Olympic fever has hit the city! This morning the torch passed through downtown Vancouver and with a little luck and timing, I managed to get a spot right close to where the torch hand off was made.
More images are up on the set on flickr.
In a fit of complete awesomeness, the Jayne Cobb hat I had custom knit for me by the most amazing @rumielf (homepage) arrived! Here's a scary picture for you:
Now granted I don't look like this guy, but I still like it. Here's a short video about the hat and the love of it the fans have.
Now the big question is a) are there other Firefly nerds on the train who'd notice it and b) is it too far out of the norm to wear as a "normal" hat :)
Many thanks again for Elf for her great work and shipping things all the way from the other side of the continent to me!
My review of the first of the new 24 and their collection of the latest and greatest cliches. Or, a quick and dirty 24 plot generator.
- Jack is retired
- Jack is trying to get back to normal life
- Random un-named-but-brown-and-islamic country is on the verge of some great peace breakthrough with the USA [saluting]
- [bad guys] do [bad things] in something unrelated
- [random person] has information that he can only get to Jack
- Jack still has a hotline to the Prez and calls in a favour
- Jack has to get [random person] to a place far from where he is
- Jack and [random person] opt to walk down the street 12 blocks instead of just taking a Taxi
- At the last second more [bad things] from [bad guys] happen
- Jack still tries to get back to normal life
- Freddie Prince Jr.? WTF?
- Starbuck works at CTU!? Awesome. She's hot too.
- Random interpersonal things happen at CTU to gie the illusion that there is character development
- Random un-named-but-brown-and-islamic president seems good and noble but [close person] and [other close person] seem creepy
- Cloe is still at CTU and all moody.
- Cloe is suddenly crippled by a new system. "Ha ha look at the geek who doesn't know stuff!". Oh what an original plot twist.
- Cloe says something ironic and 4th wall breaking... "didn't this happen too fast?"
- Jack is brought back to CTU when he just wants to get back to normal life.
- Hey look, they may have solved it in the first 2 episodes! What are the chances there'll be a [plot twist]
- Random [bad guys] still seem to have unlimited money and personnel to do [bad things] and [bad guy leaders] are all placed high up as [trusted figures]
- Technology!!
- [Bad guys] appear to have a line to [really high up person]
- [Good CTU agent] has a mysterious past and a work cell phone number available to [unsavoury people from the past]
- More random interpersonal stuff happens
- [Bad person suspect] is brought into CTU (I'll bet Jack will get to interrogate [bad person suspect])
- They won't listen to Jack!
- Jack is given the standard "I know you've been a good cop for [long time], but I'm just going to ignore your well thought out argument" response to a well thought out argument.
- I bet Jack will go rouge!
- Jack still tries to get back to normal life
- Jack ignores going back to normal life
- Cloe can't pull up a user dossier, but hack hack into archives of [surveillance] and pull up imagery needed in a few seconds.
- Technology. ENHANCE!!
- Jack and Cloe get themselves into trouble with their own team (I'll bet they have to go rouge!)
- Jack convinces a government agency he doesn't work for to give him support, personnel, weapons from the armory to [follow a wild and crazy hunch]
- DRAMATIC PLOT TWIST!
Then repeat the last 3 steps for the rest of the season.
Welcome to 2010. Wee.... should try to post here more than once every few months, but really nothing that interesting has happened lately. Life seems to be mostly stagnating sadly, so hopefully I'll be able to do something about that in the coming weeks and months. Christmas and new years was great though... a week off of work, great turkey dinner with Family, another great one with friends, a nice New Years Eve with friends watching the Blu Ray edition of Dark Knight on the big screen TV, and not one but two visits with friends flying through from Philadelphia. Other than that the week off was mostly sitting on the couch and doing pretty much nothing. Then at the end of it being pissed off that I pissed away a week of useful time to do the myriad of things needing to be done around the house. Ah well, that's what the 3 hours between coming home from work and going to sleep are for I guess.
It's rough going from a week of nothing to doing stuff, I do wish I had been a bit smarter in prepping for the early mornings instead of going from waking up at 9 or 10am straight to 5:30am. Though I'm still (mostly) lucid this morning somehow.
My biggest piss off is that over the week all the content creators on the Internet that I read and listen to (ie: podcasts) didn't stop, so now I have about 17 hours of podcasts that I feel I have to listen to and can't just delete. That's not even counting the remaining 17 hours of the History of Howard Stern (act III) 10 day retrospective series of the Howard Stern Show... those at least I'm willing to let those wait until I've finished listening to the daily radio show from there. I think I have a problem of sorts in the respect of feeling I have to listen to things.... it's probably a medical condition.
