If you ever find yourself the recipient of the Evil Eye when out in public, get yourself some magical string and be protected! Or, just take a shower and stop wearing patchouli and then maybe people will stop scowling in your presence, you smelly hippie.

Seriously, are there really people who believe this shit? Though I have to admit, there's something really appealing about fleecing new age morons by selling them $20-a-yard yarn. These are the same people who drink animal water and believe that life force energy somehow exists. They probably also take metaphysical advice from their cats and believe in (and buy!) pyramids. Honestly, sixty bucks for a nine inch wide wire pyramid? That's $10 a foot! For wire! Man, I really wish I could get me some of that hippie cash. I know where to get wire. And wire's cheap, too.

Some people might wonder how these new age hucksters sleep at night, but I think it's a really righteous burn, picking on the mentally disadvantaged like that.

Hey, if you're ever in the mood to self-diagnose, try the Worst Case Scenario site. No more wondering about whether you're gonna die... Have the worst conclusion jumped to for you! To wit:

The Worst Case Scenario system cuts out the leg work by immediately jumping to the most paranoically horrifying disease closely matching your symptoms. There may not be an exact match, but there's always something relatively close and totally panic inducing.

Can't get much clearer than that. After all, why waste all that time with doctors when you're going to be dead soon anyway?

So my new radio station has it's first DJ. He doesn't have a name, per se, so I'll have to think one up. But the guy is tireless, a real workhorse. He's on the air 24/7. Though he can be a little hard to understand at times. That's because he's from Scotland.

He reads the song titles every once in a while, has a selection of 8 different pithy sayings involving the callsign and frequency, tells you the time every so often, and even belts out a random quote or two from /usr/bin/fortune a couple times a day. I had him reading the first chapter of "War of the Worlds" earlier as a test. Guy didn't mind a bit. Pretty soon he'll be able to tell us the time, the weather forecast for Sunnyvale, and a couple of stock quotes at the top of every hour.

On a related note, I've been doing some testing, and I wound up having to change my frequency. 106.7 was really crowded. Or, I should say, far more crowded than 107.9 which has only basre static on it. And it's kinda nice being at the end of the dial.

Who knew Alton Brown was an inventor? True! He helped invent a new oven. And they make a black model, too.

Very nice...

I've had this idea for a long time where I pipe my MP3 collection throughout the house to where ever I need it. I used to have everything running through these crappy RCA wireless speakers when I wanted tunes outside. Sometimes I pulled a speaker into garage. But it was mono, and the frequency response was appaling. I'm no stereophile by any means, but when the static is as loud as the music, it's better to listen to the birds chirping and cars driving by.

For regular use, I've got an Audiotron hooked up to my home stereo. But to get sounds from there to outside, I'd need to run wires. So the idea hit me that if I could get an FM transmitter hooked up to one of the spare computers I've got laying around, I'd be able to have tunes anywhere I care to place a boombox!

Well, my FM transmitter came in the mail today, so I had to stop everything I was doing and get it hooked up.

Some twiddling with mounting Windows shares and a few perl scripts later, I'm glad to annouce that KWEE 106.7FM 107.9FM -- Super Sounds of Silicon Valley is on the air! If you're in the area (within about 150 feet of my office), give us a listen!

So far it's played Mozart, They Might Be Giants, Billy Preston, and Louis Prima. Got another 996 songs to go on this playlist, but it'll refresh at 3 am. You'll never hear the same song twice in the same day on KWEE 106.7FM.

All that's left to do is hook up the Festival text-to-speech software to the bit that reads the song title and artist, and I'm good to go. Until that's up and running, I made some little WAV files of me saying various things, and those little clips get placed between every few songs. I can't wait to hear the voice synth, though. I want Stephen Hawking to be my DJ!

UPDATE: The wonderful strains of the Pipes and Drums of the 48th Highlanders just came on over the radio in the living room. Success!

In honor of the passing of Talk Like A Pirate Day:

What kind of pirate am I? You decide!
You can also view a breakdown of results or put one of these on your own page!
Brought to you by Rum and Monkey

It had to be done:

admin@TERASTATION:~$ uname -a
Linux TERASTATION 2.4.20_mvl31-ppc_linkstation #15 Tue May 31 10:18:19 JST 2005 ppc unknown

w00t!

Transferring that new, hacked up firmware image makes for a scary couple minutes, however. It was a nail biter, especially when the progress meter stopped midway through. But I couldn't help myself; I had to tinker.

There's just so much more I can do with it now that it is running an ssh server. Like, adding a radio transmitter to it. Screwing with the web server so I can stream MP3s. Poking at all the Perl scripts under the web admin GUI. Adding NFS kernel patches. Fun stuff.

For now, though, I have to go submit the box's BogoMips rating to the Linux doc guys. I already gave 'em numbers for my AOL touchscreen thing and the cash register. Can't stop now...

