Goals this weekend:

• Baptize the house in bug killer.
• Lawn granules
• Spray weep holes and eves with elixir of death.
• Spray inside with slightly less crazy chemicals.
• Pay bills.
• Put together a video of some kind.
• Putting together bug killing equipment
• Killing bugs

We are being invaded by ants and wasps or hornets, flying bugs with big stingers. Nat got trapped in her car because several of these dive bombers hovered over the car as she sat in the garage after having pulled in. She didn’t want to close the door because that would just lock them in. Making a run for it is just childish.

Got me a brand new sprayer. Got me a whole bucket of yard guard graines. Gonna kill me some bugs.

I’m sure I’ll think of more as the weekend goes, but that is it at the time of writing.

If I’m honest, it has been a while since I came in on a weekend. I can count the weekends I worked on one hand at my old job with the huge company. Now I’m headed for an even bigger company. Not sure what will happen with things like overtime and weekends. Both will still be worked for sure. I just don’t know what the policies will look like.

My grandmother used to work nights for the phone company. She was an operator.back in the  “Number please.” days. She prefered nights because she would work six hours and get paid for eight. I don’t think that policy survived past the seventies. Now, they have people in different time zones answer the calls. Can you even get a human being any more?

Copies

There have been several short stories about copies of people and how it screws up the order of things. The possibilities are endless.

A man sells the rights of the copy of his body and mind to a company. The company makes a copy of him and ports the copy to a space station which is the only place they can do experiments legally. The copy wakes up and thinks he is the guy who will get the money. The copy is dissected and experimented on for a while before he dies. He also damns the original for cursing him with this life and death.

Another story has a soldier after a bad guy. In the pursuit, the bad guy tells the soldier that he is one of many who have come after him. It turns out the soldier is a copy always thinking he is the first one going after the bad guy.

This is an awesome premise for a story. How long before it makes its way to the theater where it will be done fifteen different ways in five years?

If I were so inclined I would write a very politically incorrect story about a person who goes to heaven and discovers that only men who owned land or slaves had soles. Everyone else was basically an NPC. He made it to heaven by mistake and isn’t sure he want’s to stay.

Lunch conversation

Today was one of those days where many people had a hard time concentrating. You can tell by the conversations. It is the Friday before a three day weekend. We are lucky no one was riding a chair through the halls.

Lunc time

• Long weekend coming up.
• Chilly dogs
• The line was long
• Perfect for a Friday
• Sports
• Someone’s team lost
• Someone mentioned fantasy sports, but we are out of season I think. Missed it.
• Portuguese vs Spanish
• The word for using a normal word as an insult.
• My ear ringing for no reason.
• Computers,laptops, and networks at work.
• Low carb bread and the fact that it lasts longer.

Then came the after lunch break

• Children’s names.
• Superhero movies

Notes:

ard and roll on (keep moving forward) despite my desire to give up.

Really liking the ability to jump from one machine to another and edit the blog entries. It is nice not worrying about copying files or emailing them to myself every day. The same is true regarding audio and video casts. I use Google reader for those and the same thing happens.

Politicians keep lying. The internet makes it easy to tell who is just plain lying. Voters don’t seem to care. Democracy doesn’t work, but it doesn’t work less than any other method so far.

Twitter really makes me think sometimes. Today it made me think “Why am I still reading stuff on Twitter?”

The term “toxic assets” is coming up when speaking about Spanish banks. I’m beginning to understand that a toxic asset is anything that has more money owed on it than it is worth. That should include my house. They cannot reduce the deficit in Spain. They are having all kinds of issues meeting the bills. It really looks like banks and other investors are simply going to have to write off debt for Spain. Maybe banks and other investors should be more careful about who they loan money to in the future.

Apple is shooting themselves in the foot. A big portion of their Apple Store experience is the whole Genus help thing. There is a move afoot to hock extra merchandise on point of sale in the stores. The stores don’t turn a profit, but they do sell a lot of Apple products. This move will change the feel of the Apple Store to more akin to Best Buy. I had five people ask me if I wanted to buy the warranty when buying a laptop a million years ago. That kind of thing leaves a bad taste in the mouth for a long time. This was the nineties after all.

First pics from my new camra

First pics from new camera Canon Elph 110

I know, photoes are secondary these days when thinking aboutcameras. Still, it is worth a try.

Lotus Notes

From what I’ve heard, there are issues with Lotus Notes and the office suite called Symphony. I’m playing with the downloadable version of Symphony (office) and so far so good. It looks like a branch of OpenOffice. I’ve been using LibreOffice for ever so I’m used to how things work I bet. I haven’t had a chance to play with Lotus Notes yet. As a matter of fact, I’ve never seen it run. the video makes it look pretty cool.

One feature I think people around here will end up loving is the click to chat feature along with the video chat. I think that is a cool feature. I imagine being much more able to work from home and attend meetings via webcasts and such. Some people will just never jump on the bandwagon.

It turns out people at IBM can use Linux for their systems. IBM appears to support most of the standard office programs and many other options for Red Hat Linux. IBM Linux The more I read about this company, the more I like it. Their health care leaves a bit to be desired, but they all do these days. That is nothing new.

Weather

The news this morning was all about the weather in Louisiana. I cannot call it the storm any more because the storm has passed. The damage is being cleaned up. People are being rescued off roof tops. I bet some folks ran back in after the storm just to get on TV and a ride on a helicopter. It makes the people in legitimate trouble look bad. Of course, there was a mandatory evacuation and they didn’t leave. Where are all those people expected to go? We have a couple ideas if we are ever ordered to leave, but no cement plans.

