Dear Mister Jones

I’d like to shake the hand of whoever did away with the scratchy tags in the back of the neck of T-Shirts.  There was never a good solution to them.  If you cut them really really short with a pair of scissors, you could still feel them.  You’d spend the rest of your wearing experience with that shirt thinking you should have just ripped out the tag - but then it was too short to do anything about it.  If you ripped them out - you’d almost always end up with some part of your collar detached from the rest of the shirt.

The only problem I have now is that occasionally I’ll discover partway through my day that I’m wearing my shirt backwards.  This little sacrifice in fashion is a small price to pay for comfort.

One of my pet peeves is when I visit a web site and it automatically takes up the entire width of the screen.  I have a rather large monitor (you’d be jealous if you saw it) - so when a block of text actually stretches completely from the left to the right, unless I’m sitting far back from the screen, I actually have to move my head from side to side to read it.  This requires much more effort than simply moving my eyes from left to right.  I’m not sure what it is about it that actually bugs me so much - I suppose I like some whitespace around the blocks of text that I read.  Otherwise I feel a feeling akin to claustrophobia.  I wonder what a word would be to describe it - zeromargiphobia? overwide-a-phobia?

Just needed to rant for a moment.

Recently one of my hosting providers went and changed the path to my home directory without telling me.  I run an svn repository there and so the next time I went to check in some changes it wouldn’t work because the path information stored in my checked out copy no longer matched what was on the server.  So, I had to go through a gajillion files and modify the path to reflect the changes.  I thought I’d go ahead and share how I did that for anyone out there that has a similar need.

There are several ways to accomplish this - but this is how I like to do it (this is from a linux command shell):

find . -name somefile -exec perl -pi.bliki -e ’s/textToFind/replacement/g’ {} \;

The above command uses the find command, starting from the current location (.), looking for files named ’somefile’ (-name somefile), and every time it finds one, it runs the command following the -exec parameter.  The command following the -exec parameter is a perl one-liner that backs up the file it’s about to modify (with a .bliki extension, I just try to pick something I’m sure will not result in overwriting a legitimate file), and then does a global search and replace of textToFind with replacement.  In the above command, the {} is where find inserts the current file it has found.  You must backslash the semi-colon at the end so that the shell doesn’t interpret it and leaves it for use by the find -exec command.

Once you’ve completed the search and replace, you use the following command to go through and remove all of the backup files created with the .bliki extension.

find . -name somefile.bliki -exec rm {} \;

Hope this makes sense?

Post questions if you need clarification on anything.

I enjoy riddles.  By happenstance, I happened upon the (in)famous -gry riddle, but luckily before I got too carried away searching for an answer I found an essay written by the Word Detective on this very puzzle.

The key to successfully finding an answer to this wriddle is in getting the wording correct:

Angry and hungry are two words that end in ‘-gry’. There are three words in the English language. What is the third word? Everyone knows what it means and everyone uses it every day. Look closely and I have already given you the third word. What is it?

For the answer, see this essay.

Feeling crippled on Windows by not having access to such commands as grep, awk, tail, less … ?  Go here to get a copy of these utilities ported to the Win32 platform.  They’ve made my life much easier when I’m trying to do some quick command-line trickery on a Windows box.

When progamming an AIR application, you may want to make use of the applicationStorageDirectory available via the flash.filesystem package to store temporary files/folders.  You can find where your system is storing these files by doing something like the following:

var f:File = File.applicationStorageDirectory.resolvePath(”Test.txt”);
trace(f.nativePath + ‘ is where my file is stored’);

I recently read an excellent article written by Po Bronson entitled, ‘What Should I Do With My Life?‘  It’s an excerpt/summary of a book of the same name.  I don’t recall when I first ran across the article, but I bookmarked it under my “read this later” folder, because it was too long to digest in a short 10 minute sitting.  Well, approximately 3 months later, I have finally returned and have read the entire article.  It was very good.  I don’t know what to do with my life yet, but I took great solace in reading Po Bronson express how others have gone about finding the answer to that question for themselves.

