tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-49995577201480269252024-03-14T03:54:51.945-07:00Linus' blogEventually this might even contain some Torvalds family pictures.Linushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10404265599082718160noreply@blogger.comBlogger56125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4999557720148026925.post-519697948307970052011-03-02T07:28:00.001-08:002011-03-02T07:43:09.362-08:00Glamorous pictures?<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEip1oW3R-Ie9F7GZBA6Fu9FEaks4LDP8w626Y4eRb-jJNtDKC0UNlh0KRBgykF6x0c-85gJCzLLRcGBMuvWLEUW9_QpRviliHKzfViJRiWTt2TJfUs0rCwdlmv7ECF4tt4VNHs2dIAXaOk/s1600/1994-May-NewOrleans-Linus-Linux-MediumRes.jpeg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 227px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEip1oW3R-Ie9F7GZBA6Fu9FEaks4LDP8w626Y4eRb-jJNtDKC0UNlh0KRBgykF6x0c-85gJCzLLRcGBMuvWLEUW9_QpRviliHKzfViJRiWTt2TJfUs0rCwdlmv7ECF4tt4VNHs2dIAXaOk/s320/1994-May-NewOrleans-Linus-Linux-MediumRes.jpeg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5579505001787657106" /></a>The event last weekend was a "no cameras" event, and while we'll have pictures, I don't have them yet. <div><br /></div><div>And I think I'll keep them private when we get them - no need to embarrass the beautiful people any more than we already did.</div><div><br /></div><div>So to make up for that, here's a glamorous shot from about seventeen years ago that maddog (on the left) found the other day. It's from DECUS, New Orleans, 1994.</div><div><br /></div><div>As you can tell, I knew how to party back then too. I'm the handsome young man on the right, in case you couldn't guess.</div><div><br /></div><div>They called me "The Stud".</div>Linushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03717121213440268008noreply@blogger.com22tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4999557720148026925.post-68134973881721416882011-02-28T10:01:00.000-08:002011-02-28T10:50:41.188-08:00Pearls before swine..My life isn't glamorous. <div><br /></div><div>I know that comes as a big shock to everybody, since geeks in general are seen as the crème de la crème of society, and the common perception is that we live the life of rock-stars and party all night with all the other glamorous people.</div><div><br /></div><div>Not so.</div><div><br /></div><div>I sit in my office (which used to be in the basement, now it's a room above the garage), usually in my ratty bathrobe, reading and writing email all day. And a lot of wasting time while waiting for people to answer or just report problems. I go to bed at ten, and wake up at seven to get the kids to school. And then it all repeats.</div><div><br /></div><div>So not glamorous. When I actually write code (which is usually in the mail reader these days - mostly telling people "do it like this" rather than actually writing real code), that's about the most exciting part of the day.</div><div><br /></div><div>But then, once in a while, I get to live the high life. This weekend, we got invited to the Night Before Oscar party (thanks Renée and Doug!) because sometimes the companies I work with apparently think that I need to get a night out. </div><div><br /></div><div>Toto, I don't think we're talking white-socks-and-sandals any more.</div><div><br /></div><div>So me and the wife were completely out of our depth, and knew absolutely nobody. We go out for a date night every week, so we a fair number of movies, but we really aren't movie people - the kinds of movies we go to don't make a huge impression. So there we were, cram-packed with celebrities, not remembering names or faces.</div><div><br /></div><div>The good news was, that as Tove said, there was no real downside. Nobody knew us, and nobody would ever remember us the next day. So we could go whole retard quite openly, and brazenly just ask people "You look really familiar, who are you?". Which we did. With some discreet google image searches when we could guess, and just wanted to verify it ("John Cusack or Paul Rudd?").</div><div><br /></div><div>Everybody seemed to take it in good cheer. We interrupted David Spade chatting up Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis (that's what Tove says, I was oblivious - it's those famous geek social graces again. I told her I'm <i>sure</i> I'd have noticed Natalie Portman and that she can't possibly have been there, but whatever), and Tove pissed off Warren Beatty by asking his name not just once, but <i>twice</i>. </div><div><br /></div><div>So here's a shout-out to my new BFF's Jon Hamm and DJ.</div><div><br /></div><div>We probably won't be invited again. But we have pictures for the kids, to prove to them that their parents are cool people.</div>Linushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03717121213440268008noreply@blogger.com77tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4999557720148026925.post-21508972083762358782010-12-06T11:35:00.001-08:002010-12-06T11:51:21.927-08:00Thank you for ...The kids all got their black belts in TKD a couple of weeks ago, and what do I find in the mailbox today if it isn't their "thank you" notes that they apparently wrote as part of that whole experience.<div><br /></div><div>(Side note: they put them in the mail without any stamps. So the USPS happily returned them to the sender address - the kids' - which obviously happened to be the same as the actual destination. Either there's somebody at the USPS that goes "Aww, how cute, more clueless children in action", or I can see a gaping hole in the USPS business plan)<br /><div><br /></div><div>And I'm starting to see a pattern about this whole "thank you" business. I blogged about a similar event last year ("Parenting gold star (?)") where Celeste - under similar forced circumstances - was thanking us for being such great parents and not flushing their dead pets down the toilet.</div><div><br /></div><div>This time around, she apparently had an even harder time to figure out what to thank us for. Because this is what she says: "Thank you for caring enough to feed me". Yes, there's more, but that's the opening line. Wow. We're really top-notch parents. Because we <i>care just enough</i> to feed our kids!</div><div><br /></div><div>Apparently childhood in the Torvalds family is a tough affair. There's this constant nagging worry about the parents caring enough that the kids are being fed. Only to be occasionally overshadowed by the terror of dead pets being flushed.</div></div>Linushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03717121213440268008noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4999557720148026925.post-2379302393177352692010-10-13T12:56:00.000-07:002010-10-13T13:05:04.951-07:00Early Halloween Guest<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrUDQxSc9Eoc2UFcJtSofF_gbIIsOnJmPX1XNfMv8M1geNuAz5k_vIVu4moUG81bqhzc_0PJTb6MHxZcMbVihICnQGb3Q6RXqJ6GLXRGGMFHWAadlqQs5atCDv7EDG0zHIpY9LseRZFHo/s1600/bat.