Cuffs skmuffs

Look out Chris, Ken, Jen and all the other cops and cops in training I know. Here is one more thing you have to worry about. This guy doesn't't look the part either. I mean, he doesn't't look particularly flexible when you first look at him.

Warp 7

I envision a day when there are no version numbers on software. There is only the date it was released. I hope this day happens soon. I'm tired of keeping track of what versions of which packages have the ability to do what I need them to do. I work with several OS types and each has unique lists of software, each only performing up to task on specific versions of the given OS. It is maddening.

I had a dream last night that there is only one universe, nut multiple. This one universe is recursive. As you go infinitely up, it turns out you end up back where you started. As you go infinitely down, it is quite the same universe. Same people. Same actions, same decisions leading to the same results. Things look different from here because ... lets call it the point of view of the observer.

It is like the many stories of people being trapped on an island. As you sail away, you come upon the same island from the other side. It might look like a whole new island until you find your own footprints.

This is how the universe worked in my dream. There are simply many sides upon which to view the universe. Hence, the many different observations of partials, and the echo of a 'big bang'. All were explained away by wishful thinking and lack of proper research funding.

If you found a way to travel to the end of the universe we occupy, you would find a wall of sorts. This wall would have a seemingly endless number of particle sized doors that have no mass. These might even be figurative. These portals would seem to lead backwards in to particles that might be spread through the existing universe. What is really happening is when traveling past this point you head up one level to the larger (recursive) universe. These doors might just be what happens at singularities like black holes.

Where does the matter come back out? I would say in the form of energy and matter all added to the end of something. Something like the edge of the universe or the energy that was potential and is now realized.

How the hell would I know? I'm a script kitty who couldn't pass rudimentary physics. It was a cool dream though.

This theory would mean that every particle of matter and indeed point in space is a theoretical worm hole to part of our universe. This would be great if we could harness such information to our advantage.

This would explain the seemingly infinite choices of quantum pretty succinctly. The different results based on observation are simply the universe turning on our will. After all, the universe we view in the experiment in the form a particle is the universe we are in. Why wouldn't it be affected by our observation?

Who knows?

Maybe a nuclear bomb really is channeling in some little bit of a sun's energy. - Extruded for our benefit through some specific bits particles that are doors to the larger or smaller recursive universe.

Maybe bound particles share forces as well as spins. Bound particles share the direction of spin regardless of distance between the particles. Perhaps they share the effects of gravity and other forces as well. I propose an experiment. Get enough bound particles split. Take one half away from Earth. Leave the other half on Earth. I bet the ship carrying the bound particles will feel the pull of Earth's gravity the same on the particles (per the mass of the particles) as those particles left on Earth, regardless of how far they get from Earth.

Maybe a black hole than is simple a particle in the wrong recursive iteration of the universe. a particle that went through a doorway for example. or, a hole that went through a hole. or, a door that is stuck open spewing energy from one iteration of the universe to the next. Where does the matter/energy go? Well, it comes straight back to the universe, only it comes in with or without the the same 'point of view' (state) as I mentioned above.  Potential energy realized.

This makes me worry about the strange beasties that might come slithering out of the new huge particle accelerators being built in Europe. If my theory is true, you just might make a full fledged black hole by smashing the wrong couple of loose particles together. In this case, I hope fro divine intervention. That or the aliens next door conquer us just before we create a black hole in the neighborhood. That or a door to hell all the video games keep predicting.

Perhaps conquer is too strong a word. Nudge us in the correct direction. That's better diction. One must be careful for what one wishes, even when blogging a bunch of nonsense from dreams.

It's Elle's Fifth Birthday

Elle is five. What happened to the time? She is a very cute five too. Sharp as a tack and getting taller by the minute.

Elle went to her cousin's place for their combined party. She had fun. Nat enjoyed taking her and catching up with folks. I stayed home and surfed the net.

Elle has an air of sophistication now. I think five is going to be a good year. She will start public school for one thing. That is a huge step in a developing life. I remember how stressful it was for me. Elle is far more capable and happy than I ever was. Good on her.

Bill picked up the tab at Chuck Cheese. Hell of a guy that Bill.

Elle didn't want to leave of course. Nat had as much fun as her daughter. Poor Bill had to bet to leave because he drove us and had to get up early in the morning.

Nerd Alert

The next time I play DnD I'm making the DM watch this before we play. I'm tired of the chubby Dex 4 DM telling me someone cant do some simple, but amazing things with enough practise. I've tought about getting tickets to Cirque du Soleil. That would show him.

