flog

Come on in! What's the news? Where you've been?

And back to our regularly scheduled nonsense:

http://spoiledphotos.com/photobomb/popular/1431-what-moth-wouldn-t-enjoy-th

Wednesday and Thursday of this past week, I had a short moment of concern as my father entered the hospital complaining of chest pains. The results of the various tests they ran were all good. His heart/chestal region is in tip top shape and modern Western medicine has bothered to offer no more explanation for the pain he felt than "acid reflux, maybe?".

Anyway, the point is in the midst of this moment of panic, I was twisting and turning the topic to try and find a handle to grasp where the sequence of events would "make sense". Trying to glean meaning from the various possible outcomes. Preparing myself for "what may come".

I visited my father in the hospital on Thursday and shortly after I left he was discharged with a clean bill of health, but still later that night I was restless and watched about 3 hours worth of Hitchens videos. Watching the dessicated husk of the post-chemo Hitchens give interviews where person after person asked him "didn't you ever ask 'why me?'?", I had a sudden visceral understanding, not an intellectual assent to the proposition, but a profound realization that there is no meaning to be gleaned from my father's eventual death - no matter which way I turn it. It's the ridiculous squandering of a life; setting fire to a lifetime's worth of experiences and knowledge. We have a rather high view of ourselves and our place in the cosmos, but as with everything else it's an illusion. Mother Nature will garbage collect the bits and pieces she let us borrow to knit ourselves together in the womb and see to it that we are thoroughly and completely unwound and recycled, never to be seen again, except as echoes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUnuLqfOBCc

"What could be more nonsensical? As a matter of fact the position we occupy would be precisely the same as it is now."

So, reading up on URIs today to see if there is some way in the .NET framework to get access to a "default path separator" character so I wouldn't have to hardcode / when constructing URLs. It doesn't look like anything that specific is available, however, while reading up on URI Fragments on wickerpedia I came across this, which is cool - if not particularly useful:

In URIs for MIME application/pdf documents Adobe PDF viewers recognize a number of fragment identifiers.[9] For instance, a URL ending in .pdf#page=35 will cause Adobe Reader to open the PDF and scroll to page 35. Several other parameters are possible, including #nameddest= (similar to HTML anchors), #search="word1 word2", #zoom=, etc. Multiple parameters can be combined with ampersands: http://example.org/doc.pdf#view=fitb&nameddest=Chapter3.

My job would be so much easier if everyone on the planet used UTC.

DECLARE @switchhour int
DECLARE @localdate datetime

-- The switch occurs on the second after the
-- first 1:59:59am local time,
-- so times before the first 1:59:59am local time use
-- yesterday's offset and times after the first
-- 1:59:59am local time use today's offset
-- NOTE: This won't work for timezones with
-- half-hour offsets from UTC
SET @switchhour = (@OffsetYesterday / 60) + 2

-- If yesterday and today's offset are the same,
-- adjust from UTC using yesterday's offset
-- Else if the offsets are different, and the
-- Login/Logout datetime is from yesterday,
-- adjust from UTC using yesterday's offset
-- Else if the offsets are different,
-- the Login/Logout datetime is from today,
-- and it is before 2:00am, adjust from UTC using
-- yesterday's offset
-- Else adjust from UTC using today's offset
SET @localdate = CASE
WHEN @OffsetYesterday = @OffsetToday THEN DATEADD(n, -1 * @OffsetYesterday, @UTCDate)
ELSE CASE
WHEN @DateIDYesterday = CONVERT(nvarchar(8), @UTCDate, 112) THEN DATEADD(n, -1 * @OffsetYesterday, @UTCDate)
ELSE CASE
WHEN DATEPART(hh, @UTCDate) < @switchhour THEN DATEADD(n, -1 * @OffsetYesterday, @UTCDate)
ELSE DATEADD(n, -1 * @OffsetToday, @UTCDate)
END
END
END

RETURN @localdate

You know you knew even before I said anything that this existed - that it had to exist. If anything we know about the universe is good or right, there has to be a wickerpedia.

http://www.elsewhere.co.nz/essentialelsewhere/2151/u2-achtung-baby-1991-zooropa-1993/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fStj3vPG5U8&t=59s

But it feels like this calm it's decaying.
It's collapsing under its own weight.
And I think it's your friend the hangman coming,
choking back a laugh, drunk and swaggering to your door.

Now do you feel that cold, icy presence,
in the morning with coffee and with bread?
Do you feel, in the movement of traffic and days,
a terrible significance?