zen.org Communal Weblog

It took no small effort, but eBay were finally shamed into banning sales of Live 8 tickets from their sites.

Ah, but never let it be said that the bottom feeders of this world are so easily dissuaded from capitalising on anything, in any way they can.

So now, if you type “Live 8 Domain” into eBay’s search bar, you’ll get a list of 19 Domain Names, all referencing the concert; e.g.: “www.live8.name,” “live8reservations.com,” “live8tickets.info,” etc., etc..

Of that 19, 18 Domain Names are being auctioned by a single seller – tjpropres in New Jersey. In his/her/its auction descriptions, the Seller includes this charming paragraph:

Whoever owns this domain could use it to redirect traffic to your existing website, or for the ticket information that thousands of people are going to want to know about! You could even sell tickets. It’s a golden opportunity, don’t wait until it’s too late, bid or buy it now!

I’ve let RTÉ know that this is going on … I really hope they’ll follow up.

Needless to say, I’ll also be getting on to both eBay and PayPal [this lowlife’s preferred payment method] about this straight away. Please do the same if you agree that this sort of carry-on needs to be stopped.

TIA

Yesterday was a day of many mixed emotions for me. On Monday I got the paper work for a job at Princeton University’s Genomics Department, so yesterday I resigned from NEC Laboratory America. To give a little hint of the relation with my two bosses here at NEC Labs, I went and told the CFO first. She said that she was sad for NEC to see me go, but happy for me personally as my new position sounds good for my résmué. Caned or sincere, my relationship with the CFO is more involved then that with my bosses, and I rarely see the CFO!

I told the CFO that about a year ago I started casually looking for a new job. Unfortunately, almost every position that wanted somebody with more ten years of experience also wanted more management experience that I had. Enjoying my time at NEC or not, I concluded that I needed a new job that would give me management experience. I finally found a place that was willing to make me a manager, plus it fulfills much of my Free Software desires.

(The rest of this blog entry is what gives blogs bad name. It’s basically me rambling on about nothing. Feel free to stop now.)

I had to then wander the halls seeking my bosses to tell them. They both seemed nonchalant, I guess all the more reason to leave. Somewhat ambivalently I went around to tell a few people whom I didn’t what to hear about my resignation on the grapevine. Then I sat down to work.

Almost every Tuesday I come into work early, so I can leave early, and yesterday was no different. Sometime between three and four I left to go get more vegetables from Cherry Grove Organic Farm, I was going to get Zoë first but there was a heat advisory at the time I thought it better not to. Luckily this time we got more then just leafy greens. The problem happened, when backing out I nicked a dark red car I didn’t see that was a little down hill and in the shade. I was going less then 1 mph when I did so, so I didn’t even notice scratch on the car different from the scratches that was already on the car. I found the lady who owned the car, she seemed not to be terribly alarmed, and didn’t even go to look. So with ever more emotions filling my head I left to pick up Zoë.

After a quick call to the liqueur store Zoë and I where home. I cooked and froze some kale and she and I finally relaxed to reflect on the day. I had a large, freshly picked organic salad and a vegetarian corn dog for dinner. Not a hard day, just an emotional one.

Out of suspicion, I tried putting our ISP’s nameservers at the top of my /etc/resolv.conf. Then I repeated some steps I’d just done—checking for new mail, visiting a particular site—and they were much much faster. This means I either misconfigured my Zaurus when I set it up to take over nameservice for our network, or something about it just makes it be slow responding.

I’ll be hopeful and review how I configured maradns; perhaps it just needs a tweak?

Does anybody know it the Intel Mac will be 32bit or 64bit?

While I haven’t spent a lot of time looking, I have spend a little time with no luck. Maybe I just don’t know how to look for Mac informaiton. According to the June 11 User Friendly strip: “AAAAAAAAAARRRRRGH!! APPLE IS MOVING TO X86 ARCHITECTURE!!”, but I’m not sure if that is a valid information source.

Well, Thursday afternoon, Magda returned home to her passport waiting in the overnight package (that she had to provide to the Embassy). In it was her visa!!!! And not for the three months we were told. She has a 6 month visa, good til the beginning of December! She’s trying to figure out what she’s going to do right now, but has to put it all in teh back of her mind cause she has a big exam next week. Whoo hoo!!

I just received my daily OED etymology fix:

welk: To lose freshness or greenness; to become flaccid or dry; to wilt, wither, fade.

I thought of only one thing: Lawrence Welk, when I was growing up. Certainly seems to match…

P.S. Definition is of course Copyright © Oxford University Press 2004.

Last February I gave a local farm, Cherry Grove Organic Farm of Lawrenceville New Jersey, a few hundrad bucks for weekly dips into there harvest. Yesterday was the first pickup day. The first thing I noticed when I pulled up was a car with a Dennis Kucinich for President bumper sticker, I was pretty sure I was at the type of place I was looking for.

I went through the list of vegetables I was to pick up: spinach, arugula, bok choy, kale, collard greens, and three or four others I forgot by the time I got home! Next time I will take notes. Weekly acces to the herb section, plus pick your own peas! It’s how one should get produce is season, direct from the local farm.

