Just Kelly

2009-07-03

Happy Forth

These are fireworks I can get in to. The only thing hurt are your cholesterol levels.

The old adage proven again

If at first you don't succeed, back up and floor it.

Natalie has these games she plays on Facebook and MySpace. She doesn't seem to realize it, but it is the interaction with other people she likes. I can tell by the way she talks about the game. "So and so said this." or "This girl wants to trade blah for yadda. can you believe that?"

Yoville, Farmville, SuperPoke Pets, and GardenSpot are the games of the moment. Nat won't fall in to the trap of second life though. She has gotten Elle sucked in too. I simply refuse to partisipate. I have enough people sapping my time in a 24 hour period.

We are going to get her a gamer-chair.

No, not that one. Something she can sit on in front of he TV without arching her back so much. Right now she sits on a foot stool and bends funny. That needs to change. She gave up using her desk a long time ago. Actually it was the day we go the TV. Our TV takes VGA straight on. I never watch TV any more. So, Nat uses the TV as her monitor.

The Cult of Environmentalism

The fact tat our government simply bands scientists that do not make for good PR or agree with the status quo, has convinced me that the environmental movement has become a massive world wide cult. I live in Texas and there are just not that many people who are militantly enforcing petty environmental rules, but they exist. Most people I know are Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, or some other tax defered religious affiliation. Now, there is another religion to add to the list. Environmentalism. The word has been used in my presence and I didn't even notice it's ascendancy to a religion.

The really important aspect the Global Warming story isn’t the subject matter — whether or not humans are heating the Earth to death — but the process through which the findings are reached. It goes right to the heart of what it means to know something. Whatever one may think about AGW, ’science’ that excludes views on the basis of not being “helpful” looks suspiciously like a process of fitting the evidence to the desired conclusion. It should be the other way around. When this fundamental is abandoned, knowledge is replaced by belief and science is supplanted by theology.

Belmont Club

Richard Fernandez is an amazing blogger. He gets it. He is intelligent and on occasion eloquent.

That said, I've been waiting for someone to call Environmentalism a cult. The article does nearly that. I do it here. Green is great, but if you call yourself an atheist and you think All Gore is cooler than Jesus, you are the blissful member of a cult. Get out of it, or get over it.

2009-07-01

Bitching

Feel free to skip this post. I only wrote it to get things out of my system. It has been a shit couple days.

Left work yesterday at around 14:00. Had a dentist appointment at 16:00. I took the bus from work to Dairy Ashford where I immediately missed one bus. The next bus blew right by me. I caught the third bus and nearly passed out running across the street to the office. My vision was hazy as I ran from the median to the far side of the street.

It was not a bad dentist visit. I got three fillings. It hurt. My jaw is left aching today. The dentist commented on my death grip on the arms of the chair. I think I stressed him out. He suggested I ask for the gas in the future.

On the way home on the bus I felt my heart beat in my teeth. I felt faint and a bit ill. I was light headed and got on the wrong bus. Nearly ended up over by the new Dow building.

Nat picked me up at the mall so I didn't have to walk. I don't think I would have made it.

When I got home I crashed. I tried to. People were setting off fireworks right behind our house. There is nothing I can do about it. Not one goddamn thing.

I got up and tried to get my server up and running. It took me a while to get vnc working. Ubuntu has some issues with settings. Nothing new apparently. The last several versions of Ubuntu have had the same problems. It has been years. I guess they don't want vnc to work out of the box. Works now. Then came getting smb working. Same thing. I was unable to get smb to support a login. I had to leave world read and write. If I had a domain server It would work. I give up. I can't get nfs working on Ubuntu. I just don't know where it is. Surely it is there somewhere.

My back was killing me. I'm not taking the cholesterol medicine any more. I tried to call my doctor and they wanted some number I don't have because they were samples. My back hurt so bad that I could not stand up after a couple hours of sleep. It locked up at one point when I tried to stand up from the computer and I ended up on my knees. I felt better this morning after not taking the medicine.

