The Daily Diversion Archive For July, 2003

Wednesday July 2, 2003

What's eating me? Let's see...

um...

ah...

Not much, really.

I've been watching a lot of the Twins. I've also been answering a lot of mail from people who have been visiting the site. It seems that at least once a day someone sends me mail that I feel I need to write a bunch to reply to it. It's pretty cool, really.

I have been updating the site a bit of late. No, there's no new graphics, images or features. There are some code revisions, a couple of new pages and I hope to have some images posted sometime soon. Stay tuned.

Played a bit of softball Monday. I did terribly at the plate, but I did pretty well behind the plate. We also won the game. That's a plus, you know.

Not much else for now.

Monday July 7, 2003

We had a lovely weekend. On Thursday night we didn't do much. I went to the basement and played CounterStrike until I nearly fell off my chair. On the 4th, we hung out at the house and stayed cool. That night we went over to Karen and Bob's place and did the party on the patio thing. Since their kid and my wife were too tired to do fireworks, we hung out, lit off firecrackers and hassled neighborhood kids.

On Saturday, I got bit by the industry bug and got some stuff done. I had the alternator in the truck fixed by noon and was up to Forest Lake to pick up a server rack that a friend of my brother-in-law had no more use for. It's a biggie and I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to do with it, but I have it all the same.

After that flurry of activity, we went to the "I" to hang out by the pool and drink lovely beverages. We took the dog along as well. He and Sadie had big fun. We left fairly early with one tired doggie. We came home and hung out again.

On Sunday, I went downstairs again, but this time to clean. I tidyed up the computer room. I watched the Twins hand the Indians a win. This sucked. After dinner I pulled the bikes out of the garage and started them both. They both came to life without much fanfare, but that's where the subtle stopped. Both smoked like a wet grass fire for quite some time. This is pretty much the usual for both of these bikes after sitting. The The Wing tends to coat the kickstand side pistons with oil when it sits. There's pretty much nothing that can be done about it. It will either smoke or not when you start it.

The Buff tends to smoke to get rid of any oil that has settled inside the crankcase. Two stroke motors tend to do this.

Anyway, neither of the bikes seems to be worse for wear from sitting, but both need a ton of work. First order of business is to get tabs for both, so that's what I'm going to be doing this afterlunch.

Tuesday July 8, 2003Life With AutoDJ:

Papa Don't Preach by Madonna was driving me nuts, so I hit the skip forward button. I got Heaven, Hell or Houston by ZZ Top. MUCH better.

Played softball last night. I sucked at the plate. I have no excuses. I hit the ball hard a couple of times, but it was right at an infielder. I must have fielded 10 throws in from the outfield to the plate. A few of them had tons o'mustard on 'em, too. I'm still using my old baseball glove, but my softball glove isn't anywhere near ready to use yet. It's too stiff. Anyway, one of the drawbacks to using a glove I got in 6th grade for softball when I'm 36 is that there's not much padding in the palm of the glove. Those hard throws into the catcher (that was me) made some funny noises. No, those weren't my screams of agony, but they were the sound of hand-bruising ball-to-glove-to-palm of hand action.

I decided to left-justify the column. Better?

Anyone out there interested in a Compaq Proliant 5000 with 4 Pentium Pro 200MHz/512kb cache processors? It has RAID, a couple of extra drives (condition unknown) a DDS1 tape drive, CD-ROM and soon to be 384Mb of RAM. It's a tower and it's just not working out for the project I acquired it for. I'm looking for a low-end PIII machine. Actually, I'd take a mobo/processor/mini-tower case combo for the Proliant. I also have a full server rack on wheels with a smoke-glass door, screen door in back and a bunch of "airflow" shelves (ones with holes in them) I could work into the deal. I got it thinking it would fit in the basement. It will, but I'm not sure I want to go with a full-rack. If anyone's interested or knows someone who is, let me know.

Wednesday July 9, 2003

I sound terrible right now.

I'd been having some kind of throat goo for a few days and this morning it caught up to me. I could hardly speak this morning and now, after ibuprofen, gargling and cough drops I sound like Harvey Fierstein. I think that's how you spell his name. Anyhow, I also felt like crud so I'm now sitting in the basement, doodling on the computer.

Thanks to the wonders of the modern-day internet, I'm able to do some of my work stuff from home. This is a big plus. Instead of taking 8 hours of sick leave, I'll only take 5 or 4, depending on how much I can do from the house. I'm still miserable, but at least I'm comfortable and not doing too much.

That's always the temptation when I stay home from work. I usually feel rotten, but I just can't sit still. I'm not a person that can take naps unless I'm at death's door. This leaves me alone and looking at things that should be done. Today, for instance, I will probably laze around the house until noonish doing work things from home. Then I'll probably take a shower and eat lunch. After lunch I'll be bored out of my mind and I'll probably set to doing some things I shouldn't. I still have a nail in one of my tires on the Maxima that I NEED to get fixed. I might do that. I might spray the dust off my motorcycles. I might take those bike to the filling station to get some air in their tires. I might decide to take another crack at recording some of my LP records in mp3 format.

