The Sparrow Nest

I hate Walmart; not because I’m against a free market economy, but because I despise being in that store. So, since I can’t bring myself to buy items at inflated grocery store prices, I’m forced to patronize Walmart about once a month.

Amazon to the rescue!

I’ve started using Amazon’s Subscribe & Save. It’s a grocery store with a limited selection. Their shelves are stocked with nonperishable bulk items at cheap¹ prices and the shipping is free. This isn’t anything to get excited about.

The “Subscribe” part is what I’m excited about. There are some things I can never seem to remember to buy. When I notice that I’m getting low on razors, I’m never in situation where I can write it down. So when I decided to buy a 12 pack of razors from Amazon, I had to specify a “Delivery Schedule”. I’m thinkin’ I’ll need another 12 pack in 3 months. We’ll see. If I’ve miscalculated the delivery schedule, I can change it later. Also, if I’m running low, I can tell Amazon to send the next shipment right away. Or, if I’m overstocked, I can tell them to skip the next shipment.

Subscribe & Save helps me cut down on mind numbing minutiae of everyday life.

me (head):

"Do I have to stop by Walmart on the way home from work today? No I don’t!"

¹Always calculate the unit price, not all items are great buys.

An open letter to the digital video/codec industry:

Dear Assclowns:

May you all burn in eternal hellfire.

Sincerely,

JC Mann

I borrowed a digital video camera so that I could record my son’s talent show act. It was a cheap, $100, no-name device, but it was better than nothing at all. I recorded the act without any problems. I brought the camera home and plugged it into my computer using the “specially designed” USB cable (Yes, you special-cable-connector-designin’-assclowns are next).

I opened the .mov file to view my masterpiece. QuickTime started playing the video immediately…sans video. While I listened to the audio, QuickTime presented me with a window containing a completely white canvas. Thanks QT. Good work. Onto other players. MPlayer? Same thing. I tried VLC, and it worked…but not without spewing tons of warning messages about the codec! Grinning like an idiot, I watched my son’s act in all its splendor, rendered in grainy low-resolution video accompanied by tinny mono audio. What an age we live in.

It’s hard to imagine what goes on at these big technology companies that produce our wonderful consumer electronics.

After a grueling three month long endeavor, I finished reading The GOD Delusion. It is a logical and scientific dissection of religion by Richard Dawkins. An evolutionary biologist and Oxford professor, Dawkins is a champion of Darwinian theory.

The book was both interesting and exhausting to read. I found that I could only read 3 to 5 pages at a time. After just a few pages, my head was swimming with words, scientific facts, and historical events that I was eager to learn more about.

Here are a few things I learned:

• Albert Einstein was an atheist. I never would have guessed that with quotes like “God doesn’t roll dice,” and “God is subtle but he is not malicious.”
• The Bible has tons of hilarious stories. How anyone can take it seriously is beyond my comprehension.
• Moses was one mean genocidal jackass.
• My relationship with my father is paradise compared to what Abraham and Isaac had.
• In 1969, the city of Montréal completely fell apart when the police went on strike.
• Pascal’s Wager is great…as long as you pray to the correct god. If you get it wrong, a modern-day Moses might kill you, your wife, your farm animals, and your pets.
• The amazing history of Cargo Cults.
• A Letter To A Christian Nation seems like a much more entertaining book.
• If you’re British, the word percent can be written as “per cent” and it’s not a typo.

Dawkins has a very wordy writing style. Maybe it’s a British thing. For example, on page 170 he writes:

A partisan in the controversy, I must beware of riding off on my pet steed Tangent, far from the main track of this book.

I think he means, “I don’t want to talk about this right now.”

Update (2007.04.17):
A friend of mine was unsure if I was recommending this book or not. Sorry about that. It’s a qualified “yes”. Although it was a difficult read, I still feel like it was worth it. The knowledge I gained was more valuable than the effort I exerted reading it.

Sherry is a fantastic cook. This is the only thing she makes that turns my stomach.

Yes, it’s edible. I guess real kitty litter is edible too, but I’m sure this dish tastes much better. I know it has melted tootsie rolls, pudding, crumbled cookies, and green food coloring.

The poo slung over the side and the real kitty litter scoop are great features of the presentation.

Back in days of yore (circa 2002, I think), Mr. Gettle and I created a Development Portal. It was our home-grown continuous integration server. We wrote it because we needed a common place to create binary distribution of our software.

We just started using Hudson at Versatile. I’m really impressed. It’s a snap to install and I had it building our project in no time.

Here are the features I like:

Painless Install - Just drop the hudson.war file in a servlet container, go to the Admin Page and start configuring your projects.

Great UI - Intuitive design, inline help, pretty graphs, AJAX stuff. Sold!

