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Apparently, if you forget to pay your ISP bills for three months, they'll cut off your access. Hmm, whoops. That's why my blog as well as *.larrythecow.org went down for a few days.
I signed up for a Linode (and did automatic billing), and I'll be moving the sites there rather soonly. That'll save us all from other responsibility-addled issues. Well, financial ones at least. 
I am sure there is something metaphysical going on here…but I am not sure what.
Negative File Delete
Yeah, I’ve been away - Mostly on Facebook, but Facebook is so private that some of the things I want to share are not available to the search engines and the world at large. I’m back, shorter posts, but more often for sure…
-Peter
I’ve started watching a new summer show on Fox: Mental. It is has been somewhat intriguing thus far. It is, however, formulaic: Dr. solves problems in an “hour”, but can’t solve his own problem(s) during a season or ever on the show. (Think House, another Fox show … which I enjoy because Dr. House is such a jerk.) [You can catch both shows on Hulu.]
In the second episode of this inaugural season of Mental, the two residents are sitting down for lunch in the hospital doctors lounge. As Dr. Suarez sits on the couch next to Dr. Artis, the camera pans to catch the coffee table in front of the couch and this is what we see:
If you didn’t catch that, here is the screen capture:
You may want to click on the image to get a better view, but check out the book. That’s right …. a 1997 Que, Special Edition of Using Microsoft Visual InterDev. Now I know there are Drs. out there who have development skills. In fact, my kids’ pediatrician is one. He and I have talked about his hacking on his office’s Patient and Records system, customizing and writing extensions. But why would any prop or set person drop a 1997 Visual InterDev book in this scene? And even worse the book was horrible, I had it at a previous job. You don’t have take my word for it, check out the reviews on Amazon.
I just read this awesome post about corporate culture about Zappos, and I was just blown away by how awesome it is. The company focuses on culture first, and by doing so, cultivates a great environment where everyone wants to work.
In some ways, it actually reminds me a lot of where I'm working at right now. I started here about 9 months ago, and I love this job. This is the first one since working at the movies (10 years ago) that I want to stick around for years.
When I was interviewing for the job, I met with the CEO and he said something that really stuck with me. He said that the #1 reason someone will accept a new job is because of the payrate, but the #1 reason they will leave is because of cultural differences. As a result, he said, they place a very high emphasis on corporate culture.
I was, of course, a little skeptical ... but after seeing how nice the place was, I thought he must be pretty serious. Well, he was. This place treats its employees incredibly nice, and in a lot of ways the culture reminds me working at the theaters. The similiarity is that the environment is especially social (we're mostly a call center, sort of ... kind of a hybrid) so that people who are social and dynamic and easy going and fun to be around stay here and build up others. When you walk around on the floor you just get a feeling of connectivity for everyone. It's really cool, and pretty rare.
Anyway, I love my job, and I don't think I've ever said that since I worked at the movie theater so many years ago.
I’ve been toying with the idea that I want a new email signature at the end of each message I send. For the longest time, I’ve been of the opinion to put an email netiquette topic in my signature on one point or another. For example, for the past 4 years, I’ve had one version or another of the following signature:
_
Aaron Toponce ( ) ASCII Ribbon Campaign
www.aarontoponce.org X www.asciiribbon.org
/ \
That signature has served me well the past few years, but I’m ready for something new and refreshing. I’m tired of the political stance that my signature carries, so how about something less political and more geek? I don’t want my name in the signature or anything vanity-related. No politics or netiquette advice. Just raw geek. I came up with the following:
. O . O . O . . O O . . . O . . . O . O O O . O . O O . . O O O O . O . . O O O O . O O O
Bonus points if you recognize this pattern, and can tell me where it’s from.
This is intending to be a quick post, so I hope I can keep it as such.
There are a few things online that are really starting to get under my skin. Thankfully, the problems can all be solved by an opt-out approach, one way or another, with of course the most dramatic staying offline. I thought I’d share my thoughts, as it seems others are following suit as well. Could this be the end of an old era, and the beginning of a new?
I would like to think that these dinosaur technologies are actually going the way of the dinosaur. Looking at many of the social media applications online, such as Facebook, Identi.ca, Jabber, Freenode, and others, I see no reason really to hold on or pay attention to email. Sure, there are communities on mailing lists, but there are also communities on Facebook and the other technologies with just as active posts. I could entirely eliminate email, and not even miss it. I could turn off voicemail, and still get a hold of the people that need me and the reasons they called in the first place. I’ve already eliminated ads, and RSS is opt-in, so I don’t need to subscribe to truncated feeds, or click through for content.
Just some thoughts about what is really starting to annoy me from the world of the Internet. If you’re of the same opinion or not, I would be interested in your reasoning.
Ah, that was fun, but I'm done. Until next year.
Man, today has been nuts. Coming up with the April Fool's day posts have really been a drain on my brain. On top of that, I totally forgot my glasses at home today, so my eyes have been a bit sensitive. Plus, I forgot to take my meds last night so I keep turning my head involuntarily because Ginger will just not *shut the crap up*. Gaw. Just when I thought the MPD was getting a bit better, too. It's probably time for a new poem.
Ah, well, I need a break after all of this. I'm definitely up for a movie tonight, I'll have to see if Lola will come along. Things have been a bit stressful lately .... I can't convince her to give up the baby, and I still have no idea what we're gonna tell her parents. Not that it matters in the long run. Everybody probably thinks I'm gay from my last post about the cats. I think everything will work out once we move to Puerto Vallarta anyway. Let them all try to figure out what happened while I'm laying on a beach.
I'm heading home.
Today has been a good day for me. It's been a bit of a clearing house of getting some posts done that I've been putting off for a while, and this one is no different.
My friends know I've been thinking about getting a pet for a while, mostly a cat. They're fun to have and pretty much take care of themselves, and aside from finding hair in places you didn't think could hold it, a generally positive experience.
So, today, I went back down to the animal shelter and adopted some small little bundles of joy. I got four total so we can have a cool D&D game together.
It was a tough decision, but mostly, it's been an obvious lifestyle change that has been coming. I'm single, in my 30s, and let's face it ... some things just aren't gonna change anytime soon. I'd like to attribute a lot of this to a real role model on TV who has gone through similar times, and I can totally relate to -- Craig Feldspar.
And see, we have another thing in common I just noticed, too -- big screen TVs. It was just made to be. Craig's the one on the left.
So, without further ado, I'd like to introduce you to my new cats:
French Fry
Marshmallow
Freschetta
Otto
I've had a bit of trouble breaking Otto into using the litterbox, but I'm sure she'll come around in due time. It's great to have some companions around the house. I don't know how I ever did without the wonderful new world of aromas before, and I'm enjoying the surprises in my cereal. Plus, this pretty much guarantees me I don't have to worry about spending money on dates anymore. I can get some great Xbox games with all the savings. Tell you what!
What a week this has been. Jason's wife was out of town, so we hung out the entire time doing all kinds of crazy stuff. It's Saturday night and I'm absolutely exhausted by all the stuff we managed to cram in, from Wii to about 5 movies in the theater to driving incredibly safe and at reasonable speeds on the highway.
I'm pooped. And I also bought a Wii today, because I'm totally hooked on Bowling and Baseball. I think I'm going to crash now. Tomorrow will be interesting.
It's not my birthday just yet (not until Friday), but that didn't stop me from doing some early shopping for presents. 
This weekend, I went out and bought a new receiver for my setup at home. I got a new 7.2 Yamaha receiver, and this thing is wicked slick.
I've been wanting to upgrade my whole audio setup for a while now, and this is the first step. I'm going to do it pretty much piecemeal, adding or upgrading one item at a time, and the receiver was the first one to go.
This thing has some really cool features. For one, it supports all the extra HD codecs that Blu-Ray supports, two of which enable up to 7.1 surround sound, and two which are lossless. Right now, I only have one Blu-Ray disc that supports 7.1 channels (Sleeping Beauty), but since I don't have the extra speakers, I won't know for a while how nice it sounds. But, one major point of doing an upgrade is to future-proof the system, so that's what I did.
I also bought some nice stereo speakers to compliment the receiver, since I figured most of the sound goes through there. My good friend Jason, who is far more the audiophile than I'll ever be, tried explaining to me that most of the audio comes through the center speaker, and I'd be better off investing in that. I didn't really understand how it could work that way, so I bought some side speakers anyway. It should be worth mentioning at this point, that my audio experience can be summed up pretty simply -- I just like the aural experience of feeling like I'm surrounded, and as far as my class as an audio expert goes, I couldn't tell the difference between a phone and a tin can on a string.
I was sure, though, that since I wanted it to sound like stuff was coming from all sides, that I needed good speakers for the sides. So I got some good ones. As I was wiring the new receiver, though, I noticed that it had been opened and returned by someone else. The previous owner's hair being all over the place was a good indicator. I think they owned a cat who apparently thought a receiver would make a great tanning bed. I wanted to make sure it would work properly before I set everything up, so I wired my old speakers, and being the lazy bum that I am, only did the side ones, leaving out the center speaker. I popped in a Blu-Ray (Clone Wars) and everything sounded fine. I puttered around for a bit looking at the manual and left the movie playing. After a few minutes I realized that I wasn't hearing any dialogue. That seemed normal enough, since I knew that it comes through the center speaker, but what I didn't realize was that wasn't *all* that comes through there. There was a cool space battle (which is one reason I recommend watching Clone Wars -- some of the coolest Star Wars battles are in there), and all I could hear from the side speakers were these little pings. None of the good stuff was coming through at all. Well, there's nothing like real world experience to school you, so with that, I packed up the very expensive speakers and took them back. I still haven't found a good center speaker I like, but I'm glad I didn't blow a load of cash on an otherwise mostly secondary effect.
I also took my receiver back, in exchange for one uncoated with fur, and setup my old speakers and away I went. The setup came with a little microphone that you can plug in and run an automatic setup to determine the distance of the speakers and how they need to be adjusted. That is really nice. One of my speakers had to have the volume level slightly higher than the other one, so it worked out well to get it all balanced. Despite the 7.2 capability (supports two subwoofers as well), I've only setup a 3.1 system so far -- two bookshelf speakers, one center, one subwoofer. I'm not sure how I want to wire my living room just yet for surround sound, and for some odd reason the idea of running speaker wire across my ceiling or floor seems a little unsightly to me. I guess I'll never be a true A/V geek.
All in all, though, it sounds really nice. For some odd reason, my old receiver had a perceived A/V sync issue on Blu-Ray discs played from my PS3. It's gone with this one, I'm glad to report, though I'm still not sure if I was just imagining it or not. Another great feature I found out about is that the receiver will upscale and export any input video through the outgoing HDMI port. That means I can plug in pretty much anything from Composite to Component and have it all go out through one display port. Not a bad feature, but my TV already comes with something like 7 input sources anyway, so I probably won't ever need it. It also has a Monitor Out feature, where it will give you an OSD for the setup. That is a really nice touch.
Just as cool as a new receiver, I got a new book in the mail from my parents -- Batman Animated.
I'm not much of one for coffee table books, but with Batman, anything goes.
I probably wasn't supposed to open it already, but if I get unwrapped presents in the mail, you can bet your bippy I'm opening it up.
It's a great book. I absolutely love the new animation style that started with Batman: The Animated Series that Warner has been using since. I'm a real freak for certain styles of art. The whole book is all sketches, drawings, commentary and the like. Awesome stuff.
