So right back to it…. I guess….

Am I late to the party or what… Command-Shift-3 and Command-Shift-4 …. now that is money… All this time I was “Grabbing” a tiff with Grab… then saving it as a png… so annoying.

What other sweet shortcuts do I need to know?

Google Custom Time

The Beta User Testimonials crack me up …

“I just got two tickets to Radiohead by being the ‘first’ to respond to a co-worker’s ‘first-come, first-serve’ email. Someone else had already won them, but I told everyone to check their inboxes again. Everyone sort of knows I used Custom Time on this one, but I’m denying it.”
Robby S., Paralegal

The Root of All Evil

A Ruby to Java compiler. It magically turns ruby source files into java class files. Interesting, interesting, interesting. I wonder if the JRuby guys have played with this at all and what they think of it? The better question is … why the hell haven’t I heard about this. It seems to have flown under my radar for a full year.

This man is a hero.

Interview with Ehren

• Attend my Brazilian Jui-Jitsu class at the Warrior’s Cove least 2 times a week with goal of obtaining second first degree gold belt by end of the year
• Get Carson into swimming lessons in the spring
• Do everything I can to help make Nearbie a success
• Give Grails a chance — Write at least 2 apps using it
• Take Erin to Napa Valley in the fall
• Cook more
• Contribute to one open source project (JRuby?) or release something as a plugin or gem

Well, I realize it is light on “Family Time” and pretty heavy on “Casey Time” — which, will undoubtedly be a topic of discussion at the dinner table tonight. Of course, that is because I saved the most important one for last –

• Be the best husband and father in the world

What are your resolutions?

The big things to keep an eye out for
Don’t forget to update the Darwin ports sudo port -d selfupdate very very important

Don’t forget the +server portion of the mysql5 install

I typically use mongrel and mongrel cluster so I don’t bother with the fcgi crap.

I also found out that the Darwin Port rb-rubygems is broken in the latest release and you will see a strange stack looking like this when you do sudo gem install blah

No worries, just manually reinstall ruby gems. In my case

wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/11289/rubygems-0.9.0.tgz
extract and sudo ruby setup.rb.

That is really about it… The next big part is ImageMagic/RMagick — I’ll add updates as I work through that mess.

Let’s not forget the rhetoric, it wasn’t that long ago

May 6, 2004

“They’ll kill innocent people to try to shake our will,” Bush said of terrorists. “That’s what they want to do. They’ll never shake the will of the United States. We understand the stakes.”
“Bush: Stay the course on terror war

July 10th, 2003

“We’re making steady progress,” he said. “A free Iraq will mean a peaceful world. And it’s very important for us to stay the course, and we will stay the course.”
U.S. ‘Will Stay the Course’ in Iraq, Bush Says

More Stay the Course Video

Top 5
• Douglas, CO – $130,146
• Loudon, VA – $127,118
• Fairfax, VA – $121,044
• Hunterdon, NJ – $119,787
• Los Alamos, NM – $117,563

Bottom 5
• Kalawao, HI – $8,852
• Buffalo, SD – $17,609
• Wilcox, AL – $20,885
• Holmes, MS – $21,275
• McDowell, WV – $21,617

Bob Marley – “Don’t gain the world and lose your soul, wisdom is better than silver or gold.”

“Behind this manufactured cheerfulness, however, is the fact that the average employee makes only $15,000 a year for full-time work. Most are denied even this poverty income, for they’re held to part-time work. While the company brags that 70% of its workers are full-time, at Wal-Mart “full time” is 28 hours a week, meaning they gross less than $11,000 a year.

Health-care benefits? Only if you’ve been there two years; then the plan hits you with such huge premiums that few can afford it-only 38% of Wal-Marters are covered. ”

http://www.mcspotlight.org/beyond/companies/antiwalmart.html

Maybe instead you like to discuss sweatshops. Walmart is kickass in this area. 13-20 cents an hour is right up there with Nike!
http://www.pbs.org/itvs/storewars/sweatshops.html

Forbes magazine, polling business executives (not employees) has ranked Wal-Mart among the best 100 corporations to work for. Yet the employees on average take home pay of under $250 a week. The salary for full-time employees (called “associates”) is $6 to $7.50 an hour for 28-40 hours a week, which is typical in the discount retail industry. This pay scale places employees with families below the poverty line, with the majority of employees’ children qualifying for free lunch at school. When closely examined, this amounts to a form of corporate welfare, as the taxpayer subsidizes the low salaries. One-third are part-time employees – limited to less than 28 hours of work per week – and are not eligible for benefits.

…..

for employees is the option to buy company stock at a discount. Wal-Mart matches 15 percent of the first $1800 in stocks purchased. Yet most workers can’t afford to buy the stock. In fact, not one in 50 workers has amassed as much as $50,000 through the stock-ownership pension plan. Voting power for these stocks remains with Wal-Mart management.

http://www.pbs.org/itvs/storewars/stores3.html

On the other hand…. Costco isn’t quite as bad….

