BunkBlog

Since I’ve got like 180 megs free in my hosting account, I figured I’d fill it up with a little something interesting. From my home movie DVD, titled “Vacation 2005,” here’s the Monterey clip. This is, of course, shrunk to one-quarter television size. If you’re one of the lucky few to be on the receiving end of the DVD mailing I’m doing this weekend, you’ll get a much better version. If you’re not, well, enjoy this one. 🙂 It’s about 47 megs.

It starts in the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and then we move to Carmel Beach (home of the world’s most aggressive panhandling squirrels), followed by a few minutes of Dennis the Menace Park.

I’ve just bookmarked NK News under “Online Oddities” – it’s a searchable archive of all the wacky DPRK propaganda spewed onto the web from the Korean Central News Agency. Fun stuff, and the host is Kim Jung Il (as portrayed in Team America).

I love the amazing chutpah of people who mindlessly back a political personality. Some jackass drove his pickemup truck over a war memorial. This good ol’ boy destroyed hundreds of crosses memorializing the fallen servicemembers and desecrated the American flag by driving over dozens of them as well.

So, as Patridiot says:

bq. That’s some kind of moral relativism from the right wing. If you put up a memorial to fallen soldiers and you support the war, that’s a valuable moral thing and any desecration of the memorial is treason. If you put up a memorial to fallen soldiers and you oppose the war, that’s a godless, anti-American thing and any desecration of the memorial is patriotic.

Way to go, moron. Way to help your side look like reasonable and sane human beings. Yep.

Twelve years I served in the United States Army. I shudder to think that anyone could be persuaded to believe this type of behavior is supporting the troops. You ran over the crosses and ripped up the flag! Holy crap, what a jackass.

Fun with LJ and Google Maps! LJ Friendsmap

Blu-Ray and HD-DVD disks will have DRM that is compatible. Isn’t that nice? Not that any DRM system has ever worked, but it’s great that they can find ways to funnel money into worthless technology that has the only end result the inconveniencing of their own customers. One piece of this technology, ROM Mark, is meant to stop the big pirates in Asia. Want to bet it won’t work?

The other piece is called BD+ and is geared to hindering attempts to crack the encryption technology shielding the content. Essentially, it allows the BDA to update the encryption scheme should the current technique be cracked. If a coder comes up with the Blu-ray equivalent of DeCSS, the BDA simply updates the format’s crypto engine on all future releases, limiting the volume of content that can be nabbed. Does that mean that the existing players will cease to work with newer movies? Hey, great way to punk your customers. Alternately, the system could force all DVD players to have an internet connection in order to have “updates” forced on them at the whim of the manufacturer or the MPAA. Um, yeah, good idea. How many people are ready to hook their television set to the internet?

Explain how it’s possible to protect things my eyes can see and my ears can hear from being copied in some way. Sure, you may be able to slow the adoption of technology that makes perfect copies. You won’t stop it. More importantly, the MP3 revolution has taught us one thing – people don’t care about perfect copies, just decent ones. Nobody can say an MP3 encoded at 160 kbps sounds just as good as the CD, but it’s good enough. Nobody can say that an XVID-encoded 1 gig video rip of a DVD looks as good as the original DVD, but it’s good enough.

So, why bother with DRM that won’t stop the big pirates in China, won’t stop people from making “good enough” copies at all, and just annoys the hell out of people who aren’t geeky enough to read the internet instructions on how to make those “good enough” copies? It’s an amazing waste of money, when the movie industry claims it’s low on cash. Ignore their record-setting box office numbers – if the MPAA says they’re hurting, those crocodile tears must be dealt with.

Kung Fu Monkey has a great post on The President and Intelligent Design

bq. Opinion has been enshrined as superior to fact. No longer need a person take into account the way the world works when forming their worldview — they can instead hunt down “facts” and “theories” which support their own comfort zone, and what’s worse, we can NO LONGER CALL BULLSHIT. Because if our leaders — pardon me, your leaders — don’t call bullshit, who will? They have undermined the very process by which we know WHEN to call bullshit!

The end of an era…With Brokaw and Rather retired, and Jennings gone, the big three anchors that most of us grew up with are no longer on the news. This is akin to when Cronkite and Brinkley retired for our parents, I suppose.

I wonder if any of the new crop of anchors will have the staying power of those three. I can’t see Stone Philips being the grand old man of television news, and certainly not the idiots that pretend to be journalists on the cable news channels.

Alex has lost his marbles. Well, at least two of them. The marble run game he’s got started with twelve and now it has ten. I’m sure I’ll fall on my ass one day soon and find them.

