Miserable, Unite!!!

I have no idea, but this video ticked me. All the anti-missoury bigots around her do not accept her. She tries to be happy and it blows up in her face. that will teach you. Someone can no more chose to be happy or miserable than they can choose to be gay or straight. I will appreciate it if people would get off the miserable people's backs. We are not going to fit your mold dammit!

Unknown Unknowns

known knowns: You know it and you know you know it and there is little question about knowing it. These bite you in the ass because you pay all your attention to the next two bullets and tend to know something so well that you ignore the obvious. An example is the conversion from metric to imperial and back. This bit NASA in the butt several years ago to the cost of God know how much.

known unknowns: You know it is there, but your are not sure what it is or how to use it to your advantage. Example: Is there water on Mars? Well, that British device that landed there and never reported back was not water proof. Maybe it landed in a big mud puddle and short circuited.  If you are there to prove water is there or is not there, maybe you need to design your craft to handle both situations. (I'm speculating wildly. I'm sure the Brits did their homework.)

unknown unknowns: Things you have no idea about, but must speculate in order to make contingency plans. Remember the probes from the 70s? One of them was sent off the grid to take a look at Jupiter's rings. For some reason, this craft is traveling faster and faster and is farther away than it should be. We know this for a fact, but no one knows why. It defies all our observations and intelligence. I tried to find a link to this information but I cannot.

Talk about wild speculation. People say that this speed up has to do with the quantum switching. That is, They appear to be speeding up because as they get farther and farther away, the spread of reality cause the cosmos to have to work harder in order to keep up with man observed reality. The universe's CPU is becoming more and more taxed as the population of the Earth increases and the distance we cover increases. Here is hoping for no blue screen of death any time soon.

Cops in Spain

It looks like cops are cops all over the world.

Podcasts

I went through my list of podcasts and cleaned up some of the old dead links. Then I killed some of the links that I never listen to.  I wound up with a pretty short list.

Typically, I only listen to podcasts at work. I've noticed that I skip over things like the Sunday morning talk shows. I would rather read blogs complaining about the Sunday morning talk shows. I listen to NPR, bur I do not like most of the attitude or direction they push in their shows. I like to listen to news shows, but they get on my nerves in shorter and shorter lengths of time as I get older.

The kind of podcasts that I like to listen to is fiction. I just added a bunch of fiction podcasts to my download lists. If you google it, dozens of lists come up.

There are a dozen or so geek podcasts I listen to. I've learned a lot, but I mostly gripe at the headphones about how I would do it differently or how 90% of what they talke about would not work on Linux. You are not a true geek unless you use Linux dammit. You get the idea.

The thought of listening to fiction appeals to me from my child hood. My mom bought me my first audio book. It was Sindbad and the 40 thieves. Then came the books on tape from the Lightouse for the Blind. They are jsut the Texas Library for the Blind or something like that now. I get about a book a month or something like that. I listen to them as I go to bed. The one I'm listening to now is all about Deep Space 9. Every one dies and there is some time thing going on. It is annoying. You can get most any kind of book. I've chosen Science Fiction. "Keep them coming." method of picking which book. I suppose they just throw the next random book from the pile in my queue. I like it.

Lost videos

Natalie trusted me to take several videos she had left on her phone for some time and post them on YouTube. The hard part is getting them off the phone. She did that. She handed me the thumb drive with her memories on it. I put the device to my computer and pulled the files off. I brought up the software to convert them to something I can edit and upload. I hit convert.

The progress bars went way too fast. The computer did not chug nearly as hard as I thought it should. I just knew something was wrong.

When I reviewed what I had done I found that I had selected the wrong kind of file to convert the videos to. I over wrote the files that Nat gave me. They were gone. Only the first picture of each video still existed, there to mock me.

What happened is the software opened each file, read the first little bit, converted it in memory, then wrote it to the drive. upon writing to the drive, the rest of the file was obliterated, never to return. Had I copied the files off the USB drive, I would have a backup. Had I selected a different output folder, changed the names, didn't work on the originals, they would be around.

I had every opportunity not to screw it up. I'm sorry Natalie. I've failed you.

Theory of Everything

I'm trying to work through a thought experiment. Below is a list of questions I walk through in my mind just for fun.

How would light from far away places look to us if the Earth were approaching a black hole?

Would this explain the accelerating expanding universe? The universe is not expanding. Time is slowing down for us. That is , the speed of light, which is really the universal speed limit, is lower and lower every meter the black hole gets closer to us.

Would this explain the ever increasing degree of red shift? If light sources (stars) heading away from us causes a red shif, then so can the universal speed limit, known as the speed of light, lowering and lowering also truncate the light waves and make them look longer to us because we are at a different ratio of time than the place where the light was cast (the star)

If the black hole is approaching Earth at slower than the speed of light, would we see it because the black hole might absorb light faster than it can escape and head toward Earth for us to see? Would we ever see it coming before we hit the even horizon? We can see the effects of black holes on some stars and such.

This is just one other possibility that explains the whole expanding universe thing. I'm just saying.

Notes:

Hunter Thompson, killed himself at the age of sixty seven. He is the guy who wrote Fear and loathing in Los Vegas. I worry that only an unstable drug addict could have written a masterpiece like that movie. I say masterpiece not because it is so good, but because it is simply carved from reality in such a way that no one else would have honed.

I need to go through my podcasts list because half of them don't work any more. I swear these people think you read their web pages for updates or something. Like I'm going to go through that much trouble. I don't use iTunes so half the links only work haf the time for mp3 podcasts. Loosers. They deserve to be lost to time.

Retraction: It is not Toyota that doesn't empty any electrical engineers, it is the U. S. regulatory commission that over sees Toyota and other auto quality. That makes much more sense. Sorry about that.

Bad Idea

The pogo ladder.

"Tired of putting up Christmas lights and having to clime that ladder twice every three feet? Just bounce from one spot to the next. Save time. Have fun while doing household chores."

"Trim trees with a very sharp machete."

"Paint the eves.while holding a long stick in one hand and clinging to the pogo ladder with the other."

"Clean the gutters while bouncing over fences, shrubs and all the crap that is piled near your house."

"Clean those high windows all the way round the house and only have to climb the ladder once."

Spoken very quickly in a much quieter voice "Paten pending. Product not endorsed by any sane person."

Notes:

A hybrid car has 100,000,000 lines of code and a hundred or so processors running. Toyota has no electrical engineers or software engineers working directly for the company.

A hot dog is not the same as a boiling puppy. You have to tell a computer that. Google has had to take this sort of thing in to account in their search algorithms.

Just another day

Assignment, Put Windows Server 2008 R2 MSDN on a couple servers an hour before quitting time. Piece of cake.

