Not Necessarily Interesting News

Good: Gift certificate to Fry’s that I used to buy a DVD burner that I’ve wanted for a long time. I wanted it to do backups and such.

Bad: Get it home, install it, and make a backup of my Windows partition that I never use. I was booted into Windows to upgrade the firmware on the drive so I figured I’d do the backup.
Next I boot back into Linux and go to do a backup of that partition. Hmmm. Why can’t I read those files in my home dir? They don’t show up in an ‘ls’ and I can’t ‘rm’ them either. Weird. Reboot for grits and shins. Now it can’t mount that drive and wants a fsck. Ok. Try it. fsck fails weirdly.
After running some tests I find that the drive cratered, minutes before I was gonna back it up. Great, just great.

Other toys I got: Games for my Nintendo DS. Some books. My traditional Eeyore sweatshirt( I now have about 8 of them). A bottle of fine bourbon. And more.

As usual, being the only grandson, my son raked it in. Santa brought him some rollerblades. He also got an authentic military helmet and lots of Marine memorabilia(He wants to be a Marine/SEAL when he grows up). He also got a board game(yes, they still make board games) from us called Ticket to Ride. It’s one of the best games I’ve played in a while. It’s simple enough for my 8 year old but deep enough to keep adults interested. He slaughtered his grandfather and me at it the first time we played. If you like board games, I recommend picking it up.

: Guilty as Sin from the album “Wayward Angel” by Kasey Chambers

Last night I settled down to watch the only network show I watch, C.S.I., and wait for Mando to drop by. About 15 minutes in the TV goes ‘pop’ and all the power disappears. Crap. I wander out to the garage to find the breaker that flipped but couldn’t see any that were tripped. Weird. I walk in to see if it could have been the surge protector behind the TV. Nope. Looks good. Then I hear the lonely beeping of a UPS coming from the computer room. Uh oh. Ok, so it’s definitely a breaker. I go out and flip every one of them off then back on. Still no dice. Shit. Mando drops by around now so we talk for a bit before I attack the breaker box again. I get out the circuit tester to test the breakers themselves. They all check out okay. I finally give up around midnight and decide to call an electrician this morning.
This morning I wake up determined to find the problem. I pulled every outlet that I believed was on the circuit and finally found what you see pictured above. Oops. That explains a lot. I had a spare outlet and replaced it and everything was good. I guess I could have burned down the house under the right condition. We got lucky.
I also found out that that one circuit served my entire computer room _and_ my entertainment center _and_ the Christmas tree. I guess it didn’t like powering 6 or 7 systems + HDTV + Xbox + surround sound + Christmas tree + a couple of lamps at the same time. Hmmm. I guess my New Years project is to rewire the computer room with it’s own upgraded circuit.

sirius proc # dmesg                
PROMLIB: Sun IEEE Boot Prom 3.25.3 2000/06/29 14:12
Linux version 2.4.28-sparc-r1 (root@livecd)
(gcc version 3.3.4 20040623 (Gentoo Linux 3.3.4))
#1 Thu Dec 16 09:39:16 CST 2004
ARCH: SUN4U

sirius proc # cat /proc/cpuinfo  
cpu             : TI UltraSparc IIi (Sabre)
fpu             : UltraSparc IIi integrated FPU

sirius proc # cat /proc/meminfo 
        total:    used:    free:  shared: buffers:  cached:
Mem:  526131200 513212416 12918784        0 50577408 376258560
Swap: 511950848        0 511950848
MemTotal:       513800 kB
MemFree:         12616 kB

My Ultra5 is alive! Alive I say!

My wife isn’t so keen on the number of computers I have currently living in my office at home. This is just a pic of the ones I have running. It doesn’t show the pile of parts and such just out of frame or the server in the closet.
For those keeping score(left to right):

• SGI Octane running Irix 6.5
• Sun Sparc Ultra 5 will be running Gentoo once I get to it
• Sun Sparc Ultra 2 Dual CPU running Solaris
• SGI O2 Irix running 6.5
• Apple iBook running OSX
• P3 (under desk, Nana’s computer in for service)
• Athlon 2800 running SuSE/WinME(under desk)

I think it’s a good start.

Yeah, it’s two weeks early but I couldn’t wait and my wife said I could pick it up.

It’s a shiny new Nintendo DS. I couldn’t afford any of the only 4 or so games it had on release day so I’m making due with the Metroid game and PictoChat software that came with it. (for family members reading this: I need games for my birthday. Anything will be fine as long as it’s for the DS. :)) I was dubious about the touch screen controls but once you discover the thumb thingy attached to the wrist strap is for the touch screen it’s great. Point and shoot. Almost as intuitive as using a mouse on a PC. 3D shooters are very playable using this format once you get used to it. The stylus is a bit small but an after-market Palm Pilot stylus works just fine. The whole machine is a bit big, about as big as an original Gameboy but sideways and in a clamshell. It’ll still fit in a pocket but just barely.

It has built-in wireless and I can’t wait for the inevitable wi-fi uses for it. It’d be awesome to have a mini web-browser and email client for it. Pop into a Schlotsky’s and do email from your Gameboy. Give me that and I won’t even need to take my laptop on trips and vacations. I notice it also has a microphone built in. That could make for some interesting game-play I guess.

It takes a bit of getting used to, especially the touch screen but I like it. Now I just need to get some more games for it. As is I’ll keep playing my old faves like Mario Golf Advance and Advance Wars 2 on it.

: Father of Mine from the album “So Much for the Afterglow” by Everclear

This last week sucked work-wise.

