Category: Stream of Consciousness

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.

Halloween

2012-10-31, 5:20 pm
Categories: Comics, Stream of Consciousness, TV

Just not feelin' it like I used to -- s'pose I'll put on my Axe Cop costume and hand out candy to trick-or-treaters but frankly that sounds like kind of a boring evening. Even with Buffy and Twilight Zone and appropriately Halloweeny things on Netflix.

Nice day, though. Biked downtown, got comics -- including Zip-A-Tone TMNT! -- and then dropped the bike at the shop for a tuneup and got a ride home.

Damn sight better than last Halloween, anyway.

Heart of Frankenstein

2012-10-30, 10:43 pm
Categories: Movies, Stream of Consciousness

Watched Young Frankenstein tonight -- it's that time of year.

Certainly one of Mel Brooks's all-time greats. And certainly there's plenty of pure spoof and slapstick, with corny jokes and wonderfully, gorgeously over-the-top performances from its impeccable cast.

But there's something in there that keeps it from being the straight-up trifle that, say, Spaceballs is (and I like Spaceballs). It doesn't have the social satire of Blazing Saddles, but it does have heart.

It's not just that it's a love letter to the original Frankenstein films (and the whole Universal Monsters line), though it's certainly that, too. It's that it's a story about family, about fathers and sons. For all that Frederick tut-tuts that it's Fronkensteen and his grandfather's work was doo-doo!, he's already followed in his footsteps to become a neurosurgeon and the very first thing he does in Castle Frankenstein is ask where his private library is. He's well on his way to taking over the family business before he ever chants "Destiny! Destiny! No escaping that for me!"

And of course, crucially, the difference between Frederick and Victor is that Frederick shows love to his creation -- even risking his own life, as the Monster points out in the climax. Because as anyone who's read Frankenstein can tell you, Frankenstein's crime isn't in creating the monster, it's in abandoning it. Mel Brooks carries that sentiment to its logical conclusion and gives us a Frankenstein who is a good father -- and so instead of the standard Tragic Ending where Everybody Dies, we get the standard Comic Ending where Everybody Gets Hitched.

Plus I doubt it's a coincidence that Wilder and Brooks wrote it around the time the former was raising a daughter and the latter fathered a son.

Triple-Booting a Mac Pro: Legacy Edition

2012-10-29, 8:17 pm
Categories: Stream of Consciousness, Tech

Well, it's been a pretty exasperating few days, but I've successfully gotten my old (2006/1,1) Mac Pro set up to triple boot Lion (with a 64-bit kernel), OpenSUSE 12.2, and the Windows 8 Release Preview.

First, I set up Lion. I followed Jabbawok's Mountain Lion guide exactly, with one exception: since I was installing Regular Lion and not Mountain Lion, I didn't need to alter OSInstall.mpkg to skip the motherboard check. (As far as drive bays: I put the installer hard drive in bay 1 and the Lion drive in bay 2.)

After this I found that I could only get the 64-bit kernel if I used Chameleon's flag for Safe Mode (-x). Otherwise I got a blank gray screen on my helper card and a white screen with a frozen mouse pointer on my main card. This fixed itself once I yanked the helper card -- but I'll get to that in a minute. If you've got a helper card and you're following this guide, don't remove it until you've got all 3 OS's installed and get a nice clean GRUB menu when you boot. (Or a stupid-looking light-gray-on-bright-green GRUB menu, as the case may be.)

Anyway, after setting up Lion, I set up Boot Camp and tried to install Win8 (on a drive in Bay 3). I got the ol' "Select CD-ROM Boot Type" prompt where everything froze and failed to recognize any input.

I'd dealt with this years ago when I first set up Windows 7; I had to bootstrap my install disc. I decided I would just as soon not fuck with that procedure ever again, so instead of bootstrapping Win8, I used my already-bootstrapped Win7 disc to install Win7 and then upgraded to the Win8 preview from there.

And then I installed OpenSUSE (over the Lion installer partition in bay 1).

The OpenSUSE install DVD gave me the same "Select CD-ROM Boot Type" prompt freeze, so I tried the OpenSUSE KDE LiveCD -- that one worked just fine.

And after I'd installed OpenSUSE, I found that my computer had set itself up to automatically boot straight to the GRUB boot prompt. And, better still -- it had correctly set up Windows and both 32- and 64-bit kernel boots for OSX. Chameleon was totally redundant and unnecessary by this point.

