Do not let my dad say this.

Ahhh

http://i.imgur.com/SJ4CR6x.jpg

No further comment

Break

Headlines

The difference between news outlets. Read the following headlines and then think about which news outlet said them.

Man arrested after rushing Brad Pitt at 'Maleficent' premiere - Fox News

Red Carpet Prankster Attacks Brad Pitt at 'Maleficent' Premiere - ABC News

Fox news starts with the result. The other starts with the action. This shows different ways of approaching the news altogether.

These were found on Google News by the way.

Lies, damned lies and statistics. The walk in this morning was relatively dry. Considering all the rain we have had recently, that is a wondrous thing. I have to admit that the recent rain storms have not caught me in the morning. Normally that is the time I get nailed. I’m out in the open. I’ve been walking between the drops I suppose.

APM did a story on all the gadgets that have come and gone trying to help educate kids. They went through all kinds of things that required levers and buttons to be pushed. They all failed. TV didn’t really help.

To learn  is to be stressed out, made to feel stupid or inadequate, and overcoming this by gaming the system in your favor. This is true in math, history, language, writing, pouring concrete, driving a vehicle, flying a spaceship, not getting in a war with your neighbors and every other activity humans find themselves trudging through on a daily basis.

I say that to learn is to be humiliated. That is the way I felt in school anyway. If you submit to the humiliation, you get through school much easier.

Computer interfaces are just the opposite. I work for a company that deals with computer interfaces every day. The interfaces change via programming every day in order to allow humans not to have to learn anything. This is the same for stone tablets and iPads. Eventually, they get too easy to use. The things you are trying to teach become too easy. 2+2 is 4, No matter how many times you ask that question or how you present it to a human, they have to comprehend numbers in order to learn it.

Notes

Lies, damned lies and statistics.

The walk in this morning was relatively dry. Considering all the rain we have had recently, that is a wondrous thing. I have to admit that the recent rain storms have not caught me in the morning. Normally that is the time I get nailed. I’m out in the open. I’ve been walking between the drops I suppose.

2 for $25 at Olive Garden5 and nowhere to park

Need a trim

Court upholds right to film police

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/court-upholds-first-amendment-right-to-film-police/?kw=100k_pvs&search=100k_pvs

Notes

2014-05-27

The walk in this morning was wet. Fortunately, I made it to the bus stop and indeed on the bus before the sky opened up. Just. I’m not kidding the drops were tinkling on the windshield as I stepped on the bus. The entire world is a huge blob of green for the rest of the day. Just from the door of the bus to the door of the building, I got wet even with a poncho on.

Has a guy on the bus ask me where I got my poncho. I told him Academy because I know he can track it down there or at the almighty Wal-Mart. I really bought this one online. A huge mistake. I do not like the design and the lack of length. The corners are over rounded which just equates in to a lack of coverage.

Memorial day is a day off in the UK. They call it a bank holiday. Not sure what that means beyond the banks being closed.

The Gulf War (1990) is often called The 100 Hour War.

There was no coffee in the cubby where the coffee snobs (me and a bunch of others make our coffee. I used normal coffee from the lunch room. The tiny bottle of milk I purchased last week had gone rotten. So, I stole a bit from someone else. I do feel a bit bad about that. It isn’t like I have a lock on my bottle. We are not supposed to do this. Still, I’ll fess up if caught.

I was listening to a radio show (via podcast) all about science when they had a story come up that started in 1978. They went around the room asking who was alive in 1978. One of the PhDs in the room had been alive in 1978. It was suitably depressing.

I’m listening to a book from the 1960s. It is pretty good, but there is definitely something different about how it is written. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but the story is told more though what people say than narrated by some invisible observer. Maybe that is just this book. The story is about international intrigue. Things were different before the internet put us all on the same block.

Food inflation. Yes, your wallet hurts for a reason.

Going to be one of those mornings

This just in from The Weather Channel for Android. For more information visit weather.com.

Rain

Tornado warning Harris County

http://m.weather.com/severe_weather/alert_details/77082?phenomena=TO&significance=W&areaid=TXC201&office=KHGX&etn=0004#

Yard and fence stuff mostly

Notes

2014-05-22

The walk in this morning was hot. I was sweating. It was below 70f the whole trip. I was on the air conditioned bus before 7:00. Ah, Good bye spring.

For a post racial society,there is a lot of bickering over race going on.

I started to change my eBay password this morning. I opened my password retention software and found that I have no eBay login. I rummaged through my memory for ever having used eBay. I’ve been part of others using the service, but never used it myself.

2014-05-23

Working a half day today. Working it from home. Strange feeling. Getting stuff done though. A few technical difficulties. The VPN client is not foolproof.

There are several stories floating about the internet talking about solar powered roads. I’m all for it, but I think things like road grime and snow will hamper efforts a bit. These things can be overcome. I also fear the power and hardware will be repurposed occasionally for things other than their original target.

