Don't feel much better after yesterday. It hit M. hardest, of course, and it was so hard for me to see how sad she was.
While we were sitting around being depressed I got mediatomb installed on my upstairs FC8 box had it scan my music directories and photo directories, and had my new PS3 showing our photos and music over our TV. That was pretty cool. We went through a lot of our photos from our trips to the Northeast Brasil and Chile. Also streaming music downstairs to the PS3/TV was really cool.
It cheered both of us to see the photos from our trips. We had a lot of great trips that I'll never forget. I still can't get over how beautiful Puerto Varas and Puerto Montt were. The hotel/posada we stayed in in Puerto Varas (Puerto Duecher) remains the best place we've ever stayed overall for beauty, cost and comfort. Every morning we would wake up amazed by the view, sitting right across from Volcano Osorno.
Thursday, December 06, 2007
Wednesday, December 05, 2007
Sunday, December 02, 2007
Testing posting from Google Docs
That last entry was written awhile ago, but I was testing posting to my blog from Google docs.
Contemplating the Good
Contemplating The Good
Imagine a person who was wholly inspired by the genius of Plato that he devoted his whole life to pursing the intellectual contemplation of The Good. But because of this passion and whole-hearted devotion to the contemplation of The Good that he neglected all else: his family, his friends, his work. Such devotion was his that the rest of his life was not good. Because of his contemplation of the The Good, his life wasn't good? Could he really have understood The Good if he subsequently lived a life like that? Wouldn't the quality of his life demonstrate that he really didn't understand The Good?
Imagine a person who was wholly inspired by the genius of Plato that he devoted his whole life to pursing the intellectual contemplation of The Good. But because of this passion and whole-hearted devotion to the contemplation of The Good that he neglected all else: his family, his friends, his work. Such devotion was his that the rest of his life was not good. Because of his contemplation of the The Good, his life wasn't good? Could he really have understood The Good if he subsequently lived a life like that? Wouldn't the quality of his life demonstrate that he really didn't understand The Good?
Shot an 82 today, Longhorns beat #1 UCLA and I didn't get paged whlie golfing ....
Quite a day. I'm oncall this weekend, and it's been a bit busy (been called out three times, Friday, Saturday and Sunday). I had a tee time at 1:39 PM at Avery Ranch and it was in the 80's in December, so really wanted to play. But I got paged out at 12:15 PM while we were still in church. It was someone from a different team who needed help (althought it was never really an issue for my team; the guy from the other team wasn't too bright). I'd brought my laptop with me, and ran out to the car, fired up the laptop and tried to connect with the Sprint broadband card. Every time I use this, it seems to need to update the firmware of the card. It did again, and took about 15 minutes to do it. Meanwhile, my crappy battery in my laptop lasts only about 45 minutes anyway, so I'd barely started, and the battery was already low. I finally got connected and talked with the customer directly. He was getting errors in DB2 (so not sure why they tried to send it to my team anyway). I talked to the customer (internal customer) briefly on sametime, and then drove to Avery Ranch while logged in.
Took me about 20 minutes to get to Avery Ranch while I was still connected via my laptop (which was about to run out of battery power). I ran into the restaurant and plugged in my laptop, ordered lunch and continued to work with the customer. I had at that point about an hour before I had to tee off. Eventually, the customer resolved it themselves (and it was certainly a DB2 issue, so not sure why it was ever sent to my team). I finished eating, paid and even got to hit a few balls at the range.
So it's nearly a miracle that I'm playing golf at all. But the whole time I'm playing doom is hanging over me. If that damn oncall phone goes off, it's all over. But it never goes off. And I shoot an 82. At a tough course. And I only have 27 putts. And I hit the ball as well as I have in a long, long time. One par 4 on the back side I hit a provisional tee shot that traveled beyond the flag on the fly (it was a par 4, albeit a short one). The yardage for this hole seemed all wrong on the card (said 371 for the tees we were playing from, but there's no way that was right). The closer tees said 297, and we think that was probably closer. But it's also possible that it was 320 or 330. The ball actually landed in the sand, else I probably would have rolled another 20 or 30 yards. It felt like the biggest drive I've ever hit (abstracting away weather, steep downhill grades and or crazy bounces etc), and I've other ones that have gone easily 330.
I had a birdie on the first hole which usually doesn't bode well for my round.
When I got home, I helped M. cook, and we had a really nice dinner. And she let me watch the Longhorns play number-one ranked (in the Coaches poll) UCLA at Pauley Pavilion and the Longhorns pulled off a miracle win with Damion James dunking for the final score when DJ just threw up a prayer. We're much better this year that we were last year, even though we lost Kevin Durant. Quite a day. My handicap had started to balloon this year, and I was at 20.60. I'm hoping this will get me back under 20. Although when I checked out the handicap spreadsheet, I noticed I'm losing a decent round off the end, so probably won't get much benefit.
Took me about 20 minutes to get to Avery Ranch while I was still connected via my laptop (which was about to run out of battery power). I ran into the restaurant and plugged in my laptop, ordered lunch and continued to work with the customer. I had at that point about an hour before I had to tee off. Eventually, the customer resolved it themselves (and it was certainly a DB2 issue, so not sure why it was ever sent to my team). I finished eating, paid and even got to hit a few balls at the range.
