tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12138841969093075972024-03-20T08:36:12.539-07:00Down The Bit BucketGlenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16803696761547157418noreply@blogger.comBlogger27125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1213884196909307597.post-62299570106431834102017-07-12T12:31:00.000-07:002017-07-12T12:31:49.307-07:00It's Been A WhileSo it's been a while since I have posted to my blog, but it seems that I should be posting more, given the current state of affairs, and I will attempt to do just that.Glenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16803696761547157418noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1213884196909307597.post-58268476094073248022013-04-29T19:39:00.000-07:002013-04-29T19:39:29.175-07:00Sailing With Eye CandyWas invited out to be bowman on the Farr 395 Eye Candy for the Protection Island Race. Boy, did I make too many mistakes - asymmetrical kites are still too new to me. I got the tack line lead the wrong way putting the sheets "outside" way too many time (three or four times, I think). Once I launched the chute with the tack and clew reversed. I'm not going to take the credit for that one, I think it was packed in the bag backwards.<br />
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Anyways, it was a long race with just about ever different sailing condition you can name. We had a pretty good ride, got knocked down pretty good a couple of times, but keep moving and actually got home quite early. We corrected out over the bigger boats and finished eighth.<br />
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Picture to come ...Glenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16803696761547157418noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1213884196909307597.post-88758976155357646892013-04-29T05:30:00.001-07:002013-04-29T19:42:35.865-07:00Big Trees, Big FunSo the wife and I spent the weekend of the 16 - 17 of March on the coast, looking for big trees. My wife was inspired by <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Forest-Giants-Pacific-Coast-Robert/dp/0295981407" target="_blank">Forest Giants of the Pacific Coast by Robert Van Pelt</a> which covers Sequoias, Redwoods, Western Red Cedars, Doug Firs, Sitka Spruce, Western Hemlocks, and quite a few others.<br />
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We managed to bag quite a few of them on the Olympic Park. We saw the Quinault Lake Cedar, the Nolan Creek Cedar, and the kalaloch Cedar. We walked through the Grove of Giants along the south shore of Quinault Lake to see massive Doug Firs, Hemlocks and Spruces. We looked at the Quinault Lake spruce and the Preston Macy tree. We looked for, but could not find the Barnes Creek Survivor Grand Fir (so we'll have to go back for that one).<br />
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And to top it all off, we spent the night in a bluff cabin at <a href="http://www.thekalalochlodge.com/" target="_blank">Kalaloch Lodge</a>, on the bluff, but back in the trees.<br />
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Nice!<br />
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I'll add pictures as I get them tweaked and converted to jpegs.Glenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16803696761547157418noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1213884196909307597.post-20264007685899885262013-04-04T05:42:00.001-07:002013-04-08T05:03:37.542-07:00Nice Ride!<p>Went out on  John's boat for a race on March 30th. That boat is a nice ride. It's a 1D35.</p>
<p>We won the race.</p>
Glenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16803696761547157418noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1213884196909307597.post-27676527878626840552013-03-03T21:50:00.000-08:002013-03-03T22:12:38.418-08:00Spring Is In The Night CrttersWhen I first moved out to the "country", thirty some years ago, I was astonished at the amount of noise made by frogs. It was so loud, I couldn't sleep. Now, I get worried when I don't hear the frogs. They've become my very own "canary in a coal mine" to let me know that my little corner of paradise still has a healthy ecology.<br />
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And so it's nice to hear them. <br />
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<iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dxuTkf9UCUH0L52UynbDXIPDGWnRqOApDI-06GWVRslRPTg1tVESVXKaMFh7Hc2c2uJ2gb7rGsCaBXjg8QPRg' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div>
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Sorry about the rather poor production values, I just heard them while I was upstairs staring at the computer, trying to write some code, and ran out and recorded them with my phone. (I'll blog about the code pretty soon, I've finished the non-GUI version and have the GUI version almost done.)<br />
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In fact, I'd have to say that's one of the aspects about living where we do that I have come to thoroughly enjoy, we see lots of critters.<br />
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Here's the deer coming through the yard last summer.<br />
