Listening to today
Classical, Psuedo Classical,Operatic and Ambiance Techno

Tchaikovsky, 1812 Overture

Vivaldi, Violin Concerto in F Major RV269 "Autumn"

Presto, Salzburg Chamber Orchestra

A Ghaoth Andeas, Soundecor Recording Company

Puccini, La Boheme - Comic Waltz

Right Mindfulness, Chinmaya Duns

Beethoven, Symphony No. 5

Bach, Air on the String

3-2-1 Contact

For the last couple of weeks I've been involved with an old IBM main frame and its Relational Data Base Management System.

Two of our developers have been giving me introductions into these systems, and as I deal with these systems and these individuals, I reminiscently think of that 1980's show 3-2-1 Contact.

I loved that show...what an awesome way to get kids involved in science and discover their surrounding world.

I love that show and love what I am doing right now...even though it can be T-E-D-I-O-U-S!

For your viewing pleasure:

Some things I heard

I'd like to comment further on what Jason Whitlock said in an interview for the Today show.

Mr. Whitlock said something of the sorts as ..."Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton asked for forgiveness when they morally failed ..."

My question to Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson--both ministers of the faith that esteems reconciliation--have they first sought to forgive and set in place the steps toward reconciliation? Have they forgiven Don Imus?

If so, are the steps they are taking done so with the intent of reconciliation with Imus and others hurt?

I agree with Jason Whitlock

Please read entire article

COMMENTARY

Imus isn’t the real bad guy
Instead of wasting time on irrelevant shock jock, black leaders need to be fighting a growing gangster culture.

By JASON WHITLOCK - Columnist

Thank you, Don Imus. You’ve given us (black people) an excuse to avoid our real problem.

You’ve given Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson another opportunity to pretend that the old fight, which is now the safe and lucrative fight, is still the most important fight in our push for true economic and social equality.

You’ve given Vivian Stringer and Rutgers the chance to hold a nationally televised recruiting celebration expertly disguised as a news conference to respond to your poor attempt at humor.

Thank you, Don Imus. You extended Black History Month to April, and we can once again wallow in victimhood, protest like it’s 1965 and delude ourselves into believing that fixing your hatred is more necessary than eradicating our self-hatred.

The bigots win again....

For the complete story, click here

Haven't Blogged much

I've never been an avid blogger like those who blog every day and sometimes more than once a day. Sometimes I envy those people and other times I don't.

As to why I don't blog as much as I could...should...want to...well, mainly cause I guess I ain't got time. And then, there's the other side -- does what I blog about really mean much? Does it impact the readers? Should it impact my readers? Ah...doesn't matter I guess.

Well, today I am blogging not so my about why I haven't blogged, but rather to post the following tidbit of information my friend Darren has sent me. I find it quite fascinating. And I am an avid, and I do mean avid, proponent of the following behavior.

Here we go.

Taken from "Why Do Men Have Nipples?"...

*On the average, a fart is composed of about 59% nitrogen, 21% hydrogen, 9% carbon dioxide, 7% methane, and 4% oxygen. Less than 1% of its makeup is what makes it stink.

*The temperature of a fart at time of creation is 98.6F.

*Farts have been clocked at a speed of 10 feet per second.

*A person farts about a half a liter of farts a day.

*Women fart as much as men.

*The gas that makes farts stink is hydrogen sulfide. The more sulfur rich your diet, the more they will stink. Foods that cause this are beans, cabbage, cheese, soda, & eggs

*Most people fart about 14 times a day.

Smell you all later!

Long time friend...New blogger

Hello all, please welcome a good friend of mine who is new to blogging.

He's a former teacher now turned property management paper pusher; He's smart, funny and witty, and writes three different topical blogs. They are:

1. http://wewowr.blogspot.com/
I will be writing when I feel it's worth it. Hopefully you will think it's worth reading.

2. http://ripsbooks.blogspot.com/
rip's books

3. http://www.exercisingdemons.com/
Exercising demons -- Writing and Proofreading Tips

Check his blogs out when you have a chance.

Later.

And thanks.

SAD DAY FOR TECH GEEKS

John W. Backus, 82, Fortran Developer, Dies

By STEVE LOHR, The NY Times
Published: March 20, 2007

John W. Backus, who assembled and led the I.B.M. team that created Fortran, the first widely used programming language, which helped open the door to modern computing, died on Saturday at his home in Ashland, Ore. He was 82.

His daughter Karen Backus announced the death, saying the family did not know the cause, other than age.

Fortran, released in 1957, was “the turning point” in computer software, much as the microprocessor was a giant step forward in hardware, according to J.A.N. Lee, a leading computer historian.

