Heaven and hell

Heaven is knowing what you have done and knowing it is good. Hell is knowing what you could have done, and knowing it was great.

Joke

A large group of Taliban fighters is moving down a ravine in the Korengal Valley, in southern Afghanistan, when they hear a hoarse voice call from behind a sand-dune in a mocking tone, "Yo, muj, did you know that one Marine Marine is better than ten of you smelly Talib?" Insulted to the quick (though he did indeed smell), the Taliban commander sent ten of his best men over the rocky hill, whereupon a gunbattle broke out immediately. The gunbattle was short, but vicious, punctuated by screams of agony and fear in Dari and Pushtu. Then there was silence. A moment later, there was a snicker, then the same voice called out, "Bad Muj! Didn't you know one grunt is better than any hundred so-called Taliban fighters?" Furious now, the Taliban commander sent his next best hundred men up and over the incline and instantly a terrible gunfight ensued. The sharp chatter of M-4 fire barked out in counterpoint to the dull clatter of the Kalashnikovs, interspersed with the detonations of grenades and screams of agony and fear in Pushtu and Dari. After a full five minutes of battle, silence reigned heavily across the valley. A moment later that same mocking voice called out, though to be fair to the muj, the grunt was obviously breathing at least a little bit faster. The voice called out, "Bad Muj, silly muj, you have to know that one grunt is better than one thousand sheep-loving Taliban!" Thoroughly enraged now, the Taliban commander mustered a full thousand of his fighters and sent them into the fight. RPGs hissed and boomed, hand grenades exploded, echoing down the Korengal Valley and even PKM fire rattled and roared over all the small arms fire. At last, one badly wounded muj fighter appeared, crawling down the military crest of the ridge. "Don't send any more men," he gasped as the life fled his body, "It's a trap. There's two of them." Defence Tech

Good night everybody!

B52 makes it home

"... the fuel proves structural integrity for the wing ..." Learned something new. I've heard that said about the B1. The B1 leaks like a sieve, or sweats fuel, until it gets to altitude where it immediately refuels before heading off to it's mission.

That pilot is probably younger than the plane.

Good times

Ah, Summer. I could say this reminds me of when I was a kid, except for the safety helmets. Wait, was that me? I suppose one too many raps on the noggin.

Very Local News (2009-05-29)

• The CIA is recruiting out of work bankers and financial annalists. it is a pay cut, but it is a steady job hunting down the financial footprints of drug dealers and terrorists.
  
• "This is the first generation in China to have the luxury of selfishness." Buick and Volkswagen are number one sellers in China. No one has siblings or aunts or uncles or cousins. It is a nation of only children. What else do they have besides themselves?
  
• Places like Africa are bypassing computers. People have a mobile phone and use it for banking and all communications. There are only 10000 land line s in Congo (which is a country by the way). The price of coper may drop as countries bypass land line all together. SMS is increasing literacy rates around the world (text short hand anyway.)
  
• "Why do we have such an expensive navy if we never use it?" Because, that way, we never have to use it. our navy is so go, no one else even tries to compete. They have navies. Not like ours. It can't even take out a bunch of chicken-shit pirate-wanna-bes.
  
• On the BBC, there is a guy I like to listen to named Mayo. Mayo does insiteful interviews and yet sounds like a human being while doing them. So he sounds smooth. Mayo is on vacation at the moment. A guy named Bacon is standing in for him who sounds, well, crunchy and loud. No wonder my cholesterol is high.

Why I use Twitter

As I turned forty, I was racked by pangs of guilt for having not done so much in my youth. I have friend, I think she is 24. Here are the last 18 or so hours of her life on twitter.

• i love austin radio - josh abbott live on kvet about 17 hours ago
• a bit drunk, thanks trudys! about 14 hours ago
• my buzz was killed when my friend turned into a trailer park for a party this is austin! i thought i left east tx! about 13 hours ago
• bleh it reeks of wee d about 13 hours ago
• honestly i worry about my bestie & the questionable friends she makes about 13 hours ago
• gay bar about 12 hours ago
• i think i need to stay somewhat sober tonight & babysit - fuck about 12 hours ago
• ust got told i was gorgeous by a guy in the group about 11 hours ago
• bleh! no more shots! paalease! about 11 hours ago
• i dont know why but i feel the need to sign thank u when i say it, esp. when drunk about 11 hours ago
• dude please! not into gay guys! about 10 hours ago
• so much for staying sober! fuckkk about 10 hours ago
• dude a guy who looked like a porn star hit on me about 9 hours ago
• im Fing hungry! & McDs is only taking cash! bitches about 9 hours ago
• my head...ugh 23 minutes ago
• why were there so many shots last night 21 minutes ago

I missed nothing as a tween, teen or twerty. Twerty being that 21-35 I'm an adult now. Get out of my way era.

She is not doing anything wrong. She is not doing much that is stupid, except possibly riding around from place to place with the most sober person behind the wheel instead of the sober person behind the wheel. I'm not wagging my finger. I'm just saying this is a great reminder that I did some of this and made the decision to become an old fart. I did this as a means of self preservation and I should not think of all that partying and casual sex that I didn't have as a bad thing. I'm in it for the long haul.

Link to Mrs Priss Twitter MySpace

Very Local News

• The Norks blew a second nuke, just to say that the first one was not a fluke. The leader of North Korea is still nuts, but now appears to be dying of some disease. Who will get the keys?
• The supreme court judge says her race will play a large part in her decisions. NPR was talking about a family that are owned by blacks. This whole race bias generation makes me sick. Racism is racism.
• The only thing that will fix the automobile industry as a whole is 40% fewer cars beeping made. This from someone who said they were an expert on a BBC podcast. It must be true.
• Stores have "earthquake supply" isles in some California communities. Sounds about right. We have hurricane supply kits here that look remarkably similar.
• In Briton, a dog was lost for 25 days. It had been down a hole somewhere and was only able to escape because it lost weight. They only found him after someone said something on a local radio station.

Time Warner vs AOL

I knew the moment I hard the two were joining up that AOL and Time Warner wouldn't last. The marriage outlasted my expectations. I thought five years was the magic number. They were the kind of combination that marketing and management things will work, but engineers and grunts know is doomed. A competitor to the internet and a provider of TV commercials don't have much in common. The only thing they had in common was a tenancy to sandbox their customers. That they agreed on.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but when two companies split and one is just left to fend for itself, isn't that a sign of its impending failure? The wording of the news note I got this morning was vague and neutral. Not that I expected  anything more definitive.

"Time Warner will exact AOL like a cancer, leaving it to fester, wither and die, stock holder be dammed."

