Rants

Houseless

Fox has a special 2-hour episode of 24 on tonight so there is no new episode of House. The adventures of Drs House, Cuddy, Wilson, Foreman, Thirteen, Kutner & Taub will have to wait a another week.

House: “Lies are like children: they’re hard work, but it’s worth it because the future depends on them.”

So instead I’ll be watching Free Anime! Are you enjoying your Time of Eve? The first four of six 15 minute chapters or online now. Chapter 5 will be released next month.

Or maybe I’ll read some more of Bitter Truth by William Lasher. I’ve read a couple of books by him that center around a Philadelphia lawyer named Victor Carl and have enjoyed them, this book is a little stranger than most, but sometimes when a person has a way with words that you enjoy so you would read anything they wrote, even if it was a restaurant menu.

I know people who look at the stars and say the night sky makes them feel insignificant, but I don’t believe them when they say it. When I look at the stars I don’t shrink but grow, filled with the perverse certainty that the whole of the universe has been put here solely for my amusement and enlightenment. But face to face with the grinning mask of death I know the truth. I am a randomly formed strand of DNA no more significant than random strands of DNA that define the leaf of grass upon which I tread or the cow whose charred muscle I gnaw. I eat Chinese food and crap corn and sweat through my socks and stink and the same DNA that gave me this nose and this chin and my ten fingers and ten toes has also sentenced me to oblivion. It directs my arteries to clog themselves with calcified fat, it directs my liver to wither, my kidneys to weaken, my lungs to spew bits of itself with every cough. And in the face of this utter randomness and planned obsolescence I can’t even imagine mustering enough energy to get out of bed and to walk the streets, to dry clean my suits, to return my library books, to vote for judges whose names I can’t pronounce, to act my part as if any of it really matters.

Or what I should do is balance the MMC checkbook and produce the Treasurer’s Report for the Club meeting this Thursday…sigh.

Started up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 134

Stop Calling Me

It seems as if the Aiken Bicycle Club has forgotten to renew their web hosting agreement, maybe even on purpose, so a Google search turns up an old link. That Geocities page has me listed as the Secretary and Newsletter Editor. The President, VP and Treasurer are, I think, no longer living around here, so none of their contact info is worth a darn. Neither of my email addresses are valid, but the phone number is still good and last weekend I got not one, but two calls asking about bike rides. There have been others previously on a sporadic basis, but two in two days made me want to do something about it.

I created that page back in the early 90s on Geocities and the page you see is a cookie crumb left behind in 2001 when the ABC went big time and got their own domain. It hasn’t been touched since and there is no way I can remember what the log in info is so I could change it or take it down. Today I used the Yahoo contact page to ask then to take the site down. I’m sure I’m spitting in the wind.

A long, long time ago I created a web site for my local bicycle club. I have moved on and so has the bicycle club, but unfortunately the old Geocities web site has not. I no longer remember the username or password for the site and undoubtedly any email address I used as a contact is no longer valid.

If you search the web for the ABC the first result is the old Geocities site and I am still getting phone calls requesting information I can no longer supply. Is there anyway that the site could be decommissioned on my request?

If not maybe it could be removed for violating your Terms of Service, to wit:

7.2 Prohibited Uses
(p) use your home page (or directory) as storage for remote loading or as a door or signpost to another home page, whether inside or beyond Yahoo! GeoCities;

Thank you for any help in this manner.

There is another Geocities page that comes in a close second when searching the web for the ABC and it also has my phone number listed. I emailed the contact on that page over a week ago and have not heard back from the owner yet. If I had to bet he is in the same boat as I am and has long since forgotten his Yahoo login info too and is too embarrassed to admit it to me. I searched for his name, Andy Nagai, and found a photography site with the domain of nagaiphotos.com. I know this is the same person because it has the same email address I used to try and contact him. It also listed his phone number (626-392-9506.) A reverse look up of that number results in a California cell phone that may or may not still belong to him (and I’m not paying anything to find out), so maybe I should just call it…

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 133

Cost Cutting?

