Diary of a Wolfeman

When do you leave good enough alone? Apparently, just before you try to add slick new themes to KDE.

I added Baghira to get a slick brushed-metal look to the top of all my windows, which somehow managed to disable about half of my widgets. A couple tries at re-installing Qt didn’t work. Then I noticed there was an update available for KDE. “That should fix that Qt problem…”
Not.

Next boot gave me really long KDE start-times followed by a complete lack of fonts.

Hrm.

So, do I try to remove then re-install KDE, or build it from scratch again?

Me? A glutton for punishment? Never!

Failure:
Tried to re-configure Earthlink dial-up on a G4 Mac today, and couldn’t get the damn thing to sync up to the server – it kept timing out before the connection was made, but would then continue connecting. Once connected, it wouldn’t let me try again until I had disconnected.

It’s been a long time since I have been that mad at a computer. I think I hate Macs. Sure they look pretty, but for someone like me who has spent years mastering Windoze, there are simply too many things in the wrong place. Then there is the really stupid shit: the CD eject button is on the keyboard, not the tower. (And of course the client had changed keyboards, and the new one did not have the media keys.)

Mastery:
I have mad KDE skillz. Kubunutu 5.10 had it’s chance, but it just wasn’t up to the task of running Rodimus Prime (my desktop, otherwise known as Hot Rod when it runs Windoze.)

So SuSE 10.0 went back in tonight, and I hamered it into the shape I wanted in short order. Tagline randomizer: check. Emails configured: check. Spam Assassin configured: check. Addressbook imported: check. Firefox extensions, themes and bookmarks: check. Multimedia fix: check. 3D acceleration: check. Audio: check.

At one point I had 7 windows open, with one of those being six tabs of Firefox. And it never slowed down. Yay Linux!

Brian Krebs of Security Fix writes to let us know that Microsoft has been prodding lawmakers to enact a Federal-level privacy law to pre-empt all the states who have been doing so locally. Makes plenty of sense to me.

First, M$ is a huge bloody company, selling its products globally. I’d bet that a sizable portion of their expenses can be found under the heading “legal fees”. If every state enacts it’s own privacy laws, then M$ has to pay a lawyer to decipher each one, and then make sure they are abiding by all of them. It gets expensive. A little money now spent urging Congress to act unilaterally will pay for itself later on down the road. Smart move.

Secondly, it’s good PR. M$ has been taking it without lube or a kiss lately over the general insecurity of their products, and this might help swing public opinion a little. Also a good move.

Here’s where we get to the part I don’t like. M$ is big enough to buy some serious sway, and that means they could have a big hand in writing the law. Him that writes the law will often make himself a loophole to get out of it.

Still, the devil will be in the details, (Chris) Hoofnagle cautioned, noting that Microsoft’s statement of principles says the company supports “consumer opt-in” — the consumer’s advance permission would be required — for sharing of sensitive (e.g., financial or medical) data but supports “opt-out” — data can be shared unless the consumer explicitly says “no” — for every other kind of information.

Personally, I am of the firm belief that any company I do business with needs to ask permission in writing before disclosing any of my personal information. This should be a completely seperate form, not wrapped up in another block of legaleze. It should have only the one option, so therefore it would be quite short, so you can use a nice easy-to-read font.

Here’s an example: “I agree to let XYZ Company share my personal information with that company’s business partners for the purpose listed here.” Followed of course, by said purpose. One purpose per page, each page requiring a signature.

Some of you may have heard this particular story before – feel free to skip along as you see fit. For those that haven’t, sit right back and you’ll hear a tale…

Way back in the never-never of 2000, I was living in apartment A of a 4-unit building. B:TNG lived in unit C, with TS and the Physicist living in the stacked apartments between us. We all decided life would be much better if we could network all of our computers together to share out B’s DSL connection and get all of us out of dial-up hell. Me being the cable guy, I spent a few hours crawling around under the building and got the whole thing working without much fuss – with one exception.

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Girls: fancy an SMS-fired Bluetooth vibrator? | The Register

Our female readers are invited to imagine the folllowing scenario: It’s Monday, you’re at work, you’re bored, you’re thinking “how could I possibly spice up this trawl of the 2,000 weekend emails in my inbox?” when it occurs to you that if someone were to invent an SMS-triggered Bluetooth vibrator then your partner could bring you to an earth-shattering climax simply by texting a few sweet words of lurv, leaving you totally satisfied as a woman and fit to face the most daunting online task…

The Toy is worn internally, linked to a mobile phone and controlled by sms text messages sent to the phone. Once read, the message is transported automatically to The Toy, which turns it into vibrations – with a huge range of movements, depending on what you have written.

That’s right folks, a vibe triggered by a text message. Puts that ‘unlimited’ messaging plan in a new light, doesn’t it?

