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Tuesday, January 05, 2010

Once upon a Database Query

I don’t make New Year’s resolutions but I do sometimes make resolutions, and it just so happens to be the new year.  I’ve been neglecting this site for a while and while that’s not totally unusual for me, it’s the thing I would like to change.  I often abandon this site for long stretches of time, with little to no warning and I’m not sure exactly why.  I guess I just go through creative highs and lows.  Right now I’m definitely in a low spot, although it helps when I see other people post on their sites. 

To help myself in my resolution, I spent most of the last two days with the Query module in Expression Engine, which is an easy way to run mysql queries directly.  Instead of relying on built-in commands and variables, this allows me to manipulate my website data much more directly and gives me more flexibility.  I’ve used it to build a more complete statistics page that tells me the average amount of time that goes by between posts in a category over different periods of time.  It’s not complete quite yet; I still have to pretty it up with colored graphs and some RSS feeds for topic ideas.  Maybe eventually it will be like my friends page and order itself by most neglected category.  My idea is that if I can see more clearly when I should make a post, and have ideas presented automatically, I just might start to post more often.  It’s definitely a process that will take time and go through many revisions.

You can see my beta statistics site here.  It’ll eventually replace the stats link on the right side, but for now it lives only in the sandbox.

Happy Two-Thousand Ten :D

Thursday, January 07, 2010

Rumors and Previews

People are actually paying attention to CES now, since so far there have been no Apple announcements to overshadow it.  Of course, the mere rumor of the new Newton device, “iSlate?” is what everyone there is talking about anyways.  What I’m really interested in is updated macbook pros, since I’ve been thinking about going down to the 13” size.  I think I can get around $750 for the 15 inch mbp I have now, so it’d only be 500ish to upgrade.  It feels wrong to buy a laptop without true dedicated graphics, but I honestly only use them for the Ohio LANs where we just end up playing Quake anyways.  However, with the tablet right around the corner - one must pause a moment and consider it.  The 15” could last a bit longer if the tablet is priced right - which it won’t be (this is apple).  But I’m sure there will be something that will make it stand out from the rest of the last decade’s tablet PCs.  I didn’t think apple could make a decent phone, yet now I swear by mine.  And it was so far off predictions that now I don’t pay as much attention to rumors as I used to.  But in place of that, I know that it’ll be something more than just an iPhone with a huge screen.  And it’s worth waiting to see just what it is they have up their sleeve.  You know what that means - July release date…

What’s also cool at the CES show is the Boxee Box, which is a dedicated little computer running Boxee as its Operating System.  Boxee has always been a good idea and I tried it out briefly on my AppleTV, but the AppleTV was just too slow to run the software.  What I like about the Boxee Box is that it’s a real competitor to the AppleTV, and probably packs more than a Celeron processor.  Hopefully it can do real HDTV.  I want Apple to finally update their crippled AppleTV and make it really HD-Capable.  What’s not good about it is the actual design of the box.  I get that it’s supposed to be hip and cool, but it looks like it wouldn’t even fit in my TV stand.  I think it’s a pretty small device which means it could probably fit even with its corners poking out, but “If it doesn’t look right, it doesn’t fly right”.  I hope Boxee got hulu back, or else there’s no real point to getting one.  The PS3 and Xbox can do everything else like streaming divx, so why waste the money?  Of course if you have iTunes content, you need the AppleTV and then you might as well hack it and run Boxee.  I want the Boxee Box to do well, because I want Apple to have a reason to give a damn about the AppleTV again.

Boxee Box!

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Proper Magic Mousing

Alison got me one of the new "Magic Mouse" mice from Apple for Christmas, although I just got it yesterday. They were readily available for about a week after they were announced, and then they were gone. It's taken forever to find one actually in stock. It's the first time I've actually been excited about a mouse from Apple. Always trying to reinvent it with each iteration, it's always seemed like a better idea just to buy a $10 usb mouse and sell the ones they come with for profit. So I was pretty skeptical when the Magic Mouse was released. Apple is all about the multi-touch tech these days and it surprisingly kicks a lot of ass. Like its predecessors, its "virtual buttons" make it not ideal for gaming but most of the time my Macbook Pro sits in the corner of my desk, and having a nice bluetooth mouse will make casual web browsing and OS use easier.

