Duck

Field	Data
Title	Duck
Description	The duck (joke)
Tags	humor funny Joke duck bar tender grapes Canon Elph 300 Houston Texas Harris county
Link	Link

Old Radio

I was listening to an old time radio of Philip Marlo today after lunch. I reached up to put a piece of Wrigley's Spearmint gum in my mouth nearly at the same moment that the old time advertisement came on. It was Wrigley's Spearmint gum. Crazy. Kind of made me stop for just a moment and think about all those people making living with radio plays way back when. Sounds like a heck of a thing to do. It also made me think that Wrigley's gum just might outlast radio as a means of entertaining the masses.

The next show had Shirley Temple and Carry Grant. They did a show called "The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer". Wow. I'm pretty sure it also had the guy who plaid Fred in Lucille Ball show. It is a story that says that people spend their childhood trying to grow up and the rest of their life trying to relive their childhood.

The very next radio show had the guy who did the voice for Fred Flintstone. Turns out that guy was in a bunch of old radio shows. I hear him often.

Believe

If someone is blind and they really really think they can see.
If they genuinely believe, ... It won't help them across the street.

Notes:

The opportunity cost of being a professional baseball player is 40%. That means, people who wanted to be professional baseball players who gave up the dream will end up making 40% more money on average. This is including the top paid people, which means the lower paid people are even worse off. -NPR, from memory.

I dug a kilo of pocket lint out of my USB key this morning. I was wondering why it only worked in half the machines. They were grossed out by the lint.

Really need to do more videos. I'm not highly concerned with quality any more. I suck at this too much to care. Still, like getting stuff out there.

VM

Did a bunch of VM work today. It is funny sometimes. You can't just unplug and plug the Ethernet cable for example. There are a few other things that are easier like changing the amount of RAM or HD space. Kind of fun. I had trouble moving the VM once I created it. It turns out the VMWare had just come up improperly and was refusing to restart nicely. I had to get all up in its grill.

It should have been easier. I missed a step that cost me some tome. I hate that. You try to learn as you go. I've done virtual machine stuff before, but not with VMWare server. That was a new animal. I've used the web page to create the shell and then install the OS by hand. This time I used the web interface all through Linux. It was kind of a pain in the ass. I had to start over a couple of times.

Did you know that to install Red Hat 6 with the GUI interface your machine must have at least some number between 512 and 1024 megabytes of RAM? I didn't try to figure out the exact number. I tried to Google around, but it didn't help. I'm hitting that problem more and more. It seems like Google only returns things for sale these days. If you are paying, you have a people fighting for your attention. If you are just trying to learn something, your answers get drown in the noise. That is the saddest thing I've ever put on this blog.

Get to do the same thing again tomorrow with a different version of the same distro. Hope that what I've learned over the several hours from today will help.

Excel issues on 64 bit Vista

We had a computer with 64 bit Vista running 32 bit MS office 2007. The issue was Excel would bog down like mad when you did a multiple paste or a fill. The recalculation took ages. It turned out the printer spooler thing was running in the background and the display was trying to keep up and filter everything through the printer definitions.

The default printer was an HP printer. Those drivers were generic and kind of crappy. I have issues with HP drivers being crap. They try to write software that turns your computer in to a front end for their printer. That is just not what I want to dedicate my computer to dammit.

The solution to the problem was to set the default printer on the computer to the Microsoft xdoc or docx (whatever it is) printer driver. You don't have to print to that printer, but it will let you edit the Excel document without trying to drag every passed through the knothole of the HP driver ecosystem.

This has further significance because our new IT guy really has his eye on the ball. He has experience and is just plane good at his job. I was able to come up with this solution because I think "What would have the programmers have tested against?" when I troubleshoot. He tried it with the user and it worked. He has shown me at least fifteen things so, I guess I was due.

awwwww

Wood

Ever split wood? I have. I'm not going to tell you what I would have been willing to do to use one of these things for fifteen minutes.

Mine. mine. MINE!!!

seagull takes off with this guys camera. Pretty cool to watch a birds eye view of the street at night as the bird fleas the scene. I just want to know how the guy found his camera.

Bike

Field	Data
Title	I want to ride my bicycle
Description	I haven't gotten on a bike in years. Pulling some maintenance on the old two wheeler.
Tags	bike bicycle home cleaning garage summer day home work maintenance honey do Canon Elph 300 Houston Texas Harris County
Link	Link

What group are you protected by?

Mark Steyn on Free Speech at the IPA from Institute of Public Affairs on Vimeo.

I'm disabled, but being a white male apparently counters this.

Final Cut Pro

A bunch of fan boys on YouTube are drooling all over the flagship video editing software. It turns out that people have issues with the software.

