All posts by dave

Health

Getting back on the horse

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I’ve been sucking at the being healthy thing the last couple weeks. Not that I’ve been sick, per-se, but I’ve been eating like garbage and I haven’t seen the inside of my gym in a couple weeks. We need to change this. I’m nearing some very unhealthy weights at this point.

I was going 3 days a week, and while I felt better, I really couldn’t say one way or another if I was making any progress. Am I insane for thinking I’d see difference in a month and a bit? To the untrained eye, yes. So tonight we’re going to start documenting things. Pic-shures. This is part one of the plan. I’m thinking a weekly thing. Don’t worry. I’m not thinking about posting the pics weekly. You may get some later on, if I’m particularly happy with the progress.

Secondly, I need to get my diet and sleep-patterns under control. They’re working against me.

And lastly, I need to get my ass in the gym. Consistently.

Speaking of sleep, I need to do that. I’ll check in with the New Plan, as soon as it surfaces.

2005 Golf TDI

Spring Cleaning

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The day I got back from the trip to the coast, I started on some maintenance that needed doing. Did the oil change (I was 400km over) and FINALLY FIXED THE FUCKING HEADLIGHTS.

I still need to:

  1. Replace the three filters (air, cabin, fuel)
  2. Drain the water seperator
  3. Replace the skid-plate and side skirts
  4. Switch off my winter rubber (I keep telling myself I want to buy a set of 16″ alloys, but I really can’t justify the cost. I need throw my OEM 15″ rubber back on)
  5. Clean like a moter fucker

After that, I’ve still got some non-maintenance stuff on the list, but still needs doing

  1. Replace the broken pull tabs on the rear seats as I’ve snapped the second one this past winter
  2. Clean like a mother fucker
  3. Re-run the wiring for my iPod adapter
  4. Setup the relay in the hatch to clarify my rear-fog vs the 5 brake light mod
  5. Steal a few LEDs from my third eye for turn signals
  6. Install a lighted compass

That’s about all I can think of when at the moment. Needed something to do while killing time before heading out again this morning. I guess we’ll see how much of this I can hammer out in the next couple weeks, first list specifically.

Geek, Linux

If a graphic designer comes up to you…

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and it looks like somebody kicked his dog, don’t worry. Knoppix can fix it. I had said GD come up to me and tell me his flash drive wasn’t being recognized by windows on his machine and he had some photo’s on it from a trip last year he hadn’t backed up (lecture on that followed later). He wanted to know if there was anything I could do. I told him to leave the drive with me and I’d see what I could do.

So I popped our trusty friend, Knoppix 5.0.1, into the drive of my work laptop and rebooted. At the knoppix prompt:
knoppix: knoppix 2 dma

This will boot knoppix and dump you onto the console. I plugged the drive in and got a few errors about no partition table, but it was able to recognize the device info. It listed the device as /dev/sda. This led me to believe that the first section of the flash memory had finally died due to extended use (Flash memory does have a finite number of writes before it fails). So the first thing I did, being that it was only 256mb was take a raw dump of the drive to work on. The laptop has enough memory in it that the ramdrive is big enough to hold this. Other options are to the hard drive in the machine if it’s formatted with a FS that knoppix can write to or an external hard drive/flash drive. If you’re writing to a fat32 drive, anything over 2.0gb will be problematic.

root@knoppix# cd /home/knoppix
root@knoppix# dd_rescue /dev/sda rawdump

The first line moved our working directory to the ramdrive, the second one invokes the raw dump. During this time, you will most likely see errors scroll across the screen. Eventually, dd_rescue will get to a good part of the drive, and you will motor through. At this point, we can run photorec on the file.

root@knoppix# photorec rawdump

This will launch photorec and tell it to use the dump we’ve taken from the drive. Follow the onscreen prompts, and it will analyze the dump file looking for files that match the type you specified and put them in a recovery folder. At this point you can copy the recovery folder to a flash drive/hard drive/across the network.

At this point you burn the files to cd, have the graphic designer almost cry, then you lecture them about backing their shit up.

Streaming

New headphone day

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I’ve now got the last piece of equipment on the current list for the streaming setup. Today I went out into the big blue room with a stack of CDs as reference material. I picked up a set of Sennheiser HD-555s from a rather nice audio shop in Edmonton called Gramaphone. I managed to convince the little brother to finally get a set of cans as well, and he decided to get the same set I did.