At least that would make for better water cooler conversation. I just don't think AOL has a sustainable business model unless it starts to compete with iTunes or Facebook in some way. That is what AOL wanted to become after all. They failed in their own special way. Maybe this is a second chance to fail a third time.

Very Local News

• NPR had a snippet in one of the podcasts bitching how much the Swine Flu virus has delayed illegal workers from picking tobacco and other crops. They just don't get it.
• The only thing I have against the BBC at the moment is that they treat tennis like a sport.
• The MSM is just now getting in to Twitter and Facebook. I hear that Twitter and Facebook are running in to problems in the area of making money. They only sites that are successful on the internet it seems are free sites or sites that are run by Google. think of all the new wonderful ideas that are not making it to the internet because no one can figure out how to make money at them.
• I ran out of podcasts before lunch today. Drag. I think one of the services went down. ARGH!! I'm going to have to look in to it.
  
• I lost a friend's information. I'm sure I lost it due to my own incompetence at keeping track of such things. this friend is going to be difficult to find because everyone I think of to ask for his info is not on speaking terms with him.
• Bumper sticker "If guns kill people, do pencils misspell words?" I like that one.

I'm old

I have bad cholesterol. My LDL (bad) is to high and my HDL (good) is too low. I have five times higher risk of heart attack than I should. I have to take a pill that slowly destroys your liver for six weeks and reassess. A life of salads it is for me.

Zombie attack

Someone at work asked "How does it feel tome come to work when it looks like the plague has wipted out half the population?"

I laughed and answered " You half expect Humvees with guys in has-mat suits to wave you through check points."

Oddly enough, the bus was packed with people headed to retail jobs or somewhere with the kids. The bus number '2' does not run on holidays. Who knew.

Where are the zombies? This scene needs zombies. Wait, I feel like a zombie. I have to work on a holiday. I have to get eaten alive by mosquitoes giddy for the meal. I had trouble sending a tweet for swatting at them. I walked in to a spider web earlier. I can't find any bites. God was with me.

I'll play the part and go bite someone's head off. I'm the red headed zombie smiling and happy to be outside and away from work.
"Brains... BRAINS... BRRRRAAAAAAIINNS!" That's it.

Very Local news

• I wonder now if my monitor is the problem or if it is a piece of software causing my trouble. The symptoms I described the other day continue. The only time I leave my computer on long enough for the power saver function to kick in is when I run gpodder over night. I need to do some further testing.
• Kelly to God. I would love to win the lottery and call myself a writer.
• Several of these 1 U servers need half hight cards.The face plates need to be swapped on the small PCI cards to make them fit. It is annoying when you have to trade up.
• Investment brokers make money via the inefficiencies in the market. These inefficiencies are also known as investors.
• My father gave me some shirts. The one I'm waring is blue with some raised horizontal stripes. While checking to make sure I had the shirt on right side out, I noticed it is an Izod. How old is this shirt?
• Our old Maytag dryer was 220. We had someone put a 110 plug on it. I'm told that may have contributed to it's demise.
• In Briton MP (elected representatives) are in trouble for expensing way too much for second homes. There is talk of building them an apartment block for their second homes. I will laugh my ass off if all those folks have to live next door to each other.
• The star of an Oscar winning movie is now homeless. the nine year old girl in Slumdog Millionaire is on the streets with her family. Their home was knocked down as part of a clean up effort in Mumbi India.
• Under Taliban rule, a woman cannot take a sick child to the doctor without a grown male escort.
• Mowed Woo-hoo!! The front yard only. No weed eating. Still, Woo-hoo!

Wichita Pandemonium

I was born in Wichita. How proud I am that this asshole is the first chance I get to blog about my home town. I don't think any one I know lives there now. Wichita is where B-52s were built in the fifties and sixties.

The music is well placed. I read somewhere that some one got hurt, so we are not supposed to laugh.

This infant of a man was asked to turn his music down and drove down the street and through city hall.

I've done this

Only, I didn't get my teeth kicked in.

Hold the weapon away from your face and do not try to lock your arm.  I've fired a pistol grip shotgun with two hands up toward the face, from the hip and one handed held out like a pistol. It ain't easy. It is wicked fun though.

Engine assembly (virtual)

I've always liked exploded diagrams and engine animations. This one is just too easy. It seems like they missed something.

Monitor

My monitor is dying .It did not give me enough life. It is out of warranty. I'm going to have to replace it.  Drag. Today is not a good day for the broke. I am in luck. 22 inch LCD monitors run about $200 on Amazon. That is not too shabby. Some are more and some are less. of course. I do want DVI connections. and I would like 1920x1080 resolution. The one I have is a smidge short of that. No big deal to be honest.

I kind of want to buy this and then find a use for it. Not sure why.

If I were buying today, this is the one I would go with. It is a Dell, but I won't hold that against it. There are a ton of monitors still available that do not have DVI. That cracks me up.

The symptoms of my current monitor are similar to things I've seen in the labs at work. The monitor switches on dimly and then switches itself off. You turn it off and back on and it tries again. Sometimes it comes on for good. The number of times you have to switch it on before it stays increases and patients to deal with it decreases as time passes. One day it stops working all together. I've found that turning the brightness and contrast all the way up helps the monitor survive a bit longer.

My parents bought me this monitor. I've really gotten good use out of it. I use it every day.

Father's day Ideas

Handy toy, er tool to keep in the shed. I'll mount this thing on the roof and give the racers a five second head start then it is 'pew pew pew!!!' "Scatter you you parasites!" 'pew pew pew!!!' Bet I could sell tickets to that.

V

I grew up a while ago and we watched V on TV. The new one looks a bit like the old one. Better CGI, well it has CGI. The old one had a moment where some chick's jaw came loose and she ate a mouse while it was kicking. My parents watched V. Every one watched V. It was some kind of event. It was before everyone had cable. We still do not have cable. I prefer having the internet. Screw cable TV.

Where was I? Oh, this time around will not be an event. I plan on skipping the TV showing of V and waiting for it to hit the Internet in legal form. If that does not occur in a comfortable length of time, I will consitter other options. Same as always.

Watch

I haven't worn a watch in a long time. I have one watch I like. I t is stylish and charges itself. I have a problem where watches go dead sitting on my arm. If there is metal to skin contact the battery in the watch goes dead long faster than I like. The watch I have is a self winding watch. I would still ware it, but the band is worn out. I have a feeling the following watch would do the trick. It is tough and charges with exposure to light. It would charge during my walks to and from the bus every day so my super power to kill watch batteries would little effect on it.

