Things left behind

Doll furniture made from coke cans and pin cushions.
Tools, shovels, screws, nails, lawn mowers, garden hoses.
Handles, knobs, casters, doorknobs, hinges by the box.
Brushes for horses, people, tools, cars, painting.
Gages, clocks, dials, Some glowed in the dark.
Switches, wire, meters, light bulbs, solder.
Scrap wood, metal, shingles, glass, pipe, cloth, leather, rugs, tile.
Hors shoes, table legs, chair backs, yard signs.
Batteries, flashlights, dishes, kitchen knives, decks of cards.
Bags for travel, dirty cloths, grass clippings, toiletries.
Headlights, door mirrors, wheel rims, cans of oil.
Hopes, dreams, offspring, memories.

Postscript

I remember being a child in my grandfather's garage, attic and basement. He had several lifetimes of stuff piled in every conceivable container. He bought and sold things. Did everyone from that generation? He had gone through World War II. He was raised in a real admitted depression. People from that era collected things. They wanted to be surrounded by things that they thought useful.

When I was a child the piles and barrels of things were a wonderland of treasures. Everything was rusted. Noting was in pristine condition except the doll furniture and a few other things that made their way to the front room on a shelf.

This list is more than his hoard. It is the combination of many places when I was a kid. A man named Bobert who raised my mom had a similar mentality, but not so much the hoard. He sold things as they came in to his possession. More often anyway.

My father has a garage full of useful things. He is very organized. I bet he can lay his hands on 90% of the things he owns without searching far. That last 10% is slop.

I'm working on a pile of my own. I have more possessions now than ever before in my life. Nat has more than I. Elle has many possessions. Our house is over stuffed. This is not a bad thing if it works for you. It does not work for us.

We are more than our possessions. I believe that possessions are fine as log as they help you be a good person and do not get in the way of you being a good person. You can't take it with you. You leave it behind.

The future is here

There are 160,000,000 females missing from Asia because of sex selection between conception and birth. This is more females than live in the U. S.. Many blame the ultrasound machine. Apparently it is easer to murder a baby before it is born than after. Many ultrasound devices are kept behind lock and key in Asia. There was an episode of ER that covered this idea.

More men, more crime.

Now they are testing babies before they are born for genetic testing. If you have a baby in your body with a horrible disease, would you get rid of it? This kind of thing is coming. Would your insurance deny you coverage if you say no?

Watch Gattaca (1997).

Someone moved a dead cat

Yup. on my walk yesterday, I noticed a dead black cat. It was in front of a building that is now a church. The area is maintained by some kind of yard crew.

When I went by today, I noticed the dead cat is one block to the west in the grass nearly blocking my path.

What gets me, is why didn't they just pick it up with a plastic bag and throw it in a dumpster like a normal person? What the heck happened there? Did the following conversation take place?

"Oh, let's pick that dead cat up and take it a block away and just toss it in the grass."

"Ya, man. We wouldn't want to just toss it in that dumpster 30 feet away. that wouldn't make any seance at all."

I would have kicked it out of my way, but I'm in sneakers today because I'm warring shorts. The next time I'm in boots I will probably do so. That of find a stick and do it. The idea of having dead cat on my person is repulsive.

A couple years ago, dead opossum was just off to the side of my path. For several months, I watched it decompose. I named him Fritz. "They killed Fritz! Little blue bastards! pew pew!!" 10 geek points if you can name that movie. Something made off with poor Fritz's head at some point. They mowed over him and left his corpse otherwise unmolested. One day I only noticed bones. Now, I cannot even find a spot of extra green grass. Poor Fritz.

Notes:

"The facts of life" premiered in August 1979.

I got an email last night on my gmail account. It was from "Microsoft" and said that since I was a Microsoft user I win a bazillion dollars as long as I give them my bank account information. Did I mention that I use Linux at the house?

Yesterday Elle road her bike for the first time without training wheels. We ran through the field next to the house. She needs to practise shoving off with one foot while peddling with the other. Training wheels given her the bad habit of putting both her feet on the peddles before starting off.

The history command gives you the time of each command but does not by default give you the date. You have to jump through some pretty ridiculous hoops to get it to do so. Example. When I look at the man page for the history command, you would think this simple task would have an override switch for the command line.

There is an old saying in Texas. "A chicken is an egg's way of making more eggs." It does too make sense. Because I said so. "You can put kittens in the oven, but it don't make 'em biscuits." That one makes sense too.

I comprehend how gyrocopters work. This does not mean I would want to fly in one.

Bad idea

I've sat down five times to make a rant video about the government. Every time I think better of it.

• Not what people want to watch on YouTube. They want cat videos and celebrity gossip. Not that I'm any good at that stuff either.
• Not what YouTube wants to put up any more. YouTube is trying to be come the family safe video outlet on the net. That is where the money is at.
• Not what I want people to think about me. I have a hard enough time getting past the on the edge scowl as it is.
• Is more of a blog entry than a video subject.

It has become unfashionable to shout about freedom from the mountain tops.

Some times I get an idea in my head and in order to move past it I have to do something about it. This is bad because so many times it is a bad idea that I shouldn't do anything about it. I am getting better at pulling the plug on bad ideas and moving on. This should have been a skill I learned in oh, lets say middle school.

Notes:

I don't know why, but I was early this morning. Well, I do know why. I didn't sleep well because of acid reflux. I ate a huge bowl of ice cream last night. It upset my stomach. I should know better by now. My urine smells like antibiotics this morning as well. The U. S. government allows more antibiotics in our livestocks than most other developed nations. It must be the reason we are all so fat. Antibiotics kill our digestive bacteria.

Many podcasts and online shows just use a number to identify each episode. I didn't think much of this until I heard a podcast that tried to do the numbering more like a magazine. They had volume, issue and even page (for sections I guess) all through the podcast. It was ridiculous. I believe they gave it up after season three or so. I'm surprised it lasted that long.

Why has no one come out with a tablet to compete with the Apple iPad? Well, ask Samsung who has been sued by Apple and cannot sell their competitor in the U. S. or Australia at least. Ask HP who read the writing on the wall and just canned all their plans for tablets and even PC computers. Apple has more cash than all the banks in Europe combined. They use this cash to sue competitors out of business.

Perhaps I'll start a conspiracy theory channel on YouTube. [begin sarcasm] There are not enough of those already God knows [end sarcasm]. I'm good at that sort of thing. I'm getting more cynical and devious minded as I get older. The term theory is not really correct in my opinion. Hypothesis is more accurate.

Funny hearing the term "living within our means" mentioned in liberal fiction. I've been hearing this recently. Normally, the idea of money and the fact that all things have some kind of cost is hand waved away in liberal fiction.

Good story

I listened to a short story about a couple thieves who use the cover of a poisonous fog to steel something valuable. People preparer for the fog by boarding up the windows and making sure they have the ships loaded and ready to sail as soon as the fog lifts. Some spend the fog in their homes, some the tavern, some church. These two spend it thieving.

This story is set in about the seventeen hundreds or so. It has set me off on a fantasy of the same thing happening in modern day. How would our world have been different with a regular disaster happening like this? I imagine no electricity, high perches and walky talkys. How would we organize against the invader? What weapons would we have to stop them. I'm thinking domes for defense for example.

Surely this is a sign of a good story and idea. I would link to it if I could remember which podcast I heard it on.

Lawn

I watered the front lawn for the first time in a wile. I we bought a new sprinkler for such tasks. It is one of those back and forth tsst tsst tsst tsst d-d-d-d-d-d kind of sprinklers. It would have worked too, but I couldn't figure it out. I mean, there is more to it than the range to and fro.

The placement it turns out is far more complex than one might imagine. Besides over spray there are things like hose tension and the angle of the spike in the ground to consider.

It also turns out the nozzle requires a tool to modify the distance or throw of the water. The contraption comes set to squirt as far as possible. This, in my case, causes as much water on the side of the house and sidewalk as on the grass. Getting the edges and crevasses of the yard are all but impossible.

Needless to say, I ended up watering by hand. I've found this action to be therapeutic. There is something soothing about watering the lawn by hand. I wonder sometimes if the plants do this or if I'm feeling an empathy all in my own head.

Notes:

They interviewed some director for an investment fund in Hong Kong. His fund is worth less now than its starting point a couple years ago. In other words it has lost money from day one. Not just in real terms, in number terms. It warms my heart knowing the magic orient is having the same trouble that the West is having. So many people hollered from the roof tops that China will show us the way. Not quite. The Chinese and the entire orient will have the same problems eventually. This is just how the system works.

