This guy's been awake since the second world war

I used to be able to sleep. Anytime, anyplace. Boom, I'm asleep. Floor, couch, chair, hammock, catwalk, broom closet, whatever. Back in the Great America days I once leaned a crappy metal chair up against a speaker stack and slept during a concert (Winger, I believe. Or Warrant. Some useless hair band). Granted, I was behind the speakers, not in front of them, but 110db is a lot of noise.

During college I started having trouble falling asleep. I could still sleep like nobody's business once I fell asleep, but getting there was tough. In the past few years I've noticed that I can fall asleep very easily, but staying asleep is a real challenge. Like when Smoochie starts yowling at 3 or 4 in the morning. Based on prior experience, I would tend to estimate his volume as about 150db. Seriously. If I'm in the bedroom and he's by the back door, which is down a hall, around a corner, through two rooms, down another hall and around another corner, what I actually hear is about conversational level volume. Now imagine that about a foot from your head. It's like someone screaming in your ear while you're trying to sleep.

And these days, once I'm up that's it. No point trying to go back to sleep.

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Piles of bills, receipts, and credit cards

This is the desk that Matt built.

Several 1x12s glued, planed, sanded, and stained with 3/4" steel pipe for the legs.
The side shelves are on 1" dowels painted to match the steel.

In place, not completely set up yet.

I still need to add a keyboard tray, and I'm considering putting up a narrow shelf on the wall as well. The honey pine stain looks great, so now I'm thinking of restaining the rolling computer cart, (to the left of the picture, supporting the iMac).

In the process of trying to shave 1/4" off the cabinet for above the fridge, I decided that sanding wasn't cutting it. So I picked up a a new toy. I should've bought it when I started on the desk, it would've made it much easier. The other thing I'm thinking of picking up is this router table, since my current router situtation is using the router bits for my dremel. It's sufficient to do edging, but channel routing is a monstrous pain and I've got a lot of that coming up in the next few projects.

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When I was young, pc meant police constable

Never underestimate the extent of human stupidity. I understand the idea of being sensitive in the use of language (even though it's usually stupid), but this is absurd on a whole new level.

We saw the Sharon Osborne episode with Barenaked Ladies last night, and that was about the funniest thing I've ever seen. It was the "sex" show, Sharon had on a bunch of Playboy models and a burlesque dancer (who happens to be Marilyn Manson's girlfriend), and actor Anthony Anderson. BNL played "Another Postcard", which is a tricky one to play live because of the staccato delivery, and then stripped down to skin-tone thongs and jumped on the bed. Apparently Ed wasn't staying in his thong (it was blurred on TV, obviously) and Anthony Anderson was completely freaked out. Ed gave a great interview and then chased Anthony around the studio and through the audience trying to jump on his back. Hilarious

courtesy of someone on /. : When life gives you crap, Make Crapade.

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He's pounding nails into a hardwood floor

I frequent several different Home Depot and Lowe's locations in the city and in the county. Over the past year I've noticed one interesting (to me) commonality amongst the Home Depot locations.

• Generally at least one of the four "self checkout" units is out of order. Of the ones that are working, they are noticably slower than the ones at Lowe's (or Schnucks or Dierbergs, the other places where I regularly do self checkout).
• Without fail, the self checkout machine will freeze on at least one item saying "wait for assistance". Several times this has happened before I've started scanning items.
• More often than not, when I hit pay now, the machine will suddenly say either "unexpected item in bagging area" or "item has been removed from bagging area" Needless to say, nothing has been added to or removed from the bagging area and the clerk has to clear the error.

Why is it that the ones at Home Depot error at a noticably higher rate than other places? Dierbergs and Schnucks most certainly get far more usage (and abusage) than Home Depot. And Lowe's is a similar environment, so it can't be sawdust or anything of that nature. I don't know what OS the Dierbergs or Schnucks or Lowe's machines use, but I know the Home Depot ones run Vuepoint on Windows (I've seen them being worked on often enough).

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Right and wrong - do you know the difference

Best protest sign ever:

Yee-ha! is not a foreign policy!

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and a shadow fell bringing sleep to all

Sometimes, when I've had a particularly frustrating problem, I find it's best to just go to sleep. Sure enough, as I drifted off last night I realized what the problem with my java classpath was.

.

That little dot is fairly important if you want anything to actually run.

[/geekspeak]

Anxious Parents is a fascinating look at how perceptions of child-rearing problems and challenges have changed over the past hundred years. Even if you are not a parent it's a fascinating read, but probably more so if you are (or are about to be).

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Let's Pretend We're Married

Massachusetts high court says the state cannot ban gay marraige. Will sanity prevail? Marriage is a contract, plain and simple. Sure, the assorted religions can prohibit gay couples from participating in their religious matrimonial ceremonies (and religious organizations should have the right to do so). From the perspective of the state, it's just another damned contract. Deal with it.

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I'm gonna give it everything I've got to give

Long day. Long week. Long lonely waiting list. I'm completely exhausted. Getting everything together and doing the party and prepping the nursery and going to classes and so on and so forth. Mae keeps trying to help in spite of the fact that she's under strict doctors' orders to rest. Marge has been a tremendous help.

