Also known as I don’t feel like being funny on a day like today.
“does my life suck because of karma” Don’t know. But I do know that Spam Karma rocks.
“drinking sucks i feel like shit” Then don’t drink, dur…
“i want to get high from lunesta” Good luck with that.
“how to start my life at 26“, “Why life sucks at 40?” and “i am 55 and life sucks” You three should talk to each other. Maybe form a support group or something.
“down rading from os 10.5 to 10.4” Yes! Do it! I Know You Can!
“colonoscopy preparation + epidrin” Hmmm. Talk to your doctor?
I’m some what disappointed, only 3 political searches, but am heartened by the andLinux searches. No Islamic world searches for the Bristol Stool Chart either.
INS Tabar, an Indian frigate dispatched last month to the area to protect the country’s merchant fleet, sighted the pirate vessel late on Tuesday. Indian officers said they spotted pirates moving on the deck with rocket propelled grenade launchers and automatic weapons. “On repeated calls, the vessel’s threatening response was that she would blow up the naval warship,” the Indian Navy said in a statement. “INS Tabar retaliated in self defence and opened fire on the mother vessel. “As a result of the firing by INS Tabar, fire broke out on the vessel and explosions were heard, possibly due to exploding ammunition that was stored on the vessel.”
First, Ethiopia, now India. Looks like the founding members of the “non-aligned” nations are going to fix the West’s biggest loss (so far) in the GWoT. Speaking of which, I need to come up with a nice punchy thing to call it, other than GWoT. The US military is leaning towards “The Long War”, but I use that for the 1917-1989 war against Russian communism. The Neo-Crusade? The 10th Crusade? The Arab Wars?
Well, I got a new battery. Actually, I got two. Let me explain. I go into $CarPartStore across the street from where Darling Wife works and next to where Redheaded Girl used to work. At $CarPartStore, I speak with Clerk Dude about my need for a battery. Clerk Dude does some computer fu and comes up with a type of battery I need and said that if I bought a 1 dollar “mounting kit” (two felt thingies that go under the cables and some sort of portected goo/lub stuff) he could install the battery. Sounds good to me, not dealing with heavy toxic acidic crap inside a car is worth a buck, plus I get the little felt thingies under the cables, score all the way around. He even yumps the battery out to the car for me. He undoes the battery, puts in new one, plus mounting kit and tells me to start it up.
Nothing. Not even tick-tick-tick etc. He putzes about with the cables. Tells me to try again. “tick-tick-tick-tick” Really weeny tick-tick-tick, I might add.
“Oh, that’s your starter.” sayth Clerk dude.
“No, It’s not. If I hook up the Jump Buddy to it, the car will start.” sayth me.
“I don’t think so, but let’s try it.” At least he was willing to listen to the customer, unlike the last “expert” I had to deal with (see rant about Vonage VoIP provider below)
Hook up “Jump Buddy”. Car starts, as expected and predicted. Clerk dude, to his credit, shrugs and takes my old battery into the store and puts it on on the battery tester. It’s dead Jim. Highest value, 6 or so volts, at any sort of amps.
He takes the portable tester out and hooks it up the “new” battery. It’s even more dead, Jim. Highest value, 4 volts, and dropped to under 2 under load. It wouldn’t even power the clock whose display at least, is a 7400 TTL based system, which means 5 volts or it’s dead. (It bothers me some times that I know things like that, but don’t remember what the syntax of a SQL insert statement is. It’s not like I’ve done any IC works since, oh, 1978 or so.)
He takes the portable test in to the store, takes battery number 3 off the shelf and test it. Good to go. Replaces battery number 2 (i.e the one I just bought) and has me do a “turn in” paper work thing. (zero days on a 3 year pro-rated warranty, comes to, oh, full price….) While he’s doing that, the store manager type (aka PHB for you Dilbert fans out there) wanders over and asks what’s going on. Clerk dude explains. PHB looks amazed that a product that is known to have a life span is dead. Shocked and appalled even. Really appalled, at one point he was standing with his arms out at 45 degree angle over his head [heralds don't pun, they cant] {rim-shot} Thanks, be here all week. Try the fish...) PHB doesn’t think clerk dude knows how to run the tester correctly. (It’s not hard. I can do now. Hook up battery like you were jumping it, i.e. red clamp on the positive terminal, black on the negative. Push test. Enter the Amps of the battery. Watch LCD. Wait 45 seconds. Read result. I could train Velifer to do it, if he had the thumbs to hook up the battery.) PHB putzes with cables. Pushes Test etc. Still dead. Reads, if any thing, lower than it did out side attached to the car.
