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Buried is a film about a truck driver named Paul. Paul is working in Iraq delivering supplies; his convoy was ambushed. He wakes up in a coffin, buried alive. He has a cellphone. The entire movie is set in the coffin with Paul as he tries to get help.
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Tuesday, Jan. 11 2011 12:44 a.m. UTC Scoop and Polie Things are starting to get more hectic here for me, with various special runs, feature requests, new arrivals (including some journalists arriving tomorrow), not to mention “House Mouse” duties (station cleaning duties which we all share in addition to our normal “jobs,” whatever they may be). I am trying to stick to a schedule, which so far seems to be working: wake at 6:30 or ....
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Tuesday, Jan. 11 2011 12:44 a.m. UTC Scoop and Polie Things are starting to get more hectic here for me, with various special runs, feature requests, new arrivals (including some journalists arriving tomorrow), not to mention “House Mouse” duties (station cleaning duties which we all share in addition to our normal “jobs,” whatever they may be). I am trying to stick to a schedule, which so far seems to be working: wake at 6:30 or ....
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Tuesday, Jan. 11 2011 12:44 a.m. UTC Scoop and Polie Things are starting to get more hectic here for me, with various special runs, feature requests, new arrivals (including some journalists arriving tomorrow), not to mention “House Mouse” duties (station cleaning duties which we all share in addition to our normal “jobs,” whatever they may be). I am trying to stick to a schedule, which so far seems to be working: wake at 6:30 or ....
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Wow, 2010 was quite a hectic year in the Midgard world. Here is a quick summary: We held three Midgard Gatherings: one in Lodz, Poland in April , one in Tampere, Finland in July and one in Gothenburg, Sweden in November . In April we announced the new directions of the project . The project completed a migration to Git (and GitHub ) for Midgard2 and Midgard MVC, together with a change in the development process to facilitate a ....
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I’m talking about this: select-1from from dual; Looks like invalid, right? Well, let’s run it: SQL> select-1from from dual; ROM ---------- -1.0E+000 This is because: Oracle doesn’t need whitespace for tokenizing the SQL statement (differences in character classes will do – as I’ve explained here ) The first from “keyword” in the above statement is broken down to two tokens as an “F” right after a digit means that the precedi..
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I’m talking about this: select-1from from dual; Looks like invalid, right? Well, let’s run it: SQL> select-1from from dual; ROM ---------- -1.0E+000 This is because: Oracle doesn’t need whitespace for tokenizing the SQL statement (differences in character classes will do – as I’ve explained here ) The first from “keyword” in the above statement is broken down to two tokens as an “F” right after a digit means that the precedi..
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So I've been hosting my own MoinMoin wiki for a while. I use it pretty heavily to manage my own little projects, packing lists, and whatnot. I used MoinMoin initially because it is written in python and we were using it at work. It has served me reasonably well, but I decide to shut it down and migrate all my data over to gitit instead. My reasoning for the migration includes the following factors. MoinMoin seems as far as I can tel....
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When we talk about religion and spirituality it seems all about believing (or not) in a higher power, or “God”. I always say I’m spiritual, but not religious. I believe that there is something more and have my own ideas of what I think it could be, but I never claim to know that there is something more. Does this mean I don’t believe? Does belief in a higher power, God, whatever, require being able to whole-heartedly say that you know i..
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Monday, Jan. 10 2011 12:05 a.m. UTC Destination Alpha I have a few minutes before today’s passenger flight arrives. Several 'Cubers are leaving on this flight and are very excited to go (some have been here since November). One colleague says the last thing he does on the last day is strip the linens off his bed — and only when the flight is 20 minutes out and there is no danger of it going back to McMurdo without landing and pick....
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Monday, Jan. 10 2011 12:05 a.m. UTC Destination Alpha I have a few minutes before today’s passenger flight arrives. Several 'Cubers are leaving on this flight and are very excited to go (some have been here since November). One colleague says the last thing he does on the last day is strip the linens off his bed — and only when the flight is 20 minutes out and there is no danger of it going back to McMurdo without landing and pick....
