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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

State of Fear

I just finished State of Fear, by Michael Crichton. I loved it. In typical Crichton style, the book is a fun page-turner. Also in typical Crichton style, the ending is just so so. But that's OK, because the nonfiction component of this book makes up for its other weaknesses.

Nonfiction? But it's fiction, isn't it? This book is different than Crichton's other works because he includes many footnotes that backup statements made by the characters. What a fantastic concept.

Throughout the book, Crichton delivers blow after punishing blow against the global warming political movement. Each of his attacks is supported by references to real scientific studies. For me the coup de grace occurred in the first appendix, where he compares the popularity of global warming to the popularity of eugenics in the first half of the 1900s. I had no idea eugenics was so popular. I guess Hitler ruined it for everyone.

The character, Ted Bradley, was maddening and hilarious at the same time. Crichton was obviously mocking Martin Sheen. Ted Bradley¹ is a charismatic actor/activist most recognized for playing the president of the United States in a now canceled TV drama. Funny.

Not in the mood to read a 600+ page book? You might enjoy this 30 minute video from Penn & Teller. But trust me, this book is a must read. You'll feel much better about the state of the world when you're finished...or half way through.

I have to thank Tommy for recommending this book. Maybe I should listen to him more often. What were those other books he wanted me to read? The Joy of Sex? The Devil Wears Prada? The Bridges of Madison County?

- - - spoiler alert - - -

¹Mr. Bradley also plays a starring role in one of best death scenes I've ever experienced. It had me laughing out loud. That can't be healthy...I need help.

Shopvac Afterburner

I like using a charcoal grill. The food tastes better, plus it's a great excuse to play with fire.

I use a charcoal chimney starter. Thanks to Lurker for introducing this device to me. I think Sherry wants to thank you too...but she has trouble being nice to people.

"This environmentally safe chimney starter lights a charcoal grill quickly and easily without lighter fluid. Food tastes better and the charcoal lighter fluid odor doesn’t permeate your picnic--or the environment."

It's pretty simple to use. Fill the top part with charcoal and the bottom part with a sheet of newspaper. Light the newspaper and wait 20 minutes. 20 minutes. That simply doesn't cut it for the have-it-right-now generation.

Here's a method I use for lighting my charcoal in 2 minutes. 2 gloriously fun and surprisingly educational minutes.

Warning: This is pretty dangerous. Before you start, make sure your kids and pets are indoors (My oldest son was with me only because I needed someone to take pictures, and Sherry was too busy watching football...err...screaming at the TV.) Choose an area that is free of dry grass and/or leaves. Wear a hat (I wore a cotton baseball hat) and eye protection (normal glasses for me).

Light the newspaper just like before, but after the newspaper is finished burning, pick up the chimney and carry it to an open area...free of combustible items.

Turn your shopvac to 'blow.'

Hold your lit chimney as far away as possible. Tilt the top slightly away from your head.

Slowly bring the blowing end of the shopvac tube to the bottom of your chimney. It's important to do it slowly because a large amount of loose ash blows out initially. The first time I did this, I realized that my hair might ignite. It was quite a precarious situation. I was holding a chimney of hot coals in one hand, a shopvac hose in the other and little pieces of hot ash where landing on my head. This is what the bottom of the chimney looks like.

At full throttle, the charcoal begins to super-heat. It puts out a staggering amount of energy. It only takes 90-120 seconds of full after-burner to light all of the coals.

You'll see the sides of your chimney start to glow red. That's a good indication that it's time to stop. ...Or...you can keep going and see how hot it can really get. Eventually, if you aren't wearing gloves, which I wasn't, the heat will become unbearable.

Turn off the shopvac and let the flames die down. At this point you'll be kicking yourself for using up all your arm strength on the prior step. You really can't move around that much during this step, and dumping the coals in to the grill is out of the question. Dig deep and find the strength to hold the chimney for a few more seconds and enjoy the two foot flames.

Finally, dump your hot glowing coals into your grill. These coals run a little hotter than coals lit using the normal method for lighting, so you'll need to adjust your cooking time. Sherry, remember the last time I did this and the hamburgers caught on fire? God that funny. Good times...good times.

New Cell Phone

So my employer finally came through with a cell phone. A shiny new LG VX8300.

I can see myself getting a lot of use out of the integrated digital camera feature. In lieu of anyone buying me a real digital camera.

