Brian's Blog

Hehe. You just gotta love Jib-Jab.

I don't personally use Speakeasy and wasn't going to initially blog about this. However, after reading my friend Ricardo's post entitled We're Totally Screwed I have to say I also have some trepidation about the acquisition. Like I've said, I don't use Speakeasy, but I have wanted to for years and couldn't due to service not being available. Anyone who hasn't been sleeping under a rock knows that Speakeasy is well known for it's outstanding customer service and for employing technicians who have a clue. At most other ISP's clueful technical help is somewhere between rare and non-existent which I'm sure has been a reason for Speakeasy's success.

We use Speakeasy at work so we were sent the announcement E-mail about this. One particular paragraph kind of made me chuckle a bit.

Best Buy, like Speakeasy, is known for its high level of customer service. Our reputation as a trusted provider of voice and data services with stellar customer service will not change. Our values are similar too -- Best Buy shares our customer passion, respect for individuals, and drive to do the right thing while achieving results.

Best Buy is far from being known for it's customer service. I'm not just repeating what I've read on this subject as I've had several horrible experiences there myself. If I only had one issue I'd call it a fluke, but having had several I can't believe it's just bad luck. Usually I make a point of avoiding Best Buy if I at all possibly can. I think the only store I avoid more is Walmart.

Even so, the letter does claim that, "All aspects of your service will continue to be managed by Speakeasy and the excellent service and support you expect will continue uninterrupted." Well, that sounds good. Hopefully Best Buy will learn a bit of something from Speakeasy rather than the other way around. It'll be interesting to see if anything noticeable changes. As long as Speakeasy stays Speakeasy I'd still be open to switching if they ever come to my area. And if Best Buy becomes more like Speakeasy I'd be open to frequenting their stores again.

During the Monica Lewinsky scandal when Clinton resisted having his aids testify before Congress Tony Snow had the following to say.

Taken to its logical extreme, that position would make it impossible for citizens to hold a chief executive accountable for anything. He would have a constitutional right to cover up. - Tony Snow, White House Press Secretary

OK then. So, what is it? Does the Legislative Branch have over site of the Executive or does it not? Are we a monarchy or a republic?

I'm not even sure what to say about this. This is the sort of thing that scares the crap out of me. But he really said it. Watch for yourself. The videos can be found on Alternet.

UPDATE: It has also been written about at The Daily Kos. This article says it much better than I could. I quote:

With Snow's blunt declaration of independence, any remaining illusion that the executive branch continues to act as part of the government is removed. If this interpretation holds, if the congress can not exert authority over the executive, then we are a democracy in name only.

Whatever you do, do not install Dropline Gnome on your system if you think you might every want to remove it. I installed it to see what it was about and to try and get updated libraries and other thingies that some Gnomish programs rely on. In my case it was to try out Cedega for playing games in Linux. Other than that one app, I really don't need Gnome. So, I decided to uninstall Cedega and Dropline along with it as it wasn't needed anymore. Afterwords my system started acting very strange. Programs sort of half worked. Some started crashing with Segfaults and other good fun. I had read somewhere that Dropline will kill your system if you ever remove it and now I believe them.

Previously I had Freerock Gnome installed which worked fine but was beginning to age. The build that was installed was actually built for Slackware 10.2 (I'm using 11.0) and the project seems to have stagnated pretty badly. Freerock is much more preferred as it is intentionally designed to be an noninclusive as possible.

To get my system working again I had to restore the root partition from a 2 week old backup. All my data sits on a separate partition so the age of the back wasn't that big of a deal. If I didn't have a backup the only practical solution would have been to reinstall. As it stands now the time spent on just trying to get it working is almost equal to doing a base install. About 10 minute after starting the restore my system was back up and running stable again.

I just saw a few days ago that there was an update to the Slackware-current Changelog. I was beginning to wonder when the next update was going to be. To be fair though it really hasn't been all that long since 11.0 was released. I'm not sure if it's official but it looks like Slackware is finally switching to the 2.6.x.x series of kernels. I really like Slackware but the one thing that was taking way to long was switching to 2.6. I'm no expert an I'm sure Patrick Volkerding has his reasons but it would have been nice to have an easy option in the setup routine to choose between 2.4 and 2.6. You could sort of do it but then it required manually finding the modules and headers package and using installpkg to install those too. It's not really a big deal for a seasoned Slackware user to do that but the convenience would have been nice. In either case, from a look at the changelog it looks like 2.6 is required which will be a welcome change.