Natalie's mouse died. Elle was very upset. Nat is worried that she messed something up and killed the poor little thing. Those little mice just die. Our house is loaded with mold. Who knows?

Forgot my podcasts and USB drive at home this morning. My jaw still aches. My back still hurts. My evening sucked last night. Got no sleep. Tired. $650 on dentist for three lousy fillings (clean and x-rays) that we do not have. Left my hat on the bus yesterday. Kelly is not a happy camper.

Very Local News

Written 2009-06-30

Work

The network thing did not go through .The one rain storm we have had in the last three months blew out a UPS and killed a copy that prevented us from upgrading. Our frigging luck. One of the guys came up to work at midnight to check on the copy. I didn't read the note on the front door that warned of the failure because the door opens out and I was afraid someone would open the door straight in to my face while I was reading it.

I'm warring a bright red shirt today. I am Lieutenant Smith. "Let me take care of that Captain. One side."

Listened to BBC 5-Live podcast. They are all about sitting and joking while the games are going on. It is much more entertaining when it is about them cracking jokes than it is watching tennis. "So And So is the sixty-ninth highest rated player in the world ..."

Envy, or not

One of the tweeters I listen to keeps going out and partying on week nights. I keep messing with the server and systems at the house. We are both tired, but she has interesting memories to help her recover. I do not envy her the hang over.

Rain

Not only did the rain blow out a UPS, but it awoke the grass. For weeks, the grass on the way in has been dying and laying over. It was bright green and erect this morning on the walk in. There was mud in the construction area. I knew better, but took that rout anyway. So, for the first time in a couple months, I had to ware my work shoes and park the muddy boots.

Now that the grass is standing up, it will be easier to mow. Well, it will be more effectively mowed.Had I mowed this weekend, I would have kicked up a bunch of dust and clipped five weeds. Now, I get the grass.

[end]

2009-06-29

Click Click Boom

Why is going out to the woods and shooting a bunch of shit with machine guns so much fun? Can't get enough. No that is not me. Darn-it.

Wimbledon

As a kid I hated Wimbledon. It came on in the middle of Summer and kicked all my TV shows (cartoons and daytime TV) off the air long enough to piss me off. Wimbledon lasts like two weeks. The neighborhood pool didn't open for business until Wimbledon was under way for that two weeks. Remember this is in the day when there were three channels. We got cable late in the game.

Tennis was particularly on my shit list because I could not play any ball sport due to my vision. Still, I would have hated it just for the TV thing.

Now, I download podcasts from the BBC. Those folks are simply mad for Wimbledon. I'm not sure I get it. It was only this year that there is a cover over the stadium. Every year, the thing got rained out on an hourly basis. People seemed to enjoy taking it in stride and carrying on. Now, they comment on the sunny hot weather and joke the roof will remain open for the duration. figures.

2009-06-28

Sunday

I weed-whacked today. I'll have to mow tomorrow. I'm headed out to the front yard in a minute to water the tree and the plants near the front wall. I've heard that dirt can move away from the slab causing problems if you don't water near the concrete.

I'm downloading a DEB repo for work. It has been running for three days. I fear it will not complete by tomorrow. This will allow us to run Ubuntu from Work on the internal network. We need this for some of our customers. I'm all for it. I like Debain distributions. They seem to work better than Red Hat from a user point of view.

Ubuntu still rocks. I tried the 'tree' command. No dice. Ubuntu came out and gave me a cut and paste command that installed the 'tree' command. It is a simple command. It generates output liike the following.

This may not look like much to someone who does not work from the command line on a daily basis,but it kicks ass when you needed it. Everything is included in the Ubuntu repositories. I know. I'm downloading them.

Police Chase in Canada (joke)

I have nothing ot add.

2009-06-27

Gold and Contact Lenses by the gram

A gold-dispensing automatic teller machine (ATM) was on display at Frankfurt's main railway station for a one-day marketing test yesterday.
A one-gram (0.0353 ounce) piece of gold, the size of a child's little fingernail and about as thin, cost 31 Euros ($42.25) -- a 30 percent premium to the spot market price

BusinessDay

Contact lense weight is about 0.06 grams.