At any rate, I enjoyed the article so much I wanted to find out more about the author, so I meandered over to his web page, and read Po’s basic philosophy on writing.  He closes with the following paragraph:

“I think when a reader reads a whole book - which takes six to ten hours - that’s kind of a gift to the author. The gift of close, undivided attention. To who else do we listen so closely for eight straight hours? And when readers give that gift to me, I’m grateful for it.”

Amen to that.  When you consider that everyone has limitless choices available when it comes to reading material these days - it truly is a gift when someone chooses to spend time absorbing yours.

It is wonderful and good to believe that you were meant for better things - but don’t forget to take out the trash on Tuesday morning.  No matter how high your dreams or your aspirations, that is all they will be if you do not continue to maintain the mundane activities of the day-to-day.

Every week on Tuesday morning, our garbage is collected.  It is my job to get it out onto the curb.  I don’t like to do it.  But I have to.  I’ve contemplated not doing it (and even ‘missed’ it a couple of times, truly, on accident) - but it just doesn’t make sense to maintain that sort of pattern for long.  If I don’t take out my trash, I end up with a house full of garbage, and things start to stink, and it’s hard to accomplish anything when you’re dealing with banana peels and orange rinds from last Saturday.

Each day is full of lots of little activities that help keep the gears running smoothly in the great cogs of life.  If we didn’t take care of the mundane things, there’s no way we could ever move on to accomplishing the great things.  Here are a few activities that will (I promise) invite some Karma into your life and make it easier to hit some of your bigger goals:

• Empty the trash
• Call your mother
• Brush your teeth
• Empty the dishwasher
• Then fill it
• Make sure your car has enough oil … and anti-freeze
• Say hello to your neighbors
• Bake cookies, and share them
• Read a good book, with no motive other than to be entertained
• Wake up early
• Eat breakfast … slowly
• Buy a comic book subscription for your son, and read it with him each month
• Buy flowers for your wife
• Try ice cream with chocolate syrup and rice krispies sprinkled on top (It’s amazing, I promise)
• Don’t wait until you need to sell your house to fix all of the things wrong with it
• Clean your office first, then respond to your Email
• Walk the dog
• Play tickle-monster with your 5 year old
• Put your shoes away and hang up your jacket
• Save some money for a rainy day
• Don’t convince yourself that a 42in. plasma TV is necessary to shield you from a rain storm
• Sweep the garage
• Go to bed early

Establish good patterns for how the 80% of your time that is on auto-pilot will conduct itself.  Then, utilize the remaining 20% of your time, unfettered, to achieve your higher goals.

One of the blogs I enjoy reading when I have time is www.betterexplained.com.  The guy there is a math genius, most of what he talks about is over my head.  But what I appreciate is that he’s taking the time to try and explain stuff in a way that I would understand.  A while back he posted this about developing a sense of scale.  It’s a great article, but this blog post is about something he mentioned in passing in his article:

“Fun and interesting: occupy a geek for hours by asking how many TIE fighters would be needed to take out the Starship Enterprise.”

Well, that’s just too interesting of a question to go unanswered.  I don’t have the time to actually figure out how many TIE fighters would be needed to take out the Starship Enterprise - so I have to go with my gut on this one.  I think it would take around 463 TIE fighters to take out the Starship Enterprise.  The important thing to take away from this is that the TIE fighters *would* take out the Enterprise.  Don’t get me wrong - I’m a fan of the Star Trek multiverse.  However, on some deep level I just know that if the two worlds were to ever collide, Jedi’s with the Force would waste the crew of the Enterprise with their phasers.  The ability to beam around to different places would definitely be an advantage to the Trekkies, though.  Why didn’t the Star Wars universe ever think of that?!  I guess it’s because too much power makes a hero uninteresting over time.  Take Superman, for example - how many times can you take a storyline that involves the arch-nemesis being the same thing over and over: a green rock from some other planet.  Wolverine is a borderline almost-too-powerful superhero, since he can heal from just about anything.  But that’s what keeps you coming back for more in his case, you never know for sure whether he’ll heal from whatever wounded him.

Sorry, I digress.  Back to the question at hand - Star Wars would win over Star Trek, ’nuff said.  It’d be cool to see a Wookie versus Klingon match, though - that might be a toss-up.