The Pacers were able to get a steal in the NBA draft. Grainger was a potential top five pick who somehow managed to still be availible at #17. He’s positioned to play immediately. He’s not a shooting guard to replace Reggie Miller, but he just might be the last piece of the puzzle needed to get a championship.
Also, in the news of the insane, we have this little gem. I’m honestly not sure what made someone think this was a good idea, but they really need to do some more ‘thought-showering’ on it.
I watched President Bush’s speech the other night and found it to be pretty good. I don’t really like his speaking style because I don’t think it’s natural or emotional enough. He always comes across as a pseudo-puppet for his speech writing staff as a result. I also didn’t like his reference to 9/11 because that event really has nothing to do with Iraq.
However, his main point (That we are fully committed to winning the war and things are progressing in that direction nicely.) was something with which I absolutely agree, and I’m very glad that he finally got up and defended himself to the national media. They have been beating him up over this issue incessantly and, while I don’t know that it’s really hurting the war efforts all that much, I do think that they are not saying these things because they are looking at the big picture and wanting to make the world a better place. They are quite obviously trying to sell newspapers, tv time, and books. This is what the media does.
I’m also glad he didn’t set a time table for pulling out. That would have been phenominally stupid. I am also glad that he said he’s listening to his military commanders with respect to how many troops are required to achieve their goals. I don’t know why people seem to continually fail to understand that we’re not there to defeat an enemy so much as to create an ally. (If you are anti-Bush, feel free to insert an oil industry joke here.) The people of Iraq have been beaten down both physically and psychologically to believe that they need dictators and terrorists to lead them if they ever want to get somewhere as a nation. If they choose to they can become a powerful nation for freedom. If they choose otherwise, as the people of Vietnam did, then our leaders will have to be willing understand this and accept it without, well, doing what we did in Vietnam.
One more basketball tidbit, Oden is going to Ohio State. Look for them to be in the Final Four in 2007.
Well, the San Antonio Spurs are the NBA Champions again. I think they played just well enough to win. Though, I’m not entirely sure that the Spurs would still win four games if these teams were to play another seven game series. It was really great to see two teams that were actual teams in the finals as opposed to a collection of high paid self absorbed athletes. I’m sure that the NBA brass will be pleased that an international team won again. That’s really going too help their demographics. Now, if only there was a way to hide from all the Spurs fans in Austin for the next few weeks…
I suppose I should add a little something here in case anyone else is running into the same annoying problems I was with Gaim on Mac OS X. I was annoyed by the console beep as my only form of sound. This meant that I would get the same tiny console beep for an incomming message, departing message, new buddy sign on, or a buddy sign off. It was annoying to have to check what was going on anytime anything happened.
So how did I solve this problem? Well, it was a lot easier than I thought it would be at first. I installed gaim using fink. So I checked fink to see if there were any programs that could play a sound from the commandline. (I’m unaware of how to do this with any native program on Mac OS X so please let me know if you know a better way.) I found madplay.
This meant that I would need some MP3 formatted sounds to use. I did a little more searching and found some really awesome sounds on a site that’s ironically named bradsucks.net. They were in *.wav format and so I did a simple conversion to *.mp3 to get me off and running. Now, I have clear, soft, and distinct sounds for each major event in Gaim. Woohoo!
Well, it’s anybody’s series now. Honestly, I can’t believe that we’re sitting here in this position. I never thought that we’d get past game six in this series. San Antonio was lucky to win game five and needs to get their act together for game seven. I didn’t watch game six, but I suppose I’ll suffer through game seven.
If you’ve been watching the news lately you’ll have seen several individuals garner national attention for various things. Natalee Holloway missing in Aruba. The 11 year old boy scout found after he was missing for four days. Jennifer Wilbanks incited a national press frenzy when she ran away from her husband and extravagent wedding.
These stories are nothing new to the American public, but there have been a number of them recently and they have left me thinking. What is so important about these individuals that separates them from all the other Americans that get kidnapped, get lost, or run away from their weddings? Why do they receive so much attention?
Fame is something pretty powerful in America today. Jennifer Wilbanks has reportedly got a book deal in the works that will make more money than I would likely make in the next ten years. Does a woman who runs away from her family and lie to the police really deserve a book deal like that? It’s probably going to be ghost written for her too.
I haven’t decided what to think about these so-called human interest stories. I’m not sure what else I would put in the press though, so perhaps I should shut up if I don’t have a better idea.
I didn’t see all of this year’s Finals game 5, but the parts of it that I saw made me glad that I didn’t watch the rest. It seemed like both teams were trying to lose. Tim Duncan in particular seemed lost. I’m not sure there’s been an uglier offensive performance by both teams in the NBA Finals. Robert Horry was basically the only one who could come away from that game with any pride left since he actually played really well. Rasheed Wallace made the blunder of a lifetime by not guarding the inbounds pass and then found a way to make it worse by continuing to leave Horry wide open so that he could hit the game winning three.
