Month: August 2002

When the night has come
And the land is dark,
And the moon is the only light we’ll see.
No I won’t be afraid,
Oh I won’t be afraid,
Just as long as you stand, stand by me

So darlin’ darlin’ stand by me,
Oh stand by me,
Oh stand, stand by me, stand by me.

If the sky that we look upon
Should tumble and fall,
Or the mountain should crumble to the sea.
I won’t cry, I won’t cry,
No I won’t shed a tear,
Just as long as you stand, stand by me.

And darlin’ darlin’ stand by me,
Oh stand by me,
Whoa stand now, stand by me, stand by me.

Darlin’ darlin’ stand by me,
Oh stand by me,
Oh stand now, stand by me, stand by me.

Whenever you’re in trouble just stand by me,
Oh stand by me,
Whoa stand now, oh stand, stand by me.

Stand by Me. is one of my favourite movies. I have been meaning to pick it up on DVD for quite a while. The last couple of nights I’ve just been crashing and watching some stuff, doens’t take much effort to lie down and watch tv and thats good at the mo. So I picked it up and I’ve just watched it. Thereis actually a very decent behind the scenes “featurette”, with interviews from most of the cast aswell as Rob Reiner and Stephen King.

I just clicked over to Wil Wheaton‘s blog to see what if anything he has online there about Stand by Me, it is one of my daily reads anyway and there is a new entry for today. Wil’s scenes have just been cut from Star Trek X. You should go read this piece and you should go read it now. Its wonderfully well written and you know thats all you need to know. Just go read it.

Also consider me officially disapointed that I won’t be seeing Wesley Crusher again. After reading Wil for about a year now, at the very least I’d have liked to have seen him play the part again. Roll on the DVD!

My pc is now back up and running and all seems to be good so far. We have a build that looks to be good. If it is still good tomorrow afternoon I’m going to take Friday off.

🙂

And to think I had decided I wanted Friday off subject to the build.

Oh and the quote isn’t mine. It is from the excellent Fight Club. It is in the movie for sure, I’m not sure about the book. You should check one or both out.

Free Culture (8mb)
Lawrence Lessig is a Professor of Law at Stanford fave the keynote speech at this year’s Open Source Convention. Its a damn good speech. If you have broadband, it is worth a listen. It is 30 min long.

In other news 🙁

On Sept. 11, the nation’s aviation system quickly and safely landed almost 4,500 planes that were in the air when the terrorist attacks took place. How was this accomplished? What was it like inside air traffic control centers and at airline headquarters? How was the decision made to land all the planes? And how did controllers execute it?
Clear the Skies. Excellent article, well worth reading.

Taking a lift into space may sound like science fiction but scientists are meeting in Seattle to discuss how to build such an elevator.
Space elevator takes off

Earnings From The Crypt. Top-Earning Dead Celebrities.
I didn’t know Robert Ludlum was dead…

and what do I do? I sign online. I was thinking about it and it quite simply boils down to a change of atmosphere. I’m sitting on my couch and I’m working on my computer and it just makes all the difference in the world.

So, I’m pretty pissed off with myself. A number of the problems we found today were my fault. They were also the problems that tipped the scales into delaying. I’m annoyed that I managed to miss them and I’m very annoyed that the people paid to look for them missed them. All were simple fixes and they are now fixed, but that is beside the point. I didn’t get much sleep last night (we’ll come to that in a moment) and I wasn’t feeling 100% all day so that just added to it all. All of the changes were sorted just after sevenish and the US agreed to build for us on the spot. So I stayed and stayed. Just after nine, I was told it would be another 3 hours. That put pay to my staying. Seen as I was the only one left at that stage, it can’t have been that important…or it could simply be that I should be a little more realistic and accept we have slipped.

So, last night I was having some trouble sleeping. It was pretty late at this stage, going on two am I guess. I suddenly realised I was cold. It wasn’t cold, it hasn’t been for a while. It was just me. It was kinda freaky. It passed after about 15 minutes but for that time I just couldn’t get warm even though I knew it wasn’t cold and I could feel the warmth from the duvet.

XP is rocking my world. My pc is running so much smoother than it was. As soon as I can get office installed again it should all be good. Then in a couple of weeks I’ll put Jaguar on my Mac and get to play with that. I’ve abused the poor thing a lot over the past few months and its not holding up all that well. Worth noting it has handled fifty plus delete and reinstalls, and far better than Windows ever would.

Won’t be ready for another 3 hours. I am going home.

I guess none of this is as important as I had thought.

jesus I’m bored as fuck waiting for this build and I’m starving. Someone blog or sign on and give me something to do!!

