Family BBQ

This is a family get together from Sunday 2010-07-04. Independence day went well for the extended family on Nat's side. My family is out of town anyway. Good BBQ and great times.

I kissed a nerd

"I'll be your Laya slave."

Warning: has some dirty lyrics.

=]

Smart Car does sky hill

I notice they waited like a week to publish this video. I suppose the guy who owned the car split before they it went up. "I told him I wouldn't. hehehe." Looks like the little guy did just fine.

New drive update

I just like checking my free space now and again. I just like knowing I have a terabyte of space out there. I just like saving a file and hearing an echo. I just like how it is already old news.

$ df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1             1.4T  122G  1.2T  10% /

10 reasons men prefer guns to women

#10. You can trade an old 44 for a new 22.
#9. You can keep one gun at home and have another for when you’re on the road.
#8. If you admire a friend’s gun and tell him so, he will probably let you try it out a few times.
#7. Your primary gun doesn’t mind if you keep another gun for a backup.
#6. Your gun will stay with you even if you run out of ammo.
#5. A gun doesn’t take up a lot of closet space.
#4. Guns function normally every day of the month.
#3. A gun doesn’t ask , “Do these new grips make me look fat?”
#2. A gun doesn’t mind if you go to sleep after you use it.
And the number one reason a gun is favored over a woman….
#1. YOU CAN BUY A SILENCER FOR A GUN!

TAIR

I kid. I kid because it's funny.

Sleeper

No, no the movie.

What is a sleeper. Whel, this is a sleeper. This guy is not the first one I've heard of putting a hot engion in a wagon in order to make people in stock Mustangs look like idiots.

I knew a guy named Shaggy after high school who suped up his Ford Ranger pickup 4 banger and would smoke stock Mustangs.

Not the same car, but on the same idea of a grocery grabber popping a wheely in a drag race. Nice.

UPDATE 2010-07-03 19-50 (or so)

I've watched this video like three times now. Each time I picture pulling up next to some corvette on Westheimer not far from my house. I would love the idea of beetling those assholes at their own game. I'm not aloud in the game. I admit this has something to do with my dislike of the practice.

The spell checker in GEdit substituted wisenheimer for Westheimer. That is a trip.

Up Late

Did a load of dishes. The pot full of beans that had been sitting out for over two weeks had some kind do swamp gas coming off of it. I'm not exaggerating. There was a visible, even to me, gas emitting off the beans. The smell nearly killed me. Why do we have seven colanders? Why are three of them brand new? I work all day every day. Why am I the one doing every single dish? Why do we eat out every meal?

Watching OlgaKay

The chat is long over. She juggled high heal shoes while cussing in Russian. Where else can you get that?

UPDATE 2010-07-03

Argh! She took the video down because the live stream is over.

Best movie insults

I'm trying to figure out which is my favorite. I haven't seen some of these movies. "You mother was a hamster and your father smelled of elderberries." I've always preferred the insults that didn't bother with obscenity.

Foot

I hurt my foot yesterday on the walk home. I worked a very long frustrating day. I did manage to get a quad boot computer running. Forgot to send along the script to the blog.

Half the night I woke up when I moved my foot. I limped in my dreams. I'm sitting at my computer desk wiggling my toes trying to get things limbered up.

So, what happened? I rolled my right ankle on the concrete while crossing the street. Normally, this would make my ankle sore, but not this time. My ankle is fine. It is the right side of my right foot. If I try to put weight on the end of my foot, not the heal, it hurts like mad. I can hobble around. The idea of hobbling around work was highly unpleasing.

I could just imagine being at work and the boss asking me to help carry something. Just yesterday I helped someone lift a couple of those really heavy servers in to a higher rack. I like being the go to guy for that kind of thing. I would have had to beg off today. Besides, crawling under and around tables and desks was just not in the cards

Notes:

Those goddamn horns make it impossible for me to listen to the World Cup games. Ban noise making devices for God's sake! Every commentator has them in the background. I miss people singing and chanting racist slogans and slurs. I've heard of more than one person watching on mute and finding some alternate commentary. Not sure how that works.

You can get designer diapers now. One has blue jeans. Another has some kind of print. This is just another way to milk people out of money.

Multi boot RHEL

I was tasked with putting Red Hat 5 and 4, 64 bit and 32 bit on one system. It has the hardware we want. I spent the entire morning learning seven ways not to do it. Adam got with me and we went over a method or two that he has used in the past.

• Install the first Red Hat.
  • Do not use Volume Groups. Use straight up partitions. This will allow the different OS version you install to find the empty drive space.
  • Leave a gigabyte or so left over for a partition that all the OSes can mount.
  • Reuse the same boot partition. You must make a backup of it before installing each version of the OS. Reformat it each time. Keep all the files safe. You will put them on the extra partition.
  • Leave one swap partition out there. They will all use the same one.
• After you have installed all the system partitions, mount the extra partition on all the systems. Then write a script that will copy the files from the /boot backup folders on that extra partition to the real /boot folder. Go in to all the backup grub.conf and other files under the grub folder and combine everything by hand. Do not touch your originals.
• Test, test, test, then test again.

