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| Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 |
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In Seattle's Georgetown neighborhood, in the blazing sun, was the Artopia festival. And one of the insane stupid things was Power Tool Races. |
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Flowers on 15th, just down the street from my home, was selling these multicolored roses. |
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( cake is behind here, in case melannen fears spoilers! ) It's supposed to rain all day tomorrow. D: |
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| Yayayayay! Yasuhara! ( Spoilerdragons meet Yasuhara; even they are a little in awe of shiny scary boy ) | ||||||
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Good News: I get to work the Dark Knight feast at Bracken Cave in San Antonio. Bad News: The reason I was automatically picked was because of my pick-up. I get to haul a bunch of stuff... therefore, I'm driving a bunch of shite about 70 miles each way. Good News: They're paying for my gas... that day... before I even go. Chef says I may even make $20 in gas over what it costs me... Bad News: The three definately going right now are Chef, myself and... D. D doesn't drive. I may get stuck driving D an hour and a half each way... fuck... |
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The modern penchant for inventing terms for everything amuses me. I'm ambivalent about it - on the one hand, coinages help us be both precise and concise within the circle of Those Who Know. On the other, they are instruments of exclusion, and sometimes they seem just plain unnecessary. For instance, I was talking to someone about how we are planning to raise our forthcoming baby, and they asked me if we were planning on "co-sleeping" and "babywearing". I replied with something along the lines of "uh, yes, if those things mean what they sound like they mean." My parents let me sleep with them as a baby, and carried me around a lot of the time, but I don't recall them ever using those terms. They just did it. Likewise "lifehacking", about which there is a book and everything now. Back in the day this used to be referred to as "being resourceful". It doesn't bother me too much, because for some reason I seem to have the knack for intuitively inferring the meaning of even obscure terms when I first see or hear them; and on the rare occasion this ability fails, my google-fu is superb. But then I'll find myself using one of these neologisms in conversation with Stacey and she'll look at me like I'm from Neptune. Do we really need terms like "babywearing"? It seems like they often go hand-in-hand with being a member of a clique, usually an elitest one. ("Are you an Attachment Parent(tm)? Awesome, me too! Wait, you don't take your baby into the bathroom with you when you poo? You fraud! Your poor children!"*) On the flip side, I guess they let you geek out about subjects which were previously un-geekable. On that note, I think I'm going to sockfoot upstairs and do some brainflushing in my lawnpatch. * Not a conversation I've actually had with anyone. Thank goodness. |
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I’m not getting much time for photography; my schedule is still badly overloaded. Yesterday the two other attendees were late for a meeting I had scheduled, so I stepped outside of the meeting room onto the balcony and took a few snapshots. I seemingly carry a camera more for exercise than for actual usage. I do have another (very small) photography project lined up. The first step is completed as this morning I won my very first eBay auction. Sugoi! More details to come (much later this month). |
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| Just in case anyone else, like me, can buy prescription drugs more cheaply overseas with cash than having insurance pay for them in the U.S., I'd like to recommend CanadaDrugs.com. They probably aren't the absolute cheapest provider around, but I've been using them for a year and a half and have found their service and response time to be superb. Most recently I placed an order at night and the prescription had run out. They called the doctor, got reauthorization, and then an actual human called me on the phone to let me know everything was OK and it had been shipped less than two days later. | ||||||
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So, I've set up hylonome (one of the decTOPs) to be the new radius server, using a mysql backend. The eventual goal there will be to make it trivial to add guests to the access list, just by popping up recent failed mac addresses in a web interface. Person comes over, tries to connect, gets denied, I go clicky clicky and they're in. I won't have to ssh into the server, edit the radius users file, restart radius, and then they're in. I want to move DHCP over to hylonome as well, but the standard ISC dhcpd doesn't do sql, and there don't seem to be a lot of options that do. Anemon appears to be a dhcp server written in python, which does talk to SQL, but it doesn't look all that impressive from what I've browsed on their website. There's apparently a version of ISC's that's been hacked to work with SQL, but the reference I found to it indicated it didn't actually /work/. So I'm trying to decide between a system that maintains the data in the db, writes a dhcpd.conf, and restarts the server as needed (there're already solutions that do that), or trying anemon and seeing if it works out, or doing my own sql hack to the isc version. Anybody know of other good options? All I really need to be able to do is maintain a list of mac->domainname mappings, preferably with metadata like the name of the device. It absolutely MUST support multiple MACs having the same domain name associated to them. It doesn't even need to come with any admin interface, I'm perfectly happy writing my own (and probably would anyway). |
