Modern sixties Vet

I can't tell if this is just a look alike, or if it is actually a sixties era vet that has been vastly modified. 1000 horsepower, modern suspension, lope, two immense turbos, stereo.

Looks, Sound, Base and Balls. That is a fine vehicle.

Radiation

How many times have you watched an old movie or cartoon that had some kind of wave drawn out on the screen to indicate radiation? Well, here is the real thing. The particles floating in the air move around and cluster where the decaying molecules have gone. This is real. This is how you do it.

The same thing happens in your body when you are exposed to radiation. These particles of alcohol are moved around enough to see them. The molecules are moved around in your body. Sometimes cells are burned or caused to fail or become cancerous by the same sort of motion you get in the cloud chamber above.

Seeing color

No wonder I cannot see the color blue on top of other colors. This is the approximate number of color receptors in an average human eye.

• 120,000,000 black/white/gray rods. They are smaller than cones and thus higher resolution.
•   3,000,000 red cones
•   3,000,000 green cones
•      10,000 blue cones

Why I don't paint

Nat wants to paint Elle and her bathroom. More power to her. I believe she wants to paint the room. We have the stuff she needs in the garage. Except that is for the most important item in my opinion. I don't remember any tarps for painting. There are a couple of old smelly tarps out there.

I am not excited about painting anything. I know it is possible to paint something in your house yourself. I know it is by far cheaper to do it yourself. I am bad at it. I cannot tell when I screw up. I cannot fix it easily when I do tell. This is not why I do not do it.

Once, when I was like 10, I helped my mom paint some wall in the garage or something. She didn't care if I got some drips on the floor of the garage. Anyway. I had a soda in a bottle sitting near me while I was painting. I avoided the drink like the plague because I had heard that paint was highly poisonous. Not two minutes in, I noticed a drop of paint dripping down both the inside and outside of the bottle. I only noticed it by accident really. Moments after I saw it, the drips were more or less gone.

At that moment, I promised never to paint again. If I could come that close to killing myself, I didn't want to maybe kill any one else. Most likely, the paint would not have killed me. I was 10 or so remember. Still, it made an impression.

Plotting at work

A couple people at work had to put together a huge chart for a presentation. We have a plotter, but the orders were not to use it yet because this was basically a rough draft. Makes sense until you watch three people try to stitch forty pages together for half an hour before the meeting, per print. I wander if the time saved would have excused the plotter expendables.

This is added to the time it took to hunt down a piece of software for the job. I suggested rasterbator for cutting up the pages better than the default printing tried to do. I believe they went with an open source package called Poster Razor, which appears to have a Linux version by the way. it is too difficult overcoming the name of that first one. I have to admit that I remembered it even though I have never used it and it has been years since it has so much as crossed my mind.

The end result looked pretty good if you ask me. The plot would have looked much better and would most likely not have taken three people three hours to compile over all. Having the right tool for the job is a must. Wish I could put up a picture.

Notes:

The geek blogs are going ape shit over the Microsoft tech that allows you to put batteries in which ever way. I looked around, but I figure you still have to put all the batteries in the same way. That is, the batteries all have to be positive to negative. Didn't someone do this when I was a kid?

The young people coming in as new engineers are surprised to find out a Lazar printer is black and white. They look at me like I'm pointing them to a slide rule. At least a couple of the new folks are very impatient when it comes to learning new software or methods of getting things done. It seems to me they think they know a better way and it eats at them that they have to do it the [this company] way. I fully understand this, but it does get in the way.

Four billion people have mobile phones. One point five billion people have access to financial institutions like banks. Apple will shortly offers PayPal kind of service. How long before Starbucks accepts iPay?

I forgot the two guys who started Twitter both worked for Google.

There are more and more contacts between my world and China. Now I know two of my friends who dated Chinese women. They both have learned the applicable languages.

Big board

I am so glad these guys are out there doing this. I want to see a pipe for this ting.

kicker

Really simple Python kicker script. I believe the subprocess module started in Python 2.4.

#!/usr/bin/env python

import sys, subprocess

command=["nedit", "-create"]
if len(sys.argv) > 0:
    command+= sys.argv[1:]
try:
    subprocess.Popen(command)
except:
    print "Error executing NEdit."

Notes:

There is a study of people who lived past 100 that says there is a collection of some number of jeans the may be used with a 77% accuracy to tell who will live to a ripe old age. The only use of this I can think of is for retirement planning and insurance rates. "You can retire at 65, but your spouse has to wait until 90." Would I want to know if I have the trait? I doubt I can afford the test right now but it will cost $7.08 at Wal-Mart's genetics kiosk in ten years.

