Finally went to the new Star Trek movie. I have to say that I really liked it. There were holes, like the two dimensional singularity. Just because Stargate has one, doesn't mean Star Trek needs one too. Whatever.
The AC was dead in the theatre. I'll take that over some jerk the row behind us cussing people out and talking through the whole movie.
There are labors broken and labors mended.
People warship your path behind and spit ahead.
Tours are built and fall.
Somewhere, someone is making a stained glass window.
Horns blowing all around a city, and industry lying still.
Holding hands and snuggling on the couch.
Our masters are thinking of something else.
We are left to our selves for a while.
I blew up a motherboard at work. I was replacing the heat sync on
one of the processors and managed to kick the processor loose. While
re-seating it, I bent a pin and did not notice. The system never
powered on again.
Come to think if it, I've never set a processor that ended up
working. I think that from now on, I'll track down someone else to seat
those things for me. I mean, that is not a bad limitation if I'm
honest. It only takes a second and a steady hand.
It really upsets me that I did this. Somehow, I should have known
about this in advance and asked someone for help. Motherboards and
processors cost money.
Then I fixed a bunch of stuff and then I fixed a bunch more stuff. I should not let this hold me back to be honest.
Marketplace, one of the podcasts I listen to on a pretty regular
basis, had a short blurb that said basically "Bribery works in
education. Kids are more likely to learn if they are paid in some way."
I hate to burst your bubble, but any motivation helps, positive or
negative. The part that works is following through on promises and
threats. And a real correlation between actions and consequences.
That is the magic bullet. It isn't rocket science. It is not science
at all. It is so basic that it should be a given in nearly every
situation. Plants respond to motivation. That is why they grow up
toward the
sun. Falling rocks respond to motivation. That is why they tend to stop
when they hit the ground.
How much of my tax money was spent finding out for the ten
thousandth time that people need motivation to do things? I'm sick of
this.Something has got to give. Read the Bible, Koran, Torah, any text
written in the last couple thousand years. They are chucked full of
stories about people responding to motivation.
The only thing that scars a writer of fiction is a blank page. It is terrifying. I refuse to call myself a writer. I will never write anything substantial at this rate. I write at the speed of a blank page. Then, I bitch about it on my blog. Not productive.
I'm not blocked. I have no ideas or direction. I have little
motivation. The only satisfaction I get from my very little bit of
writing is putting i t up on my blog and having it available to the
world to critique.
It is not that I lack creativity. I lack motivation. One must be wary of asking for motivation. Some of the best motivation is negative motivation. There may be sacrifices involved. This makes me want to write a more generic blog entry on motivation.
This is a bird strike on an f16. Noe, they only have one engine. This has been listed among the limmitations of the f16 in the past. Now you know why.
If it doesn't restart on the third try, plant the fucker.
I can't really compare the two right now because the Firefox available in Fedora 10 at the moment has a real problem. After the machine has been up for several hours it grinds to a hault and hangs. I have to power off and back on because I never manage to catch it befe it is too late.
Opera on the other hand runs for hours and hours and does most everything I as of it. I do get an error message every 4 YouTube vieeos, but it works after a refreash. I can live with that over a system hang. Trust me.
Opera is growing on me. I like the tabs and I like the layout. It seems faster than Firefox. It is more stable too. I don't know if it is justthe Firefox in Fedora 10 or all of Linuxdom. Fedora 11 comes out soon and I hope they have a new version of fedora. I wish they would include Opera as an option in Yum, supported directly by the Fedora project. Give us options guys. This one is worth it.
Firefox has a few plugins like the one that lets me copy as HTML or text from the context menu. That I'll miss if this hiades keeps up.
I'm not much on search engines that find the same thing. Both pages return good results. Not the same results. I have to give the nod to Google for getting me where I want to go. That may be due to my knowing how to get what I want out of Google.
One thing I really have to give Bing over Google is the graphics. Bing had a D-Day theme today, 2009-06-06. Google had some ridiculous Tetras. theme up today. That pisses me off. Nothing for 9/11. Nothing for any American special day. I'm sure Bing puts up a different front page for every market. Google should do the same. Patronize me. That is all I want.
I'll still use Google for the time being, but Bing just might make it in to my vocabulary.
Looks stupid. I've only seen one episode. This show will set spy game back 100 years. Miami will not survive either. The only redeeming feature of this show is Bruce Campbell. Not that he helps the story along much. I'm just glad he as the work.
I do like the little fake nuggets of information that come round while bouncing from scene to scene. It makes me think of a book that has been converted to a movie.
