Panasonic introduces JenniCam in a Box.

I really can't think of any other use for this. Any business needing security would use CCTV.

Don't forget your Brain Shaker Extreme Headphones while you're there.

I suppose I should have expected it, but it came as a shock nonetheless.

Cat Herding on the Military Range. Courtesy of the Department of Defense.

I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it myself.

A coworker's computer seemed possessed today. It would start typing a few words of gibberish from time to time into applications. Stuff like "the inferno Irish firefly ravishing purple bulldozer."

A bunch of us crowded around to watch -- it got weirder and weirder. Thinking that his computer had been hacked and an intruder was doing this, the admin pulled the network connection to his computer.

It kept on going.

We downloaded AdAware; nope, no spyware found. Virus checks found nothing. It truly seemed possessed.

Finally, we realized that it was only happening in Internet Explorer and various Office applications. After a bit of searching -- through Mozilla, which was unaffected -- we found out that it was the speech recognition engine, installed by OfficeXP, going haywire (details here).

Hm... the upper managers are all walking around with expressions like they were force-fed a bullfrog for breakfast.

My prediction: layoffs/sacking will occur on Friday or next Monday.

Edit: Actually, I think I've figured it out -- a sacking will occur, but only one. And he's (don't worry, not me, and I wouldn't mind seeing this person go) not going without a fight.

Surely, I can't be the only one to use the word cruft.

My coworkers are getting far too much entertainment out of this...

If I have to explain the same thing to the same guy for the third time in a row... augh. How *thick* can one person be?

Something is going on at work, but nobody seems to know what. But upper management has been involved in far too many secret meetings as of late and being very particular about ensuring that the whiteboards in the meeting rooms are thoroughly erased afterwards. Managers have also been told to ask who is and who isn't going to be here next Monday and Tuesday. Curious, neh?

I just want to go home and sleep.

[Edit: Just as I posted this, my manager and his manager got pulled into the big boss' office, and the door promptly shut.]

How the heck did I become so dang old? Ok, so 30 isn't that old... but I have memories of my parents when they were in their 30s.


Mattel recently announced the release of Limited-Edition "So-Cal" dolls for
the Southern California market:

Irvine Barbie
This princess Barbie is only sold at The Irvine Spectrum. She comes with an
assortment of Kate Spade handbags, a Lexus SUV, a long-haired foreign dog
named Honey, and a cookie-cutter house. Available with or without tummy
tuck and face lift. Workaholic Ken sold only in conjunction with
"augmented" version.

Tustin Barbie
This modern-day homemaker Barbie is available with Ford Windstar minivan and
matching gym outfit. She gets lost easily and has no full time occupation
or secondary education. Traffic-jamming cell phone sold separately.

Cerritos Barbie
In addition to perfect English, this Barbie also speaks fluent Japanese,
Chinese, Mandarin, and Pilipino. She earned a full scholarship to
Princeton, even though she didn't need one. Comes with her own
street-racing import car, complete with Japanese animation decals. Large
collection of video games sold separately. Careers or homes for this Barbie
are not available, because she will stay with her parents until they die.
If you purchase a Ken doll, he must move into her family's home and wait for
their inheritance.

Van Nuys Barbie
This recently paroled former "Porn Actress" Barbie comes with a 9mm handgun,
a Ray Lewis knife, a Chevy with dark tinted windows, and a methlab kit.
This model is only available after dark and can only be paid for in cash.
Preferably small, untraceable bills. Unless you are a cop, then we don't
know what you are talking about.

Santa Monica Barbie
This yuppie Barbie comes with your choice of BMW convertible or Hummer H2.
Included are her own Starbucks cup, credit card, and country club
membership. Also available for this set are Shallow Ken and Private School
Skipper. You won't be able to afford any of them.

Fontana Barbie
This pale model comes dressed in her own Wrangler jeans two sizes too small,
a NASCAR shirt, and a Tweety Bird tattoo on her shoulder. She has a
six-pack of Coors Light and a Hank Williams, Jr. CD set. She can spit over
5 feet and kick mullet-haired Ken's ass when she is drunk. Purchase her
pickup truck separately and get a confederate flag bumper sticker absolutely
free.

Newport Beach Barbie
This collagen injected, rhinoplastic Barbie wears a leopard print designer
bikini outfit and drinks cosmopolitans while entertaining friends at the
beach house. Percocet prescription, and monthly alimony checks are
included.