Fortran changed the terms of communication between humans and computers, moving up a level to a language that was more comprehensible by humans. So Fortran, in computing vernacular, is considered the first successful higher-level language.

Mr. Backus and his youthful team, then all in their 20s and 30s, devised a programming language that resembled a combination of English shorthand and algebra. Fortran, short for Formula Translator, was very similar to the algebraic formulas that scientists and engineers used in their daily work. With some training, they were no longer dependent on a programming priesthood to translate their science and engineering problems into a language a computer would understand.

In an interview several years ago, Ken Thompson, who developed the Unix operating system at Bell Labs in 1969, observed that “95 percent of the people who programmed in the early years would never have done it without Fortran.”

He added: “It was a massive step.”

Fortran was also extremely efficient, running as fast as programs painstakingly hand-coded by the programming elite, who worked in arcane machine languages. This was a feat considered impossible before Fortran. It was achieved by the masterful design of the Fortran compiler, a program that captures the human intent of a program and recasts it in a way that a computer can process.

In the Fortran project, Mr. Backus tackled two fundamental problems in computing — how to make programming easier for humans, and how to structure the underlying code to make that possible. Mr. Backus continued to work on those challenges for much of his career, and he encouraged others as well.

“His contribution was immense, and it influenced the work of many, including me,” Frances Allen, a retired research fellow at I.B.M., said yesterday.

Mr. Backus was a bit of a maverick even as a teenager. He grew up in an affluent family in Wilmington, Del., the son of a stockbroker. He had a complicated, difficult relationship with his family, and he was a wayward student.

In a series of interviews in 2000 and 2001 in San Francisco, where he lived at the time, Mr. Backus recalled that his family had sent him to an exclusive private high school, the Hill School in Pennsylvania.

“The delight of that place was all the rules you could break,” he recalled.

After flunking out of the University of Virginia, Mr. Backus was drafted in 1943. But his scores on Army aptitude tests were so high that he was dispatched on government-financed programs to three universities, with his studies ranging from engineering to medicine.

After the war, Mr. Backus found his footing as a student at Columbia University and pursued an interest in mathematics, receiving his master’s degree in 1950. Shortly before he graduated, Mr. Backus wandered by the I.B.M. headquarters on Madison Avenue in New York, where one of its room-size electronic calculators was on display.

When a tour guide inquired, Mr. Backus mentioned that he was a graduate student in math; he was whisked upstairs and asked a series of questions Mr. Backus described as math “brain teasers.” It was an informal oral exam, with no recorded score.

He was hired on the spot. As what? “As a programmer,” Mr. Backus replied, shrugging. “That was the way it was done in those days.”

Back then, there was no field of computer science, no courses or schools. The first written reference to “software” as a computer term, as something distinct from hardware, did not come until 1958.

In 1953, frustrated by his experience of “hand-to-hand combat with the machine,” Mr. Backus was eager to somehow simplify programming. He wrote a brief note to his superior, asking to be allowed to head a research project with that goal. “I figured there had to be a better way,” he said.

Mr. Backus got approval and began hiring, one by one, until the team reached 10. It was an eclectic bunch that included a crystallographer, a cryptographer, a chess wizard, an employee on loan from United Aircraft, a researcher from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a young woman who joined the project straight out of Vassar College.

“They took anyone who seemed to have an aptitude for problem-solving skills — bridge players, chess players, even women,” Lois Haibt, the Vassar graduate, recalled in an interview in 2000.

Mr. Backus, colleagues said, managed the research team with a light hand. The hours were long but informal. Snowball fights relieved lengthy days of work in winter. I.B.M. had a system of rigid yearly performance reviews, which Mr. Backus deemed ill-suited for his programmers, so he ignored it. “We were the hackers of those days,” Richard Goldberg, a member of the Fortran team, recalled in an interview in 2000.

After Fortran, Mr. Backus developed, with Peter Naur, a Danish computer scientist, a notation for describing the structure of programming languages, much like grammar for natural languages. It became known as Backus-Naur form.

Later, Mr. Backus worked for years with a group at I.B.M. in an area called functional programming. The notion, Mr. Backus said, was to develop a system of programming that would focus more on describing the problem a person wanted the computer to solve and less on giving the computer step-by-step instructions.

“That field owes a lot to John Backus and his early efforts to promote it,” said Alex Aiken, a former researcher at I.B.M. who is now a professor at Stanford University.

In addition to his daughter Karen, of New York, Mr. Backus is survived by another daughter, Paula Backus, of Ashland, Ore.; and a brother, Cecil Backus, of Easton, Md.

His second wife, Barbara Stannard, died in 2004. His first marriage, to Marjorie Jamison, ended in divorce.

