Good News

A study conducted by UCLA's Department of Psychiatry has revealed that the kind of face a woman finds attractive on a man can differ depending on where she is in her menstrual cycle. For example: If she is ovulating, she is attracted to men with rugged and masculine features. However, if she is menstruating, or menopausal, she tends to be more attracted to a man with duct tape over his mouth and a spear lodged in his chest while he is on fire. No further studies are expected. email from Anna

Sounds about right. Kind of goes along with my assessment of the Dixie Twits the other day.

Look Ma! No Wheels

I've always had a thing for aquatic planes. I have no idea why. They just seem cool. I stumbled across this video here. Pretty cool. Those Canadians are nuts.

Dixie Twits

In 2007, the Dixie Chicks received:     a Grammy for "Best Country Album" for their album "Taking the Long Way,"     a Grammy for "Song of the Year" for "Not Ready to Make Nice,"     a Grammy for "Record of the Year" for "Not Ready to Make Nice" and     a Grammy for "Album of the Year" for "Taking the Long Way." Am I the only one who suspects their much better showing in 2007 may have more to do with finding the right (or rather, left) friends than with finding some previously-hidden talent? Shamlessly lifted from The Jawa Report

Do you remember the beautiful talented girls in high school who you really wanted to fuck, but after the first three minutes of hanging out with them, you wish to God they would just .. shut ... up!

Computers Suck
Nat's computer died. It made a "ieieieieeieieieieiei" noise when she turned it on last and then quit. I suspect the power supply, but when I replaced it that didn't work. It is not an identical power supply, but what are you going to do. The computer is an eMachines. I've heard nothing but nightmares about the brand. It is out of warranty. Basically we are screwed.
If I have to replace the motherboard in Nat's machine, I fear I will have to buy a new copy of the OS. This is because of some recent Slash Dot articles that basically complain about exactly that. You have got to be kidding me. It is no wonder they are so cheap. They suck. I've heard warnings for years not to buy them. I didn't have any say in this purchase. I'll have say in any subsequent purchases.
Nat has been using my computer. This is kind of cool. She has been using my machine for a couple of days now and her only complaint is that it is slow and some videos will not play off the net. There are a bunch of plugins that wont work either. I can occasionally get Java to work in Firefox under Linux, but it is hit and mis.
Pretty soon Elle will need her own computer. i should have one running right now. I'm just lost for an OS. I can't get the drive in the machine that we have for Elle to work. Something about missing bits here and there. I refuse to buy another copy of Windows for both Nat and Elle. That is just not going to happen. I would be rewarding Microsoft for making shitty OS software. I'm just going to have to figure things out.
I would love to put Linux on both machines. Nat wants Windows features. Elle needs children's software. There are no titles for kids that I'm aware of for Linux. That means Windows in both cases. It makes me sick. I've never gotten any program of any substance to work under Wine or Crossover Office. Those packages are still in the "play with it until it works" stage. I don't have time for that crap. I need it to work out of the box.
I cannot really blame developers for not supporting the "other OS". Even developing for Mac is a pain in the ass. If it requires X amount of effort to develop a package for Windows. It will take X *1.5 to develop for Windows and Mac. It will take X * 2.2 to develop for Windows, Mac and Linux. It will take X * 2.8 to develop for Windows, Mac, Linux and OS/2.
You have to not only redevelop parts of the program. You have to rethink what you are doing in so many cases. Then, you have to have the same features on all the platforms to keep from getting sued. Some features are a snap on one system and a pain in the ass on others.
The world of software development is glad that Microsoft controls the vast majority of computers because they have one target to aim at. Now IBM is coming up with a Single Desktop solution to make Windows, Mac and Linux software run seamlessly side by side on one PC.Great. That doesn't salve the problem of developing for each OS unless IBM is the one who wins.
It doesn't fix my problem. I need a computer that Nat can and will use. I need a computer that Elle can and will use. I don't have much money. I barely have enough money to make ends meet. What do you suppose I should do?

