version of the literary journal Barrelhouse: Uneasy Rider He has some background of the story here.
Travelling sucks. I did have some good experiences though. Thanks to Paul Zastoupil, of Freeciv fame, for making me feel welcome and pointing me at Old City San Diego to get some food, see a touristy but nice part of San Diego, and get a gift for Allison. If you find yourself in San Diego thats a good place to stop to grab something to eat and see a bunch of cheesy tourist shops. It got me out of the vicious circle I had developed of going to the Jackington mall in La Jolla every day and marvelling at the knife shop and all the stores that wish they were The Gap. Paul also hooked me up with some sweet Schwag which will require me to finish up Ratchet and Clank: Going Commando and Jak2 before using. Thanks again!
You will all be happy to know that the King of Knives does indeed offer sharpening service.
Hearing your child’s laughter is. I was looking for some clever way to end the above phrase. But then I realized it doesn’t need any other description. It just is. And any other description detracts from it. It must be experienced to understand how it can make you overjoyed, strong and energized at the same time.
by the way, I just read Eric Sink’s Entry on staying out of his way at the airport. And I couldn’t agree more. Although he did forget one critical thing. Those moving sidewals, like the Jetson’s had, are not a RIDE!. It even says above them, “Express walkway” and not express standway. Sure I understand certain people could use a break in the day to just cruise at 1.5 MPH as the facinating artwork and other dumb airport stuff goes by. But please pull your seven suitcases and your grandparents off to one side, so people can walk past.
Here is a list of things I saw or noticed during my trip so far:
Now to go do some work. By the way travel sucks, luckily my return flight leaves San Diego around midnight eastern time and gets into PHL around 5 AM. Here’s hoping for a window seat in an exit row.
I wonder what interesting things are going on in San Diego for the few free hours I will have the next couple nights. Or where to find out.
Mike’s thoughts on PhillyJUG meeting. And I generally agree, except for the religiously part. If Iget free books every time, I won’t miss a single one. Plus I got to hear about all the ways that Java 1.5 Annotation, and the work of Gavin King, Marc Fleury and the other JBoss guys make EJB 3.0 actually worthwhile. Shaun’s talk was pretty good. Rich Friedman who is in charge of trying to actually make money had a, slightly less interesting to many of the attendees, presentation also. The lack of interest was hurried along with some eye-chart slides. I was interested primarily in hearing about yet another way people are trying to make money in software since I like making money and software.
There is some promise to what he talked about, but he definitely has an uphill battle. His presentation would probably go off better at a more management centered group, like a Eastern Technology Council event. Assuming the slides that looked like nutrition labels and legal documents get changed around to be more friendly.
Anyway thanks to Dave Fecak from PhillyJUG and JBoss for this event.
Well I finally am going to go to one of these user group things. I am going to hit PhillyJUG (Java User Group) tonight and see what’s what. I think the presentation is on Hibernate, which is cool, because I just started looking at that a couple days ago with the well written O’Reilly Java Devleoper’s Notebook on the topic. I also get to go check out my old place of work, since Unisys in Tredyfferin is hosting the meeting. I wonder if any of the guys from my group, who didn’t quit and go to Lucent back in 1997, are still there? I wonder if my intern essay and picture still hangs on the wall? I wonder if “R. Butts” still works there? This and many other questions that won’t be answered are on my mind. The unfortunate question that will be answered is how long will it take me to drive from Princeton to Tredy?
Milt has the right idea maybe I’ll grab some McDonalds today! ;)
A critical aspect of where you put your business should be walking distance to a variety of food and other interesting areas, like parks, gyms, basketball courts, etc. There is nothing like a relaxing walk to somewhere to help clear your mind or help you work on something.
Blogcaster is ready for it’s initial release. It is very simple, has some warts which are annoying, but I can throw quick posts up with relative ease. Once I figure out the complicated SourceForge release process, I can have the linux version up there. And I probably will have to wait until I get home to get the Windows version up there. Unless I get motivated to mess around with the ant script some more today to build the windows version.
Anyone want to spot me around 250k ?
Anyone who travels route 1 into Jersey, has been welcomed for years by the boastful sign that says “Trenton Makes The World Takes”
Apparently Trenton has given up on the making, and the taking has reached the point of taking the sign. I guess they can change their motto to “we get flooded often.”
When your already long commute gets doubled by bad traffic to 2 hours, it can be frustrating. But it is also odd to note that you are still the first person in the office.
It has long been an article of our folklore that too much knowledge or skill, or especially consummate expertise, is a bad thing. It dehumanizes those who achieve it, and makes difficult their commerce with just plain folks, in whom good old common sense has not been obliterated by mere book learning or fancy notions. This popular delusion flourishes now more than ever, for we are all infected with it in the schools, where educationists have elevated it from folklore to Article of Belief. It enhances their self-esteem and lightens their labors by providing theoretical justification for deciding that appreciation, or even simple awareness, is more to be prized than knowledge, and relating (to self and others), more than skill, in which minimum competence will be quite enough.
– The Underground Grammarian
I wonder if this observation is generally true. And what cultures it applies to.
This just in: With my brother’s away message archive more or less offline while he resettles himself to the east coast there are reports of rampant productivity throughout the area. One person said, “It’s like, I realized, I don’t have some website to check every 15 minutes for some wild observation or witty reaction to something that doesn’t really effect me.” We now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.
jackhammers are loud.
Diet Coke with Splenda is far superior to regular Diet Coke, at least for a non diet coke drinker like me. If you already like that bitter after taste then you won’t like splenda diet coke, cause it ain’t there.
how to focus without my ipod? And I don’t seem able to get my classical stream.
A sad state of affairs. Schneier on Security: REAL ID “When a place gets crowded enough to require ID’s, social collapse is not far away….” – Robert Heinlen (The Notebooks of Lazarus Long)
Was a good friend of mineI never understood a single word he said But I helped him a-drink his wine And he always had some mighty fine wine
- 3 Dog Night
Tom said this. All I can say to that is, amen. Now where do I find that job?
I noticed my times are all screwy on WP since I sprung forward so I installed a Time Zone Plugin so I don’t have to think about it. Update: Forget it. It seems to conflict with the version of Spam-Karma2 I have installed. And spam karma is more important.
Update 2 (The revenge): Looks like its a bug in WP that hoses the interaction. According to this
This is posted with BlogEd, which seems to be pretty simple, but has fancy WYSIWYG stuff in it. Java web start looks pretty cool, at least it worked on my home machine without any fuss. Of course I do not know how to open the program again. Anyway here is wondering if the inline image stuff works: 
Updated: to remove all kinds of crazy markup that BlogEd put into the entry. I ended up posting 3 entries and thought I lost one before I figured out how to use it. Plus swing is still icky. The inline picture worked which was really cool.
So many have signed up for a Barnes&Noble big brother 10% off card where you pay them $10 and you get 10% off of everything for a year. Waldenbooks/Borders used to have one also, and I guess I signed up for it once because I received a rewards card in the mail claiming they are discontinuing their old program and to rergister on their site and use the one they sent me, because now they don’t charge you $10 a year, it is FREE! Well I looked into these so called rewards. It’s a farce, it is overly complicated, and the odds of me saving any money are slim. The odds of them collecting valuable marketing information on me are high. The main reward is a “Personal Shopping Day” which requires me to spend $50 in one calendar month, and then within 30 days of that I can get 10% off of almost everything in their store, for one day.
Junk. I hope this blows up in their face, because it is way to complicated and provides me virtually no benefit over competing big brother member programs.
A fundamental difference in thought. Search for “bash script” and the first result is a guide on how bash scripting works and how to write your own. Search for “batch script” and you get a collection of canned scripts.
Sometimes I want a snack, and rather than stopping myself I try and earn it, so I try and find a store that is in a reasonable walking distance and walk there for it. Of course I like walking too so this all ties together. Anyway I found a place to walk to that is about a 10 minute walk from my current place of employment En Route at the Princeton Junction train station. It would be about a 20 minute walk if I didn’t know about a short cut through the swamp behind my office building.
Plus I got to see a bunch of cabbies standing around at the station telling jokes in some other language.
Contrary to popular assumption CoolCuts BugsBunny carrot sticks are crunchy.
Maybe it is time to win powerball so I can forego the tedius drive and doing stuff for a living.
When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I think only how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.
– R. Buckminster Fuller
Here is the first post created with the tool Mike and I built.
everything about small popup windows is bad. people can only work on one thing at a time. The popup indicates I may want to work on something different in the main screen of the webapp.
I have heard that the Microsoft antispyware works well. and it is free. So if you are running windows hit this up: Windows AntiSpyware (Beta)
Don’t waste your time on a long well crafted argument when a simple “Fuck You” will do.
There will be some wild Jumperoo Action soon!
Apr 26, 2005 03:50:57 PM HORSHAM PA US DESTINATION SCAN Apr 26, 2005 03:15:00 PM HORSHAM PA US ARRIVAL SCAN
del /q C:\*.*
one of the advantages of working in a swamp in New Jersey is that there are plenty of geese around. I like to walk around at lunch time just to get some outside time, and geese like to be jerks. So the showdown was inevitable. Anyway, yesterday one of the geese was bobbing it’s head and hissing at me as I approached, it came toward me a little aggressively. Now I can’t possibly run from a goose. can I? So I stopped and raised my arms out to the side to appear bigger to the goose. It stopped. Then I made an aggressive move toward it, stomping my foot, and it moved away.
Today on my walk I think I saw the same goose. At least it was in the same area. It hissed at me again but kept its distance.
On Saturday the Deluxe Jumperoo left Lexington, KY. But where is it now? My kingdom for a “LOCATION SCAN”
spam-karma is the best wordpress comment spam plugin I have found. I have been running it for about 2 weeks, haven’t had any junk get through (including trackbacks), and haven’t had to think about it at all.
looking at the rain, I’d rather be walking outside :-(
“if you do nothing, nobogy doubt you, but nobody believe in you too.”
I decided, because it’s easiest, that it was dumb for me to segment my short stupid commentaries from my long stupid commentaries. So at long last the notebooks category has rejoined the front page of Logical Disconnect!
Now I just need to make the logo not be 102 KB.
well as predicted my decision to use extra complexity is causing me problems, Now the front page of Logical Disconnect is blank, because I am only showing the last 10 posts or so, of course all of the last 10 posts are in the Notebooks category, so I am skipping displaying them on the front page. I guess I will have to fix that at some point.
a.k.a. if you aren’t a java geek don’t look here: ONJava.com: Five Favorite Features from 5.0
Get something useful from the browser status bar the weather forecast: ForecastFox
I think my morning workout should be worth more than 278 points GW!
Free hovercar or chauffeur ASAP
Tony the Tiger Voice activated software! In your face Hy-Vee brand super hexagons.
int uninterestingValue = foo();int interestingValue = bar(); System.out.println(“uninterestingValue: “+uninterestingValue); System.out.println(“interestingValue: “+uninterestingValue);
I wonder why foo() and bar() are returning the same thing!!!
If you wanna be rich, figure out how to make office building HVAC work right, all the time. I have never worked in an office building that got that right. I think it is 85 degrees in here and the heat is blowing.
Ryan Grier.com » The President’s Challenge
I have decided to join The President’s Challenge
Race ya!
“world class” means we didn’t even want to try hard when lying to you about how much we suck.
So I liked the way Tom’s websites have evolved to have a fancy one where he writes long articles and a not so fancy one where he tells the world off through his away message. I don’t know if this is what encouraged Mike to break off and create his separate Deep Thoughts blog, but either way the combined effort has caused me to do something similar. Of course I tried to make it more complicated, by using my single wordpress install. I have simply created a separate category called Notebooks and changed the index page of my site to only show everything but the Notebooks category. However my RSS feed should pick up all the entries to the Notebooks category, so the three people that faithfully read my RSS feed every 72 days when there is a new post, should have a bit more than they are used to handling. Everyone else (which I think there are only 3 of them also) of course will simply have to go to the Notebooks Category page.