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhrUDQxSc9Eoc2UFcJtSofF_gbIIsOnJmPX1XNfMv8M1geNuAz5k_vIVu4moUG81bqhzc_0PJTb6MHxZcMbVihICnQGb3Q6RXqJ6GLXRGGMFHWAadlqQs5atCDv7EDG0zHIpY9LseRZFHo/s320/bat.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5527622303234363858" /></a>It's not the greatest picture ever taken in the history of man-kind, but that blurry thing inside the plastic container is a small cute bat being very angry at being caught. The rock face is the fireplace in the kids playroom.<div><br /></div><div>You can kind of see the mouth and the three-inch-long fangs bared, ready to spill the blood of its captors. What you cannot hear is the furious roaring of its mighty mouth, but if you mentally visualize the old MGM Lion, you can kind of imagine what it didn't sound like. <div><br /></div><div>I have no idea how it actually got into our house, but with a graceful flick of the red construction paper, I got it just barely out the door, and it flew away.</div></div><div><br /></div><div>Bye bye, little bat.</div>Linushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03717121213440268008noreply@blogger.com27tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4999557720148026925.post-14020517246980356702010-08-03T13:16:00.000-07:002010-08-03T13:28:14.755-07:00"13744 supplied"Yeah, I'm not talking about the number of burgers McD supplies each second or anything like that. No, I'm talking about our fully automatic coffee maker. I just did a cleaning cycle, and ended up looking up what the coffee count was.<div><br /></div><div>I may have an addiction problem.</div><div><br /></div><div>Now, admittedly this is a coffee maker that we've had for something like 8 years, but that's still 4.7 doubleshots of coffee supplied <i>every day</i> for those eight years (you can ask for a single or a double, and the counter just counts "events").</div><div><br /></div><div>Ok, I lie. The coffee maker counts the different types of coffee it makes separately, and "only" about two thirds of the events are actually double-shots. But I make that up by still supporting Starbucks (and Peet's) enough to make up the difference. And Tove accounts for about half, so when I say that I have an addiction problem, I should probably have said "we".</div><div><br /></div><div>So every time I see some piece of medical research saying that caffeine is good for you, I high-five myself. Because I'm going to live forever.</div>Linushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10404265599082718160noreply@blogger.com37tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4999557720148026925.post-12763328434838499292010-05-29T11:20:00.001-07:002010-05-29T11:34:27.463-07:00Meanwhile, in Finland..Being known as a Finn living in the US, sometimes people send me pointers to things Finnish.<div><br /></div><div>Now, this weekend is obviously the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Eurovision</span> song contest (you all knew that, right?). And I expect Finland to do as well as it usually does ("Finland, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">nul</span> point" - it's a national tradition!), and you can spend up to several minutes on <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">youtube</span> transfixed by the glory, or just start from the official <a href="http://www.eurovision.tv/page/home">home page</a>.</div><div><br /></div><div>But before that glorious tradition had time to take off, Tim Elliott sent me this gem of Finnish culture seen from the outside: the <a href="http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/news/story?id=5198604">sauna championships</a>. </div><div><br /></div><div><div>What can I say? We have a sauna in our house. Even if we don't use it all <i>that</i> often, it's a Finnish thing.</div></div><div><br /></div>Linushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10404265599082718160noreply@blogger.com27tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4999557720148026925.post-65452900905863144702010-05-16T12:10:00.000-07:002010-05-16T12:14:28.733-07:00A Pig Lover's Oath<div style="text-align: center;"></div><blockquote><div style="text-align: center;">I honor and love</div><div style="text-align: center;">Every pig that I see</div><div style="text-align: center;">For maybe one day</div><div style="text-align: center;">That pig will love me.</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Our friendship with pigs</div><div style="text-align: center;">will always last</div><div style="text-align: center;">It doesn't matter</div><div style="text-align: center;">Whether it's slow or fast.</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">If we continue to hug</div><div style="text-align: center;">Every pig we can</div><div style="text-align: center;">Our love will grow</div><div style="text-align: center;">As large as this land.</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">So I promise to help</div><div style="text-align: center;">Every pig in defeat</div><div style="text-align: center;">For if it weren't for pigs</div><div style="text-align: center;">There would be no bacon to eat.</div><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: justify;">What can I say? Daniela (my middle one) is a real poet. It scans a bit oddly, but I think that falls solidly under the heading of "artistic".</div></blockquote><div style="text-align: justify;"><br /></div>Linushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10404265599082718160noreply@blogger.com34tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4999557720148026925.post-82295079330756337482010-03-31T13:20:00.001-07:002010-03-31T13:28:50.091-07:00Silly grin<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsZBJYCvz7Gpuz07sUCKvjoQaFSrx39PsiKrjNj_bJLdQzsC-56o13uqK6ZXSzm461QzqBOx0g9pABEnFR1PL2XXGcX8nnWWKpL1v3-a1JhK8NTG9DH4jGmDX0QlFFrTwOSGy7q6hHoSGc/s1600/linus-and-seadragon.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 214px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsZBJYCvz7Gpuz07sUCKvjoQaFSrx39PsiKrjNj_bJLdQzsC-56o13uqK6ZXSzm461QzqBOx0g9pABEnFR1PL2XXGcX8nnWWKpL1v3-a1JhK8NTG9DH4jGmDX0QlFFrTwOSGy7q6hHoSGc/s320/linus-and-seadragon.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5454895673247129714" border="0" /></a>This is actually from last year (LCA in Tasmania), but Oscar, who took the picture, was diving around the world for many months and only made the pictures he took available to me the other day. I thought I had a good life, but Oscar and Annemarie clearly has this whole life thing figured out.<br /><br />Those weedy sea-dragons are pretty cool. And they weren't the only cool thing there, if you get my meaning. Brrr. I prefer warm water diving.Linushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10404265599082718160noreply@blogger.com24tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4999557720148026925.post-10684456086199999032010-02-24T10:01:00.001-08:002010-02-24T10:38:24.059-08:00Turst me, I know what I'm doing...