I spent some time at UNC Hospitals today for some GI appointments I’d scheduled. Most of the time was spent waiting. I had hours today to do some thinking and/or blogging, so that’s what I did.

I watched a spontaneous conversation occur between an elderly gentleman in a wheelchair and a young woman sitting next to him. She knew all about the cast he was wearing, because she had had one just like it. They seemed to have little else in common: different races, different ages, different genders. But after five minutes, they could’ve been best of friends.

It was a highlight to see that in a hospital, what I usually consider to be a dreary setting.

I saw this photo in the January edition of National Geographic magazine. It’s from an ad for a popular asthma medication sold by a large pharmeceutical company (I won’t mention names, but it rhymes with “mirk”).
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My parents, aunts and uncles, and grandmother, hopped a plane this morning on their way to Ireland. My 93-years-young paternal grandmother Ann (nee Smith) wanted to see her father’s ancestral home. So the family made a trip of it.

We didn’t go because of lack of finances, which is unfortunate. But I did get the chance to turn my father into a leprechaun before he left. I’m hoping for some of the Luck of the Irish will keep the upcoming Photoshop Wars on the friendly side.

I hope everyone has a great time in the Old Country.

I posted how I read Doc because he and I have the same interests. Well, that’s wrong. I read Doc because he’s smart as hell.

Three years ago, he got a hunch about where the PVR is going. And I know how to get it there.

And you may find yourself living in a shotgun shack
And you may find yourself in another part of the world
And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile
And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife
And you may ask yourself-Well…How did I get here?

Letting the days go by/let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by/water flowing underground
Into the blue again/after the money’s gone
Once in a lifetime/water flowing underground.

And you may ask yourself
How do I work this?
And you may ask yourself
Where is that large automobile?
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful house!
And you may tell yourself
This is not my beautiful wife!
Letting the days go by/let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by/water flowing underground
Into the blue again/after the money’s gone
Once in a lifetime/water flowing underground.

Same as it ever was…Same as it ever was…Same as it ever was…
Same as it ever was…Same as it ever was…Same as it ever was…
Same as it ever was…Same as it ever was…

Water dissolving…and water removing
There is water at the bottom of the ocean
Carry the water at the bottom of the ocean
Remove the water at the bottom of the ocean!

Letting the days go by/let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by/water flowing underground
Into the blue again/in the silent water
Under the rocks and stones/there is water underground.

Letting the days go by/let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by/water flowing underground
Into the blue again/after the money’s gone
Once in a lifetime/water flowing underground.

And you may ask yourself
What is that beautiful house?
And you may ask yourself
Where does that highway go?
And you may ask yourself
Am I right?…Am I wrong?
And you may tell yourself
MY GOD!…WHAT HAVE I DONE?

Letting the days go by/let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by/water flowing underground
Into the blue again/in the silent water
Under the rocks and stones/there is water underground.

Letting the days go by/let the water hold me down
Letting the days go by/water flowing underground
Into the blue again/after the money’s gone
Once in a lifetime/water flowing underground.

Same as it ever was…Same as it ever was…Same as it ever was…
Same as it ever was…Same as it ever was…Same as it ever was…
Same as it ever was…Same as it ever was…

A commuter was tailgating me on my way to work this morning. Got me thinking.
How many people live their life based on what they see in the rear-view mirror? How many people are in a rush to nowhere simply because of the herd mentality pushing them there?

How many people ever look around in traffic and wonder how they got there?

I feel the need to reconnect with the woods this morning, so we’re going hiking in Umstead State Park. Hallie will ride along in the backpack.

The sunny, mid-60’s day expected here is helping drive us outdoors.

Got a busy, but fun day planned once we get back.

I’m loving the new gallery script I’m using called Singapore. It really looks stylish, and most importantly, it works great for posting lots of pictures quickly. I needed a script which is smart enough to work with pictures I dumped into directories. Singapore is great for this.

My two gripes with it: its slow speed and lack of database support. Speed isn’t really Singapore’s fault, since it relies on external apps to resize the thumbnails. And database support would be great for image captions.

I figured out where the slowdown is for thumbnails, too. I’m using ImageMagick to resize my images. ImageMagick produces high-quality thumbnails at the expense of speed. I could use GD, but thumbnails generated by GD are crappy.

Anyhow, ImageMagick’s convert utility spends its time shrinking a 1500×3000-ish pixel image down to 100×200-ish size. Those it uses for its gallery indices, which is fine.

The REAL slowdown is when you view an image at its largest size. While convert can spit out the larger resized image fairly quickly, there are five tiny (50×100) thumbnails at the top of this page. Each tiny thumbnail also spawns a convert process, bringing the server to a crawl.

I’ve decided the tiny thumbnails are redundant, since the galley index thumbnails (the 100×200 ones) should be more than adequate for this page. Since they’ve already been generated, the time it takes to view images should speed up by a factor of five. Now we’re talking!

I’ll patch the PHP code tomorrow and offer my patch to anyone who cares to ask. This should also give me a good excuse to dig into PHP.

Try clicking around Hallie’s gallery to see what I mean.

So the Smurfs play Dook today, showing on ESPN. I don’t have cable because I don’t want to pay $30 for 30 channels when all I want is one. This is called “tiering” and its big sux.

Back in the day when cable was getting started, the decoder boxes used for premium channels were dumb as bricks. The circuitry was only capable of turning on blocks of channels instead of individual ones.

All that’s changed now that digital cable is here. There is no longer any technical reason why a cable subscriber can’t pay for one or two channels of his choice.

Instead, we have tiers artifically inflating the importance of things like “The Grass Channel” and whatnot. Advertisers get roped into using these tier numbers as proof of who is watching, when it isn’t the case.

In a perfect world, I could pay for the three or four channels which really appeal to me and leave the rest to rot. In a better world, I could pick the shows carried on these channels and only pay for them. These would get streamed to my home media server, just like TiVo.

I’ve been poking into systems such as konspire to do this, but so far its a lonely system. One of my weekend projects is to package kast into some Red Hat packages in an effort to get it more widely used.

Media will work a lot differently, once I have my way!