Category: Stream of Consciousness

Hosiery: The Re-Brokening

2012-11-14, 11:26 pm
Categories: Stream of Consciousness, Tech

Welp, broke my computer again, sort of.

See, I've confirmed that the instability I've been experiencing with the ol' OSX boot is definitely due to booting it from GRUB; it works fine from EFI.

So I decided I'd give Chameleon another shot -- maybe another bootloader would be more stable? Worth a try, right?

'Cept I can't get Chameleon to work this time, and it fucked GRUB up so it won't boot anymore either. (Edit to add: Apparently an MBR disk can't have more than one bootable partition? Guess it's been awhile since I took that A+ test. So okay, it's easy enough to get GRUB working again, but it doesn't help me get Chameleon working.)

The good news is that Chameleon boots just fine from CD, so I can still boot OpenSUSE that way.

The bad news is that, for some damn reason, holding down "C" to boot from CD doesn't work anymore on my Mac, so I've had to stick the damn helper card back in to access the boot menu by holding down Option when I power up.

(The other bad news is that AVG Free decided to flag fucking rundll32.exe as a virus and delete it, but Win8 must have restored it automatically because it worked okay on a reboot. But that's all the Win8 I did today.)

Anyway. Hoping I can get this damn mess fixed tomorrow. Because I've got better shit to do than keep fucking around with bootloaders.

Pants

2012-11-13, 3:58 pm
Categories: Stream of Consciousness

So I bought a house.

Which you generally don't do right after being laid off, but I worked out an arrangement with my family.

Anyway. Among other things, it's an incentive to start getting rid of my crap.

I haven't unloaded any of my 1990's X-Men or Spider-Man comics yet, and I still need to mail those surplus Thundercats toys I said I'd give away a year ago. But today, it's pants.

I've mentioned before that I've lost a lot of weight over the past couple of years. I've had a 36" waist since junior high and I've recently dropped to 32. I've continued to wear comically oversized clown pants, partly out of concern that I'd gain the weight back and need them again, and partly because I hate shopping for clothes and have only gotten around to buying new pants a few at a time here and there.

Well, I've finally amassed enough pants that actually fit me to get rid of most of the 36's, so I spent this afternoon doing my best impression of Jared from the Subway commercials and determining which pants fall right off my waist and throwing them in some bags to donate.

Made plenty of space in my closet. Which is good, because my new closet is going to be much much smaller.

Buggy Messes

2012-11-12, 7:37 pm
Categories: Stream of Consciousness, Tech

I had some harsh words yesterday for the EaseUS software for Mac. Mainly, it constantly locked up and didn't do much of anything.

I'm not quite ready to let EaseUS off the hook just yet, but I'm seeing that same behavior in a lot of programs now. At this point I'm pretty confident that, in setting my Mac up to run like a Hackintosh, I have wound up with a system that has all the stability and reliability of a Hackintosh.

Regrettably, I'm having much the same problem with MIUI, which I installed on my phone the other day (as something to do while I waited for diags to run on my Windows 8 drive). It's slow and it crashes like a motherfucker. I really think the monthly release cycle is a pretty poor idea; what we've got is bleeding-edge code (in this case Jelly Bean running on a phone that was never meant to support it) instead of stable code.

Which is a pity because there's really a lot to love about MIUI. For starters, it's the most paranoid OS I've ever seen -- its security settings are granular as hell; it doesn't just tell you what data your program is going to have access to at install time, it defaults to warning you at access time, too -- and giving you the opportunity to refuse.

Trust the Chinese to be thorough about who's listening in on them.

It also comes with a lot of mostly-pretty-useful programs out of the box.

Except that weather program. The one that thinks I live in some place called Temperanceville (and that's not autocomplete on me typing in "Tempe", that's the location it automatically set itself to), consistently tells me I have no network connection even though I have a network connection, and can't be uninstalled. I don't like that one very much.

So I don't think I'll be sticking with MIUI. I guess the question is whether I should just restore CyanogenMod 7 from backup, or try some other ROM.

Decisions, decisions...

TestDisk

2012-11-11, 3:26 pm
Categories: Stream of Consciousness, Tech

I guess I was overdue for doing something monumentally stupid and sloppy, because Friday night I went to format an external 1TB hard drive and accidentally formatted my internal one instead -- the one with Windows on it.

