August 2004 Archives
Dubya's welcoming committee in full force. ROCK!
Hundreds of thousands of protesters calling for President George Bush to be removed descended on to the streets of Manhattan yesterday, on the eve of the Republican party convention.The march, of an estimated 250,000 people, passed off peacefully, despite predictions of violence, with demonstrators wearing badges stating "Re-defeat President Bush" and banners proclaiming "Bush lied, thousands died". Several dozen were arrested, including around 50 on bicycles, but the overall feeling was more carnival than carnage.
"He shouldn't be president and he shouldn't be coming to New York city to take advantage of 9/11," said Sarah Johnson, from Newark, New Jersey. "He's already making the rest of the world hate us and if he gets back in there's no saying what he might do."
The only problem with living in another country during the Olympics is that you are at the mercy of their TV coverage. For example, I read in today's Guardian that the British team have had one of their best competitions in ten years.
Team GB's athletes, sailors, swimmers, cyclists, rowers, kayakers, divers, riders, archers, modern pentathletes, badminton players, and finally one very special young boxer, won a total of 30 medals, nine of them gold.Of course you wouldn't know that from watching the NBC coverage. Obviously this is to be expected. I wouldn't expect the BBC to show every American athlete competing either. I dunno, it's just a little annoying and one of the few times that I wish I could watch British TV.It is the largest British medal haul since 37 medals were won at the 1984 Los Angeles games...
It would seem I have another 6 Gmail invites. In case you don't already have a Gmail account and you want to try it out, the first six people to send me an email get an invite.
Simple as that.
Not bad. Three weeks old and I'm greeted with the following when powering on the box.
Hard disk read failure - no bootable devices
Nice.
According to the desktop support bloke, they've been getting a lot of trouble tickets about dead hard drives on the new Dell laptops. Apparently I'll be getting a new hard drive tomorrow. No word on whether anything on the dead one is recoverable :-(
Well I've learned something new today. Didn't know MySQL could dump results as XML when using mysql -X on the command line.
Sometimes the olympic commentators say some really stupid things. There have been a couple of times that Sally and I just looked at each other and burst of laughing. Justin Mason caught one as well.
TV: A choice quote from NBC's Olympics coverage: 'This girl (one of the US beach volleyball team) reads a book a week!' (delivered in shocked tones.)The other night there was another one. I forget which swimming event it was but the commentator said "...she's 30 and still has good reactions". Er, yes mate, contrary to popular belief, the brain does actually still function when you reach the ancient age of 30.
...love their pickup trucks. How do I know this? Well, I have to drive past Glendale Arena every day on my way home. Apparently Toby Keith (some country bloke it would seem) played Glendale Arena last night. I kid you not, 8 out of 10 vehicles parked in the car park were pickup trucks.
Can we stop calling the USA olympic basketball team "the dream team" now? The 1992 olympic basketball team *was* "the dream team". Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird et al.
The 2004 incarnation really aren't that good are they? With all their bling bling, Bentleys, and mansions, this multi millionaire NBA 'B' team are clearly not as good as they think they are.
Just an observation :-)
So now that I'm completely addicted to all things Olympic, I find myself avoiding the news like the plague. You know, just in case I hear a result before I've seen it on TV.
How sad is that?
An old Sun Ultra 5 running Solaris 5.6 here at work...
->uptime
11:21am up 1035 day(s), 16:54, 5 users, load average: 1.09, 1.04, 1.03
A while back I mentioned that I was having problems with my wrists. About a week later my wrists were fine. Haven't had a problem since. Now I have a new problem. My elbows. To be honest I think I'm falling apart at the seams :-)
My right elbow is really quite painful. I can't lift anything heavy with my right arm at the moment. The pain started around the time I got my new laptop. Now that I think about it, I am using my laptop almost all day. Don't really do any coding on my desktop anymore. Because my arms rest slightly differently when using the laptop than they do when using the desktop, I'm sure this is the problem in a nutshell.
So I'll be going back to using my desktop for coding and just use my laptop as little as possible (just for email really) for the time being to see if that helps out. That's all a bit sucky really because my laptop rocks. Mind you I think my elbows rock a little more than my laptop so I think I'll choose them over my geeky toy :-)
And today in Star Trek transporter news...
Physicists have carried out successful teleportation with particles of light over a distance of 600m across the River Danube in Austria.
Mark Pilgrim on why specs matter.
Most developers are morons, and the rest are assholes. I have at various times counted myself in both groups, so I can say this with the utmost confidence.
Ok so we've been totally sucked into the Olympics. Been watching it for most of the day. Love it. Can't get enough. We took a break to go Mesa (60 mile round trip) to get awesome Pizza before coming home and continuing our Olympic addiction :-)
One thing is quite apparent. Empty seats. Where are the spectators?
Along with the rest of America I'm reading The Da Vinci Code at the moment. Not the best book I've ever read but it has sparked my interest in all things Holy Grail and Priory Of Sion.
For the two people who actually read this blog, you may have noticed the distinct lack of entries of late. To be quite honest I've been awfully busy and keeping up with the blogosphere (including my own blog) has taken second place to that thing called life :-)
This week has been particularly hectic. Take yesterday for instance. Got to work at 7:30am and I think I left at 7:05pm. Then when I got home I was on the phone to a couple of people who were still in the office for another hour or so. Ate my dinner at 8:45pm and then crashed on the sofa watching VH1's 100 Greatest One Hit Wonders.
Got woken up by the dogs barking at something outside at about 4:30am ish. Let them out and went with them (in my undies) to have a look around but of course we didn't find anything. By that time I was wide awake so had a shower and came into work.
You know, I think I'm going to enjoy that beer tonight.
Test post from Zempt.
If this shows up then the test was a success.
I think I got about 2 hours of sleep last night. Went to bed before 11:00pm (which is almost unheard of in our house) because I had to be at work early. The last time I looked at the clock it was around 2:30am ish and I was still wide awake.
At some point after that I knew I had drifted off because I was woken up by the sound of my pager going off. It was 4:45am. Had to get up, go downstairs, boot the laptop, ssh into my Linux box at work and fix something nasty that broke. Tried to go back to sleep after that but it was a lost cause. Ended up getting up at 5:30am, had a shower and went to work.
Surprisingly enough I don't feel too bad at the moment. I'm waiting for it to hit me at some point this afternoon. Even though I don't feel bad, I must look awful as more than one person has come up to me and said "Kev, you look like shit". Er, thanks for pointing that out guys :-)
In a fit of channel surfing last night I stumbled across Confidence. It had all the tell tale signs of being pure arse. Glad I stuck with it because it actually turned out to be a really good movie.
Edd Dumbill was also a little miffed at the number of geeks with Apple laptops at OSCON.
OSCON was a good time. However, one of the things which perennially disappoints me is the number of OS X machines there in the hands of free software hackers. And especially so given the bit in Tim O'Reilly's keynote where he mentioned various ways in which he thought desktop Linux could improve. (Which I suspect means become more like OS X, but that's OK.) I was sputtering to myself saying "but, we've already done that!" to most of them.I was lucky enough to go to OSCON 2001 in San Diego[0] and I remember being quite surprised at how many geeks had apple hardware even back then.
[0] Ahh yes, back in the day when $BIG_COMPANY would still pay for such a thing :-)
Miguel made me chuckle today.
I noticed that Open Source proponents using MacOS X have developed highly tuned excuses, similar to those that smokers have about why cigarettes are good for you.
Blimey, Ron Reagan layeth the smack down.
The son of the fortieth president of the United States takes a hard look at the son of the forty-first and does not like what he sees.