Plaidophile

Well, BIND is okay, but its library fucking sucks, when it comes to DDNS updates. Ever heard of documentation, guys?

Yeah, the new iTunes features are pretty neat. But what's neater is this. (Link requires iTunes to work.)

God damnit, doesn't ANYONE have ANY useful documentation for res_mkupdrec?!

And no, neither the manpage nor the source to nsupdate counts as "useful."

So, what's going on with the other important people in my life?

Okay, does he want a working quick hack or does he want a cumbersome crappy roundabout "proper" solution, or what?

Guh. I really hate writing Asterisk module code.

4/27 My hatred has now evolved into a deep loathing. Just FYI.

Today I got my old factory radio out of storage, and decided to try hacking line input functionality into it. It was pretty easy, due to the way the CD player is setup.

I just noticed that Renku Corporation has made another (free) release, Condenser. Go forth and leech abstract electronica goodness!

Oh, and the iPod is great, though it's kind of forced me to go through and finally put proper genre tags on my stuff since that's the only way to actually tunnel through my massive collection on it! Thankfully, iTunes smart playlists make this very easy.

Okay, so like, my iPod was supposed to be delivered yesterday, but it was delayed coming from the FedEx facility in Denver. So I figured it wouldn't arrive until Monday.

But no, they went ahead and delivered it today anyway!

I ♥ FedEx!

'coz it looks like I'm gonna be at it a while longer.

Back when inTune was still around, I posted a review of the Panasonic CQ-DP171u. In the review I made a mention of how the CD changer input was in two parts, the actual audio input and the controller port.

Tonight I decided to finally see if I could trick the player into giving me a bare aux input, for the iPod.

(Short answer: No I couldn't.)

Someone just showed up at work saying he had a 10:00 appointment with John for a job interview — for some short-term Dreamweaver work.

I mean, hello?! Experienced web developer sitting here being paid $25/hour already?

I know this is total geek sacrilege, but I'm converting (yes, transcoding!) my oggs to mp3. But so far it's okay.

Is it just me, or are the various "you need to change foo to bar" stuff on the C++ section of the gcc 3.4 changelist things which a sane programmer would never, ever do to begin with?

Apple's new 1.33GHz Powerbook line is, in every way, shape, and form (aside from storage), at least on-par (and in some cases vastly superior) to my disused Linux graphics workstation, which is still a pretty beefy system.

Now I'm really glad I didn't buy a laptop when I was in Oregon, 'coz the new systems are 33% faster than the old ones, have much better graphics chips, and have 802.11g standard (it used to be a $100 addon), and still cost the same.

When I was in Portland, terpia took me out to lunch at Benihana. For those who don't know, it's a "theme" restaurant chain which is an attempt at simulating a Japanese hibachi restaurant (where the chef prepares your food right on the table, with a little culinary acrobatics). The thing about Beni Hana is that most of the chefs aren't actually Japanese (ours was named Felipe), but they squint their eyes and speak in an extremely-forced accent right out of a 1950s sitcom; I'd imagine that any actual Japanese patrons would end up leaving totally offended.

That said, the food is pretty good.

But it gave me an idea for a theme restaurant chain to start in Japan, called "Guy Gene's."

Everyone's just so laid-back there. And everything's so close together without being confusing or sprawly. I really hope I get an offer with Intel.

but um, okay, I just noticed a huge internal inconsistency in Bush's statements on gay marriage. (Big shocker.)

From WorldNetDaily:

The move prompted President Bush in his Jan. 20 State of the Union address to voice his support for a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, decrying "activist judges" who have begun "redefining marriage by court order, without regard for the will of the people and their elected representatives."

I don't know how it is in California, but at least in New Mexico, judges are elected representatives. Doesn't that "activist judge" therefore have the same representation of the will of the people?

Today I did the following:

• Went to the Apple store, and discovered that the online store has much better deals on refurbished iPods than the physical stores
• Wandered around the mall for a while
• Met up with terpia, who took me out to lunch, and then he took me and his roommate out to see Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind which is Jim Carey being surprisingly unlike Jim Carey
• Went back to terpia's house and watched Minority Report
• Went back to the hotel, discovered that almost all of the restaurants downtown close at 7 PM on Saturdays, and ate at the hotel's restaurant (which is actually quite good, though it was crowded since it was the only restaurant open!)

This worked on whatever stupid MSN-advertising thing they're using at the hotel I'm staying at in Portland.

