• It will be interesting to see if Deals.Woot (http://bit.ly/1Qok4u) will outshine Slickdeals.net (http://bit.ly/08jX2jx) #
• I have a sunrise and sunset calculator (#sunwait) in a cronjob to tweet those events at my lat/lon (Los Angeles). It amuses me: @OhNoItsDark #
• #TomJoyner's uncles were executed in 1913 for crimes they didn't commit. #NorthCarolina has posthumously pardoned them. #deathpenalty #
• It's cool to me that @BarackObama takes time out of his schedule to tweet!  (I love him, but: three cheers for faux-populism) #
• The predicted unemployment rate in 2012 is higher than the rate that let Bill Clinton run on “it’s the economy, stupid” http://bit.ly/57c5gW #
• RT @RobCottingham: Blog'd: And with a shift-zero, they saved humanity – http://bit.ly/632svL #
• http://twitpic.com/qucdy – @yogicchai sent me free tea (it's very interesting), and I agreed to promote their Black Friday Sale. http://www.yogicchai.com #
• On #Karaoke: "If I want to see some hopeless drunk ruining an #AmyWinehouse song, I'll go to an Amy Winehouse concert." http://bit.ly/2mnaBx #
• RT @evanorenstein: In honor of the month of November… http://bit.ly/7jZdLP
  (Gah, Axl. I hate when people self-destruct.) #
• OH HOLY FUCK that's the biggest, ugliest, and scariest #opossum I've ever seen — right outside my window. Seriously, nightmare-worthy. #
• I just got auto-spammed by a Twitter robot because I USED AN EMOTICON IN A TWEET. Twitter has low enough #SNR when REAL PEOPLE ARE POSTING. #

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I’ve been reliving my youth courtesy of YouTube.  There are MTV Unplugged shows, vintage music videos — it’s awfully cool.  YouTube hasn’t been on my radar until recently, but it’s a nice incorporation into my life.  So, for nostalgia, I watched the Stone Temple Pilots MTV Unplugged show, and, as I will be transitioning from “thirty” to “thirtysomething” in a couple of weeks, I thought I would pause and reflect.

Here is “Plush” Unplugged.

Usually YouTube comments are impossibly inane.  I, of course, am not the first person to note this:

But I was oddly heartened by an exchange on the comments page:

Wrestling BC:  It sucks that I have to be in my 20s during this shitty decade.  I would gladly give away anything good about this time period … which is basically only the advancements in technology, if it meant I could go back in time an see these guys and others in their prime.

Calicsta:  I feel just the same.  I would give everything to be a part of this x-generation.

Years ago, I saw a defense of people of my generation.  The argument went like this: “We might not understand Woodstock, The British Invasion, free love, LSD.  But there’s plenty of stuff Boomers don’t know about: Tina Yothers, TrapperKeepers, etc.”

And I thought: “Yeah.  That’s not a very good trade.”

But that, of course, is not the real legacy of “Generation X”.

When “Generation Y” was first introduced some years back — I first encountered it in maybe 1995 — I thought it was kind of odd.  It bins my brother and me into different generations.  I’m at the tail-end of Gen X, he’s at the head of the subsequent generation, and that seemed somewhat ludicrous to me, even though it was reassuring to a teenager to be told there was a fundamental generational gap between you and your younger brother.

I was born in 1978.  I went to college when I was 16, which put my classmates as 1976ers, and the upperclassmen more solidly into Gen X.  Thirty is young to be reminiscing, but when I started college, we were one of the first classes to have email.  We used pine on a DEC Alpha.  Google?  Hell, there was no Altavista.  No one had heard of Amazon.com.  Yahoo! was run by a staff of volunteers.  Internet Explorer was but a gleam in a predatory company’s eye — I remember transitioning from Mosaic to Netscape Navigator.  There were people sincerely wondering whether “The Internet” was better than AOL.  Cell phones?  Blackberries?  Gah.  But, no, that’s not the biggest generational gap, either.

I graduated college in 1999.  My brother started college in — help, Dave?  2000?  I was a working adult when 9/11 occurred.  High school and college had been spent under Clinton, when American thought that a scandal was a blow job in the Oval Office.  My brother — Generation Y, remember — was 19 when the Towers collapsed.  His college days were drenched in Bush, in the worry of international terrorism, in illegal wars and unlawful presidencies and all the scary, scary shit that will take well into Generation Z++ to undo.  And, of course, there’s instant messaging.  There’s that.

So the X/Y division seemed oddly … prescient.  If it wasn’t real at the beginning, it sure as hell was true when the inhabitants became adults.  Dave, agree?

Back to music.  I’ve wondered over the years if this weren’t generational bigotry, but my first year as a teenager, here is a partial list of albums that were released:

• Nirvana “Nevermind”
• Pearl Jam “Ten”
• Guns ‘n’ Roses, “Use Your Illusion I” and “Use Your Illusion II”
• Metallica, “Black Album”
• REM, “Out of Time”
• Queensrÿche, “Empire”
• Tori Amos, “Little Earthquakes”

That’s.  Partial.  I’ve tried to convince myself that anyone’s albums when they were 13 would seem as seminal, but, no, sorry.  This was different.  These were seminal.  And — oddly, utterly oddly — grunge was a fad, which brought celebrities with bipolar disorder into public consciousness more than at any time since, maybe, Chopin.

Rant, here.  If you look back on grunge as a fad: bless you eternally.  For real.  You are truly blessed.  I’m bipolar.  I have been for lots of years — as usual, symptoms showed up when I was a teenager, years before it was diagnosed.  If you listen to Nirvana’s “Lithium” and think, “cool bassline!” rather than “wow, Kurt, you fucking nailed what being on lithium is like”, seriously — utterly seriously — good for you.  It really isn’t our fault that people with severe dopamine disregulation problems find that strong opiates work better to make us functional than anything that’s been approved by the FDA for treatment.  If you listen to Stone Temple Pilots’ “Atlanta” and it doesn’t immediately occur to you that Scott has nailed what trying to stop opiates as a bipolar feels like — well, I’ve said it.  Bless you.  It’s a blessed accident that I didn’t become a heroin addict, and, frankly, it’s still something I have to be super-careful to not do.

