You can think what you want, but Tony hits the nail on the head every time.  Hope you enjoy this columnists opinion from a local newspaper as much as I did.

As Bruce Springsteen demonstrates, the fine line between "normal liberal" and "complete moonbat" is right about here:

In a wide ranging interview in the just-published Oct. 14 issue of Rolling Stone, Springsteen says, "The press has let the country down.  It’s taken a very amoral stand, in that essential issues are often portrayed as simply one side says this and the other side says that....The job of the press is to tell the truth without fear or favor.  We have to get back to that standard."

Ah, I see.  The job of the media isn’t to present both sides of the issues objectively, it’s to tell us what to think.  Eh, Bruce?  The fact that you can say that with a straight face tells us all we need to know about you.

The problem, according to Springsteen, is that "Fox News and the Republican right have intimidated the press into an incredible self-consciousness about appearing objective and backed them into a corner of sorts where they have ceded some of their responsibility and righteous power."  In this regard, he finds The Washington Post and The New York Times admitting mistakes in their initial reporting about Iraq "very revealing."

Bruce Springsteen is an old man, and having a non-liberal voice in the major US media is a new phenomenon.  He isn’t used to it, and he doesn’t like it.  As far as he’s concerned, the liberal media should be allowed to hide their mistakes, and it’s not fair that there’s a non-liberal news outlet that lots of people listen to which forces the liberal media to be accountable for its reporting.

Phone: ring, ring
Me: hello?
Dimitry: Antony, are you asleep?
Me: no, are you?

PQI makes a USB2 flash drive that’s about the size of two pennies next to each other, and almost as thin as a credit card.  It’s really neat looking.  Strangely, the 512MB model is $49 at NewEgg but $120 at Best Buy.  The included accessory is different, but that shouldn’t be enough to justify a $70 price difference -- especially since NewEgg’s accessory is the more expensive of the two: it’s a USB connector, whereas Best Buy’s is a tiny plastic carrying case.

Speaking of flash memory, "the facts" is an email you should view.  Strong Mad is definitely the unsung hero of homestarrunner.com, mainly because though he doesn’t say much, every single thing he says is hilarious.  I have only one word for this email: I CAN BE THE QUIETEST MOUSE!!

O’Reilly interviewed President Bush and it’ll be airing next week.  In the meantime he’s got an article about the interview on his site, and it’s interesting:

For example, I am known for confrontational interviews, but you simply cannot tell a sitting President that you, the interviewer, know more than he does.  That would make you look like a moron.  So open confrontation goes right out the window.

Also, the tone of your questions must be respectful.  Although I asked everything I wanted to ask and there were no restrictions in the interview, my queries were posed less aggressively than usual.  I was direct, but subdued, another departure for me.  By the way, I never show my questions to anyone in advance, and that rule applied to the President.

Security is massive for every presidential appearance.  To even get to the interview room in a New York City hotel, I had to go through hoops that make U.S. airport security look like the Mexican border.  Back elevators were taken, I was perused by at least a dozen Secret Service Agents, and everything was bulletproof except my questions.

There’s also an interesting story about dot-com dropouts -- tech kids who left college to pursue fortunes in the late 90s.  It gives a personal profile of 3 such people and it’s really interesting.

I love these days that are getting chilly.  I love wearing long pants and long-sleeve shirts again.  I can’t wait for the leaves to change.  Hello Fall.  It’s time for a new website theme.

As usual, post a reply and let me know what you think.  Especially if you think it’s awesome.  Actually, especially if you have any trouble viewing it.

And yes, I know the font is that small.  It’s 8-point because that looks really clean and nice.  If it’s too small for you, press CTRL-+ to make it bigger.  (Hold the control key, then press the + key.)

Just wondering if anyone wanted to get together for dinner.  Nick told me about a new good restaurant that is about 10 minutes from my house. If we have any takers, post the day and time that’s good for you :o)

Rolly, I didn’t know that you guys were going away!  I hope you had a good time!

I’m so fickle when it comes to website themes.  I can’t stand this one.  My dislike for old themes is an exponentially growing function, not a linearly growing one.

