Downgraded My Netflix

...to one disk at a time, because I've seen it all. Who would have thought it possible. Maybe I should get a life.

Or better yet, maybe I should post more technically useful information and less whiny personal drivel. After all, this isn't MySpace, or MySpace-TNG.

(Yes, that was another Facebook jab.)

So... Get With The "Novating"

One of the things that I truly love about CNN is the fact that its impossible to link to a story, because they are keep changing the news. Its not their fault: history is constantly changing and it is their duty to make sure that history matches the presents view of how things should have been. But that's not my point... My point is this morning's headline about the State of the Union Address:

Obama: "We must out-innovate the world"

They do have a transcript of the speech, which quotes the President as saying:

And now it's our turn. We know what it takes to compete for the jobs and industries of our time. We need to out-innovate, out-educate, and out-build the rest of the world.

Here's my question: If you are not negative, aren't you positive? That's called a double negative. If a double negative is a positive, than don't a negative and a positive cancel each other out? If you are not positive, then you are neutral. You are not (negative) and positive, therefore... nothing. Zero.

Still with me?

If you work in a building, and you walk out or the building, you are not in the building. You are either out or in. You can be out of the office, but still be in the building, because you are in the cafeteria, which is also in the building. But you can't be out of the office and in the office at the same time.

Simple, right?

So if we out-innovate, and you can't be out an in at the same time, all that's left is to novate. Turns out novate is a word. As a matter of fact, its a legal term, which a Harvard educated attorney like President Obama would know. It means:

novate - replace with something new, especially an old obligation by a new one

In other words, the President says we don't have to honor our old obligations.

Yeah! I choose to novate my mortgage, first. Be this public notice: By order of the President, Doug no longer has to pay his mortgage.

And what are you novating?

Google Maps Hack for Bash Scripts

Here's a fun little hack. This lets you query Google maps from a bash shell script:

J="chicago"; \
K=`echo $J | sed "s/ /_/g"`; \
elinks --source http://maps.google.com/maps?q=$K | \
sed "s/}/\n/g" | grep "hnear\|latlng:" | \
sed -e "s/,+/+/g" -e "s/[,={\"]/\n/g" | \
grep "\+\|l..:[0-9\-]"
Chicago+Cook+Illinois
lat:41.878113999999997
lng:-87.629797999999994

Feed it "dakar" by setting $J, and you get:

Dakar+Region+Dakar+Senegal
lat:14.75
lng:-17.333333

What good is it? None, I'm sure.