Bias, what bias

Now we need the mainstream media to do the same thing.

As The Hollywood Reporter reported, the Caucus for Producers, Writers & Directors, a major industry insider honor society, passed a resolution in the wake of revelations springing from my book.
The resolution amended the organization’s charter to stand against discrimination based on “political ideology.” It was approved unanimously; only a few weeks after the Caucus refused to pass such a resolution, claiming that it was a “non-partisan” organization and therefore could not stand against political discrimination.
What prompted the reversal?
Public pressure from the Caucus’ conservative members, who resigned from the Caucus after one of its top members, was caught on tape stating that he was happy conservatives are blacklisted in Hollywood. Lionel Chetwynd, multiple Emmy nominee and Oscar-nominated screenwriter of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz, and Norman Powell, producer of 24 and former CBS Television executive, walked out of the Caucus.
...
But inside the Caucus, members were standing up for political openness. Greg Strangis, producer of "Eight is Enough" and "Falcon Crest," among others, insisted that the Caucus take up the resolution. He also penned a statement that the Caucus approved, supporting the ideal that the TV industry embrace a “diverse pool of talented men and women working in an open, free and supportive environment,” including “the American tradition of free speech.” The Caucus finally caved and accepted what they should have accepted all along: that discrimination based on political orientation is wrong.

Fox News

Now we need the mainstream media to do the same thing.

17 gigapixl

All digital photographs may have this zoom in ability in the future. All those stupid shows that say "We can just enhance the photo go get the identity of the killer." will finally be right. The company I work for makes a couple devices that might help turn something like this in to super high quality streaming video. They just don't know it.

Video editing

Huge video fail last night. it is frustrating, but it is frustrating for a good reason. It isn't me.

The KDENLive that installs by default in Ubuntu 11.x does not have all the features turned on. That is, the one I needed last night, the one that would have made it a five minute edit, was not there. "custom Filters" is greyed out in this version of KDENLive.

I know, I know. Download it, switch on the features you are willing to troubleshoot and build it yourself. I've heard this all before. I've done it before. I do not have six months to get this one to work only to start all over again when the next version comes out requiring a whole new tool set to work. I just want it to work. I just want it to work for free. I'm an evil consumer. I admit it.

I was trying to do another clone effect. However, I was also trying to throw in a dissolve. KDENLive would simply not let me do a mask, nor would it let me control the centering of a crop. Nor, would it let me do a region select. The tool is simply too flawed to get any kind of real editing done.

I've seen some of the special effects done by people on YouTube. it is amazing how easy these things are to perform in a $600 software package where, wait for it, everything you click on works. People go out of their way to show how they did the things that made their video special. It is awesome. It took them so long to learn how to do it that they show it off. This works out well for idiots like me.

If only I had a working software package to make these things work for me. The really bad thing is, there will never be a free video editor for Linux that works and does all the cool stuff that the pay software does. This is because of the support issue. The people in charge of the open source projects do not have time or resources to follow up on every support issue. They must be prioritized. The most common and most used broken things get fixed. Then comes new features that make them all look good. Then come bugs that make them look stupid. Then come bugs that are noticeable and easy to fix. The complex tools that only 2% of people will ever use are bumped far down the list as "I'll get to it." and really never sorted out.

In a money making venture, anything that is said to work, must work, or you might look like you are incompetent and loose customers to someone who has a less capable, cheaper software, but what is there, works. Adobe.

I'm not giving up. I'm just been clobbered by the failure of my tools again. It looks like there is a newer version on KDENLive's site for Ubuntu. "The packages in the default repo for Ubuntu 11.04 are deprecated." No shit. At least I have some options. Hopefully the only thing I have lost here is an evening spent cussing at my computer.

Notes:

Some bats have adapted so that their legs will hold their weight while hanging, but not while standing.

I tried the audio typing option on my phone. It kind of works. It does not comprehend sentences or pauses. It does not capitalize the start of a sentence. Names confuse it. There is so much editing involved that it is just faster to type what I wanted in the first place. I'm getting just a bit better with the keyboard. Not any faster, but there is a bit less editing per sentence.

Hey, ctrl-d copies the current line down in Notepad++. Who knew?

Back in the day, I thought Kelly was a girl's name. My middle name is Michael. I went by Mike for a couple years in high school. I switched back to Kelly when I went to my second semester of collage because everyone is named Mike it seems. At the company I'm with now, we have two of us named Kelly and one Michael. At one point a couple years ago, we had three people named Kelly and no one named Mike. I do not turn my head when he gets paged.

wd40

If you knew the trouble I had putting this together, you would much more impressed.

Field	Data
Title	Never enough wd40
Description	A little thing I do. This is me playing around with KDENLive. This is all from a single clip chopped up and bits used over and over to make the can appear.
Tags	magic trick wd40 wd-40 garage kdenlive video editing Canon Elph 300 Houston Texas
Link	Link

China's seams

I like the NPR stories about China. They went there five years ago to get a base line. The story yesterday was particularly telling. Some of the seams are showing strain apparently.

The commentator mentioned that the building with the consulate looked brand new, if grey and drab, five years ago. It still looked grey and drab, but now, five long years later, the building looked 35 years old. Five years ago he deliberately got off on a couple wrong floors and found a wasteland. The same thing happened this time, except there were no elevator call buttons to get back on the car and continue his journey. They had to bleep his response to that.

Good journalism, and front NPR no less.

China is huge. China is gargantuan. China is on the move. China builds everything. China has many mouths to feed. China has a government that insists on controlling its people to the Nth degree. China is is full of people who are just as smart and just a curious as you. China is full of people who are not aloud to complain.

I've been talking a lot about China lately. They are no longer this strange block of a billion plus people across the ocean any more. They are now a more familiar block of a billion plus people across the ocean. The more I learn about china and the Chinese people, the more I recognize that they are not only human, but have the same crap going on in their lives as we do. This does not really make me empathise with their government. I do not want to live under the Chinese government.

Every time I hear about the great firewall of China, I think how much our government would love to do the same thing. Trust me, our government would love to only let people have access to web pages that they control and that we pay for.

Are we indeed on our way to a world government? China is getting more like the U. S.. The U. S. is getting more like Europe. Europe is getting more like the middle east. The middle east is getting ... more like every other part of the world. I don't think it will all lead to a world government so much as a more homogeneous population who are all sick of their governments.

Notes:

What if the devil comes to us all beside our deathbed and offers us one more minute, one more breath for that price he always demands? Why would the dark one bother coming at any other point in our lives? There is a really bad novel in there someplace.

One of our marketers just loved the control some of the companies like VMWare and Oracle have over their customers. From memory "Some high level manager can just pull a price out of his ass and everyone has to pay it."

Conversation with a coworker

• Photography
• I buy cameras with the video it shoots in mind more than the pictures.
• Every device has a camera on it. This is a good thing.
• Should cops destroy people's cameras/phones when that could be evidence?
• Wide Range Photography and how even cheap cameras try to do it these days.
• Social media at work
• Google Plus is pretty dang cool. We have some chat room kind of software at work, but we want Google Plus at and for work to get our messages across. Circles are a requirement for all future social media.
• We could use media beyond the written word for explaining things.
• Facebook sucks even more now that we have both started using Google Plus. How long before Facebook steels their thunder?
• Video games
• We reminisced about how people say modern games suck and we would have killed for something that good only a decade ago.
• Video games do a lot of photo tricks to get the job done.
• I haven't plaid games in way too long. It comes from using Linux at the house.

The Chinese economy

"Will the Chinese economy continue?" The journalist who asked that question meant "Will the economy continue the way it is?" I don't remember the answer the person gave. My answer is yes.

The Chinese economy will continue to ram forward. The government will use it as a means of controlling as much of the world as they can, or they will lose control of it and it will rip the country to pieces. But, the Chinese economy will continue. It has so much momentum that it will be a steam roller or a mountain slide. It will keep going though.

Many years ago, while talking about the breakup of the Soviet Union, I heard someone say that the black market and the Russian Mafia were more or less unaffected. The more turmoil, the more opportunity. People are people. One person has. Another person wants. It turns out the wanter has something the haver wants. It is the same old story.

