Friday, September 08, 2006

The Week in Pandas



Forget about Paris Hilton's DUI and (Asian-looking) Suri Cruise's pictures in Vanity Fair, this news cycle has been all Pandas, all the time.

First up, the birth of a new cub by artificial insemination at the Zoo in Atlanta.


From Wonkette:
What else do you need to know? Some zoo down in CNN-ville has some low-level pandas that make even average pandas seem like Lindsey Lohan.

But the incompetent mama panda was somehow inseminated — artificially, like all panda moms, even in the wild — and now there’s a baby panda that experts say is ugly and dumb and obviously no match for Butterstick.

Our Panda birth commentary comes from Justin and Dr. Jason:
[via email]
theAlphaJohn: Jason, did you get your plane ticket yet to see the new panda cub?
Jason: 1st I need to find a Yeti....so I can make some gravy.
theAlphaJohn: I have some leftover in my fridge. Get us a couple danger dogs and we'll meet you at the airport.
Jason: Everyone knows they don't allow yeti gravy on planes.
theAlphaJohn: I'll tell them it's personal lubricant

Next up, the exciting news from China that Giant Panda Mommy Ya Ya dropped and crushed one of her twins:
BEIJING - Staff at a zoo in southwest China are in mourning after a sleep-deprived panda dropped her two-day-old baby and crushed it to death, local media reported on Friday.

“It was very sudden, but also unavoidable,” Guo Wei, panda department chief at Chongqing city zoo in the southwestern region of Chongqing, told the Chongqing Business News daily.

Ya Ya, a seven-year-old panda and new mother of twins, “appeared tired” when nursing the younger cub in a patch of grass, the paper said.

Her head sagged, her paws separated and her baby fell to the ground next to her. The panda then rolled on to her side and crushed her baby beneath her.

The tragedy occurred because she hadn’t slept or eaten properly since giving birth, Guo said, adding that Ya Ya lacked motherhood experience.

According to Guo, the zoo had tried on several occasions to separate the cub from its mother for their safety, but Ya Ya “was very cautious” and would “roar and bare her teeth” at zoo-keepers.

The elder of the twins was in good health and being cared for, zoo officials said.

But Ya Ya had proved inconsolable, wailing and looking for her baby after its body was taken away from her.

“Pandas who lose their young tend to be depressed for a month or so,” Guo said, adding that the zoo would assign people to care for her and provide special food to improve her mood.

First: HA HA! You crushed your chillin!
Second: I love that Panda mothers have crushed so many of their infants to death like this, we have a baseline norm for how they behave.
theAlphaJohn: [link]
Mike: awww
Mike: she should be locked up
Mike: oh, she is.....she's in a zoo
theAlphaJohn: LOL
theAlphaJohn: don't be a hippie
Mike: i crack myself up sometimes.

And for the final word, once again here is Dr. Jason: "ha...this is why they belong with the dinosaurs......"

Wednesday, September 06, 2006

Mason: Gunston Controversy Settled (for now DOT DOT DOT)

From The Broadside, Mason's student newspaper:

Gunston to Remain Mascot for George Mason Patriots

Ronnie Anthony Cristobal, Broadside Staff Writer

It was decided that Gunston the Patriot will remain the primary mascot of the George Mason Patriots after two months of speculation and uncertainty regarding the fuzzy, green creature’s future.

On June 2, Associate Athletic Director Andy Ruge announced that Gunston will no longer be the primary mascot for the George Mason. In addition, the athletic department would gather a “mascot focus group” to select possible replacements for Gunston.

However, all indications and reports point to a return of Gunston the Patriot for the 2006-07 Basketball season.

“[Gunston] is still with us,” said Daniel Walsch, from the University Relations office. “After the national attention from the Final Four, it was discussed that he would get a makeover to construct a more visible mascot.”

[...]

Others disagree, saying that Gunston is not a mascot worthy of representing a school of Final Four caliber.

The Washington Post reported that a study conducted two years ago found that 40 percent of Mason students did not know who Gunston was and that those who did recognize him wanted to see him replaced.

[...]

“Gunston is a green creature of mysterious origin whom no one seems to enjoy seeing,” said Ryan Woodard, a junior management major. “I am frustrated that after being told a new mascot would come to Mason; the old one is just simply being modified.”


