Yay robots!
For those of us who don’t read Chip’s blog, I’ve moved in with him into a house in Champaign. We’ve dubbed it AwesomeBase Alpha (his family’s place out in Gifford is known as AwesomeBase Beta, apparently). We’ve gotten roughly $2,000-$3,000 in more-or-less free stuff to furnish the place with, and it’s just about as big as my old place… only to be shared by two relatively quiet guys, instead of 5 guys and their parties.
What’s also nice is that I can take the MTD’s Blue line right from half a block down onto campus and back again, as well as downtown being walking distance from the house.
I’ve been trying (and succeeding!) to read more these past few months. Last night while I was home from work, I was reading some more Terry Prachett. I’d like to say he does to the fantasy genre what Douglas Adams does for science fiction, but in my opinion, Prachett does it better. Perhaps I need to refresh my memory of HHGttG, but Adams just can’t keep me laughing for pages and pages like Prachett can.
Categories: Life of Peawee
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Roger Allam is the all-American British badass. If you’re looking for an imposing, “love to hate” bastard for any given production, look no farther.
In the original production of Les Miserables, he played Inspector Javert. In a 2000 London musical Speer he played Hitler.
However, most of us ‘Merkins most likely know him for roles in two pop-culture movies: E. P. Arnold Royalton in Speed Racer, and Lewis Prothero in V for Vendetta.
What we really need is a movie, starring Samuel L. Jackson versus Roger Allam.
Categories: Life of Peawee
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Next time I go to have emacs auto-indent a 12,000 line FORTRAN77 source code, do it before I leave for the evening. It’s now 3:30, and it’s been chugging with roughly 85% of one of my workstation’s two cores for the past half hour.
Categories: Geeky Peawee
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…if you’re going to cry and hate on people for the DNC choosing to count your states as half, please cry to and hate on the duly-elected state-level Democratic Party officials, who decided to hold your primaries early in blatant disregard of party rules.
The Democratic Party is not the government; it doesn’t have to count your vote to begin with. Be thankful you’ve any votes being counted at all.
That is all.
Categories: Political Peawee
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…when I want tea, I want tea, damnit. I don’t need some herbal remedy for ailments including but not limited to: PMS, Prostate Health, Joint Health, Sexual Health (!), Random Pain, Dumbness, Smartness, Sleepyness, Awakenness, or anything else.
I just want some black tea that has something along the lines of a citrus fruit in it. Bigelow’s “Lemon Lift”, or almost any Earl Grey blend will do. It shouldn’t take me 10 minutes looking like a fool in the tea isle to find something I want out of all the over-the-counter medicines masquerading as tea.
Thank you.
Categories: Life of Peawee
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I’ve been running OpenSolaris Nevada on my file server for a while now. While ZFS makes administration of filesystems beautiful, I’ve been disappointed with the zpool functionality.
In addition, administering the rest of Solaris is a maze of twisty passages, all alike. Things like Perl’s CPAN, which is supposed to have a high level of “JustWorks”, fails hard in Solaris (which includes both 5.6 and 5.8). Things like libtorrent/rtorrent and FLAC with Ogg support, which compile just fine on Mac, Linux, Cygwin, and OpenBSD, fail it hard under Solaris. I’ve been frustrated with all the little quirks of the system that just don’t seem to appear under other platforms. I’m underwhelmed by the SunPRO compiler set, and the system just feels *slow* to use, as compared to Linux on the same hardware.
So, using my handy-dandy external backup drive, I backed everything up, and installed the brand-new Ubuntu 8.04 on it, and while it’s back to mdraid and lvm, the rest of the sanity more than makes up for it.
Categories: Geeky Peawee
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Last week, my poor Tempo decided that it no longer wished to be for this world. As this leaves me carless, I went and got myself a new car.
What type of car, you ask?
A 2001 Audi A6 Quattro. And I love it.
It’s smooth, comfortable, and a great highway cruiser. That last part tends to be useful for me, as if I’m not driving 2 miles, I’m driving 200, and I enjoy how comfortable this thing makes long car trips.
Also, it’s badass.
Categories: Life of Peawee
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Apple’s walled garden works well for most people. I, unfortunately, am not most people.
This is my story.
As I’ve already discussed previously, iTunes has a certain amount of suck involved.
So, I’ve discovered Play, which sucks less in some ways, and sucks more in others. As so far, the more suckage hasn’t been so much of a concern for me yet, and after checking out the source code, it don’t look too hard to create some patches against. One of my “post-graduation to-dos”.
My CD collection sits as FLACs on my server drive, and Play handles it quite nicely, updating its sqlite database of music every time it starts up. To rip, I use sbooth.org’s Max, which includes the very excellent cdparanoia ripper and pretty good support for tagging, album art, and all the formats I’ve grown to love, such as FLAC.
Currently, there are a couple of weak links. Play doesn’t export playlists to plain text files (otherwise known as .m3u), and the built-in “Convert with Max” option only lets you select 10 tracks at a time. How am I supposed to convert 200-250 FLAC files into Ogg or MP3 to put on a portable player to bring around? Solution: the music library database is simply a sqlite database, which means I can hook up a Perl script to it and extract playlists like that, and run it through conv. For use with my iPod, I can simply make a small library in iTunes, and simply import into iTunes to copy to the little machine. No biggie. If I felt like it, I could most likely write an AppleScript to automate it for me.
CD burning? Same as with the iPod; just use iTunes to make it easy.
So far, I really haven’t missed it. Huzzah!
Categories: Geeky Peawee
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One of humanity’s greatest authors, Arthur C. Clarke, passed away this morning.
Rest in peace.
Categories: Uncategorized
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February 22, 2008 5:16 pm
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