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Tinypliny's Journal

tinypliny
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03/10/2011 23:18 #53807

Dancing on snow and ice. At 12F.
Category: dance
My newest dance teacher can dance fluidly in any pair of boots at insanely cold temperatures on treacherous amounts of snow and ice in front of City Hall smack in the middle of the legendary Buffalo winter.



Can yours?!

We learnt a 30s routine in around a hour this past Monday and had too much fun doing it. Half my office and extended office contacts made up around 85% of the class. To what end, you ask?

We hope to be able to star in Missy Elliot's latest video and replace the Japanese blokes in around a year.



Watch out. The 345-BMR-Bloc* is learning some serious Hip-Hop!

NB: That's our kewl office nick if you didn't guess already.
tinypliny - 03/14/11 22:57
LOL this is going to sound really insane. This was back in December when I was having severe salsa withdrawal (classes were suspended for the month). I was coming back from my department party downtown and passed Fugazi on my way. I was extremely thirsty (having danced like a maniac at that party) and stopped in for a drink. But someone mentioned Celia Cruz while I was downing my lemonade at lightening speed and this totally trapped my attention! It was one of the bartenders chatting with another patron. I asked them if they knew of a salsa place on Allen or nearby and one thing led to another and we talked a lot about my salsa class. They asked if it was welcoming to gay couples and I said it was welcoming to anyone who cared to dance. (We do have people learning non-traditional roles (follow/lead switch) in class now...)

But this is the hip hop class - interestingly our hip hop teacher came to my salsa class in January this year. This is all turning into a very interesting dance circle...

What did he say about my salsa class?! I am now really curious! I almost wish I were facebook for all the gossip... hahaha
mike - 03/14/11 22:27
I noticed the bartender from Fugazi mentioned your salsa for your soul class on Facebook. I said you really enjoyed it! Is this related to that?
tinypliny - 03/14/11 22:16
Really? I didn't know. She is the worst dancer in her own videos.

(e:Paul), I have no idea how this happened but my hip hop class is suddenly filled with a crowd of athletic guys who were all heading to fugazi after class... And all of them share your opinion about our teacher. :)
metalpeter - 03/11/11 17:45
I haven't seen Missy "misdemeanor " Elliot in some time.... If my memory is correct she got famous from dancing in other people's videos and then that spawned her own thing.....
tinypliny - 03/11/11 08:51
The class is a pretty active one if you want to check it out. We were soaked in sweat by the end... It's very much a beginner class though. I have this strong feeling that you might find it ridiculously easy...
tinypliny - 03/11/11 08:43
Hahaha when you say you don't get the steps in his class, he has this get-in-your-face-clap-hop that I find hilarious. He is pretty experimental in his teaching methods and constantly pulls surprises on you. At one point we were trying out this complicated footwork and suddenly he pulled this fluid strange move on us.

We wanted to know how long one needs to dance to get that good and his conservative estimate was 4 years. And damn. I have no time now. I wish this was all four years back when I first moved...
paul - 03/11/11 01:36
Wow, he is really cute.

03/10/2011 22:23 #53806

Yoga as performance art
Category: dance
I just realized that I have been tagging all my yoga posts as "dance". That was because I started doing regular guided yoga to get better at salsa. My categorizing OCD kicked in recently and I wanted to re-label everything as "yoga" or maybe "fitness". But it's too late.

The yoga classes have somehow evolved into sessions of extreme performance art and creative mental dance. Yesterday, for instance, we tried to become one with the sinuous forms of this exotic looking flower called the bird of paradise...
image

Too bad, none of us ended up quite like this bloke:
image

Even secretly-super-yogi-power-(e:Paul). HEHEHE
image

But I maintain that I could have totally done it if I were at that crazyawesome beach in the background. You shouldn't believe anyone if they tell you that it depends on the extreme flexibility of hip joints and core balance. It's so obvious that you need to be at the beach.

Oooh, there is more. Erin also demonstrated to everyone how to stand on our heads.
image

This time everyone in the class ended up like this.
image

Except me. I was stuck in Figure 31 for an eternity...
image

before this rather unfortunate image made its way into my head: "And yet you incessantly stand on your head - Do you think, at your age, it is right?"
image
I wimpily decided it probably wasn't, at that particular time and gave up.

But hey, all was not lost. I was able to do the exclusive "Erin-asana" - an inspired soulful yogasana conceptualized and breathed into life by the one and only Erin at Hand to Heart. It's so exclusive, I can't even find a google image!

