I was using my IM client to annoy a coworker today. Our corporate IM client sends a tiny ding when a message arrives. If you don’t have the IM app in focus, it flashes the icon at the bottom of your screen. I knew he was in the lab so I typed a whole sentence one word at a time so he would hear it. So, I wrote a haiku about it:
Every time I type
Your boxen dings and flashes
IM clients rule
After a coworker got oil sprayed on the outside and INSIDE his car (ruining his upholstery and was un-cleanable by a auto detailer) I went on my rant about oil change, brake and muffler shops. You can read it here: Link
Here’s a little clip of information taken directly from a recent article I was reading. I replaced the parts that would give away what it is, see if you can guess what it is:
Even as project proposals were being submitted, a 53-year-old structural engineer secretly already had the job sewn up. He had met with the government official in charge of funding and the official had rigged the process so that only this engineer could possibly win the bid. When the construction was started, more than 300 prominent [inhabitants] signed a petition protesting the [construction]. They claimed that [it] would “disfigure and dishonor” the city.
There was a great deal of protest surrounding the construction as well. A [prominent] mathematics professor predicted that when the structure passed the 748-foot mark, it would inevitable collapse; another expert predicted that the [construction]’s lightening rods would kill all the fish in the [nearby river].
The [local] edition of the New York Herald claimed the [construction] was changing the weather; and a daily newspaper ran a headline story claiming The [construction] was sinking. “If it has really begun to sink,” [local paper] pontificated, “any further building should stop and sections already built should be demolished as quickly as possible.”
What was this abominable construction that would destroy the environment and be a disfigurement to the city? It was none other than the Eiffel tower.I always try to keep things like this in mind when confronted with the scads of ‘disaster is imminent’ reports on everything from new public/religious social programs, to dams, to global warming, to whatever. Whatever you’re in the middle of, by nature you are going to be very myopic. Now, this is not to say that disastrous human endeavors do occur and are often foreseen but warnings ignored, but it reminds me that you need to look at the real data and know that expert ‘opinions’ are just that – and are just as equally wrong as right on both sides.
Instead, the only way to denounce critics or lend credibility for a plan is in a *lot* of careful research and number crunching before one begins. A great example is a task force in Portland that have done some great research on homelessness patterns and found that often times the current feed/shelter system simply prolongs and perpetuates the homeless’ problems (this is not to say that homeless help should go away – but that their influence and role needs to change in a new way). Some of their findings
There has also been all this talk of carbon-neutral obsession, bio-fuels, etc. This is all good, but simply reducing environmental impact down to your ‘carbon-load’ doesn’t take into account scads of other toxic stuff you release. Use an air conditioner in your car/home? What about your freon load? What about your arsenic load? What about your estrogen loads ? (yes, estrogens from shampoos and birth control pills goes right though water treatment and has long been known to be mutating fish/river life. That one sure doesn’t get as much press as blowing up damns now does it) Now we hear that bio-fuels aren’t that much better than other fossil fuels as far as the environment goes.
I guess my point is that productive change in the right direction requires people not being reactionary, over-simplifying the problem, or lately appealing to sentimentality or emotionalism, or even spiritualism about ‘mother earth’ (I could go on about that one being even worse than the religious appeals made in the middle-ages that everyone loves to decry) – but really put some pencils and pens to paper and do the math and science. Real science that isn’t myopic ‘experts’- or we’ll end up looking as silly as the Parisians did to future generations.
Here’s a link from local news that has video clips and an interview here
Found some pictures of the lawn chair adventurer on the local news site here. Enjoy!
Oh happy day!In a recreation of the original flight by Larry Walters in 1982, a man in Bend, Oregon repeated the feat this weekend. Here’s a bit I enjoyed:
Even at two miles high, Couch said, he could hear cattle lowing and children talking. He heard gunshots, which worried him. A black butterfly flew past. He passed through clouds. He said they were fluffy.Couch stopped when he was down to a gallon of water and just eight pounds of ballast. Concerned about the rugged terrain outside La Grande, including Hells Canyon, Couch decided to come back to earth.
Man I love Oregon! Story link
I call the Intel motherboard support guys, and they were very good – probably some of the most knowledgeable front-line phone crews I’ve ever run into (and I’m not saying that just because I work there). I’ve only had to call them about 3 times, but every time they are right on the money and know exactly what obscure feature of the SATA raid controller I was trying to use, strange chipset interaction, etc and have some clever way to do what I was trying to do by pointing me to an article/whitepaper.
First they tell me to try a Microsoft patch: KB929777 (for those who want to know/try it). This is a manual patch, so I go and download it (did you know you must download the patch from the machine you’re trying to patch? The Windows Genuine verifier tool actually re-directs the website to the matching OS download (and not show you the other versions) based on the WGA response code. I did it from my XP laptop and got the 32-bit version which wouldn’t install on my Vista box. So I download it from my Vista box and you get the 64-bit version. I personally think this is colossally stupid because what if you need a patch for a machine that can’t use the internet/boot properly/etc – sigh) but no luck.
