I know that you, dear reader, are not among this group — but could you believe that there are still some people left in the world who haven’t yet heard of Manny’s Mexican Restaurant of Kansas City?  It boggles the mind, so I’m posting this here as a public service annoucement:  next time you’re in KC, check out Manny’s.

I had thought about getting a new some server, a little mac mini or something — just something that would quietly sit there and run a little home webserver and act as the print/fileserver for the house with the various music files etc all stored there.  Except that fluffy is now hesitating on getting rid of his mac mini which gave me some time to rethink the situation.

What I’m thinking now is to use my broken laptop as the home server.  It’s certainly more than powerful enough — moreso than a mac mini would be that’s for sure.  And because I’ve got my work laptop now there really is little need for having two laptops around all the time.   Right now I’ve been using my work laptop for work stuff and trying to use my home laptop for home stuff — which is very difficult because of how difficult it is to prop the screen up correctly because the LCD hinge is badly broken.

The only drawback to this idea is that my work laptop runs windows, and as you probably know by now I really hate windows with a certain passion.  I’m not stupid enough to try to install a linux distribution overtop of my work drive, but something else may work ok.  What I’m thinking is that I can run Linux under VMWare at fullscreen when I’m home, pretty much ignoring that there is another OS sitting underneath.

This is what I’m doing now, just to see how irritating this would actually be.  So far it’s not too bad really.  It’s a little bit slower than I’d like, but everything works like it should so really I shouldn’t complain.

Now, a lot of people have been saying to themselves: “I’m pretty sure rt does the best podcast of all time, but I can’t go to all the effort to download and play back the individual track.  In this day and age, can’t he do something to make it a bit easier?”

I’ve heard your many pleas, and have installed the LoudBlog podcasting server on this very website that you are now surfing on!  So now when you click on a podcast episode you can have the choice to either download the MP3 file or play it back in a convenient and nifty flash interface.  Also for those of you who use podcasting software already (ha ha), or something like iTunes, I have a iTunes compatible podcast feed that you can directly load into your programme.  And if that wasn’t enough, I also have a website that you can go to, http://ryanthiessen.com/podcast/index.php where you can see how awesome all of the past podcasts were in case (teh horrors) you missed an exciting episode.

Enjoy!

In this third biannual podcast, I examine a hot topic on the world stage. No, not that Islamists are killing each other and others again — something even bigger. That’s right, the question of whether Canada should consider joining the EU as a way to counterbalance the cultural and economic dependancy on the USA.

Podcoast Episode 3

You can be the proud owner of a book that the Premier of Alberta threw at some guy.

Buy now!

I get the feeling some old Russian folks would get a good laugh from this headline.

Skippy writes:

Man, I was thinking about getting one of those shirts. Now I cannot, because that would be “copying”, or possibly “copyright infringement” against you, and then I would go to jail.

At least that’s what they’re teaching me in Copyright Class in school…

Thank the gods for Captain Copyright teaching kids like skippy the important things in life.

Says the guy who contributes only a thought.

I just came across this great website, it’s called “Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things“.  It’s a collection of blog-o-journalists who post of a variety of interesting topics.  You get all the latest news about things that happen with extremely relevant topics like someone taking a picture of a ride at a Disney Theme park, or when there is (artful) porn to be found somewhere on the internets.  And not just that, all of the site’s contributers helpfully promote what they are doing — and it’s always fascinating.  For example, “Doctor Coryow” is speaking on behalf of the EFF, “Mark Katzenfelder” notes that his magazine continues to exist somehow, and “Jenny Jardin” lets you know when she is speaking on NPR.

Now I know what you are thinking — and don’t worry I’m thinking the same thing too:  I’d pay hundreds of dollars a month for a website that combines all of this information in one place.  But no, you get it all for free, all at http://boingboing.net.  You know you want to.

