This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter).
Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon
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 No… no… This can not be!! Let us hope they have taken the right precautions, or we are all doomed!!!
Dalek ‘kidnappers’ demand Doctor
(BBC News)
“Kidnappers” who stole a Dalek from a Somerset tourist attraction have sent its owners a ransom note – and the alien’s amputated plunger.
The 5ft model, believed to be an original from the cult BBC Dr Who series, was taken from Wookey Hole Caves near Wells on Monday.
On Thursday, staff found the plunger arm and a ransom note on a doorstep.
The note read: “We are holding the Dalek captive. We demand further instructions from the Doctor.”
The group, signing themselves Guardians of the Planet Earth, added: “For the safety of the human race we have disarmed and removed its destructive mechanism.”
(via Fark)
Wow! I have been checking the link to Greg Haverkamp’s havercamp.com site every couple of days for it seems like forever. He hadn’t updated it in a long long time though, so I didn’t check every day any more. Only those times when I had the time to actually check ALL of the sites on the left hand side of my homepage. Anyway, today I check, and Greg has gone and bloggified his site! Maybe I’ll have to check more often! It is now called Otherwise Occupied.
Here is a sample:
I know how she felt. Sort of.
I can’t claim to have been hopped up during finals, other than on cold medicine (which I do not recommend as a study aid.) However, I did find myself excessively annoyed by a guy who, while I was trying to get some reading done in some of the easy chairs, plopped his crap down and pulled a pastry out of his bag.
Of course, at least the top part of my blogroll is defined by who sends me the most email. I am sticll counting October 2004 email, so that hasn’t been updated in awhile though. I suspect that when it does get updated, Greg will fall off that list. If he is good enough though, I may put him in that second list. We shall see!
About half an hour ago, I was in my office happily working on a document for work. Suddenly, I head something like a car alarm. Right outside. After about a minute, I decided to go investigate. It was not a car alarm. It was the horn of MY car. My car does not have an alarm. The horn was on like someone was leaning on it. Nobody was.
So I tried turning on the car. No change. I tried honking the car. No change.
I started running around trying to find the fusebox to pull a fuse. Nothing was labeled. I tried to find the wire going into the horn to see if it was easy to pull out. It was not.
The car kept screaming out in anger for about 20 minutes. Slowly decreasing in volume.
Just as I had AAA on the phone to send a truck out to make my damn horn shut up, it stopped.
The horn now does not work at all.
The rest of the car still seems to be working fine though. Well, at least as fine as it was yesterday. It is an old car and shows it these days.
Poor Saturn.
I am working from home today because Amy was sick. I was just on a conference call and while on it was walking around the pool. Look down, and what do I see… hundreds and hundreds of tadpoles again!!!
On the one hand, I guess we really do have to get better at checking the chlorine level more often (and perhaps we need a new cholorinator), but on the other hand, maybe I can make up for my earlier mass murder of the frogs with the hose!
Amy and I spent a few minutes saving tadpoles and putting them into that same tank I was using last time. Then it started pouring rain, so we stopped.
I think Brandy is going to buy us a new tank on her way home from work, with lots more room for more tadpoles.
Uh, and then she’s going to pour chlorine in the pool and kill all the ones Amy and I don’t manage to get into the tank.
I was going to suggest just leaving the pool de-chlorined until all the tadpoles turn into frogs, but I don’t think she would like that idea. Especially since that cycle would probably just continue forever, cause there would always be new tadpoles.
Anyway, updates as they are warented on the new generations of tadpoles!
(I suppose we could also chase away the mating frogs when we see them, but they are there by the pool all night every night doing their thing. And they ain’t quiet about it either! Once the screen is up next month, the frogs won’t be able to get to the pool…)
Wow. The rumors have been building for years, but most specifically in the last few weeks. But I thought I’d wait to hear it from Steve himself before commenting. Yup, he just confirmed in his WWDC keynote that Apple will be moving the Macintosh to Intel chipsets over the next two years.
This is a huge change that for years people have argued vehemently would never happen or would kill Apple if it did. We shall see. It is fresh and I still don’t have well formed opinions. It was clear IBM’s PPCs had started to lag recently, and they were having trouble making a G5 fit in a powerbook, so perhaps it makes sense.
The coverage is everywhere, so I won’t link to any particular one, but looks like they have the transition pretty mapped out. Most apps will just need minor tweaks and a recompile, others will be able to run in emulation at a still decent speed. They’ve had the OS running on both platforms internally for the last FIVE YEARS.
The coverage I read so far wasn’t 100% clear, but I am assuming you will still have to run OS X on actual Macs from Apple, and you won’t just be able to install it on your typical WalMart PC. I think that is key. But who knows what things will look like a year from now when they start shipping the first Intel based Macs.
The OS is really what makes a Mac a Mac, and the really good case design and usability and such, not the chipset. But still… even if it turns out for the best, this seems just a tad… dirty. Intel. Ick!
We’ll see how they do though. Could be very interesting.
 I really have absolutely nothing to say about this, other than I saw it and I knew I had to link to it.
