Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/04/27/here-i-come/
That’s right, dannyman will soon visit the San Francisco Bay Area for a three-day weekend!
Plane arrives Thursday, May 13, at 10:30pm. I’ll have Friday and Saturday and the first half of Sunday to while away, before departure Sunday, May 16, at 6:00pm.
And I won’t be alone! My girlfriend, who speaks fluent Japanese, will actually be in the area for two weeks, one on either side of my visit!
So far, I’ve only really planned to visit Tellme on Friday and get a lunch gang going with my IT people and whatever other interested folks want to eat some food, and then rolling along with whatever party plans people have. It sounds like the girlfriend has a place to stay. I may rent a cheapo car.
But, uhmmm, suggestions or invitations are entirely welcome! Let me know what’s up that weekend, drop me a line, give me a call!
E-mail dannyman@toldme.com to get the 312 cell phone!
Alright,
-danny
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/04/28/buncha-random-stuff/
I’m on my third day of my new work shift of 7am-3pm. It is a little rough getting out of bed, sure, but I get the office to myself for two hours, I get lunch early, and at 3pm I have time to enjoy some sunshine and maybe the paper and a magazine or two, down the block at the local coffee shop. Then it is five or six and I still have time to engage in domestic or creative activities. So, today, I have some time to type stuff here. A random smattering of links and observations and whatver.
In cleaning out the mailbox, I have to give props to Matt Johnson for what he titles “YA Mirror” … the contents? A copy of “Curt Tucker is a Liar” for posterity. Google is doing its job just right, at the moment. I’m such a mean, defamatory person, huh?
Yayoi’s Mom visited last week, alla way from Japan’s third-largest city, right between the big big Tokyo in the East, and the nearly as big Osaka in the West. Well, you see the parallel as apparently we’ll have to visit Nagoya next year for their own World’s Fair. Anyway, the whole visitation worked really nicely. The ol’ lady has an awful fondness for food and drink, but today I’ve noted that my belly has shrunk considerably from the massive swelling it exhibited Monday. I also have new pants and a belt and you know what, a little N Scale steam engine for my future model railroad. Japanese-style! Yum!
It was sad for the both of them ladies to part with each other Monday morning. So, when dropping off at the airport I did the smoothest thing I could to park in the far lot and ride the people mover in to give them ample time for goodbyes. Among my newfound afternoon activities I ought to write that lady a thank-you note.
On Saturday I drove us all down to visit Champaign. Weird weird story is that as soon as I arrived at the Illini Union, I received an e-mail from a stranger on my hiptop with the title “Curt Tucker is Still a Liar” purportedly from a current employee who closed with the words “wish I’d seen this web page before I started work there.” I’m no Ralph Nader, but we can all do our small, incendiary part to get the word out when a public entity gets us a notably good or bad experience.
Ah, by the way, I’ve got a GMail account. More out of curiosity than anything. I’m not checking it so often at this time: dannyman@gmail.com. The interface is kind of slick. It groups messages in to “conversation” threads, which is something that Microsoft notably sucks at. It is also good at folding quoted blobs of text out of the way. I’d be impressed if some of their storage came from some algorithm that cleverly identified quoted text and simply cross-referenced the blob appropriately. But then, text isn’t so expensive, right? The big savings would come from being clever with binary attachments. Calm down, Danny!
I’m also on orkut in case you have decided to join that hip wave of friendster technology.
Oh, you need cheap ink for your bubblejet? I’ve done well with 1800ink.com. They sent a little business card with my order, which I taped to the printer for the next time I run out. Stuff came fast, and I paid like $3 for perfectly good cartridges that retail for like $20.
Eh, fuggit. I’m caught up on e-mail to early April now. Progress progress.