Like all Apple mice, it gets a lot of hate from people who haven't used it or are using it wrong, so I thought I'd take some pictures of its proper use. There are two types of mice it seems: the big "palm" mice like the microsoft intellimouse of a few years ago, and "finger" mice like my favorite Razer Copperhead. With palm mice, you rest your hand over the mouse and move your arm at the shoulder to move the mouse around. Finger mice are for those who keep their arm stationary and move the mouse with wrist movements. I'd definately put myself in the finger mouse camp. I hate big mice. So if you're like me, you'd probably like the Magic Mouse too.

	Here's a view of the Magic Mouse surrounded by my other two mice, the Logitech G5 (left) and the Razer Copperhead (Right). As you can see, the mouse is a little smaller than the other two, but not by much. The whole surface of the mouse is like a giant touchpad, and simply moving your finger up and down the mouse acts like a scroll wheel. I had to put them on a box since my desk is black and so are the other mice :D
It's hard to show just how thin the Magic Mouse is. Pic on the left is the MM in front of my old Razer Copperhead. The MM is about half the height of my already thin finger mouse. The G5 is more of a palm mouse so it's bigger, and the picture on the right shows the MM about 1/3 the height. The MM is wide and thin, made well of aluminum with a plastic top. Feels nice and sturdy. Not too heavy to move around, yet it stays in place when gliding your finger(s) over the surface.
	Here's me holding the Magic Mouse incorrectly, like a palm mouse. When you hold it this way, your fingers don't have any room to scroll up or down, and the bottom corners of the mouse dig into your palm a little. So when you hear people complain about its sharpness, you know they are holding it wrong.
Here's how you actually hold it, thumb and ring finger on the middle of the mouse, where it's tallest. Your index finger should be right in the middle of the mouse and free to move all the way up or down, making scrolling a dream. It's so much nicer than a scroll wheel, and if you like the two finger scrolling features macs have, this feels just like it, and maybe a touch better.

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

50,000 plz

Today Valleywag announced bribes for early access to the rumored Apple Tablet. 

I swear I saw Steve Jobs with one the other day!  Oh yeah, here it is:

$50,000 please :D

Thursday, January 14, 2010

10 Small but Annoying Things That Bother Me

I’ll jump on this blogging meme.

1. Stale Candy Bars
Milky Ways especially.  Most people don’t eat candy bars all the time so when you buy one, it’s usually a treat.  You’re all excited, looking forward to something special…man this candy bar is so bad for me but tastes so good…this is gonna be awesome.  Only then you bite down into it and the hard chocolate shell explodes into fucking glass shards in your mouth, breaking teeth and scraping and tearing your gums into unusable bleeding useless shards.  You cry in pain and disappointment, heavily tempted to throw the evil chocolate bar away…but after spending all day scrounging up enough change to actually buy the candy (who carries change anymore?) you just can’t bring yourself to abandon it.  With tears in your eyes, you suffer through the rest of the candy bar hating yourself the entire time and swearing to never buy that brand again.  Until next time.

2. Toll Roads
Why the hell can I drive between Cleveland and Dallas and all the cities in between for free, but to go from Cleveland to fucking Pittsburgh it costs $5 each way.  To hell with that.  Public roads should be public roads.  Every city has toll roads these days and it’s got to stop.  Public land, public use…so public funds.  The Cleveland I-80 was supposed to be a toll only to the point where they recovered the cost of building the road.  But then they decided “to hell with what we promised…we like money!”  Whiny people say “wahh…I dont want to pay for a road I don’t use”  Well tough, you pay for lots of things you don’t want to, and you benefit from it.  You benefit from your neighbor’s street because when he can get to work, the city’s economy benefits.  So stop taxing us twice and just be honest about it.

3. People who write their names at the bottom of forum posts
Especially this guy.  If I care who wrote what you said, all I have to do is look 5 cm to the left or right to see your online forum name.  Not only that, but your name doesn’t really mean anything to me anyways.  The only thing that matters is what you wrote.  You could just be a number for all I care, or it could show nothing at all.  I don’t really care.  You’re wasting hard drive space and my bandwidth, making me download all those extra bytes.  Stop it.

4. That fucking Bowling for Soup song that keeps interrupting my Top 25 playlist
Ok so I’m rocking out to some nice classic rock and all of a sudden without warning my ears are assaulted with “SHE SAID SHE NEEDED A BREAK A LITTLE TIME TO THINK” and I’m screaming obscenities in response, fumbling with my ipod…misclicking and being sent back to the main menu…can’t stop the song….  And I’m thinking, how did you get into my top 25, bowling for soup?  I don’t listen to you.  I mean, the song gave me a laugh so I downloaded it, but I certainly haven’t listened to you enough to earn a spot in the top 25.  And why can’t I get rid of you?  You’re louder than any other song in my library and I live in constant fear of you being the next song in the rotation.  I need a break.

