Disqus - Latest Comments for bytehead

Re: In one way, losing a father is a relief (Scripting News)

bytehead — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:34:43 -0000

Wow. I've been an adult orphan for 15 years now. I just lost my step-mother last month, my dad remarried in my late 20's. Now my wife and I are the eldest generation around in our families.

Good luck on not covering your tracks now. :)

Re: Cell Phone 911 Calls Don't Give Location - Jacksonville News Story - WJXT Jacksonville

bytehead — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 11:35:50 -0000

I thought we had Enhanced 911 for this? I can't find any timelines on this, but I thought those had already passed.

Re: Test at 2:33:00 PM (Scripting News)

bytehead — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 23:44:01 -0000

You're in luck, I was still on the page. Here's the screen grab:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bytehead/3712033938/

Re: Test at 2:33:00 PM (Scripting News)

bytehead — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 23:38:31 -0000

The timestamp of when the item was created showed 5:33pm in Bloglines. Which tells me that the server is three hours ahead of where you're at. I only noticed because you put the time in the title, and I checked to see if it was correct, and it was off (reasonably so IMHO).

Re: Test at 2:33:00 PM (Scripting News)

bytehead — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 22:57:53 -0000

You're feed is reporting that it's 5:33pm. Which means it's on EDT while you're on PDT.

Re: The longest day (Scripting News)

bytehead — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 00:22:45 -0000

I've been up longer that on a trip. Coming home from Alaska, I was doing the usual thing during the day. Then I left on a 1AM local flight to SLC. Whereupon my wife and I ate breakfast (being around 8:30AM there), which already meant that right there we were up for 24 hours, then a flight to ATL, then the final flight to JAX. By that time it was closer to 36 hours, and there wasn't much snoozing either, the flight from Anchorage was cold!

@Doc Searls: My wife was flying to and from South Africa every month last year. She did the same exact thing your wife did.

Re: Mozilla and Opera Complain About Windows 7

bytehead — Fri, 08 May 2009 16:33:31 -0000

You know what? I just installed Chrome on my laptop, it's the last browser that I wanted to install on my new install of Windows 7 RC. I bring up the options to tweak a few things, and I see it's already made the decision that it's my default browser.

So Google, you're speaking bullshit when you talk about it. You're doing the same thing.

Re: Ask Jeeves Returns, Gets a Facebook Page

bytehead — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 22:22:34 -0000

Does this mean that Bloglines is getting out of maintenance mode? Because I keep telling them about feeds that don't work, and I don't even get the robot response back.

Or is it time to just jump ship to Google Reader (ugh!) and be done with it?

Re: There must be some way out of here, revisited (Scripting News)

bytehead — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 21:59:24 -0000

"Said the joker to the thief..."

Spoiler warning.
.
.
.
.
Because it has all happened before.

The Cylons were created, they had a war, humanity fights for survival, humanity survives just barely to restart from the beginning, the Cylons go off to their own new place, everybody forgets everything, even the Cylons, leaving everything in prophecy, mankind (re)creates the Cylons, which then join up with the previous Cylons and the whole thing repeats. You did notice that the old Cylons looked like the 80's BSG Cylons and not the '00 Cylons.

Re: Reply-all e-mail storm hits State

bytehead — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 10:27:38 -0000

There is no cure for stupidity.

Re: Military Still Wary of Obama -- Political Wire

bytehead — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 15:50:00 -0000

Yes, I am damn proud of all three of them!

But I only have two sons that are MPs (the third son is starting college next week. If he doesn't get his act together, who knows...) The third one is my daughter-in-law. And yes, she's an MP as well. The two sons are/were drivers, and she is a gunner. They are now back from their deployments. The first son to enlist has qualified for Sergeant (E5) now, I think it's just paper work at this point. The other son should be E5 later this year. BTW, they are fraternal twins (a quick look and you'd think they are identical...). And my other set of twins is boy/girl.

Re: Military Still Wary of Obama -- Political Wire

bytehead — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 14:20:21 -0000

That's one big caveat. I've got three, count 'em, three MPs in the Army right now. I haven't seen one single Military Times poll that has reflected their attitudes (nor the attitudes of the squad mates either according to these three).

I've seen too many others that make ridiculous claims for soldiers.

Re: Rick Warren is over the top (Scripting News)

bytehead — Sat, 27 Dec 2008 20:18:18 -0000

Simeon, you obviously aren't as old as Dave and I.

Divorce in the past half century has become much more palatable. Being a divorce' (I'm on my son's Mac, I have no clue as to how to do the e) meant that either you had some pretty serious charges, or you had plenty of money. Mothers were always given custody of children. It just wasn't done much.

Development of the Pill gave women control over their own bodies so that they had their own choice of getting pregnant or not, which kicked off the Free Love movement.

And I've already talked about Civil rights.

And the rate of change in technology in that time? It's enough to blow one's mind.

