Monthly Archives: June 2004

Alright.

Someone, apparently in Houston, really likes my blog. They like it so much, in fact, that they are downloading my RSS feed EVERY 10 MINUTES.

Obviously, you can read this Mr./Ms. 207.44.199.XXX. You’ve been doing this since early March. Please, for the love of bandwidth (of which you’ve used nearly 100 MB) SLOW DOWN.

Netiquette says that it is impolite to download feeds more than once an hour, unless otherwise noted. Also, it is impolite to download a feed if it has not changed since the last download (that’s what status codes are for- one thing, anyway).

Please, I don’t update all that often (usually) – raise the increment your reader is using between updates.

Beth has moved up here. Marty and ctl are visiting. w007!

We are having a Turkey dinner tonight in celebration. double-w007!

Hrmm. Mostly I’m posting ‘cuz I haven’t in a while. I guess….. Bush sucks. Also, I’ve worked on improovng security a bit on my website- for no reason other than I tend towards paranoia (but I still think it’s never enough….).

There. I’ve given you an unsubstantiated opinion with a nonexistant segue into what I’m currently doing. Just like any other typical blog post.

Carry on.

Mood: hungry

Suffice to say… I really want to kick happicow‘s pointy little butt. For now, I’ll compensate by plotting against him in IRC.

Chris: TELL me before you do stuff that is going to affect my ability to do the stuff I do every day. Or AT LEAST tell me afterwards, so that I may know BEFORE I spend all morning troubleshooting, and while I may still have a chance to do something about it before going to work.

And use common sense, given two ports- one of which you know will not work with the current setup, and one of which you know will, FORWAD THE ONE THAT WILL WORK.

I got yelled at for opening a window at work today. Apparently I’ve been told to ask first in the past, but I seem to have forgotten.

Chris almost burned down the house twice (left the stove on, left the air conditioning on so the condensation was dripping into a surge protector), and wasn’t home when I got back from work so I couldn’t set up my new desk for a long time (it’s really heavy, and we both needed to lift it).

After that was finally done I went back into IRC to see that my intermittent net connection for the past few weeks is annoying the #linuxchix. So I’m not gonna go back there for a while, until my connection seems more stable, anyway. I’m not active enough in the channel to warrant annoying everyone every half hour or so with timeouts/rejoins. Sigh. Unfortunately, I have my doubts that it will get ‘better’, or at least better enough so I won’t worry about bothering people in the future.

[edit]Well, Rack was nice enough to remind me that RUSLUG‘s connection is much more reliable than my own, so I’ve taken to running irssi in a screen from there, now.[/edit]

Bah, I just feel like a big jerk. I’m going to sleep now.

Mood: upset

Yeah, I’ve said before that these things aren’t incredibly useful. But that didn’t stop me then, either. And for some reason, I still have fun doing these things :)

I found out about this “real” IQ test from Jennifer.

My results:

Your IQ score is 140

This number is based on a scientific formula that compares how many questions you answered correctly on the True IQ Test relative to others.

Your Intellectual Type is Visionary Philosopher. This means you are highly intelligent and have a powerful mix of skills and insight that can be applied in a variety of different ways. Like Plato, your exceptional math and verbal skills make you very adept at explaining things to others — and at anticipating and predicting patterns. And that’s just some of what we know about you from your IQ results.

w007.

Today whilst walking to work I got to thinking about birds that sing the car alarm noises… as opposed to the songs normally passed down in bird culture. Not that Ithaca has any of these birds- not that I’ve heard, anyway. I don’t even think I’ve ever heard a real car alarm while in Ithaca, but that’s besides the point.

If you have no idea what I’m taking about, visit a quasi-urban area, like New Brunswick, NJ, or Montclair, NJ (As an aside, Montclair has the additional problem that the pollution from nearby Newark causes a pink haze on the horizon- similar to the coming dawn. This confuses the birds, and you can often hear them singing at 1 AM as if it were 5 AM). The birds, having apparently heard the car alarms so much that they’ve grown fond of them (somebody has to like them, afterall) have taken to imitating the noises that the car alarms make. They are so good at it that one can often guess exactly which type of car alarm they are imitating.

Anyway, I got to thinking- after society has disappeared in a fit of logic, presuming the birds remain, they will continue their alarm-songs, and will pass them down to future bird generations. Hundreds of thousands of years from now, when all other vestiges of our civilization have disappeared into the dirt from which they came, the birds may still have their strange song. Future civilizations, whether they are the descendants of man or something entirely different, will hear these songs and assume that they have always been.

Ornithologists of the future will study these songs as ornithologists always have, and anthropologists will be no more involved then then they are now. We as a species may have inadvertantly created something (besides nuclear waste) that will live long past our time- something that the future will never fully grok the significance of.

That’s odd enough, but as a corollary- what if some of the bird songs we know today are really imitations of sounds that are now gone from our world, but were once common? The noise of ancient war-flutes, for instance ;)

An interesting idea, but like most of my interesting ideas I doubt anything will ever come of it. I did think it would be fun to share this particular notion, though.

My cellphone really pisses me off sometimes. Like when I take a picture and it gives me the “too large to save” error message. Even when I only have 4 out of my 20 possible picture slots used. Whoever designed the phone to have a set number of spaces for pictures, rather than total space for pictures, should be beaten with a wet noodle.

