Post Dalai Lama WTF

This is the first email I read after leaving yesterday’s talk by the Dalai Lama in Maribor. There’s voodoo at play here that I just can’t put my finger on.

dedo revitalized

I’ve been busy in the after-hours helping TheWife(tm) and TheSisterInLaw(tm) get their show on the e-road. Crawling through catacombs, experiencing ruins on a regular basis. Very cool stuff for a simple Canadian boy. I love what they do and it was an honor and a thrill to hash out a simple WordPress installation for them. The site still has a long way to go but looking at it gives me the sense that I should have chosen a different career path.

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This just in …

“Nostalgia is good when kept in reasonable doses. i know people who never managed to break away from the past and more or less live the same lifestyle. good times, but you have to move on.”

Copied verbatim from Skype to living memory. I love the people I meet.

The Curse of Global

I’ve been ordering flowers online from the same home-town shop for about 10 years now. They’re fantastic and the results always bring a smile to my “ladies back home.” Yesterday, I was a bit surprised to find that they had introduced Youtube-style regional content blocking when I hopped on to buy some Mother’s Day flowers.  Like I said, they always managed to provide excellent bang-for-the-buck so I had no problem leaving the final choice to their discretion. “I’ll pay max $XX; you just take care of the arrangement and delivery.”

I’ve been thinking a little bit about this. It’s actually the first time where I was restricted from shopping online based on where I live. I’ve seen specific products blocked; RedBull was banned in France for example causing stress on a previous-life product and the Android market is full of stupidity in this regard; I’ve however never seen entire sites blocked. I’m hurt.

Regardless of whether or not this was intentional (and I’m inclined to believe it wasn’t), I’m just worried about how this sort of thing will evolve. Is the internet really contracting into a group of protected cells? I certainly hope not.

D

Hey mimovrste.com!

$( function() { $( "#searchmainform" ).focus(); } );

Or something like that.

Shut up. Be happy.

Let me prefix this post by saying that generally I agree with what’s to follow. Rules are rules and such. Where I disagree is the general disdain and (apparent) inability for those with the authority to communicate with the people who, duh, pay for their right to be so condescending.

[Updates below.]

A few years back I took the liberty –as those with a capitalist slant are prone to do –to start a sole proprietorship (SP) in Slovenia. The process was poop simple: head over to the tax office, provide the necessary ingredients, set up a bank account and voila!, you’re good to go. The only odd point I encountered was that they wouldn’t accept my ever-so-English sounding “Elements” as a name. I sarcastically substituted the s with an i and was done with that xenophobic argument. I don’t earn a lot of money through the SP; enough to basically pay the (ever increasing) taxes and costs of running the business itself with the taxes involuntarily directed to the local mayor’s office –the lower case m is intentional –I digress for a later rant. Anyhow, I could do with a bit more money through the SP, but hey, it’s something.

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Man is a giddy thing

Actually spent the time to “google” the lyrics to a song I’ve had on rotation for the better part of the past year.

Amazing.

Love it will not betray you, dismay, or enslave you.
It will set you free.
Be more like the man you were made to be.
There is a design, an alignment to cry, of my heart to see.
The beauty of love as it was made to be.

Noted as possibly the best lyric ever.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1PpeDRfxp4

Gory Gory

To the project managers and agencies who insist on making promises that no small army could tackle:

Ebeans

Just spent the day converting a performance-dogged application from the Java Persistence API to Ebeans. If you happen to be working in a tight environment (bytes & cycles), it would be worth your while to give Ebeans a try. Despite the documentation/site being a bit on the crappy side, getting into the “flow” took me only about an hour. The app now flies (JPA can suck it) and the code is super clean.

Now I’m just wondering if I should scrap my much loved factory strategy. Who needs MyEntityFactory.listStuff() when Ebeans.find( Entity.class ).findList() is available?

Well, I’m a skeptic. Factories stay.

It’s been a while Gramps.

The thing is — for what is probably a typical Canadian situation where family distribution is measured in hours, even days — my grandparents were the happy glue of the family. We’d only have the larger get-togethers on special occasions; Christmas being the main event. If it wasn’t for Nick & Vera driving the course between their six children, I’m certain we would have lost touch. We certainly wouldn’t have a sense of “family.”
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