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The manager quietly granted my request to take my vacation week at the end of this month. This means I can do Blogathon again, after not being able to last year. Blogathon involves posting every half hour for 24 hours, for charity. This year's date is Saturday, July 26. I did it in 2006, on runes, but was unable to register on the official site at blogathon.org because of the requirement to start at 9 am Eastern Time, which would have meant taking two days off work instead of one. I'd hoped to be an official participant this time and see if I could raise more money for my charity that way . . . but the official apparatus will not be there this year. So what the heck, I'll do it anyway. I've joined ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif){kind=small} blogathon_2008 and I'll probably start at 9 am Eastern (6 am PDT) with the rest of the unofficial participants. I'll be blogging again for DELTA Rescue.I hope I can raise some money for the cats and dogs. But I do want to emphasize that I know most of my friends are short on money. I'll be grateful for anything anyone can give, but won't be disappointed if people don't. Just as important to me is the actual writing. I'll be spending as much as possible of the rest of my week writing; I have projects stacked to the ceiling. But I'm setting aside that twenty-four-hour period for writing here. Does anyone have any ideas for what I should do with these 48-49 entries? I'm failing to come up with a good one. There's a meme going around to challenge people with a topic on each of the letters of the alphabet . . . but even that's only 26. And I'd like it to be something more focused because people are more likely to come back to read the entries than to read them in real-time. (I'll try to remember to make the "You may wish to unfriend me for the weekend!" post the prior week as I did in '06.) Suggestions? Requests? |
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| Each week put 30 former Starbucks employees in Key Arena with vats of massage oil, spike their water with MDMA and charge $20 bucks a head to watch. | ||||||||
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| Hellboy II is premiering on the 11th of July. Who wants to go see it? Reply in comments, and let me know if you have a theater preference. | ||||||
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I'm now an official volunteer at SETI. Of course I've been working on my project for the past week at home, and will continue to do so, but now I have an access card and time sheets (where I can log all the time I don't get paid for) and I've watched the 45 minute video including the bird that sits on the high-tension power line and explodes. Mainly what this all gives me is a) a cool entry for my resume and b) a place to go sit in the summer when it's really freakin' hot out and I want someone else to pay the electrical bills for air conditioning. Within a few days my little software suite is going to be full-featured enough to do some real science. My first job is to reproduce the results of another group in South America to make sure everything is working correctly. Then we go on to flesh out the data to be able to write a real paper. Unfortunately, I'm realizing that this whole "not working" thing is making me broke. The crashing stock market certainly isn't helping. I'm going to have to cut back on my SETI work a little bit and go do some more flying so I can pay the bills. |
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This piece of awesome, which I found when Melissa posted it over on Shakesville, needs no explanation:
Originally published at The Last Exit to Babylon. Please leave any comments there. |
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My cell phone seems to be missing. This is not good. Otherwise, things are ducky. Wonder if I'll have any luck on this one... |
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Charles W. "Chuck" Colson explains that there are no atheists, only delusional egotists Yes, even atheists pray because the image of God is implanted in us. Independent studies have showed that we yearn to know God. It’s the way we’re wired. So to be an atheist takes a stubborn refusal to acknowledge that which deep down we all know to be true. I have, in fact, never met an atheist. When a person professes to be one, I ask him to offer me the proof that God does not exist. I’ve never had anyone successfully respond to that question. Most retreat and say they’re really agnostics. I then ask them if they have examined every religion exhaustively. Their answer is usually no. I explain they cannot be agnostics unless they are sure that God can’t be known. There are no atheists. There are simply people whose pride overwhelms their innate knowledge. Asshole. |
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Released the first alpha of my project. And I've been pretty happy with the results so far. Gotten some good feedback and there is lots more work to be done. The project is based on Pentaho and uses a Vertica cluster as the DB backend. I've gotten pretty amazing results out of the combination. I've been spending a lot of time working with two community additions to Pentaho, the Community Build Framework (CBF) and the Community Dashboard Framework (CDF). These two amazing projects are being driven by Pedro Alves, a BI consultant specializing in Pentaho. They have really allowed my project to move along rapidly in the direction I wanted to take it. The other exciting thing I hope to blog about further in the near future is the choropleth map I managed to implement in Pentaho. It was based on an example from Chris Schmidt. While writing this post, I just discovered that he lives nearby. I think I might have to take him out to lunch as a treat for the help he's given me. :) I need to look into integrating the Simile Timeplot widget into my Pentaho dashboards. I really need the ability to provide rich annotations for momentary or duration events. |
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| ( The unfinished novel meme... with bonus list of books that may never get written at all, and two bonus novellas ) | ||||||||||
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Step 2a made me think of cvillette, can't think why....
