In addition to picking up Johnny Cash’s American IV: The Man Comes Around, I also got Riding With The King by B.B. King & Eric Clapton and You Are So Good to Me by Waterdeep. The Clapton album continues my long-standing love affair with Clapton’s music—some teenage boys have a Led Zepplin or AC/DC phase, but I had an Eric Clapton phase—and the Waterdeep selection is influenced by John Wilson, who has been trying to get me to listen to Waterdeep for a couple of years now. Soon I’ll relent and buy a bunch of Waterdeep like I did with Over the Rhine at Jeff Holland’s behest.

All the while, my mother is saying, “You have no fiscal restraint when it comes to music.” She’s right. Thank goodness for BMG—which, by the way, Mom said I’d screw up royally.

Until today, I have never owned a single Johnny Cash album.

I need to be soundly beaten.

I blame Josh and Joe for my Cash purchase … thanks, guys.

I really, really hate re-writing other people’s craptacular test procedures.

When you have a general test procedure but also have a requirements documentation that goes over and above the generalized, industry-standard requirements, wouldn’t it behoove you to bounce your procedure against said documentation? I would think so.

Unfortunately, [vendor's name deleted so I don't get my ass sued] didn’t seem to think so, which leaves me to do the thinking for them.

Something about that attitude really bothers me.

This morning, when Ed and I were walking back to our office from a meeting that left me absolutely flabbergasted, said, “You know what’s really scary? I look at some of the dumb things that we do around here to shoot ourselves in the foot, and then I look at some of our vendors and competitors and realize that, unbelievably, we’re one of the better outfits around.” I replied, “I know what you mean. I don’t know about you, but that keeps me up at night.”

Our tax dollars at work, ladies and gentlemen…

I’ve been playing with a link-log for this site; the problem comes in where to put it. I think I’m going to have to go to a three-column layout to make this happen. Oi.

If I do it, I’ll likely use Rebel Pixel’s WP Recent Links plugin.

A wacky referrer to an old entry joking that my college degree was worth just $9,000 led me to run myself through the HumanForSale.com wringer a third time.

This time, I came up worth $2,348,240.00. This compares to $2,268,230 in August ‘02 and $2,259,240.00 in August ‘01. An appreciation of $80,010 isn’t bad.

Of course, I’m sure that Rick is going to come along and tell me that he’s worth more than I am … again.

As expected, I got my TiVo yesterday. As expected, I didn’t do a damn thing with it.

At 8:07 p.m. last night, I got notice that I wouldn’t get inputs until today. I have them now, and the second opinion that I’m getting for evaluations is in Florida working another program. Him being remote is making this fun, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

My patience for this vendor is wearing extremely thin. Ed had to tell me to cool off this morning, something he never has to say. :sigh:

Alex has created a hosting service for his Tasks and TasksPro™ software packages: UseTasks.com.

This is very cool: you get a hosted service with nightly backups to protect your data and automatic upgrades to the software package for a reasonable monthly fee. I would switch to this service if I did not already have a dedicated server at my disposal. I use TasksPro™ to manage the tasks for [rocksmyfaceoff.net], and I use Tasks to manage personal projects.

One more thing; we’re offering free accounts to open source projects. I’m a big fan of open source software and I’m very pleased to be able to offer a little something to those making their contributions.

That was the one nugget of information that I didn’t know prior to Alex’s announcement, and I’m blown away by the offer. That’s unbelievably cool.

If you find yourself realizing that a Web-based tracking tool would be easier than something client- or PDA-based, Tasks is the way to go. Tell Alex that I sent you—I don’t get a cut, but I know we’d both like to know who recommended it to you.

I’m trying something new for visited links on this site: checkmarks after visited links. I had to edit Mike’s pseudo-class a bit to make it work for me—I only wanted checkmarks after links inside of storycontent DIVs, not on the whole page!—but I like it for now.

You won’t see this if you use Internet Exploiter, but that’s to be expected.

Dear aerospace vendors of the world:

Don’t begin acceptance testing on the parts that I’ve ordered until I’ve approved your test procedure.

[Especially if I've had to re-write said procedure, and you've had a week to incorporate changes and have been snail-slow at returning them back to me.]

Failure to do so will result in a site visit from an extremely pissed-off engineer who has better things to do with his time.

Love,

Geof

No posts for five days.

