Lunch Hour

I didn't even take a full hour. The weather was wonderful outside today at lunch. I didn't know this until I had already walked down stairs waring my jacket. I ended up carrying it. As I got off the bus this morning, the breeze was blowing rather cold. It threw me off.

Today was one of those days I didn't eat. I walked around in the sun and just absorbed the bright warm goodness. Cherry Coke is a Spring kind of drink it turns out.

From my vantage of the seventh floor of a parking garage I noticed how hazy it was this afternoon. Not sure why. The wind was blowing only yesterday. One day of still air is not usually enough to cause that kind of haze. Perhaps there was another reason for it.

I've heard of a piece of software that takes a video and makes a panoramic 360 degree picture out of it. I want to find this and take several shots from the useless places I hang out at lunch. I wander if all you have to do is spin on a heal in a circle to get a good source file for the software to work from.

Blog/Vlog Podcast/Vidcast

I've added so many podcasts that I'm going to have to pare them down. This is a good position to be in. I went through and removed a couple podcasts that consistently gave me errors download. I pulled a couple more that had not updated in a while. I did not go check out the web pages to find out if there was a new feed or if they had an excuse. I just dropped them.

There are a tone of fiction podcasts out there. There are a tone of geek type news podcasts as well. The MSN news podcasts tend to be recordings of shows. This is fine I guess, but they definitely do not have that personal feeling of the podcast specific recordings. Not sure how to quantify that.

A blog is written. A vlog is video. they are both ways of keeping a journal online. They tend to be personal or at least keep a personal feel. This is less and less true for blogs and probably vlogs soon as every company screams that they are missing the latest wave of grabbing eyeballs from the web.

A podcasts is audio. A vidcast is video. They are both ways of recording a show and putting the content online. These are all over the place. I tried to be part of Flanking Position which was a vidcast of sorts. The only trouble with it was the length. They insist on keeping it at around 30 minutes. I thought it should have been 8 or 10 minuets after the boring bits are cut out.

I cannot make myself do a daily or even weekly vlog. I'm not pretty or interesting.  You need one of those things to make a successful vlog. I will continue down my current path of attempting to make content that works. I haven't in over a week. I'll get back on the stick here shortly.

Urine Observation

This is going to be TMI for most people. Read at your one risk.

I've noticed that when I am on antibiotics, my urine has a specific smell. I've noticed it several times and with a couple different antibiotics I've been on over my life. Sometimes it does not happen. This makes me wonder if those antibiotics were placebos. Anyway. There is a purpose to telling you this.

This smell has only occurred one other time. Consistently, I've noticed the same smell after eating beef from McDonald's and some barbecue places. If I have pork or chicken, I do not seem to notice the smell.

Am I nuts? Is it some kind of coincidence? Is it not the antibiotics causing the smell?

Normal programming resumes now. Aren't you glad I don't have a vlog?

Morning Rain

Right before I walked out the door, the weather was almost clear. The weather shill said the storms were on their way. By the time I walked out the door, the rain was poring. The walk in was sloshy and wet.

The traffic was nuts. Right after  I got on the bus, someone ran a very red light in order to cut off the bus. They were turning right and so was the bus. The bus driver honked. Nearly the same thing happened right in front of my work. Moments before I got of the bus, someone cut off the bus and mad the driver hit the breaks. This prompted another honk. The conditions were slippery. People just have no idea how much danger they are placing on the people riding the bus.

Not ten minutes after I walked in the door, the rain stopped. People who came in right after me said shit like "I thought it was supposed to rain this morning." Most of the day my legs were wet and socks, from dripping down my leg, felt damp.

eh.

Notes:

This morning I had someone ask me how many pages a document had. I looked and said "Seventy pages." I looked again and it had 69 pages. I just automatically round 69 up to 70 without even thinking about it. Scary.

One thing social media (Facebook and Twitter ...) has shown me is how close many of the people I know are to the edge of climbing a tower and throwing rocks at people. In a morbid sort of way, it makes me feel much better about my life.

