Danns Mighty Blog

It's over, done, finished; no more

I've had it. There is just way too much comment spam on ths blog. I'm closing it up. No more comments, no more posts to bblog. While I love bblog, I just cannot keep up with the spam; it's ridiculous.

I'm going to switch to wordpress; less hassle. I'll leave this blog up until I make the switch, but then, I don't know. I'll move it somewhere so it remains in archive. Or maybe i will find a way to move the posts over to Wordpress. That'll be fun.

The killer move

Moving was killer. Thanks go out to the techshow crew and Linc's wife, Michelle, for helping us load up the truck. The truck was a beast, 24' long and shaky going over 60mph. So while we can usually make the trip in about 6.5 hours doing 65-80, it was a bit longer with the truck. To make the trip all that more difficult, I was beat having moved all our stuff into the truck the leaving shortly after. We arrived a bit before 12:00 and moved in the stuff from the car: TV, tivo, dvd player and cmputer monitor. After that it was bed.

We awake just before 9:00 a.m. and set about unloading the truck. It took us until 3:00 p.m.; but we did it. After all the boxes and furniture were moved in, it came time for the 31 comic book boxes. I sent the wife to the store for a broom so we can avoid the $25 service change fore cleaning. I then set to unpacking the boxes.

Our apartment is quite nice but it is the only apartment in the complex where there is no parking lot infront. Instead, there is a nice patch of grass and the parking lot is to the side, past the playground. That means there is a good 75 feet or so to the steps. We live on the second floor.

I moved the comic boxes from the back of the front of the truck to the back 8 at a time. I then loaded them on the hand truck four at a time and pushed them to the stairs. When I had 8 piled by the stairs I moved them up into the second bedroom. By them time the 31st box was in there, I was quite dead. They filled up a rather large closet and a sizeable portion of the room infront of the closet.

When it was all done, the wife returned home. We cleaned out the truck and took it back; then went for a swim. The pool ws quite refreshing.

It was a hellish day. Luckily the weather was not too hot.

31

Today we packed up the Uhaul to move all our life down to Yourktown, Virginia. I had moved 8 long comic boxes downstairs from my office last week. I had some more under the staircase, in the storage area. Little did I realize how many I had. 31 long boxes all together. The wife is gonna kill me. The boxes took up the back of the uhaul stacked three high. I don't know how we are going to fit all of them in the apartment with everything else.

Screenkast

After reading the article on screenkast over at Tectonic, I figured I should give it a whirl. Not having much time these days for things like that, I figured it would only take a few minutes.

I popped over to the Arch User repositories to see if there were any packages; there were not. So, I grabbed the sources and set about compiling. Oh, you can get them at the Screenkast homepage. They have the sources, debian and suse packages. The only dependency I was missing, another package I had to compile, was libgsm. I had a hard time finding the source so I grabbed it from the debian repositories. That is why I love Debian, packages and sources right at your finger tips.

A few minutes later and I was rocking; or so I thought. Screenkast was working fine, but VNC was not. Screenkast starts a vnc session to record; somewhat like python-vnc2swf; only with a graphical interface surrounding the session.

Try as I might, I could not get vncserver to run. To start, there was no Xvnc, but a x0vncserver. I tried to create a symlink from x0vncserver to Xvnc; while this seemed to work, something was still wrong. To make a long story short, I removed RealVNC and installed tightvnc. No problems after that.

Screenkast seems like a nice tool. It's very similar to python-vnc2swf, and a few steps behind wink and demorecorder. There does not seem to be an editing feature like wink, and I don't see a way to include audio like Demorecorder. It's something I will have to play around with some more.

Lowes

Today we had to go purchase some carpet. As we headed begrudingly in the direction of Home Depot I querried whether we could not just go to Lowes. Surely they had the same service? Well, they did; and it was refreshing.

When you walk into Lowes, the place is well lit and clean. It doesn't look like people just threw crap up on the shelves and then a bunch of animals rummaged through tearing everything out of their packages. Ample employees roam the aisles and are willing to assist.

From the moment we decided on what carpet we wanted to completing the order it took all of 20 minutes, and we were waited on the whole time.

You know what? I even found the TSP I was looking for. Yeah, the box came in two sizes, I had a choice. And it only took me about 10 seconds of looking.

From now on, Lowes gets my business.

Ultraman is Ultra-Friggin' Awesome!

Thursday I order the newly released Ultraman Series One, Volume One DVD from Amazon and it arrives, to my astonishment, today - That's only two days. I ripped open the box and was taken back by the beauty of this package!

The box itself is decked out in the Ultraman colors with a nice description of the package on the back. But what's in the box takes the excitement to a new height! Three discs with the first 20 episodes of the Ultra 11 series in the original Japanese audio with newly translated English subtitles and the original English Audio. These are the episodes I grew up watching on Channel 11 at 4:00 p.m. (right after school! And boy did it suck when I first turned the TV on at 4:30 and caught the ending credits).

An 8 page booklets details the history of Ultraman and a synopsys of the 20 episodes included. Each disk comes in a nice plastic case detailed with Kaiju and Ultra 11 in different poses.

I popped the first disc in and took a quick look at the bonus features: An interview with the English Dub team, The original American Opening and a Monster encyclopedia. Great stuff! It brings back a lot of memories. I look forward to watching each episode over and over again!

At $24.00 from Amzaon, including shipping, this DVD is a must have for any Ultraman fan! I eagerly await the next volume and hope they consider putting out Johnny Sako and his Flying Robot! I see I can get all 52 episodes of The Space Giants on DVD over at Sell.com. Perhaps I will look into this!