I wonder what else I'm gonna get .... er, that is, from myself for me. I asked my little sister the other day, "Why is everything I want to get so expensive?" She said, "Because you've already bought everything affordable." How true it is. Happy burfday to me
I wanted something to sink my teeth into on just how large IPV6 really is. As such, I decided to do it graphically. Initially, this meant just representing each IP address with a single pixel. Surely, the images would be doable. However, as I started crunching the numbers, they were much larger than I thought, and I came to a very quick realization that this wouldn’t be possible. I needed to do some compression if I wanted to show it visually. So, I took advantage of compression where possible, and I let your imagination work in a couple spots where even compression won’t turn out anything reliable or representational.
To start, it’s well known that we’re running out of IPv4 addresses. IPv4 only address 2^32 possible IPs, which is 4,294,967,296. There are already 6.5 billion in the world, so we don’t even have enough IPs for 1 per person. Given the fact that many of us have more than 1 (Internet, cell phones, cable/satellite TV) and many businesses have gobbled up millions at a time, such as IBM and Sun Microsystems, we’re in trouble. It’s estimated that we’ll be out of IPv4 addresses within the next 2 years. There are things we can do to extend that life, but for the most part, it’s time to move on to IPv6. To give a visual of how much of the space is left, consider the image below.
This first image is 256×256 pixels, for a total of 65,536 pixels. As already mentioned, there are currently 4,294,967,296 possible IPv4 addresses. As such, each pixel in my image represents 256 unique IPv4 addresses. There are currently only 511 million addresses left, or about 12%. My graphic below gives an accurate representation of the exhaustion, if black is all the used addresses and white is what is available.
Now, what about IPv6? Well, to start, it addresses 2^128 possible IPs, which is 340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456 possible addresses. There are a lot of technical points of interest with IPv6. First, it is NOT backwards compatible with IPv4, which means we’ll be living a dual IP stack for some time. Second, 64-bits of the 128 in IPv6 are dedicated to your Ethernet hardware address, commonly referred to as the MAC address. Which means, that your ISP could give you the other 2^64, or 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 unique IP addresses when you sign up for an account. After all, as you’ll see, we have more than enough room.
This number may not look large, but I want to put it into perspective visually, so you have an idea of what we’re looking at. If each IP was a single pixel, this would produce an image 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 pixels square. Now, my monitor has the capability of showing 105 pixels per linear inch. This means my monitor would need to be 2,772,778,991,358 miles in length and width if I wanted to see the image without any scrolling. Just for comparison, a light year is 5,865,696,000,000 miles. It would take almost 6 months traveling at the speed of light to start from one end of my monitor to reach the opposite. Want an image to wrap your mind around it? The maximum distance of Pluto from our Sun is approximately 4,557,000,000 miles away. We need to do that distance about 600 times before reaching the end of my monitor. We’re still well within the Milky Way however.
Let’s get closer though. If I were to keep the same allocation of 256 IP addresses for a single pixel, as I did with my first image, then I would need a monitor capable of showing 72,057,594,037,927,936 pixels square. A linear distance of that size is about 1,083,116,793 miles across. This is slightly more doable as a visual representation. The distance from our Sun to Saturn is roughly 886 million miles. So, drive about 200 million miles further, long before we reach Uranus and we’ll reach the edge of my monitor. Want a visual representation to scale? The yellow blob on the far left, just outside the white monitor is our Sun. The pink dot on the far right just inside the monitor is Saturn. Remember, this is our monitor size if each pixel on my monitor was 256 IP addresses.
Certainly, this is much too large. Can’t I get a monitor to fit on my desk? Let’s allocate the entire IPv4 space to a singe pixel on my screen. This should give us a more manageable image, no? That means that I would need an image size of 4,294,967,296 pixels square. An image of this size would require a monitor width of only 645 miles. Putting the center of the monitor in the center of the United States, and I can see that my monitor is large enough to cover 6 states in the Midwest- Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma and Arkansas. Again, remember that each pixel in my monitor would be occupying 4.2 billion IP addresses. Think any hardware manufacturer is willing to make a monitor this large for me?
So, there you have it. A visual representation of IPV6 as best as I could do. Hopefully, this will help you understand just how large IPv6 is, and that I don’t expect us to run out of addresses with that vast number. Unless, of course, we enter inter-galactic communication on the same protocol.
(If I wanted to fit the entire IPv6 space on my physical monitor right now, each pixel would need to represent 192,903,836,122,980,988,357,922,113,056,557 IP addresses. Cool.)
I've been thinking about what I want to work on next, since I'm actually finishing up a few things all at the same time.
All within the past little while, I've finished up three big projects, or at least come really close to where the status quo is gonna work out great. I got my new Mini ITX media frontend setup, and minus a few tweaks on the remote and configs, it's good to go. I've been hacking on drip and dvd2mkv, my scripts to automate ripping and encoding both TV shows (drip) and movies (dvd2mkv). Oh, and I keep meaning to make mention of this, but I've given up trying to dream about getting those things in a "release" state. It'll never happen. But if anyone is looking for a class to access a DVD through PHP, well, it's all in SVN. And the third thing, crazy as it is, is that I've pretty much bought up all the DVDs (movies) that I've had on my wishlist for years. Again, there's a few exceptions (like two) that can either wait or they are out of print so I'm waiting for the price to come down, but mostly ... I'm done!
It's been nice to go home and watch Buck Rogers in peace, and knowing everything just works, but now I'm wondering what I'm gonna work on next. And when I say next, I mean, which project am I going to finish that I've been putting off for so long.
The first one on my list is also the one that I've been putting off the longest by far: getting the last release of this scriptures database complete. I sat down this morning for a quick second and documented all the stuff I have left to do, and there's really not much. Part of is verifying that the schema is correct on all the exports, and the rest is mostly just getting the documentation and changelogs written up. I don't know why this release has been taking me so long. Some of it just seems a bit overwhelming. I tend to put a lot of pressure on myself to get this thing done right, because I really want it to look good and work without problems.
That shouldn't take long though. Really, if I sat down, it'd take just a couple of hours to hammer out and get out the door. I still don't know what's next though. There's a lot of Gentoo stuff I want to work on, but I've kind of been hovering for the past little while, not really committing to any one area. I've been trying to decide where I wanna focus my time on that, as well. There's pretty much just two areas that I've kind of settled myself into: ebuilds and projects. Documentation used to be a third one, as I used to write a lot of stuff on the wiki, but now that it's kind of gotten hit pretty hard, I lost interest in going back to it. I am, however, working on one official Gentoo doc right now, though I don't want to promise anything since even that is going pretty slowly.
As far as the portage tree goes, I need to figure out what areas I wanna work on. I'm thinking about dropping out of the media-tv herd completely since I don't even *record* TV anymore. It's all about ripped DVDs these days. There's still a lot of stuff I'd like to cleanup before I go though, and if I do stay on, it'd mostly be because I don't wanna see stuff rot and be forgotten.
The projects, on the other hand, have always been something I'm interested in developing further. I'm talking about stuff like the packages website, GPNL, and the stats tracker. The packages frontend is about the only one I'm really satisfied with the way it is. All of them could use a lot of work though. GPNL hasn't even come close to my original vision of what I'd like it to be. Part of the reason is because it's just so hard to get metadata into the database, and it's so time consuming to do trial runs and things that I've spent way more time writing scripts to collect data than analyze it. People keep asking me about the stats program, which I want to work on as well. The one that is currently online was really nothing more than a proof of concept to see if I could collect data remotely using shell tools, and how complex it would be. It turns out it was much simpler than I expected, so it's given me a lot of ideas of where we could go with that. I think, though, that I probably won't work on it until I get the other two finished up or at least advanced a bunch more though.
Also, a side note that just occurred to me. I don't know about anyone else, but one thing that helps for me to get these things moving is knowing what kind of features people are interested in. I usually write these things so that I can fill a void -- mine, to start with, but I'm always open to slapping on some useful features that I may not have thought of. Besides, it's usually not hard once you have the base framework either. So, I need some ideas.
One last thing that's been bugging me -- I need to find a new domain name for this stuff. larrythecow.org is too long to type. I can't think of anything I like, either. Something short would be nice.
Ah, my, lots to do, and not sure of what to work on next.
I hate Facebook Application requests, and I think more and more of my family and friends are coming to agreeance. To put it bluntly, I’m not interested in taking the “What kind of [insert random noun here] are you?” quiz. I’m not interested in playing YoVille (although my wife seems to enjoy it). I’m not interested in discovering which of my friends are my relatives (I know that already). So, it’s no surprise then that I got ignored bing “tagged” in “25 Random Things About Me” about seven times so far.
Fine. I’ll give in. 
Well, on my previous blog that used to run under my family name, I blogged 101 things about me. Well, seeing as though that blog is no longer, I’m willing to put them back up here, except just using the top 25 instead of all 101. Also, I’m not going to “tag” anyone on Facebook, because I won’t read them anyway, and I find the application requests annoying. However, my blog syndicates to Facebook notes, so if you’re interested, you’ll see this post under my profile and read it there.
With that, here we go:
I’ve always been one for reducing my carbon footprint on the environment. Politics aside, I think we can all agree that CO2 emissions on the atmosphere is more harmful than good. As a result, I’ve been conscious of my contributions. So, when my wife and I bought our home, I began setting out what I could do to do my part. First thing first, was replacing the incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescents (CFLs). However, I wasn’t a fan of doing a total replacement, mainly for the fact that spending all that money up front, would take some time to get back in power consumption savings. So, as time went on, I’ve been replacing bulb for bulb as they burned out. Well, I haven’t had a bulb burn out on me in a couple of years, and I’ve been getting anxious to get them all replaced, so tonight, I went to my local hardware store, and purchased the last remaining replacements.
When my wife and I bought this home, the previous owner must’ve liked a bright house, as just about every bulb in the home was 100 watts. There were a couple 60 and 75 watt bulbs here and there, but the vast majority were 100 watts. Well, I don’t care for such a brightly lit home for a couple of reasons. First, for the small home we own, there just isn’t a room that needs that amount of light. Second, being exposed to very bright light for extended periods of time gives me headaches, so dimming the rooms down is a must. So, instead of replacing the 100 watt incandescent bulb with a CFL equivalent, I brought each bulb down to the 60 watt replacement, which is only a 13 watt CFL bulb.
I’ve kept track of all the bulbs in the house as I’ve been replacing them, as I’ve been curious to watch my electricity consumption. When we purchased the house, we had 4180 watts of installed bulbs. After tonight, we’re now totaling 1028 watts. That is a 75% decrease in electricity for light bulbs. And at an average of $3 per CFL, it hasn’t been too expensive of an investment. I’m confident that I could squeeze an additional 200-300 watts out, if I really tried, by replacing the fluorescent tubes in my kitchen and garage with lower wattages. When not in a room, the lights are also turned off to save electricity.
Of course, there’s more to your overall wattage consumption than light bulbs. I recently replaced a 19″ CRT monitor with a 19″ LCD. I’ve also turned on aggressive power saving preferences in all my computers, turning the monitors off after 10 minutes of inactivity, and hibernating after 30 minutes of inactivity. I’ve turned the brightness down 50% on all monitors as well, which mainly was just to avoid the headaches. I’ve programmed the thermostat such that when we’re away from the home, I reduce turning on the AC or heater, and when we’re home, I’ve set it such that we can endure slight warmth during the summer or slight cold during the winter. The fridge and freezer are turned up a degree or two, and Christmas lights have been replaced with LED lights. Anything and everything I can do to save the last little bit of electricity, I do. If I were to stay in this home permanently, I’d invest in solar panels on the roof, to take advantage of the energy from the sun to power most of my home. Lastly, I drive a car that gets 42/35 mpg, and my wife drives one that gets 35/28 mpg. The only thing I wish I could replace is our 50 gallon water heater with a tankless water heater.
