It is a great failing to dream of power without making an effort.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!!!

We’ve already done the
Turkey Trot
(a four miler from the zoo to the Rose Garden and back)
and I’ve mashed the potatoes for Thanksgiving day dinner at Grandma’s.
Pictures will be up tonight.

Don’t eat too much.

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I came home from work early so I could sit at my computer and just type without the distractions of the work place.
I was sitting, typing when I heard a “pop”.
Sounded like a pop gun.
Odd. I looked around. I looked outside the window.
Nothing there.
Well, back to work.

A few minutes later, the computer started going “found new hardware”, “hardware disconnected”, “found new hardware”, “hardware disconnected” with beeps and bells and the little popup from the toolbar.
I was scratching my head over this when I noticed smoke.
Smoke!!
White billowy smoke coming out of the back of the PC chassis!!
ACK!!!
I jump under the table and unplug the computer.

I’m not sure exactly what happened.
The “pop” could have been one of the
much discussed reports of
bad capacitors on motherboards
and some of the capacitor are
bulging and leaking
.
But the smoke came from my ATI All-In-Wonder card
melting itself into it’s AGP socket
.
Serious short circuilt.

Well, off to get a new motherboard.
Look out of you have a motherboard from 2002.

The excitement in the house this week was that my wife’s purse was stolen. Well, actually, she left it behind at a yogurt store and when she came back, it was lying in the parking lot sans money and ID.
So, an evening busy phoning credit card companies. And there was a lot of cash in the purse because she’d just started Christmas shopping and she had the Christmas money in transit.

Well, someone pointed out that that particular yogurt shop has a security camera. My wife talked to the store owner (who happened to not know of the theft or the visit by the police) and viewed the tape from the day before.

There, caught on tape wasthe girl and the counter and her friends (who happened to be hanging out in the shop) noticing the purse, picking it up, going through it and otherwise cleaning it out. Can’t argue with that. They could deny everything if there was no camera, but, once you see the video, there is not much to deny.

And these are young, local kids who probably took advantage of a situation. But I mentioned the money above because it was enough money to make it a felony. One of the girl’s is 18 and might end up doing time. A bad decision leading to a lot of consequences.

Clay Shirky
clearly describes the rise of
ol’ style AI
in his article
The Semantic Web, Syllogism, and Worldview
. A quotation:

After 50 years of work, the performance of machines designed to think about the world the way humans do has remained, to put it politely, sub-optimal. The Semantic Web sets out to address this by reversing the problem. Since it’s hard to make machines think about the world, the new goal is to describe the world in ways that are easy for machines to think about.

I’ve done my
own searching
for a new style of knowledge storage and processing
but the solution for artificial intelligence (little “a”, little “i”) is still illusive.
The
Semantic Web
is an interesting implementation of
frame based/ontology AI
using the web but it does not bring anything more to the cognition party
than any of the previous several decades of AI work.

Meta-data is an interesting addition to the web and having a
standard way
to navigate the structured meta-data makes new things possible,
but computers “thinking” about information on the web is still
a ways off.

At the age when we discover that fairies don’t exist, we must become fairies or good genies ourselves, and make the incredible happen.

You are glucose. People feed off of you. You are sweet, caring, and a source of energy for everyone around you.

You can inspire others with your creativity and depth, and you can keep people alive when in times of famine.

People love you…or at least the way you taste.

I saw an early sign of Christmas today — my first truck carrying a load of cut Christmas trees. Can’t be long now.

Ths week’s community newspaper came and I purused
the “Public Safety” section to see what the miscreants
were up to in our neigborhood.

It looks like someone is having too much fun with
these police reports.
I

listed a few

from the last weeks but here are some, uneditted
and just as they appeared in the newspaper

[with a few comments from me added]

.
I am not making this up.

• A woman reported missing by her husband
  came home. She was out shopping.
• A man contacted at Westlake Park was not smoking marijuana as
  origionally reported, just plain ol’ ordinary cigarettes.
• A Tri-Met bus driver called police to
  report the man who helped him fix the fare
  box using an eight-inch hunting knife
  as “suspicious”.
  Reports suggested the driver did not
  consider the man threatening.
  