There are tons of pictures on CNN’s website and many others of people sitting on couches in the storm surge. Some show street signs hit by waves. Others show people having a romantic walk on a beach, but it is a street with waves lapping on it, not a beach.

This time the trucks full of supplies and power fixing kind of folks really are/were idling outside the city waiting on the order to plow forward. That was the running joke last time. Sure we are prepared for the worst. It will take a week to get the trucks there, but that’s normal.

The storm raging, the Republican convention in full run mode and our president was campaigning at some university. This has not managed to make its way to the media surprisingly. If Obama were a Republican, reporters would faint reporting how calas, clueless and heartless the man is for ignoring the pain of the fine upstanding victims of mother nature..Same old story.

Notes:

Talk about pod-fade. I walked in this morning and found three new audiocasts ready for me to listen to. There are some days I have 20. I need to add some new feeds, bit time. The trouble is most of my feeds are weekly. Some feeds are dropping non iTune feeds as well. That really upsets me. I don’t think they realize how many people rely on RSS to keep track.

My contacts just didn’t happen this morning. I’m wearing my glasses. It is funny how used to contacts I get. It is so nice having comfortable contacts. Glasses get on my nerves these days. Guess I’m just getting older and more cantankerous. (It looks like I spelled cantankerous correctly on the first try.).

The only thing I’ve learned over my life that really makes a difference, that makes me think I would have done different things, is that there will never be a financially correct time to have children. At no point will it ever make sense from the view of your wallet that “now is the time”.Still, as I sit here thinking about it, I’m glad I did not really figure this out until I’m past the age of it making much difference. I’ve heard the words fifteen times throughout my life. At some point recently, they started making sense. Ah, youth is wasted on the young.

Listening to BBC 4 radio. I have been all morning. I’m like a hundred or something.

Surface tension. Water molecules attract each other..Imagine being in the middle of water. You are attracted from all sides. At the surface you are attracted from all sides except up. Thus, the last place you want to go is up.

Google Docs

This is day two of using the Google Docs for the Blog initiative. I’ve had issues. Not going to lie

Bad

• Pasting in to Blogger
• Things reformat according to blogger’s styles and override some of the settings made by Google Docs.
• I have to use carriage returns (hit enter) twice after paragraphs to get a space. This is 1980’s old school. I cannot use the power of the tag to group things without just manually writing it in the document and copying it manually into the HTML editor on Blogger.
• My phone does not have the storage available for editing docs. Apparently there is some way to do this on my Android phone. I’ll keep looking.
• Can’t embed a YouTube or other video in to the document. This makes it difficult to paste into Blogger as well because you have to go back and forth between editing formats to get your post to look the way you need it. In Blogger for example you can simply display the YouTube or embedded video in the editor. Surely this functionality could be ported to Drive. Then again, there are a dozen things I would like ported the other way.
• I can’t figure out how to create new styles.

Good

• Editing docs across platforms and from multiple locations is awesome!
• Autosave rocks.
• The Android app says you can take a picture of a document, turn it to text and publish it online without a computer. I’ll believe it after trying it. Bad luck so far with OCR.
• Intuitive interface. I use VIM as a text editor and have forgotten how nice a Windows style editor is for non programming documents.
• This will make it easier for me to have the computer read the text of my blog to me before I post it. This might help quality, but I doubt it.

I may start using Google Docs for my work time tracking and such. I already use Google Docs for storing my copy of the work notes. I have little proprietary information in those notes. It is a document to help me do my job. It is good to have an offsite backup. I will not put files  on Google Docs from work. Those, I will still make separate folders for on local systems.

Between spreadsheets for things like what books I’ve downloaded to my eyeglass prescription, I use Google docs for all kinds of things. I will use Google Docs even more now. I used to use Google Docs for the blog, but gave it up in 2010. This means there is a pretty good gap in my list of entries. I have them in text format at the house. Perhaps I will add them to Google Docs via Google Drive. That is, tar them up and copy them in as a file. Actually, Google Docs has turned in to Google Drive so I must start calling it that.

Have I written more since using a word processor?

Notes:

he BBC says a lot of tickets have been sold for the paralympics. Normally, the stands are empty for these folks to perform to. This time, that will not happen. I love it. These games need to be paid more respect. The jokes need to stop. Yes, I’m legally blind. Shut up!

We had to go through a list of people at our company today. It was strange to listen to the people who are here now and remember people who have left. I’m feeling nostalgic because our company has been purchased and will not technically exist in a while if things go as planned. What is going to happen to our people (me)? What is going to happen to our old equipment? Most of these questions have been answered to some extent.

One of the podcasts I listen to described having a child in New York City. They had jobs and cleared more than I do each. They said the birth and care cost them $18,000 out of pocket for about the first year including prenatal stuff.Their insurance covered the rest. They were complaining. I think that is too much for a child birth.

Someone should sit down and level out the playing field for childbirth costs.

Camp cough, starvation and Syphilis wiped out more armies than armies have.

Several audiocasts, also known as podcasts, have the idea in their head that the only way to do audio casts is in iTunes form. They constantly whine about “Give us a review in iTunes!” Losers. Not only do I not have iTunes, but I refuse to use iTunes. It is a screw Apple kind of thing. I really don’t have anything against Apple. I do so enjoy disrespecting them thought. Not sure why except that I cannot afford their equipment. That is a good enough reason I suppose.

Humans are the only animal in the world whose breasts stay visibly larger even when not pregnant or breast feeding. It probably not to attract a mate. Tammy Gene Linzy (I cannot find a link for her) was the first woman to get a breast implant in Houston in 1962. The person talking about the book where that information came from said it read like a survivor story.

