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Your fortune for today!Your patience will be rewarded right f*ing now!
(Note that the data import is a little iffy, but I was so glad that it worked that I decided to turn the sucker on. (Thanks to Mr. Data Massaging Guy, aka Tim.))
Comment away you savages!
Drat!I am forced to decide between buying a house or buying a Segway at Amazon.
I think I'll go for the house, it'll be cheaper by the time the auction is done. Plus I'm not certain I could find a stupid rich person to buy the Segway from me for twice the price; not that I could buy it in the first place... "You want a loan for what? Bwahahahahaha!"
I can't be spending cash on trinkets though, I need to save up for another two or three months for a downpayment on a house. Not that I'm actively looking or anything. I just wanna be chillin' in the Central Air Conditioned goodness of Somewhere Else before the Big Heat of Summer rolls in.
And! My Big Ass TV (KV-35V36) is starting to show signs of dying a spectacular death, e.g. an apparent voltage surge followed by the screen going black. If I turn it off and back on it will be fine for 5 minutes or a few hours, depending on its mood and planetary alignment.
Apparently Sony's Big Ass TVs have soldering issues (i.e. the soldering is bad), so it should be an easy enough fix for someone who will charge me upwards of $100 (or $500?). If it dies and will cost a lot to fix I'll eventually get a different Big Ass TV -- I will failover to my redundant 20" TV if necessary (Oh the Humanity!).
Conveniently (that would be sarcasm) the TV weighs 198 lbs, so moving it is generally something that isn't done.
Dig me, Mr. Fixit!I spent entirely too much time tonight doing an O-Ring and gasket overhaul on my bathroom sink, although most of that time was spent trying to get the grease out from under my fingernails once I got done.
How'd she turn out? Like a champ son, like a champ.
When Geeks ProposeFor those of you who missed it, some guy proposed to his girlfriend by posting a story on his website.
She responded via e-mail within 15 minutes ("Yes"), and also posted it on her website.
I just want to say: "This is all perfectly normal geek behavior. Do not be alarmed. Society has not collapsed."
Fun with submersible power tools!"I just cleaned the tub -- on purpose!"
I took my new ScumBuster for a test drive tonight 'round the dangerous curves of the surly bathtub.
The verdict: Dude, you gotta get one of these! The tub hasn't been this clean since I moved in two years ago.
I busted scum til there was no scum left to bust, yet the battery never showed signs of running down (plus, it uses the VersaPack system for easy battery swappin' if you need continuous power).
I've heard of this thing called "elbow grease" and I'll have nothing to do with it. It's much nicer to simply apply light pressure and let the ScumBuster's screamin 180 RPM motor and cleaning pad do the work. (OK, 180 RPM is actually quite slow, but it works plenty well.)
Today the bathtub, tomorrow the greasy stove!
Next week, the cleaning frenzy continues when my Steam Buggy arrives. (My main point in getting that is the mass murdering of dust mites. I got it for $79 + shipping; it's $129 at Target.)
Is that a Yagi in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?I'm sorry, but Cringley is just too f*in cool.
"From the treetop, I could log-in to my home network..."
Life, the Universe, and EverythingThe Answer is: 42
The Question is: How many more episodes of BtVS do I need to complete the set?
Eggs(all) --> Baskets(4)[Ladies and Gentlemen this is your pilot speaking: we are currently cruising at an altitude of 35,000 feet at speeds upwards of 600 megabytes per minute. We have just passed 190 gigs and should arrive at our destination (196 gigs) at approximately 8:15pm EST. Thank you for flying "Veritas Sucks" Airlines.]
It seems like it was only 11 hours ago that I got out of bed and connected to work via VPN for a nice-n-simple "fsck -o full" on our E220 RAID, and now it will be only a few more minutes before my complete fucking data restore is completed.
But I'm not bitter. Oh wait a minute, yes I am.
The whole RAID got toasted this time while trying to fix some residual damage from last week's Happy Fun Veritas Play Time. "Take the system down and do an fsck," they said. "All will be well with the world, you betcha by golly," they said.
So we do an fsck and eventually grow weary of whacking "y" to clear hundreds of bad inodes and give it the old "fsck -y" treatment. That was, apparently, a bad idea, according to the Veritas tech o' the day.
