Micro Fiction

On The Way

It was while crossing a small brook somewhere in East Africa that it hit me. "Life is short." myself said loudly. I lost my footing and the entire planet leaped from beneath my feet. There was a light rain falling not far away. The sun was low and the rays wriggled in the shape of a rainbow. I could see individual drops suspended in that moment that I found myself in mid air before falling to the ground.

The earth was muddy and I managed to miss the few rocks beside the brook. There is no trauma center for a thousand clicks in any direction. No place you would want to have a head injury treated.

I do not notice the look of concern on any one's face. I see nothing in their expressions that is not hard and more filled with purpose than a hungry dog. Their eyes are inhuman. Their senses are so keen they have the grace of predators. Which, they are. I am a tool to them, not a man.

Thank God I did not cry out on the way down. Just a splash and not much of that. Not a word. Get up and move. I'm not hurt. Not bad anyway. Keep moving.

There is nothing like the adrenalin rush of falling in to a cold stream to wake you up. Nothing like the misery of walking fifteen clicks in soaked cloths. My boots rubbed my feet nearly raw in the next five menus.I had hoped to last longer than this. I had hoped to not be the short rope, the weak one. I had hoped to be stronger this time.

They need me or I would not be here. I have skills that will come in to play later. If things get too rough I am expendable. They promise and promise, but I know this for fact. It would not be the first time the trained code monkey would fail to make the primary target. If things get bad I'm not the thing that will save their lives. How can I not let this get to me? How can I not let this fact manipulate my every decision?

We march on. Pain, thirst, short breath, pounding heart all be damned. We march.

We will make the compound by nightfall. We will be done and on our way home by dawn. We will have what we need. Or, we will all be dead.

Mystery Box

At work we have a mystery box that says it is a Sun Microsystems device. We can ping it, but not connect to it. We cannot find it yet. The tracerout doesn't make any sense. I cannot find much in our database as far as how to find the box goes. It is just sitting there, quietly absorbing electricity and bandwidth for no good reason.

It doesn't appear to be hindering us with the exception of hogging an IP address.

What is a sysadmin to do?

Losing a box amongst several labs is unforgivable, but believable. I've heard of a person who lost a box in an apartment. They could ping it, but not find it. They had to follow cables and tracked it down to a closet. What is to be done in the age of wireless? There could be imprecations beyond the confines of of the immediate area. this pings my imagination.

If someone left a wireless device on say a bus and set to find a connection, it could travel the country logging in when possible and handing over whatever information it could about it's location and what ever other sensors attached, cameras, microphones, temperature pressure anything else that comes to a devious mind.

If one designed a magnetic web cam that had a little wind mill, vibration generator, or solar panel attached to it for charging, you could snap this thing on the roof of a bus, boat or perhaps a plane with some planning and watch it go all over the place. You wold get plenty of loss, but you would have to design the devices with that in mind. These could be called mystery boxes because finding one would not necessarily tell you who had put it there. Put some legs on them or even wings and you have something that could be fun.

Homeland Security would go bat shit.

Monday Morning

Nat offered me a ride in this morning because I have a week's supply of lunch stuff to tote along. Nat also got Elle up an extra 10 minutes early because she has been dragging ass in the morning. Like mother like daughter. It is funny how things change when you have kids.

We ended up at Elle's school seven minutes early.  When it was time to take Elle to the door, Nat picked her up and threw her over her shoulder. I'm thinking "I thought you said your back was hurting." Nat mentioned it was the only way to get a hug out of Elle when she gets dropped off.

"Mom your are embarrassing me." Elle protests.

"No I'm not." Nat assures Elle.

OK, I didn't hear the conversation, but that was the relayed to me and a bit of embellishment on my part. Nat doesn't think Elle should say things like that yet. "She is six." Nat protests.

The whole moment made me feel like a member of a family. Not that I hadn't felt like part of a family you understand. Just more so this morning.

Musing (do not read)

As two fields of presents approach each other varying fields of reality begin to interact with one another. Time is just the catalyst that allows motion and interaction. Time is simply the question being asked.

Matter does not exist. There are points in space where actions and rules apply.

Does space or matter exist? Think for a moment if they do not. Think for a moment if matter and space and time are nodes in a database. They have coordinates and attributes associated with them. As place and time colide or approach colision, different rules apply with different levels of intercity.

Think about the numbers. There is no right or wrong. There is movement, but the movement is change in the numbers in place and the rules that apply based on what numbers are associated with one another.

These are not tables, the database does not take up memory. The data is places kept in moments. The moments are created as needed. The points of reality  wink in and out of existence and memory. The numbers do not care. The points do not care. No one is punching the numbers in to some keypad. They roll and waves seem to wonder through the chaos. There is random order occasionally.

Sunday Afternoon

People worry about their own dreams too much. I wonder if the idea is to make someone else's dreams come true. In the process, someone might work on yours. I do not feel like being a syndic today. The sun is shining and the grass is mowed. Elle is watching cartoons. Nat is not feeling well, but she seems to be getting better. I'm watching Dead Like Me end to end. It puts me in a strange poetic mood. Good thing I do not have a poet's heart. Unloaded it on eBay.

I'm thinking of having a drink. I cannot make up my mind whether I should have a slug of Johny Walker Black or a glass of red wine. We have the stuff for margarita's. I'm not much in to it. Maybe I'll have cool aid instead.

I wish I had something profound to talk about. There is nothing interesting here. Sorry. I prey all the time for a lack of interesting things. life is best served boring. It doesn't make for good blogs. What is a family man to do?

My mother got rid of her puppy. Elle kinds of wants a dog. Nat mentioned something about waiting for Tiger to die before we could get a dog. I have a rule about not locking up the dog 23 hours day. No more. That is just cruel. I will not stand for it.

The bills sit on my desk. I should really start paying them.

Mobile Phone Crap

Twidroid is an application that lets you use Twitter with ease from an application instead of using the slow as molases mobile browser. It works, but I can tell that the folks putting it together are trolls. That is, they listen to the buzz on Twitter, but do not always participate. I can tell this because reply and search buttons are right on the screen, but there is no 'new post' button to be had. You have to hit the menu key and then bring up the new post window. This is ridiculous. The whole point of Twitter is to get people talking. Put the new post button right in front.

I know it is no hardship to hit the menu button and then get straight on to posting. It is the principle of the thing. Why are they hiding the new post button? What is their motivation to hinder the subconscious drive to send a tweet? This app sucks regardless. I'm going to go back to text messages or just use the mobile site for now. Maybe there is a better app out there that 'gets Twitter."

UPDATE:

Looked at the comments on the market. It turns out I'm no the only one who feels this way. I was consittering logging in and bitching, but the only people who liked the search buttong on top appeared to be planted comments. They even sounded like trolls in the comments. "I never post, but I search all the time." Yadda yadda.

Don't get it!

Who can tax the Sunrise?

I'm going to go weep for a couple hours.

iPhone

There is an app for everything. They just don't accept cash. I read somewhere that the first year payout for an iPhone is something like $1600 not including purchasing apps. Not sure where that number comes from. Most of that money goes to AT&T I bet. It isn't the phone, it is the service that you have to pay attention to when you buy.

Long, my office mate, want's an iPhone, but on T-Mobile. I use T-Mobile and they are not too bad. He will have to jailbreak his phone to get any real use out of it. I'm not sure how the app store works at that point? Do you have to hand install the apps? Is there a replacement app store?

Very Local News

Nat gave me a ride in to work this morning. It had rained in the early hours of the morning. I had told her about my previous day's high stressl leaves and she, being a dear, gave me a lift this morning so I would not have to deal with the mud. Nat had to tell Elle not to hold the door for everyone this morning. Elle apparently held the door for a bit too long yesterday to let every one else in. Nat was worried she would miss breakfast.

