CharmingGeek.net Funness

Some central Florida residents were outraged to find local stores selling bags of candy including a toy depicting a airliner crashing into one of two skyscrapers. The toys, each stamped with the number 9011 were purchased site-unseen by a distributer, however the import company that sold to the distributer claims to see nothing wrong with the toy at all. That’s really just moronic. I hope these guys see their business fall off very quickly.
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Oh my. These bags of candy were packaged under a name like “plastic swing toy” and it was said that the retailers didn’t see the toy because they were packed underneath similar packages containing a toy with a man swinging between the two buildings. A bearded and turbaned man. In context, is there any doubt that this toy was designed to honor Osama Bin Laden?
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I’m shocked! Shocked!

Wow! You guys are so awesome for still dropping by and leaving me little notes, even when I hadn’t posted for something like two weeks.
I’m in my new place now, and the cable/internet guy just left, so I’m online. I’ve got to get back to work (it’s so great to be able to walk home for lunch), but now that I’m all wired, I’ll write a bit later.

Yeah, I’ve been busy.
Here’s kinda what’s going on. I’ve been at work for a week now, and I’m a little overwhelmed. Anything going on around here that isn’t classified, I just don’t understand. That gets better, right?
Anyway, I’ll be cutting out early today so I can scoot back to Martin County and pick up my belongings. Tomorrow night I’ll be in my new home. Crazy. I’m pretty excited. I’ve never had a real, full-time job before, or my own place to live. I’m even going to have furniture and all here. Well, furniture anyway. There’s going to be a poster-sized shopping list on my refrigerator. Anyhow, things are coming along well.
Wow! A permanent address!
My office is also moving today. So Monday I can put in a request for some business cards. And you know what that means….
That’s right! I will soon be eligable to win free lunches!
-Brad Parker, Potential Lunch Winner

I got a really great job offer this week. It’s just not here. So that means I’ll be moving to the outskirts of DC within the next two weeks. Everything is feeling a little surreal. And I’m thinking to myself, how am I going to get a place small enough to make it look like I have furniture?
IKEA here I come!
That and I don’t think I’ll clean my room until I move out. This is a record for me. My the time I get out, I will have only been living in this room for a maximum of three weeks.
I think it’s going to rain.
So yeah, (I do have ADD.) I sent in a resume last Thursday and got the job offer on Tuesday. For some time, I’d been completely expecting the job offer to come that suddenly when I was not expecting it. But how do you plan for something to happen when you don’t expect it?
Verse of my life: Proverbs 16:9 “In his heart a man plans his course, but the LORD determines his steps.”
And just in case you forgot: Romans 8:28 “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”

This has been on my mind for a while. I just decided to look into it for myself.
Just in case you were wondering, this bunk about “i before e except after c” is useless. Even admitting the “except when sounding like ‘a'” rule (beige), there are plenty of exceptions. “Height” for example. So lets add this one, “except when followed by ‘gh’.” That’s pretty solid, there are no words in my dictionary file with the series of letters iegh. (Many of these ‘eigh’ words also fall under the ‘a sound’ exception, ie weight, eight.) Actually, this leaves a lot of exceptions that can be better dealt with.

• conterfeit
• feisty
• forfeit
• heifer
• their
• veil
• weird

This can all be covered if we accept that this rule only applies when words have the ‘ee’ or long e sound. (Which really limits its usefulness. But hey, let’s get somewhere.)
Of course, we also have to excuse foreign words. We also have to excuse any word where there’s a syllable break between the two letters. You’ll have to figure those out yourself. (deity, science)
Now let’s see where we are: “When having the long e sound, i before e except after c, before gh, part of a foreign word, or when spanning syllables.” Ouch. Okay, I can only get the core of that into a grep expression, so I have to sort out the pronunciation and origin exceptions myself.
grep [^c]ei[^{gh}] words.txt | more
Here’s a sampling of what’s left

• caffeine
• protein
• seize

Then on the other side, the rule still doesn’t say anything about the words included in the list above or those with a c, such as these.

• ancient
• conscience
• deceit
• efficient
• glacier
• species

And I’m not seeing a pattern there at all.

I finally bought that KVM switch. I ordered it from NewEgg.com, since the guys at Best Buy were being all anal about letting anybody into the computer section. So well, I saved about $40 that way. If you’re interested, this one comes out to be about $7 after shipping.
Last night I finished the last tweaks on my FreeBSD server. It now hosts three sites (all just used for testing) with PHP and MySQL support.
I could stand to learn a little more about MySQL server, though. I’m going to get a haircut.

I just paid my cell phone bill. I used 294 of my 300 minutes this month.
I WIN!!

I know I haven’t posted in a while. Gotta keep you guys coming back. There’s not a lot going on. Lately I’ve just been doing actual productive work. I put a few hours (most of them moonlit) into TheWaitingFan, a fan site for the best band ever, and a few more hours into MemBap.org for my dad’s church. I also turned my useless computer without a monitor into a FreeBSD server. So as soon as I get the SQL files copied over, that could be the new home of TheWaitingFan. It will definitely be used as a testing server, which could be really handy.
Anyway, FreeBSD is working out a lot better for me than Fedora, which was just…well questionable.
I’m going to get a haircut.

I want one of these and some acid washed jeans.

Well, the remote moved out with Allen. So it looks like I’ll be watching the Weather Channel all day.