Scary Monsters

A the last minute I had a change of mind about my costume. I realized that it would not be comfortable to spend the entire day at work dressed as a Minneapolis airport men's room stall.

So instead I'm going to dress as a disaffected IT worker.

Happy Halloween!

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It's been hard to look in the mirror

Sometimes the best way to understand a concept is through visualization. Coding Horror has a great explanation of SQL joins that made crystal clear a concept I'd always struggled with.

If you want to see the dangers of recursion (or iteration abstraction) do this:

Fire up a VNC server on your machine.
Fire up your VNC client.
Connect to your machine.
Watch the windows cascade and take your system down.

It helps to have another machine handy with which to shell in and kill the process. This is something I did this morning in order to test that my private vpn was set up properly without thinking about the whole recursion issue.

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Bust the popcorn, drops it on my cassette

My eldest daughter needs to work on her stealth technique. She finished dinner and wanted to go play, I was still dealing with the babies. She went off into the living room, right next to the dining room. She was quiet for a few minutes, then headed off to the living room on the other side of the house where she'd have a bit more privacy. As she traipsed through the dining room she announced "I'm not carrying anything!" So I glanced over and saw that she had a whole bowl full halloween popcorn* from Poptions.

"Ah, no. Put that on the counter in the kitchen" says I. She at least handles getting caught gracefully: She blithely coos "OK" in a tone that said that was her plan the whole time and having done so continues on to the tv room as if she had any interest in doing anything in there other than eat an entire bowl of halloween popcorn.

*popcorn covered with caramel, dark chocolate, white chocolate, and mixed in with candy corn. It's even better than it sounds. So so good.

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Who you jivin with that cosmic debris (II)

A link to Orac from Griz prompted me to note that I'm always amused by the homophonous nature of diluted and deluded when the topic of homeopathy comes up*



*your regional accent may vary

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All I ever wanted was the simple things

If you own a computer, you should have a backup plan. I had one. The real test of course is restoring from the backup. Being both lazy and cheap I have been using SuperDuper!. Might I recommend doing a little research before settling on a solution. I had heard great things about SuperDuper! and decided to go with it. The interface is smooth as salmon pudding and it's dead simple to do a backup. Restoring, however is entirely up to you. All SD does is put a pretty face on opening a terminal and typing

sudo cp -Rf / /Volumes/backups

And I say cp rather than rsync because SD! doesn't do incrementals. It does a full overwrite of everything every time. Not a big deal if you're going over firewire or usb2, but if your mount is a network drive or usb1 you should fire it before going to bed.

This all came about as a result of installing a new HD in my mini. With no way to dup the old drive to the new drive (single drive controller in the mini, no 2.5" SATA enclosures on hand) I figured I would be able to just restore from the backup I did just before powering down. Which I was, just not through the SD! interface. Instead I did it command line and it was fine and I didn't lose a single configuration setting.

Conveniently enough, jwz recently wrote about backups and it's exactly what I was planning on doing as my new backup plan.

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TV Party tonight! Alright!

Excellent news, the first show from Word To Your Mutha is now ONLINE! Check it out!

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Anyone can play guitar

n a shock to the music industry, Radiohead have announced that fans will be able to decide how much to pay for their new album if they buy it as a download.

This is big for several reasons. First, Radiohead have been highly resistant to digital delivery. Second, they are doing this 100% on their own with no record label. Third, there had only been vague rumours of an album coming out this year for a week or so and they went from zero to "It's out next week" with no leaks and no speculation. Digital release two months before physical ship is certainly the way the industry is going, but for top name artists who have a fanatical following and remain a top touring attraction it's nice to see.

The box set interests me (one extra CD, two 12" vinyl disks, and an extra disk worth of content as download) but I no longer have a record player so half of it would be of no use to me :( I am going to assume that they'll eventually do what Barenaked Ladies did and release all the songs associated with the album as a digital collection.

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