BAAAD MOFO

How Baaad Is Yours?

Last night I made a sandwich. No, it wasn't a sandwich. That would be like calling A 7 million ton cruise ship with 15 restaurants, 18 swimming pools, 4 beauty salons, 8 butcher shops, 2 locksmiths, a tantric sex school, and a homeless shelter a dinghy. This was like a dagwood but better. I cut open a nice sourdough roll and spread on some Dijon, then put a layer of arugula. I topped that with some hot, cripsy, greasy bacon. Then I got out an avocado and smooshed it on there. Finally, for good measure I threw in some anchovies, salt, and freshly ground pepper. That makes it a Bacon, Avocado, Anchovy, Arugula, Dijon sandwich. In the same genus as a BLT, but a different species, we call it a BAAAD sandwich for short. I highly recommend them if you, like me, don't have enough salt and fat in your diet (can you ever have enough?). There are other things you can do to make yours more or less BAAAD. Adding artichoke hearts or Asparagus for example would make it BAAAADer, and Adding Ahi tuna steak would make it go from BAAAD to worse.

Ok. I think I've abused this sorry excuse for a sandwich joke enough. I was serious about the sandwich though, it is good. Try it. Maybe some lemon juice would be good too? I don't know. Buon Apetito.

Sorry about the picture, I'm not trying to pay homage to japaneese woodblock prints by cutting off the subject in the foreground, it's just that I broke the viewfinder on my camera and composing shots is hard.

ACK, acronyms.

TATO (The Acronyms are Taking Over)

So I was in the forum when I came across the acronym POI. She said it meant person of interest. I had never heard that one. I thought it meant point of interest. With that in mind I went to an acronym dictionary to find evidence that she had just made up this acronym. Ah HA! I was right! POI stands for point of interest, but scrolling down the list of possible meanings I found out that she was right. It also means person of interest. That is a bit confusing, but brace yourself because the dictionary lists 29 other meanings for POI. Here are my favorites.

• Point(s) Of Interest


• Poor Obfuscation Implementation


• Penguin on Ice


• Proof of Identity


• Products Of Inertia


• Probability Of Intercept


• Position of Interest


• Polygons Of Interest


• Point of Impact


• period of interest

Rudyard, I'm in India!!

A big literary hug for Rudyard Kipling.

Rudyard Kipling was a British author and poet born in India. He is best known for The Jungle Book (1894) and Kim (1901). I read Kim about 6 years ago. It was my first encounter with Kipling, and I never forgot it. The story takes place here in India, and is as much about the location as it is about the adventures of young Kim. That was also my introduction to India, and it set my expectations for this trip. Just for the record, basing your expectations of a country on an account that is over 100 years old is silly. Years later I read some of Kipling's short stories. My favorite of these is Without Benefit of Clergy, an amazingly sad story of a British officer stationed in India who has a child with an Indian woman.

The Thoughtworks Interview

The Death Star as a metaphor.
Today in TWU we were talking about the Thoughtworks interview process, and the trainer was soliciting ideas for good interview questions. During class I didn't come up with anything, but someone else came up with this, "In what way is the DEATH STAR a metaphor for software development?" The question was a recycled joke from earlier in the week, but it got a few laughs, and someone actually came up with a good answer,

Q: "In what way is the DEATH STAR a metaphor for software development?"
A: "They Deployed it before it was complete, and on the first production run it blew up."

Thoughtworks University

I've got a new job and i'm goin to India.

What happens when you mix agile development and gettin jiggy? You get Agiggly development. I don't know what the hell that means, but I am going to Thoughtworks University to learn all about Agile. Once I know that I'll be one step closer to Agiggly development. Will I write about it? I probably won't be able to think of anything funny enough so probably not. Buisness as usual here, but I will give you a link to the photo gallery documenting the trip.

Automounting with KDE and Debian

Mount your media in one easy step.

Most people who install Linux probably don't have any problems with the KDE automounting functionality, but I don't install Linux like most people. I like to start out with a completely minimal install, then I can add just the packages I need one step at a time. This has 2 advantages: first is that your install takes up very little disk space giving you a very lean and mean system, second is that you become familiar with all the various packages installed on your system and have a better idea of what they do which comes in handy sometimes. The major drawback is that some things that "just work" on most linux installs don't want to work for me. It is usually just a question of dependencies and configuration though, and with a little research and digging you always get it working in the end.

Lucene: Boosting, Multi-Field Searches, and Multi-Index Searches.

3 Completely Obvious Lucene Tricks

Look out below! Here comes another braindump, and it's all about Lucene. There are three tricks to using Lucene that I am going to illustrate here. I don't think they really qualify as tricks since there is nothing tricky about them, but if you are just getting started with Lucene it is nice to know they are there.