Learning CPR

I'm off to my new CPR class. Yes, I know I've been taking CPR classes for years. Can you blame me?

Notes:

2010-05-14

I said it was boring at work in my video yesterday. I misspoke. It is highly stressful and very busy. It is not boring so much as a dead end hurry up and figure out the problem so you can hurry up and figure out the next problem kind of job. It is not boring. I'm trying to think of just the right word to describe it. The repetitive nature of the cycle of problems and fixes make the job feel like a rut. Even though I'm hitting new stuff and learning new things all the time.

The Brits are besides themselves. They have a coalition of a couple of parties that are normally at each other's throats, dividing up responsibilities and duties like spoils of war. The word 'extraordinary' is being tossed about like rice at a wedding. It is quite cozy how quickly a coalition has been made between the two current factions running things. How convenient for the people of Great Briton.

I tried to print something landscape out of Open Office. When trying to set landscape at print time, It just plane didn't do it. I had to go in to 'Page Preview' and select landscape from there. That worked. What causes this is the settings in Open Office overriding the printer settings. The printer set up is the system and the page preview is Open Office. That's all. This is a feature, not a bug.

Obama says, as so many have before, that we must stop depending on foreign oil. The first step apparently is to kill domestic oil production. Not in so many words. No, it takes allowing BP to be sued by every one in the world for not preventing an oil spill. At what point does it become cheaper to simply pull out of the U. S. market?

There is a part of each of us that makes us human. There are other parts that do not contribute to our humanity. There are parts of us that show themselves when we are pushed. These parts harken back far in our past as mammals. We forget our past. We forget where and what we came from. We forget that we are all capable of killing and participating in fowl tasks beyond our civil duties and obligations.

Thank you!

I don't have the drive to say this. I like it being said. I like it being said with this much passion.

Work today

I finally managed to catch the UPS guys in the Target parking lot next to our work. I've had pictures up on Facebook for a while. I'm not the only one who has noticed this phenomena. Now I have video evidence of what is going on. They are swapping packages for the afternoon delivery schedule. I was hoping for so much more.

There was an earth mover in front of our building, right next to the building, with a jack hammer attachment. It banged away on that side of the building all day. “tak tak tak TAK TAK TAK tak tak tak tak!” Pause ... repeat. Did I mention it was all day? Thank God I'm on the other side of the building. We only have people raising and lowering roof repair bits past our windows a couple times a day.

The mover reminded me of Mars Attacks where the aliens aim this monstrous ray gun at the old lady's head. It was the “tak tak”, I'm sure of it. Hope no one's head explodes.

This is my first attempt of adding a little intro to the video. This almost qualifies as a vlog, but not quite. I'll work on it.

Notes:

My skin likes 40% to 60% humidity. Anything below or above that range and my skin starts to crack like mad. Thank Goodness i live in a place that probably averages 80%. That just makes life interesting.

By default, Facebook releases all your data to the entire internet with the exception of your birth date.. You have to go change everything to say something like “only friends” or whatever it is. Facebook has no Google credo like “do no evil”. They are really starting to piss me off. I use Facebook to contact with friends and even get hold of their new data when things change. The price may be too high.

When a man offers to sell you a bar of gold, do not reach for your billfold, except to make sure you still have it. While listening to one of the old time radio shows they were talking about gold costing $35 U. S. per Troy ounce. Gold just topped $1220 earlier this week on one exchange.

Abu Dhabi is a country. Abu Dooby is a drug dealer.

Money means something

“The Euro Zone is rickety.” This from financial people watching what is going on in Europe recently. “We will defend the Euro whatever it takes.”

The risk is being spread around. If the guarantee from governments does not prop up the Euro, the Euro is doomed to failing. It is all based on a promise. There is a currency swap in place which allows investors to leave the Euro now more easily. This is something you do when you are worried about people writing off their losses.

“The UK is not Grease.” Things heard on financial radiio shows. “We don't have the leadership now that we had.” mentioned moments after the previous statement.

The debate is really about who runs Europe. There is no European government. It is all treaties and agreements led by officials from member nations, but not any one who is elected by the whole of Europe. There is no Fed or central bank. There is no one who can drop a fist on a table and pint to who is responsible and who must do what needs to be done. The EU lacks leadership with teeth.

Not one country in the EU is keeping their deficit increase under 3% of GDP. Not one. This is a mandate for being a member of the EU. This is a rule that no one follows. This is a rule that is very important for stability. This is proof that the nanny state, better known as socialism, does not work. It is human nature that if you can get something for free, you will not work hard for it.

It was not that long ago when I heard someone say that Greece may go bankrupt. Well, Greece was bailed out before they pulled the trigger on bankruptcy. Now some in Briton worry that the pound will become volatile Some will make money off this unbalance, but most normal people will suffer. The fact is that Briton cannot spend 1.30 pounds for every 1.00 pounds they bring in. That is all There is no more to say on the matter. The rest of that conversation needs to bring those two numbers closer together.

Same bottom line goes for the U. S. whether or not the current administration likes it.

Note:

Great. They say it will be a bad hurricane season this year. We just don't need any hurricanes this year. No year for that matter. The place where we had water get in last time has been fixed, hopefully. Still, we just don't need any hurricanes.

I like Science Friday from NPR. They have a liberal political bend and would deny it because they do not know where center is, but fact abound none the less. I've learned things from this show that I carry with me.

Will someone please tell my boss to stop making me put Windows XP on laptops. It is too old. No one updates the drivers for hardware that has drivers and new laptops have hardware that is just plane not supported under Windows XP and never will be. It is a nightmare on some systems. I have to grind up the internet and poor it through a siv to find drivers. Sometimes I come up empty. Ubuntu seems to work fine. Can I use that? It's free. The boss man just glares.

I still need to call the dentist in the building where I work. I need some work done. I wonder if Nat will like him too.

Old Trucks

While walking around at lunch I remembered two friends. They both bought old oil field trucks. They were both old Ford f150 straight 6 trucks. One was a long bed and the other was a short bed. One guy bought the truck that was running and had a paint job. The other bought the truck with a dead transmission and was beat to death..

The running truck cost $2000 or so and ran for about six months before some real problems showed up. He had to scrap it after deciding the expense was too much. He was like me and did not know much about hands on fixing things on vehicles.

The non running truck cost $1 and about $100 for a stick transmission and some other parts from a junk yard to get running. The second truck ran for years, getting more and more rusty every time I ran in to the guy. I don't think he ever did much work on that truck beyond maintenance.

It never fails to amaze me how much it pays to understand things like home and vehicle repair. It is worth the effort of learning and practicing. I know this in my conscious mind, but I just don't bather doing it. What is wrong with me? The opportunity cost is negligible. The result is my paying too much for people who do learn to come out and fix things. Is this just the way of things?

Those Brits

The only thing in the British media over the last couple weeks has been the elections. No the only thing is the British media is the surprise cluster-fuck results. No one won a majority. This means the politicians are going to have to work together to get anything done. Good luck with that.

Some say that if one party had won, the result would have been that this party would not have won again for a generation because of the massive cuts that are going to have to be made to the budget and public services to prevent Briton from pulling a Greece.. It looks like the responsibility and blame are going to be spread around.

Both parties want a change in the way the Brits do elections. I don't think either of the parties are happy with the results that basically are a draw. The people are basically not being asked. Sounds like the U. S. in that case. However, some are using the word “stalemate” to describe the situation. That just doesn't sound good at all.

This entire planet is in a state where the ruling class is not listening to the people they rule. In the past this would have eventually lead to revolution. We have become far to civilized for this to happen today. Well, let's hope. No, I think something far more interesting just might happen because of this disconnect. The people, not just in the U. S., but all over the world, just might start paying attention and reading the news. This would be disastrous to our current generation of leaders. They depend on ignorance and apathy to get what they think will keep them and their peers in power for another election cycle.

