ObviousGuy is my new hero. And now I'm his friend!

Entirely too easy of a password to guess.

Got it on me first try!

Sometimes it's just too easy.

Hint for the rest of you, don't leave you account wide open for hacking.

My apologies for not updating this journal more often; I've been extremely busy with work (Simpli). Simpli is doing well, by the way, and we're set to introduce a new website soon, so stay tuned! ;)

I have a strange question. Upon pondering this question and realizing I knew nothing about it, I immediately wondered where I could find the answer. So I've decided to mine you guys -- the geekiest people I know -- for an answer.

I have a client who wants to rip 300 CDs to a hard drive. He'd like me to come up with a solution, so I've been studying various methods of ripping CDs. Obviously no one wants to sit there all day and feed CDs into a computer, so there needs to be a better solution.

I've Googled and it appears that the best solution is a robotic arm that attaches to a computer. My basic idea is to have two spindles of CDs: one spindle which hasn't been ripped and one which has. The arm can pick up a CD from the spindle of "not yet ripped", drop the CD into the open drive, and, when the CD is done, it can pick it back up and place it on the "ripped" spindle.

Obviously this requires some communication between the computer and the robotic arm. The best solution would probably be to use Linux, a serial or parallel port for communication, and a script ("Arm, pick up CD from 'non-ripped' spindle. CD drive, close. Ripper program, rip. CD drive, open. Arm, pick up CD and put it into 'ripped' spindle. Repeat.") Okay, so that's kind of what this guy did. But I don't care about getting CDs out of cases or anything.

I'm willing to spend up to $300 for a complete solution (not including computer, which I'll buy separately.) So that's $300 for a robot and a script to guide it. What do you think? Is this doable or reasonable? Do some research and I might give you part or all of that money to build it. ;)

EDIT: To all you people who said "Just hire a teenager," well, that's just not nearly geeky enough for me. Plus, I may want to do this again in the future.

Just a thought about the new Hamas leader.

He has gone on record and stated plainly that the U.S. is not going to be a target of Hamas attacks. This is a very astute move.

The patience with Israel around the world is growing very thin. This is not mere anti-Semitism that many Jewish leaders automatically rail against every time the Jews are criticized. There is a growing disgust with the manner in which the Israeli government treats the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza. This disgust is a direct result of our concepts of Western democracy and equal rights. Since the victory of Israel against its neighbors decades ago, the Jewish population has oppressed the Palestinian refugees in a system akin to apartheid in South Africa.

For a while here, since the beginning of the second intifada and significant increase in civilian bombings, the Palestinians were losing a lot of credibility. Of course the Israelis have the right to crack down on terrorists!

Even in the Yassin killing, Israel is fully justified in the eyes of many to have undertaken the operation.

But now the new leader of Hamas has done something very smart. He has focused his war onto a single opponent - Israel. This changes the dynamics of the war from one of Hamas vs. Israel/U.S. to only Hamas vs. Israel. The U.S. is now given the chance to disengage themselves from Israel. It also forces Israel to deal with Hamas as an opponent in a civil war rather than as part of an overarching War on Terrorism.

Bush has already taken the position that a Palestinian homeland is inevitable and desirable, and this is Hamas giving the U.S. the chance to push that position. If the U.S. is able to make Israel realize that they will lose American support unless the Jewish population stops treating the Palestinian refugees as interlopers, then we may see significant progress towards peace in Israel.

OTOH, we may see Israel lash out uninhibitedly against the Palestinians. However, the international backlash, including the possible invasion of Israel and arrest of Israeli leaders for violations of international human rights laws, would most likely put a damper on such a large Jewish offensive.

It doesn't look like the U.S. has any inclination to take the chance to disengage, if the public statements of American diplomats are any indication, though. It's too bad. This could have been a way of protecting the U.S. from increased terrorist attacks coming from opponents of Israel.

Gotta love the Japanese military

Republicans rejoice.

Aside from having my Karma stomped down to Terrible and being completely blocked from posting comments, I'm also being automatically logged out after viewing several pages.

If this is another problem, I'd like to begin the count of issues I've encountered so far.

1) Moderation weightings have been skewed such that a negative moderation affects karma significantly downward while positive moderation barely affects karma upward.

2) The new comment history page is completely fucked.

3) New cookie? New security? WTF?

4) Automatic logging out.

Anything else?

