Starry Wisdom

While in the process of moving, and while I had no reliable internet at home, I used my shell at dreamhost, which you know, I pay for, to use IRC. Evidently they are of the belief that only hackers use IRC, so they disabled my web sites thinking they were hacked, and because I had old installs of wordpress around (not active, not reachable via web…).

Anyway, I tarred up the old stuff to make it even less intrusive, updated my gallery to the current version (which really was a ‘problem’ on my end, I guess), and set it back up. So welcome back to me!

I’ve been meaning to post for a couple of weeks about strawberries. Really, I have. But I’ve been too busy (more on that in a later date), and also, I had to go on my first work trip in over 7 years this past weekend, on something like 7 hours notice.

The nice part about the trip was that it was to Chicago, so I was able to see some family and friends. This, of course, included my nephew Milo, who is super great, and I can’t wait to see again next month for his first birthday!

And, even though I had to extend my stay by an extra night, I was able to accomplish what we needed to accomplish on the customer visit.

I hope to have the time to post something more interesting (well, at least less useless, but probably also less cute) soon, as I have a couple of things backlogged.

Friday night I had originally planned to go to a happy hour, but the general crappy weather made me decide to stay in. I tried my hand at making salted caramels, but I screwed it up, and they never set properly. Part of the problem was that I couldn’t get the sugar syrup hot enough without burning it using my crappy pan. I need a new sauce pan! I ended up with a decent tasting, very thick, caramel sauce, that would have been good on ice cream, but instead most of it went in the trash. I shall try again.

Saturday I spent the morning doing my Spanish homework at one of my favorite cafes, and I got home just in time to see the new Doctor Who. Yes, I know it’s not BBC America for another two weeks, but trust me, I watched, it and it was good.

Steven Moffat was always my favorite writer of the resurrected series, and this episode was as good as one could hope for. Of course it remains to be seen how the rest of the season pans out, particularly the episodes that he didn’t write, but I feel like the show is in good hands. And to quote my friend Steve – “Who would have thought 10 years ago that the Coupling guy would become god’s gift to doctor who after taking over from the Queer as Folk dude?” Indeed, indeed.

Sunday’s awesomeness started out with Brunch at Home, which features a ‘create your own Bloody Mary” bar. Good stuff. And from there it continued to me watching the 10th Annual Bring Your Own Big Wheel event, which conveniently took place about a block from my apartment. It was raining quite viscously, so I have to commend the crazies who risked life and limb going down the tight curves down steep Vermont St. Click though the image below for my entire gallery.

White socks are boring, but if you wear sneakers 90% of the time, it’s a good bet you’ll be wearing a lot of white socks. I wear sneakers at least 90% of the time, so most of my socks are white. And, over the past 3-4 years, my ‘collection’ migrated from calf length to ankle length. This was all well and fine until my left ankle decided it had taken enough abuse over the years and it started hurting me pretty much all the time.

My primary care doctor was baffled by my ankle, since I could support weight on it, hop on it, do whatever I wanted, it just hurt. So he sent me to get an Xray and to see a specialist, who told me that the tendons were inflamed, and that I should wear a brace for 6 weeks. I did this, and my ankle was feeling much better, but he said that really, I should get an MRI to see what’s really going on. The MRI showed a ‘loose body’ near the joint, as well as some damage to the ligament, and these were the primary problems – the inflamed tendons were a side effect of this other damage – and these problems are most likely a side effect of me breaking that ankle when I was 14.

The upshot to all of this is that since the end of January I’ve been wearing the ankle brace pretty much all of the time. The brace is fairly comfortable, that’s not a big deal, but you really need to wear a calf length sock with it. Luckily I still had a few of those left over from the old days (as well as my fancier and heavier hiking socks), so I could get by, but socks became my laundry limiter, instead of underwear, and since I don’t have laundry facilities in my building, doing laundry is sort of a pain in the ass. While the brace was going to be a short term solution, I figured I would just deal with it…

However now that I know what the real problem is, and that it requires surgery to fix (thankfully pretty routine surgery), and that I don’t want to be hobbling around in the summer, I am going to need to wear the brace for quite a while longer. I’m planning on surgery in November (so as to be after my birthday – I guess I can see if I can do very late october too), which is 6 more months of brace wearing prior to surgery, and then there will be months of wearing afterwards.

All of this is a long way of saying that I bought 20 pairs of calf length crew socks at target the other day, and my ankle length socks are going to be taken out of the drawer and put into a box under my bed for the time being. Also, congratulations if you read this far!

I’m not sure if I posted about this, in fact I’m quite positive I didn’t, but back in September my Windows computer died. It was nearly five years old so this wasn’t completely unexpected. It wasn’t the end of the world either, as I mostly use my laptop. But still, it served a function as my media server, so it needed to be replaced.

Out of laziness, instead of building my own, I ordered a mid tier Dell system, which came with WIndows Vista, but also a free upgrade to Windows 7, which was due to be released within a couple of months. I was loathe to run Vista, but the free upgrade cheered me up somewhat.

I finally got my upgrade DVD in December, but I dragged my feet in installing it. In hindsight, I really should have done it last week while I was off of work, but alas. Instead I just killed two weeknights dealing with the ‘upgrade’ and its fallout.

First of all, because I’m crazy, I decided I might as well see if the actual upgrade functionality would work, as opposed to doing a fresh install of Windows 7. I didn’t really have anything of value on the OS drive, so I could deal with a clean wipe, but I guess I wanted to see how elegant Microsoft could be. The answer is not at all, and I was forced to do a fresh install after wasting 2 hours doing the upgrade process. Pretty sad, since the install only took about 45 minutes. And now things were OK. Except they weren’t.

