Nano Sucking My Will To Post

Smacky and I got iPod Nanos for the holidays. Between taking time off work, packing the nano with podcast and musical goodness, and going back to work, I haven't had much time or will to post.

Kong Is King

Just got in a little bit ago from seeing Peter Jackson's recreation of King Kong. I am again amazed at what Mr. Jackson can do. His movies never fail to stun, and yet again he has created a fantastic movie.

It has the same fetching (if far-fetched) storyline of the original, amazing effects that again play background to the story and characters, and excellent acting from all involved. Your adrenaline will be kept pumping from shortly after the beginning to the very end. It has been over for an hour, and I'm still too keyed up to sleep.

Peter Jackson deserves kudos yet again for making an amazing film. Go out and see it. I definitely need to see it again...

need vacay...badly

Hooray! One more day of slaving away for the man (who is, in my case, actually a woman, but details don't really interest me) and I have 6 WHOLE DAYS OFF! WOO HOO! In order to get six days in a row off, I have had to save a floating holiday and a vacation day, I get Thursdays off anyway and of course Christmas Day plus the weekend. No Christmas Eve. No New Years Day. No New Years Eve. I need a job where every other day is a holiday and the days you do work the hours are 10:00 AM - 3:00 PM with a 3 hour lunch.

I have been preparing for my holiday by staying up too late every night for a week. The topper was Thursday night when DFA and I went to bed at about 2:00 AM. Friday sucked and I was sleepy all weekend. BUT I am now ready for the almost-a-whole-week-long holiday weekend.

Here's some happy holiday fun for those of you who haven't seen this yet (if indeed anyone reads this). I also love this woman's blog. She is a friggin' riot. I irritate the crap out of DFA by reading her posts to him while he's trying to read or watch little movies on his computer. I don't think he appreciates her like I do...

Ready For A Break

The holidays are approaching, and quite frankly I'm ready for a break. Not the work has been horrific, or my life is burning down around my ears or anything, I'm just ready for a big group of days of doing absolutely nothing.

Although, I'm sure a portion of that "nothing" will include yard work, house-cleaning, and other responsibilities, I fully intend to do a lot of relaxing for my vacation. We aren't going anywhere. We're aren't planning on doing anything. Smacky and I are just going to have six full days of time at home doing whatever the heck we want.

This past Thursday was the most recent 3RD, and we had a bunch of friends over for a lovely evening of eating, drinking, and gabbing. Alan and Anita were in town (YAY!) and it was wonderful to see them. Tree was with them, and they brought two exceptional wines. The food was delicious. The wine was incredible. The fire in the fireplace was lovely and warm. And the company and goofiness were wonderful. Another successful 3RD.

I wanted to go see King Kong on Friday, but the 3RD wiped me and Smacky out so much we just stayed at home and went to bed, worn out from being up too late the night before gabbing into the wee hours.

This coming week should also see our baby-haysuess-day gifts arrive. IPOD Nanos! Yay! 4GB of tasty IPOD goodness. I can't wait.

On-Call Sucks

Being on-call can suck sometimes. Badly. How badly varies on a great number of factors hard and soft.

I just got off of a heavy on-call rotation. Nearly constant churn during hours of coverage. One bad part of that a lot of it was minor stuff. When big things go wrong, you feel like bringing you in was necessary. On small stuff, you feel increasingly frustrated while churning cycles on low-level crap. I did have one major failure...a SCSI interface board to an aging legacy storage array that housed a production cluster. Since we were fully redundant, and still had disk access for the cluster, it wasn't a major ordeal (other than starting the call at two in the morning). The worst thing about it was I was planning a HUGE storage-networking upgrade, involving the enterprise storage fabrics that was to start this week, and I kept getting dinged for small stuff.

All that aside, the on-call at my current job is infinitely better than other on-call duties I've had. For all the warnings I received from colleagues about how brutal this place could be, I've not seen it. In fact, it has been one of the most sane corporate jobs I've had since leaving employment at the University of Louisville. So I guess I should just be happy that the "heavy" on-call here is not soul-sucking, spirit-crushing, or asshole-filled...

So this morning was to be the beginning of my (our...it's not MINE after all) SAN upgrades. I'd spent weeks on the plans, and if we were given approval by the change-review board, I'd kick things off today and over the course of several days completely overhaul the storage network at the facility. We got approval.

Forty-five minutes ahead of when the vendor was the be onsite to do one portion of the work, I get a call from the engineer telling us there are numerous required upgrades to our SAN before we can install the two newest pieces of hardware. Nice. Known requisites, which the vendor never shared until the day of implementation. Argh. Not that I was mad at the engineer...he saved my ass by making me aware of a problem with our plans, and I could've royally screwed the storage for billions of dollars of hardware and transactions.

So the SAN upgrades go back to the drawing board, hopefully for implementation in early January. Blah. I feel stupid for not having grilled the engineer earlier about this, but technical review of the plans is supposed to happen before we pay for and receive anything from the vendor. Somehow that all got glossed over. Oh well. We'll get it installed, and in the meantime I can draft an even more detailed plan for it all, further reducing the risk of the work involved.

Such is the life of a geek.