Grab my WS 2008R2 DVD and go to the server room.
No DVD
Look in 4 places where it should be.
Look in 14 places it shouldn't be.
Find it lying on the table in a different lab.
Start install process.
Things go well until I get a read error on the CD. (25 minutes or so)
Try again and get the same result. (25 minutes or so)
Take a good long look at  the DVD and find a huge scratch that I didn't notice until now.
Start quest for another DVD. Surely we have another copy.
Look on our network. No R2
Look in other people's offices and the strange labe that I try to avoid, no R2
Ask Matt, Yay! an R2 disk.
Go home. Get snowed on. Sleep well. Walked in the next morning.
Start install. It is not R2 it is regular old 2008 server.
Rejoin quest for R2.
Find R2 on an external drive in Brian's office.
Put on USB drive.
Burn.
Start istall. Works. Rejoice!
Go to second server. and start install there.
Hangs at 'Completing Install' (25 minutes in)
Try again
Hangs at 'Completing Install' (25 minutes in)
Remove tricky hardware that we are playing with.
Try again. Worked. Rejoiced

Then I was aloud to do a normal full day's work.

This is what I do all day. Every day. It is always six simultaneous cluster-fucks. I'm not the only one who feels this way. Every thing Chris tried to do with this project has bitten him in the ass and required four things be fixed before every part of every task. It is like having to tie your shoes between every

Watch this. video. This video shows how all IT people feel about users.

Warning: NSFW!!! Watch this video and you will know how IT people would like to respond to the people above.

It's like they have a video camera in my office.

Network issues

Issue Occurs:

Only seems to occur on IP4 networks. Haven't testing on an IP6 network.

Symptom:

A machine that was recently moved or restaged with a new OS now will not receive an IP via DHCP even though nothing has changed in any other settings on the network.

Solution:

• Give the machine a static IP.
• Log in as a network user. This should work now if your network allows static IPs.
  
• Ping everything, as many different places on the network as you can think of.
• Set the machine back to DHCP and reboot.
• Should be fixed. Log in as a network user and use the machine as normal.
  

Comment:

The routers/switches all over the building have little brains. They attempt to speed things up by remembering important information and acting on those memories. That is why something changing, like the location or OS of a machine, might throw of the tuning of the network to the point where a machine cannot contact the DHCP server.

In order for a machine to get an IP from a DHCP server, this strange packet must be transmitted across the network and the "kindness of strangers" depended upon to rout that packet to the DHCP server and back to the box again. There is all kinds of mysterious bookkeeping involved. This issues is the result of that bookkeeping breaking down.

Switches and routers have have brains, but not intelligence. When you have a herd of stupid boxes directing traffic, you get lost packets.

Notes:

I hear the word 'change' coming up all the time. No one likes the way things are, they want chang.e No one setps up to the plae when you ask "Change to what?"

All the news media say "To get a link to blah, go to our web sight and hunt down the link while making our page view count look better than it really is." I find that it is typically easier to just google the story than hunt down some lost and forgotten link on a neglected page. Sometimes the story is some obscure thing that I can only find this way. Annoying.

Coming to Jesus

We had one of those meetings where a problem was flushed out on mass. The entire software department got cross examened by the big boss. It was terrifying and fascinating at the same time. We went over the process of what broke and what things should have bee. Then we went over what should be and what we are going to do.

I'm so very glad I was not in the front row. I sat one back and and felt uncomfortable. As questions arose, even more people were summoned to the room. It was hard to watch and participate in. It was a great for getting people to go over a bad thing. It was bad for teaching people to do better programming.

The whole department was called in to teach people about these kinds of meetings. Now the young guys can be exposed to this sort of ass reaming before being the target of it. It is harsh, painful, informative and time consuming. I was thinking of three or four things I could have been doing that were quite productive. I was squirming. I noticed a few others doing the same.

This was not nearly as much fun as the hours later meeting recounting the minutes (blow by blow) for a couple folks in the software department who missed the earlier adventures. Some took it calmly and some were genuinely upset. Both feelings are perfectly valid. I'm not sure what to say to either set of folks. There are going to be lasting affects of this meeting.

Notes:

Man, I had a hard time getting up this morning. It is something more than Monday-itus.

They (officials in New Orleans) are really desperate to make Mardi Gras a family friendly affair. It isn't. People who do it every year probably don't want it to be family friendly.

I wae wandering why the Frisbee was getting bigger. Then it hit me.

Bought a 1.5 (1.38) terabyte drive. Hooked it to my computer using another USB generic cable like the one I've blogged about before. I got this one to keep around the house. I think the power supply with the new cable is caput. Damnit! a 50% failure rate is unacceptable.

Trip to Wing Stop

It is funny how much fun stuff happens just heading over to a restaurant to grab some wings. Nat even takes a turn at filming me. Yes, I'm in one of my own videos.

Good times. The wings were fantastic too.

More shaggy guitar goodness from Lance. He has quite the arsenal of cool effects. He doesn't need them to play either. I used to know a couple guys who really couldn't play worth a darn and used the peddles to try and hid it. Lance is just out there Man!

Incoherent News

Dubai Killing

The guy killed in Dubai a month ago was the leader of either a terrorist or political organization depending on with whom you are speaking at the moment. It was a well planned attack with many redundancies. People are more surprised that the Dubi police were able to patch together a bunch of survaliance footage in a coherant manner. I can't help but think that someone had a Macbook, access to the raw footage and a couple uninterrupted hours. I'm more impressed that the assassination team didn't seem to give a shit that all the cameras were there.

Blog Buzz

The blogsphere is alive with people complaining about the financial situation of the United states and how the bailout was not only the worse thing to do, but exactly what the bankers wanted because they deliberately put themselves in a situation where they could blakcmake the U. S. taxpayer out of trillions of dollars all at one throw. Now, the money is tied up in accounts that will never be used to loan money to people who will create jobs or get the general economy moving again. The only way to make money quickly is to bet on crappy investments and sell them before every one figures it out. That is precisely what got us in this mess to begin with.

Prepare for bubble 2.0 in 2011/2012. No one has learned anything except how to run a better scam and make a fortune off tax payers all in the name of you better do it or you will lose to the Chinese. When we do eventually get over run by the Chinese, people will look back on this and decide that it was not our fault, but all those stupid tax payers who didn't ... wait a minute.

Boat Sinks

A friend of mine went on one of those learning cruses when she was in college. She got stuck in the middle of the ocean for a month or so because eithere there was no wind, or the boat was broken or something. I don't remember. Anyway, another ship from France or some fucking place was hit by a wind that was blowing straight down and sunk their boat. They were adrift for over a day because someone didn't answer their voice mail. Not that interesting of a story, but it just made me think about a friend.

KDEnLive on a thumb drive

This is the software I use for video editing. I use Linux, so it was just what was available. I've complained constantly about my sound issues, but that is my computer and the fact that I"m an idiot.

My recommendations with any software are to save early and often. I routinely have KDEnLive simply go away between clicks. If I were not a habitual saver, I would have lost a lot of time on this software. This is systemic with all operating systems in my opinion.

