insert into soccerstats select s.id,games.game_id, s.school_id,s.player_id,s.goals, s.assists,s.saves,s.timestamp from soccerstatsold s left join games on ( (s.game_id = games.old_id) and (games.sport='7' or games.sport='14'))
should be taking over eight minutes to run. It's maddening! Think I need to get a copy of this.
The point of all this was that my workload tends to fluctuate depending on various cyclical news events -- at the moment, primary elections and high school sports. Plus our company has a management retreat in two weeks so we've got reports to write and powerpoints to slog through. Plus my brother is coming to visit during the same week. And at the moment one person in my department is out sick, and another is on vacation. So, yeah, things have been a bit crazy.
Anyway, in the meantime, I'll leave you with a nifty link to this story in today's paper about this guy who makes pop-art using etch-a-sketches. Very cool. There's only one photo in the article, but here's his actual website.
Somewhere near the California-Oregon border, I crossed a bridge and saw a herd of elk lounging on the banks of the river. There was a turnoff ahead, so I pulled over to see if I could get a closer look.
Several other people had the same idea. At first I followed their lead and bushwhacked my way through a grove of stinging nettles (ouch!) to get closer. The view wasn't that great, however.
On my way back to my car, I realized that there was a dirt road leading down to the gravel and sand-covered river bed. I was driving a rental car, and there was no way I was going to risk burying it. But I walked down the road to get a closer look.
Some folks, however, didn't share my prudence. One dumbass in particular drove his front-wheel drive SUV down, and then proceeded to bury it up to the axels in sand. His driving showed a remarkable lack of common sense -- he was able to back up, but rather than simply backing out of the sand onto firmer ground, he went a few feet and then zoomed forward to have another go.
After watching this little show for a few minutes, I offered to help push. The guy's wife also got out to help, and a Korean tourist pitched in. The three of us waded into the sand and began frantically pushing, eventually dislodging the underpowered SUV. Unfortunately, however, I lost my footing in the sand when the vehicle started moving and did a split -- ripping a rather noticable hole in my pants.
Not content to be a Good Samaritan/sucker once in a day, about an hour later I was driving down a road and was flagged down by two adults and about 10 kids standing in the middle of the road. A shirtless guy explained to me that they were out of gas, and asked for a ride to a gas station. I wasn't in a huge hurry, so he climbed in with one of the kids and we headed to a Chevron station about 10 miles up the road. While riding, however, it emerged that the guy didn't actually have money to pay for the gas. So I ended up subsidizing a few gallons for them. It may be they were really in trouble -- or that they have just hit on a scam for getting a few gallons of free fuel. Who knows? In any case, I'll live without the $6.
Spent the night at a Motel 6 in Medford, Oregon. Today I'm off to Crater Lake, and then heading back toward the coast.
If the laptop keeps working, I'll try to post a few pictures tonight.
In the mid 1850s bandits and desperados gave Pleasanton the title of "the Desperate Town in the West." Main Street shootouts were not uncommon. Infamous bandits, such as Joaquin Murrieta, would ambush prospectors on their way from the gold fields and seek refuge in Pleasanton.
So far all I've seen is two Interstates, a Denny's and a Home Depot. I'm going to be disappointed if I don't get to meet a few desperados while I'm here.
Not sure what the plan is tomorrow except that the rehearsal dinner is in the evening. Might try to go into San Francisco for a bit.
We already have his neighbors weighing in: "I have to be honest, we have always been afraid something was going to happen," says one.
Of course, this story is getting buried by the much more weighty material. The Titans are dropping Eddie George.
I have a tolerance for bad movies that don't purport to be anything special. For example, I'm willing to (somewhat) forgive the makers of the insanely-bad Stepford Wives remake, because it was obviously intended as summer-movie pap. But when a director goes out of his way to show off how artistic and avant-garde he is, he better have something to back it up. In this case, Guy Maddin comes up with nothing.
For what its worth, I remember having a similar reaction to this.
In their study ["Money, Sex and Happiness: An Empirical Study"], Mr. [Andrew J.] Oswald and Mr. [David G.] Blanchflower analyzed the self-reported sexual activity and levels of happiness of more than 16,000 American adults who participated in a number of social surveys since the early 1990's. (Happiness is notoriously difficult to define, and the surveys make no attempt to do so; the respondents simply record how happy they believe themselves to be on a sliding scale.) By factoring out the measurable effects of other life events, the study revealed, to no one's surprise, that, "The more sex, the happier the person."Furthermore, the economists compared the levels of happiness produced by a vigorous sex life with other activities whose economic values had been calculated in prior research, allowing them to impute, in dollars, how much happiness sex was worth. They also estimated that increasing the frequency of sexual intercourse from once a month to at least once a week provided as much happiness as putting $50,000 in the bank.
