dannyman.toldme.com

Segway and the Death of the American Dream

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/08/04/lame-segway-adventure/

Best article lead I have read in a very long time:

Back in the good old days, strong men such as Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and Ken Kesey went screaming across the great American highways with heads hopped full of sour mash and benzedrine. They performed lewd acts, taunted the police, harassed the stiffs and produced great art. These days we’re left with four twenty-something geeks traveling country roads at 10 mph with their Segways, iPods and blogs.

Okay, get this. A guy is going to journey across this great land of ours … on a Segway scooter.

That could be a respectible adventure in and of itself, but he’s going to be followed, at ten miles an hour, by three buddies in a “support car” holding 16 backup batteries, and a bunch of toys, merrily blogging their adventures the whole way through. The Register continues to pound out great copy:

Kesey and the Merry Pranksters were also said to have debated the use of text messaging on their trip across the US. In the end, however, they decided that a fridge full of acid-laced orange juice would be a more profound use of technology. For Kerouac, there was but a typewriter, gallons of red wine and meth.

(more…)

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Quick Linux Peeve

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/08/10/quick-linux-peeve/

You know what’s lame? I frequently log in to Linux boxen and try to invoke “vim” only to get “command not found.” Now, this would be reasonable on Solaris or BSD, where they maintain their own version of vi, but in Linux, vi is vim, only it is vi, and not vim. Why? … It seems so pretentious. “Vim? You mean ‘vee eye?’ I got one of them, sure, although it is just vim … but you’ll have to type vi. You know, that’s how it is done on Unix systems.”

Or is there some GNU vi that is going around?

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Things that Are Good

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/08/10/mocha-in-your-mouth/

A bite of Milky Way chased by a sip of hot, French Roast coffee.

“Yeah, chocolate and coffee go great together, it’s like a mocha in your mouth,” says Dennis.

I’ll testify to that!

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Taking it Well

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/08/11/taking-it-well/

So, after two failed attempts to upgrade eSupport, frustrated that a company that sells a support/helpdesk product doesn’t have all of its useful information right there in their own install of their own helpdesk product … I could go for a burrito. I call the girlfriend, do we have any cash? But no, she has a dollar, after I handed her the $25 in my pocket for her trip with the neighbor to Target last night.

“I could make pasta.”

“Dude, I could tell you didn’t want pasta,” my colleague admits. That is okay … we’ll get paid Friday. (more…)

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You Call This August?

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/08/12/you-call-this-august/

This morning it was so chilly that I had to don a turtleneck. I had to wear a sweater atop that last night, but that was excusable because I was out on the lake, aboard my boss’ Dad’s company’s boat. We got to see the fireworks at Navy Pier, which Yayoi loves. It was extremely groovy. I’ll try to post some pictures later, if any of them came out alright.

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lnk.to Progress Modest

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/08/12/lnkto-progress/

I keep messing with how the database table should work, and I had a hard time figuring out how to create a new key within a class referring to an object that I am hash-tieing to the lnkto table with Tie::DBI, but the good news is, that I’ve actually gotten started. It is a little frustrating at the moment, but the knowledge that I am building a class that will make writing the actual web site so much easier is good for morale. (more…)

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dotPhoto: Very Good, Inexpensive Digital Printing

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/08/15/dotphoto/

This weekend I was asked for my recommendation for digital prints. I had to scratch my head and cast about my e-mail archives because I had forgotten their name, and they were not in the top results returned by Google. But if you ask me, I am very pleased with dotPhoto. Why? (more…)

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Hoohah!

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/08/16/hoohah/

The other tech support guy is out this week, so its all me, all day.

And of course, because its Monday, we have to be slammed by dumb people. (more…)

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Two Electoral Vote Maps

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/08/17/two-maps/

So, you may already know about electoral-vote.com, which shows the current state of Bush versus Kerry, based on all the latest polls, and Kerry has a wonderful lead just now. Then you start thinking about 2000 and you might start whining that you want popular elections.

Well, how about a compromise solution? The Fake Is The New Real Electoral Reform Map re-aligns the map of the United States so that we have fifty states that are roughly equal in size. (more…)

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Black Bear Prefers Rainier Beer to Busch

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/08/18/bear-rainier-beer/

From Yahoo! News …

A black bear was found passed out in a campground, after having punctured and drunk 36 cans of Rainier Beer. The bear had tried Busch, but stopped after the first can. “He drank the Rainier and wouldn’t drink the Busch beer,” said campground bookkeeper Lisa Broxson. (more…)

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Quick Unix Tip: “Look”

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/08/18/look/

You may already know about /usr/dict/words, /usr/local/share/dict/words, /usr/share/dict/words or wherever it is on your local system that the list of English-language words is installed. I don’t know how many times I have egrepped this file to check my spelling.

Apparently though, there’s been a handy command available since Version 7 AT&T UNIX. It is called “look” and it is handy for looking up words. (more…)

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Iraq’s Middle Road

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/08/19/iraqi-asshole/

Three marines were driving up the highway between Basra and Baghdad when they came upon an Iraqi insurgent who was badly injured and unconscious. On the opposite side of the road was an injured American who was semiconscious. As the Marines gave both men first aid they asked what happened. The American said, “I was moving north along the highway when I ran into this guy. We pointed our guns at each other and I said ‘Saddam Hussein is an asshole.’ Then he yelled, ‘George Bush is an asshole.’ We were standing there shaking hands when a truck hit us.

Thank you, _Playboy’s Party Jokes_

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Preview the new lnk.to!

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/08/19/lnkto-preview/

Please visit http://p0.lnk.to/ and test it out.

The database will be wiped out and loaded with current http://lnk.to/ pretty damned soon.

But if you find a bug before then, I would be happy to hear about it.

Thanks,
-danny

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Any Given Subject

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/08/24/whatever/

So, lnk.to is situated in its new home. It is something of a shadow of its former glory, but things have been busy. I’ll be flying to California this weekend for a wedding.

People miss the “top” and “recent” listings, so I hacked up a quick top page as an exercise in making SSI XBithack <––#include virtual ––> work. But I’m mainly thinking this leads to a new Lnkto::Chain class that can return a list of Lnkto::Lnk objects. But I’m too distracted to do that right just now.

I attended a seminar on customer service today as well. It was somewhat beneficial. I am moving our “run book” / “employee guide” to yet another architecture. (MediaWiki versus POD versus WordPress.) This seminar has given me material I should include on stress management, and how to do a phone call well, and left me with ideas as to how to improve call-management procedures, with an eye toward metrics. I would feel bad about “re-implementing” my documentation a few times over, but this is my first time through something like this, and I allow myself room for experimentation. Ultimately, I suspect that the happiest medium will be some combination of Wiki and Blog software. But that’s an entirely new subject …

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Dear Air America Radio

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/08/30/air-america/

Dear Air America Radio,

I have only heard that Steve Earl commercial maybe 10,000 times. I don’t think you are playing it enough. Please, please play it more, okay? “The revolution … the revolution …” I just can not get enough of that annoying plug for some lame musician. I makes me tune in to NPR from time to time …

Thanks,
-danny

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