What is the weighting of Moderation to Karma?

It is common knowledge that a +1 Funny is worth 0 karma, but are there other values that are not commonly known?

I currently have Bad karma. However, looking over my recent posts, I have many +5 Insightful/Interesting posts and have a positive moderation balance despite several downmods.

However, my karma has steadily declined. Likewise, my karma barely moves at all from Positive to Good even though I have received a moderation balance of +20 as evidenced by the daily moderation totals.

I was given notice that this Friday will be my last day at this company. The notice actually came at the end of January, so it is no surprise. My company is finally closing the Japanese office. I was given the chance to transfer back to the home office or to another office in nearby Taiwan. I chose to remain here in Japan for the sake of my family.

For years the Japanese office have been a drain on capital never having reached profitability, but also it has been a source of several very big name customers in the consumer electronic space. Unfortunately with the prolonged downturn in the economy, the home office has scrutinized the various divisions within the company and has decided to lop off those unprofitable parts. I don't blame them for the decision and I have been treated more than fairly, though my experience seems to have been out of the norm.

The company tried their best to place me elsewhere in the company because I am an expatriot specifically for them, so they felt that they had an extra responsibility to at the very least to bring me back to the U.S. I simply couldn't accept though. Aside from my suspicion that I would have been laid off after two months or so back in the U.S., I have actually just gotten settled here in Japan. I bought a car and renewed my apartment lease for another two years. I'm just not at a point where I can up and move again.

I mentioned earlier that the layoffs were actually announced at the end of January, but my last day will be this Friday. The Japanese employees, for the most part (there are still a couple people like country manager and office manager still around to help with the closing), had their last day back in January. I have had my employment extended in order to handle visa transfers and to handle other things that are required for living here that were handled by the company previously.

I've been doing that for a couple weeks now and I'm just taking a little break today. I've been running all over the place for my visa. I've been to a couple interviews which I'm still waiting on. And just last Friday I found out that I'm supposed to be working on wrapping up development for one of the customers for whom we had to cancel a project on. It gives me a chance to polish my programming a little more before being hurled into unemployment, so that's a plus. But I would have much rather had this week to finish what I need to finish in terms of things that are important to me, not for some ex-customer.

So I am going to be employment-free next week. I've talked to a few recruiters and have gone to a couple interviews through them. The companies seem cool, and I'm definitely qualified for the positions that I'm seeking (Lead QA engineer, Junior developer, or FAE). I'm not worried about finding a new job. There are plenty of jobs out there for developers, but there aren't as many for QA engineers. There is no premium nor respect for QA in Japan, it is seen as an expense only and it's engineers are no more than trained monkeys, so companies end up hiring part time workers to perform QA for less than 1000 yen an hour typically. It's a little disheartening to say the least. But I'm looking for something a little more involved than button pressing.

I've got 5 and a half years of experience at this latest company. 1 of that was as a developer, just before I moved to Japan 2 years ago to help with the Japanese QA team as a technical lead which they desperately needed. After the other members of the QA team finally left after the PM mismanaged them for the last time, I was left as the sole QA engineer. I named myself QA manager and hired on two interns (at 1000 yen per hour) and trained them to do QA while I handled the customer contacts and project scheduling. I tried my best to give them some grounding in C because they could then become much more useful to my QA team and also to any future engineering job they would get. It's funny, neither of them had any computer experience when they came in, but they left able to write simple tests in C. They were really great, for the most part. Having to fire them in November due to cost cutting was tough, though.

Now I'd like to find a position that I can grow in. QA in Japan was really a dead end because of the inability to move upwards. Becoming the QA manager is like becoming the top monkey, you're still a monkey. That's why I'm looking for stuff in development if possible. I've got development experience, but that was two years ago before I moved to Japan. I'm doing my best at interviews to emphasize that most of what I did in QA was development of test cases so I'm not rusty. That's my biggest challenge in the interviews now.

I did finally receive the results of my Japanese Language Proficiency Test last weekend and I am officially a Level 2 certificate holder. There is only one more level to go and that is Native Speaker status, so I'd like to think I've come a long way, but I know there's still quite a bit to go. I'll need to update my resume...

Heh. If you've know any positions for a Japanese-speaking American who's got several years of experience in Development, QA, and Management, please drop me a line at my email address. I'd really appreciate it.

