Silent Bish

Nosecone

2012-01-16T15:31:00.000-08:00

I have nothing to say, so I will leave you with a picture

... of a cat with a bottle cap on her nose.

Viva Las Vegas

2012-01-08T18:10:00.000-08:00

Back from Vegas, and some of us are freakin' beat.

A quick look at the (now enhanced) Goal List has us scoring very low in terms of Completion, but we still classify this trip as an unmitigated success.

Okay, partially unmitigated. My feet bailed on day two, and we began to prioritize based on goals, needs and possibilities. Thank you, LV Regional District for opting into a monorail; expensive as it was, it proved crucial to a hobbling guy looking twice his (advanced) age.

The Cirque du Soleil's "O" performance was amazing. The view of the stage from the 17th row was excellent, (giving a field of view eclipsed by four outstretched hands, pinky to thumb, at arm's length) and the divers, the dancers, the clowns and the acrobats performed one astounding feat after another for hours. And how a guy can be on fire for 5 minutes without horrible burns is unbelievable.

In the end, we left the city having had our fill, having had too much, but also wanting much and more still.

Oh. And some scotch at the duty-free.

Special thanks for the lovely surprise in our hotel room. After a very confusing romp through what must have been the entirety of the resort property, and feeling completely puny and insignificant, here we are presented with something that made us feel like freakin' rock stars. Thanks for that. And we popped the cork and dined like Caesar himself.

Brüno .

2012-01-02T19:31:00.000-08:00

I Tivoed Brüno. Yeah, right off the TV.

I'm reminded of when we showed Joey the End of the Internet. I think there should've been a sign at the start saying "There is no movie here. Turn back. Turn back." Maybe like a PSA.

Now I have to see the promo to see whether any of it could be clipped into something coherent and more than 30 seconds worth of film they can broadcast.

(googley googley)

Yeah. Wasn't possible.

At least I can be sure that no matter what else I see in the coming days and weeks, it will not have been worse than what I've seen in the first 10 minutes of Bruno.

Happy New Year

2012-01-01T00:01:00.000-08:00

Hey Kids.

It's another year, I guess; at least according to the current calendar. Did you know there's Yet Another Attempt to Reform the Calendar? Yeah, really:

But as Weekend Edition Sunday notes, some researchers at Johns Hopkins University have devised a different way to count our days — with a leap week every few years to keep the calendar on track. Hats off to USA Today for explaining it all in this nifty graphic.
And, Scientific American says, holidays like Christmas and New Year's Day would always fall on a Sunday. It seems neat and streamlined for our modern age — except maybe to those of us who work on Sundays.

Our current calendar is only just over 400 years old, so really it's not all that iron-clad. And, really, this whole Leap Year Thing is a bit of a hack to keep it drifting too far out.

I'll save you the time reading: this proposed calendar has every month with 30 days, every third month with 31, and every 5-6 years we take a jump to the left (or was that a step to the right?) and add a week to get the calendar back into synch with the seasons. This leap-week may not have a month or year to belong to, but man, we could party like it's 1999.

So there's benefits. And it was designed to begin today in order to reduce clutter with current santa-cults and their ranting, freaking, OCD observers - if you don't have your hands on your hips when you bring your knees in tight, you could go go hell - so let's start now. ... and ignore how this new arbitrary calendar caters to the faddish pointless santa-cults and ignores the 28-day 13-cycle lunar calendar, because, well, who the hell cares if the moon or any other part of the universe gets upset. The santa cults appear to believe they control the universe anyway, and the solstice is just a bunch of hottie wiccans dancing naked around a fire (get 'cher tickets now, pay per view sundaySUNdaySUNDAYYY).

But I digress two more times. Happy new year and happy new calendar.

Oh. And the Annapolis sparking rosé was freakin' awesome.

You should get some from J's uncle.

He's a great guy.

Staccato

2011-12-13T21:38:00.000-08:00

I like rap. Some of it, anyway. If it mentions 'nines', 'tens' or anything about smacking and bitches, I'm out: that shit is low-brow thuggery and offensive, yo.

But I like this style: (go to 2:05)

And this style:

Okay, especially the latter style. And it's funnier.

Fired Again

2011-12-13T20:27:00.000-08:00

No, I still work at the sweatshop. But it's an important point I need to make.

The guy at the right will fix your computer. He'll come to your home or business, and he'll make things go. Browser updates, software installs, email configuration? Sure: tell him precisely what you need done and he'll do it. He'll do everything on your list, log his time, submit a bill to be sent in the mail and leave.

And you'll never see him again, and he'll not give your setup another thought until you call him again.

He'll probably not ask whether you're backing up your data, and whether it's done in a manner that doesn't put your banking information in the hands of foreign companies who are beyond prosecution if they lose, leak or sell it. That is, unless he's selling you a paid backup service.

He'll not ask how your wireless is set up, and probably not warn you that it's not secure - it's known as 'private', which is like a drawn curtain vs the locked door of security - or that the latest version of the privacy is reeeeally close to being completely cracked. He'll not explain that wireless is less like a telephone and more like a CB radio, and privacy is like speaking piglatin and hoping no one else can understand it. That is, he'll not ask unless a new wireless unit will help his commission numbers and then it's the most secure thing in the world.

VPNs? Linking two networks like they're in the same room? Sharing your family photos safely? He can't do it. He works at the big box store, and he's just a tech. Your backups? Remote support? Discussion over where you're at with computers and where you may want to go? Honest recommendations for new gear? That's not in his training, his to-do list and his best interest.

And there's the difference. I don't do computer repair by choice; it's just that I don't know of someone I can trust not to use a key logger, copy programme or duct tape in the process of fixing your box. I don't trust they'll not sell you something stupidly outdated and overpriced, and leave you without offsite backups for when lightning hits your place and fries all your stuff at once, and without remote tech support. I don't trust their goals as being your success vs their own immediate payoff, and I especially don't trust the small town fatcat long-time shysters to do what's best for you. They've made a good living doing what's best for their company.

But I support your choice to go with an over-priced, short-sighted, blinkered, self-centered junk dealer. I won't worry once you understand that keeping your backups in the same house as your computer is not helpful in a house fire or flood. It's your choice, and that's fine. Let me know that I've been fired beforehand so I can stop the backups and we can consider where your new offsite backup place will be; because as soon as you swap out the router, getting your data copied out becomes a difficult task -- if I can't get to your machines, you can't get to my backup machines to get all your stuff back.

And I'm also fired. It makes me sad because I thought I was doing a good job.

Can I have your old blue router? It has massive potential and it saves you chucking it out. Call it my severance.

Muppets: Ode to Joy

2011-12-07T23:33:00.001-08:00

Beaker is so very awesome.

That's kind-of it.

For now. The new routine is cutting into a lot of my regular time, with its awesome commute, and so even less time trickles down to the blogging level. Which level of hell does that make it?

Foreign Bodies, 20 Years On

2011-12-03T16:59:00.000-08:00

It's been 20 years, to the day, since the incident which resulted in the semi-permanent installation above.

I'm not sure what I'm doing here; really I think I'm just marking the day.

In another version of this post, I had a list of fun facts about it, but I think it benefits no one.

So that's it.

TAKE A BREATH, Mr Paul

2011-11-23T02:08:00.000-08:00

I was doing a bit of youtubing as I was playing computer games, and I fell across this one.

It is part of an interview with Larry King and his guest Congressman (and presidential candidate) Ron Paul. Immediately a few things struck me, but watch this and see if you see it too:

First thing is, that man has to come up for air! I've only seen a few people talk like that, and it makes me think that he doesn't know this isn't a filibuster. It's an interview! Let the facts speak for themselves, and let the interviewer ask another question!

Secondly, and maybe this is related to the first, I noticed that Mr Paul wanders from topic; usually onto a "military-industrial complex is bad, they caused everything" kind of theme. But really, I worry that Mr Paul isn't listening: I think he's hearing half of what's being asked, and then intercepting the question and diverting it somewhere else.

For example, I thought that Moore guy was saying government needs to be directed by the people and not by lobbyists, that universal health care is a constitutional requirement. Mr Paul disagrees with having large government, which wasn't even being discussed. Only if one believes that only a large government can properly administer universal health care - which so far has been disproved - can the two ideas even be remotely related.

I couldn't finish watching. I was going to start shouting at the screen for Mr Paul to take a breath and listen. I worry that this flighty, non-listening candidate could actually become the next president, and I worry that he lacks the ability to listen to the other 300 million people who would be employing him.

Kinda looks like Martin Crane, though.

There is No Win in Windows 7; just D'ohs

2011-11-21T20:38:00.000-08:00

I've 'up'graded to windows 7.

With double the RAM as my old desktop, it runs the very same. And that's disappointing.

I have a whole series of upgrades I need to get through, but with the time available to me and the things I need to get done the new Vid card and Power Supply and the HDD relocation needs to wait. If it involves cabling or major components it's just not happening. Maybe next week.

I'm glad it's able to use my 8800GT video card with two monitors and not have the annoying problem where every pop-up dialogue is bifurcated. I'm able to make win7 look like XP enough that it should work for me; just the new routines for doing the same thing is going to be interesting to learn.

And WHAT THE HECK is with the pathetic, rinky-dink voodoo one has to do if one wants to check the config of the network? Click here, click there, move that, click there, close that, click there and SOME of the information's there. Some of it may never be available.

This is better than typing 'ifconfig' (interface config) on a unix box? Really?

Really?

Anyway, we came close to going Apple for our upgrade, but the concern was there about the quality of the Apple OS in recent releases, and how much more they're pushing everyone to the Cloud Junkyard -- which I say as someone who makes a living providing cloud services. We were worried that we'd soon have no choice but to keep all our personal information in an account with an international organization held captive by the likes of the DMCA and its warrantless seizure problems. One doesn't have to be a criminal to read where that's gone wrong, time and time again.

That and the migration would have been expensive, and instead of some hand-me-down parts and $200 in new stuff, it would have been $2-3000 worth of completely new stuff. I'm not into an expensive replacement just yet, and while it was for the best and most logical reasons, Apple intentionally cut themselves out of the commodity hardware market and offer no easy upgrade path.

So it is what it is. Linux is nowhere near there yet, and half the work tools - and all the games - I use are not available for Linux either. So an ugly, clunky desktop with no VIClient and no easy WoW is just not gonna work either. Windows is the only thing left, and that's the only time it's a viable choice, right?

Crafting Knives

2011-11-20T03:56:00.001-08:00

I wandered across this great video report about a guy who makes knives from scratch.

I wish I had enough money for one of his masterpieces, but then I'd have to almost take up cooking professionally, because it'd be a waste of (a lot of) money otherwise! Considering how little skill I have with cooking, and how often I'd cut myself with this ridiculously sharp thing, it's best I do what I do and leave the craftman and his customers to do what they do.

But look at that and tell me you wouldn't want to cook dinner with one of those things. Or maybe just go cuttin' potatoes all day.

That's all.

Net Ghetto

2011-11-16T19:23:00.001-08:00

I've mentioned bizarre ghetto ideas like this for a while, and I think sometimes people aren't sure I really am that cheap a bastard or that low-class to pull it off.

I assure you; I'm cheap. I'm low-class.

So here's an idea I bring out every now and then, and it surprises people at times. It's simple: go buy some cheap wal*mart school supplies, or from whatever cheap*mart you have, and focus on the $3 loose-leaf paper binders. Take them home, rip off the covers, carefully drill out the rivets (or pop them if you have better tools) and screw in the spines as really great cable management gear. It works, and it's cheap, and it's easy to do.

Did I mention it works really well, usually?

Don't screw them in like circus-gorilla tight, though, or even more than barely-all-the-way, as you'll need some space to work the mechanism, and the cheap way they're done won't work if there's no room for play. You'll figure it out on your first one, so be ready to huck one if you go all marine-corps hard on this thing too early.

Oh. Think of it for your stereo kit or TV set, as these screw in just as easily into the beaver-chow framework holding up your TV as it does into the side of this Anton roll-away.

Mmmm. Ti-dy.

Amazon Big Mac Big Mac ... and Chillin

2011-11-14T19:22:00.001-08:00

Look. I have no idea.

But it fills me with mirth.

That is all.

Too Good For Everyone

2011-11-10T20:01:00.001-08:00

TBend sent me this one:

And I laaaauughed and laughed and laughed.

Inventive Spam - Facebook Scam

2011-11-06T18:55:00.000-08:00

I got a message tonight:

David Ross commented on a photo of you.
Reply to this email to comment on this photo.

David wrote:
To see the comment thread, follow the link below:
photo?fbid=17482455130&set=p.124214211&mid=3ug7r238g723f732df23

Thanks,
The Facebook Team

Oh, how tempting it is to click the link. But, you see, that's what they want. Want to bet the link is bogus and tries to use a bug in my web browser to steal info or install a trojan? The first hint is when you check the link, it goes to some (neutered, here) bogus URL made to almost look like a real facebook link.

But it's bogus. This is known as SpearPhishing, and they're getting better. Watch what you click, and stop using IE -- that's about all I can suggest, despite having said it a million times before. For, while you will eventually accidentally click one of those bogus links, if you're not using IE you may stand a better chance of avoiding the virus on the other end.