What is the difference between a double dip recession and a depression? Well, many times someone who is drowning will get their had above the surface of the water until they just collapse from exhaustion and they die. Technically, you are are not drowning until you are dead. You are just treading water very badly, or failing to float. You are not in a depression until things are just that bad. Right now the world or at least the U. S. seems to be experiencing that bounce if you will before sinking again beneath the waves. I really hope I'm wrong.

The U. S. needs 125,000 new jobs every month just to keep up with population growth.

This week so far, I'm on a black coffee kick. I go through waves of wanting my coffee loaded with sugar and milk, or black. A couple of the guys here are coffee conscious of sorts. One is taking a class on coffee tasting. That is a bit much. Still, he can pick a great cup of coffee I'm told.

I heard years ago that disk drives got slower the farther out on the disk you ventured. I can believe it. Not that I do these images all the time I can watch a drive fill up and attest that indeed, as they fill up, they get slower and slower.

Almost a kiknd of fail

Field	Data
Title	Night ride (and complaining)
Description	Me riding the bike POV at night through my neighborhood. Aoso complaining about shooting videos.
Tags	green screen bike bicycle night ride POV maglite maglight complaining garage work light Houston Texas Canon Elph 300 KDENLive
Link	Link

Cool mall in Taiwan

I think this guy is in Taiwan. Anyway, I like the open air mall he is riding through. I like the idea of closing it down to vehicle traffic at night. I think he has ridden his scooter through the mall at night before. I might look up that video.

Notes:

A friend at work and I had a little discussion this morning about coffee. He brings in his coffee. The ... bilge we have at work is bad, inconsistent, bad, tastes like the inside of a Camel's ass, and is bad. Several of the folks at work bring in their coffee. I would consider doing the same, but it is just not in the budget of time or money. Oh, the biggest reason is my laziness.

Lunch conversation today consisted of where every one wanted to go and something about batteries. I didn't go to lunch with the rest of the folks because I'm broke. They went to Fudrudker's. I don't go there without Nat If I can help it. She likes the place.

Elle starts school next week I believe. This may have been her first summer off since starting school. I remember going back after the big break. I and most of the other kids were a wreck for about two weeks. It takes a great deal of effort to get back on track.

There are no dragons flying passed my window on their way to the fields to consumer our future.

Notes:

The bankers will not leave immediately if you pull their bonuses. They don't want you to think that is an effective deterrent. They will hang around for a bit then pull the trigger. Is this going to affect the customers? Well, the only place banks make get any money is from customers of some kind or other. Any change that costs the banks money will in some way affect the customers. It can't be helped.

Man, the stock market is circling the bowl.

One advantage of listening to old time radio shows like Superman and Sam Spade at work is the interruptions. They lead to me being able to listen to repeats several times and filling in the gaps as I go.

DNS

Domain forwarding is kind of interesting. There must be 200 settings you have to change by hand to make sure people trying to get to your site get to the place they want to get to. You have www.url.com, ftp.url.com, billyjoebob.URL.com all to worry about. These first set of characters before the first dot are called subdomains. The owner of the domain has control over them for the most part.

My blog here is plastickelly.blogspot.com. Blogspot has some script set up that when someone signs up for a blog at that URL, creates the DNS entry that points people to their blog. When someone enters www.blogspot.com they go the blogspot's front page, which I believe still pints to Blogger's front page. This is all done with domain forwarding which is done with DNS entries.

This morning I got an email that said "We got domain3. Please forward it to domain1." No problem chief.

I forward domain3 to domain1. Sounds easy. Well, I forwarded domain3.com to domain1.com. I looked at domain2.com and it was forwarded to www.domain1.com. I had to go back and change the forward for domain3 to say www.domain1.com.

It can take 48 hours for the changes to take effect. DNS is a funny beast. All the servers all over the world just talk to one another and eventually your settings make it all over the planet. There is as much voodoo as programming involved.

Will my changes make it round the planet in 48 hours of 96? I had to make the two changes one right after the other. Will the second change simply supplant the first? I doubt it. More likely One change will chase the other round the planet from server to server. With all the confusion of time stamps, I fear half the servers in the world will have one setting and half will wind up with the other. They will probably both work.

It took about an hour for the changes to take affect. No world wide game of cat and mouse. All quite boring.

Buckled road

Field	Data
Title	Street buckled
Description	That's about it. There was one minor mishap (crash). A truck lost some ground effects.
Tags	car vehicle street road buckled fender bender drought Houston Texas Westheimer Canon 300 KdenLive
Link	Link

Lunch conversation

• Baltimore Maryland
• Business trips recent and past
• Clover leaf intersections
• One way streets
• Bad neighborhoods and winding up there in
• Signage contrivances
• Local unemployment rates
• Adult temper tantrums in unrecognized cities.
• Street names that change with the political climate
• VMWare
• The concept of virtual machines is inefficient and only needed to make up for poor design in the first place.
• If VMWare could only lie to the OS about memory.
• I feel that our company will do well if we make a VMWare driver.
• Mexican food
• Good salsa going unused for lack of chips shall not stand! Well the person most passionate will stand and go get more chips.
• Baltimore has poor quality Mexican food. (This entry bounced a couple times between this bullet and the first.)
• More Mexicans means more Mexican food.
• I don't have a problem with Mexicans being in this country. I have a problem with people living here who don't pay a fare proportion of taxes.
• Virginia has some good Italian food near DC.
• The walk didn't feel nearly as hot as some other days recently.
• Know your lights, as in, don't bother running because the light turned red. The left tern people go next (Ken).

We ate at a little Mexican place across the street from our office. They have cheap sandwiches. I bought some cupcakes that were awesome on the way out the door.

MAL

I propose a new acronym for the lexicon. Recently, Google purchased Motorola for 12.x billion dollars. I say this is strictly for the patents. Why? Well, Apple and Microsoft get a portion of every Android phone because of patten lawsuits. Now, Google has all the patents from Motorola and can use them to fend off patten law suits by other companies who compete with them.

MAL: Mutually Assured Litigation. You want me to pay on your patents, I'll make you pay on my patents. This is how companies are going to defend themselves from patten infringement from now on.

Right now pattens are being used to quash what I would call legitimate competition. They are also used in a sort of camping scheme where a company buys up and creates pattens that are based on obvious and expected advances in technologies. They then sit on the pattens until someone comes along and tries to make money with the patten. The patten camper then springs the trap and makes the innovator pay even though the camper did nothing to help the innovation happen.

The way to fix Patten camping is to have some sore of use it or loose it clause in the patten laws. There needs to be a balance in place to prevent a race to an Assembly line with the crappiest venison of whatever innovation can roll off the belt in to a box, but people should not be aloud to simply patten and wait in the shadows stroking their lawyers.

The rules for patten enforcement must be fixed. If no one is able to do anything except twiddle their thumbs because of pattens preventing them from doing so, someone will win a patten on twitting your thumbs.

Euro troubles

European governments are freaking out that the economy in Europe. "We need more power to make things right." This is the battle cry. They are calling it the Eurozone Crisis. We all know what the favorite saying of modern politicians is right? "Never let a crisis go to waist." I don't hear any one saying the size of government needs to be controlled. No one is shouting loud enough for me to hear that regulation of the government needs to be put in place. At least I hear people saying these things in the U. S.. Not sure what will come of it.

What were they thinking when they drew all these nations together? Of course things would get tough at some point and the nations with the money would have to cover their bills. That was inevitable. It is happening now and they call it a crisis.

Germany is the one paying for it. No one else has even the shadow of the economic juggernaut of Germany. France is not so far behind, but the rest are hangers on to Germany. Germany has spend the last decade killing themselves getting their financial world in order. Their financial situation is not all that bad. "Why are we paying every other country's bills?" keeps being heard.

People are asking how to kick a country out of the Euro. Are all Euros the same? Some say watch out for Euros that have specific characters in their serial numbers because they were printed in specific countries. Is a Euro a Euro no matter what?

On a slightly different note, Europe is happy to criticize Libya for cutting people off from Twitter and other social media in order to prevent people from communicate and coordinate attacks on the government. Europe also noticed how effective this is. Now several European countries including the U. K. are considering similar laws about cutting off internet and other communication whenever the hell the government feels like it during a crisis. Will this include criticize of the government. I hear the Chinese are happy to say "I told you so." on this subject.

It already happened in San Fransisco. They killed WiFi in a transit station.