I sign the papers and leave, while PHB and Clerk dude start talking about checking lot numbers and who gets to do what with this issue etc. That sounds like a load of fun and games. But Not My Problem.
Got the new D&D group’s first game tonight, I’m all sorts of happy about that.
The cunning plan is fully in effect. It’s obvious that the old hard drive had more issues than I thought, based on the speed of some things, like making a EXT3 file system. On the other hand, it’s still not what you would call speedy fast. I’m trying my hand at building everything for a PIII vs generic 486 or better, which might, repeat might, make things run faster, which would be nice.
Let’s start with my car. Well, the battery. It’s dead. Need to get that fixed ASAP. dur. Should have done it this weekend.
Which brings us to “I feel like shit.” More or less literally, given that I’m taking a crap about once every 45 minutes or so. For the last 3 days. “Lots of that virus going around” the doctor says. My crapping eating habits, due to the various anti-freak out meds I take may also have something to do with it.
Then there is my VoIP provider. I’ve got 2 routers, and two number, one one each router. Each router has two phone ports. I wanted to add a 3rd number to the second phone port of the first router. This should be simple. It wasn’t. 6 (six) calls, average time 40 minutes each, and 2 (two) supervisor level personages. This did not make me a happy camper. There service if first rate, assuming you don’t have to change any thing.
The Craptop’s hard drive died. However, I have a cunning plan, and the fact that I know what to do with Gentoo now should make it an faster rebuild. Bonus, the cunning plan will make the hard drive bigger. Score all around!
Got a Doctor’s appointment later this week. Need to tweak my Cymalta I think. Current load doesn’t seem to be working quite right.
$WeSellUsedMacs is becoming more and more surreal. Average life span of a tech working there seems to be about 3 weeks. When I’m the most knowledgeable person about Mac hardware/Software in the building they have problems.
Google. Go back to the way iGoogle was before you fucked it up. It fails to read RSS titles about 70% of the time and each freaking tab has it’s own settings. This does not make me a happy camper. Actually, just fix the RSS feed issue and give and option to apply setting and theams to all tabs and that would fix it. I may need to go look at my Google Lab stuff, this might be a side effect of those. More later.
Spammers. “Comment Spammers” in particular. Please use software to comment spam that at least tries to make it look like a real comment. The “comment” on the top of the Spam Karma reject pile is ‘22gy2zo5g0a0f8lg paucyh yhtrg’. This, of course, is really a link to really random web sites, but, come on, what happened to “This is very interesting web site. I will be back later” comment spam?
Well, off to see if the Jump Buddy has enough juice yet.
Trying to get an external USB Wifi adapter to work with the toy. Having some issues, with I suspect is going to result in yet another kernel rebuild. Sound still has issues, but I’ve decided I don’t care about that any way. I suspect I’m going to rotate the game master log in to run sidewise, which makes reading PDF files a log easier and because I don’t need to use the keyboard that much with it in that mode.
Speaking of crap, I feel like it today. Well, right now, No, I don’t but that’s the migraine meds talking. Woke up this moring with a headache. Decided to not take any thing until I got to the office so I would have a fighting chance of getting some billable hours done today.
Either I am very very sick, or eating a whole bag of black licorice over the course of a couple hours turns your crap green. Plastic “Army man” green. Sort of scary looking actually. No, that’s not right, it’s very freaking scary looking.
In other medical news, I under went yet another break down yesterday, and barfed at the office, out of the clear blue, so to speak. Felt fine at 12:30, talking to Ralph on the Big White Phone around 1:15, having a full on melt-down around 2:15. Art Dude and Redheaded Girl had to come over. I suspect my medical load is going to be adjusted come the 22 or so. Plus I banged the crap out of both knees, so I’m hitting the pain pills harder than my normal load. Not A Good Day.
I’m not going to be a smart ass about this one, it’s not quite trivial.
Make sure you have SSH installed on the andLinux side. ‘apt-get install openssh’ should get it, if it’s not one of the defaults.