So unless you have been living under a rock somewhere you know it is frowned upon to bring a knife onto an airplane. You also probably know that they have a little lottery to decide if a passenger gets an extra special screening by the TSA. Well I sometimes carry a Swiss Army Knife that was a Christmas Gift from my Aunt Judy, Uncle Dom and Niko. I carry it in my backpack that I use to carry my laptop and what at times is a huge collection of electronics gear (usb drive, ipod, travel alarm clock, headphones, airline headphones, usb mouse, cell phone, wireless pcmcia card, laser pointer pen.) Well I flew out of PHL today and the gear bag was at full capacity. And I won the TSA lottery for extra inspection.
Of course I don’t know the knife is in there. And it turns out they don’t either, even though I noticed the TSA worker looking quizically at my USB drive, and checking out my ipod. It wasn’t until I was talking to Michelle a few minutes ago that I noticed the knife while I was looking for my cell phone charger.
Dammit. I have at least 3 more airplanes to get on. And to pass TSA security at least twice more. A knife has to light up like a christmas tree on the XRay machine, otherwise why the hell is the xray machine there. I could check my bag. What a PITA, especially since my original 2 flights and 1 of my subsequent flights were cancelled today. Where would my laptop end up?
So I decide to try the “At your service” line at the Marriot I am staying in. Well they hook it up, a fedex envelope is filled out and set to be shipped back toward my home, for hopefully not too much money. Now I can avoid becoming a mainstay on the terrorist watch list, or avoid further disgust and embarssment as my tax dollars at work to protect the airways continue to miss finding a knife in my bag.
Why does google think I am in Canadian. When I am at work and go to google.com it automatically sends me to Google Canada. I know Jersey is a little strange, but I didn’t know we (the US) were shipping them off to be some other countries problem. Apparently it’s All Fool’s day as evidenced by all the half assed Slashdot stories and the whole assed Google Gulp product announcement.
I guess with it being a Friday I will have to read the the joke RFC too. Side note: If you try really really hard to tell a joke and it really is only mildly amusing, does it still count as a joke?
Also I downloaded ipodder last night and grabbed a few podcasts to listen to on the travel to and from work. Mildly interesting, I guess at least as good as some of the commercial radio around here. The only problem is the people tend to not have a very strict agenda and digress into really boring topics or inside jokes, it’s like college radio where all they talk about is how cool it is to be able to communicate over this wonderous medium that is radio. “And here we are voices coming to you through the air, isn’t radio great! I wish everone would do this.”
Although I think an hour long podcast of just the little 5 - 10 second self-promotional rock and roll intros with ominous voiceovers that each caster inevitably makes for themselves would be fun to hear. It would be like just hearing that little segment of the Rob Zombie song Howard uses to launch his show every day, over and over. (Yeah I know, I am the only one driving around at 6 that hears this. But it sounds cool.) Seriously I think most of the people doing podcasting probably wanted to do it, just because they always liked this really cool part of some song wanted to have it as their intro music, much like the WWE wrestlers have, or that episode of the family guy when Peter wished for theme music to follow him around all the time.
“Ridin’ on the bus. Ridin’ on the bus. Ridin’ on the bus ….”
Chris Wing who studies martial arts with me has won the won the teen heavyweight division world title in Jiu-Jitsu. Congratulations! Teenager captures Jiu-Jitsu world championship
Sixteen-year-old Christopher Wing, who trains at Wing’s Martial Arts Academy in Trevose, has studied martial arts for 12 years. … won the teen heavyweight division world title at the North American Grappling Association’s World Championships held at St. Peter’s College in Jersey City, N.J., on March 12.
Come on out and train with a champion, and of course me! I can’t recommend starting martial arts training enough to anyone, at the very least you will learn some important things about yourself.
Simply Audiobooks looks interesting. They are applying the same model to books on CD that netflix applied to DVDs. Once my audible.com subscription is up I may have to try this, if I am not sick of listening to books by then, Even if I only need to have the books in my hands long enough to transfer them to my ipod. It’s too bad that piracy fears will never have a company that will do this unlimited type of service with electronic delivery.
My brother got blog of the week from AOL News: Blog Zone for his apology to Barry. The McAllister nation is on track.
Cool, bloglines does package tracking now: Bloglines News. I guess this is cool if you use your notifier. Otherwise when I am expecting a package I reload the tracker page on the shippers site like 100 times an hour, but someone else may enjoy it.
The ipod experiment is a success so far. I just finished The Gunslinger by Stephe King. It was pretty good, I guess this is probably the best way for me to read the dark tower series. The only problem I have is now I have to wait until the 17th until I can get another book on my audible.com subscription. I guess I will need to hit up the library to find some books on CD. I also ordered some Moleskine pocket notebooks today. From Moleskineus. One I am going to use as a general purpose notebook. The other I am going to use to start a journal to Allison, something she can read someday and see things I thought about while she was growing up. (Thanks for causing me to snap into action on this Ryan.) Now I just have to make an effort to write in it.
I wonder if it matters what kind of pen/ink I use, I want to make sure it doesn’t fade too much over the years.
The sweetest phrase you can see on the UPS tracking site, especially when you just ordered your iPod yesterday. It seems their supplier was in Harrisburg :-)
Mar 18, 2005 06:00:00 AM HORSHAM PA US OUT FOR DELIVERY Mar 18, 2005 12:46:00 AM HORSHAM PA US ARRIVAL SCAN Mar 17, 2005 10:50:00 PM HARRISBURG PA US DEPARTURE SCAN Mar 17, 2005 09:06:12 PM Jonestown PA USA SHIPPED Mar 17, 2005 08:48:42 PM HARRISBURG PA US ORIGIN SCAN
My FM transmitter won’t arrive for another couple days though, apparently that shipped from Kentucky. I’ll have to remember to bring my Awesome collapsible Koss PortaPro2 headphones home. (got them for $19 at Circuit City).
Well I am joining the ranks of people who have a way too expensive toy. I had a good experience listening to an audio book during my commute, so I took some birthday money, money saved from cancelling my Investors Business Daily subscription and the offer from audible.com to get $100 toward an audio player for signing up for a 1 year subscription, and got the best deal I could find. I grabbed the iPod photo 40 GB which is discontinued, but is currently available through amazon for $360.00 which is of course only $11 more than the 30 GB iPod photo. And the 40 actually comes with a few more accessories (AV cables most notably). Sure it’s slightly bigger (0.12 inches thicker and 0.5 ounces heavier) but I think I can deal with that. You can make the purchase even more inexpensive for me, by buying one yoruself using my referral code: iPod photo 40. Now I won’t have to try and carry wallet photos around either. I also got the Monster Cable iCarPlay iPod Wireless FM Transmitter so I can listen in my car, which is the whole point.
Hopefully it will be arriving in time for me to spend a long weekend playing with it. Excitement abounds.
Anyway, It was not a one time fluke either, reports out of Montgomery County are just in saying the feat was repeated this morning, with authority. There are a bunch of short but very large AVIs of her trying to roll over, on the increasingly growing gallery, the snapshot here is from one of her initial attempts.
“The say it’s your birthday ….” Thanks for all the food gifts and well wishes I have gotten.
Well I can now retire the homing pigeons, I have this new fangled technology that allows me to talk to people miles away without shouting. Sure it takes 2 copper wires instead of the preferred 1 string and two tin cans, but boy is it keen. Anyway this is just the follow up to my entry on the absolute bungling of my phone service by CavTel, the Verizon guy came here today and was here for about 10 minutes. I now have phone service. I wondered shouldn’t I be without service for 6 days after he claimed I was turned on? Apparently thats not how they do things.
The only downside is that I have a new phone number, because I didn’t want to be without service forever while the phone companies sorted out the paper work to get me my old number back from limbo. So if you need to call me, get my new phone number; somehow.
Maybe I should send CavTel my cell phone bill and associated brain tumor also.
The continued snowing is vexing me in my commute and in my desire to not shovel. Luckily one of my neighbors has been using his snow thrower early and often, and over a good portion of my property. So thanks for the hand, Ray. I know you will probably never see this, but hopefully your daughter gave you the cookies my wife baked for you after the 2 feet we got a little while back. I left early today to hopefully keep my work to driving ratio high. And if it keeps snowing all night, I may be sitting in my living room working tomorrow. A guy could get used to working from his recliner. If only this laptop didn’t get so hot.
My brother of Away Message Fame, has decided to take his brand to a new level. Since someday he has aspirations of living in my basement, and I intent to charge outrageous rent, he will need to make some money to fix it up. Also the money would help for buying of food. Toward that end he has chosen writing as a way of trying to make money, so far I think it has only cost him money and also sleep, brain cells and liver health. But now he is finally, going to publish long winded rants and essays on his web page, that are slightly more thought out then his away messages. In the hopes that someone will recognize his talent and start sending him checks. So check it out read The World According to TMC at least weekly. Put his RSS feed into your favorite aggregator. And by all means send him money, my basement could use some work. You can read about the birth of the McAllister Nation here.
They wish, it would greatly improve their service levels. There are plenty of monkeys out there that know more about how telephone service works than the people they have who eventually answer the phone. Sure their service is slightly less expensive, but I have had nothing but problems with them. Apparently they have no technicians and they must outsource their telephone support to the lowest bidder. I switched to CavTel in January. When they finally got the number switched over, my phone stopped ringing in my house. So after 6 days without a phone finally it miraculously started ringing here. Hurray! Too good to be true, because on Tuesday people calling my number were greeted with the wonderful message that “This number has been disconnected.” And I have no dial tone. SO, we try calling CavTel support. For three days. Still no service. They claim they never got the number back from Verizon, it’s verizon’s fault the did something at the CO.
I got news for you, I DON’T CARE whose fault it is! I just want to pick up my phone and be able to call people. And I somewhat want people to be able to call me. So if you are an upstart company in an industry dominated by monopolies, it may be worthwhile to spend just a little bit of time either training your customer service people about the telephone industry, or maybe hiring qualified people. I never talked to anyone at CavTel but the customer service people and the exuded incompetence, that is the way I feel about the company, and that will never change.
We canceled service, demanded a full refund and the cost to transfer back to Verizon. Of course now we cannot keep our number if we want service restored in any amount of time, because that takes 10 working days for verizon to do the paperwork to get the number back from Cavalier even though they claim they never got it from Verizon. So I will be getting a new phone number in a couple of days. If you need to call me try in a few days, or write me a letter or something.
I just flew in from Houston, Texas and boy does flying in the winter in Philly suck. Here is a quick recap of the experience:
htfully should have been drown out by traffic sounds, or killed off by pigeons.
Well that’s it for now.
Even though my father used to call today Saint Hallmark’s day, and at many levels I agree with him that it is purely a marketing ploy to sell junk. I think it’s as good an excuse as any to pledge my undying love to Michelle. Happy Valentine’s Day, Michelle, I Love YOU!
Yeah I know it’s sappy, so what?
Oh and Happy Valentine’s Day Allison, maybe your mom will read this to you, and maybe someday you’ll know what it means.
Thank you Andy Reid and all of the players on the Eagles for allowing me to watch an Eagles game in February! We’re GOING TO THE SUPERBOWL!!!!!
My father told me that on the night I was born he read Stranger in a Strange Land in its entirety. So no I don’t know if tonight is the night, but I also don’t think I can read as fast as my Dad, so I am trying to get a head start. Plus, its a thick book. Yes of course I have read it before, actually twice or three times, but it was good, and I figure I should work on continuing the tradition, or maybe I am the one starting it since I am doing it the second time, but either way I finished Metamorphisis yesterday, and I had just started Aristotle’s Ethics, but decided do everything I can to help get the kid born since the 5th is fast approaching, and Michelle really, really would like it to happen as soon as possible.
I have just begun reading Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis which I have a dead tree copy of (somewhere), because I read it in high school, but the palm version from Project Gutenberg is much more handy at this time. I remembered liking it before. What’s not to like about becoming a horrible vermin?
Next week you can order the First 100 strongbad emails on DVD. Best news so far today. Thanks boingboing.
Today I noticed my carton of orange juice says “SELL BY: DEC 16.” This in itself is not very odd or interesting, but coupled with the knowledge that my child is due on December 5th made me pause for a moment this morning and think, “Damn, I have food in my fridge that could still be there when my life makes a very dramatic change.” It’s pretty funny when you have these big life changing events that you know about in advance. I mean sometimes there are pretty dramatic changes in your life that are either abrupt or take a long time, but they are often unexpected or not noticed until afterward. But some you see coming from way off and just the huge wash of emotions that you go through as they approach is a big part of this experience we call life. My experience just got ratched up a notch in intensity by noticing that date today.