I don’t think that intrusion of mental illness into popular culture has really been duplicated.  Do people with rage disorders think, “wow, nu-metal legitimizes us”?  Do despicable homophobes think Eminem (gods, that man is talented, I just wish I didn’t have to delouse after The Eminem Show) stands up for them?  Well, maybe.  I don’t really know.

So, I’m switching from 30 to 31.  I just had my ten-year college reunion.  I’ve been married, and been divorced.  I watch the Unplugged shows and think, “Holy shit, I’m older than all of these guys, and, holy shit, I used to think their hair was long” (mine has now passed the middle of my back again).  And — yes — I still look in the mirror in the morning, with somewhat-ratty long curly brown hair, jeans, a rock band t-shirt, and an open flannel, and think, “Hey, I look good”.

Hey, do you know what?  I think I do.  I may be stuck back in 1991.  But, seriously, there are worse times be stuck.  Grunge forever.  Better bipolar medications now.  I’ll shout both from the rooftops.  I hope you’ll join me.

Apple has decided — I think the official reason is “because they’re dicks” — to keep people from pulling mp3s off of their iPods onto their computers.  It’s supported by the Linux program gtkpod, but while gtkpod is rather awesome at putting stuff onto iPods, it does less-than-useful things such as “violently crashing suddenly” when trying to pull stuff off of one.

So, here’s how I do it.  It works with my OS (Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope), my iPod (120GB iPod Classic), FAT32 formatting, and … other specific-to-me stuff (?) … and I’m not really interested in supporting this.  If this doesn’t work for you and you know how to do it and want to help, feel free to post, but I can’t/won’t respond if you need more help.  Sorry.

Although I have not tried it, I am roughly 111% certain this will fail with Apple DRMmed music, which is fine because my iPod is never going near an installation of iTunes.  I don’t know if it will work with newer iTunes downloads, which I’ve read/heard are DRM-free, but I’m not going to try it.  iTunes is seriously evil software, and I’m pretty sure that the only reason NAV does not remove it as malware when doing a virus scan is that doing so would be too difficult.

First, install EasyTag.  In Ubuntu, that’s as easy as

sudo apt-get install easytag

Now, get the MP3s, which are helter-skelter peppered through useless directories, onto your computer.  Mount it as as a USB block device, which should happen automatically when you plug it in.  It will likely end up somewhere like /media/IPOD, but it’s easiest to use a graphical file browser (just go to “Places” on the Ubuntu launch bar) as it will show up, conveniently, as a clearly-marked mounted device.

The files are in iPod_Control/Music (yes, I expected that to be harder), but in a completely useless hierarchy.  Copy the files over — I’d just copy the whole Music folder over — onto somewhere local to your PC.  I use a directory called ~/MusicStage, but, you know, whatever.

The files will transfer in some amount of time.  Then open EasyTag and navigate to whatever you are calling your staging folder.  The program will go through and read the tags on all the mp3s in the directory.  You will note that, internally, all the tags on the mp3s are preserved, which is cool, because this would be an obvious way in which Apple could have been bigger dicks.

Hit Control-A to select all the files.  There’s an icon — I have absolutely no idea what it’s supposed to be, but by default it’s immediately to the left of the broom icon — hit it.  This opens the “Tag and File Name scan” window.  Set the scanner to “Rename Files and Directories”.  You can go wild at this point, sorting your albums as you see fit, but I do a fairly basic [DIR]/Artist/Album/NN Track format, where NN is the track number.  To do that, put the following into “Rename File and Directory”, of course changing the beginning part to wherever your home folder is:

/home/joshua/Music/%a/%b/%n %t

Hit the same wtf-is-that-supposed-to-be icon on this dialog.  Then hit the familiar commit-to-disk icon (it looks like a green arrow pointing downwards at a hard drive) and then — well, that’s it.  Now your music is back on your PC.

I’ve got a treat for readers this week: I converted (YouTube) videos from the 2009-10-06 Los Angeles Pearl Jam concert to mp3 and I’m making them available for your downloading pleasure.  Why should you especially care about this concert?  Well — Ben Harper playing slide guitar on “Red Mosquito”?  Jerry Cantrell playing a second “Alive” solo?  Chris Cornell joining PJ onstage for a reunion of Temple of the Dog, and the band performing “Hunger Strike”?  A string quartet joining the band for three songs, including (for real) an acoustic version of “Lukin”?  If those descriptions do’t prompt you to download, you’re going to have to go sit in the hallway.  (The two tracks that are missing — “Comatose” and “Save You” — are missing in the source.)

That show begins with “Sometimes”.  I’ve always loved the lyrics, especially as the beginning of a concert (it also begins the album No Code).  It seems an entirely reasonable song for the twelfth installment of this series.

Sometimes

Large fingers pushing paint
You’re God and you’ve got big hands
The colors blend:
The challenges you give man

Seek my part
Devote myself
My small self
Like a book amongst the many on a shelf

Sometimes I know
Sometimes I rise
Sometimes I fall
Sometimes I don’t
Sometimes I cringe
Sometimes I live
Sometimes I walk
Sometimes I kneel
Sometimes I speak of nothing at all
Sometimes I reach to myself, dear God

Seriously, download the concert.

All Vedder Tuesday

• My microphone broke, so I'm talking on #Skype through the speakers on a pair of headphones. Flashbacks to being 13, here. #
• #MM #MusicMonday: #ThemCrookedVultures "Elephants"; #HeatherNova "Truth and Bone"; #FlowingTears "Grey"; #LacunaCoil "I Like It" #
• Super-scale snark alert, but "10 Reasons why Superman is better than Jesus" http://bit.ly/08RfZNe
  (Jesus "is all retconny fanfic." Ha.) #
• Whenever my #cat knocks something off a table, he stares at it for thirty seconds, apparently working through "wow … it … fell". #

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No, I haven’t gone to sleep yet.  I felt the need to relate one of the oddest email exchanges I’ve ever had in 17-or-whatever years of emailing:

“sharon”:  send my free stamp mounts to [full address]

Joshua:  I’m sorry, I do not know what you’re talking about.

