Hello and goodbye

A few months ago, I was thinking about going to Oshkosh this year. (I’m pretty sure I’m not going after all, since we’re going to be moving house around that time.) I used to be on a mailing list for pilots of Piper aircraft, and I’d met up with some of them at Sun’n’Fun in 2002 and at Oshkosh in 2003, and I thought I’d check in with them again to see who was going to Oshkosh this year.

Now, I quit that mailing list last year because like any group of pilots, it had a lot of hard core right wingers, and not just traditional “low taxes, low regulation, no government services” conservative types, but a lot of “George Bush is always right and anybody who disagrees is a traitor to the country” rabid neo-cons. And it just wasn’t fun any more. But I missed the non-jerks on the list, so I resubscribed. I vowed to stay away from any political conversation, and not be goaded into political debates no matter how uninformed and stupid some of these people’s opinions are. (The loudest and most vehement ones were always the idiots who got their “facts” from Anne Coulter and Fox News.)

Last week, somebody on the list asked what we meant when we referred to “ripping” a CD. I, and two other people, explained that it was the process of taking music off a CD and converting it to digital files like MP3s, WMA or other format for either storing on a computer, transferring to an iPod or other (lesser) hand held music player, or even burning to MP3 CDs that some CD players can play. The person who asked was satisfied with the answers he got, and asked some follow on questions. So far, so good. But three fucking days later, somebody responds to the original question with the “fact’ that “ripping” is just a synonym for “burning”. I said no, it’s the exact opposite. I don’t know if he hadn’t read the intervening days worth of discussion, or just thought that he was right and we were all wrong. So I told him that if he’d read the several correct responses to Neville’s question that were posted in the days before, he would have seen that “burning” is the process of putting information onto a CD, and “ripping” is the process of taking information from a CD.

After this exchange, guess which one of us got flamed? The guy who provided the correct information and then three days later had to correct the guy who waited three days and then contradicted him, or the guy who ignored all the correct information and arrogantly wrote something wrong? Yeah, I think I just figured out why Bush won this election – because to these people correcting wrong information and lies is being “intolerant and snotty”.

Well, sorry Blanche, Roger, Rhandi, Neville, and all the other good people on the Piper mailing list, I’m gone. And I’m blogging this as a reminder to myself not to go back.

Here’s hoping!

A few weeks back, I bought a Linksys WRT54G. I only had minor problems with my existing wireless router, but I’ve been hearing some great things about how customizable this one is because it’s open source and runs Linux. Hey, $60 for a Linux box is pretty impressive.

However, if I loaded it moderately heavily, like if I attempted to bittorrent the latest Doctor Who episode while listening to mp3s NFS mounted from my server, the wireless connection would start acting weird, and eventually stop transferring data at all, while showing full signal strength in MacStumbler. But the wired connections to the Linux server and the G4 downstairs kept working. But the only way to get wireless working again was to go downstairs and power cycle it. Which is a pain in the knees.

So it was recommended that I try one of the third party firmwares out there. I’m not sure if I want all the bells and whistles of the full Sveasoft distro, and so rather than paying the $20 for it I thought I’d try on of the free ones. I just installed dd.wrt.v22.prefinal3.1.bin. It adds a few nifty features, most of which I don’t care about. But it does have busybox on it, so I can ssh into the box. That’s just weird. But what I really want to see if it can go a few days without needing a power cycle.

What am I doing awake?

It’s 3:47am and I’ve been up out of bed for roughly an hour now. Before that, I was tossing and turning and unable to sleep. Yesterday (yeah, I guess it’s yesterday already) after work we went to the house for the engineers inspection. Nothing too major turned up. There is a some dodgy wood work and some of the exterior paint needs to be redone. We’ll probably have to suck that up ourselves, which is a pity because the engineer estimated $1500 for that. There were a couple of places the house wasn’t up to code – missing hand rails on stair ways and missing or faulty GFIs in bathrooms, etc. Hopefully we can get them to take care of those before we move in, but if not it’s not going to kill us to do it ourselves. The engineers also noted a few open junction boxes in the basement – it seems to me that’s only a problem if you have inquisitive people sticking fingers into them, right? In which case, not a problem down in the basement, where it’s very unlikely we’ll have any 7 foot tall children sticking fingers where they don’t belong.

While the engineers were poking around, I took the time to measure all the rooms. I then started drawing up a floor plan, only to realize that it wasn’t working out because the interior walls are quite thick – I measured a few in doorways and they’re over 7 inches thick. Also, there are many, many little nooks and crannies that complicated the measuring business.

One of the reasons I’m not sleeping is that I’ve been going over in my head what we’d put where. The current owners aren’t very media and technology oriented, whereas we’re the opposite, so trying to figure where to put the “public” TV set, TiVo and DVD player, where to put the stereo (and even if we need a stereo with all the iPods and computers we get 99% of our musical entertainment from), etc. I did notice a set of what I think were speakers in the dining room, so I presume the current owners have music on when they’re entertaining – that makes sense, I guess we’ll probably want to do that.

Now that we’ve got the measurements for the “blue room”, the room that’s mostly glass that we’re going to put the birds in, we can sort of mark out what size that is here and figure out how much other room we’d have once the bird cages are in it. The problem is that the birds give off so much fluff and cockatiel dust that we probably don’t want to put computers or TVs or entertainment centers in with them. Or maybe we do, as long as we put the HEPA filter in there and change the filter a lot.

One project that’s probably going to be not too low on the priority list is the basement. It’s very dark down there. Vicki wants to get in an electrician to put up fluorescent lights to brighten it up some. And ideally she’d like to put up partition walls to separate the laundry area from the rest of it. My dad has done that in both their current house and the one they had before in Brampton, so hopefully he’ll have some advice. That might be something I can do myself, although I don’t fancy hanging doors.

It’s funny, but the house had “grown” in our minds, and once we had this time to get another look at it it doesn’t seem quite so dauntingly huge. I’m a little concerned how much it’s going to cost to heat, cool and maintain it, though. It’s a big old house, and it has all characteristics of an old house, like beautiful but not very air-tight windows, probably very little or no insulation in the walls, and a high maintenance painted wood exterior. Because the house has character, and it’s in a neighbourhood that has character, we can’t do stuff like replacing the windows with double glazed modern ones or putting up siding. Not least because members of the planning board would come over and stab us in the face if we tried.

Even taking a closer look at the faults, though, it’s still remarkable how beautiful it is. I can’t wait until it’s ours so we can put up some more pictures.

National “Destroy Your Productivity Day”

Today is “Destroy Your Productivity Day” aka “Half Your Cow Orkers Are Unavailable Because They’re Entertaining Their Children Instead of Working Day”. I think it’s officially “Bring Your Son or Daughter To Work Day” in other quarters.

My Clearcase view is pooched. I can’t see any files below src/, even if I leave the view and come back into it, or doing a “ct setview -cs”. The last time I saw our Clearcase administrator, he was running around the building with his kid on some sort of scavenger hunt. I will probably have to create a new view in order to do any work, which is a pain.

At lunch, though, I got my own back. One of the older kids, a teenage boy, was eating with us and his dad. His dad said they’d seen some digital movie trailers this morning as part of the company activities. I said “So, are they going to show the secret digital print of the new Star Wars movie this afternoon”, and then quickly acted like I shouldn’t have said that in front of the kid. We don’t really have such a print, or if we do, nobody’s told me about it. (We do have a digital print of “The Village”, but only our testers are allowed to show it, we can’t show it to potential customers or even projector vendors.) But the seed is sown. Bwah hah ha.