It wasn't me. You can't prove anything.


2004-01-31

Today (Friday the 30th)
It's cold outside. It's rainy. Dumbass me didn't bring a jacket. It is going to be a fun walk home. I like the cold. I hope it doesn't rain on me. I have a poncho, but that just isn't adequate for a cold windy rain. The trees drip on you from the misty dark. Puddles catch you unaware from the shadows. I fall victim to the uneven sidewalk on the way home. The path I tread each day can be traitorous. The sidewalk sinks from its own weight into the soggy soil over time. In places the sidewalk hides slick mud troweled smooth over the hard surface by rain. It's like walking on oiled glass.
Tpro had a meeting last night. On the way to the meeting place we road through a tree lined lane. The power had been cut by the storm. The trees seemed to gather themselves from the gloom as we passed. The other cars sharing the road felt out of place among natural things.

Notes
I keep a Word document at work that contains a bunch of notes. In the last six or seven years I have gathered sixty five pages of typed notes. I only write important things down that apply only to me. This file is very important to me. I keep backups of it all over the place. I have some notes from years ago that don't seem to apply anymore. I keep them anyway. Every once in a long while, they come in handy.
One of the entries is titled “Read_Only (Reporting) Database Schedule”. Another is “Necessary Evils of the office”. The latter contains charge numbers for vacation and how to get MS Outlook to list names in emails by last name first.

Last Exile
I'm watching a Anime series called Last Exile. They have these cool air ships called Vendship that look like a 1930's car and sound like an old prop airplane. There are huge air ships like battle ships that never land. They have some kind of mana that allows them to fly called Claudia. Claudia is made of these crystals dissolved in water. Water is precious to all but the highest elite. I'm on the fifteenth of twenty five episodes and I haven't figured out if this is a love story or what. The two kids in it grew up together and view each other as brother and sister. There is also the effeminate guy from the “enemy” side who seems to have a crush on the male in the story.
I swear I'm starting to understand some of the Japanese words. I love watching Anime on the computer because I can pause the show to read all the subtitles. I've had some bad experiences with dubbed Anime. The people who do the dubbing are not always into the show. I would have loved to watch this stuff as a kid, but I never would have gotten past the subtitles.
The worse thing about Anime is the music (sorry Alexis). There have been like three songs in all of my Anime experience that didn't suck. The worse is when they sing in English. It is poorly rhymed and badly pronounced.


2004-01-28

My evening
I stopped off at the store on the way home this afternoon. I hate stopping at the store, but I had this craving for those wafer-cream cookies that are sooooo bad for you. Anyway. I buy the cookies, hot-dogs, crackers, some canned soup, and cereal. In the checkout line I notice I'm in the slowest moving line. I swipe my credit card and my phone rings. It is Visa telling me some unusual charges just came across my card and since it wasn't porn, liquor or computer parts they want me to approve it. As I'm walking out the store I notice every person in the store who is not working is a single guy or a fat housekeeper. I can't cut a break. When I get home I eat half the cookies and a bowl of chilly with tons of cheese. I'm watching some goofy romantic comedy that I downloaded. I'm also watching the Simpsons. It is a multitasking thing. I may play a video game and then work a little bit on some paperwork for Tpro. I plan on turning in early. Tomorrow is a long day.


2004-01-25

Another Victim
I can claim a victim. A friend of mine at the day office now reads Slashdot daily. She complains she is a news junky. That is hardly the case. When she cannot concentrate on programming for more than a couple of hours without her nerd news fix, then she will know the addiction. It isn't a bad thing. Sometimes being informed is a pain.
James did most of the work. He I believe is the one who got me hooked on Slashdot. Ah, to bring another into the fold. We send each other clips in email even though we know the other has read the article.

Evil
There are people on the net who make fun of the word evil. They don't like to think of the real thing. I'm watching a movie called “Hitler, The Rise of Evil”. Wow. Hitler was a serious evil. I think he truly believed in the things he wrought upon humanity. That just makes him more evil. He was a great public speaker. He was a commanding leader. This movie takes his life as a list of events. it is scary watching him grow up, watching him growing into the man who killed so many people. It is easy to hate him.
I notice Hitler rose to early pour on an employment platform. Many Germans were out of work and he got them jobs ... building a war machine.

I want a knighthood
The Queen is handing out another knighthood. This time to Bill Gates. Some complain the number of celebrities and business people getting these things has made it meaningless. They complain about it on the BBC. Perhaps soon there will be a straight up price on them. Falling, falling, falling price.