Email Notifications - Hudson notifies the developers of broken builds and when a build is fixed. It also sends special emails to the suspected build-breakers. The suspects are simply the developers who have committed code since the last successful build.

Multiple Projects - Hudson manages as many projects as you want. You can even set up project dependencies. With this, projects that depend on a core project are automatically rebuilt if the core project is successfully built.

Multi-Threaded Builds - You can specify how many build processes can be run concurrently, allowing you to throttle how hard the build server is pushed.

Distributed Builds - What an amazing feature. If you have a weak or overworked build server, you can specify slaves boxes to handle some or all of the load.

SCM Integration - Hudson can watch the source code repository and kick off a build when changes have been made. You can also create a CVS branch/tag right from Hudson. Sometimes creating a branch can take some time, in that case, Hudson will email when it’s finished. And finally, you can view all of the source via the Hudson interface just like ViewCVS.

All that said, the Hudson website has this gem listed in the Benefits section:

No more “full rebuild” before a commit:

With Hudson, I stopped doing a rebuild before I commit. Nowadays I just commit, and let Hudson check if a build fails or not for me. Meanwhile, I move on to work on other things. If a build fails, Hudson can tell me so within a few minutes, so breaking a build for that short period of time is not really a problem. Thanks to this, I can spend my time more productively.

– said the developer nobody wants on their team.

Amazon has it right. In addition to providing one of the best department stores on the interweb, they have been quietly providing incredible web services. Elastic Computing Cloud, Mechanical Turk, Simple Queue, and S3 are few of my favorites.

All of these services share the same basic theme:

“We can do this server hardware stuff much better than you. So why don’t you focus on the software, and we’ll do the rest.”

How much? Pretty damn cheap. For example, here is their pricing for S3:

• Pay only for what you use. There is no minimum fee, and no start-up cost.
• $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used.
• $0.20 per GB of data transferred.

So what can you do with it? That’s up to the developer. There are several free and open source applications that provide slick interfaces to S3. I’m using JungleDisk. It’s an active project with binaries for Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX. You give JungleDisk your S3 account information, and it gives you a file system that you can mount as a drive. The virtual file system JungleDisk provides is only available to your local machine, which is a little restricting, but there are ways around that.

Now that no one is still reading, here’s my million dollar idea:

S3 + JungleDisk + Linux + Samba + Hacked Router = the perfect network storage/backup appliance.

1. Install Linux on a router. Linksys seem to play nice with Linux.
2. Install JungleDisk on the router.
3. Point the JungleDisk instance to your S3 account.
4. Install Samba on the router and use it to share the JungleDisk mount point.
5. Enjoy your worry-free network storage appliance.

So why spend several hundred dollars on a networked storage appliance with limited capacity, when you can have the Infinite Storability Drive from Sparrowlegs Systems Inc.

Don’t ask me how I found this. I don’t want to talk about it.

Clomipramine, is an antidepressant that has many interesting side effects. This one grabbed my attention: yawns can cause orgasms. The second case, “… A married male in his mid-twenties …”, was my favorite.

My mind was/is reeling thinking about the recreational possibilities this drug possesses (wow that word has a lot of S’s).

Sherry, if you start taking this drug, can I watch? Imagine, you could climax before, during and after sex!

After I tell you a really funny and witty joke: orgasm.
After I tell you about my exciting day at work: orgasm.
During the 90 minutes of SNL: orgasm.
Morning: orgasm.
Night: orgasm.
An hour after eating turkey: oh god. oh god! orgasm.

Unfortunately, there are several not so entertaining side effects:

… , enlarged/painful breasts, unwanted breast milk production, irregular/painful menstrual periods, … , trouble urinating, severe vomiting, … , unusual/uncontrolled movements (especially of the tongue/face/lips), … , black stools, … ,vomit that looks like coffee grounds.

Coffee grounds!?

The development of my favorite Quake 3 mod is alive and kicking. I’m amazed by the longevity of the game. I know it’s dated but I love it. As I play into the night, (OK — 11PM), I must be one of 30 people who hasn’t moved on.

A few weeks ago, while aimlessly surfing the interweb¹ instead of writing a post for my blog, I decided to check out the Challenge Pro Mode site. Holy sweet Jesus! People are still actively developing the mod! The version I was running was 8 revisions behind. Wow, that’s embarrassing. They have an RSS feed now, so I won’t miss any future releases.

Here are my impressions so far…

Pros

• Greatly improved GUI, giving easy access to most of the settings. Wanna hear through walls, turn off rocket smoke, or add cool effects to the Railgun? No problem. It’s all adjustable from the GUI. No more editing configuration files.
• Better looking fonts. Sounds stupid, I know, but they look so much better than the old ones.
• New in-game announcement voice option, providing a sexy female voice alternative to the default I-also-do-narration-for-movie-trailers guy.

