Posts 251 to 275:

New Digs

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I got my first paycheck of the summer last week... it’s nice to have money again.  April and I went to Maggiano’s for lunch/early dinner yesterday, and I think it was spectacular.  That is easily my favorite restaurant.  They didn’t have Chicken Mushroom Cannelloni, which is what I had the only other time I was there, and I was sad because it was amazing.  But I had Chicken Scallopine Marsala and it was good too.

Well April loves to shop, so she said that we have to go to the mall if we’re going to be in KOP.  But she ended up not buying anything, and instead I bought a bunch of new clothes.  I literally can’t remember the last time I bought clothes.  I just never do it.  I get clothes as gifts (Christmas / birthday etc) and as hand-me-downs from Brian (who somehow is still growing at 27...) and that’s about it, but my family has good taste so that has worked out pretty well for me.

Anyway I got 2 pairs of pants and 2 short-sleeve button-down shirts, and they are all super.  Three were from the Gap, all on sale, and one from EMS that wasn’t on sale, but was still reasonably priced at $26.  The pair of jeans I got are apparently "vintage" jeans.  Vintage, that is, as in "look at me I’m so vintage my jeans even say so with a big 1969 label!  I’m hip!  check me out!!"  Fortunately, a little utility knife action took care of that.

Posted by Anthony on 3 replies

Windows stability?

So I’m trying to rename a folder on my mom’s computer, and Windows keeps telling me it can’t, because access is denied, because "the file is in use."  Which means that some other program left some hook unreleased after it closed, which is annoying.  I open up the task manager and exit all the miscellaneous stuff that isn’t a background process, and I still can’t rename it.  Sometimes Windows is just dumb like that, and I know from experience that rebooting the PC will make it work.

But as I’ve got the process manager open, I notice that "System Idle Process" has accumulated some ridiculously large number of HOURS of processor time.  I run net statistics server and learn that this system has been up since May 15th.  MAY FIFTEENTH!!  That’s over 20 days!  I don’t know what my mom and brother are doing... or NOT doing... on this machine, but that is way longer than I can manage to keep my Windows boxen running without a reboot.  Granted, I have some as-yet-unresolved problem that causes random lockups, but.... well, but nothing, that is the point... Windows machines don’t stay up that long.

Well, apparently some of ’em do.

Posted by Anthony on 2 replies

Page Rankings

I’m currently #5 on Google for brick fence photos.  Woohoo!

Posted by Anthony on 4 replies

Hilarity

Posted by Anthony on 3 replies

Mae

Last night, me and Kris went to see Elliott at the Church (technically, the First Unitarian Church) in Philadelphia.  It was an r5 show.

Elliott was good.  I like them.  A lot.  But I am really excited about the other band they’re touring with, called Mae.  (You can listen to a few of their songs on their mp3.com page.  And you should.)  I can’t really think of any band that they sound like.  They have some of the softness and prettiness of Plankeye, but they don’t sound anything like them.  They have some of the fuzzy guitars and moog sounds of The Rentals, but they really don’t sound much like them, either.  Their sound is mostly-upbeat rock music, very catchy, and fun.

One of the other opening acts, which I think is a much smaller, local band, was called Riding Bikes.  The name leaves something to be desired, in my opinion, but I really liked their music.  Very Saves the Day -ish, and I love Saves the Day, so there you go.  These guys didn’t have any merch at the show, so that’s why I figure they must be smaller/newer or just local or something.

You know what’s cool about wearing a white T-shirt to an indie show?  You’re guaranteed to be the only one there wearing one.  Everyone wears black or dark or yellow or something.  Actually, this was a pretty diverse all-ages crowd, and I saw probably 5 other people in white.  But that’s still incredibly few in a crowd of 3 or 4 hundred, and it’s always that way.

In closing, I’d like to say that this weather is so depressing.  I heard on the news last night that since May first, there have been 24 days of rain and 2 days of sun.  And also, despite the really bad drought we had last summer/fall, most counties in my area are 7 or 8 inches ABOVE normal rainfall level for the past 12 months, INCLUDING that drought period in the stats.  Which means that in the past 2 months there has been about 7 or 8 inches of rainfall.  Which is crazy.

Posted by Anthony on 1 reply

Tooltips

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Microsoft Word’s popup suggestions are hilarious.  "Oh gee, thanks, because you know, I do type SPECIAL DELIVERY all the time... and what’s more, ’special’ and ’delivery’ are so tough to spell, so thanks for helping me out there, Word."
Posted by Anthony on 1 reply

Site problems

My website has been offline since Friday night (give or take a few hours, depending on your location).  During most of that time, my domain name wasn’t even resolving, so if you sent me any email between Friday night and today, I did not receive it.  If you’re reading this, then it’s "back online" from your location.  For most people, it should be fully accessible sometime today or tomorrow.  For others (like me, at home and at work) it’s not yet online, and I had to hack my hosts file to get it to come up.

