I will die fighting

Just found out via Suburban Blight that Fidel Castro says he will "fight to the death" if invaded by the US.

Honestly...who said anything about invading Cuba?? Puh-leaze, Fidel. All the arm waving...all the drama..."fight to the death!"...when in reality he has no one to fight, and is content to starve his people instead.

Source

Yeah, but you never know...

So I'm joining the club. I vow that I will fight to the death if I am invaded by the United States. I will die "with a gun in my hand" if they come to overthrow me. Um, yeah.

Spirit may recover fully.

Looks like the Spirit is back on track to full operation.

As for the ailing Spirit rover, NASA deleted 1,700 files from its flash memory Friday and then rebooted the rover.

"I am pleased to report it appears to be working just fine," said Glenn Reeves, chief engineer for the rover's flight software. He said NASA should be able to declare Spirit "fully recovered" by Sunday.

Source: AP

Fantastic news. If you are interested, it sounds like the problem was software related—the OS may have run out RAM just trying to manage the files on the flash file system. Read on to find out more about what makes Spirit tick inside.

Exploding Whale Gut Fun

Exploding whale entrails stop traffic in Tainan. This one stands for itself. Via jwz.

Residents of Tainan learned a lesson in whale biology after the decomposing remains of a 60-ton sperm whale exploded on a busy street, showering nearby cars and shops with blood and organs and stopping traffic for hours. The 56-foot-long whale had been on a truck headed for a necropsy by researchers, when gases from internal decay caused its entrails to explode in the southern city of Tainan.

The whale drew the attention of locals because of its large penis, measured at some five feet, the Taipei Times reported. "More than 100 Tainan city residents, mostly men, have reportedly gone to see the corpse to 'experience' the size of its penis," the newspaper reported.

Source

Go check out the pictures for more exploding whale gut fun.

Joint Marketing Agreements

Every time I get a privacy policy in the mail, usually from a bank, I groan. They are all the fucking same. They are all contradictory. And most of all, they are all bad.

The scam goes like this. They claim they don't "sell your personal information to third parties." Just what I wanted! BUUUUUUT... They turn right around and give it out freely to "companies that perform marketing services on [their] behalf or to other financial institutions which we have joint marketing agreements."

So instead of directly selling your information, they set up "joint marketing agreements" or hire other companies to advertise, and give it to them. Same fucking outcome. I get spammed and other organizations get some of the info these banks collect, including "name, address, social security number, assets, income, account balance, payment history, parties to transaction, credit card usage, creditworthiness, and credit history." Fuck banks.

Power Point Literature

Found this via Dave today—literature condensed down to Power Point. And condensed is the key word. And we all know Power Point makes you dumb. Wow. Dumb out with some power point literature.

Smile! It's the McDiet.

This just in from eclecticism—fast food may be hazardous to your health. Within 30 days, a diet of McDonald's may cause vomiting, high liver toxicity, rocketing cholesterol, sexual dysfunction, headaches, splotchy skin, hefty weight gain, and, not surprisingly, depression. As Michael points out (via Kottke), who would have thought?

I do have to admit, I'm a bit surprised at how fast Mr. Morgan Spurlock, the subject of the film-documented, self-experiment, fell apart. He didn't even make it a month on the McDiet. We all know, "people don't go to McDonald's looking for diet food", but they do expect to not fall over dead after a month or two.

If you want to know more about what's in your fast food, check out Fast Food Nation, by journalist Eric Schlosser. See if you can eat Mc'eeDees and enjoy it the same way after that book.

And if you want to see first hand what the McDiet will do to you, you'll have to wait for Spurlock's documentary, "Super Size Me", to make it out of the Sundance. Good glub I love self-experiments. He should have blogged it.

Flashin' to the Beat.

You've probably already heard by now that NASA engineers have reestablished an intelligible link with the the Spirit Mars rover. They believe their problems are related to one or more of the rover's flash microchips, a solid-state memory chip you might find in your digital camera, game console memory card, or USB pen drive. The rover has 256 megs of this stuff, apparently used as a filesystem.

NASA got the rover back online by using a "RAM drive", consistent their bad flash theory. (A RAM drive creates a filesystem in the computer's RAM, which will be lost on reboot.) One thing to note—flash chips are fast when it comes to reading data from them, but very slow and often timing sensitive when writing to them. NASA is currently talking to the rover at 120 bits per second, a slothful communication speed not seen here on Earth in many years, which I have to imagine would make it very difficult to try to reprogram one or more of the chips. When writing data to flash, these chips expect data at a certain rate; if NASA couldn't feed data to the flash fast enough—at 120 bps I would consider that likely—the chip would probably "time out" thinking the computer was prematurely done programming it. This would cause the chip to stop accepting data and go back into a "read-only" mode. You can see the problem here. If they can perhaps identify which chip may be acting up, if the problem is indeed a bad flash chip, they might have to update the rover's software with logic to avoid using the misbehaving chip.

