I don’t know what was going on in the stadium area today, but the bus was trapped in traffic on 4th between Royal Brougham and at least Jackson for at least 15-20 minutes. It was so bad the meter maid in the police interceptor pulled a U in the middle of the road (traffic jams are bad for ticket quotas, I presume).
The woman next to me on the bus never went this far up the route before, “and now I know why”. I told her it was not normal. Just before Dearborn people started walking up front to beg the driver to let them off there, which she wouldn’t. Eventually the bus barely made it to the stop, letting us off just at the point where the front door passes the guardrail.
Looking ahead, I couldn’t see anything that would cause this jam.
I activated Akismet plugin for Wordpress a little while ago. I am generally kind of wary of blacklist-based spam control, but so far it’s been very industrious.
The downside is of course that now I see just how many real comments I don’t get. :)
I’d like to take this opportunity to point out a couple of the links in the “alsoby” sidebar: Google Reader and Del.Icio.Us.
The Del.Icio.Us link takes you to my personal del.icio.us list, showing all the links that I’ve come across that were so good or important to me that I had to record them for later reference. They range from the funny, to the thought-provoking, to the useful.
Meanwhile, the Google Reader link takes you to my public Reader page, showing all the blog entries that I’ve marked for sharing. If I think a blog post deserves a wider audience, I’ll star it and it’ll be displayed there. Sort of like a publicly displayed personal news clipping book, except from blogs and on the web.
I don’t necessarily add things to these lists so that others can see them, but they do show what I’m into lately. I prefer this to adding blog posts about every link or external blog I come across that I like. I’m sure it gets you lots of Technorati points to steal blog topics (and my one whiny post on AutoMeta has been my most visited so far), but I think it’s just kind of tacky and lame, unless you have something really good to add to a topic.
North Korea’s only friend in this world was China… and now even China is saying, hey world, let’s do something about this little punk.
China urges UN action on N Korea
Beijing - traditionally Pyongyang’s closest ally - said it had not ruled out UN sanctions….
China’s UN ambassador, Wang Guangya, has said North Korea must face “some punitive actions” for conducting a nuclear test.
Chinese foreign ministry spokesman Liu Jianchao said: “This will no doubt have a negative impact on China and North Korea’s relations.”
Even Russia, another lukewarm NK associate, went cold.
Russia, which like China has resisted sanctions in the past, has said it is “ready to take part in joint efforts of the interested parties….”
Of course, this FR disaster on NK’s part only bolsters my (and others’) hypothesis that it was a trick — that NK will come out and say “well, it wasn’t really a nuclear device… but it COULD have been…” And I really don’t think that impoverished NK’s nuclear weapons program, working in a vacuum, would have managed to create and detonate (safely, underground, and with complete containment) a 5-to-15 megaton device. Did we already forget just how good their missile program is?
NK would be better off worldwide if they’d spent that kind of money, resources, and effort on finishing the damned hotel.
So you’ve got a program that spits diagnostic output, but may take a while between actions. You don’t want to have to sit and watch it to see how long it takes, but it doesn’t provide timestamps.
Pipe the output to this perl one-liner:
perl -ne ‘print “[”.time().”] ” . $_’
You will get output a la:
[1160497217] Resolving kradeleet.com… 209.216.203.249
[1160497217] Connecting to kradeleet.com|209.216.203.249|:80… connected.
If you eschew Unix timestamps, try
perl -ne ‘print “[”.scalar(localtime).”] ” . $_’
which cleverly provides:
[Tue Oct 10 09:33:58 2006] Resolving kradeleet.com… 209.216.203.249
[Tue Oct 10 09:33:58 2006] Connecting to kradeleet.com|209.216.203.249|:80… connected.
Unfortunately, better timestamps in Perl take us out of one-liner territory. You could try
perl -ne ‘printf (”[%5\$d/%4\$d/%6\$d %3\$d:%2\$d:%1\$d] %10\$s\n”,localtime,$_)’
(the slashes are necessary for the shell to avoid expanding the $’s as system variables)
But this will give you:
[9/10/106 9:29:19] Resolving kradeleet.com… 209.216.203.249
[9/10/106 9:29:19] Connecting to kradeleet.com|209.216.203.249|:80… connected.
which is the wrong month (January=0, October=9) and weird-looking year (real year - 1900). You’ll have to twiddle the output array of localtime() to fix these (as everyone who uses localtime() inevitably does).
From the BBC: Scientists take fresh look at Ceres
Ceres, the latest entry into the dwarf planet club, got a full 3-D infrared scan recently, exposing its true richly-featured surface, and eliminating old assumptions that it was smooth.
This new attention is no doubt partly due to the former asteroid’s promotion to the newly formed planetoid group.
Where Pluto was once the runt of the solar system, it’s now the eldest member of a new class of junior solar system bodies. Which is a dubious distinction, to be sure; akin to being the captain of a Special Olympics team in a crowd of pro football players, but by no means one that is without high potential for honor.