Is Final Cut Pro X Apple's Biggest Mistake In Years?
"It isn't like Apple to stumble but the latest version of Final Cut Pro, the widely used tool in the professional video editing world was getting the reputation as the app that launched a thousand complaints, as the 955 reviewers and raters on iTunes collectively rated FCP as, "Two and a half stars," with 45% are giving the software one star, the lowest rating possible, bestowing on the program the dubious honor of being the lowest rated Apple software hosted by the company's digital store. Many complaints center around lost features. We used to be able to do this, and now we can't. You can't work with existing FCP Suite projects. There's no external video monitoring, no EDL imports, no backup application disk so good luck re-installing the software on the road without a good internet connection, and lots of unanswered questions about site licensing."

It doesn't work for me because I have no Mac. By the time you pay fora Mac and pay for the software, you could have purchased several computers and outfitted them with open source software.

Lazy

Why am I so frigging lazy? I have no taist for laziness in others. You would think that being a victim of laziness that I would have a tolerance for the affliction in others. No. It is the opposite. I am also, as it appears, inpatient. Someone just yesterday called me patient. I nearly fell out of my chair. I worry that she said this in order to make me more patient. Perhaps she was sensing my impending sigh.

Looking for a video to shoot. I want to dig the bike out of the garage and make it ridable. There is nothing wrong with the bike. It just needs some lube on the chain and air in the tires. Those tires are old. Here is hoping they are not rotten. Not evern sure why I want to do this. Not sure where the itch came from.

IBM real deal

For the last couple days, I've been messing around with an IBM server at work. It has perplexed me greatly. There is nothing so quaint as video on the box. There is not really a place to plug in a keyboard. There are USB ports, but they Are not really for such simple things as input devices.

On the front of this box is a little pop out control panel. This has a USB device on it. This USB plug does not go to the computer. This USB plug goes to the control device that tells you how the real computer part is doing. Even if the main board blows up, the memory packs it in and the CPU has a melt down, this bit of the box will work and dutifully tell you in no lack of detail precisely how fucked your server is.

It has hot swappable fans.

The instructions were very clear. Hook up a null modem to the serial port and establish a dumb terminal connection. Done. Wait, no, it isn't working. Why is there not any data traveling across the serial connection? What the hell?!? I just hit a brick wall. The damn thing will not talk to me. I made plans to call IBM on Monday and ask them how much of a dumb ass I was being. I knew I was doing something wrong on a very simple level. The documentation made perfect sense. It was clear and complete. I was missing something at the rookie level.

The serial port I was plugged in to looked like this. This is the kind of device I look for when you say the word "serial port". It turns out that IBM has a different standard when it comes to console connections. They look (in fact are) single line phone cables that use a converter from the more standard D9 configuration. This is exasperated by the fact that I'm using a USB to serial convirter. Ate least I was getting the same results in both Windows and Linux.

Thank goodness our new IT person had some experience with IBM servers before. I would have been lost. It did make me feel much better that the two smartest people at the company on such matters also had a hard time figuring this out. Now I know.

Notes:

Guy on the elevator said I was showing off by waring a rain slicker this morning. it was pretty funny. He asked me if it had been six months since I had to ware it last and I had to agree. Not sure the last time exactly, but it has been a long while.

Got to hook a Mac to the network today. It took me a while to figure out that you have to type the name in to the web browser in order to get where you wanted. Kind of fun.

Had the most informative and educational lunch of my career today. No, I'm not talking about it.

Sam Spade got $25 a day plus expenses.

Notes:

Rain! The walk in this morning was nearly dry. I was worried there for a bit. The breeze was awesome. it was cool and wet. The air smelled like rain. The plants seemed to sigh relief. As I exited the bus it was sprinkling. I was able to jog across the street and in to the building without getting much more than a couple drops on my head. I hope there are more than a couple drops. We really need the rain.

One of the blogs I read says that some solar panels are radioactive after their lifetime use expires. I really need to look this up and find out if this is true. The cost of installation of solar panels is bad enough, but if you need to get rid of them with radioactive waist, that is past the limit. I bet that is not in the contract that some of those tree huggers signed over the last couple years. Perhaps, the definition of radioactive is at play.

Remember when I said I had setup a real honest IBM server? I was wrong. I'm now attempting to setup an IBM PPC "Power System" server. This is the real thing. It has hot swappable fans for the love of God.

The new phones Nat and I are looking at have an on screen keyboard. The issue I had was editing once you typed. It turns out there are these swipe commands you have to used to get to the arrow keys in order to edit what you have already typed. I used a buddy's phone and found it is is doable. Funny thing is I could do it at first, but then lost it. It will take practice.

Tsunami footage

Missed this one first time round. The guy survived, so says the text comment. It is pretty scary footage though. I can't imagine.

Monkey screwing a football

Can you say "duhhhhh!" boys and girls. I mean who needs to steer anyway?