If there were no government, there would still be people. There would still be commerce. There would still be an economy. The people doing the trading would be the only one's making profit. No one else would have come along yet and said "Give us some of that money and we will make sure you don't get roughed up. Be a damn shame if someone came along and just took your stuff, wouldn't it?"

So government is a protection racket. Capitalism is a pyramid scheme. Get over it.

Hate

I've gotten to the point I can't stand listing to Obama's voice. Every time someone puts him on, I fast forward or pull my ear plugs out of my ears. This must be how all those people felt about George W. Bush a couple years ago. Sick of him and sick of everything he says before he says it.

Having said this, I cannot say that I hate Obama. I just don't want him to be president any more. I just know that the next election will be close if there is anyone on the Republican side who can stand up to the task. The only chance that Obama will not win reelection in my mind is a black female republican coming out of the weeds and taking the reins. This is not going to happen.

Are all U. S. Elections going to be based on which produced group is most sympathetic? This is no way to run a country. We have a long list to go through. Gender, sexual preference, We will need a Jew a Hindu a Pagan. Then comes the nationality question. it says the U. S. president must have been born in the U. S.. Isn't that un-PC?

It is not lost on conservatives that Obama has done most of the same things that Bush did and yet, the press have given Obama a break and the benefit of the doubt on every turn, every time. GWB was pummeled every second for everything. The pure hate came out. When there was nothing to hate, people made stuff up. Still do.

The class of person that is really catching it in teeth right now is conservative women. Any strong conservative woman who sticks her head above the battlement gets it bit off by the press. Again, people are living their lives to discredit these women. When these women make the decisions that feminists have fought to give women the right to make the that decision, those feminists condemn these women for making the decision.

The hate pouring out of our press is staggering. Many in the press don't know they are bias because they are surrounded by other people in the press who believe very close to the same thing they believe in. They seem to believe they are all in the middle. This happened because of a several decade long trend of liberal people taking over academia. There are precious few conservative in the area. People who are conservative and believe in conservative values are systematically weeded out of the path to fields like academics and communications. Add on top of this trend that conservative people will typically gravitate to field where You "do something" rather than just talking about it. Engineering comes to mind. This is far from 100%. It does happen.

Liberal or progressive or whatever folks call themselves this week are still pissed over the defeat in 2004. They genuinely feel that the election of GWB was stolen from Gore. Their guy was ripped off. I'm not sure what to think about this. I cannot blame them for being upset. I can blame them for playing dirty at every point from then on. Politics is becoming a field where the last person standing gets the job. Honest people don't want in. You have to be crooked to afford to play. Which side your are on doesn't seem to matter any more.

Hate is a bad thing. Hate is even worse when you do not realize you hate. Hate is at it's worse, when it is disguised as right, balance and good.

Notes:

Italy is the new Grease. Italy has 120% of GDP in public debt. The U. S. is headed there. The timing really blows because the rest of the world is ready for a Europe financial collapse.

Someone says that Mutual of Omaha nature show staged several of the shots they captured. In some cases, they would kidnap a baby gazelle and release it in front of a bunch of lions with the cameras running. I'm crushed.

Italy was a cluster fuck when I was a kid. Now, they are talking default. Italy may be too big to save. They may just have to start acting like a responsible entity. Have you ever tried to watch Italian TV? Something about that sentence makes me think that responsibility is just not the highest bullet on shopping lists in the country.

"The whole world is three drinks behind me and it is time they caught up." -Humphrey Bogart. I wonder if he remembered saying it.

California is taking on Amazon for state sales tax. Amazon is fighting back. If Texas does the same thing, I will be forced to buy less. It isn't that I am against sales tax. The pie, my wallet, has been sliced. Anyone who wants more pie means someone else gets less pie.

Clouds

Field	Data
Title	Cloud time lapse
Description	Just messing around. This video took three charges of my battery. The camera is facing more or less north. Virtutes Vocis Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons "Attribution 3.0" http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Tags	clouds 6th floor time lapse timelapse Houston Texas
Link	Link

The giggles

Listing to Shurlock Homes on an Old Time Radio station.

Homes and Watson are traversing a rain storm. They come to a cabin or some other place. They run in to the dark room.

Watson says "It is as dark as the inside of my pocket."

"I found a lamp. Have you a match?" Asks Homes.

"The matches in my pocket feel like spaghetti." Watson comments.

I don't know why, but this sent me on a giggling fit this morning in my office. I missed half the rest of the episode. It was one of those time where you just keep hearing the punch line in your head and giggling. I tried not to be too loud because I didn't want to explain the stupid joke to anyone walking down the hall.

Perhaps, I needed a laugh.

It didn't make me laugh, but it does make me moan to hear Homes and Watson hock Clipper Craft Men's suites for only $45.

Notes:

A woman's orgasm is like taming a lion. Just when you think you have it whipped, it bites you in the ass.

Don't store patent information on the cloud. At some point, someone is going to buy a cloud service just to get to a particular user's data. They will change the terms of service without notice and just take what they want. Do not rely on the cloud.

Now that I have a Google plus thing going, I officially give up on Tumblr. Something had to give.

Couple of short clips

Field	Data
Title	Popping the woater cooler
Description	I spend so much time at work that I have to shoot what videos I can.
Tags	water cooler jug cloud shadows work Canon Elph 300 Houston Texas
Link	Link

DIY POV

Field	Data
Title	DIY POV FAIL
Description	Attempt to make an on the cheap camera mount for my head. I road my bike around just long enough to figure out that this device is not going to work the way I want it to. I have some better ideas.
Tags	POV bicycle ride camera mount head hat zip-tie flexible tripod Canon Elph 300 Houston Texas Harris County
Link	Link

Z little VW zat coult!

Not sure why I like these things. I think my parent's had something similar when I was very young.

Users!

Just another day in IT.

"My network is dead."

I ran around the office pinging all over the place. I tracked down the machines that were affected. I reset some switches. The wires in the wall are not always obvious where they come out. Some bounce from one office to another. That is really annoying. It makes diagnostics a pain in some cases.

This one office had a switch hanging off the wall that had no power cord plugged in to it. "Ah-ha!". Back up. It turned out that someone had kicked the cable. The person who sat at the desk knew about it and didn't bother telling any one because her stuff still worked. She laughed about it. All i could think about was all the desks I had to duck under, all the wall jacks that I had to play with to check, the ladder I had to use to check the jack in orbit, the people I had to kick off their machines long enough to ping. Just rude.

One thing about running around fixing something for an IT person is that people see you and remember all the frigging problems they have. I had to stop, after fixing the other issue this time, and hook up someone's printer. someone else complained about a fan that was too loud. Someone else asked about a bad switch from the previous day. Someone else needed a KVM. Every other damn thing going on.

The funny thing is, I'm terrible at multi tasking. I can't keep things straight between tasks. I stand there for a second and have to reprogram my brain with what it was I was doing before.

Just another day in IT.

End game

One of the biggest complaints from law enforcement is the lack of control over information. There are any number of videos of police beating up people taking video of them on the job. Law enforcement gathers mountains of information every day on so many people that sifting through the information has become all but impossible. If they didn't gather so much information in the first place, this would not be a problem. But, then they wouldn't have all that information to be so upset over.

Cloud computing was supposed to be a god send to law enforcement. They love the idea of having a search engine attached to all the private data of everyone so they can just kick off a search and nab the bad people. Define bad. The U. S. already has a quarter of the prisoners in the world. What happens when the only people walking the streets are cops? I suppose they will want prisoners to have access to mobile phones so they can be more easily tracked.

Recently a big to-do was in the news about a computer program called Watson from IBM. It played a game of Jeopardy against humans. Now, I've hearing that the whole thing was publicity stunt in order to sell Watson to companies trying to do direct marketing to consumers. Watson can call you and send the sales pitch. If you interrupt, Watson can answer your questions and hopefully interact in a way that seems like a human on the other end.

The next step is the front line call center. Beware when you don't hear a bunch of hub-bub in the background when talking to tech support. You might be on the phone with a robot.

The next step after this is to put Watson at drive through windows. Then to replace cashiers at the grocery store. Then taxi, truck and bus drivers. Next goes all forms of reception on the phone or in person. Then accounting and book keeping. By this time you will notice the police and fire dispatch are run by Watson. Watson will get several talk shows because by this point, many personalities will have been programmed in. Individual instances of Watson will have been programmed to react in specific ways to specific attitudes and accents. All in the interest of diversity and political correctness of course.

