March 2007 Archives
[Moozik: The Damned - Eloise]
I just got home after witnessing a horrible accident. I was sitting at an intersection waiting for the light to go green and saw a typical Harley Davidson Hells Angels biker bloke ride past. He somehow lost control of his bike, flew over the handlebars and landed on his back on the side of the road. The bike flipped end over end and amide a shower of sparks came to a standstill 20 feet away from me.
I think the exact words out of my mouth were "holy fucking shit". I drove over to the bloke, put my emergency lights on, dialed 911 and ran over to him to see if he was alright. I was so pleased when I saw him move because when I saw his head hit the ground I thought that was it. He tried to move but I told him to stay put until the ambulance arrived. To be honest, this was the first time I'd ever had to call 911 since I've lived here in the US and I was amazed at how quickly I was directed to the Police and the Fire Department.
By now a few other people who also witnessed the accident had came over. The biker bloke told me his name was Bob which was a good sign but blood was pouring out of the back of his head onto the road and I wished the bloody ambulance would show up. A firetruck arrived first and five paramedics took care of Bob before the ambulance arrived shortly thereafter.
Thinking about it, I've never actually been at the scene of this kind of accident before and I watched in absolute awe of how quickly and professionally Bob was taken care of. One of the paramedics told us that Bob was going to live but was unsure of his exact injuries at this point. He was taken to St Joseph's Hospital in Phoenix. Those of us who witnessed the accident were asked to stick around for a bit and wait for the Police to arrive.
The Police arrived minutes later and took our statements. The sergeant took my info first because I was the first on the scene. After we were all done he said we could go home but we might be called later with any further questions they may have.
Wow. I just keep seeing Bob fly over the handlebars and see his bike flipping end over end. I was so bloody scared after I saw him hit the pavement and you've no idea how pleased I was when he tried to talk to me. I don't think I'm going to forget those eyes for a long time.
Needless to say, my first phone call tomorrow will be to the hospital to see if Bob is ok.
And no. He was not wearing a helmet.
[Moozik: Angels and Agony - Division]
So today the topic of conversation in the office turned to The Killers. Turns out they are playing at Dodge Theatre on April 11th. Nice. Except it's totally sold out. Bugger.
Still, I see the Morrissey tickets for the June 2nd concert at the Maricopa County Events Center go on sale tomorrow.
Wait. What? Sun City? Mozza's going to play in a retirement community? Amusing yes but if it means I'll finally get to see him then I'm so there regardless of physical location ;-)
[Moozik: Ladytron - Cracked LCD]
After being really quite disappointed with Lady in the Water, I'm going to give M. Night Shymalan another chance with The Happening.
LOS ANGELES - Mark Wahlberg, riding high on his Oscar nomination, has signed on to star in M. Night Shyamalan's thriller "The Happening."Production is set to begin in August in Shyamalan's hometown of Philadelphia, ahead of a Friday June 13, 2008, release via 20th Century Fox.
"Happening," the $57 million followup to Shyamalan's 2006 bomb "The Lady in the Water," revolves around a family on the run from an apocalyptic threat to humanity. Wahlberg will play Elliot Moore, the science teacher at the center of the event. Shyamalan also wrote the screenplay.
[Moozik: Catherine Wheel - The Nude]
Installing Banshee 0.12.0 on Ubuntu Edgy
The official Banshee package in Ubuntu Edgy is rather old and doesn't support the banshee-itunes-import-plugin. Not to worry though as 0.12.0 was released on March 5th and the install from source proved to be rather easy once I'd figured out the dependencies.
For future reference if I ever have to do this again, here's how I solved the dependency problem.
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get build-dep banshee
sudo apt-get install build-essential libmono-sqlite2.0-cil libmono-cairo2.0-cil \
libglib2.0-dev libtool subversion autoconf automake1.9 gnome-common \
libavahi1.0-cil
Then because I did have an older version of banshee installed, I got rid of it before installing the new version.
cd /usr/lib
rm -r banshee
Then it was a matter of installing from source along with ipod-sharp and libipoddevice.
I now had a working Banshee. Next on the agenda, importing my music collection along with playcounts & playlists from my iTunes music library.
[Moozik: Placebo - Meds]
Short note: you suck.
Longer note: I do appreciate that you are at least showing the highlights of the 2007 Swimming World Championships. I do not appreciate that on the day that 3 world records are broken including Michael Phelps breaking Ian Thorpe's long standing 200m freestyle record, you decide not to show us anything. So thanks very much.