Went Dancing
Nat and I went dancing. We went with Ken and Jen. It was someone's birthday. Nat will have to fill in the details. It was a particularly good time. We should have taken the camera and video camera. We are going to sneak them in next time.
We saw two sets of racers on the way home. One set in the parking lot of the club. The normal set at Kroger up the street. I'm really getting sick if this. Some one drove through our front yard. It looks like they parked in our driveway and took off through our front yard at some point. I'm going to keep my shotgun close for the next tress passing prick who decides to damage my property.
Oh, right. Back to the party.
Had a great time. Took a few pictures, but with someone else's camera. So, no pictures =[
God I'm tired. I'm off to bed.
Hey Ken, it didn't work.

Birthday Dinner
Nat made the best birthday dinner for me Thursday night. She went through all kinds of trouble to make things perfect.
She knows I love General Tso's chicken. Nat ate the sushi and I ate the chicken and noodles. It was wonderful. It is a magical memory. I hope Nat knows this meant a lot to me. I wonder if i didn't want anything from any one else so her gift would feel like more.

Way off

You scored as Peter Pan. Your alter ego is Peter Pan. You are a child at heart. Anything you believe is possible, and you never want to grow up. Peter Pan 100% Donald Duck 69% Goofy 56% Sleeping Beauty 50% Snow White 38% Cinderella 38% Cruella De Ville 38% Pinocchio 38% The Beast 31% Ariel 19% Which Disney Character is your Alter Ego? created with QuizFarm.com