The Cat Feels ...

2011-11-04T19:25:00.000-07:00

Much better, thank you. This whole business with the delay in the medication was very stressing.
that fresh cooked chicken is proof that the kitty gods truly love us. Nom om om nom nom.
that socks will do as yummy toys to carry around.
.. as will electric cords.
that the best defence is a good flop: nothing can hurt a flopped cat, due to special laws of physics.
just fine right here, thanks. You didn't need to get in that door, did you?
that the patented flop also legally binds any nearby humans to stop and tend to the cat's massage, scratch and chew-toy needs
that a good scratch requires good traction.
.. and carpet provides the best traction.
that Carpet - especially on stairs - is like a lamp for human moths: I scratch, they all yell and come near.
.. to scratch me.
like a scratch now, thanks.
not so highly about the forceful chatter of humans who've come to the scratchy-carpet bug lamp.
pretty highly about the claw-fluffing ability of stair-carpet
.. and rug carpet
.. and area carpet ..
.. and kitchen mat carpet too.
that being tall enough to touch the top of the kitchen counter without jumping is a great asset.
particularly proud for learning to add a little bunny hop and gain 3 inches of hooking depth over the edge and onto the top of said counter.
occasionally surprised by the noise and mess from the above trick.
that it was all intentional anyway.
bored of this game. Let's go see what's on the counter again.

My Favourite Holiday

2011-10-27T15:57:00.000-07:00

No, it's not Hallowe'en.

I LOVE SICK CATS, MIGRAINE AND CRASH THE CAR DAY !!

Hoping we don't have many more of those. Okay, thanks.

Given that the Insurance Corp zeroed out my driving history when I came back from abroad - thanks, losers - and that I was given the insurance history and fees of the average 16 year old boy, it was great when I dented the family car the last time. This time should be extra special, and I'm really looking forward to it.

Given also that the car's ownership wasn't clear, given the requirements around the loan for said car - again, because I must've become a non-person during my sojourn abroad and also lost all my credit history (phew) - I actually am glad we (just) got that cleared up. Some insurance companies will ding you if you do or have been mentioned as the co-sign on a car that has subsequently had an accident, ever, no really, and the one accident already cost those I love dearly; with their insurance mafia and the rules they pay through the nose under, this new bender would've been extra special. Off the Festivus card list for sure.

FML day over, like I said, let's hope there's no more for a while. Please, universe?

All my Troubles Seemed so Far Away

2011-10-24T14:38:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was a good day.

I woke late, had a quick yummy breakfast and went to work. A data move I had started, so that I could swap out some weak hardware for something better, had gone sideways. It's done methodically and carefully (by the computer) so there was little risk. I killed it, waited for the SCSI system to recover, and started it again. Ideally, I'll be able to empty out the hard drives without an outage, if all eventually goes well.

But I wasn't there for that; I was there to test and calibrate a UPS in the remote work site. It's funny how, after my ITIL course a ways back, things slowly drift toward a more ITIL-ish method: for this UPS calibration we'd set the outage time, mailed some people, worked a back-out or recovery plan, etc. Nothing fancy, but if we're the pros we should sometimes be professional, and I guess if we killed the UPS it would've sucked, right? Heh. Anyway, that went well enough: didn't get the result we wanted, but we rolled everything back and didn't lose or interrupt everything. And ITIL isn't about being as OCD as possible, but in establishing a framework that works and then using it. So go us.

Then I hacked. I modified a bit of code here, some code there, pushed out the updates, maybe grabbed a candy bucket or two, and that was almost it. It was a very relaxed day, punctuated by the occasional chat online, or locally with a cat or a human. I can't pick out anything disastrous about the day, really. Did I drink to forget it and succeed? I think I didn't, but I can't remember.

I just thought I'd post that, even if almost none of it has anything that most of you can latch onto: even with me glossing over the details, it's still too techy for most of my lived ones to do more than dip a toe in, and I'm mostly okay with that. Yes, I'm still working at a job that's so bad that one guy tried to kill himself onsite, and yes, said job just one a freakin' award for being a great job to work at, which makes sense as "number of people tried to kill self in last year / two years / next year (predicted)" was remarkably absent on the questionnaire when it went around. Same for "people sent home to France directly into extended psyche care" for stress, I guess, for the sweatshop would fail that one too.

The key point is, I wasn't there, yesterday. And I was producing. And I was in a relaxed environment conducive to work, with people and cats and animal crackers, or whatever people have at home. And I'm sure that went a long way toward me having something resembling something relatively like a good day, and I thought I should share as much of it with you all as I thought would be interesting. So if I get fired tomorrow - like I almost did last week - at least we'll always have Sunday the 23rd of October.

Virtual Teleportation, or the Perfect Alibi

2011-10-22T19:50:00.000-07:00

So here's another geeky post. It's low on substance so it's not goin' on the other blog, and it's not angry so it's not goin' on the other blog. And the other one's dead. And that one's idle. And ...

So in the ATL we were having THE WORST problem with an OPTO unit. No, hell, I don't know much about that thing, except that it likes networking so I like it.

The problem was, this thing was coming up, asking for an Internet Address, ignoring it and going back to asking. Repeat until the second coming.

Thing is, its friend and identical twin was working like Gangbusters at work. No fun, because that was about 45 min away and driving there would be SO 1999.

Nah. We cut one port off the WRT54GL unit (actually an Asus WL500GPv1), like yesterday, created a virtual network (LAN not tunnel) to the one at the shop, and joined this one to it. So if you plug into ports 1-3, you're at home; if you plug into port4, though, you're at work. The OPTO unit comes up, starts whining for its IP address and the one at work thinks it's in the same room. BAM. Solved; at least past that part.

Thing is, with this kinda deal, you could be away; far away. Although that tiny unit in the pic to the right is useless for this kind of thing, it's not because it couldn't; just most of the gear in that thing there is the right size but too cheaped-out and sub-par to be useful for this kind of super-versatile work. But the point is, with something not much larger than that thing, one can completely hog some hotel's wifi network by downloading massive files from the iTunes in the next room ... across the country.

Oh yeah. Want to be at work? Move network ports, refresh your stuff and you're there. Play some head to head ipod games with your buddy but you need to be on the 'same' wifi? No problem, even if you're in Japan. I back up data more quickly from 4000mi away than I do from 250mi away, so distance isn't directly an issue. Even fake out Google Latitude.

Happy traveling.

Virtually Distinct

2011-10-20T19:29:00.000-07:00

I did something awesome the other day.

On the back of these little Linksys WRT54GL units are 5 net ports. One's for the ISP are for fun. Huck some gear into the ports and par-tay together.

But they don't all need to be part of the same net. So me and NB split off all four ports into 4 separate networks, which themselves don't ever see each other, almost.

The last one? It holds a scanner and printer, which is shared by everyone. It's like it's three nets with a one-way connection in to the Common Area, and to the net.

Oh. And the Wifi is glued to only one net, but it could be a distinct, separate 5th, like I already do here.

There's a reason why the Linksys WRT54GL is still a $75 router, new, despite the fact it's only 10/100 Mb on the ports.

There's another post. Bam!

Aborted

2011-10-18T19:21:00.000-07:00

No, it would not kill me to do a new post.

But it may take up all freakin' night for two days, with no result.

Yep. About a thousand words. Three embedded youtubes, for cred. It was awesome, and it talked about how Syfy and its ilk are alienating the cattle whose eyes it half-heartedly sells to advertisers, killing expensive (read: well-written) shows which get in the way of instant short-term profit. Not a masterpiece, but worthy of a standing O(vation, you freak) for sure.

And then I edited it.

And again.

And while I firmly believed that Syfy and them were clutching frantically to idiotic notions that it wasn't their fault, that it was the fault of "the pirates," the 3% average loss toward whom was justification for skyrocketing prices and idiotic rights abuses in other media forms, I mistakenly believed that Syfy and friends were clinging to their out-dated, weak beliefs because they had nothing else. Then it hit me.

Syfy is owned by NBC, which is owned by Comcast.

Comcast, Optimum, Shaw, all have in them the future of TV. We're gradually becoming more adjusted to the idea of paying a subscription to individual series of programmes, and letting our cash fund the show directly; halving the cost to suffer commercials would mean it's about $3/mo for Firefly, and even Seinfeld could almost survive with Mr S mailing about a hun-mil a year.

This means they have no reason to cling to tightly to their bizarre notions of arresting people who only want to view the commercials they've already been paid to add into shows for their customers, and every reason to let the evolution to pure distributorship occur.

So I'm baffled. My premise is flawed, and about three thousand words (that's 1000 plus edits) is goin' nowhere.

I feel....
I need a better format. ;-)

Say Water Again. I Double-Dare You

2011-10-12T17:19:00.000-07:00

I have another blog post coming. They always are.

Here's some cheap glass beads.

Almost as good as the the Reverend Jesse Jackson doing Green Eggs and Ham.

Classic.

Power and a Backup

2011-09-05T14:28:00.000-07:00

We use Uninterruptible Power Supplies, or UPS units, to make sure our computers don't fry at the worst possible time. Given the way in which computers get around (relatively) slow disk drives by writing things to a cache for storage 'while-U-drive-off,' there's a brief window where even solid electricity can cause problems. Now, too, power that fluctuates too high can also fry stuff. Rumour has it, these 'over-volt' incidents can dry pumps, lights, heaters, monitors, disks, power supply units, etc. Who knows, though; just huck a UPS onto it and we're good. Right?

But when's the last time you checked your UPS? Like a smoke detector, maybe you should. If you have a dime-store brand - hint: Only Get APC. Only - then you won't know when/if your battery is sound. If you do have an APC, though, and you use the cable and software, then you have another line of defense. The APC units will periodically self-test:

Date: Mon, 5 Sep 2011 09:16:49 -0400
Subject: UPS battery needs changing NOW.
 
UPS battery needs changing NOW.
 
DATE     : Mon Sep 05 09:16:48 EDT 2011
MODEL    : Back-UPS XS 1300 LCD 
STATUS   : ONBATT REPLACEBATT 
LASTXFER : Automatic or explicit self test

So this software tests the batteries, in this case weekly, and reports whether they're reliable enough to give X amount of power for Y minutes. It's good to know it's looking out for us: without the proper software and connections, we could never have known that the battery was toast. (yes, this is the night job; not the sweatshop where we'd have a massive setup and overworked people potentially forgetting to check)

Checking your UPS, though, that's the point here. How's your important data? Even with a good, stable power supply unit, so it doesn't shorten the life span of your on-average 3 months disk drive -- Do you have important data backed-up and protected by a decent UPS unit? Do you have a good battery and the way set up so where it can check the battery and let you know if it's gone sour?

If you can't check the validity of your failsafe plans, then you don't really have a plan. Check your batteries. Check your backups (and bug me if I haven't provided you the method yet). Heck, pretend your computer's fried by turning it off, or pretend your house burned down; and then prove you can still see the photos from last Christmas or that you can find your address book (yeah really) ..

.. and if you can't, get it fixed. Spend some time, relative to how important this stuff is to you, and make sure you're not going to lose your data. You people with the DVD burners 'for backups' will be in for a terrible surprise.

Update

2011-08-27T22:04:00.000-07:00

I've been sleeping poorly. It's reduced my blog time, indirectly. Here's what my Friday morning looked like:

0230 - sleep/crash
0244 - regional power hit. One UPS begins panic-whining constantly
0400 - cat begins chasing crane fly. on ceiling. of bedroom. ABOVE HUMANS. Much stepping-on of heads ensued.
0500 - second UPS discovered failed, whining, downstairs. Work(state) lost.
0512 - back to bed
0730 - up for work. Let's be brilliant, kids.

That's one morning. Considering as I was trying to sleep off the labyrinthitis, I have to chalk this one up in the Failed list.

And this is why we can't have kids -- I can barely survive computers and cats.

For Sale - One TiVo

2011-08-15T02:12:00.000-07:00

We're selling the TiVo. Pretty much unloading it, I guess.

The cable company is riding the "digital antenna" wave and using it to force us all into digital, encrypted cable because it sounds the same and, hey, they have an exploitable opportunity. I have a definite problem with being forced into less choice, potentially more cost, but we're dealing with it. I hate being pushed into things, and it makes it easy for me to see the drawbacks and risks, and the biggest negative to the idea is the fact we don't get to choose to do it. If your new fancy whiziwig is so much better than what we have now, then present the differences and let me choose; don't force me. I think I need to shut up about that, though.

In this case, the cable company offers one overpriced package with 12 usable analog cable channels and X more we can't use with the TiVo. We don't watch those 12 channels; who does? So we're getting a digital box and can't use the TiVo any more, really -- really we can, but really, really, we can't. And since we don't use the TiVo any more, and it's gotta get gone, the box we (just) got to switch between that and the VCR isn't required either. It's a little $20 jobby from the Shack.

Let me know you need any of those and we'll work a price you'll like.

Don't See the Irony

2011-08-13T17:49:00.000-07:00

Half of you will notice that there's a big white square somewhere in this photo. It's a new ad campaign started by the UK's top female beach volleyball athletes. It uses a QR Code, usually encoding a website or similar URL.