Watson will learn to use a child's voice for some requests and a demanding dominant male voice for others. Some people will respond better to a female voice. Watson will learn to say things is a certain way to achieve the goal set to it/him by its/his human owners.

The whole point of communication is to change the behavior of individuals. The only purpose of creating a computer that can communicate to humans is to manipulate their behavior. From signs that says no left turn to an ad for grapefruit juice to attending a graduate level course on particle physics, it is all to modify the behavior of the person who is being communicated to.

Server side

The cloud is dead. Long live the cloud.

Back when I was a kid people used servers for the crunching of numbers. They used dumb terminals to tell the servers what to do. The servers were in a centralized location so they and their data could be better controlled.

Someone realized that the dumb terminals were getting very smart. Let's offload some of that number crunching to the not so dumb terminals and save ourselves some money. We won't need as big of servers and the electricity bill will drop.

Enter the PC (Mac, whatever). People run programs on their local system and are responsible for their own data. They pay their own electricity bill and only communicate to other computers on an as needed bases.

As things get smaller, they get dumber it seems. People want tiny devices that they can slip in their pocket. These devices cost five times as much and can only perform one fifth the math, but that is what people are willing to pay for so that is what they get. Some entrepreneurs speculate that they can offload the number crunching from the tiny devices to a server somewhere. People will be charged for this. Their data will reside somewhere else. People will be charged for this. Piracy will be all but impossible because every single byte will be tracked, identified, tagged and charged to their account.

Enter the cloud. Same as the old design, but because that model didn't work we will call it something else to prevent people who are still alive from that era from connecting the dots and being cynics about all the same problems this mechanism will have. Life expectancy of consumers is the number one cause of heart attacks in advertising executives.

Every time you click on something on a phone or connected device, you are causing hard drive in a data center to buzz and blink. Many of the functions on your device would not function without vast acreage of server farms backing you up. There are all kinds of tricks to lower the electricity usage of these juggernauts, but it all boils down to the cloud costs a fortune to run. It has gotten huge and is now over taking 2% of the energy produced in the U. S. according to the EPA. Something must be don.

All the tricks to make the cloud more energy efficient are great, but are doomed to failure because they are still consuming electricity. The real solution is to move the computation from the cloud to the devices. That makes charging for every click a bit more difficult. The cost savings may make it worth the while of the people who want to make all the money. You can't have it both ways. If you want control, you have to expend the resources to exorcise that control.

NPR just had a story on this subject. The last paragraph basically said that the cloud will be offloaded to the local devices. This means, not only will I be charged for my bandwidth, but I will be charged for the power and bandwidth that the cloud is using on my device.

Notes:

The Olympics are doomed. Genetic engineering cannot be banned by sports. We are deliberately changing ourselves, hopefully for the better. Cancer, intelligence, elimination of all kinds of genetic diseases, there are all kinds of reasons for genetic engineering. We will eventually get sick of blond hair and blue eyes. Competition will work in to it. This must be taken in to account when you think about sports. The attitudes are changing. A lot of people say "Let'em dope." or have two sets of games. Not sure I care if I'm honest.

Casey Anthony gets time off for good behavior and will leave the jail next couple days. Hey, she didn't kill any kids in the joint. That's good behavior, right?

Hey, did you know that Exchange 2003 takes a day for changes to the user accounts to show up in the emails? I did. I do. Funny how people don't believe me when I tell them this. Everything has to happen right now. Isn't that how life works? No. The queuing system in the database for Exchange 2003 has a slow tick.

The batteries I bought forthe phones will not work. The charger is useless. I'm out $23. Fuck me.

Network

Someone emailed me today that they were having trouble with a network printer. Half the time they hit print, it just didn't print. The other half of the time it seemed to work fine.

I tried pinging the printer and found dropped packets. This is yet another time where ping flood saved the day. The printer answered pings, but would drop 4% of packets when a ping flood was thrown at it. Quick way to determine that the network connection is shit. This can save hours of diagnostics and trial and error replacements.

Great, I swapped out the switch that was collecting dust beneath the table upon which the printer sat. The printer began printing without issue. The computer next to it, however began acting as though the cable were pulled from the back of the computer every 12 seconds. This rendered the computer almost usable.

The computer had two network jacks on the back, neither of which seemed to work. It seemed to work a minute ago. All I did was try a different switch. I hadn't paid any attention to how well the network connection to said computer worked before pulling the buggered switch. It turned out that having two network connections was merely a distraction. I took time to get the connector on the motherboard working only to find that the second auxiliary NIC had been added for a reason. Killed an hour.

Booting the computer in Linux via a live CD solved the IP problem. This seems to suggest that the issue is due to a software issue with XP. Perhaps a driver update or reinstall would top it up and send me on my why with a whistle. ... No.

It turned out that the original switch had one problem and the replacement switch had another. Once I grabbed a new in the box switch and placed it, all problems seemed to vanish as though they never happened. There goes three hours of my life I will not get back.

The moral of this story is that computers suck. At least I got the satisfaction of tossing the two old switches in the trash with a thump. That was satisfying.

Bus entertainment

Overheard half of a conversation on a mobile phone this morning while riding in on the bus.

"Why you be wantin' to start games. I got no time for games."

"Look fool! I ain't at home."

"I didn't shoot up your truck. I ain't got no gun. I ain't the only one who hates you."

"Why you be wantin' to start games. I got no time for games."

"Erbody in Alief got guns."

"I ain't in Alief fool. I'm on the bus." (As though people are handed a firearm upon entry to the Alief area.)

"Why you be wantin' to start games. I got no time for games."

Apparently, you have time to talk to this fool person. That is the gist of it anyway. I had to stop myself from cracking up and pretend I wasn't listening. We weren't that far from Alief.

Icon update needed

I'm looking at the icons on my phone. I worry an update may be in order.

The call and hang up icons are an old time phone hand set. The actions they depict are picking up the receiver and putting it back down. I have one of these on my desk at work. I haven't worked with that in a while because I use a headset for the most part. All the phones in my life are pretty much push button. Still relevant though.

The settings icon is a round dial. Those are rare as hen's teeth any more. Some radios in cars still have them. BMW uses a magic nob kind of controller for their in car computer. Guess it is at least relevant still.

The video icon is a film projector, an aperture, or a piece of film. None of which are actually used in the video system on the phone. Now that movies are going digital, are there any situations where people use film on a daily basis?

The camera is an aperture or a 35mm camera. The noise it makes is that of a single reflex lens camera.

Both the mail icons are paper letters sticking out of paper envelopes. How much longer will that be relevant? Most everything will be handled electronically or by courier in the future I bet.

The map app is a fold up map. When is the last time you used one of those? I haven't even noticed key maps much any more. The cops use the key map numbers, but not really key maps. I'm pretty sure they have all the map stuff on their in car computers.

The calendar is a spiral bound flip calendar.

The contacts app is a Rolodex. Has anyone seen one of those in the last couple years? I used to have one that I didn't use. this is what set me off on this post. I heard the term Rolodex in one of those old time radio shows I listen to. They had locked up their Rolodex and they had to break in to a desk to retrieve it.

Surely there are a bunch more icons out there that could use a face lift. I remember someone saying the hands in the handshake icon for the network connections should have had gloves on. That was a while ago.

Office productivity suite

So many people don't like OpenOffice, now LibreOffice only because they have learned Microsoft Office. You must do things differently. You have different options. Not everything is the same. LibreOffice is highly capable. There are a couple things like editing PDF files that Microsoft Office doesn't really offer. The Draw program in LibreOffice is very nice. I put it on par with Visio and illustrator for the average user. Professionals would find fault, but it is all there as far as I need.

Some people get it. Some people realize there is more than one tool for the job. There is a time for each tool. We have a bunch of linux developers at my office. They can only use LibreOffice on their linux boxes. We have some windows machines set up as windows office servers for those times they can't get things done. A couple people insist they need those machines for every text only document. Give me a break. They are just closed minded.

I'm closed minded on so many things. I cannot really point fingers. I do anyway because this is my blog and I have the keys. So, nya!

