Into the Treehouse

Music TopicOn to more fun things, a band of the day. This one is new to
me, which I found out about because of WREK. They are called Treehouse Project. Earlier this week, a
music director had a problem with the web UI while programming tracks
from this album, so I had to fix it in the database which made them
stick out a little in my memory. Today, I had to
look up their record label’s web site to add that into the DB and I ended up
browsing around a little (an occupational hazard.) I listened to their
MP3s and they are really cool! It’s a jazz band but with pedal steel
guitar, which gives it a country twang. Here is their their MP3 page.

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Cobb Country, just north of Atlanta and where I used to live, passed a
resolution in their school board meeting last night requiring the
teaching of creationism. I watched some footage on the news, and it
was the same tired crap, “Evolution is just a theory, Darwin only
thought it was a theory.” Well, yes, and we have a couple hundred more
years of good science since then, all of which verifies it. Other
theories which were “only theories” at that time: disease being caused
by organisms rather than humors; the existence of particles too small
to see that make up matter.

I cannot believe modern American fundamentalist Christians, whose
faith is so weak that if the whole world doesn’t act in accordance
with their beliefs, they feel threatened. I cannot believe their
literal interpretation (“If it says in the bible God made the world in
6 days, that means 144 hours!”) of the English text of a book written
in Hebrew and Greek. If they want to be so literal, shouldn’t they be
literal about the source text and in the context of the traditions at
the time it was written? I cannot believe that they believe in a God
who would create a man so capable of amazing abilities of thought and
rationality, to pick out patterns from all the noise in His creation,
and then find it against His will to use the abilities He gave
them. What a terrible way to live!

I present now, with permission, a parody press release from my friend
and one-time coworker, science and science fiction writer Mark Bourne. If you ever
saw this circulating on mailing lists a few years ago, Mark wrote it
in 1999. The fake date is exactly one millenium before the day he
actually wrote it. It is more relevant today than the day he wrote it,
sadly.

*AMENDED 10:44 AM* Mark e-mailed me and pointed out that he did
NOT write this from whole cloth, but embellished something he found at
The
Irascible Professor
, which actually states the originator as the
Johan Kuno named in the piece. So, for those of you
scoring at home, credit Johan Kuno for the concept and Mark for
rewriting it such that it reads just like an American creationist
press release.

Oskarshamn, SWEDEN, October 29, AD 999:

Today, a group headed by Johan Kuno passed a new law which states
that teaching meteorology in Swedish schools is against religious
belief and faith. Norse Mythology teaches that Thor, the god of
lightning, is responsible for all atmospheric phenomena. Lightning
bolts are _not_ naturally occurring electrical discharges — they are
caused by the hammer of Thor. Thunder and rain are also brought
forward by the Mighty Thor. There can be no other morally acceptable
explanation for these phenomena.

A few meteorologists complained, calling this measure “a ludicrous
proposition that will send us back to the Stone Age”.

Kuno responded with this statement: “This so-called ‘scientific
method’ is nothing more than a trick of Loki upon a few misguided
doubting rabble-rousers. We modern Norsemen, though favored by the
fifty-seven true gods, have forgotten the values and virtues fostered
by our fathers in the Stone Age. Why, if cutting out the eyes of your
enemy and drinking his blood from a cup mounted between the breasts of
his wife which you have made your own was good enough for our fathers,
then by golly it’s good enough for us.”

Swedish right-wing Vikings are physically powerful and therefore the
school board passed the new law after only two mugs of frothing mead
— an unprecedented event in Swedish legislative history.

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Music TopicCurrently I’m listening to one of the better shows at WREK, the
psychedelic show Psych Out. It’s really good, and you can listen to it
any time via the MP3 archives. If you like psychedelic music at all,
60’s style or modern, American, British or Japanese, give it a
listen. You can hear it in High
bandwidth
or dialup
style
versions from the MP3 archives, any time you like. Ain’t
technology grand?

Ponzi blogs

It appears to take more to get in the Ponzi scheme than I’ve got. I
submitted this URL to Blogdex a month ago, and it
just started crawling it in the last few days. I can see the
statistics, and out of the 10,000+ weblogs, there are 0 links to
me. Sigh. I knew that one of the problems with doing a standalone
weblog is that you don’t have the built-in community/blogrolling that
you get for free with LiveJournal or Userland. Maybe someday I’ll post
something sufficiently pithy to get a few freaking links. With this
damn illness, I’m lucky to be posting anything.

PHP lessons learned

I did a little more work on the WREK web pages today. I do believe I’m
to the point where I can bat out PHP pages that do a number of DB
tasks pretty simply. I’m at the point where I have the hard won
knowledge. Here are a few of my nuggest that I’ve learned, all the
hard way.

– At least for Oracle and mysql, use the FetchInto type functions and
get your results as associative arrays. There is a runtime hit, but it
makes your code much much more readable than cryptic index based
functions like “OciResult(, 3)” that force you to count columns in
your original SQL statement to see what the hell is going on.

– If you are getting a number of results to present as a table or
list, save them off into an array of the arrays from above. This
allows you to do your own sorting which might be different from the
database’s “order by”. It also enables cool things like
allowing people to sort differently via HTML forms with minimal
coding.

– Create one or a set of files you include in standard pages. If you
have a utility type function that you find yourself cutting and
pasting into another page, don’t. Put it in the utility include
instead. Otherwise, you’ll one day find yourself fixing a bug and then
having to grep to find all the files you put that bug in. Past it in
the include and remove it from all your PHP pages.

