Imablog Perspectives of a Canadian in the Old/Deep/New/Geographic South: This is where I ramble on about nothing in particular and post a few nice pictures.

We're getting a dog!

The wife and I have decided to get a dog. She's wanted to get one for a long time now, and after humming and hawing over what kind of dog to get, we settled on a Labrador Retriever. Last year she was all about Miniature Schnauzers. A few months ago, she decided to get something bigger that could also help fend off marauding strangers, so for a while we were considering German Shepherd dogs. We wanted a dog that would get along nicely with other dogs too, so finally we decided on the Lab.

Now we need to consider a time frame. I pushed for recyling a dog and getting one from the local Lab rescue group, or starting off by volunteering with them. But she wants to buy new. Fortunately, there seems to be a couple of prominent breeders in the area and not very far away for us to check out. That will be our next step.

Bush and Iraq

"It's their government, it's their country. We're there at their invitation." - G. W. Bush on when the planned attack on Fallujah will take place

The Incredibles

Went to see The Incredibles last night. I think it's probably one of the best and most adult oriented movies out of Pixar to date. Pixar's other movies I think have all been targeted primarily towards kids, with a good dose of humour for us big kids too. The Incredibles to me feels like it's targeted more towards an older audience, with plenty of humour for the big kids. There's a good bit of superhero violence in the movie, so probably not the best movie for small kids.

As usual, the animation is excellent and I thought the movie was hilariously funny. I think if Frozone (voiced by Samuel L. Jackson) had played a bigger role in the film, he could have easily stolen a good part of the movie. One scene in particular will remind anyone who's seen it of Pulp Fiction.

Definitely one to add to the DVD collection when it comes out.

I wasn't as impressed with the short film, Boundin' that came before the movie. The best one to me is still For The Birds.

Elastagirl's quite the hottie in that stretchy red outfit.

oh my poor car

my poor little car is almost at 179000 miles, but it hasn't been doing well lately. It's still running ok, but hasn't been wanting to start as easily as it used to. At first I thought it was the battery, because it was very sluggish in starting like the battery didn't have quite enough juice to get things going. Battery reads 12.3V though, which seems ok to me, and it's only a 4 year old battery. It also sounded a little more grindy for a while when starting. Now, I have to let it turn over 2 or 3 times before it will start. And if I drive out somewhere, stop the car, getting it started again is a bit dicey. It barely turns over before starting like the battery has run down.

I'm thinking maybe the starter is going bad, or maybe I'm having distributer/spark plug/wire problems. The distributer and spark plugs/wires seems like something I can check out myself easily enough, so that will be my weekend task. I think I can also replace teh starter myself too, so that will be the next thing I look at. If none of that helps, then it's off to the shop.

Pardon my dust

I really need to get around to redoing my MT templates and style sheets to make them more MT3 compliant. I've been meaning to redo them for a while now, but it's one of those things I never seem to be able to get around to doing. Time to get started on that task. So I expect for the next little while things will look different, some things will be broken and other things will just look wierd. Bits are going to be reorganized...that's the plan anyway.

They got all the dumb ones

There's no doubt that he's a smart and... he's a smart enemy and he's shown some discipline, that's for sure. I think for the most part over the past year and a half we've killed all the dumb ones and they got the smart ones left.

Captain Griffin, US Marine on the second day of the attack on Fallujah insurgents.

Google recruiting

I've really been getting a kick out of Google's recent recruiting ads, such as their GLAT booklet and their big question billboards. The most recent ad is one that I saw in the latest issue of Physics Today.

It's a big full page ad titled "How to Care for Your Big, Wonderful High-Performance Brain". It looks like one of those full-page ads for weight loss or hair growing products, or maybe an old fashioned PSA ad, or even one of those big anatomical charts you might see in your doctor's office but way more amusing.

There are sections titled "Big Brains Crave Algae and Acid", "Lead is Big-Brain Kryptonite", "Get Your Nap On" to name a few. I think they're actually pretty clever and creative.

Deck the turkey with boughs of rosemary

There's a radio station here that's already started up with the Christmas music already. What's up with that? Last year I didn't hear my first Christmas tune until Nov 20th. This year it's barely a week into November and already they're starting up with the Christmas songs. Gaaahh!

Reply to Flanders Fields

Oh! sleep in peace where poppies grow;
The torch your falling hands let go
Was caught by us, again held high,
A beacon light in Flanders sky
That dims the stars to those below.
You are our dead, you held the foe,
And ere the poppies cease to blow,
We'll prove our faith in you who lie
In Flanders Fields.
Oh! rest in peace, we quickly go
To you who bravely died, and know
In other fields was heard the cry,
For freedom's cause, of you who lie,
So still asleep where poppies grow,
In Flanders Fields.

As in rumbling sound, to and fro,
The lightning flashes, sky aglow,
The mighty hosts appear, and high
Above the din of battle cry,
Scarce heard amidst the guns below,
Are fearless hearts who fight the foe,
And guard the place where poppies grow.
Oh! sleep in peace, all you who lie
In Flanders Fields.