5.  Over Politeness
In today’s service based society, the customer is always right.  This makes service employees constantly afraid of inciting any type of negative response, to the point where they’ll rip out their own kidney and give it to you as a spare if you ask.  I had this experience with AT&T recently when my internet kept going out.  I call them up and every other word out of this guy’s mouth is “Oh I’m sorry to hear about your trouble sir.  I understand and I’m going to do my best to serve you” blah blah blah for 5 minutes until I can actually get a word in to explain my problem.  Then he says the exact same fucking spiel all over again!  Stop apologizing to me!  You’re just making me madder!  I feel like a slaveowner about to beat his slave as he pleads not to be beaten…that’s not a good feeling.  I know you’re a human and I know you didn’t break my internet. Just help me fix it or transfer me to someone who can.  If you’re so fearful of being yelled at, you’re in the wrong job.

6. People saying “Roger” inappropriately.
This is a work related one.  At one point in time I was terrible on the radio too.  I admit it.  But I got better.  The point is, “Roger” doesn’t mean “yes”.  “Roger” means “I have received your transmission.”  So when ATC asks you something, and you say roger, I always want to say “…..and?….”.  It’s like answering a yes or no question with “I heard you”.  Ok, so what?  But the point is no one ever does anything about it or corrects anyone.  Like there and their, lose and loose, your and you’re, two too and to…There are mistakes and there is willful ignorance…

7. People who are walking in front of you and then stop suddenly
I don’t know where I’m going!

8. Chick-Fil-A is closed on Sunday
It might as well be said that on the seventh day, god wanted to eat some chickens because every time I want to go there it’s a freaking Sunday and they are closed.  I get that you are a private company and if you want to be all Christian go ahead, but hire some Non-christians because there are people who want to eat on all days of the week.  Jesus fed the poor with some bread and fish, except on Sunday when he said fuck you and watched the football game.

9. Fox cancels everything
Dollhouse and Firefly mostly.  At least they played the Dollhouse episodes in order.  Then they have the nerve to ask Time Warner for more money.  Only in the USA.

10. Some people don’t like Star Trek
They can go to hell.  Star Trek is awesome.

Saturday, January 16, 2010

Fly Like an Eagle

Work has been pretty slow since the holidays.  It’s warmed up a little lately and since the airport stopped playing Christmas music, I can actually stand being there again.  It’s now my third year with American Eagle, and time is literally flying by.  A yearly checkride is coming up in the middle of February.  Otherwise I am very much on cruise control.  I still like what I’m doing, and it definitely beats having a real job.  Coming up in the next year will be the jet/prop question: Keep flying the prop for better schedules or switch to the jet for better pay?  Don’t quite know the answer to that one yet.  It depends how fast we grow this year, I guess.

Dallas ATR pilots continue to prove how valuable your pilots up there are.  Everyone makes a big deal about Sully’s OMG amazing landing (a year ago, believe that?), but could he do it with a jammed elevator?  Barely able to control motion in the up/down directions, my fellow pilots did an amazing job getting the airplane back down on he ground safely in Dallas.  I’m sure you didn’t hear anything about it for two reasons:
1. Delta’s crotch “bomber” happened the same day
2. More importantly - It was a regional flight and nobody died.

Ok, enough ranting.  Time for recent pictures.  Friends are upgraded to first class featuring a movie on today’s flight.

Read Full Entry (Friends Only)

Friday, January 22, 2010

It’s Been a Long Time

But my time is finally here!

Title continues with the “Faith of the Heart” lyric tradition started when I unveiled my Friends 2.0 page.  Today I am finally done with the third major revision to my friends page’s operation.  I announce Friends 3.0!  In my twitter feed I said you might actually care about this update, and here’s why.  My friends page has always acted similar to Livejournal’s friends page, except without the need to be a LJ user, and it can pull data from any website, not just Livejournal users.  To a guest, or someone who never sets it up, you probably won’t notice any difference between 2.0 and 3.0, but if you’re a user on my site, the new features are available to you.

