February 2005 Archives

Early last year I had this great idea that I would blog the progress of the new Cardinals stadium. It's within walking distance of my house afterall right?

Ahem, well, obviously I sucked at that :-)

So, in the great spirit of better late then never, Sally and I walked over there today and took a couple of photos. I'll really try and remember to take some more each month

Could happen.

Bella In The Shade

A couple of British students from Cornwall are going to spend their summer breaking as many of America's stupid laws as they can.

As US coast-to-coast crimewaves go, it is not in the league of Bonnie and Clyde. It lacks both violence and avarice and is further hindered by an overabundance of pre-publicity.

Undeterred, a couple of students from Cornwall are intent on making American criminal history by spending their summer breaking as many US laws as possible.

"There are thousands of stupid laws in the United States, but we are limiting ourselves to breaking about 45 of them," said Richard Smith, from Portreath, Cornwall.

"I looked on various websites, one in particular called dumblaws.com, and found loads of stupid laws. Some of them there are outmoded reasons for, others just seem to be ridiculous, like banning whale-hunting in a landlocked state," he said.

"Driving round the town square 100 times in Oxford, Mississippi, is going to take for ever because there are no roundabouts," he said. "And I'm rubbish at walking on my hands so crossing the street in Hartford, Connecticut, while walking on them is going to be very difficult."

Underwater bike ride to launch students' eight-week crime spree

My current favourites are "Donkeys cannot sleep in bathtubs" and "when being attacked by a criminal or burglar, you may only protect yourself with the same weapon that the other person posseses".

An honourable mention must go to "It is illegal for men and women over the age of 18 to have less than one missing tooth visible when smiling"

You know the type, bashing MySQL in favor of (insert some other RDBMS here - usually Postgres). I have one of those nice people in my computer architecture class at school. Last night he took great pleasure in announcing that this week's reason why Postgres is better than MySQL is because Postgres supports cursors.

Now, while that may be true, I asked him if he used Perl & DBI to do his database work. I already knew that he did but that led nicely into my next question. I then asked him if he had written his own cursor implementation. He didn't seem to know what I meant. So I told him that if he hadn't written his own implementation then he wasn't using cursors either.

So obviously he thought I was a nutter. I told him to go and read the DBD::Pg POD and let me know if he still thought he was using cursors.

I haven't heard back from him yet. I suspect that will be the end of the cursor bragging for the time being :-)

That's ok, I didn't want to do get anything productive done tonight anyway. Instead I'll be playing some of my fave arcade games from yesteryear.

NICE.

Well let's see, they range from the really quite good to the really quite crap with a couple of really quite averages thrown in.

So, in the really quite good department there was Collateral and The Manchurian Candidate. The really quite average department was represented by The Forgotten and Wimbledon. So, that just leaves the really quite crap department. And for that, we have Alien Vs. Predator.

Over the past year or so there has been an unconscious shift in how people communicate in my office. It used to be phone calls and email. Now its IM and email with the emphasis on IM. In fact I hardly ever speak to anyone on the phone anymore :-) Even in meetings you hear people saying "I'll IM you when I get back to my desk" instead of the usual "I'll call you when I get back to my desk".

Because I apparently live in a cave, I hadn't heard of Spurl until somone mentioned it at work last week. Up until now I've been using del.icio.us for all my bookmarks. Spurl has a much nicer looking user interface and a bookmark import utility that will import your existing del.icio.us bookmarks and all your browser bookmarks too. I'll give it a go for a few weeks to see if I have any reason to switch back to del.icio.us.

Insane week. Busy, busy, busy. Take tonight for example. While taking an exam for my Computer Architecture class, my pager went off four times because someone at work thought the sky was falling in. I finished the exam (it sucked BTW), and was conferenced in with three people on my cell phone while driving home.

Got in the house, fired up the laptop, ssh'd into work, fixed the impending disaster (i.e restarted a daemon - grin), and all is well in the world again :-) So, now I'm going to listen to the latest episode of LugRadio before going to bed.

That beer tomorrow night is going to taste particularly good :-)

And in big brother news.

SUTTER, Calif. - The only grade school in this rural town is requiring students to wear radio frequency identification badges that can track their every move. Some parents are outraged, fearing it will rob their children of privacy.

The badges introduced at Brittan Elementary School on Jan. 18 rely on the same radio frequency and scanner technology that companies use to track livestock and product inventory.

Calif. school requires radio ID tags for students

And here's today's indicator that I must have gone to sleep and woken up in the bizarro world. The part about the Secretary of Homeland Security being able to 'waive all laws' is particularly scary.

Section 102 of the REAL ID Act of 2005 seeks to expedite the building of a three-mile fence at the border near San Diego to staunch the flood of illegal aliens that travel through an area known as "smuggler's gulch."

Environmental laws have been the project's chief roadblock, but the bill's language appears to provide an unlimited scope, reading, "Notwithstanding any other provision of law, the Secretary of Homeland Security shall have the authority to waive, and shall waive, all laws such Secretary, in such Secretary's sole discretion, determines necessary to ensure expeditious construction of the barriers and roads under this section."

Significantly, it also says courts are prohibited from reviewing the secretary's decision.

Bill passed in House also empowers security secretary to 'waive all laws'

My dog, Foster, had to go back to the vet last Friday for a reoccurring illness. One of the medicines he was given was a dose of steroid pills. This has one or two unfortunate side effects.

He is extremely thirsty and drinks a lot of water. This of course means he pees like a racehorse. He also has, er, let’s just say he has trouble controlling his bladder. Imagine coming downstairs in the morning and thinking the washing machine had leaked during the night. Can you picture that? Good, then you're on the right track. Thankfully the only carpet we have in the house in on the stairs. I knew tile flooring would come in handy :-)

So you can imagine what happened when I though it was a good idea to take him for a ride in my car while I went to Blockbuster. Let’s just say I spent a lot of time with towels and carpet cleaner :-)

See, there are handy things about having an Arena within walking distance from your house. On April 14th, I get to stroll on over to the U2 gig. NICE.

Last night I did a bit of satellite surfing and decided to stick with the SciFi channel for a while. I ended up watching quite a few programmes and even got a chance to watch Buck Rogers for the first time since I was a wee nipper.

Let's just say that I should have been content with the fond memories I had of it. It really wasn't very good.

To be honest, I'm sure that I'd be disappointed with the majority of American TV programmes I used to watch as a kid. Yes, I'm looking at you:

The A-Team
Knight Rider
Blue Thunder
Airwolf
Streethawk
Chips
TJ Hooker
etc

The Cure have announced that Seventeen Seconds, Faith, and Pornography are being re-released as 2 CD sets this coming April. Hmm, bloody hell Robert, how many times do you want me to buy these albums? I already own them on vinyl and CD. Now I'm going to have to buy them again just to get the "rarities" on the second disc :-)

I thought The Village was really quite good. I must admit (rather embarrassingly) that I was totally surprised by "the twist" as I wasn't expecting it at all. Still think Signs is the best movie M. Night Shyamalan has made but The Village gives it a good run for its money.

Like every other gmail user, I was given 50 invites this morning. So, if you are one of the 4 people left on the planet who don't have a gmail account, let me know and I'll send an invite your way. Or, if you believe the rumours, just wait a couple of weeks until gmail opens its doors to the public.

So I've been running ubuntu for the last week and a half and I'm really quite happy with it. I have the Fedora Core 3 ISOs sitting here and I see little reason to try them out to be honest. I've done the switch distro thing for the past couple of years and I've made the decision to just pick a distro and stick with it.

Ubuntu is that distro.