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| Saturday, July 26th, 2008 |
joyeuse13
|
12:10p |
Some Fun Stuff Since I've had nothing to share for the last few days, here are some fun videos to keep you occupied: Synchronized juggling, courtesy of ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) kitanzi. Font Convention. Laugh out loud funny for the typographically nerdy.
Current Music: Small Favor - Jim Butcher |
| Friday, July 25th, 2008 |
mdlbear
|
11:35p |
Travels with Plink and Cthulth: Safe in Seattle It's been a good day. Met the flower_cat in SEA; she'd
arranged for someone to meet her and wheel her around, so all I had to do
was collect the baggage and rent the car. Avis gave us a PT Cruiser --
cool-looking, and drives well, but the controls are confusingly different
from my Honda, and cargo space is quite limited. Ended up with two bags
and the walker in the back seat to accomodate the wheelchair and large
suitacase in the back. Even then it was tight, and the rear visibility
was nil with the wheelchair in the way.
But now, we've been well fed and made welcome in the Big Green Monster,
and the Cat is sleeping beside me even as I type. Folks seem to go to bed
early around here; I'd been kind of looking forward to some late-night
conversation. Tomorrow, perhaps.
No idea what's happening tomorrow. Real-time scheduling, and likely to be
pretty relaxed. I'm hoping that everyone will get the one-on-one time
they need with me and/or Colleen respectively, and that there will be
music and burlesque at one time or another. Other than that it's all
pretty open.
Current Mood: contentCurrent Music: the FlowerCat snoring beside me |
hrj
|
9:38p |
Decisions, decisions
So here it is, 9:30 pm and I've just finished dinner (well, what I was hungry for anyway -- somehow there are vast gobs of sweet potato, broccoli, and onion left on my plate that shall have to return again tomorrow) and e-mail. And the question is: do I make a really early bedtime of it, get caught up on my sleep, and then work even more intensively on the lecture presentations tomorrow; or do I go downstairs to the desktop unit, start scanning in images, and finally quit well after midnight, going to bed dead-tired, sleeping late into the morning, and not really getting started on the work tomorrow until around noon. Hmm. Answers that question. Yoo-hoo! Bed! Here I come! |
howeird
|
5:19p |
All The News that Fits, We Print The NY Times has been bought by either Rupert Murdoch or Larry Flint. Click here for the proof. Current Mood:  cheerful |
howeird
|
3:08p |
War Aunty Took a couple of minutes at lunchtime to drop by the furniture store and opt for the 3-year warranty. They already cover parts & labor, but after a year they charge $70 to make a house call, so $40 seemed like a deal, considering in the last three years I've broken two recliners. They said the delivery folks start calling at 4 with time estimates.
Why do people hang stuff from their rear view mirrors?
Bought the Merc and picked up a Metro hoping to find travel agent ads, but there were none. Sunday paper, I guess. Went online to AAA but they are all about package tours. And only one to Vietnam.
Pep boys after work for that oil change, I think.
The E on my keyboard is wearing off. Blame my armor-plated nails. Time to get them trimmed, probably tomorrow.
Current Mood:  creative |
mdlbear
|
12:38p |
Travels with Plink and Cthulhu: further notes Went to a good party last night at the invitation of webmaven,
who's on the program committee. Sold a CD to Julie Steele, a recent
O'Reilly employee and Guy's daughter. Fun conversation. Several good
conversations, but confirmed that I can only handle one or at most two
people at a time.
The attendees at this conference, and cons in general, are getting younger
and more decorative all the time. Especially the women; I'm greatly
encouraged by the increasing number of women in open source.
The elevator music in the hotel was the stuff I was hearing in my teens.
Scary.
;;; LISP using a distributed hash table.
(defun cons (car cdr)
(put (concat car "." cdr)))
(assuming hash returns a hex string and (put s) stores string s in a
distributed hash table at a location given by its cryptographic hash, and
returns the location. You don't have to take out the garbage for a long
time. If the DHT implements a time-to-live, you can implement a
mark-and-wait garbage collector by simply refreshing everything you can
reach once in a while.
If I'd known ahead of time that Colleen was planning to take her walker,
I'd have planned on renting a car and printed out maps and directions
ahead of time. As it is, there's no real problem except that we'll be
using the Mac instead of a printout.
Current Mood: calm |
howeird
|
11:47a |
We do more by ?? am than you do all day Remember that ad for the US Army? Replace the ?? with 10 and you have my day so far. Without boring you with geeky details, I filed two bugs by 10 am, both of which required a buncha re-testing and gathering/analyzing log files. And now I'm reading the final draft of one of the release documents, happy to see some suggestions I made for cleaning up the English are in there.
