Category: Rant

What a day!

Got an piece of beta software that I’ve been waiting for for a while, but it required that I upgrade my Linux box from Ubuntu 7.10 to 8.04. The upgrade seemed to work fine, but the kernel paniced when I rebooted. It booted on “Linux.OLD”, an older kernel, but my USB keyboard didn’t work and several other things weren’t working right. I re-ran “lilo” thinking it might get the proper kernel booted, but instead it removed “Linux.OLD” from the boot menu, and now I have no way to boot it. Downloading a Live CD right now.

Went flying for the first time in a long time. The plane is badly out of rig and with full left rudder trim, still required more left rudder to center the ball. I didn’t have any destination in mind, just flew around a bit to a couple of airports I rarely visit. My third landing wasn’t too bad.

Went with Vicki to buy her a kayak. She bought a Swift Saranac 14, which is a pretty good boat, and very popular. I hope she gets lots of use out of it.

Although the menu and other buttons on the new camera don’t work, I can still take pictures with it (just can’t change the ISO, or switch to shooting in RAW, or any number of other adjustments). First picture is here.

How desperate am I?

My contract is up at the end of this month, and they’re not renewing it. They have an open position for a direct hire, but I applied for it and I haven’t heard anything back. So I thought for self-preservation purposes, I’d better start looking to see what else is out there.

First step is to see if my pimp has anything. Ok, enter http://www.[pimpname].com/ into a browser, and get “Safari can’t find the server”, but first there is a weird little flash as if it is getting redirected. So I try curl on that address, and get:

<head><title>Document Moved</title></head>
<body><h1>Object Moved</h1>This document may be found <a HREF="http://spusitinf0
02/Pages/index.aspx">here</a></body>

And I repeat the experiment with a telnet to port 80, and find they made the exact same damn stupid mistake in the Location: header in the 302 message.

Do I really want to entrust my career to people who make mistakes like this? I don’t think so.

Minolta Maxxum 7D, DOA

I bought a Maxxum 7D as I mentioned I might earlier. I decided that while it’s not the latest thing, it’s half the price of a new camera, and I can use my existing lenses. It arrived today. Only one small minor inconsequential detail. None of the buttons beside the LCD screen work. So I have no way to change any settings, review pictures, look at histograms, or basically do anything other than take pictures at 800 ISO. I’m hoping against hope that there is a setting on one of the bazillion switches and dials on the camera that is locking out those buttons, because otherwise I’m going to have to hope like hell that the seller’s “we guarantee against mechanical defects” guarantee actually means something.

Kayak Construction: Need to take some time to think

Yesterday I glued the seams on the deck of the kayak. Today I’m supposed to be taking off the wires and filling in any seams that didn’t get filled. I took a look at them, and there are some major problems and some minor ones.

Major problems:

  • The tail section didn’t go together correctly. It was so bad that I’ve had to cut the glued seams with a carpet knife. I’ve tried to slide a bit a scrap wood under it and using a combination of nails, tape and clamps tried to get it to sit right and I’ll have to re-glue it later.
  • Two places on the deck, around where the bow and stern temporary forms are, the deck has actually slumped down too low and is too wide for the hull. I’m hoping that after I glue the under side and put it back on to dry, I can somehow manipulate those sections to sit right, but I fear that I’m going to end up carving the wood along the shear line to make it fit.

Minor problems:

  • lots of glue spills on the outside of the boat that need to be scraped and sanded off
  • some HUGE glue spills on the inside of the boat, some that went down into the hull will require lots of work to get off
  • Most of the epoxy has set up correctly, but some is still rubbery. Hopefully that’s just a matter of time, and not that I somehow didn’t mix the hardener in correctly.

It’s times like this that I have to keep reminding myself that nobody else will see all the flaws.

Damnit, Sun!

A while back I mentioned how much I love “kill -3” as a Java debugging tool. Today I decided that instead of having to put a redirection in the start up script for each app in the system, I’d change the logging class so that it would do a “System.setOut” to redirect standard output. And that’s when I discovered the horrible truth – that while setOut redirects things that are printed with System.out, it doesn’t actually affect the JVM’s actual standard output. WTF?