Too much fun

Yes, I know it is an advertisement, but it is well played.

Bills

I'm sitting here staring at pile of gills. I even have a stack in my email. They are all due. Thank God I have the money to pay them.

Some thing are looking up. Some things are not. My family is healthy. Elle has a cold. Nat's mom is very ill. My father has some kidney issues he is fighting.

How many times Have I heard that I should not fret any problem that can be solved with money. That is a nice thought. 

Lunch Rant

I just plane had to go haller at the pigeons in the parking garage today. There are too many people pulling in too many directions at work. I'm not the only one who fees this way. Shit is getting deep. Many people have been under a great deal of stress over a long period of time. There is no end in sight.

It is always like this. This company is still running like a start up and it is something like thirty years old.

I say there is no end in sight, but we do have an HR person now. I don't know what is going on with this company. I know I will never get any money out of it. I honestly think I am the cut off for stock options. Not that I would have the money to buy them.

New Camera

My parents are going to buy me a new camera. The one I want is another PowerShot from Canon. It takes 12.1 MP pictures and 720p video. I can't wait to get it. They are calling this a birthday present.

This is a wonderful thing for my parent's to do for me. I use cameras one way or another nearly every day. I used my phone today at work tot capture an error message and email it to myself.

The only down side to this camera that I'm looking at that people mention in the forums is poor low light performance. I know. The lens is little bitty. If it has no light amplification, it is not going to take pictures well in low light. All snapshot cameras have trouble with low light.

I've had a Canon PowerShot for years and it has given me excellent service. It takes fantastic pictures (the old one) at 5 megapixel. The only thing I'm going to loose when giving up this camera is the same battery used for all three of my cameras. The new camera is half the size of the old one.

I looked around our house and realized how much stuff was from my parents.

• Refrigerator.
• The bed in the master bedroom.
• The dresser I use.
• Both couches.
• The TV in the living room.
• My laptop.
• Weed Eater.

That is just what I can think of off the top of my head. My parent's would say "Happy to do it." I know. Still.

Geek Rant

I had to download open suse. It comes in DVD ISO files. That's great. The files are 4.1 gigabytes each. No big deal except the 16 gig USB drive is formated FAT32. The biggest file you can have in this antique FS is one full byte short of 4 gigabytes.

Piece of cake. just format the USB drive in NTFS and go. ... but Windows XP will not let me do such a useful thing. It is just not available in the list of FS types. As a matter of fact, only FAT32 is in the 'list'. Is that a list? Is it a choice if you have the choice of This or nothing?

Two minutes after booting a box up using the Ubuntu 9.something CD I'm formating my USB key as a 16 gigabyte NTFS drive. At least Windows XP will mount the USB drive using NTFS. They are not that inept.

Take the ten minutes to copy the two files over to the USB drive. Have to use Ubuntu again to copy them off. Takes half an hour to get the files on the network and then back on to the machine I'm going to use to burn it. Burn it. Boot it. and corruption.

Something is wrong with the image. BAH!!!!!!!

Punted to the IT department. You try it.

Notes:

They have screws for holding bones together that will dissolve over time and allow bone material to fill in the gap. There is some glue or filler that looks like tooth paste that helps stitch bones as well.

There is a jell coming that you will put in your tires instead of air that will not leak out if you get a puncture. Good for bicycles as well. The difference is, this stuff bounces like air and is very light. The foam and jells up to now have been heavy and eaten the tires on the inside. Some still required air in the tire. The concept of air in tires may be on the way out.

There is a new battle cry for military and collages. It is "Whoop!" Every one seems to be doing it. I have a problem with it. It sounds stupid when people do it on mass. They sound like a bunch of toddlers.

Smurfs movie. BAH!!!

Sunday

Mowed front lawn. Cleaned out garage. Sprayed a couple gallons of weed killer all over the place. Didn't even look at the back yard.

So, Awesome Sunday. For the first time in a long time I feel like I relaxed over a weekend. Not sure why exactly. I did get like 14 hours of sleep last night. Maybe that is it. 

I'm about to head off to bed in a few minutes. I'm not sure how to say this, but I'm not so much ready for work as I am prepared. Does that make sense to any one? There are so manything that I have to do at work. Many of them depend on other people. All of it is stressful. All of it is due last week. All of it is in dispute on how other people want things done. All of it is a coordinated cluster-fuck. Did I mention stressful? Hence the reason I cannot say I am ready for work.