<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCK3686wJ7DRqEG9HC2cD9B1X119JRVhWMpDOSq1cl2WOfrxvL6TuBfhtpwlgbCcCnD70RKKo7lo662xyMXpzbD76Ie3dffuxSRzzFT2CO201c5I3JjIHHdGVZeiYEiO4ns0vVIHPg1kUh/s1600-h/HouseHub.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 209px; height: 320px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCK3686wJ7DRqEG9HC2cD9B1X119JRVhWMpDOSq1cl2WOfrxvL6TuBfhtpwlgbCcCnD70RKKo7lo662xyMXpzbD76Ie3dffuxSRzzFT2CO201c5I3JjIHHdGVZeiYEiO4ns0vVIHPg1kUh/s320/HouseHub.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5441871854777943810" border="0" /></a><br />I'm probably moving my office to be above the garage.<br /><br />In preparation for that, I did the whole "get CAT6 networking to the new location" thing, which has involved re-acquainting myself with our crawlspace. Spending my days crawling around, hoping I'm not going to encounter any dead mice (or live ones, for that matter).<br /><br />I obviously already had cable going to various locations in the house, but the way that had happened, I'd done them one at a time, and my current office ended up being the hub for it all. And since I really wasn't going to re-route all the cables and make the new office be another hub of chaos, and I certainly wasn't going to leave the hub in what will become a kids bedroom, the above is the result.<br /><br />Beautiful it ain't. It's a real media center enclosure, but the networking hubs that are meant for those things are overpriced and generally just pitiful 4-port 100Mbps switches with dubious firewall capabilities, so I'm just installing my own. And some day, I'll actually add the screws that hold the boxes where they are supposed to go, rather than just sitting in a pile on top of each other at the bottom of the box.<br /><br />I haven't had the energy to fix the telephone wiring. As you can see, I now have the header for getting that particular mess sorted out too, but I'm not the person who created that particular "rat king" of cabling under our house in the first place. So I'm not feeling the need quite acutely enough to spend another few hours crawling around straightening out all <span style="font-style: italic;">that</span> wiring. Same goes for TV cabling. You can kind of tell what part of the house wiring I actually care about...Linushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10404265599082718160noreply@blogger.com48tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4999557720148026925.post-83858371597965438992010-02-19T11:35:00.000-08:002010-02-19T11:51:51.656-08:00Demons? Really?So I was in Costco waiting for a car tire rotation and check yesterday. Wasting time, I blew three bucks on a slice of pizza and a sundae, and looked around for a place to sit down and pig out. The place was packed, and it was the middle of the day.<br /><br />So I sat down next to this group of people, and realized that one reason it was busy was that apparently people use the Costco foodcourt as a lunch place. Fair enough. A couple of bucks gets you a long way there.<br /><br />Sitting there, I can't but help overhear that it's apparently some religious discussion going on. Ok, so it's the local God Squad having their lunch meeting, no biggie. They're apparently talking about Africa, and about life and death decisions etc - at least one of them is a missionary.<br /><br />And that's when it gets strange. One of them starts to seriously talk about praying demons away, and then after the prayer has driven the demon out of the person, you have to support the person so that the demon doesn't come back. And nobody laughs at him.<br /><br />Seriously? What year is it again? I'm pretty sure they didn't have Costco foodcourts in the middle ages, but maybe there was some time warping going on.<br /><br />What the hell is <span style="font-style: italic;">wrong</span> with people?Linushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10404265599082718160noreply@blogger.com164tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4999557720148026925.post-12006083542600701562010-02-06T13:06:00.000-08:002010-02-06T13:22:03.951-08:00Happy camperI broke down and bought a Nexus One last week.<br /><br />I got the original G1 phone from google when it came out, and I hardly ever used it. Why? I generally hate phones - they are irritating and disturb you as you work or read or whatever - and a cellphone to me is just an opportunity to be irritated wherever you are. Which is not a good thing.<br /><br />At the same time I love the <span style="font-style: italic;">concept</span> of having a phone that runs Linux, and I've had a number of them over the years (in addition to the G1, I had one of the early China-only Motorola Linux phones) etc. But my hatred of phones ends up resulting in me not really ever using them. The G1, for example, ended up being mostly used for playing Galaga and Solitaire on long flights, since I had almost no reason to carry it with me except when traveling.<br /><br />But I have to admit, the Nexus One is a winner. I wasn't enthusiastic about buying a phone on the internet sight unseen, but the day it was reported that it finally had the pinch-to-zoom thing enabled, I decided to take the plunge. I've wanted to have a GPS unit for my car anyway, and I thought that google navigation might finally make a phone useful.<br /><br />And it does. What a difference! I no longer feel like I'm dragging a phone with me "just in case" I would need to get in touch with somebody - now I'm having a useful (and admittedly pretty good-looking) gadget instead. The fact that you can use it as a phone too is kind of secondary.Linushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10404265599082718160noreply@blogger.com124tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4999557720148026925.post-80746703637023768752010-01-13T15:27:00.001-08:002010-01-13T16:00:19.834-08:00Embroidery.. gaah<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5sJWmUdvYU5kDX5ftKR50rrwb-hsbbR2tnTejOWpW_0H1hnlGXnVXKM11ZX15fJnbQmirz5bORSj7Y979zH0FmVe4Ackraq6A7VF-kaDOTtC5SmjeDL-LL6QDX7vOxzHxdwsh2VVNrWBx/s1600-h/s512.png"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 302px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5sJWmUdvYU5kDX5ftKR50rrwb-hsbbR2tnTejOWpW_0H1hnlGXnVXKM11ZX15fJnbQmirz5bORSj7Y979zH0FmVe4Ackraq6A7VF-kaDOTtC5SmjeDL-LL6QDX7vOxzHxdwsh2VVNrWBx/s320/s512.png" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5426370389435815794" border="0" /></a><br />So for Christmas, Tove got this embroidery machine from Santa Claus. Since then, she's busily been filling the kids clothes with names, re-doing their Tae-Kwon-Do uniforms etc etc.