A thousand diamonds strewn across the blue blanket…

More back porch blogging…. it’s only 95 according to the weather thingy in Firefox. This is the first time in a while when I’ve been outside and it’s not been stiffeling or something like that.

July in Phoenix… it’s a wonder people live here this time of year. It’s only 110+ during the day in the shade. When the wind blows it feels like a blast furance and lets not forget the generous amount of particulate matter that make the overall feeling of a sand blaster.

Now on the “cooler” days, you know the ones where it doesn’t feel like a oven or blast furnace, it’s got to be some cruel joke by the people responsible for the weather. The “cooler” days in summer are like a messed up sauna. Puts out alot of heat a just a bit of humidity enough to drive you up the wall but not enough to truly do anything.

The heat is sometimes maddening… but you know what makes it all worth it? Come December/January/Feburary you can’t swing a broken laptop with out hitting a damned snowbird. In other words it’s great weather just alot more people are around.

The big difference between right now on the back porch and earlier musings of a back porch is the ambient noise. I normally can hear Dobson and Guadalupe roads. Tonight all I hear are crickets, and I can’t remember the last time I heard crickets. Now the lack of traffic might also be chalked up to the 7 A/C units that are within earshot and going full boar. I’m going to say it’s because there is no one out tonight.

Quotes from work…

I don’t talk about work much…. but here are some out of context quotes from this week that hopefully you too drop on your coworkers

“We’re saving lives here man, were not rolling out grass and planting trees”

“When your space shuttle is going 19,000 miles an hour and 1 inch off the launch pad, you best make sure your shit is working like it should”

“Dan read your monitor” (As Dan is trying to figure out if a character is a “5” or a “S” on a 6 foot projected image)

Q – “Why do you guys have such big monitors?”
A – “Easier to look at porn on”

Reflections in F.U.D. and you

Being a I.T. guy from time to time I get asked by certain indviduals for help for things that fall outside of my normal day to day duties.

I like to call these individuals Doctors.

So I get a call today from a doctor who wants to use his shiny new MAC to work from home with… I feel his pain. I agree to help him.

So as I’m talking to him I ask if he has made a boot camp partion for his MAC. You know since running windows in a virtulized environment is the least painful way to get 99.9% of windows only apps (read as active X or require IE) to work in MAC.

“I don’t want to load windows on to the MAC and have to deal with anti-virus”

Wait, you don’t want to deal with Anti virus in Windows on your MAC?

Ok on one side I can see the point… I mean that is why you bought a MAC isn’t it? So you didn’t have to deal with all of those stupid Windows viruses… On the other hand…

What on earth are you bitching about? Antivirus programs are so dirt simple that they should be the first or second thing you load up on your computer! And you don’t want to deal with them?

My god man…

For the record I do have Anti virus on all of my boxes (Norton and AVG mainly) Windows/Linux/Mac

Just because Lord Steve says it’s secure doesn’t mean it’s true kids…

States of mind….

So every now and again I hit a point where things just move along swimmingly and I don’t have anything that really inspires me to write. I call these events “life” events with in my “life” as of late drive me to write. You know the occasional trip to wal-mart that generally sets me off in more ways then you can imagine.

Why do I keep going there when I have so many choices available to me that are just as easily reached? Simple you can’t beat the prices on the same high quality name brand merchandise that you get at other department stores. There is no fighting the evil empire, just accept it and move on.

Speaking of evil empires, my coworkers and friends will tell you that I know way to much about cell phones. And to that charge I completely agree. They are intersting bits of technology that you can tell alot about a person from.

Smart phone… either they are trying to look smart (me) or it was issued to them (check for barcode on the back of the neck)

Music phone/Camera phone… I don’t get these they have iPods for a reason people. The nice things about music phones is they are also camera phones and you can tell how naughty someone is by how much they react to their cell phone “disappearing” I know one or two people who are really naughty.

Basic phone…. they use this phone to talk… how quaint.

Anyway I ran across a article about how a quarter of all people under the age of 30 only have cell phones. So I stopped to think about this for a second. I could only come up with 3 people under the age of 30 who had land lines. And if I wanted to get ahold of any of these people I would call their cell phone and not even bother with their land line. So that means that 90% of the people that I know are totally wireless. Granted this is way shifted towards the under 30 crowd. But still you get the idea.

