Recursive Blog Entry - Pale Albino Edition

Email funnies - now in blog form.

Brian: Between clown Eucharist and that stations of the cross thing, for the life of me I can’t see a compelling reason why I should go back [ to the Episcopal church ]

TJIC: the Catholic church has a lot going for it. Doctrinally, pretty darn close to what the Episcopal Church was a while back, long history, plausible claim to correctness… OK, my bylaws-mandated dose of propaganda has been delivered…

Brian: Roman Catholic agit-prop received - you can tell your albino Jesuit handler that you done good for the day.

I'd be lying if I said that paying a call on the local parish to see what is what isn't tempting. My sister converted years ago, when I attended chapel in the Marines [1] it was the Roman Catholic mass not the Protestant service. Plus all the cool kids are Catholic!

[1] Which wasn't very often, granted.

Down the Barrel of a Gun

When he wrote

And I don't mean to toot my own horn, but the original size of this photo makes a real incredible wallpaper. Put it up and see if you get reactions from co-workers/family. Go ahead, I double-dog dare ya!

He wasn't kidding. It looks awesome on my big CRT at work.

Things in Zimbabwe are bad

Things in Zimbabwe are bad.

How bad are they?

Things are so bad in Zimbabwe that the ruling party can't even rig an election.

A PC - 1950's style

A modern relay computer.

Sure it's clunky to program and can't run Windows but when an EMP bomb scrags all the electronics in North America, guess who is going to be the only guy with a working computer?

Your mouse and your CRT and your hard drive won't be worth much then, will they Sparky? Ah ha ha ha!

Decline

S4C's favorite radical-conservative is heard from ..

I returned last night from a one day trip to Bethlehem, PA. to speak at annual dinner of LEPOCO which was celebrating its 42nd year of peace work in the former steel town.

Upon arriving at the airport I was taken for a quick drive by the old steel works which has long been closed and is rusting and crumbling like other ancient ruins of industry across the nation.

They started their work in 1965. That's when the steel industry in the area started to tank.

Coincidence? I don't think so. We need to awaken the proles that their hard earned blue collar jobs have been stolen with the assistance of the very people that claim to protect them! Fruits come to the gardeners that remain steadfast in nurturing the plants in the garden and those people have been very, very steadfast indeed. It's morning in America and we need to wake up and smell the coffee. Up and at 'em America!


Is it as funny when the indoctrinated look like you?
Is it as cool, as kitschy, as righteous?
Is it as easy to scream “Revolution now!”
if you knew you’d have to give up some of your shit?
Is Mao still a genius when he tells you that your bougie urban
intellectual ass needs to stop reading books and go out into the fields to work?
Did Mao experiment on your family that to make a better world?
Did you know that communism is not theoretical for everyone?

Kelly Tsai - 'Little Red Books'


[1] Nothing in this post is meant to be taken seriously. Except the parts that are.

sqlite3 - commiting to the memory bank

How-To write data to a sqlite database.


natasha:~/rails/azure/db briandunbar$ sqlite3 development.sqlite3 "select * from stuff";
natasha:~/rails/azure/db briandunbar$ sqlite3 development.sqlite3 "insert into stuff (title,description) values ('chair','four legs');"
natasha:~/rails/azure/db briandunbar$ sqlite3 development.sqlite3 "select * from stuff";
1|chair|four legs


Assumes
A sqlite db file named development.sqlite3.
This database has two columns 'title' and 'description'.
That one has nothing else to do on a gloomy afternoon.

Results
Data is written.
Cockatoo looks at you funny when you chuckle madly.

Little Dee

Plus it was neat when things went 'boom' ..



See Little Dee by Chris Baldwin for all your humor needs.

Spring is Here

Spring at S4C.

* The trampoline is up. [1]

* This morning ...

Older Monkey tapped on my window

What?

OM: The frog [2] didn't make it - I found him floating in the pond.

Ah. Where is it?

OM: On the bench.

Well, can you .. bury it?

Five minutes pass. Then from the kitchen I hear ...