Nine [including this one] in a day.

This place doesn’t make sense, not even to me.

If you’ve ever wondered, “Why is this one-page PowerPoint file 1MB?!” well, let me tell you:

PowerPoint saves revisions. If you’ve cropped a bunch of slides out of a presentation and modified one to make a simpler presentation, you’ve still got some of that baggage hanging around.

PowerPoint also does a weird thing with images. Most images used in PowerPoint files are far, far too large, but inept users just scale them down with PowerPoint’s oh-so-easy click-and-drag interface. The problem is that this does not reduce file size.

If you’re going to create a very, very small presentation, start from a blank slate. Your recipients will thank you.

[I was really irked when I receivedd a one-page .ppt that was 1.1MB; it was an image and a table of text. That should have been no more than, oh, 75kB. I'm tempted to go and re-create the slide from scratch, but I'm about to go home and kill a couple of hours before coming back to the office to foil a vendor's nefarious plans to do a data dump after hours.]

I was just looking at the schedule for 3rd & Lindsley, seeing as Sandra McCracken is playing there on Saturday night [ticket: check!]. I then saw the following name for Monday, July 19:

“Jordan Knight (of New Kids on the Block)”

I went into convulsions for at least 15 seconds.

Please … make it stop!

Dear Microsoft Project:

How about showing me where the freakin’ circular reference is, you stupid piece of software, rather than making me look through 600 lines of tasks to pick it out for my own self?

I understand that you don’t want to do calculations until I clear the circular reference, but you could be kind and tell me where the problem lies so that I might fix it.

Piece of crap software!

Love,

Geof

It’s ballsy to go ahead and give sovereignty to the Iraqis, and then it’s not. What do you gain? You probably miss the timing of some planned terrorist attacks coinciding with your sovereignty handover.

My first reaction was, “This is the right thing.” But then I remembered the one truth to the handover that, perhaps, few have contemplated: American forces will generally be under the command of Iraqi politicians. We typically don’t do that. Yes, there will be some sovereignty of American forces, but someone has to keep the peace, and it’ll be our boys and girls.

Bush and Co. will rightly get the blame when those kids die, too.

Not that it’s probably not the right thing to do, but it’s certainly a hard thing to do.

Those in Washington who thing everything’s going to be copacetic are fooling themselves.

[Ed.: What a moron I am, using the homonym for reins---reigns---in place of the proper term. Yeesh.]

John Gruber’s Daring Fireball has been undergoing a change of sort as John pushes towards being a full-time Weblogger on his areas of expertise [mainly Mac stuff, but other things as well] by seeking to incorporate members-only content into his offerings. One thing he’s now doing: a
linked list.

Everyone is free to browse the Linked List web archives; however, the only daily index is the RSS feed, and there’s a one-day delay before new links are posted to the web archives. In other words, the RSS feed is the only way to get the links fresh, and the only way to subscribe to the feed is to become a member.

This exact model is one that we considered with TOTK.com Sports way back in the day: publishing content via email on one day, then putting it on the Web the next. The way John’s doing it with member-specific syndication feeds and members-only content is a better way to go than what we were doing, but that’s because the technology far better supports online self-publishing today than it did back in 1998.

It’s almost enough to make me want to get back into that, but I know that doing so would be a temptation not worthy of submittal.

I will receive my second TiVo today; it’s presently out for delivery with UPS. I’d talked about buying another one and actually did so on Thursday.

That’ll be another device for the network.

Unfortunately, I won’t get to play with it much, if at all, today; I don’t expect an input from one of my vendors until after normal business hours—they’re on the West Coast, and their comments during this morning’s telecon led me to believe that they’re going to sneak the document to us after hours, which means that I’ll be a bastard and goof off from 1700 until it gets here, just so I get a copy of it tonight!—and I’m going to take that home so I can review it tonight and be ready for the meeting in the morning. It’s all about not being the one holding up progress. The schedule hit that this particular program is going to take is particularly nasty, and we’re trying to stay out of the way of the hit.

I can’t really explain why it’s been five days between posts. I don’t think it’s for lack of anything to write about, really–perhaps I just wasn’t mused late last week.

It’s not even as if work was all that terrible–really, it wasn’t that bad. Sure, I had to re-write people’s work from craptacular form to workable form—come on, people, when you have a requirements document, writing an acceptance test procedure is not difficult; I did it when I was a snot-nosed, can’t-legally-buy-alcohol co-op!—but that’s not all that bad.

