Rantings of a Nerd

It is 22:15 on Monday night, and another idiot is trying to climb a crane. Let me go ahead and go on record and say the police should not take 3 days to solve this problem. If they keep letting these idiots get away with stopping traffic and impacting local businesses then it will never end.

Perhaps a nifty Tazer attempt earlier. Use harnesses on the officers and do their best to keep the idiot from dieing. There has to be a way to get an idiot off of a crane other than waiting them out.

I just has my first fill-up after a week of highway driving. I managed to hold a nifty 49.4 MPG. Not bad. I know there are those who think I am nuts giving up a big Avalanche for a little Prius, but the cost savings is worth it. I am going to save about $200 a month in gas. And I have all the nifty nerd toys to play with.

These things just write themselves sometimes. Note the really long title which proves I have no formal journalism training.

While eating dinner at Burger King, which says something about me, this guy dressed in business casual is wandering around talking on his cell phone. I could not make out all of his conversation, but if I had been paying attention I am sure I would have had a clue as to what he was up to. The irony of course is that he was not even a customer. His wife had taken their daughter into the bathroom. Instead of standing outside to talk he decides to walk around in the dining room and talk at full volume. When they were done the family walks around the building and into the parking lot of the shell station next to the Burger King. They weren't even parked at the restaurant.

I don't know about you, but when I am somewhere that I really have no clear right to be, I try to draw as little attention to myself as possible. Not this guy. He spoke about some manner of business deal as if he were in his private office at home.

What makes this funnier is that this morning while sitting at the doctors office I got the hear all of their personal goings on of a local house wife. I know about the boat trip she and her family are about to take with their neighbors. I know where they are leaving from and I know where she prefers to purchase Children's Dramamine.

While sitting in a relatively quiet doctors office she decided to have not one but 3 private conversations at full volume.

I know that there are people who feel like they have nothing to hide, but really. I was trying to read. Who needs the patriot act. Just get society to let down their hair and the terrorists will be the ones not talking. That was a joke.

I think that I will start offering my advice to anyone talking in a normal tone on their cell phone around me. I will just assume that they want my input in their conversation. If they respond with something like, "This is a private conversation." I will just say, "Then have it in private."

Who would have guessed I am OS X. Maybe it is the PowerBook G4 in my backpack...




Which OS are You?

NASA - Voyager Enters Solar System's Final Frontier

I love the fact that every time it moves further away we find more interesting things. This people is real rocket science. At this point it may even be starship navigation. Really slow starship navigation, but starship navigation none-the-less.

Simple software to help you get organized: 37signals

Thanks for this referral, Kenzoid. I want to look into this some more.

I decided that since we won our battle, albeit in a stupid way, there was no need for this to continue. The best possible outcome would be for us to get what we were offered, the worst was that I would be facing a horde of Starbucks lawyers.

It is archived away to be never seen again. Since it received exactly zero comments I assume it was one of the following:
1) Not interesting
2) Not original
3) Never found

PriusOnline.com :: Index

A nifty place for all things Prius.

My Prius is on the left. Dr. Ken's is on the right. What do you do when you buy a Prius? Go visit your friend with a Prius so you can photograph the cars together.

Just got the call, my Prius is being taken off the truck. They need to get it ready so I can go get it at 10AM tomorrow. Guess where I will be in the morning?

I will post some pictures.

Box Office Mojo
This is the place to track the box office haul for your favorite movies. I have a net with Eldred that RoS will take in 120 million in the first weekend. Eldred says 80 million. We shall we who is right on Monday.

MutantPop ~ Index

If you like mashups this is a site to find the people who are doing the new stuff. I don't know why I like these so much. Maybe it is the old DJ in me. This is art. Some say it has a limited life time, but then again The Beastie Boys, "Paul's boutique" is almost a mashup and most people who are musically inclined will tell you it is one of the greatest albums of all time.

Some of these guys doing the mashups may be the next Beastie Boys. Who know.

The nerd mobile is now in transit from the port to the dealership. I should have it by the end of the week. I have not been this excited about a car in years. Actually I have never waited for a car once the purchase decision has been made. This is the first car I have ever had to wait for. It is a different experience.

Okay, so you have 18 years of good to great television to pull from. And the brilliant minds who are the keepers of Trek decide to use a less than good episode of STNG to pull from?

Thanks guys, you are going to put the series on a long hiatus and you go out not on a wimper but on a complete annoyance. I sat there in my chair after midnight watching the show on Tivo the night it aired, saying out loud, "Where is his speech."

