This one uses a bit less fuel than my other one ;). It's a Scott Scale 29 Comp, it was pretty much the lightest 29" mountain bike in its price class.
So I've been busy today, bike shopping then bike riding (heh!). Hope you had a nice Sunday too.
-- Badtux the Two-wheelin' Penguin
Bought a bike rack for the back of my Jeep and went bicycle shopping. After checking multiple places, I think I've found a nice mountain bike. The serious MTB folks seem to think it's a nice entry-level mountain bike that can be upgraded with better/lighter components as needed i.e. the frame itself is a good stiff lightweight frame. This seems to be the lightest MTB I found for the price, anything of similar weight is at least $200 more...
I also bought a new digital effects pedal for my guitar, due to an upcoming gig. We really need to find a singer tho... none of us sing worth a flyin' flip :(.
-- Badtux the Busy Penguin
Sitting in the dark typing into my iPad. Wind, rain here in the Sillycone Valley took out power to several hundred homes, including mine. I hope it comes back on soon, because my furnace is useless without power and it will start getting cool enough to pull out my sleeping bag...
Actually, not exactly in the DARK, since I have plenty of flashlights and batteries plus a crank radio/flashlight...
Badtux The Prepared Penguin
Update: Power came back on at about 10:47PM. Yay!
Still disgusted that racists are upset that the character of Rue in The Hunger Games is played by a perfectly adorable little black girl -- just as described in the book. I haven't seen the movie, and won't see the movie, because I've read the book and that's always a recipe for disappointment, but this is just a sad commentary on the fact that racism isn't dead even though there's no reason for it to exist in today's America.
Dang I'm tired today. Haven't been getting enough sleep, I guess. Luckily the project at work is winding down to the point where I can work normal hours now, I was having to work off hours because I had to do some scheduled service outages and you can't do that while people are at work, and the result was late nights and disrupted sleep routines. Grr.
-- Badtux the Tired Penguin
Un-fucking believable. So I wait for the U-verse installer this morning. No-show. So I call them. They're, like, "gosh, I don't have any record that you had an appointment this morning." "Err... you guys sent me an email saying I had a *confirmed* appointment this morning!" "Well, we can schedule one for another day..."
Fuck that shit. I cancelled the order. And they'll probably fuck *that* up too. Sigh.
Y'know, I rag on Comcast, but while they aren't the world's sharpest tacks, at least they *try*. But AT&T can't even get rule #1 of sales right -- "don't fuck up the order process, that's money in the bank." Fuck that shit.
And just because I'm feeling pissy, I'm going over to the Verizon store and trading in my tired old AT&T iPad on one of those brand new Verizon iPads. Blthhhhht!
-- Badtux the Annoyed Penguin
"Blogger is getting a new look in April. Upgrade Now!"
Uhm, no, you dumb fucks. I'll upgrade when you force me to, and not one minute before. 'Cause see, I *tried* your fucking upgrade, and it sucked more than a male prostitute at a Republican convention. Wordpress is lookin' better day by day, except that they don't allow most of the plugins I run in my margin, like the Twitter plugin and the Blogroll plugin (which is automatically managed by my Google Reader account), which pisses me off too...
-- Badtux the Grouchy Penguin
I will not buy the latest iDevice. I will not buy the latest iDevice. I will not...
-- Badtux the Impulse Control Penguin
Normal posting should resume this evening. The technician hooked me back up and tightened everything up at the pole, and now I'm getting the best signal I've ever gotten -- around 3-4db higher SNR than what I was previously getting. So even if things degrade again in the rain, it should still be higher than the 30db floor below which my modem can't scrape sufficient signal out of the noise to properly function.
-- Badtux the Now-Internetted Penguin
My high speed Internet connection has gone completely down. Compost is sending a technician out early Monday morning to figure out what's wrong with it. Until my Internet is fixed daily music is at a halt since it's impractical to attempt to do that over a slow-speed modem connection. And no, I'm not going to use my employer's bandwidth to browse music videos during the workday.
-- Badtux the Almost-Internetless Penguin
Grr! He jumped right up on it and knocked it off the music table!