After class, Paul and I got a bottle of vodka (if you are thinking that it was probably to drown our mediocre birds of paradise hell, you would be wrong), had some delicious sautééd mango in sauce, crispy noodles, sushi and rice delicacies at Blue Fin (arguably the best Asian fusion restaurant on Elmwood Avenue), bitched about tech stuff, got some smashing groceries, including an out-of-this-planet olive bread, talked conspiracy theories and discussed housing markets, in that order. If you had not been at some crowded beer club, you could have enjoyed the Yogi's choicest...

Too late. It's time to honour your practice now. Or come to another adventure with us next week! :-)
tinypliny - 03/16/11 17:22
Sorry I missed your comment. I meant that yoga has become a sort of "dance" for me now so the OCD sentiment came too late. :)

It's plain (and hopefully) odourless vodka. I mean to emulsify aromatic oils with water with the alcohol for light body sprays. I haven't had the time to open it yet.

They probably do yoga when they know the tide is out. ;-)


metalpeter - 03/11/11 17:36
Without following the Link see they have in there so that after class you can get real world practice on the thugs! HA!

In Terms of the Topics I don't think it is to late.... I think that at the Bottom of your blog there is some symbol where you can edit the post and from there you could change the Category and then hit post I'm sure (e:Paul) could give you more info....

So How was the Vodka and was it plain or Flavored ? Or was it mix with something else?

It Terms of Yoga you can't trust those pictures and here is why! They are taken for the point of looking pretty with the water behind him and the nice white sand... But if you where doing Yoga wouldn't you want to know where you were as compared to water you know so you don't get wet (there are these things called tides)..... Also wouldn't you like to look at the relaxing water?
tinypliny - 03/11/11 08:28
How about capoiera? :::link::: I wanted to join and even checked out the place and the hood in detail. But it's a bit too far away and not in a neighbourhood I want to be around on foot at 9:30 PM. If it were on (e:strip) I probably would have gone. I have too many competing interests now and I just can't fit in one more class...

You could always try our hip hop class which is pretty active and charged but you probably already know all those steps we are struggling to learn! Seriously, we look like we landed here yesterday from Mars. We might look even worse to someone with such advanced dance skills as you have!

Then there is the popping class - on Thursdays at 8:00. I wanted to check it out but I have salsa on Thursdays and yesterday, when I didn't have salsa, I had work to do.
paul - 03/11/11 01:34
I like yoga a lot but I am starting to feel like I want to try something more active. The thing is I am not into fighting.

03/09/2011 17:28 #53795

Fiscal Responsibility and e:Joshua
Category: e:strip
The incredibly sad news about (e:joshua) reminded me of the last time I had a substantial conversation with him, in person. I think it was a couple years back at (e:Drew) and (e:Janelle)'s labour day breakfast (or was it July 4?) I remember it was a classic American holiday and (e:Drew) was making delightful pancakes. Obama had just been elected or maybe he was about to be elected... I am not very sure.

In between a mash-up cross conversation about current research and medical management of early-onset hypertension and where to get the freshest coffee beans in Buffalo, I was asking (e:Joshua) what he thought were the redeeming qualities of being a Republican and he said, "Fiscal Responsibility". He also gave me quite a run down of all the different ways that the US would not do well under the Democrat-led spendthrift government. He made a special case about how the debt of social security payoffs and public health programmes such as medicare and medicaid would cripple the economy in the near future. He stressed on how important it was for governments to focus on being debt-free as a long-term strategy instead of trying to bail out of trouble short-term and abandon ship after their elected terms were over.

I am not quite sure that I understood all the nitty-gritties of his argument. I remember thinking that he was being rather severe on the Democrats but I do agree that fiscal responsibility has been and will always be a crucial cornerstone to not only the success of governments but also individuals who make up the population that is being governed. I continue to believe that being responsible with our money shapes several aspects of our lives and makes our toughest of choices easier. Looking back, I think that was the core idea that (e:Joshua) was trying to explain to me over breakfast.

(e:Joshua), that was an interesting conversation and it has remained with me since. I didn't always agree with your ardent support of Republican policies across the board and your relentless criticism of a large number of ideas slightly left of centre, but I think we did agree that day over cilantro and mint chutney with crispy rice and raw onions. Hope you are having a swell time, wherever you are now! I always thought you looked awesome smiling (and resembled Major Healey from I dream of Jeannie). :-)
metalpeter - 03/09/11 19:30
I've been debating if I should write one these I kinda want to but I don't know.... I may go some places that I don't want to go on the web we shall see.... In Terms of (e:Joshua) I often didn't agree with his political view... I know this is going to sound bad but he was one of the good Republicans and not one of the crazy ones..... What I mean is there is a lot of hate and looking down on people in politics and the Josh I knew wasn't like that or at least that is my impression..... There are some republicans that a lot of their stuff to me at least is from hate and playing games and stuff that is hard to explain........ You could disagree with him and it wouldn't turn into a shouting match.... He will me missed...............

