Chaos Server

The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems. - Homer Simpson The internet has broken conferences. My friends have been going to PAX for countless years and I have never been able to attend because I've been otherwise indisposed (in Turkey, in England, in Korea, etc). For the first year I'm going to go and I am very excited about this. Different sets of my friends have a habit of going to Anime Expo, Otacon and PAX. My budget doesn't let me go to all of things, especially taking Mrs. Chaos. So the idea is to figure out which of the conferences Mrs.Chaos likes the most and just go to that one. A couple of years ago we took her to Anime Expo in Los Angeles and I think she had an okay time. The biggest challenge for her to deal with was the complete and utter indecisiveness of my friends. So we would be walking around unsure where to eat and everyone would confirm they were hungry, but no one would want to make a decision or express a preference, "Yea...

Gene Roddenberry always talked about how amazing humans were, because we could do amazing things when we worked together. He was right. - Wil Wheaton My experiment to replace my home laptop with my iPad is not going all that well. I find myself constantly reaching for my real computer for all sorts of needs. Even writing this, what I really wanted to was super-impose the two images to create a single image. How? What photo editing software on my iPad should I use? I tried doing it in iPhoto, but that's not really the point of iPhoto. So in the end I shrugged my shoulders, cropped it and just left it as two separate photos. Earlier this week I was using the iPad around the house and made a purchase (or some such) online and got back a confirmation and though, "I would really like to save that." I took a screen capture (power+home) and so I have an image of it. Not that great a solution, is it? Still I know that there is this AirPrint thing and that I can print to...

What would be the point of living if we didn't let life change us? - Mr. Carson (Downton Abbey) I was going to write up a comment about how annoying the world is when automation keeps people from talking to solve simple problems, but as I was scanning through my list of things that jotted down to write about I noticed that they are almost all negative and I thought "I am not a negative person!  I am a very happy person who loves the world.  Why are all my notes here negative griping about the kids these days!"  Then I saw a picture of Travel Mutt and my heart melted a little bit. A lot of people have a childhood stuffed animal or blanket that they grew to love.  I had a childhood stuffed dragon named "Sneezy" I think I got when I was born.  It was sometime very early.  Sneezy had a long neck and long tail and as a baby I took to twisting the head and twisting the tail.  Slowly this caused the joints to loose all their padding so that his head and...

You lie awake at night worrying about what is that which will disrupt your business model - Randall Stephenson I have to admin that I'm impressed in all sorts of ways with ATT.  I bought my very first phone from ATT Wireless which became Cingular which became ATT.  I held that original "ATT Wireless" SIM all the way through my iPhone 3G.  It mildly confused Apple geniuses at one point when I went in for repair and they told me they thought I had a knock-off SIM card.  No - sorry, it's just really old school. As an old-school iPhone owner I am blessed grandfathered into the $30/unlimited plan.  I run about 2GB/month, so my only other option would be the $30/3GB plan which obviously makes no sense.  Even Mrs.Chaos is grandmothered in to her $25/2GB plan.  At her previous job she had no WiFi, and needed all that data.  Now that she is WiFi at home and WiFi at school she's running pretty low data rates. ATT just rolled out the new "family data pl...

I hope that another part of the legacy will be that the mission has been a source of inspiration for young people, encouraging them to pursue careers in science and engineering and technology. - Steve Squyres In January 2004, I was in Europe with my brother for a couple of weeks and I was complete mesmerized by CNN International as it reported on Spirit on Opportunity. We were in Greece and there was all that great history to see, but it seemed difficult to impress upon people that we had put ROBOTS ON MARS. Now, less than a decade later, it seems almost pedestrian to PUT A ROBOT ON MARS! How did the world learn about the success of the landing? The Curiosity rover tweeted it, complete with internet meme and hashtag: @MarsCuriosity "I'm safely on the surface of Mars. GALE CRATER I AM IN YOU!!! #MSL" I have to admit it makes me sad how much focus we have on robotic exploration over human exploration. As much as we NASA is trying to anthropomorphize our little spac...

In programming, as in everything else, to be in error is to be reborn. - Alan J. Perlis Though great effort I've achieved a working relationship with the Apple Podcast app. My old system of working with Podcasts remains slightly better than the new way I have to interact with them, but I drink the Apple Kool-Aid, even when I need to choke it down. That's what Apple aims for, right? A slightly worse user experience? When I first installed Podcast and just let it go to town importing all my postcasts, subscribing and autodownloading it completely broke background sync services. The first consequence of that was my device could not download anything. Any download would get put in the background sync queue and never download. Podcasts wouldn't download. Apps wouldn't download. WiFi Sync never activated either. The worst part was the sync services would never let the phone go to sleepy mode. So the battery would die after about 6 hours. It took a while to correla...