A one gram sliver of gold is 31 Euros, or 43 dollars at the moment I typed this.

A new box of contact lenses costs me about (140/4) about $35 each. Six lenses in a box makes it a bit less than $6 per lens.

At 0.06 grams each, that is about 16 lenses per gram. At $6 each, that is $96 a gram for contact lenses.

This means, I'm paying over 2 times the cost of gold for my contacts. Three times the heavily marked up cost of gold in a vending machine and in a fancy little guift box.

I heard this story a week ago or more. It has stuck with me. I tried to think of something that I use that costs as much as gold. It dawned on me that contact lenses must cost more than their weight in gold. and I sat down this afternoon to do the math.

My math is not perfect. If you find different numbers please let me know. I would like to wine about this for a long time and I need to make sure the numbers add up. It all hinges on the mas of the contact lens. If you find a better measurement for lenses on average, than my link above please let me know and I can recalculate with better numbers..

Today's Lesson

I like the little screw up inj the middle. This is still not as difficult as it can be. Ask my father about Ruger Marc II .22 pistols.

Local Time

So, I sat there and checked the time on my watch to the time on my computer at work. They both update on the same nuclear clock in Colorado The methods they use to check are miles apart. One checks through firewalls and thousands of miles of cables. The other checks through some spotty radio transmission from the source that is only receivable next to a window at night, if it is not raining.

I typed in the 'date' command and waited to hit enter as the minute rolled over on my watch. I figured if they were less than 30 seconds off I would be greatly pleased. ... They were dead on. Not even a full second as far as I could tell separates the two time pieces.

Nice.

Ubuntu second impression

It just keeps getting better. Not only was espeak already installed and working right out of the box, but many plugins for Firefox just drop in place. Hulu, LiveLeak, YouTube all work normally.

Then one thing happened that I will remember and brag about to people who ask me what Linux distribution to use. When I double clicked a DiVx movie for the first time, the movie player simply downloaded the proper bits and the movie started playing. This light came from above and angles sang in harmony.

I made the right decision in dumping Fedora. Now I have to update my server. I wander if Deluge is available for Ubuntu through the stander software repositories.

Ubuntu at Work

We have some European customers who want to use Ubuntu. Hey, I'm all for it. I've read some articles a while back that said Ubuntu was not ready for the enterprise. I must say, I think they are wrong. Red Hat kicks as in the enterprise and is kind of blah in the user interface. The user interface is difficult because making one that doesn't suck takes time and trial and error. You have to be willing to use what works and try new stuff that you can then give up and go back to what worked before.

In order to install Ubuntu you really need to have access to a full repo to get the whole experience and usability from the OS. It is required to be honest. I'm in charge of this sort of thing at work. We will not use Ubuntu for full development, but I intend to have our network set up to support builds testing at the least. This means I have to mirror a software repository on our internal network.

With Yum you go to the correct file share, download the piles of RPMs that you need, and run 'createrepo' command on the folders. Then you point your clients to those files created by the command and you are pretty much done.

With Debain (father of Ubuntu) based distributions, you must first download the text files that are really a database that point to all the correct DEB files on another share. All the DEB files from all version and fixes and updates and whatever are all piled together in one place, so the whole repo is something like 300 gigabytes. Either you dissect the text based database (not even XML for goodness sake) to get the files you need and just download those files. Then regenerate the database with some command. Or, you use a command called 'debmirror' that kind of does that for you, but you must have a Ubuntu or DEB based machine on the Internet to perform the task of downloading.

The DEB download is running as I type at the house. I checked this morning and it was at 13% after 8 hours. Not promising. How am I going to get it to work?

Speed vs Quality, Philosophy

One of the reasons people like Debain based distributions of Linux is because they are rock soled. One of the reasons people hate the Debain distributions is because they don't sit on the bleeding edge and have the latest software. These are mutually exclusive relative to the amount of time effort and money you spend to keep the distributions moving and well tested.