Spent some more time last night looking into my Asia vacation. I've painted myself into a corner by needing to be in NE Thailand a week after my vacation starts. Also surprised to find that it's 25% cheaper to fly round trip to Bangkok than to Manila, even though Bangkok is two hours further away. As far as transportation goes, I know I can get to Angkor and Saigon overland easily from NE Thailand, but I'm not sure about visas for Americans who are not arriving by air. Anyway, still juggling options, and must not forget that World Travelers don't need no stinkin' reservations.
The laptop attache case arrived last night, and I was surprised that I was able to fit almost all the things I wanted. Some work with a seam ripper was required (I don't need two pen holders, I need space to hold two USB plug-ins - bluetooth and wireless mouse). Now that my cell phone works like a modem I don't need the phone cords or adapters. My folding headset fits, but it's awkward, so I may shop around for a mini version. I have earbuds of course, but would like a small mike too. OTOH my mini webcam has a mike. Anywho, it's a pretty aluminum attache case with combo locks on each of the two snap-open thingies, and takes up maybe half the space the laptop bag does, which was the main purpose of this exercise.
Still waiting to hear when my recliner will be delivered tomorrow. If it's early, I'll be able to go on the S. Bay meetup photo shoot at Kelly Park's History Park. May also take my camera to the zoo on the other side of the park, Happy Hollow. Sunday I'll go see Lyric Theater's staged reading/singing of long lost operetta Erminie at Mountain View music school.
Pumpkin has started curling up in the doggie bed I bought for him. It's just the right size, and he likes it being next to the easy chair which is where I spend most of my livingroom time. |
mdlbear
|
10:06a |
Travels with Plink and Cthulhu: random travel notes I've been having breakfast in the hotel this trip rather than the
Continental breakfast at the con: protein and potassium are my friends.
I'm really glad I've developed the habit of keeping my room key in my
right-hand pants pocket. I hardly ever leave a room without my pants. I
have been known to leave without my shoulder bag. Recently.
The Red Lion at the convention center is undergoing extensive renovation.
Sure, the carpets have been torn up most of the weekend. OTOH, the WiFi
works perfectly in the rooms; this is the first year that's been true.
I've been trying to figure out how many years I've been coming to OSCon.
This must be the fourth; first year I believe I was in the Inn at the
Convention Center, and I've been at the RL at least twice before. I see
LJ tags for OSCon 2006 and 2007. OK, also posts in 2005, and apparently
none in 2004.
I've taken to wearing a luggage strap as a belt. Infinitely adjustable
instantly, and no metal at all. Needs a way of temporarily attaching
something that looks like a buckle when I want to be dressy.
The San Jose airport is also being extensively renovated; Terminal C has
been rejiggered to put all of the shops inside the security zone.
Finally. They also have free WiFi. Finally.
I still hate the Mac. The apple key, which exists only because they're
using a one-button mouse, is exactly where I expect the ALT key to be.
Emacs uses Alt-Q to rewrap a paragraph, and Alt-W to copy a selection.
Fortunately you can configure the terminal to ask before closing a window
or a tab, so as long as I run emacs in a terminal window and not the
native version, I'm comparatively safe. (It also took me a long time to
figure out how to configure the terminal to treat option as alt.)
The Mac laptop's keyboard is still wretched.
The food has been very good, though I don't like the fact that breakfast
has been being served downstairs in the exhibit hall instead of upstairs
outside the room where the keynotes are given.
I've been taking realtime notes (in a text file, using emacs). It would
have been possible to turn that into real-time blogging using a couple of
well-designed scripts and makefiles, but that will have to wait for the
next time.
Current Mood: content |
jethric
|
8:55a |
Something quick Blargh. It's been a week. Dr James dealt with the majority of my back pain on Sunday. But it's taken most of a week for it to really calm down. I'm not gobbling down a lot of OTC Pain Meds any more. I still need to take some, but things are getting better. I am presently suspecting that a couple of back stretches I did when my back was hurting following a very serious jostling I got while riding BART is the cause of my issues. Dr James took care of the spine and rib alignment, but the muscles and ligaments needed to recover from the strain that I caused myself with those stretches I did in an effort to ease other pain. In otherwords... I hurt myself trying to deal with getting hurt. If that makes sense.
In any case, things are getting better. I am recovering.
So, with that going on I don't have a lot else to report on for the week, as I didn't really do a whole heck of a lot to report on. Work has taken up most of my braincells during the week. I've been working on reports that take a lot of clock-cycles to compile.
