Geeky Ramblings

Well, the election is over … and, as many will tell you, it’s quite a relief.

While, in general, I agree with this sentiment … however, without a doubt, this has been the most interesting & engaging campaign & election in recent memory.  The number of people who went out and actually voted is a testament to this.

Even the primaries were interesting … in my entire life, I cannot remember a primary where my vote actually made a difference.  This time everyone’s vote made a difference … down to the last state.

As most who read this blog know, I have been an Obama supporter for quite a while … but I have to say, the caliber of the Barack’s campaign was quite nice … he definitely took the high road and resisted the temptation to spread lies & rumors.  McCain’s campaign, not so much.

To my mind, this election should demonstrate to the world what our country is all about … we can put aside prejiduces, petty differences, and elect the person best suited for the job at hand … regardless if they are black, white, man, woman, etc.

I am definetely looking forward to the next four (or eight) years.

Well, it’s been a fairly busy two weeks …

• Work on the floor is (more or less) progressing.  I got the final rank of boards cut and installed.  We still need to touch of the paint, install the base molding, quarter round, and carpet threshold.
• Tuesday we went to village hall and cast our votes for Obama in the early voting program.  Just want to get it out of the way.
• Wednesday we headed down state to visit my niece Melissia … it was a thoroughly enjoyable trip.  We went for a walk in the Stephen Forbes state park and saw “Beverly Hills Chihuahua”.  The state park was nice and pretty empty.  About the time we left the park, it started raining.  Perfect timing.  Did a bit of shopping and then saw the moving (which was enjoyed by all in the theater … all 3 of us).
• Saturday both Ginny and I had checkups at the doctor … everything is in working order.
• Started an email exchange with a woman who wants me to GIVE her a domain I own … because she’s running a business with the name.  When I indicated that I would sell it to her, she got all bent out of shape.  I wasn’t asking multiple thousands of dollars for it … I only asked $600.  Last email from her indicated she would probably sue me for trademark infringement (she doesn’t currently have a trademark on the name, but she did indicate that she filed for one).  I’ll keep an eye on the name on the US Trademark Office’s website and, if it becomes registered to her, I’ll take down my placeholder site.
• Today I want to try and get the floor finished … at least the painting done and base molding & quarter round up.  The threshold might take a bit of time.

And, tomorrow, it’s back to work.

Well, mostly back to work … I really didn’t leave.  Like a glutton for punishment, I checked email periodically and had to address a few issues.  Nothing major though.  Hopefull, when I get back, the I18N project will be done and we can get on to real development again.

Kind of a busy two weeks … Ginny and I were on vacation.  Because of the cost of our last vacation (England & Ireland), we decided to make this a “Staycation” … basically stayed home and didn’t go anywhere big.

One of the things we wanted to was finish the floor in the smallest bedroom.  This was a project we started about 6 years ago … we had these grand ideas of turning it into a reading room, with a hardwood floor, a nice comfy chair, plenty of book shelves, etc.

Well, the project started out fine … but ended up completely stalled due to problems with the flooring material we chose.

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I just had to perform a slightly odd form of cat rescue: retrieve Riley from inside the box spring of the bed.

Riley likes to play around under the bed sometimes … playing with the fabric on the bottom if the box spring.

Today he managed to find a small rip in the fabric and make it larger. Once it was large enough, he crawled in and started exploring the inside if the box spring.

Both Ginny and I heard him under the bed, but it sounded kind of odd. He was also meowing in a somewhat odd way. When I looked under the bed, I didn’t see him. I did, however, see a jump in the box spring fabric. A bit of poking quickly identified the lump as Riley.

A quick slice of the fabric with my leatherman gave him an opening large enough for him to leave, but it took a bit if coaxing with some kitty treats to actually get to leave his new hiding place.

I’ll have to patch the rips today so he doesn’t get back in.

I found this Popular Mechanics pod cast while stumbling around today.  It features Adam Savage, of Mythbusters fame (one of my favorite TV shows), discussing science education and his annoyance with the whole Evolution vs. Creationism debate:

What I do see as a huge issue is a very anti-science vibe. Like I said, the newspapers talking about evolution versus creationism is very much an attack on science as a type of religion—believing that the scientific method is some type of religious belief. And it’s not!

