Something Odd!

A Long ago I stopped trying to make everything perfect. I think it happened when I realised that “good enough” really was good enough! Occasionally I will spend an extra ordinary amount of time trying to get some small facet of a program working just perfectly, but that’s common in every endevour. It’s so true that 20% of the work takes 80% of the time..

Batma^h^h^h^h^ Adam West returns to make a movie with Burt Ward about the 60’s tv show! Adam West is 74 now! Holy Retirement Batman!

I just finished Linus Torvald’s biography, “Just for fun” which was an enjoyable read and I saw a few parallels between his life and mine. He spent a summer in the early nineties coding and didn’t realise what the weather was like. I did the same coding a demo on the C64. At the end of the summer a shop assistant remarked that it had been a terrible summer. I still remember being dumb-founded when I realised I didn’t know. I mumbled an acknowledgement that, “yes, the weather’s been terrible” but I walked out of there in a slight daze. I’m a lot more aware of the weather now that I’m taking photographs, so at least that gets me out of the house!
Next in line in dead-tree format is “Mr. Nice” by Howard Marks. Good read, but I’m only 30 pages or so into it. He was an international drug smuggler and he’s led an interesting life!
Whenever I see “books on CD” going cheap I snap them up if I recognise the author or story. I picked up Roddy Doyle’s, “A Star Called Henry” for about 5 Euro a couple of weeks ago and I play it in the car in the evenings. It’s the story of Henry, a boy born into the squalor of Dublin tenements at the start of the 20th Century. His description of The Easter Rising in 1916 is brilliant and told well. I’m amazed at what the main character, Henry, got up to before his 15th birthday!
Finally, after downloading readM, the ebook reader for the Nokia 7650, I’m reading “In The Beginning was the Command Line” by Neal Stephenson on my phone. I have to admit I’m getting bored of it now because he’s preaching about the Apple Mac but I’ll stick with it. I particularly liked the description of the car dealers!

What do we lose? Ancient history, ancient batteries that if they had been developed, “we’d be flying to the nearest stars by now” (read or heard that somewhere a few years ago).
I read a dog-eared copy of Eric Von Daniken’s “Chariots of the Gods” ages ago and enjoyed it but I knew of the controversy surrounding the book from reading another book.

Pronnsias may have a point..

mp3burn is a simple command line tool for making audio CDs from mp3s without filling up your disk with .wav files. It requires perl, mpg123, and cdrecord.
update! Why not use a self made script? (see comments)
Because I keep forgetting the parameters to pass to cdrecord, and it’s easier to have someone else maintain a package than me. Plus there’s a few graphical frontends for mp3burn that could be handy for the family.. Might finally get my brother interested in using Linux as a desktop!

Here’s why the techies on ILUG didn’t get excited about the Government’s plan to restrict the Freedom of Information act:

1. It came just a week after the data retention fiasco. There’s only so much ranting and raving one can do, even the ILUG! People are bored of politics.
2. The FOI Act deals with data that most people just don’t care about in their day to day life. The data retention policy directly applies to me because I go online at home. Do I have any issue with the Governement that I need “secret” information to persue? No, of course not, but if you are concerned about the running of the Government then the FOI Act is important. In a perfect democracy all citizens would be concerned citizens..