captbrando's log

An interesting story about seafood exports from China.

To combat all the sewage dumped into the lake, officials have devised an utterly nonsensical fix-it. They’ve released 1.5 million silver carp, each of which can eat up to 100 pounds of algae.

The problem here is that fish eat algae, bigger fish eat the smaller fish, and so forth until it comes to the dinner table.

And that’s exactly what the Chinese are doing. They plan on directly selling the fish to consumers.

(Via Gadling.)

Barack:

I am glad that you are paying attention to my state and understand its importance to your campaign. Recorded calls by you and/or your wife begging for my vote will change neither my disposition, nor my vote. The calls (2 out of 3 anyway) seem to conveniently interrupt family time, taking my attention away from where it should be.

Rest assured, I will be voting in the primary next week. You will have to wait until then.

Sincerely,

Off The Hook, Texas

Yeah…. so turns out that the Davis weather system cables should REALLY not be used with a USB->Serial bridge.

Really.

So after some heroics, I have moved the weather station collection routine to another machine, and dump the results into the DB from there. Seems to be working just peachy now. The real trick is to see if we can get data for 48 hours straight without any intervention. I would have had this wrapped up in a flash, but real work buts in.

Thank goodness for conference calls that run long, and I’m listening.

Well, in the time I spent goofing with the weather station, we lost some data (specifically, data we need to graph).  So right now, the script is barfing due to missing data points it needs to plot. Instead of rewriting the script to deal with this, we’ll just wait.

Check back in about 6 hours.

Looks like the national Do Not Call list does not apply to politicians.  It sure would be nice if they honored it anyway.

So, as most of us in the world that dislike being interrupted during dinner, I am on the do not call list.  In the last day, I have been called by Michelle Obama (well, a recording anyway) asking for my vote for Barak.

Do not call list.

So is something that is now law not sacred?  If I vote for Obama, what other laws might be broken?  I must say, that makes it hard to love ya.  I know Texas is important to both campaigns, but seriously…

Man, what a cluster.  James came over and we started pounding through it.  It was not until I did some major hacking of the scripts I use until I figured out why…  What is worse, the whole PHP problem turned out to be that I was not passing it a php.ini file to work with.

Dude… just tell me you need a php.ini, don’t echo the script back to me.  I wrote it, I know what it looks like!

Anyway…. Weather is back up and running.  Hopefully to stay.  We’ll see how the USB->Serial interface deals now that is not in a hub (it DID NOT like being plugged into a hub).

Yep… Moving things over to the new Mac Pro, and in the process, I’m having some n00b challenges.  I hope to have the service restored by Monday.