Description:
Aliza's Journal - LiveJournal.com
Contents:
Let's see how many more keyboards I can endanger with this thought...
I have this image of Obama taking office and then pardoning Bush in the name of national unity. http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/Politics/story?id=6040142&page=1
Out of context QOTD
Tainted Memories and Unfinished Dreams
The beginning of the (financial) end?
Is this the beginning of the meltdown? http://www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSPEK16693720080925 -- Chinese banks told to stop lending to US banks.
-----------
Added 11:27 Pacific time:
This appears to be just a rumor, denied by the Chinese central bank, dealing with a bank run of its own
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/china-bank-regulator-denies-report/story.aspx?guid={1F3681AC-2953-4963-99EC-57BECF1E9291}&dist=msr_3
Dragon Cave viral game
Someone talked me into joining. So help me.
http://dragcave.net/user/Morganza
 -- Blue Patterned Dragon Egg -- "This egg has strange markings on it."
 -- Darkish Green Egg No. 1 -- "This egg is sitting in a pile of small pebbles."
 -- Pink Egg -- my favorite, of course! -- "It's bright. And pink."
 -- Darkish Green Egg No. 2
Sarah Palin's Gubernatorial Questionnaire
It's been pulled from the original website and from the Google search cache, but the Wayback Machine still has it:
http://web.archive.org/web/20070501192322/http://eagleforumalaska.blogspot.com/2006/07/2006-gubernatorial-candidate.html
I have to admit that I'm most offended by this one:
11. Are you offended by the phrase "Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance? Why or why not?
SP: Not on your life. If it was good enough for the founding fathers, its good enough for me and I'll fight in defense of our Pledge of Allegiance.
-- July 31, 2006
I guess she was thinking of all those mentions of G-d in the Constitution(*), not the fact that the words "Under God" were not added to the Pledge of Allegiance until 1954.
I don't trust her to uphold our Constitution.
- Aliza
(*) Zero.
[ Error: Irreparable invalid markup ('<hr [...] "align>') in entry. Owner must fix manually. Raw contents below.] It's been pulled from the original website and from the Google search cache, but the Wayback Machine still has it:
http://web.archive.org/web/20070501192322/http://eagleforumalaska.blogspot.com/2006/07/2006-gubernatorial-candidate.html
I have to admit that I'm most offended by this one:
11. Are you offended by the phrase "Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance? Why or why not?
SP: Not on your life. If it was good enough for the founding fathers, its good enough for me and I'll fight in defense of our Pledge of Allegiance.
-- July 31, 2006
I guess she was thinking of all those mentions of G-d in the Constitution(*), not the fact that the words "Under God" were not added to the Pledge of Allegiance until 1954.
I don't trust her to uphold our Constitution.
- Aliza
(*) Zero.
<hr "align=left" "width=40%">
Added for balance, 5:35 pm:
To be balanced:
"A sense of proportion should also guide those who police the boundaries between church and state. Not every mention of God in public is a breach to the wall of separation -- context matters. It is doubtful that children reciting the Pledge of Allegiance feel oppressed or brainwashed as a consequence of muttering the phrase 'under God.' I didn't."
-- Barack Obama , June 29, 2006
As quoted on http://undergod.procon.org/viewresource.asp?resourceID=63
A list
Cows
Dogs
Oxen
Goats
Sheep
Water Buffalo
Ponies
Donkeys
... and that's only inside the city limits!
I don't usually eat potato chips, but...
I just had to try the "Mint Mischief" flavor.
Which is actually pretty good...
India Journal, part 1 -- 5 temples, 2 mosques, and a cow
[I've sent bits of this in mail to various people, which may or may not have gone through. Photos to follow as I can.]
8:32 AM 7/29/2008
The obvious big changes are important, but there are little ones, too: What look like crows with gray necks or tails.
I only saw 4 cows on the road on my way to the hotel from the airport...
8:18 AM 7/30/2008
So yesterday I went out for a walk after getting settled, towards M.G. Road [Mahatma Gandhi Road, part of the commercial downtown core]. (Actually I just walked in a striaght line towards the center of the city, to make it trivial to get back.)
The mix of the old and the new is a bit startling -- cracked stone slab sidewalks under shiny modern buildings; the proliferation of private security guards at the gates of modern buildings; etc. However, where I was walking doesn't compare to the shantiness of some of the things I saw from the car coming from the airport.
A few blocks along I saw a very pretty litle girl, maybe 7 or 8, with a bright scarf around her waist. I took a picture of her (OK, my first mistake), at which point she smiles and started doing backflips, which really looked very cute until she stuck out her hand with a few coins in it and pantomimed being hungry. She only followed me for a block (unlike the assertive auto-rickshaw [yellow golf cart] driver who was sure that I was only walking because nobody had invited me into a cab.) The next cute little girl who did backflips for the obvious foreigner didn't seem so innocent... [And yes, I do intend to get some coins that I can give to beggars. I'm a sucker...]