Amazon.com Product Description The rugged and sporty Casio G-Shock digital watch features atomic timekeeping via radio signal for extreme accuracy, enhanced shock resistance, and water resistance up to 660 feet (200 meters). This solar powered watched comes with a power saving function and offers a battery life of 11 months on full charge without further exposure to light. The stylish gold-toned digital display comes with an automatic electro-luminescent backlight with afterglow, and three circular digital displays at the top provide additional information such as mode, timing, and battery level. The world time can be set for up to 29 different time zones (30 cities), with optional daylight savings and a city code display. The automatic calendar shows the month, date, and day below the time and is pre-programmed through 2099. This convenient, world-savvy watch also comes with a 1/100 second stopwatch, four daily alarms and one snooze alarm, a time recorder, and hourly time signals. Designed for durability, the watch is built with a stainless steel bezel and a mineral dial window. The dark gray case and band are made of resin and further the watch's ruggedly casual look. This watch is backed by a 1-year limited manufacturer's warranty. Amazon

I used to ware a watch that look much like this one. I miss having a water resistant watch.

Amazon.com Product Description Set a course for adventure every day you wear this Casio Pathfinder Triple Sensor men's digital watch (model PAG40-3V), which includes a built-in digital compass, altimeter, barometer, and thermometer. The digital compass displays 16 directions and has a 5-set memory capacity that captures direction, month, date, and measurements time data. The altimeter measures up to 32,800 feet (10,000 meters) in 20-foot (5-meter) increments, and it can store 50 sets of altitude memory with date and temperature. It also provides a target altitude alarm and graphing capability for target and altitude tendency. This large, round watch features a gray/green resin case that's topped by a black bidirectional bezel with compass markings. It offers a 1/100-second stopwatch with a 60-minute measuring capacity and elapsed time, split time, and 1st/2nd place time modes. It also includes a daily alarm, optional hourly time signal, and 12/24-hour formats. Other features include a comfortable resin strap, scratch-resistant mineral crystal, and AfterGlow LED electro-luminescent backlight, and water resistance to 100 meters (330 feet). Amazon

That is another watch that is like the first one on steroids. It is a bit over the top. No, it is way over the top. Tells temperature and altitude for God's sake.

Anti-artillery

Quote from the original poster.

Counter Rocket Artillery and Mortar System used to defend Balad AB Iraq. It may not be 100% effective but it has saved many lives.

The original poster says this is Iraq. I can't quite get the accent of the man speaking toward the end. He sounds upset more than from any particular place. I can't blame him.

Very Local News

• My phone didn't charge last night Not sure, but I bet the plug didn't go all the way in the socket. I noticed before I walked out the door this morning, but what are you going to do? Glad I have the old Motorola charger. I use it as a travel charger. Handy using USB ports for connectors on phones.
  
• Gallery Furniture burned to the ground. Of any one in the world, that guy, what's his name?, will survive. I know someone who knows his family. They tell me he is kind of nuts. You have to be to run a business these days. He ran for years with a pile of furniture covered by a tarp. I don't remember when the warehouse went up. Channel 2 had the camera on the roof of their studio watching the fire and smoke from 26 miles away.
• More efficient cars.
• People drive more, make more discretionary trips. Go places and buy things when they get there.
  
• More people on the road. More accidents. More congestion.
• More use and less taxes. The more efficient you make vehicles the higher you have to jack up taxes to make up the difference.
• Forget White Castle. McDonald's is getting in to small hamburgers along with mini donuts and all things fast food. Experts say it is a fad. Nat got some mini burgers from Jack in the Box. I haven't tried them. She says they taste like the big burgers.
• Ralph Nader is back on the car industry's back. He is attacking DRM in automobiles. Cars are so frigging complex that car companies have locked out local repair shops. They want to force people to use their computers and software to fix your car. It is the same idea as printer ink cartridges. Bastards. Go Nader. Give'em hell.
• Marketplace Money did a whole show on retirement. It was depressing  because I will never retire. I hope I will not be a burden on anyone, but I think I will work until the day I drop.
  
• You can't park a mobile home (and live there) for under $2000 a month in Southern California. How fucked up is that?
• In Germany, people get about 70% of their salary after retirement. In the U. S. it is about 40%. In thirty years neither will have enough people paying in to support those being paid. Both will fail long before that moment.
• The only thing it would take to fix the Social Security problem is to raise the retirement age to either 70 or 72. That would fix it for a while. Young people today envision 75 or 80 as a retirement age. Young people being defined here as 25. God I'm old.
  
• Started a copy of about 10G to my 16G thumb drive. It started and said 121 minutes for the copy. This is on a Windows box. I checked on it ten minutes later and it said ten minutes. Useless.
• When I have the computer read to me I speed it up. Same with the blind library tape player. When I listen to blogs, I wish there was a way to speed it up. I remember being able to speed up media in MS player. I can do it with mplayer on Linux. Not xmms as far as I can tell. I'll keep looking.

Bit of a hard right turn

The chopper takes a deliberate hard right turn just after clearing the ground. Surely it is to thrill/terrify the passengers.

Hard Drive Order

geek warning

I added a drive to a computer yesterday at work. First of all, I really like SATA over IDE, not only for performance, but the cables are much easier to deal with in a crowded machine and no jumpers to play with. That said, the drive I added refused to come up in the BIOS. It turns out I was hitting the wrong key for selecting the SATA port settings. Duh!.

The computer had two drives in it already. This was the third. I added it, after figuring out the key combination, and it came up as /dev/sdb, kicking the existing second drive to /dev/sdc. The drives were plugged in to the system board in order, so some other mechanism is used to determine the /dev/sd? order.

After digging a bit, the solution is not to use /dev/sd?.  In new Linux distributions there is /dev/disk/by-path or /dev/disk/by-label that will get you around some of the problems above even when using USB disks, which I've hit the same trouble with recently.

This doesn't help me with the older systems. It seems like you have to write every script fifteen times to overcome the disparity between OSes. Nothing works for everything. This is a time where the autonomy of Windows winds out. Even though the crappy batch and scripting environment of Windows is limited, it does offer one stop shopping on many fronts. Even Microsoft has to move forward, thus breaking the way things work. They just take their sweet time about it. Open source moves in leaps and bounds compared to most of the grinding lumbers of Old MS.

How many times have you booted your system with a USB key plugged in and your DVD disappears? That kind of crap still happens.

Very Local News

• Wimbledon has a roof now. Bring it on Mother Nature. I hate tennis. If I had perfect vision, I would hate tennis.
  
• For the longest time of history, the winners of conflicts wrote the history books. Now, that is changing. Loosers are getting a say in "how and why it happened". This is leading to deterioration of the right to rule if you are a winner. Any one who has won something is now vilified for not surrendering in the first place. It is nuts. Only winners who then completely destroy the losers will survive the scrutiny of people who had nothing to do with the conflict.
• I thought Twitter had a setting to prevent people from following you unless your OKed it without making your profile private. Couldn't find that setting. I blocked a couple spam bots. May have blocked a couple real people. Not sure you can undo a block. don't care really.
• I may have to get the extended battery for my g1. It is dying just as walk in the door in the evening.