I set up a computer at work that had Windows on it. That doesn't sound like much. The software to be used on the machine is so proprietary that the machine had to be set up a couple times to make the paths right. A bunch of software has to be installed just right. A bunch of scripts do a bunch of path voodoo to move information from point A to B. Several bits of software have to be installed so the scripts can use them. I bet $5000 worth of software is on that box to make the batch files work. It scares the crap out of me. I'm just not impressed with the amount of work that has to go in to this one box to save a bunch of work. I do not even know wheat they are trying to do. I hope it all ends up working in the end. I do not want to set that server up ... again.

The apartment complex behind work had men on the roofs. They were removing the blue tarps and putting down a new roof. I couldn't tell if they were putting down a whole new roof or if they were just covering the bad spots. I have two friends who live there so I hope them the best of shelter in this hurricane season of 2009 and beyond. I have a fantisy of the last nail being driven in a pounding rain storm.

Apologies for all the Very Local News posts. I've felt stressed by work lately more than normal. My attention span is shortened and I think I'm addicted to pop-tarts. There is no excuse. I will try to write something more substantial than these short blurbs in the near future. one would think that posting on Twitter would satisfy the need to brain dump the short ideas. Then again, the itch of needing to get it out or "down on paper" may be satisfied too easily these days.

Very Local News

In London, they have thousands of CCTV cameras watching everything people do 25/7. Last year, one crime was salved due to this vigilance. Many thousands of tickets were issued.

It trips me out how much our company depends on network connections. I've complained before. If any system between you and the database you are logging results to blinks you will get corruption and get at least some worthless data in the database. This hurts. it makes people work much harder than they should have to in may cases.

I did 20 pushups at work today on a dollar bet. I'm not sure how I got roped in to it, but I boasted that "I get paid to do pushups." and Chris called me on it. I had to do 20 pushups. He wanted to know how many I could do with him sitting on my back. I bought some pop-tarts with the money. They were extra sweet.

Year round schooling sounds good to me as long as there is some prevision made for taking vacations and days off for handling necessary details of life.

Someone needs to go through Giulia Child's old shows and cut the word 'butter' and stitch them all together in one video. I'd blog it. Someone has done this for the word 'fuck' in movies like Reservoir Dogs. It was pretty nifty. The word is said so many times that you can fallow the plot of the movie.

Several podcasts are all about the over hype of Twitter and Facebook. I say it was the celebrities getting in to the act that hurt social media. Advertisers are slaving night and day to screw things up. It has become fashionable to disconnect and pay exorbitant money for a retreat that has no wifi. One way Twitter will make money in the future is to take surveys of what people are saying about people or subjects on the service. Are they happy or angry or indifferent on the subject?

Even with times as hard as they are right now people still buy electronic gadgets. When surveyed, people would give up cigarettes before a new phone. The only thing that topped out over new gadgets was prescription drugs.

One of the guys at work goes to McDonald's and gets a McDouble the big-mac sauce. I think he saves a dollar off the price of a big-mac. Today, he made out like a bandit because they gave him a double cheese instead of a McDouble. Score.

Oh, my God! NPR interviewed a bunch of the actors from 'Thirty Something'. I nearly wept listening to it. I do not even know why. Some of them sounded a hundred. If I were making a show something like Thirty Something today, I would call it "Trying Not to Die" and it would have people of every age all the time. People would die when appropriate.

Old saying in trucking circles. "Keep the greasy side down."

Very Local News

I have difficulty writing interesting things down when I'm this busy at work.I really have to think to write things and apparently I have to think to get my job done as well. I don't know how the other guys work on open source projects or make interesting games happen when they are this busy at work. It amazes me.

One group of Israelis came out with a way to fake DNA samples. Funny, the next week another group of Israelis came out with a test that detects faked DNA samples. hmmmmm.

Look, we are going to jack up taxes and call them green taxes to make them slide down your throat a bit easier. The idea is that you will use the ungreen thing less and use the green thing more, but we need you to use all of it more so we get more money. Never mind what makes sense. Don't complain or someone will turn you in to the White House.

There was a lady who kept a daily diary for 55 years. She started when she was 15 and kept it up until the day she died. It is the better part of a human life in those pages.

Many people who call themselves Taleban  believe in their cause more than you believe in yours. They will kill because it is the right thing to do. They will kill the children of people in their way because it is the right thing to do. They will lie because it is the right thing to do. They will laugh at their enemy's stupidity because it is the right thing to do. They decline the restraint of firing on civilians. They will exploit the rules we are restrained by for their gain. They are more ruthless than we are. This deserves respect. Much the same way a poisonous snake or scorpion deserves respect.

Sanyo has a bunch of video and digital cameras coming out that connect directly to WiFi without a computer to the internet.

Duracell has an energy drink. Not available in the U. S. apparently. Drag.

Yesterday I put up a post on Twitter and Facebook from my phone about children attending first grade. I misspelled several words with typos. It looked like a first grader wrote it.

Very Local News

Boring video, but informative.

Nat would love Coke Freestyle. They have Raspberry flavored drinks with this thing. These things are crazy. They will turn up in a restaurant near you any time soon. They are connected back to the mother ship and if people particularly like one new flavor, Coke will use that information to generate more sales.

Very Local News

Pupperware parties. You have got to be kidding me. I have sympathy for any legal way to earn supplemental income in these trying time. Yee-gads. Things are getting out of hand. It used to be Tupperware, Avon and Amway used to be the big draws. Now there is every kind of direct sales you can imagine. It makes me ill. Still, I have a hard time blaming any one for doing it. Don't be offended when I say no.

Snowleopard (Apple's new OS) is coming soon. It will beat Windows 7 to the consumer. Yee-haw. Apple really likes the name 'OS-X' pronounced OS ten. I await OS 11 or whatever they cal lit.

Someone puts a program on your computer. When you log in to your bank, a live person sneaks on your computer and starts transferring money using your IP address and your authentication in a browser window you cannot see. How are you even supposed to fight that? "It wasn't me." "It's is your IP address. All the personal questions were answered correctly." You are just screwed at this point. It is enough to make me rethink online banking all together. Too bad my bank's closest outlet is in another city.

I finally watched the whole "Doctor Horrible Musical Blog" or whatever it was called. It was really good.

I set up Facebook to take pictures and video from my phone. The way Facebook is going it may replace the functionality of Twitter entirely. At the moment the only thing I cannot do is send an SMS straight to Facebook for a status update. That would make Twitter useless to be honest. Only a couple people get my Twitter posts, but a bunch of folks find my Facebook posts and comment there.

Sleep deprivation is torture, unless it is your child crying that keeps you up all night. Then it is parenting.

I was on the phone with Natalie this afternoon when a thunderstorm rolled through. She mentioned that the first drop or rain just hit the fireplace. It echoes. I looked out the office window trying to identify the column of rain that was over our house. A bolt of lightening popped near where I was looking. I heard the thunder over the phone from Na's end. She said it was very close to her and very bright on my end. Scary. She hung up with me.

Elle has this RFID key chain she has to carry to buy breakfast and lunch. We have to put money in the account. I'm not sure why she doesn't have a key and a pin. It used to be so much easier when I was a kid. If you had a hole in your pocket, you went hungry.

Lunch Conversation

Today was all about Westhiemer. The powers that be are repaving Westhiemer this week which happens to be the first week of school for the area.

