Sunset

You know, I like the view out my window right before quitting time.

Day off mess

So I walked in to day after my garage door day off with a bit of a controversy. I thought I had to take a sick day because I hadn't put in an early request. Turns out that is not the case, but I said I was taking a sick day when I called in Wednesday morning.

Something else I said was " I need to take a sick day for real this time." What kind of dumbass ever says that? Well, me. A couple weeks earlier I had called in sick, but felt better and came in anyway. That's what I meant.

The paperwork is interesting. Not long ago we had to mark a board for our sick days and request any more than a day or two. Now we put in for all days of vacation. No troubles. I just need to make sure I get my crap together. Oh, and keep to the point on the phone when declaring a day off from work.

The garage door still works better and quieter than the day we moved in.

Very Local News

• I cannot get the date right today. There is something about 12-12 that just throws me off.
• Looked up how to visually distinguish different PCI slots. It is a mish-mash of notches and random key-like designs. In the process found out PCI-Express 3.0 is coming next year or so. It is the same kind of connector with extra bits and more lanes for data. Looks different. This is how regular old PCI got so complex and random looking.
• Remember me complaining about a screw-ball problem with "Monitor Insomnia"? Well, it turns out to have something to do with the ATI cards. I just happened to replace one of the boxes video card with an nVidia card and the trouble went away on that box. It is now a matter of upgrading drivers for the ATI cards or swapping them out. It may boil down to dealing with the wavy lines.
• I have had a headache all day. I woke up with a headache five minutes before my alarm was to go off. I took a couple aspirin, but they barely touched it.

Garage Door (updated)

The garage door went all crooked and hung up. I tried to hang the door back on the rails. I tried to balance things and align things and respool the tension cables. My father said he knew a guy who required 400 stitches to reattach his scalp after messing with a garage door spring.

So, I called some guys. $200 and no new parts later, the door works better than it did the day we moved in.

I ended up just taking the day off. I have some vacation days and the stress of realizing my ineptitude of garage door repair required a day to recover.

Now, I just need to put a whole bunch of crap in the attic. I figure some good should come of this little adventure.

Remember what I was doing on the coldest day last year? I do. I was pulling the back door off the hinges in an attempt to prevent cold air from coming in. That ended up with my father coming over and a couple hundred bucks worth of repairs that may yet end up in a contractor visit. Did I mention the useless effort I put in to the garage door was while it was SNOWING!!!!? No, I didn't. Well you get the idea.

The whole issue was the tensioners coming out of the track. What caused that must have been the lack of proper lubrication, aggravated by the cold wet weather.

All in all, this has been much less fun than being at work.

Update:

I forgot to mention that the guys who showed up were here for only like 45 minutes. They took about five minutes to figure out what to do. They took aobut fifteen minutest to do it and the rest of the time was to make me feel a bit better about spending $200. I do not have a problem with paying them. They know what they do. That is worth it.

Very Local News

• Condelisa Rice calls her parents "Educational Evangelists." Sounds like it worked out pretty well to me. She is all over the political shows. People expect great things from her. Many want her to run against Hillery in a future presidential election. It really sounds like she wants to go teach or write her books or something. Maybe that is a front. Hell, she played the piano for the Queen of England.
• People give off 150 Watts of heat just sitting there. Doctor Chris (Naked Scientist) estimates it would take about half a day on an exorcise bike to generate enough energy to properly warm a cup of tea.
• One in four Americans over the age of sixty play at least some video games.
• The market for trash as in recycling is taking a dive right along with everything else. I guess the Chinese don't want our bonds or garbage any more. Maybe it will slow all the copper theft in this country.
• My current glasses make me look a bit like my eyes are too close together. I needed some larger frames than I got last time. I went a bit overboard. Live and learn.
• Jobless rate will probably hit 10% or higher next year. Another 10% may be under employed.

Monitor Insomnia

We use KVM (Keyboard Video Mouse) switches at work quite a bit. A KVM allows you to have one monitor, keyboard and mouse hook to several computers. It saves space. Most of the computers in the lab are accessed remotely 95% of the time. You only have to sit down at them when something is wrong or needs to be physically changed.

We use some 8 port KVMs that are pretty basic. They are PS/2 serial switches with analog VGA monitor connections. This is typical of a couple years ago. All our new boxes do not have PS/2 ports so we are going to have to upgrade to all USB KVM in the future.

