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May 31, 2007
Tastes
Watching this video, which morphs between 500 years of female portraits (go, watch it now) reminded me of the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty ad, revealing the work going in to presenting a fashion model - including photoshopping at the end.
Posted by griffjon at 08:12 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 29, 2007
Weekend
I didn't actually do that much, but I got a lot done. If that makes sense. I cleaned out a good chunk of our basement, in hopes that we can continue straightening it up and make a living space out of it (since it stays cool during the summer!)
A and I had bought some yummy apple wine[1] from Chateau O'Brien, and wanted to drink it before she disappears for the summer to China, so we planned an entire meal around it - Salmon with sliced apples marinated in an OJ/apple juice/mint mixture with nuts and brown sugar sprinkled on top, apple and fig chutney, basmati rice and mushrooms saute'ed in white wine. It was an apple-y but awesome meal.
[1] Yeah, yeah. I don't like "dessert wines" either - but this stuff is good.
Posted by griffjon at 03:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 23, 2007
Gradumicated
I went through all the "fun" ceremony of graduation last weekend. Being GWU, however, the ceremony does not confer graduation status, as they haven't picked through all the records and requirements yet. They saw fit to remind us about this on every piece of documentation, including, tackily enough, the printed program itself.
So, barring incompetence on my part of GWU's, I'll get confirmation sometime in June. I've decided that GWU tries to train its students to work with the government on meta-levels by throwing slowness, bullheadedness and sheer paper-chasing bureaucracy at them at every option.
In June I transition to full time at my current employer, which could be fine for the time being, provided that I can detangle myself from the reactive stance part-time + random disasters have forced on me. Seriously - since Feb:
*Our Exchange server lost a hard drive went down, exposing also incomplete backups and poorly set-up RAID configurations, it was never fully recovered, causing loosing permanently 2 weeks of email and 2 months of hassles in fixing settings to get it to send properly.
*Our firewall melted, causing Internet to drop every few minutes
*One of the UPS batteries died
*Our Big Event of the year has happened
*The website transition to a new CMS site - it's gone as well as any transition of such scale could go, really. Had there not been constant other problems, it'd've been a bit more calm
Anyhow, once I'm fulltime I hope to control all that easier and try to get away from just being the IT guy, and get proactive in looking for ICT - in -Dev type things I can do through my job.
My GF (A) will be in China for most of the summer, leaving me to find other ways to occupy myself. I'm going to try to get into better shape (spring semesters suck, and the winter didn't help either), and get re-involved with Esperanza, seeing what I can do with them remotely. I'm not sure how much time I'll have to take off to parts unknown, but I am feeling the Itch to get out of the country for a while. A is presenting at a conference in India in the early fall, and we're pondering a pre-con trip there.
Posted by griffjon at 08:33 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
lost email
BTW - if you've sent me email this past week and I didn't respond, I might not have gotten it. An awesome script I wrote back in Jamaica that read an SMS and replied with bus directions got caught in an infinite, exponentially expanding loop[1] which drug the mail server to a grinding halt. At the same time, my learning (bayesian) spam filter's database grew to an unusable size, and the clean-up method corrupted it, causing me to receive all the spam from all my accounts, which is a deluge of viagra and bank fraud schemes. Cleaning that up and re-training my spam filter have meant some lost email. In geek talk, we call this "fun"
[1] The script reads a mail and tries to extract bus numbers, street names, or points of interest from it, then sends it back in up to 3 messages (cut up to avoid the limitations of SMS). It for whatever reason sent one of these to itself, resulting in 3 messages with street/bus/POI information, each of these 3 spawned 3 more, and so on. Bad.
Posted by griffjon at 08:30 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack