Too much blood in my antihistamine stream again.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:46 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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No Instapundit. No Spleenville. No Eye on the Left.

And Blogger says

Microsoft VBScript runtime error '800a0005'

Invalid procedure call or argument: 'mid'

//functions/doAutoLogin.inc, line 15

No A Small Victory, either.

Update: Never mind, it's all better now.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:17 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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And I don't. Sniffle.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:33 AM | Comments (7) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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You can learn more about the project and how you can help at the Front Line Voices Meetingplace.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:32 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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One might even... Yes, one might even go so far as to call it good.

Now I'm off to finish reading it. After all, it's only been waiting for fifty years.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:09 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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That's my story, anyway.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:59 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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I recently bought myself a DVD writer so that I can do backups of my 3.5 million (or whatever the number is) files. I also ordered 100 DVD-Rs (Shintaro 4x disks, in case anyone is interested), so that I'd have something to backup to.

Meanwhile, my disks are filling up. Fill fill fill. Also, I still have six IBM Deathstar drives in use. These are the notorious GXP-75 series, which have a half-life of about 12 months. Suckiest disk drives since the days of Miniscribe.*

So I bought 6 Maxtor 120GB drives to replace the 6 45GB Deathstars. Got them cheap too, although the bargain price I got will look pretty ordinary in a month and hideously expensive in six. Only problem is, the Deathstars are in use and have stuff on them - more stuff than I have space to copy elsewhere. After all, if I still had 180GB free I wouldn't be buying more disks.**

So I need the DVDs to back up the Deathstars so I can take them out of use before they do that for themselves. Only... Only the DVDs are coming by Australia Post, who did what they are best at and lost them.

It's not the first expensive shipment that Australia Post have lost for me. The only comfort I have is that this time it's C.O.D., which means that I haven't paid for it. I still don't have the DVDs, which is a nuisance, but at least I'm not out of pocket.

The supplier managed to get confirmation from Australia Post today that yes, they (Australia Post) had lost my DVDs, and they (the supplier) are sending me another shipment. Maybe I should have suggested they put a GPS tracker on this lot.

* Not one of the computer biz's better moments:

In mid-December 1987, Miniscribe's management, with Wiles' approval and Schleibaum's assistance, engaged in an extensive cover-up which included recording the shipment of bricks as in-transit inventory. To implement the plan, Miniscribe employees first rented an empty warehouse in Boulder, Colorado, and procured ten, forty-eight foot exclusive-use trailers. They then purchased 26,000 bricks from the Colorado Brick Company.

On Saturday, December 18, 1987, Schleibaum, Taranta, Huff, Lorea and others gathered at the warehouse. Wiles did not attend. From early morning to late afternoon, those present loaded the bricks onto pallets, shrink wrapped the pallets, and boxed them.

The weight of each brick pallet approximated the weight of a pallet of disk drives. The brick pallets then were loaded onto the trailers and taken to a farm in Larimer County, Colorado.

Miniscribe's books, however, showed the bricks as in-transit inventory worth approximately $4,000,000. Employees at two of Miniscribe's buyers, CompuAdd and CalAbco, had agreed to refuse fictitious inventory shipments from Miniscribe totalling $4,000,000. Miniscribe then reversed the purported sales and added the fictitious inventory shipments into the company's inventory records.

** I can't back up the Deathstars onto the Maxtors because I want to build the Maxtors into a RAID-5 array, and I have neither the drive bays nor the IDE controllers to run another six drives off my Linux box.*** I doubt the power supply would be particularly happy either.

*** Huh. Come to think of it, I do have enough IDE channels to put another six drives on that box. The cabling would be... problematic at best, so I think I'll take a pass on that.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:42 AM | Comments (14) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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And 132 other assorted pieces of crap. Ranging from "Hi!" to "God Bless Pixymisa and the USA!" to the usual offers of sex and money (I'm fine for both at the moment, thanks).

Look, can't we kill just a few of them? Y'know, set an example?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:54 AM | No Comments | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:44 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Thanks to CoolDuck LeeAnn.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:05 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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I've never been disappointed by John Varley.

Until now.

If Rocketship Galileo had been written by the Robert Heinlein who wrote The Number of the Beast, rather than the Robert Heinlein who, well, wrote Rocketship Galileo, you'd have Red Thunder. It's all there: the characters too stupid to live, the pointless and unappealing sex, the arguments about who's going to drive, the contrived plot...

I give it sucks out of five. And no, I haven't suddenly developed a New Zealand accent.

Avoid.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:43 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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I wonder if I'll get any presents? I've been a little... slack in the present-giving department this year, what with my three full-time jobs and all. Maybe my nephew will give me a present, since I gave him six boxes of Lego last weekend.

* 25. Though not necessarily in base-10.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:51 PM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Arrr!

Only thing is, it insists on doing a full file-system check first. Shiver me disk drives! With 1.6 terabytes of disk, that takes a while.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:46 PM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Late for work, me hearties! Now where did I put those scurvy Linux disks?

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:41 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Well, actually, I didn't. I've always wanted to try that, but I've never had a box I didn't care about at a time when I had the time to play around.

