Ordered it last weekend. It’s got everything: full coverage up top, pretty beading, short train, and it’s not blinding squeaky-clean wash-me-out white. And it’s made for the height I am in my shoes, with an adjustable lace-up back, so with any luck, I won’t need massive alterations. It’s got this split top skirt thing going, with beading along the edges, that I really can’t say why I think is cool. I never thought I’d be one to go for the Disney princess look, but it works. The one offputting note is the beading is blue. Don’t get me wrong, I love blue. I’m probably the only female in America never to have put any thought into her nuptial proceedings beyond some fuzzy mental photos of a church and a white dress, but I know for certain the white blur never had any color on it. Oh well. Just means I don’t have to paint my toenails blue (though I think I will anyway). Now, if we can just get a location so I don’t turn into a dressed-up cliché……
Category: Life
Well, what did you expect?
I hear one of our customers has cancelled service because he’s receiving too much spam.
Last year, he asked us to disable the spam filters on mail sent to his account.
I wonder if he remembers.
What the hell…..
There is a silverfish in my keyboard. Don’t ask me how it got there or what it likes about its new hangout. It’s just sitting between the bottom plastic and the top transparent plastic in between the main bank of keys and the section with help, delete, home, end, etc. I don’t even know if it’s alive or dead. The bugger of it is that I don’t know how to get it out without royally frelling up my keyboard, and if I leave it alone and then find it gone, it’s in prime real estate for access to lots of my yummiest important papers. And if it’s dead, that’s just gross. I do not want to be typing on a sacred silverfish dying ground. Suggestions are welcome. For now, I’m just going to try to relax the disgusted curl out of my lip and keep on with life as usual….
Case Design 101
OK, I’m not one of those purists who thinks all computers should be encased in beige boxes. That said, 4 of the 5 computers in our apartment are fairly plain – but two of those are because the case predates any sense of design, one was an ultra-cheap computer, and one was an ultra-cheap case.
Last week, while looking for that ultra-cheap case so I could build Red Shirt, I looked at the more expensive cases, thinking I might replace the case on my main computer, and then reuse the old one for the new machine. And while there were several really nice cases, none of them really struck me – unless you count the ones that exhibited the two trendiest offenses in case design:
- Hiding the drive bays. Someone got the idea somewhere that drive bays, especially on a case with room for expansion, are ugly. And I can certainly see the point. But people who design cases often forget a key factor about those drive bays: people use them. That means either you’ve got to open the entire front of the case every time you pop a CD in the tray, or you end up leaving it open. Now it’s not so bad if it’s a sliding door, but if it’s hinged, then you have to worry about this huge plastic door hanging sideways in front of the computer. Not only does it get in the way every time you have to reach down with a CD, it’s uglier than just showing the drive bays would have been!
- Shoving the front USB and Firewire ports all the way to the bottom of the case. The idea of having these ports on the front is to make them convenient. And while putting them at the bottom may work for people who put their computers on top of their desks, a lot of people put them underneath to save space (whether for writing or for a giant monitor). That USB mini-drive isn’t so convenient when you have to get out of your chair and kneel down on the floor to plug it in. And I’ve seen cases where the ports are less than half an inch from the bottom – not so bad if you’ve got a wood floor, but if you’ve got a carpet, now you need to worry about the carpet getting caught in the ports. I’m sorry, but this is only marginally better than leaving the ports on the back.
In the end, I decided I didn’t want to assemble two computers, just one, so I bought the cheapest, smallest case I could find. (As it happens, it manages to make the USB situation worse by putting the ports on the side of the front panel – but I wasn’t expecting to use much in the way of USB devices on this box anyway, and it turns out the only ports this motherboard can handle are the built-in ones.)
How’s that higher education working out for you?
I call a lot of doctors’ offices, and a lot of them put me on hold. One that I called today had that overly cheerful custom Muzak with embedded recorded messages. The first time I was put on hold, the message said: “Summer. That time of year you dream about on dreary winter days. After we take your call, we suggest you venture outside and take advantage of the wonderful sunny days that abound this time of year.”
Ooookay. I was still puzzling how they thought it was summer now, even in California, when the receptionist took me off hold and then put me back on, and this came twinkling into my ear: “Spring. It’s a time when we turn the clocks ahead and do that proverbial spring cleaning. It’s also a time to say how much we appreciate your patronage.”
Damn, they’ve really turned their clocks ahead.
Disconectiva
For several months I’ve been providing installable RPM packages for the Dillo web browser. Since many different distributions use RPM packages, I’ve been getting requests to add various Linux distributions. I started out just installing to extra partitions, but then I started building virtual systems with User-Mode Linux.
Well, people have been requesting RPMs for Conectiva, a distribution from Brazil and partner in UnitedLinux. I built a UML virtual system, but was never able to get Dillo to compile or to get the imitation network driver working. So, tonight I decided to install an actual copy.
With most Linux installers, you can choose where to create a new partition, and set it up to add existing ones to the system. This has worked fine with every version of Red Hat, Mandrake, and SuSE I have installed. The installer will create the new partition, leave the others alone, and mark them to be visible in the system you’ve installed.
Conectiva didn’t leave the existing partitions alone. Each partition I had marked was gone: my main OS partition (currently Red Hat 9), my home directory, and all my download and media files. Fortunately I had backups of the most critical files from last Saturday, and I was able to recover my entire home directory with Tomsrtbt and Parted‘s rescue function. And I don’t mind losing my main OS, since it’s not that hard to re-install it – all I need is the configuration, and I’ve got that backed up.
That leaves my entire download and media archive. I always figured, “I can just re-download all of this, right?” And most of it I can. Much of the rest either isn’t important, or hasn’t changed since the last backup (which I’ll admit was a long time ago), or can be recovered from CD, or can be re-scanned. The few photos that hadn’t made it into last week’s backup turned out to still be in a temporary folder on my website. Still, there are things that will be hard to find again, and probably some that will be impossible.
Just in case, I’ve got a recovery tool scanning the lost partitions in hopes that it will come up with something.
I’m not touching Conectiva again – or any other distribution I’m not already familiar with – until I get a spare system set up, or maybe spring for something like VMWare. And I’m seriously considering picking up some sort of backup solution that will hold more than a CD-RW, so I’ll be more inclined to save everything instead of picking and choosing what to put on a few discs.
Update 7:45am: I got the download/media partition back. The tool I ran overnight didn’t seem to find anything, but when I ran parted again this morning (after remembering that it was on PAUD, the Parted And Utilities Disk, not Tomsrtbt) it was able to find the partition.
So now all that’s missing is the primary OS (I’m running off of one of the “extra” installations right now), and I can reinstall that easily.
OK, now I’m confused.
Round 1: A judge rules that the FTC does not have the authority to enforce the Do-Not-Call list, so Congress (who has the power to give the FTC that authority) passes a law explicitly granting it to the FTC. So far so good. Checks and balances are working as they’re supposed to.
Round 2: Another judge rules that the list is unconstitutional because it discriminates against commercial calls. Never mind that that traditionally, commercial speech does not have the same protections as personal, political, and other forms of speech. (Consider truth-in-advertising laws.)
The way I see it, there are two obvious solutions: Either appeal the ruling (which is inevitable) or comply with it by removing the loopholes for charities and political campaigns. Which would probably get them in more first amendment trouble.
So today, the FCC has said they will enforce the list right on schedule. OK, it’s something I wouldn’t have thought of… mainly because it doesn’t seem like it would solve the problem.
Now, I hate getting calls from telemarketers, but I just don’t see how shuffling the list to another agency resolves the problem of constitutionality. I’ve only skimmed the ruling [previously available from the court’s website] (it’s 34 pages and I’m at work, it’s not as if I can read the whole thing right now!), but it seems pretty clear on the point that (as the judge sees it) it’s the federal government that can’t enforce the list in its present form, not the FTC specifically.