I forgot to mention that I saw a guy jump off the Osborne Street bridge on Canada Day.

I was heading south into the village, and this guy was up on the east wall of the bridge holding onto the life preserver sign and talking to his girlfriend (who was on the sidewalk below). "That doesn't look like a good idea" I thought to myself, and I think pretty much everyone else on the bridge had the same idea. So we were all walking along looking at him, looking at where we were walking, looking at him, etc. Then all of a sudden he turned towards the river, put his hands up and "oop", right over the edge. Big collective gasp from everyone watching, then I ran across the street to take a look, but by the time I made it people were already shouting "He's fine!".

I guess with the water so high this year there was more to worry about from the current than from hitting the bottom. Still can't shake that brief moment of "Holy shit I think I just saw a guy kill himself."

Two unrelated people in unrelated incidents came in today, looking for the man who must be my boss.

I do work with men!

None of them are my boss!

Guardian: How Craigslist turned small ads into big business Blamed by some for the demise of print classified advertising...

Too much reading Wikipedia, but I immediately thought "[Who? (Weasel words)]".

Tristan, thanks to an unusually gripping first 10 seconds, is insisting on watching NCIS. This is a show that seldom interests me, but, it's only 8:00 and he actually wants to be in the same room with us boring grownups, so NCIS it is. This is weird because I love crime shows, but the military angle doesn't do it for me.

For dinner, I baked some potatoes, opened a can of lima beans (only I like these) and a can of green beans (I'm pretty sure everybody likes these) and cooked some pork tenderloin "chops." I get 'em at Cash & Carry for dirt cheap and they're reallly nice. usually one package runs me around $3, I have no idea why it's so cheap.

Anyway this is what I did (I found it on allrecipes but I kind of cheated) -

- Salt & peppered each piece, and browned all sides without oil on a large nonstick pan
- Removed meat from the pan and added one bottle of Kim's beer (thanks Kim, or should I say sorry Kim?) and stirred until the meat stuff came away from the pan
- Mixed up "barbecue sauce" by eyeballing a bunch of ketchup, some fat free ginger sesame salad dressing, pepper, garlic powder, "cajun rub" and worcestershire
- Added "barbecue" sauce and stirred until kinda integrated
- Returned meat to the pan, covered and simmered on low for 90 minutes, turning occasionally to keep the top from getting dry
- Towards the end, removed the cover to thicken the sauce

Anyway, it was great. Cheap, low-brow, odds and ends food, but man, it was tasty!

I have been lamenting the lack of good reading on LJ lately, surmising that it was usurped by the soundbyte social networking of Facebook. But that's not really fair is it, since I'm not writing like I used to, either.

I just have some shit going on lately is all. Primarily family worries. Not anything I want to bore you with. Instead, I lay awake between the hours of three a.m. and six a.m. fretting. Today my disposition suffered unusually from it but typically I read a boring book when that happens, which helps me get back to sleep. I keep a stack of library books right in my bed for this express purpose. Today, I had Marissa over to play Katamari Damacy (except I accidentally had We ♥ Katamari in there instead) and I dozed off during her ten minute roll-up. I really hope I can sleep through the night tonight.

The boring book I am reading right now is called "Last Chance to Eat" by Gina Mallet. Five seconds with a google search shows me that Gina Mallet is a Toronto socialite and restaurant reviewer. Before I knew that, I just considered her book a privileged and moneyed trip down memory lane. Her mother was from New York and worked for a famous publisher - apparently the publisher's notoriety was pertinent to the book? Her father was from London and during the WWII, their hardship was a retreat to an ancient estate that supposedly no one ever thought would actually be lived in. I keep reading it because it's a point of view I have not really before considered, describing a more or less romantic lifestyle that I have also not really before considered. A few things here and there are news to me, about food, but a lot of it isn't. Also, there are old timey recipes in the book and I like that. So I will finish the book, even though it's not nearly as lively as my last boring book, the low-budget "Country Living is Risky Business," which taught me how funny, painful, and disgusting raising livestock can be. So now I no longer want a "little farm."

