Gay Marriage

Friday, June 6th, 2008

This was going to be (yet another) rant on my blog. I deleted the rant part.

Here’s all I have to say about same-sex marriage:

Anyone out there who is gay who needs an officiant let me know. I’ll get myself ordained (Universal Life Church) and marry you. If you want a domestic partnership, I’ll go become a notary and grant your wish. For free.

I’m not going to fly my ass all over the globe, but if you come to me, I’ll marry you.

Why? I just had another friend tell me they were getting divorced for no particular reason. Perhaps if we allow same-sex marriages, we might actually start lowering the divorce rate.

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Money, Food, or something else?

Monday, May 19th, 2008

I’m unable to get to sleep tonight. Maybe it’s my screwed up sleep schedule after a week in China–I left Shanghai at 1pm, yesterday, and arrived in San Francisco at 12:50pm, yesterday. Maybe it’s been too much Neal Stephenson followed by Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us. It could also be that I avoided my pile of work today because I needed at least one non-work, non-travel day, and now I’m tossing and turning thinking about all the stuff I have to do tomorrow… I mean today.

Whatever the reason, I can’t sleep.

I keep thinking about the following scenario:

If we taught a requisite curriculum, and truly educated, on Money in schools
then People, as in the population of Human Beings as a whole,
would do far fewer stupid things
because today
money = food, shelter and care
and
money = happiness

For just a moment, leave philosophical arguments aside, because believe me, I will side with you about how universally incorrect the above statements are.

but…

Today, even for the incredibly crappy value of my nation’s dollar, currency is life. I don’t hunt and forage. I didn’t inherit a cent. Like most other people I know, I work.

I work in what I like to call not-my-parent’s world.

There is no job security.
No one has ever offered me a pension, and ignore the horrific time bomb called Social Security.
Layoff is now a polite term for being fired permanently.
Inflated real estate prices–yes yes, I agree with you real estate is, and always will be one of the greatest investment, but take a moment and Zillow.com Mountain View, my current town of residence. I can’t say that if I could service a million dollar plus mortgage I’d jump at the chance at grabbing a 2,000 square foot home.

Just some thoughts.

Thanks for reading. I finally feel like I can go to sleep.

Curious of others’ thoughts on the topic of Money Education.

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Open Source Life: Subversion, a revision control system (part 3 of 3)

Sunday, April 27th, 2008

It’s such a lie to call this Part III. Feels like part 33, but I wanted to close out with a couple of final notes.

There’s only three:

1. DO NOT PUT EVERYTHING UNDER REVISION CONTROL

Really, it’s a bad idea. Everyone will make up different rules about this, but no matter what not everything should be placed inside the repository. I came up with the following couple of rules to prevent my habitual tendency to just Subversion stuff:

  • Only put relatively stable drafts and projects under revision control.
  • Only put things into Subversion that need change or version tracking. If I don’t care about previous revisions, keep it out of the repository.
  • No images. Keep images someplace else unless they won’t be changing much and somehow need to be associated with a certain project like a web page.
  • No program applications. Never, never.
  • No “published” documents (aka. PDF or Microsoft Word Documents or OpenOffice Docs). XML, HTML, and even sometimes Rich Text Format (RTF) are all acceptable, but where possible, only check in the human parseable source of published documents.

2. Subversion is not a backup system

Subversion can make backing up extremely easy, and in my case, shrink the size of all of my documents (my repository hovers around 6 megabytes).

Once you put all your hard work into building your repository, make sure you have someplace located away from your computer’s hard disk to store a backup copy of it. There are loads of free online storage services available. Do yourself a favor and backup your work on one.

3. TortoiseSVN and Windows Vista don’t always play nicely

I don’t know why Microsoft had to go and be such a bunch of dick-bags and make Vista so different on the inside but so annoyingly not so much better on the outside. Case in point, every now and then TortoiseSVN seems to crash Explorer.exe. I’ll admit that I’ve been a bad Open Source community player by not submitting my crashes to either Windows or the TortoiseSVN group–admitting it in this article will probably shame me into doing something about it.