Of the half who notice the ad, there's a small percentage who are outraged. "Are they walking advertising billboards?", feminist Ms Sian Norris asks. I don't see mention as to whether the clothing itself is problematic, or just the ad.

Speaking of double standards, the rules governing approved dress for women are debatably very weighted toward giving a bit of a show: FIVB dictates a 'form-fitting top' and a bottom with 'no more than 6cm' of material at the hip. Given those regulations, though (the outfit in the pic is typical), there's just not a lot of real estate available for promoters to sell to advertisers willing to bankroll pros who train full-time. That's the reality of the situation, and given the common hunched squatty stance of a receiving volleyball player and what the public sees, I think Betfair’s Andy Lulham is near the mark when he says, "We’ve put them on the place likely to get photographed most.”

Where's the double-standard, you ask? I'd like to direct attention to the picture at right. It's not that these players are doing anything novel, as it seems to be common in the sport (see the pic), but it's entirely discriminatory to suggest that women, alone, may not advertise on their bodies but men can, and that's a side of Ms Norris' argument - and a part of televised competition - that should not be overlooked.

I think some people need to think carefully before suggesting a woman cannot wear 1/10th the adverts on her clothing as a man can without becoming objectified. I wonder how Danica Patrick would feel being so labeled.

Dredging the Farm

2011-07-31T14:42:00.000-07:00

Mr White asked me, the other day, a strange question; it had to do with a background app, running on his linux machine (a daemon, kids), that was unexpectedly terminating (winbindd, losing connection to the mother ship and freaking out), and his question was whether or not it could be set up in a loop to auto-restart. Right now, when one of them on a problematic machine dies, we get a ticket (an hour of work) to go get details (20 min) and get onto the box (2-30 min) from somewhere, via some method, and restart the process (2 sec; one command) . This is no good for us, since by the numbers we're managing between 2.33 and 3.33 times as many machines as we should be doing safely, even in the absence of TPS reports and bizarre pre-change oversight.

After a few minutes, I remembered. "Is Binky2 still around," I asked. Sure, it was, yeah. I told him to go onto the box, look at something I installed five years ago when I was in his group, and see what I did there to make another process (ntpd, freaking out on a time shift) continually restart itself as well. What I wrote there, on a machine slated for destruction, may help him do that which he wants in this case as well. We could save ourselves hours of work, and the company thousands of dollars they won't realize isn't gone.

A lot of our job is experience, and remembering past successes; I'm at a bit of a disadvantage, here, but I occasionally pull a rabbit like this out of my hat. It's very validating, and it's occasionally concerning. And, very quickly, the effort we spend in past solutions is re-used for new problems or inspiration to shorten the time required to solve totally new problems. If we are to harvest any of our old work, it's usually buried very deep; but the field is very, very productive when put to use.

I'm reminded of the peer at the office who, after 20 years of working in the bizarre government environment, attempted to kill himself, at work, within 5 months. This guy had 20 years in the organization, living its funny routine and solving problems in its environment; the sweatshop almost managed to kill him within the first half-year. What it did do is completely remove him as a resource for the rest of us, and 20 years of solutions are lost. The most mystifying part of it all is the blasé attitude expressed by the company about this loss.

Finally Saw It

2011-07-15T18:04:00.000-07:00

The two of you who will pick out this picture may still be reading my little blog. It's a risk.

I finally saw this movie. You knew I would, given the people involved, but I had a great opportunity, thanks to TiVO picking it up overnight.

A couple of things.

First, it was better than I expected, in some places as bad as I feared and as good as I hoped, and I guess it was pretty much what it had to be -- from a filming, content, plot and packaging perspective.

So I wasn't disappointed at all.

Oh. And I need to hope that there was some serious photo-shopping in the last, brave scene. Otherwise, yo, that's just not right.

You Don't Live Here !!

2011-07-12T17:43:00.000-07:00

This new complex certainly has a number of cats. The rules say two, but it seems some people have more; and they're not owning up to owning them.

On the other hand, I also fear that some cats are shared among a few tenants, and with people moving out I fear some are now shared among none. It's a very fluid cat-and-keeper relationship.

Which is why I'm not too concerned about this one.

I got home the other day, after some crucial errands (or I would've still been at home) and I hear a cat calling at the door about a millisecond after I close it. Anxious, I count feline heads and ensure it's no-one living here. Open the door and this is the visitor.

We've never seen that cat before, officer; honest. Actually I think J thought this one (also) lives up the way a bit, at another tenant's house. All I know is, this cat was certain that it needed to live here; and maybe did. The food's good, demands are low; it's a kitty-cat paradise. It called under the door for a while until a certain 4-legged resident came over to help smooth things over.

Finally, with me and a cat telling this one to go home - I'm not sure if she was translating, but I do believe we were both saying about the same thing in our respective languages - I think this interloper finally got the picture. We have enough furry fuehrers. Sell crazy someplace else, we're all stocked up here.

Muh Crib

2011-07-10T17:43:00.000-07:00

The McRib is back at McDonalds. This fills me with glee, fear and a great need.

I must have one.

McDonalds trialed the McRib for a few months as a regular menu item, but found that, like Disney princess movies, the demand is just not there for it as a regular menu offering. Introduce false demand, via availability only periodically, though, and it's a money-maker.

What, you think Apple was the first?

After some discussion, though, it was decided that a McRib is definitely not in my best interests. It has something to do with the allergy and food content in the product itself. Even my rebuttal

But, McRib!

didn't help. And here I was sure it was a guaranteed game-clincher. Alas, no go. And the McRib may just go another year.

Sally Fo(u)rth

2011-07-06T01:47:00.000-07:00

The sweatshop lost another member, this week. Unlike the guy who tried to kill himself in full view of the co-workers, the rumour is she just .. snapped. Not in an expressive way, but I think we can suggest there's been some compromise in behaviour. She's been placed on immediate vacation, and once the time's run out on that, she's going onto long-term disability. She's caught a plane home. She's left the work group, the company, the hemisphere. She's not coming back.

It's the stress. More work, ever more complex and deeper procedures, kneejerk policies and hall monitors for HR. It's a never-ending slog, and I'm assuming right now that that's what got to her. She's been in a 4-person group that's 20% under its bare, bare minimum staffing. They tried to get that fifth, but the management denied the request; they've been falling behind ever since. Now it'll be worse, and I'm sure she stayed too long due to concern for her group-mates.

There were no signs of this stress -- nothing that stood out, anyway. Yeah, I'm sure there were days of less coping than others, and I really can't be my expressive self without expecting that others will be the same, but I admit I'm surprised she was next and not someone else. I wonder who's next.

The Wooden Table Effect

2011-06-18T02:22:00.000-07:00

I left myself a note today, but more on that in a sec.

The Wooden Table Meme is a meme (or fad habit, really) that involves a wooden table to produce something. In the original post, the submitter had found a website which was produced by a company designing a fancy flyer, printing it off, printing said flyer, photographing the flyer, scanning that , and using the scanned image in the web page.
Every ridiculous process will soon be lacking only the wooden table; then we know it's 100% broken. Needless to say, we mention the wooden table at the sweatshop often.

So on to my note.

It was written on one of those new tablet devices, which I then encapsulated and e-mailed to myself . It's a reminder that a murder-mystery series is available in its entirety at amc.com . One of the guys at the sweatshop loves the series and has been raving about it all week. It's coming to a close, to they're posting the entire series in a streaming format as a lead-up to the finale, so that people have a chance to run through everything again. Like '24', 'The Killing' is told in serial form, and the entire first season is a long story arc with one murder case. It's supposed to be good.

But that's not why I'm here.

I like this hand-written, scanned, encapsulated, mailed format a lot. It's only 55,000 bytes to transmit about 24 letters. how decadent is THAT? It's awesome! It's baroque. It's a needless anachronism.

I want it. Now, how to make my handwriting NOT look like ass?

Move to Canada

2011-06-12T01:50:00.000-07:00

Canada, says a new study, is the second-best place to live on Earth.

The country has the tenth greatest life expectancy of all OECD countries. Furthermore, 88% of people in Canada report being in “good health,” compared to the OECD average of 69%. Although this is a subjective measure, it is “a good predictor of people’s future health care use,” according to the OECD. Education is also exceptional in the country. Eighty-seven percent of the population have received a high school degree or more, compared to the OECD average of 73%

Here's the list:

10. Austria
9. Israel
8. Finland
7. Switzerland
6. Sweden
5. Netherlands
4. Australia
3. Norway
2. Canada
1. Denmark

There's a few takeaways, here:

Many, if not all, of those listed have national healthcare
Many of them appear to be high tax-and-spend countries with high social agendas
Many of them are north of the equator
Only one of them is in the western hemisphere

That's where Canada comes in. I wonder if the Conscientious Objectors we hear about are really objecting to the latest conquest-as-policing plan. I wonder if they really want to move to Canada just because of how awesome it is.

And so polite, too, right?

I Look Like a German Shepherd

2011-06-10T01:20:00.000-07:00

This is Ella. She's 2. She's a German Shepherd. This is the dog that Doggleganger.co.nz decided most resembled me.

It took a bit of finagling to get the webcam to take a usable pic, but it eventually did so. I'm not sure if that's why I look more like a german shepherd here and not the bulldog I assumed I would.

Am I going to New Zealand and getting a dog? No, I don't wanna buy a dog. I admit, too, that I had a different dog in mind. While Jake was an awesome dog, I think he and other large dogs are sometimes just not for me. I'm barely able to notice a cat, and I wouldn't put myself up to actually taking care of one well enough, and a dog - with the regularity such a pet needs - would be way out.

I think dog owners are awesome, and if the local SPCA didn't violate privacy laws and send our information to foreign countries for processing, I would be happy to periodically borrow one of their charges and go out for a spin. I know I'm not a good potential dog owner, though, and that's just that.

The Solution is Not Another Walled Garden

2011-06-08T21:21:00.000-07:00

At their Worldwide Developers Conference, this year, apple dropped what to them must be the bomb the iPhone was.

Apple Blackberry Messenger for iPhones.

No, really, that's it. Apple is building out a network like Blackberries have, but for iOS devices like iPhones and ipads. Neat, eh? Not so much. It's mostly the same as: but instead of pricey SMS (text messages, or Texts if you failed grammar) conversations which go through up to two phone carriers, span every cell phone made in the world within the last decade, almost, and are as ubiquitous as ICQ once wished to be, the Apple solution is more like the Blackberry one. And with RIM's BBM working with iOS and Android, soon, it's not even as promising.

Their idea - stop me if you've heard this one before - links the 100 million uses who bought the 200 million iphones in the last 4 years, relays all communication freely through the apple network (subject to US snooping laws) and allows iPhones to talk with ... well, only iPhones, you're near a wifi hot-spot or have a paid data plan. You may have seen this when it was called MSN or ICQ or AIM, now-quaint message platforms that were popular before the official standard came along and the smart people upgraded so they could talk to all their friends.

Don't get me wrong. My work group at the sweatshop uses their blackberries for constant pings and chats throughout the day and after. Gtalk via blackberry is very solid, and I use that for coordinating constantly. The fact that RIM married a barely-useful keyboard with a free-ish comms network unilaterally rolled out and working by default on their devices - lock-in that Microsoft dreamed of for email - was one of the best things they could have done. It allows modest communication and also prevents competitors from using the social network they've build. It's like ICQ, but with hexadecimal numbers that look like 82bba019 instead of 934488.

But this is ridiculous. iMessage - yeah, really - and BB Messaging both have zero privacy, but also are proprietary. Instant messages using the official method have had really strong security and privacy for years. E-mail works because it's standardized and open in its protocol: any company can build an email app. Standardized e-mail grew and ate the old, decrepit proprietary message apps for lunch. This was done decades ago. Standardization for messaging was laid down a decade ago. Still, some company wants to lock you down, allow you to communicate with only some of your friends and harvest your membership to coerce more people to join their little society just because you're there. We've done this already. Hello, Apple, it's 2002 on the phone, all those now-cheesy messaging networks, and they all want their idea back.

It's not exactly like when the big Cable monopoly came in and bribed the clueless yokels with shiny pay-per-view beads so they'd sell off the Municipal infrastructure, because at least now we can run Gtalk on the blackberries and maybe one day apple phones too, one day, but it's still a walled garden like any other monopoly; and I'm disappointed we haven't figured it out yet.

Down with the Sickness

2011-06-06T08:49:00.000-07:00

Being under the weather really sucks.

This one is a simple bug I think I picked up at the recent wedding I attended. So many people, so much hugging and close talking, something's bound to have been transferred. I chose to attend, and it was a calculated risk. So be it.

I live a cloistered life. Yes, the quarters at the sweatshop are somewhat cramped, with my 30 square feet (think about it) of office space and sharing the air with an airplane-load of people, but I usually only interact with a few people at a time, and thus I like to think it's not a monster vector, there. With the deadlines on the second job tugging me along after them I usually don't get out very much. Yes, I miss socializing terribly, even as I abhor the thought, but it's just a life I can't have too much of at this point. If the first job keeps the lights on, the second one keeps me sane enough to keep going to the first.

