Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/10/27/cleaning-up/
On Friday I got married. There will be more on that later. News has been delayed considerably because at about the time I was getting married, the server hosting this web site went kaput.
After much reinstalling, and recovering data (there were no system-level backups, but my web site files were undamaged, and I had a database dump for the blog data to October 1, and I was able top pull the latest October entries off a cached RSS feed, but anyway) I’m back online! Yay!
Props to Andrew, who has been doing a lot of the recovery legwork here, and to Joe, who brouht the hardware back online.
-danny
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/10/16/marriage-party/
What follows is an announcement for the benefit of the hopefully small minority of my friends in the greater Chicago area who did not receive an e-mail from me or Yayoi. In which case, you should drop me a line to make sure you live in my address book properly. Thanks! (more…)
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/09/22/malaysia-monkeys-scorpions/
As reported on Yahoo! News, via Reuters, “a Malaysian man shot and killed his wife after he mistook her for a monkey picking fruit in a tree behind their house.” The guy was 70, and his 68 year-old wife had used a ladder to climb the tree to pick some fruit. They had raised thirteen children together prior to this tragedy.
There is good news from Malaysia as well. Nur Malena Hassan, the “Scorpion Queen” has wrestled her world record back from Thailand for spending more than a month in a glass box with 6,000 scorpions:
The 27-year-old moved into the box in a shopping mall in Kuantan, about 250 km (160 miles) east of Kuala Lumpur, on Aug. 21. She has only left the box for a daily 15-minute bathroom break, even though she has been stung several times … she lacks sleep because the scorpions crawl over her body. She has been warned she could pass out if stung three times within a short time.
She is going to further secure her title by spending another three days in the box. I am not sure who is crazier. Yahoo! have a slideshow of the Scorpion Queen, if you’d like to see.
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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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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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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/08/03/finnish-army/
From Yahoo! News:
HELSINKI (Reuters) – A number of Finnish conscripts have been excused their full term of military service because they are addicted to the Internet, the Finnish Defence Forces says.
Ah, Finland! Back in 1994 I volunteered for military service. I was a hard-core computer geek, and one argument my Mother employed to try and dissuade me from enlisting was that I would be away for my computer for a very long time. While that would be hard, I viewed such separation as a character-building exercise, a valuable component of military service.
(Though, I did skip out on the Marine Corps after the recruiter told me that telephone access for Marines was generally two payphones per fifty grunts. In the Army at least I had a prayer of some day gaining access to a modem.)
These Finnish men get no free pass, however, they simply get a deferrment, some growing up time:
“They get sent home for three years and after that they have to come back … “
82% of Finnish men serve in the armed forces. That number is a lot better than we have here in the United States.
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/07/18/millenium-park/
The music pavillion is outdoors, with a criss-cross metal skeleton surrounding it off of which dangle many speakers, so that you feel, you hear, the same acoustics as an indoor concert hall, but you are outdoors.
And you can see the tall buildings around you, they are minor players. Directly behind the band shell stands the Aon Building, a modest single cousin to New York’s former World Trade Center.
And we sat back and listened, in the middle of a park in the middle of a city in the middle of America, to opera, which sounded as it would in a concert hall, but under a serene blue sky.
You could tell what the desired effect had been – at the dawn of the new millenium, we could sit outdoors and have that experience and feel really damn optimistic about the future in to which we were flowing.
But it wasn’t finished on time. Four years late. Time enough for the tech bubble to burst, for an illegitimate son to take our nation’s throne, for our nation to face the inexplicable hatred and fanaticism that struck us in the face on 9/11, and two half-assed attempts at war and nation building upon two strange foreign cultures.
Four years is enough time to get used to those troubles, and be reminded of the dream we had had at the millenium. The price tag for this serenity? A steep half a billion dollars. I believe that is about our daily burn rate in Iraq. For one hundred billion dollars we can make a half-assed, ignoble attempt to impose democracy on a foreign country that doesn’t seem to want it so awfully bad, or for one hundred billion we can build 200 millenium parks.
Which would bring greater hope to humanity?
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/07/06/metabolisms/
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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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/07/05/tranquil-baghdad/
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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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/07/04/boom-boom-boom-boom/
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.
(more…)
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/07/03/yeehaw/
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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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/07/02/happy-228-usa/
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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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/07/01/soda-versus-pop/
This is the most fascinating map I’ve seen in a very long time:
Thanks for the tip, Declan!
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/06/29/our-midwestern-weekend/
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.
(more…)
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Link:
https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/06/21/management-prerequisite-self-awareness/
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.
(more…)
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