Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v.3.02

Spider

Spider at Grandma's

My new wallpaper:

Waiting On Hitting Delete

Have spent all day purging data from just one system. Basically, we have to by hand identify the backup files created last night and copy them into folders so we know why the stuff was purged. This or run another backup. (I don't want to be the person that lost something really important.) Next, we purge the data. Luckily this is a fairly automated process. However, deleting 300 million 2KB files takes longer than deleting 3 million 200KB files.

My assistant did the stuff from last Fall. I worked on Spring and Summer. Just waiting on her stuff to finish deleting so that I can hit the button and let it do Spring.

Maybe I could do both at once, but you know... it is Friday after closing. Do I want to risk the chance to spend the next 10 hours trying to fix it? I think not. Not like I am going to go hit a bar.

More likely to watch the Star Wars trilogy. Yeah, I am that much of a geek! So much so my mom bought me the new Millenium Falcon. Tempted to get an X-Wing and a TIE Interceptor for the office. Only the Interceptor does not appear to be part of the recent toys.

More Quotes

Galileo Galilei - "All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them."

Nathaniel Borenstein - "The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents."

The Homeless Guy

In the Baha'i Scripture, work (crafts or trades) is at the rank of worship. Begging is bad thing. Reading another place where this is mentioned, put me thinking about this incident about a year ago where someone approached me for money to fix his car while a group of usat a Baha'i conference in Nashville, TN last Thanksgiving weekend were headed to lunch. A funny tangent is that 500 miles away I had gotten the same line twice the month before by the same person at Books-A-Million. My response to was to not give him any cash, but I asked him to walk with us to where a group of us were headed to lunch. I bought him lunch. He seemed hesitant at first. However, he seemed quite happy to stand in line and order.

The manager of the restaurant frowned at the prospect of this guy being in his restaurant. He backed off when I assured him that I was the one paying.

The Baha'is who were with me thought that was a great response to the problem of being nice while not giving someone begging for money the money. At the time, I felt good that others thought I had done good. I knew we were getting played. This was my first time dealing with such an incident. In that I am not from around there and did not anticipate ever returning, I had no worries of ever seeing him again.

Now, however, I feel that it was not a great response. Where I live, would likely be another story. Not sure I could afford to buy lunch or dinner for every person begging for money every time they ask. What is the best response to such a situation?

Question: "why do you post so many quotes?"

Bernie asked "why do you post so many quotes?" in a comment. Good question!

I am a quote collector. I have quotes page I made a couple years ago from quotes that I received through various email lists, saving from email signatures, and visiting web sites. So I like quotes.

That does not explain why I post them, huh? Another factor is that I am a horrible memorizer. I get gists and can remember where I read something, but I cannot recite word for word without tons of work. Occasionally re-reading my collected quotes allows me to be better at reciting them.

To re-read them, the quotes need to be in a place convenient for that. With the email size limitations of free email programs and the over 1 GB of email on my desktop program, putting them in email seems no good. Posting them to that web site was great, but making the concerted effort to update that page got annoying. So I started posting them in this blog.

At some point, I figured I would use one of the modifications to aggregate categories to put all the quotes together. More likely is that they will remain mixed in with this blog.

I considered making a blog (or using another one) just for the quotes. That seemed like more work than I wanted to spend.

John Adams - "Great is

John Adams - "Great is the guilt of an unnecessary war."
(from McCullough, David - John Adams)

Pretty Pictures

In a photography mood recently, I guess...

Can't really complain about where I work in terms of being pretty.

My New Bible

How To Ask Questions The Smart Way

Some quotes:

Introduction
What we are, unapologetically, is hostile to people who seem to be unwilling to think or to do their own homework before asking questions. People like that are time sinks — they take without giving back, they waste time we could have spent on another question more interesting and another person more worthy of an answer. We call people like this “losers” (and for historical reasons we sometimes spell it “lusers”).

Before You Ask
Prepare your question. Think it through. Hasty-sounding questions get hasty answers, or none at all. The more you do to demonstrate that you have put thought and effort into solving your problem before asking for help, the more likely you are to actually get help.

Have This Friend...

Don't know what to do.

I have this friend... no, not me!... who likes this girl who lives 250 miles away. He has gotten burned by online, long distance relationships. No, this is not me! He does not want to get hurt by falling for her (I think he kind of has but is resisting). He is also just out of a bad relationship and pretty down on himself. She thinks she did something to scare him away.

This is why people should not know 2 people who might potentially be interested in each other. The drama can occasionally become too much to bear.

More Quotes

Don Marquis - "If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you."

B. F. Skinner - "The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do."

Pics From TBI and Defying Death

Some TBI pics and post-Frances clean up pics. Everyone reading this for any amount of time should recognize Lacey in the first one. The HP Tablet PCs are sweet!!

There were lots of knocked over trees, but few seem to have actually hit anything. In my grandmother's yard there was a limb that had it fallen straight down it would have hit the roof above her bedroom. Instead, it appears to have missed entirely and ended up in the bushes. The thickness of the branch was about 5".

Made It... Barely

The trip to TBI was fraught with danger as my car became difficult to drive on an interchange from the loss of a tire. Actually, I was driving, but it was not my car. Clouds of bad smelling steam poured out from under the hood. The smell remnded me of burning transmission fluid. A police officer hooked us up with a room and assisted us with the info we needed to get the car towed. As the car was being hoisted, we noticed the flat tire.

The next morning, we found out that there was first nothing wrong with the transmission and later needed a new pump? Transmissions are tricky things. 300 miles from home is not where I want someone experimenting. We got a new tire and pressed on without much incident except bieng nervous about any rough spots resembling the feel of losing a tire.

We made it to TBI.

On the way back, we watched Frances' path and decided to make a go for it. Natually, meteorologists suck so the storm ended up 300 mile east of where they predicted. That would be exactly right on top of us. Except for a few hydroplaning experiences it seemed to only batter us. Very few others were this stupid. so we did not have to fight as much traffic as we normally would have had to do.

We survived.
This only further proves how much of a charmed life I lead.

How Do You Know It Is Going To Be An "Interesting" Trip?

1. A hurricane is bearing down on you.
2. The Interstate is flooded with cars.
3. Everyone wishes they are not you.
4. You leave work 1/2 an hour later than expected.

A Mile For An Inch

Lately it feels like in order to get an inch, I have to put in that extra mile. Maybe it is harder. Maybe it only feels harder.

Margaret Millar - "Most conversations

Margaret Millar - "Most conversations are simply monologues delivered in the presence of witnesses."

Stephen Hawking Lectures

Will definitely have to check these Stephen Hawking lectures out more throughly.