• Why are they repaving Westheimer? It didn't suck. All the other streets around it suck. You can't travel from I-10 to Westhiemer on Kirkwood without having the suspension in your vehicle replace half way.
• Did they have to pick this week? It is the first week of school for our area and they rip up the busiest road in town. Good planning.
• You can't write a letter to the mayer because you would have to talk to the next mayer.
• We speculate that this must be the 'shovel ready' money that came down from the feds. Making a new bridge or doing anything substantial takes years and they want to make sure to spend all the money quickly before the feds come down and say they need the money back. They may need it to pay off Cash for Clunkers.

[end]

Sunday Evening on edge

I get on edge sometimes. I'm not sure why. I have this kind of panic attack ting going on where I get bound up in my own head and want to run away or hide or something. I'm not sure how to control it. I'm not sure how to make myself relax. It is anxiety over everything in the world. It is just a general uneasiness. More like a general pisttoffness over everything that has ever crossed you.

Tomorrow is work. Tomorrow is Monday. There is a bit of anxiety over just going to work. Every one has that. I worry for nothing to be honest. I have too much of it.

Elle has not a care in the world. I wish  tomorrow she will hit the door of that school and first grade with the confidence of dark ops. I can learn something from that little girl. She also sleeps right through the boom boom next door. It is going on tonight and will drive me up the wall.

They were boom booming all night last night. They will do the same tonight. I need to learn to sleep through it. I need to learn to like it I suppose. Humans have learned to endure far worse thing. I need to get to bed regardless of noise. I'll figure something out. I'll make it work. Or I'll burn out twice as fast for lack of sleep.

Brazil RC plane view

Not sure why exactly, but these RC plane camera views are awesome. I love watching them. My favorite are the ones where they don't do any fancy tricks or acrobatics.I like them flying over neighborhoods and in this case a river running through a town in Brazil. It is just some folks messing around before sunset I believe at the local river. Nice.

Saturday, continued

Nat ran out a while ago (before midnight) to get some Taco Cabana. I opted out. She came back saying the cops were out in force. The Mall parking lot is full of racers. The U-Haul place was full of racers. Several tow trucks were sitting in one of the parking lots near our house with the drivers standing around outside. Nat speculated the cops were planning on enforcing warrants. Makes sense.

Elle is still at the parent's place. We get her back tomorrow and she starts first grade Monday. I can't wrap my head around that. I was worried about the little thing starting school and having to go through the whole first day thing. She walked in to that school and owned the place. She made friends already. She will be just fine. She is stronger than I thought.

I can hear the racers headed up and down Westheimer. I haven't heard any sirens.

The lawn guy came and went. He did a good job. It was frigging hot too. We spoke about his truck. He is an apartment superintendent. That means he can turn a screwdriver and hit a nail. I have trouble smearing caulk in a crack. You would think that sort of thing would come easy. No.

Firefox has finally pissed me off. I have tried to make it work. I've tried to find the solution to the Flash video skipping problem. I have failed. I know it is not Flash because I installed Opera and it uses the same Flash .so and does not exhibit the problem. Opera does not have a spell checker. Nor does it have a copy as HTML function.  It is cramping my style. Opera crashes and has some other problems. It is not necessarily the best choice. I've tried Chrome with poor results before. I'll keep trying.

I looked up my numbers on Google Analytics. I had a jolt over the last couple days. Not sure why, but people are suddenly searching for 'plastickelly'. They are not staying to read my site. They are instantly heading back to the search results and trying another link. That is not a spike in readership. Drag. The lump in the graph is still kind of nice though.

High caliber jiggle goodness

I bit my finger eating chips while watching this video.

Two views of collaborative combat.

The U. S. Military

Southpark

Saturday so far

I'm waiting on the lawn guy to show up. He needed tires on his truck.

Last night, I walked out of work around 18:30 and this really scary cloud was just north of the building. I mean it looked like something out of a B scifi movie. I made it on the bus just in time and Nat picked me up at CVS in the pouring rain. She told me the power had flickered a couple times already.

When we got home, the power came on just long enough for the garage door to start moving and then stop. I had to hand crank the thing open and closed. Elle had gone over to my parents earlier Friday. We heard later that she was all about going to the park and didn't fear the large evil cloud that my parents seemed so concerned with.

We ended up walking to "Off the Hook" restaurant across the street and hanging out with the folks who work there. they had just made a big batch of crayfish and were upset, naturally, that the power outage meant they could not sell them. Some buddies came over and ate their weight in the mud-bugs. My father calls them 'bait' by the way. They had one little safety light in the back that was blinking like it was going to die any minute. I gave the loan of my Maglite when needed, but the emergency light seemed to keep on trucking as long as needed.

I stood out in the parking lot and watched the lightening. There were several layers of clouds all moving in different directions. This meant there were different flows of air and different charges in those layers. I saw some of the coolest pink, blue and green lightening displays. There were zaps that ran just slow enough to follow with the tilt of the had and eye from one horizon to the other and around in circles over our heads. Chains lept from one layer of clouds to another and back over what must have been miles in the sky. At one point I waved my hat hand cheered.

The power blinked on for two minutes. There was a buzz noise, then we were back in the dark. It was just long enough to switch off the 'open' sign in front of the store.

We ended up going over to my parent's place to sleep in the AC. We found out later that the electricity came on before many went to bed. I learned that Firefox on Windows sucks because many things just don't work that should. My father has some kind of pop-up program running. Not sure what was going on with that but it scared me. So glad I do not use Windows.

Not a bad transformation

Not bad for some poor sap in a costume. It is much better than a sandwich board. It needs a device that goes "wa-de-de-de-de-de" when you crouch and stand up.

He is my hero too

Don't you dare ask why. The answer is because he can. The hat ... The hat completes the thought on it's own. This simple video made my day.

Very Local News

Today was good. I got things done. Elle got most of her shots and otherwise is ready for school. I fixed broken things and had a ball doing it. The day started out slow. I was tired. The gloom sprouted through the sunshine to bring ugly rain and evil upon the world. Then, it got better.

My new watch eats in to my left wrist. It makes my thumb hurt. I have to ware it on my right hand. If that doesn't work long term, I'll figure out some way to attach it to my key chain.

Iceland is in a bad way financially. Icelanders feel they are paying for European mistakes. Europe has made it clear that if Iceland does not pay its debt, her entry in the European Union and IMF loans and such are on the line.

Starbuck's will re-jigger it's prices. Whoo-hoo. Who cares? The stock went up after the announcement. I have a feeling the coffee choices that compete with McDonald's are going down in price and the rest will go up.

Financial experts say that confidence is up. I listen to the details and it sounds like financial experts are more confident because they are learning how to cope with the current situation rather than the situation getting any better. Many people they talk to that are not financial experts say they have made life changes and will most likely never go back to old habits of spending and letting the credit card run wild. Not a bad thing if you ask me. The real health of the economy will benefit from this attitude if not the bottom line. by real health, I man the economy's ability to survve hits like the one we just had.

Very Local News

The Toyota Carola is the number one car purchased with the cash for clunkers program. Goes to show that people are not as stupid as the government of this country things. We have a Carola and so far we really like it. The only shortcoming is that it is not the size of a Tahoe. That is it's biggest advantage as well.

Median income in the U. S., adjusted for inflation, has dropped recently. That means most people in the U. S. are more poor than they were a couple years ago. First time this sort of thing has happened since the beginning of records on the subject.

Cricket is getting more popular in the U. S.. There are leagues popping up here and there. It is not British influence, it is middle east influence that is bringing it. Very interesting if you ask me.

Elle's first day of school is coming up. I remember my first day. I remember it because it was bad. I always hated first day of school. Nothing worked and shit was missing.  People were nerves and acting like jerks. Elle is more resilient than I was. I prey she is OK, finds true friends and learns.