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In a discussion of the liturgy of Yom Kippur,
Rabbi Yitzchak said of the person leading prayers: let respect for
the congregation be always upon you, for the kohanim (when they bless
the people) stand facing the congregation and with their backs to the
divine presence. Rabbi Nachman said this is derived from "David the
king stood and said 'hear me, my brethren and my people'" (I Chron 28:2).
Why both "brethren" and "people"? If you listen to me you are my
brethren; if you do not you are my people who I will rule with a rod.
(40b)
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Happy birthday, theferrett!
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Yup. Some of you may remember one from a while back. We'll do it again. Once again, it's a shot of me in the middle of translating for a presenter at, this time, an insurance seminar. I have no idea what I was saying or when this was taken by J... So. The person that comes up with the best caption wins something unique from Japan :D Of course the judge is me...soooo yeah. Fair? Probably not. But eh. At least I'm willing to look at my own pic and go "what the HELL was I saying??"  (^_^) |
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At work we use Subversion for version control. We chose Subversion for a couple of reasons:
Anyway, this post isn't really about Subversion. Instead, it's about Git and git-svn. If you work with Subversion repositories and you're using the usual svn client, stop right now and install git and git-svn[1]. I did, and my source code management experience improved dramatically. By using git-svn, you get all the benefits of a modern source control management system as well as a nearly seamless interface to Subversion. Some of the most useful features of git for me are:
Mercurial does have some of these features, and I like Mercurial. But the thing that sold me on git was the Subversion integration. [1] git-svn requires the Subversion perl bindings. I don't care if you think this is too many dependencies, it's still worth it. |
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Been a while since I last posted. Why? Because this trip, as with most other trips, is kicking my sorry ass... One thing after another after another...no time to worry about jet lag...actually, the jet lag helps since that means I get up earlier which means I get more work done during the day...which also means it's draining me...blaaaaaaaaah. Also, I totally forgot that next week is the G8 Summit here in Tokyo. Tons of police at stations. The lockers can't be used at all. And there are possible delays and such with the transportation. Dammit. All I really care about though? That I don't run into any protests between me and where I need to be... Of course it just took 1.5 hours to write this much since in between I got a bunch of phone calls and work e-mails that was urgent...fun times...fun times... HOWEVER, throughout all this there is a silver lining. I got some pictures :) It's the typical "picture tour" of the normal, weird, and yummy. We will lead it off with a buttload of bicycles. For the rest, make sure you click on the link to see the rest!  This isn't anything strange or unique here in Japan and probably in most other Asian and European countries. You don't see it much in the US though. This is along the side of a narrow street and went on forever and every single one of the spaces were taken. That's a lot of bikes. And since the street is too narrow, the bikes were all up against the wall. This went pretty far back behind me (about a 10 minute walk) and went all the way to the station. I have no idea how you find your own in this... I have enough problems finding my car in a parking lot... ( Click for more! ) |
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It's time for you to just scroll on past....
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| Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 |
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On to book two of Sign of the Seven! I definitely liked this one better than Book 1, for a couple of reasons. One, I liked Fox as a male lead character better than I liked Caleb. He's a more thoughtful character, in more ways than one; there's the obvious thing about his being telepathic, but also, in general, he's more analytical than Caleb and that worked better for me as a character trait. Also, I was quite charmed that he could juggle. And, dude, he plays the guitar. Automatic swoon points for a male lead who's a musician, what can I say? (Though I have to take issue with a couple of the leading ladies asking each other: "Why are guitar players so sexy?" "It's the hands!" Not for me! It's the music.) Layla as the female lead in this book is not nearly as much of a benevolent bulldozer as Quinn, yet I liked her too. She's more vulnerable, more fragile, and yet she also demonstrated her strength after having to wrestle around with her personal demons in the first bit of the book. She and Fox had some very charming chemistry together as well. Plot-wise, things do kick up a notch, although we're still building to the main event of the Seven. Our heroes and heroines figure out a few critical background details, even as the Big Bad revs up its own strength and does a pretty decent job going after Fox early in the book and then after all six of the main characters later on. The final scene, where the six of them need to accomplish a specific ritual task to prepare themselves for the forthcoming confrontation, has some suitably powerful description going on. Though, really--I think Nora's handling of the supernatural elements of this trilogy is more effective when she's not pulling out all the stops. For example, one bit that really stood out for me for how evocative it was is this one: "The demon in a child's form laughed. Then it opened its mouth, wide as a cave, and swallowed itself." Still, I'm looking forward to seeing how she does indeed gear up for the main event in Book 3--and how Gage and Cybil take their turn at center stage. Gage the rogue, the gambler, the precognitive... I think I'm going to like him too. ;) For this book, though, three and a half stars. |
