Beat down for the brown

Prod Support: You're going to let them do ______. That's a recipe for disaster.

Griz: Did you *read* the Business Requirements.

PS: Well, I just assumed you guys couldn't code it so I didn't worry about it.

Griz: Thanks for the vote of confidence

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I know a hundred games of solitaire

The situation was desperate. The volume had become too much. There was only one thing left to do: buy a new bookshelf for Miss Boo. She has one hundred books in her new bookshelf. Plus a dozen or so scattered around her Omi's and the car. This girl is definitely a reader.

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Black Sweat

The new single off the new Prince album is out on iTunes. Black Sweat b/w Beautiful, Loved, & Blessed.

Kickass.

Also, Joe Satriani has a video podcast where he talks about and plays excerpts from his upcoming album. And Ed Robertson has a podcast he's doing from the studio where Barenaked Ladies are recording their new album. 2006 looks like a good year for music and I'm excited that so many artists are embracing the new technologies.

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But if you know what life is worth

So Baylor U and Bob Jones U are banning Starbucks because a single one of their 'inspirational quotes' on their cups is about homosexuality. I wonder if they will now start boycotting a few other companies as well. Just a few of the companies that are supportive of gay rights. This list is by no means exhaustive, if you are aware of others please let me know. Some people may want to boycott these companies over the issue, I’m more likely to patronize them for the same reason.

• Adobe (including Macromedia, which means Flash web animation software)
• Aetna Inc.
• Agilent
• Amazon
• American Airlines
• American Express
• Anheuser-Busch (including Busch Gardens, SeaWorld, Sesame Place)
• Apple Computer Inc.
• AT&T (including SBC, Cingular)
• Avaya Inc.
• Bausch & Lomb Inc.
• Best Buy (including Future Shop and Magnolia Audio and Video)
• Borders (including Waldenbooks)
• BP (including am/pm, Castrol, ARCO, and Aral)
• Capital One Financial Corp.
• Cargill (including Renessen, Black River Asset Management, Seara, Sunny Fresh Foods, Sun Valley, Taylor Beef, North Star Steel, Mosaic Fertilizer, and NatureWorks)
• Chase Bank (including J.P. Morgan, Chase Manhattan, Chemical, Manufacturers Hanover, Bank One, First Chicago, and National Bank of Detroit)
• Charles Schwab (including U.S. Trust)
• ChoicePoint Inc.
• Chevron (including Texaco and Caltex)
• Chubb
• Cisco (including IntelliShield, Scientific-Atlanta, and Linksys)
• Citigroup (including Diner’s Club, Smith Barney, Citibank, Primerica, Citifinancial, Women & Co)
• Coca-Cola (including Dasani, PowerAde, Nestea, Minute Maid
• Corning (including Steuben Glass)
• Credit Suisse
• CVS Pharmacy (including Eckerd’s)
• DaimlerChrysler (including Mercedes, Dodge, Chrysler, Jeep)
• Dell
• Deutsche Bank
• Disney (including the parks, tv channels, stores, toys, ABC in all forms, ESPN in all forms, Touchstone Pictures, Hollywood Pictures, Miramax Films, Buena Vista, Baby Einstein, Hyperion Books)
• Dow Chemical (including INCLOSIA, Univation, EQUATE Polymers)
• Eastman Kodak Co.
• Ford (including Lincoln, Mercury, Mazda, Volvo, Jaguar, Land Rover)
• Freescale
• GAP (including Old Navy, Banana Republic, Forth & Towne)
• General Mills (including Pillsbury, Betty Crocker, Old El Paso, Hamburger Helper, Nature valley, Totino’s, Cascadian Farms, Muir Glen, Gold Medal, Bisquick, Yoplait, Colombo, Haagen-Dasz, Green Giant)
• GlaxoSmithKline (including Aquafresh, Binaca, Gaviscom, Nicorette, Polident, Poligrip, Sensodyne, Tagamet, Tums, hundreds of prescription medications, as well as vaccines for diphtheria, hepatitis, tetanus, and influenza)
• GM (including Buick, Cadillac, Chevrolet, GMC, Hummer, Pontiac, SAAB, Saturn)
• Goldman Sachs
• Hewlett-Packard Co. (including Compaq)
• Hilton Hotels (including Conrad Hotels, Doubletree, Embassy Suites, Hampton Inn, Homewood Suites)
• Home Depot
• Hyatt (including Hawthorn Suites, AmeriSuites, Summerfield Suites)
• IBM
• Intel Corp.
• Intuit (TurboTax, Quickbooks, Quicken)
• Johnson & Johnson (including Neutrogena, LifeScan)
• Kaiser Permanente
• Kraft
• Lehman Brothers Holdings
• Lexmark
• Levi Strauss & Co. (including Dockers)
• Lincoln National
• Liz Claiborne
• Lucent Technologies Inc.
• Mellon Financial (including AFCO, Franklin Portfolio Associates, Newton Capital Management, Dreyfus Corporation, Founders Asset Management, Eagle Investment Systems,
• Merrill Lynch
• MetLife
• Miller Brewing
• Mitchell Gold Co.
• Motorola
• Nationwide
• NCR Corp.
• Nike Inc. (including Converse, Cole Haan, Bauer, Hurley International)
• Nissan
• Nordstrom
• Northern Trust
• PBS
• Pepsi (including Frito-Lay, Gatorade, Tropicana, Quaker)
• Pfizer (including Benadryl, Dramamine, ept Pregnancy Test, Listerine, Neosporin, Rolaids, Sudafed, Unisom, Zantac, and many prescription medications)
• PG&E ...