Though, I would lay some of the blame for this blunder on Coach Brown, who should have told him to stay in Horry’s face on the inbounds pass. I have never bought into the philosophy that the best way to deny the inbounds pass, particularly from the side, is to guard their four with your five. If you have a guy in the face of the passer, you are not only pressuring the people trying to get open, but you’re cutting down on the passer’s vision. All in all it was a bad move.
One of my friends sent me a link last night that I had to share. It turns out that Chris Klink, whom I sang with in High School, is going to be in the Broadway show “The Producers.” I like to think that the year he spent trying to cover for how badly I sang has prepared him in some small way for this new opportunity.
While I haven’t really talked to many people about the news that Daniel Robbins, creator of Gentoo Linux, is now working for Microsoft, I think this could be a very good thing. His job is to help Microsoft understand Open-Source and community based projects. Anything that better helps Microsoft understand the benefits of Open Source Software has to be a good thing in my book.
It may surprise some people to learn that I’m not blindly anti-Microsoft. I don’t like some of their business practices. Actually, I don’t like a lot of their business practices, but mostly I don’t like them because many of their business choices hinder technology. The concepts of Open Source Software aren’t always the best solution in terms of furthering technology. I don’t really want to get into specifics here, but the point of all of this is that I think there could be a lot of unfair backlash for a leader in the Open Source world moving to the largest proprietary software company on the planet.
When the software business understands the importance and power of open source software and finds a way to add the focus and organization of a for profit business to it, technology benefits. I would use Apple’s Mac OS X as a prime example of this.
Also, I would like to state for the record that I cooked chicken today without burning down my apartment building.
Well, I suppose this will out me as an official country music fan, but I’m going to post it anyhow. I recently found out that Tim McGraw’s albums are now on iTunes. I have been a closet Tim McGraw fan for a while. I used to violently deny this and any other connection that might suggest that I liked country music, even to close friends that could see how much it affected me. I’m not really sure why. Maybe it’s too late at night to be posting something personal, but I just wanted to say something publicly in the hopes that I’ll not be as belligerent in the future when it comes to being a fan of country music. I’m quite pleased to see that Tim’s on iTunes now, and I’m sure there are plenty of other fans out there who are as well.
I just thought that I would give some praise to two vim plugins that I absolutely adore. The first is one that I’ve been using since college called SuperTab. This was something that my Computer Architecture project group found very useful in modifying the VHDL files that were automatically generated by Cadence. There were many long, long variable names used in those that were a huge pain to have to type out. SuperTab made editing those files far easier than it could have been without. It’s also allowed me to use adequately descriptive variable names in my other programming projects where I would otherwise have been tempted to use something that was faster to type.
The next plugin is called taglist. I found this to be really useful in larger programming projects, usually when there were single files consisting of thousands of lines of code. It allows you to bring up a window with a list of the various tags in the file you’re editing. This requires that the exuberant ctags program is installed on your machine. You can jump to the various functions and variables by switching over to that window and pressing ‘enter’ on the one to which you want to jump. It’s quite nice when you have 15 functions and they are spread out over a 1500 line code file. I tend to find myself either searching repeatedly or slowly scrolling up and down to find the spot I want to go to when I don’t have taglist available. It really makes a difference. The taglist project also has its own webpage if you’re interested.
For those of you who use Gentoo Linux, like me, these plugins are both in portage and waiting for you to emerge them.
One of my good friends recently sent me a link to one of the funniest collections of Charles Barkley quotes on the Internet. Take a look.
Slashdot recently had an article about who’s duty it is to recycle computer parts. One of the comments was an absolutely hilarious parody of Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant.
Another friend passed along a link to Store Wars, which is really quite well done, even if you don’t care whether or not you’re eating organic foods. You’ve got to tip your hat to the folks that put it together.
One of the things that I wanted to talk about but haven’t blogged about is that I went to the LJB Presidential Library last Saturday. It was really, really good. I didn’t realize how much fun I would have there or I would have gone a long time ago. It has prompted me to want to visit a bunch of the other Presidential Libraries. There was a really cool exibit on “The Swinging Sixties” which was very well done. I was also really impressed with the wall of official Presidential portraits and the selection of gifts from various heads of state. There was a lot of information about the JFK Assassination, which has always fascinated me along with millions of others. I even got a book by Max Holland called The Kennedy Assassination Tapes, which is a collection of transcripts of taped conversations during the LBJ administration about the Kennedy Assassination. It’s really well written and quite interesting. All in all it was a really good trip.