School morning

I think this was taken Thursday morning. I walked in Friday morning. I wish I had been taking a video because of the faces Elle made while Nat brushed her hair.

"Ow, Mom!"

"Suck it up." (OK, I don't remember what she said, but close enough.)

Good times.

Movies

That's not mud

Three guesses. Yup, that is an open sewer the Humvee is driving through.

Cat stuff

Cat fight!! Sort of.

Highlight Color

I can't see the screen very well, at least not all the time. Sometimes I have to play little tricks to make things easier to read. One of these tricks is to highlight text so it has more contrast. This is particularly useful on the web. People have no concept of accessibility on the internet.

For a couple of months, I've been complaining about the highlight color on Gnome (Linux) at work. The versions of Linux I use do not come with very good color schemes or themes for high contrast. All but two of the themes that EL5 comes with have white text on a light blue background for a highlight color., The high contrast white theme has icons the size of dinner plates, slide bars that take up half the screen and is uuuuugly. The rest of the themes all seem to look the same. You can't use the inverted high contrast theme because it makes spreadsheets and other programs unreadable. They are getting better, but they are miles off right now.

I cannot find a Gnome program for generating themes by hand. All I wanted to do was change the highlight color to white text with a red background or yellow background and black text. Something that sticks out.

Enter Fedora 8. The Gnome theme chooser has a color option. You can just pick the color you want. You can even save the theme.I'm going to try to bring the Blue Curve theme that I modified to Red Curve to work and get it to work with my box there.  My luck, the files will not be compatible. That is a pessimistic point of view and I'm leaving that behind. I want to at least try.

I did run across a theme for Gnome that makes your desktop look just like a Mac. There is even a program that does that floating icon picker thing on the bottom of the screen. That might be interesting, but I hate that thing at the bottom of the screen on Macs. I'm sure people love it. It is the best thing since sliced bread. I used a Mac for a little bit many years ago with the beta version of OS-X.

Another accessibility thing that does not work in gnome/X is the magnifier. There are attempts to make it work, but they are counter productive. The default magnification thing just stops after a while. I could only get it to work on like half the screen at once. I really miss the magnifier in Windows. it was so simple and yet, now I know worked elegantly.

60 minutes

So, how long is a 60 minutes podcast? 43 minutes.

Fog in a Southern City

I walk a ways past a bayou on my morning commute. Some days it is hard. Some days I take my life in my own hands. This morning had a thick fog for this area blanketed over it. The fog here is white at the sides and a light blue at the top. It is spotty and rarely too thick to drive through. It is never too thick to walk through. Not that I've ever seen. That is, except in the dark in the woods. Even with a light it can be difficult to keep from walking in to a tree or a fallen log.

People here don't get much experience driving in fog, snow or ice. When these things do happen, most people take caution. I've never been hit by a car when it was raining or foggy. I've only been hit in clear weather. At worst it was overcast, but dry. It reminds me of a statistic that I heard that people who driver cars with anti lock breaks and a dozen airbags  get in more accidents.

The news spoke of the fog as though it were a plague. The warnings rang though the mist. I've heard a traffic commentator say something like "It is a normal day with nothing wrong, so be careful. Cause that's when the y get-ya." He was joking, but it is a bit true. When things are 'normal' your guard is down. I know I do it.

As I walked, I took note of how far ahead things went out of vision. I'm not a reliable judge, but I tried any way. There is not a wall where you see things on the close side and do not see things on the far side. Cars simply melt away as they drive on. Some leave their break lights as a last gasp of existence. Trees and houses simply watch me pass by. The few people take no notice as I pass.

At my walk's end, the busy intersection is calm. There are many people going every which way. The traffic moves better than in clear weather. The people seem more patient and willing to compromise to make it to their destination. The bus driver takes half a cycle of the light to just wait for a good spot to pull in to traffic. Well, most of the drivers do that anyway.

On the ride, I stared out the window at a world packed in gray cotton candy. Places where there is grass or trees are thick. Parking lots and buildings make the fog more thin. The ground is wet in most places. Everywhere there are people. It looks like it should be cold. It is not. It is seventy degrees or so. It is humid, thus the fog. It feels thick as swimming in soup. People are sweating, but it does them no good. Traffic flowed smoothly. It was faster in the fog. Not that people went faster, but it felt that it had not taken as long because fewer people were in that dangerous hurry that gets people killed. The commute was less stressful in the fog than on a clear day. How messed up is that?

