Random snippets

Watched Invincible this weekend. Good sports movie that has all of the typical feel-good elements that a sports movie has. I believe that it was well executed. If you like this kind of movie, you won't be disappointed.

Since I don't have any sort of entertainment connection aside from my DSL connection, I am often behind the times when it comes to the stuff I'm interested in. The British car show Top Gear did a segment on the Bugatti Veyron, arguably one of the fastest production cars ever. They've had 2 segments concerning this vehicle, the first a courier race between the aforementioned car and a private aircraft delivering a package from Alba, Italy to London, UK. My understanding is that the man driving the Veyron won handily.

The second, and much more interesting (in my opinion) segment that they did was testing the claimed top speed of the vehicle. Sucessfully. Roughly 250 miles per hour. Faster than most purpose built racing vehicles. The video above is a copy of that segment. It's rather impressive.

I caught this from Stumble Upon, which is one of the most informative time-wasters on the net, second only to Wikipedia. I've found more interesting car wallpaper and tech data that's good for my current job with StumbleUpon than I have with any other tool. It's available for IE and Firefox, so there's really no excuse to not at least try it.

I finally had to replace the mainboard on my game rig, as it had succumbed to the failing caps that it was using. I had played around with doing a full system upgrade, but decided that I need to replace my daily driver before I do that, (I'm looking for a Miata BTW. Closest thing you can get to a rear drive sports car that's affordable and fun to drive, in my opinion. The Mustang is a Pony car, and it's solid rear axle, while charming, moves it out of the sports car category. Ditto the Camero. But I digress...) as it is the second tool in my toolkit for work, the first being my brain. I managed to find a derivative board of the original for $90 delivered. Kind of expensive, considering that it's still a Socket A mainboard, with AGP video bus, but I suspect it will be as reliable as it's predecessor. Hopefully, moreso if the capacitor problem has been worked out.

The Maxima is doing allright, considering. It's getting time to replace a bunch of stuff on it, tho. The outer CV joints on both axles are shot. The only thing holding up the right front corner is the spring, as the strut is toast. These are just the pressing issues that need to be resolved, not including the rest of the work (AC, power seat belt motor intermittent, power steering, oil and transmission leaks... the list goes on) that it would take to make it a nice vehicle to drive again. My boss questions my sanity in driving it as a daily, but doesn't give me too much static about it. He did volunteer his wife's car for me to drive on a south Florida run because of the car, tho.

His wife drives a 2006 Mini Cooper S convertible. Shortly, it's a mixed bag. I don't think I could justify spending the coin on it, but the experience might be different with the hard top version.

The S motor is fairly potent. Coupled with the 6 speed auto, it's enough for you to know that it has the muscle to push the "little" (in parentheses due to it's curb weight of over 3000 pounds) car around with authority, even if it does have the 4 cylinder whine behind it.

The transmission has nice close ratios, and the bump-shift option makes an acceptable substitute for a clutch. I still think that a real clutch would make the vehicle launch much better.

The convertible top up makes it nearly impossible to see anything on the right side of the vehicle, even with mirrors adjusted. I lost a vehicle in that corner while passing it on the interstate. It has the usual complaints about convertibles (loud while the top's up, wind noise, blah blah blah), and I suppose the massive blind spot comes with the territory, but it's an awful price to pay in my opinion. The blind spot problem goes away with the top down, and the rest just fades, as you get the idea behind a convertible, but using it for a daily... I think I'd go mad. If it was a weekend car, or something that I just tracked with the top down, I think I'd overlook all of these problems. It's just too expensive to have as a "fun" car, tho.

I do like the cheeky sticker that's on the convertible top's button guard. I need to take a photo of it, but it says something to the effect of "Is it necessary to put the top up? Be honest." I felt that it was hilarious, if incongruous (It is made by BMW, after all) statement that was in the car.