Yes, I believe there is a ruling class of people. They reside next door to the celebrity class of people. These in turn employ the working class. I do not think this is a good thing. This is an old idea that people will simply fall in to their place either by birth or will as society shakes out. These layers are promoted as a good thing in some countries and ignored in a few. They are always there it seems. Maybe it is simply the way human relationships on mass work

Beware any alterations to rules governing the ability of the people to know what is going on and become an informed citizenry. Obama has already complained that he cannot control the message on the internet. He used it to win and now he plays the victim of information and communication. This is just one example.

Am I the only one who feels this disconnect?

From the author: I originally called this “Bloody Brits”. I intended to be very negative, but it didn't really work out that way so I changed the title. this whole story started with the phrase “Briton pulling a Greece”.

First couple hits are free

Keywords: internet business model content

I think I have stumbled on a business model that just might work for online content of a timely nature like news and hype items. I call this the little guy plays, big guy pays model.

Use an embed script that lets people embed stuff on their page. Don't charge for the first two hundred or so hits on day one. When someone goes over the limit, kill the content unless they have an account. The more hits they want on day one, the more it costs them. After a day or maybe two of sliding hit cost, make it available. It would depend on the content and context. Every business or industry will have t to find their sweet spot.

The little guy blogger is not the person you want to piss off. They may not have the eyeballs you are looking for, but if all of them bitch you out, it shows up on mass. The little guy blogger has a little guy (broke) attitude. I get a dozen hits a day on this blog. I'm not the wallet you are looking for. This blog is spillage.

You can charge the big guy blogger because they have the money and the big guy attitude that they do not want dead content turning up on their page.

I really think this might work if someone is willing to try it out. I'm not sure it is technically doable. Not sure how much effort it would take to count each embedded story hits and keep track of people's accounts. That sound like a piece of cake for a company like Amazon or Google to solve.

What do I want?

I felt depressed over the weekend. My work is genuinely trying to kill me. The bills are piling up. The house is a wreck. Money is a nightmare. We have no plans for vacation or fun. We have no money left over at the end of the month. The list of things that have been getting to me is endless.

My life has boiled down to a list of items that are responsibilities to someone else.

• Bills

• Insurance

• Life

• House

• health

• car

• Energy

• Gas

• Electricity

• Food

• Taxes

• Income Tax

• Property Tax

• Sales Tax

• Family

• School fund raisers

• Every week it is a new pare of shoes with this kid. She is growing like a weed.

• Dentistry

• Medical bills.

• Entertainment

• What entertainment? We don't even have cable.

• A date night every once in a while.

• Internet.

• Home

• Yard

• Cutting grass

• Landscaping

• Weeding

• Picking up other people's trash in my yard.

• Repairs

• The carpet in the living room needs replacement.

• Mold where the walls got wet in the hurricane a couple years ago.

• Maintenance

• Cleaning

• Vacuuming

• Dishes

• Laundry

• Work

• There is another list three times this long just for work.

What does one prey for in this case? I have asked God to tell me what to prey for. Money is never the answer. Some one time thing like saving the world is fleeting. A super power is unlikely to do any good. I thought about it for a long time. I've been at it since I was about twelve. I think I found something that makes sense and I just might get if I prey hard enough.

I want to have my shit together.

I want to be on top of things. Shit happens and when it does, I want to be the guy who had his together. No miracles really. No putting any one else out of joint. I want the knowing, the preparing and the doing all to point to me having my shit together.

Of mice and water resistant camera cases

Remember me complaining about my mouse wheel not working. Well, I had to order a mouse from Amazon. Nat and I went to Best Buy, but they only ha cheap wireless mice. Screw having to mess with batteries. All the wired ones started at $35. Can you believe that? There was a huge roller stairway blocking the mice. If I were a seller of mice, I would be pissed at that fact alone.

I was able to order a $10 mouse on Amazon that will work fine and spend the other $25 on a water resistant camera case that will work on most of the small cameras in the house and may let me do something I've wanted to do for a long time. I want to shoot pictures and video in the rain.

Most of the video I've watched shot with one of the water resistant cases suck, but I think it will be better than trying to shoot without one. I have always wandered how many cameras have been lost shooting some truck slogging through the mud or a horse trotting through a mud puddle. The idea of a camera condom has crossed my mind.

Notes:

No one is buying the fat-finger excuse for the stock market bottom out last Wednesday. Some say it is the banks flexing their muscles. Some say it is foreign influence. The stock market is just a big pile of bets and IOUs. I've called a constant flaming house of cards. being built on one end and burned on the other. I still say that is accurate.

There is a federal bill that just might make banks charge no more than $0.50 for an ATM fee between banks. I just don't see it happening. Nice idea though. Where is the one that makes publishers charge pennies for a CD or phone companies stop charging for long distance, or ISPs have to stop lying about throttling or capping based on content?

You know the financial world is in trouble when economists pronounce that “There is more to life than happiness.” These people really are just out of touch with reality.

A lady in the elevator told me my backpack was unzipped. Sure enough, I made it all the way to work with an unzipped backpack. I checked for the expensive camera and stuff. That stuff was there. In situations like this, I think my guardian angle.

One of the SciFi podcasts I've been listening to for a while is raving about Chuck. The first couple seasons blew. They seem to think it has gotten better. I may have to check it ou.

Day

Nat got some middle eastern food for dinner last night. The spicy lamb nearly did me in. Not while I was eating it. No, This morning. I nearly didn't make it to work. I worked like mad, but still had time to jot down a bunch of notes for today's blog. Then I left them at work

Kick Ass

Spoiler alert! I don't know if I'm going to say anything about the plot or not, I do this just in case I do, you are on your own.

Went and saw Kick Ass Now I'm depressed. The guy in the movie goes after his dream. I've never done this. I never will. Now I'm depressed. It makes it difficult to go to bed tonight, get up in the morning and go to work again. Then, do it again tomorrow. Then again the day after. I haven't seen a movie in a while. Now I watch this one and it depresses me.

This guy decides he is not going to put up with people's shit any more and decides to get involved. He gets his ass handed to him a couple of times. Other people bail him out. The old adage "Nothing trumps treachery" comes in to play and some friends die because of his fuckups. Not everything works out in the end.

It isn't that I want people to loose. I'm sick of teenagers in movies. Maybe that is it. I liked Falling Down. That was all about a guy who has his ass kicked by fate and then looses it. He ends up killing himself, but until then he is empowered and taking control of his destiny. Isn't that what you are supposed to do? Isn't that what all the self help books say?

Nat would not stop talking during the movie. The BLT at Alamo was half the size it used to be. Less fries too. It turns out we had some friends of our sitting right behind us the whole movie. It was a good movie. I would recommend watching it. I kind of wish I had waited for it to hit the home theater. I may never go to a movie again.

Saturday

We went to visit Nat Mom yesterday at the hospital. I wasn't supposed to go originally, but I did. Every time she needed to get out of bed for a procedure or to take a bath, I wouldexcuse myself and walk around the area taking pictures. I filmed the ride in, and a few other random things. Noting worth writing home about. I guess I'll blog it if it kills me.

The videos I shot are mostly terrible. I may not put one up. Well, maybe something very short and cut to ribbons. I'm not going to cross post it to Facebook and Twitter. Well, maybe. We will have to find out after I cut the video.

This little adventure took the entire day. We went to a place called Texas Roadhouse. The food was 95% salt. My heart is beating funny today because of the Salt Palace. The waiter was a little too friendly. I felt like I was going to slip and bust my ass on the peanut shells all over the floor for the ambiance. Fresh veggies are more than broccoli and carrots. A Cesar salad is more than letos cheese and half a bottle of dressing. Should have gone to Denny's. 