I think it just overheated. Spring has well and truly sprung here in Sydney, but the office air conditioning is still set to Winter. So it's really not surprising that the computers are finding it a bit on the warm side.

And it's not really my PC, it's one of the servers. The one with a terabyte of data on it, to be precise.

Poot.

I've left it turned off overnight, and tomorrow I will return armed with a 30cm fan, an extension lead so we can position it somewhere a little cooler... And my Linux install CDs, because I'm not that much of an optimist.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:46 AM | Comments (12) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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See you tomorrow.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:03 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:18 AM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:29 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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As soon as he had it unwrapped, he grabbed the DVD, trotted into the living room, and -

Well, he doesn't quite have this down pat. He put the DVD on the shelf under the TV, grabbed the remote control, and started pushing buttons. After all, the DVD player is too high up for him to reach, so it's worth a try.

At two, he's realised that if you put the shiny round thing in the silver rectangular thing and push the little buttons on the small grey oblong thing, pictures and music come from the square black thing and you can dance along - which at that age consists of spinning in circles until you fall over.

Unfortunately, the DVD was warped, and in the middle of Wobbly Camel the picture and sound broke up and it swiftly became unwatchable. We found that only the first two and last three of fifteen or so songs played properly.

Which kind of ruined the magic...

What I'd like to do here is write a Whittleian essay about how what engineers really want to do is magic - build machines that work so well that the very workings that they laboured so hard to create are effectively invisible to the user. You do this and that happens, every time, without any noise or smoke or heat. You don't need to pull it apart twice a year to grease the flanges or re-tune the interociter. You don't need to prime it with margarine before starting it when the weather's below freezing.

It just works.

I guess I went into computers because it's the closest useful field we have to magic. You move this thing until that thing points to this other thing, then you push on this thing and music! Movies! Books! Your printer springs to life and prints out a newspaper, or you send a letter to your friend on the other side of the world (and it arrives in a matter of seconds.)

Bugs are the mis-aligned gears and dry solder joints in the engineering magic of programming. When you run into a bug, it reveals the workings you've tried so hard to hide. The magic is ruined, though we're used to it and we usually manage to pick ourselves up and move on.

(Like, say, when my ADSL connection drops out and destroys the illusion that the internet is "just there".)

One recent failed spell has reduced Tuning Spork to speaking in tongues in a most amusing way, but usually the results are just a bloody nuisance.

I have no idea where this post is going, though, so I'll stop here. If you do happen to know, please tell me and I'll do my best to finish it.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:25 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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All the tickets were sold in five hours.

(via The Inquirer)

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:12 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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In the meantime, why is it taking so darn long to grep this file? It's only, um, five gigabytes. It's not like it's particularly big or anything...

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:46 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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The way I look at it, is this: the concept of democracy has a number of elements which we can use to ascertain the degree of democracy. The GDR was a socalled "peoples democracy" which in our definition was not a democracy.

Yes, this is known as "a lie".

Another interpretation is not necessarily a lie.

This is not "another interpretation". Calling East Germany a democracy is a lie. There's no complication here, it is simply and entirely untrue.

From our point of view it is a lie, not from theirs. Why would our truth be more true than that of others? Because we have proven it to be so because the wall fell?

And here we get to the crux of the problem, the post-modernist fallacy that all points of view are equally valid.

Words have meaning. "Democracy" has a meaning. East Germany was not a democracy. This is a fact. They called it a democracy, therefore they lied. This is also a fact.

In fact, they knew damn well that it wasn't a democracy and the whole thing was a sham from the beginning.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:18 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:12 PM | Comments (1) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Not happy at all.

* In one post I used the term shitweasels to refer to the senior management at SCO, and received an irate comment from a shitweasel complaining that I had unfairly maligned shitweasels the world over. Hence the neologism.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:59 AM | Comments (3) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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Jerry McCusker of Machine in the Ghost ponders the question of what things would be like If Americans Ran the Afterlife, and suggests that Purgatory could be run at a profit.

Open Source Software Law has a background article on SCO vs. IBM, but they lose points for failing to use the word "shitferret".

Virtue Pure (sounds like a bottled-water company) muses on the value of role-playing, and suggests that playing Dungeons and Dragons may in fact lead us to better understand other people.

And if that fails, we can zap them with Leomund's Lamentable Belabourment. That'll teach them.

Aaron at Pardon my English suggests that giving drivers licenses to illegal immigrants may not be the smartest move.

Iocean at Inspiranote returns to an essay written shortly after the September 11 attacks. This is warm fuzzy new-age stuff, unfortunately, and not for me at all.

Eye on the Left picks up on some unusually insane ramblings. The post consists almost entirely of the quoted insanity, which confused me a little when I read it reformatted on the Bear's site.

Brainstorming spotted James Dean keeping an eye on holiday traffic and stopped to take pictures.

I couldn't find the selected post from Like a Packet of Woodbines, but this picture is a classic.

And Jim at Snooze Button Dreams wonders why he can't be gay.

So, who are my picks?

Brainstorming, because, well, that's cool and funny.

Snooze Button Dreams because it's funny and insightful, and because I have an addiction to the snooze button myself.

And Pardon my English, because sometimes irony will not do and you just have to cut loose with a rant.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:32 AM | Comments (8) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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