Journal

I'm watching an episode of Eureka. This episode has a situation where people have changed their time line. They come back to find not only has a local stature suddenly been made from a different material, but all their lives has changed. Kevin is no longer autistic. The sheriff is no longer broken up with his wife. Oh, and one of the smart people traveled back with the group from the late 1940's. He is a prick, but not so much the worst of their problems. I have to say that I really like the fact that they get stuck there. Star Trek always found a way home. I hated that. Bad things happen to people on TV shows all the time.

This made me think. I need to start not only a blog for public access items. I also should start a private journal to keep simple chronological events and cause and effect episodes. I could use the opportunity to store what really happens from my prospective. This would be a great achievement. The possibilities are enormous. This could be used by someone trying to reconstruct my life after I'm gone. It could be used to identify the person who kills me. It could be used far in the future for posterity, legacy, toilet paper.

Too bad I'm so boring. An example of something that might go in the life log that would not make it in to the blog.

Entry

Went to Julie's place today. Elle spent last night over there with Tracy and Dalton's kids. The place was a wreck when we showed up. The AC was broken. Julie had a friend of ours on the way to help fix it. I think it was Blueberry from Fair. Not sure.

Filmed the entry and exit from the driveway and put it on YouTube. Nat's commentary on the exit was nice. It rained like mad, on the way home, but I didn't get any of that on video.

Started keeping the really boring privet entries that will not go on the blog.

I worried more about work today. I have feelings of inadequacy one minute and granger the next. Still wandering about asking for a raise. How long should I wait and embed myself in the position first? Is the position worth a raise? How can I better learn the new position? I already know much of it, but there is a ton of stuff I do not yet have a handle on.

Nat cooked today, twice. She did a load of dishes. The fact that we are completely out of money this month has made an impression. We have to go the next couple weeks with as little out go as possible to survive.

The earphones that Nat got me are pinching my glasses. They also cause Nat to have to repeat herself because the earphones cover my ears. It is nice when she turns up the TV while I'm watching something else on the computer.

Had a coffees and a hot chocolate with some Irish Cream in them tonight. The Cream was not high in alcohol content, but it is a rarity for me to drink anything.

end Entry

Thoughts? I wander if I would keep up with it.

##################################

Cop Cary

This is a military 0.50 caliber weapon. It can shoot accurately over half a mile, with the right ammo, nearly a mile. How long will it be before they start paroling the streets in these wheeled, armored arsenals? Hey, if it cuts down on crime I'm for it. Well, as long as the right people get shot.

The Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio launched its 16th crime and immigration sweep in a stretch of desert in the southwestern U.S.-Mexico border, on Thursday.

Although the next crime suppression operation had been announced for July 29, Arpaio said the one-day sweep was executed sooner due to reports of many drug and immigrant smugglers activity through the Vekol Valley.

Arpaio ordered the deployment of a powerful belt-fed .50 caliber machine gun to be on site during the operation to ensure deputies' safety, as there have been recent reports of violence in the desolate desert areas.

...

By late Thursday night, sheriff's deputies said they had arrested 11 people, including seven of those being investigated for human trafficking. The rest were detained for outstanding warrants and traffic violations.

Examiner

Seven human trafficking suspects and several on warrens. You would think this sweep would have gotten a bit more than that. I want a parade of a hundred drug dealers marched right down the middle of the street while citizens get to throw rotten fruit and vegetables at them while pointing and laughing.

That would be raciest. Wait a minute. I didn't say march the Mexican drug dealers and ignore the Scandinavian drug dealers. Throw them all in to one fair and comprehensive parade.

Picking up Elle

I almost didn't put this video up. It is just us picking up Elle from Julie's place. The conversation as we leave though is kind of nice. I figure it gives a little insight in to Nat and my relationship. I didn't shoot anything else because I don't like taking pictures or video of other people's kids.

REX freedom of movement

It is the little things like selfe reliance that let us feel like we are alive. I have a hard time changing the oil.

New toy

My parents came by this afternoon to drop something off.

The Tool

The Monocular

They saw this combo at REI and thought of me. How much more Kelly could this be unless it came with a flashlight?

Arguing Fail

I understand the Ibex better than the guy.

UFO over China

The first sighting occurred at Hangzhou's Xiaoshan Airport, in the eastern part of the country, according to the state-controlled Xinhua news agency.

Eighteen flights were delayed or rerouted and operations shut down after twinkling lights were spotted above the terminal around 9 p.m. July 7, the agency said. According to Xinhua, speculation has centered on a private aircraft. The state-run China Daily quoted a source saying the object had a military connection.

"No conclusion has yet been drawn," said Wang Jian, head of air traffic control with Zhejiang branch of the Civil Aviation Administration of China, and the investigation continues.

...

<0p>Meanwhile, The Shanghai Daily reported a UFO appeared above the city of Chongqing on Thursday.

Witnesses said four "lantern-like objects forming a diamond shape" hovered for an hour above a park.

"I stared at it and it did not move," one resident told the newspaper. "After hovering for an hour, the thing started to fly higher and finally out of people's sight."

CNN

Busy day.

Fantastic Trick

You learn something every day. Someone who has an extra piece of glass and an itchy pare of tin-snips lying around give this a shot and let me know how it works. Ware safety glasses and gloves for God's sake.

Pay Wall Woes

News: Murdoch's UK Paywall a Miserable Failure

from the sorry-rupert dept.

"As part of his war against free, Rupert Murdoch put the Times and Sunday Times of London behind a paywall. Michael Wolff of Newser asks how that's working out for him. You can guess: miserable failure: 'Not only is nobody subscribing to the website, but subscribers to the paper itself — who have free access to the site — are not going beyond the registration page. It's an empty world.' Not that this wasn't entirely predictable."

Slash Dot

I give Murdoch props for at least trying. He is going about it the wrong way in my opinion. Someone needs to figure out how to make money without milking people needlessly.

It isn't that people are used to getting things for free. People are not steeling it. It is that the value of your information has dropped due to competition and explosion of choice in the area. You need to evolve or go the way of the trilobite.

I'm just saying.

Me and Tea

So, we went to Berger King. We asked for iced tea, among other things. The lady taking our order didn't sound like she was in to being there today. Nat and I have had this same discussion with half the fast food places in the Houston area.

The chick is like "It isn't sweet. Is that OK?"
"Yes, thank you."
"So, do you want it?"
"Yes please."

We got home and it was a coke.

Should have put money on it. I've asked for diet tea. I've asked for unsweet tea. I've asked for regular tea. It is always a challenge. It is no particular type of person who doesn't get it.

When I was growing up, sweet tea was asked for by name. Iced tea was just hat water, a tea bag or five and time. That was the magic formula. Nothing special, except it was served slopping over with ice and kept full at all times.

Notes:

"Can you cut police whiteout affecting law and order negatively?". I say not if you let people know in advance.

I got a new power supply for a switch at work today. It is amazing what is available out there. The switches are worth like $80. So, replacing the brick for about $16 makes sense. it is funny how excited I got firing the switch backup. The reason it died is because someone plugged that switch in to the wrong brick and it died after it over heated. Lucky it didn't catch on fire.

It stopped?

BP: No oil flowing into Gulf of Mexico for first time in months as part of test of ruptured well. Watch live on CNN.com

CNN

So, you can go to CNN.com and watch it not leak any more?

This has got to be a first. They are far too proud of nothing happening.

Is the pipe broken below the sea floor? If so, isn't it still leaking down there, thus, the oil will simply ooze from elsewhere?

Are the relief wells in operation, as in draining oil from the sea floor before it hits the open sea?

Lunch conversation

The cats dogs conversation started when Bill made the comment that one of our coworkers was under the table waiting for scraps. The BP conversation started when someone came in to the lunch room to ask a question about a customer and the two people spewed a dozen acronyms. BP dosn't actually stand for anything. That is the company's name.

