| I'm trying to control an outbreak and you're driving the monkey to the airport |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 2nd, 2008|03:52 pm] |
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It's kind of amazing to me that I have internet friends that I have never met, that I never will meet, that I care so much about. |
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| Microsoft Weirdness |
[Nov. 2nd, 2008|11:23 am] |
A friend brought me a laptop recovering from a virus sickness. She had reinstalled windows but could not get the sound card working. A bit of googling showed me that the audio driver would not install without a specific MS patch (nonstandard hardware on a panasonic tough book)
This was a generic virgin install of XP which included SP2.
The needed hotfix is not directly downloadable from MS. You have to fill out a webform and submit a request. Then they send you a link and a password via email.
Using IE6 on this brand new installation I could not submit the webform due to JS errors on the page. I had to use FF to submit the request. |
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| Election |
[Oct. 25th, 2008|09:59 am] |
I doubt anyone reading this will be interested in who I'm voting for or why, but I'm going to tell you anyway. It wasn't an easy decision but I've finally decided to vote for McCain.
To do that, I had to overcome my initial reactions about both V.P. candidates. My gut reaction about Biden? Very qualified. Palin? Unqualified and a poor choice. So given O/B vs McPalin I am slightly inclined to GoBama.
But what does that say about that choice? I'd be saying, "Obama has no experience but he has Biden to back him up". The alternative is "Oh McCain would be a good president but omg what if he dies??" So would I really be voting for Biden for President by proxy?
I do think McCain would be the better president. Obama is too liberal for me. McCain has an indisputable sense of honor and duty that I think I value more than anything else. So that's who is getting my vote. I'll just pretend he has no running mate. |
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| Fire! |
[Sep. 25th, 2008|10:37 pm] |
me:
oh
and the fire is out
so thats a good thing......
friend:
yay no fire
what fire?
me:
son's car
friend:
omg
me:
battery shorted out, started an actual fire
but it's a toyota, so once we cleared away the refuse, and the sparky part
friend:
woah!
me:
it went "OHAI! I WUZ ON FIR BUT IMOK NAU"
friend:
lol
awesome
me:
hey thats a LOLCAR! |
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| I have looked into the abyss |
[Sep. 14th, 2008|11:56 am] |
and it's name is Ikea. What an organized madhouse it is. We have to redo a bedroom in fairly short order at the condo. We are replacing the 20 year old bunkbeds that have survived remarkably well. $wife bought a semi-antique rugged heavy brass bed on craigslist and that has been sitting up in the hallway since last spring.
The room has to sleep 4, so the plan was to get some kind of convertible couch and/or chairs. But that leads to stuff like little tables, lamps, a bureau, etc. So off we go to Ikea. Holy crap! My guess is that it's at least double the size of a big Home Depot. Thats BIG. Big parking garage, big parking lots, and WOW, staff IN the parking lots directing traffic....ok this does not bode well crowd-wise.
There's a greeter at the door enthusiastically handing out maps. Yikes, I need a MAP? Oh yes I do. There are teeming masses. How can the person-density be this high in a store this big?? How can we ALL be looking at beds at the same time? Why is there a 6'x 8' x 4' crate of toilet brushes? How does this "self serve" thing work? ohhhh.... thats kinda clever. People-wise, we were very much in the minority. It's pretty obvious that Latino, Bengali, Asian, and European (speaking polish/german/etc) all share a common love of moderately priced upscale dorm furnishings. We escaped $1,400 later with a Toyota Sequoia bursting with ready to assemble cardboard boxes.
The ski rental season is rapidly approaching so I have to get my butt in gear and do the following:
- Drive to condo and unload the load
- disassemble 2 sets of bunk beds and refill truck
- strip the wallpaper and paint the walls and ceiling
- Assemble new bureau, 2 tables, and 2 convertible chair beds
- Assemble Craigslist bed and new mattress
The plan is thurs through sunday. I guess if they can do it on those home shows, I can do it too :)
we shall see. The worst case is that I have to take another day off from work and hang around VT another day, oh how horrible that will be! |
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| unfinished projects |
[Sep. 11th, 2008|11:07 pm] |
Three or more years ago I started this exact project as a way to learn c#.
Two years ago I restarted the same project to learn Ruby and Rails.