I have two jobs, and the one that keeps me sane is the one victimized the most in all this. It's the only one with a future, and it's the one I need to be the sharpest for; it just doesn't pay so much if I don't deliver on it. Social events, "popping over" (ha! 60 hours cratered) to see a friend next month, it all adds up, and I'm already overextended so it all gets taken away from the job I want to keep. Add in the reduced performance while I'm a mucky cranky mess and it's comical.

It's nothing new, and it's far from unique. I think the biggest bummer is that I can't put off being sick for a time when I'm sure I'll have relief from the deadlines. Or maybe I can be sick, but only three nights during the week until my penance is paid. Do they have a suspended sentence for illness? If I'm losing time, I think I'm already in the Bargaining stage.

Thank god my second job isn't driving a cab or something, working for some guy like Louie in the old TV show. I think I'd not be even as social as I am now.

Happiness

2011-06-02T22:26:00.000-07:00

I expressed frustration at someone I love today. With recent events it's been hard to keep the keel even, and so many official functions over the years with the job stress - I still work at a place where a guy tried to kill himself in front of us, and another was carried out on a stretcher just last month - look, nothing's an excuse, and I do try to keep it all under the concrete seal, but we all have our tsunami-earthquakes to deal with.

I'm grateful I can talk about something else.

Yesterday I watched a very dear friend get married. I haven't hung out with him in a very long time, since we were bounced out of the worksite where he is every day, and I've been so busy with the other work that I never seemed to find the time

So I found the time. I called in what little favours I have left, got myself a midweek day off, got some clothing that fits and fit the occasion and made it to the church on time. Thankfully, my date was a complete hottie so no one cared so much about the portly geeky guy with the thinning hair.

Who gets married on a Wednesday?

The ceremony was the best. I would have tweeted 'mawwiage ...' if I could, but aside from short chortles it was everything it needed to be, and nothing much it didn't. It was at the school where Ann was a Saint, if that matters, so it was old, woody and well-kept.

It was generally packed. The bride and groom high-fived after the vows. She wore white, with an orange wrap and purple, green and orange flowers in her hand to match the wraps worn by her party. He wrote a white jacket, wingtips and an orange tie. After so many cameras going off, continually, at the signing of the paperwork, the groom pulled out a camera and FIRED BACK! (That's the photo above). At the nearby reception, when they entered, a 'musical glitch' caused the DJ to 'accidentally' play the Imperial March from Star Wars. Having met at a swing club ("at the table over there", they said at the reception), they danced their first dance very well. The maid of honor talked about her Hetero Life Mate and all but said "this is not the best maid of honor speech in the world; this is just a tribute." Had she, I may have jumped up and cheered. We stayed until I was too sick to stay.

I've been dressed up and hauled into church too much, lately, and for all the wrong reasons. It's been years since the last wedding shindig, and I'm unable to properly express how glad I am that I (was) cowboyed up and (was) got to this important event. If I have to forgo every other party this year, I'm glad to have caught this one.

My Mouse is Dead. Long Live my Mouse!

2011-05-26T16:28:00.000-07:00

In my earlier post about three-button mice and the weak, losing devices touted as replacements, I forgot to mention it clearly enough: my mouse of 14 years is dying.

It's not the button, and it's not the wheel or any of the gearing. It's actually the switch behind button 2. It's begun closing the switch unexpectedly, and usually in response to movement or another switch being closed, and this kind of semi-random behaviour is unacceptable.

So after 14 years or to, usually of heavy, heavy usage, my Logitech 1996/97-era First Mouse M-S35 has to go. It outlasted 5 employers, 5 moves, 2 countries, countless RTS games (right/middle inverted strafe fo' life, yo) and many hours, but this is it.

Like I said, though, I have like three spares, and this one has great parts in it (aside from the switch), so it can go into the back yard on blocks as a parts car for the next one.

The newer one has this annoying squeak and a keyclick that's a bit too resistant for my taste, but I'm sure I'll adapt. I have 14 years.

(and if you can find a good 3-button mouse, I'd love to upgrade)

Our Own Glass Ceiling

2011-05-14T02:04:00.000-07:00

So I dropped in on my boss as he babysat a big data transfer tonight. As the bizarre rules dictate some machines cannot be maintained remotely, which is itself laughable considering how the lofty telecommuting early goals of the company are gutted anyway, this guy had to sit around and watch a bunch of bits fly out the door.

And we kinda talked. It was the usual stuff, though: the job sucks, ceasar is batshiat crazy, #8 could actually be a no-talent bully better acclimatized to a sales job in a non-technical field, etc.

One theme stuck out. Since the zoo kicked us outta their shop and we landed in the sweatshop 2.08 years ago, the sweatshop has been taking on newbies to fill for people who end up leaving or are required for the assloads of new business these gifted but clueless salespeople are drumming up with luciferian deals.

Granted, the 15-year zoo veteran who attempted to kill himself within 6 months while onsite, to protest work conditions which were worse than the zoo, he was offered a tidy 'just go away' bribe so he didn't come back onside and become a martyr, embarrassing reminder or soundbyte machine,

and, well the heart attack guy just last month was nearing the end of a contract period and just .. wasn't renewed; but the rest left. No more of the old guys, but newbs do tend to burn out within a few months of celebrating their good fortune at landing a job at such an apparently-respectable shop, and those guys are replaced with more newbs to train.

The newbs, though, have a much better contract for the company: way cheaper on-call time, slashed call-out rates if something goes wrong and they demand you come in, that kind of thing. It wasn't these guys who made the one guy type up fucking monthly status reports while waiting for his wife to give birth, but I know which company that was, for instance. And we, the fogeys, give up our awesome grandfathered contract the moment our job changes in any way. The fact that I wasn't on the on-call roster when I was kicked over that railing, for instance, means my on-call terms are way, way beneath the point where it's worth getting zero hours sleep for a week, and far beneath those of me closest peer who has 2 weeks less seniority than I do.

What that means is, us old guys have no future at the company. We can't take a promotion, for it means less money and more risk after the contract is changed to the sweatshop norm. We can't be re-classed. We probably can't change our work schedule. The slightest alteration means we drop from our upper-class society into the muck of the newb contract, the one the Union greedily agreed to like a dog knowing its owner has a treat. We're stuck where we are, and can't advance or change areas at all.

In short, we're all waiting to leave and the company can't get rid of us quickly enough and save a few bucks . It would rather we didn't leave on a stretcher, but those guys' replacements (before they quit) did very well on far lower salary, so .. score!

What's that mean for the company? We have some very smart, very talented, very stressed-out people at the sweatshop, and they will soon take their accumulated experience with them. Their replacements will be trained on their core jobs, and - estimated - within 6 months may understand the complicated environment of the sweatshop enough to go on call. Will they ever be replacements for 10-, 15- and 20-year veterans? I'd say no. Those guys would be just too expensive.

Oh. I included that screen shot because a toaster that toasts hot dogs and buns is awesome.

Elect, Shun

2011-04-22T09:23:00.000-07:00

Well, I guess there's an election coming up. The other day, while sitting around the sweatshop cafeteria, I asked BW a random question that came up. Should world leaders own stock?

Now, hear me out: the president before this one, apparently, carried a lot of Haliburton stock. Coincidentally, his decisions were somewhat .. martial in nature. When he left Office, he bequeathed to a token successor some of the worst debt and continued obligations I think I've ever seen; in the spectrum of transitions, I think this would stand out as the flaming poop-bag left on the doorstep. I've read articles suggesting Haliburton factored very well in foreign engagements, though, and is a very successful company.

I wouldn't suggest for a second that our world leaders are anything but the most upstanding citizens, even if I've bandied about archetypes in throwaway speech for months. I've characterized one potential leader as a seditious provincialist, and another as a slack-jawed numbskull. I've clearly indicated my fears that the lazy fair-weather carpet-bagger and scary deviant (which I wouldn't leave my kids with for an hour - even when he takes off the red nose and make-up) are looking to clone the worst ideas possible for both our medical and defense sectors. (no, really: take the worst idea imaginable, for the most provably ineffective policies and that's their idea) But I'll not go as far as suggest that, beyond their provincial and ideological shirt-sightedness, that they'd bend the policy of an entire nation to suit their financial portfolio.

Not consciously, anyway. but what about unconsciously? It's been well-repeated that MSCE-holders only know one solution to any problem, that Microsoft keeps people recommending only its product because it churns out these techies who know know one company's products at all and can't possibly fairly recommend any other possible solution to a given problem - say, email - despite how bad the Microsoft products actually get. When the choices are fewer it's simpler - not easier - to choose, is a rule I've repeated. Even given the abysmal performance and security in some products, I see them recommended by 'experts' again and again. The two worst applications in the world, ever, are the most expensive by far, the least versatile and nearly the most popular, barely work on the world stage and inter-operate with almost nothing.

Microsoft claimed it always acted in the interests of its
customers. This statement alone should carry a prison sentence.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=6217

How about our world leaders? To have stock in Haliburton, to name one company, especially a lot of stock, makes one naturally follow the company's achievements, hopes and dreams. This makes a person draw closer to that company, given how we tend to liken ourselves to things we've been into for a while ("People get used to what they're accustomed," a certain car salesman used to say). In the same sense that the stereotypical MCSE graduate only knows one solution to any problem, I can see where someone steeped in the idea of invading and pacifying areas using the newest martial tech will more easily consider that as a way of 'helping' others, vs other solutions, and it's not a conflict of interest when the intent is helping others and not oneself; that's just the indirect long-term result.

"those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end,
for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
-- C. S. Lewis

So, and here's the question. Despite election laws requiring (some) world leaders to divest themselves from their stock portfolios so it can't be a direct influence, should we be basking many of our decisions on where a given leader's money is or was placed? Should we avoid candidates with too much money in Pfizer or BMG, since it would imply a strong patent-troll outlook or push us to a health care system which will line the pockets of corporations with the skin of our countrymen? If we choose an ex-union rep, will we perpetuate a system keeping potentially lazy shovel-leaners running our buses, maintaining our roads, cleaning our hospitals? What kind of (former) stock portfolio and group affiliation do we look for?

And given our own leanings, affiliations and subscriptions, are we qualified to vote? I guess there's so many of us that it should even out, on our side, but I worry about that.

"Things would be easier if I was a dictator."
--George W. Bush, May 2001,
upon leaving White House Press Room

In the end, I'm just gonna write my own name down, and I'm counting on you to do the same. I promise my dictatorship will be a benevolent one, to reign in just the outrageous spending in healthcare, to revert a lot of the freedoms taken from us .. but as long as I abolish the cancer-ridden scanners at airports and the molestation alternative, I think I'm in.

The Brilliance of Being Human

2011-04-12T01:40:00.000-07:00

I watch the Being Human show. It's brilliant beyond belief, and I hope it's a faithful clone of the BBC original.

Not for the potentially tired premise, and not for the marginally contrived per-episode short-arc stories. It's for the long-arc stories, and for the highly credible writing, for characters who aren't heroes or villains, but real, and it's for scenes like this one.

Insanely brilliant. Fucking insane.

And every single episode has this time-stopping kind of money shot or pic in the episode; something that makes you go 'oooooohhhh' and reflect.

Yeah, the larger story is impressive, and the first season looks to have ended exactly as it should have, and needed to, and there's money shots all over the place. But it's the little points of brilliance that make up this dark little interlude run.

Having said that, I expect it to be canceled within the year. If it were Fox, it would already be dead.

Year of the Mouse

2011-04-09T15:06:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I know. It's not the year of the rat.

But my mouse is dying, and it may be time to replace it. It's a Logitech M-S35 (model 1) and I've used it since 1996 or 1997. I thought I've only been using it 12 years, as suggested by the lame title, but that makes it near 15 years old, and it's been used constantly, 8-12 hours a day, since. It could have 40,000 hours on it, but I'd have to guess at the number of clicks. Had I not started playing Quake in 1997, though, I can assure you it'd be a much lower number.

This mouse has a very important feature: three buttons. Most people don't know the value of a true three-button mouse; most manufacturers don't as well, considering the crap they're calling a three-button mouse now - as if that bizarre wheelie device that can occasionally function as button three can actually be called a button. It's the 50-km Spare Tire of the mouse button world. If it can't corner at 70k/h in the 40k twisty part of the old highway, then, well, it's not a tire, and if it can't reliably, repeatedly be found and clicked quickly and easily every time, and without rolling that fucking rolly thing around, then it's not a third button.

What's good is a real third button? It's become completely abused in software, so the loser button often is used to do idiotic things like open or close windows, stupid stuff like that; but its purpose is varied even without the sidecar of add-on crap:

in mozilla, you use it to paste
or to close a tab
or open a new tab with a link,
Sometimes in Mozilla it can be used for gestures.
In terminal sessions, you use it to paste.
In order term windows it's the way to use the scrollbar, normally quasi-locked.
In WoW, it's one of the 12 ways you can walk forward; it's also the easiest.
and a bajillion more routines I can't remember.

So there I was. I was considering the HP DY651A as a replacement, but we're in a spending freeze at home right now and since I haven't checked in a week, HP probably stopped selling it like everything else more than a week old. Luckily, I have 3 standby units waiting around for the imminent death of the original mouse. And one for spare parts. I'm prepared.

