Lunch Fortune

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It's not the end yet.
Let's stay with it.

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From the Department of Redundancy Department

Master Your Information Manifesto: 21 Tips to Deal with Info Overload

Can you say, "Waaaaaaaay too much information?" I knew you could.

Next!

10 things your IT guy wants you to know...

Starting a conversation by insulting yourself (i.e. “I’m such an idiot”) will not make me laugh, or feel sorry for you; all it will do is remind me that yes, you are an idiot and that I am going to hate having to talk to you. Trust me; you don’t want to start a call that way.

Bubble rich, karma poor

Are you using any of this software? Then go here ( this link ) and pony up for all the hard work that Steven Hudson has done to make your life a little easier.

TwitBox for Twitter

TwitBox is my Windows client for being able to view and post to the Twitter service.

Pulse for MP3’s

Pulse is just a simple littler program for cleaning up those screwy MP3 filenames you sometimes get when downloading MP3 for various spots on the Internet.

Scrappy

Scrappy is a simple drag and drop interface for creating and unzipping zip files

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(Disclaimer: I have known|collaborated with|laughed with|cried with Steven for many years. Unfortunately he writes for Windows so I cannot use his great programs.)

Confliction: Stuff

I am pacing. Unable to focus. Unable to sit still. I am pacing.

This is a sure sign of my conflictions.

I am conflicted about...

My owning and being owned by stuff.

The worst stuff in this respect may be stuff you don't use much
because it's too good. Nothing owns you like fragile stuff. For
example, the "good china" so many households have, and whose defining
quality is not so much that it's fun to use, but that one must be
especially careful not to break it.

To further complicate my confliction is the fact that I cannot seem to find a way to get rid of this stuff. I recently inherited the 'good family china'. Boxes and boxes of fragile and expensive plates, bowls and unidentified serving things. Oh, and did I mention the 'good family silver'?

Initially I thought I could make it 'live' so we unpacked it all. Gently washed and stacked it all. Counted pieces and even went so far as to photograph them. And we polished silver. The entire family polished until our fingers were blackened and the piles of flatware gleamed. We even set a table, once, to see just how it felt to use such finery. Then slowly the pieces went back into their respective boxes. As I type the flatware sits, nicely sorted, in its own plastic 'silverware' drawer insert on a table at my elbow covered unceremoniously with an old hand towel.

In an attempt to resolve this owner/owned situation I prompted one of my daughters to explore the possibility of posting select pieces on E-Bay. Her diligence paid off. She came to realize the value of the select pieces. And the cost of posting them. And the likelihood of actually selling them. And the real market value of the pieces. And, most importantly, that the likely 'buyers' of such pieces didn't really want them for their 'possession' value but for their potential resale value. It turns out that when it comes to 'stuff' people don't really want it, they want the value it represents - and the opportunity to sell it to someone else who unknowingly will be owned by their new stuff.

Folks let me tell you that some of this stuff is really very good, expensive stuff.

So, I don't know what to do. I have given some consideration to just giving the stuff away. Yet this resolution is not without issues. I believe that the recipient of such gifted stuff must value it. Must have some sense of what they are receiving and should be able to 'value' the gifted pieces as they are and not for their immediate resale value.

Another scenario is simply to destroy the pieces. In a sense releasing their value such that they can no longer own anyone. While altruistic I push back from this resolve. Something deep down inside is repelled by the thought of destroying valuable works of art and craftsmanship. I liken this feeling to the repulsion I feel about burning books. I cannot bring myself to consider destroying 'bad' books. (I won't go into 'bad' in this post but sufficed to say there are books that don't warrant reading the first time let alone a second.)

So ironically that which my father worked so hard at preserving for his heirs turns out to be the same burden that he paid so dearly for through the last half of his life. Looking back I can now see that he paid hundreds if not thousands of dollars to be owned by his inheritance. Prior to this newly found awareness I just assumed that he was 'old school' upholding values that he got from his parents. It never occurred to me that I might have been just as lost as I am now.

My real concern now is that I figure out a way to not burden my children with the legacy of my father's inheritance.

New Poet Laureate: Charles Simic

Charles Simic

Thanks to the WashingtonPost....

A Master's Verse

COUNTRY FAIR

If you didn't see the six-legged dog,
It doesn't matter.
We did, and he mostly lay in the corner.
As for the extra legs,

One got used to them quickly
And thought of other things.
Like, what a cold, dark night
To be out at the fair.

Then the keeper threw a stick
And the dog went after it
On four legs, the other two flapping behind,
Which made one girl shriek with laughter.

She was drunk and so was the man
Who kept kissing her neck.
The dog got the stick and looked back at us.
And that was the whole show.

