Happy Christmas

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The holidays are past, finally. Don’t get me wrong – I love Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the advent of a new year. It’s just insanely busy around here. You probably know the drill. Needless to say (but I’m going to say it anyway), that leaves precious little time for blogging.

Of note is the fact that our new living room furniture arrived on Tuesday evening. Whilst cleaning the carpets I noticed several problems with the old sofa and decided it was time to retire the old girl. Michelle didn’t argue, so we spent the better part of a Saturday afternoon looking for something. After we got an idea of what we wanted, I decided I had to model the living room and our proposed changes, because we didn’t really know if the new pieces would fit. Enter Google Sketchup; in the space of hours over a couple of days I built a rudimentary 3D model of the major features of the room plus most of the furniture we had planned to keep. It turned out to be a good thing because one of the things we were looking at was a sofa and love seat combo… and the love seat was simply too big for the space available.

Lots more happened but I’m quite out of time at the moment. It seems that I’ve never mentioned some of the toys that have consumed my limited attention span lately (MythTV/iPod rescued!/DS Lite) but I promise, I’ll get an update about some of these soon. Four months is way too long…

R.I.P. Steve Irwin

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Steve Irwin, best known as television’s Crocodile Hunter, has died after being struck by a stingray barb, according to The Age.

Our heart goes out to his wife and family.

UPDATE: The Daily Telegraph has more, describing it as a freak accident.

MORE: ABC and ninemsn.

[The ninemsn article has been updated with more details.]

My reading over at Marine Medic suggests that a stingray strike through the heart is a rare occurrence.

Parsing natural language

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Is the following statement true or false?

IF YOU HAVE TWO AND ONE IS TAKEN AWAY
THEN YOU HAVE ONLY ONE LEFT

This is true, right? I mean, it’s obvious. Whether you think of this as being a simple algebra problem or just common sense, that’s the answer that most of you just gave.

The problem is, you’re wrong. Sort of. Without other cues, a machine attempting to parse this statement could legitimately look at this as involving a set of things labeled “one” and “two.” In this light, if “one” is taken away, you have only “two” left. It is true that we can write the question without ambiguity, usually by adding quotation marks, but this is much more difficult with spoken language.

Just something to think about the next time you’re cursing an automated phone attendant…

How to Sell Your Boss

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I’ve been sitting on this for a long time. It’s time to get it out of my “inbox” – shame on me!

In his Working Smart blog, Michael Hyatt writes:

How to Sell Your Boss

Selling your boss is critical to your success. If you can’t get your boss’s approval when you need it, you are not going to go very far in your career.

As the president of a company, I spend a good deal of time listening to proposals. Those doing the pitching usually need my approval to proceed with their project. Frankly, I never cease to be amazed at how poorly most people do in this kind of situation. Unfortunately, most of us never receive any formal training […]

The article is moderately long but contains a lot of fantastic advice. I’ve been caught in most of the traps that he refers to over the years. Hopefully, never again.

Server crash

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After running for several months without incident (not counting the time one of the kids pushed the power button and put it to sleep), the rev A iMac that runs this site decided it was unhappy. I have no idea why. It just stopped. Sure, the mouse moved and everything, but nothing responded. An animated icon was suspended in the middle of a movement. “Nothing to do but pull the plug,” I thought, so that’s what I did.

As a result of all of this, of course, I’ve reviewed several of the logs with a more keen eye than usual. Apparently it doesn’t take long for the hackers to notice. I’ve got some security changes to make. But don’t worry – you won’t feel a thing, I promise.

The new web site is dead, and other tales.

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This was something I talked about well over a year ago that never really took off. It was slow. It ran on a piece of hardware I didn’t really want to maintain. It was outside my firewall, making it difficult to get to. It sucked power. And that’s the honest-to-goodness truth.

So, I killed it.

Now, I’ve put up a very bare-bones page that directs you to either my .Mac home page – the place where I put family pictures, movies, and such – or to this blog. It’s hosted on the same hardware as this blog. I’m also running an occasional streaming audio feed through the server. None of these, however, are the primary purpose of the machine, so that means it actually gets attention. Once in a while.

In other news related to past entries, some of which you probably know:

  • My iPod mini died. It was dropped once too many. It’s not completely dead, just mostly dead. But that’s enough to make it practically impossible to use in the car. Sigh.
  • NetBSD vs. ThinkPad update: I’ve updated to NetBSD 3.0.1 and KDE 3.5.3. Almost everything works, still. I goofed up something in power management that requires me to manually put the machine to sleep instead of just closing the lid. Overall, though, the machine is just as functional as when I first set it up. I’ve also tweaked Linux a bit so that it almost works properly. Still fighting with sound drivers, though. How annoying.
  • Katrina blew through more than eleven months ago. In spite of this, they still need your help down there. The rebuilding effort will be going on for a long time. Don’t forget them just because the media has. Please.
  • Gizmo Project has added XMPP (Jabber) IM support, and this past winter, Google Talk opened up their network. This means that you can IM your Google Talk friends with Gizmo Project and vice versa. We’re still waiting for voice chat interoperability, but expect that it will happen before long. (Feel free to give me a holler!)
  • I’m still not sold on converged mobile phone/PDA/music players. Two out of three might not be too bad. I don’t see a way to combine a phone and a PDA in a way that makes them palatable for general use. Yet. I sense a paradigm shift…
  • Microsoft won’t be adding support for Intel Macintosh systems to Virtual PC. What a waste. I suppose it’s just as well; Virtual PC doesn’t really seem to compete with VMware, the virtualization big kid on the block, anyway.

That’s about it. At least. that’s all I can think of, at the moment.

The new web site is dead. Long live the new web site!

You can tune a piano…

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But if you let me play that piano, it’s unlikely you’ll recognize that fact. (What, you expected me to say something about a certain tasty canned fish?)

I’ve been tinkering with Garage Band some more since my Retrocaptive entry back in 2005. I’ve also played with Logic Express a bit, and oh, what a difference! Anyway, at least for the time being I’m including links to the latest tunes I’ve put up over on iCompositions (you can find them on the left under My Music). Is it because they’re awesome tunes? No, but I really would like to hear your critical opinion, if you have one. Yes, even if you don’t like it.Thanks in advance!