03/07/2011 18:17 #53779

Set time out (s)
Category: i-tech
Does anyone else have their recently updated chrome pop-up a javascript dialogue to set time out (s), whenever it starts up for the first time? I thought it was a linux-related problem (amidst all my zillion other linux problems) but now this pop-up javascript dialogue has started appearing on my windows terminals as well... Wonder what it is...
tinypliny - 03/08/11 07:26
I eliminated all extensions (I had 5, lazarus, tab manager, autocomplete, lights off for youtube and doi resolver) and this darned message still kept popping up. I migrated to Chrome 10.x beta. It has gone away now.
paul - 03/07/11 18:53
I have never seen this. Could it be an extension you have installed?

03/06/2011 16:29 #53773

Glib-Warning
Category: linux

GLib-WARNING **: getpwuid_r(): failed due to unknown user id (0)



I get to bat my eyelashes at this gibberish every time my laptop boots. And every glib soul on the World-Wide-Web seems to be just as mystified as me about what it can possibly mean.

Oh, the joys of linux.
paul - 03/11/11 16:10
Ya right click on your gnome panel at the top. Select add to panel. Then choose the system monitor widget. Its got it all.
tinypliny - 03/11/11 12:39
I forgot to ask.. do you know of a simple gnome-based resource monitor to see what is using the most CPU and RAM at any given time.
paul - 03/08/11 10:14
Have you tried running top or the GUI based system resource gnome panel widget. Just like the task manager on windows it shows you what is running and how much CPU, memory, etc is being used. I find my fedora box uses almost nothing unless I am actively running other programs or there is a system update running. Using that tool you can get a feel for anything taking up resources. Then you can remove those things or use the GUI, or the nice command to reduce the amount if CPU given to those tasks.

I could help you with it after yoga on Wed night if you want.
tinypliny - 03/08/11 07:43
You are right and unfortunately, I am finding it very difficult to work up the energy or the vision to share your bigger picture about the necessity of passwords. On the surface, your post sounds rather paranoid and it's easy for people with lazy tendencies like me to dismiss extreme scenarios and shut our eyes to anything that seems a bit of an inconvenience. You see, this is not that different from all those people who simply refuse to learn the ropes of i2. I am laughing at my own hypocrisy because I am doing the very same thing with linux as people generally do with i2.

However I do know that it's not really as over-the-top as it might sound. After all, we definitely know that something of this sort happened when the Chinese government paid hackers to control the gmail accounts of political activists last year. It was probably made easier by 123, abcd like dictionary passwords or worse shared passwords. It does pay to be safe than sorry.

As for switching distros, my motive was to give R the maximum resources it possibly could get without system resources hogging RAM or CPU power - hence the preference for a lean system. As you noticed, I am not a very good code writer and improving my code skills could be a time-consuming alternative. I instead opted to throw bigger hardware at my poor code-writing. Searching for "easier" ways to make this bigger hardware be at least 95% available to R was what I was trying to do.

Anyway, you make very valid points and I have been running my models on Fedora Gnome and it's not been going as disastrously as I imagined apart from an occasional freeze up or two...

And as a funny endnote, all this tinkering with linux (maybe for all the wrong reasons) is making me more dissatisfied with Win XP everyday. lol
paul - 03/07/11 19:10
I am not sure why you are using linux anymore? It sounds like you are spending more time installing OSes than you would waiting for your windows computer even in its slowness. Besides your new laptop should be faster. What exactly are you trying to accomplish? If you just want a machine that executes R fast and for which R is easy to install, then fedora seems like a good match. Why the constant OS re-installation?

As for those passwords they have nothing to do with people stealing your computer physically. Without them your computer is totally vulnerable from being owned over the net.

The whole reason XP was so insecure was because it did not ask you for any passwords to do administrative tasks like install software and start and stop services. Thus when you ran as an admin, which you were, and you visited a website that had malware, which you could - it would simply auto install in the background and you would be owned. Your computer could seem normal but in reality it could just be waiting for commands from the master.

Even if you don't care about your own data safety, which you should - you should care about contributing to the terrorists, mafia, foreign hostile governments, etc which all use these methods to exploit your computer and others into giant zombie super computers that they can use to reak havok on the world at large.

Imagine if no one cares, and if the OSes are not more secure than it becomes pretty easy to create a zombie infrastucture which could attack our own systems like the electric grid, nuclear power, etc. If you don't secure your computer than you should not network it at all.

