Multi colar truck

This truck has been in the 15 minute been for longer tgan 15 minutes. Guess it is 15 minuets per collor.

Looks like the roaches won

This was the Wendy's near my work. It was infested. A friend of mine got a roach in her sandwich. Maybe this will help.

Another magic lunch

Recent nostalgia

Out the window, rain

Looks kindof cool with the buildings in the foreground for perspective. What do yall think?

Notes

Goreogrophy: Gore in films just for the sake of gore. Not a bad thing mind you.

Wal-Mart shooter targets white victims.

Gnome desktop background switcher

It turns out that the command below ‘gconftool-2’ does not function properly when executed from within a cron job. There is some environment issue because the script ran fine on the command line no matter what and indeed changed the value of the gnome conf database, but would not implement the change when run from a cron job.

I run this script from the gnome “Startup Applications” mechanism.

Put an integer number of seconds on  the command line. If left blank, it runs once (changes the background) and exists.

Original script found http://www.webupd8.org/2009/11/3-lines-script-to-automatically-change.html.

Bash script to swap out the background of the gnome desktop every x number of seconds.

#!/bin/bash

# found http://www.webupd8.org/2009/11/3-lines-script-to-automatically-change.html

# Script to randomly set Background from files in a directory

# Directory Containing Pictures

DIR="/space/wide"

# Command to set Background Image

changeMe() {

# Command to Select a random jpg file from directory

# Delete the *.jpg to select any file but it may return a folder

PIC=$(/bin/ls $DIR/*.jpg | /usr/bin/shuf -n1)

/usr/bin/gconftool-2 -t string -s /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename $PIC

}

if [ ! -z $1 ]; then

seconds=$1

else

# Run onece and quit

changeMe

exit 0

fi

while true ; do

changeMe

sleep ${seconds}s

done

He just wants the chair

Lawyers and Facebook

I do not personally know any lawyers. I have heard that many law firms do not want any of their members (lawyers who work for the firm) to participate in social media online. Apparently this means being in youtube videos either. These lawyers cannot let themselves be pictured on other’s web sites without getting in trouble.

The potential damage of getting caught with a drink in their  hand or an arm around the wrong person is so great that the people who do battle on the battlefield of law cannot allow themselves to join in to the surveillance revolution.

This tells me something very important to know about lawyers. They are more worried about perception than reality. It is not the reality of your situation, but the perception of the situation, by a jury, that get you thrown in prison or not. Basically, it boils down to what specific people think about the situation.

Perhaps there will come a day, soon hopefully, where things that happen on social media are left on social media. People have to live their lives. They are not in a bubble. The only thing that has changed is the amount of scrutiny.

Lawyers and politicians, because they are mostly lawyers, have one rule. Control the narrative, control the situation. Or, the one who controls the story controls the outcome. They call it driving or steering the narrative. It is done by controlling what people think by controlling what people are told or what evidence is available.

Lawyers would say “I lost the narrative” instead of “I got caught lying”..

The same argument was once made about the burden of literacy. The more that people know the harder they are to control. The last thing you want to teach  people is they don’t need you to survive. This is the same regardless of whether you want them to stay under your control or not.

Notes

Lobbyists do not want to be called lobbyists any more. The word has a taint to it. These people do not want to tell their friends and relatives what they do for a living for fear of excommunication.

found out the move is not going to happen for a week or more. I now have a less cluttered office and a bunch of the IT crap is out of my office. Win.

I just got ripped off by the vending machine at work. We only pay a quarter for snacks. The dollar bill take stopped giving change. There was a sign on the machine for a while that warned people of this  The sign in gone, but the behavior continues. All these conspiracy theories go through my head I imagine the guy picking up the money is deliberately not fixing the machine because he is pocketing the change that I would have gotten. I’m thinking of contacting the vendor directly, but our company might get upset. My only recourse is to stop using the machines.

Moving Office

Notes

At lunch today I Listened to a couple of the fellas talk about Magic the Gathering. The game has never grabbed me, but I like how really intelligent number oriented, rule oriented people obese over the process of the game. Today, the topic was how to choose when to Mulligen. One of the guys was testing his deck by shuffling, dealing out his cards, and choosing his first couple of moves based on the cards. He did this several times. This is apparently one of the things people do with their deck before playing with someone else. This makes sure you have not screwed yourself with too many or too few of some kind of card or other. Apparently it is fun for these obsessive types as well.

Need to check out PodioBooks.com.

