November 05, 2003
Wildlife Report
Yesterday was Melbourne Cup Day. On my way to work I pass the Albert Tavern in North Sydney, and they had two shetland ponies out front. Real live ones, munching on hay with every sign of enjoyment.
What I didn't see was a shovel. Since I went past at 8 am and the race starts at 3 pm, I expect that they found one somewhere... Also, this morning as I was leaving the house, I found [DON'T LOOK MOOKIE!!] a spider as big as my hand clinging to my front door. It was one of the long spindly ones, though, rather than one of the big fat hairy ones with enormous fangs and roughly three million eyes. It looked rather like the mothership for all the daddy longlegs you've ever seen. I was running late or I would have gone back inside to get my camera. Next time...Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:22 PM | Comments (43) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
November 04, 2003
Hal Clement
Damn.
I got to meet him once - really nice guy. Time to read Mission of Gravity again.Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:18 AM | Comments (45) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
November 03, 2003
Productivity Negative
Warlords IV is out. It uses the (very cool) Warlords Battlecry II graphics engine, but with good old Warlords-style turn-based play.
There's a new X-Com game out too. It's like 1990 all over again, only with better graphics.Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:28 AM | Comments (41) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
November 02, 2003
Cleaning Up
Cleaning up for me, after the incidents at school and at my house... It must have been hard. The school, your house, and the Great Seito Bridge. They all went through a mysterious collapse one after the other. So the media just went and conveniently connected them all.It's season three of Tenchi Muyo! Though it does suffer from a slight case of "show the whole of season one in flashbacks in the first episode"...
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 01:53 AM | Comments (46) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Doesn't Suck
Pixy Misa's Doesn't Suck Award today goes to my new ISP, Swiftel. Of course, the truth is that they do suck, because they have to do with computers and everything involving computers sucks. That's Pixy's First Law. Still, they win the coveted Doesn't Suck award because compared to every other ISP in Australia (and never mind Telstra's Bigpond, which is galactic-centre-black-hole-grade suck), um, compared to the rest they don't suck at all.
They just upped my download allocation again. When I signed up, it was 6GB a month (my old ISP allowed me 2.5GB). That went to 7 the next month. Then 8. Then 10. Now it's 12. Only one month since I joined that they didn't boost the allowance. And the last two days of October were free because they were installing a new usage meter. And the new usage meter allows them to have free downloads - their news server is now free. Plus all the usual goodies they've always had - free unlimited uploads, static IP address, freedom to run servers (I have a mail server and a web server running off that line... Of course, I also have a mail server and a web server running on the mu.nu box. Everyone needs two mail servers and two web servers, right?) And $6 per GB for excess downloads instead of $149. That's still expensive, but it's just annoying rather than terrifying. Leave the line running all weekend and the most damage I can do now is $48... With my old ISP it was more like $7000. Yay! Swiftel! Yay!Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:43 AM | Comments (47) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Still Not Dead
Though I'm rapidly running out of DVDs to burn stuff onto. I ordered another hundred last week. Where are they? Where are they?
Bloody Australia Post. If they sucked three times as much, they'd be Telstra, but that's a whole 'nother story. Where did all these blasted flac and wav files come from, anyway? I thought I had everything converted to 256k mp3s. No wonder my [entirely legal &mdash Ed.] music stash is taking up so much room. Oh look, there's another episode of the live action Sailor Moon series out! The one I saw at Animania back about six years ago when I had a life was the funniest thing I've seen in oh, about six years. Must download. Haha! Damn, I'm already out of bandwidth. Need a faster connection. Except that that would cost meIn one of the strangest events ever to transfix the city, countless thousands of people, evidently citizens of New York from the 1930s, have been walking out of the Hudson River and converging calmly on Times Square. Overwhelmed by sheer numbers, police have ordered SWAT teams against the possibility of massive violence, although the invasion seems to be peaceful. Experts estimate that if the influx of river people continues unabated, all current residents of Manhattan will be displaced into the surounding waters by tomorow afternoon. The mayor has requested military backup, but warns that if conventional fire power is to no vail, the city may be forced to that last, grim recourse of modern civilization and summon Hollywood celebrities. Pictures at eleven.I told you to read Pibgorn! I told you! And you didn't listen!
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 12:24 AM | Comments (45) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
November 01, 2003
Newblog Showcase
Oops, another week, another showcase. Since I'm in the middle of dealing with an omnidirectional computer meltdown, I'll just note that our own Daniel David Darren Daniel (I was right the first time!) has an entry in the contest, not for his MuNu blog, but for Bsurot Tovot, a blog dedicated to bringing the good news from Israel. Including - ahem - two articles on the new 8 teraflop optical DSP from Lenslet.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:17 AM | Comments (42) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
October 31, 2003
You're Under Arrest
If I'm going to spend my weekend recovering files off my computer, I might as well have a bit of entertainment in between feeding it blank DVDs. So off I went to AnimeSuki, the galaxy's number one anime fansub BitTorrent directory.
