I've heard it several times now, it's making the circuit on talk radio - they are saying that today we live not in a gilded age, but a gelded age. BWAHAHAHA!!!

Er, wait, it would be funny if it weren't so true :(
*sob*

So, Bill Whittle has a new post. http://ejectejecteject.com/

I like his opening paragraph - made me laugh :D

Occam's Razor is the idea that when confronted with competing theories that explain certain data equally well, the simplest one is usually correct. It's called Occam's Razor, and not Occam's Hypothesis, or Occam's Theorem, or Occam's Bit of Useful Advice, because it is a razor - it cuts cleanly and with great efficiency.

Occam's Bit of Useful Advice... that's very funny!

So, ever since my company relocated from midtown to Roswell, I've been getting in real early, typically by 7am, because traffic is so bad that if I try to leave any time between 7 and 8, it will take a minimum of an hour and a half, maybe two hours, and that assumes there are no collisions, wrecks or stalls, and that Norfolk-Southern, in its infinite wisdom, isn't running a 500 car train across Pleasant Hill at Buford Hwy during peak rush hour. If you have any problems, you may as well turn around and go home, because by the time you get to the office, it'd be quitting time anyways. It's a total disaster. If I leave by 6am, however, I can get in in 40-45 minutes. That's 1/2 to 1/3 the commute time by leaving an hour earlier. It's just nuts.

There was a lot of talk a few years ago about building "The Northern Arc", which would have been a high-speed highway going east-west some miles north of the perimeter, more or less right where my commute takes me these days. At the time I didn't have a dog in the fight so I didn't pay attention, but a lot of people opposed it because friends of the politicians who were pushing the deal stood to make a lot of money from the sale of land along the route. Let me tell you, now that I have that commute myself, I don't give a damn who makes money off the construction of such a road, build the damn thing! Of course audit to make sure the prices paid are fair, but as long as they are fair market value, who cares if it's some politicos buddy? SOMEBODY is going to make money off the deal anyways, and that road is desparately, urgently needed.

Anyways, I'm not here to talk about the Northern Arc or the politics surrounding it, I'm here to talk about the sun.

Leaving at 6 in the morning and getting to work by 7 in the morning generally means I don't get any sunlight on the commute. There's no windows in the part of the building they have most of us seated, so I don't get any sun while I'm working. If it's not too cold or not raining, I'll go outside at lunch time, but that's a small amount of sun at a point where I've already been up for 7+ hours. Doesn't help.

Last week here in Atlanta all the elementary schools had spring break. On top of that, I worked so late into the night on several nights that there was no possibility of waking up early. I didn't mind so much however since I figured with spring break and the final four, traffic so far north where I am would be light. And I was right. So leaving for work at 7:30 or 8 in the morning meant driving into work with the sun.

This week I've been working out of the datacenter in downtown for 3 of 4 days so far. Working out of the datacenter is no fun, so I impose a fee for having to do so of getting in around 9. But since it's a straight shot down I-85, I can generally leave around 7:45 or 8:00 and still make it in around 9, so again this week I've been driving in with the sun.

So here's the point of all this: when I wake up and get into work before the sun has even started to rise, I find myself tired and grumpy all the time. When I wake up with the sun and drive into work in daylight, I don't find myself sleepy at all. It's not just that I get extra time to sleep - even if I get to sleep by 10pm on the days I wake up a 5:30, I still am tired and grumpy. Even if I get only 5 or 6 hours of sleep on the days I get up at 8, I am completely fine all day long. Even if, while at the data center, I don't see the sun again until I leave at 6pm in the evening, I am fine.

So all I'm really trying to say here is that it is quite amazing just how much impact the sun can have on your quality of life. It is so important, at least to my biology, to get that sun light in the morning. Life sucks without it. And you just can't make up missed morning sunlight with afternoon sunlight. Doesn't work for me, anyways. It's totally different and totally unhelpful. I gotta get that sunlight in the morning to help get me woken up and properly functioning.

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2007/4/10/223445.shtml?s=ic

Giuliani Off the Mark on Grocery Costs

Republican presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani hasn't done a lot of grocery shopping lately -- at least based on his answers about the cost of milk and bread.

I do grocery shopping nearly every week, and I haven't the faintest clue how much a gallon of milk costs, nor a loaf of bread. I occassionaly buy a quart of milk, which I guess is in the 1.50 neighborhood, but that doesn't mean a gallon is $6. I would guess probably in the neighborhood of $3.50 to $4, but I never look at how much a gallon would cost so I can't say that with any confidence.

