Music:

Guster The Repuation Ben Kweller The Weepies the Postal Service

Friends:

Travis(lj) Billy Pete-Head Natalya(lj) Viv

Pick two: Good, Fast, Cheap Date: 08-13-2007 10:40 This weekend the flange connecting my the B-pipe of my exhaust to the catalytic converter broke. My guess is that it rusted right through over the years and finally met it's breaking point while I was creeping over some unsteady terrain this weekend I'll do most car work myself, but I've never been a big fan of exhausts. This is mostly because of rusted bolts. There's also the added factor that and my condo association frowns upon the fact that I might be performing car surgery in our parking lots. Over the last few years I've already replaced a belt (in the Jeep), swapped an alternator, and removed my rear suspension so I could replace bushings. If they see me out there with my car jacked up at all four corners hitting rusty exhaust bolts with a MAP gas torch I'm sure that someone will probably say something. Now, if I had a lift to go with my torch and maybe an extra set of hands to get the exhaust into place, and not to mention the time to do all of this I would do it tonight, but I don't. Professionals have this and I estimate that they could pop out the bolts and hang the exhaust in about an hour. I dropped of my car at Gurney's Auto in Nashua because I'd 1)Read on Car Talk's Mechanic Files that they were good and 2)They're about a 5 minute drive from my home. They did just call and quoted 620.00. I almost fell out of my chair. I can get real Honda parts (b-pipe, muffler, gaskets, bolts) from a dealer on-line for about 375 (Actual parts cost is 300, but it would have to be shipped), Northern Foreign Auto has the pats for 379, and Gurney's told me the parts are 418. So I'm convinced they're probably marking them up to make a small profit. Hey, everyone's got to make a living and I don't have a problem with the parts price. It's the labor cost involved. As I mentioned before I believe this is a 1 hour job with the right tools. In fact I'd even provided a spare catalytic converter (yes, I happen to just have a second one laying around) in case the flanges that connect the b-pipe were too rusty or broke. Either way, once the rusty bolts are off hanging and bolting on the new stuff only takes a few minutes. So I had to choose two: Good, Fast, or Cheap. Cheap doesn't appear to be an option however the car should be ready tonight. I'm not sure of the quality of the work. Only time and oxidation will tell I suppose. [EDIT 8-22-07] I did get my car back that evening and it cost me 580 which is 40 dollars less than they quoted, but my opinion is still that it's a fairly straight forward job which should have cost 500 or less.

Bicycle Commuting Date: 08-05-2007 23:25 This year I started commuting to work and so far things have been good. I figured that I'd run into people who didn't understand the concept of a bike riding with traffic but so far I can't recall a single beep. I'm sure that I'll eventually get someone who's ignorant or a road raging menace, but until then it's all good. I outfitted my old Trek 8000 with a Blackburn "Moutain" rear rack. At first I tried to use it with an old backpack. Bun-geeing the backpack down to the rack turned out to be a hassle and that lasted about a week before I broke down and picked up some inexpensive panniers from Nashbar. I picked the "Euro" panniers because they were inexpensive and looked like heal-strike would be less likely. Now I can carry my laptop (in Erin's Timbuktu case), a change of clothes, and lunch with no problems. Unfortunately I've found that heal-strike can still occasionally be an issue when the laptop is in one of the bags, but mostly if I happen to be rolling my pedals backwards and that's not very common. Overall I'm enjoying the commute. It's good exercise and I've lost about 5 lbs in the last month. Gas savings isn't really much of a factor. I might be saving a dollar a day, but it doesn't really offset the cost of bike tires, lights, panniers, etc. At this point I'm not sure how long I'll ride, maybe through October if the cold weather keeps at bay.

Regex, Blank lines and Windows is a bad combination Date: 04-12-2007 14:17 For the last 2 hours I'd been attempting to split a large text file using csplit (from the gnu win32 ports) on a Windows box with little success. The file was formatted as: Group1 Member Member Member Group(n) Member Member ... So I figured I'd csplit it with a regex to catch the blank line, then run a wc against the whole dir. The line count will tell me the number of members (minus 1 for the groupname as well) and the whole process should take about 5 minutes. Hah. So I tried a /\r\n\r\n/ because viewing via a hex editor of my source file showed those blank lines were "OD OA OD OA". When it didn't work I tried various other matches of cr's, lf's and returns. Then tried various thing's like ^$ until fustration set in. So then it hit me that it would be easier to do in perl, I wrote a 20 line perl script in a few minutes it was done. Unfricking believable. If someone happens to know why I can't match the blank lines with a regex I'd like to know why. Googling proved to be somewhat futile.

Ubuntu surround sound not working try... Date: 11-18-2006 19:07 Ran into an issue with no sound in Ubuntu (Breezy) linux. My surround sound through the optical audio out stopped working when I was fiddling with the settings to get the TV card working. Ends up if you MUTE: "EIC958 Playback" then audio starts coming via the optical connection. Alrighty then.

Overheating woes Date: 09-28-2006 13:51 At about 4 AM this morning I heard buzzing, not from my alarm clock but from my server. My server machine shutdown due to overheating. So I spent the morning removing then cleaning out the heatsink and fan that was cooling CPU. The Zalman cooler was designed to blow air towards the sink & chip, so looking at the outside of the heatsink there's almost no signs of dust. Once I removed the fan I could see that the inside was caked with a good layer. I'm tempted to flip the fan around to have it suck the air away. At least I would be able to hit the machine with a can of air once a year to remove the external dust bunnies rather than make downtime to remove the entire cooler. Sleeper had been up for about 300 days before the first outage which actually occurred about two weeks ago. I'd kicked off an rsync to backup everyone.s homedir and about 5 minutes into it I came back to find that the server had shutdown. It's likely the CPU was working overtime running the rsync and in combination with warm loft temperatures it exceeded the 175 F shutdown temp set in the BIOS. At the time I thought it was the rsync that caused the box to crash. Interesting.