/danny
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/04/30/write-what-you-know/
Benjy,
Isn’t there anything in your current life that makes you nuts? Like, the other day I got some coffee grounds. I have a twelve-cup coffee pot, but the instructions for the coffee grounds are for ounces or milliliters of desired coffee. How many ounces in a cup? Well, I looked in my fridge and was able to convert a cup on the milk serving size to ml, which I then correlated with a 6oz serving size on the orange juice, to arrive at 1 cup = 8 oz. And it’s like 2 tablespoons per cup or so, which is just insane.
I went back to my normal method of just dumping grounds into the filter ’til I figured thats just enough. Yayoi called the Starbucks consumer hotline, and a guy with an Indian accent had no idea what she was talking about. He probably drinks tea, but apparently his best advice was “I’d use more coffee.” After all, he is taking that call on Starbucks’ behalf.
It is not fair that a person who has not had their coffee should have to perform so much math in the morning.
Love,
-danny
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/04/30/thats-usually-not-one-expect/
I figured out how to get the damned Comodo Certificate that somebody else installed into the damn Plesk server to work. Among my obstacles were unhelpful technical support from Comodo, and bizarre rambling posts in the Plesk message board, and at long last, completely inscrutable documentation from Apache:
Because although placing a CA certificate of the server certificate chain into SSLCACertificatePath has the same effect for the certificate chain construction, it has the side-effect that client certificates issued by this same CA certificate are also accepted on client authentication. That’s usually not one expect.
Basically, the trick is that Plesk puts a rootchain.pem in the /usr/local/psa/admin/conf, so what one must do, is try not to read the Apache documentation too much, and add the following line to the /usr/local/psa/admin/conf/httpsd.conf:
SSLCertificateChainFile /usr/local/psa/admin/conf/rootchain.pem
It’s only taken a few weeks of casual research to figure this out.
/danny
1 Comment
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/05/05/props-to-freebsd-and-its-usb-support/
I spied a pretty Microsoft mouse laying near my desk. It has laser beams. Cool. I swapped it in to my workstation. I was apprehensive at first, because the existing mouse is PS/2, and this new mouse is USB … oh man, this could be a pain in the ass. I even avoided unplugging the PS/2 mouse. Back in 1997 when PS/2 mice were new, I recall a coworker at NCSA being reluctant to reboot FreeBSD so that it would see the PS/2 mouse, which was in those days only probed at boot.
Well, wouldn’t you know, but the new mouse worked right out of the box, so to speak. The USB architecture detects the mouse, then runs the appropriate daemon and hooks it up to /dev/sysmouse, which X is looking at. Everything was great, except the wheel didn’t take. I dropped by the awesome and handy Mouse Wheel Support for X in FreeBSD, edited my usbd.conf, restarted the moused, and everything was groovy.
Yeah, Windows handles mice better, but I’m impressed that FreeBSD did well enough in one of its weak spots – I didn’t have to restart X or nuffin’!
/danny
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/05/07/limbaugh-torturing-prisoners-is-an-acceptable-good-time-torelieve-stress/
Apparently, if you are a political conservative, being a dumb-ass who undermines your nation’s war effort by torturing other human beings is all in a day’s work, or so Rush Limbaugh would have you believe:
“This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation and we’re going to ruin people’s lives over it and we’re going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. You know, these people are being fired at every day. I’m talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You [ever] heard of need to blow some steam off?”
To prove that he just doesn’t get it, he goes on to state:
“This is a pure, media-generated story. I’m not saying it didn’t happen or that the pictures aren’t there, but this is being given more life than the Waco investigation got. It’s almost become an Oklahoma City-type thing.”
Uhm, hello? The bigger point is that it is a big media thing! Not only is fucking with prisoners wrong, not only is it a big deal for us, but it is an even bigger deal on Al Jazeera. The whole point is that we have to win “hearts and minds” and you do it by not being a complete bonehead who takes pictures of your colleagues acting like inhumane jackasses, humiliating subjects of the population you are trying to dissuade from rising up and trying to kill you.
