blogx » Debris

P.S.A. Tests Profits

admin — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 02:05:23 +0000

From the fellow that discovered the P.S.A. test comes a message in the New York Times, that except for certain cases, routine testing of the sort is nothing but a profit machine for the medical industry.

Olympic Flame Arrives

admin — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:31:16 +0000

The very first thank yous are to the First Nations tribes in the Lower Mainland for welcoming the Olympic torch to these lands, that was kinda cool, then it’s on to all the honourables and your worships etc. and a speech by John Furlong et al. The Province newspaper on line has more pics of the torch.

Math Symmetry

admin — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:31:22 +0000

Math symmetry can be kinda cool:

9 x 9 + 7 = 88
98 x 9 + 6 = 888
987 x 9 + 5 = 8888
9876 x 9 + 4 = 88888
98765 x 9 + 3 = 888888
987654 x 9 + 2 = 8888888
9876543 x 9 + 1 = 88888888
98765432 x 9 + 0 = 888888888

and this:

1 x 1 = 1
11 x 11 = 121
111 x 111 = 12321
1111 x 1111 = 1234321
11111 x 11111 = 123454321
111111 x 111111 = 12345654321
1111111 x 1111111 = 1234567654321
11111111 x 11111111 = 123456787654321
111111111 x 111111111 = 12345678987654321

9 x 9 + 7 = 88

RIP MJ and George

admin — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 13:55:00 +0000

“..with fame and celebrity as its core values, with money as its sole motive, it chewed this child up and spat him out.” via: Andrew Sullivan.

Never knew the fellow myself and not really into his music, pop goes another icon.

Knew George though, more videos available on BowenTV.

Dropping Like Flies

admin — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 14:03:09 +0000

Jeez, Kurt Vonnegut then Uncle Walt and now George Carlin has bit the dust too. One of the side effects of getting old is having people close to you go away at a greater rate, hurts sometimes but the cycle of life on this planet has been going on for quite a while and most likely will continue long after the humans have left.

It Looked Good On Paper

admin — Sat, 31 May 2008 01:19:40 +0000

With all the deer on this island, if the “big one” hit the fan there would be venison to eat for at least a few days. Can’t help but think that the city slickers around these parts though would be getting up to trying the same thing as this West Virginian did: “it looked good on paper”!

CERN Day 3

admin — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 00:36:09 +0000

Phil is on his insider’s visit to CERN, very interesting stuff if you are into quantum physics at all. And a day or two later, Scobleizer has some video to go with it.

Good Readin’

admin — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 04:10:59 +0000

A flurry of posts again from someone haven’t heard much from lately, (2006-ish) and the forum for it has noticed the return of Dean as well. Used the Textpattern software as a blogging tool based on his text generator for a couple years myself, and later as a CMS for a local group until they wanted more extensibility and it was easier to switch them over to Website Baker, which they are still using.

Anyhoo, there’s some good stuff coming off his keyboard often and linkyness to go with it including this recent interesting shell command history meme:
mark-laptop:~$ history|awk ‘{print $2}’|sort|uniq -c|sort -rn|head

    162 sudo
     25 cd
     13 kdesu
      8 calc
      7 emerald
      4 wget
      4 ls
      4 locate
      4 compiz
      3 tar

With all the wonderful Compiz and Emerald GUI things happening, seems I still spend a fair amount of time on a terminal to root around this new machine. Reminds me that I wanted to redo the back-end of this blog too and get off the WordPress wagon, and get back to some basics and hash over the pros and cons of using a relational database for the content or other means. Seem to recall the fastest way on Apache to stitch content together regardless of horsepower was using server side includes, so may start there and see where it takes me.

Safer Than Ever

admin — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 00:16:52 +0000

Read an editorial from a sane parent that has not succumbed to the constant drum beat of fear fed hourly onto the psyche of the North American people. Quite an amazing thing really to have MSNBC pick this up with an interview (video) and article,Â Mom isn’t about to cave in to the “expert” at the interview and refreshing TV for a change, they should be doing a lot more of that.

Graveyards

admin — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 23:10:00 +0000

Never cared much for his music, but have enjoyed Mathew Good’s writing for quite some time now – his latest blog post on the grief, war and the cost of it all.