Planet Nashville 2600

Yep. It's me over here, too. I've been using this name everywhere, including offline for a very long time now.

So I'm calling ASUS for the third time today, because the first two reps I got through to (after waiting on hold for fifteen minutes each time) elected to hang up on me, apparently because it would impact their call time metrics after they looked at the records on this unit. The second guy tried to tell me that the netbook is now out of warranty, which is ludicrous considering that I'm just trying to get them to perform the original warranty repair corectly.

For the record, I bought this netbook refurbished back in May. It was unstable. I tried for a month or so puttering with it, doing only things which would not violate the warranty, in an attempt to sort it out. I reflashed four different versions of the BIOS released for that netbook. I reset the CMOS settings countless times. I even completely reinstalled Ubuntu Netbook Remix a few times just for the sake of completeness. Being that the CMOS battery isn't a user-replaceable thing, it has to go to ASUS's RMA department. Luckly refurbished equipment does have a 90-day warranty which was still valid.

So, following ASUS's instructions, I sent the netbook alone, along with a description of what was wrong with it and their checklist to ASUS RMA. Well, they met their stated timeframe for repair and sent it back to me, unfortunately all they did was reflash the BIOS and reimage the disks with their slightly tacky version of Linux. Obviously that didn't work.

So... I called ASUS support again, and they gave me a new RMA number and had me send it to them again. Now it's four months in, but do they manage to fix it this time? No. In fact the second person did even less than the first technician because the repair notes state that they simply cleared the CMOS and put it back in the box. Being that I mentioned explicitly in the notes I sent both times that clearing the CMOS only makes the machine stable for 1-3 boots, I find that downright insulting.

...so here I am on a Sunday, listening to their hold music for the third time in one day, and trying to keep my cool about this. It's not helping that the hold music has a guy talking about how other notebook manufacturers have over "twice" the failure rates of ASUS. I fail to see how this is even possible, or relevant, since I can't get one repair done correctly on something that did fail.

There will be updates.

Nevermind what this is about, it'll be explained in a few days

1. Failing stator
2. Failing CDI trigger sensor
2. Failing CDI
3. Loose f**king wire



99,389. The stereo amp.

Thought of the day:
When laying people off, you might want to... oh... I don't know... inform the IT guy so he can disable their accounts.

So, in a twist of utter moral bankruptcy it appears that a company called ICM Registry has finally succeeded at strong-arming ICANN (the international body responsible for seeing to it that the DNS system that makes the internet work doesn't get torn to shreds by greedy lunatics) into giving it licence to run it's very own virtual land-grab, under threat of lawsuits.

In short, this means that the .XXX top-level domain will soon appear, and the company that will be collecting money for every name in that namespace is ICM Registry.

There's no sensible need for this type of top-level domain. It will merely accomplish two things: 1. The press and general public will have another opportunity to act generally shocked about the sheer volume of porn on the internet before going back to downloading as much of it as they can. 2. Conservative groups will demand that it be banned from everywhere.

I'd like to say it will accomplish three things, oh wait, I can...

3. It will force companies whose legal departments are terrified someone might tread on their trademark to purchase YET ANOTHER needlessly redundant domain name.

...and that's what ICM Registry is counting on to make a buck. It was willing to force the internet at lawyer-point to be needlessly more complex to do it. It's willing to create a new problem (or extend an old problem) for everyone else to do it. It is "damage" to the internet, which we should now route things around until someone fixes it.

THAT is a good reason to block the .XXX domain. Not because there's going to be porno on it--if you have a problem with that you should go ahead and block .com lookups. Not because they're sloshing around in an already cloudy list of near-useless TLDs. ...but because the company responsible was willing to degrade the internet further just to make a buck.

I will so be making a longer rant on this subject later.

If I thought I had a decent shot at it, I'd go one better. I'd save the arsonist for later.

Ten minutes is not nearly enough time to express my displeasure with someone for setting my place and all my stuff on fire.