“sharon”:  the mounts you put over your stamps to protect them

Joshua:  No, I understand what stamp mounts are, I’m just not offering any, free or otherwise.  AFAIK Gopher Supply has the best prices.  Could I ask why you think I’m offering free stamp mounts?

“sharon”:  thats what it sed

Joshua:  That’s.  What.  It.  Said.  Where?

“sharon”:  where i was looking it stamps up it said it was free

Joshua:  I’m sorry.  I’m not offering free stamp mounts.  I have never offered free stamp mounts.  And I was trying to find out where you saw what you interpreted as an offer for free stamp mounts, but I’m being unsuccessful in communicating that.

As far as I know, this is the cheapest place for stamp mounts: http://www.gvstamps.com/

If you can tell me where you thought you understood the mounts to be free, I would be appreciative so that I could address that, but if you can’t, there is no need to burden you with writing again.

“sharon”:  go to google and put in free stamps and look at every thing about free stamps and look for your web site under eather on of thoughts sites

• It's awfully convenient that the same line of wifi routers that Linksys ships without security all have the same default SSID. #
• http://twitpic.com/qhpii – #LacunaCoil's new album is ridiculously good. And, of course, it helps that #CristinaScabbia is ridiculously hot. #

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A sampling of things I said to my mother upon her presentation of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire to Niall and me:

“Is there backstory I should know?”

“Do crazy Christians freak out about this?”

[On seeing Emma Watson appear onscreen:] “Oh, she’s going to be pretty when she grows up!  Wait, when did this come out?  Maybe she has grown up.”

“So, if I’ve counted right, that’s, like, the fourth racial stereotype they’ve presented.”

“This is dense storytelling.  They must be trying to be authentic to the long novels I’ve seen.”

I’m still sick, but I feel rather negligent having skipped a Vedder Tuesday.  So I want to repay it with interest, with a compound post of the “driving songs”.

Rearviewmirror

I took a drive today
Time to emancipate
I guess it was the beatings that made me wise
But I am not about to give thanks, or apologize

I couldn’t breathe, holding me down
Hand on my face, pushed to the ground
Enmity gaged, united by fear
Forced to endure what I could not forgive

I seem to look away
Wounds in the mirror waved
It wasn’t my surface most defiled

Head at your feet, fool to your crown
Fist on my plate, swallowed it down
Enmity gaged, united by fear
Tried to endure what I could not forgive

Saw things clearer when you were in my rearview mirror

I gather speed from you fucking with me
Once and for all I’m far away
I hardly believe — finally the shades are raised

Saw things so much clearer
Once you, once you were in my rearview mirror

Untitled

I’ve got a car
I’ve got some gas
Let’s get out of here
Get out of here fast
Everyone’s confused
So I stay in my room
If I go, I don’t want to go alone

I hope you get this message,
Or you’re not home
I could be there in ten minutes or so
I’ve got my things
We’ll make it up as we go along
With you i could never be alone

MFC

Sliding out of reverse into drive
This wheel will be turning right, then straight
Off in the sunset she’ll ride
She can remember a time [??? -- "denied"?]
Stood by side of the road, spilled like wine
Now she’s out on her own and [??? -- "line high"?]

There’s no leaving here
Ask, I’m an ear
She’s disappeared

They said timing was everything
Made him want to be everywhere
There’s a lot to be said for nowhere

There’s no leaving here
Ask, I’m an ear
We’ve disappeared
There’s no leaving here
Ask, I’m an ear
Fuck it, we’ll disappear

Gone

No more upset mornings
No more trying evenings
This American Dream I am disbelieving
When the gas in my tank feels like money in the bank
Gonna blow it all this time, take me one last ride

For the lights of this city, they only look good when I’m speeding
I wanna leave them all behind me, ’cause this time I’m gone

Long gone
This time I’m letting go of it all
So long
This time I’m gone

In the far-off distance as my taillights fade
No one thinks to witness, but they will someday
Feel like a question is forming
And the answer’s far:
I will be what I could be
Once I get out of this town

For the lights of this city, they have lost all feeling
Gonna leave them all behind me ’cause this time I’m gone

Long gone
This time I’m letting go of it all
So long
Long gone, I’m letting go of it all
Yeah, this time I’m gone

If nothing is everything,
If nothing is everything I’ll have it all
If nothing is everything then I will have it all

Did I forget any Vedder driving songs?  Other than Once, which isn’t at all in the same mold?

All Vedder Tuesday

I’m really sick right now.  Vedder Tuesday and the 15th of the Month Portfolio will continue, but I’m just too exhausted right now.  Sorry.

• Is there a way I could be professionally #waterboarded in a controlled setting in #LosAngeles? I'd like to know what I'm talking about. #

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• I wish there were an "opt-out" option for crippling pain. I'd say I promise not to tax myself, just knock it off with this neg reinforcement #
• Name for attack wherein the victim feels freezing cold;blood-curdling #terror;hallucinations;waking nightmares;#claustrophobia? TREATMENTS?! #

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• RT @denyreligion: Ask Richard: Surrounded by Evangelists at Work #atheism http://bit.ly/4k4JVW [Linked to for the comments. #BestOfTheWeb!] #
• Brrr.  Brrr brrr brrr.  And this is only *November* in *Los Angeles*. Insulation maybe? Brrr. #
• RT @jordancdarwin: I'm a PC and I run Linux. And I rule. Yeah. #
• RT @jordancdarwin: I don't like to dish out but if I do, god would tremble at my wrath. In all his fictional embodiment, of course.. #
• Do home #thermostats use #AC? It's not immediately apparent to me how they wouldn't, but wouldn't "9V battery" work? #
• New meme. #youmightbeanatheist if you are baffled by literal belief in figurative myth. If devoutness makes you worry about your safety. #
• Rarely do I mention a Twitter user just to mock him, but could theists please suggest to @heidiraff that HE ISN'T HELPING YOUR CASE? in reply to heidiraff #
• #youmightbeanatheist if you think "non-overlapping magisteria" is so much pandering twaddle. There is *fact*, and there is *myth*. #NOMA #
• #youmightbeanatheist if loud profession of faith makes you wonder what is being marketed (that's not so much belief as observation, though.) #
• #youmightbeanatheist if your brain stumbles when someone (e.g., @heidiraff) considers a case closed by saying "They were blaspheming" #
• Being awoken by shivering is fun when #camping, but no so much at home. Actually, it's not really fun when camping, either. (<– Good story) #
• I'm considering finding an oil drum and burning some of my possessions for heat. It should be warmer inside than outside. <– no heater now #
• I got my new automated Twitter script working. It's pretty amusing. I'll watch it until Friday, when I'll #FF it (sneaky, yes?) #
• It would be mildly entertaining if Nintendo staged the beating as a publicity stunt: http://bit.ly/1Bfw0p
  (via @thinkgeek) #

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1.

