Is there any chance that the self described “Code Monkey” from Austin on this episode of Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me our very own Grumpy Code Monkey?
Coincidence?
by John Cole| 65 Comments
This post is in: Blogospheric Navel-Gazing
by John Cole| 65 Comments
This post is in: Blogospheric Navel-Gazing
Is there any chance that the self described “Code Monkey” from Austin on this episode of Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me our very own Grumpy Code Monkey?
Comments are closed.
? Martin
Lots of code monkeys out there. Don’t recall where GCM is from.
Fans of Richard’s posts should watch the video in this article from The Atlantic. Nice explainer on the difference between survival and mortality rates. You can cut through a decent bit of healthcare policy bullshit if you know the difference between the two.
schrodinger's cat
We are all grumpy and have descended from monkeys and most of us have sometimes written code. So I am a Grumpy Code Monkey too, but I don’t live in Texas.
ruemara
BJ has become too hoity toity. I fear it may lose it’s rustic charm with all the glamour, what with stars hanging out and all.
MikeJ
Since Jonathon Coulton did the song more people have adopted the term.
schrodinger's cat
Besides writing code, you know what else makes me grumpy, a column by David Brooks. My grumpy response.
schrodinger's cat
A question for fellow code monkeys, especially users of LaTeX. Do you know of any software that converts Word documents to LaTeX and is free? Thanks.
Tim C.
Totally OT, but the game of thrones thread down a bit has me jonesing for a hit… any chance you could make a post in all “Hodors”? Either that or google needs to code a translator for English to Hodor. Even better if they can do Hodor to English.
the Conster
That’s what I thought when I heard the name too. Who knows. That segment with Peter Guralnick talking about Elvis was awesome – almost makes me want to read his two volume tome on Elvis. The anecdote about the disconnected for thirty years phone suddenly ringing while sitting in his dad Vernon’s office, well that was very very cool.
dmsilev
@schrodinger’s cat: How complicated is your Word document, and how long? If you don’t have a huge amount of formatting or equations or anything like that, copying the text out of Word and into a regular text editor, and adding in the small amount of LaTeX markup might be the easiest.
The times I’ve done that conversion it’s all been by hand. I’d usually copy/paste a couple of paragraphs at a time, and then go through and manually put in the bold/italics and BibTeX codes and figures and so forth. Tedious, but manageable.
raven
@Tim C.: Oh god no, please.
jl
@? Martin: Thanks. Great video.
But I will note, even using 5 year survival rates for common cancers, or heart attack or stroke, it is not true that the US ‘dominates’ or ‘is the best in the world’ across the board compared to other high income industrialized countries. So, even giving him a pass for using the wrong measure, Rudy was still wrong about the U.S. health care system.
schrodinger's cat
@dmsilev: Husband kitteh is trying to edit a manuscript which was in Word and convert it to LaTeX. AFAIK it has a manageable number of equations but lots of tables. Its about 50 pages or so. He is doing what you said, but it is a bit tedious to do that for 50 pages.
ranchandsyrup
My wifey’s post on growing up but seeing that you haven’t grown up.
Mark B.
I’m a code monkey from Austin, and I’m even going on the Jonathan Coulton cruise this year. But it’s not me.
dmsilev
@schrodinger’s cat: Tables are tedious in LaTeX to be sure. My condolences, and sorry I don’t have any more useful suggestions.
raven
@schrodinger’s cat: Outsource?
Mark B.
@schrodinger’s cat: You might try this product: http://writer2latex.sourceforge.net/
It works with Open Office,so it should take a Word Document OK. Hopefully you don’t have too many mathematical formulas, because I doubt the conversion in that case would be seamless.
Eric U.
@schrodinger’s cat: I used a trial version of something and I thought it came out ok, but then editors got involved and some code monkey had to re-write.
Just looking online, it seems that a lot of people have written something to do this, but I have no experience. Mostly a linux or osx thing though
schrodinger's cat
@Mark B.: Thanks, I found this one and a couple of others. Have you used it yourself?
Mark B.
@schrodinger’s cat: Nope, it’s been several years since I had to do anything with LaTex. I just found this with a web search, and it had a few recommendations. I’ve used Open Office quite a bit, and it’s gotten a lot better. If it’s up to that quality, it’s probably worthwhile. Open source products vary a lot in quality, but many of them are excellent. Hopefully, this is one.
muricafukyea
Please hurry up and post your “Rand Paul has some good ideas” post so I can laugh loudly at you. I know you want to. Are you waiting for Griftwald to blow him some wet kisses first?
