obfuscated.org

Busy with family, I didn’t get to watch both of yesterday’s NBA games. I saw the second half of Lakers @ Heat, which was about what I expected. (I had the Heat by 10, so I guess it was a little off, but still.) The good game, however, was on earlier and was the one that I completely missed. (NBA – San Antonio Spurs/Detroit Pistons Recap Sunday December 25, 2005 – Yahoo! Sports)

The recap, however, provided a great deal of entertainment. Here’s a quote from San Antonio’s coach, who is by far one of the most amusing interviews in the league:

“We’re very honored, but we realize it is a great responsibility to play in the JV game,” San Antonio coach Gregg Popovich joked before the game. “We have to do a good job to make sure the fans stay around to watch the varsity game.”

Hilarious! Detroit and San Antonio are far and away the best teams in the league, yet they’re hugely overshadowed by the Kobe/Shaq soap opera. It pleases me when this sort of thing is taken in stride and joked at by the rest of the league, especially the teams getting the short end of the media attention stick.

I can’t wait to watch these two teams in the finals. (At this point, I’m pretty sure that my preseason prediction of Miami making the finals was wrong. Sorry, Shaq.) With Pop on one side and ‘Sheed on the other, it’ll be another year of great interviews.

John Skeet posted a pretty good feature comparison between Visual Studio and Eclipse. (Jon Skeet’s Coding Blog : Visual Studio vs Eclipse) I don’t really use IDE’s much, but I’ve had good and bad experiences with both VS and Eclipse. Either way, here’s to hoping that the VS team picks up Eclipse’s better features and the other way around.

One useful and obvious tip that’s listed in the comments is a performance improvement for Eclipse. I’ve always thought it was a little bit pokey, but for whatever reason upping the amount of memory available to Eclipse’s JVM never occurred to me. Under OSX, edit the following file:

/Applications/eclipse/Eclipse.app/Contents/MacOS/eclipse.ini

And change the “-Xmx256m” line to read “-Xmx512m” or similar depending upon the available memory on your computer.

Center of the Earth
Originally uploaded by Corey Porter.

When you fire up Google Earth, it presents you with a “default” view that you can zoom in on. As it happens, this default point is two blocks from my parents’ home in Lawrence, KS. I’m told that the corner of Crestline Drive and Compton Square (Compton is the name of the owner of the apartment complex located at that intersection) became the center of the default view because the engineer who entered the defaults once lived in these apartments.

Can anybody recommend a good Applescript reference? I’ve got some ugly jobs that I want to automate, which seems like a good opportunity to pick up a new tool. Here’s what I want to do:

I’m moving my photos from Picasa — which I love dearly and will miss, but I never use my Windows PC any more, so it seems sort of daft to keep my photos there — to iPhoto. Picasa has a really cool “export” feature that can dump all of your photos out to disk in directories named after the albums you’ve created. I want to import all of these in to iPhoto, preserving the album names from Picasa. Seems pretty straightforward, no?

Anyway, pointers to good web Applescript references or even book recommendations would be appreciated. Alternately, if there’s an easy way to automate this sort of thing in other tools — Python in particular — that’d almost be better. (Although learning a new tool may or may not be the larger objective here.)

I’m glad to see that BB has finally gotten on the Cock Flavoured soup bus. (Boing Boing: Unfortunately suggestive food packaging) Erich gave me a packet of this a few months back. (cock flavoured soup photo here) This truly is the soup of the future.

• Sharp stick in the eye (left)
• Listening to Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” backwards
• Curry paste, rubbed in to genitals
• NyQuil and vodka, up
• Luge
• Verbal abuse from checker at Vons
• Disdain for all mankind
• Cuban cigars
• Bowling (provided you don’t win the beer frame)
• 1980′s video game smash hit “Joust”
• Progressive Rock
• Chestnuts roasting on an open fire (yours — the nuts, not the fire)
• Hittin’ switches and/or gettin’ your swerve on
• Wind sprints
• Kittens (broiled)
• Gunpowder suppositories
• Teleportation
• Curling with the LAUSD advisory board
• Rod Setwart’s “Maggie May”
• Cold pills from Mexico provided by someone called “Mr. Sticky”
• Annual outing with the Polar Bear Club
• Southwest flight 2762

Isn’t it cute how these things always hit just as you start a vacation? I think I’ll stick to rest and OJ, as the above just didn’t do it for me.

The senate at least temporarily put a hold on the PATRIOT act today. If you think this is a good thing — I most certainly do — here’s a fun and easy way to let them know:

EFF: Thank the Senators who Stopped PATRIOT!

Did you ever notice that some people shorten “Death Penalty” to “DP” in written forums? What’s with that? “DP.” “D to the P.” “Donkey Puncharello” if you’re not in to the whole brevity thing.

Schwarzenegger denies clemency to convicted killer – Yahoo! News. You’ll recall that Schwarzenegger is a self-described social moderate. Seems to me that with this sort of nonsense decision he’s a far-right pandering assclown. If you needed yet another reason to vote against this guy when he comes up for reelection — and if you do, you haven’t been paying attention — here it is.

Have you made your iTunes Signature yet? From the site:

People often ask me what music I listen to, and I find it difficult to describe my enormous music collection in just a few sentences. So I created iTSM to answer in sound a question I cannot answer in words.

Here’s My signature. Its contents are as follows:

• Surf Wax Off Your Shoulder (Jay-Z vs. Weezer)
• Too High for the Supermarket (The Uninvited)
• Outcome (Beck)
• Stuart (The Dead Milkmen)
• Baby, Let Me Follow You Down (Bob Dylan)
• Don’t Think Twice (Mike Ness)
• The Bad Homecoming (Dean Gray — from the “American Edit” album)
• Outlaw Blues (Bob Dylan)
• Scenario (A Tribe Called Quest)
• What’s Left of the Flag (Flogging Molly)
• Israel (Miles Davis)
• Trouble Man (Marvin Gaye)
• Embraceable You (Miles Davis & Charlie Parker)
• Good Girl (The Neptunes)
• Shut ‘Em Down (Public Enemy vs. The X-ecutioners)
• Sabrosa (Beastie Boys)
• My Back Pages (The Magokoro Brothers)
• Just Like A Woman (Beres Hammond)
• Crazy Little Pimp Called Love (Q-Unit — 50 cent vs. Queen)
• Gritty Shaker (David Holmes)