A lasting marriage, by comparison, offers about $100,000 worth of happiness a year -- that is, on average, a single person would need to receive $100,000 annually to be as happy as a married person with the same education, job status and other characteristics. Divorce, on the other hand, imposes an emotional toll of about $66,000 a year, though there may be a short-term economic gain from the immediate relief provided by leaving your spouse.
So, the way I figure it, that means that happily married folks should have to pay more income taxes!
Oswald acknowleges that there are some limitations to his statistical methodology, but he says it's difficult to carry out controlled experiments in the field. "It would be great to assign Mr. and Mrs. X a certain amount of sexual activity and a certain amount of income, and see how it impacts their happiness," he said. "But I think it would be hard to get government funding."
Here's the actual study (PDF), but be warned that it has, like, numbers and stuff! ;-) The NY Times story is now stuck behind their paid archive, but you can read a similar account over here.
When I went to Mexico City, I was able to find a family owned guesthouse in the heart of the metropolis for about $30/night. Alas, I'm quickly realizing that traveling to the high-rent district that is the Pacific Northwest is an entirely different story. In the U.S., guesthouses of the sort I've encountered in Italy or Mexico have been pushed out of the market by the the ubiquitous chain motels that spring up like mushrooms around Interstate exits. So if you're looking to stay "in town" in a place with a bit of character, you end up perusing the "Bed and Breakfast" market -- complete with antique furniture in the room, breakfast served on crystal, and a hefty price tag. Definitely overkill. But I'm really not thrilled about spending every night in a generic motel room out by the Interstate -- I want to be where I can walk around and sightsee, and where I'm likely to meet other people in the process. So that makes things a bit more complicated.
Plus, the stuff I'm interested in seeing in Oregon and Washington is less centralized than Mexico City -- I'm considering trying to see Mount Hood, Crater Lake, the falls on the Columbia River, etc. This means that to do this with any sort of speed, I'm going to need to have a car. And the cost of the car rental is probably going to dwarf the cost of my plane tickets to California.
The end result is that the trip is going to be a lot more expensive than I initially thought. Still, though, I'm looking forward to it. Now the big challenge is simply figuring out how to cram everything into 11 days.
Right now all I know for sure is that I'm arriving in Oakland on Friday night, and leaving from Seattle the following Tuesday afternoon. Everything between that is up in the air.
In addition to sightseeing around the Bay area and the actual wedding on Sunday, here's a rough list of things I may want to hit on this trip:
I have no idea how exactly I'm going to accomplish all this, however. If y'all know anything about this area and have suggestions, I'd love to hear them.
American success or failure in Iraq may well depend on whether the Iraqis ... like American soldiers or not. ... One of your jobs is to prevent Hitler's agents from getting in their dirty work. The best way you can do this is by getting along with the Iraqis and making them your friends. ... Every American soldier is an ... ambassador of good will.
and
Kerbela (and) Nejef ... are particularly sacred to the Iraqi Moslems. ... It is advisable to stay away from them.
Apparently the folks running the current occupation hadn't read this book.
The complete document is available as a PDF right here.
Guess that whole homeland security thing is paying off...
At the moment I'm in no huge rush to get out of my current job, although I'm still interested in what else is out there.
So when I was contacted by a headhunter trying to fill a job in Knoxville the other day, I didn't immediately tell him to take a hike. But I also didn't get all lovey dovey with him.
Basically, the job sounds like it would have pluses and minuses. With the biggest minus being that it's in Knoxville. I've always told myself that if I left my current job it would be to move back to the Northeast. So I'm not especially interested in this.
On the other hand, everyone has a price. <rationalization>And Knoxville is closer to the northeast by about three hours... :-) </rationalization> So I sent him a note back essentially saying that I might be interested if they were paying about 25%-35% more than I'm making now, but it would still depend a lot on the particular company (which he's being cagey about.) I'm not expecting anything to come out of this, but it makes life interesting to have it floating around out there.
Whatever is causing the pop-unders, it appears to be hidden in script being pulled from another server, since viewing source does not reveal the offending code. There is no smoking gun, but this guy has a theory that Bravenet has begun serving popunder ads with its "free" counters at random intervals.
To test this theory, we're going to expunge any bravenet-related code from our templates. Please let us know if you continue to see popunders when you visit.
