The liberal, the conservative, and the drowning man.

A certain liberal was waking through the forest towards a lake. Upon arriving at the shore, the liberal saw a man thrashing about in the middle of the lake. It was instantly obvious that the man did not know how to swim, and would soon succumb to the water. The liberal yelled out, "I'll save you!"

The enlightened liberal began thinking of ways save the man and to prevent this from happening again. Under consideration was giving the man a life preserver, which quickly escalated into giving everyone a life preserver. Except if you have a boat. If you have a boat, you are dry and should therefore give the life preservers on your boat to the government for redistribution.

Signs should be posted illustrating the hazards of being on the water. A fence should be constructed to prevent people from getting into the water. The lake bottom should be raised so that the man could walk to shore from anywhere on the lake.

As the liberal was contemplating, a conservative saw the man in the lake. Immediately the conservative began running for the lake and, after stripping off shoes and heavy clothing, dove into the water. A moment later the drowning man was on shore. The conservative offered to teach him how to swim.

The liberal, seeing that the conservative had stolen the "drowning" issue, started yelling about how the conservative had destroyed the pristine shoreline; how the conservative had risked the life of the drowning man; how the conservative had been reckless with resources like shoes and clothing.

The conservative shrugged off this criticism, got dressed, and walked home, happy in the knowledge that the drowning man was better for the action taken, not the good intentions.

Fixing iTunes / Quicktime pain

Last week I attempted to update my iTunes / Quicktime software. I'm running a vista system so the standard update method fails. I have to manually update so that I can click retry for each config.msi/, the installer needs to delete.

After the update MP4 files would play audio, but the video was a Black image. Change the directX settings only caused it to be a white image. It turns out that the file "3ivxD4_451.qtx" was causing my problem. I didn't know this so I uninstalled quicktime/itunes and reinstalled. This didn't solve my problem. So I uninstalled again and then moved the file mentioned before to my desktop. I then reinstalled. Everything works fine now so I'm going to blame that file and delete it.

This is a reminder that uninstalling software does not always get rid of extensions and plug-ins. You should look for them and delete them after you uninstall software. And find them suspect if the program does not work after uninstall/reinstall.

fixing frozen mail

use eximon to watch what happens

as root:

exipick | grep frozen > ~/broken

edit ~/broken to only contain id's

for x in `cat ~/broken`; do exim -Mar $x username@localaddress; done
/etc/init.d/exim4 stop
exim4 -bd -qff 15m

for x in `cat ~/broken`; do exim -Mmad $x; done

/etc/init.d/exim4 start

Pictures of E/G

Here is a first ultra sound picture of Elizabeth/George (if it's a girl its Elizabeth, if it's a boy it's George) E/G for short. It's a healthy baby with a healthy heart rate and good size :)

CMU Essay: Interests

Choosing a primary interest of research at CMU is like trying to choose what to eat a fine restaurant. You know that anything and everything will be delicious. Even the food you don't like will be delicious.

I really liked the multi-robot research. I think that will be the future of space exploration. Instead of a singular billion dollar machine. Send 1,000 machines or 10,000 machines. Then let them be automated and let them determine the most efficient way to map a location, to check the composition of the soil, and to get the needed experimental results.

What I'm curious about is how do you allow the system to account for partially disabled robots? How do you account for robots with different equipment sets and different abilities. Especially if those abilities overlap in some manner.

A less robotic interest is an adaptive system where default behavior is altered based on time of day, day of week, and calender day. This would be cross referenced with historical data. An example would be a stop light that learns to favor east bound traffic in the morning, west bound traffic in the evening, and north south traffic when a special event is detected. In theory this light would continue to adapt it's timing as it's environment changed.

Good and Bad Deeds (an incomplete thought)

If you follow Christ's example and keep the Father in mind while doing an action, then that action is a good deed. But if you do not have the Father in mind, then your actions are bad deeds no matter how much they benefit man. For we were not put on this earth to benefit man, but to benefit God.

This is just a first thought. It doesn't really provide insight into how Christ helps us and the purpose of the Holy Spirit. And it says nothing about how we can contort what the Father really has in mind into what we actually want. It's really easy to say "God wants me to be happy so I'm going to steal something." Part of keeping the Father in your mind is to remember that this world is insignificant (the people in it are not).

RSS found.

After reading this -> http://cravingideas.blogs.com/backinskinnyjeans/2006/09/how_to_explain_.html article, I have now found the joy that is RSS. Why load and plow through pages upon pages of useless crap when you can look for the gold. (No gold here just crap.) I spent about an hour today just bouncing from bookmark to bookmark converting blogs to rss feeds. Now when I'm bored, I just click my rss bookmark and run through the list of interesting web articles.

Firefox also makes it easy with Live Bookmarks. Just look for the rss logo ->
in your URL bar (where you type www.google.com) . Click it and add the live bookmark. Now when you click that bookmark you'll get a list of all the articles on that site. What could be easier?