Even though I feel like junk, I seem to have to do something. A couple of years back, even though I was running a fever, I went out to the garage and rubbed down all the chrome on one of my bikes with WD-40. It was hot, tough work and my arm hurt like hell later that day from all the rubbing, but I HAD to do it. Even though I should have been sitting and chilling, I was out in the garage working my ass off and feeling miserable.

I guess that might be a big part of the deal: When I feel miserable and can't sit still, I might as well put that energy to good use while I have it rather than sit and feel lousy.

We went out to eat at The Modern last night. Our friends Susan and Jim gave us a call and asked us out so we went. Being 1/2 price wine night, we picked a lovely red, Shafer Firebreak. Yum, yum, yummy. At 1/2 price it was a huge deal, too. I had the fish special and Sarah had the Buccatini. Once again, that place just rocks.

Tuesday July 15, 2003

So I'm minding my own business, reading CNN's website when I stumble upon this little tidbit.

Um, yeah.

Pat Robertson is calling on God himself to remove 3 Supreme Court Justices from the bench so that our oh so moral President can replace them with conservatives.

I don't know about you, but this kind of shit gives me the willy-wahs.

Where to start...OK.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry. This punches so many of my buttons that I'm not even sure I'm rational. I HATE people telling me what I can and can't do. I do NOT want to live in a theocracy. I like the way the Supreme Court works. Sure, it would be nice if they were a bit more liberal socially, but they're doing a pretty decent job. Oh, yeah--they should also strike down the DMCA. But that's another rant.

I'd like to call on God to put it in Pat Robertson's mind that the time has come to retire. Take a powder, Pat. Take your idiotic commentary on the social situation here in the U.S. with you. Better yet, Pat, head on over to Liberia and take up the fundy cause with your gold-mining buddy, despot and all-around asshole Charles Taylor. Shit, you guys have a lot in common.

It says in the article that Robertson has launched a 21-day "Prayer Offensive" to try to shift some of the Justices out. Apparently, he was pretty pissed about that whole sodomy law thing. To me, this is nothing short of "Offensive Prayer" and I will now be wishing the Justices continued good health until the day that they decide they've had enough of the bench. Hopefully at that time, someone other than our esteemed President will be in office so this country doesn't slide back to 1950s morality.

Here's hoping that marriage between same-sex couples becomes legal here in the U.S. sooner rather than later.

Welcome to all of you who've come over from the City Pages' Babelogue site. If you haven't, head on over there and check out the local talent.

Yep, it's the Midsummer Classic tonight and I'm pretty pumped. It's kinda stupid, but I really like the ASG. The new angle this year is that the winning league will be home team for this year's World Series. That's pretty cool, really. I guess we'll see how it actually works.

I watched the Home Run Derby last night. Wow. True, these guys are getting tossed thumpable pitches, but it really is something to see a ball hit nearly 500 feet. I thought it would be kinda stupid, but it was a lot of fun instead. My only question: What the hell's with the crowd of kids shagging the balls that didn't leave the stadium?

I'm putting together the new home for this blog/site. The hardware is going together nicely and I'll be debugging it for the balance of the week and weekend. Hopefully, by next week sometime this server will be on a new box. Naturally, if I do my job skillfully, there will be exactly zero noticeable difference between the two. The only difference will be in the server's back-end power. This will allow Nick and I to migrate to one of those Perl-powered content management systems and allow me to set up a calendaring program for my lovely wife's project.

In case anyone cares, the new machine will be, at least for now, a PII 400 with 256Mb of RAM and an 8Gb HDD. It's not sexy, not SMP (dual processor or better) and not much of an upgrade, but it will have more power to do the things we need it to do. It could also be very temporary.

I'm still wondering if anyone out there in internetland needs a Quad-processor Pentium Pro server with RAID. I have a Compaq Proliant 5000 with 4 processors and 384Mb of RAM I'm looking to trade or sell. I also have a full-size server rack on wheels with several shelves and a glass door for sale or trade. I'd much rather trade than sell and I can deliver both within the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area. Further out will be a bit of a problem due to my ratty old pickup. I don't wan't to have to abandon it if it breaks.

I tried out a Creative Sound Blaster MP3 USB external sound card this week. I was thinking about an Extigy, but they're too expensive and I'm really not sure USB can handle the data flow to the HDD. I'm glad I chose the cheaper option as I didn't have to lay out a ton of cash to find out that it didn't work. I tried it on two different machines with two different .wav creation programs and all I got was Mick Jagger sounding like Max Headroom.

