Blog Posts

Home /
Blog Posts

Training Pays Off

Mario Frangoulis sings a wonderful cover of the Moody Blues song, “Nights in White Satin.” This guy has an amazing voice. It’s a great song, but put it in Italian and give it to an opera singer, and wow–powerful stuff!

Just goes to show, if you know what you are doing, you can sing anything and people will love it.

Enjoy!

Second Life's Strang Second Life | The Verge

alter-text

The Verge has a good article about Second Life, but the interesting part is the posts layout. The post has some nice features, like eye catching pull outs and rotating images, all floating on a retro background. Well done.

When mainstream media outlets touched down in Second Life seven years ago they tended to focus on the strangeness of it all. People were having sex through a game and dressing up as foxes and kittens. The reality, says Tom Boellstorff, a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Irvine, is more prosaic: “Humans already live many different kinds of life: online is just one more of those kinds of lives.”
Read More

Common MySQL Queries

I ran across this terrific resource, Common MySQL Queries.

Tons of great examples…for example:

Given a birthdate in @dob, here are two simple formulae for age in years:

Date_format( From_Days( To_Days(Curdate()) - To_Days(@dob) ), '%Y' ) + 0
Year(Curdate()) - Year(@dob) - ( Right(Curdate(),5) &amp;lt; Right(@dob,5) )

and here is one for age in years to two decimal places, ignoring day of month:

Round((((Year(now()) - Year(@dob)))*12 + (((Month(now()) - Month(@dob)))))/12, 2)

Enjoy!

Dragons Past and Present

Below is a paper I wrote for a college lit class. It was a fun research project. Enjoy – Bill

Dragons appear in our oldest mythology and folklore. Dragons have been a source of terror and mystery, throughout history. They populate early mythology, medieval literature, the Renaissance, and modern fiction. The dragons of today share many characteristics of the dragons from our earliest folklore and myths. No longer the feared hero’s antagonist, or the confidants of emperors, today dragons live on in our fiction.

The Galaxy Note II After a Week or So

The thing is huge! I know I’ve said that a dozen times already, but it is ridiculously large. Its the same (almost) screen size as my kindle touch. For someone without an iPad, the extra screen real estate might be nice, but as a phone, it is just way too big.

There are a couple of features that I really do like. For example, a setting will mute the phone if it is sitting face down on the desk. I don’t know where the setting is, I was hoping to find it and include as part of the post, but I can’t find it. I know about it because a popup shortly after I started using the phone told me about the feature and offered to activate it.

The Galaxy Note II by Samsung

I got an evaluation phone at work to fiddle with for 30 days. I’ve been a long time apple iPhone fan, and still am, but I’ve been hearing more and more good things about Android and Android phones that I figured it was time to check them out.

My first reaction when they handed me the box was, “Damn! This thing is huge!”

1Password yeah! I wasn’t smart enough to look for a 1Password android version first thing. It took me a couple of hours and several typed passwords before I wised up and searched. 1Password syncs with my dropbox password list just like on the iPhone.

Apartment Living

Yeah! I’m finally getting settled in the new place. Moving is exhausting. Mostly mental, but exhausting none the less.

I haven’t lived in an apartment since my early Navy days in Virginia. I shared an apartment with a Navy buddy in Virginia Beach. We were noisy! To be honest, I don’t remember much about the complex, just the apartment. I don’t know if we had lots of neighbors, and if the raucous we created caused problems.

Anger Management

Silence. Internal voices saying, “I’m not good enough,” and “I’m evil.” Jibes and taunts. I talked about this some in the MBAGPP post, what it is like to stand apart from society and deal with the bigotry.

Folks are driven by these challenges in different ways. Some turn away and find new groups and families that meet their support requirements. Some close down and get angry. And some quit, unable to deal with or unable to bear the burden.

People Are Challenging

I make no claim to understand people. In fact, I’m often confused by peoples motivations or responses.

For a long time, I was convinced that my lack of understanding was a result of my own limitations. I believed I was either naive about the situation, or I had put up too many barriers between myself and others to ‘grok’ their meaning.

We all have so much in common, so why is basic communication so difficult? We are all born, we all die, we all suffer, and we all experience occasional joy.

Old Words

Packing, boxes, tape, more boxes more tape…. That’s my life for the next few weeks. I’m getting ready to move. Finally facing reality and ditching the too-big house and moving into an apartment in the part of town where stuff actually happens.

And I am going to use this opportunity to shed much of the stuff I’ve been hauling around for the past thirty years. We’ll see how that goes.