zen.org Communal Weblog

Your 37th birthday is something of a unique event. You’re that much closer to 40, which just realigns your target to worry about 50. You’re way past your 20s, so day-to-day craziness is imitating a logarithmic curve approaching but, you insist, never reaching zero.

Two things so far have made today unique amongst birthdays. Well, three, but the first was cool: our eldest made me a great birthday card and had chosen what he wanted to give me for my birthday. He’s definitely growing up.

Another part of the feeling of truly living your age: I finally went into our local insurance broker and set up life insurance. I’ve been meaning to do it for a while now (since the birth of our first son, in fact), but seemed to never actually make the effort. At long last, I’m accepting some reality and making sure my wife and kids are suitably taken care of should I be suddenly attacked by rabid squirrels while walking down the street.

Then there’s the discovery this morning in one gift. My mother doesn’t live in Ireland, so she ordered my gift from someone in Cork and had it sent to me through the post. In it was a nice card:

Creative! If I didn’t know he made it up himself, I’d be convinced some online form completion was taken literally. 🙂

The American Antiquarian Society has put up a piece about the upcoming book The Gentleman in the Purple Waistcoat, an investigation into the murder in 1849 of Dr. George Parkman. Before the development of CSI-emulated forensics, it took only six months to decide Harvard Professor John W. Webster did it, should be arrested, and would die by hanging.

The “vignette” written by the AAS is really interesting reading. The book is apparently going to introduce plenty of reasonable doubt about the guilt of Professor Webster.

I’m happy with my Dell Dimension C521 running Kubuntu, and now that I can write to the NTFS partition I can rip all kinds of CDs (NTFS is good for something). Four tops, no problem. India.Arie, Jill Scott, no ploblem. Lars Winnerbäck, Mel Tormé, Moby, Pete Fountain, Sublime, easy. Eagles, Nirvana, buzz! Out of a whim I try in on the old Quantex PII, was zen before the tree, no problem! I even tried it on the Dell at ×2. What does the old PII have that the AMD64 don’t?

Sure, Samhain doesn’t start for a week, but having a three year old means it is on! Zoë just watched this little bit, like, ten times in a row. This is Hallowe’en music:

Squirrel Nut Zippers already has a great Christmas album, they should make a Hallowe’en one too. Or is that every album but the Christmas one?

Where I work we have to processes files from many sources, we have found three different line endings: “\n”, “\r\n”, and “\r”. We didn’t want to process all the files before, er, processing them so I wrote the following:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;

until (($/ = getc(STDIN)) =~ m/[\r\n]/) {
die “no new line!” if (eof(STDIN));
};
if ($/ eq “\r”) {
$/ .= “\n” if (getc(STDIN) eq “\n”);
}
seek(STDIN,0,0); # rewind()

This will set $/ to which ever of the three file endings we have so you can then process them without thinking. Well, almost no thinking, you will need to use chomp instead of chop. I’m sure it could be nicely abstracted too, bit I didn’t.

According to Wikipedia, the attack on Perl Harbor killed 2,388 people, the September 11, 2001 attacks killed 2,993. The 9/11 sum includes the terrorists, I don’t think the Perl Harbor deaths include any invaders, but all but 55 of them where military. The 9/11 deaths were predominantly civilians.

The Japanese invasion united the country, al Qaeda united the country. As I watch Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s The War I am amazed at the lessons forgotten. I would of bought a war bonds, I would of (I did) limit my gas usage, I wanted to sacrifice. When George W. Bush was first running for President I remember hoping John McCain would win, and there is only one Republican I have ever voted for, but Mr. Bush won, so I wanted him to succeed. I’m a patriot, what the masses thought was more impartant then what I thought. One of these posts I’ll figure out what I think now.

This arrived in my mailbox just a few minutes ago; couldn’t resist sharing:

After a little difficulty, I’ve got it working! The music on the Mac Mini upstairs is coming out of the speakers of our 15 year-old Aiwa stereo in the diningroom downstairs.

My laptop’s got a Belkin TuneCastII FM Transmitter plugged into its headphone jack. The laptop (booted into WindowsXP) is running iTunes, playing a song—right now, “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” by The Charlie Daniels Band. And the laptop’s connected over our wireless network.

The Linksys WRT54G in the livingroom is running DD-WRT, a replacement firmware giving it a lot more oompf than what comes on the box by default. I specifically put it on to solve the continuous problem of Mac laptops losing their association with it after a few hours or a day.

Anyway, it turns out the only thing preventing the iTunes on my laptop from seeing the shared music off the mini upstairs was that I’d left the “SPI Firewall” enabled. Since I’ve got the wireless already as tight as I can get it (no broadcast, mac filter, wep encrypted and soon wpa), it’s probably not particularly useful since anything connected via an Ethernet cable wouldn’t be protected by it either.

With that firewall disabled, the packets (to whatever port(s)) made it through and can finally play music on my laptop!

Our 9 month-old boy doesn’t seem to like “Let It Roll”, the next song in that album. Let’s see if he likes The Eagles…

Like, Oh Em Gee, there was a Mac OS X update today and I didn’t have to reboot! Praises from Summerland! The only problem was it didn’t tell me that until it was done and I had already saved and quit out of all my applications by the time it finished.

My life is whole again now that The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are on the air again, but I fear the next time they have a vacation. I don’t know what I would do without it. Mr. Colbert and Mr. Stewart should be chained to there desks and be forced to report 24/7.