Web Of The Day #20

Kansas Professor Attacked Along Rural Road
Just another fine example of the caring, giving, peace-loving "christian" psychopaths that inhabit my country. They're so christian, they decided to beat on a teacher! Good for them! Honestly, how much more of this are we going to tolerate before we start prosecuting these "religious" psychopaths?!

Vogon Poem Generator
From Furtive...and while I disagree with the political slant to the post, I agree that this prosody generator is damn funny. The one it created for me is as follows (please note, the one it will generate for you will be nearly identical as it is more of a "Vogon Poem Fill-In-The-Blankerator"):

See, see the mercurial sky
Marvel at its big fuschia depths.
Tell me, Chili do you
Wonder why the aardvark ignores you?
Why its foobly stare
makes you feel dead.
I can tell you, it is
Worried by your flibbletymaculate facial growth
That looks like
A capers.
What's more, it knows
Your pluck potting shed
Smells of booger.
Everything under the big mercurial sky
Asks why, why do you even bother?
You only charm limberger cheeses.

Reality Is A Malleable Thing
Another brain-bender of a study in "crazy." Please please please can't we get these people some help?!

Recolored
Automatic photo colorizing software. Worth a look. I prefer B&W though, so I doubt I'll use it. This is cool technology though.

CSS image map
Extremely cool CSS-based imagemap for callouts. Wow.

Inexpensive and Abundant LEDs
The ingenuity of humans always amazes me. This guy has the potential to save himself a LOT of money, depending on how many he needs/harvests. I have been researching LED costs myself, with the intention of using them in stained-glass projects in the future. And he's right, you can save anywhere from several cents to several dimes on each LED you harvest. I think I'm going to hit the stores when the holiday decorations go on clearance!

Original Intent? Maybe.

Mother Jones has an article about the ultra-religious' revisionist history when it comes to God and America. One of my favorite bits:

It is ludicrous to suggest that men as precise in their use of words as Adams and Madison would, perhaps in their haste to get home to their wives, have simply forgotten to mention God.

All I can say is, "Right on!" Too bad those who most need a good lesson in history are the least likely to read it. And we certainly don't get this picture in history classes, since the truth might offend someone.

The greatest thing about our country is that we were specifically created to be non-theocratic, and to be able to change our government for the betterment of our people without religion getting in the way. Too bad most of the zealots can't fathom these two great ideals. Too bad they are gaining ground in their psychotic attempts to overthrow the secular democracy our fore-fathers tried their damndest to create.

Religion and government are not like peanut butter and chocolate...they are not two great tastes that taste great together...

Web Of The Day #19

Today's (well, last night's) web included all kinds of assorted insanity...

Factum Non Fabula
Today's masterpiece. I had the weirdest fucking dreams after a late dinner and reading this site right before bed. This site is right up there with Time Cube. I've seen nothing like it. It has Julie Andrews, the monarchy of Finland, Hitler, Monty Python, Christina Ricci, the Nazis, and more! Oh hell, just go (try to) read it. I made it about halfway before I had to stop... Someone please get this guy some help!

The Last Video Game
The Japanese have hit the pinnacle (low point?) of their gaming creativity. That's right...a fighting game whose core mechanic is upskirt photography. I sat amazed. I agree with the reviewer...the Japanese are done...they may go home now.

Squirrels Kill Dog
Totally a WTF kind of article!

Part Flash Mob, Part Political Statement
Hilarity ensues when hipsters, punks, and freaks try to stage a dance party at a Wal-Mart.

Only In Alaska
Only in Alaska would someone want to run a cyclotron in their garage. And only in Alaska would there be such a controversy. And only in America would politicians "rush through laws" to prevent it. My only concern? Is he within radiation safety regulations as set forth by the government? If yes, and he is not in contravention of zoning laws, then it should be OK. But instead there's going to be a special anti-private-cyclotron law now. Fucking insane.

Limbo A No-No

So apparently there is a proposal to remove the concept of "limbo" from Catholicism.

I mean, wow. The comments I heard went something like..."It's a medieval concept that is no longer necessary." Wait a minute...a fundamental aspect of the faith of many Catholics, drilled into them for decades, is not necessary? You mean, it isn't TRUE?! You mean, it was a completely arbitrary creation to deal with pesky issues arising out of other completely arbitrary concepts?! NO!

The amount of cognitive dissonance involved with discussions such as this makes me want to scream. People argue, fight, and die over stupid crap such as "what happens to the souls of unbaptised babies?!" Catholics needed to explain it to keep The Church from splitting (again). Protestants split from them anyway (over a number of reasons nailed to a door), and ever since then have used Limbo as one amongst a large list of rallying battle cries leading to divisiveness, hatred, and outright violence.

We are the stupidest creatures in existence. First, we try to explain the unexplainable with meandering illogical inconsistent anthologies of feverish scribblings (some of them about "peace" and "joy"). Then we argue about those scribblings to the point of hating and murdering each other for millenia. WE SUCK!

Resist the urge to be stupid. Leave these dogmas of isanity behind and start thinking and being decent to one another. Shit.

Infectious Meme

So not only has "google" taken over for "searching the internet" or "finding information online" or anything like that. Now Google has taken over mass media. TWICE in the last two or three days, I have heard reference to Google in radio news broadcasts. Such as "If you google the word..." and also "Using Google Maps, if you..."

Google is taking over. I hope they aren't evil bastards in disguise.