My old fileserver is on its way out, and has been for a while. It's the same box we used to play Tribes2 on back at S4R (when we had it down at the Verio datacenter, stuffed sideways into an empty cabinet in the corner by itself so that nobody would see the little beige mid-tower case poking out). It's had a long happy life with its Red Hat 6.2 install and served us well. That 80GB of RAID1 storage has lasted about 5 years; we hit 98% full just last week as I was copying music over to it. But its time has come. Goodbye, tiny Athlon 600.

One of the fans in it somewhere has been getting progressively louder, and if you try to transfer too much over the network, it locks up. Actually, I think that it locks up every couple days, and just happens to when I'm trying to back stuff up off my PC. Clearly it has hardware issues beyond pure age and something new is needed. Disk corruption kinda goes against the entire grain of storing files redundantly, you know?

For a long time now, I've been meaning to go pick up a 3Ware RAID card and a brace of hard disks and build a new box. Even downloaded a copy of CentOS for the OS. So when Tracy and I were at Fry's last night buying a fridge for our new house, I figured I'd saunter on over to the computer hardware aisle and see what they had in the way of RAID stuff. And I sure do love the smell of new electronics.

I find a decent card, and the cart has a stack of 4 cheapo hard drives in it, I'm totalling up how much it's all going to be, what I'll have to tell Tracy, and a sale sign catches my eye. They had a deal on a self-contained NAS box, that day only. I'd never heard of the the company, Buffalo, nor the product, the TeraStation. I'd seen consumer-grade NAS appliances before, and had always dismissed them. They were either very expensive (three or fours times more for what I could build on my own using whitebox PC parts), or lacking in features (what the hell good is a network storage device that doesn't offer any sort of failure protection?! One disk? Or two in non-redundant RAID0 Mode? Useless!). But the TeraStation actually looked kinda cool.

So I start totalling up what I got: $1,050 and change in materials, one long weekend fussing with screwdrivers and setting up filesystems and accounts (and a machine I have to minimally admin). The TeraStation is on sale for $640, and has $125 in rebates. Hmmm, compelling. Then I look at the TeraStation's box in detail to see what features it's got. Users and groups permissions on a per-share level, 4 USB 2.0 ports, super quiet operation, gigabit ethernet, XFS filesystem ("So it runs Linux... I wonder if I can get ssh and NFS support on there..."), UPS support for automatic shutdowns, web-based management, backup software for PCs, and hardware RAID 1, 10, 5 or JBOD with 4 160GB disks.

Let's see here... that's half a terabyte in RAID5 mode. In an appliance-style box (with das blinkenlights!). That I don't have to fuck with all the time. Comes with a print server, too? Sold. All that other shit goes back on the shelf...

I would have liked to have gotten the next model up, but it wasn't on sale, and they weren't in stock anyway. It would have been $400 more, and would have netted me another 400GB; it's a buck a gigabyte either way. Turns out that if you get another terastation, you can sync the two up. And seeing as how it took 5 years to fill 80GB, I'll get at least 3 years out of six times that amount of space. Who knows, maybe in 3 years I'll get the screwdriver out and stuff four 1TB disks in the thing.

Anyway, setting it up was a breeze, and I've got some stuff moving on over to it right now. I just wish I hadn't packed away all of my networking stuff. All I have here in the temp apartment is the crappy hub I used for the Tivo back at the old house. It takes a while to move 75 gigabytes of data at 10 megabits per second. About 16 hours, in fact. I think it's time to get with the 21st century and move on up to gigabit ethernet.

The only thing that it's missing is disk quotas and logging. I'd like to be able to say "this is the junk share, anyone can write to it, but it's only 100MB in size". You can't do that. But since it's only me and Tracy on the thing, I don't care too much about that. Having some sort of remote logging, so that you could see what went wrong and when or get stats on disk usage, would have been nice. That's not really a show stopper either.

It was a good buy, I think. Expensive, but worth it. And seeing as how we opted not to get the fridge with the TV built into it, it was virtually free!

UPDATE: I should have moved to gigabit ethernet a long, long time ago. Wow.

Having nothing much to do this morning, I decided to load up the Russians with 50 bucks (from a $100 credit card I got for finding my apartment via rent.com) and see how many MP3s it could get me. I found some nice stuff:

Albert King: Born Under a Bad Sign - Really super good blues.

Beck: Guero - His newest. Some good songs, and it was only like a buck-oh-five. Or maybe a buck-fiddy. I forget.

Billie Holiday: All Or Nothing At All - We already have a lot, but one can never have too much Billie.

The Blue Hawaiians: Live At The Lava Lounge - Hello, my name is Bill and I am a tikiholic.

Bo Diddley: His Best - The Chess 50th Anniversary Collection - I've always dug on Bo, but until now never managed to get one of his records. Nobody does slide guitar like him.

Cake: Pressure Chief - This was an automatic choice. I'll listen to anything by Cake. I have all their albums, and every song on every one of them is listenable.

