Why My Life Sucks

I give you the 12 gauge 6 shooter

Just the ice flowing off the car port. That’s going to hurt if falls on some one.

Well, sort of in the sun. Still have a thin cloud cover to deal with.

We got about 6 inches on top of the 1/2 inch of ice. Generic photos of snow around the house and car to follow, once the sun is up enough so that I don’t have to use flash. The good news is we still have power and interwebs, plus it’s Saturday with nothing to do, so were good. There is a QT with in walking distance if all else fails. Plus a Pizza Hut, a Sonic and an Atwoods, so it’s all good. I’ll get some not so drab and depressing once the over cast goes away.

Brandy, my Min-Pen seems to think that if I am in the room, she needs to be there as well. Because I’m not using the pillows she might as well.

Mother, Ashley and Buddy.

Just a random snow photo of the back yard.

Brandy is a nest builder. She’s not really happy unless she can move around a bunch of bedding and make her a nice little nest to sleep in. She also doesn’t under stand “get off the bed, it’s time to make it.” It’s a bit of a pain to deal with because she freaks out and runs around UNDER the covers trying to find an edge.

1 December isn’t a bad day for that.

I collect US Army Field Manuals, in pdf format. The ones that aren’t restricted can be found at the Reimer Digital Library That’s where this image came from. For some reason it just creeps me right the fuck out.

Mother, Ashley and Buddy. Ashley is the cat, Buddy is the dog.

They both have their eyes open, can’t quite walk yet, but are cute as all get out. Mommy cat, Daz, wasn’t really happy about me taking them out and putting them next to her, because she had gotten out of the box to take a short break. Oh well….

Just some random photos I took this morning. The kitten box is a bit harder to take photos in, so I had to dink around with it first. The Darling Wife seems to have broken out in critters this morning as she tried to take her medications.   The tabby kitten has her eyes open, but the tuxedo’s eyes are still shut.

This is Brandy. I’ve talked about her a few times on the blog, but this is her first photo.

For reasons I do not understand, she has decided that I am her human. If I am in the house, she is in the same room with me, and normally with in 5 feet of me. Keeni is much the same way, but she will some times wander off for a bit.

Brandy was a breeder in a puppy mill and was rescued by The Redheaded Girl. Brandy, being the wise dog that she is, didn’t like The Redhead Girl’s current boyfriend, so she ended up in a dog run out side their trailer. Once we got her out of there, she stuck to me like crazy, which The Redheaded Girl thought was odd, because she was under the impression Brandy didn’t like men.

Seems it’s she (Brandy) didn’t like her(The Redhead Girl) ex and his friends. Having been exposed to this bunch of people I can understand why.

She’s more than a little nurotic and still has some trust issues with regards to being given doggie treats, for example, but she’s a sweet dog and a very freaking good “alarm” dog (vs a watch dog). A watch dog will attack some one coming into and area they are not supposed to be in.   Jack   fills that role in our house, I suspect.   An alarm dog will tell you if some one is. She still not so sure about the allowing our neibour’s kids to go between the houses (on there side of the fence) just our side our windows. She barks a couple of times then “grumbles” about them for a while. She also barks at any one that comes into the the house unless I tell her that it’s OK. The execption to this list are The Redhead Girl and Art Dude. You will not the Darling Wife is not on this list. Makes for fun time when she gets off work at 3:00 AM.

