BunkBlog

Just found LOW MORALE, thanks to . The centerpiece of all the animation *must* be the Creep video. Since he’s complaining about bandwidth issues, I’ve mirrored it for anyone who must watch it. And you must. You must.

I like to listen to 102.1 THE EDGE because the local radio stations suck ass. So tonight, I’m listening and a voice keeps breaking through. Apparently one of the internal comm lines is patched into the mixer board and they haven’t noticed it is being broadcast. Maybe it is only being sent on the net so nobody has complained. Weird. Anyway, I moved over to 91X instead. 🙂

Finland requires their young men to complete a massive six month military commitment. Some of them can’t make it that long without their most prized activity. Sex? Drugs? Nope, the intarweb and Everquest. What’s astounding isn’t that people would try anything to get out of being a draftee, it’s that the military is going along with it!

bq. Finland’s military conscription unit revealed that some of the young men drafted can’t cope with being apart from their beloved PCs and have been booted off their full term of military service.

Came up with another new design for the shops – Some mornings it’s just not worth chewing through the leather straps. I think it’s funny.

This version of Snake is just way too addictive. Bad, crack-like game.

Got a cool error from the military proxy server today:

bq. explicitly denied. Reason: art/culture

Yeah, we don’t want any of that art and culture junk to get on-base!

This is your weekend update, with your anchor… Oh, never mind.

We’ll be gone this weekend, doing the “drive to the airport” thing which only people in the middle of nowhere Texas associate with a two-day ordeal of roads and hotels. The end result is that I won’t be online until Sunday afternoon. It’s shocking, I know – Gary away from the computer for over 24 hours; however will I survive?

I’m told I’m not supposed to eat Cool Ranch Doritoes and drink Mountain Dew all month while they’re gone. Sure, right. 🙂

Does anyone know a lot of Access/SQL tricks? I manage the databases at work, but don’t have any particular training beyond hitting F1. Well, the installation I’m stuck with is not one I’d prefer, but it is what it is.

I have to maintain two databases with identical structures but different data. How can I make a query that will provide me a unified view of the data, in a third “front-end” database? I know it must be possible, but I can’t figure it out. The SQL JOIN command sounded like a good avenue of investigation, but doesn’t look right for this. I need to be able to create a fake append, more or less, without modifying the data in the tables themselves.

An example: I’ve got two tables with lesson data (when it was assigned, completed, etc.) but I want to output one report at the end of the month on what was accomplished by everyone. I know, I should just leave everything in one database instead of two. I don’t have a choice. I know, I should use something more powerful than MS Access. I don’t have a choice.

Any help would be appreciated.

*Update* I convinced them to go with a sane configuration, and we’ll be going to one database with an optional field.

In the article Are the Browser Wars Back? – How Mozilla’s Firefox trumps Internet Explorer, Paul Boutin trashes IE and espouses the glory that is Firefox. What makes this most interesting is that he’s doing it on MSN. You just know he felt a little trepidation writing this one up.

I have heard a little about Project Looking Glass by Sun Microsystems lately, as they recently opened the source code for free use and update by all. Isn’t it pretty?

What I don’t understand is why anyone would care. I see it is pretty. But how does a 3d metaphor make better use of the desktop space? If you use Windows or KDE or CDE or Gnome or OSX, you minimize windows to a taskbar of some kind and you can bring them back with a single click. The programs continue to run and take up next-to-no space. With Looking Glass, you’d spin the window off to the side, where it would continue to take up a small but not negligible part of the main screen. Meanwhile, the content on the window is so obscured by the perspective shift that it is unusable, so why not just minimize the darned thing?

I must be somewhat dense, as I can’t figure out why a window which can be turned on edge is better than the metaphor of the flat desktop we use now, where windows are behind each other or minimized. What am I missing here?

Gotta love this new helper object which installs itself into Internet Explorer. If you think your connection is secure because it has HTTPS in the address and the little lock is clicked shut in the status bar, you may be wrong. You could be sending your bank account information to a scriptbot that uses the “helper object” structure that Microsoft so *helpfully* added to IE.

Reminder to all, IE is not the only browser.

“Firefox”:http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/
“Opera”:http://www.opera.com

Just a thought.

According to this article in the Washington Post, the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team is recommending that web surfers stop using Microsoft browsers entirely, at least until the latest virii and worms have been clobbered.

So there, all you Mozilla-doubters!

I added a pair of Size Matters stores to my Cafepress pantheon. Not that I actually sell anything, but it amuses me that such items exist. Don’t forget my other designs:
What Would Cthulhu Do?
I’m not wearing any pants (inspired by )
Army Girl
Sassy Bitch
Ninja
Eat Me
Get Odd
Mess With Texas

I’ve recently been accosted by some certification companies, and it got me to thinking of the future. IT security is a growth industry, with (according to ISC2) has 12 jobs for each qualified applicant. Combine that with a TS clearance with SBI, it seems that CISSP certification might be a good idea. Just thinking of positioning myself for future opportunities, not planning to move again anytime soon (egad, not again!).

So, anyone know the inside scoop on security jobs? Is the work shitty, are the hours crazy, is it a good deal or not? I’m looking at an average salary over *twice* what I make now, and that’s something I have a hard time ignoring. Taking care of my family is important, and it seems like the job might be interesting, if or when I get there someday.

Anyone a member of Orkut that wants to invite me in? I have a pathological need to find out what it’s all about. 🙂

Sixapart is once again Announcing Pricing & Licensing Changes to Movable Type. Go figure. I don’t see a huge difference, myself. With a paid license, you no longer have any limits on number of weblogs created, but there are author limits. With the free version, you’re still limited to *one* author, which seems silly for many people.

I only have one person authoring anything on my site, but that depends on your definition of site. I host “Lysa”:http://lysa.andysocial.com as well, so does she count as another author and weblog? Or, would she count as a separate installation? It’s kind of irrelevent to me now, since I’ve moved to the Open Source “WordPress”:http://www.wordpress.org for my weblog.

My biggest heartache with the pricing scheme they have at Sixapart is this: one piece of software costs different amounts for different people. It’s the same bundle of code, yet if it’s used by one person it’s free, by two people it’s 70 bucks, and by six people it’s a hundred bucks. Why?

Again I look at other software and think, “huh?” If I buy Adobe Photoshop, it costs the same for me to use it or for me and five other people to use it, on a single installation. It’s the number of installations that matter, not the number of users.

Now that I’ve settled into a decent WordPress and LJ combined posting system, there’s one more item to address. Those of you reading this via Livejournal, would you prefer to have the separate LJ commenting system as it is now, or would you prefer to jump into the main comment setup on my site (as demonstrated by the link at the end of each dual-posted item)? I’m flexible, but I know some of you are hidebound and anal. 🙂

I’m attempting to use the LJ-Synch plugin again. Let’s see if it’s working now.

What this means to you: adding the feed to your friends list should no longer be necessary, as I’ll be able to synch new posts between my site and . Kind of neato keen.

After I backup the Movable Type database to a flat text file, I’m going to nuke the MT database off the server, as well as the 20 megs of archived HTML. One big benefit of WordPress over MT: No redundant files. Every time I update the blog, MT rebuilds something that takes somewhere between 30 seconds and 10 minutes, depending on what it interacts with. The HTML that gets served up is prebuilt for the viewers, so that saves an SQL hit, but it incurs a lot more PHP time for each rebuild, so I think the space and time savings with WP will be better overall. We’ll see. Since I’m backing everything up, if I get a wild hair and want to go back to MT, I can. If I can get the LJ plugin to work in WP, I may not even look at switching away from the Open Source WordPress anyhow. Open Source is my friend.