Snarky Son

My oldest son has developed a cutting sense of humor. I'm not sure where he gets it. Probably from school.Sherry was holding up individual housewarming gifts a friend had given her to show me:

Sherry:	“See? I got a some chocolate, a cookbook, a measuring cup, and (showing oddly shaped kitchen shears) scissors for cutting.”
son:	“Really? For cutting”
me:	“He's gotta point.”
Sherry:	“Nice.”

We were shopping at Lowe's. I was busy trying to figure out which plumbing parts I needed for our bathroom renovation. I heard an announcement over the P.A. system about a car in the parking lot. I ignored it.

son:	“Dad, did you hear that?”
me:	“Uh, yeah, but I wasn't listening.”
son:	“They said that there was a red Honda Civic illegally parked in the parking lot and that it was going to be towed.”
me:	“REALLY?!”
son:	“...(rolling his eyes) No dad. And we drove the van.”

Oldest son and I were having a nice conversation about cars. It's a common interest we share, so it makes it easy for us to have father-son-bonding moments. It was going well until he decided to dial-in a little more snark:

me:	“Oh, I had an idea. You know how the stuff always rolls around in the---”
son:	“wait---”
me:	“Hold on, let me finish. The stuff in the trunk is always---”
son:	“Dad, wait!”
me:	“What?!”
son:	“(pausing for dramatic effect; revealing just a hint of a smile)...You have an idea. I just thought you'd want to savor the moment...”
me:	“(struggling to conceal my pride)...Wow...That's harsh!”
son:	“(still maintaining his composure)...Did you to want write this one down? Just to make sure it sounds right, you know, before you embarrass yourself.”

World Wide Asshole

Over a year ago I published an article about the sweet demise of my childhood bully. I know you probably think I'm sick in the head, and I am. But luckily, I have someone to blame.

Writing that article was a cathartic experience for me, and to this day, rereading it lifts my spirits.

I noticed that the visitor count on my blog was steadily rising. I thought this was kind of odd. Sites usually become more popular because they produce compelling content at regular and frequent intervals. Then I realized that the majority of my hits were coming from Google Image Search. People who searched for an image of an "asshole" were rewarded with David Fleming's high school yearbook photo. Awesome.

Warning: Unless you're a Goatse fan, you may want to edit your Google search preferences and the set SafeSearch Filtering to Moderate before you perform this search.

Over the past 6 months I've been watching Mr. Fleming's Google Asshole Index rise. When I first started checking (Yes, I was checking regularly. Shut up.), he appeared on about third page. I got more and more excited whenever his Asshole Index afforded him a higher result position. It was kind of like watching the ball drop on New Year's Eve, or refreshing the Olsen Twins legal age countdown page.





When he finally broke into the top ten, I just couldn't contain myself. I had to let someone know. It feels good knowing that people all over the world associate "asshole" with "David Fleming".

I Heart Amazon

I hate Walmart; not because I'm against a free market economy, but because I despise being in that store. So, since I can't bring myself to buy items at inflated grocery store prices, I'm forced to patronize Walmart about once a month.

Amazon to the rescue!

I've started using Amazon's Subscribe & Save. It's a grocery store with a limited selection. Their shelves are stocked with nonperishable bulk items at cheap¹ prices and the shipping is free. This isn't anything to get excited about.

The "Subscribe" part is what I'm excited about. There are some things I can never seem to remember to buy. When I notice that I'm getting low on razors, I'm never in situation where I can write it down. So when I decided to buy a 12 pack of razors from Amazon, I had to specify a "Delivery Schedule". I'm thinkin' I'll need another 12 pack in 3 months. We'll see. If I've miscalculated the delivery schedule, I can change it later. Also, if I'm running low, I can tell Amazon to send the next shipment right away. Or, if I'm overstocked, I can tell them to skip the next shipment.

Subscribe & Save helps me cut down on mind numbing minutiae of everyday life.

me (head):

"Do I have to stop by Walmart on the way home from work today? No I don't!"

¹Always calculate the unit price, not all items are great buys.

Friendly Competition

It's been a little over a year since I started working at the new company.

I'm feeling more comfortable with my coworkers. Mr. Kratzer and I figured it was time for some friendly competition.



