Lunch conversation

I do not agree with everything said. I'm just reporting.

• Food

• Vanilla ice cream. vs more complex flavors.

• Hamburger and mushroom pizza is relay good. Onions may add some flavor, but not too much.

• Peperoni is popular based on peer pressure and not flavor.

• Pizza is American, not Italian. What they call pizza in Italy is much different.

• The oil rig tragedy.

• One of our coworkers' parents work for BP. Learned that today.

• It is a drilling ship, not an oil rig.

• The rest of us call it an oil rig.

• Nearly all of us know people who work or have worked on oil rigs.

• immigration

• Protests.

• “These people are treated like law breakers.” They are law breakers.

• Someone in Texas is looking in to s similar law.

• People have died trying to defend their land from border runners in Arizona.

• Sum reports put the support in Arizona at sixty to eighty percent.

• Pagers from times past at work. It seems like Wade is getting paged every three minutes. He used to have a pager.

• Our internet machines do not have sound cards for the most part. They really feel like they are missing something.

Chatty lunch today.

News saturation

Four Dudes on Tech had a podcast that started with “No Apple and no Google.” They were sick of the news stories. I agree. I'm tired of hearing about both of them for a bit. They have overshot their most recent news cycle.

I say we add politics to that list. I tell you, half the crazy shit that happens in politics happens only because people want to keep their catastrophe of choice stays in the news.

What kinds of things should be added to this list?

• Bankers. Hang them or forgive them dammit.

• CEOs of corporations who suck at their job.

• Private lives of politicians. Find a line and leave the little stuff to the authorities.

• Real life pirates.

• Green. I'm sick of all things green. Green used ot be my favorite color, but I'm going to pick another color because I'm sick of gree.

• Sports. I have always sucked at sports so I'm tired of hearing about them.

• Swine flu. Now they are bitching about the sky falling and the waist vaccine.

• Grace and the European Union having to bail out train wreck countries that never should have been trusted with a credit card.

What kinds of things should be covered more?

• What are your rights and how do you enforce them?

• What rights have you lost recently as a citizen of the U. S.?

I'll hold my breath.

Bad Brown!

If you are a politically exposed person, double check you do not still have a microphone on your person before bad-mouthing a constituent.

The prime minster of Briton Gordon Brown said a woman was a bigot who asked him a question about how Briton is supposed to support the huge number of immigrants. He acted all nice and conciliatory in public while he was in front of the cameras. Then, after getting in a car he called her a bigot for questioning immigration policy.. She even said that you just cant talk about immigration. Her concern was around the deficit and how tax payers are supposed to pay for all these people who are using services and not contributing.

You are not a bigot by questioning immigration policy immigration. You are not recast when you say that people should work for a living if they are capable. You are not a racist if you think that people who have come to your country illegally should be held accountable for their actions. You are not a racist if you believe the laws and rules about borders of your country should be enforced.

The terms bigot and racist are over used and misused. They have become a way to yell “shut up!” and actually have people shut up. They have become the end of an argument. If someone disagrees with you and presents any argument, just link it to racism in some loos way and you win the argument. This needs to stop.

There are racists in the world. They may now hide behind the deluge of accusations. Real racism is now hidden from view. It is obfuscated from arguments. The real evil is lurking in plane sight behind childish laziness to prove a point in a manor that requires support of an argument.

Brown is just a fuckup. It seems like every five minutes he is stepping on someone's toes or pissing off the family of a dead soldier with a poorly spelled letter of consolation.

[end]

Notes

The kid who 'hacked' Palin's email account may face 50 years worth of charges. He didn't do anything but guess her shitty password. I really hope he gets in trouble. I'm not sure he should get a felony conviction. some think Palin should get a fine too.

That “Hitler Rants ...” video came from a movie called Pitfall. The film company is pulling the parody clips down with an automatic feature. They fall under fair use, so they should not be aloud to pull them down. I hate the videos because they annoy me. I don't care.

Twitter is getting on my nerves. I'm getting tweets from people I do not know. I assume this is some kind of advertisement, but it pisses me off. I cannot figure out how these people are able to talk to me without me approving it. I'm about five tweets from locking my feed so no one knows it is there.

I had two Palm Pilots. Both of them made me say “This thing needs to be on the internet.” Well, Palm sucked at getting the connectivity they needed. the scuttlebutt is that HP bought Palm to get patents and force Apple and others to pay HP for basically nothing.

The average American who reads books, reads at an eighth grade level. I'm guilty of this. Keep your sentences short.

Notes:

We do some work with simple USB type flash cards. It can take forever to write one of those things using USB. I'm talking over an hour to read and almost two hours to write over USB 2.0. One of the guys found a SATA connector that cuts the time to thirteen minutes and change and the write to under twenty five minutes. Good find.

YouTube may provide streaming soon. Sounds interesting. There are dozens of streaming sites for video. Not sure how that will work out.

Notes:

Should children of illegal immigrants born in the U. S. be citizens? Children of visiting diplomats born in the U. S. do not get citizenship. There are all kinds of situations where the constitution that says “people” born in the U. S. are citizens..

You know, Open Solaris strikes me as a distribution that exists only to give a corporation (SUN, now Oracle) the ability to say they have an open products. Oracle, as far as I can tell, is dead set against the concept of “open” anything, on principle.

Heard on a financial podcast on the BBC. (from memory) “You can't get a pig by winding a sausage grinder backwards.” I believe the point was that something was not undoable. I'm so stealing this one.

There is a study that says children don't learn shit from TV shows. They switch their brains off while they watch and it all goes in one year and out the other. Older kids can learn, but younger kids basically didn't get crap out of TV. It turns out that social interaction is the really important thing. If a TV show is all about people learning and discussing they worked better. If the TV shows were just demonstrations, they did not.