Clothing for Chickens
(Ananova)
A range of fashion clothing for chickens has been launched by a group of designers working in Austria and Japan. Austrian Edgar Honetschlaeger said he decided to work with the Japanese on the project because he hoped to make the chicken label clothing essential. He said “It’s something that you don’t really need but everyone wants to have anyway”.
(via Boing Boing)
Probably just a joke, but hey, these days you never know.
 So Saturday afternoon we needed to go to Vero to retreive Brandy’s car. (Remember, she was partying earlier in the weekend. :-) So since we had driven way out there, we decided we’d catch a movie while there. The kid appropriate choices were basically Madagascar and this one. Amy saw Madagascar first, and was chanting that, until she saw the Pants. Then she changed her tune, and it was decided. This was what we would see.
Basic plot: Four teenagers, friends for life, seperating for the summer. They decide to mail a pair of pants back and forth. Through the travels of the pants, we watch the emotional travels of the three girls as they each grow up in different ways.
I think we were basically seeing this because Rory Gilmore was in it. She is cute, but she was really skinny in this one. As they say, she needs to eat a sammich. I think the other girl with the blue hair was the best of the four girls though in terms of her performance.
Anyway, the immediate comparison here is to Raising Helen, since I’d just watched it a couple days earlier. RH is a bit more lightweight of a movie. It has the death of the sister and such, but mostly tries not to be TOO serious. Traveling pants has its light moments, but is definately more serious, and has more depth to it. You get four stories, each of which you care about. I think the blue haired girl’s is the most poignant. But they all have their moments. Rory’s is mostly happy though. She gets to find first love. The other three end up less happy, but grow from it, etc.
At various points in the movie, there were people crying all over the theater. And that is one of my main criterea for a good movie. You’ve gotta cry! And this one does that.
So, I liked this movie. Madagascar might have been fun too, but I’m glad Amy picked this one.
 I have had a long history of Treo problems. Within a few days of getting Treo #5 the yellow spot sort of thing that had happened with Treo #4 started happening again. Of course, I didn’t go right back in, cause it is a pain in the ass. So I used it as long as I could.
About a week ago we went back to the Sprint store. But this time I let Brandy do all the talking. She threw a fit about how this was the fifth one, and we had big problems with the 600, and we wanted something different. So they ordered me an upgrade to the 650. Woo!
We picked it up Saturday. I have spent a bunch of time since then configuring it and getting it set up the way I like. Definately an improvement over the 600. At least so far. We’ll see if it gets a yellow spot too.
So, while this is Treo #6 overall… it is now a new model. Lets start the count over. This is Treo #1, at least as far as 650’s go.
 Friday after work, Brandy was going out partying with people from her work, so I suggested to Amy that we have one of our movie nights at home which we haven’t had for awhile. So we ordered Chinese and watched her current Netflix movie. It was Raising Helen.
That’s the one where the New York Sex in the City Style woman’s sister dies, and suddenly she has three kids. You get the struggles as she adapots to suddenly having kids. She has to give up tons. Her life changes completely. The kids are in mourning and the oldest one rebels.
OK, I’ll admit something. At this point I saw this DVD almost two days ago. I meant to write the little web review thing right away, and had a number of things I intended to say. But things kept coming up and it is now two days later, and I mostly forget now. And I guess that says a bunch.
It was a decent little movie. Pulled some emotional strings at the right moments. At the end things end up like you think they would. I did not like the woman playing the older surviving sister. I didn’t mind the couple of hours I spent. It was fun and I got to hang out with Amy. But it wouldn’t be on a list of movies I must own or watch again…
It has been a LONG time since I blogged anything related to what I do for a living, but I figure an occational entry on that front is OK, even if most of the people who read this could care less.
I came across an interesting article today on the phases of spending on a content management implementation. It appears to be more geared toward web content management, but also applies to other types, including the presentation manangement sort of thing we do.
Spending patterns during CMS implementation
(James Robinson, CM Briefing)
Beyond the initial go-live, there is still much work to be done. There is typically more content to be migrated, or more sites to be moved into the CMS.
The number of authors is generally also expanded during this phase, particularly when moving to a ‘decentralised’ authoring model.
More work will also be done on general ‘housekeeping’, such as rewriting key content, deleting old material, or further restructuring the site.
Workflow rules may also be tested and refined, along with security settings and other CMS configuration details.
Overall, it may take upwards of 12 months to fully complete the content migration, and have the CMS running as ‘business as usual’.
(via CMSWatch)
Actually, I think if anything here, they significantly underestimate the effort required in the adoption phase. While the dollar costs may be less if you don’t count person*hours, the total costs are more significant. One of the biggest reasons for CM implementations failing is underestimating the work required for the adoption phase. Work processes have to be adapted to the new tool. Habits need to be changed. Internal users need to be “sold” on the idea that the system actually helps them. They have to become comfortable with the tool. The best way to use the tool to match the business needs has to be determined. And for any enterprise scale tool (and even many smaller scale ones) this is not trivial, and requires thought and planning. Those that try to just “wing it” will almost certainly fail unless they get really lucky.
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