This really isn’t “the beer of the day”, because, well, It’s only 3:30 and I haven’t had a beer yet. Choc 1919 (note corrected spelling of name and warning, flash monster web site) is one of my top 10 beers from any where, and is my current favorite domestic beers. Choc has had a fairly strong effect on my life, given that I met Redheaded Girl at a club that I became a regular at because they had it on tap. Me meeting Redheaded Girl, of course, had a huge effect on both The Darling Wife, Art Dude and the sundry critters, Brandy and CoCo being hers to start with.
Enough about that, let’s talk beer.   It’s an odd duck, being a fairly   dark beer, officially an “American Wheat Ale”, made with2 row barley malt,   malted wheat with a mix of   Liberty and Cascade hops.   It’s IBU is 15, and it’s officially 3.2% by weight, which is why you can buy it at Reasors and QT stores, which are both Oklahoma based companies and a major force in “Green Country” retail markets.   I will note, for the record, that Krebs isn’t in Green Country as such, being in “Little Dixie“.   I’ll also note that it’s one of the few 3.2% beers that the better “beer” liquor stores in Tulsa carry on a regular basis.

For those of you that aren’t from Oklahoma, you can’t sell any thing stronger than 3.2% beer at any thing but a liquor store.   There is a tendency in liquor stores, at least in Tulsa,   to some what specializes as either a beer, wine or “normal” liquor place.

It’s bottle conditioned, and is unfiltered, so you do get that slight hazy effect and of course some yeast stuff in the bottom of the bottle.   It’s a damn good beer.   A soon as I can get the time and energy together, the whole of the extended family group may make a trip down to Krebs where they make it.   I’ve been told the restaurant that started it is damn good as well.

For relative scores:
(The daily beer will show up in Bold Red)

I seem to have lost my “I am your Ghod, fear me” effect with Windows computers.   The Windows side of Godzilla decided to start rebooting when selected.   In what is unquestionably a related note, don’t point the c_drive pseudo drive of the current release of Linux wine at your real C drive.         Also, don’t attempt to run the second life windows client under wine, unless you REALLY like a bad acid trip screen.

However, I am it’s Ghod, it should have feared me, because I found my XP Pro SP2 disk, the one that I have a legit 20+ install key for.     The Windows XP Home version installed by a moron is being removed even as I speak.   I have no freaking idea what drugs he was on when he installed it.   And, no, it wasn’t me.

The good news is that the default XP OEM disk has some idea what sort of network card I have.     That means every thing else is just driver down loads and dinking about.   However, that does bring up an older rant. I’ve always had an issue with the Microsoft IP Address widget.     It’s not quite smart enough to do what it thinks it’s doing and the fact that tab does the wrong thing in it is a pain in the ass.   Because I haven’t been dinking with IP setup on XP machines for awhile, I had some what forgotten about how fucked it is.   I used to rant about it damn near daily when I was working for $WeMakeEmailServers.

Important safety note.   If you are downloading “important documents” via Ktorrent, stop it when you start downloading things for other machines.   Eats your band width just a hair it does.

Fairly painless install, as windows installs go.   First up, get Firefox installed, then SP3, SecondLife and Daz Studio/Poser 7.   May or may not install open office on the windows side.     The whole reason for the Windows side is to run Second life and Daz Studio.   Maybe Never Winter Nights, even though I really don’t need yet another time sink.   Every thing else on the box will be Linux based.     “Game OS” indeed.

Good thing it’s painless, need to do it again.   Should have formatted the drive.   All sorts of cruft left on.     When Microsoft says “deleting the /Windows Directory, they lie.     Oddly, it installs a hell of lot faster after doing a format.

Just downloaded and installed the video drivers.     Damn the generic svga driver sucks.   Now starting the the Microsoft update cycle.   “We think our customers are thieves”, of course, goes on first.     Didn’t want a reboot after it decided that I am, after all, a MSDN user.     SP3 going on.   I’m going to bite the bullet and put some sort of C++ on this box, I suspect the current Express version.   And cygwin, forgot how much the command prompt is XT sucks.   No sense in doing andLinux however.

Of course, the SP3 download just failed.   Starting over.   And the graphics driver wants .net to work 100%.         Don’t forget, this is a more or less pain free install of windows.   Bleh.   Just found out why it failed.   It was doing auto updates at the same freaking time and it can’t quite deal with the idea of telling the manual update it’s working, please try again later.     On debian based systems apt can and does do that.   I’ll grant the Gentoo’s emerge will cheerfully let you shoot your self in the foot with multiply copies running, but Gentoo does assume you know what you are doing.