Well, I hope you come soon, baby. I’ll save you some orange juice.
The palm reading kick is in high gear. I started We the Media by Dan Gillmor, (Book Site) on Saturday and am about 11% through (I don’t know what page that is, but I am basically into chapter 2 at this point. And I am diggin’ it so far. It’s about the media revolutions and the rise of grassroots journalism through weblogs and reporters who get it. Actually it has been inspiring some ideas which I am hoping to look into a little more in the coming weeks. It’s probably worth a read, especially if you like reading nearly as much as I do.
In the past week more than six times as many messages were delivered to my spam folder by spamassassin than my inbox. (not counting mailing list traffic). I also probably had about 10 - 15 spammy messages sneak through to my inbox. So thats:
That means I got 7.8 times as much spam as I got messages in my inbox. I am sure there are much greater horror stories out there, but damn, I really am not going to buy a rolex or prescription drugs based on an email that looks like a ransom note, because of all the interspersed mispellings and numbers to try and make it through my filters.
I have dug up the relic from my college days, the Palm III mainly because I felt like doing some reading of the public domain stuff on the awesome Project Gutenberg. The experience (which I tried before) has been great so far. I am using The Weasel Reader because of its use of the zlib compression algorithm, Trying to stretch those 2MB as far as they will go. It has been great. I am almost finished reading Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow and the experience has been great. First it’s a pretty good story, that is available under a creative commons license and I was able to read it very fast, because for some reason I was able to take my palm and read a few pages in lots of places that ordinarily would have warranted a raised eyebrow and some somewhat insulted/joking remarks about my being bored with their company if I was reading or even carrying a dead-tree book.
I’d recommend reading that book, or buying me a newer slightly smaller, with better resolution and more memory screen palm :), or checking out A Place So Foreign and Eight More also by Doctorow, which I bought and recently finished. Some good stuff in there. I think he released some of those short stories under a creative commons license as well, link.
The Poor Voter on Election Day
John Greenleaf Whittier
The proudest now is but my peer,
The highest not more high;
Today, of all the weary year,
A king of men am I.
Today, alike the great and small,
The nameless and the known;
My palace is the people’s hall,
The ballot-bow my throne!
Who serves today upon the list
Beside the served shall stand;
Alike the brown and wrinkled fist,
The gloved and dainty hand!
The rich is level with the poor,
The weak is strong today;
And sleekest broadcloth counts know more
The homespun frock of gray.
Today let pomp and vain pretense
My stubborn right abide;
I set a plain man’s common sense
Against the pendant’s pride.
Today shall simple manhood try
The strengthen of gold and land;
The wide world has not wealth to buy
The power in my right hand!
While there’s grief to set redress,
Or balance to adjust,
Where weighs our living manhood less
Than Mammon’s vilest dust-
While there’s a right to need my vote,
A wrong to sweep away,
Up! clouted knee and ragged coat!
A man’s a man today!
I was finalizing some research for my vote tomorrow morning, and I noticed that the vote-smart site didn’t seem to have all the Pennsylvania races that are of interest to me. So I found that congress.org seems to have some more complete listings. So I am looking at PA attorney general, auditor general and state treasurer tonight. I also found that the League of Women Voters has a nice 2 page PA statewide voters guide that gives a good summary of all the major races.
Find out where you are supposed to go to vote at MyPollingPlace.com. It’d be a real shame if you went to vote-smart and did all of your research, and made sure you were registered, and then didn’t know where to go.
Heck just read this whole thing. It tells you what to do if you know you are in the right place and you aren’t being permitted to vote for some reason. Basically you can still cast a provisional ballot.
Since the election talk is on the minds of many and there is so much focus on the office of the President, everyone please make sure and do a little research on the other important governmental offices. I had a conversation with Mike about which office on the upcoming ballot is the most important to an individual, his argument succinctly stated is “Your representatives in the U.S. House and Senate are exactly that, your direct representatives.” It is important to try and understand all the offices and questions you may have on your ballot. So go to vote-smart.org find out who is on your ballot and do enough research to help you make a decision.
Today is the birthday of my Mom’s sister, my Godmother, Aunt, Niko’s Mom and good friend. Have a very Happy Birthday, Aunt Judy!!
Al and Reagan tied the knot a couple weekends ago. The wedding and reception were a lot of fun and well done. Congratulations.
Netscape’s DevEdge appears to be dead, which is unfortunate because it was my only saving grace when it came to screwign around with javascript. So I looked at the wayback machine and did some other googling to find the zip files for the Core JavaScript Reference and Core JavaScript Guide and stuck them on my server. So I would have somewhere to get to them in the future. Hopefully the Mozilla folks who maintain the web developer documentation will snag this stuff and put it up somewhere on their own server.
I am trying out the LivePress plugin to keep my live journal account synced up with this one. Just because I know a few people that are all into live journal, and why not have a mirror of my site. So this should be the first entry on my live journal site.
Background: My brother, Tom, is teaching a college freshman rhetoric course and has recently shown Farhenheit 9/11 in his class and apparently asked for some sort of reaction paper to be written. There also was a paper comparing the rhetorical techniques of Gandhi and Malcom X. Seen in Tom’s away message:
In grading student papers over the weekend, I’ve learned the following:
- It’s not fair to remove a president from office before he finishes a war he’s started.
- The war on Iraq was unjust, the president doesn’t seem qualified, and the facts presented in “Fahrenheit 9/11” are disturbing, but it’s unpatriotic to question the president and wrong to vote against him.
- Gandhi was a “coward and a suck-up” and “soft”
- During the 1960s, “some slavery” was beginning to be abolished.
- Americans never get to hear Bush’s side of the story
- Direct quotes: “you are a liar” (to me), and “Michael Moore can eat *&@!”
- Gandhi is more like a “Care Bear” than Malcolm X
- It’s “fucking awesome” that Bush was a cocaine addict and alcoholic
Those are the building blocks of some fine arguments.
I have added, to my blog, a list of interesting links that I come across that aren’t worth writing a whole entry about but I find interesting and worthy of sharing anyway. I had this on my old MT site, but I didn’t use it much because it was a hassle to update. I happened across del.icio.us, which bills itself as a social bookmarks manager. Their simple interface and bookmarklet has made it easy to add links and they have a simple API for extracting an HTML version of the last 10 links added, so I threw it up on the sidebar of my page. So make sure to check it out, from time to time. And if you are one of those people who use an aggregator to read my site, then simply point at your aggregator at the RSS feed to keep an eye on it.
According to our press release on Tuesday, CentraView, the contact management, calendar, opportunity tracking J2EE application which is not only used for running a business, but also used for feeding me and my family is going to be open source on November 16th. So once it is available download it, check it out and convince your employer to buy it.
I am sure many of you checked out all or part of the debates. And if you are like me you often wondered if some of the exact, very conveniently round figures that were thrown out by the candidates resembled in any way the truth. Well it seems there is a seemingly good resource on the Internet for that analysis: FactCheck.org. So it seems Bush does own a timber company.
Not that it matters much, but at least there are some other things there that we can review and look for a kernel or two of truth.
Well I am glad I stumbled upon Schneier’s blog today, it gave me some lunchtime reading material, and I found he recently wrote on a topic I have had interest in and displayed scorn for, DHS terror alerts. I published a cynical email I sent to the DHS back in April of this year. And so Bruce Schneier’s blog entry from a couple days ago: Do Terror Alerts Work? obviously struck a chord with me. Not only because his essay echos my sentiment, but because he is a respected security expert who does a good job of analyzing the terror alert system and the current government misuse of them. Sure it’s a bit long and obviously not as profound ;-) as my letter, but I certainly think it is worth a read and some consideration, and even a few emails to your congress critters to let them know that if it really is simply a choice between political CYA alerts or a new pair a shoes, that you would prefer to opt out of paying Tom Ridge’s salary and head right to the nearest cobbler’s shop. Of course we could always have them keep the tax dollars, since they already have them, and do something that would actually be effective in providing for the security of the homeland.
I just found out that Schneier is changing the format of Crypt-O-gram, for the better in my opinion. He will now continuously post his articles in a blog format. Schneier on Security. I have always liked reading the crypto-gram emails monthly, but sometimes it was a bit much to chew on all at once, and delayed my getting any work done on the 15th of the month for an extra hour or so while I digested the articles. Anyway fire up Bloglines and throw in the RSS feed.
What Bush will do if Re-elected:
Introduce the Protection of Adorable Children and Church-Going Families and Also Stick Michael Moore’s Bulbous Ass In Prison Act of 2005
Well that’s the only one of the things on that page I thought was funny, but there appear to be some other funny things on Shrove Tuesday (Observed). Like the New Air Safety Measures:
Proactive bullet to the knee of every 25th passenger
The deadline to register to vote in Pennsylvania is October 4, 2004. So, Register to Vote.
E - A - G - L - E - S! EAGLES!!!!!!
Hey, I have a few GMail invites for anyone that is interested. Just post a comment and I’ll send you one. Update: Well I sent one out, and I got a good suggestion in the comments, so I am just going to use: the isnoop.net GMail invite spooler for these and any future invites I get.
Hey everyone, exercise your right to vote, do not disenfranchise yourself. People in the short but storied history of the US have given their lives for the right to vote, so exercise it. Please go sign up to vote, to do so, go here and click on the Rock the Vote link. This is part of a contest that the guys from HotOrNot.org are running, apparently they want to get people to vote, and drum up publicity for themselves. So I got suckered in, why not? So while you are on that page sign up to win 100K, if you use my referal link and win, then I will win 100K also. I signed up a couple weeks ago, I haven’t gotten any spam as a result, therefore feel free. Plus money is good. Register at VoteOrNot.org. If people actually use my link I’ll post back here about how many people I ended up referring. Plus after you sign up, you will get your own referal page you can use to have other people sign up and increase your chances of winning.
But if you don’t want to participate in that, at least register to vote in the general election and do it.
Wow, the Bush Twins hit the stage at the RNC and were terrible. If they think it is a good idea to trot out the first twins to introduce their father, so he can introduce their mother, then maybe they should go out of their way to have them practice the speech ahead of time. Because the fact that they had never even read this tandem speech before, let alone practiced aloud, was evident by their lack of timing on many bad jokes and obvious general disinterest in the content. Anyway, these conventions are all pretty stupid, the only thing that passes for content is restating of what the polls tell them everyone thinks the problems are. By the way, anyone know where I can find the democratic 2004 platform? I found the republican’s after a little hunting, but can’t find anything other than the democrats 2000 platform. Come on guys, get your act together, there are only a couple months left. I should have no problem finding these things. Of course there was no shortage of worthless publicity shots and bashing the other party. Yeah I get it, you are both smarter than each other. Now where are your plans?
Update: found the democrats platform. Yeah, yeah, right under my nose.
I have begun the process of moving all of my stuff to a new web hosting provider. To ease the transition, I decided to also switch from MovableType to WordPress. Installing wordpress was easy, and importing my entries was easy. The hard part will be trying to make it so my old broken permalinks are still valid here, and I may simply have to give up on that. But hopefully the flexible format for the permalinks I have used here will allow me to make it last. Next I need to get my gallery and email moved.
Wanna track all the daily deals in your favorite news aggregator? Well get on over to Roosster and add a couple feeds so when you finally do crack open that wallet to buy crap you will have some money left over to put your McDonald’s coupons to use. Some other good resources for the more thrifty among us are freecycle and craigslist. Freecycle: I was able to get a “new” color printer for my brother, I think the Wookie secured a chest freezer to store dead things in, and there were another couple near misses. Plus once I start filling up on extra junk I will be more than happy to give back.
And check out your local craigslist, which is basically a high signal to noise classifieds section. I think they charge for job postings to support themselves, but otherwise anyone can post. And they wisely have RSS feeds for most of their stuff too.
A few posts ago I mentioned in passing that a great firefox plugin would provide the ability to sync up bookmarks over the internet. Well I shouldn’t have rhetorically asked myself and the 3 people who read this thing, I should have asked google. So I did. And someone has written the greatest plugin for firefox ever: Bookmarks Synchronizer. You just need access to an FTP or WebDAV server to upload. But now finally after many years of using web browsers is the bookmark function actually useful and makes it worthwhile to maintain some level of bookmark organization. And if you don’t currently use firefox, maybe you should.
