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I just heard that one of my U of O classmates and a friend died last night (2 nights ago?). I'm so sad right now.
It's funny how something like that hits you like a tidal wave and all other issues are instantly swept away. I don't know what I was thinking or doing 30 minutes ago. It doesn't really matter either.
Guilt, sadness, loss...
Goodbye Scott.
Yesterday we got an unexpected call. Laura's 3rd grade teacher called us up and wanted to talk to Laura. Someone that she had not spoken to in ~ 20 years. The teacher had seen our wedding announcement that Laura's folks had put into the paper in June. The lady looked up in the phone book Laura's last name and ended up calling Laura's grandmother who told the lady all about what Laura's been doing lately. Including our home phone number. Which the lady called when we were napping (Laura worked over night and I'm training for the Nappy Olympics).
Why did this all happen? The lady's doc is retiring in 5 years and she's looking for a replacement. Wow. What other profession are people looking 5 years ahead?
This brings up a different issue, a social engineering issue and something that most of us (including myself) are guilty of: giving out someone else's phone number. If unknown Person A (PA) calls looking for your Buddy (B), it's much better to take down PA's contact info and pass that along to B rather than just giving PA the contact info for B. Being a middle man in this case is a good thing.
I was just going to blog about wanting to learn how to take better pictures. Somehow this sounded familiar so I checked: yes, I had blogged about this before, a year ago almost to the day. *sigh* No real progress to report unfortunately.
Every time I try and use the manual settings for the camera I usually end up taking a super over exposed picture so that all you see is white. If I play around with the more basic settings (like macro) I usually end up leaving those "on" so when someone else uses the camera all they get is blurry shots. I feel that I should look for a clue stick and beat myself over the head with it.
If all else fails I'll read the instructions for the camera. :-P
I remember years ago hearing about a study that showed being active in your religion was good for your health. It didn't matter what religion, just that you had one that you were somewhat active in. They attributed this to having a community that you belonged to for support and a sense of self.
I'd describe myself as an agnostic. So what group do I join in order to create a sense of community? "The group going to the bar" doesn't count. I'd almost start going to a church if it wouldn't be the overwhelming feeling of hypocrisy.
It took me a little digging around to get subversion running locally on my mac. No, I'm not a total tool trying to have a versioning system installed locally, I'm doing it so I can work on a bamboo plug-in.
Make sure I am up to date with subversion:
fink update svn
Tell subversion where the repo is:
svnadmin create --fs-type fsfs /path/to/repo
Add your local subversion to eclipse as a repo:
file://localhost/path/to/repo
Pretty easy really... just had to find all the steps.
I just checked out the weather for this week... Saturday has a high of 6 C and 80% chance of rain. Just after 37 cm of snow... craptastic!
Our house has drippy taps. It pisses me off to no end. I wanted to look into the cost of a drippy tab. So let's do some math. Correct me if I'm wrong! Coffee hasn't kicked in yet...
From yahoo answers we get the estimation of 20 drops = ~1 ml (0.05 mL). Let's assume that there is a drop per second and there are 31 556 926 seconds per year. That works out to 1 577 846.3 ml / year. So that works to ~ 1 578 L / year, or 1.6 cubic meters. That's a lot of water in drips.
Now looking at the city of Ottawa page for water and sewer charges the price works out to 2.1266 $ / cubic metre (86.8¢ per cubic metre + (0.868 * 145%)).
So over the course of 1 year, each tap will cost us about 3.41 $. Wow. That's a lot less that I thought that it would.
A few years ago when Ryan was installing MoveableType (which this blog runs on), it was one of the leading pieces of blog software. Then they came out with version 3 that wasn't as free. There were restrictions on the number of blogs you could install among others.
That pretty much guaranteed that another piece of software would become the "leader". Now they've moved to totally free again and are trying the only open source business model that I've seen work: paid support. Will they become the leader again? Who knows, but now they have an uphill battle.
Competition is good though. Time will show how this works out for them.
One thing that I find funny is how people love to tell horror stories about work. Everyone has a couple of good ones, always about someone else and how they did some dumb thing. 90% of the time it just seems to be because the person didn't know any better. 5% of the time it's because the "customer / user was soooo dumb!" for wanting / needing something. 4% of the time it's because the manager / management was dumb or motivated for the "wrong" reasons.
Then and again you come across a story where it just boggles the mind with how things came about. Those are the truly frightening ones.
In case you didn't guess it, I made up those %'s. People can come up with statistics to prove anything. Forfty percent of all people know that.
Ah, there isn't anything quite as ironic as tool creators not using the tools they create. I noticed this recently with one of the tools that I used so I filed a bug for them to actually use it. Then I checked out other maven reporting plugins: most of them don't report on themselves. The funnest is the clover plugin generating coverage data using cobertura.
You always hear stories like this like with microsoft running unix in an anti-unix campaign. I just don't get why people don't think of eating their own dog food. I know that I've been guilty of this in the past as well. Is it just one of those cases of being too close to the trees to see the forest?
Via boingboing, I finally beat the cat. :-) Sad that it took me more than a couple of tries...
I read a short story in high school that I can't get it out of my head, but neither can I find the original story. If you know who it's by or what it's called, please leave a comment. It goes like this:
There was a young, brave knight who wanted to go out and bring truth, justice and happiness to all. He wanted to put a stop to all that would prevent this, namely the black knights. One day he was done all his training, all his gear was in sparkly, shinning white, working order and he set out. It was not long before he saw in the distance a blank knight cresting a hill. The black knight raised his weapon in challenge. The white knight bravely raised his as well and charged the black knight and won. That was the first of many victories.
After many years and many victories the white knight became tired. In the many battles that he had fought for truth, justice and freedom his armor had become dented, tarnished and scored. It had become the colour of soot from the flames of the dragons he had slain. He decided at long last to return home.
As he neared home he crested one of the last hills. In the distance he sees a white knight, with new shinny amour. He feels glad to see a friendly face after so long so he raises his weapon in greeting. The young white knight also raises his weapon. Then the young white knight charges.
Update: Austin Repath left a comment explaining that it was a story by Eric Nicol and even provided a link.