Hopefully work over the next few days will be slow enough that I can just sit and let the talk of tech, Apple, Microsoft, photography and whatever else is in the queue flow over me while I work. Work really hard that is. Yea, that's it.
1am is not the time any sane person should be awake. Nor is it the time that any sane person should be wandering around in the freezing ice-rain in a bathrobe. Nor even more so is it the time that you should be blogging about why.
So Firefly got some work lined up with the newly-falling snow doing snow removal from parking lots. Someone setup something with someone and it basically came down to "we'll probably call you, and it'll probably be in the middle of the night" (to get ready for holiday shoppers no doubt). So we go to bed around 11 (myself a bit later as I was getting Christmas cards done) and I can't sleep anyway, most likely due to the high octane coffee they have at work. So finally just about when I'm ready to get to sleep, the dreaded call comes in.
12:08am
Horrible time, but all things considered, expected. There's talking on the phone, and then rustling around to get the 18 layers of clothing required to run a bobcat in the snow in the middle of the freakin' night. In all of this there's also a lot of burping and sounds of someone not 100% on their game. So being that I was barely asleep anyway, I'm up and about to see what's going on. She's not feeling all that well, but hard to say if it's the fact she was jolted out of sleep to talk on the phone about snow removal or something else. So tea is drawn, a mandarin orange is eaten, and after a while I find I don't need to overreact and my loverly wife is feeling back to normal again, and ready to drive a huge truck, plus trailer with bobcat on it, to Coquitlam (luckily she does have someone driving with her and knows not to push it so I don't have to go all mother hen on her).
Almost time to go back to bed when she's back at the door from the snow/slush/rain combination falling in the -4C temperature to see if I had an ice scraper. Keys to my car are handed off, and then I end up going out to help because they're having problems finding the key hole and making sure the stupid thing is un-alarmed properly (last thing I want is my car alarm going off at 1am).
Let me tell you even with the blubber I have on, and even with the heavy duty housecoat I was wrapped in, that wind cuts right through the exposed skin like you wouldn't believe.
Luckily now they are bundled in a big truck to go off on a bobcat riding adventure and I have noted down the adventure to bring value to this oft-ignored blog and to hopefully let whatever caffeine is still in my system deplete enough that the next 4 hours will be blissful sleep.
What would be really awesome to have on the iPhone, and I'm sure it's completely doable, as the device is just a little computer, is advanced incoming phone call management, like Google Voice. For example, I'd love to be able to set up my phone so that:
- Contacts from my "business" category are either silent or go directly to voicemail from 8-12 and 1-5 Monday to Friday
- Contacts from my "family" category ring regardless of ringer mode
- Contacts from "family" after 10pm ring twice as long as normal before going to voicemail (to let me wake up and find the phone)
- If calling after 11pm and the soucrce is my brother-in-law's #, immediately goes to the whiney "but I have to get up early to go to work" voicemail and he gets an electric shock in the ear...
Ok, so the last one is a bit mean and unrealistic, but you can see the potential. Actually looking at this list I can see the awesomeness of Google Voice which until now I didn't quite get. Sadly until it goes international, us poor Canadians are out of luck. I wonder if one of the reasons that the GV app was rejected from the iPhone was because Apple can do these things and are maybe planning some of this awesomeness for iPhone OS 4.0?
Random thoughts at midnight-thirty while I can't sleep and have to get up in 5 hours.
Question: Do you ever worry about your cat getting annoyed at you for petting it while it's trying to sleep, and it not being able to sleep because you keep on petting it?
Answer: I wouldn't worry about it. Think about this. When you get home from work after a twelve hour day and find your cat sleeping on the bed, realize that it's probably been there since you left in the morning, with only minor interruptions of turning around. Keeping him or her from sleeping because you keep on petting the little bugger to hear them purr is the last of their worries.
A list, in no particular order:
- The rude ass in front of my and to the left who had his cell phone out a bunch during the first half of the movie. I don't care if you're texting or checking your email or whatever, but hide the bright white screen so it's not shining in my eye while I'm trying to enjoy the world blowing up.
- The maybe crying, maybe laughing, maybe just heavy breathing woman to my right. Honestly, I have no idea why she was making so much noise.
- The noisy, chatty, moving around, going out to refill their popcorn and pop, rude ass little high school brats in front of me. For all I know they were having sex with all the rustling around they were doing.
