The flash-based “game” illustrates how very difficult it is to survive on $9 an hour income. Working through the scenarios here is a bit like watching the Morgan Spurlock “30 Days” episode where he lives for a month on minimum wage.
One of the advantages of having your entire site in text files on your computer, is being able to munge those files with any number of nifty Unix-style commands. For example, I can easily count all the postings on my site with ls -l | wc -l and see that this is the 1,812th posting here.
Or, I can count all the words in all the postings with wc * | sort and see that the smallest posting has 20 words, while the largest has 4,963 words. In total I’ve published 561,922 words in the last decade or so. Half a million.
And I can see that 2,346 files total are pushed to my server to make this site work by running find . -type f | wc -l.
I love being a nerd.
Some interesting ideas about why we can’t get big stuff done anymore from one of my favorite authors, Neal Stephenson.
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
In my ongoing effort to find an exercise routine that I (a) like and (b) am willing to incorportate into my daily life, I am now going swimming.
Last winter I bought a magnetic trainer and rode my bicycle on it some, but not regularly and not enough to make a difference in my weight. Over the summer it was too hot to even think about exercise, much less do any.
As a univeristy employee I get access to the rec center and to the natatorium. Yesterday I signed up for three months of pool access and today at 5 pm is the first public swim session available to me. I haven’t been swimming in seven years and I’ve never used swimming as a form of exercise.
Hopefully twice-a-week swim sessions will take hold and grow into a habit. And, if nothing else, I’ve got a great Peter Gabriel song running in my head now as a result of the title for this posting.
Now scroll. (via Daring Fireball)
Sibylle and I just returned from a short trip to Germany. We hadn’t been since May 2010 and the occasion of her thirty year high school reunion seemed like a good reason to go. Sibylle planned for the week off when she was setting up her fall teaching schedule, and so we booked tickets, made a room reservation at our favorite hotel in Bürg, packed our bags, and went.
We needed to mail a letter before we left and managed not to visit a mail box on our way out of town Wednesday evening. The Holiday Inn Express were we stayed didn’t have an out-going mail drop, so we took the letter with us to the airport. Guess what you can’t do at the airport? Mail anything. In the wake of 9-11 all US Postal Services were removed from all airports. There is a package service where you can put your pocket knife or 4 ounce bottle of what ever in a pouch and ship it to yourself for an exhorbitant fee, but you cannot mail a stamped letter.
When we bought our plane tickets we were offered “economy comfort” seats on the overseas legs of our flight, for a mere $40 per seat. We decided to splurge and were very pleased with the result. The seat rows were considerably farther apart, and our seats reclined much further than normal. It was possible to be less uncomfortable than riding in the rather cramped coach section. Both going over and coming back we were able to sleep some and arrive a bit more rested.
Unfortunately we both came down with some kind of intestinal flu or virus. Neither of us felt particularly good the entire time we were in Germany. Sibylle felt so poorly on Monday that she spent the entire day in bed asleep. It was very disappointing and frustrating to have traveled all the way to Germany only to be sick enough that we didn’t want to be away from a bathroom. Public restrooms are few and far between in Europe, and leaving our hotel meant taking a very real chance that we’d need a bathroom and not have one available. No fun.
Internet access is far easier to come by now than it was four years ago when we made our first trip to Germany together. The Starbucks in Stadtmitte Stuttgart has free wi-fi, as did our hotel. And our favorite restuarant in Winnenden sits next to an open wi-fi hotspot. All of which means we can check email and keep up with the world around us as we choose. However, we had difficulty getting to our domain hosted email accounts while at the hotel. I suspect their router was setup to block some ports, and unfortunately those included the ones used by our domain host for secure email. Also, I wasn’t able to use secure shell to access either of my computers here in the States, which mean I was unable to do any remote posting to my web site.
We are safely home again, and in the process of readjusting to a new time zone. I know we’ll have other trips to Europe, I only hope that we don’t end up sick again.
Now I just need a Kindle and for my library to offer Kindle format eBooks. (Actually I have the Kindle reader on all my electronic devices, so I just need the eBooks.)
My work desktop is a 27" iMac and it has this nifty wide bezel at the bottom, perfect for holding a variety of sticky notes. Here are the contents of the notes currently adorning that bezel.
cvs -qn up -d & jboss.pl -i ome -a debug – Updating CVS checkouts
and running our local JBoss management script
cmd-shift-del – This clears Chrome’s cache
cmd-option-eject – This will cause your Mac OS X machine to go to
sleep. If you require a password when your machine awakens, then this
effectively locks your computer.
cmd-shift-eject – This blanks the screen on your Mac OS X machine.
cmd-shift-. – When you have an open/save dialog open, this key
combination toggles the visibility of hidden files.
NIMBY – An acronym for “not in my backyard”. I have no idea where
this came from.
repo sync -f -j6 -d – I believe this is part of the process of
checking out Android’s source.
“Those that know, do. Those that understand, teach.” ~ Aristotle
nc -vvv -w 5 <hostname> <port> – What to use instead of ping for
testing connectivity to remote servers. Ping is blocked here.
!<term> [tab] – Search zsh history. Type “!” followed by any part
of the command and then press “tab”. You can scroll through the
results using the arrow keys.
wc -w * | sort | tail -n# – Count the words in all the files in the
current directory, then sort them, and finally display the largest #
of them.
I ought to put all of these in a wiki or Dropbox housed text file, but it’s easier and faster to put them on little bits of yellow paper which is sticky on one side and glue them (temporarily) to my monitor.
Ever since I was a small child I’ve had a love affair with books. Both of my parents read out loud to me from the time I was a small boy. One of my proudest moments as a child was getting my own library card and being able to checkout books from the library.
I read every day and I like to make lists, so I’ve added a page devoted entirely to [books]({{ root_url }}/books “Books”) here on zanshin.net. The page uses a nifty Amazon Web Service to grab the cover image of a book using just the Amazon identifier. And the Liquid tags used by Octopress allowed me to build the page with just 12 lines of code. This makes both the nerd in me, and the book lover in me, very happy.