Niall and I are in the kitchen, and Niall asks “Do you smell gas?”

My heart skips a beat.  “No.  Do you?!”

“No,” he says.  “This sign [under the sink] says ‘What do do if you smell gas.’  If you smell gas, ask me and I’ll — well, you can read the words that are too hard for me, and I’ll read you the rest.”

2.

Joshua: When I was little, [my dad] told me that if I saved up for something expensive, I’d only have to save for half of it, and he’d pay the other half.  So I’m telling you the same thing.

Niall: What did you save up for?

Joshua: A telescope.

Niall: Do you still have it?

Joshua: No.

Niall: Why not?

Joshua: It broke.

Niall: When did it break?

Joshua: About ten years ago.

Niall: Are you sad?

Joshua: A little bit.

Niall: I’m going to save up and buy you another one.  But you might have to wait until I’m 7 or 8.  I only have twenty dollars right now.

I almost always watch DVDs with French subtitles on.  It helps a lot with colloquial phrases that I have not otherwise found a way to learn.  I read French much, much better than I can understand spoken French, though.  I can manage sometimes, especially if it’s educated, Parisian French, but even that’s about 60-70%.  A film like Chrysalis is something that is extremely annoying because I can almost understand it without English subtitles.  But — and this baffles me — having a French film playing with English subtitles seemingly does nothing to help me learn.  So this reminds me of … R2-D2.

The premise for the character of R2-D2 is of a robot that can understand spoken English perfectly but cannot generate it.  And the language in which he speaks to C3-PO seems woefully insufficient to communicate the complexity of the thoughts that are supposedly being transmitted, unless there is some weird tonal stuff going on that, like Mandarin, is completely inaudible to me.  (That was a joke.)  Even in the 1970s, I expect that tech-minded people would have been sophisticated enough to understand that they had this backwards.  But even that is comparing just a speech recognition program to a TTS.  The idea that a little robot can understand spoken language in an NLP way, with perfect comprehension, but no one could be bothered to give him a better synthesizer?  It’s like Noonian Soong getting everything perfect in an android except for skin tone.

• Anyone else get the urge to watch #Lost from the beginning every few eps? I always begged for complex mythologies. Now I have one – and – hm #
• test #
• Twitter is working oddly for me. If this gets posted and the post I'm trying to tweet doesn't, I'm giving up. Except I'm not good at that. #
• If ("when", prob) #DumaKey gets made into a film, I'm boycotting it unless #JeffFahey gets cast as Wireman http://bit.ly/1RFGHZ #StephenKing #

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I saved this as a file last week, when I was trying to get my wireless working.  In the end I got it working, but the reveal is more poignant if I start with just this.

Nerds are going to like this for content; I hope others (whom I know in meatspace) will learn a little bit about me, about how my mind works, and a suggestion (along with the Aspergers) of why I’m surprised when other people’s minds don’t work in the same way.

The setup, as Twitter readers will have seen so far, is that my Internet connection stopped working some days ago.  Tonight I arrived home, could not find my phone, and was very frustrated at not having had the ability to check my email in days.  So I wanted to fix it.  I thought today that an automatic Ubuntu update must have broken it.  That’s the intro.

A note about the Dramatis Personæ: the unitalicized speaker is my conscious train of thought.  The italicized speaker is a voice I’ve worked very hard to train, a voice that before now I haven’t needed a name for.  I considered “Meta”, and “Metashua”, and “Metash”, but I’m settling on “Dæmon”, for a (very) funny computer in-joke, and something not funny for a reason I discovered while thinking through this tonight.

OK, wireless.  Wireless stopped working.  An auto-update broke it.  Damn.  What do you do when an update breaks networking?  You can’t exactly go online to fix it.  But that’s OK, I have a “live” Micro SD card, and a keychain USB Micro SD card reader dongle thing.  Good.  That hasn’t been working.  Bad.  Maybe I can get it to work.

OK, backpack.  Got it.  Plug it in.  Hmm.  What’s supposed to happen?  “Nothing”, right?  I always disable all auto-load and auto-mounts on my system.  OK, Places→Computer.  “SD Card”.  Good.  Mount that.

OK, that doesn’t work.  Of course that doesn’t work.  It didn’t work before.  That’s why I took it off my keychain and put it in my backpack.  It didn’t work because of a bent pin, right?

[I take off the cover and remove the Micro SD card]

OK.  Yes, definitely a bent pin.  But my hand is shaking.  To get my hand to stop shaking, I’m going to have to drink a bunch of wine.  Why can’t they come up with something for essential tremor that’s less incapacitating than alcohol?  I just need a sympathetic nervous system depressant.  Benzos.  I have Ativan.  Can I spare some Ativan?  No, I’m super-low, and won’t be able to get more until Tuesday.  Scratch that.  We can move back to the bent pin.  I’ll try wiggling.

[I wiggle]

OK, good sign.  It’s coming in and out of view.  So something is sketchy in the adaptor, because the Micro SD card didn’t move.  Oh, wait.  Did it?  OK, wiggle and press in the Micro SD card.

There it is.  OK, mount.  Nope.  No mount.  It must be the bent pin.  I need to unbend the pin.  Except, I can’t unbend the pin.  Hand tremor.  Thanks, Grandad!  Thanks, Dad!  Fuck.  OK.

Why don’t I have a PCCARD card reader?  I have a slot for it in the desktop.  There’s a dummy piece of plastic there right now.  Right?