Another call to Intel’s support and we back and forth the info, and he nails it right off. He asks what bios version I’m using (ver. 1687) and says, Ahh, well, the 965 chipsets have a known problem we just discovered with these last two bios revisions. Turns out there is a bug in the bios (as I predicted) that shows itself if you have 4 gigs/4 sticks of ram in at the same time. You must go back to bios ver 1669 before they introduced the problem. Well, upgrading a bios is easy as pie, but rolling back a bios requires a multistage process of setting a recovery jumper, burning a cd, etc (go to support.intel.com and look up article 023360 for the process) then go download an old version of the bios 1669 by going to your board’s update page, scrolling down to the bottom and select “This product has Previously Released software” then download version 1669. Flash your machine, and voila! Super-fast machine. But not only that, I did a test. It took ~1:45 sec to boot with 3 gigs using bios 1687; but with bios 1669, the same 3 gig setup takes ~0:45 sec. That sounds like more than one problem, but anyway…
So, there’s your answer. Go to bios 1669 and wait for a bios update after 1687 that specifically mentions a fix for this 4-stick/gig problem.
Well, well. I installed a very beta Vista application I used to use, and low and behold – it goofed up my system something fierce. Unfortunately, uninstalling left buckets of configuration problems that I could fiddle with for hours, or in the same time just backup and re-install. I chose option 2. But something strange happened. When I tried to run the install DVD again, it took 5-10 minutes between each dialog box – mouse was slow, screen repaints were painfully visible, etc. Everything was going at a horrible snails pace. What happened?! I did my last install in like 20 minutes.
I methodically unplug all my devices until I get back down to the bare system board (no effect), then on a whim I take 2 gigs out – since I’d recently upgraded from 2 to 4 gigs of ram. Maybe those were bad sticks of memory. Voila – super-fast again. Huh? I try different combinations of the sticks, and the same result. It’s not bad ram, it’s the fact there is 4gigs total ram. I start looking on forums and sure enough, other people are having similar problems. Seems there are various motherboards that are having this problem when they upgrade from 2 to 4gigs, or in some cases, 4 to 8gigs. Extremely slow system responses, etc but pull the memory out and it works like a champ. I downloaded the latest bios and flashed it, but it didn’t fix the problem. Guess I’ll have to wait or order another motherboard. This isn’t a huge problem as 2 gigs has been more than adequate for everything I’ve been doing so far; but now I have 2 extra gigs of really nice DDR2 800mhz ram sitting around waiting for a bios patch. Bogus. For the record it’s a DG965OTMKR motherboard (which I really love b/c of it’s built in SATA raid, etc)
Summer is here. Summer is great.
Summer is always way the heck too busy.
I find my daily social calendar gets double and triple-booked more often than a flight from Cali to New York on Christmas eve. Current events about to come up in the next 3-4 weeks: A trip to Alaska for a friend’s ordination and hiking in Denali, daily running excursions, wine parties, roller-derbies, church picnics, BBQ’s, more ordinations (3 in total!), weddings, hiking friends/groups, beach trips, movie nights, bachelor parties, journals to read, house parties, local festivals about every weekend, folks visiting from out of town, last Thursday, first Thursdays, weekly brewpub meetups with coworkers/friends, great local summer bands to go see just about every night, personal coding projects, climbing and hiking clubs I’d like to get involved with (I want to climb Hood and St. Helens), taking photographs, etc, etc, etc. I seem to turn down 4x the number of things I can make it too. It’s been wearing on me a bit. As a person that loves their quiet and down time, I usually find that by summer’s end I’m ready for a couple long months of rainy indoor activities.
Still, all this activity has brought another interesting set of questions with it. See, every year up till this one for the last 4-5 years, my summer has been figured out. I was usually doing stuff at a parish, hospital, or other seminary assignment. But now my time is all my own, and I find myself kind of floundering as to how to spend my time. I have been doing a lot of running lately to get back in shape, and as I was thinking about it a priest friend’s sermon came to mind. In one homily, he simply asked, “What will you do with this one, beautiful, wacky life you’ve been given?” It really sums up the question I’m asking myself. So. Where will it be?
Availability of sweet tea as the delineation of the Mason-Dixon line: http://eightoverfive.com/SweetTea.swf
Dante’s Inferno – a virtual trip through Hell: http://web.eku.edu/flash/inferno/
A game show in Japan where contestants have to strike a fixed pose which matches the holes on the board: link
Guy attached a camera to his cat’s collar and recorded his adventures: Link
LOLCats have their own programming language! Link