foolscap001

"Top 20 Unfortunate Lessons Girls Learn from Twilight"

Not sure whether I should list my mood as amused or nauseated...

So, here's the story. We started out with the following:

• Apevia X-QPACK2-NW black micro ATX case w/500W power supply
• Gigabyte GA-MA785GMT-UD2H micro ATX motherboard
• G.Skill 2 x 2GB DDR3 1333 RAM
• AMD Athlon II 620 Propus 2.6 GHz quad core CPU
• Western Digital Caviar Green 750GB SATA hard drive
• Lite-On DVD/CD burner of the SATA persuasion

We put it together...and the BIOS didn't recognize the hard drive. We found that the Ubuntu Live CD ran fine if we disconnected the hard drive, but not if we connected it. Inference: the hard drive is DOA.

We'll do the RMA thing... in the meantime, we get a Caviar Black 1 TB hard drive. The BIOS sees it... but the results are otherwise the same. Inference: despite Antec's web site saying that with the stuff we have in that box, 325 W would do (and the power supply having sufficient total current on 12V for the graphics card), we could use a bigger power supply.

We go get one--and find out the hard way that the ATX spec must just fix the cross-sectional dimensions and face plate, not the depth, and exchange it for a modular power supply that we still only barely manage to fit in. (Those cables are stiff!)

Ubuntu 9.10 installs beautifully (and quickly, too--Cox Cable gives my sister 20 Mb/s download, 5 Mb/s upload, as opposed to Mediacom's pathetic 12 Mb/s down, 1 Mb/s up, and for less money, too). As instructed, we remove the CD, press enter to reboot...

...and nothing.

Now when we power up, we get the initial beep and display on the screen, but it stops before even doing the scan of RAM, and does not respond to the keyboard.

The motherboard knows about that particular CPU; we checked on Gigabyte's web site. We ran memtest86+, so we think the memory is OK. The keyboard has power, because we can get the num lock LED to light up.

Any suggestions?

UPDATE: Disconnected the hard drive and it boots. Fiddled with the BIOS SATA settings and it came up on the hard drive, but after installing updates and rebooting--same old thing. Here we see something about difficulties with Karmic Koala and AHCI, so I will try IDE mode. That may have been the whole problem. Will update here as we learn more.

UPDATE: That wasn't it. We set the SATA mode to IDE, and still a reboot causes it to hang in POST. I have to power down, disconnect the hard drive, power up, and then reboot. When it runs, it runs beautifully... but I can't expect my sister and niece to have to futz with the innards each time they reboot. Time to look at Gigabyte's web site again, I think.

UPDATE: A fellow on a forum claimed that the DVD and hard drive had to be hooked up to specific SATA ports, but that claim is inconsistent with the manual, and having to take enough stuff apart to do that would be a big pain for dubious benefit, so we didn't do it... but when we moved it back from the kitchen table to the desk, plugged things back in, and powered up, it came right up. Several hours running perfectly, reboot... and it hangs in POST. What is different between the two attempts? Actually being without power. Power down, throw the on/off switch on the power supply, twiddle thumbs a bit, turn it back on, push the button... and it comes right up. I now very seriously suspect the BIOS. Something (a race condition?) is different between a cold boot and a reboot.

The positive airway pressure device has flaked out, and here we are in Oklahoma for Thanksgiving. Fortunately, we're able to rent one from Norman Regional Home Medical for a month--and given the vagaries of insurance, we might be best off just buying it.

So here I am, or rather, there I was (it was last night), trying to put together my sister's new computer. I ordered the parts and had them shipped to her place the preceding week.

Graphics cards these days are at the high end of the "wee, not so wee, and FRIGGIN' HUGE!" scale, largely because of the humongous fans that they have for cooling. The particular card I got isn't so long as to not fit in the case--at least according to the manual, and gee, I wish newegg.com would give physical dimensions in the specs--but it is so long as to hang out over the SATA connections--so that we'll need right angle cables, and that will mean we won't have access to all of them. Dang it.

