January 2006
Monthly Archive
January 30, 2006
A disturbing letter I found anonymously posted on a forum. It is amazingly disturbing.
Dear Citizens of the World,
I believe the time has come to reveal to you some of the perplexities you have faced in recent decades.It is well for you to understand some of these things so that you might know how to behave in the New Order now taking shape in the earth. We want you to be able to become fully involved and integrated into our new society. After all, this is for your best interest if you will do this. (more…)
Like this:
Like Loading...
January 30, 2006
Here’s a random comment from an internet forum. I’m not posting the original poster’s identity, to protect them.
(I’m also not asking for their permission to repost it.)
“I worked from 2001 to 2005 in a company where I was privy to the bid requests of the DARPA, NSA, CIA and others regards information mining and technology related. I am sure somebody will want to disagree with me and call me troll for saying so, but the Bush Administration’s NSA spying campaign which they call limited monitoring of terrorists is nothing of the sort.
The Bush Administration undertook at various high levels in the US Government to secure every single communication and to process it for their use. That is a fact. It is not opinion. To be blunt this was securing a level of invasion of privacy that the German SS (1930’s to 1940’s) never imagined possible. It’s only goal has to be the construction of a police state. I saw this in the bid requests! They wanted 100% of all data including to be able to evaluate photographs, many languages and even other issues. They wanted 100% of all commercial transactions and to pattern everything.
Read this for what you will, it isn’t toll to tell the truth. I am reasonably certain some party will think I am being partizan. I am not. I am reasonably certain that the Democrat leadership would do the same thing if given the chance. We in the USA have a real problem with our leaders. Seeking to understand their behavior through the eyes of their party propaganda machines is just nuts. Republicans all too often have a Karl Rove point of view. Of course the Democrats have their own propaganda team. We need to see that what is being stolen in the name of national security is all of our security. We have none if people like these destroy the US Constitution this way.
For those who cannot read, I will spell it out for you. The US Constitution REMOVES from government the power to do anything not permitted. Specifically warrantless searches are prohibited in the US Constitution. The claim that there is no law prohibiting what is happening is just ignorant at the highest level of ignorance. This infinite seaching and invasion of privacy is ILLEGAL — 100% — no excuses. Excusing it because some Democrat did it or some previous crook did it is no excuse.”
Like this:
Like Loading...
January 27, 2006
http://us.imdb.com/mymovies/list?l=1054136
Click here, then click the ratings column to sort from highest-to-lowest.
This is about 200 movies I’ve rated. In my netflix account I’ve rated 1400, and I wish I could export that to IMDB. Anyone know how to do that?
Like this:
Like Loading...
January 27, 2006
Like this:
Like Loading...
January 27, 2006
Like this:
Like Loading...
January 25, 2006
I really like Type O Negative‘s newest album, Life Is Killing Me. (more…)
Like this:
Like Loading...
January 20, 2006
So Dave Oranchak says I need to blog more about the shows I watch.
Anyway………….. Justice League Unlimited is fabulous. I was sooooooo pleasantly surprised to see S5E05 after such a long hiatus. We watched it that night. It was great. It had been way too long.
But then to see a torrent appear (minin0va) for S5E06 the next freaking day was awesome. It took less than 10 minutes to download at 300K/s. Not that I’m impatient, but when I had 75K/s, you could drop a torrent in right when you got home and if you were lucky it would be done at 10 or 11PM. It’s nice having no limits or backlog.
So anyway, Justice League S5E06 was really good. They’ve shyed away from magic and dealt with science generally, but this episode had a mystic angle, souls, magic, all that jazz. And it was done well. And the plots had been building up to the battle at the end pretty much for this entire season.
I hope the remaining ~7 eps come out soon!
Meanwhile, we’re working through Frasier. There’s almost as many episodes as The Simpsons so I expect it to take awhile. (NOTE: It ended up taking 3-4 months to watch them all!)
Like this:
Like Loading...
January 20, 2006
Well, last night I set up the network sharing and edited my environment so as to include the 60G and 80G drives we recovered from Fire before decomissioning it. So now, we officially have over 2 terabytes of accessible disk space! Now I just have to get my FTP server working again so I can get to my files remotely. I’m hoping my new SATA card will come this weekend so I can install it while Carolyn is on her ski trip. If it works, a 500G drive will not be far off. By the end of 2006 I expect to have at least 3 terabytes. :)
Like this:
Like Loading...
January 18, 2006
I would like to celebrate the day when I finally have re-memorized my new credit card number.
It took a few years. But everytime I order, I guess. And each time, I get closer. Today, I finally did it all (incl expiration and the 3-digit # on the back of the card) right without looking. Last time that happened, a site holding onto my CC# told me their databases had been compromised by Russian hackers. So maybe it’s time again…
Like this:
Like Loading...
January 12, 2006
So I tried installing VectorLinux on Fire (after burning a new disc with better media). No go.
At least with Kubuntu, through some googling I found out Alt-M puts you in adminstrator mode. So I can do administrator stuff despite the fact the button everything says to push doesn’t exist.
Of course, that did nothing to fix the network, which doesn’t work. And I’m not super-duper interested in finding out what the problem is when the card worked fine under windows.
This is my 3rd bout with Linux (Slackware in 1999, Redhat in 2002) and once again I do not think it is ready for old machines. Maybe it would work fine on new machines, but Windows is still better in my book. And less annoying. Yes, I said it.
Like this:
Like Loading...
January 12, 2006
Well, my computer “Fire” seems to be shaping up a bit. Once we realized the cd was invalid, despite passing verification, we realized we’d spent like 2 nites pulling harddrives 5 times, ram once, cpu once, moving monitors, and all kinds of crazy shit. All of it was a wild-goose-chase stemming from thinking the computer was bad instead of the CD!