At home, after playing with the baby and rebooting Rerun (sorry about the down time) I cooked and froze the spinach. I’m sure the other leafy greens can be frozen too, but feezing spinach in a know issue with me. After getting my Mother to take a good portion of one of the forgotten salad greens, and Zoë to bed, I sat down with a big bowl of arugula salad. I’m not a big fan of arugla, but it was the best argula I’ve ever had.

I wonder what’s in store for next week.

I cannot believe the disgust I have for the US Government right now.

Magda wants to come to the states, and we’d love for her to visit us. So she’s coming in late summer. We jumped through the hoops to get the forms she needed and photos and the 80 euros for the tourist visa (80 FREAKING EUROS!?). She got an appointment at the embassy. And I went with her, cause if she’s gonna be staying with us, I thought I should be there.

Now, I’ve heard stories about the embassy, but I thought they’d be decent to someone who wanted to come, spend their hard-earned money, and experience the land of milk and honey, then go home and not suck up valuable tax dollars by trying to claim welfare. Apparently, I was wrong.

The clerk who helped us (after we waited 45 minutes after our ‘appointment’) was one of the rudest men I think I have ever come across. He actually said that they needed to assume that everyone who is coming to the states is trying to sneak in and live there. No, he really said that. Basically, since Magda is a student and is young and from Poland (and living in Ireland), he thinks she doesn’t have good enough family ties (FFS, she lives with her dad and brother and boyfriend) and if she was married it would be better. He didn’t talk loud enough to hear him all the time through the bulletproof glass of the counter (after having to go through a security checkpoint to even get into the ‘complex’, including no keys or mobiles, and the security guard checking my travel mug of tea), which was a problem for both Magda and I. Things he didn’t like about Magda:

She was young
She was Polish
Her family situation (ie dad is a carpenter not “someone who works at IBM”)
Unmarried
Student (not working)

I can see how that would be an issue. No, really. But the rudeness, and the attitude, MAN. I just can’t get how ANYONE would want to go to the states after that fun. And then we still have to deal with immigration in Shannon (or whereever she flies from). Argh.

I am embarassed that the US would treat someone that way. No matter who they were. I can now understand why people do what they do. I read recently that the US is like a drunk waving a gun around in a bar. No one’s going to mess with him, but once he passes out or drops the gun, his ass will be handed to him on a platter.

Never before had I thought about revoking my US citizenship. Now, I wonder. I’m disgusted by the comments the man made, and the assumptions.

I got a spam about a training kit (DVD, guide, and audio tape) for how to teach kids in cultures of poverty. Then in big letters in the middle of the message it told me if I ordered it soon it would save me $40, at only $355.00!

A 5-hour expert training session on learning to teach kids in impoverished nations is probably worth the money, but the paradox of spending nearly $400 to figure out how to help those in need cracked me up. Put on top of this how under-funded many schools are, regardless of the country they’re in, and you wonder where the money could come from. Certainly not most teachers’ salaries.

After a little effort, our box can now play MPEGs properly! Until now there was always a problem with them: audio was never in sync with video, making it unusable. AVIs were fine, but MPEGs divided up between the Hauppauge PVR-350 card for video and our normal audio out. After I’d seen others make mention of using xine for MythTV, I thought I’d finally give it a shot. (I’ve used xine and VideoLAN, aka VLC, for playing mpegs under Linux, but not yet like this.) In only a few steps, it worked!

I first had to download xine itself, and use

rpm -Uvh libxine1-1.0.1cvs-050527.i686.rpm xine-ui-0.99.3cvs-050603.i586.rpm

to install the packages; those copies are regular nightly builds. In the MythTV front-end, I went through Setup to Video to Player Settings, and changed it from running mplayer to instead do

xine -pfhq --no-splash --audio-driver oss %s


Next, I created the ~/.xine directory and put these lines into the file ~/.xine/config:

audio.volume.mixer_volume:60
audio.synchronization.force_rate:44100
audio.device.alsa_front_device:default

Those values came from a forum or blog post somewhere, but I never wrote down the origin and Google doesn’t appear to have it. I’ll certainly attribute them to the source once I find out who it was. 🙂 The config file will be used by xine, and those values will get pulled in then included in the auto-generated version that xine saves back out to the file.

Finally, to make xine honor commands from the remote control I had to edit ~/.mythtv/lircrc and insert the xine entries from Peter Baumgartner’s blog. His are based on Jarod Wilson’s guide, with additions for xine. Continuing the trend, I adjusted mine to have the Stop button actually exit xine, not just stop it and show the xine banner:

begin
prog = xine
button = STOP
repeat = 3
# instead, make this quit
#config = Stop
config = Quit
end

I just had to restart the MythTV front-end (using the green button), and voila! I could use a .mpg file and it plays it all correctly; open up any part of a ripped DVD, and it looks right. Yahoo! Big step.

Now we can play Letter Factory™ for Patrick any time we want since we’ve got it ripped onto the box’s hard drive, instead of worrying about putting in the DVD all the time. 🙂 See? It just calls for the right motivation…