March 2004 Archives

Today is the big office outing to watch one of the spring training baseball games. As I look around it seems that there are a lot of people who haven't gone - myself included obviously.

While I can't speak for any of my other coworkers here, I haven't gone because I just can't get into baseball. I've tried, I really have. It's just not my cup of tea. It's not all doom and gloom regarding American sports though. I have actually found one American sport that I like - Ice Hockey. When my mum and dad were here last week, we went to a Coyotes game and we all really got into it. Seeing as Glendale Arena is literally a 10 minute walk from my house I think Sally and I might be going to another game soon :-)

While sipping a couple of glasses of Pinot Grigio last night, I realized that it was exactly 10 years ago this week that I met my wife. So how cool is that? I was really quite impressed that we've been together for a decade now. The amazing thing is that she isn't sick of me. Perhaps she needs her head examined or something :-)

I'm really not sure where Spring went to be honest. Seems like we're cutting out the middle man and going straight to summer this year. Record temp in Phoenix yesterday. A chilly 97°.

It became quite obvious this morning that it would take me a while to go through my blogroll to catch up on last week's blog posts. At this point I'm wondering if I should even bother - perhaps I should just mark them all as read and start with a clean slate? But then I'll wonder what I missed out on :-)

My goodness, doesn't time fly when you're on vacation eh? Last week my Mum & Dad came to visit. It was great to see them again. 18 months is an awfully long time between visits.

During the week we did quite a lot of driving and saw some really cool stuff. If you're ever in southern Arizona, go to Biosphere 2. It was originally designed as an experiment to see what it would take to make a completely self-sufficient environment for humans if we ever established a base on another planet. 8 people lived there for 2 years without any help from the outside world. They recycled their water/oxygen, grew their own food, generated their own energy. Well worth a visit - if you're into that kind of thing :-)

If you're ever in Sedona, try out the Pink Jeep Tour. We went on the Broken Arrow tour. All I can say is "wow". The scenary is absolutely breathtaking and you'll be amazed at how those jeeps can climb up rocks & boulders. You think to yourself "there's no way we're getting up there" - but you do. Awesome.

Today was back to reality with a bang. To say that I didn't want to go to work would be the understatement of the year. Why is it so hard to remember passwords when you come back from vacation eh? And why has my typing got so bad after a mere 9 days away from the keyboard?

This a kind of scary. Ever wondered if any of your neighbours have donated to a presidential campaign? Well, wonder no more, go check for yourself. I now know that a bloke on my street made a hefty contribution. Not sure that he'd like the fact that I know mind you :-)

Some mailing lists are easy to unsubscribe from. You just take a peek at the headers, figure out which email address to send your unsubscribe request to, they'll send you a confirmation, you reply back to confirm - et voila.

The Gnome mailing lists? They're another story.

So, after figuring out how to unsubscribe by looking at the headers, I get a nastygram back saying that they didn't recognize the request. You know, the request *they* told me to send based on *their* headers. Apparently "unsubscribe" is not enough in the subject line. No, I need to send my password *and* my email address in the subject line as well. Fuckers. I've been on these mailing lists for ages and of course I don't remember what my password is and why the hell do you need my email address in the subject line? Other mailing list management software does just fine figuring that part out without any "help" from me :-) Grr.

I'll be on vaction next week. My mum & dad are making the journey across the pond to come and visit. They decided to come in March so that they could beat the heat. I think that's awfully amusing considering we're having a heatwave in Phoenix right now. Record temperatures in fact - today will be 92°.

Just finished unsubscribing from the plethora of mailing lists I'm on as I really don't want to have 4000 emails when I get back. I suspect I'll have a fun time wading through the 1000s of blog entries that will accumulate next week too. Compared with some people, I don't have *that* many blogs in my blogroll but they sure to pile up if you don't keep on top of 'em. I took a day off last Friday and didn't read any blogs over that weekend. Come Monday, my aggregator was swamped. People write a lot of stuff in their blogs. Just try letting it build up for a few days to see what I mean :-)

As I mentioned on Monday, Rummy got caught with his pants down on Face The Nation. Those helpful folks at MoveOn.org have turned the video footage into an ad. Go watch the lying liar in action for yourself :-)

I like reading the CD booklet thingies from cover to cover. I like to know who wrote the songs, what instruments they played, where they recorded the album, who produced it. Stuff like that. Stuff that no-one really gives a shit about except me :-) Occasionally I'll find something of interest, like finding that Bon Harris (of Nitzer Ebb fame - nice bloke as well) had a hand in Marilyn Manson's HolyWood album playing a bit of synth and some engineering as I recall.

I was reading the booklet from No Doubt's "Singles" album and was interested to read that they almost didn't record Talk Talk's "It's My Life". They were considering Depeche Mode's "Question Of Lust" and INXS's "Don't Change". Both of those songs are awesome and I would have loved to have heard the No Doubt version. They did a damn good job of "It's My Life". I still prefer the original Talk Talk version but it was a good attempt nonetheless.