One Step Forward two steps back into an oil slick

Each day is complemented with either scrubbing and prepping wall and/or painting them. The heat is a bit of a bear, but you get used to it. Sweating is nothing new. But what was new was the smell I was greeted with two nights ago as I was doing laundry: A tinny oil smell. While it left some concern I figured maybe it was the heat as I could see nothing wrong with the furnace. I did notice a bit of water in the back room of the basement where the oil tank is; but that happens from time-to-time after a torrential rain.

Cut to the next day after work and the smell is 10 times more potent. I go to the back room and there is an inch of the water on the ground. This is what is causing the smell. I notice an old kerosene can that has been sitting in the back corner since before we moved in. I figure it must have rusted out and leaked. Even though I can find no leak, there is still a bit of kerosene in there and I am not about to shake that out.

It takes about an 45 minutes to clean up the mess, but I do a decent job. I figure it will dry and the smell will disipate in a few days.

That night, after the show I go down in the basement again to find another large puddle, almost the same size. This time I know it is not the kerosene can as that is outside. It must be the oil tank, which is very old. But the tank is not leaking, its the pipe from the tank to the furnace. It cuts along the wall and is covered by some patch concrete.

I call our oil company, Petro, and they send a technician out. He notes that it is the pipe and comments that back in the day they used to cover the pipes with concrete in order to protect them. But! Concrete contains lye which errodes the metal; so it actually did more harm than good. He also comments that our very old tank needs to be replaced before it too springs a leak.

Good think I cleaned out that back room a few weeks ago or the mess would have been almost unsurmountable.

The guy did a fantastic job cleaning up the mess and even took the waste away, which is a good thing. I helped by holding open the bag. He was a very pleasant fellow and I was infinetly grateful for the job he did.

Now we need to get a new oil tank. I hope the smell will go away soon. It makes going down in the basement very unpleasant.

Lump Update

Well, we learned what the lumps are. On the way down to the apartment in Virginia, the wife said the largest lump popped revealing it to be an abscess. It made a rather nasty mess on the towl in the cat carrier, but Milton is looking, and feeling, much better she said. Good for him!

Ol' One-Eye Gets the FIV

Our cat Milton, named after the immortal poet , is a frail cat, but a bit of a scrapper. His brother Bukowski; his namesake one of America's greatest writers - Charles Bukowski; is easily twice his size but a bit of a baby. Perhaps they are misnamed? Or maybe not. Never-the-less, during his second year of life, Milton lost his right eye to a cat fight. He's pretty alergic to fleas and a bit high-strung. Rarely does he let anyone get close to him unless he is feeling under the weather.

About a week ago I realized it was time to administer another dose of Frontline (damn, is that stuff expensive; but it works). Anyway he seemed fine, except for some serious scratching that resulted in an ugly, scabby skin condition. I figured it would clear up in a few days.

Well, a few days pass and he is hanging around, not his usual fearful self. I notice a lump on his side; a big lump. Almost tumor like right behind his left rib cage. Right smack where his kidneys are. He also sports a smaller lump on the other side and is looking a bit dehydrated. So we take him off to the vet on Saturday.

After some tests they determine he is infected with the Feline Imuno-Deficiency Virus, FIV, which is similar to HIV in humans, although not as bad it seems. While he is more susceptible to illness, if watched and kept indoors he could live a normal, feline lifespan. While this is a bummer, it's not fatal it seems. But there is a heightened risk that the other cats in the house could contract the disease. We need to get them tested.

According to the vet the disease is tranmitted most easily through cat fights. They said casual contact and partner grooming, sharing food bowls and litter boxes can also transmit the virus. Although the pamphlet said it's not as likely to spread this way. Perhaps our other cats won't get infected; who knows?

None of the other tests determined what the lumps were, the vet was a bit baffled. We'll see how he fares over the next few weeks. He's the first cat to leave the house and move down to Virginia. That now makes three former dwellers down. Four more disappear in August leaving me the only resident. Boohoo!

Anyway, I have some paiting to do, some sushi to eat and lots of work to get done.

Dapper is Great, But...

Sometime around release candidtate 3 I upgraded my Powerbook running Breezy to Dapper. The upgrade was painless and all-in-all it was pretty solid. As time progressed, though, Audacity became flaky bombing out with Watchdog errors. This was disturbing as I used this system to record TLLTS. After a few shows recorded under OS X I moved the external soundcard to my arch workstation and have not looked back.

Last week I managed to cobble together a lower end system (PIII 450 with 256mb ram) for my wife's friend. This is the friend who gave us a PI 166 with 16 mb ram which I upgraded to 32 and installed Peanut. Peanut was great but Firefox was slow. I almost bit the bullet and sent them packing with Win98 where Firefox was a bit faster but everything else was slower until I got my hands on the other system.

The install of Dapper was painless and I switched it to Edubuntu with a bunch of other packages. All-in-all it's a pretty sweet system. But there is a bug and it involves video playback.

At first, dvd's would not play at all. I'd get audio but no video (kind of like what I get on my father's computer with win2000 PowerDVD). But now, for some reason when I fired up the system to get the exact error, DVD's are playing but very choppy. It could be the low system resources. But no go with video, specifically a wmv though mplayer. This is the error I get:

X11 error: BadAlloc (insufficient resources for operation)?,?% 1 0

I get the same error with Totem, but not xine, which does not play the video, even though I have the right packages for it to play.

I'm digging through error reports but it's not apparent where the problem is. I hope to resolve it before I give the machine up.

Now one might say the system resources are too low for playing videos. Mind you, I have an identical machine running Arch Linux 7.01 which has no problems playing the same videos I have tested. I even tried running the videos under Blackbox instead of Gnome, no dice.

What concerns me, though, is this type of error occurs for me in packages from the Universe or Multiverse repository which are unsupported. While I'd like these issue to be top priority, as video playback is important for a desktop system, I fear they may not.

Ah well, I'll keep plugging away.