For all you Lispers out there...

I give you the cons cell t-shirt!

/me adds to Christmas list...

Dammit, Aaron...

Fine, I'll do it...


W O U L D Y O U R A T H E R . . .
1) Pierce your nose or tongue: Nose
2) Be serious or be funny: seriously hilarious
3) Drink whole or skim milk: whole

A R E Y O U . . .
4) Simple or complicated: simple
5) Flowers or angels: no freakin' idea - neither
6) Grey or gray: Tomato
7) Color or black-and-white photos: sepia 4 life
8) Sunrise or sunset: sunset
9) M&Ms or Skittles: skittles
10) Rap or rock: neither, how about "good"?
11) Staying up late or waking up early: late
12) TV or radio: radio
13) Apples or oranges: apples

A N S W E R T R U T H F U L L Y . . .
14) Do you have a crush: Yes, but don't tell my wife...
15) Who is it: LOL IT'S MY WIFE GOT U

D O Y O U P R E F E R . .
16) Being hot or cold: cold
17) Tall or short people: smart people
18) Sun or moon: sun
19) Emeralds or rubies: k
20) Left or right: left
21) Having ten acquaintances or one best friend?: one best friend
22) Sun or rain: rain
23) Vanilla ice cream or chocolate ice cream: vanilla

M I S C E L L A N E O U S . . .
24) What are your biggest fears in the world: Losing my family
25) Kids or no kids: kids++
26) Cat or dog: pet rock
27) Half empty or half full: gone, after I consume it
28) Mustard or ketchup: mustard
29) Hardcover books or soft cover books: hardcover
30) Newspaper or magazine? magazine
31) Sandals or sneakers: sneakers
32) Wonder or amazement: amazement
33) Red car or white car: bike
34) Happy and poor or sad and rich: happy and poor (like everybody else who's filled this out)
35) Singing or dancing: either one, as long as nobody is watching me...

A B O U T Y O U . . .
36) What time is it: 2:35pm
37) Number of siblings: 1
38) Birthdate: August 27, 1978
39) Height: 6’ 2”
40) Eye color: Green/Brown
41) Hair color: brown
42) Piercing(s): Nips

W H A T D O Y O U W A N T . . .
44) How many kids do you want: a freakin' pantload

W H I C H I S B E T T E R . . .
45) Two doors or four (on a car): 4
46) Coffee or ice cream: coffee
47) Bridges or tunnels: bridges

F A V O R I T E S . . .
48) Color of socks: white
49) Food: Pizza - Beautiful, Beautiful Pizza
50) Non-alcoholic drink: Mountain Freakin' Dew
51) Alcoholic drink: beer or scotch

I A M . . .
52) Wearing: T-shirt, brown pants, black hat
53) Listening to: Coalesce

C U R R E N T S. . .
54) Hairstyle: Covered by aforementioned hat
55) Annoyance: SQL servers that decide to crap out
56) Smell: Nothing at all.
57) Show: Tell
58) Book: Practical Common Lisp
59) Refreshment: Coke from lunch several hours ago
60) Thought: "Man, I can't wait to get the hell out of here..."

You talkin' to ME?

You talkin' to ME?
Originally uploaded by inkedmn.

Yep, still cute.

I wrote a program!

So, many times throughout the day, somebody in #gh or something will link to a torrent they're downloading. Even if I have the time, I prefer not to download things onto my work computer just because it's not the time or the place. But, invariably, I'll forget all about it by the time I get home to my own computer. Well, those days are over...

Introducing a little hack called AutoAzureus. Basically, you email your .torrent files to a special email account and this little guy will poll the mailbox, download any messages, extract .torrent files, and feed them into Azureus. It's pretty much fully tested under Windows XP, and I still have to write (or, if somebody were feeling particularly adventurous, they could write) the *nix implementation.

Here's what you need to do:

• Get an extra email account - Gmail is perfect for this, email me if you need an invite
• Install Python 2.4
• Install Azureus
• Go through AA.conf and fill in the values appropriate to your environment.
• Extract it and exeute

If Azureus isn't running it will be started. If it IS running, the .torrent file will be loaded into Azureus.

You can download this thing here...

Feedback LOVED.

I like this comment-based poll thing... here's another

Seinfeld or The Simpsons?

From what I can gather (from my friends and peers, at least), these are pretty much the big two as far as sitcoms. Sure, there's Friends, but that show (in my humble opinion) sucks.

