Bits & Pieces (Friday Night Open Mic)

Posted on January 27, 2012 by Kevin S. Willis

Here are 5 People Who Succeeded Long After They Should’ve Quit.

Robert Hooke was the Steve Jobs of the 17th Century.

It doesn’t look like things are going to improve much in North Korea. North Korea makes it a war crime to use a cell phone during 100 day mourning period.

Monopoly

Everything Lee Stranahan’s learned about business, he learned from playing Monopoly.

Not that any of you need any more reasons to avoid swinging drug-fueled orgies with strange couples, but now you have one: bear mace.

Survivors of the Costa Concordia are being offered money to shut up and sign a liability waver. At least, that’s my assumption. Given that Carnival Cruises, who owns Costa Cruises, has a lot of money, I’m betting not everybody takes them up on that offer. I’d at least assume that’s a first offer, and return with: “Well, I’m talking to my lawyer, and he says the whole thing was a lot more traumatic than that.”

Cruise Ships Should Not Lay On Their Side

The Costa Concordia After Captain Ignored Both Maps and Procedures to "Wave at people"

That’s it for tonight. Hope you have a great Friday Night! — KW

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Bits & Pieces (Thursday Night Open Mic)

Posted on January 26, 2012 by Kevin S. Willis

I linked to this song before, but now the actual music video is available. “Man or Muppet”, from The Muppets, one of my favorite movies this year. Of course, I love the Muppets.

Love it.

Um. How about the Angry Video Game Nerd reviews Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker for Sega Genesis? Profanity abounds.


Yeah, I’m low on content tonight. Feel free to add.

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Bits & Pieces (Wednesday Night Open Mic)

Posted on January 25, 2012 by Kevin S. Willis

iPad textbooks won’t replace textbooks soon. Heck, I can’t even get an iPad 2 so I can do demonstrations to our school support staff. At least, not yet. 😉

Did a webinar for the new Filemaker features. Had to agree to an NDA, but the demonstration of new features was extremely weak tea compared to what I saw at FileMaker DevCon this year. Alas, with the school merger pending, we may never do another FileMaker upgrade. Still, there’s not a better integrated DB and interface builder around. What, Access you say? Pthpht!

Does money really buy elections? Freakonomics says no.

A primer on 3D printing from TED:

Thomas Dolby talks about, and then performs, One of Our Submarines from his Sole Inhabitant Tour.


I’m a big Thomas Dolby fan. Golden Age of Wireless is a near-perfect album.

Speaking of which, I’ve posted this before but I’m going to post it again, because I love the song. Thomas Dolby’s “Oceanea”.

For anyone with a Spotify account, here’s the link for Thomas Dolby’s “Cruel”, one of my favorite songs from him.

That’s it for tonight. Please talk amongst yourselves. —KW

______________________________________________

And a bleg — please vote in my poll if you haven’t already.  It looks to be very close between Newt and Mitt, though Mitt got a bit of a bounce from the debate Monday night.

— Mike

One more thing to spend time doing: Interactive map of Euro crisis

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Bits & Pieces (Tuesday Night Open Mic)

Posted on January 24, 2012 by Kevin S. Willis

You probably won’t want to watch the whole thing. It lasts over 2 hours.

In 2009, Casey Pugh asked thousands of Internet users to remake “Star Wars: A New Hope” into a fan film, 15 seconds at a time. Contributors were allowed to recreate scenes from Star Wars however they wanted. Within just a few months SWU grew into a wild success. The creativity that poured into the project was unimaginable.

The 5 Online Petitions that Prove Democracy is Broken. Like that was really necessary.

Coming up with stuff to link to would be a lot easier if the Net Nanny here didn’t block The Onion. Someone link to something from The Onion.

Will this be Apple’s First $40 Billion Quarter?

I miss Bloom County.

For you physicists and metaphysicists in the audience . . .

Click on it to actually see the whole thing. All right. That’s it for tonight. Just somebody link to something in The Onion.

— KW

And, by the way, the FAQ page is up. Look it over and let me know what you think–and feel free to add (or just leave it in a comment and I’ll add it either tonight or [more likely] tomorrow)!
— Michigoose

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Bits & Pieces (Wednesday Night Open Mic)

Posted on January 18, 2012 by Kevin S. Willis

Not much from me today. Feel free to add. I’m busy transferring data between my laptop and the new iMac at work, and it’s taking a lot longer than I expected. A little disappointed: I thought I was getting the big honkin’ 3.1 ghz 27″ iMac, and instead I got it’s less robust baby brother, the 21″ 2.8ghz model.

The iMac

Not exactly what I expected . . .