Notes:

Someone interviewed a drug dealer. He was complaining that not only do junkies not have money from a job to spend on dope, but they are running out of things to steel from honest people because the honest people are out of work. Things are tough all over I suppose. I want to know how weed is selling in California. The stuff is more or less legal there, but still costs money.

Someone did the study that if you give unemployment benefits and keep extending the length, you get people out of work for longer. Even if you just pester people constantly about looking and retraining for work, they will get back to work more quickly.

XT10 flashlight

This is my current obsession.

link

I want the light and a rechargable battery or two. The whole thing is well over $100. I so freaking want it though. Maybe for Christmas.

Lunch Vlog

Shot part of a video at lunch today in the parking garage. I'll have to check it out before uploading it. Not sure of the quality yet. The wind was blowing and the I was nerves of people coming around the corner.

...

After viewing, I think that it sucks, but I'll put it up anyway.

Field	Data
Title	Work DVD anecdote
Description	Little story about my work. Blog: http://zhsy00001.blogspot.com
Tags	work dvd drive usb equipment IT information technology job Houston Texas Canon Elph 300 KDENLive
Link	Link

Notes:

It would be great to have written something. It is so easy these days to put words down for others to read. It is no easier to have anything to say. It is harder to be honest. Harder because the ideas don't have time to take seed and grow. They flutter away in the wind instantly.

I woke up this morning at the right time. I reached for my phone which was not there. This is a reflex that I do every morning because I use my phone for an alarm clock. The phone was in my pocket, very dead. Habit, or my guardian angle watching out for me? You decide. You see, I do not wake up on the weekends and reach for a phone that is not going off. The alarm is programmed for week days only. How convenient.

It sucks when the host OS doesn't outlast the guest OS. I have to reboot my Windows machine hosting my Linux VMs more than the Linux VMs. That blows.

Forbidden Planet was filmed on the same sound stage as The Wizard of Oz. There was a fifteen year difference.

Charge phone in war zone

Any one know if this really works?

If you don't have electricity: Get two batteries and dunk them in the cup of water for 1 or 1 1/2 hours and then link the mobile phone with USB cable to the water! Great improvised technique for those traveling through revolution areas, or maybe just backpacking somewhere and you don't have electricity.
As a background to video, Syria, Yemen and Libya (the three countries currently deadlocked in revolutions for half a year without getting change) are undergoing severe power cuts and gas/deisel shortages so that even generators cannot be run. In Libya war has cut off supplies and production. In Syria and Yemen the governments have applied sanctions of mass punishment against the population and left them without services in general.

Live leak

Need rain

When I mow the grass, it crunches under my feet. The mower raises a cloud of dust from my yard. The only green spots are right under the roof. What rain there is doesn't make it far past where it falls. The ground cracks. The fence starts to fall over. The dirt pulls away from the house.

When I water, I'm aiming at the dirt around the foundation of the house and those fence posts. The plants are not quite on their own, but I don't spare much for them.

The ground around my home is raised slightly. They did this on purpose when they built the place. The ground beneath the top soil is clay. It is hard as concrete when it is dry. It is sticky and stiff as bubble gum when it is wet. It shifts around like slow flowing water. That is why we have concrete slabs in Houston. It also means when we have a dry spell, the top foot of dirt on my property turns in to a sandbox. A sandbox, that will not support plants and pulls away from the foundation of the house and fence posts.

The ants don't seem to have a problem with the heat and dry weather. They just come in the house, put their feet up and help themselves to the fridge, ice maker and all. I need to figure out how to put a screen over those weep holes in my wall.

We need rain.

Sunday, two storm clouds passed my home. One passed to the north and the other passed to the south. I don't think we got a drop that day. I heard a tap tap and hoped it was rain drops. It had been so long. It turned out to be gunfire from the range about a mile north of us.

We need rain.

financial stuff

Some person being interviewed said that it took us seven years to get in this mess. It is going to take us several years to get out of it. I hate to tell him, but we are not done getting in to the mess yet. Economic stimulus comes when people have jobs that they trust will be there beyond the end of the current pay period. Economic stimulus comes when people think about the future and think about what university they want their kids to go to, not where their meals will come from, how they are going to make rent, will the car make it another year.

Some people sound optimistic. More people sound pessimistic. The people who are making money sound like the kind of people who will always be in a good situation. There are just some people who always seem to come out on top. There are plenty of people who find themselves on the other end of that spectrum.

It has gotten bad enough that the radio people on the BBC show "Wakeup to Money" have asked listeners for new analogies. They are sick of the standard lot they have been putting out over and over.

No one in any important position is going to call what we are in a depression until we are out of it. Pumping money in to the banks hasn't helped. The obvious solution is to pump even more money in to the banks. That should do the trick. Just don't pay attention to the billions going to banker's bonuses. That fact kind of fractures the narrative. The guy who did Freakonomics called what we are in "re great depression". That is the bravest move I've heard yet to let people know what situation we are in.

The markets are up 5% one day and down 5% the next day. Things are bat-shit nuts on the market right now. We don't have people jumping out of windows on Wall Street, but none of those windows open if memory serves.

The only reason there is no wild fractionation in the currency markets is interconnectivity. That is, as one country takes a hit, many of the countries around them feel the hit through the interconnected markets. Thus, the currencies from the different countries reflect the hit to some extent. Unemployment, lack of stability in most forms cross borders more than ever. Heck, people complaining on Twitter about losing on a stock sends ripples around the world. At some point, governments are going to ban complaining about a stock for 24 hours after the first affect.

Someone estimated that four trillion dollars have been wiped off world wide markets in the last two weeks. The gravy train has left the station.

On All Over the Shop, a comedy show in Australia, they recommend buying a ream of paper and holding on to it. The blank paper will be worth more in a couple years then the equivalent weight in stock certificates. Sounds like a plan to me.

Notes:

I want a constitutional amendment that only lets Congress meet for 3 consecutive days and only 3 consecutive days a year. They have to take care of all business in those 3 days. They must then have a full time job outside of being a representative. The position must be unpaid. What do you think?

Mark Lavin named Barrack Obama as the de facto founder of the Tea Party. I would add Nancy Palosi as a co-founder.

I had the goofiest dream last night. I was splitting wood and the trees kept walking up and asking if I could split them. I was wondering why they wanted to be split. They would pull of some limbs like cutting hair and hand them over.

Remember the 200th episode on YouTube? It was actually the 201st video that I uploaded. I had already shot some of the footage and had the works rolling when I had to re-upload the previous upload due to some SNAFU. These things happen. I hope no one is upset about it. I doubt anyone has done or will do the math.

One day I'll own one of these.

Vids

I'm impressed. I couldn't climb that thing.

20 minutes of rain. This is what we need in South Texas. They are advertising MP3's, but I don't care. I think I'm going to make this one of my favorites.

Yes, Virginia, you can loop the loop a gyrocopter. It is not recommended by the manufacturer.

Huff

I've blocked Huffington Post on Twitter. I've blocked the channel 13 feed too. I still get them in my feed when someone else retweets them. This is bad enough. However, I also turned off retweets from this person. I still get the damn feeds. I don't want to remember that Huffington Post exists. I'm not evil. I'm not ignorant. I'm a conservative. I just don't want to hear their dribble.

Ice

Field	Data
Title	Ice in a red galss
Description	Yup, that is pretty much what it is.
Tags	crushed ice fridge refrigerator ice dispenser flashlight red glass cup Houston Texas Canon Elph 300 KDENLive
Link	Link

YouTube

I want to make an intro and outtro to my videos. Something extremely short, understated and quiet. Some ideas are bouncing around in my head. I would want to use music from Incometech. That means putting credits on every single video. This is not a big deal to be honest. Most Tubers change their intros and outtro on a constant basis. This will simply be the first round of my efforts.

YouTube sent me an email about becoming a partner on YouTube. I would love to do so, even if I don't get paid very much. Being a partner opens some options. I need to learn how the system works this weekend. This means some homework. It is happy homework.

Something about being a partner I've noticed is the people. Not all of them qualify under the terms that I read. They are in other countries. I suppose the rules are more mailable in Australia and Canada because YouTube wants to make a larger presence in those places.

Why not go for it? All they will do is tell me to go jump in a lake. I'll get hits off that video.

To be honest, I just don't envision myself as winning a shed load subscribers and showing up on the front page of YouTube. I'm not that interesting. I'm also employed. Another thing I've noticed about the high end Tubers, the top rated ones anyway, is they do it full time. That is, they do entertainment full time.