I really wish he’d stop quoting every cartoon he’s ever seen as his entire vocabulary, but he is having fun with the marbles. I’m trying to teach him that the longer runs are usually slower, which seems so basic to us but not so obvious to him.

Went to see March of the Penguins with monkey boy today. Wow, what a fantastic film. I can’t believe the amount of time the crew must have spent on the scene during an Antarctic winter. Great views of the birds, especially close-ups of the fur-like feathers. Beautiful.

If you want to see a movie that is rated G and doesn’t involve talking animals, this is probably the only one that will come out this year.

From the Alt Friday 5:

1. Have you ever quit a job? Tell us a little about it. Well, I quit the family business to join the army and quit the army after twelve years. Not really the usual definition of quitting, are they?

2. Have you ever been fired? Tell us a little about it. Nope.

3. Have you ever been bought as part of a merger or takeover? Tell us a little about it. Twice. TRW was bought by Northrup Grumman and pretty much nothing changed. CTI was bought by MTC, and they took away our snacks and sodas; we’ve been waiting eight months for the stock sale money to show up. Yay.

4. Of all the jobs you’ve had, which job were you saddest to leave? Why? Never really been sad to leave a job, but I was most ambivalent about leaving TRW/NGMS – they were willing to pay me a lot of money to be just barely competent, because most other employees were actively incompetent.

5. Of all the jobs you’ve had, which job were you happiest to leave? Why? The army. No more involuntary trips to Korea, no more wearing face paint, no more living in a tent for weeks. Oh, yeah. Glad to be done with that.

This article neglects to mention facts contrary to this quote:

bq. “This (Foo Fighters) CD has a copy protection scheme that makes it totally useless to 30 million iPod owners,” wrote C. Anderson of Plano, Texas on Amazon.com’s customer review link.

You know, the fact that it takes about three minutes to break the copy protection on the latest Foo Fighters disk.

So, not only do they piss off millions of customers who can’t play their Foo Fighters in their iPods, they don’t actually stop the distribution of the music on the internet to begin with. What an amazingly savvy marketing move.

Adjectives on the typewriter
He moves his words like a prize fighter
The frenzied pace of the mind inside the cell

The man on the street might just as well
The man on the street might just as well
The man on the street might just as well be
Outside, outside the walls

But the steel eye, tight jaw
Out where you don’t hear the echoes and calls
Say it all, say it all
But the white paint, plastic saints
Say it all, say it all, say it all,
Say somebody’s got to say it all
Say it all, say it all, say it all
I said somebody has got to say it all

My heart can’t forget about this self-defense
I’m so nervous, I’m so tense
I thumb the cool blade but I know this can’t last
And the air is so hot and my breath comes fast
I thumb the cool blade but I know this can’t last
Outside, outside the walls

But the steel eye, tight jaw
Say it all, say it all
Out where you don’t hear the echoes and calls
Say it all, say it all, say it all,
Somebody’s got to say it all Say it all, say it all, say it all
But the white paint, plastic saints
Say somebody’s got to say it all

On a lark, I hit the Intertel Homepage tonight. Turns out, I scored five points too low on the SAT to be a member. So I’m just barely outside the top 1% of standardized IQ test scores. That and three bucks and I can get a cup of coffee at Starbucks.

Bush used his authority to make Bolton the new UN Ambassador, during the Congressional recess. This is not the first time Bush has used the recess appointment ploy to bypass the Senate, so I guess nobody should be surprised. When the going gets tough, the Prez gets sneaky.

Conversation between father and son:

Son: Could you super glue this back together?

Dad: No.

S: But I want it back together.

D: Did I tell you that if you bashed your toys together they would break?

S: Yes.

D: Did you bash your toys together after I told you not to?

S: Yes.

D: Did they break?

S: Yes.

D: There ya go.

Someone sent me a package. I’m pretty sure it’s not something I ordered, but when I check the tracking information, it gets weird.

If you click that image and check it out carefully, you’ll see the origin of the package (Santa Rosa, CA) and then you’ll see its travels on its way to San Angelo, TX. Although it’s silly, I’ve grown accustomed to the “everything UPS has to go through Dallas” thing, so that detour was expected. The detour to Cerritos, CA and then back to the Bay Area before shipping it to Texas is a new one though.

Another interesting thing: The package left Santa Rosa on the 13th of June, went to Cerritos on the 15th of June, and then went to San Pablo on the 21st of July. Was it taking a vacation in Southern California? This is very odd.

