A summer of grueling, hard-fought competition ....

Well, the long summer season finally ended this weekend. We worked pretty hard, competed without respite all summer long. I didn't think I could handle the long haul, but somehow I managed to last until the end. And, I'd made a pretty big comeback towards the end, but got beaten pretty badly one of the last few weeks, and it was too much to overcome. In the end, Ren proved to be the better man, and convincingly so.

I think we all deserve congratulations for how we persevered. I'm really going to miss Fantasy Golf.



I'm "Desire is the golf game killer" (and a truer word was never said).

Bad day, good night ...

Tough start to the day.

While not much could make up for how the day started, we went to a friend's house for picanha (cooked generously with ice cream salt) and hung around chatting and (some of us) drinking beer. Very nice night. We agreed we'd do a batida (sp?) party sometime soon, which is apparently a Brasilian drink made with cachaca, condensed milk and something else that sounded really good. This drink was invented with me in mind.

Remote downlevel document

I'd never been able to get printing working when my HP OfficeJet 4215 was samba shared to my Linux boxes. The print jobs would always show up as "Remote Downlevel Document" then the spooler would basically hang, and I could no longer print unless I deleted the job and rebooted the Windows box. The printer would work fine if it was connected directly to the Linux box (although we'd lose some of the functionality).

Was looking on the internet again today to see if anyone figured this out yet. I'd seen a lot of other people had this same problem, and never found a satisfactory solution. Finally, I hit paydirt: someone finally figured it out! Worked for me too. Nice.

Also, watched the Longhorns game recorded, and it was a pretty dominating victory. It would have been a great day if I'd hit better at the range.

Helping out ....

So my wife often complains that I don't help out around the house enough. One of the reasons this has happened is that my wife is very intense about everything being done a very specific way (her way), so that you pretty much stay out of her way, if possible. I've often warned her that if I started to do more around the house, I was fairly confident that she was not going to be happy with the fact that I was helping, but would likely be upset with me for not doing it exactly as she would have done it.

But, anyway, I can't not help based on this suspicion, can I? That's a total cop out. I've got got to keep the faith and assume everything will be fine. So, lately I've started to try and do more to help out. Tonight, I did the laundry while she watched TV (was a bachelor for a long time and have done my share of laundry). I won't go into details, however, let's just say it did not go well. Laundry got done, but there was no happiness.

What happened to my chomp?

Was working on a perl script for work today (a pretty ugly behemoth of a script at this point) and I kept getting weird behavior when printing some debug output. chomp() seemed like it had gone completely useless. Now if I was Toben, I would have started stomping around my office complaining about how broken perl was (I wish I could do that). However, I'm all too familiar with my propensity for shooting myself in the foot when writing perl code. And, as it turned out, setting $/ to a string naturally results in a useless chomp(). Although the perl programming book was kind enough to point out the error of my ways and that I could set $/ locally in a loop to get it back to it's normal behavior. Cool.

But the real question is: where were you Ren when I needed you?

Ryder Cup and seed-spitting ...

Had planned to record the Ryder Cup and watch later (although I didn't really have a good chunk of time available to actually watch the recording). But I blew off mowing the yard this afternoon (was still semi-wet) and watched the Ryder Cup (partly catching up the recording and partly live). So many putts were made it was quite remarkable! The ending was a little anti-climactic considering how well everyone played. I think the Euros wore down a little bit; the crowd was great for the US and it takes a lot of energy to fight that again and again.

After the Ryder Cup ended we went over to the house of a friend from church and had a potluck dinner. Food was very good, company was great, and we finished the night outside on their stone deck having a watermelon seed-spitting contest. The temperature was perfect, the sky was purple and dark blue and it was so quiet out. All in all, an awesome day.

Ubiquitous shells ...

Starting playing with Ubiquity and I like it. It's basically a small shell that you can install into firefox and allows you to do actions relative to specific contexts (highlighted text in the webpage or relative to the URL). It will need a lot more commands before it's really going to be useful, but I'm already using the email feature to send myself bookmarks.

Infinite Jest ...

Bought the book tonight at Barnes & Noble. We went down to San Marcos with A. and G., bought some golf shoes (only $40), came back, went to the golf range at Avery Rancy (we all mostly sucked today) then to dinner at Momji (sp?) where there was almost nothing on the menu I really liked. However, the mango ice cream kicked ass.

Football and other ...

Was disappointed in the USC-OSU game. Had been recording it on my mythtv box and one of our DVRs, but the game was so bad, I deleted both recordings around halftime (even though I have plenty of space on both).

Hadn't heard of David Foster Wallace (which kind of surprises me since he's the kind of author I would have normally known about) and the news of his death is a bit odd. When stuff like this happens don't the family usually try and hide the fact that it was suicide? I have no problem with the fact that they didn't, since I think in death, I wouldn't want the final statement of my life, that's this big, hidden. But it's almost as if they're broadcasting the fact that it was suicide (and if they are, they probably have a good reason to do so).

I think I'll have to read Infinite Jest, even though I've seen many reviews that suggest it's a book that's being clever for the sake of being clever (and I generally don't have any patience for that). I guess I need to read and decide for myself; the theme certainly sounds fascinating.

Rumours about McCain true?

Been reading lots of blogs lately that claim that McCain has completely changed his personality in the last several weeks/months of this campaign. I have no way of knowing whether this is really true except via second-hand reports, and most of the folks who are in a position to report on this generally have their own agendas. If it is true, however, it's unfortunate. Even if I was unlikely that I was going to vote for him, I was glad he was the Republican candidate, since he seemed to be "different" than your normal glad-handing, ass-kissing, talking-points speaking politician.

iotop (2)

Have I mentioned iotop before and how much it rocks?

Mythtv ...

Forgot to post this awhile ago: I've had Mythtv working for awhile with the free regular cable jack that I got from Time Warner (for spending so much money with them, I guess). However, I kept having problems getting my frontends on remote boxes to work. Turns out I misunderstood the sql for enabling remote boxes to connect to mysql that they had in the mythtv docs:

grant all on mythconverg.* to "mythtv"@"" identified by "mythtv";

The docs don't mention (where I could see), that the "identified" clause is setting the password. I thought it meant something else, and so I kept setting the wrong password. :-) Now it's all good. Pretty soon I'll have a hard drive full of old Star Trek episodes, which still remain, in my mind, some of the finest over the top science fiction drama of all time (unlike the new Star Treks which are generally devoid of drama and replete with agendas).

factcheck.org

After reading some of the entries on their site and subscribing to their feed, I'm almost inspired to become non-partisan myself.