My grandparents wouldn't be able to comprehend what is going on today with the social changes, let alone the simple(!) ability of having 500 channels of TV available 24 hours a day.

You seem to think that marriage is the only right that gays are fighting for, and I can assure you that isn't the only fight. And Rick Warren has gone on further than that about the subject.

It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. You might not want it to happen, but I know my children will.

And I didn't say you were attacking Dave, I said you totally misread what Dave wrote. And that's a totally different thing. And he did correct you.

Re: Rick Warren is over the top (Scripting News)

bytehead — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 02:40:57 -0000

"people like you who try to frame the gay-marriage debate as being about bigotry..."

Isn't it? If not, the what is the debate about? Blue versus green?

And I would defend Dave, but I think he's big enough to defend himself. Because you really didn't read what he wrote. Skimming can do that to you.

Re: Rick Warren is over the top (Scripting News)

bytehead — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 02:21:45 -0000

Does this make all of us gay? Never mind. And yes, I was being serious there.

We all discriminate. In one way or another, we make decisions that we discriminate on.Apple/Microsoft/Linus/Solaris/BSD. Intel/AMD/Nvidia. X86/ARM/Atom. Weigh too much/Weigh too little. Skin color. Accent. Theist/Deist/Atheist. Even Episcopalian and Christian. Heck, we've even got people getting fired because they won't go through Scientology indoctrination!.

Yes, I don't like Warren's message about gays. I do like that evangelicals are also going nuts about him being chosen.

But come on Dave, I remember, and you're a bit (not much) older than me so you should remember too, what the 60's and 70's were like in dealing with civil rights. I went to a lily white high school in the country, mostly because my father decided I wasn't going to be exposed to "that element" in the city schools. How we didn't get bussed is still a miracle to me. At least I wasn't freaking when I started making some black friends in college. Now our kids went to a school with plenty of people of different color and nationalities. And we're still working on racial equality.

And yet, they also got exposed to gay friends along the way, openly gay friends. I only knew one gay guy in my class, which was after the fact. He didn't make it to our fifth class reunion because he died of AIDS. I've learned of other friends the same way.

I think that while it would be nice to see anti-gay disappear now,, we'll get there one way or another, just not as fast as some of us want it, and certainly we'll be dragging some others that way although they definitely don't want to go there.

And it's always best to know if somebody is really against you and why, instead of just hiding the discrimination.

Re: Switzerland may go bankrupt (Scripting News)

bytehead — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 10:09:52 -0000

I think it has to do with the fact that the outgoing tide is sinking the yachts faster than it's sinking the fishing boats. It's not just that the stock market is sinking, but the hedge funds that are supposed to work the opposite way of the stock market are also sinking. And it seems that the only strategies that are currently working are shorts, particularly naked shorts. And the SEC is trying to stop those dead in their tracks.

Re: Switzerland may go bankrupt (Scripting News)

bytehead — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 10:01:25 -0000

That's sad.

I enjoyed my two weeks in Basil, Switzerland last year. Fountains all over the place, even for your pets. Friendly people, a great public transport system. At least their currency is still somewhat in line now with what it was then.

I spent a month in South Africa July. The Rand is now 70% of what it was four months ago!

As far as Citibank, we're already showing signs of bailout fatigue as evidenced by the auto bail out talks. I myself wouldn't be cynical if it weren't for Hank Paulson pulling a switcheroo with the TARP program. Then again, I felt that he needed to get the boot to start with. Along with Bernanke We still have the foxes guarding the hen house, and I think history will bare that out in the end.

What does the world look like in the future? I'm afraid my crystal ball is cracked way to much to even get a glimpse.

Re: Morning Joe Put on Delay - mediabistro.com: TVNewser

bytehead — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 20:51:42 -0000

I rather enjoyed it myself. But then, that's me.

Re: A second look at MSI Wind (Scripting News)

bytehead — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 01:54:31 -0000

I've run D-Links (pretty much loved them, with resets at most a month at a time until they start going bad, which is, the WAN port decides it doesn't want to see the cable modem anymore), I've run Linksys (I'm not impressed, had to reset every three days), I'm currently running a Netgear (after having previous troubles getting a Netgear wired card talking to another Netgear card, let alone my 3Com 3C509, so I wasn't too happy when I found out I had ordered a Netgear instead of the D-Link I thought it was buying) and I have to reset every now and then, but a lot better than the Linksys. And I have another D-Link lined up for when the Netgear decides to bite it.

I'd like to be able to set up two routers, daisy chained, one offering open access and one offering WPA. Or find one that does both. I'm pretty sure I could put up a certain combination (D-Links?) that might work. Then again, it might take more tweaking, but last time I tried it, I couldn't get the first router to rout to the second router. Thinking about it, I need to put both routers on the same subnet (I was thinking 255.255.0.0, but 255.255.255.0 might work as well as long as I partition the available addresses correctly...) Hmmm. I may try to implement that sometime this week with my extra router. Pay no attention as I mumble to myself...