Ah, well, you get what you get and you don’t pitch a fit. I should be able to hook up my current monitor to it, doubling my working screen real estate, which is what I’m really after. Still could have used that extra .3 ghz, though.

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Bits & Pieces (Tuesday Night Open Mic)

Posted on January 17, 2012 by Kevin S. Willis

I a guy who wrote a blog novel got the novel published, there’s going to be a sequel soon, and now the first one has been made into a movie. It’s a weird book, but a great read. Reminded me of Stephen King filtered through tosh.0, in terms of writing style. Fun and imminently readable. It’s called John Dies At the End, and here’s the trailer:

Lionsgate tests simultaneous Facebook rental and DVD release. Is there anyone here who has ever or would ever rent a movie on Facebook? Amazon.com, Netflix, Flixter, sure. But Facebook? Well, maybe.

Dennis Hoff plans to open a sci-fi theme brothel in Nevada. That sounds fun.

I just watched Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory. It was strange to watch Gary Gitchell, the lead West Memphis investigator on the case, talking about the case at the time, and then to come in to work the next day and have him walk by my cubicle (he’s head of security for the district). Didn’t really realize until watching the movie that that’s who he was.

All I could think during most of the movie, with the Johnny Depps and Peter Jacksons coming out to hire the best forensic folks to review the case, is that—while these 3 men were not lucky, given their circumstances–they sure are lucky they’re white. Given the prison population in this country, demographically, they couldn’t find someone non-caucasian who had been railroaded to produce 3 HBO documentaries about, and then an independent film?

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Sorry For Screwing Up The Invite

Posted on January 13, 2012 by Kevin S. Willis

I invited a lot of people as followers, then re-invited them as Editors. Hope that works. If anybody needs to be re-invited, let me know in comments or at Blogger. Whoops! Sorry about all the unnecessary email, everybody. And the confusion. That’s not WordPress, though, that was just me being in a hurry.

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Testing Poll Creation Ability in WordPress

Posted on January 13, 2012 by Kevin S. Willis

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Bits & Pieces (Monday Night Open Mic)

Posted on January 9, 2012 by Kevin S. Willis

I been gone all day, and will be similarly disposed Tuesday and Wednesday. PowerSchool SQL training at work, new puppy and busted TV at home, I’m busy.

So, this is what I’m doing right now:

select st.lastfirst,st.grade_level gl,sc.abbreviation, 

sch2.abbreviation as abbr2,st.entrydate,st.exitdate,st.enroll_status, 

sch2.dfltnextschool, sch3.name,re.entrydate “PrevEntDate”, 

re.grade_level PrevGL,re.schoolid PrevSchoolID

from students st 

join schools scon st.schoolid = sc.school_numberjoin reenrollments re 

on st.schoolid != re.schoolidand st.id = re.studentidjoin schools sch2

on re.schoolid=sch2.school_numberjoin schools sch3

on sch3.school_number = sch2.dfltnextschoolwhere st.schoolid=25and st.enroll_status = 0

and re.exitdate = to_date(’06/04/2011′,’mm/dd/yyyy’)

and (sch2.dfltnextschool != st.schoolid)

and st.schoolid != st.next_schoolorder BY lastfirst

But I’m more interested in figuring out what the custom fields are inside custom CLOBs, but no love so far. See you later!

***

A former employee dishes on working for Keith Olberman. Blocked by my net nanny, but I’m going to have to read that later. 😉

– KW

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Bits & Pieces (Thursday Night Open Mic)

Posted on January 5, 2012 by Kevin S. Willis

10 Toys That Made Sense in Their Era and Nowhere Else.

Fully jointed, too. Hmph.

Women are a Mystery to Stephen Hawking.

The Problem With Carbon Taxes.

How Much Money Will You Spend To Look Stupid While Playing Video Games?

Bradley Cooper as Lex Luthor? That should be interesting.

All I got. Sleep well, peoples. — KW

Mark adds that Texans sometimes can almost unanimously get it right! 

Thinks he is popular in Lubbock…

Craig James is camera-friendly, but Texas voters don’t seem to see him as their next senator.(Getty Images)  

For those of you who don’t like Craig James — and judging from polls and other measuring sticks, that’s pretty much everybody — his campaign for U.S. Senate has been like the 12 days of Christmas, with enough goodies left over to celebrate the eight days of Hanukkah. And the week of Kwanzaa.
Actually, there’s enough here to carry into the New Year, way past April Fool’s Day (U.S. Sen. Craig James!) and onto the Fourth of July. Maybe even into Halloween. What ridiculous costume are you going to wear? Me, I’m thinking of going as U.S. Sen. Craig James.


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