/dev/zero

What is it with people who write advertisment copy?

Every time I see an ad on TV for a new home exercise machine, they use the phrase “more work in one effortless motion”.
Excuse me, but since when is work “effortless”? The point of exercise is to burn energy. The entire point is that it IS effort. If it wasn’t an effort, you wouldn’t be burning any energy. If you don’t burn energy, you don’t lose weight.
They want to project this image that you can use their machine to lose weight, without actually having to work. You don’t have to get out of breath, sweaty, have achy muscles, etc. Yet it’s impossible to do any effective exercise without getting out of breath and sweaty.

What the F?
Someone posted a comment to my posting on weird Ebay folks consisting of all sorts of “penis enlargement” keywords.

Now spammers are taking advantage of the ability to post comments to people’s blogs to send spam.

Someone posted the following as a comment to “Ebay people are strange, redux.” - Note the “if this is inappropriate” text at the bottom of the link. NO, it is NOT ok to post your completely NOT relevant spam to my blog, then make it my responsibility to get rid of it. (I did, but only because I have no choice. This theft of resources goes FAR beyond email spamming. When spamming by email, you’re stealing my server quota (if any), and my cost to run my server and/or my cost for bandwidth to download said spam. With blog spamming, you’re doing all of the above, and forcing me to publish your spam for you, potentially generating more unwanted traffic, for which I must pay.)
Someone else just posted another comment to the same blog entry containing the whoppingly brilliant content of (and this is an exact quote): “Hey”.
Only a first name given, with a bogus email address. Of course, I have to thank them in a way. When they posted their comment on this old blog entry, I got an email notifying me. It was only then that I looked at the comments for that entry (thinking perhaps the email had gotten truncated and perhaps “Kyle” had something more scintillating to say) that I noticed the spam posted over a month ago, but somehow I never saw the email.

As usual, I’m posting when I should be in bed.
Last week they started digging lots of holes around the house in preparation for jacking up the foundation, which has settled.
Last Sunday, Dad had something resembling a heart attack. He still has to go back to the cardiologist for some tests.

Apparently he had a heart attack in 1997 that no one saw fit to tell me about. Apparently of all my siblings, I was the only one who wasn’t told. Again.
This week, they started digging holes INSIDE the house for jacking up the foundation. Watching someone take a jackhammer to the middle of your living room is a surreal experience, let me tell you.
I had a mid-term in Advanced Food Prep and Macro Economics last week. Got a C in Food Prep, and a high C / low B in Macro Econ.
This week, midterm in Basic Food Prep (I think I got about a C) and Intro. to Economics. I think I got about a B there, to. I need to discuss one of the questions with the instructor when he gets back from his conference. None of the multiple choices made sense for the question, but one of them DID make sense if he made a typo in the question. So I gave that answer. And I’m 100% sure none of the choices could have been correct, and 100% sure the answer I gave would be correct if made the typo I think he did.
(Your company has a TFC of $10,000 to produce an item, wth an AVC of $30/unit. You can sell the product for $50/unit. How many units would you have to sell to break even?)
TFC + (AVC * Units made) == Price * Units sold
$10,000 + ($30 * x) = $50 * x.
$10,000 + ($30 * 500 units) = $25,000 = $50 * 500 units.
But the choices were

1. 3334
2. 3335
3. 5000
4. 5001

However: $100,000 + ($30 * 5,000) = $250,000 = $50 * 5,000.
So if he typod and and meant TFC of $100,000, answer c works. None of the given choices works with a TFC of $10,000.
This is also exactly the kind of problem we learned to solve in the first week of Intermediate Algebra. Even if I couldn’t do it algebraicly, I had my trusty TI-86 with me (we were allowed a calculator during the exam), and I just needed to punch in the two equations and see where their graphs intersect. Or with numbers like these, use the table function. Trying to find a window setting that will show the intersection of the graphs is a pain.
Which is just a long winded way of saying knowledge learned in the two classes overlaps.
It’s also another way of saying: I’m actually learning in Intermediate Algebra. Not just learning but passing. And not just passing, either. I’m aceing the class. Which is saying something since I failed it at least twice, and possibly 3 times already. (I can’t actually remember how many times I failed the class now.) But an extra 10 years, a different college, different teacher, a calculator that practicly does the work for you (which is required for the class), and an approach to teaching the subject matter that actually helps you understand what it is the calculator is doing will do that I guess. I used to say I loved math until I got to algebra. I hated algebra. I just didn’t grok algebra. I loved geometry. The numbers in geometry meant something to me. Not algebra.
I get algebra now. If I get at least a B in this class (in the bag) I’ll continue on and study more math. And I’ll try to get into sections taught by this teacher, to. She treats us like a bunch of high school students (it’s clear she taught high school for many years), and she constantly makes simple errors on the overhead, but she’s good at communicating the material.

