the frig blig

Where the Hell is Matt? (2008) from Matthew Harding on Vimeo.

This link was posted on Josh’s blog and it’s just so sweet I had to post it here on the Blig.

Two images from an alley, yesterday in Pioneer Square:

Crow wants to know: What makes my country think it’s better than all the other countries?
Crow wants to know: Why does my country invade other countries on a regular basis?

Frog rolled his big yellow eyes, finally letting them focus on a point an inch in front of Crow’s beak. And he said:

“It’s like this, Crow. Cuz we live inside of these borders we’re all right. Cuz them other folk live inside of those other borders they’re evil.

Everybody knows it is most honorable to destroy evil.”

Frog started hopping back and forth on his legs as he warmed up.

“If you get hurt while destroying evil we will give you a precious purple medal you can wear with pride, and everyone will know you’re a hero. And if we kill more of them than they kill of us, we get more points…and we win! The more we win, the better we look, the better we feel and the better we ARE. Stronger, bigger and sweeter than we are now!”

Crow cocked his head and watched Frog jumping up and down croaking “Brighter brights! Whiter whites!” and spat out Caw! Caw! Caw!* and with a flutter of black wings he was gone.

* Translation: ‘What — it’s not about the oil?’

I updated the sqlver utility (available on the Bamboo utilities page) to detect versions up to Sqlserver 2008; the display format is also more human-friendly than before. Current version is 1.1.

Before:
After:

I run Windows XP in a Vmware Server VM on an Ubuntu workstation in my workplace cubicle. Every Monday when I come in I routinely reboot the XP machine in order to free up memory, which invariably will have crept up to > 1G used after a week of running time. I’m not sure if the leak is caused by my six instances of perfmon which I use to monitor server resource utilization, or by some other app which I use every day* — I never have been able to pinpoint the culprit, and learned to live with the workaround of weekly reboots. This is not a bad thing for a Windows machine, according to many IT folks.

So anyway I installed SP3 for XP a couple of weeks ago, and lo and behold (sic) — the most amazing unexpected thing resulted — the memory leak disappeared! I have now been running the same instance of XP for 11 days and memory utilization is only 667M.

Have to congratulate Microsoft on this quiet little bug fix. (Although how long did customers wait between the release of SP2 and SP3?)

* Groupwise, AD Users & Computers, cmd, errlook, taskmgr, SQL Management Studio

One of my favorite comedians George Carlin died last night. I used to watch him on Rowan & Martin when I was a kid and he always cracked me up.

He gained notoriety in the early 1970s for his ‘Seven Words You Can’t Say on TV’ routine. George was not afraid of controversy, of having unpopular opinions or of speaking them. He enlarged his audience with those tactics and made them think.

Lots of people are bold; few were as funny and observant and had as much fun playing with words as Carlin. He got cranky and mean in his later years, but was still an interesting character.

Dang, what’s that up there on the roof, looks kinda like a frisbee?

Right on time, the Fremont Fair 2008 solstice celebration welcomed the start of summer with, among other traditional and nontraditional activities, the art car outdoor gallery. My fav was CHEWBRU from Kansas, a truly impressive presentation of dental obsession and paranoia. This photo shows the top of the car.

Saw this hiking the Cedar Butte trail a few weeks ago. The owner kept out of sight however.

Is here. Read it and leap.