Month: September 2002

  • Weekly Recap VII: Not deadly, but possibly a sin.

    I won’t have the luxury of waiting until day’s end to do this, so why don’t we just get this out of the way right now? Now’s a good time to point out that the Blogs of Note are randomized. Yes, that’s right, I’m such a geek AND I’m so stressed about the perception of playing favorites that I spent three hours hacking together a system whereby Blogs of Note are stored in a database table and randomly sequenced every time you visit this page. I really need to get out more. Anyway…

    • Moving along the list of tabs at the top of my Mozilla window, we start with Emily. She just started school, bicycles a lot and apparently finds coconuts far more interesting than condoms. Not that I blame her.
    • At the one-year anniversary of her site, the proprietess of Blogatelle experienced a crisis of faith. One devoutly hopes that the crisis passes and she resumes the butt-kicking work of which her fans are so enamoured.
    • Phoemeister loves The Sims, though one could argue that she likes some strange things about the game. There aren’t any hamster updates, but we do get an interesting slang primer as well as a couple of long and funny chat logs.
    • Matt of debris.com throws like a girl. You heard it here first, folks. Well, second.
    • Captain Rooba digs the Punk Kittens, peering down on peoples’ homes from space, and amusing after-party anecdotes. He hates stupid people, but anyone with enough common sense hates stupid people. More to the point, he wants your “stupid people” stories so he can carry on the fight for more common sense. I can get behind that idea…
    • Thanks to Melpster we know that this past Monday was Vance DeGeneres’ birthday. Cool! It is also revealed that in addition to being a big Vance fan, she also loves MST3K. More cool! She awoke this morning feeling The Love, albeit a generalized vague sort of The Love. But hey, everybody needs Love.
    • Sar of Dragon Ink got another domain, though she probably shouldn’t have. The He-Man vs. She-Ra debate continues on into the new millenium, thanks in part to that gods-awful new rendition. (Ewww.) When you get right down to it, though, what Sar is all about is ideas. Lots and lots and lots of ideas.
    • Fluttergirl. Let’s see… Punk Kittens, tainted Pepsi, overweight canines, casting your own movie, group blog, pricey sneakers, Anna Nicole marathon, possible job in Portland (yay!). Did I miss anything? You be the judge.
    • At Argephontes, brevity is the soul of Friday Fives. (Hell, hers is even more terse than the one I did a few weeks ago.) The start of the football season is cause for celebration, doggie porn is probably not. Nor are CD-ROM drives that don’t like audio CDs.
    • Meanwhile, Madame Sinister is an electricity freak, or so she says. Remember, it’s just three months. I wonder what it’s like to be a wheelchair wrangler… but not enough to actually go find out. Lip-syncing always sucks, though I find the notion that Axl Rose was the only person at the VMAs to buck the trend just a little bit weird.
    • Jessy has gone back to her new home. Hopefully that DSL hookup will come soon so she can return to us.
    • Snappy the Clam sent the rugrat to kindergarten this week, which is one of the most mind-altering experiences a parent can have. He’s doing a lot of testing, probably of the Moveable Type/Emacs thing though it’s hard to be sure. Duly noted is the nigh-inevitable weeding out of the rampaging hordes of blogs that started up over the last couple of years. (I’m not going anywhere, thank you. You should be so lucky.)
    • This week, the Cosmic Babe started work, causing an inevitable drop in posting output. Money is a good thing, though, so who are we to complain? Earlier in the week she marveled at how an activity that should be sexy can somehow manage not to seem at all sexy. One of the demonspawn had a fever. School supplies were shopped for much the same way they were at the Kerezman house (that is, the day before school started). It would appear that the workplace will probably become rich anecdotal source material in fairly short order.
    • Placed last by sheer blind luck, Q Daily News laments the decreased mindshare of the concept of free speech. Also sorely missed are sniglets. (I collected Far Side calendars, but I probably would have gotten a kick out of a Sniglets calendar.) Duly noted is a whale of a coincidence. We’re also treated to a couple of bits of neat medical stuff. (While I could never be a doctor, I find medical science interesting from time to time.)
  • Peevish Friday Five

    • What is your biggest pet peeve? Why? – I have so many! Karaoke (defined as “someone singing along to a recorded song”) is a big peeve. Just ask my poor wife, who likes to sing and is actually quite good at it. Not closing containers when you’re done with them, that’ll peeve me. There are others. I just told Wendi that I was answering this question, and she responded with, “My wife.” She underestimates herself, methinks. =)
    • What irritating habits do you have? – You mean, other than jumping all over people for setting off my myriad peevish buttons? That’s probably the worst, really. Wendi chimes in, though, with “You suck on your tongue when sleeping… drives me nuts…” It’s just revenge for your snoring, dear. Nyah!
    • Have you tried to change the irritating habits or just let them be? – Well, I can’t do much about the tongue-sucking thing. Sorry, Wendi-love. I have, however, made considerable effort on the whole “angry grousing” thing. It’s a work in progress to be sure. Hey, if I were perfect it would be boring.
    • What grosses you out more than anything else? Why? – Let’s just say I could never be a doctor or other sort of medical practitioner. Internal fluids and parts, ewwwww! (Why ask why? I mean, really now.)
    • What one thing can you never see yourself doing that other people do? – Driving. No, really. I’ve been behind the wheel of a real automobile twice, and I’m in no hurry to do it again. I know that normal people really do drive without any problems, but I’m just too jumpy and tense. I’d probably cause too many collisions because there’s no way I could ever relax enough behind the wheel.

