Kitchen Magnet

Kitchen magnets are like bumper stickers, except for heart and home and not for the outside world. Here's one we like and keep on our fridge:

Think deeply, speak gently, love much, laugh aloud, work hard, give freely and be kind

I don't know where we got this and while it's not from the bible, and therefore subject to serious debate, it sounds like truth doesn't it? The quest continues :)

Tuesday, Sep 11 at 11:33 PM #

September 11, 2007

So many thoughts and feelings but instead here's this.

Tuesday, Sep 11 at 9:34 AM #

What I did on vacation

I hacked a lot, napped a lot, chatted a lot, and yesterday I went out with a client and shot a lot of ammo!

It was SO choice. I'd never shot a pistol before and now can say I've shot about 10 different ones of various makes and calibers. And as an added surprise, they broke out a couple machine guns, whoot!

Tuesday, Sep 4 at 4:55 AM #

Will Santa put a USB mic under the tree?

I really would love a chance to see if one of these 4 microphones would be as good as it seems it would be.

Mad props to Neal! He says, as a follow-on, "Rhode is a higher-end company the other two are semi-professional level
The Alesis one only has one review and it's awful
Alesis is a mixed-bag company
go Samson if you want cheap and Rhode if you want top-quality"

Tag this "Christmas wish list" :)

Monday, Sep 3 at 10:21 PM #

Howard

Howard is cool.

Sunday, Sep 2 at 5:46 PM #

Still crazy after all these years

Gotta write that wishlist software. Christmas is coming.

Also, I want this for Christmas.

Saturday, Sep 1 at 8:49 AM #

Stupid Internet

How telling that this is at our fat finger tips but the version it mocks is not.

I noticed a mistake I've been making and need to do better with. Some people do indeed dream of success, and lately I haven't been one of the others that wakes up and works hard at it. I should do less goofing off and focus more on productivity!

Saturday, Sep 1 at 7:32 AM #

New Toy

I should wait until this part of my web content looks a lot better and is much more useful... but it would be out of character to do so.

Tuesday, Aug 28 at 1:20 PM #

Open source cred

Recent events got me thinking about contributing more effort to open source (perhaps a LOT more effort but that's another story, ha). So here's a fresh story to tell, small but it's all good.

My wife and I have used JChatBox for years to facilitate communications during the work day. Her employer won't allow her to install a chat client so HTML-based chat action is required. It's good and I just made it better, you can download my work as an add-on. I enhanced the chatroom skin to display the time of the chat message, or not. Before it was done I had to code a bunch of javascript and CSS to hide and show the time div, and even needed to employ a cookie to remember the mode between screen refreshes. Big fun, now one can check the times or hide them to save screen space.

My man Kyle observed that somebody really needs to code AJAX and stop the flickering screen. He's right of course. I want it almost bad enough to develop it myself but I've got lots of irons in the fire so... who knows. Also I've got work to finish out and submit which greatly enhances the emoticons feature another fellow coded.

Love the open source!

Sunday, Aug 26 at 7:41 AM #

Ask the important questions first!

Doh. I just went to a new shopping site, selected my product, filled out the personal info (not the billing CC number thankfully) and found it all very tedious and usual...

And then they throw an error: "Sorry! We cannot bill or ship to the state of Oregon".

Not so nice. They better not spam me.

Wednesday, Aug 22 at 9:08 AM #

War Against Forgetting Stuff

I just found a new tool and am flush with the excitement that comes from playing with fresh tasty bits. Check this out. I think I'm high on it because it doesn't require I abandon anything I'm doing now, doesn't penalize for starting and not continuing, really I don't see anything bad to say about it.

Another thought on my mind as I type this, it's time for me to switch browsers again! But that's another story and not as happy to talk about... perhaps another time.

Sunday, Aug 19 at 7:38 AM #

Think about this a minute

The philosopher says, "My gut feeling, and it’s nothing more than that, is that there’s a 20 percent chance we’re living in a computer simulation."

I say fat chance, but that's just my first take on it. I hope to refer to this in a future episode of my podcast.