Post Scriptum: The incredibly awesome part about LJ is that this post appears to be a non-sequitir, but when I go to edit it, it merrily shows me the link to http://www.livejournal.com/misc/latestqotd.bml?qid=1603 which is what it was written in response to. Yay LJ!

Seriously? Where's the "break his/her legs to stop them from getting out" option?

Dear movie promoters,
If you know theater has a capacity of x, don't hand out 3x sneak peak passes.

Dear theater managers,
If promoter was a fucktard and handed out 3x sneak peak passes, don't be a dick and say "damn shame" to the folks that didn't show up an hour early.

coworker: My aunt called my cellphone 12 times the other night trying to pester me about her son whose one of our clients.
me: Give her a silent ringtone or block her number.
coworker: I can't do that. She's family.
me: and? I've done it to my mom a few days at a time before.
coworker: !!!

Seriously. W.T.F is with NES.

No explanation from them aside from conflicting stories, the buildings that were flooded have been checked out by the electrical inspector, and the goddamn substation has been dry for days now.

I've just moved my gaming machine over to someone else's house until NES gets me some goddamn electricity.

All of Civilization IV for ten bucks: Good
Finally logging into WoW and missing the Children's Week by a handful of minutes: @#$@#$!!

It kinda highlights that I'VE BEEN WITHOUT A FUNCTIONAL PLACE TO LIVE FOR A GODDAMN WEEK THANKS TO NES.

"F**k the Cumberland" still, but NES are the reason I've still got no electricity.

If no one's seen repairmen out there by noon tomorrow, I'm going to start calling people until I find someone's fucking Sunday to ruin.

Yeah, so the floodwaters have been gone from the transformer that feeds my apartment all day, and surprise surprise... no one's seen NES go anywhere near it.

Who wants to bet money they're probably over at Opry Mills trying to restore power to Shopryland. There's a whole buncha retired and/or old people where I live. This isn't cool.

This afternoon when I went by my West Nashville apartment (which wasn't flooded, but not by much, and I can't say the same for the transformer that feeds my stuff power) to get a quick change of clothes, someone snatched my helmet and netbook from the breezeway.

I want them back.

There's a $200 "no questions asked" reward for getting them both back. $100 for either.

The helmet is fairly unique, so I'm posting pictures here. It's size XXXL so it's going to take some considerable time to get another one made and shipped. It looks like below and as far as I know is the only one in Nashville. If you see it, snap a pic or something and drop me a line about it.

So... apparently We chose a really good weekend to flee Nashville for Detroit (visiting family + Penguicon). I'm guessing the fact that I can still ssh into my linux box at home means that all of my stuff is ok.

Now, the question is whether or not I try to drive home tomorrow or wait until Tuesday. Think I'll call my boss in the morning and ask her.

Sheesh...  Keep an eye out for old men loading shooing animals into boats.  Over by the marina where my condo is the river is already pretty high and the little creeks that feed into it are flooding.

The Weather Channel is talking about many inches of rain last night and possibly eight more today.

Thought reannon would appreciate today's Sinfest.

14:42 < Jesus> wow. IMDB movie synopses are written by people for whom English
is a fair maiden, to be donkey-punched and given a Dirty Sanchez.

By the way, Comcast can definitely count me as someone who will soon be an ex-customer as soon as there's some decent competition here.  So far this year they've managed to increase everyone's bill for upgrading to digital cable by adding a $7 fee for "HD service" which would have been fine if anyone had ever mentioned it when I was upgrading.  They're also now dropping analog broadcasts entirely.

Let's hear it for charging more and delivering less! 

Fuck you, Comcast.

They got my scooter working again. I'm strongly suspicious of how it failed, but at the moment I'm going with "tickled by lightning" because nothing else explains it unless one of the oldsters in this condoplex decided it was a "noisy motorcycle" and tased it or something.  Yes, East Side Scooters.

Oh, and *fuck* H&R Block. If you thought they put a lot of effort into trying to convince you to pay them money to free-file your taxes last year, you haven't seen anything yet. For example:

•  In a framed window with a pile of whitespace filling the middle (so there's no excuse about the browser being "too short" the first time they try to get you to "upgrade" to Basic (for $29.95) you have to actually scroll down to see something more than the "Yes, I'd like to pay you money to file for free" link.  What you see at the bottom of the window without scrolling is just the text and link for "upgrading".   There's a good two inches of empty whitespace on the screen, and if you scroll down a half inch you then see the "Next" button.
• Towards the end of things, three times in a row they ask you again, if you'd like to pay them money.  One of these times they ask you if you'd like to pay them money to file your state return.  For people who are claiming to know what they're doing, I find this highly questionable since Tennessee has no state taxes to file.
• When it comes time to pay, if you owe, they don't even do it through the main site.  They show you a link to another site called "payUSAtax.com" (guess who runs it...  That's right... H&R Block!) which when you click on it spawns another window that says it's directing you to there so you can pay your taxes.  ...except it doesn't actually do this.  With Chrome and Firefox the new window spawns and just sits there doing nothing in particular (checking the network traffic, the webserver doesn't even bother to respond!).  In Internet Explorer (yes, I actually ran that one, too) with all of it's default settings glory the window spawns, waits a moment, and then closes like nothing ever happened.

I will say that I'm pretty impressed with one thing.  H&R Block actually managed to be more disingenuous than "free" porn sites.  About the only thing they left out was an attempt at exploiting the browser through some PDF-centric vulnerability (then again, I haven't looked that closely at the PDF version of my tax return).

Conversation I had with the company's VP yesterday:
(background: My office also contains the server room, so there's an electronic lock on the door. I recently changed the code, and the maintenance guys were upset that I wouldn't give it to them since they're convinced that my office/server room is a storage closet. Oh, and the head maintenance guy is the father of the owner of the company)

VP: What's the new code to your door?
Me: xxxx
VP: Ok, I'm going to give this to [head maintenance guy].
Me: Well, a good part of why I changed the code is that he and the maintenance folks kept coming in and poking around the server room looking for paint, mops, etc.
VP: Ok, I'll tell him that this isn't a maintenance closet. If it becomes a problem, just change the code.
Me: *headdesk*

For those of you who would like to now claim, along with your Republican masters, that public health care will bankrupt America, I've got one question...

WHY DIDN'T IT BANKRUPT CANADA?

They've had it since the freaking 70's.

Personally, I suspect it's because up there, they're not so interested in the rich grinding the poor into dust for their own sustenance.

Drat it, I knew I should have started the thing a few times during the winter (I did at least slosh the gas around twice a week or more). Won't start.

Hopefully getting it running again won't involve anything major. It turns, but won't fire (and this is after I recharged the battery).

Anyone got any suggestions?

Yep. It's time.

CNN just did a story on ChatRoulette. This means that "old people" may now see it and find out about it. If you don't already know about it, it's probably better if things stay that way, but you still may have parents who aren't so wise in the ways of the world.

On the surface, ChatRoulette sounds like a pretty sweet deal. Click a button and you and your webcam are immediately connected to someone else and their webcam, somewhere out on the internet.

Let's go over that again in case you missed it.

You click a button, and you and your webcam are immediately connected to someone strange person out there on the internet who is, statistically speaking, probably masturbating furiously at this very moment.

Your parents may have recently purchased a netbook with a webcam installed, therefore...

It's time to talk to your parents about Teh Internets, before Teh Internets do it for you.

* Flowplayer is cool and all, but when you've recently written some code to handle partial range HTTP requests outside of the usual Apache module, it's just very irritating to find that its pseudostreaming mechanism only has the archaic uri://hostname/reference?startpos=n mechanism available.

* FLV seeking of streams is ugly. Trust in the internets that the one example I can find of what's necessary in order to put metadata back into the partial bits and pieces is in a language nothing remotely related to it is written in, i.e., (@#$%!) Ruby.

