I got new tires the other day, and a wheel alignment too. One of the places I got a quote from was Wal*Mart Tire and Lube Express. Here is the interesting part:
I don’t know how you could beat an unwaivering commitment, so I got my tires there.
Does anyone has a Hi-8 camcorder I could borrow?
I’ve got some old tapes I’d like to convert to DVD. Our Hi-8 camcorder is busted, so there’s no way to play the tapes back, and that’s step one of any conversion.
I don’t want to pay a service to convert them. I’d rather borrow a camcorder and do it myself. I’d even buy one, if the price weren’t too horrible.
If you can help, comment on this posting. (You’ll have to set up an account, but then you can comment on any posting.)
The other day, I pointed out a beautiful chartreuse Dodge Charger/Daytona at the hospital. It turns out there’s something in the water at the hospital that makes the staff pick wild colors for their cars. Here’s that same car again, in the background, and a gorgeous purple twin of it in the foreground.
I’m not a real car aficionado, so I don’t know if this car is a “Charger” or a “Daytona.” Back in the day, they were Chargers, though, and between that and Rush’s song “War Paint” (from their Presto album) I’m going to go with “Charger.”
Either my next car, or possibly the next paint job on my current car, will be gassy green like this one:
(I refer to the green one in back. Mine is the black-and-bare-metal one in front.)
I don’t think a new car is in my budget any time soon, but this one looks pretty sweet. It looks a lot faster than mine, sure, with that high hood and close-to-the-bumper front wheel placement. But most of all, it’s chartreuse.
The other day I tried to create a view of one of my tables, and I got some weird message (not able to fork lock file PID on /tmp, or something like that, that appealed to the vestigial *ix programmer lobe in my brain).
Anyway, I believed what I read on the internet and did all kinds of things to fix it, all unsuccessfully. I wound up deleting my entire MySQL installation and reinstalling. I did that several times, in fact, because there’s no MySQL uninstaller, just lore distributed across various people’s blogs. I found this post helpful, but what I eventually used was this one.
But I have a little bit of wisdom of my own to contribute, and it is as follows:
Soon after installing MySQL, I created a file .my.cnf in my $HOME directory. It looks like this:
[client] # The following password will be sent to all standard MySQL clients password="abc123"
(where abc123 is the real password, of course.)
Long story short: get rid of that file while you’re installing and testing the initial installation of MySQL.
Check out this video from one of the next generation of churches. It’s Contemporvant, which is the cool way of saying it has everything I’m looking for in my next church:
I showed this to the people in my Pastor’s Bible study today, and we had some fun with it. So, obviously, did the people who made it. (Take a really close look at the tattoo, for example.)
I wonder if my church could make fun of itself in that same way. And, if we could, what would we say about ourselves and the way we do worship?
Well, my laptop won’t be the only functioning computer at church any more. I got the secretary’s new computer set up today.
It’s an Inspiron Desktop 570 MiniTower, and features:
All that plus a 1-year warranty of sorts. And the amazing thing, to an old duffer like me, was the cost. We didn’t buy a monitor, so the total, including tax and free shipping was $368.66 from the Dell Outlet.
It only took me about an hour to get the software configured. XP used to took forever. Partly this is because Dell seems to be including substantially less crapware that has to be removed.
It would have taken forever, though, if not for Ninite.com. If you still run Windows and you’re not using Ninite, you’re wasting your time.
My secretary’s machine blue-screened a couple of days ago with a STOP 24 message, which tells you (or rather, doesn’t tell you) that either the disk or the filesystem is broken.
Fortunately(!) we’d just gone through a couple of weeks restoring everything after a virus infestation, so there wasn’t much on it of value, except for the Quicken bookkeeping data.
I spent awhile learning about Windows recovery disks, and made a WinPE disk that I ought to have been able to boot off. But for whatever reason, I couldn’t, and — honestly — I don’t have time to figure out how to route around Microsoft stupidity.
Today, finally, I had a half hour to spare, so I extracted the hard drive from the Windows box, slapped it into an external USB housing, and connected it to my linux backup server. (Elapsed time: about 10 minutes. That’s too long, but I didn’t have a good phillips screwdriver and had to use my leatherman. Also I was flummoxed briefly by the easy-to-open case on the Dell Dimension 3000.)
Sadly, it didn’t automount on my desktop. I run Ubuntu 9.10, and have become accustomed to it “just working” no matter what I need doing. But apparently support for NTFS USB drives doesn’t come in the out-of-box configuration.
No matter. I hit the internet (specifically, I did a single Google search for “ubuntu external drive ntfs“) and found out I needed to install ntfs-config. The search and subsequent installation took about 2 minutes. I cycled the power on the external drive, and — voila! — there was the drive. I popped into terminal, ran a quick find|cpio, and Bob’s your uncle.
I really enjoyed the Catalyst (West) conference again this year. I’m too old and its target audience is younger, etc., but there it is: I still enjoyed it.
One of the reasons I enjoyed it was Tripp and Tyler.
When a series of speakers challenge everything you think you know about a series of important topics, it’s useful to have some court-jester emcee types between them, to lighten things up. Otherwise you’ll just hunker down and miss everything the following speaker is saying.
Here’s an example of how it works: before Donald Miller came out to talk about whatever he had to say, Tripp and Tyler ran this video about him.
My secretary’s PC crashed today. I don’t know what’s wrong with it, and didn’t have time to investigate. So I made some obnoxious Mac fanboy-type remarks about silly Microsoft and its sad excuses for operating systems. (Then I told her to make do as well as she could with a pencil and calculator.)
So this afternoon, my MacBook Pro BSOD’d on me:
Ah, snap! I really liked that email!
Which is pretty shocking. I’m not sure if this might be the first time it’s done that. I know I’ve seen this BSOD screen before today, but it might have been on the iMac at work, or the other Mac at home.
But I just got a second chance to study the phenomenon. Just as I was blogging the above, it panicked again:
A BSOD, Apple-style
Twice. In one day. The day my secretary’s ancient PC belly-upped and I made superior remarks about the sad, sad mistake called Windows XP. Oh the irony of it all.
What the heck did Apple put in that last Security Update? Or was it Snow Leopard 10.6.3?