I alluded above to the fact that I had more than one drive in the computer. The second drive was the hard drive from my old, dead machine, which was filled with various media files (video and audio). Was is the key term here, since that drive perished in the upgrade. Actually, I’m pretty sure I know what happened to it, and it seems it’s half my fault for not keeping my drive’s firmware up to date (hah, clearly everyone needs to do that!). There is a bug on particular Seagate Barracudas, of which my drive is one, where upon bootup the drive can basically become a spinning brick. All your data is there, but since you cannot talk to the disk, you cannot retrieve it. The only solace to me in this is that I am 99% sure I have all the music on my old Ipod, which I can pull back off it. Oh, and that I can get a warranty replacement.

And now we come to the third woe: my wireless router is a piece of crap. I always knew that the Linksys WRT54G that I had was a less desirable version (v6 if you must know) but because it worked pretty well, I didn’t care. But now my new printer (bought to replace my more than nine year old deskjet that barely worked with Vista, and based on an experience at Erin’s with Windows 7, I figured I was best served with spending $100 to enter the modern age. Oh and I would be getting a scanner and a copier at the same time), which is fully wireless, taught me why that router might not be so great.

You see, I configured the printer to use my wireless network, and it seemed to be happy. But when I tried to find it on my laptop, no luck. And please remember, on this first night, I wasn’t done futzing around with the desktop, so I had no other way to test the printer. It just seemed like it wasn’t working. But on the second night, I found I was able to connect to the printer if I plugged it onto the router via wired ethernet. And on the third night, I learned that my wired windows computer could connect to the printer when it was connected wirelessly to the router. A bit more fooling around with devices and I determined:

So everything works except two wireless devices which try to talk to each other. I am mostly certain, but cannot be positive that this used to work. I decided to see what I could do to debug this, but the router’s web interface doesn’t really give you much to see. Then I looked up custom firmware to see if that would help me debug, and it turns out it probably would, but the dd-wrt website told me I should just sell the old router and get a better one. I don’t think I’ll be selling my neutered router, although I might see if someone at work wants it for free, but I did order a WRT54GL. The L stands for linux, and it’s basically Linksys admitting it was evil with the later revisions of the router. The first thing I’ll do is get the custom firmware on the new router, and after I get that working, I’ll unleash the old one on someone at work.

Anyway, there was a lot of rambling here, but I think you can see how this defends my thesis, I HATE COMPUTERS. At least some of the time, when I don’t really like them.

I’m trying to decide if I should do NANOWRIMO this year or not. For the record, I’ve attempted it every year since 2003, not getting too far that first year, due to job searching, but completing it in 2004, 2005, 2007 and 2008 (in 2006 I only got to about 45,000 words, due to moving in November).

I’m trying to fathom if I have the desire to go through with it again, knowing that if I want to I can complete it (most of the stuff I’ve done has been incredibly stupid, but hey, it’s easier to write stupid than smart). It’s a lot of hours of time blocked off, when I could just as well be doing something else, either more or less useful. I have a seed of an idea, but I would have to spend some time prethinking of it before I could actually write on it, which means even more time spent.

Should I or shouldn’t I? I have 26 days left to decide!

Talking to Paul at work today, he surmised that it might be that the encoding was off, and instead of the receiver thinking that the dialog should go to the central channel (in phase on L and R inputs) it should go to the rear channel (out of phase on L and R inputs). I guess that’s a bit simplified for how Prologic works, but the upshot of this talk is that I hooked up my surround speakers to see if the audio was going backwards. Well, no, now it is properly going to the CENTER CHANNEL. Which is great, it works now, but that means that netflix had a bug the other night.

I’m pretty annoyed right now. For reasons that I really don’t understand, This American Life Season 2, as seen by Netflix Watch Instantly on Xbox 360 Live was not working properly. The music was working fine, and some sound effects, but not the dialog.

Now, I think I should explain a bit how things are wired up. The component output goes into the TV, and the stereo audio outputs WERE going into the satellite inputs on my receiver. This has worked perfectly fine since I bought the 360 last fall – but not tonight. I tried two separate episodes of the series, and both “failed”. I tried some other instant watchable Netflix and it worked. I futzed around with the surround settings on the receiver, and occasionally was able to hear Ira Glass, sounding like he was at the bottom of a well. I turned off the 360 in disgust.

On a whim, I tried moving the audio outputs to the VCR inputs on the receiver, and lo-and-behold it just works. I really am not sure why the receiver input matters in this case, but there’s bound to be an explanation. Maybe one of me 5 readers knows. If not it will just be a mystery to me.

I slept the wrong 6 hours last night. Basically from 7:30pm until 1:30am. I watched some tv until 3, then tried to sleep again, and at 4:45 decided it wasn’t going to happen, so I showered and went in to the office. An hour or so late, I’ve finished going through my email from the past week, and I am ready to start doing work. Stupid Jetlag!

Moving day is Monday, so my primary activity this weekend is packing. I feel like it is going at a reasonable rate, but it is super tiring. Also it’s all dusty up behind desks and what not – and my skin is all itchy, and I have either a bug bite, or a particularly bad reaction to dust or some other substance I’ve come in to contact with on my left forearm. Seeing as the skin there is sensitive (just below the elbow on the inside) it’s probably a reaction, and I am glad I have some prescription caliber topical steroids around…

Time for a short break playing Fallout 3.