<br /><br />And why do I care? It turns out that all those embroidery machines can be extended with new patterns, and most of them - including the one Tove has - seem to use this special and pretty much undocumented "PES" format that was designed by Brother. So Tove has been buying embroidery patterns, but actually seeing them on the computer and transferring them to the sewing machine is a big pain.<br /><br />So the above beautiful png file is what I did today. It's the result of me doing a thumbnailer for those PES files (and yes, "PES" stands for "PESky", I'm convinced), so that Tove can see the designs in her file manager as she moves them around.<br /><br />I can read them (largely thanks to converting a <a href="http://bobosch.dyndns.org/embroidery/showFile.php?pes.php">php script</a> written by Robert Heel - which in turn seems to be based on a GPL C# project from <a href="http://www.njcrawford.com/embroidery-reader/">njcrawford.com</a> - into C code) and then drawing them and writing the result out as a png out with cairo. Sadly, it seems that the embroidery machine itself sometimes has a rather harder time. When uploading the designs to the machine, a number of them just say "Data Error", which is very annoying.<br /><br />I wonder what those embroidery machine firmware people were thinking. No diagnostics, no nothing. If a design is too large for the hoop of the machine, the machine accepts it (no "Data Error"), but doesn't actually show or use the design - it just silently ignores it.<br /><br />Whee. Undocumented formats, bad firmware, lack of sane error messages. And did I mention crazy interfaces? The embroidery machine itself shows up as a USB storage device when you connect it, except it for some reason takes about half a minute to calm down enough to be mounted. And forget about the embroidery card reader/writer - that one needs some magic USB driver too.<br /><br />But hey, if somebody else is fighting with PES files, here's a pointer to '<a href="http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/pesconvert.git;a=summary">pesconvert</a>', my git source tree for that silly thumbnailer that created the above png. You'll need pnglib-devel and cairo-devel to compile it, but it's small and simple. And in case you wonder about the source PES file, it's <a href="http://brotheraccessories.com/HomeSewing/GetCreative/free-designs.aspx?PARAM=heart">Jan_heartsdelight.pes</a>, a demonstration PES image from brother.Linushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10404265599082718160noreply@blogger.com35tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4999557720148026925.post-75754903772651399062009-12-21T08:11:00.000-08:002009-12-21T08:50:42.132-08:00Finnish culture...It's not all that often that we encounter things from Finland here in Portland. So imagine my surprise when we're on our way to our weekly date-night with Tove, and our baby-sitter is gushing about this adorable and wonderful Finnish YouTube video.. She apparently have been watching it three or four times a day for the last few days (weeks?), laughing hysterically.<br /><br />I'm intrigued by this notion, so I look it up, and notice that I am very late to an internet phenomenon. The thing in question is Armi & Danny's <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kA5GkLM5C7M">"I Want to Love You Tender"</a>, which has apparently been a big hit on youtube for several years now.<br /><br />Now, people who aren't from Finland may not realize the whole <span style="font-style: italic;">depth</span> of that video. To an outsider, it may look like some highschool musical number with particularly inept dancing. It's funny, yes, but you go on to watch keyboard cat and dramatic chipmunk.<br /><br />But to somebody from Finland, the first reaction is "I recognize that tune". The second reaction is "Oh, it's <span style="font-style: italic;">them</span>!". That's not some inept highschool musical number, that's one of the most beloved Finnish entertainers <span style="font-style: italic;">ever</span>! Ok, so the version you hear in Finland is in Finnish, and the above is the English version - and Finns back in the seventies weren't really all that good at English. That explains some of it.<br /><br />When I grew up, the Swedes had ABBA and Björn Borg. The Finns had Armi ja Danny. Really.<br /><br />Now I just find myself wishing that we'd have Finnish meal-pouches with musical accompaniments. "Rudolf in a Bag" MRE's (reindeer meat with lingonberries) with Armi and Danny on BluRay.<br /><br />Although I'm not sure I could take the concentrated awesomeness that is "I Want to Love You Tender" in glorious HD. Maybe it's safer in that low-quality YouTube version.Linushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10404265599082718160noreply@blogger.com42tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4999557720148026925.post-14987904454369607152009-10-03T14:10:00.000-07:002009-10-03T14:48:33.994-07:00WTF?So Tove is off learning how to judge Tae-Kwon-Do competitions, and the kids are roaming the neighborhood like jackals (or maybe they're upstairs reading a book. Who knows? I take a "hands off" approach to parenting).<br /><br />So I'm stalking the kitchen looking for food, my trusted canine companion by my side. My prey hides quietly on a remote shelf, but I outsmart the cardboard packaging easily (along with the NASA-designed internal metallic pouch), and am soon ready to feast on the guts of some random Indian lentil stew.<br /><br />And that's when it hits me.<br /><br />A quiet rattling emanates ominously from inside the nutritionally uninteresting outer shell as I'm about to discard it. I go on high alert, and ancient instincts immediately raise my adrenaline levels. What's going on?<br /><br />So I look inside, and in addition to the metallic pouch with the actual food, my meal has come with a CD full of (and I quote) "Authentic Indian Cuisine". No, wait! Underneath that it says "Indian Classical Duets".<br /><br />Which brings me to today's title: "WTF?" Have I been leading an unusually sheltered life, and this is actually normal? What's next? Happy Meals that come with Beyonce CD's?<br /><br />Now I'm intrigued, and considering going through our other indian ready-made meals. Was this a one-off? Or had I not just noticed before, and do all those $2.99 pre-made indian meal pouches come with these odd musical accompaniments?Linushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10404265599082718160noreply@blogger.com39tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4999557720148026925.post-39560157143560758712009-08-09T12:48:00.000-07:002009-08-09T13:07:49.364-07:00ProgrammingI've actually written code lately, although for some reason it's been all these stupid projects. First I needed to fix the kernel <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">tty</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">refcounting</span>, then I got all <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">OCD</span> on the git <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">SHA</span>1 routines.