Horse power

It isn't the horse power, it is the torque.

Care trailer fail

Why will U-Haul insist that the vehicle you are towing with out weigh the vehicle you are towing by 50%?

Day

The day is nearly done.
It is nearly done well.
I tried God, a good run.
No lies to tell.

I find this day's end.
Maybe it finds me.
No time for me to lend.
Rest calls, leave be.

Tomorrow comes too soon.
Yesterday was fun.
Today made me a loon.
I'm calling it done.

Good night.

Lunch conversation

• Wal-Mart figured out that if you screw too many people, they let you get away with it.
• Jake can read the news ticker from across the room at McDonald's.
• The news woman looks like a lizard.
• Circle something-or-other
• Compared and contrast the different McDonald's pies.
• Weather and lack there of. It is hot.
• Magic tournaments plaid on our own time.
• A kid died at a Rave in Houston.

All in all, an interesting and short lunch.

Yee-frigging-ha

Two senior federal law enforcement sources say acting ATF director Kenneth Melson is expected to resign under pressure, perhaps in the next day or two, amid the ongoing controversy over the "Fast and Furious" operation in which straw buyers were allowed to illegally purchase large numbers of weapons, some of which ended up in the hands of cartels in Mexico.

CNN Headline News email

From what I have put together, also called "Project Gun Runner" the U. S. government let a bunch of drug traffickers buy small arms (assault rifles) from the U. S. and told the sellers to shut up about it. These guys were never supposed to get in to the hands of people who would use them. Apparently, the U. S. authorities expected the full shipments to stay together and not get broken up the moment the opportunity presented itself. Huge mistake.

This is a criminal level cluster fuck. It has been called "felony stupid". I hear that a border agent has been killed with one of these guns. Why would the powers that be let U. S. guns travel across the border? Because they want guns baned in the U. S.. Think I'm kidding? Goggle the story above, go past the first couple links. Did they think it was a good idea to let the guns be used in killings so they could then make a case more easily? Isn't that worse? Sounds like someone in charge at the moment.

Can you imagine if the media had a Republican president to yell at about this? There would be a mob with pitchforks and torches circling the White House.

Speaking of White Hose, how high did this conspiracy go? Is Kenneth falling on his sword for the president? No one admits how high. People, when asked "Why told you to do this?", keep responding with "I don't know."

Too big to get sued

The Supreme Court put the brakes on a massive job discrimination lawsuit against mega-retailer Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., saying sweeping class-action status that could potentially involve hundreds of thousands of current and former female workers was simply too large.

CNN Headline News email

All you have to do is screw a lot of people for a long time and you get away with it. Yet one more freedom that is out the window. I have friends who have worked for Wal-Mart. They have horror stories. I buy stuff at Wal-Mart. I feel just a touch of shame when I do. This kind of thing may not last that much longer because A) Everyone is buying their supplies from China. And B) China will not be the juggernaut of cheap labor for all that much longer. Manufacturing labor expense is climbing by 16% a year. That shall not stand.

Notes:

I'm tired of complaining about boom boom. They plaid all night last night. I got no sleep. This took it's toll on my work today. I saw them leave as I started my journey to the bus stop to go to work. It is so unfair. But then, life is not fair.

As I edited my videos this weekend, I noticed that doing a thing seems to go slower than watching it. That is, it seems like I'm going faster when I am in video. I need to to some time tests to make sure the camera is really shooting at the number of frames it says. Really, as long as the sound lines up, I'm not too worried about it.

First thing this morning, I wanted to capture a bit of video of the fountain with the sun shining through the trees. That is the way the sun shines on our building. The trouble is, just as the sun hits the best angle in my opinion, early summer, but there is a building in the way. This building casts a shadow at just the wrong time. I'll have to pay better attention over the next couple months to get the best lighting.

News letters? Really? There are some companies that insist on mailing me a news letter. I have RSS for the things I really want to read that are piratical. I have email for bills to notify me they are ready to pay. I have Twitter for complaining. I have a blog for things I want to say or really complain about. I toyed briefly with a news letter for personal stuff many years ago. This was when people first started paying attention to email. Before email became just for paying bills. I grew out of it.

Pandora closed down $3. They have never turned a profit. Maybe people have learned from the great tech bubble of 99, or whenever it was.

Surface

In 2205 a really crappy TV series was born called Surface. I'm hooked. It is all about the sea getting warmer because of these huge creatures that have been opening fissures from the deep.

This show has it all.

• Aquatic city
• Dragons
• Diving scenes
• German scientist expert
• Government conspiracies
• Mean girls who make the guy who caught one of these baby creatures think she ilks him. Then she laughs at him in front of all her friends. Then the monster eats her dog.
• Corny special effects

How did I mes this? Well, it probably comes from not watching TV in eight years or so. I really missed a gem here. Now I'm going to scour online sources for crazy fictional TV shows. I'll fail miserably, but the search should be fun.