Notes:

I don't remember the walk in this morning. This guy in the elevator "I see you walking ..." A lot of people see me walking. I felt like reminding him that I nearly beat him to the elevator. That would have been the cynical thing to do.

A buddy asked me yesterday why I was in such a bad mood. I responded I'm just not a happy person. This is who I am.

Frigging every one at work is sick.

I have a hard time telling when I have files highlighted in Vista. It has to do with the crap video card installed and the color theme that I'm using. The high contract settings don't work worth a crap either. Things just vanish when you try to use those themes. Bastards. This is due to a lack of testing. Anyway, I found a setting under folder settings that uses check boxes next to the files to show you which is selected. I thought this was the dumbest thing ever. Until I needed it.

Frigging cats

Notes

There is a study out that says people who use sweetener substitutes gain weight because the artificial sweeteners do not satisfy the craving for something sweet. Your tung may not know the difference (right), but the rest of your body does.

All the big GUI interfaces are headed to a tablet interface for both tablets and computers. This is to provide a more contiguous interface so they don't have to support multiple interfaces. In five years, there will not be computers as we know them for sale. They will all be some form of tablet. If there is a separate box that they call a CPU, it will be controlled via a tablet interface instead of a mouse keyboard and monitor. I for one welcome it. This means no more KVMs.

Follow the money

• The U. S. issues a Treasury bill.
• The Federal Reserve, a private company, buys 80% of those treasuries. This means the U. S. owes the private bank of the Federal Reserve the money.
• The U. S. then uses the money just borrowed to buy back old Treasuries, pay off old debt, from, wait for it, the Federal Reserve and China mostly.

When is it going to come out that the Chinese owner the Federal Reserve?

Family Wagon

Field	Data
Title	The family wagon
Description	Fourth of July (on the third) celebration. Elle has a $10 wagon and gives us all rides.
Tags	happy child wagon drive way fourth of July Independence day 2011 family fun celebration Canon Elph 300 Fort Bend Texas Missouri City Quail Vally
Link	Link

Working on a Saturday

Time	Do
Got up	05:30
Left the house	06:30 (about)
Got to work	07:23
Left work	09:03
Got home	10:23

Gone: 3 hours 53 minutes.

At work 1 hour 26 minutes.

Total commute time is 2 hours 27 minutes. That is a lame ratio.

I got to work and almost irremediably fixed the issue. I needed to wait around for someone to make sure all the tests were still running. This gave me time to kick off a low priority project of my own while I was there. I have wanted to make a Linux VM to eventually replace my linux machine. The Virtualbox software has an issue where it tells me a change is required in my computer's BIOS. That setting is just not there. This means I must use the 32 bit version.

Wish me luck.

Notes:

Someone left a cart full of old crappy equipment in my office. I hate that. I don't blame them. I'm the guy for such things. I bring in new equipment and get rid of old equipment. It still drives me up the wall. More, that they didn't say anything and I don't know who it was. I wish I could have thrown some of it away. It was just that old. Parts were usable. It all got filed. I'm running out of places to store useless equipment.

I ordered some extra batteries for the phones. Now my battery is lasting longer than it did before. It must have heard me talking about the purchase.

Bah. Have to go in to work tomorrow and fix something that will hopefully take 15 minutes. Need to mow and do a Sam's trip. BAH! I say.

Lunatic

Why is he waring a helmet?

Duck

Field	Data
Title	Duck
Description	The duck (joke)
Tags	humor funny Joke duck bar tender grapes Canon Elph 300 Houston Texas Harris county
Link	Link

Old Radio

I was listening to an old time radio of Philip Marlo today after lunch. I reached up to put a piece of Wrigley's Spearmint gum in my mouth nearly at the same moment that the old time advertisement came on. It was Wrigley's Spearmint gum. Crazy. Kind of made me stop for just a moment and think about all those people making living with radio plays way back when. Sounds like a heck of a thing to do. It also made me think that Wrigley's gum just might outlast radio as a means of entertaining the masses.

The next show had Shirley Temple and Carry Grant. They did a show called "The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer". Wow. I'm pretty sure it also had the guy who plaid Fred in Lucille Ball show. It is a story that says that people spend their childhood trying to grow up and the rest of their life trying to relive their childhood.

The very next radio show had the guy who did the voice for Fred Flintstone. Turns out that guy was in a bunch of old radio shows. I hear him often.

Believe

If someone is blind and they really really think they can see.
If they genuinely believe, ... It won't help them across the street.

Notes:

The opportunity cost of being a professional baseball player is 40%. That means, people who wanted to be professional baseball players who gave up the dream will end up making 40% more money on average. This is including the top paid people, which means the lower paid people are even worse off. -NPR, from memory.

I dug a kilo of pocket lint out of my USB key this morning. I was wondering why it only worked in half the machines. They were grossed out by the lint.

Really need to do more videos. I'm not highly concerned with quality any more. I suck at this too much to care. Still, like getting stuff out there.

VM

Did a bunch of VM work today. It is funny sometimes. You can't just unplug and plug the Ethernet cable for example. There are a few other things that are easier like changing the amount of RAM or HD space. Kind of fun. I had trouble moving the VM once I created it. It turns out the VMWare had just come up improperly and was refusing to restart nicely. I had to get all up in its grill.

It should have been easier. I missed a step that cost me some tome. I hate that. You try to learn as you go. I've done virtual machine stuff before, but not with VMWare server. That was a new animal. I've used the web page to create the shell and then install the OS by hand. This time I used the web interface all through Linux. It was kind of a pain in the ass. I had to start over a couple of times.

Did you know that to install Red Hat 6 with the GUI interface your machine must have at least some number between 512 and 1024 megabytes of RAM? I didn't try to figure out the exact number. I tried to Google around, but it didn't help. I'm hitting that problem more and more. It seems like Google only returns things for sale these days. If you are paying, you have a people fighting for your attention. If you are just trying to learn something, your answers get drown in the noise. That is the saddest thing I've ever put on this blog.

Get to do the same thing again tomorrow with a different version of the same distro. Hope that what I've learned over the several hours from today will help.

Excel issues on 64 bit Vista

We had a computer with 64 bit Vista running 32 bit MS office 2007. The issue was Excel would bog down like mad when you did a multiple paste or a fill. The recalculation took ages. It turned out the printer spooler thing was running in the background and the display was trying to keep up and filter everything through the printer definitions.

The default printer was an HP printer. Those drivers were generic and kind of crappy. I have issues with HP drivers being crap. They try to write software that turns your computer in to a front end for their printer. That is just not what I want to dedicate my computer to dammit.

The solution to the problem was to set the default printer on the computer to the Microsoft xdoc or docx (whatever it is) printer driver. You don't have to print to that printer, but it will let you edit the Excel document without trying to drag every passed through the knothole of the HP driver ecosystem.

This has further significance because our new IT guy really has his eye on the ball. He has experience and is just plane good at his job. I was able to come up with this solution because I think "What would have the programmers have tested against?" when I troubleshoot. He tried it with the user and it worked. He has shown me at least fifteen things so, I guess I was due.

awwwww

Wood

Ever split wood? I have. I'm not going to tell you what I would have been willing to do to use one of these things for fifteen minutes.

Mine. mine. MINE!!!

seagull takes off with this guys camera. Pretty cool to watch a birds eye view of the street at night as the bird fleas the scene. I just want to know how the guy found his camera.

Bike

Field	Data
Title	I want to ride my bicycle
Description	I haven't gotten on a bike in years. Pulling some maintenance on the old two wheeler.
Tags	bike bicycle home cleaning garage summer day home work maintenance honey do Canon Elph 300 Houston Texas Harris County
Link	Link

What group are you protected by?

Mark Steyn on Free Speech at the IPA from Institute of Public Affairs on Vimeo.

I'm disabled, but being a white male apparently counters this.

Final Cut Pro

A bunch of fan boys on YouTube are drooling all over the flagship video editing software. It turns out that people have issues with the software.