<br /><br />I don't quite know why I wasted that much time on something as trivial as <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">SHA</span>1 hashing, but it was kind of fun in a "let's use the compiler as a glorified assembler" kind of way. Some people seem to think that C is a real programming language, but they are sadly mistaken. It really is about writing almost-portable assembly language, and it turns out that getting good results from <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">SHA</span>1 really is mostly about trying to fight the compilers tendency to try to be clever.<br /><br />So <a href="http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git;a=blob;f=block-sha1/sha1.c;h=886bcf25e2f52dff239f1c744c11774af12da48a;hb=66c9c6c0fbba0894ebce3da572f62eb05162e547">here</a> is the current result of me trying to get <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">gcc</span> (well, arguably of it is mostly the C <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">pre</span>-processor, rather than the compiler proper ) to generate good assembly code. On my <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">Nehalem</span> machine (but not <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">Netburst</span> or Atom - poor fragile micro-architectures that they are), it actually seems to outperform the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">OpenSSL</span> hand-written assembly language implementation.<br /><br />And once I get rid of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">libcrypt</span> from <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">openssl</span>, I get rid of two silly <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">runtime</span> loadable libraries that git no longer needs. And that in turn speeds up the test-suite by a couple of seconds.<br /><br />Did I mention that I seem to have some <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">OCD</span> issues?Linushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10404265599082718160noreply@blogger.com49tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4999557720148026925.post-57130341550764400312009-07-14T08:26:00.001-07:002009-07-14T08:47:34.022-07:00Parenting gold star (?)It's summer.<br /><br />Which in our family means summer camps.<br /><br />Oh, the kids are happy playing together, and we usually have one or two of the neighbors kids running around too, so it's not like they tend to get bored. But Tove is a big believer in making doubly sure that they don't go stir crazy around the house, so summer camps it is.<br /><br />Last week was <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Tae</span>-<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">Kwon</span>-Do camp (Tove is also a big believer in beating up other people), and apparently it was all fine. But what do I know - I wasn't interested in sports when I was small, I'm not interested in sports now either.<br /><br />And as part of their camp (presumably when they were taking a breather from trying to kill each other), they had to write a letter home about how they are thankful to their parents. Oh, those wacky Asian self-defense sports and their respect for their elders - another thing I don't seem to recall from my own childhood.<br /><br />Anyway, very cute. They all seem to be well on their path of writing pleasing prose, and I see a promising career of writing Hallmark cards (and made-for-TV shows) for all of them.<br /><br />Except possibly Celeste. There's a <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">WTF</span> moment here:<br /><blockquote>You buy me lunch, breakfast and dinner. You bought me animals to play with so I could have a lot of fun in my life.</blockquote><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">Ok</span>, fine so far. She's a bit hung up on the "buying" part of this whole parenting gig, but hey, she's just eight. She'll get over it, and if she doesn't, I guess she'll fit right into the culture. But then comes the kicker:<br /><blockquote>You also let me bury them instead of flushing them down the toilet.</blockquote>Ooh, yeah! That's some premium parenting there. Gold stars all around! It just makes me glow with pride.<br /><br />Of course, she has clearly forgotten about the fish. We did flush those.Linushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10404265599082718160noreply@blogger.com30tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4999557720148026925.post-88968338244837925882009-07-12T16:36:00.000-07:002009-07-12T17:13:00.458-07:00Not-so-evil empireI'm usually not enamoured with the customer service of big companies, and you always tend to hear all the horror stories. But I want to give a shout-out to Comcast.<br /><br />Yeah, that Comcast. That same one that everybody loves to hate.<br /><br />I switched from DSL to cable a couple of days ago, mainly because I had been hoping for a long time for our phone company (Qwest, who I also have had nothing but good service from) to offer faster DSL speeds. And they never did. So I decided that I should look at the alternatives.<br /><br />I went for the "professional install" from Comcast, because I was pretty sure that our cable needed upgrading (it did). And since I hate renting any electronics equipment in our house, so I was off to Fry's before-hand, and I got a Comcast-approved Linksys cable modem with built-in firewall ethernet and wireless router.<br /><br />Everything worked out fine, the installer was a few hours late, but he was friendly and knew what he was doing. He did say that he would have suggested going with a stand-alone modem and separate router box, but I've used Linksys routers before, so I wasn't too worried and liked the all-in-one box. I was left with some temporary cable laid in our back yard, and it's probably going to be that way for a few weeks, but all in all, a good experience.<br /><br />Until later in the day, when the Linksys box rebooted.<br /><br />And then it did it again. And again. Roughly once an hour or so. It came up each time, but there was a very annoying 70-second pause in my internet connection each time. I had good statistics on exactly when it happened, and how long the internet was off-line, because I'd done some silly tools to keep track of that earlier when I had had DSL line trouble (due to just bad signal and constant retraining).<br /><br />In other words, it turns out that the cable installer was not just friendly and knew what he was doing, he really was right on the money. I don't know why, but that Linksys cable router is apparently total crap. And googling for it, I was clearly not the only one with the problem. It looks like you should avoid the WCG200v2 like the plague.<br /><br />I asked Comcast (email support, just to see how <span style="font-style: italic;">that</span> works) whether they can upgrade the firmware of the thing, or can do anything about it, but they answered that they can't do anything about customer equipment. Hey, fair enough. Not their fault.