Spring time commute home

I do it every day. I've been hurting for something to put up on the, dare I say, vlog. No, my YouTube channel is not a vlog because I do not look in to the camera while I do stuff. I do not directly address the audience very often. Yes, I'm this desperate for something to video. Any ideas welcome.

Give it hell Jake

I believe this is an original work by Jake. Not bad. We are working on getting Jake a better camera setup.

[end]

Notes:

They still build 747 aircraft in the U. S.. I did not know this until a podcast today. The podcast was all about the Seattle area and the housing bubble. I'm so not worried about housing prices on the west coast. It is cool to learn that the best aircraft ever made, the 747 is still being cranked out. That and Seattle only gets 58 sunny days a year.

The projects to store nuclear waist for long term in the U. S. may be dead for the time being, but it is OK to stuff it in islands off Finland's coast. The storage has to last 100,000 years 100,000 years ago, neanderthals still wondered north Africa. One of the biggest worries is that people will build it, store the nuclear waist there and forget about it.

Harem woes

Surely you have heard of a harem. If you are a guy, you have fantasized about having a harem full of lovely wives at your beck and call. However, I learned something about harems. The few times a harem existed, in all cases, the man's mother ran the harem like her house. So, your mother would be there telling which wives to do what and when. You know, that just kind of kills it for me. I think the money is in defying someone else's harem.

This means the women can be bitches to me and nice to my mother and get their way. Screw that. It makes my skin crawl thinking about it. This is a situation where a little knowledge has ruined a great idea.

Notes:

2010-04-26

Nat gave me a ride to work this morning. it is a funny thing living west of the city. You travel straight in to the sun morning and afternoon more often than not. With daylight savings time, you do it 4 times a year. This morning I nearly broke out the camera and filmed a bit just to capture the moment for posterity. When I mentioned it to Nat she wandered what my problem with the car in front of us was.

You wonder around a place. You wander why you are there. Now that Adam has busted my ass about this, I've found many people making the mistake. The only way I remember it is the 'o' in 'wonder' means you wonder around.

There will be a place for people to perform very complex financial investments with each other somewhere in the world. It if is not Wall Street, it will be Hong Kong or London or somewhere else.

Remember Max Headroom? He was introduced in a Coke ad. New Coke. Remember New Coke?

A shilling was 1/20th of a pound.

YouTube

I've been watching a tone of YouTube lately. I'm using the excuse to figure out what works and what doesn't, but really, I'm just looking for something to run out the clock on my boring life. Not that I particularly want an interesting life, but you know how it goes.

The most obvious thing you notice when you start watching these people do their thing is that they are in on it together. They promote each other and keep the promotions in the family as it goes. There are at least three major groups of people. There is the California group, the East cost group, and the Canadian group. The East and West cost group are melding together and the Canadian group is becoming more Middle-America every day.

Over the last week, there has been a trend of guys cross dressing to make it to the top of the lists. It is purely a grab for ratings. Some people are just in to that sort of thing. 

Then comes something this cool. This is Jake. He and I shared an office for a while. This is the kind of thing that YouTube was supposed to be about.

It is beyond cool when my friends have videos up. I love getting a glimpse of their lives outside of where our roads cross. Maybe this is what works.

Rules for wishes

• It needs to be something personal. Something that affects you or your loved ones directly, or as directly as possible. The following are OK.
• It can be about health, yours or others.
• It can be about a nation or a people.
• It can be about all people.
• It has to pass the committee. That is, it has to be a good idea that people who love you would agree you need or should have our deserve. not living people who might be greedy and think that your success might benefit them. People who have no skin in the game.
• Hateful wishes almost never make it past committee, but the committee might know what you need better than you and give you something that fixes the real problem.
• The committee is not a Ginni. You do not have to use legalese. That is what the committee is for, to interpret and understand and to help make sure the right thing is done.
• It can't be related to money or material because that stuff is too generic and not personal. If you need a problem solved that would be solved by money, wish for that.

The most important thing to remember about wishes is too important to leave in a bullet. You have to mean it. You have to want it. In order to make it past the noise of a simple every day desire, you have to really mean it for a wish to stand out. It helps to want the wish over a long period of time and it really helps to work toward that wish on your own. These last two are not mandatory.

If you have made it this far, try this. Change the word wish for prayer and change the word committee to God.

High School Memory

One of the only memories from high school that sticks with me is as follows.

It was during lunch. I started to walk up one of the fifteen sets of stares. it was a split stair with a little flat area in the middle. I was on my way up and two girls were on their way down. I don't remember what they looked like. I couldn't pick them out of a lineup.

As we past each other on the stares, I looked back at the girls and they looked at me. I tripped over a stair and did something amazing. I fell and rolled up the stares landing at the top, on my back. No idea how this happened. The girls giggled and I got up and left.

That's it. That is the most vivid memory I have from high school.

Other memories on steps in high school include helping a girl on crutches up the stares. She was pretty.

Another memory is when some delinquent put cheese mayo on the door handles exiting the well.

Another is me standing on a stare saying good by to a good friend who was leaving for another state and wishing I would kiss her, but it is was against the rules. I would kiss her years later after she came back, but it never lead to anything.

Another memory is sitting next to one of the stares over lunch and wishing I was just not there. Anywhere, but there.

Mostly, my memories of school are like that last one. I just wanted to not be there. I just wanted to be out and gone. I had no plan I just wanted out and away. There was no way to do anything good there and there was nothing waiting for me on the other side. I didn't care and no one cred whether I cared or not. It was bad.

The memories of school haunt me. When I hear someone speak fondly of school, I feel pain. I find the idea of the TV show Glee offensive. My god I was miserable.

Things are better now. Life is so much better than planning for and learning about life.