Ok, I’ve rambled enough. Bed time. I have to go to church in the morning.

Dad’s in the hospital tonight.
We went out and got Mom a wireless network card (Netgear WP54g) yesterday to replace the HPNA card she has, but it was DOA. I put it in her computer and it refused to boot. Wouldn’t even POST. I tried it in my computer and it did the same thing. So after church today, Dad and I took it back to Microcenter and got a Linksys card instead. I stuck it in and Mom’s computer would POST, but then give a “Parity Check 1 0000″ error. In my computer, it wouldn’t even POST. So back to Microcenter we go for a 3rd time, and this time we pick up a USB wireless adaptor (Belkin). As we’re walking away from the service desk and heading back to the car, Dad tells me he’s feeling some pressure in his chest. We get in the car and start driving for home. About 3 blocks later, Dad starts fiddling with the GPS navigation system, which is odd since we’re just going straight home and he knows the way. I ask what he’s looking up and he tells me the nearest hospital. Then he calls Mom from his cell phone to let her know and we go to Richardson Regional Medical Center.
Boy the check-in person pissed me off. We walk in and the first station is the cashier. That alone struck me as rather odd. So we go to the an available cashier, she asks what we need, Dad says he’s having chest pressure and fears it may be a heart attack. She asks him to be seated and tells us to wait a minute while she finishes up taking care of another patient’s paperwork. She spends several minutes doing that, then comes back to us and spends 10 minutes getting Dad’s name, SSN, drivers license, insurance card, initial here, here, here and here, sign here and here… I’m thinking “My god, he may be having a heart attack and the first thing you’re worried about is the billing! Where’s the triage nurse? Take care of triage first, THEN worry about whether or not you’re bloody getting paid!” Then when she finished with her stuff, she had him go back and sit down in the waiting room.
Luckily it was less than 5 minutes after that before a nurse was out with a wheel chair to take him back to be evaluated.
Once they got him to an exam area, things went pretty quick. Got him wired up right away and the monitor looked pretty good (to my layman’s eyes). Normal heart rhythm, good blood ox, normal BP. They drew some blood and sent it up to the lab, took a chest x-ray, then had to quickly wheel his bed into another room as the Richardson Fire Dept. was bringing in a severe case and they needed the “severe trauma” room we were in.
The rest of the day / evening passed pretty slowly, with different nurses coming in to check on him, the ER doc coming back once to check on him, then Dad’s regular doctor showed up to check on him. The blood tests came back negative for the various cardiac enzymes and what not they look for that indicate a heart attack. The pressure, slight nausea and shortness of breath he described, we were told were non-specific symptoms. They COULD indicate a heart attack or other cardiac distress, or they could be symptoms of something else. It is a case of “we can’t positively conclude you DID have a heart attack, but we can’t positively conclude you didn’t.” so they’re keeping him overnight for observation. They’ll take blood tests a couple more times to check for cardiac enzymes and have a cardiologist do a stress test in the morning to check for angina. With luck he’ll be back home tomorrow afternoon.