<br /><br />So, like any self-respecting geek, I decided that I'll just buy more equipment, because let's face it, you can never have enough toys in your home. So off to Fry's I went again, and got myself a DOCSIS-3.0 motorola box and a separate Netgear router.<br /><br />Not only did I decide to avoid Linksys this time, but the Netgear one made a big deal about running open-source software, and I assume the "L" at the end of the name means that the open-source in question is Linux. Sure, Linksys had a Linux router too (with a penguin!) but let's face it, they screwed up, so I'm giving the competition a go this time.<br /><br />So I need to provision it (ie letting Comcast know about the new modem MAC address), so I call up Comcast. It being a Sunday afternoon, I was expecting <span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"></span></span>that I'll just have to wait for Monday to get it sorted out. But no, not only is there a friendly tech who is greeting me with neither silly muzak nor waiting, but she's happy to get my all provisioned and up and running with a new cable modem in minutes (ok, so it took more than a couple of minutes, but a lot of it was literally waiting for the new cable box to boot up a few times).<br /><br />And so far, the new box isn't rebooting constantly whenever there's more than a few internet connections going on. Which is just as well, since it clearly does take longer to boot than the old one. Knock wood.<br /><br />So what can I say? Friendly competence all around. Good for Comcast. And a big black eye for Linksys.Linushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10404265599082718160noreply@blogger.com71tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4999557720148026925.post-48835382735576923762009-07-04T14:53:00.000-07:002009-07-04T15:17:29.856-07:00PatheticIt's the 4<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">th</span> of July, the kids are out playing, Tove's at the mall, and I'm following my new toy as it crawls across the map of the US towards me, courtesy of UPS tracking and google maps.<br /><br />This fall, we'll go for two scuba trips: in addition to our yearly week in Hawaii, Tove is treating me to a week in Belize. Because I only turn 40 once, I'm told. Little does she know that if that trip turns out successful, I'm planning on turning forty the year after too!<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Anyway</span>. In preparation of all this, my new toy is a dive computer, and it should arrive in a few days. I always just rent all my gear, and as a result on some dives I then end up following the dive master like a dog on a leash because I don't carry my own computer. The divers who know what they are doing always like feeling like everybody keeps track of their own nitrogen levels.<br /><br />But I will be leashed no more. <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">Paraphrasing</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">Braveheart</span>: "They may paint my butt blue, but they'll never take <span style="font-style: italic;">our Freedom</span><span style="font-style: italic;"></span>". Or something like that. I never actually saw the movie.<br /><br />Of course, the trips are months away, and in the meantime I'll just have to amuse myself by taking long baths with my toy. Once it arrives. I may be turning 40, but that doesn't mean I can't act like a little child. I may not live the dream, but I can dream the life.<br /><br />Am also considering taking a <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">Nitrox</span> course. Just because. Because that way I'll have more buttons I can press, and modes I can set, on my new toy. Anybody got suggestions on places that do that around Portland?Linushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10404265599082718160noreply@blogger.com45tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4999557720148026925.post-50959547056876332342009-06-17T15:00:00.001-07:002009-06-17T15:33:14.707-07:00Outwitting the fashion policeThis is a public service announcement for all geeks.<br /><br />Are you tired of people pointing out that you shouldn't use socks and sandals? I know, it really annoyed me too. It's like they are trying to take away your geek card.<br /><br />But there's a solution.<br /><br />For a year now, I've been avoiding the fashion police by instead of "sandals" wearing "shoes with holes in their sides". I've got these Keen's that look enough like shoes that nobody ever bats an eye at you wearing them with socks (Ok, by "nobody", I mean my wife, but that's all that matters, right?).<br /><br />The problem is that it looks like the fashion police may be starting to figure it out. The model I have seems to be no longer in production, and now all the new ones I find are pretty obviously sandals (toes and/or heel showing).<br /><br />So when I wear out my current ones, I'm going to be in trouble again. Damn.Linushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10404265599082718160noreply@blogger.com54tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4999557720148026925.post-33292799502587447032009-06-11T13:43:00.000-07:002009-06-11T13:56:55.997-07:00Happiness is a warm SCMI'll have to post this while I'm still happy, because the merge window for Linux 2.6.31 opened a day ago (well, somewhat more, but I don't take patches immediately after doing a release), and so far it's been such a nice thing that I thought I'd better post while in a good mood. Before somebody sends me the merge request from hell.<br /><br />So why am I in a good mood?<br /><br />My real "work" is not really writing code any more, and hasn't been for a long time. No, I worry most about the whole "flow of patches", and the way development happens, rather than so much about any individual piece of code I maintain. And the last few release cycles have had a couple of really hard-to-merge issues - not because the code was necessarily bad, but because of how it was then presented to me as a fairly messy history.<br /><br />And so far, the 2.6.31 merge window is going swimmingly. The x86 tree, which has gone through a yo-yo of different development models with (different) problems, seems to have gotten to that "good place" where it seems to be working.<br /><br />Part of the problem is that 'git' is such a flexible tool that you can use it in various modes, and mix things up freely. The whole distributed nature means that there's no gatekeeper, you can do whatever you want. And the flexibility and power is good, but it does mean that it's also easy to make a mess of it - the old UNIX philosophy of giving people rope, and letting them hang themselves with it if they want to.