DS Lite shuts down Date: 07-26-2006 23:46 If you notice that your DS Lite is powering off, often when playing the New Super Mario Brothers, it's likely a defect in the unit. Pressing Y + B in any game over and over can cause the system to instantly power off. I'm sending mine in for repair. There should be a recall. Bah.

Comcast Abuse Dept. == Poor communication skills Date: 03-24-2006 20:51 I went to NYC for business and on my return I'd noticed something strange. Several EFNet IRC servers had klined my IP address. After some investigation I found that my IP had been added to the CBL during the middle off week. That weekend I requested that G run extensive checks on his machines and I ran checks on my two linux boxes. Neither of my boxes exhibited signs of being compromised and neither was configured to relay mail. Of G's two boxes one did have a *possible* exploit/adware problem but not one that would allow the sending of spam mail. I put in a request to remove my IP from CBL. Network wise, it's more likely that someone hopped on my wireless network who was infected or otherwise feeling malicious. I took action by moving to WPA encryption. Not that WPA is really "more" security as I believe that all wireless security is inherently a joke. The following day I noticed that all incoming mail ceased to my home account. At approx. 2AM on 3/19 it appears Comcast applied filter on my cable modem on port 25. I don't disagree with their action. It's an excellent policy to block users who hit that CBL list. I don't really mind either that they're doing a shoot first ask questions later type thing. I get it. What follows is what bothers me. I check my comcast.net mail and sure enough they have notified me that : Dear Comcast High-Speed Internet Customer, We have determined that your computer has been used to transmit unsolicited e-mail, an activity that is in violation of the Comcast Terms of Service Agreement. Actually, I'm sure that whoever reported my IP to the CBL notified them. If Abuse actually determined the abuse I'd love to see the proof because the CONTENT of those spam messages may be the forensic info I need to figure out if it were actually one my machines or a third party causing the problem. Their wording indicates that "your computer" is in violation, well... I'm pretty sure it wasn't one of MY computers. Now I'm just nit-picking. The letter goes on to list some generic steps which make sense (Run Windows update, check for virus, etc), and also lists the following : "If you would like to speak to someone by telephone concerning the steps we have taken with your modem, please call 856-317-7272 and leave a voicemail with your name and contact information. The Network Abuse and Policy Observance team will respond to all voicemails within 24 hours. On Sunday this seemed like the likely step. I called the number and the voicemail message states that to expedite requests for this problem please send an e-mail to: secure-port25@comcast.net. So I do. It also noted that they don't respond to requests on the weekends. Monday: No response from Abuse. No acknowledgment e-mail. I send another request. Tuesday: No response from either e-mail. I send another request. Wednesday: Since I can not speak with a live person at the abuse number I call 1-800-Comcast. I get a rep named Tosif who knows exactly what I'm talking about and quickly files me a ticket to Abuse to take care of it. Friday: I felt it was necessary to give Abuse a full 24 hrs to do what they need to do. I called back customer support to check my ticket status and they reported that my case has been closed and the problem was fixed. Got back from work, tested it, still broken. Called again to see if someone could help me, this time I was routed to a Southern call center. The initial rep who took my call "Andrew" was again nice to talk to and helpful but could not fix the problem. I requested to speak with someone else. The team Lead "Rod" explained to me that Abuse and Customer service don't interact and there was basically nothing he could do. Overall Rod didn't leave me with warm fuzzies. I have worked years in the technical support/customer service/IT industry and know it's all about the warm fuzzies. Even when your product or service stinks you can at least be super-curtious, speak intelligently, and leave the customer feeling good about the call. OR maybe Texans are getting to me and I'm just bitter over the 2004 elections. Rod wasn't helping me further so thanked him for his time. So I have now hit the weekend. Left VM for Abuse and I'm sure I will have no action until Monday or later. The problem here is not just that port 25 is still blocked on my cablemodem. It's that there is a disconnect in Comcast between Abuse & Customer service. Comcast Abuse should be : - Acknowledging E-mails with responses. A simple "Yes, we've received your e-mail" email would be a nice indicator that messages are not going into a black hole. - Contacting the customer (maybe not directly but by using Customer Service). - Updating their case notes with useful information. Comcast Customer Support should be: - Reminding their Team Leads that customer happiness is key. Think Warm, think Fuzzy. Turn off the attitude, it's not helping. - Not require that your phone number be entered two times or more in their IVR system then requesting it again when you finally speak to a person. I still have stock in this company left over from when i worked at M1 -> ATTBI which is now Comcast. I still care, and I will let someone know what I feel what is not being done correctly. There are some people doing it right, so far in this weeks worth of interaction it comes down to 1 Comcast employee: Tosif. So props to him. And Abuse: If you're reading this. UNBLOCK MY PORT.

Anti-Xanga rant Date: 02-19-2006 23:06 Xanga has this feature that makes it very easy for users to specify an MP3 to play on their profile page. This is great when those users are hosting their own files, but when they're coming off my server it doesn't work out so well. So I just went ahead and "fixed the glitch". This involved using the stupendously awesome mod_rewrite on apache: RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://www.xanga.com/.*$ RewriteRule \.*$ http://mywebsite.978.org/reallybad.mp3 [R,L] Note: I was lazy and didn't specify "mp3" and every case variation of it, yes it's sloppy. Also the mp3 there doesn't exist, above is an example. I'm re-writing everything from xanga to a super-low bitrate mp3 from Mr. Bungle's first album. This album had an explict lyrics tag on it and the song is particulary bad. What can I say, I was having a mean streak. The users can use this replacement mp3 if they choose to but I have a feeling it will just work itself out naturally.

OSX baby Date: 12-27-2005 01:11 With x86 Macs coming, probably next month all we need now is VMWare to make a port that'll run on the new hardware and then everyone can switch.

BitchX tty vs. pts Date: 07-18-2005 22:49 Noticed a little quirk or I should say Jef pointed this out. BitchX wasn't working correctly, it would just seem to spit out data all on one line, like the ANSI wasn't quite right. I hopped on the terminal on the server and sure enough it was working. After about an hour I realized it was only the mingetty sessions, people coming in via pts/? The times I tested it I was on a tty and it was fine. All I had to do was adjust the TERM variable. EXPORT TERM="linux" Added it to the .bash_profile. For some reason under CentOS it defaults to xterm which doesn't work so well with the copy of BitchX I'm using.

