But instead I offer visual confirmation that the legends are true!
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Breaking News!
Dave read a book!
A fiction book!
Last night I finished reading “Variable Star”, by Robert A. Heinlein and Spider Robinson. And by finished, I mean yesterday morning I was less than half-done. After I’d done laundry and dinner and such I picked it back up and didn’t really put it down till I was done at 0100. I really wanted to go to sleep earlier, but there was just no good place to stop in the last half-dozen chapters.
Most people that know me are rather shocked by all this. It’s been a good long time since I’ve read any fiction. A good part of starting to read fiction is finding a new way to destress. Finding a way to have my life not revolve around work all the time. And possibly improving my vocabulary a bit. I know the creative part of my brain has been atrophying for a good chunk of time. I can feel it. It’s like trying to use muscles to do something way beyond their capability. I try and I can feel my brain fire back with a “503 Service Unavailable”. Dialtoning every time I try to explain something is getting rather old.
So I picked up “Variable Star” after listening to Spider Robinson’s excellent podcast (including some chapters of the book as well as other essays) as well as (albeit non-fiction) the 2 volume abridgment of Arnold J. Toynbee’s “A Study of History. It currently hurts to read this, but it’s time I start pushing my brain again.
And the upside of it all is I get to become an even bigger geek in the process.
Quick Xen Note on PAE
I’ve got lots to blog about, but I’ve been too busy playing with new toys to get around to it. This is just a quick note for the internets.
Running Xen on Debian Etch on a machine with 4gb of ram, if you get
"PAE mode mismatch error (xen=yes dom0=no)"
you need to install:
apt-get install xen-hypervisor-3.0.3-1-i386-pae
as the default xen kernel now enables pae by itself when necessary, and the default hypervisor doesn’t support it.
I would love to expound on the ideas Lessig puts forth at the end of this talk, but I don’t quite have the time at the moment. Instead, I ask that everyone just watch this.
The Mythbox just got hotted up
I’ve spent most of the afternoon revamping the mythbox here. I removed myth-backend from neo and installed it on architect, as well as mysql-server to back myth-backend. I’ve installed and configured LIRC and created a .lircrc for the Packard Bell remote and receiver I bought years ago on ebay.
I’ve installed splashy on the machine for a more pretty boot sequence and set X up to auto-spawn on ttyS7 for the mythtv user and automagically runs irxevent and mythfronted via .xinitrc.
For most people, they will read to hear and take away that my mythbox is now sexier. For the insane few that care to know what exactly I did, that’s after the jump. Continue reading The Mythbox just got hotted up
Is it too early to bake fun of this?
I created a platform with two triangular supports. And covered it all with tinfoil. I baked two 9″x13″ pan cakes. The first of which was almost a complete failure as it didn’t want to come out of the pan. The second time around I sprayed the pan much more liberally with olive oil and the cake was released quite easily. The failed cake worked out quite well as the angled section of bridge deck.
Chocolatey Success!
I’ve managed to blow through almost another month without posting
Go me!
Life in general has been pretty damn busy. I spent a few days being frustratedby my guitar and then went out and purchased an Epiphone Gothic SG
Excepting last week which got mucked up by a work-trip down to Canmore I’ve been doing pretty damn good about getting to the gym in the mornings. I can’t say as I’ve made much progress in terms of strength but I can’t really have expected to anyways. The big accomplishment so far has been to be regular about working about and not pussying out during the workouts and cutting things short. I gained a few pounds over the last week so the 10lbs I’d lost in the first 2 months of moving out have all but disappeared. I’m not terribly chapped by it though. I know it’s going to be a bit of a battle to cut the fat I’m carrying.
The apartment has been coming together really well. I’ve got a lamp to hang somehow from a concrete ceiling in the bedroom and a speaker cable to pin up so we stop tripping on it, but after that we’ll be mostly ready for our housewarming parties finally. Bit of cleaning to do, some research into how to make the chocolate fountain go, and a lot of trying not to stress out over what people think of the place.
A little over a week ago I bought a slow cooker so Friday I took a page from the cookbook that came with it and made “Chicken with 40 cloves of garlic”. It proved to be rather tasty. The leftovers from that chicken as well as a roast chicken purchased earlier that week became soup this weekend, which shall be dinner tonight. While cleaning Saturday we also made a couple cups of rice so we can make fried rice Tuesday night. I’m so domestic it hurts.
That’s all for now, I guess we’ll see how long it takes for me to post again.
A Minor Update
Life’s been treating me pretty well this past month.
I’ve been good about something things (try to de-stress and such) and not so good about others (diet… exercise) but overall I’ve been pretty happy about how this month has gone. Ultimately it’s time for me to develop a new routine and stick to it rather religiously.
Over the last couple evenings I’ve attempted a repair of the poorly designed floating bridge on my guitar and restrung it. Spent a few minutes strumming away before I made supper this evening. I’ve been debating trying to pick up guitar again as a winter project. Other contenders for that spot are also getting my HAM license and working on my geek cred. I suppose it would be possible to do all of these things, but I don’t know how likely that really is.
Yesterday also brought an upgrade of wordpress to the blogs I host. 2.3 seems to be pretty neat. They’ve added tag support as well as a tag-cloud widget for the side bar. It figures that such a thing should exist as just 3 days ago I found a cloud widget that works on the existing category system. I guess if I’m to start tagging things I’ll need to reconsider my current categories.
I’ve also seen talk of a Debian User Planet which somewhat intrigues me. I think I’d be more inclined to write and thusly post more technical articles if I knew people who’d get some use out of them would actually be exposed to them. Though for such a thing to happen I would need to be able to generate an RSS feed for just a single category and I haven’t found a way to do this yet.
To be fair, if I expect people to read what I write, then I need to write more compelling content and post more frequently. I suppose that would tie in with the above. Establish a routine that involves posting to the intarwebs, practicing guitar, studying for the HAM license, and working out. Oh yeah, and work and socializing and sleep.
oi.
On upgrading Debian Sid
For as long as I’ve used Debian and Alsa, I’ve used to alsaconf to configure my soundcard(s). Late last week, I dist-upgrade’d my machine and moved from the 2.6.18 kernel to the 2.6.22 kernel which seemed to improve a number of performance issues with my E6420 and Asus P5B-E (though I haven’t tried recompiling the gigabit NIC driver under this kernel to check if those performance issues are resolved, so I’m still using a 3Com 10/100). However alsa broke for me with this upgrade. After running alsaconf, I would get the following:
amixer: Mixer attach default error: No such device
I googled at first, and found nothing, so I gave up for a couple of days. Last night I decided it was time to fix shit, so I got back into troubleshooting mode. Long story short, update-modules is now deprecated, alsaconf relies on update-modules, so stop using alsaconf. Let udev load the drivers for your soundcards and it’ll be all good.