Look Ma, I can awk!

Today I was looking at this CD we got from a photographer. She put each picture on it in color and black and white. I want to upload the CD for family to see but if they want black & white I think they can do that easily enough themselves. So for kicks I wanted to know how many MegaBytes this was going to be. Welcome to the world of Linux where there is a way to do this without cut & paste for an hour. I use the following line of code to learn that instead of 199MB for everything, it will be 110MB. I knew it would be more than half because the color photos would use more memory, but I was glad to see that it was close to only half. Mostly I was just happy to have found a new use for awk.
ls -l /media/100526_0814/IMG_8[123][0-9][0-9]\.jpg|awk '{sum+=$5}END{print sum}'

Thoughts on the 2012 election

I remember one of the big reasons I didn't vote for McCain was that he wanted to pass some universal health bill of his own. Some of Obama's biggest supporters didn't even want or expect his health bill to pass. My question is do you think McCain would have ever passed the health bill that he was proposing? It's so hard to perceive what a candidate is saying to get voted for vs what they intend to follow through with.

So my thoughts are that I should vote within the party I align myself with and disregard campaign promises by either party. I still can't imagine Palin as the vice president.

At the moment Mit is the front runner for the GOP in 2012, if he didn't make it passed the primaries, what are his chances of making it as president next election?
If religion didn't play a role in America's decision I think Mit may have stood a good chance against Obama, if he does make it past the primaries I wonder if the Democrats will be more open minded toward a Mormon president.

Too bad Ron Paul will be way way too old to vote for in 2012. :( I still believe what we really need is someone willing to be fiscally conservative.

coolest old person

I feel like the goal for the rest of my life is to prepare to be the coolest old person I can be. Some old people are really cool. I admire the old people with vigor, the ones that AREN'T too old to contribute to the workforce. I admire the old people who refuse to become victims to would be robbers but instead physically detain these thugs until the police arrive to take them away. I also want to have a truck and hair like President Uchtdorf. Maybe I'll learn how to cook a few more things too.

Mac Book

I like my Mac Book Pro, it's pretty sweet. The touch pad is awesome, it's hard to go back to a normal undersized touch pad that doesn't know what to do with two fingers. However they keyboard continuously drives me crazy. It lacks the tactile feel of even a normal laptop keyboard. Aside from that it lacks essential keys such as Insert, backspace, page up/down and printscreen. Like my crazy Lenovo, the Mac mistakenly thinks the function key should bump the control key out of the corner - now I'm used to it. The Mac is however, very sound hardware. It looks and feels solid and beautiful, I just wish there were a few more well placed keys and perhaps a little bit more control over the operating system.

Now China's government on the other hand...

If they said, "We're looking into the incident" I would believe they didn't know what was going on, but because they flat out deny that their country had anything to do with it (as usual), I think it's almost as good as owning up to it. Not like someone else has your range of IP's or that your hacking school has been hacked into by Nigeria.

Cyber attack? Let the government take over!

The government is notorious for being a bunch of Luddites, the military hires contractors to do all their real IT support. So the government decides to do a cyber attack simulation, which apparently was about as technical as a bunch of people standing around talking about different scenarios. They decided that the real problem was that if (the privately owned) infrastructure we rely on was attacked, that the government wouldn't have instant access to meddle with whatever they wanted.

Hmm imagine that, an organization that pays educated people to put together and maintain a system, might not want Senator Ted Stevens (who up until recently was in charge of this sort of thing) randomly unplugging everything when he supposes your service might be the reason he can't get "Wheel of Fortune" on his TV. Let's also remember that he may have decided that the problem was with a company that has nothing to do with the issue. And even if he did get the right company, he is certain to be less qualified to make any suggestions on how to mitigate or remedy any technical issues.

I think it is a noble thought that we might be susceptible to a cyber attack and that we need to be more prepared. But giving the government control of all things technical is not the right first step. Perhaps requiring critical infrastructure to meet a set of security standards would be in everyone's best interest. If the government can pass laws requiring automakers to meet fuel efficiency standards, they can certainly pass laws requiring ISP's and hosting facilities to meet internet security standards. In fact they've already mandated that all .gov sites use DNSSEC.

I like the way ...

It started in primary, positive reinforcement; when it seemed that the kids were losing focus, the one conducting would start singing, "I like the way (name of child) is listening", until the other kids noticed that the new focus was on paying attention. Kristy took it home by singing things like, "I like the way Amber is cleaning", etc. Today Amber was upset about something and was crying on the way home when Julie started singing, "I like the way Amber is crying".