Hell with space travel, we need AC in the desert

Air Conditioning the Military Costs More Than NASA’s Entire Budget
Kwame Opam — According to Steve Anderson, a retired brigadier general who served as Gen. Petraeus' chief logistician in Iraq, the Department of Defense spends $20 billion air conditioning tents and temporary structures for the military. That's more than NASA's entire $19 billion annual budget.
That cost comes out of the fuel needed to heat and cool tents on the front lines. However, the trucks that transport this fuel have become targets for IEDs used by the insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to Anderson, at least 1000 soldiers have been killed moving fuel.
Anderson believes that a simple solution would be to instead spray tents with polyurethane foam, kind of like the foam sealant you would use in your own home. In fact, an active $95 million contract to insulate tents is producing $1 billion in cost avoidance, proving it's both safer and greener than air conditioning the desert. Doing this while also searching for other energy-efficient solutions would save both money and lives.
The DOD just needs to hurry up and take on this kind of initiative. [The World via Grist, Image Credit: mumbojumbo / Shutterstock.com]

Gizmodo

But the president is serious when it comes to using space as a pathway to learning about the universe, right? No Virginia, the president doesn't care about learning. The president only cares that he is the one in charge, regardless of what it is in charge of. Behold the face of evil, your name is Obama.

Too many Mes

Field	Data
Title	Too many Mes
Description	Me screwing around at work.
Tags	high rise fountain mirrored glass Canon Elph 300 Houston Texas
Link	Link

Phone hell

What are the goals of phone hell? What are they really after when they send you around in circles? Well, it is not to help you get what you want. Why, because they are afraid they don't really sell what you want. They have to make what they sell look like what you want. They got to get their hooks in you.

• Get you off the phone.
  No human, no cost. Once you are talking to a human, you are costing them serious money. The idea is to get you off the phone as quickly as possible.
• Get you in to a long term contract.
  They don't make that much money off the devices. They make good money off loaning you the money to buy the device. It may not look like a loan, but it is. When you are done paying the loan back, they make money off you continuing to pay the amount you are used to every month. Only, now, you have no loan to pay off. You are handing them money at this point.
I remember a day when you had to notify Houston Cellular two months before the end of your contract to leave it. If you didn't, you were automatically renewed in a contract with the same terms and length. Trust me, the mobile phone companies think of this as the good old days.
• Sell you additional services.
  Particularly, the services that cost more every month. Text messaging costs more to keep track of than to provide.
• Sell you additional products.
  Well, duh.
• Do not get sued.
  The people you are talking to have a very specific script to follow. If they leave that script, they get fired. There is a line round the block for every job. They will never admit they are out to get you.

What bullets have I missed?

Notes:

It really upsets me that we have already started to run the 2012 campaign. This is just ridiculous. It will be over a year, nearly a year and a half before anyone casts a vote. The current president will basically have unlimited funds to pound his name in to the public ear. He will use every speech as president to push his reelection agenda. Every public meeting as president, he will be on the campaign trail. Every one else will be playing catch up.

How many boxes?

Set up an IBM box today. Nothing special about that. It took them 5 boxes, some boxes inside other boxes, to send us a full machine. Oh, wait, we still have no hard drive. I set it up on a USB drive. Hoping the drive is just on the way. I don't get it. My office looks like a UPS truck hit it, all for one system.

The RAM was ordered separately. That took two boxes. The CPU took one. The DVD drive took two boxes, a reasonable sized box in a huge box. Oh, wait. The DVD drive itself was in a separate box. Those boxes were for the mounting bracket and a changed cowling.

The way I figure it, the items all came from China. They then had to be warehoused for a bit and then reboxed and sent to us. They don't have time to repackage the items so they just pack everything in a bigger box. Since every single item comes from a different warehouse each item gets reboxed.

On a side not, it took me nearly an hour to figure out how to get the DVD drive mounted and in it's proper place. Between the metal bracket, the little spring thing they called a retention bracket and the cable, It was crazy.

All in all, it has been successful. Still no drive. Hopefully I can image it over later. It feels funny having set up my first real live IBM server. There is something about an IBM that says professional or "the real deal". Not sure that still makes sense, but there it is.

Bad sound

I found out this morning that the sound is off on my most recent video. It also happens to be my first real HD video. Great timing. About a minute and a half in the sound skips a couple seconds. The last bit of the video has no sound. This sort of thing has happened before. I blame the webm codec.

Yes, I watched the video before I uploaded it. The damage came after YouTube had hold of it. I really hate this. This means that other videos have been damaged this way as well. So much for webm format for now and so much for not back checking YouTube after an upload.