Mhari seems to be doing okay. I'm afraid I haven't been very conscious of things with her a lot due to my back pain. She's going through a lot of mental anguish over her mother's health, which is not... um.. not good at all. So Mhari is 'hiding' a lot. 'Hiding' inside City of Heroes, playing Katiri, who hit 49 last night while I was laying down heading to sleep. (Pizza we had for dinner hit me hard in the blood sugar, so I went to bed 'early'.)
My weekend plans are to take it easy, play City of Heroes, and also go to a table-top rolegaming (That's the new word I've seen getting used for role-play gaming: rolegaming) session tomorrow night. I suspect my participation in those games is further decreasing, but I don't know what will come first... my leaving the games or the games falling apart. We are already down to only the one session monthly... or every 4 weeks or whatever it is. I will admit my heart isn't really in it right now.
Hmmm... that bares some further thought. But I won't do it here right now. I need to get back to work. I hope everyone has a good weekend. I sure plan to. (As well as looking forward to whatever announcements will come out of this weekend's ComiCon International.) Current Mood:  busy |
capplor
|
9:28a |
|
gramina
|
8:12a |
Mayland has hatched! --  And this one has started -- I can't name them till they hatch, though.  And this is my newest:  Click on them for more information and to help them hatch and grow up -- this really is more fun than anything this silly ought to be... Current Mood:  silly |
quadrivium
|
10:04a |
|
ohiblather
|
8:11a |
|
hrj
|
1:24a |
Brief Review: Mama Mia
I needed at least a little break from the lecture preparations, so after doing some work on the next two outlines over sushi (I had an "I need to get out of the house to avoid distractions" evening) I swung by the theater to see Mama Mia!. Yes, I know that in some people's eyes my love of ABBA music puts me beyond redemption. (On the other hand, Tuesday at the gym, when I needed to work off the desperate need to strangle at least one of my co-workers, after pondering between setting the iPod to Sousa, Wagner, or ABBA, I chose the last because it seemed the other two were much too mellow and laid back. So ... whatever.)
This is a FUN movie. I laughed. I cried. I sang along at points. (I think this is going to end up being one of those sing-along-cult movies.) I reveled in a movie centering around mature women being unabashedly sexual and sexy. OHMIGHOD MERYL STREEP IS SOOOOOOO HOT! Seriously. The only part of the movie that came close to the delightfulness of Meryl Streep was the Greek Chorus (often, literally Greek). Especially the ladies in the kitchen. Oh, and the old woman with the sticks. Perfect. In fact, the whole Dancing Queen procession bit. This is about the third recent movie musical that has made me think that Bollywood is making some major infiltrations into American cinematic esthetics.
Totally different subject. We got a "save the date" notice at work that they're reviving the tradition of alternating the annual summer picnic with a "formal dinner gala". My first reaction was, "Yeah, that'd be a barrel of monkeys if you don't have a date." Then I realized that it was a perfect challenge for the Dating Project: find someone who would not only be up to attending a formal employer-sponsored dinner (free food!) but could have a good time doing so. Dancing may be required. I have until mid-November. (It is, alas, on the same day as Mists Investiture, but then I don't think that cuts down the available dating pool significantly.) |
krellan
|
12:43a |
Rediscovered old tcsh setup file
Ignore the next paragraph if you're not a UNIX/Linux user, as it probably won't make much sense to you.
Just had the thought the other day about my old shell prompt I used to have while running tcsh. I haven't ran tcsh in some time, due to various annoyances in it, but it does have some convenience features bash just doesn't have. My old shell prompt was very detailed, and had a lot of information in it. I ported most of it to bash, which is what I use these days. So, now my bash shell prompt looks nicer and has more useful information in it. Unfortunately bash doesn't allow boldfacing/underlining/etc. of anything in the shell prompt, and if you sneak it in with escape codes, then it screws up bash's count of the cursor position and causes lines to falsely wordwrap when they shouldn't. That's one of the limitations of bash. There's other corresponding limitations in tcsh, plus it is no longer installed by default on most installations, so I quit using it. I don't want to reignite the old bash vs. tcsh wars, but I sometimes wish they would come together and make a unified shell that combined the best features of both.
What was noteworthy about this is that it's a file I've more-or-less had since the early 1990's when I first learned UNIX. I last touched the file in 2005. I'm glad I haven't lost it, since it had a lot of various preferences and settings in it that I had built up over time. Always nice to make an old rediscovery like that.
