Chuggnutt!

Category: Blogging

  • Dilemma

    I got this in email today, and I liked it. It’s probably making the rounds, but that’s okay.

    You are driving along in your car on a wild, stormy night, when you pass by a bus stop, and you see three people waiting for the bus:

    1. An old lady who looks as if she is about to die.
    2. An old friend who once saved your life.
    3. The perfect partner you have been dreaming about.

    Which one would you choose to offer a ride to, knowing that there could only be one passenger in your car? Think before you continue reading… This is a moral/ethical dilemma that was once actually used as part of a job application.

    . . .

    You could pick up the old lady, because she is going to die, and thus you should save her first; Or you could take the old friend because he once saved your life, and this would be the perfect chance to pay him back. However, you may never be able to find your perfect mate again.

    The candidate who was hired (out of 200 applicants) had no trouble coming up with his answer. He simply answered: “I would give the car keys to my old friend and let him take the lady to the hospital. I would stay behind and wait for the bus with the partner of my dreams.”

    Sometimes, we gain more if we are able to give up our stubborn thought limitations. Never forget to “Think Outside of the Box.”

    However, the correct answer is to run the old lady over and put her out of her misery, have sex with the perfect partner against the bus stop, then drive off with the old friend for some beers.

  • What’s Your Matrix Name?

    Here’s something that might provide amusement to some of you out there in cyberspace: What’s your Matrix name?

    It’s a fun little program I’ve been hacking together over the last few evenings. If you ever wanted to know what your name in the Matrix would be (and we all know this is highly— highly— important), try it out.

  • Lunar eclipse

    In case you live in a cave somewhere and don’t look up into the night sky, there was a total lunar eclipse tonight. Unfortunately, here on the west coast we missed most of the show; by the time the moon rose over the cloudy horizon, it was just past totality and starting to emerge from the Earth’s shadow.

    Still totally cool.

    Took some pictures with our digital camera, on the night mode setting. This is about the best one, I think:

    Lunar eclipse
    click to view larger image

    Pretty neat, eh?

  • Mental cases

    Only in Oregon, I suppose. Apparently, Multnomah County needs a Klingon interpreter for mental health patients. The CNN story is here.

    I don’t think any more needs to be said.

  • Site Updates

    I’ve been busy on this site the last few days with updates and revisions. To wit:

    1. Got the search feature working (finally). This is using MySQL’s built-in FULLTEXT indexing capabilities; it’s pretty slick, the first time I’ve played with it. It does natural language searches using frequency of keywords to produce relevancy scores… if you understood that, drop me a line because you’re as big a geek as I am…
    2. I’ve been adding new ebooks for the Palm Reader. I finally buckled down and loaded the Dropbook software on the new machine at home, and hacked up a PHP command-line script to do almost all of the work in converting Project Gutenburg texts to PML format. Now I can crank out several ebooks a day.
    3. Added the “Word Stemmer” item to the list of projects on the right. It’s a PHP class I wrote myself available for download; I’ll be putting more up there as I get them prettied up, code-wise.

    There’s been several other tweaks I’ve been doing behind the scenes, too. Nothing overt, but stuff to make things (hopefully) run more smoothly.

  • Spring Ahead

    Daylight Savings Time for DummiesDaylight savings.

    Feh.

    I hate daylight savings.

    But I thought this picture would be amusing.

    Enjoy.

  • No clever title

    I love the irony in this Slashdot posting: “XML Co-Creator says XML Is Too Hard For Programmers“. Reads to me like a title The Onion would publish.

    Anyway. The Slashdot post led me to Tim Bray’s weblog, which is pretty cool to me. (But then, I’m a geek and this probably won’t be as cool to you.) This is the guy who helped invent XML. His blog posts look pretty insightful and/or entertaining, and I rather like the design of the site. Simple. Uses CSS for all the layout, no HTML tables. Nice. I need to brush up on my CSS.

    On another note, I’m finally re-launching The Brew Site. I’m working behind the scenes to get all the PHP working and the site active, but I figure if I don’t do this now, I probably never will…

  • 03/03/03

    By now I’m sure everyone in the Gregorian calendar-using world has commented on how cool it is that today’s the third day of the third month of the third year of the century/millenium. I got a kick out of it when I saw it as the due date on a Blockbuster receipt a couple of days ago. Isn’t it amazing how our brains can construct patterns and meaning out of what are basically arbitrary numbers?

    Just wait til 06/06/06…

    I just got around to watching last week’s episode of Enterprise tonight, “Canamar,” and boy, what a riff on Con Air, even right down to the name. Con Air takes place on a plane full of convicts being transferred to another prison; “Canamar” takes place on a ship transporting prisoners to a prison planet. Con Air has a criminal mastermind escape, take over the plane, and hijack it to parts unknown; “Canamar” has a criminal mastermind that escapes, takes over the ship, and hijacks it to parts unknown; Con Air has a hero on his way to freedom when disaster strikes, forcing him to save the day; “Canamar” has a hero (two, actually) about to gain freedom when disaster strikes, forcing them to save the day… I’ll stop there. You get the picture.

    I was actually one of the few people who liked Con Air, by the way.

    Random web link: Harlan Ellison’s official webpage; “Ellison Webderland” as it’s called (which is a not-so-clever play on “Ellison Wonderland” which was clever. At the time).

  • I had what?

    My friend Justin just turned 30 a little over a week ago, and for his birthday I had all the video of our little public access show that we did together in Spokane transferred to DVD (almost three hours’ worth). Six episodes and a short movie (The Crusader), all at least 8 years old; the show ran in 1994 and ’95, I think, and all the filming was done then or from even earlier projects.

    Watching it all again and looking back on that time sure brings back memories. Most embarrassingly (and I think I blocked this out), I was at the time in a long hair phase, but all my hair was not uniformly long (as it would later become); no, it was nice and short in front and fairly long in back.

    That’s right.

    Worst. Mullet. Ever.

    I was like the poster boy for mullets. Bearing in mind, I’d never heard the term mullet back then, and was blissfully clueless. Now, though. Damn. And it’s all captured in DVD glory forever.

    It didn’t last forever, though. I got it chopped to a uniform length and let it grow out again, and for a time had nice, straight, long hair almost down to my tailbone. That phase ended in 1998, though, the year I got married. Now, I keep my hair very short. Go figure.

  • Recap 2002

    Back with the first posting of the New Year, looking back on 2002 and some of its key events for me.

    • 2 weddings; the first in January, of a close family friend. The second in Las Vegas just this last weekend between Christmas and New Years, of my brother.
    • I lost both my grandmothers in the first half of the year, fairly close to one another.
    • My youngest child celebrated his first birthday.
    • My oldest celebrated her third.
    • I myself celebrated my 30th.
    • I changed jobs, in a bit of a rollercoaster few months.
    • A tree fell on my house. (No damage, thankfully.)
    • Some memorable trips, including:
      • The trip to Portland for the first wedding;
      • An anniversary trip to Portland, away from the kids, on a dinner cruise and expensive hotel;
      • A week-long vacation traveling down the Oregon coast;
      • The trip to Las Vegas for my brother’s wedding.

    2002. Had to love it.