Last year I restarted the same project to resharpen my java skills. I really did. In fact I probably blogged about it here somewhere. I busted up files into chunks, encrypted them, base64 encoded them and stuffed them into XML CDATA to be passed around like hunks of a torrent. It really is an excellent useful idea. I hope they make millions. If they do though, I will see yet another of my many excellent ideas brought to fruition by someone with more ambition than me. |
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| iPhone Stuff |
[Aug. 24th, 2008|12:57 pm] |
This weekend has been freakin gorgeous! Sun, no humidity, light breeze. Just exactly the kind of days you'd want to really enjoy because you know they won't really last much longer....or at least thats what I think it was like as I looked out the window.
I spent almost the whole weekend so far coding. The goal is to make a few iPhone apps worthy of the app store. I have a couple of good, simple ideas and now I have to make sure I don't lose momentum. The learning curve for the SDK is significant. Objective C is not completely intuitive. The IDE takes a bit of getting used to, no... a LOT of getting used to. You think it's doing a lot of magic when you drag/drop controls (i.e. Visual Basic) but there are critical lines of code you must write by hand in the behind-the-scenes controller to make it work.
So 2 books, a handful of tutorials, and at least a dozen disposable apps titled deleteme1, deleteme2, deleteme3 later, I can now write simple ugly apps with the most basic controls and I can make stuff happen. The next step is to make something attractive and usable!
Now I have to go finish digging a hole, filling it with stone, mow at least a little, run, and then go to a meeting at 6PM! |
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| Rick Romero works for the MA DMV |
[Aug. 12th, 2008|08:50 pm] |
So because $wife will now be commuting 3 miles to/from work we thought it would be cool to get something like a vespa or honda scooter. It turns out that in MA there is a big difference between a scooter and a moped. Mopeds must not be physically capable of going over 30MPH, through the use of a governor. A scooter must not "be operated at a speed greater than twenty miles per hour" but the law makes no distinction if a scooter can be physically capable of going over 20.
And of course the last category is a motorcycle.
So, the one we're looking at is a Honda Metropolitan. It meets 100% of the requirements of the law if and only if (IFF for you math geeks) you drive 20 or less. HOWEVER it is capable of going over 30, so right there it cannot be a moped. It's got a 49cc engine and nobody would mistake it for a scooter. I want it to be a scooter, it should be a scooter and again, it can't be a moped.
So will the cops call it a scooter if it CAN go over 20 even if I'm driving slower? The distinction is important because if it is in fact a scooter I'm golden. I don't need to get a motorcycle learners permit. I don't need to take the motorcycle test, I don't need to get motorcycle insurance and I don't even have to register it. So clearly I want it to be a scooter. Well I guess I'd better check with those fine people at the DMV. And here is their fine reply:
"A scooter cannot be classified as a motorized bicycle (moped)/motorized
scooter if it does not meet the definition of a motorized bicycle
(moped) or motorized scooter."
And by the way, tautologies are tautological. |
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| Riff of the Day |
[Aug. 2nd, 2008|11:58 am] |
Ladies and gentleman, I give to you Rodrigo y Gabriela
The savvy among you already know of them I'm sure. For the rest, I hope you like it as much as I did!
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| Save your money |
[Jul. 27th, 2008|12:31 am] |
I just saw the X Files Movie
On a scale of 1 to 10 it gave me leukemia |
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| Lazor Gunz Go Pew |
[Jul. 19th, 2008|08:42 am] |
"Here's Your Score: You correctly answered 11 out of the 12 possible questions, which means you did better on the quiz than 91% of the general public."
and I *knew* the one I got wrong too....
Try it yourself Pew! Pew! |
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| *facepalm* |
[Jun. 1st, 2008|11:42 pm] |
So I was talking with a friend about skiing in new england and she started to go off about the environment. I described the year we had a tremendous blizzard and she said "when was that" and I said "1999 I think" and she immediately said "but that was before global warming"
Before? I didn't realize that there was an identifiable time when someone threw a switch to doom all the NE ski areas (which was her premise)
Evil Knievel couldn't jump to that conclusion. |
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| (no subject) |
[May. 25th, 2008|01:51 pm] |
by far the high point of this weekend was fixing my tractor. And I don't mean that my weekend is sad and pathetic. On the contrary. It really is great that I fixed it, because the alternative was a trip to the tractor hospital which would be easily $200. Plus, I took off the side panels and hood and front and washed the inside too :)
The other good thing that happened earlier this week is that I finally, after literally a decade, have gotten my amateur radio license. This was at the strong encouragement of a good friend who has gotten me into a couple of activities that basically require a ham license.
I'm so new that I don't have a callsign yet! I may get a vanity sign that has "SQL" in it, just cuz. Or I may get my dads callsign which had been my intention all along.
Anyway, off to a family clam boil now.