Now, after a moment's panic, I realized that I didn't have anything vital and irreplaceable on there -- I had backups of my resume, my password wallet, things like that. I hadn't backed up my financial spreadsheets or work search log in a couple weeks, but I could reconstruct those if I absolutely had to from my bank statements and E-Mails. And I had a Mass Effect 2 save that was maybe an hour farther along than my backup.

So, nothing life-or-death. But I'd still just as soon not have to take the time to reinstall Win7, reinstall Win8, reconstruct my spreadsheets, and replay that last hour of ME2 if I could avoid it. And I knew it was just a quick format, so my data should all still be intact on the drive -- it was just a matter of getting to it.

I was booted to OSX at the time, and the first piece of recovery software I found was EaseUS. It was a free trial for a $90 piece of software. Now, I knew going in that there was no way my lost data was worth $90 to me, but I figured I'd see how far I'd get with it.

Not fucking very.

You'd think a trial for a $90 piece of software would be designed to make you think the software was worth $90. Instead the fucker just kept hanging -- I might, might get as far as it displaying all my disks and partitions, but after that (or, just as frequently, before that) it would just lock up, static unresponsive window, Spinning Beach Ball of Death, all that shit.

So then I stumbled upon TestDisk. I missed the part where it said there was an OSX version, so I rebooted to Linux to see if I could install it.

And found that my OpenSUSE boot had somehow become hosed too. (I would later find out that this was not a coincidence and that OpenSUSE actually goes into Emergency Boot Mode if it fails to load a filesystem in its fstab. I did not consider this at the time because (1) I was very tired and (2) Linux failing to boot because it can't mount a Windows drive is the stupidest fucking thing I have ever heard.)

But fortunately I still have my old Kubuntu drive onhand, and it was not only able to boot, but it already had TestDisk installed, with no worrying about having to fuck with repos. I think it may even be part of the basic Ubuntu installation.

Now, there's a lovely step-by-step guide at the TestDisk site called Recovery of Reformatted Partition.

The bad news: I spent yesterday trying to recover the drive and never did get it to work, and I'm finally giving up the ghost because it's just not worth fucking with it any longer. But I figured I'd put this up here just in case you have better luck with it than I did. I had a hard time, in my initial search, finding a good listing of Linux software to use to try and recover an NTFS partition that has accidentally been reformatted. Maybe somebody will stumble across this page in a similar search someday, and find TestDisk as a result.

Again, it didn't work for me -- but it looks like a solid piece of software, and it's worth a shot. (Unlike EaseUS, which is a piece of crap you should not waste your time with.) Good luck.

Tron Lives

2012-11-09, 9:35 pm
Categories: Cartoons, Stream of Consciousness

Tron: Uprising is like an amalgamation of all my favorite cartoons from the 1990's.

Like Batman Beyond, it's the story of a familiar character, a shadow of his former self but still formidable, training a brash young successor.

Like Sonic the Hedgehog, it's the story of a small group of rebels waging an asymmetric war against a ubiquitous technocratic dictatorship.

And like Beast Wars, it uses the fact that its characters aren't actually human as an end run around standards and practices in order to be the most violent children's cartoon on television.

Seriously, it turns out that if you change "kill" to "de-res" and change blood to little blue cubes, you can show a dude with half his face cut off and the outline of an eyelid still blinking over an empty eyesocket. Game of Thrones wasn't that graphic when Tyrion took an axe to the face.

Also: Fred Tatasciore's impression of Jeff Bridges is uncanny.

Anyway, in case you haven't caught the show yet, here's the first episode (which thetvdb classifies as a "special" instead of the first episode, thus offsetting the numbering of every single episode by one -- so thanks for that, thetvdb). It's hosted on the official Disney XD channel, so that means it's not liable to be taken down any time soon, but also means it's probably region-locked -- sorry 'bout that.

Routine

2012-11-08, 7:32 pm
Categories: Stream of Consciousness, Work

If there's one thing unemployment does, it's fuck with your routine.

When I was working it was pretty well set -- get up at 6 AM, shower, pour coffee and water, grab a frozen lunch and a breakfast bar, go to work for eight hours, come home, work out.

