BunkBlog

I’ve added another photo to the photo gallery, a satellite shot of my old high school. I’m having way too much fun with World Wind.

New photos in the gallery, of Alex’s birthday party. He had lots of fun and there was much chaos.

I fully intend to go to In n Out at least once on the Great Californian Trip next summer. Looking at their nutritional information, it might be only once. They’re not as bad as Burger King with their 1200 calorie Double Whopper, but one meal is a day’s supply of calories and a couple days worth of fat. Geez.

Add it up:

* Double Double 670 Calories
* Fries 400
* Chocolate shake 690 (!)

That’s 1760 calories for one meal. I won’t get a Double Double, because I can never finish one, but even dropping down to a cheeseburger only loses 190 calories.

I hate being aware of what I eat – it’s no fun.

Had a conversation with one of my cow-orkers today which was quite surreal. It’s like I’ve had a similar conversation before…

One of the geeks at work is the only person who really understands how some of the tools work. This is because he’s the one who wrote the tools, and he uses the strangest user interface non-standard widgets seen since Kai’s Power Tools. So my cow-orker says the problem we’re having is that Mike just is so smart he thinks differently than we do.

This is insulting and wrong. It’s insulting because it supposes that Mike is smarter than I am; I’ve seen no evidence of this. It’s wrong because smart people need to remember to make their projects accessible to the people who will be using them. If you’re a designer and you break every convention that people expect to see, you’re an idiot or an artist. If you’re an artist, get off the Intelligence Training System. If you’re an idiot, stop being dumb.

And why do people continue to lump me into the group that does not include the “crazy smart people” anyway? Is it because I’m capable of a normal conversation? Is it because I try not to pepper my speech with too many obscure references? Is it because I’m not a prick, as so many of these people who are perceived as “crazy smart” are?

Maybe I should start insulting people gratuitously and then they’ll think I’m smarter than they are. Still won’t make any more money, but they’ll stop asking for my help anyway. 🙂

Name a CD you own that you think no-one else on your friends list does.
Ofra Haza – Kirya

Name a book you own that you think no-one else on your friends list does.
Mel Gilden – Surfing Samurai Robots

Name a movie you own on DVD/VHS/whatever that you think no-one else on your friends list does.
Grey

Name a place that you have visited that you think no-one else on your friends list has.
I really doubt that I can, but how about…
La Bufadora, Baja California Norte, Mexico

Libertarian and Green presidential candidate arrested

bq. On October 8th at 9PM, two third party candidates were arrested for attempting to enter the Washington University complex holding the second presidential debate. The candidates, Michael Badnarik of the Libertarian Party and David Cobb of the Green Party, chose civil disobedience to fight the bipartisan Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD). Over half of Americans believe third party candidates should be included, yet politicians continue to funnel public funds into the bi-partisan Commission.

I am now 5 lessons shy of 400 total created at work since September of 2003. I’m past the 400 mark if I look at the previous contract numbers, but that requires opening two databases instead of one, so I’ll stick to just this contract.

If you count up the lessons produced by the next-highest producer (137) and then keep going down the line until you beat my total in aggregate, you’ll have rounded up five of my cow-orkers and still be 20 lessons short.

On the plus side, I finally got some recognition from this company yesterday, with an employee of the quarter award and a hundred bucks in Mall Money. I do need some new socks…

Google has introduced yet another search tool – Google Print. This is like Amazon’s “Search Inside the Book” feature, which lets you do full-text queries of any book in the database.

Neither of these two services cover public domain works, over 10,000 of which are already scanned in and converted to readable ASCII text. I guess if you can’t make money at it, Amazon doesn’t see a benefit; but Google probably isn’t making much money off of this to begin with, so I don’t understand why they haven’t hooked into Project Gutenberg in some official way. Yes, I know that Google can be used to search PG archives, but linking it to the print.google.com URL would be cooler.

Shoot, with the availability of print-on-demand machines, Google or Amazon actually could make money off of public-domain books. Wouldn’t that be an interesting profit-generating idea?

According to the CIA, there were no WMD stockpiles in Iraq at the time of our latest war. *None*

bq. “[Saddam] wanted to end sanctions while preserving the capability to reconstitute his weapons of mass destruction when sanctions were lifted,” a summary of the report says.

I’m sure the neocons will take that one line and decide that they were right. We’ve gone from saying he had weapons, to saying he had weapons programs, to saying he had weapons-related programs. What’s the harm in changing that to “the intention to someday once again have weapons-related programs maybe”? What’s a little truth and accuracy between ideologues anyway?

The VP debate wasn’t as intense as the Presidential debate last week, but it was decent enough. Considering it preempted everything else, it was hard to miss.