Stumbled onto this website and thought about all the inspirational words as well as just the fun idioms I find here.  Maybe one of you who visit Anthony’s site can get Published on Pringles, hmm?

www.wpxi.com/slideshow/weather/3740179/detail.html?qs=1&s=1&dm=ss&p=weather

Look at all the lovely pictures of Pittsburgh and what Irene did to it.  We haven’t had flooding out here even close to this since anyone can remember.  I was not trapped in this.  I was in downtown Pittsburgh after work on Friday desperately trying to find a place to stay.  Why do you ask?  It seems that a state of emergency was declared on my town of Etna.  I’ve been staying at my wonderful girlfriends house ever since then.

Getting back to Etna today was not fun either.  3 ways to get in to town.  Only one way not barricaded with mudslides across the road.  That last way was difficult too because only Etna residents and cleanup crews were allowed in the area.  I have nothing with me that has my Etna address on it.  That cop was nice so he let me go. 

Get back to my home.  Anthony knows how large a hill I live on so no flood damage.  I was just hoping it would still be there with all the mudslides I was hearing about.

And that’s my weekend.

i saw a hummer today with license:

i8asuv

: )

So my programming job is becoming more of a sysadmin job lately, which is cool, because I love sysadmin type stuff.  One of the things I’m working on is a unified backup scheme to backup our Linux servers, Mac OS9 and OSX servers and workstations, and Windows 2000/XP workstations.  This is actually fairly straightforward if you can manage to get rsync installed on all the machines, and get your local network punk admin to open port 873 on all the clients.  Linux and OSX already have rsync, and there’s a nice free version for Windows called cwRsync too.  Then it’s just a matter of mounting the OS9 systems’ drives on the OSX machines, and you’ve got them all covered.

Also straightforward is the destination for all the backups: just buy a nice 500GB external firewire hard drive and you’re all set.  Erm... until you hook it up and realize that your backup server is Red Hat Linux 8 running an ancient kernel, and by ancient I mean 2.4.backWhenFirwireWasStillExperimental.  Sure, the firewire modules will load, and you can partition your shiny new backup drive, but the whole system hardlocks after you transfer a little data to it.

A kernel upgrade would solve the problem.  But in the Changes file distributed with each kernel, there’s a list of about 15 dependencies (make, binutils, etc) and their required versions.  I would have had to upgrade more than half of them before I could install the new kernel.  And as I’ve said before, manually upgrading dependencies on a Linux system is a real pain.

So I decided to try installing yum.  Yum is the package manager used by Fedora Linux, and since Fedora is basically the new version of Red Hat, I thought maybe I’d be able to install it and have it automatically take care of the hassle of upgrading all those dependencies.  It installed OK, but didn’t run quite right, so I asked my friendly neighborhood Fedora guru (that would be Kev) for some help.

It turns out that you can actually upgrade a Red Hat 8 system to Fedora Core 2 quite simply.  All I had to do was:

1. Install yum, but I already did that.
2. rpm -Uvh fedora-release-2-4.i386.rpm
3. Replace the default /etc/yum.conf with Kev’s
4. yum -y upgrade

Step 4 gave me some trouble at first (something about an unresolvable interdependency between glibc and glibc-common), but I tried it again the next day or so, and it downloaded some new headers which must have cleared things up.  It installed/updated a few thousand packages automatically, and before I knew it, my Red Hat box was a Fedora box : )

Extra super thanks to Kev for helping me through this.  Though I later found out that at least one website explains this process, I would never have guessed it was even possible, so I didn’t look for it.

Anyway, all I was after was a kernel upgrade, but I had actually been talking with the guys at work about getting this old box upgraded to either Fedora or Gentoo... and now it’s done.  I’m very happy.  And now I have some peace of mind knowing that the data around our lab and the others we administer is actually backed up.

These are two of the funniest things I’ve come across in a long, long time:

When I least expect it!  Ahahaha... pure genius.

I found them at knoble.org, which I saw in my visitor log.

(show full-size image viewer)

(You have to imagine Brittany’s comments in white text on a blinding neon pink background for full effect.)

