27 8x10 Color glossy pictures

"I Don't Want a Pickle"

Saturday Cindy, Elyse, and I went to see Arlo Guthrie. We stayed for the first 2 shows. It was a great! He was just as funny as he was when I saw him in the 80s at a small club in CT. He looks very different now; I would never have recognized him. In the first show he sang "The Motorcycle Song" and in the second he sang the entire "Alice's Restaurant". He had his entire family with him in the show, and made a joke about how he is his own reunion tour. After the second show he came out for autographs (darn that I forgot to bring my Alice's Restaurant LP). My friend Stacy was the show director that day and she allowed us to take this photograph. If he comes back next year, and I was told that it is possible , I will definitely bring this photo and my LP for him to sign.





House of Lords is winding down this leg of their European tour. Man just looking at their schedule makes me tired. A USA tour is in the works. We're hoping there will be an Orlando or Tampa or Jacksonville or perhaps even an Atlanta (we have family there) show date we can attend. In the meantime I've been listening to Robin's new CD and there's a wonderful duet between her and James on it.


Club Yahoos

Looks like the yahoos are at it again. I'm away for two weeks and suddenly people are saying the club is filled with stalkers. Of course members of this concerned group are stalkers themselves, so this is not be the first time they've spread stalker accusations. From what I understand, the complaint is that certain people showed up at an event honoring departing cast members. I wasn't there so I don't know if the real problem was whether this group or some of the cast were annoyed that people they didn't want were in attendance, or whether people crashed that actually weren't invited or welcome. I have seen guests (mostly women) so obsessed there have been past problems in this area, but this group complaining has a history of distorting events or retelling gossip. I'd have to hear what happened from a reliable source.

The cast being employed professionals should not share private information with guests in the first place, especially those who can't keep secrets or appoint themselves acting guardians. If this occurred at one of the locations I think it did, it was either at a public place or an accessible club room so some non-cast could attend. In both these cases it wouldn't be the first time nice cast members OK'd friends to be there and some people got bent out of shape over it. It's even possible the attendees helped prepare the event and the complainers are just ignorant or annoyed. Any nonsense could easily be avoided by holding the event privately (off-hours, backstage, a person's home), so I have to wonder why this was not the case.



MythTV

I ordered extra memory so both computers will have at least a gig in them. I still need to order the HD tuners, antenna, and large SATA drive before I can begin with the software configuation. I have one system running Fedora and the other running Ubuntu. Both are having problem with the 3GL crashing parts of Gnome, but I'm just playing. I wish that the Fedora package installer/RPM was faster, and that the system bootup console was better hidden behind a graphic. I wish Ubuntu layout looked more like Fedora's. I wish they both handled window manger configuration changes without breaking.



"I Just Want to Ride On My MotorCyc-le"

What's with this motorcycle safety commercial that's playing 1000 times a day? It's the one where a person does the right thing by looking both way before pulling slowly out into the intersections, but a motorcycle rams into him anyway. The commercial is trying to tell you that looking both ways is no longer enough. You need to look twice.

If you watch the video carefully you'll notice a few things. (1) The driver looks left, then right. Since traffic comes from the left, everyone would naturally look to the right first then keep an eye on the left for their own safety. You could spend all day looking back and forth before moving. What about the other direction that only got one look, shouldn't you look back there again? The driver didn't need to look twice, he needed to look in the correct directions once. (2) The motorcycle is in one lane when he hits the car in the first clip, then he is in another lane or a more distant street in the next clip. (3) The motorcycle is traveling much too fast to react; the car was moving slowly and was barely out into the street. Suppose that was a child that ran into the street instead? I think the bike would have hit them.

Having been the driver of one of the smallest cars you can own, smaller than a motorcycle in fact, I can tell you first hand that people do all sorts of stupid things to you and blame the fact that they didn't see you; especially since they are all driving tank size vehicles and chatting on cell phones. Sounding my horn stopped many an accident. I don't want them looking back and forth twice, I want them focused on their driving and looking once correctly in the first place.

Syndicated 2008-05-08 06:28:45 (Updated 2008-05-09 06:15:37) from Keith

Linux wars, duck season, Toy Story, and smores

DUCK!

Just after lunch I sometimes walk around the lake outside my building. Early last week I passed by a duck family with baby ducklings.





The next day, I was eating lunch in the cafeteria, sitting next to the window. A large bird the size of a duck suddenly flew toward the window. A loud BONK occurred as it hit, causing everyone in the cafeteria to turn and watch. The bird turned in mid drop and flew away toward the lake. Most people have seen or heard of small birds hitting windows, but this was a large creature. My grandmother lived in a house with a large glass window and she use to tell me stories of how an occasional bird would fly into it and she'd pick it up, revive it by running cold water on its head, and let it go free.