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Add-on:

The six-legged dog played well here in Kentucky and the girl that shrieked with laugher was his cousin.

Ain't gonna study war no more...ok, maybe just a little

I naively believed in peace. I believed that when candidates began talking about the mistakes that got us into and keep us in the Iraq conflict ... that they would not make those mistakes. The next round of candidates would not 'study war' but rather would celebrate peace... Golly-gee-whizzikers, I am naive.

BarackObama.com | The War We Need to Win

The time has come to turn the page on a failed approach.

We must stop fighting the wrong war and start fighting the war we need to win.

The next President of the United States must commit to getting our troops out of Iraq and taking the fight to the terrorists. We must reinforce our mission in Afghanistan with additional troops. We must press Pakistan and President Musharraf to close down terrorist training camps and stop the Taliban from using Pakistan as a safe-haven. If Musharraf acts, we will stand with him. But if Pakistan will not act against Osama bin Ladin and the terrorists who killed 3,000 Americans, we will. These are achievable goals, and when I am president we will wage the war we need to win with a comprehensive strategy

Oh well, guess we'll study war some more...

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87% of the people equals roughly an 'overwhelming majority'...

Of seemingly STUPID people?

Pew Research Center: Public Blames Media for Too Much Celebrity Coverage

An overwhelming majority of the public (87%) says celebrity scandals
receive too much news coverage. This criticism generally holds across
most major demographic and political groups. Virtually no one thinks
there is too little coverage of celebrity scandals, according to new
national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People & the
Press.

Emphasis mine! Let 87% of the public STOP BUYING TRASH and we will see how the media covers celebrity anything.

NEWS FLASH: Overwhelming majority of public are featherless bi-peds. Film at 11:00....

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Microsoft takes careful aim...at its own foot.

Mary Jo reports ...

» Ad-funded Microsoft Works pilot starting soon | All about Microsoft | ZDNet.com

The Works 9.0 SE (which isn’t an acronym for anything, according to
Senior Product Manager Melissa Stern) version will be a desktop-client
product. Ads — from vendors which Microsoft declined to disclose — will
appear in the Works task pane and task launcher. The ads will be served
up by Microsoft’s display-ad platform, Stern said.

So, my question is... didn't Microsoft learn the Opera lesson? People just won't sit still for embedded ads ... or they will find an alternative. Like FireFox, perhaps?

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Sure do miss him...

Was visiting a Cozy Shack and saw this...just pulls at the heart strings...

Feeping Creatures

Uh, Ken... Could you be just a wee bit more specific?

Digital Common Sense » ScribeFire - Dying from Feeping Creaturism

Except for 'working correctly with Blogger' I am not sure I see the feeping creatures to which you refer.

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WSJ ...you should be ashamed

Security Musings: Getting around IT?

The Wall Street Journal had an article today Ten Things your IT Department Won’t Tell You

Publishing this kind of article is just plain wrong. While 'security through ignorance' has been shown impractical there is no excuse for 'educating' users in methods of circumventing security best practices.


Technorati Tags: WSJ, Security,

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Repeat after me...

gapingvoid: "cartoons drawn on the back of business cards": s.f. update

[REPEAT AFTER ME: "Hugh got to hang out with Evelyn Rodriguez and I didn't. I am insanely jealous etc etc etc."]

Ok, you got me...

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He's got it bad...can you help?

Platicus asks...

Now, I need your help.
Does anyone have copies of the other 3(Bart, Lisa, Homer) that they do
not plan to keep ? If so, I beg of you to send them to me. I would
gladly reimburse for the price of the mag and mailing costs

Sandwich Flats

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Me^2 Tagged

Looking up...from my z-list position on the blog food chain ... I realized that I am one of the last bloggers to get tagged with this meme. (See below) This means two things as far as my participation goes... 1.) I am ecstatic to have actually been tagged. And 2.) all of the people who I have a clue about in the blogosphere were tagged with this meme weeks ago. So there is no one that I can tag...

This meme has hit the bottom of the blogosphere.

The meme stops here.

In nomine Patris virtualis, et Filii virtualis, et Spiritus Sancti virtualis.

Gospel 2.0: Jesuits move into Second Life

Meme Tagged

My good friend Steven Hudson at Winextra 'tagged' me with this meme...

Initially I was a bit uneasy - then I started looking in the dark corners of my sordid life ... turns out I remembered stuff that even I didn't know. :) Well, most of it is true...

Eight things you might not know about me...

1. As a mini-kid I spent a summer on Kodiak Island, AK with family friends while my parents worked a halibut trawler, The Yukon. (Which was prominently 'featured' in a picture of the great earthquake - in the middle of the street, downtown Anchorage (I think.))
   
