i got a new bottle of cork cement. this is about halfway through. it looks together, but it still doesn’t play completely. now is the time i take a hammer to it, to whack it into shape… really… 😎
Monthly Archives: September 2013
twas brillig and the slithy toves…
this is a test of iOS7 with the wordpress app .
it’s definitely NOT going to work for regular use, but it’ll be interesting to see what happens…
smb
i figured out stumbled across the method of making my mac accessible to my linux box that doesn’t include sftp, but does include smb. theoretically, i’ve got smb running on my linux box, as well (thus the ability to access my mac), but for some reason, my linux box doesn’t show up on my mac.
it’s nothing new. my mac has always shown up on my linux box, and my linux box has never shown up on my mac. the fact that i stumbled across the method of making my mac visible on my linux box indicates to me that it should be fairly easy to make the linux box visible from the mac…
but, so far, it hasn’t happened yet… 😐
snake suspenderz
i haven’t been writing that much about snake suspenderz recently, because we haven’t been doing that much as a group… except recently.
last night we played for a gay wedding. a couple of years ago, we played for this couple’s 40th anniversary, and, now that they’re actually able to get married (gasp), they wanted us back for their wedding. it was an honour, of course, and the only shame was that they had to live together for 42 years before they were legally able to get married. we got plied with many different varieties of victuals, beer and liquor, played up a storm (literally, not last night, but this morning) and walked away with $200 a piece. now all we have to do is find a gig like that every week, and we’ll be set.
today was the 2nd annual “Day Of Music” at benaroya hall… and the grammatical error that was in the bus tunnel is STILL there. i lived near there in 1998, when it was originally put up, and noticed it then, and sent several letters complaining about their shoddy attempts at proofreading to various different civic groups, but, as is obvious, nobody ever did anything about it, and my tax dollars are still going towards the mis-education of millions of metro riders every year…
but that was then, and this is now. i was given a “discounted” parking pass for the parking garage under benaroya hall, but it was for a “$3 discount” on the, normal $7 parking fee, and i figured that if i get there early and search around a little, there’s a good chance that i can park on the street for free, which i did: i parked four blocks away, on the waterfront, and dragged my tuba uphill six blocks, because there is no wheelchair ramp at the “Waterfront Steps”. it actually wasn’t all that bad, and i figured that i would find another way down later on. i showed up in time to watch the one man band who was on stage ahead of us, and during his time on stage the weather went from dry but cloudy to “car wash” status, and they actually told us that we might be delayed or cancelled, if it got too outrageous… which, of course, it didn’t, but that didn’t prevent me from playing a half-hour set with rain dribbling down my back… and they don’t call upright tubas “rain catchers” for nothing… 😐 and, of course, i wasn’t able to find a way down, so i had to walk three blocks out of my way, in the pouring rain, which, at that point, also included lightning and thunder, to get back to my car.
allegedly we have another gay wedding in tacoma, next month, that also pays us $200 a piece. thaddeus was connected to this gig by an old friend of his who books bands for events. maybe he should… um… i don’t know, let his friend know that WE’RE A BAND THAT NEEDS GIGS or something like that… and then, maybe it won’t have been nine months since our last gig… 😐
put this into a perspective that we can relate to…
Don’t panic: Earth has at least 1.75 billion years to go, scientists say — saying it like that makes it seem like there’s something that we, as living individuals, could do about it. putting it into a little more realistic perspective, i.e. 100 years is 3 to 4 generations, that is 52,500,000 to 70,000,000 GENERATIONS they think we will last until the sun gets too hot…
i’m pretty sure they will have completely forgotten about me, and my son, and his offspring, and their offspring, and their offspring, before we even have to think about worrying that we’re approaching the end of the world. we have a better chance of ending the world ourselves before then than we do actually lasting that long.
get over it. the sun is eventually going to get too hot for humans to live on earth, but, unless we act a lot more sensibly than we have been the past 2000 years, we’re very likely to drive ourselves into extinction a long time before that will happen.
update
moe’s car died yesterday. the alternator went out while she was driving down the freeway. fortunately she was able to get off the freeway before anything catastrophic happened, but the result is that she drove my car to work today, and i’ve been stuck at home fielding calls from the repair shop, which says that it’s going to cost on the order of $600 to get it running again.
i got my old computer transferred to my new computer, and got the new computer in the backup routine — and it has only taken me four days — and that is not to mention that much of the important software on my old computer won’t work on the new one, so i’ve been franically flailing around to try and update everything before one of my clients calls and asks for an emergency change to their business card, or something like that.
as an aside, one of the applications that no longer worked was photoshop. i’ve been using CE since my minuteman press days (i.e. 10 years ago) and i was pleasantly surprised to discover that it worked both on my OS9 mac and my OSX mac, so i figured that it would continue to work, given that i haven’t changed platforms, i’ve just upgraded it… BUT NO… 😐 apparently “Universal Binaries” are no longer supported, despite the fact that i’ve got a number of open source programs that are also, apparently, “universal binaries” and they work just fine… fortunately i was able to find a copy of CS2 on ebay, and CS2 will work, because i AM NOT going to purchase CC (the “cloud” version), because that is not software, it is sold as a “subscription” which means that, if you don’t pay for it, you can’t use it… another one of the “universal binary” applications that no longer works is macromedia freehand, which is, truly, a shame, because it’s replacement in the commercial market (illustrator) doesn’t work half as well, and uses adobe’s “home office” terminology, rather than the much more standard “industry” terminology…
woo…
i got my new laptop. it says it’s going to take 30 hours to transfer all the data. i don’t know whether this is good or bad.
