Geek at Play

RIP Mitch Hedberg

One of my favorite comedians (probably my absolute favorite) has passed away. Mitch Hedberg died this week in his hotel room. I love his albums and the DVD I have, but I’ll never get the chance to see hime live. This makes me truly sad.

I’m against picketing, but I don’t know how to show it.
– Mitch Hedberg

rsync and vfat

It took several tries, and a lot of poking around, but I finally have my music collection mirrored to a disk I can take around (most notably to work). The hard part was getting rsync to work right. Finally I got it working after finding a helpful article on the topic. To summarize (in less than 3 pages), I used to following 2 commands:

mount -t vfat -o shortname=mixed,iocharset=utf8 /dev/sda1 /mnt
rsync --modify-window=1 -rtv --delete /data/mp3/ /mnt/mp3

Now I won’t lose them, and maybe they’ll help you. The only reason for having problems is that I was using the vfat filesystem under FC3 Linux (where my custom-built audio archive exists) to make a disk I could plug in to my work laptop. Windows filesystems aren’t so great, they have problems doing mixed case and being very accurate with times. So this makes it work!

SBC sucks

Well, I think I’m officially going to try to avoid using SBC for phone service in the future. I’ve been trying to call today to make some changes to my account (since competition has made stuff cheaper) and they keep saying that they are unable to take my call. Just a recording. All their customer service lines. Great.

I fell

Yesterday was a big day for me. I started by driving down to the Monterey area and jumping out of an airplane with my best friend Liz. Then I hustled back to a dinner party at my neighbors’ that ended up being a Persian New Year celebration (amazing food and lively company). Once that was all said and done, I headed up to SF to go dancing at a psi-trance thing up at the Blue Cube. It turns out that it is pretty amazing how well you can fill your days if you really try to.

On skydiving, it was really a pretty amazing experience. It was marred a little bit by the fact that we had to wait for about 3 hours before going. As expected, people who jump out of planes aren’t real big on organization and scheduling; the “reservation time” we had was fairly pointless. But once it happened, the experience was beyond words. I was mostly dumbstruck as I hopped from a plan and just fell for 60 seconds. It was so unreal that I kind of disconnected from it. Some part of me refused to believe that it really could be happening. Except for some bruising around the shoulders and the fact that I was too big for the harness (and probably for the guy strapped to my back), it went wonderfully. I might have to do it again. Liz, ever the adrenaline junkie, is convinced that it will become her next hobby!

Oh, and it is worth noting that I didn’t bother to tell any part of my family about it until afterward. On the way back to RWC, I called the folks to let them know. I said, “Guess what, I just jumped out of an airplane.” True to form, my father immediately dead-panned, “You idiot”, and promptly laughed.

Ugly

Crap. Some guy found one of my especially-awful old pictures (taken because it was funny) and decided to use it as fodder for a marginally funny web page that makes me look like some sort of freak. Ok, maybe it is the picture that makes me look like some sort of freak. But it’s my job to mock myself, not his! I’m under the label “Broadi”; that’s what my hair looked like after 2 hours in a convertible.

Fortunately, he was dumb enough to just point to the image on my server. Thanks to the miracles of SetEnvIf, I plan to replace the picture with something embarassing. For him, not me.

WP and Amazon

I’ve decided to make the world a better place by putting out a quick little hack of a plugin for WordPress to take care of linking to ASIN numbers on Amazon for you. It’s really just a thing to handle the fact that I had a similar hack back when I was on MT. I didn’t want to go find all the occurrences of it in my post archive.

I’m also happy to note that a patch of mine made it into the SVN repository although I was not given credit by name. Hrm. That always bugs me.

Hands

Man, my hands are swollen again today. It’s one of those strange things that happens with some regularity and I think it relates to my workouts. I had a nice, hefty workout on my back and biceps last night. Everything involved in working on my back involves gripping something and pulling (as opposed to chest, where the weight can effectively just rest on your hands as you push). Now, this morning, my favorite little silver ring doesn’t fit.

Oh well, I jammed it on far enough to stick (and far enough that I can’t get it off). Give it a couple hours and it’ll settle into place.

Sacrifice to the cooking gods

Well, I finally made a sacrifice to the cooking gods tonight. mitchn and I have decided to cook for ourselves lately in hopes of imroving our health, dropping a few unwanted pounds, and having some fun. Well, I was having fun right up until the point where I got a little ahead of myself during onion-chopping. Blammo, sharp knife almost a 1/4″ into my thumb and nail. D’oh! I guess that is some sort of rite of passage. I’ve shed some virgin cook’s blood.

The beef stroganoff still turned out to be a darn good (if a little plain) meal.

New CMS, ahoy

So, I’ve switched to the WordPress blog/CMS system. There was just something about MT that drove me nuts. So far, I like that I can everything I want in one place (both regular pages and blog-ness). It is a little awkward, but at least I can easily hack it.