It feels good to minimize our CO2 emissions as best we can while remaining practical and affordable. It also feels good to be saving my hard earned cash. Now, the only question that’s left, is what are you doing to minimize your footprint on the environment?
For those subscribing to my blog via RSS/Atom, I’ve moved my feeds from the Feedburner servers to Google, seeing as though Google acquired them some time ago. As such, the URI for my feed has changed. You will be automatically forwarded to the new feed, however, if you would like you can update it now in your reader. It’s http://feeds2.feedburner.com/pthree. Planet Ubuntu has already been updated, with Planet OpenID and Utah Open Source Planet to be notified.
Thanks.
Looks like Circuit City is officially going away for good. Well, poo. I really liked that store, and have been shopping there for a long, long time.
Comparably, I can’t stand Best Buy. Sure it may be cleaner / nicer in some ways, but they also have really annoying pestering sales people who pressure you to buy magazines at checkout. It’s gotten to the point where I pay cash just so I know I won’t get signed up for an MSN subscription or something. The worst problem I ever had with Circuit City was that I couldn’t figure out where the cashiers were hiding.
One thing I really liked about Circuit City was that it was always a nice place to quietly just browse and look around without being bothered. That might contribute to their poor sales (no sales people bothering me, no customers making noise), but I’m still going to miss the ability to go through the aisles at my own pace and just look at stuff without being interrupted. At Best Buy, they always have *loud* music on overhead, and the displays for most stuff is badly lit. I guess I’m just old school.
There’s a *lot* of stuff I’ve bought at Circuit City. In fact, every major piece of entertainment hardware I’ve bought there at one time: game console, TV, HDTV, receiver, speakers, CDs, DVDs, remote, car stereo, etc. I even bought my netbook from there just last month (it’s a Lenovo IdeaPad, I still need to write a post about it).
I’m bummed.
Edit: I keep thinking about this — not Circuit City specifically, but shopping in general — and I figured I’d comment a bit more on things.
Brick and mortar stores have, for me, become nothing more than a convenience factor. I buy just about everything except food, office supplies and clothes online, and it’s been that way for years. One other exception is big-ticket items, like a game console or an HDTV, because that’s something I’d really like to see and inspect in person before I buy something like that. But, for the most part, stores have just become the go-to place for when I don’t want to wait.
I’m sure that Internet sales played some part in how badly business has gone. It’s obviously much simpler for Amazon to update a column in their database to say that a DVD is on sale, versus Circuit City who has to plan the thing ahead weeks ahead of time, prepare circulation and ads and still time it with the website as well. There’s just so fewer steps for online stores, and it’s been my experience (as a shopper) that traditional stores are just pretending to ignore that the Internet exists completely, and not trying to compete at all.
There is one kind of a store that I would like to see, and that’s ones that have hard-to-find items to start with. For instance, there’s nowhere in Utah that I could go to buy a Mini-ITX board today (well, not without a huge markup of 50% or more) or find a video store that has pretty much every title available. Part of that problem, of course, is that I live in Utah. I realize that, as far as populous states go, I’m in the boonies. But I also realize that because of the economics, it’s not gonna happen … a long tail store just isn’t gonna spring up. It makes more business sense to sell just the hits. Of course, a part of me thinks there could be a compromise — just have a simple store frontend with one cashier at your warehouse. I don’t wanna browse, I know what I want, and I could just go in and pick it up that day for the online price. No glitter, no fuss, very little overhead, and I can still get what I want.
Anyway. I’m not an economics major, and I’m not really interested in why some things work out or don’t all that much, but I’m pretty certain that the business model of ignoring the Internet as competition is what is really hurting these traditional chains. I’ve summed up a lot of my thoughts in a previous post of how a video store chain could catch up and compete in this one: video stores are deprecated. That pretty much says it all, I think.
It’s official - I like Facebook. A bunch of my friends are jumping on, and it’s starting to get interesting. Now if they could figure out how to serve interesting ads, I might support them. I’m afraid though, that the bigger it gets, the more in the red it will go until it joins the legions of other dot bombs.
Please prove me wrong. Please figure it out - it has taken a long time to get my links and friends together. I really don’t want to have to do it again. If you are going to die though, please give me some notice so that I can at least grab everyone’s contact info. Thank you. 
-Peter
Note: I had a real hard time phrasing this post properly .. some pictures would probably help clarify.
I’m not one for New Year’s resolutions, since I’m big on making resolutions all the time. But, when I’m gone for a long time (Christmas vacation) and come home, I tend to have a new perspective on things.
When I got home from vacation, I had a fresh approach on how things were setup in my apartment. I could look at it more objectively since I hadn’t been living there day to day for a week. In my living room, I have a card table where I throw all my incoming mail and just general stuff. I hate organizing and filing paperwork, whether its bills, receipts, things to do or archive or whatever. What happens is I just lump them on my desk and tell myself that I’ll get to them later. Later usually meaning anywhere from next week to next year.
I took one look at my desk and thought, “this system isn’t working. I’m going to completely scrap it.” So, I did.
I realized that the stuff I had sitting around falls in one of very few categories:
Aside from stacks of ads and newspapers and junk mail that was lying around, that was it. So, I decided that instead of trying to save it all and eventually get around to it, I’d try a new system where I just have a place to put all of it, or get rid of it. Essentially it comes down to four options: deal with it, file it, shred it (or throw it away) or recycle it.
As far as stuff to deal with, that’s just bills. I looked at the ones I hadn’t paid yet so I checked out if I could do online billing so I wouldn’t have to worry about them anymore. That’s already helping. The rest, I just write checks for and send em off. One thing I always do, as well, is I keep my old bills for everything I get sent (credit cards, insurance payments, phone bills, whatever) and archive them in a file folder. I decided I’m not doing that any more. I always hang on them because of this vague sense that someday I might need them or something’s going to happen where I’ll have to look something up. Screw that. That *never* happens. If something does come up, just get on the phone and call them up. I figure I’ll let the corporations do the record keeping, I’m tired of cluttering up my desk and my life dealing with paperwork of stuff that’s routine and isn’t gonna change anyway. I do keep the important ones, like my credit card bill and my credit union statement, but everything else is easy to access and I’ll never need them again. Into the shredder they go.
The recycling stuff is easy, too. I get some junk mail, not a lot, but most of it’s already targeted for me so a lot of times I’ll hang onto it thinking I’ll look at it later. What happens though is I never get around to it, and instead if I need to find something I just use the Internet anyway. So, I just have a small box that sits next to my front door where I immediately throw any junk in there so it gets recycled. That’s done with, too.
There’s also my little mementos. I already have a small tin jar where I keep memorable stuff and keepsakes, but it was getting full, so I found a shoebox and just started using that. It’s big enough to hold everything, and it works great.
Finally for the stuff that’s “important” but doesn’t really fit in a file folder all its own, I just decided to get a set of folders and label them monthly only. That way, if I ever do need them, I can just look back to the month when I think it came up, and I’ve already got it. And I don’t get nervous knowing I threw something away just because I didn’t wanna find a place to file it.
So far, my new system is working great. The biggest problem I had, I realize, is that I completely overestimated the value of some paperwork. Realizing that I hadn’t ever gone back to look up stuff at all, ever (minus financial stuff) really helped put that in perspective. I really hate the feeling of having too much paperwork in my life. I cleaned off, threw away or filed all the clutter on my desk and I can soon get rid of it completely and just have a few boxes on my floor where I deal with all the incoming mail from the moment I get it. Minus the bills, of course. I’m still working on a system for that one.
Best of all, that’s one idea that’s been coming up lately that has been really helpful. Too many times when I have a system that isn’t working, my initial reaction is, “well, you just need more self-control.” That’s just a recipe for disaster because you’re constantly coming up short. It takes some thinking outside the box and using your imagination to scrap the system and start over, but almost everytime I do it, it just works out much better and far more efficient than I could have supposed. It really takes some perspective to see that the entire thing isn’t working, though, and then have the strength of character to start over. It’s worth it, though.
Well, after a bit of nagging from family and friends, coupled with a bit of curiosity, I’ve gone social. I’m now part of the Web 2.0 bubble that seems to be all the rage. I have Identi.ca, Facebook, FriendFeed, Last.fm and Ping.fm accounts. Trying to restore Twitter as well (I left Twitter when Identi.ca came online). IRC, Jabber and email wasn’t enough to be considered “cool”. Now it’s “microblogging” and gathering all the possible friends in the universe you can find. Ok, so I’m a bit sarcastic there. I will say that there has been some value in these social apps. I’ve been able to connect to old friends that I haven’t seen or heard of in years, and I’ve been able to keep in contact with family and friends that have moved out of state. So, there’s been some value in it for me.
However, with all these social apps, it’s getting difficult to manage them all. Definitely when trying to update statuses to the accounts. So, a single point of entry would be preferred, that could push my status out to each application once. Ping.fm fits the bill. With Ping.fm, I can update my status to Identi.ca, Twitter, Facebook and FriendFeed with a single message. Because Ping.fm, Identi.ca and FriendFeed all have Jabber bots, I can follow the updates of others through that. Because each service offers sending emails when someone is following my status, or other things, I can pull up the site as needed.
My Jabber client is Bitlbee and runs in Irssi, my IRC client. This way all messaging is managed in a single source. This keeps me from having to go to separate sites in my web browser. The only thing that could improve the setup, is having each of the Jabber bots posting their updates in a MUC room rather than each private messaging me. In fact, if I could join a Jabber MUC that was exclusively built for each bot (an Identi.ca room and a FriendFeed room), that treated posts from those I’m following as a message from that person rather than from the bot, that would be cool.
So, there you have it. I am now a statistic in the Web 2.0 world.
The GNOME DVCS (Distributed Version Control System) Survey completed
about a week and a half ago, with responses from 579 different people with
svn accounts. (There are 1083 people with commit access to
GNOME SVN, so this is about a 53% response rate.) The survey was
intended to collect data related to a possible move for the GNOME
project from SVN to a distributed version control system in 2009, thus
questions about svn were included despite the fact that it is not
distributed. The results of the survey are shown below. (I got the data from Behdad; the scripts I used to generate the plots can be found here.)
The plots of the data I present simply cover all the questions –
twice. Once to show the percentages of respondents with each answer
for the specific question, then again to contrast how those who
answered a given question differently had differing rankings for the
various VCSes. So the plots are as neutral as I think is possible.
I also add some commentary of my own, analyzing the data and noting
items that surprised me (I had several predictions about how the
survey would turn out; many of my predictions were right but there
were a number of surprises for me too). I don’t think it’s possible
to make such commentary unbiased. In fact, since I noticed a clear
front-runner in looking at the results, I thought it most useful to
look at that particular system, so the majority of my comments focus
on it. If you do not want my bias, ignore my comments and draw your
own conclusions from the data.
First, let’s remind everyone what the survey questions were:
(Edit: I wish the question, “In which ways do you characterize
your current GNOME SVN contributions?” had also been asked.
