Category Archives: Lite

What A Mess We Have In Zimbra

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Webmail Plus and Apple, two tastes that make for awkward WTF’ery. At work I get meeting invitations so I open up Calendar and I open the invitation up. I change which calendar it’s on over to my iCloud calendar because I do not like using Webmail Plus and if I can avoid it, I will. But when I do that single action it apparently sends meeting cancellation notices to everyone else who is invited to the meeting! So the hilarity ensues. Then I get emails from everyone confused as to whether or not the meeting is on, or not.

So, it’s an incompatibility between Webmail Plus and Apple’s Calendar application. What a shocker. The workaround? Just ignore the invitations from Webmail Plus and bang in the details manually using my keyboard. It’s low-brow, but alas, it’s what must be done.

I find it hilarious that doing this sends out a cancellation to everyone else, even though the meeting wasn’t organized by me. Seems to be a bug, but since I just laugh at Webmail Plus and it’s issues, I just shrug and move on. Zimbra. Hah. Whatever.

SQL Tattletale

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While at work I had an irritation with my SQL Server database. My coworkers give me data to load and without fail I have to create new tables to accept the data that they give me. The data is all headed somewhere and that somewhere always has many tables and in each of those tables many columns. The need I have is for the names of those columns, their data types, how long they are, and what their collations are. I don’t really have any of that information written down and for the longest time I’ve been schlepping to sp_help ‘table name’ to find the answers and it’s been a right mess. The data is there, but it’s annoying as sp_help gives me way too much information and there is no way to trim it back. So, I created a new stored procedure and I named it “tattle”, here it is in T-SQL:

CREATE PROCEDURE [dbo].[tattle]
@MYARG char(255)
AS
SELECT COLUMN_NAME,DATA_TYPE,CHARACTER_MAXIMUM_LENGTH,COLLATION_NAME FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.COLUMNS WHERE TABLE_NAME=@MYARG
GO

I’m quite proud of what I accomplished and the output is EXACTLY what I need when I need it. To run it I just type in tattle ‘table’ and it spits out just what I am after.

It’s the little victories you have to savor. 🙂

Definitely the Moon…

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As I was tending to dinner I started just mumbling stock tunes and plugging in random lyrics as I often times do. Then it hit me.

A tasteless gay porn video with a retro 70’s outfitted cast, bell bottoms, powder-blue frilly pirate shirts, the cheesiest period-Muzak available and the plot is during the civil war, with a poorly-done knockoff of “The Picture of Dorian Gray” as a shamefully plugged plot device… Then the title, which caps it all off: “Dougie does Daguerreotypes”!

LULZ!

That’s what idleness, a full moon, and a touch of Gemini Rising can do for ya! Hah! 🙂

A Good Addiction

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There is an iOS game that I’ve heard before and didn’t think anything of until I downloaded it and started to play. The game is called Letterpress and it’s incredibly addicting. Each game is composed of 25 english letters in a 5×5 grid and the person who starts the game with another player is the first to go. You can select words from these 25 characters, one letter at a time and as you play the letters they are marked with your color. Your color is blue and your opponents color is red. When you use a letter the colors start out faint, but as you use letters and surround other claimed letters, the letters that are surrounded get a bolder color of whomever claimed them. All letters can be used over and over again and you get points for claiming a letter and stealing letters with weak colors from your opponent. Letters that are in strong colors can still be used but they don’t give you any points. The game ends when all letters have been claimed with a color and the person with the higher score wins.

The games themselves are tiny and quick and really fun. It’s like speed-yahtzee and it exercises your vocabulary as you try to construct words with or without really helpful bits like e’s and “ing”‘s. The app is freemium and so it’s free to play a few games but you can upgrade and play an unlimited number of games for $1.99. It’s the best iOS game I’ve ever played. It’s fair, it’s nicely balanced, and the quick game play is great fun. My win/loss is 50/50 and I don’t really care to win that much, but boy, do I love playing. The game is designed with touch, so it has pleasing sounds when you select and move letter tiles to make words and to remove old dead games you can swipe across the display and tap the Remove button and the game makes a really satisfying exploding noise and it actually explodes off the display. Another added extra is that Letterpress is a universal app, it works on the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad equally well and your upgrade works for your Apple ID and then applies to all the different devices you have associated with that Apple ID. All in all I love it and I’m trying to get to word out to friends and family so they can start playing along.

Accessing the Big Bag O’ Tangents

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At work I got to talking about the climate and climate change. About how all the weird weather is just going to get worse and how stupid all of it is. From Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth that nobody much cared for because they just don’t like Al Gore is where a lot of the foolishness starts. I started to riff on a theme after that, noticing on the way that a lot of rich people seem to cluster around the water’s edge. I got to laughing as I considered what a pretty good rise in sea level would do. Say goodbye to New Yack, buh-bye Florida, and then there was this: “Oh yes, we have a house in the Hamptons… we’re so filthy rich and ohh-la-la.” … “We had a house in the Hamptons, but that’s all under the sea now.” I shifted gears and thought about a anthropomorphized mother nature beating the tar out of Florida. I don’t really care much for Florida, they have citrus, rain, oppressive heat, and really adorable under-the-sea-level-but-still-dry land contours. What happens when the sea rises? Florida will be covered with sea water. It’s going to be very hard to grow any citrus after an anthropomorphized mother nature is finished SALTING THE EARTH, after all, seawater is saltwater! Anyhow, I eventually returned to climate change and got to talking about how methane is a much worse gas than carbon dioxide when it comes to the greenhouse effect and that got me talking about how American stockyard animals all fart and release Methane.