The trouble? GRUB had the same problem Chameleon had: OSX would lock on boot unless I ran it in safe mode.

So that's when I popped out the helper card.

(Don't know what a helper card is? Then you don't need to know about it. But the gist is this: my Mac Pro came with a GeForce 7300GT graphics card. Last year I upgraded to a GTX 570. While current versions of OSX do recognize the GTX 570, the EFI boot firmware does not -- so I needed to leave the 7300GT plugged in to see the boot menu.)

Once I popped the 7300GT, everything worked great -- the GRUB menu came up, and booted any of the 3 OS's without any trouble. Success!

Or at least, success until earlier today when something got fucked up and broke everything and I spent my entire day trying to fix it. Ultimately it appears to have been a weird fluke -- I think my partition table got corrupted somehow, because I found that even a format/reinstall didn't fix the problem; I had to actually repartition (the Chameleon/OpenSUSE drive) to get it working again.

So that sucked. And is the second time in two days I found myself chasing down help pages for the last line of a boot log only to find it had nothing whatsoever to do with the actual problem I was having. What a damn bummer.

The upshot, though, is that I've got a 64-bit kernel working in OSX, which should let me set up the RAIDZ array I wanted to put together for my grandmother's home movies.

And last night I played Mass Effect 2 for an hour or so without getting a BSOD. Could be just a coincidence, but I'm hoping that removing the helper card and booting from GRUB instead of EFI fixed the constant crashes I'd been having before.

Next I'll try it under WINE -- maybe I won't have to reboot to Windows at all anymore.

As for how I feel about Macs, Windows 8, and OpenSUSE...well, those are all ripe topics for another day.

Reinstallating

2012-10-27, 8:27 pm
Categories: Stream of Consciousness, Tech

Decided that, now that I've got more free time, I may as well give my computer a clean install of everything.

For OSX: Attempting to install Chameleon Bootloader so I can use a 64-bit kernel.

For Windows: Trying out the Win8 Release Preview.

For Linux: Switching to OpenSUSE.

So far it's been rocky. Something's not quite right with Chameleon and I can only boot OSX in 64-bit mode if I do it in safe mode. Haven't been able to determine where the problem is, as the last few lines of verbose boot happen whether it's in safe mode or not. If it's not in safe mode I get a freeze on a white screen, with mouse pointer visible. While I'm considering trying to upgrade from Lion to Mountain Lion to see if that fixes the problem, I've seen people report similar issues in ML and I wouldn't want to spend $20 on discovering I still have the same problem. (Plus if I switch to ML I won't be able to fall back to a regular, non-Chameleon EFI boot like I can with Lion.)

Win8 -- well, it's set up. The parts that look the way they're supposed to look pretty damn good; the icons, tiles, and fonts are all really attractive. A lot of legacy stuff -- like program installers -- looks like blurry hell, but I'll give MS the benefit of the doubt and suggest that maybe that's because I'm using a beta. Not sold on the Start Screen yet, the shit that's moved is not easy to find, and switching between Metro and Oldschool-Style programs is unintuitive as fuck.

As for OpenSUSE, well, haven't had time to install it yet. Stay tuned.

Dressup

2012-10-26, 6:17 pm
Categories: Stream of Consciousness, Work

The biggest problem with my interview clothes is that I've lost a bunch of weight and now they're all baggy. I didn't really think about this until I put them on right before my last interview -- by which point it was of course too late.

So since then I got a new pair of pants, and dug out some old dress shirts from my grandparents' house.

The pants are fine but today I discovered that one of the shirts is still too baggy, and the other one is sheer enough to see my nipples through. So I guess next I'm going to have to buy some undershirts.

I went back and forth on whether to wear my sport coat. On the one hand, I've never worked for anyone who wore them -- not even company VP's. On the other, they're inline with the salary this place is offering.

Finally, after actually putting the thing on and looking at myself in the mirror, I decided that yeah it was a little over-the-top. Think I made the right call; nobody in the office was even wearing a tie, including the company owners.

And the company owners were interviewing people directly. And between that and just generally being busy, I did spend a good big lot of my time there just sitting around waiting. And I had to wonder what the protocol for that is. Can you whip out your cell phone and just find something to do while you're waiting? I didn't want to chance it, so mostly I looked at the wall and scribbled some notes in my notebook. Most of which formed the outline for this post.