Vlog hurry up and wifi

Field	Data
Title	Hurry up and wifi
Description	Just another evening * Twitter https://twitter.com/#!/zhsy00001 * Blog http://plastickelly.blogspot.com * YouTube RSS http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/zhsy00001/uploads
Tags	vlog vlogging weed eating weed whacking weed eater lawn care wifi rant internet issues Houston Texas Canon Elph 110 Kdenlive
Link	Link

Apple vs Samsung

Samsung is a Korean company. It trips me out how many people don't know this. People assume it is Japanese or Chinese. Folks in Korea are not happy about the recent Apple vs Korea verdict. Some Korean folks think Apple would have lost if the same lawsuit were held in Korea. I say, well duh. The jury voted for the home team.

News has come out that the jury in the Apple Samsung case didn't read the jury instructions. The foreman came out and said "we wanted it to be sufficient to be painful." Which, does not follow intellectual property laws rules. This leaves the door open for appeal.
Some say that Samsung spent a billion dollars to become the number two mobile phone manufacturer of smart phones. That is cheap at the price. It turns out the iPhone has only recently been made available in South Korea. The iPhone and related devices are still not aloud in mainland China.
Someone asked if this sort of thing will be passed on to consumers. The expert basically said the only way Samsung gets money is from consumers so of course the cost will have to be passed on at some point or another. I like that.
Apple has asked that many Samsung phones be banned in the U. S.. It ain't over by any measure. Who is next on Apple's list of targets for this sort of treatment?

Testing of Google Docs

I want to use Google Docs to store my copy of my blog entries. This is a quick test of things that I do every time I use documents. I know most of them will probably work in the Google Docs editor, but this is a test of how much of this will survive to the Blogger environment.

This is a test of ctrl enter to remove space after a paragraph.
Works in Google Docs.
The default page settings are changeable now. This means I can reduce the acre of margin to something manageable. I can put some space after the paragraphs, which is what it looks like on my blog more or less.

• Bullets 1
• Bullets 1.5 (worked hitting tab)
• Bullets 2
• Bullets 3

There only appears to be “Normal Text” style. I haven’t found a way to make, for example “Code” style, which I need to make things work in my technical universe. I’ll keep looking.
Spelling works, but no hot keys. Can’t find a way to remove bad custom words. That could be bad.
No way to get rid of page breaks it seems. Though, the separation is unobtrusive. There is a simple line between pages. That will work if it is consistent.
Embedding does not work. Will have to do embedding code separately. No big deal to be honest.
No way to do an HTML preview of anything.
Headers and footers are a bit clunky. I don’t typically use them for my needs.
Looks like the editors are identical in Linux and windows.
Lets find out how editing on one computer and the changes showing up on another computer that still has the document open works. ... I didn’t have to reload the document or anything. The moment I killed the screen saver, the changes had beaten me from one desk to the other. As a matter of fact, I could just leave the doc on multiple machines and run back and forth without much effort. Have to remember that.
The highlight color is too light. I could use something with more contrast. They appear to be copying Microsoft or Apple on the just change the shade and not the color hilight front. The underline for the spelling is of the same level of too light to see half the time. Too bad for me.
After a quick test of pasting the contents of this and the other entries for today in to the blogger editor, I noticed the text spacing and other things are messed up. That doesn’t matter if I’m honest. The editor has always sucked on Blogger’s system. The styles of the template you use are applied after you hit post. If that editor was much better, I wouldn’t need to find an editor for my posts.
Test for blockquote (emulation)

This is a test quote. From some link somewhere

Finally found the column width setting. Looks workable to me as long as the copy and paste works properly.
Table for vlog entries

Field	Data
Title	This is a test title
Description	This is a test description. * Twitter https://twitter.com/#!/zhsy00001 * Blog http://plastickelly.blogspot.com * YouTube RSS http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/zhsy00001/uploads
Tags	These are test tags vlog vlogging yadda
Link	Link

I have to say that the table above looks exactly the way I want it on the Google Docs screen. The real test will of course be the Blogger paste. I’ll have to put together a seed document for tables and blockquotes and such for the blog. Note: I can’t use bullets in the above description section because that is the format YouTube wants for bullets to show up properly in their interface.
This just might work. I’m sure there are issues that will piss me off. This interface has many shortcomings. It is miles better than it was a couple years ago. I think it is finally something that will work for me.

Notes:

2012-08-27

I’m learning that wifi is not science. it is voodoo. Sometimes you can have two devices too close to one another and one will jam the other. Microwave ovens are like black holes. Even if shielded, they seem to absorb EM energy. There must be something to this. Mirrors and glass seem to hurt pass through most of the time, but not always. Even though you tell people not to rely on wifi, they do. Have a backup plan means screw it, just use the wifi.
Not sure what is going on with my audiocasts. They are all falling off the end of the world. People are figuring out that it takes effort to talk into a microphone for more than ten minutes. If you don't do your homework, no one listens. You will get sick of your subject matter. You will answer all the questions 85 times and start referring people to old audiocasts. It does just get old. Many of my audiocasts are professional radio shows that are simply recorded and any IP removed that would get them in trouble. These seem to last. Of course, someone is making money on these shows usually.
The contacts I’m wearing now were put in Monday morning. It is Tuesday well after lunch at the writing of this paragraph. The contacts are more comfortable now than my old pair were even moments after putting them in. it still amazes me how much difference there is between brands of contacts.
All the new projectors come with wifi display setup. It has the same issues as all of wifi. That is, a lott. However it really saves effort on running wires. You don’t understand how much of a nightmare it can  be to run a wire from the floor level to the ceiling level of a room in an office environment. You have to deal with people and governments. You have to deal with insulation and bugs. You have to deal with wet and dust. You have to deal with bosses and desperate salespeople. I still recommend the wifi video.