Sitting out front

Someone is not oaying attention in a meeting

Notes

The sun is creeping higher and higher in the sky at 6:00 when I exit the house. I’m to the point already that I do not really need my flashlight for the walk. Normally, I get up earlier and start my walk earlier. this time of year, but I’m already at 4:45 for fuck sake. I’ll just have to deal with the rising sun.

I have a bunch clips on my phone. My vlog has deteriorated to stapling a bunch of clips together over a week or so and slapping them up on the weekend. This blog has become a place to put pictures and these notes posts. I’m not very good at this social media stuff.

The word stapling has no vowel in the middle. This means it is two syllables, not three like many pronounce it. I hear “stapoling” (short “o”) all the time when people speak. I wonder if it is a south thing.

The Russians and Chinese are executing war games as I type. Our future enemies are colluding against us and our allies. Neither country has a particularly good navy. China is just getting started. Russia has never had a particularly powerful navy.

Emergency room visits are up after the ACA kicks in. This is the opposite of what lawmakers promised when they dumped this in our collective laps. No one is saying why yet.

EMT joke - “Bleeding always stops.”

More people killed with hammers.

Video ideas

• Metric president (May have already done this one)
• Dogs vs cats (stupid)
• Stapling syllables (stupid)
• Lunch conversation topics

I owe, I owe. It's off to work I go

Lunch Conversation

I wish I could have recorded today’s lunch conversation. We did more than cover topics, we bonded today. Below are all topics and ideas come up with by other folks. We went to the seafood place just up the street. Good stuff.

• Cars
• GPS in cars suck
• The competitive market is going to come up with something better than anything Ford creates in GPS apps.
• Phones have gotten it much better.
• Tesla uses Google Maps
• If they used yahoo maps, it wouldn't count as better even though it was a competitive market choice.
• You should be able to buy a car piece by piece and construct the vehicle you want.
• Cars should have app stores
• Standards that allow you to go to the car seat store and get the seats you want.
• Financing
• Any time you allow financing of something, you the price skyrockets
• College costs beating inflation
• Bubble trying to burst.
• Housing costs beating inflation
• Already had a bubble burst.
• LED lighting
• Designed obsolescence
• Vibration resistance (not)
• Children
• Better to make your child pay for their own devices and stuff
• No lending of devices
• No rough treatment
• Gards it like a hawk
• Gain respect of working for it.
• Chores are greater than the chores.
• Work smarter not harder
• Financial planning
• Value of a dollar
• Warren Buffett's kids will get nothing from his fortune
• News
• With all the wars and troubles in the world, MSNBC was covering golf.
• Ratings are tanking for MSN news because they don’t have news.

Adam, you missed a doozy.

Golden moment at sunset

Notes

Blocking content is burning books. That is all.

Scary stuff. People are throwing around the idea that we are headed for a new cold war. Were we ever out of the cold war? Were the Ruskies just playing possum?

You don’t fight belief with facts.

360 video camera. Nice.

The U. S. has two competing regimes trying to take over the country without due process. I’m watching the end happen before my eyes. Do not be fooled in the future. I knew it was coming. I watched it all fall apart. I complained.l I worked. I raised my kid. I did the things.

I didn't do lunch. Walked around and yelled at the pidgins. I want to make a video.when I got home, I trimmed the tree. Tried to shoot video, but the battery was very flat. No dice.

Dinner

Notes

2014-05-19

My company doesn’t always get it. They have these training videos that are mandatory that are just some kind of propaganda. I’m not sure what we are supposed to take away from this training. I suppose they want us to know different ways to put the customer first. I’ll keep watching.

I don’t even remember the walk in this morning. I do remember looking out the bus window and noticing the dawn looked pretty cool. By the time I got to work, however, it was just sort of blah.

We had another situation where a restore was called for at work. It turns out a different piece of hardware failed with pretty much the same result. I only want to know why my folder is so far down on the list to be restored.

Lunch conversation

We went to the Mexican place. We spoke about something. For some reason, I cannot remember much of anything. I didn’t really contribute much either. I was off my conversational game today.

• Work
• Sports
• A party everyone went to over the weekend.

Notes

2014-05-15

Stopped at Chick-fil-a this morning on the way in. I got Nat’s minis by accident. I was grabbing the box of hashbrowns and missed. Funny how bad I feel about it.

The Blogger app on my Android phone will not push some photos. It just sits there saying it is uploading when all it is doing is hammering my battery. Idiots. Billions to patent breathing, but not enough to fix the bugs in their existing software. thanks Google.

M1 Abrams tank 62 metric tons.

Space Shuttle 74 Metric tons

The facts above put me aback. The shuttle is many times larger than an M1. I can imagine every care is taken to lighten up the shuttle. Then I think about how much more horsepower the shuttle has over the tank.

Of course, once you add fuel, coolant and things like toothbrushes, the shuttle probably adds up to a number double that.

Podcastle has outdone themselves with this one. I love spoken fiction.