Someone in a powerful position must have complained that the tech podcasts were giving too much information on some articles because several of the podcasts I listen to are deliberately leaving out some details. A couple of the casters have come right out and said they will not give all the details to make sure people still want to go check out the original article. ... It works dammit. Just last night I tracked down one of the articles and found Mint Linux.

In Europe, the credit cards are harder to hack. This has increased the number of hack attacks because the value of the information stolen has gone up. How Fucked up is that?

Recently set up a machine in Japanese for work. I found out how this sort of thing works. In linux, the GUI changes drastically, but the paths and commands do not. This is a good thing. In Windows, I set up a machine in German.Program Files turned in to a single word long word like so many things in German. It took some work to get things to act properly during installs. The same is true for Linux. One must be careful dealing with error messages because they come back in the language in the GUI, but not in the TTY terminal.

Some scientists have falsified DNA samples as are used in crime scene investigations. They were trying to prove that DNA is not the holy grail of proof of guilt or innocence. They did make it look easy.

Gnome Color Theme

Ubuntu does not install the high contrast themes for Gnome by default. One gets installed. I had to hunt them down in the package repositories. That kind of surprises me, but not really. I understand the idea of only installing the things you need on install. There was one of the high contrast themes. The inverse theme, think white text on a dark gray/blue background, which sucks for me because it causes my eyes to focus on the inverse sections of the screen and then when I get to software like the browser where the scheme flips back to black on white, I have to refocus and end up with a headache.

Color themes are a bane of mine. I remember fluxing with Windows colors until they were perfect and then getting board of them the next day. I had one color scheme of ambers that I called Scotch. it is the one I kept going back to time after time. Windows allowed you to change pretty much everything as far as colors in the GUI. You can really screw things up if you want. It is great. I have not figured out how to do this in Gnome yet. KDE is easy and more flexible. Gnome requires some other piece of software to really turn a wrench.

What I end up having to do is copy an existing theme and changing some attributes. Different versions of Gnome handle this with different means. earlier versions of Gnome just plane don't support changing the highlight color for example. You are stuck with the theme. Newer versions hat least let you do this which makes it much more fun to play with the themes. Still need to figure out what the Gnome theme editor is.

At home right now I use Clear Looks modified to use a green highlight color. The affects the color of the highlighting and the color of the top title bar. Green is a background on which I can read both white text and black text. This is important because Gnome is shit when it comes standards for handling font color based on the theme instead of just hard coding in the program as 'black'. The pale blue used normally in this theme for a highlight color is great if you have black text, but white text is simply lost. I'm probably going to use high contrast white on the laptop. It is just plane easier to use. I use a different theme on the server because I typically only access it through a VNC session and like to have different colors show up to remind me that I'm on on the local box.

Glasses

Not my regular glasses. These are the dime store magnifying glasses that I use at work with my contacts to read the screen. I had a pare from my old job. That is over three and a half years ago. They were scratched and trashed. I treated them badly. I did not use them every day, but I used them a lot.

I had to trash them. One of the arms came off. The general state of the lenses said it was time. This pare had the springy hinges. That is probably the only reason they lasted as long as they did. I only paid $8 for them if memory serves. The glasses I got to replace them last night cost $11 something at CVS for two pare. The only choices of glasses at CVS were low power. They had tons of 1.25 through 2.0 additive glasses. I only found two sets of 2.5. One of which was the two pare in a package that I got.

So far so good.

I've toyed with the idea of ordering some computer glasses from ZenniOptical.com for work. I used to have a pare of glasses made specifically for the computer. They worked well. The dime store ones do not account for astigmatism. The really scary thing is that the ZenniOptical glasses are just as cheap as the glasses from the drug store and they are custom ground.

Low Pass

Just part of the job for these pilots.

I heard of these things and saw some pictures. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the F-82 Twin Mustang.

Very Local News

A Texas bank named Guaranteed Financial went belly up.

Unemployment in Nebraska is 5%. That is because the only people in Nebraska are people stuck there because of their job. there is talk about many rural unemployed are not counted because they are treading water without being on the books.

Readers Digest is going under.

Credit card fraud may make more money than illegal drugs world wide.

Lunch Conversation: Kids, drunk fathers, meet and greet meetings at work and who looked like they ware going to faint, District 9, Bats in the theater, all made the list. Nothing magic.

It pisses me off when security people say you must have a password that is not easy to guess and change it often. This means use a password that is humanly impossible to remember over time and will get you locked out of your service.

The UK has an official UFO sighting form.

Found a new distribution of Linux called Mint. It is based on Ubuntu. It sounds like it is set up for many quick changes and the developers stay closely tuned to users. That is nice and all, but that is what Fedra was supposed to be and I just got fed up with it. I'll give Mint a pass for the moment and stick with Ubuntu. Maybe next week. There is always a VM.

Very Local News

Fewer people moved in the U. S. in the last year than have since 1962.

What do the following things have in common?

• Slamming a metal ammo can shut.
• Open a trash bag by popping it in the air.
• Whistling too loud.
  
• Natalie yelling at the cats.
• Thunder.
  
• Typing the wrong numbers on a keypad.
• Opening a door or window at the wrong time.
  

They all set the alarm off.

Nat bought me some boxer-briefs. Never had any quite like them. They were a bit funky in the beginning. I have to say, my pants didn't rub me so bad on the walk in. I'm starting to wonder if the secret to happiness for men is boxers. I don't know any truly unhappy men who ware boxers.

One of the podcasts interviews a guitar player. I like his influence list. "Old blind dead black men." That tickled me.

Very Local News

Cleaned the Master Bathroom. It is far from spotless, but much better than it was before. I think I did myself some damage with the fumes and spider bites.

We have a schedule this Saturday for the lawn guy. He will have his work cut out for him. I plan on paying double for the first run. I want to ask him about doing the beds as well.

Elle will attend public school. This is the most recent decision any way. We have to get shots and uniforms. Elle was leaning toward home school until she figured out she was going to get the shot regardless.

Proof that it does not start when you are a teenage boy.

Corvair

They sure used to know how to sell them. They almost make it look safe. This is the target of the "Unsafe at Any Speed."

When Knudsen took over the reins of Cherolet in 1961, he insisted that he was given corporate authorization to install a stablizing bar in the rear to counteract the natural tendencies of the Corvair to flip off the road. The cost of the change would be about $15 a car. But his request was refused by The Fourteenth Floor as 'too expensive'. Bunkie was livid. As I understand it, he went to the Executive Committee and told the top officers of the corporation that, if they didn't reappraise his request and give him permission to make the Corvair safe, he was going to resign from General Motors. This threat and the fear of the bad publicity that surely would result from Knudsen's resignation forced management's hand. They relented. Bunkie put a stabilizing bar on the Corvair in the 1964 models. The next year a completlely new and safer independent suspenion designed by Frank Winchell [the 'diagonal pivot swing axle' by the way] was put on the Corvair. And it became on the of safest cars on the road. . . . There wasn't a man in top GM management who had anything to do with the Corvair who would purposely build a car that he knew would hurt or kill people. But, as part of a management team pushing for increased sales and profits, each gave his individual approval in a group of decisions which produced the car in the face of the serious doubts that were raised about its safety, and then later sought to squelch information which might prove the car's deficiencies. . . . In April of 1971, 19 boxes of microfilmed Corvair owner complaints, which had been ordered destroyed by upper managment, turned up in the possession of two suburban Detroit junk dealers. When The Fourteenth Floor found this out, it went into panic and we at Chevrolet were ordered to buy the microfilm back and have it destroyed.[End of excerpts] LiveLeak

I used to know someone who claimed to own a 66 Corvair. Never laid eyes on it. It didn't run. I helped a buddy put an old TA on the road. We drove it to Florida. That story is done and dusted. I suppose it could have been worse. We might have tried a Lotus.