Quick Video (don't watch it. It is boring)

Pictures

The pictures are not half bad. 

Link

Map of the campus

View Larger Map

Note the cement culvert running down the East side of the area. That is one of the pictures in the bundle.

Notes:

The stock market is a flaming house of cards. That is how investors like it because they can get away with murder while the powers that be fight to keep the flaming house erect. So, $15,000,000 and $15,000,000,000 sound quite similar when you say them. Well, I will take aether one you have spare, thank you. This is just the latest debacle. What is going to bring the house down?

My mouse at the house is dying. I don't think I have anything other than old crappy mechanical (ball) mice at the house. I'm going to have to pick up some cheap mouse to tide me over until I get a new computer in five or six years. The wheel has stopped working for scrolling and now the middle click, obtained by pushing on the wheel, is going. You use the middle mouse button in Linux all the time.

Natalie's mother is very ill. Please prey for her.

I listened to an old time radio podcast that was about people taking a cruse across the Atlantic from the U. S. to England. They had given themselves six months to have adventures in England and points west. When they go to England, they took their time and did one thing a day as far as I could tell from the story. It was about betrayal and murder. The story was calming picturing the things people were doing between the plot points.

There was a police stop in the parking lot across from my office.. There were five cop cars, some of which may have been K9 units. it was like something out of a movie. The funny thing was the tow trucks. There were at least 5 trucks all sitting drivers' windows together talking to each other. waiting for the moment to get a job. The cops ended up letting the car go. I wander how many times they have to show up to get a paying job. It sounds like a hard way to make a buck. Of course it was breaking up just as I reached for my camera.

If Greece is not allowed to go bankrupt, the Euro is not a stable reliable currency. There is a simple fact that every one seems to miss. Countries should not be allowed to spend money they do not have. Their debt should be no better because they are a state.

Lunch Conversation

Photography, One of the guys went on vacation to a really photogenic park. He brought back a bunch of pictures. This sparked a conversation about fear of heights as well as photography. This lead to talking about when people got their first digital camera. This lead to me bragging about my Canon 940. Someone asked what was so special about the Flip. I told them it was cool and had the little switch blade USB thing. Other than that, it is lacking in features.

Sweet Potatoes. On of the guys brought a sweet potato casserole He and his wife are headed on vacation tomorrow and he just wanted it not to go bad without having a chance to be eaten. I had a big plate. Not sure if any one else did. It was really good. This sparked a conversation about one of the guys who had a bad experience with sweet potatoes when he was a kid and he is off them ever since. Someone said their wife had something similar happen with blueberries.

Stephen Hawking came up. One of the guys saw Stephen Hawkins at a lecture in the nineties at his university. The conversation quickly deteriorated to the MC Hawking web page and all the music that came out in that electronic voice that Hawking seems to have made famous.

My day

Got up this morning at 05-30.

Left the house at about 06-30.

Got to work at about 07-30

Worked like an honest man all day. You would think I was a stolen mule.

Left work at 19-17.

Got on the bus at 19-55.

Got off the bus at 20-17.

Walked in the door at 20-55.

in an hour and five minutes I get to start all over again.

Note:

Some very smart people who have their head wrapped around the technical world are saying that Flash is against the ropes. Adobe says they are going to give all their employees a Flash friendly Android phone to encourage development in that area. Sites every day turn up with HTML5. It is going to be a bumpy ride for developers.

In London, thieves stole 20 lb of copper from a voltage regulator for the copper. This caused a huge power surge and blew out appliances and computers all over town. Someone said they might have received ten pounds for the raw materials, if they can find someone who would not turn them in.

There are so many unwanted new homes in Ireland that they are starting to tare down whole estates (neighborhoods) So many are abandon that they came up with a term “Ghost Estate”. Some say every one in Ireland will end up evicted.

Oil in the Gulf

Why did it take 8 days for Obama to react to the oil platform issue in the Gulf of Mexico? Where are all the people who bitched about Bush reacting to the Katrina disaster? Bush is still blamed for every frigging problem in the Gulf region. The justice department is sending lawyers. Yay. So BP will get sued. Yay.

I bet the plan is not to put people to work cleaning up the mess. I be the plan is to sue BP for lost time for fishing crews, and whomever else has skin in the game. Then sue them again for cleaning up the mess. That is how Obama thinks. Don't fix the problem, sue people and get them to fix the problem for you. Then, when they do an unsatisfactory job, sue them again.

This is called a bullshit fix. You can bullshit your way out of a financial system failing when the financial system ends up fixing itself. It is more difficult to bullshit your way out of oil washing up on a beach and killing sea life.

Is the U. S. government sending any one to the gulf who will roll their sleeves up and help clean up the mess? I just haven't heard of this happening yet. Am I just missing the announcement? do they expect BP to take care of the details like, Oh, wiping up rocks and clearing off dead creatures?

Exxon fought lawsuits from the Valdez accident for 20 plus years. The law suites cost far more than the clean up. Same is going to happen here.

Euro Woes

Greece is calling the bailout a European bailout. Every one else is calling a Greece bailout. I wander if the next countries that go to join the Euro will have to put up some kind of deposit. Several experts say, even with the enormous bailout, Greece has no choice but to default. No idea when, but it will have to happen.

The Germans are pissed. Lets face it, the Euro is a polished German Mark. There have been whispers if kicking Greece out of the Euro, if not Europe all together. Sounds like a plan to me.

This is quite an advantage for Europe. I've tried to find out of California can be kicked out of the United States and come up blank. I'm not sure it is possible. Surely it would only take a 2/3ds vote somewhere. If not California, some other state will be the first to go insolvent. Is there a plan for such a thing. I doubt it.

I'm having a hard time feeling sympathy for Greece, Germany or Europe in general. The reason they all ganged up with the Euro was to bully the world with a huge powerful currency. They were out to counter China and the U. S. and associated currency policies. Now things have blown up with one piss ant country and the whole house of credit cards is tumbling down.

Colors make a difference

There is a high contrast dark scheme/theme on almost all computers. They all suck. I've complained about these before. it would be great to use them. My eyes don't have to try to focus as much using a dark background with lighter text. It never fails that some graphic or text is black on really dark blue and impossible to read. Why do I keep trying?

In Open Office the background of tables do not change, but the color of the text does change. This can make for very hard to read sections and design problems. Who cares? I'll flip back and forth to get things done as needed.

I remember the days of DOS and MS Word on DOS. It only worked with gray text on a blue background. It was impossible to read, even for people with perfect vision for the long term. A later version of Word for DOS allowed for a different color scheme. If memory serves, there were no tables. Just a note how old that platform was.

Publishing Bullshit

One of the podcasts I listen to predicts a book publishing crash coming within about the next year based on ebook and all the new software out there. The per unit print price will skyrocket and ebooks are easy to publish and promote. Authors may want to take the challenge on themselves instead of using a publisher more often than happens now. Authors are already saying “If I sell 10,000 copies of this ebook, I'll write a equal.” Basically, the whole process is being handed to authors. Is this a good thing or a bad thing?

It looks like e-pub is the dominate file format. There are a tone of devices out there. Even the Apple-happy liberals say that Apple is an eight hundred pound gorilla and there needs to be competition. Sony, Microsoft and even Google are getting in to the whole ebook reader device world.

I just don't need another device. Make it work on my existing phone. Scratch that. Let my phone read it to me. I'm all for that. I'm legally blind and need an audio reader. I'm willing to sue for the functionality. I might even pay for content. Maybe. As apposed to public domain content of course.

Notes:

I spent a couple hours this morning jut trying to figure out what prerequisites we need for an install. It cracks me up how difficult it is to figure out what a package depends on to work. There are dozens of tools for this.

Old Time Radio has an episode of <dun dun dun!> “The Green Hornet!”. Love it. These are awesome. There are ads for “War Jobs” and “War Bonds.” Cool stuff.

