| West[eo]n |
[18 Jul 2009|01:55am] |
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I just spent 15 minutes trying to find the name of the actor playing eccentric code-breaker Spencer Witawski on the latest episode of Burn Notice, "Signals and Codes" (S03E05). It kept being right in front of me, but I didn't see it, because his real life name is Michael Weston. The main character on the show, played by Jeffrey Donovan, is Michael Westen.
There was also an episode in which Westen must assume one of his many cover IDs, and introduces himself to a mark as an Australian named Terry Miller (Aus: "Millah"). That's the producer's name that always shows up in big letters in the opening credits. I think the people on this show are lazy when it comes to making up names and casting people. I can't blame them. Any time I have to name anything, my mind gives up and takes a nap. That's why none of my cars, computers, hard drives, or appliances have had names. I think I've given the visiting cat about 12 different names, but I don't really consider any of them to be its name. They're just what it's called.
Anyway... In a scene in one of the last few episodes of season 2, I for some reason took note of about a dozen different people strolling the streets of Miami Beach all around the main characters, as the camera work danced between establishing and closeup shots. I guess spy shows make me more spy-like, trying to memorize everyone's face, and where all my exits are. As it turned out, there were only about 12-15 people total, and they all keep re-pairing up, splitting apart, coming back together, and in the case of a few, appearing on both sides of the main characters simultaneously as the cameras cut back and forth. One such man, a bit obvious in his dreads, also shows up as a heavy later in the same episode. I wonder if they're all friends of the cast and crew, or if the show actually spent a full $250 on extras.
And okay, I admit it... I've been supplementing my episode-watching with tree-research. I couldn't help it. They kept having scenes out in the powdery sands of the miami coastline, right next to some cool looking trees with huge round leaves that I at first thought might be some kind of mangrove, because as it turns out, I have no idea what a mangrove is. It took the whole episode's length, but I tracked them down: Sea Grapes! AKA Coccolobo uvifera, every part of the typically 2m (8m max) tall tree is useful, from the grapes which are sweet, and can be made into 'seaside jelly' or wine, to the wood, which when boiled serves up a useful red dye. If large enough, the wood is great for cabinet work - unexpected (by me) from a tree that thrives in salt-sprays. You can soothe a sore throat with the gum (resin/sap), and you can even use the roots for treating dysentery. I hope when my ship wrecks, it does so near a nice large stand of these things. They're like a convenience/hardware store, some assembly required.
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| cascading capacity failures |
[17 Jul 2009|01:46pm] |
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After a couple of years of enough capacity, it all comes to a head today. A guy at work brought in an HDD of a few gigs of stuff I needed for the weekend. My 2 drives at work were full. One had just enough space to almost fit one of the things he brought, but after deleting everything deletable, it was about 80MB shy. My other disc had only 211MB. I had my USB drive with me, though. It had almost enough to take one thing, but again, not enough. I tried my camera card - 8GB - but it had almost no room left, because I was out of room at home, and haven't been able to dump anything for weeks. I managed to move one thing over to the card from the thumbdrive, making room for a single thing (of about 5) from my coworker. When I ran out for lunch, there was something interesting that demanded I take a video, but after a few seconds, the card was out of room, thanks to that thing I moved over.
Three cheers for the 3TB I just got. I'm moving things to them post-haste.
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| The truth behind my Ubuntu update |
[15 Jul 2009|03:23pm] |
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Mostly it worked great. The RAID array, however, was another story. I felt a tinge of pain realizing I'd have to dig back into that to at least partially understand things again enough to fire it up once more. It has all my pictures and movies I've ever taken on it, in desperate need of backing up. You know how it is. I didn't even remember the magic incantations (mdadm, et al), and spent 3 nights looking things up, occasionally getting 2 of the 3 drives to assemble, losing 2 of the drives for most of a night, and then getting 2 of 3 back just long enough to copy the important stuff to a different drive. This was made extra difficult by the fact that it's nearly 160GB of data, and I'm very low on space everywhere. In fact, I couldn't put the last handful of things on that empty partition, so they're still on my camera.
Clearly I needed more drive space, but I'm in savings-mode, trying not to spend *any* money for awhile as I replenish my coffers (pay-day today should help). I checked my filing cabinet's "gift cards" folder, and still had 2 Best Buy cards from Christmases past. Turns out they were just shy of $400 in total, so I picked up a WD Caviar Black 1TB internal, and a Seagate FreeAgent |XTreme 2TB external. That's 3TBs in all!</mathlete>. There's about an hour left in copying just my image and movie files from the other FreeAgent Desktop drive to the new 2TB home. I will be moving less important things (movies, games) to the 2TB, and using the 3 500GB drives that were in a RAID 5 array as singular 500GB drives for more unimportant stuff, as well as backing up my important stuff across multiple internal and external drives.
