BillSaysThis

[via garret]

On the Atkins diet, one eats copious quantities of meat. So about every four or five weeks we make a meat run to the butcher shop at Costco to stock up. The bill came to just over a C note, including some salad, Ziploc freezer bags, swiss cheese, and whipped cream and we got:

• 4 lbs sliced Turkey Breast (for lunches)
  

• 4 lbs Bacon (actually this is usually weekend breakfast food)
  

• 2.35 lbs Top Sirloin (4 steaks, 2 meals)
  

• 4.15 lbs Pork Loin Chop (10 chops, 3 meals with leftovers)
  

• 6.25 lbs Fryer Thighs (14 thighs, 5 meals with leftovers)
  

• 5.52 lbs Ground Beef (12 large patties, 4 meals with leftovers)
  

• 3.19 lbs Salmon (sliced into 2 meal-sized portions)
  

• 9.61 lbs (2) whole Chickens (each ought to be a dinner plus several lunches)

That’s at least 19 meals not counting leftovers to go with salad for lunch and the breakfasts!

And for the curious, yeah, it’s working. I’m down 18 pounds and the Sweet One has shed 20(!) in 40 days. We’re both working out regularly, too. This holiday new and smaller clothing will make great presents.

“Senate Bill @xxx provided a one-time increase of the benefits on your unemployment insurance claim. The new weekly benefit amount is $330. The new maximum benefit is $8480. A check for the difference in benefits for the weeks of unemployment compensation you received is attached.”

Another foreign film, this time from France and 1967. Directed by Louis Malle, who said that after 10 years in the business he tried to make a story of rebellion from a comfortable middle class existence, set in turn of the century Europe, just as he had tried to rebel. I think he was even more influenced by the ennui and existensialism of mid-60’s Paris.

Jean-Paul Belmondo stars as Georges Randal, The Thief of Paris, a slick thief who preys on (mostly) absent rich homeowners and, I’m sure you’ll be as amazed as me, all the women can’t give it up fast enough to him. Particularly Genevieve Bujold as his cousin and lifelong love Charlotte and Marie Dubois as Madame Delpiels, a woman trapped in a harsh marriage who Randal stumbles upon during an evening’s work as she is attempting to join his profession.

Julien Guiomar plays a thief masquarading as the priest l’abbe La Margelle. He takes Georges under his wing after the younger man’s first robbery, done more out of anger than anything else, and shows him the professional world. The faux-priest serves more as a sounding board for conversations about life and meaning, though, and I tend to believe that the action in the movie, in bed and a work is simply given to illustrate the meaninglessness of attempting material gain.

With a cool poster:

Recommended for those with a taste of more intellectual romances

Harvard University’s financial relationship with President Bush’s former oil company was deeper than previously understood, with the university’s management fund creating a separate ‘off the books’ partnership with Harken Energy Corp. that helped keep afloat the financially troubled company, according to a report written by a respected financial investigator to be released today. The same investigator who brought down former House Speaker Jim Wright and the Keating Five.

I have this thing for off-beat Australian movies. Among the more well-known are The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Muriel’s Wedding. But this one is really strange, very psychedelic. One minute our protagonist (played by Johnathon Schaech) is in midtown Manhattan trying to pawn off some cockatoos and the next he’s driving a beat down old VW minibus across the Australian outback.

Welcome to Woop Woop, released in 1997, is actually the next directorial effort from Stephan Elliot (he wrote and directed Priscilla). Elliot will next year be writing and directing the 30th anniversary TV remake of Rocky Horror Picture Show. Anyway, Woop Woop is a town that’s not on anyone’s map, just a bunch–a hundred or so–of Australians led by Rod Taylor who embody the “leave me alone” lifestyle. When one of them needs a mate, they go off and see who likes to fuck them; the lucky winner gets drugged and shanghaied back to the little outpost. And not only is the place ringed by steep rock embankments, Taylor has guards with rifles and shoot to kill orders to keep pontential deserters in line.

Schaech catches the eye of Susie Porter, a tasty blonde hitchhiker who jumps his bones while he drives her to the sea. She decides she loves him, asks him if he feels the same way. The stupid schmuck, thinking it will keep her in bed a little longer, says he does. Let’s face it, if the boy was so smart he would not have needed to scram from NYC.

The actors all do fine jobs but this is a film that you need to be open to, be willing to not worry quite so much about the reality of the lives. And then you will enjoy the job that Elliot has done.

Recommended

Well, I finally seem to have pulled it all together. Both the Countdown list on the top right of the main page and the Birthday and Anniversary lists on Important Dates have been implemented using the code. A little bit of clean up work and I expect to post it for download. I’m even thinking of turning it into an article for one of the PHP magazines or webzines, probably know more about that later.

Definitely need to say thanks to Andre Naess for his replies to my sometimes blithering doltishness in the comp.lang.php newsgroup. Thanks Andre! And thanks to the people who put their time and effort into the MySQL open source database project (MySQL Manual | 6.3.4 Date and Time Functions was incredibly useful) and, of course, PHP.