The sliders sucked the first time around. I hear there is another show coming out. It is an interesting idea. I can't believe it will be better than the first attempt. The Coen Brothers are remaking True Grit.

Every single podcast that mentions Apple griping about Flash says it is the pot calling the settle black. Every single one.

So, I'm not nuts

It turns out the trouble I am experiencing with the mouse pointer in Ubuntu 10.04 on both of my machines is indeed real. There is some crazy manual X configuration work around that looks like more trouble than it is worth. Any time you have to use a CLI to fix your GUI you are in trouble.

There is hope. If it is a bug, there is a chance it will get fixed. I was considering creating a login just to bring up the whole accessibility thing, but someone beat me to it. "Who/'s power cord do you have to trip over to get this bumped?" Argh! The best laid planes.

Here is hoping it just turns up fixed after a couple of aptitude full-upgrades.

Notes:

Many times through my life I have wished I could draw. There are so many things that could be even slightly helped by being able to draw an idea down. I'm not a visual thinker to be honest. I would call myself a word thinker. That is not entirely correct I am a spacial construct thinker. Then again, I'm a daydreamer. Maybe a just distracted. When is thinking daydreaming? When is daydreaming meditating? When is meditating epilepsy?

Monday Morning Heat

It was a cool calm blue sky walk in this morning. I even noticed a hot air balloon in the sky right as I got to the bus stop. I'd say it was pleasant. Then I got to work. The AC was off and it was like a sauna. It felt strange because it is normally a deep freeze.

Well, the AC was chugging, but the chiller was on half duty because the water got worked on over the weekend. Thankfully, we didn't have to work through that. No water and no AC makes Kelly a grumpy old fart. At least at work.

I did get to shut down an entire lab of computers. It was more annoying than it sounds. I hit my head. There is more than hitting a couple buttons. We had to pull the plug on one box full of hard drives. I'm not sure if I've ever witnessed any one using that box, ever. I ran through the other boxes trying to shut them down as painfully as possible.

Turning things on was not nearly as much of a pain. I figure I'll sweep the lab for machines that are still turned off at the end of the week and make note for retasking, removal or recycling. When you are handed lemons, make lemon aid.

It amazes me how much work got done without the lab boxes. Scary.

Ubuntu upgrade

I upgraded from Ubuntu 9.10 to 10.04. Everything  Most stuff seems to work. One thing that is just plane not working is the mouse pointer. I cannot change the mouse pointer. Normaly, I put a mouse pointer up that lets me blow the pinter up a bit so it is easier to spot as it zips across the screen. I can't do that any more. I'm sure this is an upgrade problem. I bet it works just fine from a straight install.

Pretty much everything else I've tried has worked. Including Samba. Normally, I have to go fight configuration battles in and around smb.conf to get the ability to share files easily between my two computers. Not this time. That is a huge plus. There are usually other things that break as well, but it has been over a day and both computers seem in tip top.

As soon as I get the mouse pointer thing figured out, I'll blog it. It is either the need to remove an old configuration or theme seed file. That must be what is causing the trouble. 

I did have to reset the audio settings in KDENlive. I had to set them back to 'auto', the default setting. No it works just as well/poorly as it did before. Still have to pre-render all the audio to mp3. Life could suck worse.

Mud Bug party

We got there a bit late. The first round was already on the tables. Not such a bad thing. I got to walk in and start eating. This group of people is an extended family to me. I started hanging out with them long before I started working at the same company. We have shared good and bad times. It has been fun and crazy. This is one of the more calm times we shared.

Some things I learned yesterday

• Two of the guys dated the same crazy chick in the same year a couple of years ago.
• Little girls are meaner than little boys.
• Sponge Bob brings out the stand on your throat, laugh and gloat maniac in me.
• I really miss the cool parts of cable TV. History, Cartoon, Military, and SyFy channels come to mind.
• MinPin dogs are escape artists.

I have a question. Is a keg in your passenger seat considered an open container? We almost found out last night.

Pics

Burned up Bike

This one is for all those motorcycle riders in my village of friends and family.

This is what happens to a motorcycle when it catches on fire. Watch, or jump to the end. The last couple seconds of the video shows what was left. I wander why the first extinguisher did not help put out the fire. I wonder if the firefighters have extinguishers with a different mix specifically for car fires.

Lunch conversation

I do not agree with everything said. I'm just reporting.

• Food

• Vanilla ice cream. vs more complex flavors.

• Hamburger and mushroom pizza is relay good. Onions may add some flavor, but not too much.

• Peperoni is popular based on peer pressure and not flavor.

• Pizza is American, not Italian. What they call pizza in Italy is much different.

• The oil rig tragedy.

• One of our coworkers' parents work for BP. Learned that today.

• It is a drilling ship, not an oil rig.

• The rest of us call it an oil rig.

• Nearly all of us know people who work or have worked on oil rigs.

• immigration

• Protests.

• “These people are treated like law breakers.” They are law breakers.

• Someone in Texas is looking in to s similar law.

• People have died trying to defend their land from border runners in Arizona.

• Sum reports put the support in Arizona at sixty to eighty percent.

• Pagers from times past at work. It seems like Wade is getting paged every three minutes. He used to have a pager.

• Our internet machines do not have sound cards for the most part. They really feel like they are missing something.

Chatty lunch today.

News saturation

Four Dudes on Tech had a podcast that started with “No Apple and no Google.” They were sick of the news stories. I agree. I'm tired of hearing about both of them for a bit. They have overshot their most recent news cycle.

I say we add politics to that list. I tell you, half the crazy shit that happens in politics happens only because people want to keep their catastrophe of choice stays in the news.

What kinds of things should be added to this list?

• Bankers. Hang them or forgive them dammit.

• CEOs of corporations who suck at their job.

• Private lives of politicians. Find a line and leave the little stuff to the authorities.

• Real life pirates.

• Green. I'm sick of all things green. Green used ot be my favorite color, but I'm going to pick another color because I'm sick of gree.

• Sports. I have always sucked at sports so I'm tired of hearing about them.

• Swine flu. Now they are bitching about the sky falling and the waist vaccine.

• Grace and the European Union having to bail out train wreck countries that never should have been trusted with a credit card.

What kinds of things should be covered more?

• What are your rights and how do you enforce them?

• What rights have you lost recently as a citizen of the U. S.?

I'll hold my breath.

Bad Brown!

If you are a politically exposed person, double check you do not still have a microphone on your person before bad-mouthing a constituent.

The prime minster of Briton Gordon Brown said a woman was a bigot who asked him a question about how Briton is supposed to support the huge number of immigrants. He acted all nice and conciliatory in public while he was in front of the cameras. Then, after getting in a car he called her a bigot for questioning immigration policy.. She even said that you just cant talk about immigration. Her concern was around the deficit and how tax payers are supposed to pay for all these people who are using services and not contributing.

You are not a bigot by questioning immigration policy immigration. You are not recast when you say that people should work for a living if they are capable. You are not a racist if you think that people who have come to your country illegally should be held accountable for their actions. You are not a racist if you believe the laws and rules about borders of your country should be enforced.

The terms bigot and racist are over used and misused. They have become a way to yell “shut up!” and actually have people shut up. They have become the end of an argument. If someone disagrees with you and presents any argument, just link it to racism in some loos way and you win the argument. This needs to stop.

There are racists in the world. They may now hide behind the deluge of accusations. Real racism is now hidden from view. It is obfuscated from arguments. The real evil is lurking in plane sight behind childish laziness to prove a point in a manor that requires support of an argument.

Brown is just a fuckup. It seems like every five minutes he is stepping on someone's toes or pissing off the family of a dead soldier with a poorly spelled letter of consolation.