So Microsoft, unable to compete in web searching by providing a quality product, is now making a deal with Rupert Murdoch to delist his web sites from Google. No doubt there will be a deal so that you can only search said web sites with Bing. The Financial Times reports that MS has entered similar talks with other online news sources.

Sure enough, reseating the DVD data connector did the trick.This means that I have a spare DVD burner to make up for my forgetting to order one for my sister's new computer, which we'll be building shortly. Yay!

From Rob Morrow's Facebook page:

"Hi All, CBS has pulled us back to 16 eps from an original order of 22. not a good sign. but, we're not over yet. we need a big write-in campaign. ya'll have to get everyone u know to blitz the network with unrelenting letters. keep numbers alive....

here is the address:
Nina Tassler
President, CBS Entertainment
4024 Radford Ave., Room 3118
Studio City, CA 91604

thanks all, rob m"

Numb3rs is a fresh breath of rationality and favorable view of math in popular entertainment; the two hours of dreck that precede it drive the point home. Please consider expressing your opinion to the folks at CBS.

So tonight on NCIS there's an episode that starts out with people taking out an ISP and then doing something to trigger a widespread power grid failure--and suddenly our intrepid investigators must go back to old methods.

All of a sudden I was reminded of an early database package of sorts. I'm not sure whether I saw it in an Edmund Scientific catalog or maybe even, of all places, a Lafayette Electronics catalog--that's a vague memory I don't think I should trust. After all, the whole point was that no electricity was required.

The hardware? A bunch of stiff cards that you wrote information on. Each card had holes punched around the border, and each hole corresponds to a predicate. Actually, you could go either way--having the hole cut out to the edge could either represent the predicate being true or being false, and you could even set up negative logic, a la logic circuits, if it would make certain common queries faster.

Let's say we go with "hole = false, slot = true". Then you use rods through the holes/slots for the predicates you're interested in. Simplest query: select all records for which p is true. Stick one rod through the deck at the spot corresponding to p; all cards that fall off have the hole cut through to the edge, and hence have p. p is false? Stick the rod through; all those that stay on the rod are those for which not-p. p and q? Rods through two holes; those that fall off have both cut through, and hence p and q are both true. And so forth. Really kind of clever for the era if you can't afford a 407 accounting machine.

UPDATE: That's the term! Edge-notched cards.

I'm still amazed at how they've plummeted. I recall a coworker once who bought a hard drive that would hold a whole gigabyte! It was a SCSI drive, 5.25", full height, and cost a bit over a thousand dollars. You'd never fill that, I thought, just as a few years earlier I thought I'd never fill the thirty megabytes available on the hard drive I hooked up to my CoCo 3.

Tomorrow morning, the UPS guy will hand me a SATA II hard drive that's 3.5", half height, holds 1500 times as much as that gigabyte hard drive, and costs a tenth as much. Initially. It's also a "green" hard drive, so I'm sure it will consume far less electricity than the old SCSI hard drive did. It will slide right into a D-Link NAS unit I've seen recommended by several sources, and I'll set it up to keep backups of irpooh 's and my systems.

As a wise person once said, though, the correct number of something to have is either zero, one, or infinitely many, and if you listen to Leo Laporte's Tech Guy shows*, you regularly hear him say, "If there's only one copy of something, it's not backed up." Also, there's the whole offsite backup issue. What do you folks do?

*If you listen to Kim Komando for non-comedic reasons, I urge  you to switch to the Tech Guy show.

I did the update. So far, so good, mostly. For some reason, "switch user" in KDE is behaving as if I'd asked it to lock the screen. I did something stupid, i.e. put the 64-bit Flash plugin in the directory for 32-bit Firefox plugins, and that broke Flash on some sites in a bizarre fashion. Other than that, it's nice.

So, the Karmic Koala  release candidate install went without a hitch on the netbook, and it was time for my home computer, eeyore, to get the treatment.

