It looks like there is a fire going on at Clemson. You can see it on one of the webcams.

[Update: By 6:23am the next day, news about the fire is finally on the web.]

Okay. Enough fire watching. I’m headed off to Zzzz Land. Looks like the watching students are thinning out.

And the fire truck just left the intersection

Probably the one of the lowest forms of skunk around. Setting fire to buildings, and then shooting at Firemen and EMT’s.

“Police said the shooter began firing rapidly at authorities the moment they arrived”. So, Rapid fire, poor accuracy (just one EMT hit), and yet the article calls the rat a “Sniper”.

I’m thinking of learning Hebrew. It looks irresistibly like code.

So far I have acquired a Hebrew “Old Testament” and learned three letters so far. Time will tell how if I manage to allocate enough time to learning it, since at present it is merely a whim. :)

My Dad’s company is upgrading to the new version of their accounting package, BusinessWorks. To convert on a duel xeon workstation just 3.5 megs of accounting data to the new version format, has taken more than an hour - before we gave up and left it to run overnight!

We did not believe the converter program when it ordered us to “Run this at the end of the workday. May take more than ten hours to complete.” I just don’t understand how you can spend HOURS converting three floppy disks work of data. I just really, really don’t understand it.

Every night one of the websites I coded downloads about 50 megs of data on 50,000 homes. It does several different data transformations (rearranging about 30 items per listing, and doing some other data lookups), imports it into a mysql database, and indexes the data - in about one minute on a cheap PIII 800.

I really, really don’t understand a time measured in hours for 3.5 megs of data. But then, this is from the company whose home page says:

Sadly I’ve been neglecting this blog. About a month ago I set myself up an “internal” blog at the company I volunteer at. I’ve been posting there multiple times a day, and ignoring this one. I need to only post “internal” stuff over there, and keep the generally applicable stuff out here.

Okay. So that’s what I will do.

Pumas on Hoverbikes - Notes on managing sysadmins (via Decafbad)

The reasons for my decision to quit were myriad, but central to the decision was the realization that there are two kinds of companies: Good ones ask you to think for them. The others tell you to think like them. —Monkeybagel

Basecamp does look like a cute way to communicate with customers. The price is reasonable as well. I just saw that they have a free plan with support for only one active project - I must have missed that one at first. Eventually, I’ll give it a try.