Trip to Wing Stop

It is funny how much fun stuff happens just heading over to a restaurant to grab some wings. Nat even takes a turn at filming me. Yes, I'm in one of my own videos.

Good times. The wings were fantastic too.

More shaggy guitar goodness from Lance. He has quite the arsenal of cool effects. He doesn't need them to play either. I used to know a couple guys who really couldn't play worth a darn and used the peddles to try and hid it. Lance is just out there Man!

Incoherent News

Dubai Killing

The guy killed in Dubai a month ago was the leader of either a terrorist or political organization depending on with whom you are speaking at the moment. It was a well planned attack with many redundancies. People are more surprised that the Dubi police were able to patch together a bunch of survaliance footage in a coherant manner. I can't help but think that someone had a Macbook, access to the raw footage and a couple uninterrupted hours. I'm more impressed that the assassination team didn't seem to give a shit that all the cameras were there.

Blog Buzz

The blogsphere is alive with people complaining about the financial situation of the United states and how the bailout was not only the worse thing to do, but exactly what the bankers wanted because they deliberately put themselves in a situation where they could blakcmake the U. S. taxpayer out of trillions of dollars all at one throw. Now, the money is tied up in accounts that will never be used to loan money to people who will create jobs or get the general economy moving again. The only way to make money quickly is to bet on crappy investments and sell them before every one figures it out. That is precisely what got us in this mess to begin with.

Prepare for bubble 2.0 in 2011/2012. No one has learned anything except how to run a better scam and make a fortune off tax payers all in the name of you better do it or you will lose to the Chinese. When we do eventually get over run by the Chinese, people will look back on this and decide that it was not our fault, but all those stupid tax payers who didn't ... wait a minute.

Boat Sinks

A friend of mine went on one of those learning cruses when she was in college. She got stuck in the middle of the ocean for a month or so because eithere there was no wind, or the boat was broken or something. I don't remember. Anyway, another ship from France or some fucking place was hit by a wind that was blowing straight down and sunk their boat. They were adrift for over a day because someone didn't answer their voice mail. Not that interesting of a story, but it just made me think about a friend.

KDEnLive on a thumb drive

This is the software I use for video editing. I use Linux, so it was just what was available. I've complained constantly about my sound issues, but that is my computer and the fact that I"m an idiot.

My recommendations with any software are to save early and often. I routinely have KDEnLive simply go away between clicks. If I were not a habitual saver, I would have lost a lot of time on this software. This is systemic with all operating systems in my opinion.

Lance and his new pedle

Something about a blue box and a crybaby waw-waw pedel. I completely missed it. The whole thing sounds cool though. Check it out.

Ugly Trees

There are ugly trees. There are mesquite trees in Texas. They are scraggly twisted sticks with stickers all around. They are bushes really. No, they are tough thorny weeds. They clog fields, mess with the water table and are a general nucense most of the time. If you need to clear a field cluttered with mesquite trees, you have to rent a tractor with a cutter or have a healthy back and a well maintained chainsaw.

Mesquite wood makes for good barbecuing. There is something about the thick dark smoke that makes meat cook with that wood flavor. I don't think you can build anything beyond a mes or a fire with mesquite.

It isn't like there is a shortage thought. You can find counties full of mesquite and no one who will get in your way to collect as much as you can carry if you look around in mid to west Texas.

The future in game consoles

They won't be consoles any more. They will be glasses. Stupid geeky 3D kind of glasses that cool people won't want to ware. Then they will become cool, like mobile phones did there for a while. Then our bosses and the local governments will expect us to have them on at all times while in public. You know, like phones. People who do not have them will be considered second class citizanes and will be austrasized by the rest of society. By the time they just become implants and not noticeable from the outside except by people with the implant, parents will be expected to have their kids done by the time they can walk. Then something even more invasive will have taken their place.

But I'm not a cynic. I'm a realest.

Notes:

Had to deal with Microsoft licensing this morning. For some reason their email system does not like my email address. I had to use another one to get registered. I'll know by Monday if it took.

