General Rambling

Tool is a Bunch of Scurvy Dogs

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The Tool concert scheduled for tonight at the Kohl Center has been canceled due to an illness in the band. There will be no make-up date scheduled for this show. Fans who purchased tickets through the University of Wisconsin Athletic Ticket Office will receive a full refund for the concert. Fans who purchased tickets through uwbadgers.com or over the phone through the Athletic Ticket Office will receive refunds directly on their credit cards within the next ten business days. Crap! I was looking forward to this concert. I saw them out at Coachella in April and they were great.

5 AM Maintenance. Arrrrr.

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There is nothing I love more than getting up at 5 AM to patch and reboot servers. Not. It is nice, though, to have the world to myself at this hour. Quiet, peaceful. If it wasn’t for the fact that I only got three hours of sleep I’d be in heaven. I know I’ll be dragging later today. I almost forgot it’s Talk Like A Pirate Day! Hmm, going to have to get a few more instances of “Avast!” into my lexicon today. Arrrr.

Minnesota Twins Own the AL Central

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Hot damn, the Twins are 1 game back from the Tigers in the AL Central, with the White Sox 5 games back. They play Boston, Baltimore, and Kansas City before facing the White Sox at the very end of the season. I’m bored so I’m going to try to predict the division winner. I’ve never done this before, and I’ll just use the blog as my notepad. 🙂 Read through and if you think I’m wrong leave your prediction as a comment. They swept Boston last time, 3-0 for the season. They went 2-1 with the Orioles both other times they faced them. They’ve had the worst time with Kansas City, though, 9-6 on the season. Detroit is 9-1 against …

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ReiserFS, heh

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When people comment on my blog I like going to their web sites to see what they have going on. Mark from Blipverts was reminding me of Apple Lossless Encoding, and in reading his blog caught the news about Hans Reiser. A couple of observations: 1) The couple married in 1999. She emigrated to the U.S. about six years ago. She’s twelve years younger than him, which isn’t a huge deal but seems to be another data point. Um, mail order bride? She was 23-24 in 1999… 2) You don’t re-drug people, they come over and continue to do drugs with you, and then engage in all the random sexual acts. People don’t hang out with other people that drug …

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Dear Anybody Who Develops a Music Player: FLAC

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Dear anybody who develops an application to play music, One word: FLAC. It’s free, it’s open, it’s what I’m reripping all my CDs into. Apple, it would be absolutely killer if you supported FLAC in iTunes, and automatically transcoded into MP3 for my iPod. But I’m not going to hold my breath, since you only add features that generate revenue. This also means you, last.fm. Why don’t you work with FLAC files playing through WinAMP? …Bob

Why Buy New When Strange Will Do?

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“Hey Bob, do you think you can install Linux on a machine for me?” I hate “just installing Linux” for people. Actually, it’s not all that bad, but the machines become one-offs. I’d much rather give people the CDs and have them do it themselves, and then maintain it themselves. “Sure. What kind of machine is it?” I’m a masochist at heart, apparently. “Oh, it’s this old machine that was a mail scanning appliance. I want to rebuild it and use it for a desktop.” “I know the machine you speak of. Isn’t it like five years old?” “Yeah. Linux should run okay on it, right?” Linux, the miracle worker. Dear Linux, I have an IBM PS/2 Model 30 386 …

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Shell Scripting & Blogs

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You know why I love my blog? It’s because of everybody who reads it. Thanks y’all. Case in point: my fix to randomize shell script execution went from # Don’t slam the mail servers! sleepamt=$(echo “$RANDOM/1092” | bc) /bin/sleep $sleepamt to # Don’t slam the mail servers! /bin/sleep $(($RANDOM/1092)) Hehe. It’s like extreme programming, writ large. The second case has fewer dependencies, though, and I like that.

Dear New York City

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Dear New York City, I was with you on September 11, 2001, trying not to be mindlessly patriotic in the aftermath but also amazed that somebody could do such a thing. Just as my mother remembers exactly where she was when JFK was shot I remember exactly what happened for me that morning as I watched. I remember the second plane strike, answering some of our questions. I’ve been to Ground Zero twice, thinking each time of the sheer volume of the destruction. Five thousand people dying is small compared to wars, genocide, and epidemics, but never in such close proximity and with so little warning. And never with such a toll on emergency personnel. I’m glad the U.S. has …

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Burgers and Fries

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A) Who would name a cat “Burgers and Fries?” B) OMFG this is funny. C) Bruce Schneier blogs about squid. I’m going to blog about pissed off cats. Meet Pinky the cat, a loving feline who needs a good home.

Prefontaine

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“The best pace is a suicide pace, and today is a good day to die.” “Somebody may beat me, but they are going to have to bleed to do it.” “A lot of people run a race to see who’s the fastest. I run to see who has the most guts.” – Steve Prefontaine, taken from his Wikipedia entry If the movie “Without Limits” is true to the spirit of Steve Prefontaine, I think he and I would have had a lot in common. Starting with our attitudes.

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