Ridicule-less Power

2011-04-06T02:09:00.000-07:00

Want to see ridiculous?

Now if you suck at math, you'll think you can save power by reducing your usage by .0000001% . You'll go crazy: you'll unplug everything, you'll kill the power to your VCR and Microwave when you're not using it - FYI, leave the TiVO plugged in so it can record stuff - and you'll turn off everything you can find and drive everyone around you crazy.

And, after a year, you'll save as much energy as you'd spend idling at a stop light for 3 seconds.

So if you lack the ability to do math, you may equate wasting a bunch of paper and wasting a tiny bit of hydro power. And that's ridiculous.

The Cheap Seats

2011-03-27T17:02:00.000-07:00

We've been settled in for a while, now -- or, well, one of us is settled in, judging from the sheer volume of clutter and crap that one of us has to still go through. I'm not saying whom.

So the topic then becomes the fact that we're still using a kitchen chair at one of our workstations. Now, I'm not so affected, since it's not mine, but there was some concern there overall:

if it's not comfortable, then you won't use it, and it's not useful, and it needs to be tossed if that's the case. Something about clutter in that statement.
it's not healthy, and you continue to use it at all, then it's going to cause injury, however slowly and slight.
there's the money thing.

So let's talk about amortization, comfort and usability.

We bought a moderately comfy chair, a ways back. We got it for $100 too; new, even. Set-up was easy and the chair worked fine. Three months later its spine was broken and it was in danger of cracking completely -- that's when I moved to the backup chair, and after 14 years, it broke too! So we worked like that for a while, but when it came time to get a new chair we went with a good one (and I'm going to chiro).

Our new chair has a 12 year warranty on it: I think if the paper on the receipt is still legible, then it's good! It also comes with a full catalogue of replaceable parts on this unit, for every single part on this chair is serviceable and replaceable directly from the manufacturer (which has been in business for 70 years, and making this product for 15).

This chair also has set a name for itself as a comfortable chair for long-term workers; and a chair that's good for 16 hour days is certainly not going to harm your spine in the first 3 hours of the day, or the first 8, or the first half-hour. If it's good for 16 hour shift work, built for 12 years of life and covered by warranty and a complete line of replacement parts for 100% of the chair itself, it stands to reason that we're buying a decent enough unit for the cash.

Amortize this chair over its lifespan. It's $7/mo , or 5c per hour if used 8 hours each workday. That 'cheap' chair? $30/month, three month warranty. What kind of cheap chair is that?!?

Hands up if you can't afford $7 each month for a 16-hour chair with a 12 year warranty, full replacement parts and famously comfy seating.

SEVEN DOLLARS

Obviously, that was within our budget.

Take Care

2011-03-19T15:28:00.000-07:00

I saw a commercial the other day.

(Stop snickering, xots. I'll get to the point. Wait for it!)

In the commercial, they're comparing butchers to artists -- painters, drafters (architects?) and such. And I'm thinking to myself ...

Did you see how sharp that freakin' knife is?!? Holy crap! The butcher's holding the thing by a thumb and forefinger, and all but drawing a smooth curve around about an inch-thick piece of dead animal. Un-possible! And then they show someone calmly drawing a filet knife through some more meat, and it could be a freakin' light-saber with how smoothly and effortlessly it slices through that stuff.

And now I have two thoughts:

I gotta get me some knives that sharp, so that I'm not pushing them through squash and stuff and risking injury, and
I'd sure as hell also be holding that slab o' meat by a finger and thumb more than 2 inches away from where I'm using the knife. You see how easily I could get cut by that stuff?

And that was all. Okay, maybe another post in a day or two. Not much more meaningful than this one, though, so don't get your hopes up.

Ex Cape ism

2011-01-09T14:45:00.000-08:00

There's a new series out. It's called The Cape.

the cape, of course, refers to that article worn by super-heroes. This is a super-hero TV series. In an environment filled with Dark Knights, No Ordinary Families, and, well Heroes themselves, can we really stand another hero TV series?

Heroes the series worked well because it was the first one on the scene. It lost its momentum because it lacked the backing to hold true to its original premise and method -- and the re-tooling sent it down a path snowballing in suck as its options ran out.

Can we squeeze another one in? I guess so, but it has to not suck, and it has to have Summer Glau. Oh, wait. it does. Okay, I'm hooked.

Oh, and here's Thor too.

There. NOW you are saturated.

Testing the Crash, 50 years Later

2010-12-31T12:18:00.000-08:00

50 years ago, the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety began crashing cars into one another, and into solid objects, and rating just how well those cars stayed together. 50 years later, they're patting themselves on the back with a video comparing or pitting a 1959 chevy and a 2009 chevy. Watch the carnage.

We often make statements suggesting that new cars are shite for construction, and that older cars are truly solid and wonderful pieces of equipment; the stories of people running into brick walls without injuries and only a minor bill from the auto shop for new paint abound. I have an aunt who was fond of recommending old-ass, safe boat cars as new-driver fodder, because the bigger cars are considered so much safer.

This video makes me think that maybe just some of that is a bit romanticized.

I'm just glad they used a Malibu. I hate the new versions, but only because I've driven one. Opposite to the Mini Cooper effect, it's actually smaller inside a Malibu than it looks from the outside. The Bel Air certainly looked better in its ugly 70s phase than it did in the 50s at least, so that's good news too.

Time Badly Spent

2010-12-30T16:39:00.000-08:00

My Christmas holiday is drawing to a close, and I think I have to say I've accomplished very little on my goal list. I've not been so lazy because I've been enjoying a calm, quiet holiday at home -- which I have, but that's not the point. The point is, I've been sick from about the day before I went on holiday, until now. I can't shake this cold.

The graph, above, is taken from Google Latitude, a cool little tool to help locate your friends now and then. It's inaccurate, it's flaky, and it only tracks approximately where the phone happens to be, but it's still pretty shiny.

I can hear the gasp: How did I, a total whackjob paranoid security nut, actually give this thing the stamp of approval? Easy: Once I set my phone down, all concerns about intrusion into my life and movements ends. If you can't be without your phone for an hour, then maybe you should consider talking to someone about it. And that's from me, who always has a phone. Or three.

CatBox

2010-12-20T09:58:00.000-08:00

Our kitty has a toybox. That's not it in the picture (she has many impromptu toyboxes).

In the toybox are

about a million cardboard inner-tubes from paper towel and bathroom tissue
bottle caps, like from plastic soda or water bottles
a moose plush toy
a frog plush toy
about 7 pairs of my socks

Okay, cut those numbers in half, because half of this thing is emptied out all over the living room floor at one point or another. And yes, my socks form a huge part of this cat's toys. Unable to walk properly while carrying a bundle of socks, she hops like a bunny, and it'll put you in stitches. We find my socks under the bed, in the hallway, under the couch, on the floor, in her bed, etc. We're only now discovering the places where she hides things .. and what she hides. It's bizarre.

This cat plays. Hard. Full-on pattering of feet we can hear from downstairs, double-overtime cat hockey, lying in wait behind closed doors for humans to sneak-leap-attack, it all takes its toll on the small cat. After about 10 minutes, though, she enters Crash Mode and pretty much flops down to sleep. Middle of the floor? Sure; great place to sleep.

Usually she bugs humans to sit down so she can crawl up to sleep on your neck. It's one of the few times she'll actually sit closer than beside a human. You can tell what she wants when she mews plaintively and quints the droopy eyes a bit.

Schroedinger's Naptime

2010-11-29T22:12:00.000-08:00

Excerpted from email, embellished painfully little.

Jump onto the bed.
Jump off the bed.

On the bed. Off the bed. On the bed. Step on your head. Meow. Off the bed. On the bed. Pounce on limbs moving underneath covers. Off the bed. Meow. On the bed. Purr. Step on your head. Pounce on ear. An EAR! Meow. Dig under covers. Off the bed. On the bed. Off the bed. On the bed. Purr. Onto nightstand. Drink from tall water glass. Drink from tall water glass now by licking dipped paw. Humans move glass to avoid torrential repeat of Great Tipping Water Dish incident, and it must be play time -- meow. Run around. On the bed. Purr. Off the bed. On the bed. Step on head. Off the bed. On the bed. Off the bed. on the bed. Pounce on mice/limbs under covers. Off the bed. On the bed. Off the bed. On the bed. Off the bed. On the bed. Purr. Off the bed.

For a night that seemed so long in the making, it sure seemed short afterward.

They Sent us Along, As a Surrogate Band....

2010-11-19T17:37:00.000-08:00

Yeah, so I had something like three posts ready to go.

Killed 'em all.

I hated 'em. They were either boring as fuck or they were ranting and whiny. Maybe both.

So here's a Youtube vid. JWZ put me onto it, and I gotta say

Donny Osmond is seriously cool. He takes the show.

So there. You probably woke up and didn't expect me to say anything even CLOSE to that.

And Weird Al is cool as ever.

If Flash Mobs go Wrong

2010-11-14T23:42:00.000-08:00

Two things.

Ignite's an ongoing presentation deal. A guy gets 20 slides, and they auto-advance every 15 seconds. So it's a forced 5-minute presentation. Be brilliant, be fast.

This presentation is on flash mobs, the Internet, progress and what could happen when they go terribly wrong.

Truth be told, and he says it in the presentation: this didn't happen. Well, maybe all its parts happened, but that story is just a collection of those parts. 4chan exists. Chatroulette exists. Twitter and Facebook? We know those are mobs in the making.

The point of the presentation hits home. Texting - hell, personal phones! - didn't exist last generation. The internet. E-mail. The web. Banking from home. DVRs. Quake. Halo. Wow. None of it. The world changes, and we change with it, more than we understand.

282430

2010-11-12T16:15:00.000-08:00

It is done.

Vulgar Rumbling Thunder

2010-11-10T00:13:00.000-08:00

Back in the day, cloistered up in the awesome 6th floor Bull lab, losing myself in email and the web, minutes and hours flew by. It was mostly a very excellent time.

I lose myself, now, in youtube. I've seen dogs doing tricks, people wiping out doing what looks like bike messenger racing from a muddy hell - complete with simulated stairs - and I've listened to a cover of RadioHead that would rip the roof off of the room and maybe your mind.

Here's another lame youtube post:

So that's the cover. Of course, I came along from this one, which is way better.

But, as covers go, Duran Duran did it almost as well as Johnny Cash, in terms of improving on the original. Just sayin. So anyway, I came along to say I understand some of the allure to that hobby (job? Can one make money at that?). Raising the roof would be awesome.

Tuesday, Wednesday, Fall Apart

2010-11-08T18:37:00.000-08:00

Best t-shirt design ever.

That is all.

Fender Bender

2010-11-06T14:29:00.000-07:00

No, I didn't wreck the car.

Fender, who makes guitars, is making a hybrid model that one can use either with an amplifier like now, or plug into the Rock Band 3 game. This is awesome.

Our schools are declining. My niece won reasonably good grades at school, but writing on FacePlant like "U" and "R" draws that into question. I don't know about math, but there's the impression that they're phoning it in on so many levels. Football and other sports programmes are supposed to be good for keeping our kids active and healthy, but I worry that those are more for earning government fitness grants and encourage past glory-seeking navel-gazers to dig deep when it comes to the Estate. In short, I worry that even that's a money grab or cost-saving effort. Without getting a monthly allowance for jihadist training, the secular schools are at a serious disadvantage.

Arts? Hah! Music programmes are gutted, and I'm not sure what kind of arts are even being taught. there's just no time, and it's hard to justify some namby-pamby art teachers on the school budget.

So here comes the Rock Band game. This version of the game supports the connection of new instruments, and a new level of difficulty. Go see the video on the page linked above; you'll see that, in order to make the high score on Super Duper Expert, you'll have to actually PLAY the guitar. You know, like real people.

No, it teaches tablature and not music, which is disappointing, I guess, but given that our schools aren't teaching music theory that much anymore either, I think I can give this one a pass. This is the one video game that I'd really be happy to hear The Boy playing.

Let me know when you can hook up a Sax. I'll rock out the Miami Sound Machine shit like nobody's business. I'd ask for this for Christmas, but I don't even have an x-box, TV or anything to play it on. Just sayin, don't even try.

Angry Chair

2010-11-02T22:52:00.000-07:00

Do this: Go to your kitchen, grab a chair from your table, if that's how you roll (some people have no table; you people cannot play this game).

Take that chair and put it in front of your computer (if you have one; the rest of you are excused).

Now work in front of that computer for 4-8 hours a day for as long as you can. Maybe 10 days. Sucks, eh?

That's unfortunately how my last coupla weeks was: I busted my comfy work chair. Not too big a deal, actually, as it was a cheapo I grabbed from the Red Store. By the time it was dead, I think I got a day of use for every dollar we paid for it.

I have a backup chair. It's a 1996 United Chair VT series chair and, yes, it's older than most household pets and/or children. Aside from being less comfy, it was a pretty good chair, that I got in 2003. It was used, but not by many. It died too, after 14 years, which isn't bad for a chair with so much mechanics in it.

Coincidentally, it wasn't the mechanics that busted either: it was the pneumatic cylinder, and the rod just blew right out the bottom in the middle of the night, all but pitching me onto the floor. That's another story.

