Missing family members sparking collections of people.
I don't know if this is something I'd put on my car... but I've seen worse, and it's funny as hell. The issues of Creationism-vs-Natural-Selection have very little proof to confirm their theories, and one is arguing on proof while the other argues using faith and politics. People have lost their jobs only by saying "Natural Selection should be considered [as equally as Creationism]". That's pretty vulgar.
So fight back... bury the bone, if a fish had a bone.
Looks like the London trip I was looking for has come in; still tentative, but looking pretty solid.
Update 2008-01-04 21:24Z: Yay! Air India... <shudder> heard bad things about them...
Looking for attribution still on this image sent from a friend.
Thanksgiving at the SeaCom, booked my flight. Proximity to SeaTac means that I'm flying into there for convenience as I'm mooching rides and such.
Update 20071127 05:49Z: Thanksgiving came and went... the Pizza-and-Chinese was replaced by a tasty Turkey and assorted trimmings by a chef who has been promised anonymity. Very much Robot Chicken, a bit of Halo 3. How about some notable quotes?
My grandfather has passed, and this time that I've lost a family member, I'm actually aware ahead-of-time and on the same continent. Attendance is a question of "how" not "whether".
I don't know much about my grandfather. Grandfather was a soldier -- specifically, a member of the aircrew to put hardware into the skies. Since inception, aircraft has been a deciding factor in land-battles, whether defensive or offensive. The crew can maintain better health, rapidly travel to targets, and swing certain engagements in short-notice limited only by safety and resources.
Thereafter, his commander in peace-time was my dominant grandmother. It's easy for some of us to accept one commander after another, and so his life seemed to be in service to her, for whatever the family needed. For a while, he was a Justice-of-the-Peace, committing marriage in strange circumstances, but otherwise still my grandmother's husband.
I have a healthy respect for soldiers, who dedicate their lives to causes of others. I didn't know he served until I joined. He's not a hero as a rough/hardy guy, but as a guy who does what's required, and does them in a "good Christian way", meaning a way that is virtuous, respectable, a role-model of the right things. My scant understanding of him, he's my hero, just as my father is.
She passed, reluctantly
Grandfather hadn't risen from bed in a month. He has been a bit detached, even mistaking my brother for a soldier (polar opposites) in his half-waking state. Recently, he stopped eating, and passed a day later. That's really all I know of my grandfather that isn't clouded by negative judgements about my grandmother. The two were identified as a single unit, it seems.
In his passing, he leaves a memory of a kind man, and of course the big nose, big toes, kooky eyebrows, facial shape, and slightly-webbed finger that I'll carry with me always.
My boss has called me to London; I might be there until Christmas. I have a Nov 3 commitment in New Westminster (Vancouver) I assume, but waiting on details for that. Will update this entry when I get confirmation and a flight plan.
In a communication that exists only via IM and email, use your own IM name.
It's not so hard to log in, and some - such as ICQ - let you switch to your own account very quickly. Sure, we all get a bit lazy and leave the IM to log in/out automatically, but that's a little too far.
Consider this: In technology, your password is as respected as your signature and your spoken promise.
Consider this: whatever someone says from your logged-in IM, you're responsible for that.
If this is acceptible to you, give me your password, and I'll be sure to make some stock-trades, and tell your friends how you really feel about them.
When I see a message from "Erick", I know it's from Erick. When I see a message from "Ana", there's a really good chance (think: 100%) that it came from Ana. My own family, seems that's a bit of a stretch: a message from any of their IDs might have come from any one of them (well, there's one who will never write to me, and another who is forbidden by that same from writing, but hey, no one wants to hear about that)
This has pissed me off for years. ow, for those of my family too handicapped to recognize which brother goes through with his decisions and which needs a kick-in-the-ass, which one needed a bail-out from An Evil Professor, An Evil Sergeant, An Evil Business Partner, An Evil... oh I'm sure there will be more, I'm the independent one. For those too blind to realize which one is open, blunt, and communicative, and which one is manipulative, secretive, and psychotic, I'm the one who communicates. Problem is, I'm the one who asks questions no one wants to hear - also, the current Root-of-All-Evil. If I cannot be sure who is on the other end of the chat, or who can read the logs, how can you expect any candor from me?
It's so easy to be just as secretive; is that what you want? Stretch a little: Use Your Own Friggin IM name.
The X Show has made a commercial for all of us to enjoy:
The Gordian Knot approaches...
Updated 2007-10-22 The event took place at Deer Harbour Inn, a quite place on beautiful Orcas Island. Difficult to get to (for which I harassed the Mr) but worth the time once arrived.
Now I'm 36 hours, no sleep since a puppy licked my left hand, wandered around the bed, and licked my right hand, because he really really had to go outside.
Woke up early, had an idea, so I hacked it out... in the end, I fixed the remaining difficulty - I think - with the redirector (/r/) in the website engine (so now /r/vcard works again) and made the calendar conversion (/ical) work. The travel info now always makes a celendar entry to which I can self-subscribe into iCal to verify my travel information. Also, if a reader is curious where I am, well, it's really easy to keep up.
To be honest, it's not so useful as a way to check on automatic conversion of data
My buddy is getting married in Beijing, so I'm getting myself there. Need to backtrack and actually find when this action started, but it was verbally approved ages ago...
I might be in San Francisco soon; this came up suddenly, but this blog entry can be used to track the latest info. All I know right now is:
Yeah, for a while, I broke the DR again. I unbroke it today, finally, but it's not all back yet.