Thinking

Thinking is simply memory, adaption and projection. You learn and make educated guesses. I think we are much closer to building a sentient computer than we think.

Something happens, you remember it. You adapt your existence, everything you do, based on every decision you make. Decisions are the projection part.

You want to go to lunch with some friends. You do not want so and so to come. That is a decision based on some memory of so and so. You have adapted your lunch eating habits.

There is not much more to thinking than that. When doing math, you take rules you have learned and apply them to situations. You project in to the future in dry runs for math problems to make sure you are on the correct path or to solve a problem. When something doesn't fit, you have to diagnose. Are you using the correct rules? Did you make the correct decisions and put numbers in the correct places? You combine these skills to project the next move and eventually get to the answer.

The tools for thinking are simple. I think we need to work on the projection portion of the equation.

Lunch Conversation

Today people discussed their driver's test experiences. I had to get the hell out of there before I start spouting about not being able to drive. I would have loved to go do something for lunch. It didn't work out that way. No one, including me, want's to hear that.

Before that, wa a nice description of a horrible wreck in front of the old building. A car ramped over a concrete embankment and took out some other cars. They described the car as “folded up”. Sorry I missed it. Yes, that is cold. It is exciting to be shot at and missed.

Something went by about a dog and a porcupine. I missed it. Come to think of it, I don't think I spoke directly to anyone.

Old Time Radio

Life Boy, Velveeta, and not one oil company. I listen to a bunch of old time radio shows. They leave in the old ads. It is funny what products that have stuck around and which have not. That is not the only source of these old time radio podcasts.

The man who did the voice for Fred Flintstone is in some of those old time radio podcasts. I can't help picturing Fred in my mind's eye. The latest was an episode of “Johnny Dollar”. Never heard of it until these podcasts. There are a couple big names in these shows. There is a world of amazing talent that was on tape sixty or eighty years ago.

The very funny thing is listening to the ads from the podcast people. Really modern things like Roku players and online desktop sharing abound. They make the sound pop and hiss like the original recordings sometimes. It is awesome.

Notes:

The potential sale of MGM has put the breaks on the next Bond film indefensibly.

People in England and other points Europe have been getting the run around all over the place. The Brit Military have tried to haul some Brits home but many have been turned away from even that. People are charging a king's ransom for a car ride.

Solaris 10 make and SVN setup

Companion Tools

Download and install Solaris Companion Tools from Oracle/Sun. This will put things like sudo and sfw tools on the system.

Fix sudo (if broken)

>$ PATH=/opt/sfw/bin:/opt/sfw/sbin:/$PATH

>$ export PATH

>$ visudo

Make sure the proper line is added to the bottom of the sudoers file. It is the same line used on Linux.

>$ chmod 4111 /opt/sfw/bin/sudo

Sudo should work at this point.

SunStudio

Download and install the following file from Oracle/Sun

>$ bzcat SunStudio12u1-SunOS-x86-pkgs-ML.tar.bz2 | /bin/tar -xf -

>$ cd SunStudio12u1-SunOS-x86-pkgs-ML

># ./SunStudio12u1-SunOS-x86-pkgs.sh

Follow the instructions on the Java based graphical installer.

SVN Subversion

Download and install the following file from Collabnet.com

>$ pkgadd -d CSVNclnt-1.6.9.1-x86-local

cshrc settings

Added to tms_build and my cshrc

# SVN on Solaris 10

if( -d /opt/CollabNet_Subversion/bin ) then

setenv PATH /opt/CollabNet_Subversion/bin:$PATH

endif

# ld on Solaris 10

if( -d /usr/ccs/bin ) then

setenv PATH /usr/ccs/bin:$PATH

endif

Notes:

It is ridiculously difficult to keep a company worth of computers up to date without internet access. We need to set up an in house update system. I have something for Linux that kind of works. We have an IT person who will probably maintain things from now on. That is so cool. I can concentrate on development work.

Obama got over a million dollars from Goldman Sax. He has been asked if he will return the money. No answer yet. I wait patiently Mr President.

There are some financial people who believe firmly that inflati9on is not a good thing. Often, people come up and say something like “Inflation should be 3%.” Why? Well, I've been over this before, but this way, the government makes money on every dime in circulation. If someone is not using money to make money that money that is just sitting there becomes slowly worthless and falls off the books a bit at a time.

The money and finance podcasts i listen to from Briton are all about how to recover money from lost time at work or having to travel off time due to all the flight cancellations over Europe. There was a story about One of the Monty Python guys taking a taxi umpteen hundred kilometers to catch a train back to England. It sounds like a real mess. Good time to be at home, far away from valcanoes.

Starship Sofa is the first podcast to be nominated for a Hugo Award. Pretty damn cool, especially considering I just heard of this podcast earlier this week. I am falling in love with fiction podcasts.

Crazy tail hating cats

Merlin does this sort of thing. He is not nearly as violent about it. I'm going to have to stop giving him so much crap over it.

Good ting

A good thing happened at work today. It was not a very good thing. It was not a wonderful thing. Something worked. Something did what it should have done in the first place. It did it in the first place. It did it on the first try. None of the contingency plans were needed. I called it a win and came home. It was quitting time anyway. 

It also took me most of the day to get a stupid Solaris 10 box to the point where I could log in and build something. That I'm not counting as a win because it should have only taken me an hour or two instead of all day. It works now. I have an Open Solaris box to do tomorrow.

The thing that die work is hard to explain.It had to do with a XEN Kernel and building a bunch of things that are highly dependant on other things. It has not worked so many times and people had warned me that it would not work again this time that I expected a battle. It worked on the first try. It was still a balancing act, but workable. I fear that the end target, the real thing we are after will not work for some time yet, but that day is coming. It has too.