And still the poppies gently blow,
Between the crosses, row on row.
The larks, still bravely soaring high,
Are singing now their lullaby To you who sleep where poppies grow
In Flanders Fields.

- John Mitchell

Chill in the air, smoke in the house.

All over the apartment complex this morning, there were smoke detectors ringing. Not because there were any real fires going on. It's because of the weather. As the weather cools down, people naturally turn the heaters on. In these apartments, the AC/heater units must have some kind of heating element that collects dust, because as soon as you turn them on (after being idle for most of the summer), there's invariably the smell of something burning. The accompanying smoke of course triggers the smoke detectors. There were plenty of smoke detectors going off this morning as I walked back and forth on trips to the laundry room.

Happens every year.

Going filmless, the final stage

This week we're making the final long awaited steps toward going completely filmless in our department. Installation of a CD/DVD burning system to put patient images onto CD/DVD instead of handing patients a stack of films is expected to save the department a ton of money in film supplies and printing costs. It's something we've been able to do before on a limited basis, but it's always been very labour intensive. The new system is pretty much completely automated and so far is being very well received.

The other step is the conversion to digital in one of the last bastions of film: mammography. Last week we had the first of 4 digital mammography units installed, replacing one of our conventional film/screen units. This week applications training started. From what I've heard from the residents, images are great and far superior to regular film/screen. A few snafus with printing and workstation workflow, but probably nothing that won't be solved with a little bit of training and tweaking. By the end of the year, our mammography department will be completely digital and we'll finally be almost completely filmless after almost a decade of digital imaging.

You know you're a geek when...

You know you're a nuclear medicine geek when you look at the tail lights of one of the newer Honda Civic Coupes and see horizontal long axis slices from a cardiac scan.

Forms with PHP

Over at ONLamp.com there's a very good article with a number of good tips for handling forms with PHP.

Tip 7 looks like a pretty good one which I think I'll use when I start redesigning some of my web database projects. I'll have to check out this HTML_Quickform thing too.

PHP Form Handling by David Sklar -- If your PHP program is a dynamic web page (and it probably is) and your PHP program is dealing with user input (and it probably is), then you need to work with HTML forms. David Sklar, author of Learning PHP 5, offers tips for simplifying, securing, and organizing your form-handling PHP code.

Patent insanity

Adding to the patent insanity, apparently now programming language operators are fair game for patenting. Seems a patent has been applied for the IsNOt operator in BASIC.

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION

A system, method and computer-readable medium support the use of a single operator that allows a comparison of two variables to determine if the two variables point to different locations in memory, that is, the reverse of the existing "Is" operator in a BASIC programming language or a derivative of BASIC or BASIC-like programming language. In one embodiment of the invention, the memory locations represent objects. The new operator enables a user to determine if the left operand (e.g., a reference type) "is not" the same instance as the reference type listed as the right operand. The use of a single operand for this concept may increase the readability of the programming language.

Found at Slashdot.

Hooligan Moment #323: The Flaming Buttbuca

Over on Slashdot there's a post about some guys testing the effects of filtering cheap vodka.

A comment on the Slashdot posting reminded me of the 'Flaming Sambuca's' that were consumed on a houseboating trip one year. The Flaming Sambuca was a simple trick. Pour some Sambuca into a shot glass and light it on fire. After a second or so put your hand on the glass. The oxygen will be burned up by the flame, and the glass gets stuck to your hand by the vacuum. Then remove the glass and suck the vapours out, then down the shot.

One of my friends, in a fit of drunken creativity, created a variant of the trick where instead of using his hand, he stuck the drink to his butt. Thus was born the "Butt-buca"! Being drunk, there was much amusement in this and the round red hickeys left on their butts.

Later, after a post-houseboating house party, he was showing off the Buttbuca. This time, the trick went tragically wrong (for him). He left it on too long, the shot glass got stuck and he couldn't get it off. All of us were rolling on the ground in pain because we were laughing so hard at him running around yelling "It's stuck! It's stuck! Get it off!"

Of course none of us wanted to get close enough to his ass to help him remove the shot glass. When he did finally get it off, there was this massively red hickey that left a mark for weeks.

spam spam spam spam

I've been getting a bunch of comment spam lately with .info URLs in them, so in an attempt to block them I added a pretty broad ranging MT Blacklist regexp to block anything that looks like a domain ending in .info. At least that's what I think it looks like it's supposed to do. The regex looks like:

^[a-zA-Z0-9]+([a-zA-Z0-9\-\.]+)?\.(info|INFO)

If you get blocked trying to leave a legit comment, fire off an email to me and let me know. The regex will probably need a little tweaking.

BTW, for those of you that aren't regex gurus, there's this fantastic site, Regular Expression Library where you can search their library of user submitted regular expressions, and even test out your own. They also have a bunch of links to other regexp resources out there to use.

Bye bye old vacuum, hello Roomba!

