Craig's Blog

Pay up

When NASA first started sending up astronauts, they quickly discovered that ball-point pens would not work in zero gravity. To combat this problem, NASA scientists spent a decade and $12 billion developing a pen that writes in zero gravity, upside down, on almost any surface including glass and at temperatures ranging from below freezing to over 300 C. The Russians used a pencil. Enjoy paying your taxes--they're due again.

Rod Stewart concert

Last Friday Annette and I and her sister and fiance went to see Rod Stewart in concert. Second row tickets, right in the middle, best seats I've ever had for a concert. Rod although in his 60th year has still got it. His voice, while not ever the best, still has that same gravely rasp that we've all grown to appreciate. He was for the most part right on with his songs. He still dilly dallies around on stage, strutting his stuff, trying to conjure up those wild years. Being that close to the stage really was a interesting experience for me because you can see the expressions on the performers face so well. I could tell that Rod has matured and is gracefully entering his senior years. Whenever he put a move on the crowd (mostly female) like shaking his butt or dancing sexy I could tell he had a smirk like “ok I'll give you what you came for but I'm not going to do this the whole show, I'm too damn old for this“. He's somehow pulled off something astonishing though. He made an album entirely of old 1940's classic songs and somehow managed to sell 10 million of them. So after the intermission the stage was redone to look like a 1940's big band look and feel. Even his backup singers and musicians changed costumes to look like they stepped out of Casablanca. I've always been a fan of the old big band / swooners of that era so I enjoyed the 4 or 5 songs he did. Most of the crowd yawned though or took pee breaks. Interesting choice on his part. If I were him I would have booked small venues and billed it as 1940's music only. Leave it out of the arena concerts. Anyway he finished off with some of his disco and 70's love song classics. Overall it was a lot of fun.

The Battle of Epping Forest

I'm a big fan of Genesis (the rock group, not the biblical concept). My favorite album by them is Selling England By the Pound. I've been listening to it since college, great progressive rock in it's prime. Anyway I've often wondered what the song The Battle of Epping Forest was all about. I did a lyrics search and found them. For the love of Mary and Joseph what a confusing song! It's like a schizophrenic wrote it, basically it's word salad. Please tell me these guys were stoned when they put these lyrics together...

You know you're from St.Louis when..

Similar lists exist for Cincinnati and rednecks and they both ring as true as this list --

You Know you're from St. Louis if:

• You love toasted ravioli with Budweiser beer.
• "Vacation" is a choice between Silver Dollar City and Lake of the Ozarks.
• You can find Pestalozzi Street by aroma alone.(the street by the brewery)
• You can get anywhere in 20 minutes, except on highway 40.
• You've seen all the biggest bands ten years AFTER they were popular.
• You can debate for 30 minutes whether Missouri Baking or Marge Amighetti makes the best Italian bread.
• You know what "Party Cove" is, and where the "lake" is.
• You still can't believe the Arena is gone.
• Your first question to a new person is, "Where did you go to High School?"
• Your non-St. Louisan friends always ask if you're aware there is no "r" in "wash."
• You know at least one person who's gotten hurt at Johnson Shut-ins.
• You know in your heart that Mizzou can beat Nebraska in football.
• You end your sentences with an unnecessary preposition. Example: "Where's my coat at?"
• You think the four major food groups are Beef, Pork, Budweiser and Imo's.
• You've had to switch from heat to AC in the same day.
• You know there are really only three salad dressings: Imo's, Zia's and Rich and Charlie's.
• You'll pay for your kid to go to college unless they want to go to KU.
• You can't think of anything better than sitting on the porch, in the summer, during a thunderstorm.
• You would rather have a root canal without anesthetic than drive on Manchester on a Saturday afternoon.
• It just doesn't seem like a wedding without mostaciolli. AND YOU PRONOUNCE IT 'MUSKACHOLLI'.  The balance of the menu is ham, boiled roast beef, string beans with ham and of course pitchers of Busch Bavarian (class weddings have Bud)
• You know, within a three-mile radius, where another St. Louisan grew up as soon as they open their mouth.
• You know what a Pork Steak is...and what kind of sauce to put on it!
• Everyone in your family has floated the Meramec River at least once.
• A hoosier is someone that lives just south of Chouteau, not a person from Indiana.
• You have made fun of Mike Shanahan and tried to imitate him ordering another cold, frosty Busch Bavarian Beer.
• You have listened to Mike's broadcast on KMOX, while watching the game on TV and wonder what game he is watching. A tear forms in your eye as someone mentions their favorite Jack Buck story.
• You've ever said, "It's not the heat, it's the humidity."
• Your favorite summer treat is handed to you upside-down (Ted Drewe's - YUM!)
  