But I still do wish I had a bunny. And maybe a chicken.

I was at my folks' yesterday flipping through channels and ended up watching some ST:TNG.

Which reminded me of this, which I still find absolutely hilarious:



Sorry in advance for putting an animation on your friends page.

Is this the right comm to whine about the Club Nintendo awards?






I know most people will be angry that these awards don't even remotely stack up in comparison to some of the nicer Japanese Club Nintendo prizes, but realistically since this was the first year of Club Nintendo in North America and a lot of games from the past few years had been accepted, making Platinum status (and at the very least Gold) somewhat easy to obtain. I also read that last year's Platinum award in Japan was a Mario hat or a Gold Wii Wheel, so it's on par with one of the worse years of Japan's awards.

What annoys me is that Platinum members can't choose the Gold award (and it annoys me more that apparently in Japan they get Platinum and the Gold award if they reach Platinum), because the WiiWare title is simply a cop-out to save on shipping, and I really don't care for Mario or his hats. I just noticed that the calendar goes by the month instead of a proper day calendar, but since I have no affinity for either of the Platinum awards I'd really much rather the Gold award. I'm now going to hold my breath and once the awards start (maybe?) rolling in, the calendar will turn out to be really boring and I'd end up just wanting the hat anyways, but this is silly. The Platinum-awards are too franchise specific, and if you aren't a fan of either franchise, these awards are underwhelming.

In before "don't complain about free stuff", while I don't feel entitled and I have a hunch me being in Canada I'm probably insanely lucky it's "Club Nintendo North America" and not "Club Nintendo USA", but these prizes represent somewhere in the upper hundreds of dollars in terms of brand loyalty and they don't look like much more than afterthoughts.

Since Perforce depends on workspaces, I should have expected that "Revert Unchanged Files" would compare to the local workspace instead of the most recent changelist in the depot.

Is there any way to take some files and say "revert these if they are unchanged vs. the depot?"

I still can't believe that setting option "revertunchanged" leaves zombie numbered changelists... I guess I could check if no files were submitted and then delete the empty changelist...

As long as I found the time to post a few pics today I might as well post a few more. My weekends have been so busy. We're already booked through Labor Day. I'm having a lot of fun but it does make the year go by awfully quickly.




At the private party at the Hotel on the 4th of July

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Me, Paula and Vicki, after a day of running around New York, at the Cloister Café in the East Village finally sitting down to relax and have a drink and a bite to eat. We’ve been trying to get together at least one weekend a month either in CT or here in NY.

I took over 200 photos on our vacation so I've just picked out a handful here just to give you a taste of the trip so you can decide if it's the sort of thing you might enjoy.


Sailing away from New York. This was taken from the balcony of someone I met on Cruise Critic who invited us to his suite for sailaway.


Entrance to our suite. It leads to a living area with a pull out sofa and table and chair and a tv. Off that is a short hall to the bedroom, also with a tv and chair and very large closet, and a dressing area leading to both the bedroom and the bathroom. All these areas have doors which can be pushed out of the way to add light and air or closed to allow privacy. The bathroom has a Jacuzzi tub and glass shower and double sinks. (I mention this because if you have children or a third person you can easily have them in a suite with you and still maintain some privacy.) This particular suite that we had also included a balcony which wraparound the back and side of the suite. (220 sq feet)

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Some acquaintances of mine recently bought bookstore on Taché and renamed it "Plato's Cave". Previously the bookstore was mystery/romance/self-help heavy, but they seem to be doing a good job at getting their hands on a lot of classics, history, and philosophy-type books. (http://caveofplato.com/)

Running a used bookstore seems mildly insane to me, but I hope they do well.

On a completely unrelated note I picked up yesterday two of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, Ring World, Vonnegut's Hocus Pocus, and good copies of Othello and King Lear.

I also visited McNally and got Shake Hands with the Devil (finally), Spook Country, the remaining Foundation novel, and Best Science Writing 2007.

