Diary of a Wolfeman

If you haven’t noticed, I have been upgrading WordPress to version 1.5, and having a rare issue in the fact that it didn’t go seamlessly. My previous index page hashed the new options, so I’ve had to revert to a stock model until I can re-arrange things to my liking.

I’ve done some minor tweaking to it; the major tweaking will have to wait for a day when I am more awake. Until then, you’ll just have to deal with the greys.

No, not those greys, Captain Conspiracy.

Anywho, notice the bit off to the left there that says “Pages”? That’s a new feature, where you can plant long-winded posts to a journal type-format and link them.

Anywho, off to bed.

Blood For Odin

This story was ganked from the above site, after being linked by Grou at Frizzen Sparks. No clues as to the veracity, but still a funny tale.

“A friend of a friend lives in NYC and participates in the SCA [Society for Creative Anachronism]. He’s stereotypical Viking, 6’7″ tall, LONG blonde hair, about 350 – 400 lbs of solid muscle, and looks every bit of it. Well, he was going to a meet in full getup with long cloak and battle axe and sitting on the subway… hunched over leaning on the axe with the cloak pulled over it so he wouldn’t scare anybody.

Lo and behold some little punk comes up… MAYBE 5’2”, 120 lbs soaking wet, and brandishes a knife saying “GIMME YOUR MONEY!” Naturally the guy sits there… somewhat befuddled at the balls of this punk. “GIMME YOUR *bleepin* MONEY OR ELSE!” and the guy stands up… and up… and UP. Raising the battle axe over his head, screaming at the top of his lungs “BLOOD FOR ODIN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” At this point, the fellow passengers learn the true sound of terror. Not a scream, no curses, just a simple little “urk” as the guy leaves a wet spot as he’s bolting for anywhere but here.

A couple weeks later our friend is at a club in the men’s room, doing what all guys do when they’ve had a bit of ale, and looks over and at the next stall is that SAME PUNK! Up for a bit of a laugh, the guy leans over, and quietly whispers in the dude’s ear “Blood for Odin”……The cops catch up with him a couple blocks away… screaming bloody murder, running like the hounds of hell are after him, with his pants around his ankles.

Well, Its not a rapier and dagger, but I think it will do…” Dale

Well, it’s official: my apartment building has been sold, effective so immediately that March rent is to be paid to the new management company.

This sucks, because a sale like this is usually followed shortly thereafter by a raise in the rent – the purchaser needs to make back that capital investment. If it goes up, I may be forced to move. I hate moving.

Blurgh.

Ok, here’s the final rundown of the Linux Laptop Project:

Distro: Slackware 10.1, kernel 2.6.10
I started with SuSE 9.2 as an experiment, and was promptly dumped into RPM hell. Bleah. Suse is a good learner distro as a step up from Mandrake, but they do funky things with it. I would happily give it to my boss and use it for work, but not at home where I like things just so. Kernel choice was to keep current. 2.4.29 is stable, but has too much stuff crammed into it to make other stuff work. 2.6.10 runs smoother. (I no longer have to reseat the wifi card after coming back from standby.)

Window Manager: KDE
Like there was really another choice. Okay, there’s lots of other choices (this is Linux, after all,) but I have been a KDE user since 1.0 and just can’t break away from it.

Internet connection: Orinoco wifi
The D-Link got better signal strength in Windoze, but it came down to the fact that I could get this one working and not the DWL650. Win some, lose some.

Usability: Good
What, only good? The fact remains, this is a PIII with only 128 megs of RAM, when I’m used to having an Athlon XP2400+ with 512 megs RAM. I could speed things up a bit by using a different window manager, but I’m tolerant of certain things. It is running a bit faster than it did under Win2k, but not by an amount significant enough to brag about. (Bragging rights are reserved for the P4 / 1GB box at work.) Security, though is a slam-dunk.

Quirks remaining: 2 or three, nothing serious.
On boot, I have to stop the wifi card and reseat it for some reason; I’m sure I could get to the bottom of if I cared that much about it. One of the reasons I stuffed Slack into this thing is to get away from the multitude of reboots necessary under windoze. There are also some minor issues playing back video, and I need to get the power-management tweaked in. Like I said, no biggie.