There are some other small oddities, like if I'm watching a movie fullscreen and move the mouse, sometimes I get a 1-frame flash of my desktop poking through, but nothing of any serious nature like the RAID hassle. Like most others I know, I'm done with RAID :)
Oh, and while choosing my drives, I was approached by a slightly confused older man - sort of a Morgan Freeman type, sans affair-with-step-granddaughter (at least, pending further investigation). He asked me if I was on Mac or Windows, and said I was on Linux. I wasn't in a pedantic mood, but he wanted to know about it, and kept dragging more info out of me with deeper questions, until I was explaining to him the benefits and drawbacks of open source methodologies, and explaining how he could try things non-destructively with liveCDs. He wanted to know if he could have my email address in case he had any further questions, so I gave it to him. He wanted to know what I did for a living, and as his questions turned more toward how I liked it, and what I saw in my future, I mentioned that I seem to be getting more and more into woodworking, actually, and I learned that he's friends with Graham Blackburn, who's made a lot of books and videos, and traveled around a lot giving lectures on the subject.
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| For your consideration... |
[11 Jul 2009|01:53pm] |
Episode three of Christopher Andrews' Duet is up.
See for yourself why I've never had a speaking role before, and likely never will again.
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| Michael Jackson: My Memorial |
[07 Jul 2009|10:06am] |
As the world descends upon Los Angeles for Michael Jackson's All Star Celebrity Funeral, I am reminded of a little something I wrote for the upcoming August '09 issue of Geek Monthly.
In my review for "Jackson Hole Strawberry Rhubarb Soda," I said:
In fact, the tart, sweet flavor of Jackson Hole Strawberry Rhubarb Soda is so uncannily pie-like that I've managed to write this entire review without latching onto the phrase "Jackson Hole" and making a cheap, off-color remark about the goings on at Neverland Ranch. If that doesn't convince you that its flavor is startlingly delicious, nothing will.
Of course, I wrote this back in April '09, and was mortified when I realized that, when the issue comes out, it will look like I was making the bad joke because of the recent tragedy. But now that I think about it, I stand by my easy, hack comedy.
If I had asked any one of you "Who is Michael Jackson?" a month ago, you would have said, "Also, he's one of the world's greatest entertainers, and the King of Pop," right after you had said, "He's a ghoulish pervert weirdo."
Yes, Michael Jackson has left the world with a legacy of music, and he will hold a permanent place in the pantheon of popular culture. But we would be remiss to neglect Michael Jackson's other legacy: a bottomless source of material for hack comedians. From your local radio DJ all the way up to Jay Leno, a jab at Michael Jackson is always a great fallback when you need to say something that's allegedly funny but actually isn't.
In time, this wave of rekindled hero worship will fade, and once again lazy comedy writers will be able to dig into that deep Michael Jackson treasure trove of plastic surgery gone awry, pet monkeys, skin bleaching, oh, and of course alleged child molestation.
Michael Jackson, you will be missed, but as long as there are lousy comedians, you will never be forgotten.
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| Hello from Jaunty |
[07 Jul 2009|03:36am] |
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Oh hi! I'm back. The Intrepid->Jaunty update was error-free, and everything is like how everything was before. Like, exactly like it. Almost everything is almost exactly like how everything was before I started on this adventure. It was a fun half-day on Intrepid :)
The System menu is almost gone now. They've been pruning. There are about 5 entries now, whereas there were over 10 before. The login screen is super dark and goth now, like my other PC with Ubuntu Studio on it. Other than that, as I simply upgraded from the update manager twice, everything I've set up has just carried over, including desktop themes, wallpaper, custom taskbar and icon stuff, Compiz Fusion settings, et al. System things, like Nautilus folder windows got a bit of polish, but overall, I'm up-to-date, and otherwise unaffected by the sweeping changes... so far.
Nice to get all the latest stuff with no purchases or CD burnings.
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| First Ubuntu upgrade completish |
[06 Jul 2009|11:02pm] |
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How do I look? So that worked 100%, except for whatever fractional bit of 100% is the system being unable to connect to the internet. I notice nothing else different - save one icon in a menu that looked new, and my Firefox fonts are tinier, and sharper looking - but sadly, nay, tragically, I needed to fire up that second computer to get on the net to search up why this machine wasn't connecting. Turns out it's a bug that was introduced by fixing some other bug, but by fixing this new bug, those old bugs would return, or something. The fix was simple, by an 'amount of work' metric, but very complicated if you don't know the particulars of network down at the config file level. I barely understand them up at my dumb level, and I still don't know what it was exactly that I did. Well, I know exactly what I did, but you know... I don't know why I did it. Okay, I know why I did it - to get on the net again - but I don't know what exactly... oh, you get what I'm saying.
