I just recalled the end of a conversation I had with a fellow at a the Oakwood bar a few weeks ago. We chatted briefly, and upon parting ways he left me with:

Make it a great day.

Normally I would have thrown out my usual “later, hope you have a good one,” but his command was echoing through my ears like the roar of an animal I had never seen before. So I stood bewildered, pondering those words, as he walked away. He probably thought I was a jerk for not responding, but I honestly got stuck in a moment.

That closing instruction, “make it a great day,” leaves someone with a task. It reminds you that life isn’t up for grabs, you control your own destiny.

No matter what kind of day you’re having, you can always turn it around.

Here are 5 things you can do to change the direction of even your worst day.

• Exercise. Whether that’s taking a break from work to crawl on the floor and do 10 pushups and 20 situps every hour for a day, having vigorous sex with your partner, or taking a lunch trip to the gym, you can always find a way to get your heart pumping.
• Eat Healthy: It’s so damn easy and cheap to go to McDonald’s and grab a value meal. But what does that say about the value of your insides? That grade-E beef covers your arteries with more cholesterol than you could imagine and makes you pay for every bite. Instead, take a bag of oranges and a apples to work, munch on some carrots, eat a few hard-boiled eggwhites, and drink 10 glasses of water. You’ll walk away with your head held high and without suffering horrible heartburn and instant regret.
• Clean your Desk. Get rid of the clutter and spray something that smells pretty in the area. Get rid of visual distractions so you can focus on the task at hand.
• Learn a New Word. There are plenty of sites that will give you a new word every day. Find one you like and set it as your homepage. Or visit a random wikipedia article to get even more in depth.
• Hug Somebody. And hug them right. Squeeze them tight and take a deep breath to get the scent of their hair. If you don’t have someone that will let you do that without calling HR, I suggest you go to a bar, strike up a conversation, buy the person a drink, and 9 times out of 10 you can sneak in a good hug when leaving (and bonus points if you leave them with the message to Make It A Great Day)

No worries, we can easily add the parter repository, then install Sun Java.

sudo add-apt-repository "deb http://archive.canonical.com/ lucid partner"
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install sun-java6-jre

Once completed, the Aventail VPN installation can proceed.

tar xf AventailConnect-Linux.tar
sudo ./install.sh

If you did attempt to install Aventail using the OpenJDK, you’ll need to uninstall it and re-install after installing Sun Java. See /usr/local/Aventail/uninstall.sh.

What works best in a nursery?

I’m still looking for lots more goodies. I have yet to find the perfect off-road running stroller, and I’m a bit disappointed by the selection of baby snowboards, but I’ve got a few more months to sort it all out.

Here’s some of the clothes and gear I’ve found so far…

Nerdy T-shirts:

Exothermic reaction t-shirt – clevercuties.com

Bibonacci t-shirt – clevercuties.com. The nerd in me cannot resist something this awesome.

Big boys clothes in little man sizes:

Baby track suit – Nordstrom’s. Oh heck yes, he gonna be a soccer playa!

Baby Chuck’s – zappos.com

Outdoor gear:

Full-face helmet – nybikergear.com. This is a prerequisite for the snowboard, dirt bike, skateboard, and baby sky-diving outfit that he’ll be donning after a few months.

Kid in a bag – rei.com. Before he’s able to walk, he’ll be able to tag along on hikes. Throw him in a bag on my back and off we go. They even sell sun visors and other accessories.

Snowsuit – backcountry.com. He’s gonna be the hippest kid on the slopes for sure. Gotta look good, especially considering he’ll almost certainly be the youngest person to ever bust a double cork.

I don’t think it’s any shock that Google has the data to segment users based on their browsing habits. The shocker to me is that they’re making the result of that segmentation available to webmasters everywhere.

The full text of the email is:

From: Google AdSense
Subject: Introducing interest-based advertising – action required for your AdSense account

Hi,

We’re writing to let you know about the upcoming launch of interest-based advertising, which will require you to review and make any necessary changes to your site’s privacy policies. You’ll also see some new options on your Account Settings page.

Interest-based advertising will allow advertisers to show ads based on a user’s previous interactions with them, such as visits to advertiser website and also to reach users based on their interests (e.g. “sports enthusiast”). To develop interest categories, we will recognize the types of web pages users visit throughout the Google content network. As an example, if they visit a number of sports pages, we will add them to the “sports enthusiast” interest category. To learn more about your associated account settings, please visit the AdSense Help Center at http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=20310.

As a result of this announcement, your privacy policy will now need to reflect the use of interest-based advertising. Please review the information at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=100557 to ensure that your site’s privacy policies are up-to-date, and make any necessary changes by April 8, 2009. Because publisher sites and laws vary across countries, we’re unfortunately unable to suggest specific privacy policy language.

For more information about interest-based advertising, you can also visit the Inside AdSense Blog at http://adsense.blogspot.com/2009/03/driving-monetization-with-ads-that.html.

We appreciate your participation and look forward to this upcoming enhancement.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

Email preferences: You have received this mandatory email service announcement to update you about important changes to your AdSense product or account.

Google Inc.
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

One thing that has me thinking they’re less than purely evil is that they at least show you what they think you are in your personal ad preferences page, and allow you some options for configuration. However, it would take someone reasonably savvy to locate that page.

I’m interested to see where this goes. I know it’s a big win for businesses that want better ad targeting, but this is clearly a big setback for privacy advocates.

