Polish Women

In case you might wonder what life will be like if you marry a Polish woman, my wife (of Polish descent) sent me this joke the other day... To borrow from Homer, "Its funny cause its true." An elderly Polish man lay dying in his bed. While suffering the agonies of impending death, he suddenly smelled the aroma of his favorite pierogi with fried onions wafting up the stairs. He gathered his remaining strength, and lifted himself from the bed.Gripping the railing with both hands, he crawled downstairs. Downstairs, he leaned against the door frame, gazing into the kitchen, where if not for death's agony, he would have thought himself already in heaven, for there, spread out upon waxed paper on the kitchen table were hundreds of his favorite pierogi. Was it heaven? Or was it one final act of love from his wife of sixty years, seeing to it that he left this world a happy man? He threw himself towards the table, landing on his knees in a crumpled posture. His parched lips parted, the wondrous taste of the pierogi was already in his mouth. With a trembling hand he reached up to the edge of the table, when suddenly he was smacked with a wooden spoon by his wife. "Back off!" she said. "Those are for the funeral."

(2007-06-15 11:30:02.0) Comments [2] // Permalink

Its Called the Express Line for a reason

Just a reminder to everyone, when you are in the express line at the super market, keep your transaction simple, otherwise, move it over to another line will ya! Here's a few things to keep in mind... No "Oops this is the wrong product, hold on while I get the right one." No "Are you sure that is the right price? Can you double check?" Make sure you've tried out the credit-card/ATM-card scanner once before. Use plastic or cash if possible, checks take too long. If you must use a check, can you start filling it out before your stuff is all scanned? Thanks... We're All In It Together!

(2007-06-15 10:37:50.0) Comments [2] // Permalink

Deadliest Advert

Ok so I know television stations and programs make money through advertisers, but this is kinda getting ridiculous. As I was watching Deadliest Catch this evening, I noticed some very peculiar embedded advertisements. First off on the Dutch Harbor map, down in the corner, a Lexus logo. Seems a bit strange to have a logo of such a "refined" automobile on such a show as Deadliest Catch. And then, low and behold, guess whose sponsoring the Crab Count, well its none other than Yellow Book. Ahh it reminds me of all the sponsored tickers and scoreboards you always see on NFL coverage, only not done nearly as well.

(2007-04-10 22:34:21.0) // Permalink

Another weight problem.

A couple of months ago I mentioned how I had lost some weight. I now seem to have a new problem related to that. I can't seem to keep weight on. This morning, the scale read 135 lbs. And that's after a night of eating a big mexican dinner (three big fajitas, rice and beans) as well as a couple of Samuel Adam's (see Rama, I occasionally drink something besides the Silver Bullet.) Not to mention I really haven't exercised since I messed up my quad playing football in early December. Well, the weight has got to stablize at some point, but maybe I should make it a point to drink one of those odwalla Super Protein drinks regularly.

(2007-02-08 12:48:26.0) Comments [1] // Permalink

MacBook Pro/Day 4 - Another View

First, Hats off to Levi, long time Apple/Mac advocate, for providing Rama and I a bunch of stuff to help us acclimate to the Apple way. As I need to do something new, I've consulted his list of stuff before searching the web. Now on to round two... What's up Dock? - One of the things that is not so bad in XP is the Start Menu. Its got everything I need literally at my finger tips. Among other things, there is a section for Favorite applications, A menu to all apllications, and an section to get to my "Home" folder and disks. This isn't so convenient with OS X. It appears to be a combination of the Dock and the Finder to provide these same things. I've taken to using the Dock for my essential applications, and then using the Finder to get to all applications. Neither of which are as easy to get to as with simply pressing the Windows button on the keyboard. The Dock is an odd beast that doesn't seem incredibly intuitive to me. Seems to be more function than form. But I'm getting used to it. Application Voila - Is it really that easy to install an application? All I really do is drag and drop the application into the Applications folder and that's it? I must be doing something wrong cause software isn't supposed to be that easy to install. Actually I remember my wife using MacOS 9 and mentioning something to that effect so it must be right. Bravo. Blinkin Lights - Oh where art thou? The dang thing is too quiet so I need some way to see what's doing on. I need a disk LED. And maybe a network/wifi LED. I was using Fink the other night at home to install some stuff and when it was downloading, I couldn't tell whether it was still downloading, or hung or what. Sure Fink should provide some better progress meter, but one tiny LED for disk activity isn't going to hurt the fit and finish. One Button to Rule Them All - Check out the dude trying to defend the single button mouse in Rama's MacBook entry. This is just silly. Yes, I know I can get by with a single mouse button but I don't want to. I don't want to click-and-hold the mouse button for 1.5 seconds to bring up a menu. I want it NOW! And I don't want to ever hold down a any key/button for any period of time, my carpal tunnel's are begging me not to.