(22:03:26) CawntryGirl92: hey
(22:04:06) Me: hey
(22:04:25) CawntryGirl92: wats up
(22:05:04) Me: sysadmining.... who is this?
(22:05:23) CawntryGirl92: brittany
(22:05:39) Me: do I know you?
(22:06:06) CawntryGirl92: i don’t think so
(22:06:36) Me: that’s interesting... were you born in 1992?
(22:06:47) CawntryGirl92: yup y
(22:10:30) CawntryGirl92: what your name
(22:11:13) Me: Arphaxad.... how did you get my screenname?
(22:11:28) CawntryGirl92: someone gave it to me
(22:11:38) Me: someone who knows me?
(22:11:44) CawntryGirl92: yes
(22:11:53) Me: who would that be?
(22:12:09) CawntryGirl92: i think kelsey
(22:12:20) Me: Kelsey......
(22:12:28) CawntryGirl92: sanders
(22:12:44) Me: hm, I definitely don’t know anyone with that name
(22:13:08) CawntryGirl92: ok
(22:13:19) CawntryGirl92: r u a boy or girl
(22:14:00) Me: a boy, why
(22:14:16) CawntryGirl92: just wondering
(22:14:58) CawntryGirl92: do u go to castle
(22:15:13) Me: what is "no."
(22:15:42) CawntryGirl92: what school do u go to and how old r u
(22:15:47) CawntryGirl92: ??
(22:16:04) Me: Penn State and 23
(22:16:16) CawntryGirl92: really
(22:16:48) CawntryGirl92: and u don’t no kelsey sanders
(22:17:38) Me: that is *more* surprising now that you know I’m 11 years older than you?!?
(22:17:49) CawntryGirl92: yup
(22:18:35) CawntryGirl92: and i don’t no where i got your s/n
(22:18:43) Me: that much is clear
(22:18:50) CawntryGirl92: yup
(22:19:56) CawntryGirl92: do u have any younger bros or sister
(22:20:47) Me: maybe, but I don’t want to tell you too much about me, in case you’re a serial killer
(22:21:09) CawntryGirl92: no i’m not
(22:21:15) CawntryGirl92: r u
(22:21:44) Me: for all you know, yes
(22:22:04) CawntryGirl92: thats scary
(22:22:13) Me: not to me
(22:22:22) CawntryGirl92: lol

Apparently "unsafe abortions" kill 70,000 women per year.

Aw, what a shame.

"Safe" abortions kill 1.4 million people per year in the US alone.

So I’m putting Linux on my mom’s computer.  There are tons of reasons to NOT use Windows, and literally just a couple in its favor (Quicken, TurboTax), which Crossover Office will solve on Linux anyway, for $50 or so.

I figured I’d install Fedora, because 1) it’s supposed to be an easy desktop distro, and 2) it’s really popular so I’d like to learn it.  I run Gentoo on my box, and of course I know that inside out, but wanted to install the "easy" distro for my mom/sister to use.

But so far, Fedora is anything but easy.  The default kernel doesn’t support firewire nor NTFS, so I couldn’t copy mom’s data from Windows without recompiling the kernel.  Red Hat has removed the MP3 support from XMMS due to "patent issues" so I had to manually find and download the MP3 plugin for an MP3 player... ridiculous.

The GUI-based printer setup is ridiculous.  The driver options are all obscure and meaningless (no "Epson", "HP", etc).  If you click on something like "PCL 5e" you get a sub-menu with some hplj drivers, but my printer is an Epson.  There’s an Epson driver under "Dot Matrix" but this is 2004... my printer isn’t dot-matrix.

The search-from-URL in Mozilla just plain doesn’t work, for no good reason.  It works fine on Gentoo, fine on WinXP, but on Fedora it says "The URL is invalid and cannot be loaded."  No kidding fool, it’s not a URL, you’re supposed to *search* for it.  Ugh...

And yum is a nightmare.  It’s slow as crap, and almost every time I run it, one of the initial ~10 servers it tries to contact times out.  Instead of being sensible and moving right along, yum waits for 3 minutes.  For.  Each.  Freaking.  One.  And then, if I want to, say, "yum search thunderbird," it insists on first looking for updated packages for ALL THE PACKAGES on my system.  Yeah, that’s brilliant.  I really want that to happen every time I want to just search for one package.

I think I’m going to end up just putting Gentoo on here after all.  It’s not all bubbly like RedHat/Fedora but at least it’s logical and it works... and at this point, it’s definitely easier to use than Fedora.  Maybe in a year or two Fedora will mature and be reasonable.