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Arthur Foss (star of Tugboat Annie -- it was the Tugboat, not the Annie) ( Read more... ) |
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| Thursday, July 3rd, 2008 |
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Via ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/syndicated.gif){kind=small} physorg_med, reported on by the Chicago Tribune and WNBC (NYC).From WNBC Caught On Camera: Patient Dies Alone In E.R.Video at that link. More story at the Chicago Tribune. Also, the Chicago Tribune has a blog ("Triage: Making Sense of health care"), at which a letter from the president of the hospital is reprinted. To the doctor who looked and walked away: good luck with your incipient case of Major Depressive Disorder and/or PTSD. This may constitute all the counseling you get, because, like, I suspect, many therapists, while I feel for you as a human being who in your frailty fucked up in a way which violated your core values, your identity, and everything you've built of your self and your life, honestly I would have trouble getting past my counter-transferential issues in this case, which largely consist of the feeling of wanting to beat you to death with a shovel. |
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More of the five icon meme. |
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| Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008 |
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come here, little girl get into the car it's a brand new cadillac. bright red. |
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For over 80 years it has been believed that much of Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" was lost. But recently, a complete copy was found in Buenos Aires. Hot damn! |
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There's a parlor game going around that calls for the poster to list three things he has done that he doesn't think any of his readers have done. I think I must be too boring; I can't think of three (that would also be interesting enough to post).
I keep a log for Erik, recording anything unusual and all medication starts/stops. I started doing this because I thought there might be correlations between meds and appetite changes; none have emerged so far, but it's turned out to be useful in other ways. ("Any vomiting?" "June 2, in the morning". "You know that stuff?") So anyway... Erik's appetite had been low last week, so at my vet's direction I gave him fluids for a few days (also logged). Things got better so I stopped, but Monday he was back to not eating so I hit him again, this time with a bit more because I could (150ml). Tuesday's log entry: "oink". :-) Good to see that work sometimes... (The healthy appetite has continued today.) I have a minor workplace mystery. Yesterday someone left me a post-it note containing a charge code and nothing else, and used my Sharpie to do so without recapping it (so it was dried out and useless). I asked the usual suspects, but no one recognized the code. Shrug. Today I came in to find my entire post-it pad and several pens missing. WTF? I have the back desk in a two-person enclosed space; it's unlikely that a passerby needed a pen or some paper and my desk was the most convenient source. I wonder what surprise will greet me tomorrow. Language peeves: "council" is a body; "counsel" is what advisors give. "Populous" means there are lots of people; "populace" is the people. The "populous" should not be giving "council" to anyone, ok? (Both of these errors are common on SCA mailing lists.) Language Log reproduces some careless spam from Barnes and Noble. I like the poster's method of thanking them.
Funny cat video via Something in our house is chirping intermittently. It sounds like a smoke detector, but we've changed all the relevant batteries and it hasn't stopped. It does not happen predictably (and when it does it chirps only once), so it's very hard to localize. Whee.
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Here's a li'l story from back when I was a tenured (10-yeared) grad student, illustrating the importance of a particular Good Student Survival Skill. [Excerpted from a comment I made else-LJ] Many years ago, in grad school, I took a grad-level math class for my minor -- the first grad-level math class I'd ever taken. It was "Applied Algebra"[*], and I was worried about it. I'd hoped the 'applied' in the title would save me, since I was no theoretical mathematician. Once class started, that worry became terror -- I was way out of my depth, and I knew it. There was all sorts of theoretical gibberish I could make neither head nor tail of, and no textbook. I suspect the professor was a lousy teacher, but I was so lost I couldn't even properly judge that! I frantically scribbled it all down, and was terrified. There was to be an ORAL FINAL, which was to be most of our grade. Aieeeeeee! I'm bad at oral exams anyway, and this was on stuff I was completely lost in. During my frantic notetaking, I remember one day this crazy prof got particularly excited about some of the gibberish, making a big fat hairy deal about it, so I applied a Good Student Survival Skill and circled it in my notes, and put a Big Star on the page of notes. So in preparing for the exam I saw that star, and made sure one of things I could do for the exam was regurgitate the gibberish on that page, even if I understood none of it. The day of the exam, apparently my time slot was one of the later ones (prolly chosen by me, 'cause I'm SO not a Morning Person). I went in, terrified. The prof asked me, effectively, "What was that gibberish I was so excited about?" I jotted a few bits from that page of notes. He then got very excited, and stopped me from writing further. "Wow, you're the first person today to get that!", he said. He then proceeded to expound on that gibberish, going