Vlog

Too lazy for this details stuff tonight.

Trigger happy

Yikes. It looks like all the people injured in the shootout in front of the Empire State Building were shot by cops.

All nine people injured in Friday's shooting in front of the Empire State Building were wounded by police gunfire, New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly told reporters Saturday.

CNN Headline News email

This is one I want to know what happened. I'm going to have to follow this story. What kind of confusing circumstances ended up with the cops gunning down nine civilians? I need to know.

Notes:

2012-08-27

KVM devices need reset switches. Three times a week I get calls from folks saying their KVM died. "Unplug all the USB ports from the KVM to the computers at the same time. Count to ten. Plug them back in." Every week.

You have to spend money on fixing things. There is not much you can do about it except not fix things at some point. You need to make sure you are getting value for your money and you pull the trigger. Then comes the inevitable bitching. If you fail to fix something you will receive hate from people for whatever it was needing to be fixed again. If you did fix it correctly, those same people will bitch that you waisted money fixing it in the first place.

coming back from special forces to civilian life is going to change. The government has always been terrified of military members coming back from training and combat. These are capable people. The government needs to keep track of these people. They are all but encouraged to apply for disability. This makes them easier to track.

Vlog - New camera:w

Field	Data
Title	Vlog 2012-08-26 - new camera
Description	This is the first vlog with the new camera. It is a Canon Elph 110. Works pretty well. Let me know what you think. * Twitter https://twitter.com/#!/zhsy00001 * Blog http://plastickelly.blogspot.com * YouTube RSS http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/zhsy00001/uploads
Tags	vlog vlogging new camera Canon Elph 110 HS Houston Texas lawn mow lawnmower kids family fun cat
link	link

Why are turbochargers more efficient?

A turbocharger does two things. It recovers energy that would have been waisted out the tailpipe. It also increases air pressure and airflow through the engine. It is important to remember that internal combustion engines do not run on fuel. They run on air. The fuel is a catalyst to burn the oxygen in the air.

When a cylinder moves, the amount of space it takes up is called displacement. The ratio of most volume to least volume tells us the compression. The higher the compression, the more explosion. The higher the compression, the more finicky an engine becomes. The higher the compression, the better quality fuel you need to use to make your engine run smoothly.

A turbocharger lets you cheat on compression. Instead of crushing the fuel air mixture in to a small space, you force more air and fuel in to the cylinder when it is at maximum volume. This gives you the efficiency of high compression with the fewer issues of the lower compression engines.

Exhaust exits the cylinder and travels out the tail pipe. A turbocharger uses some of those hot expanding gasses to crank a fan that forces more air in to the engine than would normally happen without a turbo. In a normally aspirated engine you have about 1 atmosphere of pressure shoving air in to the engine. No matter how big you make the intake, you still only have that amount of pressure to work with. A turbocharger might double or even triple the amount of pressure shoving air in the engine.

The difference between a turbocharger and a supercharger is the turbocharger uses exhaust gasses to turn the turbine. A supercharger uses a belt driven straight off the engine, like the alternator. Super chargers have an advantage of instant power. Turbo charger have the advantage of recycling the lost exhaust energy. There have been vehicles that use two turbochargers or even a supercharger and a turbocharger to solve the issue of turbo lag without loosing performance.

In some cases you can put a turbocharger on a vehicle that did not come with one from the factory without a bunch of modifications. I've heard of this being done on trucks and Suburban vehicles. As long as the turbo does not push engines limits the conversion should work. Typically, this is a low boost turbo. In one case I read that an older Suburban went from 13 MPG to 17 MPG and from 20 sec 0 to 60 to 12 sec 0 to 60. Not shabby. It is important to note this was a pre-fuel injection vehicle.

Field	Data
Title	Why are turbochargers more efficient?
Description	And I don't even show one in the video. More info below * Blog: * Twitter https://twitter.com/#!/zhsy00001 * Blog http://plastickelly.blogspot.com * YouTube RSS http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/zhsy00001/uploads
Tags	vlog vlogging Houston Texas CAnon Elph 300 Kdenlive broken camera trubo turbocharger supercharger how it works
Link	Link

Notes

>

2012-08-23

Should abortion be aloud in rape cases or is that murdering a child for the sins of the father? That question kind of focus on all three entities in the issue. People have issues with calling abortion murder, but is it?

Vlog - Allergy tests and a Jeep Liberty

Field	Data
Title	Vlog - Allergy tests and a Jeep Liberty
Description	Alternate title - Of Jeeps and diseases * Twitter https://twitter.com/#!/zhsy00001 * Blog http://plastickelly.blogspot.com * YouTube RSS http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/zhsy00001/uploads
Tags	Allergy allergies Jeep Liberty 2005 6 speed Canon Elph 300 Kdenlive Houston Texas
link	link

Notes:

2012-08-22

If I were on the jury for that Apple vs Samsung paten battle, I would as the judge one question. "Is there a way to find both parties at fault and make sure that they both know they have lost?"

It is august. The humidity was not that bad this morning. The breeze was blowing. I sweat a bit on the way in, but it was sweat that worked. That is, it evaporated and cooled me down. This is a novelty in Houston. I don't know what combination of weather conditions lead to this pleasant morning, but more please.