A fraternity prank? Torturing and sexually humiliating Arab men is not the same as cow-tipping! If we refuse to see Arabs as the human beings that they are, then why should they see us as something other than sexually depraved monsters with no moral decency who might as well be destroyed?
There’s a lot of fucking retards in this country.
/danny
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/05/12/obligatory-abu-ghraib-rant/
I was looking at those pictures yesterday from Abu Ghraib … they are terrible. And while I believe that we have to root out whatever elements of the chain of command are responsible for what happened, I have a hard time accepting the excuses of those little guys … you weren’t schooled in the Geneva Convention? You were forced to smile while doing depraved things to naked men? I like a bit I read somewhere about one guy in the prisons wasn’t willing to do anything the least bit shady unless the party ordering it filed appropriate paperwork.
Ginmar, who is stationed in Iraq, and whose blog is totally worth reading, put it well:
Maybe it’s the idea that these soldiers just weren’t the scary-looking weirdos in the alley we’d like to believe they are. It’s so easy to look at the mob and hang their savagery on their religion, their country, whatever. But when the mob is one of our own, I think it’s important to claim them and confront whatever it was that made them do it.
I’ve heard that Iraqis are sickened by the video of that guy beheading an American. You know, I don’t want people to die, but if the guy is killed for a particular nefarious purpose, and it backfires … I think that guy who lost his head, if it reminds the Iraqis that their partisans are at least as sick and depraved as our confused kids from West Virginia … there is plenty of evil to go around, hopefully a lot of folks can keep it in mind that America is less evil.
We are, aren’t we? I’ve heard as much from Americans and from Arabs.
What is really disgusting … I saw some Republican Congressman saying that the controversy is worse than the act itself, because, after all, these were a bunch of bad guys who may have had blood on their hands. This at the same time that I hear about 80% of Iraqis who are picked up are picked up by accident. Pandering. It is dishonest, it is cheap, it is without honor. The honor lies with Senator John McCain, who said something along the lines of “and I have some personal experience with this, but torturing prisoners never works, they’ll just tell you whatever you want to hear.”
The ruthlessness of our enemies can never excuse our reciprocal depravity, since the reason we are fighting is because we hold ourselves to a higher level of moral expectations than our enemy. Right? I wouldn’t have us win by becoming indistinguishable from that which we sought to replace. Torturing Iraqi’s in Saddam Hussein’s prison … that should have ceased when the statue got pulled down.
/danny
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/05/19/budgetcom-contact-us/
Hello,
I made a reservation for a one-day rental, to pick up at Palo Alto at 2pm, and return to SFO at 4pm. I was told that this would cost $30. At the facility, I agreed to another $20 for insurance. “You don’t already have liability insurance?” He prattled something about “piece of mind.” As I don’t want to drive without the state-required liability insurance, and I don’t want to be liable for your vehicle, I agreed to about $20 in insurance.
I received a free upgrade, drove around, filled up the tank, and dropped the car off promptly.
Total charges $78.54. I was figuring I’d be out around $50. What happened?
I note you nailed me for “1 HR and 1 DY” though technically I guess I had the car for “2 HR and 1 DY” .. okay, yeah, whatever. $10.
Then, $3.19 sales tax. Okay …
LDW? $18? What’s that? And PAE/ESP/SLI CHG? $23.90? Which of those are insurance and what insurance am I obligated to get when I rent a car?
As it stands, I can not say that I would use Budget again. I feel as if I have been taken advantage of.
Thanks,
-danny
hey say. If anyone wishes to impart some car-renting advice or wisdom, I’m happy to hear. I could publish your message here.
/danny
2 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/05/28/whatever-became-of-1998s-christmas-bonus/
Back in 1998 I took a semester off of school to work at a company called EnterAct. It was the most awesome ISP in Chicago, and I had previously worked there as a technical support intern during the summer of 1996. For Christmas that year, they handed out stock as bonuses. It was kind of a cheat on me and Juan, though, as we were both leaving the company in January – I was returning to finish school, so we’d never see the one year cliff to vest our Christmas bonuses. What fame and fortune was not to be mine!