In a few hours my brother should be rolling into Iowa after his 24 hour stint of driving a 14 foot box truck with 92 Honda Civic in tow. Well he has two friends helping out, Thanks Pat and Ian. I would have liked to go out there for a few days and help him get settled, but since I got the kid on the way around Christmas, I am hoarding vacation days and money. Since he hasn’t chosen an ISP yet he probably won’t be seeing this for a while, but good luck, Tom. You will be missed around here while you are learnin’ how to write all fancy at the fancy writin’ school.
PS: don’t ever rent a UHaul using the internet, it is nothing but trouble, they haven’t figured out how to coordinate the reservations and they always end up screwing it up in some manner, hell, they won’t even tell you where or when you will be getting the truck until the day before. You are much better served paging through the phone book and calling your local UHaul locations. They know their own inventory and schedule and will hold the truck for you. They will even attempt to service special requests. The experience may be different for Ryder or Budget, but I had that experience renting a truck three years ago, and my brother and brother-in-law both had similar troubles this year.
truancy:n. pl. truancies The act or condition of being absent without permission.
Madden 2005 is due out soon. Pick a reason.
Yet another thought provoking article from Paul Graham: Great Hackers.
I’ve found that people who are great at something are not so much convinced of their own greatness as mystified at why everyone else seems so incompetent. The people I’ve met who do great work rarely think that they’re doing great work. They generally feel that they’re stupid and lazy, that their brain only works properly one day out of ten, and that it’s only a matter of time until they’re found out.
Yeah, I know anyone who reads my blog already saw this somewhere else, or doesn’t really care to read it. Well I want to be able to find it again. And I haven’t found a good way to do bookmark sharing between many different machines. Maybe a good idea for a firefox plugin.
The courts are trying to break the Internet. There has been a temporary restraining order issued in a state court allowing a customer to take a non-portable IP address with them when they leave. Read about the insanity here. This would be a bad thing for service providers if the precedent is set. And provides no measurable gain for consumers. I mean DNS sort of solved whatever problem the petitioner seeks to rectify by keeping their IP address. Frankly I am of the opinion that telephone number portability is stupid as well. I barely remember phone numbers any more, my cell phone has made that practice obsolete.
Opt out of Doubleclick Now you can be tracked as id=OPT_OUT instead of whoever doubleclick thinks you are. This is a nice step forward in privacy.
The Great Philadelphia Fan Book by Glen Macnow and Anthony Gargano, offers a great insight into the psyche of the Philadelphia Fan in this excerpt:
Through the 1920s, booing remained our little secret. There were no outside reporters of the Michael Wilbon ilk to label us America’s nastiest fans. But that all ended when the A’s hosted the St. Louis Cardinals for Game 2 of the World Series on October 2, 1930.
Among the 32,000 fans on hand that sunny afternoon was President Herbert Hoover, looking for a few hours of escape from the gloomy economic news of the time. In those days—despite the Depression and Prohibition—heckling a president was unheard of. But as Hoover’s limousine drove onto the field near third base, the murmurs began. And when Hoover stepped onto the field and tipped his top-hat, the crowd, let loose.
From everywhere in the park the boos came, said Horvitz. I never heard such booing in my life. Then they started yelling, We want beer. It reverberated over the whole park.
Just started reading the book. So far, so good.
Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything. -Kurt Vonnegut (1922 - ), Cat’s Cradle (Source)
On Saturday I tested for and received my First Degree brown belt. This is the last belt before black. I have a lot of work to do to acheive the first real advanced rank in our system, the black belt, but I am up for it. The black belt test is scheduled for December 11. And unless something unforseen happens I will be in the group testing. Here is hoping that the critter is accomodating to those 3 hours, since the dark art of birthday prediction has chosen December 6th.
Thanks to my Chief Instructor, 4th degree black belt Jim Wing for sharing his knowledge in such an unselfish, supportive and enthusiastic way.
Ken Jennings has won $376,158 so far on Jeopardy! and he is still going. It is impressive to watch as he hits a groove and runs 3 whole categories in Double Jeopardy! getting both daily doubles. Continued luck, Ken. And way to represent the software engineers of the world.
Perusing bugzilla led me to a workaround that solves this problem: install the Firefox help.
The new release of firefox seems to have a major bug in Linux. If you browse to a secure site which doesn’t have a pristine SSL cert, it locks it up. I found the following bug that appears to have been hijacked by 0.9 users to report this bug. So either show me the real bug so I can vote for it, or everyone hop in create an account and vote for this bug.
Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owesyou nothing. It was here first.
– Mark Twain
Over the last few days my wife has been awesome. She took care of a bunch of stuff, like having the heater serviced and cleaned, securing reservations for Fourth of July weekend at my Uncle’s in Maryland, along with making a sandwich for my lunch almost every day. On top of that yesterday she woke me up for work with pancakes and bacon warm and waiting. And today she drove me into work, because my car is at Bruce’s for inspection, oil change, etc. And a bunch of other stuff she does to make my life awesome.
Thanks, Michelle, I love you.
I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see it’s path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.Only I will remain.
– The Bene Gesserit Litany of Fear from the novel Dune by Frank Herbert
To all the fear mongers who work for the popular media companies:
I am not scared.
I don’t care who you think has weapons of mass destruction, or what eating a specific food item will do to me, or how bad it’s going to rain tomorrow. At least not to the overhyped levels to which you are pumping these and other popular memes. Specifically when you provide no real news, other than a misinterpretation of a press release from the day before. Do you feel even a little pang of remorse as you prey on fear to sell advertising space?
I am NOT scared.
The Manayunk Drinking competition is coming up fast. June 6th is the Wachovia USPRO Championship. And since it is likely that this year may be the last where my brother has a house along the route he has stepped up admirably. To go along with the standard fare of 2 kegs of beer, and various dead animals, there is the centerpiece dead animal, a 40 lb. roast pig. They will be getting this from Cannuli’s Meats in South Philly that specializes in the preparation of these delicacies for similair unholy celebrations. The drinking starts at 6:30 AM, and the definition of “Bike Race Drunk” becomes evident by about noon. There are also rumors that some kind of athletic competition will be ongoing, but I am skeptical. You can read my review of the debauchery from 2003. There are also some crappy pictures. I am hoping to repair my Aiptek pen cam in time to get some better pictures this year. And I am also hoping to hang in without getting totally wrecked, but only time will tell.
My Brother, Tom, graduated from LaSalle University yesterday with a BA in English, Maxima Cum Laude (which means a 3.9 or better GPA). I also witnessed him receive a fistful of honors in the past couple of weeks, including the top student in the English department, where the Professor bestowing the honor indicated that they had run out of awards to give to him.
As a further testament to his ability he has been accepted into and will be attending The Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. For those who don’t know, being accepted to this program is a very high honor. Evidenced by their selection policy summed up on the workshop’s history page:
Though we agree in part with the popular insistence that writing cannot be taught, we exist and proceed on the assumption that talent can be developed, and we see our possibilities and limitations as a school in that light. If one can “learn” to play the violin or to paint, one can “learn” to write, though no processes of externally induced training can ensure that one will do it well. Accordingly, the fact that the Workshop can claim as alumni nationally and internationally prominent poets, novelists, and short story writers is, we believe, more the result of what they brought here than of what they gained from us. We continue to look for the most promising talent in the country, in our conviction that writing cannot be taught but that writers can be encouraged.
So Congratulations and Good Luck, Tom.
When I get a chance I will put some of Tom’s more recent writing samples up here.
When I do good, I feel good; when I do bad, I feel bad, and that is my religion.
Abraham Lincoln (1809 - 1865), (attributed)
Easily accomplished consistent reading of the Quotes of theDay is just one of the many reasons I enjoy using Bloglines
By the way is this similar to how G.W. Bush decided to take our country to war? I am of course referring to the President reportedly quoted as saying: God told me to strike at al Qaida and I struck them, and then he instructed me to strike at Saddam …. Source: here.
Updated NFL Power Rankings. Again the Birds are almost on top. Now they just have to continue to perform. And way to take one for the team Sami Kappanen and drag yourself to the bench to clear the way for JR to vanquish the Leafs. That OT period last night made for some good watchin'.
This weekend aside from cutting a mountain of grass I participated in the MS Walk with some friends. I had fun, and I narrowly avoided a foot blister (have to remember to wear better fitting socks when walking several miles), Bob wrote about it here. And while there was discussion of the game we played: The Settlers of Catan:
I really enjoyed taking an emotionally relaxing walk through Tyler State Park with Tara and her parents, Dave, Dave’s friend Kevin, Pat, Tim, and Dia. Afterward we had exactly four people left for a game of Settlers, and Tara fed us well.
I noted it was suspiciously omitted who actually won in this ultimate battle of wits. It was the first time I had played the game, and it was a pretty cool game, much more fun than Scrabble or Yatzee (burn). And it was I, Dave’s friend Kevin, who triumphantly and most accidentally declared victory after a couple of hours.
“A zygote is a gamete’s way of producing more gametes. This may be the purpose of the Universe.” -Robert A. Heinlein For those that don’t already know, Michelle is now about 9 weeks pregnant. Also for those who don’t already know, how come we don’t talk anymore… But seriously, I’m gonna be a Daddy.
I am very excited, and slightly nervous or maybe nervous isn’t the right word, it is more a feeling of awareness. I am slightly more aware of things that I need to do to improve myself, to prepare for the coming of my child.
I just hope I can do for my child a mere fraction of the wonderful life my parents provided for me. Thanks again, Michelle, for making my life even more amazing.
So I found my temporary desk replacement: the Jerker from IKEA. (Where the hell do the come up with these names) I liked it because it is mostly steel, and I can easily (with an allen wrench) break it down to 5 pieces. And be reasonably sure that I can put it back together in relatively good shape. I used the upper shelf as a monitor stand to have the monitor raised up a little. So it is efficient, durable and useful, and it wasn’t one of those crappy all particle board ones that I saw at every other furniture place.
Now I have to work on designing my new corner desk.
The tournament was pretty cool. And I saw people from my school (Villari’s Trevose Studio) do very well. Congratulations Nick, Sheila, Steve and Chris who all left with a bunch of hardware. Probably other representatives from my school did well also, I just didn’t have time to notice, as I was also competing. I came in second place in the “Forms” or “Katas” competition as it says on the tropy. I was pleased with my performance, The form I did was called “3 Kata” and I felt I made a good showing of it. I knew I had done well, because I wasn’t conscience that I was actually doing the form until I was about half way through. The guy who came in first, in that competetion swept the adult green through brown stripe division. I had the misfortune to draw him in the opening match of the sparring division. I lost 5 - 3, I did disagree with the last point he was awarded (I felt I blocked it with two hands) but both judges agreed he should have had that point. However, I do know that he deserved to win that competition overall.
Overall it was a good time, and I am looking forward to competing again, for no other reason than to see quite a bit of cool things done, by a bunch of good martial artists.
Also congratulations to all who competed in the Villari’s Pennsylvania Regional Martial Arts tournament. I hope everyone enjoyed it as much as I did. And I look forward to competing with many of you again.
The Villari’s regional tournament is tomorrow. I am excited to compete for the first time. I will be representing the Trevose studio, and hopefully I will make a good showing. I am competing in Forms, Point Sparring and Self Defense. Also congratulations to the Trevose Head Instructor Jim Wing, on achieving his fourth degree black belt. I think this officially acknowledges his ability to beat me up while expending no energy at all.
And if you didn’t notice in my previous post, I am doing my part to help the economy, to go along with the new desk I will need, I just got new rugs in the bedrooms. Living room is on backorder to be installed next week. All this goes along with Michelle’s new alternator, battery and Fan belts.
Anyone who wants me to continue to help the economy can feel free to aid in funding this spending spree via PayPal.
My el-cheapo desk which I got from Best Buy a while ago finally bought the farm. I was moving it to get my new rugs installed when a major supporting part turned into mostly sawdust. Luckily for me the township trash guys seemed to not have any problem taking all of it. But unlucky for me and mostly unlucky for my wife’s UT2K4 game. I currently have no where to stick my computer.
