Car wreck

We had a car accident. Everyone is OK. The car is pretty messed up and we got a rent car for a bit. Our insurance is going through the roof after this. What are you going to do? No medical bills though. That is the good news.

One thing that pisses me off is the car is not totaled. I have to be honest. I hoped it would have been ruined to the point it was not worth fixing. This might have gotten us a pay out for a new car. The old car is eight years old and starting to show it. The damage assessment so far is not nearly enough for that I’m told. I have not seen the car yet.

Nat rented the Toyota Scion, however it is spelled. It is basically a hatchback Carola. I like it. It has as much room as a Rav 4, but much better mileage. Nat didn’t like the old ones because they were boxy. The new ones look far more pill shaped. Not too shabby on the room, but not as big as the Rav 4. I don’t care what the brochures say. Still, that might be our next vehicle.

I’ll try to take some pics.

White House scandals again

I forgot some (in red). There are so many it is difficult to remember them all.

• Using the IRS to squash political enemies.
• Benghazi
• Comments about the “fake” scandals pissing off the mother of one of the men who died defending the consulate.
• Repeated comments about ongoing cases in trial in public. This is an abuse of office.
• Obama’s friend at some university who had issue setting off his own alarm.
• Comments inciting racial divide during the Zimmerman case
• NSA overstepping the bounds of freedom and the constitution and acting like it is just all in a day’s work.
• Our government promising to support countries and then leaving everyone high and dry.
• Egypt and Syria are both basically The Bay of Pigs all over again.
• The “red line” for Iran is apparently a mushroom cloud over Tel Aviv. Then again, maybe not.
• Delaying parts of Obama Care without authority by edict (executive order) not to enforce parts of the rules set forth by congress.
• Fast and furious, or hand the drug runners guns to make guns look bad.
• The estimates run as high as hundreds of Mexican citizens dead by these weapons.
• At least one American law enforcement member know killed with one of these weapons.

Notes

Sincerity is everything. If you can fake that you have won.

Listened to the BBC 5 Live for much of the morning. They are six hours in front of us. It is interesting listening to the interviews. I do miss mayo running things. New guy is pretty good.

The British Yellow Pages is a publicly traded company. The stock is through the floor. They didn’t take advantage of moving it to the internet. Everyone uses Google and the like for finding things.

The current pope basically says (paraphrasing) “God watches what you do, not what you feel.” To me this means you don’t have to like it. You just have to do it.

Spending my evening snacking around the world. I’m crossing oceans and continents. The days where I squeezed telling around the world are gone. This is just boring.

Field	Data
Title	ime
Description	A vlog mostly about time and the tracking there of. My Links * Twitter https://twitter.com/#!/zhsy00001 * Google+ https://plus.google.com/110920679448216202152/posts/p/pub * Blog http://plastickelly.blogspot.com * YouTube RSS http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/zhsy00001/uploads
Tags	vlog, vlogging, time, phone, watch, story, anecdote, garage, yard, bright light, eye,
Bullets
Link	Link

Lunch conversation

• Driving on specific sides of the road
• George
• Texas colloquialisms vs other parts of the country
• y’all (You all)
• we’all (we all), vs we’ill (we will)
• Hissle
• Youse
• Food
• Epanimpas vs Scottish and Texas pastries.
• Chicken fried steak and why it is called that.
• Travel
• Timing your flights to get the latest movies
• Fuzzy rockets at the NASA gift shop
• Car racing
• Nascar
• Formula 1
• Rally
• In car video is far more exciting.
• Only want to watch the crashes and not the races.
• BMW: Because assholes need cars too. Apparently, this is the slogan word wide.

Can you tell I went to lunch with a bunch of Europeans (UK) folk today? It was enlightening and fun. I think I have almost watched enough BBC to understand the humor.

White House Scandals

• Using the IRS to squash political enemies.
• Benghazi
• Comments about the “fake” scandals pissing off the mother of one of the men who died defending the consulate.
• Repeated comments about ongoing cases in trial in public. This is an abuse of office.
• Obama’s friend at some university who had issue setting off his own alarm.
• Comments inciting racial divide during the Zimmerman case
• NSA overstepping the bounds of freedom and the constitution and acting like it is just all in a day’s work.
• Our government promising to support countries and then leaving everyone high and dry.
• Egypt and Syria are both basically The Bay of Pigs all over again.
• The “red line” for Iran is apparently a mushroom cloud over Tel Aviv. Then again, maybe not.
• Delaying parts of Obama Care without authority by edict (executive order) not to enforce parts of the rules set forth by congress.