• Cats vs Dogs
• Dogs are too much work.
• Cats are useless.
• Cats are good for target practise.
• BP
• I heard the cap finally worked.
• I heard the cap didn't work.
• I heard the government made them open the valves for 24 hours just to measure the flow rate so they would know how much to fine BP.
• Sounds like something our government would do.
• I heard there is a break in the pipe under the sea floor so there is not much hope of capping the leak. It will just ooze up somewhere else.

Spy hunt

Deported Russian (Spy?) Worked At Microsoft

subtropolis writes "KOMO News in Seattle is reporting that a recently-deported 23-yr-old Russian man 'appears to have ties to the recently-exposed Russian counterintelligence' (according to unnamed Feds). The article states that he admitted to unspecified immigration violations and was promptly shown the door on Tuesday. It also says that 'Microsoft confirms Karetnikov worked as an entry-level software tester for less than a year.' So, I'm thinking that MS had better take a really good at their logs for that time. He may have got in at 'entry-level' but his abilities may have been a fair bit beyond that. ... Interestingly, his admission to mere 'violations' and swift departure would be right in line with how this swap has gone down. The four Russians who were flown to Britain and the US had to first sign a confession before President Medvedev granted them pardons." The same news is at CBS News, too.

sladhdot

Yes, this is scary. Where are the next batch working? Where is the made for TV movie of this rusky invasion? When lobbyists do this sort of thing they call it a job. When spies do it they call it an incident.

Muscle Memory

Dribbling a basketball. Juggling. Yo-yo. Bicycle. Think about any kind of thing that is very difficult to explain, yet must be mastered through repetition. This involves muscle memory.

It is funny when you learn a new password. I don't know about every one else in the world, but I type it in consciously for a long time and get it right because I have to stop and think about it. Then, as it gets put in muscle memory, I get faster and make many more mistakes. Perhaps there is something to having the pas-phrases that cannot possibly be remembered in muscle memory, thus forcing you to consciously run through it every time.

This is a funny thing, muscle memory. It helps for all kinds of movements. When I was teaching myself nunchucks, I notice early on that if I stopped thinking about what was happening and just thought about which move I wanted to do next, I would throw those things around much more quickly and hit myself in the back of the head much less.

Phone numbers and passwords are a dangerous thing to leave to muscle memory. I can't tell you how many times have I had someone asked me the password to some functional shared account and had to type it in order to remember with accuracy. I'm not the only one. This happened just the other day with someone telling me.

Typing in general relies on the same thing. I cannot see well. I put the keyboard out of sight and have the monitors up close to my face. Some People freak when they watch me type because it seems like I have the entire keyboard memorized. Trouble is, if you ask me where a key is on the keyboard, I have to try to type it to find it.

Even when it comes to the on-screen keyboard for my phone is in my muscle memory. This is not really a good thing because I have such poor eye hand coordination that I get the wrong character and make the same mistakes over and over.

There are places for muscle memory and places to avoid it. Balance is true in all things I suppose.

Notes:

China owns 30% to 40% of the U. S. bond market.

I killed a bunch of ants yesterday at home. Now, I find a bunch of little tiny ants in my office. They are in the walls. Someone warned me they were there. I got bit by one. I wander how they found out.

It took me 45 minutes to set up my own email on a new Windows system at work. Some admin.

The G. G. Liddy show had some black activist on who said basically, if black people think things are bad now, wait until Latinos are on top. From memory "I'm surprised there have not been race riots in Los Angeles." The guy was from Project Twenty One.

I do not need to consume collieries or caffeine in order to function. I do not need to drink a soda, eat a candy bar, consume chips or another cup of coffee after lunch. I did not eat lunch. That doesn't matter. I hereby declare myself immune to low blood sugar. It is my own fault for not eating lunch. I have food, I'm too lazy to fix the food I have and I'm too cheap to buy a burger.

Have I already complained about the spell checker in GEdit that does not work for contractions? Well, I should some time.

There is a book out about living life without air conditioning. The U. S. uses more electricity for air conditioning than the entire continent of Africa (a billion people) use for everything. The book is called "Loosing our Cool." They have dubbed a new disease "Nature Deficit Disorder." I like it. I'm all for sweating like mad and just stinking.

Anchor Baby: When a foreign woman or couple has a baby in the U. S. in order to achieve residency.

I set up a bunch of filters at my work email. Why did I wait this long to do this?

Couple of videos

Poor kitty.

Thieving Alligator! Take that!

Not that I have a problem with sucking coffee through a straw, but there is just something manly about making a coffee cup work in zero G. Once again, coffee contributes to science.

Just kind of cool.

File Filter

Before adding six more criteria.

-------- Summary ---------------------------------------------------------------
Total files processed     > .............................................. 73574
Good files in playlist    > .............................................. 44248
Bad files out of list     > .............................................. 12611
Fantastic files           > ............................................... 5429
Number of Duplicates      > .............................................. 13695
-------- time ------------------------------------------------------------------
Process h:m:s             > .............................................. 0:8:3
Elapsed h:m:s             > .............................................. 0:8:3
Files/second              > ................................................ 152
reg ex count              > ............................................. 317957
CPU h:m:s of this process > .............................................. 0:7:9
-------- Info ------------------------------------------------------------------
Good file                 > ..................................... kelly_good.m3u
Fantastic file            > ...................................... kelly_fan.m3u
Log file                  > ..................... kelly_log_2010-07-12_07-28.log
Directory processed       > ..................................... ['/mnt/music']
Items in kill list        > ................................................ 172
Items in fantastic list   > ................................................. 78
Options                   > .......................................... See below
 ['-o', '-g', 'kelly_good', '-f', 'kelly_fan', '-l', 'kelly_log']
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

After

-------- Summary ---------------------------------------------------------------
Total files processed     > .............................................. 73574
Good files in playlist    > .............................................. 42904
Bad files out of list     > .............................................. 14098
Fantastic files           > ............................................... 5415
Number of Duplicates      > .............................................. 13552
-------- time ------------------------------------------------------------------
Process h:m:s             > ............................................. 0:7:36
Elapsed h:m:s             > ............................................. 0:7:36
Files/second              > ................................................ 161
reg ex count              > ............................................. 313496
CPU h:m:s of this process > ............................................. 0:6:45
-------- Info ------------------------------------------------------------------
Good file                 > ..................................... kelly_good.m3u
Fantastic file            > ...................................... kelly_fan.m3u
Log file                  > ..................... kelly_log_2010-07-12_12-52.log
Directory processed       > ..................................... ['/mnt/music']
Items in kill list        > ................................................ 178
Items in fantastic list   > ................................................. 78
Options                   > .......................................... See below
 ['-o', '-g', 'kelly_good', '-f', 'kelly_fan', '-l', 'kelly_log']
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Note over a thousand files are added to the bad files list. Note the time and regex decrease. This is because of the way I nested the loops. The more you eliminate from the bad list the fewer duplicates you have to check for.

Podcasts

I managed to blow away my podcasts today because of a lack of a semicolon. I so hate that.

My normal process is as follows.

• Download the files at the house.
• Somehow only download one file and not notice.
• Put them on my thumb drive.
• Forget to put the files on the drive (sync) before I go to bed.
• Leave the drive at home.
• Copy the files off the drive to my hard drive at work.
• Blow away the files.
• Copy all the files to the wrong spot and not discover it for a week.
• Copy the files all to one folder, thus making it a pain in the butt figuring out what file is what podcast.

You get the idea. Ironically, washing the drive in the laundry didn't do crap to the data on the drive. The plastic broke on the back, but my files were still there.

Then comes things that are not my fault like the Gnome interface in Red hat 5.5 that we use at work will not let me remove files, even with rights, from the GUI. I have to remove files through the command line. This makes me do the whole thing from the command line. I must remember not to do command line stuff before coffee in the future.

I'm really starting to understand the attraction to having a dedicated device for this crap. Many smart phones, including mine, allow the gathering and playing of podcasts. I can't get the software to work and I do not have enough memory on my phone to do much good. There is always something. Maybe in my next phone. I'll still be too cheap.