It was Mr. Backus who set the tone for the Fortran team. Yet if the style was informal, the work was intense, a four-year venture with no guarantee of success and many small setbacks along the way.

Innovation, Mr. Backus said, was a constant process of trial and error.

“You need the willingness to fail all the time,” he said. “You have to generate many ideas and then you have to work very hard only to discover that they don’t work. And you keep doing that over and over until you find one that does work.”

Click here for The Ny Times

Happy Birthday, me

Today, 31 years ago, at approximately 10:23 a.m., I sprouted my head and came into this world.

Here's to me and my birthday and the terrible head cold I'm suffering with.

Yippee! Ouch....

Happy

Its so nice to be here working in the county. It really is cool and find myself happy.

Even though it is only the second day, I like it. I know with time it will get busier, and that's okay...I'm really happy to be here.

If I were to sum up how I feel, I'd say I feel like a Regina Spektor song -- all over the place and happy and content.

Summer

Days of isolation
Hot, warm, sunny, weather

Fresh cut grass, sweet water aroma smell
Windows rolled down, sweat rolls down my cheek

Days of remembrance, take me to a place of isolation
Days of sovereign solitude, days free from pain

To remember those, what a joy...and...what pain

Mercy me, the grace that thou have for me

I remember the days of fresh cut grass, sweet water aroma smell
Windows rolled down, sweat rolling down my check

Days of youth-hood, not many cares or trouble...
Far from me today, far from me...today...

Thanks to Jeremiah for showing me this

I so dig her ...

Reminders

I glanced at a quick online ad today and it reminded me of sister. Although it wasn't her, it prompted me to google her name to see what would come up.

I found an article written about her death by a reporter at the RJ.

I read the article and think, "that's not my sister". Then again, yes, it is.

Here's the article:

Sunday, April 14, 2002
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal
COLUMN: John L. Smith

Questions linger on cause of death of renowned Las Vegas model Hill


Model Martie Hill was a genuine showstopper, the kind of stunning young woman whose face and figure could snarl traffic and make strong hearts flutter.

Her beauty was rivaled only by her determination to succeed as a model and, later, as an art broker. She worked in New York and Los Angeles but was most successful in Las Vegas, where for years her image was ubiquitous. As a teen-ager, she was a Las Vegan magazine cover girl and won a string of beauty contests from Miss Legs of Las Vegas to Miss Star Body to Miss English Leather. The jobs poured in, and she rarely passed up an opportunity.

Whether in television commercials or on billboards, Martie was everywhere.

"She was beautiful, smart, funny and very Christian when I knew her," former model Donna Baldwin recalls. Given Hill's drive, friends and family figured there wasn't anything their Martie couldn't do if she put her mind to it.

At 40, Hill still was modeling but concentrating more on art brokering and developing her own business. By all appearances, her life still held the limitless potential of her youth.

But instead of appearing on a marquee or in a list of successful businesswomen, Martie Hill was found dead last month down on Hoover Street in the middle of a neighborhood notorious for its sidewalk drug sales.

Her body was discovered March 20 wrapped in a blanket and placed in the passenger seat of her BMW 700 IL. Her arms were constrained in the blanket, and her shoes were missing. Her cell phone and purse were next to her.

The driver's seat was pushed back to accommodate a person much taller than Hill's 5 feet 4 inches.

North Las Vegas police studied the scene and surmised the obvious: that Hill died elsewhere, was rolled into a blanket and taken to Hoover Street. After a quick inquiry and a few interviews, a detective determined that the case was not a homicide, but a probable drug overdose.

Was Martie Hill really just another Las Vegas beauty gone bad?

Although a toxicology report is incomplete, informed sources say preliminary indications are that Hill died of a cocaine overdose. This surprises her brother, Paul Hill, and a friend, Cliff Behl, because they didn't know her to use cocaine. Friends say she took anxiety medication to relieve a panic disorder and occasionally used marijuana.

"We believe there's more to it than that," Paul Hill says. "Somebody placed her car over there hoping they would think it's just another druggie."

Says Behl, a former fiance, "Drugs? She was almost violently opposed to it."

In fact, no one interviewed for this column reports Hill ever using cocaine. At times a fitness fanatic and devout Christian, she simply wasn't much of a drug user.

"I'm absolutely shocked," longtime friend Paul Murphy says. "I think that would surprise anyone who knows her. It was just not the Martie Hill that I knew very well."

"Martie was just completely against hard drugs," says Kendra Crosby, a friend of six years. "She just felt no need for them."

They also wonder why police, who admittedly have plenty of homicide cases pending, only briefly questioned Hill's roommate, Jeff Loth. He had known Hill a short time and moved into her Lakes home March 1. My attempts to reach Loth were unsuccessful.

