Not Necessarily Interesting News

I’ve finally gotten a while to sit and play with my new PSP. I upgraded to the latest firmware and the browser is amazing as I’ve said. We were at Freebird’s this afternoon and I pulled it out and checked my email right at our table on their free WiFi. The images from my digital camera do the screen zero justice. The screen on this thing is amazing. Even though the text is very small on the screen it is quite readable. I sat up last night reading an e-Book I downloaded without problem.
That was cool and all but today I finally figured out the right settings to get a movie ripped off a DVD and onto my Memory Stick. I managed to get an entire 82 minute movie, “Ghost in the Shell” (Mamoru Oshii), squeezed down to 225MB. I know I can get it smaller and will keep working on it but this is just too cool. Now any DVD in our nearly 750 title library can be brought on the road for watching with the PSP. Once I’m totally happy with the results I’ll post a how to.

I’m going to try to find a reasonably priced 1GB MemoryStick for this so I can load 2-3 movies, a few games, and several e-Books to keep with me wherever I go. I’ll always be prepared to wait for my son’s Scout meetings or Karate class, etc.

Remember the heart stress tests I took a few months ago? Well, the insurance company decided they weren’t going to cover that and now I’ve got a bill for nearly $500 sitting here. Well, there goes the money from the Defender.

Isn’t that the way it always works? You get a little ahead and then the Money Fairy gets word and says “No you don’t. I’ll take that” and kicks you in the nuts and takes your cash. I picture the Money Fairy to be exactly like Carol Kane as the Ghost of Christmas Present in Scrooged with Bill Murray. She gets a sick joy out of beating you up when you hope for/expect her to help you out.

Ok, how sweet is this? The 2.0 browser kicks ass. E-mail,IM, and web access. It’s slow but functional. I’m in love. 🙂

I boxed up and shipped off the A/C out of my Defender today to a guy in New York. I figured I wasn’t using it as I run all summer with the top off and don’t need it in the winter obviously. I sold it for $1K and am using the money to buy parts, help pay for our vacation in December, and buy myself a new toy. Of course, today it’s supposed to be 101degrees here in Austin. Not that I’d have used it anyways but not having the option seems kind of weird. Not many idiots will drive around Texas in summer without A/C. I had a couple people say it’d hurt resale value but then I never plan on selling my baby so that’s a moot point. I am liking all the extra legroom now that I’ve taken the condensor out of the passenger footwell and the vents off the underside of the dash.

Yeah, I went out and did it. I’ve been wanting one for a while so last night I went out with a bit of the cash I made from selling the A/C from my Defender and bought a Sony PSP. I bought it used to make sure I’d get the older 1.5 firmware so I could play ‘home-brewed’ apps. I’ve already downloaded a few old school games to play, an eBook reader, and MAME. I am very tempted by the release of the 2.0 firmware today but don’t want to give up the usefulness I’ve already found in 1.5. Good job, Sony. Way to make your hardware less useful.

Well, I’m getting closer to getting everything back. It’s going to take days if not weeks to recover everything. I run a RAID-5 SCSI array on my webserver. The array consists of 4 primary disks + one hot spare. Well, what happened was a cascade of crap that caused the loss/misplacement of a bunch of data in the array.
Timeline:
– A spammer decides that he’s going to use one of my email addresses as a fake return email. Ok, it’s happened before.
– The resulting torrent of spam gives my server fits but is no problem. It handles it in stride.
– Road Runner sees a shitload of connects to port 25 from my server trying to send back bounce notifications and cuts me off about 2AM.
– Sometime in here I have a disk go bad in the array.
– I wake up and can’t get online.
– My server is now unreachable for some reason. My only choice, and a bad one at that, was to hard power the machine.
– Upon coming online the RAID array decides it doesn’t want to play nice and trashes its journal file. fsck recovers most stuff but tosses it in lost+found instead of its previous spot.
– My backup drive for all this was useless. For unknown reasons it will not mount on any of my machines.
– I get to now spend hours/days/weeks going through lost+found moving files to their correct places.

Kill me now…

I don’t even want to go into what happened but let’s just say the impossible happened with regards to my webserver. Thanks to backups, RAID, and a bit of luck I’ve recovered most of my data. The new look is the default WordPress theme. I still need to find that backup. Looks like I may have lost most of 100GBs of mp3s but those are re-rippable I guess. *sigh*

I was coming to work today and stopped at a light behind a Ford Explorer. It had the typical pot-smoking hippy bumper stickers you see all over town. You know the ones, the W in the red circle, Hillary 2008, etc. Typical Democratic BS.

The clincher was this one:
SUVs promote terrorism

I’ll give you a second to go back and read what kind of car that was on again.

Really insightful bumper sticker there, moron.

Got in a couple of my magazine subscriptions yesterday. I realized I sat down and read Popular Mechanics before I picked up Stuff. I don’t know what to think.