[end]

Notes

The kid who 'hacked' Palin's email account may face 50 years worth of charges. He didn't do anything but guess her shitty password. I really hope he gets in trouble. I'm not sure he should get a felony conviction. some think Palin should get a fine too.

That “Hitler Rants ...” video came from a movie called Pitfall. The film company is pulling the parody clips down with an automatic feature. They fall under fair use, so they should not be aloud to pull them down. I hate the videos because they annoy me. I don't care.

Twitter is getting on my nerves. I'm getting tweets from people I do not know. I assume this is some kind of advertisement, but it pisses me off. I cannot figure out how these people are able to talk to me without me approving it. I'm about five tweets from locking my feed so no one knows it is there.

I had two Palm Pilots. Both of them made me say “This thing needs to be on the internet.” Well, Palm sucked at getting the connectivity they needed. the scuttlebutt is that HP bought Palm to get patents and force Apple and others to pay HP for basically nothing.

The average American who reads books, reads at an eighth grade level. I'm guilty of this. Keep your sentences short.

Notes:

We do some work with simple USB type flash cards. It can take forever to write one of those things using USB. I'm talking over an hour to read and almost two hours to write over USB 2.0. One of the guys found a SATA connector that cuts the time to thirteen minutes and change and the write to under twenty five minutes. Good find.

YouTube may provide streaming soon. Sounds interesting. There are dozens of streaming sites for video. Not sure how that will work out.

Notes:

Should children of illegal immigrants born in the U. S. be citizens? Children of visiting diplomats born in the U. S. do not get citizenship. There are all kinds of situations where the constitution that says “people” born in the U. S. are citizens..

You know, Open Solaris strikes me as a distribution that exists only to give a corporation (SUN, now Oracle) the ability to say they have an open products. Oracle, as far as I can tell, is dead set against the concept of “open” anything, on principle.

Heard on a financial podcast on the BBC. (from memory) “You can't get a pig by winding a sausage grinder backwards.” I believe the point was that something was not undoable. I'm so stealing this one.

There is a study that says children don't learn shit from TV shows. They switch their brains off while they watch and it all goes in one year and out the other. Older kids can learn, but younger kids basically didn't get crap out of TV. It turns out that social interaction is the really important thing. If a TV show is all about people learning and discussing they worked better. If the TV shows were just demonstrations, they did not.

Spring time commute home

I do it every day. I've been hurting for something to put up on the, dare I say, vlog. No, my YouTube channel is not a vlog because I do not look in to the camera while I do stuff. I do not directly address the audience very often. Yes, I'm this desperate for something to video. Any ideas welcome.

Give it hell Jake

I believe this is an original work by Jake. Not bad. We are working on getting Jake a better camera setup.

[end]

Notes:

They still build 747 aircraft in the U. S.. I did not know this until a podcast today. The podcast was all about the Seattle area and the housing bubble. I'm so not worried about housing prices on the west coast. It is cool to learn that the best aircraft ever made, the 747 is still being cranked out. That and Seattle only gets 58 sunny days a year.

The projects to store nuclear waist for long term in the U. S. may be dead for the time being, but it is OK to stuff it in islands off Finland's coast. The storage has to last 100,000 years 100,000 years ago, neanderthals still wondered north Africa. One of the biggest worries is that people will build it, store the nuclear waist there and forget about it.

Harem woes

Surely you have heard of a harem. If you are a guy, you have fantasized about having a harem full of lovely wives at your beck and call. However, I learned something about harems. The few times a harem existed, in all cases, the man's mother ran the harem like her house. So, your mother would be there telling which wives to do what and when. You know, that just kind of kills it for me. I think the money is in defying someone else's harem.

This means the women can be bitches to me and nice to my mother and get their way. Screw that. It makes my skin crawl thinking about it. This is a situation where a little knowledge has ruined a great idea.

Notes:

2010-04-26

Nat gave me a ride to work this morning. it is a funny thing living west of the city. You travel straight in to the sun morning and afternoon more often than not. With daylight savings time, you do it 4 times a year. This morning I nearly broke out the camera and filmed a bit just to capture the moment for posterity. When I mentioned it to Nat she wandered what my problem with the car in front of us was.

You wonder around a place. You wander why you are there. Now that Adam has busted my ass about this, I've found many people making the mistake. The only way I remember it is the 'o' in 'wonder' means you wonder around.

There will be a place for people to perform very complex financial investments with each other somewhere in the world. It if is not Wall Street, it will be Hong Kong or London or somewhere else.

Remember Max Headroom? He was introduced in a Coke ad. New Coke. Remember New Coke?

A shilling was 1/20th of a pound.

YouTube

I've been watching a tone of YouTube lately. I'm using the excuse to figure out what works and what doesn't, but really, I'm just looking for something to run out the clock on my boring life. Not that I particularly want an interesting life, but you know how it goes.

The most obvious thing you notice when you start watching these people do their thing is that they are in on it together. They promote each other and keep the promotions in the family as it goes. There are at least three major groups of people. There is the California group, the East cost group, and the Canadian group. The East and West cost group are melding together and the Canadian group is becoming more Middle-America every day.

Over the last week, there has been a trend of guys cross dressing to make it to the top of the lists. It is purely a grab for ratings. Some people are just in to that sort of thing. 

Then comes something this cool. This is Jake. He and I shared an office for a while. This is the kind of thing that YouTube was supposed to be about.

It is beyond cool when my friends have videos up. I love getting a glimpse of their lives outside of where our roads cross. Maybe this is what works.

Rules for wishes

• It needs to be something personal. Something that affects you or your loved ones directly, or as directly as possible. The following are OK.
• It can be about health, yours or others.
• It can be about a nation or a people.
• It can be about all people.
• It has to pass the committee. That is, it has to be a good idea that people who love you would agree you need or should have our deserve. not living people who might be greedy and think that your success might benefit them. People who have no skin in the game.
• Hateful wishes almost never make it past committee, but the committee might know what you need better than you and give you something that fixes the real problem.
• The committee is not a Ginni. You do not have to use legalese. That is what the committee is for, to interpret and understand and to help make sure the right thing is done.
• It can't be related to money or material because that stuff is too generic and not personal. If you need a problem solved that would be solved by money, wish for that.

The most important thing to remember about wishes is too important to leave in a bullet. You have to mean it. You have to want it. In order to make it past the noise of a simple every day desire, you have to really mean it for a wish to stand out. It helps to want the wish over a long period of time and it really helps to work toward that wish on your own. These last two are not mandatory.

If you have made it this far, try this. Change the word wish for prayer and change the word committee to God.

High School Memory

One of the only memories from high school that sticks with me is as follows.

It was during lunch. I started to walk up one of the fifteen sets of stares. it was a split stair with a little flat area in the middle. I was on my way up and two girls were on their way down. I don't remember what they looked like. I couldn't pick them out of a lineup.

As we past each other on the stares, I looked back at the girls and they looked at me. I tripped over a stair and did something amazing. I fell and rolled up the stares landing at the top, on my back. No idea how this happened. The girls giggled and I got up and left.

That's it. That is the most vivid memory I have from high school.

Other memories on steps in high school include helping a girl on crutches up the stares. She was pretty.

Another memory is when some delinquent put cheese mayo on the door handles exiting the well.

Another is me standing on a stare saying good by to a good friend who was leaving for another state and wishing I would kiss her, but it is was against the rules. I would kiss her years later after she came back, but it never lead to anything.

Another memory is sitting next to one of the stares over lunch and wishing I was just not there. Anywhere, but there.

Mostly, my memories of school are like that last one. I just wanted to not be there. I just wanted to be out and gone. I had no plan I just wanted out and away. There was no way to do anything good there and there was nothing waiting for me on the other side. I didn't care and no one cred whether I cared or not. It was bad.