Ubuntu is pretty solid, pretty up to date, and well supported. The community has done a great job of explaining things in terms that nearly anyone can follow to get things done. The community support is nothing short of fantastic for Ubuntu. Fedora has a place where a community can discuss things and come up with instructions, but it just doesn't work. Mainly, people complain that Red Hat contributes so little to the Fedora project. Half the time I was using Fedora, I used the instructions from the Ubuntu forums to get things done.

In the days of making everything work by hand, I would say that I wanted speed over quality because things would break in a major way every time the developers opened their mouths. You had to jump through ten hoops to be able to edit a text file. you had to hunt down an obscure C library and link it in an offhand way to get a mouse pointer that didn't disappear when it moved left. Why not go hog wild and get the latest stuff?

Things have changed. I'm 40. My priorities are different. I have a family to pay attention to. I have a full time plus job that knows it is a crap economy and that we have few options. I want things that work.

Complaining

Over the last couple weeks, I found myself asking the question "Why am I not using Windows at home?" The stress of trying to keep Fedora running had drained my faith in open source. It can work. It might kill you, but it can work.

So many things do not work with open source.Flash, a non-free closed source collection of machine consuming crap that brings your half the content on the web, but shouldn't, only kind of works on open source platforms. There are no killer games.

When someone says "You can use a computer to ..." They mane Windows or Mac. People pay a fortune to Microsoft so Microsoft may advertise back to them so they will buy more Microsoft products. I suppose that is how capitalisms works. I'm not a communist. People should get paid for what they do. Companies should not be able to rule the roost. International corporations are not even living beings and have more freedom to make money and control people's lives than any living breathing human.

Always happens in 3's 4's

Farra Fawcett was relegated to the back burner. At least David Carradine and Ed McMahon had their five minute blurbs on the nightly news. Now the news of the spike in internet traffic after the Jackson announcement bumps Farra's headline. NBC came right out and said "While we were putting together a story on Farra, we got news about Michael Jackson." That is messed up.

I never really liked Michael Jackson's music. Some of his early stuff was definitely toe tapping, but I never understood the hype. The last ten years or so have just been scary regarding Mike. I wander how much different he and his fame would be if he had never done plastic surgery. He may not have become so famous, but would that have been so bad?

Where are the lawsuits? Who is going to come forth with Jackson's baby? Who is going to want a slice of the pie? What films, testimonies, witnesses are going to come forward with allegations? What is Mckuly Kulkin going to have to say now about his time in Never Land?

I felt bad for Farra's passing. She was a hell of a gal. Michael, I felt a loss, more of an icon than someone I respected. Same for Ed. With David, I felt like someone I knew died because I loved his shows as a kid and I respected him as an actor.

2009-06-25

Ubuntu kind of freaked me out

I've used Ubuntu before. It still uses Gnome so the interface is similar. Worry not, there is a Kubuntu for the KDE fans out there. I hear it doesn't suck The user experience is not what freaked me out last night when I was converting my data over from one system to another.

First of all, there is not much conversion needed because most of my data files are OpenOffice. Ubuntu supports OO just fine. Not sure of versions. I'll have to deal with as I go.

No, what freaked me out is that I really only have one program left that I have to save a data file from in order to transfer straight across. This is Gpodder. It exports an OPML file that is the list of podcast information that allows me to keep track of my news. I put the file on my second drive, which I have not hooked back up yet. I install OSes with only the install drive hooked up because Linux in general freak out and put partitions all over the place if you don't go in and do thing by hand. So, I haven't verified that the OPML file works to save all my likes. I'm sure I'll blog it if things blow up in my face. I have the links saved in gdocs in a spreadsheet.

That's it. There are some OpenOffice docs, but everything else is in the cloud. That is, I use gdocs for most of my blog stuff. I use gdocs for most of my personal documents. Formatting sucks. I've tried tried to print anything yet. It is a for prophet company, so if it goes belly up I might just loose everything. I use it none the less.

