Ben's Useless Blog

Linux on the Desktop

2008-12-03T17:37:00.004-05:00

It's that time of year when I get sick of Windows and decide to run some alternative OS on my main desktop PC in my home office.

My hardware:
Intel Core2 Duo E6750 @ 2.66GHz
4GB RAM

I was running a 64 bit edition of XP for the last 11 months or so. It's always annoyed me, but I was productive enough, so I dealt with it.

Lately I've been paying some attention to the OSX86 Project and decided to give that a try.

The install process went well, but upon my first boot attempt, I got the dreaded "waiting for root device" error. I gave up promptly and decided to give Ubuntu a try.

Ubuntu recently released version 8.10. I tried Kubuntu 8.10 (which comes with KDE 4.1.2) for a day, but I realized that I'm a Gnome man after all - straight Ubuntu it is!

Anyway, my main reason for writing this post is because I want to praise the makers of a handy program, UNetbootin. During my adventures over the long weekend, I must have burnt 10 different LiveCD's, and reformatted/installed a new OS at least 3 or 4 times. Somewhere in there, my cd/dvd drive completely died. This happened while my workstation was in a non-bootable state - nothing to boot back into. Nowhere to call home! In a whirlwind of panic and slight drunkenness, I found this program which saved the day by allowing me to install Ubuntu 8.10 from my USB thumb drive.

Never burn a CD again to install or try out Linux. Save your burner, stop wasting plastic CD-R trees! Use UNetbootin!

It was remarkably easy to use. Just pointed it to the .iso for the ubuntu install disc which I had already downloaded, plugged a USB thumb drive in, and it did the rest.

As a bonus, the Ubuntu install went remarkably fast from the thumb drive. Way faster than installing from from a CD/DVD.

We'll see how long I stick with Linux this time :) In the past I've never made it more than a few months. But I have high hopes for this time around - Ubuntu has lived up to "it just works" motto so far with only a minor exception here and there for the more off-the-beaten-path things I'm trying to do.

Net Neutrality; Grim Future for the Internet

2008-06-08T21:20:00.002-04:00

Several ISPs have leaked that they are planning on moving to tiered internet plans, essentially like Cable Television

My friend Ryan writes about it here

And Google's CEO, Eric Schmidt, writes it about it here

And here's a video by some internet activists who describe in more detail what's happening:
http://ipower.ning.com/netneutrality2

I think it's fairly evident that the main purpose of this change is to control what information makes its way to the public. Traditional media outlets have always been annoyed that any guy with a blog can report on what's happening in the world. A free Internet is bad for them. The goal would seem to be a regression toward a more centralized and filtered source of news and other information. Something that can easily be policed by those with their own agendas.

My horoscope was actually relevant?

2008-03-24T19:35:00.005-04:00

Often times when I'm doing my daily sudoku puzzle, on the same page are other useless things like daily horoscopes and comics. Now, I don't want those authors to feel I'm ignoring them, so sometimes I have a look-see. Well today my horoscope was spookily pertinent given the recent developments in my social life. God ... I hope I don't become one of those people that lives and dies by their daily horoscope.

Google Maps meets Grand Theft Auto

2008-03-15T11:06:00.001-04:00

http://www.phatfusion.net/googledrive/

No More Drunk Dialing

2007-12-06T12:30:00.000-05:00

Since they're planning to open up the iPhone to 3rd party applications, I think someone needs to finally go ahead and implement protection against drunk dialing.

This could be a puzzle, or series of questions -- any means to test a person's sobriety level -- that would need to be correctly solved before unlocking the phone for outbound calls.

With the advent of consumer-grade portable breathalyzers (which have come down remarkably in price over the past few years), all we'd need is a USB or Bluetooth enabled breathalyzer that can be paired up with your phone, and hazzah! -- We could restrict calls based on how much alchohol is detected in the user's breath.

Or it could just lock certain contacts - that way you can always drunk dial your best friend, but not that boy you just met last week to tell them how much you really really like him ;)

Allow different levels of drunk dialing. Think "thresholds."