Happy Memorial Day to everyone. |
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| (no subject) |
[May. 11th, 2008|12:57 pm] |
I'm pissed at myself because my bench weight keeps dropping. I was at a solid 240, with a peak one time at 260. Then I dropped back and mixed 240/230, then I was at a steady 230. Friday I couldn't finish 3 sets of 230 grrrrr. I need to be more prepared and consistent. I swear my weekly run is getting harder to do too, and my times are not improving. Getting old sucks rocks.
And speaking of boring. Saturday morning I woke up in the very middle of a dream (7:20 AM, time to get up anyway). It was very vivid. Are you ready for this? I was briefing a very short 2 star Admiral about a system I built at work. Wow. Boy isn't THAT an exciting dream? What would Freud say about that? "you are veddy borink. You are low fat vanilla ice milk. And You are a taupe sveatar. You are the Switzerlund of people, in fact Svitzerlund thinks YOU are borink"
And happy mothers day to all mothers :) |
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| (no subject) |
[May. 1st, 2008|05:11 pm] |
I took a day off today, mostly because I can. You know how that goes.
I got a lot less done than I expected. First, I checked a website that I made a recent change to and *ugh* it's dead. It took me a while to figure out that the configuration on my dev/test machine isn't the same as my production machine. That's back to normal but it killed nearly an hour.
I did one really productive thing today and that was to take the rear tire off my tractor and NOT just leave it there in the barn fully INTENDING to take it to be fixed. I cleaned it up and drove off to the local tractor repair place to have it done. Bonus, he said it would be done tomorrow. I got very greasy and surprisingly sweaty. I mowed for at least an hour. This was the first mow of the year. You can almost hear the grass growing.
I cleaned a lot too, just at a slow pace. Yes, I DID vacuum! And I have the pictures to PROVE it :) |
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| (no subject) |
[Apr. 26th, 2008|04:18 pm] |
I probably should have spent a little more time outside today than I did. I got off to a late start and did our usual saturday cleaning albeit with a significant lack of gusto. I wasted a trip out to see someone who I thought would be at the ambulance building but both units were out on call.
When I got home I decided to pull out my chainsaw and cut up two large broken branches that came down this winter. They were both 5" in dia and probably errr... 16' long. Ordinarily, I would just throw them on the springtime cleanup bonfire, but with wood at $250/cord I keep most everything that is burnable now. The saw ran great which is always nice, especially since I was using gas from last fall. The problem was that it wasn't enough gas and I ran out when the job was 2/3 done. Arg.
So I came in and cleaned up and started cooking the most scatterbrained soup/stew/chili ever. Basically, I've boiled anything left in the house that even vaguely resembles a bean. I even threw in some wild rice, just cuz. Seriously, there are about 8 different beans in there, one I can't even identify (looks like a lentil but it's brown). Then for the spices. Hmm, we seem short in that dept. Here's some soup starter, bullion cubes (beef), Mrs. Dash, salt, pepper (lots), cumin, chili powder, curry powder, a white onion, two cans of crushed tomato, a can of paste, a yellow onion, Tabasco, and worcershire sauce (sp?). I *almost* put in the last cup of leftover coffee, it adds richness to some soups, I've done it before and it's good :) Finally, I put in about 2lbs of chopped leftover beef (chuck roast I think).
The last step in this recipe is my usual "cook till done", which probably will be another 2 hours.
In non-food news....I apparently need to get a red passport..... |
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| rock the vote |
[Apr. 14th, 2008|06:56 pm] |
Today was voting day in our little democratic town. There is nothing really significant going on. We have no mayor or council, we have 3 Selectmen. I guess that's kinda the same thing as a council.
The lesser contests are usually more interesting. Recreation commission, parks dept, library trustee, tree warden.....
There are 9 members on the recreation commission and I think at least 6 were up for vote with almost all of them being write in candidate (blanks). My wife voted for me. I jokingly told my S-I-L to vote for me too. If she does, I probably will get elected.
"I've said it before and I'll say it again, Democracy simply doesn't work...." - Kent Brockman |
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| (no subject) |
[Apr. 7th, 2008|10:43 pm] |
I don't know jack about theater or great performances, but this has been amazing, what I've seen of it.
I'm equally unqualified to say who deserves awards but holy crap, Paul Giamatti absolutely deserves an award for this. |
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| Awwww |
[Mar. 31st, 2008|11:29 pm] |
I really feel bad for people having financial trouble. This poor bastard lost his job and had to trade in his corvette for a Suburban!! And *horrors* they fired their gardner! What a travesty!
Not quite shadenfreude but almost. |
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