Archive for March, 2005

Mar 31 2005

Just for fun

Published by Andrew under Uncategorized

OK, just for the heck of it, name the person who said it, on what show / movie:

  1. “I’ve eaten a river of liver and an ocean of fish.”
  2. “There’s no such thing as hooker-client confidentiality.”
  3. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this…”
  4. “I wanted to ask you a couple of questions while I have you here. I’m interested in selling my youngest daughter into slavery as sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. She’s a Georgetown sophomore, speaks fluent Italian, always cleared the table when it was her turn. What would a good price for her be? While thinking about that, can I ask another? My Chief of Staff ${name} insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2 clearly says he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill him myself or is it okay to call the police? Here’s one that’s really important because we’ve got a lot of sports fans in this town: touching the skin of a dead pig makes one unclean. Leviticus 11:7. If they promise to wear gloves, can the Washington Redskins still play football? Can Notre Dame? Can West Point? Does the whole town really have to be together to stone my brother John for planting different crops side by side? Can I burn my mother in a small family gathering for wearing garments made from two different threads? Think about those questions, would you?”
  5. A: “OK guys, the party’s over.”
    B: “Was the music too loud?”
    A: “No, the furniture is too on fire.”
  6. “Could you please remove any metallic items you may be carrying, keys, loose change…
  7. “You know, people think kids don’t listen to their parents, but they do. And if you tell them they are nothing, they think they are nothing.”
  8. “I told you, I’m a pro. I get hit in the head all the time.”
  9. “You have a problem with authority. You believe you are special, that somehow the rules do not apply to you. Obviously, you are mistaken.”
  10. “You have the right to remain silent. And unless you want me to leave you alone in the car with my partner, I would suggest that you use it.”
  11. “I hate the damn army, but I love these people.”
  12. “Why, why, oh why do you ask me questions that you absolutely positively know I’m not going to answer?”
  13. “You can say what you want. It’s always the guy in my job that ends up doing 18 months in Danbury minimum security prison.”
  14. “Civil liberties, good. Lawyers, bad.”
  15. “Let me see if I got this. The third story on the news tonight was that someone I didn’t know thirteen years ago when I wasn’t president participated in a demonstration where no laws were being broken in protest of something that so many people were against, it doesn’t exist anymore. Just out of curiosity, what was the fourth story?”
  16. “I know what you’ve been doing… why you hardly sleep, why you live alone, and why night after night, you sit by your computer.”

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Mar 30 2005

Augh!

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Dad has allergies. Mom developed allergies later in life.

My brother had terrible allergies and asthma as a kid. I always felt kinda sorry for him back then. For a while he couldn’t eat tomatoes, milk, chocolate. All things I love. And you gotta feel sorry for a kid who can’t have chocolate. On Halloween this worked out well for me. We’d go trick-or-treating, then during the ritual of the parent inspecting the candy before you could eat any, I’d get most of his chocolate in exchange for my hard candy. Seemed like I got the better end of that deal to me.

Just the other night I was telling Dad that David seemed to get my share of the allergy inheritance.
But it appears I’m developing some sort of seasonal allergy. The last couple of weeks I’ve had itchy, watery eyes, constant sneezing, runny nose. No congestion or other breathing trouble, no headaches, body aches, fever or anything so I know it’s not a flu or cold.
Not the best time to get my contact lens prescription renewed. My eyes have been itching like crazy. The doc switched me to another brand, so I’m supposed to wear them for a week before I decide if they’re right for me. I can’t tell if this brand is right or not, with this allergic reaction.

I’m supposed to see my regular doctor to check up on another prescription in about a week. I think I’m going to call and ask if they can do an allergy test while I’m at it.

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Mar 30 2005

State income tax, when you neither live nor work in the state?

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This is just plain ridiculous.

Court rules telecommuter must pay taxes

This sets a rather disturbing precedent. Next thing you know, the Court of International Trade will use this precedent to rule that an American employee of a European company has to pay that country’s income taxes if he logs into a corporate server.

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Mar 30 2005

Dead car battery. Again.

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After a couple of months of giving me no trouble at all, my car battery was dead when I needed to go to class tonight.
Damnit.

