As I have mentioned before, there is a wonderful buzz on here in Chile-economic, technological and political. The Economist picked up on it and published this article yesterday. Read it. It's good.

Two nights ago, I had this dream:

I was in a taxi in Winnipeg in the winter going to Home Street I told the driver, but when I realized I was on Sturgeon heading south toward Ness, I knew I was close to my grandparents home, where I spent most of my life. Turn right, the first street past the Safeway, I said. There's nothing there the taxi driver said. Sure enough, the city ended at Heritage Blvd. I got out of the taxi and looked north. On my right was the city and the night sky was filled with stars. There was not an empty spot in the sky. On the left was snow and above it a black sky.

The taxi driver asked me what it meant. I said it meant that I was dreaming and that he was a character in my dream. The sky on the right was my right cerebral hemisphere being updated structurally with the experience of the day past. The left was black because the plasticity of the left hemisphere is much lower...

When I awoke I realized that my taxi driver was Bill Macy, who played Bea Arthur's husband in the 70's sitcom, Maud, and who is the reason William H. Macy uses an H.

I have an odd brain.

Yesterday, the lights went out, then the sky filled with low flying military jets. I counted more than thirty of all kinds--Mirages, F5's, and even a 707 with all kinds of radar systems hanging off of it. Apparently the blackout effected 1/2 the population of Chile. The jets were a coincidence as far as I can tell, but it was scary for a bit. I enjoyed the big blackout of 2003 in Toronto much more, not even a little bit scary...

Well, I didn't get the UPS commercial part...instead I got a job running the systems for the company that shot the commercial, which I am informed is being broadcast around the world now. Here it is. Very fancy live action motion control stuff--not computer graphics! It was shot in Valpariso.

Want to know what 2014 is going to look like?

Like most long-in-the-tooth geeks [I remember the Ajax commercial where the kid rolls an Apollo Command Module across a black and white checkered kitchen floor], I was shocked at what Google pulled off with Gmail. It's an amazing piece of software. I'm in love with it actually. It has me remembering the old days and the vision of thin clients...finally! Next stop: GoogleOffice.

Will AJAX help Google clean up?

This is an interesting work of collaborative art...

http://www.eviltree.de/zoomquilt/zoom.htm

I have just passed the three month mark on my second sally to South America and the books I shipped to myself via surface post from Toronto just arrived!

This week I will be installing a Penguin Computing Relion 1XT server at my client's site...I will blow away RH9 and replace it with FC3 on the sound advice of my very good friend Samir who runs the computer science department network at the U of T. It has been quite some time since I tried to install a linux system [December 31, 1994 according to my posting of that date to comp.os.linux.advocacy]...I guess a decade is long enough to wait before jumping in!

My date with Carol the pop art painter on Friday was wonderful. And speaking of decades, she's a decade younger than I am which is kind of odd because the last woman I dated was a decade the other way...that's a pretty big operating range..I think I can push it yet another decade either way!

So the author of phpThumbs, James Heinrich, responded to my email..."I confirm the problem -- your JPEG had some garbage in it that didn't prevent most programs from displaying it, but it GD's imagecreatefrom* functions didn't like it."

He cleaned the image and returned it to me--very nice of him. When I asked him how to trap the error as I had more bad images, he very decently changed his program to handle my corrupted data nicely and emailed me a copy of it. Super, super nice guy.

A cafe on Estados Unitos around the corner from my apartment, there is a gentle breeze. We're both laughing and I smell her perfume as the breeze shifts--flowers. I'm not wearing perfume she says and I lean forward and she leans forward and I realize she isn't wearing any perfume--it was just some passing magic and I cup her face in my hand and we kiss a perfect first kiss.

Cafe Geometrico. Both very nervous, but she asked me out, so I feel somewhat more confident than I would otherwise...oh hell, I never would have asked her out. Way way way too pretty for me to manage anything coherent in my second language. I see her again tomorrow for lunch. Neither of us can wait for the weekend. Averaging a text message an hour. Is it tomorrow yet?

My software is working. My software is working!

There is something amazing about getting an idea working in code that I think is deeply related to sex. Yes, writing software is a form of reproduction--access to immortality.

I remember working on the VLT and whenever I would push this button or that button I would get a strong image of the particular programmer who wrote the code the button would trigger...makes me wonder about all the code I have written in my life that is still running...and speaking of code...mindpixels are code. Mindpixles will stick around maybe as close to forever as anything written by humans will ever achieve...

I am building a php/mysql database application that requires thumbnailing of images, and have been working with phpthumb.

There is some strange inverted login in the code section of phpthumb.php for database interface. One needs to flip it before it works.

As well, the query string needs to be changed to look like the one that is at the site mentioned as an example in the comments in the code. Once those two changes are made, it will make thumbs from a mysql longblob, which is nice. But, it fails on random images of various sizes. Might be something to do with the way it handles jpeg headers, as the two images that it breaks on on my system were both modified with gimp... anyone out there working with phpthumb??

221 googles today. Up very quickly from zero on the 17th.

Mmmm. I feel like cookies baking, walking centerwards down Bilbo toward the park with insanely tall fifteen story palm trees and stone sculptured fountain not quite as tall but just as insane. We sit and watch the girls watching back and bake another layer of bakedness and float back to work to produce some more television commercials and php...