One Shelf Down

I just spent the better part of an hour clearing off a shelf in my living room. The shelves are industrial and hold a tremendous amount of weight. I know for a fact now because I cleaned out my old books. I had thirty old books I purchased in my Tellipro days. Most of them gathered dust, but a couple of them helped me through some tough times at my old employer. In the pile was also an old broken laptop (not toe one you gave me Adam, another one.) and several old cables and disks with useless crap on them. The two things I thought were still useful went in to bins on lower shelves. The dust was inspiring. Inspiring me to want to run the vacuum. Haven't yet.

Nat went to Sam's to get away and feel a sense of accomplishment. Elle helped me pick up a stack of envelopes that made it's way to the floor in a spread surprisingly ordered. I should have taken a picture. It was some kind of quantum pattern of dispersal. Amazing. Lost forever now. The cats always enjoy when dust gets kicked up and ran around sniffing things as I placed them in the box.

There was a trash bag and a box bound for the attic. I tapped the box shut. It is a Dell box, sturdy for shipping computers. I nabbed several from work for just this very task. They were just going throw them out anyway. Hate it when something that useful goes to waist. I've blogged about hauling them home on the bus before. I always get some interesting glances, but no one seems to mind. The headache I woke with this morning is still around despite the aspirin and caffeine I've taken for it.

I had these grand plans of using smaller boxes to store the books and emptying the shelves of other clutter that has accumulated over the last ten twenty years. The shelves are not that old, but the crap on them is. It is mostly computer stuff and books and a bit of Nat's stuff that has not found its way to the attic yet.

The moment I picked up the box, I knew it was not going to make it in to the attic. I wrestled it out to the garage, pulled down the stairs, and looked back and forth from the box to the hole in the sealing with all the pointy bits aimed at my ribs. I walked over to the trash can, opened the lid and hefted the box of bricks in to the bin. "It fits." ... dusted my hands, closed the attic access and went inside to blog about the affair.

Going for a walk

The kitchen is a wreck. The yard looks like death. The doors need attention. The rest of the house is a disaster area. Time for a drop of Scotch.

It begins

Science: Chinese Clinic Uses DNA Tests To Predict Kids' Talents on Saturday August 15, @12:01AM Posted by Soulskill on Saturday August 15, @12:01AM from the this-one-will-be-a-level-80-death-knight dept. background: url(//c.fsdn.com/sd/topics/topicbiotech.gif); width:42px; height:65px; biotech Death Metal writes with this excerpt from CNN: "About 30 children aged 3 to 12 years old and their parents are participating in a new program that uses DNA testing to identify genetic gifts and predict the future. ... The test is conducted by the Shanghai Biochip Corporation. Scientists claim a simple saliva swab collects as many as 10,000 cells that enable them to isolate eleven different genes. By taking a closer look at the genetic codes, they say they can extract information about a child's IQ, emotional control, focus, memory, athletic ability and more. For about $880, Chinese parents can sign their kids up for the test and five days of summer camp in Chongqing, where the children will be evaluated in various settings from sports to art. The scientific results, combined with observations by experts throughout the week, will be used to make recommendations to parents about what their child should pursue." biotech gattaca eugenics goodluckwiththat usanext science biotech story Slashdot

Gattaca Day has already happened. It only took 12 years. "Welcome to camp kids. Take these simple tests, let us swab your inner cheek and if you are very special, you will get coolaid at the end."

Very Local News

Experts say the recession is over. Consumers say 'what recession? I am in a depression. Let the other guy start spending." As for me, I'm only buying what I need. If I can make it last, I do. France and Germany's economies grew by 0.03%. Well, screw them. I'm in Texas.

My G1 phone (Android) does not handle extensions very well. I get a message that it cannot dial the number. There is no place to put a zzz-zzz-zzzz xzzz or something like that. Maybe a separate field is needed.  Do not need to automatically dial the extension. I just need to know it and have it displayed when I pick the number. A quarter of the people in my phone book have the same work phone number as myself. The difference is the extension. Get on the stick Google.

The light is flickering in the men's room since the power blips yesterday. A lot of stuff seems to have been affected by those blips. Anyway, Every time I walk in the head this morning, I have a flash back to Duke Nukem 3D or some variant where there was a mens room where the lights flickered and you were jumped by a bunch of bad guys when you walked in. There was a mirror and duke said "Damn, I'm lookin' good." The first time he saw himself in it.

I heard the term "IED" used to describe the device that brought down the Lockerbe plane. I think the term IDE, Improvised Explosive Device, should not be used for just any non-manufactured device. Some of the IEDs used in Iraq were made in part outside the country. I bet the bits only came in the country because they were going to be used in a device of war so it is hard to call it improvised. I doubt the bombers pull a McGiver and make a bomb out of toothpaste and fingernail clippings.

Golf may be in the Olympics. I refuse to buy it. That is, I think it is a rich white man's game that is currently dominated by a middle class black man. Baseball is on the list of games that get voted on for a while. No dice.

Some of the members of the house of commons (congers) in Briton get 83 days of paid holiday a year. This may change due to the fact that people are seriously pissed at the MPs.Many are resigning and nearly half are expected to be defeated in their next election. The British are about to hit the reset button on their government some have said. We should consider this action in the U. S..

The GamerWok guy says half the people at his work have Facebook on one screen and all their work on another screen. I believe it.

Network Woes

We had this strange coinsurance at work. We had a power blip yesterday in the evening. Our network and the local boxes all seemed to recover. One lead from the UPS didn't catch and machines lost power. No big deal. We will get it looked at. Yesterday afternoon I noticed I could not get to some parts of our intranet. This morning I rebooted my machine and Firefox would not come up at all. I mean it would make a lock file and sit there doing nothing. No messages and no activity and no ctrl-C. Nothing.

After cussing, and poking around for a half hour I found the messages in the boot system that lockd server was not responding. That is some NFS voodoo service. Everything else was working

I tried to figure what machines were affected. It turns out , only newer RHEL 5.2 boxes were affected. Some 5.1 boxes did not have the trouble. When I poked around in the user folders for Firefox there were some rbf files one of which was labeled localstore.rdf. I'm not sure where the change happened, but it appears that newer machines use more locking and authentication than the old machines did. OpenOffice must use the same locking mechanisms.

It freaks me out how dependent computers have become on networks.  People are buying netbooks by the case and loving it. My phone won't run a hello world without a network. Now the desktops on an integral network blow a gasket every time some locking mechanism trips over a power blip. Great. I guess TVs have always been useless without a network signal.

When you download a Linux OS, it comes with enough to get you booted up and logged on to the net. That is where all the real install files are. They are called live CDs. They are getting smaller every week. The online repositories are getting larger. The one for Ubuntu ended up being 22 gigabytes. I know I downloaded it for use on our internal network.

Windows requires you to get online in order to download updates to all the security software that protects you from being online.

Health Care

End of life care is on fire at the moment. I've already gone over what I want in this blog. I've made sure others know what I want.The discussion is over "death panels" which is not what was in the bill. End of life care means you are asked what you want and you decide how hard people are to work to keep you alive. How much money is the last three or four shitty years or months of your life worth?

I am pro-socialized medicine. I'm not concerned with the health care industry. I have a couple things I want in the bill or pie in the sky wants I suppose.

• People need health care access without it being attached to their employment. When you get sick, the first thing you lose is your job.
  
• We have socialized medicine right now. It is called an emergency room. This method is not working. I know people who think it is free and that you don't have to pay to see a doctor if you go to the emergency room. No, I pay for it with my insurance.
  