As for bread, I couldn't even make a ball-park guess. I *NEVER* buy bread. Can't even guess what the price would be.

It's not because I don't shop, it's because I don't buy those things.

What an absolutely stupid, stupid, stupid non-story that is. Not knowing the prices of milk and bread isn't, in my mind, indicative of any damn thing at all.

Just because someone doesn't know the prices of arbitrary food items doesn't mean they are out of touch, it just means they don't buy those things. They may be staples for some people, but hardly for every person. Probably for fewer people than you might imagine. Especially in a place like Atlanta where everybody seems to eat their meals out at restaurants, three meals a day, 7 days a week. And those that don't are generally the immigrants who are going to eat whatever they are used to, not what americans may be used to, and probably doesn't involve either milk or bread (asians certainly don't eat those things, and they represent a sizeable portion of the Atlanta immigrant population). I'd be surprised if the majority of people in Atlanta could have gotten that question close to right...

Bacon. Can you imagine having to go through life never being allowed to eat bacon? That's just inhuman! No wonder they become terrorists, being deprived of one of the best foods God put on earth!

*shudder*

Now I just feel sorry for them :-p

I was going to write today about how journalists always try to tell you not just the news, but how you're supposed to feel about it as well, and maybe I'll do that tomorrow, but then I saw that it's four years since Baghdad fell and I saw the headlines and I'm going to write about that instead.

So we're four years in Iraq. A sampling of headlines from news.google.com:

Thousands mark Saddam's fall

Shiite leader calls for Iraqis to join militia

Timeline: Four years of turmoil

Iraqis call for US forces to leave

Iraqis march in honor of Baghdad's fall

Rally marks anniversary of Baghdad's fall

Sadr-Backed Protests Urge US to Quit Iraq

Iraqis rally in Shiite holy cities for anti-American march

Shiite Cleric Urges Fight Against US

Just imagine a small town person who doesn't have internet access and only reads one or two newspapers. Obviously their view of Iraq would be severely distorted according to which of the headlines above he got. Some of them don't have any suggestion of anti-US sentiment, others have it but it would seem mild or harmless, others make it seem extremely virulent. Frankly, given the current state of what passes for journalism these days, and just how many "reporters" seem to just outright lie and make stuff up, and/or don't bother to do any fact checking (is there any meaningful difference between a reporter intentionally not bothering to fact check and their just outright lying?), I don't know what to believe any more. I don't even feel comfortable with the idea that the truth lies somewhere in between. I just don't know any more.

What do you do for news when ALL of the media outlets can no longer be trusted?

Or do you just give up on the news completely and glide through life blissfully unaware of anything outside your job and family?

For those who are still wondering, what this function does is it takes a list of names that are sorted alphabetically, assigns a random number to each one, then sorts the numbers so that the names appear to be random.

If I had written it I probably would have called it RandomizeList or RandomizeNames or some such, but no, this person had to call it RandomSort.

*rolls eyes*

So, you're looking through some old code written years ago by someone long gone from the company. You stumble across a function named RandomSort(). Before even looking at what the function does, your reflexive reaction to a function name like that is?

So, ever since google took groups.google.com out of beta, the interface has been completely and utterly unusable, and has only gone down hill over time. Anybody have any recommendations for other web-based usenet reading ... things?

Nobody on the left seems to be screaming bloody murder over this Barack as Jesus thing. In fact, they seem to kind of like it. As with all things, as long as it's one of their own, it's not a problem. It's only when it relates favorably to the OTHER SIDE that they have a problem with it :-p

Wait, it is Tuesday today, right? :-)

So, I have this .zip file sitting out on a Linux box that was compressed on a Mac (OS X).

% unzip -v -t foo.zip
Archive: foo.zip
warning [foo.zip]: 513937 extra bytes at beginning or within zipfile
    (attempting to process anyway)
error [foo.zip]: start of central directory not found;
    zipfile corrupt.
    (please check that you have transferred or created the zipfile in the
    appropriate BINARY mode and that you have compiled UnZip properly)

Well that looks bad. So I look at the header in hex mode and get the following out of it:

Local file header signature: 0x04034b50
Version needed to extract: 0x0a0d (0a = 10 = Windows NTFS; 0d = 13 = v1.3)
General purpose bit flag: 0x0000
compression method: 0x0000 (stored, no compression)
last mod file time: 0x4a00
last mod file date: 0x7eb0
crc-32: 0x00000036
compressed size: 0x00000000
uncompressed size: 0x00000000
file name length: 0x0e00 (0x000e = 14)
extra field length: 0x1000 (0x0010 = 16)

First of all, version 1.3? WTF? From the info I can find, it appears it went from 1.1 to 2.0, so that makes no sense. Anyways, the extra field:

Header ID: 0x5855 = Info-ZIP UNIX (original, also OS/2, NT, etc)
tsize 0x000c
access time 0x0a0dc102
mod time 0x0dc12b46
uid 0x460a
gid 0x01f5

Umm...