The proof is in the pudding and the pudding is served tomorrow. Our over night tests will tell us if what happened yesterday is really a win or not. I'm counting it as a win regardless. I need one.

Email HTML

Work is busy, but I jot down notes at there for the blog when I have a chance. I try to strike when the iron is hot and finish things up at home.; This means I need to take information from work to home. It needs to be in a form that I can edit and modify once I get it home.

I've tried just writing things down in Thunderbird at work and copying and pasting them in to Google Docs at home. The trouble is, there is a bunch of formatting that comes along for the ride and screws up my fonts on the Blog. This happens whether I paste the information in to the body of the email or I attatch the file as HTML. I'm not sure I care too much to be honest. Still, I like the blog to be consistent.

So, what is wrong with jotting down notes in text format? Well, I like to keep bold, italic and heading settings inside the text. I also like to throw together tables occasionally. If you do straight text, you loose all those settings as well. So, I want formatting and I don't want the email to screw it up. This is a tall order it turns out.

I may be able to paste the HTML code in to the body of the email. This kind of sucks because you don't get clean emails, but if it gets the code home without screwing it up, then so be it. I'm tired of having to jump through so many hoops. I wander if just renaming the file from HTML to TXT might fix the problem.

Lunch Conversation

We went to Taco Bell for lunch. I had five soft tacos. Should have left it at four. Jake got a DP. We all noticed off the bat that something was off a bit with the soda machine. The dispenser in the eating area was putting out too much carbonation. Remember, we get free sodas at work. Jake went back and got water. Then he got a soda from the people behind the counter out of the drive through dispenser. That one was too strong on syrup. He then proceeded to try to mix some of the dining area machine soda in to balance things out. No dice. He ended up tossing it at work. Now, remember, we get free sodas at work.

Jake is a cool guy. He gave me something to write about in the blog today. Thanks Jake.

• iPhone apps cost too much at $0.99. The games are impossible to play on those little screens and the controls suck.
• The iPhone next generation phone that was found in a bar and sent to Gismoto is offal convenient for Apple.
• Jake ate at Taco Bell 13 work days in a row last month and didn't die.
• Magic, The Gathering. There is a tenement going on this week after work. Jake actually got to work early today so he can leave at 17:00 or so to make the early game.
• Email related to one of our projects at work .How could the situation have been better handled? I hate talking shop at lunch. It was a good vent though.

Notes:

I have had the song Family Tradition stuck in my head for three days. Ever since hearing it in karaoke it has been going round and round. Must make it stop.

Got the new glasses. So far so good. They are lighter, smaller and feel more comfortable than the old pare. I already tried them out under the safety glasses. I like the looks.

Yemen is making noises to make it the law that women cannot get married until age 17. At the moment, there is no limit. It used to be that women married at young age married a man of similar age and they lived with family until maturation. No more. Time to make a change some say.

Bacteria invented antibiotics a couple billion years ago to kill each other. We are using biologic warfare techniques that were invented billions of years before we were. Yet, you can patten antibiotics, even if you invented nothing. I suppose there is already no money in curing people.

Canon PowerShot SD940 IS video file format

This blog entry is kind of a comparasin of the Canon 940 vs the Flip HD (first generation). These are the two devices are all I have experience with.

File Formats

These numbers come from Ubuntu 9.10 Linux by right clicking on the file and going to the Audio Video tab and reading the information listed there. I'm sure there are better ways of getting details. Every program I use to gather information tells me something slightly different. Some of them straight up lie.

The file format of the Canon PowerShot 940 is as follows

File format straight off the Canon PowerShot dn 940 is
Audio	Raw 16-bit PCM audio Mono 44100 HZ
Video	1280x720 H.264/AVC 30fps
Container	MOV (file extension)

The file format of the Flip HD (first generation anyway) is as follows

File format straight off the Flip HD (first Generation)
Audio	MPEG-4 AAC audio Stereo 44100 Hz
Video	1280x720 h.264/AVC 30 fps
Container	MP4 (file extension)

Editing the video in Ubuntu Linux 9.10

When I edit the Canon 940 files with KDENLive, I have an issue with sound. As soon as I copy the file in the clip area, I can play the clip and the sound will be choppy. It will repeat itself and get off track. Then it will get back on track for a moment and repeat then be off track or a while. It turns out KDENLive does not like the audio codec from There is no such issue when editing the Flip HD files. This appears to be a KDENLive issue and does not repeat in other programs as far as I can tell yet.

When using AVIDemux there is no such problem. Things work perfectly normal, which is bad enough in Linux. I don't really like editing in AVIDemux. There are just not enough bells and whistles. Nor is there a true time line. I've found a multiple track time line design highly required for video editing. This presents a problem.

The Mobile File Converter program works well, but it appears to only change the file to a mobile screen size. That is, it shoots it down to a little bitty size. There must be a way way to stop this, but I'm not so worried about it because I've found something a little bit better.

Even if I do not like editing in AVIDemux, I can use it to change a file's format. At the moment this requires me to open each clip, set video to copy, container to mp4, and audio to AAC or MP3, then render. AVIDemux has a tone of command line parameters, so I may be able to script this up. The timing appears to be fine even after the conversion. This is something you have to check every time you touch the files. Once changed, the files can simply be dropped in KDENLive and used normaly.

The software that came with the Flip is supposed to be easy to use. I am on Linux and thus have never given it a shot. I hear it is sandboxed and completely closed source.. Has any one out there in inter-webs land tried it? Let me know what you thought.

Canon Advantages

• You can have a second battery charged and standing by.
• The Canon uses SD cards so you can keep shooting.
• The Canon lens gets covered up automatically when you turn off the unit. I like this one because I keep it in a backpack.
• The Canon has better wide angle and zoom without needing a second external lens. The digital zoom seems to work well as far ast digital zoom goes.
• The Canon takes 12 MP pictures.
• The Canon is smaller.
• The Canon screen is nine times better.

