Drugged

2013-02-04, 6:23 pm
Categories: Stream of Consciousness, Work

I mentioned recently that I've got COBRA coverage sort-of worked out and took a trip to the pulmonologist last week so I could renew some prescriptions.

I went back on an inhaler, a nasal spray, and a pill that I'd gone off a couple of years ago.

The relief was immediate. What took a couple days was the reminder of why I'd gone off them.

Some combination of my meds makes me dizzy. It's a sort of constant, mild-to-moderate discomfort. It affects my balance and coordination; I bump into doorways. And it makes it hard for me to concentrate. I feel slow and sluggish -- like I'm, well, drugged.

I'm not sure if it's the inhaler, the spray, or both. (It's not the pill because I forgot to take it a couple times and still got the symptoms.) But the dizziness came back.

Today I cut the dosage of my inhaler by half. The dizziness still came, but it didn't seem to last as long. I managed to do 45 minutes on the elliptical machine, though it wasn't entirely comfortable. At least I've got handles to grip to steady myself -- don't know how I'd do on a bike right now.

So I'm not sure if cutting the dosage really helped with the dizziness or not. But my wheezing and coughing seem worse.

Would sure be nice if I could work it out so I don't have to choose between one kind of discomfort and another.

I'll experiment (experiment with drugs!) over the next few days -- try the dosage I've got right now for a couple days and see if there's any cumulative effect; if not, maybe try increasing the inhaler again while halving or stopping the spray. Because I sure do enjoy being able to breathe comfortably, but I'd like to be able to move and think coherently while breathing comfortably.

On the plus side, I got four auditions recorded before my stomach started gurgling too much for me to continue. That's a productive day. Next up: dinner.

Night Flight: Limited Visual Vocabulary

2013-02-03, 9:36 pm
Categories: Music, TV

I've noted, on multiple occasions, that Zappa wasn't opposed to music videos in principle, but found them to be a corrosive influence in practice. This clip is a nice, succinct explanation of why: the clichés of MTV are about as far from the surreal madness of 200 Motels as you're going to find.

Seriousness Itself is Something That's to be Laughed At

2013-02-02, 10:18 pm
Categories: Music, Politics, TV

This is an odd one. Half of it's in Dutch, and Zappa shares a bizarre theory about beer leading to militaristic behavior through yeast growth.

The interview was recorded in 1991 but not broadcast until right before Zappa's death in December 1993. The interviewer is Ivo Niehe and the network is TROS.

Your Average Ordinary Alien: My Second Audiobook

2013-02-02, 2:02 pm
Categories: Announcements, Books, Stream of Consciousness, Tech, Work

My latest audiobook: Your Average Ordinary Alien, written by Adam Graham. Available from Audible, Amazon, and iTunes.

The description, in the author's words:

Kirk Picard Skywalker is an unemployed sci-fi fanatic who dreams of being abducted by aliens from outer space. One day his dreams come through and he's horrified to learn that the aliens are all too ordinary.

It's the story of an unemployed computer scientist and his long-suffering girlfriend -- can't imagine what drew me to it -- and gave me the opportunity to flex some comedy muscles and play three characters plus narrator. It's a fun read, a bit of good-natured but ultimately sympathetic skewering of fanboys, and it made me smile. It's also got a Christian message -- a bit outside my usual, more cynical milieu, I suppose, but "Work hard and be kind to people" is, I think, a sentiment most everybody can get behind.

Be sure and read my previous audiobook post for some notes on Audible DRM. And you can discuss my audiobooks at Brontoforumus.

Crossfire 1989

2013-02-01, 10:38 pm
Categories: Politics, TV

It's not the epic, classic performance of his 1986 "Fascist Theocracy" interview, but it's a pretty damn great conversation nonetheless: the government shouldn't get to decide what is and isn't art and determine funding based on politicians' personal tastes, and at any rate it's a pretty ridiculous sideshow given what an insignificant portion of the budget funding for the arts actually is.

RAID Project

2013-02-01, 9:12 pm
Categories: Stream of Consciousness, Tech

My grandmother makes home movies on her MacBook Pro.