Personally, I think Seinfeld is the clear choice. George Costanza is the single funniest character in the history of television.

(Honorable Mention goes to Family Guy, which is as good as The Simpsons, if you ask me).

How about you?

Comedy

The Top 100 Things I'd Do if I Ever Became an Evil Overlord

New Crap

Some changes going on over there on the right side of this here blog...

- Added a link to Reddit, a really cool community-based news site (which was funded by Paul Graham's VC firm). Check it out.
- There's now an "Add to Google" button just below the profile box. Click it to add this site's feed to Google Reader or your personalized Google homepage (which you should *all* be using, by the way...).
- Removed some duplicate links and stuff.

Oh, job update...

New job is, well, disappointing (much like losing both arms in a car accident would be disappointing) . So, the job hunt is in full swing. Email me if you know anybody who wants a C#/Python/SQL person :)

I'm sure I'll post something of some substance this weekend sometime (wow, three "some"s in one sentence). Going to see Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire in a couple ours - should be a good time indeed.

Ok, enough is enough... A Poll.

Now, I wasn't able to find a decent way of putting an actual poll up using some third party widget, so we're doing this the old-fashioned way. Comments.

Here's the question. To the right, you see the classic Mother's Animal Cookies. Everybody has had these at some point in their lives, so I should get buttloads of feedback on this.

Question:

Do the white ones taste different than the pink?

Joana and Chris both contend that, not only do they taste different, but they refuse to eat the pink ones because they think they taste so bad. I think this is bullcrap and they taste the same.

Thoughts?

Chad is frickin' back

A few months ago, a little internet mini-craze spawned as a result of a guy named Chad Kultgen. His claim to fame was the hilarious (and creative) product reviews on Amazon. There were only a handful up when I found out about them, probably less than 10. Well, they were only up for a short time before Amazon took them down, presumably because of the language (which I wouldn't consider offensive, but I can see how some would). The whole thing appeared on and left my radar inside of a week, but I still think back on it fondly.

Fast-forward to today - I'm getting the Google cache of a web page I need, and I wonder to myself, "Maybe that Chad guy's reviews are still in Google someplace". So, I google his name and, lo and behold, I find this.

That's right, if Amazon wasn't going to let him post reviews, he was just going to post them elsewhere in all their frickin' badass glory.

Welcome back Chad.

I guess I shouln't be suprised...

The vast majority of the crap on television is just that: crap. Aside from a handful of quality shows (The Simpsons, Family Guy and others), the airwaves are typically clogged up with garbage like Friends and whatever the WB happens to be showing. A little over two years ago, Fox shed upon an unsuspecting populace a glimmer of hope; hope that there were still people involved in entertainment who knew what comedy was about and could produce a quality program instead of the typical mindless drivel. They gave us Arrested Development.

The show, currently in it's third season, is amazing. Very dry, intelligent humor with no laugh track. The jokes come fast and furious, and one must frequently re-watch episodes to get the whole experience. It was a wonderful, wonderful time. But, then, just this morning, I got the horrible news...

Fox cancelled it. One of the last remaining, truly funny sitcoms gets the ax. Forget about the half-dozen pile-of-crap reality shows they air week after week (and yes, I understand that it's to a drooling, reality-crazed populace), that damn A.D. needs to go.

It's truly a sad day.

Freakin' Chris...

Fat props to the Doctor for taking first in a No-Limit Texas Hold'em Turbo event at Pokerroom.com.

Check out the tournament page here for more details.

So, yeah, big dumbass over here...

Awhile back, I decided it'd be fun to dual-boot my work laptop with Ubuntu Linux. I had oodles of disk space and had wanted to see how my Dell Precision M60 would run Linux. So, I setup a 10gb parition to install onto, and off I went...

That was several months ago. I've probably booted Ubuntu 5 times since installing, so I decided that I could really use that space now. The bootloader I was using to boot between OS's was installed to the master boot record, so I didn't think it'd be a problem if I just deleted the partition under windows and recreated it. "I just won't select linux from the boot menu!", I thought, stupidly. So, I deleted the partition on Friday and have been hibernating my machine ever since. That is, until this afternoon when the battery ran out. I go to turn the beast back on, and am presented with a lovely error message from grub. As soon as I saw it, I realized that grub gets it's menu information (among, I'm sure, many other things) from the linux parition that I'd recently deleted. Re. tarded.

