Lunch conversation

2013-10-04

• Minecraft
• Words I caught: redstone, pistons, carrot farm, obsidian pipes.
• Kansas vs Oklahoma. Neither side won.
• Plagues of Europe and effects on development throughout  history
• No, really. We did.
• Weather
• We have had the hottest day of the year.
• This weekend is supposed to be nice.
• Work
• We are all starting to feel the strain of the rush.

Taking notes for business

Today, I took a paper notebook (I have to specify paper these days)  to a meeting I was late too. As it happened, everyone was late to it. Still, I had to take notes and noticed some issues.

• Paper
• I can type on my phone faster than I can write.
• I’m still not particularly fast on the phone, I’m just slow with a pen.
• I have to type in the notes to the computer.
• Phone
• I can read my phone better than I can read my own writing.
• It also has a spell checker.
• I can email it to myself already in text format.
• Hell, I can have the phone read it aloud to me.
• I could speak to the phone and it would type the text. I suck at it and this would not work in a meeting situation, but still, it is cool.
• People still think you are goofing off if you type on your phone in a business meeting.
• My laptop requires me to sit at a table to take notes.
• The battery life on the laptop sucks compared to my phone.

Notes

2013-10-04

Obama and the president of Iran are tweeting back and forth.

Nearly 10,000,000 fewer Americans in the workforce since Obama took office. You don’t hear much about these people. Where did they go? How are they putting food on the table? How are they paying for their kids to go to school? They are not contributing as much to the economy as they would if they were employed I bet.

2013-10-07

One of the podcasts I listen to interviewed a writer. I love his primary advice. “Don’t work for free.” He said it doesn’t matter what kind of exposure you get if you work for free. You just get more jobs where you work for free. It doesn’t matter if millions of people read your work if you don’t get paid.

Video ideas

Linux system crashing today

Gout

One more

The Republic stand still this day. May she stand  many tomorrows.

A bit centennial,  but I mean it. I really am afraid we will shed our freedom without knowing what we loose.

Sunday sunset

Show this to your kid when they ask for a motorcycle.

Motorcycles are not dangerous. It is everyone else on the road who is dangerous.

Weenend stuff

that is about all there was this weekend. Not much going on. Weather was great. Family is pretty much well. Things are going good at the moment.

Boingy boingy

I'm sick of fighting the embed code for these Live Leak videos. This bear can dribble better than I can.

http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=e80_1380951780

Beer Can WiFi Booster!

Someone try this and let me know if it really works.

Cases for Nat's electronics

Wendy's

I might give it a second chance after this.

Inconvenient fact

Almost 10,000,000 fewer Americans in the workforce since Obama took office. Haven't heard much about them.

Long but eorth the read

"The Snowden files: why the British public should be worried about GCHQ" http://feedly.com/k/19nWIrg

Oops, just saw this today while exiting the building

Lunch Conversation

• Kansas & Oklahoma
• One of the guys has a daughter soccer game up there.
• There is a hill with a cosmic station and a couple burger joints.
• My grandfather had “the Big House” that was some old plantation looking house.
• Crazy laws up that way.
• You have to have two headlights in your car. They don’t have to be plugged in, or on the front.
• Nowhere to eat for miles.
• Roll up the sidewalks on holidays.
• Every fifteen people have to declare a small town.
• Work
• Blah
• Other restaurants
• Super n Sallad is still around
• There are some restaurants from my childhood still open inside the loop.
• Casinos
• Most of casino profits come from households under $50,000
• There are some seedy casinos
• You are more likely to win at the crap casinos
• One of the guys saw a line of U-Hauls at a casino once full of women and children waiting.
• One of our friends played ace in the world championship of poker one year. He didn’t get far.

Today we had eight people at the table. I am afraid this is the largest number of people who can hold a single conversation over a long period of time. If there are more people, inevitably, they break off into multiple conversations. I’m sure the number changes based on the situation.

Notes

I taped a sign to a shelf. When I tried to remove the sign, the veneer came off much easier than the tape. Lesson learned. Do not use packing tape to put signs on crappy veneer covered particle board. Use masking tape.

Recently WWII veterans were blocked from going to the WWII memorial in DC. This made the news. The President was prepared to blame Republicans again for harming the nation's veterans until he looked at the polls. People are blaming Democrats, Republicans and independents for failing to do their job which is working for the Citizenry of the United States. They do not remember they are in Washington for that, not to perpetually campaign. The president backed off. it was costing more to block the veterans than it would have just to leave the park open to the public.