Posted by Anthony on 3 replies

SSH!

Ha!  I finally found a way to SSH into my linux box at home from work.  Darn corporate firewalls.  Anyway... now I can hopefully find a port to run the webserver on that’s 1) not going to upset Comcast and 2) able to pass through the firewall here.  I can’t say I blame Unisys for having tight security, but I can certainly blame Comcast (along with nearly every other ISP out there...) for prohibiting webservers on the standard HTTP port.  Paying $40/month for an "internet connection," that’s really only half a connection, is crap.

In unrelated news, the Lancer is the new Neon.  Ugh.  As if it’s not painful enough to have to see billions of them all over the place, we have to see them "souped up" too...

Posted by Anthony on reply

Just stopped by and wanted to say "hey"

"Hey!"
I see that your site is as vibrant as ever.  Don’t change!
Maybe I’ll be able to stop by now and then, I seem to have computer access at the moment.  SARS has an adverse affect on my computer usage.  That’s why I say I’m freakin’ in Harbin!
Bye bye!

Posted by *amanda* on 5 replies

New Photos

Ew.  Ew ew ew.

Posted by Anthony on 3 replies

Bush vs. Gore

Quote:

There are still many people who cling to the magical notion that George W. Bush did not legally win the Presidency. Challenge their contention with evidence and watch them move the goalpost:

Bush stole the election. No, he had the majority of electoral votes. Yeah, but Gore won the popular vote. The President is not elected by popular votes. He’s elected by electoral votes. The electoral college is outdated. Well, maybe it is and maybe it isn’t, but you don’t get to change the rules after you lost the game. Gore really won Florida. Not according to three recounts he didn’t. The recounts don’t matter because the Supreme Court selected him. The Supreme Court only told the Florida Court to play by the rules. Bush stole the election because I say so!  Ahhh. At last. Now we get down to brass tacks.

That’s a tender morsel from Bill Whittle’s latest, "Magic."

Posted by Anthony on 1 reply

update to rma

well, I got my card back from evga...  sorta...

what i sent back - 128mb Geforce4 TI4600...
what they sent me - 256mb Geforce FX5600

:)

Posted by steev on 2 replies

Kicker

I had a problem with "kicker" disappearing while using KDE on RHL 7.3.  I found the solution on your site, but now I can’t find it using a search.

I am trying to document my solution.  I think it was just to launch "kicker" from a term.  Is this right?

Posted by Pat Copland on 2 replies

Ugh, cont'd

Get up at 6:30am.  Leave for work at 7:15, arrive at work around 8:15.  Leave work at 4:30, arrive at home around 5:30.

I need to go to bed around 10pm if I want to get any decent amount of sleep.  That means I have the time between 5:30pm and 10:00pm, that’s 4.5 hours, of non-working non-sleeping time.  In that time, I need to eat dinner and shower and shave, so make that ~3.5 hours.  3.5 hours of life per day.

That is so sucky and depressing.  It’s not that I don’t love my job -- I do.  I’m incredibly thankful to have any job at all right now, and especially this job in particular.  The pay is spectacular and the other engineers I work with are the nicest group of guys you could ask for.  But 3.5 hours of life per day is no life at all.  Curse Adam for cursing me thusly.

My options are:
1. sleep deprivation (not an option)
2. move to Europe where the work week is ~30 hours (looking better and better every day...)
3. move closer to work (probably the best/easiest option, but it requires graduating first and saving up money to get a house/apartment)

In the meantime... ugh.

Posted by Anthony on 7 replies

Ugh...

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Posted by Anthony on 1 reply

Reloaded

We had an amazing first quarter at Unisys.  The biggest news is the launch of the ES7000/500, a server that "scales from four to 32 Xeon MP processors and offers the same functions as Unix servers that cost twice the price."  It’s big stuff and all of us within Unisys are excited about it.  Because of that, and also just to foster "the company spirit" as it were, the head of my department (which is roughly the "computer engineering" department) took us all out to see the Matrix Reloaded on Friday morning.  Over a hundred of us went, and we filled the theater.  You just can’t beat watching a cool new movie on the company dime, with free popcorn and soda (iced tea for me) to boot.

So anyway, about that movie, it rocked!  If you haven’t seen it yet, and you plan to, then stop reading here, because I’m going to talk about it.