The two machines: My Toshiba Portege 7220CTe, a PIII 650MHz with 320Mb of RAM. I tried it with and without the docking station and with both the supplied Creative Wave Studio and SoundForge 6.

I tried the same configurations with my AMD K6/2 550MHz powered Frankenputer as well. I tried it with the on-board USB and with a PCI USB card.

In all configurations, it sounded like the datastream was being interrupted. So it didn't sound exactly like Max Headroom in that the sound was repeated, it sounded as if tiny chunks of the data stream weren't getting to the HDD. Tiny drops of data made me insane.

The sound quality at the headphone jack was pretty good, and I suppose it could have been the machines on the receiving end of the data not recording correctly. The idea behind this device was to record stuff through an external sound card through the USB connector. That it didn't work on my two machines, both of which were well inside the recommended specs for using the device means that I had to return it to the store. It was a nice idea, but for whatever reason, it didn't work.

By the way, I did have the DMA settings enabled for ATA/33 speeds on both machines.

Thursday July 17, 2003

I started up the ol' text editor with a whole, whoppin' head o'steam and now that I'm live, I'm dumbstruck. Figures.

Apparently the power company has come by today and uglified our house. We're having our streets redone and there's lots of stuff going on. We're getting new water and sewer lines. The power company has also decided to move our gas meter to the outside of the house. Fine. Dandy. They came today an popped it right on to the front of the house. I've not seen it yet, but Sarah says that it sticks out like an extra nose on someone's forehead.

Thanks Excel.

I still stand by my assertion that their new, swooshy logo looks like a whore's butt-print.

Big doings around the house last night. I successfully recorded an LP record to mp3. I could also have burnt it to CD, but the album I was working on wasn't that important. It's a cool album, but if I want the CD, I could just go buy the CD. It was a garage sale record that I figured I could practice recording on.

I'll say this: I got really sick of the the songs on the one side. Mighty sick. Almost as sick as trying several different configurations of my gear and having them all not work correctly. I got everything pulling the same way last night and got the goods to show for it. Hooray for me. Now I can start getting rid of my vast record collection.

Not all of it will go, but most of it should. I don't listen to LPs much any more. I don't have that great a phono cartridge, my turntable isn't all that great and the audio section of the machine I'm recording these mp3s on is pretty noisy. Very noisy. Crap-like. I'm going to have to listen to the product to see if the noise shows up on the recordings. If it does, then it's back to the store for a real sound card--not just the one that came on the board when I bought it.

Monday July 21, 2003

The motherboard I won off eBay last week got here on Friday. The guy I bought it from gets an award as the fastest shipper ever. I think it was two days and he didn't even specify how he was going to ship it. Friends, that kicks ass.

So I had something to do on Friday night. The old motherboard I was trying to use was fried. I know this because the one I won on eBay worked perfectly the first time I turned it on. It's been running stably all weekend so sometime this week I'll be looking to switch it over from Win2K to FreeBSD.

I'm still trying to decide which version I want to use. We do want to use particular features of Apache 1.3, so that's what we'll be using until mod_perl is finished for 2.0. This still leaves me with the question, should we run 5.1 or 4.8. 5.1 is the latest version, but it isn't a "stable" version yet. By "stable" I mean it hasn't been tagged "stable" by the BSD gods that be. It is stable. It's just still in development. It's kinda like a late beta version. It's pretty darn stable, but it isn't quite rock solid yet. 4.8 has been stable since 4.3 or so. Currently, we're running 4.4. I'd really like to go with 5.1, but I don't want any severe headaches. Decisions, decisions...

I didn't get any further recording done this weekend, but I should get some done this week. I'm also thinking of raiding my wife's turntable for here phono cartridge. It almost HAS to be better than the one I'm currently using.

I'd like to get all political right now, but I just don't have the steam up. I guess I'll gloat over The Twins SWEEPING the evil Oakland A's. Yes, the good guys triumphed over the bad guys AGAIN! The Twinks really needed the sweep and got it. Now we play host to a pair with Seattle and then 3 more with the Royals. There's no reason we shouldn't sweep them both, but they're both good teams. Anything can happen. I'm hoping for a sweep.

Football season is rapidly approaching. Be afraid.

Naturally, no sports season can happen around these parts without the rumour that the team in question are going to move if they don't get a new stadium. Apparently, Red is entertaining offers from Los Angeles to move the team there.

Yawn... You know, fuck'em. If they want to leave, fine. I could give a shit. Sure it would suck ass to not have a football team here in Minnesota, but I'm sure some other team would come knocking. All it would take is a new stadium. One thing's for sure: I am FUCKING SICK of our pro teams blackmailing us for new stadiums. Cut. It. OUT!!! Really.

