Your silhouette is so stationary

The first spacewalk by the Chinese space program. It's nice to see some more competition in the space race, the more the merrier!

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And you may ask yourself-Well...How did I get here?

It is a sign that things have gone severely strange when I find myself agreeing with Andrew Sullivan on a regular basis.

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And now my memory's full

Two key quotes (neither directed at me) that I took away from the status meeting:

Never explain in production.

You aren't allowed to talk! You are read-only for this meeting!

The first may require some decrypting. There is a tool in IBM's DB2 database server (and probably other databases, I'm not a DBA nor do I play one on the internet) called 'explain' which does just that when run against a database object (stored procedure, table, blah blah blah you don't care). Fun tip: running this creates a new schema to store the output of the explain, but the user that creates it does not have permissions to delete it.

That's sort of like saying "Oh, yea, you have permission to create a new Word document on your desktop, but you have to get a system administrator to delete it for you."

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Tick tick tickin' in my head

This weekend we bought a coffee machine. I've never owned nor even operated one before, so this is going to be a learning experience. As a wise friend of mine often used to say "Oh no, not another learning experience!" Here's the thing. The coffee maker has a built in clock. Which makes it easily the third of fourth clock in my kitchen. Why does every piece of electronics have a clock in it? I don't need another clock. And if I did, I'd get an aesthetically pleasing wall clock that functioned as an attractive piece of artwork as well as a functional timepiece.

In the 2.5 minutes of research I did on this topic I found the following items, other than the usual suspects, with clocks built in.

• Can opener
• Bookcase
• Photo frames
• Dress shoes
• Mirror
• Inflatable Bed

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I wish I was anything but a rock

I saw the headline "The Stirling fauna: big critters from the dawn of time?" and expected dinosaurs or giant wooly mammoths or something along those lines. I had not realized that the particular research in question is focused on fossils from two BILLION years ago. Where giant creatures are on the scale of 2-3mm.

Unrelated conversation from this morning:
grizzly: AHHHHHHH. The theme song from Weeds is stuck in my head and won't get out.
rev_matt: heh, I had some stupid kids song running through my head this morning, so I'm on a Tom Waits cleansing
grizzly: A Tom Waits cleansing - so, you're alternating whiskey and beer while smoking 3 packs of cigarettes?

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You want it all

On a warm summer day there was nothing quite like going to the mom and pop grocery across from my best friend Brian's house and getting an It's It!. There was a poster next to the freezer case that said "What is it? It's-it!" This delicious concoction was a favorite treat throughout my childhood all the way up until I move to L.A. They were only sold in the Bay Area, and everyone knew what an It's-It was. Vanilla ice cream between two oatmeal cookies and dipped in chocolate. Incredible.

Last night something Boo said at the dinner table while eating her ice cream caused me to start singing Faith No More's hit single Epic. Which reminded me of pet sitting for my sister at her apartment and having access to MTV for the first time, when the video was in heavy rotation. The next day I went out and bought the cassingle to see if I liked it enough to buy the whole album. The b-side. Edge of the World, is what really sold me on them and remains one of my favorite FNM tracks.

As my daughters finished off their ice cream I had one of those moments of clarity in which it dawned on me that the obtuse chorus of Epic may well refer to the delicious ice cream treat. It's it/What is it?/It's it/What is it? Only took me 19 years to figure that one out.

Now I'm craving one, and they're only available by the case.

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I'm curious with myself

Yesterday I had to renew my I.D. badge. It looks very "I am curious: orange." The overall quality of the layout, colors, and fonts are so poor that I'm sure that if I showed it to anyone outside the agency they'd think I made it myself at home as a joke.

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Answer the phone, I know that you're home

Our architect and external interface team lead came up to my cube and the architect was on a cell phone. He said "Hang on, he's right here" and handed the phone to me. I of course totally missed the point was that he was showing off a shiny new 16G iPhone. It's pretty damn slick, I must say.

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And it leaves me blind

New iTunes. OK, so some medicated rambling on what's annoying me at this point. Yay that I don't have to upgrade to another full version of QT. Small blessings et al. They took away album list view or whatever it was called that grouped each album into it's own box and showed the artwork on the side. That was my preferred view. Grid view is crap if you are a heavy podcast listener. Click the podcast, then click to open the list of episodes, then click the episode? WTF? Thanks for making it harder to actually listen to podcasts, that's so helpful.

If you were foolish enough to upgrade right away instead of waiting for others to discover the downsides, you can go back to the working version at oldapps.com

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No peace in this mind

Migraines bad. This has been an interesting experience. Of course, at this point we're not even entirely sure it's a migraine, still awaiting MRI results to rule out worse things. My head is still sore, and I'm still having moments of difficulty concentrating, though now unrelated to flashes of pain and probably attributable to medication. It's funny that half the side effects of my anti-inflammatory are identical to the symptoms I'm having. How will I know if it's helping?

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There are things that make me Dad

Orac has an excellent overview of the most recent studies that demonstrate no link between vaccines and autism. Note that these studies did not fail to find causation, they even showed that there's not even correlation between the two.

There is a clear and documented link between the decrease in vaccinations and the increase in measles outbreaks.

There is zero relationship between vaccines and autism. That is all.

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The man in the White House has got a conscience like a sieve

I was talking politics with Mom last night and she was as baffled as I that more than eighty percent of the country believes we're on the wrong track and yet 47% plan on voting for four more years of wrong track. This has been one of Bill Maher's main points of his last season and I expect it will continue to be so. The answer, of course, is obvious: The polls are wrong. Wait, no, I think it's "family values". Or is it "the war on terra?". While certainly as Thomas Frank noted there is a large contingent of the population who will gladly vote against their own best interest in order to promote an ideological issue that will never impact their lives I think there is a much more prosaic answer and it is twofold. First: The mainstream media is quick to jump on any story that carries negative connotations for a Democratic candidate. This constant stream of data that casts the candidate in a poor light likely has a statistically significant impact on undecided voters. Negative stories about Republicans are certainly reported on but to a much lesser degree and are largely ignored or ridiculed on the talk shows where most of the public opinion is informed. Second: This country is still too racist to elect a President who is not a rich white male. It really is as simple as that. Hillary voters who are voting for McCain? Progressive women who fought hard for their candidate on the basis of women's rights are going to vote for someone who is opposed to most of their key issues just to spite Obama? That seems likely. It is a neanderthal view of women as highly emotional irrational creatures who will cut off their nose to spite their face. Yet in spite of the fact that I haven't been able to track down a single one of these supposed "Hillary voters for McCain" it was the media's favorite story until the announcement of Palin. One of the main themes in the Democratic Convention coverage was that 'in spite of half-hearted statements on the part of Hillary and Bill, most Hillary voters will be voting for Obama'. And yet those thousands of reporters could only find a handful that they quoted in every single story the entire week, which I suspect is an accurate reflection of how large this alleged movement actually is. As frustrating as it is, I forecast McCain's win of the Presidency back in April and I hold to that prediction.

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