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Mar 29 2005

NPR : Microsoft’s Grammar Glitch

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NPR : Microsoft’s Grammar Glitch

While I agree with the professor, the student has no business blaming Word. It’s a tool. Don’t blame your tools for poor work. By college, you’re expected to have some understanding of proper grammar. A simple mistake or two is one thing, but having a paper riddled with grammar errors is not acceptable.

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Mar 29 2005

When truth in advertising isn’t enough

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Talk about your ridiculous law suits:

NPR : Cereal Companies Sugarcoat Claims?

It’s not good enough that they never made any claim that their product was “healthy”. Apparently by making and marketing a product with less sugar, they are open to law suits because some idiot woman assumes “less sugar == healthy”.
Read the label, stupid woman. There’s a reason why the “high sugar” cereals have the same amount of carbs as the “healthy” cereal. There’s a huge difference between carbs from whole grain oat and carbs from refined sugar.
If they lie in their marketing, sure, sue them. If they simply say “less sugar”, don’t turn off your critical mind and assume they’re saying “healthy”.

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Mar 29 2005

Blog of Death: Wanda Alston

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Blog of Death: Wanda Alston

What do you want to bet some redneck is going to claim she deserved it, or it was “God’s will” for being gay?

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Mar 29 2005

Yahoo! News - Teaching Darwin splits Pennsylvania town

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Sighted by :

We’ve been attacked by the intelligent, educated segment of the culture

Better than being attacked by those who think the Bible is a scientific document…

For the record, I believe in Evolution (”Darwinism”). I also believe in Creation (as opposed to “Creationism”). I don’t believe they’re mutually exclusive. One is they “why”. One is the “how”.

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Mar 28 2005

Firefox extensions

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Ah, good to have my extensions back.
Turns out I just had to un-install and re-install them. PITA and I wish it wouldn’t do that when I update Firefox, but I’m SO glad to have simple things like mouse navigation and Google bar back.

I also found a couple of useful new extensions, like one that enables the right mouse button on those stupid pages that think disabbling your right mouse button will “prevent you from stealing their images” (or seeing source code, or whatever).

Ya know what, idiot “webmasters”? 99.999999% of the time, when I use my right mouse button, it’s not because I’m the least bit interested in your crappy source code or stealing your images. It’s because I want to leave your web page by going back, and I do that by clicking right, then left. And you have NO RIGHT TO MESS WITH HOW MY SOFTWARE WORKS!

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Mar 28 2005

Firefox “Updates” and extensions

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I find it highly annoying that when Firefox downloads and installs an “update”, it then goes and “deactivates” all your “old” extensions, then doesn’t give you any way to REactivate them.
I don’t have my Google bar. I don’t have mouse navigation. Missing the Wikipedia bar. Missing the site navigation tool. Missing Gmail notifier.

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Mar 28 2005

Wordpress plugins

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Hmm. It seems the combination of the Markdown and LJ plugins don’t allow Markdown to translate it’s shortcuts to HTML before posting to LJ, so the shortcut for em and strong look like asterisks instead of being translated to the HTML, when viewed in LJ. Not sure how I’m going to like that. Might just turn Markdown off and do things by hand. I’m betting the shortcuts for inserting links won’t work either. Let’s test:

This is a link to [eBay](http://www.ebay.com tittle=”Link to eBay”).

[Edit: Yup. Broken. Seems that plugin will be useless to me, so I've deactivated it.]

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Mar 28 2005

Not (quite) so stupid ISP

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Yesterday I posted a rant about how my hosting provider couldn’t be reached when my new server went down.

Well it turns out, while everything I said about not being able to get a hold of them when I needed them still holds true, at least the server crash wasn’t their fault. When I told MySQL to restart, we got a kernel OOPS.

When Thomas made it down to the co-lo, he found the front door and door to the server room wide open, and NO ONE WAS THERE! Apparently the ISP is fixing to move across the parking lot to a larger suite, with better facilities for the server room, so everyone was over there checking out the new space. That’s fine. But when you’re supposed to have people there to answer the phones (IE: “Tech support”) their ass better be in the chair with a pair of headphones on to answer the phone. OK, 5 minutes to go over with everyone else and gawk and go “Cool! We’ll have SPACE!” is one thing, but I was trying to call for over an hour.