I should have kept track of my pod-fade. I bet I'm listening to 5 of the same podcasts that I listened to 3 years ago. I went through recently and found that several podcasts in my list have gone away or faded in the last few months. Typically I let them sit for six months before killing the feed. This always motivates me to go find some new sources. This time I found a couple that don't suck. I need to put a list together.

Vlog 2012-08-21

Field	Data
Title	Vlog 2012-08-21
Description	Frigging shopping carts. * Twitter https://twitter.com/#!/zhsy00001 * Blog http://plastickelly.blogspot.con * YouTube RSS http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/zhsy00001/uploads
Tags	parking lot hot target radio shack toshiba laptop headset Houston Texas Canon Elph 300 Kdenlive
link	link

Julian Assange whining about his choices

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, making his first public remarks from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London where he is holed up, called on President Obama on Sunday to "do the right thing."
"The United States must renounce its witch hunt against WikiLeaks" and "dissolve its FBI investigation," he said.

CNN headline news email

Hey Julian, the right thing is to nab you and force you to pay for your crimes. I just wish the powers that be would just accept the fact that they are going to have to just throw you to the wolves and not use trumped up charges.

I'm hearing some really horrible shit about old Assange. I can't find any corroboration, but some say he is a terrible house guest. I'm not going to repeat what was said. Let's just say that from this source, it sounds like Julian is one of those people you would kick out of your house after 24 hours.

Notes:

2012-08-20

The company had a free lunch to answer some questions with all the new stuff going down at our work. We had Chick Fil-a. The food was awesome. The people who helped setup were great. It was a big hit with the employees as far as I could tell. They had these cookies that were awesome too. I was a wreck after lunch. I had consumed far too many calories. I was logy.

Started using Google Drive. It really works in Windows and Ubuntu? So far, things work with drag and drop. Linux appears to support some command line mounting well. That means, I could mount the files live from the web and edit them on the fly. The trouble with this is I would leave them open when traveling back and forth. That would suck to be hones. I need to come up with a strategy for dealing with these documents. When I write more than a few paragraphs, I by far prefer a true word processor like LibreOffice Write. Who doesn't?

2012-08-21

Many newspapers are cutting their days of print back ad just printing on high profit days. Some papers are just eliminating offline production all together. Once they do this, they are just another web page. What about the 20% of people in the U. S. who don't have internet access? Well, they are the new class of the left out. At some point I envision a right to online because all government pages and such will be online. People have to pay for water and electricity service. Somehow, I feel the information age will lead to free connectivity and paying for everything you do online.

I listened to a guy talk about the war in Syria. He spoke of atrocities committed by both sides. There is no right and wrong in war. There is winning and loosing. A guy called in saying his Christian family had been ordered out of a town in Syria. It seems like he was cut off before he completed his statement. Frigging NPR.

In the U. K., they want to make bank account numbers as movable as mobile phone numbers. How cool would that be? You could change banks and not even have to contact anyone you have automatic payments or deposits with. This would make it one step closer to people having some super magic number that everything is based on. This is where we are headed. What is your human number? Isn't that the mark of the beast?

Notes:

2012-08-17

Have big news that I don't want to talk about on the blog. Sorry listeners. Maybe one day. Unfortunately, this is all that is warring on my mind the last couple days. Thus, I have little else to say on other subjects. It good news for me personally. Nothing happening right now. The next year or so will be interesting.

I'm thinking of challenging myself to pick a news story at random from the font page of a news organization, reading up on it, and vlogging about it even if it doesn't interest me. It isn't that this would prove anything. It would be good exercise for the whole public speaking thing.

2012-08-18

Best MincCraft mod I've seen yet.

Megadeth gaff

Field	Data
Title	Megadeth gaff
Description	Story Links News http://www.rollingstone.com/music/videos/megadeth-singer-obama-is-behind-aurora-sikh-temple-shootings-20120816 Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megadeth My Links * Twitter https://twitter.com/#!/zhsy00001 * Blog http://plastickelly.blogspot.com * YouTube RSS http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/zhsy00001/uploads
Tags	Megadeth band gaff Obama gun control manipulation politics New world order one world government Europe military fail Canon Elph 300 Houston Texas Kdenlive
link	link

Julian Assange 101

Field	Data
Title	Julian Assange 101
Description	Story links News http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/17/world/americas/ecuador-to-let-assange-stay-in-its-embassy.html?pagewanted=all Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Assange My Links * Twitter https://twitter.com/#!/zhsy00001 * Blog http://plastickelly.blogspot.com * YouTube RSS http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/zhsy00001/uploads
Tags	Julian Assange wikileaks criminal politics UK USA sexual assault charges Sweden Canon Elph 300 Houston Texas
link	link

Notes:

2012-08-15

Most people say they want smaller government until they are the ones affected by the cuts.

Obama won't even say the word "stimulus" any more. It has become toxic.

an atheist believes there is no god. An agnostic believes it cannot be proven either way. I believe in God, yet reject religion. What is that called?

I use Google Reader for my podcasts. It has some shortcomings. Not the least of which is the lack of a rating system. I would like to give stars or thumbs up or down to podcasts on a per episode basis.

Lately, I've been bunching several notes sections together. I think I messed up last night and missed a post or double posted something. I need to stop doing this when I'm fighting off sleep late in the evening if I want things to not suck.

Saw an interesting post on Facebook. "You are prettier than a beer truck pulling up in my driveway." That is the kind of complement that a real guy gives. I don't like beer that much, but I get the sentiment.

Amos and Andy were two white guys. I have the hardest time listening to them. They were on one kind of media or another from 1928 to 1960 doing that show. It disgusts me. I don't blame these men for following the money. I don't blame people for laughing at shows that were racist by today's standards.