Lance and his new pedle

Something about a blue box and a crybaby waw-waw pedel. I completely missed it. The whole thing sounds cool though. Check it out.

Ugly Trees

There are ugly trees. There are mesquite trees in Texas. They are scraggly twisted sticks with stickers all around. They are bushes really. No, they are tough thorny weeds. They clog fields, mess with the water table and are a general nucense most of the time. If you need to clear a field cluttered with mesquite trees, you have to rent a tractor with a cutter or have a healthy back and a well maintained chainsaw.

Mesquite wood makes for good barbecuing. There is something about the thick dark smoke that makes meat cook with that wood flavor. I don't think you can build anything beyond a mes or a fire with mesquite.

It isn't like there is a shortage thought. You can find counties full of mesquite and no one who will get in your way to collect as much as you can carry if you look around in mid to west Texas.

The future in game consoles

They won't be consoles any more. They will be glasses. Stupid geeky 3D kind of glasses that cool people won't want to ware. Then they will become cool, like mobile phones did there for a while. Then our bosses and the local governments will expect us to have them on at all times while in public. You know, like phones. People who do not have them will be considered second class citizanes and will be austrasized by the rest of society. By the time they just become implants and not noticeable from the outside except by people with the implant, parents will be expected to have their kids done by the time they can walk. Then something even more invasive will have taken their place.

But I'm not a cynic. I'm a realest.

Notes:

Had to deal with Microsoft licensing this morning. For some reason their email system does not like my email address. I had to use another one to get registered. I'll know by Monday if it took.

Left work early. I had a headache that would not quit. It is a sinus headache and I was worried that it might be the same trouble a friend of mine had who ended up needing surgery on his ear to straighten things out. I'm not so worried now. I figured out that the medicin I was taking was the new crappy decongestant. Nat stopped on the way home and we got some of the real stuff you have to sign for. I started feeling better twenty minutes after I took it.

To dream

The Blind Shall See Again, But When? from Slashdot by timothy 15 people liked this An anonymous reader writes "Restoring hearing with cochlea implants that replace the inner ear with an electronic version has become standard procedure for many types of deafness. Now it looks like the same thing might happen for many types of blindness. With five national labs funded by the Department of Energy, this third-generation artificial retina promises to enable the blind to see again soon. Already it has been successful in over a dozen test patients, but at resolutions too low for doing much more than proving the concept. However, if the DoE can perfect this larger version of an artificial retina, then the company Second Sight promises to commercialize the implant, aiming for VGA resolution within the decade." SlashDot

The problem with my eyes has more to do with my brain than with my retinas. However, I also have trouble with my retinas. This is awesome news. I just hope it does not go the way of flying cars. I remember people talking about the 1950 and how they were promised flying cars. Please Lord, make this one real.

Put the burn in burnout

This is the best run I've ever witnessed that ended with the fire crew being called to the scene.

Playing Games

There is a LAN party tonight. I have no games.

• I cannot afford the initial cost of games.
• I cannot afford the continuing cost that so many games have these days.
• I run on Linux so there are no games that work consistently.

Saves me from lugging my computer al lover creation I suppose. I did attend a LAN party many moons ago. It was a blast. We blew the power breakers a couple times. We had to run extension cords from the first floor to the second to use different circuits.

I miss playing games. I miss first person shooters, god mode, exploring endless treks of post apocalyptic ruin and smiting anything that moves. That was the only draw I had to gaming.

Lunch conversation

• We laughed how much one of our coworkers is like Hitler and thinks the Haitians would be better off dead. We laughed uncomfortably.
  
• The recent story about a Palestinian being killed by assassins must be a setup. It is just plane convent with all those facts lying around.
• Luge (the sport where you ride down an ice track on a sled) is deadly and requires both balls and skill. Who knew?
  
• Something about sports trades that I missed.
• We speculated about the guy who flew a plane in to a building in Austin.

IAEA wakes up

The IAEA admits that Iran may be building a nuke for a warhead. This was filed under the "Well Duhhh!" category. Are they the last people on earth to figure this out? Where have they been for the past three years?

Have they, the IAEA, just been holding off on saying this until it was too late to gently push Iran in the direction of something peaceful? Was this a political ploy. Was it a way to keep dialog going?

Was it bullshit!?! Did they just not get it? Are we sending idiots to the ends of the Earth to verify the lack of nuclear ambition in demagogic states that have threatened to wipe other countries off the map only because of the dominant religion of that stat? Are we?!?

I'm getting tired of very important people playing games with my well being. I'm tired of being a pawn in their threats and rhetoric. I will not be satisfied until I have a collection of nukes and the means to deliver them to any living entity in the universe that could do more harm than give me the sniffles.

Notes:

I started messing with Linux at Red Hat 6.11.  Now Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 is in the pipeline. I don't know when the beta will come out, but I hear whispers of it's presents round the back corners of chat rooms. Someone came in to my office this morning and mentioned Red Hat 5.4. It took a while to get 5.4 on our network because of the CentOS repos taking so long.  Not much new in 5.4 that I noticed. I could go over the release notes I suppose, but I just don't care.

A friend of mine had a really frightening ear infection recently. Now, my left ear feels like it is getting sick. I do not need ear surgery.

I got more news alerts today than in a long time.

• The train wreck in East Houston.
• The guy in Austin who flew a plane in to the IRS building.
• IAEA finally woke up about Iran building a warhead for a nuke.

The end

The speed of light is a misnomer. Light travels at the quickest pace it can muster. Lets call this the Universal Speed Constant, USC. Light travels at USC.

For a while people thought that bound particles could send information across the universe at an instant. The way they work is by spinning a particle in one direction and then reversing it. Well, in some rare cases, if you split a particle in half the two halves will continue switching directions of rotation even when separated across the Earth or indeed space.

That sounds pretty cool, but there is an issue. I've heard the switch still takes place over a period of time to suggest that the speed of light or USC. Nothing in the universe may exist, including information, at a speed any faster than the USC. This is the speed of change in the universe. The dominoes that make up the universe may not fall any faster than the USC.

There is a theory of an expanding universe. This theory was come upon by a man named Doppler. He noticed a shift in light waves to the red as they came in over huge distances across the known universe. This led him to imagine that the suns far off were traveling even farther away. The change was constant the farther something was away from Earth, the more pronounced the shift This meant, to Doppler and his followers to think that the distance between the suns was increasing. The rate of increase was increasing.

The idea of distance, also known as space and time as constants is now questioned. There are other explanations to the shift of light to the red in Doppler's calculations.

Light may have a half life. Light may be affected by gravity in such a way as to cause the red shift. Or, perhaps, time is not constant. If time is slowing down and light that was created long ago at a faster speed, had to slow down in order to travel now at the lesser USC the light would appear to have the same shift that Doppler saw in those early photographs. And the rate at which it is slowing down is increasing.