[I check]

OK, right.  Yeah.  OK.  I just need to read this card.

Stop.  You’re boxed.  What are you trying to do?

I’m trying to boot off a live USB device.

No.  You’re trying to reinstall a driver.

I’m trying to reinstall a driver.  OK.  What else?  Church computer?  No.  I’m not supposed to use those any longer, and, besides, I don’t have a USB drive, and I don’t have a blank CD-R.

CD-R.  That’s good.  I have a CD-R somewhere.  Older version, but it worked when you installed it.  But, crap, is updraging going to wreck my system?  Well, maybe.  But you’ll figure that out before you get to that point.

[I look for the CD-R]

Gah!  Fuck!  Why can’t I keep my desk cleaner?  It was right there!  On top of the printer.

Then maybe it’s next to the printer.

Good.  OK.  Dig dig dig.  There it is.  Thanks, Sebastian [cat]!

[I take it back to the workstation.]

OK, inserwaitaminute.  What’s that?  Oh, that’s a dent in the disc.  Aargh!  I don’t have another one.  Thanks, Sebastian [cat]!.

Actually, that’s probably not Sebastian [cat]‘s fault.  It’s right next to your sink.  You probably knocked something heavy and pointy over and didn’t notice.  God, I don’t see anything heavy and sharp.  Could a cat’s claw do that?

Not.  Helping.

Yeah, OK.  Well, Ubuntu live CDs can be burned onto a credit-card CD.  And this dent is at the outside.  Maybe it can load.  What’s the worst that could happen?  It wouldn’t load, right?  Or.  Hmm.  It could shatter.  If it’s enough off-balance, it can shatter.  Fine.

Or it could shatter and destroy the laser.

Yeah, it could shatter and destroy the laser.  But that’s unlikely.

Or it could shatter and jam your CD drive shut

Oh, yeah.  And my fallback for the evening is that David Mamet movie.

Fuck it.  I don’t care.

[I load the CD in X.]

“This disc has packages.  Do you want to open the package manager?”  Oh, good sign.  Now I need to boot off of it.

[Restarts the computer.  On boot-up, I get a BIOS warning that I'm using a 65W power adapter, which will yield suboptimal performance.]

Fuck.  God.  [racism redacted due to cowardice]

This.  Is.  Racist.  Knock it off!  And, besides, you’ve established that your power is wonky.  The A/C adapters blowing could be your fault.

But the fact that it’s 65W is sure not my fault!

Stop.  This isn’t helping.

Yeah.  OK, I’m at the CD menu.  “Install Ubuntu”.

[I scroll down and hit Return]

Please.  Please please.  Oh.  Hmm.  “Installation disk error.  Reboot.”  OK.

[I reboot.]

Try again.  I can run it as a live CD.  The live CD part should probably be written close to the interior.  Wait, how sure am I of this?  Not remotely.  Anyway, it’s back again.  “Try Ubuntu without installing it.”  Good, I can probably download a replacement driver.  “Installation disk error.  Reboot.”

But the boot part should be close the interior!  Wait, how sure am I?  Well, unsure enough to eject the disc and check it.

[I eject.]

Oh.  Yeah.  Congealed food on the interior.  Can’t really blame that on Sebastian [cat].  Clean that off.  OK, clean the whole surface off.  Insert.  Reboot.

[I insert and reboot.]

OK.  Run as live CD.  Good.  This is good.  This is longer than it went before.  Oh, there’s a roadsign.  OK, cool!  “Installation disk error.  Reboot.”  Damn.

You’re boxed.  Step back.  What are you trying to do?

I’m trying to roll back a driver.

No.  You’re trying to connect to the Internet.

Yeah.  I have a USB wifi modem/antenna.  Somewhere.  God my desk is so fucking dirty!  It was rightohthereitis.  Antenna.  Antenna looks good.  Power.  Damn, no power cord.

[I look some more.]

Well, maybe I have something else that can power it.  What it is?

[Examines.  "5V / 2A".]

Is that an L-type plug?  I probably have something that matches.  In that box of cables from hardware that went to heaven.

Had.

Oh yeah.  Had.  God, downsizing can suck sometimes.  Well, does anything else run on this?  All I need is an adapter.  I could open the case of the modem, splice in the power, and go for it.  Except I don’t have a soldering iron.  That’s OK.  I can hold it in place.  I don’t need it to run very long.

No, actually, I can’t.  Hand tremor.  I’d need a bunch more wine, and then I wouldn’t be able to debug the problem.  OK, nix that.  USB wifi adapter?  I had one.  Oh, gave it to my mom.  Um.  I could buy one tomorrow.  But aren’t they like $54?  They used to be, anyway.  I don’t have that kind of money, especially if it’s an upgrade problem.  I could borrow it from her.  But maybe I took it back already?  Where would it be?  HellifIknow.

You’re boxed.  What are you trying to do?

I’m trying to get my wifi adapter working.  But I don’t even have any CAT-5!

No.  You’re trying to get on the Internet.

Yeah.  Maybe that Micro SD card was a good idea.  But I don’t have a reader.  But, wait, I have devices that take SD cards and have a USB connection!  My broken camera!  I can mount the SD card as a USB device!  But I need a Micro SD – Full-size SD adapter.  Where would that be?

Hmm.  What would I do with it?  I have switched over mostly to Micro SD.  Hey, maybe it’s in a device that takes a full-size device.  What are those?  Kindle –

[checks Kindle]

No.  Oh, it could be in the camera itself!

[checks camera]

Bingo!  OK.  There it is.  Turn it on — oh, yeah.  It’s broken because it can’t turn on.  But now you have a carriage to convert Micro to full-size.  “Carriage?”  “Adapter?”  Something.  Hmm.

Not important.

Yeah.  OK, I have a card reader here somewhere.  I think it’s powered off of USB.  I think I know where it is.

[Looks.]

Oh, golden!  It’s an Iomega multi-card-plus-floppy reader.  Floppy?  What the fuck?  No, stop, go on.  No power connection.  It must draw power from the USB port.  Good.

[I put the Micro SD card in the carriage, put that in the card reader, and plug that into a USB port.  Two "USB drive"s and a "Floppy drive" show up in "Computer".]