Cons

• Lower ammo counts for weapon pickup. You know, when you frag someone and get to pick up ammo from the weapon they dropped? For the Rocket Launcher, it used to be a 10 round/rocket reward, now it’s 5. Doesn’t sound like much but you’ll notice.
• Slightly less running speed. I realized that I wasn’t able to make all of my usual trick jumps. Surely, it can’t be me.
• More segmentation faults. The CPMA bots (level 6 and up) appear to be broken again. My version of the game crashes from a segmentation fault whenever I attempt to use them.

In related news, I got a new mouse for Christmas. When it comes to tracking accuracy and speed, this one is better than my old mouse. The buttons could be a little better. There are five buttons in the wheel: scroll up, scroll down, click, tilt-left, and tilt-right. For normal computer use, these buttons are really handy, but in the heat of battle, I still have trouble. The tilt buttons are really sensitive, and the mouse wheel click requires too much force.

¹ Deppen, I’ve added this word to my spell checker dictionary. So, no, I’m not going to stop using it. I’m a pioneer.

I just finished State of Fear, by Michael Crichton. I loved it. In typical Crichton style, the book is a fun page-turner. Also in typical Crichton style, the ending is just so so. But that’s OK, because the nonfiction component of this book makes up for its other weaknesses.

Nonfiction? But it’s fiction, isn’t it? This book is different than Crichton’s other works because he includes many footnotes that backup statements made by the characters. What a fantastic concept.

Throughout the book, Crichton delivers blow after punishing blow against the global warming political movement. Each of his attacks is supported by references to real scientific studies. For me the coup de grace occurred in the first appendix, where he compares the popularity of global warming to the popularity of eugenics in the first half of the 1900s. I had no idea eugenics was so popular. I guess Hitler ruined it for everyone.

The character, Ted Bradley, was maddening and hilarious at the same time. Crichton was obviously mocking Martin Sheen. Ted Bradley¹ is a charismatic actor/activist most recognized for playing the president of the United States in a now canceled TV drama. Funny.

Not in the mood to read a 600+ page book? You might enjoy this 30 minute video from Penn & Teller. But trust me, this book is a must read. You’ll feel much better about the state of the world when you’re finished…or half way through.

I have to thank Tommy for recommending this book. Maybe I should listen to him more often. What were those other books he wanted me to read? The Joy of Sex? The Devil Wears Prada? The Bridges of Madison County?

¹Mr. Bradley also plays a starring role in one of best death scenes I’ve ever experienced. It had me laughing out loud. That can’t be healthy…I need help.

I like using a charcoal grill. The food tastes better, plus it’s a great excuse to play with fire.

I use a charcoal chimney starter. Thanks to Lurker for introducing this device to me. I think Sherry wants to thank you too…but she has trouble being nice to people.

“This environmentally safe chimney starter lights a charcoal grill quickly and easily without lighter fluid. Food tastes better and the charcoal lighter fluid odor doesn’t permeate your picnic–or the environment.”

It’s pretty simple to use. Fill the top part with charcoal and the bottom part with a sheet of newspaper. Light the newspaper and wait 20 minutes. 20 minutes. That simply doesn’t cut it for the have-it-right-now generation.

Here’s a method I use for lighting my charcoal in 2 minutes. 2 gloriously fun and surprisingly educational minutes.

Light the newspaper just like before, but after the newspaper is finished burning, pick up the chimney and carry it to an open area…free of combustible items.

Turn your shopvac to ‘blow.’

Hold your lit chimney as far away as possible. Tilt the top slightly away from your head.

Slowly bring the blowing end of the shopvac tube to the bottom of your chimney. It’s important to do it slowly because a large amount of loose ash blows out initially. The first time I did this, I realized that my hair might ignite. It was quite a precarious situation. I was holding a chimney of hot coals in one hand, a shopvac hose in the other and little pieces of hot ash where landing on my head. This is what the bottom of the chimney looks like.

At full throttle, the charcoal begins to super-heat. It puts out a staggering amount of energy. It only takes 90-120 seconds of full after-burner to light all of the coals.

You’ll see the sides of your chimney start to glow red. That’s a good indication that it’s time to stop. …Or…you can keep going and see how hot it can really get. Eventually, if you aren’t wearing gloves, which I wasn’t, the heat will become unbearable.

Turn off the shopvac and let the flames die down. At this point you’ll be kicking yourself for using up all your arm strength on the prior step. You really can’t move around that much during this step, and dumping the coals in to the grill is out of the question. Dig deep and find the strength to hold the chimney for a few more seconds and enjoy the two foot flames.

Finally, dump your hot glowing coals into your grill. These coals run a little hotter than coals lit using the normal method for lighting, so you’ll need to adjust your cooking time. Sherry, remember the last time I did this and the hamburgers caught on fire? God that funny. Good times…good times.