I always like it when they start off an episode of Law & Order (including spinoffs) by warning us that the events are fictional and not based on a true story. This of course always means that the story is going to be “ripped from the headlines”. It gives them opportunity to make fun of Tom Cruise’s stupid anti-pharmacology rant, just to give one example.

The point is, Law & Order is AWESOME. Remember that.

Several meta items on the agenda today.

1) Obviously my posting volume is going to decrease somewhat, since I am busy as a beaver with the new job and the moving.   I will do my best though to come up with AWESOME things during the day to post when I get home though, in between packing.
2) Aside from very general terms, I’m not going to blog about my job — except for the fact that I do in fact have one.  I’m not going to be one of those people who gets fired for blogging about their work, that’s for darn sure.  So I won’t mention the name of my employer or what they do, nor any details that might identify what it is I’m doing beyond vague generalities.

3) I am still not a fish.  If you have any questions, that’s your problem.

4) Instead of the How AWESOME is this ranking from 1 to 5 stars, I have undergone a lot of work and replaced that with a simpler (and more AWESOME) yes/no rating system.  Because of past ratings, some things will be ranked at over 100% awesome… but if you have a problem with this, just consider that it would be even more appropriate for ALL entries to be over 100% AWESOME so stop your complaining already.
5) I now control the #1 hit to “worse than hitler” on google.  Suck it, Chavez!

Aside from my web server adminstration and some consulting work that I’ve done, today was the first day of work in a very long time… if I count correctly about seventeen months.  That’s right, I’ve been messing with immigration stuffs for about a year and a half.

I think this new position is going to be both very interesting and very challenging at the same time.  My coworkers seem both cool and competant, the work atmosphere is awesome… free Dr Pepper stocked in the fridge for crying out loud!  Oh, and the rush hour commute today took all of about 8 minutes.  I think I’m starting to like living in Seattle…  :-)

gotta work tomorrow.

WORK!

Oh crap, if you’ve read this it’s too late for you

As mentioned in a previous entry, my laptop’s hinge has seen better days and no longer holds itself upright which can be pretty darn annoying. But I am pleased to say that the velcro solution that was suggested by the internets was in fact a very good idea.

Back of laptop

Front of laptop (see bottom left of LCD)

Okay, I admit… mostly I am just showing off my AWESOME t-rex stickers.

At least on a holiday weekend, that is. We went there today to get some strips of velcro and a BBQ, and it boggles the mind what a difficult and annoying procedure the whole event was. Whereas I’ve normally found that the orange-clad Home Despot staff were helpful and friendly, today they seemed surly and too busy to bother with people like us trying to pay them hundreds of dollars for a frigging BBQ.

We ended up getting this model, because it was both pretty, seemed well constructed, and wasn’t too large to fit in my car. But to do this we had to wait for quite some time to find a salesperson to write down the bill for us, then we had to track down two different people to get the grill for us… and then because it didn’t fit in my Civic without taking the wings off first I had to wander through the store trying to borrow a screwdriver from someone, literally had to go to five different stations and wait in line at most of those before being shuffled off to the next station.

It wasn’t just that I wasn’t buying something that made the staff unfriendly, even when I was looking for items they were rushed and unhelpful. We ended up not buying a hanging planter from them because we both couldn’t find one and because no one bothered to show us where one was despite asking several busy employees. Meh. I’m definitely going to avoid Home Depot except for times when they aren’t likely to be busy from now on.

This is a bit of an amusing story… it seems when certain employees left Air Canada to work for rival WestJet airlines, Air Canada forgot to terminate the computer access codes to the reservation systems for those employees. Then WestJet accessed those reservation systems extensively and used the load information to help plan the best routes.

They finally settled today, ending a several year court battle.

I’m pretty sure that yesterday was the first time that I’d seen a movie in the theatres all frigging year so far, and I think I made a good choice when I decided to go see the third X-Men movie. If you’ve seen the first two, you’re already familiar with the weak plots offset by excellent special effects… well if you were okay with that, definitely put X-Men 3 on your list as well. If anything, the effects were significantly better than the past two movies, but the plot was at the same time weaker. No spoilers, but the use of mutant powers to do very clever things with the camera was most excellent, and at least for me this redeemed any of the badness caused by the crummy and often slow-moving plot.