Further on I saw a fragile-looking woman sweeping dirt out of the gutters with two hand-brooms. I took a few pictures from half a block away, but decided not to take any from closer, even though the tradiitonally-dressed woman sweeping dirt against a backdrop of traffic would have made a great shot. *sigh*
I did take a picture of the construction workers who had crawled up a structure and were welding on it, in hard-hats and flip-flops.
This morning I'm contemplating a walk in the other direction -- out of the back of the hotel, where from my roon I can see 5 temples, 2 mosques, and a moderately busy road with a steady stream of autos, buses, motor scooters, and oh yes a cow lying in a presumably cool and comfortable mud puddle in the construction area for Bangalore's new mass-transit line.
It's odd -- the most popular means of personal transit seems to be the motor scooter, and not the bicycle. Maybe that's a function of how spread-out this city is. There were traffic cops at most of the bigger intersections on my rush-hour walk yesterday; still, I felt nervous about crossing a number of the streets. The cynical solution to that, of course, is to find someone else about to cross the same street, and stay downstream of them ;-)
4:22 AM 7/31/2008
Insomnia is not your friend. I'm also told that some of the emails I've sent haven't gone through...
A few snippets:
Globalization means that the safe in my hotel room was made in Israel, and the light bulb in the bedside lamp in Indonesia. Oh, and Tuesday night I was drinking beer from Ireland with the manager of the group I'm working with. :-)
From the morning of the 29th: [blockquote]
As Bilbo said, adventures make one late for dinner. (Did I mention that I'm hungry?)
I have an... interesting view out my hotel room window. It occasionally features a circling raptor with angled tan striped on the backs of its wings; I'll try to get a photo and work on identifying it.
All:
We only passed 4 cows on the road getting here from the airport. Toto, I don't think I'm in Kansas any more...
I think my first task here in India will be to buy appropriate clothes to wear to work tomorrow. ;-) [Cue flashback to previous note about adventures.]
[/blockquote]
(that view features 5 temples (one Sikh and 4 Hindu, I think) and 2 mosques, laundry and solar water heaters on the roofs of some flats, a semi-busy road jammed with cars, buses, scooters, a few bikes, and the ubiquitous yellow "auto-rickshaws", which are three-wheeled taxis that sem to be slightly overgrown golf carts. You know the traffic is bad when people stop their engines when the car starts, and the "autos", as they are called, need to be restarted with a pull of a cord.) There's also a construction area for Bangalore's future mass-transit line, which features a cool comfortable patch of dirt that generally hosts one or two cows.
A few more notes:
By the way, one amazing thing is that even fairly grubby autos and trucks often have some decorative touches, whether it's a line of hand-painted flowers where a car would have a racing stripe, a garland on the front of a truck, multi- colored filigree work fringing a truck bed...
Beggars showing off sickly babies whenever the car stops in traffic are a bit disturbing. The people hawking towels, newspapers, toy motorcycles, and rubik's cubes are a lot easier to ignore. (Yes, I've been stopped in traffic and had someone walk around between the cars trying to interest people in Rubik's cubes. It didn't even seem surreal in context.)
We only passed one ox-driven cart, and I saw a few cows and one long-horned ox by the side of the road, as well as what might have been a camel market. Hopefully today it won't be raining and I can take bad photos from the car. ;-)
As we got further out of the city towards my office there were more men in traditional waist-wraps instead of Western trousers, usually topped with a Western button-down shirt. I'm told that the men are from Kerala State, and that their native language is Malayalam (the world's longest language-name palindrome ;-) ) like some of my colleagues. Most of the women I see are wearing traditional clothing, though of course India has a huge diversity of cultures and traditions -- saris, tunics (kurtas) with flowing pants or rarely jeans, a scattering of hijabs. Only one of me female co-workers wears Westernized clothing, though it still slants towards a kurta influense. She's also the only one of the women who speaks up and asks questions during meetings. Hm, perhaps there's a correlation ;-)
Not Clear On The Concept -- GMail Bloat
The last few times I've logged into GMail, my script blocker has notified me that there was blocked remote-site content on the GMail front page. Today I finally allowed it to see what it was.
After a several second delay, this showed up:
Latest News from the Gmail Blog
A need for speed: the path to a faster loading sequence
Posted May 13, 2008
Great performance has always been an obsession at Google and it's something that we think about and work on everyday. We...
Way to go, Google, adding several seconds of load time to the GMail entry page to tell me that you're trying to optimize system performance!
And so much for the streamlined clutter-free GMail interface...
Only at a California Seder...
Sashimi instead of gefilte fish.
Yum!
Tech Tip of the Day
Trying to click on the links in a screen shot of a web browser doesn't work very well.
Housemate needed -- Sunnyvale, CA
I've posted this on Craigslist, but I figured more exposure wouldn't hurt.
This is ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) plymouth's room, as she's moving in with Auros.
Life continues to march forward, and one of our good friends is finally moving on to something new. As a result, we're left with some empty space in our otherwise happy household. In an attempt to replace our loss, we're throwing ourselves at the mercy of Craigslist. Come one, come all...
The Room
---------
$600/mo plus 1/4 utils - This room is on the second floor and shares a full bathroom just across the hall. There is a window which faces roughly east, so the room receives a reasonable dose of morning sun. The floorspace is roughly 12 by 10, with a closet next to the door. Available second week in Feb. (possibly sooner).
