The following article examines the question of why so many terrorists have engineering degrees.

http://www.slate.com/id/2240157/

I have a related question I'd like to examine the question of why so many liberal arts majors keep asking me if I'd like fries with that.

With the 2012 end of the world stuff I just did the math and realized I'll be turning 40 in 2012. So I guess there's a chance that my turning 40, will, in fact, be the end of the world. 

Yeah, so shitty week at work this week¹. Layoffs, gutting whole teams. I knew my job wasn't going to get axed this week, but still pretty stressful. 

Unlike most people in my field,  I don't change jobs very freqently. When I started my current gig the industry was still pretty much in the dot-com-bust crapper. This week's layoffs just seem to remind me of that time. It's been a week of deja vu all over again.

¹If you follow business news closely you might be able to guess where this is. But I'd rather not name names.

Some people fear that we will create robots as killing machines. Then these machines will rise up and wipe us out. However today I had an epiphany; I welcome the robot killing machines. To understand why, let's take a trip to the battlefield of tomorrow.

Solider 1: Is the terminator ready?

Solider 2: Yes, here he comes.

[Metal endoskeleton lumbers along, carrying a large rifle. Suddenly, its eyes change from glowing red to glowing blue.]

Solider 1: Why did his eyes turn blue?

Solider 2: He crashed again. We need to reboot him.

Solider 1: God damn it. Go reboot him.

[Solider 2 runs over to the terminator, starts poking things. The terminator twitches, takes a step, then stops again.]

Solider 1: What happened?

Solider 2: I dunno, I think it's got a driver issue.

Solider 1: Well, hurry up. Those killbots are almost here.

[Solider 2 works frantically on terminator. Killbots crest the hill in the distance.]

Killbots: SOLIDERS! DO YOU HAS THE POTENCY SHE NEEDZ? CHEAP PHARMA, V1AG@!!

Solider 1: What the fuck?

Solider 2: The killbots, sir, they've been taken over by spammers.

[Solider 1 thows his rifle on the ground.]

Solider 1: Fuck this shit. I'm going home.

And that's when peace broke out all over the world.

Just changed my blog engine from Presstopia (lighter but less features and I frickin' hate VB) to BlogEngineDotNet (more features and C#). Oi that was a pain in the ass. On the up side, I think I've got it set up & working with MySql which my hosting service provides, thanks to this post over here.

If you go that route however note there's some issues with the SQL script, mainly having to do database case sensitivity. At least the installation of MySql my hosting service provides is case-sensitve. I was able to read the source and make the required changes, though. Good thing Real Programmers compile from source.

Unless you're on emacs, then you just use C-x M-c M-butterfly...

[edit: since everything seems to be running without boom, I uploaded the updated SQL script here: setup.sql.zip (3.78 kb). Change the "use blogengine" on the first line to whatever the name of your database is.]