Suddenly I found myself out of seating. Well, comfy seating, anyway. As a guy who's harped about proper work tools quite a few times (only once on this (version of this) blog), I think it's almost ironic that I'm the guy who busts all his fancy-pants seating and has to sit on a kitchen chair all night while he works.

Okay, maybe I'll laugh later, when I have a fancy new chair again. Anyone got a butt-pillow?

Cat Nap

2010-10-31T22:41:00.000-07:00

And now, Fainting Goat kittens:

But not real goats, of course. These are mere copycats, cats with Myotonia Congenita, what they normally call "fainting goat syndrome." As you'll read and see, they don't really faint, but their locking limbs make them fall over a bit.

We're kinda mixed, over here, as to whether fainting goat cats are cruel to have, cruel to exist, or merely just cruel to videotape (I think it's cruel if all three are true and you're scaring them continually; that's like continually causing a betta fish to flare or pulling the tails off your lizards.)

Until then, the kittens are as cute as other kittens, and just a little quirky. Hey! You! You with the teacup pig! Stop laughing at my weird genetically-surprising cat! (for yes, I will have one of these...)

A Man's Lego Home is his Castle

2010-10-27T23:28:00.000-07:00

Here's a little video that brings back memories. It's one of the two most iconic and revered Lego building sets of all time. It's famous. It's invaluable, and - with the Lunar Explorer kit - was part of the new generation of lego sets.

And we had it. I think my entire extended family must-a chipped in to get this bad boy, but it was, is, and will forever be worth it. The things we made from this kit is insane.

So, while we didn't have the nintendos and play stations and 200 kinds of GI Joe dolls, one can never say we were lacking.

(And, given the size of pieces, degree of brick sprawl and efficiency of the hungry vacuum cleaner, one can never say the vacuum went hungry. Nom nom, eating up icons is tasty. Thank Lego for the growing piece custom-order service, and I hope they expand it to encompass all the historic catalogue. Please please!)

Piracy vs Theft

2010-10-25T22:43:00.000-07:00

Number of posts considered for the blog? A bajillion.

Post rejected for content? A bajillion.

too geeky
too OCD
too whiny
too grumpy
too fanboyish

You get the idea.

Anyway, here's a lame pic post to tide you over.

There ya go. Enjoy.

Some kind of Clysm

2010-10-17T16:31:00.000-07:00

Now hear this.

That is all.

Good news and Bad news

2010-10-16T15:27:00.000-07:00

The good news is, it looks like the Lego Universe (WoW with Lego) is now open to the public! yay!

The bad news is, my involvement as a beta tester is now done, and I've got to pay to play that one now, too. I don't see it in the same budget given the other monthlies I've signed up for, and so I think my Lego Universe time is ending with the beta.

Did I enjoy the game? Oh, for sure. Not having been exposed to the platform Lego games, I can't say, but I hear it's a lot like their Indiana Jones and Starwars games in play and UI. The Universe UI seems to be very arcade-y, too, suggesting they were borrowing programming code from those projects to build this one; if NetDevil did those, too, it's almost assured. No reason not to re-use good programming code that works, if it can be 'ported' to the new environment.

So I'm kinda disappointed that I can't play Lego Universe for some easy chuckles and clean fun - I actually grew to really enjoy the race tracks and I loved the pseudolego creatures - and I'm hoping some smart bunch will post some model instructions so I can grab some bricks and build myself some souvenirs.

HabeoBukket is just a memory, now, but if they offered me another month or two, or maybe off-sold some of the in-game models, I'd *so* be there.

I am currently ...

2010-10-14T18:16:00.000-07:00

Right now, I am

watching the live stream of the chilean miner rescue (this is being written on Tuesday)
synchronizing a series of time-lapse still shot components from a far away place .. which itself is a synchronization from another faraway place
watching in anticipation as WoW patches to 4.0.0
grabbing video files off the tivo
and encoding them so I can watch them on the computer
thinking of the format of a hand-off letter I have to draft to a potential new software co-contract on a soho network maintenance job
monitoring network packets coming into a machine for signs of a connection difficulty reported by the Peruvian co-contract
looking over the potential of installing Andriod on the tiny laptop I was asked about on the weekend. It would be far, far faster than windows, and I think it would provide almost as much functionality (or more)

But not that much, really. No no, I can talk on the phone. Let me shut down what else I'm doing, since I can either listen or think.

Left Behind

2010-10-12T17:29:00.000-07:00

One really sharp knife we were very happy about getting and enjoyed showing off and sharing.
computer #251.
computer #6.
A blizzard. Pumpkin or cookiedough; I'm not proud.
Ungathered panda cory catfish.
Unfinished work.
Unvisited people.
Unstated worry about my sobrina bella , the eggs she has all in one treacherous basket, and how inconsiderate people do inconsiderate things despite the efforts of those to 'change' them.
A thanksgiving pic of everyone around the table that I never took, despite having - count it up - probably 7 cameras in that room alone.

Considering the Other Side

2010-10-11T03:20:00.000-07:00

I have a confession to make.

For the longest time, I was in the same camp as this guy: Why did the chicken cross the road?

The most common answer to this riddle is "To get to the other side." When asked at the end of a series of other riddles, whose answers are clever, obscure, and tricky, this answer's obviousness and straight-forwardness becomes part of the humor. Some psychologists believe the riddle's humor comes from the fact that its answer is expected to be funny, but is not. (Courtesy Wikipedia)

Like this guy, I believed in the chicken with goals of simply transversing a street.

I thought small. I thought obvious.

For the longest time, I just didn't get that there was more to this than wikipedia and a global collection of boneheads suggested. I stayed on the surface and didn't look deeper.

.. to get to the other side.

But I finally, at long last, 'got it'.

To get to the other side! Of course! A metaphor for death! Why'd a chicken run across the road? To get to the "other side". It's been maybe 30 years I've been hearing that thing, and I never got it before.

But what about that chicken? That's some kinda depressed chicken.

10/10/10 10:10:10

2010-10-10T18:16:00.001-07:00

I was sleeping. It was awesome. I now will take the next 7 days off.

How was your 10/10/10?

RT: Facebook Friend Spam begets Unfriendings

2010-10-06T18:31:00.000-07:00

Top Reason for Facebook Unfriending Is Too Many Useless Posts:

The No. 1 reason why friends dump friends on Facebook is when they get fed up seeing too many useless posts, according to new research [...] to get to the bottom of why people dump each other. Not surprisingly, people who flood others with posts are at great risk of being unfriended. 'The 100th post about your favorite band is no longer interesting,' he said.

One can only guess how long the pushy local-shopping fair-trade uppity vegan lasts.

.. Well, one can approximate, mostly, since accurate measurement requires tools for measuring really, really small units of time.

Okay, I'm done poking fun at stereotypes. Back to work.

Betty F*$^n White

2010-10-02T23:34:00.000-07:00

There's nothin' to say here, but watch this thing.

"Ella está la diabla."

Compelling, if Deluded.

2010-10-01T17:29:00.000-07:00

This isn't the post you're looking for. That post isn't all that important anyway.

In the meantime, here's a clip of an almost-promising congressman.

The problem is, he believes in fairytales and magic, which makes him a raving loon and insult to his own founding fathers, but up to that point and after that point he's compelling.

For those who don't know, to "yield the balance of" one's "time" or anything regarding one's time, is part of the protocol for speaking in the House, and simply indicates that the person is finished the planned portion of the speech.

Aquariums and Bubbles

2010-09-20T23:36:00.000-07:00

The aquaria are on the bubble, it seems.

We worry about where they fit in our new setup, and with the new flooring that's being put in, there's certainly places they cannot go. Would it be okay if they became the ugly child we hide in the basement that nobody much sees? I think not, but that's the kind of thing they could easily become.

Maybe they could go in the office, but not right away. And if we have to shut down the hobby for a few months, then we still have to find a permanent home for the fish. That's terrible! Then what? We restart the hobby later, maybe, and build it all back up again?

There's a lot of talk about just calling it quits on it. This, while we're looking for a tank to replace the risky one in the photo. And then there's the continual fear of Something Happening with those ones.

I dunno. We're still talking about it. Obviously.

London Calling

2010-09-19T09:12:00.000-07:00

Don't panic: I didn't get a job offer from a faraway place, big enough to own a spare room and a couch and fund the occasional plane ticket. Not happening. Given my age, probably never happening: I've gotta get myself out there myself, dammit. And here I was hoping for a relo(cation) package.

Nah. I've been on London Time all weekend, though. I was totally bagged after this Friday at the Sweatshop, and I came home and all but died. I was in bed around 7PM, which is probably my usual bad bedtime were I in London.

Which meant I woke up around 1AM local time.

Which meant I crashed again at 5PM local time.

And now I'm up at 1AM again. This is madness.

(This. Is. Spartaaaaa!!)

Okay, so anyway, I'm on a stupid sleep schedule. I don't think it can harm my social life much further, but I'm getting way too much done, which is annoying.

Oh yes. We're also fighting over the coffee pot.

Five Years Gone

2010-09-15T01:57:00.000-07:00

Today marks 5 years from the day I was severed from, so far, the greatest job I ever had. Severed? Laid off? I'm not sure, but give me anything but 'let go' and I'll be happy. There was no 'letting' there; they pushed me over the railing against my will, and although I don't like to have been so dismissed, I do understand the decision they made. And I'm glad I didn't put up a fuss, because, really, as soon as HR gets onto the conference call too, it's kinda all over by that point. But, when it's all said and done, despite all the stress, the deadlines, the attached issues with the entire experience, I still would do it again.

But I think that's an important part. Given everything that transpired over the course of the 6 years and more I worked for that company, it's significant that I'd go back and do it all again if I could. I'm somewhat satisfied where I've ended up. A little late, as usual, as I've been called my entire life, but I'm somewhat pleased where this road's taken me.

I'd do it all again, but let me start 11 years younger too, though, okay? Then we have a deal.

Seven Years and Itchy Feet

2010-09-11T02:05:00.000-07:00

So I came back on 9-11 day.

For the last 9 years, now, people associate something else with that day. Me, it's 7 years since I came home, and it's been home ever since. I enjoyed the change in environment, from the place before, the one before that and the one before that, as change is as good as a rest, sometimes. Some things need to change so that other things can stay the same, I guess. Change what you can change or lose what you can't change.

But I'm looking forward to the day where I can leave this one. The building has changed around us, and its management has changed 4 times. Where we were once asked, on the way in, how loud we were, in order to better place us in the building, several managers ago the practice seemed to have ended: we're above and below some noisy - for lack of a better word - kids, who stomp about, smoke bad weed and generally act like hooligans I don't remember being. We've enjoyed our time here, but it's really looking like we'll find more joy elsewhere, and that we should be looking forward to such a move and itching to get it done as soon as possible.

I look forward to the change, like a rest, but seeing as I've made 7 years on this one I think I'm in an improving trend. The next one should last longer, and the one after that longer still. Having jinxed myself into getting a great international job, then, I think that's the most I want to say about that. (except, no job so far)

A VeeGee

2010-09-10T00:59:00.000-07:00

I used to use AVG. It was a good enough free antivirus app.

Now it's bloated and slow: it tries to monitor stuff that even paranoid me doesn't care about, and it's just too large. It's the winnebago ahread of you on the freeway of Second Life. It's the big hairy man padding down the caribbean beach in his speedos, crunching a fat cigar between his sweaty lips under his beady eyes, obscuring your view of the beach hotties. It's .. well, you get the idea. It just won't Get.Out.Of.The.Way.

So I looked into alternatives, and I read some comparisons. Avast looked really good, so I had a chance to download and install it.

Big mistake. What, i have to give out my name and register for email spam just to run it? Nah, I don't think so. In this day and age, harvesting personal information is rude and uncalled-for.

Bye, now.

So I grabbed AVG, which was rated 'okay' in terms of bloat -- at least in relation to the other wildebeest/manatee apps out there. While it's large, sweaty, smelly and swerving down the road in front of you, a few well-placed whacks with the Hatchet of Reconfiguration will trim some of the more jiggley parts from it.

Bring on the bikini babes, please.

Culture in the Darkest Places

2010-09-09T17:46:00.000-07:00

I just saw an ad for an upcoming movie called "Let Me In", and it was bizarrely striking in similarity to a film I saw two years ago, called "Let the Right One In". It's obviously a remake for the US market, because, well, the original was in Norwegian and only subtitled in English, and really only released in Norway, from what I hear.

The original was edgy, dark, stark at times, brutal at others, poignant and wonderful. This is, after all, a horror-adjacent drama about a boy, coming of age and meeting a girl before he finds out she's a 200 year old vampire at the eternal physical age of 12. Of course, the long dark winters of Norway make a great backdrop to any vampire story.

Things happen. People are invited over for dinner. More bad things happen. That's how those things go. But in the middle of it, there's some real growth and introspection here; way, way more than the average Day of the Dead kind of flick.