(low): No dialing recent dates or new crushes
(medium): No dialing anyone of the opposite sex (or same sex, whichever)
(high): No calls except to cab companies or 911
(alcohol poisoning): Automatically call an ambulance for you ;)

My credit card company: da bomb, yo

2007-07-02T15:02:00.000-04:00

I just got a physical letter in the mail from my credit card company that says "Your CitiBank statement is now available at http://www.citicards.com. This notification is part of the All-Electronic Program you enrolled in to receive your statements online only instead of in the mail."

More CNN Irony, School shootings

2007-04-20T02:24:00.000-04:00

Ok, so in a piece entitled Killer's images 'a second assault on us', the author describes how upset the families of the victims are regarding the media's plastering of the killer's images and videos all over the place -- AND THEN POSTS A LINK TO VIEW THE FULL SET OF THE KILLER'S IMAGES!

Am I the only one who finds this fucked up?

View the original article here: http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/04/20/vtech.shooting/index.html

More CNN "American Idol" headlines

2007-03-22T13:50:00.000-04:00

CNN's cynicism continues. I really enjoy these headlines. For a previous example, see my earlier post, CNN's sense of humor

I realize they may not have been trying to convey sarcasm here since there is a legitimate question of whether American Idol is "for real" in this case. But the way it presents on CNN's page of the top 10 most popular stories (http://cnn.com/mostpopular) amuses me perhaps more than it should.

Goodbye Michigan, Hello New York

2007-03-21T00:34:00.000-04:00

As of today, I begin the progression from Michigander to New Yorker. I have found a buyer for my house (Screw all those nay sayers who say for-sale-by-owner doesn't work!). They will take possession May 4th, 2007, at which time I will officially be free of my Michigan attachments, and can begin my life as a New Yorker.

w00t

UPDATE: The buyers took possession April 6th, 2007. I'm outta here!

CNN's sense of humor

2007-03-06T15:39:00.000-05:00

It's nice to see that CNN's writers share my sentiments on the importance of 'idol' related stories.

Monroe Panty Shots

2007-01-07T17:10:00.000-05:00

If Marilyn Monroe were alive today, we'd be trading cellphone snapshots of her getting out of a car with no panties on.

The past was a classy time for high profile promiscuity. I think the upscale and famous slutty women of today are given a bad rep by society's relentless thirst for career-crippling up-the-skirt photographs.

No longer do we regard these women as "sex goddesses." The term implies a level of respect in addition to their sex symbol status, a position worthy of filling. Now any hot chick can bang Rick Salomon, tape it, pretend to disapprove of its release, and end up with a reality show contract by the time they wash the cum out of their hair.

If Paris Hilton [or Britney, etc] lived in the time of Marilyn Monroe, she could have been regarded as an elite socialite with even respectable social status, worthy of presidential coital relations.

But since all sense of mystery has been stripped - nothing is left to the imagination. We have night vision cock-sucking clips, and front-page shaved pussy shots, and an endless stream of talking-heads to give us the play-by-play.

Mork? Are you kidding me?

2006-11-05T16:41:00.000-05:00

So I've recently learned that Mozilla Firefox stores some of it's profile data in "Mork" formatted files. I wanted to recover some data that I had submitted in a web form the other day, but then subsequently lost. I don't want to have to re-write it. So I figured "Hey, I can just grab it from Firefox's formhistory.dat file! No problem." <-- WRONG, fucking Mork.

After some Google'ing, I found some info on Mork. David McCusker, a Netscape engineer, invented Mork, a generic textual database file format "loosely inspired by LISP." The following quote from some geek's blog seems to sum it up: [see original post here]

This looks like a model example of somebody who's written code to prove how smart they are, rather than to merely do the simplest thing in the simplest way. I've observed that this is the key difference between developers who are bright, and developers who think they're bright and love to broadcast it to the world.

However, it has to be said that going on what I've seen of McCusker's publicly-indexed emails and forum posts, he is quite literally certifiably nuts, and thus probably deserves to be cut a little slack. For crying out loud, this man writes everything in haiku.