Ah, fuck.   Just looked at what it auto-downloaded.   Still going to have to put service pack 3 on, and I suspect find a copy of dot freaking net to install.   Bleh is right.   Still, the pain level is under what doing this to Smallbox was like.       Granted having XP see the network from the jump was a HUGH help.

First mandatory reboot.   Video Driver wanted one, but would let me put it off.

Odd.   It wanted to download and install SP3, but when I said do it, it just started to install it.   Something strange in the neighborhood…

Finished doing that,   and yes, had to reboot.

And it “found new hard ware”.   Audio thingy, which it did not find a driver for.     Will deal with that if and when I get speaker for this machine that work.

All right, off doing the 4 fixes post SP3 that it did not have, Media Player 11, because I’m stupid like that and both 1.1 and 2.x .net frameworks.   Assuming no other Microsoft updates, time to install real stuff.   Fortunately, I’ve been chunking most of the the install packages off on Smallbox’s external data drive, which Godzilla can get to with ease.

And reboot.   Still looking for the damn sound card stuff.   Sigh.   May need to deal with that now.   Check for updates.   Need to install 7 more.   Ok, that’s the 24 it autodown loaded, SP 3, 8 right after SP 3 and this set of 7.     That’s 40 updates.   Granted it’s from a rather old CD, but three of the last 7 were for Media Player 11.   Ah, why not roll those into the base down load of the application?   This is almost, but not quite, as bad as Java on OS X 10.4 (which, granted, isn’t really Apple’s fault, but it’s still a pain in the ass)

Small hyper dog wants, no, needs to go out and chase tree rats.   I’m going to take small calm dog out as well.   She will not be happy about that.

And reboot.   Oh, look, new audio device.   Still can’t find drivers.     Need to do that now.   Damn that’s a big freaking file, with a slow server pipe.   This is the longest single stage in the whole damn thing, including the format and install fresh copy of XP, and I’ve still got 20 minutes to go.   I’m going to publish this now and update as needed.

I’m going to let both hyper and calm small dogs back in.     They are happy doggies now, eating their post go out side cookies.   Keeni, my Russian Blue is helping me deal with Godzilla by holding down my lap top case.   And no, she can not has cheezeburger

Of course doing an XP install nails the MBR, so I’m going to have to make a GRUB install CD or just re-install xunbutu.   I may do the second because I got a bit carried away with stuff on it, so the Linux side is a bit crufty as well.

Because it’s Saturday and I really don’t have enough to do (sarcasm tags implied) I may go ahead and update the various blogs, other than RedHeaded Girl’s to Wordpress 2.7 RC 1, just to make the damn things stop whining at me.   Of course the actual release is Dec 10, so I may wait for that.   Depends on how Godzilla goes.

Just finished the driver download install.   Reboot, of course.   Seems happy now.

Installing real stuff now.

1. Of course Firefox, done way up there.   Also install DownThemAll, Adblock ,Adblock Filter Set G, the Google tool bar and Webdevloper tool set for Firefox
2. Gimp 2.6
3. Foxit Reader
4. ACDSee Classic
5. Cygwin (Just doing a core set, plus mc and bash completaion to start with, have other things to do, and I know this one takes some time to run)
6. PDFCreator
7. UFRaw
8. ISORecorder
9. Clone Cleaner ‘Lite’
10. SeaMonkey.   (OK, so I like the Mozilla composer to do quick HTML Pages.   Sue me.) (which wanted to upgrade as soon as I installed.   Whatever)
11. WSFTPle
12. Palm desktop
13. Putty
14. SmartlistToGo, desktop side
15. Servage Web Drive, just because
16. Second Life Windows Client.   Of course, this seems to have issues.       Of course.
17. OpenOffice

OK, now to fix and/or repair the Linux side, due to the mentioned MBR trashing that Windows did to me.