Our fsck failed with this error:
vxfs fsck: rgetblk bad request, bno = 17039621, sz = -2145361920
file system check failure, aborting ...That means, effectively, "Have a nice day, reformat." (Or, alternately, that the tech o' the day gave up pretty easily when I said I had a fresh backup I could restore from.)
It would be perfectly peachy with me if the volume had giant holes in it but was still mountable, but no such luck. Let's just pitch 196 gigs worth of data into the bit bucket and start over.
Not trusting Veritas one iota, after last week, I had mirrored all the data to our old server before taking the system down. The full system backup had also just completed, and there's even an additional backup the users do manually.
So redundancy (paranoia) saves the day. Veritas does not save the day, yet again.
Is Veritas Foundation Suite a giant pile of crap or am I just lucky? What do the poor bastards with only one server do?
I am getting to be quite the wiz with rsync though, so that's something.
Teensy site updateFirst of all, any resemblance of the Buffy-O-Meter to the progress bar over there at distributed.net is purely coincidental. (YR!)
The Buffy-O-Meter is tracking my accumulation of BtVS episodes on VCD or SVCD. Today I hit 50% (currently 56 of 112 episodes, counting the unaired pilot). Wooo!
I'm gonna need a bunch of CDs of course. Not a problem since they're practically free now. I picked up an Imation 50-pack at Worst Buy for $5 after rebate (1 per cust., good til 1/26/02, yada, yada).
I'm kinda wanting a faster burner, ya know. Glad I didn't get that 8x dog.
Are we having fun yet?This morning I made the mistake of speaking aloud these fateful words: "I think today is going to be a good day."
I, of course, spent the next few hours on the phone with Veritas Support resurrecting a server 1,000 miles away from here. I especially liked the part when the technician said there was a 50% chance of getting our data back.
A real comedian, that fellow.
Is it just me or does Veritas Foundation Suite cause more problems than it solves? Yes, we've got the filesystem that's supposed to do useful things vis-a-vis journaling and surviving crashes nicely but it can't survive an orderly F*ing shutdown. Breathe on the config files wrong and the server don't boot no more. What the hell is up with that?
Interestingly, the configuration info I had for the disk groups was out of date. As you might expect, this is not a good thing. This is the point where the Veritas tech will start running out of ideas.
If you can pull the correct volume size information out of your ass at this point it would be fantastically useful. So we did that.
Actually we used the partition information from 'format'. Since the volume in question was a single 272 gig volume on a hardware RAID it was relatively straightforward.
And thus was the world saved, or at least 180 gigs of it. (180 gigs was the used space, BTW. Got the whole RAID back.)
I was never terribly concerned though... what with my 8-hour old backup and my redundant server. Ha! Suck on that Veritas!
Oh yeah, if you're running vxfs now would be a good time to run 'vxprint -ht' and save that to a file somewhere. Maybe print it out, make a couple of copies, mail it to some friends, etc.
Eh, whatever.I kinda feel like I should post something here, seein's-as-how it's been a couple of weeks since the last post. Here are some things I thought about posting but never got around to...
I saw a cool sig on Usenet (Gavin somebody): "Welcome to Rivendell... Mr. Anderson."*
I spent a lot of time on Usenet, in general, and continue to go through blank CDs like candy. The local news server is more or less fully functional now so I am back to just using that and EasyNews. Those losers at NewsFeebs (sic) can sell shoddy news feeds to someone else, thanks.
Speaking of CDs, the new Toast Titanium update doesn't have that nasty little bug that caused the app to crash and hold the CD hostage until the computer was restarted. Instead of quitting other apps and burning at 8X I now burn CDs at 12x while simultaneously downloading news, listening to MP3s, cracking RC5-64, and websurfing. Amen.
The car bumper fix was a bit cheaper than the estimate, coming in at just under $700.
My DVDs aren't here yet and I'm getting a little peeved. They have shipped though, or so they claim.
My new chair is here but thanks to the spectacularly bad packing job, and unkind shipping, the swivel mechanism on one of the arms was broken and the back is just a little bit crooked. I called the chair people and new parts are on the way. It's not quite as "solid" as the $450 chair from HOM but I wasn't in the mood to spend $450 at this juncture, and this chair certainly isn't going to fall apart like the last one.