Bronze paperweight

Sunday afternoon

The Chuck Norris Slingshot (a.k.a. Shooting Yourself In The Foot)

Vlog clips from this past week

Putting together table

Passing by

Notes

Death by a thousand cuts

We had a small name change in one bit of one function cause a headache in a bunch of tests. it broke a bunch of crazy stuff in a bunch of crazy places. It turns out the tests need to be updated. Broke stuff for a day. Planned change that rippled. These things happen in development. It was such a small change. It was such a nasty ripple. It really is one of those butterfly wing conundrums.

I never used to rely on a battery for a laptop. I have to at my new ... Well, current job. It isn’t really new any longer.

So glad I got the kmag (KDE screen magnification program) working. It makes this whole laptop on wifi thing work Otherwise, I couldn’t  really use my laptop screen for much.

We have awesome printers at work. I Cannot use them for scanning. They will scan to email. Pretty cool when it works. I cannot make it work fast enough for the goddamn printer not to reset back to the main screen. I really hope I do not have to deal with this printer for very long. I will end up smashing the fucker the next time it cuts me off after fucking with it for fifteen minutes.

Phonetic alphabet from memory

Alpha

Bravo

Charlie

Delta

Foxtrot

Golf

Hotel

India

Juliet

Kilo

Lima

Mike (took me a minute)

Nora --> November

Ocean --> Oscar

Papa

Quebec

Romeo

Siera

Tango

Uniform

Victor

Whisky

X-ray

Yankee

Zulu

Mislanious

Lunch Conversation

I almost didn’t go to lunch today. It was a tossup. Ken was “Adamed”. Ken did not get his meal with everyone else. He had wait for what I would consider too long a time for his meal. I reminisced about the days Adam’s mom would track down the kitchen staff who screwed up and not let the manager get away without compensating in some way. She was or is the manager in a retail store and simply will not put up with such nonsense.

• Trees
• How to tell when trees are stressed (higher a tree guy to tell you)
• Sometimes bushes are worth more than the trees next to them.
• Trees can’t use the dirt under concrete very well. (I suspected this)
• Trees use mostly the soil within the first 30 cm of ground or so.
• Deep roots are really for water.
• Pressure fertilize watering trees (with the probe that squirts the mixture under the ground) may simply aerate the soil
• Oxygen rich soil may promote microbial growth that the tree depends on to get nutrients out of the soil.
• Beards! Heck ya!!
• Kids
• How different they they are from one another even only a year apart.
• Private schools and curriculum.
• Molecular Physics compared to chemistry
• Controlling the magnetic spin of molecules to force electron tunneling between molecules.
  I believe this was to ram electrons down the throat of tiny structures like Buckyballs.
• 3D printing and Molecular Physics
• Citizenship (U. S.)
• Half the folks at the table were from Britain. At least one is seeking U. S. citizenship.
• Have no assets and you get a free ticket.
• Similar crap happening in Britain.
• International affairs
• Russia, WTF!
• Why is Russia doing the things it’s doing.
• It can
• Snowden (the prick)
• Russia killing civilians and blaming the CIA.
• The oil pipeline going through Ukraine is now running from Eastern Europe in to Ukraine.
• Libya and issues there - We saw something happening on the TV in the restaurant, but couldn’t make it out.
• Work (not too much)
• How our infrastructure uses our old equipment.
• How some of our old equipment is not nearly as reliable as our new stuff.
• Planning around IT issues
• How much we depend on our network for everyday work.

Haven't taken a selfie in a good 15 minutes

Look how blue that sky is.

Notes

Nat gave me a ride in this morning. It was a great day to have a ride. The weather was pretty nasty. Lost of rain and thunderstorms. They don’t put up 100% chance of rain very often, but today had about 8 hours at 100%.

Well, the machine at work is running much better after the restage. It is soft of a restage in place. They have a bootable image that allows you to reinstall the entire system to a known good state without destroying your user data. Nice. It tries to catch you up on what is installed, but fails. I’ve spent the last two days installing and configuring the machine. There is one proprietary software package that refuses to install. I’m using a server somewhere for it instead.

Registered on Dilbert.com to lodge a comment.

Remember that missing plane? It sounds like the data that said it turned left might be wrong. That or the path that some say it took after the left may be wrong. Great. This means it could be anywhere in an area that covers 1/7th of the globe mostly covered in deep ocean.

Latest in conference tables

Glass hall

Notes

2014-05-12

“Hate coal, not the miners.” -NPR Pinko tree hugging ... They gave advice on how to avoid investing in coal and coal related companies.

I had to rebuild my work Linux computer over the weekend. It went pretty well. I’ll let yo9u know after a couple days if it fixed my hang issue. It didn’t take long to get back to a basic functioning system. Well, most of the morning, but that was a software update.

If I had my palm read, the palm reader would shake her head and give me my money back.

When I was a lad, I didn’t hear the name of the president every day. Now I cannot listen to news or indeed any online content without hearing the name of our leader.