About three years back she was low on space and got a stack of 500GB LaCie drives. I wanted to arrange them as a software RAID 10 array for a bit of redundancy, but I realized that 4 500GB drives arranged in RAID 10 comes out to only 1TB -- not that much in the scheme of things.

So we ordered 4 2TB drives to swap out.

About this time, I read about software in development by an organization called Ten's Complement. See, Apple had been planning to switch to ZFS as its primary filesystem a few OS releases ago, but the project fell through; its former FS head left and started his own company and was still working on bringing ZFS to Mac. So I figured I'd wait for the imminent release of the product so I could use RAIDZ instead of RAID 10, and not have to give up so much space.

There was delay after delay. Finally the software was released as ZEVO Silver Edition; Gold and Platinum releases were slated for the future. (I guess calling your software Silver, Gold, Platinum is kinda like those pizza places that have Medium, Large, and Extra Large pies.)

But the forecast release dates came and went, with no Gold or Platinum and no word from Ten's Complement.

Months later, there was finally an explanation -- ZEVO had been bought out by Greenbytes -- but still no Gold or Platinum (or even Silver anymore). There was a free-as-in-beer command-line-only Community Edition, and...that was it.

Now, I don't want my grandmother stuck using the command line, but I figured I could use the Community Edition to set up the array on my computer and after that it should run fine on hers.

The problem? The documentation says ZEVO only runs on Macs with 64-bit kernels.

Now, I've got a Mac Pro 1,1. It has 32-bit EFI. To run a 64-bit kernel requires a third-party bootloader.

And I've chronicled my experience with 64-bit OSX already, in October and again a couple weeks ago. tl;dr it boots but it's so unstable as to be useless.

Only this week did it occur to me to check whether my grandmother's computer can run a 64-bit kernel.

It doesn't. So ZEVO looks like a moot point anyway, because God knows I'm not going to subject her to the kind of hoops I've had to jump through to try to get 64-bit Darwin working.

I figure I'll still try it, just in case it works despite being unsupported -- but I'm not holding my breath. Guess it's back to RAID 10 after all. I guess on the plus side, 2TB hard drives haven't gotten any cheaper in the 2 or 3 years these have been sitting unopened waiting for use.

So I went to take a crack at setting up RAID 10 today, and it looks like one of the LaCie power supplies has gone and died on me -- this is not the first time this has happened. So, one more setback while I order a replacement and wait for it to come in.

Too bad the RAIDZ thing hasn't panned out so well. And of course it's a double-edged sword that Apple's as aggressive as it is in discontinuing support for old hardware.

But hopefully I'll finally be able to wrap this thing up sometime next week.

Nightwatch

2013-01-31, 11:41 pm
Categories: Cartoons, Music, Politics, TV

Another upload by tomtiddler1: Halloween '83, with Moon and Dweezil along. Amazing how much her vocabulary and inflection mirror her dad's, and it's nice to watch them all together -- here's a family that likes being around each other. And while there are the usual interview bits where Frank starts to roll his eyes, they really seem to bring out the kid in him, too.

Stray Thoughts

2013-01-31, 10:08 pm
Categories: Books, Stream of Consciousness, Tech, Work

Bit of a sore throat today. Second consecutive day I haven't felt quite up to biking downtown for comics. Hope I'm not coming down with anything. I'm on a new inhaler (actually, I've started taking one I haven't taken in a couple years) but it started before that.

Speaking of meds, tried to buy my prescriptions at the Costco pharmacy last night, now that my COBRA's kicked in. They said my insurance card was rejected; when I said I was on COBRA they said I needed a new card. Today I called the COBRA line. When prompted, I entered the option for "I don't know my account number". So it asked me for other information -- first my zip code, then the month I was born, as a two-digit number. I entered 10 and it told me that was an invalid selection. I tried it again; it told me it was an invalid selection. Again and again. That was it. No other information, no option for exiting the loop; it just kept telling me that 10 was not a valid entry, and then telling me to enter the month I was born as a two-digit number. I tried 6-2, for the first two letters of October; I tried saying "October", "one-zero", "ten" -- same error message, over and over. Just for the hell of it I tried 11; got an error for that too. Then I pounded 0 until it disconnected the call, called back, and chose the option for "I don't have an account number" and was promptly connected to a human being.

