I am #10 on Google for:

nonsense poems about moldy bread

My life is now complete.

- Cox and Forkum

epifagus:/Users/fgpbackup/backups root# ps -lax|grep rsync
su: ps: command not found
su: /usr/bin/grep: Too many open files in system

Thanks, Mac OS X.

Last week I (half-jokingly) posted on the Rox mailing list that it’d been two and a half months since there was a new release of the Rox Filer.  Then a couple days later, Thomas Leonard (Rox’s author) announced a new release for this weekend :)  Sweet.  The new release will contain a few fixes that I’m excited about, mainly much faster thumbnail generation when browsing image files.  Which was a bug that I also reported, after noticing that gThumb generates thumbnails about an order of magnitude faster than Rox.  It turned out that a simple single-line change in a few places -- using a function that allows you to specify the thumbnail size when allocating the buffer for the resized image, instead of a function that doesn’t -- was all it took to make Rox’s thumbnail generation almost just as fast as gThumb’s.  I wasn’t the one who found the solution, but I’m glad it was so easy, and I’ve been anxious for the new version.

Under the category of ’let me drop everything and work on your problem’, could you add ’auto spell correction’ to your preview of weblog posts for your spellingly challenged Mom?

Thanx :>}

Dude, check this news headline.

Why are you going to school when you can work for the best place to work for with a high school education.  Think about all the free stuff too.

I’m not obsessive about cleanliness or neatness in general, but when it comes to anything that I’m going to ingest, eat off of, or which will TOUCH any such thing (i.e. people’s hands who are preparing things I will eat), I definitely am obsessive about cleanliness.  However I wasn’t always this way, and as a kid, I put a coin in my mouth at least one time.  I have no idea why, really.  But for some reason I distinctly remember the taste and feeling of it even now.  I also have no idea why that is, nor why I thought of it while driving yesterday.

My little sister IMed me this the other day, about our cat CJ:

Maria: hi
Maria: there was a spider on the ceiling and mom wacked it on the floor and CJ batted it around for a while untill it stopped movin (it wasn’t dead, it was just scared) and then he licked it up. a live spider!!!
Maria: eeeeeeeeeeeew!

"A live spider!!!"  That cracks me up  : )

In other news that isn’t funny or random, I fixed a problem on Kim’s notebook yesterday, for which she sent it back to HP twice and they did nothing but wipe the hard drive and leave the problem intact.  The problem was that it would sporadically just shut down for no reason at all, and then refuse to turn back on.  They apparently couldn’t identify the cause of problem, which is strange because it’s a common problem with notebook computers.  It stems from the fact that over time, as the receptacle for the power plug gets jostled and worn, the solder joints connecting it to the motherboard start to weaken and break.  It gets to the point that if you turn the power plug a certain way, it works fine, but bump it just a tad, and it breaks the contact.  Eventually, if it goes long enough without being repaired, there is no contact at all unless you press/hold the plug to one side, or up or down or something, and when you let go, it loses the contact immediately.

We disassembled the whole thing, which with notebooks is always a little tricky, and then I re-soldered the 3 connections for the power jack.  But upon re-assembling and testing, it was no different.  Which was pretty frustrating because the disassembly and re-assembly is quite a process -- not that it’s hard, but it’s sort of tedious because there are so many screws and different pieces which aren’t standard at all from one notebook to the next.  But I ended up doing it 3 times so by now I’m pretty good at it :)

The second time, I removed the jack completely and just soldered two wires directly into the motherboard.  This didn’t work either.  My last resort was to try maybe soldering the top of the board, too; instead of just soldering the pins when they come through the bottom, I now put some on the top too.  This was tough because there’s so little space and so many components right around the jack, in addition to the fact that the jack itself is tall and there isn’t much room to get the tip of the iron into the space around it.  I replaced the crusty old tip on my soldering iron with a nice pointy new one, soldered the tops of the pins, and that fixed the problem.

I’m pretty excited that it finally worked, because the only other source of power is the battery, which charges in the laptop through this power connection.  So basically the computer would be trash, even though the rest of the system is mostly fine, and it’s decently spec’d too -- 700MHz PIII, 384MB memory, 40gig drive, etc.  So I was really glad to be able to save the poor lappy; it’d be such a shame to have to get rid of it over something like this.

Not only is the site hideous, not only is it apparently written by a 22-going-on-13-year-old who just learned the F-word, not only is it infested with those irritating look-how-cool-I-am posed self-portraits, but the person is embedding a Reggie track from MY server as the background-sound for her little website.  Not downloading the song and then uploading it to her myspace account, mind you -- heaven forbid she should actually do any WORK or use any of her OWN bandwidth for her background sounds -- oh no, she is PLAYING THE SONG FROM MY SERVER DIRECTLY.

Did I mention that I propose a mandatory test for any person wishing to publish anything, anywhere, on the internet?  Oh yes, I do.  I propose this test: if you are not an ignorant jerk, then you are allowed to put things on the internet.  If you are an ignorant jerk, then instead of being allowed to post things on the internet, you get a kick in the face.

I think that’s reasonable.