My twins are now in first grade and they’re involved in soccer 3 days a week plus cub scouts.  The rest of my free time has been pretty much dedicated to competitive shooting – mostly practice.

I haven’t had much interesting to say about software of the business of software either since I haven’t been working on anything cutting edge, or what I would consider interesting beyond a very small niche of programmers.

So I thought I’d try writing about shooting for a while.  I’m heavily involved in competitive shooting, and since most of my free time goes into that I thought why not?  I’ll try that and see how it goes.

Since Why The Lucky Stiff disappeared and the poignant guide domain with him, I’ve made the PDF available here:  Why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby

It’s also available online in html format here: http://mislav.uniqpath.com/poignant-guide/ if you prefer that format.

Hoping Why reappears soon.

Cheers.

This is just a stupid retort to this viral comment on Fark: http://www.fark.com

I admit I haven’t proof-read this, so excuse the grammar and spelling as I’m sure there are errors.  It’s not meant to be a political commentary so much as a simple rebuttal to the seemingly witty ozone.

Disclaimer: If you don’t have a sense of humor, or you’re unsure about its quality, stop now; do not pass Go; do not collect $200.  Please direct your browser to disney.com. Otherwise proceed.

Dear ozone, I fixed this for you.

This morning I wasn’t awakened by my alarm clock because the electric meter was broken, so I called the public power monopoly regulated by the U.S. Department of Energy to get some assistance. I was told they would send someone out in about 9 hours, but the meter is attached to my house so they would have to charge me. I complained about the customer service, but it’s a monopoly.

I then took a shower in the clean, chlorine-less water provided by my private well.

After that, I turned on the TV to one of the FCC-regulated channels to see what the local news channel’s Doppler radar indicated that the weather would be like. My satellite dish receives signals using satellites designed and built by a private company who paid the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to put it into orbit. At least I have two choices of satellite providers unlike my local FCC/FTC-enabled cable monopoly.

I watched this while eating my breakfast of genetically engineered U.S. Department of Agriculture-inspected food hoping not to have a repeat bout of salmonella. I took the Food and Drug Administration-approved drugs that are believed responsible for heart failure and liver damage, but are still on the market thanks to the drug lobby our political machination adores.

On the way out the door I deposit any mail I have to be sent out in my email sent items and fedex any urgent materials. I then drop the kids off at the private school because the public schools are under-funded and falling behind the rest of the world in curriculum and education standards.

At the appropriate time, as regulated by the U.S. Congress and kept accurate by the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the U.S. Naval Observatory, I get into my National Highway Traffic Safety Administration-approved automobile and set out to the airport on the roads built by the local, state, and federal Departments of Transportation that are in desperate need of repair, possibly stopping to purchase additional fuel of a quality level determined by the Environmental Protection Agency, using legal tender issued by the privately held Federal Reserve Bank that prints money on behalf and at the request of the U.S. government.

I almost missed my flight (operated by a private airline regulated by the Federal Aviation Administration) because the screeners who work for the U.S. Transportation Security
Administration under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security accused me of carrying too much toothpaste, and harassed me because I refused to submit to a millimeter wave full body scan. There was also a mix-up with my name potentially being on a secret “no-fly” list but that was sorted out when the FBI arrived and assured the screener that my name hadn’t shown up on any unauthorized warrantless wiretaps.

After spending another day not being maimed or killed at work because I sit in an air-conditioned office working on the Underwriters’ Labs Inc.-approved computers and monitors. Thankfully I don’t rely on the U.S. government to sanction any of these devices in light of the soldiers in Iraq being electrocuted just trying to shower.  I also enjoyed another two meals which again do not kill me despite the USDA, I drive my NHTSA car back home on the shoddy DOT roads incurring only one pot hole-induced flat tire, to my house which has not burned down in my absence, even though it was built in the 1800′s before the fire marshal inspected such buildings, because I remembered to turn off the burners on the stove. Fortunately it has not been plundered of all its valuables thanks to the locks I placed on the doors myself purchased from the privately owned hardware store down the street. My home was burglarized once but the police never did catch the people responsible.

And then I log on to the privately developed World Wide Web, underpinned by the Internet developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration, to read the local news gathered and reported by employees of the privately held newspaper company.  I read the news about the trillions of dollars of bailout money the U.S. government gave to the banks responsible for the recession and collapse of the economy. I also saw a headline about the exhaustion of U.S. Social Security funds.

Then I decide I’ve had enough so I post on Freerepublic.com and Fox News forums about how SOCIALISM in medicine is BAD because the government can’t do anything right.