Calexico: In the Black Light - A coworker turned me on to these guys. They're from Tucson, too, but I think they formed after I had already left there for San Diego. They sound pretty much like you'd expect: a kind of tex-mex/rock & roll combo.

Cheap Trick: The Essential Cheap Trick - I actually owned "Live at Budokan" on cassette, and of course it's long gone now. Kind of a guilty pleasure, I've always liked Cheap Trick and I have no idea why.

The Chemical Brothers: Singles 93-03 - I'm pretty sure that Tracy won't like this one but I found it strangely compelling.

Deadly Avenger: Deep Red - I found these guys in the "Funky Breaks" section. And, um, I like bongos.

Duke Ellington: Take the "A" Train - Reminds me of being on liberty, and the USO on a Saturday night. Oh all right, I'll fess up: it has "Caravan" on it.

Echo & the Bunnymen: Ocean Rain - Retro emo. They were one of my favorite bands in high school. They're one of those 80s bands you never hear about on those "I love the 80s" shows or in movies with 80s soundtracks, for some odd reason. I sure listened to the heck out of them, but I guess nobody else did. Still good, though...

ELO: The Very Best Of Electric Light Orchestra (CDs 1 & 2) - The disco compilation down below got me started down this track. Why not download a couple hours of ELO?

Frank Sinatra: On The Sunny Side Of The Street - "I got chunks of guys like you in my stool..."

Foo Fighters: In Your Honor - I've never owned one of their albums, and only ever heard them on the radio. Thought I'd pick some up...

Funkadelic: The Electric Spanking Of War Babies - Not too bad. I think I remember them from way back when. Some of the songs sound oddly familiar.

Goldfrapp: Supernature - A band I'd never even heard of before today. But after a quick listen, this is a decent album with a mesmerizing kind of beat.

Joe Walsh: But Seriously Folks - I heard a Joe Walsh song on the jukebox in this shitty dive bar a bunch of us went to after work last night. So I figured I'd load up. You never know when Mike The Mullet will come over for a Pabst...

Junior Brown: 12 Shade of Brown - I was amazed that I had not one single Junior Brown album anywhere. So I had to rectify that situation.

Kasabian: Kasabian - One of my new favorite bands I think. I've been listening to the album while everythign else downloads, and have yet to hear a song I dislike. I wish this album had more songs on it.

KC & the Sunshine Band: Best of KC & the Sunshine Band - Because you have to. Really.

Kool and the Gang: Collection - Where goes KC, so goes Kool.

Kula Shakur: Peasants, Pigs & Astronauts - They remind me of The Verve. Some mellowish eletronica stuff, some faster stuff, some world beat sounding stuff. Good background music. And there's the odd bagpipe in there, too.

Miles Davis: Essential Miles Davis - Miles Davis' music is sitting in a chair by the window, reading a book, on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

Nine Inch Nails: Pretty Hate Machine - Somehow I never got this when it came out back in 1989. Heard it enough. Same thing happen to Red Hot Chili Peppers. Anyhow, I got it for a dollar, so it was like going back in time and telling myself to save $14.

Planet Funk: Non Zero Sumness - Spacey electronica music. I got it for work listening. Might grab another one of the albums as well.

Rage Against the Machine: Renegades - Another odd, guilty pleasure. I always dug RAtM. I think it's that beat thing. This was the only album from them I didn't have.

Red Elvises: Surfing in Siberia - These guys are hilarious. Everything they do is great. Russian Elvis rockabilly surf music. Love it!

The Stranglers: Rattus Norvegicus - Old punk kinda-sorta, and still a good listen.

T-Bone Walker: T-Bone Blues - The Essential Recordings - Man, that's some great stuff there...

Ursula 1000: Ursadelica - I found this album by accident, and it's great! It's hard to describe (it's a remix compilation), but it has elctronica/bossa nova/lounge/tiki sort of music on it. I especially liked "gaijin a go go" by Temura Mental and "Chick A Boom" by Joe Bataan. Can't spend two bucks any better than this.

Ursula 1000: Kinda Kinky - After I found the compilation above, I went looking for more. The genre for this one was listed as "Club/Dance, Funky Breaks" so I had to give it a try. Reminds me of Propellerheads.

Various: Pure Disco, CDs 1996 & 1997 - Sometimes, and not very often, this movement overcomes you. And then you have to listen to Alicia Bridges.

The Verve: A Northern Soul - I found them from a compilation I got a while ago, and for some odd reason recalled their name today. Very atmospheric music, good for doing concentration work.

Violent Femmes: Violent Femmes - I think I must have owned five copies of this back in high school, and got a kick out of listening to it again.

Wild Sammy: Speed Crazy - These guys are hard to describe (being from Japan makes that axiomatic) but they have an infectous beat (to which I am always the sucker).

Not bad for 48 dollars and change, eh?

Now this news story is just plain weird.

Steve Ballmer is just not right. No ape required.