What shall I download, I wonder. How about the entire second season of You're Under Arrest? Only 4.3 gigabytes. Never mind the fact that I haven't got around to watching the first season yet...Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:58 PM | Comments (42) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
October 30, 2003
Purr?
You are a tabby cat. The total home-body. You'd be
content just to stay at home all day and not
get up from the couch. You lazy sloth! Try and
make a movement every now and then, or someone
might decide to bury you in the back yard!
What color of cat are you?
brought to you by Quizilla
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:22 PM | Comments (47) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Yay-ish
I've recovered 37,000 files so far. That leaves about 210,000 files to go.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 09:01 AM | Comments (45) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
October 29, 2003
Yay?
If your filesystem has become corrupt and Windows no longer recognises it, panic not! Delay not, but buy Stellar Phoenix. It doesn't suck. It recovers files, without (so far) error. Quickly - uh, well, not actually quickly. But easily. Reliably.
Hooray for Stellar Phoenix! Hooray! Now I just have to work out what I'm going to do with this 230GB of files I'm recovering...Posted by: Pixy Misa at 07:53 PM | Comments (41) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Protection
Not only have I lost two disk drives so far this week, but I've come down with a nasty cold. At least I'm better off than this guy:
There'll be an airplane crash in Burma next week, but it shouldn't affect me here in New York. And the feegs certainly can't harm me. Not with all my closet doors closed. No, the big problem is lesnerizing. I must not lesnerize. Absolutely not. As you can imagine, that hampers me. And to top it all, I think I'm catching a really nasty cold.Must not lesnerize...
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:03 PM | Comments (44) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
October 28, 2003
Not Yay
Very much not yay.
I suddenly have 250GB less files to worry about. Came home this evening, thought about burning another DVD, decided to have a nap first. Had nap, came back to computer:The disk in drive D is not formatted. Would you like to format it now?Given that drive D is a 250GB external hard disk, this is not a good sign. Excuse me a moment. fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck Sorry. I wonder if the disk is dead outright, or if the filesystem has been corrupted. I'll have to see what is available in the way of recovery tools. Sigh. At least I got to back up the anime. Update: The disk is not dead; the filesystem is corrupt. Probably recoverable. So, anyone know what the best, reasonably priced utility for recovering poodulated FAT32 filesystems is? I downloaded a copy of GetDataBack, which has let me know that the files are there. Is there something better I should be using? Does Partition Magic do this? (Because I have other uses for it, if it does.) Update: The demo version of Stellar Phoenix has found 388,063 files totalling 377.859GB. This includes deleted files (which, given that the disk was full, are a lost cause - but that's okay, because all I want is the not-deleted files). I just told it to exclude the deleted files, and it's having a bit of a think. (Read: grinding the CPU into powder.) Every file I expected seems to be there, with no signs of corruption in the directory structures. The demo version won't let me at the files, but so far I'm tempted to buy this one.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:37 PM | Comments (43) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
50 Down, 149 To Go
Burnt 49 DVDs without a hiccup... Number 50 was a coaster.
Oh well. I've ordered another hundred disks. Did I mention that I have a lot of files?Posted by: Pixy Misa at 05:47 PM | Comments (41) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
October 27, 2003
Foobie Bletch
Another disk drive went South overnight. Acutally, given that this is the Southern Hemisphere, it may actually have gone North. Hard to tell without a magnetometer. Anyway, last night, working fine. This morning, as dead as Blogspot's archives on a bad day.
Fortunately, I spent much of the weekend running backups.Unfortunately, I hadn't got around to that drive yet. Of course, it's part of a RAID-5 array, so all I have to do is reboot, and it will fail the drive out, run a file system check... Run a file system check... Run a... Reboot. Go into interactive mode... I said, go into interactive mode... Grr. Reboot. Go into interactive mode. Zap that filesystem out of the table so that it doesn't automount. And... Reboot. Boot boot boot. Good. Mount the filesystem manually... Good. Now, copy all the files across to... Um. Did I mention that I don't have any disk space left? Hmm, now that I've backed up all these files, I don't actually need to keep them on the disk. Not as such. So zzzzap! Bye bye 50GB of, well, stuff. Copy copy. Now why is there an scp process running on the target machine, chewing up 99% of the CPU, and doing no I/O whatsoever? And why has my copy stalled? Kill the process. Kill the... Bugger. Reboot - the other box, this time. Copy copy copy. And now I have no disk space again.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 03:14 PM | Comments (47) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
October 26, 2003
Blogroll
I have extracted my blogroll from the evil clutches of Blogrolling, and put it up here for all to see. Yay!