Very Local News

• I heard on one of the podcasts that more efficient vehicles and engines are coming. One of the 'innovations' was more diesel engines. it is about frigging time. How many times have I bitched about the U. S. not letting small diesel engines in? Ford already has them in Europe and elsewhere.
• One of the podcast geeks is making a huge deal of switching from Windows to Mac. Pussy. Go Linux if you want a change. He keeps saying he is switching from 'PC' to Mac. I suppose it is like calling all drinks a Coke. this guy ranted for an entire show about how great Macs are. I agree. They are wonderful. They are also three times the cost of a comparable box. You get what you pay for. This is a gaming podcast and I have a feeling our little podcaster is growing up.
• There is a jack hammer six floors below. It is maddening. Hopefully it will nto be there all day. Hopefully it will fix the drainage problem at the corner so I do not have to step over a puddle of smelly glop every morning after exiting the bus.
• Took a ten minute lunch today. Walked outside long enough to warm my brain with some sunshine. I have to take a lunch that quick because I'm leaving at 16:00 for Elle's kindergarten graduation and would not take a lunch, but if I do not take a lunch, they dock me an hour. I hit a stopping point at around lunch time and walked around out back.

• Elle graduated Kindergarten today. I live tweeted the event out of sheer boredom. It did bring a tear to most eyes in the room.

Wol-Sheeeeit

I hate to tell you fine educated folks out there, but this is what the rest of the world thinks of the centre of the U. S. and her citizenry. All the TV shows are made in New York and California. The people who make the shows call the rest of the country 'the fly over states'. If we want to improve the image of the U. S. as a whole, we need to start exporting TV shows and movies of real people from the country, not just two states.

This guy is ignorant. He is drunk. He and is rotund love are making a show that will take international relations back in time a hundred and fifty years. This clip will be playing in the UN for weeks and they will call it a documentary.

Forget licensing the gun, you need to license the damn video cameras.

Not Running for the Bus

I've mentioned before that I do not run to catch the bus. It is a principle of mine that I've managed to stick with. Today a bus was going by the stop long before I got there. I was content with taking my time to cross the street. I pretty much have to do so or die.

The Bus driver wanted to wait for me. I tried to signal him on, but someone else ran past me across the street. He bolted with only a glance for oncoming traffic. He was clear, and had young eyes so I'm sure he was safe. After he got on the bus the drive still wanted to wait for me. "Damn-it!" I waved my hand for him to go. I'm sure he made some hand gesture to tell me that he would wait. I cannot see that either.

I hate this situation. There is a breakdown of communication all round. I refuse to run for the bus because if I get hit by a car or trip over a stone, Metro is not going to pick up the tab. I do not want to be detracted by being in a hurry while I cross the street. The driver is not mean, he/she just doesn't understand my situation. I cant let myself get angry.

Besides, it was beautiful this morning. The dawn was bright and the brown waves of dead grass were waving in the unmowed fields. Just the right amount of breeze was blowing. Screw the bus. I want to sit at the bus stop and surf the net on my phone for twenty minutes. Smell the roses.

Very Local News

• I need to look in to the google voice thing. It sounds like a useful tool. Wonder if it works as advertised.
• We had a birthday at work. The cake was good. People kind of like having the cake at 15:00. I say we have a monthly birthday cake, just for the hell of it. If there is a month with no one in it, we celebrate having a cake to eat. I've never worked anywhere that did this. They tried at Ridgway's, but it didn't work.
• You can cook guava plants, the plant that tequila is made from, but it takes 3 days of pit roasting to get them in an edible state.

Too Cool Cat

This little guy is a bit too calm. Of course, he knows he will survive a jump from the plane. I can't help but think that if anything does spook the little guy, he will go right for the pilot's eyes. and never look back.

Fiction "Gravity 101"

"The board was all green a couple seconds ago." Art tried to have an even tone over the comm. HQ would not be pleased over his denting their new toy. First came a thud, then came a scraping sound that was clearly metal on metal. Never a good sound in orbit. Now it was back to silence except for Angel-4.

"Full damage report!" Angel-4 demanded. That was impossible. The ship was still in motion and the debris field was drifting off in a direction away from view. It would take half an hour to properly deploy ball-bots, zero G maintenance robots, to check things out.  That was not going to happen.

"None of the aft thrusters are reporting, but they still work." Art read from the screen to his right. That same screen would be displayed in front of Angel-4 several thousand kilometres down. The thrusters are semi-autonomous and very adaptive. You have to feed them to a tree-chipper to stop them from at least trying their little transistors out to make the ship go in the correct direction. They might be dangling by their control clusters and still moving the ship accurately.

Art mumbles "Ask me if the catch is OK." He knows its coming. Salvage/Repair/Maintenance (SRM) is cut-throat and he just knows ...

"What happened to the T-3?" blares the headset. Angel-4 waists little time getting to the point.

Arte slams the manual manoeuvring controls and squawks "Turning for a better look." and then making sure the mike is off continues in an angry mumble "Show me how much you just lost us Art."

Art's mind wonders. The only reason they have people in these tugs is the unions. Things like this is why people are constantly taken out of loops all over the place. You can't get a burger made by a human. Not for years.

Then something comes in to view through the window. A lump of expensive electronics, that kind of resembles a stepped on hamburger, spins majestically ever shedding little sparkly bits. 

The thought bubble above Art's head would be full of jumbled symbols and resemble a stepped on hamburger right about now. He fidgets for controls. The one he wants isn't there. He really wants to be beamed away to an island with no outside contact and lots of coconut palms. Maybe a pineapple tree. A vision of a homemade hamburger with thick pineapple slice distracted him for a moment.

"Status!" shrieks the voice of an agitated Angel-4. Art nearly jumps out of his skin, beads of sweat lining the inside of his visor. Those things are not supposed to fog up under normal circumstances.

Art replied "Give me a minute." in a tone that spoke volumes. He only meant to shut Angel-4 up for a second to let him think, but the cat leaped from the bag. Art expected Angel-4 to come back on screaming, but only silence. Typing up the pink slip, surely.

What did this contraption do anyway?

Art tapped a couple keys and came up with a description. Normally he didn't give a tinkers damn, but now that he would be paying for evaporating lawn ornament for the rest of his career, he thought it might be nice to know.

It was a movement monitor satellite. That is, it monitored people's movements. They dotted the skies looking down and keeping tabs on the citizenry every moment. This one did not belong to the government, it was private. "Is that even legal?"he muttered to himself.