Modern art, or just a very strange attempt by rt at destroying an old hard drive that contains sensitive information but cannot be erased? You decide!

Star Dolphins running back Ricky Williams was banned from playing for the NFL (again), and so he’s packing his bags for Canada to play the 2006/2007 season for the Toronto Argonauts.

I <3 the CFL. I’m going to have to buy some tickets to some games and head up to Vancouver this season now that I can afford to.

Grumble. My laptop’s LCD hinge has gotten really loose, which is annoying because now it doesn’t properly support its own weight when open. What I need is the opposite of WD-40, something that will make the hinge more sticky but still work. WD-39, perhaps?

[UPDATE] a google search for people with similar problems has given me the idea of using strips of velcro so it can be adjustable. Will head down to Home Despot tomorrow to pick some up.

The New York Times has an editorial on the declining state of post-secondary science education in the US. It suggests a number of factors are to blame, such as racism and uninspired teaching. I’m sure that those are indeed factors in the equation, but it seems to me that it’s no

For some reason, the article seems to overlook what I would consider to be the two most important factors: science is hard, and it doesn’t pay that well. Or to phrase it a slightly different way, the effort:reward ratio just isn’t that high when compared with the alternatives. A person who is bright enough to be successful in the sciences has a lot of options, most of which are frankly more lucrative. They could become a doctor, go into business, computer science, pharmacy, or engineering — all sorts of things that are both interesting and reward the person financially.

With the relative lack of rewards that a person in the sciences receives, it’s in fact pretty amazing that any bright person would go into a science profession at all instead of choosing one of the many alternatives available to him or her. It’s my suspicion that only those people who truly love science enter and stick with it. And of course, the developments that these poorly rewarded scientists are the same ones who help drive the aforementioned professions into success! Without these talented scientists, engineering, computer science, medicine, business, and all of society would all suffer.

I wasn’t gifted enough to compete at the top levels of science, so I didn’t really bother trying. But I do know enough to appreciate these brilliant people… so at the very least I want to say thanks!

We have officially rented a new apartment and will be moving in June 11^th, though we took possession of it today. It will be so so so nice to have a nice new apartment instead of the crummy old place we are in now. It’s kind of stunning to take a walk through our new place and see just how much more awesome it really is. The lease agreement was surprisingly reasonable, too, despite being about 250 pages of fine print on legal paper.

Comcast was “nice” enough to pre-fill our mailbox with spam offers for their overpriced crappy cable Internets and tv service. No thanks, but no thanks. I looked at getting Speakeasy DSL service but it was incredibly hard to justify because they charge double the price of what Qwest does for the same bandwidth. Plus they couldn’t set it up to hook things up on the day we moved which is totally lame… I can hardly imagine the horror of several days in a row without Internets access.

Also, I start work on Tuesday. Woo!

Our esteemed Prime Minister Harper* has taken it upon himself to declare war on the press corps, who he has decided are biased against him. Forget for a second about how laughably stupid his claim is, considering this is the same press corps that openly mocked Paul Martin in a live press conference when the former PM made a disingenuous remark. No, forget that. The bigger issue here is that Harper is trying to divide the country much as his Republican counterparts in America have done since 2000.

By declaring war on the media, in the long run Harper sets up a strategy of spinning any negative commentary on the biases of his media enemies. This has been established in the US with great success by Harper’s ideological counterparts, where the news is completely split between some organizations that report the news and other organizations that report what the Republicans would like the news to be.

In trying to establish similar success, Harper needs to convince his supporters that the media is out to get him — so when a real scandal breaks he can just revert to his previous statements and suggest that the problems are just illusions of Liberal spin. Canada already has CPC friendly media outlets in newspaper and television form, and Harper is attempting to give them an excuse split from reality much like their US counterparts.

We will all pay for this in the long run, I suspect.

