Liz’ favorite commercial

McDonald’s Happy Meal Ad Cha Cha Slide (long version)

Liz’ favorite McDonald’s commercial. When it comes on the boys start yelling “Mommy, your commercial!”

DHL still sucks

Back in December I had an ordeal with DHL, and they think Russell Davies is at fault for not being there when DHL attempted to drop off his parcel.

buzzwords

The tech industry is overflowing with buzzwords. I’m not sure if other industries are the same, but I know I am inundated with buzzwords on a daily basis, sometimes to the point of exhaustion.

George Carlin, one of my favorite comedians, has his “Seven dirty words” so I figured I’d list the seven dirty buzzwords I can do without for quite some time.

1. platform
2. pluggable (plugins)
3. enterprise
4. scalability (scalable)
5. high availability
6. extensibility
7. architecture

If I never hear the above words again it wouldn’t bother me in the least. And you may notice I avoided the acronym hell that JEE (yes I’m using one of them) puts you through, that’s a much longer list.

Bank of America needs more space

Apparently, Bank of America needs to raise their fees in order to afford more space. That’s the only thing I can gather from this error. Maybe they should include a paypal link on the error page:

NetworkManager and WPA!

NetworkManager (0.7.0-0.6.7.svn3235) works with WPA security! That’s great news because every time I visited my in-laws I had to use a wired connection. I have been wanting to change their wireless to use WEP so I could connect more easily, but I don’t have to anymore. Kudos to the NetworkManager folks, you’ve made my laptop life that much easier.

xargs tip of the day

I use xargs a lot especially with find. Many times I want to pass the arguments as parameters to the command I’m trying to run with xargs usually somewhere in the middle. Today I found it

Time for an arbitrary example, this is completely made up to illustrate the point so don’t bother with “why are you using xargs for that comments”. So you want to find .png files that are different in /foobar/tmp and /tmp/.

cd /foobar/tmp; find . -name '*.png' | xargs -n 1 -I imagename diff imagename /tmp/imagename

The -I argument tells xargs to replace the string that follows -I in the command arguments with the values from standard input. This is totally cool, and beats the old way I did things which was to write a simple shell script and call that from xargs

There are many ways to do what I did above, but hopefully folks find this xargs tip useful.

Happy Birthday

Happy 1st Birthday, Iliana!

john.he.is

Vote Obama! McCain is NOT the right choice. He’s starting to actually make Bush sound smart which is pretty hard to do.

Terps beats Pack!

My alma mater, the University of Maryland, College Park beat the NC State Wolfpack this weekend 84-70 to go 6-3 in the ACC. Go TERPS!

My dad on “El Nuevo Dia” Puerto Rican newspaper

“El Nuevo Dia” interviewed my dad and his associates at their barber shop, the Washington Square Hair Salon on politics. All are staunch democrats and plan on voting for Hillary Clinton at Maryland’s primary on Tuesday. Being informed about politics and the importance of voting has always been one of the values my dad instilled in me. That is why today I find myself watching CNN for all of the primary races to see what is going on. The other thing I got from my dad is newspaper reading. While I get a lot of my news online now, I still find time to read the Sunday newspaper (and not just the comics and sports sections)

From left to right, the Boricuas Jesús Rodríguez (my dad), Ismael Rodríguez y José Morales, owners of the “Washington Square Hair Salon” barbershop in Washington, DC. Photo by Sandy Schaeffer.