Very Local News

Irrational Fact

Greenpeace just pisses me off.

Geek Stuff

We only have OpenOffice 2.3 at work. It is annoying. They hadn't worked out the whole editing a stand alone web page mechanism yet in that version. This is no big deal. I don't have much need to edit web pages much,but I like to keep notes in HTML format for posterity. OO 3.0 seems to have worked the kinks out for the most part. The email system was down this morning and that made me have to go back to the OO. Ah, I may have to go package OO 3 for our internal network. It is a huge step forward and Red Hat 5 just needs to catch up. After email came back and I was able to stop using OO, I lamented for a quieter time.

For some reason, the podcast software I use stopped downloading a bunch of streams. I have to go in and tell the episodes, marked for download to ... download. I hate that. It is an obvious bug that should get fixed. I have to wait for that bug to be fixed by the people writing the software and then wait for Ubuntu to include the fix in its repositories. I refuse to maintain it myself. That leads to another barrel of trouble.

Someone has patent on podcasting. There is prior art to kill their patent. No one has challenged yet. A lawyer name Ernest Grumbles (with a podcast) says they may use it to bully people in to doing business with them instead of others. I bet I could get a patent on making fire from rubbing a couple sticks together and then make all internal combustion, electricity generated from anything to do with heat,  and tobacco pay me a fortune.\

Inductive Coupling May be the way you charge everything in the future. You will use them in in tandem with new capacitors instead of batteries. You might have a lightening rod on top of your house that pulls electricity out of the air in form of lightening to charge your home salt battery below your foundation.

Non-Geek-Vernen News

Leeann comes on Facebook and says "RIP Unix".

I asked her "What is RIP?" thinking it is a program or something.

She answers "Rest in piece."

I came back with "Long live Linux."

She hit me with "Do you know what Unix is?"

I decided to be curious rather than mad and responded with "I guess not." Who know what she will come back with.

She said "An old computer data system. We are replacing it with SAP. Does that help?"

If only she new I work every day in Linux. I use Linux as my home OS. I've used VMS for years before I left the company that had it running. I find myself having to make HP/OS work soon and other flavors of both Linux and Unix. I do this every day. It is what I do. It is all I do.

I did not respond. I let it go.

Weather

It poured rain at lunch today. I went to McDonald's a few steps away from our building. As I walked back the clouds came from the North it seemed and no sooner did I get back to my desk than rumblings told me of impending damp streets. We need the rain.

It has been very dry this year. It is scary dry. It worries me about the hurricane season. People say a dry summer leads to more hurricanes. Not sure how. Just something I've heard more than once. The heat is breaking records here and in places like Washington state. People are complaining that no one has an AC unit. They are selling like ... hotcakes. Some friends in the East and places like Colorado complain about the cool weather not feeling like Summer.

Once the cloud past, the ground baked in the sun. I do not envy people walking around in the steam.