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And I've got a picture of a black bear racing through the yard too (he was NOT going to stand still for a photo).</div>
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There's been a family of owls which have also taken up residence somewhere on our property this last year, they make the most crazy sounds at night sometimes (I tell my wife that's when they're getting it on). I'll try to get recordings of them too. <br />
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Oh, to be young and horny, like a toad...Glenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16803696761547157418noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1213884196909307597.post-83773505518521137202013-02-23T17:49:00.000-08:002013-02-23T17:54:46.772-08:00About That New KeyboardSo I've been using this new keyboard for a while now and thought it was time to do a more through review (which I had promised on an earlier blog post).<br />
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It's a <a href="http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16823201053" target="_blank">Rosewill RK-9100BR</a>, translated that s a mechanical, illuminated keyboard using Cheery MX Brown switches. These are the silent version of the Blue switches so these have tactile feedback but no clicky sound. I should note that the keyboard is not silent, and that a rubber dome type keyboard is probably more quiet .<br />
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Plus the keys are individually illuminated by an LED - a blue LED in this particular model. There are three illumination modes (which keys are lite) and four levels of brightness for each mode - almost everyone complains that all levels except for the minimal level are too bright. I do have mine set for the minimal level so I suppose I fall in to that camp.<br />
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Plus it has a small set, only eight, media keys available for a bit of control over things happening on your "desktop". I am using Linux (as readers of this blog know) and was pleased to find that all of the media keys work right out of the box without any fussing around on my part in key definitions. That's always nice. I don't use many of them, but volume control is always useful.<br />
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I bought mine at Newegg for $119 which is quit a bit of moola for a keyboard (and that was on sale for ten bucks), but I suspect that with a little care and cleaning, this could be the last keyboard I will need for a long, long time. I had my last keyboard for over ten years (a Logitech Access keyboard), and will take better care of this one since I happen to like it a bit more too.<br />
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I went back to Newegg to make the link to the keyboard (I suppose I could link to the Rosewill website too) and noticed, as for the last month, that the keyboard remains sold out. I can understand why, when I went looking for a new keyboard (mostly prompted by seeing how useful my wife's Macbook Pro illuminated keyboard was for typing in darker rooms) it was the keyboard which best fit my requirements:<br />
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Black - all my other PC stuff seems to have migrated to black<br />
Mechanical key switches - Cherry Brown being the preferred choice<br />
Illuminated - LED was best and I don't need funky multiple colors<br />
Media keys - I wanted a minimal set of media keys mostly to change volume <br />
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Of all the keyboards I looked at this one best fit the above list. There are a couple of items from other keyboards which would be good such as the Linux key caps to replace the windows keys on the Das Keyboard, N key rollover on a PS/2 with hardware interrupt would be nice, but this keyboard needed USB to get power for the LEDs (and this unit has 6 key rollover which really is good enough).<br />
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So no photos but there are better photos available at the Newegg website and <a href="http://www.rosewill.com/products/2321/ProductDetail_Overview.htm" target="_blank">here</a> at the Rosewill web site.<br />
<br />Glenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16803696761547157418noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1213884196909307597.post-68160400541603167182013-01-11T23:05:00.000-08:002013-01-11T23:07:04.164-08:00The Black Dog In The Dark Night (Of My Soul)Not a normal post for me, but...<br />
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I have always struggled with the Black Dog, and as my daughter pointed out to my wife, "He always does this during Christmas". <br />
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Shit. I hate doing this. I hate was it does to my family, my co-workers, and everybody else stuck around me.<br />
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Times like these, I read the news and despair. I've tried to live my life right, only to see that greed, corruption, and fraud prevail - honesty, diligence, and trust are for chumps.<br />