It the future, I will just have to watch the full video before uploading and after uploading in order to make sure it is not broke. This is time consuming. If I were making money on this task, it wouldn't be nearly as annoying. Taking last night as an example, I didn't get the video uploaded until 23:30. I needed to go to bed. yes, the video is only a couple minutes long. Still, it is one more thing to do before bed. There is no guarantee I'll notice whatever is wrong with the video after playing with it for a couple hours. The mind tends to fill in the blanks after the first several viewings.

Notes:

It was a pretty walk in this morning. The weather is hot and a bit sticky, but the breeze was blowing and the mosquitoes were taking a coffee break as I walked by. The sun was cool looking because of the pollution or whatever in the air. There were three of us waiting on the bus this morning. That is a bit more than just me. The donut shop smelled nice.

I wore my "Budget Ninja Costume" today. It consist of a black t-shirt that says that on it. I got more comments on this shirt than any other single shirt I've ever worn to this job. Not too shabby for a $1 after Halloween special that Nat found.

Board at work

Field	Data
Title	Videos with the new camera - Canon Elph 300 HS
Description	This is me playing around with the new camera while stuck at work on various occasions. This is mostly videoed in 1080P, but not all of it. When you are panning with this camera, it is a bit blurry in 24 fps. Maybe it is me.
Tags	compilation work atrium building entry high rise board camera video filters Canon Elph 300 Houston Texas
Link	Link

Work Pictures

Or, Go here

Pictures online

Last night I found out that Tumblr only lets you upload something like 10 pictures at a time. This is not acceptable for my needs. Hey, Twitter only lets you upload one at a time. It could be worse. This means ineed to go back to using some other system for my photos.

Yesterday evening I tried Picasa again. It only allows so much storage for free and then, of course, you have to pay for more storage. This is how they all work I believe. There is a way of making multiple accounts. This becomes unwindable of course. That is the idea. They have to make a living. I do not begrudge them that. I'm just broke.

I have my own server. It sits at my feet every night and just does it's job. Every five meinutes I have to change what software I use to generate the web pages. I don't know if the one I used to use is even available. There are so many these days. There was a day I put my own together. The code I wrote was terrable. I went through my old picture pages and found that they are all over the place in quality and look. The result of having so many different software packages is a patchwork of design.

What is the solution? My ISP charges me to upload the pics. Everyplace wants me to pay to store and make the pics available. It is getting to the point you can't just put up your content. They want to make money coming, sitting and going. It isn't worth it. People will stop putting stuff up if they have to pay for every click and for the lack of clicks. Not every step has to make money.

Perhaps I'll just find the software to make the web pages and put them on my own server. That is not the easiest way, but it works. My server goes down too often to be reliable. I'll keep looking for a better place. I enjoy posting pictures too much to let it fall by the way side.

Wish me luck.

Old Time Radio

I listen to old time radio. They had a show on about a woman being chased through a ravine. The frogs were loud and prominent. I can't remember the last time I heard frogs that loud. I have heard frogs that loud before. Just, not in a long time. Oh, she made it home, found the bad man in her home and killed him with the sewing scissors. A different time.

Another old radio show was about a doctor who was too sick to help all the dying people around him. He sent his dog to the outpost with some people headed there. They put the cure on the dog and he made it back to save the day. He made it back in the nick of time. The guy doing the dog sounds was pretty good. So cheesy. Still brought a tear to my eye.

One of the Loan Ranger episodes has a climax of the Lone Ranger preventing a crowd of people from saving miners who are about to drown in a collapsed mine until they confes and let the rightful owner out of the mine with them. Bit harsh. A different time.

Some of the radio shows have advertisements for war bonds. They talk about the “Nazi menace”. They put down socialism. They pick a side. That sounds so strange to hear someone officially and deliberately take a side rather than try to hide it in the choice of story or tone of reporting.

There is simply so much offered in these old radio stories. The list of people in these shows reads as a list of 40's and 50's movie stars. They used to take radio shows very seriously before TV. It strikes me that either the really bad stuff has withered and blown away, or the era produced a great deal of entertaining and thoughtful prose. Even with censorship, even with prejudiced, even with ajendas, the stories, content and the telling are good.

Notes

Today, I had to remove a seven year old computer from inventory. There was more dust than computer in some of those cases. I think of seven years as a million computer years. The guy who was working with me said he didn't think of it that way. He thought of it more in a useful vs not useful way. That is a better way of thinking about it. This particular machine had problems, but there are still a couple floating around doing a job.

No one cares, but I'm writing this in a word processor. I will then copy the paragraphs out and post them. I'm sick of typing out HTML by hand for raw text. LibreOffice does not support a good enough list of HTML features to be an HTML editor. I prefer writing in a word processor kind of environment for some reason. I suppose it just what I learned to use first.