I hate showoff's. Of course, I probably could have just re-written my lost form data by now, but hoping that a little research would pay off countless times in the future, I pursued this 'formhistory.dat' business. No cigar.

Closer

2006-09-02T22:56:00.000-04:00

In my youthful innocence, I first met the movie Closer with shock and a little disgust.

Now, having been perhaps damaged a bit by the world (or at least the people in it), I think Clive Owen's performance is the funniest fucking thing I've ever been privy to.

Bra-fucking-vo.

Technology Restored

2006-08-29T16:30:00.000-04:00

Yay! As of today I have both power AND Internet access :)

Pictures are slowly being added to my flickr set as well:

Downed Power Lines on Haisley

2006-08-27T23:38:00.000-04:00

My back yard looks like hurricaine Katrina made a cameo

I had just walked in my front door after coming home from my mom's house (I'm dog sitting for her). I was standing in my living room watching the rain come down in my back yard. The rain had just started to build up to 'storm' levels.

All of the sudden there was an incredibly bright white flash of lightning in my back yard, striking my neighbor's tree, sending it toppling towards me into my yard. It brought the electrical wires down with it as it came crashing through the fence dividing our backyards. Once it landed, the top of the tree was not more than 10 feet from the edge of my house. Damn I was lucky.

A downed transformer was going nuts - a bright white ball of electrical fire was hissing and cracking near the ground. Sparks were flying everywhere as smoke filled my yard and seeped out into the street in front of my house.

The lights in my house would brown out every time the transformer arched. So the first thing I did was run down into the basement and flip the main circuit breaker so I could at least spare my appliances and computers from further damage.

Next step was to call *someone* ... 911? DTE? Mom? But shit, the battery in my cell phone (my only phone) was almost dead. So I grabbed my dog and ran out to my car so I could plug the phone into my car charger. I dialed 911 and told the woman on the other end what was happening. One of my neighbors ran up and banged on my passenger side window as I was talking to the 911 operator. I was probably acting like your typical freaked out 911 caller. Talking to my neighbor and the 911 operator at the same time. The 911 operator had to tell me to calm down and tell her fully what was going on. At the end, she told me the fire department was on its way and we hung up.

I got out of the car ... went back inside to quickly put suitable clothes on and put my contacts in. Couldn't have taken me more than 3 or 4 minutes and by the time i was ready to go back outside, the fire department had already arrived. Good response time guys!

Now I could finally relax. I stood out in the street with my neighbors and my dog as the fire department taped off my house and the one next door. The rain had let up a bit so it wasn't too bad standing out there.

The firemen weren't actually able to to do much though. The only way to get into my back yard without going through the house involves opening a metal gate which is attached to a metal fence which goes back into the danger zone. So the firemen weren't able to get close. Then they got a call that another person's garage was on fire just a couple blocks away from the same incident. So they gave us a little warning speech about not touching anything metal in our houses, and they left.

We stood around chatting in the street for a while after the firemen left. Hell, it happened to my house and I almost missed the speech. The firemen just looked for the largest group of people I think and just started explaining the situation to them, regardless of where they lived or how they were related to the affected houses. My immediate neighbor missed the speech and continued to walk inside the danger zone and go in and out of his house like everything was normal. We didn't warn him or anything but he seemed to be doing fine ... so that gave me the courage to walk back into my house ;) It was nice to be back inside where it was dry, and also get a great view of all the damage. I took a few snapshots with my camera-phone and a short video clip as well .... wish I had a real camera so I could take some high resolution shots, but oh well.

So I decided to go to my dad's house, where I could enjoy modern luxuries like power and running water. I grabbed a change of clothes so I could take a shower, some essentials that I wanted to save from the fridge/freezer (i.e. Ice cream!), a few DVDs, and my laptop and headed out with dog in hand.