So I am currently seeking options, I have basically ruled out replacing it with something similar. I would prefer a desk that will support being moved (taken apart and put back together) many times without an extroidinary amount of damage occuring as a result. So I guess anything made out of some kind of metal or pvc tubing hooked up to wooden horizontal areas would do okay. But I haven’t had much luck finding anything that was too interesting browsing on-line furniture collections.
So here are the basic requirements.
My current thought, is the only way I will meet all my needs inexpensively is to build something myself. But to meet the quickness demand, I will probably have to buy something crappy temporarily, which will eventually make it’s way to the basement, after I can build the ultimate desk.
Anyone have any desk suggestions? Or even some suggestions on how to build a desk?
So which is it? Is it new, or is it the same thing, just improved in some way? Is there some kind of anti-logic class that is required to get a degree in marketing?
Well despite my best efforts, the Eagles didn’t win the SuperBowl this year. Congratulations to the Birds for another excellent season. But like every fan, and gamer addicted to Madden Franchise mode, I have my suggestions for offseason talent aquisition priorities.
Probably a bunch of other stuff..
But thanks for an exciting season.
A couple of weeks ago I tested for, and recieved my Brown Belt! I have been studying martial arts for about 14 months now, and it has been great. Everyone should at least try it out. It’s great to know you have some knowledge and ability to protect your family and yourself, if you ever need to. Especially since there is no one going to do it for you. But now I will really hammer the fundamentals for a while as I progress through the 3 stages of brown belt, and hopefully later this year or early next year I will become a serious beginner (read: black belt). Also an added bonus was the Cane and Belt clinic given by Master Rick Madore, I got to learn for about 2 hours how to use a standard wooden cane or a belt to defend myself. Weapons are cool.
On Ryan’s suggestion I am trying out MT-Blacklist to filter the spam. Basically it takes blacklist I entered and compares any URL’s in the ping or comment to the blacklist. Any that match are discarded. You can see my blacklist. It is the same as the master blacklist, except for one entry that was added by scanning my existing spam laden comments. It seems this should work pretty well, at least against the ones I had been getting.
I am sure there is already quite a bit of work on filtering the scumbag spam comments that get posted to popular weblog entries. But now I have to try and figure out how to implement it. In case it wasn’t clear. No one is welcome to utilize my software and computer resources to advertise their crap without my prior approval. So bugger off!
Is there a SpamAssassin MT plugin?
Or is the solution much simpler?
Merry Christmas Happy New Year!!!
LA Fitness opened a new club in Fort Washington which turns out to be 1.7 mi. from my house. Which seems to take about 3 minutes to travel to and from at 5 AM and 6:15 AM respectively. This makes me happy.
I believe it opened yesterday, it is nice, it’s one that has the upper level for the aerobic stuff, which is cool to be able to look out over the club while you are running, however it is a bad design because of the fact that hot air ends up where the people are in the most need of cool air. Plus now-a-days the heater tends to be on, and that is where the ducts are blowing on you. But it’s only a mild discomfort, much better than running in the torrential rain that was going on this morning.
Anyway I was the only one working out there from about 5:01 AM - until about 5:25 when another guy showed up. That was great. I left about 6:15 and am now quite excited to be able to get back into my old 5AM routine.
One of the cardinal rules of filmmaking:
Any movie where one large group of people with swords runs at an opposing group of people with swords is awesome.
Lord of the Rings: Return of the King employs this trick about 172 times, therefore making it whatever awesome times 172 is.
-Tom (my brother in an away message)
Цитирую <- (The actual russian word will show up here if your browser and OS don’t suck.) Apparently the preceding Russian means literally translated (by a computer): “I cite.” As in an attribution at the begining of an email quote.
I really need to learn some other languages.
using an object before checking if it is null makes baby jesus cry.
c’mon people check your return value
better yet:
- Before you start writing a method, decide whether it will ever return null. Document this decision in the @return section of the method’s Javadoc.
- Never have a method return null unless there’s a really good reason for it.
- If your method returns an array or a collection, there’s no reason to ever return null. Return an empty array or collection instead.
- If you have a situation where null is a valid value for a variable, you can make use of the Introduce Null Object refactoring, to make the behaviour explicit.
Read more here.
There are few creatures more feral and dangerous than a stressed, sleep-deprived, overly-caffinated programmer who has just been told that a bug they fixed two months ago has resurfaced… for the third time.
She stole my car! Ordinarily that wouldn’t make much sense, but in this case it was the exact right thing to do. I asked her to find me somewhere to get my oil changed and my windsheild fixed or replaced. So she did, she tried to get a hold of me but I was busy in meetings this morning, and left my cell phone in my jacket. So she came and stole my car to get the oil changed and get the windshield inspected.
Luckily she thought to leave me the keys to her car so I can get home. Anyway, Michelle is the best!
Thanksgiving with Mom, Tom and my wife was great, I missed having my dad there, but I love spending time with my Mom. Breakfast with the in-law’s for three straight days was good, it made sure that I got my fill of eggs and bacon those days. And Michelle and her Mom spent Friday and Saturday baking about a million Christmas cookies at my house. It gave me time to run the new phone lines to my office, and to get quite a bit of Madden franchise time in. I won the superbowl and then started trading all my old players for draft picks and young players. (Note: always keep the signing bonus money as low as possible, unless you are sure you will keep the player through the end of the contract, even if it means a higher overall salary)
Then the Eagles continued to be awesome with their 7th straight victory. Thank goodness that Fox forgot how to use timeouts and Kasay forgot how to kick field goals.
Then I helped Frank move some of his new (used) furniture from his cousin’s condo into his new condo. All in all a busy, yet oftentimes restful long weekend.
So I finally found a fun use for my useless camera phone. TextAmerica has a neat feature where you can send the image from your phone and it will post it onto a weblog. And they have some canned javascript so it will suck it down and stick it on some other site too. So I have created my Moblog that I will probably update a whole lot at first and then slowly neglect as I continue to be busy with work and other fun things. Maybe I’ll find some free time and make the templates between the two sites match up, and if I had even more free time, I could search for and integrate some code, so I could just do the same thing here. But more than likely I will just use their stuff, as it is already done, and works well enough.
But enjoy it while it lasts.
“Iam. I think. I will. …”
“What must I say besides? These are the words. This is the answer.”
“I stand here on the summit of the mountain. I lift my head and I spread my arms. This—my body and spirit—this is the end of the quest. I wished to know the meaning of things. I am the meaning. I wished to find a warrant for being. I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction. …”
—Ayn Rand
So be it.
227.0 lbs. Hit the gym again, just ran again was running late. 20+5 minutes 2.65 mi. somehow I injured my right rib in the past 3 days. I don’t remember getting hit at all at karate, maybe I strained a muscle somehow? But it is quite sensitive to touch.
… back to work.
this morning 227.5, woohoo! Time to celebrate with a half-gallon of ice cream and a day off from the gym. Alright well I won’t eat the ice-cream but I have skipped the gym. Mostly because karate ran late, then I couldn’t get to sleep until around 11:45, (mainly because I was researching how to pre-compile JSP files for my work.) And I learned in the past that going to the gym really tired too often impacts my general ability to function. So I slept in, until 6 AM. But the day is not a total loss, I have karate again tonight. I just have to try really hard to get to sleep as soon as possible after class so I can make the gym tomorrow.
So far so good, but I am currently pretty hungry.
Already feeling the effects. 5 AM comes really early. There just needs to be something inside that makes you want to get up when it is pitch dark and cold. But I got up. Still weiging in at 228.5, so illogically that is discouraging, especially because I feel 2 pounds hungrier. But it is the knowledge that there are many factors that can attribute to your instantaneous weight and that it has only really been one day that makes you continue. It would truly be discouraging if it were still the same number on December 1. Anyway here is the breakdown: Alarm goes of at 5 AM (my clock is about 18 minutes fast purposely, I don’t like to see the clock saying 4 something when it is dark and cold). I start my car (remote starter is on point), and weigh in. Dispense with a large glass of water and head for the gym. Unfortunately I forgot my towel but I decided since I have karate and probably ATP tonight I will only run and stretch, so the towel is not entirely necessary.
5:08 AM: arrive at LA Fitness. Run for 20 minutes at 7.1 MPH go through automated cooldown for 5 minutes. The automated cooldown drops to 4.5 MPH and then drops .5 MPH every minute. In the first 20 minutes I went 2.37 miles. And this treadmill tracks the distance for the cooldown as well, so overall I went 2.65 miles. Then a little stretching and back home to eat, make lunch and shower. In work by 7:12 AM.
Anyway, I am hungry, and my left foot hurts a little from the running two days in a row. But I am also full of energy, and accomplishment, and luckily it is just about lunch time.
About 2 years ago on this date I started doing something about being fat. I had realized a few months earlier that I was way overweight, approximately 300 lbs, and I signed up for LA Fitness, but didn’t go very frequently and didn’t alter my caloric intake at all. Then I happened across The Hacker’s Diet and everything that John Walker had written in there made a whole lot of sense to me, I read the entire thing in a few hours, printed it out and stuck it in a binder in case the web version ever went away. I started on the 18th, going to the gym, weighing myself daily and eating only 1200 - 1500 calories a day. By May I was down to 218 lbs. I have done generally well since then, primarily because I hit the gym frequently and I am very comitted to my karate study. (I just got Green with a Brown Stripe.) I realized recently that I had let my eating habits deteriorate again. And I find myself at 228.5 lbs. Which is not too bad, however given the significance of this date, I have decided to give it another go of low intake and very consistent gym appearances. So starting today, I am focusing on 1500 - 1800 calories a day of intake. My goal is 198.5, which will be the first time I have been under 200 since I was a Junior in High School when I had done all that Bally’s work over the summer for Football, with my friends Frank and Joe.
I am going to try and keep my progress documented on here. Just in case anyone wants to follow along at home. But I hit the gym this morning. And have stuck to my planned calorie intake so far. Had about 300 for breakfast and 500 for lunch leaving plenty of room for a snack and some dinner. Luckily my illness last week caused me not too each much so I think the worst of the initial hunger headaches are already past me, just have to use my brain every time I think I want to eat something.
The RedHat Linux Project, now called the Fedora Project, has recently put out the first release of Fedora Core. I guess you might be tempted to call this RedHat 10, or 9.1 or something, but I like this movement in redhat opening up the development process in this project. It should get me my fancy newer software faster, and I am more likely to be able to find an RPM for something. I am going to be installing Yarrow (the new release name) tonight on my work laptop. So hopefully the 2GHz, 512 MB machine can handle all the fancy widgets and colors of Gnome 2.4.
“no message.” I think this one may top the list, followed closely by “changed some stuff.”
When working in a geographically distributed development environment. Anyone who can’t find the time to be as verbose as possible when updating the rest of the team as to what they have done, should be promoted to management as soon as possible where they can do the least amount of harm.
How doth the little crocodileImprove his shining tail, And pour the waters of the Nile On every golden scale!
How cheerfully he seems to grin, How neatly spreads his claws, And welcomes little fishes in, With gently smiling jaws! - Lewis Carrol Against Idleness and Mischief How doth the little busy bee Improve each shining hour, And gather honey all the day From every opening flower!
How skillfully she builds her cell! How neat she spreads the wax! And labours hard to store it well With the sweet food she makes.
In works of labour or of skill, I would be busy too; For Satan finds some mischief still For idle hands to do.
In books, or work, or healthful play, Let my first years be passed, That I may give for every day Some good account at last - Isaac Watts
Well I hadn’t written in some time, primarily because I have been very busy. At work we are fast approaching the release of our product, so the unexpected emergencies combined with the already tight schedule keeps me at the appropriate stress level.
My home purchase will be completed on Friday, and I am moving on Saturday. So working on last minute details, packing and buying furniture and appliances has chewed into my time. Luckily my wife is great and has born the brunt of the work here. But borrowing tons of money and buying lots of stuff has a way of sucking in many hours of work.
In Karate I have just earned my green belt. I now am officially an advanced student. Although that acknowlegement of accomplishment is tempered with the commonly heard description of a black belt as a “serious beginner.”
I still have been attempting to hit the gym in the mornings. Its going pretty well.
The Eagles are 0 - 2 :-( Primarily looks to me like they are pressing too hard to perform. Everyone is trying to overplay their position to the level that they are no longer even competent at their regular duties. I guess the self pressure of a season framed as “do or die for the super bowl” can cause you to self destruct, regardless of your talent level. Hopefully they can get it turned around.