My friend Steve pointed me to this article about fixing a problem with TortoiseSVN on Windows Vista (e.g. Problems with errant File Locking). This wasn’t my problem, but I hope this can help someone else out.

Crashing Explorer.exe on Windows Vista does not have near the bad impact as on previous versions of Windows, but it’s still annoying. But it’s not too bad. I’ll be using Subversion long after I’m done using Windows.

That’s all I have to say right now. Hope you’re having a great weekend!

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Open Source Life: Subversion, a revision control system (part 2.6b of 3)

Thursday, April 24th, 2008

Branching. You haven’t really used Subversion until you have branched something.

I recommend viewing this video in full screen (click the icon to the left of the volume button).

 For the direct link on YouTube, go here.

 That’s all the videos for now. Must resolve hosted video quality before I’m willing to put the effort into making anymore.

 

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Open Source Life: Subversion, a revision control system (part 2.6a of 3)

Thursday, April 24th, 2008

A final few notes for now. This part deals with Subversion’s revision numbering, and how to access previously stored versions of a saved document.

I recommend viewing this video in full screen (click the icon to the left of the volume button).

 For the direct link on YouTube, go here.

 

 

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Open Source Life: Subversion, a revision control system (part 2.5 of 3)

Friday, April 18th, 2008

Part 5 is here. I’ve been having problems with my free hosting at openomy, but no matter I now have my own server running. When I get Apache up and running, I’ll host my stuff over there. For now, the video below comes directly from YouTube. Bad quality, but still does the job.

I recommend viewing this video in full screen (click the icon to the left of the volume button).

For the direct link on YouTube, go here.

 

 

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Odd display problems on my blog?

Sunday, April 6th, 2008

I hope it’s just me, as articles are occasionally overlaying one on top of the other in my browser. I haven’t figured out why, but if you notice it, too, please let me know.

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Open Source Life: Subversion, a revision control system (part 2.4 of 3)

Sunday, April 6th, 2008

And here we cover “Checking in” and “Checking out” files. Silly me, since I haven’t been scripting these, you’ll notice in the beginning I say this one will be, “The shortest video so far.” Hah! and oops.

Download
I recommend viewing this video in full screen (click the icon to the left of the volume button).

Had to split the video to post it on YouTube. Part 4a is here. Part 4b is here.

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Open Source Life: Subversion, a revision control system (part 2.3 of 3)

Thursday, April 3rd, 2008

Part 2.3: Organization

Download
I recommend viewing this video in full screen (click the icon to the left of the volume button).

I have started cross-posting these videos at YouTube under my channel. The quality isn’t as good, but if you’re having trouble viewing it here, then YouTube is the next best thing.

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Now downloading the Nine Inch Nails new Ghosts I-IV Album(s)

Tuesday, March 18th, 2008

nin_ghosts_splash.jpg

I forget where I first heard about this album release, maybe it was Lawrence Lessig’s blog? I’ve enjoyed Trent Reznor’s, a.k.a. Nine Inch Nails, music since I was in high school. The band’s most recent album is Ghosts I-IV and Firefox has just informed me that my download of the album has completed.

What I love the most about this album is that it is released under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license. Ghosts I is freely distributed at the album website. The entire collection is available for $5, probably just to cover the distribution fees. I bought the fully digital album for a mere $5, the first album that I’ve purchased since I dumped iTunes.

What was heartwarming is that when I went to order my copy, the 2500 copies of the $300 edition have sold out. Playing the Devil’s Advocate, maybe others out there haven’t had to read the CC licenses umpteen times, and maybe it’s just ignorance. I mean, in this day and age when stealing is so easy, wouldn’t people know that this CC license translates to: I, or anyone who has a copy of the music, can now give you a copy of my Ghosts I-IV absolutely free?

Rather, I’d prefer to think that people do understand the license, and they chose to support the people behind Nine Inch Nails because they love their work.

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