Is Final Cut Pro X Apple's Biggest Mistake In Years?
"It isn't like Apple to stumble but the latest version of Final Cut Pro, the widely used tool in the professional video editing world was getting the reputation as the app that launched a thousand complaints, as the 955 reviewers and raters on iTunes collectively rated FCP as, "Two and a half stars," with 45% are giving the software one star, the lowest rating possible, bestowing on the program the dubious honor of being the lowest rated Apple software hosted by the company's digital store. Many complaints center around lost features. We used to be able to do this, and now we can't. You can't work with existing FCP Suite projects. There's no external video monitoring, no EDL imports, no backup application disk so good luck re-installing the software on the road without a good internet connection, and lots of unanswered questions about site licensing."

It doesn't work for me because I have no Mac. By the time you pay fora Mac and pay for the software, you could have purchased several computers and outfitted them with open source software.

Lazy

Why am I so frigging lazy? I have no taist for laziness in others. You would think that being a victim of laziness that I would have a tolerance for the affliction in others. No. It is the opposite. I am also, as it appears, inpatient. Someone just yesterday called me patient. I nearly fell out of my chair. I worry that she said this in order to make me more patient. Perhaps she was sensing my impending sigh.

Looking for a video to shoot. I want to dig the bike out of the garage and make it ridable. There is nothing wrong with the bike. It just needs some lube on the chain and air in the tires. Those tires are old. Here is hoping they are not rotten. Not evern sure why I want to do this. Not sure where the itch came from.

IBM real deal

For the last couple days, I've been messing around with an IBM server at work. It has perplexed me greatly. There is nothing so quaint as video on the box. There is not really a place to plug in a keyboard. There are USB ports, but they Are not really for such simple things as input devices.

On the front of this box is a little pop out control panel. This has a USB device on it. This USB plug does not go to the computer. This USB plug goes to the control device that tells you how the real computer part is doing. Even if the main board blows up, the memory packs it in and the CPU has a melt down, this bit of the box will work and dutifully tell you in no lack of detail precisely how fucked your server is.

It has hot swappable fans.

The instructions were very clear. Hook up a null modem to the serial port and establish a dumb terminal connection. Done. Wait, no, it isn't working. Why is there not any data traveling across the serial connection? What the hell?!? I just hit a brick wall. The damn thing will not talk to me. I made plans to call IBM on Monday and ask them how much of a dumb ass I was being. I knew I was doing something wrong on a very simple level. The documentation made perfect sense. It was clear and complete. I was missing something at the rookie level.

The serial port I was plugged in to looked like this. This is the kind of device I look for when you say the word "serial port". It turns out that IBM has a different standard when it comes to console connections. They look (in fact are) single line phone cables that use a converter from the more standard D9 configuration. This is exasperated by the fact that I'm using a USB to serial convirter. Ate least I was getting the same results in both Windows and Linux.

Thank goodness our new IT person had some experience with IBM servers before. I would have been lost. It did make me feel much better that the two smartest people at the company on such matters also had a hard time figuring this out. Now I know.

Notes:

Guy on the elevator said I was showing off by waring a rain slicker this morning. it was pretty funny. He asked me if it had been six months since I had to ware it last and I had to agree. Not sure the last time exactly, but it has been a long while.

Got to hook a Mac to the network today. It took me a while to figure out that you have to type the name in to the web browser in order to get where you wanted. Kind of fun.

Had the most informative and educational lunch of my career today. No, I'm not talking about it.

Sam Spade got $25 a day plus expenses.

Notes:

Rain! The walk in this morning was nearly dry. I was worried there for a bit. The breeze was awesome. it was cool and wet. The air smelled like rain. The plants seemed to sigh relief. As I exited the bus it was sprinkling. I was able to jog across the street and in to the building without getting much more than a couple drops on my head. I hope there are more than a couple drops. We really need the rain.

One of the blogs I read says that some solar panels are radioactive after their lifetime use expires. I really need to look this up and find out if this is true. The cost of installation of solar panels is bad enough, but if you need to get rid of them with radioactive waist, that is past the limit. I bet that is not in the contract that some of those tree huggers signed over the last couple years. Perhaps, the definition of radioactive is at play.

Remember when I said I had setup a real honest IBM server? I was wrong. I'm now attempting to setup an IBM PPC "Power System" server. This is the real thing. It has hot swappable fans for the love of God.

The new phones Nat and I are looking at have an on screen keyboard. The issue I had was editing once you typed. It turns out there are these swipe commands you have to used to get to the arrow keys in order to edit what you have already typed. I used a buddy's phone and found it is is doable. Funny thing is I could do it at first, but then lost it. It will take practice.

Tsunami footage

Missed this one first time round. The guy survived, so says the text comment. It is pretty scary footage though. I can't imagine.

Monkey screwing a football

Can you say "duhhhhh!" boys and girls. I mean who needs to steer anyway?

Horse power

It isn't the horse power, it is the torque.

Care trailer fail

Why will U-Haul insist that the vehicle you are towing with out weigh the vehicle you are towing by 50%?

Day

The day is nearly done.
It is nearly done well.
I tried God, a good run.
No lies to tell.

I find this day's end.
Maybe it finds me.
No time for me to lend.
Rest calls, leave be.

Tomorrow comes too soon.
Yesterday was fun.
Today made me a loon.
I'm calling it done.

Good night.

Lunch conversation

• Wal-Mart figured out that if you screw too many people, they let you get away with it.
• Jake can read the news ticker from across the room at McDonald's.
• The news woman looks like a lizard.
• Circle something-or-other
• Compared and contrast the different McDonald's pies.
• Weather and lack there of. It is hot.
• Magic tournaments plaid on our own time.
• A kid died at a Rave in Houston.

All in all, an interesting and short lunch.

Yee-frigging-ha

Two senior federal law enforcement sources say acting ATF director Kenneth Melson is expected to resign under pressure, perhaps in the next day or two, amid the ongoing controversy over the "Fast and Furious" operation in which straw buyers were allowed to illegally purchase large numbers of weapons, some of which ended up in the hands of cartels in Mexico.

CNN Headline News email

From what I have put together, also called "Project Gun Runner" the U. S. government let a bunch of drug traffickers buy small arms (assault rifles) from the U. S. and told the sellers to shut up about it. These guys were never supposed to get in to the hands of people who would use them. Apparently, the U. S. authorities expected the full shipments to stay together and not get broken up the moment the opportunity presented itself. Huge mistake.

This is a criminal level cluster fuck. It has been called "felony stupid". I hear that a border agent has been killed with one of these guns. Why would the powers that be let U. S. guns travel across the border? Because they want guns baned in the U. S.. Think I'm kidding? Goggle the story above, go past the first couple links. Did they think it was a good idea to let the guns be used in killings so they could then make a case more easily? Isn't that worse? Sounds like someone in charge at the moment.

Can you imagine if the media had a Republican president to yell at about this? There would be a mob with pitchforks and torches circling the White House.

Speaking of White Hose, how high did this conspiracy go? Is Kenneth falling on his sword for the president? No one admits how high. People, when asked "Why told you to do this?", keep responding with "I don't know."

Too big to get sued

The Supreme Court put the brakes on a massive job discrimination lawsuit against mega-retailer Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., saying sweeping class-action status that could potentially involve hundreds of thousands of current and former female workers was simply too large.

CNN Headline News email

All you have to do is screw a lot of people for a long time and you get away with it. Yet one more freedom that is out the window. I have friends who have worked for Wal-Mart. They have horror stories. I buy stuff at Wal-Mart. I feel just a touch of shame when I do. This kind of thing may not last that much longer because A) Everyone is buying their supplies from China. And B) China will not be the juggernaut of cheap labor for all that much longer. Manufacturing labor expense is climbing by 16% a year. That shall not stand.

Notes:

I'm tired of complaining about boom boom. They plaid all night last night. I got no sleep. This took it's toll on my work today. I saw them leave as I started my journey to the bus stop to go to work. It is so unfair. But then, life is not fair.

As I edited my videos this weekend, I noticed that doing a thing seems to go slower than watching it. That is, it seems like I'm going faster when I am in video. I need to to some time tests to make sure the camera is really shooting at the number of frames it says. Really, as long as the sound lines up, I'm not too worried about it.

First thing this morning, I wanted to capture a bit of video of the fountain with the sun shining through the trees. That is the way the sun shines on our building. The trouble is, just as the sun hits the best angle in my opinion, early summer, but there is a building in the way. This building casts a shadow at just the wrong time. I'll have to pay better attention over the next couple months to get the best lighting.