It was quiet this morning. Not really. All the sounds were there. The fog didn't stop the waves from moving about. People were muted in some way. They were thinking more quiet thoughts. It showed in their attitude and actions. It was nice. Hell, I wish every day was foggy on the commute.

The fog was still hanging around, though not as thick, at lunch time. The sun was shining. It was warm, but there was a funny bite to the air. It was like the atmosphere reminded me of somewhere I've never been.

Definitions

PHD: Permanent Head Damage (I like it)

synthespian: I'm not sure if this is a completely fabricated digital character, or a person who only does body movements to be digitized into a computer for a film.

Cyber Monday

What the hell? Cyber Monday is the Monday after Thanksgiving break. People go back to work and hit the internet for Christmas shopping.  I complain a lot about not having internet access at my job. I understand why. The estimates are out of the world on how much this phenomena costs employers.

Plus, I'm jealous. I used to have internet access at other jobs and I didn't really abuse it. I used it for work related stuff and I checked Dilbert every morning. There wasn't much else unless I needed something right then.

My cousin was the CEO of a comic book company and played WOW on the job. How enviable is that statement? A) CEO of a comic book business. B) Played WOW on the job and who was going to say anything about it? Humph!

Little Difference

I'm warring my watch again lately. I seemed to have given it up for a while. I'm also back to warring my contacts the last couple of days.

It has been so long since I've worn my watch that I misread the time yesterday by an hour at one point. It is an analog watch. I'm so used to 24 hour time that I loose track thinking in terms of "quarter till" and "half past". I like the sweep feel of an analog time piece. I need one that does 24 hour time. I like the visual queue you get by imagining the appropriate hand sweeping forward to another time and counting the number of ticks it goes past. It gives a sense of how long until something happens, more so than a digital read out. At least, it does for me.

The contacts have been in my bag for weeks. Every since I got my new bifocals, I haven't been warring my contacts. That means the whole Faire season has been glasses.

I forget how much better I can see with contacts. It is not a huge difference, but it is noticeable, especially at night and off toward the horizon. Well, contacts are better as long as they are sitting right. They have a history of messing up after long day. That is normal from what I hear. I don't know how long this little trend will last. I figure until the next time my contacts piss me off.

It's nearly 2008

I remember asking someone in the early eighties "How should we refer to 2001 2002 2003 ...? Should we say oh-one, or two thousand one, or twenty oh-one?" I was a boring child. I tried looking up how people referred to 1901 and 1902. Some people in old movies said aught-one or not-one. That didn't sound right.

Now that we are almost out of the decade, I'm running through my memory and trying to remember how people referred to the years and record it here so the boring kid at the end of the next century can look it up and think "That doesn't sound right."

9/11, 7/7

When referring to huge happenings that take on a meaning of their own, the year is not in the name that people seem to use. These are simple happenings that do not need more information to tell people what you are talking about. Honestly I've had to stop a could of times and remind myself that 9/11 happened in 2001. 7/7 happened in 2005, I think ... anyway.

Conversation

In every day speech I've noticed that people just say the full year. "It happened in two thousand six." Or "It is a two thousand three model." In writing and blogs it is all over the place. You do not get a two digit date much anywhere beyond hand written notes. It is really a non issue. Nobody cares.

Y2K influence

I blame the year two thousand issue that was This was the buzz word of the late nineties. The only thing managers and PR people like better than an acronym is an acronym with numbers in it.

The place I worked hired a whole floor of people to fix problems and sign off on old programs saying they would at least function after the date rolled over. I wonder what percentage of the economy was running on the "millennium momentum."

The concept of a two digit date reaping havoc across the globe was in every TV show and news cast for a couple of years. "What's going to happen when the millennium clock rolls over?" Note I didn't say "ends" or "starts" or anything like that. That statement is technically correct because the year two thousand is the last year of the previous millennium, not the first year of the next millennium. It cracks me up that it was the most debated and promoted non-issue in history.

I think people just got used to the idea of not abbreviating the year portion of the date any more.

The true tell will come in about the middle of the next decade. What colloquialisms will people use to refer to this decade? ... I predict it will be a non issue and no one will really care. They will continue writing out the whole year until about the fifties when no one cares about Y2K or other such influences. Then it will all begin again.

Fedora 8 Upgrade

Well, it went better than I expected. It took all night for everything to install and then it took me most of the evening to the the repo links working. The way you get yum to point to the new repo is by typing it in by hand or using an RPM to force the upgrade of the files. I did it by hand. It took me several tries to get the auto stuff back to the auto settings on both of my machines.