At some point the universe will grind to a halt. I imagine it looking like a black hole absorbing the entire universe in a gulp or a slow slurping inhale. Perhaps all the black holes we know of are all leading back to the big bang and release their energy and matter at the start of our universe. The ultimate recursive recycling.

Notes:

What is with Tuesdays. It seems like I post a lot more on Tuesdays. Not sure if it s true, or if I just notice more on Tuesdays.

There are only 900,000,000 English speakers in the world. I'm not sure why I expected it to be more.

Notes:

The old map of where the tung tastes bitter, sweet and salt and such is a bad. The real study was in German and lost the true meaning in translation. There are different kinds of taste buds, but they are spread around the tung.

Red Hat 5.5 just came out in beta. Dammit. I just 5.4 up and running on our internal network. BAH!

The reason I hate Google Buzz has nothing to do with Google Buzz. Sometime in the 1990's there was a radio station called "The Buzz". They were the only radio station in town that plaid good music. The rest of the station was horrible. Every four seconds "The Buzz ... The Buzz ... The Buzz ... The Buzz!!" AAA!! The term "Buzz" has been forever etched in to my brain as evil annoying painful anti-entertainment.

Lunch Conversation

I must note that I ate lunch with my long term and fellow geek friend, Adam.

• Dogs and dominance
• Cats and dominance
  
• Video editing software
• Open source software
• Building Open Solaris for fun and profit.

Europe the word

"Europe" is a word, not a place.

• There is no nation or continent.
• There is no line between Europe and other countries or continent.
• There is no nationality or religion.
  
• There is no money. The Euro is not the only money available. If Germany opts out of the Euro, there will be no Euro.
  
• There is no one government, though Brussels thinks it is a government. Brussels is a comity with a president and a bunch of rules.
  
• There is no military. There is the UN and NATO. China has a lot to talk about in both those organizations. Europe cannot declare war on anyone.
• There is no police force. MI5/6 and Interpol are not part of the European Union as far as I know.
  
• There is no unity. There are treaties that are agreements, though no one seems to agree on anything. We are one child custody case away from secessions of multiple countries.
• There are taxes. It is amazing how much every European is paying to Europe for not doing anything, beyond taking the time to tax them.

Explain to me why Obama and so many Democrats want to be another Europe.

European Finances

There is a ton of talk (and stronger than just talk) about bailing out Grease. Spain, Portugal, and others are in line behind Grease. There were supposed to be rules in place to handle this sort of collapse. the trouble is the rules would have been fine if someone went bust in good times. No one really planned on six or seven countries going belly up during bad times. No one thought that would be the most likely time for the shit to hit the fan.

Some in the U. K. are thanking God they are not members of the Euro. "We were right to stay out."

Some call the bail out of Grease a German financial issue. They are the one's footing the bill for the most part. If Germany were not such a juggernaut, all of Europe would be in a far worse place. When is the last time you bought something made in Germany?

Last Night's Moon

Last night, as I walked home, I noticed the moon. She slung low over the horizon in the gloom. She had one sliver of shimmer, a sliver of light closest to the earth.  Below her was a halo of light from a stadium behind a hill. To me, the moon looked like a ball frozen in the air just above the ground. The whole moon was visible as a shadow or a ghost image.

There were helicopters and planes flying over the park near the moon. There were planes and bright stars shining in the same piece of sky. The whole thing looked like a light show put on just for me. How often I wonder how many people driving by at top speed look up and notice the majesty of the night's sky. Then I'm glad they don't because it would take their breath away and cause a wreck. Poor bastards. Last night, I was glad to have viewed such a ponderous thing. I feel like I had the scene all to myself.

I wanted to try to capture the magic moment. I just knew that it would never let me do such a thing. The moment was mine. I was simply not aloud to share it. Apologies.

The moon was hanging out this evening low in the sky, but just as cool. She was sinking in blue. Had I waited, She would have gone to red before fading out at the horizon.

Is bidding gambling?

If you have a reserve price on an auction, starting bids below that price should be fraudulent in my opinion. If you won't take any less than X then X is where you should start. If you are afraid of bids stopping at X/10, then don't put it up for auction, or start the bidding higher.

I know people don't get caught up in the excitement and won't bid as high. That is because they are gamblers who have a disease and you are taking advantage. Think about it.

My experience tels me that there are gamblers and every one else. I've know people who would bet on stupid stuff and got nothing out of the experience unless something was on the line. They insisted on some sort of sill be involved beyond chance. This skill might be bartering or haggling. It might be bidding strategy. It might be picking a stock or choosing the right time. It might be poker, snooker or baccarat over the wheels or dice.

it all smells like gambling to me.

Dungeons and dragons doesn't appeal to me so much any more because I want a good narrative over playing the game. I would almost rather read about a great adventure than play a game within a good adventure. Perhaps I am an anti-gambler. I just don't like risk. I wander if this is the problem I've had with women all my life. That is taking a chance. Perhaps I have simply become far too risk averse. Life is a risk. I cross the street on a regular basis. Tell me a legally blind person crossing the street under the best situation is less dangerous than driving on that street.

Good man bad man

I just watched a police officer die on video. It was dash cam of a traffic stop. I will not post it. This video is by far the most vile thing I've ever seen on the internet. It has nothing to do with the violence and sounds of human suffering. It is the waist and the fact that the officer did not need to die. This police officer died because of too many warnings and too much leeway given to someone acting drunk and belligerent. I hope training accounts for this today. There is only so much rope you have to give a man before he needs to be put down.

If any one wants the link, I will keep it in my notes. It is very hard to watch and listen to. 

The man gets out of his truck. He screams at the police officer. There are obscenaties and the man approaces the police car. The officer repeatedly shouts instructions to the man and the man returns to his vehicle. The officer shouts at the man to get out of his vehicle. The man produces a gun. A gun fight ensues with windows on both vehicles being shot out.

The man charges the police car and lands a shot with the police officer shouting in pain. Further shots are exchanged with the officer calling on the radio for help, obviously in agony. The man approaches the police car and shots the officer fatally. He does not die instantly. The officer moans and the last sounds you hear are the officer gasping for air as he drowns in his own blood.

The man drives off, is caught, and sentenced to death. This is why we have death penalties. This happened in 1998

Deputy Kyle Dinkheller was shot and killed after pulling over a man on a rural road about 6 miles north of Dublin, Georgia. During the traffic stop he called in for backup. Before the backup arrived he was shot by the man with a rifle. He was able to return fire, striking the suspect in the stomach. The suspect was found during a search the next morning and taken into custody. The entire incident was videotaped by a camera in Deputy Dinkheller's patrol car. On January 28, 2000, the suspect was found guilty of murder and was sentenced to death two days later. Deputy Dinkheller is survived by his expectant wife and 22-month-old daughter. Deputy Dinkheller's son was born in early September 1998. The Officer Down Memorial Page

No comment

Notes:

The financial situation in Grease is bad. The country may default and leave the Euro Zone with the bill. This may cause a domino affect across the subcontinent. The situation is bad enough that tax collectors have gone on strike in Grease. That is a bad sign.