My student loan balance is $409.75. I might get crazy and just pay that off, lest Sallie Mae decides to lower my payment yet again to drag it out more. My payments started at $80, then went to $72, then dropped to $50. "How 'bout I just send you a fucking check, it's only $400 dammit!"
The new iMac is OK in my book. It just needs R2-D2 decals for the dome. I especially like how the high-end model has a DVD burner, a faster G4 processor, and an LCD display but only costs $200 more than the G4 Quicksilver I bought mere months ago.
Wil Wheaton actually has a pretty decent weblog. He has recently apologized for being such a dick between the ages of 15 and 21, and is currently having some CGI problems with Ikonboard.
I am waiting semi-patiently for the official launch of the new website from Erik. I know the new URL and it's lookin' good so far.
While it is still technically possible it is unlikely that I'll get to bed by 1am for the 10th day in a row. Last week my work start time fell within a tight 4-hour range -- skewed somewhat by getting there at 6:30am on Monday for a server change.
* Watch "The Matrix" and "The Lord of the Rings" if you don't get why that's drop dead funny.
Woo! Woo! Woo!They fired Dennis Green's losin' ass!!
Wooooooooooo!
And now, New DVD Releases of Some Importance1/02/02 - The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai, Across the 8th Dimension (got it!)
1/15/02 - American Pie 2 (ordering...)
1/15/02 - Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 1 (ordering...)
1/15/02 - Tron (20th Anniversary Edition) (ordering...)OK, 'nuther $76.86 spent. I'm spending money willy-nilly this week.
Stays Crunchy in Milk!Actually, no milk was involved, but I doubt that a protective coating of milk would have done anything useful to save my bumper.
Anywho, I had just spent an uneventful X-Mas with the relatives -- which is to say I got bored and bailed on the 26th instead of going to X-Mas #2 and #3 -- and had successfully navigated the 400-odd miles of interstate with nary a hitch, not too difficult with the nice roads, until I got home to the parking garage.
At this point I should mention that my parking spot lies between a brick wall and big cement post -- which are spaced approximately 1 car-width + 18 inches apart. The wall and the location of the parking spot pretty much guarantee that it's necessary to back into the space; believe me when I say that it was tremendous fun backing into that spot when I had a rented Cadillac Seville SLS for almost two weeks while my Camry was getting fixed after my second car stereo theft... but I digress.
The upshot is that I, you guessed it, whacked the cement post backing into the space, which cracked the bumper.
You may ask yourself, as I did, what does it cost to fix a plastic bumper on an Audi? The answer is, apparently, $732.55. I say "apparently" because I'm still waiting to get it fixed (backlog at the body shop).
I suppose I could just not bother fixing it but it's just about the only cosmetic damage the car has; the other biggy is the right headlight -- $350, thankyouverymuch. I've already told the shop to order the part though ($400 hunk of plastic) so I might as well fix it now.
This is all very helpful for the whole "saving for a house" scenario.
And, furthermore...My desk chair has finally decided to die. By this I mean that, despite the one dozen steel mending straps, one arm has now fallen off completely.
I have taken this as a sign. The sign says "It's time to buy a new chair!" in large, friendly letters.
And lo, the new chair should be shipping tomorrow!
BTW, I dropped into HOM Furniture yesterday. They have ONE good chair, two "OK" chairs, and a bunch of mediocre chairs. Their good chair is $450; my chair will be $250, is more adjustable and has a 15-year warranty. Weee!
Big Sale, Last WeekIf it's still Saturday when you read this there's a chance in hell that you can make it over to CompUSA in time to nab a spindle of 100 Imation CD-Rs (24x, 700 meg) for $24.99 (after rebates, limit one per customer).
The price gets down to $24.99 after a $5 instant savings and a $10 rebate. So it's still just $34.99 even if you don't send in the form. Not to shabby.
I've already got 3 spindles of 50 CD-Rs sitting here next to my computer. One spindle has 24 blanks. One spindle is empty; which I will use for temporary storage whilst sorting the contents of the third spindle which contains the parts used to make the VCDs I've been burning. The VCDs are stored in separate, black binders.