Entertainers

• The Vlog Brothers are authors.
• Philip Defranco is a producer of many things YouTube.
• Shay Carl is breaking in to show business.
• Charles Trippy has a degree in communications. I don't know where he will end up, but it will be in entertainment I'd wager.
• Olga Kay is an out of work actress and circus performer. Seriously.

Other businesses

• My Friend Pete has an auto repair place. He doesn't monetize his videos as far as I can tell.
• The Crazy British Bloke and Canadian Carpenter are both in construction.
• Redneck Rick'em is a ... well, a professional Jack of all triads. He does land care taking as a side line.
• The Fat Aussie Bastard has a computer repair places as his primary source of employment.

I could go through all 90 of my subscriptions. The people who have monetized make better videos. It takes effort to monetize. It takes time to keep things going. YouTube doesn't want to let just anyone start putting ads on their videos because people would start and account, put up something that YouTube and the advertisers would not like, but would get a ton of hits. Some of the time, the wheels of justice would grind slowly enough to let bad people make money. Thus, the process takes time and effort.

My whole life, I've spent trying to fit in and hide from attention. I'm not really attempting to seek it out here. I just feel the need to do this. It scratches some itch. In other words, I must find my muse, harness my motivation, zingo, moxy and all those other show biz buzz words. If I'm going to stick with the video thing, I got to learn the language lingo.

Moons

There is a hypothesis going round that Earth may have had two moons at some point. They collided and gave us one large moon. Some scientists with nothing better to do ran a bunch of simulations and crunched a bunch of numbers. I can't help but wonder what else they could have expended their efforts on. Still, this news sends visions of much closer moons to Earth rising and falling by the hour. I dream of weekly eclipses and occasional alignments. For some reason I picture this world as more peaceful.

If two moons why not three? Who can hate on a planet with three moons?

What would the tides be like?

Without predictable tides, no with unpredictable ties for these first several centuries of early adventuring and exploration, people would have not traveled over seas as easily. Storms would have been more or possibly less fierce. How this would have affected people and their societal development is beyond my ponder.

What poems would be written for the three moons?

The beggars three roaming the night.
Prey for rain to hide their sight.

One then the other will blot the sun.
Try neither to hide nor run.

What would different civilizations and tribes call the three moons?

Loonus, Conis and Masis.

Why is this distracting me so strongly?

This distracts me because it is a fresh thought in my head. I like the way it tickles.

Notes:

I had a dream last night that stuck with me. Nat, Elle and I were in an RV traveling around the country. It kept getting bigger and bigger every time I turned around. Then it was a spaceship and we were traveling to distant galaxies. I hope this is not an omen for change.

There is an apartment complex I pass every day. There are two places on the perimeter where water mains have broken. One is oozing and the other is gushing. I hear this sort of thing is happening all over Houston. The dry dirt shifts around and the pipes crack. This is happening in my back yard to a point. The fence is leaning because the dirt is not remaining stable. I need to get some concrete.

Shurlock Holmes retired to a cottage in a quiet corner in Briton near the sea to raise bees.

I had to get something to eat today at lunch. I can't really afford to buy lunch. I went to McDonald's and got 2 $1 burgers and a couple of strawberry pies for $3 and change. The strawberry pies are lame. They had peach for a while earlier this year. Those weren't half bad. There apple pies are about as good, but they always have them.

An Asian bank has stopped lending to a French bank. This is the tip of the iceberg. France is buckling. Even NPR has experts on who question the longevity of the Euro.

I'm trying to think of a quick intro for my videos. The only ideas I've had are something with words that have understated music playing in the background. I want it to last about eight seconds tops. Maybe less. This means I need to make sure I like the name of my vlog. Right now it is zhsy00001. I'm also thinking of calling it "The dumbest channel name on YouTube" to quote the Fat Aussie Bastard. It's going to boil down to playing with it for a while and then putting up whatever I end up with in the end. That seems to be how these things go.

There are several online backup solutions. This is great except 1) I pay for data. 2) It doesn't work in Linux. 3) I don't want them to have my data because a) They or their employees have access to it. b) These places get hacked every five minutes.

Technology is pretty cool. 3D sucks. The Caffiniation Podcast guy had a pretty good thing to say about it. There is no way to interact with these 3D devices in three dimensions. What is the point? He read off the disclaimer for a new 3D laptop. It sounds like one of those medication disclaimers.

These old time radio (think 1930s) are great. There are all kinds of shows from The Adventures of Superman to a dozen private eye serials. Most of them have a standard sponsor like hair tonic or shaving cream, cigarettes to automobiles. Every time the Spenser comes on, I think of "A Christmas Story" Where Ralph decodes the message and all it says is "Drink your Ovaltine." I still like his response

Our insurance company gave us a bunch of the little tops you put on can's of soda with their name on them. I attached one to the soda I had for lunch. It was so tight that the can deformed and nearly squashed getting it on. It came off easily enough. made the soda taste a like plastic.

Russian hit man. Igonna Bumpemov.

Box on wheels

Proof it doesn't have to be pretty.

Tree trimming

Field	Data
Title	Tree trimming on the road
Description	I'm sick of hitting this tree every time I walk to the bus stop. Music: One-eyed Maestro Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons "Attribution 3.0" http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Tags	tree trim trimming road side pocket knife Leatherman Charge hot sunny summer Houston Texas Canon Elph 300 KDENLive
Link	Link

Say it loud

I wish I were articulate. No, I wish I had the strength to shout from the mountain top. No, I wish that people would be held accountable. Yes.

Hot

Field	Data
Title	Hot days in Houston
Description	It is different when you have to walk home a mile and a half in the heat. It cracks me up when people who walk from their car to the door and from the door to their car complain about the heat.
Tags	hot sweat summer day commute bus walk fence posts Houston Texas Canon Elph 300 KDENLive
Link	Link

Tired

Work kicks my butt. I remember my dad coming home and watching TV until he passed out. I understand how he felt. My job is pretty stressful for me. by the time I get home I want to crash and do nothing. The weekends are even worse. Again, I just don't want to do anything. I want to laze around and let others deal with it. I can't get away with it.

I weed whacked this weekend, but I nearly passed out so I didn't mow. This still needs to be done.

The flooring in the living room needs to be repaired.

Nat recently took care of two things for me. She is a peach. But, she called John More. They are pricey as hell. The AC needed to be checked out. They charged us $500 to spray stuff in the duct work and vacuumed them out a bit. We needed an exterminator and she bought a year worth of visits for another $500. That is a good chunk of my pay for a month.

I can't help but think that we could have gotten it a lot cheaper somewhere else. I know it. She doesn't want to take the time to shop around and I'm at work. I'll just need to take a day of vacation next time. We can't afford to pay crazy prices for simple tasks. We simply can't afford to be taken advantage of.

I am simply not handy. I can't do most of these things myself. I've tried to do the poison thing, but it just didn't work. I cleaned the filter and grating for the AC. I wanted the guy to check the AC for problems, not clean it. I know to tell Nat to say no to a cleaning in the future. It isn't her fault. I did ask her to take care of it and she did.

The answer is simple. I need to not be tired ans lazy. I need to get off my butt and take care of business and home. Why is it so frigging hard to keep focused?

Notes:

The best experts in the financial fields are only a little bit better than a coin flip at prediction the future of financial issues. Meteorologists are better at predicting the weather, but not by much.

Europe and Australia have this thing called Science without Borders. This is a way to get places like Brazil and spots in Africa to foot the bill for some of the science stuff that western countries have been doing up to the present. Not a bad idea to be honest. The rest of the world has skin in the science game after all.

Marijuana is as bad for you physically as tobacco. That's what I've heard over and over anyway. Yet, people in California are complaining that their friends who smoke mo-jo get pissed at them if they light up a cigarette. Hypocrites. Personally, I find marijuana stink just as stinky as tobacco. People who smoke don't think it is offensive.

Today, I debugged some scripts to setup computers on a network. I used a virtual machine to perform this task. It is not the first time. I have used a regular computer in the past that I had to fix between trials. I have to tell you, having the snapshot ability makes it easy to blow a machine up and start over. Just fantastic. This must have saved me a full day of trial and error.

End game

I'm hearing some funny things these days. I heard NPR bitch about the Democrat in the Whitehorse. This is not something that I expected. I fully expected to hear every bit of the main stream media guzzling the cool aid until the bitter end. They are coming to the conclusion that all our leaders self centered twits who are only out for themselves. Well, a couple people in the MSM are coming around. Not all by any measure.

How I contempt my government. Let me count the ways. No, I'll spare you my opinion. I'll stick to the facts.

