Missives from the 6th Floor

g0g0g0

Mon, 17 Nov 2008 21:20:17 -0800

Red Ring of Death

Sat, 15 Nov 2008 17:07:52 -0800

After about two years of very occasional service (I can count the number of games played on my hands and have fingers left over) our XBox displayed the "Red Ring of Death" this evening, after locking up a couple times playing Lego Batman.

So I guess I join the ranks of those who've had to send their consoles in for repair. And just days before Left4Dead releases, of course.

Ubuntu Install - Step-by-Step

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 19:32:13 -0800

19:23 As I type, I'm in the process of installing Ubuntu 8.10 onto my primary home machine.

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On Covers

Thu, 13 Nov 2008 09:28:07 -0800

Over the past few weeks, the local NPR affiliate (and awesome Jazz station) had their annual membership drive. This makes listening to Morning Edition on the way to work, or All Things Considered on the way home, significantly less pleasant, and had me searching for alternative audio distraction.

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Package Manager Fail (followup)

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 10:39:03 -0800

Uninstalling KDE beta packages...

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Remembrance, and Thanks

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 08:41:38 -0800

To those who have served in times of conflict, doing a job most would rather not, my thanks and respect.

Ubuntu 8 - First Impressions

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 21:52:42 -0800

I needed a Linux box at work for some testing, and while I've been a "RedHat guy" since waaay back (RedHat 4.2), I decided to give Ubuntu a whirl. I downloaded the 8.04 64bit desktop ISO, burned a CD, and booted the installer.

A short while later, I had a mostly working machine - made more difficult only by the lack of in-built support for the Intel on-board NIC, which required me to grab drivers from sourceforge, and use a USB stick to get the machine on-line. (I say only knowing full well that such a situation would be a "dead end" for a normal user, even if they had a second machine from which they could google and download said drivers.)

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Now We're Cooking With Gas

Sun, 09 Nov 2008 19:35:04 -0800

Cooked the first "real meal" in the new kitchen - nothing fancy, flank steak with apple bacon (assembled by Costco), roasted herbed potatoes, and "Alan's Carrots." Boy did I miss a gas range - hot when you want it, cool when you don't, and no waiting for 5 minutes in between. The new broiler is awesome - like hell has opened up in my oven. And it makes me smile to know that running the range full bore is generating more BTU than the furnace that heats the whole house.

package manager fail

Fri, 07 Nov 2008 10:07:23 -0800

$ uname -a Darwin ... 9.5.0 Darwin Kernel Version 9.5.0: Wed Sep 3 11:29:43 PDT 2008; root:xnu-1228.7.58~1/RELEASE_I386 i386

$ man repair_packages ... BUGS repair_packages does not verify file contents or restore missing files; It can only verify or repair filesystem permissions.

$ man pkgutil ... BUGS Package dependency analysis and reference counting are not yet available, hence there is no --uninstall command yet.

Come on... I mean really.

FAIL.

Institutionalized Intolerance

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 20:59:49 -0800

I'm incredibly disappointed in California. Passing Prop 8 is the most intolerant, bigoted, and narrow minded behavior possible. It says it's ok to discriminate against people who are different from you. It says it's ok to impose your morals and values on someone else's life, even when their decisions have no affect on yours.

It's an act of cowardice and fear.

And I'm ashamed of it.

Straight Up or On the Rocks

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 07:15:27 -0800

Dawnise turned me on to an article on slashfood about bar-tending - something of a fascination of mine. The author had a recommended reading list, and I was happy to find that the library had Straight Up or On the Rocks in their collection. I tossed it on my request queue, and it arrived the other day.

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When Things That Should be Simple, Aren't...

Sun, 02 Nov 2008 10:42:58 -0800

Dawnise reads lots of craft sites - and quite often these sites have tutorials that she wants to preserve. In Windows, it was simple - drag-select the text and images in Firefox, copy, paste into Word (or WordPad, or some other rich text editor) and viola, the document, with formatting and images, in an offline form she could archive.

Turns out that on the Mac, this is what we in the business call a "pain in the ass."

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Size Really Does Matter

Sat, 01 Nov 2008 21:45:17 -0800

The kitchen is mostly done - when I got home yesterday the dust barriers were gone, most of the trim work was finished, and by Monday or Tuesday it should be done.

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Kitchen: Won't Be Long Now...

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 12:53:13 -0800

We have cabinets, counters, Advantium, sink (w/ faucet), and dishwasher all installed and operational.

The vent hood and stove are the only major bits left - and the rest is "finish work" - trim, baseboards, and the like.

We might have a working kitchen by weeks end.

I'm all a-quiver with antici-

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You Dropped your Rock

Fri, 24 Oct 2008 09:07:55 -0800

The granite guys are here - big slabs of granite in tow. By this afternoon, we'll have counters (knock ~~wood~~stone).

Then we paint this weekend, and Dan hangs the uppers, installs the dishwasher, and we've got a kitchen again.

I can almost taste it...