Am I happy with it? Yes. Could it be better? Of course. But then again, it was free. :)

Who’d a thunk it…

While digging around the forums and bashing my head against a wall trying to get my D-Link DWL-650 wifi card to work, I ran across a blurb saying that Slack comes stock with an Orinoco driver already installed. It just so happens that the roomie has one of these lying around, so we popped it in here and (sound of minor tweaking) Poof! I now have working wifi access under Slackware on my laptop!

I can now happily compute in a completely Windows-free manner wherever I go! Yay!!

This is a happy ending to a happy weekend for me.

With all the crap that went down with my daughter during the week, things got off to a slightly rocky start with my girlfriend, but smoothed out after some booze and silly movies. We watched Catwoman first.

The overall plot of the movie was fairly well laid out, and the dialog wasn’t all that bad. Unfortunately, the movie was completely over-CGI’d, and would have been much better had the director opted to actually train Halle Berry to do some stunts. Of all the Catwomen over the years, she is the only one who did not have to do any real stunt work, and the movie suffered badly for it. They also opted to use fast camera moves to simulate fast actor moves, and once again the movie suffers. To top it all off, they cast Sharon Stone as the villainess, which I don’t list as a positive. General rating: Blah.

We followed that up with Resident Evil: Appacolypse, which was a much better movie. Not a real thinker, but a good fun zombie movie with Mila Jojovich kicking some zombie ass. Highly recommended.

Saturday night, I finally watched Moulin Rouge, a movie I basically knew nothing about. What is it with John Leguizamo getting the really bizarre roles?

Anyway, I actually liked the movie, despite the fact that the creative team behind it has done waaaaaaaaaaaay too many halucinagens in recent years. The hardest part of the movie is not letting your head get stuck with any one song, because they switch songs fast and often, mostly transposing pop hits from the last couple decades into something else. When the narcoleptic Argentinian busts out with Roxanne I damn near bust a gut laughing, and to see the show’s manager singing Like a Virgin is…disturbing to say the least.

So, I think I’m ready to face the week now, with the happy prospect of being able to be in the new shop – at least for Monday, anyway (wink). Knowing my luck, they’ll find a reason to keep me West after the meeting on Tuesday, but I’m suppoesd to open the East store Monday morning. And there is work waiting for me, as well as computer that needs to be picked up and paid for.

That’s enough for now, kids.

You ever have one of those days where you feel the need to write about something and just draw a blank? Random thoughts fly around in me head, but nothing settles long enough for me to jot it down. I’d drop a few links in here, but I haven’t seen anything worth linking in a while.

Really I’ve just been trying to get myself back into the swing of working a full time job again. Alot of my frustration comes from having to ration my paychecks so closely now – I’m actually taking home less money than when I was on unemployment, and I was spoiled for three years working a good job. I got too used to just buying what I wanted at the grocery store instead of watching every penny and clipping coupons.

And I keep running across little fun things to do, but then saying to myself “when am I going to have the time for that?” I’ll say it again: I want a 30-hour day.

Of course, it would help if the little things would go away to, like my daughter’s viral rash, which then settled into her knee, making it swell up and become very painful. So much so, that I had to cancel a date tonight to go down to the ER with her to make sure it wasn’t something really bad. (It’s not, just time and ibuprofin to heal.)

I suppose things will even out for me once work settles into a bit of a routine. We’re still kind of frantic, and today we got hammered for about an hour with walk-in customers. The incoming shelf is pretty full again as well, so I’m still in the West office part-time to keep up with the work. I’ll end up taking some of it East with me tomorrow, since I have an appointment to meet with a customer at the new shop. With any luck at all, I’ll be on my way there by 10am, more likely it won’t be until 1pm.

On that front, I may or may not have an assistant at this point. We hired a guy for the spot, and he seems to have the knack for the work, but he pulled a bone-headed dissappearing act today without calling in. Not a smart thing to do on your third day of work. We’ll get his story from him at the meeting tomorrow and decide if we can cut him some slack.