* The people who designed SNMP should be flogged until they explain why it was necessary to put 1.3.6.1.4.1 into pretty much every SNMP query that will ever be made, and then just kinda stopped defining things shortly thereafter.

* This goes double for the people who write the resulting explanation of their particular implementation of MIBs in Backus-Naur, but not just in BNF but also carefully formatted to be equally unreadable to both man and machine.

* The error messages WMP11 emits about files it won't stream are just a delight to behold. The player might as well just put up an image of two fingers flying for all the good it does you. Did the remote end send back a 404? Did the remote end send back a text file containing ASCII art of horses? Did the remote end genuinely start handing over a file it has no idea how to play? Did the remote end explode in a fireball of doom? It's all the same!

I know some of my friends roll their eyes when I say that something needs to be seriously done to the ATF (preferably, have them absorbed by the DEA and the FBI), so I thought I would share this lovely example.

A couple years ago, a company by the name of German Sports Guns decided to cash in on the popularity of the H&K MP5 and make a .22 caliber clone. A lot of people (myself included) were excited about this since it's practically impossible for a civilian to own a real MP5 due to its short barrel and full-auto capability. So, they started building and importing a .22 that looks a hell of a lot like the original, but is semi-auto only and has a 16.5" (instead of 9") barrel on it to satisfy the NFA regulations. In order to make it not look really silly with the long barrel, they put a plastic housing around the barrel that looks like a silencer. The variants that is important to story is made to look like an MP5 with an integrated silencer.

Now, let me make this clear, this barrel shroud was purely for decoration, it does nothing to suppress the sound and is in no way a functional silencer.

As is the law, GSG had every model (including this one) that they wished to sell in the US inspected by the ATF, and the ATF gav them the thumbs up. The guns started hitting the shelves, people started buying them, all is well. Right?

Um..... no....

Fast forward to last month. American Tactical, the importer of GSG firearms, posted a letter to their website. Apparently the ATF has changed its mind and decided that the piece of plastic that was wrapped around the barrel is a silencer, and that they must stop importing/selling the item immediately and must recall and replace those thae already sold. Apparently GSG has come up with a replacement that the ATF is happy with, but the fact remains that people who legally purchased this firearm in the past couple years are now committing a felony for posessing the old version.

Let me repeat that, there are folks out there that are unknowingly guilty of a felony because a non-elected government organization changed its mind.

And there's not a whole lot that the general populas can do about it since the law gives the ATF the power to interpret things as they like.

In a moment of complete insanity, apparently Southwest Airlines tossed Kevin Smith off a flight for being too fat.

See also: http://twitpic.com/1340gw

So... last night, I was complaining that the revolver option for thugs masterminds in City of Heroes was just comically huge and I wish they were smaller to look more realistic.

Here is an image of the "magnum revolver," the normal revolver just has a shorter barrel.

Well, apparently they were just planning ahead for Taurus to come out with a revolver that shoots 3" magnum .410 shotgun shells.

Listening to conservative talk radio today. As can be expected, people are all upset over the idea that gays might be able to server in the military and be open about their preference. One of the arguments against it caught my interest: what about benefits to the spouse?

I mean... how do you really know who's a spouse in a same sex relationship versus just some guy or girl that person knows? If it's a romantic interest, what truly counts as a spouse? 2 weeks? 6 months? 5 years?

It's almost as if we would need some sort of legally binding contract to declare this... I wonder what that might look like...

Last night we finally got ourselves together enough to go in there.  We downed Lord Marrowgar on the second go (I think), Lady Deathwhisper after a few wipes figuring it out, and the Gunship Battle on the second attempt.  We were down to 8 people by the time we got to that orc, and attacked him anyway just to get a feel for it.

He's soooo dead the next time we go.

Post Scriptum: Rocket packs!@#!#!!one!!

 So, after swapping my new phone out for my old phone with the cell provider, I thought things would be fine and I'd fix the phone I'd "broken" later tonight once I got off work.  Then I got back to my work area and noticed the old, reliable Razr doing the same "up, down, up, down, no service now lol" thing the new Palm was doing.

