Month: July 2004

I can’t believe it! The rumors I commented on earlier about Bush pushing Pakistan to come up with al Qaida bigwigs during the convention are true!

CNN: Pakistan captures high-level al Qaeda operative

They have no shame. Tonight just happens to be the biggest single moment in Kerry’s campaign.

From Coreyh.com on May 11th:

I have long suspected that Karl Rove has been dreaming about engineering a high profile arrest close to the election. Even if they captured somebody now they’d probably just come up with some bogus reason to hold him in secret until the political climate is more attractive for maximum possible votes.

Just to pass on some added information, about which we’ll be saying more. There is chatter in Pakistani intelligence circles that the US has let the Pakistanis know that the optimal time for bagging ‘high value’ al Qaida suspects in the untamed Afghan-Pakistani border lands is the last ten days of July, 2004.

— Josh Marshall [via Talking Points Memo]

The corporate PhotoHunt team was in Paris at the tail end of a worldwide (work) tour and found a Megatouch 2002 Machine. Even without my help they were able to achieve an impressive international debut with a #8 on the board.

Previous EPH coverage here.

I really can’t explain why I like this picture soooo much.

via Curbed

Hollie just sent this via her new camera phone. Needless to say I’m pretty jealous.

I have a Motorola MPX200 from AT&T WS running Windows Mobile 2002 for Smartphones. No camera for me unless I want to walk around with a camera apendage sticking out of the SD slot.

Based on a tip from MarcF I decided to take the plunge and install the semi-pirate Windows Mobile 2003 ROM on my phone.

It was a seamless procedure once I was able to find the ROMs online (again). Here is an in-direct link.

I’ll post a recap of how it goes in a week or so.

 

 

Here are instructions for updating the gentoo kernel from 2.4 to 2.6. I’m mostly doing this because I did this wrong about twenty times and it feels better if I share it.

Not one but two Ali-G mentions in the New York Times.

First is in an Op-Ed by Moureen Dowd who I dismissed inappropriately, but who I have since begun to like quite a bit. She then links to an interview with Sacha himself.

I’ve been a big fan of his from way back when I used to download the British version off Usenet.

!FB-aye!

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Our travel department booked me on Virgin Air from Hong Kong to London against my original instruction for an American Airline milage partner. I’m half glad they did.

The 777 is a great plane – quiet and smooth. They have the new super sleeper cabin on this particular flight. Each seat is its own little cocoon with all the accoutriments. There are three rows of seats facing diagnally. I haven’t figured out what all these buttons are for yet.

To convert to full sleep mode you have to get up and out of the seat, hit a special button and the seat folds down to reveal a 100% flat bed. The flight attendent brings over sheets and a duvet and practically tucks you in.

Maybe best of all a very hot flight attendent (think Kate Beckinsale at 35 (who’s 30 now)) came by to ask if I would like an in-flight massage and which treatment I wanted. Unfortunately my quest for continued sleep and my discomfort at receiving services from good looking women meant that I passed. 

While not quite Austin Powers level there is a full-on bar with stools and everything at the back of the first class cabin. I like how business and first class are merged into a singular “Upper Class”.

Co-worker whom I just met: “Where are you from? What accent is that?”

Me: “Uh, nowhere, but I grew up originally in southern California…”

Her: “Oh yeah, that explains it”

Me: “mkay”

Her: “Cause when I first met you I thought your voice sounded like you were holding in a bong hit”

Me:

Our upcoming project at work will have a clustered SQL Server for a backend. No current production systems currently use clustering and our vendor building the solution doesn’t really have the budget to buy cluster capable hardware just for testing.

Here’s where VM technology comes in. For this I chose Virtual Server 2005 because I could get a trial version and I only need this system to be running for a few months (the trial expires in Jan 2005).

On one physical server I build an Active Directory domain controller and two SQL Server 2000 servers attached to a virtual Shared disk subsystem – just a file on the host machine in active/passive clustering mode. This way we can test our application, test failover procedures without having to actually buy cluster hardware.

The beauty of all this was I was able to do it in just a few hours and didn’t encounter any trouble at any step along the way.

I’m getting better at taking pictures of the skyline. The trick is to use the infrared remote control, balance the camera on a railing somewhere, turn on landscape mode and turn off the flash.