Lament

If only I could sit in the grass and listen.
Where I live is beside a highway.
Beside a field of tall grass, full of bugs.
The ants own my yard.
Soon, I shall take it back. Soon.

If only I could go for a drive.
If only I could ride a motorcycle in the country.
Never been much on horses, but ride a horse too.
Find myself in a stream with my pants rolled up.
Watch the fish pass me by with more important things to do.

What ever happened to summer days playing in the dirt?
What happened to running in the heat?
What happened to waking up early just to be the first in the public pool?
I miss BB guns in walking down the bayou.
I never did steel a kiss from just any girl who would let me.

We played Dungeons and Dragons for entire weekends.
We learned how to program basic and pascal.
We helped poor driveways and build fences.
We did landscaping and mowed.
We taught ourselves to care about money.

Playing from dawn until dusk.
My parents had to beg me to come home.
We would conspire to waist time.
We would dream.
We explored our universe.

Now I'm older, summer is hot.
I miss summer, when it was cool.
I miss youth, a time when I did what felt right.
I'm still alive, does that count for much?
Youth is a state of mind, I need to get out there and play.

Notes:

I heard "The Wichita Lineman" on a TV show this past weekend. it was a modern TV show. That is not the normal fare for hip TV shows. Then I heard it today come up randomly on the music list. 70,000+ files. Wander if there is more to work in the universe.

Got a touch of rain this afternoon at lunch. If I hadn't had my phone with me, I would have just stood there and gotten soaked. It felt that good.

Tried a free form poem today. How long has it been?

A couple of the new young engineers are sick of doing technical writing stuff. "This isn't engineering." Welcome to our company.

Lance! explain this to me

I want to have Back to the Future style hover board by the end of the month.

Bradford Football Disaster

Warning: Graphic tragedy.

The Bradford City Fire Disaster occurred on Saturday 11 May 1985 when a flash fire consumed one side of the Valley Parade football stadium in Bradford, England.

The fire broke out during a football match between Bradford City (the home team) and Lincoln City, on the day that Bradford City were supposed to have celebrated their winning the Football League Third Division trophy. A total of 56 people died and more than 265 others were injured.

This is raw footage from the Bradford football disaster. Most of you have seen some footage of it, mostly in tributes and other compilations. This is pretty rare and raw footage from that tragic day.

Live Leak

I listen to the BBC all the time. I've heard reference to the Bradford Football Disaster, but never thought to hunt down footage of it. I didn't realizde how many people died. If you had so much as a sore toe, it would slow you down.

Worse than Metro

I need to stop complaining about Houston Metro service so much.

I'm starting to feel much better about metro.

Oil price rize

Where have all the oil rigs gone? Where is all their money spent?

Diamond Offshore announced Friday that its Ocean Endeavor drilling rig will leave the Gulf of Mexico and move to Egyptian waters immediately — making it the first to abandon the United States in the wake of the BP oil spill and a ban on deep-water drilling.

...

Once the rigs relocate, it could be a minimum of five to 10 years before they return, predicted Rep. Pete Olson, R-Sugar Land.

Fausta's Blog

Hell of a guy that Obama. I cannot help but wander if he is deliberately doing this to th Gulf Coast region to force high paying jobs out of existence in order to weaken Republican strongholds. I mean, that is what makes sense. Isn't it still OK to drill on the East coast, a Democrat stronghold?

Modern sixties Vet

I can't tell if this is just a look alike, or if it is actually a sixties era vet that has been vastly modified. 1000 horsepower, modern suspension, lope, two immense turbos, stereo.

Looks, Sound, Base and Balls. That is a fine vehicle.

Radiation

How many times have you watched an old movie or cartoon that had some kind of wave drawn out on the screen to indicate radiation? Well, here is the real thing. The particles floating in the air move around and cluster where the decaying molecules have gone. This is real. This is how you do it.

The same thing happens in your body when you are exposed to radiation. These particles of alcohol are moved around enough to see them. The molecules are moved around in your body. Sometimes cells are burned or caused to fail or become cancerous by the same sort of motion you get in the cloud chamber above.

Seeing color

No wonder I cannot see the color blue on top of other colors. This is the approximate number of color receptors in an average human eye.

• 120,000,000 black/white/gray rods. They are smaller than cones and thus higher resolution.
•   3,000,000 red cones
•   3,000,000 green cones
•      10,000 blue cones

Why I don't paint

Nat wants to paint Elle and her bathroom. More power to her. I believe she wants to paint the room. We have the stuff she needs in the garage. Except that is for the most important item in my opinion. I don't remember any tarps for painting. There are a couple of old smelly tarps out there.

I am not excited about painting anything. I know it is possible to paint something in your house yourself. I know it is by far cheaper to do it yourself. I am bad at it. I cannot tell when I screw up. I cannot fix it easily when I do tell. This is not why I do not do it.

Once, when I was like 10, I helped my mom paint some wall in the garage or something. She didn't care if I got some drips on the floor of the garage. Anyway. I had a soda in a bottle sitting near me while I was painting. I avoided the drink like the plague because I had heard that paint was highly poisonous. Not two minutes in, I noticed a drop of paint dripping down both the inside and outside of the bottle. I only noticed it by accident really. Moments after I saw it, the drips were more or less gone.

At that moment, I promised never to paint again. If I could come that close to killing myself, I didn't want to maybe kill any one else. Most likely, the paint would not have killed me. I was 10 or so remember. Still, it made an impression.

Plotting at work

A couple people at work had to put together a huge chart for a presentation. We have a plotter, but the orders were not to use it yet because this was basically a rough draft. Makes sense until you watch three people try to stitch forty pages together for half an hour before the meeting, per print. I wander if the time saved would have excused the plotter expendables.

This is added to the time it took to hunt down a piece of software for the job. I suggested rasterbator for cutting up the pages better than the default printing tried to do. I believe they went with an open source package called Poster Razor, which appears to have a Linux version by the way. it is too difficult overcoming the name of that first one. I have to admit that I remembered it even though I have never used it and it has been years since it has so much as crossed my mind.

The end result looked pretty good if you ask me. The plot would have looked much better and would most likely not have taken three people three hours to compile over all. Having the right tool for the job is a must. Wish I could put up a picture.

Notes:

The geek blogs are going ape shit over the Microsoft tech that allows you to put batteries in which ever way. I looked around, but I figure you still have to put all the batteries in the same way. That is, the batteries all have to be positive to negative. Didn't someone do this when I was a kid?

The young people coming in as new engineers are surprised to find out a Lazar printer is black and white. They look at me like I'm pointing them to a slide rule. At least a couple of the new folks are very impatient when it comes to learning new software or methods of getting things done. It seems to me they think they know a better way and it eats at them that they have to do it the [this company] way. I fully understand this, but it does get in the way.

Four billion people have mobile phones. One point five billion people have access to financial institutions like banks. Apple will shortly offers PayPal kind of service. How long before Starbucks accepts iPay?

I forgot the two guys who started Twitter both worked for Google.

There are more and more contacts between my world and China. Now I know two of my friends who dated Chinese women. They both have learned the applicable languages.

Big board

I am so glad these guys are out there doing this. I want to see a pipe for this ting.

kicker

Really simple Python kicker script. I believe the subprocess module started in Python 2.4.

#!/usr/bin/env python

import sys, subprocess

command=["nedit", "-create"]
if len(sys.argv) > 0:
    command+= sys.argv[1:]
try:
    subprocess.Popen(command)
except:
    print "Error executing NEdit."

Notes:

There is a study of people who lived past 100 that says there is a collection of some number of jeans the may be used with a 77% accuracy to tell who will live to a ripe old age. The only use of this I can think of is for retirement planning and insurance rates. "You can retire at 65, but your spouse has to wait until 90." Would I want to know if I have the trait? I doubt I can afford the test right now but it will cost $7.08 at Wal-Mart's genetics kiosk in ten years.

