Screaming in an Elevator

Getting on the elevator this morning, it turned out I should have waited. Some woman was yelling at someone on the elevator about how he should support health-care, and some randomness about the unnamed politician who’s bumper sticker adorned his jacket was so terrible and such. She continued to rant at him all the way […]

Essential Spirit

I’d like to thank all of those who voted for Scott Brown. You’ve done the courageous thing by making sure the rest of the country cannot have a health care system roughly equivalent to the one you already enjoy in Massachusetts. Most people—ordinary people—would not allow themselves to simply ignore the monumental shamefulness of that. […]

Ubuntu on the Dell Adamo

I went ahead and got the Adamo from Dell, so here’s my review of it, and what I did to set it up and get it working the way I wanted. Firstly, on the hardware: AC adapters is the weak point of this guy. For my old MacBook, I had three: one in my bag, […]

Dear Lazyweb

Does anyone have any experiences with Karmic on the white Dell Adamo? Update: It seems positive, at least compared with the cheaper MacBook Air where you have to fuss with kernel boot options and whatnot.

Scratching The Itch

It’s been said before, but a person’s first foray into free culture of any type is often to scratch an itch. For me, my first Wikipedia edit was undoing vandalism on the Hernando de Soto Polar page conflating him with the conquistador of the same name—replacing his actual birth date with 1500-something, etc. It’s somewhat […]

Customer Service Fail

One of the bad ideas currently infecting companies in the technology field is the LivePerson “chat with a support person now” thing. This is a bad idea for multiple reasons: It’s a gigantic floating piece of garbage distracting me from whatever it is I’m trying to learn about your company or it’s products. The representatives […]

Siding with the Bastards

Let me preface this by stating a few things: if you are going to tell me that girls are inherently bad at technology, programming, or are getting their panties in a twist, please fuck the fuck off. I feel confident in judging you a waste of an opportunity for a perfectly good pair of ovary […]

Distributing Static Routes with DHCP

I’m setting up an isolated network for people to test internal applications on, since the developers all have Sun workstations with a dual-port Gigabit NIC on the motherboard, and we’ve got a bunch of older network equipment that we haven’t gotten around to eBaying yet. What I’m doing is linking the second NICs together with […]

My First JBOD, Part 2: Irony

After unpacking, racking, and mounting the JBOD, I waited until the weekend had started before powering down the server and installing the RAID card. Connected it all up, rebooted into the Adaptec BIOS, and configured the 6x 1TB drives into a RAID6 array. After that, I installed the RAID StorageManager off of Sun’s website, and […]

My First JBOD: Introduction

This is me setting up a JBOD for use by one or more XEN hosts, using professional hardware. It’s not a hack, not throwing a shitload of drives into a PC with some “prosumer” SATA RAID cards that require you spend weeks fussing with drivers and firmware to get even a minimal write performance out […]

Productively Procrastinating

I’ve spent quite a bit of time procrastinating this weekend, surfing the Internet when I should’ve been finishing cleaning my apartment. Of course, in addition to total time sinks like Facebook games (Yahoo games for people who like assisting spammers), I’ve watched a shitload of TED talks… So far the most interesting by far are […]

Status

One week on, I’m down about 6lbs, which is around 10% of the goal. Today is a low day (that is, 1350 calories), and I was still coming up short by the end of the day so I hit the chips and queso after dinner… which I’ve got to say is addictive once you get […]

Laptop Suspend, Status

I’ve inadvertently stumbled onto the calorie cycling method of weight loss. Two days of radically low calorie intakes (1300) followed by two days of “normal” intakes for my desired loss (1850). I’ve seen varying numbers, but the recommended course is to use this method when your weight loss flattens out, I was using it because […]

Inanities

I went to the optometrist’s offices today to try to get the little feet on my glasses replaced… they have to order new ones and charge me $15 for the trouble. Irritating, and precisely the sort of nickel-and-diming bullshit one should expect from a “family owned” business. On the other hand, I tried to get […]