So, what does this class do? First, store some information about some number of events into a database: event name, the date it occurs on, associated URL, category, and active status. The basic code grabs the records for a given category, calculates the number of days until the event, filters them based on active status and that the event takes place in the future, and provides a string formatted for inclusion in an HTML page (the list used on the main page). An elaboration, called a child class in object-oriented programming terms, customizes the filtering (all birthdays by definition are in the past), and uses a different formatting for the result; the number of days until the next birthday is calculated and used to emphasize dates less 31 days away.

So essentially this is the guts of what could be a web-based reminder service, not totally unlike Userland’s MailToTheFuture, that could be enhanced to support multiple users and some type of notification service. One could also add additional child classes to handle different types of events. But I wrote this mostly for my own use, to stretch my programming muscles a tad and to have a more automated way to handle the Countdowns list.

Amidst a huge sports weekend (the Sweet One like baseball alot more than me), Liverpool’s Sunday match against Chelsea probably would have gone missing but in any case Fox Sports World did not choose to broadcast it. Still, the Reds did defeat the Blues 1-0 on a literally last minute rebound put-in by Michael Owen (second consecutive match where Number 10 did all the LFC scoring). The big bad news for the team was the aggravated hamstring injury to central defender Stephen Henchoz who faces five weeks out and minor surgery.

Clubs across the Continent now get an early season break, though many of Liverpool’s players will not, as the leagues shut down for 10 days for the first qualifying matches of Euro2004 (at Slovakia, home to Macedonia for England). The next club outing is an away match at Leeds United (13 Premiership points after nine games, eight points behind the Reds) on 19 October and a trip to Russia for the return Champions League leg against Spartak Moscow.

The Sweet One is laying on the couch taking a nap while I watch the ballgame and surf. I would sneak you a photo but she would kill me. She looks so cute though, holding the pillow and turned away, her knitting on the floor ext to her.

Some day I will get the hang of date arithmetic in PHP. Until then I’ll be spending an extra hour or two for every class I try to create that needs it. In the end, I did triumph and create a new class that manages a countdown list of events such as the one in the right hand column on my main pag: bstCountdown. The events themselves are stored in a database table and filtered by list name (category). The code will be posted soon but I’m still working through an issue with a subclass. Take my word for it, this is very cool.

Okay, it’s GoogleFight, a fun new(?) use of the Google API that lets you enter two terms and returns the number of hits for each. MetaFilter has a long and mostly amusing thread. My contribution:

“Never having gotten over fighting with my sister when we were kids, though I love her dearly now:

Bill vs. Joanne

For once I win in a landslide! Woohoo”

One of my favorites: farty pants vs. poopy head

Vaxgen executives knew that, as promising as it will be in the next few years, their AIDSVAX AIDS vaccine alone is not enough to build a successful company. The two top managers, CEO Lance Gordon and President Donald P. Francis, are seasoned researchers in the field of seriously nasty viruses so they went out and won a contract from the US Government to develop and supply an anthrax vaccine. Which has given the stock price a nice boost over the last few days, from a low of $8.35 Tuesday to today’s close of $10.40 even though the NASDAQ Composite has continued down. Though this is nothing compared to what the stock price will be after AIDSVAX passes the last clinical trials early next year and gets FDA approval.

Evan and I went to the Expo at Web Services Edge 2002 at the San Jose Convention Center. The economy’s bad, I know, but even so attendance was amazingly low by both visitors and vendors; maybe 25 booths and less than 150 people, maybe closer to 100, walking around and I’m not sure how many of them were vendor staff wandering around out of boredom.

I did visit with a few interesting companies. In particular, DreamFactory and Vultus had very interesting tools for developing front-ends to web services and Actional had superior management solutions. Far too many of the vendors were showing me-too products that seemed like attempts to stretch J2EE-related products to cover a new buzzword.

I did run into two old friends from pre-Sun NetDynamics days, which was nice. One (now the Marketing VP) was staffing her company’s booth; the other said he was a walking booth (he’s the CTO of his company). Both are working hard, really hard, to get business done in this tough sea.

Strangest of all: I saw a woman I would swear is my ex-wife. But I haven’t seen her in over five years and she didn’t seem to recognize me though she looked straight at me. I couldn’t see her badge and the face did seem a little different. Even if that was her, I have no clue what we would say to each other.

Do you eat fruits like bananas, pineapples, mangoes, or oranges? Guess what? Any of them that come into this area on boats will be going up in price by serious amounts starting tomorrow and continuing as long as the ports are shut down. At the market today, the manager told the person in front of me in line that the cost of bananas will go from $11 per case to about $30. Good thing bananas are not allowed on Atkins!

From: “Bruce Springsteen”

To:

Sent: Thursday, October 03, 2002 5:09 PM

Subject: BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN ON SNL THIS SATURDAY

> BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN ON SNL THIS SATURDAY

>

> BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN ON SNL THIS SATURDAY!

>

> Live from New York!

>

> It’s Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band!

>

> Don’t miss the season premiere of Saturday Night Live

> this Saturday, October 5th.