Create a non-root user (see the andLinux FAQ) Not that you only have to do step on using this method. It might not be a bad idea to add this user to the sudo list via visudo
Install an SSH client on your machine (I use putty)
Make sure andLinux and the X windows thing is running. If you set it up as automatic it should be.
SSH into the andlinux ‘machine’ The IP address out of the box is 192.168.11.150
Log in as the user you created in step 2
Issue the command ‘kicker && exit’ Note the exit part is optional, it closes the ssh terminal window, which you want to do because your going to start using the xwindow terminal of your choice.
You should get a couple of lines of text while KDE wakes up, but then you will get the kicker bar. I normally modify mine to live on the top of the screen so it doesn’t overlap the windows task bar.
After the first time all you have to do is steps 5-7. I’ve removed all the various andLinux windows side app launchers from the quick start area and this is how I do it for day to day operations. Please note that startup perl script is still running as root. I haven’t tried removing it just yet, I have a gut feeling that it doesn’t need to run at all any more. I’ll poke it with sharp sticks later and find out.
Oh, and yeah, I was right. I really didn’t get out of bed yesterday, other than to make a fast trip to the local market for milk and soda.
You know yet another reason why my life sucks. The boss and I can’t seem to be in the same building at the same time long enough to get my invoice turned in and a check issued. Caused a lot of bills to pile up, the server bill being one of them.
Fixed for a year, so that not going to be a issue, however I might start with a donate button some time.
I use IceRocket to track visitors here. I just got some one from the Islamic Republic of Iran. He, or possibly she, got here via Google Images. This is the page he ened up on.
Frankly, I’m not sure what to say about that.
Other odd search request that end up here:
“army mos, high paying” – Let me make that easy. There aren’t any.
“darling i dont want to be professional for my wife” – Again, not sure what to say there.
“upgrading worth it 10.5.5 10.4″ – NO don’t do it!
“Nixon vs Mondale 1968″ – Ah, dude. Read a history book.
“was jimmy carter in the army” – Rational question. Nope, in the Navy.
“dungeons and dragons for linux” – That’s a bit geeky, but dumb. If it the web based stuff it will run, otherwise, not really. D&D is a table top game.
“1970 olympic flight seized by arabs” – Unless they mean an airline named Olympic, that’s a weird combo.
“drinking beer on lunesta” – Good way to get a long nap.
“upgrading from 10.4.11 to 10.5.5″ – NO Don’t Do It.
“pictures of cats and bats” – No bat pictures, but do have pictures of cats named after bats however, close enough?
“Rants of a lost life” – Nice turn of phrase. May steal that.
“I didn’t get into law school my life sucks” – my fair heart bleeds for you dude.
“can you get high off Amidrine” – Not really. Make you loopy and feel like shit however. Better than the headache, I’ll give you that.
“10.5.5 main.cf group” – Good luck. You will need it.
“using diclofenac with midrin” – Done it, but it’s not really a good idea unless you are getting regular blood test for liver and kidney failure.
“adderall ubuntu” – Odd mix there. Shoulnd’t need the adderal, Ubuntu installs fast enough that you should be able to finish.
“heather alexander alexander james adams wtf” – What? He’s a transexual filk singer. Can’t be the only one…
“fink vs macports” – Use Fink. MacPorts has issues. Not as many as 10.5.5, but fink still wins.
“24Q10″ – Nike Herc Rules!
“bristol stool chart type 4″ – That’s what you want, dude.
“working for michael kors sucks” – But he seems so fun on Project Runway.
“Apple postfix not working 10.5.5″ – I feel your pain.
‘”scary devil monastery” – We don’t talk about chickens here.
“is leopard 10.5.5 worth upgrading” – NO.
“OKLAHOMA ROADS SUCK” – Why, yes. Yes they do.
“MY LIFE SUCKS BACKWA” – Ah? what?
“why did jimmy carter suck” – Don’t know. Let’s re-visit that question in a year.
It’s just a bad sinus infection. Doctor is givng her some stronger antibiotics than she was on last week, something for pain and some steroids. She sleeping now, but with the IV meds she was given plus the time of day, that’s to be expected.
