The Blog of Lucien Stals

I’m *not* calling it global warming. I won’t, I WON’T!

At least I’m not at despair anymore

There was an interesting program on SBS last night. Cutting Edge: Five Disasters Waiting To Happen. It’s good to see people paying attention to this stuff. I wonder when people will see enough climate change to wake up and start doing something about in on a global scale.

(I just noticed that next weeks program looks good too. Global Warming: Bush’s Climate of Fear. Must make a note to watch it.)

I also just listened to a podcast from Ockham’s Razor on Climate Change. It doesn’t put a rosy spin on it, but at least it’s not as doom and gloom as some of the stuff I’ve been seeing/hearing/reading.

I’m famous! I have my own action figures!

And just for reference, here’s another reference to myself.

And finally, there’s a “Lucien” in one of Clive Barker’s novels (Everville, I think). He’s a minor character, but he does get crucified, for what it’s worth. I claim this one because I did have the fortune to meet Clive Barker *before* he wrote the book. He even said “That’s a cool name”, or something like that.

Hey, we claim our 15 minutes wherever we can get it

Something Al Gore said in the movie the other night was (to paraphrase) “Don’t move from awareness straight to despair. There’s a middle step which is ‘take action.’”

I’m so trying not to go to despair. I really am trying…

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In response to Andrews post:

Things I’m doing to save the world:

1. Green Electricity at home
2. Carbon offsets for gas use at home (I think Andrew and I both have Origin as our energy provider)
3. Energy efficient light bulbs. As old incandescent bulb blow, we replace them with energy efficient ones. I think were at about 95% with the efficient globs now
4. We do not have a fuel efficient car
   But we *do* have only one car and I catch public transport to work all the time.
5. I vote Green. I grew up in a working class, Labour Party loving family, but I vote Green because they seem to be about the only people who give a s***t.
6. I have started turning off appliances at the wall.
7. Letting others know. I’m doing it right now!

Things to do:

1. Buy a new fridge with a better energy rating.
2. Buy a wind up clock so I don’t need to plug anything in or buy batteries.
3. Agitate for more change at work.

So lets hear what everyone else has done/is doing?

Andrew and Raj organised a night out to see the Al Gore movie An Inconvenient Truth. It ain’t no feel good movie, but it was good.

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I just got back from the Prahran Campus where Apple gave us their road show presentation. It was well worth the trip. The ticket machine at the train station on the way there mistakenly time stamped my ticket so it’s valid until 2 am tomorrow (20th)! It’s only supposed to be a 2 hour ticket and it *should* have run out at 2pm today (the 19th)

I’m tempted to take the afternoon off and go traveling.

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I found this great
Web 2.0 Bullshit Generator. I thought it would be a suitable post script to my earlier post.

Clinton and I were imagining a 2.0 game show. Kind of a cross between The Price is Right, and Wheel of Fortune.

__________._

Go on! Guess what the phrase is!

So why isn’t Swinburne teaching Ruby on Rails?

It’s also great to see Apple getting wise to Ruby on Rails.

I just had fun with this little script. I wish I know Python better so I didn’t have to spend so much time looking stuff up in the API, but this takes the current directory and finds all instances of “vssver.scc”, a Visual Source Safe file, and removes it. I wanted to do this for a *large* directory structure before I checked it into SVN. That right, bye bye VSS, hello SVN.

import os
from os.path import join
 
def killvss(dir):
    for root, dirs, files in os.walk(dir):
        for name in files:
#            print name
            if name == “vssver.scc”:
                os.remove(join(root, name))
        for d in dirs:
            killvss(d)
 
 
directory = os.getcwd()
#print "For: ", directory
killvss(directory)

Hmm, something like this might work for getting rid of all those pesky hidden files apples write into every folder…

A long running gripe of mine has been the overuse of acronyms and metaphors. But I was just reading a bunch of stuff about Blackboard 2.0. One blog I read talked about the principles of Web 2.0 driving E-Learning 2.0 so that we end up with Blackboard 2.0.

Argh! MAKE IT STOP!

“It hurts us. It hurts us. Nasty 2.0 face.” -Golum

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