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CoreLogthe record of the Worlds |
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| Jul. 15th, 2009 @ 12:02 pm Ehhh!!!!! | |||
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| Deerbuster Wolf Urine 100% natural, they say. Wonder how the wolves feel about this one. Also, just click through and read the customer reviews. They just about killed me with laughter. |
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| Jul. 12th, 2009 @ 12:44 pm An apology | |||
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| The previous two security-related entries have been removed from sight. My apologies for being an ass and an attempted know-it-all. I will work to rectify this. |
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| Jul. 10th, 2009 @ 05:19 pm Fees... | |||
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| I now remember why I eventually decided that eBay and Paypal weren't all that wonderful for selling shit. Don't get me wrong, I love Paypal for buying stuff, but for selling...not so wonderful. Having sold an item for about $200...eBay's "Final Value Fee" is almost $20, and Paypal's fee for receiving payment almost $10. Yes, it's very nice to have sold the item and to be getting any money at all, but paying 15% of it back to eBay/Paypal is annoying, to say the least. |
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| Jul. 9th, 2009 @ 06:50 pm Herding the birdings | |||
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| Right, so I just went to the kitchen for a glass of water. Heard an interesting noise, so I glanced around the corner into the living room. There, in front of the open patio door, was a bird. It bobbed its head at me a few times, and I told it to go outside. Naturally, it didn't listen. I took a step towards it, hoping it would fly out the window, but it decided to retreat into the living room instead. Okay, fine, let me go around the other side and herd you back to the patio door. Nope, now it heads into the kitchen. Here I have a wonderful idea about closing the kitchen door to give it no choice but to go out back to the patio. However, I'm no longer in the kitchen. That's all right, I'll just go back around and close the door. No, now he's in the kitchen...and retreating into the back of the kitchen where there is no door. This is going to get annoying...but hey, if I shut both doors, he can't go anywhere else! So, I do that, and grab a towel. I don't fancy getting flapped at or pecked, so a towel is useful here. Flaps and pecks are okay coming from budgies. Not so much from "jumbo jets" (my family's designation for birds the size of mourning doves). (Note that I have owned several birds, so I do have a reasonable idea on how to handle them--I'm just a bit rusty.) Then followed a merry time of "chase the birdie around the kitchen". Said birdie trying several times to perch on the wall, usually on top of a poster or a cupboard ledge. The laser printer was also a favorite spot, as was a high shelf with not much on it. At one point, a dinner plate and a bag of dinner buns also became involved as perches for our intrepid visitor. However, at long last, I managed to get the towel over the bird, which immediately calmed down, especially when I picked it up and soothed it (still through the towel). Open the doors to the kitchen, go outside to the patio, close the patio door, and set the towel down on the patio. The bird, naturally, doesn't move. And still doesn't move...at least until I open the towel enough for it to see sunlight. Then he comes out, quite offended and head-bobby at me. I retrieved the towel and had a good look at him. Largish, with grey-rimmed eyes, dark feathers, and quite a shiny purple-green iridescent section around his neck, most prominently towards the chest. Orange feet, with a golden bangle on each leg. Most interesting. I went back inside and closed the screen door behind me. Birdie stuck around for about five minutes, trying to get back in the house and occasionally pecking at things on the patio itself. I was busy looking for Trapa's camera, but I couldn't find it before our guest hopped up on the railing and launched himself off the edge. Well, that was interesting. :) |
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| Jul. 9th, 2009 @ 05:53 pm Flying with United Airlines? | |||
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United says this video "strikes a chord" with them. See, they do have a sense of humor after all! |
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| Jul. 6th, 2009 @ 08:47 pm ARRRGH! | |||
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| Okay, hard drive's fine. The external enclosure has failed. Had to disconnect a DVD drive to reconnect the archive drive, but hey...it couldn't write anything any more anyways. Then the Internet was down...the ISP is doing goodness-only-knows-what with it, so we're on stopgap measures here. Meaning that all my websites and all Trapa websites and other external services are down until further notice, basically. And I didn't get any work done for myself, and I didn't get any work done for Trapa, and I'm freaking hungry, and all of this is making me cranky at the moment. |
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| Jul. 6th, 2009 @ 12:35 pm Arcane magic to the rescue... | |||
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| Specifically, the arcane magic of the bootdisk. Persistence and patience are valuable tools when working through some of the more arcane techniques of the machine. A tool (such as a floppy disk) may not be suitable for use the first, second, third, or fourth time you try. But with patience and persistence (and multiple rewrites), you can indeed stabilize it enough to become usable again for the short period of time required to work the technique. It's been a while since I had to modify this boot image, and much of my knowledge is rusty. But still present. I know the structure of the boot sequence, and I know what files must be where. Having verified their contents against the vendor and device IDs present on my system, I know that I can boot my machine and attach it to a network server for backup. However, there remain some obstacles in my path. First, how much room is left on the image? If I remember correctly, only a few kilobytes are free. This could be a significant issue, considering the netboot files are not exactly small, taking up a third of a disk by themselves. It is possible that I may need to tamper with the first file and force it to go looking for the CD drive to pull its files, rather than expecting them to be on the source drive. Second, will this floppy actually work, or will it not? After several attempts to write the image, all have failed verification. I've formatted the disk and am rewriting the image to it, but if it continues to fail, I will have no choice but to try and locate another floppy. Unreliable tools are the bane of any one who tries to use the arcane arts! Mayhap I will have to try and find somebody who still has a supply of floppies in the city. Free Geek, perhaps. Persistence and patience. A method of backing up to the network would be invaluable for my aging machine, both cutting costs and increasing the number of times I could backup in a year. |
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| Jul. 6th, 2009 @ 10:40 am Fan-fucking-tastic... | |||
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| It seems my data archive drive, long-suffering as it was, has just gone the way of all drives. And taken most of my data with it. Now, that's not nearly as bad a blow as it could have been. I had just moved a lot of Cisco material off there, which would have been a severe loss. I hadn't yet moved any of the 40GB of waiting data to it, which would have been annoying. All my music is backed up on my Archos, which is very helpful. And I've already got a hell of a lot of video data burned to DVD. Even so, there are some files on that drive which are irreplaceable. My next task is to attempt to retrieve those in the last gasp of the drive. I don't need the full 250GB of data back--only the important stuff. Three, maybe five gigs of data? If I have more time after that, I'll go for some of my video files which aren't backed up, such as my collection of music videos from way back when. Into the freezer you go, my dear. After eight years of faithful service across continents, I'm going to try one more time to read some data off you. And if you fail to spin up, I'm going to operate, remove your heart, and try that one last time alone. Now where am I going to get another data drive of 250GB or more? :P More to the point, how much is it going to be (for somebody without a job, no less!), and how long before the other components in my system start failing? Eight years is a long time to be in continual, 24/7/365 operation, especially for a consumer "disposable-class" machine. It was a budget beige-box machine, not built to last more than three years, at most! How plans do change... I wonder if Trapa would mind if I did my quarterly backup to the NAS this one time, instead of to DVD... |
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| Jul. 4th, 2009 @ 05:06 pm Tacos! Or not. | |||
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Hey, sockscatt! Going for tacos any time soon? :D Maybe we don't want to go to this taco place after all... |
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| Jul. 3rd, 2009 @ 09:03 pm Note to self: don't do that again... | |||
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| It's not a good idea to try and run a UPS self-test when you've removed part of the battery...instead of running a self-test, the UPS completely fails and powers off all your important and sensitive equipment... Doy. |
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