It is just plane bleak in the job market. Every bit of news sounds bad. The over all rate is 10%. For black people it is 15.x%, women 12%, men, 17%. For black male teens the rate is 43% unemployed. Remember, these are only people still looking for work.

Interest rates are at their lowest numbers in 50 years. New home loans are down over 30% from last year. Habitat for Humanity is doing pretty well. They are looking at buying foreclosed homes and giving them away as apposed to building them.

GM sales more cars in China than the U. S..

Nat came home Monday with 100 44 cent stamps. Why didn't you get "forever stamps?" "I didn't think about it." I hear Tuesday that they are going to 46 cents. sigh!

There was a British board game form the seventies called BP Oil Strike. One of the 'hazard cards' caused a blowout and had one million dollars cleanup cost. Now, why were the costs in U. S. dollars I wander? Creepy.

I have a simple idea for a very short fiction story, but it is too close to what we do at work to clear the censors. I'll keep it in my mind and try to figure out how to write something that isn't too close to reality.

How ... Cold War -- From CNN email "Judge: 10 spy suspects pleaded guilty and will be deported to Russia, which in turn will release four prisoners to U.S."

Notes:

Bloodmobile is poor diction. Both sanguine mobile and blood wagon are better because they do not cross languages in the same word. I separated them to make thing readable.

China imports coal from Wyoming among other places.

Nearly half of U. S. states have worse financial status than Greece.

Android based consumer level tablets by Christmas this year. Business level devices next year. Rumor is, they will run Flash out of the box. It may be moot because an EU law may force Apple to support Flash on the phones and pads.

Flip WiFi camera out very soon. It will have to have a different interface. That is, more buttons or a touch screen ore some way to input information like a WiFi password. Can't wait to check it out. No, I will not get one.

Lady Gaga went over 10,000 fans on Facebook. Yup. End of civilization.

Can you imagine a world without helium? That day may be coming.

Day 1

Neural networks are a collection of decision making nodes that are connected to one another in a network of pathways that can change and be prioritized and even eliminated based on need. Each decision is small, but all of them piled on top of one another and the using pathways of a given moment make it nearly impossible to predict the outcome in a perfect fashion the result of problem posed to a neural network.

By introducing the ability to increase the number of nodes based on need, and designing the decision making algorithms and design of pathways to be extensible, the limits of the neural network and capabilities of the network to complete problems can be increased dramatically. The use of virtual nodes and virtual nodes that can run recursive networks, links that can be madke from parent networks to child networks, the capabilities of the neural networks can become greater than the capabilities of the hardware the software is running on. It is not the speed of decisions every time that is important, it is the answer that comes back.

When neural networks are combined with preexisting training of parts of the network, recursion, access to external controls and data, the limits of the neural network become the limits of the neural network to change the situation around it.

All neural networks should be subject to oversight by people who have the understanding of the signs and consequences of runaway processing. The best example of a run away neural network is all of life as we know it at the present time.

Office

90% of the things that 90% of people need an office package for is doable in Open Office. I say this having used it for a couple years now. The only times I have had to track down a box with MS Office on it was to satisfy someone who said specifically that they wanted me to do something in a proprietary MS Office format.

We have had some new folks at my office who are in technical fields who have not ever used Open Office for anything. I cornered a couple of them and they ended up admitting that they either fudge on the student purchase forms or outright pirate MS Office in non professional arias like home or friend's computers they set up.

This is one area where I wish MS would start going after people for prating their software. Open Office has problems. The more people who used it, or are at least exposed to it, the better it will become. There are other office packages. Some are OK and some are outright terrible. The tide of MS enforcing their rights would raise all the boats in this case.

We setup a couple computers on our network that let people run MS Office remotely. There are three. If I go look at the logs, they get used about three times a week by the same people over and over. Then, thirty five people all try to use them at once. It would be great if we had a virtual machine system that would scale and allow so many hours of use or whatever as people needed them. This is what the whole MS Office Online thing is supposed to allow. The trouble is, we don't have internet access.

Tax the Rich

I knew that redistribution of wealth meant taking it from private citizens and handing it to public entities. The goal of leftists is the classless society. This is not true of any human society. They keep trying it over and over and it keeps failing over and over. It is a classless society except the political class is on top.

They say "tax the rich" only because the poor don't have anything worth taking. The poor have already lost their freedom and do not even know it.

The current government of the U. S. wants to tell you what to eat, how much sleep to get, where to work, what you are aloud to spend money on. Perhaps our government has no problem with the Chinese paying for it all, but I do. The U. S. shouldn't owe any one any thing. It has been decades. How is this possibly a good thing?

Saying one thing on TV and another behind closed doors is lying. It is what the terrorists do saying one thing in English and another in Arabic for example or other language. There need to be consequences for lying to the American citizenry. Apparently, just being voted out of office next time is not good enough.

Gloom

Heard while listing to podcasts about U. K. Financial well being. (all from memory)

• "Ferocious" while speaking about the job market.
• "70 applicants per vacancy"
• "No one ever asked employers if they needed double the graduates in the last fifteen years."
• "There are going to be hundreds of thousands of additional job losses in the U. K. yet."
• "Don't touch property with a barge pole." when asked about buying a home.
• "Households do worse during the recovery than the re recession."

Dreams

As one who works that nine to five, I have to say that he is right. If there were anything that I could do that would make me stand out in the crowd, it would get me fired.

The only thing I'm good at that I really enjoy is being an asshole.

We had a guy named Larry at work. He was a new engineer not far out of school. He worked in a couple different departments at our office at different times. I don't know how to put it, but he never quite meshed with the flaming mayhem that is our engineering staff. if your ass is not on fire and you don't look like you are about to climb a tour with a deer rifle, your are not exhibiting a sense of urgency. That is why a guy got let go a couple years ago. Or work is not healthy for the engineers. They are worked to death and expected to sacrifice their youth and brilliance to the cause and can't even shift a couple hours around to spend time with their families.

This i true through the engineering world. It is no wander that so few women get involved in this field. They can do better without trying very hard. They are smart.

So, Larry left today to go back to school He and is wife packed up and went back to Austin. God bless them. Forty five minutes after he was gone, I, the IT guy, packed up his computer and moved in another engineer in his place.

Don't be an engineer. They will squeeze you until you are empty, then throw you away for the new guy. Follow Phil's advice and find something you are good at that you can make money at and do that. Do it well. Be the best. Make that work for you rather than making yourself work to fill in someone else's dreams.

I listened to a podcast today that was reviewing films. He mentioned music and said he would take someone who could barely sign their name, but loved their music like their children over someone with a PHD in any form of music. This is along the same rail. Is it possible to live your dreams without loosing everything in the process? Can you feel like you accomplished your dreams without loosing everything or sacrificing everything else?

Someone out there tell me you are following your dream.

Go or blow!

She blue.

Persons Unknown

Bad attempt. Persons Unknown is another show about people trapped on an island. Well, sort of. They have a barrier they cannot pass. They have someone declaring their power over them. This is a LOST wannabe. It doesn't look nearly as good. I hate the characters. I dislike the power. I have a hard time following the flashbacks because I just don't care about the people.

When is it going to stop. Every time someone comes up with a show that kind of works, there are copy cats that just don't get it right. Not by miles in this case.

The area is not big enough. The people are shallow. The power is failing to control. The barrier is not impervious or scary enough. The happenings are predictable. There is very little suspense. There is no action.

Lame.

Firworks

This is what it looks like from my driveway on the Forth of July. One of the biggest shows used to be right next door. Fortunately, I still have a hard time with this concept, a fireworks stand moved in right at the end of the block. This means my next door neighbor cannot pop firecrackers because he is in the 300 foot limit. Nor can people pop them in the neighboring field or in front of our house.

Vow of poverty

I love the number of people who think that there is a huge number of rich people who are sitting on a big piles of money and cackling while not spending it for useless goods made by the Chinese.