Oh, and Sugar Ray's "Chasin' You Around" is one of the best songs I've heard in ages. To think I'd almost given up on new moozik :-)

Rummy, he's such a prick character isn't he? Lies through his teeth and then quickly stumbles when he's caught out. From Face The Nation:

SCHIEFFER: Well, let me just ask you this. If they did not have these weapons of mass destruction, though, granted all of that is true, why then did they pose an immediate threat to us, to this country?

Sec. RUMSFELD: Well, you're the--you and a few other critics are the only people I've heard use the phrase `immediate threat.' I didn't. The president didn't. And it's become kind of folklore that that's--that's what's happened. The president went...

SCHIEFFER: You're saying that nobody in the administration said that.

Sec. RUMSFELD: I--I can't speak for nobody--everybody in the administration and say nobody said that.

SCHIEFFER: Vice president didn't say that? The...

Sec. RUMSFELD: Not--if--if you have any citations, I'd like to see 'em.

Mr. FRIEDMAN: We have one here. It says `some have argued that the nu'--this is you speaking--`that the nuclear threat from Iraq is not imminent, that Saddam is at least five to seven years away from having nuclear weapons. I would not be so certain.'

Sec. RUMSFELD: And--and...

Mr. FRIEDMAN: It was close to imminent.

Sec. RUMSFELD: Well, I've--I've tried to be precise, and I've tried to be accurate. I'm s--suppose I've...

Mr. FRIEDMAN: `No terrorist state poses a greater or more immediate threat to the security of our people and the stability of the world and the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.'

Sec. RUMSFELD: Mm-hmm. It--my view of--of the situation was that he--he had--we--we believe, the best intelligence that we had and other countries had and that--that we believed and we still do not know--we will know.

Via Atrios

Seems the Canada actually wanted some evidence before they joined up with Dubya to invade Iraq. They didn't get any, so they didn't get involved. Seems perfectly reasonable to me :-)

Ottawa — Canadian officials say they challenged the U.S. to share secret intelligence showing that the Baghdad regime had dangerous weapons of mass destruction in the run-up to the Iraq war, but Washington failed to deliver, thus cementing the Chrétien government's resolve to stay out of the conflict.

Washington's refusal to share raw intelligence with its close ally seemed puzzling at the time, one senior official said. But a year later, the reason now seems clear: "They didn't have any evidence."

The Americans were trying hard to draw Canada into the military coalition poised to attack Iraq, or at least win the political support of then-prime-minister Jean Chrétien and the Liberal government.

At least twice President George W. Bush's advisers said they would come to Ottawa "to present the case" for war, says this Ottawa official, who worked with Mr. Chrétien on the Iraq file in the Prime Minister's Office.

"We weren't interested in 'the case.' We were looking for the evidence," the PMO official said, dismissing the U.S. offer as nothing more than a "PowerPoint slide show."

Proposed Iraq briefing had Canada skeptical

Via Atrios.

Jay Allen waxes lyrical on the future of MT-Blacklist.

I am disinclined to do any work on MT-Blacklist because it will be going away soon. Or rather, it will be obsolete. Unnecessary. Kaput. I will most likely open-source it for anyone else to develop if they wish, but I can’t see any reason for it to continue for reasons I won’t go into right now. It’s sad to me that I never reached my goals with the program, but I suppose I did what was needed, when it was needed. It’s time to put the pride away and move on.

As it ends, so too it begins

Words cannot describe how much MT-Blacklist rocks. I'm wondering what new features in MT 3.0 will cause MT-Blacklist to become obsolete (if MT 3.0 is indeed what Jay is referring to in his blog post)? I know they're going to add comment registration but I thought that feature was going to be optional. With that in mind I don't think MT-Blacklist will become obsolete because I, for one, have absolutely no intention of enabling comment registration.

After leaving Galeon behind when I switched to Firefox, I can now say that I'm 100% Mozilla compliant. Thunderbird is now my email client of choice at work instead of Evolution. Evolution rocks but Thunderbird rocketh harder. I dunno the UI just feels faster & cleaner to me.

I'll prolly try Evolution 2.0 when it comes out to see what improvements have been made. Until then it's Thunderbird all the way :-)

I'd just like to take the time to thank the fuckwit who unleashed the comment spambot on me last night. Luckily I checked my email right in the middle of the attack and noticed the 447 new comments that had already been posted. Also luckily, the spambot used the same IP so it was easy enough to stop the attack by adding it to my banned IP list. Then it was just a matter of using Jay Allen's fan-fucking-tastic MT-Blacklist to get rid of the offending comments.

Get a life you spam-commenting-bastards.

There, I feel better now.

I think it's quite scary how these programs are sneaking through under the guise of 'anti-terrorism' tools when they can/will be used for no such purpose by ordinary law enforcement. And never mind that, why are billions of ordinary American's activities in an anti-terrorism database in the first place? That's what I'd like to know :-)

Even as states retreat from participating in a controversial interstate antiterrorism database that holds billions of records of ordinary Americans' activities, Wisconsin has decided to join the program.

The head of Wisconsin's division of criminal investigation, James R. Warren, signed on to join the Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange, or Matrix, on Feb. 11, said Tom Berlinger, a spokesman for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which runs the program.