Bring it on Highspire First Church of God. Bring it on.

In related news, one of my religious coworkers tried argue that because atheists are morally bankrupt, it would OK steal candy from our box. Yawn.

Just two days after the competition began, our opponent resigned and removed their candy box.

Still Alive

I'm still here. I've been unmotivated and too busy to write a post...for 89 days.

I've been busy:

• buying a new, ghost free, home


• making last minute repairs on our old home before putting it on the market (read: polishing the turd)


• selling our old home


• helping the 4 other household members deal with the stress of school


• working (duh!)


• teaching a class on Hibernate...shut up!


• trying to get Comcast to unfuck my "triple play" service - 45 days without a home phone


• going on the best vacation ever

To quote Sweet Tea -- "Waaaaaa!"

Anyway, I'm back.

God Is Love

I was treated to this inspiring bumper sticker on my drive home from work.

SIN-KILLS
THE WAGES OF SIN IS DEATH
ARE YOU SAVED?

Ummm...I could just feel the warmth of God's love embrace my soul.

Yup, I'm still an atheist. Sharing heaven with this guy would be hell.

Salad Fingers

My middle son scares me sometimes. For example, he recently introduced me to his favorite interweb video, Salad Fingers, which is an episodic cartoon produced by David Firth. It's dark, disturbing, and not for everyone.

I experienced uneasy pride as I thoroughly enjoyed episode 4. He wanted me to watch this one first, because he thought it would speak to me. He was right. I found it to be creepy yet hilarious. The main character is a green, three-fingered being with bad teeth. He enjoys role playing, rusty metal and blood. Why, it practically writes itself!

Mr Firth is a genius. And for that, I'll gladly purchase some of his apparel.

I Hate People: part 4, The Trash Fairies Get Creative

Why does this keep happening to me?

There haven't been any notable trash events on the sidewalk in front of our house in recent weeks.

Maybe that's because the Trash Fairies moved their base of operations to the alley behind our house.

What is their motivation?

Why do they need to lynch a bag of trash?

Why do they do this stuff near me?

Digital Video Sucks Ass

An open letter to the digital video/codec industry:

Dear Assclowns:

May you all burn in eternal hellfire.

Sincerely,

JC Mann

I borrowed a digital video camera so that I could record my son's talent show act. It was a cheap, $100, no-name device, but it was better than nothing at all. I recorded the act without any problems. I brought the camera home and plugged it into my computer using the "specially designed" USB cable (Yes, you special-cable-connector-designin'-assclowns are next).

I opened the .mov file to view my masterpiece. QuickTime started playing the video immediately...sans video. While I listened to the audio, QuickTime presented me with a window containing a completely white canvas. Thanks QT. Good work. Onto other players. MPlayer? Same thing. I tried VLC, and it worked...but not without spewing tons of warning messages about the codec! Grinning like an idiot, I watched my son's act in all its splendor, rendered in grainy low-resolution video accompanied by tinny mono audio. What an age we live in.



It's hard to imagine what goes on at these big technology companies that produce our wonderful consumer electronics.

tech-lead:	“OK people, how are we gonna store the video for our new camcorder? We need ideas.”
new guy:	“We could use MPEG. It's used in tons of places: DVDs, HD transmission, HD-DVDs, and Blue Ray. It's kind of become the de facto standard, so the chip sets for encoding and decoding have become a commodity.”
awkward glances
tech-lead:	“OK, we need ideas people.”
engineer 1:	“I've just finished developing my own codec.”
tech-lead:	“Fantastic. License?”
engineer 1:	“Oh, it's all our intellectual property.”
engineer 2:	“How well does it compress?”
engineer 1:	“Sometimes a little better than MPEG. I pretty much took the MPEG algorithm and tweaked it.”
tech-lead:	“Software compatibility?”
engineer 1:	“I've written a plug-in for Windows Media Player.”
tech-lead:	“So, it will only work with Windows?”
engineer 1:	“Well, if they're running Vista with the latest OS patches.”
tech-lead:	“Wait, what about other OS's?”
engineer 2:	“What other OS's?!”
laughter
engineer 1:	“I guess it could be reverse engineered, but by the time it is, we'll be using a different codec.”
tech-lead:	“Right. Of course. It's always worked for us in the past.”
engineer 2:	“Is the plug-in secure?”
engineer 1:	“Well, not really. It could allow a hacker to execute arbitrary code.”
tech-lead:	“Whoa-whoa. That sounds bad.”
engineer 1:	“I'm thinkin', when was the last time a hacker was able compromise a plug-in for Windows Media Player?”
tech-lead:	“Good point.”