Narnia with Smores

One of the problems of living in the Disney/Orlando area is that there is something worth attending almost every day, and some days there are 2 or 3 things going on at once, so conflicts occur a lot. Some Voices of Liberty friends were singing in a private show in Solivita. Cindy and wanted to see that show, especially since we were at Solivita on their opening day and almost moved there before settling on Celebration, but we had other plans. A group of friends had invited us to dinner at Fort Wilderness, followed by an evening of campfire smores and the outdoor showing of the Narnia movie. I always love going to FW because the trees remind me of North Carolina. We had a good time, except for the occasional child armed with a flashlight and cigarette smoker. Ashlee had never seen the movie before, which is a sad because this was not a good venue to watch a major movie premiere with all the distractions. Next time we are going to try the new setup at the Beach club, which looks a bit nicer.


Tux Wars

My new flatscreen monitor arrived so I spent several days this week putting together the computer systems that will replace our existing computer, and serve as a MythTV setup. Earlier this month I picked up 2 inexpensive, used P4 systems from property control and combined them to form a 1.75ghz P4 with 1gig memory and 80gig HD. My plan was to install a Linux desktop on them, but which release? My extensive experience with Red Hat made Fedora an obvious choice, but Ubuntu kept getting raves about being the better desktop system and the best for MythTV.

I installed and played around with both. Fedora was the most familiar to me and my preferred choice for server and development environments, but I was looking at this as a desktop system for my wife to also use. Both systems default to Gnome as the desktop GUI. Ubuntu was a much nicer and more stable installation, but being based on Debian it was unfamiliar to me. I can hack the heck out of a Red Hat system, while finding and installing outside packages for Debian was a bit more of a challenge because .deb packages are less common than .rpm packages. There is a utility to turn rpms into debs but it doesn't always work when there are complicated scripts in the package. The Gnome menu layout is different between them also, and I preferred the Ubuntu here. Fedora defaulted to using LVM for the disk, which I ended up not liking for this setup. The Fedora install blew away my previous grub setup even though I tried to avoid that, but to be fair that may have happened if Ubuntu was installed second instead.

Both seem to work well, so I haven't reached a decision. My impulse is to say the Fedora is a better server and Ubuntu the better desktop, BUT my home server will also be my MythTV backend and Ubuntu MythTV was the direction I was heading in so for me these lines are blurred. Ubuntu seems to be fairing better so far.

Looks like more playing is needed, especially since I learned iTunes works under WINE. I also have to buy my HD tuner cards.


Toy Story

I went to the Cast Premiere of the new Toy Story attraction at Disney Hollywood Studios. I couldnot take photos and I can't give anything away, but obviously it is themed after Pixar's Toy Story movie. Always fun looking at childhood toys, and Mr. Potatoe Head was an amazing character to watch. I was surprised with all the board game references that I did not see any for Monopoly, especially considering Disney has several Monopoly games of their own in production.


Other Distractions

Disney is a company very much into recycling, but I had to laugh when I came across this rcycling bin at work with the following notice:



You may be asking yourself what's left? Well it's in the IT area so it's for white printer paper.

I might be going to Phoenix for a week for my J2EE training.

With all the upcoming events - Speed Racer, Ironman, Orlando Cabaret, Narnia 2, Indiana Jones, Epcot concerts, travel, ASl classes, computer projects, Sci-Fi shows - where am I going to find the time?

Syndicated 2008-05-03 16:14:28 (Updated 2008-05-04 05:48:33) from Keith

BSG musings; with fraking UPDATES

Friends were surprised when I said as far back as book 5 that I thought that Harry Pottor would turn out to be a horcrux. Now I've been trying to figure out where Battlestar Galactica is heading with it's final story line.

The fleet population is down to 30,000. Will they simply get wiped out? Will they make it to earth and find it populated by cylons, or destroyed by them shortly thereafter? Will the internal conflicts in the cylon race or their half-breed children cause them to end up merged with or replacing the humans? The most interesting plots would be to take earth out of the picture, or have both races virtually destroy each other leaving earth alone.

The problem is that the authors are intentionally supplying every strong fact with something weaker to make you doubt it. Here it is the last season of the series and you really haven't moved that far from season 1 in hard core information except that the cylons do look human. The crux of the series has been the emotional and character impact of an ugly situation.