Art thought for a second, but Angel-4 clanged and interrupted his thought. "TXI-16, " Art thought it was a good sign they are using his call name. "... Art, " Crap. "We have a visual. Get all the pieces you can and prepare to hold foe inspection."

"Understood." Art's voice surprised him. He sounded like someone who still had a job. Can't even flip burgers these days.

### To be continued. Maybe.

OK, it stinks. I am not a fiction writer. I dabble and come up blank most of the time. I'm still putting it on the blog for no good reason.

Doctor's visit

So, I turned forty and had my first r5eal physical in like sixteen years or so. It was a thorough physical. Things looked good from the visit itself. The blood work will come in later this week.  I got an EKG and that looked good too.

We went to the hospital to get a chest x-ray. I'm forty, apparently that is just on the list of things to do. I still have my ever-cough. No swollen nodes or lumps where there are not supposed to be lumps. Pending the blood work, I'd fetch a good price at auction.

At the hospital, Nat and I were the only white people there. Every one else in the place was Hispanic. Even the people behind the counter. I really need to learn Spanish.  It won't be that long before Spanish comes first around here. I've hard Stories about that happening in San Antonio already.

It is such a nice day outside, I'm happy to have had a chance to go out in it. The weather is dry and cool. There is a breeze blowing. Nat got mad at me for stepping outside without telling her at the hospital. I couldn't help myself. There was a bench in the shade that called my name.

I'm so glad I took the whole day off. It was really nice not to be rushed between errands. Did the yard yesterday, though it still looks like crap. Need to weed whack every fifteen minutes to stay ahead of the lawn. The front flower bead needs weeding. Nat swears she is on top of it. Fortunately, I am not supposed to lift anything with my right arm because of the way I bled for the blood work. I'm going to kick back and surf the net.

Yeee-haw!!!

My other truck is even dirtier.

The trouble with having the biggest truck is, who is going to pull you out when you get stuck.

More Please

If every one who ran from the cops got shot in the head, I bet people would stop running from the cops.

Car of the future

We will all be in these things if Obama has his way. Where are the crumple zones you ask? You knees are the crumple zone. Show me the child safety seat .........

UAV, Still boring

I did a search on UAV and this little guy is the only one that impressed me. The breakthrough will come when there is no need fror a remote or a pilot at all. When I just talk to the thing and it knows what to do, I'll be impressed.

And that music! blekh!

Flash, for the hell of it

So, for the first time I went to Pepsi's  web page. I was trying to find some information about the drinks that Pepsi is coming out with that use sugar instead of corn syrup as a sweetener. Nat wa happy when she found Mexican (made in Mexico) Coke for sale in Sam's Club. The laws dictate the use of sugar in Mexico. Not 100% sure why. Must have something to do with subsidies and protectionism. Regardless, Pepsi has done what companies should do. They started making something that their customers want. More companies and indeed industries could learn from Pepsi's lead.

RIAA and the music industry insists on sewing people to make them buy their products instead of altering their offerings to match what people want to buy. They were so slow at it that cottage industries have grown up to answer the call and provide services and products without so much as offering 90% to the music companies for permission to make a dime themselves. These folks should look up the word capitalism before condemning each other.

The web page for Pepsi and Coke are chucked full of Flash. It is a troubled method of presenting cool stuff. The mechanism is a disaster. The little bit I've worked in Flash I was amazed how muchs stress was put on the system to make a ball bounce around. The OS doesn't seem to matter. There is something inharrently wong with Flash across the board.  Linux Flash doesn't work most of the time. I have better luck running the windows version of Firefox with flash installed under Wine. That tells me that it is Flash's fault that it sucks and not Linux.

People in charge of selling things seem to think that colorfull, shiny, noisy pages are better than content for getting the message across. The message is "buy our products." so what is there to tell me that I don't know by the time I go to your site? Give me some frigging content. Coke even has some forum heavy on graphics and gizmoes that they call a web 2.0 social network. That page can be shut down with the wave of a pen. I would not want to be tied to it.

All of the capitalist world is missing the point. It isn't glitz. It is information. If you don't have anything constructive to add to the conversation, shut up and let people buy your products.

Perhaps a class in local birds

As I put this little video in the editor I use for my blog entries it refused to paste. I had to go back several times and copy from the place I found it, back to the editor and paste again. It finally took pasting in to another program, a real text editor and not google docs, before I was able to copy properly and paste in to google docs. I blame google docs. Google docs suck. Now, the animatino does not suck.

Found here .

Kizzy passed away

Kizzy was my mom's little dog. She passed some time this last week. Kizzy is survived by Sugar, my mom's other dog. Kizzy was a bit twitchy and a bundle of nerves. She was not much on tricks and not much on personality. She enjoyed playing ball and following Sugar around. Kizzy was 15.

The dog my parents had before Kizzy, with quite a bit of overlap, was named Lacy. Lacy had a great personality.  Not sure what happened to Kizzy on that front.

I'm not in to dogs or cats. I do not feel the need to have a pet. I'm not sure what part of our  existence pets satisfy. I know people who treat dogs like kids. I know people who treat cats like kings. I don't get it.

There was a blurb in the news that people are still spending money on their pets even in these hard times. Some things have been slacked, but over all spending is not down as much as may expect. Pets are people's friends, loved ones. Pets are important to people.

Very Local News

• There is an old blind man and a woman who travels with him on the bus every couple mornings. It looks like he is headed in to the hospital. I would love to know his story for some reason. Maybe not.
• One of the podcasts yesterday had a watch from Casio that charged itself off sunlight, was water resistant and shock resistant, and it got the time off that system that does it over the airwaves.  It was like $80, but they said there were cheaper versions. Nice.
• There was an up tick in consumer spending last month. Up from what I do not know. I bought two things I needed for work that totaled $40 last month. That is about it. I just don't have it.
• Nat got some pictures with the help of Bill (Thanks!!) of Elle's kindergarten graduation. kindergarten graduation kindergarten graduation, Nope. No matter how I say it, it makes no sense.
• I ran through a list of 'geek' podcasts yesterday. It amazed me how many were windows only. You should not be allowed to call yourself a geek if you are windows only. You are a geek-wannabe. Some said things like "we cover windows and mac." Like that is all there is to the world of computing. Some of these idiots even said things like "There are too many kinds of Linux." That is why Linux doesn't suck.  There is one windows and one mack os. There are dozens of flavors of Linux. Try one. If you don't like it, try another. Start with Ubuntu. IF any one asks me about Linux, I use Ubuntu as the gage.
  
• There is some debate about priest celibacy. Some male priest got caught snogging/connoodling on a beach with a woman. he said he did not want to be the 'poster boy' for celibacy in the priesthood. Too bad buddy. You are apparently it. Sex is a bit much to give up for a job.