Well, EnterAct soon after got acquired by 21st Century Cable, which was subsequently acquired by RCN Cable, which my Mom still uses for her cable, telephone, and broadband Internet provider. I read in the Tribune just now that RCN yesterday declared bankruptcy. “Common shareholders are expected to have their equity stakes wiped out, though once RCN emerges from bankruptcy, it said it plans to issue equity warrants to its previous shareholders equal to 2 percent of the newly structured company.”
The closing paragraph of the story hints at what a wild ride it has been, “RCN’s stock price, which climbed to $72 a share on Feb. 8, 2000, closed on Thursday at 15 cents a share.”
As for me, I graduated in May, 1999, with an offer from EnterAct and another from Tellme Networks, which was then a close-lipped startup in California. Tellme’s offer was $3,000 higher, so I went there. When I visited California two weekends ago I quietly inquired and learned that my half-vested shares in that company are worth a decent amount of money, and the people there remain confident that some day they will all find themselves respectably wealthy. More power to ‘m.
By the way, I never heard from Budget. I should work up a list of my corporate endorsements and blacklists sometime. You know, for fun.
/danny
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/05/28/microsofts-priority-update-laptop-de-nazification/
Cleaning out the inbox, I find this image to recall:
Yes, apparently there was a swastika or two found in the reserved areas of a font set that had been converted over from some overseas workers who didn’t know any better. The de-Nazification of my laptop was regarded as a Critical Update for Windows that may have required a system reboot.
/danny
3 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/05/29/the-seattle-library-a-view-from-two-cities/
Since returning to the middle class at the beginning of this year, I have really started to enjoy reading The New Yorker. Alas, I have to skip over a lot of stuff at the beginning of the magazine about what’s happening in New York, but there’s a lot of good articles and really excellent writing. I really appreciate The New Yorker, even if it makes me a feel a tiny bit provincial in The Second City.
I have read that Chicago has had a long-standing inferiority complex, because despite its own inherent greatness, and its own motto to “make no small plans” it will never be the Great Metropolis that New York City is. On the one hand, a lot of folks dig that its not New York City. We are, after all, midwesterners, who would be lost in such an insanely huge city. Chicago is so large and chaotic as it is … why would we want to make it moreso? But our Civic Leaders – the rich folk, the intelligentsia … the people who could have anything they want, and could live anywhere they want, have to justify settling for America’s Second-Greatest city. So, they have historically taken corrective measures to secure Chicago’s superiority – the World’s Fair and the Columbian Exposition. Our great Museums, most notably the Art Institute … and the ferris wheel at Navy Pier. Tallest Building in the World. Busiest Airport in the World. The title “Windy City” was earned not because of our weather, but from New York City newpapers, reflecting on how much we bragged about our World’s Fair, so long ago.
I was reading The New Yorker today, which had a good article on Seattle’s new library … designed for useability. A bold statement at the beginning of the new century, that could be compared with and contrasted against New York’s own great library, built at the beginning of the last century. The praise was even-handed. There was no jealousy. After all, The New Yorker already lives at the Center of the Universe, it is interesting that one of America’s modest cities should construct something new and innovative.
(more…)
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/06/05/spam-spam-sausage-eggs/
Some output from the daily cron job:
Total Number Folder
----- ------ ------
664829 90 .spam/
3765099 411 /dev/null
83557 27 /home/djh/Maildir/
41492 16 /usr/sbin/sendmail -oi dannyman@gmail.com
The first is likely spam, which goes in a “quarantine” folder that I review every few days, catching the occasional “false positive.” The second is definately spam, and /dev/null is a special place on a Unix system that is akin to a black hole or a “circular file.” The next line are messages that are not spam — twenty seven legitimate messages, and sixteen of those are actually addressed to me, and are thus forwarded to the archive of my GMail account.