Rover “Spirit”
Unless you've been under a rock the last couple of days,
the rover on Mars has been quiet. It just yesterday let loose 73 megabytes of data relayed through the other rover on the lander. Then they found out what the trouble was. It turns out it was flash RAM. You know, that thumb USB drive you wanted for Christmas. Same stuff. That is great news. I still wander if a little green guy with a “bleenball” bat had something to do with the silence.

Drunken elephants electrocted
It isn't often a news junkie like myself can say “That is a new one.”


2004-01-20

Currency blocking in software
There have been
articles about blocking the image of currency from software like Photoshop for years. It is a reality. Photoshop will not open a file that is of US currency. I believe it acts the same way with the Euro. Some speculate scanners and CD burners are next. I say, why stop there. Cyber space could be scanned on the fly (thank you TMS) for images of currency. Of course, there is a down side to all of this. If digital cameras are high enough resolution to make nice copies of currency, then they too must be able to pull the images from the ether and quash them. This means, if I want to rob a bank in a couple of years, I should tape a dollar bill to my forehead and the cameras will fail to capture my features.
That may sound a bit outlandish, It is just plane censorship. As the article linked above discuses, fair use is also stopped by the modified software. How long will it be before television and movies cannot show money changing hands.


2004-01-19

Badger
Badger badger badger
Badger badger badger
Badger badger badger

source

=]

Warning
“If you've bothered reading this warning, you probably shouldn't edit the settings below.”
This was the gist of a warning in one of the conf files I ran across this weekend. I like open source software.

Notebook
When I say "notebook" now I think portable computer. I have an old diary kept in a bunch of notebooks (the paper kind). I should put it on the net sometime. It will show a more disturbed Kelly. I've gotten better emotionally in the last several years. Anyway, Notebook. I'm a bit disappointed with my laptop in some ways. I like it in others. I know I will choose a different notebook next time. I will pick a more powerful, but bigger laptop. This one is very light and capable, but not powerful. This one is a Dell. I've come to the conclusion that Dell is not that much better in quality than any other manufacturer. My CD is still not burning properly I have to deal with that.

Wily Wanka
Tim Berton and Johnny Depp are looking at remaking Wily Wanka. I bet they can do a good job. "umpa-umpa umpati-do. We will make a movie for you. ..."

Buttons
I had this old gene-jacket. I was originally black. It got washed in hot water by mistake and turned gray. I decided to finish the job and bleached the jacket white. A friend of mine (Saline) silk-screened a Metallica snake on the back which I colored in by hand. That was ages ago. The bleach took a toll on the fabric and eventually the second from the bottom button hole wore through. It was time to buy a new gene-jacket. I go to Academy and pick up a new $20 jeans-jacket (I paid $17 for the first one). It is great, except when I get home, I notice it is missing the same button as the old one, the second from the bottom. It is just gone. I found the button broken in the bag. It was actually on the jacket when I bought it. It fell off into the bag at some point. My Mother, God bless her, is going to take the jacket back and exchange it for me. The next morning I get up and grab a shirt from the closet to start my day, and notice - wait for it - it is missing a button. It wasn't the same button. This time it was second from the top. If it had been the same button, I think I would have staid home from work and curled up under the covers with a crucifix and a rabbit's foot. My Mom is going to sew the button on too. What a gal!


2004-01-18

Working on the weekend
I find it nearly impossible to work on the weekend. Between my noisy neighbors and just plain laziness, I get little done.
Having a life is tough today. I'll bet it was easier in the fifties or so. Between wars people knew their place and had the ability to fight it too. There were struggles and people died to make their freedom work. That has always been the way. Nothing happens in America without a pile of bodies to raise eyebrows. Banks won't put in bulletproof windows at the teller windows because it looks bad to the customers. They lobby against it. If every bank had the bulletproof glass then they wouldn't look out of place.
Lately my day job has been kicking my butt. Nothing works. There is no real problem. All the software that I'm trying to make work is going through changes. Some of it is so old, it just works funny on the new machines. I have to go round and round with the vendor's tech support for answers. I should remember the fifty packages that worked over the last year. Every single one has something special about it. I can't think of a single one that just worked.
The work I'm doing on the weekend is for Tpro. I need to get a support software up and running. I need to learn it for myself, not Tpro or the customers. I must focus through the noisy neighbors. I must propel myself for myself. I must drink another Mt. Dew.
I'm on step two. This time I made a backup of the conf file first. That is one lesson learned. One thing Gforge does is make you change your document root to Gforge's folder. That is annoying because I need this server to support my web page too. I made a symlink to the real http folder and changed the links in my index.html to match. The rest of the links should be relative. That is one of the things that has been weighing on me. Hopefully this is now fixed. That counts as one more step. Now if my neighbor would just shut up. I'm going to ask to move apartments before I sign a new lease.
Mandrake has a different httpd.conf setup than Red Hat did. There are three different files that need to be modified instead of the one. There is a warning in on of the files to “Don't use this setting use one of the other files”. Give me a break. This looks amateur.
It only took me two hours to find the trouble and get my page back up.


