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musings of mark since 2001

Just when I’ve about given up on finding a girlfriend on this little island and am thinking of moving back to the mainland, along comes someone on-line through instant messaging that’s got an interest in me. Turns out she’s a previous Bowen resident and eager to move back if the time was right, so it’s worth it to find out if we’re more compatible. All the usual stuff is there - we’re near enough to the same age and like the same things and have the same bad habits, but you never know until you meet someone if there is actual sparks, or if it’s just plain electricity flying over the internet instant messaging.

You would think it would be easy to meet someone on a small island, and it is in a general sort of way. I know a gazillion people from the year spent at the Pharmacy, but the cost of living here keeps most of the mainland single population away, and it’s a suburban high-income family type that’s mostly visible.

A good part of it also is that the percentage of people that can live with my views on money, especially on an island that is full of it, is very slim. Add in my thoughts that land ownership is just an illusion created by bankers and states/governments, in a place where “buying a piece of the rock” is a mantra for most, and we’ve got a dichotomy of sorts. So I just might be here for a while longer if there is someone around that doesn’t care if I don’t want land or money, this is a really nice place to live.

A good little wind storm blew through last night and knocked out the internet for Shaw Cable customers and it’s still out this morning too, as there isn’t any dial-up available for my little room. When it comes back I’ll have to Google on how to speed things up for the dev server on the Windows box when there isn’t any connection. Thought it would be a good time to just work locally with 127.0.0.1 and find a little bug in a class that wasn’t working for me, but every time a request was made, IE and FF browsers would take their time first to look elsewhere for the internet, and then after finally not being found, do my stuff.

First post using the Linspire OS, a version of Linux that’s about the best one I’ve seen yet for an all around computer. IMHO, it’s the best because it recognizes everything - your infrared mouse, display, and keyboard are working right off, along with your network connections and Mozilla is right on the desk top ready to go, IM, email and everything else works too.

My favorite island Kingbaby Theatre Company has a new play out, “The View”, and it’s hilarious. It’s centered around two couples, one is the sterotype of the outdoorsman and new age chakra wielding woman and the other is the type that sleeps on Bowen Island and spends the most of the rest of day on the continent or on the ferry in their expensive automobile.
The plot concerns a tree that has a name, the view it’s blocking, and whose view that is. It’s billed as a ’supernatural sex farce’, and it is definitely an ‘adult’ play complete with blue language and not so subtle references and gags.
Great way to spend a Satuday night, saw a lot of teary eyes from laughing so hard when the house lights came up:-) Although this play might not have the over-all appeal of something like the Christmas classic Mad Mabel, it’s sure to come back for another island run as a favourite.

Haven’t blogged much lately, but not from lack of things to talk about. Part of it is that there’s just so much a person can think about the goings-on down south and the other is just lack of wanting to put any brainpower to it. The grey matter has been devoted to integrating some mailing list software into the a web site, and so far so good. The mailing list part of it is working great, just working on pulling the data from four different tables of the master list, to be used for displaying info elsewhere on the site. The left join to do it all that I’ve have been working got too big of a result set at first, and working on paring that down to just what I need. This would be a good time to have a machine to work on as fast as the servers, it’s amazing how big the table can get with a join, as the software that originally created the database has made oodles of tables with just a few columns but gazillions of rows, and with just the wrong query things can get quite large. hmm, the other pages are public and get lots of hits, maybe it’s not worth the overhead of all this query work and just link the few dozen fields that I do need to a whole new table. Then cache those results as html ready for even less of a server hit, hmm again…
update: got the join working, but it’s huge:
SELECT * FROM t1 LEFT JOIN (t2, t3, t4)
ON (t2.a=t1.a AND t3.b=t1.b AND t4.c=t1.c)
Did a test last night, and a series of selects is much faster than the join above in this case.