Riverside Barbie
This tobacco chewing, brassy-haired Barbie has a pair of her own high-heeled
sandals with one broken heel from the time she chased Beer-Gut Ken out of
Fontana Barbie's house. Her ensemble includes low-rise acid-washed jeans,
fake fingernails, and a see-through halter top. Also available with a
mobile home.

Laguna Beach Barbie
This doll is made of actual tofu. She has long straight brown hair,
archless feet, hairy armpits, no makeup, and Birkenstocks with white socks.
She prefers that you call her "Willow". She does not want or need a Ken
doll, but if you purchase two Laguna Beach Barbie's and the optional Subaru
wagon, you get a rainbow flag sticker for free.

Long Beach Barbie
This Barbie now comes with a stroller and infant doll. Optional accessories
include a GED and a bus pass. Gangsta Ken and his '79 Caddy were available,
but are now very difficult to find since the addition of the infant.

Rancho Santa Margarita Barbie
She's perfect in every way. Her home is perfect. Her family is perfect.
Comes with a part time job to earn her own spending money and a bible for
church on Sundays. Also has a pre-assigned carpool day. We don't know who
Ken is because he's always away hunting or biking or something....

City of Industry Barbie
This Spanish-speaking-only Barbie comes with a 1984 Toyota with expired
temporary plates and three baby Barbies in the back seat, but no car seats.
The optional Ken doll comes with a meat-packer's uniform and is missing
three fingers on his left hand. Green cards are not available for City of
Industry Barbie or Ken.

West Hollywood Barbie/Ken
This versatile doll can be easily converted from Barbie to Ken by simply
adding or subtracting the multiple "snap-on" parts.

1956... Budapest is rising...

First, if you haven't already, please send me your address for Christmas/Chanukah cards!

While waiting for a lengthy compile to complete at work today, I got the idea to remake Chess. I've only heard the music; it's never been well-received as a musical, so I haven't been able to see it. Downloaded the libretto...

Ugh. I see why. The first act builds the suspense so well, only to fall completely flat in the second act. We're talking month-old open bottle of soda flat.

My thought is to tweak it a bit... keep as much of the original music as possible, but change the roles a bit, and change plot complete. Perhaps instead of US vs. USSR, recast it as Kasparov vs. HyperBlue, a mythical successor to IBM's DeepBlue. The American will instead be the project manager, set on not just proving his excellence in creating such a powerful machine but also humiliating Kasparov.

Hmm...

Interestingly, I saw no fewer than 20 wild turkeys on my way in to work. Bad timing, fellas... :-)

And now for something not quite so different... (yes, this means you!)

Argh. My right pinky feels like it's going to fall off.

Why, oh why, do most of the relevant punctionation marks in C require significant pinky extensions? Trying to hit [ ] { } | ' and " while toggling back to  ;  and occasionally  :  is maddening...

I'm about to rip this keyboard open and relocate those keys between my index fingers.

Dear Canada

Dear Canada,

It has been brought to my attention that the maple leaf is your national symbol.

While I am touched by the pride it brings to you, I kindly ask that you not litter my yard with your symbol. I'll admit that the first time was funny; it was nice to spend the hour or so in the crisp autumn air raking away. This weekend, however, I spent about seven hours hauling 40 30-gallon bags -- that's a total of about 4500 litres -- of maple leaves off my rather steep front and back yards.

I ask that you please identify those responsible and send them to clean up the mess they have made of my yard. I will provide rakes, bags, and some refreshments.

Respectfully,
-dac

Time for a game of Good Idea, Bad Idea

Good Idea:
Finding some code that depends on a specific type of machine and rewriting it to work on any type of machine.

Bad Idea:
Changing code that works on any machine so that it works only on one kind of machine.

Very Bad Idea:
And that kind of machine is one that we don't ship software on.

Extremely Bad Idea:
Doing this to Dave's code.

Yep... someone did this to my code over the past week and checked those changes back into the main tree everyone uses. Now, instead of doing useful work, I'm stuck trying to clean up their mess.

My LiveJournal Trick-or-Treat Haul
dacut goes trick-or-treating, dressed up as a rodent of unusual size.
aki gives you 13 yellow lemon-flavoured gummy bats.
cappadocius gives you 10 yellow orange-flavoured gumdrops.
carn_carby gives you 5 light orange spearmint-flavoured miniature candy bars.
chanilye gives you 7 mauve cherry-flavoured pieces of bubblegum.
hokie gives you 12 dark blue grape-flavoured wafers.
jennay138 tricks you! You get a block of wood.
jessi16 gives you 5 light orange peach-flavoured gummy bats.
kalamar gives you 8 blue chocolate-flavoured gummy bats.
particleman gives you 18 mauve strawberry-flavoured pieces of chewing gum.
polarbee tricks you! You lose 33 pieces of candy!
dacut ends up with 45 pieces of candy, and a block of wood.
Go trick-or-treating! Username:
Another fun meme brought to you by rfreebern.