2004-01-16

Pole
This is a Slashdot pole from 2004-01-15. I fit all but one of these. (LOTR).
Your Biggest Failure as a Nerd?
Haven't seen LOTR. (I haven't seen the last movie, because I hate going to theaters these days. Until they ban mobiles and twits I'm a DVD watcher.)
Didn't build my own computer. (depends on which computer your talking about.)
Don't run Linux. (half my home network machines run Linux.)
Have a significant other. (nnnnnnnnope)
Don't use caffeine. (I both breath and consume caffeine, but not necessarily in that order.)
Exercise regularly. (bwaaaa aaaa aaaaaaa!!)
Only have one email address. (Six active at last count. (Company 1, company 2, four home emails (ISP 1 (can't delete), ISP 2 (use to talk to people) hotmail (for purchase), yahoo (for people backup))))
Less than excellent karma.  (My karma, though used, is shiny and still has that new karma smell.

Web server
Now that I have had the opportunity to run a web server for a little while, I sympathies with the hoards of crappy web page responses out there. It's funny. I understand what is wrong on some of the errors I get across the net. There was one the other day that gave a PHP error and I'm like "You need to reset the privileges on the file for the Apache group."  Of course, I don't tell any one except the screen. Then I giggle at myself for being a geek.

Blog
There may be a new place (web address) for my blog. Blogger and BlogSpot suck. I'm going to figure out a way to put it on my server. I mean, come on. I have a web server sitting in my apartment. It probably won't be any more reliable than the one supported by BlogSpot. I mess with my server quite a bit so I'm doomed to unreliable service.

Cable <rant>
I don't have cable. Some people have an odd reaction to that statement. The reason I don't have cable is the money. I'm just too cheap. I have five channels and I watch too much TV now. A couple months ago I was in a class for some software. The people teaching the class were from the North East. They tried to make small talk with the crowd in the the audience. The trouble is they started talking about some cable TV show. There were nine of us in the class and not one of us had ever heard of the show. Those of us who had cable at the time never watched TV. Some said they only had it to appease their kids.
Even with the TV on all the time at my apartment I'm usually in front of the computer and use the noise from the TV to drown out my neighbors. The Cable company in my area doesn't offer cable modems. The guy has come by like three times to give me some offer. It is the same offer or so it seems. I like things the way they are. I don't want four hundred channels. There will come a day when broadcast TV goes the way of the CB radio. I'll find a substitute then. Right now, I'm far more worried about having a computer that works.




2004-01-13

xzoom fallout (boring stuff)
I've had to restage my Linux box. It turns out xzoom damaged some fonts to the point X (X-Windows) would not load. I tried briefly to fix the trouble, but it was dead. I wanted to move to another distribution anyway. I've gone to Mandrake 9.2.
It took me the better part of an evening to get Mandrake installed and reconfigured for my Samba server (Windows file server) and Apache web server. My page should be back up now. I'm still working on Gforge. It takes over the web server, so the site may be iffy while I'm testing. Please bare with me. I need to get Gforge up and running. Actually, running isn't the trouble. Configuring Gforge is what drives you nuts.


2004-01-11

xzoom
I was trying to get this program to work on Linux called xzoom. It is a bit like the magn9fyer in Windows. It comes in compressed file that only contains the code and some notes. The code is old and has dozens of dependancies (other programs that need to be there first). I mess with it. And mess with it. And mess with it. I ask some one else who has more experience to mess with it. Always with the errors. It never works. That is bad enough, but now I have a problem on the machine I was using to try it out. The fonts aren't working correctly in X-windows. X-windows is the user interface part of Linux. It is the programs that you see running in the graphical user interface. Anyway. A lousy font will not load correctly and the whole X-windows environment takes a massive dump every time I try to load. Sometimes Linux sucks. One cool thing is the Linux system will still let me telnet in and grab my files before I re-stage. Sometimes Linux doesn't suck.
What does suck is I am trying to get G-Forge up and running. I am out a web server for the time being. I'm out a test machine. I need another box for testing. I'm not paying for MS Windows if I'm not going to use it. Try to go to CompUSA and buy a made machine without an operating system on it. Something told me this weekend was going to be a disaster as far as productivity. Computers are still too expensive to just say “send me one”.