Even if people spent all the money they had on Chinese made products, it shouldn't help Americans very much. Do people who have money deserve to have money or do they deserve to have someone come in and take it away? Honestly. Do you feel that people who earn money deserve to spend it or save it or invest it as they please?

If you are someone on the receiving side of spent money, answer this. Do you not dream of having money? If you come in to money by earning it or just finding it along the way, like marriage or lottery, should you then be required to give it up just because you have it?

Economic freedom is the first freedom. It is the foundation for all other freedoms. The freedom of the press resides with those who own one. The freedom to speak your mind resides with those people who can afford the lawyers to defend that right. the right to own property lies with those who can afford that property and avoid imminent domain.

The current government speaks about medical doctors like they are Wall Street bankers. Doctors are business owners and operators. They have to worry about a bottom line just like any other business. They have to additional worries of killing their customers if they screw up. Do doctors deserve to have their livelihoods taken from them because they make money? Do butchers, bakers, hair stylists deserver the same?

What professions do people deserve to make money doing? I suppose the entertainment industry, the industry that must have the largest ratio of millionaires in the States, is exempt from the rules of wealth distribution. Why do they get a pass? Why do some politicians get a pass and others do not? Democrats want to pass money out by the truckload and Republicans wont to help people make dump truck loads of money.

I don't get it. It is like there is a social stigma against success. We are teaching children that trying is more important than succeeding in schools. We teach that "everybody wins" makes sense. Then we bitch when people show up at our door and take our house away because we could not afford to make the payments. We complain when there are no jobs because people in other countries do wheat we did for a tenth of the money.

Family BBQ

This is a family get together from Sunday 2010-07-04. Independence day went well for the extended family on Nat's side. My family is out of town anyway. Good BBQ and great times.

I kissed a nerd

"I'll be your Laya slave."

Warning: has some dirty lyrics.

=]

Smart Car does sky hill

I notice they waited like a week to publish this video. I suppose the guy who owned the car split before they it went up. "I told him I wouldn't. hehehe." Looks like the little guy did just fine.

New drive update

I just like checking my free space now and again. I just like knowing I have a terabyte of space out there. I just like saving a file and hearing an echo. I just like how it is already old news.

$ df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1             1.4T  122G  1.2T  10% /

10 reasons men prefer guns to women

#10. You can trade an old 44 for a new 22.
#9. You can keep one gun at home and have another for when you’re on the road.
#8. If you admire a friend’s gun and tell him so, he will probably let you try it out a few times.
#7. Your primary gun doesn’t mind if you keep another gun for a backup.
#6. Your gun will stay with you even if you run out of ammo.
#5. A gun doesn’t take up a lot of closet space.
#4. Guns function normally every day of the month.
#3. A gun doesn’t ask , “Do these new grips make me look fat?”
#2. A gun doesn’t mind if you go to sleep after you use it.
And the number one reason a gun is favored over a woman….
#1. YOU CAN BUY A SILENCER FOR A GUN!

TAIR

I kid. I kid because it's funny.

Sleeper

No, no the movie.

What is a sleeper. Whel, this is a sleeper. This guy is not the first one I've heard of putting a hot engion in a wagon in order to make people in stock Mustangs look like idiots.

I knew a guy named Shaggy after high school who suped up his Ford Ranger pickup 4 banger and would smoke stock Mustangs.

Not the same car, but on the same idea of a grocery grabber popping a wheely in a drag race. Nice.

UPDATE 2010-07-03 19-50 (or so)

I've watched this video like three times now. Each time I picture pulling up next to some corvette on Westheimer not far from my house. I would love the idea of beetling those assholes at their own game. I'm not aloud in the game. I admit this has something to do with my dislike of the practice.

The spell checker in GEdit substituted wisenheimer for Westheimer. That is a trip.

Up Late

Did a load of dishes. The pot full of beans that had been sitting out for over two weeks had some kind do swamp gas coming off of it. I'm not exaggerating. There was a visible, even to me, gas emitting off the beans. The smell nearly killed me. Why do we have seven colanders? Why are three of them brand new? I work all day every day. Why am I the one doing every single dish? Why do we eat out every meal?

Watching OlgaKay

The chat is long over. She juggled high heal shoes while cussing in Russian. Where else can you get that?

UPDATE 2010-07-03

Argh! She took the video down because the live stream is over.

Best movie insults

I'm trying to figure out which is my favorite. I haven't seen some of these movies. "You mother was a hamster and your father smelled of elderberries." I've always preferred the insults that didn't bother with obscenity.

Foot

I hurt my foot yesterday on the walk home. I worked a very long frustrating day. I did manage to get a quad boot computer running. Forgot to send along the script to the blog.

Half the night I woke up when I moved my foot. I limped in my dreams. I'm sitting at my computer desk wiggling my toes trying to get things limbered up.

So, what happened? I rolled my right ankle on the concrete while crossing the street. Normally, this would make my ankle sore, but not this time. My ankle is fine. It is the right side of my right foot. If I try to put weight on the end of my foot, not the heal, it hurts like mad. I can hobble around. The idea of hobbling around work was highly unpleasing.

I could just imagine being at work and the boss asking me to help carry something. Just yesterday I helped someone lift a couple of those really heavy servers in to a higher rack. I like being the go to guy for that kind of thing. I would have had to beg off today. Besides, crawling under and around tables and desks was just not in the cards

Notes:

Those goddamn horns make it impossible for me to listen to the World Cup games. Ban noise making devices for God's sake! Every commentator has them in the background. I miss people singing and chanting racist slogans and slurs. I've heard of more than one person watching on mute and finding some alternate commentary. Not sure how that works.

You can get designer diapers now. One has blue jeans. Another has some kind of print. This is just another way to milk people out of money.

Multi boot RHEL

I was tasked with putting Red Hat 5 and 4, 64 bit and 32 bit on one system. It has the hardware we want. I spent the entire morning learning seven ways not to do it. Adam got with me and we went over a method or two that he has used in the past.

• Install the first Red Hat.
  • Do not use Volume Groups. Use straight up partitions. This will allow the different OS version you install to find the empty drive space.
  • Leave a gigabyte or so left over for a partition that all the OSes can mount.
  • Reuse the same boot partition. You must make a backup of it before installing each version of the OS. Reformat it each time. Keep all the files safe. You will put them on the extra partition.
  • Leave one swap partition out there. They will all use the same one.
• After you have installed all the system partitions, mount the extra partition on all the systems. Then write a script that will copy the files from the /boot backup folders on that extra partition to the real /boot folder. Go in to all the backup grub.conf and other files under the grub folder and combine everything by hand. Do not touch your originals.
• Test, test, test, then test again.

Red Hat 5 seems to let you boot just fine if you copy all the 32 bit /boot stuff from both 64 bit and 32 bit in to the /boot folder. Red Hat 4 does not play well with such shenanigans. Surely, though, something will blow up down the road if you do not have the correct /boot files in place so for goodness sake, make the script and go through the trouble.

How long did this take me to figure out. Well, I took the morning to learn six different ways of doing it wrong. Just after lunch is when I got with Adam and found myself on a good track.

Noisy Podcasts

I listen to some podcast about tech stuff. The guy who does it has two boys and the tech reviews he does use the kids as test beds. It works out very well, because he will say things like "I thought this was a dud product, but my kids loved it."

The one I listened to today was pretty good. He reviewed a ruggedized camera. I liked the review, but I liked the distractions more. As he was speaking things in the background would clump, buzz, jingle or yell to each other down stairs.

His family were down stairs. They were yelling from one room to the other apparently. He hollered down to them to keep it down, which they did for about forty five seconds.

His air conditioner kicked in which sounds like a cement mixer. He wheeled his chair over to it, taking the microphone with him to adjust it. I think he made it louder.

Rex the podcasting wonder dog came in and scratched at his feet. This is heard by the cowbell sized dog tags jingling in that distinct dog scratching rhythm.