I hate putting up with this shit:
—————————————————————
HOW TO BUILD AN AIRCRAFT CARRIER: THE OLD WAY

Day 1
—–

Manager: Joe, please build me an aircraft carrier. It has to be six times bigger than the Nimitz. Let me know when it’s ready.

Joe: Yes, sir.

Day 347
——-

Manager: Oh, hello, Joe. What can I do for you?

Joe: You remember that aircraft carrier you ordered?

Manager: Yes, I do. Well, what about it?

Joe: It’s ready.

Manager: Ready to start building it? The design is finished?

Joe: No, the ship is finished. It’s currently returning from its first combat operation in the Pacific. It won, by the way.

Manager: Okay. Thanks, Joe, you’ve done well. I’ll tell the board it’s ready – they’ll be delighted. They were getting a bit nervous about it, to tell you the truth…

HOW TO BUILD AN AIRCRAFT CARRIER: THE NEW WAY

Day 1
—–

Manager: Joe, please build me an aircraft carrier. It has to be six times bigger than the Nimitz. I want daily status reports.

Joe: Yes, sir.

Day 2
—–

Manager: Joe, got a demo yet?

Joe: Well, kind of. Come and have a look.

[They go to the test area.]

Manager: What am I looking at?

Joe: Well, this is what we call a plastic duck. It’s very small, but it does float, and that’s important for aircraft carriers.

Manager: How many aircraft can it carry?

Joe: Well, none yet, but it’s early days.

Day 17
——

Manager: How’s that duck coming along?

Joe: We’ve cracked the size problem by using an inflatable duck. We can now get 200 Airfix models onto it, including Spitfires, Hurricanes, and Migs.

Manager: 200 aircraft – not bad going… HEY! Whaddya mean, MIGS!

Joe: Um, sorry, it’s all we could find. We’ll try to get some B-52s instead.

Manager: Well, you’ve been working on this for less than three weeks, and already you have a ship capable of carrying 200 aircraft – that’s pretty impressive! Can I tell the board yet?

Joe: Um, that might not be a bright idea…

Day 347
——-

Manager: Joe, we’re getting close to release date, and the board are getting itchy. I’ve told them I’ve been monitoring the progress closely, and I’ve been sending in the reports, but now they actually want to see the ship. Tomorrow. What have we got for them?

Joe: We have an inflatable duck over a mile long. It can carry 430,000 military aircraft, each about 7″ long, made of polystyrene, and hand-painted by Tom and Lucy in authentic original livery, as requested by management on Day 23. The duck uses hydrogen gas to maximise its buoyancy. Since hydrogen is pretty inflammable, we have used 8″ steel plates all the way around the duck’s “hull” to protect it from enemy fire, as requested by management on day 27. Consequently, the duck – I mean aircraft carrier – sits rather low in the water, but we solved that by extending the keel all the way down to the sea-bed. Mobility is assured because we’ve adopted management’s suggestion (on day 82) to put some wheels on the bottom of the keel. The wheels work fine in the testing tank, so we’re reasonably sure they’ll be okay on the sea-bed too. Unfortunately, this gave us some problems with mobility. The ship was too heavy for the paddle-wheels. We tried turning them faster, and that worked for a while, but eventually they were going so fast they broke to pieces. We’ve discovered, though, that we can add paddle-wheels. We’re up to 200 wheels on each side, now. Powering these, we have a nuclear fission plant. That also supplies power to the rest of the duck – um, ship – so we feel that it more than makes up for the extra-heavy shielding we had to add. Another problem with the keel is that it can be a hazard to other shipping – specifically, submarines. When this was realised, on day 261, we didn’t have any waterproof lighting immediately to hand, so we’ve lashed electric eels to the keel at 10 yard intervals, in the hope that they’ll emit enough light to warn subs not to bump into us. Since enemy subs will have no such qualms, the ship will need a constant submarine escort to fight off enemy subs. You’ll find this listed in the report, somewhere in Section 734. We still have a few problems with the hull – we’re looking for a more waterproof glue for the armour plating – but it’s more or less there. Yes, I think we’re ready for a demo to the board.

Manager: Good work, Joe! They’ll be so pleased…

fuck fuck fuck

So with today being a quiet day in work I’ve taken the chance to sort out some computer problems I have been having. With all my files backed up and I formatted and reinstalled this time with XP. There is a huge difference in speed. I’ve not been happy with the performance of this over the past while and had just requested an upgrade. If XP keeps going like this when I get everything installed I’m going to be very happy with it.