Flip Advantages

• Cool factor. I hate to admit it, but this is important.
• The Flip is Cheaper by a bit.
• The Flip is one step copy and edit. It comes with software you can use on Mac and Windows.
• The Flip has superior sound quality and it is stereo. When I go film my friends playing a gig, I will pack the Flip and Canon.
• The Flip has a slightly better low light capability in my humble opinion. Not a great deal.

Opinion

Which one do I carry around with me? I carry the Canon. It has several advantages over the Flip. Not all points by any measure.

Notes:

LightPeak vs USB 3.0? LightPeak cannot power devices. It is faster though. USB 3.0 is kind of backward compatible with USB 2.0 (normal USB).

Old WWII jokes

Bombardier who cant hit a plate with a fork.

Navigator who can't find the men's room.

CB Reunion

CB Reunion, What the kids did

This is pretty amazing. The lady on the trampoline is Shela. Her and Robb have six kids. I'm not sure which kids belong to whom. They were this hyper the entire night. They never let up. Thank goodness the place we were had plenty of room for them to run and scream.

This is a funny thing about our group. We all have a ton of kids between us. There is enough for a basketball team, football team Soccer ... .

The kids seemed to have a great time. I wonder if they had a better time than the adults. The adults had a bunch of politics going on throughout the entire gathering. The kids all seemed to get along just fine. Hell, even the dogs did better than the adults.

CB Reunion Karaoke (strong language)

Remember, many of these people had not spoken in eight to ten years. People used to hang out at different clubs and sing all these songs before karaoke was even a word in the U. S. vernacular.

I'll be honest, I missed most of that stuff. I was home not hanging out with friends. Wa!

Pictures

Link

Don't look too close. Why didn't I take more video during the day? I did. There are three folders under this day in videos. One is labeled "kids". Another is labeled "karaoke". The third is labled "boring".

Outsiders

If you are not part of the group in question, please take away from this that there are many different kinds of people in this group. We spent part of our lives hanging out with one another. We learned to live, love, help and hate others.

There must be an anecdote that would sum this whole moment up with a resounding ring of a bell. No. Nothing comes to mine. A bunch of stuff happened. A bunch of people were there. It is called life. Still, we got together after ten years an no blood was spilled. I'm putting this one in the win column.

Elle's first video

Elle shot this last weekend. It took me a while to get my crap together. Pretty cool first effort.

Day at the park

Pictures

Map

Ton of fun just walking through the woods hanging out with the family.

Phone Screen

There was an ad in video form touting how wonderful the Nexus 1's screen is. They compared it to 'other phones' and you could tell just at a glance how much better the depth and resolution was on the Nexus 1. this pisses me off.

I now know why Google maps is so damn hard to read. That is the program they compared on the two phones. Even when I use a magnifying glass I have a hard time reading the text. I cannot read the street names or store names when they are around. The text is small, but the real problem is the resolution. The characters are only made of a few dots.

After seeing the commercial, I'm not just disappointed, I'm angry at Google. My phone is a G1. The screen on that phone was known not to be high enough resolution. Google is designing the applications to fit their top of the line phone and leaving the old phones in the dust. Sounds  familiar.

Wish I knew then what I know now. How many times in my life have I said those words? Too many.

Notes:

Once uranium is enriched past 20% it becomes much easier to then push it to even higher purity, not harder. 20% purity is actually 90% of the way to 90% purity.

Corporate America is getting in to the whole podcast vidcast thing with a vengeance. There is a gmail podcast and a Toyota podcast. It will not end. Companies seem to be chasing their tails trying to keep up with surf flight. Surf flight is what I call the actions people take to avoid advertisement and paying for content. Someone will always provide less good products for less. Look at the Chinese.

I had no idea how difficult it can be to get a database to accept leading zeros on some numbers.

Remember the mad bomber? Can you imagine a mad bomber on a children's show now days?

Tax Day

There was an interview with the leader of the IRS. I forget what he is called. it isn't like he is a CEO. Anyway, the running joke is that he doesn't do his own taxes. His excuse is that he does his own taxes, but has an expert go over line by line and make sure he didn't mess anything up. If I were him, I wouldn't do my own taxes either.

It is tax day. It was rainy and the day dripped with gloom and doom from moment one.The news had a financial guy on who said it is too late to work magic, but not too late to apply for an extension.

"The Taxman" by the Beatles keeps going through my head. the head of the IRS says you can hear it playing gently in the background in the IRS offices from time to time.

There is a Tea Party protest going on today. They, or perhaps I should say we are upset over how our taxes are being spent. The big news is that people who are anti Tea Party are attempting to infiltrate the protests and make people look bad by having things like raciest statements being heard and misspelled signs and such. This is a wonderful thing to have on tax day. If memory serves, "decent is the highest form of patriotism".

Weekend Plans

There is an old saying. "If you want to hear God laugh, tell him your plans." I don't like talking about plans on the blog much to keep people from knowing where I will be at any given moment. I'm paranoid like that.

This weekend we will attend a party organized via Facebook. We used to all hang out on the CB in Missouri City fifteen years ago. Now, we have all spread to the four corners of the wind. Some have kept in touch. This weekend promises to be interesting. Some of these folks have not met up in all this time.

Back in the day I was on roller blades and used a walky-talky. That will to happen this time. I kind of wander if any one still has a CB in their car or otherwise. In this era of communication, the CB has gone by the wayside. People forget that it is a completely stand alone system. No tours or government shut-off controls.

This is a perfect opportunity to take a bunch of pictures and maybe even some video. Who knows what I will end up with by the end of the party. This is the crowd to catch strange stuff. Too bad every one has kids now and people are all older and wiser. and worried about jerks like me putting every spare moment up on the net for the entire universe to gawk at.

