Ice Station Zebra Circa 1968. I’m giving this one 4 out of 5 stars. I DVR’d this one on the TCM (Turner Classic Movie Channel) and I’m glad I did. The movie didn’t rely on a lot of special effects, and it had a teriffic plot.
I’ve been watching a lot of the TCM channel recently. A lot of the older movies have better plots then the more recently produced ones I’ve seen.
Evaluate / Install / Document SMS Messaging software. This semester I’ll be working with Kannel and RapidSMS in the context of Ushahidi. It should be rather interesting. My kickoff is tomorrow afternoon. My wife will be away for a few days so it should give me a chance to get the project well underway. I’ll report progress back here on that matter.
I’m getting a late start to school this semester. Instead of taking a traditional class, I’ll be working on a project. It will combine SMS Messaging and Cloud Computing
. I think it will prove to be interesting. While I have some of the details of the project I will get the whole thing on Monday. I liked the idea of the project because last semester was tough. Between teaching twice a week and taking class once a week, I didn’t get home till 11pm - 12am a few nights a week. Truthfully, I was burned out. I wasn’t going to take classes at all this semester, but the opportunity to do a project presented itself and I thought it would be a good solution. I can work on it at my convenience Perhaps on Saturday mornings or on the train to/from work.
So .. two more classes. One of them is Software Engineering 1, the other is an elective. It’d be great if I can finish it up over the summer.
The 1970’s, where men were men. You had to be a badass to pull stuff like this off.
Here’s a couple of bad asses just ready to set upon some enemy with a display of fistacufs that haven’t been seen in a long time. I woulda pooped myself if I saw these two loitering around someplace.
Note the bad ass stance, and all the demim here. This guy is like the leader of the gang:
you can tell that this guy means business.
With Christmas over, we swung right into New Years!!! We had New Years Eve at our house this year. A small group of friends and family came over and stayed the night. We couldn’t have a huge party this year because we had to fly out on New Years Day to Orlando, but in the future, we’ll have more elobarate NYE parties. The logistics worked out great at our house. We have lots of bedrooms and bathrooms so nobody has to drive home. Plenty of room to stay. I suppose we’ll do a big dinner on New Years Eve, and then a brunch on New Years Day. This year was the test run.
So, new years resolutions. As always, lose a few pounds, I lost some from last year but I’d like to lose a few more in 2010. Finish my MS degree. I don’t have much left, but I’d like to finish it up. Finally .. save more for retirement. We’ve made some dramatic changes this past year but I think we can do even better.
My wife, sister, brother-in-law, and myself go to Orlando each December or January (one of the past trips: Orlando 2008). This year it was flippin cold. In the 30’s most of the time. The forcast said 65ish, so I left my jacket in the car at the airport. Fatal error. I ended up getting a cold. As usual, we ate and drank our way through Orlando at Disney and a few other places. On this trip we discoverd Joe’s Crab Shack. Let’s just say “YUM”. Teriffic seafood, and lots of it. We also did a very nice dinner at Sleuths Mystery Dinner Shows. It was quite entertaining.
The weather and my cold was about the only bummer. We were in San Diego last month and the weather was in the 40’s because of a typhoon someplace in the Pacific. That’s unusually cold for San Diego. Now we went to Florida and they had the coldest weather they’ve had in years. I’ve been trying to escape the cold all winter without any success. I think I need another vacation. I’ve been gyped thus far.
Anyway, I’ll update again soon
Apex Technologies in Edison NJ, got a NJ court to shutdown websites that criticized their H1B program. This is clearly another company that I would not recommend people do any kind of business with or work for. This article from BrightFuturejobs.com is a very good read on the topic.
Consider yourself warned.
Brightfuturejobs.com is a grassroots lobbying campaign dedicated to counteracting claims that Americans can’t do science and technology. They lobby to require employers to seek local talent for US job openings before recruiting abroad.
Their exposure of federal government documents declaring that the H-1b law’s intention is to bypass the US workforce resulted in the introduction of the bipartisan Durbin-Grassley “”The H-1B and L-1 Visa Fraud and Abuse Prevention Act of 2007″ (S. 1035). We were instrumental in securing the passage of a Cook County resolution urging passage of the Durbin reform bill in September, 2007.
http://www.noradsanta.org/en/index.html
Wow, this was a tough semester. I had a really hard time getting into the work this time around. The topics were interesting, but I have to admit to feeling a little burned out. Just a few more classes before I finish though.
In class this semester we did a lot of work with XML and web services (UDDI, WSDL, SOAP)
I’ve been working on a paper for school, with a team of other fellows. We’re working on the new Go language from google. My portion of it was to benchmark it against other more established languages. I choose C, Perl and Java. The first task was to write code that would work on all of these languages with only minor syntactical differences, then to compile and run. I was impressed, especially since this is only a beta version of the language. Apparently, as languages evolve, compilers get optimized and they go faster. So, beta version of GO was just about as quick as Java, which has evolved for about 12 years.
Rosie and I took a trip to San Diego for a few days this past week. The weather wasn’t the greatest, but we had the chance to walk along the beaches on Coronado Island, did some antique and rug shopping in La Jolla, and of course we found a really good steak house called Georges on 5th. Our time share is located in the Gaslamp Quarter of San Diego, so we didn’t really have to do much driving. There are loads of terrific bars and restaurants all through out San Diego, but there is a concentration of such places in the Gaslamp Quarter. One place we really loved was the Excalibur Cigar and Wine Bar. We spent a bit of time there sampling wines and smoking cigars. If you haven’t been there, or its been a while, I’d say its worth the trip.