Here is hoping for a good night's sleep and a productive day/week/month/live. It never ends until it all ends. I'll relax in the grave.

Clean Garage Day

I tried to do a timelaps kind of quick video thing, but KDEnLive doesn't do that without compiling the code along with the library for rendering. Bastards. I also managed to blow away the clip of me pushing the car out of the garage with the gear in reverse instead of neutral. This took three hours including cleaning the garage. Nearly melted the Flip. You get this, love it or lump it.

Hey, it isn't yard work.

Flip Fail

I have the Flip Mino HD. I tried to film something earlier today and the camera over heated. It also ran out of record time and the battery was nearly drained. This camera is awesome to throw in you pocket and go, but it needs replaceable batteries, a wider angel lens out of the factory, and it needs to take SD cards like every other camera in the universe.

By over heating I mean the camera turns off and complains about being too hot if you turn it back on. You have to let it cool before you can do anything beyond pulling stuff off the camera. The temperature was below 80 degrees Fahrenheit in the garage. I was pounding like mad for over 50 minutes building a shelving unit and the camera was not warm to the touch. The little warning message came up about heat and the camera shut it self off.

I may consult with Nat over purchasing a replacement. I have no idea what will work better. The Flip takes relatively good video and very good audio for my two cents. I fear trying to identify what camera will keep up with the performance and give me the features I listed above.

This guy!

Pat Condell is something else. I've listened to his rants over a couple years no I should think. He has strong opinions and I'm so very glad he has put them somewhere I can find them.

I do not agree with everything he rants about. I do not check his facts. I respect his opinion only as far as I am too lazy to look things up. I've heard the argument that the Catholic church should be blamed for Jew hatred. In a small way, I agree.

What was the conflict before Jesus came along? I blame Usury. I've ranted on this myself before. I've been told that Jews were aloud to charge interest on loaned money and others were not. That is the sort of thing that would cause people to hate one another. I do not know enough to be sure.

Pat, please keep ranting. Everyone please keep ranting. Stand on the highest web page and shout to the universe. Let all with bandwidth hear and listen. Get your facts straight. Do the homework and math. Be prepared to be Fisked.

Best video in a long time

I embed many videos. Most of them suck. This one is very cool. It is a ride around the conveyor belt at sushi restaurant. It is a small slice of raw humanity. What is those guys' buill going to be? Their plates were stacked fifteen high. I don't like eating anything that is not cooked if only to kill the germs. My only real problem with sushi is the cost.

"He doesn't care. He/s Mexican." HA!

Weekend plans:

• Yard work
  
• Weed-whack
• Poison weeds
• Poison ants
  
• Dishes
  
• Laundry
• Film something, no more yard work videos for a while.

Watching a process run in BASH

Once you get the process ID you can watch the process with the ps command and do whatever you want in the loop. Most of the time I am waiting for something to complete or looking for a specific thing to happen. Typically you want to do this in order to report progress or enforce a timeout. You cannot trap errors this way, well, you loose track of the error channel. It is all a balance of needs and capabilities.

#!/bin/bash 
sleep 10 # Just kick off a process and wait 10 seconds
processID=$! # Gives you the last backgrounded process ID 
echo -n "running"
while [ -n "`ps -ef | egrep \" $processID \"`" ]; do 
    echo -n "." 
    sleep 1 
done
echo ""
echo "ID was $processID"

It was so much fun playing around with this and trying to get this basic idea to work in a far more complex script that I missed a meeting. That was kind of cool. Not that I missed the meeting, but hat I was that focused on one task. I get pulled in so many directions at work these days that It was nice to work on one thing for half a day or so.

Banned or taxed?

The FDA is actually talking about banning indoor tanning. About frigging time if you ask me. The evidence is there that says it is just plane bad for you.  There are lots of these things that come to mind. Things that should either be banned and shoved to a black market or taxed out of prosperity.

• Mono sodium glutamate
• Nicotine
  
• High fructose corn syrup
  
• International remittances
  
• Marijuana
• 3D movies
  

Wait a minute, marijuana is already banned. You know, being banned was actually a boon for marijuana. The hemp promotion people called the fact that marijuana was illegal a subsidy. Now that California is seriously looking at making it a legal commodity, not only can they tax the crap out of it, but the drug cartels in Mexico will have to find some other way of making money as well. Win win.