The House
---------
Actively maintained by a pleasant (yet quirky) owner and landlady, this four bedroom house has weathered the years quite well. It sits back from Hollenbeck Avenue (an often traveled but not busy street), and is one of the more attractive homes on the block. The owner tends to the grounds on a weekly basis, which includes a relatively large back yard and an attractive interior front patio. The neighborhood is safe, and is only a few blocks from the nearest Sunnyvale park.
The house is mostly furnished, and includes a living room with separate sitting area, large kitchen, separate breakfast and dining areas, ground-floor washroom, and two-car garage. Amenities include central air, full sized washing machine and dryer, wireless high-speed internet, satellite television with DVR, and a forthcoming digital theater projector (for movies, TV, or games).
Parking is never a problem, and quick highway access is available due to close proximity to 85. One of us walks to Caltrain every day. There's room for your bike indoors next to all of ours.
We are currently interviewing cleaning services; we expect to get a cleaner in every other week.
Three Free Roommates
--------------------
Ray - a 29 year-old software engineer turned project manager at a large local IT company. Occasionally reserved but always amiable, his interests range from studying Mandarin at the local community college to riding his motorcycle in the local foothills. Secretly an avid competitor, Ray is always on the look out for someone with whom he can hit a round of golf, race down the slopes at Tahoe, stare down in a hand of Texas Hold'em, or hunt down in Halo 2.
Lee, 37, is a web monkey, dancer, musician, writer, blogger, and movie buff. His web work has been seen by millions, writing read by hundreds, and music heard by a dozen. His current passions include hyperbole, CrossFit, and jumping around on San Francisco dancefloors. He's originally from Idaho and has a lingering twang of hillbilly left in his brain, but it's rapidly fading.
Aliza - Typical computer nerd... well, not *quite* typical. Vices include _Cosmopolitan_ and NFL football, as well as more nerdly pursuits like board gaming (think Puerto Rico and Power Grid, not Scrabble or Trivial Pursuit), SF, puns, and digital photography.
The three of us are rarely all home at the same time; when we are we might be in the living room with our laptops watching Family Guy, Mythbusters, or one of Lee's Independent Spirit Award movies. (We account for varying tastes in viewing by passing the remote around. Aliza doesn't inflict football on anyone else.) We tend to go out more often than we have folks over.
Showings
--------
Give us a little time to tidy up and we're free to show the (currently occupied) room. Let us know if you or someone you know is interested!
A few older pictures can be found at
http://pics.livejournal.com/plymouth/gallery/0000d1c2
(though some of the pictures are of furnishings belonging to our departing roommate.)
Please no smokers (including outdoors) and no illegal drug use. No pets, sorry.
870 Hollenbeck Ave at Harvard , halfway between El Camino and Fremont.
(And yes, I know, I haven't posted to LJ in forever and y'all miss me. I miss you too... I just got out of the habit of reading and posting.)
Re-Establishing Windows XP Network Credentials
(This is a "feature" of Windows networking that has aggravated me for years. Anyone who can teach me a workaround will gain my undying gratitude.)
Between docking and undocking my laptop, and using it at home, I've somehow managed to lose my network credentials yet again. I don't want to have to reboot just so I can print a one-page text file.
Is there any way to re-establish my network credentials without rebooting my machine? (Logging out of Windows would be just as disruptive as a reboot, as I would have to close out all of my windows with work in progress.)
Please note that my TCP/IP network connectivity is working perfectly. I have a zillion open SSH sessions, web browser windows, IMAP views, etc. none of which are affected by this bit of Windows stupidity.
Failing that, is there a way to set up this machine so I can log in and out of Windows without interrupting tasks I have in progress?
Windows XP Pro (Version 2002) with SP2
A blast from the past...
A blast of hot stale fetid air from the past...
Twiki's formatting oddities remind me a bit of programming in SNOBOL...
Harry Potter 7...
... was better than book 6.
I got it!
This better have been worth standing in line for...
Image Link: Pink Dolphin
http://calcasieucharters.com/index.cfm?act=imagegallery.cfm?name=Rare+Pink+Dolphin+Photo+Gallery
Somehow I suspect someone would have sent me this link if I hadn't found it on my own :-)
Worst spam of the day
An executive resume, complete with spelling errors and formatting issues.
Duelling Deities
Coyote is just Anubis on drugs.
- chiendarrendor
When I am an Evil Overlord Sysadmin...
I will not use the root password for my most secure server as my password for an online game.
From the Geek Ten Commandments
Thou shalt not kill -9
Party conversation-starter
So, what have you done to get yourself on the Homeland Security watch list?
(and yes, I assume that this LJ post isn't mine...)
Subtlety
If you have to rip out someone's still-beating heart every time you do something, that's not subtle.
Con quotes
Author: I still have what I wrote when I was 19
Question: Was it dark and full of angst?
A: It was full of ellipses...
Fake WorldCon Bids We'd Like to See
ConDescenscion -- the con for elitist snobs.
Home
|