That’s right kids, around five megabytes of spam per day. Five million “bytes” is five million western characters, or letters, that a computer scans for me automatically to shitcan. I’m not sure whether to be depressed at the spam or marvel that the filters process it so well. The latter is surely the greater achievement!
/danny
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/06/07/all-under-control/
(21:56:01) MaryJ: so, are you living in chicago?
(21:56:07) dannyman: yes.
(21:56:10) MaryJ: cool..
(21:56:10) dannyman: totally.
(21:56:13) dannyman: everything rules.
(21:56:20) MaryJ: just you and your girl?
(21:56:32) MaryJ: and you have gainful employment
(21:56:58) MaryJ: near your momma
(21:57:03) dannyman: my boss is actually my landlord, and the office is in a coach house behind the apartment. there’s a coffee shop on the corner across from a pizza place. and the subway is three blocks away and i can bike to the lake in fifteen minutes.
(21:57:09) MaryJ: sounds like you got it all under control
(21:57:28) dannyman: well mom is like seven miles away by city streets but i get to see her.
(21:57:36) dannyman: and my sister comes to party at my place.
(21:57:43) dannyman: sexiness abounds.
(21:57:54) MaryJ: i’m happy for you, boy
(21:58:25) MaryJ: okay.. now it’s time for six feet under..
(21:58:29) MaryJ: talk to you soon..
(21:58:43) dannyman: i have tivo too.
(21:58:44) dannyman: cya!
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/06/08/three-quick-anecdotes/
- As of July 7, 2004, I will be a Community Representative of the Wells High School Local School Council. There was a three-way tie for the two seats, and my name was selected out of a wastepaper basket. I am honored. Actually, the LSC Meeting was cool yesterday. I attended as a public observer. I may write more on that later …
- You know why Windows administration sucks? Because sometimes you need to dump some data so you can move a config somewhere else. On Unix, you just cat the data output to a text file, most days. Today I had to take a screen shot of a window on a remote server, paste that in to Microsoft Paint, and print out a picture of the window on the screen. Ewww!
- Amazon.com versus Barnes and Noble. Okay, I just ordered four books. Amazon.com was cheaper on three of the books, and a penny pricier on the fourth. The total came out 10% lower. Barnes and Noble gave me the total right off, with free standard shipping. To actually total the order on Amazon.com, I had to enter my Credit Card information. With not-free standard shipping, the total, after I had to enter my credit card number, was a few cents higher. To be sure, Amazon.com offers free super-saver shipping, which is slower than the free standard shipping from Barnes and Noble. The Winner? Barnes and Noble. Four books plus free standard shipping six cents cheaper than four books plus not-free standard shipping on Amazon.com, and I don’t have to enter my credit card to see the shipping charges, so they’re more straight-up and honest. I’ve complained in my log about Amazon.com before. We’ll see how bn stacks up.
/danny
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/06/14/vivent-la-bonne-vie-de-fromage/
My books just came from Barnes and Noble. They include a sticker so you can return the books if you don’t like the books. I read “Who Moved My Cheese? For Teens” — I had tried to order “Who Moved My Cheese?” This version I guess is “Who Moved My Cheese?” but with some cheesy teen dialog written by marketing folk.
It’s this parable about the rat race, and how if they move your cheese you should get over it and pick yourself up and go find some new cheese, and you’ll recall that finding the cheese in the first place was part of what made you happy. Well, I know all too well that I have to keep a lookout for new cheese … is the lesson lost on me?
I’m so clever that I ask “what if you are sufficiently comfortable hunting the cheese that what you’re really trying to figure out is whether you should enjoy the cheese you have before you and not waste your time hunting cheese?”
(more…)
Feedback Welcome
« Older Stuff . . . Newer Stuff »
Arrr!
. . .
Avast!
Site Archive