- Commenty mc-chatterson behind me. Not enough to deserve a comment or look, but enough to annoy the hell out of me.
- Pre-bagged popcorn. Really, if I'm paying what they charge for popcorn and butter I want my popcorn well mixed with the butter, not for you (pimply cashier kid who you can tell doesn't give a shit) to get a bag of popcorn already full, drizzle a bit of butter over the top, and give it to me.
Oh the movie? Oh it was fine actually, the world blowing up with great special effects, and a minimal of that silly character development stuff (actually it did have some pretty good characters in it) made it a fun ride.
The rest of the experience however, aims to make me want to justify a big screen TV and blue-ray plwyer so I don't have to deal with the other humans in the movie theaters as much.
So this morning I woke up and my first generation Drobo was acting funny. I rebooted it, and long story short when it came back it looks like the first 2TB partition, where all my data was stored, was gone, currupted, nuked, or otherwise unavailable. All my music, tagged over a period of months. All my videos, collected over years, and my collection of "classics" I've been making sure I get so that they are safe. All 13 seasons of Top Gear. All 40+ years of Doctor Who. All. Gone.
I've emailed off to Data Robotics, and I will gladly pay them the $100 (or hell, $500) support license I decided not to renew last year (because of course everything was going fine) if they can magically get it back for me.
Of course, if it does come back, will I now be able to trust the device? Or will I have to build a new system with another wack of disk space to act as a backup for that (blah blah best practices of course blah blah)? Or should I just dump the $1000+ worth of computer hardware and build another Linux box with RAID5 or buy a Windows Home Server box that does similar things.
I hate computers. Especially now as the Drobo was something that was rock solid and had had zero issues in the time I've had it. Data Robitics, or Cali Lewis, help me, you're my only hope!
Seriously, this is completely bummed me out.
Update: After a few back and forths with Valorie at Data Robitics, and the end result of this being "just run the disk utillity", plus running a couple of other mac data recovery bits, the Drobo seems to have righted itself somehow. It told me first it couldn't recover anything, but after a bit more mucking around I suddenly noticed a "Storage1" (the name of the partition) sitting on my desktop. Drilling into it I could see my data, and drilling down farther I could (wait for it!) access my data!
Yay!
So now I'm frantically backing up, though I'm not sure if this really needs a backup or not. I'm also going to be picking up a 1 or 2 TB secondary backup tomorrow to have a backup for my backup, just in case. However, my data, my precious data appears (so far) be be alive. The backup is going to take about 5 hours it says, so we'll see if it makes it through that without incident.
Yay!
A bit ago I got an almost-free computer from work with a couple of parts I wanted to upgrade my home system, bumping the CPU a bit and replacing the video card that goes WRRRAAAAAAWWWRRRRRRR-ER-ER-ER WRRRRRAAAAAWWWWRRRR with something a little quieter. Last night I finally got around to switching the parts, and found a couple of issues moving from the nVidia TI-4200 video card to an ATI Radeon 9250, so I figured I'd document it as an excuse to get something on this page so it doesn't completely stagnate.
First of all, I did it completely wrong, and simply shut down the system, swapped the video cards and booted it up. The graphics, which were configured for the nVidia card completely failed when booting up, giving me just a flashing console as it tried to run X11 with a driver for a card that wasn't installed at all.
I was lucky and had a computer next to me that I could ssh into the linux system and do maintenance remotely, however if you don't have this, read this to find out how to edit the GRUB config on boot to enter single user mode.
To recover the video, the first step was to remove that customization from the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. I have no idea why I had device specific configuration in there, as the last couple of Ubuntu releases have required only a skeleton file and will figure out your video cards for you. So the section I had at the bottom which looked like this:
Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
Driver "nvidia"
Option "NoLogo" "True"
EndSection
was removed.
Next I removed the nvidia packages I had installed:
$ dpkg -l | grep nvidia | grep ii
[list of packages, for me they were the "173" version, you might have different ones]
$ sudo apt-get remove nvidia-settings nvidia-glx-173 nvidia-common nvidia-173-kernel-source
And then install the non-free, evil, binary only packages for the ATI drivers (in theory I could have rebooted, let the system boot up with the default video drivers and install the restricted drivers from the 'hardware' application under the system configuration menu).
$ sudo apt-get install fglrx-kernel-source xorg-driver-fglrx
Packages install, reboot, and voila, the system should boot up as normal.