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  Posted on February 23, 2006 | 1 comment so far.

They need to conform to our marketing plan

I don't recall where I read this, but there was a blog entry a few days ago from a woman criticising the iTunes Music Store. Her position was that since she wasn't that into music and didn't care much about buying songs or albums, then the iTunes Music Store was doomed to failure unless they changed their business model to cater to people like her.

This would be like me telling Tommy Hilfiger that unless they catered to my fashion sense (and I do have some. Stop laughing.) then they would go bankrupt.

If you aren't part of the target market for a product or service, chances are the company is aware of the segment you are a part of but doesn't view it as one they are interested in. They're just not that into you. Move on.

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Searching for the unknown crumb

Mmmmm marble mocha macchiato.

The only problem is the belgian chocolate stir stick you get isn't long enough to properly stir a venti. You have to stick you fingers about a half inch into the drink to reach the white chocolate on the bottom. Very tasty nonetheless.

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All the critics love u

Prince live at the 2006 Brit Awards with Wendy and Lisa and Sheila E. Seriously incredible if you get a chance to see. Tamar is thankfully relegated to a background singer except for joining Prince at the mike for the choruses in Purple Rain.

It opens with the new track Te Amo Corazon, which is a pretty nice ballad. One of his better ones of the past decade that segues into Fury, the rock song he played on SNL. He finishes out with a full Purple Rain that has all the starts in the audience on their feet. Sheila and the secondary drummer do a smooth swap in between measures and she hops onto the timbales etc for Let's Go Crazy. Good stuff all around.

I saw some of the Stones performance at the superbowl, it was just plain boring. This was incredible, energetic, exciting, and impressive. I would really be happy if he'd hire a better choreographer for his dancers though, that was some silly high school "Bring It On" nonsense.

Unrelated, I forgot what a bad Doug E Fresh clone Will Smith is.

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Somebody is diggin' my bones again

My daughter is obsessed with dinosaurs. Everyone who has been over recently has been bombarded with dinosaur books and toys to admire as she announces "DINOSAUR AT THE SCIENCE CENTER!!!!" We spent much of Sunday morning googling pictures of dinosaurs. Which, to me at least, is more interesting than pictures of steam.

Note that a google image search for 'steam' returns wildly different results from a 'steamy'. And a search for 'T Rex' will just give you tons of pictures of bad 70's glam rock.

Because of this interest in dinosaurs I can't get the song by King Crimson out of my head. So I've been teaching her to sing it, and she does. Which is just hilarious. I crack up every time.

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Slow motion like a dream but real time is what it seems

Live blogging today, because Friday is a slow day in blogland

7:00 am the next day - Another wild friday night at our house: vacuuming, playing catch, bath time, and everyone in bed by 10pm. N tried to convince me it was time to get up at 3am, but I talked her out of it. She was more persuasive at 6:30.

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15:45 - Amazing how much I can get done when everyone is gone. This bodes quite well for Monday. My music has been entertaining my coworkers more so than normal today, as I'm listening to the Coverville podcast. Snow Patrol's take on Crazy in Love is great, but it's hard to top Richard Cheese singing Down With The Sickness.

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14:30 - For some reason, Fridays are not slow here. The big front-burner system always seems to have some critical problem on Friday afternoons Or maybe the users just notice the problems when they try and actually get some work done before leaving for the weekend. It's not unusual for the gov Project Manager and the Architect to show up at my desk at 4pm wanting something hotfixed in production and backported to cert, test, and dev. Yes, fix in prod and backport.

But Monday is a federal holiday. The few federal employees who bothered showing up today mostly left by noon. So I can spend the rest of the afternoon catching up on all the action items I haven't had time for all week.

