dannyman.toldme.com

You know that feeling after a long weekend where you’re too full of food and relaxation to bust your butt doing work?

I’ve had that feeling all day. Half hour ’til I can go home, relax, and hop on the bike with Yayoi and we can get our metabolisms back.

I started writing metabolia, but the only hit returned by the dictionary was:

0-12:30 djh@ratchet ~> dict metabolia
1 definition found
 
From Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary (1913) [web1913]:
 
  Metabola Me*tab"o*la, Metabolia Met`a*bo"li*a, n. pl. [NL.
     See 1st {Metabola}.] (Zo["o]l.)
     A comprehensive group of insects, including those that
     undegro a metamorphosis.

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Last night, while trying to get some sleep, past midnight, bangbangbang a constant sound in our neighborhood, I bragged to Yayoi about how spectacular the fireworks were in our own neighborhood. boom boom bang bang boom boom kids setting stuff off in the streets, and prettier stuff going off overhead. The best stuff was behind Wells High School, where they were shooting off very pretty lights into the sky, that were accompanied by very loud explosions – M80 at least. Walking down my own street at one point I had to turn back and run away from a roman candle that had fallen over and was shotting sparks toward me.

“I hope that Baghdad is quieter than Chicago tonight.”

Yayoi agreed to that.

I look forward to when those 130,000 soldiers can peel off their sweaty body armor and enjoy July 4th at home. Back home, we know how to party. It was all I could do to drag myself from slumber this morning to stumble in to work, where I’m spending the day on my own projects, while answering what ought to be highly infrequent calls from customers requesting server reboots, which I relay to the Datacenter Technician.

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Well, the family just left, and Yayoi is down at Navy Pier with Brian and his sisters to watch the fireworks. So, I have the place to myself. Time to check out this new software.

Yesterday I had to Google for “how to tie a tie” and I found that the third hit returned was the best one. So, I mention it here in the hope that this page will get a better placement. We went off to Li Chun’s wedding, in Chinatown. It was a spectacular affair. About 80% of the thing was in Cantonese, with some translation into English. The wedding banquet was a twelve course meal, give or take, of top-notch Chinese food. If you want to hear see what a Chinese wedding banquet is like then you need to procure yourself a copy of Ang Lee’s “The Wedding Banquet” which would give you a fair idea of what ours was like. It is a culture that knows how to have fun. The groom speaks Mandarin and the bride’s family speaks Cantonese. (These are two dialects of “Chinese” which has a common written language, but sounds completely different in different parts of the country. You can’t understand folk from Naw’lins or Scotland? Same thing, but with an extra few millenia of history …) So, as part of the amusement had at the expense of the wedded couple, the groom had to recite wedding vows in Cantonese. I know that this was a very funny ordeal, because I was laughing. And I wasn’t laughing because I understood what he was saying, but because everyone else was laughing, and whether we all spoke the same language or not, we all understood that the guy was happy to have everyone laughing at his expense because at the end of the night, he got to go off with the bride.

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We got ourselves a new piece of software. This WordPress stuff seems pretty darned not-broken, which is good. But after a long nite of playing with HTML and tweaking parsers to generate meta-data appropriately, it is time to get some sleep. Got a wedding to attend tomorrow …

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An anecdote from http://wordsmith.org/words/anacreontic.html:

The US national anthem ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ is set to the tune of the English song ‘To Anacreon in Heaven’ which was the ‘constitutional song’ of the Anacreontic Society, a gentlemen’s music club in London.

It is worth subscribing to A.Word.A.Day to expand your mind with stuff like this.

/danny

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This is the most fascinating map I’ve seen in a very long time:

Thanks for the tip, Declan!

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Friday we visited Mom, who was layed off recently. She’s doing very well with the whole thing, but she was having home networking issues. After a lot of poking around we went off to dinner together to a Persian restaurant that Yayoi found in the Japanese guidebook her mom sent her. We ate a great deal and came home stuffed, after picking up a replacement router, because I had diagnosed Mom’s Linksys as bad. I showed her how to set it up and turn off the wireless part, making her network more secure.

Saturday we drove to Michigan for Ravee’s picnic. The weather was fantastic and the drive was so pleasant. The picnic was alright – I got to see Yvonne, an old highschool friend, and one of the few I’ve stayed in touch with, and she and Yayoi talked at great length. I mostly just used the time to relax. At the end of the picnic I ran up and tossed mine, Yayoi’s, and Ravee’s name in the hat for the giveaway. Yayoi won a portable CD player, which she gave to Yvonne, because we have one and Yvonne does not. Then Ravee won a slimline DVD player, and gave it to us, because he already has a DVD player and we would like to have one. Ravee pointed out that I had put his name in the hat anyway, and I remarked that it was all good karma.

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I noticed that e-mails from the Kerry campaign are consistently quarantined to my Spam folder. So I forwarded them a sample and gave them some suggestions for being less spammy. They responded promptly:

Dear Friend,

Thank you for attempting to send a message to the John Kerry Campaign. To better handle and manage our email volume, everyone must now use the new web form reached by clicking the link below: http://www.johnkerry.com/contact/contact.php

This does not inspire confidence …

… but I’m already in for $100, so I went to the web site and suggested they spend some of it on better IT.

Hrmmm, no auto-response from BushCheney04@GeorgeWBush.com. I’ll let ya know if I get anything back from the pachyderms.

And, I’m sorry to report, that Ralph Nader’s website has only a form, and no e-mail link that I can find. You’d think a populist …

/danny

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What has been going on lately, we all like to know?

Well, let us step back a few years. When I was a kid, I spent most of my time in institutions. There was pre-school, public school, after school, Cub Scouts, Boy Scouts, soccer … heck, when I graduated High School it only made sense to enlist in the Army. I was pretty good at institutions — no great responsibilities, and a clever guy like myself could figure out the game and mostly do what he pleased.

And so this led the way through college and in to work. I was accustomed to having bosses. I had more respect for the private sector than for education – a TA grad student was giving me instructions as part of a course that was ostensibly for my benefit. A boss or a manager was paying me money to affect certain outcomes. It was an exchange. For the bosses I would bust my butt, and get money. For the teacher … not so much. After all, I was there for my own education, right?

My biggest crisis in the past few years came from unemployment. I’ve been so accustomed to having other people telling me what to do, whether I was ignoring them, fighting them, or cheerfully serving them, that I was at a complete loss for what to do when nobody was demanding anything of me. In fact, I couldn’t find anyone to boss me around. For someone who had lived his life being bossed around up until that point … well, like I said, it was a crisis.

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Dear Wired,

I really enjoy reading your RSS feeds, and I enjoyed the high-quality advertising included in my previous complimentary subscription to Wired magazine. Unfortunately, your complimentary subscription has lapsed. This is unfortunate, as I would like you to enjoy the benefits of high-quality readers like me. I thus extend this invitation to you to resume your complimentary subscription.

Given that I am in a valuable target demographic, (a mid-career technology professional, an upper middle-class geek, and a business manager,) I believe that sending me a complimentary subscription to Wired Magazine is in your best interests, and in the best interests of your advertisers. Please do not pass up this special offer. Act today!

As an avid reader, I look forward to hearing from you. It is my sincere hope that you can continue to enjoy the beneficial advertising revenue that a valuable reader like myself can help to bring your fine publication.

Sincerely,
-danny

Unfortunately, their web site is either rejecting my message without an error, or it keeps accepting it over and over, but it is just not telling me that it has been accepted. Maybe I’ll send them a paper offer. I could throw in some stickers, perhaps.

/danny

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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?”

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1. 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 …
2. 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!
3. 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

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