We received our ESPN Magazine in the mail today. Strange thing, all the usual crap cards that are stapled in just fell on the counter. That happened because there were no staples in the magazine.

You can buy 25,000 staples for $5.49 at, where else, Staples. ESPN Magazine has a monthly circulation of nearly 2 million. Eliminating two staples per magazine means they are saving about $10,500 a year.

Started up, went down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 129

88,000 Genetic Manipulations

We went grocery shopping on Friday afternoon and I bought a small bunch of 4 bananas. Buying bananas always seems to be a chancy proposition, invariably they are either bright green or so ripe they are fit for nothing but an ingredient in banana nut bread. Friday was my lucky day (or so I thought), as the bananas on display were the very definition banana yellow.

Saturday morning I went to peel one of the bananas and I knew I was in trouble because the skin was thick and hard to tear. Ever hopeful, I took a bite, big mistake, it was tough as shoe leather, I spit it out and threw the rest away. Using all the brain power I could muster I determined that these pieces of fruit were not ripe and decided to skip Saturday’s banana and wait until Sunday before eating another.

By Sunday the peeling process was slightly better and the banana was almost al dente, but I choked it down anyway. No banana this morning and I am hopefully that by tomorrow they will be really ripe.

The only way I can explain it is that these bananas have been genetically altered so that they turn yellow when they really should still be green.

The Emperor flipped past the 88,000 mile mark on the way home from Augusta on Saturday.

Started down, went up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 128

Intrepid Ibex

No time for posting I’m too busy monkeying around with a distro of Linux, Ubuntu 8.10. I’m in for some serious fun as it doesn’t recognize the wireless card in the Dell laptop I’m installing it on.

Back to the command line in a terminal window (those weren’t the days), Step 1 get and install some drivers:
sudo apt-get install cabextract
wget ftp://ftp.compaq.com/pub/softpaq/sp34001-34500/sp34152.exe
cabextract sp34152.exe

At first it didn’t install because it didn’t recognize the command ‘cabextract’. When I got that working I couldn’t complete step 2:
sudo ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf

Didn’t recognize ‘ndiswrapper.’ I did discover that it will connect to the internet if I plug in the cat5 cable straight from the router. Tomorrow I’ll figure out this wrapper thing.

Started up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 106

I Need More Time

At work the password required for network access is good for 45 days and when you get down to 5 days left it will start reminding you each time you log in that your password is going to expire in “X Days.” ASCO also uses an AS400 for its business systems software and it needs a separate password from the one you need for the PC network. The AS400 password is only good for 28 days, that is not too bad, but the annoying thing is that it starts to remind your password will expire at the 14 day mark.

Why don’t they just go ahead and start reminding you when you get down to say…27 days left.

Started up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 100

French Toast

The MMC meet for their monthly breakfast event here in Aiken at the Sugar Magnolia Cafe (not to be confused with Sugar Magnolia’s Cafe in Lompoc, CA) and we got a nice turn out of 10 people in 7 cars, 5 Miatas and a Sebring (which counts as two Miatas), a much nicer turn out than the November one there which was just Donna and I.

Frakking Sony DVD player. I spent most of the late morning and early afternoon trying to get William & Mary burned on a DVD. No matter what I tried, none of the 4 discs produced would do anything but play the No Public Display warning, the production company logo and the “pirating is stealing” PSA before halting and giving an out of region error message.

All the forums posts I found on the net said that the programs I was using should take care of the Region Coding. Then I searched for a way to set the Sony DVD player to region free and found that there were no sure fire way of doing it with my model, but there were a couple of ways that I could try that worked on similar models. Ha, close, but oh so frustrating.

I’m not sure what prompted me, but about 3 o’clock I took one of the, what I thought were toast, discs into the other room and tried it in the old JVC player. It worked perfectly….

The JVC was exiled to the back bedroom a few months ago because it was refusing to play DVDs or lock up with increasing regularity. We bought a Sony DVP-NS57P for $40 at Walmart to replace it and it has been great; until now. I’ve moved the JVC back into the living room, now the two of them sit on top of each other in the cabinet ready for anything.

Started up, still up.
Miata Top Transitions since 10/24/08: 100