Then there is his drink. He is not paid by Mountain Dew Code Red, but he should be. He insists on using a plastic bucket full of ice to consume it as he podcasts.

this kind of makes the personal. I've noticed that I prefer when pod podcasters give a dose of their real life along with their other content. It gives me a bit of attachment to the media. All the vlogs I watch have personal content or a separate channel for personal content except one. That one is comedy and has someone from old media as the spokes person. there are a couple podcasts that don't have much personalization. I definitely remember the personalized ones better.

Hurricane Alex

This was a strange one. Alex always kind of looked like he was headed for the south Texas north Mexico area. There was a moment early on they were saying it was unlikely, but possible for Alex to turn toward Louisiana. Some part of me always wanders if they just throw those in to cover their ass.

We got some odd rain patterns. Normally, you could set your watch by the rain coming in at about 16:00 in the afternoon on summer days in west Houston. Alex brought the rain later, but harder. The downpours were merciless. They brought cold winds and tons of lightening. I didn't hear anything about tornadoes, but the clouds sure looked like they were ready to pass a few twisters out for good measure.

I actually signed up for one of the text weather alerts. I got about ten text messages keeping me up on how to stop the text messages, get help and wind speed. It did tell me when and where Alex made landfall. I was waiting for the "It turned north. Head for the hills." but it never came thankfully.

This reminds me that all sorts of communications were cut off in the last hurricane we had. We lost power and couldn't make mobile phone calls or use internet on our phones for days. However, texting still seemed to work.

Morning ants

Nat gave me a ride this morning. She needed to get some groceries at whole foods so it is on her way. This gave me a chance to talk to Elle in front of the garage while we waited for Nat to get ready. Elle is in summer school until Thursday.

At some point I walked across the front yard to pick up one of those damn flier that keep getting blown all over the place. It is one of those doorknob fliers. It is no wander HOAs ban these things when they can.

While I was occupied with this, Elle stepped in to the side of the yard closer to the field next to our house. She managed to get ants all over her feet. She squirmed and freaked out over the ants. She stomped her foot and refused to brush off the ants with her hand or a rag. It took me a couple tries to get her to calm down and start knocking off the ants. "Elle, you are going to have to deal with ants for the rest of your life."

It didn't look like she got bit very much. I told Nat about it. I can't wait to get a note from the school.

We need to get some more granular poison. It has been raining every evening when I get home so the granular stuff won't work well. I will spray the house inside and out tonight regardless of rain. Excuses excuses. Time to get on the stick. They are hurting my little girl.

Notes:

Noticed someone talking about tape backup at work. I forget the context. Just the mention of a tape backup made me pause. I always imagine a refrigerator with a reel to reel on the front.

WEP encryption is a bit like having one of those locks on a door where you can see through the keyhole. How many people know what that analogy means? Who has seen one of these locks? My Aunt had a house with some of those locks on internal doors. This is the kind of lock I'm talking about.

A guy sold a 10% share in Apple in the mid seventies for $800. How many days has this guy kicked his own ass over this?

Some researchers are saying a pill form of marijuana would be better for medicinal purposes rather than allowing people to smoke it. It requires higher doses. It also stems (no pun intended) the negative of inhaling smoke. Pill forms have been available, but not popular because the high is long and low vs up in a spike like smoking.

Man breaks spine. Insurance says he had a spine before the break, and didn't express the possession on his pre existing condition list at the point of purchase. Disallowed. Yes, I'm exaggerating a bit. You almost bought it though.

Rainy ride home

Just another day. I know I'm old because my biggest complaint is about not being able to mow the grass for the rain. Thanks Sweety for the ride. I know you were not feeling well.

Brought back some memories

One of my earliest memories is riding on the tank of my dad's motorcycle around some trails. I remember veguely a blue bike and a red one. I laso remember some trike like three wheelers. We road around some parking lot. One was light green and the other was black. Hey folks! Remind me what I'm remembering will ya? Did I dream this stuff. Then there is the VW pickup. That was black as well.

Convert text files to CSV

#!/bin/env python
#############################################################################
# Parameters:     None
# Note:           2010-06-28
# This script helped with the software key (Microsoft) audit. It converts
# the multiple text files from "keyfinder.exe" to one cvs format file that
# is imported in to a spreadsheet and edited manually for clarity. I still
# had to hand remove a couple lines after running this script. This script
# was aimed at 98% success.
#############################################################################

import os
import sys
import glob

fileExt="*.txt"
fileList=""
outputName="output.csv"
fileList=glob.glob(str(fileExt))
if (len(fileList) == 0):
    print("Error - Could not obtain "+str(fileExt)+" files.")
    sys.exit(0)
if (os.path.exists(str(outputName))):
    os.remove(str(outputName))
outputPointer=open(str(outputName),"w")
for fileName in fileList:
    computerName=fileName.rstrip(str(fileExt))
    filePointer=open(str(fileName),"r")
    fileContents=filePointer.readlines()
    filePointer.close()
    outputString=""
    for contentLine in fileContents:
        contentLine=contentLine.strip("\n")
        if (str(contentLine) == "Professional"):
            outputString+=" Professional"
            continue
        if (str(contentLine) == "Home Edition"):
            outputString+=" Home Edition"
            continue
        if (len(str(contentLine)) == 0):
            outputString+=("\n"+str(computerName))
        elif (str(contentLine).find("Magical") == -1 and str(contentLine).find("magical") == -1):
            outputString+=","+str(contentLine)
    outputString=outputString.rstrip("\n"+str(computerName))
    outputString=outputString.strip("\n\n")
    outputPointer.write(str(outputString)+"\n")
outputPointer.close()

I know, I know. It is a lame script. It works for the most part. It converts a bunch of multiple line text files in to a single CVS (comma delimited) file for import in to a spreadsheet.

Book of Tired

In the beginning, it was dark, and noisy. I hit the alarm and got up. I switched on the TV to the local morning news to find out if Israel has been nuked yet. No. One more day perhaps. The only thing I get out of the local news is the weather and reminders what parts of town to stay away from.

While in the shower I thought of something interesting to blog about and then forgot it while shaving. I need one of those write in the rain notebooks and a space pen for the shower. That or a waterproof voice recorder. I have a water resistent case for my video camera, but I would be afraid those videos would get out and blind the masses.

The morning ritual has become something that I do not even remember. As far as I can tell the only thing that happened out of the ordinary this morning was that I didn't catch Merlin trying to sneak in to Nat's room as I kissed her goodby.

This is a testament to my life. I've found a rut and seem to enjoy it. That is usually when something jumps up and bites you in the ass. Just knowing I'm nine years from fifty is bad enough. My ex-girlfriend's kids are nearly old enough to have kids on at least one case.

The real trouble came at work today. I had time to breath. A couple things I've been working feverishly on lately have completed, or at least come to a stopping point for a minute. It was difficult to motivate myself to start new projects. I've been told unofficially that I'm taking on some different hat at the office. This makes me want to stop doing what I've been doing in the past and start the new thing. I don't know if it is going to work out or if it is going to burn down before I get there. That is the way things go I suppose. This is a stress unto itself. This is a down side to having room to breath.

Oh, I got work done. I researched wireless encryption, looked up bison, Touched up some scripts, updated my notes, helped people find driv4ers for a couple pieces of equipment, retired some old dead equipment, cleaned up the cubby (an impromptu lab) a bit and a bunch of other stuff that is important, but hard to document. This little stuff is important. Some of it gets done between the important stuff. Enough of it piles up that it needs to have some time devoted to it. That was today.

Mostly I'm tired. I've been sleeping well, but I'm worn out. I'm frazzled. What are some other adjectives I can come up with? Tore up from the floor up. Dragging ass. Well, dragging ass implies I'm not doing my job. I've been working hard. I'm weary, worn out, old. Wait a minute. Is that what really has me down? Am I hitting the middle aged crazy? Is that what this is about?

