Mostly about my amusement

Year: 2007 (page 4 of 18)

Mineola train crash and the wrong restaurant

Wow. This image is from Newsday’s web site.

Train and car collision in Mineola, image from Newsday.com

Lily and I usually try to catch the 5:53 PM to Ronkonkoma out of Penn Station. Thursday night all the passengers were told that there was a fatal car accident at Mineola. Luckily that accident was not fatal, in fact the driver was rescued with 10 seconds to spare. But our line was canceled until further notice.

With all the trains not running we figured it would be a couple of hours before we could even get on a train. So we went to look for a good Thai restaurant that we know of. It’s on 48th street between 8th avenue and Broadway, close to 8th. Remember that address.

We went up 8th avenue but turned towards 9th avenue instead. Lily used to work on 50th street and we were wandering around 9th avenue saying “Wow the neighborhood really looks different”.

It was different alright. Lily kept insisting that she would get to this place from work by going out the back of her old building. That was true, but her old building was between Broadway and 8th avenue. Her current building was between 8th and 9th.

I was pretty sure that we were on the wrong avenue and said so. But I did not push the point since I learned many years ago to not contradict my very determined wife.

Eventually we ended up in a different Thai restaurant where I looked up the address of the place we were searching for on my phone. We both got a laugh out of that and I was told “Why didn’t you look that up earlier?” (I had offered to do so, was told not to bother, see earlier point about not contradicting my wife).

We ended up catching the 9:14 PM train.

Okay I think I got ATPP working

I think I’ve gotten the machine translation working to a point of good stability. Meaning my MySQL config is not killing the box with requests, caching seems to be working fine.

Right now I have 65 translated pages in my database. When I encounter one that is munged (meaning the database timed out) I manually delete that page in the ATPP cache and only that page. So fare so good.

I combined ATPP with WP-CACHE and all seems right in the world.

Chuck Prince is resigning

Lily subscribes to the Wall Street Journal and today there is an article online that reads “Citigroup CEO Plans to Resign As Losses Grow”.

That was not hard to see coming. The article shows that the stock price is currently at $37.73. Last year when I worked at Citigroup the conversation was if it would stay above $50. Having some of my retirement in Citi stock does not concern me; retirement is a long term investment and Citi’s a good company.

But I wonder what his successor will do? Citigroup is a monster because of its size. One, two, or five businesses within it could not drive the stock in any direction. It took a major industry wide hit to drive the stock down that far. The challenge was not (well till recently) keeping the stock from plummeting, the challenge was to get the stock to grow. It just did not move. It was like seeing a group of people say “We’re going to move that glacier with tablespoons”.

I can’t wait to see what happens next. Wonder if my old workplace is going to change dramatically? Getting paperclips was a minimum 6 month exercise and projects were 18 months of paperwork and meetings. It would be cool to hear that global IT gets a fire about so high to make them move.

To the pain

This came up in conversation at work (today it’s applicable).

Prince Humperdinck: First things first, to the death.
Westley: No. To the pain.
Prince Humperdinck: I don’t think I’m quite familiar with that phrase.
Westley: I’ll explain and I’ll use small words so that you’ll be sure to understand, you warthog faced buffoon.
Prince Humperdinck: That may be the first time in my life a man has dared insult me.
Westley: It won’t be the last. To the pain means the first thing you will lose will be your feet below the ankles. Then your hands at the wrists. Next your nose.
Prince Humperdinck: And then my tongue I suppose, I killed you too quickly the last time. A mistake I don’t mean to duplicate tonight.
Westley: I wasn’t finished. The next thing you will lose will be your left eye followed by your right.
Prince Humperdinck: And then my ears, I understand let’s get on with it.
Westley: WRONG. Your ears you keep and I’ll tell you why. So that every shriek of every child at seeing your hideousness will be yours to cherish. Every babe that weeps at your approach, every woman who cries out, “Dear God! What is that thing,” will echo in your perfect ears. That is what to the pain means. It means I leave you in anguish, wallowing in freakish misery forever.
Prince Humperdinck: I think your bluffing.
Westley: It’s possible, Pig, I might be bluffing. It’s conceivable, you miserable, vomitous mass, that I’m only lying here because I lack the strength to stand. But, then again… perhaps I have the strength after all.
[slowly rises and points sword directly at the prince]
Westley: DROP… YOUR… SWORD!
[mouth hanging open, drops sword to floor]

The Princess Bride, what a classic.

Amateur balloon hits 30km with pics

Reddit’s web site is a pure time waster by design. This morning I saw this link. It leads to a web site that shows how a hobbyist built a kit and put it on a high altitude balloon. According to his sensors he hit about 30km and has pictures to back that up. Amazing!

This kit (space capsule?) let him take spectacular digital photos that he posted. The kit contained GPS, sensors, digital camera, etc. My favorite part is where the hobbyist Alexei Karpenko states

Also, I have verified that the Earth is indeed round and that space is black.

I can’t see many people running out an getting into this hobby but it sure reminds me of when amateur rocketry using Estes kits was popular when I was a kid.

Head over to that site, the web page details the time line, what was in the kit, and the data and pictures collected.

Update: I guess the site got hit with the Digg effect!  The new URL is not redirecting properly, use this link to get to the Flight 2 web page http://natrium42.elyxa.com/halo/flight2/? .

Wow, sometimes it does work out

When I read that newspaper executives were arrested in Arizona and that they earlier were sent a subpoena for “the names and Internet addresses of all people who have viewed the site since Jan. 1, 2004” I was not surprised.

That’s just the type of country we live in these days.

We see our government move political dissent outside of view.

We see the use of tasers when it’s just not called for, when tasers are supposed to be used as a non-lethal substitute for guns. They are not really meant to torment some drunk woman or college smart mouth who pisses people off makes the police angry.

We see irrationality in debates with candidates trying to out Jack Bauer each other.

We have a Democratic party in charge of congress but lack the resolve to do anything other than be the President’s punching bag. Harry Reid will just fold on FISA, telecom immunity, anything the President wants. The Democrats are the Lame Ducks after all.

We see that we don’t torture as long as our government can define what torture is.

Authority has become the theme for our time and disagreeing with authority gets you in trouble. The courts don’t help people, they also defer to authority. Just ask this guy.

So this morning I read that in Arizona the County Attorney did the right thing and I found that to be really outrageous. I’m more shocked that the investigation and charges are dismissed rather than they are there in the first place.

I don’t know why the County Attorney dismissed the whole thing. He could have gone after anything he wants and would have gotten away with it. After all, that is the type of country we live in.