Archives: February 25, 2008

Caphrim007 and I were talking the other day, and we decided, to better fit in, to consider talking in parables. However, parable may not be the correct term, since while most of what we say does have a moral, it usually not spiritual in nature, and certainly oftain contains talking animals, plants and inanimate objects. I guess we should use metaphors instead. This way, maybe people will understand us better, and we should better fit in ‘inner circles’.

So, if you teach a man to fish, he will get eaten by a shark. The shark will free the tuna in a net, thus a bird will fall from a wire.

What is one without one? It is for naught. But without one, naught cannot exist.

Blue will provide the light, but beware the shade. Colorless is nothing and everything, while colorful is lacking.

wrt the orthogonal symmetry is conducive parallel of the walltime docet to reach a state of an art herein a SLA of utmost importance of SOA to do their modular exposed diligence since harm rolls down hill before a prior.

While driving for food this evening, I was behind someone in a pickup truck (not that I have anything against pickup trucks since I drive one). Never mond that the ‘Driving Miss Daisey’ driver was doing 10+ MPH under the speed limit. No, that in itself is not unusal, being near a raisin farm. What was ironic is this pickup truck had:
– Truck Nuts (again, not unusual)
– NASCAR sticker
– NHRA sticker
– ‘Drive it like you stole it’ sticker
– SPEED Channel sticker
– Dale Earnhardt sticker
– Checkered flag window graphic
Basically everything that screams ‘I like racing and to go fast’. Why then go 10+MPH under the speed limit? I expected this rolling billboard to be breaking the sound barrier. I guess all the adverts weighed him down.

Since it is spring break, my daughter has been wanting to go see dino’s and mummy’s, so off to the museum we went! She LOVED it. I am glad some of my science/technology genes rubbed off. It is amazing to see the fossils and recreation of dinosaurs, along with the skeletons of other animals, and the taxidermy of various animals. I just LOVED the dino’s, and their bredth really makes you feel small. We spent a great deal of time at these exibits, and even caught the exbibit on Dragons and other myhical creatures (which was so-so, but no pic alowed 🙁 ). At the end of the day, we were wiped out, but determined to get our monies worth, took a gander at the less popular exhibits such as Tibet, China, Gems/Geology and other cultural displays.

During my grade school days (in the late 70’s), there were books I checked out from the library almost every week that I would love to share with my daughter now, but alas, cannot remember the titles, and Google returns a bazillion results, Amazon has pages upon pages of books that are not what I am looking for, and eBay likewise disappointed me.
These books were of the science type for kids. They were hard cover, about 10 inches wide and about 14 inches tall. They had around 40-50 pages or so of ‘How-To’ build things. Some were about robots, others medivial castles and catapults, others of vehicles and so on. One of the books was about robots. It had a picture of some cardboard type robots on the cover, and if I recall correctly, there was one that was made out of a red shoebox. These books would describe how the things work, and how to build your own using things around the house (most used paper towel tubes and rubber bands for portions of the construction). As a kid, I didn’t have access to much of the construction materials, not because they were obscure or dangerous, but because, well, my parents probably threw the stuff out before I could get to it.
Anyway, if anyone has suggestions as to where I might find the books that may fit the vague description, please let me know! They were published around the 1975-79 time frame, but may even be as late as up to 1983’ish.

WARNING — APPLE FANBOYS – LOOK AWAY NOW !!! — WARNING

To contune with my rants about Apple, I submit to you the following TV commercial for Apple, debueted during the ‘Big Game’ (can’t say the superb*** word anymore without paying royalties) in 1984:

Well, how times have changed. Here is a company that was poking fun at PC users for basically being assimilated by the Borg known at the time as IBM. Don’t conform; break the chains; ‘Think Different’; Blah Blah Blah. All the dirty, smelly, free living hippie type reality altering hallucination talk you expect. Well, fast forward to 2008:
(wait for it. I cannot view the iPhone SDK User Agreement until I register with ‘The Man’, providing personal information before I can view a file to decide if I wish to proceed or not)
“3.3.3 Without Apple’s prior written approval, an Application may not provide, unlock or enable additional features or functionality through distribution mechanisms other than the iTunes Store”
“May not have Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) functionality.”
This is just part of the User Agreement. If you dig deeper, you see all sorts of ‘thou shall conform’ type constraints.