Burned a new cd. Used its self-testing method to self-test. Fine. The thing actually worked.
I wasn’t sure if it was going to work, so I only installed the base package. What a mistake that was. I was all done and all I got was a unix prompt! “HELP” only revealed shell operator commands. I guess I’m supposed to know all this stuff already? I manually went thru directory trees looking for “startx” where I thought it should be. Finally, I realized I only had the base package installed.
So I decide to install the rest. How do I do it? I don’t know. Apt-Get? Nah. My network wasn’t configured. I said “configure network later”. No opportunity was given. If “configure network later” means having to do it manually later, then warn me!!! I kidna figured I would be presented with an opportunity of equal ease to setup my network. And to install the additional packages. No fucking way.
So, yes, I had to install again starting from scratch. This time I put in my network info right away, and did the full installation.
Yay! I had a login prompt by bedtime! But… My browser wouldn’t work. Oh look, my network card is greyed out.
I’d like to change the settings, but they are greyed out. They say I need to push the “Administrator Mode” button to be able to make those kinds of changes.
I do not see this button. And upon googling, I am finding other people who don’t see the button. So then they have to find out the name of the binary that is being called and “sudo <binaryname>” just to use what is essentially a control panel.
Fuck that. I might just literally throw the whole computer away. This Ubuntu is not living up to it’s reputation.
There’s still VectorLinux to try. At least it has some cool screensavers.
Like this:
Like Loading...
January 10, 2006
So my computer Fire is confusing me again… Now I find out the Ubuntu install cd has some sort of self-check program, and it tells me the fucking disc is corrupt! Well goddamn, I burned it using Nero with Verify turned on on my pre-built Gateway machine running Windows XP. Never in my whole life of Windows not-XP or non-Gateway cd-burners have I had this problem.
And “Storm” (my main computer, best computer ever) just had it’s cd-burner break! That Plextor burned every cd I burned for years! (Of course I’ll never get another Plextor, but that’s another story.)
So now I am stuck with 600 or so blank cds from my huge batch of 1,200 way way way way back when (3 dvd burners ago). And they aren’t “in the burn strategy list” for the stupid Gateway DVD/CD burner. It insists on a verification. And lies to you that it is fine when it isn’t. What… The… Fuck.
Am I to become suspect of combo cd/dvd drives now? Do I need to buy a separate cd burner? (That’s sooooooo stupid when dvd burners are so cheap!) Do I have to research the cd-burning capabilities for my dvd drives?
Oh why did I buy those 1,200 CD-Rs?
Fortunately Gateway had some stupid recovery program that came with their computers, and I opened the shrink-wrap and found five CD-Rs I can use in the meanwhile. I must choose wisely. Ugh. It’s like collecting fancy pennies. Worthless, but you need several kinds. Okay sue me I’m not in the mood to think of a good analogy, you’ll just have to be happy with a bad one. I’d be surprised if anyone read this far. :)
Like this:
Like Loading...
January 10, 2006
Well it definitely looks like our computer “Fire” is dead, and dead for good. Carolyn gave it a bad IP address and didn’t change it back last summer, which in theory contributed to the death of that machine’s webserver, shortly followed by TCP/IP stack death and/or total OS death. It sat for a few months during this construction detente and finally we needed the space back bad enough that we started trying to fix it — in January. (Yes, a few months passed by, and I really needed some of the data on the 160G that lived on that machine.!)
We tried Win2K. We tried TinyXp. We tried Linux — both Ubuntu and VectorLinux. No go. Nothing installed.
Then we took the 17G out, and moved it to Carolyn’s computer “Magic”. Our newer computers (Hell, Magic) have SATA cards and all SATA harddrives. But Magic is our oldest new computer (if that makes sense), so it had both SATA and EIDE ports. So we moved Fire’s old old 17G harddrive (the oldest harddrive still in use in the house: we use 17G, 25G, 80G, 80G, 80G, 120G, 120G, 120G, 160G, maybe a 200G, 250G, maybe a 300G, 400G). We use so many harddrives I can’t rememeber them all but the total storage is about 2.2 terabytes.
So anyway we move 17G over to Magic, map it on the network, and I finally recover many files I’ve needed for about 6 months. After a couple hours I’ve moved everything over to my main computer (“Storm”). Now we have an EMPTY 17G drive. We tried Ubuntu Linux and Vector Linux and TinyXP again. No go.
I thought, “What if the installs are failing because the cd-drive is reading the disc improperly?” Very improbably, but I hunteded down the old computers people had given me, found one, and gutted it, gaining a floppy drive, a cd drive, and 2 EIDE cables. The 90W power supply was utterly useless and the 8G drive was too hard to unscrew (A drive screwed directly into a case? What the fuck were they thinking back in the Pentium-II days?!?!).
Tried the new cd drive and lo and behold, the thing doesn’t even eject. Okay, we got to stress test the cd tray at least. “If I kick this, will it really break off?” Findings indicate cd drive eject trays don’t break as easily as one would expect. Still, “It’s fun to smash stuff” as Homer says to Marge.
Is “Fire” dead? I think so.
But I’m still going to try 2 more installs. One with half my ram in, one with the other half of my ram in. Maybe I have some bad RAM.
And I’m going to set the bios to failsafe. Sure, I enjoyed overclocking my P3-450 to 558mHz all these years, but if it’s making it a non-computer, it’s not worth it.
If all that fails, I’ll gut it for the cd, floppy, network, sound, and video cards and it will be on my curb.
Someday, I’ll have a web and ftp server again.
Like this:
Like Loading...
Claire's blog 