Larry David
This was a delightful way to start the morning.
This was a delightful way to start the morning.
Will we ever get over the whole Muppets fixation?
Access sucks.
Anyway…
I managed to blow three fuses last night: one in my car, one in my cell phone car charger, and one in my brain. Luckily, I didn’t have to replace the third one.
So, my cell phone car charger, on a purely mechanical basis, exploded into the power adapter port in my console last night. By mechanically exploded, I mean came disassembled rapidly. The fuse fell out just as I began investigating the situation, and it is now somewhere in the purgatory of unsearchable depths beneath my seat.
So now I have a bunch of metal stuff down in the bottom of the power outlet, my cell phone charger is an empty husk with a cord coming out of it, and I’m missing the most important part of the charger.
I was concerned that the metal pieces might be hot. In a sort of meatheaded male way, it’s probably better to say I was aware there was a possibility that the metal pieces could be hot, so I kept that in mind and went for getting them out of the socket.
This is hard to do, as the typical pincher formation we use, as thumbalopods or whatever we upper primates are called, is a bit fat to slip down into a narrow socket like the DC adapter port.
I eased the three little parts out of there (not even warm) and got out of Dodge, which currently was still the parking lot at work.
Getting out on Refinery Road, I reached down to activate the radio, only to discover that the radio is completely deactivated and will not respond to any button presses.
I didn’t see “Microsoft” on the front of the radio, but I went ahead and shut my whole car off and started it up, with no effect on the radio.
Plugging in a DC adapter that did have a fuse proved that the DC socket was also not working, which made me immediately diagnose a fuse shared between the two devices.
Turns out that this was a correct diagnosis, and I bought the two fuses at the Shack last night (luckily, they still had them in stock). You could see the clerk’s visible excitement when I revealed one of the two issues involved a cell phone.
What this really means is that somehow, some way, those metal parts managed to stand up on each other and short across the contacts of the car adapter port, decreasing its resistance from infinity to near-zero, and ramping up the current to above 20 A, which blew the automotive fuse.
The fuse on the charger was likely fine, but my clumsiness made its recovery infeasible.
I’m planning on this never happening again.
It’s like… I have my credit card out, but I can’t even buy this yet.
Hello, Christmas 2008!
Things have finally calmed down. I mostly did last week to myself, but either way it was taking its toll.
I reformatted my personal laptop a few days ago and reloaded most of my files. My recent foray into video processing and editing resulted in a last-ditch carpetbomb of all possible free applications that could make a DVD out of Flash video. It was time to purge after all that.
I also started messing with TrueCrypt, which lived up to the hype I was already beginning to repeat without even trying it. It’s a clean, simple program (didn’t even have to install it), and I’ve got a 512 MB file-based partition I can mount to drive Z: by typing a password any time. This is great for financial data and minor password files.
I also managed to get Eclipse up and running on the new Windows install. This was not as easy as I would have anticipated, but not having to install my own extensions was a welcome feature.
Having to install a Python “toolchain” was not a welcome feature. But, whatever, I guess it promotes choice and flexibility.
So, Sigma runs inside Eclipse now. I realized very quickly that I need an actual player (administrator) command that will shut down the server “remotely,” as I can’t push a Ctrl+C combination through the little embedded console that Eclipse provides.
I have designed a certain method, somewhere between what I would like to term an algorithm and a process.
If a computer program performed this process, it would definitely be an algorithm. Since it’s semi-manual, it falls more under “process.”
When I show it to people here (many of whom have spent years working with SAP), I present it like I would a magic trick. There is a patter, timed pauses, flourishes of Excel style.
The flow of action is simple. There is, literally, nothing up my sleeve. Two formulas, a sort, and a row deletion are all that is required. When I’m done, my audience gets that look on their faces (just like a magic show audience), like, “Oh, now. You got me there. Back up a step and let me see that again.”
What does my little trick do? It converts an outline view to a table view.
This is what SAP does to a company. Business schools trumpet the benefits of ERP: standardization, automation, unified data architecture.
Fine, but don’t dictate that I can’t pull data out of the system in a natively machine-readable format!
How can you get away with designing a program that can’t produce reports, but works against all methods to produce reports outside of the system?
Anyway, getting stuff in tabular view means it can be pulled into a database and made to do the acrobatics that such formats allow. It’s saving a lot of time.
Just realized how precarious it is to use “no less” as a generic “as a matter of fact”-type idiom.
In Excel 2007, changing text from normal to bold no longer increases the size of the default font, Calibri (one of the Office 2007/Vista “C” fonts).
For us compulsive column-resizers, this is like sweet tea on a hot, Georgia afternoon.
My Office 2000⁄2003 workflow is typically:
Type + Return + AutoFit Column + Bold + AutoFit Column
First, “You’ve Got a Friend” is totally out of place on Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon (James Taylor). The themes of the album are self-isolation, comfort in defining “home,” and the tension between needing to change and missing times past. Then, here comes track #2 with “I’ll be there for you when you’re down.”
Secondly, it looks like both Gnome and KDE are moving to using WebKit as their web rendering engine. This means that the average Linux/BSD desktop will see pages as though they’re being viewed on a Mac. A refreshing move toward standardization, as well as a testament to how well a closed source company can benefit open source by upgrading an existing technology to mass-production quality (WebKit was originally KHTML, the KDE rendering library).
Remember when the default background color with web browsers was gray? You had to change it (BGCOLOR=#FFFFFF) to get white! And you didn’t use quotation marks around the color or lowercase for the tags and attributes! And you didn’t really have to close the BODY tag if you forgot!
Of course, you could still validate back then, but not as many people cared, because the good features were proprietary to whichever browser you chose to support fully.
Those were the days. They should bring back animated GIFs for “page under construction.”