Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2006/01/09/ikea-emeryville-bah/
IKEA Flags, San Diego (Thanks,
Juan23)
Don’t get me wrong, I mean, I love shopping at IKEA . . . the drive to the mega-store, the search for parking, the endless meandering through furniture and accoutrements, only to find yourself facing the stark reality of a giant warehouse, asking yourself if the Black-Brown BILLY bookshelf, which looks so black in the warehouse, is really the same color you were looking at in the showroom, and standing in line, wondering just what kind of crap they put in a 50c hot dog. But once you pay, and you’re rolling out the door, you know you’re not far from the actual joy of wrangling your heavy flat-packed furniture up the stairs and getting busy with the allen wrench.
But yesterday . . . well, I have officially given up on the Emeryville, CA IKEA. Here is my tale, as told in the call-and-response format that passes for “customer service” via the “Internet” these days: (more…)
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/12/09/americans-cut-some-slack/
Well, so we know that Americans put in a lot more time at work than our counterparts in Europe. We get fewer benefits, but higher salaries. Of course, we tend to commute by car, and live in very hot or very cold places, so we spend a lot more cash on energy, or we would, if our government were not structured to keep energy artificially cheap. As a consequence, we convert valuable cropland into large suburban houses, and spend more time driving SUVs around the freeways.
Anyway . . . higher pay or not, I’m jealous of the five weeks of vacation that I’d get if I worked in Europe. On the other hand, Wired reports that American employers have mostly come to accept the fact that Internet access means some amount of employee slack time:
Companies are growing more accepting of the idea that workers will fritter away part of the workday shopping online, according to purveyors of employee internet-monitoring tools. Most employers engage in some sort of monitoring of workplace internet access. But rather than block all shopping sites, employers preoccupied with productivity are more apt to set time limits on access. Today . . . employers commonly permit use of non-work-related sites for around an hour a day.
(more…)
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/12/07/starbucks-not-evil/
I am not a big fan of Starbucks. It’s not merely that I’m anti-trendy, but it just isn’t my idea of a nice coffee shop. (My idea of coffee doesn’t encompass “twenty ounces served in a paper cup with a plastic lid,” unless I’m stopping at a gas station on the Interstate.) But they give benefits to part-time employees, and as far as I have ever heard, the company conducts itself in a decent manner uncharacteristic of many greedy megacorporations. The latest evidence comes from AP / Yahoo: (more…)
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/12/05/gilmore-v-gonzales/
If you are free to visit San Francisco on Thursday December 8, then this may be an interesting activity. Even if you can’t go to this thing, you may be interested in your freedom anyway:
On the 4th of July 2002, John Gilmore, American citizen, decided to take a trip from one part of the United States of America to another. He went to Oakland International Airport — ticket in hand — and was told he had to produce his ID if he wanted to travel. He asked to see the law demanding he show his ‘papers’ and was told after a time that the law was secret and no, he wouldn’t be allowed to read it.
He hasn’t flown in his own country since.
On December 8th 2005, oral arguments in Gilmore v. Gonzales will be heard before the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. At stake is nothing less than the right of Americans to travel anonymously in their own country — and the exposure of ‘secret law’ for what it is: an abomination.
You may think he’s crazy, but it is good when people challenge the government–read more at http://papersplease.org/gilmore/facts.html.
Thanks, Jeff!
Feedback Welcome
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/11/17/kundera-sucks/
Actually, I enjoyed The Unbearable Lightness of Being but that’s not so say I’m going to disagree Maciej. How can you disagree when someone with impeccable Eastern European street cred runs through a list of “date books” with such exuberence:
[The Unbearable Lightness of Being] has that sexy whiff of the Eastern Bloc to it (very effective on anyone who hasn’t been immunized by an actual relationship with an Eastern European), it’s full of young people having complex, turgid sex with one another, and since the first sentence of the book mentions ‘Nietzsche’, it is ipso facto philosophical.
I mean, he even goes to the trouble of worrying about the right translation for you, his gentle reader: (more…)
2 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/11/15/history-aint-changed/
The change, it had to come
We knew it all along
We were liberated from the fold, that’s all
And the world looks just the same
And history ain’t changed
Remember how Iraq used to be run by a brutal tyrant who did nasty things to minority elements? Until American troops came in and liberated the place, and ran the jails, except after awhile the American troops got crazy again? (more…)
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/11/13/japanese-gaming-chic/
“Right now Asian fans really like the Japanese products and culture. They want the package in Japanese, manual in Japanese, they want everything to be in Japanese, or Japanese style. Japan is cool and popular in China, and right now it seems like they don’t want anything else.”
Takeshi Kimura
SNK Playmore
Game Devloper Magazine, November 2005
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/11/08/slash-initrd/
Do not taunt Red Hat Enterprise Linux:
Finally, one more directory worth noting is the /initrd/ directory. It is empty, but is used as a critical mount point during the boot process.