Sleeper moved Date: 07-17-2005 21:55 My main server 'sleeper' has finally been moved. It went from a PIII 300 with 256Mb to an Athlon 1.8 with 512Mb. Hardware wise it's not a crazy jump but the OS went from Red Hat 7.2 to CentOS4. It's about time I changed that OS as RH7.2 has been EOL for a while now. With the move I've also finally gotten around to moving from a really really old version of Gallery to Gallery 2. It wasn't hard, just time consuming as it wouldn't import anything from the old version. Now I've got to add a bunch of comments back to the photos but I'll admit, it's much better and I was impressed by the installer and it's ease of use. In non-geek news: things are going well at work, condo is still in one piece, car is stil running. I still need furniture, but I'm working on that one... really.

DVD Copying under Linux? Date: 04-02-2005 12:34 Why does this have to be a big pain in the bum? I've used vobcopy and dvdbackup and for some reason some of the vobs are still encrypted. If you know what I'm doing wrong (besides removing the encryption :) ) please let me know. I really don't want to have to setup a Windows box here just for DVD copying. Although I'm thinking of setting up a media PC... I just need more parts.

Welcome Back Date: 02-05-2005 21:52 Since the last time I wrote a number of things have happened. Probably the most significant is that Jennifer and I are no longer together. Oddly enough, out of every relationship I've ever had, this has been the easiest to overcome. I think it's because there was such a concrete reason for us breaking apart. A living, breathing, other person was that reason. She cheated on me with one of her co-workers which totally took me by surprise. While I wish it could have turned out another way... the fact that it happened this way made dealing with it much easier. I've been hanging out with friends again. Discovered some new music. Work is challenging. I've also been playing my guitar (though, not very well). It's good to be back.

I voted for the other guy Date: 11-03-2004 16:31 The election is over and we've got four more years of GW Bush. I voted for the other guy... and no, I don't mean Ralph Nader. I've heard more than one person say lately that if Bush got re-elected then moving somewhere might be a good option. I was thinking about it today and it reminded me of this: The Tank and the Coffee Tree It was written a few years ago by a guy I haven't seen in probably 10 years. Excuse the expression but... Patrick has the biggest balls of anyone else I know. I'm still here, but I'd like to assume that my tax dollars are being used on federal research grants or WIC programs.

First generation Integra update Date: 09-06-2004 14:14 Jiro basically said I could have his 89 Integra to fix up and sell. I thing is probably only worth 700 on a good day, but I figured, what the heck. I might put some time into it but it might be worth it. The interior is fine but the body has rust damage. Engine runs fine, but the battery was shot. Replaced the battery. Brought the old one back to AutoZone because it was still semi-new looking. Ends up they gave me a 30 dollar credit as part of their warranty. They didn't have the battery in stock. Picked up a nice Die Hard at Sears. Car started fine with a new battery but it needs exhaust work. Apparently the pipe between the cat and muffler rotted out. Tried to back up but the whole car lurched and I ended up dragging the back wheel which was locked. Ended up having to remove the brake caliper to find that one of the pads appears to have welded itself o the rotor. Banged it off with a hammer and put it back on. Two front tires weren't holding air so I started to replace them with some civic 13" steelies (actually del sol, but same thing). They barely cleared the calipers but they fit. While taking off the front passenger side tire two wheel studs snapped off. I searched for some time and didn't find too much exact information on replacing them so here's the quick how to: 1. Jack up the car. Put it on jackstands for safety's sake. 2. Remove wheel. 3. Remove two bolts holding on caliper. Pop that off and suspend with string. No need to remove the rotor. 4. Looking at the back of the assembly your can see a metal heatshield, it extends and covers most of the back but not much of the front. Bend it out of the way near the front area. 5. Put the car in in netural, rotate the assembly until it's in position and hammer out the old stud. It'll fall right out. 6. Get the new stud. Here's the trick I learned from a Hybrid forum post... Grind down the top of the stud so instead of an "O" it shaped more like a "D". using a metal file it took about 5 minutes of manual labor for each stud to do this. Ground mind down until it was even with the rest of the stud. 7. Put the stud in position with the flat side against the part of the assembly you'd normally be really stuck. It still wont slide right in so bang it into place. I was worried about wrecking the threads but I did both studs with almost no thread damage to the studs. 8. Using an extension, pound the new stud down into position. Done. So far I've only spent 32 dollars on this project. It still needs body work and an exhaust piece but I we can probably keep total cost under 150 bucks.

Gone linux, gone wireless Date: 06-22-2004 20:15 So Bill gave me an extra 4 gig notebook HD and I threw it in and put SuSE 9.1 on it. Thanks Bill! During this time I've had a really long network cable strung across the apartment. Since then I hopped on two great deals. From OfficeMax a Belkin 802.11g PCMCIA card (f5d7010): 10 dollars + 5 dollars shipping... but there was a 10 dollar rebate making it 5 bucks. This in addition to the 802.11b Netgear router I picked up at Staples which worked out to about 15 dollars (once again, after rebate). So basically my wireless setup has cost me a whopping 20 dollars (or actually 20.74 because of the two stamps). Now I mentioned the Belkin wireless card to Travis today and he gave me a "Good luck getting THAT to work under linux" comment. Hey buddy, it only took me an hour and a half, and that's because I spent the last hour trying to get the damn thing to start-up automagically. Then again... I'm using a 2.6 kernel and when he tried it the ndiswrappers probably werent around. The ndiswrapper is cool, it lets you use the Windows drivers under linux. So just in case anyone needs it.. here's how to quickly set it up (well under SuSE 9.1): I ran this all as root: 1) Open Yast and run a search for "ndiswrapper". Install it. 2) Stick in the Belkin CD, mount it (duh). 3) From a shell find the .inf file on the cd then type "ndiswrapper -i bcmw15.inf". This copies the inf file over. 4) Insert the PCMCIA card. 5) From a shell type "modprobe ndiswrapper". The powerlight should turn on on the card. 6) In KDE open up the hardware plugger program and pick the wireless nic and press Configure. Basically setup the configuration from there. I actually did it twice. First I had my wireless access point wide open, no WEP key, etc. It worked. Reverted back to my normal settings. Went back in I entered my WEP key, default channel, network ID, etc. Finish and at this point it'll be working, BUT when you reboot it wont so... 7) from the root shell "ndiswrapper -m" to write your config. 8) I lifted this part from a post somewhere else. On startup you need to get that modprobe ndiswrapper command re-run. Go into /etc/init.d/rc5.d. Create two files, a startup file and a kill file. You'll notice that the files with S are numbered in order. You want to create a new one between S??pcmcia and S??network. example, I was able to use "touch S04wlan" (pcmcia was 03, network was 05). Edit the file now and add #!/bin/bash modprobe ndiswrapper Make another one for the K file, once again with a number between network and pcmcia. In that one use "modprobe -r ndiswrapper" to unload it before shutting down pcmcia. chmod both files +x (ie "chmod +x S04wlan"). Now on reboot it'll run the command and you'll have your wireless available.