It would be really interesting to see the results of such a
select-all-that-apply question.)
Why do we attract so few people that self-identify as primarily being
documenters? Is it because people who get involved in documentation
then also get heavily involved in other areas and thus put themselves
in the “Other” category (most of the documenters I can think of
probably did this)? Are distros more likely to attract this kind of
volunteer? Do we just have a fundamental shortcoming somewhere?
Wow…we have an awful lot of people already familiar with other
VCSes. Over 60% familiar with git, and nearly half the people already
use it regularly? I knew there were a lot of people out there, but I
didn’t know it was that many. bzr and hg also have fairly strong
representation among the community (there’s even 31 people who are
familiar with all three systems, and one person who regularly uses all
three — no I’m not that person). The number of people who regularly
use git still leads the other two systems by quite a bit; I thought
they (or at least bzr) would have caught up more by now but I guess
not.
The lion’s share of the votes for whether we should switch were either
for those that wanted to switch or those that didn’t have a strong
feeling. Although only a small percentage (less than 3%) voted “no”,
that may have been due to the wording; for purposes of counting, the
“why?” column should be lumped with the “no”s. It’s a lighter no, but
still a no. The “other” column is a bit of a wildcard and represents
a somewhat significant cross-section of the community. As can be seen
in the next section, among this group who chose “other” in answer to
the question of whether we should switch, there was a preference for
git over the other systems.
Note that I’ve created an extra plot derived from the other five, ‘Average rank’, which shows the average rank of each VCS (the number in parenthesis for this extra plot is the number of people whose rankings were averaged). If the community were evenly divided, or if no one cared which system we used, then every VCS would have a rank of 3. So the relevant question in the average rank plot is how far from rank 3 each system is.
Note that the different graphs have different y-axis ranges, as was true with previous plots too. Sorry.
This set of plots really surprised me. I have often thought of git as
polarizing and expected it to have the most first place votes and the
most last place votes. It definitely got the most first place votes,
was close on second place votes, and significantly lagged all other
systems in second-to-last and last place votes. I was floored by
this.
One question I was really interested in was which version control
system various demographics preferred. For example, there were a
significant number of people who selected “other” for whether we
should switch to another system. What’s their preference? Do
translators or testers have a different favorite system than coders?
Do maintainers of multiple modules have a different outlook than
non-maintainers? So, in this section I try to look into this
question. Note that in each plot, the number in parentheses are the number of people across whom the average was taken.
It looks like VCS preference doesn’t change much relative to
maintainence and development load. However, I found it interesting
that bzr had its highest support among maintainers/developers of a
single module and that git had its highest support among
maintainers/developers of multiple modules. (Mercurial had more
support among non-maintainers and non-developers, though that may just
be a reflection of the latter demographic having less strongly held
opinions.) That matched my intuition about design choices of bzr and
git, what they were optimized for, and how it has reflected in their
usage. However, although I was correct about the trend, the size of
the trend turned out to be nearly negligible.
Not much variance here either. As expected, it looks like regular committers have stronger opinions (average rankings further from 3) than occasional or non-committers.
I was surprised by these plots. I expected support for git
to be found almost exclusively among coders, but apparently that is
not the case at all. git is ranked highest by all groups other than
documenters. Documenters, though, do rank git dead last.
Some might suggest we discard the last plot given the tiny sample size
(only 4 people self-identify as being ‘primarily’ documenters!).
While there’s some merit to that claim, I find it to be the most
interesting plot (as a bit of a VCS junkie) since it is the only
non-VCS related demographic for which git does not come in first
place.
I also find the translator plot interesting (as a VCS junkie), as it’s
the only other such plot for which git does not have a commanding
preference lead over all other VCSes. Honestly, though, I was quite
surprised that git was even close to svn for translators, let alone
that it had a small lead.
No real surprise here as far as the favorite goes — users who are familiar with or regularly use a certain system tend to prefer that system. However, git enjoys positive support in all cases and at least comes in second? I found that somewhat surprising. I thought it would get a average ranking lower than 3 by those familiar with or using bzr/hg — much as bzr, svn, and hg did among those familiar with or regularly using git.
Those who think we should switch want to go to git. Those who have no
strong preference or selected other, also had a preference for git.
Those who don’t care whether we switch, wonder what’s wrong with
subversion, or think we just shouldn’t switch, all prefer subversion.
Even among the latter group, git came in a positive second for the
“why?” and “I don’t care” groups.
It looks like there’s a strong preference in the community toward
switching, and that git has a strong lead in preference among the
community, followed by svn, then bzr, then mercurial.
Among the non-VCS-related demographics, there was only two in which
git did not have a commanding lead: testers and documenters. Among
testers, git was still the preferred system, but it only marginally
lead svn (and these two strongly lead bzr and hg). Among documenters,
git came dead last by a large margin (while bzr came in a commanding
first). It would be interesting to find out why; perhaps we should
poll the 4 relevant people.
Among the VCS-related demographics, people familiar with or regularly
using a certain system tended to prefer that system. git always came
in a positive second, though. Also, those not wanting to switch
systems or not caring *at all* whether we switched strongly supported
subversion, while everyone else (including those with no strong
feeling about the switch) strongly preferred git. Even among the “why
switch” and “I don’t care” groups that preferred subversion, git came
in a positive second. Among the tiniest switch preference group,
those that don’t want to change systems at all, bzr was second
followed fairly closely by git.
I spent a lot more time discussing git than bzr or hg in my comments
here, but that was mostly a reflection of where it appeared in the
stats. As shown in the survey results, the other systems don’t appear
to be nearly as preferred in the community, so I simply didn’t discuss
them as much. I apologize if that makes my analysis looks biased; as
I said at the beginning, feel free to ignore my analysis and draw your
own conclusions from the stats.
I thought it might be kind of fun to see what kind of predictions I can set for myself for the upcoming year. I’m a creature of habit, so this shouldn’t be too hard for most of them.
I’m pretty predictable, so I think most or all of those will come true. Lots of stuff I wanna get accomplished, that’s for sure. I left out the more personal stuff since I don’t really touch on that here anyway.
I’ve blogged about the Das Keyboard 2 before. I loved it. Unfortunately, however, my daughter stepped on it while in the floor (she was playing with it) and broke the space bar fairly bad. I tried my best to get it repaired, but nothing succeeded. So, for several months, I was without my glorious Das Keyboard, and was stuck with those crappy, squishy, HP multimedia keyboards.
Until now.
Thanks to my generous wife, she went on eBay, and purchased a used Das Keyboard Ultimate. As with version 2, the Ultimate has blank keys, and also brings a couple other features to the table, that make this keyboard tough to beat. Here are features of the Das Keyboard Ultimate:
Aside from the features listed above, the keyboard has some extra weight that version 2 did not have. It seems to have a more solid feel to the keyboard, rather than the light plastic feel of its predecessors. It still has the same clickety-clack that I have grown to love from the IBM Model M and version 2. The noise drives my wife nuts at times, however. It’s also slightly smaller than version 2, making it a bit more attractive.
I haven’t put the time into this keyboard that I have put into the other one, but so far, I love it. My fingers just enjoy the tactile feedback that the keys bring. I love the sound of the keys as I’m typing away, including typing this post. Version 2 had an expected lifespan of 50 million key strokes. If that’s the case with this keyboard, I suspect I won’t be needing a new one any time soon.
This keyboard just brings back the joy in typing. I would highly recommend it to anyone seriously looking for a good keyboard. Combine that with the Dvorak layout, and you will find yourself in typing heaven.
MAN I LOVE THIS KEYBOARD!
Every geek has his/her game. For me, initially, it was chess. I learned chess well enough to hold my own in elementary school, then joined the chess clubs in junior and high school. During these times, I was studying professional players, watching chess matches, learning opening, middle and end games. I was soaking in anything and everything chess. I subscribed to chess magazines, established quite the library on chess books, and when I was introduced to the Internet, I played on Yahoo! games. I had chess software installed on my comptuer and even attended a local chess club that met at the local library. Once, at work, I decorated my cubical with a chess theme, and had a daily chess puzzle, that many of my coworkers enjoyed solving. I ate, slept, walked and talked chess for years.
Then, I came to a sad conclusion. Chess mastery is nothing more than memorizing offensive and defensive opening moves, playing a solid middle game, and holding your own in the end. But, it’s the opening that will make or break your game. Seeing as though there are arguably only 10 or so solid opening sequences, chess becomes pretty boring. It’s always the same attacks. It’s always the same defenses. Nothing new. The only thing with professional chess, is seeing if you can remember your move sequences for a longer time than your opponent. This is what Garry Kasparov excels at. He has a vast library of knowledge regarding opening sequences, and can keep pulling out of the library the whole game.
The once brilliant, then hopelessly pathetic, Bobby Fischer, modified a chess variant that solves this very problem. It’s known as “Chess 960“. The idea with chess 960 is to randomize placement of the pieces on the back row, thus opening up the nearly unlimited potential of opening sequences in a chess game. Chess 960 still keeps to some fundamental rules about piece placement, but for the most part, the back row is completely randomized by a computer. Now, chess prowess is determined by studying the board, and calculating strengths, weaknesses and risks. No more analyzing memorized opening moves.
An interesting quality of myself, is that once I lose interest in something, it takes a herculean effort to bring the interest back. I lost interest in studying chess, and even though chess 960 brings back the excitement of the game, it’s a lost cause for me. Now, don’t get me wrong. I won’t turn down a game from anyone, and I can still hold my own, but I’m not dedicating time to it any longer. Instead, I discovered Go.
I liked the challenges that chess presented. It made you think. It made you analyze. So, when I discovered Go (I’ll capitalize it from here on out), I was immediately intrigued. What really impressed me with Go, was not the strategy involved with playing the game, but the fact that there are no opening moves to memorize. Every game is different, with billions and trillions of possibilities. Supposedly, the game of Go is so astoundingly large, that it’s theorized that no algorithm can be built, which will beat an intermediate player, let alone an advanced one. Count me in.
As such, I picked up a Go set from my local game store, and started studying. Unfortunately, my life seems to put more of my spare time in other interests instead of Go. So, I don’t get to spend the time studying the game, like I did with chess. The result is if you were to play a game of Go with me, and you have any experience whatsoever, you’ll find that I am a total newbie to the game, and you would feel like you were playing a second grader. I want to study it. I want to deeply learn it’s strategies and such, but I just don’t have the time to dedicate to it.
Then, the other night, my sister introduced me to a new game- Killer Bunnies. If you are familiar with this game, it’s very unlike chess or Go. Rather than strategy, Killer Bunnies is complete luck. You’re playing the lottery when playing a game. Learning the game play is somewhat of a challenge, but once you get over the initial learning curve, the game is a blast. It has strategies, from which you can increase your chances of winning, but other than that, it’s a non-thinking all-for-fun whimsical game.
Why would I be interested in such a game, if I was a Chess student, and future Go world champion (I can dream, can’t I)? The reason I like the game, is the fact that I don’t have to study deep for it. This could be said for many other games that are in mine or your game closet. While this is true, the thing that intrigues me the most, are the booster packs. Like other card games, booster packs enhance the game play, and introduce new challenges to the game. With Killer Bunnies, there are 10 booster packs, and 1 starter deck. Supposedly, as booster packs are added, the complexity of the game increases, as well as the game duration. If all booster packs are added, you’re talking well over 700 cards that are in play!
While Go may be the first choice as my geek game, Killer Bunnies is a new found interest. Anyone up for a game?