Still, should be fun.

Notes:

Got to learn how to setup scheduled tasks in Vista today.

According to Toyota, the plural of Lexus is Lexus. One Lexus, fifteen Lexus.

Notes:

I shaved my goatee this past weekend. Every one at my company has mentioned it it seems. I intend to grow it back, but don't be surprised if a very red beard shows up.

This guy on one of the podcasts yesterday was talking about a motor vehicle that someone dalled up to look like a Battlestar Galactica fighter. Pretty cool idea, but the podcaster kept saying that it had a "small black Chevi engine" and was wondering why you needed to know the color of the motor. It is "Chevi small block" you nerd! The large block was for engine sizes of 454 cubic inches and such. A small block is for 350 and less or so. The numbers may very. The engines are physically different sizes and use different cranks. Two different blocks.

Why did the lobster not want to share it's food? Because it is shellfish. (dinner party download)

Dead tape

This has happened several times. I'm not sure what to do about it. Nat says I should tell someone. I suppose I will this time. I may send off the pictures and video to the email for the Texas Library for the Blind this time. Maybe.

Notes:

I had to explain to someone that when referring to products and software, QA does not stand for questions and answers. It stands for quality assurance. I've always thought this was crap because there is such a thing as poor quality. It should be GQA, good quality assurance or HQA, high quality assurance. Then again, that would committing to something. Let's face it, QA is a sound byte. Maybe it should be CYA or something that says "We are not going to look bad if you blow things up."

"[redacted] is loosing the wind from their sails." Someone didn't know what that meant. Am I that old? Where did I learn what that meant?

There needs to be a constitutional amendment that says corporations must first serve their customers and then their investors.

There is an engineer Barbi on the way. Cool. They have come a long way from "Math is hard." Look under the 'controversies' section. How the hell have they stayed in business?

Something worked. I had two different people come to me needing a beta build for different people. What worked? Well, it was the self same code they needed. One build gets them both on their way. YES!!!

Old Merc

You know, people in Europe call Mercedes Merc's. I heard the term used with Mercury.

Couple of good old boys in Austin showing off old cars, old guitars and old friends. Nice looking chop Mercury.

Double Clutching

I can't drive and people ask me all the time what double clutching is. Well, here is an example on what appears to be a sixties era truck.

• Clutch in
• Move shifter to neutral
• Clutch out
• Rev engine if necessary
• Clutch in
• Move shifter to gear
• Clutch out

Euphoria

The sound doesn't sound right on this copy. It is the best one I could find on YouTube. That says a lot.

Drawing test

Test drawing in Google's new drawing editor. It will not allow cut and paste or drag and drop. I'm noticing a bunch of shortcomings. Let's find out what happens when you try to j8uts copy and past the HTML on to the web.

It appears I can see it while logged in to google, but no one else can. Useless.

Trying to Publish the document to the web gives the following result.

Well, that shows up as an image inside google documents, but not on the web. Useless.

This did just come out today. I'll give it some time before really rolling my eyes.

Something to say

It turns out that 4299 was the magic number. That is the last post on this blog where I had anything to say.

Weather report

I'm out sick today. My head hurts. I was up all night with acid reflux and nearly puked a couple times this morning. I decided to call it a day at that point. I checked work email before lunch and sure enough, the place has not burned down in my absence.

It is nice outside. I really would love to hit a park and just walk through nature for a bit. Someplace quite where I can hear ... nothing and enjoy it. Fat chance finding that in Houston.

The only news on the internet is about iPad or Obama-Care. I want little to do with either. I await the federal law requiring every houshold to have five iPads to help employment in China.

Elle wanted me to post a video she shot over the weekend. I didn't have a card reader so I couldn't. She never got with Nat either. Hence, I've ordered a USB multiple card reader.

I cannot take this keyboard. I wonder if it is one of the things holding me back from posting as much as I probably should. I've ordered  cheap USB keyboard with a normal layout.

This day off is starting to cost me.

Doable

This is one of those things you like to think is possible, but are too afraid to actually try. I'm so glad the person in this video filmed this experiment.

Random Pictures

 

I took some random pics around my office. They make the camera look good. One thing I like about the new Canon PowerShot 940 is that it will just take the damn picture when you mash the button all the way down. Even if it is not 100% set. You can use this to your advantage by aiming the camera at one spot, like a bright area, then aiming at a dark area and taking the picture for az darker, but some times richer picture. This is a good snapshot camera.

Spirit is fine

Damn Lance. You don't suck. This is a one man band kind of video. I'm going to forward this on to some people who do video stuff.

Money

The walk in was kind of chilly this morning. I didn't listen to radio on my phone. I heard that T-Mobile is going to start charging per byte so I'm cutting back. I'm not sure, but it looks like you will not be able to get an unlimited plan in a couple years. They want to nickel and dime you to death.

There was a note in one of the podcasts this morning about Pepsi and some other company ganging up to twist the arms of content providers like TV and radio to get better advertising rates. Isn't that illegal? When does collective bargaining become monopoly and collusion?

30% of residential rental space (apartments) are unoccupied. I know some folks who are doubling up because of finances. Property taxes are skyrocketing. My taxes stayed almost the same from last year. That is not a good thing honestly. They should have gone down because the value of my house is dropping. The tax rates are going up. Bastards.

People are still spending beyond their means. They are just not using credit. That means they are dipping in to their savings. What savings? Retailers are shitting themselves looking for people who are willing to spend money regardless whether or not those people actually have money to spend. The only growth is "value conscious consumers."

The price of tobacco products has doubled in France. The number of people smoking has climbed. The more people are told they can't or shouldn't do it, the more they do it. You can't smoke in the building at my work. At any given time, there two or three folks out front or huddling in the parking garage to have a smoke. Better than working I suppose. I just can't stand the smell.