CFF Walk this weekend Date: 05-09-2004 21:21 This weekend Jennifer and I will be participating in the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation's Great Strides Walk. The person we know with CF is Tovah: More Pictures:(2),(3) Isn't she a cutie? If you'd like to donate the please write out a Check to the "Cystic Fibrosis Foundation", e-mail me and I'll swing by and pick it up. If you don't care about it being tax deductible you can always send something via PayPal. Even a dollar will help! Every dollar helps. Push the button below.

Frickin' Gallery, TSS and Bye Peter. Date: 04-16-2004 08:25 I stayed up and watched the Red Sox and worked on upgrading Gallery last night. I've been trying to upgrade so I could start using this command line perl script to add pictures. Why? Because I want to use it in conjunction with my other script that puts my T300 camera phone pictures on here via e-mail. Right now they just dump into a directory which is fine, but it's not pretty. I guess what I want is a fairly simple moblog without having to use a site like textamerica.com. I'm just creating more work for myself... I know. In other news Jennifer and I have started watching The Screen Savers on TechTV. I find myself yelling out the answers at the TV each time someone calls in with a question or thinking "Slashdot covered that YESTERDAY!" when they do the news segments. Overall, I don't really learn much from the show, but it's entertaining. The thing that sucks is that shortly after we started watching, Leo Laporte left the show. It's not that I don't really like Kevin and Patrick (two current hosts), but Leo was just funny as heck and seemed to have a lot more personality. I also just found out this morning that my friend Peter will be moving to Albany in a month. Best of luck Pete-head.

No NetSol woes for me. Date: 01-28-2004 10:25 I wanted to write today about my domain name registrar change. I've heard various rumors about transitioning registrars from Network Solutions (netsol). I had read various web pages saying this process was a nightmare. A friend of mine said it took several attempts and requests to get their domain transferred from them. I was expecting a battle and was let down. I've been with netsol since they were the only game in town. My domain Guster.net was due to expire in just over a month. I looked at the netsol prices for renewal. 35 dollars a year? That seemed a bit steep. Sure it's cheaper if you renew multiple years, but their prices are still high. Especially when other places charge a fraction of the price. On Monday I signed up with my new registrar TheNic.com. Prices were a decent 12.50 a year and they were recommended by a friend (Travis) so I figured I'd go with them. After signing up, a day later an e-mail was sent to me from Netsol asking to confirm the transition. I clicked on the link provided in the e-mail and approved the change via a short form. The next day I got e-mails from theNIC.com and netsol indicating my domain was transferred. Hmm. Too easy. Maybe netsol has cleaned up their act?

Upgrade Time Date: 01-15-2004 08:03 I've upgraded my "primary" machine. Instead of a Celeron 533 I now have: 1.8Ghz Athlon XP : Should be about twice as fast as my old CPU. I picked this CPU because it's in my price range (read: around $50) and the Athlon's always seem to perform better than their Celeron equivalents. I'd considered a Duron chip but right now the Athlon's are basically priced the same for the same performance. Speeze CPU Cooler: Basically, it looks like a full size fan attached to a big aluminum heat sink. I just got it for the name: Speeze! It just sounded good. Abit KD7A mainboard : So far I'm impressed with the board. It was relatively cheap ($67). It has four USB 2.0 ports, built in nic, AC97 sound card, and a VIA KT400A chipset. So SuSE is running very well and it detected all the new hardware without a hitch. I did have to enter into yast a few times to get everything setup, but it ended up being much easier to setup than I expected. Maxtor 80 gig HD: 8 meg cache and 7200 RPM. My old mainboard only support ATA 33, so despite the speed of the drive it was still running fairly slow. Under SuSE it's now showing up properly as an ATA133 drive. 256 Meg DDR 333: I got one stick of memory, I'd rather have two but I was on a tight budget. Sapphire Radeon 7000 AGP card: It was the cheapest new card with TV/Out that I could find. So far I can't get any 3d support to work, but 2d is fine. I guess the 3d support isn't really an issue since I rarely play any games. After spending a few hours googling the issue I just gave up. Sorry Tux Racer, no love for you. Overall the machine is running well. I'm still getting used to SuSE's environment. I'm not a fan of KDE so I *attempted* to install Ximian XD2. That didn't turn out so well. I thought since Novell had acquired both SuSE and Ximian the first release would be really tight. Right now I can't even get to an XD2 session without choosing "Failsafe Gnome Session" for my login. All the install bugs I'm having are now in Ximian's knowledge base, but it doesn't seem stable enough to use so I'm still playing with KDE. In the long run I'm trying to find a complete replacement for my Windows 2000 setup. Finding decent video editing software has been an adventure. I don't do intensive video editing, but I would like the ability to do some basic TV captures from my bt848 card and encode them in MPEG 1/2 or another popular format. Broadcast 2000 came bundled in with SuSE. I tried Broadcast 2000 but I wasn't having much luck performing a capture. I installed Cinerella, which I guess is the updated version of B2000, but that was just as hard to use. While some captures worked many frames were dropped (320x240 29 fps capture) which is unacceptable. Now I'm testing out LiVES as the requirements seem to be a lot lower. It was very easy to setup, has a simple interface. It's almost time to format the Win 2K partition with reiser. Goodbye Microsoft.