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I know it's just me, but it seems like the world's going down the drain, my country's going down the drain, and we're all just along for the ride. My wife tells me not to read the news when I get like this - she's probably right.<br />
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All one can do is grab your bootstraps, pull yourself up, and get on with it, but it is hard - the bloom came off of this rose a long time ago.<br />
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Man, I really am a downer. <br />
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I'm sorry my daughter, my wife, you deserve better.Glenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16803696761547157418noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1213884196909307597.post-51103625690437009152012-12-02T16:01:00.001-08:002012-12-02T16:01:28.883-08:00Switching To FLAC (It's Only Rock n Roll)A while back I bought a 2TB Western Digital Caviar Black hard drive to replace a 250GB Hitachi that was losing sectors - it had already used up the 5 "spare" sectors, and any more failure was going to result in losing data. The disk was quite old, the SMART data showed that it had been powered up and running for over five years. I think I'd owned it for longer than that - maybe ten years - the equivalent of over a hundred in "hard drive" years. I'd used it on my last two PCs (I was actually surprised I'd been smart enough to buy a drive with an SATA and an IDE interface way back then!)<br />
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I'd been watching the old drive fail for a while and was planning on replacing it with a new drive, but I had not been looking at such a monster. We were in the local Fry's one night a while back, buying a wireless router for my daughter and I asked the nice sales guy that was helping us what they had in the way of Western Digital drives. The WD 2TB SATA III drive (<a href="http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136792" target="_blank">WDC WD 2002FAEX</a> to be exact) was on sale for 130 bucks. Well, I'd already read reviews that stated that <a href="http://www.silentpcreview.com/wd-black-2tb-vr600" target="_blank">this drive represented the state of the art in spinning hard drives,</a> and the price made it too good a deal to resist so I went home with a damn big new drive. It's been installed and running for 40.4 days (according to the SMART data) and I can heartily recommend this monster if you happen to be in the market. Solid state drives will eventually be the way to go, but right now, these are too expensive to use as big data drives. (I would like to get one as a system drive.)<br />
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I suddenly went from having about twenty gigs of free space (only maintained by diligent scrubbing of garbage files in cache and downloads out of my home directory) to over 1.3 TB of free space.<br />
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Hmm...<br />
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I conducted some listening tests this morning comparing <a href="http://www.stereophile.com/features/308mp3cd/" target="_blank">CDs to MP3s (with a constant bit rate of 256) to FLACs</a> using the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let_It_Bleed" target="_blank">Rolling Stones Let It Bleed</a> (a magnificent album), an older Soundblaster sound card with a nice amp, and my trusty<a href="http://downthebitbucket.blogspot.com/2010/01/wow-good-cans.html" target="_blank"> Grado headphones</a>. Did I notice a difference? Well, yes, I did, which was somewhat surprising to be honest. So I decided I would have to re-do my music library from MP3 to FLAC.<br />
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Now I'm sitting at my PC, feeding it all our CDs to re-rip them in FLAC format. It took a while to figure out how to reconfigure Grip, <a href="http://gnuru.org/article/1160/ripping-flac-with-grip" target="_blank">and this blog post</a> got me over the last hump - Clemetine would not add the FLAC music to it's database due to missing Vorbis metadata.<br />
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Thank you, gnuru!<br />
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My wife has been watching this frenzy and thinks I'm nuts (she's probably right), and I'm starting to wonder just how many formats I used over the years with some of this music - vinyl, cassette, reel to reel, CD, SACD, MP3, and now FLAC. {I'm proud to say I never succumbed to 8 track tape.) I don't own the cassette player or the reel to reel anymore, but my record player and CD player are currently attached to a dead stereo amp - a subject for another blog post - for now, let's just say that keeping a fifty year old tube amp running requires more than your occasional dusting. (Bugger!)<br />
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And I'm pretty sure I'll be switching my music collection to another super duper format before I'm all done. I suspect it will this new thing called <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/zackomalleygreenburg/2011/07/13/vinyl-vs-cd-the-tables-are-turning-rolling-stones-dom-lyor-cohen/" target="_blank">vinyl</a> or maybe a straight shot to<a href="http://flac.sourceforge.net/" target="_blank"> FLAC</a>.<br />