Baltar is spreading a belief in one God and getting persecuted for it. Wouldn't it disappointing that when Earth is discovered, it's around 0 BC our time and Baltar is the only person to survive and land? Given his current physical appearance and the direction his personality is taking the writers could be trying to turn him into Jesus. He has advanced healing skills, and if he turned out to be the 12th Cylon they could make him come back to life after being killed. And if not Baltar, then perhaps one of the Cylon-human babies is used to carry this idea. It would support that "last supper" promotional poster of the show's stars they keep showing. I wonder is it's significant there are 12 models of cylons? These are almost as bad as the Galactica 1980 episodes, but it sure seems like the plot lines are heading in this direction. I think fans are hoping for a more humans-overcome-cylons ending.

As to which human is the last unknown Cylon model, the candidates are obvious. The president, Comander Adama, Starbuck, and Baltar. The president, with her "shove them out the airlock" attitude has the personality most resembling Cylons, but then she (claims) she's dying. Baltar has this mental communication thing with Six (not to be confused with another slim blonde sci-fi cyborg babe named Seven). We are lead to believe this is imaginary, but it could be that he's a cylon and it's real communication. Of course the Cylons told him that he's not one of them, but that means little. Adama would be the most interesting plot twist and his ancestors created the AI that resulted in the Cylon intelligence. Starbuck was missing for months, seen destroyed by a Cylon ship, comes back with a poor memory and a brand new Viper and a "feeling" about where earth is".

Of course this would be a much shorter series if they could come up with what should be an easy way to examine a person and tell if he's human or cylon. You would think a race advanced enough to cut the corners off their writing paper could build a strength test to distinguish cylon from human.

My vote is for the president, with Starbuck as a runner up. Discovering the president was a Cylon would create a story line about Adama dealing with the dilema.

My recorder lets me watch shows at double speed with pitch adjusted audio. I have discovered that if I record BSG and watch it that way, all the slow music, long lulls, and paused filled conversations come across much more normal. The episodes are quite stretched to fill 60 minutes.


FRAKING UPDATE

24 hours after I wrote my BSG thoughts, Digg published a story about how bloggers are musing over BSG plot clues. This coincidence has happened to me before. Someone even mentioned my Baltar plot idea. But there was one proposal I can't believe I didn't think of...

Starbuck's return from Earth in a brand new ship is likely a retelling of the "ship of lights" story from the original series. In that story a superior race in both ability and technology used some Colonial warriors to help in the fight between good and evil. People that departed from the lightship ended up with white uniforms and vipers. This would mean she really did go to Earth and take photos, and her mind was manipulated to both help and hide facts.

I think this is what is happening here. Whether Starbuck may also be a cylon doesn't really prevent this possibility. The "ship of lights" could even be manned by humans from Earth, or rogue cylons. There are several possible outcomes, but they all point to Starbuck really returning from Earth.

Another person proposed that EVEYONE is a cylon. If I run with that idea, then perhaps cylons don't even realize this and are just recreating a past event (the original series). It would also mean the cylon raid on caprica was cylons killing cylons. This is a fun idea, but it's doubtful because there would have to have been millions or billions of different cylon human models and it's been made plain there are only 12.

I think everyone is expecting that Earth will NOT be today's existing society and recreate the Galactica 1980 series. Most think it will be a future version, where Earth is actiually the source of the 12 colonies rather than a missing 13th (this is what I think), or something more dark like being destroed.
.

Syndicated 2008-04-26 05:48:31 (Updated 2008-04-29 09:50:05) from Keith

Laptops and Cars [UPDATED]

[photos have been added]

Offline

My laptop hard drive failed last Sunday, which is why I haven't been on-line or posted anything in over a week. It's a company laptop and I had nothing personal or of great value on the drive, but my own laptop died about 2 years ago and I had no need to replace it while this one was available to me. I went through the process of getting the drive replaced and got it back on Tuesday, then had to take time to reinstall all the missing applications. It's actually impressive this was accomplished in 4 days and it's back to normal.

It was an eventful week. Dr. Who is back on Sci-Fi channel, as is BSG, as is the new Sarah Jane Adventures. I finally cashed in my BD massage gift and had months of stress removed from my shoulders. A new Fletcher Hodges started Thursday at the club; I'm taking bets on who will be the first yahoo to post a report about him. My garage door motor was replaced. I lost more weight. Friend Robert was in town for some fun and late night breakfast. Friday was a LONG day at work, plus I learned my lack of taking vacations though the years has resulted in my reaching the maximum accumulation of unused vacation days. I have 20 days of paid leave available. I'm going to take some days off and have fun before I lose earning vacation time.