This makes me wonder why people pay so frigging much for MS Windows on their desktop. What do people really use their computers for anyway? My phone does many tasks today that I used to need a computer to get done. Next week the iPhone Car Wash app will come out and you will be able to sit in the shade and sip a mi-ti while it labors over a sudsy fender. ... Maybe not.

I use Google Reader for a feed reader or agrigator. This keeps track of what I have and have not read in the wonderful world of blogs.

Come to think of it, I haven't looked for espeak, the software that reds aloud to me. There are dozens of packages that do this, but I like espeak because it is simply drag and drop command line driven text reading. All the packages try to go beyond this and screw things up with complexity. There must be something that will work. I have also not tried playing the Divix movies. I remember getting them to work in Ubuntu the last time I used it so my confidence level is high on this one.

What did work right out of the box was Flash. I was able to watch YouTube and Hulu videos with the click of a mouse. All my old Firefox plugins just plane worked. Ubuntu has standard repositories for software that do not just jump forward to the bleeding edge of package versions. They wait for a bit to let some of the bugs get shaken out of the system. These are the "Not 1.0" repos. These are the one's I have hooked up at the moment. If it comes right down to it, I'm tired of things that don't work.

I got home at around 22:00 last night and went to bed around 0:45. It took me three tries to get the system installed because I had to convince myself to pull the second drive

it is my opinion that Fedora is a failed experiment.

Very Local News

Coffee

Some of the folks at work insist on a decent cup of coffee. I have to say that the name brand we have at work, purchased at Sam's every so often, is not bad. They just need to pay three times as much to feel better about themselves. I must say that I feel like they are pussies for buying the higher priced coffee. There is bad coffee, good coffee and over priced coffee. I still drink it. I still say thank you.

Flight

If I ever do fly anywhere in my life again, I think I will show up in boxers and flip flops with my passport in hand. The airlines are charging a fee if you don't pay the additional bag fee before you show up at the counter.

Swinging Dicks

What is with all the politicians admitting they have been unfaithful? I suppose the New York guy loosing his job has made all the other politicians want to air out dirty laundry, but it shouldn't make the frigging news any more that politicians think the rules are for other people and not themselves. come on. Plane crashes and floods people.

What do people expect to learn from this news? I'm not sure you can find an honest, faithful politician because people have to be ruthless and sometimes crewel to survive in the political universe. Kind, honest, stand up people don't seem to make it to the top in politics. It is a shame, but that is the world we have voted for all these generations. I doubt politicians in other kinds of governesses fare much better. Perhaps it is simply destiny that right assholes will end up being the ones in charge of the rest of us.

Is Fedora Still Relevant?

No.

Red Hat vomits a new version of Fedora every so often that breaks everything and no one goes and fixes this bugs. Screw Fedora. I'm going Ubuntu all the way.

I've been with Fedora because we use Red Hat at work so much. Red Hat linux is awesome, stable, capable, rugged, robust. Fedora ends up never working long enough get anything done. It breaks between updates and it breaks on updates. They use beta software in the official updates. The two distributions don't match any more. The free version of Red Hat is CentOS. Red Hat claims they use Fedora for testing new technologies, but they should say it is a frigging alpha release.

What really pisses me off is that Flash ran fine on 10. I updated and I cannot play videos on all the relevant pages without problems or at all. It is not Flash because it is the self same object files that I had before in the updated browser and OS.

Belt

I have a real problem. I realized just how pudgy I was several months ago and decided to stop eating fries. I have eaten ten times my weight in fries so I can do without to be honest. I gave up most junk that I eat. Not all. I drink a soda or two a day.I drink a lot more water. I don't take cream in my coffee any more. Sometimes regular milk.

I bought a belt right before I started all this. Of course, I got the one that would let me get bigger. Now, my pants are falling off. I need to cut some new notches. I don't think we have a leather punch. My parents have dozens.