My first attempt at picking a new host was a tragic disaster.  I was looking for a *nix (Linux or FreeBSD) host and preferably a “green” host.  After some research I chose… poorly.  The first host I chose was a FreeBSD shop.  Their problems are too numerous to mention; suffice it to say they had better get their act together if they want to stay in business. I made the mistake of changing my name servers before I had everything set up properly and it bit me by losing a few comments and a post from my blog.  That’ll teach me.

My second attempt went much better – here I am!  I’m not in the business of advertising or reselling, so the only thing I’ll say is I’m very happy with this new host so far.  My current host is a Linux shop and from what I can tell it’s well run.

So here I am – all “green” and Linux.  Welcome.

Cheers,

Goody

If your webserver is running PHP 4.x then the cformsII 10.1 plug-in needs to be updated to work with PHP 4.  There are two files in the wp-content/plugins/cforms/phpmailer directory that you must update:

• class.phpmailer.php
• class.smtp.php

Open the files in your favorite text editor and change all of the variables from “public”/”private” to “var” and remove the access specifiers on all of the functions, including the static.

Example:

  public $Priority          = 3;
becomes
  var $Priority             = 3;

  private $smtp            = NULL;
becomes
  var $smtp                = NULL;

For functions:

  public function IsSMTP()
becomes
  function IsSMTP()

  private static function RFCDate()
becomes
  function RFCDate()

It’s very simple to do and it will get your cformsII mailer working with PHP 4.x.

Cheers,

Goody

We now return you to your regularaly scheduled loafing.

I deleted my Twitter account.  Gone; done; terminated; boxed; flushed; whacked; finished.  There are probably endless euphemisms for it.  In any case, I cogitated long and hard and I made the decision to eliminate it.  

I don’t recall getting any phishing emails as a direct result of my Twitter account, though I did get my share of spam.

Why did I do it?  It reminded me too much of electronic high-school.  Maybe junior high.  There’s just too much “oooh, my coworkers are doing this, hee hee”; “I’m peeing”; “I’m so tired today”; “So-and-so  is wearing pink shoes.”  Seriously.  This is what the girls giggled about in high school, folks.  Add to that the cliques – oh and there are cliques, you best believe – and the deal is closed.  

For me, the signal-to-noise ratio was unbelievably low; I derived no benefit from it whatsoever, and in fact it was detrimental to both my work and my free time.  I was following somewhere around 70 people give or take a few, and had about 80 followers.  There’s no way I could find the time to sift through the banter to find the one nugget of useful information that may have slipped past me three hours ago while I was building 8.0, fetching 7.2, closing bug tickets, and writing functional specs and reading design specs.  To further complicate matters tweets become conversations and you have to follow entire threads of tweets to figure out what  a dozen people are discussing, only to discover it started with someone flaming imperative programming languages.

Maybe I wasn’t following the right people.  That’s a tough argument to make; I believe I was.  It just never materialized into anything other than a time sink – a giant sucking sound as my life was drained from me.  Sure, I’m guilty for tweeting my share of inane drivel.  But the whole concept of Twitter – expressing something meaningful and useful in 140 characters or less is just… well, nuts.  The whole point of Twitter is “exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?”  Who cares?  Maybe I’m sleeping.  Maybe I’m dropping a deuce, do you really care?  It answers the question, though.  Does anyone really care who is wearing pink shoes, or who is typing a Twitter-flame right now?  Probably not.  I don’t, anyway.  I can’t possibly believe that people who are following more than 50 other people derive anything more than simple chatty pleasure from it.  There can be no way to justify the maintenance costs to get a minimal amount of useful information.  

It is said (by Dr. Brian Cox) of the Large Hadron Collider during a collision that it generates the equivalent of “10,000 Encyclopedia Britannica’s a second.”  I believe Twitter is the human analog of the LHC.  There is more data being generated by the hundreds of thousands of users than can be distilled into anything meaningful by a single person in real time.  When more than one person tries, it becomes recursive Twitter.

Twitter does seem to have some redeeming qualities.  If you live in your parent’s basement for example, it’s a 21st century chat room.  It seems useful for people who have a lot of free time at work – the kind of people who either get paid to talk to other people for a living or who will be replaced by software soon.  To say the least, Twitter seems to have found it’s niche in the social networking world, but it’s just not a place that I want to hang out.  I have friends, a family, kids, and hobbies (way too many hobbies) and perhaps most importantly a job.  I just don’t have the time currency to sink into a losing investment.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to watch paint dry.

Goody

The unseen irony in this is that as I was taking the photos I was in the process cooking venison steaks on the indoor electric grill.  This is just the latest salvo in the “war of the sunflower seeds.”