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A friend brought this dish with her to a party a week ago and I liked it so much that I asked for the recipe. I changed it just slightly and made it with non-sugar sweeteners. This makes an amazingly good Thanksgiving or Christmas appetizer or party tray.
Cranberry Salsa with Cream Cheese
Remove soft and rotten cranberries from batch and wash. Chop cranberries, onion, cilantro and jalapeño to medium fine in food processor. Mix in sweetener, cumin salt and citrus juice. Cover and let macerate in fridge for 2 - 4 hours to let flavor build and the cranberries to soften. It will sweeten as it stands in the fridge so add less sweetener at the first and check before serving adding up to 3/4 c. sugar (total) equivalent.
Serve at room temperature poured over the top of the blocks of cream cheese with whole grain crackers.
Happy Holidays!!!!!!!!
When I began writing technical documentation and courseware for Guru Labs, I asked a question during training about whether we should be putting two spaces after a period, colon, question mark and exclamation point, or one. The answer shocked me, as I was hoping for the standard answer as a means of teaching the rest of my colleagues. The answer was ONE space, not two. Then, I listened to the argument.
When the first commercially successful typewriter was invented by Christopher Latham Scholes in 1867 and sold to Remmington, each letter on the typebars were the same width. This is known today as a monospace font. Initially, rumor has it, that typists only put one space after the end of a sentence, question, or exclamation. However, in the early 1920s, we began to see additional spaces added, sometimes more than one, at the end of these punctuations. The “unwritten rule” was that two spaces were all that was needed, no more, and thus became the standard practice for published works.
This practice continued well into the age of computers, and was even taught in typing class (I was taught it too). However, computers have an advantage over typewriters- variable width font. In other words, the width of the letter “m” is different than the width for the letter “i”. Due to these proportional fonts, we no longer need that extra space. In fact, we could easily say that the standard practice of putting extra spaces in our text is down right dead. Here are some reasons why you do not want an extra space:
As an interesting side note, if you are an HTML developer, you must explicitly use the escape sequence for two spaces “ ”, as HTML will ignore the extra space, and only place one in the rendered text.
Spend some time online Googling whether to use one space or two following sentences, and you will quickly see that the trend has reversed back to using a single space, not two. In the meeting with my coworkers, I was quickly humbled, and have since been using one space at the end of my fullstops instead of two. It was an easy habit to get into, and you should be doing the same.
I lost my favorite hat about a month ago. I have no idea where it disappeared to. It was a good hat. I wore it skating. It was a black Etnies hat. I got an Etnies one since that was my first pair of skating shoes about 12 years ago, and it looked cool.
Meh. I miss my hat.
And I can’t find another one just like it. Poopy.
I ran across these guys and I was surprised to see that surfer music is still alive. You can check them out at www.acousticsurfmusic.com
I have a friend who posted on her first day of her new workout, which got me thinking about Boot Camp, and other diet fads, and here’s one I think I could do. Let me know if you want to sign up:
Los Angeles Diet
Give me your schedule and some money. Periodically I’ll have a weirdo stalk you as you walk to your car. I’ll be sure to rotate weirdos so that you don’t know whether it a hired weirdo or a real weirdo. For a little more, he can step up to your window at a light, and knock. If you get the window knock, I think I can throw in some weird phone calls for free. Fire and earthquakes are not included in the base package.
All of this would get your heart rate going, probably increase your metabolism, all while decreasing your appetite.
The other thing about this cool diet is that it works better for women than men. Ready to sign up?
-Peter
Finally the long awaited ePUB format books are starting to show up on Penguin Publisher’s site! Here’s a search for the word ‘epub’ that turns up 682 results as of October 15th, 2008. Not all of them are available for download yet but a number of them are accessible right now.
All I can say is AWESOME!
The ePUB format is an open ebook standard open to all publishers. Several software e-reader software packages already exist that read ePUB books including Stanza (http://www.lexcycle.com) for Mac, Windows and iPhone/iPod touch and Adobe’s Digital Editions (http://www.adobe.com/products/digitaleditions). The one hardware reader that I’m aware of right now is the Sony Reader PRS-505 and PRS-700 or newer models.
I have the PRS-505 and have been waiting for a publisher to release titles in the open format for a couple months now. I’m very pleased that there are so many titles available now. Several other sites have free, out-of-copyright texts such as http://www.feedbooks.com, http://www.web-books.com and http://www.munseys.com. Sony’s own site sells thousands of books in their own proprietary format however, I’m glad there’s now source of high quality modern published works in an open format! Did I already say ‘awesome‘?
If you ran a business and the walls figuratively came crashing down around you like they have in the United States economy the last few months, what would you do?
You could just call it quits and walk away.
You could make calls into every person you know and beg them for help and support.
There are many directions you could go, but there is one thing I can't imagine anyone would do: try to go on living like nothing has happened.
The problems in our financial markets and talk within the ranks of legislative and executive leadership of propping up failed institutions have brought to light another very glaring miscalculation: The U.S. government is already in a terrible amount of debt. These are all signs of the seriousness of the situation we are in. These signs suggest a calculated, careful, well thought-out response.
More importantly, these signs demand that we, as a people, forget political loyalties, forget the frivolity of our lifestyles, forget luxury and conveniences, and forget about the thoughts of others.
We must concentrate on one thing: Getting through this together in one piece. That means making serious sacrifices and planning for the future.
Why, during all that is going on, do I see that the U.S. Mint has announced a forthcoming set of commemorative pennies to celebrate Abraham Lincoln's 200th birthday?
It's not much in the grand scheme of things, but this is a perfect example of how government is just going on doing what it has always done when it should be doing much, much less.
The U.S. Mint operations should probably scale back to one standard set of coin and paper currency. The U.S. Postal Service could probably minimize postal options. The U.S. Department of Transportation could make a quick decision of which construction projects currently underway can be suspended immediately, which projects can be brought to a point at which they can be suspended, and how costs can be minimized on other projects.
Everything our government does needs to be assessed and evaluated for fat that can be trimmed so that only essential services are provided. programs will need to be scrapped, shut down, or scaled back. To help those in need who have traditionally relied on government services or assistance, groups outside the government will need to step forward and help.
The failed businesses have failed. Propping them up will cost more money. Figuring out why they failed will cost more money. Reorganizing them, placing them in a conservatorship will all cost more money. Money... money we don't have and can't afford to keep borrowing.
Can we set an example, as a country, for what should be done?
I hope so.
So, a couple months back, I tried to setup a git repository on repo.or.cz. No dice; it didn’t seem to like my ssh key and I was never able to push. Never got a response to my email either.
I figured I’d try again with gitorious.org. So I go over there and create an account, upload my public ssh key, create a project, try to push…and am prompted for a password (yes I remembered to run ssh-add first). While I’m no ssh expert, I have used ssh keys before to connect between systems without having to enter a password for each connection, so I’m a bit perplexed at what’s wrong.
Since gitorious.org allows me to remove or add additional keys myself (unlike repo.or.cz), I tried playing around with adding others (and selectively adding or removing keys from my ssh keyagent with ssh-add). Here’s what I’m doing:
$ ssh-keygen -t dsa -f gitorious -C "newren@gitorious.org"
$ cp gitorious* ~/.ssh
$ ssh-add ~/.ssh/gitorious
<Enter appropriate password>
<Copy & paste contents of ~/.ssh/gitorious.pub into the add ssh key thing at the gitorious.org site>
<Periodically reload http://gitorious.org/account until my new public ssh key is shown>
$ git push newren@gitorious.org:eg/mainline.git
newren@gitorious.org's password:
<Hit Ctrl-C>
$ ssh -v newren@gitorious.org echo hi
<I snipped a lot of output here>
debug1: SSH2_MSG_SERVICE_ACCEPT received
debug1: Authentications that can continue: publickey,password
debug1: Next authentication method: publickey
debug1: Offering public key: /home/newren/.ssh/gitorious
debug1: Authentications that can continue: publickey,password
debug1: Trying private key: /home/newren/.ssh/id_rsa
debug1: Trying private key: /home/newren/.ssh/id_dsa
debug1: Next authentication method: password
newren@gitorious.org's password:
<Hit Ctrl-C>
I know lots of other people are using these sites without problems. Which step or steps am I doing wrong?
UPDATE: Many thanks for the different suggestions. Adam G spotted the problem; my push command should have been
$ git push git@gitorious.org:eg/mainline.git
instead of
$ git push newren@gitorious.org:eg/mainline.git
I suspect my problem with repo.or.cz was the same thing.
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Getting ready to head home for the evening, last night (Sept. 18, 2008), I packed up my stuff, changed into my biking gear and headed out to where my bike had been securely locked while I was at work. I was a bit disappointed to find that my rear tire on my recumbent bike was flat. I had plenty of patches though, being an occasional commuter, I like to think I am prepared for such events. I removed the wheel and got the inner tube removed, patched and replaced in about 1o minutes. After pumping and pumping for much longer that it should have taken I noticed that it wasn’t holding more than 30psi and quickly dropped to nothing once I stopped. An hour later and 5 holes patched on the ancient rubber band I was kind enough to call an inner tube and I decided that there was no fixing the old oxidized piece of rubber.
The tube is about two or three years old and it turns out that my removing it from the tire stretched and cracked it, probably creating more holes that I had patches. Even if I did fix the ones I’d found, there’s no guarantee that I wouldn’t create more when re-installing the tube or that I wouldn’t get part way home before feeling that I was pushing my bike through sand on a beach as a new hole decided to show up and the tire deflates. I thought about any friends that might have a truck that could pick me up and called Debbi to whine about my situation (who doesn’t have a truck, but I just wanted to talk with her anyway). I knew however, that I’d just have to come back in the morning. My car is in the shop this week getting painted. Its supposed to be finished today. I found a body shop close to work so that I could commute on my bike and easily pick up my jeep when it was finished. Thinking that I’d have to at least get myself back to the area in the morning before any bike shops were open, I thought finding a way home seemed pretty useless.
Seeing that the sun was about half an hour from setting and no bike stores open at the time, I packed up and spent the night at the office on the most uncomfortable bed in the world. The building I work in has “health rooms” which are like small hotel rooms with a table, chair and a small bed for the employees when they are sick or work late and need a place to crash. Unfortunately, the cheap cot I slept on last night reminded me of the bed in Jerry Seinfeld’s parent’s condo in Florida. Everyone who slept on it ended up not being able to walk the next day with back problems (The Pen, The Cadillac) . The bed I slept in was sunken in the middle like a giant potato chip. I felt like I was being being bent into the shape of a banana all night long. The springs were uneven and hard so lying on my side was actually quite painful. The pillow (or what they seem to want to call a pillow) was almost completely flat and provided no support whatsoever for my head. I woke up with my neck feeling much worse than it did the night before. It was feeling fine last night. It’s not this morning.
I tossed and turned all night waking up several times and finally gave up trying to get any kind of good sleep at 6am. I walked back down the hall to my office and started working.
I am walking-distance from a theater in a mall so I decided to to see a movie last night (seeing as I didn’t have much else to do that was not work related). I saw Dark Night which started at 8pm. It was the only thing showing at a decent time - everything else either had already started or didn’t start till nearly 9:30 or 10pm. It was the second time I saw it and it was as good this time as the first. The nice thing about watching it last night was that there were only about 10 other people in the theater. I walked back from the theater to my office in the dark.
