Category: Personal

What is isoTope?

MS gives: 101 Visual Basic and C# Code Samples

Today is definitely a sad day for my family because, for the second time this week, close friends of my parents were involved in a serious road accident. Last Friday one married couple was hit head on by a driver who drifted into their (oncoming) lane at reasonably high speed; both of them are still in intensive care and one still in a coma.

Worse, yesterday afternoon another couple, a wonderful, caring husband and wife I’ve known since I was 15, were killed in a major pileup on the NJ Turnpike, their car crushed between a truck and a bus. I remember the Trotts so fondly and their older daughter Susan was responsible for me meeting my first wife. They will be missed.

Checking my email this morning I found one from some guy who’d searched me out after smelling something off in an eBay auction of a 1979 Fender Telecaster. Same kind as I own. I guess he did a little googling and found my Telecaster for Sale page, then wrote to check things out.

Sure enough, this bottom feeder is attempting to sell my guitar, is using my guitar’s serial number and the photos right off my web page! Damn! I sent an alert to the eBay police but not sure what, if anything, will happen as the automated response was less than crystal on that score. Seemed strange to me but there wasn’t even space in the reporting form to include more than the auction number, no place to include an explanation. Still, at least I’ve done my part and hopefully no one will be taken by this apparent crooked deal, which “Ends Mar-11-04 10:34:56 PST” anyway.

Update: Well, not sure what will happen but someone did in the end submit a bid above the $700 minimum set by the seller (shahards) and was declared “the winner.” I do wonder, though, if he wasn’t part of the seller’s fraud network (or even another account of the same person) and simply gave a shill bid in order to improve the seller’s rating. Guess it’s not really my problem any more.

Semi-fresh: A peek at script kiddie culture

I was over at Michael’s at Shoreline this afternoon and driving home along Shoreline Boulevard the real nature of the vacant commercial real estate space flood here in Mountain View. Looked like nearly every commercial building had a For Lease sign out front except for the Computer History Museum. Which of course used to be Silicon Graphics’ main office building.

In one of those mindboggling foreign thingies, David Beckham’s contract with Real Madrid contains a standard buyout clause. That is, it specifies the minimum amount another club would have to pay the Spanish side for his contract. But what sets my eyes spinning is the amount: £140 million or, in US currency, $257.555 million!

Later: Just finished watching Beckham’s old club, Manchester United, host Portuguese champions FC Porto in a Champions League clash. This was the second leg of the round, with Porto winning 2-1 at home two weeks ago. ManU took a 1-0 lead after 32 minutes on a sweet header by Paul Scholes but, two minutes from the end of regulation, their defense was way out of position on the rebound from a 25 yard free kick and one of Porto’s men put it net. Porto goes through to the CL quarterfinals on the aggregate score 3-2.

What was really sad, even though I’m no ManU fan, is that the referee, a Russian named Valentin Ivanov, took the game away. Just before halftime Scholes appeared to have scored a second goal but it was waived off by the sideline assistant referee who judged that Scholes was offside; however, the replays showed clearly that he wasn’t and it should have been game over, Red Devils up 2-0. Then late in the second period Ivanov made another game changing error, calling a foul on Christian Ronaldo for diving when the midfielder was clearly fouled badly by a Porto player and in fact had to be carried off the playing area on a stretcher–at first the announcers thought the referee was reaching to give Ronaldo a yellow! All in all, on a night when they didn’t show brilliance but did play well, a major loss for Manchester United.

There are a lot of people speaking up against the burgeoning move to expand marital law to all those couples in our society who want it. But the wave continues to rise. Yesterday alone, governments in Seattle and Asbury Park added their voices to the mix and, locally, the San Jose City Council will discuss recognizing marriages performed elsewhere as qualifying for married benefits packages.

Writing in the NY Times, Don Browning and Elizabeth Marquardt attempt to make the negative argument by separating it from purely religious concerns but, while their use of the English language is quite elegant, the two go on for hundreds of words without saying anything definitive. In other words, more hot air. The core of their essay is the following quote:

Even in ancient secular systems, legal marriage was seen as a way to help society regulate and achieve a complex set of desires and goals: sexual activity, procreation, mutual help and affection, and parental care and accountability.

But looking at that sentence closely, one has to wonder which part does not apply to homosexual couples and does apply to all heterosexual couples. All apply just as well to all couples except, perhaps, procreation and even that is not simple; the authors do mention that many homosexual couples are raising children and it is certainly quite simple for any of them to have children either through cooperation with a member of the missing gender or adoption.