Michele Barnes roomed with Hill for nine years.

"She was loved by a lot of people, and she had the biggest heart," Barnes says. "She helped so many people, and she always tried to see the good in everybody. She was a friend to everyone."

What about hard drugs?

"Never," Barnes says.

At Hill's funeral, people from every strata of Las Vegas life assembled. The service overflowed with family and friends. Casino bosses sent flowers, and the outpouring of affection was overwhelming.

Afterward, those friends and family members were left with aching, unanswered questions about her death.

This is certain: There is a witness to her final moments. Someone she knew drove her body down to Hoover Street. That person also knew the neighborhood's reputation.

That doesn't necessarily add up to homicide, but it does add to the mystery surrounding the death of a Las Vegas showstopper.

John L. Smith's column appears Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. E-mail him at jsmith@reviewjournal.com or call him at 383-0295.

The feeling of ...

I don't mind being on crunch time. But I hate the feeling of being on crunch time while totally lost and frustrated.

Crunch time is good, unless of course you get too much of it. And if that be the case, then one of two things is happening, well maybe three:

1. you're a glutton for crunch time.
2. you're repeatedly forced into crunch time by work, family, life, etc...
3. you're a procrastinator ... and therefore, you suck!

I must admit that I am, at least for today, a combo of number 3 and 1. But now that I think of it, 1 and 3 are pretty darn similar.

Damn it...I'm a sucky glutton!


Waiting Anticipatively

There are some cool things brewing in the background. Once I find out if they are a go or no go, I'll let you know.

If you feel lead, please pray - although you don't know what it is - pray that it would happen if it be his will.


7 months

My lovely wife reminded me this morning via IM that we have hit our 7 month weeding anniversary.

I'm making her dinner this evening. Too bad she won't get home till 7 p.m. :-(


Jeremiah Smith

Any other week I would call him a "punk, jerk face". But this week, I envy him. The man with the killer job is 'working' in Australia this week. While he counts cards and scratches Wilda beasts on their behind, I'm stuck in Vegas counting lines of code and scratching my own behind.

I kinda miss him. Hurry home, mate.

I want that crab!

Elevator

As I took the elevator to the third floor, I smell something slightly foul and uncomfortably familiar.

As the elevator putted along I wonder what that smell could be. I believed it was either vomit or old chicken parmigiana heavy ladded with smelly parmigiana cheese.

After the elevator stopped, I walked up to the waiting room front desk counter. Sitting at the end of the counter was an open bag of cheese popcorn.

I guess that was it.

Jeb Bush
The last person I'd vote for as President of the United States.


John McCain
Most likely the first person I'd vote for as President of the United States


John Edwards and Barrack Obama
People that I like but whom I feel our country is not ready for just yet. Maybe 2012.

Bill Gates and V for Vendetta

Two weeks ago I officially began my journey into Mr. Bill Gates' world of Microsoft. I'm currently enrolled in the IT academy at UNLV which is a Microsoft partner. I'm taking a series of seven courses that will give the experience and education to help get me certified as a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer.

So far I really like the classes. The professor is good. He's got several accreditations and tons of hands-on experience. Being with him and the other students has been good. I'm also liking the class make-up and structure. With the exception of two peeople, all the students in the class are currently in IT. The cool thing is that many of the people are in the business and have proven themselves exponentially. However, they also see the benefit of taking these preparatory classes. That makes me more comfortable in dropping xK dollars for these classes. I'm relieved :-)

On another front, this past weekend MaryAnn, my mom and I watch V for Vendetta. I was impressed. It blew my expectations. I had expected the movie to be about some masked man going around killing people in the future. But to the contrary, that's not what the movie was about. It was actually very good and had obviously some great affects, and a really good story and some great acting.

I would liken V for Vendetta as a mix between The Matrix and 1984 (the movie).

Great photo. Great food.

I love octopus!

My Favorite Movies
Damn you Myspace

Ever since I joined myspace I've been nagged to figure out what 'my favorite' movies are. The reason being is that on my myspace profile, there is a section to list the titles of my favorite movies. So, ever since joining myspace, I've been trying to figure out what my fav's are.

After much thought and deliberation, please find below 'my favortie' movies -- or at least a partial list -- in no particular order:

Pirates of Silicon Valley

Finding Forester

Antwone Fisher

Goodwill Hunting

Barry Gordy's The Last Dragon

Dead Poets Society

The Matrix (1st and 3rd, not the second)

The War At Home

The Rock

La Babamba

Napolean Dynomite

The Sum of All Fear

Stand and Deliver

Philadelphia

The Island

Big Fish