Wisdom teeth

I had my wisdom teeth taken out over a week ago. They put me to sleep. While falling asleep all the color left the room. Waking up was really trippy. My brain didn't quite know how to interpret what I was seeing. I spent the next few hours sleeping, swapping gauze, and trying not to move my mouth. My wife tells me that I was in enough pain at one point that I whimpered. After about 1 am, I was feeling much better and haven't taken any pain medication since. I felt able to drive the next day and even enjoyed a bit of a party. Now I'm back to work (and have been since Monday).

good evening

good evening <-John Hodgman's blog. Very nice. He's the PC btw.

CoH/CoV

Yeah I'm playing Co[HV] again. The graphics have been stepped up so I now have to run a fan on my video card. Without it the card locks the whole system. It doesn't run under linux very well. The OpenGL version of the game seems to heat the chip up even more than the directx so the card locks up the linux system too. So no (or very little) Co[HV] in linux.

New website

I need to create a whole new website.

I need to determine a layout.

I need to determine what my content will be.
(So much of the web is content free, including this website as it stands now. If I'm going to bother having a domain name, I should have a website that does something.)

I think I'll keep my content free blog.

I may make a content blog also.

The color scheme should be normal on normal, with normal link color.

The color scheme may be changed in limited circumstances to alert the user to a change in content.
IE. How-To-Documents may have a pleasant background color or quiet background image.

The content free blog may be as obnoxious as is entertaining to the writer (me) as no one else is likely to even look at it.

The new website must require very little of the user's machine.

Magic should be restricted to the server.

The layout should be usable in text and graphical format. Graphical should be usable at any resolution, with emphasis on standard resolutions.

To be released when I get around to working on it.

Give Iran the BOMB

I think the best way to make Iran our friend it blow them up and then help rebuild them. Iran wants the BOMB, I think we should give it too them. Only not in the manner they are hoping for. Shove it down their throat and pull the pin.

Ok I'm done being irrational. But I still think we should bring them the war they want.

More tree banter

We are definitely making progress on our trees. We are focusing on the brush at the moment. The brush stacks poorly and makes working with the chainsaw difficult. We are taking the limbs to the back yard, burning the brush and stacking the bigger stuff to be cut later. So far we have cleared the back and side yard and now we can drag limbs from the front yard to the back.

Getting the green brush to start on Saturday was a real pain. Eventually Joyce suggested cardboard and it did the trick. After it was started and we had some good coals, it burned the wood at the same pace as our trimming efforts. About dark we let the fire ash over. There were enough coals left on Sunday to relight the fire pretty easy. There was
a bit more smoke but all in all it went pretty well.

With the storms it seems we got those trees down at just the right time. I'm sure they'd be down now after the 80MPH winds we got last night. The storm blew the rain guard off of the exhaust pipe for the water heater and stove vent. We got a new one last night. We also got a rain check for an 18" 42cc chainsaw of our very own. :)

trees; Road School

This past weekend my wife, our dad's and I took down the trees in our front yard. The more north tree was easier. It was shorter and only had our electrical line and our house to worry about. We removed the electrical line and took it down on friday. The other tree was much more difficult as it was 60 ft tall (the lift we rented only got us 45 ft) and was over our house and our neighbors electrical line. We had to tie off almost every branch, top it, and carve it into managable peices. Then we moved on to the next branch. It was a very slow process and took 2 days to complete.

Now we have (still) all of the tree in our front yard layered between 1-4 ft tall. My wife's job over the next few weeks will be to cut, collect, burn or store all of the wood. I hope it's all done by the weekend of April 22. I want to go to Gary's wedding without having to worry about the wood around the house.

I have refrained from doing much work on the trees debris while Joyce was at Road School at Purdue. It's risky to wield a chainsaw while other are around to call 911; it's suicidal to do so while one is alone. Joyce had fun stomping arround Purdue again, so it was worth it I believe. I'll probably hear all about it tonight.

Stupid rain.

Saturday night we had a thunderstorm. The storm was preceded by 5 days of rain. Thus there was no where for the rain to go on Saturday, except inside the house. The house leaked about 2 gallons of water into the basement. Not much, but lots more than the zero that the basement usually gets. The garage also had an amazing amount of water in it. It often floods. But it had never flooded this bad before. 1000 sq. ft. with 1/2 inch of water. About 300 gallons of water.

Sunday I bought a wet/dry vacuum and sucked up all the water that hadn't drained or dried.

Monday morning it stormed again. I got about 45 gallons up this time.

It's been sunny since. So really I'm not mad. I mostly want to document it somewhere.

By the seat of your pants

This web site shows how to tie a webbing harness. Seems like a pretty good one.
http://brmrg.med.virginia.edu/knots/seat.html

high Definition TV;CVS

So I've had high definition since the middle of Feburary. It blows me away. I love watching old episodes of "Battlestar Galactica". I though the ship scenes were amazing in normal definition. But high definition just blows it away. It's amazing what having 4 times the area will do to an image. You can tell the difference between the cylon and fleet ships anywhere on the screen at any perspective. I also love watching sporting events in high def. You can see the faces of the crowd. You can see the boards in the floors or the rocks on the track or any number of other details. It's making me much more interested in sports on TV.

Recently I've been learning CVS. It too is pretty groovy. It took a bit to figure out how to start a new project, but after that everything has been pretty cool. I have been working with checkout, update, and commit for some time. But I've never tried to make a new project and I've never tried to make my own server. I'm pretty happy with the initial results.