Latest MythTV attempt

Well I threw in the towel last night. I just can't get MythTV running. Score one for MythTV, it's beaten another victim :) Actually it's come a long way since last summer when I last looked at it. Drivers are more mature for one. My difficulties stem from an attempt to use an already compiled package of rpms created by some guy named Axel. Apparently everyone on RedHat uses this to get Myth up and running. There is one good guide on instructions to installing them, but it's written by a guy who's using a beta version of RedHat, Fedora. I think that's where part of my problem stemmed from because I suddenly noticed Fedora files in my RedHat 9 install. Weird. Anyway I got very close last night until I rebooted and my entire graphics layer was killed, leaving me with a command line only. I'm hoping that some of the newbie linux distros like Mandrake or Xandros will wrap it up in one of their upcoming releases. That would be very cool. I know there's been talk of putting it into Mandrake 10.

So what did I do? Well installed trusty ol Windows XP and Snapstream's BeyondTV. What a work of art that app is. Got XP installed and was watching tv in under an hour. What a change! Compared to the 30 some hours I spent dicking around with Linux. I plan to investigate SageTV and the free .Net app GBPVR. Both of those apps have also come a long way. I will say one thing, BeyondTV has got the best looking UI of all of them. I'll have more to report later when I get a chance to play with these some more.

Irag and shades of the past -- Somolia / Lebanon / Vietnam

First off a honorable link to Chris' fine blog article on the mindset of world war. I have to agree that when you see the only superpower going around and whipping up on third world nations it's like giving the local revolutionary with a gun the idea “well if big daddy can do it, so can I! Viv la _____ (insert favorite cause here)”.

I've been trying to educate myself lately on what the hell is going wrong in Iraq these past few days. Here's my take on the whole situation. We seem to be veering down the same muddy road we got stuck in when we tried to “right“ the “wrongs” in our past “Vietnams“. We go in with good intentions but find out that we can't fight a war with an enemy that is willing to fight dirty. We refuse to fight that way and end up getting picked off one by one in ambush after ambush until we finally give up. Not to give bin Laden any credit but he did say early on that the US doesn't have the stomach to fight a war. From what I've see it's a sentiment that most of the Islamic extremists and terrorists agree with. They know if they fight dirty we'll be disgusted and want to go home. So we sit on the outskirts of these trouble areas, establish “green zones“ and train the local police how to hold a gun, pay them enough to make it worth their while not to sell the gun to the bad guys and hope they will act like good citizens and clean up the mess. As we saw over the weekend, they figure if they just stand there holding the gun and not use it they won't get picked off by a sniper and yet still get paid. Thanks guys.

So the way I look at it we have two choices --
1. Start fighting dirty, religous monuments are fair game for carpet bombing, hit them hard until they see the light that they can't get away with their current game plan. It's the only form of respect they understand. These are terrorists after all.
2. Pick up our stuff and leave.

The fallout from both choices will be enormous. Wholesale slaughter will make us look even worse in the world's eyes, more like Russia was seen in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Leaving with our tail between our legs will just encourage these towelheads to fight even harder in other parts of the world. I don't think we can just sit back and hope that our mostly humane operations to face the enemy head on will prevail. Like the movie Apocalypse Now “I sit in this hotel while out in the jungle Charlie is getting stronger...“. In my own way I'm praying that we will prevail and that good will overcome this evil, that the majority of the Iraqi people will be free of this terror, that our soldiers can come home and not have to deal with the death anymore. We can only hope that our leaders will act like leaders and make some real choices before more of our soldiers are lost in vain.

SciFi awards

As reported in SciFi Weekly:

Ruff Wins Tiptree Award

att Ruff has won the 2003 James Tiptree Jr. Award for his novel Set This House in Order: A Romance of Souls, it was announced yesterday by the James Tiptree Jr. Literary Award Council. Ruff will be presented with his award, $1,000 and other prizes at WisCon 28, to be held Memorial Day weekend in Madison, Wis.

The novel focuses on Andy Gage, a 28-year-old with multiple-personality disorder. His many personalities, or souls, as he calls them, reside in the house inside his head. The stability of Gage's house is threatened when he meets Penny Driver, a young woman who's not aware that she has multiple personalities.

The James Tiptree Jr. Award was created in 1991 to honor Alice Sheldon, who wrote under the pseudonym James Tiptree Jr. and helped break down gender barriers in the literary field. The Tiptree Award is presented annually to a work that explores and expands gender roles in SF and fantasy.

---

So all it takes is $1000 to make up a book award? I say we pool our money and come up with one on our own. Any suggestions?

