Entertainment, Food

Wouldn’t you like to be a Pepper too?

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Quick drink review, if only so I don’t go for more than a week and a half without a post….

Over the weekend I was at the mall and Dr. Pepper had a big booth giving out free cans of Diet Dr. Pepper and Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper. I’m a big fan of Diet Dr. Pepper, so I thought I’d give its new cousin a try.

I was a bit leery because I think Diet Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper has too many modifiers as part of its name. My fears were unfounded. Its a bit sweeter tasting then I’d like to have everyday but the cherry and vanilla flavors really compliment the taste of Dr. Pepper.

If you like Dr. Pepper, you’ll probably like this. If you don’t like Dr. Pepper, this isn’t going to make you like it.

Omphaloskepsis

Girlfriend in a coma, I know, I know – it’s serious

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Thanks to the whole Shivo mess, Sarah and I had a discussion about what we want. Eventually this will be written down in a living will.

For the record, if I cannot answer for myself, what my wife says goes. Not my parents, not anyone else, especially not the members of the circus known as the US Congress. She is in the best position to know what I want, and I trust her to rationally make the right decision.

I can’t imagine her making a decision my parents didn’t back her up on. However, if she does end up getting into a pissing contest with my parents, like the story that has our national media attention, she wins. It is her call.

Geek, Linux

Open the iPod bay doors, HAL

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As I’ve written about before I’ve written a .fdi file for my iPod for using with hald on FC3. My .fdi file fixes a few things that hald does by default. To find out more, just read that post!

Anyway, I just wanted to drop a note that I figured out last night how to specify any arbitrary mount option. I suppose it was possible all along, but last time I went down this trail, my brain was getting fried and thought only the mount options I saw in examples were possible. It turns out you can do any mount option as long as you specifiy it as a bool and set it true or false. You can also turn off default ones.

For some reason, for vfat filesystems, hald‘s default .fdis are set up to mount fat as UTF-8 by using the mount option of iocharset=utf8. This was causing some problems with gtkpod, so I wanted to remove that. Looking at some examples, I deceided to finally try specifing this in my iPod.fdi:

<merge key="volume.policy.mount_option.iocharset=utf8" type="bool">false</merge>

This worked, so I thought I’d try some other mount options I would have liked, but couldn’t figure out how to get going my last go around with the iPod.

<merge key="volume.policy.mount_option.shortname=win95" type="bool">true</merge>
<merge key="volume.policy.mount_option.noatime" type="bool">true</merge>

Those also worked. It looks like you can put anything after volume.policy.mount_option. as long as you specify the full option and set it to true.

If you want to recreate what I’ve done, take my .fdi from the previous post add the above lines to it for the second parition on the iPod and you two can get fstab-sync to create an fstab entry that looks like this:

/dev/sda2 /media/iPod vfat pamconsole,exec,noauto,noatime,shortname=win95,sync,managed 0 0
Entertainment

The only way to watch TV

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USA Today had an article titled Kill your TV — but keep your DVD player which talked about using Netflix to rent TV show seasons on DVD.

This isn’t news to me, as Sarah and I use our Netflix subscription for this all the time. There was one scary quote in there…

After Angel, I’ll dig in to cult ’60s show The Prisoner, the first two seasons of Alias…

After we finish the 3rd season of Smallville we’re moving onto the last season of Angel and next in the queue after that is The Prisoner. Although, we’re all up to date on Alias. With Netflix we finished up the last season of Buffy… and watched the first two seasons of Smallville.

Actually, it is a bit of a quandry, we haven’t figured out what show to dive into next. We’ve been kicking around ST:DS9 as we both stopped watching it before “it got good.” I’ve been also thinking about Stargate.

Any suggestions? Okay, smartasses. Any suggestions besides “stop watching tv?”

Entertainment, Geek

WWCSI

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As Wil Wheaton reminded us yesterday via his blog, tonight is the airing of the Wil Wheaton enhanced episode of CSI. I find I’m having a Reece’s Peanut Butter Cup moment where someone’s put one of my favorite blogs into one of my favorite tv shows, or one of my favorite tv shows into one of my favorite blogs.

I’ve been following Wil’s blog for quite awhile now and as cliche as this sounds, he comes across as a truly nice guy and a fellow geek that I could have some really good conversations with over Guinness with. While I’d be watching CSI anyway, I feel like a lame teenage girl due to my excitement that Wil will be on. Of course, this is all due to getting to know him via his internet ramblings. Without him sharing himself on the net, he’d be just another actor that I think I recognize as a guest on the show.

If nothing else, I hope this helps relauch Wil into a regular series of some sort. If only so he can be reinvited to either World Poker Tour’s Hollywood Home Game or Celebrity Poker Showdown to redeem himself after his recent WTPHHG appearence. Just kidding, mostly. Really, it’d just be great for a nice guy, who’s great with his family, to get something good now that he’s figured out who he is and what’s important to him.

General

Bad Kitty!

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Its never good when you’re tired and slipping into bed, stretching out your legs, and then you hit the cold wet spot left by a pool of cat urine. Its especially not good when the cat seems to be targeting you, but that is what Baby seems to be doing to Sarah. Having Dinah in the house must be ticking off Baby as he’s getting way less attention. To show his displeasure he’s will target Sarah’s side of the bed for a full-on bladder dump. Its never my side of the bed, its always Sarah’s. We think it might be the recent addition of baby gates to the house that ticked him off this time, as when we have them closed to keep Dinah in, the gates have the side-effect of keeping Baby out.

For months we’ve just been leaving our bedroom door closed when we’re not in it, to keep Baby from having the chance. Yesterday, I left the door open for a five minute window and Baby took his chance. Of course, we didn’t discover it until about 10:30 at night when we were going to bed, and by then it had soaked all the way down to the mattress.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time. Baby was the perfect cat (at least in regards to waste elimination) until he got a urinary tract infection in Dec. 2002. Now the UTI has become a yearly occurrence, and as a side effect it opened his eyes to the wonders of doing his business in inappropriate places.

Sarah is at wits end and we can’t figure out what to do. We’ve tried all sorts of techniques to stop him from peeing in all the wrong places, but there is always a point where we get complacent and forget to put the technique in place, or Baby just learns to ignore the deterrent. We’re also concerned because we have an infant crawling around and we’re uncomfortable with the thought that one day Dinah will come across a puddle we hadn’t yet identified.

Our options are starting to become limited and the options we are starting to be left with don’t make me comfortable, especially because of how much Dinah lights up when Baby comes into the room. Some of these options would be easier if he was old or infirm, but he’s neither. Its really quite depressing.

Coding, Geek, Windows, ____ of the day/week

Today’s computer hatred brought to you by INTERNAL COMPILER ERROR

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Generally, I really love working with computers. I can’t imagine what else I’d do as a profession if I wasn’t doing what I do. However, there are some bugs on some days that just piss me off so much I need a place to vent. Good thing I have a blog.

Anyway, it looks like if you’re trying to compile things on Windows XP SP2 using Visual C++ with pre-compiled headers turned on and your code is hosted on a network drive hosted by samba, you’ll cause:

fatal error C1001: INTERNAL COMPILER ERROR
(compiler file ‘f:\vs70builds\3077\vc\Compiler\Utc\src\P2\p2symtab.c’, line 1609)

http://lists.samba.org/archive/samba/2005-January/099421.html

This is probably one of those bugs that is half samba’s fault and half VC++’s fault. That being said, I also found a report that looked similar, but with win2k and offline files.

Keith's attempts to fix the cable of life