New toy!

My new dSLR is on the FedEx truck "out for delivery" as I type! Wahoo! Gonna get me some serious photo action.

I am such a nerd.

Figgy Pudding

WTF is figgy pudding, I why am I trying to extort some from my neighbors? And what would I do with if even if they did bring me some? This song just creeps me out.

Don't even get me started on 'He abhors not the virgin's womb'. I really hope that's just a really bad translation.

Something Works

Figured out why my .php photo galleries weren't working properly on my local computers - turns out the newer versions of PHP have an environmental switch defaulted to OFF for security reasons. This switch was defaulted to ON in earlier versions. Either my hosting service uses an old version or they thew the switch for me. Once I understood the problem, five minutes of research showed me how to modify my page to work without the switch. Cool.

Still Nothing Works!

$&^@*
@&#(*!!I)@
@#*(0

and

&@$#*($&#@*(@#

Smarter Than a Monkey!

Your Final Quiz Score: 45 right out of a possible 60
The Monkey's Final Score: 15 right out of 60

You asserted your intellectual superiority brilliantly! The monkey is now left contemplating his own inferiority. Where others have failed to claim the mantel of unequivocal dominance over lesser species, you have truly succeeded! Congratulations on besting the ape and reaffirming the capabilities of the human mind. You have done mankind proud.

You scored in the 95th percentile.
(95% of quiz takers scored worse than you)

Geography Your score: 12 Monkey's score: 5 -- Quite a sufficient job.	History Your score: 12 Monkey's score: 3 -- Nicely done.
Science/Technology Your score: 11 Monkey's score: 4 -- Well done.	Random Trivia Your score: 10 Monkey's score: 3 -- A handy defeat of the monkey.

Link: Monkey Challenge Quiz


Alternatively,


I beat the monkey by 30 points.
Monkey Trivia Quiz

Update

Well, some things work.

Just not most of them.

Argh.

Nothing Works Today!

God damn it!

Damn! Damn!

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jvo9peaj bvea]fdabk
[ab k
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[abbadf

I feel better now.

What's that big glowing thing in the sky?

After 9 strait days of rain, the sun came out today. Yipee!

Today's activity: finally install Windows XP on Rogue. Yes, I firmly believe in keeping up with the times!

Listening to: "Turning Japanese" by some 80s band.

Drinking: Electric lemonade.

Party at Lester's

I am so fucked up.

Drank a beer, two Mike's Hard Lemonades, and two margaritas, the first of which was way too strong. Apparently I was amusing, particularly to my co-workers. Had to let Brett drive Binky der Uberbug home. She did fine.

Remaining goals for tonight: smoke a good cigar and have wild monkey sex with my wife. Good luck to me.

Street Legal

After 3 trips to the DMV I finally got all the paperwork in front of a clerk who would process it. So now Binky der Uberbug is now legally mine. Wahoo!

Something Whimsical

Saw this on the news - socks which are sold in packs of three, none of which match. The company name is Little Miss Matched. Gotta get me some.

Fubar

As I read Jonathan Phillips' new book about it, it occurs to me that the Fourth Crusade was probably the greatest instance of Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition in the history of Western Civilization.

Not Interchangeable

No posts for the past 6 weeks or so because I've been busy with three very different projects: amusement parks, PHP, and sex. These are not to be confused with each other; the results would be unpredictable at best, and might result in the removal from the park with no refund.

1. Amusement parks. It is spring (finally!), which means roller coasters. Went to Great Adventure for the first time in a few years & got meself a season pass. I will say that 6 Flags has been working on its image. The park was the cleanest I've ever seen, with most of the grafitti gone and new paint jobs for Scream Machine, Batman, and the Chiller. Kingda Ka was standing with 456 feet of goodness, but not yet operating. Hence the need for a season pass - so I can get in for free when it revs up. Currently planning to go back in June.

Scheduled for May: a weekend at Walt Disney World - breakfast with Cinderella at the Magic Kingdom, Lucky the Dinosaur at Animal Kingdom, and Cirque du Soleil in between. I anticipate a very fun and intense 48 hours. Later in the month we go back to Dorney Park, which we somehow missed last year. Currently planning to spend the day with Bob & his family.