Which USB card is it?  Well, try them both.

[I try both.]

Oh.  But maybe one needs a powered USB port.  That has to be a powered port, doesn’t it?  And they wouldn’t show up at all if the device were not powered.

How certain of you are that?

Well, not at all.  But if I were designing this computer, I’d make the ports powered.  Actually, I’d make sure to power at least one.  That wouldn’t work, though, right?  You’d have to do it in pairs.  So maybe it’s the ones on the back.

[I try]

Nope.  Fails.

How certain are you that it has to be done in pairs?

Um: not certain enough that I shouldn’t try the last port.  Oh, great!  Light came on momentarily.  Will it work?!

No.  OK.  But there’s a floppy drive.  Do I have an Ubuntu boot floppy?  No, stop it, that’s ridiculous.  Do I have any sort of boot floppy?  Hmm.  Maybe a DOS 6.22 floppy.  Or did it take more than one floppy?  Well, for sure the first one was bootable.  Otherwise it wouldn’t work.  But I need something that would get my wireless working.  That sure as hell won’t.

Stop.  You’re boxed.  What are you trying to do?

I’m trying to get on the Internet.

Good.  Do you have any other way to get on the Internet?  Even for just a bit?

Oh, Kindle!  Thank You Amazon!  W00t!  Turn.  On.  Wireless. 

Wait, what am I looking for?  Damn.  Wait.  What?  Damn.  Stop with the wine.  You need to think clearly more than you need to stop shaking. 

Stop.  You’re boxed.  Why could this have stopped working.

A driver.

Look for stuff about the driver.

I don’t know what card I have.  I don’t know how to find out what card I have.  There’s no “Device Manager”.  How did I ever get qualified under Red Hat if I don’t know this shit?  Did I forget it all?  Did I ever know it?

Stop.

Stop.  What I need is to roll back a driver.  Search→”@web roll back Ubuntu driver”.  Good.  There’s an Ubuntu suggestion for someone wanting to roll back a driver.  Maybe it’s solved.  Maybe someone told him how it’s solved.

[I read thread.  The person is asking for a rollback feature in Ubuntu; he gives an example of being sysadmin at a company, added a new module, and networking stop working.]

Good.  This is good.  Solutions?

[I read more.  Someone has written "A sysadmin loads a module and doesn't test it and brings a whole company's network down?!  That sysadmin should be fired.]

Oh, ha ha.  So funny.  Fuckwad.  Could you answer the fucking question of whether I can roll back?

[My eyes see the words "module" and "modprobe".]

Oh, of course!  A kernel module!  That’s how it’s done in Linux!  Maybe a module became unloaded.  “lsmod”.  Damn, that’s a lot.  OK, “lsmod | sort | less”.  “ieee80211″.  Sounds promising.  Load it.  Restart networking.

[I restart.]

Failure.  Hmm.  Maybe the whole kernel got upgraded.  Maybe the module from the old kernel will work.

[I fuck around for a bit.  I see a bunch of wireless modules.  Maybe I can load them all, I think.  I start tinkering.]

STOP.  You’re messing with the kernel, using out-of-date modules.  You’re going to destroy the system.

But I can’t exactly roll back the kernel!

[Stares at me internally]

Oh.  Yeah.  Sure I can.  From lilo.  OK, reboot.  65W power adapter warning.  Shit!  I have two weeks to return it, right?  I really need to do that tomorrow.  Boot menu.  Bingo!  There’s the old kernel.

[I boot, try various tricks with the kernel.  No dice.]

OK, check online again.

Here’s where I stop writing the first night.

There is an awesome xkcd about perfect phrases:

While xkcd meshes really well with my sense of humor, I like to baffle people a bit more, so from Lost (S05E12) comes the perfect response to someone explaining his behavior:

Is [action] what Jacob wants?

• Ethanol dehydrogenase recipe:

  1) Lots of water

  2) Lots of B vitamins

  3) Cool wet towel on eyes

  4) Regret #

• I *would* help look for aliens or Mersenne primes, but I have no spare flops.  Sorry.  Aargh expensive video conversion. #
• #Apocalyptica turned #Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King" into a #heavymetal piece. Played by four #cellos. I love strange #music. #
• "#Computer #programmers are most productive when they’re supposed to be doing something else" http://bit.ly/3v6GjZ #

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I’ve been tutoring a high schooler in mathematics.  It’s pretty rewarding (watching his test scores jump from 65% to 93% has been pretty cool, for instance.)  His mother insists, over and over, that I give him “real world” applications of the math he’s learning.  I happen to believe that the math itself is cool and beautiful enough on its own, but, whatever, I can swing with that.

So he was being introduced to exponential decay (“So why is a power of e?”  “No good reason, actually, but it fits the points best.  Since decays aren’t time-sequenced in discrete jumps, it is modeled best as a continuous function.”)  So, aha, applications!  Chernobyl!

1986 … Ukraine … how a power reactor works … how criticality works … how operators try to plunge and remove cores so that they don’t get oscillations, which are modeled like this … criticality … radioactive chain reactions … decay byproducts … Strontium 90 … Calcium … incorporated into bone matricies … people with Strontium irradiation are having children now … geopolitics … Soviet Union … government secrecy and inter-state intervention … shit, I’m outside of the scope of math teaching, get back quick.

I think it helped.  So I do the couple-minute review at the end of which I concluded, poking fun at myself, “And now, if you see Chernobyl in your history book, you’ll know something about it.”

And he says, “Well, maybe.  1986: that’s, like, Nixon, right?”

I try to maintain a poker face while tutoring, but I said, “God, man!  Nixon was before I was born!”

“Well then …?”

“Reagan!”

“Oh.”

“What year were you born?!”

“1993.”

And I’m reminded that Niall will construct sentences that begin with phrases like “Back when Daddy and Nonna were little …”  And then I feel really, really, really old.