(2007-01-30 21:37:12.0) Comments [5] // Permalink

Not the Opera too!

Arg! Now advertising has gone too far. Not content to bombard us on TV, magazines and even movies, it has finally hit the Opera too. At the last couple of performances at the San Francisco Opera, a list of a few of the major donators flashed onto the supertitles before the show. It seems like a small things, but to me, this has gone too far. The opera already lists donations in every program and has had displays of the major contributors on posters outside the theater. But to me, when you step inside the theater, it should teleport you back to the era of the Opera with all the history, all the fanfare, all the luxury that it used to be. A place that you could even take your children and show them a living history of entertainment of the time. Yes, I understand that revenue from tickets only funds a portion of the budget. But there are other outlets, like programs and posters, to recognize the donations of gracious individuals and corporations that are less infringing on the patrons. I mean really, most people are sitting in their seats well before the performances start anyways, and most of them are leafing through the programs too. Is that not enough?

(2006-12-31 18:41:44.0) // Permalink

The Time of the Season.

Ahh, Christmas is such a wonderful time. Time for fun, time for family, time for heading home to fix all your dad's computer problems. I'm sure it occurred countless times across the country this year. Your dad has queued up all his computer problems until you come home for the holidays. I had my share of things to do with my dad. Task 1: First off, he wanted to install the hard drive from his old computer into his one one as a second drive. Ok, that should be a no brainer, right? I even packed a few extra cables I had laying around. So we cracked open the case, slid the drive in, installed the P-ATA and power cables, and lit it up, expecting it to just work. As with anything that is not your own, it didn't go so smoothly. When Windows booted up, it recognized the drive, and even noticed that there was an NTFS partition on there. But wouldn't assign a drive letter, and so we couldn't access any files. A lot of head scratching, and rebooting into the BIOS didn't help. So, for lack of anything else, we decided to make the drive the bootable drive. As it booted, we saw some boot screen for a application called GoBack, and then it would attempt to boot into Windows. On the boot screen, there was an option to disable GoBack. What the hell, lets give it a try. It undid itself, and rebooted. And what do you know, when Windows eventually booted, it now recognized the drive and assigned a drive letter. Whew! Task 2: Now on to a more interesting problem. My father could not access some apparently random set of web sites. For example, he could access ING Direct but could not click on the login link from that main page. He had quite a list that included Netflix, T. Rowe Price and so on. My father apparently had done some extensive remote debugging with his ISP and they were fairly sure there was no problems. So first thing I did, was take the computer out of the picture and hooked up my laptop to hist Cable line. No problems, just what I would expect. After hooking his computer back up, I did a variety of things including ping, traceroute (or tracert in the Windows world). I tried telnet'ing to the remote machine, and even tried changing his DNS settings. All to no avail. Next thought was firewall. He's using Zone Alarm so we took a peek around in his settings, nothing too obvious. I was stumped. So last ditch effort, I started doing some internet searches. Along the road down the results, I saw someome mention a similar problem which was cleared up when the removed some old evaluation applications he had installed. So I decided to look at what was installed, and I found one curious application called "nVidia Forceware Network Access Manager." My first thought was to just remove it entirely, but I clicked the option to change the installed components, and what do you know, one of the components is yet another firewall! The application apparently has a web interface, and doing a little more searching I found the port it runs on. The firewall was installed and active, so I decided to disable it. Cha-ching! That was it. He could now access all his favorite sites. So I just removed the firewall component of NAM altogether. And that was about it for the big ones. I did have to explain some finer points of Windows to him. He didn't entirely understand, for example, that he couldn't run programs that had been installed on his second drive because Windows doesn't really know about them. Oh well, at least the hard ones were resolved.

