Drunken Debauchery and Geekdom

I happened to stumble across these two gems today at work. Seems like a good way to break the drought of posts:

• CIA chief: Waterboarding probably not legal


• Tornado survivor downed shot, 'then I heard this noise'

The second one is a pretty sweet article too. And I quote:
"A tornado was headed straight toward his town. Then the lights went out. ... He put on sweat pants, grabbed a flashlight, drank a shot of whiskey, 'and then I heard this noise,' Kruger said Thursday."

I like the point that he wasn't wearing any pants prior to realizing there was a tornado coming...

http://www.jamglue.com/

This site is amazing. It's also a pretty cool that they use Amazon S3 and ECS2 for their backend storage and processing.

It's been a while since I've poked fun at my Microsoft friends across the lake and today I found a nice little opportunity.

Taken from a White Paper on Windows Vista SP1:



Who actually builds charts like this? Certainly not engineers. My guess -- it looks like something from the Underpants Gnomes:

1. Collect Underpants
2. ?
3. Profit

Idaho senator pleads guilty after airport arrest

"[The Capitol Hill Newspaper], citing the report, said Sgt. Dave Karsnia made the arrest after an encounter in which he was seated in a stall next to a stall occupied by [Senator] Craig. Karsnia described Craig tapping his foot, which Karsnia said he 'recognized as a signal used by persons wishing to engage in lewd conduct.'

"'Craig tapped his toes several times and moved his foot closer to my foot. I moved my foot up and down slowly,' the report states. 'The presence of others did not seem to deter Craig as he moved his right foot so that it touched the side of my left foot which was within my stall area.'"

Ok, so aside from how hilarious this whole thing is, the frequency with which congressional members get caught doing weird shit is alarming. Seriously, where are we finding these people?

Apparently Windows Vista x64 does not cooperate with iTunes 7.x. Tonight I was attempting to burn some songs I had bought through iTMS to CD but the driver with iTunes sucks and does not support Vista x64. Eventually I had to hack around Vista and iTunes' respective incompetencies by mounting my Windows machine on my Linux desktop.

After searching around for about a second I stumbled upon the hymn project (http://www.hymn-project.org/) which distributes the QTFairUse6 app for removing the iTunes DRM from purchased files. Unfortunately, I really didn't want to run all my purchased music (a couple of hundred tracks) through their untested app without having a backup. Really what I wanted to do was backup all the music files for the playlist I wanted to burn and just let the app convert those files. However, with the crazy directory structure created by iTunes, just backing up selected files to a new location seemed tedious. Unfortunately again, Windows has a command shell that sucks balls.

Fortunately, Linux and bash do not suffer this problem:

[sslotnick@slotdesk d]$ cat /tmp/m4ps | sed "s/D:\\\//" | sed "s/\\\/\//g" > /tmp/m4ps2
[sslotnick@slotdesk d]$ while read filename; do NEWFN=`echo $filename | sed "s/.*\/\([^/]*\)$/\1/"`; echo -n "Copying $filename..."; sudo cp "$filename" "MusicCopy/S$NEWFN"; echo "DONE"; done < /tmp/m4ps2


</geeking>

The Clinton campaign did a spoof of the final Sopranos episode. While this would normally be only mildly amusing, the diner featured in the video is none other than the Mt. Kisco diner -- a landmark during my high school years. We were there so often that the night manager, Maurice, got to know all of us. Damn, feels like way back in the day.

The other night I watched one of my favorite episodes of the West Wing: "The California 47th" from season 4. The episode begins with US troops taking the airport in the fictitious African nation of Kundu. The episode has some of the best quotes of any episode in the series:

Bartlet: Mr Ambassador, I'm sorry to keep you waiting, I was just in the white house situation room...

Ambasador Tiki: Mr President, the US is trampling on the sovereignty of my country and on behalf of President Enzili...

Bartlet: I've just taken your airport...clearing the way for the 101st Airborne air assault to take the capital. 7000 troops, 25 battle tanks, 15 apache attack helicopters, and 3 destroyers. Strictly speaking, I conquered your country without the paperwork.

Kundu aide: Kundu is in the midst of a civil war...

Bartlet: No its not, its in the midst of a one sided slaughtering of an entire people. Both the Secretary General of the United Nations and the Vatican have pleaded with President Enzili for a cease fire and both the UN and holy father have struck out -- to the peril of 115,000 Enduyay men women and God knows children, particularly the boys...

Tiki: Who will soon be men and will rise up...

Bartlet: The heads of Ghana, Nigeria and Zaire have similarly been sent packing. The red cross has been denied entry on 3 separate occasions in the last ten days. President Enzili has 36 hours to give the command to his troops to hand over their weapons to the 82 airborne division of the United States Army. At 36 hours and 1 minute, I give the order for the 101st air assault to take Batonga and run up our flag. ... I skipped breakfast, anyone want some coffee or something?

Later on:
Barlet to Sam: The French have denied us access to their airspace. I'm not sure why they think we're gonna need it to get from here to Africa, but what the hell...

So apparently someone thought it would be a good idea to do a Die Hard 4. I don't know who this person was, but apparently they were fucking stupid. I think my dad put it best about 5 years ago, "Another Die Hard? Where is Bruce Willis battling terrorists now, the retirement home?"

But still, it looks like someone in Hollywood decided that they'd make another Die Hard and John McClane needed to be more like Jack Bauer.



