Plaidophile

Filesystem              512-blocks      Used     Avail Capacity  Mounted on
/dev/disk0s3             116948016  73926176  42509840    63%    /
/dev/disk3s3              58524928  54334736   4190192    93%    /Volumes/portabilly
/dev/disk1s3             489972528 244967272 245005256    50%    /Volumes/Media
/dev/disk6s3             585678096 215781584 369896512    37%    /Volumes/Backup

Total: 625561784KiB of storage, after formatting etc. 640GB (597GiB). 0.64TB (0.52TiB).

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I just finally caught the first episode of Doctor Who on the telly, and I must say it's bloody great. At first I thought it seemed too slick and overproduced like it was done by some MTV wanker, but then it started to get this great vibe which came across like the original show.

It would have been nice if they used more traditional effects rather than horrid CG, but on the other hand, horrid CG is the new latex puppets. There were also plenty of latex puppets anyway, so it's all good.

Random quick hack. Enjoy.

My subconscious has gone into game design mode again.

It turns out it wasn't the hard drive which died after all — it was the piece of shit CompUSA enclosure which was making the noise after all. (Though the drive itself may still be unreliable...)

I popped my old 250GB into the new MacAlly enclosure, and it's running like a dream — and totally silently.

This new enclosure is way the hell better than the CompUSA one, and also about half the cost (since it's only FireWire, not USB+FireWire, which is okay because FW is all I need).

So, right now my primary task at work is to get MIDI-based music and sound effects assembled for the game, which will Really Be Done by Tuesday (we hope, since that's a deadline our publisher is trying to hold us to in order to get some more Egregious Stuff added in).

So, I brought my new Oxygen8 and a copy of Logic Hit Kit in.

So, my new hard drive arrived today, though the new second enclosure (which was shipped separately from a different NewEgg distributor) didn't. Of course, as soon as I got home the first thing I did was plug the drive in... and it just made the same weird noises as the dead 250GB.

So I listened close to find out where the noises were coming from and actually it seems to be coming from one of the capacitors on the enclosure's controller board! So maybe my mp3 collection is still intact!

• Logic is a lot of fun
• The only reason I'm not playing with Logic 24/7 is because I'm playing Star Control 2 instead
• I finally ordered another hard drive to replace the dead 250GB. New Egg is selling 300GB 5400RPM Maxtors (with 5-year warranty, even)! So I ordered one of those, a second external enclosure, and also a 7-port USB2 hub while I was at it since my current hub situation is just getting stupid (I have one USB2 hub and one 4-port passive USB1 hub and way too many devices so they're always getting overloaded). So anyway, for now I'll probably just keep on using a single-drive setup and then use the 7200RPM 250GB Maxtor as an occasional backup drive (rather than run it 24/7).

Hey Jason, I think you have some spyware on your computer. Every time you load my "job stuff" category page, my webhost gets hammered with hits to the archive page which list the "job stuff" page as a referrer, when there's no actual hits to said page from that page (and anyway, generating about 300 hits to the identical page in the course of 4 seconds is just a wee bit odd). You might want to run Ad-Aware or something.

Just busy and not feeling particularly chatty.

Mac-using musicians might be interested to know that Apple now has a free trial available of Logic Express... fully-functional, just limited to 30 days.

After playing with it for a couple hours, I can now say that yes, I do actually want to spend money for Logic 7; previously I was just going to warez it in order to see if I liked it or not. Apple is definitely doing The Right Thing here.

Even with my third-party links set rel="nofollow" and with my anti-spammer stuff turned on anyway, a couple of spams (which appear to have been hand-posted) were waiting here for me when I groggily got up to take my erythromycin. Cleaning them up was easy but now I guess I need to raise the bar a bit. Hopefully that doesn't mean disabling anonymous commenting just yet, since I do occasionally get good valuable anonymous comments which I wouldn't get if they had to register first.

Last night, my downstairs neighbors were practicing their music again. This time they started at 10:30 PM. At 12:30 AM while doped up again I called the police's non-emergency number. They took down the information and gave me a case number and the impression that they really cared but not enough to divert police from things like murders and drug deals and jaywalkers to politely ask my downstairs neighbors to not be such bloody cunts. The music continued until well after the diphenhydramine and fatigue overwhelmed my consciousness.