Last night I edited a video with the touch pad on my laptop. I had done some editing before with the device, but not much. I found myself craving a mouse. This time, the mouse was across the room and I didn't feel like getting up and dragging my lazy carcass over there and getting it. It was a snap to edit the video. It didn't cost me much additional time to use the touch pad. This means my dislike of using it for video editing was a preference and not based on performance.

Lately, I've been running power strips under the couch and other furniture to bring plugs to the front, you know, where the devices re.

Had to hunt down a modem to day. We want to set up a low traffic fax system at work. We ended up using an old laptop that had been collecting dust for the last couple years. I'll probably keep you informed about or progress. I think I have an old modem at the house that hasn't been used in forever. I might just bring it in for giggles.

Wouldn't it be funny if jalapeños were the fountain of youth? That or pickles. If you ate pickles every day, you would live forever. Wouldn't it be great if it were that easy?

Anything you do that is not the most difficult thing you have ever done is teaching you enough.

Lost domains

Video idea: Spent 45 minutes hunting down a non existent domain name.

• Where is the domain?
• It is right in front of me
• Can't find it
• Stuck in a page break in the PDF

The next version of MS Office is to edit PDF files natively. This is something that Microsoft should have done fifteen years ago. I wonder if some patent ran out or something. Why now? LibreOffice Draw has allowed editing of PDF files in one form or another for years. It has been a pretty good selling point of the package. Maybe that is it. And, yes, this sounds like a whole new opportunity to get virus software installed on every computer in the world.

Field	Data
Title	Vlog 2012-08-14 The lost domain
Description	Of page breaks ans lost domains. * Twitter https://twitter.com/#!/zhsy00001 * Blog http://plastickelly.blogspot.com * YouTube RSS http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/zhsy00001/uploads
Tags	Adobe PDF Microsoft Office rant edit computer desktop printing Canon Elph 300 Kdenlive
Link	Link

Notes:

I listened to a podcast all about the seventies show "Logan's Run". That movie made me think as a kid. It makes me think as an adult. I'm 43. I'm going to start saying hello and good morning by saying "Be useful". Logan gets fucked by a computer. He is not in charge of the computer. It is in charge of him. He does not know how to tell the computer to get fucked. No one does. The computer has a set of rules and orders to enforce them. The computer doesn't care if any human lives or dies. The computer doesn't care if humans suffer. The computer has an off switch somewhere. Find it. Work it. Live!

I took my first 20 minute look at Rails today. It took me 3 hours. Ever started a big project and wished the same first 200 or so steps that are pretty close the same thing every time were already done? Ever tried to copy an existing project and at some point thought it would have been easier to start a new project rather than hunt down every frigging place you have to change something to fit the new project? Well, Rails is what you were looking for if your project is web app.

Have you watched Star Trek, the original series? Half those shows have some kind of god or daemon with the power to wrestle a starship frozen in the orbit of a planet or to toss stars about like jacks. Could you imagine writing those mission reports. No wonder Kerk was a nutter.

Notes:

2012-08-14

Who do you work for? You work for whomever pays your check, right? Who pays their check? Is it the consumer? Is it the bank that supplies the consumer with credit? Who do you work for?

I sweat like a fiend this morning. The walk in was in the dark, but the humidity was nuts. By the time I got to the bus stop, I was dripping sweat off my head like a fountain. It was so bad that a mosquito got stuck on the back of my neck and I got her. It was awesome climbing on the bus. It was the Houston deep freeze, just like it should be.

Some say there is no privacy any more. I say that privacy has been so devalued that no one wants it any more. It means so little to many people that loosing it costs them nothing. Or, perhaps they let it go for nothing so the cost of fearing its loss will not drain them.

Do you know who Opha Mae Johnson is? You should.

Still using gvim for most of my text editing needs. The more I use it the less I hate it. That is the sign of long term acceptance isn't it?

I listened to a podcast all about the seventies show "Logan's Run". That movie made me think as a kid. It makes me think as an adult. I'm 43. I'm going to start saying hello and good morning by saying "Be useful". Logan gets fucked by a computer. He is not in charge of the computer. It is in charge of him. He does not know how to tell the computer to get fucked. No one does. The computer has a set of rules and orders to enforce them. The computer doesn't care if any human lives or dies. The computer doesn't care if humans suffer. The computer has an off switch somewhere. Find it. Work it. Live!

I took my first 20 minute look at Rails today. It took me 3 hours. Ever started a big project and wished the same first 200 or so steps that are pretty close the same thing every time were already done? Ever tried to copy an existing project and at some point thought it would have been easier to start a new project rather than hunt down every frigging place you have to change something to fit the new project? Well, Rails is what you were looking for if your project is web app.

Have you watched Star Trek, the original series? Half those shows have some kind of god or daemon with the power to wrestle a starship frozen in the orbit of a planet or to toss stars about like jacks. Could you imagine writing those mission reports. No wonder Kerk was a nutter.

Vlog 2012-08-10

Field	Data
Title	Vlog 2012-08-10 traffic noise and old computers
Description	Me whining about urban noise and how computers have become pick pockets. some weather too. * Blog http://plastickelly.blogspot.com * YouTube RSS http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/zhsy00001/uploads
Tags	Commodore 64 vlog vlogging rant urban noise weather fire truck scooter Canon Elph 300 Houston Texas Kdenlive
link	link

Notes:

At work, we are going through efforts to restore some old files from backup. It is certainly possible, but the software makes it a pain in the ass when it really doesn't need to be so. For example, you need every single file listed in an index before you can even look at what files you have. It takes an age to find out you are missing one little file that is just on the next or previous drive in the series. It would be great if you could tell it to shut up and show me what you have, or rebuild the index without needing an act of Congress. Way more trouble than it should be.