I was surprised by both candidates performance last night. Cheney actually seemed sane and reasonable, a feat he doesn’t seem capable of on the campaign trail. Edwards, for his first debate ever, turned in a good performance as well. Of course, since he’s had lots of practice in court rooms, I’d expect him to be a decent orator and quick to respond to questions. But, he didn’t let Cheney rattle him, which might be difficult considering some of the personal attacks the VP slid into the debate while sounding reasonable.

Both of them made good points, and I don’t think this debate really ended up with one of them as the clear winner. Edwards spent too much time belaboring Halliburton, but then it is an enormous scandal – or would be if the media actually spent any time at all doing a decent analysis of the whole mess. Cheney, for his part, didn’t beat any one horse which may end up making Edwards’s speaking more memorable to the public. We’ll see.

Regardless, the VP debate doesn’t really make much difference, unless you have a narcoleptic admiral on the podium.

SecDef Rumsfeld says his statement has been misunderstood to mean that Iraq and al Qaeda did not have any links. What might that statement have been? Well, let’s see…

“To my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two.”

Gee, where would someone get the idea that he said there was no evidence of a link between them? That’s such an ambiguous statement, I can see how he might be misunderstood. Much as when the President said the war on terra is unwinnable. Very confusing statements – it’s a good thing they came back later to contradict themselves, isn’t it?

OK, maybe not fun. Easy to make fun of?

I don’t know how many times the “deer in the headlights” look appeared on the President’s face last night, but it was quite a few. I’ve never seen someone founder so badly while groping for an answer.

I like the way Bush was able to turn every question about Afghanistan into an answer about Iraq. “The enemy attacked us, so we took the fight to them in Iraq” seemed to be his attitude throughout the debate. Apparently nobody has told him the hijackers were mostly Saudi citizens who trained in Afghanistan. You’d think after three years he would know this, wouldn’t you?

In case you needed another reason to slam Microsoft, the Windows OS has been used by the Air Traffic Control folks in LA, rather than the Unix systems that worked for decades. It hasn’t been pretty.

The servers are timed to automatically shut themselves off every 49 days, because otherwise they’d crash. Are these the kind of high-reliability systems we should be using for something as essential as keeping track of multi-ton flying bombs filled with people? Just a thought.

The so-called Marriage Protection Amendment comes before the House on Wednesday. Please let your congresscritter know that it’s a stupid thing to enshrine discrimination in the Constitution.

You are Shockwave. The fact that you don’t have a face says it all. No one really knows what your true intentions are but you, and your intentions are dictated totally by logic. You approach everything with a cold and objective approach. You think you should be in charge because you believe it’s only logical. It has nothing to do with ambition. However, if you are faced with anything emotional, you just can’t understand it. Rock on with your logical and secretive self.

Transformers Generation One Personality Test
brought to you by Quizilla

Slashdot has an article about the new World Wind software from NASA. Naturally, this causes NASA’s servers to choke from the load of trying to serve up a 200+ megabyte file to every geekboy on the planet.

Solution? Several bittorrent files have been posted. Now I’m grabbing this monster file in under 30 minutes, instead of looking at a day. Good thing Orrin Hatch hasn’t gotten this Peer to Peer stuff outlawed yet. I wonder if there is some other substantial non-infringing use out there? 🙂

ABCNEWS.com : Stevens Returns to U.K. After Detention

bq. During a visit in May he met with officials of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives “to talk about philanthropic work,” according to White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan.

That’s classic. He is cozying up to the controversial Faith-Based Initiatives office, yet not allowed to come back to the States? What the hell?

What a difference a build makes. The 0.9.3 build of Firefox was a little weird for me, causing me to reload pages from dynamic scripts at times. The 1.0RC is faboo, though. I’m trying to decide if I should kill NewzCrawler for the built-in RSS feeds in the bookmarks page. I’m thinking not. The newspaper format I can generate from NewzCrawler is just much cooler than the headline-only feeds in the Bookmarks list. Still, it’s interesting to see a new way of deploying RSS feeds to users.

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow is a cool movie. Alex is running around the den screaming random Sky Captain-related phrases now, driving his mother insane.

Gorgeous movie, really. The first 30 or 40 minutes were fantastic, and then it slowed down a bit. Still maintained a great noir-like look and feel, but Paltrow was doing way too much of the intrepid female reporter crap. I know the movies it is aping were kind of melodramatic, so I’ll let it go a bit. The performance of the late Laurence Olivier was pretty cool, but not as realistic as I thought it would be. The trailers made it seem that Angelina Jolie was the lead, but she doesn’t even show up until at least an hour into the film.

Anyway, fun movie. No particular depth, and some of the surprises are telegraphed 5 to 30 minutes before the punch lines, but fun matinee. Go see it. Take your hyperactive little boys. They’ll love it.

Teacher Arrested After Bookmark Called Concealed Weapon

bq. Harrington said she’ll never again carry her bookmark into an airport.

Guess she learned her lesson. Just think, you could have been mauled by a 50-something schoolteacher and her bookmark!