1. Boot CD.
2. Tell it I’m an American that speaks English
3. Tell it I’m Central Time Zone.
4. Tell it manual partition.
5. Tell it nuke the old ext3 partition.
6. Tell it computer name, my name and a pass word.
7. Tell it to import my windows account
8. Watch install bar go across screen
9. Open front door of Godzilla because it’s about to eject CD
10. Click “Restart”
11. Remove CD
12. Press Enter
13. Close Front door of Godzilla
14. log in (it’ rebooted all on it’s on)
15. Open terminal window, issue sudo apt-get update
16. Issue sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
17. Note that I, in theory, didn’t have to do that, because it told me I have software to install.
18. Watch it take 5 minutes to download and update system.   While it’s doing that I check what is installed.     This is the XFCE4 based version, so it’s a little light, but it will do for now.
19. While waiting on the update, I tweaked the grub menu.lst to give me 30 seconds to select OS.     Trivial, but first thing that required any geek skills, assuming you used the automated update system.
20. Issued sudo apt-get install mc ncftp arj xpdf
21. reboot, just to make sure I can get into windows.   And I can.   More or less done for now.

Spent about 20 minutes poking about with Synaptic to find what I wanted installed.   It’s a little crufty, but It’s not bad.   Basicly grabbed all the image processing tools and the KDE development stuff, plus a good size amount of PHP/MySQL/Apache2 stuff.     It’s installing now.   I think I’m going to declare victory and start reading Jane’s.

Other machines:

• Craptop is my game master machine.     Doesn’t do much else.   Lives in my briefcase now.   Need to load it up with d20 Modern stuff today.
• MacCraptop (yes, even worse than yours Art Dude).   Currently has OS 9.2.1 installed.   I think I can get it up to OS 10.3, but getting GCC for that species of OS X might be hard, which means no fink.   OS X with out fink is bad.
• Smallbox.   Rocking away as the household primary machine.   Need to upgrade the external drive “Real Soon Now”.     Most likely after Christmas.   When I do that, however, I’m making it an EXT3 drive, the whole mounting an NTFS drive read/write is starting to be a pain, in that I can’t copy files over to it via Midnight Commander with out turning off the “save settings” flag.     I want that on most of the time, so I can’t just disable it.   Minor bitch.   As it happens, small box is making an ISO of the disk I just used on Godzilla even as I type.
• DellBookPro.     See my post about turning the machine on it side.   As a side note, it may or may not be important to know that standard duct tape is exactly the right width to fit over the hinges of a D600.   The fact that I know this should tell you something about the design of the screen hinges of a D600.   The fact that the default color of a the machine is damn near the same as a normal duct tape tells me something.   Of course Dell is a Texas company, and duct tape is a primary part of the redneck tool kit, so this may or may not be by design.
• Tektux.   My webmaster box, currently living on my desk at $WeSellUsedMacsAndNewWii.   With random free shipping.   Need to spend some quality time on why that is happening.
• Smallmac and Bigmac.   (not really mine, but might as well be.)   A G4 laptop (yes, that one Art Dude) and a G5 iMac.   Both have OS X 10.4.11 Server version install, and the full KDE 3.5 via fink X11 suite.   Nice boxes.   I’m going to try and get Bigmac to really be mine if and when I stop working at $WeSellUsedMacsAndNewWii.   Once I got the fan issue resolved on that box, it’s turned into my favorite computer of all time.     More or less.

Why do I say that? Because I know that this is a Textron Marine and Land Systems Division [formerly Cadillac Gage] “Stingray” light tank, being delivered to it’s only user, Thailand. It weights about a third of what a M1A1 tank weighs (22 vs 67 tons, depending on the breaks). And I knew this before I started using Google. Yeah, pretty much “geek with no life”, that would be me.