<br /><br />So it takes time for people (me included) to learn the rules that work. And it seems people are learning. And that feels really good.Linushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10404265599082718160noreply@blogger.com42tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4999557720148026925.post-43834608773677201892009-05-28T12:54:00.000-07:002009-05-28T13:44:06.517-07:00Yet more readingSomebody in the comments wondered how I have time to read so much.. Part of it is simply that reading is my only real hobby (scuba? Sure - one week a year. Reading? 51 weeks a year). So I literally spend my time either in front of my computer or reading - and I don't waste it on commuting.<br /><br />Another part obviously ends up being that I'm just a fast reader. Oh, I know people who read faster, but if it's some easily read sci-fi or fantasy, I'll read at a pace of 100-150 pages per hour, and you simply <span style="font-style: italic;">cannot</span> distract me while I'm reading. Try to talk to me, and I won't hear a word.<br /><br />So most books I finish in a single sitting, and weekends I might read two books in a day. The more sciency books I read take longer, but that may explain why I probably average about three books per week, and sometimes do many more - especially during the later parts of the merge window when things aren't as hectic on the kernel front.<br /><br />Anyway, the haul over the last couple of weeks has been mostly random stuff (<span style="font-style: italic;">Fire Upon the Deep</span> by Vernon Vinge, <span style="font-style: italic;">Golden Torc</span> by Simon Green, <span style="font-style: italic;">Turn Coat</span> by Jim Butcher, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Laurentine Spy</span> by Emily Gee). Don't ask me what the common thread is, because there is none. Some were randomly picked up from the book store in desperation over not having anything at all to read, others were things I'd read the authors before. I enjoyed them all, in different ways.<br /><br />On the non-fluff front, I read <span style="font-style: italic;">Phantoms int he Brain</span> by V.S. Ramachandran, based on a recommendation in the comments of the last reading post. I have to say, it is a better book than <span style="font-style: italic;">The Brain that Changes Itself</span> (the one that triggered the recommendation), but at the same time I was also a bit disappointed with it.<br /><br />Why? All the chapters on different disorders were absolutely fascinating, but then the last chapter just stood out as a big disappointment. It seems that any time that people start discussing "qualia" and guessing about what consciousness is, otherwise sane and coherent people end up being just confused and crazy (example: Roger Penrose). Ramachandran avoids the outright crazy, but chapter 12 ended up being a big disappointment to an otherwise engrossing book for me. But even that disappointing chapter had interesting content in it.<br /><br />So, highly recommended, despite the small nagging feeling that the last chapter really could have been so much better. Most of the book is about the fascinating ways the brain fails at what it's supposed to do, and what it teaches us about how people really function.<br /><br />The other non-fluff book was Bart Ehrman's <span style="font-style: italic;">"Jesus Interrupted"</span>, a kind of follow-up to the earlier <span style="font-style: italic;">Misquoting Jesus</span> that I read some time ago. Bible study is actually fairly interesting, although in many ways I always thought the Old Testament was way more interesting. Ehrman, of course, concentrates pretty much exclusively on just the New Testament, with just passing mention of OT issues as they relate to NT issues. The book was also the inspiration for the current kernel naming ("Man-Eating Seals of Antiquity"), since it fit perfectly with my pattern of nonsensical animal-related naming scheme.<br /><br />Recommended. Not nearly as engrossing as <span style="font-style: italic;">Phantoms</span>, but an interesting read none-the-less.Linushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10404265599082718160noreply@blogger.com55tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4999557720148026925.post-54258308251433460462009-05-26T16:00:00.001-07:002009-05-26T16:06:31.804-07:00Memorial day BBQ<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigaMpKpn495FBuFF5nzNHSus3NPbnum6GwHEiavDpV1fsIYDcqKAzMTHLZEukJCymKg3fuMZQDdSoEYPmO8EsEeELt4Ub7114DlAHmpCHvBlJHlG7AD4-QyT87LJRohGyQhMlxhuF3Lilo/s1600-h/limitations.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer; width: 320px; height: 268px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEigaMpKpn495FBuFF5nzNHSus3NPbnum6GwHEiavDpV1fsIYDcqKAzMTHLZEukJCymKg3fuMZQDdSoEYPmO8EsEeELt4Ub7114DlAHmpCHvBlJHlG7AD4-QyT87LJRohGyQhMlxhuF3Lilo/s320/limitations.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5340271401011357426" border="0" /></a>I've always liked the demotivational posters from despair.com a lot more than those inane motivational ones. And this one obviously hits close to home.<br /><br />So what do our neighbors bring with them when we invite them for a BBQ? Yup.<br /><br />Do my friends know me or what? Of course, my favourite is probably the one that says something like "The point of your life may be just to act as a warning to others", but that one doesn't have penguins.<br /><br />The downside to actually finally having the physical thing, of course, is that I'm not much for hanging things up. So it will probably end up propped up in my office somewhere, adding to the general messiness.Linushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10404265599082718160noreply@blogger.com26tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4999557720148026925.post-76055447919832475192009-05-11T18:07:00.000-07:002009-05-11T18:34:44.256-07:00More reading..So in between testing -rc5 on all the machines I can find (and in the process being a total PITA when I find just configuration idiocies and a random "my wireless doesn't work - oh, wait, yes it does"), I've been reading more.<br /><br />And yes, I finished off the Soldier Son trilogy. And yes, Nevare was fat and stupid and whiny, up until the last chapter. Oh well. Not unexpected.<br /><br />On the positive front, there's "<span style="font-style: italic;">Why Evolution is True</span>" by<span> Jerry A Coyne.<br /><br />I'm not quite sure who this book is for (the people denying evolution certainly don't have enough braincells or background to read it), but I suspect that if you're sitting on the fence, and want to educate yourself, but have been talking too much to people who tell you that evolution can't be true because [ insert some odd reason here] then this might be the book for you.<br /><br />It's a pretty good read, with a lot of examples from different areas. It made me think that I'll be really happy to give this book to the kids when they are ready for it, which is probably not for a few years, but still..