There were some fantastic special effects that I really liked.  The movie opens with Trinity driving a motorcycle off the top of a building, jumping off and doing some gymnastics in mid-air, and letting the bike crash into the security post of a building.  She ends up diving through a window really high up on this skyscraper, falling down in super slow motion, and shooting at the agent who is falling after her.  My first reaction was "all right, this is cool but sorta too unrealistic and flashy" but it turns out that it’s just a dream that Neo is having.  But what’s REALLY cool is that towards the end of the movie, you find out that it wasn’t actually a dream, it really happened, just... in the future.

Two tractor trailers collided head-on in slow-motion, and from the air you saw their bodies slowly crumple and ripple from front to back, and the cabs eventually exploded.

Neo can fly now, so he flew in and rescued Morpheus and the keymaker from the top of one of the trailers just as they exploded.  "The superman thing" is sort of cheesy, but also sort of cool.  And you can’t say that it isn’t handy as anything.  And when you’re inside of the matrix, life isn’t real anyway, so why not?

The fight scenes were out of control at times.  Neo alone took on about 300 Mr. Smiths simultaneously with nothing more than a pipe and his super flying abilities.  It was cool for a while, but it went on for quite a few minutes, and it got old.  Still it was awesome to see Neo take out the one guy by kicking the pipe into him, and then catching it when it bounces off... just like in stickman battletime.  (I wonder if they watched that?)  Stickman battletime, of course, uses the super slow-mo 360°-camera-view flying kick, in a style taken from the original Matrix movie.

...

Ugh.  I wrote that all on Saturday night and here it is Wednesday.  I’ve meant to finish this post but haven’t had time, in 4 days.  How sad is that.  There was a bunch more I wanted to say but I’m feeling rather tired and uninspired so I’ll just say some of it quickly.

It was really cool how Trinity shut down the power grid using *nix and an ssh exploit that actually exists (well, existed).  And it was really retarded how that whole "rave" or "dance party" or whatever, went on for about half an hour, with all the people’s shirts soaked in sweat and therefore partially see-through, and all the while they’re switching back and forth to Neo and Trinity having sex.  No, it wasn’t really retarded that it went on for half an hour... it was really retarded that they put it in the movie at all.  There wasn’t any "actual" nudity except for the semi-seethough shirts, but even that is totally unnecessary, and the whole thing in general was pointless and added nothing to the movie.

Posted by Anthony on reply

Abortion

[moved from guestbook]

I love your site however one saying from Short Quotes does jump out and speak to me on a PERSONAL LEVEL.

"Gandy only briefly discussed abortion during her speech, ..........
"I’d just like to point out that technically speaking, murder is not a "reproductive right."  How pathetic and selfish and self-deceiving people can be. -Anthony

Anthony do you believe that all counts are, as you put it murder. 15 years ago before I came to America, My very good friend and confidant was rapped! Was she to carry her rapist’s baby for 10 months? And then to give birth to her rapists baby and bear the pain, again? And after  all this has happened, the pain of giving up an innocent child? As men we have know idea what women go through we can only imagine. If these women were your mother, sister or wife would it "technically speaking, be murder" or simply a women’s  "reproductive right".  I know how I would feel. I respect your right to your own opinions and view, I just sometimes feel that until we have had this event in our life (or family) we will never really understand it.  As a point of intrest the next but one quote was very appropriate

"You never know what you have, till you get it ripped out of your chest. - Saves The Day"

Anthony, again this is just my opinion. Great site and useful Linux resource. glad I found it. I will be back.

Posted by Nigel on 14 replies

Click it!

On the way to work today, I saw one of those flashy orange-light roadside information signs:

Buckle up... click it or ticket!

Posted by Anthony on reply

Joshua

Need to sleep, soon.  But I wanted to say that Joshua’s album "Singing to Your Subconscious" is my favorite album.  In my opinion, this is as close to perfect as music can get.  The songs on my page from this album (What Love Requires, and This Past September) are mostly slow and sad, but the album has some very upbeat (even slightly hard) and happy songs as well.  In general, it’s just incredibly emotional, and not in an emo way.  He’s not a kid and he doesn’t have an emo voice, but his lyrics and his tone are very emotional.  This CD just moves me so much every time I listen to it, and it’s one of the very few CDs I own that I can listen to even when I’m not in the mood for it -- because I get a few seconds into the first song and it makes me want to hear the whole thing.  As I say on my music page, I really think this CD would appeal to nearly everyone.  The thing is, I haven’t met anyone who’s been excited about them at all, and I really can’t believe it.  Not that I’ve campaigned to discover such a person, but the couple people I know who’ve heard it have had decidedly cool reactions.  I just want to find someone feels like they’re going to burst with pure joy upon hearing it, as I do.