It’s still a cool photo.

Hat tip to “From my position… On The way!“

This is Velifer, yet another cat named after bats. Velifer is The Darling Wife’s cat, but he likes any one that will pet him.

He also likes to drink bath water, but only AFTER a human has gotten into it, which is a bit weird.

I, for one, would like to know what this is of.   Regardless, it’s way freaking cool.   I mean, seriously, what the hell?   On the other hand, this does make me want to vote Palin/McCain more than before. I mean, if we can have VP who will hang out with people in odd costumes, in 16 or so years having a President who used to be Prince of Drakenwald will not be so weird.

Or should that be moar kitteh fotoz? Any rate this is Vampyressa Pusilla, normally called Pressa, yep, it’s another cat named after a bat. Pressa is one of Ben, the owner of The Original Game Shop kittens. She’s also great for taking low light photos of because she will hold very still for you.

This is the last photo I took of JoJo, the spherical cat of uniform density.

Rest in Peace my old friend

I’m going to do a set of photos of my various pets. Today it’s “Pipistrellus” or “Pip”. Yes, he’s named after Pipistrellus pipistrellus, the common small gray bat. A lot of my cats are named after bats. It’s a Family Thing.

Pip is also known as “The Miracle Kitty” due to how we found him and what it took to keep him alive. Let’s just say that a “dot com” era bonus check was spent on this cat. May have been the best thing I did with any of those checks.

A while ago, I mentioned in a w00t! post Pops and said I had pictures. Here is a picture of Redheaded Girl in “the pose” in front of the “pops” statue to soda.

In related news, the sole seller of Jolt Cola in Tulsa has decided to NOT carry it any more. I bought the last bottle of it. I am sad. I will be forced to get it on the inter-webs or via trips to OKC.

FedEx’s API as seen from a web master’s point of view.

For starters, it has a _very_ odd method of sending data back and forth, which makes for a _fun_ time getting data parsed.

Then their servers just dies at random.

Then, of course, the whole meter issue.

You will note this is NOT my first rant about FedEx or some aspect of them. I’m seeing a trend.

The sad part is they are best of the package shippers.

Just got weird. Again, with out violating more than my own privacy, I can’t go into the full details of why, but yeah, it’s weird.

On the geek side of life, I’ve beaten ’smallbox’ into submission, and it’s back to being mainly a Linux box, with booting into Windows if and when needed. Can’t say enough good things about Hardy Heron, the latest version of Ubuntu aka Ubuntu 8.04 LTS.

I’ve also gotten quite fond of andLinux on the laptop. Really slick design. Runs a modified version the Linux kernel as a service under XP. You get more or less the full KDE experience if you run ‘kicker’ I’ve got mine configured to be a vertical tool bar on the left hand side of the screen, normally in “hidden” mode, so all you see in windows in a small button with an arrow pointing down. Once you click that, you get the normal KDE 3.5 launcher.

In other geek news I’m going to be starting a D&D 4.0 campaign, with the first “full” game coming up this Sunday. Granted it’s ‘Keep on the Shadowfells” to start with, but until the books and SRD comes out that is what we’ve got. The enWord.org’s “Pre-release” book is also a good starting point. The offical WOTC page for it has a 6th pre gen, which gives some idea on how to level up a Warlord, which is new info.

On the personal front, other than “weirdness”, Redheaded Girl and I need to talk about what the word “puppy” means. The white dog in this photo is the “puppy” that they rescued. She had called me to find out if I could keep it for the afternoon while they dealt with a situation out at Art Dude’s property. I said sure. When I got home, well, I went out to look at the “puppy”. Sorry, if you are that size, you are a dog, not a puppy. I’ll grant it might not be full grown, but still, that’s not a puppy. Sweet dog. Gets along just fine with other dogs (or at least with our 3). No clue about cats, but I’m sure we will find out real soon, given the number of cats Redheaded Girl and Art Dude have. Might keep the semi-tamed raccoon and the opossum off her front porch, but most likely not given that the pit bulls next door to her house.