Looked up print servers today. They are little boxes you plug in to your network that let you plug a print in and just share it. These are on the same line as a NAS, network attached storage. They are simple purpose built devices that focus on doing one thing and do it as badly cheaply as possible without getting sued.

#######################################################

EAGG facts

There are only about 10 active inheritance.

• Sudoephadrine: Triggers the release of adnorapenefrine. Causes blood vessels to contract. Stuffy nose.
• Paracetamol and Acetaminophen: Inflammatory. It gets rid of the things that make you swell up.
• Codeine also 3 methyl morphine: Codeine is converted to morphine in your liver.
• Vic's or Menthol: Triggers cool receptors, feels good, but does nothing for pain. Does very little to make your better.

There are six billion people in the world. There five billion accounts for mobile phones. Someone said they went to deepest Africa and saw a Masi Warier texting.

That thing you heard about mobile phones causing brain cancer? Well, the increase was called out to be 40% higher. Higher than what? The example given was: If the chance of getting brain cancer is 5 out of 100,000, then an increase of 40% would raise it to 7 out of 100,000. Again, media hype is nuts. Besides, there is no citation of what study the cancer risk people were talking about.

Heard on Einstein-a-go-go

Notes:

Someone told me there is a book about a guy who lost everything because of jury duty.

One of our employees is off on maternity leave. She answers her email earlier and faster than most of the people who are here. She is always quick. That is just the way she rolls.

Smoking really does have a weight control component. They have finally figured it out. The details are complex. Let's just say that it is real and they now know why that when someone quits smoking, they gain weight. -Naked Scientist

Scientists are showing promise at getting the human heart to rebuild itself after a heart attack. This is using stem cells. Good thing we are fully funding stem cell research in this country. (sarcasm) -Naked Scientist.

The U. K. government appears to be telling people that they need to be employed and if they are employed they need to be happy they have a job and stop complaining about the job market. That is one interpretation. Employers want people to be desperate. That is true all over the world. Employers seem to be the only one's who have the money to affect politicos. Nothing new here. The news is starting to let the mask slip in rare cases.

Half of Main Stream Media says we have extreme weather all over the globe and the other half says that what is going on is a glut of mass hysteria and a normal weather pattern world wide. East Texas has a drought and the mid west has a monsoon. Sounds about right.

Have to install Windows on a drive just to get the over clocking software to work. Then I get to over clock the machine. Then I get to put the old OSes back on the device so people can use them and complain that they are still too slow. It is maddening. It is a living though. I suppose it could be worse. I could have to have three people watching me to change a light bulb.

I get 20 views a day on this blog on a good week. I get about 30 a day on YouTube. I get 1 a day on Tumblr. I have no way of knowing how many I get on Twitter.

They had the fountain at work cranked today. I wanted to get some footage at lunch while the sun was hitting the spouts. I didn't get a lunch today. The morning sun comes in at about the best angle to get some good looking light. The building, however, reflects like mad and you get sun in the frame.

20% of Americans are unemployed or under employed. Stores are closed. You can't get a buyer for your house. It isn't a depression though.

Took yesterday off for contact lenses. It is amazing how much better these contacts are than my old ones. They cost about twice as much I think, but they are just plane amazing. I don't know how they sell the old ones any more. Still, you need a day off now and again.

It's funny watching and listening to media from Australia. They are in winter. The heat is killing us here. It is kind of nice knowing the weather really does have sense of humor.

Plane crossing

Honduras

Yes, another time lapse

Field	Data
Title	Home from grandma's house time lapse
Description	Pretty much what the tittle says. Please ignore the skips. The Elph 300 has a 10 minute limit on the video. Music: Airport Lounge Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons "Attribution 3.0" http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Tags	streets time lapse timelapse trip home I-10 toll road beltway Conroe Houston Texas Canon Elph 300.
Link	Link

Some videos

These are mostly from Gizmoto.

positioning systems I - falling objects from pe lang on Vimeo.

Why? I wanted to see that nidle shoot a drop in the middle of all those drops and a cascade of joining take place or something. What is this machine needed for?

Hector Thunderstorm Project from Murray Fredericks on Vimeo.

That's it, I give up doing time lapse videos. This one kils anything I ever hoped of doing.

Yup yup yup yup yup yup yup yup yup yup yup!!!

What I did today

This took me about 9 to 10 hours today. I didn't take a lunch today. I could have taken a lunch, but I just didn't feel like it. Today, I chose not to take a lunch. I wasn't hungry and I wanted to get things done. Did so.