I'm not complaining, though. I think it all worked out pretty well; I like the company and I hope I get this gig. Nice bunch of people, and a good, growing industry.

But I should still buy some undershirts. Just in case I do have more interviews on the horizon.

Such as Seals

2012-10-25, 11:10 pm
Categories: Movies, Stream of Consciousness

Welp, another Halloween, another Rifftrax Live. This year: Birdemic.

It is increasingly clear to me that House on Haunted Hill is far and away the best movie Rifftrax Live has ever done.

I mean, House on Haunted Hill has Vincent Price and a handful of other colorful characters, is competently written and directed, and is unironically fun to watch all by itself.

Birdemic...Birdemic doesn't even have the homemade charm of Manos.

I mean, it is homemade. It's homemade as hell. But it's homemade in an era when any-damn-body can make a homemade movie.

Manos was shot on a shoestring budget with primitive equipment in 1966. Birdemic was shot on a shoestring budget with primitive equipment in 2010. Manos took effort to make; it's surprising the damn thing was finished at all.

Referring to Birdemic as "finished", on the other hand, makes for liberal damn use of the word "finished".

Not only does it feature CG that actually looks substantially worse than if they had just used stock footage or rubber birds (and presumably cost more, too, unless it actually came with the video software they used to make the movie -- which, to be fair, is a distinct possibility), it is the most amateurishly, sloppily edited film I have ever seen, and that's coming from a guy wearing a Crow T. Robot T-shirt who has namedropped three separate Rifftrax Live events so far in this post. I have seen some bad movies, is what I am getting at.

Manos -- well, the entire damn film is dubbed because it was shot without sound. And yet, the inevitable sync issues aside, the audio editing is solid. The audio of Birdemic cuts out, constantly -- just straight-the-fuck-up cuts out. No sound. And that's without getting into the multiple scenes where you can't hear what actors are saying because they're shooting on a windy beach, the multiple times actors clearly flub their lines and they don't reshoot, and the bits where going from one character to another comes with a very long pause in the dialog and a substantial difference in background noise.

Of all the bad movies I've ever seen, this may be the only one where I wasn't struck most by the quality of the acting, the writing, the shooting, or even the effects (and trust me, all of them are pretty terrible), but the editing. It is shoddy, shoddy work. This movie makes Sci-Fi Originals look like...well, at least as good as House on Haunted Hill.

Birdemic 2 is slated for a 2013 release.

Doctor Who: The Ribos Operation

2012-10-23, 10:47 pm
Categories: Stream of Consciousness, TV

All right, so I'm phoning it in with another Doctor Who review I already wrote. Just because I've got free time doesn't mean I've got ideas for things to write about -- hell, the opposite may even be true.

So here goes. Originally posted on Brontoforumus, 2008-09-03.

The Ribos Operation is a mediocre story saved by interesting characters. It's probably most remarkable as the first appearance of Romana, who isn't one of them. At this point she's just a know-it-all college girl and general ice queen (as made less subtle by her costume). While this is the only serial I've seen with Mary Tamm in the role, I can reasonably assume she and the Doctor warm up to each other over time -- but I can also reasonably assume she never achieves the same chemistry with Baker that Ward had, what with Baker and Ward sleeping together and all.

This is the first part of The Key to Time Series, AKA Collection Quest: The Movie, wherein a generic good-guy overlord tells the Doctor he has to collect a series of MacGuffins before a generic bad-guy overlord can get to them first. The plot from there is simultaneously simple and needlessly convoluted: as the Doctor and Romana seek the first piece of the Key, they find that a royal exile and a pair of small-time thieves want it too. The series shows the pacing problems faced by so many early Who serials in that nothing really happens until it's half-over.

That's saved, as I said, by a good cast of characters: the lovable con-men, the ambitious villain, an alien version of Galileo, an entertainingly over-the-top augurer, and a rubber-suit monster that doesn't get nearly enough screen time.

It ends with what I've so often complained that RTD simply can't seem to do: a short but satisfying goodbye scene.

All in all, it was probably worth the rental but leaves me fairly nonplussed about the whole Key to Time series. I assume I will find the next serial, The Pirate Planet, much more impressive, as it was written by Douglas Adams.