In our of the labs we had this symptom that drove most of us nuts. The monitor hooked to several boxes would not go to sleep. It would get a bunch of wavy lines. It looked like TV that was stuck between channels or just out of range of the station. I'd only given a little bit of passing attention to it in the past. This week, I finally got fed up and sat down to do some experimentation.

• Hooked a different monitor to the same KVM.
• Hooked the old monitor straight to a machine.
• Hooked an unrelated monitor to the same KVM.
• Hooked the old monitor to another KVM of the same type.
• Swapped the KVM for another of the same type.
  

These steps all required leaving the monitor to sit until it drifts off to electronic la-la-land. I don't want to hurry the process because that might taint the results.

My conclusion is the monitor is not syncing properly when it should switch to "sleep mode". Instead, it tries to sync the resolution and refresh rate automatically. This cause the monitor to throw its personified hand in the air and just leave a bunch of garbage sliding up the screen in a cranky tantrum. Thus, driving all the people up the wall who walk by the lab's windows on every trip to the restroom.

I have no idea if it is a crossed wire, power, short, corrosion, signal interception or what happens inside that KVM. It can't be that complex. Maybe there is a signal booster that takes the nap that the monitor has earned. The solution is even easier. Replace the KVM. Easer diagnosed than implemented. Swapped it out and bingo ... still does the same thing. Drat!

Morning Commute

I tried to ware my poncho this morning. I got to the end of the driveway and figured out that was not going to work. I went back in the house. Nat was not feeling well so I rummaged around the closet and storage corner of the bedroom until I found my old rain suit. I only used the pants. I bundled up and made it to work with blowing rain in the high thirties warm and dry. Glad I was waring my boots because the stop where I exit the bus was flooded for some reason. It almost looks like the sidewalk sank behind the curb.

It could have been much worse. The poncho gave me trouble. I was outside, under the over hang in front of my front door trying to put the poncho on and still listen to my radio. That is a much harder chore than it sounds. The poncho is unwieldy and the snaps keep coming undone. I finally got rolling and the rain blew right up the damn poncho. I turned around and went back in to fetch my full rain suit.

The rain felt a bit like sleet. It was just water. There were no snow flurries. My only exposed areas were my hands and face. I tucked my hands up my sleeves a bit. That works well with the North Face jacket my father found for me. The hood of the jacket closes up so my face was pretty well protected too. I had a scarf on as well. I was so warm that half way through my walk, I had to start letting my hands out to cool off a bit. Awesome.

The bus stop I wait at was dry. I only waited for a moment. Good day to walk right up and get on the bus. I had to sit on the bus with my backpack still on under my jacket. It takes me a minute to get in and out so no point in removing it. Fortunately, ridership was light this morning. Every one was bundled up like a new born.

The stop where I got off was under water. People were jumping over a lake to get to the bus which had stopped several meters short of the stop. I had to walk through the mud behind the stop to avoid drowning in the muck trapped behind the curb. Normally, bus patrons worry about the water in front of the curb that assholes drive through to drench them while waiting. Today would have been a very bad day indeed to get wet in the elements.

When I got to work I had to disassemble the external armor against the wet and cold. My boots were muddy so I switched to  some shoes I leave at work. I would have been soaked from the waste down had I stayed with the poncho only. I have to say that I'm a bit proud of having braved the elements and stayed warm and dry on such a wet cold blowing rain day.

No one else seems to have had quite so much excitement on the way to work this morning.

Very Local News

• Someone brought in party left overs this morning. Nat and I could not make the party. There are Double Dave pizza rolls and sandwiches. The sandwiches are a bit left over tasting. The pizza rolls are kind of like kolatchy-ish. it counts as a breakfast food. Pizza is the generic any time food. Right?
• There was sort of this large drop sprinkle going on this morning. As I walked, I felt a couple of large drops, but no mist or sprinkling. It surprises me that this was enough to keep the ground wet the whole time. It didn't dry up until late morning. It never rained, but there were puddles al lover the place like it had. It had to have been 150% humidity most of the morning.
• I listened to Meet the Pres from last Sunday. Obama was on. I didn't mind a single thing he said. I did not agree with some of it. That is, I don't think some of his ideas are going to work. At least he is doing something. I'm glad he is not going to stick with many of his campaign promises. To be honest, he sound more like a Republican than McCain. He did sound much more worried about drug trafficking in Afghanistan than he did in Mexico. I do not like that.
  