/var/log/daemon.log held failures surrounded by "send_packet: Message too long" messages. The fix was to remove the parameter "interface-mtu" from the comma separated param list found in /etc/dhcp3/dhclient.conf, save and exit, then run:
$ ifconfig eth0 mtu 1500
It was apparently incorrectly set to 64, which is - I'm told - nonsensically low. If you say so.
...and dozens more have their decision to avoid Linux at all costs reaffirmed. Maybe next time, Linux. Had I not had the second machine that worked online, I'd be figuring this out as well as possible with printed out screencaps and my work PC, hoping whatever info I could dig up worked on my lunch break, or after work. Tonight I shall attempt to force feed this box Jaunty. I can only assume I'm in Intrepid currently, but my usual place to check - System->About Ubuntu - has this for the second line (and paragraph):
Thank you for your interest in Ubuntu - the - released in .
That used to be a quick, easy-to-remember location for me to remind myself of my current release. I can never remember that command and flag to check version number from the command line. "uname something," was it? That doesn't make any sense to me. It also doesn't tell me the codename, so I'd have to go look that up online anyway :)
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| let's get jaunty, finally |
[06 Jul 2009|03:17pm] |
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Ubuntu is currently up to v. 9.10 (correction: 9.04), Jaunty Jackalope. Previous to that was 9.04 (correction: 8.10 - thanks, Fub!), Intrepid Ibex. When Jaunty was released, I realized I'd never moved up to Intrepid. I don't even remember choosing not to. It somehow passed me by. I'm still on 8.04, Hardy Heron. Last night I decided to read up on double-upgrading, and after a few minutes I already had the easiest method determined:
gksudo "update-manager -c -d"
Normally, the update manager doesn't show me the upgrade button for the next version, because I'm too far behind now. Running the above command gave it to me, though, for 8.10, so I'll be able to upgrade to that first, then from there use the regular invocation of the UM to upgrade again. It should all be pretty automated. I'll report back how it goes.
That said, I haven't updated yet, as I didn't have enough space in /boot. I knew this was coming. I foolishly made it only 50MB back in, IIRC, Gutsy Gibbon, or maybe even Feisty Fawn. Can't recall now. Anyway, each release sees an increase in the amount of necessary boot partition space. In fact, whenever they patch up things in /boot, the autoupdater fails, and I have to go clean out old versions and auto-backups of files. I've been bumping into the ceiling for awhile now. Intrepid wants a crazy 126MB! That's more than double what I gave the partition.
The answer was easy enough. I put in an old Ubuntu 8.04 Live CD I had laying around (it wasn't even the one I'm on - it's the one with EMC2 (for my CNC machines) baked in, by the linuxcnc.org crowd), and booted into that, which kept my partitions from mounting. However, /swap mounted, but in gparted, the partition editor I was using to resize /boot to something bigger, I could right-click on /swap and choose 'swapoff' to disable it. Then I resized / (root) from 47.7GB to 47GB (it's still only at around 28GB used, and not growing fast with each release), moved /swap up against it, and resized /boot to fill the hole. I didn't bother backing up anything, as my stuff is on the 4th partition, /home, which I didn't touch.
It all worked out fine. I'm back out of the Live CD, and my regular old setup is fine, and /boot is now large enough to proceed. I've been wanting a bigger /boot for a year now at least. I feel like the pressure has been released. Tonight, we upgrade!
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| Geek Monthly - July 2009 |
[05 Jul 2009|03:44pm] |
 The July Geek Monthly cover features an illustration of Optimus Prime and Optimus Prime, apparently drawn in third period study hall.
Want to hear me talk about a lamp? Go to page 64, where this month's Crack the Curmudgeon focuses on the Berkeley Lamp II.
Then there's pages 78 and 80, where I review Ramune Mochi, RichardSolo Remote Control Candles, the MindSpa Personal Development System, Star Wars Luke Skywalker's X-Wing Fighter Kite, Design Toscano's Bigfoot the Garden Yeti, and Moose Munch (finally paying off this entry).
Do you have a product to transform and roll out? Roll it here:
Geek Monthly
Attn: Random Reviews
29219 Canwood St. Suite 100
Agoura Hills, CA 91301
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