I've been participating in reading groups with some friends and people from school. I've not really done this in the past, but it's quite interesting. I'm finding that reading with other people provides a good motivation to think carefully about everything in a work, not just the parts that jump out at you.

Seen used by wiggiemomsi:

Has Facebook killed LiveJournal?

From the T-Mobile mobile broadband FAQ:

Why is the web'n'walk/Mobile Broadband Fair Use Policy usage date different to my billing period?

T-Mobile monitor web'n'walk/Mobile Broadband usage based on a calendar month rather than a billing month. This means your data usage is measured from the first day of the month, to the last day of the month.

No ... no that is "HOW does the usage date differ from my billing period", not "WHY".

I bought a used copy of Professor Layton and the Curious Village and I want to know how to reset the whole thing so I'm not seeing clues and stuff that was figured out by someone else. I don't see any options and the booklet wasn't in the case.

I tried to search online and all I could find was "choose 'save file' and turn power off while it's saving and the file will reset" but that didn't work.

Any REAL answers out there?

ETA:
I downloaded the manual for it and basically... you can't delete the info.

It's possible to over write the files that have already been saved, so when someone beats the game, their info stays there forever until I over write it with MY game info so instead of 126 puzzles it'll only have 3 or however many I've completed. However you can't do it from the VERY beginning, so you have 3 puzzles to solve before getting the option. My husband suggested I save over all the other person's info with mine on all three files so it's back to the basics. So that's what I did.

very lame in my personal opinion. Hopefully I will like the game more than I like the save/delete/reset functions that basically don't exist.

Having used twitter for a full week now, I can safely say I'm not that impressed. I prefer LJ, but maybe that's just because I'm a verbose SoB. Scrolls by too fast, nothing feels permanent. Maybe that's alright for inconsequential stuff, but I like to at least pretend some of my stuff has import.

Meanwhile, I'm out of my splint but my stitches are staying in another week. The wound is not quite healed, so I have to be careful washing it and such. The doc also says he wants me to hold of on riding my motorcycle for another 2-3 weeks.

Meanwhile, I got like 3 hours of sleep last night. I was having one of those nights where I was just feeling overstimulated. I wanted to bury myself in a pillow fort and shut off my brain. I was too hot AND too cold, sensitive to the touch, and needed something to occupy my brain but couldn't sit through anything on TV (let alone read). Still, I have some schoolwork to do, and another job opening to reply to, so I know I'll be working on those later. Right now, I'm just trying to get used to having two arms again.

In other news, only 5 hours til I supposedly get this splint off my arm. My right hand got a little wet in Tuesday's rain and ALL THE DEAD SKIN FLAKED OFF EW EWW ICKY EWW. Not eager to see what my arm looks like under the bandages. Will probably have to scrub it with a brush after my first shower with an unbagged arm in 2 weeks.

On the plus side, I should be able to ride my motorcycle again (will have to check with the Dr.).
On the down side, I don't think I'll be doing this year's MMT, because if my bike goes down off the beaten path somewhere and I don't have cell signal, I doubt I'll be able to pick it up using only one arm (still not supposed to bear any weight with my right for several weeks).

I just woke up from the most awesomely realistic dream. I was a NASA employee, living and working on the moon in the early days of civilian colonization. There was only one city (domed, for your breathing convenience) with a smattering of businesses like you might expect in any modern frontier town. There was a gas station with convenience store, where the price of gas was a low, low $3.45/gallon thanks to government subsidy (the real cost of fuel would have been so exorbitant as to prohibit colonization, so it was incentivized).

We were stationed at the base, going over map and survey data, when the call came in. I think it was actually skreidle who gave me and my boss/mission commander the news. They'd found what could be best described as a cave on the surface of the moon, about an hour and a half's moon buggy ride away. It seemed by all appearances to be natural, which was odd, because to my knowledge caves are usually the result of erosion by the kind of natural forces which are absent on the moon. So my commander and I started planning to get out there ASAP. There was no decision; it was a foregone conclusion that we'd go see it in person. At least, that my boss would, since he was the commander. And since regs said no one goes out alone, I'd be going with him.