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But no matter how it's formatted, <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUiXd233MZE" target="_blank">it's only rock n roll, and I like it...</a>Glenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16803696761547157418noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1213884196909307597.post-55003766775402254932012-12-01T22:08:00.001-08:002012-12-01T22:14:49.724-08:00Wet, But Winter Awaits...The weather here has been WET. But that's fairly normal for this time of year on the PNW. Bummer that it's cut into my bike commuting - I only got two days of riding in last week, yet I have not altered my caloric intake accordingly - I didn't stick to the salads, I'm gaining weight).<br />
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Hopefully, I'll get more skiing in this year with a pretty good season's pass deal for Steven's Pass. Gotta burn the thighs, and the calories! And it's just one more chance to impress the twenty year old kids out there on the slopes with my retro (actually all original) eighties ski duds.<br />
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Hey, maybe I'll finally buy shape skis this year! For those of you also planning on hitting the slopes, signing up for Larry's Powder Alert is a must:<br />
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http://www.skiwashington.com/larry<br />
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Happy skiing!<br />
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And as a special treat - my lovely wife, kicking it old school:<br />
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<br />Glenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16803696761547157418noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1213884196909307597.post-32248024186983002892012-11-27T05:05:00.001-08:002012-11-28T04:35:32.678-08:00Humpy Rabbit Socks<p>Cold weather riding home, but I'm warm in my comfy humpy rabbit socks.</p>
<div class='separator' style='clear: both; text-align: center;'> <a href='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg173sF9hToddUg19_bJnb5M7SIInJvZSZjL4oKTJj04z-Jju6A_N5d5Oaw6ZMjo6SUNQQCtwLqEUV7I6ClRHEE50SWnZHgLZtyCjwkM0sTrFG2p2dIobXkpJffiUvvdJwRrynIuflCSGpR/s1600/20121127_050355.jpg' imageanchor='1' style='margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;'> <img border='0' src='https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg173sF9hToddUg19_bJnb5M7SIInJvZSZjL4oKTJj04z-Jju6A_N5d5Oaw6ZMjo6SUNQQCtwLqEUV7I6ClRHEE50SWnZHgLZtyCjwkM0sTrFG2p2dIobXkpJffiUvvdJwRrynIuflCSGpR/s200/20121127_050355.jpg' /> </a> </div>Glenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16803696761547157418noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1213884196909307597.post-80757722546700981392012-11-25T21:19:00.000-08:002012-11-28T04:38:04.845-08:00Post Coital T-Day Bliss - Back To The GRINDSo it was nice getting a couple of days off where, quite frankly, not too damn much got done. I've still got wood to chop and house remodeling to finish. Dorris is feeling a little crummy so I've been keeping the wood stove going and the house nice and warm.<br />
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Now, I'm getting ready for my Monday morning wake-up at 3:40 AM. The weather's supposed to be good so I'm taking the commuter bike. It's a 7:31 sunrise so I think I'll just take the van pool to work and ride home. It's only a 4:22 sunset so I cannot stay too late either. (Riding home the the dark sucks - riding to work in the dark sucks too.)<br />
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I've been looking at my commuter bike - a bike I've owned for over thirty years and raced on in college. It's over due for a little love and cleaning - I'll see if I can get that done this week. Here it is back when it was my everyday ride and I'm coming back down Hurricane Ridge with Cliff (I'm on the left).<br />
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Man, I gotta lose some weight. I think I can ride two or three days this week, and salads for dinner.<br />
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I'm using my new keyboard more (note the sudden interest in doing blog entries) and I'm loving it the more I use it. Glenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16803696761547157418noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1213884196909307597.post-80676194376042338112012-11-24T18:00:00.001-08:002012-11-25T01:12:51.079-08:00From The PhoneSo this is an attempt to add a blog post from my<a href="http://prepaid-phones.t-mobile.com/prepaid-phone/Samsung-Exhibit-4G-Prepaid"> smart phone </a>using Blogger. So far, so good. Let's see if I can put in a picture of my phone:<br />
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I ended up doing more editing from the PC because I could not figure out how to add more text after the photo, put in links and so on, but you can see that I've also upgraded my keyboard to a <a href="http://http//www.rosewill.com/products/2321/ProductDetail_Overview.htm">Rosewill RK-9100BR</a>. Sweet! Now I can really hack away in the dark instead of just figuratively hacking away in the dark!<br />
