BunkBlog

Slashdot is pink. ThinkGeek is selling USB tanning centers and wireless extension cords. Welcome to April Fool 2006. Be afraid.

1. Name one of your flaws. I’m a gigantic smartass.
2. Have you ever won first place?  In 7th grade, I won first place for the science fair (Tesla coil and Jacob’s Ladder) and also for an art contest (some elephant sketch).
3. Who is the last person to make you smile?  Probably one of the ladies at work.
4. Describe a time when you should have tried harder.  High school.  Specifically, the “getting into college” period.
5. What are you good at?  Folding paper, building computers, animated GIFs, sex, cooking, baking.  A few things, all of them indoors.  Huh.

Alex has finished his second week with the “Kid’s Karate” program, and he’s starting to figure out his left from his right. All in good time, I suppose.

He’s very cute in his little white uniform, jumping around like a tiny kangaroo.

And so ends another week. Back to hanging out with my main girl, the cat.

I read the graphic novel a while ago, and the movie version of V For Vendetta
is true to the source material and yet quite different.

The Commander’s review pretty much covers the material, so I won’t be redundant.  The most striking difference between the novel and the movie in my mind was the final scene.  I don’t recall a scene like that in the novel (the above ground bits, that is).  Makes the movie more hopeful than the book, which is not nearly as dark as most Moore stuff.  Might explain why he screamed to take his name off it.

Since Qumana didn’t work, and I finally got my host to unlock the xmlrpc functionality so Performancing can work now. Let’s see how this goes.

Checking out the Qumana blog editor for posting to the site. It’s also supposed to work with Livejournal, but it’s not working for me.  Maybe in the next beta.

Since Livepress is stuck in version 1.5, and I’m using WordPress 2.0.2, the automatic post synch doesn’t function directly.  This is my attempt to get there through a different route.  Maybe another way, since this isn’t ready yet.  *sigh*

Several people have recently asked why in the world I would need 350 gigs of storage space, when that equates to hundreds of hours of video footage – way more than I could watch in a reasonable amount of time.

So, here’s the explanation for those who haven’t drunk the DVR koolaid yet.

I don’t record things to watch them at a specific time (except for a few shows that I look forward to talking about at work), but to have them for whenever I feel like watching them. Say I feel like watching a cooking show.  Six months ago, I could flip over to the Food Network and hope one of the shows I liked was on, or deal with watching the Al Roker barbecue special again.  Now, I just see which Good Eats or 30 Minute Meals episode I feel like watching. And Alex has three episodes of every one of his shows on tap, for whenever he wants to spend his 30 minutes of screen time per day.

Although I’m still opposed to the idea of tuners being not part of an industry standard and therefore being held hostage to a cable or satellite company for digital signals, I can see the utility of a dual-tuner HD box sometime in the future. The bigger problem is that whole DRM nonsense. As the consumers get more educated and begin to revolt against all the copy protection crap the MPAA and RIAA want us to encumber our media with, they continue to plan even more.  France has legislated the first step toward making DRM illegal, and yet the US government opposes the measure.  It’s astounding.

As Cory Doctorow says, nobody wants to do less with their media today than they did yesterday.  Yet, that’s what the MPAA want to force on us.  Why?

Surprisingly, Alex is in love with a new recipe for onion soup with cheesy bread. Pretty simple soup (sauteed onions, leeks, and shallots in beef broth), but the cheesy bread had three cheeses – smoked gouda, gruyere, and cheddar.  I’ve got a bowl sealed up and waiting for lunch at work tomorrow, along with one chunk of bread.

The Boy actually requested the soup two days in a row.  Guess it’s a keeper.

Apparently, Microsoft is still running into issues with Vista, even after deleting several features from the original Longhorn plan. They’ve announced an updated availability date, and it’s 2007! For those keeping score, Longhorn was originally planned for a 2004 release.

They delayed it until 2005 for security issues. At that point, Allchin promised WinFS would be in the release.

Four months after that announcement, MS announced the removal of WinFS from the 2006 release.

Eight months after that, there was rampant speculation that the 2006 date was optimistic. MS denied any such thing.

Just recently, EFI booting support was pulled from the planned Vista release.

Wonder when it will ship and what will be in it.

I swear, Family Guy is written just for nuts like me. Just in the first seven minutes of tonight’s episode, the references included Mytzlplk, 80s children’s television, John Cusack movies, the Disney versions of Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin, and the war in Iraq.

The other obscure references that I noticed include the Dukes of Hazzard, Punk’d, the psychotically vague Second Amendment verbiage, a particular Burgundy wine (or restaurant in Tribeca), Planet of the Apes, Woody Woodpecker, Fatal Attraction, Less Than Zero (or maybe Bright Lights Big City – I’ve only read the books not seen the movies), and zombie movies.

There was also a reference to a movie that doesn’t seem familiar – ancient language-speaking forestdwelling people who are apparently reincarnated soul mates later in history. Anyone know that one?

Microsoft originally said WinFS (the pseudofile system) would be part of Longhorn (now named Vista). WinFS was dropped months ago. They said Vista would boot with EFI. EFI support won’t be available at launch. Maybe later?

What other features promised in Longhorn won’t actually be in Vista when it launches? Tell me again why Vista is better than XP?  It has a new skinning engine?  Ooh, pretty.  I guess if you’re into bright shiny things, you’ll want to pick it up.

Remember the new hard drive? Well, I decided to stop the separation of the various media files between hda4 and hdb1, because it causes issues that require me to manually move recorded movies to the video share in order to free up the space on hda4 (which was the original purpose of the extra drive). So, I spent a few hours today moving 140 gigs of files around from drive to drive, so as to get the system up and running using the Logical Volume Manager system. Now that it’s up, it’s sweet and future maintenance will be crazy easy.

Previously, the df command showed

/dev/hda1 /
/dev/hda3 /cache
/dev/hda4 /myth

/dev/hdb1 /myth/video

Now, the df command shows:

/dev/hda1 /
/dev/hda3 /cache
/dev/mythvg/mythlv /myth

Physically, that /dev/mythvg/mythlv device is a logical device, spread across two physical devices, with a combined total available space of 365 gigabytes. Now, instead of having 120 gigs free on the video drive and 80 gigs free (and falling fast) free on the main myth drive, I’ve got 206 gigs free on the logical myth drive. And, if I decide to be a bigger packrat, I can grab a SATA drive or two and extend the logical volume group across the new drives as well. I’m gonna get a terabyte, babay!

Based on reviews from Kitiara and others, I think I’ll pass on Ultraviolet. How bad does a movie have to be when it gets a three percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes? Wow, that’s an accomplishment.  One of the reviewers recommended seeing it, and twenty-nine others recommend giving yourself a root canal without anesthetic as less painful.