This morning about 9:00am the body shop called. My Jeep wont be done till next Wednesday.
Last Saturday, my friend Jason and I made another trek to the Salt Flats in northwest Utah. It’s actually right on the border to Nevada, about 2 minutes away. The Salt Flats is an incredible place — there is just this huge plain of tightly packed salt that stretches for miles in every direction, and you get to go out there and drive as fast as you freaking want. It’s great.
It’s also where a lot of world-record speeds are set, though I didn’t do any myself. I only got up to 120 mph this year, getting slightly nervous after that and backing off. I think Jason got around to 143 mph or so. Interestingly, it’s actually a lot easier to go fast and you don’t notice it nearly as much if you’re racing someone rather than just going fast by yourself.
We had a great time, though. Last year when I went the salt was kicking up everywhere and I literally caked my car in the stuff. It was at least half an inch thick on the back of my car, it was so crazy, and it took a very long time to clean off. This year, it was totally different. They had a long 8.2 mile strip of raceway completely flattened. It was just like driving on asphalt, it was so sturdy.
We met up with a professional photographer who wanted to build his portfolio, so took a lot of video of Jason driving his Mustang. The videos turned out really well, you can check them out here.
I had a lot more fun this year as well. Last time we went, I had just bought my car, and I was still learning how to use a stick shift, and I burned out my engine quite a bit screwing things up. This time I only choked about twice. Once, we found along the raceway this one part in the middle that was a little more salty than normal, and when we would peel out the salt would just spit up and go everywhere. So we decided to do a drag race starting from there, and as I took off, I redlined in first in no time flat, kicked it in second and kept spinning. I was in third gear by the time I had actually gone about 20 feet, because we could barely move. It was hilarious.
After we finished driving around for a few hours, we decided to go exploring a bit before leaving. I wanted to drive off in the distance and try and reach some mountains. We headed off, but the plains got really bumpy and it made us both a little nervous, since we didn’t wanna get stuck out there. As we were driving along though, in the middle of nowhere, we found a port-a-potty out there. It was at least 12 miles away from any roads, and I couldn’t even see it until we got quite a ways from the track. That was another highlight of our visit. Random toilets in the wilderness.
Jason put together a video of our visit in a blog post. Just as a warning, the first four minutes is of him singing, so you may want to skip ahead.
Good times all around, can’t wait to go back next year.
Following the Planet Ubuntu MEME, I’ve already blogged about the computers on my network, and why I name them the way I do. See my first post, second post and third post on the subject. Since the last post, there have been some updates to the computers on my network.
First, Hercules gave up the ghost. My old, faithful HP Pavilion laptop is no more. I can’t yet take the DNS entry out, nor can I give up his IP address from my DHCP server, so as it sits, he’ll be forever carved into my network structure.
Second, Windows found an appropriate place in our home, which would actually be NOT in our home. Since removing Windows from the desktop, there was no need for dual booting, so Janus became Poseidon. Why Poseidon? Poseidon is the god of the seas, oceans and water in general, as well as the god of horses and earthquakes. However, Poseidon is also the brother of Zeus and Hades. Due to my sadistic play, with me acting as Zeus and my network Hades, and the fact that that box is the oldest box on the network, it seemed appropriate to name him such.
Thirdly, there’s also been a new box added to the network, a brand-spanking new iMac. I decided that all Mac computers will get Greek goddess names. Because my wife will mainly be using the computer, and Hera is the wife of Zeus, Hera seemed an appropriate fit for the iMac.
Lastly, I found that my Vonage gateway was stealing the IP address reserved for Hera. So, I needed a name for the Vonage gateway as well, which I hadn’t thought was necessary. Tartarus was chosen. I have no reason, other than it was the first name that came to me when trying to pick one. It will likely be changed to something more fitting.
Also, my cell phone, a Palm Centro, felt left out, so it acquired the name Hermes, the god of boundaries and travelers who cross them (very fitting for myself).
So, for the computers on my network, the updated view is as follows:
Me: Zeus
Domain: Cocytus
Firewall/Router: Hades
Active computers: Achilles, Athena, Helios, Hera, Kratos, Poseidon
Retired computers: Hercules
Phone gateway: Tartarus
Cell phone: Hermes
Dear Lazyweb-
I have a Lenovo ThinkPad T61 with an internal 100GB SATA drive and a modular 200GB SATA drive in the modular bay. Thus, I have 300GB of SATA glory at my disposal. I have been debating putting these together under a RAID array, possibly level 0 (I’m not that concerned about redundancy. This is a laptop after all.), then using encrypted LVM to manage the storage. I’m wiping the laptop clean soon preparing for a new install, and I can’t continue until I make a decision. The only thing that is stopping me from making such a decision, is that I still have the DVD-RW drive. Do I need the drive? I could rely on others to burn discs for me, which wouldn’t be all that often. Or will I miss it? I do travel for a living, teaching Linux, and may find myself in a hotel room needing to burn a CD for class. So, if you could help me with this situation, I would be much obliged. Should I add my modular bay drive to a RAID array coupled with LVM, or should I just use one hard drive, and keep the bay modular?
Thanks in advance!
I got this unexpected windfall this week (a check from an old job that I forgot about), and honestly, one of the first things I thought about when I got it was, “Oh, good, I can pay my rent early.”
Something has obviously gone horribly wrong.
I think I need to go buy a framed poster of Small Soldiers or something to make up for it.
So, one of my friends and co-workers Eric, just came to my office and asked if I had a couple AA batteries that he could borrow. I searched and looked and finally found two in a Maglite flashlight I had in my backpack. I held the flashlight up and said “here’s a couple” and he said “Uh, you don’t have 4? OK, I’ll keep looking”.
I could have sworn that “a couple” meant two. I think he’s just focused elsewhere - his last day here is tomorrow.
Just an FYI- I’m testing out a new IRC nickname- eightyeight. I play the piano, of which I’ve done since a kid, and a number of friends through high school called me “eightyeight keys” or “eightyeight” for short. It stuck, and as such, I ended up getting a tattoo on my right shoulder with “88 KEYS” of my own design. Well, after trying out a few nicknames online, it hit me that “eightyeight” would be appropriate. I got the nick registered on Freenode as well as a few other servers I frequent. We’ll see how it turns out. Just in case if you’re wondering who “eightyeight” is.
From the grass is always greener dept….
“Hey, we own the auction space. How about if we stop doing that and try to compete with someone else.”
WAKE UP! Ebay = auctions. Amazon = other stuff. If I want to just buy stuff, I’ll go to Amazon. If it’s the same price as ebay, I’ll buy it at Amazon. I’ll always look to ebay first though - because that’s where the bargains are.
If you want to turn around ebay, bring back the bargains. Make it cheap for sellers to sell anything. I list stuff on Craigslist because ebay is too expensive. Make it so cheap that I can buy a block of auction fees for $20 and then sell anything I want. Start with free and go up from there. i.e I have boxes. I can ship them or you can pick them up. Shipping is $x.xx per box. Let people bid on the boxes that I was going to give away for free. If it goes for free, no charge. If I get money, I share it - Once. I should be able to get this for just the paypal fee or the ebay fee. Requiring me to use both is painful and inefficient. Efficient markets succeed. Inefficient markets fail. The problem at ebay is not that Amazon is too good.
Stupid - stupid - STUPID!
Story that started the rant:
-Peter
We just finished upgrading our home server. The migration, while it took time, was rather easy. I combined our separate blogs all under a Wordpress MU install to simplfy maintenance. One thing that I am happy about with the upgrade, besides improved performance, is that the iPhone wordpress app now works. I had errors connecting before. One thing that helped in configuring the app is improved error handling in the latest version. The initial release would always just die when trying to connect with no errors. I tried sniffing the connection, but unsuccesfully.
As I contiunue to use the app, I’ll update you on to what I like and don’t like. For now I’m happy!
How often do you make a difference in other people's lives? I often feel I don't make much of a difference in anyone's lives, mostly because I often seem to be on auto-pilot, tending to my own affairs and minding my own business. Some people, on the other hand, make it their life's work to help others in need.
I'm not suggesting that we should all beat ourselves up for not being more charitable or supportive, but I would like to share something I did that I know will help someone out who is a tough spot. The good news is that you can do the same exact thing!
I don't think many people have heard the story of Monica Ramos and Patty Compean. Their husbands are serving time in prison, currently in solitary confinement. I believe they were unfairly convicted and sentenced for crimes they did not commit.
I first heard about this story on the radio and Glenn Beck has talked a lot about it. However, don't be misled into believing this is a conservative or Republican issue. No, this is an American issue and a case where the government has conspired against its own people.
You can read the story that landed Ignacio Ramos and Jose Compean in jail on Wikipedia or a number of other sites. The short version of the story is this: Ramos and Compean were border guards working the US-Mexico border in Texas. In 2005, they were in pursuit of a drug smuggler who fled after they stopped his van (which was full of drugs). There was a shot fired, and the smuggler ran away. While it appeared no one got hurt, the smuggler was apparently struck in the buttock with the bullet. Later, the US government granted the smuggler immunity for his testimony against Compean and Ramos on charges they covered up the shooting and acted out of order. The immunity included a border crossing pass and while the trial was underway, the smuggler was apprehended again with a another load of drugs, but let go because he had immunity. In addition, it appears the US government paid for medical treatment for his gunshot wound.
After Ramos and Compean were sentenced to prison, their attorneys, of course, filed appeals. Meanwhile, members of congress, talk radio personalities, and concerned individuals in Texas and around the country, started digging up as much information as they could about the case. It was revealed the US district attorney that prosecuted the case lied repeatedly about the evidence and the circumstances surrounding the case. During the trial, he requested and was granted that information about the drug smuggler would be sealed so that the jury would not discover he had been caught smuggling a second load of drugs since the original incident.
The appeal was finally read by a panel of the 5th circuit court of appeals about five months ago. Those in attendance of the hearings said the judges were very concerned that the case was mishandled and chastised the prosecuting attorneys for prosecuting on ridiculous charges, and generally bungling the case so badly. However, five months later, just a week or two ago, the court upheld the sentences and only dropped minor charges against the men.
Many believe these men are political prisoners and that the fault goes clear to the White House. The US attorney general has longtime ties with Alberto Gonzales and President George W. Bush. Congress and others have asked President Bush to commute or pardon these men who were just trying to do their jobs as border guards, but he has done nothing and has said nothing.
Others believe the Mexican government is involved as well. Why? I don't know.
It is terrible that these men are in prison, but many don't realize the suffering their families have been going through. Both men are married and have children. These families no longer have a primary breadwinner and must deal with the stress and emotional trauma of having a loved unjustly imprisoned.
It probably goes without saying, Monica Ramos and Patty Compean are hurting-- financially, mentally, emotionally, and otherwise.
A local talk radio host in Houston set up a fundraiser to help these families and word got to Glenn Beck. He had both women on his radio show last week and asked one how much her rent was that she was struggling to pay. She told him it was $11,000 or so for the year. Glenn told her he would be writing her a personal check for $11,000 and would write one in the same amount for the other family.
I've followed this story for months and was heartbroken to hear that the families were struggling. One of the women said her son had been persecuted at school and that is one of the reasons they had moved. I was ready to donate some money myself even before Glenn announced his donation.
So, today, I wrote two checks. One to Patty Compean and one to Monica Ramos. I don't have the kind of money Glenn Beck does, but I sent fifty dollars and I'm sure it will help with something. Hopefully, I can make this a regular thing, sending a little money every month. I hope many others are doing the same thing. These families will suffer regardless of how much money people send because they can't be with the husbands/fathers they love, but the money will help make it just a little easier.