The funny thing is, watching football is kind of a pain in the ass. I love to watch the games, but seeing one on a TiVo really drove the point home: These games are mostly ads and babble. A TiVoed game lasts about an hour fifteen. That's zapping through commercials, skipping halftime and fast forwarding through huddles. So greater than half of a pro football game is watching something other than guys hit each other. Watching a game alone on the couch is kinda dull. Beer helps, naturally, but there are other annoyances: Most announcers aren't worth their weight in dung and the commentator position is like a home for washed-up athletes and coaches. Watching a guy score in the NFL is starting to suck. I do NOT want see your little victory dance, Mr. Wentpro Withtwoyearsofcollegeeligibilityleft. Your display is just poor sportsmanship and baiting. I do not want to see the wing-wang waggle, the humpa-humpa or the i've dominated you just like i dominated those 15 beers and got a DWI in training camp dance.

Of course, I am looking forward to the season and it'll be a successful season as long as the Vikes beat the Packers.

Thursday July 23, 2003

So I went to the Minneapolis Ribfest with Illya and Angela today. It was yummy. I still loathe the ticket system. I guess it saves some time at the head of the line not having to wait for change, but it still grates on me.

I had ribs from the only place on the 4th St. side and Illya, who had both these and some others from another booth said that although these ribs were good, the others were better. Guess where I'm going tomorrow?

Yes, this is one of the many advantages of working in downtown Minneapolis. Other good things are the Farmers' Market, The Foshay Tower and the soon to be completed light rail system. I hope to be a daily rider.

I got my Friends of Fred shipment of wine from Fred Peterson's Peterson Vineyard. Yummee. Since my favorite drinkin' buddy and my co-oenophile is pregnant, I gotta put this bottle down solo. It's gonna be fun tomorrow at work.

I was going to install FreeBSD 4.8 tonight, but my download from last night killed sometime during the night. So here I am, watching the Twinks and waiting for the iso to download. This is life as a geek. Hopefully I'll be able to finish the install tonight, but I'm not going to hold my breath.

I had a nice if slow trip home from work today. It was very nice out so I put my windows down on the Maxima and rolled the sunroof back and played 'fake convertible' all the way home. The tunes on the iPod made a good thing even better, too.

Tuesday July 29, 2003

I played softball last night and FINALLY got a hit. A hit, that is, if our scorer is nice to me. I should have been thrown out, but the guy who chased down my infield hit didn't quite make the catch. It might have been an error, but I hope not. I got forced out at 2nd so it didn't count for much anyway. That was kind of the way the game went. We were pretty much out of it by the end of the second inning.

The season's over and I hope they consider me again for next year. So, if anyone's looking for a guy to play softball in a fall league here in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area, I'm availible.

I had a mondo productive day Sunday. I emptied 5 more boxes in the basement, re-did the front brakes on my Suzuki and did a bunch of other stuff as well. It was a good day.

Speaking of good days, Sarah is feeling better. She's had a whopper of a chest cold for most of the last few days. She's doing much better with tons of bed rest and not much else. The pregnancy is going fine and we now know what the baby is. It's a boy. August Stanley Holtan if the name fits. How cool is that?

One of the things about central air is that it turns the inside of your house into its own little planet. Go outside and the weather has nothing to do with the nice, cool interior of your house. It's harsh and nasty outside and cool and dry inside. It's planet suck outside and planet comfort on the inside. It makes you not want to leave the house. Is this a drawback? Not this summer with the mosquitos as thick has they've been.

Some of our night softball games have almost bled me white. Clouds of the little buggers everywhere. There's nothing quite as wrenching as having a ball on the way to the plate and seeing one of those little bloodsuckers land on your arm. Swat it and you may get a ball in the face. Leave it and there'll be an itchy lump on your arm for the next few days.

I hate mosquitos.

Wednesday July 30, 2003

All I want is an estimate. Is that so difficult?

So I'm trying to get a contractor or two to come over and take a look at the sewer and water lines to the house. The city is tearing up the street this summer and putting down new water and sewer lines. They've offered some attractive terms for getting this work done, so I'm trying to take them up on it. I have called 4 contractors so far. The first two blew me off completely. They said, "We'll be out and have a look and we'll get an estimate back to you in a couple of days." Neither of them did.

This round, I decided to ask two different contractors to give me bids. This time, both of the contractors set up times when they'd be out to the house and gave me dates by which I'd have my estimate. I hate to hope I'm done with this, but it may be. Just for kicks, I tried to contact one of the ones that blew me off to see if they'd be interested in actually giving me a quote. The guy I talked to wanted to argue with me that I did't really need my sewers done. Fine, asshole. I'm done with you.

Having work done like this is hard. Not so much physically hard, but it's hard to line up all the estimates, send the right papers to the right places and generally not screw it up so bad that nothing gets done. Hopefully I'm just about done with this project.

I sold my Proliant and my server rack last night. All it took was a posting to a forsale news group and that was that. I got my first response within 20 minutes.

It will be nice to have these things out of the way.