Can you imagine if a Republican president had any two of these bullets/ Their would be mass strikes calling for the head of the dictator. What is it going to take?

Notes

CNN Is dying. I remember the days that CNN was a trusted name in news. No more. They just lie about things. I guess they take their cues from our government.

There are 750,000 SIM cards that are vulnerable to some funky hack. It is simple as sending the phone a text message. Yikes. There are about 6 billion SIM cards in the universe.

Black boxes in  cars are going to be mandatory in many cases in the U. S. next year. I can’t wait. If someone is in an accident, you can subpoena the black box and tell all kinds of information about the vehicle. A bit about the driver too.

Some say the podcast sphere is shrinking. The numbers don’t seem to agree. There are more podcasts and more people listening every day. The hype over podcasts has died down a bit. Some individual podcasts have faded away. Oh, I forgot I need to call them media casts because the term podcast is owned by Apple I believe.

Chromecast is the way of the future. This is how it should have worked a couple years ago. Link. Someone listened to people. Someone sat down and asked “Why are we making this whole cable TV thing so hard and expensive?”

2% of NFL players get arrested every year. That compares to 4% of the general population. The spotlight is just on the players. -APM Marketplace

Terms of use

This morning we had a couple things come up in a meeting that made perfect sense to programmers.

The term “language barrier” came up. This time it was to remind folks that a specific group had little experience with the python scripting language.

The other was “remote serial killer”. Now, I know that term sounds like something that shouldn't come up in a programming meeting. It sounds more like something that should be in a law enforcement group get together. A serial killer is a computer you hook to your test system that is a separate network connection. When your test system gets into a very bad state, you can hit the big red button from anywhere on the planet. This prevents late night calls to the security guard down stairs.

Notes

I have the Scooby Doo theme song in my head. Jankees!

It is still funny listening to ads for cigarettes. Sometimes during the day, I listen to Shoutcast. I search for “otr” That stands for old time radio. They play old radio shows like Dragnet, The Shadow Knows, and a million others. It is fun.

Notes

2013-07-24

I learned a lot today. It was all about a software package we have at work. It was all about one specific build issue. It took me all day just to narrow down how I need to generate a specific build for that software package. I would call today a rough, but good day.

Taco Bell had a kid’s menu. They dropped it. They target the tasty, cheap, and allot market. Kids want to eat what their parents and peers are eating. The era of kid’s meals might be winding down. The toy market will implode.

In order to change behavior, someone needs to see or experience someone they know and trust performing and benefitting from the behavior. Show don’t tell.

Notes

We have a situation in our lab where we need to hook up a webcam to watch a process. It is pretty normal. It is the job of the new guy to get it to work. He has a degree in engineering. Tape was involved.  i would imagine that an engineer would think of tape as failure on a stick, but apparently, no. Must be that “new engineering”.

This morning, I was working on a script. When I get in this mode, I tend to put on blinders and just nose down and go. I did make my meeting on time, but the wrong meeting was in progress and I just plowed in and sat down. Right time. My meeting usually starts a bit late. I was on time dang it. Talk about absent minded programmer. I just stood up and left. Fortunately, they all know me. I did have that first day of class jitter for a second.

The bugs in our guts make a huge difference in how drugs work in our bodies. This is why people who are genetically and environmentally close have completely different reactions to some drugs.  The bacteria in our guts might break down or completely ignore some drugs. This means some drugs will have to be accompa nied by changes in diets or changes in gut bugs to make the drugs work.

Looks like fifteen years after a autism scare, there is a spike in measles. Go figure. “I was afraid of the autism. It was in all the papers.”

Someone came up with a mobile phone charger the size of a car battery. Why not use a car battery you ask? Well, this charger runs on Urin. That’s right you wee into it and plug in to it and go. They are working on shrinking the device.

A contest winner named SPAM.(Something Posing As Meat).

Wrong Meeting

Field	Data
Title	Wrong Meeting
Description	Complaining about walking into the wrong meeting. My Links * Twitter https://twitter.com/#!/zhsy00001 * Google+ https://plus.google.com/110920679448216202152/posts/p/pub * Blog http://plastickelly.blogspot.com * YouTube RSS http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/zhsy00001/uploads
Tags	vlog, vvlogging, meetings, stories, parking garage, lunch, McDonnald’s
Bullets
Link	Link

Notes

There is a big move in Europe and indeed the world that big companies play countries play countries off one another. The companies want favorable tax laws and subsidies. This is simply how business is done. The countries want to change that. There are going to be international treaties now governing the tax laws for multinational companies. That smells a lot like international fiscal policy to may. That smells very much like world government. “Let’s all make sure the big businesses (who only make money off individuals at the end of the day) pay the taxes they should.”

