So I heard the name “Qatar” pronounced several different ways by Arabic speakers while there for work, and I think the last was the most common. I had some very nice food, met some nice people, and generally had a nice time.

I know, not the insightful dialog and rapier wit you expect from me, but really, I was only there for four days on the ground, three of which I spent working fairly intensely (when I wasn’t falling asleep in my hotel room trying to work on something) and one of which I spent partially jetlagged and suffering from what I’m guessing was just travel stress and possibly an insufficiently washed apple.

I know, TMI, but hey, it happens, alright?

I will instead present a couple of pictures (for example:

)

…and some random observations.

Continue reading →

So I got a temporary onlay taken out this morning, and a permanent one put in. I really was unprepared for it to be done without being numbed. The drilling had obviously been deep, and I could even just feel air moving over the exposed surface. Once the porcelain overlay was put on, it hurt for a couple of hours, until I took some aspirin.

I suppose, this being a wisdom tooth, it wasn’t worth the time and expense for it, but any more and I’d be begging for some lidocaine.

Just thought I’d share.

Moral of the story: Brush and floss while you’re young, kids, ‘cuz the longer you let something go, the more it hurts.

I’ll be moving to a new server, which will hopefully allow trackbacks for me. There may be a slight delay as DNS resolves to the new server. Expect wonkiness, but hopefully brief wonkiness.

Update: Upgrade appears to be successful; I can indeed ping. Apparently Slackware 9 is a little more advanced than Slackware 4. Still, my host, Hurricane Electric, made it super-easy to do. A few more tests and I am so done for the day.

This concerns not just this incident but 7 or 8 others I’ve had in the past 10 years or so…is it McDonald’s official corporate policy not to have milkshakes? I ask this in all seriousness because across the Eastern seabord and on the West coast I have several times attempted to purchase a simple vanilla milkshake, and EVERY TIME your franchisee has claimed that the “machine is down” or you’re “out”. So I have to ask–bait and switch?

I mean, is there a picture of your CEO actually holding a McDonald’s milkshake and a current newspaper? Practically the only thing I’ve ever really liked at your place prior to 1994 or so was the milkshakes, and now apparently you no longer actually have them, just list them for old time’s sake on the menu.

That’s it. I will now drive waaaay out of my way to find a Burger King the next time I want a simple milkshake–as such appears to be beyond the capacity of the McDonald’s corporation. If you’ve wondered why sales have been off–well, here’s a clue.

Eat McDonald’s food and McDie,
Sandy

So I finally bowed to the peer pressure I’ve been getting for the last year and watched “Old School” on TV at a friend’s house last night.

Y-y-a-a-awn.

This is the lifetime performance of the usually unfunny Will Farrel? Really? The guy is only funny occasionally. I counted maybe 5 good bits in the entire movie that were attributed to him. One other was attributable to the fact that said friend is still miffed that I made him sit through Kansas as the opening act for Yes three and a half years ago, and Will Farrel’s character sings “Dust in the Wind” at a funeral.

Luke Wilson is at best amusing, the other guy in the trio is slightly more so, but the script just wasn’t funny, the pacing would be charitably called “uneven” and generally the film made “Dude, Where’s My Car?” look like an intellectual tour-de-force.

So I have now learned that nothing can save Will Farrel in a movie, just as nothing can save Keanu Reeves in a movie, and yes that includes the bloody Matrix, with its high-school stoner philosophy. *Toke* “What if, like, the world is just, like, a dream, man?” If you didn’t believe me with the first one, you for damn sure believed me by the third.

Please, people, just learn to admit that Steve Martin (yes, I’ve seen the bloody Jerk, I kept waiting for the funny bit), Will Farrel, and Richard Pryor (The Toy. Superman III. ‘Nuff said.) are the most overrated comedians on the planet. You’ll feel better liberating yourself from the herd. Honestly. Bill Murray still makes movies. It’s OK. There’s other stuff to watch. I promise.

Well, here I am on an unseasonably warm Saturday in January, at work.

Oh, and more soldiers have been killed in Iraq in what look like continuing attacks. Sure, I mean, that is much more tragic and important by comparison to me working over the weekend, but that’s not what has me pissed off.

What has me pissed off is that the reason why I’m working on a weekend was preventable. Generally, the only way you can avoid being attacked in Iraq is not to go there. Others have hashed that issue over many times, and I have nothing new to add. So it’s project management instead.

I’m going to start a series of posts on what I, as a programmer, value in a good project manager. It’s sad, but I think your average programmer has a much better appreciation of what it takes to be a good project manager than project managers have of what it takes to be a good programmer. I don’t claim to be the world’s greatest programmer, but, let’s face it, I was the one chosen for this weekend delight because I’d managed to get my projects done ahead of time. So I have at least some businessworthy skills.

I do this in hopes that maybe a project manager looking on the Web for info outside of the brain-dead Project Mangement press (5 Easy Ways to Use PowerPoint to Impress Your Boss! Unsatisfied in Meetings? 6 Ways to Know If You’re a Meeting Whiz or Fizz! 7 Ways to Seduce Your Intern!). I’ve seen what our management reads, and it’s like the playing sheets for Buzzword Bingo. Obviously, they’re not getting sufficient help from it, so this will be my contribution.

The purpose of this post, however, is just to gripe. I’m trying not to think about how I could be in the mountians right now. At least it’s not sunny…

I have a nasty habit of assuming that anything like a bang or rumble that I feel is a truck. A truck backing into something, a truck going by, a truck changing gears…doesn’t matter. I have mistaken a plane flying into the Pentagon 1.5 miles away and a bomb in Budapest only a block away as varying forms of truck noise. It’s only afterwards that I figure out what it is.

OK, so this time, I assumed it was people moving furniture or doing something else weird, but, unusual for these parts, there was a magnitude 4.5 earthquake 45 miles up the James River from Richmond, VA.

A friend IMed me a half-hour later and clued me in to what it was.

At least I didn’t think it was a truck.