Regardless, I really can’t wait to see the ad profile they assign me… . o O ( Computer nerd, mountain biking, porn addicted, binge drinker )

OMBC Race Series

1. Mohican Wilderness – Loudonville (March 29)
2. Vulture’s Knob – Wooster (April 18)
3. Mount Wood Challenge – WV (May 3)
4. The Wilds – Zanesville (May 17)
5. Eastfork State Park – Bethel (June 28)
6. S&S Trails – Mt. Perry (July 12)
7. Alum Creek State Park – Delaware (July 26)
8. Lake Hope SP – Nelsonville (August 2)
9. Caesar Creek SP – Waynesville (August 23)
10. Dillon XC Race – Zanesville (August 30)
11. Westbranch SP – Ravenna (September 27)
12. Mohican State Park – Loudonville (October 11)
13. Mohican Wilderness – Loudonville (October 25)

Endurance Events:

1. Mohican MTB100 (May 30)
2. Mohican Trail 100 (June 20-21)
3. 12/24 Hours of Mohican (September 19-20)

* Dates are subject to change. See www.ombc.net for the latest and greatest info.

After fighting with Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 for months to get WIFI working, I finally found a Dell driver [0] that worked on my HP laptop through ndiswrapper [1].

A few hours later with success claimed, I decided to upgrade to Ubuntu Intrepid 8.10, assuming I had conquered all possible obstacles and that anything in the future would be pithy. Little did I realize, I was in for a world of hurt, as Ubuntu decided to muck with the guts of video/display drivers between 8.04 and 8.10.

After an initial upgrade, I was stuck with 800×600 resolution using the crappy built-in display drivers. I tried to activate the restricted Nvidia driver, but it hung and nothing happened. I went to Nvidia’s website, downloaded their open-source driver, installed it as they suggested, and rebooted. It looked great at first — the resolution was back to normal at the login window, but as soon as I logged-in, the screen went blank. Stumped, I pressed ctrl+alt+f1, then ctrl+alt+del to reboot. I went into the terminal, restored the original /etc/X11/xorg.conf.backup, and was able to get back in, but back to 800×600.

Two full days later, I’ve finally got 1280×800 resolution back on my laptop. It appears that the auto-detected settings from Nvidia in my xorg.conf put in faulty horizontal sync and vertical refresh settings.

The proper settings are:

    HorizSync       30.0 - 110.0
    VertRefresh     50.0 - 150.0

With that, I was able to enable the nvidia driver and boot into gnome successfully.

Next, I decided to re-enable some desktop effects through the appearance manager. I opened it up, enabled the medium-level of effects, and immediately got the f$@#%%ng black screen!!! BLASTED!!! A reboot got me back to where I started.

This whole process is so frustrating. Luckily, xkcd can provide some comic relief…

So that’s where I’m at now. Hopefully I’ll figure something out soon, and update this post for any other HP laptop owners to reference.

Reference:
[0] Dell wifi driver that worked with the HP Pavilion dv2715nr’s 14e4:4315 Broadcom card ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/network/R174291.exe
[1] Instructions for ndiswrapper can be found at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Driver/Ndiswrapper

I was impressed, but needed to check the accuracy of such a statement. So I dialed up a python session.

import re
awesomedrome = """Dammit I'm mad.
Evil is a deed as I live.
God, am I reviled? I rise, my bed on a sun, I melt.
To be not one man emanating is sad. I piss.
Alas, it is so late. Who stops to help?
Man, it is hot. I'm in it. I tell.
I am not a devil. I level "Mad Dog".
Ah, say burning is, as a deified gulp,
In my halo of a mired rum tin.
I erase many men. Oh, to be man, a sin.
Is evil in a clam? In a trap?
No. It is open. On it I was stuck.
Rats peed on hope. Elsewhere dips a web.
Be still if I fill its ebb.
Ew, a spider... eh?
We sleep. Oh no!
Deep, stark cuts saw it in one position.
Part animal, can I live? Sin is a name.
Both, one... my names are in it.
Murder? I'm a fool.
A hymn I plug, deified as a sign in ruby ash,
A Goddam level I lived at.
On mail let it in. I'm it.
Oh, sit in ample hot spots. Oh wet!
A loss it is alas (sip). I'd assign it a name.
Name not one bottle minus an ode by me:
"Sir, I deliver. I'm a dog"
Evil is a deed as I live.
Dammit I'm mad."""
 
# strip out all punctuation
just_the_chars = re.compile('\W').sub('', awesomedrome).lower()
 
def test_palindrome():
    # chars[::-1] gives the reverse of the resulting string
    assert just_the_chars == just_the_chars[::-1]

I stripped out any non-word characters (punctuation, space, etc) with the regular expression, lower-cased it all, and compared it front to back.

$ python is_demtri_a_god.py
not exactly

As you can see, it’s not palindromic.

So close.

$ nosetests test_demetri.py
.
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ran 1 test in 0.001s
 
OK

Update 4/22:
Not sure why the original script used to doubted the claim to palindromity, but I’ve fixed it now. Demetri really does rock our socks off!

Here’s some rationale I spewed at my hombres, only to be rejected immediately:

• So that all your other friends know what you’re eating and drinking.
• To benefit your career by showing your potential employers and colleagues your ideas out in the wild.
• “Group-text” everyone to plan festivities.

And really, it makes sense that they shouldn’t be twittering. I don’t want to hear when anyone else is taking a crap, so why would they want me to tell them as much? Why would I give away my next great idea? Most importantly, the majority of my text messages should never be seen in public, for fear that women and children everywhere would begin crying.

Maybe the problem is that I haven’t convinced myself that I should be on Twitter…