The show deserves a B.
Fedora 11 comes out in three days. Not that I think anything cool is coming in 11. At least nothing flashy. It sounds like an incramental upgrade.
Currently, I use Fedora 10 on both my machines. Fedora 10 is hanging after being up for a long time. It reminds me of Windows. I've sounded like a broken record lately. "Fedora reminds me of Windows." I hate saying that. I hate that it is true. I want to use Linux because it is reliable and stable and gets the job done. I do not know if the Linux world is in some sort of transit, or if people are just trying to get too many features in the next release without fixing the old bugs.
The end of the home computer is nigh. So many people who might just know something about the tech world come round to thinking that the future holds mobile phones as the device of choice for communicating and getting anything productive done. I don't know how the tiny monitor problem will be fixed. I believe it will be fixed at some point.
When I say phone I mean mobile or cell phone. The term has changed. Now, if I mean the kind of phone you plug in to a copper wire, I say land line or home phone.
My desktop will have a computer on if for the foreseeable future. There is a long list of bullets I need addressed before I'll give up the hot box under my desk. Even if it is a notebook.
With my past couple of experiences with Fedora upgrading from 7 to 8 to 9 to 10, I may backup, format and start over this time around. I'm getting sick of strange shit breaking for no good reason after an upgrade. Stupid stuff fails. Only once has the machine broken resulting in loss of data. That had something to do with Grub failing. Once Grub blows a gasket the machine is typically a paperweight.
The U. S. Army finally upgrades to Vista, now that Windows 7 is coming out. They will be an OS behind again. Apparently, a seven year turn around is just too fast for the Military to keep up with. They are waiting for the good MS OS to come out (Windows 7 has some good reviews from tech types) to upgrade to the shitty one.
It used to be huge for an OS upgrade to come around. Now it is no big deal..Computers do 95% of what we need right now. The other 5% is covered by phones and just not done.
The next Android phone is out soon. There is more than one. I've heard tell there is a version that looks exactly like an iPhone with no keyboard. There are plans for netboos as well. Though it appears Android may not be the primary OS on those boxes. It may be a pre-boot OS for obtaining information or making a call without waiting for the computer (Windows) to boot.
My current desktop computer will hold me for a while yet baring failures. Don't know how log that will hod true. It is 32 bit, not that it matters on a desktop system. I don't play games so the limitations are not that big a deal. Maybe I'll get a better computer the next time our company gives away old boxes. We just recycled a bunch of computers that are the same hardware I have now. The next round of boxes will be superior. Not that I can rely on this.
The fact that I do not have to pay for my OS all over again when I upgrade is wonderful. Linux is free.
Google is dropping the ball. They are so worried about taking on Microsoft they forget to make there stuff better than Microsoft.
I'm not looking for a lot. I just want some templates dammit. google docs is supposed to be a professional grade office productivity too. Not until some of this chicken shit stuff is handled I say.
This is my CSS page. Not very complex, I agree. Imagine having to type it in before you can use a document.
p {
margin-top: 8px;
margin-bottom: 8px;
}
Well, the large beautiful monitor died. I can replace it for about $200 or so. It is just too bad I don't really have it. There are so many thing I would rather spend $200 on like a storm dor in the back or to have someone who knows what they are doing look at the yard. It sucks being broke. Life in America is so much more fun when you have money. I'm using an old shit monitor from work. The big bos got a hair up his butt one day and just started handing them out. Hey, it works.
There is a long list of how inferior this monitor is than the other. There is no point in elaborating. I'm going to sulk off in the corner and not do anything. Between downgrading the monitor and a sore throat, I'm not in the mood to participate in reality today.
Not sure if they put something on the tires to make them act like this or not. Who knows.That is a highly modified Jeep. I hope Jeep as a brand survives all the current financial troubles of Chrysler. I have a soft spot for them. I'm sure it is just the WWII movies I watched as a kid. Still, it is there.
There is a European company offering some employees five years of
time off at one third pay. That could come in handy. I would go find a
job somewhere else, or write a book. I couldn't afford to live on 95%
of my current salary. We would loose the house. Still, would be fun I
bet.
Many people in the bad spots of Mexico drive around at night with
their interior lights on so the drug traffickers will not mistake them
for any one else and shoot them. The Guatemalan drug dealers complain
that the Mexican drug dealers are giving them a bad name.
