Category: Life

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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.

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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.

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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.

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1. You can disagree with or dislike people in your government, from your city council up through the President, and still love your country. (Conservatives disliked the President for 8 years; denying that privilege to the rest of us is hypocrisy at best.)

2. You can oppose war – or a particular war – without being anti-American. Speaking out against your nation’s policies and actions is not treason, it is necessary for a free society. If no one disagrees with the official policy, and that policy turns out to be a mistake – say, slavery, for instance – the mistake will never be corrected.

3. No, being a movie star does not make you an expert on politics. Neither does being a country singer. But neither job makes your opinion matter any less than anyone else’s.

4. America is not and should not be a theocracy. Freedom of religion does not exist without freedom from religion. If you are free to attend a Lutheran service only if you also attend a Catholic mass, you don’t have freedom of religion. If you can practice Christianity at home but your children are expected to recite Allah Akbar daily in school, you don’t have freedom of religion. This doesn’t mean that you can’t pray the way you want to. It does mean you cannot coerce me into praying the way you want me to.

5. Remember, the first amendment is there to protect unpopular speech. The popular speech doesn’t need protecting. And not everyone is offended by the same things.

6. The right to speak freely does not compel others to listen. You always have the right to turn the radio to another station, hang up the phone, or walk away. If I don’t want you to call or email me, I have the right to block you, and as long as the choice is mine, there is no reason I can’t let someone else handle the administrative details – whether it’s a restraining order against a stalker, a spam blacklist, or a do-not-call list.

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Aaagh. Every time we try to get something going on wedding planning, we find more reasons to scrap the whole thing. Last month we got soured on a whole lot of aspects with one series of tours, and we just managed to get ourselves out of the house on the subject again today.

I had vowed at the beginning of this to avoid David’s, the Wal-Mart of bridal stores, like the plague. However, being this close and having nothing to show for it but a pair of shoes, toasting glasses, and a cake server has begun to freak me out, so I braved the place. I remembered walking in and being accosted by a plethora of pushy, smiley salestwigs who wanted us to try on all sorts of stuff. Not this time. Turns out the place is having a sale, and as a result was completely packed. And sometime between 2000 and 2003, they made appointments mandatory for bridal tryons. So here I am, getting wonderful upper-arm exercise pawing through the racks, trying to get the attention of someone who won’t even take the time to ask if I have an appointment, and nobody bothers to tell me that I need one. For half an hour. So they’re off my list, again.

Then we get home and there’s another piece of paper spam for a hotel offering reception sevices. Since there’s no way my hair could make a standard-time-slot morning wedding on time, we’re looking at afternoon, which means a dinner reception. Their cheapest dinner is $31.95 a plate, not including 19% gratuity and 7.75% sales tax, which makes it $40.97 a person. And depending on what the “chef’s choice” of vegetable might be, Kelson might not be able to eat it. No, thank you.

Vegas is looking pretty and shiny again.

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Yes, it’s real! Last week Katie remarked we were running low on coffee, and I remembered an article on MozillaZine a few weeks ago about RJ Tarpley’s Mozilla Coffee. I figured, what the heck, let’s order some. It’s a way to get coffee and support Mozilla at the same time.

An open box containing a bag of Mozilla Coffee.

We went out for a late lunch/early dinner today, and as we came up the stairs we noticed a note tucked into the doorframe. At first I figured UPS had left a “sorry we missed you” note, but when we got up to the landing, the doormat was propped up on a six inch tall box! (That and it turned out to be FedEx, but I digress.) “Hey, no one will notice if we hide this under the doormat!”

We haven’t tried it yet, but we’ll post the results of our taste-test once we do.

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