Today was my birthday.
This is how I felt today: Today was an absolutely shitty day and bloody
tomorrow is about as promising. And I hate all of you bastards who do not
have to work for a living!
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Well, they may need this capability
in my care. But more on the plants later.
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The EU-constitution is going dead and the Oz dollar surges against the Euro (but of course two months too late for my most recent transfer). ATS 8.50 per AU$ is the highest in a few years... And of course there's these rumours of the Euro zone breaking apart.
Some of the newly planted shrubs around the house are dying rapidly. Others thrive. No pattern; my non-green thumb strikes again. I've got a new toy, a standalone DVD/DIVX player. And I'm done with the kitchen tiles, just did the silicone around the joints. Photos when I'm finished rubbing off the remaining grout haze and the silicone is cleaned.
The usual global stupidity abounds, the Murkins now make laws worthy of bad old Stalin: be as stool pigeon - or be a jailbird for 2 years. Samizdata has a nice discussion on that.
In local breaking news, the Tenterfield Shire (about 250km SW from here) has noted that hanging dead dogs from trees offends the tourists and that people therefore shouldn't do this anymore. What a surprise.
Over The Hedge, one of my favourite comics is no longer readable via RSS stream. dailystrips comes to the rescue.
And, to really top off the Interesting Times stuff there's lousy news at work:
group A has just borged group B. I'm a part of group B. Uni council favoured
group A's appetite for power. Council via group A may or may
not want us to run any of the Group B stuff anymore in the medium future.
Which would make the place smaller by a good third or so, and us minus jobs.
Which obviously sucks.
Stephan Pastis ran the career counselling theme recently in
Pearls Before Swine.
That strip (a/v up to a month) fits a bit too closely for comfort.
You'd better, if you want to pass the HGFA exam for an advanced rating (paragliding or hanggliding). I found this quite amusing.
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This is "Bad Table", a piece of real-world furniture made and sold by a Vancouver Company (fittingly called "Straight Line Designs"). (To the designers of their flash eye cancer webshite: here's a nickle, kids, get yourself a real editor and a copy of the relevant RFCs.)
If only I had the money for such practical jokes...dream
and I reach the 100 hour mark. And all of it is inland flying.
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Had a lecture before noon today, not too bad. On my way back to the office
I'm very much ready for a mug of coffee and a trip to the toilet.
click
Great. Now I'm stuck in the elevator and there is no power (just the
emergency dimbulb). Campus security tells me everything is out
and just wait a bit.
About 10 minutes later the diesels kick in and the elevators wheeze back
into action. A trip to the dark potty later and I'm ready for the
rest of the day.
Most of the campus is without juice, as are some of the surrounding suburbs.
I'm doing some stuff on paper, because dead trees do not fail.
The plan for the rest of the day? Another lecture, supposed to happen at 1400. In a lab which is pitch-black right now. With no more than an extremely vague idea of what I was supposed to talk about, because my notes are on my desktop box. Which is power-less. (And on the web, which I can't access banging rocks together - maybe I need to learn to whistle V.34?)
About 15 minutes before the lecture is supposed to start the power comes back. Everybody rushes to the kitchen - think coffee deprivation in a place with electric kettles without electricity.
Back at my office, my desktop refuses to turn on. Fritzed PSU in the Dell piece-of-shite. FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKIHATETHISTDAY. Ok, no lecture preparation then. I'll get my slides off the web (as all the students do, too) and start talking, seats of the pants operation.
The lab (which we were stuck with as Central Services are a bunch of headless chickens) is a lightless dungeon (therefore disliked for lectures; lab-work is fine). At least that lab is under my full control (including wiring cabinet and firewall).
The firewall is dead. Everything else blinkenlights fine, but not that box. And without it, no login (LDAP) and no net. Having had enough go wrong already, I had such premonitions and did bring the key to the cabinet where the firewall resides - and it does turn on (not a given; two weeks ago its mainboard had gone fritz and the Dell idiots took 3 days to come up with a spare - despite everything being on 24hrs support contracts...SEP).
I survive the lecture, with (as usual) lots of content uncovered.