• My goodness my phone takes terrible pictures. I never thought it would be an issue. Well, it is. Next time Nat and I go look at phones, I'm going to pay better attention to the camera. Not a whole lot. Enough though. May have to pay attention to video quality as well. Maybe not. We will find out. I'll also make sure Nat gets the phone she likes. she has done nothing but complain about the Razer.
  
• A little before lunch Nat sent me a text that said "It's storming here." I sent one back that said nothing had kicked off at the office yet. Well, the minute I walked out the door for lunch came a downpour. It got worse and worse until it just stopped. There was all kinds of water in the parking garage. The wind blew. People tried to stay dry.the pidgins didn't seem to notice.
• it isn't just property and manufacturing any more. The financial crisis is now hitting the service industries. I'm telling you, plumbers are the only safe ones. I need some work done on the back of the house. I wonder if I'll get a deal, or get gouged because the contractor has to make up for every one else not paying. god help us.
• No sunset this evening at work. It was all dark and damp. The clouds would not hear of it.
• I tried to clean at least somewhat the shower last night before bed. I used 409 and a bunch of paper towels. It will take something more industrial to cut that mold. We have one of those shower spray things, but it only hits the exposed surfaces. As a matter of fact, it doesn't the spot right behind the spray nozzle. That is annoying.

Pictures For Today

 

Just me being weird for Natalie's benefit. It didn't work.

   

Some random shots at work.

Shots of the rain at lunch.

Fedora Freaked Again

I installed Fedora 10, upgrading from 9 using the DVD. This is the recommended method. All was well for a couple of days. I did a yum update. When I attempted to reboot the machine after the successful update the screen simply read "GRUB" and nothing else. The only thing pressing keys did was eventually make the computer beep.

I booted using the Fedora 10 DVD and told it to upgrade. Then selected "replace boot loader" or whatever it says. This recreated the GRUB configuration and possibly the versions of the software. I don't know. It worked on the first try. That never worked before. I've tried it many times in similar situations. Stubbornness pays off.

What am I to do for Fedora 11? I mean, there is nothing to be done for upgrading. I must delete all and install new to avoid the black screen of death at boot. What is the point?

Videos

These folks make it look easy. Landing one of these juggernauts is a pain in the best conditions.

Someone has way too much time on their hands. This is an automated Lego plane building factory made from Lego. This counts as the beginning of the end. Who knew sentient life would come from self replicating Lego?

Bill is proud of his Seabring's roof. It is a rag-top. This one probably counts as a hard top. They have gotten much better since I was a kid. I remember fighting with some several years ago. It is all a button push away now a days. You cannot tell me this thing will never leak with age. There are just too many moving parts for it to work for long. I disbelieve in engineering.

Men's brans vs. women's brains. It made me laugh.

Very Local News

• Beautiful sunrise this morning. So often I envy people blowing by me on their way to work. Today I bet they would have envied me for I had time to stop and ponder the moment. Never let it be said that I did not stop to smell the roses at least once.
       
       
• Elle's Birthday pictures are up. Main site. I had to learn a new version of the same old software so forgive the cou-ple of foibles. Let me know if anything is unusable.
  
• Deer are destroying woodland in the UK. There are more deer in the UK now than in the last thousand years, and a damn site less places for them to live. You can get a permit for a rifle in the UK. It is not easy.
  
• There are thousands of vehicles sitting on docs in the U. S.. Dealers do not want them because they cannot sell them. I have a feeling that next year you will be able to pick up a new, year old car for a song outside the U. S.. They will move them out of this market because they will have new cars coming in next year.
• Natalie got busted impersonating the tooth ferry last night. Natalie gave Elle the story that she had made a deal with the tooth ferry to keep Elle's first tooth. I remember my father tripping over a skateboard.
• You can get a tattoo at the mall in New Jersey.There is a franchise called "Tattoo Nation". Coming to a Mall near you. It is just not cool any more.
• I heard a story on Cybershake that said NASA invented the computer mouse. I heard a story somewhere that it came out of AT&T labs. Another that Xerox had something to do with it. For goodness sake, The patent is gone. Let it go.
• Live for the questions as well as the answers.
• Bones do not stand on their own.
• Money in the UK is cheaper now than it has been in the last 50 years.
• There were a gaggle of pidgins on the roof of the parking garage today at lunch. They insisted on sitting on the wall next to where I was passing.I walked slow enough that they would come back and land between my passes. I would deliberately walk on the opposite side of the parking area, but one pidgin would jump off the wall and start flying. This would cause all of them to do so. They just couldn't help themselves.
• Obama wants to put together a package not too far from the highway building in the fifties. Fix the infrastructure and other public works to put Americans to work. Do Americans still work in construction? I don't know any American citizen who makes money in construction. I know a few who went broke because of illegals doing it without paying any taxes. Don't get me started. How do you say "new new deal" in Spanish?
  
