Floaters

Today has been the most perfect weather in the history of perfect weather! YES. MORE LIKE THIS. If the weather here was like this all the time, I would be one happy camper. My life would be perfect and I would shit rainbows 24/7, I'm sure. It's 2AM and it's still, like, 70 degrees. GOD BLESS GLOBAL WARMING. Sure, it probably means we're going to be extinct in a couple of decades, but at maybe the weather in San Francisco will cease to suck for a few years in the meantime. You know. Before the food riots, and plagues from the mountains of corpses and whatnot.

This may not be the best place to post this, but then again, it is kind of on topic...

I own a small computer shop.  We often get people bringing in their systems to get cleaned of virii and other assorted malware.

What I would like to have made are stickers to place on these infected machines to warn my employees not to plug them in to the 'net till they're clean. (I hire complete n00bs and teach them...)

Ideally, I'd like them to be obvious, noticeable, and the message clear: 

"This Computer is INFECTED.  DO NOT connect to the network." or something to that effect.

I'd also like them to have a graphic similar to yet distinct from the biohazard symbol. 

A format like the European Hazard Symbols or ADR labels would be appropriate as would something along the lines of these. 

Yes, I would make these available to people who would want them at close to my cost (usually no more than a dollar or two each) plus the cost to ship them.

Any takers?

Okay guys. SO CLOSE to gone for the summer.

I'm completely packed for camp school, minus last minute stuff like glasses and cell phone charger. I'm partially packed for summer camp, since most of what I'll be taking is going to camp school with me.

I'm down to folding my clean laundry, because if I don't do it now, it won't get done until July, and that's just Not On.

Can't think of anythng I'm forgetting, except for my sanity.

I'm leaving tomorrow morning at 7 am and driving up to Middle Of Nowhere, North Carolina (seriously, this place is near absolutely no cities), and I'll be there through either next Saturday early early morning, or that evening. I have to report in to camp the next day at 2, which means I really want to get there that Saturday night in order to unpack all my stuff and get settled before that first roll call.

Then, we have staff week, which is going to make me spazz out, because I have to train people around all the youth protection training we have to recieve, and around a day trip I'm going to have to take to inspect the climbing program at the other camp!

Is it sad that I'm looking forward to actual camp as a time to relax? Actually, I'm going to have all day Friday to myself, since my classes start on Saturday (I'm going up early because rumershard's classes start Friday, so I can try to unwind. I thought about bringing the laptop, even to do silly stuff like organizing my LJ icons, but there's just too much stuff to worry about with bringing it when I'm only going to use it one day, so I'm not worried about it. I've got a couple of books, and it'll be a good day to hike around the camp. Hell, I can "rent" myself out to the directors on staff if any of them need help getting set up.

Assuming I have cell phone service up there, I'll be able to check email, so if you happen to need to tell me anything, that'll be your best bet.

And now, to finish laundry and then crash. Farewell, LJ!

Brilliant. Thanks Pip.

Welp, the folks at 6a took away our email addresses yesterday. (Don't use carrie@sixapart anymore, I am now @livejournalinc.com!)

I'm taking this opportunity to go through and delete some unused support communities. Please let me know if you are continuing to use any of the following communities:

bookmarklj
comm_example (haven't we switched to examplecomm instead?)
communityname --^
howtosupport
support_clients
support_embed

If you want to keep any of these and would like to maintain them (and you're qualified, *cough*), let me know and I can hand the keys over.

Also, just a reminder that lj_support membership is reserved for people with the supporthelp privilege. If I've rejected you recently, it's nothing personal, and you're still welcome to help out! You just have to get more reviewing (and probably a bunch of practice, unless you're walking in with a lot of experience) done in order to join this community.

This reminds me of the "censorship" pixelization code in The Sims that prevents you from ever seeing their little 1×2-pixel SimRogenous zones. (Don Hopkins once told me a long story about how hard that was to implement...)

There are also now Wikipedia links in the maps (checkbox on the "More" tab). There aren't very many of them, though. Anyone know what triggers their presence?

Margarita Night Wednesday Night

Where:
LA Alameda
3807 University Dr
Huntsville, AL 35816
Phone: 256-539-6244
*** just East of Dreamland BBQ ***

When:
Wednesday, 7:ish pm - 9:30ish pm.

What:
Margarita's - $9.45
Big Ass Beer - $3.85
Good Food - Under $10.00
Excellent Company - As FREE as it gets!




See y'all tonight!

EDIT 11:48am Wednesday

Depending on when my nieces dance recitals are over, I won't be there until after 7:30pm.



EDIT 12:19pm Wednesday

Whelp, just found out that my niece is dancing in the First dance and in the Last dance. It's not due to be over until after 8pm. So, I won't be there until after then. Y'all have fun until I get there.