Warning Warning
Do not remove the /initrd/ directory for any reason. Removing this directory causes the system to fail to boot with a kernel panic error message.
<doomsey> do not taunt the happy fun directory. (more…)
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/10/19/martin-luther-king-quotes/
We happened by the Yerba Buena Gardens in San Francisco this weekend, visited the Zeum, which was cool, and caught the Wallace and Gromit movie, which rocked, and also checked out this cool monument to Martin Luther King, and brought back some good words that seem to apply to the present day: (more…)
1 Comment
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/10/03/nerdtv-library-alexandria/
I just finished watching the most recent episode of NerdTV, which, if you are a nerd, especially a Silicon Valley type nerd, you ought to check out. You don’t need cable to watch, you can download from the Internet. Using BitTorrent. Truth in distribution!
NerdTV is a blast because they basically take all-star nerds, people who are often not far removed from myself, and interview them, 1:1 for an hour, about, whatever, and while you have to be in the right mood to watch a one-hour interview with a Nerd, well . . . insightful. “Charlie Rose with Nerds,” I think is the tagline. (more…)
2 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/09/26/buncha-squares/
Man, it is one thing when the media flame the powers that be, but I think it is a bit more tasty when people flame those of us who may well be reading. My first taste is from David Denby, in the September 26 New Yorker magazine:
Movie taste has turned very square in this country, and I don’t know if audiences are prepared to accept a shitheel as a hero. “Lord of War” tells you why intelligent people may enjoy doing evil things, and it lets you in on the fun. It has been made without hypocrisy . . .
My, such potty-mouthed writing in The New Yorker! But for the proper lashing we turn to a local independent, The Wave magazine, which feature’s Seanbaby’s “The Final Last Word” in the September 21 issue: (more…)
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/08/23/daily-show-piracy/
We watch The Daily Show every day. It is actually one of the very few shows we watch regularly, and so instead of spending tens of dollars a month on cable television, we download our television off the Internet. It is a little less convenient because I have to download the shows manually instead of setting up a DVR, and the video quality is often inconsistent. On the other hand, the people who upload the shows edit the commercials out beforehand, and I can copy the files to a laptop to watch on the plane.
Wired magazine publishes an interview with Daily Show anchor Jon Stewart and producer Ben Karlin:
Wired: [The Daily Show is] among the most popular shows traded online. People download and watch the whole thing, every day. Were you guys aware of that?
Karlin: Not only am I not aware of that, I don’t want to be aware of that.
Wired: Well, don’t go shutting it down.
Stewart: We’re not going to shut it down – we don’t even know what it is. I’m having enough trouble just getting porn.
Whew! (more…)
1 Comment
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/07/04/usa-christian-roots-faq/
“What of America’s Christian Roots?”
From what I can tell, the founding fathers were about as Christian as other Americans. Which means, some were plenty Christian and some were pretty open-minded, or minimalist, like me. I think this excerpt from The Week, June 10, 2005 explains our Christian Heritage fairly well: (more…)
3 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/06/14/outrage-fatigue/
Joe told me he made a deliberate effort to stop reading political blogs, and I said that I never really did bother to read political blogs, because they generally don’t go past provoking self-righteous outrage at the other side, and since about 2003 or so I have definitely had “outrage fatigue.”
But that doesn’t mean I still don’t pay attention, and that doesn’t mean that I am ignorant of the outrages. I get a trickle of the worst, usually from The New Yorker, and that’s when I feel compelled to re-tell the stories of the greatest outrage.
Amnesty International recently referred to Guantanamo and other prisons like it as “the gulag of our times” or words to that effect, and the Bush Administration and conservatives flipped out over that . . . (that outrage!) because really, our suspending the Geneva Conventions and inprisoning a classified number of people throughout the world based on classified intelligence without ever charging them with a crime is nothing at all like the Soviet gulag, where millions of Stalin’s own citizens were worked to their deaths.
And you know, they have a point, or maybe I was daydreaming about something else when I read the chapter in “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” that was similar to this passage, from Hendrik Hertzberg in The New Yorker, May 30, 2005: (more…)
2 Comments
Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/06/11/perl-convert-celsius-and-fahrenheit/
I recently had a need for two quick temperature conversion algorithms in a Perl script. I asked Google, but did not immediately get a great answer, so here’s my answer:
# Two quick helper functions: CtoF and FtoC
sub CtoF { my $c = shift; $c =~ s/[^\d\.]//g; return (9/5)*($c+32); }
sub FtoC { my $f = shift; $f =~ s/[^\d\.]//g; return (5/9)*($f-32); }
The regex is to untaint the input datum, and could be eliminated if you know that your variable is clean. This code has been incorporated into a systems health and data trend monitoring script for FreeBSD. For the vaguely interested, here’s today’s perldoc: (more…)
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