I actually used my printer at work for a non bullshit reason last week. I had to track down and print a mailing label to send a laptop back to a manufacturer. Everything else is lists, forms and paperwork.

Activision is the largest game manufacturer. That just doesn't sound right.

I left home this morning at about 06:30. I got to work a bit before 08:00. I leave work around 18:00 and get home around 19:30. Long frigging day.

Joke

Jewish family. The son calls his mother. "Mom, I'm bringing home my future wife. Just to find out what you really think, I'm going to bring three girls home this weekend and I want you to guess which is the girl I want to marry."

That weekend, the mother spoke with the three women on the couch for five minutes and took her son aside. "It is the one on the right."

The son was flabbergasted. "Mom, how did you know?"

Without missing a beat the mother answered "I don't like her."

Toys

Man toys. These are the sorts of trucks that retired rich men buy in order to make themselves feel strong again. I want one for this very reason. We may not be able to park it in the garage, but we coul probably tow the house around with most of them.

Keyboard Woes

While in the throws of figuring out how to fix my video editing woes recently, I caused another issue. I got pissed off and smacked my Dell keyboard. It had given me flawless service for years. The shift key stuck. The only way I noticed was the funny way I was shifting from one desktop to the other. The only reason I've had to cuss this keyboard were the little bumps on the index fingers for the home keys. They were very small and easy to miss. Not bad for $10 several years ago.

I tried the keyboard I normally use for my server, but the space bar requires 4000 N to produce a space on the screen. Actually, I think it is just the left side of the space bar that has this issue. The right side seems to work without hesitation. This key bard also has the back-slash in the wrong spot. You know how the back-space key is extra wide, right? Not on this keyboard. Where the left half of the back space sits on a 'normal' qwerty keyboard, this one had the back-slash key. That was maddening too. Back to the server.

After a quick trip to the attic, I now have, wait for it, a Microsoft keyboard on my machine. Yes, I'm using a Microsoft keyboard on a Linux box. Something about that tickles me. It is a keyboard that my dad gave Nat some time ago. He now uses the wireless version, with the same layout. The left shift key sticks a bit, but that may have more to do with hangining out in the attic for four years than build quality. One of the Microsoft split keyboards had the '6' key on the right hand side. This one has it on the left. That would be a no-go feature.

The new keyboard is about a foot taller, another keyboard deeper, and a bit wider than either of the other keyboards or indeed any of the keyboards I've used in a long time. Please forgive at least some of the typoes recently. I know I'm bad enough even with a standard keyboard that I'm used to.

Back to surfing the net and screaming at my computer for other reasons. Normal operations resume now.

The internet sucks

Most podcasts use iTunes and nothing else. Yes iTunes is a pretty good piece of software, but if Apple decides they do not like you any more, you are out on your keister. Something that I've noticed over and over again is professional podcasts like tech magazines and notable web pages that should know better, screwing up the link that points to their non-iTunes podcast that is in MP3 format most likely. This happens repeatedly and in some cases for weeks on end.

Typically they will point to a web page that holds the link to the MP3. This does not work worth a shit in an aggregate program for podcasts outside of the iTunes sphere of influence.

Not long ago, one of the well known podcasters who runs Geek News Centrel, ran a survey of such quality issues across the podcast spectrum and found that [from memory] about a third of non iTunes links for podcast sites were broken. I believe it. Instead of recognizing an endemic issue, people yelled at him for exposing their own inadequacies and publishing the results. I believe that too.

Recently, Google has squeezed out another social media point of interest. They call it Google Buzz. I'm sure this is in memory of the now defunct Yahoo Buzz from a few years ago. Maybe not.

I hereby refuse to attend or indeed pay any attention to another social network site. I have too many to pay attention to right now. I use Facebook, Twitter, this blog, LinkedIn, Twitter, email, IM, face to face conversations, phone calls, text messages, screaming, smoke signals, preying, body language, dirty looks, smiles, hitting of solid surfices with my head, and TPoT (The Pitching of Toenails) to get my messages across. No more.

I am not going to add another thing to the list until something else falls off the list. When Facebook pisses me off, or Twitter gets banned from the planet again, we will talk.

A heartbeat from the presidency

Biden, like most Democrats, will do nothing, bitch and bitch and bitch, then take credit when someone else gets it right. These are the people in charge of our future. These are the people we have running the place. I wish us all luck in the whole war on terror thing. We are doomed.

Vote Republican/Independent, anything. Get these creepy haters out of the white house.

Like this

Lifted from here.

DnD

Well, after bitching about how little I had to work with and how bad this was bound to be because of it, here it is.

Not many of the jokes come through. I'm not sure what I expected. Note that I had nearly 52 minutes of footage to choose from. Someone who has no affiliation with our group or DnD in general please let me know if this is in the least little bit interesting.

Video

I'm trying to rescue the video I shot of dungeons and dragons this past Friday. I was saying that if I could save 30 seconds I would call it a win. The trouble with this idea is the length of possible clips is long. Too long. The jokes all require setup and a rolling sort of movement through the conversation. The jokes are also nearly all inside, or based on inside information to the group.

I have almost conquered the issue of being able to edit video along side the sound that was recorded at the same time. This sounds like something obvious to any one who has edited video, but not, it seems, on Linux. This is too much to ask.

By fluxing around with the sound settings in each program, I've achieved editing with shitty video and the machine not grinding to a halt and the software not crashing before the end of a single edit. I have gotten the audio to a point I can understand most of what is said. That is more than I expected. I'm used to never getting what I want out of computers running Linux.

Even though I have the editor working to the point of usefulness, there may yet not be a dnd video.

Something else I've noticed about my videos lately a blurry area on the right side of the video. If I remove the wide angle lens I bought, the blurry bit seems to go away. This is annoying because I paid money for that thing. The drop in quality is starting to make me question its usefulness.

Saturday Malaise

Ever have one of those lives where nothing goes your way. Not much good happens and all life eventually dies? I have.

Natalie's mother is very ill. Natalie is a wreck. The doctors keep jerking Nat's mom around and changing the schedule. She has been on a liquid diet and looks very thin and weak.

Natalie asked Bill to bring Elle back so she would have someone besides me around to comfort her. That is a legitimate consern because I'm horrable at that sort of thing.. Now Nat is passed out in her room while Elle watches a DVD at her laptop. Elle did her job. I think Nat is getting some needed rest.

I'm reading blogs and drinking coffee. I took a very long nap and I'm drinking coffee. I suppose boom boom will start up soon. Tonight promises zero sleep. I'm not worried about it. Life is just like this right now. Maybe Kelly 2.0 will have a better experience.

I'm not looking at the numbers any more. It is far too depressing. I cannot edit a video with sound on this computer. It is not the computer, it is the Linux os. I honestly believe there is no way to do it on this OS. Useless.

