Author: Matt

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Countdown to Default?!?!

Dear CNBC:

I’m writing to let you know I’m quitting you.  For 10 years watching every morning I’ve let you get away with a lot of stuff, but this is too much.   This was two hour long commercial for a political agenda.  Letting someone say that we’re frozen by  ‘regulatory activism’ when we’re coming out of a crisis of regulatory failure, talking about our ‘debt crisis’ when our financing costs are at historical lows, calling debate about a joke of a budget demagoguery , I could go on and on.

I’m not sure what I’ll watch instead but there’s got to be something better.

Demagoguery

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Bikes and Drugs

I’m glad CyclingNews saved me from having to do this. Yes, the wife makes fun of me for being suspicious of southern Europe, but… but…

And way to go GB!  Punching above your weight and out of your class.  Bradley Wiggins is a tosser.  St. Millar?  Garmin does alright (first non-French, to turn an ironic phrase), but would have done better without their part owner.  A little disappointed by Tyler (F. not H., this is 2010) and very by CVV.  If you’d told me that Lance & Levi would be in the same 0-10 group as Christian and Cadel I probably would have called you a tosser, too.  It is me doing the tossing, I guess.  Everyone dopes, get used to it.

BUT THEN!  Jens, Andy, Fabian!  So, yes, technically anything > 1 is suspicious, but it’s hard to not give a little slack to the 2s, which means that most of lEHoPARD-T, most of the guys that everyone loves (Stuey! again: Jens!), keep on being loved. Think about this: no one understood why Matti & Nicki didn’t make the jump… could it really be really true?  Really?

Big George’s irrelevance extends to the level where he doesn’t even cheat anymore, just shows up.  Maybe it was all Lance making him do it.   A boy can dream.

And French housewives can continue dreaming about Sylvan & little Tommy V.  And on July 14th so can I.

Ok, enough dreaming.  I know that this isn’t the true/false list we’ve all been looking for lo these many years.  But it’s not like the list isn’t made for reading into.   L’Equipe highlighted the Frenchies to show that they averaged right.  It’s born of politics, released on the eve of the (A)TOC in order to embarrass the UCI to the betterment of ASO.  If you wrote this plot people would call you lame.  It’s the soap opera that is professional cycling, and I don’t think there’s anyone left paying attention after these long last 13 years that can’t handle it.

Bradley Wiggins is a tosser.

 

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Bikes & Politics

A great summary of recent history.

I blame Critical Mass.

Some people say that the growth of bikelanes over the last few years has sparked the backlash, but it’s hard to argue that those aren’t a net positive.

I commute to work by bike, and have for nearly a decade.  I’ll admit to not stopping at every light, but for the last six years I’ve been fortunate that there aren’t many lights between home and work.

I’ve been noticing lately (because I’ve been trying to pay attention) that when there is interaction w/ a pedestrian, either on the commute or on the weekend, it nearly always ends with them apologizing to me for jaywalking in front of me.  I’m no saint, but this city’s filled with people who aren’t following every law they’re supposed to follow.

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Thank you MicroSoft

Thank you for protecting innovation with your lawyer army and Scrooge-McDuck-sized vault of gold.

I shudder to think of the world we might live in: a world where we mortals have discovered a way to highlight text on a page but haven’t taken the unobvious next step of adjusting that selection.  Thank you, Geniuses of Redmond, for discovering this strange and nearly mystical technology.

I’ll include your other innovations below for posterity, although my puny mind struggles to understand the nonobvious, substantial, and significant nature of these inventions.  In fact, I may go mad from the sudden expansion of my perspective.

Whatever you do, gentle reader, look away before reading about the way they’ve completely redefined the way we ‘annotate’ things:

The Microsoft-created features protected by the patents infringed by the Nook and Nook Color tablet are core to the user experience. For example, the patents we asserted today protect innovations that:

• Give people easy ways to navigate through information provided by their device apps via a separate control window with tabs;

• Enable display of a webpage’s content before the background image is received, allowing users to interact with the page faster;

• Allow apps to superimpose download status on top of the downloading content;

• Permit users to easily select text in a document and adjust that selection; and

• Provide users the ability to annotate text without changing the underlying document.