I worry that it won't play well for our market, given our producers and film companies can't seem to get themselves out of the pygmalian death-spiral of the mid-teen market. Removing the starkness to please the short attention spans, removing the brutality to appease the censors and injecting in the right amount of fart jokes and other blatant comic relief, I suspect all that will make this thing closer to Buffy (a fine movie in its own genre) than to the original version. I worry that it'll tarnish the entire story for its failing.

If you can see this flick, do so and tell me it if doesn't suck. Then (find a way to) see the original Norwegian version and see if/how it stands up.

99 Problems but the Height Ain't One

2010-09-07T14:23:00.000-07:00

I like surprises. I like this surprise.

Read the article: Edward Hernandez is a little man. He's just a bit over 2 feet tall, and has only grown a foot-and-a-half since birth. His little brother is also gonna be a little guy. But Sr Hernandez seems to be okay with being different -- "I feel happy because I am unique," is the quote.

This pic ain't 'shopped.

The guy's a dancer, professionally, and travels when he can. Jokes about overhead storage compartments should just be left unsaid.

Here's the strange part. Can I say 'little' anymore? Is that the proper term? Is that 'right'? Am I wrong for wanting to see how far we can get this guy to travel? Is it bad that I just compared him to a Travelocity gnome without realizing I'd done so, and then realized what I'd done and felt guilty, and then felt guilty for feeling guilty because I only felt so after realizing it was because he was undertall? Was I showing prejudice by reading about the travel hobby and wanting him to go places, or was I showing more prejudice by feeling guilty about the accidental travelocity allusion because at that moment I was singling him out as not only different but also special? The moment in time where I actually booked my ticket to hell is hard to figure out. At least I wished him luck before I drew the allusion, so I think I'm okay. Aisle seat, please, and no smoking on my trip to hell. har har.

Oh. And Sr Hernandez is an actor: He plays a drug dealer or a gangster in a recent role. There's something about that kind of character that itself is novel, that someone with a distinct appearance isn't marginalized as a supporting role (mini me, oddjob) but is actually the kingpin.

At least he can wear a suit. He's like a Colombian James Bond or something.

Why Wil Wheaton is Cool #45168

2010-09-06T14:03:00.000-07:00

Quick history: Wil Wheaton used to be a professional actor. He put the acting on the back burner for a while, and started working as an author.

Like, books.

Lots of his writing is personal stuff, relating what life as a geeky teen is like, and only occasionally talking about Star Trek. Because his writing is great and popular, he does readings at conventions and whatnot, and it's usually really good. I hope this clip survives, or my random verbiage to set up this youtube clip will seem like terrible fawning. Really I just want him to pay the 5 bucks he owes me.

This makes me chuckle as much as when he guests on the Big Bang Theory.

As an aside I would laugh my ass off to see Wheaton pick up and date the leading lady for a while, just to see both the boys scream, in unison,

W h e a t o n n n n n !

(heh. "My wife is not a

nerd; she's nerd-adjacent".

Heh. I have to tell the boys)

FacePlant gets Monied, Misses the Joke

2010-09-03T20:11:00.000-07:00

Okay, so Faceplant has a money thing.

I have to admit: I have not even the slightest clue as to what the hell FB could be selling or making or leasing or renting that it would see offering a currency as anything even remotely related to its core business. So I googled. And I discovered:

[The Site], which neither makes nor sells anything physical, takes a big step towards creating a unified online currency by selling gift cards in Target that work for Zynga, PopCap and other 3rd party games.
-- Fortune via CNN Money via OneNewsPage via my god MOAR LINXZZ

And then I realized the connection.

Okay, maybe I didn't. It's like when eBay bought Skype, because what I want to do it talk to the seedy prick selling his used lawn darts or whatever. No, really, and I want to pay money over skype too, because I trust instantaneous non-bank payment systems and can really see a time when I have my computer, internet, mic and speakers, but yet am too far from a bank or web bank and need a novel, new method to pay off the people I chat with on skype.

But I'm not here to say much about my confusion over this latest version of flooz or e-gold, despite what you may think from the gobs of copy I belched out over the keyboard above. I'm not proud of it, but I'm not takin' it back either.

What I wanna know is,

Was 'facebucks' taken as a name?

I mean, how long did that take dumb ol' me to figure out? 'Credits'? Really?

Really?

Colour Blind

2010-09-01T19:45:00.000-07:00

Thanks Berry Much

2010-08-25T15:54:00.000-07:00

The sweatshop is not without its handy, smart people. One such person has borrowed the crackberry that I was issued by the sweatshop, about a year ago and 3 months before it was useless, and restored it to functionality. It's great.

It's a blackberry 8330. It's the one with the pearl rolly ball they touted so much in the ads. It was great, it was shiny, see the pearl, blah blah. You know the weakest part of this design? It's the freakin' pearl. It dies about a year before the cheap keyboard.

It's a simple thing: a mixture of standard hand oil plus dust forms a happy fine cement on the wee pinch-rollers that measure movement on the pearl rolly-ball. Like all the superior (mechanical) mice, the user will notice a slowing of the movement, a slow response, and eventually no movement response at all. The ball may either not register the movement or actually jam up and refuse to mechanically move in the one direction, but the result is the same: crippling of the device. Unlike the superior form of mice, its small scale makes it very challenging to get in there, clean off the plaque and get out without wrecking it.

Although it's incredibly hard to work with the tiny components, I did try cleaning it myself; it's just a regular rolly-ball mouse, but scaled down. Sadly, I only got about a week of use from it before it began acting up again. I'm not that sweaty a guy, and I'm thinking I just didn't get it all cleaned up enough.

Anyway, this genius at the sweatshop is maintaining a running stock of cleaned parts, and we were able to replace the entire rolly assembly (and a battery) in about 5 minutes each. Very cool.

Before you ask, no we cannot return the devices. The sweatshop deals with information and information regulations, and the regs actually state that a phone goes from a working state to a crushed and ground-up state, because it carries non-volatile RAM chips -- and stores address -book information on it, really.

So I have the crackberry back again for a while. I'm back in the in-crowd. I'm inching up ever closer to being as cool as Joey.

Backups Hate Deletion

2010-08-21T18:58:00.000-07:00

In our lives, we see a series of seemingly polar opposites: Bloods and Crips, the Jets and the Sharks, vi vs emacs people, US republicans vs intelligent fact-based government and Back-ups vs Deletes. We're an increasingly cluttered society, truly. We're bombarded with up to 2,000 advertisements every day, we receive, traffic and archive a huge amount of paper and e-paper, and we consume media at a tremendous rate. We take in a whack of email and other information. If we don't prune it carefully, we could be buried.

That's the problem. We prune something about a day before we need it again.

So that's where backups come in, but do you see the problem? Back-ups only fire, usually, once a day. If something's not within what the back-up system sees at the time when it wants to take a snapshot, then it may as well never have existed, and back-ups from that point of view are worthless.

Everything, when it's worthless, is too expensive.

I've been working on a few methods to ensure back-ups are as complete as they can be, because to me it's as important an issue as it is a tricky one. The biggest problem is figuring out a way to back-up email, since it changes often, usually sits in a big, fat emailbox and is usually viciously pruned beyond what's - in hindsight - safe.

Email and file back-ups are different. When regular (file-based) back-ups are taken, whole files are copied off a computer and into the back-up system. Good back-up systems will copy only changed files instead of pointlessly copying all 20 gigabytes of data over, which is neat because it would take a whole month to do so over our modern internet connections -- no really. Better back-up systems will only transfer the changed parts of changed files. Any system at all will either require that freakin' month of time, or it will require some time to calculate the changes. And that's the next part -- do we want to use our computers to do any real work, or just spend all its time calculating transfer solutions to back up the files that are there now?

The end result, for me, is a mixture of several methods, depending on how big a file is, how dynamic it is with the size and rate it changes, and what's available to back it up:

for almost all files, they're backed-up file to file. Most files are either small, static or slow with regard to changes, and it's easy to calculate a transfer solution. Archived email, too, become large, static files after the archive moves on to the next month or whatever.
for common files, like installations and resource files, I do some light caching, or archiving on separate media, and while these files are also slow and static, we can save by only backing up the archive once.
email is the hardest thing I think we'll ever want to back up. Big files, changing constantly, which we need to have access to and for which I think we'll need to have the fastest restore time on. The worst. All but impossible. So I do not back-up your INBOX. How's that? I back up your archives, with all your attachments, and that's it. I store your INBOX somewhere else.

For email, I am using a free, large repository to store it all. You don't know it. In cases where significant data loss risks are low, where searching is fast and where people can't be trained adequately to store everything in an archive folder somewhere and stop deleting everything, I instead grab your email on the way in. This archive steals your mail, and holds it for you. And it usually makes a copy of it on the way through, dropping it into an archive you'll probably not have filled within the next decade anyway. It can be searched, mail can be replied-to or forwarded onward, and it works invisibly.

Now I just have to make it so the machines using it stop deleting things. Only if we understand all our crap will be saved uselessly somewhere can we be sure that that one email message we need today hasn't been deleted by us boneheads last week, thinking it was also crap.

Extreme Lawn Bowling

2010-08-11T20:58:00.000-07:00

My buddy's wife is getting really good at Lawn Bowling. Over lunch today, we decided, though, that lawn bowling has a chance of not being exciting enough. I mean, is it on ESPN highlight reels? I think not.

We need to fix it up a bit. We need edgier, harder bowling.

Extreme bowling.

We tossed a few ideas around, but I'm sure we could do better:

Bowling with porcupines. Wouldn't that be awesome?
Or hedgehogs. Even better. Tighter balls, sharper teeth, etc.
Rabid wolves released onto the green. Field. Lane. Whatever.
Rabid zombie wolves on the field.
Hockey sticks and cross-checking.
Flaming bocce balls (is bocce the same thing?)
Dynamite! Yeah! And snakes! Snakes with Dynamite in their mouths! Flaming angry zombie dachshunds launched from stadium T-Shirt bazookas! Roving horned whip-wielding bikini demons from ..

And with that, the WoW players were outed.

For the rest of you, who also may not immediately flock to Wide World of Sports for the Lawn Bowling World Series, what do you think would give it that punch and bring you to the Television?

The King is Dead. Long Live the King! (II)

2010-08-05T19:50:00.000-07:00

My monitor kicked it, sadly. It lasted 5.5 years, almost double its warrantied life expectancy. As I thought, I knew I was under the gun to replace it when I did, as the PT813 CRT tube had just blown. Nice, eh?

So the other day the unit's making noise; the next day, it was !pop! crackle. And that was it.

Back then - I love mining my own drek for new posts - I wrote that I was gonna go cheap, but J reminded me that I stare at this thing all freakin' day: it should be good enough for that.

	Old	New
	Viewsonic VP201s	Samsung 2443BW
LCD	20.1" TFT UXGA	24" WUXGA
Resolution	1600x1200	1920x1200
Lamp	50,000hrs	30,000hrs
Response	8ms	5ms
Contrast	1000:1	1000:1
Brightness	300 cd/m2	300 cd/m2
View Angle	176/176	170/160
USB	1up, 4down	1up, 2down

Sadly, the new one isn't as good as that, but it should do for a while, at least. I have to say, even going back to the fine store that sold me the VP201s last time, it was hard finding anything which even measured up. What's the matter with you consumers that the quality of mainstream LCD screens is actually worse than it was 6 years ago?

Here's a comparison, to the right. In short, for half the price I found a unit which will last half as long, deliver half the USB ports but at least give a vertical resolution as big as I could get 6 years ago. And this is the one I had to special-order, which didn't stock anything better.

Quick recap: 1200-pixel vertical resolution (UXGA) was the default used for 15" laptop screen resolution when they came out -- and FShop can't stock a 20-inch desktop monitor to beat that? How sad!

The price was right, so I may get a second, but we'll see how it performs and whether it's going to last half as long. In the meantime, though, all you guys need to shape up! Buy better stuff, demand better stuff, stop paying good money for technology that was obsolete 10 years ago, or I'll be forced into buying a dinky-little 1080p panel next time.

Having used that for a week, I just gotta know -- how can you live with such sucky vertical resolution?

Lego My Beta

2010-07-29T00:34:00.000-07:00

(At least) one of us has been selected to beta-test Lego Universe. Wow with bricks.

The only reason you'll ever see me again - because, cmon, it's wow with bricks - is because testing isn't open 24-7.

But I'll get my shot soon. I've downloaded my gigabyte-odd bit of install (holy!) and I should be ready when it opens for business tomorrow.

Never Gonna Give your Teen Spirit Up

2010-07-19T11:48:00.000-07:00

Internet culture celebrates the RickRoll, where one geek will try and make the other watch Rick Astley's 'Never Gonna Give You Up' video. The little drum fill that forms the intro to the song is burned into my brain -- half from when I was fooled, the other from checking the link before fooling someone else.

This isn't a RickRoll. Someone's gone and mashed up Never Gonna Give You Up and Smells Like Teen Spirit.

Bloody Brilliant. If this post is old and they've removed it from Youtube, go search for it. It's almost a RickRoll, but the quality of the mash-up more than makes up for that aspect.