I expect I will get to reposting my Pirate Planet review at some point here; suffice to say it had its moments but I was largely disappointed and I didn't stick around for any of the rest of the season arc. I did watch the Black Guardian Trilogy from the Fifth Doctor Era, and wished I'd stopped after the first serial.

Adventures in Unemployment: Contact Quotas are Dumb

2012-10-22, 12:20 pm
Categories: Stream of Consciousness, Tech, Work

I reapplied for unemployment on Friday afternoon, right after completing my last day of work.

On Sunday I logged in to see if I was in the system yet and if they'd let me start filing claims. Sure enough, I logged in successfully and it let me fill out information for the week -- even though it was last week, when I was still working. (Before I go any farther, let me make it perfectly clear that I reported all my income for last week and will not be receiving any money from unemployment for a week I was still working. All I did was go through the motions to make sure everything was working for next week.)

Everything worked much the same as a year and a half ago when I last did this, except that I was already in the system after two days (rather than having to wait a week like last time) and -- and here's the part this post is really about -- they've added a section where you have to log the contacts you've made over the past week in your job search.

Now, that in and of itself isn't a bad thing. I've been keeping every contact in a spreadsheet anyway. And I think it's perfectly reasonable to ask my to copy-paste that information into a text field and submit it every week -- hell, if I do get audited, that's going to save on paperwork.

The problem is that, thanks to a new federal requirement which I assume was a condition of the latest extension of unemployment benefits, they now require that you contact people at least four days in each week. To prove you're seriously looking for work.

This is one of those things that sounds like a good idea to government bureaucrats but is just fucking stupid out here in real life.

Yes, by all means there should be a standard for determining that someone is seriously looking for work and not just cashing unemployment checks and sitting around playing Xbox (provided he hasn't pawned it yet because he's unemployed). And "looking for work four days a week" is a pretty modest standard for that.

But when you actually make it a requirement? A quota? Now you're giving people a bare minimum. And when you give people a bare minimum, you're going to find that a whole lot of people only meet that bare minimum. Think "pieces of flair" in Office Space.

This sends the message that a person who looks for one job Monday, one job Tuesday, one job Wednesday, and one job Thursday is more serious in his job search than a person who looks for ten jobs Monday, ten jobs Tuesday, and ten jobs Wednesday but then spends Thursday and Friday doing other Responsible Adult Things like paying bills, going to the doctor, applying for warranty repair on his laptop, getting his tires rotated, and studying up for certifications that might help him in his job search.

Obviously this is designed to encourage people to Seriously Look for Work instead of just collecting unemployment while doing nothing. That's a laudable goal. But in practice, people who are out just to collect unemployment while doing nothing aren't going to expend any more effort than before this regulation passed -- in fact, they might actually expend less now that they know they only have to apply for four jobs a week.

Meanwhile, it's an inconvenience for people who are seriously looking for work, because now they actually have to game their way through and make sure they don't just apply for multiple jobs, they do it across four days.

I got a call from the agency this morning, and they scheduled an interview for Friday. Boom -- that's two different days; I was halfway done with my required job search for the week by 10:30 Monday morning.

If I was the kind of guy who was only interested in doing the bare minimum to collect unemployment, instead of actually getting a job, I would call it a day and then look for two more jobs later in the week.

But of course I'm not. I'm going to spit-shine the ol' resume, update my profile on a few different job sites, and go hunting for other positions that are available.

But I'll make sure I don't actually click the "Submit" button on any of them until tomorrow. And then save some for Wednesday, too.

I sure hope CareerBuilder's fixed that damn memory leak in its JavaScript since the last time I had to do this. Because I'd very much like to be able to leave a few of its pages up in a browser window without worrying about my entire system locking up.

Took me weeks, and multiple browsers, to figure out what was happening last year.

Nope, Not Just Me

2012-10-22, 11:22 am
Categories: Stream of Consciousness

So the current tally stands at:

  • Nice Clean Shave: Merkur, Blue bird, Bic
  • Cut the Hell Out My Face: Shark, Gillette, Feather
  • Untested: Astra

I'll get back to you on Astra in about a week.

The irritating thing (currently mentally irritating, and soon to be skin irritating) is knowing that I still have all those mostly-full containers of Shark, Gillette, and Feather razors, and I'm not the sort of guy to let them go to waste over a few nicks. But when I run out of this sampler pack, I'm going to have to find a nice cheap box of razors I like. I think Bic is my current favorite and it sure shouldn't be hard to find.