"Would it help if I got out and pushed?!"
- Princess Leia
Nearly since the dawn of time, humanity has believed it faced struggles of greater difficulty and complexity than the world had ever experienced. While this is undoubtedly true, a side effect of science and technology and all that they bear, societal struggles have always been variations on a single theme: the Haves versus the Have Nots. And whether the Have Nots want money, food, freedom, or even just respect, there's one thing the Haves always have that they hate to give up, and that is power. Power relieves that which is the most common, least desired, and most underrecognized aspect of humanity--fear. And though fear simply serves to help lower thoughtful beings survive, for man it's been so much more, as man's most productive work has come in finding new ways to twist and turn it to his advantage, and to conceal it wherever necessary. What will the future bring? You may not recognize it at first, but everything you saw yesterday, will be everything you see tomorrow, sprinkled with a touch of new understanding, and a touch of new complexity.
The comforting thing about the universe is that it expands linearly, whereas the human mind expands and contracts with enough regularity to leave us dumbfounded by the lack of answers we have to all our most important questions.
My company is hiring for three different ASP.Net-related positions in Downtown Seattle (the International District to be precise). Drop me a line if you might be interested.
- Software Test Engineeer
- Software Engineer
- Configuration Management Engineer
- Cap'n Crunch
- Golden Grahams
- Quisp
- Cheerios
- Maple Pecan Crisp (Peace)
honorable mention: Cookie Crisp, even though it's barely a cereal, or maybe because it's barely a cereal
* this list changes somewhat often
" My roommate says, "I'm going to take a shower and shave, does anyone need to use the bathroom?" It's like some weird quiz where he reveals the answer first. "
- Mitch Hedberg
The world is caught in a catch-22, the consequences of which could be disastrous to life on Earth. Despite all the seemingly wonderful things we've gained since the advent of capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, we've been stuck in a loop of waste and destruction for quite some time now, and as long as the law of supply and demand continues to be very lightly regulated, the loop will continue. This is primarily because energy prices have been low enough that
consumption continues to climb, reducing total resources significantly (only so much and
only certain things can be recycled). The problem lies in the fact that the less we consume, the lower prices will go; and the lower prices go, the more we consume. A rate of consumption significantly less than the current level is required
for life to be sustained on Earth for several centuries or millenia at current technology. So maybe the big question is, is there a technological solution to dwindling resources and climate change? And can this solution allow Earth to
support a human population greater than six billion?
If you have a composite control you've created for use in ASP.Net, and you want to use that control to display the name and version of the web application's assembly, there's something you need to know: As far as I can tell, there's no way to get the correct assembly if you're only embedding the control in the HTML code. In this case, GetCallingAssembly() returns System.Web rather than the app name. But if you add the control from the codebehind, or if you add a method to the control that gets called on Page_Load() from the ASP.Net page, then you will get the app name and version you're looking for, presumably because the calling assembly returned by GetCallingAssembly() is the web app assembly.
"And there is distrust in Washington. I am surprised, frankly, at the amount of distrust that exists in this town. And I'm sorry it's the case, and I'll work hard to try to elevate it."
-George W. Bush
Plastic comes in many forms. The common plastic bottle resins, as listed in the resin identification code (that small triangle you find on most bottles), are:
- Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET)
- High Density Polyethylene (HDPE)
- Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC)
- Low Density Polyethylene (LDPE)
- Polypropylene (PP)
- Polystyrene (PS)
- Other
As of the end of 2005, PET and HDPE comprised over 95% of the plastic bottle market and 99.6% of the recycled pounds. Of the five remaining resins, polypropylene had the largest market share of the plastic bottle market at 2%. Although each of the #3 through #7 resins are recyclable, the challenge has always been reaching critical mass for collection, transport, and processing of these materials.
Barriers to Increased Plastic Bottle Recycling
Consumers continue to be unaware of the significant value and high market demand for HPDE post-consumer resin (PCR). Plastics recycling would benefit from significant local education campaigns.
Many communities have experienced large turnover in their recycling coordinators. As determined from recent plastic recycling workshops conducted by the Association of Postconsumer Plastic Recyclers with ACC support, many of the new municipal and county recycling managers are not aware of the value of recycled plastic bottles. Ongoing education needs to be focused on collection methods, collection expansion, and consumer education regarding the strong markets for recycled bottles and the critical need for this valuable raw material.
Thanks to the American Chemistry Council and the Association of Postconsumer Plastic Recyclers for this information.
It's amazing that to this day I still forget sometimes that any comparison with NULL is "unknown." Case in point, I have 105 tables in my database, but when I run the query below I only get 84 rows (assume for now that I only have one key per table), which briefly baffled me. The reason for this is that t2.table_name is NULL in 21 cases, and when SQL Server attempts to compare 'dtproperties' to NULL, it doesn't get TRUE or FALSE, it gets UNKNOWN. Thanks to Michael Coles for reminding me of this, and for elaborating.
SELECT *
FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES t1
FULL OUTER JOIN INFORMATION_SCHEMA.CONSTRAINT_COLUMN_USAGE t2
ON t1.table_name = t2.table_name
WHERE t2.table_name != 'dtproperties'
Maybe God has finally taken it upon Himself to separate church from state. If so, the whole omnipotency theory just crumbled.
http://tinyurl.com/youlyb
There is probably no more obnoxious class of citizen, taken end for end, than the returning vacationist.
- Robet Benchley
How come nobody asks the important questions anymore, like:
What are the limits of Mystique's powers? Can she transform into a being of any size? Can she transform into an inanimate object? Couldn't she transform all her senses (e.g. by changing the genetics of her eyeballs) so that she can touch, feel, see, and hear better than anybody? (I purposely skipped taste because "better taste" seems subjective.)
A lot of people are looking to "clean coal" as the fuel of the future (especially the coal mining industry), at least to supply the United States with electricity. Here are some facts about coal:
- the oldest coal mine in the UK is at Wearmouth, Tyne and Wear, and dates to circa 1822
- coal is found on every continent from the Arctic to the Antarctic, yet it was formed in temperate and subtropical conditions
- most estimates say the U.S. currently has around 250 years of coal remaining in the ground (at current rates). This does not take into account the very high probability that petroleum and natural gas will be virtually gone within the next 50 years, and that energy needs (i.e. wants) continue to grow at a rapid pace all over the planet
- 39% of electricity generated worldwide comes from coal
- the iron and steel industries depend on the use of coal
- coal-fired power plants are responsible for 60% of U.S. sulfur dioxide emissions, 33% of U.S. mercury emissions, 25% of nitrogen oxide emissions, and more than 33% of the nation's carbon dioxide air emissions
- one of the primary ways the coal industry wants to make coal clean is through carbon sequestration, the effects of which very little is known at this point
A camera follows around several different homeless people, watching them as they ask strangers for money and go off on schizophrenic rants. In between rants, an interviewer looks each of them square in the tooth and asks why they're too lazy to get a job. This might be a good show for the Fox News channel.