Whoah Date: 07-19-2003 19:04 Jiro reminded me that my website is way out of date. I just updated some links and I'm posting now. What's going on with me? Well I'm working full time and no longer as a contractor which is nice. It's been a long time since I've had benefits. Paying full price for prescriptions was starting to really stink. In other news my car was hit by a pedestrian (yes, not the other way around). It's recovered, actually looking better than before and as an added bonus it got a new windshield which is something it's been needing for year. And no the pedestrian wasn't hurt, I heard he went to the hospital and they released him because nothing was broken. I saw him on the street the other day and he seemed to be normal as usual. Okay, time to shut up, please come back in another six months and there might be something new here. (kidding.)

The past few weeks Date: 12-14-2002 11:12 I haven't time to write since I started work. As some of you know I'm working as a contractor now so my schedule has changed. No more hanging out at home and watching Good Morning America. I've been going to bed at 9 or 10 so I can be up at 6 AM. I need to get a full night's sleep because I'm in training all day. The first two weeks of training were alright. Basically a lot of off the shelf software training that's relevant to the client (MS products / Lotus Notes / Ticketing). Next week is the last week of training then I get the week of Christmas off with no pay because I'm a contractor. At least that will give me time to go Christmas shopping. Weeks ago I did go to that Guster concert at Merrimack College. I'd received an e-invite to a dinner party at Viv's house. I ended up showing up after dinner and had a beer with everyone before the show. Viv & Dave's place is pretty cool. I guess it's some converted frat house that is now used for alumni of Phillips Academy (Viv works for them). High ceilings and well decorated with Guster & Blues Traveler paraphernalia. After hanging out for a while I carpooled over to the venue with Viv and Dave. So we get there and it's freezing out so we opted to wait in the car (SUV actually). Beth and "Rebecca" joined us inside and I attempted to scalp Viv's remaining ticket for her. I also ended up FINALLY meeting Richard Kwong (used to be in #978). I also met up with Dawn, Faye and Jen H. from the Fan2Fan list for our B&P-type trade. Show was pretty good... very long and lots of new songs. I didn't have my camera with me so I didn't both to venture up front to take pictures. I'm not sure how much I like the three newest songs from Guster. So far the only song I really like is "Homecoming King", and that is relatively old. They played it with a segway into "Another Brick in the Wall" which was really cool. Thanksgiving was alright. I spent the day at Jennifer's parents house and had dinner with them. My family decided that we'd do Thanksgiving dinner on Friday instead because my mom was working all day. Apparently Thanksgiving is a big eat-out night in the Hotel industry. So on Friday I called my parents at 11AM and they told us to be there by noon or something which was highly unusual since we normally eat holiday meals at like 4-6PM. There was a lack of communication with Jiro so he wasn't even there because he probably assumed the same thing I did, that dinner would be in the afternoon and not at noon. My parents were rushing because they wanted to go car shopping that afternoon. My parents have decided that they are getting brand new Toyota Sienna (minivan). I they haven't bought new since I was about 10 years old. Since then they've owned mostly small, used, commuter type cars: Mazda 323, Toyota Corolla, Toyota Camry. All of were alright, and I guess they deserve something nice. I'm wondering if they'll want to get rid of the truck and also what they will do with either the Camry or Corolla. Last weekend I helped Jiro some more with his car. The torsion bar on the driver's side broke. It twisted apart inside the tube so if we tapped it forward to remove the locking clip it would really be sliding over the other piece and putting all the pressure on walls of the tube. He ended up removing the front lower arm to get the remainder of the bar out. On top of that, while I was helping him one of the lower control arm bolts broke. Working on older cars is such a pain in the ass. I can't wait till I own a house and have money to buy air tools.

Pond draining and Tori Amos Date: 11-22-2002 11:53 Spent a day at my parents house draining their backyard pond. Since there weren't any fish I put a pump into it and ran some garden hose down to the sewer drain. Draining took a few hours so I spent some time inside playing my bass trying to hash out a reasonable transcription of Guster's "Homecoming King" (new song). I'm stuck in some places because the recording I have is too muddy for me to hear the bass line well enough to figure it out. When I see them Saturday I'll have to cheat a little and pay attention to Ryan's playing. When the pond got down to the last few feet I started skimming out sludge and leaves to find a whole bunch of these scary water bugs jumping around and six frogs. I scooped up the frogs and relocated them to the river down the street from the house. Also went to see Tori Amos on Tuesday night. Jennifer and I both took naps before the show and ended up running a little late. I drove like a mad man to get there, but there was a line down the street and around the corner to get inside the venue. They were frisking people and taking away lighters and cigarettes. It was pretty cool. I've never been big on smelling like the Smoking Man after concerts. That always means I've got to hit the shower before bed. By the time we got inside I totally missed Howie Day's performance. The good news is that we happened to run into Jessica (a.k.a Messica/Talulaq) and she gave us her floor seats. She somehow got hooked up with front row seats. The floor seats were good, definitely better than what we had. The show was alright. Mostly a good mix of Little Earthquakes material and stuff from Scarlet's Walk. I'm not sure if I liked the lack of guitar on this tour. The bassist was a crazy guy did a lot of interesting stuff, but it still didn't make up for the lack of a guitarist. Anyway, lunch time!