Deer-crossing road signs show an image of a joyous leaping deer, but bear-crossing signs just say the words "Bear Crossing."  I for one would enjoy bear-crossing signs much more if they had some kind of cute fuzzy bear image on them.

Street signs are funny.  I always see the one that says "Speed enforced from aircraft."  Yeah I doubt it.  Speed monitored from aircraft, perhaps... but unless they’re launching missiles at speeding cars, they aren’t enforcing speed from aircraft.

Then in New Jersey the other day I saw "Speed radar controlled."  Riiight.  So they’re actually using radar to change the speed at which cars are moving??  Amazing.  I didn’t know that my car’s accelerator was adjustable via police radar.

So we got a new Saturn Ion for Margie over the weekend, and I was reading the owners manual last night.  I came to the section entitled "New Vehicle Break-in Guidelines".  The first guideline stated "Do not drive at any one speed-fast or slow-for the first 500 miles".  What????  As read, this means one must drive in a constant state of acceleration or deceleration for the first 500 miles on the car to properly break in the engine.  I’m sure that wasn’t the intent, and the statement should have been qualified by a mileage interval or something.  It’s hilarious what makes it past the editors of these drivers manuals.  They should be perfect for the money you spend on the product.

There is this brilliant guy I have been working with that really knows the ins/outs of Win32 application packaging, group policy software deployment and many other M$ tricks.

I keep trying to get him into more open source.  He says he has no reason to move away from the Windows registry and DLLs.  There isn’t much he can’t do with Install Shield Admin Studio and GPMC.  He asked me how easy it would be to administer a Linux desktop.  I couldn’t speak at length, but I explained what I know (running as different user accounts, editing configuration text files, reloading the "kicker", running entire installation read-only).

I was hoping to get some good examples of how to make configuration changes and centrally push software to Linux desktops.  He is very good at doing this with Windows desktops and would really groove on checking it out on Linux.

Musicbox lives : )  Now I’m really glad I never turned this old 233mmx system into a server like I kept thinking of doing.

It was going to be a long 3 hour drive home without music... I mean I’m bringing the cat, but he’s not very talkative during carrides ’cause he gets nervous.

Trying to clear the CMOS on my musicbox’s VIA motherboard.  Move the jumper from 1-2 to 2-3, turn on the power for 10 seconds, turn it off, move the jumper back.  But now the system doesn’t start.

Try 15 different things to no avail.  Pull out the manual and read this:

STOP: Avoid clearing the CMOS while the system is on.  This will damage the motherboard.

Oh, freaking great, thanks VIA, since I’ve only built/repaired about a hundred systems in the past 8 years that REQUIRE THE POWER TO BE ON to clear the CMOS.  I’d love to wring the neck of the moron who designed this scheme.  Now my board is toast.  No musicbox.  No music in my car.

Good thing I don’t live 3 hours from all the people I want to see over the next 2 weeks, and good thing I don’t have two trips to the shore planned in that time.

Note to self: this could come in handy.

Verizon (Level3) Nameservers
4.2.2.1
4.2.2.2
4.2.2.3
4.2.2.4
4.2.2.5
4.2.2.6

SpeakEasy Nameservers
66.93.87.2
216.231.41.2
216.254.95.2
64.81.45.2
64.81.111.2
64.81.127.2
64.81.79.2
64.81.159.2
66.92.64.2
66.92.224.2
66.92.159.2
64.81.79.2
64.81.159.2
64.81.127.2
64.81.45.2
216.27.175.2
66.92.159.2
66.93.87.2

ORSC Public Access DNS Nameservers
199.166.24.253
199.166.27.253
199.166.28.10
199.166.29.3
199.166.31.3
195.117.6.25
204.57.55.100

Sprintlink General DNS
204.117.214.10
199.2.252.10
204.97.212.10

Cisco
128.107.241.185
192.135.250.69

Kev made a nifty logo for me:

Thanks Kev!

I checked it out under IE6/WinXP on my mom’s computer to see if it showed up OK... and learned that this whole layout is borked under that user-agent.  That’s kind of funny.  Actually, what’s funny is how unmotivated I am to discover and workaround whichever IE bug happens to be causing the problem.  There are few things I hate as much as Internet Explorer.