Professional politicians are in the business of getting in to and staying in office. They are in the business of finding themselves a nice cushy job after they leave office. They are in the business of setting themselves up so they do not ever have to work again after they leave office.

This is not the worst kind of politician. The worst kind of politician is the kind with an agenda. No honest person can afford to be elected. No one goes in to politics any more thinking they are going to do some good for their fellow citizens. Everything, every word, every smile and look must be aimed straight at the end game. If they want to make money and power, that is bad enough, but when they only want to make everyone else comply with their beliefs. This is the worst kind of politician.

I really believe that we have these kinds of politicians in charge of the U. S.. For years, I've thought this of Europe. I'm learning every day that people running this country do not intend to just make a buck. They intend to make the U. S. in to their personal Utopia. They want the U. S. to take her turn as the world's largest Socialist entity. It worked so well for Russia and the Chinese, we should give it a try.

What can the citizenry do about a leadership who have wormed their way to the positions where they can take over the country and bend her to their will without firing a shot? Well, this is what the Constitution was for. We, the people, are not supposed to be able to vote ourselves in to a mess like this. The current president is using regulation to enforce unwritten laws using the EPA and other government entities. Congress is passing multi-thousand page laws without giving the public the opportunity to read the law first.

We live in tyranny.

The U. S. is a two party system at the moment. It sucks that they are working together on the same agenda. The end goal is to get rid of the constitution and allow a dictatorship to happen in the U. S.. Who is this? Who has their hands on the strings? I don't know. The only entities that make sense are international banking or people who already control same. Think about how much is going on. People are broke. Countries are broke. Every one is hading money to banks crying "Please don't go broke!"

What would crack me up is if it boils down to one family or counsel of families who have secretly been in charge foe centuries. They have been hiding in the shadows right in the open since the beginning of the written word was young. You couldn't write a novel about this. No one would buy it.

I would prefer this over the truth. The truth is that our leaders are incompetent and working together to make their names high in the history books. They want a retirement and the admiration of adoring fans. They want celebrity and they are too ugly to do it in TV or movies. They are too stupid to write fiction. They are too crooked to accomplish great works. They genuinely don't give a crap about the people they hurt. They do not understand that they are not just killing an idea of a country, but they are getting people killed in the process.

They refuse to believe that when the end comes, their necks will be on the same block as the rest of us. The winner, or better, the last country standing, will write the history books. The U. S. has done this in the past, but will not do it again. Our day is done. No amount of spending other people's money will fix it. We have spend all there is to get here. There will be no hero to save us from ourselves. No personality will pop above the line and lead the charge to responsibility. We are doomed. Worse, it is our own fault.

I really hope I'm wrong.

Notes:

It cracks me up how difficult it is to rename computers on our network. There must be a specific order in which things have to happen. This is because some changes will unchanged themselves. It turns in to a complex game of whack-a-mole. Eventually things start working. Well, sometimes. The first time I did this took 2 years for all the changes to take effect. The computers involved the machines being off for a while. Still working on the change for today.

I was listening to another old time radio show. It was a murder mystery. The investigator was listening between rooms on a dictagraph. The mystery was simple and shallow. The confession was read out over the device. All I could think was "That is a dictaphone, not a dictagraph. Nothing is being recorded." I'm a nerd. Oh, the husband did it of course. Considering he was the one paying the bill, I can't really call it a happy ending.

Lunch conversation

Adam ate a hand full of Wasaby. It nearly did him in.

Let me back up. A bunch of guys went to GenCon over the long weekend. Long for them anyway. The stories are always great when they come back. I'll try to figure out if I can post some pictures. They are on Google Plus so maybe not.

Every year, they go to a sushi place. It is a nice place. They make you take off your shoes and sit at one of those low tables. John nearly went through one of the paper walls. Adam, goaded on by Jake, ate a hand full of Wasaby. He literally choked it down. He was sweating and cough. Brian tels the story that Adam slowly stood up, put on his shoes, and staggered to the bathroom. Adam had that look on his face of absolute concentration. You know the one. If you loose concentration you are going to loose "it".

The price of his trouble was three favors from Jake. I am not privileged to know the stipulation of what a "favor" is in this context. I imagine it boils down to being the one to order food on Adam's turn at some gathering or means of manipulation in a game of some sort.

After chuckling at this story, there was a heated debate about a free game. That is, a $50 game that was given away for free at the show. John was complaining that Brian just left his swag copy in the hotel room. The argument was that Brian should have brought it back so someone else could use the free initial purchase price of $50 and the complementary free first month to try the game out. Brian's tung in cheek argument was that he didn't care enough about any one around here to have bother packing it away. Brian can be contrary just for the heck of it. John can be that guy who pokes just to poke. I feel quite privileged to have witnessed it. Kind of wished I could have caught it on video.

Benefit of zeros

I have to make images of hard drives. I have troubles with large drives because the compressed files are massive. The way I do images it compresses the blank space as well as the used space. Today I tried for the first time to write zeros to the free space before making the image. The drive in question had a 230 gigabyte partition I wanted to image. The data on the drive only added up to about 20 gigabytes.

Commands from memory for writing the zeros to the free space

$> dd -if=/dev/zero -of=/tmp.txt bs=1G count=194
$> rm /tmp.txt
$> reboot

Next time I'll do bs=1m count=194000 or something. I worry that the huge block size may have not cleared as much data as I hoped. Live and learn.

Once you start the image process, you can watch it hit the zero blocks. The speed of the compression goes through the roof. The bytes second climbs very quickly. All zeros is easy to compress. This should not only help on the size of the file, but the speed of the backup as well.

Up to 5% had been really stressful because It is only barely working. I hoped the drive used up most of the space toward the front of the drive. When I used to look at the data on drive this was the case. I believe the drive just doesn't have to move as much to read and write to that part of the drive. If this was not the case, I would be screwed. As I watched the size of the file climb and the percentage not go by fast enough, I started to sweat. Things were looking good at the half way point. At 53%, the size of the file was 5+ gigabytes.

It took several hours, but the result was awesome. The 230G drive with 20G of data and a snoot full of zeros applied liberally to the "empty" space compressed down to a 9.5G file. This is much better than past performance using similar techniques without the zeros. Many times I would not get 3 to 2 compression on un zeroed partitions.

The numbers

58.1% of American adults have employment. Some of that 41.9% of the not employed are retired. Some have no intention of seeking legitimate employment. Some are full time parents. Some are content living at home for the duration. Some may be students. Some may be criminals and work harder than a real job for less money. Some may already be incarcerated. Some are just rich enough to not work.

More people were working in June than July by 38,000. The labor Department reported that the unemployment number dropped because that many people gave up on looking for a job. (begin sarcasm) Yay!!! Thank God those people are not gumming up the economy and making the numbers look so bad any more. What a windfall. (end sarcasm)

15 billion a month go out to unemployment payments.

The unemployment numbers are more like 16% when you count people who have given up and people who are underemployed. The way we used to measure unemployment, the numbers are closer to 22% unemployment. This is nearly as bad as it got during the great depression.

The president threw a party this past weekend. He says he wants to move quickly on job growth. He will probably start moving quickly when congress gets back in three or so weeks. That just doesn't sound "quick" to me.

He is planning on another stimulus. A stimulus is money to and for temporary things that will be gone soon. If the pours that be actually built something, they, the politicians, would have to take responsibility for it. If they, the politicians, fix a problem, they do not have that problem any more to use to get elected.

Notes:

I listened to a story about Chinese culture being a hindrance to innovation. People are afraid to criticize and question what they have been told. Well, what do you expect? You just might get bullet in the head if you stand on a street corner and shout "I disagree with the government." What do they expect? The story mentioned that plagiarism is the way students are expected to learn at lower levels. Do what teacher tells you and don't dare disagree. This does not leave much room for making a difference.

"Why did the hipster burn his mouth on his pizza? Because he ate it before it was cool." -Dinner party download.

All weekend, the YouTube people I watch were all about the live streaming of Lolapalusa on YouTube. "It's great!" It didn't work in Linux. I had no way of viewing it. I also refused to install Firefox in Wine then installing flash there in just to bypass an OS check on the YouTube page because the word Linux sends them in to a convulsive fit. Losers.

Little Orphan Anny ran for 86 years. The guy who wrote the original was a Conservative. The Broadway play was re-written to be a liberal showcase. Famously, the author would have hated it.