[Moozik: Joy Division - These Days]
Just plain genius. Now, if only I could get my hands on some ;-)
[Moozik: The Clash - The Call Up]
As I mentioned earlier, my entire music collection resides on a 100GB ntfs disk. So, in order for this whole experiment to be even slightly successful, access to that disk is an absolute must. Luckily thanks to ntfs-3g, read-write access to ntfs partitions from Linux *just works* these days.
After determining that the disk in question was /dev/hdb1, I created a mount point of /media/storage, and added the following line to /etc/fstab so that the disk would automatically mount on boot:
/dev/hdb1 /media/storage ntfs-3g defaults,locale=en_US.utf8 0 0
Which all worked like a charm. So far so good. Now all I need is a media player and I'll be all set.
I initially set a lofty goal of finding a player that offered the following features: smart playlists, last.fm support, album cover support, iPod support, and iTunes library import capability. I'm a statistics junkie so being able to import playcounts and date-last-played was of vital importance to me ;-)
After taking a peek at Rhythmbox, Listen, Banshee, and the Linux version of Songbird I ended up choosing Banshee. Banshee satisfied all my initial requirements. And thanks to the rather spiffy banshee-itunes-import-plugin, importing those playcounts would hopefully be rather easy.
Next on the agenda, heavy Banshee usage. Would I miss iTunes?
[Moozik: Manic Street Preachers - Repeat (U.K)]
I'm liking the fact that I can watch live Premier League games while eating my breakfast and sipping coffee first thing in the morning here.
Yesterday I watched my boys dispose of Watford 3-1. Well, should have been 3-0 if Chimbonda had pretended to defend properly for 5 seconds. Grr. But you know what, any game in which your goalkeeper scores is ok with me. Paul Robinson sir, you rock. Shame it's not on YouTube yet.
Pat Jennings admitted he couldn't help but raise a smile as he witnessed Paul Robinson join him on the list of Spurs' goalscoring goalkeepers.Then this morning I watched Everton beat Arsenal. It was a really good game and I was in two minds about the result. Usually anytime Arsenal lose I have a teeny grin because, well, I'm a Spurs fan, we're supposed to smile when Arsenal lose. But, the fact that Everton got 3 points means they've leapfrogged over us in the table and pushed us down to 7th place. Bugger.Almost 40 years after Big Pat heaved his huge kick over the head of Alex Stepney in the Charity Shield at Old Trafford, Robbo struck a free-kick from deep inside our half that Watford defender Danny Shittu ducked under and left keeper Ben Foster stranded, the ball boucing over him and home.
It was very similar to Pat's goal in the 1967 Charity Shield against Manchester United, the only difference that Pat kicked the ball out of his hands before it bounced up and deceived Stepney.
Still, tomorrow we play Chelsea in the FA cup replay which, yay, is also being shown over here.
Update: Bugger. Well, there's always next year.
[Moozik: Sheep On Drugs - Uberman]
One of my PCs has been dual boot WinXP and Linux for quite some time. I kept WinXP around for one reason and one reason alone. iTunes. As a music collection manager, iTunes is really quite nice I must admit.
Well, I decided to change all that a couple of weeks ago, you know, just to shake things up ;-)
The PC in question has two hard drives, a 40GB master that booted WinXP & Ubuntu 6.06 and a 100GB slave that is the ever so important home to my music collection. I wiped the 40GB disk and installed Ubuntu 6.10 from scratch thus waving goodbye to my windows partition.
As always, the Ubuntu install went flawlessly and as always, I was more than impressed that these days we have a Linux distro that quite frankly "just works". Gone are the days where I have the patience to spend hours online hunting down which planets have to be in alignment in order for my hardware to play nicely together.
After installing a shedload of ubuntu updates, my next task was tackling that 100GB ntfs disk with my music collection, and installing my new media player of choice.
[Moozik: Simple Minds - Book Of Brilliant Things (live)]
As I drove home from work tonight I happened to catch the local news on the radio. Today marked the fourth day in a row that we've broken temperature records. Sky Harbor Airport in Phoenix recorded 99° at 4:00pm this afternoon. 99°. In. March.