The memories of school haunt me. When I hear someone speak fondly of school, I feel pain. I find the idea of the TV show Glee offensive. My god I was miserable.

Things are better now. Life is so much better than planning for and learning about life.

Thinking

Thinking is simply memory, adaption and projection. You learn and make educated guesses. I think we are much closer to building a sentient computer than we think.

Something happens, you remember it. You adapt your existence, everything you do, based on every decision you make. Decisions are the projection part.

You want to go to lunch with some friends. You do not want so and so to come. That is a decision based on some memory of so and so. You have adapted your lunch eating habits.

There is not much more to thinking than that. When doing math, you take rules you have learned and apply them to situations. You project in to the future in dry runs for math problems to make sure you are on the correct path or to solve a problem. When something doesn't fit, you have to diagnose. Are you using the correct rules? Did you make the correct decisions and put numbers in the correct places? You combine these skills to project the next move and eventually get to the answer.

The tools for thinking are simple. I think we need to work on the projection portion of the equation.

Lunch Conversation

Today people discussed their driver's test experiences. I had to get the hell out of there before I start spouting about not being able to drive. I would have loved to go do something for lunch. It didn't work out that way. No one, including me, want's to hear that.

Before that, wa a nice description of a horrible wreck in front of the old building. A car ramped over a concrete embankment and took out some other cars. They described the car as “folded up”. Sorry I missed it. Yes, that is cold. It is exciting to be shot at and missed.

Something went by about a dog and a porcupine. I missed it. Come to think of it, I don't think I spoke directly to anyone.

Old Time Radio

Life Boy, Velveeta, and not one oil company. I listen to a bunch of old time radio shows. They leave in the old ads. It is funny what products that have stuck around and which have not. That is not the only source of these old time radio podcasts.

The man who did the voice for Fred Flintstone is in some of those old time radio podcasts. I can't help picturing Fred in my mind's eye. The latest was an episode of “Johnny Dollar”. Never heard of it until these podcasts. There are a couple big names in these shows. There is a world of amazing talent that was on tape sixty or eighty years ago.

The very funny thing is listening to the ads from the podcast people. Really modern things like Roku players and online desktop sharing abound. They make the sound pop and hiss like the original recordings sometimes. It is awesome.

Notes:

The potential sale of MGM has put the breaks on the next Bond film indefensibly.

People in England and other points Europe have been getting the run around all over the place. The Brit Military have tried to haul some Brits home but many have been turned away from even that. People are charging a king's ransom for a car ride.

Solaris 10 make and SVN setup

Companion Tools

Download and install Solaris Companion Tools from Oracle/Sun. This will put things like sudo and sfw tools on the system.

Fix sudo (if broken)

>$ PATH=/opt/sfw/bin:/opt/sfw/sbin:/$PATH

>$ export PATH

>$ visudo

Make sure the proper line is added to the bottom of the sudoers file. It is the same line used on Linux.

>$ chmod 4111 /opt/sfw/bin/sudo

Sudo should work at this point.

SunStudio

Download and install the following file from Oracle/Sun

>$ bzcat SunStudio12u1-SunOS-x86-pkgs-ML.tar.bz2 | /bin/tar -xf -

>$ cd SunStudio12u1-SunOS-x86-pkgs-ML

># ./SunStudio12u1-SunOS-x86-pkgs.sh

Follow the instructions on the Java based graphical installer.

SVN Subversion

Download and install the following file from Collabnet.com

>$ pkgadd -d CSVNclnt-1.6.9.1-x86-local

cshrc settings

Added to tms_build and my cshrc

# SVN on Solaris 10

if( -d /opt/CollabNet_Subversion/bin ) then

setenv PATH /opt/CollabNet_Subversion/bin:$PATH

endif

# ld on Solaris 10

if( -d /usr/ccs/bin ) then

setenv PATH /usr/ccs/bin:$PATH

endif

Notes:

It is ridiculously difficult to keep a company worth of computers up to date without internet access. We need to set up an in house update system. I have something for Linux that kind of works. We have an IT person who will probably maintain things from now on. That is so cool. I can concentrate on development work.

Obama got over a million dollars from Goldman Sax. He has been asked if he will return the money. No answer yet. I wait patiently Mr President.

There are some financial people who believe firmly that inflati9on is not a good thing. Often, people come up and say something like “Inflation should be 3%.” Why? Well, I've been over this before, but this way, the government makes money on every dime in circulation. If someone is not using money to make money that money that is just sitting there becomes slowly worthless and falls off the books a bit at a time.

The money and finance podcasts i listen to from Briton are all about how to recover money from lost time at work or having to travel off time due to all the flight cancellations over Europe. There was a story about One of the Monty Python guys taking a taxi umpteen hundred kilometers to catch a train back to England. It sounds like a real mess. Good time to be at home, far away from valcanoes.

Starship Sofa is the first podcast to be nominated for a Hugo Award. Pretty damn cool, especially considering I just heard of this podcast earlier this week. I am falling in love with fiction podcasts.

Crazy tail hating cats

Merlin does this sort of thing. He is not nearly as violent about it. I'm going to have to stop giving him so much crap over it.

Good ting

A good thing happened at work today. It was not a very good thing. It was not a wonderful thing. Something worked. Something did what it should have done in the first place. It did it in the first place. It did it on the first try. None of the contingency plans were needed. I called it a win and came home. It was quitting time anyway. 

It also took me most of the day to get a stupid Solaris 10 box to the point where I could log in and build something. That I'm not counting as a win because it should have only taken me an hour or two instead of all day. It works now. I have an Open Solaris box to do tomorrow.

The thing that die work is hard to explain.It had to do with a XEN Kernel and building a bunch of things that are highly dependant on other things. It has not worked so many times and people had warned me that it would not work again this time that I expected a battle. It worked on the first try. It was still a balancing act, but workable. I fear that the end target, the real thing we are after will not work for some time yet, but that day is coming. It has too.

The proof is in the pudding and the pudding is served tomorrow. Our over night tests will tell us if what happened yesterday is really a win or not. I'm counting it as a win regardless. I need one.

Email HTML

Work is busy, but I jot down notes at there for the blog when I have a chance. I try to strike when the iron is hot and finish things up at home.; This means I need to take information from work to home. It needs to be in a form that I can edit and modify once I get it home.

I've tried just writing things down in Thunderbird at work and copying and pasting them in to Google Docs at home. The trouble is, there is a bunch of formatting that comes along for the ride and screws up my fonts on the Blog. This happens whether I paste the information in to the body of the email or I attatch the file as HTML. I'm not sure I care too much to be honest. Still, I like the blog to be consistent.

So, what is wrong with jotting down notes in text format? Well, I like to keep bold, italic and heading settings inside the text. I also like to throw together tables occasionally. If you do straight text, you loose all those settings as well. So, I want formatting and I don't want the email to screw it up. This is a tall order it turns out.

I may be able to paste the HTML code in to the body of the email. This kind of sucks because you don't get clean emails, but if it gets the code home without screwing it up, then so be it. I'm tired of having to jump through so many hoops. I wander if just renaming the file from HTML to TXT might fix the problem.

Lunch Conversation

We went to Taco Bell for lunch. I had five soft tacos. Should have left it at four. Jake got a DP. We all noticed off the bat that something was off a bit with the soda machine. The dispenser in the eating area was putting out too much carbonation. Remember, we get free sodas at work. Jake went back and got water. Then he got a soda from the people behind the counter out of the drive through dispenser. That one was too strong on syrup. He then proceeded to try to mix some of the dining area machine soda in to balance things out. No dice. He ended up tossing it at work. Now, remember, we get free sodas at work.

Jake is a cool guy. He gave me something to write about in the blog today. Thanks Jake.