In theory, my current schedule should be something like get up at 8 AM, pour coffee, look for work, eat breakfast, shower, look for work some more, work out. But as you might expect, the order of these things tends to vary a bit.

Slept until 10 this morning, then looked for work until about noon. Then, as I was cooking breakfast, I got a call from my agency; they told me I didn't get the last job but there's a new one open -- a new one that requires a whole lot of paperwork.

So then I spent maybe 3 hours putting together my college transcript and letters of recommendation and filling out a buggy-ass PDF form that doesn't show text in half the fields after it's entered.

Then I worked out.

And only then -- around 4 PM -- did I finally get to shower.

I don't want to make a habit of that. Thing is, I'm not likely to make a habit of much of anything -- every day is different, and it's impossible to maintain a consistent schedule the way I did when I had a set place to be for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week.

Tomorrow? Who knows.

More Parallel-Universe Politics

2012-11-07, 10:36 am
Categories: Politics, Stream of Consciousness

You know, I got to thinking last night.

If John McCain had been elected in '08, Jan Brewer would never have become governor. SB1070 would have been vetoed.

And a McCain Justice Department sure as hell would not have dropped an investigation into Joe Arpaio right before the damn 2012 election.

I'm beginning to see why candidates almost always win their home states: sure, I still think McCain would have been a terrible choice for the country...but I'm beginning to think Arizona really would have been in much better shape if he were President.

Then again, Russell Pearce would probably still be Senate President. So there's that.

Hey Karl Rove?

2012-11-06, 9:41 pm
Categories: Politics, Stream of Consciousness

My brother asked me the other night if I was voting for Goldman or Sachs.

That is largely how I feel about this race and about Obama. (I wound up going Stein, BTW.) But on the whole he's the lesser evil, and this is a victory for a number of reasons -- gay rights, taxation, healthcare, and, perhaps most importantly:

A big Fuck You to Karl Rove, Shel Adelson, Citizens United, SuperPACs, and all the plutocrats' best efforts to buy this election.

Sure, tomorrow we're back to gridlock, drone strikes, warrantless domestic surveillance, mass unemployment, high gas prices, impending sequestration, and a vanishing middle class. But tonight? Maybe I'll sleep a little bit better than those fatcats.

And then go back to looking for work while they count their money. But hey, I'll take what I can get.

Provisional

2012-11-06, 5:55 pm
Categories: Politics, Stream of Consciousness

Watching election coverage. Appears that a truly ridiculous number of voters are being asked to fill out provisional ballots -- very close to 1:1 in may precincts, and some locations are even reporting twice as many provisional ballots as regular.

Hispanics are disproportionately affected -- quelle surprise.

This state, man...

I don't think we'll know the outcome of the Arpaio/Penzone race tonight. And probably not a number of others, either.

Why KDE?

2012-11-02, 10:01 am
Categories: Stream of Consciousness, Tech

I just switched from Kubuntu to OpenSUSE. I plan on writing a bit about my experience, but it occurs to me -- people may wonder why I went with OpenSUSE.

Well, the answer is because I've seen various reviews saying OpenSUSE is the best KDE-based distro -- so the question then becomes Why KDE?

I've preferred KDE over GNOME since about the KDE 2.x/GNOME 1.x era. And I think the bottom line is customizability.

I never much liked the look-and-feel of GNOME, not even in 2.x. The Apple-style system bar across the top of the screen without the Apple-style integrated menubar -- that's just wasted space.

But it could be worse. It could be GNOME 3.

Image: Wasted Space in GNOME 3

I liked KDE3 better than 4, but 4 got to the point of being passable. Even if it's still missing basic functionality like being able to right-click on a launcher to change its shortcut settings. In fact the whole "Show a Launcher When Not Running" feature (an overly-verbose version of MacOS's "Keep in Dock" and Windows 7's "Pin to Taskbar") is pretty damn broken -- I can't get it to work at all with LibreOffice. (Well, I mean, I can get it to show a launcher. Just not one that works.)

So okay. It's pretty far from ideal. But XFCE and LXDE aren't exactly rolling in GUI-based configuration options, and the simpler WM's are worse still. So KDE it is, for now.