PhoneBoy Says

I had no idea that the last KPLUG meeting we had in December was the last time I'd see Bruce "Renigaid" Kingsland. The membership knew he was battling cancer, and had been for a while. It sounded like things were looking up. Obviously, they took a turn for the worst. While I wasn't particularly close to Bruce, he did add a great deal to our little Linux community and he will surely be missed. The long-time KPLUG members are planning to go up to Port Hadlock for his funeral this weekend.

I suppose I can take some solace in knowing that the last time I spoke with him, I helped him with something. It was related to his Linux box at home. He kept a Linux box nailed up to the Internet through a dialup modem--yes, there are people that still do that. He was trying to reach this box from the Internet. He had set up dynamic DNS so that his machine would be reachable. His machine had stopped being reachable and didn't know why.

Network troubleshooting is something I do fairly well, so of course I dug in and figured out that I didn't have enough information to help him. I told him I'd send him an email when I got home asking for the things I needed to go deeper into this. He sent the information, and lo and behold, I figured out what the issue was--his dynamic DNS wasn't updating properly.

It does make you think, though. If you knew that this was going to be the last time you saw someone, would you act differently towards that person? Would you say some things to that person?

I actually did see someone just before they died. In fact, they keeled over in front of me, quite literally. I was living in Hawaii at the time and was having lunch with Ray Beak, an older man whom taught me a lot about amateur radio. In fact, he had helped me get my amateur radio license (which I have since let expire). I did various things to fix his computer and we were going out to lunch after a session of beating the computer into submission. We were having lunch at the local Sizzler in Kona. We were sitting at the table waiting for our food and, all of a sudden, he gurgled and keeled over.

I ran up to the cashier to ask them to call an ambulance. An ambulance ride later, we're at the hospital and the doctors are checking him out. I wasn't family, so I wasn't allowed in with him or anything. I don't remember too much about it as I was very much in shock. But I do remember the doctor coming out to let us know he died. I also remember that a classmate of mine at school had committed suicide at around the same time.

Even though I knew it was the last time I'd see him alive, by then it was too late to actually say anything to him. Not sure what I would have said to him except "Thank you for everything." Maybe that's what I would have said to Bruce, too, had I known.

We were the home team today. Watching 6 and 7 year olds play basketball was less painful than watching our President jibber-jabber on TV.

How do you pass the time during a flight? What do you bring in your carry-on?

I either listen to podcasts that I have downloaded to my Nokia phone or I watch videos I have downloaded from online and encoded to the 3GP format for use on a Nokia N93. I wrote a procedure for how to do this on a Mac fairly easily, and you can see the results.

The flights I usually take are only an hour and a half in the air. When I went to Finland in October, I had a bunch of stuff encoded on my phone, laptops, whatever had a battery that could play these videos. :)

If you're a big fan of the show Heroes, take the quiz and find out which hero you are. For me, it was a bit of a shock:

You are like Sylar

Be careful, for your ability to absorb others energy may come with a terrible price.

And always remember, however powerful you may be as an individual, we are more powerful together than we could ever be apart.

So which hero are you?

Yesterday, I lucked out and got to sleep in until 9am IN MY OWN BED. Both children cooperated with this somehow. I'm sure it will never happen again.

Meanwhile, tonight, I had plans to be done a little earlier than now. However, a little thing called an Internet outage on my cable modem caused me some grief. Even with a backup DSL connection, switching between them does take a small amount of work. Undoing that work is also fairly easy.

What seems to happen with me is a matter of "one more thing." I think "oh yeah, I'll do this one more thing and be done. Okay, this one more thing and I'll be done." Repeat until sometime after 1:30am or later. The only way for me to successfully go to bed early is to not go up to my office after I'm done picking up around the house after the kids go to bed. And that almost never happens. ;)

Meanwhile, I'm starting to think Jaden might also be going down this road. This evening after I got done cleaning up downstairs, I noticed that Jaden's fishies were still playing about 45 minutes after he went to bed. I walked into his room to see what he was he was doing. He was laying in bed reading. While I didn't tell him to go to bed, I suggested that it was awfully late and that he was going to have to get up early in the morning to go to school. Whether that made him put down the book and go to bed or if he had come to that conclusion already, I don't know.

Meanwhile, it's 2am. The third cup of green tea I had after everyone went to bed is starting to weigh on my bladder (yes, the caffeine I get from the Costco Green Tea doesn't affect me at all). It's bedtime.

Anyone with kids in primary school should watch this. It explains the wacky crap that our schools are teaching kids with respect to multiplication and division.

At the moment, I'm happy that Jaden can do 2 digit addition in his head.

Math Education: An Inconvenient Truth

I am reminded of the Tom Lehrer song called New Math, which was from a different era (the 1960s), but kind of relays the same sentiment--you can't do your child's arithmetic homework. Thanks to YouTube, you get it with animation:

New Math (Tom Lehrer) Animation

Or, in Gracie's case, hand paints.

No, I've never been visited by the fine folks who work for Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. However, I have experiences with each of these things.

Alcohol: Well, let's just say this problem plagued both sides of my family, i.e. there were people on both sides of the family with issues. I don't recall my mother ever having a problem with it while I was a kid, but it certainly became a problem later. It's probably still a problem now. My dad, well, I recall a few incidences with it. My memory of that time isn't so great, so I don't know the extent of the problems. He recently told me he's been sober for several years now, which is a good thing.