The FreeBSD bootloader does not seem to talk to my USB keyboard, so I have to sit through 10 seconds of 'devil menu' every time I boot up.

It would be nice if this were configurable, skippable, or if the loader would just talk to my USB keyboard so I could skip the menu manually.

No update on the DHCP issue. The machine still isn't talking to the Internet.

This weekend I downloaded the FreeBSD 5.2 .iso and tried installing it on my new used PC. I'm having some trouble with setting up the DHCP client.

The LAN card is a 3Com card that is detected properly by the FreeBSD installation script. During installation, it asks me whether the card will use IPv6 or DHCP and I choose DHCP. The script then goes off to contact the DHCP server and retrieves what appears to be an appropriate IP address. 192.168.xx.3. The router is 192.168.xx.1, and my other PC (Win2K) is 192.168.xx.2 and works fine. So the .3 IP seems to be correct.

However, when the OS boots up, I am unable to make contact with anything. I can't ping the router, much less anything on the internet.

I went through the installation again and tried to install via FTP rather than from CD. That didn't work either, though the DHCP client seemed to retrieve an appropriate IP address from the router.

Besides a network connection, I seem to have everything installed correctly. My video needs a little tweaking, but I'm not sure how much I can do with that, it's an old system.

What can I do to get DHCP working?

What happened to Search.pl and Comments.pl? They don't seem to be keeping up with the front page at all.

Yes, if everyone else jumped off a cliff I would too.

The Kingdom of the Obvious

Motto: "Prima Facie"

UN Category: Capitalist Paradise
Civil Rights: Very Good
Economy: Thriving
Political Freedoms: Excellent

Location: the West Pacific
The Kingdom of The Obvious is a tiny, economically powerful nation, remarkable for its absence of drug laws. Its hard-nosed, hard-working, intelligent population of 5 million are either ruled by a small, efficient government or a conglomerate of multinational corporations; it's difficult to tell which.

There is no government in the normal sense the word; however, a small group of community-minded individuals is effectively ruled by the Department of Commerce, with areas such as Law & Order and Religion & Spirituality receiving almost no funds by comparison. Income tax is unheard of. A large private sector is led by the Information Technology industry, followed by Cheese Exports and Basket Weaving.

Crime is a serious problem, and the police force struggles against a lack of funding and a high mortality rate. The Obvious's national animal is the dog, which teeters on the brink of extinction due to widespread deforestation, and its currency is the Value.

Well, I just had a rather interesting and funny conversation over AIM with a hapless job-seeker. I thought I'd post it here for your benefit (names have been changed to protect the innocent.)

[14:12] Hapless Job-Seeker: hello
[14:13] simplisales: Hello :) This is Erica from Simpli sales. How may I help you?
[14:14] Hapless Job-Seeker: i was wondering if u could check out my resume :p
[14:14] Hapless Job-Seeker: (Link: [to posted resume])
[14:14] Hapless Job-Seeker: thanx a lot
[14:15] simplisales: You know you messaged me about this before, right? :)
[14:15] Hapless Job-Seeker: :p
[14:15] Hapless Job-Seeker: did i?
[14:15] Hapless Job-Seeker: its possible :p
[14:15] simplisales: And I said:
[14:15] Hapless Job-Seeker: what was ur answer
[14:15] simplisales: [12:47] simplisales: Then why the heck are you using "u" in your resume? Do you expect companies to take you seriously?
[14:15] Hapless Job-Seeker: ahha!
[14:15] Hapless Job-Seeker: thanx
[14:15] simplisales: And I see that advice went straight to the pooper.
[14:15] Hapless Job-Seeker: *looks for exscuse*
[14:15] Hapless Job-Seeker: *cant find one*
[14:16] simplisales: ;)
[14:16] Hapless Job-Seeker: so
[14:16] simplisales: You need to brush up on your professionalism.
[14:16] Hapless Job-Seeker: no mind changing revalations then :p
[14:17] simplisales: I would also recommend reading a couple books on how to write a professional resume.
[14:18] Hapless Job-Seeker: in fact, i have decided that this is not going to get anywhere :p
[14:18] Hapless Job-Seeker: and have made a concious desicion to go and smoke lots of dope :p
[14:18] Hapless Job-Seeker: goodbye
[14:19] simplisales: Talk to you later.

Now there's a winner! ;)

---

By the way, we have filled the position advertised in my previous journal entry with someone from Slashdot. More about this later!