How to install software
It never fails to amaze me how may ways there are to install software. Even one one OS there are so many solutions. They all have their problems and most of them are simply lacking.
There are two concepts regarding installing software. There is the package manager. If you are on windows you just said "a what?" because Windows doesn't do well with package managers. At my old company, they wrote their own package management system  They called the software shelf. It was a web page that linked to all the installs. It aloud you to install sanctioned software packages and upgrade as you went.
Well, most other operating systems have these package managers built in, or available. They use repositories that hold the individual packages as needed.
The other concept is the one most folks are familiar with. It is the single package install. This is where you put a CD in the drive and it comes up asking you a bunch of questions and installs some software. Or, you download a package from the net and install it on your system. This is very hard to maintain. Things get broken when packages conflict. Things get broken when one package removes a shared file. Things get broken when different versions of things conflict.
If you bought a computer and stuck it in the closet and ever turned it on. It would run just as well in five years as it did that first day. When is the last time you had a computer go five years without having a melt down somewhere along the way? The above problems along with a few others are the reason computers get slow and start breaking as they are used.
If you never install or remove any software, the computer will run better for longer. If you lock the users out of the engine compartment, the can't destroy things as easily. But people need to upgrade and keep up to date virus detection, spam detection, firewall, ad removal and other kinds of software on a daily basis. These are layers upon layers of things that can go wrong.
In Linux, there must be ten different ways to bundle up software for distribution. I use YUM/RPM. I also use apt-get/DEB to a lesser degree. There is the one in Linspire. I'm not familiar with it. SUN has their own on Solaris. I hear it is lacking. YUM is the package manager and RPM is the method of installing the individual packages. Apt-get is the package manager and DEB is the method for each package. None of these are compatible with each other. They claim to jump the gap, but there are always troubles in my experience.
Why doesn't Windows have a package manager? Well, they do, kind of. Windows has an installer with no repository support  tha I'm aware of. It is the Windows Installer. However, when you base your existence on commercial proprietary software, no one is going to agree to put their install in a repository with every one elses stuff. There could be a repository for open source software for Windows. That will not happen because Microsoft would have to support it in some way. If MS decided not to (which they have because their investors won't allow it) it will not happen. I bet you could get YUM and RPM to work on Windows with some work. You could make repositories that are for win32 and win64. It sounds easy enough to me. Well, easy to some one who knows it well enough.
When I want to update mys system at home to the latest software versions of just about everything, I type in the following command.
sudo yum -y update
or
sudo apt-get update
Those commands will update the minor version of most software packages. If I want to cut a bit deeper, I use the word "upgrade" in stead of "update" and a further leap of version numbers will be taken.
When I want to uninstall a package the command is something like the following.
sudo yum remove <package>
That's it. The package manager worries about all the required packages and libraries. Sometimes there is a dependency that needs to be resolved. That is a pain. Nothing like it was before YUM or apt-get.
That is it. All the software on my box that I installed using YUM gets updated in the background while I get on with my day. Somethings things go hey-wire, but any time you make changes stuff freaks. I have to say, it is much better than keeping everything up to date by hand.
So, who keeps the repositories up to date? Right now it is the community of Linux users who sign up and give a few hours a week to the cause on their own time. I believe Linspire has paid people doing it. Red Hat may have people on staff who help out. I bet most of the companies involved in enterprise systems contribute in one way or another. It is the high end users out there who do the trudge work though.
To install a piece of software you first must decide if there are any prerequisites required. These are called dependencies.  On Windows and other non repository systems this is pretty much a manual step. you don't know until you try to install or, for the love of God, read the instructions. If you are on a repository system (YUM or apt-get for example) the package management software tries really hard to install all the dependencies and their dependencies and their dependencies before installing the package in question.
In Windows (and other closed source projects) most programs include the dependencies in the install package. This can cause conflict. It is referred to as DLL hell. In open source OS projects most of the dependencies are not included because of licensing. Open source says you can freely distribute a package unless you make it part of another package that you sell. Thus, most. open source projects have a long list of all too separate dependencies. Without a package management system you are in trouble.
A good example is a sound editing program that I installed on Windows many years ago. it could not support MP3 directly because of lichening. MP3 is a proprietary format and you must pay to use it in your program. When you clicked on "save as mp3" a dialog box popped up telling you to got to www.whatever.com and download a specific DLL file and put it in a specific spot. They could not put it there for you because that would be redistribution. You had to go get it yourself.
I'm sure any one who has made it to this point is a confirmed geek. Let me guess, Nat, my parents, and most random people have dropped off before this point. Maybe Adam and Ken (Viper) made it this far. None of my other geeky friends read my blog. Let me know in the comments.
Back to the subject. . . There is no silver bullet. Every single method of install and removal has problems. They mostly have the same problems. Don't put on enough, take off too much, or break something that was working. There is a movement in the world to have a one folder install called zero install. All dependencies would be linked from withing the folder and to run the program you would just double click the folder. When time comes to remove the program, you delete the folder.  it is very easy to find the dependencies that have no folders pointing to them. You could choose to remove them or leave them there. This is a Utopian idea that might actually work. it would eliminate DLL hell and would make the  Windows Registry redundant. It would make the dependency torture easier. If you need five different versions of a library on your system, just rename their folders and point your link point to that one copy. Hard drives are cheap.

Absent Minded Programmer
So, someone comes in to my office. I take off my earphones to talk to them about something related to work. When they leave I look around for where I laid my earphones. They are not in the normal five places I do find the cord and follow it.
They were around my neck.

Lunch Conversation
It was mostly about the case of the psycho astronaut who allegedly tried to kill a romantic rival.
# No one has spoken to the male astronaut's wife. He was married too.
# One of the night show people asked what kind of car she was driving would go 900 miles without stopping for gas or to pee. Is it one of those special NASA cars?
# Someone interviewed by the news asked "What is with Clear Lake raising all these crazy women?" I have to agree.
# The local news last night said they were having "over night coverage" of the situation. They stuck a camera in the window of an SUV while it pulled into a garage. "She is probably laying down on the floor of the SUV ..."  - Bastards.

Jihady Joke
How may Jihady does it take to take over the world?
One to be radical. And the rest to do nothing.

hmmm, not very funny is it.

