Slippery Slope

I let the fact that Sundays are the last day of the weekend affect my ability to enjoy myself on Sundays. Yes, I have to go back to work tomorrow. That does not mean I can't have some fun. I know this consciously, but it happens.

Justin and Lance have a music thing tonight. I've been looking forward to videoing them just for something to put up on YouTube. This show is not far from my house. Nat doesn't want to go. She is worried about her mother tomorrow.

Tomorrow I go to work, Nat goes to visit her mom. Elle is with Bill. I wish there were a better way to relax while worrying about tomorrow. I mean, tomorrow will get here weather I like it or not. It doesn't matter how well I prepare, or how much I fret. If tomorrow does not come then why was I worried?

Right now I'm waiting for a text or a tweet telling me the right time to show up at J. P. Hops House. Sundays are open mike night.

Sunday

Headed to a music thing this evening. Hoping to get some video footage. I'm watching Top Gear. No other posts today.

Paranormal Activity

I watched the movie Paranormal Activity.

I don't get it.

Not only was I never scared. I had a hard time sympathizing with any character. If anything, I wanted to hear what the ghost had to say.

Why are people so hung up on ghosts from the past. Must there be a story behind all hauntings? Are evil people still evil after they die? There are so many random crimes committed every day that if people had a choice to do anything after death it would be to continue doing the same thing they did in life. Which, would most likely be random crimes since that is what happens more often in life.

Enough about the plot. I hated the characters. I was glad they were being haunted. I didn't feel bad for them, even at the end. There was no protagonist. None that I found antagonistic. I was definitly rooting for Darth Vader in this flick.

The style left me cold. The single camera layout of this movie made me itchy. I ached for more shots from the tripod. A five minute video is OK if it is jumpy. I'm upset with entire movies shot from the hip. I'm so glad I did not pay to watch this in a theater.

Notes:

I walked around the parking garage at lunch trying to relax a bit before hitting it again. When I was done, I walked down from the top floor in a rarely used stairwell. The temperature had dropped 20 degrees F since the morning. The stairwell was downright warm. My glasses fogged. There was one door left open no about the third floor. There was a thermal zone where the temperature and humidity  equalized in about 10 feet. It was crazy.

Chrome browser has the worst spell checker of any publicly available software that I'm aware of.

LMGTFY - Next time someone asks you for information that they could have just typed in to Google. (Google it)

Power Supply Woes at Work

Nearly burned my office down this morning.

I walked in to work and popped a new power supply in to a box. We have an exchange warranty on hardware so when the power supply crackled popped and smoked we sent in a ticket.

Got the new power supply. Popped it in. and snap crackle and smoke. Unplug. Take the case off to make sure it is not on fire. Hand to someone else to deal with. Well, maybe not. I'm sure this will be my problem.

There must be a short on the motherboard. Fortunately we have people at my company who are great at finding that kind of thing.

The motherboard will need to be replaced. I have to call HP Monday and walk through the destination. The motherboard will need to be re;laced. The replacement will fall on my shoulders. I suck at it. We have people who are great at it, but they will not be called in to help.

The excitement of a fire did wake me up.

Project

I'm going to build one of these in my back yard and call it a jungle gym.

$750

Our deductible is paid for the year on the car. W paid $750 today for rapiers after Nat got run off the road. This is what insurance is for, right? Well maybe if they paid for stuff.

$600 last month on a toilet. Now $750 on the car. Plus the bits we had to pay for the rent car. The insurance only covers so much. The insurance only paid like $400 on the car. Not sure what the rent car comes out to. I'll do an after video if the muse hits me.

iPad

So, I have been reading a couple comments about the iPad. Mainly people think the name is stupid. Mainly people thing the idea is not what people want. Then, the griping starts about it doesn't do this or that. It has too many limitations to do what I want. It costs too much. It is a Kindle killer, but it really isn't .