With access to the Matrix database, Wisconsin law enforcement officials can look up vast amounts of personal information culled from government and commercial databases. The information includes driver's license pictures, addresses, professional licenses, names of neighbors and relatives, and even domain-name registration filings and hunting licenses.

Privacy advocates have criticized the system, saying it enables law enforcement officials to conduct electronic searches of citizens without any evidence of wrongdoing. Responding to this criticism, Connecticut's Public Safety Commission and a Utah committee held public hearings on the Matrix in early February. Seven states, including Utah and Georgia, have already pulled out or suspended participation, partly because of privacy concerns, in addition to legal issues and projected future costs.

Matrix Expands to Wisconsin

So yesterday, along with the majority of the Phoenix metro area, we decided to go to the Nursery and buy some plants/flowers for the back garden. After we'd planted the new stuff, we thought it would be a good idea to move our 2 year old citrus tree because we'd originally planted it in a really crap place. "Shouldn't take too long to move" said I. Famous last words.

Transplanting a tree is a delicate process because you want to make sure you leave as many of the roots intact as possible so that the tree has a chance of surviving "the move". Arizona "soil" is a horrible clay type yuckfest and the roots of said citrus tree had grown out further than I imagined. So if you can imagine me laying on my stomach, trying to dig around roots in a 3 ft clay hole for close to 2 hours then you have a good idea of how mindnumbingly irratating the whole thing was.

After digging the new hole, the tree was finally in its new home. Then I realized that we didn't have enough soil to fill in around the tree - BUGGER. So, off to Home Depot I went and by the time I got back it was dark.

Not ones to get discouraged by the fact that we couldn't see a damn thing, we rigged up some spot lights and carried on. I'm sure the neighbours thought we were nutjobs.

At the end of the day, the tree move was either a really good idea or a really bad idea. If the tree lives then it was a really good idea and I must of thought of it. If the tree dies then it was a really bad idea and Sally must of thought of it :-) Yeah, that's it.

After what seemed like forever (15 months I think), the new season of The Sopranos started last night. Easily the best thing on TV right now and it's the sole reason that I pay for HBO.

Don't you just love those people who take the last drop of coffee from the pot and then leave without making a fresh one. How hard is it to throw the coffee in the filter and push 'brew' eh? Of the 3 cups I've had today, I had to make a fresh pot every time because the bloody thing was empty.

And on a completely unrelated note, management have decided that we can wear whatever we like for the rest of the month. NICE. Jeans and DMs it is then :-)

Blimey, Dubya's use of 9/11 images in his political ads aren't going down well.

A group representing 120 families of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks called on President George W. Bush's re-election campaign to withdraw political advertising using images of the attack's aftermath.

``I am outraged at the Republicans for doing this, and I don't like my son being used as a political pawn,'' said Robert McIlvane, a member of the group called ``Sept. 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows,'' which held a press conference in Manhattan.

Bush Campaign Should Withdraw TV Ads, Sept. 11 Families Say

NPR ran a similar news story last night. One man interviewed had a family member killed in the 9/11 attacks and called the Dubya ads "sickening".

I have a big policy of live and let live. If it doesn't impact my life, I couldn't care less. Whatever your sexual preference is or what your views on religion, abortion, guns, hunting (etc) are is fine with me - whatever floats your boat.

I know some avid hunters. I personally couldn't go out in the woods and shoot deer for fun. But that's just me. Do I think any less of the hunters? No.

I know some people who are against abortion. I'm pro-choice myself. Do I think any less of the anti-abortion people? No.

I know some people who are very religious. I'm an atheist. Do I think any less of the religious people? No.

Everyone has the right to their own opinion but don't try and preach to me why my point of view is so very wrong. At University the other night, one of my classmates was going on and on about how gay marriage was the end of society and how it was all going to hell in a handbasket. He carried on preaching stating how he couldn't stand 'left wing wackos" (his exact words) who supported things like abortion and gay marriage.

It was that point where I had to leave the room because I just wanted to deck the bloke. If you want to piss me off quickly, that's EXACTLY the way to do it.

I overheard two people at work talking about gay marriage this morning. One of them said something to the effect of "if my next door neighbours were a gay couple and they got married, how will that affect my life or my marriage? Answer - not one bit.". That's exactly my point of view on the subject.

Data::Dumper has to be one of the handiest Perl modules around. I really miss it when writing C++. Maybe it's because I'm still a C++ newbie and haven't found the right library yet but it's a pain in the arse having to write a dump method in your class just so that you can see in-a-nutshell the attributes of your object.

In Perl it's just so easy...

my $foo = Foo::Bar->new;

# then at some later point...

$log->debug(Data::Dumper->Dump([$foo]));

Nice.

One of my coworkers got a George Carlin calendar for Christmas. Every morning he tears of yesterday's page and gives it to me to read. Some of the comments are not really funny, ok, to be perfectly honest, most of the comments are not funny. Today was an exception and at least made me grin.

You know what you never hear about anymore? Quicksand. When I was a kid, movies and comic books had quicksand all the time. What happened? Same thing with whirlpools. You never hear about some guy being sucked down into a whirlpool anymore. I miss that.

George Carlin