Older Sister: Oh my Gawd what the heck is wrong with you! Take that back outside! Ew, that is gross!

OM: Hahahhhaha okay now I'll bury it.

Kids are cool.

[1] I'd take credit for it but Older Monkey asked if he could. Confident he'd need help I went outside and ... done. Kids are amazing and they grow up way too fast.

[2] We have a pond. It's not deep enough for the fish to survive the winter so around September they come inside the house. Last summer we acquired a small frog for the pond but he refused to be caught. We hoped for the best ...

Prosperity

If you could conserve your way to prosperity





Haiti would be rich.

Spiritual consultations

Hmm.

Though Wright and Obama do not often talk one-on-one often, the senator does check with his pastor before making any bold political moves.

How is this different from consulting with a Astrologer?

if you're not careful, you might learn something before it's done - cat and screen

cat makes line numbers

natasha:~/foo briandunbar$ cat foosrt
3
46
52
10
30
natasha:~/foo briandunbar$ sort -n foosrt | cat -n
1 3
2 10
3 30
4 46
5 52


You can put the hostname in screen. Here I've got it in the status line

natasha:~ briandunbar$ cat .screenrc | grep caption
(snip)
caption always "%{wB} %H %{kk} %{gB} %n %t %{kb}| %{wb}%W %= %{kk} %{wB} %D %Y.%m.%d %C %A "
(snip)


Which looks like this ..





Subject Line Tip O' the Hat.

Rack Screw Recommendation

A man who knows his screws.

Most common relay racks for holding electronic equipment have mounting holes in the uprights tapped for 10-32 screws (although there are exceptions). In many places people use whatever sort of screw is available - round head, pan head, binder head and others. As a result of years of experiences, I am now recommending that the preferred screw for holding equipment in racks be the Bud Industries part number 7346 screw.

Boom, done, no argument.

And he's probably right.

Saving so you don't have to eat kibble

It appears that the Obamas are not investing seriously in their retirement ...

Where does Obama Invest His Money?

Ryan Ellis of the American Shareholders Association has examined the Obama returns for calendar years 2001 to 2006 and found that, in all of those years, the couple reported a mere $1,188 in dividends in 2006 and another $2,754 in dividends in 2005. In the previous years, they reported no dividends of any kind.

Given all this, Mr. Ellis asks why the Senator is so “hell-bent on pursuing punitive taxes on capital that would wreck America’s retirement savings?” His answer: Perhaps it’s “because, by and large, he doesn’t have any skin in the game.”

Wait ... he's a lawyer, six years my senior, with essentially no retirement savings?

He's not hell-bent on punitive taxes for it's own sake - he's auditioning for a job with a cushy retirement plan and perks out the wazoo and pretty much a rock-solid guarantee of work after his term is over.

Most people, in a competitive job interview for a coveted billet, will naturally say things that the interviewers want to hear.

He's pursuing the American Dream! Gob'less America.

via.

Documentation

Under the 'you fix it once, you own it' ethos ... I own a report application and server.

The application is so poorly documented that it appears that I've been running OracleAS on this host for going on a year now - but the report tool is really using OracleAS on yet another host so the only thing the server must do is run the application.

It's a little like having a heater running full blast in the basement, venting to a room that no longer exists so there is this farging pipe hanging out of the house venting a blast of warm air into the chill of the Wisconsin winter.

Clarke Event

Protected Static wrote ...

Larry Sessions, a columnist for Earth & Sky, has suggested in his blog that the gamma-ray event whose radiation reached us a few hours before Arthur C. Clarke died, and which occurred 7.5 billion years ago, be named the Clarke Event. The outburst, which produced enough visible light to render it a naked eye object across half the universe, is officially designated GRB 080319B. What more fitting tribute to Clarke than to associate his name with the greatest bang since the big one?

The Clarke Event. I like it.

I second the motion and move that the measure be sent to the floor for immediate consideration.

And by 'sent to the floor' I mean everyone start referring to it that way as if it's the most obvious thing in the world.

Which it is.