(2006-12-28 11:37:01.0) // Permalink

My Car on Earl?

So I'm watching My Name is Earl last night, great show by the way, and Earl has got himself in some trouble with some gang in Mexico, when low and behold... Could it be... My new car on Earl. It sure looks like it. So I'm eagerly watching for more shots which include this fine piece of automobile. Looking for signs of what it might be... And there it is, on the front of the car. It isn't a Buick afterall... its just a Plymouth... Ok so its still pretty sweet.

(2006-12-08 16:34:45.0) Comments [1] // Permalink

Gone, Daddy Gone!

Three months ago today I began something I would end up calling - to nobody but myself - "Watt Fit 40" - an effort to regain some physical fitness before I turn 40, this month! Now, it didn't start out so lofty, it started out because my damn wife had to replace our damn scale and I was stupid enough to give it a try. I was pretty suprised when I read 159 lbs on the scale. Now that might not sound like too much but for a 5'8" guy who's always had a target of about 145 lbs, that was way too much. And I was not going to be 160. So that night I decided that I finally needed to get off my ass and do something about it. Cut to the chase - After just a short 3 months, on a good day, I have lost 20 lbs, this morning, in fact, I was 140. That's over 10% of my body weight. My resting heart rate has lowered by 10-20 points, which has increased my heart rate reserve by about that much. And none of my pants fit me anymore. How I did it - Not ever having had to watch my weight before it took a little bit to decide on a plan, but it essentially boiled down the a two pronged effort all aimed at creating a caloric deficit to force my body to burn fat. First off, aerobic exercise in the form of the treadmill 3 times a week. At first I could barely do a 30 minute, 1.5 mile program peaking at 4 MPH, now I can easily do a 50 minute, 3.7 miles program peaking at 6 MPH. And the second prong, a meal program - ok you could call it a diet. For pretty much the last 3 months (except for Thankgiving), its been a breakfast bar in the morning, sandwich and salad for lunch (now just salad), and chicken or fish with steamed vegetables for dinner. I gotta say though that my body was not ready to give up the pizza, beer & ice cream. For the first 2-3 weeks I felt pretty crappy. Like I was trying to break an addiction. But I managed through it, and very quickly after the initial period, my body flipped the other way and started to crave exercise. The downside - Well, not much except that my wife is pissed at me because apparently I'm violating some rule she has where I must weigh a certain number of pounds more than her. Oh, and she's also mad that I am finally interested in eating well, something she's been pushing for a long time. Next steps - Maybe, just maybe, I'll start going with Will and Rama to the gym to start toning and muscle building - If they are still doing that. But that won't be until after the party in Vegas.

(2006-12-05 13:51:49.0) Comments [5] // Permalink

CSS Frustrations

So I've been tinkering with Cascading StyleSheets lately, in an attempt to create a new theme for JSPWiki. Its pretty frustrating how far computing has come and yet there is still so many hacks you have to deal with, even for something simple. So far I have been bit by the Three Pixel Text Jog bug in IE when just trying to do a simple two column layout with floats. And have uncovered something called the Wyke-Smith/Alsett/Holly 'clearfix' hack. I found a pretty good description of the 'clearfix' hack in an article called How To Clear Floats Without Structural Markup. Its an amusing read of how fricked up things have gotten. It presents ways to make IE/Firefox/Mac browsers all do the right thing by use of browser bugs on each platform. Now I see why people pay big money to web designers.

