Motion Blur

My boss is selling his brand new copy of Motion for the Apple, having bought a Mac Mini, which won't run it. You can read the full story here.

I can understand where he's coming from. Now, in Apple's defense, it only took me a couple of moments, looking only at the two apple.com pages linked above (the Mac Mini graphics page, and the Motion product description page), to determine that Motion would probably not run on a Mac Mini. That said, there is no excuse for the way they behaved; their customer service is apparently anything but.

Currently listening to: "You Look Like I Need a Drink", Against Me!

O, Teh Bunnies!

For those of you who don't read Fazed, this is freaking hilarious.

Bunny suicides!

[Edit] Never mind, the page has been removed. Looks like all the Fazed traffic made them a.) susceptible to bandwidth overages, b.) susceptible to lawsuits from whoever published the book, or c.) annoyed.

[Edit] to the [Edit] Someone found a mirror: Die, Bunnies, Die!

It Can Always Be Worse

Very handy of my good friend to remind me not to take things for granted.

Me: I'm hungry, and I want to drink.
Her: I'm in a dry county so even if I wanted a drink I'd be shit out of luck.
Her: Oh and the nearest place to eat is like 40 minutes.
Me: ...
Her: So enjoy your "modern conveniences"
Me: You mean "40 minutes spent dragging oneself with one's lips", right?
Her: and by modern conveniences I mean liquor stores and restaurants.
Me: If I had no arms and no legs, I could still, quite literally, get to a bar with good cheeseburgers inside of, I dunno, maybe 10 minutes.
Her: lol Oh no dearie, I mean by car travelling 70 miles per hour.
Me: Where you live sucks.

Social D @ The Pageant

Just noticed that one of my longtime favorite bands, Social Distortion, will be here at The Pageant on February 16th.

Woo!

Radio Free Dad

My dad is currently doing his second "DJ For An Hour" program on WUTC in Chattanooga. The CD he gave me from his last show made the rounds around the office, filled as it was with good, yet somewhat obscure, music, most notably a bluegrass version of the Beatles' "I've Just Seen a Face", courtesy of Arlo Guthrie and Shenandoah.

I called in to heckle, but the studio has caller ID, so I could not pull off any shenanigans, such as giving a birthday shout out to "Hugh Jass".

Some sample artists who made the cut this time around:

Nina Simone, "Ne Me Quitte Pas"
Pearl Jam, "Masters of War"
Richie Havens, "High Flyin' Bird"
Neil Young, "Rockin' in the Free World (acoustic)"
Stan Kenton, "Turtle Talk"
Live, "White, Discussion"
Rahsaan Roland Kirk, "Old Rugged Cross"

He's quite natural on the radio, sounding like someone who has been a DJ for quite some time, while somehow managing to avoid getting jaded about it. Go Dad.

Currently listening to: Dad

It's Not A Shark, But...

Tonight I bought a drill press. With a frickin' laser attached to it!

In other news, it looks like Alone In The Dark will be the next video game-based movie.

In other other news, I've felt sketchy since this afternoon, and now have a full-on cold going. Work tomorrow looks unlikely.

Pleasing Web Geekery

Neverminding the intriguing domain name, this is a nifty little web tool this guy has concocted.

http://www.ilovejackdaniels.com/resources/view-page-structure/

For those of you too lazy to click on the link, it is a web app which parses the HTML structure of a page according to its elements, and then displays it visually.

I shall make use of it.

Inexplicable

For the life of me, I just don't get why half of the free world seems to be obsessed with Lindsey Lohan. She's not unattractive, exactly...she's just not nearly attractive enough to warrant all the attention she seems to be getting.

For my money, Shirley Manson or Famke Janssen are leagues above her, for pure hotness. Never you mind that they rhyme, which I myself have just discovered.

Aaron: 1, Vaio: 0

The sweet taste of success fills my senses, although that could actually just be hunger.

I used Partition Magic to chop off 1 gig of space at the end of the primary dos partition (C:, of course), and create a fake D: drive, onto which I copied the entire Win98SE CD. Booted up via floppy and formatted the C: partition, which left my shiny new D: partition alone, but destroyed all previous traces of Windows, so I could do a clean install. Once that's done, I can toast that D: partition, although I may leave it and install Linux there.