Luckily it was my spare Mac that I used only for music. I can probably get all my data off of it. Not that there's much there that I don't have elsewhere. TMF can NOT manage to kill my big server, after all -- it weighs 80 pounds and could probably withstand an elephant!
So in other news I've been really, really, really busy at work. As in, from Friday afternoon to now, working 11-12 hour days getting a complex project to the point where I can breathe. As in, there were a dozen other people depending on me getting this done so they could do their own work. So if you're wondering why you're getting really short personal things rather than commentary on the economy, GOP thuggery, and so forth, this is it -- I *finally* got to leave the office on time today. Phew!
-- Badtux the Busy Penguin
Well, no, not really. It seems to have taken out my "real" Internet service again, leaving me on my iPhone :(.
-- Badtux the Wireless Penguin
The Silly Cone Valley has been cold damp and miserable this weekend, plus I've been working (sigh!) so that's been a downer too. I handled that yesterday by going out for a big bowl of chicken pho, the perfect dish for when the sky is spitting occasional bursts of water and the temperature is hovering in the low 50's. The kittehs deal with it like this:
Yay, a kitty pile!
-- Badtux the Bad Weather Penguin
Yay fun.
[For those who don't know, the Duo-Sonic has what is known as "classic" tuners. This means that the new strings must be cut to exactly the correct length *before* being run through the holes in the bridge and over the saddles to get to the tuners. Tedious work, sigh.]
Anyhow, I use the best strings around -- Elixir Nanowebs Lights (.10 size) which are nicely slinky on this short-scale guitar -- but while they're long lived, they don't last *forever*. So it goes.
- Badtux the Musician Penguin
You've already heard about the U.S. soldier in Afghanistan who went postal on a village. Not much I can say there. There's an easy way to make sure it never happens again: Leave. 'Nuff said.
I finished the red beans and rice. Four meals straight of red beans and rice? Just call me Toots McPenguin ;).
This bloody daylight savings time has walloped me good. So I'm going to wrap it up and head to bed.
-- Badtux the Tired Penguin
So foo. Anyhow, here's my computer screen this morning. The Macbook is in lozenge mode (that silvery thing over to the right). The big server that runs Windows 7 and Centos 6.2 (in a VirtualBox VM, it handles the RAID arrays because Linux is the universal solvent of networks, capable of providing filesystems to both Windows and Mac systems in their native protocols) is that big black box below it. That's a 25" monitor. The keyboard is an Apple Bluetooth wireless keyboard, and the trackpad beside it is an Apple MagicPad multi-touch thingy that I like because it lets me go swipe-swipe-swipe and do all sorts of things depending on how many fingers and what direction I'm swiping (and the whole trackpad is a button -- it has two little feet that also serve as buttons below it). Atop the sound system on the shelf above the desk are the keyboard and mouse for the big server, I usually RDP in from the Macbook using Microsoft's Remote Desktop Connection client for MacOS (I have the Linux VM set to start up in the background so I RDP to it too). To the right, out of picture, is the big HP printer-scanner-copier that I barely use nowadays.
Just feeling geeky. Something to do while tired, heh.
-- Badtux the Tired Garden Penguin(*)
(*) Not to be confused with a garden gnome, penguins are much more handsome!
The Offspring, "The Kids Aren't All Right", off their brilliant 1998 album Americana.
I was born on a street about four miles long that started at the front halls of an elite private Methodist university, went for a mile or so with large and spacious homes on the hill and, across from them, the smaller homes of the college professors, and ended in the most abject segregation-era black poverty at its far end, where the streets were tar dirt and the smell of raw sewage permeated the air as beat-down black faces looked out the windows and small children played in dirt yards with sticks and rocks. My childhood home was on the dividing line between the college professors and the working class neighborhood of plumbers and cops and factory workers that was in the middle of all of this, and my childhood friends were from from both sides of that line.