This is in reference to Rand Paul saying he wants to sue the Administration over NSA data collection. I KNOW there are lots of idiots on Ball Juice who are dumb enough to fall for that political grandstanding bullshit.
? Martin
RIP, Sid. You changed this country for the better.
raven
pamelabrown53
@ruemara: Belly laugh, ruemara, re: BJ losing its “rustic charm”. When it comes to Code Monkey, I’d think (s)he would be mortified by participating in anything “NPR”.
P.S. I’m so uncool that I love “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me”…oh, and “Car Talk”.
RoonieRoo
As wife of Grumpy Code Monkey, that is not him. Sorry.
raven
misfire
Jewish Steel
@? Martin: Like Shirley Temple, I had no idea he was still alive.
But Baby Peggy is still alive and sharp as a tack! I heard an interview with her today. She sounded like she could be my age.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diana_Serra_Cary
ranchandsyrup
@raven: Cruz stuck the shiv into R leadership. Made McConnell and others vote for cloture.
Belafon
@raven: Another in Ted Cruz’s series on how to win friends and influence people.
rikyrah
Wall Street’s Hot New Financial Product: Your Rent Check
Investment firms are playing landlord and bundling their rental homes into new securities. What could go wrong?
By Laura Gottesdiener March/April 2014
Toward the end of 2012, Mark Alston, a real estate broker in Los Angeles, began noticing something strange. Home prices were starting to rise, and fast—about 20 percent annually. Normally, higher home prices would signal increased demand from homebuyers and indicate that the economy was rebounding. But the home ownership rate was still dropping. Somehow, the real estate market was out of whack.
Then there were the buyers themselves. “I went two years without selling to a black family, and that wasn’t for lack of trying,” recalls Alston, whose business is concentrated in inner-city neighborhoods where the majority of residents are African American and Latino. Now all his buyers were businessmen in suits. And weirder yet, they were all paying in cash.
Over the last two years, private equity firms and hedge funds have amassed an unprecedented real estate empire, snapping up Spanish revivals in Phoenix, adobes in Los Angeles, Queen Anne Victorians in Atlanta, and brick-faced bungalows in Chicago. In total, Wall Street investors have bought more than 200,000 cheap, mostly foreclosed houses in some of the cities hardest hit by the economic meltdown. But they’re not simply flipping these houses. Instead, they’ve started bundling some of them into a new kind of financial product that could blow up the housing market all over again.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/01/blackstone-rental-homes-bundled-derivatives
dmsilev
Bleh. I hate verifying page proofs. Tedious as all Hell trying to spot when the copy editor changed a perfectly good comma to a semicolon and so forth. Almost done, thank God.
some guy
Apartheid regime no like being reminded they are an apartheid regime:
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/world/middleeast/article4001765.ece
raven
@Belafon: There’s a method. . .
dmsilev
@ranchandsyrup: It was strategically stupid though. Thanks to Cruz, the vote ended up being 67-31, so the Democrats can now go around saying “look, bipartisan!”. If he kept his mouth shut, it would have passed on a party-line vote.
Matt
@schrodinger’s cat: I don’t know if it would work, but perhaps LyX might do the trick. It’s a WYSIWG LaTeX editor. You could do a copy and paste job, and see whether LyX got you at least close to where you needed to be. Might at least cut down on some of the work.
Amir Khalid
@some guy:
You know, it’s no use posting links that lead to a paywall.
WaterGirl
@ranchandsyrup: I really enjoyed that!
Amir Khalid
@dmsilev:
Gasp! How can you say such a thing?! Ted Cruz is so smart, he doesn’t even pal around with people who didn’t go to prestigious universities like he did. He’s always the smarterest person in any room!
raven
“Render onto Caesar what is his due. He deserves real applause from the American people.”
SiubhanDuinne
@? Martin:
@Jewish Steel:
Forgive my ignorance, but who is Sid? (NYT obits no help.)
WaterGirl
@Amir Khalid: I got to the article just fine. ??
raven
@SiubhanDuinne: The great Sid Caesar.
raven
Sid Caesar- Health Food Restaurant
some guy
@Amir Khalid:
this article dealing with the same campaign to spy on activists, from The Australian, isn’t behind a paywall:
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/israel-starts-new-propaganda-war-to-beat-boycott/story-fnb64oi6-1226823640289#
Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism
@SiubhanDuinne: Sid Caesar
ranchandsyrup
@dmsilev: Agreed. Looks like it is more important to Cruz to get the “RINOs” out.
@WaterGirl: Thanks! I’ll pass that along to my lovely wife. :)
SiubhanDuinne
@raven:
@Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism:
Had I only waited five minutes, I would have heard the headline on NPR. Susan Stamberg doing tribute now. Thanks.