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More posts on both on how I hacked my phone and the nice new keyboard are coming...Glenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16803696761547157418noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1213884196909307597.post-90791390787961197692011-12-12T15:50:00.000-08:002011-12-12T16:57:05.311-08:00THE POWER!So I did all those upgrades and still decided to overclock the CPU - after all, it is an unlocked Black Edition. So I bumped the CPU multiplier from 16 to 18 for a 12.5% bump in CPU speed. I didn't touch the voltages, and if it starts running full bore for any length of time, it would give the existing fans a very hard time.Glenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16803696761547157418noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1213884196909307597.post-70659377446523112092011-09-07T13:34:00.000-07:002011-12-12T15:50:49.267-08:00Now Running - Debian Squeeze!Quite a few upgrades both hardware and software to catch up on:<div><br /></div><div>Upgraded hardware to Athlon II X2 245 CPU on a Gigabyte MA-785GM-US2H. This CPU overclocks nicely (and the DDR2 overclocked also.)</div><div><br /></div><div>Then upgraded to a Phenom X6 1090T with 8Gb of DDR2 1066. Ended up buying a new Antec Solo case to get the heat and noise under control - very nice case. (I feel no need to overclock this chip.)</div><div><br /></div><div>Tried to upgrade to Ubuntu 10.04.2 LTS amd64 and FAILED! (Funny, the live disk ran fine!)</div><div><br /></div><div>Then upgraded to Debian Squeeze 6.0.2.1 amd64. (I took a hard look at Archlinux and may still give that a try later.) All working very well - I seem to conveniently forget how much custom software I have to install and compile every time I do this. </div>Glenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16803696761547157418noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1213884196909307597.post-6920200520374303672011-09-07T13:32:00.000-07:002011-09-07T13:33:41.340-07:00Oops! Long TIme - No PostOuch! Long time no post. <div><br /></div><div>We'll try and get a few out.</div>Glenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16803696761547157418noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1213884196909307597.post-72197244208901072772010-08-28T17:46:00.000-07:002010-08-28T18:08:42.165-07:00Upgraded To Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid LynxSo I upgraded to Ubuntu 10.04 some time back. I did the network upgrade from 9.10 to 10.04. Without a doubt, the easiest online upgrade I have ever done. The weird thing is, I vastly prefer to do a clean install, but I could not get the 10.04 CD to work so I crossed my fingers and went for it. Only thing that did happen was Ethernet didn't work (and I had to scramble to remember the ifconfig commands). I traced this back to the way I had configured /etc/network/interfaces.<br /><br />Couple of things I did do:<br /><br />Un installed the Nvidia video card drivers and switched back to the stock vga driver.<br />Backed up my home directory.<br /><br />But really, this even went better than the 9.04 to 9.10. I had to reach in and tweak the GRUB settings from a rescue CD after that upgrade to even get GRUB to boot.Glenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16803696761547157418noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1213884196909307597.post-23447662549969335422010-05-16T11:14:00.000-07:002010-08-28T19:47:36.242-07:00Extend And Pretend - How Does It End?Recent economic signs increasingly point to a "double dip", although I have to agree with Robert Reich that most (98%) Americans never got out of the first dip. I think that even the idiots in DC and on Wall St are starting to realize that there is a snowball's chance in hell that the housing market can get back to where it was in 2007 any time in the next year or two. (I'd argue that it will take ten plus years to that, maybe longer if you include inflation.) Plus, it's now obvious that TBTF banks are making "record" profits, but this has done little to nothing to re-starting the economy. (I would make the argument once again, that bailing out the banks is the problem, not the solution since time, after time, after time, all that was done since the Reagan 80's has been to bail out failing Wall St firms rather than letting them go bust - with one notable exception: Lehman Brothers.)<br /><br />So when does the Obama government decide to end "Extend and Pretend" and actually start to fix the problems with our economy?<br /><br />Here's my best guess - we're all Katrina victims now. NOLA is the new role model for how our nation will recover. The middle and lower class will get left to fend for themselves, the rich will be protected and coddled by the state. The economy will continue to disintegrate, our country will continue to fracture.Glenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16803696761547157418noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1213884196909307597.post-65196997615442468992010-03-20T20:51:00.000-07:002010-05-02T08:24:24.326-07:00Problems With Libgphoto2 in Karmic?Strangely, gthumb is no longer able to import photos from a CD or from Compact Flash. What's up with that?