I want to write a fictional log of a person stuck on a ship in the middle of deep space for some reason. Not sure where to go with it. My scenarios end in death most of the time. Not sure how to filter those out for one where the protagonist lives.

Would anyone out there pay a nickel to read my blog posts? Is $0.05 too much to ask? I wouldn’t pay it.

Is there any country in history that had a single party rule situation that did not devolve into Fascism or dictatorship?

Just out of the blue today my mouse got super sensitive. My pointer was jetting around the screen. I did nothing. This is Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.4. I am developing a distaste for the distribution as a desktop platform. It is still better than Ubuntu that hides the mouse settings in three different spots and you just plane can’t change the frigging pointer without major surgery and an exorcism on the operating system.

No matter how much I adjusted my mouse the rest of the afternoon, it never felt right. I refuse to reboot for such bullshit. it takes much bigger bullshit to push me over the cliff of reboot on a Linux box.

Look up (book) Burning Chrome - William Gibson

I’ve been listening to Night Valve Audiocast. it is a special kind of fiction. it is sort of a stream of consciousness rant radio show of a fiction town under the influence of some kind of crossroads of universes.

We are a normal first world family. We have a grocery list on our refrigerator. Nat never remembers it. I cannot blame her. Every time she asks me if I need something or remember what was on the list, I draw a blank. This is not how my memory works. I have installed a notes app on my phone. The only note on it is my grocery list. The next time Nat asks me if I need anything from the store I’m going to consult my list. Then I’m going to text it to her. Then I’m going to mark it as communicated on the list and start a new entry above it. This is the plan damnit.

Me complaining about the government

Rights

I'm vlogging and people are looking at me funny. First amendment baby.

Notes

finding yourself daydreaming about future advancements does nothing to put food on the table. Making a story and telling it just might. I’m not going to hold my breath.

Someone described the equinox correctly, except they said it was in the northern hemisphere. That is a pretty good trick if you can pull it off.Last I checked, the two hemispheres were attached in the middle and could not change their angle to the sun without consulting one another.

Vets being protested by paid protesters.

Inflation: A tax on everything paid to they who print the money.

Justice! Well, not really. This is a motorcyclist getting arrested for beating a driver. The police are still looking for the one who did the original break-check causing the accident that injured the first bike rider. I can’t keep this straight. The video looked to me like a bunch of bikes surrounded a vehicle. The vehicle took off, running over a motorcycle and injuring a rider. The gang of bikers took off after the SUV driver, pulled him out of the car and beat him up.

Aw man, Tom Clancy died. I kind of liked his work.

Shutdown

BARD down due to shutdown. It is the web page where I download my audio books. They still use the term talking books. That hangs over from the days of books on tape. This sucks, but I would rather the government shut down than continue on its current trajectory toward ruin. The veterans being barred from memorials is over the top.

The shutdown hits. Nonessential agencies have been closed. Topping the list, the EPA. That is very telling in my opinion. There was an interview with a guy who took samples and analyzed them for the EPA. He sounded like he was going to cry when he described the official email that said go home.\

My company is affected by anything the government does. I in turn suffer through less opportunity at my company because of the company suffering a bit.

Obamacare

Ruthless incrementalism. That is what the implementation of Obamacare has been called. This is a poor bring up. The whole idea is going to be a nightmare no matter if the law is well constructed or not. The problem is, the law is also poorly constructed and thought through. I’m not the one saying that. There are many.

This is going to take a decade to get up and running before people stop being left crushed in the ruts. That is if people stop trying to hamstring it. There is a fundamental issue with healthcare.

I do not want Obamacare. I would prefer single payer over Obamacare. I would prefer something far different from what we had before. It was not working. This will not work either. Whatever is next will not work. As long as people get sick and die, mankind will not be satisfied with their healthcare. This is one of those situations where an infinite amount of resources will still not fix the problem.

Engineers and free food

Notes

Well, we are broke. The US is officially closing her wallet. About time. #shutdown

I’m thinking of putting a hash tag on every one of my tweets from now on. I hear YouTube will soon support hashtags in video names. This would allow YouTube to support trending searches easier. They kind of support it now. I think it will make for very messy titles of videos. I’m just waiting for a memo or report to come across my desk that has hashtags in the title.

Brain cells don’t have that much of an immune response when you transplant brain cells from one person to another. At some point there may be a brain tissue transplant into, for example, Parkinson's sufferers.