Rubik's Clock Date: 11-14-2002 15:34 I went to my parents house today to find some books in the basement and instead I found a Rubik's Clock. Everyone knows what Rubik's Cube is and maybe Rubik's Magic (Can you link the Rings?). Many years ago a relative of mine gave me and my brother each a Rubik's Clock. Basically it's a plastic game with nine clock faces on one side, nine clock faces on the opposite side. It has four buttons on each side which locks the four clocks around it and four spinners that rotate the clock faces. Basically you need to use the spinners and locks to get all of the clocks facing twelve o'clock. It SOUNDS harder than it looks. Once you figure it out the first time the solution is simple. Kind of like the way a Rubik's Magic works. Anyway, my brother and I both got one of these things. I managed to figure it out eventually (hey, I was like 12). The funny thing was, I knew the solution and tried it on my brother's clock and it didn't work. One of the clock faces was off by an hour all the time so it was basically unsolvable. It's a good thing that we had a working one otherwise we'd be scratching our heads to this day.

Goostah and Salem (the other Salem) Date: 11-12-2002 14:56 I got a call today from the Guster office regarding the Merrimack College show. It looks like I'll be going to Merrimack! I'm thinking of not going to the SHNH show in Manchester, NH. It'll be a Sunday night and the only day that Jennifer isn't working. It'll be nice to spend the night together, chill on the couch and watch Alias. My two year anniversary with Jennifer is tomorrow. Yesterday I drove to Salem, MA with my brother to drop by the art gallery/framing store where I got Norman (a pencil/water color piece of a cat named "Norman"). Well it ends up they were one of the few stores that was closed on Veteran's Day. G and I walked around Salem. He was in search of a replacement cheap-o hematite ring and I popped into all the artsy places in town in search of a present. Well he found his ring, for a whopping 1.75 so he got two and I left empty handed. It was amazing how dead Salem was. I guess things just quiet down after Halloween over there.

News on the job front Date: 11-09-2002 19:54 I was looking into doing some work as a security guard. I needed the money to get me through Christmas time, otherwise my friends and family were more than likely to get very cheap gifts (tube socks, soap, stock in Genuity). So I went to the security guard orientation and got lined up to do training. On Tuesday Jennifer got a call from a contracting company. She informed the recruiter that she already had a job, but referred him to me. Next day I went for an interview and by that afternoon I was told that I got the job. Basically I'll be working as tier 1 help desk support. The pay isn't exactly great. Let's just say it's a little better than the security gig, but about half of what I was making at my last job. At least it's work and more importantly it's in the right field.

Random babbling... Date: 10-25-2002 13:57 Haven't written here for a while. Last weekend Jennifer and I went to New Jersey to attend Tamara and Chris's wedding. I drove there and back, and other than some annoying wrist pain and getting stuck at the GW Bridge it was a good drive. C15 through Connecticut is really nice. A four lane divided highway with trees on both sides and trees in the middle. If I had my own car it would have been really fun drive. My mom hooked us up with an employee discount and I only ended up spending 47 dollars on a room at the Marriot Residence Inn. Wedding was short and sweet. At the reception we got to sit with two mom's and four other live journal people. Jennifer and I talked mostly to the mom's. I don't know what it is with us, but we seem to connect well with the older crowd. Maybe it's because we go to bed at like 10 o'clock. I only got up for one dance with Jennifer and it was a slow one. I think it's the first time we ever danced. It was just nice to be there on the dance floor and kind of ignore everyone else. I felt as if we connected in some way and I think that's the best memory I'll have of the trip. Last night we went to see Christine Kane at BC's Chestnuthill campus. She played for over an hour and there were a lot of stories. One of them was about how she flew to South Africa to be with this guy and he dumped her in the airport. We're going to try to see her tonight in Newton and I'm hoping that she'll have some different between song banter and a drastically different set (just to mix things up a little). In other news, I'm working with my brother to make some shift lights for my car. I was able to find a schematic on-line for a circuit which does what I want. I had to search Google for like an hour then ended up using the Way Back Machine to get a cached version of the page. Anyway, my car reaches red line at 8200 RPM. By the time you get that high a rev limiter kicks in and shuts off fuel to the car to protect the engine, which is a good thing. A bad thing is forgetting to shift by the time you get to that point. The schematic I got is a two stage shift light. In my case I'll probably have it so that the warning LED will turn on at about 7500 RPM (yellow LED) and then have second one turn on at 8000 RPM (red LED). Hopefully the thing will go together without issues. I'm kind of confused at how it works, but G seems to understand. He's been covering some of the concepts in class and said he'll explain it to me which is pretty cool.

Mmmmm Apple pie Date: 10-07-2002 16:19 Jennifer and I went apple picking last week. Since then I've made an apple crisp (from a box), but to redeem myself I decided to make an apple pie from scratch. The pie is cooling off on top the stove right now. I did a lattice top and it looks pretty good. Hopefully it tastes as good as it looks. Now I know why people just buy pies at the store. Yesterday we drove to Dairy Queen. It was actually kind of cold, especially with the roof off, but more importantly we had a good time. On the way there I got on the wrong way on 110 and took us for a 15 minute detour. It would have been nice if the foliage was in full force and if we weren't in Haverhill, but it wasn't and we were in Haverhill. When we got there it was apparent that the weekly car show (50,60,70's era) wasn't happening anymore. There were two old corvettes in the lot. Oddly enough one of them is owned by a science teacher I had when I was in the 7th grade. Everyone feared this guy because he ran a very strict classroom. There was no talking unless you raised your hand, no passing notes, no fiddling with your pen or pencil, nothing. He wouldn't open the windows in the summer time because of the off chance that a bee would fly into the classroom and sting a student who happened to be allergic to them. Behind his desk the linoleum was worn down to a dull brownish-black because he constantly walked back and forth during his class lectures. However, he was the best teacher I had in elementary school. And in other news I sold the Street Fighter II machine. I sold the marquee separately to someone else for 10 bucks. I'm still waiting to put the old jamma board up on Ebay. I had it sold once, but the guy took forever to get me the money (read: over a month). I was so frustrated that he hadn't sent me the money... then he finally sends me a personal check. On my original auction I noted that I don't accept personal checks. I don't trust random people and their ability to maintain the status of their checking accounts. If it bounces, MY bank charges me a fee which I think is completely unfair. I ended up canceling that auction though and getting my money back from ebay. So eventually it'll be back up there.