(2006-11-30 10:48:29.0) // Permalink

Why does this still happen?

Try bring up this website and widening your browser window, and see what happens. Are you surprised that nothing happens to the content? It drives me crazy that even though solutions to dynamically adjust content are available in just about any application (I was introduced to them over 15 years ago with Xawt) the browser content is so static. If I have my browser windows as wide as my widescreen LCD goes, I want the content inside the window to span all that space. Is it too much to ask?

(2006-10-30 16:09:19.0) Comments [3] // Permalink

To that wreckless punk who passed me on the road.

Yeah, you! The one taking unnecessary risks trying to get passed me in the fast lane on Sunday. Where were you trying to get to so fast? Were you coming down from South San Francisco to see your Homeeez in Santa Clara? Well think about this dude. That trip is only 35 miles, and going the 75mph I was going you'd get there in about 28 minutes. So how fast did you want to get there? Maybe shave 5 minutes off that time and make it in 23 minutes? Well here's the skinny dude. If you hadn't have dropped out of high school you could have figured out that you'd have to average a crazy 91mph to get there in 23 minutes. And if you wanted get there in 18 minutes, you have to drive at an insane 116mph. Its not worth it dude. But if you must drive that fast, do us all a favor and kill yourself on the track instead of taking out an innocent bystander with you.

(2006-10-30 12:12:40.0) Comments [4] // Permalink

Happy Birthday to Me!

Well its still a couple of months until my 40th birthday but my wife has already sprung my birthday present on me. My wife and I often half-joked about how sweet it would be to have a classic convertible to tool around in from time to time. Well my wife found one. A 1963 Buick Skylark Special. Here's a picture of it just being delivered this morning. Although its not quite as sought after as your Impala for example, its a very sweet car. And, reminds me of my first car, a 1964 Buick Wildcat. That thing was a tank. A real piece of Detroit steel. They don't make 'em like this anymore. The exterior of the Skylark looks great, and the interior isn't too bad either. Its definitely not show quality but we weren't really looking for that anyways. But the most interesting part, its a "three-on-the-tree" standard transmission. Which threw me for a second as I sat in to take it for a spin. In fact, I realized I didn't even know what the shifting pattern was, so after I drove it around the block , in whatever gear I was in, and into the driveway, I did a web search to see if I could find out the pattern. Surprisingly I found the shifting pattern on Everything2 which I've never really been a big fan of. We'll I definitely have some practicing to do this weekend.

(2006-10-27 10:32:08.0) Comments [2] // Permalink

Kidz Bop

Recently I've noticed a commercial on TV for something called "Kidz Bop", that I've been curious about. Hey I have a kid, she might like it. So I finally took a look at the Kidz Bop web site. Apparently they are a series of CDs of kids doing covers of popular songs. Sounds kinda cool, only as I started to look at the song selection, there are some peculiar ones. From what I recognize, there are songs like Weezer's awkward and depressing "Beverly Hills", Green Day's "Boulevard of Broken Dreams" and the somber "Wake me up when September Ends", and what I've always considered a dark song, Gorillaz "Feel Good Inc." Course I don't know why I really should be surprised, there so many more absurd things out there. The way cool Devo cover kids band DEV2.0 comes to mind.

(2006-08-18 12:18:59.0) Comments [1] // Permalink

Huckin'

I caught a series of commercials the recently which featured a dude in a chicken suit throwing big airs on a motorcycle with an equally absurd audio track in the background. Its so absurd that is pretty hilarious, and unforgetable. Well the last time I saw it, I caught the URL for a web site, which I squirreled away in some part of my memory to be regurgitated at some random point in the future. And when it was, boy what a treat. The site features a whole set of tricks that chicken is bustin' out. If you're in to absurd marketting, or really just want to see some huge tricks, check it out. http://www.huckinchicken.com Warning: don't watch too long, you might get that damn jingle stuck in your head.

(2006-07-13 16:17:45.0) // Permalink