Thanksgiving weekend Wining

The good stuff

Tried to do some homework. We had Thanksgiving dinner at my parents. That was awesome. Ate too much and crashed. Shot a video of Elle and my mother playing ball in the back yard. Natalie burned her hand and hair at Faire because of some drunk.

Homework

Before I left work, I had a task to do. I had to make a copy of a 16G image on to a flash drive. This osunds so easy. So, I'm the second to last one in the building on the day before Thanksgiving trying to

• Get a 4.5G file off our shit network.
• Decompress this file to a 16G image.
• Copy that image to a 16G flash card.

Well, the file failed off the network on the first try. Then the decompression failed on the second try. The file decompressed, but did not copy itself from the temp location for some reason. I ended up copying the file to my thumb drive, thank God I had used ext3 to format the the drive and not vfat for just this reason, and take it home to complete the job.

Got the file home and copied it off the thumb drive. It took four tries to get my home computer to mount the stupid thumb drive because what kind of idiot uses anything besides vfat to format a thumb drive? Then I try to decompress the file. It failed. Not in the same way as at work. This time it looks like corruption. Something did not jive on the trip from the office to home.

The box this card is for is supposed to ship tomorrow afternoon. It takes 2.5 hours to copy the image from the file to the 16/G drive. I failed. I really hope I do not cause the box to be late.

Video

I uploaded the video three full times now. This does not include the several attempts I made to upload the picture from my phone. Apparently, 6.6 megabytes is just too much for the nation wide T-Mobile infrastructure to handle. How amazing is that? We spent half the day looking for a cable that I could use to put the video on a computer over at my parent's place. I only meant for it to take a minute then give up and just wait until I got home. It had to become a whole thing.

When I goth home I uploaded the video and noticed YouTube said "error" so I uploaded it again. Only, YouTube went ahead and uploaded the video. It turns out this causes a duplicate. Once you have a duplicate, nothing works correctly. I could not tell which video was the duplicate because apparently the error video completed after the second video I uploaded so I managed to delete the wrong video. Since the other video was a "duplicate" It would not play or embed or anything. I had to delete it too. YouTube sucks.

Thank goodness for laziness because the video file was still on my hard drive. I copied it up and spent the next half hour trying to find the embed code to update the place where I put the video so it is not some gaping hole in my blog. I had to play the video and copy the embed code out of the little shell. I still cannot find the place to copy the embed code for videos that I have uploaded myself. I feel like I can embed anyone's video but my own.

Nat's burn adventure

So, I'm reading along on Facebook and come across a good friend of mine who says he had to take someone to the ER who got burned in a campfire out at Faire. I didn't even think about it and commented on the post saying he was a hell of a guy for doing that. Then I call Natalie and find out it was her.

Some fat drunk was acting a fool and swung his arms around and knocked her in to an open ground fire. She got some blisters on her hand and some singed hair. I think she will be fine. Have you ever tried to put on garb one handed.

Thank God, she seems OK. This was the last weekend of Faire for this year. I have a funny feeling about next year. Something will change. Maybe they will not allow camping by patrons. I'm just saying I feel strange about the whole idea. So many friends of mine are fed up with it.

Sleep

Well, I didn't get much sleep the whole weekend. I was worried that something would happen to my father's truck because Nat took it out to Faire for some reason. And the boom boom idiots were out in force Saturday evening.

Then I found this guy. He is the number one YouTuber in Canada I think and he is the number one car related site on YouTube even beating out corporate sponsored pages. I watched a hundred or more of his videos. He is crazy, and a drunk, and doesn't seem to have a proper respect for the fragility of human life, but I love his videos. He has a bunch of car crashing and joy riding and some interesting informative videos on how things work, specifically cars and engines.

Laptop

I updated my laptop to Ubuntu 9.10. I don't know why. I never use the damn thing. I've heard there were problems with things like disappearing wireless controllers. My wireless controller disappeared. Well, the device was there. It just didn't work.

It would just not recognize WEP. I jacked with it and jacked with it. I turned off WEP just for a moment to try it out and it worked fine. I changed the WEP key that was working fine before the upgrade because it didn't have enough letters vs numbers in it. I used a thumb drive to copy the key to make sure it was not a typo. I jacked with it some more. Did I mention that I did the update over the Wireless connector, so it worked.

This killed the better part of an entire afternoon. Then I power cycled the router and it started working. "JUNK!!!!!!" I'm surrounded by junk.

Hot chocolate

We are now and have all weekend been out of hot chocolate. BAH!!!

Conclusion

Well, I wish the frigging weekend would just end. I can't wait to get back to work.

Update 2009-11-29 21-26: Added the laptop section.