I’ll definitely give Don, the owner, a call tomorrow to complain / suggest that he have a talk with whoever was supposed to be on duty.

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Mar 27 2005

SanDisk CF Card Survives Blast That Destroys Camera

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From :

SanDisk CF Card Survives Blast That Destroys Camera : Digital Imaging : MobileMag

Glad that’s not *my* $15,000 camera.

First image is the last image caught by this camera.
The second image, caught by another camera, is the death of the camera capturing the first image. (*click on images to go to the original article and see full size images*)

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Mar 26 2005

Stupid ISP

Published by Andrew under Uncategorized

I really hate it when one of my servers goes down with no explanation.
Scratch that. I hate it when one of my servers goes down.
I really, really hate it when the idiots that call themselves an ISP won’t even answer the fucking phone!
I was logged into our new server and had just executed the command to re-start the database server when I lost all connectivity. I can’t ping it. I can’t ssh into it. Nothing.
I can get to the other server, sitting on the same rack. It’s working just fine.
But when I call the support number at the ISP, I get the usual “All support reps are currently helping other customers. Please stay on the line…” After about two minutes of this it rolls over to their voicemail with no option to continue holding. I’m sorry, “Leave a message and we’ll call you back” doesn’t cut it with a Priority One “server down” issue. Especially since I know the won’t call back for at least 2 days.
This is not the first time this has happened, either. They once just unplugged one of our servers to move it to a new UPS, with no prior warning and no proper shutdown. Just yanked the power out and plugged it in somewhere else. If I was actually paying them for service, I’d have dumped their asses and moved to their competitor down the street long ago. And pretty soon we will be paying, and we better not see this kind of crap again.

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Mar 26 2005

Test

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Testing a plugin…

[php]
< ?php echo('Hello, World!'); ?>
[/php]

[html]

This is h1

This is h2

This is a paragraph.

  • This is an li in a ul
  1. This is an li in an ol

some text
[/html]

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Mar 26 2005

New server

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Our new server is up and running. It was a PITA to set up though.
Thomas built it up, then turned me loose to configure it. I ended up ripping out and reinstalling Apache and all it’s related modules twice before I figured out the problems it was giving me were related to Mandrake’s security packages. Now I’ve solved the issue and moved all my web pages to the new server. If you’re reading this from my blog, you’re reading it from the new server.

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Mar 25 2005

RIP: John DeLorean

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Blog of Death: John DeLorean

You created one cool car.

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Mar 22 2005

The “How Far” meme

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Mar 21 2005

“Online ordering” that doens’t work

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What’s the point of heavily advertising your “on-line ordering system” if NOTHING about it works.
I placed an order of a new prescription through Walgreens web page last night, to be picked up at the local brick-n-mortar. Supposedly with a new prescription, they phone the doctor to verify and all’s good.
I got an email today indicating there was a problem with my insurance. No real big surprise there. It’s new insurance, I’ve never used it to fill a prescription before and I got three different cards, with three different policy / group numbers and company names. No big surprise I entered the wrong one. The asked me to email back with all the information over again. Instead I called the supplied 800 number. When I get through, the look up my order and can’t find anything in their system. Nothing. Nada. So they tell me I need to call the local location where I was going to pick it up and ask THEM about my insurance. I have NO idea why the actual location would have more info about my insurance issue, when I placed the order through the web page. But they give me the number and I call.
The local Walgreens has no record of my order either. Oddly, they have my name, phone number and address in their system, even though I’ve never had a prescription filled there, but they don’t have my order or any insurance information. Nothing. Nada. Oh, and “If it’s a new prescription, we need to see the hard copy.” Completely contradicting everything on their web page and on the web page for the medication in question (which touts as one of it’s advantages the fact that it’s not a “controlled substance” so you get the convenience of being able to phone in a prescription.)
Not that big an inconvenience, since I was going to go to the store to pick it up anyway, but it seems stupid to advertise all the convenience of on-line ordering, if it’s just | /dev/null.