Foreign Matters, except for Israel

I just listened to a Foreign Matters podcast. normally an anti-Israel liberal fest of the ridiculous. I listen to wake myself up to the way the ignorant half lives.

This podcast was about religion and how important it is to understand it to understand what is going on in the world. It almost sounded like they got it. It must be a ruse to throw me off. They even compared laughing at Christians singing at a camp and praising a drug addict for worshiping Mary Jane. They talked about many thing in the middle east and India. They seemed to get it there for a moment.

Then it hit me. They didn't mention Israel at all. There was a lack of defense or condemnation of a religious state that was not Islamic or Hindu or Christian or whatever.

So, they almost fooled me, but not quite. Still the same anti-Israel liberals.

Admin day two

I did a bunch more system administration stuff today. We got the bench systems done. I was even able to make custom setting changes quickly after the fact. I'm getting used to the toil. I also got to use the new USB cable I bought. It allows you to hook up several different kinds of drives including IDE, IDE (laptop) and SATA to the USB port. IT comes with a power adapter. It is not the quickest connector in the universe, but it works. I was able to run utilities on a couple dead drives today and get some results. I hope it will work for hooking up a DVD burner via USB as well. That is something I could use daily.

This is the typical high tech purchase. I'm getting all kinds of use out of the $10 cable and nearly none out of the $30 USB drive. It will not go to waist. Worry not.

I did make a new release for one of the software groups. I tried to make some needed changes to a build. I just didn't feel like working late today. I do, contrary to Nat's opinion, enjoy being home with my family after work. We have our own special time. This time is spent with Me on the computer, Nat watching TV, and Elle complaining or chasing the cats. It is still us time dammit.

Adam and I didn't even cross paths today. We may have said something this morning. I heard him cough so he was there. He has been Solaris Boy for the past couple weeks.

Something like fifteen people grabbed me today and pulled me in different directions. I was able to handle most of it. I still needed to ask questions. I didn't get quite everything done. There is a dead VM of SLES 11 sitting on a server. I'll have to catch it tomorrow.

My favourite thing that happened today was Aaron asking me about a dead video card. As we went to the lab he mentioned that Lance had taken a look too. I grabbed another card so we could give it a shot. When we got there, Aaron hit the on button and it just worked. I said 'ta-da' and walked off. Those are so rare, but so fun. It turns out he had just pulled the video card and popped it right back in. It was probably seated a mm off center or something. Still, it was fun.

Nazi ATV

Why did they bother with the front wheel? It looks like the thing would have worked better without it. It almost looks like the handle bars are hooked to the speed control of the tracks. Thus, a familiar method of steering to the user, but not actually there for effect.

Russian Chick with a Gun

I'll take the weapon. If anything bad happens you blow this whistle and I'll come save you.

Plane + hurricane

I've always wondered what it would be like, from a distance, taking off in a hurricane. Now, from a distance, I know. Thank you internet.

Admin Day

I got to play system administrator all day today. Someone's hard drive blew up and I got to swap it and restage their machine. No sooner was I in the middle of that than I found out  the yum repository had been restored from tape a while back and was missing a bunch of files to other things could install. I backed up a couple steps and fixed that. Then finished setting up their person's machine.

Then came a bunch of bench systems. Bench systems are a piece of plywood with a motherboard and a bunch of other computer kind of bits bolted to it. These are laid open and make it very easy for boards to be swapped. For the first time in my life, I got to add CPU chips to the motherboard and the CPU fans. Then something amazing happened. It didn't blow up. Both the systems worked and reported all the bits I checked.

Then came one of our real servers. This server will become one of those real servers the every one in the company relies on to do things every day. All of software development will use it daily. It took me half the afternoon to get it up and running (twice, because I bright it up on the wrong kernel the first time) and even then I needed help with the final network configuration. The trouble turned out to be a path that normally happens automatically, but was now missing in the manual set up  (Set up is two words? Who knew?)

As I write this, it just doesn't sound like a lot of work. It is. System administration is like that. So many people think it is easy to put computers together and then put networks together and then make everything work and then make everything only work when the right people want it to work. It is a nightmare. System Administrators are expected to kill themselves to make things work. Normally the hours suck, but not today.

Today the deadlines made sense. The effort made me feel like I learned something and that I got something done. Today was a busy, but a good day. More please.

How many egg rolls in China

I can't say it any better.

3,500th post

Yee-haw

This is my 3,500th post. ... Nothing follows.

Removing a desktop icon

I had an icon to the windows version of Firefox on my Linux desktop. I had installed Firefox under Wine in order to get Yoville working. The flash player for Linux blows. It looks like the iPhone will run better flash than Linux any day now. That really pisses me off considering there are many times as many people using Linux across the world as the iPhone. That makes this a political decision. It pisses me off no end.

Nat insisted that I play the game so she would have one additional person in her crew. I have not logged in for quite a while. I have $10,000 sitting in my account of Yoville bucks or the base money, which ever you get by going to work in the game.

The icon is off my desktop. It always made me angry that I had to have it there to do something as mundane as play a flash game that Nat would simply leave and move to another flash game. She is on MySpace playing some garden game. Fortunately, my joining that game buys her little or nothing. She will waist hours on that stuff. And she still rides me for reading blogs. I get information out of blogs. Most of them anyway. I get direction in some cases. It just feels like more than a way to waist my time when I read blogs.

Night run by a ship.

Not sure why, but this is cool.

Twitter Rumors

I bet a third of people out there would be happy if Apple bought Twitter. The other two thirds weould not care. I'm a minority of one and there for insignificant. I believe that if Apple buys Twitter, they will make all future functionality depend on owning and operating an iPhone or iTunes. This would further isolate Linux users. Or perhaps further sandbox Apple users.

If I were the owners of Twitter I would sell out on a guarantee of cash and no future commitment. This is because I feel that once Apple buys the service it will turn to crap and only a bunch of apple liberals will do anything on the service. Competition will finally pop up and I'll go there. Once I move away, the service will plummet to the depths of obscurity. Well, I'll not care any more regardless.

If Twitter goes belly up, by belly up I mean gets bought by Apple and starts to suck, it might be a good thing. It might make me put more content on the blog. Lately, I've gone to a Twitter-esk format of Very Local News bullets. Not much real content that enriches any one's life. Not that I've ever had something here of that caliber anyway. There is a chance I'll trip over something worth reading one of these days.

Economy

Some Chrysler dealers are doing financing through GMAC. That may sound messed up, but I read somewhere that GMAC is making money on it's own. Sounds like a plan to me. Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do.

Obama wants to close many of the foreign tax shelters  it is designed to rais money for universal health care. A bunch of money is held off shore. Not sure it will work. Of course, once something is enacted, it is never taken away agin without being replaced with something even more expensive.