You may have thought it was cute to have Troi say, "Every school child had to memorize that speech." We have never heard it. We can guess what its contents are. But hey you just killed off one of the best characters in the series. Also told us the romance we watched grow over the series fizzled and never blossomed. Then you leave us hanging.

And one more thing... You had Archer, Kirk and Picard speak, but what about the other 2 Captains? Were Janeway and Sisko not Captain enough? You had a chance to pay homage to all the shows and left out the middle two.

After seeing what you can do with "Though a Mirror Darkly" I am forced to think you must have been tied up at gunpoint and a crack addict wrote and produced the last show. You guys were better than this. Now we are forced to face years of no new Trek with a bad taste in our mouths.

Worst of all we get to hear you say this is a good thing. Mr. Braga, Mr. Berman you have missed the boat. If you want a break then you should have let someone else take over and stepped aside.

I am disappointed with your stewardship of the Star Trek. The actors and directors did their best. You led then nowhere.

Perhaps you are in fear of Star Wars live action in Fall 2006. If so then you should have taken the challenge to produce good science fiction and show how good it is compared to science fantasy. Maybe it is the resurrected Battle Star Galactica that scared you off. Maybe you are just tired.

Bottom line, you could have done and have done better.

Belief in sex-mad demon tests nerves - Yahoo! News

This is just fascinating.

Lazarus Project :: Write once compile everywhere!

The other part of the free pascal project. The dephi like IDE.

Free Pascal - Home Page

This is awesome. I love this. My favorite language is still alive and kicking. I am even more interested in the "Delphi" free version. I must try this.

Computer Scientists rejoice, Pascal lives.

As the salesman said, "It is in the hands of union workers now." Apparently they do the leather seats at a mini-plant located in Jacksonville for all the cars that come from Japan.

I will have a full review once the car is here. I will take plenty of pictures of the car and of course blog the mileage I am getting. For now, this is the factory photo.

I expect my World of Warcraft playing time may be diminished by all my driving around, but I will have to rest sometime.

Usually I have only bad things to say about customer service, so it is with a joyful heart that I have something good to say. While it may be next to impossible to actually speak with a human being at Tivo about a technical support problem, I used the classic work around of asking for billing. There are always people working in billing.

So what would make me, a computer scientist, need to call technical support for a tivo? Simple, the remote was going nuts and would not stop going up or down. I assumed that this was linked to the other dozen or so glitches that were introduced with the dreaded 7.1 patch. This latest release features such new joys as high levels of pixilation and slow changing of channels and other fun hiccups.

I had exhausted the on-line knowledge base and found nothing but people complaining bitterly about problems from the update. I made the assumption that since nothing about this was in the forums or knowledge base that I was the lucky recipient of a new problem.

The nice person in billing put up with me and opened a case. I assume I was not the first person to use the calling billing trick to get to real technical support. Then after 3 minutes of on hold someone at their first tier technical support answered.

She opened my case and listened to my description of the problem. As soon as I was finished describing the issue, without hesitation she said, "You have IR interference from somewhere."

I balked, she asked me to take the batteries out of all the other remotes. I balked but hid all the other remotes in a drawer, all the while mumbling to hid my sudden realization that I should have thought of this.

Guess what? It worked. One of the older remotes must be losing it, though I have yet to determine which one. I really don't care.

I told the support person that she should walk by her boss strutting with an air of technical superiority and say that her knowledge and skills have won the day for her company.

This is one of those cases that demonstrates why you have to have knowledgeable customer support. There was no delay in her response. She knew the problem and how to solve it. If This had been someone just off the street flipping though a 3 ring binder it would have take an hour to get to this point.

Tivo, you have earned my respect for another day. Now go fix the software issues.

Well that one camera is up and running still. I have noticed that traffic seems to be moving the same, maybe even a little better. No one seems to be running the red lights, but they never did before.

2 mile north on the same cross road I fully expected to see that cameras has been installed as well. Guess what? No cameras at the intersection where cars routinely run the red light. As in every cycle of the light 2 lanes of cars turning left just run the light. No cameras. Guess they don't want to catch those guys. It is a busy intersection after all.

I am hopeful that Cameras will appear there soon. It might actually make a difference.

I have put the money down and my Prius is scheduled to get off the boat on the 13th, and arrive at the dealership on the 18th. I am sure there will be some frustrations along the way, but it will be worth it. Once I have it I will make my review over at nerware.blogspot.com

Of course I will just brag about the great mileage I am getting here as well. Expect my posts to be littered with things about hybrid synergry drive.

