...the mice figure out what to do.

Tess is off on some wine-and-women-only thing (no clue), and I'm Macaulay Culkin. I'm home alone. I decided to play rock and roll music extremely loudly. I had "Anarchy Burger" by The Vandals going. There was some X being played and I heard Sisters of Mercy. I played 'Jocko Homo' by Devo even. I'm a rebel. An aging rebel. w00t.

I never turned up all the way the $400 sound system on my PC. It gets pretty fuggin loud. I also never expected that kind of fidelity at such loud a volume. I'm impressed. I mean, I can't hear the keyboard clicking as I type this. Anyone that knows me knows of my predilection for the loudest and heaviest keyboards possible. (I currently use a circa 1991 Keytronics, although I have an IBM keyboard from 1981 that is louder). So that's saying something. It sounds like a party in here. A party of one, at least.

Aside from rock and roll music (AC/DC is playing now; 'Back in Black' has to be loud), I'm trying to find a free virus scanner for Windows. It's been so long since I used Windows at home that I find myself wanting to scan things I download. It sucks. The download in question is Masters of Orion. I don't know if I want to play it. It involves thinking and strategy and learning a new interface and new rules. I'd rather just do mindless stuff. I put in over 55 hours this week. I have a government job, mind you. Time to zone out and barbeque some chicken.

By the way, Rage Against the Machine sounds really good at full volume. Even if I don't agree with their politics, they make damn good music.

I need to find a mindless, non-constructive activity. Besides TV.

Microsoft is going to let the Chinese government take a look at the source code to Windows. Take a guess on how much respect the Chinese have for anti-piracy/intellectual property laws. Yeah. So this basically means that the Windows source code will be freely available before too long. I give it 9 months (revised from my earlier estimate).

It's pretty sad when your software has a reputation for being so completely shoddy and insecure that you have to give foreign governments the source in order to get them to trust you. You'd think giving away source would also be bad for U.S. national security and help us lose wars, but I guess that's not the case (anymore).

I got an email today from my old friend Andy from Arizona. Apparently, I must soon visit. He tells me that I have to go camping with him, because he has "this thing he'd like to show me". He sent me a picture of it.

That, my friends, is a picture of a Browning 1919-A4 .308 caliber belt fed machine gun. 400 to 600 rounds per minute of pure joy (when properly adapted). All you'd need for a full day of fun and excitement is a truck full of pumpkins and watermelons (and maybe a few bowling balls). That's just so completely porno. I think I'm in love. Or at least lust.

Andy is my hero.

Last month, it was found that MS had decided to give users of the Opera browser who visit MSN a different stylesheet than everyone else. The stylesheet (which decides the web page layout) was intentionally broken, and the MSN site looked bad when viewed with the Opera browser. Opera complained to Microsoft, they didn't do anything substantive, so Opera took matters into their own hands.

I haven't been able to stop laughing. I went and downloaded the bork version and it's hilarious. I'm don't normally visit MSN, but I might start now since it looks so useful.

A while back I had some RAID problems. I had a disk fail, and the new disk would give me lots of errors when I moved large amounts of files around. I'd see a lot of these in the logs:

Jan 26 04:15:02 hostname kernel: hdb: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
Jan 26 04:15:02 hostname kernel: hdb: dma_intr: error=0x84 { DriveStatusError BadCRC }

I figured out what that was happening. Turns out the one drive in the RAID pair (/dev/hdd) had DMA off, while /dev/hdb had it turned on. I don't know why that was the case. Perhaps my late night fiddling resulting in some sort of fat fingering (wait... that sounded really bad). Anyway, I decided to do some tests by copying about 150MB of MP3s to my array while setting DMA to either on or off.

With DMA on/off (regardless of which drive has DMA on or off), I get the errors. With it set to off/off, I don't get errors, and the array is slower than a wounded prawn and a huge CPU hog: the copy takes around 50 seconds and the load average (basically how busy the CPU is) hovers around 4.50. I don't care about slow since this is an NFS/Samba server and CAT5 is my bottleneck. The CPU load I do care about since the box does other things besides simply serve files. With DMA set to on for both drives, I also don't get the errors, which is very cool. The copy takes around 10 seconds and the load average is about 0.70. All that is to be expected, since DMA gives quite a performance boost. But it's good to know I can turn it on.

Anyway, the mystery of the BadCRC is over, finally. Now I need to look into the mystery of why the roof above my office leaks.