If you are touched as I have been, you can send a donation as well. Edd Henndee, one of the talk radio hosts in Houston, is collecting the donations and delivering them to the families. He asks that people make out two separate checks, one to Monica Ramos, one to Patty Compean, and mail them to:
Edd Henndee
Taste of Texas
10505 Katy Freeway
Houston, Texas 77024
I never thought I would say it, but I miss Teriyaki Stix. Even if they only have food half the time (funny post), I miss them. I’ll just have to settle for In-N-Out I guess.
-Peter
Well I’ve been here almost two months, but the state welcomed me with an earthquake this morning. It wasn’t too bad, and even kind of fun. Details here:
-Peter
This last weekend, I came down with some kind of weird sickness. I woke up Saturday morning, showered, got dressed, and was about to eat a bowl of cereal when I suddenly felt very fatigued. I ate my cereal and then layed down and fell asleep. A couple hours later, I woke up and had a salad Christine made for me. The salad wasn’t very appetizing (it should have been) and I was again very tired, so I went back to sleep. I slept most of the rest of the day, only getting up for short amounts of time and then resuming my slumber.
Sunday morning, I woke up, showered, and went back to bed. I slept until about 2 in the afternoon. When I got up then, I finally felt I had some energy and I’ve been up ever since (blogging like mad, by the looks of it.)
My two daughters have had these one-day stomach “flu” things this last week, but my sickness didn’t seem to be gastrointenstinal. It just seemed to be more... just tired. I had a headache that seemed to be worse when I moved around, but no fever and no distinct pain anywhere else in my body. Very odd.
Hopefully it’s past and I can resume normal life.
One principle in Wing Chun is the maintaining of forward tension. To explain, I’ll draw the distinction between Tension and Energy and show how this principle in Wing Chun can be applied to Change Management.
Tension is a type of Energy
A Wing Chun maxim goes as follows:
soft and relaxed strength will put your opponent in jeopardy
That maxim means that forward tension is not necessarily using force, or forcing through a barrier or “pushing through”. But, there is soft force, or tension, such that when a gap presents itself, then the hand or arm shoots forward like a spring. The “shooting forward” is not done with force, but is an unleashing of potential energy.
Using that definition, then, Forward Tension is much different than the overly-used business term “Breakthrough.” In the context of Forward Tension, the notion of “breakthrough” is ridiculous, because it connotes a forcing of oneself or of one’s ideas. Forcing anything only invites resistance and rebellion, not conversion.
So, in sum, tension is really potential energy and when a gap presents itself, that potential energy becomes kinetic energy. Forward Tension works with the current context in such a way that does not invite rebellion or resistance or eventual back-biting. It is open, but straightforward.
Application to Change Management
Don’t force things on people. The most humane approach to change management is to treat those involved in the change as human beings; this means having a dialogue — listen, speak, listen some more, argue a little, and steadily deposit goodwill.
As much as I like love data, I also fully understand that data does not soften hearts or change people’s minds: true change happens when people feel heard, have given their opinion, are willing to try something new, and are part of the change. The challenge in change management is largely an emotional one; a psychological one; a relational one.
Hold The Tension
Without forcing or pushing of people, maintaining the tension encourages discussion, debate, and invites people to inquire and become curious about the topic of change. That is the key: behave in such a way that it invites people to learn, argue, debate, and eventually try it out.
Tension in Wing Chun
The video below shows Sifu Grados in Chi Sao (Sticky Hands). This sensitivity exercise demonstrates the principle of holding the tension and visually explains the principle of transformation of potential energy to kinetic energy very well.
NOTE: none of the movements are rehearsed. What is taught and practiced are the principles and how those principles are applied during Chi Sao depends on the situation.
Articles on Leadership:
Articles on Queueing Theory:
Articles on Operations, lean and six sigma:
I’m still dealing with, what I call, novelty overload — so much new stuff to setup and play with that my head is spinning wildly with the possibilities and I’m trying to absorb it all at once. It’s like trying to drink from a fire hose.
I’ve got my Internet back again and now a phone line to, and Ive been trying to get Grand Central all hooked up and working right. I still haven’t been able to verify that it’s actually ringing both phones at once — there might be some latency on the Comcast line or something. My cell phone will always ring though. Maybe I just set something up wrong, who knows.
Also, first impressions of the Comcast digital voice setup — it sucks. I was gonna write a whole post about it, but I’ll probably not be that coherent enough anytime soon. One thing I don’t like about it is that you can’t turn the voice mail option off at all. That may be an odd request, but my opinion is that if you are going to add any feature, the first option should be to have it available. In my case, I don’t care about any voice mails that go to my home phone, because I’m not giving out that number so anyone who calls there directly has either got the wrong number or is trying to sell something.
Their online interface is just really buggy. To delete or view details about a voicemail, you have to listen to it first. Even then, it will only delete the very last one in the list (there’s a bug), so if you want to delete all of them you have to do it from the bottom up. Secondly, I went into the preferences menu (I forgot which one now, and this is totally anecdotal so feel free to ignore because of lack of details), changed two options which had nothing to do with each other, and got an error response. Whoops. One other thing that was weird was that in my account details it has my *old* address listed on the account. Fail. Finally, and this is the thing that I find kind of freaky, is it shows *all* incoming and outgoing calls made up to a month back. Normally that would be cool — if I was the one making the calls. It should have displayed the logs based on my activation date. Plus I already got a voicemail of someone calling the old guy’s number and mentioning him by name, so if I really wanted to be evil I could go on a little identity theft digging spree based on the past call activity. Not that I would, but being as paranoid when it comes to security as I am, the thought just naturally comes to me.
Despite all that, I’ll probably stick with it anyway — I still want to find a decent phone, and while this request may seem odd, I’d like to get one that at least has as the same basic features as my cell phone (minus playing games, of course). I think stuff like hanging up on an incoming call but still letting it ring through, or changing call volume or simple stuff like that should be standard. I dunno how much home phones have changed over the years, it’s been a long time since I bought one, and I just grabbed the first one that looked decent at Shop-Ko so I could have something.
As far as everything else in my life, it’s all been busy. I’m going to be looking for a new job here in the next month, my family has been visiting recently (which is a rare occurrence which just happened to fall on the exact time I’m moving), and I’ve still got to move in and get all that crap done.
I *started* looking at Gentoo stuff finally this morning for the first time since who remembers when. Between it being summer, skating, and getting a new PS3, it seriously cut into my time and desire to work on Gentoo stuff a lot, so I’ve been taking a bit of a long break. What worries me though is that this is the first time that I’m getting the feeling that there’s too much to do and users are nagging on bugzilla to get their stuff done (contribute patches, people! “me too!” comments on bugs totally suck), so I think I really need to scale back what I’ve taken on over the years and see where I really can and want to make a difference. I’ve already stopped supporting or maintaining a lot of stuff in the tree that I used to take care of (little stuff, mostly) because of time constraints and lack of energy. I dunno where I’m gonna refocus my efforts yet. I dunno. Too much going on right now to think about it anyway.
Well, that’s all the brain dump I can leak out right now. I sure could use a week off of work right now just to get my life in order, but I’ll have to settle with doing what I can when I can. It’s all good, I guess. I’m just not accustomed to having so many things going on all at once.
My brother got me a Grand Central phone number tonight (thanks, man). No, you can’t have my phone number. I hate getting phone calls (which I’m sure will inspire at least one of you to track me down and call me up).
Since I don’t get cell phone coverage on my block, this is going to come in really handy. I can have it ring both my home phone and cell phone all at once. I’m most excited about freely giving out the # to businesses though so when they sell me out, I can mark their incoming calls as spam. I don’t know why I get a kick out of that.
Anyway, hopefully I’ll get my Internets back tomorrow and another piece of the puzzle will be put back together. My new place is really nice, I’m liking it. I think the best way to describe it is it’s simple. The layout is simple and nice, the rooms are nice and big and just well designed. Plus, the walls are really thick so I can watch movies loudly without annoying anyone. Tonight I popped in ‘Flight of the Navigator’. What a great flick. The soundtrack is pretty awesome, too. I wonder if I could find a t-shirt or something. Okay, I did find some black and white t-shirt but it’s not that great looking. My TRON t-shirt really rocks. I’ll post a pic sometime.
I should have attended this service. I definitely want to make a point to attend it next year, regardless of who is speaking, because of the way it made me feel to watch it.
KBYU has streaming video of the service. If you want to skip straight to Glenn Beck's speech, you can seek to 50-55% into the stream where Stephen Covey (yes, that Stephen Covey) introduces Glenn.
Glenn shares some personal stories, stories from the history of our country, and some counsel for those "looking for a leader" in today's troublesome times.
Well, I’m all moved in to my new place now, which is actually pretty nice. I’ve gotten the bug now to do some home improvement this time around, because I really wanna get this place cleaned up and tweaked. I want to do some electrical and plumbing work where I can, just gotta figure out how to do that without killing myself.
In the meantime, I’m just trying to get unpacked, and get a sense of normalcy and stability back in my life. I don’t have an Internet connection yet, and Comcast is coming out this week. I don’t have cell phone coverage in my house (or the whole street, even), so I’ve got to get a landline installed as well. I’m gonna have them install that as well. Strangely enough, all my neighbors use Qwest / DirecTV, so I’m hoping the cable guy doesn’t come out here and surprise me with the fact that they can’t install anything at my place — partially because then I’ll have to wait two weeks to get anything else in there and be cut off from the world even longer, and also because I can’t stand Qwest.
On the plus side, Civilization for the PS3 is supposed to come out tomorrow, and I can’t wait for that. I did get Overlord this weekend, and that’s been fun (though harder than I imagined).
Anyway, I can’t wait for life to get back to a normal routine. At least I’m sleeping, though. Half my life might be in boxes right now, but at least I get plenty of sleep at night.
My birthday was last week, and I’m at the point where the things that I really want require years of saving, weekends of making, or soul selling. The other stuff, I usually just pick up when I need it. It was great this year to have a few things that I didn’t have, that fall in the fun to have department, and weren’t too expensive. I got three really cool things:
The keyboard is what it is, just better looking - and almost silent.
A mouse is a mouse except that the mighty mouse has a ball instead of a wheel which means spreadsheets are a dream. I’m also amazed that it really can recognize a right click. Finally, It think it’s great that Apple put on a power switch/optics protector.
The PowerMate is a horse of another color. It’s not just another substantial, well built, cool, and fun volume knob. It only has about 8 different things it can do, but it does them differently depending on the app that I’m in. The defaults are cool, I just wish that I could get more feedback from the cool LED on the bottom. It is taking time to get used to having it, (I find myself a creature of habit) but it makes scrolling a dream. As Ferris said, “If you have the means, I highly recommend picking one up.”
All in all, it was a good day - Thank you to those who celebrated it with me.
-Peter
I’m a HUGE fan of AdBlock Plus coupled with EasyList, the awesome extension for Firefox. The reason being? I hate seeing ads on websites.