Hey, uh, there is something really weird with your proxy server at work, which is doing some Wonky Stuff which results in a bunch of index.php processes remaining open in write-blocked states whenever you load my weblog, which in turn sometimes acts as a denial-of-service on my weblog (since the DB connections stay open). It's also doing some really weird stuff to the HTTP referrer headers as well.

Yours is the only thing doing this, and I have no idea what's causing it but I'd like to know so that I can fix it on my end if possible. Feel free to contact me privately or whatever.

Thanks.

So, since I've had this cold/sinus infection/bronchitis/blah stuff going on, I've lately been taking a Sudafed Nighttime before going to bed, which makes for a rather interesting experience. It's basically a sleeping pill with pseudoephedrine (which is a bit of a stimulant which I sometimes take to get high even when I don't need a decongestant).

The thing is that, well, I don't know if this is normal, but when it starts to kick in, I get hypnagogic hallucinations, only without the sleep-paralysis precursors. So it's like I'm dreaming while I'm really awake, and not just in a half-awake state.

Told in the third person.

3/9 Some minor edits, and fixed some dialog where the original speaker told me the exact words he used.

So, this morning I was feeling sick. Like, really sick, from yet another stupid sinus infection-come-bronchitis. So I went to work, like the capitalist pigdog that I am, and got very little done. I called my doctor's office and asked about making an appointment; as usual, the answer was, "We're really busy today but we can try to squeeze you in, so come in sometime this afternoon."

So, I was going to go to CompUSA because today is the last day of a sale where for $60 you can get a 160GB Hitachi hard drive and a (fan-cooled) USB2 enclosure for it. But the L train is out of service, so the only way I can get to Manhattan is the M, which doesn't run very often on the weekends.

But you'd think that since twice as many people would be needing the M today, that they'd run the M twice as often. But of course you'd only think that if you haven't lived here for 8 months.

So, tonight I was watching an episode of CSI:NY (I'm not a regular viewer, I just wanted to see what it was about) entitled The Fall. CSI isn't that good, really, but it held my attention at least.

In one scene, there was a bit part from a guy who looked really familiar, but I couldn't place his name or where I'd seen him before.

As I got on the elevator this morning, the other occupant asked me, "Which floor?"

"9," I said, noticing that she had already pressed it for herself, marking her as a Gameloft employee. "Everyone works on the 9th floor," I joked.

She laughed.

I dreamt that due to FTC intervention, the laundromat started to let people into the secret place in back where all of the missing socks/underwear/shirts/relatives/etc. went. It was a huge, serpentine conveyor belt which went on forever in all directions, slowly but deliberately carrying a six-foot-deep pile of missing laundry. I was able to find a few of my missing pairs of socks pretty quickly. Strangely, everyone could tell what was theirs, and the honor system worked pretty well.

I also found some of my underwear, but I decided it'd be better to be safe than sorry and left it behind.

I was going to buy a 300GB drive at CompUSA tonight so I could get started sooner rather than later, but then I realized that was kind of dumb, and it's not like I need my media drive up and running Right Away or anything. (If I want to listen to music there's always mp3 streams or whatever.)

So, some various random deals...

Just did my taxes. I got a pretty nice refund; $1614 between federal, New York, and New Mexico. I used TurboTax Online even though Intuit is evil, because it saved me a hell of a lot of hassle and so it was worth the $45 ($20 for federal, $25 for NYC, with eFile for both, though the NYC one was kind of a ripoff).

This morning, my 250GB media drive ceased to function while I was syncing my iPod. I immediately put it into a zip-lock bag and put that into the freezer and I'm going to buy another drive at lunchtime today, but if the cold storage trick doesn't work, that means I've just lost 50GB of music of which a lot is irreplaceable (SongFight Live and CoverFight and lots of Internet bands who have since disappeared — just last night I was thinking about how it's impossible to find Narbotic's stuff again) and a whole bunch of video which will be hard (and probably not worth it) to recover.

I also lost basically all of my old music master files, but copies still exist (though not in places they'll be easy to get to).