[Moozik: The Sisterhood - Jihad]
This week has been insane. Got to love those short notice deadlines. I think tonight is probably the only night this week that I haven't found myself writing code at 11:00pm. And the lesson from this week is that XML Schemas can get needlessly complicated and that I find myself longing for the old skool DTD. Which is all rather ironic seeing as I had plenty of grumblings about XML DTDs back in the day too ;-)
Still, I can't say enough good things about XML::LibXML and XML::LibXML::Schema. Sometimes you open a beer, reflect back on the week and marvel at those that make your job so much easier.
[Moozik: Simple Minds - Somebody Up There Likes You]
From Kottke:
The first rule of Global Warming Deniers Club is: don't talk about the polar bears losing their habitat.
[Moozik: The Birthday Massacre - Violet]
So there I was minding my own business on the freeway this morning driving to work. Hocico blasting out of the speakers, going under the speed limit because of the amount of traffic, sipping on some coffee. In other words, a typical morning. Out of the blue a Highway Patrol car slots in behind me. Blimey, that bloke's a bit close I think. On go his lights. Bollocks
He shouts at me over his loudspeaker to not pull over on the side of the freeway but to get off at the upcoming exit. So I do. And of course he makes me sit there puzzling over WTF I had done to warrant being pulled over. He slowly wanders up to the car and tells me he pulled me over because I was driving too close to the truck in front of me.
Er, hello, so was everyone mate, it's called morning rush hour. If we were going 20mph I'd be surprised. And sod's law seemed to dictate that he ignored cars in front and to the side of me swerving in and out of traffic.
Nevertheless he does the typical let's see your driver's license, registration, proof of insurance routine. I oblige and he goes back to his car and starts writing on a form. He was obviously writing a ticket so I was not particularly amused. Then it starts to get a little interesting. He walks back to the car, looks at me for a bit then says "sir, please get out of the vehicle and follow me up front". Which for just driving too close to someone was a little, er, extreme and surely he's not going to arrest me for that I wonder to myself.
As I get out of the car he rests his hand on his gun and asks me if I've got any knives or other weapons on me. And it's at this point that I'm sure all colour drained from my face. Ok now I'm seriously thinking he's going to arrest me. I swear he did that just to wind me up.
No, instead of arresting me as his body language indicated, he proceeds to give me a physical demonstration of a safe driving distance. I'm far from amused but he seemed to get a kick out of it. This whole process had now taken close to 20 mins. And the piece of paper he was writing on? An official warning. No ticket, no fine, no having to go to court, no points on my license.
As I drove away I thought oooookay, that was a little bizarre.
[Moozik: The Mission - Tower of Strength]
I'm convinced that I totally jinxed myself when I announced that I'd paid off my car loan. Sod's law dictates that as soon as you do that, a costly repair is just around the corner. You can probably guess where this post is going ;-)
On Monday I got that dreaded feeling of doom when I spotted an oil stain on the ground as I pulled out of my parking space at work. And it wasn't exactly a little stain either. So, in the true spirit of "holy poo I'd better get that looked at" I called the dealer and booked the car in for today. By the time I took the car in first thing this morning, oil was leaking at a noticeable rate, you could actually see it dripping.
So, long story short, it needs a new rear main seal. Not an expensive part (you know there's a but coming) but to replace said seal, they have to take apart half the bloody engine. It will take the bloke 12 hours. Yes, that's 12 hours of labour. Can you see the same dollar signs in front of your eyes that I can?
As I was driving my rental car home this afternoon I couldn't help but wish I'd studied car engines in my youth. Or post-youth for that matter ;-) Because if you're anything like me, you hate standing there at the mercy of Mr-Smug-Mechanic-Bloke as he treats you like a five year old while explaining exactly what he's going to do.
mechanic: you see Kevin, we need to pull the frobnosticator that attaches to the floovill on the main drive shaft. (chuckles in that smug all knowing way). It's because the flabulation seal is contained deep within the filationishtic device that (nods knowingly) means we'll have to pull the goonishn first before we can even replace the nissunjum.me: (gulp) that's what I was thinking you'd have to do. Ahem. Proceed sir.
[Moozik: Kraftwerk - The Man Machine (Live)
Last Sunday morning, Fox Soccer Channel, bless em, played the entire Tottenham vs West Ham game live. Yes. Live. On. American. TV.
American TV, who would have thought? ;-)
Talk about a nail biting game. I'll be the first to admit that we were awfully lucky that Paul Stalteri scored the winner in the dying seconds of the game. Yes I'm rather biased but I must admit that this was one of the better matches I've watched lately.