– Use source control, even for your own trivial projects at home and
even if you are the only person touching the files. There is nothing
like having that history to fall back on, and just being able to avoid
having all those “file.old”, “file.backup”, and crap like that is
worth it. I’m on the cusp of installing Subversion to try it out.

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Back at work. I don’t really feel that much better, but this is the
best I’m going to get anytime soon. Water, OJ, Sudafed and then let it
roll. There seems to be two major camps in sickness vs. work
issues. There is the “Sick days are for wussies” camp, of which my
boss is a proponent. These are the people who think that it would be
such a productivity hit to not work for a day that they come in ill
and infect everyone else, causing the loss of many workdays across
many people. The other school is the “Why should I schlep in ill for
this? That’s my philosophy.

Maybe this is just because I am sick and cranky, but almost everyone
is bugging me lately. This is coworkers, friends, people online,
people on mailing lists, people offline, everyone. I’m so sick of
having the same few arguments over and over on the same subjects over
and over with the same few people. I’m ceasing to argue on every
subject indefinitely. I’m not an evangelist, so I’ve decided that I
don’t give a shit about changing anyone’s mind on anything for a
while. Believe what you want to believe, do what you want to
do. Maybe one day I’ll resume, but not now.

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Out of work again with a relapse on this cold. I’ve been finding it
hard even to weblog. Here is something that I ran across via a post on
DM.net – an article by Col. David Hackworth questioning
the headlong flight to war
. I’m not familiar with WorldNetDaily,
but it has commentary by local (to Atlanta) Libertarian talk show host
Neal Boortz, Dennis Prager and others. Interesting.

Fat, Greek

I’m finally starting to feel a little better. If this was a workday I
would be up to going to work. My mother-in-law is in town this
weekend, and yesterday we went to see My Big Fat Greek
Wedding
, which I liked quite a bit. I especially like how it
was atypically Hollywood, in that the transition from frumpy girl to
pretty girl was not that dramatic and while pretty enough, the “after”
transformation woman was not a stunner. I get very tired of Hollywood
judgements of beauty, such as The Truth about Cats and
Dogs
, where Uma Thurman is the pretty girl and Janeane
Garafalo is the ugly girl. In almost any other context in the world,
JG would be considered attractive in her own right. I have like John
Corbett for a long time, and thought he did a great job. I expected to
enjoy the movie, but it was quite a bit better than I thought it would
be.

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More SUV stuff, this time from The Car Talk guys, including
the “Need a SUV quiz?” I’d like to see a study on how many accidents
are caused indirectly by SUVs, by the fact that drivers in normal
sized passenger vehicles can’t see around them. My personal SUV goal –
I’d like to see them require a special class of license with a
mandatory SUV driving test. I’m tired of dodging Lincoln Navigators
that cross the center line when their drivers can’t handle
them. Forget terrorism, I have much more immediate risk to my life and
safety posed to me by drivers of Ford Excursions talking on their cellphones.

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I didn’t even write anything in here yesterday because I was too sick
to even focus long enough for it. I had foolishly gone into work and
then faded fast and by lunchtime I was ready to just put my head down
and go to sleep. I came home and watched a couple of those MST3K
episodes on my laptop, with it lying on my belly on the couch. I gave
up the VCD path, just watching the AVI files directly and then
deleting them. It turns out that one I downloaded, The
Incredibly Strange Creatures blah blah Mixed up Zombies
isn’t
what I thought it was. I had already seen that one. For some reason, I
was thinking that was the movie where Rosie Greer got a white man’s
head implanted on his shoulder. On the agenda for today – sleeping,
OJ, and cartoons.

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I do believe that we are at the point in the year where I have to
start thinking about transitioning away from shorts and sandals every
day. Our office is already refrigerated by AC to the point it is
unpleasant (I frequently walk around with a thick sweater over me) so
if I won’t die of heat stroke between the car and the front door, I
guess long pants are the way to go. It’s a shame, because I always
prefer to dress like I’m heading to the beach if at all possible.

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We’re watching the season premiere of The Real World
and within 10 minutes I had decided that I hate all seven people. It’s
been many many years since I enjoyed a Real World show (probably
London was the last one I could stand) but this one is really
bad. Darlene likes them, but I just can’t take it. It’s unwatchable,
with vapid and self-involved people just whining. I guess in that
respect its not so much unlike my weblog.

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On my drive home today, I was behind a PT Cruiser with one of those
advertising car wraps, for a firm named RetroTechs. It had pulp sci-fi
graphics in and around the logo. I looked them up when I got home, and
find they are a Mac and PC support organization (seems like Mac is
their specialty) that is jazzing up their image. They seem to be going
for a Ghostbusters-y/Men In Black kind of branding, where they all wear sunglasses
and skinny ties. Turns out their headquarters is right in my
neighborhood and they’ve been around for 11 years (albeit with a
different name and without the schtick.) Still, how did I miss all
this? Goofy but fun.

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Interesting article in USA Today about the rift between recording
artists and the RIAA – read
it here.
My favorit bit:

“The record companies are like cartels, like countries, for God’s
sake,” singer/songwriter Tom Waits says. “It’s a nightmare to be
trapped in one. I’m on a good label (Epitaph) now that’s not part of
the plantation system. But all the old records I did for Island have
been swallowed up and spit out in whatever form they choose. These
corporations don’t have feelings, and they don’t see themselves as the
stewards of the work. They are making shoes, and then they want to go
to the Bahamas and get a suntan.”