Backseat Poltergeists
So, Elle said she didn't want to go to school today. That never worked when I was a kid, but it did with Nat this morning. She missed Elle from the long weekend without her. Nat and Elle were on their way to Nat's mom's place. Things were running smoothly. Then, from the back seat comes "Mommy, I ate too much."
Then came the sound that every parent' knows all to well. A sound deserving of it's own paragraph.
BWAAAAAKH!!!
Nat tells me Elle did a pretty good job of confining the torrent to the back seat. I picture Elle's head spinning and puke spraying all over the car like a vomit lawn sprinkler, but I'm assured that was not the case.
Nat had to stop at Target and get a new booster seat. The old car seat is in the trunk festering as I type. That is going to be a fun clean up this evening.
Reminds me of a story from my childhood. I was enjoying a bag of marshmallows. Yah, marshmallows. Well, I vaguely remember my mother telling me not to eat too many, but you know kids. I ate my fill, snapped my fingers and went to bed. Sometime later, in the middle of the night. I stumbled into my parents room and said something very profound. Something every parents hears at least a dozen times.
"Mom, I don't feel so gooBWAAAAAKH!!!"
My father didn't miss a beat. From the dark, without even being fully away he says "Somebody just threw up." Can't put nothing past the old man.
Well, I puked on the carpet again and my mom rushed me to the bathroom. I assured her
"I'm finBWAAAAAKH!!!"
I knelt corrected.
Ah, payback is a bitch.

New Contacts
I like these new contacts. The prescription is a bit stronger. I'm getting to the point with glasses that the world looks fish-eyed around the edges. None of that with contacts. Everything is just clear. Well, clear as long as the contacts are sitting the right way. I have astigmatism so the contacts mus sit with the correct bit pointing up. About every hour I have to give them a nudge to point them in the right direction. I've tried blinking different ways and looking in strange and stressful directions, but nothing really works. You just have to nudge them with your finger.
I had to order some new lenses. I have a new prescription anyway. I really do see better with contacts. I can read signs sometimes while riding in the car. I still can't make out the menus behind the tellers at fast food places. I think I get the most out of the vision I have with contacts.
I have to ware glasses with the contacts to read. That is kind of back-asswords, I know. I like getting up out of my seat and walking down the hall able to recognize people. and not trip over my own feet. Bifocals have warn their welcome thin. I'm just plane tired of only seeing half of everything. Someone needs to come up with a real cure for focusing the eyes. Either thin out the human lens or come up with auto focusing lenses for glasses or contacts. I don't care how you do it. Make them zoom while your at it.

One year
It has been one year today since I started the new job. I suppose I can't call it a new job now. I've made it past a mile stone. the job is hard. Thats good.
So, I could lament over the past year. I could compare and contrast the two jobs. No one wants to hear that. The biggest difference is going from a fifty thousand person company to a roughly fifty person company. It is nice working for a medium company. I got closer to the folks I work with. It helps that I knew most of them before I worked here.
We have lunches together. We do things outside of work with each other. It is more of a village feeling.
However, When I used to work for a print house, I never felt the way I do here. The print house was a sweat shop. We kept getting new managers and they kept throwing up their hands and leaving. We were disgruntled. No one worked there because they wanted to. The only people who seemed to enjoy their job were the delivery people. They worked on contract and were paid pretty much per delivery. The rest of us just hated to be at work.
Maybe it was the smell. That place had a bad smell from all the chemicals we used in the different process. Now that I think about it, that may have had something to do with it.