Red Hat 5 seems to let you boot just fine if you copy all the 32 bit /boot stuff from both 64 bit and 32 bit in to the /boot folder. Red Hat 4 does not play well with such shenanigans. Surely, though, something will blow up down the road if you do not have the correct /boot files in place so for goodness sake, make the script and go through the trouble.

How long did this take me to figure out. Well, I took the morning to learn six different ways of doing it wrong. Just after lunch is when I got with Adam and found myself on a good track.

Noisy Podcasts

I listen to some podcast about tech stuff. The guy who does it has two boys and the tech reviews he does use the kids as test beds. It works out very well, because he will say things like "I thought this was a dud product, but my kids loved it."

The one I listened to today was pretty good. He reviewed a ruggedized camera. I liked the review, but I liked the distractions more. As he was speaking things in the background would clump, buzz, jingle or yell to each other down stairs.

His family were down stairs. They were yelling from one room to the other apparently. He hollered down to them to keep it down, which they did for about forty five seconds.

His air conditioner kicked in which sounds like a cement mixer. He wheeled his chair over to it, taking the microphone with him to adjust it. I think he made it louder.

Rex the podcasting wonder dog came in and scratched at his feet. This is heard by the cowbell sized dog tags jingling in that distinct dog scratching rhythm.

Then there is his drink. He is not paid by Mountain Dew Code Red, but he should be. He insists on using a plastic bucket full of ice to consume it as he podcasts.

this kind of makes the personal. I've noticed that I prefer when pod podcasters give a dose of their real life along with their other content. It gives me a bit of attachment to the media. All the vlogs I watch have personal content or a separate channel for personal content except one. That one is comedy and has someone from old media as the spokes person. there are a couple podcasts that don't have much personalization. I definitely remember the personalized ones better.

Hurricane Alex

This was a strange one. Alex always kind of looked like he was headed for the south Texas north Mexico area. There was a moment early on they were saying it was unlikely, but possible for Alex to turn toward Louisiana. Some part of me always wanders if they just throw those in to cover their ass.

We got some odd rain patterns. Normally, you could set your watch by the rain coming in at about 16:00 in the afternoon on summer days in west Houston. Alex brought the rain later, but harder. The downpours were merciless. They brought cold winds and tons of lightening. I didn't hear anything about tornadoes, but the clouds sure looked like they were ready to pass a few twisters out for good measure.

I actually signed up for one of the text weather alerts. I got about ten text messages keeping me up on how to stop the text messages, get help and wind speed. It did tell me when and where Alex made landfall. I was waiting for the "It turned north. Head for the hills." but it never came thankfully.

This reminds me that all sorts of communications were cut off in the last hurricane we had. We lost power and couldn't make mobile phone calls or use internet on our phones for days. However, texting still seemed to work.

Morning ants

Nat gave me a ride this morning. She needed to get some groceries at whole foods so it is on her way. This gave me a chance to talk to Elle in front of the garage while we waited for Nat to get ready. Elle is in summer school until Thursday.

At some point I walked across the front yard to pick up one of those damn flier that keep getting blown all over the place. It is one of those doorknob fliers. It is no wander HOAs ban these things when they can.

While I was occupied with this, Elle stepped in to the side of the yard closer to the field next to our house. She managed to get ants all over her feet. She squirmed and freaked out over the ants. She stomped her foot and refused to brush off the ants with her hand or a rag. It took me a couple tries to get her to calm down and start knocking off the ants. "Elle, you are going to have to deal with ants for the rest of your life."

It didn't look like she got bit very much. I told Nat about it. I can't wait to get a note from the school.

We need to get some more granular poison. It has been raining every evening when I get home so the granular stuff won't work well. I will spray the house inside and out tonight regardless of rain. Excuses excuses. Time to get on the stick. They are hurting my little girl.

Notes:

Noticed someone talking about tape backup at work. I forget the context. Just the mention of a tape backup made me pause. I always imagine a refrigerator with a reel to reel on the front.

WEP encryption is a bit like having one of those locks on a door where you can see through the keyhole. How many people know what that analogy means? Who has seen one of these locks? My Aunt had a house with some of those locks on internal doors. This is the kind of lock I'm talking about.

A guy sold a 10% share in Apple in the mid seventies for $800. How many days has this guy kicked his own ass over this?

Some researchers are saying a pill form of marijuana would be better for medicinal purposes rather than allowing people to smoke it. It requires higher doses. It also stems (no pun intended) the negative of inhaling smoke. Pill forms have been available, but not popular because the high is long and low vs up in a spike like smoking.

Man breaks spine. Insurance says he had a spine before the break, and didn't express the possession on his pre existing condition list at the point of purchase. Disallowed. Yes, I'm exaggerating a bit. You almost bought it though.

Rainy ride home

Just another day. I know I'm old because my biggest complaint is about not being able to mow the grass for the rain. Thanks Sweety for the ride. I know you were not feeling well.