<br /><br />Looks like it's this<a href="http://https//bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gthumb/+bug/442448"> bug</a>.<br /><br />This is a pretty easy bug for me to work around so far, and I'm sure Ill run into more Karmic Kola issues. I'm working on a post on transcoding in Karmic - apparently ffmpeg is left unable to use h264 and aac due to potential patent issues.Glenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16803696761547157418noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1213884196909307597.post-70447529945862605062010-03-20T20:26:00.000-07:002010-05-02T08:23:56.167-07:00Health Care ReformMan, February flew by without a thought! And much of March.<div><br /></div><div>I'll have to say - I've been spending lots of time and energy watching and posting at other blogs about Health Care Reform. I'm not impressed with President Obama or the Democratic party. The proposed HCR is very weak, pretty much a bailout of the health care insurance industry that created our current mess.</div><div><br /></div><div>Just giving everybody the option to buy into Medicare, with a graduated cost scale, and fixing Medicare, would have been much better.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Glenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16803696761547157418noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1213884196909307597.post-3997603391819177432010-01-25T23:09:00.000-08:002010-05-02T08:27:41.807-07:00Cash For Democratic/Republican Clunkers!<div>A new exciting program is being readied for you by your Federal government!</div><div><br /></div><div>Last year, the Cash for Clunkers program provided exceptional return on investment. We've spent tens of trillions of dollars on Wall St banks only to see excessive bonuses for the people who crashed the world's economy, but spending just $3 billion on Cash for Clunkers provided a over half of the GDP increase from the stimulus.</div><div><br /></div><div>Well, with such excellent return on investment, and in accordance with the recent SCOTUS ruling, the Federal government will be announcing the Cash for Democratic/Republican Clunkers program!</div><div><br /></div><div>This program will allow us, the real and imaginary corporate people of the United States to purchase our own brand, spanking new Senator or House member, and get rid of some real clunkers!</div><div><br /></div><div>These Democratic/Republican Clunkers have to go now! These are all dangerously out of date, unsafe at any speed, and polluting! Heck, half of them actually have recently, due to their own action, or lack there of, been classified as the party of NO, or Not Operational.</div><div><br /></div><div>It's just a crying shame that these perfectly useful Senate and House positions which can be used to help run the country, and ensure the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness of the American people, both real and imaginary, have been abandon, overrun by weeds, and are in such general disrepair that these are now lowering the property values of all of Congress!</div><div><br /></div><div>So examine your budget, and come prepared to help us get rid of these Democratic/Republican Clunkers! Contact your preferred organization and learn how you can donate and participate in buying a couple of Senators and House members you can call your very own!</div><div><br /></div><div><div>Poll</div><div>What Do I Have To Do, To Get You To Do This Deal TODAY?</div><div><br /></div><div>I'm calling my preferred Democratic/Republican organization RIGHT NOW!</div><div>0%<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>0 votes</div><div>Well, I'm On a Tight Budget - But It's Tempting</div><div>0%<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>0 votes</div><div>I'm In the Market, But Have to Be Sure My Money Purchases A Real Progressive!</div><div>0%<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>0 votes</div><div>Darn, I Spent All My Money On Booze, Cigs, and Ammo!</div><div>16%<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>1 votes</div><div>I'm In, But Only Because The Little League Team I Sponsor Isn't Playing This Year</div><div>0%<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>0 votes</div><div>I Represent A Foreign Imaginary Corporate Person, And We'll Take Ten!</div><div>16%<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>1 votes</div><div>Do You Take Gold Bars, or Coffee Cans Full of Unmarked Bills?</div><div>16%<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>1 votes</div><div>I'm Holding Out For the Cash For Blue Dog Clunkers!</div><div>0%<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>0 votes</div><div>Sorry, I Just Bought One, But Came For The Free Toaster.</div><div>0%<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>0 votes</div><div>I'm In, But Only If They Install Luxury Owner's Boxes In the Viewing Gallery!</div><div>0%<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>0 votes</div><div>Does This Come With All The Required Batteries?