MythTV

I've been without a Tivo like DVR for quite a while, so I've started planning my MythTV project. A few months ago I tried to be lazy and buy a completed system, but the one place that was making a decent configured product no longer exists, so now I'm going to build it myself. It will have separate server and front-end systems, 2 HD tuners, between 700gig and 1 terabyte of disk space, WiFi, store my DVD and CD collection ripped, and be based on Ubuntu or Fedora Linux. It will also likely use the upcoming Hauppauge HD product


Celebration

This weekend was the annual Celebration Exotic Car Show AND annual Pie Festival AND Disney property control liquidation sale. First we met Elyse at the high school gym for the Disney sale. We bought a few items but there wasn't really anything there of interest to me. Then we walked to meet up with Robert where all the show cars were parked. The streets were packed with people. This is the same car event I use to enter (and win awards) with my Caterham 7 until I sold it last year. There was the same large collection of Farrari's, DeLoreans, Lamborghini's, etc.






I was surprised to see there was also a new entry - a green Lotus 7 like my old car.







The AMC theater had a section roped off where the Star Wars characters, land speeder, and "Back to the Future" DeLorean were set up. The land speeder was on cinder blocks, so I guess it really was not worth much when luke sold it.



This was also where you could buy a VIP pass to join Christopher Lloyd that evening for a Q&A session. Having seen these cars and characters many times before at theme parks I didn't pay the extra $10 to enter. Later on Darth Vader, C3PO, R2D2 and storm troopers came and mingled with the street crowds for photos.






We didn't go to the pie festival. Robert had to leave and none of us were really interested in paying for a buffet of pies. Instead we drove over to TGIF for lunch.

Syndicated 2008-04-20 06:23:36 (Updated 2008-04-21 03:15:02) from Keith

Party Party Taxes Taxes

I FINALLY located the English MP3 of that addictive "party party join us" song from the closing credits of the "Crayon Shin-Chan" Japanese anime. There were plenty of YouTube videos, but I wanted an MP3. That short song was almost as hard to find as an MP3 of the "Kim Possible" ring tone. It's playing on my myspace page if you want to hear it. The lyrics are cute too:

Pari Jona Daisakusen ("Party Join Us Daisakusen")
By Maron Koushaku


Woke up late this morning
A storm was really rollin’
Frogs and dogs were raining from the sky
Everything seems awkward to me
Nothing's just as it should be
If this keeps on I’m sure I won’t get by

But then I close my eyes and try to smile
I know things are bad and getting worse
But after all this I can rest awhile
And then I’ll party party

Party Party Join us Join us
Party Party Join us Join us
Party Party Join us Join us
Shake your day away and you can
Party Party Join us Join us
Party Party Join us Join us
Party Party Join us Join us
Shake your blues away

(switches to Reggae' music)
Yo Reggae vacation Mon
This party’s shakin'
and it ain’t just shakin' me here
I see that smile
You’re grinnin' ear to ear
Sing this song
And you should really sing it clear
Just sing along with us

Party Party Join us Join us
Party Party Join us Join us
Party Party Join us Join us
Shake your day away and you can
PARTY PARTY. PARTY PARTY. PARTY PARTY.

I had an unexpected surprise last week. I've been holding onto a few special domain names for several years at about $10/year each, expecting to eventually find a buyer for them. I just sold one for over $2k. It was less than I wanted and I'm sure the buyer is going to make it up within a month or two, but still it was a nice return on my investment.

At work I finally had time to complete a simple java POJO that's been hanging over my head for months. For those geeky enough to understand; my new work environment is an XP station with dual monitors, running RAD7 eclipse, using MQ to exchange XML messages with java apps running under AIX WebSphere. I'm trying to include Maven and RichFaces in future projects.

Last weekend Cindy and I spent most of our time pulling our 2007 records from the files. This took much longer than expected because we couldn't locate November and December. I knew they'd all be together somewhere, and I remembered why - I had used them to prepare our 2008 budget back in January. Cindy finally located them on Monday.

Now that all our records are together and any necessary photocopies created, I'm spending this weekend doing the taxes and plugging the data into spreadsheets and TurboTax. I totally forgot this was also the weekend for the deaf expo I wanted to attend. Oh Well; I'll have to miss it. It's pouring rain outside anyway. "Party Party Join Us Join Us".

Syndicated 2008-04-06 20:07:48 (Updated 2008-04-06 20:16:54) from Keith