Not really. Actually they were digging for a diamond... or topaz.... or cubic zirconium. A sandbox may seen like a dumb place to look, but two $2500 diamonds were found plus a bunch more of the less valuable stones.

This was from the "Diamond Dig" at the Dayton Art Institute this past weekend. It was a promotional event sponsored by some local radio stations to promote the Egypt show currently on display at DAI. And speaking of DAI; don't forget that Oktoberfest is this weekend! We'll be there.

Posted by ra at 02:28 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

I think she wants to go to prom with you.
http://www.ebaumsworld.com/videos/gotoprom.html

Posted by ra at 17:55 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

I finally got some vacation time and so we left for France last night.

I don't know what airport we flew out of, but I wouldn't recommend it. I saw two planes headed right at each other on the same runway; one landing and one taking off. Right before they would have collided, the jet taking off pulled an abrupt maneuver sending it straight up; nearly vertical. Then it made another quick change or course, sending it away from the airport... upside-down! I sure am glad we weren't on that flight.

I had a hard time packing for this trip. I went to all kinds of stores to buy things I needed for the trip, but half of the time I forgot what I was buying when I got to the store. I guess that will teach me to pack my bags ahead of time in the future.

Posted by ra at 17:24 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

Broken rectangles. WTF. Don't like my kind? Maybe I should try a disguise? Is there a point in here somewhere? Are you really that stupid or do you just enjoy screwing around with people? Tired; very, very tired. There is no vacation. Free parking costs $7/hour. This isn't perfect because of something I did why not why not why not? Cheese seven. Tall crap. Smells like snacks. Probably denied too. Thank you. Water.

Posted by ra in rants at 00:39 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

This morning I had a 7:00 appt with 3 other people. Which meant I had to get up at like 6:15. When I arrived, on time, there was only one person there. The guy who scheduled the fucking meeting showed up 45 min later. Grrrr. If you are going to make me get up too early, at least come and share the pain.

Tomorrow morning I have a 7:30 meeting. Grrrr. What are we going to talk about? I think I'll mention the fact that I'd rather be sleeping.

Mostly I hate getting up before the sun is even awake. It just seems wrong. The sun isn't up before seven:thirty, so who the hell am I to argue with the sun??

Posted by ra in rants at 11:36 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

If I had to guess it looks like you need to floor it around in circles, doing donuts in the intersection(s) as you pass through.

Although I'm generally a big fan of roundabouts; I have to say this one looks a little daunting. The "magic roundabout", as it's called, looks to me like it was designed by someone high on magic mushrooms. You can read more about this roundabout and the city where it is found here: http://www.swindonweb.com/life/lifemagi0.htm

Posted by ra in main at 21:07 | Comments (0) | Trackbacks (0)

For MONTHS I have been irritated that I have been unable to use knotes (a utility providing memo pad or "post-it note"-like functionality in KDE.) It kept duplicating my entries many times over, giving me an enornous sea of extra notes, and consequently making it impossible to find anything. I tried blowing away the notes files themselves and the knotes config file (knotesrc) but nothing helped. Any new notes I created were heavily duplicated as soon as I quit a restarted knotes. (to be clear, they weren't actually duplicated in the notes.ics file, only in the display of notes from the knotes panel applet or the knotes viewer in kontact). I finally got so frustrated that I backed up my .kde directory and just started blowing away files and directories inside until I found a cure to the problem. At last I have solved this annoying problem.

After removing the following file, my knotes behavoir returned to normal
~/.kde/share/config/kresources/notes/stdrc

I'm not sure of the exact cause of the problem, but after testing with a new user with no prior .kde dir, I could not reproduce the problem; so I think it probably had to do with the huge quantity of notes I had retained since I started using knotes, and the fact that I have upgraded to newer versions of kde and knotes several times since.

In any case, I'm very happy to be able to use knotes again!

Posted by ra in tech at 12:19 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)