Banning behavior is a slippery slope. We must have bans on murder, rape, assault and a huge number of things that bring direct harm between people. There are all kinds of activities that are banned that do not have direct harm, like fraud and identity theft as well that should be banned. What about riding a bicycle naked, teaching your kid to be an acrobat?

Notes:

crusade + jihad - cruhad, jisade, crusadihad ??? too politically incorrect to contemplate?

Lots of companies are backing away from Google to keep China happy. The money is just too much to pass on. Share holders are screaming. Apparently evil is required to make money in big business. Who knew?

It's funny because it's true

I got this in an email. I have not checked these facts, sounds good to me.

If George W. Bush had been the first President to need a teleprompter installed to be able to get through a press conference, would you have laughed and said this is more proof of how inept he is on his own and is really controlled by smarter men behind the scenes?  If George W. Bush had spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to take Laura Bush to a play in NYC, would you have approved?  If George W. Bush had reduced your retirement plan's holdings of GM stock by 90% and given the unions a majority stake in GM, would you have approved?  If George W. Bush had made a joke at the expense of the Special Olympics, would you have approved?  If George W. Bush had given Gordon Brown a set of inexpensive and incorrectly formatted DVDs, when Gordon Brown had given him a thoughtful and historically significant gift, would you have approved?  If George W. Bush had given the Queen of England an iPod containing videos of his speeches, would you have thought this embarrassingly narcissistic and tacky?  If George W. Bush had bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia, would you have approved?  If George W. Bush had visited  Austria and made reference to the non-existent "Austrian language," would you have brushed it off as a minor slip?  If George W. Bush had filled his cabinet and circle of advisers with people who cannot seem to keep current in their income taxes, would you have approved?  If George W. Bush had stated that there were 57 states in the  United States , would you have said that he is clueless. If George W. Bush would have flown all the way to  Denmark to make a five minute speech about how the Olympics would benefit him walking out his front door in  Texas , would you have thought he was a self important, conceded, egotistical prick. If George W. Bush had been so Spanish illiterate as to refer to "Cinco de Cuatro" in front of the Mexican ambassador when it was the 5th of May (Cinco de Mayo), and continued to flub it when he tried again, would you have winced in embarrassment?  If George W. Bush had mis-spelled the word "advice" would you have hammered him for it for years like Dan Quayle and potatoe as proof of what a dunce he is?  If George W. Bush had burned 9,000 gallons of jet fuel to go plant a single tree on Earth Day, would you have concluded he's a hypocrite?  If George W. Bush's administration had okayed Air Force One flying low over millions of people followed by a jet fighter in downtown  Manhattan causing widespread panic, would you have wondered whether they actually  get what happened on 9-11?  If George W. Bush had failed to send relief aid to flood victims throughout the Midwest with more people killed or made homeless than in    New Orleans , would you want it made into a major ongoing political issue with claims of racism and incompetence?  If George W. Bush had created the position of 32 Czars who report directly to him, bypassing the House and Senate on much of what is happening in  America , would you have approved.  If George W. Bush had ordered the firing of the CEO of a major corporation, even though he had no constitutional authority to do so, would you have approved?  If George W. Bush had proposed to double the national debt, which had taken more than two centuries to accumulate, in one year, would you have approved?  If George W. Bush had then proposed to double the debt again within 10 years, would you have approved?  So, tell me again, what is it about Obama that makes him so brilliant and impressive? Can't think of anything? Don't worry. He's done all this in 10 months -- so you'll have three years and two months to come up with an answer.

Notes:

Why do octopuses have such large brains? Problem solving.

Hear I go again setting up a Windows XP machine. This time is even worse because it is a laptop. Every single piece of equipment on the system needs to be touched to make it work. Drivers, updates, updates and more updates. We can't put a more recent vintage of Windows on the system because of license. I noted that Ubuntu worked on it just fine. it takes a day just to run all the updates. Dell did not have XP as a supported OS, but I was eventually able to get links to drivers through a forum somewhere.

I cannot fathom running in to a burning building.

Rain of the day

It rained most of the day yesterday. We were in Richmond visiting the tax guy when the rain started. The drops were these little stinging pins. The roads were amazingly slick. It rained most of the night.

This morning, the roads were slick. Apparently, the rain stopped fifteen minutes before the rush hour started. I had to cross the street and walk in the street on the north side of Westheimer. The on coming traffic as I head in to town on the outbound side of the road is relativity light that time in the morning. Still, most people in the far right lane (their right) moved over for me. I was blinking my flashlight on my coat to be seen. A couple people just plane don't care and try to pass in that lane. 