</div><div>0%<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>0 votes</div><div>Is This A Tax Write off?</div><div>16%<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>1 votes</div><div>Can I Get This With Pie?</div><div>16%<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>1 votes</div><div>Sorry, I'm Just Here To Get My Democratic Clunker Tuned Up!</div><div>16%<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>1 votes</div><div>Can I Get This One In a Nice Dark Blue?</div><div>0%<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>0 votes</div></div>Glenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16803696761547157418noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1213884196909307597.post-23976050862568289302010-01-17T14:55:00.000-08:002010-01-17T15:24:36.177-08:00Ubuntu Upgrade From 9.04 To 9.10, Oops...So I had been putting off upgrading from Ubuntu 9.04 to 9.10. I did this because the Ubuntu 9.10 CD I had downloaded was not able to live boot on my PC. Now, my PC's getting pretty long in the tooth, so I just figured it was a problem related to the age of my PC, and that I'd do a bit of investigation into potential problems prior to performing the upgrade. Well, I never did much of that and ended up doing the upgrade anyways. Oops...<div><br /></div><div>So I started the network upgrade from 9.04 to 9.10 yesterday morning, and it finished and rebooted yesterday evening. Busybox timed out trying to finish booting the PC. It had "lost" the root harddrive. I rebooted to a Fedora 12 Live CD I had made just last week, and did some investigation on potential Grub problems after upgrading. First, I was still using Grub 1 rather than Grub 2, probably because one only gets Grub 2 installed if coming from a fresh installation. This is OK with me, I've also decided to stick with using ext3 file systems since test reports show significant performance hits with ext4. I ended up having to modify the root= parameter in grub's menu.lst file. This got the machine booting.</div><div><br /></div><div>There were a couple other problems I ended up having to de-fang to get things running. First off, Networkmanager sure doesn't like static IP configrations (or it didn't allow me to edit the settings) so I removed it. Second, bind doesn't seem to by running as a caching name server so I had to put a nameserver line into resolv.conf. Third, lm_sensors was buggered up and I could not get the iy87 module to load. This was fixed by adding aan additional boot parameter acpi_enforce_resources=lax to the menu.lst file, and then running grub-update. I'm still ironing out bugs and moving things around, but it's running good now, better than 9.04 did (pulseaudio seems to run better). I'll report more progress later on.</div>Glenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16803696761547157418noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1213884196909307597.post-54472214291547729112010-01-15T18:45:00.000-08:002010-01-17T15:25:24.529-08:00Haiti Needs Our Help, Should We Send Our Military?<div>We have a rather stark choice here, one which we can make with humanity, grace, and wisdom, or with the casual banality of evil ignorance.</div><div><br /></div><div>Haiti was a poor, impoverished state, barely hanging on before the earthquake. Now, it is on the knife edge of becoming a "failed state". "Failed state", that should ring some alarm bells. Afghanistan, that's a "failed state". Do we want an Afghanistan just south of our borders?</div><div><br /></div><div>Haiti is our neighbor, one which needs our help. One which is our friend, an ally. How can we, this professed nation of "God fearing Christians", not extend a generous helping hand? Is it not best to defend our own freedom by offering the hand of friendship to those in need? Cannot our military, those who are our so often called to defend our nation, be our ambassadors of friendship, good will, and aid?</div><div><br /></div><div>The other option is dark - ignore this natural disaster and let a country teetering on the edge, fall off, into chaos.</div><div><br /></div><div>America did not become a world leader by throwing our military around like a great club. We did not have large standing armies for WWI or WWII. We, instead, were pulled unwillingly into defending free nations fighting evil and darkness. Let's reaffirm that tradition by sending our military to fight the evil of disaster, hurt, and hunger, and in so doing, provide aid for those in need, and prevent the spread of chaos and darkness.</div><div><br /></div><div>Is this so hard to see?</div><div><br /></div><div>So often our military gets to deal with the shit in this world. Send them in - let them be the heros we know they are.</div><div><br /></div>Glenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16803696761547157418noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1213884196909307597.post-51230709049584991642010-01-06T22:18:00.000-08:002010-01-06T22:46:49.216-08:00Fair winds and following seas<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhl6mGQojUq5W6h-rOokWpq2971v9DpICwiVaUvzkvcyDKIEO2AL9nHZy1K31j1arsOBb2YDDS2BO9WVk3GGnv3tfV332ZIgWKAcHusUNfgtBRfQvNL6BvW1ZXMocAIk2hgCXZKmDzdwLQu/s1600-h/schuss.