Not that I was considering this as a replacement vehicle anyway, but it was just something that crossed my mind while I was typing here... So sue me, I'm a stream-of-consciousness writer.

I certanly hope that Microsoft is listening:

http://docs.google.com
If I recall correctly, "Groove", which is a part of the Office 2007 suite supports this kind of functionality, but I *LIKE* the idea of not being dependent on the machine for my documents. All I need is one of the two major web browsers( it appears that Opera is not supported yet) and an internet connection. Log on, create a document, when you're done, save it to local storage if you choose (in a variety of formats), print, or just leave on the server for later editing and log out.
Collaboration, revision history, spell checking, simple to moderate formatting (including image insertion), it's all there. Everything that 90% of the userbase of Word uses. Free. At least currently it's free. Google has the right to change that policy at a whim, but for now, it's a great FREE product, with Google's "don't be evil" motto and technology backing it up.
To put a twist on a famous advert:
Audience: Google is listening

How to defend your liberty, in four easy steps:

Use the following four boxes, in this order, starting now:

• Soap
  
• Ballot
  
• Jury
  
• Ammo
  

'nuff said.

Because I'm a WeirdAl fan...

Weird Al has a new album coming out at the end of September. Straight out of Lynwood promises to be more of the same from Weird Al: Witty, if sometimes juvenile, lyrics on top of music that's straight off of the charts.

I find that the more I listen to Weird Al, the more I appreciate his talent. He's a lyrical genius, *and* has his finger on the pulse of pop music. He can pull off *any* style seemingly effortlessly, and sometimes improve upon the original music. The group of musicians that surround him are all great studio guys.

The link above has a small sample of stuff that's going to be on the upcoming album. Have fun.

My life is what it is...

Nothing really new of note, aside from the fact that we're moving around the corner to a new apartment in 2 weeks. More space, better kitchen, add dishwasher, clothes washer/drier in unit, minus stairs. The extra coin is a bummer, but the nice extras far outweigh the burden of higher rent. Pics when we get moved.

Because I like to give links and props to things that pull my ass out of the fire

I am sometimes a typical user. We all have user moments, and I had one today.

I'm working on a collection of PERL scripts to parse and format a series of text files for me. I've been massaging this file for a while. Well, today, I fatfinger my keyboard and DELETE THE DAMN THING!!! BAH!!! I'M SUCH A USER!!! Well, I should be able to recover it, it's a modern file system...

Whaddya mean ReiserFS doesn't have a native undelete option. You're kidding right? You're not kidding.... Drat.

/me rummages through the warehouse of our benevolent almighty data overlords Google...

Ooooh... so THAT'S how you recover deleted files from ReiserFS.

I had to work on the file when I got it back, as it had been concatenated with about 120000 lines of other deleted files, but it was all there. Thanks DeePak.

Because fart jokes and stories are still funny...

Talk bass forum subject: Farting during a show

I finally set it back up...