We decided to get a Roomba. Went for the Discovery model after checking it out in the store and reading a few reviews. Hopefully it lives up to the some of the rave reviews I've seen about them online. There's a lot of carpet in this place and it'll be interesting watching this thing wander around doing the vacuuming for me. And it'll go under the bed too.

While I'm at it, I need to remember these sites:
Roomba Community Forum.
Roomba guts

Another season winding down

It's finally coming to an end. This year's hurricane season winds down at the end of the month, and thankfully the last couple of months was blissfully quiet and uneventful. Gaston, which was the only significant storm to affect us this year, got upgraded to a hurricane. Time to pack away the hurricane kit for another 6 months.

More Hooligan Wedding Bells

On the heels of one Hooligan wedding Friday (congratulations again to the round-headed kid and his blonde-haired girl...sorry I couldn't make the festivities) comes word of another wedding allegedly coming soon. Best known for going underground and vanishing for months at a time, he's surfaced once again to let me know he's gotten himself engaged and thinking of a cruise ship wedding possibly in the spring.

Someone's going to have to go along and make sure he doesn't forget his wallet.

To the house in the woods

Headed off to the in-laws for Turkey day. This year it should be a lot less work than past years has been. We're going to be roasting a much smaller turkey than usual (only 12-14 lb instead of the monster 25 pounder we did last year) and doing less cooking this year. This time around the festivities are going to be held at my wife's aunt's place somewhere near Rocky Mount NC. Should be an interesting time.

Go go gadget Roomba!

After unpacking our little Roomba and letting it juice up for a few hours, it's scurrying around vacuuming up stuff. The first thing it did was a spiral pattern to do it's room check, then after moving around a while, promptly got stuck under our couch. Not Roomba's fault though. Our couch is old and has raggedy fabric hanging down and it got tangled up in that. After extricating it, we set it back on it's merry way.

It's not going to get deep into the carpet and suck out ground in dirt though but it actually works remarkably well at picking up surface stuff. And it's very agile too. It was able to get itself out of a few tight corners in our apartment. And it has this funny Cartman waddle as it runs along a wall. It's kind of funny to watch I think.

We spent a good part of the evening just watching it run around, bumping into things and seeing where it would go next.

Now I'm wondering if I should give it a name or something.

Convenience produce

It's probably a sign that people's lifestyles have become overly hectic and busy, when convenience reaches the produce in the grocery store. That or people have just become really lazy.

There are all kinds of convenience foods in the store already. Frozen foods you just stick in the microwave for a near instant meal and canned stuff you pop open for an instant snack or meal. Cookies, chips, pop and all sorts of other crap to stuff in our faces.

Now you can find convenience in the produce section. Containers full of pre-sliced fruits perfect for snacking on. And then came the veggies. If you're too lazy to slice your own onions or tomatoes, no problem! They come pre-sliced now! Just go to the store and pick some up. Carrots too! They come sliced or in sticks.

I expect pre-digested food will be next. Oh, wait, they have that already! It's called baby food.

It's just food colour!

I'm starting to think that the cake and cookie decorating industry is just one big scam to get us to buy horribly over-priced products just to make treats look good.

It's the only explanation I can come up with why a 5 kg bag of sugar only costs $3, but a tiny little 63 g bottle of coloured sugar costs almost $2. That's like more than 50x the price of regular sugar! I mean really, how hard can it be to turn plain old sugar red or green? It's a scam, a total scam I tell you!

Newspapers...not just for the news

Reading the newspaper really is educational! And I'm not talking about for just current events. No, you can learn all sorts of trivia from newspapers. In today's paper, I learned that there's a whole 'ology' devoted to studying flags. It's called vexillology, and from the quick little Google search I did on it, it's a Big Thing. There are whole associations devoted to studying flags of various types.

Never would have thought people would be so interested in flags to spend their time studying them.

A final gasp for the season

From the National Hurricane Center come word that a possible tropical system may be brewing out in the Atlantic on the last official day of the season. It might even become a tropical storm later today.

THE AREA OF LOW PRESSURE LOCATED ABOUT 800 MILES EAST OF BERMUDA CONTINUES TO ACQUIRE TROPICAL CHARACTERISTICS AND THUNDERSTORM ACTIVITY HAS BECOME MORE CONCENTRATED NEAR THE CENTER. IF THIS TREND CONTINUES...SUBTROPICAL OR TROPICAL STORM ADVISORIES MAY BE ISSUED LATER THIS MORNING.

Glowing holiday fun

I have my little Christmas tree glowing happily away on my desk at work now. With just under 4 weeks to go till Christmas, I figure it's probably time to start getting into the spirit of the season. I'm thinking one of these might also look cute sitting next to my tree. I still think $12.99 is a little pricey though.

To the woman that almost ran into me on I-26

Hey lady, yakking on your cell phone cruising down the highway is bad enough. Next time you might also want to make sure there isn't anyone next to you when you decide to change lanes.

It's a good thing at least one person was paying attention to what's going on around them.