The upgrade process explained in CHANGED_AND_HINTS.TXT looks a bit onerous though. Perhaps it will get better but I don't think it will matter so much for me as I'm thinking of a fresh install anyway. My current install has been upgraded since 9.0 (or maybe 9.1) if I recall correctly and is beginning to develop some cruft. It'll be somewhat painful until I get things just right again but it'll be nice to start with a clean slate. Slackware 9.0 was released in March of 2003 so this install has been around for about 4 years or so without any major problems. Not a bad run I think. Wow, 4 years, has it been that long? Normally I keep my system updated to current but am thinking of holding off until it's farther along in development. Maybe I'll even wait till it's released before taking plunge. I get the impression that things are changing a lot for this next release.

On a somewhat related note I've decided to finally give Ubuntu a shot on a spare system. I had to install the kubuntu-desktop package as I can't stand Gnome. It looks pretty nice so far though. I need to get more familiar with it's package management system though. So far I've figure out it has apt-get, aptitude, and synaptic as ways to manage your packages. Each one has it's advantages and disadvantages but I'm not sure just what those are yet. I did get Beryl working on it briefly and it looked really nice but never got it to work again. I'm not sure what changed as it was working before I went to bed and the next day it wouldn't run. Unless the gremlins stopped by and messed with things nothing was changed by me overnight. Beryl looks like it is still very experimental though so I can't complain about instability.

It may not seem like it having said all of the above, but prepping for the 70-296 exam continues. I've just about finished getting more familiar with the Windows Certificate Authority stuff which is something we actually use at work. As always, prepping seems to take longer than anticipated. I tend to over prepare for these exams and can't seem to break away from that. I'd rather study to know the material than study to just pass the test. At $125 a try, pass or fail, I hate to take chances.

OK, I think I'm done rambling now.

I'm surprised. Within two hours of sending my E-mail to Tom's Hardware I had a reply and the feed was fixed. I generally expect that when a site gets large that they stop caring about the little guy sending them feedback. But it seems that hasn't happened in this case.

Darn Cool.

Today at work I was reminded of Tom's Hardware Guide. I figured that they had to have an RSS feed somewhere and I was right. However, when I added it to my aggregator I got an Invalid character at line 8, column 227 error. I've never had an issue adding any other feed to fofredux before. So I found this cool Feed Validator to check who was at fault, fofredux or the feed itself. It turns out that the main feed on Tom's Hardware is not valid, which actually surprises me as you can't get much more technical than the guys at Tom's Hardware. I've E-mailed them to let them know but I don't know if it'll actually get fixed. Still, I wanted to add it to my feeds before I forgot. To do this I stumbled on FeedBlendr which lets you merge multiple feeds into one. I only put the feed for Tom's Hardware and it seems that FeedBlendr can handle the malformed RSS just fine and presents me with a valid feed that I can actually add successfully. It's like kind of a silly way to do things but it works for now.

Back in the day Tom's used to be the place to go for hardware info. It's been literally years since I've read much of anything there. I hope they are still just as useful.

I have no great insight on this subject. After all I'm only a computer geek, not an environmental scientist but wow are they raking this guy over the coals in a serious way. Check out the 14.5 minute long (approx) video.

I've heard of these mysterious edits to the EPA Report on Climate Change but didn't realize there were any over site hearings going on. It's good to see our government starting to get back on it's feet with some accountability, at least on some subjects. Oddly enough, this stuff seems to have started happening when the Democrats took the majority in the House and Senate in November. This is the sort of thing that should happen regardless of the political party.

A quick search for the phrase "global warming report edits" seems to come up with a slew of hits on the subject. Now, I haven't done extensive reading on the it having gotten most of my news from NPR or Democracy Now. Still, my hunch is that this doctoring of information is happening and that it's not exactly a new concept. Especially by this already proven untrustworthy administration that we have. But, obviously, that is just my opinion for whatever it is worth.

I think this will be an interesting story to follow. Who needs soap operas when you have this sort of thing to watch!

I'm not sure if this is useful, but I needed a bit of a diversion and felt like playing with some XHTML. I've created individual RSS feels for the different categories that I have and modified the main index template to show them in the Syndicate section on the right. This version of Nanoblogger has always been able to make category feeds but I never implemented them.

Hopefully this is my last Nanoblogger horah before changing to something else.