• Best use of gratuitous sex (Robert Heinlein would of course get the lifetime acheivement award)
• Most likely to be made into a movie (Michael Crichton would be disqualified since he does this intentionally)
• Best story using new scientific ideas
• Best use of drugs to produce a story (Philip Dick, lifetime achievement award there too)

Multi-tabbed web browsers

I often get a surprised look from the people I work with or friends when they see me using one of the several multi-tabbed web browsers. It always surprises me that more people don't use them, especially power users. What they are is a container application that looks just like Internet Explorer but allows you to open many web pages within it. It's a more sensible approach than opening many IE instances and littering your taskbar. Plus it's better use of your memory. Most of the multi-tabbed web browsers only consume around 30-40MB of memory where you can hit that with only a few IE windows open. Most of them use the IE web browser engine so it's not like you are risking a new rendering engine. Most of them also offer some things that should be built in to IE, like popup ad blocking, mouse gestures, skins and auto fill form. Now I command each and every one of you to go out and download at least one of them, try it out and I guarantee that you will see the light --

Avant browser - Freeware. I used it for over a year and decided to switch. The author issues release almost on a daily basis. I got tired of this because he was always inadvertantly breaking something whenever he tried to add a new feature or break an existing bug. Test, test, test first before releasing!!

Green browser - Freeware. Written by a German whose download page is in german but you can switch to English when running the browser. Right now this is my favorite browser and use it at work and at home.

MYIE2 - Freeware. I use it from time to time. It's come a long way and is as good as the rest now.

Crazy browser - Freeware. I used this for a year also. I finally dropped it when it was crashing too much. Since then they probably have solidified the code.

Slimbrowser - Freeware. Never used this one before

NetCaptor browser - Shareware. This one is shareware and really not worth it considering the freeware alternatives are just as good.

Mozilla - Open source alternative to IE. It has it's own rendering engine and works really well on most websites. You lose the ability to view some websites that take advantage of IE's extensive dom (that is not compliant with W3C specs).

April Fools

I read where google.com is going to offer free email service with 1 GB of storage. I'm waiting to see if this is just a big April Fool's joke still.

I haven't pulled a good April Fool's joke on anyone in awhile. My best one was on my ex-wife. At the time we had a comet in the sky and I told her the comet had split into two. She says no way and ran outside. That was a good memory :)

Anyone have a good story? Is anyone really out there?

Egoware

I came across a word today - egoware. I like it because I write a LOT of egoware on my own time. I define egoware as the following:

* Software that's indulgently written, heavy in the “it feels right so I'm writing it this way” light on proper coding techniques.
* Software that really has no use other than to go “wow” that was cool.
* Software that could easily be downloaded off of some freeware site instead of written by hand.
* Software written in order to learn new techniques. That borders on “eduware” though.

Does anyone remember sniglets? Words that should exist to describe something that currently has no word assigned to it. Re: egoware. It was an 80's thing, long gone, how sad, I enjoyed them.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0020125305/102-2936717-2144968?v=glance
http://bertc.com/sniglets.htm (whats with cow girl picture?)
http://www.sniglets.com/ (don't hire this company - no one could be more of an idiot than to name their company sniglet)

Austrailia

I found this cool web site Confluence Project. Basically it's taking pictures of the world's land mass at every point where latitude and longitude lines cross at whole numbers. Of course I had to wonder around the extreme spots like the high latitudes and where 0 - 0  cross. I took a look at Austrailia because whenever I see pictures/videos of that continent it always looked so desolate. Figured this is way to find out without actually being there. Well I'm still not impressed, it's still desolate looking to me. Scrub bushes, red dirt and flatness. Sort of like Oklahoma without the Baptists. I can now see why Australia has never been more populated than you'd expect from a first world country. Just a few major coastal cities and that's it. I once read somewhere that Austrailia is one of the only places on earth that is not geologically active. No mountain building or volcanoes. The result is a dehydrated flat continent. Apparently all continents spread away from Austrailia making it the last piece of the great continent Pangea. I read a book recently called Evolution by Stephen Baxter. An excellent read. It was sort of like the James Michner story for the human race. Baxter being a scifi author finished the book off by going forward in the far future, where will our species end up? The interesting part is that all the continents will eventually ram into each other again, forming another Pangea. His story described a massive Austrailia. Life is reduced to a hardy few tough plants and animals, featureless, plain, struggling to maintain themselves in a symbiotic fashion to scrape the last few organic chemicals left to them. Depressing ending -- but like many of Baxter's stories, really makes you feel insignificant. Sort of like Kurt Vonnegut.