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Yesterday, after returning from a trip to Kenya , the hard drive on my old MacBook Air decided to die. Eventually I was able to recover most of it, but many files on my home directory were simply gone. But this isn't such a big problem, as everything of importance is anyway online, conforming with the Linus backup strategy : Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it. So, where ....
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Monday, Jan. 10 2011 12:05 a.m. UTC Destination Alpha I have a few minutes before today’s passenger flight arrives. Several 'Cubers are leaving on this flight and are very excited to go (some have been here since November). One colleague says the last thing he does on the last day is strip the linens off his bed — and only when the flight is 20 minutes out and there is no danger of it going back to McMurdo without landing and pick....
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As I promised last year, I have 2 christmas gifts for you. I have already forgotten what the other one was supposed to be :), but the first one is Snapper v3.52 which has (the much requested) Oracle 9.2 support! The syntax is the same, with Snapper you can now sample ASH-like data on Oracle 9.2 too. Instead of SQL_IDs it will display you SQL hash values: SQL> @snapper ash,ash1=user+sql_id,ash2=sid+event 5 1 all Sampling SID all wit....
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As I promised last year, I have 2 christmas gifts for you. I have already forgotten what the other one was supposed to be :), but the first one is Snapper v3.52 which has (the much requested) Oracle 9.2 support! The syntax is the same, with Snapper you can now sample ASH-like data on Oracle 9.2 too. Instead of SQL_IDs it will display you SQL hash values: SQL> @snapper ash,ash1=user+sql_id,ash2=sid+event 5 1 all Sampling SID all wit....
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Sunday, Jan. 9 2011 1:50 a.m. UTC Fire Sleds Today most people on station have the day off; some 'Cubers are working, though — I’m taking it a bit easy to try to finally overcome the twin poisons of altitude sickness and paucity of sleep caused by the usual jet lag, lack of nighttime, noise on station, exhaustion, et cetera . Yesterday a large group of us had snowmobile training, focused largely on the rules (helmets for all d..
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Sunday, Jan. 9 2011 1:50 a.m. UTC Fire Sleds Today most people on station have the day off; some 'Cubers are working, though — I’m taking it a bit easy to try to finally overcome the twin poisons of altitude sickness and paucity of sleep caused by the usual jet lag, lack of nighttime, noise on station, exhaustion, et cetera . Yesterday a large group of us had snowmobile training, focused largely on the rules (helmets for all d..
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Sunday, Jan. 9 2011 1:50 a.m. UTC Fire Sleds Today most people on station have the day off; some 'Cubers are working, though — I’m taking it a bit easy to try to finally overcome the twin poisons of altitude sickness and paucity of sleep caused by the usual jet lag, lack of nighttime, noise on station, exhaustion, et cetera . Yesterday a large group of us had snowmobile training, focused largely on the rules (helmets for all d..
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Friday, Jan. 7 2011 6:12 p.m. UTC Radio measurement Woke up before 0500h to do some work on the detector and get caught up on emails & such. Today’s post is going to be brief since it is almost time for breakfast and the morning meeting. Last night was the first time I’ve worked (or even gone) outside since arriving the day before. Sebastian and I did some radio noise measurements out in Summer Camp (a collection of Korean-War-....
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Friday, Jan. 7 2011 6:12 p.m. UTC Radio measurement Woke up before 0500h to do some work on the detector and get caught up on emails & such. Today’s post is going to be brief since it is almost time for breakfast and the morning meeting. Last night was the first time I’ve worked (or even gone) outside since arriving the day before. Sebastian and I did some radio noise measurements out in Summer Camp (a collection of Korean-War-....