• iPhone apps cost too much at $0.99. The games are impossible to play on those little screens and the controls suck.
• The iPhone next generation phone that was found in a bar and sent to Gismoto is offal convenient for Apple.
• Jake ate at Taco Bell 13 work days in a row last month and didn't die.
• Magic, The Gathering. There is a tenement going on this week after work. Jake actually got to work early today so he can leave at 17:00 or so to make the early game.
• Email related to one of our projects at work .How could the situation have been better handled? I hate talking shop at lunch. It was a good vent though.

Notes:

I have had the song Family Tradition stuck in my head for three days. Ever since hearing it in karaoke it has been going round and round. Must make it stop.

Got the new glasses. So far so good. They are lighter, smaller and feel more comfortable than the old pare. I already tried them out under the safety glasses. I like the looks.

Yemen is making noises to make it the law that women cannot get married until age 17. At the moment, there is no limit. It used to be that women married at young age married a man of similar age and they lived with family until maturation. No more. Time to make a change some say.

Bacteria invented antibiotics a couple billion years ago to kill each other. We are using biologic warfare techniques that were invented billions of years before we were. Yet, you can patten antibiotics, even if you invented nothing. I suppose there is already no money in curing people.

Canon PowerShot SD940 IS video file format

This blog entry is kind of a comparasin of the Canon 940 vs the Flip HD (first generation). These are the two devices are all I have experience with.

File Formats

These numbers come from Ubuntu 9.10 Linux by right clicking on the file and going to the Audio Video tab and reading the information listed there. I'm sure there are better ways of getting details. Every program I use to gather information tells me something slightly different. Some of them straight up lie.

The file format of the Canon PowerShot 940 is as follows

File format straight off the Canon PowerShot dn 940 is
Audio	Raw 16-bit PCM audio Mono 44100 HZ
Video	1280x720 H.264/AVC 30fps
Container	MOV (file extension)

The file format of the Flip HD (first generation anyway) is as follows

File format straight off the Flip HD (first Generation)
Audio	MPEG-4 AAC audio Stereo 44100 Hz
Video	1280x720 h.264/AVC 30 fps
Container	MP4 (file extension)

Editing the video in Ubuntu Linux 9.10

When I edit the Canon 940 files with KDENLive, I have an issue with sound. As soon as I copy the file in the clip area, I can play the clip and the sound will be choppy. It will repeat itself and get off track. Then it will get back on track for a moment and repeat then be off track or a while. It turns out KDENLive does not like the audio codec from There is no such issue when editing the Flip HD files. This appears to be a KDENLive issue and does not repeat in other programs as far as I can tell yet.

When using AVIDemux there is no such problem. Things work perfectly normal, which is bad enough in Linux. I don't really like editing in AVIDemux. There are just not enough bells and whistles. Nor is there a true time line. I've found a multiple track time line design highly required for video editing. This presents a problem.

The Mobile File Converter program works well, but it appears to only change the file to a mobile screen size. That is, it shoots it down to a little bitty size. There must be a way way to stop this, but I'm not so worried about it because I've found something a little bit better.

Even if I do not like editing in AVIDemux, I can use it to change a file's format. At the moment this requires me to open each clip, set video to copy, container to mp4, and audio to AAC or MP3, then render. AVIDemux has a tone of command line parameters, so I may be able to script this up. The timing appears to be fine even after the conversion. This is something you have to check every time you touch the files. Once changed, the files can simply be dropped in KDENLive and used normaly.

The software that came with the Flip is supposed to be easy to use. I am on Linux and thus have never given it a shot. I hear it is sandboxed and completely closed source.. Has any one out there in inter-webs land tried it? Let me know what you thought.

Canon Advantages

• You can have a second battery charged and standing by.
• The Canon uses SD cards so you can keep shooting.
• The Canon lens gets covered up automatically when you turn off the unit. I like this one because I keep it in a backpack.
• The Canon has better wide angle and zoom without needing a second external lens. The digital zoom seems to work well as far ast digital zoom goes.
• The Canon takes 12 MP pictures.
• The Canon is smaller.
• The Canon screen is nine times better.

Flip Advantages

• Cool factor. I hate to admit it, but this is important.
• The Flip is Cheaper by a bit.
• The Flip is one step copy and edit. It comes with software you can use on Mac and Windows.
• The Flip has superior sound quality and it is stereo. When I go film my friends playing a gig, I will pack the Flip and Canon.
• The Flip has a slightly better low light capability in my humble opinion. Not a great deal.

Opinion

Which one do I carry around with me? I carry the Canon. It has several advantages over the Flip. Not all points by any measure.

Notes:

LightPeak vs USB 3.0? LightPeak cannot power devices. It is faster though. USB 3.0 is kind of backward compatible with USB 2.0 (normal USB).

Old WWII jokes

Bombardier who cant hit a plate with a fork.

Navigator who can't find the men's room.

CB Reunion

CB Reunion, What the kids did

This is pretty amazing. The lady on the trampoline is Shela. Her and Robb have six kids. I'm not sure which kids belong to whom. They were this hyper the entire night. They never let up. Thank goodness the place we were had plenty of room for them to run and scream.

This is a funny thing about our group. We all have a ton of kids between us. There is enough for a basketball team, football team Soccer ... .

The kids seemed to have a great time. I wonder if they had a better time than the adults. The adults had a bunch of politics going on throughout the entire gathering. The kids all seemed to get along just fine. Hell, even the dogs did better than the adults.

CB Reunion Karaoke (strong language)

Remember, many of these people had not spoken in eight to ten years. People used to hang out at different clubs and sing all these songs before karaoke was even a word in the U. S. vernacular.

I'll be honest, I missed most of that stuff. I was home not hanging out with friends. Wa!

Pictures

Link

Don't look too close. Why didn't I take more video during the day? I did. There are three folders under this day in videos. One is labeled "kids". Another is labeled "karaoke". The third is labled "boring".

Outsiders

If you are not part of the group in question, please take away from this that there are many different kinds of people in this group. We spent part of our lives hanging out with one another. We learned to live, love, help and hate others.

There must be an anecdote that would sum this whole moment up with a resounding ring of a bell. No. Nothing comes to mine. A bunch of stuff happened. A bunch of people were there. It is called life. Still, we got together after ten years an no blood was spilled. I'm putting this one in the win column.

Elle's first video

Elle shot this last weekend. It took me a while to get my crap together. Pretty cool first effort.

Day at the park

Pictures

Map

Ton of fun just walking through the woods hanging out with the family.

Phone Screen

There was an ad in video form touting how wonderful the Nexus 1's screen is. They compared it to 'other phones' and you could tell just at a glance how much better the depth and resolution was on the Nexus 1. this pisses me off.

I now know why Google maps is so damn hard to read. That is the program they compared on the two phones. Even when I use a magnifying glass I have a hard time reading the text. I cannot read the street names or store names when they are around. The text is small, but the real problem is the resolution. The characters are only made of a few dots.

After seeing the commercial, I'm not just disappointed, I'm angry at Google. My phone is a G1. The screen on that phone was known not to be high enough resolution. Google is designing the applications to fit their top of the line phone and leaving the old phones in the dust. Sounds  familiar.

Wish I knew then what I know now. How many times in my life have I said those words? Too many.

Notes:

Once uranium is enriched past 20% it becomes much easier to then push it to even higher purity, not harder. 20% purity is actually 90% of the way to 90% purity.

Corporate America is getting in to the whole podcast vidcast thing with a vengeance. There is a gmail podcast and a Toyota podcast. It will not end. Companies seem to be chasing their tails trying to keep up with surf flight. Surf flight is what I call the actions people take to avoid advertisement and paying for content. Someone will always provide less good products for less. Look at the Chinese.

I had no idea how difficult it can be to get a database to accept leading zeros on some numbers.

Remember the mad bomber? Can you imagine a mad bomber on a children's show now days?