But seriously, what’s wrong with those folks?  Take for example their national drink, Fosters, pretty much always judged the best tasting beer in all of Australia.  I mean, that stuff is pure crap — what on Earth are they thinking, drinking that stuff?

Also, when they were naming states, how the halibut did they decide to choose the abbreviation WA for Western Australia?  Didn’t they realize that this would frustrate the efforts of Database Developers everywhere who would like a unique key on the state code field that encompasses Australia, America, and Canada?  I first suggested that the best solution would be to destroy the state, however this was considered impractical because of all the effort that would be needed to evacuate the beloved cane toads.

So instead, I suggest an official name change, from Western Australia to “Another Empty Australian State”, abbreviated to AEAS.  That will be a unique code so Database Developers around the world can rejoice, knowing that they can include Australian states in their tables without having to add a second key for country code.

Who’s with me?!?

Here is a picture of me wearing my new AWESOME t-shirt that arrived in the mail today.
(more…)

As previously reported on this very website, there is a real life time cube and you can buy it for only $15.  I ordered it and it shipped today, I should have it in a week or so.  Will provide pictures when it comes, assuming I can figure out which box my camera is in.

Bush and his cronies are up in arms about the New York Times and other papers publishing reports of things that the administration is doing.  How dare they publish information that will assist the enemy during wartime?  And you know what?  They are totally right, but they don’t go far enough.

The war on terror isn’t the only war going on.  What about the war on drugs?  Would you believe that police officers actually tell people they arrest that they have the right to remain silent and the right to hire an attorney?  These do-gooding liberal minded coppers are like the New York Times on steroids!

It’s hard to believe in this post-911 world of ours that people are allowed to post information about their rights and what the government is and isn’t doing.  Isn’t it about time that we let our elected officials tell us what we need to know and then shut up and stop asking questions?

I just can’t bring myself to care about Ray, the movie about Ray Charles.  Musician struggles with drug and womanizing problems.  Oh, also he’s black and blind too.

Meh.

Right now we have no phone line service thanks to the good folks at Qwest.  Thankfully our internets are still working, so it’s not an utter loss.  Plus we have our cellphones… but still: Qwest, you suck.

When you visit Kansas City, don’t forget to get your DiscoverKC pass from visitkc.com. Otherwise you’ll get hosed on such KC treats as the Rhythm and Ribs jazz festival, or the theme park Worlds of Fun. You won’t regret it!

Please note: The DiscoverKC Pass is only available to those who live outside the five-county Kansas City Metropolitan area.

I have to admit: I had low hopes for Syriana after a string of bad movies that I’d seen.  I’m happy to report however that I was positively surprised by this movie.  I was expecting lame moralizing of the kind that disappointed me about Lord of War, however this movie managed to make it’s way through without introducing cartoonish villains.  What it did have instead were complicated people with realistic motivations, spun together in a series of interconnecting narratives that made the film a pleasure to watch.

What really impressed me was that despite the well-known political leanings of show star George Clooney, the US government was portrayed not as a faceless villain who wants to destroy the world, but instead as a collection of individuals with different goals, who make actions in their own self-interest with non-evil motivations — even if the end result ends up being suboptimal.  It’s too easy to just fall back to the activist position and just make use of they as was done in Lord of War, but Syriana was happily not guilty of this offense.

With a complex plot like this that weaves multiple stories together, it’s pretty easy to be confused by what is going on where.  I credit excellent casting for making it pretty obvious which characters belonged where so even a dumb guy like me could easily remember which person belonged in each storyline.  Clooney and Damon, the show’s big name stars, both did good in their very different roles.  Neither of them was really stellar or standout, perhaps because this was really not the kind of movie that could provide the proper stage for that kind of thing.  While each of them could have been described as being the lead actor in the film, really they just played a part in their own narratives, two among many.

Definitely one to rent.