Here's where some of the most interesting (to me) elements of the realism came in. We had to figure out how much air and fuel we needed to get there. This meant calculating our route. And since we would be traveling on the on the surface, we had to examine topographical maps of all the territory between us and the site. Since it was in a pretty craterous area outside the mare or plain the colony was on, it turned out that the safest and most passable route was basically to travel due north and then dogleg east in an L shape. I was very acutely aware that if we'd just assumed a straight vector to the site we'd not only have run out of fuel and been stranded but also run out of air pretty quickly. It'd be nice just to take as much as possible at all times, but budget constraints and other practical matters limited that. For example, the more food and fuel you take with you, the worse your mileage. We were also limited on how much air we could carry in our tanks, and extra tanks were pretty heavy. So it was all about efficiency, and there was a certain finality about our calculations. We would live and die by the strength of our estimates. There was no protocol to follow; we were the first explorers. We were making the protocol.

I'd only been stationed there for a few short weeks. I remembered my transit to the moon. The in-flight entertainment was a worn and glitchy old copy of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I'd suggested, half jokingly, that they get a copy of that new movie... what was it... Moon? if it was out on DVD yet, but this was poorly received by my superiors. No, 2001, this beat-up old copy of it, was the tradition, and so it would stay. That aside, I'd integrated pretty well with the rest of the crew (important when stationed in a remote location with a small group). But I definitely remember being the junior man there, out of what I think was 8 low g-men. 2 were asleep, and would stay behind while the station ran itself, and the other four were at the cave site. I definitely felt pangs of jealousy at not having discovered the cave myself, but these were eclipsed by the shadow of the massive amount of work needed to prepare for our trip.

So now came the fun (and less realistic) part. I recall visualizing a two-man rover before some part of my brain went: MOON + DUNE BUGGIES = MOON BUGGIES! Soon, we were suited up and in these two little vehicles that resembled extreme offroad versions of shifter karts more than anything else. Small, maneuverable, and fast. The gas station was across from our building, so we pulled out, zipped across the main road dodging between the normal-sized traffic (incl. in my case an angry 18-wheeler as I struggled to keep up with my maniac hooligan boss who may or may not have resembled volta), and pulled in for the fuel stop. After we'd fueled up, we hit the convenience store and supplemented our rations with some energy bars (pretty much all you could get on the moon aside from freeze-dried meals due to the prohibitive cost of shipping fresh foods) and then set out, with our pedals to the metal, racing headlong towards the wall of the dome where the road ended and our adventure would begin.

Sadly, this is where I woke up. I feel like a tourist who says, "The pictures don't do it justice." I've tried and experienced a lot of things in dreams, but though I've been in space, I've never been on another world before. It really felt like I was on the moon, complete with lower gravity (affecting how we moved around) and the isolation that came with knowing you were the only civilization for hundreds of thousands of miles. I feel like I've come back from an amazing trip or something.

So long, Moon. I hardly knew ye. But I'll think back fondly on our time together, and maybe wave from time to time when I see you.

Let's say I'm submitting to Perforce, and I use "revert if unchanged" to avoid spamming the changelists.

How do I prevent P4 from creating a zombie named changelist if the submit ends up empty because all files were the same as in the depot?

Update:

    # Get the file into the default changelist
    p4_out_add = p4.modify(files=[xml_path])
    print "Add",p4_out_add
    
    # Take the file out of the changelist if it hasn't changed
    p4_out_revert = p4.revert(files=[xml_path], unchangedOnly=True)
    print "Revert",p4_out_revert
    
    # Only submit if the file is still in the list
    opened = p4.opened(files=[xml_path])
    print "Opened",opened
    if opened:
        p4_out_submit = p4.submit(files=[xml_path], description="TODO")
        print p4_out_submit