Lesse, I ended one contract to take another contract for more money. I had a start date of this past Monday. I get a call from my new contract company late the Friday before I’m to start saying ‘the PO hasn’t been approved, you’ll start Tuesday, Wednesday at the latest’. Ok, the time off will hurt my budget. I don’t get paid if I don’t work. I’ll make do.

No news Monday. I email Tuesday and get no answer. I call and get no response. Wednesday I get a hold of someone. ‘Still waiting on the PO. Sorry.’ Thursday morning first thing I get a call saying ‘Oops, another company has all the contracts for that department. We can’t be your company. Call these folks and get things rolling with them’. WTF? I call the new-new contract company and get told that I might be able to start as early as the 29th. You’ve got to be kidding! I quit a job to move to better pay and now being out of work 2 weeks negates any gains for the next couple months. I then get a call Thursday afternoon saying, ‘oh, you can work for us(the original company) but you’ll have to switch companies again on Jan 1st’. Another WTF!

I finally started Friday afternoon. Looks to be a decent job and I’ll have fun. The bad part is I’ll have to re-negotiate my contract with a new company in a month. A company that seems to have all the contracts on site. So I’m sure I’ll get screwed and lose my gain in pay from moving positions. The new contract company will have the upper hand. I can’t go to a different company to work there. I’ll have to use them. Eliminate the competing contract companies and they can really stick to the contractors. Pay for all contractors on-site has gone down about 20-25% over the past 4 years. It’ll drop yet again over this, I’m sure.

Anybody own a landscaping business that needs a lawnmower driver?

I did get a lot of time to play Halo2 over the past week while waiting though so it wasn’t all bad. 🙂

: A Million Tears from the album “Barricades & Brickwalls” by Kasey Chambers

…but I’m getting a better handle on it.

Lately I’ve been getting a lot of ‘Rolex’, or R0lex, or is it R0|e}{, spam lately. Spamassassin has been good for me the past few years but the spammers are getting better at tuning spam to get past it. Normally the spam cutoff is a ‘5’. They’ve got things tuned to come in at 4.5. I’ve dropped my cutoff to 4.5 and that’s helped a bit but not enough. It was time to get more drastic. I’ve now invoked Postfix’s ability to do header and body checks on incoming mail and reject it before it even gets in to the server. I’ve spent the last day or so coming up with regex’s like c[|i][@a][|l][1i|]s and v[1i|][a@]gr[a@] to catch every possible (mis)spelling of whatever drug they’re pushing. The war just keeps escalating.

: Double Team from the album “Tenacious D” by Tenacious D

This morning we went down to Wimberley for their first Saturday sale. While browsing the various antique and craft booths I came across a dealer that had a set of original, in the original box, Lawn Jarts.

I had to own them.

We haggled over price and I walked away with my prize for a mere $8. I wasn’t about to tell him they sell for around $50-$150 on the Net, when you can find them. The reason they are so expensive is that they have banned from manufacturing and resale in the US since 1988. eBay cancels all attempts at selling them. Yeah, you can sell swords, knives, and other instruments of doom on eBay but not good ol’ Jarts. These things are dangerous as all hell and a blast to play with.

These things also bring back lots of memories. My favorite memory of them is from when I was around 9 years old. A friend of mine that lived two doors up had a set of them. I’d stand in my backyard, and he in his. Each of us would have a pair of the daggers of flying death. We put out the rings and get ready to play. From our yards we could not see each other. We’d decide who went first and go.

INCOMING!

When you heard that cry you’d better be looking up as pointy airborne death from above was inbound to your location. Remember, we couldn’t see the person tossing. We had to acquire our potential Grim-Reaper-on-wings in mid-air and get the hell out of the way before it impacted. Once it hit we’d give fire correction over the tin-can phone we had strung from his yard to mine and they’d fire again. We’d do this for hours on a summer afternoon.

How we ever survived childhood without our nanny government looking out for us I’ll never know.

: Hello City from the album “Play Everywhere For Everyone Austin, TX 03-10-04” by Barenaked Ladies

Ok, I love my new TV. It’s great and we’re rewatching all our old movies in big screen glory.

Here’s my problem. Playing my Xbox now gets me motion sick. I’ve never had that problem before. I was playing Medal of Honor last night and I had to quit and walk away after 10 minutes. I was getting queasy and I started to break into a cold sweat. Not normal.

A few hours later I decided it was something else and I fired up Colin McRae 4. I love rally racing. It’s real racing on real roads. Anyone can make a left hand turn for 500miles. Driving a mountain road in the snow at 100+ MPH takes real skill. I guess because it can’t be done in a stadium it’ll never take off in the US.

Well, after 15 minutes of racing I started to get queasy again and had to quit. I think because the screen is so big and fills my peripheral vision it’s causing me to get motion sick. I’ve never had this problem before and I’ve played games for years. I don’t want to go back to a smaller TV because games look awesome on the new one but if I’m gonna throw up while playing games I may have to.

Decisions, decisions…

A friend of mine, Bill, is moving to Houston and didn’t want to hassle with taking his big screen TV along. He offered for me to buy it and I took him up on it. We picked up the 51″ beast this afternoon and just barely beat the rain home. We went to Best Buy to get some cabling after dinner and just got it hooked up. I took the time to adjust the colors and stuff and then my wife had me throw in her favorite movie for testing and it looks awesome. In our smallish family room it is downright huge. We had to do some major rearranging to fit it in. We’re thinking of turning the living room we never use into a dedicated home theater setup instead. I’ll be trying out the Xbox a little later and I’m sure that’ll be a blast.

Thanks Bill.