Tax Day

There was an interview with the leader of the IRS. I forget what he is called. it isn't like he is a CEO. Anyway, the running joke is that he doesn't do his own taxes. His excuse is that he does his own taxes, but has an expert go over line by line and make sure he didn't mess anything up. If I were him, I wouldn't do my own taxes either.

It is tax day. It was rainy and the day dripped with gloom and doom from moment one.The news had a financial guy on who said it is too late to work magic, but not too late to apply for an extension.

"The Taxman" by the Beatles keeps going through my head. the head of the IRS says you can hear it playing gently in the background in the IRS offices from time to time.

There is a Tea Party protest going on today. They, or perhaps I should say we are upset over how our taxes are being spent. The big news is that people who are anti Tea Party are attempting to infiltrate the protests and make people look bad by having things like raciest statements being heard and misspelled signs and such. This is a wonderful thing to have on tax day. If memory serves, "decent is the highest form of patriotism".

Weekend Plans

There is an old saying. "If you want to hear God laugh, tell him your plans." I don't like talking about plans on the blog much to keep people from knowing where I will be at any given moment. I'm paranoid like that.

This weekend we will attend a party organized via Facebook. We used to all hang out on the CB in Missouri City fifteen years ago. Now, we have all spread to the four corners of the wind. Some have kept in touch. This weekend promises to be interesting. Some of these folks have not met up in all this time.

Back in the day I was on roller blades and used a walky-talky. That will to happen this time. I kind of wander if any one still has a CB in their car or otherwise. In this era of communication, the CB has gone by the wayside. People forget that it is a completely stand alone system. No tours or government shut-off controls.

This is a perfect opportunity to take a bunch of pictures and maybe even some video. Who knows what I will end up with by the end of the party. This is the crowd to catch strange stuff. Too bad every one has kids now and people are all older and wiser. and worried about jerks like me putting every spare moment up on the net for the entire universe to gawk at.

Still, should be fun.

Notes:

Got to learn how to setup scheduled tasks in Vista today.

According to Toyota, the plural of Lexus is Lexus. One Lexus, fifteen Lexus.

Notes:

I shaved my goatee this past weekend. Every one at my company has mentioned it it seems. I intend to grow it back, but don't be surprised if a very red beard shows up.

This guy on one of the podcasts yesterday was talking about a motor vehicle that someone dalled up to look like a Battlestar Galactica fighter. Pretty cool idea, but the podcaster kept saying that it had a "small black Chevi engine" and was wondering why you needed to know the color of the motor. It is "Chevi small block" you nerd! The large block was for engine sizes of 454 cubic inches and such. A small block is for 350 and less or so. The numbers may very. The engines are physically different sizes and use different cranks. Two different blocks.

Why did the lobster not want to share it's food? Because it is shellfish. (dinner party download)

Dead tape

This has happened several times. I'm not sure what to do about it. Nat says I should tell someone. I suppose I will this time. I may send off the pictures and video to the email for the Texas Library for the Blind this time. Maybe.

Notes:

I had to explain to someone that when referring to products and software, QA does not stand for questions and answers. It stands for quality assurance. I've always thought this was crap because there is such a thing as poor quality. It should be GQA, good quality assurance or HQA, high quality assurance. Then again, that would committing to something. Let's face it, QA is a sound byte. Maybe it should be CYA or something that says "We are not going to look bad if you blow things up."

"[redacted] is loosing the wind from their sails." Someone didn't know what that meant. Am I that old? Where did I learn what that meant?

There needs to be a constitutional amendment that says corporations must first serve their customers and then their investors.

There is an engineer Barbi on the way. Cool. They have come a long way from "Math is hard." Look under the 'controversies' section. How the hell have they stayed in business?

Something worked. I had two different people come to me needing a beta build for different people. What worked? Well, it was the self same code they needed. One build gets them both on their way. YES!!!

Old Merc

You know, people in Europe call Mercedes Merc's. I heard the term used with Mercury.

Couple of good old boys in Austin showing off old cars, old guitars and old friends. Nice looking chop Mercury.

Double Clutching

I can't drive and people ask me all the time what double clutching is. Well, here is an example on what appears to be a sixties era truck.

• Clutch in
• Move shifter to neutral
• Clutch out
• Rev engine if necessary
• Clutch in
• Move shifter to gear
• Clutch out

Euphoria

The sound doesn't sound right on this copy. It is the best one I could find on YouTube. That says a lot.

Drawing test

Test drawing in Google's new drawing editor. It will not allow cut and paste or drag and drop. I'm noticing a bunch of shortcomings. Let's find out what happens when you try to j8uts copy and past the HTML on to the web.

It appears I can see it while logged in to google, but no one else can. Useless.

Trying to Publish the document to the web gives the following result.

Well, that shows up as an image inside google documents, but not on the web. Useless.

This did just come out today. I'll give it some time before really rolling my eyes.

Something to say

It turns out that 4299 was the magic number. That is the last post on this blog where I had anything to say.

Weather report

I'm out sick today. My head hurts. I was up all night with acid reflux and nearly puked a couple times this morning. I decided to call it a day at that point. I checked work email before lunch and sure enough, the place has not burned down in my absence.

It is nice outside. I really would love to hit a park and just walk through nature for a bit. Someplace quite where I can hear ... nothing and enjoy it. Fat chance finding that in Houston.

The only news on the internet is about iPad or Obama-Care. I want little to do with either. I await the federal law requiring every houshold to have five iPads to help employment in China.

Elle wanted me to post a video she shot over the weekend. I didn't have a card reader so I couldn't. She never got with Nat either. Hence, I've ordered a USB multiple card reader.

I cannot take this keyboard. I wonder if it is one of the things holding me back from posting as much as I probably should. I've ordered  cheap USB keyboard with a normal layout.

This day off is starting to cost me.

Doable

This is one of those things you like to think is possible, but are too afraid to actually try. I'm so glad the person in this video filmed this experiment.

Random Pictures

 

I took some random pics around my office. They make the camera look good. One thing I like about the new Canon PowerShot 940 is that it will just take the damn picture when you mash the button all the way down. Even if it is not 100% set. You can use this to your advantage by aiming the camera at one spot, like a bright area, then aiming at a dark area and taking the picture for az darker, but some times richer picture. This is a good snapshot camera.

Spirit is fine

Damn Lance. You don't suck. This is a one man band kind of video. I'm going to forward this on to some people who do video stuff.

Money

The walk in was kind of chilly this morning. I didn't listen to radio on my phone. I heard that T-Mobile is going to start charging per byte so I'm cutting back. I'm not sure, but it looks like you will not be able to get an unlimited plan in a couple years. They want to nickel and dime you to death.

There was a note in one of the podcasts this morning about Pepsi and some other company ganging up to twist the arms of content providers like TV and radio to get better advertising rates. Isn't that illegal? When does collective bargaining become monopoly and collusion?

30% of residential rental space (apartments) are unoccupied. I know some folks who are doubling up because of finances. Property taxes are skyrocketing. My taxes stayed almost the same from last year. That is not a good thing honestly. They should have gone down because the value of my house is dropping. The tax rates are going up. Bastards.

People are still spending beyond their means. They are just not using credit. That means they are dipping in to their savings. What savings? Retailers are shitting themselves looking for people who are willing to spend money regardless whether or not those people actually have money to spend. The only growth is "value conscious consumers."

The price of tobacco products has doubled in France. The number of people smoking has climbed. The more people are told they can't or shouldn't do it, the more they do it. You can't smoke in the building at my work. At any given time, there two or three folks out front or huddling in the parking garage to have a smoke. Better than working I suppose. I just can't stand the smell.

All of the gloom and doom and threats that you better save and other threats that you may as well not save because of inflation and that kind of crap, Nat and I are trying to make a date night soon. I hope we can get it together long enough to enjoy an evening out.