I'm always the last person to hear about anything

I'm sure I'm the last person to see this, but I laughed pretty hard. This is my kind of "bit" and I can't believe I didn't think of it first:

Linus does 25 things about me.

Holy Cow!

Old Barney Miller episodes on Hulu! This is like the greatest sitcom of all time!

Amazing to hear myself say it ....

It's a girl! That is all.

Life is funnier than ...

Two funny incidents in the last two days, both involving my wife:

1) Last night we were at a Thanksgiving Potluck; several of our friends are Taiwanese (my wife was born in Taiwan, although spent her whole life in Brasil). We told people there that we were pregnant, and one of our friends said it was old Taiwanese saying that after you conceived, if the woman got prettier during the pregnancy, you were carrying a girl; if you got uglier (ie, if your complexion got worse etc), you were carrying a boy. A funny saying, that. Anyway, I quickly turned, and looked at my wife, paused a second and said:

"Hmmmmm, looks like it must be a boy."

Got a pretty good chuckle out of that, and a few slaps upside the head. (Of course, could never get away with something like that if she wasn't pretty.)

2) My wife and I work at the same company, and a couple days a week, we work from home in the same office. Today, we were working like this, and I heard her say while on a phone call with a customer:

"No, I can't tell you where you put your install media."

I couldn't help myself: I laughed alound, and pretty loud. I don't know if the customer heard this, but they couldn't help but notice when my wife started laughing too. She had to make up some story that I was looking at my camera, and there was something funny on it, and I showed her, and it made her laugh. (Camera??? I asked her about this, and she meant to say "TV".)

This is the kind of stuff you read online and never believe. Working in Support is the perfect machine for generating comedic content. I'd write a novel based on this, if I wasn't so busy helping customers find their install media.

The Magic Typo

Imaginary situation: I've just searched for something in Google toolbar; what it is isn't important. I'm reading my feeds in Google Reader (maybe I should be in a commercial for Google) and I'm using the shortcut keys. But as often happens, Google Reader doesn't have focus, and my focus is still in Google Toolbar. The combination of the search and the unintentional extra characters produces the greatest search ever, the one search on Google that returns the magical hit that changes life forever. Imagine that.

So much for my turn at President ....

I had planned to become President of the United States in 4 or 8 years until I saw this story. Can you imagine being without email for 4 to 8 years? I can't. I guess that's it then: I guess I can stop working on my acceptance speech.

Meme poseur ...

There's a meme going on over on planet gnome. I usually don't care for them, but I liked this one:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open it to page 56.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

People who know me won't be surprised by mine:

"This in turn will stretch and tighten the body to a degree at which the downswing becomes an instinctive and uninhibited reaction."

Treeman

Search on "treeman" at Google for one of the saddest and most unusual stories of an individual struggling (courageously) against HPV.

Spirit of 76!

One of the two people who read this blog already know about this (golfed with me), but have to blog it anyway. I shot a 76 today! This is 5 strokes better than any round I've had in the last 10 years, and 3 strokes better than my best round (at Lions with a couple of beers in me when I was much, much younger).

I birdied 1, 9, and 17 with lengthy birdie putts (for me anyway). I could have potentially shot lower if I'd not three-putted two par 5's on the back nine (bogied both of them). Saved several pars with one-putts. Was unusually accurate with my short irons. Almost holed a sand wedge on the first hole.

I had no idea I was going that low until I checked the golf cart score card on the 18th after my third shot was on the green. I two-putted for the 76. In our golf foursome, the best previous score was a 78 and Ren and Toben had both scored several rounds under 80. It looked like I was never going to shoot a round like that ever. I was pretty much in a state of a shock when I realized I'd shot a 76. A very happy, pleasant state of shock.

Long live '76! Life is good!!

How sound can hang ...

I finally found it! I've been plagued with random gnome app hangs (usually gnome-panel, but plenty of other apps as well). I started stracing some of the hanging apps and it wouldn't give me much, but if I killed them, and restarted them under strace, I'd always see something like this at the end:

access("/tmp/.esd-501/socket", R_OK|W_OK) = 0
socket(PF_FILE, SOCK_STREAM, 0) = 18
fcntl64(18, F_SETFD, FD_CLOEXEC) = 0
setsockopt(18, SOL_SOCKET, SO_REUSEADDR, [1], 4) = 0
connect(18, {sa_family=AF_FILE, path="/tmp/.esd-501/socket"}, 22) = 0
rt_sigaction(SIGPIPE, {0x3d07c0, [PIPE], SA_RESTART}, {SIG_IGN}, 8) = 0
open("/home/foo/.esd_auth", O_RDONLY) = 19
read(19, "\371\27PG\6\f2utX=!\f\2):", 16) = 16
write(18, "\371\27PG\6\f2utX=!\f\2):", 16) = 16
write(18, "NDNE", 4) = 4
read(18,

It was always hanging trying to read this esd socket. After seeing several of these, I searched online, and it took me almost no time to find this once I searched on 'gnome-panel hangs esd socket'. This has been bugging me for weeks, and I had blamed it all on Notes 8. Nice to know I was wrong.

Looks like killing esd, pulseaudio or both resolves this problem. Previously I was actually having to reboot to resolve this!

Cool beans ...

I'm very excited about the results tonight. No one will (I think) claim that he's perfect, or will be free from mistakes, but I wonder if this is how many Americans felt when JFK won the election back in the day. While I'm writing this, McCain is giving his concession speech, and so far it's quite good ...

Voted!

I voted today. I went to the wrong precinct at first, and there was no line at all in the wrong place. They redirected me to the right precinct, and at the new voting location .... there was no line at all!

Rescued ....

We had two power outages today at home. The second one was about 45 minutes long. The worst part was it zapped my master boot record on my mythtv Fedora 9 machine. When I tried to boot it just printed:

"GRUB"

and stopped. This normally would have caused a great deal of panic in the old days, since I used to believe this wasn't recoverable. However, this is actually pretty easy to fix. I had already recently created a Fedora 9 respin using jigdo. I burned that and booted the computer in rescue mode.

Then did:

chroot /mnt/sysimage

and then tried to do:

grub-install

but it gave me:

"does not have any corresponding BIOS drive"

grub-install --recheck /dev/sda

Took a long time but eventually worked.

Next, started up grub and did:

root( hd0,1 )

setup( hd0 )

Everything worked, and I was able to boot ok!

Cleaning up rpm duplicates

Every once in awhile I'd have one of my linux boxes crashing during a yum update. If yum doesn't have a chance to do cleanup, it will leave a bunch of duplicate rpms that will totally mess up yum and it's dependency resolution. I used to have this rpm one-liner a colleague had come up with to list duplicates, then would manually remove them. This was a pretty not-fun process.

Well, apparently there's a tool that does this for you:

package-cleanup --cleandupes

package-cleanup --dupes

will list any duplicates. This is in the rpm yum-utils. I wonder when this was added?

When good food goes wrong ...

Had the worst case of food poisoning on Saturday night. It was either the Dim Sum we had Saturday afternoon, or the steak and salmon a friend cooked for me Saturday night. In either case, the symptoms were the most violent I've ever experienced, and for several days. My wife actually insisted I go to the ER (which, of course, was a total waste). I'm only now starting to feel anywhere close to normal. I don't think you'll see me at Dim Sum for quite a while ....

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?