Exhaust woes and the Beach Date: 09-25-2002 19:07 Hung out with Bill on Sunday morning and had breakfast at Friendly's. I really don't like their lunch/dinner menu, but they really are the cheapest breakfast in town and that works for me. Played a little catch up on things and I ended up going to his place Tuesday night as well to borrow his Dremel rotory tool. Damn truck exhaust had these chunks of metal that were preventing a good seal so I wanted to flatten things out. Ends up, I used the Dremel to remove the metal but now the gasket isn't being pinched which means the exhaust leak is now worse. Stopped at AutoZone for a $1.99 tube of muffler sealant. I'm hoping that by smearing the sealant all over the place it'll help make a good seal and at least get me through inspection. Jennifer and I also went to Salisbury beach today. Most of the places were basically closed for the rest of the season so we got pizza at Christy's then went to the only open arcade. I played some shooting game where you are supposed to duck, and your character will duck on the screen to avoid on-coming bullets. My thighs are still aching from playing it which just goes to show out out of shape I am. My timer is beeping which means my coffee is brewed (french press). Time for some apple pie a la mode and a cup of joe! :)

Date: 09-21-2002 19:58 Went to Scrapefest 2002 today with Travis. It was all the way up in Hopkinton, NH which is kind of a haul, but not so bad since I drove to Manchester then Travis drove from there. Just after the toll booth on 93 we saw 4 riceboys pulled over by a few state troopers. Either they were racing, or they blew the toll. It's too bad I didn't get picture of them. We did see them finally get to the event at least a half hour after we'd already been there. Overall the show was more rice than nice. I think I saw ONE turbo'd Honda, and one supercharged pickup. Lots of APC crap and vinyl stickers. The import "scene" isn't much to talk about around here. I did talk to a nice older guy with a 'sol who was promoting some SCCA-like road racing program up in Loudon. He had a sol with a GSR motor and roll cage. Big ricey wing and duo tail pipes though (bleh). Only person I actually talked to besides Travis. Afterwards we went to Travis's parents house and played with his MAME box. Pretty cool. I've run MAME before and I didn't care much for it, but it's a better experience with actual arcade controls. I also was able to borrow some tin snips and a rivet gun from his dad's garage so I can work on the truck this week. Failed inspection due to an exhuast leak and a hole in the floor pan. Anyway, time to watch BB3.

Wipers and Movies Date: 09-16-2002 13:36 On Saturday I worked on the truck, a 1986 Ford Ranger. My parents asked me to get in inspected for them. So prior to bringing it in I did a check on the basics and of course something was broken... Wipers didn't work. So I spent a half hour trying to find batteries for G's multimeter so I could check the fuse. Fuse was fine so I ended up running to the library to get the Chilton's manual. Stopped to help Jennifer's dad put the cover on their pool. Also met Fred, who seems like a pretty nice guy. Very down to earth, likes hot rods and bowling. Doesn't like guys the guys on the radio who *think* they know everything about baseball and football. Got back to the truck. Put some oil on the rotating assembly, removed the wipers and tried them again. I thought that taking some load off the system would get things going again but it didn't work. Each time I had been starting the engine and the one time I didn't I noticed that the wiper motor actually was getting power because it was clicking. Last time I heard clicking in my Honda was when the starter wouldn't turn over due to a bad ground. Took off the ground wire of the wiper motor and cleaned it along with the bolts. I used G's battery terminal cleaner to get all the rust off the parts. Put it back together and it worked. Never got to the inspection, but it can wait till another day. On Sunday Jennifer and I went to see One Hour Photo. Begining was funny and it progressed to getting darker and darker then leaves you wondering what will happen to William's character. My brother used to work for a well known store's photo center (begins with W and ends with MART). He showed me a couple of funny prints before. Like half naked people, who really really shouldn't be half naked, nevermind take pictures of themselves. If you didn't know it already, the photo tech's will look at your prints. I'm glad I went digital, not that I take any pictures of things I shouldn't. I just don't like strangers looking at my pictures. I also watched Rashomon. I'd seen Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samuri before so I figured it would be pretty good. I didn't really like it... not because it didn't have meaning. It was chock full o'meaning. It was the maniacal laughter of some of the characters and the annoying crying of the only woman in the film.

One year ago... well tomorrow Date: 09-12-2002 15:33 Tomorrow will be my one year "living with Jennifer" anniversary, as well as our one year and ten month anniversary. Seems like it was just the other day that we moved in here. Jennifer, if you read this: I love living with you :)

Cousin Akira, Baseball and DOMO-KUN Date: 09-06-2002 11:09 So all this week my cousin Akira as been in town. He's about my age, but I can't really tell you too much about him. We didn't speak much because he doesn't know much english, and I don't speak much Japanese. Went to the Red Sox game last night (Sox vs. BlueJays) with my mom and Akira. It was a pretty exciting game down to the last inning. It's amazing how many people left shortly after the seventh inning stretch. There were about 30,000 people there (according to the billboard) and my guess is that about a third to maybe half the fans left before the game was over. They were down by 3 runs, but hell if they stayed till the end it was a close game. They only lost by one run. In other news, my sister Yuki sent me a very cool Domo-Kun doll, complete with battery powered flailing arms. When you push his head he says "DOMO!!!" then his arms start moving to some kind of rock-like music. The thing has an "alarm" function, which was apparently setup for sometime around midnight. It went off and scared the hell out of Jennifer. I was a bit startled too... I don't know if I'll be using Domo as my alarm clock in the future.

Good News Date: 08-27-2002 10:31 My 19" monitor that was soaked from the sprinkler seems to be working fine. After draining all the water out of it I let it sit for five days. I'm surprised it's working! Only loss was the cheap keyboard. Got a nice replacement from my brother. Woot!