I actually bought a real, honest-to-some-goddess, shrink wrapped CD copy of the Sex Pistols album Never Mind the Bullocks. Yes, I've heard it before. I've even bought the album before, twice in fact. I owned it on cassette at one point and somewhere in my brother's garage floats a circa 1983 vinyl copy hand carried from England (used to be you couldn't get such subversive music outside of LA and New York unless you knew a guy who was going to England). But I bought it again.

My friend Andy gave me a Barnes & Noble gift certificate for my birthday and it arrived via email last year. It got tagged as spam by an over zealous filter and wound up languishing until recently when I cleared out all my 27.org mailboxes and, as a side project, went on a hunt for it to see if I really received the email. I did and it was a very sweet gift.

I bought a William C. Dietz (my favorite author outside of John Steakley) book, a computer geek book, and... I had nothing. I honestly drew a blank when it came to filling the remaining $15, so I left my browser window open on the bn.com shopping cart page for a couple days. Something or other around that time reminded me of high school, and then the song "Pretty Vacant" popped into my head for no reason at all (it happens to me a lot -- not-so-much ironically when the title in question this time is considered). I went and added the Sex Pistols to my order and hit submit.

So that's how I bought a brand new copy of a 27 year-old record at full price instead of finding it used somewhere.

I'm listening to it now. It sounds very pet rock in here. Makes me want to smoke a clove and hide shit in a trench coat and ditch class and cause trouble and run away from The Authorities. Except now half my life has past since I had anything to rebel against. I live in darkest suburbia and am generally happy with how things turned out, although back then I used to wonder if I'd ever make it this far and I'd try to imagine what my life would be like if I did. I didn't think I'd be not only listening to but also buying the same old records. Heh... life is strange sometimes.

I thought this Sun internal memo was one of the funniest things I'd read in a long time (even if it's probably not true). The 9MB 'Hello World' ranks right up there with '640K ought to be enough for anyone'. Seriously, I think the best part was this bit:

"A study performed by an outside team appears to indicate a rough parity in performance between Java and a common implementation of another OO language called Python (see IEEE Computing, October 2000, "An Empirical Comparison of Seven Programming Languages" by Lutz Prechelt of the University of Karlsruhe)."

I'm getting ready to go on a cruise ship, my first. I've always wanted to go on a cruise -- I don't know why. The desire could have come from watching Love Boat as a kid (anything to get outta homework, eh?). A group of six of us (me and Tess, brother Shawn and his wife Lauren, my uncle John and brother in-law Zac; Trey and his wife were set to go but might not) are heading out tomorrow.

It's sort of an event, this cruise. We're going to go to Catalina island and see The Ventures play at the Casino, then we sail to Ensenada to see Los Straitjackets in concert at some unamed venue there. I've never seen either band, but I own every CD Los Straitjackets has put out, and I've wanted to see The Ventures since I was a kid. Uncle John has a farily impressive record collection which includes many albums from the 60's (and earlier/later). He has a lot of Ventures albums (has some on reel-to-reel tape even), and I remember listening to one in particular. I don't remember the name of it, but it had a big "The Ventures play only Mosrite guitars" advertisement looking thing on the back cover. We listened to it over and over whenever we were at uncle John's house.

So it's safe to say that we're all fans of the surf guitar, and it doesn't get any better than either The Ventures or Los Straitjackets. The cruise should be a hoot. I mean, seeing The Ventures live has been something I've wanted to do since I was probably 15. Seeing them at the Casino on Catalina is just some super-friggin-cool icing on the cake (a couple years ago, Tess and I saw Dick Dale at the Casino and had an amazing time).

I'm getting everything ready, packing, and right now I'm putting stuff on that old laptop I lugged to England last fall. I put a bigger (4GB -- whew!) hard drive in it, and my plan is that everyone can take a lot of digital pictures and then upload them to the laptop. I'm also hoping that people won't mind writing a note or two about the day's pics while they copy the files (it can't take a couple minutes to read the SmartMedia cards, so they'll be sitting there anyway). That'll give us some nice annotation for the images. I'm also putting a spare Orinoco card in it and installing NetStumbler. I don't know if the cruise ship has 802.11b on it. but I figure it won't hurt to find out, eh?

Anyway, I made a new category for these entries, and I'll likely move the London entries to it as well. I'll probably wind up taking this beater laptop on all my trips and takes notes/pics like I've done. I was thinking the other night that I would have loved to read about our last London trip as it happened, so it's good to have a running account.

Hmmm, just had a thought: What I really need is a real travel laptop, like a Panasonic Toughbook. I can get an old used one on ebay for cheap. Magnesium alloy case, gell-encased hard drive, almost water proof keyboard, moisture/dust port covers, carrying handle... everything you could need. The newer ones even have built-in wireless networking. Yes, very nice. Maybe someday...