I have never met a single person who is normal. I have never met a single person who was raised in a normal family. Yet I have met many people who insist, often to such a degree that it causes them a great deal of anxiety and stress, that everyone else, with them being the sole exception, is a normal person who was raised in a normal household.

I am not worried, dismayed, or upset by people who are crazy. We are all crazy. What I can't stand is people who insist on always holding themselves up to some idealized abstraction that they call normal.

Where I am from, being of mixed race is normal. Never going to church is normal. Recycling is normal. In the house I grew up in, worrying if there would be enough money to pay the bills next month was normal. A happy joyous Christmas was normal. My father getting up at 6:30am to fry me a steak for breakfast was normal.

Not knowing if my father was going to live tomorrow.

Normal.

Not knowing who my birth mother is.

Normal.

Cursing her every day for forcing me to live with the consequences and end effects of her behavior?

Normal.

Knowing I have a loving family to go home to, no matter how psychologically messed up or near death they may be on any given day?

Normal.

The things we take for granted, the things we, personally, in our hearts, believe to be universal truths that are beyond any doubt, make up what we consider to be normal.

To live a happier life, do not take for granted any of the positives blessings that you have received in life, no matter how few they may be. Be thankful, truly grateful to the world, for all the good that has come your way. Look at everything good in your life that you take for granted, all the positives that you assume are normal, and love them with all your heart. That which you assume is normal are things many others cannot take for granted. Food on the table. A safe bed to sleep in at night. A shoulder to cry on. A place to run away to when your home has become too crazy. Whatever it is in your life, love it and hold it dear.

Come to the understanding that everything wrong, everything negative in life that you take for granted, does not have to be that way. If you are unloved, do not assume that is normal. Do not take it for granted that no one will ever love you. If you saw your parents addicted to drugs, do not assume that you too must become a drug addict. If you saw your father beat your mother, do not assume that you must beat your wife or be beaten by your husband.

The beautiful thing about normal, is that it can, it does, everyday, change meaning. We define it. You and I define it for ourselves, and for the world as a whole.

Do not strive for normal. Strive for joy. Strive for happiness. Strive for a better future, for yourself, and for all of us. Make that the new normal.

I've written here about my experience this weekend writing a google app engine application for people with iPhones or Android phones. The demo video for the site is here.

I'm still fighting some scaling problems. So I'm not ready to publicize the app.

I'm trying to submit a news story about Microsoft charging for Linux and a company actually paying for it... with links... carefully crafted... and I can't submit it because the server says I must wait to submit it.

This is the first story I've submitted in years.

Why do I have to wait?

I haven't commented here in *hours*

If all this is to get people to use slashdot less then I'd say it's working.

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/12/please-show-us-your-code/

[...] calculations done by Scafetta & West (in the journals Geophysical Research Letters, Journal of Geophysical Research, and Physics Today) have inspired the idea that the recent warming is due to changes in the sun, rather than greenhouse gases. [...] Gavin and I published a paper in Journal of Geophysical Research, where we tested the general approach used by Scafetta & West, and tried to repeat their analysis. We were up-front about our lack of success in a 100% replication of their work, but we argue that the any pronounced effect - as claimed by Scafetta & West - should be detectable even if the set-up is not 100% identical.

However, Scafetta does not accept our analysis and has criticized me for lacking knowledge about wavelet analysis - he tells me to read the text books. So I asked him to post his code openly on the Internet so that others could repeat our test with their code. That should settle our controversy.

Looks like the denialists have something to hide...

I'm looking to start working with Android. I found this tutorial. Basically my thought is this: cellphones are going to go boom. The last time I saw this kind of hype storm and positioning it was around this silly thing called "the internet" and if my pattern matching software is working right we're getting ready for a new boom in the next decade or so... this time fueled by whatever the cellphone is about to become.