Anheuser Bush (Budweiser) is cutting back on advertisement. They are moving to a 120 day pay cycle. They are making some ruthless decisions to cut costs. You know times are bad if beer companies are having trouble. Some say the advertisement are better than the beer. I have to agree. I've said Bud tastes like the business end of a horse's business.

Mac and cheese and Oreos are selling fine in these tough times.

The low carbon cartel still insists on billions of dollars for design and parts for low carbon and environmentally friendly vehicles. The cars on the shelf are not selling. Come on people. Can we afford to save ourselves from ourselves? I am already saved thank you. I do not need your god to tell me what to buy.

Several banks have been told to go looking for new investors. No one is going to invest in a bank that is asking to be invested in at the moment. I wouldn't I read the news for goodness sake. If they have to ask, you don't want to invest. This sort of thing should have been thought out a bit better. Any one willing to invest will be out for a hell of a return. All the banks asking at once causes the price to go up. Stupid stupid stupid.

Personally, Nat and I are broke. We have the money to get by right now, but not enough to excel and take vacatins. Nat would like an SUV. We got phones. Yadda-yadda. Things are tough all over. Deal with it.

Very Local News

• 36,000 people die from the flue every year in the U. S.. That is nearly 100 a day.
• "We are the best funded German university, but we need to triple our budget to compete with American universities." The Germans are charging more fees and people are paying far more money for education. Yikes. Obama says to copy Europe and the Europeans are taking a page from the American funding book.
• Frigging Windows. We have some machines at work with the EN1000 video video chipset from ATI. It is great for popping on motherboards for servers. It is a minimal video card and very cheap. Works. XP has no driver for it so when we use these boxes as workstations, we had to use other video cards. I had tried to use the server 2003 driver on XP, but it hadn't worked before. Dan got that to work .I wonder if it had to do with installing the video driver before service pack 3 for XP? I'm tired of thinking about it. I'm just glad we have something that works.
• Some study says we are more happy with our jobs this year than in several years past. No one is fooled. People who have jobs are happy to have a job, for the most part anyway.
• Banged my kneecap on a table leg a bit ago. It is the same table leg I've banged the same kneecap in to before. It always takes my breath away to bang my kneecap. Not sure why.
• Chevron is suffering troubles from Texaco troubles in Ecuador and elsewhere. Dow Chemical has problems left over from the purchase of Union Carbide. It makes me wonder what the advantage is to buying another company.
• I have a lump in my throat that tels me I'm getting sick. All the precautions and I'm still going to become ill. I haven't started oinking yet. I'm sure I'll blog it when it happens.
• To save the U. S. from financial implosion, some experts say Baby Boomers should take up smoking again. This would kill them off more quickly, removing them as a burden. It would also raise much needed tax revenue and subsidize farming.

Should have hired the MythBusters

These folks like like professionals. You would think they would have ... oh ... a tried and true guard rail behind the one they were testing. No. Maybe clear the area. No, people all over the place. Assume the worse. Plan for everything to fail. No. Sure, it will work .Th is a government job after all. We don't have to think.

Very Local News

• 36,000 people die from the flue every year in the U. S.. That is nearly 100 a day.
• "We are the best funded German university, but we need to triple our budget to compete with American universities." The Germans are charging more fees and people are paying far more money for education. Yikes. Obama says to copy Europe and the Europeans are taking a page from the American funding book.
• Frigging Windows. We have some machines at work with the EN1000 video video chipset from ATI. It is great for popping on motherboards for servers. It is a minimal video card and very cheap. Works. XP has no driver for it so when we use these boxes as workstations, we had to use other video cards. I had tried to use the server 2003 driver on XP, but it hadn't worked before. Dan got that to work .I wonder if it had to do with installing the video driver before service pack 3 for XP? I'm tired of thinking about it. I'm just glad we have something that works.
• Some study says we are more happy with our jobs this year than in several years past. No one is fooled. People who have jobs are happy to have a job, for the most part anyway.
• Banged my kneecap on a table leg a bit ago. It is the same table leg I've banged the same kneecap in to before. It always takes my breath away to bang my kneecap. Not sure why.
• Chevron is suffering troubles from Texaco troubles in Ecuador and elsewhere. Dow Chemical has problems left over from the purchase of Union Carbide. It makes me wonder what the advantage is to buying another company.
• I have a lump in my throat that tels me I'm getting sick. All the precautions and I'm still going to become ill. I haven't started oinking yet. I'm sure I'll blog it when it happens.
• To save the U. S. from financial implosion, some experts say Baby Boomers should take up smoking again. This would kill them off more quickly, removing them as a burden. It would also raise much needed tax revenue and subsidize farming.

Very Local News

• I went to touch a coffee cup to my lip this morning and it reminded me of a time when I was a little kid. I burned my lip because at some point I had learned that my lips were very good at telling temperature. I subconsciously did it with an iron to tell if it was hot. Lesson learned.
• I tried hooking up this thing called twitpic yesterday. I'll give it a shot later today at some point. It lets you send a picture to twitter via email and comment on it. Not sure if any one will follow the links or not. Not sure if I can link from my blog. I suppose we will all learn together.
• Do you know how much of a pain in the ass it is to have an issue with a machine on the network and it is nowhere to be found. People just willy-nilly move crap around and don't think anything of it. There is a system that answers a ping, but refuses to connect. I cannot find it to diagnose it or reboot. AARGH!!!
• No podcasts today. I managed to leave all four of my memory sticks at work. Go figure. I tried to use my camera as a portable drive. When I got to work, the Linux box refused to mount the camera as a drive and only as a camera. The Windows box didn't find the podcasts folder that was on the card. I have no idea what the hell happened to my podcasts, but I bet they are in a folder under /mnt/podcasts.
• I smelled like dirt all day because the bus stop across from our building is nearly submerged under muck. A pipe is leaking over there and smelly mud is all over the place. The entire corner worth of side walk is sinking. I can't wait until the street starts sinking. That is usually when someone finally does something about it.
• New battery in the car. Nat says its running well. Special thinks to Bill for the loan of a battery charger and running Nat to Wal-Mart after charging didn't work. Hell of a guy.  Is four years good for a battery in a small car?

Very Local News

• Chrysler is all in the news as going under. Fiat wants to buy Chrysler. It really looks like this is going to happen. The people who invested in Chrysler are getting royally screwed. I'm glad I have not invested in many companies because they (meaning the Obama administration and Democratic congress) are just going to come along and take them away from me and other inverters and sell them off (again) to the highest bidder. That is a hell of a way to run a capitalists country.
• 3/4 of diamonds are cut and polished in India.
• Here is a statistic that scares the hell out of me "50% of what goes down the toilet is bacteria." From The Naked Scientist. If you count the number of cells, bacteria out number human cells by 50 to one. (same show).
• I'm really getting <cough> sick of all this <cough> pandemic swine flue <cough> bullsh<cough>it. <COUGH!!!> I do not foresee an aporcalypse.
  