I'm trying a bunch of new podcasts that I found this weekend. Some of them really suck. That is, they do not appeal to me. I will not go in to names. You have to sift a lit of dirt to find a diamond.

I have the g1 phone. It has a built in keyboard. The new OS for it has a setting to make the whole phone flip from horizontal to versicle. This is mainly for phones that have no keyboard. The default for the G1 is to turn that off and use the keyboard exposure to determine if the phone orients itself. Well, I thought it was cool and turned it on. Now, I'm amazed how often I look at my phone, turn away, look back and the orientation has flipped. OK, it can be annoying.

There was an awesome rainbow at work today. Lance called me from his office to get a picture. I took my phone. I should have taken my camera. The phone would not focus correctly. Pictures sucked.

Miserable, Unite!!!

I have no idea, but this video ticked me. All the anti-missoury bigots around her do not accept her. She tries to be happy and it blows up in her face. that will teach you. Someone can no more chose to be happy or miserable than they can choose to be gay or straight. I will appreciate it if people would get off the miserable people's backs. We are not going to fit your mold dammit!

Unknown Unknowns

known knowns: You know it and you know you know it and there is little question about knowing it. These bite you in the ass because you pay all your attention to the next two bullets and tend to know something so well that you ignore the obvious. An example is the conversion from metric to imperial and back. This bit NASA in the butt several years ago to the cost of God know how much.

known unknowns: You know it is there, but your are not sure what it is or how to use it to your advantage. Example: Is there water on Mars? Well, that British device that landed there and never reported back was not water proof. Maybe it landed in a big mud puddle and short circuited.  If you are there to prove water is there or is not there, maybe you need to design your craft to handle both situations. (I'm speculating wildly. I'm sure the Brits did their homework.)

unknown unknowns: Things you have no idea about, but must speculate in order to make contingency plans. Remember the probes from the 70s? One of them was sent off the grid to take a look at Jupiter's rings. For some reason, this craft is traveling faster and faster and is farther away than it should be. We know this for a fact, but no one knows why. It defies all our observations and intelligence. I tried to find a link to this information but I cannot.

Talk about wild speculation. People say that this speed up has to do with the quantum switching. That is, They appear to be speeding up because as they get farther and farther away, the spread of reality cause the cosmos to have to work harder in order to keep up with man observed reality. The universe's CPU is becoming more and more taxed as the population of the Earth increases and the distance we cover increases. Here is hoping for no blue screen of death any time soon.

Cops in Spain

It looks like cops are cops all over the world.

Podcasts

I went through my list of podcasts and cleaned up some of the old dead links. Then I killed some of the links that I never listen to.  I wound up with a pretty short list.

Typically, I only listen to podcasts at work. I've noticed that I skip over things like the Sunday morning talk shows. I would rather read blogs complaining about the Sunday morning talk shows. I listen to NPR, bur I do not like most of the attitude or direction they push in their shows. I like to listen to news shows, but they get on my nerves in shorter and shorter lengths of time as I get older.

The kind of podcasts that I like to listen to is fiction. I just added a bunch of fiction podcasts to my download lists. If you google it, dozens of lists come up.

There are a dozen or so geek podcasts I listen to. I've learned a lot, but I mostly gripe at the headphones about how I would do it differently or how 90% of what they talke about would not work on Linux. You are not a true geek unless you use Linux dammit. You get the idea.

The thought of listening to fiction appeals to me from my child hood. My mom bought me my first audio book. It was Sindbad and the 40 thieves. Then came the books on tape from the Lightouse for the Blind. They are jsut the Texas Library for the Blind or something like that now. I get about a book a month or something like that. I listen to them as I go to bed. The one I'm listening to now is all about Deep Space 9. Every one dies and there is some time thing going on. It is annoying. You can get most any kind of book. I've chosen Science Fiction. "Keep them coming." method of picking which book. I suppose they just throw the next random book from the pile in my queue. I like it.

Lost videos

Natalie trusted me to take several videos she had left on her phone for some time and post them on YouTube. The hard part is getting them off the phone. She did that. She handed me the thumb drive with her memories on it. I put the device to my computer and pulled the files off. I brought up the software to convert them to something I can edit and upload. I hit convert.