Wednesday, Aug 15 at 4:32 PM #

CVS remove subdirectory

Dr. Bart will see this and tell me to upgrade my life to git or something, but meanwhile I still use CVS and thought I'd blog about this for future reference, who knows, maybe help somebody? Actually I'm uncertain this is all 100% good and correct, whatever, YMMV.

Googled for cvs +remove +subdirectory and found today's lucky hit is only so helpful. Eventually found another work, Simple Project Management Using CVS, and some other ideas here. Again I say, I'm not sure this is good, but here's what I found today:

for file in `ls|grep -v CVS` ; do
rm $file
cvs rm $file
cvs ci -m "removed" $file
done
cd ..
cvs -q update -P

This is close but no cigar, `cvs -q update -d` recreates the offending folder. Eventually I just hacked into the CVS server and removed the thing entirely:

rm -rf /var/lib/cvs/{project_path}/{that directory}

There, gone forever. Well, until I recreated it myself... to finish this thought I added it to .cvsignore and then created this spiffy blog entry.

Saturday, Aug 11 at 9:38 AM #

Been too long...

Wow I haven't blogged in awhile... and I'd have to check but am pretty sure these are the first pictures I've posted in 2007. Wow!

Wanna buy a bunk bed? We won't charge extra for the custom decorations.

Tuesday, Jul 31 at 2:36 PM #

Enjoyment vs addiction

I really enjoyed episode 99 of Garrick Van Buren's First Crack Podcast. I'm addicted to caffine but like the idea of really, really enjoying a great cup of coffee.

Thursday, Jun 21 at 2:37 PM #

Distant Early Warning

That's perhaps not the best title for this entry but I like that song by Rush. The topic here is a warning about a trend and so anyway...

I received a version of this article in my inbox today. Deemed it blogworthy because the tone is sad and yes a call to be aware. Somebody added to the bottom of my emailed article an excellent quote by John Stuart Mill:

"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling, which thinks nothing is worth a war, is worse. A man who has nothing which he cares more about than his safety is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."

Quite a sobering start to my day, and weekend.

Friday, Apr 27 at 8:33 AM #

Groan

I'm not going into the details right now, but I must complain. Once again, I'm spending time on the net that sounds like this:

Learn a little bit.

Say, "gee, that's interesting, tell me more".

Learn a little more.

Say "huh, I wonder if I can trust what I've learned".

Conduct "research" on the Internet.

Rapidly come to the conclusion that every web site on the topic starts with a bias.

Ping pong between "these guys support the argument" and "these guys refute the argument".

...and repeat until frustrated, then blog about it.

Sunday, Apr 22 at 10:55 PM #

Having more fun

These guys are having a lot more fun than I am. Somebody built a Lego robot to play Wii Bowling. Perfect game. Check it out.

It's funny, as I blog this I realize by this point I fully intended to have replaced my old Lego Mindstorms with the new kit, and to have acquired a Wii. Haven't done either. I haven't taken the time to sort out my Mindstorms kits and figure out what I want to sell, and I got freaked out by Wii Have A Problem.

Tuesday, Apr 3 at 4:57 PM #

Friday grins

Leisa found another amusing one to tease me with. I'd heard Jonathan Coulton's Code Monkey before, and it's pretty good grins in itself... but then observe the lyric "Code Monkey have a boring meeting, with boring manager Rob" and the fun will surely ensue.

Funny stuff, but another one comes to mind that she found and we laughedd and laughed about: this short story Downstairs features a Robert Leachman who turns out to be a blood-sucking Cthulhu monster. Niiiice.

Friday, Mar 30 at 1:21 PM #

Another fun one

Wow my last few blog entries suggest I'm just goofing off playing games and watching video clips all the time... which isn't entirely true, but I'm not having much fun doing other stuff.

Anyway try Desktop Tower Defense and see how you like it. I'm torn, I mean it's fun and addicting and nicely done and... and yet, I'm not sure it's really "enjoyable" so much as an irritating itch that must be scratched.

So watch out for it. If you do play, feel free to put your scores with mine under group "Weeners". 6448 is my best yet.