I cannot eat fast food like I used to. Yesterday some very young vlogers, in their twenties, had the fast food challenge where they ate one of everything off the dollar (now dollar fifty) menu at Wendy's. That would kill me. I would die on the twenty third bite. I wouldn't drop, I would just seize up in place, like a statue with a half eaten burger half way to my gaping maw.

Ah, the good old days. I could eat anything. I could sleep like a rock. I could mow the whole yard in the middle of summer without passing out. Well, I haven't past out, but I've felt like it was an option.

APHC Podcast

A Prairie Home Companion was in rare form this most recent podcast.

s“It's easier for young people to be pagans than older people.”

Joke:

A preacher was going for a walk in the woods and got chaised by a bear. Just as the bear caught him and pinned him on the ground the preacher said “Lord please save your servent and make the bear a Christian!”

The bear clasped his paws and said “Lord, thank you for that which I am about to receive.”

Notes:

I hate it when I try out a new podcast and my first impressions are formed by the intro music. So, I'm playing this tech podcast for the first time and I roll my eyes when the intro music is some saxophone jazz medley kind of thing. It took a lot to make it in to the first three minutes.

54% of companies say they are going to cut IT in the next several years. Doing more with less people. Expect problems and the excuse “computer error” to come up more than normal from 54% of companies over the next several years.

My phone does wi-fi. I hooked it up for the first time to the work network. I also figured out that I'm using the wrong encryption at home. WEP is 2003. I need to try to get WPA working at the house. Not sure my old shitty router supports anything recent. It is ancient. Maybe I can get Nat's iPod running as well.

Notes:

Trying to think of a way to convince my boss that hitting www.dilbert.com and wallpapering my office in tacky prints of same is part of my job as an IT professional.

I've heard about all the cuts in the British system. It cracks me up that the first place they mention is “More efficient use of IT.” Meaning making do with half the people. That is a bit like saying you can save money on a dam by skimping on the cement in the middle.

One of the BBC podcasts I listen to mentioned that one of the casters had a Facebook fan page that was created by someone else. I'm thinking he might want to look in to that sort of thing. Imagine having your name on the side of a building that you have no control over.

Corporations are squeezing their employees for more hours to cover layoffs. It isn't like they are loosing money. Last quarter reported huge prophets in many sectors of the economy. This is a cycle that cannot continue. People will start finding other employment and having heart attacks. I had to look up how to spell 'heart' to make sure I wasn't screwing it up.

The Times of London put up a registration only wall in front of their content. They are not charging yet, just making people register. Their traffic cut in half. The competing papers in the same area who have not yet taken this step noticed only a 0.6% increase in traffic. People may be headed for free foreign news. The New York Times wants to repeat this experiment it sounds like. Heaven forbid they learn from other's experience.

From CNN email “Supreme Court strikes down Chicago handgun ban; case may have far-reaching impact for states, local governments.” YES!!!!!!! Law abiding citizens rejoice. When I sent this to Twitter and Facebook, I misspelled rejoice.

It strikes me as ridiculous when someone uses the term “Kalashnikov” when describing AK-47 rifles. The percentage of AK-47 weapons made in Russia and distributed throughout the world is probably low. Not sure what the official right to distribute the weapons people may have throughout the world.

The Iraqis bitched that security was better under Saddam when the U. S. first showed up. Now they are bitching that the American soldiers at least asked what was going on. The Iraqi security forces just ignore them and go on about their business of taking charge of everything that makes money in the country.

So, The most annoying thing about using a fresh installation of an office suite has got to be the re-add-to-dictionary of all your custom words. That or the loss of your favorite templates and settings. Won't someone please think of the custom dictionary and settings?

Economy concept flaw

I'm starting to run though what an economy is. In my head I imagine the millions of vendibles that lead to an economy. Societies all working together, apart and to win. Each striving to be better, obtain an advantage, keep an advantage. The only way to win is to help someone else loose.

One person decides they want corn and someone else has corn for sale, the two come together and decide how the transaction will happen. The government takes a slice for services they have provided like roads, water, sewage, police and every other goddamn thing. If the corn is bad, the buyer is unhappy. If enough buyers become unhappy, people stop buying corn. If too many people grow corn, there is an over supply and prices drop. When prices drop, the government does not get as much in taxes. Thus, the government has a hand in the quality control over corn.

As old people die off, their assets get redistributed. As new people are born they come in to new assets. Everyone who can works to some extent. That is people are out for their own survival. This is a predictable thing. If given the opportunity to not work they will not work for what they need. Ask any one who lived in Soviet Russia. If there is no motivation to do a good job, everyone does the minimum.

Some people want power and some people want to relax and drink beer. Others want to play video games. Most designs of ways to separate people from their money, also known as an economy, will cover as many possibilities as can be done. Still no flying cars, but they are working on it. Basically, if enough people are willing to spend money one it, it will be made.

Is economy a zero sum game?

The planet has a GDP (Gross Domestic Product). Goodness knows how you would measure it. No matter what numbers show up, they are meaningless because the people on the earth either have enough to get along or they do not. There is not much point in keeping track of the planetary GDP until there is another planet to compete with.

There is the rub. All these numbers exist just to tell winners from loosers in order to place the next round of bets. Some may say to make better informed investments, but they are indeed bets.

Any entity that can survive on its own without dependence on the rest of the world is not contributing to the world economy or detracting from it. There are people who think this sort of thing should not be aloud. Everyone must be made to be part of the economy. How else do you control them? If they are not worried about the things in the news, why will they get upset enough to vote.

The quickest way to guarantee everyone is part of the economy is to tax everything. I heard somewhere that online card based roll playing games cannot allow online trades of cards amongst it's members because sales tax would have to be collected.

I thought this post had a point there for a minute.

Deep Jeep

I like the stuff floating in the back of the jeep and it just keeps going. It just drags the quad behind.

Notes:

I need a robot that edges. I hate edging. I am terrible at it. The robot needs to be autonomous and run on humidity and mosquitoes. Oh, and grass clippings. ya.

I listen to a podcast all about the new Doctor Who series. They are a month ahead or so of the U. S.. It honestly makes the experience better watching Doctor Who having already experienced a spoiler. I can follow the little hidden story lines that are thick in the franchise.

The strangest thing happened this morning. I had a backwards headache. No, my head didn't feel great. The more busy I got, the more consent ration I did, the more the headache went away. If I stopped and had a minute to catch my breath the headache came back in buckets. The headache lasted most of the day. I thought it was because I didn't have any caffeine yesterday. Just plane forgot. Woke up with the pain early this morning.

I'm sick of people saying kids used to be better at school. I constantly hear things like kids used to have beautiful handwriting, be well spoken, read tons of books. Well, back in the day, only kids who showed promise were allowed to go to school. Dumb asses were put to work. This has two fold effects. The school does not have to slow down teaching to keep the slow kids up to speed. As kids reach their limit, they are simply left behind. And, there is a hell of a motivation not to be a dumb ass or you would be put to work. Mystery solved.

The financial news from the UK sounds like a teacher scolding a child. "Every one is going to get some pain." while speaking about the tax hikes and loss of public services. It has been nuts how far out of whack the UK has been when talking about income of the country vs services. How long has this correction been coming? Paying attention to the financial news is like watching a train wreck in slow motion. Slow enough to take years. It is painful. They haven't started doing anything yet. They are still in the bitching stage.

No fiction in a long time. No thoughts beyond that which is real. how ... weak of me. It takes strength to imagine. It takes will to be that person who creates. I weary of reality. Desire for freedom will draw me away from this world for a bit. Shall the monster live or die? What is next?

The dark side of coffee

I listen to a coffee related podcast. I'm not a foody or a coffee fanatic. I just like the podcast for no particular reason.

From the podcast, from memory "Starbucks is over roasted. I consider it on the dark side of coffee."

This instantly kicked me off on a tangent of Darth Vader at Starbucks ordering a coffee. What kind of coffee would he order? How long would it take him to distance-choke the teen behind the bar? The possibilities are endless. If I had the gumption, I would rent a costume and make up a skit.

