Category: Rant

Do the Wolf Cubs count?

In anticipation of an Obama victory, I’m filling out a N-400 (Application for Naturalization). One of the questions asks me to list every club or organization I’ve ever belonged to, anywhere. Ok, I think I’ve got most of the ones I belong to now, and I remember belonging to the Wolf Cubs (sort of a junior Boy Scouts) back when I lived in Schomberg, but I’m a little hazy on what I belonged to in between.

Does the stamp collecting club at my public school count? How about the Strategy Gamers club at my high school. (Yes, the nerd die was cast early.) Oh, speaking of die… Oh wait, our D&D group never called itself a club. Never mind then.

I used to have a ski racer’s “card”, which I needed to race in local cross country ski races, but I don’t remember who issued it.

Oh, I think I have a card in my wallet that says I belong to the Subway Sub Club, does that count? Probably not since I didn’t actually give them my name, just money and little stamps.

I thought about adding PFLAG, even though I’m not technically a member, just to see if it would raise any alarm bells.

Sigh. I can see this is going to be a long process.

Blind. Sided.

I renewed my aviation medical today, and while it was relatively painless, I failed the vision test without my reading glasses, and so now I have a restriction. Which is stupid, because I have no problem reading things at the distance of my charts or GPS, it’s only really close up and in dim light that I need my glasses. Also I still appear to have some twitchiness in my right eye, the one that was having problems, due to lack of sleep and I have no doubt that I’d pass the test on a normal day.

Oh well. It sucks getting old.

Maybe I’m a little stressed out

My impending job change has me stressed out so much that I’m having trouble sleeping. But maybe I’m letting it get to me more than I should. Today I used the word “asshat” in a problem report resolution. Mind you, I was referring to whoever at Sun is responsible for changing the name of the Java Runtime Engine from jre to j2re and then back to jre (and a whole bunch of other gratuitous naming convention and numbering scheme changes), so it’s a very appropriate adjective, but in retrospect I don’t think my cow orkers would quite understand my sentiment.

Why did I do that?

Gallery 2.3 just came out, and I made the mistake of upgrading instead of waiting for it to shake out a bit. And of course, things are slightly broken. Everything works, but at the end of every page is this:

Database Error
An error has occurred while interacting with the database.

The exact nature of database errors is not captured unless Gallery debug mode is enabled in config.php. Before seeking support for this error please enable buffered debug output and retry the operation. Look near the bottom of the lengthy debug output to find error details.
Back to the Gallery

Error Detail –
Error (ERROR_STORAGE_FAILURE)
in modules/core/classes/GalleryStorage/GalleryStorageExtras.class at line 1007 (gallerycoreapi::error)
in modules/core/classes/GalleryStorage.class at line 521 (gallerystorageextras::addmapentry)
in modules/core/classes/GalleryCoreApi.class at line 2955 (postgresqlstorage::addmapentry)
in modules/core/classes/GalleryDataCache.class at line 692 (gallerycoreapi::addmapentry)
in main.php at line 594 (gallerydatacache::putpagedata)
in main.php at line 104
in main.php at line 88
System Information
Gallery version 2.3
PHP version 4.4.4-8+etch6 apache2handler
Webserver Apache/2.2.3 (Debian) mod_python/3.2.10 Python/2.4.4 PHP/4.4.4-8+etch6 mod_perl/2.0.2 Perl/v5.8.8
Database postgres7
Operating system Linux xen1.xcski.com 2.6.18-3-xen-686 #1 SMP Mon Dec 4 20:48:20 UTC 2006 i686
Browser Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_5; en-us) AppleWebKit/525.18 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.1.2 Safari/525.20.1

The weird thing is that it was happening almost everywhere, and now it’s only some pages.

Probably should have been paying attention

I just noticed that the upstairs TiVo hasn’t recorded anything since Tuesday, not even the manual recordings of the Daily Show. I tried rebooting it, and the “ToDo List” still shows “No shows pending” for every entry in the Season Pass list, even the manual recordings. So now I’ve got a call into tech support, which at 6pm on a Friday, I’m not expecting a quick callback.

Update: an hour after rebooting, the ToDo List has finally been populated.