Film Fail

So I tried to film DnD last night. I failed. I got the footage, kind of. I got the room from one angle. on high. It sucked. I'll have to think of something different next time I try to film something like this.  I have 52q minutes of people yelling at each other and being 10. no point if I'm honest.

Fail!

Notes:

I have a hard time finding motivation to write anything lately. I'm not sure why. It might be the weather. It has been cold and rainy. It may be that winter doldrum that I'm fighting. It might be work. I've been working hard lately. There has been a lot to do. It has been interesting and kind of fun to learn new things. Still, it has taken a bit out of me. It might be that I'm watching videos of people doing silly things like talking to the camera lately. I've been watching vlogs on mass. I'm trying to figure out what works and what does not.

Some video camera had an interesting feature. If you hit record, you had some way of making the camera capturing some amount of time before you hit record. If the camera was on and in a stand by mode, it was really capturing video and round-robin recording the last umpteen seconds that you could add to the beginning of your recording. Interesting feature. I'm not sure how usefully that is. Most of the time I miss a video, I'm miles from my video camera.

Google Buzz seems a couple years late and a couple notches low. I was automatically following people and automatically being followed by like five people. I'm just not interested in yet another social networking gadget t ordeal with.

Macro Money

Some expert who predicted the last couple dips has predicted another dip coming this year. The culprit is deflationary pressure due to people getting pay cuts and inflation taking away any rises they receive. People just cannot afford to keep up their bills. Increasing spending is just not in the cards for most people. This will cause the FED and other countries to keep interest rates low because they will be afraid of slitting the throat of any real recovery. Inflation will most likely go up to 4% before it plummets to nearly negative teratology.

Grease "Must be bailed out for the Euro Zone to continue." That is a frightening statement. Who is going to bail out Grease? Who has the money and will? I think the U. S. should bail out Grease and demand a proxy membership and a veto power in votes. What do you think?

Oil is going to hit $100, $150, $200 over the next couple of years and stay there. The planet is hitting the peak of the amount of oil they can withdraw from the ground and process. No one wants to bring any more capacity online. Biro oil is not working out. No one uses electricity to move cars around on mass. In short, we are screwed. Buy a nice bicycle and get in shape.

This is almost enough to make one invest in canned food and shotguns. "They can all go to hell. Except cave seventy six!"

Chasing the sun

There is no one moment of a sunrise. They give times in the paper, but they do not understand what it means to chase the sun across the sky just to watch it rise and dance a moment with the clouds.

Notes:

I tried to shoot video of the sunrise this morning. I can't decide if it s a wash or if it is worth posting as a 'fail' video. it was just a couple of couple of second long clicks.

I took another quick stab at html 5 last night. There was an update to Chrome for Linux. No go. I did sit down and read the known issues that were on the front page of the YouTube beta test. From memory "Videos with ads will still play in Flash."That makes sense. All those stupid over video ads are in Flash. I wander if that is why no one is leaping to the front of the line to support html 5.

It pisses me off that depression is so many times diagnosed based on what drugs are available. Many of the drugs are no better than a placebo unless the situations are specific. Way too many people are handed a bottle of pills and told to go and sob no more.

Right now U. S. citizens pay 31% (average) of their income in federal taxes. In 20 years, if the current list of political promises are kept, we will pay 45%. Ridiculous.

Had a huge baked potato from the bbq place just down the road. My goodness, it was the size of a football, covered in meat, I smothered it in jalapeños and onions and ate it right down to the skin. I had a bunch of work to do that afternoon and nearly passed out from feast. Not bad for $7.

One of the podcasts I listened to today was talking about scarves. What's fashionable and not. I know, "What the hell are you doing listening to that Kelly?" It got better. Some ballerina in the thirties I believe was famous for warring these long flowing scarves. One day she was driving her new Bugatti convertible and was strangled to death by her scarf wrapping itself around an axl.

The iPhone will soon have an SD card reader (external). The iPad will soon have a camera kit from the same company. Screw you Apple.

A young man found out his twin brother had died in a car crash by readying the well wishes for the other passenger who was also in the car crash. He was reading the Facebook updates. The police were having trouble contacting the next of kin. This is scary that Facebook beat the police to notifying family members. Sad, harsh. I heard this on GNC. I know this just sounds like an urban legend.

One way not to vlog

Lesson learned. Do not click on your own live video podcast/blog.

Me-mememememememe!!!

They still got it.

Notes:

The Saturday morning chaos video had 140 hits the last time I looked. That is about double the number of the highest count on any of the music videos I got at JP's last week. Shows you the way it goes.

One of the podcasts I listen to is in Hawaii.He said it was Chilly. They closed the windows and things started warming up. No mention of turning on a heater or anything. Bastards.

I got a free lunch today. It was awesome. We went to J Alexander's. I had some club sandwich that was fantastic. The guy buying me lunch tried to convince me to get something more expensive. Not sure I could have handled it. No, I took no media. Sorry followers.

Work Politics

I had a code change today that was very easy. the requirement was basically to remove one line of code that controlled a link, and move a file around so it got picked up by another line of code. Very easy manipulation. Why did it take a week? It took a week because I had been specifically told not to do what I was being asked to do a couple months ago. I had to make sure those folks were on board before pulling the trigger on the change.

This took all of twenty minutes to make the changes and almost two hours to test with interruptions. Funny how that works. It took nearly a week to get approval of sorts. Let's call it a consensus.

Ah, politics. The company  work for has become a medium sized company. We are having growing pains and getting to the point where several people do nothing but push paper work around to handle the rest of the people who do work for or on products. Such is the way of modern business. It is perfectly normal and perfectly regular and perfectly a pain in the ass for all involved.

This is punctuated by a sign of a truly medium to large company. This morning we had a pre-meeting-meeting to cover the bullets so t the meeting went well and there were no surprises. Nearly every one in the meeting was in the pre-meeting-meeting.

Yup, watching our little company grow in to a conglomerate. I'm so proud.

Super Bowl

I did not watch the Super Bowl. I did read a summery. It sounds like a nail-biter where the underdog pulled a rabbit out of their hat at the last moment. Not too shabby. Still kind of glad that I didn't watch. It is just a bunch of guys hitting each other with a ball getting tossed around. It is all too involved for me.

it was interesting listening to several day old podcasts on Monday making predictions about the game.  Some guy was interviewed from the New Orleans city government was all about "The Saints are going to take it all. The national media has it wrong." He held the company line for sure. He was completely right too.

Someone had an audio recorder ready on Bourbon Street and captured a general hooray from the crowded bars in the area. Nice. It must be nice having that kind of comradely when that cool of a thing happens to the home team. It reminds me of the sweep the Rockets performed all those years ago and Richmond was simply clogged with people celebrating with brooms in their hands.