It is just plane bleak in the job market. Every bit of news sounds bad. The over all rate is 10%. For black people it is 15.x%, women 12%, men, 17%. For black male teens the rate is 43% unemployed. Remember, these are only people still looking for work.

Interest rates are at their lowest numbers in 50 years. New home loans are down over 30% from last year. Habitat for Humanity is doing pretty well. They are looking at buying foreclosed homes and giving them away as apposed to building them.

GM sales more cars in China than the U. S..

Nat came home Monday with 100 44 cent stamps. Why didn't you get "forever stamps?" "I didn't think about it." I hear Tuesday that they are going to 46 cents. sigh!

There was a British board game form the seventies called BP Oil Strike. One of the 'hazard cards' caused a blowout and had one million dollars cleanup cost. Now, why were the costs in U. S. dollars I wander? Creepy.

I have a simple idea for a very short fiction story, but it is too close to what we do at work to clear the censors. I'll keep it in my mind and try to figure out how to write something that isn't too close to reality.

How ... Cold War -- From CNN email "Judge: 10 spy suspects pleaded guilty and will be deported to Russia, which in turn will release four prisoners to U.S."

Notes:

Bloodmobile is poor diction. Both sanguine mobile and blood wagon are better because they do not cross languages in the same word. I separated them to make thing readable.

China imports coal from Wyoming among other places.

Nearly half of U. S. states have worse financial status than Greece.

Android based consumer level tablets by Christmas this year. Business level devices next year. Rumor is, they will run Flash out of the box. It may be moot because an EU law may force Apple to support Flash on the phones and pads.

Flip WiFi camera out very soon. It will have to have a different interface. That is, more buttons or a touch screen ore some way to input information like a WiFi password. Can't wait to check it out. No, I will not get one.

Lady Gaga went over 10,000 fans on Facebook. Yup. End of civilization.

Can you imagine a world without helium? That day may be coming.

Day 1

Neural networks are a collection of decision making nodes that are connected to one another in a network of pathways that can change and be prioritized and even eliminated based on need. Each decision is small, but all of them piled on top of one another and the using pathways of a given moment make it nearly impossible to predict the outcome in a perfect fashion the result of problem posed to a neural network.

By introducing the ability to increase the number of nodes based on need, and designing the decision making algorithms and design of pathways to be extensible, the limits of the neural network and capabilities of the network to complete problems can be increased dramatically. The use of virtual nodes and virtual nodes that can run recursive networks, links that can be madke from parent networks to child networks, the capabilities of the neural networks can become greater than the capabilities of the hardware the software is running on. It is not the speed of decisions every time that is important, it is the answer that comes back.

When neural networks are combined with preexisting training of parts of the network, recursion, access to external controls and data, the limits of the neural network become the limits of the neural network to change the situation around it.

All neural networks should be subject to oversight by people who have the understanding of the signs and consequences of runaway processing. The best example of a run away neural network is all of life as we know it at the present time.

Office

90% of the things that 90% of people need an office package for is doable in Open Office. I say this having used it for a couple years now. The only times I have had to track down a box with MS Office on it was to satisfy someone who said specifically that they wanted me to do something in a proprietary MS Office format.

We have had some new folks at my office who are in technical fields who have not ever used Open Office for anything. I cornered a couple of them and they ended up admitting that they either fudge on the student purchase forms or outright pirate MS Office in non professional arias like home or friend's computers they set up.

This is one area where I wish MS would start going after people for prating their software. Open Office has problems. The more people who used it, or are at least exposed to it, the better it will become. There are other office packages. Some are OK and some are outright terrible. The tide of MS enforcing their rights would raise all the boats in this case.

We setup a couple computers on our network that let people run MS Office remotely. There are three. If I go look at the logs, they get used about three times a week by the same people over and over. Then, thirty five people all try to use them at once. It would be great if we had a virtual machine system that would scale and allow so many hours of use or whatever as people needed them. This is what the whole MS Office Online thing is supposed to allow. The trouble is, we don't have internet access.

Tax the Rich

I knew that redistribution of wealth meant taking it from private citizens and handing it to public entities. The goal of leftists is the classless society. This is not true of any human society. They keep trying it over and over and it keeps failing over and over. It is a classless society except the political class is on top.

They say "tax the rich" only because the poor don't have anything worth taking. The poor have already lost their freedom and do not even know it.

The current government of the U. S. wants to tell you what to eat, how much sleep to get, where to work, what you are aloud to spend money on. Perhaps our government has no problem with the Chinese paying for it all, but I do. The U. S. shouldn't owe any one any thing. It has been decades. How is this possibly a good thing?

Saying one thing on TV and another behind closed doors is lying. It is what the terrorists do saying one thing in English and another in Arabic for example or other language. There need to be consequences for lying to the American citizenry. Apparently, just being voted out of office next time is not good enough.