Two phones, different manufacturers, different software revisions, exhibiting the same malfunction and the only commonality being that they were both using PCS (1900) instead of CDMA (800) on a particular provider.  Not bloody likely.  I suspected there was something not right about this when Verizon's network had no apparent problems telling me I couldn't make calls while roaming on their network, over and over.
At approximately the same time as I was talking with Sprint Technical Support again, I got an email from one of the managers at work saying something was up with Sprint's nearby repeater tower.  Too right it was on Sprint's end, but I don't think it was the tower.  The technician gave me a different MSID to program in than the one I'd gotten from their website last night--which immediately solved the problem.  Just a few minutes ago when I re-provisioned the Palm back onto my account, it gave me that same MSID. 

It's pretty awesome when you make multiple calls to technical support and no one is willing to admit they actually had a problem--like we're supposed to believe these things magically fix themselves.  If I could get signal with anyone else in this building I would so be getting a new phone and service provider right now.  Comcast has more useful support reps.

Looks like the second time was the charm... my cell phone is temporarily out of commission until I can get the Razr back online while I take a shot at fixing it.  If ya need me, email or Google Talk.

The TSA continues to try its best to kill the airline industry. Now you apparently can't leave your seat an hour before landing and can't have anything in your lap including small electronics or books! (link)

You know, it's amazing.  I have no obvious grey anythings, and yet the "community sales rep" Comcast assigned to our area seemed to think it would be appropriate to act as if I were a senile, easily-confused retiree on multiple occasions just because I live in a condoplex that has a lot of retirees.  When he first came around to "save me some money" he was looking straight at me so he can't possibly have confused me with the aged and infirm then.  After about 10 minutes of listning to him try to tell me he would be saving me money by signing me for more expensive classes of service.  I told him that I didn't need my internet upgraded because I already had double-docsis, just like everyone else in the area because they'd upgraded everyone over a year ago.  I also told him I wasn't interested in digital cable yet because my PVR equipment can't handle high-def yet and sent him on his way.  He left behind a broadsheet with channel lineups on it.  I told him I'd call him once I got some time freed up because I was planning to reconfigure things to handle digital broadcast media before the end of the year. A lot of technical language there, you think?  Most people would get the clue that they're dealing with someone who won't look kindly on being told to their face that they're "saving money" on a rate that is only marginally less than what they're already paying, and only lasts for three to six months.  For the record the "deal" he was trying to get me would have amounted to about $165 or so a month after the promotion discount ran out.  This is absolutely not cheaper than the $111 I'm paying now, and it was clear he thought I was an idiot because he kept insisting he would be saving me money, even after I pointed out that the rate changes after three months. So yesterday, I got around to calling him again.  I blew about an hour on it, and it was a complete waste of my time.  Comcast's site is a little gnomic, and I figured I would make things easy for the guy with one simple criteria: "What's the least expensive package that will get me Syfy in HD?" He couldn't answer this question.  He wouldn't even really address it.  He wanted to talk about saving me money by setting me up with phone service I don't need.  This went on for several rounds of me reiterating the question and hoping he would catch on to the words coming directly from my mouth, and then listening to him go back into "hard sell" mode and talk about their triple play.  So, after about 45 minutes of completely wasting my time, I faked some cell problems and hung up on him.  You know, the last time I checked, making the customer want to strangle you to death was not considered to be a winning sales tactic. I then went to Comcast's website, poked around a bit, noticed that it's screwed up and Syfy HD doesn't show up under any channel lineup at the moment, and then just called the 800 number.  That nice lady managed to answer my simple question and set things up so I can just drive over to the Comcast offices tomorrow and pick up a digital box.  About 15 minutes, problem solved, and no one has to die.  The idiot rep tried to call me back during and after the call to the 800 number.  If he calls me again today, god help him--because if he hadn't been such a thick-skulled jackass I would have actually had time to go pick up a digital cable box yesterday after talking to him.  I'll call up Comcast and let them know how well this guy is doing his job--and how he's misrepresenting more than just "savings".  (There's some things I know Comcast frowns on, like telling people that after the promotional rate expires, they'll just sign you up for the new promotional rate.) God forbid he show up unannounced on my doorstep where I could actually reach him in a moment of weakness.  I'm pretty much furious with Comcast right now, and most of it's because of this one guy.