Posted by Anthony on reply

RMA?

Has anyone ever RMA’d something before?  I bought an eVGA video card off of newegg.com, and they said that I needed to go through evga for the rma (it went bad, think it was the ram on the card), so, I goto evga’s website, and apparently, my video card is registered to someone else, not cool, so i email them, and they get everything sorted out, and they authorize my rma, and i ship it back to them, last friday, 3 day, and they signed for it on Tuesday.  I paid 15 dollars to RMA it, another 20 for them to ship it back 3 day, plus the 20 for shipping it to them 3 day.  So, 55 dollars.  Well, I still haven’t heard anything back from them, and my video card still isn’t here, and I haven’t received any answers to my emails to them about the card.

What do I do?  I mean, I paid for 3 day shipping, and obviously, this isn’t 3 days worth of shipping, now, granted, it should possibly take them a day or 2 for processing, but, in that time, shouldn’t there be some form of communication?  Especially since I emailed them not only the tracking number, but also because i have emailed a few times about the status of it?  What are my rights?  Does anyone know?

Posted by steev on 1 reply

Miles

mr vw dealer: we can get you out of your lease, plus give you five hundred dollars for being a loyal vw customer.
me: super.
mr vw dealer: so, what is the miles on your vw now, over the limit?
me: eighteen.
mr vw dealer: eighteen? eighteen what, you mean eighteen hundred?
me: uh, no, eighteen thousand.
mr vw dealer: EIGHTEEN THOUSAND!!  ANTHONY, WHERE ARE YOU DRIVING??

Posted by Anthony on reply

If a tree falls in the forest...

"If a server fails and heals itself instantly, did it ever really fail?"

(One of Unisys’ taglines for our self-healing servers)

Did I mention that I love working here?

Posted by Anthony on reply

New Photos of Cailin

Rolly just sent them to me, go see!

Posted by Anthony on reply

Whitaker Wins

As much as I love O’Reilly, Whitaker is right on this one:

Like so many other fanatical integrationists, Bill O’Reilly demands that “the races” be mixed in the name of “Americanism.”

First of all, this has nothing to do with “the races.”  Nobody cares whether Chinese and black people intermingle.  No one demands that Japan or Taiwan let in third world immigrants. No one demands that Africa let some other third worlders have some of its empty lands.

When integrationists say “the races,” they mean the white race.  When they say “getting rid of racism” it is code for getting rid of whites.  Respectable conservatives want ONLY white majority countries to bring in the third world, and they demand that EVERY white majority country bring in the third world.

But O’Reilly and the conservative integrationists wring their hands when their children go to college and learn to hate America.  What exactly did they expect?  The highest morality they taught their children is to fight for the extinction of their own kind.  So naturally that sick “morality” will not be limited to a hatred of their own race.
...
Like everybody who criticizes the Israeli Lobby, I get accused of being anti-Semitic.  When the space shuttle disaster occurred I got an anonymous e-mail saying I was probably happy that happened because a Jew (an Israeli) was killed.

A lot of gentile Americans were killed on that shuttle, but that never occurred to the person.  Did it occur to this guy that even if I were anti-Semitic, the death of my fellow gentiles might bother me?

Of course not.  He assumed that I was as totally obsessed with Jews as he was.
...
The Israeli Lobby interests me because it is a real threat to our national interests.  The Anti-Defamation League says the white race must go.  They say that anyone who mentions saving the white race is a white racist which means it is anti-Semitism.  The Methodist Church says the same thing, which is why I left it.

A Jewish Professor at Harvard, Noel Ignatiev, stated this position honestly and bluntly:

"The goal of abolishing the white race is on its face so desirable that some may find it hard to believe that it could incur any opposition other than from committed white supremacists."

Posted by Anthony on 1 reply

No Subject

...and what if the hokie-pokie really IS what it’s all about  ;->

But seriously, can anyone help me find a contact email address or a postal address or a phone number for the manufacturer of the Cabbage Patch Dolls?  I know the name listed at Amazon.com and Toysrus.com is ’Pacific Playthings’ but the owner of that www domain name definately does not make these dolls. 

I thoughts since all you kids are out of school on summer break and have lots of spare time on your hands (hehe) you could do some searching  for me. 

Maria has two dolls that have a manufacturing defect and I want to contact the makers to see if they can remedy the situation.

Thanks much, lvuall

p.s.  Anthony, hope it’s ok to post a request on your messageboard  :-)

Posted by Mom on 1 reply

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