She told me the pharmacy had been wrong, that my current card is the right one for COBRA, but that my insurance probably won't be processed until thirty days after I paid my first bill. Which is just grand, because my insurer took two months to get my information to COBRA in the first place. Man, health insurance in this country.

Speaking of horrible, kafkaesque looping menus, I also got an E-Mail from CareerBuilder asking me to fill out a survey. I usually do when they ask; I like to think it helps them improve their site, and sometimes they offer prizes.

But the goddamn thing was a mess. It kept asking me the same handful of questions, over and over again. Sometimes it would rearrange the order of the answers I could choose. I began to wonder if this was really a survey to see how I felt about CareerBuilder, or some grad student's psych project to see if my answers would change if the multiple-choice options were rearranged.

I spent about fifteen minutes at it, getting more and more of the same questions, and more and more complex and detailed questions that took longer and longer to answer, and then showed up again thirty seconds later -- and no, you couldn't just choose not to answer. Even if the question was "If you are currently working, how do you like your job?" and the options were "A lot", "Somewhat", or "Not at all" -- if you didn't select any of them, you'd get an error telling you you had to answer the question.

As you might expect, I did not answer the text-field questions more than once; when I started getting them repeatedly, I started putting in things like "I have already answered this question. If you need to find a competent Web developer to fix your survey, I know one who is currently looking for work."

It was about the time I noticed that the progress bar at the top of the page was actually decreasing -- it was at 55%, I clicked continue, and it changed to 53% -- that I finally gave up. I wrote something snarky in the last text box, hit Continue, and then clicked Exit Survey. They probably never saw my responses -- I'm guessing incomplete surveys aren't submitted -- but I did click Continue that one last time, just in case.

Other'n that, kind of a slow day. Got declined for an audiobook part (no big deal, that's part of the job; I'll record some more auditions tomorrow if my throat's better), called a contact for a job lead (left a voicemail). When my fiancée got home we took a trip up to Changing Hands; I bought a used copy of Starship Titanic (one of the few remaining Douglas Adams books I haven't read), and noticed that Cory Doctorow is going to be doing a signing next week. Guess you have to buy a book to get a ticket, so I suppose I should buy one of his books in print -- otherwise I guess I'd have him sign my Nexus 7, since that's where I've been keeping my copies of his books up to this point. Debating whether to go or not, but it would be fun.

Dinosaurs in the Home Depot: My First Audiobook

2013-01-30, 3:38 pm
Categories: Announcements, Books, Stream of Consciousness, Tech, Work

As you may have guessed from the various not-so-subtle hints I've been dropping over the past month, I've started recording audiobooks.

The first one, Dinosaurs in the Home Depot, written by Bret Wellman, has been released, and is available from Audible, Amazon, and iTunes.

The audiobook is 18 minutes long and delivers what it promises. There is a Home Depot. There are dinosaurs in it. The story does not waste time on details like why there are dinosaurs, why somebody decided to leave them in a Home Depot, or actually bothering to give any of the characters names (unless you count "the ugly giant" as a name). It's mostly people fighting dinosaurs with power tools.

If you want to give it a read before you buy, it's available for Kindle, or you can read it for free on the author's website.

It's also bundled with Audible's DRM. Staunch anti-DRM advocate that I am, I regret this, but there's nothing I can do about it except let people know before they buy. You shouldn't have trouble playing it under Windows or OSX, and there are clients for iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and Blackberry as well. I haven't tried it under desktop Linux yet; I've read that the Windows player works under WINE, though users have reported playback issues with recent versions. You can read more about Audible's DRM format at Wikipedia.

I've got two more audiobooks coming sometime in the next few weeks; I'll write about them when they're available.

Discuss my audiobooks at Brontoforumus.