• Bravo!  #DidierDrogba has given GBP3M to build a hospital in Côte d'Ivoire. #Chelsea #soccer #football #
• Apparently "Rural people are evil, bloodthirsty, inhuman monsters" is a bona-fide #horror #film #genre. #Classism w00t! #
• RT @denyreligion: Jesus and Mo: harsh #atheism http://bit.ly/4D6QRN #
• It has been demanded that I stop saying "Then it MUST be true!" to personal accounts with small sample sizes. OK. Good to know. #
• #FF #FollowFriday @jordancdarwin @greenchangeorg @denyreligion @NYTimesKrugman @HomeDepot Follow Friday #
• I'm insulated from the 99.3% of Twitter users who can't tell the diff between "your" and "you're" Morons, you're bus is leaving #fakenumber #
• I'm seeing if a two-hours'-sleep night, last night, can reset me to #PST.  Worth a shot.  #insomnia #
• Hey, one gets to *name* an #iPod, at least in #Linux!  So I named mine "Tiny Awesome".  (Seemed like a good idea at the time.) #

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Gods, finally!

OK, so:

ffmpeg -i [filename] -f mp4 -vcodec mpeg4 -maxrate 1000k -b 700000 -qmin 3 -qmax 5 -bufsize 4096000 -g 300 -acodec aac -ab 192000 -s 320x240 -aspect 4:3 "[dir]/[filename].mov"

Or for a whole directory of files (let’s say they’re all avis):

ls *.avi | xargs -I{} ffmpeg -i '{}' -f mp4 -vcodec mpeg4 -maxrate 1000k -b 700000 -qmin 3 -qmax 5 -bufsize 4096000 -g 300 -acodec aac -ab 192000 -s 320x240 -aspect 4:3 '{}'.mov

[Don't use those.  USE THIS.  —JHM]

That *.avi?  Change that to whatever filemask you need.  So if you have a bunch of YouTube .flvs, you can substitute ls *.flv at the beginning.  Or, just make a file of the filenames you want, and cat them into xargs: cat [file.with.video.names] | xargs....

To transfer them to your iPod, the best bet is apt-get install gtkpod-aac.

And maybe I’ll add more — in excruciating detail, so that people-just-slightly-less-experienced-than-I can make great use of it.

• Do you know what would be nice?  Configurable #keyboardshorcuts for real life. #
• The flat surface on my dashboard gets too hot. I've come to terms with that by leaving things there to dehydrate (true). #
• Cheap #sherry is better than cheap a-lot-of-other-things.  #wine #
• "I want to see her face when she eats my pudding" is not a line one frequently has reason to say on TV. Even on #Fox. #fringe #
• Someone on #Fringe, playing a paramedic, says a character's blood pressure is "jumping to 180 over 20". I'm guessing the script said "120" #
• I'm guessing the the junior agent in #Fringe S02E01 will be a regular. She's one of those actors you see and think "Wow. 3σ into beautiful." #
• In another #JJAbrams teleportation conceit, apparently you can drive from Boston to Manhattan in 45 minutes. #Fringe #Alias #

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• Anyone else's scrolling on #Firefox suddenly break? I can't scroll with arrow keys, even with the page in-focus, and otherwise it's jittery. #
• Huh. On the #Firefox scrolling thing, it's in a #lynx-style mode where the arrow keys go from link to link. I imagine I did that. Switch? #
• "We've been bickering over strategy as long as #atheists have been a visible part of the culture" http://bit.ly/1CFDPV
  #atheism #
• I read a quip that began "In the words of Henry the Fourth, Part 2", and I've been trying to work that joke into conversation ever since. #
• My #cat is better at crashing my #Linux box than any #h4xor I've encountered in the last ten years. #Cats! http://bit.ly/16yZeH #
• I'm lazy enough that I wrote shell scripts called "bbcworld", "bbcnews", and "npr". I can't even bother to bring up a bookmarked stream. #
• Every time #SandiToksvig says "This week's News Quiz", I hear "This weak snooze quiz".  http://bit.ly/KgW96
    #TheNewsQuiz #
• Eventually I will come to terms with the fact that my #cat is the best black-hat cracker I've ever met and learn to close my laptop.  [sigh] #
• RT @BrentSpiner: RT @Tawnmaru @BrentSpiner I guess the only safe thing to talk about is the weather.–Now, about global warming… #
• OK, so, #Fox canceled #Dollhouse. Well, duh. They're *FOX*. Will that idiot never learn who appreciates the #Jossverse and who doesn't? #
• Now that they have none of my favorite shows any longer, I can pretend I would #BoycottFox all along. (Oh, wait, #Fringe — integrity w00t!) #
• You know that #HarrisonFord / #TomClancy movie movie in which Ford is racing to download files before they get deleted? No? OK, then: joke. #
• A Facebooker just entirely failed to get this: http://mcgees.org/2009/11/11/a-modest-execution-proposal/
    Either I'm not as clever as I thought or … something.  #deathpenalty #

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I’m putting a couple of posts into place for subjects that come up a lot, so that I can continue the chain without polluting the front page post feed but still maintain context for the subjects.  So, if you would like, you can subscribe to the RSS field for this post directly, and, also, you are welcome to contribute your own.

This one is “Dumb ideas that spring into my stream of consciousness.”

I’m putting a couple of posts into place for subjects that come up a lot, so that I can continue the chain without polluting the front page post feed but still maintain context for the subjects.  So, if you would like, you can subscribe to the RSS field for this post directly, and, also, you are welcome to contribute your own.

This one is “Plans I come up with late at night, in reply to which I think ‘Maybe going to sleep is a better idea.’”

John Allen Muhammed, the “Beltway Sniper”, was just executed by the state of Virginia by lethal injection.  The U.S. Supreme Court denied a last-minute appeal.  Many people think this was necessary to provide closure.  I think we haven’t done enough.

For one thing, the news reports I’ve read have said “his family’s reactions were not discussed”.  What the fuck?  His family?  Are we talking immediate family?  We let them live?  What kind of a country is this?  I don’t think they’re talking about kissing cousins, either.  This sounds like immediate fucking family.  As far as I’m concerned, we’re just getting started.

Next stop: he was born in New Orleans.  Now, yes, granted, the Bush administration did everything in its power to destroy the city already, but last time I checked, it’s still fucking there.  This means that potentially there are neighbors, schools — people instrumental in his very upbringing — who are still alive and kicking.