Saw Blue Man Group's concert tour last night with Tam (it was our anniversary-ish date). Was quite excellent and different from the show in Boston. I would, however, like to kill the people around us for talking (loudly and obnoxiously) through both opening groups (Tracy Bonham and Venus Hum, who were also in the BMG show itself).

My family is being threatened by the fires in San Diego and has told to stand by to evacuate, but the order hasn't come yet. They're already hosting one friend who had to evacuate. From what I can tell, the entire county is on fire. You know things are bad when most of the weather forecasts state "smoke." My mom got excited on Sunday when she heard rain falling on the roof; when she went outside, it turned out to be raining embers, and she was far less excited about that.

This is a portable post

I'm starting to get very pissed off by the number of "build systems to end all build systems" that exist.

My latest beef is with Jam. "jam" makes "make" look pretty.

Make isn't very portable, but at least it comes with every system. And you can install GNU's make tool, which a lot of tools seem to have converged upon.

Jam is supposed to be a portable replacement for make. If it's so damn portable, why do (at least) three different, incompatible versions exist? There's Perforce Jam, from which everything else is derived. But to build FreeType, I need FTJam. Today, I needed to build Boost, which wanted its own version, BJam.

Ok, ok, well, if it can detect my platform's oddities, I can live with that. Oops. It can't.

Nevermind that I have Python in my path. bjam insists on looking for it in /usr/local, unless I set an environment variable documented in some back alley of the Boost manual.

Ok, set PYTHON_ROOT and PYTHON_VERSION. Run bjam again. Hmm... ok, it's going... oops. Those look like errors, and bjam isn't bothering to stop. Nope, just going ahead, scrolling the errors away so I can't see what the problem is.

Dig though manual. Oh, gee, despite all this configuration hoopla, it doesn't support Python 2.3. Ok, find older python... reset PYTHON_ROOT and PYTHON_VERSION... rerun bjam... wait... halt... reset variable... rerun...

I hit a bunch of people with a truck during lunch.

And I got prizes.

http://jet.ro/dismount/

I was told today by Glen (engineering director) that Jim (our HR/CFO/IT manager) had denied my timecard from last month when I took two days off for my uncle's funeral. I had marked those days as "absent" rather than "vacation," but apparently Jim has decided that the death of an uncle is not significant enough to warrant paid-time-off.

Instead, he is going to deduct two vacation days (I have a negative balance at this point). Glen, however, told me to take two random days off and mark them as here. Uh, ok, sure...

I'm sure there's a moral to this story. Maybe it's, "Stay in school, kids, because working for The Man is not fun."

Many of you have heard about the "Damn Fan" incident at Wrigley Field last night (for those who didn't: a fan nabbed a foul ball before Alou could catch it, possibly robbing the Cubs of an out; the rest of the inning went down hill from there, with the Marlins scoring eight runs).

A few AP and Knight Ridder articles (e.g., this Atlanta Journal-Constitution article) quote some rabid fan named Jim Cuthbert, of Lombard, Ill., who was "escorted shouting from the area" and ejected from the stadium.

Nope. No coincidence. That's my uncle.

Apparently, he's going to be on Inside Edition tonight. Fox Sports is sending a limo over to take him and my aunt Judi to the game tonight.

Interestingly, this isn't the first time he's been involved in an incident of this type to be televised. He was also ejected from a Hawks game and was shown on local Chicago news being escorted away by Chicago police.

Sittin' on a street corner, waiting for my compiles to finish, discovering the odd stuff you can buy through CafePress...

^_^

How can you bring your company's main Solaris server in 60 seconds or less?

Two words: ioctl SIOCGIFARP

Uh, yeah. So I managed to bring what little productivity we have here to a complete halt from noon until 3:30 today. That's only 150 man-hours lost. And, yeah, 3.5 hours is how long it takes for that machine to boot up. (Actually, we were surprised it came back that quickly...)

Of course, it's Sun's fault for having a bug like that allow any given user to take down an entire machine. But it's not like they're going to fix it or anything...

Every so often, I go and see what bugs our customers are filing. This reminds me why I actively hate our customers, and why a good chunk of them should be taken out to pasture and shot.

My loathing of our field applications engineers runs a close second.

It disappoints me that companies run by people like this manage to stay in business.