* saying that still makes me puke, in case you’re keeping track

Today I had an appointment with the Department of Homeland Security. And yes, this was my second trip in two days for different appointments, thank you very much. After clearing security and getting through triage as usual, I sat alone in a large room (with capacity for about a hundred people) for two hours with no contact with anyone.

Just before noon, some employees came out of the door on their way to lunch when they looked at me quizzically and asked me what I was doing there. I replied that I had an appointment and had been directed to wait there. The employee said that she was the person in charge of handing appointments like the one I had, but that no one had informed her that anyone was waiting. So this means for two hours I completely wasted my time. Grar.

The one bit of icing on the cake is that after today, if everything went well (which it really should have) I won’t have to go back for another two years!

I was fairly frustrated today to find out that I had to wake up early and drive all the way out to Tukwila in rush hour traffic for a DHS appointment only to find that all they wanted was duplication of information they had collected from me months ago.

When I got my Employment Authorization Card, I had to give them my fingerprints and get my picture taken. But now for my Green Card, just a couple of months later, I have to go to the same place and do the same exact procedure all over again. What’s the point of all this duplication?

When do I get to be frustrated about a waste of taxpayers money? I guess that’ll be soon, eh?

Is just three blocks away from a Matt’s Gourmet Hot Dogs location.

You know, for the record.

One corner of our apartment is a huge ugly jumble of wires and electronic equipment, and I decided to finally clean this up as of course we are moving soon. Of the problems is that I have a very small computer case (a Shuttle), and if I plug two hard drives into it at once I cannot close the case. So as mentioned a while ago I went out and purchased some external USB drive enclosures that I could plug my hard drives into and access them externally. I would of course leave one hard drive inside the box, but then I could close it and have two nice neat external devices next to it which would be much nicer than the pile of electronic crap that looks like it’s about to fall over or electrocute someone.

However, I have utterly failed at this. The problem seems to be with a hard drive of mine that I’ve had lots and lots of trouble with in the past. Some of you may recall a few months ago when I had a drive that scrambled itself when I tried to install windows on it, regardless it’s the same device now that is giving me troubles. My one hard drive worked like a charm, I hooked it up and presto I’ve got working. But not the other one, the problem child of the bunch.

I’m not entirely sure what is wrong with it, the symptoms don’t really make a whole lot of sense. As I implied before, when I try to install Windows onto a partition of the drive it not only refuses to install, but also scrambles the entire disk in a few seconds flat. I’m really not sure how this is even possible, yet I tried and I can actually reproduce this error. Grar! I did finally learn to live with the drive, it works ok as a secondary internal device… but now that I want to close the case to get things cleaned up that doesn’t seem to be a good option.

This is very frustrating, as it’s a decently large hard drive (200G), but it seems that I’m going to have to just throw it away. I’ll replace it with a larger device, but it’s annoying that I can’t use it for something even though it functions under some circumstances. Technology: grumble grumble.

[UPDATE: edited for clarity]

Educator ban of Time Cube free speech
is Nazi like evil.  Professors are evil
bastards for suppressing Time Cube, and
deserve ‘tar & feathers’ by betrayed students.

No spoilers, but I just want to reiterate that Season 5 of the show 24 was probably the best of its run thus far.  Not only was the finale last night dramatic and awesome, but they set up a great scenario to start up season 6 with too!

Most excellent.  Those of you waiting to see the show on DVD, I suggest you pre-order today.

Every day, multiple people post listings for free moving boxes on craigslist it’s a really good way to save some time and money moving.  Much better than the former solution, which was to go to the liquor store and take what they were willing to get rid of — those were all annoying tiny boxes.  Craigslist even lets you create an RSS feed for a search term, so you can be updated quickly and be the first one to respond to a free moving box post.
Of course, now that I have the boxes means that I have to pack them.  Crap.

When I was a kid, I thought this was the funniest joke of all time:

“Why did the frog cross the road?”

(more…)

I use gmail as my primary email client because it’s quick and also I can access it from anywhere.  But there are some really annoying things about it, and I will gripe about them now.

