Kikkoman

Great quote from Wired about it implying if would induce “retinal diabetes”.

It arrived out of the blockbuster queue and would have truly been un-watchsble without the fast forward button.

Awesome book. Went from good to great to awesome. It’s right up there with Snowcrash, but wig a better ending.

Is the phrase that came to mind when I saw an add for Satellite TV on hulu….

Has taken on a new meaning for me lately. It has transitioned from the scholastic to the “manual labor” front with two home improvement / repair projects recently.

First the “The Pheonix Shed”

During a “wind storm” one of the trees in my backyard split itself down the middle. It was an odd tree in that it had a single “main” trunk to to about 5 ft, and then split off in to three smaller trunks. One of the “trunks” fell down, and naturally it landed on the shed. The first couple of pictures show the damage.

In a weakened state the shed eventually fell over. Mainly due to the fact that it wasn’t on flat / level ground, as can be seen in the 4th photo. So the project was to build a foundation for it.

This was accomplished with some smal CMUs and backfill (bricks on sale from Lowe’s and bags of pebbles).

Once the foundation was done the Shed went back up without incident. I am actually rather impressed by the design of it, aka interchangability of all the pieces.

The second project is “Finishing the Garage”. We are still in the middle of it so no photos as of yet.

The project is to repair all the holes in the garage’s drywall, and paint it.

Is wonderful. Read all about it here.

Works well. I created a single MobileMe account, and after cleaning up and organizing the my calendars and my wife’s calendars, I was able to get over the air push of Calendar updates to work.

Each person in the household has an iCal Calendar Group to themselves (and more importantly a unique color).

It is possible to just sync calendars, even though you can’t find a screenshot or mention of it on the official site.

Link to NYTimes science article.

“In fact, the dominant females ordinarily eat a little more than the subordinates. The lower status monkeys can get as much food as they want but seem to have less of a desire to eat, perhaps because of the higher level of stress hormones in their brain. The anxiety of constantly toadying to their social superiors seems to curb their appetite, researchers suspect, at least when their regular high-fiber, low-fat chow is on the menu.”
…
“Once these foods were available, the low-status monkeys promptly developed an appetite. They began eating significantly more calories than their social superiors. While the dominant monkeys dabbled in the sweet, fatty pellets just during the daytime, the subordinate monkeys kept scarfing them down after dark.”

Practical upshot: If your at the top, you don’t crave the comfort of comfort food.

http://lifehacker.com/389595/slim-down-your-wallet-with-your-phone

Explosives Camp!

… You are now part of the problem.

That’s a good line, I’m going to have to use it on someone.

Shawna was having a fairly serious talk with the kids in the other room.   I was out messing  with my computer.  Later when it was over.

Shawna : “So did you hear the talk?”

Milo : “Yeah.”

Shawna : “And?”

Milo : “uhmm … It was very talky.”

Normal person : “Dude, the new Nine Inch Nails [album] rocks!”

Milo :  “Dude, 9 of 15 of the new Nine Inch Nails songs rock!”

After getting a Mac laptop back in 2002-ish I have moved family and friends over to macs, which is at least 9 macs over the years. 5 laptops, 3 minis, and 2 iMacs.

My old Athlon 64 system is getting a little long in the tooth, so I am going to pass it onto my sister and get another desktop. I’d like to get a Mac, but can’t due to the hole in the mac product line.

I am getting a Dell, not because I want a Dell or Vista or want to run Linux on it (which is my plan), but because won’t sell a reasonably priced “normal desktop” box. The only Mac you can get that you can open up, add a harddrive, upgrade the video card etc, is the crazy expensive Mac Pro.

I sold my mac stock recently, I’ll consider buying more when they come out with the iPhone “mini” which needs to be at a $300 pricepoint (at $600 its going to flop like the PS3), and or when they offer a midrange $1k box that is upgrade / tinker friendly.

Update :  The new computer is nice.   It is very quiet.   We have named it StormTrooper after its white and black paint job / finish.   That and Ubuntu 7.04 was able to correctly set video resolution on my monitor (odd widescreen 1600×1050) with no /etc/xorg.conf hacking.

And yes Apple did just announce record profits, I still think the iPhone will initially be a dud.

Neat.

Going to Guam for the races for two weeks soon. Work has settled down, its now getting house stuff straight so I can leave.

Got Kelly’s mac mini setup; cracked the case open and installed a 1 gig ram chip. Used, a bunch of laminated and plastic cards (library card, old ITunes gift card, etc) to get the lid off.

Finished God of War last week. Fanstastic game. I am hoping to catch 300 while in Guam, but it is probably no longer in theatres.

Pick a color, and it gives your others that “go well” with it.

Nice.

I have had occasion recently to focus on my deep and abiding dislike of SQL and (databases in general), and have determined that there is actually one thing SQL could do that would “make it all better”.

That would be: give me nice, easy, standard way of generating a pivot table / query where I don’t need to know all the columns I want back ahead of time.

Please, for the love of … whatever … make it so.    We all know the database can do it and do it reasonably efficiently, cause we’ve all spent days fiddling with frustratingly obtuse queries to trick it into doing it.

Hence you can imagine my surprise to find out that Access already has this all figured out.  Behold, Access’s TRANSFORM statement. Which pretty much does exactly what you want.

The kicker is that, it has been around and in use for a long time.

Can you imagine the billions of dollars wasted around the world writing stupid pivot table queries in SQL when companies have upgraded from Acess to a “real database”?  OMG.

Interesting things I have learned about java recently.

Recursive Generics
Initializing your member variables to null is bad.   Because if you then add in lazy initialization and contructor chaining, you could lazy init twice.
String.intern()  been there since at least 1.2.

Being detached with hope is opposite from being invested with expectations.  -Tseric

http://www.acc.umu.se/~zqad/cats/index.html