• Setting up [a laptop] for redeployment.
• Active Directory purge.
• Round robin backup server offsite. Updates. Move files.
• Restage [a machine] for [a user].
• Image and setup [a laptop] for redeployment.
• Install Acrobat on a bunch of Unix systems.
• DHCP for [a user] with Manual changes.
• Misc Tasks that take less than an hour.
• IT meeting.
• Help Rusty a bit with an install.
• Deal with [a user's] printer.
• Join a Linux box to the network.
• Local machine setup 101 with a user.
• Jiggle a cable on a server to bring internal web page back up.

I'm trying to think of something that I learned today. I learned that Ubuntu local user do not like their home folders moved around. Well, I already knew this. I learned that you basically have to set the root password, remove your existing user created at install, move the files, and then create a new user at the command line while pointing it to the new folder to get this done.

Notes:

I'm trying to figure out how line wrap works in Notepad++. This is maddening. I want line wrap turned on. There are like fifteen kinds of line wrap on this crazy program. Ah-ha. Line wrap is what happens to the same line as you go past the end of the page. Word wrap is what I'm looking for. Live and learn. I was just writing this line to get something to test with. Enjoy.

Why does Dell put a program called Dell-eBay on their new computers? I do not know what this software does, but I guess it is for buying more Dell products using eBay or it is a discount system for Dell products by using the program to perform your eBay tasks. Bastards.

There is a small group of scientists who are studying how fish react to the sounds of a reef. The scientists are actually studying how the fish react to carbon dioxide content of the water. They say the PH of the sea is changing faster now than it has in the past 600,000 years. -The Naked Scientist.

Pics

Weather report

Today is sunny, hot, humid, partly cloudy. People are annoying for some reason. I've been in a horrible mood lately. Everything seems like it is a waist of time and useless. It is one of these depressed days where you think you should have just stayed in bed. Of course, I went to work, not for lack of sick days, but because I am a loyal employee and too proud to let a little depression keep me from performing my duties. All in all, the walk I took around the parking lot at least felt good. At least the breeze was blowing.

Where does this stuff come from? I cracked my head Tuesday. I had a nose bleed earlier today. Now I'm reporting depression. Perhaps this is a list of symptoms. What kinds of things exhibit when you clock your noggin?

Surely I'm over the hump. I mean, I will go to the doctor when it seems like it will do me some good. I do pull a "heck with medicine" every now and again. This may be one of those.

Last night I accidentally scratched my head and made it bleed. The sore is healing and thus itches. I was able to shave thank goodness. The hit is right on my nonexistent hair line. I have a history of doing this. Particularly I do it with scratches from the cat on my hands.

...

Weather! Yes. Expecting a rain storm this afternoon. Not sure where I heard that. South east Texas is in a drought. I can tell because the side of Westheimer I walk on is still passable even though it has not been mowed for over six months. There are a couple new shoots, but most of the grass is just lying over and has turned yellow. I'm not loosing sleep over it. My yard is only growing in spots. It looks even more like crap than normal. I refuse to water because of principle. We don't even own a sprinkler. We would have to tie Elle up to keep her out of it.

What scares me is the hurricane season. I like to hope that all the tornadoes and crazy weather has taken a bunch of energy out of the atmosphere. I know this is not how it works.

Notes:

Had a nose bleed this morning. I can't tell if it is related to the sinus trouble I had recently or if it has something to do with getting clobbered by a desk Tuesday. Hopefully the former.

Steve Jobs has been called the Evangelical tech. There is a cult of personality going on with this guy. This makes me worry when it comes to the Apple stock. Steve has been ill. he may very will succumb to his illness in the short term. That is tragic, but when he is gone, what is going to happen to Apple? I'm not a big fan of Apple. I respect the man and the position. Still, Steve is starting to look like one of the preachers who shout the end of the world.

Zelda is 25 years old. Mario is 26.

We should hire someone named Jesus, just so we can page him occasionally.

We have stomaches to kill bacteria. Ulcers are do to bacteria, not stress. From Einstein-a-go-go.

Algae reproduction

Field	Data
Title	Why do algae bread asexually?
Description	This is a joke stolen from Matt at work. He stopped me in the hall to tell it to me. He swore up and down that he wrote it.
Tags	sex asexual humor joke Canon Elph 300 Houston Texas garage
Link	Link

Lunch conversation

I missed half the conversation this time because we sat at different tables. The place we went, Smashberger, his long and thin. it has an outside area that a bunch of the pansies didn't want to eat at because -winy voice- "It's hot." I sat at the table with a bunch of nerds, like myself.

• Portable gaming systems and games that don't have anything added by the included 3D interface.
• Work.
• HTTP servers.
• DB servers.
• Java vs Python.
• New folks.
• Money.
• Vacations.
• The food.

Nothing about any of the three wars our country is involved in. Nothing about loss of freedoms. Nothing about women really. Nothing about cars or guns or houses or marbles. Just another lunch and forgettable conversation.