• I got an email today saying that the firm I used to work for is having a pretty hefty lay-off. No one will know anything for sure until after January 2 2009 or so.
• You shouldn't be aloud to reissue stock for five years after bankruptcy. People are buying these tanking financial firms because their stocks are so cheap. Bad idea. They will go through bankruptcy or pseudo-bankruptcy. Then they will reissue stock and the old stock holders are out in the cold. It is crap. Crap I say! Sure, there will be stories of some lucky idiot making a killing. You won't hear about the droves of losers who got their lunch handed to them.
  
• I heard one of the 60 minutes guys use the phrase "blogs and online forums were all a twitter with comments ..." The really scary thing is I don't think he realizes the irony. I suppose Twitter was a twitter as well.

Hulu

The web page hulu.com has changed my viewing habits. As I type this, several shows are playing on Fox that I would normally watch. Nat takes the good TV on Sunday night. Soon the crappy TV will not even work. I have gotten upset in the past that I would miss my shows on Sunday night. Then came LOST. I couldn't wrench the TV from Nat two nights a week.

The solution is to not watch TV at all. I now catch the shows on hulu a couple days later. There are a couple different sites. LOST is on ABC I think it is. Whatever. I'll look it up when it matters.

Right now I'm catching up on blogs. I'm listening to my computer read me a pretty good argument saying legalize drugs and tax the crap out of them. Make drugs pay off the financial crisis. Turn the IRS loose on illegal drug dealers. I've heard it all before. I like it.

Nat is watching some ridiculous evening soap opera. She breaks in every so often to give me some fact about her show. I just can't follow it. If I go sit next to her I will fall asleep.

Elle is supposed to be cleaning her room. It sounds like she is goofing off to me. Nat and Elle spent hours yesterday evening cleaning up her room. Nat was not very happy about the state of Elle's room only hours later.

One of the best things about hulu and other online sites is the same thing that is good about TiVo and other DVR systems. You can pause things. As one of the guys at work said "You can pause your show, deal with your wife's shit. Then get back to where you left off." Some of the guys also like holding off on football games until the last 45 minutes and then fast forward through many hours of crap to watch the action bits. This is what that half field league was supposed to be about. They missed the mark by miles. People don't want glitz. They want action and content.

I'm off to catch the last ten minutes of 'Family Guy' on legacy TV.

Spam in a can

Shark: "Hey guys, that is a mighty fine looking shark cage you got there. Shaaaame if anything happened to it!"

Divers: "AAAAAA!!! AAAA!! AAAA!!!!"

Miracle no one appeared hurt.I like how one of the divers had to go back through an opening in the cage to untangle some kind of safety line so he could get the hell o9ut of the water. Cool video.

Cool

Just cool. Nothing farther.

Elle lost tooth

Elle came over to me this afternoon holding a tissue to her mouth. She had this desperate look on her face. She mumbled something in that little kid speak complicated by I did something wrong filter, further encrypted by the I'm in pain algorithm. I had no idea what she said. I did notice blood on the tissue. I calmly stopped doing what I was doing. I turned to her and got out of her that she lost a tooth

We went to alert Nat who was resting. Elle freaked out, and the two of us had to calm her and ensure her that it was normal to loose teeth at this point in her career as a child. It took a while for her to be convinced. Nat and Elle went on a hunt for the tooth. No one informed her she needed to keep track of such things.

Elle had a birthday party engagement this afternoon. Bill came by and picked her up. Heck of a guy. There has been no mention of tooth ferries or post tooth-self-extraction monetary compensation The subjects will have to be covered at some point for Elle will hear about the common practice through the grape vine at some point.

I meant to take a picture of her new growing-up smile, but forgot before she let out for the birthday party. I'll catch her this evening hopefully.

This leads me to think about the $800 or so we spent on fixing a baby tooth only last month. The check cleared and now they are falling out. Yes, this makes me love dentists. I'm going to keep those particular two teeth and demand compensation from the government. Surely there must be a program to repay ignorent parents for paying for dentistry on baby teeth. I still feel like a sucker for this expendature that I cannot help but feel is simply unwarrented. I would love to sue. I mane, shouldn't the dentis know that ther is no reason to fix a tooth that is just going to fall out in a couple of weeks? I suppose he had to pay for that BMW somehow.

