March 10th, 2009

 

Last night it snowed 1/2-1″ at my house.  However, today it’s fairly sunny. The sidewalks are clean and clear, as is the road. But my driveway has some snow on it.

This afternoon around 11:30 AM I hear a loud, ‘there’s a fire!’-like knock at the door. Immediately following the knock, a solid doorbell ring. There stands an old lady around 5 feet tall, wearing a thin blue jacket.  She also had thin, somewhat scraggly hair and didn’t have the best of apperances. 
release-the-hounds
Here’s how the conversation went:

Me:”Can I help you?”

Lori:”Hi My names Lori” (Extends hand)

Me:”Hi Lori what can I do for you?” (hesistantly shakes hand)

Lori:”I’m trying to earn some money I was wondering if I could shovel your drive way, and you can decide what it’s worth”

 
At this point, I’ll admit here on the blog that I went into standard solictor reactionary mode. I wasn’t thinking. My immediate response:

Me:“I’m sorry, not today”

Lori:”Okay thanks” (As she turns away and takes off)

What the crap… “I’m sorry, not today?”. What, like come back another day? I have no idea what I was thinking. It was like my instinct to kick people to the curb just took over and I essentially didn’t even hear what the lady said.

To be fair, I don’t think I had any cash anyway. I called my wife 10 minutes after just to tell her about it, and she told me we might have had a few dollars slipped away somewhere in a random place or two. I didn’t know that at the time, but I’ll be honest and say I wasn’t thinking about that when I told her to beat it.Also, as far as I could tell, there was no shovel. Now I could be wrong, maybe she put it up against my garage, or maybe she intended on asking me to get one for her. Who knows.

Regardless, I feel crappy about it. I wouldn’t have felt right having an old lady shovel my driveway. Maybe I should’ve just given her some dough? Is this just a new scam? Instead of “will work for food”, refusing to work if you actually offer work? Or did I totally blow it? I feel like I kinda blew it.

What would you have done? Am I the worst person ever?

Comments definitely welcome.

February 27th, 2009

The NBA is apparently in need of a $175 million dollar loan. Essentially a bailout from Bank of America and JP Morgan, which in turn were bailed out by US Taxpayer funds.

http://www.breitbart.com/
The National Basketball Association will borrow 175 million dollars to serve as aid to teams that might struggle in the weak global economy, Sports Business Journal reported Thursday…

Half of the league’s 30 teams agreed there was a need to go through with the borrowing, according to the report…

That’s fantastic.  Apparently even major league sports are really hurting in this tough economic times.

Gosh! If only there were a way to cut back some of the spending from this crucial organization. Maybe like, oh I don’t know, work over some of their salaries?

The NBA Spends over 2.1 BILLION Dollars a year a salaries alone!

The League Minimum Salary for the Calendar year 2008 was $412,718 per year. And few players are making the NBA’s minimum wage.

The top 30 highest paid players in the NBA make over 14 million dollars a year. Kevin Garnett from Boston ringing in at number 1 with a $24,750,000  salary. At the bottom of the top 30 is Lebron James with a yearly salary of $14,410,581.

The New York Knicks spend almost $100 Million dollars a year on salaries alone. And that’s just one of 30 teams!

You know, sports has it’s place in the world. But this is disgusting.

SalariesSource: HoopsHype

February 25th, 2009

Well, apparently Google hates Barack Obama because right now, searching images.google.com for “Obama” returns nothing:

No Results

Interesting. Makes you wonder what bug they were fixing that accidentally broke a search term for Obama. But I’m sure Google doesn’t mess with their search results… ;)

February 23rd, 2009

For the longest time, I’ve wanted to know how to search on a Flag in bugzilla. We use flags to determine what bugs have already been automated in our regression testing suite, and a variety of other things. So really, a filtered list of bugs based on what their flag has been set to would really be useful.

Filtering a bugzilla search by flag

First, ascertain the name of your flag:
flag11

In this case, my flag name is “Automation/FT”. 

Now, using an advanced bugzilla search, let’s search on it by searching on the Flag Name, combined with a ?,-, or + at the end (depending on what you’re searching for).

flag21

 

In my example, this search will return all bugs in which the “Automation/FT” Flag has been set to “-”. Of course, that search is further filtered by parameters I’ve used above like products or keywords.

See, searching on flags in bugzilla can be quite fun. This is probably fairly common knowledge, but I never knew how to do it!

February 20th, 2009

I have added HTML e-mail support to makemetheking.com. Now, if an e-mail is received that the service can’t render, users can view the HTML version of that e-mail.

Keep in mind that viewing HTML e-mails does come with some specific risks, including viruses, spyware, and who knows what else. Feel free to read more about it here.