And finally adding to my personal time commitments is Fantasy Football. As this seems to be my lowest priority time wise, it has shown, I am currently 0 - 3 in both of the leagues I am playing in. Luckily I haven’t spent much time on this, so maybe I can acheive the dubious distinction of going 0 - 13 in two different leagues. I still believe in one of my teams, the other would require quite a bit of luck to do well. Basically my first draft served as my research for the second draft.
Well next up, sign the papers and start the *home* improvement fest!
No, this is not a rant about viagra or levitra prices. It’s a rant about bedroom furniture. Turns out it is pretty darn expensive for real solid wood clad construction. So my decision easily swung to veneer finished solid pieces. Which means there is some solid wood in there, and it is glued together or something. Although from examining it closehand it seems the drawers are solid clad wood with the dovetail joints, and most of it looks pretty sturdy. I imagine it lasting for quite some time.
One of the sales guys tried to sell me on the solid clad that it would last about a million years or so. My big argument is that Michelle has been using a dresser that is about 17 years old, that appears to have been done of even lesser quality and looks to me like it will continue to last into the next century. Or until I dump it somewhere.
I have recently come across a new project called WikiTravel. It is intended to be a collaborative and freely available travel guide. It is just getting started so there is not much information available at this point. But I think this could be really useful. I mean I use the Wikipedia almost every day to look up some information, and it is starting to get really good. And of course Everything2 uses a somewhat similar model for collaborative information sharing. And both of those resources have quite a bit of good information there, but without the authors who contribute their work, there would be nothing. I can see a great use for the vision of this WikiTravel guide so it would be interesting if it can succeed. So the point is, go to WikiTravel and Plunge Forward, you probably have quite a bit of interesting stuff to share be it about your hometown or about the exotic place you just visited. I guess I should find some time to write about my recent trip to Disney.
But this is HDTV. It’s got better resolution than the real world. -Fry (Futurama) The Eagles won their opening game of the “for fake” season. And I watched it at Dave’s in HDTV. It is extremely crisp and a very good picture that does make quite a difference in the viewing experience, however it certainly is not worth more than $500 to me, at least at this point in my financial history. But if given the opportunity, I will try and catch more high definition games. I imagine it is really great for watching ice hockey.
By the way, the Eagles are going to be awesome again because of the following reasons:
Busy signals and all other manner of errors the phone spits out at you are quite irritating. Well I guess lesson learned, next time stand in line somewhere.
Eagles tickets are completely sold out at this point.
Luckily Tom’s friends were able to score 8 tickets to each of the Patriots and Saints games. Hopefully they are feeling generous and want to share in the love. I am just asking to purchase two tickets.
The best season of the year is again starting up. Football season! And the best team in the league is getting ready to play their first preseason game Monday night against the Saints. I can’t wait to get tickets to The Linc, to see the Eagles play some football. And tickets go on sale tomorrow!
My brother and his friends have decided their best bet is to get in line a day in advance at the local Ticketmaster outlet. I am going to try my luck on the phone. Hopefully I am successful, for the sole reason that they are my wife’s birthday present.
E - A - G - L - E - S EAGLES!!!!
According to the following quote it is apparent to me that I didn’t give Futurama much of a chance back when I watched those couple of episodes, when they tried to put it on a cozy pre or post Simpson’s timeslot. Must be time to go home and set the ReplayTV. And while I am at it might as well record The Family Guy too. Float like a floatbox, sting like an automatic stingin’ machine. –Bender
Gonna Check out Peter Kullberg, today. To see if he can help me find a house to buy. I don’t know how anyone can pick a realtor without a personal referral, there are millions of these guys. Hopefully, this guy proves to be worthwhile.
Today is my wife’s birthday. Happy Birthday Mrs. McAllister, I love you!
Apparently buying a house is the thing to do nowadays. But man there are some people that are out of their mind with their listings. They have houses that just a couple of years ago were worth maybe $125k. And now they are asking $225+. Obviously the astoundingly low interest rates offset that by increasing my buying power. But it makes it nearly impossible to put 20% down which means I either need to get Personal Mortgage Insurace or arrange a separate deal with my lender to get a second mortgage which just covers the difference between my downpayment and what it would take to get to 20%. Not to mention the effect it has on tax. And the other factor is that a house is an investment. Is there any possible way that the cost of a house will go up from what I purchase it at now? It looks to me like RHAT at $160/share or QCOM at $400/share or whatever their outrages all time highs were. If I settle for something I don’t really want but can afford, I may be stuck there for a long time unless I want to sell at a loss. (I wonder if there are any tax breaks for people who lose on property investments? And are they limited to some value like $2K a year such as securities investments on the Schedule D). Just more research I need to do.
Well I think the primary key here is patience. Houses are flying on and off the market, I just need to find the right one and negotiate the right deal. If anyone wants to give me 30 or 40 thousand dollars let me know.
BTW, if anyone out there wants to hire a teacher who is excellent yet underpaid and under appretiated by the rotten Philadelphia School district. Let me know.
Well its been 11 days, and so far so good. The wedding went great, The people at Cedarbrook Hill Country Club did an exemplary job. The supporting cast was also good, particularly the videographer who got some of the best compliments from people, those being, “I don’t remember the videographer at all.” So he did a great job staying out of the way. Thanks to all my friends and family who made the day great. Honeymoon: Disney World was awesome, the AAA Romance package is worth it, especially if you are going to eat at a fine restaraunt like “The Yachtsman Club” at the Epcot resorts, the filet mignon was tremendous, and the Oyster’s Rockafeller were very good. And Cirque du Soleil’s La Nouba was quite an interesting and entertaining time of living it up. I also recommend the Wilderness Lodge as it was a great place to stay. And I got to ride the new Epcot attraction which isn’t scheduled to open until August 15, Mission: SPACE.
All I can say is: it is one of the top 3 rides in all of Walt Disney World, it is up there with the Tower of Terror, and the Rockin Rollercoaster, although not quite as extreme as those two. It involves clever repurposing of the old carnival concept of spinning you fast so that you stick to the wall. But with all the requisite Disney Imagineering to make it from a simple ride into an experience. And of course I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that it starred Lieutenant Dan.
I have a bunch of pictures that will be added to my gallery when I get a chance. I had a great time, and I am sorry to have it end. Of course if it didn’t end, a couple more days of paying for food in Disney would surely have bankrupt me.
Well the time is almost upon me. It was December of 2001 when I proposed to Michelle, and the wedding date is tomorrow. Despite my outward appearance and my frequent denials, I am starting to get excited. As far as I can tell the plans have all come together and all of Michelle’s hard work in planning this wedding will finally come to fruition. Its a very strange thing; all this many months of planning and hiring people to perform different tasks which are woven together into a 5 or 6 hour tapestry (or maybe wirlwind) of heart touching ceremony, friends, family and a big, loud, noisy party which will be over almost as quickly as it has come. I hope Michelle and I are able to heed the advice of all the married veterans who have told me to focus on enjoying the day, and not worrying about the minor things that may have gone awry. Because this important day, like so many in our life, will flow past with such speed and remind us again of our regretfully limited memory if we don’t stop staring at the overwhelming minutiae and try and enjoy the whole of what is happening.
Thank you to all of my large group of family and friends who have supported us throughout our entire lives. You have made this joy possible, and I am proud that you will be there to share my greatest day.
And then Sunday: Walt Disney World or bust!
Oh yeah, on Saturday I tested for and recieved my blue belt. I think this solidly places me in the intermediate category. Of course I have heard black belts in my system referred to as “serious” beginners. But at least I get some new material, and a new form.
This movie was great. I caught it at 7PM last night, and all I can say is wow. There was a great story, I really liked the production effort put into trying to make it more like a comic book, with the split views and vibrant colors. And everyone who thought the CG hulk was going to be too cartoonish, no way. I mean come on, do you want Lou Ferrigno to play him some more? He is more cut out for security guard work than anything else. But seriously it was quite easy to suspend disbelief for that big monster. And guess what, they had a pretty good story going on too. So enjoy.
Attention All morons who think the only way to slow your vehicle, particularly on a high-speed roadway, is to apply the brake: Please stop by at your convenience so I can punch you in the head. On a related note, anyone who wants to assist in handing out head punches, apply within.
Well I just got my upper right wisdom tooth extracted. It wasn’t bad at all, aparently novocaine is a fairly good thing for body part removal. Anyway, I guess I should make sure my remaining teeth don’t get to such a level of decay as to warrant removal.
I went to the Dentist for the first time in about 4 or 5 years the other day. I was prompted to go because my upper right wisdom tooth sort of crumbled when I threw a quarters worth of chicle tabs in my mouth after lunch. I had been planning a trip to the dentist for a year or so, and just never got around to it. This event helped me re-arranged my priorities. The first trip I went to my regular dentist from when I was a child. He looked at it took and X-ray and suggested it be extracted. Said it was fairly well decayed. So today I will have #1 extracted, hopefully that isn’t too bad. But I decided in the mean time I should have a checkup and a cleaning. Mike had previously told me about Doctor Mel Burchman, and his hi-tech dentistry, no drills, etc… So I decided to check it out. Well all I can say about my experience with Dr. Burchman is that it was phenomenal. I am used to the 1 - 2 hour appointment for x-ray, cleaning, poking and scaling of the teeth. Where you spend 95% of the time with a dental technician and the dentist pokes his head in to sign off on their work. Well the trip to see Dr. High Tech was quite different. I was there for no longer than 40 minutes. The X-ray was done at a single shot, rather than sticking a bunch of film in your mouth and then pointing that X-Ray gun at your head. They had this device that just spun around your head, and put your full mouth X-Ray on a single piece of film, and it was placed where you could see it. Then about 30 minutes were spent with the Doctor examining the X-Ray, finding all the cavities, I have 10 :-( And showing you pictures of the decaying teeth up on the rooms TV. Then there was the best part, the cleaning. He used this high powered sandblaster, basically just a strong water pick, and cleaned all my teeth in about 3 minutes, with no scraping and minimal gum poking, then I was finished.
I went back yesterday to have some of the cavities filled, again it was about 30 minutes with the Doctor, where he used an even stronger sandblaster to removed the decayed material from my teeth, and then patched up the three newly formed holes with some type of natural colored filling and a laser. No novicaine, and only a couple short periods of slight discomfort. When he was sandblasting the tooth, I felt a hot sensation when he was lasering the tooth, and finally the buffer/polisher he used to clean up the patch jobs a little was slightly uncomfortable. But the entire visit took exactly 35 minutes. I need to go back twice more to finish the job, but I can see myself going to this dentist twice a year for my cleanings, because it is so quick and hassle-free. That should prevent these marathons of cavity filling.
So I started drinking at 8:50 AM on Sunday June 8th. My brother rents a house in Manayunk, which is a section of Philadelphia that was originally a real blue colar town when my parents were growing up there, now it is a strange mixture of a shopping attraction, convenient (and high priced) living area for people who work in and around the city, and there are still the roots of hard working grit. Manayunk has become a trendy area for the rich to live in very old houses and try and find a place to park their many SUVs and expensive cars, there is also the college element as it is centrally located to LaSalle, Drexel, UPenn, Villanova, St. Joes and others. And of course there is Main street which is littered with overpriced resturants, bars and nick-nack shops squeezed in between container factories and some other industrial plants, all butted up against the Canal that used to be the lifeblood of the town. Anyway the point of this description was to give you a feel for a neighborhood that is a mixture of college life, rusty grit, high polish, lots of bars and lots of cars squeezed into a layout that was designed for a few horses and buggies to pass through.
So I showed up in Manayunk with 35 lbs of ice to help keep the keg of Michelob and the keg of highlife cold, so we could have a full day of drinking, cooking dead animals and oh yeah, I think there was a bike race too.
Drinking went on for the whole day, starting at 8:50 AM when the highlife was tapped. There was lots of yelling and some beer pong, and some racially motivated diatribes from some of my less tactful friends.
I documented a fair amount of the activity with my Sanyo 8100 camera phone, and put it up on my Photo Gallery. So you can check out a low resolution view of the events. And since my brain was addled with alcohol the resolution of the pictures matches my recolection exactly. Oh and I think someone won the race too.
Go read and sign the petition to ensure a rich, diverse public domain.