I was pretty sad to learn the other day that Harriet the Tortoise had a heart attack and died at the age of (about) 175. Aside from just being awesome, Harriet was collected by Charles Darwin himself during his Voyage of the Beagle days from the Galapagos Islands and brought back to UK with him. Later in life, Harriet was brought back to Steve Irwin’s Australia Zoo, where I was lucky enough to see her while visiting that crikeyiffic place a couple of years go.

It was pretty strange to see this turtle walking around, knowing that it had personal contact with one of the greatest people to ever walk the face of the Earth. For me at least, Darwin has always been more myth than man, even if you know he was a real person who actually existed blah blah blah it was still pretty neat to see something that he had collected that was still alive. This was no museum piece, it was a living breathing piece of history and gave me and infitismally small connection with something that I usually think of as the very far distant past. Forget about geological time, in tortoise time it’s only been one generation.

So I’m sorry to see Harriet go. Other science nerds will no longer get this same strange feeling from meeting her and this connection with the past is officially gone. But at least I was lucky enough to get that for myself, just in time. RIP, Harriet the Tortoise.

Oh, Harvey, Harvey
Harvey the Wonder Hamster
He doesn’t bite and he doesn’t squeal
He just runs around on his hamster wheel
Harvey, Harvey
Harvey the Wonder Hamster
Hey, Harvey!

by Al Yankovic

When this came out, it was the coolest game ever. Probably because it had an awesome level editor which was very unique at the time.

You people rock.

I usually talk about MySQL in hateful terms, so I’ll make an exception for that today.

Let’s say you want do find a distinct field in a group of data, except most of the other fields are non distinct. For example, say you are looking at a product shipping table and just want to know the information for the last product that shipped in a month.

Product | Address | Price | Shipment_ID | Customer_ID
1 | 123 Main St | $2 | 1020201 | 1001
2 | 312 Main St | $2 | 1020202 | 1002
2 | 666 Main St | $1 | 1020203 | 1003
1 | 881 Main St | $2 | 1020204 | 1004
1 | 42 Main St | $3 | 1020205 | 1005

In this data set, what you want is just two records, one for product 1 and the other for product 2. Except you don’t want just those two records, you want the full row for each of those items.

To do this in SQL requires a bit of a annoying workaround. If you tried to do something simple like:

SELECT * FROM Product_Table GROUP BY Product

That would obviously not work becase you need to aggregate each of the fields you are going to include, which is annoying for non-numberic fields, not to mention that it makes the rows non-unique. So you have to do funky things with HAVING.  Except, I just found out by accident that the command given above Just Works in MySQL, and gives the behaviour I actually wanted.  You just need to order it the way you want, and you can get distinct rows in complete violation of proper SQL syntax.  Nifty!

Of course, my supervisor suggested that I not use this anyhow, as undocumented hack “features” might go away in the future… and he’s right.  But still, cool.

Shawn, your comment system is broken so I’ll reply here:

US law says that the government cannot legislate away the right of Americans to own guns.  Thus even as an anti-gun advocate like myself I can’t in good faith argue that the congress should pass laws which restrict those rights — this is just as fundamentally wrong as violating any of the other legal rights granted to Americans in the constitution and amdendments.

Of course, I would wholeheartedly endorse an amendment to reverse the 2nd… ;-)  But until that happens, the NRA are right to remind people that they have the right to own firearms, just as the ACLU is right to remind people they have the other rights the government might prefer to subtract from citizens.

I am thoroughly disgusted by the Morning Edition piece on Wednesday June 21 by Scott Cleland, also published on the internet at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5500103.

How on Earth could this thinly disguised propaganda piece make it through your editorial process onto your radio show and your website?  I understand that you have a legitimate need to show several different perspectives on an issue that is being debated in Congress, but it hardly seems reasonable to fulfill that need by letting your organization be used by an industry shill.