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12:40 - Wasabi Sushi on Washington is a pretty nice place. And I'm better with chopsticks than I would've thought. Note that when they say "spicy" they really mean it. Also note that four programmers can't figure out how to divide a bill.

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11:00 - I spend a lot more time in meetings these days. I don't enjoy meetings. But I'm feeling pretty good about the role I have now and I think I'm making good progress. Copious notes and follow up are the key to configuration management.

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9:30 - I've tracked down the problem (MQ Series, of course) while Sparks and the architect have tracked down the code side of the issue and mapped out the data problems created by it. Read my wife's blog and Ben's and decided to put of my half-written post about music and generations in favor of live blogging.

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8:12 - Keith lets me know that there is a substantial problem in production with accounts and to be ready to tackle it when I get to the office

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8:10 - Tell Sparks and Keith at Starbucks that N is now a messenger. She can tell mom what she had for breakfast and ...

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'Cos I'm a slut and you just suck

There was a time when I cared what people thought about my musical preferences. I firmly espoused the view that 'You cannot say band x or genre x sucks, because it's just your opinion". This was entirely a defensive view, to protect my burgeoning taste from assault. I quietly believed that punk rock and country and top 40 all sucked, but I wouldn't say it out loud.

Of course, I was also 16. What the hell did I know. Sure, it's an opinion. It can't be 'wrong'. The facts on which an opinion is based can be wrong. The world is not flat. You are free to believe it all you want, that's your opinion. Doesn't make it true.

I no longer care what people think of my musical taste, which has worked out well for me. I'm open to listening to all sorts of things most people would never consider listening to. And I enjoy a fair amount of it. And I think lots of music sucks, too. What the hell is this emo crap that is suddenly so popular? I was wrong about punk, but I still hate country music, and most top 40 as well.

Your favorite band sucks.

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And it lives in Minneapolis

Title: Is rock dead?
Author: Kevin J.H.Dettmar
Publisher: Routledge Press
Rating: 8 out of 10

This reads much like a thesis on the history of declarations of the demise of rock music. In fact, it reads much like my senior thesis on the history of opposition to rock music. If I'd gone on to grad school, I may well have written a very similar book. Dettmar did extensive research, and does a very nice job of drawing parallels to similar histories of the death of all other art forms, with particular attention to jazz and classical music. Interestingly, while he does address the MP3/file sharing phenomenon he fails to make the connection to previous uproars over radio, vinyl, audio tapes, and CDs.

The writing itself is pedestrian but serviceable, and there is certainly no great depth or obscure trivia revealed. If you are not well versed in rock history and trivia, this covers all of the high points you'd want to get familiar with it. If you are more like the guys in High Fidelity, this would be a pleasant way to while away an afternoon.

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Killed my television

So HBO doesn't want you to be able to watch their shows at any time other than those they choose. To me this is the semantic equivalent of "We don't want you to watch our shows." If this goes into effect We can cancel our HBO subscription because I won't schedule my life around TV shows.

As long as I can watch them on my TiVO when it's convenient for me, I enjoy the specials and Bill Maher, and Curb Your Enthusiasm. But I often don't get around to watching a given show until a week or more after it broadcasts. If I can't do that, then the monthly fee I pay to HBO is wasted and I'll just stop paying it and find other things to do with my limited free time.

There is more and more competition for consumer entertainment dollars. HBO appears to be announcing that they aren't interested in being competitive. If I were a shareholder, I'd be very very concerned.

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Random, random, obtuse

via griz: One of the other projects found that [offshore group] had coded VBSCRIPT CALLS directly into stored procedures. Because they can. Why on earth Microsoft thought this was a good idea to be able to do that I'll never know.

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It brings us closer together

We finally have some snow. It probably won't stick around long, but it's nice to get it at all with how warm this winter has been. But, you know, there's 'no such thing as global warming'.

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I try to catch my breath again I hurt so much

I have a name for my pain, and it is bronchitis. Antibiotics: good. Albuterol inhaler: nasty.

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I rock, therefore I am

Just saw the Prince SNL performance. Yes, at 5am. My daughter was up sick most of the night. Fury is a killer rock track, it will probably be the first single of the album (due 3/21). Hope it's on iTunes the same day, but Prince is one of the few artists that I'd still want to buy the physical CD for. There is a thread in the Bruce Springsteen group with some pretty funny comments. I do agree that it highlighted Prince's mad guitar skills.


The second song, Beautiful, was solid but I think Tamar is overrated. I thought it was Tamar Braxton when I first heard who his new protege is, but I don't know if that's accurate.

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My Own Kind Of Heaven

matt: can you turn the rsync cron on on production?

sysadmin: i don't know, what does it like? candy? flowers? fancy dinners? maybe a poem? oh wait, written by a guy -- porn

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