Gloom

Heard while listing to podcasts about U. K. Financial well being. (all from memory)

• "Ferocious" while speaking about the job market.
• "70 applicants per vacancy"
• "No one ever asked employers if they needed double the graduates in the last fifteen years."
• "There are going to be hundreds of thousands of additional job losses in the U. K. yet."
• "Don't touch property with a barge pole." when asked about buying a home.
• "Households do worse during the recovery than the re recession."

Dreams

As one who works that nine to five, I have to say that he is right. If there were anything that I could do that would make me stand out in the crowd, it would get me fired.

The only thing I'm good at that I really enjoy is being an asshole.

We had a guy named Larry at work. He was a new engineer not far out of school. He worked in a couple different departments at our office at different times. I don't know how to put it, but he never quite meshed with the flaming mayhem that is our engineering staff. if your ass is not on fire and you don't look like you are about to climb a tour with a deer rifle, your are not exhibiting a sense of urgency. That is why a guy got let go a couple years ago. Or work is not healthy for the engineers. They are worked to death and expected to sacrifice their youth and brilliance to the cause and can't even shift a couple hours around to spend time with their families.

This i true through the engineering world. It is no wander that so few women get involved in this field. They can do better without trying very hard. They are smart.

So, Larry left today to go back to school He and is wife packed up and went back to Austin. God bless them. Forty five minutes after he was gone, I, the IT guy, packed up his computer and moved in another engineer in his place.

Don't be an engineer. They will squeeze you until you are empty, then throw you away for the new guy. Follow Phil's advice and find something you are good at that you can make money at and do that. Do it well. Be the best. Make that work for you rather than making yourself work to fill in someone else's dreams.

I listened to a podcast today that was reviewing films. He mentioned music and said he would take someone who could barely sign their name, but loved their music like their children over someone with a PHD in any form of music. This is along the same rail. Is it possible to live your dreams without loosing everything in the process? Can you feel like you accomplished your dreams without loosing everything or sacrificing everything else?

Someone out there tell me you are following your dream.

Go or blow!

She blue.

Persons Unknown

Bad attempt. Persons Unknown is another show about people trapped on an island. Well, sort of. They have a barrier they cannot pass. They have someone declaring their power over them. This is a LOST wannabe. It doesn't look nearly as good. I hate the characters. I dislike the power. I have a hard time following the flashbacks because I just don't care about the people.

When is it going to stop. Every time someone comes up with a show that kind of works, there are copy cats that just don't get it right. Not by miles in this case.

The area is not big enough. The people are shallow. The power is failing to control. The barrier is not impervious or scary enough. The happenings are predictable. There is very little suspense. There is no action.

Lame.

Firworks

This is what it looks like from my driveway on the Forth of July. One of the biggest shows used to be right next door. Fortunately, I still have a hard time with this concept, a fireworks stand moved in right at the end of the block. This means my next door neighbor cannot pop firecrackers because he is in the 300 foot limit. Nor can people pop them in the neighboring field or in front of our house.

Vow of poverty

I love the number of people who think that there is a huge number of rich people who are sitting on a big piles of money and cackling while not spending it for useless goods made by the Chinese.

Even if people spent all the money they had on Chinese made products, it shouldn't help Americans very much. Do people who have money deserve to have money or do they deserve to have someone come in and take it away? Honestly. Do you feel that people who earn money deserve to spend it or save it or invest it as they please?

If you are someone on the receiving side of spent money, answer this. Do you not dream of having money? If you come in to money by earning it or just finding it along the way, like marriage or lottery, should you then be required to give it up just because you have it?

Economic freedom is the first freedom. It is the foundation for all other freedoms. The freedom of the press resides with those who own one. The freedom to speak your mind resides with those people who can afford the lawyers to defend that right. the right to own property lies with those who can afford that property and avoid imminent domain.

The current government speaks about medical doctors like they are Wall Street bankers. Doctors are business owners and operators. They have to worry about a bottom line just like any other business. They have to additional worries of killing their customers if they screw up. Do doctors deserve to have their livelihoods taken from them because they make money? Do butchers, bakers, hair stylists deserver the same?

What professions do people deserve to make money doing? I suppose the entertainment industry, the industry that must have the largest ratio of millionaires in the States, is exempt from the rules of wealth distribution. Why do they get a pass? Why do some politicians get a pass and others do not? Democrats want to pass money out by the truckload and Republicans wont to help people make dump truck loads of money.

I don't get it. It is like there is a social stigma against success. We are teaching children that trying is more important than succeeding in schools. We teach that "everybody wins" makes sense. Then we bitch when people show up at our door and take our house away because we could not afford to make the payments. We complain when there are no jobs because people in other countries do wheat we did for a tenth of the money.