Natalie is headed out to do some shopping today. She insists on forgetting the list we keep on the fridge. I was going to use my new phone to MMS her a picture of the list. Too bad I forgot to take a photo of the list before I left. ... Shut up! It isn’t like it would take up space on my phone. I have an SD card. It isn’t like I could just take another pic every time I add something to the list to keep it up to date. I might miss something Nat put up there, but I could have the gist. Still, I do not have it on my phone.

Video editors

Pitivi requires the use of an external program to make a “pictures”. This would be fine except I am incompetent in photo editors. I messed with a video this past weekend and fought the copyright ending for two hours. I gave up and used my old video editor Kdenlive, which uses some built in editor for text , and had the whole video done in 30 minutes.

Openshot reminds me a lot of Pitivi. It has a text editing thing built in or you can use an external editor. It is clunky, but usable. However, moving a bunch of clips at once is a nightmare. This is something I have to do all the time. Kdenlive has a tool you select and simply move a bunch of clips and all the effects attached to them around at will. You can move clips in Openshot, but the effects do not move with them .This makes the program useless to me.

Back Kdenlive I go.

360

Just messing arround.

Taters

i made mashed potatoes last night. I only had powdered milk so that is what I used. I put in the powdered milk, then the water for the powdered milk. Then I put in the water for the instant mashed potatoes. Then I mixed and heated everything.

The concoction didn’t mix properly. It was dry. i had to add nearly a third more water to the mix. It still didn’t really gel in to smooth mashed potatoes.

The only thing I can think of is the powdered milk threw off the ability of the dried mashed potato mix to absorb the water. Perhaps I’ll have to mix the water, potato mix and then after mixing, add the pre-made powdered milk. That will give the potato mix the best opportunity to gel before getting hit by the milk.

They were still good, if a  bit chalky. A bit chalky is much better than watery.

FYI, this is today’s lunch conversation.

Notes

Baby names by state.

Inertia is related to how quickly something changes temperature.

$49 billion a year for counterfeit foods. -Marketplace

Expect nutria to start turning up in dog food. -Marketplace

Apple is the coolest company in the UK. -BBC Wake up to Money

Ride home

Quick game od Magic at lunch.

Lunch conversation

2013-09-20

Phones

We discussed phones. This is the reason we avoid the rain like the plague. They all cost too much. They have become required equipment. We all used them to check out the radar to tell if the rain was as bad as it looked out the window. It was.

We discussed batteries and methods of charging. I like the solar panel idea, but the guy I was talking to said dragging around a solar panel is surprisingly difficult. He suggested getting one of the huge 10 amp storage batteries. It charge your phone for a week.

Games

We went over several phone games but the main topic of games covered the Minecraft knockoff games that give it a first Person Shooter feal. There was also a discussion of the difference between first and third person gaming. We decided the difference is if you are playing the character and aim their shots and such, it is still a first person even if you are looking over their shoulder.

Grid Computing

Remember SETI @Home. We discussed it. We agreed they never should have disconnected the idea of gaming the system with more powerful computers. They also never should have made chips automatically kick in to power save mode when a human is not blathering away in front of the screen.

We spoke of using smart phones to run SETI packets. it’s possible ,but the guy I was speaking with had some issues. His phone while on the car charger is multitasking the following tasks.

• Downloading map information
• Running display on 100%
• Speaking directions
• Connecting to the stereo via bluetooth
• Streaming music to said stereo

Just because the phone is plugged in, does not mean it has spare bandwidth to run an additional ap to do something that is not helping him get on in his life at that specific moment. The phone can be on the car charger and the battery will discharge if he doesn’t cut one of the above tasks.

Rain

On the way out the door, I decided to catch a ride with David instead of our normal walk. This turned out to be a good decision. The rain was coming down in buckets by the time we pulled out of Beck’s Prime.

Beck’s Prime is too expensive. They make a good burger and a good malt. I had both today. I spent a fortune. I had planned on eating about 45 cents worth of noodles. I spent $16 instead. I’m a dumbass. It was fun and I got to spend some good face time with the coworkers. I spent far too much money doing it. How do these people afford these kinds of lunches every day?

It has been so long since we had a good amount of rain. People are afraid to ask for rain in Houston. They do not want a hurricane. My fence is pulling away from the house. The ground is cracking. The pipes are bursging. It is late summer and we are still behind on our rain for the year.

Josh

Josh used a borrowed umbrella to head back to the office. he passed us as we came in from the parking garage. He was headed out. He had used the umbrella to come back to the office to get his large car and run back to gather the stranglers so they would not have to get wet. The rain was coming down sideways. He got soaked. I hope the others remember his sacrifice.

Conclusion

Do you now understand why I blow the money and go to lunches occasionally? The comradery is too important to never go.