Carving a Jack-‘o-Lantern with the Pookster:

“No, Daddy, don’t throw away the seeds – I want to make mine throw up!”

An excellent artistic vision she has, wot? Unfortunately, you’ll have to get very close to see it, as the Jack in question is about the size of an apple. Maybe I’ll augment the scene with a larger “Daddy” Jack holding a spoon and a bottle of ippecac.

Best use of “guts” I’ve ever seen though was a pumpkin holding a toy gun to itself, with the opposite side being a massive exit wound.

Do you have any idea how long it takes to drive in a 1.5 inch machine bolt one ratchet-click at a time? Yeah. Bloody forever. On the upside, the preliminary results indicate that replacing the solenoid on the starter seems to have done the trick.

I say “preliminary” because when I took the starter in to Schuck’s today for testing it worked. This means to me that if the solenoid was the actual problem (and all the troubleshooting I could think of plus opinions of a couple other people point to it), it may have been a heat-related issue. Both times it has refused to start were on days where I had put the car through a fair amount of mileage. And let’s face it – even if it wasn’t the whole problem, replacing a 17-year-old part isn’t a bad idea.

So, the WBGF helped me put the whole thing back together (she ended up making the blood sacrifice) and it started a couple times without fuss. The car started again after the round-trip of taking my sweetie home, so I think all is again in order.

Knock on wood…
*UPDATE*
Not hard enough, I guess.

I was proud of myself for getting up on time for once this week and out the door in such a manner as to show up for work a few minutes early, only to find that the Beastie refused to start – it was doing that cyclic thing with the starter again.

Luckily, I remembered that I have a solid-steel steering column before I started bashing my head against it. I ended up hoofing it down to the train to catch my first appointment downtown, then grabbed B:TNG out of his office to jump the car and take it to Schuck’s for another test, hoping it would fail.

Sure as shit, she cranked and started on the first try. And the second and third tries down at Schuck’s, where they pronounced the battery and charging system “good”.
Razzle-frazzen !#@$!!%^@%#!!!

So, back to the house for a quick lunch and back on the road to work…NOT! Refused to start again. Talked one of the guys at the industrial shop across the street into jump-starting it, and, back down to Schuck’s for more testing. Drumroll please….

IT FAILED!! Yay!!!

They okayed the warranty discount, and I managed to get the new battery installed. (This one is slightly larger and requires me to remove a small body brace. I had also forgot my 13mm ratchet for removing the holding block and ended up buying a new one.)

So anyway, I bring to a close the last car-related post for some time with a happily starting car and a much-relieved author.

If it doesn’t start in the morning, I’m pushing it into the river.

Tonight was The World’s Best Girlfriend’s birthday, and the party went off very well. She turned the ripe old age of Beautiful, smiled for three solid hours, and the world is a better place for it.

I am incredibly lucky to have her in my life, and a day doesn’t go by when I don’t think it.

I love you, Beautiful.

Do you remember the halcyon days or yore when it was physically possible for Joe Shadetree to actually perform routine maintenance and repair of his vehicle? Days when it was possible to actually see and touch a nut or bolt at the same time?

Efficient use of space does not have to mean cramming as much as possible into a space as small as possible. Leaving room for a poor mook to get his hand on a part is an efficient use of space.

Tonight, I encountered possibly the strangest thing yet about my car: a part (the starter) that was reasonably reachable, located at the bottom front (!) of the motor. The problem: a 13mm bolt located behind the exhaust pipe that allowed for at most one click of the ratchet in travel.

One click. That’s all, and to get that click I had to use my torque wrench instead of a regular ratchet because of the depth of reach. It took me a half hour to remove that one of the three bolts. Replacing it will be oh-so-much fun.

Then I had to get the wiring off – a proposition that really requires two hands, but space allows for only one.

I will grant that during engine assembly, this procedure is simplicity itself. It would be nice however, if it were just as easy with the engine actually in the vehicle.

Just a thought.

Is anyone else getting sick of all these bullshit commercials about drugs lately? Not illegal drugs, I’m talking about prescription medications here.

The pharmecuetical companies have apparently decided that it isn’t enough to send out announcements to all the physicians in the phone book – they now find it necessary to advertise directly to the end-user with print and tv ads. This strikes me as wrong in a number of ways.

It seems to me these companies should be spending those millions of advertising dollars on something more important – like more research to iron out all those pesky little side-effects such as liver problems, internal bleeding and death.

That’s right, I have distinctly heard “death” referred to as a possible side-effect of a drug on a commercial. If possibilities such as these are important enough to mention in the ad, how the frell did it get past the FDA?

Write your representative – link is to the right. Don’t bother writing to the FCC – the current chairman was appointed by Bush. I’d say that puts the chances of him telling big business “no” at pretty slim.