My desktop is still dead, Dell promises some sod coming on-site tomorrow (as if that promise was worth a damn) to replace the PSU (not as if we couldn't do it, but the gear is leased so we're supposed to keep our grubby fingers off it). In the meantime I can't do any prep work for tomorrow which is - of course - the busiest day of the week. Great.
On a more positive note: I've finished tiling and grouting my kitchen tiles yesterday night. More on that later.
Last week my two mailservers collected these silly Sober.P/Q thingies by the hundreds. Not that I need to care much: I don't do Microsoft crap.
Now, however, the bloody thing has started its operation on all those subverted wankstations and blasts the world with bad German Nazi propaganda. With addresses belonging to me as sender. Gee, thanks for all those bounces!
Death is too good for both Nazis and virus spreaders. And, of course, for the idiots responsible for the lousy vulnerable software in the first place...
Picture me drinking tea. Lots of tea.
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The recent troubles I had with my tape robot fall into the category
magic:
weird resets/lockups/recycles of the device in the Sun 411 case, which took
out heffalump a few times as reported earlier.
So I switched it to a spare scsi bus (always mount a scratch monkey...), same
behaviour but sans lockup of the box. Next thing was to test it on a different
system: I dug out my trusty AHA-1460 PCMCIA scsi controller and blasted
the robot with data. Same lousy behaviour.
Finally I decided that the only thing that I had changed recently was the
case. So I moved the robot back into the (noisy) lynx case, without having
much hope for the thing, and....it works.
The only lame explanation that I have is that the 411's PSU is rated at 1.7A on the primary side (dunno secondary), while the tape robot wants 0.7A for the tape and up to 2.0A for the robot. (Not that the problems were in any way associated with the robot moving; that worked fine and lockups were never experienced with the robot moving. Still I have no better "explanation". It works, that's currently good enough for me.)
Less magic but still good news is that the debian MyMess -> Sarge upgrades I did today on the lapdog and the work desktop were mostly harmless and a good excuse for cleaning up unused software on the go. I suppose after Sarge is now frozen it's time to eat my own dogfood. This dogfood tastes good.
Not good news is the weather recently: it all sucks, big time. Rarely a day in the last couple of weeks when it doesn't either drizzle or rain or blow gale-force winds. I WANT TO FLY. I NEED TO FLY. bugger.
Related to lack of flying, my problems re licence levels and flying in .at are also confirmed. We'll see if I manage to get the required Oz license in time but I'm not very optimistic. Ah well, I'll go hiking with Cornelia then.
The next semester starts on Monday. I'm so thrilled.
Spent the last few days fixing up years of gut-wrenchingly bad HTML excrements spattered across the website for the Canungra Cup competition (as usual I didn't say "no" fast enough and am now hosting/caring for/maintaining the thing...geeks are suckers). That hurt so bad, even after various runs through tidy and friends...quite some curses and beer later (my homebrew batch has worked out and is starting to get drinkable) most of the pages are standards-compliant and looking at the source doesn't immediately introduce projective vomiting anymore (like the MS shite "let's make a gratuitous table here to produce some indentation, and let's put all the font settings everywhere" did).
Subject: Re: a sad host From: Brian Kantor Date: Wed, 11 May 2005 05:28:34 +0000 (UTC) Newsgroups: alt.sysadmin.recovery Garrett Wollman ... wrote: >Yeah, it is kind of sad when machines have to be rebooted weekly. > 4:15PM up 409 days, 22:02, 1 user, load averages: 12.34, 9.87, 8.01 >-GAWollman Or yearly, even: >Last login: Wed Apr 20 15:56:09 2005 from karoshi.ucsd.edu >10:26PM up 1453 days, 18:20, 3 users, load averages: 0.35, 0.17, 0.15 >----------------------------------------------------------------------- >[brian] 1 :
hehe
MS UK, transatlantic offspring of the Evil Empire is sponsoring a short film competition, titled "Thought Thieves".
"The theme of your film should be about how intellectual property theft affects both individuals and society."
The entry form clearly shows its origins:
"...Should I be selected as a finalist in this competition, I confirm the following: 7. I will formally license on terms acceptable to Microsoft, all intellectual property rights in my film and agree to waive all moral rights in relation to my film if requested to do so..."
Pot. Kettle. Black. Assholes.