News letters? Really? There are some companies that insist on mailing me a news letter. I have RSS for the things I really want to read that are piratical. I have email for bills to notify me they are ready to pay. I have Twitter for complaining. I have a blog for things I want to say or really complain about. I toyed briefly with a news letter for personal stuff many years ago. This was when people first started paying attention to email. Before email became just for paying bills. I grew out of it.

Pandora closed down $3. They have never turned a profit. Maybe people have learned from the great tech bubble of 99, or whenever it was.

Surface

In 2205 a really crappy TV series was born called Surface. I'm hooked. It is all about the sea getting warmer because of these huge creatures that have been opening fissures from the deep.

This show has it all.

• Aquatic city
• Dragons
• Diving scenes
• German scientist expert
• Government conspiracies
• Mean girls who make the guy who caught one of these baby creatures think she ilks him. Then she laughs at him in front of all her friends. Then the monster eats her dog.
• Corny special effects

How did I mes this? Well, it probably comes from not watching TV in eight years or so. I really missed a gem here. Now I'm going to scour online sources for crazy fictional TV shows. I'll fail miserably, but the search should be fun.

Hell with space travel, we need AC in the desert

Air Conditioning the Military Costs More Than NASA’s Entire Budget
Kwame Opam — According to Steve Anderson, a retired brigadier general who served as Gen. Petraeus' chief logistician in Iraq, the Department of Defense spends $20 billion air conditioning tents and temporary structures for the military. That's more than NASA's entire $19 billion annual budget.
That cost comes out of the fuel needed to heat and cool tents on the front lines. However, the trucks that transport this fuel have become targets for IEDs used by the insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to Anderson, at least 1000 soldiers have been killed moving fuel.
Anderson believes that a simple solution would be to instead spray tents with polyurethane foam, kind of like the foam sealant you would use in your own home. In fact, an active $95 million contract to insulate tents is producing $1 billion in cost avoidance, proving it's both safer and greener than air conditioning the desert. Doing this while also searching for other energy-efficient solutions would save both money and lives.
The DOD just needs to hurry up and take on this kind of initiative. [The World via Grist, Image Credit: mumbojumbo / Shutterstock.com]

Gizmodo

But the president is serious when it comes to using space as a pathway to learning about the universe, right? No Virginia, the president doesn't care about learning. The president only cares that he is the one in charge, regardless of what it is in charge of. Behold the face of evil, your name is Obama.

Too many Mes

Field	Data
Title	Too many Mes
Description	Me screwing around at work.
Tags	high rise fountain mirrored glass Canon Elph 300 Houston Texas
Link	Link

Phone hell

What are the goals of phone hell? What are they really after when they send you around in circles? Well, it is not to help you get what you want. Why, because they are afraid they don't really sell what you want. They have to make what they sell look like what you want. They got to get their hooks in you.

• Get you off the phone.
  No human, no cost. Once you are talking to a human, you are costing them serious money. The idea is to get you off the phone as quickly as possible.
• Get you in to a long term contract.
  They don't make that much money off the devices. They make good money off loaning you the money to buy the device. It may not look like a loan, but it is. When you are done paying the loan back, they make money off you continuing to pay the amount you are used to every month. Only, now, you have no loan to pay off. You are handing them money at this point.
I remember a day when you had to notify Houston Cellular two months before the end of your contract to leave it. If you didn't, you were automatically renewed in a contract with the same terms and length. Trust me, the mobile phone companies think of this as the good old days.
• Sell you additional services.
  Particularly, the services that cost more every month. Text messaging costs more to keep track of than to provide.
• Sell you additional products.
  Well, duh.
• Do not get sued.
  The people you are talking to have a very specific script to follow. If they leave that script, they get fired. There is a line round the block for every job. They will never admit they are out to get you.

What bullets have I missed?

Notes:

It really upsets me that we have already started to run the 2012 campaign. This is just ridiculous. It will be over a year, nearly a year and a half before anyone casts a vote. The current president will basically have unlimited funds to pound his name in to the public ear. He will use every speech as president to push his reelection agenda. Every public meeting as president, he will be on the campaign trail. Every one else will be playing catch up.

How many boxes?

Set up an IBM box today. Nothing special about that. It took them 5 boxes, some boxes inside other boxes, to send us a full machine. Oh, wait, we still have no hard drive. I set it up on a USB drive. Hoping the drive is just on the way. I don't get it. My office looks like a UPS truck hit it, all for one system.

The RAM was ordered separately. That took two boxes. The CPU took one. The DVD drive took two boxes, a reasonable sized box in a huge box. Oh, wait. The DVD drive itself was in a separate box. Those boxes were for the mounting bracket and a changed cowling.

The way I figure it, the items all came from China. They then had to be warehoused for a bit and then reboxed and sent to us. They don't have time to repackage the items so they just pack everything in a bigger box. Since every single item comes from a different warehouse each item gets reboxed.

On a side not, it took me nearly an hour to figure out how to get the DVD drive mounted and in it's proper place. Between the metal bracket, the little spring thing they called a retention bracket and the cable, It was crazy.

All in all, it has been successful. Still no drive. Hopefully I can image it over later. It feels funny having set up my first real live IBM server. There is something about an IBM that says professional or "the real deal". Not sure that still makes sense, but there it is.

Bad sound

I found out this morning that the sound is off on my most recent video. It also happens to be my first real HD video. Great timing. About a minute and a half in the sound skips a couple seconds. The last bit of the video has no sound. This sort of thing has happened before. I blame the webm codec.

Yes, I watched the video before I uploaded it. The damage came after YouTube had hold of it. I really hate this. This means that other videos have been damaged this way as well. So much for webm format for now and so much for not back checking YouTube after an upload.

It the future, I will just have to watch the full video before uploading and after uploading in order to make sure it is not broke. This is time consuming. If I were making money on this task, it wouldn't be nearly as annoying. Taking last night as an example, I didn't get the video uploaded until 23:30. I needed to go to bed. yes, the video is only a couple minutes long. Still, it is one more thing to do before bed. There is no guarantee I'll notice whatever is wrong with the video after playing with it for a couple hours. The mind tends to fill in the blanks after the first several viewings.

Notes:

It was a pretty walk in this morning. The weather is hot and a bit sticky, but the breeze was blowing and the mosquitoes were taking a coffee break as I walked by. The sun was cool looking because of the pollution or whatever in the air. There were three of us waiting on the bus this morning. That is a bit more than just me. The donut shop smelled nice.

I wore my "Budget Ninja Costume" today. It consist of a black t-shirt that says that on it. I got more comments on this shirt than any other single shirt I've ever worn to this job. Not too shabby for a $1 after Halloween special that Nat found.

Board at work

Field	Data
Title	Videos with the new camera - Canon Elph 300 HS
Description	This is me playing around with the new camera while stuck at work on various occasions. This is mostly videoed in 1080P, but not all of it. When you are panning with this camera, it is a bit blurry in 24 fps. Maybe it is me.
Tags	compilation work atrium building entry high rise board camera video filters Canon Elph 300 Houston Texas
Link	Link

Work Pictures

Or, Go here

Pictures online

Last night I found out that Tumblr only lets you upload something like 10 pictures at a time. This is not acceptable for my needs. Hey, Twitter only lets you upload one at a time. It could be worse. This means ineed to go back to using some other system for my photos.

Yesterday evening I tried Picasa again. It only allows so much storage for free and then, of course, you have to pay for more storage. This is how they all work I believe. There is a way of making multiple accounts. This becomes unwindable of course. That is the idea. They have to make a living. I do not begrudge them that. I'm just broke.

I have my own server. It sits at my feet every night and just does it's job. Every five meinutes I have to change what software I use to generate the web pages. I don't know if the one I used to use is even available. There are so many these days. There was a day I put my own together. The code I wrote was terrable. I went through my old picture pages and found that they are all over the place in quality and look. The result of having so many different software packages is a patchwork of design.

What is the solution? My ISP charges me to upload the pics. Everyplace wants me to pay to store and make the pics available. It is getting to the point you can't just put up your content. They want to make money coming, sitting and going. It isn't worth it. People will stop putting stuff up if they have to pay for every click and for the lack of clicks. Not every step has to make money.