Some crabs have a 12.4 hour clock along side the normal 24.0 (ish) hour clock the rest of us share. that 12.4 hour clock is to keep track of tides. Handy, if you are a crab that hangs out in the tide land.

What does a Canadian girl say if you ask her if she wants to have sex? “Only if you’re having some yourself.” -DPD #joke

Bright sunshiny day

Clouds and sun

Notes

Marketplace had the riff of “No Sleep ‘till Brooklin” between segments. Not too shabby.

France has almost banned child beauty contests. I think they should be banned. Freakin’ sick if you ask me. I blame Honey Boo-Boo.

A paper mill in Massachusetts makes all the dollar bills. It has for 135 years.

Gathered some cardboard together this afternoon. between this and a roll of packing tape I intend on making myself some light breaks in my new office. I have a rather large piece and a smaller piece to try.  I’ll make it work. if it looks interesting, I’ll put up some pics.

Penn jelet wants a law that says basically you cannot discriminate against people who have had dirty pictures of themselves on the internet. I’m in.

The Shutdown

It turns out I’m affected by the Government shut down. This sucks. Italix is a quote.

Dear TBP Patron:

As you know, there is a possibility that a Federal government shutdown will occur tonight at midnight. In the event that this happens, all electronic resources provided by the National Library Service will be temporarily unavailable. This includes BARD, the Voyager online catalog, and the system that handles magazines on cartridge.

The Texas Talking Book Program will not shut down. We will continue to send you books and respond to your inquiries during the Federal shutdown. With a little luck, the shutdown will either be averted, or will last only a short time. Please call us at 1-800-252-9605 or email us at tbp.services@tsl.state.tx.us if you need assistance.

Email from TBP (Talking Book Program)

Not sure what to do from here. i do not use the book program on cartridge. I use BARD. They are the automatic download people. That is the service that absolutely rocks.  They just came out with a note about getting books from publishers straight on. This would speed up getting books. Not all of them would be a year old. Delays delays.

I’ll live. I will make do. There are other ways of getting to books in audio format without spending a bunch of money. I might just have to buy some. Maybe not.

Multi colar truck

This truck has been in the 15 minute been for longer tgan 15 minutes. Guess it is 15 minuets per collor.

Looks like the roaches won

This was the Wendy's near my work. It was infested. A friend of mine got a roach in her sandwich. Maybe this will help.

Another magic lunch

Recent nostalgia

Out the window, rain

Looks kindof cool with the buildings in the foreground for perspective. What do yall think?

Notes

Goreogrophy: Gore in films just for the sake of gore. Not a bad thing mind you.

Wal-Mart shooter targets white victims.

Gnome desktop background switcher

It turns out that the command below ‘gconftool-2’ does not function properly when executed from within a cron job. There is some environment issue because the script ran fine on the command line no matter what and indeed changed the value of the gnome conf database, but would not implement the change when run from a cron job.

I run this script from the gnome “Startup Applications” mechanism.

Put an integer number of seconds on  the command line. If left blank, it runs once (changes the background) and exists.

Original script found http://www.webupd8.org/2009/11/3-lines-script-to-automatically-change.html.

Bash script to swap out the background of the gnome desktop every x number of seconds.

#!/bin/bash

# found http://www.webupd8.org/2009/11/3-lines-script-to-automatically-change.html

# Script to randomly set Background from files in a directory

# Directory Containing Pictures

DIR="/space/wide"

# Command to set Background Image

changeMe() {

# Command to Select a random jpg file from directory

# Delete the *.jpg to select any file but it may return a folder

PIC=$(/bin/ls $DIR/*.jpg | /usr/bin/shuf -n1)

/usr/bin/gconftool-2 -t string -s /desktop/gnome/background/picture_filename $PIC

}

if [ ! -z $1 ]; then

seconds=$1

else

# Run onece and quit

changeMe

exit 0

fi

while true ; do

changeMe

sleep ${seconds}s

done

He just wants the chair

Lawyers and Facebook

I do not personally know any lawyers. I have heard that many law firms do not want any of their members (lawyers who work for the firm) to participate in social media online. Apparently this means being in youtube videos either. These lawyers cannot let themselves be pictured on other’s web sites without getting in trouble.

The potential damage of getting caught with a drink in their  hand or an arm around the wrong person is so great that the people who do battle on the battlefield of law cannot allow themselves to join in to the surveillance revolution.