It’s 9:30 in the morning. I’m in St. John’s Emergency room. The Darling Wife woke me up at 7:30 with the worst headache she had ever had. She had taken Tylenol and it had had no effect. When it didn’t get better after 20 minutes, I, being the med blog reading sort I am, freaked and decided to take her to the ER. My 8:15 alarm went off while driving there. My 8:30 alarm went off in triage. The doctor saw her a little before 8:50. He poked and prodded at her for a bit, and spent a lot of time with the light and funnel thing looking in her ears and nose. Ordered blood work and maybe a CAT scan, plus ordered drugs and IV fluids. One shot Benadryl, some sort of anti-nausea and diladud later and she is asleep. They just came to take her to the CAT scan.
Please, God, let this just be a sinus infection or a flare up of one her normal things. The other options are to horrible to think about. Please, let this trip be a waste of time and money. I can lose those, I can’t lose her.
No, not that damn, this is a Craptop damn. First time I’ve need to recompile the kernel since day 1 of the Gentoo era. Seems sound wasn’t enabled. grrr…
I’m posting this from Firefox 3.0.3 on the craptop. All I’ve got left to do is get the sound working and I’m done with this machine. Woot! Now to get my mother’s working….
I’ve got it up and running XFCE4 on a non-root account, with full screen resolution. Speedy fast, at least so far. Still need to finish putting toys on, and decide on a browser. Opera is looking more and more like the one I’m going to use.
Well, the machine isn’t dead. I did figure out why it went into thermal shutdown however. The speaker grills on the front of the machine are also the inbound air intakes. Closing the lid, with the machine running isn’t a good idea. Of course, NOT closing the lid when it’s running something in back ground isn’t a good idea with as many cats as I have.
Solution: Don’t let it run in background mode unless I’m in the room so I can keep Pip and/or Velifer off of it.
The Craptop project may have just hit a freaking wall. I finished the current emerge, and issued a ’shutdown now -h’ command, then moved the machine from the living room to my desk in the bed room. Machine will not turn on now. Turns on, does a memory count, detects the hard drive and DVD drive, then turns it’s self off. I’m hoping that it’s an over heat situation and letting it cool down will fix it (it has been running full bore for several days now), but just in case, I’m installing the rest of the LAMP stack on the andLinux part of the DellBookâ„ ¢
Of course, saying “The New Era” means I skipped over “Mega-Craptop”, but that’s a game geek joke. I really hope this doesn’t stray into “Craptop-4″, that would be bad.
Any rate, I’ve decided, or had shown to me, that the uber build command line is not a good idea. One package at time now. Currently doing XFCE4. Once that is running the way I like it the machine is more or less ready to go.
All this reminds me of an expression we used at $WeMakeVoiceMail.
“Software, small, fast, cheap. Choose any two.”
My then not quite PHB, of course, had trouble with the “two” part and wanted all three. He got, in the end, small and fast.
Finished fixing the fucked install dumbass attack, plus got PHP/MySQL/Apache2 and the like playing nice with each other. Now attempting to get XFCE4/The Gimp/Firefox/DigiKam running. The emerge to do that results in 119 items to install. Off we go!
After that, I’ll re-run the update the world, and declare victory.
Actually, I do care, but really, when you get down to it, I don’t. While I think the most important issue of my generation and the next (i.e. The Other Writers kids) is the Islamic Jihad against the West. I don’t think we will loose it due to who the president is for 4-8 years. We won the Long War (1918-1989) despite some fairly bad choices in the White House. Which ones were bad choices and why I leave as an exercise for the reader. I’m sure any one that reads this blog can find a bad one in that time frame.
I have faith in the people of the West, and I don’t think we are going to go quietly into that good night. If not, well, I’m perfectly willing to be a 21st century “Flandry Of Terra”. I may not stop the Fall of Night, but it will not happen while I still live.
American civilization will survive a higher tax rate on capital gains. It will survive a higher base income tax rate. Hell, it will even survive single payer medical system. We might not like it as much, but none of these would kill what we call America. Sharia law, on the other, would. Noting remotely resembling America would survive under that.
Adderall can cause rage like behaivor, which I tend towards any way. No, really, I do. Today my lack of tolerence of fools, an oncoming Adderall crash and low blood suger level damn near made a perfect storm, possibly leading to my arrest and trial for manslaughter.
Let me explain. No, there is to much, let me sum up.
