StarTrekWiki: “Memory Alpha is a collaborative project to create the most definitive, accurate, and accessible encyclopedia and reference for everything related to Star Trek. The database is organized in a WikiWiki structure, which allows an incredible level of interconnectedness and expansion. We started in November 2003, and the database currently includes 19,403 articles. If you’re new to Memory Alpha, please join us! Visit the Help page and experiment with the Sandbox to learn how you can contribute to any article right now!” Very comprehensive.
12
Jun 06
When you need to search of text
I had to sift through tons of server logs today. On Linux, there is a ‘grep’ command that does this, however for Windows you can use a nice freeware program called Windows Grep. It works very well.
07
Jun 06
The Comforting Words of the Long Since Dead
I’ve been rereading Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, the archetypical philosopher-king and Roman Caesar. Meditations is a diary-like accounting of Marcus Aurelius’ thoughts and ideas. You can almost imagine him encamped with his legions on the Danube, writing down his thoughts and examining his life. The original title is closer in meaning to “notes to himself” rather than what most modern people think of when they hear the word “meditation”. It is a highly enjoyable and thought-provoking read. The personal, thoughtful writing style gives you a real sense of the man, who lived and died more than two thousand years ago. A student of the Stoic school, Marcus Aurelius reflects on life and death and often about how to endure and accept what we cannot change. Here are a few quotations:
- Let it be your constant method to look into the design of people’s actions, and see what they would be at, as often as it is practicable; and to make this custom the more significant, practice it first upon yourself.
- Anger cannot be dishonest.
- Dig within. Within is the wellspring of Good; and it is always ready to bubble up, if you just dig.
- Never let the future disturb you. You will meet it, if you have to, with the same weapons of reason which today arm you against the present.
- We ought to do good to others as simply as a horse runs, or a bee makes honey, or a vine bears grapes season after season without thinking of the grapes it has borne.
30
May 06
asides
Apartment rents expected to rise 5% Inflation alert. More than anything else, fixed geographic costs like this will hit the middle and lower middle class consumers hard.
30
May 06
Hank Paulson is new Secretary of Treasury
In a huge nod to Wall Street, Bush nominates Goldman Sachs’ Henry “Hank” Paulson for Secretary of the Treasury. This is about as high profile a cabinet pick as you can get as Paulson is one of the most well known and respected captains of finance. This follows on the heels of the high profile selection of Fox talking head, Tony Snow, for White House spokesman. It looks like Bush is signalling the business world (rather obviously) that he may need their help to keep the wheels on.
I found this quote, which in this context is rather interesting:
“The thing I learned in Washington is that just as important, or more so, as what you do is who you do it with.” -Hank Paulson, CEO Goldman Sachs
23
May 06
Assassinating comment spam
After I logged in to discover 152 friendly (“Great site! Ci@lis!”) spam comments from Cialis and online poker sites, I had to move to a new solution for fighting comment spam. It seems the spammers circumvented my previous solution and implemented it into whatever scripts and tools they use to troll the vast blog geography. Luckily, due to the open source nature of WordPress there were several available solutions for preventing automated comment spam through the use of ‘captcha‘ images. There was one WordPress plugin, SecureImage, that stood out due to its simple drop-in functionality. You just throw the plugin into your WordPress plugin directory and activate it. You must also have the ImageMagick module installed on your server, which is usually the case. If not, it’s an easy install. I had to make one change to the plugin script since it was not detecting the presence of ImageMagick’s convert utility. If you have the same problem, simply comment out the section where the script checks for the location of convert. To see the captcha script in action, try to leave a comment.
19
May 06
Untitled
LARPer Stone Golem made from foam rubber. Video
Live interpreters over Skype for $2.99 a minute. “Be on the phone with an interpreter within seconds. Now all Skype subscribers can have immediate access to live, high-quality professional interpreters, who speak over 150 languages.”
19
May 06
Into the Wild
One of the auditors at work who often inhabits the cube next to me recommended a book he had been reading, “Into the Wild” by John Krakaurer. I picked it up while on lunch and read it over the next two days. It’s the tragic tale of 24 year old Chris McCandless, aka Alexander Supertramp, an intelligent and educated young man with existential angst and wanderlust, who lived off the land of rural Alaska for one summer before succumbing to starvation and injury from mysterious causes and dying alone inside an abandoned school bus where he had been camped. You know going into the book that he dies. The book is really about trying to unravel his motivations and reasons for living such a perilous life on the fringe. Why did he feel so uncomfortable in his world and with himself? Why did he feel so strongly about proving himself against nature and reality? What experience did he hope to achieve?
It’s also about growing up and searching for meaning, the relationships between fathers and sons, the individual and society, the siren song of idealism against the inhumanity of reality. It’s about life and ultimately failure.
13
May 06
The Father Factor
In “The Father Factor,” Stephan Poulter lists five styles of fathers — super-achieving, time bomb, passive, absent and compassionate/mentor — who have powerful influences on the careers of their sons and daughters.
Children of the “time-bomb” father, for example, who explodes in anger at his family, learn how to read people and their moods. Those intuitive abilities make them good at such jobs as personnel managers or negotiators, he writes.
But those same children may have trouble feeling safe and developing trust, said Poulter, a clinical psychologist who also works with adolescents in Los Angeles area schools.
“I’ve seen more people hit their heads on what they call a glass ceiling or a cement wall in their careers, and it’s what I call the father factor,” Poulter said in an interview. “What role did your father have in your life? It’s this unknown variable which has this huge impact because we’re all sons and daughters.”
Styles of fathering can affect whether their children get along with others at work, have an entrepreneurial spirit, worry too much about their career, burn out or become the boss, Poulter writes.
Even absent fathers affect how their children work, he writes, by instilling feelings of rejection and abandonment.
11
May 06
Untitled
YouTube: the original 13-minute short film of Bottle Rocket, directed by Wes Anderson