Juggling is sometimes called the art of controlling patterns, controlling patterns in time and space. - Ronald Graham
I was talking with one of my coworkers last night and she asked when I was going to pack for my trip next week. I responded, "either tomorrow or Thursday." There was a slight pause, followed by "tomorrow is Thursday." I had a moment of disbelief. I was sure it wasn't. It was. I am badly in need of holiday. So I'm running away to Hawaii for a week. I leave this Friday!
I've been doing a lot of interviews at work. My standard question that I ask is "Can you juggle'" I think get to hear horrible jokes about "well, I can juggle tasks or projects." That's not what I'm asking about. This is (we'll see if this works in RSS and how the Podcast 2.0 will handle it). I know, it would be more impressive if I didn't drop them:
Why God Made Boyfriends (09/18/2006)
Save a boyfriend for a rainy day - and another, in case it doesn't rain. - Mae West
Gumdrop's been complaining that her personal computer is slow. Truly, her parents mooch off the computer and they had been complaining it was running slow. She suspected spy ware and brought it over. Ad-Aware wouldn't run. It just rebooted. So I took a little deeper look and realized a few things. There was no anti-virus. The personal firewall was off. Finally, there was no SP2. I shuddered. My mind can only imagine the slew of disease this computer must have. I was honestly a little scared to plug the sucker into my network, but then I remembers we are 100% Windows free. We have four Macs and one Linux machine. No worries.
I installed the Symantec Anti-Virus, but Live Update didn't work. I just got errors from it. The old definitions were able to wipe off a couple dozen pieces of mal-ware, ad-ware and viruses. Still the virus definition wouldn't update. I tried Ad-Aware. I'd start to run it, and the "Critical Item" count would got up a few times before the machine would spontaneously reboot. Finally I tried Spy Sweeper. After installation, it just said the install was "Damaged" and couldn't run. Lovely, isn't it'
So I rebooted to safe-mode. Ad-Aware still rebooted. Gloriously, Spy Sweeper worked! I scanned the drive and wiped out another dozen ad-wars and mal-wares. I ran through the registry and nuked all the start-up items that weren't essential. I went into Windows IE and nuked the Web Objects that were evil. Another reboot, and virus definitions updated! Progress! Active Protection was working! It found Beagle! It found WinFixer! Re-install Ad-Aware and it ran! 100 Critical Issues removed. Progress!
It's mind boggling. People don't drive their car without out their seat belt. People don't skip changing the oil in their car. Have an anti-virus. Install all the security updates. Just do those two things.
A View from Above (09/17/2006)
I do not intend that our natural resources shall be exploited by the few against the interests of the many. - Theodore Roosevelt
The girlfriend is out traveling for work again. While she is away enticing young, bright-eyed college students into joining a giant company that will suck out theirlivelihood, I'm spending the weekend relaxing. Just relaxing. Saturday, one of my old friends mentioned that her boytoy was out camping with her family and she was planning to stay home and clean, so I packed my stuff up and made the voyage up toward Berkeley.
After lunch we headed up in Tilden Park in the Berkeley hills. The space was gorgeous. I'm surprised I had never heard of it or wandered there before. In my time in San Leandro, I'd often head to Lake Chabot park to wander around and spend a lazy afternoon. Tilden is much farther, and it's magnitudes of gorgeousness better. We paused at one point in the drive on a bluff overlooking the bay. Everything looked pale and washed out, but it was beautiful. We identified all the sites. "What's that island looking thing'" "Alameda Island." "Ohh." Too boys were up smoking pipes; clearly they are professors in training. We could even see the people sitting at the Cal stadium for football and from time to time hear the light roar of the crowd as it washed up the hill.