A choice blog posting had this:
"It’s not like I have high hopes or anything, but I’ve yet to be disappointed by the Die Hard franchise. It’s kind of like that Down Syndrome chick you met on the bus and lured back to your place with some candy: Sure, it’s dumb, but I bet i’ll be a helluva fun ride."

Amen. Especially since Lucy McClane is all grown up now :)

Newsweek is running a series of articles that walk through the Iraq war from the perspective of the soldiers in it. In addition to numerous letters and emails, they have up a few short videos about soldiers who made the ultimate sacrifice. A few of the ones I thought were especially powerful: one two three

If you haven't seen this, you should definitely check it out. I don't really care to discuss the politics of this war anymore -- there's just no way that any given position can be right. There's only one thing that can be said, and it is that these guys are heroes.

Also, while reading through this I learned about the AnySoldier program. Basically they maintain a listing of soldiers to whom you can send care packages, letters, etc. I'm definitely going to send them some stuff and I encourage others to do so as well.

After a drawn out process of obtaining all the parts, I started building my new PC yesterday. Here is my initial Vista experience within the first 30 seconds of the installation process completing.



I can get into safe mode and things are pretty stable there, so it looks to be a driver problem. Still, I think I will blame Microsoft and their inability to develop quality applications, test effectively, or establish good logo testing (check, check, and check...Nic, Jeff, and Eric).

*UPDATE:* Oh well, I guess Microsoft really isn't responsible for all the evil in the world. It seems with my motherboard and memory you need to set memory timings and voltage manually. Now I'm running fine. I'll have to wait until another day to give my friends shit :) Props to NewEgg customer reviews on the Asus P5N-E SLI.

I'm at the gym today and go to turn on my iPod (30GB 4G Photo), but instead of the familiar menu, I get the following little logo:


Underneath the icon is the URL "http://www.apple.com/support/ipod." Crap, this can't be good.

I come home and check the Apple web site as suggested. Apparently this indicates a hardware issue and unless you can reset the iPod successfully (which I couldn't), it needs to be taken in for service. Being a year and a half old, there's no way it's under warranty any longer, so I figure I might as well shop around for an upgrade.

After looking around for a while, I settle on the 60GB 5G Video which is currently selling on the cheap vs the newer 80GB 5.5G Video. After another round of deliberation and trying to find a new case, I figure I haven't even tried looking for a way to fix the old one yet so that might be worth a shot.

Google easily finds me instructions to take apart your 3G/4G iPod. Once inside, I lifted up the hard drive, removed the sticker covering where the interface cable meets the mobo and checked that connection. On the other end, I pulled out the cable from the hard disk (gave it a little blow as a throwback to the good old 8-bit NES days) and re-seated it in the drive. After popping the whole thing back together, I turn it on, and bam...$300 saved. Sometimes being a geek has its good days.

Is this for real? Is our Federal Government so inept that they need a special codified procedure to deal with missing children within federal buildings? How can this possibly be different from a missing child anywhere else in the world. Furthermore, is there seriously a widespread problem of lost children on federal property?

"There's a missing child, oh shit, what do I do? Getting a physical description of the child can't be right, better check the manual." Tax dollars at work.

Apparently Miss USA gets to keep her crown. Personally, I am relieved. For a second, I was starting to think that we live in a country where a slut can't be a slut.

The Superficial provides additional color commentary:
"But the real moral of the story? You can do anything when you're pretty. Want to punch a fireman in the face? Go for it. Eat a bald eagle? Sure, why not. You've earned it."

More snow in Seattle...more absurd behavior from Seattle drivers who apparently think snow melts cars. At least I had my fun.

This is blowing my mind

Yesterday I got back from my Thanksgiving trip to New York and there was this strange white fluffy stuff on the cars outside the airport. Again today, more of it fell from the sky. It hasn't snowed in Seattle since I moved here about a year and a half ago, so it's kind of cool. Watching the traffic and news, however, it is perfectly clear what they say about Seattle not being equipped for the snow. There's less than a few inches of accumulation and everyone seems to be shitting a brick. In Ann Arbor they wouldn't have even plowed the streets yet and we'd be able to go out and do donuts!

For the past few weeks work has been miserable due to preparations for a release that I was in charge of. It was supposed to go out last Tuesday then met a series of delays and finally went out on Monday. As if releases aren't hectic enough when you get 250,000,000 calls a day, we're rapidly approaching the pre-Christmas season when Amazon gets crazy in general. Fortunately everything went out smoothly and the hell is finally over!

I may have more to say about this later, but for now:
"Democrats intend to lead the most honest, the most open and the most ethical Congress in history," says Nancy Pelosi.

I'm gonna hold you to that and judging from the results of this election, it looks like the rest of America is with me. I really hope this was a national referendum on politicians -- you either do the job or you're fired.

Oops

This serves as a nice follow up to my post ahead of the 2004 election. These guys are all pricks. Yes, Kerry is a career politician and I really doubt he went up there to insult the troops. What he likely meant to say was, "If you don’t [succeed in school], you [become President and] get [the country] stuck in Iraq." Nonetheless, he took a cheap shot at Bush and despite my general agreement that Bush is brain dead, I'm glad Kerry is paying for it.

This is my new platform: This election day, vote to oust every incumbent up for re-election. And if you don't want to support either mainstream candidate, there are other options.

Something tells me this guy is going to mysteriously find a JDAM dropped on his house.