Conservation of Knowledge

Our oldest son must make a documentary film for a school project. The title of his film? "How Cars Work." No surprise there. Shooting hasn't started yet, but he wrote a draft of the script, which he gave to me to proofread.

son:	“I don't need you to fix any spelling or grammar. I just need to know if it's right on a technical level.”
me (head):	“That's code for -- 'Dad, you're a functional illiterate, but you're the only person in the family who knows more about cars than I do.'”

The script was well written and nicely organized. He covered the major components in a logical succession, starting with the engine and ending with the brakes. That's when I got to this part:

"The brakes are responsible for converting the kinetic energy of the car into heat energy, so they need to be well ventilated."

Wow! He actually listened when I taught him about conservation of energy. Cool.

My chest swelled with geek-pride.

Stranger Than Fiction

Stranger Than Fiction is comedy-drama about an IRS auditor played by Will Ferrell who realizes that he's protagonist of a novel. Unfortunately, the author of this unfinished work is known for her talent for penning tragedies. Or hero, Harold Crick, sets out to change his fate and drama and comedy ensues. His love interest, Ana Pascal, is played by Maggie Gyllenhaal, who I find myself attracted too even though she could be the spokesperson for the National Scoliosis Foundation. If you are the type of person that pays to see and movie and then refuses to suspend your belief, this isn't the movie for you. As the title implies, it's weirder than fiction.

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this movie because it's very close to being a romantic comedy (even though is doesn't star Meg Ryan or Tom Hanks) and it's devoid the typical Will Ferrell physical humor.

It's a Literary Reference

The movie is entertaining on many levels, but the most obvious was literary. Authors and avid readers probably glean more from this film than I could ever hope.

Architecture

I love architecture. The film was shot in Chicago, a city with many beautiful and modern locations. I felt like the director wanted the spaces to be another character in the movie. As I listened to the dialog, I found myself admiring the rest of the scene. Most of the one-on-one interior scenes were not framed tight on the actors' faces. Instead, the director chose a wider shot that incorporated more of the surroundings. Warm lighting played off of the clean, contemporary architectural features. The Professor's office provided one of my favorite backdrops, polished stone walls segmented by tall slot-like tinted windows.

Watch

Another unexpected character in the movie was Harold's watch. Strange, but it worked. The watch took on its own personality as it attempted to stir his owner toward a different fate. The style of the watch, like the entire film, was clean and modern.

Augmented Reality

Ever since I watched the first Terminator movie, I've dreamed of a device (glasses, contact lens, retinal implants, ...) that would create annotated versions of what the wearer sees. For Mr. Crick, his obsessive and mathematical mind constructed graphs and annotations for the world around him. The facts and figures in his mind were displayed as 3D graphics attached to his head. You know the “I'm thinkin' Arby's” commercials, where the Arby's logo floats above the character's head and tracks his movements? Well, imagine that style of animation, but with a stream of words, numbers, and graphs rendered with clean white lines.

Math

All of the characters in the movie where named after famous mathematicians. I'm embarrassed that I didn't catch this, even with names like Hilbert, Pascal, and Mercator.

The GOD Delusion

After a grueling three month long endeavor, I finished reading The GOD Delusion. It is a logical and scientific dissection of religion by Richard Dawkins. An evolutionary biologist and Oxford professor, Dawkins is a champion of Darwinian theory.

The book was both interesting and exhausting to read. I found that I could only read 3 to 5 pages at a time. After just a few pages, my head was swimming with words, scientific facts, and historical events that I was eager to learn more about.

Here are a few things I learned:

• Albert Einstein was an atheist. I never would have guessed that with quotes like "God doesn't roll dice," and "God is subtle but he is not malicious."


• The Bible has tons of hilarious stories. How anyone can take it seriously is beyond my comprehension.