Link to the boingboing article
snort! The quote is from a
newspaper article
on some fellows taking a bus for a joyride (after the driver had gone for a pee and forgot the keys
in the ignition).
Australians seem to like public transportation only if they can drive themselves, as evidenced by the final paragraph of said article:
"The trio resisted picking up passengers during their short trip, say police, unlike in Melbourne a month ago, when a 15-year-old boy was caught after picking up passengers in a tram he had taken."
Seems like the recent problems with my DAT changer are SCSI related;
it's taken out heffalump three times in the last two days.
There goes my hope of making a SCSI chain work which consists of a wide controller, two SCA drives internally, a Sun 68-to-50 cable followed by the narrow changer+tape unit and a narrow terminator at the end of the mess. (I don't have any wide cables, sockets etc. to fix up the narrow tape changer...)
Of course this is -as SCSI goes- not a big surprise; everybody knows that termination issues can only be resolved with judicious application of candles, knives and goats. The fact that my setup has worked fine for a few weeks only reaffirms the Magic SCSI Properties.
...which presently sucks big time.
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Bolero Large Yellow/Red/White,
DHV 1, 90-110kg. 3 years old, 63 hours. No beach, in perfect condition,
just inspected: 130+ seconds on the porosity meter. Comes with glider bag and
stirrup. $1400 ONO.
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says the Definite Guide to Aussies. I'm going flying+camping to Killarney over the
weekend, and I'll bring salad and beer with me. Sausages, too -
a balanced feed, you know ;-)
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(snarfed from the Earth Edition of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy or short H2G2)
Australia is a very confusing place, taking up a large amount of the
bottom half of the planet. It is recognisable from orbit because of many
unusual features, including what at first looks like an enormous bite
taken out of its southern edge; a wall of sheer cliffs which plunge deep
into the girting sea. Geologists assure us that this is simply an
accident of geomorphology and plate tectonics, but they still call it
the "Great Australian Bight" proving that not only are they covering up
a more frightening theory, but they can't spell either.
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says R.S. McNamara in The Fog of War. His fellow citizens in the U.S. of Jesusistan don't believe in proportionality anywhere: 3-10 years of jail for making a copy of a movie. The act which has just been passed (with a big majority...) is called FECA -for "Family Entertainment and Copyright Act"- and the title is a perfect example of doublethink. They've all got FECAl matter for brains.
Link to the Heise article (german, can't be bothered looking for an english source)
"It's made out of poo, but also it's so Aussie."
say Joanna Gair of Creative Paper Tasmania who is the manufacturer of a paper made from roo dung.
Which seems to be a solid seller despite looking like, well, shite.
King Midas would be impressed.
Link to
the ABC's story
Already the 19th. sigh
Some updates regarding what I've been doing lately: I've been tinkering
a fair bit.
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blosxom is a blogging engine in a single tiny piece of
perl; it's what this site uses. Well, it's small, fairly simple and
not too ugly.
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One or the other silly Waste The Day student club/association/bunch at work has recently run an annoying ad campaign all over the place; 2m x 1m display stands everywhere with Shiny Stuff on them and so on.
Most memorable (for its tackiness) slogan:
"Be Not Afraid of Sudden Fear" (Book of Proverbs)
He. Come to one of my exams unprepared and you'll get some sudden fear to be afraid of! Bloody dimwits.
The campaign was centered around their "free exam pack" which exceeded all levels of shite I've seen before (despite being printed on glossy paper): a list of common sense exam "tips" (ala "bring a pen") and on the bottom of the shiny flyer some discount vouchers for various entertainment in Surfers. blink Ah, that's where the money for this junk came from...
...and this (brilliant) scientific paper generator; I'll have to borrow some of their phrasing (and the diagram generator) for my own future papers. Because obviously only frilly hot air accomplishes anything on this stinking planet.
Disgruntled Cynic? Me? Where do you get that impression?
I've got a perl CGI thing that needs to check in data files with ci,
because of child-safety and Tracking Revisions Is Good.
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A mad norwegian has made this yahoo+google mashup: two frames showing you both search engines' results side-by-side. Very cool, especially as one shouldn't trust google to far anyway. (Nor is yahoo the One Source of Truth)
A firefox searchplugin is available over there.
Yes, I had a good day: I did 23.1km from Beechmont to Beaudesert.
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