Well, I can't believe I missed it. Just three days ago it was Pi Day and I was asleep at the wheel. I'm not a math geek and I've never even made the connection of 3/14 being Pi Day until I saw this posted on boing boing. Apparently they had pointed it out on 3/14 but I missed it. Still, I don't need much of an excuse to have a celebration and to eat yummy pies so I think I'll add this day to my calendar.

I wonder if I can push to have this be an official paid holiday at work?

After many months of having the ingredients sitting in a box I've finally got off my lazy arse and decided to brew some beer. It's been a good long time. To bad it takes 3-4 week (minimum) to get drinkable beer because I'm kind of in the mood for one now!

Anyway, the recipe for this time around is called 3 Spice Lemon Weiz and it a wheat beer. Something I've never made before and I don't think I've ever had wheat beer at all. Hopefully I'll like it. The description sure sounds good though:

If you're looking to brew something a little out of the ordinary, this sharp and zesty wheat beer will be right up your alley. The blend of brown spices and fruity esters abound in every complex and contemplative sip of 3 Spice Lemon Wheat.

In addition to the canned Malt/Hops mix that you get with the recipe it also calls for lemon juice, coriander seed, nutmeg, and cinnamon. The wort smelled pretty good before I put it in the keg. So, in two weeks or so if I'm lucky I'll be bottling it up and getting onto the next recipe in the queue, Defibrillator Doppelbock.

It turns out that the photo album that I had the pictures I took of some of the things I've made from leather was sitting on the very top of the pile! Having found them so easy I decided to scan them in right away. This brings my photo record of what I've made as up to date as it can get. I know I've made a few other things but never took pictures of them. For instance, I know my Mother-in-law has a checkbook cover of a different design than the ones I've pictured and my father-in-law has a belt my wife and I made together for him.

The pics are in my gallery in the Miscellaneous section at the bottom for those who care.

No, not that kind of leather!

It's been quite a few years since I've plied the craft and I have to say I missed it. Way back when I was a Boy Scout (yeah, I know I'm even geekier than you thought!) I was introduced to leather carving while working on the various requisite merit badges for Eagle Scout. After that I didn't work leather for something on the order of 10 years but then returned to the hobby in my late 20s. Not long after that Tandy Leather disappeared from the face of the earth. Tandy Leather, by the way, is a local company that sells leather, supplies, and a multitude of tools to work leather into useful things. When they went out of business I stopped working with leather because of the inconvenience of buying leather on line and the fact that you don't know what quality you are going to get in a skin. Well, I was quite happy when my wife pointed out that Tandy Leather has opened up again and has a store about 5 minutes from my house! It turns out that another company bought up the previous version of Tandy Leather Company, changed the name to Tandy Leather Factory, and decided to open stores up in all the cities where they originally were.

In about 1997 or so I made my wife a nice carved purse which she has used hard and it's showing wear. It's been repaired multiple times and, even though she loves it, she has decided to retired it for fear of ruining it entirely. So, she put me to the task of making her a new purse. I just finished the new one this weekend and have a picture of it here in this post. The only thing I don't like about the way it turned out is the highlighting came out sort of swirly rather than the smooth even color it should have been. I'm not sure why it turned out this way as I did a dry run of the finishing process on another piece of leather to make sure something crazy wouldn't happen on the real article. Depending on ones point of view it makes it look somewhat antiqued which is a kind of nice look. Either way, I don't think it turned out hideous. What do you think?

Since I can actually get back into this hobby again I've made a gallery to show off pictures of things I make. Thus far it only has pics of my wife's old purse and her new one. Go here if you'd like a closer look at what I've done so far. Somewhere or another I think I have printed pictures of other things I've done. If I can manage to find them and if time permits I may scan them in and put them up also.

I almost missed it until my mother pointed it out last night. It's been years since I've seen an eclipse and it was pretty cool now that I'm older and have a better appreciation of what is really going on. Supposedly it was much better to view in the southern hemisphere but here in the northern half of the planet it started out by turning a bazaar light almost blood red color with a strange opaque shadow over about three quarters of it. Later on it was a normal while colored mood with a dark shadow making it look like it was either waxing or waning but the angle of the shadow seemed off from a normal waxing or waning moon. Since it would normally have been a full moon last night all this was a bit more dramatic I think.

It's easy to see how ancient cultures would take take events like these as mystical in nature. Unless you know the scientific explanation watching the moon turn blood red for no reason can be rather traumatic.