In other words, I have:
One Spindle to Burn Them All,
One Spindle to Sort Them,
One Spindle to Recreate Them All,
And in the Darkness Bind Them
These Pipes are Clean!On Friday -- erm, the previous Friday; so I'm behind a little bit... -- an elite (sorry, "l337") paramilitary team of plumbers toting a nuclear-powered drain snake were victorious over The Drain Clog that Ate Cincinnati. The drain is clear! The water flows!
Actually, I wasn't here when the strike team parachuted in but I think it's safe to assume that: (a) the apartment complex was cordoned off and traffic was redirected around the building; (b) the team consisted of 10-20 highly trained, mustachioed individuals, most of them named "Mario" or "Luigi", wearing colorful overalls over standard SWAT-issue riot gear; (c) after the successful extraction the drain clog was escorted out of the building wearing handcuffs and leg irons to a waiting, unmarked van, which took it to a secret S.C. Johnson and Company lab where now, even during Festivus, they are conducting unspeakable, vicious experiments.
Redefining the term "suck feed"Looking at the calendar I see I've had a Newsfeeds.com "Premium Plus" account for about 5 days now AND I CAN'T BELIEVE HOW MUCH THEY SUCK!
With the "plus" account I have access to 18 of their news servers -- and I need just about every damn one of them. (Actually, I'm only using 7 of them, but it feels like more.)
Where to begin... (1) the retention is good but the completion sucks; (2) if I happen to find all the parts on a particular server (good luck there) there will be at least a couple of CRC errors in downloading (almost always); (3) since their web interface is crap, relative to EasyNews, I can't combine pre-uudecoded files into a single zip file and download that, so I have to download 20-25% more to get the same amount of data; (4) because of (#3) it's pretty easy to hit the 500 meg per server limit, especially with all the re-downloading of parts you thought you had (see #2).
Now, the special multimedia server has a 750 meg/day limit. I've never hit that limit because the server is so damn slow and overloaded that sometimes the file transfer will just plain stop mid-file and hang there... so I have to keep checking on it just to make sure it's still going. Hence it is the server of last resort.
For a company claiming that they have great servers, tremendous bandwidth and lots of incoming newsfeeds they have a huge amount of variation in the completeness of files across the servers. So here's the typical downloading session: (A) try the AT&T news server, note that there are typically no new files; (B) spend a few hours bouncing between Newsfeeds' servers getting as many parts of the file as possible, (C) go to EasyNews and get the remaining parts.
In this way I can nurse my remaining 1 gig at EasyNews for another couple of weeks.
I hear you asking "Is that worth all the bother?" The answer is, no, not really, but I'm already paid up for the month and I keep hoping that they'll get better... there is some mention of a CRC problem they're trying to track down, and download speed has been good the last two nights, but I still spent hours downloading (and re-downloading) files I could have queued up in about 5 minutes at EasyNews.
After all of this grief I have 14.9 episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (site), including the unaired pilot. Burning VCDs, SVCDs and the RAR parts I've used about 36 CDs in the last 3 weeks... but I still have 70+ blanks at the ready.
Seventy CDs won't last long though, the Repostathon has 56 more episodes scheduled from now til the end of February, not counting new episodes.
So, I am currently 95.1 episodes away from a complete set... yow! I'd buy these on DVD if I could, we are currently in Season 6 and Season 1 won't be released til January 15th. Does that mean I wait til 2007/2008 to buy _this_ season, or do I download episodes the same night they air. Hmmmm.
(Yeah, I videotape the new ones, but an SVCD with no commercials made from a digital satellite source that I can play in my DVD player is a bit nicer, especially since I have no cable TV at the moment.)
Internet still here, fans rejoice!So here's the effect of the Excite@Home bankruptcy on moi: my new homepage (that I don't use) should be set to http://home.attbroadband.com/ instead of http://home.excite.com/.
Yawn.
I escaped the horrific fate of being relegated to 56k Hell by being a former MediaOne customer. Skippy!
OTOH, it looks like the local news server is f*cked up again -- unless people suddenly stopped posting MP3s. Grrr.
I thought of a little money making scheme the other day while checking out commercial news feeds: my own commercial news feed! It seems like half of the news feeds are just reselling newsfeeds.com content anyway.
