Month: July 2003

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Dedicated Box

All options exhausted — DSL too slow, Comcast seals off port 80, and we’re just outside range for 5.8GHz microwave. So colo it is. Scored a healthy G4 off craigslist and used Carbon Copy Cloner to image birdhouse hosting onto it, so our mail and web server is finally on a dedicated box. Transition went flawlessly. I’ll let it run for a week here to break it in, then haul it up to fortress geek (most likely) to ride on their T1. If anyone can suggest other East Bay colos, I’m all ears.

Music: Roots Radics :: The Death Of Mr. Spock
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Final Vinyl

Last night started to digitize some 20-year-old cassette tapes of unreplaceable music*. Have been threatening to do this for ages, then when I got it all together six months ago, couldn’t find the tapes! They surfaced in the move.

Old cassette deck –> RCA-minijack adapter –> Griffin iMic –> Final Vinyl

From there I’ll import the AIFFs into iTunes and add metadata, encode to MP3. Final Vinyl is a great piece of freeware, if a bit awkward. Gets the job done. First tape I stuck in got tangled in the capstan and detached at the spool. That one will need surgery once the hand is usable again.

* As a teenager I worked in a surf shop. “Al the reggae mailman” delivered our mail. He used to make these two-turntable reggae mix tapes with choice 70s cuts straight from the island. He would trade us tapes to play in the shop for wetsuits and other gear. This is not the reggae that shows up on Trojan and Studio One compilations – this is true rare groove stuff — music I won’t listen to often but that is burned in my soul from those years in the shop.

Music: Lennie Tristano/Lee Konitz/Warne Marsh :: 317 E, 32nd
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Miles’ Brush with Stardom

Almost forgot: A couple of weeks ago we were at Hidden City Cafe’ in Point Richmond, Miles between us in a high chair banging Cheerios into a fine powder, when suddenly he breaks into that huge smile he reserves for people who are really turning him on. We turn to see who’s eye he’s caught this time, and it’s Elliott Gould, stopping to make goo-goo faces at a baby on his way out of the restaurant. He grins at us and slips out the door, probably too soon to avoid hearing one of us stammer, “Hey, isn’t Robert Gould?” Doi.

Music: Reggae Disco Rockers :: Baby
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See an Orthopod

Before and after, one wrist/arm with twin fractures, the other normal. Click if not squeamish. Although the E.R. told me to “see an orthopod in a few days,” my PCP wouldn’t give me a referral over the phone. Tomorrow I go in, no doubt, to waste two hours and half a day of work, take my blood pressure, and get referred to “an orthopod.” I hate that aspect of HMOs — against all common sense, referrals always required. Actually worked today one-handed, which is NOT half-speed, but around 1/4 speed since left hand has to float and search for each letter. Patience wearing thin, going to file a police report tomorrow and am now considering suing after all. I can’t change Miles’ diapers, can’t even pick him up. Can’t drive, can’t ride, can’t pull change out of my pants. Amy has to tie my shoes. My life is screwed for a month while the driver is scot-free. It’s a moral imperative to get her off the road, that’s a given, but I’m starting to think compensation makes sense too … unless it would be trying to squeeze blood from a stone.

Music: Fila Brazillia :: Asthma
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Polyester, Desperate Living

Part of the fun of breaking limbs (Amy commented today that I’m starting to look familiar in a cast) is staying home, checking out, and renting movies. Saturday brought home a pair of John Waters films.

Waters’ goal for years was to make sure that each film outdid the last in bad taste … though Polyester broke that tradition somewhat in an attempt to appeal to a wider audience. It’s still my favorite, and I still have one of the original Odorama cards in a box somewhere.

Desperate Living somewhat harder to watch unless you’re thirsty for 90 minutes of extreme, wonderful trash. Picture Queen Carlotta as a “special” actress missing two front teeth, half-spherical, giant red hair, ruling prone from her perch on a four-poster cot held aloft by Castro boys in leather motorcycle caps and black mesh shirts.


Peggy Gravel: The citizens of Mortville are beneath contempt. Only the rich should be allowed to live.

Queen Carlotta: I like the way you think. I’ll give you a trial run. Your first duty will be to help my soldiers spread rabies to the whole town. Do you think you can handle that?

Gravel: Oh, yes, your majesty. And I know just the person I want to give it to first.