Noes

2013-09-20

About 35 million people are direct descendants from the pilgrims.

Farnsworth, inventor of the Television, was a potato farmer. He fought RCA for the patents on TV and won. He died in 1971 of pneumonia unsung and more or less broke.

Fire these guys.They obviously suck.

Hiding in the dark trying to read my phone

Us vs them

"Samizdata quote of the day | Samizdata" http://feedly.com/k/18Ntphs

This is becomming more and more apparent to me. I just wonder how many other folks think the same way.

Satellite dish and rain

Can't wait

I laughed 5 times in the trailer.  I have a 5 laugh limit on a show of this caliber. It has already passed that limitation,.

I'm an asshole

I'm an asshole

Spinnoff

"null" http://feedly.com/k/19ZLNXA

A friend of mine predicted back before this sho evan started that if it was oooular, there would be spinnoffs. The comic lent itself to non parallel story lines.

Let me know what you think.

Kitty in the w8ndow

Soul kitty

I will consume your soul!
Buy mor catnip.
You are getting sleepy.
Bow down before me mortle and disoare!

Notes

Sweat like a pig on the way into work today. The weather was not that bad. I am just out of shape. People looked at me funny on the bus. I was dripping like it had rained. That AC on the bus was awesome though. Dryed up for the moste part by the time a I got to work. Afternoon link.

My trick of rolling a coffee filter with coffee and making a cup tea style is not making strong enough coffee. It tastes like coffee flavored water with cream and sugar. I may just have to bite the bullet and get a coffee maker for the office. That is what everyone else does.. The coffee they get is not bad it is the communal coffee maker. Someone cleans it with soap and it tears up my intestines.

One of the guys from Britain went to Big Bend park for a vacation. He told us stories about getting stopped at two checkpoints. The checkpoints were looking for illegal aliens. He is legal, but couldn’t find his passport, of course.  He said it was something like a $100 fine, which wasn’t that bad, but also 30 days in jail. We laughed for five minutes about the balance of $100 vs 30 days in jail. Our value system leans toward 30 days being a very long time to spend in jail. We might still work if they have wifi.

There was a shooting this morning at a Navy yard. I found myself waiting to really pay attention to the story because the early stuff is so often wrong. I’m waiting for the bullshit to settle before paying attention. I’m not bitter. Just taking note of the existence of the story and waiting to pay attention.

Penn Jillette says you cannot have faith in God without admitting there is no God. I disagree. Why would you need faith if God obviously existed. I don’t have faith in the dresser I stub my toe in to on the way to the bathroom in the middle of the night. I don’t need faith in the dresser. There are two points I would like to make. This (as in this world and universe around us) is a test of our faith. And fuck you Penn. =]

Need to lookup Fred Willard

Some say the National Endowment for the Arts should be cut off. People should just use crowd funding sites. There are dozens of them. If people think something is a good idea, then they can pony up the doe. Penn Jillette is trying to fund a full feature film with crowdfunding. He is putting in much of his own money. God bless that atheist.

More weather

Weather

Panorama off my phone, Samsung S4. Just trying it out.

Fixing the air compressor

Bunny ears fail

pinky and the brain take over the world

Steel and other darts from a shotgun

This is how I spend my Sunday. Watching some guys experiment with sending different design darts down range from shotguns. it seems they are all unstable. Some fundamental issue is going on here. I feel we need more spin, or fold out wings or something to stabilize the darts.

Beard and Breakers

Canadian Red Necks

May I get to my computer?

Been a while. Loved this show.

When I was a kid, I watched this show evey chance I got. I had no idea the theme song was so popular in Germany. Learn something every day.

Bus selfy

Notes

Friday the 13th. Friday outweighs the whole 13th part in my book.

Los Alamos, the place where we design and build nuclear bombs, sits atop a fault. I heard this years ago, but just heard it again. The article was complaining about how much we are spending nuclear stuff. 16,000 employees and 90,000 contractors. funny thing about people who don’t work for a company or agency. They have no loyalty to that company or agency.

Pakistan has a very low opinion of the U. S.. Pew does poles. Well, randomly droning citizens of a country generates an enemy. Who knew?

Had lunch with the wife. She has a habit of still being at the house when she is supposed to be somewhere. We got a late start and the place we went to was still packed. I ended up running a smidge over an hour. Fortunately, I had come in early this morning and gotten a build done right before lunch. I was not stressed about taking a couple extra minutes.

A shoemaker makes shoes.

A cobbler repairs shoes.

I have been marathoning the third season of Walking Dead. It makes for some interesting dreams.