The difference would be that my news server would only carry a handful of binary groups (i.e. Buffy and Futurama) and the retention would be freakin huge. Charge $5/mo. and dominate the niche.
Now if I could only find some free servers and free bandwidth... $)
UPDATE: my net connection is good but _this_ server is down. Assume that if you're reading this that it is back up.
Tick... tick... tick...Excite@Home may, or may not, shutdown tonight -- midnight or sooner. This would apparently mean that the Excite for AT&T@Home webpage which I've never even looked at until tonight will go away and be replaced by something else I will also ignore.
AT&T claims that there will be no internet service interruption.
They'd better be right -- they just fixed their newserver this afternoon (apparently). How am I supposed to download BtVS at 56k?
The upside would be that my monthly 6-gig download limit at Easynews would seem extravagant. As it is though, it's starting to cramp my style... I'm at 3.37 gigs, I just queued up a 443 meg download, and it'll be 19 days 'til my download counter resets.
If my "free" newserver tanks I'll have to check out these guys, the Premium Plus account will let you download 9 gigs a day -- if you bounce between all 16 of their servers.
I figure 9 gigs/day should be sufficient, since I can only theoretically download 7.5 gigs a day anyway.
BTW, my VCDs and SVCDs are working just fine in my Pioneer DV-343. SVCDs are, as the kids say, "da bomb!"
Internet: 1, Real World: 0I spent around 90 minutes this afternoon dodging the teaming hordes of post-Turkey Day shoppers while searching for a Pioneer DV-343 DVD player. That was enough time to hit just about every place in town that sells DVD players (AFAIK).
BB had stacks of DV-341s and DV-440s. AK had one display unit (but I'm boycotting them... and it was $30 more expensive there). Circuit City - Ha! They continue to be one of the most worthless stores in existence. The mall, worthless. The other mall, why bother. A couple of other places were closed.
So I got home and spent 3 minutes ordering it from Amazon. It took me three minutes because I did a last minute comparison between the 333 and 343, ordered it with 1-click, and then changed my shipping options. It'll be here Wednesday.
In other news, the Vikings have about 5 seconds to score a touchdown to tie the game. And the Winner is: Chicago. Have a day.
The drain clog that ate CincinnatiBTW, the bathroom sink is still clogged. I finally got all the hoses and such so I could fire up the Drain King. I hooked it up and let the pressure build... and build... and build... and... nothing!
Nothing, that is, except a small approximation of Old Faithful when I turned off the water. The Drain King expands to fill the pipe when the water is running, when the water is shut off it deflates and a jet of water shoots out of the drain, assuming the clog is still there.
I quickly learned to block the drain to avoid drenching the bathroom (again).
Numerous attempts were made, the pipes groaned, nothing worked. Something must be busted somewhere.
D-V-D-V-D-V-D, Hiya Buck!Sad but True: it occurs to me that I cannot continue with my SVCD creation experiments until I buy a DVD player 'cuz I don't have any way to actually play SVCDs.
Now, VCDs I can do without too much fuss but VCD is limited to MPEG1 for compression. We all know that MPEG1 sucks ass...
SVCD lets you use MPEG2 and VBR (or is that the same damn difference?). Anywho, point is you get a much nicer picture out of MPEG2. I can play one of my SVCD MPEG2 files with Videolan but a different file crashes the app. (See fun stuff here: VCDHelp.com.) Running the S-video out from the PowerBook gives a moderately decent picture on the TV though, even with MPEG1.
Toast Titanium lets me make just about anything QuickTime understands into a VCD but does nothing for SVCD. My computer spent 6 hours last night converting a 50 minute DivX file into a crappy MPEG1 file -- I guess I've figured out I shouldn't try that again (meaning divx to mpeg1, a good QuickTime movie worked just fine). The manual says it could take up to 10 minutes per minute of the original file to do the export. Mine took 7.1 minutes per minute. I shoulda got the G4/867! Regardless of that, someone needs to optimize their code a bit more.
There are ways, however, to make SVCDs with Toast but I can't tell if I've got it right just yet, hence the need for a DVD player (which I hear can also play DVDs... hmmm).