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Friday, Jan. 7 2011 6:12 p.m. UTC Radio measurement Woke up before 0500h to do some work on the detector and get caught up on emails & such. Today’s post is going to be brief since it is almost time for breakfast and the morning meeting. Last night was the first time I’ve worked (or even gone) outside since arriving the day before. Sebastian and I did some radio noise measurements out in Summer Camp (a collection of Korean-War-....
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There is a great debate in C-style languages about the position of the asterisk and the space when declaring pointers: MyType *x; // Original C style MyType* x; // The other style I was reminded of this when attending an Objective-C training course recently. Apple’s tools create declarations of the first form, the trainer preferred the second form. I remember having an opinion on this debate back when I first came across the second form, ..
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Been here about nineteen hours and am settling in, though I have yet to do any real work. The current barometer reads 10,369 feet and, while I really felt the altitude last night, today I feel almost normal. My dorm room is noisy as usual, and not light-tight (recall that it is always daylight outside), but somehow I managed to sleep 6 hours or so, without earplugs. The first couple of days you are supposed to take it real easy and I kno....
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Been here about nineteen hours and am settling in, though I have yet to do any real work. The current barometer reads 10,369 feet and, while I really felt the altitude last night, today I feel almost normal. My dorm room is noisy as usual, and not light-tight (recall that it is always daylight outside), but somehow I managed to sleep 6 hours or so, without earplugs. The first couple of days you are supposed to take it real easy and I kno....
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Been here about nineteen hours and am settling in, though I have yet to do any real work. The current barometer reads 10,369 feet and, while I really felt the altitude last night, today I feel almost normal. My dorm room is noisy as usual, and not light-tight (recall that it is always daylight outside), but somehow I managed to sleep 6 hours or so, without earplugs. The first couple of days you are supposed to take it real easy and I kno....
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The Emperor and I If you are reading this post, then we have made it to the South Pole. At the moment we are airborne on Flight P-106. There are 17 of us today plus a palette or so of cargo, with plenty of room on the C-130 to spread out. I, for one, am standing in the middle of the plane, with the laptop perched atop some bags. A few others have found spots on the floor or are checking out the flight deck one by one. Yesterday’s ....
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The Emperor and I If you are reading this post, then we have made it to the South Pole. At the moment we are airborne on Flight P-106. There are 17 of us today plus a palette or so of cargo, with plenty of room on the C-130 to spread out. I, for one, am standing in the middle of the plane, with the laptop perched atop some bags. A few others have found spots on the floor or are checking out the flight deck one by one. Yesterday’s ....
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The Emperor and I If you are reading this post, then we have made it to the South Pole. At the moment we are airborne on Flight P-106. There are 17 of us today plus a palette or so of cargo, with plenty of room on the C-130 to spread out. I, for one, am standing in the middle of the plane, with the laptop perched atop some bags. A few others have found spots on the floor or are checking out the flight deck one by one. Yesterday’s ....
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I was thinking about some of my favorite books recently. I wouldn’t necessarily call them all time favorites - they’re just the ones that have stuck with me and have been the most memorable.
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As we began our descent to Pegasus Airfield, it finally came to me, bleary-eyed after a brief but intense bout with REM sleep, why we had left Christchurch at the unholy hour of 11 PM rather than something more civilized. I had chalked it up to the whimsical vagaries of military flight schedules (picturing some tough hombre of a McMurdo Ops flight sergeant displaying active and deliberate lack of consideration for everyone’s sleep schedule)....
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As we began our descent to Pegasus Airfield, it finally came to me, bleary-eyed after a brief but intense bout with REM sleep, why we had left Christchurch at the unholy hour of 11 PM rather than something more civilized. I had chalked it up to the whimsical vagaries of military flight schedules (picturing some tough hombre of a McMurdo Ops flight sergeant displaying active and deliberate lack of consideration for everyone’s sleep schedule)....
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As we began our descent to Pegasus Airfield, it finally came to me, bleary-eyed after a brief but intense bout with REM sleep, why we had left Christchurch at the unholy hour of 11 PM rather than something more civilized. I had chalked it up to the whimsical vagaries of military flight schedules (picturing some tough hombre of a McMurdo Ops flight sergeant displaying active and deliberate lack of consideration for everyone’s sleep schedule)....
