Hey Crackhead
Good read: Hey Crackhead.
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April 28, 2004
April 27, 2004
iMix
The iTunes Music Store has a new feature called iMix, which allows any user to publish a shared playlist of songs. Call it your own celbrity playlist. Here are some mine:
April 26, 2004
Spontaneous Reno
Saturday night was Sugam's birthday party at the Phoenix Hotel in the City. Towards the end of the night, Sugam and Katie were talking about Reno, so I suggested that we should go the next day. After some "ask Katie" and "ask Sugam" back-and-forth, we had a consensus.
So Sunday, I checked the weather, all good (great, in fact) and a few hours later we were flying to Reno. The trip took about an hour and 45 minutes, and Reno was fantastic. We ended up playing craps at the Silver Legacy, and had a total blast. Sugam and I both ended up with significantly more money than we went in with, more than enough to pay for the flight, and some designated shopping cash for Katie. Then we flew back via South Lake Tahoe just after nightfall.
All told, a great way to spend a Sunday.
April 20, 2004
Gratuitous bad-assness
So, I thought this was pretty clever: goto for Python. comefrom, in particular, is nice hack.
For some background, see Come From (thanks, Bill). Note that in parallel C-INTERCAL, multiple COME FROMs pointing to the same location actually works. Eep.
Then Ben points me at this: Lingua::Romana::Perligata. Nyargh!! My…brain…is…expl…
Subversion 1.0.2 package available
I've rolled a new OS X Subversion package for 1.0.2. The other required packages remain the same. Mount this URL in Finder: http://idisk.mac.com/wsanchez/Public/ or go to http://www.wsanchez.net/iDisk.
April 18, 2004
GOP Census
For whatever reason, the Republican National Committee think's I'm on their team, which is suprising since I registered as a Democrat to vote in the only primary that mattered this season. Anyway, the RNC sends me a lot of mail, including, twice now, the GOP Census, in which they ask questions to gauge the level of support I and other RNC fans have for RNC initiatives.
It seems this is really a survey to see how many lemmings exist out there who are RNC members are will support anything, given enough propaganda. The reason I say that is that the questions are terrible; any hack who took a college course in surveys and statistics would looks at this thing and puke, because the class was really hard, and here, someone got paid to create a survey that's clearly not worthy anything above an F in such a class. In starts:
Domestic and International Security- Do you support President Bush's initiatives to promote the safety and security of all Americans?
- Do you support the use of air strikes against any country that offers safe harbor or aid to individuals or organizations committed to further attacks on America?
- Do you continue to support increasing the amount of security at airports, train stations and all government buildings including monuments and museums?
These questions are both leading and overly broad. The survey isn't a survey. It's propaganda disguised as a survey.
I'm all for increased security, I guess, but I also know that air travel, which sucked in the extreme before 9/11, hasn't gotten any more fun since then. A friend of mine, who is a British citizen, waited a year to get an appointment at INS. Due to the increased security, it took him a very long time to get into the building. He showed up two minutes late, so they sent him home. Now, I know INS is not answerable in any way to its customers, which is problematic at best, but that was mean.
The air strikes question is pretty scary. Also leading, I can only assume that it's intent it to generate a conclusion that Americans, at least the patriotic RNC members, as all for bombing any country (say, France) because there are suspected terrorists in that country and their laws (the government) don't encourage them to turn them over to a witch trial in the U.S., not that any trial (witch or otherwise) would necessarily be offered by the present U.S. government at all. All men are created equal, as long as they are one of us.
The previous survey I got had an even scarier question. It asked (paraphrased from memory):
Some people are complaining that the FBI is violating the constitutional rights of U.S. citizens in its efforts to fight terrorism. Is this acceptable if it results in the capture of more terrorists?
The RNC actually is asking it's members if it's OK to ignore the Constitution of the United States in an effort to protect U.S. interests? Members of the U.S. military are sworn to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, and the political party supporting the Commander-in-Chief wants to know, while soldiers are in Iraq fighting for American values, whether it's OK to toss the Constitution out in the domestic war on terror. Maybe we need the soldiers more at home.
April 12, 2004
LaunchBar Search Templates
I just added my own large piles of Search Templates into my copy LaunchBar 4. Thought I'd share my config.
Included items:
- AirNav: Airport by ID
- Amazon Books
- Amazon Music
- Burning Man
- CDW | Mac Warehouse
- Commonwealth Club of California
- Consumer Search
- Dictionary.com
- Drugstore.com
- eBay
- eLyrics4U
- Epicurious
- Lyrics Cafe
- Lyrics Time
- Lyrics XP
- Motley Fool
- National Public Radio
- Netflix
- Pollstar Concerts
- Python Documentation
- Rotten Tomatoes
- United States Government
- Weather Channel
- WebTender
April 08, 2004
Flight to the Southland
Since the plane got out of the shop, I'm been getting in a lot of flying. This past weekend, I logged over 10 hours of flight time.
Saturday, Klee, Mateo, and I headed north, to Shelter Cove. I flew over Shelter Cove some time ago on a trip up to Eureka, and it really stood out as an airport I had to land at some day. It's on the California coastline in an area where most of the coastline is cliffs, except for this patch of lang that just out and on which is a small town with an airport. According to Yahoo! Maps, if I were to drive from the Cupertino to Shelter Cover, it would take me 5 hours, 39 minutes. Don't think I would ever have made it there by road. The flight took about 2 hours. As we were eating, clouds started to form overhead, so we boogied on out of there, briefly heading towards Japan to get out from under the line clouds forming on the coastine, climbed above, then turned back to Willits for fuel, then back home to RHV.
Sunday, Payam, Mateo, and I went for a trip to the Los Angeles area. Payam's folks live near Zamperini Field in Torrence, so we dropped by for a day at their house, where we had a yummy lunch and lounged by the pool. The trip back was at night on an IFR flight plan. The trip down was hazy, and not being familiar with the airspace around L.A., being under ATC control seemed safest. That worked out well, especially since when we got to Silicon Valley, the entire valley was covered with an overcast layer. I shot the ILS 20R into SJC until we got under the cloud cover, then broke off for a VFR landing into RHV. Payam took some video footage as well as some pictures of the trip.