2004-01-09

Good Times
I was walking past the refrigerator the other day. That is not remarkable. There are two pictures on the front of the refrigerator. One is Adam Ethan and I after we got back from the Gwar (link has violence and "nudity")concert in like 1990 or something. My goodness, that was a long time ago. Adam looks thin. I look young. Ethan just looks like a skinny kid. Our shirts are covered with the crap that Gwar spews all over the audience. There are all kinds of rumors about what is in the stuff, but the news hinted that it is unsweetened cool-aid. My ex-wife stuck the stupid stickers on the pictures. I could have screamed when I saw them. She just didn't understand photography.
I took that picture with my rusty-trusty Canon AE-1. I bought an old rebel a couple of years ago, but is the oooold rebel before they came with the flash built in. I want a new camera. Unfortunately, the one I want is $1800 or so. That is way down from $10,000 a couple of years ago.


2004-01-08

Shame on me
My mother comes over to clean my apartment every now and then. I feel nine years old when she does it. I do appreciate it. She is retired and has a bunch of church functions and the like to keep her busy. She keeps threatening to get a part time job so she can meet people. Really, she wants a new bumper and big wheels and tires for her Jeep YJ.
She asked what I wanted for Christmas and I said "I want a
hippopotamus for Christmas. Only a hippopotamus will do." It's an old song from the 50s. She found a toy hippo and stuck it in my stocking.

Salmon
The
BBC has a story about the contamination of salmon around the world. It turns out farmed salmon is almost always higher than natural fish. The trouble with salmon is they are at the top of the food chain and the fish they eat are the culprit. The industry is throwing a fit. Scotland has the most contamination.
It just freaks me out that the farm raised stuff is worse (contamination wise) than the natural stuff. With all the nuclear dumping and chemical runoff from industry and farming. There is a huge case here in Huston of a company dumping chemicals in a river for decades. It has only just caught up with them.

Walking in the rain
I walk about a mile from the bus stop to my work door. This morning it was cold and wet. I should have brought my laptop for a meeting this afternoon, but I don't have enough rain gear to fit over the bag. I'm stretching the coat to get my backpack covered. Everything usually just fits. I ware a hat (a ball cap) because the rain will still hit my glasses and face under the hood of the rain gear jacket if I don't have something with a bill to block it. I don't bather with the flashlight. The pants of the rain suit have come apart in a couple of places and I have staples holding it together. Digging through my pockets can cause grievous bodily harm if I'm not careful. I'm lucky if I remember to pull out the bus pass before I seal myself in. The suit is bright canary-ass yellow. If any one doesn't see me they need not be on the road.
People from my work stop to ask if I want a ride on clear days. No one stops on the rainy days. I would just soak their car seat anyway.


2004-01-07

Atkins Diet
Some people ask why the Atkins diet causes weight loss. There are calories in meat and fat. I think of it in caveman terms. If all you get is meat, you must have to catch your food. Thus, you need to stay lean and/or mean. That sounds good to me anyway.