• Limit malpractice compensation and limit how much lawyers can make off health care related cases. It would be great to me if all you would get out of a malpractice suit is the doctor's license revoked, or the appropriate people in jail for negligence.
  
• I want to be able to walk in to any clinic in the U. S. and talk to a doctor without fear of a wild bill for thousands of dollars.
  
• Figure out why there are so many tests run that do not need to be run and make it stop. Run the tests when they are needed, but not when they are not needed. It isn't rocket science.
  

That can't be it. There has to be more. Maybe if I did this for a living I could come up with 400 some odd pages of legalese on the subject.

Clinton wanted to make every one buy insurance weather they wanted it or not. The fact that young healthy people and many others fall out of the bottom of the system is only one reason the costs are higher.

McCain wanted to tax health benefits from work. Tax every goddamn thing why don't you? I mean come on. If you tax people to death, they are dead and you get no more tax out of them. At some point, you end up with communism because every one is working for the government regardless of what it says on your check. Now we are going to get both, taxed and mandatory.

Very Local News

Watched Saturday the 14th the other day. I hadn't seen that flick in decades. i remember my dad and I sitting in the living room watching this show. I thought it was a half decent show and my father looked like he was about to throw something at the TV. The show was a lot worse than I remembered. It wasn't campy enough I guess.

So, I text Adam at 08:00 this morning to find out if he has had any luck getting Twitter working and he responds with "Playing a game now." I'm trying to remember the last time I witnessed him up and running before 08:00.

The best selling copyrighted book is <drum roll> The Guinness Book of World Records. It has sold over 100 million copies.

My machine at work had been up for 22 days. I come across a script being edited in a text editor that now asks me if I want to save changes. I do not remember having made any changes. I go look at th e last updated date on the file. July 24. It is Aug 13. God knows what changes have been sitting in memory for 20 days. I clicked the choice that meant

And just for that little bit of excitement

Wholey 8x8 Batman!

When four wheels is just not enough.

Very Local News

There are almost seven billion people on the planet.

A guy got thrown in jail in Florida for writing a song that threatened two cops. It turns out he was facing cocaine charges and probation problems.

Adam set up a twitter account. The world has tilted just a mm or two off its axis. They are headed out to GenCon. Adam jokingly asked me to come with them today. I said I was too broke. I couldn't handle the nonstop gaming. That is just too much for me.

Afghanistan supplies about 90% of the worlds heroin, and has for thousands of years I bet.

My spelling is terrible in the best of circumstances. (I just spelled circumstances correctly on the first try.) It is embarrassing when I type on the phone. It is at its worse with the on screen keyboard on the phone. Yesterday I asked Nat if her sinus was bothering her and hit the 'a' instead of the 's'. Do the math. That about tops the list of snafus so far.

I had a very busy day today. It was a good day. I figured out most of the challenges thrown at me. People came to me for answers and I was mostly able to help. I was hit with surprises and coped. I learned a couple things and suspect I may be handed some new responsibilities in the future. Not a bad day by any measure. As a matter of fact, since it was a hard day, I have no guilt that it will be counted as a good day against the limited number of good days I will have over my life. That makes it an even better day. It is like a free good day.

Buick vs Saturn

GM kept Buick and dumped Saturn. A lot of people think they should have gone the other way. I think Saturn got dumped because of it's pricing structure. They had fixed prices on cars and car companies just wrap their heads around fair pricing structures. There is something very feminine about fixed pricing. Buick was kept because they sell like hot cakes in China. Buicks are still manly. That is why they don't sell in the U. S..

 (from memory) "If you love your country and you want a Lexus, buy a Buick. because I want to get my investment back." says a reporter on one of the investment podcasts.

Ballix

I agree for the most part. I've know people who buy every explanation other than the most obvious. The answer that works will require work. That can't be right. The difference is, I do not believe in science either. People are full of crap.

A dentist is a legally sanctioned sadist.

A scientist is a geek trained to think inside the box who can't get a date and never experienced dominance except when he makes others feel stupid.

A doctor is someone who is smarter than I am telling me about the bad decisions I've made and how much pain I'm going to get before I die.

A politician is a person who has put themselves in charge of my life. They think they are better at making my decisions than I am. They think they are helping.

G. I. Joe Baled

I hear this is better than the movie. I've not seen it. This is pretty good though.

The Ballad of G.I. Joe from Olivia Wilde

Very Local news

I drained my phone battery last night to the point it turned off. I plan on doing this a couple times. I wonder if it really helps lengthen the life of the battery.

The bus driver this morning was out to kill someone. Every time someone got on the bus he punched it and tried to throw them down the isle. It isn't the first time either. I may try to catch the jerk on video and find out how he likes a DVD sent to his superiors. Lucky for him I'm so lazy.

Nissan.com is a computer technician. Nissanusa.com is Nissan. Microsoft just bought office.com.

Swiss banks have been secretive for ages. It may flip the other way round. U. S. is pushing very hard to get 50,000 U. S. citizen's names and account information. This will kill the whole idea of parking your money in a Swiss bank.

I put a typo in my father's phone number in Gmail. This was no big deal until I used Chompmsms on my phone to send him an sms. Now, Chomp insists on linking the broken number every time I try to send my dad a text. I do not know how to clear the cache of information on my phone. This is driving me nuts.

A friend of mine is headed to Gen Con next week. Actually, it is several friends. They go every year. They always have a blast. There are new stories every time. They invited me several years ago. I could not put up with that much gaming for four days. It just wouldn't work out.  I wish they would take more pictures. I wish they would Tweet the convention. No dice. I don't think any of them are in to that sort of thing

What does it matter?

WARNING: Geek stuff

There is no such thing as matter. The thing we call matter is simply an apposing force that is local to the area. The smaller and smaller you go only tightens the field of repulsion. The reason my hands do not pass through each other when I clap is the field of repulsion is smaller than the the field of cohesion that holds the bits of space acting like matter together. Thus reality, is an idea. Reality is just a collection of forces acting on each other. There is no matter. There is no mass.

This same residence force that acts a bit like matter would be the self same force that is gravity. It is simply the other side of the coin.

I need to explain light and the particle vs wave thing.

Time is still a bugger.

Then comes inertia and momentum.

Charge is simply a flow of the points of existence called electrons from one spot to another. This might explain the electron cloud.

I'm sure the physics community is quaking in their loafers at the overwhelming proof contained in this post.

One Opinion

Members of the United States Military form one of the few remaining bastions of support for traditional constitutional governance in this country. How will they respond when their orders require them to rip down what remains of the Constitution and tread it underfoot? It’s reassuring to learn that not all of them plan to obey without question any order that might be given to them. An organization known as Oath Keepers has been formed to remind veterans and serving members of the military that their oath is to the Constitution, and not to the President, the SecDef, the Pentagon, or any other person or organization. The motto of Oath Keepers is “Not on Our Watch!” Here’s part of their explanation for what they are doing: Gates of Vienna

There have been scenes in movies where soldiers refuse to follow orders. So many people cried "I was just following orders." after World War II.

“The time is now near at hand which must probably determine, whether Americans are to be, Freemen, or Slaves; whether they are to have any property they can call their own; whether their Houses, and Farms, are to be pillaged and destroyed, and they consigned to a State of Wretchedness from which no human efforts will probably deliver them. The fate of unborn Millions will now depend, under God, on the Courage and Conduct of this army” -- Gen. George Washington, to his troops before the battle of Long Island Such a time is near at hand again. The fate of unborn millions will now depend, under God, on the Courage and Conduct of this Army -- and this Marine Corps, This Air Force, This Navy and the National Guard and police units of these sovereign states. Oath Keepers is a non-partisan association of currently serving military, reserves, National Guard, peace officers, fire-fighters, and veterans who swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic … and meant it.