Notes:

One of my tasks today was to set up an existing laptop for a new user. The laptop had a ton of extras installed by the previous user. The machine seemed to run very slowly. Every single program I removed seemed to make the machine run a little bit faster. By the time I got to the bottom of the list, the machine was running pretty well. Goes to show that Windows is messed up. Just installing a program should not drag on over all machine performance.

My head feels a bit better today. Nat made fun of me. She was on about symmetry with the dent from the Maglite.

"If your are going to be two faced, at least make one of the pretty." Marilyn Munro.

Day

I really hate it when you have network issues that do not reveal themselves. We had a bad switch this morning that turned in to a general network is not work properly issue. I really hate this. Cody, our new IT pro, who seems to know his stuff and seems to have hit the ground running, was of great help. Out network is so freaking crazy that we had horrible issues tracking down the root issue. I'm not saying what it was online.

I managed to bang my head in the process of chasing wires. This one is on the right side of my head and does not quite match the old lump on the left side that I did myself with a Maglite.

Shiny

This makes me want to be a bad buy.

Rainy day

Field	Data
Title	Rainy day
Description	Power goes out. Gives me a chance to try my video light.
Tags	storm lightening rain blackout power out outage Canon Elph 300 Houston Texas
Link	Link

Weekend tally

How many of the tasks did I get to check for this weekend?

• Yard work - check
• Finish the bills - check
• Clean up around the house - check (more or less)
• Shoot a video - check
• Sam's trip - fail

Not too bad. Nat says she will do the Sam's trip tomorrow. Hope that works out.

Poetic License

Wouldn't it be nice if you could just crank out beautiful prows when you have nothing else going on? I've noticed that I feel the muse of writing most on days when I have the most going on. Days where I'm sitting on my tukes and staring at the walls, nothing comes to mind to spill upon the page. Maybe it just seems this way. Maybe there is no reality to my perception of do vs create.

This law of creativity applies to more than poetry. It seems like all forms of creativity hit you while you are doing something else. Perhaps this is why love has such prevalence. While folks are falling in and indeed out of love, they seem to ooze creativity. Whatever form of creation takes them comes in buckets. There was a Seinfeld episode on the subject. Men get smarter as they have less sex. Women get smarter as they have more sex. That is a bit off base of my theme here , but you get the idea.

Potential time killers

Ode to an air conditioner.

How dirty can carpet get?

Scour Hulu for that episode of SG1 you missed. (found it!)

The balance between security and escaping a fire.

The art of cleaning clean guns.

Surfing the net until you pass out.

Shoot the most boring YouTube video ever.

Those are almost creative suggestions. I had to stop myself from suggesting that you get something done round the house to alleviate boredom. That would just be wrong. What is the deal with not wanting to be productive when you are bored? If only there were a pill that would make people who are willing to sit and do nothing get up and do something. This would change how the world works.

How many times have I wined about not having two things. I lack get up and do it. I also lack stick to it. How different would my life be if I had these two attributes? Would I be happier? Would I be richer? Would I be alive?

All I wanted when I started this blog entry was to write a stupid poem that no one would remember.

Some random pictures

This week was about haze and reflections.

Yes!!

I love this!

The case went to court and the homeowners were able to prove they didn't owe Bank of America anything on the house. In fact, it was proven that the couple never even had a mortgage bill to pay.
A Collier County Judge agreed and after the hearing, Bank of America was ordered, by the court to pay the legal fees of the homeowners', Maurenn Nyergers and her husband.
...
So, how did it end with bank being foreclosed on? After more than 5 months of the judge's ruling, the bank still hadn't paid the legal fees, and the homeowner's attorney did exactly what the bank tried to do to the homeowners. He seized the bank's assets.
"They've ignored our calls, ignored our letters, legally this is the next step to get my clients compensated, " attorney Todd Allen told CBS.

www.digtriad.com

Banks seem to think they are above the law. Politicians seem to think they are above the law. Just because there is a crook in the White House doesn't mean they are right. The leader of the IMF may have to face attempted rape charges. He is not above the law.

The idea that you can get away with bad things because defending yourself in court costs too much for honest people to afford is tyranny. I don't know what to do about it. I have too much on my mind keeping the bills paid and food on the table. I guess that is the point. Only people who have money can afford to have rights in this very modern world.

Weekend to do

How many of these things will I get done this weekend?

• Yard work
• Finish the bills
• Clean up around the house
• Shoot a video
• Sam's trip

Longer term to do list.

• Get in to my 401K web page
• Consolidate 401K funds
• Take some classes for something somewhere (keep my mind in the game)

Me at about 25

I believed I was helping a friend named Seline move in to or out of a dorm room at UH.

Wind and rain

This is footage from a home security camera. Shows an area just north of where the real damage happened. Hard to believe so much damage was done until you watch this and think that it is just a bit off the worst of it.