And I agree with napalees. WiFi is a standard, and Apple should follow it to a T.

Then again, I've heard (I didn't get to address the problem myself) that Apple's Ethernet (at least 10-11 years ago) was so bad that a whole division of Macs needed it's own router to connect to an AS/400 because they kept timing out (due to collisions), regardless of the fact that the Windows machines had no problems, and everybody was going through the same corporate switch (gigabyte I believe), and there were more PCs! Wired Ethernet was certainly a platinum standard by that time. If true (and I actually think it was just a ploy for that division to get their own router), that's pretty sad.

Re: Autumn colors (Scripting News)

bytehead — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 22:24:03 -0000

Yeah, you don't get to see too much of that in Florida.

Re: I'd like to have a word with Republicans (Scripting News)

bytehead — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 12:49:20 -0000

(I already pay enough, and government is already big enough)

I'm sorry, but with a 10+trillion dollar debt that this week got turned into an 11+trillion dollar debt, my response is that we aren't paying enough taxes. All of us. You can not cut spending down enough to get the current budget without pissing off certain large portions of the citizenship that would quickly rejigger the election winners to get back that spending.

And it's pretty clear that we have to do something. Because it's very obvious that nobody is going to bail out the United States like we just did with Wall Street. I'm still of the opinion that we should have let the private business handle the situation and kept Congress and the Administration out of it completely.

The point that I think you miss isn't that it wasn't a McCain/Palin supporter that made the comment, it was Sarah Palin herself. If Biden had said those words, then maybe you would have a point. To give equal balance to what one nut cases says to what one candidate says (and it was Palin, not a supporter) is not ludicrous.

Watching the VP debate for as long as I could stand it (wasn't long), all I could think of while Palin was talking was a) she looked like a moose, er, dear caught in headlights and b) a Valley girl, and just as vacuous. That's my opinion. Is there a difference between me saying that and Biden saying that? You betcha! /groan

Re: I'd like to have a word with Republicans (Scripting News)

bytehead — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 12:25:28 -0000

Not a Republican. Not really a Democrat either.

The fact that McCain hasn't been swiftboatted yet says tons. Because I do believe that a few national commercials calling him "Songbird" and bringing up his special treatment as a POW would be the death knell for him. Yes, I've seen the commercial about other POWs talking about how unqualified he is, but that's at a logical level. The swiftboating of Kerry was effective not because it was logical but because it was emotional.

And then there's the Democrats who are threatening to vote for McCain because their candidate (Hillary Clinton) isn't in the running. I know a couple of those. That's truly sad.

Re: Bush and Cheney must resign (Scripting News)

bytehead — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 21:42:19 -0000

As much as I like it, I don't see it happening.

Look at what has happened with Palin and Troopergate. At first there was supposed to be full cooperation. Now, absolutely no cooperation, they are going to have to be headbutted to get anything out of them. And I'm not sure that they will survive the headbutting. That same mentality still exists in the administration, even with Rove gone. The whole situation could have been handled a lot better if she had been properly vetted. As a former (different) state worker, I've seen my share of scandals in office, and I don't see ANY state employees jumping up and done to vote for Palin/McCain '08.

I don't see McCain putting his head out for this. This is literally his last attempt for anything political. He can't be that stupid. /shrug

I think a Yes vote for this bail-out is going to be toxic, no matter if it actually passes or not. This close to the election, with all those Representatives up for reelection? There's no time to make the voters forget. I think this is the October Surprise where nobody wins.

Re: What if a Great Depression starts this week? (Scripting News)

bytehead — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 17:29:40 -0000

And of course, if you depend on even more exotic first aid (drugs for high blood pressure, Diabetes, Parkinson's, tranqs, and other stuff...

Not a good scenario.

Re: What if a Great Depression starts this week? (Scripting News)

bytehead — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 17:26:20 -0000

Some people are already hungry in the streets. That said, even if the shit where to hit today, I don't think there would be that many more in the streets hungry. Two weeks, a month, and yeah.

My family would do OK. My wife would still be working regardless, she's out of the country now, and will be busy at least for some time before things could actually implode.

Me, my thoughts of actually getting a real job like I had before I got married may be dashed, and I could possibly do some consulting on the side if anybody is still actually doing things on computers around here.

The trouble that I see with the current "fix" is that I'm afraid the issue wouldn't be solved with 700 billion dollars, it's liable to double, if not triple. Because I think the sub-prime loans are the canaries in the coal mine. The prime melt down has gotten into full gear yet, and yes, I do believe that scenario is in progress, and there's the commercial sector as well. Maybe the sub-prime will be the bulk, but who knows?

And then there's the possibility that the "fix" works in the short run, but really bends us over in the end when things cannot support any of it, not the fix, not the failure.