mikal – Page 87 – Made by Mikal

How do you spot the Australian kids in an American playground?

Post author:mikal
Post published:June 10, 2007
Post category:Travel

They're the ones wearing hats. Despite it being noon, the various American kids at the playground all lacked sun protection. In fact, they pretty much all lacked practical clothing, it was all way too dressy. Americans don't seem to have figured out skin cancer at all in fact, every weekend there are bikini clad young ladies sunning themselves around the pool, the schools don't require kids to wear sun protection, and it's pretty common to see outside workers not wearing any sun protection either. How odd.

Review

Post author:mikal
Post published:June 4, 2007
Post category:Mythtv

"If you're interested in setting up a PVR, then this is definitely a book to check out. Apress sells the paper version for $30, and offers an eBook for $15. Amazon offers it for $19.79, but I doubt that price will last long. I definitely give this book a 5 out of 5..." http://www.yeraze.com/article.php/20070603160650701

Is there any way to access the match text in MySQL rlike selects?

Post author:mikal
Post published:May 13, 2007
Post category:Mysql

Hi. I am doing a select like this in MySQL 5: select * from foo where bar rlike '(.*),(.*)'; The specific example here is made up. Anyway, I'd like to be able to get to the matched text from bar, like I can with various languages regexp libraries. Is this functionality exposed at all in MySQL? I've looked at the docs and can't see any indication that it is, so this might just be wishful thinking.

Apparently I am ruder in the office than I realise

Post author:mikal
Post published:May 11, 2007
Post category:Link

Some quotes from the Dublin office last week make me think that I might owe "Master N" (as he will be called) an apology. Master N, you're nothing like a butterfly. You don't have wings.

On Virgin Atlantic premium economy

Post author:mikal
Post published:May 10, 2007
Post category:Travel

Welcome to Mikal's badly organised travel tips. On the trip to Dublin I flew Virgin Atlantic premium economy. That's kind of like anyone else's business class, given the classes on Virgin are economy, premium economy, and upper class. It's much cheaper than anyone else's business class fare to Heathrow though. I thought that premium economy was pretty good... The seats are old and both of the ones I sat in were subtly broken, but the seat spacing is excellent, the seat is wider than normal, and reclines just that little extra. The extra money was worth it given I got off the plane and walked straight into a meeting in Dublin, and on the return flight I got a heap of work done. Premium economy even offers power for laptops, although my corporate-issue iGo doesn't work with the new Lenovo x60, and Virgin didn't have a tip for the x60 in their collection. That's a pretty common compliant with the newer Intel Core2 laptops though -- they draw too much power for older universal power supplies. I got around the power problem with two "eight hour" batteries for the x60. The quotes are because I actually get more like four…

Dublin trip

Post author:mikal
Post published:May 10, 2007
Post category:Travel

I occasionally wonder to myself why I don't blog more these days, and I think the answer is that I'm not convinced that other people would be interested in what happens to me from day to day. For example, when writing the books, all that is really involved is a massive amount of time in front of a computer. The finished product is cool, but the process of producing it is actually quite boring. (Although I feel that I will one day write up my universal theory of project management... The short summary is something like: "project management is about removing obstacles to delivery of the project -- not deadlines, hassling, gantt charts, or general futzing". Or something like that.) The Dublin trip is similar. I had a good time, although am very tired. I flew Virgin Atlantic premium economy from San Francisco to Heathrow, and then BMI to Dublin. Virgin is great, BMI suck even more than I could have imagined. For example -- they advertise that they have the best on time record of any LHR flying airline, but they were late every time on my trip. Oh, and one of the planes had a power generation engine…

Book printed!

Post author:mikal
Post published:May 5, 2007
Post category:Mythtv

I got off the phone with Catherine a few hours ago, and apparently my copies of the book have arrived at home (I'm in Dublin for work at the moment). That's very exciting. Looks like now would be a good time to buy it, while it's shipping soon and still on special.

A large percentage of marriages fail

Post author:mikal
Post published:May 5, 2007
Post category:Link

Apparently that applies to marriages involving goats as well. Such a shame. Who will think of the kids?

Australian Health Insurance

Post author:mikal
Post published:May 5, 2007
Post category:Link

It sounds to me like it's time for some sort of wiki-based health insurance comparison service. As someone who has recently been insured in Australia and the US though, I should point out the Australian system is way less confusing than the US one.

Australian teachers advocate a China style firewall for Australian internet users

Post author:mikal
Post published:May 4, 2007
Post category:Link

SMH article and the actual site It's logical really: Some Australian teachers are perceived as sucking by their students The students rate them on line, thus exercising free speech The teachers can't face a life of people knowing that other people think they suck Teacher's federation proposes some crazy firewall scheme Hurrah! Censorship is always the answer.