Life is funnier than ...

Two funny incidents in the last two days, both involving my wife:

1) Last night we were at a Thanksgiving Potluck; several of our friends are Taiwanese (my wife was born in Taiwan, although spent her whole life in Brasil). We told people there that we were pregnant, and one of our friends said it was old Taiwanese saying that after you conceived, if the woman got prettier during the pregnancy, you were carrying a girl; if you got uglier (ie, if your complexion got worse etc), you were carrying a boy. A funny saying, that. Anyway, I quickly turned, and looked at my wife, paused a second and said:

"Hmmmmm, looks like it must be a boy."

Got a pretty good chuckle out of that, and a few slaps upside the head. (Of course, could never get away with something like that if she wasn't pretty.)

2) My wife and I work at the same company, and a couple days a week, we work from home in the same office. Today, we were working like this, and I heard her say while on a phone call with a customer:

"No, I can't tell you where you put your install media."

I couldn't help myself: I laughed alound, and pretty loud. I don't know if the customer heard this, but they couldn't help but notice when my wife started laughing too. She had to make up some story that I was looking at my camera, and there was something funny on it, and I showed her, and it made her laugh. (Camera??? I asked her about this, and she meant to say "TV".)

This is the kind of stuff you read online and never believe. Working in Support is the perfect machine for generating comedic content. I'd write a novel based on this, if I wasn't so busy helping customers find their install media.

The Magic Typo

Imaginary situation: I've just searched for something in Google toolbar; what it is isn't important. I'm reading my feeds in Google Reader (maybe I should be in a commercial for Google) and I'm using the shortcut keys. But as often happens, Google Reader doesn't have focus, and my focus is still in Google Toolbar. The combination of the search and the unintentional extra characters produces the greatest search ever, the one search on Google that returns the magical hit that changes life forever. Imagine that.

So much for my turn at President ....

I had planned to become President of the United States in 4 or 8 years until I saw this story. Can you imagine being without email for 4 to 8 years? I can't. I guess that's it then: I guess I can stop working on my acceptance speech.

Meme poseur ...

There's a meme going on over on planet gnome. I usually don't care for them, but I liked this one:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open it to page 56.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

People who know me won't be surprised by mine:

"This in turn will stretch and tighten the body to a degree at which the downswing becomes an instinctive and uninhibited reaction."

Treeman

Search on "treeman" at Google for one of the saddest and most unusual stories of an individual struggling (courageously) against HPV.

Spirit of 76!

One of the two people who read this blog already know about this (golfed with me), but have to blog it anyway. I shot a 76 today! This is 5 strokes better than any round I've had in the last 10 years, and 3 strokes better than my best round (at Lions with a couple of beers in me when I was much, much younger).

I birdied 1, 9, and 17 with lengthy birdie putts (for me anyway). I could have potentially shot lower if I'd not three-putted two par 5's on the back nine (bogied both of them). Saved several pars with one-putts. Was unusually accurate with my short irons. Almost holed a sand wedge on the first hole.

I had no idea I was going that low until I checked the golf cart score card on the 18th after my third shot was on the green. I two-putted for the 76. In our golf foursome, the best previous score was a 78 and Ren and Toben had both scored several rounds under 80. It looked like I was never going to shoot a round like that ever. I was pretty much in a state of a shock when I realized I'd shot a 76. A very happy, pleasant state of shock.

Long live '76! Life is good!!

How sound can hang ...

I finally found it! I've been plagued with random gnome app hangs (usually gnome-panel, but plenty of other apps as well). I started stracing some of the hanging apps and it wouldn't give me much, but if I killed them, and restarted them under strace, I'd always see something like this at the end:

access("/tmp/.esd-501/socket", R_OK|W_OK) = 0
socket(PF_FILE, SOCK_STREAM, 0) = 18
fcntl64(18, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC) = 0
setsockopt(18, SOL_SOCKET, SO_REUSEADDR, [1], 4) = 0
connect(18, {sa_family=AF_FILE, path="/tmp/.esd-501/socket"}, 22) = 0
rt_sigaction(SIGPIPE, {0x3d07c0, [PIPE], SA_RESTART}, {SIG_IGN}, 8) = 0
open("/home/foo/.esd_auth", O_RDONLY) = 19
read(19, "\371\27PG\6\f2utX=!\f\2):", 16) = 16
write(18, "\371\27PG\6\f2utX=!\f\2):", 16) = 16
write(18, "NDNE", 4) = 4
read(18,

It was always hanging trying to read this esd socket. After seeing several of these, I searched online, and it took me almost no time to find this once I searched on 'gnome-panel hangs esd socket'. This has been bugging me for weeks, and I had blamed it all on Notes 8. Nice to know I was wrong.

Looks like killing esd, pulseaudio or both resolves this problem. Previously I was actually having to reboot to resolve this!

Cool beans ...

I'm very excited about the results tonight. No one will (I think) claim that he's perfect, or will be free from mistakes, but I wonder if this is how many Americans felt when JFK won the election back in the day. While I'm writing this, McCain is giving his concession speech, and so far it's quite good ...

Voted!

I voted today. I went to the wrong precinct at first, and there was no line at all in the wrong place. They redirected me to the right precinct, and at the new voting location .... there was no line at all!