There I am in a bunker of some kind in the middle of a city. I have all these problems to solve. I have to live off my supplies and not make any noise. I have to decide who to trust and who to shoot. I have to find a way to get rid of waist and a way to acquire good water. Then, my geometry teacher shows up and tells me how I’m doing things wrong. What the hell does she know about zombie apocalypse survival?

Look up Redeye on Fox.

Carolla from a height

Marini's

Marini's for lunch. Place is packed.

Notes

Olympus has fallen.

In Google Drive Text Writer or whatever it is called, if you get a link stuck at the bottom of your page, it is there forever. You cannot get on both sides of it and get rid of it. I wonder how many documents in Google Drive have a hanging zero length link as the last character.

“How fast should the fans run?” -Heard at work today for the 900th time. It amazes me how much debate there is over this sort of thing. Everyone has good points.

One of the developers I don’t really work with has latched on to me as an IT person. He comes to me wit all his questions. Trouble is, I can usually answer them. I think we did the second round of “your password has expired” help this morning. I really hope this guy is good at whatever he does for the company.

I am weak. I had breakfast and lunch today. I think my out of pocket is $14. Bad Kelly. I’m also allegedly trying not to be fat. Fat and broke here I come.

Apple is not pulling its weight in the market. The idea of an Apple TV and a cheap iPhone have cost Apple a fortune. They never should have come out with a cheap iPhone. They have been premium brand. They are tarnishing their own flash.

Suicide bombers - and how to beat them

What if:
- I wrap my mechanism in a Friday bag?
- Use simplified engines like old diesels?
- Use a programmed shielded drone?

What’s in a name?

2013-09-11

Someone renamed a file at work. That is, they changed the name of an output file of a build. That is something that happens every day. This one is a particular pain in my ass because it breaks my code. That’s fine. I’ll go fix it. Only, I find that people don’t want it fixed on our side of things because they think it should be fixed on the other side, the people who changed the name in the first place.

That’s fine, but I need my automated builds to work. The guy who can crack the whip will be back next Monday. meanwhile, I have to go fix things by hand via a symbolic links.

The files are on a remote server so I cannot go check for the file’s existence before choosing the name. The issue will randomly fix itself because no one tells me anything on these projects. They just bitch when they won’t build. I don’t have rights in either of the projcts where the error happens to make changes. I support a third over project that builds the other two. I have to make any fixes on the fly fourth hand with sed statements. Not efficient.

Welcome to another day in the work life of Kelly. I complain, but it is a living. I bet I have something in place well before the whip cracker gets back Monday.

Notes

2013-09-11

“If you elect a clown, you get a circus.” I have no idea where that quote comes from.

I’ve not yet had the opportunity to take a picture with my phone of some covert document and spirited it away to better the world for the good guys. I probably never will.

Need to watch Smokin Aces.

No 9/11 posts really. I just don’t have it in me, still.

Vlogging floods, and blown breakers

Lunch conversation

2013-09-10

A buddy of mine had his birthday today. We went to Fuddruckers. I had a chicken Caesar salad. I’m trying not to be a fat asshole. Just an asshole will do.

• Work. Can people not talk about work at lunch please?
• Bugs
• Meetings
• The foundation work going on in the restaurant we were in.
• Singing Happy Birthday.
• Copyrights thereof
• Chicken fried steak sandwiches
• Burgers vs salads
• Jalapenos on burgers and salads.
• Dupont (not our company)
• The difference between 3G and 4G is who owns the rights.
• One of our guys used to work for the company that owns all the 3G patants.

I don't want people to see me like this

Merlin is having a bad hair day.

Notes

We got new tables in the lunch room and conference rooms. For as long as knew the old company we only used fold up tables for everything. Only one of the conference rooms had a real conference table. The rest of them had nice fold up tables. I still don’t know where one finds nice (lacquered top) fold up tables. We had them. it has been 9 months since the transition. The office is finally really starting to feel like a different place. A better place if I’m honest. Still too many meetings.

Up to now, I’ve insisted, subconsciously, in writing my blog entries in Google Drive before publishing them. Once I threw the switch, gave myself permission to publish a blog entry without putting it in GDrive first, I noticed I started putting more smaller links and such on the blog. Lets give this a try for a while and find out how it goes. This came about because of the Blogger app on my phone. I could have put it on my old phone, but would have crashed. The new one handles all of this without breaking a sweat.

Couple of goofballs.

Well, well, well. The dumbing down of our society is finally biting us in the ass, Why won't someone think of the children? All this time  we were wortied about cranking out graduates instead of educating people to do a job.

"48% Of American Births On Medicaid" http://feedly.com/k/15czl74

Accessory

Some use a mouse..