<br /><br />Currently reading "<span style="font-style: italic;">The Brain that Changes Itself</span>" by Norman Doidge. I have no idea where that book came from, but Tove claims I bought it. So it must be so. I clearly buy too many books, and some of them get forgotten and then found again. It's like a mild case of Alzheimer's - every day is a new adventure.<br /><br />Anyway, I got sidetracked there a bit: the book started out like some crazy persons rant against the "establishment", and I was sure I could not possibly have bought it, and Tove had decided that it was time to get me to read some odd new-age literature. But once you get past the preface, and get over the point where Norman claims that brain plasticity is somehow a radical new thing, the book actually is quite interesting.<br /><br />Ok, so I'm only about two-thirds through, and parts of it really do seem to be a bit too overly excited and over-hyped (and read as a commercial for some of the things mentioned), but I've been enjoying it. I suspect there are much more balanced accounts out there, but with the caveat that you should probably read this book with a healthy dose of critical thinking, it's been a good read.<br /></span>Linushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10404265599082718160noreply@blogger.com59tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4999557720148026925.post-47873995151381884092009-05-06T09:24:00.000-07:002009-05-06T09:38:35.282-07:00Reading: Evil Genes.. by Barbara Oakley.<br /><br />I have to say that I was a bit disappointed in the lack of any actual science (it starts out much more promising than it then ends up being).<br /><br />But that disappointment is balanced by the fact that it was actually a fun read, mostly because you end up trying to match some of the traits being discussed to yourself, your crazy relatives, your psychotic co-workers etc.<br /><br />So I'd say that it ended up having not a lot about genes, and a lot of armchair psychology of people Barbara never actually met (apart from her sister). But I'll still have to give it a thumbs up just for being entertaining.<br /><br />The merge window is calming down, so I've been reading other things too, but they've been eminently forgettable. I'm now steeling myself to begin "Renegade's Magic", the third installment of Robin Hobb's Soldier Son trilogy. The two first ones were big disappointments, and I had already decided that I'm not even going to bother finishing the trilogy, but I guess I can't.<br /><br />Here's to hoping Nevare turns out to be less of a fat whining idiot in the third book. But I'm not really holding my breath.Linushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10404265599082718160noreply@blogger.com19tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4999557720148026925.post-642281788203068462009-05-04T09:33:00.000-07:002009-05-04T10:06:27.133-07:00Peeve of the day<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Ok</span>, so I have <span style="font-style: italic;">lots</span> of pet peeves, and if I wanted to blog them all I'd have no time for anything else (and a lot more blog posts than the occasional one), but this one struck me the other day.<br /><br />I was at the optometrist with Patricia, who is near-sighted like me. Or rather - not like me, since I've had <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">lasik</span>, and since she's more nearsighted than I ever was. She's blind as a bat without glasses or contacts, in other words.<br /><br />Also like me, she's allergic to pollen. She gets itchy, watery eyes. So at the optometrist, when they ask about whether she's had problems with her eyes, the allergies come up. And what do you know, they have eye-drops for that.<br /><br /><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">Ok</span>, not surprising. But what I <span style="font-style: italic;">do</span> find surprising is the kind of eye-drops they have. This is a doctor's office, you'd expect them to be professional. But their eye-drops are homeopathic, and the doctor talks them up as not having any harsh medication in them. Well, duh! They're saline solution.<br /><br />So I sit there quietly, and don't call him out for being a quack, because real doctors do actually prescribe placebos, and maybe he does know better. And there's also no question that plain saline solution isn't a fine thing to use when your eyes are itchy.<br /><br />So afterwards, I spend some time afterwards talking to Patricia about placebos and homeopathy and quackery, in my never-ending hope that my kids won't grow up to be morons. But it's been a few days, and quite frankly, it still disturbs me. I've not had any other issues with that optometrist, but I'm seriously wondering if this is worth switching eye doctors over.<br /><br />Do I want somebody who sells snake-oil (<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">ok</span>, so he gave a free sample, and no way would I have paid for it anyway) looking at my kids eyes? Even if it's harmless and even beneficial?<br /><br />I'd much rather have seen free samples of "sterile saline solution". And oh yes, please feel free to make a big deal out of the "sterile" part, and feel free to talk about how it is "all natural" and free of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">Tetrahydrozoline</span> or other chemicals.<br /><br />But this piece-of-crap saline solution talked about the magical homeopathic "active ingredients" (non-existent and bogus), and while it did list the "inactive ingredients" (<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">ie</span> water and sodium chloride - aka "saline solution"), it was basically a huge advert for teaching people bad science and paying extra for it.<br /><br />And I'm not crazy. I'm not going to make my own saline solution to save money. I'll happily pay extra for "sterile". I'll pay extra for nice prepared droppers in tiny sizes, even if it means you pay actual money for just tiny amounts of water with some table salt in it (no iodine - get the "kosher" salt if you want to make your own, and use distilled water). I'll happily pay for the convenience of having somebody else prepare saline solution of the proper strength and in a convenient package.<br /><br />And the funny thing is, I don't mind it when I see the same thing at the checkout counter in the organic grocery store I prefer to go to. I <span style="font-style: italic;"></span>go there because quite frankly, the average meat department in something like a Safeway or <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">Albertsons</span> leaves a lot to be desired. And hey, it's an organic store, so I kind of <span style="font-style: italic;">expect</span> it to then cater to the ignorant and the crack-pots too.<br /><br />But at the doctors' office?Linushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10404265599082718160noreply@blogger.com96