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I left this in mostly to make Dave happy. :-) Though it doesn't, because Pitas doesn't escape ampersands, and neither do I; the spec is broken on that point.
A Wish, From Me, To You
Please accept with no obligation, expressed or implied, my best wishes for an environmentally conscious, socially responsible, low stress, non-addictive, gender neutral celebration of the holiday practiced within the most enjoyable traditions of the religious persuasion or secular practices of your choice, with respect for the religious/secular persuasions and/or traditions of others, or their choice not to practice religious or secular traditions at all -- and...
(deep breath here)
A fiscally successful, personally fulfilling, and medically
uncomplicated recognition of the initiation of the generally accepted calendar year 2008, but not without due respect for the calendars of choice of other cultures whose contributions to society have helped make America great (not to imply that America is necessarily greater than any other country or is the only "America" in the western hemisphere), and without regard to the race, creed, color, age, physical ability, religious faith, or sexual preference of the wishee.
By accepting this greeting, you are accepting these terms: This greeting is subject to clarification or withdrawal. It is freely transferable with no alteration to the original greeting. It implies no promise by the wisher to actually implement any of the wishes for her/himself or others and is void where prohibited by law and is revocable at the sole discretion of the wisher.
(This wish is warranted to perform as expected within the usual application of good tidings for a period of one year, or until the issuance of a subsequent holiday greeting, whichever comes first and warranty is limited to replacement of this wish or issuance of a new wish at the sole discretion of the wisher.)
Oh, and that old flame who set me on fire for Valentine's Day? Wow. :-)
Run 100 meters, jump over an 8 foot tall privacy fence, climb up on a roof, throw a 1000 foot box of wire across a drive way, and terminate an Ethernet plug on the end of it.
Our buried cable died. :-}
The fiber quote is out now. Finally.
[ Hat tip to Joel who both did much of the running, and coined the term ]
It's for that reason that I'm overjoyed that the US Supreme Court today ruled in DC v Haller, explicitly, that the Second Amendment right "to keep and bear arms" is an individual right as non-Democrat constitutional scholars have been asserting for years and decades.
Amongst all the damage that George the Younger has done to the United States, which we will be forever recovering from (sorry, everybody!), if he has to have one legacy viewed positively, this will be it, for me.
is a site that publishes shooting scripts for classic -- and less than classic -- films. I know they're the shooting scripts because, for example, this script, for Real Genius, has an entire Chris-Knight-gets-laid-on-the-root scene in the first act that didn't make the final cut... if indeed it was shot at all.
Limited blogging this weekend (he says, just like he's been posting an entry every day for the last 6 weeks :-).\
[ Had a nice time; sorry for the repeats; didn't notice the timestamp til now; the "WebpAd" in the room apparently doesn't speak NTP; who's surprised? ]
And so it goes for my con-husband Charlie, whose proposal for the new one room schoolhouse would leave us with a teacher making a quarter-million a year. He got it published at one of his regular hangouts, with the delightfully self-contradictory name of Pajamas Media, and the comments are quite interesting as well.
Check it out -- especially if you run a school district.
And, while I don't think it was as much of a scam as this guy does, I had some advance warning that it wasn't what they represented it as: it's consumer market research underthe guise of consumer market research.
Perhaps that merits a little explanation. :-)
What they *say* they're doing is getting your opinions on the TV shows they show you -- which are uniformly mediocre (though I actually did sort of like them both, with caveats -- my sister and I watch a fair amount of TV, and are equipped to correct for Pilot Syndrome) -- but what they're *actually* doing is checking to see if the commercials they show you affect the answers you give on the product questionnaires you answer later.
For my part, except for the TV shows, I spent most of my attention on the absolutely beautiful redhead seated one row in front of me; damn, I wish I'd had my camera, and business cards.
The commercials were actually pretty decent, including a badly-lipsynched but otherwise pretty cool animated thing for Lyrica, a fibromyalgia pain reliever that makes a cameo appearance in the questionnaire later, a spot for Northern toilet tissue, that asks the burning question "isn't it a drag when your toilet paper comes apart on your {bare,bear's} ass?", and a really *nice* kaleidoscope one for M&M's that I've never seen before.
My favorite quote:
The company gathers viewers' opinions on commercials and programs (a Television Preview employee says, "My favorite answer was the person who wrote that Soulmates should be shown to the prison population as a form of punishment") and e-mails the results the same night to the people paying for the research -- "mostly advertisers," Forsyth says.
Chad, the young black guy who hosted the second half of our presentation (and had to ask a dozen questions about "wet methods" -- that's 'using baby wipes on your adult butt', for those not playing along at home) was actually pretty good as well.
Do I feel like I was scammed? Nah; I knew what I was going into; real focus groups *hate* me, precisely *because* I can speak eloquently (and have your babies) about the things they want to know, and they don't *want* people like that...
[ This Just In: according to that second newspaper piece I linked, they're apparently *not paying royalties on the shows they're using*. I feel a letter to SAG and AFTRA coming on... I'll bet Kim Raver's agent would be interested, too. For more snark than you can handle, written even better than this, go here. ]
[ And finally: one even better review here. And the best researched piece on it that I found in the general press about it -- alas too late -- was this one. ... And here's one more writeup, by someone whom I really couldn't figure out whether they got it or not... ]
I've raised the WeatherBar again, as we enter the 2008 Atlantic Hurricane Season.