Friends 3.0 is my friends page, but now with your friends on it!  I understand that not everyone I am friends with are friends with each other, and so it makes following my friends a little pointless.  Now you can remove people you don’t want to follow, and add any rss feed you do follow, and get all your RSS feed updates on one site!  It’s tied in with the user names on this site, and already available.  All you have to do is set it up. Sign up, log in, follow instructions.  It’s pretty easy.

Monday, January 25, 2010

Something going on

krhainos: this has to be the worst code i've ever written
krhainos: its pascal syntax, except missing most of the pascal language
krhainos: its for a touchscreen remote interface for a conference room
Eclipse: ugh pascal
krhainos: i dont think i've done something where about 1/3 of the stuff i type is comments
krhainos: so i dont accidentally screw myself over
Eclipse: if you comment stuff too much, you make yourself replaceable
krhainos: this is probably my best comment of all time
krhainos: //something going on
Eclipse: heh
krhainos: //shit, son
krhainos: i know what that means, will anyone else?
Eclipse: thats what programming is
krhainos: no wonder i switched majors
Eclipse: you make a nice code and then bobomega screws everything up, and you have to make little edits all over the place to accommodate him and then its all a fucking mess the next time you look at it

Sunday, January 31, 2010

The iPad Discussion

---

The iPad is supposed to revolutionize the computing industry.  It’s a giant iPod touch, we know that.  But the fact that it’s a giant iPod touch means every app goes through the App Store, and every App should therefore be safe to run.  It shouldn’t be prone to viruses and crashing like normal computers.  Despite the fact that Apple is now the oppressive totalitarian regime it once threw a hammer at, it will just work.  You give up your access and freedom to do it.  Apple people love it because it’s apple, Windows people love it because they love their iPhone and are afraid to get a mac.

People who don’t care if their computers work can fix problems by themselves, enjoy hacking/tinkering with their tech, or stopped caring about computers because they bought an xbox.  They couldn’t care less about the tablet because they already have a nintendo DS and a cheap computer running Windows or maybe some sort of Linux.

In the middle are the Apple users and the Windows users.  Apple users want their computer to work so they love the stability of unix, but are drawn to the shininess of the OS and computers themselves.  Windows Users want their computers to just work also, but not enough to get a mac.  They shy away from the shiny but pretend Windows Vista looks just as good.		If you don’t want your computer to work, but you’re still a fanboy (eccentric), you are running linux.  You passionately rebel against anything M$ and you hate all other fanboys, especially Apple’s.  After you’ve recompiled your OS for the 4th time today, you’ll start a flamewar at a mac site about how Apple controls everything and that everyone who buys one is a sheep.  Then your computer will kernel panic and you’ll have to…no….you GET to recompile it again
	In the middle are the total geeks who own all three types of the major OS’s.  They already have a netbook and might trade it for an iPad depending if they have an iPhone, or not if they have an Android.
On the bottom are the fanboys.  They don’t care if it works.  They don’t care if it doesn’t work.  They will defend it to the grave.  They will attack anything else.		They cannot be reasoned with.  They cannot be ignored.  Be afraid, be very afraid.

Tuesday, February 09, 2010

Endeavour, Always

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Snow Day

Today the Dallas-Fort Worth area got pwned by a huge snowstorm.  DFW airport really lacks the ability to handle this much snow and flying around in these types clouds for such a long time leads to too much exposure to icing.  As a result, every single Eagle flight into and out of Dallas Fort Worth cancelled today!  At least on the ATR side they did.  Pretty sure the jets did the same.  Unfortunately, I did not get to take part in the snow day because I had recurrent ground school at the training center.

Recurrent was good, and I got refreshed about a lot of things that get lost over time.  I have to go down to Houston on the 13-14 to do some recurrent flight training.  It’s not a checkride, but a chance to jump in the simulators and practice some engine outs, wind shear escapes, stall profiles, etc.  I think they’ll hit the stalls hard after the Colgan flight findings from Buffalo.  Not really looking forward to it, mostly just can’t wait until it’s over.  I’ll be in the simulator the morning of February 14, exactly 6 years after I earned my Private Pilot’s Certificate in New Castle, PA.  Hmm..

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Thursday, March 04, 2010

Escape to Cancun

Back in the end of January when it was actually cold in Dallas for over a week straight, I decided I had had enough.  Alison and I both had 3 days off coming up, so we decided to do something about it, and set our sights on Cancun, Mexico.  A day later, we were taking off first class in an American 757 and landed in warm weather just two and a half hours later.  Cancun boasts 350 sunny days a year, so I guess we should consider ourselves lucky that we got so see such a rare event as a rain storm over the beach.  Spent some time exploring the hotel, having lunch, and hanging out in lobby when the rain finally stopped so we could head outside.