We at $WeSellUsedMacs have a dude (and he is a dude, if you know what I mean, and I think you do), that comes in once or twice a month, asks dozens of dumb questions and general takes up time and space and never buys any thing. He came in today and I damn near killed him. Dude has an old ass craptacular iMac that he wants to run some version i-freaking-life. This machine can just barely run the version of the OS he has on it. Could not understand that it couldn’t run an current version of iLife because it’s a 500mhz G3, and it iLife needs better than that, for any version made after 2005. Also didn’t seem to understand that the 2005 version of iLife needs a faster machine to run parts of it or that he didn’t have a fast enough machine AND didn’t have a DVD so the iDVD application would be non-functional. Then the dude sits there and lies to me. Example: as a point of fact, the default setting for Tiger (aka OS X 10.4) is to check, weekly, for software upgrades. The current release is 10.4.11. Dude’s machine, “Which I had on the Internet this morning” is running, and I use that term loosely, 10.4 dot nothing, i.e. never been updated. The fact that he didn’t know what software update was means, in general, he didn’t know how to turn off the default, or, again, he was lying to me, either way, not a good idea if you want to stay on the good side of the only person in the store that will talk to you.
Once we had established that we did have a version that would run, more or less, and that we did not have the 2004 version, and that we could not get it we get a copy of the CD out of the back room. As an aside, I have no idea why we keep something in the front and some things in the back. It’s 30.00 item, no need to keep it under lock in key. Any rate, it turns out that he may or may not have enough cash on him, so he wants to know if he pays cash for it now, can he come in later (like 2 or 3 days later), get the cash back and put it on his credit card. Ah, no, and WTF, Over? Next he wants to know what our policy on software returns is. We don’t have one, (or more accuratly, you can’t return opened software or software that doesn’t come sealed). Next “One more quesion ‘My father has this G5 that has iLife installed on it and iMovie doesn’t work, why?’”
Damn if I know or care, and I’m damn sure not going to attempt to trouble shoot it with out seeing it. Told him that the only way that we could find out would be to check it in for service. I can pretty much tell y’all that we’re going to get the 50 buck diagnostic fee up front.
One the craptop front, I’m done to the last one in the “fix the fucked install” update, and I’m going to try the uber build in a few. If you’re going to do things like this, made damn sure that you have screen installed so you can log on and off the machine as it does this long ass sort of thing.
Update: Not done with the fix emerge. Have a conflict in the use flags on the last freaking item. Fixed that and relaunced the fix emerge. This results in only one package needing to be install. Woot! Might get this done today.
Updated update: Needed 2 items after all the conflicts were resolved.
Have you ever noticed how much rock music is about, well, rock music? Either tributes to other rockers, bitching about being on the road or just plain about rock. This effect is spread over a wide area, both good and bad bands do it. It seems to me that this sub genre of seems to account for about 10% or so of all rock.
The uber build failed, with some sort of error about video card drivers for a card it doesn’t have not being the correct kernel version.
Ah, yeah. Thought the whole point of Gentoo was to avoid that sort of crap, if not, why would any one do this? I’m a geek, and this is way more than I think any rational person should do to get a machine up and running. At this point, I’ve put enough into it that I’m going to make it fucking work. So one more “emerge –verbose –update –ask –newuse world” then the uber build again and see what’s up. In theory, unless I have to dink with stuff it should work, but the smart money is on “will need to dink.”
It is an important note that I did this, in part, to myself, by attempting to do parallel install of packages that need each other to work correctly, mainly because it would let me (vs apt-get, which will not let you do two installs at that same time.).
My Sunday D&D game moved to Tuesday and changed places. My Sunday game became a Mongoose Traveller game. More on both of those on there blogs once I get moving.
Well, this morning I issued an ungodly long command line to get every thing I think I need on it all at once, then spent some quality time looking over the various flags and setting them in my /etc/make.conf file.
It wants to down load 245 files now, which, I thought, wasn’t as bad as I thought, given that XFCE4, gimp, php, DigiKam and MySql were in the list to get.
Well, it’s bad, in fact, it’s worse. Item number 3 is the freaking Linux kernel. It’s going to rebuild the kernel, again… I hope this thing gets down by the time we get back from the Game today…
I’ve just spent an hour or so of quality, quality I tell you, time dealing with the “USE” option in /etc/make.conf After dealing with all that, it needs to either rebuild or install 150+ items. I launched a ’screen’ session and fired that puppy up. I’ll come back in a hour or so an check on it.
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