The king of Saudi Arabia promises to reform government. Give women
the right to drive and vote, not hold office or anything. Oh, women's
testimony in court will still count as half that of a man. Rape victims
would still have to prove they were rapped or be punished severely for
bringing it up. We wouldn't want to go nuts. His motto is "Yes we
can." "Change takes time." Yup.
One of the most influential technological advances affecting warfare
was canned food.
Hunter Gatherer peoples worked about two days a week or so. Farmers
work 6 to 7 days a week. They also lived longer. Farming made it easier
to feed an army and support a larger population, but it caused disease
and shorter life spans.
Carrots were yellow or purple back in the day. Orange carrots were
selectively bred for the Earl of Orange.
The Air France flight that went down recently used some sort of text
message technology through satellites to transmit errors to the
maintenance people as systems failed. I don't know about you, but I do
not want to monitor the Twitter feed of the plane I'm flying in. "Shit!
My left engine is about to catch on fire. I'm so screwed."
More people are run over by trains than die in airline crashes. It is more dangerous for a pilot to drive to the airport than fly the plane.
Gmail has a nice interface for keeping contact information. I can keep tabs on people. I can attach a limitless amount of phone numbers or email addresses. I can keep notes and link them to Google Chat. Soon, I will be able to use Google Wave and attach blogs, Twitter, pictures, documents, calendars, all cross linked and indexed for searching. That sounds like one stop shopping for the proper authorities with a warrant.
Facebook runs software to recognize faces in pictures. You can link a square of space in an uploaded pic to someone's profile. A story came out a while back that iTunes found a face in a pan of cookies, so it is not perfect by any measure. Still, this technology is the holy grail of data mining advocates.
In London and other parts of Briton, the cameras follow people everywhere. As a matter of fact, they can follow someone backwards. Once a crime is viewed on camera, operators can fallow a person forward or backward through the city. I've heard that clicking on spots in a frozen image can lead you to other cameras in the database that might have a better view of that spot. the time line can be moved back and forth with eas displaying a frozen snapshot of the city at a moment in time from any number of angles all linked and indexed for searching.
Add to this the location data contained in phones. The two databases can then be linked to one another and a bubble appears above every one's head as they walk around with their name and any flags that might be pertinent to the viewers. Ad to this the ID card and driver's license data, relatives, taxes and the data people leave behind when they travel. Oh, and don't forget any criminal history. Of course, that makes a difference. A flick of a switch displays that information next to every one in view of the cameras.
Now, add look over time and link known relationships between people who have spent time in the same residence or work place. People may have been on the same bus together, or flight, or passed one another on the street. Maybe they spent the night an arm's length apart many nights in a row. Which church, synagogue, mausq do they frequent?
Now, add credit card information. Add where they went to school, what they studied, professor and teacher comments, discipline issues, credits, awards.
Add employment history. Add exposure to knowledge like how to make two devices communicate and how to remotely control electronics. Add chemicals they have used and know how to use. Do they know how to fly a plane, navigate a suer, sky dive, scuba dive, scale a flat surface, can they swim?
I approve. ... Cary on.
Oh, more? Fine.
They should have had an on-screen keyboard the whole time. I'm not sure who made the decision on leaving the keyboard to external developers and rely solely on the mechanical device, but they are stupid and should not be listened to in the future on similar decisions.
The mechanical keyboard is easier for me to type with. It is faster for longer sentences. When I have more than a few strokes to type in, I use the mechanical keyboard. To be hones, 90% of what I type on the phone so far is one sentence, and a phone SMS sentence at that. The on screen keyboard is a smidge better at simbols and the extra stuff. I hear there is one of emoticons Haven't found that one yet.
The camera now works. Before, the camera was slow. When you pressed the button all the way to take a picture, ti went blank for a full send before it forze the image and made that the picture. Now, the image freezes and that is the picture. In other words, you are not blind for the last second before the camera snaps the shot. It helps me hod the camera still which is very important because the camera still desperately needs a flash. That is in the next software upgrade right?
The camera now takes video. That is awesome. The quality is still phone level. I'm not upset about that. I like the choice. The old app you had to install was so buggy it was not usable. The integrated video camera is far better. Now I know why no one wrote a good app for video all this time.
This is the complex one. I loaded an app called ChompSMS. It was very cool and included the same on-screen keyboard that was just included in the 1.5 update. I got a preview and fell in love. Anyway, I had to uninstall the pre-cupcake (the name of the software package) version of ChompSMS and liked how it handled messages and threads, so even after getting the Android update, I tried Chomp. It crashed, and crashed again. Crap. Stupid me, I had to uninstall the old one and go find the new post-1.5 update version.
