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Article posted on Jan 28
No Title
- Posted by Ryan Finnie on January 28, 2003, 3:32 pm
Please stop these stupid[0] useless annotations[1]. Thank you[2].
[0] You all suck.
[1] I'm naked right now.
[2] Mention this post for a free latte at the center camp.
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Article posted on Jan 27
*sigh*
- Posted by Ryan Finnie on January 27, 2003, 5:44 pm
I guess the description is pretty accurate. I'm definitely flakey, my memory is horrible... back in high school, everbody knew me ("hey ryan" -- "hi, umm, *low-key mumble*, how you doing?")... I'm PRETTY sure I'm well-liked...
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Article posted on Jan 27
No Title
- Posted by Ryan Finnie on January 27, 2003, 1:41 pm
Every time I walk into Wild Oats, I think "goddamn hippie freaks". They have good salad though. The checkout guy asked "paper or plastic", and I responded by asking if the paper bags were certified organic. I don't think he got the joke.
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Article posted on Jan 23
If you play with fire, you're gonna get burned
- Posted by Ryan Finnie on January 23, 2003, 8:09 pm
A couple years ago I bought a 20 hour tivo (contains a 22GB HD), and upgraded it by adding an 80GB drive. To be absolutely safe, I copied the original A drive to a new 30GB HD (since it's hard to find 22GB drives), and put away the original A drive. However, the technology was not around at the time to expand that drive to use the extra 8GB; all I could do was add the 80GB B drive, but I was happy with that.
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Article posted on Jan 20
Goodbye, sweet f00f...
- Posted by Ryan Finnie on January 20, 2003, 5:42 pm
# uptime
12:35AM up 438 days, 23:30, 1 user, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
# shutdown -h +5
Shutdown at Tue Jan 21 00:40:26 2003.
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Article posted on Jan 20
No Title
- Posted by Ryan Finnie on January 20, 2003, 1:16 am
Kaspersky Antivirus is cool. I'm working on deploying it on our mail servers. $50/machine/year, and it sounds like the price is well worth it. I got a demo key for the linux product, which expires at the end of 2004. Oh well, I guess the legit thing to do is to actually buy the licenses. :) I'm using qmail-scanner as a conduit between qmail and Kaspersky, and it's working rather well. The biggest problem is the extra latency needed to run the scan. It only takes less than a second to actually scan the message, but takes an average of 10-15 seconds to break up the message's parts and write them to temporary files. I was bummed that it didn't catch the latest virus going around, but then I realized I was using a virus database that was A WHOLE WEEK old. Downloading the latest daily update caught it right away. So I hacked together a shell script to download the updates every day.
This week I'll also set up the public ftp server. It's an old Dell PowerEdge 350 with 2x60GB disks. It was Redundant's windows file sharing server up until a week ago (and was the first computer that Redundant had, back before we had these funky "datacenter" things), but Ian reported that Windows was reporting seek errors on the hard drives. Turns out the hard drives are IBM DeskStar 60GB disks, which as we all know are utter crap. However, Dell is stupid and won't take back the drives unless their diagnostic software reports errors (which of course they didn't). I guess I'll keep using the disks, since it's more or less disposable use.
Actually, it's primary purpose will be a temporary storage area for copying over stuff from RDU that needs to be backed up (we only have one tape jukebox, in RNO). The rest of the space will be used, along with our excess bandwidth, for serving various mirrors. As it stands right now, we're hosting some ISOs off a development server willy-nilly. This new machine will be a bit more public and a bit more structured. I was looking for something to mirror for us to be an "official" mirror site. php.net's download/documentation section was out since they're basically saying on their site "we have enough US mirrors, go away". Besides, we already have a donated dedicated box and bandwidth that the PHP group maintains for rsync and snaps. Redhat would be cool, but they don't seem to have a public rsync server, nor any instructions on how to become a mirror site. I wonder how their other mirrors do it...
Then it hit me: kernel.org. Their FTP archive is relatively small (their site says 11GB), they have relatively easy-to-follow instructions on becoming a mirror, and Linux is a cool thing to mirror I guess... I've been rsyncing the better part of the evening; 7.6GB and counting...
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Article posted on Jan 19
Harry Poter and the Mysterious T-Shirt
- Posted by Ryan Finnie on January 19, 2003, 4:44 pm
I was digging through a closet today and found a black DNA Lounge t-shirt. But I don't remember ever buying this shirt. I've only been to the DNA Lounge twice, and I'm pretty sure I didn't buy anything (besides cover and drinks, of course). It looks like it hasn't been worn much, but is balled up and wrinkled (as are most things in my closet). Hmmm...
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Article posted on Jan 18
Best Buy fucked me over. As usual.
- Posted by Ryan Finnie on January 18, 2003, 11:18 am
You know all those nice things I said about Best Buy on monday? Never mind.