The average price of gas has gone up 30% in the last month. It is higher this year than the same time last year.

Rush had an interesting idea. The Democratic party is trying to turn the U. S. government in to that missing husband and father that so many communities and families lack. The Democratic part seems to want people dependant on the government that this sounds like a fair point.

Half the poles say Obama is several points in the lead. The other half say Romney is in the lead. It all depends on who you are listening to at the moment. I don't get it. Someone needs to figure out and report how these places are so bias. I've heard some stories that describe how questions can be manipulated, location, time of day, method of communication and any of a hundred factors can affect the outcome of surveys.

There is no way to tell what tomorrow will bring beyond our hopes and dreams.

2012-08-10

I'm burning through podcasts. That is, I start listening to them and then they fade away. It is called pod-fade. I have fewer podcasts now than a year ago. So many just suck.

On this blog, I've stated that I don't like saxophone music. For the most part, I don't. However, I just heard a base sax used in place of a base guitar on a podcast and that was great. Maybe I just don't like saxophones used as the focus of music.

This morning, I looked up some replacement SSD drives for laptops. The prices on these things has really come down. I found several 128G SSD drives for SATA II and III at $100. SATA II is a bit more expensive than SATA III it seems. I suppose fewer companies are manufacturing SATA II drives these days.

I remember a time when I had to think about thins I wanted to do on a computer before sitting down and doing anything. There was no internet or really entertainment available on computers. The entertainment was making the computer do something that it was really supposed to do without much effort. I wondered at the time if programmers were really sadistic.

There was a guy in the parking garage walking around in a circle on the top floor. He was out there for exorcize I'm sure. I was vlogging. I just vlogged with him around. I ignored him as best I could. If you share the space you share the crazy. He came around even after I vlogged so he was not scared off.

There are some really dirty politics going on this year. The campaigns are out for blood. At least the fight will be interesting, if completely bogus. Both people who are in the top spots are basically identical on what they will do once elected. Well, they are not that far off anyway. I firmly believe neither of them will get anything constructive for the U. S., her citizens, or the world done. It turns out democracy is very expensive entertainment.

I miss having summers off.

Vlog 2012-08-08

Field	Data
Title	Vlog 2012-08-08
Description	Completely missing the Olympics. Yes! * Twitter https://twitter.com/#!/zhsy00001 * Blog http://plastickelly.blogspot.com * YouTube RSS http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/zhsy00001/uploads
Tags	vlog vlogging olympics rant nbc trees fruit serial keyboards old equipment time lapse Kdenlive Canon Elph 300 Houston Texas
link	link

The Religion of Kelly

L Ron Hubbard once said "The real money is in making your own religion."

Once, a while back, I asked God "God, which is the correct religion? What really matters?" I got an answer. This following words popped in to my head as matter of fact as any thought in my life. "Everything matters"

That is the name of my religion. Everything Matters. It is a complete thought. It is even a complete sentence. It is the truth in science. and it is my mantra.

I have been listening to Penn Gillette probably more than I should here lately. I need to come up with my own religion. I'm trying to come up with rules. That is what religion is all about isn't it? Rules and control are the name of the game. My real thing when it comes to religion is that I believe very much in God, but not at all in religion.

Rules

• Afterlife
• You go to the same place you were before your were born. Was it so bad then?
• You are currently in a body. The body dies. You do not.
• Treating other people
• Be careful because everything matters.
• Reward and punishment
• Be careful because everything matters.
• Sins
• Be careful because everything matters.

Do you get a trend here? What happens when you do whatever Kelly? Well, there are no freebies. Everything you do matters in some way. Everything has consequences. I have to breath to keep this body alive. Every breath I take affects the world that little bit. It matters. That breath might do harm to someone else. I am expected to take care of this body. I am expected to breath. It still matters.

Will there be punishment if I do something wrong? Yes, just like there will be reward if you do something right. Or, maybe not. The universe or fate or circumstance or chance or God or whatever you call it makes the choice, not you.

Poor automation

One of the trading companies got stuck with a very high bills after one of their automated transactions went nuts. It brings in to question the idea of automated trading. Even the old guy who was reporting the story said "It isn't the computer's fault. It is the idiot who programmed it." This is true. This is the kind of thing that happens when you do not test properly.

Possible excuses for the above cluster fuck.

• Its my first day.
• I just clicked next and whammy!
• The window washer exposed himself. As I reached up to cover my eyes, I accidentally hit the submit button.
• I was tying to show the new guy how not to do it when I hit submit out of habit.
• The word "Shit!" screamed at the top of one's lungs should be mapped to the "undo" function.
• I was trying to add some entry limitations to the code and forgot to switch off the production database.

I don't have any details on the case. I wonder how long it took the powers that be to figure out this horrible thing was happening.

• Did the bank call someone? I would not have wanted to be the recipient of that call.
• Did the person realize the moment they hit send?
• Did one of the traders who made a killing off this send a thank you note?

From what I've herd, this case only made it to the media because it might put a large firm out of business. I doubt they had insurance to cover this size of snafu. The news says it might have been 400,000,000 pounds involved. If you or I took a bottle of pop from a shop, we would go to jail. How many of these boners roll by without making the headlines?

Notes:

2012-08-07

They mowed. I noticed it yesterday morning while Nat was giving me a ride in. I enjoyed it this morning. The tall grass isn't so bad. It is the heather stuff that grabs your feet after it gets past 20c or so high. That stuff is dangerous.