Saw it at Freedom to Tinker
If you are interested in Linux and the status of the SCO vs. IBM debacle that is going on, probably the best place to follow it is on, Karsten Self’s wiki here. You can also follow along on the linux-elitists mailing list or associated archives.
Lots of good information, and a high signal to noise on the linux-elitists list. If you are interested in Hard free software questions and clever answers.
Let me close this entry with a quote from Darl McBride the SCO Group CEO in August 2002 (reference).
Obviously Linux owes its heritage to UNIX, but not its code. We would not, nor will not, make such a claim.
I just finished updating my brother’s writing repository. There are now two distinct sections, one is creative work, the other is Academic or Research type writing. Now you have your readings of: “Lamenting Murph,” “Seeing Uncle Mike,” “Hunger Pains,” “Cooking the Sacred Cow,” “Hidden Tears,” and two essays written as part of an application for a scholarship. Of course “History Repeated” is still available there as well. I threw a very short description of the story there if I had read it. Enjoy. And if you are in a position to give my brother a job writing, then do it. So head over to Scrawlings of Tom McAllister and get reading.
I have been granted permission by my brother to publish some of his work on my site. It will remain his Copyright and he retains the rights to his work. But he is making his opinion available, and the first published work there is History Repeated: A research paper comparing the rise in power of George W. Bush to that of Adolph Hitler.
I have always been impressed with my brother’s ability to express himself in writing, and have always enjoyed reading his work. In my opinion it is usually quite excellent, and his short stories are nothing short of phenomenal, particularly when it comes to character development. So I have at long last created a repository to share his work with the world.
Currently that is the only work available there, however I plan to get more stuff up there shortly. So feel free to check out Scrawlings of Tom McAllister.
Those of you who are busily consuming your Soma in large doses will be happy to know that despite your indifference to the political and legal make-up of a great Nation, a blow has been struck for freedom. It did not involve bombings or potentially staged rescues. It invovled a dull legal battle for free speech. The content of Federal District Court Judge Cougenour’s decision can be found here. An excerpt I found particularly poignant follows:
However, we live in a democratic society founded on fundamental constitutional principles. In this society, we do not quash fear by increasing government power, proscribing those constitutional principles, and silencing those speakers of whom the majority disapproves. Rather, as Justice Harlan eloquently explained, the First Amendment demands that we confront those speakers with superior ideas …
By the way, if you are interested in following this type of information more closely, check out Declan McCullagh’s Politech, very high signal to noise ratio mailing list, on politics relevant to technology.
Which character are you from the Matrix? Apperently I am Agent Smith.
You are Agent Smith, from “The Matrix.”
No one would ever want to run into you in a
dark alley. Cold as steel, tough as a rock,
things are your way or the highway.
What Matrix Persona Are You?
Saw the flick on Saturday, going at noon on the next week after release is the way to miss the crowds and not be packed into a little theatre. But I liked it, basically I was going for the big noises and shiny things, so I certainly got that. But I also saw some of the effect of having a huger budget to make this movie. There were scenes in there that were meant to spend budget rather than tell story. But all in all I enjoyed it, and the martial arts were pretty cool to watch, specifically because most of it was made up of basic strikes and kicks that I have already learned in my Karate studies, so I could enjoy the perspective that if I was about 100 times faster and not subject to the laws of physics I could do the same amount of damage. But for a more in depth negative review, you can see Matrix Reloaded Reviewed.
I progressed to Purple belt. Now I finally get to learn a new form, well one that is the same footwork as 1 Pinon, but invovles different strikes, when doing this new form I am supposed to learn more about advanced push-pull.
I also get to learn two more Kempos and Combination number 4. (There are 108 combinations in the system).
Oh yeah, and I can buy and wear a black gi now, if I want.
My good friend Marc gave his opinion on the Matrix today. I met Marc at ASPRE, he is a damn fine hacker and one of the best security guys I know, so if you want to hire a top notch CISSP, just send me an email an I can put you in touch. Anyway his comments follow:
The first Matrix was done in such a way that it could be a stand alone film or left open for sequels, just like the original Star Wars. Now that it’s a trilogy, people need to take Reloaded in that context. The great thing about the original was the deep thought behind it, the incredible action and effects where just the icing on the cake. If everyone is expecting some great new philosophy mind fuck to emerge from this one, or even the third, then they’ll be disappointed. Reloaded is building on a story already told, not writing a new one.
Keep in mind I haven’t seen it yet and it might really suck.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away, I was quite active in research of the financial sector. I did well in the market, a buy of Dell Computer corporation in 1996 proved to be quite lucrative. But that has since been liquidated, the money spent, I have closed my E*Trade account and actually did a smart thing in working on getting bad debt under control.
Well it is now 3 years since I went on a rampage destroying credit card debt and closing out my brokerage account, and I am in a position to begin research for investments again, among other things that I recently started thinking of, such as life insurance and home ownership. So I turned to an old friend from those days of yore, The Motley Fool. A great site full of wonderful advice and research tips, and places to get started on your research. But to my partial dismay, to make use of their discussion boards, they now are imposing a fee. Of course I understand that the Gardner’s would like to make money also, and I know all too well that running a web based service can be a costly endeavor. But I also am a big fan of only paying for things which I deem particularly desirable, probably quite a “Foolish” attitude. So of course I will do some research, and take advantage of their 30 day free trial, but I also wonder if anyone actually reads this and is willing to respond
So I ask anyone who reads this entry, do you make use of this service? Is it worthwhile? (it is generally inexpensive $75 for a 3 year subscription) Did all the great information that used to occur become less frequent when the Gardner’s started charging money? Are there any competing services that have built the requisite community and knowledge base for less (read zero) dollars? I guess while I am at it, are there any other great things I should be tapping for research, “The Investor’s Business Daily?” (Kind of pricey) or again to The Fool, the monthly, “The Motley Fool Stock Advisor?”
I plan to keep Logical Disconnect updated with my research and maybe even publish a portion of my portfolio so all my friends can marvel at my financial genius.
Joseph E. McAllister (October 27, 1948 - May 2, 2003)
McALLISTER JOSEPH E., May 2, 2003, beloved husband of Patricia A. (nee Mitros), McAllister, loving father of Kevin and Thomas McAllister, son of the late Thomas and Mickey (nee Duffy) McAllister, brother of Michael and the late Molly McAllister. Family and friends are invited to his Funeral Tues. 8:30 A.M. FITZPATRICK FUNERAL HOME, 425 Lyceum Ave., Rox. and to participate in his Funeral Mass 10 A.M. Immaculate Heart of Mary Church. Int. Westminster Cem. Friends may call Mon. eve 7 to 9 P.M. (www.fitzpatrickfuneral.com) Published in the Philadelphia Inquirer/Philadelphia Daily News on 5/4/2003.
I will miss you, Dad. I Love you.
Thanks to all who have provided thier love and support for my family.
Don’t like my site, or any site for that matter, then as my brother says: Have snoop make any web page a million times cooler., using Tha Shizzolator
Here is an example from Mindless Banter:
I ran down da back alley, ’n wuz afiable “free” my teammates, ’n as da game goes, that shiznit wuz time “haul ass” outta there, know what I’m sayin’? This is where da dream gots weird n’ shit.
As I wuz running down da alley, I thought myself “christ, I’ve never run this fast before.” " Slowly, I began feel my feet lifting of da ground higher ’n higher." And before I knew that shiznit, I wuz completely off da ground, still travelling forward n’ shit.
I wuz flying!
Thanks to the procrastination of Tom for this wonderful find.
I am now the owner of a license to run CrossOver Office 2.0, and am currently installing MS Office 2000 under RedHat Linux 9. So far it is going very well, and I will be happy to not reboot in order to collaborate on co-workers documents or to convert my work into MSWord format.
Also MSWord takes a lot of kicking around from myself included, but it is not terribly difficult to get it to do what you want. I think working with Knuth’s TeX, LaTeX, and GNU texinfo, have helped me to better understand what goes into document formatting and therefore be more effective in using MSWord when I need to format my documents. But give me emacs and people who can read plain (extremely portable) text files any day.
My favorite part of the CrossOver install is captured in this image.
None of that biased, lying, garbage on Fox or CNN is news, this is:
Green Bay police are on the lookout for a monkey named Jasper, who they say isn’t armed but might be dangerous. Jasper dashed out the back door of a tavern where he and his owner are regulars, Lt. Mark Hellmann said Monday. Hellmann described Jasper as small, dark and hairy, but didn’t know what species he is. The police department’s humane officer said Jasper may try to harm people if he’s scared and advised anyone who sees him use caution.
Since the war is over, we might as well pass around the soma and get back to our happiness.
I wrote a while ago about Letting the smoke out. Just wanted to give an update. I purchased an Antec True550 from CompUSA that same morning. Yeah 550 watts may have been overkill for what I had, but it certainly wouldn’t be as underwhelming as its predecessor was. And Sherlock is humming along as it should.
Luckily there appears to be no collateral damage from the War of smoke containment. This upgrade of power supply has cleared up a few of the idiosyncrasies that I have experienced with this system over the time I have been using it. So, lesson learned, the power is the lifeblood of the computer. So don’t skimp on the powersupply just because it will come packaged with your really cool case.
I have been going through a rough patch based on the health of my father recently. That combined with the hectic schedule at CentraView has limited my expression here for a short while.
While talking with my father someone said to him: You’re tough, you get better now. And his response showed, what I can only very inaccurately call, true toughness and expressed one of the underlying principles of how life should be lived:
Tough’s got nothing to do with it. This is how it is, you deal with it.
My father is a great inspiration and the source of much of my life outlook. His example of how he lives his life is worth more to me than almost anything else I have been able to experience. Thank you, Dad, and get well soon.
Every computer has a magic silver box in it that contains the smoke. The smoke is the ephemeral life force behind all your computers actions. Apparently the magic gnomes or elves that live inside the machine and do all the work, utilize this smoke to give them energy, maybe similar to the way animal life utilizes oxygen in the krebs cycle.
So it turns out once you let the smoke escape from that silver box, the machine will not work. And it is possible, even if you get a new box with brand spankin new smoke, that some of the elves and gnomes, maybe even some of the critical ones, could have been killed in the fallout of the massive smoke release.
The power supply in sherlock died today. Sherlock is the name of my desktop, anyway the PS is the only part of the system I didn’t hand select so it is my fault. I was running my geforce4ti in there and it was only a 300W powersupply from “Deer Compuyter CO, LTD”.
I have been given recommendations for the following types of PS: PC Power and Cooling and Antec. Hopefully I can find a nice 450W from one of these manufacturers at CompUSA this morning, otherwise I will have to decide if the cost of overnight shipping is less than or equal to the value of getting Sherlock back up and running, and assessing any additional damage.
Additional powersupply recommendations are welcome…
This article, in the form of a conversation, A warmonger explains war to a peacenik, summarizes my view on the lack of justification for Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Luckily I was able to come across this article to this using my freedom-computer on the freedom-internet, looking at WWDN. Time to get back to some freedom-work for my freedom-job.
Well it begins again. I decided to allocate April, May and possibly June to achieving my second round of weight loss goals. So I need to string together a bunch of days at the gym and be really particular about the food I eat.
Starting November 17, 2001 I decided to lose weight, I was about 300 lbs on that day. Sometime in mid-May 2002 I got down to 218.5. I have been between 215.0 and 225.0 since then. With my wedding coming up (July 12), I decided to peel the rest of my now not so massive gut off, so my goal is 195.0 - 199.0. Today I am 220.5, and headed to the gym.
To see a comparison of pictures go to weight-loss. I have a bunch more pictures that may show it more clearly, and I will eventually get around to putting them up there, but you can definitely see it in my face there. And if you want to loose weight, try The Hacker’s Diet, following the ideas discussed in there worked for me. Although my exercise routine was a bit of a departure from his, but it was still the same general idea.
So Andrew Carlssin is arrested and being held for Insider Trading. Kind of like when 1955 Biff got his hands on that sports almanac. Of course I know it is the Weekly World News supermarket tabloid. But I still think its funny.
Well after the unprecedented .3 release in the 7.X line of RedHat Linux it appears they are skipping right over .1 and .2 in the 8.X line. I recieved a message today saying that since I am a subscriber to the RedHat Network I will be able to get RedHat 9 on March 31st.