I still need to decide what I’m going to do with the mixing console. I’ve been pondering building a sound-treated enclosure to put my mic in, and if I do that I’ll probably put it above an small incline for the board. Said enclosure would also give me the opportunity to build in a switch to turn the mixer on and off, as behringer neglected to provide with such. And because it’s dave, I would most likely put in some sort of light to illuminate the mixer. Also tied to the switch, of course.

After cleaning up a little tomorrow, I’m going to post pics of the new kit. It’s only right to include geek-pr0n with a post-toygasm entry.

Streaming

Show Number 0

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Last night made me happy because I found Jamendo. Tonight made me happy for a different, though related, reason.

Tonight, as I type this, the last three tracks on the playlist for my show tonight are rounding out. I’ve completed the first episode of “Take the Next Step” on Hypatia Media. For the last month and a half I’ve been doing private test streams but tonights show is the first official show. The first above board, completely CC licensed show. I’m absolutely ecstatic. It was brilliant, despite how sad it was. I was so excited to finally be picking CC music for the show that I forgot to get material together to talk about.

There’s definitely a list of things to be taken care of. I still need new headphones, I want to find some better software to stream with, I might need a new sound card and I want to have the live tags working for song info. But ultimately we’re alive. We have no idea where our fearless leader is but I don’t care. I’m just going to keep streaming, keep pushing, and hopefully keep hooking people in. I’ve got some homework for the week. I’m hoping everyone out there will heed my call and provide some bumpers over the next few weeks.

The Next Step You Take Episode Zero ( 63:23 )

Playlist for the show follows:
Continue reading Show Number 0 →

Geek, Life, Linux

Day 2 of what I believe to be a 12 day break

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I have spent all morning playing Wii Bowling.  I took my Mii, who’d never bowled before from 0 to pro.  I’ve now managed two 200+ games.

I fear I must actually do something with today or I will feel rather… unhappy with myself.  So that something is going to be installing working on a spam filter for my main mail server.  The time has come. Details to follow of what I do.

Geek, Life

Woodshed!

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Alright. Here’s the deal.

I’ve got 3 days off, to myself. I’ve got a list of shit I want to get done. I’ve got my TV, my laptop, papasan chair, and the Matrix box set that desperately needs re-watching.

I think we all know what needs to happen.

Geek, Work

Today was much like the motherfucking Titanic

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The day started off pretty well. Much pomp and circumstance when the first appointment of the day went well. I was Shrub, standing on the deck of an aircraft carrier with a Mission Accomplished sign hanging behind me. I hopped into the Davemobile and headed off to appointment number two all smiles, singing to “These Eyes” courtesy of k-rock.

Night falls upon the glorius vessel that I named November 8th and I coast through dark waters, running about 3 different upgrades at once. Parralelism is great to save time, but it sucks when something fails and leaves you in the lurch.

And we get scuttled by a motherfucking iceberg. There’s ice on the deck and we’re taking on water. A large chunk of data just dissapeared into the ether, and now my confidence is shot for the day. I need to get this back, I need to make this better. There is a gaping hole in the side of my boat and I need to make it better.

Breath.

We snag the machine and set up an interim solution. A small chunk of my boat snaps off but the piece I’m on levels out. We run the fuck away and try and get on with the day. Nothing we can do till we get to the dry dock. Third appointment is short and sweet, surgical even. And then onwards to the 4th. While sweating bullets here, we realise the boat is lifting again. The boss called. Another machine. Another client. Smells like hard drive failure. My little piece of boat is almost completely vertical. I’m standing on top of if trying to figure out when to jump, and from what side. I need to get off early enough to not be sucked down, but not so early I die on impact. I need an exit strategy, I need to jump off the right side of the ship so I don’t hit the propeller on the way down.

I update the print drivers on this workstation so I can setup remote printing from the Terminal Server. Run a test page, it all looks good. I install the same set on the server. Run a test page. The print spooler on the workstation shits a brick. I’ve hit the propller.

But I’ve only clipped my ankle. My fall is completely uncontrolled and I’m flipping around.  Ripping keys out of the registry left and right, getting this god forsaken driver out so I can rescue the print spooler.  I grab the bottom of my coat and spread it like a flying squirrel suit. I managed to right myself and splash down feet first into the ocean.  With a bit of a hack reminiscent of the flying squirrel suit, I manage to get it to print remotely. I start swimming away from the day… er … boat. I have no lifeboats.  I have two machines to recover data from.

I can’t see the shore.

Looks like I’m swimming all night.