• Masks do not work to prevent flue. They might help if you have a bug to prevent it from infecting someone else. Maybe. That's about it.
• I get off the bus this evening and call Nat. She informs me the car won't start. Bill came over with a battery charger. We just made the last payment. It begins.

Creative car thieves

I heard about the last method. Not sure how that works. Changes in temperature and air pressure moving mechanical bits around makes sense. The first one is the one that gets me. I'm shocked. How do you learn about things like this? I suppose from places like YouTube and LiveLeak.

Bus accidents

How many people need to keep their eyes on the frigging road. You never know when a bus is coming.

Saturday Morning

Elle is hand-sanitiz3er-happy. She can't walk by the bottle without squirting some and smelling it. It smells like alcohol. It worries me. Nat put it in the linen closet. They are watching that Chihuahua movie where they talk and go to Mexico. Crap, but it keeps them off the streets. "Its so corny, its funny." I'm watching 'Fringe' on Hulu. I didn't get up until 14:00 or so. I just didn't want to get out of bed. I was supposed to mow the yard this morning. It looks like it might rain tomorrow and I"ll be out of luck.

Elle giggles a second or so after Nat at exactly the same length and intercity. IT is fascinating to observe.

Work has not so much let off, but has gone back to a reasonable level. I was able to leave work on time Thursday and Friday. It was nice getting out of work while the sun was still up and not knowing exactly where you had to pick up the next day. It was nice not leaving only because you had no more energy and knew if you stayed, you would only set off the alarm after waking up at your desk at 03:00. Hell, I was able to follow up on something like USB boot utilities for goodness sake. This is good for work too. It also happens to be something that I want to do.

I was hoping to get in some real blogging. The kind where I research something and put up something interesting and informative on this space. I'm afraid it will not happen right off the bat.

As it is, I'm ordering a 16G USB thumb drive and a cable that I have needed at work that lets me hook an internal hard drive up via USB and perform different tasks. This cable is $10 and will save me a decade of time messing with drives. It may even let me install an OS on a drive before installing the drive by using images. I'm sure I'll blog how it goes.

USB Boot

Knoppix

Knoppix 6 has lost it's direction I think. Knoppix was a go to OS for figuring out what was wrong with a box and getting information off it. It performed no miracles. It was just handy. Lots of utilities and was built for purpose.

Then came Adrian.  Adrian is fine if you are blind and need to get around a computer. It reads the OS to you as you navigate menu trees to get around and get things done. It is a pain to get through this interface to the meat of Knoppix to get something done. Once you get to the full Knoppix install, you realize most of the utilities and cool stuff about Knoppix has disappeared to make room for Adrian.

Knoppix does have a cut down version without Adrian for people who need the OS to come up and get to a box without the stupid front end. It sounds like people complained and the developers made the change as an after thought. I've used it. It seems to work fine.

When you install the Knoppix 6 ISO on to a USB drive it detects this and gives you an option to make a save partition where you can put your own documents or what have you. Very nice. It looks like saving writes as soon as you hit save. Perhaps a sync is required for a full write. This is important because you will loose data if you have clicked save and your data sits in a cache somewhere without a true write to the drive.

Puppy

I found Puppy Linux. It is what Knoppix was supposed to  be. Puppy seems to make their Linux so you can take it and use it like a wrapper around your software. I installed Puppy on a 128MB USB key drive and still had 22MB left for my crap. If I use it, I'll use a larger drive. I just had that one lying around for the test.

Puppy doesn't have a bunch of utilities, but that is not the point. I have not had an opportunity to boot it on many boxes, so I do not know if the drivers available work across a spectrum of machines or not. It looks like nothing is really saved until you shut down or reboot the system. This is disastrous. This kind of thing might blow the whole deal.

The cute fluffy little logos are more annoying than the penguin that I've never really liked. I'm going to open a restaurant in international waters that only serves cuddle fare.

Problems

Knoppix has issues running on crappy machines. It also has problems with old hardware. Knoppix has become a bit bloated for what I need and yet removed many utilities I consider important.

Puppy is very small, runs fast, but is incomplete by miles. That isn't their target. I do not know yet if I' will be able to get utilities to run properly under that limited OS. It is small, which is cool and a drag at the same time. I like the clock gadget that comes up by default.

Use

Mainly I need something that will let me bring up a system on a healthy OS. 99% of thins that go wrong with computers is software. People have messed with their settings until it broke and then they call me. These Boot devices let me make changes to configuration files and back up data before blowing up the box.

I also need Ghost or other utility for imaging hard drives. Even this has become all but moot because of PXE booting. That is where you boot from an image file on a server and not even go through the trouble of installing it on the local box. Pretty cool stuff. The day is on it's way when you don't have an OS on your local system. There will just be a simple menu that lets you boot the box in to your software. No more conflicts, but it makes cut and paste a bit more complex. I suppose that is where virtual machines come in.

Very Local News

• I got a USB with Knoppix 6 running. I hen got Puppy loading on another old unused drive.
  
• I think that so many people were expecting a huge to-do about Obama's first 100 days that most of the news outlets didn't make a big deal about it. I heard more on the BBC than from the States. Besides, the first 100 days kind of make Obama look like a human. That is not why he was elected.
  
• Some warning messages that you will not find in driver installs.
• "Do not bludgeon the equipment with a sledge hammer while installing."
• "Do not operate equipment while submerged or  in a vacuum."
• "Do not use equipment as a jungle-gym while installing."
• "Do not use equipment as a boogy-board or to prop up table legs."
• Rosy Scenario is a tricky bitch.
• My USB key drive went through the washer. I knew it would happen. I kept it in the watch pocket of jeans. It was left in a couple. This time it got washed. Still works. How many pieces of electronics can you say that about?
• There is a brail e-book reader. it would be great if it took pictures, ran OCR, then converted that to brail. Designed in Korea. Is this thing violating someone's copyright? Amazon won't touch it with a ten meter cattle prod.
  
• God! I'm tired. I had the hardest time this afternoon focusing. It was amazing how much I wanted to go to sleep. I wasn't really sleepy. I just couldn't focus. No medicine, no big meal.
  
• Home funerals are all the rage. Have you seen the cost of a funeral lately? box me and plant me. I don't care.
• One of the guys at work who had the same phone I have, the G1, lost it down town while drinking. That is bad enough, but it had a chick's number in it. Insult on top of injury.