on and on about it while I nodded politely, for the rest of my exam time. I got an A in the class. I still wonder to this day what it was about (both the allegedly exciting gibberish and the entire class), and am still offended that the 'applied' part of the class was never addressed in the slightest. The shocking bit to me, though, was that in a class full of Graduate Students (OK, there were only about 10 or 12), I was the only person to take note of this prof's excitement and attachment of importance to that particular gibberish. How did these other grad students get to that late point in their studental lives without learning that Good Student Survival Skill?!! ------------------- [*] Actually the title of the course may have been "Applied Abstract Algebra". I remember so little from that course.... *sigh* UPDATE: Whoa, the title of the course just popped into my head: "Applied Algebraic Structures". Still don't know what it was about! ;) |
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I fear I'm going to miss BiCamp 2008. This time from a work conflict. My fault, for not getting it on my work calendar soon enough. I accidentally gave the client du jour 10 hours instead of 8 today. I got involved in building a query... My bank, BECU, is guilty of the third party password antipattern, doing it against another bank!!! Overheard: It's not so much a Pride Party, as it is a Shameless Party. The current big hacking project is fun! When it settles down, I'm going to port all my storage engine work to it. |
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Alex: We're all bees. I'm the queen bee. Me: I guess you lay lots and lots of eggs, huh? Alex (very proudly): I also mate! Me: ... Alex: I mate! I mate with the... what kind of bee is it? Me: The drones? Alex: Yeah. I mate with many drones. |
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| As tends to be tradition for my b'day I plan to go to Sharis for pie at about 1 am. If you wish you're welcome to join. RSVP via text or cell. | ||||||
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how to suddenly feel really good about yourself: have two job interviews in one day and have both interviewers offer you a position. have one of the interviewers tell you she really hopes you take the job with her but that she thinks you'll be great at whatever you choose to do. have the other interviewer tell you that the interview was basically just a formality because she decided you'd be great for the job when you picked up the application the day before. so, yeah, fantastic ego boost today. just when i've been needing one too. i've been feeling like a loser recently because of the whole no job, no degree (well, okay i have a degree, but i was supposed to have another by now), totally sponging off my sister thing. pretty much hit an all time low when i had to borrow some money from Gwen to keep my checking account from going under when they take my gym membership fee out here in a day or two. but i'm good now. : ) also, i finally got my economic stimulus check, so i didn't actually end up needing the borrowed cash. just in time for having fun with skorzy while he's up here visiting people and my trip to Arizona next week. trip? you say. what trip? ah, yes, my trip. i talked around with my parents, and we decided that i should fly down to AZ and then the three of us can caravan up. we'll share three drivers over the two vehicles, and i can have my truck up here! just when i'll be getting a job. fantastic timing. : )now i just have to decide which job to take...or maybe both. job #1 is as a trainer at Curves. $8.07 / hour plus commissions off of sales of Curves merchandise...and my membership for free. job #2 is as a sales cleark at The Children's Place. $9 / hour plus a 30% discount (only good for buying stuff for Zoe, who already has a ton of clothing) and some sort of health plan. obviously, The Children's Place is the better single job, but i really like the managers and feel of both places. also, working both would give me the chance to not just tread water but start doing stuff like paying off my credit cards, saving for tuition, or saving for my student loans. of course, working means less time for my thesis (though having limited time in which to work may actually mean me actually doing more work...i'm odd like that), less time for possibly taking the classes for that Ecosystem Restoration certificate at UW, and less time for seeing people...including the people i live with. that is one thing that worries me about doing a retail job, in particular. i'm likely to get evening and weekend hours which are the only times i can see Gwen, Zoe, and Norm anyway. now, i know that i see them a lot more now than i'd see them if i had a normal job and lived in my own place, so this shouldn't be a big deal. i really enjoy being part of their lives, though. oh well, we'll see. i'm going to talk through everything with Gwen and Norm before i decide. anyway, that's my good day. |
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Who knows something about painting on plastic? Remember those storage containers? And remember that comic? Well, what I'd intended to do was to see if Codak would do a life-sized version of the 'Food <cookie> ?' design that I could print out and affix to the container. But it occurs to me that I'd have to take it off to wash them. So, I think painting it would be a better options. So, what would be the best way to go about that? And who's good at painting cookies? |
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| Tired. Continuing to fail at packing. Must feed cat and self, in that order, before doing anything else. | ||||||
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voidampersand! Have a good one, and here's some virtual fireworks (because California has too many fires as it is right now!)...
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Friends LiveJournal for fuse_sat.
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artistic.
You're Welcome.
hungry.
fannish.
amused.
tired.
hot.
happy.