So it's nearly a miracle that I'm playing golf at all. But the whole time I'm playing doom is hanging over me. If that damn oncall phone goes off, it's all over. But it never goes off. And I shoot an 82. At a tough course. And I only have 27 putts. And I hit the ball as well as I have in a long, long time. One par 4 on the back side I hit a provisional tee shot that traveled beyond the flag on the fly (it was a par 4, albeit a short one). The yardage for this hole seemed all wrong on the card (said 371 for the tees we were playing from, but there's no way that was right). The closer tees said 297, and we think that was probably closer. But it's also possible that it was 320 or 330. The ball actually landed in the sand, else I probably would have rolled another 20 or 30 yards. It felt like the biggest drive I've ever hit (abstracting away weather, steep downhill grades and or crazy bounces etc), and I've other ones that have gone easily 330.
I had a birdie on the first hole which usually doesn't bode well for my round.
When I got home, I helped M. cook, and we had a really nice dinner. And she let me watch the Longhorns play number-one ranked (in the Coaches poll) UCLA at Pauley Pavilion and the Longhorns pulled off a miracle win with Damion James dunking for the final score when DJ just threw up a prayer. We're much better this year that we were last year, even though we lost Kevin Durant. Quite a day. My handicap had started to balloon this year, and I was at 20.60. I'm hoping this will get me back under 20. Although when I checked out the handicap spreadsheet, I noticed I'm losing a decent round off the end, so probably won't get much benefit.
Saturday, December 01, 2007
Pregnant!
Should have blogged about this awhile ago, but wasn't thinking about blogging much when we found out: M. is pregnant! She's now 10 weeks pregnant and she's due next Summer.
Pan's Labyrinth, Palm TX and David Roochnik's Book
Watched Pan's Labyrinth, which was quite good (shocker, I think everyone liked this movie). It was more interesting to read the director's commentary. I'd rented this off of Netflix, but might buy a copy for myself just for the director's commentary. It was one of the better director movie commentaries, I've heard (although I didn't listen to it all because M. was getting bored).
Almost done with David Roochnik's "The Tragedy of Reason". There were a lot of things I liked about this book; it takes up the confrontation between truth-driven conceptions of reality and the more anarchic conceptions in a good way. There's several people that I've known who probably would have liked to have written this book, or a book with this theme. However, stylistically, it felt too glib. It feels like a book written on this theme should be written differently, at least stylistically. I like his tendencies toward a narrative approach, but some part of me believes the narrative should be more serious. Also, it never seems like it really gives the positive views of Plato's logocentric view, and is itself too protreptic. I wanted more focus on the journey that would take one along Plato's route (and it seems like the book sees a journey like this is possible).
Just got my Palm TX syncing with Evolution on my Thinkpad T41P running Fedora 7. I had network sync working fine for awhile with this box, but I really wanted to get it syncing with desktop machine at work and I don't have work wireless setup on that Palm. So I really needed usb syncing working. This is what I did to get this working:
1) created the pilot.rules file in /etc/udev/rules that contained:
BUS=="usb", SYSFS{product}=="Palm Handheld*|Handspring *", KERNEL=="ttyUSB*", NAME="ttyUSB%n", SYMLINK="pilot", GROUP="usb", MODE="0666"
2) copied the 60-libpisock.rules file that's included with the pilot-link rpm on Feodora to /etc/udev/rules.d.
3) I already had my user added to the uucp group
4) Was able to get 'pilot-xfer -p usb: -l' to work as a test.
5) Changed the config in gpilotd-control-applet to point at 'usb:' instead of /dev/pilot or /dev/ttyUSB*.
I think the main thing that got this working was changing to 'usb:' in gpilotd-control-applet. Not sure which of the other things helped, and which didn't matter.
Almost done with David Roochnik's "The Tragedy of Reason". There were a lot of things I liked about this book; it takes up the confrontation between truth-driven conceptions of reality and the more anarchic conceptions in a good way. There's several people that I've known who probably would have liked to have written this book, or a book with this theme. However, stylistically, it felt too glib. It feels like a book written on this theme should be written differently, at least stylistically. I like his tendencies toward a narrative approach, but some part of me believes the narrative should be more serious. Also, it never seems like it really gives the positive views of Plato's logocentric view, and is itself too protreptic. I wanted more focus on the journey that would take one along Plato's route (and it seems like the book sees a journey like this is possible).
Just got my Palm TX syncing with Evolution on my Thinkpad T41P running Fedora 7. I had network sync working fine for awhile with this box, but I really wanted to get it syncing with desktop machine at work and I don't have work wireless setup on that Palm. So I really needed usb syncing working. This is what I did to get this working:
1) created the pilot.rules file in /etc/udev/rules that contained:
BUS=="usb", SYSFS{product}=="Palm Handheld*|Handspring *", KERNEL=="ttyUSB*", NAME="ttyUSB%n", SYMLINK="pilot", GROUP="usb", MODE="0666"
2) copied the 60-libpisock.rules file that's included with the pilot-link rpm on Feodora to /etc/udev/rules.d.
3) I already had my user added to the uucp group
4) Was able to get 'pilot-xfer -p usb: -l' to work as a test.
5) Changed the config in gpilotd-control-applet to point at 'usb:' instead of /dev/pilot or /dev/ttyUSB*.
I think the main thing that got this working was changing to 'usb:' in gpilotd-control-applet. Not sure which of the other things helped, and which didn't matter.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)