No one says it better.

Wireless and work

I've blogged about having a laptop from my mother. I blogged about having to mess with the wireless stuff to get it working. I've blogged about wanting a way to listen to online radio at work and using my phone instead of a computer and prefering it because I can also use it for commuting. I've blogged about one of the guys getting a $300 netbook or webbook or whatever they are called this week.

We had a consultant come through a couple weeks ago at work. She said two things about our company. We do a good job writing drivers and she has never seen another company in our industry with a time clock. That is important because it establishes a mentality. We do not have internet at our desks because it is a distraction. There are internet stations throughout the building where people can do research. That's great, but I can't help but think, over all, we would be more productive with internet access at our desks. There are times I try to figure out things through secondary means like manual pages and emailing other people before I will just go Google it. Googling turns up answers with amazing consistency and nearly instantaneously. It makes me feel like it was not worth the walk to one of the kiosks.

I'm not the only one who feels this way. Nothing will change in the foreseeable future. I don't have a problem with the lack of change. I just want to make sure the universe knows my opinion. That is what blogs are all about.

Rain and grass

As I type this, the clouds are making their opinion known above our heads. We got about five minutes of gully-washer rain and now it is misty outside. We really need the rain.

I found out a guy down the street named Jesse is mowing lawns. He lost his job and now mowing lawns to cover the gap. I've decided to higher him to do ours. Not only am I terrable at it, but this way my pride can take a back seat as I help out someone in our area get back on their feet. Really, I just want the lawn to look nice.

Update:

If you click on the pictures and Twitpic says they are not available, try again. Twitpic is having issues apparently.

Reading too many blogs

There is a bunch of stuff going on in the blogsphere. There were several 'town hall' meetings where a politician shows up and so do a bunch of citizens. Only things is, now that citizens are asking tough questions and fights are breaking out, the town is no longer invited to the meetings.

At one of these 'town hall' meetings a black man was beaten up by a white guy. This has not made the news because the black man was passing out leaflets that questioned the ability of our government to run the health care industry. A man who was a member of a union that gave millions to the Democratic party beat him up for exorcizing his first amendment rights. How free and hope and change can you get?

When G. W. Bush was in charge, the Democrats said protesting was the greatest form of patriotism. Now that they are on the other end of it, protesters are "mobs" and unamerican. Go figure. I guess that is what community organization is all about.

Is it me, or are too many groups defining themselves as anti-whatever these days. now we have clashes between anti-blah and anti-yadda.

I added a ton of new blogs to my list. I've managed to read them all. I've reached the end of the blogsphere and want more.

C-130 on a Carrier

It just seems like this is the result of a drunken bet to me. "I'm telling you, it would work."

Wireless

I got the wireless gizmos working on my laptop. It turns out it was much harder in Ubuntu 8. This is Ubuntu 9. i just had to find the correct utilities, settings and password for the router. Oh, and you have to disable the MAC address check, or add your MAC to that list. Something has to give. I was wondering why I could not get the system to hook up even when I turned incription off. Oh, and you have to hit the wireless button.

There is a command called iwconfig that tells you what all the settings are and wether or not you are transmitting.

There is another command you need to install called iwcd. This is the GUI that is the wireless settings control panel equivelent in windows.

Nat was not impressed. "It doesn't helpe me."

So we got ice cream.

Vacation Time

There is an advantage to having long vacation times that businesses are not taking in to account. It starts with accountants. I've heard many stories that ended with "The accountant was cooking the books." That started with "The accountant went on maternity leave." or "The accountant took their first vacation in fifteen years." That is how they get busted to be honest. Someone has to come in and cover their position for a bit and find the discrepancies. My old accounting professor said he insisted on mandatory vacations for accountants for this reason.

I listen to a podcast called "Simon Mayo" from the BBC. He interviews people and makes all kinds of great radio in my opinion. He takes long vacations and I notice the drop in quality. It is not the fault of people who fill in for him. They do a great job. They are not Simon though, and it shows.

Thing is, the BBC makes do. Simon looks good because the quality drops when he is gone. The people respect Simon because they miss him. If someone else filled in and people complained when that person was gone, then the BBC would have an idea that there is someone better to fill the slot than Simon.

So, I'm trying to make a good case for more vacation time. People in Europe are getting squeezed to work longer hours, still not as long as the U. S. and take less vacation time. I say it is better for business to force people to take vacations and to give them longer vacations.  You will find out who is really needed and who has no backup. No one will listen to me though.

Very Local News

I had a headache yesterday.  I ended up missing work. It was the nausea that got me.  Not sure it was a migraine because I didn't have the squiggly lines in my vision. Had all the other symptoms. Felt fine about 15:00. Thought about doing the yard, but didn't want to get over heated after a headache like that. I did a ton of laundry though. That worked out well.

One of the pods had a couple guys blabbing on about Macs and how well they run Windows software. You are paying $1500 for a box and running software on it designed for a box that costs $700. Are you getting twice the performance? No.

The contacts refused to work this morning. The left one, a new contact lens only worn once, felt like a live creature burrowing through my cornea. I tossed them. I'm just going to have to go back to glasses for a while. Normally, I last longer than this. I like waring contacts, but I just cannot do it for ever. It upsets me because I really do see just a bit better with contacts.

In Lebanon they have a credit card marketed directly to women. One side of the card is a mirror. How long will it be before targeted advertisements are considered racist and no longer aloud? I'm surprised they get away with half the stuff they do now.

I'm trying desperately to find a good calendar software for Linux that is compatible with Exchange calender system. I've tried a couple and come up blank on real support. Lightening lets you use the meeting notices to give yourself a reminder. Evolution lets you sync with Google Calendar. They talk about Exchange Calendar, but I haven't found the magic combination of settings. I'm on the track. If I get it working, we will probably keep the calendaring section of the Exchange system. It makes things so much easier when you want to use someone else's time for your needs.

Three point landing

landing gear, nose and roof.

Why didn't Gore go?

As happy as I am to find the journalists coming home, I'm upset that Clinton gets a feather in his cap for being a diplomat. I do not like the fact that 'an apology' passed from the U. S. to North Korea.  I'm very upset that the Norks feel like they got their point across.

Nat was watching the plane land that had the journalists on board. Natalie was crying on the phone while describing the scene to me. Gore cracked a joke and one of the women ignored her four year old as someone made a speech. It was all very pompous sounding.

I didn't know that Gore owned the company that the two women worked for. I hope he is ponying up the cash for the whole trip. I hope my tax dollars are not paying for this mess.

Why didn't Gore go? He asked his buddy Bill to take care of it. Maybe there is a bunch of politicking going on in the background. I know I do not know the facts. I do not want to know the facts. I do not want this issue to soak up thought cycles of my mind any more than it already has. I want Gore and Bill Clinton to gracefully fade away and not darken my the doorstep of my synapses again.

It sounds like Gore didn't have the clout that the Norks wanted. That has got to eat him alive. He seems like a stuck up French pig of a man to me. Just saying.

Lunch Conversation

One of the guys had a handful of coupons for Macdonald's Angus something or other berger. I got a couple apple pies on top. I thought about asking for the same glass that was in the picture, a Coke glass that Nat would have liked, but I didn't push the issue.

We spoke of the economy, the journalists who got freed by North Korea recently, the fact that I got an upgraded fries for smiling at the lady behind the counter, and a bunch of other inane dribble.  At least we were better than the folks, also from our company, at the next table who seemed to talk shop the whole time. Sales people!

The berger was passable. I had this big-red kind of stuff to drink. It was nasty. I like Mt Dew and this st

Very Local News

I need to write a book about suffering in the Houston Humidity. I just spin a tale of woe that will earn me a Nobel Prize for suffering. It is August in Houston.