Amir Khalid
@Amir Khalid:
Seriously, Ted Cruz is showing immense pigheadedness coupled with a serious inability to fake sensitivity towards others. I don’t see this guy making much more progress in his political career. People are going to turned off pretty quick by his jerkitude, and my guess is that he’ll stall out at this level.
Trollhattan
@ranchandsyrup:
I see y’all elected the Republican for mayor. Our paper describes him as “moderate,” which I take to mean he never shot anybody. Yet.
Task #1, go find water.
Trollhattan
@Amir Khalid:
Correctamundo. Folks who either see Terrible Ted as the party’s next big thing, or fear his national ambitions, seem to have never watched/listened to him speak. That’s one pig no amount of lipstick can fix.
Cliff in NH
@Amir Khalid:
google a highlighted sentence or paragraph
justdale
@schrodinger’s cat:
CTAN is your friend.
rtf2latex2e is what I’ve used in the past (and tex2rtf in the other direction). The translators will usually get you about 80% of the way….
NonyNony
@dmsilev:
Um, I’m fairly certain that for Ted Cruz the calculus was:
“Ted Cruz Gets To Look Like He’s Doing Something” > “Republican Party Gets To Avoid Tough Vote”
This is all about Ted Cruz getting to pretend that he’s an Important Senator Man Who Must Be Appeased. Cruz’s schtick makes a lot more sense when you realize he cares only about his own personal political ambition AND he doesn’t believe that he needs anyone’s help to get what he wants.
I’d love to be there the day that this finally all backfires on Teddy Cruz. Hopefully by that point he will have even pissed off the Wingnut Welfare Suppliers so that they won’t hire him on at some cushy sinecure.
raven
@NonyNony: Did you see the segment Tweety did on his fascist ass father trotting around with all this birther shit?
Amir Khalid
@some guy:
I clicked on this link and got hit by another paywall.
ranchandsyrup
@Trollhattan: Faulconer is not a moderate. He’s a bought and paid for puppet of our local plutocrat that will now get to develop prime waterfront property. Such a bummer. SD is now the largest city to have an R mayor. Missed opportunity by the Ds. The plutocrat spent heavy in the primary to get the more electable D out. Alvarez (who lost) is a real progressive, but he couldn’t pull it off.
Went to a talk yesterday about our water issues with City personnel speaking. We’re good for this year due to voluntary 15% reduction. Likely mandatory restrictions. Rate hikes coming to pay for the “investments” we made but it’s really because they didn’t budget for the reduction.
WaterGirl
@Amir Khalid: I was wrong – I did hit the paywall on the first link. And the second one.
When I googled: Israel Starts New Propaganda War To Beat Boycott
I got some links, most of which were paywalled. But not this one at Islam Times:
WaterGirl
@WaterGirl: I particularly liked this paragraph from the article above:
It’s a great idea, and I think it would spell the beginning of the end of business settlements, at least, on the west bank.
Trollhattan
@ranchandsyrup:
Is said plutocrat the one who bought and laid to waste your “paper of record”?
Mobile Grumpy Code Monkey
Nope, wasn’t me. I’ve been thinking about playing the game, but I’m too lazy to dial in.
ranchandsyrup
@Trollhattan: The same one. Also bought up the smaller local papers that he could. Then laid off most of the staff. Also cut the healthcare to remaining employees because of Obamacare. Then tried to run his “dream” candidate for SD (a gay repub that is now running for congress) but lost to Filner.
I’m a little disappointed, if you can’t tell.
WaterGirl
@ranchandsyrup: Well, fuck. That sucks. Looks like it wasn’t even close.
ranchandsyrup
@WaterGirl: Not really close, no. I has some sads about it. Some commenters put in a bunch of work to get a better result. I truly thank them for their time and efforts. I still think that Nathan Fletcher would have won. He isn’t nearly as progressive as Alvarez, but he’s light-years better than having Faulconer in there.
Interesting dynamics in the D party down here.
Howard Beale IV
Some Code Monkeys learned how to program COBOL and assembler before they learned how to drive a car.
In 1974.
As was said back in that time period-Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.
WaterGirl
@ranchandsyrup:
I am starting to hear that more and more often. So frustrating. The good thing is when you’ve worked your butt off for the candidate you want, at least you have no regrets that maybe if you’d worked harder then it would have gone the other way.
That’s why I was so driven to work my butt off for Obama in the primaries, starting in 2007 for Iowa and then on to Colorado and then on to Michigan, etc. I felt like i had to do everything I could to get him to the general when other people would start believing in him. It was all about no regrets. Except with a happy ending ! :-)