George Carlin Rules

New Rule: Stop giving me that pop-up ad for Classmates.com! There's reason you don't talk to people for 25 years. Because you don't particularly like them!  Besides, I already know what the captain of the football team is doing these days:  he's mowing my lawn. New Rule:  Don't eat anything that's served to you out a window unless you're a seagull.  People are acting all shocked that a human finger was found in a  bowl of Wendy's chili. Hey, it cost less than a dollar. What did you expect it to contain? Trout?     New Rule:  Stop saying that teenage boys who have sex with their hot, blonde teachers are permanently damaged.  I have a better description for these kids: lucky bastards. New Rule:  If you need to shave and you still collect baseball cards, you're gay.  If you're a kid, the cards are keepsakes of your idols. If you're a grown man, they're pictures of men. New Rule:  Ladies, leave your eyebrows alone.  Here's how much men care about your eyebrows: do you have two of them?  Okay, we're done. New Rule:  There's no such thing as flavored water.  There's a whole aisle of this crap at the supermarket - water, but without that watery taste.  Sorry, but flavored water is called a soft drink.  You want flavored water?  Pour some scotch over ice and let it melt.  That's your flavored water. New Rule:  Stop messing with old people.  Target is introducing a redesigned pill bottle that's square, with a bigger label.  And the top is now the bottom.  And by the time grandpa figures out how to open it, his ass will be in the morgue.  Congratulations, Target, you just solved the Social Security crisis. New Rule:  The more complicated the Starbucks order, the bigger the jerk. If you walk into a Starbucks and order a "decaf grande half-soy, half-low fat, iced vanilla, double-shot, gingerbread cappuccino, extra dry, light ice, with one Sweet-n'-Low and one NutraSweet," .  Ooh, you're a huge jerk. New Rule: I'm not the cashier!  By the time I look up from sliding my card, entering my PIN number, pressing "Enter," verifying the amount, deciding, no, I don't want cash back, and pressing "Enter" again, the kid who is supposedto be ringing me up is standing there eating my Almond Joy. New Rule:  Just because your tattoo has Chinese characters in it doesn't make you spiritual.  It's right above the crack of your ass.  And it actually translates to "beef with broccoli."  The last time you did anything spiritual, you were praying to God you weren't pregnant. You're not spiritual.  You're just high. New Rule:  Competitive eating isn't a sport.  It's one of the seven deadly sins.  ESPN recently televised the US Open of Competitive Eating, because watching those athletes at the poker table was just too damned exciting.  What's next, competitive farting? Oh wait. They're already doing that.  It's called "The Howard Stern Show."   New Rule:  I don't need a bigger mega M&M. If I'm extra hungry for M&Ms, I'll go nuts and eat two! New Rule:  If you're going to insist on making movies based on crappy, old television shows, then you have to give everyone in the Cineplex a remote so we can see what's playing on the other screens.  Let's remember the reason something was a television show in the first place is that the idea wasn't good enough to be a movie.   New Rule:  No more gift registries.  You know, it used to be just for weddings.  Now it's for babies and new homes and graduations from rehab. Picking out the stuff you want and having other people buy it for you isn't gift giving, it's the white people version of looting.     New Rule (and this one is long overdue):  No more bathroom attendants! After I zip up, some guy is offering me a towel and a mint like I just had sex with George Michael.  I can't even tell if he's supposed to be there, or just some freak with a fetish.  Don't want to be on your webcam, Dude.  I just want to wash my hands.     New Rule:  When I ask how old your toddler is, I don't need to know in months.  Not "27 Months."  "He's two," will do just fine.  He's not a cheese.  And I didn't really care in the first place.

These rock. I'm not sure where my dad found them. They are new to me. I don't know where to put the link so I'll put it to George Carlin. Sounds good to me.

Weekend
Anna hung out at the new house and watched the game. She went dancing too.
Josh hung out at the in law's place for the game. Sounds like he has some pretty cool in laws.
Trip had a village over to his place for the game.
Rob from work had a party with coworkers.
Nat and I hung out at the house and missed Elle. She was in Kansas seeing her father off. He shipped out to Iraq just before kick-off. That really took the wind out of my sails. He is about the  closest person to me who has gone to Iraq. I have some friends over there and some friend's relatives. Elle is near and dear. Her father is there for important to me.

Elle just made it back a few minutes ago. Nat is in the kitchen making tacos for dinner. Elle keeps asking if she can help. There is something on TV. The cats are hanging out at Nat's feet waiting for something to drop. The dog is locked up in the cage, or she would be there too.
Sounds like a family.

Super bowl Sunday
Yesterday, I poisoned my back yard. I sprayed for weeds and bugs. I'm not sure it did any good.
Nat is dressing up the cats. It cracks me up that the young one can't walk in cloths, even if they don't cover his feet.
The dog is going nuts because we are not dressing her up too.
I'm putting off doing taxes. I'm not sure what to do with all the paperwork. I need a tax person.
Ted ships out to Iraq today.
The Super bowl is at 5:00. I'm probably not going to watch because, I just don't care.

