It’s called “work.” It’s good for you.

There was a book that made a lot of ruckus a while back called “The four hour workweek” by Timothy Ferriss. The premise was that you could do some clever stuff and live comfortably now instead of waiting until you retire. I recently had an idea on a different way to enjoy the four hour work week, but first we need to revisit some basic principles of high school physics.

(as a follow-up to “How data affects wifi range“)

It’s also important to realize that if a country consumes more media on the Internet than it produces, the electrons will get shifted from the creating country to the consuming country.

Because electrons have a negative charge this will leave the creating country with a positive charge and the consuming country with a negative charge. In effect, “polarizing the nations.” This was actually discussed in ancient biblical prophecy and is a sign that the battle of Armageddon and the end of the world is near.

On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 11:53 AM, David McLaughlin wrote:
> I’ve had much better luck with range by placing the router as high as
> possible within the house.

That’s because the newer wifi signals are actually slightly heavier than air so they fall down gradually after they’re broadcast. Kind of like the branches of a willow tree.

OK, I’m making my own meme, though I’ve not googled it, someone may have come up with it before me.

1. Click in your firefox address bar,
1. delete what’s there,
1. type the letter “w” and list the first four or five entries that firefox suggests

(feel free to use whatever web browser you like if they offer the same functionality)

Mine are:

1. Google Analytics – [www.google.com/analytics](http://www.google.com/analytics)
1. Canonical Homepage – [www.canonical.com](http://www.canonical.com)
1. Netbook Redirect Page – [www.canonical.com/netbooks](http://www.canonical.com/netbooks)
1. Bearfruit.org comments moderation page – hidden page on this site
1. Ubuntu.com homepage – [www.ubuntu.com](http://www.ubuntu.com)

Post yours in the comments or a link to your blog post that continues the meme.

In an effort to save money I decided to shave my cat rather than take him to the groomer to be shaved.

I don’t think I’ll do that again. Some things are worth paying for. Fortunately he’s very forgiving. Sorry Snickers.

We crea_t_ed a new banner for Debian’s birt_h_day. At 15 y_e_a_r_s th_e_y_’_re one of the olde_s_t distros still in _a_ctive usage. What has made Debia_n_ uniqu_e_ is that its m_a_intainer_s_ are passiona_t_e about two things – fr_e_e softwa_r_e and the OSS philosophy and also about t_e_chnical excelence. Debian is the foundation of Ubuntu so of course we’d have to do something to celebrate their birthday. The banner itself was created by Kenneth Wimer. I took it and overlaid it onto an existin_g_ Ubuntu banner so that it looked more like a real banner hun_g_ up over a doorway like you might do for a birthday party.


Oddly enough, the night before I put the banner up I had this crazy dream that a bunch of Debian developers were chasing me shouting about LZW compression algorithm patents and I was trying to justify myself by pointing out that the patent expired and that LZW was ok now. It’s always funny when you wake up remembering your dreams.

If you have no clue what I’m talking about that you haven’t looked closely enough or you just aren’t clever. Sorry. :-/ If you do get it then be sure to post a comment here so I know.

Last week, around May 2nd or 3rd, my daughter learned to crawl. It’s been a week so now she’s officially at that stage referred to as, “no really, don’t take your eyes off of her!”

So now I’ve got this challenge that so many people before me have faced. How to get her to be stationary for a little bit. This is my brief and whimsical diary of a few experiments.

Attempt one
I’ll call this one, immobilize, I stumbled on it by accident and it worked for a good 30 or 40 seconds. It gave me the inspiration to do this investigation and try to find a technique that would work, possibly for even longer!

As you can see this technique is quite simple because all you have to do is entangle the legs. Unfortunately it is simple but ineffective after the first time. You’ll notice the picture above is a bit blurry… I forgot to flip up the flash on the camera so it chose a slow shutter speed. Quicker than I was able to pop the flash and snap another picture she had escape the entanglement.

Attempt two
Best called distraction, this technique works quite well in certain circumstances. Basically you lay cheerios on the floor in a path that leads nowhere.

Unfortunately there are numerous ways this can go wrong. Also this technique means you will be vacuuming the floor more often than you will be washing your hair.

Attempt three
This attempt was a miserable failure. Nothing more needs to be said – except that I had no idea a 10 month old could lift up a laptop.

Attempt four
The tried and true technique.

It never fails.

OK, that subject line makes this sound more cool that it really is. The process was pretty simple. A little python script is attached that you can run locally. I’ll probably remake this in Javascript using a cool image based font that looks like the display on the speak and spell, but for now I just wanted to post this before I forgot about it. (I almost recycled it while cleaning off my desktop!)

In case you’re not familiar with the Speak & Spell, the code feature is a simple, reversible encoding program where you enter a short phrase and it will encrypt it. If you encrypt it again you get the original phrase. It is *not* rot13 but it works similarly.

__Cats and Toilets__

I think I’ve figured out why cats drink from the toilet. You see, when you feed a dog, he’ll clean the dish. Therefore you must feed him proper portions. Cats tend to be thrifty by nature. If you feed a cat, he’ll eat when he wants to, and just enough to satisfy himself. Therefore I’ve surmised that cats, being thrifty, drink from the toilet because they see it as a bountiful supply of water and are merely rationing their water bowl for that day that the toilet runs out. Quite brilliant.

I’m not sure why dogs drink from the toilet. It probably has something to do with either their highly personable nature or their poor cognitive ability.

__Dishes__

On another psychology related note, there appears to be no difference in my wife’s reaction when she sees the sink full of dishes either stacked neatly, in order from largest (at the bottom) to smallest and when she sees the sink full of dishes haphazardly tossed in.

I have two theories on why there is no visible difference in her reaction.

* __Theory 1:__ She knows that a sink of stacked dishes holds more than a sink filled haphazardly. Therefore she’s doing a quick mental calculation on the number of dishes and observing stacked = more dishes, which is naturally disheartening, or messy = chaos, which is also naturally disheartening.
* __Theory 2:__ My wife simply doesn’t like seeing dishes in the sink.

If I were to set the rules, I would emphatically say that there should be no _entropy_ in the sink. I can handle having dishes in the sink, but they should be orderly. In this regard though, I don’t set the rules and therefore I submit to, “there should be _nothing_ in the sink.”