The party went well, as far as I can tell. Everyone seemed to have a good time, and there was more than enough food. I didn't get to talk to everyone as much as I wanted to, though I at least had a few minutes with pretty much everybody. I suppose that's the best I could do given the circumstances. Sorry if I didn't spend more time with you, as I really wanted to spend more time with everyone.

Christy, the MP3 is 8MB, way too big for a yahoo account. I'll burn you a CD with all sorts of good stuff.

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Just Eat It

Chris is on the phone with a gov't person who wants a consolidated report of security. LDAP is being uncooperative, so it's taking longer than expected.

Chris: I can give it to you in a really unpalatable format.

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What's my name?

Another sign of what freaking morons we can be. Unless you're getting paid to advertise for these companies, why would you name your child ESPN?

Damn.

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Playa Hatin

Witt says it best.

You know how you sometimes hear people say, "Don't hate the playa, hate the game"? I hate them both. Saves time.

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Imagine what a man can build with his hands

Last night I managed to swap drives like a madman and get server and workstations all back to normal, with the exception of the test box, which doesn't want to POST anymore. Must be tired.

I also put my new desk in place. Pictures will be forthcoming. This has been a public service announcement for Kat, who is (hopefully) recovering nicely from surgery.

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Baby baby baby if it's all right

Been very very busy of late. This is good. Mostly.

[geekspeak warning]
Samba version fights between mp3 server and workstation destroyed most of last night and the night before. Problem resolved by ripping HDs out of server and placing them in workstation. I'll beat Fedora Core into submission on the server tonight, perhaps. libcompat problems with Websphere Studio on Fedora. Blech. WSAD must run as root if you enable Local OS security. That's stupid. Strong typing in Java is the suck. I converted the freaking string to an int, and the CallableStatement is still blowing up. Rrrggghhh.

Chaos at work. A new Project Manager is coming in. He has some great ideas, and I like a lot of the announced plans, but I will wait to see if they are actually implemented before I get excited.

Baby class was interesting and entertaining. Gotta love any childbirth class that starts with a clip of Bill Cosby back when he was funny.

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With my naked eye I saw

It's not every day that you see one of these landing in the middle of thirteenth street. Right by the Veteran's Memorial. I'll assume it's for something to do with Veteran's Day. Keith, Carol, and I walked down to check it out. It's very black. The only thing on it not black is the number below the tail rotors. A class of kids (probably about 1st graders) was walking through the park and flipped out completely. I was most amused that the crowd of people concentrated themselves about 20 feet from the copter directly in front of the rockets. We chose to stand off to the side...

On the way back I saw an uncancelled check on the ground, which appears to have fallen out of someones wallet. Now I must track them down.

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While You Were Art

While you were out is in St. Louis. They are staying at the Sheraton by Savvis. I know this because I drove past the trailers on my way to work for the 8am super mondo everyone-and-their-dog meeting. Which was actually quite interesting. I don't mention it enough, but there are some really sharp people on the government side. I'm making notes of people I want to get time to talk more with and bring their ideas to fruition for the next few phases. I'm quite encouraged by what I heard about consolidation of legacy systems and assorted other obscurities about which you care not at all.

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It won't do you a bit of good to use new math

In a discussion about Amazon's text search feature, the subject turned to textbooks and college students and how the kids today can use the feature to find just the parts of the book that they need for their paper or homework rather than buying the book. And we talked about how outrageous textbook prices were when we were in college (I assume they still are). And professors who published their own book and used it for the class.

My dad was one of those. So I looked him up. His book is ranked somewhere around 69,000 in Amazon's Sales Rank. Not bad considering it was last published over 6 years ago and is a field in which change is rapid. And it still sells. It seems that it's still a required text for a lot of engineering students. One reader reviewer commented that his PE Exam book was a lot harder than the actual exam.

Mom was unaware that the book is still being sold, so hopefully she'll check with the publisher and see if there are royalties still due her.

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The less you know the better

The Post has a piece on the recent media survey. None of which is surprising to me. From my interactions with a wide swath of the public, particularly the conservative public, I've found one absolute and that is that people who trust Fox News tend to be wrong more often than anyone else.

Of course, back in the early 90's Rupert Murdoch openly admitted that none of his news outlets would ever dare to present anything that he disagreed with in terms of social or political policy. Fox News is a propaganda tool for a right wing ideology. If you believe otherwise you are lying to yourself and the world.

The more you watch, the less you know.

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Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps

NBC's "Coupling" has been cancelled. It should've never aired, but at least they had the good sense to kill it after only running 4 episodes.

The new baby furniture hasn't worked out as planned. Halfway through putting together the dresser Mae realized that the top was warped and the paint was screwed up along the front edge. I will be calling the company for a replacement part today. I did route out a mortise and tenon for the top of entertainment/storage center I am making for the nursery and get it glued up and clamped. Routing with a Dremel tool is more challenging than using a real router, as it's not as powerful and the bit is much smaller. So it takes longer, but it works still. All that's left is to sand and brace a mid-shelf and put the backing on. Then of course comes the facing which will be MUCH more difficult. Oh, and MDF is a pain in the ass to work with. I'll avoid it in the future.

There are few things more frustrating to a geek than the bizarre phenomenon whereby turning a perfectly working computer off and moving it to another room results in a dead hunk of metal. It is at least consoling that all the geeks I know acknowledged having had similar experiences.

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