The progress bars went way too fast. The computer did not chug nearly as hard as I thought it should. I just knew something was wrong.

When I reviewed what I had done I found that I had selected the wrong kind of file to convert the videos to. I over wrote the files that Nat gave me. They were gone. Only the first picture of each video still existed, there to mock me.

What happened is the software opened each file, read the first little bit, converted it in memory, then wrote it to the drive. upon writing to the drive, the rest of the file was obliterated, never to return. Had I copied the files off the USB drive, I would have a backup. Had I selected a different output folder, changed the names, didn't work on the originals, they would be around.

I had every opportunity not to screw it up. I'm sorry Natalie. I've failed you.

Theory of Everything

I'm trying to work through a thought experiment. Below is a list of questions I walk through in my mind just for fun.

How would light from far away places look to us if the Earth were approaching a black hole?

Would this explain the accelerating expanding universe? The universe is not expanding. Time is slowing down for us. That is , the speed of light, which is really the universal speed limit, is lower and lower every meter the black hole gets closer to us.

Would this explain the ever increasing degree of red shift? If light sources (stars) heading away from us causes a red shif, then so can the universal speed limit, known as the speed of light, lowering and lowering also truncate the light waves and make them look longer to us because we are at a different ratio of time than the place where the light was cast (the star)

If the black hole is approaching Earth at slower than the speed of light, would we see it because the black hole might absorb light faster than it can escape and head toward Earth for us to see? Would we ever see it coming before we hit the even horizon? We can see the effects of black holes on some stars and such.

This is just one other possibility that explains the whole expanding universe thing. I'm just saying.

Notes:

Hunter Thompson, killed himself at the age of sixty seven. He is the guy who wrote Fear and loathing in Los Vegas. I worry that only an unstable drug addict could have written a masterpiece like that movie. I say masterpiece not because it is so good, but because it is simply carved from reality in such a way that no one else would have honed.

I need to go through my podcasts list because half of them don't work any more. I swear these people think you read their web pages for updates or something. Like I'm going to go through that much trouble. I don't use iTunes so half the links only work haf the time for mp3 podcasts. Loosers. They deserve to be lost to time.

Retraction: It is not Toyota that doesn't empty any electrical engineers, it is the U. S. regulatory commission that over sees Toyota and other auto quality. That makes much more sense. Sorry about that.

Bad Idea

The pogo ladder.

"Tired of putting up Christmas lights and having to clime that ladder twice every three feet? Just bounce from one spot to the next. Save time. Have fun while doing household chores."

"Trim trees with a very sharp machete."

"Paint the eves.while holding a long stick in one hand and clinging to the pogo ladder with the other."

"Clean the gutters while bouncing over fences, shrubs and all the crap that is piled near your house."

"Clean those high windows all the way round the house and only have to climb the ladder once."

Spoken very quickly in a much quieter voice "Paten pending. Product not endorsed by any sane person."

Notes:

A hybrid car has 100,000,000 lines of code and a hundred or so processors running. Toyota has no electrical engineers or software engineers working directly for the company.

A hot dog is not the same as a boiling puppy. You have to tell a computer that. Google has had to take this sort of thing in to account in their search algorithms.

Just another day

Assignment, Put Windows Server 2008 R2 MSDN on a couple servers an hour before quitting time. Piece of cake.

Grab my WS 2008R2 DVD and go to the server room.
No DVD
Look in 4 places where it should be.
Look in 14 places it shouldn't be.
Find it lying on the table in a different lab.
Start install process.
Things go well until I get a read error on the CD. (25 minutes or so)
Try again and get the same result. (25 minutes or so)
Take a good long look at  the DVD and find a huge scratch that I didn't notice until now.
Start quest for another DVD. Surely we have another copy.
Look on our network. No R2
Look in other people's offices and the strange labe that I try to avoid, no R2
Ask Matt, Yay! an R2 disk.
Go home. Get snowed on. Sleep well. Walked in the next morning.
Start install. It is not R2 it is regular old 2008 server.
Rejoin quest for R2.
Find R2 on an external drive in Brian's office.
Put on USB drive.
Burn.
Start istall. Works. Rejoice!
Go to second server. and start install there.
Hangs at 'Completing Install' (25 minutes in)
Try again
Hangs at 'Completing Install' (25 minutes in)
Remove tricky hardware that we are playing with.
Try again. Worked. Rejoiced

Then I was aloud to do a normal full day's work.

