CNN.com – ‘Louisiana 1927′ – Sep 1, 2005

Haunting tales o the City of New Orleans being flooded, the gulf destroyed, and people losing everything in their lives. except it isn’t today’s news. This happened 78 years ago.

Gotta start searching for a recording of this song.

It’s the holiday weekend, where everyone gets the 3-day weekend that I usually enjoy. I get mondays off because I work long hours the rest of the week. I usually use the Monday to do errands, doctor visits, etc. It works out rather well because most people are at work, and there isn’t much of a line anyplace. You can just go places and do your business and be gone without waiting.

I’ve been doing some serious study of the administation tools for MySQL databases. I see a lot of mysql database issues at work, and I got a really good book that focuses on the admin area of mysql. I will likely be making some arguments regarding that in this space soon.

Syntax versus semantics:
Syntax –
the word is from late latin, meaning “arrange together”
a) the way in which the words and phrases of a sentence are arranged to show how they relate to each other; sentence structure
b) the patterns of such arrangement in a given language

Semantics –
the word is also from late latin, meaning “signify, show, significant”
a) the scientific study of the meanings, and the development of meanings, of words.
b) the scientific study of symbols as denotative units, of their relationship to each other, and of their impact on society.

Semantics are the meanings of the sentences you are using (e.g. what you are saying) and syntax is how you are saying it, the mechanics of the sentences you are using.

So there *is* a difference between walking around, saying “It’s all semantics” and walking around saying that “It’s all syntax”

We had a picnic today with some lifelong friends-of-family. It turned out to be very mild weather, and it went rather well. The kids played hard, and fell asleep before we left the parking lot at the park, and are still sleeping. We talked about how busy we all are in our lives, and how it sucks that we never seem to have time to visit with people we know. That was all of us, mind you: the parents, the kids, their kids. Three generations of people stuck in the cycle of working all the time, mutitasking, getting too little sleep, no self-time, stress and traffic and bills, and trying to make things better for self and family.

It’s a sad state of things, really.

I recently was given a link. not any link. It’s this link.

Twigger’s holiday is a really cool miniseries, written from a middle-school perspective, and acted with a lot of heart. The video effects range from really subtle all the way to hilariously overdone. The page that the link goes to has them in reverse order, so you will need to scroll to the bottom and work your way up.

I’ve been working on some of my sites, and wanted a banner rotation tool. I was going to whip up something with Javascript, but then all the places I was looking for advice kept mentioning phpAdsNew.

We have a bunch of customers that use that software to run full advertising campaigns and sell ads, so I figured I may as well try it out. It’s very overblown for my purposes, but it runs rather nicely.

I picked up another script as a hotlink management tool. I just needed a place to dump links, and I was going to build up a small script to display them in a table so that my list of hotlinks could be placed on any page and on any of my sites with a single include.

The script I got handled that, but there were other functions that were kind of odd, and a reciprocal link checker that didn’t work the way I wanted. I started hacking at it to get it to work, and ended up frankensteining and rewriting a lot of it. I should have just whipped up what I wanted in Perl.

I have been reading up on Python over the past few months, and was working on an install of mod_python for Apache 1.3 yesterday. It’s still not completely working, but it’s very promising.

So for Memorial Day weekend, we thought we’d pack all of the kids in the car and go for camping at the beach. Most of the campsites were full, but we booked a tent area at the last one we called, and headed down.

we stopped about halfway, and I went into a service station to get drinks, and saw on the local weather that the whole region was to be soaked with rain for the whole weekend.

We got there and set up camp, then found that there is a burn ban in effect in the county where the campground is. No campfire. No cooking for us. We didn’t get to see the water, hardly slept, and only had cold hot dogs, etc to eat. Then something was up with the bank, so we had to get back on the little bit of cash we had left, watching the fuel guage very closely.

So I’ve been moved to working overnights during the week at work. I am still getting used to the new wake/sleep schedule, and ‘my women’ are too. ‘my women’ are my wife, my 2 girls, and my dog. It’s funny, because after my sister left home, I lived in a house full of guys up through high school, then went to college and lived in mens’ dormitories, etc and now I live in a house full of women.

I’ve been watching the new Doctor Who series (thanks to whomever in britain has been nice enough to share them online, as not even BBC America is carrying it so far. It’s really good, and the Doctor this time is much more edgy than the others before him. Each episode is well thought-out. Highly recommended.

so my older daughter went on vacation with my wife’s sister the week before last to Florida, and as soon as they got back last weekend, we went camping near Tellico Plains, TN. The place where we camped was in a flat area in a small valley, surrounded by mountains. There were a lot of new trees planted, but all of them were still saplings, so there was no wind cover. It was rather cold for us. We took our dog with us, and she was getting used to camping. She kept barking at the other campers, and didn’t like the noises of the tent material. She got nervous and wet our sleeping bags a couple of times.

Tellico Plains is also one of the endpoints of the mile high skyway called Cherohala or “the dragon’s tail” in motorcyclist circles. There were a few other intersting venues in the area, but most of our time outside the camp was on Sunday, and most of them were closed. We’ll have to hit the area again when we have some Friday/Saturday time.

I just found this project on i-hacked.com for taking apart a power inverter, mounting it under the hood, and wiring the switch and outlets in the car.

Someone should kit that out. You know how much that would be worth as an after market? It would just rock.

Oh my.

Over the weekend, I did some updating to the coffee site and got it looking much better. I’m still thinking about changing some of the background colors. Colors are always a full-blown debate, even when you are debating yourself.

My neighbors across the street moved out in a big rush, and the new neighbors moved in right away. The police are complaining about cars speeding through the neighborhood, but won’t put speedbreakers in. Isn’t that odd? Maybe we should organize a concert to raise money for speedbumps. Hey, it worked in Wayne’s World 2…

I was checking out the firebird database project, and it is coming along nicely. It will serve nicely as an embedded db or an option for scripts or programs to work for people who might not have a running db (like mysql or postgres, or even Oracle). There is also a project creating a management console that will just plug-in called FlameRobin. I was thinking of even joining that project. Sounds like a good challenge.

Your Inner European is French!

Smart and sophisticated. You have the best of everything – at least, *you* think so.

Mais oui. Absolutement!