Thankfully so, since I get to do it again today. Why are we paying this vendor, again? It’s so much fun in this line of business to pay someone to do the job and then have to have someone sit in their facility to tell them how to do it. It’s a situation of, “We’d do the work ourselves if we had the volume of work to merit doing it, but this is outside our core competency.” Yes, I just used the phrase “core competency” in a sentence; I typed it with a straight face, too.

I mean, crap, I’ve even used the phrase “added value” of late without laughing.

I don’t know what’s becoming of me.

[What was I posting about again?]

Shelley Powers says:

I am taking great care in my writing to make sure there is no flint to spark against, no flames to fan—unless the flint is of imagination, and the resulting fire is the same flame I hoped to spark when I created my first weblog page, back in 1995. No battles will be fought, no dragons to be slain—all I see now are windmills.

What’s the point of writing if you don’t inspire some to anger from time to time? If you’ve made someone angry, you’ve at least made them think. [Yes, often those who read something and angrily respond often haven't truly read the piece and are reading in their own inferences and biases, but hey, that's people.]

If you’re effectively arguing something, you’re going to piss someone off. To make an omelette, you have to break some eggs—and a published argument is a written omelette.

About a month ago, I looked at my little four-port router and said, “I’m going to have to buy a switch. I’m out of ports.” Between my roommates’ computers and my WAP, I had one port remaining, and I had at least four things I could attach to the network at any time [three computers and a TiVo].

I originally bought an 8-port switch, but then I got to thinking about it, and I bought two 5-ports to supplement that. Yes, 18 ports—but really, it makes sense. The area of computers will soak up one of those 5-port switches, and the other switch is in the entertainment center. With a TiVo, a PlayStation2, and perhaps a Squeezebox in the future, running one long bit of Cat6 from the router to a switch over there made sense. [It makes more sense if I put a TiVo in my bedroom, since the entertainment center is on a common wall with my bedroom, so I can tap into that switch to run back to my room.

After fixing all this last night, I pointed it out to my roommates. Randy said, “Man, I guess I have to get you to show me what’s wrong with the setup in my room, then.” Turns out he had a router jacked into the 100-ft piece of Cat5e running to his room. No wonder his performance can best be described as “spotty”. I told him to go buy a 5-port switch.

The 8-port switch is up by the router, which leaves room if people in the living room ever need a hardwire port–plenty available.

Now I just need to tack some wires down before some midnight-snacking roommate doesn’t do a header coming out of the kitchen …

Some of you have asked me what I think of SpaceShipOne. Here’s my thinking:

Thank God Someone Is Doing It

I’m happy that someone out there is pursuing private LEO tourism. LEO tourism probably is practical, and the tourism will lead to practical use in terms of creating transports.

Will there be risks? Sure—anytime you’re using a rocket, it could blow up. The risks are probably pretty small, but in the early tourism days, any vehicle’s going to be a developmental and not an operational vehicle. A developmental vehicle has risks that an operational vehicle doesn’t–and frankly, I’m not sure there’s such an animal as an operational space transport right now. Soyuz might be one, but I’m not sure if they’re still twiddling things with the system. I should know, but I don’t. STS/Shuttle is still developmental, and probably always will be. For that, you have a bunch of Congressional ass-clowns and Dick Frickin’ Nixon to thank for that.

The Concept Is Cool

I think the SpaceShipOne concept is a good one. Sure, it’s an X-15 all over again—tow a rocketship to altitude, drop it like a bomb, light the rocket, ride to space, glide to a smooth finish—but it uses a hybrid rocket motor, and I friggin’ love hybrids. Some people—my boss, for one, and it always causes an argument when he does!—call a hybrid a “throttleable solid”. As anyone who’s been around me during a viewing of Armageddon knows, “You can’t throttle a solid rocket, dammit!”

Brief Interlude Into Propulsion Terminology

Solid rocket: fuel and oxidizer are both solid, often mixed; light it and the surface burns. You can burn it like a cigarette, inside-out, or a combination. Thrust is generally related to amount of surface area burning.

Liquid rocket: fuel and oxidizer are both liquid, tanked separately, and pumped together into a combustion chamber. Some reactions happen without catalysts [hypergolic], some require sparks or heat. Hypergolics are fun to play with and, in my mind, preferable.