The ipodder lemon team got a nice release out today to get it working with the new iTunes 4.8 release. There are no other changes to the Ipodder 2.0.3 client but getting it to work again is more than enough. Thanks guys.

I had looked at the Prius over a year ago and they were not not be found. After spending $57 to fill up my Avalanche that was enough. The saga has begun. I put some money down to hold the car that is to arrive in port on the 13th. It is scheduled to be at the dealership by the 18th. We shall see if it makes it on time. Now I have to get rid of a gas guzzler. Car Max here I come. They have bough 3 cars from me over the years. Funny, I have never bought one from there.

I can think of nothing more important to nerds than caffeine delivery systems. I finally found some Diet Coke with Splenda. The verdict, I would choose it over regular Diet Coke. I like Splenda. I choose it for my coffee.

If you are on the fence and not sure if you want to waste a dollar trying it, I say go ahead. It tastes like coke.

I have to admit that I have been very happy to have found a place that is turning in to a very good discussion site.

The SFAG has always been on with strong opinions but I never cease to marvel at his ability to avoid making enemies with his statements. He managed to get a large number of people with very different backgrounds to carry on some very interesting discussions.

I have to admit that at some point in the conversations it felt a little like I was in Gibson's "Pattern Recognition." It is starting to feel like a community. It will be interesting to see how it plays out.

If you have an interest in things military and like listening to Special Forces guys tell real stories, you will be happy there. If you want to hear some war stories that are more like fairy tales, then keep on looking.

Why do I care about this subject? I was a soldier. You should know that if you have read every entry here. Actually if have read every entry here and you do not know me personally then I might suggest some on-line games to take up that spare time. I am not that interesting.

I was just an enlisted grunt, at 31CV9. If you know what that is then you know what I did. If you don't then don't worry about it. It is a specialized area of communications.

Check out the SFAG if you want to see what blogs can do for an area of the military that is very misunderstood.

I cancelled my matrix on-line account today. I made my final review over at nerdware. Now I am down to just World of Warcraft and Guild Wars. Luckily on WoW has a recurring fee.

I was more than a little surprised to see that traffic light cameras had been installed at a busy intersection that is on my way to work. It is not the worst intersection I pass though on the way to the interstate. In fact in 3 years of going to work this way I have only seen one wreck there. It was bad, but I have seen dozens closer to the interstate.

I am sure that people are running the red light, it is Atlanta afterall. That goes along with speeding and not using our turn signals. It is just what we do.

I suppose that this will cut down on idiots who run the red light and over time will make everone more courteous. It has worked in several places and it probably not a bad thing.

I know that I will be more cautious in that area. But it will take longer to get though the intersection.

This is perhaps the most interesting personal not private photo I have. It is of the police blocking the streets after the Court House shootings.

I realized that it was far beyond silly to use an alias. So after a year or more, I decided to go ahead and just use my name.

Montana's News Station, Coverage You Can Count On -New business: cooking pizza en route

Now this is a reasonable idea... cooking the pizza on the way to your house. Those hot bags we used to use when I was a Dominos Minion did a nice job of trying to cook my car seats.

The New York Times > Log In

The Regular Guys who were tossed off the air more than a year ago for accidental porn audio on the air are back on the same radio station again. About a month ago they surfaced on the WGST 640 AM, which is the sister station of 96 Rock. After 1 month of living under the restrictions of, "You can't do that on AM Talk radio" They are back under the restrictions of, "You can't do that on FM."

All in all I guess it is a good thing, and it shows that even giant radio conglomerates know that they need listeners to actually listen to the radio stuff between commercials. Else, you will have to charge less for the commercials.

The Time Traveler Convention
May 7, 2005, 10:00pm EDT (08 May 2005 02:00:00 UTC)
East Campus Courtyard, MIT
42:21:36.025°N, 71:05:16.332°W
(42.360007,-071.087870 in decimal degrees)


Pass this along to your friends. The idea is simple. It assumes that one day time travel will be possible. Once it is this will be a time an place that time travellers can come to hang out.

If it is famous enough and becomes a part of our history then time travellers in the future can't resist.

Why invent time travel when you can just have time travel come to you. I would seriously doubt that any future time traveling civilization would want to have anything to do with this. I have seen enough Star Trek, it will only be the bad guys who want to come.

My son and I were having a Simpsons inspired discussion last night and could only come up with pancake batter for deepfrying bratwerst. Then you could dip the finished product in maple syrup. It would be like making your own McGriddle.

Of course some manner of beer batter comes to mind. But Nothing else.

This of course breaks so many dietary rules it has to be good.