What a mess

What caused the economic crises? "Greedy bankers" says some people. There is certainly a lot of greed about. For example, the people who trampled a part time Security Guard to death at a Walmart on Long Island (as he shielded a fallen pregnant women from them) were certainly greedy. Even after it was announced they had killed a man they still did not want to give up shopping for bargains in the sale and were very angry at being removed from the store. But I doubt there were any bankers in the Walmart sale crowd - although I am open to being proved wrong. And the lawyers who are talking about "going after Walmart" over the death are greedy also - they are targeting Walmart, rather than the mob of shoppers, because Walmart has "deep pockets". But these lawyers are not bankers. ... A credit boom can only carry on if it is supported by a Central Bank - whatever this Central Bank is called. This is why the credit-money bubble of the late 1920's was bigger than previous credit-money bubbles of American history. Because the Federal Reserve system, specifically New York Federal Reserve Bank Governor Ben Strong, had pushed it up and up. Do people remember the newspaper headlines every so often between 1987 and 2007? Specially the "Alan Greenspan saves the world" stories? Ever wondered what the great Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, had actually done? What he had done is as follows: Every time the credit-money bubble looked like it was finally going to burst Alan Greenspan jumped in and increased the money supply to "save" things. And he did prevent the credit bubble bursting - but at the price of making it bigger and bigger. Without this increase in the money supply, ACORN and Chris Dodd and Barney Frank and Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, and the private banks, insurance companies (like A.I.G.) and other such would have no funny money to work with. They could not have wreaked everything without the ammunition (the money) Alan Greenspan was indirectly giving them. Of course he did not work alone, for example the present head of the New York Fed (who will be Treasury Secretary soon) has been involved in almost every bailout since Mexico in 1995. Samizdata.net

One blogger's two cents. Glad someone can spare two cents. I wish I had something intelligent to ad to this report. All that wants to go on the screen are a bunch of complaints about being broke. I remember telling someone in the early naughts that Greenspan had only to come on TV and say in a flat drone that "All is well." and the stock market soared. It turns out all to have been a shame. The man is a politician. That is the most damning thing I can think of at the moment.

Go read the whole thing.

Fedora Upgrade

I upgraded from Fedora 9 to Fedora 10 using the DVD. This blog entry is being written directly after the update and so far so good. It has only been like ten minutes. Give it time. It looks like my settings and data are save after the upgrade. Most of my new stuff is in Google Docs, so what good would it have done to break?

The first thing I did of course is a yum update. That updates all the packages possible on the machine. It is still downloading the 213 updates. This is another oprotunity to blow up in my face. Not updating the server until everything has been tested. Ther is just no reason.

Training

Really glad I'm not going up against these guys.

Upgrading to Fedora 10

As I type, I'm downloading the DVD for Fedora 10. I've waited this time a bit for the bugs to get worked out of the system. I know it is not good enough. I'll still have some catastrophe steel all my data and delay me from getting what I want out of the cyber world. I don't care. I have some need to be up to date. I do not understand it.

This time I will use the DVD to upgrade. This time I will leave one computer at 9 for a long while before upgrading. I've taken a peak at some forums and there appear to be the normal background hum of troubles and problems.  This is about the way things should be.

Why do some people feel the need to have open source? What happened in the world that tells us we need to put so much effort in to a project that will benefit us so little directly? Why don't we all toe the line and work only for profit? Does the world need open source? The Internet Explorer project was all but shut down in the late nineties. The dust was blown off the project with Mozilla's FireFox. Now that Mozilla is having issues with the realities of software development and under the threat of collapse under it's own internal political crap. There must be ten other browsers climbing out of the woodwork. There is no browser war any more. There is no good guy or bad guy. There is online content and getting to it. This is how it should have been all along.

This is not only the death of the browser as a brand, but it is the death of any one caring what operating system is on their computer. Microsoft and every one else has had the goal of making every one rent software and access it online since the beginning of computers. They all thought that would be a huge cash cow that would allow them to rack in the bucks. What they all missed, is the fact that it would allow any one to get in to the market and compete. It is easy. It is so easy, that any one can do it. Thanks guys. You are about to work yourselves out of a business model.