VCDHelp.com has a "big ass list" of DVD players. The Pioneer DV-343 ($150 street price) seems to be highly regarded as it will play just about any disk you put in it, and any mostly-compliant VCD or SVCD you throw at it. It doesn't do MP3s though, for that you need the DV-444 (and an extra $100).
I'm thinkin' that tomorrow I will visit Worst Buy and if they don't have a DV-343 in stock I'll snag it from Amazon ($149.88 w/free shipping, woo!) since I'm boycotting Audio Dinks (WTF is up with needing an 8 hour appointment to install a car stereo? Bah!).
A day without sunshine is like nightI thought I'd share the fact that I've lost all track of time. I haven't had to go to work for 3 days and have stayed up very late for 4 days; now the clock says 10:40pm but to me it feels more like 5ish.
All the more reason to make sure my artificial daylight device is engaged for Monday morning. This device consists of a small 40-watt desklamp and a 24-hour timer -- the timer turns the light on for about an hour in the morning at approximately the same time my alarm clock goes off.
The point of all this fabulous technology is to increase the odds that I will get out of bed sometime before 9am, preferably 8am. It works pretty well.
You can buy a lamp with a built-in timer and dimer that simulates dawn and dusk for about $200. I felt that my free solution (since I already had the timer and lamp) was preferable, even though it can be a bit harsh when the light clicks on in the morning.
The expensive lamp with all the dimming finery can be faked with about $80 worth of X-10 equipment if you are of a mind to do that.
My news server sucks ass, and not in a good wayI had forgotten how much of a time-sucking vortex the newsgroups are. I was reminded last Saturday when I went spelunking through abmbvs to download the Buffy Musical (in, um, 3 different formats... along with 5 versions of the unofficial soundtrack).
I made my own version of the soundtrack Friday night by making a digital CD quality recording from my low-fi P.O.S. VCR and turning that into MP3s -- hence the quest for better recordings from people with non-P.O.S. VCRs or digital recorders. I finally found a really good set which should hold me over til the official soundtrack is released (there was a vote for it at the website, it looks like it'll be a sure thing).
So, anywho, as I was saying, my news server (MediaOne/ATT) sucks. It has *dick* for retention, good luck finding an entire set of files for just about anything. It's fun to download 600 megs worth of files and then discover that you're missing part 43 of 60. Argh!
Throwing a little cash at this problem made it go away. I am now a happy subscriber of EasyNews. You get 6 gigs of downloading a month for $9.98, and here's the important bit: they have a couple of weeks worth of retention so there are really good odds of finding a complete set of files, and they have a nifty wingus that makes zip files of the stuff you want to download so you can just grab one or two multi-hundred megabyte files for a complete episode, depending on the format, of course. I just grabbed the 240 meg VBR MPG of the last episode this afternoon in about 30 minutes (not bad for 42 minutes of video).
I managed to use up 1.25 gigs of my monthly total in about 4 hours Sunday morning. Cable modems are cool. :)
BTW, Giganews.com is another alternative for commercial usenet news but they charge you for downloading headers and text messages too, unlike EasyNews.
My hard drive is beginning to feel a little strain. Since I haven't removed any of the zip files or rar files yet I'm using 3x the space of all the stuff I've downloaded so far. I think I'm down about 8 gigs at the moment, which means I should burn some stuff to CD pretty soon.
Speaking of CD burning, I'll need to buy Toast so I can make VCDs. Then I'll need to buy a real DVD player when I get sick of watching shows on the PowerBook. And now I want one of these too. Here's a lesser ($99) option.
Once I actually got the files downloaded I still had to contend with some non-Mac friendly filetypes. Issue #1: dealing with .rar files, Issue #2: converting Divx/avi to QuickTime, Issue #3: .par files.
#1) I determined that Stuffit Expander's handling of .rar files is, shall we say, sub-par -- only in the sense that it doesn't f*cking work at all. I grabbed the source for unrar-2.71 and compiled it (cc -o unrar -O2 unrar.c) -- after uncommenting "#define _UNIX" in "os.h" first. Works like a champ!