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 273px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhl6mGQojUq5W6h-rOokWpq2971v9DpICwiVaUvzkvcyDKIEO2AL9nHZy1K31j1arsOBb2YDDS2BO9WVk3GGnv3tfV332ZIgWKAcHusUNfgtBRfQvNL6BvW1ZXMocAIk2hgCXZKmDzdwLQu/s400/schuss.jpg" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5423884906245905906" /></a><br />It was with shock that I learned a good friend, Dave Lewis, had passed away from cancer on December 12th. I hadn't spoken with him in a while since our work schedules and locations had changed. I should know better than to take our presence here for granted at my age, and had sent that email or picked up the phone to say hi.<div><br /></div><div><a href="http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/seattletimes/obituary.aspx?n=david-crowell-lewis&pid=137500468">Dave</a> was good man with a big heart. He loved to sail, was a damn good racer, and we were lucky enough to go racing with him on our boat over the years.</div><div><br /></div><div>We'll miss him.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Glenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16803696761547157418noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1213884196909307597.post-9096499496361347262010-01-04T21:07:00.000-08:002010-01-04T21:18:43.892-08:00Wow, Good Cans!<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjU1fo1qU2CKzii5DLQNgOf2tKgEKVm9CVzznTTy4S2wrxY75tM5je4HF0x9KfLIX4qjyriteHiuvMaQKrqxtOjdo8jpy3HxsXT_nuEQQ41M0lcBHiWQEttXHKJ_KLmSbfJYLaJyUn_apLr/s1600-h/sr60i.png"><img style="float:left; margin:0 10px 10px 0;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 248px; height: 400px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjU1fo1qU2CKzii5DLQNgOf2tKgEKVm9CVzznTTy4S2wrxY75tM5je4HF0x9KfLIX4qjyriteHiuvMaQKrqxtOjdo8jpy3HxsXT_nuEQQ41M0lcBHiWQEttXHKJ_KLmSbfJYLaJyUn_apLr/s400/sr60i.png" border="0" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5423119953995869890" /></a><br />No, for all you pseudo pervs that jump to conclusions, this is not a post about female body parts!<br /><br />I've been using Grado SR60i headphones for about two months now, and these things are freaking fantastic! Lots of deep bass, maybe even better than my stereo in the living room. They do look a bit dorky, and can be a bit uncomfortable, but a killer price and made in America.<div><br /></div><div>Here's a link to their web page:<div><div><br /><a href="http://www.gradolabs.com/frameset_main.htm">Grado SR60i</a></div><div><br /></div><div>Life's too short and most earbuds hurt and sound like shit. Get your Grado's today.</div><div><br /></div></div></div>Glenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16803696761547157418noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1213884196909307597.post-13394696916577553022009-12-31T19:39:00.000-08:002009-12-31T20:44:20.556-08:002009 Wall St Recovery, What About The Rest Of Us?So Wall St had a very good year, but then again, they got a massive amount of money from us, the US taxpayer. How much did they get? <a href="http://www.blogger.com/www.sitemason.com/files/esMlDW/bailouttallydec2009.pdf">12.2 Trillion Dollars</a>. Now, most of that was supposed to "trickle down" to us, <a href="http://www.alternet.org/media/144776/wall_street's_10_greatest_lies_of_2009?page=entire">but very little actually did anything for Main St.</a> Not to shabby a deal for wrecking the world's economy.<div><br /></div><div>But what did we get? Well, by the same report, we got 1.8 trillion dollars which is not exactly nothing, but it's certainly almost an order of magnitude less than Wall St, and honestly, the trend here about who gets what is very distressing. The talk in DC is to reign in the deficit by <a href="http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090302/greider">cutting Social Security and Medicare</a>. It looks like Wall St is going to pull off a double whammy - they've wiped out my home equity, crushed my pension, gutted my 401K, and now thery're going to take my Social Security and Medicare (and no, those are NOT entitlements, I've been paying for them my whole adult life.) And, there is more than a passing suspicion that even health care reform is nothing but a <a href="http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2009/12/guest-post-economist-says-health-care-bill-is-just-another-bailout-of-the-financial-system.html">taxpayer bailout of failed financial companies.</a></div><div><br /></div><div>Here's a couple more astute financial experts discussing our recovery - or lack of it:</div><div><br /></div><div><a href="http://robertreich.blogspot.com/2009/12/2009-year-wall-street-bounced-back-and.html">Robert Reich </a></div><div><a href="http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/opinion/2009-12/31/content_9249981.htm">Joseph Stiglitz</a></div><div><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/20/opinion/20krugman.html">Paul Krugman</a></div><div><br /></div><div>So here's hoping that the US taxpayer gets a better deal next year than this year - because this year, we got screwed.</div><div><br /></div>Glenhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16803696761547157418noreply@blogger.com0