• Moses was one mean genocidal jackass.


• My relationship with my father is paradise compared to what Abraham and Isaac had.


• In 1969, the city of Montréal completely fell apart when the police went on strike.


• Pascal's Wager is great...as long as you pray to the correct god. If you get it wrong, a modern-day Moses might kill you, your wife, your farm animals, and your pets.


• The amazing history of Cargo Cults.


• A Letter To A Christian Nation seems like a much more entertaining book.


• If you're British, the word percent can be written as "per cent" and it's not a typo.

Dawkins has a very wordy writing style. Maybe it's a British thing. For example, on page 170 he writes:

A partisan in the controversy, I must beware of riding off on my pet steed Tangent, far from the main track of this book.

I think he means, "I don't want to talk about this right now."

Update (2007.04.17):
A friend of mine was unsure if I was recommending this book or not. Sorry about that. It's a qualified "yes". Although it was a difficult read, I still feel like it was worth it. The knowledge I gained was more valuable than the effort I exerted reading it.

Purrfect Cook

Sherry is a fantastic cook. This is the only thing she makes that turns my stomach.

Yes, it's edible. I guess real kitty litter is edible too, but I'm sure this dish tastes much better. I know it has melted tootsie rolls, pudding, crumbled cookies, and green food coloring.

The poo slung over the side and the real kitty litter scoop are great features of the presentation.

Lego Photography

A few people have asked me how I do the lighting for the photographs of my kids' Lego models.

I found this how-to article on the interweb. It's pretty simple and cheap.

If you don't want to use a tripod, you'll have to flood the scene with a crap-load of light. For my setup, I use two halogen shop lights, totaling 1kw. Needless to say, the working environment gets pretty hot. It's a shame that 90% of that 1kw is converted into heat.

It's not a perfect solution, but I'm happy with the results. I still have to tweak the colors a bit, and the size of the model is limited by the size of the bucket.

Here is the setup:

Winona 1990-2007

Another month, another pet. We had to euthanize our cat today. She was old, and her quality of life took a nosedive over the past few days. We have three other pets and none of them have any health problems (psychological or physical), so I doubt I'll be writing another post like this for a while.

Not enough information? Read more about it.

Haircut Hazzards

I hate getting my hair cut.

It's the people. You might not know this, but getting a haircut is incredibly social. Shoot me. I don't want to be social.

I go to a barber in Camp Hill, that employs 8 to 10 barbers. A wonderful selection, right? Not really. Most of them are talkers. There must be a prerequisite to graduating from the barber academy, a course entitled "The Essentials of Smalltalk : making conversation out of nothing."

I hate smalltalk.

Oh please waste my time and interrupt my inner-quiet by talking to me about the safest topic you can think of. No really, I love forging temporary friendships with strangers as we completely agree about something that is really boring. I cherish the wake of ten-minute-friendships that litter my past.

I had to try several before I found one that didn't talk to me. Switching to a new barber within the same shop is very awkward. Barbers remember their customers. When I return for another trim, all of the barbers I sampled in the past look at me expectantly as I pick a barber I haven't tried.

The perfect barber can cut my hair in less than ten minutes and only utter two words, 'hello' and 'thanks'. Ideally a barber should be able to figure out my hairstyle by LOOKING AT MY HAIR. I want something just like what you're seeing, but SHORTER. But this is never the case.

"Buzzed up the sides with a number three and about half an inch off of the top. Keep the sideburns at their current length." That usually works for me. But there are always fuck-ups. Sometimes I forget to say the last part about my sideburns, which always results in the barber completely removing them. Great. Ice Ice Baby. Sometimes the barber bulks at the buzz-number I've selected; informing me that my hair will look silly if they cut it that close. I struggle to hide my incredulity. How can they not have standards for these things?! Afraid of what might happen, I usually tell them to use their best judgment, which works to my advantage about half the time.

Even when I find a barber that works for me, it never lasts. I enjoy a few months of talk-free bliss, until the barber thinks that we're friends, friendly, or something horrible like that. That's when I start hearing details of his personal life, what he did over the weekend, and all about his World Of Warcraft characters.

My search for a new barber starts with my next visit.

Plumbing Fun

Living in an old house, it's kind of expected that the drains are "slow-to-move" (That's what the plumbers like to say).