God bless the toy makers

The makers of toys bring the universe to the hands and minds of children. They teach. They build teachers. The bits they put together add up to well more than the sum of their parts and their labor. They mold plastic and clay. They mold minds. God bless the toy makers.

Fessenden said he's has had the truck since 2007, when his brother Ernie, a software engineer in Rochester, Minn., and Kevin Guy, the owner of the Everything Hobby shop in Rochester, rigged it with a wireless video camera and shipped it to him.
Last week, he said, it paid off when he loaned the truck to a group of Soldiers who used it to check the road ahead on a patrol.
The tiny truck hit a trip wire and set off an estimated 500 pounds of explosives. The six Soldiers, controlling the toy in their following Humvee, escaped injury.
...
His brother and hobby shop owner Kevin Guy said they're trying to send Chris a new truck.
"That's just unreal," said Guy when he learned of the recent incident. "That's six mothers that six guys are going home to."

Military.com

How much would it cost to get say 1000 of these trucks to the troupes? I want to say "on the front line" but that term doesn't apply in this case.

True

Truer words. The description said this commercial was banned. I don't know about that, but this is the first I noticed it. I do not claim to support the place doing commercial so visit their site at your own risk.

Roller blading down a salt mine

This looks like fun to be honest. I would like to see this in the next closed in space horror monster movie. Our heroin is blading for her life as she out runs the gigantic spiders from Venus or something.

200

Field	Data
Title	200th YouTube video extraviganza
Description	This is my 200th YouTube video. Yippe. I wanted something nice for my vieweres and this is all I got.
Tags	200 mile stone milestone YouTube vlog vlogging stick with it clip video Canon Elph 300 Houston Texas KDENLive
Link	Link

In a hole

Our government is fighting over 7 billion dollars worth of cuts. The budget increase is 1.5 trillion.

1.5 trillion	1,500,000,000,000
7 billion	7,000,000,000

Imagine you are in a hole 1,500 feet deep. That is almost a quarter mile. Then imagine that the ladder you have to get out of this hole is only 7 feet tall. Do you suppose it makes much difference? Any one remember the most important rule when finding yourself in a deep hole? Stop digging.

Assuming the population of the U. S. is 300,000,000 lets do some maths. 1.5 trillion is (1500000000000 / 300000000 = 5000) 5000 per American for the increase. The amount they are arguing over is (7000000000 / 300000000 = 33(ish)) per American.

This is just the increase that they were talking about this time. The whole budget is much higher. We need a balanced budget amendment in this country. I'm not sure it would help because our current administration doesn't seem to bother itself with the limitations on power listed our Constitution.

Is the U. S. funding some whopping great secret spaceship or hollowing out the Earth or something. This amount of money is astronomical. Are we putting a down payment on another planet?

Notes:

Why aren't consumer buying more? Our economy relies on this. Well, when people have less money in their pocket and little access to additional debt, they stop buying. They are not denying the world their consuming goodness, they simply don't have what it takes to perform the task. Duh.

30% of adults and 60% of teens in the U. K. admit they are addicted to their mobile phones. I'm not sure if I can say I am addicted to my phone. This study didn't count using other devices instead of the phone. If that were the case, I could probably get away without a phone for a week. I would complain online about it incessantly.

I was trying to get a fixed font in one of my blog entries. It worked with the "pre" tag, but that also caused a space after the sections which I did not want. The font settings didn't seem to get applied. I tried several things. Then I thought about it for second. I had over ridden the font settings in that browser to make pages more easily readable.

"The U. S. had to up the debt ceiling. There was really no choice." This is why we want a balanced budget amendment. This will remove the debt ceiling as a choice. The government choice will be to stop spending money they do not already have.

Shooting my 200th video today. Bits and pieces. Can't wait to show it off. It is not good or anything. Just want it done.

One more lesson

Today was a lesson in not giving people what the ask for.

Me: "What OS do you need on the system?"

Them: "Whatever you think is best."

Me: "Linux, right?"

Them: "Yup."

Me: "I'll put the latest version on for you."

Them: "Perfect."

Two days of "This isn't working" and rebuilds later, I ended up setting the system up like another system they had that had been working before. Should have done that in the first place.

I let myself get way too upset over this. it is honest work. I can't expect everyone to know what they need in these kinds of situations. I didn't know what they needed. I find myself asking people what worked before or what is working elsewhere when they tell me they need a system setup. This do it four or five times stuff is annoying.

Notes:

The Chinese are moving to robots. They have rising labor cost. They also have a high suicide rate amounts workers. People have cracked jokes about the robots sounding like that depressed robot from Hitchhiker Guide. The companies in China basically say that they are not getting rid of people. They are moving people up the value chain. I wonder if that chain leads out the door. I use an LG phone. It was made in one of the factories.

Foursquare sucks. Not the service. I mean getting the notifications of "I'm here!" every three minutes in Twitter. At least in Facebook you can block Foursquare. I haven't noticed any in g+, but I have noticed location information on posts. That just worries me. You can get a map of where people were when they made posts by clicking on their profile.

Check the firewall settings before you start installing or un-installing anything.

Once there was a guy who made BBQ out of the back of a truck. Then 500,000 other's joined him and all moved to Los Angeles. Apparently, they have a glut of food trucks.

Spent something like a grand on the house and $15 on the car headlight today.

The house

We have ants. Have exterminator coming tomorrow. $109 for the visits. I'm worried they won't do the place with the mess. Tomorrow will tell. I spray the weep holes and the parameter of the house. I also spray the cabinets. Not sure what else to do. Maybe we can figure out how they are getting in.

We also have the AC people coming out to check on the AC. We haven't touched it since we moved in. it needs a checkup at least. I really hope there is nothing wrong with it.

We need to start looking at getting the floor in the living room replaced. I do not want carpet. I want some kind of tile or fake wood that will last 500 years and look fresh as a daisy the whole time. The fence could use some mending as well, possible replacing. The back wall needs looking after since the hurricane several years ago. What else? Landscaping. Several walls could use a coat of paint. The outside wouldn't duck if some paint was thrown at it. We could just keep spending money if it came down to it.

Nat has already mentioned the idea of a larger place. I feel it necessary to tell her that it isn't the size of the place, it is the amount of crap in it. She is only half buying that idea. The house is getting better. It takes a great deal of effort.

The car is starting to show her age. Ah, life is expensive. If only I were one of those handy guys who can do this crap without getting raked over the coals by contractors.

The blog

The blog is turning in to a data dump. I didn't mean for this to happen. I jot down notes here. I put up messages on social media sites. I post things here so I can reference them elsewhere. The bad thing is I have no idea where this is going to lead. Will I stop blogging at some point? Will I bail on these annoying social media sites? Only time will tell.

The other places where I put up information are designed for very short output. They are designed for a little bit of information in a pre formatted design. They are popular because they make it easy for people to fall across your information. They are designed to keep things short because who the hell is going to read a long blog entry? No one wants the details it seems. People seem to want to know who is banging who and where the party is today.

You cannot put tables on g+. If you could, it would beat Blogger in my opinion. I use tables to present my data. This is going away. Not one of the new blog platforms let you use tables unless you have their software (page layout really) installed. I don't think any of them have software for Linux. I'm thinking of WordPress. Correct me if I'm wrong.

This blog is written in HTML. That is, I write the HTML and paste it in to the box. All the formatting inside the posts is mine. Bold, tables, color, whatever, that is all me. The layout of the page and links down the right hand side of the page are handled by Blogger. I like this. It gives me freedom to emphasize and present as I please and still keep things organized.

Twitter has zero formatting. Tumblr allowed quite a bit, but I couldn't figure out tables. Facebook is just stupid. Google Plus allows good organization, but you can only put up specific designed posts and still, no tables. They are not designed for blogging. They are designed for those really short status updates. I need a full blog interface I suppose.

Notes:

It was a noisy day in my office. Not only did I have loud fanned server panting away, but the UPS down the hall, the kind of UPS that you need a moving truck to transport, was beeping it's head off as they updated the batteries or something.

Awesome

This is pretty dang cool. I worry how many beers were spilled in the training for this video.

Don't worry, there is no war on our border

I witness stuff like this and I have no words. They are killing our citizens. They are destroying our country. People we elect in Washington need a constant catastrophe to keep themselves in office so they don't do anything about it.

Early bike ride

Field	Data
Title	POV Early bike ride
Description	Me trying to get out of the house early this past Sunday and ride the bike around the neighborhood.
Tags	POV point of view helmet cam bike bicycle neighborhood tire pump exorcise Houston Texas Canon Elph 300 KDENLive
Link	Link

Tank stuck in mud

I believe that model weighs 80 tons. If the armored bulldozer couldn't get it out, it is stuck.