Accordingly, this open-minded heterosexual’s search for a substantive rationale opposing legal recognition of loving unions will have to continue.

One File Swapper, One Lawsuit. RIAA is a bunch of punk ass bitches, which is my fav new phrase.

Neil got married yesterday but George and Jeb had better things to do, as did Neil’s oldest child.

On a completely non-ha front, one of the sweeter women I know in this area got engaged yesterday. Congrats and best wishes to Pam and Henry!

Grum has an amusing summary of the various Seinfeld girlfriends who were more famous, before or after, than just for this.

Hope you saw the new Sopranos tonight, great start to a new season.

Watching this 1954 film by Alfred Hitchcock, I was a little surprised by how mechanical everything seemed, and how little suspense generated, and then I read this review by B. Kite of a recent revivial and found out the original release was part of that mid-’50s craze for 3-D movies. Unlike most of the movies he made, Hitchcock came on late in the game with Dial M for Murder and had less opportunity to make it his own.

Set in post-WWII London, Ray Milland plays former tennis pro Tony Wendice and the lustrous Grace Kelly his rich wife Margot, who’s having an affair with American mystery novelist Mark Halliday (played by Robert Cummings). Supporting them are John Williams (I remember him from Sabrina and To Catch a Thief) as a classic British police inspector and Anthony Dawson as one of Milland’s long-ago university classmates.

Milland uncovered the affair a year before but Cummings returned to America and is just returning to England as Dial begins; Milland has spent the year preparing and now thinks he’s plotted the perfect murder. The lovers think they’ve been discrete and one of the early scenes, with the three of them in the Wendices’ flat talking, is painfully amusing. Milland even asks the novelist if he’s come up with the perfect murder for one of his books but Cummings says such a thing is not possible in the real world.

And of course it isn’t. The plan develops cracks from the moment it goes into motion and this is where Hitchcock can work his gleefully intense magic on what began life as a minor stage play. Lighting, sounds, carefully designed movement, even purposeful looks combine to overcome the bloated, talky opening act.

recommended

Nothing much appealing on last night so we watched Vin Diesel’s essentially failed attempt to broaden his proven base beyond big budget flicks with this look at a cop driven beyond the pale. A Man Apart didn’t do the box office New Line Cinema had hoped nor did it get the kind of critical reaction Diesel wanted.

The story is basic enough, and Diesel actually gives a fine performance, so I blame director F. Gary Gray (who did a much better job on his next movie, The Italian Job) or perhaps writers Paul Scheuring and Christian Gudegast. This is a police thriller, not science fiction, and I really don’t expect to have to suspend my disbelief quite as much as A Man Apart demands. For instance, at the begining Diesel and his DEA team take part in a raid of a Tijuana nightclub by their Mexican counterparts; while officially the Americans are not allowed guns, someone reaches in a bag and passes enough of them around so everyone has one but in the end their are no repercussions and the targetted drug lord is simply whisked off to American justice (second impossibility as their would be years of court battles over extradition).

not recommended

Just got a chance to watch Concert for George via PBS (previous entry). Some awesome performances from Clapton, McCartney, Jeff Lynne, Joe Brown (a musician from Liverpool who was just a little bigger than the Beatles back in the day, got to do Here Comes The Sun and lead all the rest in the closer, I’ll See You In My Dreams) but I especially loved My Sweet Lord which featured Billy Preston on vocals and organ and Clapton on acoustic guitar before the rest of the band came in towards the end. Harrison’s catalogue is like an iceberg and he suffered badly in comparison to his two much more famous badmates but he made plenty of gems too. If like me you’re not oging to buy the CD or DVD, try and see if any accessible PBS station will be rebroadcasting this and dig it!

Big thanks to Anatoly Lubarsky for his help in solving at least one CSS issue, getting a <div> to a minimum height in IE since IE doesn’t implement the min-height property.

Plus I did get Carl’s menu code working, which is very sweet, though I’m still having width problems. But not girth.

Lately I’ve been trying to work up a very simple CSS-based dropdown menu, one where the top level item under the cursor changes colors and if there is a submenu it is displayed. Many sites have these, I’m sure you’ve seen them. However, most use JavaScript, a language I’ve never learned, and so I’m looking for a pre-built solution. There are many of these, some free, some inexpensive (for commercial use, which the intended use is) and at least one other ridiculously expensive (the site wisely does not display the pricing but I was quoted $1500 as the standard single site fee, which instantly dropped to $500 when I pushed back but even at that amount I was laughing to hard to manage a reply to the salesperson).