Costco pays its average employee $17 an hour. It offers workers an affordable health-care package that 85 percent of employees take part in. It contributes to employees’ 401(k) plan.

Of course, Jim Sinegal, the CEO of Costco, takes a more modest annual salary of $350,000, a sliver of what Wal-Mart’s Lee brings to his palatial estate.

Crazy Fan Video

http://www.google.com/notebook/

The New Minneapolis Public Library

Alcatraz

http://code.google.com/summerofcode.html
http://code.google.com/soc/studentfaq.html

Artie is a service that utilizes Amazon.com’s public database of images to retrieve any missing cover art for your iTune’s library. Just upload your easy-to-find iTunes Music Library.xml file, wait a second while it analyzes everything, and drag the artwork straight into your running iTunes program. The correct art is found more then 95 percent of the time, however databases aren’t perfect, so it’s possible you might get a Yanni cover for your new G-Unit CD, for these few mistakes, we appologize.

http://www.patrickmoberg.com/artie/

http://caseyhelbling.googlepages.com

In other news finance.google.com is up and running. They are mashing up news data points with the stock charts. This is something I have thought would be nice for awhile now. The other sweet feature is the deep links right into other third party data like finance.yahoo.com and Wikipedia.

John Kerry, the 2004 presidential nominee, was overheard in an Irish bar on Capitol Hill talking about how satisfying it would be to impeach Bush if Congress went Democrat. He was just having a laugh, his spokeswoman rushed to explain: “Impeachment jokes in Washington are as old as Donald Rumsfeld.”

But then she turned serious: “How are the same Republicans, who tried to impeach a president over whether he misled a nation about an affair, going to pretend it does not matter if the administration intentionally misled the country into war?”

Times Online

In other sad news, the US continues to hold its own hostages in order to demonstrate to the world what it takes to be strong democracy.

About 490 foreign terrorism suspects are being held at Guantanamo, many for four years and only 10 charged with a crime.

Maybe in an attempt to be more like the US, the new Iraqi government should hire Tom Fox’s captors to teach them how to take hostages, torture people and all in all just be more like the US.

ASSCLOWN received a package yesterday. I know I had problems signing the electronic clipboard thingy… but… I hardly believe my scribble looked anything like “ASSCLOWN.” See for yourself. My tracking number is 1Z 90X 310 39 4516 857 6 I’m just trying to decide if this falls in the realms of a slander lawsuit. ]]> http://www.slurredspeech.com/ups-thinks-im-an-assclown/feed/ 6 http://www.slurredspeech.com/the-baby/ http://www.slurredspeech.com/the-baby/#comments Mon, 06 Mar 2006 18:50:57 +0000 casey http://www.slurredspeech.com/?p=106 This morning Erin and I had the ultrasound for the baby. It was so amazing to see the little guy/girl?! wiggling around inside Erin. We are 19 weeks along and it is really starting to sink in that in less than 5 months I am going to be a daddy. Wow! Have fun with the photos… The first three are aggregate photos with about 4-6 individuals on one page. All the rest are broken out individuals. “baby_individual_2006.03.06_06.jpg” seen below is a cool image where you can see him/her yawning… or … insert random alien screaming joke here.

Small photos
Large photos

Missouri bill proposes Christianity as official religion

The wide-ranging poll also shows that 58% of those serving in country say the U.S. mission in Iraq is clear in their minds, while 42% said it is either somewhat or very unclear to them, that they have no understanding of it at all, or are unsure. While 85% said the U.S. mission is mainly “to retaliate for Saddam’s role in the 9-11 attacks,” 77% said they also believe the main or a major reason for the war was “to stop Saddam from protecting al Qaeda in Iraq.”

http://www.zogby.com/news

Andrew Sullivan remarks:

“It’s absurd, of course. But no more absurd than the empirically baseless claims that kids brought up by gay parents are somehow at a disadvantage.”

17″ WUXGA+ (1920 x 1200) Active Matrix , Glare-Type Display
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ (2.2Ghz; L2 Cache: 1MB x 2) Toledo
Artic Silver 5 (AS5) Thermal CPU Paste Compound
256MB GDDR3 nVIDIA GeForce Go 7800 GTX PCI-Express 16x
2048 MB DDR SDRAM (400 MHz, PC-3200, Dual Channel) (2 x 1024 MB)
80 GB Hard Drive (7200 RPM) SATA
HDD RAID Settings – Off
8X DVD±R/RW / 4X+Dual Layer / 5X DVD-RAM / CD-RW Multi Drive (Pioneer DVR-k16)
External USB Floppy Drive
Built in 56k V.90 Modem
Built in 10/100/1000 Fast Ethernet / LAN Network Card
Wireless (Wi-Fi) Lan Card 802.11g (54 Mbps)
Add Internal Bluetooth Card (Combo card with Wi-Fi)
Smart Lithium Ion Battery (12 Cells)
Integrated 7-in-1 Card Reader
Integrated Video Camera / Internal Subwoofer Module
Auto-switching AC Adapter (220W; 100-250V)

ahhh snap…