Now imagine 90 minutes of similarly insane scene making and you get the basic idea of Desperate Living. If you’ve already seen your share of Waters’ films, his directors’ commentaries on the DVDs make them worth re-watching.

Music: Count Basie and His Orchestra :: Broadway
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Accident

So 80% of my bicycle commute is off city streets. The remaining 20% is still in the car-o-sphere, as I discovered this evening when a woman with no insurance (of course) hooked a sudden left in front of me. Half a second to react, and I was looking at a horizontal Honda in my path. That quick pang of inevitability before my front wheel hit her flank and I went sailing over the trunk. Right wrist and forearm took most of the impact, back and ribs caught some too.

What pissed me off was the way she started yelling that she didn’t see me, as if that somehow made it my fault. It was broad daylight, the sun was at her back, and she wasn’t on the phone. So then… what? Why are bikes so damn invisible to cars? As she continued her stupid defensive rant, I lay on my back halfway on the sidewalk and told her about Matthew, and how that driver “just didn’t see him” either. It started to sink in and she started to cry.

A very kind woman (a theology prof) gave me a ride home. Turns out she was connected to Matthew as well. Eerie.

Spent the rest of the evening in the emergency room. Two fractures in my right forearm/wrist. In a splint and sling for the next long while. I feel a monstro cars/bikes rant coming on — the one I’ve supressed since Matthew’s death — but typing one-handed is too slow.

Music: John Fahey :: Knott’s Berry Farm Molly
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XServe Arrives

The XServe arrived at the J-School today. Sysadmin is out of town, so it gets to live in my office for a while, bootstrap it through the transition from Wintel. Surprisingly large. Surprisingly loud. A work of art. Packed with software, ready to rock. In the rack. Dancing blue lights on the front of the box monitor dual CPU activity, which I haven’t seen since the BeBox went bye-bye. Afternoon spent RTFM’ing and exploring config options. Tomorrow we get down.

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14,600 Redux

Since posting about the DSL bandwidth bummers in the new house last week, the outlook has not brightened. Speakeasy put me in touch with their throughput gurus and we looked at the problem from every angle (I can’t recommend Speakeasy highly enough – their customer service is sterling). Conclusion – they can get me maybe 5% or even 10% more upstream, but we’re not going to get anywhere close to the 768kbps upstream I had in the previous house until the telco builds a closer C.O. Called the telco and got laughed at — “You’re already within DSL range — why would we build another C.O.?”

Started doing more research into cable options via Comcast. Just getting through to them has been a study in frustration. Half a dozen phone calls and emails unreturned. All I wanted to know was what their upstream cap was and whether they impose any restrictions on ports/servers. Their web site was totally unhelpful. Their commercial service sounded promising, but no details online. Finally, a sympathetic soul in tech support passed me to someone with a clue. Sure enough, 384kbps upstream cap and no traffic on port 80 allowed. Period.

So I’m back to square one. Home T1 too expensive. Colo probably affordable but will necessitate buying another box. Having too much fun running servers to throw in the towel, though someone with a less-thick head than myself probably would have long ago.

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Did Jesus Compile His Own Kernel?

What stranges me out about Does Linux equal socialism? is the fact that the author seems very careful to point out that the GPL allows for profit, and that open source therefore isn’t entirely socialistic after all. The implication is that if open source [anything] is socialistic in nature, we’d better steer clear because Jesus wouldn’t like that, but thank goodness Red Hat and IBM have profited from open source since that makes Linux capitalistic, and therefore okay.

The implication being that Jesus was a capitalist, or that there are anti-socialist teachings somewhere in the Bible. If you had asked me, I would have said that Jesus was a socialist. “We are our brother’s keeper” and all that. I would have thought Jesus would have compiled his own kernel.

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No Cable

Had it up to here [points to gullet] with the endless expanses of nothingness on standard cable TV. It’s not that there’s nothing on, just that every time we sit down we have usually half hour or so and just want to be entertained for a bit. More often than not the burrito is done before the commercials finally end, and what’s on is just plain bleak, unsatisfying. There are a few things we like, but the likelihood of them being on when we have free time is slim. Tivo seems like the grail, but to have that, you have to subscribe both to Tivo and to the cable or satellite to feed it.

Feh. Mutiny. Jacked in the 50-year-old antenna on top of the new house and whoa, we get almost a dozen network channels, most of them fairly clear. Unfortunately this also means no 24 hr news and no trigger happy tv, but we’re going to live with this for a while and see how it goes.