All of the gloom and doom and threats that you better save and other threats that you may as well not save because of inflation and that kind of crap, Nat and I are trying to make a date night soon. I hope we can get it together long enough to enjoy an evening out.

Evening Commute

Bus and a car to get home this evening. Thanks for the ride Nat. You are aces.

It took three rounds of editing to get this done. I kept watching the finished product and cutting more out. I still think the sound got off track at some point. I really hope not because this is the first attempt at editing video off the new camera. Let me know what you think.

News:

There was a story on one of the podcasts about the battle of the bulge (fat taxes) in Bulgaria. They have run out of real news.

A couple podcasts that I normally listen to have turned in to "What can I do with an iPad?" shows. It is annoying. Get over this thing. It is not the device, it is the rights and access that will make it or break it. Every single old school publisher on Earth is betting that people will enjoy taking this thing in the toilet to read their paper and pay for the privilege. They may have sold a bunch of these things, but people haven't gotten the third month's bills yet.

I shot some bad video on the way home. It took me a while to get thing laid out in the editor. I rendered it. Then I did something that I've noticed is a waining art. I watched the video before publishing it. The whole first section was so bad that I went back and just removed it. It took a while to re-rip and it made me stay up a bit later than I hoped. It is a better products. 

Random Pics

I snapped some pictures just for the heck of it today. I just wanted to fill up the camera. There are nearly 100 pics here. The camera says it can hold over 4000. This might take a while. Good thing videos take up so much room.

Breathing

My nose whistles. I sound way too much like my grandfather did most of my life. He had trouble breathing through his nose. My father blamed his nasal trouble on his nose being broken a couple times. That may have made it worse, I've not had my nose broken, but I have trouble breathing through my nose.

If I press on the tip of my nose and push it up a bit, I can breath much better and the little whistle stops cold. It is like those Breathright strips were supposed to work. I tried those things, but they didn't seem to work very well.

This is clearly affecting my sleep. It always has. I may start taping my nose to find out if that helps me sleep more easily. I may ask my doctor about. That is a sign of desperation for me. I hate talking to doctors.

There is a prejudice against people who breath through their mouths. They are called mouth breathers for God's sake. Nat asked me to breath through my mouth in the car once because she could hear me over the radio and wind noise.

Part of this is seasonal allergies.A ton of people at work ae sneezing their way down the hall. Poor Elle has it going on. She was complaining about sneezing so much the other day. Nat is a mess. What can be done about allergies. This is east Texas. We live in a grassy swamp. We are doomed to whistling noses and breathing through our mouths. Give us a break! 

The walk home

I decided to break out the camera and take a bunch of random pics on the way home. Just a taste.

The zoom on this new camera is nuts. The video quality is pretty good too.

The video is just me complaining about nowhere to walk next to the wall of infinite scratches.

Name that tune

Do you remember the show called "Name that tune"? I've heard that show mentioned three times in the last week on unrelated podcasts. People use it in the following contexts.

• Name that "The Next Generation" plot in the shortest time possible while watching an episode for the first time.
  
• "I can do this podcast in 2 beers." "I can do this podcast in 5 beers." "Do that podcast."
• The show was referenced by someone who was complaining about glitchy phone calls. "I feel like I'm playing Name That Tune."
  

This was in a week. I wander if it is time for a new "Name That Tune" concept show. Something to do with clips from TV or movies and naming as much information about the shows as possible kind of thing. 

That little game show is actually being done in one of the science fiction podcasts I listen to and it is riveting. They do not do contestants. It is actually the other way round. They have some person external to the central group who puts these clips together and tries to stump the panel of people who do the podcast.

Paying for news

Apple has gotten in bed with several old school publishers. Apparently, Apple intends to turn the iPad in to a pay for absolutely every little click platform. I bet Al Jazeera still gives it away for free. That is the issue with people having to pay for direct content. They will drift to the cheapest content. At some point the only free content will be that content with a cause or bias.

If I pay for news, can I sew if I feel they do not give me what I was looking for or if their new format does not satisfy my needs? Wheat if they say something I don't like and I stop subscribing? The move to put content behind a pay wall is going to make news outlets more bias, not less. People will shop around for news outlets that tell them what they want to hear instead of what needs to be said.

Here is how I figure things will pan out. Some people will pay for news. Some people will not. Some people who do not pay for news will complain that they are not an informed citizenry and there for, the constitutional protections over a free press will not apply to the pay news. Government will use this to control the press through intimidation or out write imprisonment.

When your news choices amount to The Jihad Press, Zionism Daily, and The Mormon Chronicle, you have lost some choices in the matter of being informed. In the end of it all, the American people will simply be left out in the cold with no idea or path to find out why they have no control over their lives any more.

At the very same moment as all the news is desperately diving behind a pay wall, something else is happening. The idea of printing something on paper is finally going away for good. Yay for the trees, but there are some other side effects to this.

Right now, someone who cannot afford a internet, a daily paper or cable or magazines for their news can pick up some free TV stations in some cases and may even be able to <gasp> read yesterday's news paper. This will not happen in the near future. 

Right now you can peruse a library for past copies of papers from a million years ago. We may have to wait until things are out of copyright or pay a fee to the holders of the estate just to read or look at the article. It will be a whole other issue if you want to make copies or take something with you. They will want a percentage of what ever endeavor you intend to use the information to create or benefiter. Teaching a class? Those kids can't learn for free. They need to sign a binding slice of their future over or no dice. They are not aloud to think the answer in that information without paying for it in advance.

I give you permission to learn from this blog and use that data to your advantage. Then again, I have a bias and a cause. Would you read if I didn't?