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Mar 20 2005

Spring in the air

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I guess it says something about what kind of geek I am that when it turns spring, my reaction is to take the laptop out to the gazebo and prove that the changes I made to the wireless network really will allow you to use it in the back yard.
It is a beautiful day today. Too bad I’m too broke to go out and do anything / have no one to go out and do anything with.

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Mar 19 2005

The fallacy of dictionary blocking

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From Brown Equals Terrorist:
“How can you be an Iran specialist and not have the word ‘Iran’ on your résumé?”

I guess Monster didn’t learn from AOL’s mistake: Blocking “objectionable” content by simple word match is just going to bite you in the ass. Luckily I’m not hosted at AOL, so they can’t slap me with a TOS violation for using the word “ass” in a non-medical context, or as a reference to a donkey.

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Mar 18 2005

NPR : FCC Nominee Favors Strong Anti-Decency(sic) Fines

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NPR : FCC Nominee Favors Strong Anti-Decency Fines
Listen to this story... by

One wonders why fans of media deregulation are “praise(ing) the choice” of a man who is advocating more regulation…

Because, of course, they’re not “fans of media dereuglation”, they’re Republicans, who are fans of deregulation in general… but only when it means less government interference in making them money. They are huge fans of regulating anything they view as a “moral” issue. Your activity in your bedroom, what advice you can get from your doctor, what you can watch, or listen to, or read…

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Mar 18 2005

NPR : Albert Einstein’s Year of Miracles: Light Theory

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NPR : Albert Einstein’s Year of Miracles: Light Theory
Listen to this story... by

Congratulations, Albert.

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Mar 18 2005

Gmail invites

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If anyone is still looking for a Gmail invite, I’ve got 50 of them to give away.

(Edit: comments to this post are automatically screened, so you can safely comment with the email address to which you’d like me to send an invite.)

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Mar 17 2005

Recruiter called today

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I got a call during dinner, from a recruiter who found my resume on line.
This is the first time I’ve been cold-called by a recruiter in over 4 years.
Too bad the job is with a major corporation who will probably decide I don’t have the skills necessary and those I have are too out of date. In the heyday of the ‘Net boom, I would have gotten the job with ease. Today, I’d probably be considered borderline qualified, and no recent experience.
I also don’t tend to interview well.

the_title

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Mar 16 2005

How poly are you?

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Fave Non Poly =)
You’re 65% Poly =) 79% tolerant of the poly lifestyle =) (But… you’re 21% just in it for the sex =))
You’re not very poly yourself (and that’s cool - there’s nothing wrong
with monogamy at all =)) and you’re awfully tolerant of poly
relationships which is a very cool thing =)

On top of that you scored low on the “just want to get laid by
everyone” scale and high on the honesty scale - all in all - you’re my
favorite non poly person today =)

Nice to meet you!

Oh - just so you don’t go off wondering - the first question? the one
about monogamous cultures? the answer is 16% of recorded cultures have
been monogamous - 84% have been non monogamous! how about that? =)

Have a good one =)
Gabriel_Night


My test tracked 4 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:
You scored higher than 1% on True Poly
You scored higher than 1% on Tolerance
You scored higher than 75% on Sex Only
You scored higher than 62% on Honesty

Link: The Polyamorous Test written by Gabriel_Night on Ok Cupid

Though I detect a strong bias, which I won’t get into right now.

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Mar 16 2005

(Not so) Interesting

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So it seems a former friend has not only un-friended me on Livejournal, I’m now banned from commenting in their journal.
Not that I’m at all surprised.

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Mar 16 2005

Strattera

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Started taking Strattera yesterday.
Doc started me on a “child’s” dose of 18mg, twice daily. He gave me a week’s worth of samples of that dosage, and a prescription for 30 more pills, 40mg, 2x daily, with one refill.
I see him again in 3 weeks.
He also wants to start me on cholesterol medication, but I wanted to give diet and exercise a try first.

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Mar 16 2005

Sleep

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So for the first time in weeks I actually went to bed (and to sleep) at a half-way decent hour, and got up again at a reasonable hour.
Of course, two cats fighting on my bed at exactly 8:00 AM is not my preferred way of being woken up…
But effective.

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Mar 15 2005

Skype user name

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I forgot to post my Skype user name for those of you who might want to call.

You can Skype me at Strongbow1800

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