The phone has lots of other interesting features, including bluetooth. Unfortunately most of these features are neutered by Verizon Wireless. Thanks. I'm sure your technically retarded business decisions are making you boat loads of cash.

When a mobile phone has bluetooth it should mean that it becomes less of an information island. Verizon doesn't see it that way. They want you to use bluetooth to attach A-Hole-like accessories like the Jabra BT350, which Versatile was kind enough to provide for me. Now I have another device in my arsenal with which to annoy my wife. Whatdoya say babe? Pretty annoying? Babe? Wanna drive to Hogwarts?

If I want the cool photos I've been snapping, I'll have to email them to myself. Really? That doesn't seem right. Why can't I transfer them to my laptop via bluetooth. Verizon says 'no'.

I keep my contacts in my Yahoo address book. It would be nice if I could transfer them to my phone via bluetooth. Verizon says 'no'.

Luckily there are ways around these problems. With an open source tool called BitPim, I'm able to do all kinds of things with my phone. I'm pretty sure I haven't voided any warranties. Now I can transfer pictures, music, and contacts betwixt my phone and laptop. Cool.

Ubuntu

After I got my company laptop, I was happy to overwrite the default Windows installation with Linux.

For two days I struggled with the Gentoo install. Not having the Gettle to do it all for me, I quickly (OK, 2 days) realized that this task was unrealistic for my skill-set.

So, I downloaded the Ubuntu ISO and gave it a try. Wow. I had a working Linux installation in 30 minutes. It took another 15 minutes to get the the direct rendering working. Most of that time was spent reading documentation. The laptop has a dual core processor, but it didn't look like the OS knew about it. So, 10 minutes later (again, most of that time was spent reading documentation) I had a SMP-enabled kernel. Cool.

The default Ubuntu installing uses Gnome for it's window manager. I like fluxbox. So I installed that. Unfortunately, fluxbox doesn't play nice with GDM and/or Ubuntu. It runs fine, but when I logout and try to return to the GDM login screen, the screen goes all crazy-silly. I guess I'll use Gnome for now. There is a fluxbox-ubuntu distro, but I found out about it too late.

After the installation was complete, I was alarmed to find that there was no root account. Oh no, did I forget something? Did I not pay attention during the install? Alas, this is how the default Ubuntu install works. Sigh. The root account can be enabled, but they prefer you use sudo. So far, I've been happy with using sudo.

I wasn't surprised to find that the install didn't pickup my wireless chip-set. I looked at the wireless installation notes. "Download blah1.2422314.323.patch. Apply the kernel patch. Recompile the kernel. Download huh3124.234.23.deb module." It seemed kind of complicated, so I avoided the issue for a few days. On a whim, I decided to try a different method. Gnome has a nice network configuration GUI application. I started that up and enabled the wireless network and that was it. I now have a wireless network connection.

The software updates are easy. Ubuntu checks once a day for any patches. If it finds something, it notifies you by displaying an icon in the upper right-hand corner. Clicking on the icon activates the software updates download/install.

As you can tell, I'm pretty happy with Ubuntu. So happy that I proposed to my kids that we (OK, I) install it on a computer for them to use. My daughter and youngest son were both concerned with not being about to use Word or PowerPoint. God damn you Microsoft. Damn you all to hell.

Google Code Search

I'm currently wiping down my computer.

I just found out about Google Code Search. As you can probably guess (OK, maybe not Tommy or Sherry), it's a search engine specifically tuned to find open source code. Cool enough.

But the thing that made me cream all over the keyboard was Google's decision to use regular expressions for their search string syntax. Good god. Does this mean that regular expressions are going to hit the mainstream? I hope so.

Imagine (Tommy and Sherry, you're exempt from this activity) how much more useful Google would be with regular expression capability.

Update 2006.10.09: All technology can be used for evil.

Hibernate's New Clothes

Ever since it's inception, Hibernate has been touted as the savior of the database centric application. Its Object-Relational mapping defined externally to the application code was going to eliminate thousands of lines of code for doing Create, Read, Update, and Delete (CRUD) database activities. Every press article I've ever read has nothing but good things to say about Hibernate. If you as a developer are not using Hibernate, there must be something wrong with you.

There's a fairy tale written by Hans Christian Anderson entitled The Emperor's New Clothes. In a nutshell, the story is about two smooth talking tailors who convince the Emperor that the invisible clothes they have made for him are the most exquisite in all of the kingdom. The tailors added that anyone who couldn't see how remarkable the clothes were was obviously a fool. Not wanting to be thought a fool the Emperor "dons" the clothing, and strolls through town completely naked. All of the townsfolk, not wanting to be thought fools either, praise the craftsmanship of the clothing. Only a single boy in the kingdom has the courage to say that the Emperor is not wearing any clothes.