One thing about all of these implementations is that they require customization for each use. Clearly that makes sense because, at the least, every menu will have different choices and then there are factors such as color, size, location and behaviors as well. But what none of the implementations have, which really truly surprises me, is some sort of wizard to generate the menu source code.

How hard would this be to write? Instead of adding some ridiculous tweak that no commercial site would use, and here I’m thinking of the first days of laser printers when corporate geeks constantly created ransom note-like memos, why not spend some time developing a real value-add. Since I’m getting paid for this effort, albeit not all that much, I am willing to pay a modest licensing fee for this and I imagine that so would quite a few others. And even if the market wouldn’t bear a higher license fee than what seems to be the norm just now (between $30 and $50), these developers should think about the savings in support costs of such an enhancement.

So please, Milonic, Dynamic Drive, Imposter and the rest of you bunch, somebody get busy and deliver this ASAP, m’kay? How about you, Foo?

Samuel P. Huntington has published a lengthy essay in the current issue of Foreign Policy titled The Hispanic Challenge. A friend forwarded the link to me with the comment “I say we should seal the borders tight like a …” This friend is an intelligent, well-meaning guy but (sorry dude) sometimes I think that he is very representative of the modern self-centered American.

Huntington is chairman of the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies and I’ve often seen him described as, essentially, one of the top academic thinkers on history and government. He’s perhaps best known for authoring the 1993 essay/book The Clash of Civilizations?, a look at modern history that stood in stark contrast to the contemporaneous The End of History by Francis Fukuyama.

In The Hispanic Challenge, Huntington goes to extreme length to show that Mexican immigrants are not assimilating into the American melting pot in the way that almost all nationalities have previously done. Perhaps because the group is so numerous and has tended to settle in their own neighborhoods, these new Americans haven’t felt the urgency to adopt American attitudes or even the general use of English in order to fit in. Huntington cites Canada and Belgium as stable democracies split between two major cultural/language groups but then dismisses them as trying to hard to achieve their stability and equality.

While all that he’s written may be factually correct, overall this piece comes off as nasty and racist to me. If we are not free to retain what elements of our origins we choose, we are less free. Personally I would prefer that all residents of the Estados Unidos speak understandable English, that’s just because my life would be easier.

My answer to my friend’s comment was even simpler: “I cannot begin to imagine how America could change this immigration pattern unless and until Mexico and the other Latin countries can provide jobs and quality of life as are available here.” And that is the bottom line from a practical level.

Yet another film made in New Zealand but Whale Rider is to Scarfies what Airplane is to Scary Movie 3. In this movie based on Witi Ihimaera’s novel, we get an honest emotional trip by a young woman who refuses to accept the place in life others want to assign her. Kind of resonates with my recent reading of The Secret Life of Bees.

The movie begins with a tragedy, the mother and one of a pair of twins, a boy, die as she gives birth; though the other twin, a girl, is healthy and lives, the father is driven away and the grandfather is shaken to his core. Whale Rider is set in a Maori village in New Zealand and the grandfather (Rawiri Paratene) is the tribal chief. According to tradition, the firstborn son must succeed him as chief but after his wife’s death, the son (Cliff Curtis) leaves the village, his daughter and future behind to become an artist in Germany. The grandparents raise Pai, their granddaughter, but the tradition-bound old man cannot bring himself to allow her a place mandated by present-day mores. Instead he goes so far as to re-open a school to teach the village teenage boys enough so they may participate in a contest to find the new chief.

But Pai will not go along, hanging around outside the school, practicing mostly on her own, sneaking help from her uncle at times, and all along simply looking for the normal approval any child wants from the man who raised her. Keisha Castle-Hughes won a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her effort; while she lost that to Charlize Theron, I can see why she was shortlisted–Castle-Hughes did win the New Zealand version of the award as well as numerous others–and look forward to seeing her in Star Wars Episode III (even if I end up waiting to see that on TV).

Niki Caro did an excellent job of adapting the novel into a screenplay and directing the film. People in America generally look at the landscapes of New Zealand and break into excited words, which Caro uses a bit here, but more than that she connects the characters to their territory visually. The dialog does well by avoiding overt sentimentality as would be all too easy in scenes such as when Pai’s father returns for a brief visit or when her grandfather is let down by the young boys.

definitely recommended, this is not a chick flick

First thing after I get a job, this kitchen is getting remodeled!

Some sadness here this morning as I cut the remaining financial ties to Sun Microsystems. Back in the day it fueled some big dreams but foolishness inserted itself into my reality and erased these romantic dreams in my head. In the end, I think I paid more in AMT and other taxes than I actually made in profit, which shows what a wonderful system we have.