We went to Sam's. and got a load of food for the month.
Hold your hat, because we have the windows open. It is a banner day in Houston.

Car woes
So, Nat took a left the other day and the car makes this grinding noise in the right front. I'm thinking constant velocity joint. I'm also thinking "They fucked up the car last month when the fixed it." Well, it turns out the wheel well wall (say that a couple of times fast) came loose on that side. it had enough damage that they replaced it. Of course it did. $104. In mechanic speak that meas it was a $10 part.
I would love to kick off a rant about mechanics. I would like to call them every name in the book and say that someone needs to come up with binding arbitration for mechanic shops. Someone needs to outlaw the BBB's practice of not taking complaints aimed at members (so only crooked companies should be members). I would make some innuendo about actually doing something about the situation. However, you and I know I will not do anything about it. that is why mechanics get away with this crap. I wish I were the kind who would sue. Then again, that sounds like a bunch of effort. If I were that motivated, I would have fixed the damn thing myself.
Nothing is covered by the stupid warranty we got. The only good warranties have done is make car manufacturers fix a couple of chronic issues. For example, Honda had CV joint problems for a couple of decades. Every small car they made would blow the CV joints at 60 - 80 thousand miles. This was no skin off Honda's nose because their warranties only went to 36 thousand at the time. in the nineties, many of the warranties went to well over 50 thousand miles. Honda finally did something about the design of their CV joints. They seem to last longer now. I knew a mechanic in the early nineties who made a very good living fixing Honda CV joints and automatic transmissions. That was all he did.
There were no warranties on cars until the Japanese got into the market. None of the things that go wrong with the care a ever covered. I remember a friend in the late eighties who had an RX7. It had a bumper to bumper warranty that only covered moving parts in the drive train.  RX7 has a Wankel engine. There are only 4 moving parts in the frigging thing. They will never go out. The rest of the car will rot away and the moving parts in the engine will still work. Things like bumper mounts and door handles are not covered.
It's getting to the point of institutional deceit. That is where the lies become so ingrained into the fabric of the business that people don't even call them on it any more.
Didn't I say I was not going to rant? I better stop now.

Bad Precedent
I've noticed some fallout from the Mooninite scare in Boston. It seems that the police were very upset about this kind of thing going on. It seems there is a rebellious streak showing amongst the youth. Has there ever been a time where the younger people didn't want to piss off the older people? Several other cities didn't freak out. What's up with Boston?
Let's recap. A bunch of hippies want to promote a goofy (and funny) TV show by leaving light-bright boxes all over the city. This is a promotional stunt just to get attention. Hey, that's great. Those boxes are just about the size of a Claymore  mine. They have lights and batteries visible. They could very much be mistaken for bombs to someone who doesn't know what a bomb looks like. Isn't that one of the rubs though? What does a bomb or mine look like?
If I were a cop, I would worry the next time someone says that those blinking boxes all over the city are just a promotional gimmick and not to worry. People walking past will know instantly they are not dangerous.
These guys were just trying to get a message across. Think about it. All the terrorists want to do is get their message across.

What a couple of morons

he men, Peter Berdovsky, 27, and Sean Stevens, 28, had been hired by a marketing firm, Interference Inc., which had been hired by Turner Broadcasting. They placed 38 of the devices on buildings, under bridges and in other spots around the city, and each earned $300. The devices, featured flashing lights in the shape of a character from the cartoon show “Aqua Teen Hunger Force.” ... Other cities made sure that the devices were being taken down Thursday. In New York, the police contacted Interference Inc., which told them that at least 20 devices had been placed in Brooklyn and Manhattan. The police found two devices, at West 33rd Street and 12th Avenue, stuck to metal panels under an overpass, and said they believed that the others were removed by passers-by. New York Times

Whatthe hell where they thinking?!? Yes, lets put up scary boxes in the subways. I hope these dopes get the book thrown at them.
Video