Our bathroom sink was always problem. I know this because Sherry was always bringing it to my attention.

After seven years and 20 bottles of Drāno I thought it might be time to see what the problem was. Hum, what's this? A 20-year-old toothbrush encased hair and sludge? Yum.

Note to self: Drāno will not dissolve a toothbrush.

Hudson

Back in days of yore (circa 2002, I think), Mr. Gettle and I created a Development Portal. It was our home-grown continuous integration server. We wrote it because we needed a common place to create binary distribution of our software.

We just started using Hudson at Versatile. I'm really impressed. It's a snap to install and I had it building our project in no time.

Here are the features I like:

Painless Install - Just drop the hudson.war file in a servlet container, go to the Admin Page and start configuring your projects.

Great UI - Intuitive design, inline help, pretty graphs, AJAX stuff. Sold!

Email Notifications - Hudson notifies the developers of broken builds and when a build is fixed. It also sends special emails to the suspected build-breakers. The suspects are simply the developers who have committed code since the last successful build.

Multiple Projects - Hudson manages as many projects as you want. You can even set up project dependencies. With this, projects that depend on a core project are automatically rebuilt if the core project is successfully built.

Multi-Threaded Builds - You can specify how many build processes can be run concurrently, allowing you to throttle how hard the build server is pushed.

Distributed Builds - What an amazing feature. If you have a weak or overworked build server, you can specify slaves boxes to handle some or all of the load.

SCM Integration - Hudson can watch the source code repository and kick off a build when changes have been made. You can also create a CVS branch/tag right from Hudson. Sometimes creating a branch can take some time, in that case, Hudson will email when it's finished. And finally, you can view all of the source via the Hudson interface just like ViewCVS.

All that said, the Hudson website has this gem listed in the Benefits section:

No more "full rebuild" before a commit:

With Hudson, I stopped doing a rebuild before I commit. Nowadays I just commit, and let Hudson check if a build fails or not for me. Meanwhile, I move on to work on other things. If a build fails, Hudson can tell me so within a few minutes, so breaking a build for that short period of time is not really a problem. Thanks to this, I can spend my time more productively.

-- said the developer nobody wants on their team.

SPF 0

This winter weather we're having has me longing for summer. Which reminds me of an annual argument my wife and I have sometime in the middle of June.

I come home from work and see that my beautiful wife has been burnt to a crisp by Mr. Sun.

me (head):	“Christ. Every fuckin' year. We have to say something.”
me:	“Nice.”
Sherry:	(feigning ignorance) “What.”
me (head):	“And here we go...”
me:	“How's that sunscreen? Is it still in the bottle?”
Sherry:	“I used it. I swear!”
me (head):	“Say something sarcastic. Something witty!”
me:	“Right.”
me (head):	“See, this is why we never win arguments with her.”
Sherry:	“Ask the kids.”
Oldest Son:	“Dad, she put it on. I saw her. She put it on herself after she put it on us.”
Sherry:	(grinning like an idiot) “See?”
me (head):	“First rule of Parent Fight Club: don't involve the kids.”
me:	“So you put it on and then...what? You took a shower?”
Sherry:	“It must have washed off in the pool.”
me:	“Really. If that's the case, then the kids should be burnt as well.”
Sherry:	“I don't know. It doesn't matter. I'm not like you. This will turn into a nice tan in two days.”
me (head):	“That's why she does it. Every fuckin' year. Say something. Let her know that we're on to her.”
me:	“I'm gonna play Quake now.”

And so my thoughts are littered with images of Sherry at the beach with her grandchildren.

Mmmmm. GILF.

Unit Testing: still rewarding

I'm not going into all of the obvious virtues of unit testing. If you're a developer and you don't know them, you should probably find a new career.

I didn't like unit testing. I didn't like spending my time writing a test when there was plenty of useful code to be written. Working at Capital Blue Cross for a year changed all of that. My partner, Andy H., insisted that I write a unit test for every part of the system. My work wasn't considered done until the corresponding unit test was written. What a taskmaster. Consequently, I didn't feel productive at all.