Blogs were a bit light yesterday. I noticed several blogs mentioning the game with a 'light posting' notice. Some just didn't post. Some of the professional blogs seemed to make a point of posting something off topic. Some of the gather of the minds kind of blogs had revelries going. those were the interesting ones. If any one had prebuilt, time delayed posts, I didn't notice.

Notes:

When I was very young, someone asked me "What do you want to  be when you grow up?" I answered "Something to do with computers." That is exactly what I got. That should be my job title. "Something to do with computers." That is what I do.

I've caught myself using the camera on my phone several times over the last couple months. Mostly to capture blue Screens of Death on Windows boxes in order to document the crashes. it is easy to snap a  pic and email it to myself. Then it just pops straight in to a ticket. Easy-peasy.

Census workers can make $17 an hour. Where do I sign up? All positions are temporary. Everything in life is temporary if you think about it. The Pyramids are not truly permanent. Thankfully, we don't have to do everything on geologic time scales.

Attempted HTML5

I'm on Ubuntu Linux 9.10. I tried the latest stable Chromium browser loaded via the deb repo from Google with HTML5 and it just plane didn't work. I joined the HTML5 beta on YouTube. The little graphic pops up with "html5" written below it, then nothing. My machine is not downloading anything. The system is just sitting there.

I unjoined the beta and reverted to Flash.

This is a drag because I just know that Linux is going to be the last OS that has any attention paid to it on the HTML5 subject. I was terrified of Silverlight. That is a Microsoft thing. Fortunately, no one really uses it except Microsoft. I have few needs to hit Microsoft pages at home and work only lets Windows boxes on the internet ironically.

People bitch indecently about the lack of Flash on the iPhone and Android. The new iPad (snicker) doesn't support Flash either. Many netbooks have a hard time with it. I have said that a computer should not be allowed to say it can surf the net until it supports Flash. Those days are over.

The Flash project needs an overhaul of biblical proportion to trim it down and turn it from  a land bound walrus to a sparrow in flight. That, or it needs to be abandon on the web completely and replaced by something designed for the needs of our modern era of internet use. Something extensible and scalable. Hopefully, something that is not controlled by one company.

I'm impressed

I noticed off the bat that this is an acrobatic shoot. Still, I'm impressed with that kind of skill from anyone. How in the world do you get good at that sort ofthing. I mean one mess up and it is splatville.

Wander if it is faked somehow. I wander if it is actually a remote controlled device that just looks like a real person below a fancy shoot.

Subaru fun in the snow

Why do they make 4x2 still cars? Oh, yes. Because they are cheaper.

Vlogging vs Blogging

I'm starting to understand the draw to vlogging over standard blogging.

• It is more expressive emotionally. People get the emotions of your face and body language.
  
• It is easier to point a camera at something and describe it than just describe it. You can get away with a far less intense explanation for many things.
• You can easily include willing people and they don't have to do much beyond talking to you normally. Some people are just natural talkers and make for good conversation if not interviews.
  
• Less need to be a good speller. It still doesn't hurt.
  
• You can spend three minutes videoing and three hours editing, but that is part of the fun.
• You can show off other talents, not just describe them.
• People will watch a stupid video longer than read a stupid blog.
  

I do not know what is going to happen when YouTube starts charging. I fear it is inevitable because YouTube looses money on bandwidth. They will have to come up with a model that charges content providers via a straight up charge, or through advertising. People will not pay for YouTube to watch it. The number of vloggers is going up and the number of bloggers is going down. At the moment, YouTube makes a wonderful case for adding content beyond the written word to the internet. It is a fantastic time to be someone who uploads.

With videos it is so much easier to present a lot of information in a short amount of time about your surroundings. It is difficult to present lecture type information and keep an audience. A car wreck will go much further in gathering attention than me building a set of shelves. A pretty girl building a set of shelves would work too.

Some people can just talk in to a camera and it seems interesting. I guess that is charisma. There is a group of New Yorkers who all vlog and all know each other. I bet one got recognition and the others fell in to the game. The same is happening to some out of work actors in LA. Here we go again with the U. S. being boiled down to two out of three costs.

You can definitely stop and think about what your are writing much more than when you are shooting a video. You can shoot multiple takes and edit out the blanks and brain farts, but you can hone written word more. I think that is why books are just so much better than movies in so many cases. The experience of the written word is in your imagination. The reader pulls an idea off the page and then another, building a castle in your head. With movies, it takes much greater skill to leave things to the imagination and make the story stick. Then there is Avatar. I have still not seen it. I hear that it dominates the imagination and hammers the visual world down your throat until there is nothing left. This leaves some viewers in a state of 'duhhhy' for hours if not a lifetime after the movie.  Hitchcock was a master at putting just enough on the screen to make you dream the story.

Saturday Morning Chaos

Couldn't help myself. Playing with Elle and the cats this morning I broke out the Flip. It sucks, but it was fun. Took an age to upload. I pulled this in to the editor and was looking for stuff to cut out. Then, I just didn't. I'm always terrified of leaving in something that is bad.

Truth

I have nothing to add. I cannot follow this except to say that I fear the same is happening in the U. S..

Notes:

Today is the fifth of February. My birthday comes up soon. I haven't even looked up what day of the week if falls on. Normally, up till I turned 40 at least, I would have done this some time last year. I don't care about 41 thought. It is just rolling off my back on the floor, where I'm leaving it to fend for itself.

A couple years ago every company decided they needed a web page to survive. Now they want a Facebook fan page or personality to be noticed. It is turning in to a place that tries to sell you stuff. When it becomes a place where I pay my bills, I may decide it is too much trouble to deal with. It is getting too big and too unwieldy. It was a place to keep in touch with your friends.

 It has been nearly 10 years since the Concord crash. It has finally boiled down to a bunch of law suites. Continental Airlines and a couple employees and a couple engineers and a guy who had something to do with the design of the Concord are all defendants. "Things just take a long time here [France]." I remember the video.

 While on my way to the elevator, friend of mine asked me a strange question. "Why do you smell like meat?" This took me off guard. It took me a minute to remember that my jacket still smells like smoke from Ken's birthday party several weeks ago. It is wood smoke, We didn't cook anything over the fire. Not sure why, but it does smell like cooked meat.

Notes:

There ae at least 12 words for 'bribe' used in Afghanistan. I'm trying to think how many words we have in the U. S. that mean the same thing as 'bribe'. I'm thinking of phrases like 'kick back', 'greasing the wheels', 'cross the palm [with silver]'. There must be hundreds. No single words come to mind. 'Graft' is more than bribes. 'Corruption' is just generic.

Bad Box

I had to swap out a motherboard today at work. It was not a big deal to do the work. I was able to do everything except the CPUs. I have bad luck with CPUs. I needed help making sure the heat syncs were properly mounted and that goop was properly used.

This task had me by the short hairs for some reason. I've done this kin of thing before, but this one just wore on me. It might be due to the long time It has taken to get the parts from HP and the fact that we first got a new power supply. who knows.

• Unplug all the exterior stuff.
  