Long day gone

Long day gone

If you could live a life with no work, that is, you would only live the part of your life where you didn't work, like the weekends and vacations, would you?

When you get up on a work day, you blink when you leave the house to commute in the morning and suddenly you are walking in the house after a long day. You may be tired, but emotionally, you are both awake and aware. You remember the day just fine, but you didn't have to breath every moment. You didn't have to make the decisions and suffer the stress.

Every moment of rest and creation are there waiting for you. You have whatever money you make otherwise, but you get to spend good time at home.

I've tried to live my life in two conscious lines. Work and home. It didn't work. I could not live one life at work and one life at home. I do not know how people who have two families in two different towns do it. I've heard of that sort of thing. I could not pull it off. At some point, the lives bleed from one to the other and back again. It mostly stemmed from a lost night sleep making my whole life suck in three day chunks at a time.

Notes:

Nat doesn't like to be part of the blog or the rest of my online persona to be honest. She only finds the bits when I have something to complain about. I wish we could share the space with her.

You get more of the good stuff out of tomato paste than from tomatoes themselves. One slice of pizza has more of the antioxidants and such than a couple of tomatoes.

There is only one tea plantation in England. It is about 100 acres.

Baloon Base

Here is another one for Justin and Lance to consider.

The Gentleman Rimer

I heard about this psycho on Pods and Blogs. Many moons ago that old lady from all the movies did some rap songs. She didn't suck either. This guy is actually good and doesn't have the production team from a move promoting him as far as I can tell. He looks independent, but who knows?

Lance Rocks

I have no idea how long Lance has been playing, but he has always seemed good to me. He is not just able to play, but has a genuine creativity. What really sucks is he is a great programmer too. He has the left and right brain thing going on, that creative capable youthful bastard.

Nostalgia

I was on the computer, feeling all nostalgic about my days at the University of Houston Central. I hopped on Google Maps and searched for the campus and was hovering over it at about 1500 m altitude in no time.

As I wandered the campus remembering paths and people, squirrel and cougars in small cages, I slowly remembered how much  I hated collage.

I am not smart. I am not focused. I was no good at being a collage student. I do not party. I do not communicate well. I was and am bad at being that fun guy who can communicate how much fun he is having.

I'm a curmudgeon who no one wants to hang out with for long.

I never got laid the whole time I was there. It is all my fault. I was/am just no good at the whole getting laid thing. I can't even figure out when my wife is in the mood. Ask her.

There may have been a moment when I thought that it having been 20 years since I was there I might want to go back and bathe in the moment and memories that come flooding back. Then I looked at the maps and more detailed memories started popping in my head.

Gay men hitting on me and I didn't get it until someone asked me later why I didn't punch them in the nose.

Female gay cops hitting on my wanna-be girlfriend in front of me and I didn't even catch on until she told me years later.

Women hitting on me and I didn't get it until someone told me later and asked me why I didn't respond.

Flunking classes because I didn't understand back then that you had to stroke the professor, not make a good argument.

Failing math and physics classes because I cannot tell ababa from abada at first glance.

Only getting half of what I read because I didn't have a computer at the time that would read to me audibly.

No internet for research.

I missed a lot in collage. It was only a little bit better at HCC. I only remember the relationships I had there and not so much what I studied. That campus is not even there any more. Where was my head?

What a waisted trip it would have been to head to the UH campus. Thank goodness for Google Maps.

TV show

OK, Is it me or has Flash Forward jumped the shark in the first season? The latest episode with the trip to Africa is hard to watch.

Ornery Old Ford

I've put this same Ford pickup on my blog multiple times. This is the first start of 2010 I believe. It is sort of a tradition keeping this rusty relic running. I've become quite attached to it. I like hearing how the old girl is doing.

Perhaps driving through the frozen lake in the middle of winter has something to do with the solenoid going bad prematurely. Perhaps it was driving in the lake in the middle of summer. Or maybe mudding in fall. Good times.

Open SUSE 10.3

I get orders for a box with Open SUSE installed. Someone needs to build a piece of software on this box. 

"The source will not build on Open SUSE. Shouldn't it work out of the box?" says he.

"No." says I. "We only support SLES, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, not Open SUSE. They are two different animals.

"They should work together." says he.

"We do not support Open SUSE." says I. 

"Shut up and make it so!" says he.

I already ranted about having to format my USB drive as NTFS and use Ubuntu to move it off to the network to burn it and ending up with corrupted image that would not install. I downloaded the DVD ISO from multiple spots with the same result. I tried tot get the admin to transfer it thinking it was my cobbled together USB key. It was not. I ended up downloading the CD ISO and that one worked.

Well, it kind of worked. The online repositories are apparently missing something. There are a ton of bad dependency problems that barf errors. You have to go through this "How would you like to handle this problem?" questions and you have shed loads of choices, none of which work except "Force run.". That one kind of does the job.

So, I call the guy to come get his 3 day train wreck of a machine and he tels me "We told the people we don't support Open SUSE. We don't need the box any more."

Quick test of the new camera

This is the Canon PowerShot SD940IS. It is shot in kind of low light and uploaded without editing straight off the camera to YouTube.

On a happy note, the videos appear to work straight off the camera in my editor. I was worried that Canon would use some oddball format, but it is straight up .mov or MPEG format. The video is pretty good for such a tiny lens. The best part is the wide angle on the lens. The card says I have 90 minutes of video. The batteries are $8 a pop on Amazon. I have a place in my backpack to carry this stack of credit cards. I get to take out my old camera which means a net loss of about half a kilo for my pack. Sweet.

Trip to the Doctor's office

I took a half day and went to the doctor's office. This is my boring trip down Westheimer. There is also a rant about people not looking when the turn at intersections. A swastika in the concrete. A nice little noisy green area. Oh, and glass walled elevator. All that and it is still boring. That is talent.