The Only Rule of M-Night as placed by naught : If this is your first time to M-night you HAVE to drink! That's either a Monster Marg or a Big Ass Beer - no fucking La-Las!
Remember the Code of M-night as set by jillykillroy : Assholes and Fucktards are not allowed - don't invite them and don't let them tag along - please, reiterate this part to the people that you do invite.
M-Night Motto as quoted by travlr1 : Be There or be a Fucktard, just don't be a Fucktard There!

http://www.picturesforsadchildren.com

2008-05-14 06:47:08 i usually don't talk about this stuff, but i replaced that hideous ad with a graphic linking to my store and feel better about that in general. i think my experiment with ads may be over, though i reserve the right to try them out again at a later date. feel free to ask me a ridiculous question on ebay.

The technique for building tension on American Idol is an interesting one. Rather than tell you who came out on top each week, they instead tell you who came out on the bottom, giving the impression that it's an active competition which anyone can win. The truth is quite a bit more boring. If you look at the previous season eliminations, in four of the six seasons the eventual winner was never in the bottom group, and the earliest the eventual winner was in the bottom group was in the sixth show. So the show could instead knock out a third of the top 12 on the very first show, and probably not have changed the eventual result in any of the contests thus far. Chances are that in most seasons the eventual winner starts getting the most votes early and stays that way every episode.

Does this mean that American Idol would do a better job of picking the winner if it had stayed with the format of the first few seasons, where votes were used to advance competitors through to the finals? Probably, but there's a distinct lack of any criterion with which to measure 'better'. Yes, votes are more representative of later votes than the judge's judgment, and if the pool of people is bigger there's a greatly reduced chance that there won't be any decent competitors in it (as happened in season six, yeesh), but the only measure available for determining how accurate voting was is later album sales, and those have some very wacky things going on.

Looking at the American Idol top sellers one thing stands out: in most of the seasons, exactly one finalist sold over a million albums, with a big gap below that. The exceptions are season 2, which had two, and season 6, which had none (see aforementioned observation about complete lack of talent in season 6). Apparently the show's producers pick exactly one singer to put some real marketing muscle behind each season, and let the others sell however many they happen to sell. The other thing which stands out is that with the exception of Kelly Clarkson, the first season winner, not a single top seller has sold more than half as many copies of their second album as their first, strongly implying that almost all of their sales are due to Idol-related publicity, with complete failure to build a fanbase on their singing merits alone.

Clarkson was the huge exception to that rule. She sold more than twice as many copies of her second album as her first. My guess is that had American Idol not lucked out with Clarkson in the first season, it would be viewed as having no legitimacy as a source of new talent whatsoever.

Margarita Night Wednesday Night

Where:
LA Alameda
3807 University Dr
Huntsville, AL 35816
Phone: 256-539-6244
*** just East of Dreamland BBQ ***

When:
Wednesday, 7:ish pm - 9:30ish pm.

What:
Margarita's - $9.45
Big Ass Beer - $3.85
Good Food - Under $10.00
Excellent Company - As FREE as it gets!




See y'all tonight!

EDIT 11:48am Wednesday

Depending on when my nieces dance recitals are over, I won't be there until after 7:30pm.




The Only Rule of M-Night as placed by naught : If this is your first time to M-night you HAVE to drink! That's either a Monster Marg or a Big Ass Beer - no fucking La-Las!
Remember the Code of M-night as set by jillykillroy : Assholes and Fucktards are not allowed - don't invite them and don't let them tag along - please, reiterate this part to the people that you do invite.
M-Night Motto as quoted by travlr1 : Be There or be a Fucktard, just don't be a Fucktard There!

DNA Lounge update, wherein we network with a socialness.

I couldn't let today pass without making note of The Great Debian OpenSSL bug. It is a serious pain and it is going to bite so many people in the ass. I spent hours dealing with this on my own systems.

Why, Debian, Why!?

Am I being singled out, or is there a new plague of AIM bots going around? I used to get prodded by these stupid things every couple of weeks, but I've blocked a dozen of them in the last week. This time it's usually a bot with "salmon" in its name.

The web browser is the new operating system. My own computer is at this point little more than a glorified web browser, with a text editor, command prompt, python interpreter and svn thrown in for the occasional color.

Since the web browser is the new OS, it should really, really, have the equivalent of a process list. I almost always have a whole bunch of tabs open, and firefox is most of the time using a nontrivial amount of CPU doing not much of anything. I have to guess which tab is causing the problem when the CPU gets pegged, and sometimes it seems that even shutting down all tabs doesn't completely fix the problem. Could somebody please implement metrics on how much CPU each tab/window is using, and get the process separation right so that whenever a tab/window is shut down all remnants of it are completely toast?

If you weren't crazy before it, you will be after it.

postin' this by boyfriend request so wendy will see it before i mail the original from 'merica. (surprise wendy i drew you a comic) p.s. wendy your boyfriend is cruisin for smooches

efterklang - frida found a friend