Left work early. I had a headache that would not quit. It is a sinus headache and I was worried that it might be the same trouble a friend of mine had who ended up needing surgery on his ear to straighten things out. I'm not so worried now. I figured out that the medicin I was taking was the new crappy decongestant. Nat stopped on the way home and we got some of the real stuff you have to sign for. I started feeling better twenty minutes after I took it.

To dream

The Blind Shall See Again, But When? from Slashdot by timothy 15 people liked this An anonymous reader writes "Restoring hearing with cochlea implants that replace the inner ear with an electronic version has become standard procedure for many types of deafness. Now it looks like the same thing might happen for many types of blindness. With five national labs funded by the Department of Energy, this third-generation artificial retina promises to enable the blind to see again soon. Already it has been successful in over a dozen test patients, but at resolutions too low for doing much more than proving the concept. However, if the DoE can perfect this larger version of an artificial retina, then the company Second Sight promises to commercialize the implant, aiming for VGA resolution within the decade." SlashDot

The problem with my eyes has more to do with my brain than with my retinas. However, I also have trouble with my retinas. This is awesome news. I just hope it does not go the way of flying cars. I remember people talking about the 1950 and how they were promised flying cars. Please Lord, make this one real.

Put the burn in burnout

This is the best run I've ever witnessed that ended with the fire crew being called to the scene.

Playing Games

There is a LAN party tonight. I have no games.

• I cannot afford the initial cost of games.
• I cannot afford the continuing cost that so many games have these days.
• I run on Linux so there are no games that work consistently.

Saves me from lugging my computer al lover creation I suppose. I did attend a LAN party many moons ago. It was a blast. We blew the power breakers a couple times. We had to run extension cords from the first floor to the second to use different circuits.

I miss playing games. I miss first person shooters, god mode, exploring endless treks of post apocalyptic ruin and smiting anything that moves. That was the only draw I had to gaming.

Lunch conversation

• We laughed how much one of our coworkers is like Hitler and thinks the Haitians would be better off dead. We laughed uncomfortably.
  
• The recent story about a Palestinian being killed by assassins must be a setup. It is just plane convent with all those facts lying around.
• Luge (the sport where you ride down an ice track on a sled) is deadly and requires both balls and skill. Who knew?
  
• Something about sports trades that I missed.
• We speculated about the guy who flew a plane in to a building in Austin.

IAEA wakes up

The IAEA admits that Iran may be building a nuke for a warhead. This was filed under the "Well Duhhh!" category. Are they the last people on earth to figure this out? Where have they been for the past three years?

Have they, the IAEA, just been holding off on saying this until it was too late to gently push Iran in the direction of something peaceful? Was this a political ploy. Was it a way to keep dialog going?

Was it bullshit!?! Did they just not get it? Are we sending idiots to the ends of the Earth to verify the lack of nuclear ambition in demagogic states that have threatened to wipe other countries off the map only because of the dominant religion of that stat? Are we?!?

I'm getting tired of very important people playing games with my well being. I'm tired of being a pawn in their threats and rhetoric. I will not be satisfied until I have a collection of nukes and the means to deliver them to any living entity in the universe that could do more harm than give me the sniffles.

Notes:

I started messing with Linux at Red Hat 6.11.  Now Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 is in the pipeline. I don't know when the beta will come out, but I hear whispers of it's presents round the back corners of chat rooms. Someone came in to my office this morning and mentioned Red Hat 5.4. It took a while to get 5.4 on our network because of the CentOS repos taking so long.  Not much new in 5.4 that I noticed. I could go over the release notes I suppose, but I just don't care.

A friend of mine had a really frightening ear infection recently. Now, my left ear feels like it is getting sick. I do not need ear surgery.

I got more news alerts today than in a long time.

• The train wreck in East Houston.
• The guy in Austin who flew a plane in to the IRS building.
• IAEA finally woke up about Iran building a warhead for a nuke.

The end

The speed of light is a misnomer. Light travels at the quickest pace it can muster. Lets call this the Universal Speed Constant, USC. Light travels at USC.

For a while people thought that bound particles could send information across the universe at an instant. The way they work is by spinning a particle in one direction and then reversing it. Well, in some rare cases, if you split a particle in half the two halves will continue switching directions of rotation even when separated across the Earth or indeed space.

