Oh no! The owner of what is probably my favorite restaurant in New Orleans, Uglesich’s, may be retiring soon. Sounds like the restaurant has gotten even busier than I remember, and I remember having to wait 45 minutes for a table unless you arrived really early, so Anthony is probably due for some time off. Maybe this would be a good excuse to head to New Orleans for a visit soon?
A story in today’s Seattle Times shows an interesting side to the homeless. Around the University District, the city is thinking about installing ‘giving meters’ — like parking meters, but used for collecting spare change that goes to helping the homeless. The homeless themselves are outraged. Why?
Because the money collected in the meters won’t go to them directly. Instead, the money would be paid out by social-service representatives for doing work deemed good for the neighborhood: painting murals, removing graffiti or meeting with The Ave’s shopkeepers.
You see, instead of getting handouts, they’re going to have to work for money. (And I’m sorry, but I don’t consider selling Real Change, the homeless “newspaper”, to be real work.) Heaven forbid that they’d have to do something positive for the neighborhood instead of their current negative behavior.
However, I’m skeptical that a few meters is going to raise enough money to really make any difference; in Vancouver, where they have a similar project, the meters bring in $2,000 to $3,000 a year. It’s enough to support a mural painting or two, but not more than that.
I’m sure this meme is spreading like wildfire around the world wide web, but I figured I’d pass it along. Go to Google, type in “french military victories”, then hit the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button. Nice hoax, fellas.
Just got back yesterday afternoon after spending a week in Hawaii. The large snowfall we got in Indiana last month was pretty much the last straw. We had accumulated a number of frequent flyer miles with United Airlines, and we figured we might as well use them before United goes belly-up. (Unfortunately for United, many people seem to have the same idea, as we met a number of other couples in Hawaii with the same idea.) No inline photos with this entry, but you can see the album of photos here.
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TinyURL.com allows you to set up a very small redirect to a URL which could be very large, useful for putting really long URLs in e-mail and such. Example: http://tinyurl.com/71uf.
This past Tuesday, the primary system adminstrator for this server was making a few adjustments to the partitioning scheme. He wasn’t being careful enough, and ended up wiping out all the mail and most of the websites on this server. Luckilly, we had got a DLT tape system set up, and he made a backup about five days prior. He’s since got us back up an running, nevertheless we lost five days of mail and website changes.
Meanwhile, I was equally careless with my own work today. I was playing with branching in CVS, trying to fix a bug in the stable version of some software while keeping my development changes, and proceeded to lose all my development changes. Easily a day’s work down the drain. I’m such a bonehead.