Back everything up to the little purple USB drive (all 120 GB of it--nice time for a nap), insert the CD I'd just burned, reboot, watch the little startup screen, wait for it to time out and go to the default Live CD boot (for some reason, the Ubuntu Live CD doesn't deign to notice the USB keyboard, not initially)--and see the "ERROR -- can't read CD" message.

Tried it again--same result.

Reboot into 9.04, and try to burn another CD--and it doesn't notice that I've put a blank CD in the drive. Put in a Best of Judy Collins CD... and Sound Juicer doesn't notice it's there.

What are the chances that the DVD/CD burner would die on me just then, I ask you?

(Posted here and on Facebook)

Sad to say, the state of Iowa has a Gatling gun pointed at its foot and is turning the crank as fast as it can, by totally freezing the Film Tax Incentives program while it investigates the abuses of a few. The film projects that are in limbo thanks to the freeze can't wait forever; they'll go elsewhere--and it's not just productions that come, film, and then go. We're talking new permanent businesses in Iowa to support those productions that are also at risk, and of course the lodging, catering, car rentals, and all the other existing businesses that benefit from films being made in Iowa. Take a look at this PDF for more details and things you can do.

Last Sunday, irpooh and I were trying to remember a song part of which was going through her head. ".... Beecher, my English teacher" was what she remembered. I remembered the tune, but was fuzzy on the lyrics. I thought maybe her first name was "Natalie"; to paraphrase Rodney Carrington, "hell, it scanned."

"English" was what foiled my Googling at first, it was "history". Freddy "Boom Boom" Cannon, "Abigail Beecher". The lyrics are here.

Why do I feel really, really old? Well, remember those literary anthologies where, for the really old stuff there were footnotes explaining obscure old cultural references and the like that people from WAY back then would catch on to, but we wouldn't? Take a look at those lyrics. Footnotes, explaining really old cultural references (Why did they call Freddy Cannon "Boom Boom"? What's an XKE?  What the [bleep] are the Monkey and the Watusi?).

Excuse me while I go sit on a lawn chair and soak up some sun... oh, wait, this is Iowa in October. Never mind.

EXTRA CREDIT QUESTION (since we're remembering English lit): in what bad movie did a great dancer utter the line quoted in the title?

I'd like very much to talk sometime with one of irpooh 's friends. By all indications very intelligent, well-read, well-spoken, and creative.

Well... reading my dear wife's friends page, said friend announced getting in to the "ENO Messiah". (Excellent news indeed!) I followed the link and it turned out to be the English National Opera, but for one uncomprehending but tantalizing second the notion of Brian Eno doing a version of Handel's oratorio hung before my mind's eye. I think I'd like to hear it. Hear both, actually, but I won't be able to make it to England.

Spanish (and maybe other Romance languages; I haven't really looked) seems to like to make nouns out of past participles more than English does. Los descamisados, los desaparecidos, enchilada, ensalada, and so on. (That last one is another bit of Roman cooking influence on Romance languages. Romance languages' words for "liver" don't come from the Latin word for liver, but from the Latin for fig--because the Romans cooked liver with figs. Similarly, they put salt on their salads; "ensalada" is literally "salted".) On the other hand, I sat around and tried to think of English examples: newlywed and newborn--has anyone used "reborn" as a noun?--were the only ones I could think of.

Another thing Spanish does that I don't see in English is gluing together verb and direct object to make a noun, e.g. "chupacabras", literally "it sucks goats". English would, and I think does, use "goatsucker". Anyone know of other Spanish examples?

Sigh... how stupid.

If the fellow had evidence, rather than asking for a piddly $2M, he should have just gone ahead and published the book. I'm sure he'd make a LOT more than that.

So, since Letterman has confessed to having sex with female members of his staff, does that constitute sexual harrassment? A hostile working environment? If CBS tolerates it, are they liable?

Packing for the trip was a wretched experience. We had to retrieve some stuff from Sleepy Hollow, which is an utter shoe-sucking mud pit when it rains. (DMRF was VERY lucky when it came to the weather this year.) We were cold, stiff, and aching as we set out.