Rain

Field	Data
Title	Tropical storm rolling past Houston time lapse 2011-07-29
Description	As above. Music: Protofunk Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons "Attribution 3.0" http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Tags	time lapse timelapse weather storm rain office building window Houston Texas Canon Elph 300 Kdenlive
Link	Link

Onions

There is a tearless onion on the horizon. They say it has the flavor and texture of a normal onion, but you will not cry when you cut it. Kind of takes the fun out of it if you ask me. How many different kinds of onions are they going to copy? There are many. They all have different places in recipes.

Cures for crying while cutting an onion.

• Wait the 15 or so years for the tearless onion to come out.
• Fan.
• Cut under water, though this leads to cut fingers for some reason.
• Goggles and hold your breath. Or, use a snorkel. Or, a gas mask with an activated charcoal filter.

I used the ventilation method as listed above. People looked at me funny, but it worked.

Cable TV

A bunch of people do not subscribe to cable. Specifically, young people have found other ways to get TV shows. The idea now is to have an 8 day waiting period to view the online version of a show. This will give cable the nod. That means by the time you watch the show you access to online, cable has already shown the next show in the series.

I don't have a problem with that. I don't watch TV for the talking about it reasons really. I'll live with waiting 8 days. If it isn't available online, I'll wait. The simple fact is, I do not have the disposable income for cable or satellite TV. It just isn't there. I will have to give up too much in order to make watching TV a priority.

Drug violence

Warez Mexico is nuts. The local shops and what not have been hit up for protection money. Manufacturing is still doing pretty good. Big companies are increasing manufacturing footprint in Mexico.

I give it a couple months. The cartel people will hear about this on NPR, where I did and think, "Why are we letting those bastards off when every one else has to pay?" Thanks NPR.

U. S. Debt

The sun will come up August 3rd regardless of what the U. S. does in their financial endeavors. The August 2nd deadline is bullshit. This is one thing that NPR and Mark Lavin agree on. it must be true. It will take a while for the U. S. world to end. People keep saying "End of empire" when referring to this thing that is happening. The U. S. is not now and has never really been an Empire. We have been one of the only countries that had our collective shit together for the longest time. This era is coming to an end. This is a bad thing for the U. S. and the rest of world.

The U. S. dollar will not be the world's currency for much longer. You will not have to bring baked goods to the gas station to get a tank of gas. You will have to work until you drop from old age. The concept of retirement may go away. The concept of salary vs hourly may go away. These are bad things.

This is a setup for takeover by the international banking cartel according to Lavin. That happened the day we dropped the gold standard Mark. Others say it is China preparing to take us over. I hate to tell ya, bit it is the simple incompetence of our leadership. Professional politicians are simply bad decision makers. They base their decisions on what will get them reelected, not what will make our children prosper.

Notes:

Learned today that the PPC Red Hat is a whole different license. I have no idea what it costs, but I bet it is an arm and a good portion of a leg. Why in the world do we need PPC? Because it is cool, that's why.

Why everybody got to go playing loud music on me?!? All I want is some quiet.

Shrinking data

When you dd a partition in to gzip and to a file you must still compress blank space. This takes up more space. You could use bz2, but that takes 10 times as long to perform the compression, but the blank space will get compressed much more efficiently.

The gzip program is zip compatible for the most part. The math is the same. It takes a fixed size slice of your file and calculates the compression based on a given compression algorithm. Same math and slice applied to the whole bit of data you feed to the program. Has been working for several decades.

The bzip2 program uses a variable size slice and a variable math approach to the data in order to squeeze the air out of the data in the best possible way. This means the program must look at the data several times and compare bits of math to one another. This means that at compression time, you are performing several calculations with slightly different settings over and over. Sometimes it pays off. I'm not sure how long bzip2 has been around. It is a nice tool in the compression toolbox.

I've done this with hard drives, flash drives, RAM and just about every other thing that counts as computer storage. The dd command is probably the most exceptional Linux command ever. It is the move that is just plane ones and zeros from here to there. It is about the lowest level command you have at the command line. You just about have to write machine code to get lower. Swaths of the operating system have been designed to use the dd command. That is why there is a /proc after all, so you can use dd and related commands to move things around.

If you understand any part of what I've just said, congratulations. You are a Linux geek.

What I'm talking about is not just adding files to a compressed folder or downloading a file and then copying files out of it for use. It turns out there is far more to data compression than this. I remember the days of ARC. Then came the days of "Down with ARC" because the guy who wrote ARC got nothing for it. The licensing was nuts too. This lead directly to ZIP. That lasted for a million years. Now, it is anything goes. BZ2 is just one of a million different compression schemes. There are specific designers for compressing whole mounted drives. Some are just for compressing streamed data. I haven't even gotten to th idea of loss compression. This is another universe beyond what we are talking about.

Notes:

People in the financial areas are telling their clients to diversify and sit tight. Move away from U. S. Treasury bonds. The insecurity of what is going on in Washington are killing the market. This is not helping the hiring or recovery by any measure.

I sat today on the roof of the parking garage in the sun and heat. It felt wonderful. The birds were not up there. That time of day, they are looking for shade. Not me. Not today. I just needed a moment out there in it. When I ran out of $1 hamburgers (2) and soda, I came back in to the air conditioning. Back to work.

The TV show Friends is social masturbation.

West Africa is in the middle of a drought that is the worse in many decades. I suppose we are not the only one's in a dry year. We have plenty of support from the rest of the U. S.. These folks are not nearly as lucky.

Clouds while waiting for a ride

What You Want (version 2) Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons "Attribution 3.0" http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Field	Data
Title	Cirrus while waiting for a ride (time lapse)
Description	Waiting for a ride. Music: What You Want (version 2) Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons "Attribution 3.0" http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
Tags	time lapse clouds cirrus street light Canon Elph 300 Houston Texas KDENLive
Link	Link

Sunday sunday sunday!

Field	Data
Title	Sunday family day
Description	The whole side of the clan hanging out and fending off a stray dog. He wasn't hurt. We have called on him a couple times.
Tags	family fun Sunday afternoon summer bicycle laundry vacuum ear plugs zizzer bugs stray dog canon elph 300 houston fort bend Harris county texas
Link	Link

Noise

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it raise the carbon footprint of the surrounding forest?

Walk outside some time wherever you may live and let me know if you can hear an airplane, cars, boats, air conditioners, or some other modern convenience that makes a drone noise. I tried to video something this past week and the sound that came along with my videoing in my back yard reminded of an industrial complex next to a freeway. Oh, wait, I live next to both.

I'm not out for magnificence. I'm not aiming at great. Good is a bit beyond my pay grade. No, I'm prepared to accept something between eh and scaring the kids. If I can get my point across without people switching off, I'm declaring success and moving on.

You can edit video bits in and out of the final product. You can put one thing on top of another and balance things across the screen as much as possible. I'm no good at it, but what little I've learned has convinced me that no video is trustworthy as evidence. I believe nothing to be honest.

Sound is another matter. it is more difficult to mix and match sound. Sound is one dimensional. Some people will hear the tricks. The rest will blow it off. Every time you try to mix in a new sound, you also get the static and any hiss that is in the background. Sound does not stack well. Everything heads quickly toward white noise. The voices get quieter and the air conditioner gets louder.

Editing is kind of fun. Shooting video is kind of fun. There are good and bad about them. I love playing with equipment trying to make things work. I need a green screen.

Green screen ideas

• Walking through a door that leads somewhere it obviously doesn't.
• Size change.
• Put myself in a different scene.
• Punch someone famous in the face just for fun.
• UFO.

Notes:

On the way in this morning I noticed five guys in hard hats standing in the middle of a field talking. I assume they were surveying. There were no vehicles nearby and no survey flags that I could see. Do survey crews have to ware hard hats?

I paid up the phones last night for the first time. We are on month to month. This has a couple of good things. If we need to drop out bill by a bit, we can. If we need to drop the phones we can. It also means we pay sales tax on the bill which is 8.25% or so and not the 35% or so that is on land lines and normal mobile phones. I suppose this is because you are buying a defined product on the spot. There is no guarantee you will buy it. You just have to by the end of your cycle or no phone. Love it.

The shuttle has landed for the last time. It is the end of an era. Someone tweeted "Have you lived in a world without a shuttle before?" This is a pretty telling tweet because the first one went up in the early eighties. I was in grade school or middle school. Was it 1979? I don't remember. Most of my life we have had a shuttle at least out there. What will come along next?