The good news is that everything seems to have worked and upgraded. Most everything is working except Nedit. Nedit never seems to work. This time Nedit closes down every time I try to paste. That means it is useless to me.

Flash works, Mplayer works, Firefox works, aMule works, web server works. Other stuff seems to be flowing well.

The new Gedit doesn't want to set the background to black and the foreground to white. The default settings are kind of hard to read.

I"m sure there are some other changes that will make my life a living normal. I'm sure I'll bitch about the troubles it causes here in the blog. Hey, at least I can post.

Kids say the darnedest things

We were at JITB this evening woofing down some great American burgers. Elle got a toy. It was an anthropologist kit. It consisted of little tub of play-doe. Nat asked Elle if she could say anthropologist. Elle replied "anrchocolate". I nearly came out of my chair.

Lesson Learned

I learned several thing from this video. Don't let this guy near your SUV, Security gate, or anything else. If you find yourself chasing down a run away vehicle, take the extra second to sit down in the seat before jabbing on the break. It kind of looks like this guy was hitting both peddles or something along those lines. It doesn't't't look like there is any one else in the car. I cannot tell.

Guitar

You know, I tried playing the guitar several years ago. I was bad. I didn't practice enough. I don't have very good coordination to start with. There are any number of excuses. I suck at music in general. I enjoy listening.

There are a bunch of folks at my office who are good. They are engineers too. That kind of pisses me off. It really does seem like some people got double helpings at the talent fountain in the line to get born. I've witnessed people juggling infants while riding a unicycle on a tight rope over a flaming pit of death. I cant barely walk and chew gum.

There are some other issues that I have with my genetic situation. There is an old joke. What is the best way to live a long life. Answer, choose your parents well. It is the truth to this day.

If science has really figured out how to trick a skin cell in to thinking it is a stem cell, the rules might change. That is still in the "some day" category though. I just don't think this stuff will help me out. Maybe Elle's generation will benefit.

In Unix there is a command called 'ps'. It tells you what is running on the machine. It lists each process out with some useful details. The primary use for this command is to figure out what to kill. This is a metaphor for life. Someone needs to come up with a way to figure out what really is going on in your life and allow the removal of bits and pieces that cause problems.

There is more to a human life I suppose. Things get too out of hand and you think "God, one more straw and my back is going to break." That can be the truth. Something needs to give.

I'm not there right now. I'm in a good place. Things are under control as long as Nat and I can keep the bills paid. It has been a long time since I felt comfortable where I was. These moments are fleeting and far between. It doesn't matter if things are on the edge of a cliff. Just so long as you know where you are and you are OK with it.

For the moment, I'm OK with all of it. Not even. I'm great with it. I hope Nat feels the same way.

I know, I know, I'm opening myself up for the other shoe to drop. Well, I hope it doesn't. I hope the other shoe lives it's own life and leaves me and mine alone. Things are good. Things are bad. Things come and go. People come and go. It is life. Up and down.

Lunch

I walked around the top of the parking garage and talked to myself. This was not different than many other days where AI have no other plans for lunch. It was cool and quiet on top of the garage. The ground level was windy. The top of the garage was calm with only a gentle breeze, cool as it was. The sun was warm. The sound of my boots squeaking didn't even bother me that much as I passed.

I wish Nat was there. I don't remember the last time she and I just went for a walk. How many opportunities does one have to stop and smell the roses?

Upgrade

So, I'm upgrading both boxes to Fedora 8. I didn't even know it came out until night before last. While looking for information that might help my notebook woes, I found out that my primary OS had a major upgrade.

As I type the RPM system is breaking it's back making sure all the software on the system is the proper version.

I tried to use the DVD to do the upgrade but the install hung on a circular dependency. That is A required B and B required A and the line never ended. The GUI upgrade just showed a progress bar. I could only tell the system had not completely locked up. I had to sit and watch the list of dependencies rocket up the screen and recognize the pattern repeating itself in order to catch that there was something wrong.

Uninstalling several offending packages and disabling a couple of repositories seemed to help. I should have written down the changes I had to make to the system to get things work. Things will simply have to find their way back on the system as needed I guess.

It wasn't that long ago for the last upgrade. I'm not sure, but it seems like it was only about 8 months since the last major version of Fedora. From what I can tell the changes are not that vast. I think they are just promising upgrades every so often and cranking them out. I wonder where they got that idea.

Wish me luck.

Not long now

This is an inevitable step in evolution. That, and it is just plane cool.