We walked along the beach and waded out into the ocean, but there were pretty strong waves so we called it quits pretty quickly.  Went back up to the hotel to change and ended up falling asleep after having to wake up so early for our flight.  Later in the evening when we woke up, we went out walking along the street and came upon the hard rock cafe for dinner.  The burgers were big and good, but the band wasn’t too great so we left for the hotel again.

The next day the weather was sunny again, with temperatures in the upper 70’s.  Glad to be out of cold Dallas and especially glad to be out of the snowy northeast, we set off for the beach again.  The waves were still pretty strong so we didn’t last long in the water.  We found an umbrella to sit under, but were chased away promptly by some mexican guy demanding money.  The Hyatt’s beach was still under construction, so we didn’t have any nice beachfront to enjoy ourselves and we ended up coming back to the hotel to lay by the pool.  Of course the pool wasn’t heated and was freezing cold so almost no one was swimming, and everyone was crowded along the outside of the pool laying on chairs under umbrellas.  We found an unused umbrella by the top pool, which the wind picked up out of its stand, threw it 10 feet in the air, and then back at us.  So much for the upstairs umbrellas.  Finally we were able to secure a nice spot by the downstairs pool and spent the afternoon down there.

For dinner we went out to an authentic mexican restaurant across from the Hyatt.  It was a large restaurant but was completely empty except for one other couple.  It was a pretty strange place.  It seemed like they didn’t even know why we had come when we opened the doors, asking us what we wanted.  Yeah…we’d like some food please…  So I figured they were all in the mexican mafia and the restaurant was a cover-up.  But the food was okay and it ended up all good.  Early the next morning we headed back to Dallas first class again, awesome!

Fun trip all in all.  This was different than our usual touristy trips where we explore cities.  We mostly stayed in and around the hotel.  I forgot how easily I sunburn, so I’ll take an extra moment to think about it before signing up for the next beach vacation.  The mexican folks were nice people, but they are so in-your-face about selling you stuff.  They spot you from a mile away and rush you.  I felt like sometimes I couldn’t get a whole sentence out without being interrupted by someone trying to sell me tickets to a comedy club.  The more they asked, the less I wanted to go.  It got to the point where I didn’t want to go out anymore.  Also, every time I looked at something’s price I freaked out because the symbol for the peso is the same as the dollar but it’s worth 12 times less.  So a dinner entry costs $650.  Couldn’t get used to that in the short time we were there.  Other than that and sunburns, I did enjoy getting away for a few days and not freezing anymore.  Might try Key West next though instead of Mexico.

Saturday, March 06, 2010

The House Post

Well it must be the beginning of a new year because we’re moving again!  Hopefully for the last time in a long, long while!  While the housing market has not crashed as much in Dallas as other parts of the country, it’s mostly because everything here is just dirt cheap to begin with.  Alison brought up the idea of moving into a house first.  Her aunt is a real estate agent down here in Dallas, and made everything pretty easy for us.  We came up a budget of $100-$120,000 and wanted to stay in Euless to be close to the airport for work.  We saw about 10 houses in all.  Most were crap, some were okay but not really us.  One was decent but way overpriced.  We were about to put in a lowball offer on it when the new one came onto the market.  We looked at it right away.  It is light years ahead of the other homes at its price.  They accepted with very minor tweaks to the contract.

The house is an older house, built in 1963, which means it’s got some wear and tear, but nothing too major.  The only problems I see are the weakass electrical system and a little bit of remodeling in the master bedroom.  Other than that just a lot of elbow grease, and time.  The inside is nice, almost 1700 sq feet which is more space than we know what to do with at the moment.  What really sold the house was the backyard.  It’s got a nice backyard with a few big trees for shade, landscaping is already done, a huge porch for grilling and stuff, and an addition to the house in the form of a nice sunroom which, located between the kitchen and the future grill, will be our dining room.  Our option period is over, so it’s pretty much a done deal pending our financing now.

Should be looking good by quakecon, which was announced for August 12-15 at the Hilton Anatole, downtown Dallas.  You should come on down and visit!  Also, free standby airline tickets to the first 2 people who offer to help us move in April! :D

Not any really good pictures of the inside yet.  Will post when I have them.