Perhaps I'll just find the software to make the web pages and put them on my own server. That is not the easiest way, but it works. My server goes down too often to be reliable. I'll keep looking for a better place. I enjoy posting pictures too much to let it fall by the way side.

Wish me luck.

Old Time Radio

I listen to old time radio. They had a show on about a woman being chased through a ravine. The frogs were loud and prominent. I can't remember the last time I heard frogs that loud. I have heard frogs that loud before. Just, not in a long time. Oh, she made it home, found the bad man in her home and killed him with the sewing scissors. A different time.

Another old radio show was about a doctor who was too sick to help all the dying people around him. He sent his dog to the outpost with some people headed there. They put the cure on the dog and he made it back to save the day. He made it back in the nick of time. The guy doing the dog sounds was pretty good. So cheesy. Still brought a tear to my eye.

One of the Loan Ranger episodes has a climax of the Lone Ranger preventing a crowd of people from saving miners who are about to drown in a collapsed mine until they confes and let the rightful owner out of the mine with them. Bit harsh. A different time.

Some of the radio shows have advertisements for war bonds. They talk about the “Nazi menace”. They put down socialism. They pick a side. That sounds so strange to hear someone officially and deliberately take a side rather than try to hide it in the choice of story or tone of reporting.

There is simply so much offered in these old radio stories. The list of people in these shows reads as a list of 40's and 50's movie stars. They used to take radio shows very seriously before TV. It strikes me that either the really bad stuff has withered and blown away, or the era produced a great deal of entertaining and thoughtful prose. Even with censorship, even with prejudiced, even with ajendas, the stories, content and the telling are good.

Notes

Today, I had to remove a seven year old computer from inventory. There was more dust than computer in some of those cases. I think of seven years as a million computer years. The guy who was working with me said he didn't think of it that way. He thought of it more in a useful vs not useful way. That is a better way of thinking about it. This particular machine had problems, but there are still a couple floating around doing a job.

No one cares, but I'm writing this in a word processor. I will then copy the paragraphs out and post them. I'm sick of typing out HTML by hand for raw text. LibreOffice does not support a good enough list of HTML features to be an HTML editor. I prefer writing in a word processor kind of environment for some reason. I suppose it just what I learned to use first.

Looked up print servers today. They are little boxes you plug in to your network that let you plug a print in and just share it. These are on the same line as a NAS, network attached storage. They are simple purpose built devices that focus on doing one thing and do it as badly cheaply as possible without getting sued.

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

EAGG facts

There are only about 10 active inheritance.

• Sudoephadrine: Triggers the release of adnorapenefrine. Causes blood vessels to contract. Stuffy nose.
• Paracetamol and Acetaminophen: Inflammatory. It gets rid of the things that make you swell up.
• Codeine also 3 methyl morphine: Codeine is converted to morphine in your liver.
• Vic's or Menthol: Triggers cool receptors, feels good, but does nothing for pain. Does very little to make your better.

There are six billion people in the world. There five billion accounts for mobile phones. Someone said they went to deepest Africa and saw a Masi Warier texting.

That thing you heard about mobile phones causing brain cancer? Well, the increase was called out to be 40% higher. Higher than what? The example given was: If the chance of getting brain cancer is 5 out of 100,000, then an increase of 40% would raise it to 7 out of 100,000. Again, media hype is nuts. Besides, there is no citation of what study the cancer risk people were talking about.

Heard on Einstein-a-go-go

Notes:

Someone told me there is a book about a guy who lost everything because of jury duty.

One of our employees is off on maternity leave. She answers her email earlier and faster than most of the people who are here. She is always quick. That is just the way she rolls.

Smoking really does have a weight control component. They have finally figured it out. The details are complex. Let's just say that it is real and they now know why that when someone quits smoking, they gain weight. -Naked Scientist

Scientists are showing promise at getting the human heart to rebuild itself after a heart attack. This is using stem cells. Good thing we are fully funding stem cell research in this country. (sarcasm) -Naked Scientist.

The U. K. government appears to be telling people that they need to be employed and if they are employed they need to be happy they have a job and stop complaining about the job market. That is one interpretation. Employers want people to be desperate. That is true all over the world. Employers seem to be the only one's who have the money to affect politicos. Nothing new here. The news is starting to let the mask slip in rare cases.

Half of Main Stream Media says we have extreme weather all over the globe and the other half says that what is going on is a glut of mass hysteria and a normal weather pattern world wide. East Texas has a drought and the mid west has a monsoon. Sounds about right.

Have to install Windows on a drive just to get the over clocking software to work. Then I get to over clock the machine. Then I get to put the old OSes back on the device so people can use them and complain that they are still too slow. It is maddening. It is a living though. I suppose it could be worse. I could have to have three people watching me to change a light bulb.

I get 20 views a day on this blog on a good week. I get about 30 a day on YouTube. I get 1 a day on Tumblr. I have no way of knowing how many I get on Twitter.

They had the fountain at work cranked today. I wanted to get some footage at lunch while the sun was hitting the spouts. I didn't get a lunch today. The morning sun comes in at about the best angle to get some good looking light. The building, however, reflects like mad and you get sun in the frame.

20% of Americans are unemployed or under employed. Stores are closed. You can't get a buyer for your house. It isn't a depression though.

Took yesterday off for contact lenses. It is amazing how much better these contacts are than my old ones. They cost about twice as much I think, but they are just plane amazing. I don't know how they sell the old ones any more. Still, you need a day off now and again.

It's funny watching and listening to media from Australia. They are in winter. The heat is killing us here. It is kind of nice knowing the weather really does have sense of humor.

Plane crossing

Honduras

Yes, another time lapse

Field	Data
Title	Home from grandma's house time lapse
Description	Pretty much what the tittle says. Please ignore the skips. The Elph 300 has a 10 minute limit on the video. Music: Airport Lounge Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons "Attribution 3.0" http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Tags	streets time lapse timelapse trip home I-10 toll road beltway Conroe Houston Texas Canon Elph 300.
Link	Link

Some videos

These are mostly from Gizmoto.

positioning systems I - falling objects from pe lang on Vimeo.

Why? I wanted to see that nidle shoot a drop in the middle of all those drops and a cascade of joining take place or something. What is this machine needed for?

Hector Thunderstorm Project from Murray Fredericks on Vimeo.

That's it, I give up doing time lapse videos. This one kils anything I ever hoped of doing.

Yup yup yup yup yup yup yup yup yup yup yup!!!

What I did today

This took me about 9 to 10 hours today. I didn't take a lunch today. I could have taken a lunch, but I just didn't feel like it. Today, I chose not to take a lunch. I wasn't hungry and I wanted to get things done. Did so.

• Setting up [a laptop] for redeployment.
• Active Directory purge.
• Round robin backup server offsite. Updates. Move files.
• Restage [a machine] for [a user].
• Image and setup [a laptop] for redeployment.
• Install Acrobat on a bunch of Unix systems.
• DHCP for [a user] with Manual changes.
• Misc Tasks that take less than an hour.
• IT meeting.
• Help Rusty a bit with an install.
• Deal with [a user's] printer.
• Join a Linux box to the network.
• Local machine setup 101 with a user.
• Jiggle a cable on a server to bring internal web page back up.

I'm trying to think of something that I learned today. I learned that Ubuntu local user do not like their home folders moved around. Well, I already knew this. I learned that you basically have to set the root password, remove your existing user created at install, move the files, and then create a new user at the command line while pointing it to the new folder to get this done.

Notes:

I'm trying to figure out how line wrap works in Notepad++. This is maddening. I want line wrap turned on. There are like fifteen kinds of line wrap on this crazy program. Ah-ha. Line wrap is what happens to the same line as you go past the end of the page. Word wrap is what I'm looking for. Live and learn. I was just writing this line to get something to test with. Enjoy.

Why does Dell put a program called Dell-eBay on their new computers? I do not know what this software does, but I guess it is for buying more Dell products using eBay or it is a discount system for Dell products by using the program to perform your eBay tasks. Bastards.