Thanks to the several of you who helped!

Currently listening to: "Somewhere Over The Rainbow/What A Wonderful World", Israel Kamakawiwo'ole

No One Understands Them :(

Every LiveJournal page currently shows this:

Our data center (Internap) lost all its power, including redundant backup power, for some unknown reason. (unknown to me, at least) We're currently dealing with bringing our 100+ servers back online. Not fun. We're not happy about this. Sorry... :-/ More details later.

Update #1, 7:35 pm PST: we're up on 'dirty' power for now (it works, but it's unreliable), and we're working to assess the state of the databases. The worst thing we could do right now is rush the site up in an unreliable state. We're checking all the hardware and data, making sure everything's consistent. Where it's not, we'll be restoring from recent backups and replaying all the changes since that time, to get to the current point in time, but in good shape. We'll be providing more technical details later, for those curious, on the power failure (when we learn more), the database details, and the recovery process. For now, please be patient. We'll be working all weekend on this if we have to.

It crashed under the weight of all that ponderous whining! They should have at least spiffed up the page a little with a "Mood: Depressed" or something.

Cheese With That?

It occurred to me just how whiny that last post may sound...boohoo, free laptop...so let me just say that, as always, my parents rock, and I enjoy taking apart anything electronic that comes within reach of me and a screwdriver.

Uppity Vaio

As mentioned in the preceeding post, while I was home I picked up an older Sony Vaio my parents had laying around. There seems to have been some confusion as to its nature, as one of them told me it was a P3 800Mhz, when it is actually a 233Mhz. That doesn't really matter much, as I don't really have any need for a laptop, and only planned to use it for occasional webwork or what-have-you, not for playing Doom 3 on the subway. Not that we have a subway. I could play in Subway.

Anyway.

The problem is that the PCMCIA CD-ROM doesn't seem to work, I don't have a driver disc for it, and I can't find drivers which seem to work. Without that, I can't install an operating system. It does have Win98SE on it right now, and I got a USB wireless network adapter (pilfered from my poor Tivo) running, but I would like to reformat and reinstall, to maximize whatever performance it's going to have. This is a little difficult without a CD drive.

My brother had the good idea of just pulling the hard drive, and doing the necessary work by installing it in D's computer, like I did with the Tivo, so I set about doing that. I managed to disassemble and reassemble the Vaio in less than an hour without incident, but unbeknownst to me (until now), laptop IDE connections are smaller than regular desktop IDE cables. Darn.

I'm going to fool around with getting network access to it from DOS, and if I can do that, maybe I can format and install Win98 over the network. If anyone knows how to do that, and/or has any clever ideas, I'd love to hear 'em.

Currently listening to: "Flugufrelsarinn", Sigur Rós

Trip Home

A is for Adam, and both of his spawn
B is for Best Buy, where my money has gone

C is for Christmas, late in arriving
D's for Denise, who did all the driving

E is for Evansville, puking with glee, 'cause
F is for food poisoning, see letter E

G's for the good times our families have shown
H is for hotels, and time spent alone

I is for idle, which happened in spots
J is for Jason, who gave us free shots

K's for kalimba, Google at will
L is for lamb, which made us all ill

M is for Meemaw, 96-year-old teen
N is for Nabe, and sushi cuisine

O is for opening, presents and beer
P is for parents, the reason we're here

Q for something which starts with a Q
R is for Ren, and Denise's new 'do

S is for Stoli, on which Aaron thrives
T is for Tivos, cleared with both wives

U is for uncles chasing nephews about
V is for hand-me-down Vaios, no doubt

W's Wes, chef nonpareil
X is XM, played loud as hell

Y is for you, friends and family I know
Z is for Zzz, where I should now go

Yeah, I could kick Shakespeare's powdered ass.

Hot PHP Action

Spent most of the day converting all six or seven of the hardcoded PhoneCam pages to a single mySQL/PHP page, after learning a little about mySQL. Still have to write myself a little admin page for them, but overall, quite pleased. I think tomorrow I will finish the 90's lyrics quiz I started last year sometime, converting it from Perl to PHP.

Now I must clean and do dishes, which is what I should have been doing all this time, instead.

Currently listening to: "Best Left Unsaid", Story of the Year (I think)