Then I remembered the little bit of trivia that marsupials don’t host the bacteria that convert sugars into methane so animals like Kangaroo just don’t fart. Kangaroo Obviously I wasn’t done, and I needed to end it on a humorous note and I pulled down some points in the column of ‘obnoxious and obscene’ and posited that we should switch out cows, pigs, and chickens for their marsupial counterparts, like kangaroos and such and that would be better for the environment. It didn’t actually stop there, I got to thinking about how one dispatches chickens – you decapitate them and then them run about until they exsanguinate and stop moving, then you pick up the dead and dress it and you’re all set. Naturally I thought about what one could do in my fictional America where we’ve switched out to Kangaroos. What if you decapitated a Kangaroo and let it bound about? Kangaroos are big, lots of blood and energy and without a brain they’d probably take off bouncing along. Here’s the good part, imagine a new reality TV series where people bet online to see which Kangaroo, once properly beheaded gets as far as it can bounding off without a brain. Make it a national lottery, pack it with ads, boy, that would be a huge moneymaker.

There will be a full moon in two days. So, you know, that’s my excuse for all of this. People who know me shouldn’t even bat an eye at any of this. 🙂

Addressing Balance In The Force

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You can’t really have a lot of negative things in your head just mobbing out all the good things that also have happened. To that end, today I have a particular real humor-based life preserver brought to me by the Apple Spotlight twitter account. Pictures are worth a thousand words, and this is worth a million billion bajillion lulz:

 

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This pleases me.

 

Unexpected Side Effects

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One thing I wasn’t really expecting but that I’m getting in a rather steady stream are spam comments. There seems to be several species of spam floating about. Amongst these are the link droppers, the foreign language gobbledygook, the ‘cheaters’ messages and the random attaboy messages that are possibly authentic but utterly meaningless.

But then there is another class of commentary. There is a whole argument chain about the Wheel of Time that has been marching along. It seems like real comments from real people, as the commentary has a real argumentative structure but I haven’t written any critical posts about WOT.

I’ve been deleting the spammy comments, all of them, and eventually I think I’ll have to create an email filter to organize them into batches or turn off email notification altogether. At least the WordPress app allows me to deal with comments like the mail app allows me to deal with multiple emails. Highlight batches and delete.

It’s not that I don’t want comments. I do! But I want real comments from real people. One thing I will state, if a comment is obnoxious I will kill it without remorse. If you have an unquenchable opinion, start your own blog.

WOT: Matrim Cauthon’s Theme Song

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I wrote about this years ago when I first started reading Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series of books. One of the main characters of the story is Matrim Cauthon and he plays a central role throughout the entire story. I’m currently reading “Memory of Light” and just finished a rather well-written section early in this book featuring Mat.

That section got me to thinking about an old LiveJournal post I wrote all those years ago. Thanks to Spotify I can embed the music right in this post:


After reading the lyrics and thinking about Mat I really think this track from Coldplay has Mat nailed down pretty well. I thought everyone else might enjoy it as well.

PAD 1/5/2013 – First Lines of Favorite Books

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Post a Day for 1/5/13:

“Take the first sentence from your favorite book and make it the first sentence of your post.”

—

“A blur of rushing images ‘Begin at the beginning’ is the phrase.”

And this is how my favorite book of all time starts. That book is “What Dreams May Come” and I’ve been in love ever since I first read it years ago. The movie version was good, but I found the deleted ending to be better.

Sometimes I think that the first line is a great place to start. Especially these days since I’ve been moving my old LiveJournal post entires into my Day One archive one at a time. The key phrase is all about a blur of rushing images. There are bits of my past that I’ve forgotten about for a very long time and now that I’ve uncorked them and browsing them they all tend to flow back over me like a blur of rushing images.

I still have eight hundred entries left to move over into Day One. After that, then maybe more trips down memory lane. There was a lot of material and much of it I’ll never share with anyone, but out of all of it, perhaps there will be something.

Post-a-Day 1/3/12 & 1/4/13

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The post-a-day prompt for yesterday was meaningless to me:

What’s the 11th item on your bucket list?

I don’t even have a bucket list. Why could have been on it? A trip to Paris, but I’ve done that twice now. How about investigating my ancestors? Doing that currently with other family members using Ancestry.com. Reconnect with my brother? Yeah, accomplished that too. Really why do you even need a bucket list if you are determined to enjoy your life while you have it? Live without regret. Live without guilt. LIVE.

Do you have a favorite quote that you return to again and again? What is it, and why does it move you?

It’s attributed to Dr. Seuss: “Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.”

It’s been on the top of the charts since I discovered it a long time ago. It speaks directly to how I feel about much of my life. Either you like me and what I say or you don’t. I live my life without regret, guilt, or apology. As I’ve been fond of saying, if you don’t like what I say there is nothing keeping you chained to me. You can go away; My feelings are made of sterner stuff.