What happened to them? Life happened to them. The son of the college professor that we all envied for his muscular build and swift intellect that got an "A" in every course he took at the college-prep magnet high school... he ended up a drug addict, living on the streets, spotted from time to time digging food out of dumpsters when he's not in jail for breaking into people's homes to steal stuff to use to buy drugs. The son of the rich doctor? He married his childhood sweetheart then abandoned her with their kids to live in abject poverty, and spends his days living on the road in a minivan to avoid process servers, occasionally popping up from nowhere to get his latest trust fund check. The cop's kid? He ended up being institutionalized when he had a psychotic break, then nobody knows what happened to him after he was released. The skinny tow-headed kid from down the street who lived with an abusive grandfather, who everybody assumed was going to be a criminal because he was always getting in trouble? He moved to the West Coast and learned how to handle boats and recently got his pilot's certification, and married a girl and has two kids and they are all spectacularly ridiculously happy. The weird drugged-out kid who lived in the run-down ghetto house and ran with the cops' kid and the doctor's kid and the professors' kid? Erm. He grew up to be a well-paid engineer in the Silicon Valley.
But for the few success stories, by far the majority of stories from that street are the stories in this song, the stories of kids of all sorts who ended up with broken lives and shattered dreams in the land once known as the land of the free(*) and home of the brave(**)...
-- Badtux the Reminiscing Penguin
(*)Prior to Patriot Act
(**)Prior to "cower! cower in fear!" message beamed into everybody's mind by 24/7 news channels, and subsequent cowering in fear and willingness to give up freedoms by majority of Americans.
... I spent the day gardening. I removed the old bark from the flower bed out front and started digging holes to plant flowers. Ugh. Disaster. Turns out that at some point in the past a tenant had ornamental rocks in the flower bed out front, then at some *later* point soil got put on top of the ornamental rocks, then bark got put on top of the soil... so anyhow, ended up moving a lot of dirt around to get most of the rocks out. But I got about half the flowers planted today and fresh bark spread amongst them, it looks good, a lot better than tired old bark with weeds growing inbetween, hopefully will be able to finish planting the rest later.
Off to go grocery shopping...
- Badtux the Tired Penguin
Well, not exactly. First, I went to Costco and cashed my American Express cashback check and bought a bunch of stuff that I needed (ink and paper for my printer, toothbrush refills for my sonic toothbrush, kimchi noodles, tissues), then went to the hardware store and got a new soap dispenser for the sink to replace the one with the broken stem. I also looked at the dishwasher and did a Dr. McCoy on it -- "she's dead, Jim", i.e., fixing it would require a new pump and new racks and that would cost more than a new dishwasher. Unfortunately it appears the dishwasher is pretty much tiled in... there's a half-inch lip where the subflooring for the tile was put down and there's not half an inch above the dishwasher to pick it up over that lip. It looks like some subflooring will have to be ripped out to make enough room to get the dishwasher out and a new one in, though maybe you could replace the pump and racks with it in place. Oh well. I'm not going to deal with that mess right now, I'll tell the landlord when I move out that it's broken, and he can fix it (or not) then (I don't need a dishwasher, given how few dishes I dirty hand-washing them is quite viable). In the meantime I unplugged it and disconnected the water to it so that nobody tries to run it and ends up making a mess.
TMF is still psycho. One moment he's curled up against Mencken warming his nose in Mencken's fur, a minute later after he jumps down from my bed to follow me to the kitchen he looks back at the sound of Mencken jumping down from my bed and lets out a gut-curdling howl and screech at this strange cat in *his* territory. Mencken's starting to get a bit of a dazed look to his eyes, like, "I'm living in a madhouse!". I don't blame him. TMF was curled up against me in the music room purring, Mencken came in, and... err. You know the rest of that story.
- Badtux the Tired Penguin
I got my income tax refunds back today. Why does it feel so good to get back my own money? The money went straight to savings of course, to replenish the sum that went into the IRA at the end of last year.
Meanwhile, I dabbed The Mighty Fang's face with vanilla extract. No idea yet whether it's going to make any difference, but at least it makes him smell better :). He didn't seem to mind me putting some extract on a cotton swab and dabbing him with it, because he seemed to think it smelled like food. What a chow-hound.
-- Badtux the Cat-owned Penguin