I'm 19! (09/14/2006)
If a squirrel is approaching you at a high velocity, there comes a distance when it magically changes from cute to terrifying. - George Hrab
I got Heely's around six weeks ago. That's right. It's the shoe with the wheel in the heel. Every twelve-year old is jealous of me. They were marketed to high school kids, but it just never seemed to take off. The first few days in the office produced a lot of second takes and laughs. Now everyone is used to it. Heely's really weren't designed to take you more than ten feet at a time, especially on carpet, but that is exactly the distance I want to travel around my office. I'm going from one cube to the next.
I can't do anything tricky yet. I've been trying to spin, heel-to-heel split or go backwards, three things I can easily do on inline skates, but none of it seemed very plausible with just that one wheel. I was just watching some of the promotion videos, and it looks like all three of those are quite possible. Plus railing. I'll need to get to work on that. Clearly I'm not practicing enough.
I also got a set of juggling pins as an early birthday present. Once again, I'm shocked at the difficulty. I can't go for more than a few seconds with the pins. It's been so long since I learned how to juggle balls, I'd forgotten how lame it is to drop your props all the time. Bending down to pick them up, especially in Heely's, is lame!
My Sweet Tooth (09/13/2006)
I told my dentist my teeth are going yellow. he told me to wear a brown tie. - Rodney Dangerfield
After the thirty-fourth cavity was filled some time ago, I changed my lifestyle. I said goodbye to the joy of Pepsi and welcomed the less joyful Diet Pepsi. I have brushed my teeth absolutely every night since then without a miss. Before that time, I would miss doing around once a week (don't worry Gumdrop, it was before we were dating. For all the other girls, sorry.) I got a little lazy about the second brushing after lunch, but it's time to get back on track. I floss twice a day. My dentist compliments me as one of his "most improved" patients, but he won't be buying any more yachts off my work.
Last week Adzar and I had a big sugar craving. The house had none so we went walking to the grocery store and made a bowl of chocolate chip ice cream then added some raw cookie dough and then added Cool Whip and then Whip Cream. It was sweet. It was vomitously sweet. I had to drink diet cola to cut the sweetness.
Last night the craving came back, but we were out of the key ingredients. Except we still had frozen Cool Whip. So I took a spoonful of it. Tasty! Then I brushed my teeth.
Secret Code (09/12/2006)
If you think technology can solve your security problems, then you don't understand the problems and you don't understand the technology. - Bruce Schneier
In what is a truly bizarre situation. I wish I were working right now. I was hard at work when the system admin said he wanted to install hard drive encryption on my laptop. I applauded this activity. I'm very good about keeping all my sensitive files encrypted when I'm not working on them and I delete with PGP wipe, but I'm always a little worried about caches and other interesting places on my laptop that can store evil things. He did the fifteen minute install and said my machine would "run a little slow" while the rest encrypted. It is, unfortunately, unusablely slow. So I drove home, laptop encrypting away in the passenger seat. It was a good use of my commute. But the progress bar says I need to wait another 44 minutes (or 89 minutes, it's a Windows progress bar, so it's hard to tell).
When I first got my new MacBook Pro I used FileVault on my home folder. I thought it was a great idea! I use TrueCrypt on my Windows flash drives and Encrypted Disk Images on my Mac ones, so using a sparse encrypted image for the home folder sounded cool. It was not. There were just too many little annoying issues I kept running into. Finally I gave up and decrypted it. Now I just have a smaller encrypted image where I store my really secret stuff. Can you fix that for me Apple'
The Mac is Back (09/09/2006)
The products suck! There's no sex in them anymore! - Steve Jobs (1997)
I left my laptop power cable up in Sacramento over the Labor Day Weekend holiday. It was a tragic moment. The whole week I had to struggle without my Macintosh. There are three other Macs in the house, but none of them use the new mag-safe connector. In addition, my battery is the wrong size to swap with any for a quick and dirty charge. I swung by the Apple Store on Wednesday, in withdrawal, but a new cable is $80. Apple hasn't licensed out the patent to third parties yet. So I sucked it up and lived without my mac. It was a hard life.
The cable is back in my hands and the computer is charged. Glory be.