This tells me something very important to know about lawyers. They are more worried about perception than reality. It is not the reality of your situation, but the perception of the situation, by a jury, that get you thrown in prison or not. Basically, it boils down to what specific people think about the situation.

Perhaps there will come a day, soon hopefully, where things that happen on social media are left on social media. People have to live their lives. They are not in a bubble. The only thing that has changed is the amount of scrutiny.

Lawyers and politicians, because they are mostly lawyers, have one rule. Control the narrative, control the situation. Or, the one who controls the story controls the outcome. They call it driving or steering the narrative. It is done by controlling what people think by controlling what people are told or what evidence is available.

Lawyers would say “I lost the narrative” instead of “I got caught lying”..

The same argument was once made about the burden of literacy. The more that people know the harder they are to control. The last thing you want to teach  people is they don’t need you to survive. This is the same regardless of whether you want them to stay under your control or not.

Notes

Lobbyists do not want to be called lobbyists any more. The word has a taint to it. These people do not want to tell their friends and relatives what they do for a living for fear of excommunication.

found out the move is not going to happen for a week or more. I now have a less cluttered office and a bunch of the IT crap is out of my office. Win.

I just got ripped off by the vending machine at work. We only pay a quarter for snacks. The dollar bill take stopped giving change. There was a sign on the machine for a while that warned people of this  The sign in gone, but the behavior continues. All these conspiracy theories go through my head I imagine the guy picking up the money is deliberately not fixing the machine because he is pocketing the change that I would have gotten. I’m thinking of contacting the vendor directly, but our company might get upset. My only recourse is to stop using the machines.

Moving Office

Notes

At lunch today I Listened to a couple of the fellas talk about Magic the Gathering. The game has never grabbed me, but I like how really intelligent number oriented, rule oriented people obese over the process of the game. Today, the topic was how to choose when to Mulligen. One of the guys was testing his deck by shuffling, dealing out his cards, and choosing his first couple of moves based on the cards. He did this several times. This is apparently one of the things people do with their deck before playing with someone else. This makes sure you have not screwed yourself with too many or too few of some kind of card or other. Apparently it is fun for these obsessive types as well.

Need to check out PodioBooks.com.

Natalie is headed out to do some shopping today. She insists on forgetting the list we keep on the fridge. I was going to use my new phone to MMS her a picture of the list. Too bad I forgot to take a photo of the list before I left. ... Shut up! It isn’t like it would take up space on my phone. I have an SD card. It isn’t like I could just take another pic every time I add something to the list to keep it up to date. I might miss something Nat put up there, but I could have the gist. Still, I do not have it on my phone.

Video editors

Pitivi requires the use of an external program to make a “pictures”. This would be fine except I am incompetent in photo editors. I messed with a video this past weekend and fought the copyright ending for two hours. I gave up and used my old video editor Kdenlive, which uses some built in editor for text , and had the whole video done in 30 minutes.

Openshot reminds me a lot of Pitivi. It has a text editing thing built in or you can use an external editor. It is clunky, but usable. However, moving a bunch of clips at once is a nightmare. This is something I have to do all the time. Kdenlive has a tool you select and simply move a bunch of clips and all the effects attached to them around at will. You can move clips in Openshot, but the effects do not move with them .This makes the program useless to me.

Back Kdenlive I go.

360

Just messing arround.

Taters

i made mashed potatoes last night. I only had powdered milk so that is what I used. I put in the powdered milk, then the water for the powdered milk. Then I put in the water for the instant mashed potatoes. Then I mixed and heated everything.

The concoction didn’t mix properly. It was dry. i had to add nearly a third more water to the mix. It still didn’t really gel in to smooth mashed potatoes.

The only thing I can think of is the powdered milk threw off the ability of the dried mashed potato mix to absorb the water. Perhaps I’ll have to mix the water, potato mix and then after mixing, add the pre-made powdered milk. That will give the potato mix the best opportunity to gel before getting hit by the milk.

They were still good, if a  bit chalky. A bit chalky is much better than watery.

FYI, this is today’s lunch conversation.

Notes

Baby names by state.

Inertia is related to how quickly something changes temperature.

$49 billion a year for counterfeit foods. -Marketplace

Expect nutria to start turning up in dog food. -Marketplace

Apple is the coolest company in the UK. -BBC Wake up to Money

Ride home

Quick game od Magic at lunch.