2. PHP. Stands for PHP Hypertext Preprocessor. I've been rebuilding CoasterGeek.com as a set of PHP pages which dynamically querry a MySQL database for stats and opinions of any coaster I choose to discuss. It was a lot of work to enter everything into the database, but now that it's done it makes it much easier to add new roller coasters (don't have to manually add them to all the menus, etc). It will also make it possible to create custom lists (all over 200 feet, all ridden in 2003, etc.) but I still need to add that.

3. Sex. I'm not sure exactly what happened, but something in our sessions with Claudia led Brett to decide that it's okay to have sex just for the fun of it. Instead of me having to spend a week or two courting her and being very careful to get her in the mood without doing or saying anything that might cause offence, we've been doing it about twice a week. And the passion level has been way, way up. For both of us. In addition to the obvious benefits, I'm finding that it leaves me much less bothered by the stuff she does or doesn't do the rest of the time. Not a 100% reduction, but 50-70% is a big improvement. I have no idea if this will last, but since everyone is benefitting I sure hope it will.

Yup, it's still Winter

March 12 and we got another couple inches of Snow. Taylor's having a "Pirate Birthday" today, but it sure don't look like the Caribbean out there.

Will this madness ever end?!?!?!?!?!?

I Hate Winter

I hate it with a passion. The Passion of the Captain. Here were are, a whole week into March, and I gotta drive home in snow and ice and I-495 stops for twenty minutes while we wait for the snowplows and I really, really hate it!

I am so ready for Spring.

New Metaphor

Just came up with & I want to remember it for possible future use:

When the troll is knocking down your door, you don't care about the
color of his sneakers.

42 Million Bucks

That's what HP is paying Carly Fiorina as a severence package. For that kind of money, they can fire my ass too.

Bump in the Night

Woke up at 4:00 this morning to a ticking sound. "What the hell is that?" I asked myself. Since I didn't answer, I got up to investigate. Turned out the (brand new) furnace had sprung a leak. Water dripped onto the electronic control, causing it to short circuit & go into overdrive. The ticking sound was steam percolating through the radiators. This was not a good thing. Neither was the small lake forming in the middle of my house.

Cut the power, called the service company, listened to the horible rumbling as the pressure relief valve let go, blah blah blah, yadda yadda yadda.

All better now. Thank god for lifetime warranties.

Dry Spell

Haven't had sex since December 12, which was 43 days ago. Wonder how long this will go on for.

Auto maintanence

My elders always said I should keep a log of any service done on my car, so I guess I'll try.

Two new tires on the F150 (fron wheels). Price: $185. Miles: 195,000. Drives a lot better now.

Other recent items:
Water pump on the Taurus. Price: Couple hundred. Miles: 90,000.
Wheel bearing and related items on the F150. front right wheel. Price: $700 (ouch!). Miles: 194,000 or thereabouts.

Some good things

1) My sister paid me the money she borrowed four years ago. I asked for it & she said no problem and mailed me a check. Good for her.

2) Steelers are in the playoffs, after a 15-1 season. Today they play the Jets, whom they beat earlier in the season. Good for them.

3) The Short One and I have joined a fencing club. We exercise, we have fun, we get to hit people with swords. Good for us.

Out of the Frying Pan...

They finally got the down cluster running yesterday. Once that was all okay, we
stopped all the jobs running on the other cluster for some minor
upgrades to the queueing system. At 1:30 everything was looking good &
the sysadmin said he just needed to change a few scripts and reboot and
then we could start using it again.

Ha.

It is now 5:00 and it is showing no signs of coming back to life.
You can't win.

To make my breakfast complete, a herd of clients are zooming over for meetings tomorrow. So I can pretty much kiss my productivity goodbye for the day.

Dead Dead Dead

The bigger of our two linux clusters went down last week. The problem appears to be a bad CPU on the control workstation. Turns out that for IBM both the Friday before Jan 1 and the Monday after were both holidays, so the earliest they could get a technician out here was today, five days after it went down. Meanwhile, no jobs running. Very expensive for us.

We, of course, did not get either Friday or Monday off.

Maybe I should go work for IBM.

The good news is that my new workstation stepped up to the plate. Running both CPUs, I can get nearly the same performance as I was getting with 4 CPUs on the cluster. I won't even mention how much faster it is than the old unix box...