Hey Ryan -- Gunston does have a Facebook profile. Show some fucking respect.

Tuesday, September 05, 2006

Campus Catholic Ministry Presents: Weekend Beach Retreat

Let me gather my sarcastic thoughts while you read what I just read:



So I'm supposed to go to the beach...with the son of God? Who can walk on water? Like my bunk mate's party tricks won't land me outside in a sleeping bag while a little "not-so-immaculate conception goes on".

Which observation proves I'm a moron?

1) That I put on a sock with a hole in the toe this morning?
2) That I have worn this sock several times since finding this hole, and continue to wash it and wear it?
3) That, when coming back from lunch today with my toe poking through said hole, I first thought "I need to throw these socks out" which was immediately followed up with "...or I could darn it".

Who the fuck darns socks anymore?

Target sells Presidential (in)Action Figures

Thank you Wonkette for pointing this out! Target is now selling presidential action figures, and Wonkette has challenged readers to write their own sarcastic reviews.



Under my pal Jimmy Carter is this review:



Man, I wish I could take credit for the Reagan one. I guess I'll write my own. Once again, Will joins me to provide commentary:

theAlphaJohn: wtf: [link]
Will: hahaha
theAlphaJohn: do you think the JFK doll
theAlphaJohn: doll's fingers smell like the Marylin Monroe doll?
Will: haha
Will: i was going finish your sentence and say "do you think the jfk doll has an exploding head?"
theAlphaJohn: lol
Will: if they were ass cheap, i would get a couple for some stop motion video fun
theAlphaJohn: You know they're going to star in a future episode of robot chicken
theAlphaJohn: Does the Thomas Jefferson doll come with a slave he can impregnate?
Will: hahaha
Will: i like how some of the dolls have guest ratings
theAlphaJohn: read the jimmy carter ones
theAlphaJohn: i tried to add a comment but it hasn't been approved
Will: hahahahahaha
Will: "Does the reagan doll allow for the murder of hundreds of marine dolls in doll Lebanon and retaliate by pulling our troops out so fast that it makes your head spin?"
Will: wow
theAlphaJohn: The one I added for Carter was something like, "I love this doll cause they renamed National Airport after him. No idiot would rename national airport after the moron who promised the ATC Union he'd help with their grievences in writing before illegally firing the air traffic controllers, now would they?"
Will: nice
Will: they should have an andrew jackson doll
Will: that comes smelling like whiskey and good times
theAlphaJohn: lol
theAlphaJohn: a Ulysseus S Grant doll that's always drunk and corrupt
theAlphaJohn: or a Herbert Hoover doll that makes barbie and ken live in cardboard "Hoover Doll Houses" and reassures them with claims of "a doll chicken in every doll pot"
Will: i'm saying
Will: they really didn't explore their options with the dolls
theAlphaJohn: so much untapped potential
Will: for real
theAlphaJohn: which president didn't have a first lady?
theAlphaJohn: they could make his doll mom to live with him
Will: James Buchanan
Will: haha
Will: snap
theAlphaJohn: you know he never got presidental whores with mom next door in the lincoln bedroom
theAlphaJohn: he certainly didn't have no vernon jordan to run down to dairy queen and get him some fine-ass hookers

Friday, September 01, 2006

Oh Christ...For Snack's Sake!

Cameron Fucking Manheim is in my English Class!!

A Brief History of (my favorite meal of the week) Brunch

The Nerds at Slate whipped this one up fresh:

Sunday brunch is so omnipresent in New York—extending uptown and downtown, upscale and downscale, and, these days, across all days and hours of the week—that its origins are necessarily hazy. Dozens of Manhattan restaurants can lay claim to inventing some part of brunch: You can trace the mythic origins of eggs Benedict, for example, to Delmonico's, a downtown steakhouse, and the Waldorf, in Midtown. But Sunday brunch's formative cauldron may be this otherwise unremarkable six-block stretch of Amsterdam on the Upper West Side. It is here that Sunday brunch acquired its defining characteristics, its casual manners.

Opie & Anthony: The Letterman Appearance



Fucking brilliant, total home run.