Anyways, I've tried unzip, gunzip, bunzip2, 7za, all with no luck.

I'm beginning to think the file is corrupt, but was wondering if anybody had any additional thoughts before I ask for a resend. (The person who made the file is out of town so waiting means losing a day.)

I need a yottabyte drive.

1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176 bytes, or 1024^8, or 2^80

Man, that would sure be enough diskspace to not have to give a damn about running out of diskspace on these 2 terrabyte data processing jobs.

I wonder what the seek time would be on a disk that size... :-p

So, I'm trying to run some jcl jobs for work, but the amount of data involved is very large. I knew before I started that the /data/in partition needed 500 gigs, and I had that much available on it. The output is going to /data/out2 and that had 500 gigs available on it, so I went ahead and ran the job.

About 4 hours later there's I discover it uses /data/out1, which didn't have enough disk space, so the job failed for lack of disk space. out1 started at around 400 gigs, but apparently it needs 500+ gigs.

Ok, I take care of that, then run it again. Another 6 hours later I discover there's ANOTHER partition involved, /data/uber, that ALSO needs a good 500+ gigs available. Damnit, how much fsking disk space does this bloody job need? Is 2 terrabytes going to be enough already? Are there other partitions involved I don't know about yet?

And of course, every single person who could help me identify files to delete is either out of town or out of country.

And this might not be such a big deal, but I have 3 other jcl jobs that need to be run after this, one of which will also require 2 terrabytes of disk space to run, and all these jobs take like 10-20 hours to run, and then there's an 8 hour database load, and it was SUPPOSED to be going into production before the start of business Monday. So much for that.

And the job I've been trying to run all damn day today was a job that was supposed to be done by Friday, but one of the DVDs we got with the data on it was bad so we had to have them resend it, so we lost a day there on top of losing all of today.

Somebody just shoot me now, please.

So, this whole thing with British sailors being kidnapped by Iran.

Look, I'm all in favor of a very intimiate relationship with Britain - they've been the best ally we've ever had over the past 200 years, and as far as I'm concerned, an attack on Britain is the same thing as an attack on the USA. I hear people saying how this kidnapping is an act of war, and some people are so outraged that we weren't already bombing Iran within hours of the kidnapping. I hope those people don't vote.

Kidnapping of sailors was hardly invented by Iran - it's an extremely ancient practice. The British were among the most notorious not only for kidnapping sailors of other nations, they went one step further and impressed the kidnapped sailors into crewing British vessels. In fact, the British impressed so many US sailors, thousands of them, that it became one of the key reasons for the War of 1812. We did go to war, in part, over the issue of kidnapping of sailors, but we didn't go to war within hours of the first sailors being impressed, it took a good 5 or 6 YEARS for this to reach the point of justifying war.

I understand this is not just one isolated incident of Iranian aggression, they've become very belicose of late, but when it comes to Britain dealing with the kidnapping of their sailors, it's a situation that Britain, of ALL countries in the world, necessarily must handle delicately, given their own sordid history of this sort. The US also has a rather bad history, in fact extending 100 years longer than the British practice (it was made a federal crime only in 1915, yes not until after The Great War was under way!), of shanghai'ing innocents. Going to war so quickly over only one such an event is just... stupid.

Of course, as part of a pattern of behavior (kipnapping UK sailors, supplying both material AND troops to the terrorists in Iraq, just its general history of the biggest state sponsor of terrorism in recent decades, it's defiance of the UN on the issue of nuclear weapons, it's violations the Geneva Conventions, it's stated goal of obliterating Israel and genocide against the jews, it's support of terror groups like Hezbollah, etc. etc. etc), it helps build a compelling case for some sort of action against Iran, but don't just say we should start dropping bombs because they kipnapped some sailors. It would be a very foolhardy country indeed who used that as a sole reason for war.

I'm gonna troll anyways!

http://youtube.com/watch?v=eaE98w1KZ-c

It's a long one, but a good troll none the less :D