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Thursday, Jan. 13 2011 11:37 p.m. UTC ARO, antenna, geographic pole marker, and pedestrian Satellite is up in a few minutes so I’d better prepare today’s post. Been jonesing for a bath the last couple of days. Those 1-2 minute showers every couple of days are getting old. We have a massive exodus of IceCube drillers leaving in a few minutes (all but one, 21 in all) on today’s passenger flight. Hopefully they won’t get stuck in ....
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Thursday, Jan. 13 2011 11:37 p.m. UTC ARO, antenna, geographic pole marker, and pedestrian Satellite is up in a few minutes so I’d better prepare today’s post. Been jonesing for a bath the last couple of days. Those 1-2 minute showers every couple of days are getting old. We have a massive exodus of IceCube drillers leaving in a few minutes (all but one, 21 in all) on today’s passenger flight. Hopefully they won’t get stuck in ....
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Thursday, Jan. 13 2011 11:37 p.m. UTC ARO, antenna, geographic pole marker, and pedestrian Satellite is up in a few minutes so I’d better prepare today’s post. Been jonesing for a bath the last couple of days. Those 1-2 minute showers every couple of days are getting old. We have a massive exodus of IceCube drillers leaving in a few minutes (all but one, 21 in all) on today’s passenger flight. Hopefully they won’t get stuck in ....
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My stay here in Christchurch may be a short one. Arrived yesterday afternoon to the heat of high summer and found out directly that our clothing date would be this evening — and that we were scheduled to fly immediately after receiving our cold weather gear. That gives just over a day here, which is shorter than I might have liked, but which might result in arriving at the Pole and getting settled in sooner, which would also be nice. The....
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My stay here in Christchurch may be a short one. Arrived yesterday afternoon to the heat of high summer and found out directly that our clothing date would be this evening — and that we were scheduled to fly immediately after receiving our cold weather gear. That gives just over a day here, which is shorter than I might have liked, but which might result in arriving at the Pole and getting settled in sooner, which would also be nice. The....
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My stay here in Christchurch may be a short one. Arrived yesterday afternoon to the heat of high summer and found out directly that our clothing date would be this evening — and that we were scheduled to fly immediately after receiving our cold weather gear. That gives just over a day here, which is shorter than I might have liked, but which might result in arriving at the Pole and getting settled in sooner, which would also be nice. The....
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I didn’t get a post in yesterday, because it was only January 2 for a few hours, just before I crossed over the International Date Line. Not to mention the fact that there was no WiFi on the flight (though apparently some planes have that now). My second flight didn’t take off until nearly midnight, local time. I dread the flight to Auckland more than any other stage of the trip; it feels like the bardo state from Tibetan Buddhism, in wh....
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I didn’t get a post in yesterday, because it was only January 2 for a few hours, just before I crossed over the International Date Line. Not to mention the fact that there was no WiFi on the flight (though apparently some planes have that now). My second flight didn’t take off until nearly midnight, local time. I dread the flight to Auckland more than any other stage of the trip; it feels like the bardo state from Tibetan Buddhism, in wh....
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I didn’t get a post in yesterday, because it was only January 2 for a few hours, just before I crossed over the International Date Line. Not to mention the fact that there was no WiFi on the flight (though apparently some planes have that now). My second flight didn’t take off until nearly midnight, local time. I dread the flight to Auckland more than any other stage of the trip; it feels like the bardo state from Tibetan Buddhism, in wh....
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Happy New Year to everyone from the skies somewhere over the western USA, en route to LAX. This is my ninth and probably final trip to the Geographic South Pole, and if you’re reading this you probably know me and know I’ve been preparing for this trip off and on for a number of months (and, in some ways, for decades — more on that later). Now I am finally under way, and I’m relieved to be launched and finally headed towards whatever this j....
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