#2) Determined that EasyDivx sucks. Used Avi2Mov instead (look for "divx for X 1.1.7" at VersionTracker)
#3) Grabbed parchive from Sourceforge. PAR files will save your ass. They are parity files for .rar archives. A single par file (.p01, .p02, etc.) will replace any single missing rar file (.r09, .r42, etc.) in an archive. If a newsgroup poster includes 5 par files you can deal with any 5 missing files, which is just astonishingly useful. My 240 meg VBR was missing 3 parts (4.8 megs each) which I recreated from the PAR files. Sweet!
And did I mention that my regular news feed sucks? That VBR I grabbed has been on EasyNews for 3 days and still hasn't shown up at MediaOne. I wanted to just use EasyNews as a backup but I can't very well do that if my primary "free" ($50/mo. cable modem) news server doesn't get the files in the first place. Bastards!
Once More, With FeelingRejoice! If you missed the Buffy Musical on Tuesday you will have another chance to see it tonight (8/7c) on UPN.
This episode -- nay, TV Event! -- is already one of my favorites; it gets better each time I see it. It's simply hilarious.
Even SMG's caterwauling grows on you after a while. She's about the 5th best singer on the show... of 8, and that's only because two characters only sing a few lines which isn't enough to make an accurate assessment.
Beware! The epsiode runs about 10 minutes long (i.e. 1 hour and 10 minutes), set your VCRs accordingly.
Rustic plumbing -or- yet another reason to buy a houseSo, the drain in my bathroom sink had been getting slower and slower recently, for no apparent reason.
- First I tried some Drano Foamer -- it got slower.
- Days later I tried some Liquid Plumer -- it got a bit faster.
- Still later I tried Drano Crystals -- it's stopped dead.
- I tried a sink plunger -- no dice!
- I bought a cheap ($5) drain snake -- can't get past the first right angle turn in the pipe... drat!
I figure that all the chemicals have managed to just add to and harden the clog, thus leading to the current situation where I've removed the trap and the sink drains into a bucket... I am conserving lots of water at the bathroom sink nowadays.
I have not yet given up! I just picked up a Drain King at Home Depot to blast that pesky clog into oblivion! Unfortunately they were sold out of the hose and adapter kit that would let me use the shower as a water blasting source so I'm going to have to find a short garden hose and an adapter to fake it. Argh!
Rest assured that I will keep you posted on my progress.
I crack myself upI was preparing to snag the second Star Wars Ep II trailer (from the Quicktime download cache) and realized that I hadn't yet copied my spiffy perl code that does that over to this Mac.
Conveniently I had posted the code as a comment over there at Tim's site so I just grabbed it off the 'net. :)
Sadly, since access to the trailer requires the Ep I DVD in the drive I had to grab my other Mac anyway.
The kicker is that, of course, the site is overloaded and essentially non-functional.
Decisions, decisions...Do I buy a new computer chair? Or do I buy an iPod? Or both?
I came across an "extra" $360 in my mail today, which will make a serious dent in the $399 list price of the iPod; or completely cover the cost of the chair I want. Practical, or cool gadget? Hmmmm.
Hmmmmmmmmmmmm.
What to do... what to do...
I figure if I watch the iPod intro videos enough times and get a chance to play with one at the Apple Store I'll eventually decide to buy one.
There is a third option: save up for a house, but that would go against my reckless spending habits and is therefore an unlikely outcome. (But I am still stashing away some cash so I can avoid apartments that cater to psychos, among other things.)
The good (old) news: the psycho who used to work at Arby's -- and may have touched my food -- now works at Burger King (where he can touch your food).
The bad news: he still lives in my building.
Doh!!It would appear that I broke the link to the javascript countdown clock a few months ago when I was reorganizing the archives.
I apologize for the inconvenience. I suppose I should read the logs once in a while...
I've updated the clock to countdown to the opening of the new Hitchhiker's Guide movie. (According to countingdown.com, which has an ultra, ultra nifty Shockwave clock (note that the time will be wrong since I just lifted the link without any of the code around it (the 'now' and 'end' dates in the link are YYMMDDhhmmss, the 'event' needs to be all caps)) I'm just going to assume that they don't want me to steal the clock so I'm leaving that link pointing to their page. They've got a pretty good site, check it out.)
Man, that Java clock looks pretty lame compared to the shockwave clock! But I digress... Since I've got today off (and the next six as well) I'm now going to attempt to read The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide in one sitting.