We got a couple Flip Video cameras in at work. We plan to use them to get some stuff for the web and various other things. One thing we’ll do sometime this week is write a review. That being said, Chris took one home to play with to get a feel for them, and caught this moment of awesomeness.
What is with me this week?
For the first time in about 11 years, I’m seriously considering using another nickname on IRC. I think we can actually blame twitter for this.
Random Observation
When you’re listening to Nine Inch Nails and your speakers get GSM interference from your phone… It just fits in as part of the music.
Sunday fun
- Shutdown
- <install new/replacement disk>
- fdisk
- mkswap
- umount /boot
- dd
- e2fsck && resize2fs
- mount -o remount,ro /
- dd
- e2fsck && resize2fs
- mount -o remount,rw /
- pvcreate
- vgextend
- pvmove (wait a long long long time for 174 GB, especially with disk read errors, to move)
- vgreduce
- shutdown
- remove old and busted, put new hotness in as primary disk
- boot into rescue disk
- mount / /usr
- grub-install /dev/hda1
- ms-sys -m /dev/hda
- vi /etc/fstab
- shutdown -r now
- Party like its 1999 or, if you like assembler better: GGB
4 more years! 4 more years!
Dinah is 4 years old today. She’s lived her toughest year to date having to adjust to a younger sibling who’s become mobile and takes her stuff now. Here’s a picture from her princess makeover and photo shoot at Disney World.

Yes, hopefully its a lot more than 4 more years, but the title brings the funny to me.
New panic in the streets!
I read this in the dead tree edition of the Tribune yesterday and forgot to make a post bitching about it. Luckily, Chicagoist was there: Congressman Says Second Life Could Expose Kids To Porn, Predators.
Basically, Mark Kirk got his panties all up in a bunch because Second Life have some adult stuff going on and in his opionin its too easy for minors to get into that area. While I understand his concern, I disagree that the government should be stepping in here, even with something as minor as an FTP consumer alert. Parents should be monitoring what their children are doing on-line. If you can’t take the time and/or education commitment to do that as a parent, disable your internet access.
The part that really chaps my hide is the following (quoted from the Tribune):
Kirk said he knew of no cases in which children were targeted by sexual predators on Second Life, but he said he considers the virtual world an emerging danger.
So…there’s been no reported problems, or at least none visible to him, but OH MY GOD! RAISE THE ALARM BELLS! THE CHILDRENS! WON’T SOMEONE THINKS OF THEM??!?!?!!! I hate election year fear-based attention-getting pandering.
For the record, I have no particular love for Second Live either. I’ve played with it a bit but I don’t get all the hype around it. I must just be getting old.
Great syntax highlighting plugin for WordPress
At times, I think I spend more time writing about using wordpress than actually using it sometimes. I’ll need to fix that. Today, thanks to WordPress’s dashboard, I came across the WP-Codebox plugin. THanks to GeSHI, it can color up a lot of languages and fixes some problems I’ve had with other plugins. Honestly, I’ve never been satisfied with any of them. I think this could change that.
Just to show it off, I present to you some random ruby I wrote the other day when I was working on something. I’ll leave it to you to guess what I’m doing and why with this code. (And I also think I could do it better than using a while loop, but I was able to bang it out quickly for what I needed.)
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 | #!/usr/bin/env ruby require 'fileutils' srand(Time.now.to_i) offset = 214 files = Dir['*'] count = 1 while !files.empty? file = files.delete_at(rand(files.size)) extention = File.extname(file).downcase name = sprintf('%d%s', count + offset, extention) puts "#{file} -> #{name}" FileUtils.move(file, name) count += 1 end |
For future reference….
And so Google knows this in the future…
16:23 <@spruance> what the hell is PFOTQ? even google does not know
PFOTQ stands for People Fucking On The Quad.
This post brought to you by the UIUC Quad Cam.
The best a man can get
Let me get this out at the beginning. I suck at shaving, I’m no good at it. Part of the reason is a lack of practice. Why do I have lack of practice? Because as a man-child, I cannot grow facial hair on a schedule that men do. Unlike my buddy Greezy who needs to shave about every 30 minutes, I can generally go two days, and sometimes three, without shaving. This is just fine with me, as in general its a time consuming exercise. A necessary one, but still time consuming. (A situation that can probably improve with added practice, but bringing that up makes this paragraph circular.)
Due to my infrequency of shaving, when I buy shaving supplies they last somewhere around 5 to 6 years. I just hit that magic time where I needed to re-up.
Like many, I laughed when The Onion mocked the practice of adding more and more blades to a razor. Fuck Everything, We’re Doing Five Blades is a classic article, or rather, would have been a classic piece of comedy if it wasn’t in fact prophecy. Yes, enter the Gillette Fusion which made 5 blades a reality. Now, for most people, this is old news, and to me it is as well.
Since it was time to rebuy, I thought I’d give the whole 5 blade thing a try. I have to say, its the closest/best shave I’ve ever had. It makes me feel like a shaving pro without any required effort on my part. Its strange I find myself gushing about a razor, but its that much of an improvement on my shaving. I don’t even have the Fusion with the vibrator build in, just the regular old blade. I’ve had the vibrating one is even better, but my face doesn’t need pleasure while I’m shaving.
So, yeah, I’m a product loving dork.