   
2. Learned FORTRAN 4 (1970-71) - Wrote a Tic-Tac-Toe program that could not be beaten - best you could hope for was a tie. A special subroutine was called so that 'turns' could be entered in the washing machine sized 'keyboard' interface of the IBM 360 (instead of having to re-run the punch card deck with the new turn.)
   
   
3. Junior Achievement "President of the Year" 1970-71 (Lansing Michigan) - Heady times when rules were made to be bent... Leading was just the willingness to take one more step than the folks standing next to you. (Object lesson: There are no friends in business and there should be no business among friends.)
   
   
4. Summered in Guadalajara Mexico
   
   1972: Worked with Don Pablo Muños, "El Quetero" (The Rocketman") - Speaking Spanish faster than any person I have ever heard Don Pablo showed me the ins and outs of making firework displays, Castillos.
   
   1973: Set up a darkroom in the hotel bathroom. At night processed B&W film and printed pictures. During the day of took photographs of 'Street People' - gritty, grainy, high contrast images of real people making their way in daily life.
   
   
5. Attended the Saturday, January 20, 1973 Counter-Inaugural March in Washington D.C. - No More War! - Caused traffic tie-ups by claiming the van I was driving was stalled at intersections.
   
   
6. Summer of 1975 - Ran away to the Circus Kirk - Three Rings Under The Big Top - World's Largest Brass Band - weeks on end of 18+ hour days, wet tired hungry and very sleepy - and then ran away from the circus
   
   
7. Evening Announcer for WKLA AM & FM in Ludington MI. 'The Captain' offered a late night array of low rumbling 'Barry White' intros to some of the coolest and hottest Jazz ever heard in north west Michigan.
   
   
8. Last and certainly not least, there is a roman numeral after my son's name ... VIII ... which of course means the roman numeral after my name is VII, my father was VI, his father was V, etc.

...from this point on this is a self-appointing meme. If you like the premise please feel free to self-tag and post your 8 things list.

System Administrator Appreciation Day

July 27th, 2007 (Last Friday Of July)
8th Annual
System Administrator Appreciation Day

If you can read this, thank your sysadmin

Advice to employees on the proper use of the System Administrator's valuable time

(In following examples, we will substitute the name "Ted" as the System Administrator)

Here are a few that I 'never' get... :)

• Never write down error messages. Just click OK, or restart your computer. Ted likes to guess what the error message was.
• When Ted says he coming right over, log out and go for coffee. It's no problem for him to remember your password.
• Send urgent email ALL IN UPPERCASE. The mail server picks it up and flags it as a rush delivery.
• When the photocopier doesn't work, call Ted. There's electronics in it, so it should be right up his alley.
• Feel perfectly free to say things like "I don't know nothing about that boneheaded computer crap." It never bothers Ted to hear his area of professional expertise referred to as boneheaded crap.
• When you send that 500-page document to the printer, don't bother to check if the printer has enough paper. That's Ted's job.
• When Ted calls you 30 minutes later and tells you that the printer printed 24 pages of your 500-page document before it ran out of paper, and there are now nine other jobs in the queue behind yours, ask him why he didn't bother to add more paper.

78's, 45's, LP's, 8-Tracks, Cassettes...

T. Colin Dodd in his article ODF: The inevitable format makes two very important observations...

The original data had been misplaced, and when the huge magnetic tapes
that stored the data were found, they were “in a format so old that the
programmers who knew it had died.”

and...

The tragic sense that would have accompanied the loss of this knowledge is echoed in accounts of the destruction of the Library at Alexandria, and probably why book-burnings are seen as a sure sign that a society is unhealthy

While the title of this post is a bit absurd it points to everyday examples of the same problem. Here are a few more that I have encountered ...

• photographic 'slides' - processed film positives (as opposed to negatives) mounted between two pieces of thin glass, bound with black cloth tape. I don't know of anyone who still has a slide projector let alone one that is robust enough to handle these.
  
  
• Reel-to-reel recordings. The old Wollensak hasn't been seen in ages.
  
  
• Super-8 films - both the editor and the projector are in the same place as the Wollensak
  
  
• Opened a box and discovered ... Punch Cards
  
  
• 3.5" Floppies (1.44M - There are still a large number of these drives around. But...)
  
  
• 5.25" Floppies
  
  
• RLL/MFM Hard disks

Technorati Tags: data formats, anchient memories

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Kudzu excuse me for a moment?

Usually I slip, stumble and twist in your calculated cultivated vines.

Today I have been slapped straight and slid onto a sizzling griddle to be served up pink in the middle rare

Life is soooooo good