• It is impossible to write filters that would help reduce spam levels.  For example, any mail that arrives with asian or cyrillic characters in the “from” column is going to be spam, and I’d like to delete that straight off.
• Deleting large volumes of stored mail at once is near impossible.  I have mailing lists with over ten thousand messages in them, but I can’t bulk delete them and if I want to I’d have to page through them 100 entries at a time.
• Lots of my friends have multiple email addresses, but they all count as different entires in the address book.  It would be super if I could select four email addresses and hit “merge” so that they would all be joined in some super-contact so I don’t get 200 duplicate suggest every time I start writing an email address starting with “joh..”
• If you have a contact with multiple email addresses (which you manually entered), it will still suggest their @gmail address even if you set their primary address to a different one.
• The calendar is poorly intergrated, and the reminder email doesn’t always work as I discovered yesterday.
• The conversation threading feature is very cool. but when its not it can be very annoying.  Especially in a >2 person email conversation, it always lists the first person to send the message at the front of the message even if someone else replied last.  Example: wordpress comments notifications.
• When I click on a “mailto” link on my desktop, that doesn’t bring up gmail.  I could probably hack a workaround for this though.
• Probably more. It’s still a great system, and I’m going to keep using it — but I wish it were better.

In reading the article about the independence vote in Montenegro, I noted that there are only 700,000 people in what will be this new country.  Which is roughly the size of the last two places I’ve lived, Seattle WA and Vancouver BC.

If North America were Europe, it seems that each suburb would have to be its own country, and I’d have to cross national borders 20 times before I needed to fill up on gas.  Oh sorry, petrol.

I have worked dilligently to ensure that Worse Than Hitler is now Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict. Finally now I hope the endless complaints about the invalid syntax of that page will cease — I hope!

In other meta-news, I once again edited the commenting system to make it easier for people to comment without their comments being lost due to the spam trap.  Now, if you forget to write it, it tells you what you just wrote so you can copy/paste it again.  And also it reminds you twice that you need to include that field instead of just once.   Also I spent about 45 minutes getting the “How AWESOME is this post” rating system to correctly switch between “vote” and “votes“.

I hope you all appreciate it.

Here’s a little illusion I made.
Stare at the black dot in the center of this image for 30 seconds.
Without moving your eyes, move your mouse over the image.

-John Sadowski

It’s part of my mission statement for this weblog to share with my dear readers some of the awesome things I come across.  So I feel compelled to share with you a video put out by the fine folks over at Utah-based firearms store Totally Awesome Guns & Range.

It’s totally awesome.

For my new position I’m going to have to be using a Windows desktop, so the question is how do you get any proper work done on one of those machines?  One of the biggest problems is that the windows terminal application is pitiful and requires annoying dos syntax.  What people usually do in this situation is install a program called “Cygwin“, which lets you run proper unix-style commands so you aren’t limited to crappy dos syntax, but this still leaves you in the old for proper terminal program.  You can run Xwindows and an Xterm, but that pretty annoying, and you can alternatively use “rxvt” which unlike Xterm doesn’t require loading cygwin’s Xwindows first, but is still annoying.  What to do?

I just discovered a REALLY nifty way to get around the problem: install a local sshd via cygwin, and then connect to it locally via putty!  Unlike the three applications listed above, the Putty terminal interface is fast, slick, and featureful.  One drawback is that you have to use passwords or keys for each session, but if you use the putty-agent program with ssh keys you only have to do that once.  Very, VERY cool.

This will have been the last time I did laundry at a laundromat for what I hope to be a very long time.  So long, quarters — I for one welcome our new in-apartment washer/dryer overlords.

If you hit this site or RSS feed today at the wrong time, you may have gotten strange or broken results… this is because of some little stupid thing that I was working on today.  I wanted to have my random face image that you see in the upper right show up in the RSS too because that is how many people read the site.  So I got a rss feed plugin “better feeds” that allows you to customize the way the RSS feeds work, and then I hacked it up to include my random face image.  After a couple of aborted attempts, I finally got it working, but for some reason some of the Wordpress administration tools completely stopped working.

