Good Day/Hard Night

It wasn't much fun to install, however. Under my desk is — to put it in the best of possible terms — a messy war zone of technology. Having four computers hooked up (PowerMac, Dell desktop, Dell laptop and a “guest” system — presently the Shuttle XPC), plus all the other niceties such a printer, pda, cable modem, router, etc. leads to lots and lots of cables. Uhg! I decided to move everything out rather than just tossing the new KVM cables under there — to make everything somewhat organized.

Ha! That was 7:30 p.m. tonight. It is now 1:00 a.m. I got everything back in place and nicely bundled by 9:00 p.m. At 9:45 p.m. I realized that there was a low “beep” and static when using the KVM switch with my speakers on the G5. Hrfm. It was 10:30 when everything was completely moved out again and probably 11:15 when I realized the problem was the switch (both the 2 and 4 port versions do the same thing). The sound mysteriously disappeared when the Mac was directly connected to speakers, so I was sure it was the switch. Using a heavily shielded audio cable rather than the integrated KVM one didn't change anything.

I think it was about 12:00 when I realized the same noise could be heard when I switched to my PC desktop while the Mac was on — thus it seems that the KVM is vulnerable to sound interference and the G5 seems to be emitting a lot of it. About 12:10 I finally isolated the culprit - it's the G5's hard disk. When the hard disk spins up, noise appears on the speakers. Take that for what you will.

Overall though, besides very sore knees and back, I'm pretty happy. When the sound is at a reasonable level, you really can't hear the interference and when there is actually music playing, you can't hear it at all. If I leave my speaker volume low and turn the computer's volume up, I should be good to go.

Christmas is Expensive These Days

Christmas is getting expensive, according to a PNC Bank study. According to the study (and yes, this is real), the cost of Christmas went up 18.8% over last year. What is it, you ask, that went up 18.8%?

Well, that should be obvious. One partridge in a pear tree now costs $77.50. Two turtle doves come in slightly cheaper at $58.00. The really pricey parts of Christmas are the seven swans-a-swimming at $3,500 (which jumped 66.7% from last year), the 10 lords a leaping at $4,230.89 and the nine ladies dancing at $3,921.44. According to PNC Advisers, that brings the total price of Christmas to $65,264.28 — after all 12 verses, of course.

According to Jeff Kleintop, PNC's chief investment strategist, “the Index reflects the broader trend of productivity growth in the U.S. economy that has driven prices lower on goods while allowing prices for services to rise modestly.” Kleintop continued by noting, “whereas in the mid-1980s the cost of the goods in the song dominated the Index, the trend over time has been toward lower goods prices, such as the pear tree, and higher prices for skilled labor, such as the pipers.”

That's good to keep in mind.

Alpha

A friend of mine mentioned the Alpha Course to me a few months ago when I said my church was looking for an evangelistic outreach event. It sounds pretty nice — it's a kind of “Christianity 101,” so to speak. The said person lent me the book the course is based on from Nicky Gumbel too, and I've just started it. It seems pretty good. It has lots of good endorsements — hey, even Rick Warren likes it!

Anyone familiar with this course? Have you been through it?

/dev/random

Thought for the Day: There are two types of people. Those that think there are two types of people and those that don't.

A Charlotte, NC, lawyer purchased a box of very rare and expensive cigars, then insured them against fire among other things. Within a month having smoked his entire stockpile of these great cigars and without yet having made even his first premium payment on the policy, the lawyer filed claim against the insurance company.

In his claim, the lawyer stated the cigars were lost “in a series
of small fires.” The insurance company refused to pay, citing the
obvious reason: that the man had consumed the cigars in the normal fashion.

The lawyer sued…and won!

In delivering the ruling the judge agreed with the insurance company that the claim was frivolous. The Judge stated nevertheless, that the lawyer held a policy from the company in which it had warranted that the cigars were insurable and also guaranteed that it would insure them against fire, without defining what is considered to be unacceptable fire, and was obligated to pay the claim.
Rather than endure lengthy and costly appeal process, the insurance company accepted the ruling and paid $15,000 to the lawyer for his loss of the rare cigars lost in the “fires.”

NOW FOR THE BEST PART… After the lawyer cashed the check, the insurance company had him arrested on 24 counts of ARSON!!!! With his own insurance claim and testimony from the previous case being used against him, the lawyer was convicted of intentionally burning his insured property and was sentenced to 24 months in jail and a $24,000 fine.

Only in America, eh?

I wasn't able to find a quick confirmation on whether this was true. It sounds about right though.

Glider Fun for Free

Here's something for any and all Mac or Windows users who read this blog (just curious: how many Mac users read this blog anyway — I know there's Kevin…). Anyway, here's what I found: the publisher of Glider, that classic of classic games, has gone out of business. The program's other has decided to give the current versions away.

Glider Pro X is the latest version and works on Mac OS X 10.x. I actually bought a copy of this a few months ago and never got around to installing it (I was planning to do it this weekend). There is also an old copy of Glider 4.0 for Windows and Mac OS available if you don't have OS X.