    Friday Five

  • I love my job… most days.

    Most days I love my job. I get paid a decent salary, I have great job security, most days I don’t have to work long or hard hours, I make most of the decisions about how I’m going to implement technology, and I have a lot of neat toys to play with.

    There are days like today, however, that put my love to the test. The server-room printer is out for repair. The Rosey VoxPro Mac refuses to boot from the Norton Utilities CD… any CD, in fact. The T-1 line that feeds this website as well as the main corporate site went down twice today. I’m still waiting to hear back from CTL’s tech support about the useless hunk of junk we bought from them a couple of weeks ago. Best of all, one of our sales managers watched his PC die this morning. The error message given upon boot is only mildly cryptic, but I’ll spare you the message and give you the loose translation: “Your copy of Windows ™ has gone to meet its Maker. Burn a small animal at the Altar of Bill, say three Hail Microsofts and reinstall the operating system all over again from scratch. You worm.”

    I’ve faced this before, so I gathered the remains of the PC and took it to my lair. After throwing the last of my small animals on the altar I attempted to revive the patient. Things looked promising until I made the foolish mistake of installing the drivers for the sound card. Immediately the computer froze solid. “Okay,” I said to myself… and I can often be heard talking to myself… “Maybe the sound card is what frazzled the PC. Let’s get out a totally different sound card and try installing it.” Surprise of surprises, the computer froze in exactly the same way just after I completed installing the drivers for the new card. So, as long as there’s no working sound card drivers in the machine it works great.

    As of this writing I have given up on that chassis and am instead “refurbing” one of the Dell boxen we bought a year ago. They’re wonderful machines, though they seem to carry some sort of curse… whosoever gains the use of one of these GX1s is fated soon to leave the company. If you have a better explanation of why I’ve had to transfer one of these five computers to new users almost 20 times in the past year, I’d like to hear it.

    Hmm. “Here you go, Name Withheld! Enjoy! Mwahahahahaha….”

    (ps – I’m not that evil. Really. And in case one of my coworkers reads this, please understand that I hold everyone in the company in the highest regard, except for those that I don’t. My opinions are my own, blah blah blah.)

  • Zero, yet again

    I’m rebuilding Zero once again. This time she has a lot less hard disk space, but I can live with that because I’ve given up attempting to do video-capture under Linux. I’ll be putting an All-in-Wonder Radeon into Ryoko soon as well as a bigger SCSI hard drive. Then I’ll use the plethora of Windows-based video tools instead of wrestling with the inadequate and incomplete Linux options.

    Having done a few Linux From Scratch installs now, something has finally occurred to me that I should’ve thought of months ago: I’m keeping a log of various quirks and “undocumented features” as I go through the process of building all of the software parts I want. Every time I do this I get hung up on the same things. Maybe if I have a document to consult from the previous run-through I can save myself a lot of time and aggravation.

    Wish me luck.

  • From then until now

    “So, Karel, what’s been going on in your life lately?”

    • Saturday was a nice big goof-off day, culminating in the premiere of InuYasha on Cartoon Network. Not too shabby, really, but I like most of the stuff from the creator of Ranma 1/2. I couldn’t tell you what Sunday was like, I don’t remember. It must not have been terribly interesting.
    • Yesterday was a day of guests. Ben and John came over early in the afternoon for hours and hours of Diablo II gaming as well as a short Doom Legacy fragfest. Nothing like nostalgic gaming, right down to the “why won’t Doom effing network properly?” Brought back memories, I tell ya. A few hours after they left, the Bourgos came over. We convinced Amy (Michael needed none) to play Age of Empires instead of Diablo, since I’d already had more than my fill over the weekend. A great time was had by all. For the record, Amy and Michael won thanks to her early wonder completion and a flotilla of Michael’s Viking longboats to protect said wonder. My Korean turtle ships didn’t stand a chance, so I spent the 400 year countdown beating the living crap out of my Japanese neighbors. Yes, I’m a big wuss.
    • The kids start school again tomorrow, so Wendi’s got them out shopping and doing other preparatory activities.
    • Zero crashed. Hard. As I was getting ready to type up a really big Thoughts entry. (I’ve been shamefully neglecting that category since about, oh, this time last year.) Turns out that the loud whining noise coming from her tower is the sound of a hard drive on its last bearings. As I type this, data is being transferred to another computer in anticipation of replacing the hard drives in Zero and starting over again. Wheee. I wasn’t planning to do another Linux From Scratch build quite so soon, but life is often that way… unplanned situations that don’t bear waiting.
    • On a related note, the “Current Music” feature will be missing until Zero is fully operational and trustworthy once more. Turns out that if XMMS isn’t running on Zero, the “Current Music” code stalls and prevents the loading of the rest of this site. Eep! I’ll see about coming up with some sort of better way of showing off my music collection.
  • I’m sure that’s not what Lucas meant…

    Found on Blogatelle this link to a collection of lines from the “original” Star Wars trilogy that could be read… differently… given certain circumstances.

    ‘I look forward to completing your training. In time you will call me master.’

    *chortle* I’ve always wanted to say that…