All Things Patrick - Working Hard to be Lazy!

People keep asking me about Chicago and if it was any good. It was good & I've been working on a blog post, but I've not had time to finish it... So for now I'll just post a link to Terry Chay's closing keynote speech.

http://lavalantern.org/wwfm_blog/?p=272

Also, Paul Reinheimer has video up from the Dutch PHP Conference at http://blog.preinheimer.com/.

For those that aren't familiar with Pirate Bay, it provides links to lots and lots of torrents, both legal and illegal... Well, at least illegal in certain places in the world. Where Pirate Bay exists Copyright Law does not apply to software and is therefore operating legally according to it's local laws.

Pirate Bay has recently been dealing with several lawyers (yet again). More details can be found in the blog post Pirate Bay IP Addresses Assigned to Prosecution Lawyers.

I'm sorry for waiting so long to type this up. I've been thinking about this for a while and something that happened this weekend prompted me to sit down and type.

Recently I was able to talk to an old high school friend of mine. We discussed what we'd been up to since the last time we'd talked and while it lasted longer than it should have (got to love questions for detail and then complaints about the discussion lasting too long ;)) we discovered that both of us had been going through some crap at about the same time. He thought my ordeal was worse, but on the flip side I wouldn't want his troubles.

The question he asked of me though was, did you ask God why you were going through all of that. As Phillipe [Matthew Broderick] said in Ladyhawke, ...the truth is I talk to God all the time.... On the other side of that I never asked about my ordeal - the part that bothered me wasn't necessarily getting fired, it was that someone I trusted stabbed me in the back due to their insecurity about their job. Either it was my fault for being too trusting (this isn't the first time something similar has happened) or God was simply reminding me that people are human.

However, I think what my friend was more worried about has been my erratic career. I think the best thing my consulting career has taught me thus far is that no job is permanent. And looking back to several times when my dad was worried about his own job, even government jobs are not secure. Plus, I'm not sure that my goal has ever been to have a safe, secure, permanent job so it's not been something I've worried about.

We should all be familiar with the basic principal of the circle of life. We're born, we consume, we die, and are consumed. Everything in nature has it's part to play in the circle of life.

If you've not seen the news yet, Oracle is buying Sun for 10 cents a share more than IBM's final offer (Oracle Agrees to Acquire Sun Microsystems). And if you're really lagging in tech news, MySQL was purchased by Sun a while ago.

Many people were worried about Sun's purchase of MySQL and what that would mean. MySQL is an open source database and is in use all over the internet. I was somewhat worried about where they might decide to push the commercial product as that somewhat leads the open source project.

I'm thinking Oracle is primarily purchasing Sun for their hardware, not for MySQL - MySQL is just a bonus. However, as someone else pointed out, Oracle hasn't really been making anything new. Oracle has been buying out companies that make great 3rd party apps for Oracle, repackaging it with the Oracle brand, and selling as is - bugs and all.

I knew VLC was great for playing video files, especially those files I hadn't been able to play using other players... & it's even cross-platform! What I hadn't paid attention to before was it's ability to stream videos.

My friend, Craig Fowler (aka ToreadorVampire), recently ran me through the process rather quickly... I didn't have much time and he didn't have anything really written up... It was a last minute discussion over IM and I thought it could help to at least get people pointed in the right direction.

There is some documentation up at videolan.org (Streaming HowTo/VLM - VideoLAN Wiki) that shows how to set VLC up to do the streaming, talks about the HTTP interface, etc, but isn't an instant answer.

I got my Mini Cooper last October (about 4 months ago). While I thought I realized before getting one that they were an enthusiast car, apparently I had no idea...

Sure, growing up we went through a couple of VW Vanagons and we'd get a wave every once in a while when we were out on vacation... In almost any car driving down back roads running into the occasional farmer will yield a wave or a hat off. The only other recognition I think I've gotten from other people as I'm driving down the road is when I had my really sad and pathetic '95 Saturn S-1 - people had a tendancy to give me the finger <sarcasm>telling me I was #1</sarcasm>.

I think about 80% of the other Mini Cooper drivers I've come across have waved or nodded at me... After realizing it wasn't because they thought they knew me, I've started waving back. I've not waved at people since... well, as a kid in the back of the Vanagon when I'd also pump my arm at tractor trailer rigs to get them to blow their horns.

Some people just have way too much time on their hands...

Somebody posted a link in IRC to this very long screenshot of the Bohemian Rhapsody with each user posting a single line... Geeze, the things that take talent and social engineering these days...

Quick details:

• Offer ends on Friday 13th February (2009).
• 100% of the proceeds from this sale will be donated to victims of the recent Australian bushfires.
• Choose any 5 books (in PDF format) and pay $29.95 USD.

A friend of mine just sent me an email today with the subject line of SitePoint 5 for 1 Bushfire Relief Sale and all the body contained was the link http://5for1.aws.sitepoint.com/. Copy/pasting the link into firefox dropped me at a page showing a fireman giving a koala a drink of water - how cute. Scrolling farther down the page past the form for selecting the PDFs you want I found the Why is SitePoint doing this? section and I'm stunned! Wow! Over 170 dead, 5000 now homeless... I hope my friends in Australia are all ok.

So yesterday morning I tuned in to EVE-Radio (live radio stream) to listen to some music and maybe hear some updates on the Alliance Tournament. I was not prepared for what I heard instead...

I logged in just as FunkyBacon had started talking about what has to be the biggest news in EVE-Online history. It's even bigger news than the Peak Concurrent User record of over 47,000 users (achieved Jan 12, 2009) and bigger than the currently ongoing Alliance Tournament.