March 2005 Archives

An Irishman named O'Malley went to his doctor after a long illness.

The doctor, after a lengthy examination sighed and looked O'Malley in the eye and said, "I've some bad news for you. You have cancer, and it can't be cured. You'd best put your affairs in order."

O'Malley was shocked and saddened but, being a solid character and good man, he managed to compose himself and walk from the doctor's office into the waiting room, where his son had been waiting.

"Well son, we Irish celebrate when things are good, and we celebrate when things don't go well. In this case, things aren't so well. I have cancer. Let's head to the pub and have a few pints."

After 3 or 4 pints, or more, the two were feeling a little less somber.

There were some laughs and some more beers.

They were eventually approached by some of O'Malley's old friends who were curious as to what the two were celebrating.

O'Malley told them that the Irish celebrate the good as well as the bad. He went on to tell his friends that they were drinking to his impending end. He told his friends, "I have been diagnosed with AIDS."

The friends gave O'Malley their condolences, and they had a couple of more beers.

After the friends left, O'Malley's son leaned over and whispered his confusion. "Dad, I thought you told me that you were dying of cancer, and you just told your friends that you were dying of AIDS!"

O'Malley said, "I don't want any of them sleeping with your Mother after I am gone."

Finally, I get to wish everyone a happy st pat's. I've had a horrible day and know now that I should never ever go to work on St Pat's again. This was the first time I went in in about 5 or 6 years and it proved a very bad idea. Some dinner and then off for some Guinness I go!

Defintely an amusing article at The Register. The author Ashlee Vance spends 3 paragraphs bitching about the tech folks coming to the SXSW music fest. Sadly, she hasn't paid enough attention to notice they will all be at SXSW Interactive, not the music fest which starts the day after SWSWi ends.

And they bitch about bloggers not doing their research and just wildly posting anything that comes to their mind. Great to see that "real" journalists make sure they have all their facts straight before publishing an article.

The Black Crowes are back! JamBase has all the details, including a full set of tour dates and who will be playing with them. Hope I can catch one of these dates.

The good folks over at South by Southwest have put up 2.6G of music of the artists playing at the festival. You can grab a torrent here.

Really Learn Spanish is a podcast to help you learn spanish. Very cool. I wish there was one to learn Irish (Gaelic), as thats the language I really want to learn.

Yesterday was my half birthday. That means just 6 more months until 30. Yikes!

Got a movie from Netflix that was just about cracked in two. Nice that I was able to report the shipping problem via the web site and they will send me the next available copy. Gotta love their service. Now I just need to remember to send the broken one back tomorrow.

Ok, I have to admit, I like watching poker on TV, its fun to watch people's strategies or lack there of. It can get slow at times, but otherwise, it can be enjoyable.

Now, Bravo has announced Celebrity Pool. Come on now! Do I really need to watch celebrities play pool? Is there ANY chance this is going to be enjoyable?

Watched Garden State on Tuesday. Cool movie. Definitely related to it in many ways. It's sort of a coming of age movie, but not really. It's got a good combination of humor and drama. I really enjoyed the two main characters and their interaction. And isn't Natalie Portman just the cutest girl ever? Her character really seems to bring out that cuteness of her. This movie definitely gave me a new respect for Zach Braff who wrote and directed this.

I've been working from home much of this week (except Monday which I actually stayed home sick). I love working from home. In a previous job, I did it for 3 years.

The best part about working from home is the freedom. I can work for a few hours and then go run to the grocery store or watch a movie or something, if I need to clear my head.

The other great thing is the lack of distractions. If I'm working from home, I don't need to worry about someone stopping by my cube to chat or something coming up that someone needs me for. Also, I can smoke right in place, instead of having to put on a jacket and go outside. That's a HUGE distraction at work.

While working from home this week, I started thinking about it some more. One of the huge things for me when working from home is the money I save. I started doing some numbers. If I go to work, it costs me about $6 for gas, $4 for tolls, and then usually $4-$7 for lunch. So let's say $17/day. Well, if I work from home, I can warm something up or at the most eat a $3 frozen pizza. Maybe $1 for the iced tea or soda I have while around the house. So, that's like $4/day. So, if I worked from home, I basically can save myself up to $13/day. If I worked from home 3 days a week, that's almost $40 a week I can save myself. Just 2 and it's still like $25/week. If you take $25 a week and times it by 52, that's $1300 a year. I really need to start working from home some more.

In this day and age, between e-mail, IM, cell phones, VOIP, laptops, high speed Internet access everywhere, why shouldn't anyone be able to work from home? Unless you need to physically be in a meeting or actually doing physical work, you should be able to work from home, right? I just don't understand why more people don't do it.

My biggest guess is that people don't feel they are (or just plain aren't) disciplined enough to work from home. People think they are going to spend the whole day watching TV or goofing off or something. I know I can do it, so I take advantage of it whenever I can. I usually get so much more work done when I do anyways. And now that I notice how much it actually saves me, I think I'm going to have to start doing it more.

This is one of the funniest things I have heard in a while.

A buddy of mine works in IT. One of the people at his work asked for some information. He told the person he would need to come pick it up. This is about 200 feet from his desk. The person said to send someone over. They said no, come pick it up. The person persisted. So, they sent someone over:

System Administators are not your personal slaves, learn the lesson now or you could be the next one with a monkey at your desk.

Just days after I posted about Terry O'Quinn, CNN.com has am article about him. They want to be me!

Over at Cruftbox a great post, What to know about SXSW Interactive, which gives some excellent tips on attending the Interactice part of South by Southwest.

I long to go to both the Interactive part as well as the Music Festival. Some day I will have the funds to take a week off and head down to Austin for some fun and learning. But, for those of you going now, you should definitely check out these tips, lots of good ones in there.

There are some rumblings starting on the interweb about a fall Bonnaroo in Vegas this year. Now that could be scary (and a boatload of fun). Anyone else heard this?

After having a rather lacking February in terms of posts, my goal for March is at least one post a day, we'll see how I do.

Linus has announced kernel 2.6.11. He has declared: "So it's now _officially_ all bug-free." Why do I think that comment is going to get him in trouble?

According to the dates in my previous post, Dave Matthews Band are playing Boston on 07/09 and 07/10. A friend notes the Red Sox are out of town that weekend. Looking closer at the schedule, the Red Sox are out of town the entire week before and the All Star Game is the following week, so they don't return until the following Thursday. This gives crews plenty of time to set up and clean up from a show. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.....

[via JamBase] Dave Matthews Band have announced a HUGE summer tour.

The good folks working on Beagle have put out release 0.0.7. The biggest change in this release is beagle can now run without an Inotify enabled kernel. The full release notes are here

I spent a bunch of time yesterday trying to get fejj's IMAP4 stuff working with Beagle. I think I may have bitten off a little more than I can chew. Hopefully I can make some more progress in the next few days.

I installed mod_security on here last night after getting so much referer spam to my CGI's that it was killing my machine. I set it up and then used the MT-Blacklist to mod_security script to put all the domains in my blacklist on the blocking list. Well, just overnight it blocked 100s of requests to my system, which means 100s of times that CGI scripts were not run. Yay!