After looking at the specs this is the Apple equivalent of a netbook. It has that touch interface that Apple is so frigging proud of. It has an on screen keyboard or you can use a bluetooth keyboard. Maybe a mouse, but I bet the touch interface takes over. I kind of hate people touching my frigging screen. 

I herd someone say that Apple wants families to buy six or seven of these things. One for every room and or person in the house. You go from one to the other and they can tell who it is is and adopt your settings and persona. Yadda yadda. I prefer sitting in front of a desk to deal with the invasion of the outside world in to my world. I like being able to get up and walk away from it at times.

This just doesn't feel like the next big thing to me. What do I possible know about that sort of thing. I'm a nobody. I'm a consumer. I'm a computer geek. This thing has little geek apeal to me. It just seems like a fail waiting to happen.

Haven't ten different computer manufacturers gone down this road? Microsoft did and dropped the whole tablet PC line after a while. The Census people had tablet computers purpose built last time around. They made the news. Same after Katrina. People from the government and insurance companies walked around taking pictures whit GPS and adding notes to a database.

All in all, I feel a resounding collective yawn.

Notes:

Traffic was light this morning. Is today some kind of holiday? Anything I should know about?

"He is treated better than the average child in Pennsylvania." PITA wants to replace the groundhogs responsible for groundhog day with a robot. The guy who runs the organization that takes care of him responded with the quote above. PITA has apparently achieved every other animal rights goal in the universe.

Local Band (lanceandjustin)

Some friends of mine have a new band Twitter feed. Check them out. I give them my highest rating. "Doesn't suck!""

Web Hits

The other day, i was feeling down. I asked god for a sign. That is a bad thing to do I know, but I did it any way. I was about to check my hits on my blog. I said "If life is bad, then my hits will be down. If the hits are up, then life is good. If they are the same, then I'll just go to bed." I know this is a rood thing to ask if God. I fully expected the hits to be right about the same and to head off to bed in my depressed stooper.

I normally have a few less than 20 per day. That is not bad I've found out for a blog that has no theme and is just background noise on the world wide web. I saw a hockey stick. The last number was 37. Woh, what happened.? I looked in to what caused the numbers. It was exactly the same balance of direct traffic, searches and referring sights that I always have. the numbers were just higher. Nothing to tell me that it was caused by any one page or post.

For example, not long ago I posted about an iPhone fire email that i received. That post even got a few comments. It was a spike in hits. As a matter of fact it was easily the highest number of hits I've gotten in one day. If memory serves it was 96. This is not what happened here. All of those hits showed on one specific post. These recent hits were simply all over the place. It was a simple uprising for one day.

This blip was from Tuesday. Tuesdays are typically flat. When I wen to look at the current day, Wednesday, the numbers looked about normal for a Wednesday. I wander if it was just a blip. I wander if it was the sign I was looking for. I know what I believe.

Notes:

I had to look up the parts and warranty of an HP server this morning. It took me fifteen minutes to track down the "find the dates for the warranty on one of your boxes" link. I found all kinds of generic warranty information. I found all kids of offers t update warranty.

Notes:

Five failed banks were taken over last Friday. Don't be surprised if our government wants to start handing out "toxic assets" are handed out as tax refunds pretty soon. I'll take cash thank you.

This morning I accidentally hit the delete key and blue away all my podcasts on my Linux box at work. This was on a thumb drive. Those file do not show up in the trash can that is on the desktop. However, there is another trash can on the thumb drive that you have to go look in. Some times files show up there and some times they do not. Not every version of Linux uses the hidden folder. Some Linux distros use different names. This morning, the files were there. I used the command line to moved them back to a folder where the GUI could see them. I'm not sure, but it doesn't seem like there is a way to see hidden files and folders from the GUI. I suppose this is a good thing.

45 BC is the first year that January first was drawn up as the break of the new year.

Sunset

I got a wild hare and took a couple pictures of the sunset from my office window. I've done this sort of thing before. I wonder if I will ever get my crap together long enough to make a montage of sunsets from my office window? I doubt it.

