Author: cosmo

Oh how I love the command-line. I spend most of my work time either hacking away at stuff in a text editor or slapping together cryptic commands at my shell prompt.

So I just imported a database onto a staging server:

[fixed:zing@stage01:~ > dbl mocapay dump-mocapay.sql.gz]

As if that’s not cryptic enough, I needed to import a second database as well. Let’s be honest: that command above is a lot to type. It’s so much easier to do this:

[fixed:zing@stage01:~ > !!:gs/y/y_ext]

And voila!

I just don’t understand those people who think the command line is complicated… heh heh.

Breaking news from West Chester, OH:

But the best part of the article is this:

Umm… I’m guessing the cause of death was the explosion that shook houses across the neighborhood. But hey, I’m just a programmer guy, not a forensic pathologist…

We just watched the movie Stardust with the kids, and it was fantastic. I couldn’t help but compare it to The Princess Bride, for sheer simple enjoyment and the same kind of mix of fantasy, romance, adventure, and humor. I hadn’t even heard of the movie until my friend Dave told me it was a good one, and he was right.

Happy New Year!

To celebrate the end of 2007, today I’m going to… work on taxes.

Whee! I need to get my corporate finances in order, so I can send them to my accountant (because no mere mortal like me can comprehend the corporate tax code) so he can process them and send them back to me so I can do my personal taxes (with the help of software from the nice folks at H&R Block, because no mere mortal can comprehend the personal tax code either) and in the end, figure out how much I owe. Oh, how I love writing that annual check to the “United States Treasury”, knowing that my money is being spent wisely by our benevolent government.

“And there is distrust in Washington. I am surprised, frankly, at the amount of distrust that exists in this town. And I’m sorry it’s the case, and I’ll work hard to try to elevate it.”

— President George W. Bush

Tom and I always exchange gift cards for Christmas and birthdays, so in keeping with long tradition I decided to get him a card from Lowe’s, since he’s always working on some new house project.

But when I hit the Lowe’s web site and went to the gift card area, I see this:

What the heck? I want to send him a card via e-mail– not even a physical card or anything– and it says I can’t. Is the internet full or something?

Even today, five days after Christmas, it’s still down. This is really starting to suck. At this rate Tom might have to wait until his birthday to get the dang thing…

So the kids came home from school with some Christmas gifts this week. According to the story (verified by Laralee, who knows all of the “in people” over there), a mysterious benefactor actually bought presents for every kid in the school. And these aren’t just cheesy plastic cups with a snowman on them or something– Zack got an Etch-a-Sketch, Kyra ended up with a nice silver charm bracelet, etc.

There are around 450 students enrolled at Loma Linda Elementary, and about 65% of them are on the “free lunch” program because their household income is pretty much at the poverty level. These are kids who probably don’t have much of a Christmas, and even if they do, Dad probably has to leave to work one of his three jobs to scrape by. So for someone to buy gifts for all 450 of the kids is a really, really cool thing.

I found this picture on a plastic cup I’d made in first grade. Holy cow.

The cup had, sadly, finally fallen apart to the point where you couldn’t drink out of it. But I figured I should at least salvage the picture.

This cartoon struck me as terrifically romantic, in a geeky kind of way.

Maybe I’ll put it on a Valentine’s card for Laralee someday…

Whoever thought of the idea of a talking web site– err, I mean “virtual salesperson”– must have been smoking something pretty interesting. I stumbled across one today:

Does anyone really believe that having a web site start talking to you is going to “increase online sales”? I would think it would make people click the “X” in the corner as fast as they can move their mouse over there.

And for the record, this woman had a really hard time saying “hey yo wassup brotha”. Her pronunciation was all wrong.