Speaking of Slack, I’m thinking about losing SuSE on the laptop here and going with Slackware instead. This seems to be running slower than the difference in hardware should make between my two systems, and I’ve already been stung by RPM hell. I’ll think about it for another day or two and see what comes up.

I am utterly amazed. I have spent the past several hours doing my taxes, and I will actually get money back this year.

(sound of a jaw dropping)

What with my self-employment, un-employment and other miscelleneous crapola, I fully expected to be in the hole, and was just praying for a $0-$0 balance. What I got was a Federal return large enough to cover my State and County taxes plus some extra for the ol’ slosh fund. (That is, the fund from which money to get sloshed on comes from. *grin*) Tip ‘o the fedora goes to TurboTax for the assist on the forms. Of course, I don’t have the cash on hand for the electronic filing, so I’ll have to wait an extra week for the forms to get there in the mail. I did opt for the direct-deposit, though.

Still, just amazed.

Now if only the State could adopt the same taxation forms as the Fed, then I’d get money back all ’round. Too much to ask for, I know.

Well now, that’s better.

Here I am in SuSE 9.2 Pro on the laptop, successfully dual-booted with only a minor flaw that can be understood, and was frankly expected.

It turns out that there is a flaw in the original FTP 1.0 code that couldn’t see anything over 2 GB in size, and that is more than likely what caused the screwup with the first download. I was able to work around it by going through an Italian mirror that had handily chopped the iso into two parts, then stitched them back together before burning. (They thankfully gave me over 200 kb/s speeds for download)

After that, installation was basically just clicking “OK” at every question. I tweaked it to use LILO instead of Grub, but otherwise all the default selections were fine, including initial package selection. The only problem was, again, expected, in that it hasn’t figured out my wifi card yet. This is par for the course in Linux, since very few card makers and even fewer distros talk to each other for drivers. Stupid, I know. How to best get Linux into the workplace? Make it so that EVERY SINGLE piece of hardware gets auto-detected and works without user tweaks.

I know, I’m dreaming again.

Other than that though, all I did was install a current version of Firefox. SuSE includes one, but it’s out-of-date.

That’s going to have to be the end of the review for now though – it’s bedtime.

In this modern world, there are still some things that you simply have to wait for, regardless of how much technology you throw at them.

Comcast recently upped my download speeds to a whopping 4 Megabits per second. I have a relatively high-speed processor, hard drive, and half a gig of RAM. This, however, all means nothing when the server you are downloading from lets you top out at 25 Kilobits per second. What does all that mean? It means it took me a full 24 hours to download the latest release from SuSE Linux.

Of course, it was a 3 Gigabyte DVD ISO image.

With those speeds, however, one wonders if the other method for the free version of their distro has ever actually worked for anyone. They offer the option of an FTP install, where you download just the installation program and do the rest on-line, only downloading what you need, instead of getting the whole shebang like I did. Call me crazy, but I’m not too keen on spending the next 6 hours waiting to complete an install, when a dropped connection could possibly mean having to wait and start again from scratch. Ewww.

So, I will now attempt to dual-boot the laptop here with SuSE. Cross your fingers…
———————-
Well, fuckity. Apparently, I grabbed the wrong file or it downloaded incorrectly, because the package list isn’t there. I suppose I’ll try again.

Time for a look at the rest of my life.

The pookster is currently suffering from a nasty post-viral rash that basically just showed up out of the middle of nowhere like one I had back when I was 16 or so. She’s hating it, but it is going away fairly quickly. I think the EMC is hating it more though, since the two of thwm have been pretty much stuck in the house for a few days now.

In happier news, yesterday marked the one-year anniversary for me and my gal – yay! She surprised me with the gift of a new sledgehammer.

Ok, so maybe it only hits like one. What she gave me is a new 20-oz graphite pool cue. It’s on the heavy side of the range (just the way I like it) , and the graphite construction means it has almost no axial compression – every erg of force you put into a shot transfers directly to the cue ball.

So, since we now both have our own cues, it seemed only natural to have dinner at Sam’s Billiards in Hollywood on 42nd Ave. The steaks, of course, were delectable, but nowhere near as delectable as my girl in her red dress. She got quite a few looks as we played.

Sorry boys, but she’s taken :)