Every OS requires passwords to do administrative tasks at this point. Either that or the system is horribly gimped and tied to some commerical account that you install software through, e.g. iOS, or tied to your google account android.

I mean how hard is it for you to type in a password? It you are incapable of remembering it you could switch to a system with a smartcard reader or a fingerprint scanner. Plenty of laptops come with those now anyways. If you really hate having a password you can remove it as root. Login as root with su. Then type passwd -d -f USERNAME, replacing USERNAME with the user you want to remove the password for.
tinypliny - 03/07/11 18:14
I will try the uid solution and see if that message goes away in one of my other laptops (which is running peppermint Ice now). I might change that laptop to linux mint...
tinypliny - 03/07/11 18:13
Thanks. :) I have put in Fedora Gnome now and I am completely hating all the passwords and logins its asking every single time. Autologin is a nightmare to set up. I really could not care less if my current laptop has ANY security whatsoever. Chances are it will never leave home anyway...
uncutsaniflush - 03/07/11 04:21
And, oh yeah, by the way, (e:tinypliny) did you have an existing persistent /home partition before you did whatever it is that you did? If you went from something vaguely Debian (aka Ubuntu) to something vaguely Redhat (aka Fedora) and kept the persistent /home partition, you could have uid(user id)problems because of different uid numbering conventions. /home/tinypliny could have an uid of 500 in Fedora and 1000 in Ubuntu. If you have that problem, you should change the uid to the right number in something like /etc/passwd (or yr distro's equivalent).
uncutsaniflush - 03/07/11 04:04
(e:tinypliny) - actually what I think you are experiencing are the joys of Windows. My assumption is that if Windows (or/and osX) did what you wanted, you wouldn't be mucking about with linux.

I concur with (e:paul). You might want to examine why you want a stripped down minimal system and decide if the extra hassle is worth it. If you want to use Fedora (or even Ubuntu (assuming no hardware issues), his advice is good. Remember you can always install openbox later and use it. Modern distros support multiple windows managers and desktop shells.
paul - 03/06/11 23:30
This month:
Windows - 73.05%
Mac - 14.27%
Android - 4.19%
IPhone - 2.45%
Linux - 2.31%
paul - 03/06/11 23:14
I would suggest not using the ldxe spin. Not because there is anything wrong with it but because, based on the hardware you purchased there is no need to par down.
Instead I would just run the default fedora gnome desktop that installs off the live CD. Becuae many more people run this default install it will be much easier to find support than it you run a non mainstream desktop manager. Looking at this report from os news :::link::: you are not having any if the same limitations these systems are designed for. The amount of memory you ate saving is meaningless on an 8gb of ram system? Is disk space even am issue anymore? I would say it's not worth the risk of having things be more complicated. Nothing is going to steel major CPU either. Just don't tun a milling things along with your heavy r processing. Your new computer can handle it. Don't be scared to utilize it.
tinypliny - 03/06/11 22:35
BTW, do user OSes turn up in your statistics for the site? Whatpercentagel of (e:peeps) actually run linux?
tinypliny - 03/06/11 22:33
Downloading fedora-lxde spin now... It might be nice if I didn't have to wrestle with things for a change. :)
paul - 03/06/11 20:41
If you install fedora from the live CD instead of the DVD it will have way less stuff by default.
paul - 03/06/11 19:28
Fedora boots for me so fast. It also runs openbox if you need it. That being said, I think you may be complicating things by trying to be so minimal.

If you go super stripped down, then you will always need to install stuff everytime you need anything. And that can be great if you know what you are doing but its not a big advantage otherwise. Like the problem you had when trying to compile the other day but you did not have the dev library stuff you needed.

What are you goals. A fast box that runs a browser but can also run R code natively? If thats the case , I would just go gnome desktop on fedora and install R with "sudo yum install R" Then install chrome from the google site.

The trickiest part with Fedora is going to be installing flash or proprietary third party video drivers as it only comes with open source software. That being said, flash is relatively easy now and the latest fedora include open source video drivers that will be good for anything you need minus say, 3D gaming and animation.
tinypliny - 03/06/11 19:03
With no applications when installed and everything left to the user to decide, maybe?
tinypliny - 03/06/11 19:02
For instance do you know of a reliable Fedora distro running openbox?
tinypliny - 03/06/11 18:59
:-) What is the smallest slimmest Fedora you know of?
paul - 03/06/11 17:31
Seems like something belongs to a uid (user _id ) that does not match what you have in the user db on your system. I have never seen this in fedora, just saying.