Something very magical happened at this point. I noticed that the post-1.5 update of ChompSMS has a spell checker. Yes, my Tweets will have a shot at being spelled at least somewhat correctly. I'm not the only one who as complained about not being able to check myself. It also has a little counter to tell you how many characters you have used. That should required by law regarding SMS software.
Gmail on the G1 still has NO spell checker that I can find. There are plenty of library apps and one off spelling mechanisms on the G1. I know it can be done. Either I'm missing it, or Google is behind the curve on their own device. Come Google., chop chop.
Still sucks on the G1. Google just came out with this whole 'wave' thing and it will not work on the G1 for the known future. No spell-checker and your characters are all messed up when you sync a doc back to google docs. Someone does not get it. New stuff is great, but it has to work with the old stuff.
The graphical security trace thing that pops up when the phone wakes up looks tranparent. It is more difficult to read in the sun shine. It might be adjustable.
That is about it. I haven't noticed anything else yet. I still need the extended battery. That bit hasn't changed. I'm sure if anything pisses me off, you will hear about it here.
I'm white in case you didn't know. I happen to be male. I a ma white
male. The blame of everything wrong in the world rides on my shoulders.
Who knew?
We have a supreme court justice nominee who will be put in place I
feel who openly says her race and sex makes her better than white men.
This is not a step forward. This is a step sideways.
This is not justice. This is not pay back. This is bad. She will be
placed in power because the party that won the last election want it to
happen and will dare any one to get in their way.
"Out and proud." "Black power." "Girl power." Those slogans and
hundreds of others are just fine with the establishment. They promote
victimization. They say "I agree to be a victim of circumstances and
allow my political masters to use me as a pulpit for their own benefit."
This has become a mantra of late. To leap from cause to cause,
riding the wave each time, climbing a ladder, using people and their
situations as stepping stones to further political means is the goal.
There is no end game. There is no win. Once you have won, you are
supposed to stop. The last thing politicians want is to win a cause or
cure their chosen disease. That means they have to start over again or
find a new poster victim.
I'm not proud of being white. I didn't choose to be white. I didn't
choose to be legally blind. I didn't choose to be male. I didn't choose
to be a dumbass who can't graduate collage. I didn't choose to be born
in the U. S., but I am proud of her because she chooses to be better
than the rest of the world and makes it happen.
I listen to a podcast called Marketplace. It has been ridiculously
depressing the last several months. They give plenty of good advice and
ideas. Every one is broke. Everyone has a crisis going on. The bottom
line is people and relationships. Money is state sanctioned trust. You
trust the state (country) to honer the paper more than you trust your
neighbor to not swindle you over a bushel of oats.
There is an application available for the G1 called ChompSMS. It has
a tone of features. One I like, it breaks up twitter SMS by user name
so you get a thread interface. I love that. That one feature is worth
the price. ChompSMS is free. Basically it takes the time to install it.
It also comes with an on-screen keyboard. Nice. Still needs a spell
checker.
This evening I'm going straight home and paying bills. I'm going to
try to take the same amount of money I paid to the car in to the
savings account. We just might be able to pull it off.
I bought some safety glasses online. Wal-Mart wants six bucks a
pare. Sam's doesn't normally carry over-glasses kinds of safety
glasses. Home Depot wants ten bucks a pare for a single pare or six
bucks for the same pare of safety glasses and one set of earplugs and a
face mask. Still haven't figured that one out. I payed $2.50 each for
12 pare online. I also picked up another pare of fit-over sunglasses
(safety glasses) for $6.95 as apposed to $11 at Wal-Mart for basically
the same thing. Froogle, right? I use safety glasses for yard work and
anything in the garage.
There is a new movie out called "Drag me to Hell". It is about a
mortgage broker who says no one too many times. Something about an old
woman cursing the broker when she is made homeless. It is refreshing to
get a movie about someone besides a cop, lawyer, scientist, doctor,
politician or writer.
Money, what money? It has become trendy to be broke. It is about
time. It has been trendy to buy too much and get in to insane debt for
most of my life. I've tried, and sometimes failed, to avoid that trend.
I like and encourage living within one's means.
My brand new monitor is going out at the house. It is limping along
annoyingly. I have another monitor to use when it dies completely.
Right now I have to turn it on and off several times to let it warm up
before it decides to work. It makes me think of all those old tube TVs
we had that did something similar after several years of reliable use.
This one is like nine months old. Maybe we will replace it and maybe
not. I don't know how it will go.
[end]
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