There is a small group of scientists who are studying how fish react to the sounds of a reef. The scientists are actually studying how the fish react to carbon dioxide content of the water. They say the PH of the sea is changing faster now than it has in the past 600,000 years. -The Naked Scientist.

Pics

Weather report

Today is sunny, hot, humid, partly cloudy. People are annoying for some reason. I've been in a horrible mood lately. Everything seems like it is a waist of time and useless. It is one of these depressed days where you think you should have just stayed in bed. Of course, I went to work, not for lack of sick days, but because I am a loyal employee and too proud to let a little depression keep me from performing my duties. All in all, the walk I took around the parking lot at least felt good. At least the breeze was blowing.

Where does this stuff come from? I cracked my head Tuesday. I had a nose bleed earlier today. Now I'm reporting depression. Perhaps this is a list of symptoms. What kinds of things exhibit when you clock your noggin?

Surely I'm over the hump. I mean, I will go to the doctor when it seems like it will do me some good. I do pull a "heck with medicine" every now and again. This may be one of those.

Last night I accidentally scratched my head and made it bleed. The sore is healing and thus itches. I was able to shave thank goodness. The hit is right on my nonexistent hair line. I have a history of doing this. Particularly I do it with scratches from the cat on my hands.

...

Weather! Yes. Expecting a rain storm this afternoon. Not sure where I heard that. South east Texas is in a drought. I can tell because the side of Westheimer I walk on is still passable even though it has not been mowed for over six months. There are a couple new shoots, but most of the grass is just lying over and has turned yellow. I'm not loosing sleep over it. My yard is only growing in spots. It looks even more like crap than normal. I refuse to water because of principle. We don't even own a sprinkler. We would have to tie Elle up to keep her out of it.

What scares me is the hurricane season. I like to hope that all the tornadoes and crazy weather has taken a bunch of energy out of the atmosphere. I know this is not how it works.

Notes:

Had a nose bleed this morning. I can't tell if it is related to the sinus trouble I had recently or if it has something to do with getting clobbered by a desk Tuesday. Hopefully the former.

Steve Jobs has been called the Evangelical tech. There is a cult of personality going on with this guy. This makes me worry when it comes to the Apple stock. Steve has been ill. he may very will succumb to his illness in the short term. That is tragic, but when he is gone, what is going to happen to Apple? I'm not a big fan of Apple. I respect the man and the position. Still, Steve is starting to look like one of the preachers who shout the end of the world.

Zelda is 25 years old. Mario is 26.

We should hire someone named Jesus, just so we can page him occasionally.

We have stomaches to kill bacteria. Ulcers are do to bacteria, not stress. From Einstein-a-go-go.

Algae reproduction

Field	Data
Title	Why do algae bread asexually?
Description	This is a joke stolen from Matt at work. He stopped me in the hall to tell it to me. He swore up and down that he wrote it.
Tags	sex asexual humor joke Canon Elph 300 Houston Texas garage
Link	Link

Lunch conversation

I missed half the conversation this time because we sat at different tables. The place we went, Smashberger, his long and thin. it has an outside area that a bunch of the pansies didn't want to eat at because -winy voice- "It's hot." I sat at the table with a bunch of nerds, like myself.

• Portable gaming systems and games that don't have anything added by the included 3D interface.
• Work.
• HTTP servers.
• DB servers.
• Java vs Python.
• New folks.
• Money.
• Vacations.
• The food.

Nothing about any of the three wars our country is involved in. Nothing about loss of freedoms. Nothing about women really. Nothing about cars or guns or houses or marbles. Just another lunch and forgettable conversation.

Notes:

One of my tasks today was to set up an existing laptop for a new user. The laptop had a ton of extras installed by the previous user. The machine seemed to run very slowly. Every single program I removed seemed to make the machine run a little bit faster. By the time I got to the bottom of the list, the machine was running pretty well. Goes to show that Windows is messed up. Just installing a program should not drag on over all machine performance.

My head feels a bit better today. Nat made fun of me. She was on about symmetry with the dent from the Maglite.

"If your are going to be two faced, at least make one of the pretty." Marilyn Munro.

Day

I really hate it when you have network issues that do not reveal themselves. We had a bad switch this morning that turned in to a general network is not work properly issue. I really hate this. Cody, our new IT pro, who seems to know his stuff and seems to have hit the ground running, was of great help. Out network is so freaking crazy that we had horrible issues tracking down the root issue. I'm not saying what it was online.

I managed to bang my head in the process of chasing wires. This one is on the right side of my head and does not quite match the old lump on the left side that I did myself with a Maglite.

Shiny

This makes me want to be a bad buy.

Rainy day

Field	Data
Title	Rainy day
Description	Power goes out. Gives me a chance to try my video light.
Tags	storm lightening rain blackout power out outage Canon Elph 300 Houston Texas
Link	Link

Weekend tally

How many of the tasks did I get to check for this weekend?

• Yard work - check
• Finish the bills - check
• Clean up around the house - check (more or less)
• Shoot a video - check
• Sam's trip - fail

Not too bad. Nat says she will do the Sam's trip tomorrow. Hope that works out.

Poetic License

Wouldn't it be nice if you could just crank out beautiful prows when you have nothing else going on? I've noticed that I feel the muse of writing most on days when I have the most going on. Days where I'm sitting on my tukes and staring at the walls, nothing comes to mind to spill upon the page. Maybe it just seems this way. Maybe there is no reality to my perception of do vs create.

This law of creativity applies to more than poetry. It seems like all forms of creativity hit you while you are doing something else. Perhaps this is why love has such prevalence. While folks are falling in and indeed out of love, they seem to ooze creativity. Whatever form of creation takes them comes in buckets. There was a Seinfeld episode on the subject. Men get smarter as they have less sex. Women get smarter as they have more sex. That is a bit off base of my theme here , but you get the idea.

Potential time killers

Ode to an air conditioner.

How dirty can carpet get?

Scour Hulu for that episode of SG1 you missed. (found it!)

The balance between security and escaping a fire.

The art of cleaning clean guns.

Surfing the net until you pass out.

Shoot the most boring YouTube video ever.

Those are almost creative suggestions. I had to stop myself from suggesting that you get something done round the house to alleviate boredom. That would just be wrong. What is the deal with not wanting to be productive when you are bored? If only there were a pill that would make people who are willing to sit and do nothing get up and do something. This would change how the world works.

How many times have I wined about not having two things. I lack get up and do it. I also lack stick to it. How different would my life be if I had these two attributes? Would I be happier? Would I be richer? Would I be alive?

All I wanted when I started this blog entry was to write a stupid poem that no one would remember.

Some random pictures

This week was about haze and reflections.

Yes!!

I love this!

The case went to court and the homeowners were able to prove they didn't owe Bank of America anything on the house. In fact, it was proven that the couple never even had a mortgage bill to pay.
A Collier County Judge agreed and after the hearing, Bank of America was ordered, by the court to pay the legal fees of the homeowners', Maurenn Nyergers and her husband.
...
So, how did it end with bank being foreclosed on? After more than 5 months of the judge's ruling, the bank still hadn't paid the legal fees, and the homeowner's attorney did exactly what the bank tried to do to the homeowners. He seized the bank's assets.
"They've ignored our calls, ignored our letters, legally this is the next step to get my clients compensated, " attorney Todd Allen told CBS.

www.digtriad.com

Banks seem to think they are above the law. Politicians seem to think they are above the law. Just because there is a crook in the White House doesn't mean they are right. The leader of the IMF may have to face attempted rape charges. He is not above the law.

The idea that you can get away with bad things because defending yourself in court costs too much for honest people to afford is tyranny. I don't know what to do about it. I have too much on my mind keeping the bills paid and food on the table. I guess that is the point. Only people who have money can afford to have rights in this very modern world.

Weekend to do

How many of these things will I get done this weekend?

• Yard work
• Finish the bills
• Clean up around the house
• Shoot a video
• Sam's trip

Longer term to do list.

• Get in to my 401K web page
• Consolidate 401K funds
• Take some classes for something somewhere (keep my mind in the game)

Me at about 25

I believed I was helping a friend named Seline move in to or out of a dorm room at UH.

Wind and rain

This is footage from a home security camera. Shows an area just north of where the real damage happened. Hard to believe so much damage was done until you watch this and think that it is just a bit off the worst of it.