The firemen earlier said that DTE was "more than aware of the problem" but they didn't know when they would be out. But I decided to call them myself from my dad's just to lodge a formal incident report and get an estimate and whatnot. And when I spoke to them, they did NOT have a previous ticket for the incident ... so that was confusing. Anyway, one of the questions they ask when you report a downed wire is if you live near a school park or playground. I happen to be right next to an elementary school's playground, thus making this an extremely high priority case. Note to self -- always try to live near a school park or playground because the power company will take you much more seriously when there's a problem :)

Addendum: Pictures of the tree and my fence made the 11 O'clock NBC news tonight as the newscaster said something along the lines of: Residents in an ann arbor neighborhood are still without power after an Oak tree fell and took down some power lines on Haisley street. Woohoo!

Why does our government hate us?

2006-07-26T00:01:00.000-04:00

I just watched the documentary Loose Change, 2nd Edition and it completely changed my perspective on the events of 9/11/2001. I can't recommend this film enough. In my humble opinion, every American should see this movie.

You can actually view it online (for free) at http://www.loosechange911.com/ (there's a link to Google Video where you can view the entire movie). If you don't have a connection capable of this, I'd be happy to personally make you a copy and send it to you.

I was a skeptic going in, but I've been convinced. The evidence is far too compelling to ignore. Even if some of it sounds far-fetched, the bulk of the evidence presented is just undeniable. Please do yourself a favor and watch the film -- Then show it to your friends and family .. and then have them do the same. People NEED to hear this information.

Go Flickr yourself

2005-11-16T02:09:00.000-05:00

Ok ok, I give in. I signed up for Flickr today.

Check out my "pleasantville" style picture.

Ann Arbor Love

2005-11-08T21:16:00.000-05:00

Davy and Peter Rothbart scored the cover of this month's "Current" for their "Found Magazine" fame -- Here's a link to the online article which unfortunately doesn't include the cover picture. I'll upload it if I find a copy:

http://ecurrent.com/art/found1105.php

See half-ass pic here

An idea blog

2005-11-08T17:44:00.000-05:00

So my friend, Ernie, and I have talked about creating an "idea blog" several times in the past. A place where people could submit ideas for web based projects that would benefit us and others in the community. I think another one of my friends, Mark, also had this idea, and perhaps has followed up on it.

Today, out of the blue, someone sent me a link to a site that was my vision realized! The site is ShouldExist - their tagline is "Idea exchange, news of the future."

And holy shit, someone even posted an idea for the type of wiki that my business partner and I were just discussing today: http://www.shouldexist.org/story/2004/10/13/32944/857

This may be old news to a lot of you. And if so, screw you for not telling me about this earlier. I may be late to the game, but I'm excited none the less.

I love the Internet.

Moved To Blogger

2005-11-06T19:36:00.000-05:00

Well, as some of you may notice, I've ditched b2evolution and started using Blogger for my main blog (this page). I brought over my old posts, but unfortunately all comments were lost. Since there weren't that many comments on the old blog anyway, I guess this is no tragedy :)

Anyway, hopefully I'll start posting more now that I'm using a blog engine I don't hate :)

Idea for a site to Identify Music

2005-09-29T19:29:00.000-04:00

Ok, so I've had this idea in the past, and a few people have expressed interest.

We've all had those moments where you can't remember the name of a song, or just heard it on the radio but didn't catch the name when the DJ said it. But you know the general tune and maybe a few words. Well what if there were a site where you could upload a clip of yourself singing/humming the song so that other visitors of the site could help identify that song title for you?

Anyone? Interest? Do you think it's possible to get a big enough user base to make this an asset to the internet community?

Anne Rice

2005-09-07T19:28:00.000-04:00

Anne Rice's "Do You Know What It Means to Lose New Orleans?" click for article

The Real World

2005-07-10T19:28:00.000-04:00

If there's one thing worse than watching The Real World it's having to hear about last night's episode in great detail over instant messenger.

Debauchery

2005-06-21T19:28:00.000-04:00

yay for debauchery

dishtris

2005-03-10T19:27:00.000-05:00

Through a series of scientific studies and surveys, I've come to the indisputable conclusion that there is a direct relation between a person's skill level in Tetris and their ability to efficiently load a dishwasher.