Unclear on the concept

This guy

Who was the person who called Steve Martin a Guinuess. He is far From it. He holds the worst comedy act in history. What an idiot this guy is. The King Tutt thing and the Ex-cuse me Thing, had to be the most stupid comedy sketches. Threr are Comic that deserve praize, Like Robbin Williams, I just feel Steve Martin runs around praizing himself and waiting for people to agree with him. "The Jerk" pretty much somes it up. He is one.

falls firmly into the 'doesn't get it' category.

Dialup

I got this many visitors in the last week, by people using dial-up;

Visits - % visits
39 - 1.98%

Who are you people? Why dial-up? Do you like your current provider? What would it take to make you switch?

All kinds of awesome - OS X Edition

Assume you have OS X. Open terminal and type this in, press return.


/System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Versions/A/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/ScreenSaverEngine -background


Your screensaver is now running as background.

Via.

.. and a Con broke out

Brin, Niven and Pournelle [1] showed up for a government panel and a Con broke out.

“Do you know how politically incorrect you are?” Pournelle asked (Niven).

“I know it may not be possible to use this solution, but it does work,” Niven replied.

“My guess is we won’t need quite so many paid agents of the state to do that for us, which means maybe we can try being a republic instead of an incompetent empire,” he (Pournelle) said, then railed against the Transportation Security Administration for treating passengers like “subjects” rather than “citizens.”

The 45-minute panel discussion quickly deteriorated as federal, local and state homeland security officials, and at least one congressional aid, attempted to ask questions, which were largely ignored.

Instead the writers used their time to pontificate on a variety of tangentially related topics, including their past roles advising the government, predictions in their stories that have come to pass, the demise of the paperback book market, and low-cost launch into space.

David Brin, keeping on the topic of empowering citizens with mobile phone technology, delivered a self-described “rant” on the lack of funds being spent to support citizen reservists to back up the military, homeland security officials and first responders in times of crisis.

“It is impossible for you to succeed without us!” he shouted at the assembled officials, while banging his fist on the table and at one point jumping off his chair to wave a mobile phone in their faces

I love it.

[1] And twenty-one others.

Via.

Bruce

When a reply to a comment on a post turns into a long reply .. it's not time to edit, it's time to make it a post!

Sorry... It hit a nerve. In St. Louis, I worked for a woman-owned/minority-owned IT firm. We worked as a subcontractor a lot, and it was taken for granted by the White programmers we subcontracted to that I was a good programmer, while my Black coworker (who was a better programmer than I) had to prove himself continually.

I ran into that when I contracted at the Resolution Trust Corp.

Bruce was the desktop guy. Bruce was good at his job, very professional.

Bruce was also black, a big guy and worked out with weights. His weekend job as a bouncer paid about as much as he was making at RTC.

As do we all from time to time, Bruce had problems to deal with. Where a skinny dude like me can express frustration aloud, when Bruce did it was threatening, or at least that was what we were told by the folks running RTC.

That was weird, to me. I'd just spent eight years in the Marines - guys like Bruce were an asset. The Marines liked physically fit, whip-smart guys. Guys like that got the schools, the meritorious promotions, the interesting jobs.

Guys like Bruce were in the technical fields and made rank and were the go-to people.

Eventually, RTC folded into the FDIC, our contract was assumed. Bruce didn't make the jump with us - he found a better opportunity [1] and was giving serious thought to getting out of IT and doing the bouncer gig full time.

Which sucked - I'd rather have a dozen guys like Bruce working with me than some of the other guys on that crew. [2]


[1] RTC's desktop support needs were minimal and non-taxing - 99% of the desktops were PCs with the hard drive ripped out, booting from floppy and running menu driven from the Banyan Vines servers - all the action was happening on the LAN side. The FDIC was about messed up eleven ways from Sunday and had all kinds of issues and problems on the desktop side - they really needed Bruce there.

[2] They were good guys and gals on that contract [3] but one guy ... he was good but only within the narrow confines of what he knew; give him a problem where he had to think and he was lost.

[3] One of whom I have to thank for the job - thanks, Jay!