If you aren't familiar with Glider, it's an amazingly fun little game where you attempt to fly a paper airplane around the dangers of a house. Hazards include paper shredders, flat surfaces and flying thumb tacks. As stupid as that might sound, the game's simple concept makes it very playable and as enjoyable today as it was a decade ago. If you haven't played it before, go download it and give it a try — it's worth a few minutes of time. Now if only there was a GNU/Linux version.

Tired

What a week. At the cost of sounding like a broken record CD, it has been a crazy week. After tomorrow, though, I expect clear sailing (not counting normal Christmas hustle and bustle) for the rest of the month. That'd be nice!

It's only 15 days 'til Christmas… are you all ready for it or saying “already?” I'm ready for the Christmas season, but I'm not ready for Christmas day yet. It'd be nice if it was around December 1 right now. Oh, well — still two weeks to finish decorating and all the other good stuff.

KVM Blues

Well, earlier this year I replaced my trusty Linksys 2-port ProConnect KVM with a Belkin E-series 4-port KVM switch. It's never worked quite right with GNU/Linux (I have to switch screens to get things back in order), but I lived with it. Unfortunately, even after adding a USB adapter to get the switch hooked up with the G5, things haven't gone well between the two of them.

The G5 works with the switch and PS/2 mouse and keyboard when I first boot it up, but if I switch and then return to that system, the G5 often doesn't see the mouse and almost never sees the keyboard. A few times, it didn't even see the keyboard at boot. sigh So it looks like I'm going to have to retire a 9-month old KVM and get a different one that works better with Macs (hopefully it will work better with GNU/Linux too). In the mean time, just as a word of warning: be aware that E-series KVM's don't seem to get along with Mac or Linux.

New Look, Same Great Taste

Well, I've been planning to bedeck asisaid for Christmas since the end of October and that fit in neatly with my desire for some improvements in the site's design. Christopher's recent reworking of What in Tarnation!?!? and Avoiding Evil got me even more in the mood to redesign. While I'm still working on some things (like redoing the navbar categories — they really don't fit as well as they did before the site became mostly centered around this blog), I've pretty much revised the look. It's about time: not much has changed on the site for almost two years and I was getting tired of the way things looked.

Obviously, some of it is season specific (it's Ccchrrriiissstmmmmassssss allll oooovverrr the woooooorrrlld… uh, ahem) , but what do you think overall? Is it an improvement? I've tested it on Mozilla, Konqueror and Internet Explorer and everything checks out. I would have tried Safari too, but my KVM switch seems to be getting ready to buy the farm and I can't control my G5 very well atm. sigh

By the way, I realized that last week marked the one year anniversary of the first time I was aware that someone other than Ciaran (who gave me the software to start this blog) was reading this blog — Mr. Wright! It also marks a year since I added comments, so perhaps Christopher, or someone else, was here before that, although I rarely posted anything that was very interesting prior to the redesign of the blogging software that added comments.

The Premier of...

Actually, I don't need this system anymore than I need the Shuttle system I got for free (or actually half price, since I had to buy components for it), but I ended up ordering it anyway in late October. It finally arrived last Wednesday. It's a 2 Hz Dual Processor PowerMac G5. It took almost a month since I custom ordered it with a Radeon 9800 and Bluetooth capability. It's very fast and very nice. I've been too busy to try it as much as I would have liked, but I did take some time over the holiday to set it up.

The thing that really is great about this particular G5 is that it came from TerraSoft, the Apple Authorized Proprietary Solutions Provider that specialized in GNU/Linux. Thus it came with not only Mac OS X Panther, it also came with a preliminary preview release of Teresita's Yellow Dog Linux for the G5. Yellow Dog looks nice, although (as you'd expect with a beta) I'm still fighting with it to give me a proper resolution in X11. Once I get some time to devote to it, I'm sure I'll get it working. Next week, perhaps. It's exciting since, as Linus Torvalds notes, the G5 offers an affordable platform for 64-bit GNU/Linux.

At any rate, TerraSoft deserves a large heap of praise. They got it on Friday, November 14 fresh from Apple. They then delayed shipment (with my permission) because they knew a substantially better version of YD would be out very soon. On Monday, the 24th, they thought they almost had it and they informed me they were upgrading my shipping from 3-day UPS to 2-day UPS for free so that it'd arrive before Thanksgiving. A bug in the new code delayed the system and so it wasn't able to ship until Tuesday. However, TerraSoft still managed to get it to me by Wednesday by eating the cost for next day air (roughly $70 extra dollars over 3-day shipping). In their rush to get it to me, they accidentally forgot to repack the System Restore disc, so this week they sent it to me ASAP using Next Day Air once again. Impressive!

Now I just need to find time to give it a good test.

Not Dead.

Despite rumors of such, I actually am still here. Time permitting I might get a nice post in tonight — if not tonight, tomorrow for sure. I have some last minute work piled up, but I think it should go fairly quickly. Or maybe not.

At any rate, I have some stuff to talk about. I have two new computers sitting under my desk — one of which I really don't need… I'll explain why in my next post.