So, I'm thinking "no problem, I'll just get an XP cd and boot off of it, get to the recovery console, do a quick 'fdisk /mbr' and be done with it". Thankfully, I hit up Strike and Braden, both of which gave me the same suggestion: "dude, don't use fdisk - fixmbr is your friend".

Next, I fire up my lappy with the XP cd, it starts it's install fun and then prompts me to start the recovery console, which I do. It's at this moment that I realize that I don't know the local administrator password (I log onto the domain at work, never locally). Grand.

Strike points me to Nordahl's Password Reset CD, a nifty (linux-based) utility that will rewrite local passwords. Boot off of that, follow the prompts, and my administrator password is now "".

Next, I get back to the recovery console, enter my blank password, type "fixmbr" and reboot. Voila, there's my hibernated windows session.

The moral of the story is this - don't go mucking with your partitions unless you know what you're effing doing.

This is too cool

Now, anybody who spends any amount of time on a computer has seen those little banners, like this:

I've always found these to be cool (only because they're simple and small). Now, if you're in agreement, you'll love this site (which, incidentally, is where I made this: )

So, go make a button/banner/thingie - and get creative. Expect several to appear here in the coming days...

First Dance

First Dance
Originally uploaded by inkedmn.

I've always liked this picture from our wedding, though the whole "washed-out" thing was an accident.

I've been uploading like crazy to flickr, but most of it has been older stuff. Still worth checking out, I think :)

Holden the Tomato

Holden the Tomato
Originally uploaded by inkedmn.

Rad

Testing Flickr's "Blog This" function :)

Pretty cute kid, no? I think we'll keep'im.

Soon enough...

I shall drink thee. Oh, yes, I shall...

Image Hosting

So, I'm pretty sure I've found a new home for all of my pictures over at Flickr. For a mere $25 per year, they'll host an unlimited number of images, unlimited bandwidth, free permanent archiving of all the images (in their original, high-resolution format), as well the ability to create all the "sets" (read: albums or collections) I want. It's a pretty sweet deal, and I'll be able to stop hosting them on my junky server at home.

They have several tools for uploading images, including one for OS X (which is rad). I'll be uploading them slowly but surely for the next few weeks, and my server will be up until they're completely transferred. Know that I do plan on paring down my massive archive of pictures, so some of the ones that don't get many hits will probably be omitted. Let me know if you don't see a picture you like, or something...

There are only a handful up there now, but you can view them here (don't forget to bookmark it).

One Small Victory

A couple days ago, I beat my father-in-law at backgammon for the first time. It was a thing of beauty :)

The Magriel book has really helped my play. Highly recommended for
anybody looking to study the nuances of the game. (See link to the
right)

Sweet, mostly a dude

You Are 60% Boyish and 40% Girlish

You are pretty evenly split down the middle - a total eunuch. Okay, kidding about the eunuch part. But you do get along with both sexes. You reject traditional gender roles. However, you don't actively fight them. You're just you. You don't try to be what people expect you to be.

How Boyish or Girlish Are You?

A Victim of Circumstance

So, as of tomorrow, I'll no longer be a professional programmer.

Apparently, my employer feels the development department is a bit too big. So, tomorrow I'll be meeting with the CFO and she'll tell me that I'm being transferred to network operations, doing netadmin stuff along with second-level tech support. I'll (hopefully) be able to still do some light programming (as it relates to systems administration), but we'll see just how real of a possibility that is - let's just say I'm not getting my hopes up.

I'm annoyed about this on many levels, but I've been told (repeatedly) that it has nothing to do with my work or my ability to my job. It's just a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Here's what really pisses me off about this:

• I'm really the only person in development who's passionate about programming. I've been programming for far longer than I've been getting paid to program.
• Part of the reason I was given for this move was the fact that I seem to glom onto network-related projects (since I have several years of network experience prior to becoming a developer). That's only because those were the projects I was given because I know about networking. So, my abilities in other areas made me the prime candidate for transfer. Lovely.

Now, like I said, it's not because I'm a bad programmer. I just haven't done much work on the super-visible projects.

Obviously, I'm glad they decided to transfer me instead of just cutting me loose (which would've been pretty freakin' horrible at this point in my life), but I still can't help but feel like my talents and energy won't be fully utilized in network ops.



That is all for now, more to come as the situation develops...