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 06:09 PM | Comments (44) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
The End of Productivity
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 02:25 AM | Comments (44) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
October 25, 2003
Reminder Notice
If you are an anti-idiotarian, rightist (is that a word?), centrist, or even a non-barking-moonbat lefty, there's still time for you to get over to the New Blog Showcase and vote for Defending the Blogosphere Front in the War on Terrorism at Irreconcilable Musings.
We've already squished the LLLs like bugs, but there's always room for more squishing. And if you are a barking-moonbat lefty, keep reading this blog and your cure is assured! (Warning: Some thinking may also be required.) Update: It looks like the League of Losers tried a little Chicago-style "Vote early and often" chicanery, but they are rank amateurs at the game compared to Harvey of Bad Money:Earlier this week (twice, actually) a bunch of losers ran a denial of service attack on Hosting Matters. Pissed me right off. First, if you don't like someone's blog, you should make a better one yourself. Second, if you're not qualified to do so, then just hit the damn back button & don't give them your traffic. Irreconcilable Musings has a NBS entry that discusses this topic, and even offers an idea for something you can do to keep a good blog from being knocked down again. That makes him a winner in my book. Or at least votable.or Physics Geek:
And just for fun, I'm going to give IM some Chicago-style bonus votes. Rumor has it the Bear's vote counter is a little wonky. Well, when in Rome...
Defending the Blogosphere Front in the War on Terrorism over at Irreconcilable Musings I see that the Axis of Weenies has put in all their 27 votes for the post saying Bush=Hitler, Cheney=Satan, we're all being Enron-ed. Grow up, people. It's not the best written post, or even the most entertaining. If a liberal version of Frank J. ever appeared in the Showcase, I'd vote for it because it would be FUNNY. Actually, since most liberals are humor impaired, my example is a huge stretch, but you catch my drift. Anyway, voting for someone's blog just because you happen to agree with their ideology only makes you look stupid. Look, I can make like a liberal blogger, too: Bush is Hitler! Halliburton controls my life because Cheney is Satan! Bill Clinton makes me wet::puke::. Sorry, there are some things I just can't do. Update: I see that the Axis of Weenies decided to cheat by treating the New Blog Showcase as their own personal Chicago-style election. I've decided to try their approach and make the assault so pernicious that Truth Laid Bear will cancel all the multiple votes as cheating. Since the lefties have decided to create a Florida redux election by manufacturing votes, I'll join right in.In fact, Physics Geek posted that not once, but three times! Applause! Update: Loyal reader and occasional commenter Mitch H. of Blogfonte tsks loudly. He has a point. But they started it! Um... I'm only reporting the news, not making it! Let's see... A rolling stone... No, that one doesn't work at all. The drugs made me do it! Or possibly the devil! Devildrugs!
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 11:22 PM | Comments (45) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Burnination!
Burning DVDs. Burn burn burnity burn. Number 18 is being toasted right now, containing episodes 1 to 25 of Groove Adventure Rave.
This, I have to say, is pretty cool. $2.40 for the blank DVD-R (Shintaro 4x) and it will hold a whole season of an anime series. (Or 9 episodes of Buffy.) I could have done this on my CD writer, but it would have required 7 times as many disks, so 7 times as much effort. Burning (counts on fingers) 126 CDs - probably more, in fact, because I'd only get one episode of Buffy to a CD - isn't all that attractive. In fact, I don't think I've burnt 126 CDs since I bought the writer. Writers. Um, there's four in the three main PCs, one for the notebook, one in the G4 Mac. I think the SGI has a CD writer too. But DVDs are in the sweet spot, at least for now; they hold enough that it's not painful to do backups; both the drives and the disks are reasonably priced (and getting cheaper fast). Sony (and others) are working to obsoletify the DVD as quickly as they can, and I salute them for their efforts. Who the heck wants to have to change disks in the middle of Fellowship of the Ring? And that's not even HD - which will naturally require higher bit rates. But right now, DVDs it is, and I'm happy. Except that they are crappy little things with pathetic cover art. I'm sure some of you are old enough to remember LPs -y'know, vinyl - and how with 144 square inches to work with the artists could produce something that actually stood out. I have a whole bunch of laserdisks, too, and particularly the ones from Japan have some wonderful artwork. Bring 'em back, I say. A 12" double-sided Blu-Ray disk would hold something like... carry the twelve... 300GB of data on a single layer. All of Buffy on one disk. Woot! And I'd actually be able to find the damn thing.Posted by: Pixy Misa at 10:53 PM | Comments (47) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
News Headlines
Sheep Ship of Shame Finally Unloads
Eritrea Given Politically Embarrassing Sheep
Eritrea Home for Sheep of the Desert
Sheep to Shore in Eritrea
Sheep of Fools
Posted by: Pixy Misa at 04:25 PM | Comments (43) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
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