Forget Shorter Showers | Derrick Jensen | Orion Magazine

2010-07-12T20:16:00.000-07:00

Derrick Jensen writes in an Orion Magazine piece entitled Forget Shorter Showers:

I want to be clear. I’m not saying we shouldn’t live simply. I live reasonably simply myself, but I don’t pretend that not buying much (or not driving much, or not having kids) is a powerful political act, or that it’s deeply revolutionary. It’s not. Personal change doesn’t equal social change.

It's a really great piece about how we've become misdirected in our efforts to not extract and destroy everything we see like a virus. Go read it. Discuss it there or here, depending on your taste.

Happy 7-11 Day

2010-07-11T20:32:00.000-07:00

Did you go get your free 7.11oz slurpee from a local 7-11 store between the hours of (yes) 7 and 11 AM today?

If not, you missed out.

Me too. Sniff.

Oh well. Maybe next year I won't stay up all freakin' night installing hard drives and actually get myself out in the morning to get said slurpee.

Oh. Wait. I could've done that before bed.

I now have a plan for next year.

Critical Aid by Air Drop

2010-07-10T19:13:00.000-07:00

My lifelong buddy Pollywog has a virus.

I know this because his computer keeps sending me attractive but completely impersonal offers to look at kitten picture galleries. Now, I love kittens like the next guy, and even the furry feline kind, but I'm really sure that Paul wouldn't launch that kind of a gem onto the address-book of people with whom he exchanges 2-3 email messages a year. There'd be more of a pre-amble, at least.

So it's gotta be a virus. And I'm sure he's had it for a month or more, since I've been getting these for a bit. Always "Go look at this site" stuff, which is probably an attempt to make me look at a page created to exploit a security bug in IE, and then to install a virus on my end. Probably the same one he has. (No, of course I don't use IE; I use a browser. the vast majority of people are still stuck with what may be the second-worst app in the history of the Internet, though)

Here's where I switch from whinging to fixing. I want to fix this. I'm really close.

On (some of) the blue routers I maintain, there's an extra feature where computers in behind one can boot over the network: they start up, without touching their own hard drive, and can take instructions or work with code (if the person selects it) that's delivered just by being behind these things. No, they can't do a full-on diskless boot, but it's enough to make use of some 'hand off' code to allow it to reference another server, with tools and ... well, whateverthefuck, right? In short, though, I have the technology to allow a computer behind a blue router to boot up, run some tools and maybe, just maybe, do a rebuild.

Almost.

I wish for the time and focus to complete the job: I want to ship my suffering friends $50 routers, have them plug them in, and fix their stupid computers from here. Boot them up, run a new virus scan from a trusted, pristine source ...

because running a virus scanner on the computer you're scanning seems stupid -- how do you know that the virus scan app, even with the 16-month average lag between a virus being released and you being protected from it, isn't already corrupted by the virus present in your system? It's like a clothes dryer with no venting or ecoterrorists and priests policing themselves, when you think of it.

.. maybe run a backup, and get his stuff fixed.

It's not too hard, technically: boot up one of those mini linux netbootable distributions, ones that allow a VNC service to start up. Connect to that, launch a scanner and repair tool to work on the hard drive in that machine, and skim it for whatever virus code we can see from there.

All I'd need to do would be to fedex him out a standard, fresh router and build out the service on this end. How hard is that?

EDeO lives!

2010-07-06T01:55:00.000-07:00

EDeO sent me a message, so unexpected I had to check it a few times. It looks real!

J was surprised too, and just as happy as I was. Unfortunately I don't know whom else I can share the news with. My family circle has gotten smaller - in that respect, anyway - and I don't know who would both know the significance and be genuinely happy for me.

It's hard to figure these things out, and I don't have a the headspace for it. It's been a busy few weeks and I'm still not done figuring all that stuff out. And the thing on Sunday was generally a terrible use of time and didn't accomplish anything either.

I need more vacation.

Lost Weekend

2010-07-05T23:03:00.000-07:00

The weekend is over, and for some of us in this house, we're not sure where it went.

Pictures will be forthcoming. Hopefully they will be attached to blog posts.

Driving, repairing, visiting, driving, posing, driving, seeing long-lost cousins, more driving, sleeping too little, more driving, conveying, driving, unpacking, driving, playing nice, driving, hosting, sleeping too long, driving, meeting, driving.

Now it's late Monday, and even with some of us having clawed an extra day from the world, even that was sucked into the vortex.

A waste of time? No. But spare time? Downtime? None of that either. Soon as I have some spare time, I'll try and post more.

The 20

2010-06-30T22:35:00.000-07:00

Almost time to go home.

There's a lot to discuss in that. Apologies for my stress-induced no-fun bad-houseguest behaviour in advance. Ha ha ha -- that's funny because you have a glimmer of doubt about how serious I am.

The elapsed time between arrival and re-departure is 36 hours, and if I get anything close to the sleep I should that total drops to 20 hours.

I have an event to attend, computers to fix - don't say I don't; just hope they're yours because it'll mean they won't collapse - another event to attend, and then whoosh I'm away because I have to be somewhere else.

If I say I'll be more relaxed soon, it'll be more because I stop inflicting myself on people who don't have a choice, which is stressful right now.

Back It Up, A Little Bit

2010-06-29T20:43:00.000-07:00

During some recent work to migrate my home machine onto the AHA2504 HBA I grabbed (itself a fix for a performance issue) the question was asked that I was rather dreading. It went like this:

Most of your family's computers back up to here. Um, where does your stuff back up to? If you had lost that one hard drive, would you now have no vacation pictures?

And while one could claim that 'accidental' deletion of proof that I do actually occasionally relax could be a good thing, maybe, having them deleted in an unplanned fashion could earn me some grief.

So What's my backup solution?
I grabbed a QNAP TS-419P this week.

It's a little box, about the size of a six-pack, with the brains of a decent router and some hard drive connections wired in. Really, it's kinda like a big blue router with four hard drives and a bajillion USB ports.

And one button.

Maybe two. One to start it, one to signal a quick synchronization via USB. That's kinda it.

It's a backup 'server'. I need to set it down somewhere safe, and back things up to it. It will sit and beep and meep and occasionally save one extra copy of things I only have here. If a meteor hits here, at least my pictures of Julia Stiles will be safe. Phew.

The fun part is, you need to see just what the QNAP ('Quality Network Appliance Provider', hee hee) people are doing with this thing. They're like me with the blue routers. So they update the firmware on this thing about weekly; No point in trying to keep up. They store and ship everything from PBX (Asterisk) Servers to answer your phones and take messages to iTunes radio station apps, mini web servers to mini webcam find-out-which-neighbour's-dog-is-peeing-in-my-yard cam apps.

Oh. And if you buy two, one will automatically synch to the other. And they both provide windows shares, FTP space, web space WebDAV space, rsync space, etc. And it uses EXT4. And .. and .. and ..

It's apparent that, if I can get it installed in this whirlwind trip to the hometown this weekend, it'll be sad to see it actually go. It's got too much stuff.

I think it's an expensive little toy, but it's a very cool one.

This is maybe my last nerdy post. It may also disappear as I move some posts over to a new blog. It's not to keep you people from the nerdy stuff, but to keep the nerds from romping over my family news.

Pioneer One

2010-06-20T15:44:00.000-07:00

Pioneer One is a new Internet Video Drama shot on a microscopic budget. You should understand that, so you know why it looks like some Canadian cop show.

The premise is simple: some untracked satellite has re-entered the atmosphere, and while the authorities are freaking over the potential implications inherent in a foreign-owned spacecraft's leaky battering spewing radiation all over the place, the type of people who get the calls late in the night when things go really wrong are learning more about the situation. Yes, I chose a run-on sentence instead of a spoiler.

Watch Episode one here, but then hit Pioneerone.tv and maybe give them a buck for the experience.

I'm glad for every freakin' site I follow having a link to this. Good start to a promising series, I'm thinking.

2010-06-11T02:15:00.000-07:00

Gladys

Agnes

Jack

Lionel

Gunnard

Douglas

Edna

Fred.

A Salt

2010-04-14T00:58:00.000-07:00

I felt the pressure, heard a little snap, and I think I almost got my nose broken.

It was mere moments before we were to leave for the sweatshop. The apartment was dark and I was just closing a few doors. Don't ask why. In the darkness, I claim I couldn't have seen it coming. After all, who can? A safe place I've lived for years, the culprit sneaked in and struck literally without warning. Who can be prepared for that? An attack in one's own home?

Man, did it ever hurt. 16 hours later, it still hurts like hell. The bleeding's mostly stopped but it still aches a bunch.

It's no time to get emotional, lemme tell you. People can get even more injured; maybe even die. You've got to keep a level head, and get to safety quickly. And we did. Only once you're out of harm's way it is okay to get emotional. And boy, did she ever. But I don't blame her for laughing.

Who runs into a wall, anyway?

Survivor: Hero defeated by Villians

2010-04-04T16:55:00.000-07:00

Okay, so "Boston" Rob Mariano has been voted off of Survivor: Heroes vs Villains, and one of my favourite characters* is now gone. My reason for watching the show is that much more diminished.

Oh. But let's be honest. While some of the reasons I watched the show are no longer valid, there's a few reasons why I'm still gonna watch.

I think they placed Rob poorly for this one -- it was evident every single episode that he just didn't seem to fit in with the pack of short-sighted losers how the tribe is portrayed. He was continually exhausted from carrying the team back at the camp, and I guess it's only time for them to shed him once they get complacent.

The best moment in the entire game, considering the incredible buffoon character portrayed masterfully by Ben Wade, was the last line in the show, as seen to the right. It reminds us that the Ben Wade character seemed to have been using his fancy ideals as a retrojustification of whatever he wanted to do anyway; it foreshadows some potential character development and personal growth in the storyline if the writers decide to go that route. It could provide a good heroic sub-plot when all the character is used for now is accidental comic relief. So there's that too.

But mainly it's the remaining awesome characters and the scantily-clad cute girls.

gRound Out, again

2010-04-04T02:44:00.000-07:00

Yeah, so the job offer looks to be as done as done can get.

This stuff's getting more painful with the repetition. So here's the gist: without a degree, I haven't an equal chance, and to claim otherwise is naive. Again I've failed a get a job that my nearest intellectual peer said he wouldn't take if they offered it to him, so I can't even chase and catch other people's trash jobs.

I'm way more disappointed than I wanted to be, and I think it's because I actually thought for a brief instant that I had a shot at this thing. At least there's still a place for me and other washouts at the sweat shop. Woo!

I Envy Kevin Smith a Bit More

2010-04-03T00:55:00.000-07:00

LAN ho

2010-03-31T13:32:00.000-07:00

So I rejiggered my new server machine at home.If you look at the pic, the old version of the box had a few virtual NICs there -- some of them linked to the real NICs, some of them leading into the rabbit hole where all its little virtual LANs live.

Well right now I have 4 internal networks on it, some for Building sofware automatically, actual development, testing and a place I can drop a virtual server in a nice DMZ, and when you look at it all, it's a lot of network interfaces. Already it's 6, and I'm sure 8's my limit, and I thought I should clean it the hell up.

I still have the two real NICs, but I rolled all the other ones up into a vLan connection, or Virtual LAN. Now, VMware ESXi normally sets everything up as a vLan, when it provides its hardware, but the thing is, it normally sets it all up as what Cisco would call an Access Port. I needed it to be set up as a Trunk Port, because I need to pass all the virtual LANs down the one virtual pipe to the one server I use there for everything, and have it bust out the channels and work with it on the vLAN level itself.

It was too easy. The good news is that ESX - is it a standard? - dumps in a trunked connection from its vSwitch if you just set the vLan on a particular port to be 4095 (or all 12 1s) and it sets it all up as a trunked port. Just like that.

Then, with some vLan magic in RedHat, which is also easy as pie, I just add the 4 other networks to the interface already receiving the trunked port, and suddenly I can see everything again. DHCP works, firewalling was easy to fix, it was done in seconds.

The best news is that I can add or remove one without altering the virtual hardware in the machine, so that's an added bonus that I can skip the reboot on that. Woot! So I'm one step closer to the perfect setup.

Separate but Equal

2010-03-30T01:32:00.000-07:00

Yeah, I have to wake up another of my blogs soon.

I don't have much to say on the lame, me front - that boring stream of unconsciousness that passes for my personal blog. You'd think if I didn't put anything really personal in it then it'd be blank, but no-oo. Seems I've overshared on personal grounds as well as techie grounds. It's apparent I need to rejigger the posts on this-here blog, and separate them back out.

One day, there will be a separation of the Objective B (heh), the bitter inner me, the geek and the union crybaby. I had them all separate before (and another besides), but I just let them go stagnant for a bit. I have a buttload of crap to spew on the geeky front, though, and honestly I can either try to make it universally acceptable or I can stop patronizing people with Tech Romper Room or something; I'm either insulting you or boring you or both, and I'm not doing any of us a disservice there.

But once I break them all up, I'll have to do some post editing. That's gonna suck. That's another task for which I can't afford the time budget.

It's apparent I need a personal assistant just to keep my shit together.

Oh. No news yet on the other crap. Keep the dream alive, people, anda slice of the time-shared couch could be yours for the renting. And when you're renting a foreign couch, the only thing forcing you to Go the Hell Home is because someone else is at the airport. That's the rule I hope to live by, anyway!