friday the 13th!
flooooooooooooote!!!
through an interaction with someone i didn’t know on the south king county freecycle, i found out about this gemeinhardt flute for sale for $15 on craigslist…
so i went and bought it.
it was made for me… 😎
i can repair it for probably under $10 (not including my labor, which i’m not charging myself for anyway) and turn this flute around for between $80 and $120… maybe as much as $150 to the right person… 😉
flute pieces — all present and accounted for!
only i gotta buy some new cork cement, because the last bottle i had is about 2 years old…
soon! 😎
why is this happening?
several of my web hosting clients have been having trouble with their email not getting through, recently. i went through a frighteningly similar situation last year, which ended up with my moving my web sites, lock stock and CGI scripts, to another server with a different IP address… same host provider, just a different IP address. the reason was that, for some unexplained reason, the IP address kept getting listed in the CBL… which means that someone using that shared-hosting machine (not me, or any of my clients) was using it to sent spam.
the same thing has happened again. i complained, they suspended someone, it didn’t fix the problem, they told me that it takes time to propagate, i waited, it didn’t fix the problem, i complained again, they told me that it was an exim misconfiguration, that didn’t fix the problem, i complained again, they told me that they had written to the CBL to get answers…
well, guess what?
copied from the CBL home page: “There is no supporting data or “evidence” file available for any given listing, and no mechanism to ask why any given listing took place.”
so i wrote back to them, and said “whatever is causing the IP to be relisted hasn’t gone away, and won’t go away with you guys waiting for a response that won’t come.”
whereupon they closed the ticket with no further response.
maybe it’s time to start looking for a cheap VPS… 😐
latest battle news
things keep fixing themselves, and/or i find out how to fix them: i figured out how to make my secondary internal ext3 disk mount at boot, and the version of KDE that has the fix for the recently used documents bug came down the line a couple of days ago… there’s still some things that haven’t completely worked their way out yet, but i keep creeping up on where i used to be before “the disaster” happened.
on the other hand, i recently discovered that the IP address for hybridelephant.com (and all other domains that i host) has, once again, found itself on the CBL, and the sysadmins are just as clueless and stubborn about fixing it as they were last year. i reported the problem, and they immediately got back to me and said that they had suspended a suspicious user and that the problem was resolved. problem was, they didn’t actually fix the problem, and i told them so, with references to back up my case. once again, they told me the problem was solved, and that i shouldn’t worry about it. at the same time, my IP address was listed in the CBL, and had been for the past 14 hours. i pointed this out to them, and they told me that it was “a misconfigured exim” and that the problem really was resolved… now it’s just a matter of waiting to see if that really has fixed the problem. i’m not holding my breath, but so far it’s not been re-listed. we’ll see how it goes.
also, i bought a new (reconditioned) mac the other day. it’s allegedly going to be delivered on the 16th.
They also sell knockers and hinges. ‘Hinges’ isn’t an innuendo but they’re fukken useful.
only on internet… seriously… ONLY on internet.
today i’ve was reading through my RSS feeds, and i came across several references, in widely different publications, about An Open Letter To Bigot Diners by Hajime Sato, sushi chef and owner of the local japanese restaurant Mashiko (and, coincidentally, also owner of Katsu Burger, which is a place i’ve driven by quite often, and wondered what the hell it was…), concerning the presence of caucasian female sushi chefs behind the bar of their authentic japanese restaurant.
being a fairly regular customer of another local japanese restaurant, Maneki, i was interested in reading through his “Open Letter…” and agreed with it wholeheartedly, but that’s not the funny part.
the funny part is that i commented that i didn’t know he also owned Katsu Burger, and then, i noticed a very familiar name on the comment just ahead of mine…
i find it very odd that both my father and i would be moved to comment on the same article within three hours of each other, with no other impetus than to voice our agreement with a third person, who neither of us know IRL…
Missing Daughter
the most recent iteration of the battle of the computer is winding down…
i got my dropbox fixed. i still don’t know why or how, but at least it’s working. 😐
i just discovered that the issue with my “Recently Used Documents” menu is due to a bug in KDE4.11.0 which is why they’ve already released KDE4.11.1, but that doesn’t come until later… because apparently the KDE for kubuntu 12.04 is 4.8.5, which may mean that there’s something else bizarre going on… means that i have kubuntu backports ppa enabled (because of a problem that i was having with amarok, about a year ago) in my repositories list, and i’m not going to turn them off now… 😐
there’s a whole bunch of “new” information, via hobbit, regarding the linux compose key, which while not “new” to the world in general, is very new and interesting to me… and with a minimum amount of twangling, i got it set up. unfortunately, it doesn’t work when publishing to the web (which is not particuarly surprising), so a demonstration of it on this page would be extremely disappointing. 😉