Near the end of the project, it was time for us to start running the application through its end-to-end testing. After a few runtime setup environment problems and false starts, the application ran without a problem. It was one of those "Did it just run without a problem?" moments of disbelief. Not only did it run without crashing, it produced the output we were expecting. Hopefully Andy will back me up with a comment so my readers know that I'm not making this up.

OK, so unit testing produces applications with less bugs. Duh. If you didn't know that, or worse, you don't believe it, please stop reading now.

Now for the benefits that I wasn't expecting.

Writing testable code means writing readable and organized code. For example, I wrote an object responsible for building an email using contextual data and a template and sending it. I blew through the implementation pretty quickly. In no time, I had a 150 line method that did it all. OK, time to test. Congratulations jackass, you just wrote a lump of untestable code. I was forced to break the huge-ass method into smaller, more testable, methods. When I was done, I had a class that was easier to read. Even better, I had a class that was tested.

No more Winnebago classes. We've all done it. "Oooh, I know, I'll add this neat feature. No one needs it right now, but someone might need it in the future." When writing code with unit testing in mind, you tend to skip those neat-o features when you also have to write a test for them. The result is lean code that does only what it has to do.

Writing unit tests forces you to think about the design from a different perspective. You may write a nicely organized class that is easy to test, only to realize a design flaw while writing the unit test. After writing a unit test with 70 test methods, you may think the class would make more sense if it were broken into two classes.

Even though I've had mostly positive experiences incorporating unit testing into my development cycle, I still feel unproductive while I'm writing a unit test. Hopefully this feeling will change. I guess I feel unproductive because the benefits are delayed. I take great pleasure in watching 16 unit tests fail because a developer (probably me) made a "simple change" to a core class.

Squirtle 2000-2007

We had to euthanize our dog for obvious reasons. I know it's the right thing to do, but it feels so wrong. At 4:15PM today, he was injected with the blue chemical and died in my arms.

I Know a Guy Who Knows a Guy

We have/had the worst oil company ever.

Instead of spending my morning protesting in front of the local church, I was busy calling home heating oil companies. After twenty-three separate, "I'm sorry, sir, we only provide emergency service to existing customers," dead ends, I gave my neighbor a call. He's a man who's spent his life in Carlisle and seems to know a little something about everyone.

He leans on me for geek support, I lean on him when I have...I don't...I can't think of...any other kind of problem.

me:	“Hey, man. I got a problem with my furnace and I was wondering if you could help"”
John:	“Sure. What do you need"”
me:	“Um, two hundred fifty gallons of oil.”
John:	“Dauphin Oil left you high and dry.”
me:	“Yeah...how'd you know"”
John:	“Oh, everyone knows they've been havin' problems lately. I bet you're havin' fun tryin' to get someone to fill up your tank on a Sunday.”
me:	“I called everyone I could find in the phone book. They all tell me the same thing.”
John:	“That they only help existing customers, right"”
me:	“Right.”
John:	“OK, let me make a few calls. I'll call you back in a few minutes.”
me:	“K. Thanks.”
a few minutes later
John:	“OK, here's what you need to do. Call Carlisle Petroleum and...”
me:	“I already called them.”
John:	“Well, call them again. But this time, tell the person that the message is for Paul.”
me:	“Paul"”
John:	“Paul. And tell them that you're a customer of Dauphin Oil.”
me:	“OK. Is that it"”
John:	“Yeah. She won't do anything until you tell her that the message is for Paul.”
me:	“Tell her the message is for Paul and that I'm a customer of Dauphin Oil.”
John:	“Yeah. Tell them that and you'll have heat in an hour.”
CPI Service:	“I'm sorry sir, we only provide emergency service to existing...”
me:	“This message is for Paul. Please tell Paul that I need oil.”
CPI Service:	“....OK, can I have your address and phone number please.”

Fifty minutes later? Heat.

A Million Dollar Idea

Amazon has it right. In addition to providing one of the best department stores on the interweb, they have been quietly providing incredible web services. Elastic Computing Cloud, Mechanical Turk, Simple Queue, and S3 are few of my favorites.

All of these services share the same basic theme:

"We can do this server hardware stuff much better than you. So why don't you focus on the software, and we'll do the rest."

How much? Pretty damn cheap. For example, here is their pricing for S3:

• Pay only for what you use. There is no minimum fee, and no start-up cost.