Sheesh. I think I have problems debugging embedded software. I'd hate to have the job of the NASA techies who have to fix this mess. Good luck, guys.

Got this monkey on my butt

Something tells me this must signal the end of the world.

Be the first on your block to get Funky Monkey Panties. Or for the guys, "bright red briefs for men featuring Chinese characters for wealth and prosperity," (via AP).

The Chinese new year is almost year, and 2004 is the year of the Monkey. So get your Monkey Panties in time, and you too may be prosperous and successful.

Strangest thing I've seen in a while.

I found this over at found objects and it is the weirdest thing I've seen in a long time.

Head on over and check out the box of reject vampire teeth someone found in South England. I guess Europeans don't make vampires like they used to.

What's even more strange is that something like this was thrown on the side of the road.

Me Vs. Henry Ford, Round Five

This Sunday I took my car into the local Walmart for an oil change. This overdue oil change unfortunately waited a thousand miles or two over the suggested miles between such fun events. I decided to make a stop down at the local Walmart, the purveyor of everything good, cheap, American, and plastic for the scheduled maintenance.

At Walmart I found that the last mechanic who had worked on my car kindly stripped the oil plug, the technical name for the thingy that holds the oil in the bottom of your car. The tired looking Walmart technician (wannabe mechanic who works the desk) informed me that they can remove it but they can't replace it. A 99 Escort model apparently isn't an oil plug they carry, as it isn't exactly a popular car in SUV land. It looked like it had to have come from a Ford shop.

The local Ford place in my parent's hometown did my last oil change. The assholes had snuck it in on a 60K mile maintenance, just after my previous oil change. The sticker stated a clear mileage beyond the then current odometer reading but they did it anyway. These are the same fuckups that tried to kill me by leaving my fuel filter halfway installed and not fixing my IAC valve. Great to leave someone driving away in a car that stops all of the time—thanks to the IAC valve it may die while idling—and a fuel filter that could explode any time I crank the damn thing.

They must have it out for me or something.

Sometimes cars seem to get more use out of me, dragging their asses around to be repaired, than I get out of them, driving.

"I'm having a website emergency."

Technology is wonderful. It really is. It is the one thing in my life I can always count on to bring new possibilities of emergency situations. Year after year, with a robotic certainty, I wind up with some heretofore unknown catastrophic failure of some bit of technology. What other human institution can do the same for your life?

When Ford invented the automobile, within years I'm sure we discovered its cousin, the automobile accident. Yep, you could end your life in an all new, grisly way. (Don't get me started on Ford just yet. I've got beef with him and I'll have to let him have it shortly—I don't need it anyway, as I'm a vegetarian.) Then, when the Wright brothers took their pioneering flight, they probably only narrowly avoided the previously unknown airplane crash. With each new technology, the human race learned about a new way for it to go all kinds of wrong.

And, dear readers, I apologize, as I am the victim of the technological failure of created by the age of bloggers—the website emergency.

Looks like the admin of Freeshell decided to push through the PHP changes, leaving my entire website down and misbehaving. I just got home from visiting my girlfriend, late Sunday night, and before I even put away my groceries (still haven't), I noticed my my website had taken a nose-dive. Broken scripts galore.

After a about 40 minutes of recovery, I have my front page working. None of the links into /blog, /section, or /gallery, work. As of 8:16pm CST, I am about to set up a small (working, hopefully) script to redirect all of these links to the frontpage, so everyone can read this explanation. Sorry for the outage, folks.

Update

As of 8:53pm CST, things seem to be actually somewhat working. A bit of digging through the suphp source turned up a bit of apache magic to save the day. (I hope.) More on this later.

LAB-Y back up now.

LAB-Y is now back up after about 40 minutes of unscheduled maintenance. I upgraded to a new version of backend code I've been working on. For the most part, you shouldn't notice anything different, but if anything appears broken, please send a note my way. My email address is "obfuscated" in the footer of every page.

Sorry for the inconvenience and thank you for reading LAB-Y.

Maintenance Man Mishap

This made me so mad I just had to say something about it.