We arrived at the motel where RIverssance had arranged for us to stay. I was a bit concerned after reading one online review, but I'm happy to say that things were not at all as that reviewer said. The room was very nice, though when we entered it was like entering a blast furnace--someone had turned the heat up full blast for some reason, and we actually switched it over to cool. (The heating/cooling unit's front was not securely attached to the wall, but it didn't fall off, so we didn't really care.) The beds were/are (surely they haven't changed in the time since we left...) wonderful, and I hope we stay there again next year.

The one major blemish on the motel experience was this: when we arrived, there was a very helpful lady behind the counter, who suggested a couple of places to call to have food delivered--but one of them was a pizza place that she didn't recall the phone number of. Out came the netbook, and after some searching we found the place, called it... found that we needed to call their establishment nearer the part of town we were in, and got some very good pizza. So... I call the front desk to give the helpful lady behind the counter the information I'd found, so the next people don't have to go Googling. I can only think that the shift changed in the meantime, because I got someone who was quite rude and sarcastic. Another person we talked to said she'd been treated rudely by the person at the front desk also.

Saturday morning was chilly, not rainy--but the fallen friar Phil's spirit was irrepressible as ever, and we set out with a will to give folks a good time.

My lady wife irpooh won an award for entrepreneurship at DMRF this year, and she made a very wise decision for the weekend, namely to carry gloves and handwarmers. On the first day we sold out of gloves and had maybe a couple of handwarmers left. We replenished our supply Saturday evening, and while, thank goodness, the sun came out Sunday and there was less call for them, we still sold a number of them, and they were much appreciated.

The Wayne State madrigal group is excellent, and there was a kick-posterior recorder consort (OK, broken consort--one fellow played a transverse flute) there as well. Danza Mystique were a joy as always, and drove the cold autumn away. (I regret to have to say that I've yet to make it to see the Desert Angels, who show up on the Riverssance web site as the "Dessert Angels".) We tootled as best we could with stiff, cold fingers (sigh; I fear I will have to see a doctor about my hands) and sold people things they needed and would otherwise have had to leave the site for. The royalty and street people at Riverssance are top notch.

We will be eternally grateful to the most excellent milli--er,, mil--um, hatmaker Felicity (see her work at DMRF and at Riverssance!), who kindly let us put the cart in her tent Saturday evening.

But of all the wonderful things that happened (and they happen every year at Riverssance; if you've never been there, for heaven's sake do something about that next year!), for me, the best was this: there were some musically inclined students there from Martin Luther College who came and played with us. The enthusiasm of one young woman in particular, a flautist who'd taken up the recorder, was wonderful; it's good to know that the next generation is interested in early music. (The woman who heads the MLC Pro Musica was delighted to get a look at and hands-on experience with a garklein.)

The spirit of Riverssance carried through to packing for departure--the cart's new wheels punched through the Masonite on the ramp, and a couple of guys saw it and immediately headed over to lift the cart into the van.

Next year I'm going to take the Monday after as well as the Friday before off; we made it back by 10:02 last night, but the trip back was a grind and hard on Billie's hands. (Not just for Riverssance, but for CoCoFest and the Medieval Fair as well. ADB evidently will take up the Microware tradition of being closed from Christmas to New Year's, and I have a goodly number of vacation days.)

P.S. Some years back I seemed to regularly see the occasional person or people wandering about Renaissance fairs displaying BDSM inclinations--typically it would be one person leading another in chains, either with hands shackled or with a collar. Either I am becoming less observant, I don't go to as many Renfairs, or there are enough fewer such folks that it's been years since I've seen such folks. OTOH, at Riverssance this year I first saw a woman dressed in the "Elegant Gothic Lolita" style.

I'm going to celebrate what we have left of a free market here by not going to see Michael Moore's latest garbage.

Norma Loquendi is in mourning; William Safire has passed away.