Not that I have anything against advertising. I don’t. I watch the Super Bowl, the NBA Finals, the World Series and even the Heavyweight Title Bout just for the commercials. I couldn’t care less about sports, or the televised event. Why? Because the ads are incredible. They are fun, creative, hip and all around just great, yet, they still manage to reach me as a viewer advertising their product. I can remember specific Nike, Budweiser, GoDaddy, BMW, Dell, Levi’s, and many other ads from several years ago (remember the Budweiser frogs?). They left an impression on me. On rare occasion, even ads on everyday prime time television seem to “hit home”, and stay logged in the memory banks of my mind.
What’s great? These ads have been so effective, that there are sites a plenty following the main event dedicated to people who want to watch just the adverts, such as superbowl-ads.com.
For the most part, however, ads just come and go. Radio ads. Mailbox ads. Television ads. And even online ads. Nothing original. Nothing creative. Nothing hip. Nothing fun. It’s the same thing, over and over and over, just using different graphics, or a different theme. The presentation remains the same. Think of the paper ads that you find in your mailbox or in the newspaper. Do you recall any specific ad insert, or do they all just blend in as the same thing? Do you recall anything specific that the insert was advertising? What’ about a radio ad? I have a few good ones that have stuck with me, specifically a Pringles ad, but for the most part, it’s just the same dull audio. I think you get the point.
The Internet sits at a different position than its other media outlet cousins. It has the ability for anyone, including me with this blog, to push their opinion, product or content. So, you would think that advertising marketers would take advantage of this outlet, and present ads that influence the browser. However, that’s just not the case. With online ads currently, it’s either:
First off, both suffer from great irrelevance. I have personally seen ads of both nature, that have nothing to do with the site I’m visiting. For example, when recording my workout on an exercise site, I don’t want to see something on improving my love life. If viewing a page about something related to Ubuntu, I probably don’t want to purchase an enterprise rack system with Linux preinstalled. We all know what I’m referring to. Advertisements using text on the page to create a “relevant” ad. While some ads have gotten better in this department, for the most part, I’m unimpressed.
Further, picking on just the flash-based sites, I hate to see moving objects on a web page while I’m trying to read a document. It’s annoying, obnoxious, and I end up adjusting my window size and page location, so the advert is out of my peripheral while reading. Or, I just install an ad-blocker, then I don’t have to worry about it.
So, it’s no surprise to me when I read Techdirt’s article regarding the problem with online advertising. They hit the subject right in the head. While you would think online advertisers would appreciate this sort of feedback (users installing ad-blocking software), instead, they are complaining that if ads aren’t online, we’ll see less and less content being published.
The simple fact is, the current state of online advertising is bad advertising. They just aren’t reaching the average web surfer. While this doesn’t necessarily mean that ads haven’t been a youthful spring of wealth for content publishers, there seems to be little data supporting the growth and profit of products purchased from online ads, yet a wealth of data showing the amount of revenue spent on online ads. Sorry, but the captive audience is dead.
Yet, the Washington Post, as Techdirt points out, seems to have missed the memo. “Rick752″, his handle online, is being targeted in that article as the man that could “threaten the financial underpinnings of much of the Web”. Maybe I missed the memo, but I fail to notice where “the Web” is built on the financial gains of any one company. If content publishers go out of business because of Rick752, they failed to learn how to reach their audience, and thus, failed to sell their product. All they were selling, were ads.
Take Daily Kos, for example, as the Washington Post points out. If you’re running an ad-blocking software, such as AdBlock Plus, you’ll notice a nag at the top of the page pleading, nay, begging you to either disable the blocker, or subscribe to what is normally a free site. If they get visits without the ad revenue from clicks, then their content will go under, and Daily Kos will be forced to go offline. It’s rather unfortunate that they haven’t learned the principle of Content is Advertising. So, if they go offline due to a lack of ad revenue, they have no one to blame but themselves.
In a nutshell, I’m not offended by ads. Again, I like to watch the major sporting events on television just because of the ads. I know many people who are the same. I’m just not a fan of the current state of affairs. I’ve had AdBlock Plus installed practically from the day it was installed. Since then, not only have I not been annoyed, but I haven’t received any malware or spyware from the ads. My pages load faster, and my browser is more stable.
Keep rockin’ AdBlock!
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I’m always amazed by the generosity of my friends and family at this time of year. With only a week and a half, I not only raised the minimum for participation in this year’s ride but had to change my goal twice! I want to thank everyone who has contributed financially as well as those who support me in other ways each and every year for the MS150! I can’t do it without you and I really appreciate your kindness.
Here’s the original post about the ride and a direct link to my MS150 page.
Well, the delirium has calmed down from my weekend of heat trauma so I’ve been able to think calmly and rationally, and do what any normal person would do — get a new apartment. Believe it or not, I already found one and I’ll be moving in within a few weeks.
I actually can’t believe I found something so fast, though I must say I was pretty inspired (and desperate) to get out. Lucky for me, I found a place only four blocks away so I’m still close to the parks and I don’t have to move to an unfamiliar neighborhood.
Best of all, it has a new HVAC system put in just a few months ago. When I went and saw it at noon, it was 66 degrees inside. Man, it was nice. I was ready to lie down and take a nap right then and there. That wasn’t the only thing that won me over, though. It’s on the lower level of a fourplex, has a huge living room and bedroom, and a very nice kitchen. Did I mention it has air conditioning?
In the meantime, I’ve done the only sensible thing to do while waiting to get into my new place: I’ve moved my bedroom into the kitchen and quarantined the bedrooms. It’s a nice 75 degrees in there and about 85 in the living room, so I think I can live with that. As long as I get some sleep, I should be fine.
Man, I’m glad that’s resolved. I never expected anything to happen so quickly.
My crap it’s hot in my apartment. About 89 degrees (Farenheit) right now, which is actually *good*. And it’s 10 at night. It’s usually about 95 degrees in here.
I got sick this weekend so I had to stay home and rest the whole time, but I seriously went delirious from the heat. I went to the doctor today to find out if it was that or just something else that’d been making me tired, and I’ll get the results from the blood test tomorrow. In the meantime, I’m looking for some practical ways to cool off my house.
This morning I went to the hardware store and spent about $200 on drapes that are designed to block out supposedly 99% of the sunlight. It’s so bright in my living room that it blocks out about 80% I’d say in my main front window, and that’s with a canopy already out front. I’m on the top floor in my complex, so the heat gets in all day, and then never leaves.
I just spent about three hours drawing this awesome picture of my setup while eating ice cream.
The annoying problem I have is that in the kitchen, there is an AC unit sitting in the window, which does a great job, but only keeps the kitchen cool. The circulation in this apartment is horrible (no central air), so only the kitchen stays cool. The bedroom gets hot, but I don’t mind so much because by the time I go to bed I just open the window and turn on the ceiling fan and that’s usually enough to get me through the night. Plus, I’m sensitive to noise so I can’t get an AC unit in there.
Probably the most practical thing to do is to get another window AC unit for the living room since that’s where I spend most of my time when I’m at home. I’ve just been stubborn and don’t want to spend the money or install it, but dying from heat tends to change your mind about things like that.
Either way I still have the problem with poor circulation. The office and the bedroom both have ceiling fans that are almost always on full blast, and while it cools off a little, no air is moving from room to room. So I’m not sure how to solve that one.
Anyway, I’m open to ideas. In the meantime, suddenly work is the most exciting place to be. Now that’s pathetic.
For Father’s Day, I was expecting the traditional breakfast in bed, cards from the kids, and my only sleep-in-past 7AM for the year, but I got something extra this year: tickets to see Snoop Dogg and 311!
I have to say this was a huge surprise because I don’t listen to Snoop Dogg. I like 311, but I’m not into Snoop all that much. When I was in 5th grade, I bought my first tape — a $2 USD bootleg of NWA. I pretty much grew-up on NWA, Eazy-E, and Dr. Dre, but I never got into Snoop. Those early years of my life were years of trouble and self-destruction and I’m glad I’m not there anymore. Now, I’m fully focused on staying positive, contributing back to society, and just doing good in the world.
Seeing Snoop will be fun, or at lease entertaining.
To get myself stoked, I listened to some of his songs and, it made me wonder what Snoop’s songs would be like if he were a geeky business guy. What would snoop’s songs look like as a Pareto Chart, Process Map, and a Regression?
Rollin down the street, smokin indo, sippin on gin and juice
Laid back [with my mind on my money and my money on my mind]
Here’s Snoop’s Gin and Juice in a Pareto:
Its where it takes place so Im a ask your attention
Mobbin like a *** but I aint *********
Droppin the funky **** thats makin the sucka ******** mumble
When Im on the mic, its like a cookie, they all crumble
Try to get close, and your ***** get smacked
My ******* homie doggy dogg has my back
Never let me slip, cause if I slip, then Im slippin
But if I got my nina, then you know Im straight trippin
And Im a continue to put the rap down, put the mack down
And if your ******* talk ****, I have ta put the smack down
Yeah, and ya dont stop
I told you Im just like a clock when I tick and I tock
Here’s a Process Map for “Nuthin’ but a G Thang”:
One, two, three and to the fo
Snoop doggy dogg and dr. dre are at the do
A Linear Regression for “Nuthin’ but a G Thang”:
The regression above tells us that as we increment from one to fo’, the more likely will Snoop and Dre be at the do’. With an R^2 of 1, in fact, there is no argument — Snoop and Dre will definitely — foshizzle bizzle — be at the dizzle. In other words, all of the variation in the data is explained by the regression model. Foshiznit.
I don’t know about you, but Snoop as a foshizzle bizniz fizzle would be a fun d-o-double g. Dig?
Articles on Ethnography and Design:
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Please articles on Queueing Theory below:
Articles on Operations, lean and six sigma, please visit the links below:
Get ready to be sick, twisted and freakay! Glenn Beck is coming to a "buttload" of movie theaters around the country on July 17 when his Dallas, TX live comedy stage show performance will be simulcast in HD nationwide to participating theaters.
Take it from someone who's seen Mr. Beck on stage a few times before, met him in-person, listens to radio show daily, and can't stop yakking about how Right he is... you won't want to miss this. Take your family, but make sure you invite someone who wouldn't normally go. You'll enjoy watching them pick their lower jaw up off the floor and wish they had worn Depends undergarments.
Tickets for this amazingly sick and twisted event go on sale a week from the day I'm writing this: Friday, 20 June 2008.
For more information, go here: http://www.glennbeck.com/content/articles/article/198/11224/.
If you have read my blog in the past, you might have learned a little about my network, and the hostnames of the computers that reside therein. The idea is simple, yet sadistic:
I put on an elaborate play, in which I play the main character Zeus, and the computers in my network are Greek and Roman gods. My network is guarded by Hades, leader and god of the Underworld. In the Underworld, these “gods” are thrown into the river Cocytus, which is one of the 5 rivers flowing through Hades. Cocytus, as Greek mythology has it, is the River of Lamentation. As such, my gods are suffering an endless torment with weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth, until the hardware breaks, and the computer is replaced. As it currently sits, I have thrown the following gods into the river Cocytus:
Achilles, Athena, Hades, Helios, Janus (a Roman God) and Kratos. A former member, who finally gave up the ghost after much lamentation, was Heracles, a good HP laptop.
Where Cocytus comes into play, is it has been chosen as the domain for my network. Fully qualified domains follow the syntax of GOD.LOCATION, where in this case, LOCATION is the purchased cocyt.us domain, and it is the fundamental domain for my sadistic play. So, achilles.cocyt.us, hades.cocyt.us, helios.cocyt.us, and so forth. Of course, this domain is only for internal DNS queries, and won’t provide anything useful to the external network.
What’s next that I can add to this play?