Now, you also have to pay Apple to write apps for their iPhone and iPod:
“Standard Program $99
The Standard Program is for developers who are creating free and commercial applications for iPhone and iPod touch.

Enterprise Program $299
The Enterprise Program is for developers who are creating proprietary, in-house applications for iPhone and iPod touch.”

OK, you can distribute your app through iTunes and make some money. But what if you want to write some apps for your personal use? It’ll cost you $99. What if you want to write apps to give away for free? It’ll cost you $99. What if you want to write something and apple doesn’t like it, or it isn’t pretty enough or is otherwise deemed that there are already too many apps of this type? It’ll cost you $99 to be shot down. Now in all fairness, it is not $99 per app, but if you want to write some crummy app and use it, it’ll cost you.

Let’s look back a bit. OSX runs only on Apple hardware (or rather, not without some hacking and violating the license agreement). OS upgrades come out rather frequently and will cost you. The Apple developer community didn’t learn a thing from the old trialware and shareware days and tries to soak every penny from Mac users. I forgot: Here are our new models for this year! Same old specs, but NEW COLORS!!!! Did they attend the same class that Nintendo Gameboy marketers did?

I could go on and on, but if you look at the bigger picture, the PC, which started life under the thumb of IBM, eventually cut the apron strings from mommy-Blue. Apple keeps tightening those strings. One can only hope that their circulation gets cut. That is when you will truely see innovative products for the Apple empire.

I have found the ultimate Windows application. If you are not a true geek, you can stop reading now. If you are a geek, navigate and install the application from andlinux.org. This is Ubuntu 7.10 Linux configured to run on Windows. It is not running in a virtual machine like VMWare or VPC, but real binaries (similar to Cygwin, but MUCH better). It installs a service as LocalSystem and a network driver. Afterwards, simply start the X-Windows terminal and you have full access to the Ubuntu goodness minus the boring desktop (for which you *could* install if you really wanted the bloat). You have access to the full APT repository with no modifications or recompiling. You can easily cut-and-paste between the Linux programs and Windows, and can easily get at files on your Windows drive. It creates a 2GB file which contains the Ubuntu install, and if that is not enough space, you can easily use the Windows disk for additional storage. Since I routinely access many remote Unix installations, I no longer need to run Reflection or hack together Putty w/Kerberos authentication. I can simply pop into an Ubuntu shell, kinit and ssh away!

The best thing is I can now analyze malware and suspicious web sites from a safe web browser without risk to my underlying Windows installation. I simply launch FireFox in the Ubuntu shell which runs in the Linux context and have no worries about getting cooties!

Oh yeah, I also got a Corsair Survivor 16GB USB thumb drive. It is a little big since it is a waterproof version (about the size of those waterproof match cases), but it is 16 FRICKING GIG OF STORAGE!!!

Here are some kids songs I could really get into:

My daughter has the flu, and is dehydrated, so her dr ordered her to the hospital. A couple hours later, after sitting in the ER room (at least not in the waiting room!), they finally started her on a drip. Then we got the news: She was staying overnight. My wife ran home (40 minutes each way on a good day, but it was a blizzard!!!), then I took off and got home around 1:30am. Came back this morning and relieved the wife so she could catch up on sleep. Well, the kid was up all morning, can’t sleep. During that time, we hardly saw anyone. Finally, she falls into a very much needed slumber and the IV finishes and starts beeping every couple of seconds. I go and tell the staff, but after 40 minutes, no one comes in to reset it so I turn it off. That was not the correct thing to do, since they then had to flush out the tubes (sorry kiddo!). She falls back asleep and for the past 1.5 hours, I think I have seen every person who works in this hospital. THey must have radar: ‘If sleeping, go disturb’:
– The maintenance guys proceeded to fix the emergency exit right next to our room. 30 minutes of high pitch beeping and talking on 2-way radios
– Housekeeping comes in to clean even though I asked if she could come back. She rattled everything that moved. A bomb is quieter. Oh yeah, she didn’t like where I had the chair, so proceeded to drag it across the floor. I got her: I didn’t pick up my feet which she was sweeping.
– Our lunch was very late in arriving, but a few minutes ago, someone comes tearing in with 2 trays. I tell him I didn’t order anything now, and he is insisting, and is rattling the tops, glasses, etc. Finally, he concedes it is the wrong room, then makes even more noise leaving.
– A fire marshal tramps through looking for oxygen equipment.
– An orderly comes in just to look, then leaves. Comes back again and takes my daughters vitals. Comes back again because she forgot something. Opens the door again, then shuts it.
– The nurse keeps popping it.

So, they say to get as much rest as you can while in the hostipal. I dare you to try.

I was ‘tagged’ by Melissa at Hope for the Hopless so I guess I need to list 7 random, weird or quirky things about me.

End User License Agreement

# Link to the person who tagged you
# Post the rules on your blog.
# Share seven random and/or weird facts about yourself on your blog.
# Tag seven random people at the end of your post, and include links to their blogs.
# Leave a comment on their blogs so that they know they have been tagged.

I agree to the terms and conditions

1) I have many different hobbies. If something interests me, I pursue it. I have a closet full of astronomy, tools, electronics, R/C, aviation, rock climbing, video games, toys and anything else that sounding like fun at the moment.

2) I would spend every dollar I have if I could. I would have stacks of unopened TV’s, video games, books, movies, gadgets and anything else available at BestBuy, Circuit City, Fry’s and the hobby shops.

3) I am slightly dyslexic. That is, I read magazines from back cover to front cover. I read a page starting with the second paragraph or so, finish the page, then *maybe* skim back to the first paragraph. I usually skip over the first few and last words in a sentence and the wordy meaningless descriptive text.

4) Continuing on #3 (gotta stretch these out), I write weird as well (when I actually use a pen and paper!). I will write a word starting with the second letter, finish spelling the word, then go back and fill in the first letter.

5) An infants’ scribblings with a crayon is more legible than my signature. You think your doctor has a bad signature? Mine is worse (but I can tell if I wrote it or someone forged it).

6) I cannot sit still. I am constantly thumping my leg, twitching my shoulder or drumming my fingers. I hate being cooped up all day, and need to get out just about every day. If I don’t get out of bed, take a shower then head out the door, my day just seems to drag and I lose energy.

7) I don’t accept ‘I don’t know’ for an answer and have high expectations of people. I believe too many people simply accept ‘just because’ to explain things. It drives me nuts, and really gets under my skin! Since I am geek, I thirst knowledge. I get frustrated when people don’t seem to live up to their potential that I *assume* they have.

BONUS) I repeat myself. When talking to someone, I will describe what they are to do many times over. This probably comes from years of being ignored by Alpha-Geeks during my apprentice days. I repeat myself. This probably comes from years of being ignored by Alpha-Geeks during my apprentice days. When talking to someone, I will describe what they are to do many times over. I repeat myself. When talking to someone, I will describe what they are to do many times over. This probably comes from years of being ignored by Alpha-Geeks during my apprentice days. I repeat myself. This probably comes from years of being ignored by Alpha-Geeks during my apprentice days. When talking to someone, I will describe what they are to do many times over.

Extra Credit) I talk to myself. Out loud. In the car. I will have an entire conversation for 50 minutes on my drive home from work, going over things that happened that day, things to do tomorrow or ‘rehersing’ for upcoming meetings or presentations.

I’ll have to break the EULA above to ‘tag 7 others’ right now. I’ll have to get back to you on that one. Check back later.