So I started to think about why do I have a land line? Honestly it’s thrown in free with my cable tv and internet (i.e. it costs the same if I have my cable service and internet with or with out the phone option). Granted I have a couple of upgrades to my cable but that is beside the point. Why else do I have a land line? I send all of my credit cards there, you know since you have to call and activate credit cards from your home phone line. I just don’t feel comfortable doing this with a cell phone. I’ve read enough articles over the years to know that cell phones are just as susceptible to cloning today as they were 15 years ago.

Paranoid? you betcha…

Final reason? I send my voter registration to that line. So since voter reg is not under the federal do not call lists I get a million and one calls during election season. Last year I got enough phone calls on my land line that didn’t goto my cell that I was happy to keep it. And that was a off year!

Would I ever give up my land line? Yeah, and probably goto some sort of cheap voice over IP setup (like $5 a month cheap) or cheap cell phone. But since VOIP isn’t exactly that cheap and pay as you go phones are a huge rip off in my mind the land line stays collecting dust.

Lights Make Monkey Happy….

Alright here is the setup…. When I was in Kingman I had a workstation light that I kept on the top of my monitor to illuminate my desk. Why did I have this you ask? Simple there was no light in the room. It was a nifty Eclipse Computer Light that I picked up from Thinkgeek and damn did that thing rock. Sadly I had to retire it to my desk instead of monitor in 2004 after I picked up my first flat panel monitor. You know flat panel being flat and all I really couldn’t fit it on there anymore.

So that was December of 2004 and in July 2005 I left Kingman. In October of 2005 I moved into my current house. And along with me came the eclipse light. When I got the new office setup I had a dimmer switch on my lights so I figured that I wouldn’t need the eclipse light anymore.

And for the better part of 2 years that is what I did. Then my bulbs burned out… DAMN YOU KHAN!!! (I always blame Khan for my light bulbs burning out… mainly because he’s evil like that). So I do what any somewhat socially conscious person would do I head to wal-mart and purchase some Compact Fluorescent Light bulbs (Notice that I said somewhat socially conscious, if I were truly socially conscious I would have gone some place else… but that is a rant for another time). I bring home the new environmentally friendly light bulbs and duly do not install them for 2 weeks…

Finally the darkness starts to annoy me and I install the lights… much to my disappointment in my dimmer they have two settings… On and Off… it’s a binary state like Drunk and Not Drunk…. I’m not pleased by my new highly illuminated surroundings. So enter my eclipse light… not only does it fit on my Dell Monitor it fit’s PERFECTLY!

Yes I know it’s sad when the best thing in a week that I have to blog about is my Eclipse Light… but hey at least you get a nifty picture out of it!

The shape of things to come…

Driving home from work I saw a interesting sight. It was a repo truck for other cars and the license plate was “UBWALKN”. Great just what the world needs repo guys with a sense of humor. Next thing you know there will be bloggers out there talking about things like the license plate they saw on the drive home from work… oh wait….

So yeah…. about that those bloggers great people eh?

Ok time to move on. So with my moving from a Dell PDA back to Palm I’m once again free from the tryanny of Outlook (at home). I also have a PDA for sell if anyone is interested. Actually for the record just about everything I have is for sale. That is just the kind of guy that I am.

Anyway I’m free from Outlook since I’m only syncing my calendar with the Treo and can do that with Palm Desktop. Sweet I finally have a thrown free all of my bonds from the Windows Platform!

OH look a shackle with a large lock that’s got alot of gum in the key hole… oh yes gaming my Achilles heal.

/sigh

I have considered going back to Thunderbird but honestly I just don’t like it’s interface very much and I find it’s database system to be more susceptible to corruption then Outlook. I know Mr. Open Source likes a Microsoft product. Yeah I know let me turn in my geek cred badge at the door.

Then again when your into Linux you run into these type of things all of the time. You know the idealouges who want to a “perfect open source system” and the cold harsh reality of “the business world

Hmmm maybe I need to find a woman who apperciates the term “free as in beer or free as in speech

This blog entry is brought to you by a really good whiskey and the smoking lamp is off

This one is for the BSG nurds….

I’ve been watching Deep Space Nine on DVD starting with Season 1. Yes I know I’m a gluten for punishment. Anyway I’m a nurd… one of the things that I like to do is look up the actors from a series I’m watching and see what is written about them in the IMDB.