I guess I’ll find out tomorrow, when I finally get the package. The UPS automated system won’t let you schedule a time to go pick the blasted thing up until they have made the three tries at the door thing first. What makes this amusing is they repeatedly attempt delivery at the same time every day. Most people are at work at 11 am, right? Do you think that if I’m not home at 11 am on Wednesday, not home at 11 am on Thursday, maybe I’ll be home on Friday? Nope, that isn’t very rational. But, when I call the number listed to “prevent your package from being returned to sender” the only option I am given is to listen to where the stupid thing IS, with no option to stop them from another fruitless delivery attempt on the morrow. *sigh* I hate stupid people.

In case you are unaware, I’m a “Data Management Specialist” for a defense contractor; this means something rather vague, but includes a lot of database administration. Unfortunately, the particular DoD agency which employs my company at this location doesn’t think we need an actual enterprise-quality database management system. I use Microsoft Access.

I know, it’s shameful. Alas, it is my lot in life and I must do what I can with it. The near-complete lack of concurrent transactioning in Access was not much of an issue back when the office had a half-dozen people entering data throughout the day. We’ve got a few dozen now, and boy does it suck. Somehow, the upgrade to Win2k and Office2k a few months ago (right on the cutting edge, eh?) seems to have only exacerbated the errors. In Access 97, I could edit the forms or even the design of a table while people were using other forms or other tables; in Access 2000, I have to have completely exclusive control of the database to make even the slightest structural change.

Structural changes should be rare, you would think. Not with some of my cow-orkers attempting new and astounding feats of “what does this button do” every few days. To make things more interesting, the network we are on has random hiccups of a distressing length and severity. And, just for kicks, the system design folks (who don’t work on this base or even in this state) forbid any exposure of the network group lists so I can’t automate any sort of real security on the database itself. That means, anything I can do as the programmer/administrator, any other user can do too. You can imagine how much joy this brings me.

So far, I’ve had to redesign a couple forms to stop someone from changing his own name and therefore reassigning all his work to a non-existent person; I’ve had to redesign forms to stop someone from filling out a date inappropriately, thereby moving documents into the wrong stage of the review process; I’ve had to redesign forms to stop someone from erasing someone’s name from the database.

Did I do these things preemptively? No, I didn’t think anyone would ever try some of those things, so it never occured to me to stop them from being possible.

Can I get MySQL and PHP, please?

Blame Sierra.

Bold means I love(d) it/watch(ed) it religiously/etc.
Italic means I like(d) it but did/do not watch religiously.
CAPS means I’ve seen/saw it but am/was pretty much indifferent to it.
Regular roman letters means I didn’t see it/never saw it.
Underline means I have seen it but dislike(d) it.

Absolutely Fabulous
Alien Nation
A-Team
Angel
The Avengers
Babylon 5
Battlestar Galactica (Old)
Battlestar Galactica (New)
BLAKE’S SEVEN
Beauty And The Beast
BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER
THE BIONIC WOMAN
Danger Man/Secret Agent Man
Dark Shadows
The Daily Show
Doctor Who
Family Guy
Farscape
FIREFLY
Forever Knight
4400
Freaks And Geeks
Futurama
Joan Of Arcadia
The Invisible Man
Knight Rider
KUNG-FU
The Legend Of Hercules
My So-Called Life
Mystery Science Theatre 3000
Monk
Monty Python’s Flying Circus
Nowhere Man
The Outer Limits
The Prisoner
Quantum Leap
The Twilight Zone
The Six Million Dollar Man
The Simpsons
Space:1999
STARGATE SG-1
Star Trek: TOS
Star Trek: TNG
Star Trek: DS9
STAR TREK: VOYAGER
Star Trek: Enterprise
V
Vampire: The Masquerade
Twin Peaks
Wonderfalls
Xena: Warrior Princess
THE X-FILES

Konfabulator was bought by Yahoo, so now it’s free. I played with it yesterday, but I’m not sure it’s really much use for me. Maybe if I was anal about the statistics of my system, or if I didn’t have an RSS reader already, or if I cared what my internal IP address was (it’s static to the router)… well, I don’t see much use for my system, but here’s what my desktop looked like after playing with it for a while:

The trailer for the upcoming movie V for Vendetta is pretty cool. Looks like a decent attempt at adapting the graphic novel, although Alan Moore publicly disavows any association with the movie, even telling the Wachowski Brothers to not use his name in any way related to the film. I guess “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” really soured him on Hollywood.