A Pig Lover's Oath

I honor and love

Every pig that I see

For maybe one day

That pig will love me.

Our friendship with pigs

will always last

It doesn't matter

Whether it's slow or fast.

If we continue to hug

Every pig we can

Our love will grow

As large as this land.

So I promise to help

Every pig in defeat

For if it weren't for pigs

There would be no bacon to eat.

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".

Silly grin

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.

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.

Turst me, I know what I'm doing...

I'm probably moving my office to be above the garage.

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).

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.

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.

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 that wiring. Same goes for TV cabling. You can kind of tell what part of the house wiring I actually care about...

Demons? 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What the hell is wrong with people?

Happy camper

I broke down and bought a Nexus One last week.

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.

At the same time I love the concept 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.

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.

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.

Embroidery.. gaah

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.

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.

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.

I can read them (largely thanks to converting a php script written by Robert Heel - which in turn seems to be based on a GPL C# project from njcrawford.com - 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.

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.

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.

But hey, if somebody else is fighting with PES files, here's a pointer to 'pesconvert', 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 Jan_heartsdelight.pes, a demonstration PES image from brother.

Finnish 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.

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 "I Want to Love You Tender", which has apparently been a big hit on youtube for several years now.

Now, people who aren't from Finland may not realize the whole depth 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.

But to somebody from Finland, the first reaction is "I recognize that tune". The second reaction is "Oh, it's them!". That's not some inept highschool musical number, that's one of the most beloved Finnish entertainers ever! 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.

When I grew up, the Swedes had ABBA and Björn Borg. The Finns had Armi ja Danny. Really.

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.

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.