The lunch conversation today consisted of people being violent toward each other, stake tar tar, one of the local lunch groups, and the Olympics. Not much else going on. Did head out and shoot some vlog.

I'm only just now getting used to doing every day work on laptops again. At my old company, I had laptops along with everyone else. I did use a keyboard and external monitors to get my job done. These days, I use the laptop at the house without an additional monitor. Same at work. I use a desktop for most work and a laptop for the over lap stuff and as a media player. This is the way the world is going. The day you can't find a classic desktop is coming.

We have a USB DVD drive at work. Every week someone barrows it because a bunch of our systems don't have CD or DVD drives. They might need to burn A CD or DVD as well. It has a habit of vanishing. This time, one of the new guys has taken it upon himself to track it down. How awesome. Most of the developers just say "sorry" and stick their nose back on the screen. This is refreshing. It won't last.

2012-08-08

Excuse: No internet last night. No uploads of vlogs or blogs. Get over it. It isn't like that many people are reading or viewing these things. Thank you for being one of the people who do.

Banksters; All these asshole big bank executives breaking laws. I heard this on NPR which means I should have heard it elsewhere before this point.

There are a couple new people at work who brought their phones in. They want to use them as internet machines. I don't really care except they want me to provide a cable and a monitor. Screw that. With our internet policy that is currently in place I shouldn't let them use the damn things, much less provide them with help.

There was a story on NPR about down town London. The big push for the Olympics was all about how much money it was going to bring in to the area. It was supposed to be a bonanza of economic wonderment. Instead, people are avoiding the entire area like the plague. Parts of London's retail areas are ghost towns. People don't want to get in the way of all the security. Many businesses are going under because they planned for heavy traffic and have none. Between the congestion tax and check points for security, I cannot believe anyone thought it would be any different. I would stay away as well.

Another story on NPR was about the nightmare in Cuba for small business enraptures. If you start making money, the local government comes in and just takes it all away from you and shuts you down. Unless, I suppose, if they have skin in the game.

One of the bus drivers gave me a complement on my chair. He said it was smart to carry one of those little camp chairs around.

We had an outage this afternoon at work. It took people calling in to alert us because we were all doing other stuff. I thought about combining a WIFI enabled switch with a bubble gum light to better alert us in the future. Mark suggested a sound looping mechanism that blares Star Trek red alert. Just a thought.

Lunch conversation

I had PB&J with Skippy peanut butter. It is important to note the brand name because I skipped down the hall saying "Sssskipyyyy" like an extra in Beatlejuice just before getting to the lunch room. My beloved wife had bought some good for you healthy peanut butter that was difficult to work with with plastic implements. The Skippy was perfect. It was the creamy kind and lived up to it's name. It brought back thoughts from my childhood. "I hate peanut butter!" I've since grown in the eatable Spackle.

We spoke of movies mostly today. There was some movie by the same guy who did Signs. In this movie there was a guy who only worked out one arm. This kicked off another discussion of people who only use one arm for things.

I knew a kid in middle school who was in a car wreck. The couple years I knew him, one of his arms was strong and the other was flimsy because it needed all kinds of physical therapy.

We spoke of movies that creeped us out at various ages. One guy it was Freddy. One girl it was The Exorcist. For me it was Alien. That was the first real scary movie I saw. My father covered my eyes from the row behind me at one spot, where the robot gets his head knocked off. I didn't catch that scene for almost a decade.

Vlog 2012-08-04

Field	Data
Title	Vlog 2012-08-04
Description	A clip video over a couple days of clips. Blah. Loud chick on the bus. * Twitter https://twitter.com/#!/zhsy00001 * Blog http://plastickelly.blogspot.com * YouTube RSS http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/zhsy00001/uploads
Tags	vlog vlogging bus metro people Houston Texas Kdenlive Canon Elph 300
link	link

Lunch conversation< 2012-08-03

No bulleted list this time. I need to convey the order of operations. The following list is in order of one thing lead to another.

Who watched the Olympics?

The North Korean fencing chick who got robbed came up first thing.

She had to wait on the stage while her handlers went to get the money to appeal the decision.

When they were denied she cried for 45 minutes. Yes, we did crack some very politically incorrect jokes about how every one she ever met was probably being detained pending her winning a metal, or her getting thrown from the airplane on the ride home. We are bad like that when unsupervised.

We started talking about the leader of North Korea. Someone asked how one of the guys at the table who was about the leader's age how he would act if he were the despotic leader of a corpse nation. He basically said he would act a lot like the current leader.

We did all seem to agree that we could give a shit about North Korea getting screwed on the metal, but we felt bad for the woman. On a side note, I could only feel bad for her thinking of all the people in North Korea starving and here she is trying to make this hell on Earth to look good in order to get her family that extra crust of bread. Now that is all shot to hell.

We also spoke of the badminton teams who tried to loose a couple matches in order to get better positioning in subsequent matches. Apparently the two Chinese teams didn't want to play one another.

Notes:

2012-08-02

The mechanism for itching has only been understood for about 15 years. You want a cure for cancer? Give us 100 years or so. -Paraphrasing from Dr Karl.

I have been eating French fries again. Well, it is time to realize I've been screwing up and getting right back on the wagon. There is just no need to eat French fries. They are not an essential food.

Some days I seem to have a dozen extra podcasts coming in. Other days It seems like I am way short on material to listen to at work. Is it my work that makes me feel the difference, or the number and timing of the podcasts coming in? I'll have to pay better attention and document my findings here.

No sooner do I get a portable seat for the bus stop than I find an article that says people who sit are more likely to get a million age related diseases like Diabetes and such. No more French fries.