» 2002 » December
Article posted on Dec 29
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- Posted by Ryan Finnie on December 29, 2002, 9:23 pm
That's it, I'm getting a new digital camera. My current camera isn't bad as far as the pictures it takes, but 1) there is no USB cable for transferring the images, just serial, 2) my laptop doesn't have a serial port, so I have to use the stupid usb-to-serial adapter, and 3) it's SmartMedia, but the camera is 4 years old, which was before a SmartMedia file format was standardized, so the cards are incompatible with the USB card readers out there. It took me a half hour to find the serial adapter tonight.
I got the last few weeks' photos up on my site. First comes the continued adventures of everybody's favorite thong! xiology's face got caught in one shot (and she's camera shy on odd-numbered days), so I got a little creative.
Tonight I arranged my entertainment center. Pictures found here.
Also, some pics from my (unsuccessful) attempt at cooking a pizza during a power outage.
And finally, a picture of myself sporting a goatee, which is all the rage these days...
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Article posted on Dec 27
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- Posted by Ryan Finnie on December 27, 2002, 6:47 pm
Pop quiz time! This one is REAL easy... if you don't know this, your right to live on this planet will be revoked. Enjoy!
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Article posted on Dec 26
A dim light brightens
- Posted by Ryan Finnie on December 26, 2002, 11:43 pm
<fo0bar> oh god, I just realized something
<fo0bar> Elijah Wood was the one in Deep Impact
<fo0bar> I'll never look at Frodo the same again
<fo0bar> ugh
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Article posted on Dec 26
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- Posted by Ryan Finnie on December 26, 2002, 7:48 pm
Get your own, mine's in the mail.
What's the scam you say? You either buy something from one of their sponsors or paypal $2 (I'd recommend the $2, most of the "sponsors" are pretty shifty). While the site itself looks questionable, it seems legit (the site's owner emailed me a couple minutes after I paid, and commented on the pic).
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Article posted on Dec 25
Chesnuts roasting on a $10k jackpot... (or something)
- Posted by Ryan Finnie on December 25, 2002, 12:55 pm
The UPS died about 10 minutes after I made my last post. So I played solitaire, read a bit, and generally got bored pretty fast. I got in the car and drove to the movie theater. Being christmas eve, it was dead empty. As luck would have it, ST Nemesis was starting when I got there. But that's a different post. Long story short, the movie wasn't bad. It wasn't good either, but it wasn't bad. YMMV.
I drove home at about 10:30, expecting the power to be on by now. (At 6PM, they said it would be another 2 hours). Nope, nada. On top of that, it's 38F in there, coming up on 10 hours without power or heat (I have a gas fireplace, but it's not enough to heat an entire townhouse). So I get back in the car and head for the Atlantis.
They have 2 types of rooms available. Motor lodge room for $30, or concierge suite for $65. I said to myself, "what the hell", and got the concierge suite. They gave
me a key card and directed me to a set of elevators dedicated to the concierge floors (20-25). Only keycards for rooms on 20-25 would activate the elevators. When I actually got to my room, I was less impressed. It was a standard hotel room. The "concierge suite services" on floor 25 had things that any decent hotel has these days: continental breakfast, cash bar, internet access (well, web access, it appears port 22 was blocked), bigscreen tv, etc. Still, it was $65. You can't get a room at a Super 8 in the bay area for that price.
I went back down to the first floor and wasted some time in the casino. Lost $5 in slots (slots should be illegal... they're addicting, but it seems nobody ever wins anything), and played roulette for an hour, walking away with -$20 at the end of the day. At about 11:30PM, power is lost at the casino level for about 5 minutes. It's an odd sensation to hear all the buzzing and ringing from the slot machines just cut off. However, all the table games continued, though it did halt my winning luck (I had won 3 split bets in a row before the power outage). Eventually the lights came back on, the cheap band started playing again, and the sounds of quarters plinking and sirens and crap from the slot machine resumed.
I got a semi-restful nights sleep. In the morning I took a shower, got some breakfast, went home, checked the clock to see when the power came back on, and called my parents to wish them a merry christmas.
The power came back a little after 1AM this morning. 12 hours. Jeesh.
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Article posted on Dec 24
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- Posted by Ryan Finnie on December 24, 2002, 6:07 pm
God bless Sierra Pacific and their five 8s of power availability.
It's cold. Cold cold cold. I got home at about 4:30PM, opened the front door and flipped on the hallway light switch. Nothing. "Damn burnt out bulb." So I walk into the living room and turn on the lamp. Nothing. "Huh? Wait, what's beeping upstairs." It was the UPS. Which has been performing pretty well. It has a cisco 806, modem, switch, and wap11 on it and is still kicking. Power could possibly have been out since 1PM, so that makes 5 hours for a UPS that advertises 100 minutes with "a desktop PC and a 15 inch monitor".
From monitoring the police band and hearing from pdx6, Sierra Pacific says another 2 hours. Ugh.
What's really annoying is that I came home with a papa murphys pizza, but can't heat it because my oven is electric. Bah.
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Article posted on Dec 24
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- Posted by Ryan Finnie on December 24, 2002, 3:06 pm
I bought a poof chair yesterday, and rearranged/redecorated my cubicle to make room for it (by "redecorate", I mean I lined the walls with "caution" tape). My cubicle now looks kickass; I must find my camera and show the world. It's not jwz-cubicle-quality, but I still like it.
It's christmas eve, and I'm sitting in my poof chair at work, upgrading the kernels on the RNO production machines from a hacked up 2.4.9 kernel that, at one time many moons ago was the default redhat 7.2 kernel (but has gone through many revisions of blahness), to a sleek new 2.4.20. And it boots fricking fast. Well, not the DL380s, but that's because it takes 3 minutes to go through the POST. The tradeoff for speed is compatibility. IE, it'll only work on 3 types of machines: Compaq DL320s and DL380s, and vmware with a scsi linux config. But it's fast. And it's less frankenstein-esque.
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Article posted on Dec 23
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- Posted by Ryan Finnie on December 23, 2002, 2:19 pm
Today is a very good day:
Linux blahblah.redundant.com 2.4.20 #1 Mon Dec 23 21:35:46 UTC 2002 i686 unknown
Finally got Linux compiled for the DL380 machines without using redhat's stock kernel as a base. Woo!
Also, I realized I have an emotional attachment to IDE disks. Sure, there are no IDE HDs in any of my servers, but I couldn't bring myself to compile a kernel without IDE disk support. I can't figure out why.
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Article posted on Dec 22
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- Posted by Ryan Finnie on December 22, 2002, 11:03 am
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Article posted on Dec 21
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- Posted by Ryan Finnie on December 21, 2002, 11:54 pm
Why do all DVD menus have to be totally stupid?
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