There was a protest Sunday in Houston. I missed it. It was over the Zimmerman, Martin case.  The neighborhood was Memorial, chosen because it is a rich white neighborhood. No deaths. HPD was all over the place.

Eventually, the retirement will have to be cut on most European accounts. The pensions are simply underfunded. The current generations cannot find a job that pays enough for them to contribute to their own retirement much less pay for the last three generations. People are living longer, but want to retire younger. The idea of retirement is on the way out.

The president is worried about using a case that involved a gun to get guns banned. Every single member of our sitting government is only worried about using problems to get elected and has no intention of fixing those problems because then they could not use those problems to get elected. Our government is dysfunctional.

Detroit is bankrupt. People on pensions are not going to get paid. People and businesses are bailing out of the city by the truckload. it is going to be 10 years before Detroit is functional as a city again. The city has more debt than most countries.

Students just yapping about what is going on this weekend are learning how to encrypt their communications to prevent snooping. What happens when most or all communications are encrypted? Will the U. S. government ban encryption? Will laws get passed that say encrypting your communications is a sign of doing something sinister?

Zimmerman pulled a family of four to safety. http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/archives/216560.php What a racist prick. =]

Field	Data
Title	Sony Exmor R review (sort of)
Description	The Sony Exmor R is a crap camera for vlogging. I’m using it anyway because I can overcome most of the shortcomings. My Links * Twitter https://twitter.com/#!/zhsy00001 * Google+ https://plus.google.com/110920679448216202152/posts/p/pub * Blog http://plastickelly.blogspot.com * YouTube RSS http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/zhsy00001/uploads
Tags	vlog, vlogging, Sony exmor R, Cybershot, product review, camera review, vloging camera, sample video, example video
Bullets
Link	Link

Notes

2013-07-18

They want to build another frigging airport in London. They don’t want to shut down any of the existing airports. No, they want to expand the existing airports as will. Is there really that many passengers? Will the number of flights just increase until there are delays again?

Transformers are 30 years old.

The public has rejected 3D TV that involves wearing glasses. I already wear glasses so it is nonsense to wear two pair to watch TV. ESPN, BBC have both dropped their 3D content for the moment.

At work, we have guest wifi. It is OK for employees to use the guest wifi for things like phones and such. Great deal. I wonder sometimes why the whole guest wifi system goes down nationwide all at once. It goes down and stays down for a week at a time. This has got to be some kind of productivity test.

One of the blogs I frequent is saying that people should stop watching TV because it is just a way for people to tell you how to think. Well, everything you do is telling you how to think in one way or another. I say think and learn, then think some more. It goes both ways. I’m not giving up TV.

“I don’t buy Apple products when I know they are coming out with something new soon. They are always coming out with something new soon.”

Trayvon Martin was the victim, but all the hub-bub is talks about Zimmerman.

I have to reboot my phone to get on the company visitor wifi. Why? It should just work. This still doesn’t work most of the time. Not sure what is going on, but no one else seems to complain. I’ve only just recently started using wifi on my phone again because leaving the phone on mobile networking (3g) craters the battery.

Read a blog about the politics of hatred. They made some amazing points. Hate motivates much more than love or happiness.

I want to make movies with character names like “Alien 6” in the credits. That is, if I felt like spending my time making movies at all.  I prefer sleeping.

It felt like I got absolutely nothing done before lunch. It felt like I was spinning my wheels. Between fixing broken things that had no business to break and talking to people and meetings, it was just fluff. Necessary fluff.

10 things the media is not telling you about the Zimmerman case.

That link ended up on all my social media. On Twitter I just said “Zimmerman’s secrets”. Should have done that on all of them.

I wish I could write. I mean write well. Everytime I try, it just feels cluttered and lost. I wish I would write regardless.

Got in to work right at 7:00. Had to stay past 18:00 to restart services after an update on a server. Long day. Feel like I got a lot done. Learned how to use some proprietary software. The bullet list is long, but that doesn’t mean much most of the time.

Content

Field	Data
Title	Content
Description	Me complaining about content. My Links * Twitter https://twitter.com/#!/zhsy00001 * Google+ https://plus.google.com/110920679448216202152/posts/p/pub * Blog http://plastickelly.blogspot.com * YouTube RSS http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/zhsy00001/uploads
Tags	vlog, vlogging,  content, complaining, parking garage, rain
Bullets
Link	Link