The pants I wore over the weekend were falling off. The pants I'm warring right now are falling off. I know I had no pants that were falling off before I started this little experiment. This experiment needs to go longterm if not permanent.

I know. "Bitch bitch bitch."

2009-06-22

Petrol and springs

I lost the frigging spring to the weed whacker yesterday. I got all of a bout ten feet of side walk done and the string hung up. I had to pull the spindle and work a knot loose. Of course, I lost the spring that is really a lynch pin for the entire weed-whacking industry. The fate of our time line was at stake for the sake of a $0.20 spring that is still lying in my grass somewhere, never take it's presents know again. Until, that is, it is thrown my the lawn mower through one of the front windows.

Do you have any idea how much mayhem one could cause with the right knowledge and a large enough gift card from Home depot? Is that me laughing and ringing my hands?

I also picked up a gas can. Get this. It is full of gasoline, has "keep out of the reach of children." written all over it, and has this child proof handle thing that requires flipping a switch and holding a leaver while pouring. What is the point. I only wanted a container that had a functioning spout that let me poor without spilling. I guess this will work.

The gas can I was using had a broken lid from day three or so. I had been using duct tape to keep dust out of the gas. I used it for two-stroke gas because it was one gallon. Trouble is, it is more than a gallon, or the new one is less than a gallon because I poured the contents of the old in the new and had gas left over. This means the measure of two-stroke oil is off either in the old container, not enough oil, or in the new container, too much oil. I would rather ere on the side of too much to be honest.

Home Depot had the part I needed. I had t buy the spindle and spring. No biggy. It seems to work. They of course had anti-plant-based-alien weed-whacking accessories as well. Ah, that helicopter blade thing looked handy.

Very Local News

Burning down the house

The firecracker bin is back in the parking lot across the street. I try so very hard to not wish bad things on people. I do wish very bad things on the people making money off that firecracker bin. As dry as it is, there is going to be a fire.

FYI, I will have the cops on speed dial if I catch any one popping firecrackers within X number of feet of that frigging box. I'm not giving in. I will video it and find out who to complain to and get the owner of the property fined if I can. I'm sick of this crap.

Technology

Next month you will be able to get 128GB thumb drive. Yes, 128GB on a key sized drive. This is nuts. I just bought a 16G for moving data around. I feel gypped. When the 128GB comes out the 16GB will half in price. What's next, sliced bread?

I don't think you can get a USB 3.0 device yet, but Ubuntu will have support for it in the next sub release coming out next month or the month after. Cool beans. Yet another reason to convert my home systems to Ubuntu. Fedora blows huge green donkey balls.

Money

Microsoft Money is dead. Quicken has won the battle of the financial software. I read a couple years ago that Microsoft Money had never made a dime. There will be no more support or updates.

I use a spreadsheet to keep track of expenses. It is not extremely useful. It lets me know where the money goes. I probably should use something like Quicken. I'm far to lazy to keep it up. I've used Quicken. I've never used used Microsoft Money.

Father's day sucks

Father's day is a made up load of bollix to fleece the public and fill a small card-holiday gap after Mother's day. Men don't seem to care if they get cards. If they do, other men worry about them.

I had a really shitty Father's Day. I don't want to get in to it. Let's just say that Natalie understood and was quite patient with me.that means a lot to me.

This is one problem with social media like Facebook. Every third post is "Happy Father's Day every one!" and I want to respond with "Fuck you and Father's day!" I try to hold it in. Poor Nat has to take the brunt.

At least I have a blog on which to wine and complain. At least I know Father's day means something to me. At lest I know I miss the little girl in my life.

Happy Father's day to my dad. He is a hell of a guy. I've learned very much from him.

Just Kelly

2009-07-03

2009-07-01

Work

Envy, or not

Rain

2009-06-29

2009-06-28

2009-06-27

Ubuntu at Work

Speed vs Quality, Philosophy

Complaining

2009-06-25

Coffee

Flight

Swinging Dicks

Is Fedora Still Relevant?

Belt

2009-06-22

Burning down the house

Technology

Money

Links

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