I like the German term "Handi"

Anyone have any preferences for a b/g/n router? I'd like one so that I can put my nice, modern Apple stuff on the N side of things, and the shitty, legacy crap over on the b/g side. Already have an older Time Capsule that isn't full, so I'm not going that route. (Oh, and I'll probably not give my brother access to the N, cause he pisses me off too much).

Thinking to bridge the connection from that to the Time Capsule, and let the Time Capsule handle the rest of it.

I don't care about off the wall firmware. That doesn't interest me in any way, shape or form. Unless I have to deal with that kind of malarkey to get either my Time Capsule or my tons of BT stuff to work nicely.

.. ..

About time, i hope his only justification is "someone needed to do it."

Edit: Looks like he wasn't just shooting abortion protesters :(

I stopped writing in my journal regularly because over the last few years I've moved to using my blog more. The blog has even lead to me contributing to several articles to an industry magazine. Now, maybe my writing is better... or maybe that would never happen in a journal.

Why? Why aren't journals more like blogs? Why doesn't journal publication naturally lead to the kinds of connections that blog entries do? Is slashdot just like facebook in that respect? Is /. a walled garden?

Not even you.

Ever build an apparatus to study subatomic particles out of stuff sitting around your house? Well my friend did and this video is the result of our replication (sort of) of the Wilson Cloud Chamber. We used the updated diffusion cloud chamber design from Andy Folannd with a bit of info from Cosmicrays.org.

The apparatus is a bit finicky and prone to getting too cold, but it worked. We observed several dozen alpha particles zipping through the room interacting with the alcohol vapor. Unfortunately, no muon decays or scattering was observed. It would be interesting to try this again with a different chamber shape / height, a different temperature differential (measuring it next time), and possibly with a magnet to observe the magnetic field affects of the paths on the charged particles.

Observation notes: It greatly aided the observation to have the live video feed piped via s-video to nearby TV, so more than one person could observe the interactions. Only close proximity ~12" makes in person observation possible due to breath condensation and freezing on the cold chamber wall.

We are looking for other experiments that can be performed at home with out significant investments / highly specialized materials that exhibit the ordinarily invisible elements of our universe that also show well on video (or can be made to so so with appropriate pre-planning). Any suggestions?

Notes on the video: shot with GL2 on Matthews tripod at F1.8, 1/60th, WB to sunlight (led light source ~5400K), 0dB gain (except opening scene which had some gain) and MF locked. No specialized color / exposure profile used, no post WB. Opening text plain with background fractal keyframed movement. "Highlight" effect applied to duplicate additive track placed above source with exclusion mask applied to select sections of the video. Video trimmed to exclude empty segments. Cinescore Soundtrack. Rendered as 3Mbps Peak VBR single pass WMV.

I need to help someone get a crash course in QA work on an OSS stack, as opposed to their previous few years of QA work on a Win32 stack. We will be installing Ubuntu tomorrow for a quick and easy workstation. Then we need to find or write a series of tasks to learn the skills to help said person get a crash course in working in / with the LAMP OSS environment.

Again, not a SW dev, or admin, just a QA guy, so tasks, reference material, etc need not be super low level. I have the perl trifecta (learning Perl, Perl Cookbook, and Reg Ex with Perl), but everything else I have relating to Linux is +5yrs old.

Fortunately, Fink and MacPorts have brought back tools like Gimp, wget, nmap, and kismet to my arsenal... but still I miss:

1. 3D cube. "Spaces" just ain't it.
2. Flaming window effect... (oh man that was so cool)
3. the vast application selection in aptget
4. ability to use VIM/gvim/kvim ubiquitously
5. telinit
6. simple script based init system was easier to manage
7. ability to change file to program associations from a text editor
8. virtual terminals
9. hackable keyboard macros/keys (although the mac defaults are pretty damn good)
10. custom keystroke to lock screen

What do you (or would you) miss most about your Linux desktop?

Modpoints for sale. If you have a good one tomorrow (TT) that isn't getting the love, let me know.

Red stop sucking cock for money yet?