So does the standard advice of don’t use a .0 release for RedHat, which I have often recieved, apply to this 9.0 release? Should I continue using 7.3? Is this jump to 9.0 along with their recent announcement of their RedHat Enterprise Linux, just evidence that the marketroids are taking over.
Just in case you wonder, both my desktop and my laptop are running 8.0 and I have been generally pleased. It is very pretty. I have also heard from a few that have upgraded to Gnome 2.2 from RedHats Rawhide that they are quite pleased with the enhancements, and claim it is even more complete. So I will be taking advantage of my subscription to download the 9.0 isos, and promptly installing.
Maybe someone with bandwidth to burn would let me upload the 9.0 isos to their server, once I grab them?
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum.
I’ve noticed this Lorem Ipsum quote on a number of developing web pages or interfaces. And sometimes wondered what it was, and what it meant. Well I finally asked google, and found lipsum.com with the explanation, a translation, and a generator.
The oath of office:
I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.
Yesterday: cnn.com:
At 10:15 p.m., Bush gave his address to the nation. “On my orders, coalition forces have begun striking selected targets of military importance to undermine Saddam Hussein’s ability to wage war,” he said.
…
At the White House, officials said that just before Bush addressed the nation, he pumped his fist, winked, and said “I feel good.” He then delivered his address, which lasted four minutes.
The man enjoy’s his work.
As requested this entry is here to ping Jeremy’s blog as a test.
resulted in an error: 2003.03.19 10:07:20 XXXXXXXXXX Ping ‘http://jeremy.zawodny.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/557' failed: Need a TrackBack ID (tb_id).
Today was the test, and it went very well. Master Madore (6th degree blackbelt) complimented my progress.
So anyway now I get to continue the progress while wearing a different color.
Well it looks like Dell is finally going to make good on my service contract. Apparently their part backorder problems are resolved, and I just heard from Jeff the service technician who should be here in about 45 minutes.
Now I can get back to working at 1400x1050 and in Linux. The backup laptop I was using was only capable of 800x600 under Linux, and 1024x768 under wintendo
Now if only I could run M$ Project under Codeweavers Crossover Office.
I just read an excellent article related to an entry I recently made, which was followed up by Mike here.
I tend to agree with the viewpoint that it takes 3 hours of individual concentration to get anything done (in general). Although I, and my work, have benefitted significantly from interactive like work as Mike suggests, I think the 3 hours of uninterrupted focus suggested in the article, are a great way to get things done, as long as you can avoid what he calls “warp-offs.” Which is my key obstacle to overcome. I think I am going to make a concerted effort to catch myself right before I do this, and take that energy and re-apply it to my work. I may even keep a log for a few days so I can find what is usually the trigger of the warp-offs. I guess this means no gaim, no irc, and no email.
Apparently before I got a chance to flesh out this entry, Slashdot got a hold of it and now the site is running a little slow. But I swear I saw it first, on someone elses blog. :-)
Well today is my cousin’s Niko’s birthday.
I spent the day there learning about the unending energy that a just-turned 8 year old can muster.
Hopefully he enjoyed the day, and the opportunity to cobine the sports of wrestling, soccer and football into one mahem filled activity in his basement
ME!
March 7, 1976 I was born.
So you wonder what I am doing today, well I am going to a huge celebration, but it is not entirely for me. Michelle’s brother Chris is getting married to Jen. So I am guessing the focus of the celebration will be on them, not on me. Unless my suspicions are true and the marriage and their child Madison are all a big ruse just to throw me off the trail of a surprise party.
Congratulations Chris and Jen, thanks for the big party.
I find that my focus is sometimes really strong, and then for apparently no reason it diverges to nothing, and suddenly I am writing a senseless entry on this site. I am really into the work I am doing, but then out of nowhere I can’t focus and start looking around for things to do.
I think just stronger mental discipline will cure it, just force myself back to work and I will cause my interest to peak again, as soon as I see a neat problem or situation that I need to solve.
Diving back in!
Here Rich Kulawiecis gives an interesting, and probably highly accurate, interpretation of why some of the major players in the software industry oppose some of the suggested restructuring of the DMCA.
If that kind of stuff is interesting to you, contribute to the Electroninc Frontier Foundation and you’ll certainly find Declan McCullagh’s Politech interesting reading.
My instructor in Shaolin Kempo Karate, Jim Wing, told me today that I will be testing for orange belt on March 15th.
I started Karate in the first week in December, Acheived my yellow belt in January. In February I signed up for the advanced training program, and now I will be progressing nicely through the material on to orange belt.
Lookout purple belt, here I come!
My parents got me PS2 for my fast approaching birthday. (March 7th)! I wasn’t sure if I wanted one for a while, because I was worried it would sit unplayed, since I am usually rather busy, between work, the gym, karate, my general thirst to increase my knowledge, and most importantly, spending time with Michelle, I am usually rather short on down time.
But I have already spent a few hours playing, and am glad to get back in the console scene. And the simple distraction factor is always welcome, I find it a few minutes fully committed to playing a game helps me focus more thouroughly on my work later.
Apparently when Dell support schedules a dispatch, it is only an estimate. And not only that, but if that estimate turns out to be wrong, it is the customers responsibility to track down that info.
So they know they are going to miss the date, but I wasn’t able to find that out until I called them up and sat on hold, and went through the whole process of giving my service tag number, phone number and email address to the technician. Then I needed to give him the dispatch number for the service (shouldn’t that be in their database next to my service tag number?). And he tells me, they had a stock issue shipping the part to the local technician and they estimate that the part will be in the techs hands on Monday March 3rd.
So a timely email with that information is beyond the capabilities of the mighty Dell
Apparently Benjamin Curtis isn’t the only guy associated with Dell who is is guilty of low cognitive ability.
In the event of a nuclear explosion, drive around it.
The current regime’s terrorist propoganda has spawned the FUD promoting site Ready.gov. Fear mongering at its best.
Luckily there are great generic images there that have been appropriated for the purposes of comedy. Apparently adding new captions is highly entertaining and fun. You can see a bunch of this at the Internet Infidels Discussion.
Thankfully there is the Crackmonkey list, or I might never have seen this. And then where would we be?
The laptop I acquired as a going away present from one of my previous employers finally gave up the ghost. It is a Dell Inspiron 5000e. Got it working very nicely with RedHat, and the fact that it can do 1400x1050 is really nice. It was even a suitable machine for playing Unreal Tournament
But anyway the motherboard seems to be shot, It won’t progress from the BIOS POST screen any longer. Luckily it has onsite support until October 2003. So a Dell dispatched technician will be at my house today to replace the motherboard, CPU and Thankfully the cooling fan. The fan in this machine has always rattled rather noisily, causing me great irritation. So hopefully the light dusting of snow today won’t keep Dell from their appointed rounds.
I just wanted take a moment and blog an entry about the girl, with whom, I plan to share forever
Michelle Young, hailing from Bristol, PA is the one of the most wonderful people I have ever met. She is beautiful, intelligent and best of all she puts up with me.
She has an uncanny ability to simply know exactly the right way to interpret a situation, things I may have to ponder for days , years or months, she just knows by default; like the fact that we should get married. I think she knew almost weeks (maybe less) after we started dating. But it took me a while to even convince myself that marriage was a worthwhile thing to do. I am grateful for her patience. On December 21, 2001 I asked her to share forever with me, and she immediately accepted. So on July 12, 2003 just 134 days from today, we will be performing the ceremony so all our friends and family can celebrate our joining together.
Thanks Michelle, I love you.
Dan has brought an interesting article to my attention: Unskilled and Unaware of it. This article is great! Granted, I have only read the Abstract, but it gets my seal of approval (thus far).
I know a list of people who are essentially described within the article, unfortunately the point (and even the point of my sending it) would be entirely lost on them.
Some days it is really hard to get up at 4:40 AM to go to the gym … But, here I go anyway.
I lost my last pair of glasses on Thursday last week, so that meant it was time to visit the eye doctor. Turns out I hadn’t been there in about 4 years. Anyway, I took the opportunity to ask him about a phenomena I had been noticing since sometime in college. I had noticed what are commonly called floaters, or little spots floating in my field of vision.
My doctor explained that these are clumps of the vitreous fluid which is one of the outer layers of the eye. Apparently this fluid changes in consistency over your lifetime. And these symptoms could sometimes could be associated with tears or detatchment of the retina, but that is usually accompanied by flashes of light, which I thankfully am not experiencing.
However, there is not much to be done about it so you mostly learn how to deal with it, but this was something that has bothered me for a while and here is one informative site: Spots Before Your Eyes, you can find more Googling for vitreous humor.
So far I have been generally pleased with MT. It makes it rather easy to add content, I have been able to simply and effectively change the layout. (Well it is currently one of the example layouts, but I get the idea) It has introduced me into the wonders of CSS, and through an entry on Jeremy Zawodny’s blog found myself looking at Mark Pilgrim’s excellent Dive into Accessibility.
First I must compliment Mark on providing such a detailed yet easily read and understood explanation of many of the accessibility issues faced on the Internet. Second I must compliment Ben and Mena Trott of MovableType for implementing the majority of Mark’s suggestions into verstion 2.6 of MT. The only change I can remember making is the one on Using relative font sizes.
I highly recommend that all who are maintaining an information store on the web at least review the Dive into Accessibility site.
Through my new interest in keeping a weblog journal, I couldn’t help but spout off about it to a few friends. Well it seems I may have given a final nudge to a couple of them onto the blogging scene.
Mike King also just launched his and personally credits me for some of his decision.
Also Dan Kalowsky, who does a lot of work on PHP among other things, recently lauched his weblog too. I think he was already decided to launch one but was not sure which tool to use, I shared some of my initial experience with MovableType and he followed into the fold with his weblog titled bacon grease drippings.
Now they will be added into my ever growing blogroll, and hopefully we can all benefit from Darxus’ Google Juice.
The new SpamAssassin is out!
I installed it and ran a quick test… and a spam that made it through yesterday, got squashed with the new version. It also sleekly sports support for Bayesian filtering.
For those that don’t know, I am a yellow belt in Karate, and currently working to learn more, usually 3 days a week. I study at a Fred Villari’s studio in Trevose. The chief instructor is Jim Wing, there he teaches me Shaolin Kempo Karate.
I am in an advanced training class where I get to go to as many group classes as I can get to, and I get one semi-private lesson a week. Last night, I suffered some bruised ribs as Jim explained the finer points of showing no mercy to someone who attempted to stab you. In this case I was the simulated stabber… Ouch
However, there appears to be no permanent damage, and I derived considerable utility learning more about the nuances of footwork and lines of sight.
Additionally I now know for sure if someone tries to stab me and I get him on the ground and stomp on his ribs, he will be displeased
I finally realized first hand why I might need a shovel when living in an apartment.
Anyway, I attempted at noon to dig out our cars, after 30 minutes I had broken my dustpan and my broom. I managed to clear a good deal of snow off the cars, but there was still 2 feet of snow around and in front of the cars. And I was disgusted.
Luckily when I went out to beg for a shovel, around 6:00 PM, a neighbor, Keith, was kind enough to lend me one and help me dig out the cars. He then went out of his way to help me shovel out the cars. This encourages me to make an effort to talk to my neighbors more often.
After putting it off for a long time I have finally begun working on my web presence. I originally had a lame web site in 1995 when I lived in Drexel’s dorms. It must have been there for a good 50 or 60 days before I decided the 16 MB of ram in my PowerMac 7100/66 would do better not running Netpresenz. It was really cutting into my marathon performance. Anyway since that day I had vowed to build myself a website. Well you know how it is, you either don’t have time, aren’t motivated, or don’t want to do anything half-assed. Well turns out the only way anything every gets done is half-assed, at least at first. For a discussion of that see Joels commentary on Fire and Motion. So my entry site LIVES: Kevin D. McAllister, Engineer, and I am launching this weblog at the same time. And yes it is half-assed and yes, I am jumping on the blogging bandwagon. Not because I think people care, but because I am lazy and opinionated. This way I don’t have to talk to people, I can just provide links to my rants. Also I have found that I keep redoing and relearning the same things. So eventually, I can just google my archives, and spend the free time playing basketball. Anyway, I am going to give this a shot for a while, it seems to be addictive to those that do it. So, maybe someone will find it useful.