Update: White dog gets along fine with cats. Some of my cat’s don’t deal well with her however.

On the professional front I’ll be back doing work at $WeSellUsedMacs next week. Don’t know how long that will last, but I’m trying to make it a “full time” part time job. I think, I can do a 20-30 hour week now, but we will see.

Well, not really.

Just a random photo of the violets in my back yard.

Just an important safety note for all you retro-computing people out there. Don’t use the Ubuntu 7.10 network install CD to do any thing more than the CLI version. It will fail when it attempts to start down loading what ever desktop version you tell it to do. I know this, I don’t know why I keep trying.

To install Ubuntu 8.04 with a desktop worth using on an older machine do the following
1) download the xubuntu iso, burn it to CD and install from that or

2) do what I did.
Down load and burn the 7.10 (gutsy) mini iso and burn it.
Install the CLI version of unbutu
Log in.
edit the /etc/apt/sources.list file changing all gutsy to hardy
issue
apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade
take a break
Once you get a command line back issue
apt-get install xorg xubuntu-desktop synaptic
Take longer break.
reboot
Should be in X window with xfc4 running when you get done.

It’s spring. That means I’m taking pictures of flowers. This particular tulip grows in a rather awkward spot in my back yard. Makes mowing a bit tricky. This weekend was weird. Found out that not taking my “blue pills” (no, not those, my 10mg Amphetamine pills) and trying to DM a longish high level (15th plus) D&D 3.5 game isn’t really a good idea. This really isn’t new, just I didn’t really understand what a difference they made. Previous games were (after I started taking the speed) 5-6 hours or more. This one ran about 3 and half hours, and I was wiped out.

I’ve got an appointment with Dr. McClure tomorrow, will talk about weird sleep patterns, hope to go get that taken care of. Still not sure how much is the new anti-depressants, how much was the antihistamines and how much of it was I was in a pretty bad funk for the last 10 days.

On the headache front, I am aware this is not real data, but I can give a single data point on this. Despite what you may read, say here I’ve had one, count it, one, migraine after I changed out the CFL bulbs in my house for normal glowing wire sort of light bulbs. I was having them near daily. This was not helping my mental state. yes, I know, not a real scientific study and the plural of anecdote is not datum, but I do know what has happened to me. Trust me, the other stress factors and migraine triggers in my life right around the time I made that change got worse, not better. I really hope the statements that they have new designs fix this issue or that Ms. Bachmann gets her bill passed.

This is taken with my 50mm lens, opened all the way up, at just right on the edge of it’s minimal focal distance. I took a bunch yesterday, during the hour or so I was 1) awake and 2) not sneezing my fool head off. More later.

My brother, Dafydd (and happy birthday!) has this on going project to take a picture of every commercial building inside the inner dispersal loop of down town Tulsa. OK, every one needs a hobby. At least he’s not trying to see a home football game of every high school in the state, like a former co-worker of mine. Any rate, last week we went down town together to do some photos. I took the photos, he just pointed me where. This one is one of my favorites. It was taking by laying flat on my back and pointing up at the ceiling in the lobby of the Philtower.

I need to go back there and take some photos for the express purpose of using them as textures in second life. More about second life later.

Yeah, I know. Over 3 months ago. Old news What ever. This is what my front lawn looked like. Did I mention that my wife was in the hospital, and that I was temporally staying with my mother,(the chain smoker),my youngest brother and his wife? Not the best time of my life. I strongly suspect it had something to do with me finally going to see a real mental health professional however. Dec 2007 to Feb 2008 is officially the worst 3 months of my life that didn’t have someone important to me die in.

For the love of God, the Invisible Pink Unicorn and the Flying Spaghetti Monster, and every thing else that is holy, I don’t know what to say.