Well, I just have this to say, "Hibernate, put some clothes on!"

I had another run-in with Hibernate the other day. I was working with a very simply database model.



I was using Hibernate to do the normal CRUD operations. Until I tried to do something fancy.

I wanted to insert a new Item and a new ItemType at the same time. I know what you're thinking, "That's Crazy!". Hibernate thought I was crazy too. It complained of a foreign key constraint violation. I spent two days trying to solve this problem, thinking the whole time how much easier it would be to use JDBC.

I solicited SweetTea’s help. He suggested that I set the cascade attribute on the many-to-one relationship to "none". That didn’t fix the problem. He also suggested that I re-fetch the new ItemType after I inserted it. That didn’t fix the problem either. Sorry, SweetTea. Your two years of Hibernate experience aren’t enough for this problem.

So, I checked online, and I found lots of tutorials/reviews written by enamored Hibernate fan-boys. Saying things like:

"Hibernate is simply the greatest object-relational mapping tool available for Java. I wrote an order application in just a few lines of code. I can’t imagine how hard it would have been to use straight JDBC."

Really? I can. It’s not that hard. I’m sure I can do a crazy two table insert in less than two days.

Thankfully, DeviousBard saved the day. Whoosh! After he was finished laughing at me for having to work with Hibernate, he dug in and started tweaking the Hibernate configuration files. Between us, DeviousBard and I have about 20 years of Java experience, but we must be complete idiots. We were pretty much changing settings randomly, and getting unexpected results.

• Lazy initialization Errors


• Batch Update Exceptions


• Class Cast Exceptions


• OMG Hibernate Sucks Exceptions

A few hours later, DeviousBard noticed something that appeared to be completely unrelated. A few lines above my troubled code, I was fetching an object by ID from one of the tables that I was attempting to insert into. The object was not found, and Hibernate simply returned null. Not a problem. Right? Wrong! This was the problem. Our best guess is that because the fetch was done within the same transactional context as the insert, Hibernate attempted to perform some sort of CRUD activity on the null object. By simply removing the seemingly unrelated code, my code suddenly started working. Shoot me.

I’m usually interested in knowing why and how things work. Usually when I start using a new API, I dig into the source, and have a look around. I have no interest in Hibernate internals. It’s like trying to figure out why a turd stinks.

I think I’m gonna write an Eclipse plugin called "WakeUp". Its sole purpose is to convert a Hibernate configuration file and the associated Java code back into POJO's that use JDBC. Then maybe, when everyone else in the Java world is willing to admit that Hibernate has no clothes, I can become a millionaire by selling the product that brings them back to reality.

Anonymous Cowards Rejoice!

OK, the doors are open again.

It appears that WordPress has pretty good splog control. So, I've changed my comment settings to:

• Anyone can comment.


• Anyone can register.

I'm pretty sure I'm going to end up regretting this, but it's worth a try. Right?

I'm Back

Hi. I'm back. I'm sorry about that. I had a nasty run-in with a group of Brazilian hackers. Two months, a few defaced web pages, new blogging software, and I'm finally back online. I think I'm going to be more diligent about backups (Skinny, a "backup" is something that is used by system administrators to recover from catastrophic failures such as a disk crash).

The old blogging software I was using had some problems. I've switched to Wordpress. This is what I like about Wordpress so far:

• categories -- I can assign more than one category to a post.


• list management -- You know, that stuff on the right sidebar. Links, blogs, movies, etc.


• cool administrative interface -- You'll see it if you have a user id.


• more secure...I think.


• easier to install/administrate


• better comment/splog filtering

<geek>

I'm having a problem with the RSS feeds. It looks like some of the characters are not encoded properly.  Stay tuned.

2006.08.21, update: If you want an RSS feed, use the link in the sidebar.

</geek>

I'm not sure if I like the new look...so that may be changing.

All the user ids have been migrated, but the passwords will have to be reset. Send me an email to get your new password.

The Mouthpiece

The sleep doctor told me to get an Adjustable Mandibular Advancement Device. This is a fancy name for a mouthpiece that pulls the lower jaw (mandible) forward to create a more open airway.

I went to the dentist and they made molds of my mouth, which they turned into clay castings. If you ask nicely, they'll give you your castings.