Brought back some memories

One of my earliest memories is riding on the tank of my dad's motorcycle around some trails. I remember veguely a blue bike and a red one. I laso remember some trike like three wheelers. We road around some parking lot. One was light green and the other was black. Hey folks! Remind me what I'm remembering will ya? Did I dream this stuff. Then there is the VW pickup. That was black as well.

Convert text files to CSV

#!/bin/env python
#############################################################################
# Parameters:     None
# Note:           2010-06-28
# This script helped with the software key (Microsoft) audit. It converts
# the multiple text files from "keyfinder.exe" to one cvs format file that
# is imported in to a spreadsheet and edited manually for clarity. I still
# had to hand remove a couple lines after running this script. This script
# was aimed at 98% success.
#############################################################################

import os
import sys
import glob

fileExt="*.txt"
fileList=""
outputName="output.csv"
fileList=glob.glob(str(fileExt))
if (len(fileList) == 0):
    print("Error - Could not obtain "+str(fileExt)+" files.")
    sys.exit(0)
if (os.path.exists(str(outputName))):
    os.remove(str(outputName))
outputPointer=open(str(outputName),"w")
for fileName in fileList:
    computerName=fileName.rstrip(str(fileExt))
    filePointer=open(str(fileName),"r")
    fileContents=filePointer.readlines()
    filePointer.close()
    outputString=""
    for contentLine in fileContents:
        contentLine=contentLine.strip("\n")
        if (str(contentLine) == "Professional"):
            outputString+=" Professional"
            continue
        if (str(contentLine) == "Home Edition"):
            outputString+=" Home Edition"
            continue
        if (len(str(contentLine)) == 0):
            outputString+=("\n"+str(computerName))
        elif (str(contentLine).find("Magical") == -1 and str(contentLine).find("magical") == -1):
            outputString+=","+str(contentLine)
    outputString=outputString.rstrip("\n"+str(computerName))
    outputString=outputString.strip("\n\n")
    outputPointer.write(str(outputString)+"\n")
outputPointer.close()

I know, I know. It is a lame script. It works for the most part. It converts a bunch of multiple line text files in to a single CVS (comma delimited) file for import in to a spreadsheet.

Book of Tired

In the beginning, it was dark, and noisy. I hit the alarm and got up. I switched on the TV to the local morning news to find out if Israel has been nuked yet. No. One more day perhaps. The only thing I get out of the local news is the weather and reminders what parts of town to stay away from.

While in the shower I thought of something interesting to blog about and then forgot it while shaving. I need one of those write in the rain notebooks and a space pen for the shower. That or a waterproof voice recorder. I have a water resistent case for my video camera, but I would be afraid those videos would get out and blind the masses.

The morning ritual has become something that I do not even remember. As far as I can tell the only thing that happened out of the ordinary this morning was that I didn't catch Merlin trying to sneak in to Nat's room as I kissed her goodby.

This is a testament to my life. I've found a rut and seem to enjoy it. That is usually when something jumps up and bites you in the ass. Just knowing I'm nine years from fifty is bad enough. My ex-girlfriend's kids are nearly old enough to have kids on at least one case.

The real trouble came at work today. I had time to breath. A couple things I've been working feverishly on lately have completed, or at least come to a stopping point for a minute. It was difficult to motivate myself to start new projects. I've been told unofficially that I'm taking on some different hat at the office. This makes me want to stop doing what I've been doing in the past and start the new thing. I don't know if it is going to work out or if it is going to burn down before I get there. That is the way things go I suppose. This is a stress unto itself. This is a down side to having room to breath.

Oh, I got work done. I researched wireless encryption, looked up bison, Touched up some scripts, updated my notes, helped people find driv4ers for a couple pieces of equipment, retired some old dead equipment, cleaned up the cubby (an impromptu lab) a bit and a bunch of other stuff that is important, but hard to document. This little stuff is important. Some of it gets done between the important stuff. Enough of it piles up that it needs to have some time devoted to it. That was today.

Mostly I'm tired. I've been sleeping well, but I'm worn out. I'm frazzled. What are some other adjectives I can come up with? Tore up from the floor up. Dragging ass. Well, dragging ass implies I'm not doing my job. I've been working hard. I'm weary, worn out, old. Wait a minute. Is that what really has me down? Am I hitting the middle aged crazy? Is that what this is about?

I cannot eat fast food like I used to. Yesterday some very young vlogers, in their twenties, had the fast food challenge where they ate one of everything off the dollar (now dollar fifty) menu at Wendy's. That would kill me. I would die on the twenty third bite. I wouldn't drop, I would just seize up in place, like a statue with a half eaten burger half way to my gaping maw.

Ah, the good old days. I could eat anything. I could sleep like a rock. I could mow the whole yard in the middle of summer without passing out. Well, I haven't past out, but I've felt like it was an option.

APHC Podcast

A Prairie Home Companion was in rare form this most recent podcast.

s“It's easier for young people to be pagans than older people.”

Joke:

A preacher was going for a walk in the woods and got chaised by a bear. Just as the bear caught him and pinned him on the ground the preacher said “Lord please save your servent and make the bear a Christian!”

The bear clasped his paws and said “Lord, thank you for that which I am about to receive.”