In any case, seeing the problems that alcohol caused in my family, I took a very cautious approach to drinking. I didn't do a whole lot of it until I was 21. I had a couple of instances in college where I definitely had more than my share. Jack and Coke. Lots of Jack, not so much Coke. Got that out of my system. These days, I will drink at a party or if I'm traveling (i.e. when someone else is paying), but I rarely drink at home, if ever.

I recently brought home a six pack of beer from the store. This is a rare thing, and it made the wife a bit nervous given my family history. She admitted to be she is being overly cautious about it, though I can certainly understand. The beer I bought is still sitting in the fridge in the garage. I did drink one of the beers. It sucked.

Tobacco: My father and my granny smoked often while growing up, so I grew up around smokers. My first "experience" smoking a cigarette was, when I was 7, granny asked me to hold her cigarette while she went to the bathroom. She was in a wheelchair, so needed both hands to navigate into and out of the bathroom. Being the curious lad I was, I put my lips to the cigarette to see what the big deal was. She caught me and told me that if she ever caught me doing that again, I'd have to smoke a whole cigarette. Considering how disgusted I was at that mini-drag I took, I decided right then and there I didn't want to smoke again.

Well, that didn't happen. Later in life, after college, I did smoke. I'd call it "socially" smoking because I would only do it with other smokers and the most number of cigarettes I've ever smoked in a day is 2. Any more than that made me ill. Once in a blue moon, I will have a smoke with someone. But I feel so disgusting afterwords. The smell that permeates everything on me. The taste in my mouth.

Speaking of the smell, every time I would come back from my dads, I would have to fumigate myself and my possessions. Everything stunk to hell and back of cigarette smoke. I was recently reminded of how badly that could smell when a co-worker of mine got a backpack from work to give to me. He is a definite smoker and the bag reeked of it.

There was a time when I was a kid when I begged my dad to stop smoking. I used all the usual arguments people use, at least as well I could make them at about 12, but the main reason I remember is that it was just disgusting. I eventually gave up asking him to do so when I realized that there was nothing I could say to make him quit. I'm sure he's still doing it to this day and, unless he decides otherwise, he won't quit until he dies.

Firearms: My one experience with firearms was with a bee-bee gun that some adult associated with my mom let me fire. We went to some place around Boulder Creek (where we lived at the time) and found a place in the woods where we set up some cans. I got to do some target practice. Other than fake firearms (e.g. video games), I've had no experience with real firearms.

I believe people should have the right to bear firearms. It is, after all, in the Second Amendment. If people want to have guns in accordance with the various laws, I'm cool with that. In fact, I tend to agree with Robert Heinlein who is often quoted as saying "An armed society is a polite society." Banning guns will only keep guns out of the good guys hands. All this being said, it is unlikely that I will be purchasing or carrying a gun anytime soon.

Which consisted of a lot of this.

One of the things I am doing right now is trying to rate all of the music I have sucked into iTunes from my CD collection. The main reason: I want to be able to make playlists based on my ratings. However, I have a couple thousand tracks and, quite frankly, I don't want to listen to them all.

iTunes lets you rate tracks with 1 thru 5 stars. The theory is that 4 and 5 star tracks will be listened to a lot, 3 stars occasionally, 2 rarely, and 1 not at all. There are Applescripts on the net that should help in generating those playlists.

Anyway, back to rating. Some of the tracks, of course, are very familiar and I can make a pretty good judgement within a few seconds of listening. Or I can just continue to listen to the track. The problem is that there are a lot of songs I don't know know so well. This is what happens when you buy a CD for a couple of songs. Do I really want to listen to it all? Of course not.

What I've been doing is listening to the first 30 seconds or so and clicking through at various parts of the songs to get a feel for the song. If there is some sense of familiarity, I will assign it an appropriate value. Otherwise, I try and make a quick judgment about whether or not I will tolerate the song. It seems like I'm just making a half-assed guess in all cases. I have no clue.

I guess it boils down to a couple of things:

• Is it a familiar song that I like? 4 or 5 depending on how much.
• Is it a familiar song that I kind of like? 3.
• Is it a song I don't mind listening to once in a while? 2.
• Is it a song I never want to hear again? 1.
• Is it an unfamiliar song that I might want to listen to again? 3, else 2.

For giggles, here's the 10 most recent songs I've rated 5 during this project. Note I use the term 'album' below instead of CD, only because that's how I'm used to referring to them. It's like how people of my grandparents generation refer to "Dinner" as what we now call "Lunch" and "Supper" as what we now call "Dinner." Don't like it? Too bad!

Anyway, here's the list:

1. There's No Way Out of Here off David Gilmour's self-titled album
2. Hotel California (Live) off Hell Freezes Over by The Eagles
3. Conquest of Paradise off the 1492: The Conquest of Paradise by Vangelis
4. Girls on Film on Decade by Duran Duran
5. Polka Your Eyes Out off Off The Deep End by Weird Al Yankovic
6. One Of These Days off of a Pink Floyd ROIO of the Pulse tour.
7. The Ballad of Dick and Jane off Live by Pinkard and Bowden
8. Joe's Garage off the Frank Zappa album of the same name
9. After The Thrill Is Gone off of One Of These Nights by The Eagles
10. The Kids In The Hall theme off of Televisions Greatest Hits, Volume 7