The content of his opinion piece was empty, substituting political rhetoric to confuse the issues and even put in some blatant lies.  I can tolerate different opinions than my own, but this was no opinion: it was ugly spin paid for by corporations that are trying to influence policy in their favour.  If you cannot find a person who has an opinion on a subject that isn’t bought and paid for, perhaps it’s best to just avoid the issue altogether.

I understand that some media outlets like to publish material in order to get more consumers to watch/read/listen – but NPR is in theory not advertiser driven so the idea of creating controversy should not be a driving force for your publishing process.  Indeed the opposite is true, you rely on your consumers to finance your operations – consumers who are hoping for reasonable discussions and not this sort of industry-created garbage.  I know that I for one will not be giving any money to NPR this year, because if you’re just going to put nonsense out there I can just listen to and read a commercial outlet where this sort of thing is commonplace.

Monkeys are cool.

In my second inaugural podcast, I examine the metaphysical issues concerning space-time as it relates to the idea of Faster Than Light (FTL) travel posited in various forms of science fiction.

Podcast Episode 2

The hilarious comments to this article got me thinking. Nietzsche was wrong when he proclaimed God was dead — really, it’s Thought that is dead.

I know fluffy in particular will chide me for this, but when I got my RAZR via Cingular I failed to check to see if they crippled the bluetooth on it first.  And of course, those horrible [censored] at Cingular indeed blocked obex.  In case you’re not a mobile nutter, OBEX is the way you transfer files back and forth between your phone and computer so that you can download/upload pictures, applications, etc.  The nice people at Motorola who made my RAZR were nice enough to include this feature, the [censored] people at Cingular however stripped my phone of this feature.

Bah.  I’m sure it was buried in the fine print somewhere, but I should have known better.  But now I’m just bitter.

1) The official zombo.com t-shirt, which is totally awesome.

2) A notice from DHS saying that I need to be fingerprinted yet again. This will be the third time they will do the exact same procedure. Mental note: don’t forget the date Aug 17.

I need to make myself one of these.

Canada’s always-busy Senate has a new idea: an ad free cbc tv, supported not by advertising dollars but instead by taxpayers. I have to say that I fully support this idea. I have not read the full report, but I assume that it excludes sporting events coverage so they could still afford to show Hockey Night in Canada and the Olympics. But the money that CBC currently spends on dramatic programming could be better spent funneled into existing programs to make Canadian dramas for non-CBC channels. This would leave the CBC to what it does best: news, documentaries, and non-corporate culture. More like Australia’s ABC really, or a cut down version of the BBC perhaps.

This is a very long, yet informative article.

This will help if you ever go to China Star Super Buffet at 13515 S Mur Len Rd, Olathe, KS.

and the horse says to the Imam: “What, you don’t have anything to blog about today?”

When I started my new job, I was thrown to the wolves a bit and started working on a tool that I’d never heard of before let alone seen.  But now a few weeks in we’re getting trained on how to use it, which is two parts frustrating trying to get the technical bits of the training session working, three parts boring because it’s a review of stuff I’ve already taught myself, and one part new stuff that makes me glad I’m there.  Worst of all it was far away from the coffee and coke machines, though this will be fixed for the rest of the training days thank the gods.
I’d rather be working.   Don’t see that on bumper stickers very often.

click for better resolution copy.

The tragically short-lived television series Firefly ranks as my favourite show in the genre that I can think of.  But it strikes me that they pretty much copied large elements from another sci fi show, Star Wars.  If you think about it, Firefly is pretty much Han Solo on the Millenium Falcon running away from the empire with a band of misfits, doing what’s best for himself but in a good-hearted way — and sometimes being convinced to do the “right thing” against his better judgement.  Of course, Firefly stripped out the alien crap and the force mythology, which in my opinion only further contributed to making the show even stronger.

If only they could have sold the show to the public like this, I think a lot more people would have watched.  As it is, I can only faintly hope that someday another show will emerge that shows this same personality type, because the Han Solo/Malcom Reynolds archetype is really fun to watch in a central role.