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.

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.