So I’m going through the Deep Space Nine entry from the IMDB and they have all of the executive producers listed. One of them is Ronald D. Moore, who we all know is the Executive Producer and Creator of the “New Battlestar Galactica“. But if you’ve watched DS9 before you already knew this (I did). What the hell I will go take a look at Ron Moore’s IMDB entry

There is a trivia section and it had this comment…

In the pilot episode of the fifth Star Trek series, “Enterprise”, a character was named after him. The farmer who shot the Klingon (Klaang) in the beginning of the episode was named Farmer “Moore”. This is not only homage to Ron’s reputation with klingons, but also his reputation for killing off characters.

Well shit that explains a few things.

So of course this leads me to the Wikipedia entry for Ronald D. Moore where I learn that he was a producer on “Voyager” for a little bit in the Sixth season.

And a excerpt from the interview Moore did concerning Voyager after he left

Moore’s re-imagining of Galactica is noted for taking a more serious tone than its predecessor, something that was foreshadowed in the January 2000 for Cinescape interview, where he discussed what he saw as the root problem with Voyager.

“The premise has a lot of possibilities. Before it aired, I was at a convention in Pasadena, and Sternbach and Okuda were on stage, and they were answering questions from the audience about the new ship. It was all very technical, and they were talking about the fact that in the premise this ship was going to have problems. It wasn’t going to have unlimited sources of energy. It wasn’t going to have all the doodads of the Enterprise. It was going to be rougher, fending for themselves more, having to trade to get supplies that they want. That didn’t happen. It doesn’t happen at all, and it’s a lie to the audience. I think the audience intuitively knows when something is true and something is not true. Voyager is not true. If it were true, the ship would not look spic-and-span every week, after all these battles it goes through. How many times has the bridge been destroyed? How many shuttlecrafts have vanished, and another one just comes out of the oven? That kind of bullshitting the audience I think takes its toll. At some point the audience stops taking it seriously, because they know that this is not really the way this would happen. These people wouldn’t act like this.”

Two things… this is why Ronald D. Moore is the man! And one of my biggest problems with Voyager.

Good night and good luck.

Putting in my time Tom style.

Getting mytruck serviced is always an adventure for me. Most of this stems from the fact that I am car idiot and I know it. I’m fine with this, the part that gives me heart burn is getting the service estimate.

Do I really need the super-dura tess synthetic tire oil?

Going to get my car serviced reminds me that computer geeks aren’t the only people with their own freaking language.

On the bright side the dealership I go to has a REALLY NICE LOUNGE so the wait isn’t as bad as it used to be. I mean it has a wifi connection for you to use if you have a laptop with you. And well since I do travel with a Treo these days a laptop isn’t that far fetched of a concept. Now if only my laptop could play supreme commander

The musings of a back porch….

You know I think I can really get used to this whole back porch thing… It’s February and I’m sitting on my back porch with a beer, laptop, and iPod. Just taking in the whole serenity of the evening.

I find that having a bit of alone time is good every now and again. I’m talking serious alone time 24 to 36 hours of the stuff. It’s good for finding a center of your being, it’s almost zen like. Well as zen as one can be with out being either a Buddhist monk or a Novel Netware Admin.

I live in the East valley… now I’m not that far out in the East valley, but it’s only 10 minutes in 2 diffrent directions to hit open deseret. (south and south east by freeway). I never noticed before but the clouds at night absorb the light of the city and glow reddish. It’s kind of strange but at the same time cool.

The album of choice is “Mezzanine” by Massive Attack. Everyone should check it out.

So with the brief winter that Phoenix experinces now over we are into the part of year that I like to call “Why we live here weather”. Let’s face it folks no one in their right mind lives in a place where it gets 120 in the summer and has 100+ days of 100+ degree heat. No I don’t count I moved here willingly and love it. I’m also a PACS administrator. If you ever meet another PACS administrator they will tell you anybody who does that job willingly is either stupid or crazy. I’m going to have to go with crazy people for $100 Alex.

I’ve come to the realization that everyone is beautiful on myspace. Which is why I use a comic for my picture (and here too). It’s not what the author looks like it’s what they have to say. Now I’m fine with the fact that this is page is a cesspool of incessant rambling and talking about things only I care about (for the record I haven’t talked about Linux in like 3 months). Myspace just feels like the sewer system of internet. Everyone goes there, but no one I know freely admits to going there on a regular basis. Actually let me rephrase that… people I call my friends admit they go there, they however have mostly moved to becoming flickr and blogger whores (welcome my brothers and sisters). So why have the myspace? I don’t know… part of me wants to be able to reconnect with my past… the other part of me doesn’t want to look back. I keep the myspace to keep the part of me that wants to look back happy. I keep this to keep the part of me that wants to look forward happy.