 

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The TV says I should take Lunesta, but…

When taking LUNESTA you may experience

  • Unpleasant taste in mouth, dry mouth
  • Morning drowsiness
  • Dizziness
  • Headache
  • Symptoms of the common cold

You may still feel drowsy the next day after taking LUNESTA. Do not drive or do other dangerous activities after taking LUNESTA until you feel fully awake.

Possible serious side effects of LUNESTA include:

  • Getting out of bed while not being fully awake and doing an activity you do not know you are doing. (To learn more, read the LUNESTA Medication Guide).
  • Abnormal thoughts and behavior. Symptoms include more outgoing or aggressive behavior than normal, confusion, agitation, hallucinations, worsening of depression, and suicidal thoughts or actions.
  • Memory loss
  • Anxiety
  • Severe allergic reactions. Symptoms include swelling of the tongue or throat, trouble breathing, and nausea and vomiting. Get emergency medical help if you get these symptoms after taking LUNESTA.

These are not all the side effects of LUNESTA. Ask your healthcare professional for more information.

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Visual Dissonance

Maybe this doesn’t bother other people like it bothers me, but I’d rather have the text backwards than the buildings.

I’ll be replacing the album cover in all my meta data w/ this one, and my apologies to the artist who put it together originally.  I’m sure they must have had some reason for flipping reality.

On a related note: meh.

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Archos Gen 8 70i

I hope to have more about this later, but this took me a while to get around to researching so I thought I’d leave here for anyone else having the same problem:

Media files w/ ‘#’ in the name appear to stop the Archos Media Scanner dead in its tracks.  Not just skipping the files, skipping all files that would have been scanned after that file.

Arcade Fire, Elliott Smith, even the Minutemen…

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OnMerge RT CF Merging

Looking around on how to merge CF with multiple entries in RT, I couldn’t find anything and this was only useful as a starting point.  I have to admit I couldn’t figure out how to add a section to the RT Wiki, so I’m leaving the code here for future reference.

Here’s what replaces the Custom Action Cleanup Code:

#Define the Custom Field Name Were Going to Play with.
my $CFName = 'Auction';

#Transaction Association
my $txnObj = $self->TransactionObj;

#Ticket Association
#The New Ticket your Merging into
my $ticketObj  = $self->TicketObj;
my $queueObj   = $self->TicketObj->QueueObj;
my $CFObj      = RT::CustomField->new($RT::SystemUser);
$CFObj->LoadByNameAndQueue(Name => $CFName, Queue => $queueObj->id);
unless($CFObj->id) {
 $CFObj->LoadByNameAndQueue(Name => $CFName, Queue=>0);
 unless($CFObj->id){
 $RT::Logger->warning("Custom Field: $CFName not for this Queue");
 return undef;
 }
};

#The old Ticket you're merging From
my $oldTicket = RT::Ticket->new($RT::SystemUser);
$oldTicket->LoadById($txnObj->ObjectId);

my $field = $ticketObj->CustomFieldValues($CFObj->id);
my @currentvals;
while (my $value = $field->Next) {
 push @currentvals, $value->Content;
}

my $oldfield = $oldTicket->CustomFieldValues($CFObj->id);
unless ($oldfield) {
 $RT::Logger->warning("No entries for $CFName to merge");
 return undef;
}
while (my $value = $oldfield->Next) {
 my $content = $value->Content;
 if (grep {/^$content$/} @currentvals) {
 $RT::Logger->warning("Already found $content in $CFName");
 next;
 }
 my ($st, $msg) = $ticketObj->AddCustomFieldValue(
 Field => $CFObj->id,
 Value => $content,
 RecordTransaction => 1
 );

 if ($st){
 $RT::Logger->warning("Added $content to $CFName");
 } else {
 $RT::Logger->warning("Odd we couldn't set $CFName to $content");
 }
}

 return 1;