Little Opie is such a twittering ball of nerves, but as one caller said this morning, "It's like seeing your kid walk across the stage at their highschool graduation."

How to be Emo

Emo: The New Goth
Goth: The New Grunge
Grunge: The New Punk
Punk: The New Metal-Head
Metal-Head: The New Hippie
Hippie: The New Sock-Hopper
Sock-Hopper: The New Flapper
Flapper: The New {however the previous generation pissed their parents off}

The (Bill) Joy of Technology

As I previously mentioned, we're doing a proof-of-concept with two Content Management System. The idea behind this is to consolidate all of our websites into a single development environment to standardize navigation, look and feel, etc. There was a project to do this two years ago that imploded (I wasn't involved, but if you ask me the vendor sold us fantasyware) so this time around we decided to play with each system for a few weeks to really understand it before we chose one.



We're winding down our work on the first system, and yesterday we showed our work to a panel of department super users (including the Dean of the College of Science and the Assistant Dean of the College of Liberal Arts) to get their feedback. I couldn't have asked for a better reaction, they were very pleased with the due dilligance we had done (we had an answer for every one of their questions) and they loved what we showed them.



With that out of the way, I started working on the installation of the second system. We start the proof-of-concept on that September 18th. This application does templating using XML/XSLT and is build using Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) that run inside JBOSS. Having followed their install instructions, I was immediately greeted by 2MB of thread dumps (which is about 2 billions lines of "go fuck yourself".

09:48:28,581 ERROR [EntityContainer] Starting failed jboss.j2ee:jndiName=ejb/FolderContainedEntity,service=EJB
org.jboss.deployment.DeploymentException: Error while fixing table name; - nested throwable: (org.jboss.util.NestedSQLException: Could not create connection; - nested throwable: (java.sql.SQLException: Unable to connect to any hosts due to exception: java.net.ConnectException: Connection refused); - nested throwable: (org.jboss.resource.JBossResourceException: Could not create connection; - nested throwable: (java.sql.SQLException: Unable to connect to any hosts due to exception: java.net.ConnectException: Connection refused)))
at org.jboss.ejb.plugins.cmp.jdbc.SQLUtil.fixTableName(SQLUtil.java:196)
at org.jboss.ejb.plugins.cmp.jdbc.bridge.JDBCEntityBridge.init(JDBCEntityBridge.java:143)


Alright then. I made a few changes (clickity click) and fired it up again, basically the same mess. I dug through the errors a little deeper and found this:

ObjectName: jboss.j2ee:service=EJB,plugin=pool,jndiName=ejb/Page
state: CREATED
I Depend On:
Depends On Me:
ObjectName: jboss.j2ee:service=EJB,plugin=pool,jndiName=ejb/BaseEntity
state: CREATED
I Depend On:
Depends On Me:
ObjectName: jboss.j2ee:service=EJB,plugin=pool,jndiName=ejb/Mail
state: CREATED
I Depend On:
Depends On Me:


::scratches head::

I had a little chat with Will about it:

theAlphaJohn: i already hate [the second CMS system]
Will: uh oh
Will: did they steal your lunch money?
theAlphaJohn: if only
theAlphaJohn: it just shit out like 2MB of error messages (that's like 2 billion lines of text)
Will: yeah
theAlphaJohn: This is what would happen if Java wrote song lyrics:
theAlphaJohn: [sends error]
theAlphaJohn: I DEPEND ON (dot dot dot)
theAlphaJohn: (DOT DOT DOT) depends on me
theAlphaJohn: beep beep *blink* *blink*
Will: haha


This is one of the things I dislike about cutting/bleeding/clotting-edge technology. Make no mistake fuckers, I am a 1337-@ss mofo right up in here, but 2 billion lines of "java.net.io.doucebag exception error: fuckface thread dump unpacking ejb container go fuck yourself......" does not help me find the problem. It's not like I'm stepping through your code in a debugger or working through it in JUnit. And even if I could, why would I then pay you for it if I had to do that?

In the old days (circa 2003), we used to get an exception and the program would abend and leave us a tasty core dump and a stack trace to find our way back to the problem. Most people don't find that helpful, but you can work with it. Volumes of exploding Java methods are not going to lead me back to the missing configuration file the vendor didn't provide me with, now are they?