There have to be specific lines. I'm thinking "I just want coffee." ... "Large, do I have to explain 'large'?!?" Followed shorty by the choking sounds from behind the counter and a pot of coffee floating though the air and filling a cup.

Someone get right on that.

Me and sports

I don't watch sports much. I couldn't participate as a kid much so it never stuck to watch sports. One exception is soccer. I was talking to my new office mate Larry about the World Cup this afternoon. We went over why Soccer will or will not catch on i the U. S.. People are talking about this because it was brought up at lunch yesterday as well.

We went over things like the recent contrives and the U. S. team doing pretty well this time around. We also covered things like people in the U. S. wanting instant gratification and drop dead times in the game. As it is, soccer ends when the referee says it ends. People in the U. S. seem to want a stop watch displayed on the screen at all times. The soccer method is more gentlemanly in my opinion.

We also went over things like running the score up a bit to attract the U. S. audience. This was tried in the seventies to massive failure. Good athletes in the U. S. do not go in to soccer. Good soccer players in the U. S. do not play here.

I've known many people, including Larry, who played soccer growing up. They can't compete against the Mexican kids because they do not live and breath the game.

The lack of English commentary is an issue, though I swearer I heard about an online audio simulcast in English for several games that are in Spanish otherwise. Surely, this could be solved with some relaxation of telecast rights for a given amount of time until interest here catches up with some goal.

There is a podcast that I listen to about the World Cup from the BBC. However, I find myself ignoring it quickly because it is geared toward people who are obsessed with the event already. Still, it is worth a listen if you can stand names of athleats and even some countries dropping you have never heard of.

Freedom!

FFFFf RRRR  EEEEE EEEEE DDDD   OOO   M   M !!
F     R   R E     E     D   D O   O  MM MM !!
FFF   RRR   EEEE  EEEE  D   D O   O  M M M !!
F     R  R  E     E     D   D O   O  M   M
F     R   R EEEEE EEEEE DDDD   OOO   M   M !!

How does a goat cross the road?

That's how.

Lunch conversation

I went to lunch today with 12 other people. The conversation was nuts to follow. I was worried a bit about rain and we all nearly expired from sun exposure on the way back.

• Man gets eaten by a bear and his girlfriend.
• Games
• Too many super moves in some game
• The new 3d capture from Microsoft looks cool, but what are they going to do with it?
• Friend's trips to Alaska
• One mountain being much higher than another when looking at it.
• Her husband is driving back and has several 500 mile days between himself and home. Did I mention he has the two kids with him?
• Someone hit reply-all instead of reply on one of the company emails recently. Imagine doing that at a company with 40,000 nodes on the network. Someone else said they would have discussions at his old company sent to everyone like "Stop hitting reply-all" ... "OK."

New drive

I had to replace one of the hard drives in my main computer. It is making a click noise occasionally. This is a death rattle. it is an old IDE drive. yes, my computer is that old. I bought a second rive that is SATA a couple years ago. It seems to be running just fine. Both drives are about 120G drives. The new one is a 1.5 terabyte drive. It does run hot. What is the deal with that? Everything has gotten hotter over the last several years it seems. When did drives start running hot?

I tried to mirror the boot drive over to the new drive, but it wouldn't boot properly. It seemed to have something to do with the name of the drive or something. Still, I really didn't feel like messing with it so I just installed Ubuntu on the new drive. It may take longer than fixing the existing install, but it is less stressful. Now I need to install all the software I use and configure everything.

The system boots in like twenty seconds. It shuts down in no time flat. Ubuntu has made huge strides in this area. Nice. Even my old HP laptop boots much faster under Ubuntu than it did under XP. That is not nearly as impressive because XP was a disaster. Still. Nice.

Home Sales

From CNN "New home sales plunged almost 33 percent in May, the federal government says." Yawzza!!! That is a spicy meatball! What happened? I have no details. This is nuts. Fell by a third?!? I'm going to have to look in to that one.

How much is up to how many homes are in foreclosure? Or, coming out of foreclosure and now sitting on the market depreciating?

How much is bubble price drops and builders not wanting to build for pennies on the dollar? People just can't afford as much home as they once could because they can't get ridiculous loans to cover it any longer.

How much is over building of both homes and apartments? It has been like a race to build apartments here in Houston over the last decade.

I bet none of this has anything to do with "green" building issues. Building codes and lack of supplies for green building is most likely running full steam ahead. I bet it is any way. It takes extra resources to meet these needs, but I just don't think it is the key issues here for slowing things down.

Glad I'm not trying to sell or buy a house. If anything, I wish I could drop a couple bucks off my loan. They never reward honest hard working people for making their payments. Only the people who didn't pay any attention or who deliberately tried to get more house then they can afford are being helped out of debt. Sad. If only I were more devious in my finances. Curs this honest heart of mine.

Goals

Goals were so important at work that I had the following sign in my to do list to keep me focused. I turned them in this afternoon and HR accepted them. We had to do this sort of thing at my old employer all the time. For some reason, this one caused me some stress because I ware so many hats at this job.

#############################
#  GG   OO   AA  L    SS  ! #
# G    O  O A  A L   S    ! #
# G GG O  O AAAA L    SS  ! #
# G  G O  O A  A L      S   #
#  GG   OO  A  A LLLL SS  ! #
#############################

Some issues

• First time round so the rules are a moving target.
• Moved offices in the middle of this task.
• Out sick one day.
• They sent us MS office documents and we had to convert them to Open Office documents to fill them in.
• It took time to type up that sign!

Notes:

The news is full of BP hate. It is more than just "their fault." The press wants blood. People are angry and looking for someone to hang. The U. S. government is all about blaming BP. The fingers are pointing in just about every direction. Good luck with avoiding it. Some people want to know if anything can just be an accident any more. The last time that BP did not have a dividend was WWII.

Get ready for $10 to $20 a month for a checking account if you do not have a credit card with your bank. Hey, they have to make up for all those lost fees somehow.

USA won. Sweet. On to round 2 or whatever they call it in that other football type sport. I sent the notice around the office to some random people and got yelled at because more than one of them was waiting to watch the game this evening on their DVR. oops.

From CNN "Gen. David Petraeus to replace Gen. Stanley McChrystal as commander of forces in Afghanistan, source tells CNN." It is a day for big news on the CNN emails. I've been reading about this all weekend. Apparently Stan shot his mouth off to Rolling Stone magazine about how fucked our leadership is. "Your fired for speaking the truth." Not the first time, won't be the last. This administration is threads to show strain at the seems. I hope he writes a book. That'll show'em

I cannot get Thunderbird 3 running on my system at work. It has something to do with the Firefox browser and the messed up install of Java on my system. It seems to work fine on other people's systems. I hate dealing with this junk. Why can't email just work. How many deckades have we had email? Still, it takes a frigging day to get someone set up in many cases. This is why I use Gmail at home.

The one child policy in China was scheduled to end or be scaled back right about now. Some estimate that 400,000,000 births have been prevented by this policy. Most think the current regime will keep the policy as is.

Kudzu saves lives

Well, some anyway.

McDowell County, North Carolina . According To The Source , A helicopter lost power and crashed while a videographer was shooting images of kudzu, an invasive plant species. The thick vines slowed the chopper's descent and allowed the crew to walk away from the accident without serious injury.
While filming aerials of invasive species in the North Carolina forests the helicopter lost power and crashed into the side of the mountain. Kudzu is one of many invasive species and it was the Kudzu that broke and slowed our decent and allowed us to walk away with only minor scratches. Pilot Chris Dupree did an exceptional job of saving our lives while the aircraft lost power. It was like sinking into water, that is how it felt to me as the power was lost.

Live Leak

No idea where that text comes from. It was in the video description.

I have to say that this is the calmest helicopter crash that I've ever watched the video of from the comfort of my living room. The pilot seems to have done an amazing job of controlling the craft as it lost power in my opinion. Great job folks.