SpamAssassin Date: 08-26-2002 20:06 Installed Spam Assassin on August 15th. It's already captured about 40 spam messages. It did catch four messages from a legit mailing list I am on (Guster's Fan2Fan), but otherwise it's working well. I made some changes to the sensitivity of the program to prevent future legit messages from being filtered. Nifty program. All you do is setup procmail to feed everything through SpamAssassin. SpamAssassin does a bunch of tests to check if something is spam, adds up the score, and if it's over your threshold it gets dumped into a file (at least I have mine setup that way). If it's below threshold it goes to your mailbox as usual. I highy reccomend it to linux/unix users (if you aren't using something else already...).

Soaking and Portsmouth Date: 08-21-2002 20:19 Woke up this morning, walked into the computer room. Ends up, I left the window in the computer room wide open. The sprinkler system outside went off before I got up and sprayed water all over my desk and one of my machines (sleeper). Cleaning up my desk wasn't an issue. It's the computer that's the issue. Keyboard is useless now. Tipped it upside down and a bunch of water poured out. I took it apart and it uses a 3 layer film with contacts on the two outside layers. Pretty cool, but water was trapped between the layers. I cleaned out the film, but it looks like the contacts are all shot. Typing certain keys results in two characters, or sometimes the wrong character. Time to get a new 10 dollar keyboard. Luckly the 19" monitor wasn't on at the time so I am hoping it will be alright. I'm going to let it sit for a few days before turning it on. I guess it could be toast since picture tubes (or the electronics around them) tend to hold some type of charge. I'll find out in a few days. Homeowners insurance is probably useless for this case. Even if I got the claim through my deductible is still $250.00. I'm also going to have to call the apartment office and have them fix the sprinkler system. In other news... Jennifer and I spent the day at Odiorne State Park. Saw a bunch of snails a few (two) crabs. I got bitten by some bastard greenhead flys, or something like them because when I left I had a handful of bite marks and swelling on my legs. After Odiorne we went to downtown Portsmouth for a bite to eat at the Rusty Hammer (not to be confused with The Self Tapping Screw). Food was kind of eh, but it was the first place I brought Jennifer to have a real meal after she had her tonsils out. Also picked up Ben Kweller's CD today for 8.97. I figure that even if I only end up liking two songs (Walk on Me, Falling) it's not such a bad purchase. SHA SHA.

Red Sox and me on TV Date: 08-08-2002 00:57 So Jennifer and I went to see the Sox take on the Oakland A's tonght. Before the game we made this sign, which caused our entire apartment to smell like markers. When we got to Fenway I ended up having to park about 7 or 8 blocks away. I ended up paying 15 bucks for parking, but it was still better than the 20 or 25 that lots next to the park were charging. I also had to fold up the sign and hide it in the flannel shirt I was carrying. Luckly we got through without issues. We saw Nerissa (from the Nields) on our way to our seats. She was there with her sister to sing the national anthem. So we said "hi" to her and wished her luck. Great game, but the Red Sox ended up losing. It was exciting all the way to the end though. Bottom of the 9th, they are down by a run. Two guys on base and Manny's got 2 strikes and 2 balls (I think). He hit a ball into homerun territory, but the A's center fielder stretched his arm over the wall to catch the ball (low wall to the warm-up area). Very nice catch, so I guess it was a deserved win for the A's. Here's the best part though. We taped the game and our poster got on TV. You can't really see Jennifer's head because she's holding the sign, but you can see me! Hehe. Pictures and video clip are here

NAWWS Date: 08-07-2002 10:59 A few days ago I went shopping with Jennifer and her two nieces. I was forced to go to stores like Clarie's, Rave Girl, and The Limited Too. Jennifer was really nice though and got me The Fast and The Furious on DVD as a thank you. We watched it last night and tried to come up with a drinking game (not that we play drinking games). If you drink to "Tuna" it ends up being said about 5-7 times in the first 20 minutes of the movie. If you drink to "NOS" it's about 7-10 times in the first half hour. Unfortunately the "NAWWWS" doesn't stick around for last hour of the movie. Anyway, it's worth owning for comedic value. "Double Clutching", "Blowing the welds off your intake manifold", and the thought of sticking Nissan SR20DET's into Civics makes me laugh. Not to mention the NAWWWWWs! Bored people can check out my Fast and Furious captions archive: Here. Can't add captions anymore because my server was getting slammed.

For Sale Date: 07-31-2002 09:43 Not that anyone I know wants this, but I have a Street Fighter II Hyper Fighter arcade machine for sale. $300.00 OBO. Pictures and details are in the gallery. I also have the old SF2 Championship Edition PCB which is currently for sale on Ebay, but probably wont get a single bid.

I can play DVDs! Date: 07-12-2002 19:15 So Jennifer and I finally got around to watching Shrek on dvd the other day and realized that it sucks that neither of us have a DVD ROM in our computers. Apparently Shrek, Harry Potter, and a bunch of other DVD's we own probably have extra's which we haven't seen. So I was swapping my video card in the linux box. The GeForce 256 that was in there kept having this weird shadowing problem. Every area where colors would be in contrast (like black text on a white background) would result in a light grey shadowing effect horizontally across the screen. I'd swapped out the card a few days earlier with a junker Starfighter that G had sitting around. The problem went away, but I figured I'd pop in the other card one more time just to make sure it was causing the problem before tossing it in the trash. So I am down there swapping cards and notice the linux box has a DVD drive. Silly me, I'd never noticed before. So last night I started playing with Xine. After much configuring and installing of various versions I finally realized that they don't include support for decoding encyrpted DVDs. Just about all DVD's are encyrpted so it was basically useless after you do a base install. After about 4 hours of widdling I was able to get it DVD's to play with the d4d plug-in. So far xine rocks with the exception that: The user interface isn't exactly user friendly. I can't figure out where the menu controls are, but at least the DVD menus appear. I can press play though and it will start playing a movie. Jumping chapters is iffy as well. Pressing the next track button appears to do nothing. The biggest bug I noticed is that in full screen mode subtitles on my Tampopo DVD werent working. Anyway, It doesn't solve the whole DVD ROM thing because I bet there's probably a catch that you need Windows to run the programs. It's still damn cool though.

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