• Open the box
• Start pulling things off that are in the way. This box had tons of air flow stuff that came off easily.
  
• Mark everything plugged in to the board. This box had a dozen fans all plugged in sequence.
  
• Pull the memory and any other modular crap like that. Note where everything went.
  
• Unplug everything.
• Figure out which screws need to come out. Some of those screws are probably holding a heat sync on the back of the board for the CPUs.
• Pull the heat syncs off and make sure nothing is hiding behind them.
• Mark the board as bad with a big sticker.
• Swap the CPUs. You probably want to wait for the motherboard to be screwed down before putting the heat syncs on.

Then repeat in reverse order.

There is a tone of details. It is great where I work. People are willing to help me out when I come across something that I do not feel comfortable with. That is basically putting the heat syncs back on. This is because the goop you have to use takes a bit of artistry to get it right. It needs to be thin, but consistent. I'm not good at either. Fortunately, we have folks who do that and much more complex tasks for a living.

This case is a 1 U blade server. That means it is nearly two dimensional. Fitting one thing on top of another or running wires over or under something is a real pain. This made sliding the new motherboard in to place a challenge because every loose wire wanted to scoot under the board as I was trying to herd all the rest of the wires out of the way.

It worked. Left it running the afternoon. Left it running over night. Generally, it fails in the first five minutes if it is getting hot. Wish me luck.

Setting up a work notebook

No, I do not get a notebook. I do get to set them up.

Had to call Dell on a laptop at work. The machine worked for a while and then stopped booting. The LEDs on the front of the system were blinking in a specific order. They had me re-seat the memory and in the short term, that seems to have worked. Easy Peasy. Thanks Dell. Hopefully, this is the last blog on the subject.

I nearly had to call Dell back because I couldn't figure out how to throw the switch to get the wireless activated. There is an LED that shows the activated wireless hardware. It was dim on this machine which means the wireless network is turned off.

I searched for a button. I searched for a symbol for the function system on the notebook keyboard. I finally asked Long, my roomy, to take a look because I was just plane missing it. It turns out you have to touch the LED. It is a button. It is part of flat plastic surface with a bunch of other LEDs that just screams "This is not a button."

Thanks Long.

It was all kind of a wash, because the laptop had some real problems and ended up getting sent back to Dell. We will get the same model back in like a month so I will have completely forgotten how to do it. Someone call me on it if I blog the same thing in three or four weeks. Long will probably yell at me.

Not too may problems like that from Dell for us. I would say we have had pretty good treatment of bad bits from Dell. I still feel confident recommending them to folks.

Every Angle

Remember that nut who jumped a rally car between buildings? Well, here are a bunch of POV (Point of View) angles from the car.

The quality is a bit granny. Still Cool to check out.

The one

Science: Super Strong Metal Foam Discovered on Monday February 01, @03:39PM Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Monday February 01, @03:39PM from the body-armor-in-a-can dept. class="media"> background: url(//a.fsdn.com/sd/topics/topicscience.gif); width:62px; height:75px; science background: url(//a.fsdn.com/sd/topics/topictech2.gif); width:60px; height:80px; technology ikeChino writes to tell us that a North Carolina State University researcher has discovered what appears to be the strongest metal foam yet, capable of compressing up to 80% of it's original size under load and still retain the original shape. The hope is that this amazing material could be used in cars, body armor, or even buildings to absorb the shock from earthquakes. "Metal foam is exactly what you might think – a cellular structure made from metal with tiny pockets of space inside. What makes Rabiei’s metal foam better than others is that she’s been able to make the tiny pockets of space more uniform. And that apparently is what gives it the strength as well as elasticity it needs in order to compress as much as it does without deformation. Many tests are being performed in the laboratory to determine its strength, but so far Rabiei says that the spongy material has 'a much higher strength-to-density ratio than any metal foam that has ever been reported.' Calculations also predict that in car accidents, when two pieces of her composite metal foam are inserted 'behind the bumper of a car traveling at 28 mph, the impact would feel the same to passengers as an impact traveling at only 5 mph.'" Slashdot

That little voice in my gut that has never failed me except when I do not listen to it tells me that this invention is the one that will lead to the revolution in many things like batteries and materials strong as steel and light as cotton candy. I picture one day being able to spray steel on to a room temperature mold like paint to reinforce your creation. They will build houses out of plastic chicken wire and spray foam that last a hundred years. When you are done, you melt it down and put it back in to a can for the next house.

Well, that would be nice.

Notes:

February. It was August fifteen minutes ago.

I was so busy getting video stuff done last night that I never did get my podcasts for today at work. I had to, gasp, listen to music. It was nice not having news playing in my ear. The news really is depressing and stressful. No wonder people know so little about current events.

I'm thinking of writing a python script that randomizes code indention on all projects in an SVN repository. Just to stir things up. What do you think?

Sunday Evening Music and Video

Got the text with the time and headed to PJ's. I tried to convince Nat to go. I think she would have enjoyed it. They don't turn the volume up too damn loud. You can still talk to your friends and hear the music.

I walked in the door to Lance and Justin waving me over. We chatted for a while and enjoyed a couple artists taking their turn on stage. It's funny how much talent there is out there just walking around. I want to go back and video some other folks.

When the fellas went on stage, they really looked like they were enjoying themselves. Justin has this box he uses for percussion. It works great. It is like a portable drum kit. He should take that thing to Faire. He would be a huge hit. At one point Justin uses Lance's guitar as part of the percussion. The crowd seems to like it.

I snuck up to the front and shot some video. It was fun. One of the regulars told me to move the bits of stage out of my way next time, that no one would care. It is a very friendly place. I imagine as long as i don't get between people enjoying the show, I'll be OK. I'm shocked how well the Flip recorded the sound. Not a half bad job.

The guys came off stage and looked electric. They loved performing. The crowd applauded. I have to say that I've only experienced that once or twice in my life, after plays I was in. It is addictive.

Nat was a real sweetheart and gave me rides to and from PJ's. Nat has been worried about her mother. She is not in the best health. Any spare prayers are appreciated. Elle was with Bill.

When I got home, I put the videos on the computer and started editing. It took me two tries because I thought there were three songs and figured out after my first attempt at uploading that there were four. It turns out if you change the name of a video too soon after uploading it, it blows a gasket. Lesson learned. I ended up re-uploading them this morning before work. That didn't leave me any time to post a blog entry or hit the social media sites.

Lately, I've been watching a bunch of vlogs. It seems like there are about ten good ones and thy are all in cahoots. They are all New York collage students who are friends. As a matter of fact, the vlogs are much better than Friends ever was. So, I've been aching to add some content. I got it, thanks to other's talent and hard work.

Ate after the show. I had one beer. I woke up this morning with a headache. I had acid reflux all night because I ate so late. God, I'm old. Had a ball.

Let/s try an embedded play list and find out what we get. ... Dagnabit. It is playing in reverse order. I'll figure it out eventually.