And don’t get me fucking started on the Muslim bit.  Islam is still legal after the rampage?  WTF?

Pinko Justice Stevens dissented from the majority opinion opposing a stay by noting that it is “perverse” to execute a criminal before his appeals process has concluded.  Appeals?!  You’ve got to be kidding me.  This guy gets appeals?!  He’s a fucking terrorist.

But it gets worse.  I’ve heard it proposed that we should have just chopped off the guy’s hands.  Nonsense.  Modern prostheses are awesome.  They have shoulder control.  I was listening to an amputee vet just tonight talk about them.  So they proposed chopping off his arms.  But as far as I’m concerned, he would still have his head, would he not?  And to the people who think we should have just cut off his head?  For fuck’s sake: the guy worked for Farrakahn.  You think a little head-chopping is going to stop him?

But –

[sigh.  deep breath.]

I can deal with these liberals.  I just needed a pause.  There are people — real people — supposed Americans — who thought that imprisoning him for life would have been effective.  “It would get him off the streets,” they argued with straight faces.  “He could never hurt anyone again.”  Blah blah blah unable to differentiate right from wrong blah blah blah human rights blah blah blah counter-productive in a realm where jihadists regularly make martyrs of suicide bombers.  And you thought not killing his family was bad.  Seriously: I know where some of these commies live.  Contact me by email.  We’ll sort this out.

I’d like to take a moment and defend Will Smith.  Will Smith is being pilloried on Twitter, largely due to an easily mockable video of Will Smith on Tavis Smiley’s program (previously).  I’ve joined in the mocking.  But the caption of the video is “Will Smith on Will Smith, Scientologist”, and I’d like to reflect on what it means to accuse someone of being a Scientologist in this country, as opposed to what it means to accuse someone of being a Christian.

According to advanced Scientology doctrine, “thetans” are spirits that have existed for 300 trillion years.  This is, of course, ludicrous.  The universe is only, roughly, 14 billion years old.  Scientology is off by four orders of magnitude.  But according to Christian tradition — and many Christians, especially in the United States — the universe is 6,000 years old.  This is off by six orders of magnitude.

Scientology teaches that the human mind is a thing of great power, capable of amazing things.  This is true, in that the human brain does measurably do things.  Not all the things that Scientology says it can do, to be sure, but stuff.  But in the Christian Bible (John 11) human bodies that have been buried for four days come back to health.  This can’t happen.

Scientology uses weird pseudo-technological boxes of wires, switches, and lights to aid in its teaching.  The boxes do nothing.  But some boxes of wires, switches, and lights do do things.  I’m typing on one right now.  But a device made by crossing two sticks?  That’s supposed to be, essentially, magic in Christianity, but most are too small to do anything but metaphorically beat things.

The Church of Scientology is a wealthy organization able to command great donations from its followers, and claims many adherents among celebrities.  But the wealth of this church absolutely pales in comparison with the wealth of the Roman Catholic Church, which claims not only many, many more Hollywood celebs, but actual lawmakers able to make decisions that affect my life and the life of my son.

A valid comment on Scientology, however, is that it is new.  As far as I can tell, this is the primary differentiating factor from Christianity.

Now, to you, the Christian reader (I know there are many): some of you will claim that of course you don’t believe in the magic part of Christianity.  Of course the universe is old, of course putrid bodies don’t come back to life, of course totems hold only placebo value.  And many will admit that the Christian churches wield a frightening and inappropriate amount of power in the world, and especially the U.S.  But, to get to the core point: Will Smith is not a Scientologist.  He’s a bit loony, to be sure, but what he actually says is “I just think a lot of the ideas in Scientology are brilliant and revolutionary and non-religious”.  And I’d like you to reflect — to reflect carefully — on how this is different from someone who discards the magic in Christianity and embraces it as a historically novel and revolutionary ethical framework.

Not a troll.  Please think.  And the next time you are writing a check to a multi-billion-dollar organization and supporting it in public: introspect.  And maybe cut the Scientologists a bit of slack.

• Look. I know my tweet volume is driving people away, but #xkcd is new to me, and I laughed for twenty seconds at this: http://bit.ly/4luOwu #
• Oh, hey, that's a great opening for a film! Violence against children! A girl, no less! In a small box filling with sludge! [sigh] #WalledIn #
• I've frequently thought that if I wanted to target only a sophisticated web user on the cheap with Google Adwords, I'd bid on Rot-13ed words #
• RT @DawnReneCano: "Thanx Cousin Joshua. I'm starting a "pretend" family. Anybody need a family member?" — Any McGees want to help her? #
• RT @algore: President Obama should go to Copenhagen http://bit.ly/Pjc5k #
• RT @NYTimesKrugman "There’s a persistent delusion … that we’re … having a rational political discussion" http://bit.ly/uYZdl #
• It's not Friday, but: @shitmydadsays #
• And I thought it was a good idea putting my bed next to my computer desk (true): http://xkcd.com/490/ Gah, xkcd has hover-captions! 450 in! #
• Sign I'm getting old: almost saying "So's your mom!" to a friend whose mom is dead. Moms just get fewer from here on out. #
• Can't confirm the accuracy of the translation from Arabic. I can confirm my nausea. http://bit.ly/4pTdmU
  #islam #feminism #domesticviolence #
• RT: @mwmicrobrews: Feel good about your number of followers?  Kimmy from Growing Pain has over 11,000 (@andreabarber).  How do you feel now? #
• According to #WillSmith, "2+2 is gonna be what I want it to be." Oh, and he wants to "represent magic". WTF? http://bit.ly/2PLMro #

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A story my dad told me about visit to an electronics store in the early 1990s just sprang into my head:

Electronics Store Employee:  … and some batteries [hands him a package].

My Dad:  Duracell?!

Electronics Store Employee:  Yes, they’re the best.

My Dad:  Really?!

Electronics Store Employee:  Yes.

My Dad:  But … but … the bunny!

Electronics Store Employee:  The … wait, what?

My Dad:  Are you saying the bunny lies?

Electronics Store Employee:  …

My Dad:  The bunny wouldn’t lie!