Hybrid rocket: one of fuel and oxidizer is solid, other is liquid. Typically the fuel is solid [fuel grain], and the oxidizer is liquid or gaseous. The classic hybrid is a through-tapped cylinder where you flow the oxidizer through the fuel grain. Most hybrids need an ignitor/heat supply. A hypergolic hybrid would be … well, it would be fucking cool as shit. [I could kill myself playing with one in so many amusing ways that I perish the thought.]

Hybrids are cool as hell because you can include them in the structure of your [disposable] rocket, much the same way that liquid rockets often use the pressurized tanks as structural members. Yes, this makes for fun structural calculations as you start to exhaust your fuel supply, but that’s what we have those weenies for!

The SSO hybrid uses N2O and HTPB—yep, laughing gas and rubber. The last hybrid I played with fired was a clear acrylic with either N2O or NO–I forget which. It was a bench unit about a foot long, and if you had a high-speed camera, you could watch the flame propogate down the tube as it lit. Bad-ass.

Why Private Entrepreneurship is Important to Privatized Manned Spaceflight

Look, what we do in Manned Spaceflight in NASA just isn’t applicable to the average Joe Millionaire wanting to drop $500k on a 30-minute trip to space. STS is developmental and mission-specific; the US hasn’t developed a winged crew-to-space vehicle since the X programs. That’s forty years, folks.

Someone’s going to have to figure out how you do this economically. I think a two-bird approach like SSO is going to be the end result—mainly because Single Stage-to-Orbit is the pipe dream of the people who don’t have a fucking clue about propulsion. [Come on, if a bunch of ignorant Alabama kids can do the mass fraction calculations of SSTO spaceflight and see that you get 2-3% cargo at best on a back-of-the-envelope, no-iteration, liberal-as-hell calculation, then some Ph.D'd eggheads has to know it's impractical.] I think a rocket-fired first stage is also impractical because of the risks and the ground clearance you’d need to rip one off; an airplane first will allow you to use major airports.

That someone to do something economically, though, is not NASA. NASA does nothing economically–we have all these standards to kill the profit line. They’re necessary for developmental vehicles, but not operational stuff.

People want to go to LEO. Someone with the bucks to sink in capital can make it happen. Maybe it’s Rutan and Co. But it’ll be someone.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m using Feed on Feeds as my syndication feed aggregator of choice. FoF just progressed to v0.1.7, and despite a couple concerns—which I will detail later—I have migrated to it for personal use from 0.1.2. I tested other intermediate versions and found them slightly wanting before I upgraded. [If you want to see my unprotected 0.1.7 test bed, you can see it at http://gfmorris.net/feedstest/. This uses a slightly out-of-date feed database, and if you add/delete from it, I'm not going to cry---it's a testbed and nothing else.]

How I use Feed on Feeds

I have a cronjob set up to run every 20 minutes to run update-quiet.php. This updates all my feeds in the background, and every once in a while, I load hit “view new items” in the frames view. If there are new items, they show up.

I’ve modified 0.1.7 to show posts in chronological order as noted in the linked RFE. I hate viewing syndication items in Weblog-style—that is, reverse chronological—order, because it doesn’t tell me what I missed in the order that I missed it. If I’m reading every 20 minutes, it’s not a big issue, really, but when reading overnights or over-the-weekends, yeah, there’s a difference.

I like the frames view, although I rearrange it every time it loads. I need to look and see how the frame sizing is declared so that I can change the defaults.

Why I Use Feed on Feeds

I read feeds from multiple machines; this makes client-based aggregators a pain for me. [There are great client-based aggregators on the market---FeedDemon is the only one I would recommend to Windows users.] I wanted something server-based, GPL‘d, and FREE. I found FoF thanks to Q Daily News, and I’ve been mostly happy with it.

Concerns I have with Feed on Feeds

There are obvious concerns—the biggest being that this is early-development software!—and one not-so-obvious one: FoF uses MagpieRSS as its feed parser, and the version of MagpieRSS used does not liberally parse feeds in the way that Mark Pilgrim’s Universal Feed Parser does. I agree with Mark that there are no exceptions to Postel’s Law: “Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send.” As such, I’m concerned that Magpie is not a liberal feed parser, but I will happily note that I am too lazy to try to re-write FoF to use UFP. Perhaps MagpieRSS will get with the liberalization as it approaches 1.0.