Baffled, I reverted themes but found the same error present, and I struggled for a long time trying to figure out what the heck was going on.  Eventually after ruling out lots of other things, I disabled the plugins and found out that the problem was caused my inclusion of the “better feeds” plugin — but I still didn’t know why that should have anything to do with the problem.  So i did a bit of reseach, and I found out that the PHP include function which I was using to share code between the RSS feed and the sidebar, brings all of the variables from the included file into the current scope.  That is to say, all of the variable are completely global.

So one of the variables I used in my face rotation script conflicted with a variable name that the wordpress administration system uses, so when they overlapped it would prevent the administration from working problem.   When I finally moved all of the variable names to be specific to my little script, the administration interface instantly starting working again.  What I find most amazing is that not only is this behaviour not considered a bug, it’s seems to be an intentional feature of the wordpress, and indeed is the foundation of how the plugin system works.

This strikes me as a very terrible solution — to rely and use globals all over the place is just asking for trouble, trouble of the sort that I accidentally ran into.  I’ve seen plugin solutions implemented elsewhere and I suppose I just assumed that having hooks in important places and making that available to plugin authors was the way everyone did plugins.  But I’m not really impressed by the utter lack of controls wordpress seems to implement.  Oh well, it still works well as a blogging system…

In other meta news, I added a “how awesome is this post?” rating system to each entry, so please (ab)use this as you see fit.

The Trailer Park Boys, that’s what.

Another movie I watched recently that I enjoyed was “A History of Violence“, the story of a mild mannered family man in a small Indiana town who stops an armed robbery in a high-profile way.  Part of the attention he gets though is from a group of out-of-town mobsters who think that he is someone they’ve been after for a long time.  I don’t normally like films directed by David Cronenberg (exception: the fly) but this was quite well done both in direction and in the stellar acting performances by Viggo Mortensen and Maria Bello.

This is no action movie by any means, but this fact makes the few violent scenes in the film even more jarring, which is important to the point of the film.  It’s mostly about the interactions within the protagonist’s family as they deal with the crisis around them, and I found it all very interesting.  Definately one to put on your to watch list.

You suck.  I bought your “Network Storage” device today, thinking that would be a nifty way to share files between the three computers we have in our apartment.  The idea is that instead of having a dedicated host for the files, the storage device itself acts as a host and picks up a dhcp hostname and the other computers in the local network can share files on it.  Not entirely new, but nifty idea nonetheless.

However, I returned your product about 30 minutes after I bought it, because it seems that your device is Windows only.  My household runs Mac and Linux computers, so your little machine is completely useless and relies on stupid proprietary methods for filesharing instead of one of the many good open standards out there.  So you lost yourself a customer, and instead I bought two cheapish IDE< ->USB connectors instead that do the job I need it to do and work with open standards that work with Linux, Mac, Windows, and pretty much anything else without the need for special craptastic drivers and Windows-only requirements.

Suck it, netgear.

The movie “24 Hours on Craigslist” is a fascinating documentary that looks at the people who are behind those wacky posts on the internet service Craigslist. The filmmakers dispatched several crews on a single day, meeting with dozens of people who posted and replied to some of the colourful listings on the service. After seeing it, it surprised me to find that the reviews of the film were so terrible.

“The disorganized documentary 24 Hours on Craigslist is primarily a stroll through human desire as manifested on the popular Internet site Craigslist.org.” — nytimes

That sounds like a pretty solid endorsement to me, but they ended up giving it 2 stars — and they were not alone, most of the reviews I could find described it as aimless, dull, pointless, etc. I’m wondering if they watched the same movie as me, because I really enjoyed it.

This may sound odd, but something that struck me while watching this film is that it would be the perfect thing for a Time Capsule, because it so accurately portrays a segment of society that never existed before in the same fashion as it does today. Before the advent of the Internet, classified ads were expensive and only high-ticket items were generally available — plus there was strict control on what could be posted by the newspapers. But things just sort of exploded thanks to the freedom that the free service CraigsList allowed for and produced a neat little ecosystem where people can interact no matter how strange and unique they really are.

24 Hours on Craigslist is not going to change the world, or make a billion dollars at the box office. It was low-budget filmmaking and you can tell. But it was still a good time, especially if you have ever wanted to see who those crazy people behind the scenes were, but didn’t want to actually have to meet them!