  [Just your normal, everyday citizen
  helping out. --MB]
  
• Police took a call from a man claiming he
  came home to find 10 people camped out in
  his house.
  The man retracted his story after taking
  his medication and realizing he’d
  imagined the whole thing.
  
  [This happens to me all the time. --MB]
  
• 
  [This is exactly as it appears in
  the paper. --MB]
  
  A Dumpster fire was reported at the
  Luscher Farm dog park.
  The Dumpster is provided for the disposal
  of … ew, gross.

I was crusing Amazon for CDs when I ran across a
“free download”
of the hit track from
Three Days Grace
.

I thought I’d give it a try. Download… download. Drag and drop onto Windows Media Player. What ho? A popup saying need to get an “identification” and a
licence for my for-free music track. I press “yes” and “yes” and here I sit, 10 minutes later while Media Player sits saying “Aquiring license…”.

This is not an improvement. I just sat through a day of seminars on how
companies can do what they know how to do without really addressing
the customers needs or priorities. For me, the spontanious wish to listen
to this song is passed and they’ve missed their opportunity.

They still don’t get it.

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The new master bath is finally usable and it’s time to move in. The
remodel
has taken forever– 9 months total!!

My new motto is:
Never remodel — just buy a new house.

Our local community newspaper prints a “public
safety” section which lists the week’s DUIs,
car breakins and other police incidents.
Well, it’s clear that police work is not all
car chases and high tension stake outs from
these police incidents I’ve collected the last three weeks:

• Police helped a woman retrieve her
  keys from underneath the seat in her car.
• A concerned citizen reported a man on the
  sidewalk holding his head.
  Police reponded and found the man talking
  on a cell phone.
• An employee of the Indoor Tennis Center
  called to report a leaky toilet in the men’s room.
• Two people found laying on the railroad
  tracks near Summit Driver were told not
  to do such things.
• Reports of a glowing orange apparition in the
  dog park on Stafford proved to be unfounded –
  just a light held by a dog walker.
• The intoxicated driver reported at
  Lakeridge High School was actually
  a person learning how to drive.

As
Dave Barry
would say, I’m not making this up.

There is no remedy for love but to love more.

Just got back from seeing the

.
If you are a Matrix fan, you’ll probably go see it no matter
what anyone says.
If you are not a Matrix fan, you probably won’t see it unless
you are married to or otherwise attached to a Matrix fan.
Any way it happens, you will be disappointed.

Today is being spent doing tasks around the house. The remodel is almost done so I’m doing finish work (sealing the tile, chalking, adding fasteners for tile access panels) and any time left over will be spent moving into te new area. My family has it’s priorities — the computers move first.

Then there are regular home tasks: snaking the downstairs shower, mowing the lawn for the last time this year, raking leaves. And the kids want to see the new Matrix movie tonight.

Can’t say I’m not alive.

Krispy Kream
finally came to Portland. With much fanfare, one opened on the east side of town.
I heard stories of lines of cars around the block.
Then, about two months ago, they opened one on the west side of town.
This one is in the middle of the
Silicon Forest
– lots of tech people to suck up those donuts.

I can see the bright neon lights from the highway as I drive by twice a day.
But I don’t see lines of cars or a packed parking lot.
I see a donut shop that you can walk into and get a dozen
without waiting.
I’m not sure if it’s that Portlanders are not attuned to donuts
or whether the thrill of the Krispy magic is passing.

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Made it through Halloween.
There weren’t as many trick-or-treaters as there usually are — I don’t know if the cold weather kept them away or if there are fewer little kids this year.
I took
pictures
of some of the ones who did come to our door.

But there are teenagers around. We woke up to find that someone
(or, more likely a groups of someones)
had taken most of the carved pumpkins off the porches up and
down the street and smashed them.
The drive down the block was slippery.