This is what I do all day. Every day. It is always six simultaneous cluster-fucks. I'm not the only one who feels this way. Every thing Chris tried to do with this project has bitten him in the ass and required four things be fixed before every part of every task. It is like having to tie your shoes between every

Watch this. video. This video shows how all IT people feel about users.

Warning: NSFW!!! Watch this video and you will know how IT people would like to respond to the people above.

It's like they have a video camera in my office.

Network issues

Issue Occurs:

Only seems to occur on IP4 networks. Haven't testing on an IP6 network.

Symptom:

A machine that was recently moved or restaged with a new OS now will not receive an IP via DHCP even though nothing has changed in any other settings on the network.

Solution:

• Give the machine a static IP.
• Log in as a network user. This should work now if your network allows static IPs.
  
• Ping everything, as many different places on the network as you can think of.
• Set the machine back to DHCP and reboot.
• Should be fixed. Log in as a network user and use the machine as normal.
  

Comment:

The routers/switches all over the building have little brains. They attempt to speed things up by remembering important information and acting on those memories. That is why something changing, like the location or OS of a machine, might throw of the tuning of the network to the point where a machine cannot contact the DHCP server.

In order for a machine to get an IP from a DHCP server, this strange packet must be transmitted across the network and the "kindness of strangers" depended upon to rout that packet to the DHCP server and back to the box again. There is all kinds of mysterious bookkeeping involved. This issues is the result of that bookkeeping breaking down.

Switches and routers have have brains, but not intelligence. When you have a herd of stupid boxes directing traffic, you get lost packets.

Notes:

I hear the word 'change' coming up all the time. No one likes the way things are, they want chang.e No one setps up to the plae when you ask "Change to what?"

All the news media say "To get a link to blah, go to our web sight and hunt down the link while making our page view count look better than it really is." I find that it is typically easier to just google the story than hunt down some lost and forgotten link on a neglected page. Sometimes the story is some obscure thing that I can only find this way. Annoying.

Coming to Jesus

We had one of those meetings where a problem was flushed out on mass. The entire software department got cross examened by the big boss. It was terrifying and fascinating at the same time. We went over the process of what broke and what things should have bee. Then we went over what should be and what we are going to do.

I'm so very glad I was not in the front row. I sat one back and and felt uncomfortable. As questions arose, even more people were summoned to the room. It was hard to watch and participate in. It was a great for getting people to go over a bad thing. It was bad for teaching people to do better programming.

The whole department was called in to teach people about these kinds of meetings. Now the young guys can be exposed to this sort of ass reaming before being the target of it. It is harsh, painful, informative and time consuming. I was thinking of three or four things I could have been doing that were quite productive. I was squirming. I noticed a few others doing the same.

This was not nearly as much fun as the hours later meeting recounting the minutes (blow by blow) for a couple folks in the software department who missed the earlier adventures. Some took it calmly and some were genuinely upset. Both feelings are perfectly valid. I'm not sure what to say to either set of folks. There are going to be lasting affects of this meeting.

Notes:

Man, I had a hard time getting up this morning. It is something more than Monday-itus.

They (officials in New Orleans) are really desperate to make Mardi Gras a family friendly affair. It isn't. People who do it every year probably don't want it to be family friendly.

I wae wandering why the Frisbee was getting bigger. Then it hit me.

Bought a 1.5 (1.38) terabyte drive. Hooked it to my computer using another USB generic cable like the one I've blogged about before. I got this one to keep around the house. I think the power supply with the new cable is caput. Damnit! a 50% failure rate is unacceptable.