On New Year’s Eve 2007, the worst job of my life was over. I hadn’t been there long, but pretty much everything that could go wrong had gone wrong, except the stuff where my team and I had control. Still, the stress nearly killed me and the ten extra pounds I gained were nothing compared to the solace provided by a freshly baked chocolate chip cookie at the end of a long day.
Continue readingHave you ever done that? Created a content item that is of sufficient length that your session expired? You hit “Save,” Joomla tells you that you are not authorized to view the resource, and you are left there with a giant blog entry that is gone for good. You think.
I had that problem several times. Joomla could react a lot better to a session timeout than by making you lose hours of work, wouldn’t you think? It’s easy enough to fix, too. But we are not going to change the Joomla code right now just to find a fix from this impasse.
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Go shredding! I can’t believe I waited this long, but 1/4 was my first day of boarding this season. I took bayareaskibus.com to Kirkwood, and had a blast. It was an amazing trip, with perfect road conditions, perfect weather, and really good snow.
The most exciting thing was that I didn’t have to drive one mile! I just hopped on the bus, and four and a half hours later I was on the slopes. Next time I’ll even take the PSP with me, and Shaun White Snowboarding on it!
No car and snowboarder? What do you do? Take your bike up to Tahoe (hopefully it’s motorized) with your gear and your snowboard strapped on your back? Comes in handy when going downhill, you can use the board as your wings and fly above the crowd waiting in that giant parking lot that is I-80 on a Sunday evening.
So far, I had three options: rent a car, go with friends that are willing to drive, or hitch a ride with unknown strangers on craigslist or one of the carshare sites. Each of the three came with advantages and disadvantages:
Continue reading[Note: this is the first post in a new section, Diet & Health. As my pics prove, I used to be seriously overweight (108kg, about 240 lbs) and lost all the extra weight, replacing much of it with muscle. I felt I can add to the plethora of diet advice on the Internet, because I had to learn so much about weight management.]
It’s time for New Year’s Resolutions, and this year I decided to try a low carb diet. I am just human, and in the five weeks between Thanksgiving and New Year, there is a certain amount of risk I abused the ever-present cookies and sweets. Trader Joe’s, in particular, has a section devoted every year to Christmas candy, cookies, and chocolate that has almost magical syren song qualities.
Continue readingI waited for the paperback edition of this book to come out, and I did well. This is a book best read with a bit of distance to the events described.
A history of the Supreme Court of the United States of America in recent times. Once an institution of minor rank, over the 20th century the Supreme Court transformed itself into a powerhouse of societal transformation, pushing the nation forward towards equality and the rule of law. Never mind that most of the justices were appointed by conservatives: they ended up veering sharply to the liberal side once appointed.
Continue readingThere is no topic in elementary physics as odd as quantum mechanics. Once you learn the formalism, it is easy to apply (although the mathematics required can be daunting). The experimenters say, on the other hand, that the results you get from quantum mechanical computations are accurate within the limits of measurement.
Problem is, there is no reason for that. We are all a little surprised by how accurately QM models the world. It’s as if God in his or her infinite wisdom had decided to choose QM as the infinitesimal model of the world on a whim.
Continue readingAs a good California resident, it’s no surprise I cast my lot (figuratively) with Barack Obama, the clear favorite of the Golden State. Indeed, after the shortest election night I can remember, we heard the concession speech just after 8p and the victory speech soon after.
One has to admit that the real surprise of the night was John McCain’s concession speech. It was the McCain I remember pre-2004: the man of integrity that puts his country above his own interests and those of his party. He was gracious beyond reproach, in one fell swoop making me forget the rhetoric he had been spewing for months. Besides, the words were aided by his demeanor. John McCain seemed genuinely relieved this election was over. Not that he lost it, mind you, just that it was over and that he could return to being the man he had been his whole life long. I doubt we’ll see him running for president again.
Continue readingHappy as a clam I followed the instructions to get my Kubuntu 8.04 machines upgraded to 8.10 – and with them KDE from 3.5 to 4.1. It was a swift download, about 30 minutes, and I encountered no problems at all with the installation process. Kudos!
After the reboot, though, the problems started surfacing. Most of them were minor, and the only serious annoyance at this point was the changes to knetworkmanager. Once it didn’t support WPA (which was an item of criminal neglect), while now it was mandatory to use wpa_supplicant. No problem, once it tried to connect to a network that had encrpytion turned on, you just needed to click on the tiny lock icon to set the encryption parameters.
Continue readingIt’s been a long while that I’ve been curious about Bollywood movies. I have enough friends from India that their constant chatter about them has started to make a dent, and I’ve been quite bored with standard Hollywood fare. I think part of it is that Netflix continues suggesting crappy movies from the 80s (Ladyhawke, Labyrinth and Working Girl amongst the latest).
Regardless: when the Internation section of my recommendations contained a Bollywood title with great rating, I added it to my queue, not hoping much, but assuming it would be better than the other stuff I’d seen these days.
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