I got my tiny Linux server running again, and serving web pages, shells, and X window sessions. I'm using Ubuntu this time around, because it seems to be a little bit more current than Debian, yet still using apt at its core, and some of the Debian repos to boot. I won't say that it's as nice of a server set up (some of the Apache packages were broken when I tried to get them the first time around), but it's an excellent desktop setup. Seeing as how that's the Ubuntu goal, I'd say that they're doing well. I'm actually posting this from that machine now, using a SSH tunneled remote X session with Cygwin. I haven't figured out how to "drop an icon on the Windows desktop to connect" yet, but I'm really close. I have plans on perhaps making this a media server in the entertainment center with a wireless card for network access to shares. This idea *really* appeals to me, as I can have it serve up tunes as well as web pages, and perhaps use the VGA out for video delivery, and control it all via a remote X session. Oh yes, there's potential.
The machine that I'm hosting on is a laptop with a bad battery (A Dell Inspiron 2650 to be exact), so it's really not useful as a portable laptop, unfortunately. Pentium 4M 1.4Ghz, 512MB RAM, and 10GB disk (I stole the original 20GB drive to use for portable storage. The 10GB drive came from another dead laptop we had at the shop), it does alright, and realistically is overkill for what little I'm doing with it currently. It's bungeed to the underside of my computer table (on one of the leg supports of one of those simple folding tables that you can get from any office supply store), so it's completely out of the way, and safe from feline and human jarring alike. I like the idea of using laptops as servers, as they tend to be quiet, consume less power, and (unlike this one, unfortunately. Batteries are not inexpensive for these units) have their own battery backup on board. Also, if you can't access the thing remotely, you already have a complete interface setup (keyboard, mouse, and display) on the unit, assuming that all are functional. Used laptops with damaged monitors or bad batteries can be had for a song from eBay, so while you lose one of the advantages of using a laptop, you keep the rest.
Hopefully, I can get some of the photos that I've taken in the past couple of years posted. Out of the several thousand snaps I've taken, I do have a few that I'm proud of. :)
What I *haven't* done is ride my motorcycle in a couple of weeks. I'll have to remedy that soon.

From the "mostly entertaining" category

The Right Brothers, Bush was right has to be one of the most entertaining bits of political satire that I've heard in quite a while. The Right Brothers are selling their stuff through their own website. I might just have to send them some coin.

A tiny bit late...

but this *really* takes the cake. Lemme set this up, and then offer more commentary:

The incident started with this: A woman pushes by Capitol Security, bypassing a metal detector. One of the officers repeatedly ask her to stop. He reaches to stop her. Something happens between these two.

Other facts remain to be said: The woman was House Representative Cynthia McKenney, GA, D.
All Congresscritters are given an ID pin of some sort that is supposed to make them easily identifiable to Capitol Security. I don't have an image of this to show that I can be certain of.
McKenney didn't have hers on.

Those are the facts as we know it. The rest is kinda fuzzy.

Please be forewarned, the rant tag is now ON, and turned to 11.

(Gee, a good use for the blink tag. Whodathunk?)

This congresscritter has the audacity to say this on her website:

Earlier today I had an unfortunate confrontation with a Capitol Hill Police Officer. It is traditional protocol that Capitol Hill Police Officers secure 535 Members of Congress, including 100 Senators. It is the expectation of most Members of Congress that Capitol Hill Police officers know who they are. I was urgently trying to get to an important meeting on time to fulfill my obligations to my constituents. Unfortunately, the Police Officer did not recognize me as a Member of Congress and a confrontation ensued. I did not have on my Congressional pin but showed the Police Officer my Congressional ID.

Please note the lack of apology, and the "well, he should have known" mentality. This being the USA, I don't really expect much more. The real thing that set me off was this from the Associated Press via The Ledger-Enquirer, a newsrag out of Columbus Georgia:

McKinney held a news conference Friday in Washington in which she said -- quote -- "This whole incident was instigated by the inappropriate touching and stopping of me, a female black congresswoman."

Allright girl, where do you get off bringing gender and race into this subject? If it had been some no name white male senator, that the officer didn't recognize (and I'd imagine it's even *easier* to forget those guys faces... more than half of the congresscritters are older white males), this would have had the *exact same ending*. Being late for a meeting does not give you a free pass by protocol. All the times you got a free passes from Capitol security before don't count either. Those guys were slacking. The guy was doing the one thing he gets paid for: his JOB.
The irony of this is, if someone actually gets by security, and nukes the hell out of the place, whose fault is it? Capitol security. Funny how she feels that she should get to break the rules, when it's *her* life on the line if other people who may want to do harm to the nation may also get to break the rules as well.
This just makes me fume. Almost as much as the Pat Robertson deal. Almost. It also makes me sad for the state of our nation's government. There was a time where this would have been a non-story. I don't remember this time first hand, but I've read about it. I wish for less government in our lives, for my sake, and the sake of my generation's children.