So it seems the only thing everyone in California can talk about today is the election, and how stupid it is that, through a democratic process, the governor has been recalled. “Oh those NASTY republicans, trying to steal more power with their sneaky sneaky ways! They can’t win at the ballot box, so they use these un-democratic means!” Uh… yeah. The people have an election and vote to recall someone and it’s “undemocratic”… OK…. I’d sure like to see the definition of “democracy” these people are complaining about being violated…

I watched my first episode of “The restaurant” tonight. My take? STOP HIRING FUCKING ACTORS AND EXPECTING THEM TO MAKE GOOD FOOD SERVICE STAFF!!! What was the figure I heard one of them mentioning? They got over 4,000 applications for the waiter positions? That is what is known, in the theater business, as a “cattle call”. Where did they advertise the openings, Variety? “Need 5 waiters for a hot new TV show. Must be able to look frustrated on camera. Ability to actually get a customer’s order right and get the food to the table while it’s still hot completely irrelevant.”
EVERY person on that show (except for the dinners) is a drama queen. And top on that list is Topher. If I had been in that staff meeting where everyone was airing their gripes, the first words out of my mouth would have been “Topher, drop the ‘flaming fag’ act, OK?” That’s the worst, most over-used cliché on television today (Don’t even get me started on that guy from Queer Eye for the Straight Guy).
Rocco is a real prize himself. The guy has this huge ego about how great a restaurant he has (”It’s the hottest restaurant in the city!” In a city with, what, 5,000 restaurants, most of whom CAN get food to the table hot?) yet he obviously hasn’t a clue what he’s doing. And someone else was talking about how he’s this really great, hot chef. Uhm, he’s like 25… He isn’t old enough to enough years under his belt in any decent kitchen to have established himself with much of a reputation. I mean, had anyone ever even heard of this guy before NBC decided to throw lots of money at him to open a restaurant?

Ok, that’s just my problems with the personalities on the show. Now for the cooking we get to see on camera.
Not ONE person in that kitchen had a hat or even so much as a hair net on. That would get them shut down by the health department right there.
Tonight, they were having problems with something dripping through the ceiling. They’re standing around debating WHAT the substance is. Uhm… I’d be a little less concerned with figuring out what it is, and more concerned with NOT PREPARING FOOD RIGHT UNDER THE DRIPS! And throw out the food that’s just sitting there being dripped on.

I’m watching the movie The Red Violin on Bravo. I’d been told about the amazing, hauntingly beautiful music in this movie. So far I’m not really very impressed. The story is intriguing, but while the music is good, it isn’t that good. I much prefer, say, Cho-Liang Lin’s performance of Hayden’s Concerto in C Major.

Just discovered two old, formerly very close friends are on Livejournal.
Densaer and Mitrian.

Densaer is one of the reasons I miss California.
Mitrian… well, best I not comment about her. Suffice it to say I mourn the loss of that friendship, but it was by her choice.

Now, I have a macro economics class in 5 hours. I need sleep.

Remind me not to begin upgrades of mailing list software at 1:00 AM.
I just finished getting an updated version of Mailman working.

Not only did I have to go through the config file carefully, and spend an hour scratching my head when it didn’t work as documented (it would be nice if the EXAMPLE showed the single quote characters it turned out it needed around a strong!), but the new version changes how it talks to it’s SMTP server.
Instead of simply re-mailing messages to list members with “RCPT to:<member@address.com>”, it goes and changes it to “RCPT to:<listname-bounces+member=address.com@list.domain.name>”.
For the longest time I thought my sendmail config was broken ’cause it appeared to be barfing all over the damn +detail email addresses. I was going through sendmail docs trying to figure out how to activate that functionality (which was never broken before), when I realized I had to create a whole new set of aliases in the /etc/aliases file for already existing lists. The old version only required 4 aliases:
listname
listname-admin
listname-bounces
listname-request

The new version adds:
listname-bounces
listname-confirm
listname-join
listname-leave
listname-subscribe
listname-unsubscribe

IE: It’s trying to be Majordomo. If I wanted all that majordomo’ish crap, I’d run majordomo. Which is crap.
Anyway, the new version adds a bunch of functionality I’ve been waiting for for nearly 2 years.
Namely the ability to strip out HTML messages, virtual domain hosting functions, and a way for non-root users to create their own mailing lists. Though I haven’t tested that out fully yet. We shall see.
Anyway, time <YAWN!> for some shuteye.