A while back I was surfing around, looking for some PostgreSQL wallpapers to make my computer better.

I was extremely disappointed at how few I found. I sat at my desk at work and wept quietly (mainly because the office is an open design, and loud sobbing is distracting to the other employees).

Parts of western Pennsylvania are being overrun with Emerald Ash Borer bugs. Apparently these things are not native to this area, kill ash trees dead, and spread like crazy.

There are a lot of ash trees in this part of the country. Should we get an infestation locally, there'd be 3 or 4 trees in my yard that would die.

Luckily, our state government cares. Unluckily, they're completely incompetent.

They've decided to issue a quarantine. This is good. It's currently illegal to transport wood around if you're in an infected area.

There's was recently a fairly heated discussion on the PostgreSQL advocacy mailing list. Generally, I don't feel that I've got anything useful to contribute to such discussions and tend to stay out of them, but for some reason, I decided to make a few comments regarding this one.

I didn't really have too much to contribute, just a few thoughts. But this guy apparently needs to switch to decaf.

If you're creating software, you're probably using some sort of database. It may be an SQL database, or something like XML or some other format, but it's likely a database of some kind.

I was thinking recently, and I figured I'd put my thoughts on the blog. I'm sure there are plenty of people out there who already understand what I'm about to write, and many who understand it better than I do.

It's pretty simple really. You don't need any Einsteinian equations or light cones to prove it. Just simple logic.

I spend a lot of time thinking about why I'm not yet published. This probably isn't a very good use of my time, overall, as the answer probably lies in a failure to adhere to Heinlein's rules for writing, specifically, I'm not writing enough.

Go buy Bash Down the Door and Slice Open the Badguy.

"Why?" you ask.

Because it's sexier than Allison Stokke! (There are even pictures at the beginning of each story!)

How the mind works is fascinating.

I have this happen entirely too often. My reflexive assessment is that I'm a relatively smart person, but not a very innovative person.

For example, at Poul-Henning's talk yesterday, he made a comment on how foolish it is to use "round-robin" style dispatching for load balancing. He called it "queue" or FIFO, but they're all similar concepts -- the least recently used system is the next one up for use.

If I'm going to keep a blog, I obviously must write daily when I go to conferences ...

So here I am in the lovely city of Ottawa. I was up at 4:00 AM to get to the airport and fly to DC (because planes from Pittsburgh don't fly anywhere, they fly you to some other airport where you can get where you're going. It's virtually impossible to get anywhere from Pittsburgh without a connecting flight).

Anyway, I arrived unharmed (although a bit disheveled, I do dislike air travel) and got into the swing of things pretty quickly.

I just got back from a mountain bike excursion at Boyce Park.

The park is fantastic right now. It's been a dry spring, which is bad for kayaking and growing plants and the like, but actually makes mountain biking a lot more enjoyable (unless you're the type who enjoys getting muddy). So I encourage folks to get out to the park while the gettin' is good. See the updated information I've posted.