Before I bought nearly $500 worth of car stereo crap, I specifically mentioned 1) what make/model/year car it was, 2) I had a factory stereo, which I wasn't going to get rid of, and 3) I wanted to know all installation charges and get them paid for when I bought the equipment. I paid for all of it and went on my merry way.
Today I went back to drop off my car. The install tech looked through the car, writing down misc things, then gave me the good news: it would be another $120 in "special labor and parts" to get it installed. One of the parts needed was a wiring harness to attach to the factory stereo system so it could accept RCA inputs. That sent me over the edge. Typical best buy shit: I get a promise that everything I needed was included, then they hit me with other charges. It has happened before. Funny thing is, if I would have just known about the extra charges on monday, I probably would have bought the equipment anyways.
The salesperson who sold me the crap happened to be working, but he convieniently remembered almost nothing about the transaction, despite spending over an hour with me on Monday. The manager was no help either, saying something to the effect of "well we can't anticipate everything that is needed to install equipment." I mentioned that it took a tech 2 minutes to determine what was needed (which could have been done while I was buying), and said tech said that every factory stereo needs a wiring kit, which contradicted points 2 and 3 above. Her response was, verbatim, "Well this is was it takes to install your equipment. Or do you want to do it yourself?" "No, I'm going to return all of this equipment." "Sure, whatever." (I shit you not, she said that. I wouldn't even expect a best buy manager to say something like that.)
I went back to the installation bay to get my keys back and rip up the installation paperwork. The tech refused, saying he needed a copy. I insisted. He drooled. I threatened to call the police (at this point I wouldn't have put it by them to try to use that sheet and my estimate signature to show that I somehow owed them that money). He drooled. I took out my cellphone and dialed 411. "Reno please, police non-emergency" "Okay okay, I can't let you have the paperwork but I'll scribble over your information." "And the estimate signature..." "*grumble*"
So I got my car, gathered the equipment and went back to the customer service desk. Everything was unopened in their boxes except 1) the sub box's cardboard box was at home and 2) the bass filters were installed in my car. I lied and said the box was an open item and they had to ring it up by the sku number when I paid for it (yeah, like I have any problem with ethics and lying at this point). As for the filters, fate shined down on me. The brand name was "Install Edge", and the person at the return counter assumed it was another installation charge, and credited those back too. So at least I know I screwed best buy out of $20 for those.
It's still going to be a pain in the ass to remove those and resplice the orignal wires. Fuckers.
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Article posted on Jan 17
No Title
- Posted by Ryan Finnie on January 17, 2003, 11:37 pm
Summary for the impatient (like myself): Tomorrow I go to best buy to get the amp/sub installed. I installed bass filters tonight. It was hard. It worked.
Tomorrow morning I'm bringing my car into Best Buy to pick up the amp and get everything installed. One thing I didn't pay for installation on was the bass filters on the speakers, which sounded easy to do myself. It's kinda funny that in order to get MORE bass out of my new system, I have to have the speakers do LESS bass. But the best buy guy explained it pretty well; the filters are needed so you can assign more power to the speakers, while at the same time having power available for the amp/sub itself.
In retrospect, I should have done it during the daytime. It was a pain in the ass to take apart my car using a flashlight. The back speakers were pretty easy, once I figured out how to disassemble the back dashboard. Now, what you have to do to install the filters is splice it into the positive wire going to the speaker. The trouble is, nothing is labeled. The wires just go into a wiring harness attached to the speaker. But the wires were red and white, so I made an educated guess and assumed the red wire was positive. I spliced in the filter, then moved on to the other back speaker. But the wire colors were... blue and pink? Turns out each speaker was colored differently. But again, an educated guess said that the darker color was positive. Nothing blew up, so I guess I was right.
On to the front speakers. Turns out the speaker casing is molded into the door's plastic, and for the life of me, I couldn't figure out how to disassemble the inside door casing. However, I found out that if I removed the door's console (that controls the power locks/windows), I had access to the speaker's wire pair. But it was a VERY tight squeeze. Took me about an hour of fiddling on each speaker, and my fingers are VERY sore from constantly rubbing against the sharp plastic on the sides. However, I eventually prevailed. Yay me.
I started the car and tested out each of the speakers. They all responded. Then I balanced the speakers again and listened to a song that had a lot of bass. It didn't sound any different. I thought about it for awhile, then realized that I was comparing this to my old car's stereo (since I have been riding in the old car for the last couple days), which is pretty much crap when it comes to bass. So yeah, the filters did work.
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Article posted on Jan 14
No Title
- Posted by Ryan Finnie on January 14, 2003, 3:11 pm
Alas, 415-987-PERL is dead. My contract finally expired, and I have cancelled my at&t service from when I lived in the bay area. A truly sad moment. Funeral services will be held this weekend.
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