Kudos to Steve Minutillo for his work on FoF, and to Kellan Elliott-McCrea for his work on MagpieRSS. Thanks to these two guys, I have a solution that works for me.

I have become, unfortunately for me, the guru for Microsoft Project among the manufacturing folks at work.

This means I get all sorts of “Why isn’t this working?!” calls.

Nine times out of ten, it comes because someone doesn’t understand what they’re doing with the program.

What I hate about Project is that they’ve dumbed down how Gantt charts are built and made it too easy for people to build horribly wrong schedule waterfalls with insane dependencies.

I get the fun of undoing the spaghetti and pointing out where the problem is.

My frustration? I don’t get a charge line for when these people bother me with their questions. There are times when I’d rather just maintain their schedules myself, because then it’d friggin’ work.

Oh well. Back to doing Real Engineering Work™—rewriting someone else’s acceptance test reports! Happy happy, joy joy.

I’ve always hated the www. subdomain.

Now I have the solution: http://no-www.org/.

[Hey, this is short, but I have an acceptance test report to re-write this afternoon, and it's not mine.]

What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?
– Langston Hughes, “Dream Deferred”

I had this dream when I was a kid growing up, watching my beloved Cincinnati Reds: Ken Griffey, Jr., would come home from Seattle to play for the hometown team. He’d raked at Moeller High, and I could see him patrolling center in Riverfront. It was a common dream—all of Southwest Ohio’s baseball fans had that same dream.

One day, it came true.

Or fester like a sore–and then run?

Except that it didn’t. 2000 was ugly for Junior and for us fans—death threats, poor performances. 1999 had been a high point—one we should have recognized as one of a mediocre team with a lot of luck, but did not. I remember driving to class, hearing about the trade: if the Reds could come to the brink of the playoffs without Junior, maybe they could win a league pennant with him. Maybe we could best the Yankees.

The 2000 Reds came back to Earth when Junior proved too fragile to hold them up. It was too much of a burden for one man—baseball being an team sport based around individual trials, one batter taking on one pitcher, with the defense only reactionary if the ball is in play—too much to reasonably expect that Just Junior would make it all right. The death threats, the poor performance that resulted, the pressure, and the fact that, well, luck was not with those Reds.

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Then came the injuries. The Juniories—one or two a year. You’d look up at the end of the season and see he’d played … just 60 games? Could it have been so few?

The outcry came. The home town turned: fans, prompted by local media, started examining the team’s record with and without Griffey. [A preposterous notion---one can statistically prove any one player's value over that of your average AAA stiff you could replace him with, and few get above a hand full of wins. Barry Bonds? You might have to take a shoe off.]

Or crust and sugar over–like a syrupy sweet?

Each spring, you’d read of the season before’s sadness and woe, and read of Junior’s work in the offseason to make himself stronger, and you looked at his steely eye and determination and think, “Maybe this is the year he’ll be healthy.”

And then no.

Maybe it just sags like a heavy load

This was my final fear for Junior—a scowl on his face, determined to prove everything wrong. The Kid turned into The Monster that everyone sees Barry Bonds being. All work, no play. [Bonds likely plays, but why show us?]

Or does it just explode?

Finally, it exploded.

Congratulations, Ken, on getting #500, getting healthy, and getting back to having fun. That post-game press conference yesterday was delightful: you were funny and it was all spontaneous. You emoted, and we knew it was true. You … sparkled.

The Kid is back. He never left.

As some of you have met him and others have read his posts on Ye Olde Rumor Forum, my friend Mark Smiley works for Xerox’s Olympics support arm. [Yes, they have a name for that, but that's what it is, for all intents and purposes.].

Mark posted a link to a story that quotes him about some of the paper hassles behind the Olympics. Mark once showed me a photo he’d taken in one of their warehouses—boxes of paper as far as the eye could see. He gave me a few minutes to take it in, and then he said, “Just don’t ask me how many boxes high that stack is or how fast we’ll go through it.”

Anytime you think about the joke that is the “paperless office”, you should think about poor schlepps like Mark—yeah, he’s having a great time over there in Greece, but that’s a job where a paper cut isn’t just a risk, it’s something the medical people insure you against!

[I just guaranteed that "virtualdumbass.com" will continue to point here, didn't I?]