Crawling along ....

Bella ...


crawled for the first time yesterday!

I was going to buy a nook ....

Not any longer.

Update: This was almost certainly an overreaction on my part (although the story is pretty horrific). But what I do take as a pretty safe conclusion from all this: B&N's customer service is putrid. When compared to Amazon.com's service (with whom I've always had such a fantastic experience): why take any chances? Chances are I'm probably going to buy a Kindle (although a Sony reader remains a possibility).

Round Rock Library

I just got my library card for Round Rock Public Library; I'm amazed at how many resources are available through this library. I had really thought to join to get access to inter-library loan programs with UT, but there's a lot of really cool stuff I can get access to from the RRPL itself. They have lot of ebooks I can access for some of the Platonic studies I want to read. This is one of the best things I've done in some time ....

First Christmas ...

Isabella's first Christmas is tomorrow!!! I'm beyond excited. She didn't like her first visit with Santa this week, but hard to not adore the emotional honesty. :-)

Closed academic communities ...

I've been reading a lot of Kierkegaard again lately. Right now, I'm particularly interested in the relationship between Hegel, Kierkegaard and how Kierkegaard understands Hegel. I went searching Google to see what was online, and it quickly became clear that very few communities are as closed as academic communities. I kind of knew this already from my grad school days, but was surprised things haven't changed. If any knowledge and/or scholarly contribution desires to be free, it's philosophical contributions. But I could quickly become poor if I started buying all the articles I wanted to read on Kierkegaard. Typically, these articles go for $30 or $40 a pop. I could join a good library and get free access to many of these articles, but that would generally require being physically present in the library itself (ie Perry Castenada Library). In the academic communities themselves, most of the "free" philosophy online is quackery (and it's certainly true, most of the "free" stuff online is abysmally bad) and so to offer something free online probably smells of desparation.

tracker needs some serious love ...

I remember reading a lot of posts/emails etc from the author of tracker awhile back that was badmouthing beagle and extolling the virtues of tracker. I've been using tracker on one of my fedora 12 boxes for a week now, and all it does is chew cpu and ignore my preference settings (and crash all day long). Just now, I had the setting which says to pause indexing when the computer is busy, and trackerd was using 99% of one of my cores. I decided to strace this to see what it was doing:

strace -p -o /tmp/trackerd_strace.out

I let it run for about 30 seconds, and then go to /tmp to try and tail -f the file a bit. However, when I get there, there are 81,000 files from this afternoon matching the pattern tracker-evolution-module-* all from this afternoon. Yikes. I kill trackerd and vim the trackerd_strace.out file, and what does it contain? It contains 2,500,000 lines of this:

poll([{fd=4, events=POLLIN}, {fd=3, events=POLLIN}, {fd=6, events=POLLIN}, {fd=9, events=POLLIN}, {fd=7, events=POLLIN}], 5, 0) = 0 (Timeout)

I used to be a big beagle fan, but it looks like it's basically unmaintained right now, so I switched over to tracker. Since I've done that I get about 20 - 30 trackerd crashes a day (per abrt) and this constant cpu usage. I think I'm going to have disable tracker and go back to beagle, or start using google desktop again.

Don't go to Italy ....

OK, I'd read several accounts of the Knox case, and while I obviously don't know what really happened, I'd also read a book on a very famous crime in Italy (don't have the link now), written by an American who lived there for several years that said there's a 0% chance that Amanda Knox was guilty, but, because of the absurd way the Italian legal system works, a huge chance she'd be convicted anyway. And she was. I'm never going to Italy.

Need to dig up the aforementioned book (it was about the famous serial killer in Italy); it describes in great detail how many innocent people were stalked by Italian prosecutors not with the goal of reaching the truth, but to further their own careers. Certainly that goes on here, but usually those prosecutions have to at least wear the guise of attempting to reach the truth, so that it's hard to tell the difference. From the description in the book I read, it's not clear that "truth" is even a value that many in the Italian criminal system even recognize.

Huh?

My auto/home insurance company (who I am very happy with, btw) gave me a discount for moving to a new neighborhood recently. They do not have discounts for giving birth. I'm sure there's a specific reason for this, but it's surprising to me: if there was anything that would really change my behavior on the roads, this is it.

Isabella!

Our new daughter Isabella was born last night! She's amazing!

Little things ...

I was immensely pleased today by something very minor. I was working pretty hard at work today, and I think I managed to wrap up a couple of really hard pmrs. I wanted "something" but wasn't sure what it was, and went to the beverage fridge, even though I was pretty tired of Diet Coke. Then, suddenly, realized we'd just bought Diet Barq's that that was what I wanted! Glorious!

Absurdly funny tweet ...

(Or whatever they're called these days.)

Find it here.

I'm always the last person to hear about anything

I'm sure I'm the last person to see this, but I laughed pretty hard. This is my kind of "bit" and I can't believe I didn't think of it first:

Linus does 25 things about me.

Holy Cow!

Old Barney Miller episodes on Hulu! This is like the greatest sitcom of all time!

Amazing to hear myself say it ....

It's a girl! That is all.

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!!