That sounds pretty cool, but there is an issue. I've heard the switch still takes place over a period of time to suggest that the speed of light or USC. Nothing in the universe may exist, including information, at a speed any faster than the USC. This is the speed of change in the universe. The dominoes that make up the universe may not fall any faster than the USC.

There is a theory of an expanding universe. This theory was come upon by a man named Doppler. He noticed a shift in light waves to the red as they came in over huge distances across the known universe. This led him to imagine that the suns far off were traveling even farther away. The change was constant the farther something was away from Earth, the more pronounced the shift This meant, to Doppler and his followers to think that the distance between the suns was increasing. The rate of increase was increasing.

The idea of distance, also known as space and time as constants is now questioned. There are other explanations to the shift of light to the red in Doppler's calculations.

Light may have a half life. Light may be affected by gravity in such a way as to cause the red shift. Or, perhaps, time is not constant. If time is slowing down and light that was created long ago at a faster speed, had to slow down in order to travel now at the lesser USC the light would appear to have the same shift that Doppler saw in those early photographs. And the rate at which it is slowing down is increasing.

At some point the universe will grind to a halt. I imagine it looking like a black hole absorbing the entire universe in a gulp or a slow slurping inhale. Perhaps all the black holes we know of are all leading back to the big bang and release their energy and matter at the start of our universe. The ultimate recursive recycling.

Notes:

What is with Tuesdays. It seems like I post a lot more on Tuesdays. Not sure if it s true, or if I just notice more on Tuesdays.

There are only 900,000,000 English speakers in the world. I'm not sure why I expected it to be more.

Notes:

The old map of where the tung tastes bitter, sweet and salt and such is a bad. The real study was in German and lost the true meaning in translation. There are different kinds of taste buds, but they are spread around the tung.

Red Hat 5.5 just came out in beta. Dammit. I just 5.4 up and running on our internal network. BAH!

The reason I hate Google Buzz has nothing to do with Google Buzz. Sometime in the 1990's there was a radio station called "The Buzz". They were the only radio station in town that plaid good music. The rest of the station was horrible. Every four seconds "The Buzz ... The Buzz ... The Buzz ... The Buzz!!" AAA!! The term "Buzz" has been forever etched in to my brain as evil annoying painful anti-entertainment.

Lunch Conversation

I must note that I ate lunch with my long term and fellow geek friend, Adam.

• Dogs and dominance
• Cats and dominance
  
• Video editing software
• Open source software
• Building Open Solaris for fun and profit.

Europe the word

"Europe" is a word, not a place.

• There is no nation or continent.
• There is no line between Europe and other countries or continent.
• There is no nationality or religion.
  
• There is no money. The Euro is not the only money available. If Germany opts out of the Euro, there will be no Euro.
  
• There is no one government, though Brussels thinks it is a government. Brussels is a comity with a president and a bunch of rules.
  
• There is no military. There is the UN and NATO. China has a lot to talk about in both those organizations. Europe cannot declare war on anyone.
• There is no police force. MI5/6 and Interpol are not part of the European Union as far as I know.
  
• There is no unity. There are treaties that are agreements, though no one seems to agree on anything. We are one child custody case away from secessions of multiple countries.
• There are taxes. It is amazing how much every European is paying to Europe for not doing anything, beyond taking the time to tax them.

Explain to me why Obama and so many Democrats want to be another Europe.

European Finances

There is a ton of talk (and stronger than just talk) about bailing out Grease. Spain, Portugal, and others are in line behind Grease. There were supposed to be rules in place to handle this sort of collapse. the trouble is the rules would have been fine if someone went bust in good times. No one really planned on six or seven countries going belly up during bad times. No one thought that would be the most likely time for the shit to hit the fan.

Some in the U. K. are thanking God they are not members of the Euro. "We were right to stay out."

Some call the bail out of Grease a German financial issue. They are the one's footing the bill for the most part. If Germany were not such a juggernaut, all of Europe would be in a far worse place. When is the last time you bought something made in Germany?