I probably need to update it a little bit, but I'll get to that this week some time. At the moment though, my favorite 9 words in the English language apply:
There are no active tropical cyclones at this time.
To Sail Beyond The Sunset..., he recounts the girlhood of the second lead in his earlier masterwork, Time Enough For Love, and in particular, recounts from the alternate first person viewpoint some scenes from the earlier book. It's a lot of fun, if you like such things, but my girlfriend's nickname is Mo, and she started reading the book...
when I gave her a copy, at 17.
Sometimes, it bites me.
There's a scene, about 6 chapters or so in, where she really badly wants to lose her virginity. She's taken her chosen squire out to the racktrack, up into the judges' booth, and he's having second thoughts.
Ensues a conversation about another young gent, who's made it clear he's second in line, and the "dirty deed" ensueth, and then some exposition about how sometimes you have to put tomcats "in sharpest competition" to move them along to what everyone knows they're going to do anyway.
Happened to me tonight.
It's not *quite* like playing the game for points. Just almost.
Happily, I appear not to have screwed it up. But it was a near thing. Thanks, Kelli.
in the history of technology, Sprint has gotten QChat (the successor Direct Connect technology to iDen) not only working and interoperable, but in trials, and I never even heard about it.
Miley Cyrus has apparently had buyers remorse on what looks to me like a standard Annie Leibovitz/Vanity Fair photo shoot, and is going on about how horrible she feels, and how that's not the image she wants to project...
though they ran a quote with the pics about how it was artistic and "not skanky", as you would expect from Annie.
C'mon, Miley. Grow up.
You, too, Billy Ray. You both should have known better -- and reportedly, you did; here's the money quote:
Leibovitz said Monday that she and Cyrus had discussed the photos beforehand, and Vanity Fair said "Miley's parents and/or minders were on the set all day ... everyone thought it was a beautiful and natural portrait." As for Disney, it accused editors of creating a situation "to deliberately manipulate a 15-year-old." Disney declined to make anyone connected with "Hannah Montana" available to speak for this article.
Unfortunately for Cyrus, the photos, taken in February, might not have made nearly such a splash but for a bit of awkward timing: They emerged just days after some attention-getting amateur shots of Cyrus hit the Web. In one, she tugs down a tank top to reveal a bright green bra. In another, she lies languidly on her back across a male friend, shirt raised to bare her midriff.
So the timing was terrible. But some celebrity watchers saw the developments as an attempt by Cyrus and her handlers - while not necessarily calculated - to look ahead a few years, beyond the tween audience.
I've been trying to get the incredibly recalcitrant Nagios nrpe proxy facility to work properly, and I discovered the solution to "Could not complete SSL handshake"...
nrpe.conf can *only* have #comments that start in character 1; if you try to put a comment on, say, the end of the allowed_hosts configuration line, it will break, and even after you fix it, you need to remember to restart the daemon before it will actually work.
on my photography website from people searching for Alexis Whitesell, a damned yummy (:-) actress who was part of the cast of HAiR I photographed back in January of last year.
They're mostly from Orlando; is *that* where you landed, Alexis? :-)
no one but my sister seemed to notice -- or at least saw fit to comment on -- the fact that I hadn't posted anything here in a couple of weeks.
Fact is, I got a new job (Weird Al would be proud).
I'm the sysadmin for a company in Largo with about 25 servers and 200 workstations, all running Linux. Ok, ok, we have 15 Windoze workstations and 2 servers, too, but I try not to mention those in public.
I've been busily installing all sorts of open source software to keep my sanity -- I set up a MediaWiki the day I got here, and all the notes on everything else are in it. I'm working on OTRS for ticket tracking, cause it's slightly less stupid than RT -- though I still really wanna write my own -- and I just today set up a skeleton Nagios for monitoring everything.
Yesterday I got ntop running, and discovered that it doesn't do a) what it used to do nor b) what I really want -- which was what it used to do.
What I want is total transfer/throughput per local host, expandable to the active flows. That's what it used to do, before it got all webby, and I don't see *any* way to do that anymore.
It does lots of cool shit, but that's the thing I *want*.
On a side trip, since I got our 10mb/s uplink working, I've been spending a lot of quality time with Radio Paradise (and even sent them $10 :-), and I recommend that you check them out as well.
Today I'm adding more hosts to Nagios, and I got our Core2Quad fileserver to behave itself, finally. Now it's time to move stuff to it.
[ Update: Here's the St Pete Times' nice obit on Jennifer. ]
I'm told that Jennifer Packer, former manager of the Harp and Thistle Pub, and daughter of its owners, Pat and the late Bob Packer -- who has apparently been missing since last night around 9pm -- was just recovered from the waters of Tampa Bay.
The SPB Police are calling this a suicide; an unconfirmed report from an acquaintance of Jennifer's whom I decline to identify, but whom I deem reliable, says that she had been depressed over the actions of the people who bought out the Harp at the last minute when it closed, 4 years ago -- they specifically asked the Packer's to include all the accumulated memorabilia from the pub's 18 year run, as "they wanted to display it all" at the new location.
That new location was attached to a hotel a mile or so south; business didn't take off the way they liked, remodeling of the motel killed their room service food business, and they converted it to a sports bar.
Apparently, most of the incidental accoutrements were merely disposed of along the way.
I'd have been depressed, too.
A service for Jennifer was held Saturday, and a good Irish wake afterwards, at whatever that place is called now that it's a sports bar.
Saturday, July 5, 2008 @ 03:46 p.m. - Comment