I got a complement on my recent Tweet about the bird on the bus. "it is so abstract." They read me!!! They really read me!!!

Could you imagine trying to dredge Buffalo Beau today to make a ship channel? It would never happen. No one will let you change Mother Nature enough to get things like that done today. Environmental impact studies will always turn up some endangered camel-scrotum-flea that must be considered above mere human needs. I wonder if there will ever be a project by Wester Civilization again as grandiose as the Panama Canal for example.

Southern Comfort is going to spend their entire advertising budget of 8 million dollars completely online. Not sure what they expect to get out of it. They are dropping TV, magazines, events. All online. Wonder if it is a stunt, or how long it will last.

I had  to take my contacts out at around 15:00 today. The left one was bugging me yesterday. I replaced it this morning and the brand new contact lens feels like a brick in my eye. I'm warring my old glasses, the small ones. They still make things more clear than my current glasses. I believe this is because they are not bifocal. They are just one fixed focus, and well fixed.

Mark this day. I agree with Ariana Huffington from the Huffington Post. She commented on the opportunity cost of bailing out Wall Street and the  Not just the money, but the economic power has been sapped from the U. S. and handed to a bunch of rich bankers who have so much money now, they will have trouble spending it all. Most of that is me. She was in there somewhere.

Henry does dance

Something tells me Rollins did not approve this message.

Air bags on the outside of the vehicle

This idea looks just crazy enough to work. Found here.

This means the bad guys will have to coordinate attacks. If the vehicle is disabled, they will still have to transfer or find alternate transportation. The good guys will have less injuries and deaths. The IED is the only effective weapon our enemies have against us at the moment. The IED is the only effective weapon our enemies have against us at the moment.nk

Very Local News

The humidity was biblical this morning. I was trying to think of the most appropriate word to describe the soup I was walking through this morning, but the lack of oxygen to my brain affected me. I'm surprised humans in East Texas have not reverted to gills, just for the summer time.

Americans hate th FED more than the IRS. It isn't that people fear the FED like they fear the IRS. People perceive that the FED has a huge effect on their lives, yet the FED has no idea what it is doing.

I only know a couple people who smoke. I just heard a statistic that one billion people in the world smoke. Even third world countries are turning to anti smoking mentalities. Tabasco still generates a fortune in taxes all over the world. If you push the taxes too high, people turn to a black market. "... an entirely preventable epidermic."

My dad sold his Harley. I never road on that bike. I will mis it. I just liked the idea of my dad owning a Hog. I could live vicariously through his irresponsibility.

ESPN is in the UK. Will it make money? Is there too much competition. Do I give a rat's tits?

It used to be that every village (street) in the U. K. had its own pub. They have been closing in mass because the taxes on beer are insane and coffee has taken beer's place as a social mechanism. Now the pubs have gotten together and are providing a delivery service from pub to pub that is very cheap. This way, you can pop down to your local pub and send a parcel to aunt Martha who can pick it up at the pub on her end. Thinking outside the box I say. Good on them. I hope it works. I've never been to a real pub. I would like the opportunity to do so in the future.

There are whispers out there that many manufacturers will abandon 32 bit processors in the near future unless the device specifically calls for a one. This means Software will not be updated for 32 bit for long. All the machines in our house are 32 bit, because they are cheaper. Surely we are not the only one's in this situation. Great.

In Gaza, Israel will not allow full shipments of concrete because of bunker building issues. Some industrious people have reverted to thousand year old methods of making buildings out of mud and straw. Others are using that mix with old tires thrown in for extra flammability. Stop lobbing rockets and maybe you can get some concrete.

Saudi women were recently given permission to work as local house maids within the country. Foreign women coming in as maids have been treated so badly that the practice has been compared to slavery. Now, that locals are doing the job, maybe maids will get some rights.

One of our labs has a clear plastic wall right down the middle. This is for air flow reasons. The wall goes from floor to ceiling and used to only be a couple panels. The new one goes clear across the room. The one panel closest to the outside wall is basically empty space and used to be used as a walk way. It not contains a piece of paper right at face level that says "Caution! This is no longer a walk way." I don't know if any plowed in to it, but I'm glad they up up the sign. I would have been the first. I think I would have been the first even if I had perfect vision. I so wish I could take a picture and blog it, but no dice. It is lab.

September 11th is Ethiopian new year. Who Knew?

What's to hand

Few fights end with one man standing over another in a decisive victory. Few people are willing to go that far. Some are driven to win. They have the drive within them before the fight. They find the motivation during the fight. Or something is stirred within. They win.

There was this video on LiveLeak of a Russian guy who had been hit in the head with a shovel. Forgive me if it not Russian. I'm going on the description. I watched the video and it looked frigging real to me. The guy had a spade type of shovel head sticking most of the way out of his head on the right hand side. He was semiconscious and flopping around saying something in Russian while people walked around him filming.

The caption read that shovel-head had tried to rob a store of some kind and gotten his scull split for his trouble. The handle of the shovel had broken off. There was a split running down the side of his head that kind of looked like the joint that is between the plates in a human scull. His eyes were looking around.  He tried to get up. He cried out for someone or maybe it was something. No one was laughing.

There was less blood than I would expect. By the time the camera comes on, the bleeding looks like it has slowed dramatically. I know for personal experience that even minor cuts to the head bleed like mad. I do not know how major head traumas work, fortunately. This fact makes me wonder if this is staged.

It reminded me a little bit of a song by Johnny Cash called "Don't take your guns to town." not sure why. It also reminded me of the video I saw years ago of the helicopter chopping the guy's hands off called "watch your hands". It reminded me of any number of movies where someone gets shot or hit in the head and stays alive for a while.  It reminded me of a story of a guy who had a hunting knife sunk to the hilt in his head by a 'friend'. He survived. Somehow, I don't think this guy did.

If this is indeed real and the guy was indeed robbing the place, I have little sympathy for him. You just cannot trust stuff you find on the internet. I have to be skeptical at every click. This is just the world we live in. I'm not going to post the video because my mother reads this blog.

Another reason NOT to get a Smart Car (updated)

(Amsterdam, Netherlands) Dutch media indicate that environmentally-friendly "smart" cars, tiny two-seaters, are being picked up by roving bands of "pranksters" and tossed into the city's canals. According to the Dutch-language Telegraff, five of the smart cars have been thrown in the water in the past two weeks. Authorities fear the practice will spread to other locations. ... The Smart Smijten practice has been compared to the 1960s stunts of picking up and moving Volkwagen Beetles but there's a difference. As I recall, the Volkwagens floated. Smart cars don't and "any car that spends the night sleeping with the fishes at the bottom of a canal is very likely a total loss." Nevertheless, I suggest that the problem of "pranksters" taking Smart cars would be prevented by providing the light-weight vehicles with beefy bicycle chains and locking them to fence posts or street lights. You're welcome. Interested-Participant

	The Sun

I vote we only allow people to drive cars they can carry. If we are going to go this direction, then we need the Jetson type cars that fold up in to little briefcases. Or wallets. That would take care of this problem. Or, make the things float.

UPDATE:

The more I look at that picture, the faker it looks. The reflections in the window do not look right for some reason and the shadow in front of the tire doesn't look right either. Not sure why. The reflection in the water is too light compared to other things reflecting in the water. The engine is in the back so that car should have sunk like a stone. That is, unless we are expected to think someone threw the cart by hand that far in the canal. When comparing the scale of the car to the boat even closer to the canal, it is wrong. Someone on that closest boat would be as tall as the top of the door to that car. Unless it is a boat designed for children, I call shenanigans on this pic.