Disclosed Information

When I moved a few months ago, I was in the middle of slowly reading another freakin’ Dave Eggers book, What is the What. NYT book of the year or whatever, yada yada; of course I can’t get enough of the guy just like everybody else on earth. This one was a little different though. A coming of age story about an African refugee? What? You can read better descriptions on Amazon than I could write, but the gist is that the main character was displaced by civil war at a very young age and after 13 years of refugee camps and death and struggle and long, long walks, he gets a chance to come struggle in the US. (note: that isn’t a summary of the first chapter - that’s a summary of the whole book.)
90% of the readers of this book would probably be kidding themselves if they think they’d have read the book if Papa E didn’t write it, myself included. If you look over my bookshelves, the only books of strife and struggle that you see either take place in space, or involve educated white men. Or vampires. Space vampires. In that alone, I see enough reason to be impressed with the book.
So anyway, a few months pass and I realize that I stopped reading the book when I went through my own incredible struggle and displacement (moving out into the suburbs.) Last week, I picked it up again and finished it. Overall, it made me sad and embarrassed with myself. Stack this on top of a few movies about people Doing the Right Thing, and you could say I’ve had an impression left on me.
Either way, gotta love e-diddy.

July 30th, 2008 | Category: books | Leave a comment

I played tennis too hard and now it hurts to type.

July 29th, 2008 | Category: misc | Leave a comment

I didn’t find an answer to this in my first few google search results, so I’m posting it here.

When using CONCAT() in MySQL, if any of the values are NULL, then the CONCAT fails and the return is NULL. BQW told me about NVL(), which is Oracle/PGSQL (so useless for me), but that led me to IFNULL(). IFNULL(statement, return): If ’statement’ is null, ‘return’ is returned. Simple use can be IFNULL(fieldName, “”), which will fit nicely into a concat. It actually worked much better in my case, allowing me to do some conditional output formatting.

July 25th, 2008 | Category: programming, work | Leave a comment

At work, we’re moving our glorified server closet into a room more suited to the title ‘data center’.  Twenty-five or so racks, though most are less than half full.  Several days of continuous downtime is, of course, unacceptable, so we’re moving piece by piece over the course of a few weeks.  Production systems move at night.

This means that I’m still awake at 3:30am.  See ya at work in the morning, right?

June 27th, 2008 | Tags: datacenter, tired, work | Category: work | Leave a comment

I took the server down a month ago to move it. It’s taken this long to get it back up. This is mostly out of laziness, but that’s not your problem. Sorry. So what took my time, instead? I did some webwork for the OSU Solar Decathlon (Drupal theming, etc). Continued with my silly Java class. Prepared for moving buildings at work. Oh yeah, I moved. Saw a rollerderby. Saw In Bruge again. Made plans to go to Vegas. Washed my car for the first time in a year. Most of that was in the past few days, as my memory for these things isn’t very effective. Yar.

June 11th, 2008 | Tags: apologies, months | Category: misc | Leave a comment

hardstatus alwayslastline "%{= KW}%-w%{= wk}%50>%n %t%{-}%+w%<"

1 bash   2 bash   3 bash   4 bash   5 bash

function ssh() {
    echo -n -e "\033k$1\033\134"
    /usr/bin/ssh $@
    echo -n -e "\033k`hostname`\033\134"
}

May 1st, 2008 | Category: misc | Leave a comment

Top 2 new slang phrases invented in the past week: 1. Undergird 2. Manhub

March 21st, 2008 | Category: misc | Leave a comment

Last night was my last scheduled match for this session of the straight pool league. I have one make-up that I’m doing Saturday (come watch and play if you want), and then next week is the position match (sort of like tihs league’s version of the playoffs, but it barely matters.. just allows you to move up a few points if you play well. I’m not playing next session, as I have two classes starting April 1st or so, and I’m pretty sure it might kill me. That probably means no junto, but I’ve basically given up on the big J, due to lack of ambition. speaking of ambition: I borrowed a GTD book so I can jump on that bandwagon a couple years late, but whatever. It is very good so far.

March 21st, 2008 | Category: misc | Leave a comment

Watched Je t’aime Paris last night. Movie made up of 15 or so(?) short films about Paris, mostly focusing on emotion - all by different directors.. Some of it was kinda stupid, but in general it had a nice feel. A few were really great. TONS of basically cameo appearances.

March 20th, 2008 | Category: misc, movies | Leave a comment