From the castings, they created a plastic mouthpiece.

This changes everything. The results are spectacular. I don't have to wear the CPAP mask anymore.

It's annoying to wear, but compared to the CPAP mask, it's nothing.

It's really easy to clean. I just soak it in a cleaning solution for a few hours. I use gasoline. The fumes help me fall asleep faster.

The best part? I get to sleep with my wife again!

The worst part? My wife got used to...err...being single. She keeps crying out in the middle of the night "Oh Sweettea! Post another comment on my blog!" Hmmm, no problems there.

Hyperdog

Yesterday I bought a HyperDog. This thing is well worth the money. As the name implies, it's designed to be a dog toy, but I'm not using that way. Are you surprised?Currently, I am the favorite parent. The kids absolutely love this thing. It's capable of launching a tennis ball at an incredible high velocity. Because it doesn't put any spin on the ball, every shot is like a knuckle-ball. As the ball screams along at 600fps, it has a weird random movement. When I first saw it, I couldn't believe my eyes.

My oldest son is delighted. I'm finally able to help him practice his fielding at a level he finds challenging without killing my shoulder. I have to say I was pretty impressed. "Hit me dad" he said as he patted his hand on his chest. "Are you sure?" I said...mostly for liability/insurance reasons. "Yeah. Come on. Hit me." he said as he stood in the ready position. I drew back as far as I could pull and released a line drive to his head. The ball hurled toward him giving him very little time to react. I held my breath, as he unflinchingly gloved the ball threw it back to me. Cool. "Awesome Dad. Hit me again. This time make it a grounder." I could do this all day. "Dad, you could do this all day."

The nice feature: The kids can't use it. Their arms aren't long enough to get any kind of power out of it. Now I don't have to worry that my son will try to hunt his little sister.

Editor's Note: Day four of posting every day. I'm experiencing blurred vision and frequent headaches. Must...keep...going. I can do this.

Eats for Geeks

Skinny and I have been hooked on Sheetz's MTO for years. For a geek, the service is near perfection:

• no eye contact required


• no speaking required


• cool touch-screen computer used to place order


• no order ambiguity


• chicks stare in amazement as you quickly navigate the order interface

It appears Red Robin has been working to remove the human component from their dining experience as well. Sweet Tea just told me about Red Robin's Burger Customizer. It's much like MTO, only flashier. You use the power of the interweb to customize your burger while sitting in the privacy of your own home naked from the waist down. When you're finished, you can printed it out and hand it to a server (a person, not a computer) at Red Robin.

I can't wait to try it. I bet I can complete an entire Red Robin dining transaction without uttering a single word to the help.

Technology Rules!

. . .And that was the happiest day of my life

Ever since the crash, I've been living in a world without Quake. A month without Quake is tough. I found myself mentally firing rockets at various people in the real world.

Shortly after my Linux box crashed I got a new computer. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to get Quake to run on it. Running the game resulted in a unresponsive white screen. Well, it wasn't entirely unresponsive. If I pressed the Enter key the game (white screen) would exit. Beautiful.

For weeks I've been trying to use the power of the interweb to solve my white screen of death. The gaming forums were uninformative and infuriating. If you've ever tried to solve a problem this way, you know the routine:

person #1:
subject: Help! Getting white screen trying to run quake3 on OSX.
I installed the latest patch of quake3 on my new mac...person #2:
subject: re: Help! Getting white screen trying to run quake3 on ...
Did you install the latest patch?

person #1:
subject: re: re: Help! Getting white screen trying to run quake3 ...
Yes I did. argh!!

person #2:
subject: re: re: re: Help! Getting white screen trying to run ...
hummmm...works fine on my new mac.

completely random jackass:
subject: re: re: re: re: Help! Getting white screen trying to ...
I just installed quake. It's awesome! I'm getting 500 frames per second. Yeah!

person #1:
subject: re: re: re: re: re: Help! Getting white screen trying ...
Never mind. I found my problem.

sparrowlegs:
subject: re: re: re: re: re: re: Help! Getting white screen ...
Can you post your solution?

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OMFG! Shoot me.

I finally got Quake to run of my new computer¹. Sigh. Now I can uninstall the Methadone Quake replacement games: Cube, Sauerbraten, and Unreal Tournament 2004 (yawn).

I'm sure I'll get complaints from my wife about the speed of our internet connection as I download all of the maps and mods.

¹ I doubt anyone cares...but here is the solution.