>

> Bruce & the band will be performing

> “You’re Missing” and “Lonesome Day”

> from their critically acclaimed album,

> “The Rising”

>

> Saturday Night Live can be seen

> at 11:30pm on NBC

> (Please check local listings for exact time)

>

> Bruce online, 24 hours a day: http://www.brucespringsteen.net/

The season has gone well so far for Liverpool: sitting only two points behind Arsenal at the top of the Premiership and a key victory yesterday to put them in good standing to advance in the Champions League. Now this: I want to play up front, Heskey tells Houllier. Uh oh!

I’d always wondered about the way European sides, the top ones at least, stockpile extra players. Especially up front on teams that play 4-4-2 alignments (two forwards, that is). Liverpool has Michael Owen, who is only 22 years old and simply owns the righthand forward’s spot and then Heskey, El Hadji Diouf, and Milan Baros; even John Arne Riise, who’s been playing defense recently, has had a start or two up front and done well. Aside from Arsenal and Man Utd., these four would be stars on any English side. None of the strikers, other than Owen who came up through the club’s youth system, were gotten cheaply either. Heskey cost about $16 million two years ago, Baros about $5.5M a year ago, and Diouf was the big acquisition, for $15M, over the summer.

Manager Gerard Houllier is not one to take public complaints lightly. At least once in the past month he told the press he would not tolerate any whiners on the club. A fan poll on the club’s website after yesterday’s win gave Heskey man of match honors. Sounds like a collision, not a good one for the team with the transfer window shut tight until January, could be on the way.

No, I’m not reprinting headlines from 1917! Just reporting on the glorious 5-0 victory by Liverpool FC today at home against Spartak Moscow in their third match of the current season of Champions League play. Vastly better than last week’s 1-1 draw with Basel.

Since ESPN2 has the US broadcast rights to Champions League matches and is currently only braodcasting one match per week (Tuesdays, 11:30 a.m. PST), this game was once again not shown. However, the reports indicate that the Russian side simply could not keep up with LFC’s speed even though Emile Heskey started up front and not Milan Baros; didn’t hurt that Heskey scored two goals. Bruno Cheyrou took Heskey’s previous space in midfield and also contributed a goal and John Arne Riise remained at left back though Jimmy Traore did come on as a substitute for the recovered Stephen Henchoz at the hour mark.

Excellent result for a home match and, combined with Valencia’s 6-2 drubbing of Basel moves the Reds into second in their group at the halfway point of the first round.

Next for the boys is a tough Sunday Premiership meeting with Chelsea at Anfield.

Like many stories, The Fear needs to go back in and retool. I’ve been able to take it in an interesting direction, or so I’ve been told, but the current scene at the side of 101 is just getting way too talky and going on too long. And I’m stuck, with the current structure, unable to get Jamie moving again.

I do have a plan for making things work again but this will require a little time. So for now I’ve taken down the featured link, though the page will remain as is. I hope to have a new draft to release by Monday that includes most all of the content so far; please bear with me as I struggle through the authorial process. Please?

RL paused and looked over at Jamie. He rubbed his chin, as if that morning’s shave hadn’t been close enough, and pursed his lips, made a tight sucking sound. The cars on the freeway roared past them and RL leaned in to be a little closer.

“Well as you can imagine, the nephew was more than a little surprised. Not at the secret or that another successful family had come from their little village on Sicily. But he couldn’t understand why his uncle was letting him in on this information. So he asked, ‘That is astonishing, uncle, truly good fortune.Respectfully, though, I must ask why you are telling me about it now.’

“‘Joseph,’ the uncle answered, ‘I am telling you because I wonder if you can make something more out of this than your father or I have. We must be very careful to use this precious thing as little as possible so that it is never discovered and we never bring shame to our friends and their family. Few times we have had favors from these men, yes, but important ones. Times are changing though, I have seen many things in the last decade that I never expected. Change has come to this thing of ours and we would be well advised to find a new way to continue. So I tell you because you have studied things very different from what your father and I, and all our friends to tell the truth, know anything about.

“‘Now your education is complete and you come home to join with us. We are very proud of what you have achieved, even if these machines are a mystery to us. I have been thinking that perhaps you can find ways to help us move beyond our troubles, perhaps these new machines can help, but I want you to know of all the important resources that we possess so that you may do your best.’

“‘Uncle,’ Joseph said, ‘I thank you for your confidence and trust. I will do my best to live up to them. This brings to mind a saying my professors had: garbage in, garbage out. I know, I know, what does trash have to do with computers? But this simply means that if you put bad information into a calculation, you cannot end up with a good result.'”

RL said that the two men shook hands and parted, the younger wanting time to sleep and ponder his new assignment. And surprising to his family, thogh it would not have surprised his teachers, he approached the task as if he were researching and writing a new thesis for school rather than a business plan to modernize La Cosa Nostra. He went to the office with his father, went on rounds with his uncle, sat in on meetings they had with other capos. Joseph, or Little Joe as he was called, spent the summer listening to music his family would never appreciate and devising the most brilliant criminal business model anyone had ever thought of.