That kind of attack absolutely is damaging science exploration across the whole country. I do think that’s a significant problem. And until we can get our head out of the sand and realize that science isn’t about truth—it’s why this debate about the “theory of evolution” bugs the hell out of me. What scientists mean by theory is very different than what people think.

People want science to give them these ultimate truths. When of course it’s never going to do that.

No scientist will ever even tell you that he’ll guarantee the sun will come up tomorrow because that’s not a scientific statement. He can say it’ll come up because the evidence supports it and he can say he’s 99.99999% sure that it’s going to come up, but something could always happen.

And that willingness to have your mind changed – which is basically what that is – that willingness to change, to see something different based on the evidence, that’s deeply scientific, and it’s deeply creative, and I don’t think enough people realize how creative science is as a field.

What can I say? I agree with Adam 100%.

Popular Mechanics Podcast

Found this via Mike Wills blog …

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Over the past few months I’ve heard lots of stories on the radio about the election and how people are going to vote.  I’ve got to tell you … there are some people that are just so incredibly stupid about how they make their voting decisions it just makes my blood boil.

Please, people, vote for the RIGHT reason … for instance:

• Don’t vote for McCain BECAUSE he’s a veteran … vote for his position on veterans affairs.
• Don’t vote for Obama BECAUSE he’s a African American … vote for his position on minority rights.

The worst example was from a story on NPR’s All Things Considered … during the primary they interviewed some women about Hillary Clinton running for the Democratic ticket … and one woman said that she thought it was admirable that Clinton was running … but it just wasn’t appropriate for her to be president because woman should be subservient to men.  To be fair, they were interviewing people at a conservative church gathering) … but still …  GAAHHHH!!!  What a stupid person.  People like that should have their voters registration cards revoked.

Of course, this raises one of my other pet questions … what’s worse … not voting or making an uninformed vote?

I’ve encountered a weird error in Wordpress … for some reason, when a post is submitted using the XML-RPC api (which is used by the Wordpress iPhone app), any leading ‘<’ symbols on the HTML is being stripped out.

Ginny noticed this a few days ago and I just confirmed it on a test blog.

The content that is posted looks something like this …

p>a href="http://beta.geekyramblings.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/p-
640-480-2fd9116d-5703-4e8b-b72c-2605beab02b5.jpeg">img src="http://
beta.geekyramblings.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/p-640-480-2fd9116d
--5703-4e8b-b72c-2605beab02b5.jpeg" alt="" width="225" height="300"
class="alignnone size-full wp-image-364" />/a>/p>

I’ll have to do some digging to find if this has already been logged or not.

I wish I was more skilled at PHP … I’m sure it’s someething I could sink my teeth into.

Update: FWIW I’ve opened ticket 7771 on the Wordpress tracking system on this issue.

In an effort to criticize John McCain’s economic policies and his apparent unwillingness to support “buy American” restrictions including Harley-Davidson motorcycles for the Secret Service, a group of American-made hybrid car owners and Harley riders rolled into downtown Grand Rapids, MI on Tuesday to support Barack Obama. The only stipulation for participation? Hybrids had to be American made, meaning no Priuses allowed.

- No Priuses Allowed at Hybrids & Harleys for Obama Rally

Darn, wish I had known about this before … would have been cool to roll along with in my Ford Escape Hybrid (built in Kansas City, MO).

My poor little Laptop … something’s gone wrong with it’s video card.

A few days ago I was watching a video on the laptop and something went horribly wrong … the video got completely corrupted.  Even rebooting the system didn’t help.  My initial thought was that my external monitor had gone casters up, so I undocked the system and booted it up.  Video on the laptops display was corrupted too.

Got on another PC and started a chat with Dell hardware support … I was quite surprised that the tech I chatted with quickly picked up on the fact that I was technically competent and didn’t waste my time with each individual mouse click and key press.  He simply said “OK, let’s delete the video adapter from the device manager”.

After we deleted the video adapter and reinstalled the video drivers, the problem seemed to go away.  The tech had me run a few video intensive programs to see if the failure came back.  It didn’t.

Yesterday, however, the problem came back.

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