When I got to work, I noticed my pant legs had gone down below my heal. That is one way to keep the mud off my boots. My boots were roughly clean. I had been walking on the street most of the time. Those big waste deep holes are still there.

By the time I walked in to work, the sky was clear from sized to side. The ground was saturated as the sun came up. The smell was of wet dirt.

By lunch, however, the wind was blowing cold in the shade. One of the guys was in shorts because "I want it to be Summer so bad!" He refuses to believe it is as chilly as it is in late March. This is Huston after all. It is supposed to be hot and humid.

Sugar vs Hight Fructose Corn Syrup

"Some people have claimed that high-fructose corn syrup is no different than other sweeteners when it comes to weight gain and obesity, but our results make it clear that this just isn't true, at least under the conditions of our tests," said psychology professor Bart Hoebel, who specializes in the neuroscience of appetite, weight and sugar addiction. "When rats are drinking high-fructose corn syrup at levels well below those in soda pop, they're becoming obese -- every single one, across the board. Even when rats are fed a high-fat diet, you don't see this; they don't all gain extra weight." ... In the 40 years since the introduction of high-fructose corn syrup as a cost-effective sweetener in the American diet, rates of obesity in the U.S. have skyrocketed, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 1970, around 15 percent of the U.S. population met the definition for obesity; today, roughly one-third of the American adults are considered obese, the CDC reported. High-fructose corn syrup is found in a wide range of foods and beverages, including fruit juice, soda, cereal, bread, yogurt, ketchup and mayonnaise. On average, Americans consume 60 pounds of the sweetener per person every year.  "Our findings lend support to the theory that the excessive consumption of high-fructose corn syrup found in many beverages may be an important factor in the obesity epidemic," Avena said.  The new research complements previous work led by Hoebel and Avena demonstrating that sucrose can be addictive, having effects on the brain similar to some drugs of abuse.   In the future, the team intends to explore how the animals respond to the consumption of high-fructose corn syrup in conjunction with a high-fat diet -- the equivalent of a typical fast-food meal containing a hamburger, fries and soda -- and whether excessive high-fructose corn syrup consumption contributes to the diseases associated with obesity. Another step will be to study how fructose affects brain function in the control of appetite.  The research was supported by the U.S. Public Health Service. Princton

The emphases above is mine. High Fructose Corn Syrup I don't feel the need to define sugar. That should say something right there.

I get free sodas at work. I may as the our HR person to look in to charging for the sodas that have corn syrup in them to make it easier for me to walk past them every day. I may be a paria, but I will be skinnier and able to out run those tubby complainers.

I'm getting tired of being lied to by corporations. For the last couple years I've had a pretty good idea that there was something wrong with HFC because so many huge corporations were telling me it was fine. If what you are doing is hurting people, then stop doing it. Do something else that is not hurting people. Do not hide it. Do not deny it after there is proof. Do not lobby your troubles away with cheap politicians. Fix the problem.

We need a tax on lobbying by non living citizens. If you are a corporation or a foreign national, you should have to pay a tax relative to how much money you are going to make by lobbying for some rule or law change.

Notes:

There are schools in really shitty areas who have gotten a grant from our government to give food to the kids to take home to feed their families. You cannot learn on an empty stomach.

I was listening to a podcast of a financial show. They used Lady Gaga as a segway.  I thought the song didn't fit the show. Then I thought something far more disturbing. I could identify a Lady Gaga song by the beat, no words. ... sigh.

Four Square is the new Twitter. I am not posting where I am at all times. Deal with it. I think it would be far more interesting to post where I am not at any given time. I should tweet what is not going on or how much fun I'm not having. I'm sure people would find that as interesting as my current fare of meal contents and complaining. Maybe that is complaining.

Some states, like Ohio, have different colored license plats for people who have been convicted of drunk driving. I like that idea.

There is no legal definition of white as in a race. No binding definition anyway. for the most part there have been definitions of black and white was mostly what was left over. A hundred and fifty years ago Irish were not white. A hundred years ago Italians and Jews were not white. Is that some crazy stuff? I'm sick of being lumped in with those evil greedy controlling freaks. I want to be able to chose 'other' on all the forms and just write 'You tell me' in the line provided.