Current Mood: geeky
Current Music: Energy 92.7 still |
| Thursday, July 24th, 2008 |
krellan
|
11:31p |
Brought Congo to CA Extreme I brought my Congo pinball machine to the California Extreme arcade show. It turned out to be a popular game! I will definitely bring the game to more shows in the future. Now that I have gotten into the habit of removing the head on the games, they become easier to move, even though it takes a little more time to reconnect all the various wires in the head. Current Mood: accomplishedCurrent Music: Energy 92.7 |
johno
|
6:10p |
|
bovil
|
3:49p |
Technology that works! A few months ago I mentioned that I bought a NetGear ReadyNAS NV+. Two weeks ago we blew a breaker and the UPS that was supposed to keep the ReadyNAS up went down. The ReadyNAS didn't want to reboot after that. The ReadyNAS Forum pointed me in the right direction, and I was able to boot the unit to the point that it identified a bad drive. It wouldn't identify which drive, which pretty much means that it was drive #1. It also suggested that I boot the unit without the (probable) offending drive. That got the machine up in compromised mode; the data was still all there, but the performance was subpar and there was no redundancy; if another drive failed it was curtains. I ticketed the problem out to Netgear and got routed to their super-secret ReadyNAS direct support line. They were all ready to RMA me out a replacement drive, but it turns out that the reseller I bought from stocked the unit with different drives (Hitachi) than Netgear uses (Seagate). I decided to order a replacement Hitachi drive, get it in, and then return the bad Hitachi drive for warranty replacement. The new drive just came in yesterday. So how hard is it to replace the disk? Remove the bad drive from the carrier (4 screws), put the new drive in the carrier, hot-plug it back in. The rest is magic, and about 6 hours later the unit reported that the RAID sync was complete and redundancy was restored. I'm very happy with the ReadyNAS service group, and the product itself performed beautifully. We'll see how Hitachi stands up to this standard. |
mrgoodwraith
|
4:57p |
The bestest wedding reception picksha Out of all of the pictures I've seen so far that lord_korak took at Rand's and Erin's wedding festivities in which I am visible, I think I like this one the best. Apparently either I've just stepped on ohiblather's toes or she's channeling Yoko Ono. Hee hee hee... |
johno
|
1:45p |
When I work at home...
...I usually have the TV going for noise and visual stimulation.
Today is a marathon of "Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List"
The current episode has her hanging out with Steve "the woz" Wozniak.
So what does she do when she gets to spend time with a billionaire?
She takes him to a Bear convention.
The reactions of the convention members is priceless, as the ultimate Sugar Daddy Bear walks through the crowd. He seemed oblivious to the pools of drool that were collecting in his path. |
capplor
|
2:45p |
The big X-0
No, I'm not talking about the laptop. It's my birthday today, and I started thinking about the other X-0 birthdays.
10 -- Nothing actually comes to mind, though before another year had passed, there were humans on the moon. They came home on my 11th birthday.
20 -- I was on vacation with my parents. It was a particularly good day. I even won a stuffed animal at a carnival. (I don't have it anymore, but to actually win one of those chance games, and get a significant prize. I'm not sure I believed such a thing possible before then
30 -- I was "the kid" in the social group (the 4 Crazy Old Ladies of Omaha, NE) Within a year I had moved to California to start a new, non-military job.
40 -- Happy birthday & congrats. I understand that Fred was insistant it should not be a baby shower. Almost too bad, because the real shower ended up being after the baby was born.
And then there's this year. Happy birthday & farewell, again. We had the party early, because I had to move. This is the actual day. Tammy spilled the beans this morning that there's some kind of present running. And I'm just beginning to get the idea of how to do the new job. Still trying to get a drivers' license, too.
Wonder where I'll be for 6-0. |
ohiblather
|
2:27p |
|
howeird
|
10:13a |
Weird non-Dream Channel IRL last night I went to the hot tubs to soak away some of the pain in my legs & thighs. Went to bed way late, I don't remember dreaming but I do remember waking up remembering the feeling of being in the hot tub. My pillow was soaked through. It was so soaked that an hour later it was still damp. Current Mood:  devious |
gramina
|
10:11a |
|
mrgoodwraith
|
12:22p |
New filk for filkertom: "4-and-19 Tales" This will be my entry for Tom Smith Parody and Dedication Time, tomorrow night at 8 p.m. at Confluence. I was going to refrain from posting it until after Confluence so I could surprise everybody at the con with it, but it was too much fun to write and I'm too happy with it to keep it to myself that long. :-) ( 'Hello, I am an exiled African businessman...' ) |
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consonance_con
curious