Oh, and USB is still pissing me off. Even though I compiled uhci_hcd into my kernel as a module, I still can’t get USB to work right (recap: USB works, suddenly USB doesn’t work [possibly after a suspend], only way to fix USB is by rebooting the computer). The specifc error I get in syslog when USB decides not to work is:

Jun 14 09:37:29 localhost kernel: ehci_hcd 0000:00:1d.7: port 3 reset error -110
Jun 14 09:37:29 localhost kernel: hub 1-0:1.0: hub_port_status failed (err = -32)
Jun 14 09:37:29 localhost kernel: hub 1-0:1.0: Cannot enable port 3. Maybe the USB cable is bad?

Looks like I’m gonna have to try compiling ehci-hcd in as a module. Rinse, repeat.

Today after Beth woke up we went and got food at Manos (so much for watching what I eat… bah.). Then we went to buy her some furniture for her new apartment. Because I can’t seem to go more than one pay period without a new major purchase, I ended up buying a new desk for myself as well. It’s a cool desk, at the very least- and I figured that if I don’t get it now I’ll just end up getting it when the house is done anyway, and this gets it out of the way so I can worry about other thngs then. I should have it on Tuesday, sometime shortly thereafter I may have a new geekosphere picture (it’s been a long time, anyway).

In other news, my ~10-hour game of Escape from Monkey Island™ seems to have gotten itself stuck. And me, being an idiot, saved it in this stuck state. What happened is that Guybrush got “stuck” after talking to Otis on Jambalaya Island. I couldn’t move him at all, or open the inventory, but I could open the save/options menu. Bleh. Hopefully it’s just a game fart, and when I try it again later it will work (though one soft reboot didn’t fix it). Otherwise I don’t think I’ll start it again for a while… I was over halfway through the game and free time is scarce enough so that iit’s not worthwhile to start over at the moment :/

From Justn: Underline what you own. Bold what you’ve seen. Italicize what you’ve only partly seen. Add three titles.

01. Trainspotting
02. Shrek
03. M
04. Dogma
05. Strictly Ballroom
06. The Princess Bride
07. Love Actually
08. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Rings
09. The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
10. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
11. Reservoir Dogs
12. Desperado
13. Swordfish
14. Kill Bill Vol. 1
15. Donnie Darko
16. Spirited Away
17. Better Than Sex
18. Sleepy Hollow
19. Pirates of the Caribbean
20. The Eye
21. Requiem for a Dream
22. Dawn of the Dead The original.
23. The Pillow Book
24. The Italian Job (most recent version)
25. The Goonies
26. Baseketball
27. The Spice Girls Movie (Spice World)
28. Army of Darkness
29. The Color Purple
30. The Safety of Objects
31. Can’t Hardly Wait
32. Mystic Pizza
33. Finding Nemo
34. Monsters Inc.
35. Circle of Friends
36. Mary Poppins
37. The Bourne Identity
38. Forrest Gump
39. A Clockwork Orange
40. Kindergarten Cop
41. On The Line
42. My Big Fat Greek Wedding
43. Final Destination
44. Sorority Boys
45. Urban Legends
46. Cheaper by the Dozen The original.
47. Fierce Creatures
48. Dude, Where’s My Car
49. Ladyhawke
50. Ghostbusters
51. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
52. Back to the Future
53. An Affair To Remember
54. Somewhere In Time
55. North By Northwest
56. Moulin Rouge
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
58. The Wizard of Oz
59. Zoolander
60. A Walk to Remember
61. Chicago
62. Vanilla Sky
63. The Sweetest Thing
64. Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead
65. The Nightmare Before Christmas
66. Chasing Amy
67. Edward Scissorhands
68. Adventures of Priscilla: Queen of the Desert
69. Muriel’s Wedding
70. Croupier
71. Blade Runner
72. Cruel Intentions
73. Ocean’s Eleven
74. Magnolia
75. Fight Club
76. Beauty and The Beast
77. Much Ado About Nothing
78. Dirty Dancing
79. Gladiator
80. Ever After
81. Braveheart
82. What Lies Beneath
83. Regarding Henry
84. The Dark Crystal
85. Star Wars
86. The Birds
87. Beaches
88. Cujo
89. Maid In Manhattan
90. Labyrinth
91. Thoroughly Modern Millie
92. His Girl Friday
93. Chocolat
94. Independence Day
95. Singing in the Rain
96. Big Fish
97. The Thomas Crown Affair
98. The Matrix
99. Stargate
100. A Hard Day’s Night
101. About A Boy
102. Jurassic Park
103. Life of Brian
104. Dune
105. Help!
106. Grease
107. Newsies
108. Gone With The Wind
109. School of Rock
110. TOMMY
111. Yellow Submarine
112. From Hell
113. Benny & Joon
114. Amelie
115. Bridget Jones’ Diary
116. Holy Grail
117. Heavenly Creatures
118. All About Eve
119. The Outsiders
120. Airplane!
121. The Sorcerer
122. The Crying Game
123. Hedwig and the Angry Inch
124. Slap Her, She’s French
125. Amadeus
126. Tommy Boy
127. Aladdin
128. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
129. Snatch
130. American History X
131. Jack and Sarah
132. Monkey Bone
133. Rocky Horror Picture Show
134. Kate and Leopold
135. Interview with the Vampire
136. Underworld
137. Truly, Madly, Deeply
138. Dogma (AGAIN. People should pay more attention. Idjits.)
139. Tank Girl
140. Boondock Saints (fell asleep!)
141. Blow Dry
142. Big Trouble in Little China
143. The Chinese Connection
144. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
145. Disney’s Hercules
146. Shanghai Noon
147. Catch Me If You Can
148. The Count of Monte Cristo
149. Kung Pow! Enter the First
150. Death to Smoochy
151. Tron
152. WarGames
153. Murder By Death