More on cars
At some point in high school I decided to become a gear-head, at least in the talk if not the walk. I sat there in study hall and listened to the guys who knew what was going on talk about their cars. It is amazing how far this has gotten me. I went to Florida in a 73 T-A ram-air with a Pontiac 400 with a 850 CFM carburetor. It had a Turbo 400 tranny. The engine came from an old pickup that was not the original owner. We had to swap another tranny for the one we ended up using. The front shocks were shot, but that kind of works in a 70's muscle car. It makes the front end rise when you hit it. We foolishly cut a hole in the hood to make room for the high-rise air-filter. It turns out we could have sold that stock hood for more than we paid for the car. DOH!
The guy who put together the T-A also had a 71 Chivvy pickup. It was a straight six with a granny gear four on the floor. It was fun because you had to kill the engine with the clutch. If you just tried to turn off the ignition, the crank turned and the pistons fired without spark. This caused the timing chain to pop back and forth. It would eventually break that way. So, you planted your foot on the break with the truck in gear and let out the clutch as you were turning off the key. I drove that truck a couple of times. I've gone over that before.
I still don't know what is what under a hood. Oh, I can point to stuff and guess what it is, but I stopped taking stuff apart long ago. I program now. That satisfies my need to create and learn.
What this has done for me is allow me to communicate with specific people. Not every one in the USA has a car, but you would think so when you speak to people. In Europe, they actually take the train and other forms of mass transit just to get from place to place. The need for individuality and the coming of age that the automobile has evolved into in the USA don't seem to have the same draw in Europe. Some people take pride in how efficient their cars are. A BBC study found that cars have become fashion statements in the USA. People have different cars for different occasions here. That is just nuts.
I live in a city that has designed itself around the automobile. Any one spotted walking is assumed to have something wrong with them. There are whole sections of the city you just can't get to if you try to walk. Freeways cut off buildings and apartment complexes.to pedestrian traffic. It seems people like it that way. My apartment building has seven entrances/exits for automobiles and one for pedestrians. There are over six hundred units, and one entrance if you are on foot. People are expected to walk through the automobile gates. Where I work has three automobile entrances/exits and no pedestrian access from outside. The only pedestrian access is from the parking lots, that are inside the outer-most fence. Most people who work here have no idea this is the case. It has just never crossed their minds. The EPA gets on the company's case to clean up the environment and get people to drive less vehicles to work. This building is one mile from the closest bus stop. There is no way to enter the complex without walking between moving vehicles at their entrance to do so.
Blaw blaw blaw. I will stop griping.


2004-01-06

Hell

Indifference
A bunch of shallow party people talk about the wallpaper pattern. They truly enjoy themselves and eat cucumber sandwiches while you live the life of a land mine victim in South East Asia.

Labor
Toile on a symbol to a man who thinks he is a god. Born in bondage, die in bondage, live the lives of an entire people enslaved to build a monument to their conquer.

Time
Learn the preciousness of one second as you live the last moment of a drowning man's life. Reach the air with your had, and know that you cannot breath, trapped inches below the surface with no help. Oh, you never actually drown, you just sit there in the last conscience moment of terror before the end.

Consumption
Picture swimming in a clear blue ocean. When you look down there is only gray. Then a shape begins to form below you. It is just a blob of light, that seems to rise silently toward you. Just as you realize the helpless crumb you have made yourself without knowing, alone, no screams, no help, no struggling will change what you see below, a huge shark takes shape from the gloom you with it's mouth opening.

Despair
You, the rightful king of a glorious nation, having won the war to save your people, now find a knife between your ribs. Your child has murdered you and betrayed the people who cheer your name to the enemy. The war you fought was for nothing. As the last breath passes your lips the child frames you and smites your legacy. Your people will remember you as a traitor. Life fades, floating through peaceful splendor, angles find you. As they approach their faces contort and their light laughter turns to loud cackles. They are daemons. Your riches life was fraud. You are in hell. There was never nation of people who loved you, who would die to protect the world you created. You were a petty sinner, damned long ago.


2004-01-05

Maturity
Dear God! I just spelled the word "banjoes" correctly without looking it up. What is happening to me?

One Muslim traveler
I'm listening to the BBC about traveling to America. The funny thing is, the British are far more interested in the American travel rules than Americans seem to be. A Muslim man said he may change the names of his children to Christine sounding names because of the profiling going on. He and his wife ask for Muslim meals. They have Arabic sounding names. His wife wares Muslim head dress when in public. The man has a beard. Those are all the signs the authorities look for apparently.

Things I've learned today
Computers are on Earth to piss me off.
I can bite my lip so hard that it sends a pain down my neck and it doesn't even bleed. Actually, I believe my teeth clapped together just as I bit my lip. I don't know if other people feel that kind of shock wave when you teeth grind wrong. I bet it was the combination of a little bit of pain from the biting my lip with the shock wave of my teeth rubbing together that made me stumble in agony.
I am not suffering from manic depression. I read up on the symptoms and I aint there. At worst, I've got a case of the lonely blues. I should write a song or sky-dive or something.
Allot of people who use IM (Instant Messaging) have separate user IDs for every single person they talk too on a daily basis. This is to avoid people they don't want to talk to without blocking them. There are programs out there that allow you to have ump-teen user IDs up at once.
The CD burner on my laptop is messed up. The CDs won't read correctly. I'm pricing notebook DVD burners.