   

Light at the Crossroads

Westheimer and Walnut Bend. It looked like someone had hit the light with a tall truck. I waled out of the building thinking I would have to walk down to Wilcrest to get on the bus. Traffic moved pretty stedily and people seemed to let each other move from lane to lane.

I was, dishonorably, hoping for a wreck. That would have made for much more interesting video.

Notes:

Linux is 1.2% or 6.x% of market share for the OS share. I'm not sure of the details. It depends on who you listen to. I've blogged before that I almost hope it does not become too popular. Linux has managed to stay off the malware radar for the most part.

Don't define points and lines. Define their relationships. It is impossible to define a point and a line on to themselves. They don't exist and the idea of how to work with them is abstract. This translates to reality. It is no wonder politics is so difficult. We are aloud to define relationships but not people. Defining people is discrimination. Defining relationships is a no fly list.

There was a guy on the bus reading a book that was six inches thick. He was at the beginning of the book. I nearly went over and asked him what the book was just so I would know how to write it up in the blog. That wasn't happening.

Nat's iPod Touch will not recognize my wireless router. I can get my laptop and my phone on the wireless network. her iPhod refuses. It has something to do with the 'password' vs 'WEP key'. My laptop and phone both say 'enter the key' and her iPod says 'enter the password'. I looked around online and found a couple places where they said to enter the password or WEP key in the password field. That did not work. I think my router is just out of date. I bet the protocols have moved on. I have a slightly newer router. I don't know if it has the features I want. I may have to give it a try.

"Are you the pidgin or the stature today?"

I updated my work machine from Red Hat 5.3 to Red Hat 5.4 using the repos that I downloaded. I was so confident that it would work I made backups and said a prayer. I did have to rebuild and install the the video driver. Everything else seems to be working fine. I'll turn the repos loose on the company tomorrow.

Burner concepts

Elle's burner phone has no camera. Thank goodness. It does however have a flashlight. How cool is that?!? The phone weighs nothing. I've thought of buying one and throwing it in my bag and forgetting about it. Thought about suggesting Nat throw one in the glove box for the same reason. We have decided not to tell Elle about the flashlight functionality. She is almost as crazy for flashlights as I was at that age. (Yes, am now as well.)

The flashlight thing is cool. I'm trying to think of other ways to get people to buy a burner mobile. I'm thinking a Pocket Fisherman kind of device that would be advertised on late night TV.

The idea of an emergency radio, flashlight, tire pump, mobile phone almost makes sense.

• waterproof
• pare of wire cutter/players, other multi-tools
  
• place for matches or a built in lighter
  
• wind up charger
• GPS
• emergency radio/TV receiver (It would have to be digital these days)
  
• emergency transmitter locater thing
  

The idea of a cheap device is out the window.

Saving

Humans are designed to over eat when the resources present themselves in order to build up a savings account of fat when food get hard to find.only nature had applied this principle to our financial skills. If people saved by default, society would never have developed a financial wing. There would have been no need to barrow or take risks in the same way that we have now.

Nat had to pull some money out of the savings account this morning to pay for the rent car. The Carola is in the shop after someone ran her in to a curb.I know it is a required expense, but it is the end of the month and pulling money out of the savings account drives me up the wall.  i become irrational because it is so hard to put money in the savings account in the first place.

Save save save save SAVE!!! Where have these words been?

Bent rims

Natalie got run off the road Saturday evening. Some jerk was trying to racer her on the freeway and pulled off when she did. he cut her off and ran her in to a curb. The driver side rims are scratched up and I bet they are bent. We filled out a police report in case we have to call on the insurance.

I like Nat's comment "What about a 2005 Carola says 'I want to race.'?"

Apologies for the quality .I think it is just the dark conditions in the garage.

Blown Engine

That's how you blow an engine. It explodes, catches on fire, falls out of the vehicle, and you then run over it. Stile! And they are all so smooth about it too.