I rent an apartment and, like all apartments, periodically a maintenance man has to come in and fix something. No biggie. It is a fact of life for renters and as a matter of fact, I appreciate the service.

For the past month or so, my shower has been leaking. And not just leaking, but pouring water constantly. Now, I don't pay for water—it is covered in the rent—but it is annoyingly loud. The apartment manager has known about it for a while and the maintenance man promised a while back to fix it.

Today when I came home for my lunch break (the double-illusion hour), I found a set of keys in my lock. Just sitting there. A few other tenants were going about their business but there was no maintenance man or apartment manager to be found. Just keys hanging in the door, which I quickly found to be unlocked. When I came in, nobody was inside.

So I took the keys out and went on inside. A bit later, the repair guy came around and knocked on my door. Stumbling over his own words and scratching his head, he informed me that he fixed my shower; he didn't mention anything about any keys. Before he walked off, I showed him the keys.

He quickly offered an explanation, which made the situation much worse. "When I have to work on a bunch of units, I leave keys in the doors that I need to come back to." Greeeeaaaaat, so he does this all of the time and to everyone here.

The worst bit about the whole situation was that he didn't even remember that he had left any keys in my apartment. For fuck's sake, anyone could have come by and snatched them, since he was nowhere to be found when I came home.

I haven't decided what to do about it. I asked him to please not do that again, and after an initial protest, he agreed. I just hope he doesn't decide to do something nasty in return, like giving my keys out or taking something out of my apartment.

New Kernel Bliss!

Tonight, right before I began my workout, I started new kernels compiling on all my machines—version 2.4.24 to be specific. If you haven't heard already, there is a local root vulnerability in 2.4.23 that is fixed in this version. I had upgraded to 2.4.23 not too long ago due to the previous security issue and it gave me problems with NewsMonster. Specifically, I got tons of DNS errors, causing failures fetching many of the RSS feeds I subscribe to.

I'm extremely happy to report that I don't see that problem in 2.4.24. So now I'm pimpin with a new, shiny kernel. And I can't put my finger on it but it seems faster on my laptop. But anyway.

Amen, Les. Fsck fixing cars.

I'm with Les on this one. Fsck fixing cars. Like he points out, you can save money that way, but I say only if your time has no value. Fsck fixing cars. My time is worth something—a hell of a lot more something than what I pay someone to change my oil.

Unlike Les, I didn't have an opportunity to learn to fix them. The only mechanically inclined parental figure (or something) I knew was my biological father, who skipped out on me early in life. The father who raised me wasn't as mechanical but faithfully paid others to maintain his vehicle, right on schedule. Personally, I agree with Les, when he said "my plan was to have a decent enough job that I could afford to pay someone else to fix my car."

I'll never forget one of the guys I worked with at my previous job. He was a chemical engineering major working a summer job as a programmer who always did all of his own car maintenance. And not just the easy stuff, he did almost all of it, including the difficult stuff. I've never seen someone with a supposedly working set of wheels have to ask for so many rides to work. Having only a few hours in the evenings and the weekends to do his repairs, his vehicle spent a lot of time out of commission.

So fsck fixing your own car. Pay someone else to do it.

My predictions for 2004

Seems like everyone has had their chance make predictions for 2004 except me. The predictions range from dramatic events in the blogosphere to world events, and from personal goals to hip hop forecasts. I'm not much of a prognosticator, but I've got a prediction of my own.

Bloggers will continue making predictions for at least another week or two, yielding enough of a pool where at least a few of them will prove to be true. The predictions will slowly die down, people will forget about them, and in the end, the bulk of them will turn out to be bogus.

Thank you.

The neglected vacation blog

Sitting around, waiting for the Playstation to free up is about the only time I spend during my vacation doing anything blogging related. Reading Stupid Evil Bastard, Les hits it on the head—vacation is like an extended weekend, when blogging is rarely done.

On the weekends I don't tend to post as often because I generally sleep in and miss the news programs and I'm at home where the lure of countless partially finished video games manages to overpower my admitted short-at-times attention span. Well, when I'm on vacation it's kinda like one big weekend. Toss in the holidays and the fact that I've received a plethora of new games as of the 25th and I have even less reason to make my usual web surfing rounds.

Source

I've been tossing around the idea of using moblogging to fill in these gaps. Or perhaps that is just me making an excuse to buy a snappy new camera-phone. Oh well, whatever it is, those video games are calling my name.

Happy New Year

Happy new year, everyone. Party like the end of the world is here, cause it's 2004 and our robotic overlords and masters are a few years late. We're living on borrowed time so make the best of it.