1. Make an unhandled URI request, such as to file://c|. This causes the browser shell to crash back to the desktop.
2. The "secured" user runs a scheduled task which checks to see if the shell is still running, and if not, it reboots the computer. So, you have about a minute to go to the control panel and create a new user (which is easy since this "secured" user is set as an administrator).
3. When the computer reboots, just after it auto-logins the "secured" user but before it starts up the shell, do a user switch over to the new user account. (This way the shell is still running but can't take over the screen.)
4. Feel good knowing that you've helped yourself and the other guests to actually have a decent web-browsing experience (as well as the ablity to check your non-webmail email; I mean, come on, not everyone uses Hotmail!)

Free Internet access from the 'business center.' Woo!

Anyway. Intel has put me in an exceedingly swanky hotel downtown, which is so swanky that the only parking is valet service. They sure better be paying for that.

My interviews at Sandia today went well. Of the 6 groups I interviewed at, I liked 4 of them, and of my top 3, I'm positive that one is hiring and pretty sure about another one. (Sandia makes you guess which one(s) actually have the jobs. It's dumb.)

Tomorrow I head to Portland for interviews at Intel. Yay me. Be good while I'm gone. (Remember, I know SQL, and I'm not afraid to use it.)

Dear user at ,

I love you.

Your lucky numbers are currently 38, 103, 63, and 59.

dibs on your stuff

<John> Well, you know, that's why I never register to vote. When I lived out in California, I got jury duty all the freaking time.

My trusty, old (1999-vintage) G4/450 is starting to develop some stability issues. (I think that aftermarket Radeon I installed is overheating. Unfortunately, the original Rage 128 is in storage.)

Smalldog has some amazing (but still too much for me right now) deals on Apple laptops.

Argh.

Never mind, it was just delayed in processing, probably because of Good Friday. I've been paid now.

It'll be pretty hard to know how to get in touch with you when I'm in Portland if I don't have an email address with which to exchange phone numbers with you by. And since I'll probably be totally Internetless while I'm there, I'd rather get the contact information sooner, rather than later...

Send me an email, or register for my forum and send a private message, or something. :)

Love,
fluffy

While hearing yet another Easter-related ad for a church on the radio just now, I noticed yet another double standard held by religious groups.

Whenever scientists make some mention to a general audience about evolution or anything else which contradicts the Bible, they have to qualify it with tons of statements like "Scientists believe that" or similar.

However, whenever a religious organization says something about how Jesus rose from the grave 2000 years ago without any sort of qualifying statements and otherwise phrased as a statement of hard fact, it's okay.

So, on very rare occasion, my T610 was having a rather weird issue where three of the buttons would stop responding for about 15 minutes. Of course, they were the three which were absolutely vital to the phone's operation.

The workplace has gone back to being neutral, at least. And it looks like I'm almost finished with the project I was hired to do anyway, so maybe the 40% of next week that I'm working will be the end of it.

Or, if it goes really well, I'll be able to give John my two weeks' notice sometime during the week of the 19th. (Considering how much I got done during the two and a half weeks I've worked for him, I think two weeks of notice is beyond plenty considering I was originally just hired on spec anyway.)

Over the weekend, this job went from being the most fun I've had to being yet another Dr. Cecil situation. So, I am desparately looking forward to my interviews next week.

I picked up a Micro Advantage CD-RW drive for my Mac, for $20 at Office Max (after $30 rebate). Of course, since Apple never certified this drive for use with OSX, OSX complains that it's "not supported" (meaning, we won't even try to make it work even though it uses the standard ATA command set, because we don't want to deal with tech support for aftermarket stuff).

Fortunately, PatchBurn II made short work of this.

This morning I got an email, scheduling an all-day interview at Sandia Labs next Wednesday.

This afternoon I got an email, scheduling me being flown out next Thursday to Portland, Oregon for an interview with Intel.

Whoa.

Today while picking up some stuff from my storage unit, I saw a guy walking down the sidewalk with an ivory-white crucifix resting on his shoulder.

The impact of him suffering for whatever he was railing against was severely lessened by the big training wheels at the bottom.

I got the following:

• Lots of work done
• More job prospects for permanent work
• A huge raise on my contract
• Warm fuzzies
• A gig bag and tuner for my guitar

I hacked up some of my old computer speakers to turn them into a cheezy preamp, so I could boost the output level of my electric guitar to something which the filters in the SIDstation could deal with.

But, damn is it noisy. And it turns out that the SIDstation's filters aren't really good for anything guitar-processing-wise anyway. Bleh.

I just realized that the theme to "Inspector Gadget" is extremely similar to "In the Hall of the Mountain King."