• $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used.


• $0.20 per GB of data transferred.

So what can you do with it? That's up to the developer. There are several free and open source applications that provide slick interfaces to S3. I'm using JungleDisk. It's an active project with binaries for Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX. You give JungleDisk your S3 account information, and it gives you a file system that you can mount as a drive. The virtual file system JungleDisk provides is only available to your local machine, which is a little restricting, but there are ways around that.

Now that no one is still reading, here's my million dollar idea:

S3 + JungleDisk + Linux + Samba + Hacked Router = the perfect network storage/backup appliance.

1. Install Linux on a router. Linksys seem to play nice with Linux.


2. Install JungleDisk on the router.


3. Point the JungleDisk instance to your S3 account.


4. Install Samba on the router and use it to share the JungleDisk mount point.


5. Enjoy your worry-free network storage appliance.

So why spend several hundred dollars on a networked storage appliance with limited capacity, when you can have the Infinite Storability Drive from Sparrowlegs Systems Inc.

Sometimes I pee a little when I cough -Sometimes I ejaculate a little when I yawn

Don't ask me how I found this. I don't want to talk about it.

Clomipramine, is an antidepressant that has many interesting side effects. This one grabbed my attention: yawns can cause orgasms. The second case, "... A married male in his mid-twenties ...", was my favorite.

My mind was/is reeling thinking about the recreational possibilities this drug possesses (wow that word has a lot of S's).

Sherry, if you start taking this drug, can I watch? Imagine, you could climax before, during and after sex!

After I tell you a really funny and witty joke: orgasm.
After I tell you about my exciting day at work: orgasm.
During the 90 minutes of SNL: orgasm.
Morning: orgasm.
Night: orgasm.
An hour after eating turkey: oh god. oh god! orgasm.

Unfortunately, there are several not so entertaining side effects:

... , enlarged/painful breasts, unwanted breast milk production, irregular/painful menstrual periods, ... , trouble urinating, severe vomiting, ... , unusual/uncontrolled movements (especially of the tongue/face/lips), ... , black stools, ... ,vomit that looks like coffee grounds.

Coffee grounds!?

Challenge Pro Mode Matches On

The development of my favorite Quake 3 mod is alive and kicking. I'm amazed by the longevity of the game. I know it's dated but I love it. As I play into the night, (OK -- 11PM), I must be one of 30 people who hasn't moved on.

A few weeks ago, while aimlessly surfing the interweb¹ instead of writing a post for my blog, I decided to check out the Challenge Pro Mode site. Holy sweet Jesus! People are still actively developing the mod! The version I was running was 8 revisions behind. Wow, that's embarrassing. They have an RSS feed now, so I won't miss any future releases.

Here are my impressions so far...

Pros

• Greatly improved GUI, giving easy access to most of the settings. Wanna hear through walls, turn off rocket smoke, or add cool effects to the Railgun? No problem. It's all adjustable from the GUI. No more editing configuration files.


• Better looking fonts. Sounds stupid, I know, but they look so much better than the old ones.


• New in-game announcement voice option, providing a sexy female voice alternative to the default I-also-do-narration-for-movie-trailers guy.

Cons

• Lower ammo counts for weapon pickup. You know, when you frag someone and get to pick up ammo from the weapon they dropped? For the Rocket Launcher, it used to be a 10 round/rocket reward, now it's 5. Doesn't sound like much but you'll notice.


• Slightly less running speed. I realized that I wasn't able to make all of my usual trick jumps. Surely, it can't be me.


• More segmentation faults. The CPMA bots (level 6 and up) appear to be broken again. My version of the game crashes from a segmentation fault whenever I attempt to use them.

In related news, I got a new mouse for Christmas. When it comes to tracking accuracy and speed, this one is better than my old mouse. The buttons could be a little better. There are five buttons in the wheel: scroll up, scroll down, click, tilt-left, and tilt-right. For normal computer use, these buttons are really handy, but in the heat of battle, I still have trouble. The tilt buttons are really sensitive, and the mouse wheel click requires too much force.

¹ Deppen, I've added this word to my spell checker dictionary. So, no, I'm not going to stop using it. I'm a pioneer.