A nation founded on freedom will fall on the day her people freely choose tyranny over responsibility.

Today was a funny day for rain. From my sixth floor perch, I noticed a couple rain clouds off in the distance. It was more a broken assault than a front. These are the kinds of storms we normally get in summer. It is a good sign. Hopefully the patter will continue. I would not doubt that patter is more than half the average rain fall of the year. We are far too far behind.

This afternoon was difficult. I had a hard time concentrating. I do not know why, but I was sleepy. It was a combination of the weather affecting my sinuses, Friday afternoon, and poor sleep this past week. I managed.

Unity after a week

I refused to use Unity until I figured out how to change the number of workspaces from four to as many as I wanted. Solution found here, It worked and made Unity something I was willing to try.

The side bar is always up and by default only hides itself when you drag a program over it. This makes perfect sense for a tabulate, but I'm on a computer. It was very annoying and I found myself deliberately dragging program windows over it to make it go away. I set it to auto hide. This would probably not work on a tablet. On a desktop, I have found myself just not using the side bar. Solution found here.

Those are basically the two big changes I made that make Unity usable for me. I've been using it for a bit and found one announce that only bites me every so often.

X11 (Unix) interfaces typically focus the windows under the mouse. That is, even if a window is behind another window, if the mouse is moved over the window, you can type in to the window and it will stay in the background. This is a nice way of doing things because it lets you control one program while watching another. It turns out this is really nice.

Unity is supposed to take many of its queues and designs from the OSX (MacIntosh) interface. The window controls are on the left side of the top bar for example. One other change they made is to have the window menus appear at the top of the screen like a Mac. By default, Unity does not have window focus set to mouse over, so this is not an issue. However, when I turn mouse over control on, I have to dodge open windows to make sure the last window I moused over is still on top when I get to the top bar. This setting is adjusted in system - preferences - windows.

I could explain this in two seconds with a video. In words, it is difficult.

Last night I nearly set the window focus settings back to the way they work in MS Windows. I'm not sure if that is something I'm willing to do or not. I have to use Windows machines at work and it drives me nuts how the window focus works. I hear there are ways to make MS Windows do it like X11, but I don't trust it. I do not want to give in on this, but I probably will.

From what I can tell, all the major interfaces are headed to this type of design. The designers are attempting to make a single interface, or perhaps a similar looking interface, for desktops with a mouse and tablets with a touch interface. I'm hearing intelligent people say that a Mac with both a mouse and touch screen is just around the corner.

We have a couple people at work who use iPads and desktops. I watched one of these users then try to use a laptop for the first time in a while and repeatedly try to touch the screen instead of the touch pad. The idea of using the screen based interface is far more intuitive than a touch pad or mouse to be honest. I mean, it is direct manipulation for goodness sake. Direct manipulation will always win over indirect in my mind.

Oh, remember the complaint I had about Ubuntu not accepting my changes to the size and color of the mouse pointer? That is still a problem. As a matter of fact, the fix that kind of worked before does nothing now. I recommend just sticking with the default and dealing with it. This is what the developers are telling people as well.

Future

Why didn't the past tablet systems work? I say it is because they still had a mouse pointer involved. The PC-tablet I saw several years ago ran Windows XP. It still had a mouse pointer. The first thing anyone wanted to do was grab a mouse and plug it in. The difference with the iPad and phones is the lack of a mouse pointer on the screen and designing for that interface from the ground up.

This is why I think the merging of desktops and tablets is doomed. We will end up with tablets and servers. We will have tablets for the user to interface with and servers to run things in the background and do all the heavy lifting. When computers started, there were terminals and servers. We are basically headed back there.

Notes:

Men are waring nail polish. Yes, this is a trend now. There are lines of manly named nail polish. I hear by draw the line.

The media is supposed to be a watchdog. The police are supposed to have people policing them. The issue recently is these two entities have gotten far too cozy. It doesn't matter what the relationship between them is, the public suffers when both or either are not forward and honest. Corruption between them hurts the citizenry.

Even when you follow the rules and only kill the bad guys, innocent people die in war. Don't make war if you don't want any civilians to die.

OpenOffice is dead. Long live LibreOffice. Every Linux disto switched to LibreOffice. Brazil uses their own version of OpenOffice and are now switching to LibreOffice. IBM may through their weight behind LibreOffice. That would rock. Our little productivity suite is growing up.

Notes:

Did battle with a single motherboard all day. We have some test systems that use a particular type of motherboard. It is a server system. Something happens to these motherboards. They die. First the Ethernet ports disappear. Then the system hangs every time you try to put power through it. It has happened before.

Thirteen

Field	Data
Title	Thirteen
Description	What the ...?
Tags	humor joke thirteen fence back yard Canon Elph 300 kdenlive audacity Houston Texas
Link	Link

Health

Nothing hurts. I noticed this morning on my walk in that nothing hurts. Sometimes at night I will wake up with my side hurting because I've been lying on it too long. I have to lye on my side to breath. If I roll over on my back, I not only snore like a chainsaw, but I get sleep Ania and wake up unable to breath. This is a problem that will probably get worse as I get older.

My father is now on kidney dialyses. My grandfathers on both sides had heart problems. I have had no symptoms of either that I can think of. I get some exorcise. I don't eat nearly healthy enough. I consumed too many sodas (one a day is too many). Is this a health life style?

A friend of mine has diabetes. He lost a portion of his left leg below the knee. He now says his left arm is not responding properly and the doctors will not talk to him about it. He has been in and out of the hospital for complications for years.

"Something is going to kill you."

"You have to die of something."

These are true, but depressing. Wouldn't it be nice to let the go when the time comes? Wouldn't it be nice to be that guy who says "... fighting evil in another dimension." or something like that. I'm not afraid of death so much as dying. It is the pain, sickness and fear I fear.

"Ain't going out like that!"

Death is difficult to talk about. It is far more difficult to do. It is difficult to even conceive. It hurts to think of loved ones we have lost. It is difficult to live. The word I want to use here is dignity. I want some dignity on the way out. I want people to remember the boring guy who took pictures and put some videos up online.

I have had a deep seeded fear of death and dying all my life. I wonder if this has been the source of my being a jerk most of the time. Perhaps I've let my fear of death lead me down a road where I let my life be depressing and full of bad things to convince myself that death is not so bad.

Fuck that.

Notes:

The "crime tax" shop lifting and employee theft, costs the average U. S. family about $400 a year. Almost makes me want to steel music movies.

Twenty million Americans are unemployed or under employed. This has been in place for the longest time since the great depression of the 1930s. But, we are not in a depression. Years from now, will we call this decade a depression? What will our grandchildren be told to call it?

If the U. S. credit rating is lowered, some insurance and retirement accounts will be forced by law to sell holdings. This will cause a downward spiral of U. S. bonds. Interest ratings will sky rocket. It will end up costing a lot more for the U. S. to buy back their bonds.

Notes:

I'm in IT. I send out emails. I send some to everyone. I sent one this morning. It came back to me. I hear the person's computer in the next office beep. I save such emails really just to remind myself that I sent one out.

We have spent 4 billion dollars on the James Webb Telescope. There is three billion more to go to get it put together and shot in to orbit. The project will be canceled because we ain't got the money. It will not pick up where it left off in a couple years. We will have to basically start over again with the spending. The Hubble will die shortly. What are all those scientists going to complain about when they run out of shinny toys?

I have this idea in my head about shooting a video of a joke. No one will be in my videos but me so I've been practicing the cloning technique. I need a fence with a hole in it and my fence would be perfect for this. The area outside my house is far to noisy to do this during the day. All you would hear is traffic. I may have to shoot it early in the morning before 4:30 to get what I want. This basically means, I'm not doing it outside. That or I'll have to figure out how to redo the sound after the fact.

Complain and yee shall receive

Buy the The Happy Helmet Bike Camera Mount at the Photojojo Store!

I was trying to get my dad to build me a contraption that would let me mount the camera on top of a bicycle helmet. My dad found the above mechanism online. I was kind of trying to give him something to do. Now I need a bicycle helmet. I had one at some point. It was one of the old kind with square holes. Not sure it would work with this nifty device.

This really looks like it will work. It will definitely work better than a hat and some zip-ties. The bicycle helmet will work even if I want to video myself doing something other than riding a bike.

Twig-pod

Buy the The Alite Twig Pod at the Photojojo Store!

This is one of their other products that kind of looks promising. No idea how it would work in wind or what-not.