C&P runs on Free OpenSource Software which has its own issues to go with the "freedom": just as equality amongst people doesn't guarantee any form of civic support for those who need it, freedom of FOSS doesn't guarantee that it will work today and always for my application. Sometimes, something gets a bit broken and the user has to fix the tools ("free if your time is cheap"). Sometimes the orjects used are extremely complex, too complex for people to fix unless they are deeply within the continuous development for that project. Late-joiners are useless.
C&P uses too many projects using each other to do its work.
Initially, the Apache was cutting a few characters off the documents; this is mostly OK for normal files, but for XML, this is fatal. So I tried to upgrade the various little components.
That, too, was fatal
Fast-forward to today, I've remotely forced an upgrade of the whole server, and it needs a reboot. I cannot yet reboot because I'm sure it won't survive. I cheated too many times in the upgrade. I'll have to get the hosting site to babysit the reboot. Right now, the flat documents (such as XSL and templates) are working, and the database sucessfully pulls content and converts to XML. The Redirector (anything with /r/ in the URL, such as my vcard: http://chickenandporn.com/r/vcard) is not. Some Icons won't work, and some templates are simply broken.
I'd like to convert this to an aggregate of my various resources, so that this shows everything but different blogs from different sources can offer more focused content, because I blog and write about all sorts of crap, without a common theme.
"Alright, Allan, my public service for the day, this tentanus shot should make you good for another ten years."
Four stitches, the nose remains unbroken. Untill the swelling goes down, I should work on my Leno impersonations.
305 is gone, vcard updated.
Had I remained living there for the full 3 years, I would have profitted famously. Devaluing the benefit of living in a city where you don't need a car, in an apartment that builds value every month, while double-downing on the principle... I wonder if the person who devalues this path has simply a different experience than I did, or has even tried (or rather, is making shit up).
The best thing a new graduate can do is choose a company, develop their reputation in that company while expanding on their skillset, and own a house: besides converting rent to an asset-developer for an equal payment, the owner's credit rating reflects a solid work-history, a equal-or-better annual salary, and a solid net worth. This further reduces the cash wasted on interest rates and lost opportunities. ...but hey, what do I know?
New broadband: phone, cable, internet, one-stop-shop. Sure, the one-piece stereo might not be an expert of any one thing, and the three-way-deal is either overpriced or not as good as components (and when one fails, they all do) but it's simple.
How does it compare to yours?
OK, for some, this is just bandwidth, but for me, it's like my left hand is reconnected...
Synch never works. I swear. I have a Chinese mobile phone, but an english windows laptop that doesn't preserve any non-english characters... because who would want that? :( And of course MacOSX offers no profit in making sync work, because, well, it's a reliable platform that few people use. That's OK, not everyone joins Mensa either.
So I'm experimenting with some sync stuff, and so this is another boring blog post where I'm kinda taking notes. So there.
My Handset is an Ascension P3a with 01.37.41I loaded, and flex was done (for me, since I am not that smart)
applied
Per website,
svn co http://svn.opensync.org/libsyncml/trunk libsyncmlcd libsyncmlautoreconf -vsfi./configure && make installchecking for wbxml - version >= 0.9.0... no
... so I did the usual "remove the doc part from wbxml2", fix the (redundant) version && make dist && rpm -ta wbxml2-0.9.2.tar.gz
Of course, this requires
Did a braindead port forward for libsoup-2.2.1 to libsoup-2.2.99, which has resolved #159901 and #166627
Still doesn't build... needs gtk-doc, which needs a bazillion other things. This is the patch-flurry of Linux, but I'll tame it...
Sitting in a Starbucks, hacking a change to my project that runs this website, and 14:20 rolls around. I'm not sure what this coincides with, seems it is the time that many, many schoolkids are done for the day. The arrive in packs.
Coffee shops like Starbucks thrive on social groups -- you go for coffee with friends, a neutral space to relax, a space you don't have to keep tidy for others to see if your home life is a bit.. cluttered. Starbucks is a social place. It's been said (shoot, I should find a reference) that girls develop social contacts sooner than boys... based on my own childhood I agree, and I should add that masculine social contacts start as dares: jump over this, follow me, eat this, blow that up, fight, steal the Pink Panther Diamond, etc. It's about dares. Sitting here in the starbucks, seeing that the crowd of kids that wanders in is 95% girls, I wonder if that's enough to prove my point (about the social, not the theft, for which I have no comment, your honour, but that's a nice robe).
We all know that coffee charges up your energy level, but it leaves you a bit... detached, disconnected. I was reading recently that it changes the mind's ability to focus. Caffeine apparently improves the body's ability to function by habit, by procedure, but reduces the ability to focus, innovate, create. The mind is scattered. What's that got to do with kids?
First of all, where did kids get USD4.50 per day to drop on coffee?
14-yr-old kids, still developing physically, by the dehydrating effect of coffee. Also, while learning, their ability to concentrate, focus, learn, is impacted by the scatter-brain effect of coffee. This adds to the scattering effect of a short-attention-span that today's media gives: not a rant against video games, but my own childhood seems relatively boring compared to kids today (only so much fun in feeding chickens and dumping dirt on the leaking pipe in the garden).
I wonder if reducing coffee would improve my effectiveness to my employer. This could be an argument in addition to the diminishing-returns argument of working too long of hours: the caffeine used to combat reduced-sleep actually counters the workplace innovation that is necessary to play my part in the group.
(the image links to an interesting page about cannibalistic practice in business)