So, a virus "making the rounds" in the local area seems to be powered by a nice little rootkit called h8srt.  Here's some info that can help.

• TeaTimer (from Spybot Search & Destroy) can prevent it from writing to the registry when it attempts to hook it's second stage payload in through WinLogon with a key named 'Taskman'.
• Comodo Antivirus's whitelist can forcibly keep iexplore.exe from spawning silently in the background to access websites to get phony referral hits (if yer PC is playing commercials for no reason now, guess what).
• Malwarebytes can see the second stage trojan it dropped, but can't see the actual rootkit.
• It likes to install it's current second-stage payload into C:\RECYLER
• It will bootstrap in more friends.  Take the affected machines offline immediately.
• The rootkit prevents mbam.exe (Malwarebytes) from running, and even does a special something to cause vB errors if you try to rename the binary something and sneak around it.  (It's probably not smart enough to fall for it's own tricks, tho.  Renaming mbam.exe to firefox.exe will possibly work)
• It definitely jumps onto thumbdrives using an autoexec.inf that winds up being pretty mangled because of the way they insert it.
• RootRepeal can kill the sucker dead in memory hiding in the SSDT and just about everywhere else.  THEN you stand a chance at removing it with mbam and a little heavy-handed deleting.
• The people who make AntiMalware are bitches.  The very first thing this variant did was trick the user into allowing AntiMalware to be installed by presenting a fake virus warning.  AntiMalware itself generates more phony virus warnings at a genuinely furious pace.  I would like video of the FTC cornholing their management team if a live viewing isn't possible. 

Yes, being able to make comments like that last one is why I flagged my own blog as being unsuitable for minors. Entertaingly when you uninstall AntiMalware, it actually asks why and reports that back.  I think I might have uninstalled it a few thousand times today.  I might still be repeatedly uninstalling it.  It really depends on how long I stay irritable.

I went to bottle up my latest batch (English Brown Ale) thinking that I had plenty of bottles - I have 11 of the 1L flip top bottles that I bought from NotLarry, plus I had a case of 12 22 oz. bottles from before, and then another 12 of the 1L flip top bottles in a box. Well, as it turns out I'm short 5 of the 22 oz. bottles (somebody didn't return the empty after I gave them some free homebrew!) and the unopened box of flip top bottles I had didn't come with the tops!

I had to improvise - there was a nearly empty 2L bottle of Black Cherry Soda in the fridge, so I emptied it out, washed it out, and it was barely able to hold the leftover that I had in the bottling bucket.

I decided to bottle instead of keg this batch since I plan on giving some out at Christmas.

:RASPBERRY:

So, I've been kicking around with the idea of building steampunk garb for a while and bought a few pieces at Dragoncon this past year. I know, I'm a couple years late to the party, but there it is.

One thing I keep coming back to is the weaponry I see people carrying and what I should build/buy. I know I won't be happy if it look like a piece of shit, so most of the "eh, just buy a funny looking squirt gun and paint it" solutions won't work, and I can't seem to be happy with any concept I com up with using a NERF gun as a base (which seems to be a standard). I've seen some wonderful pieces of art made from wood, metal, and glass, but something always seemed off with them, and I think I've finally figured out what it is.

They're too damn complicated to ever have been reasonably created in any world.

Ok... I take that back. The folks dressed up as mad scientists get a pass, because, well, they're mad... and scientists/inventors/tinkerers often build things that aren't practical in the "real world" for a variety of reasons. But the hunters? the gun slingers? the air pirates? Would they rather have a big, clumsy firearm that has a good chance of breaking if dropped, hit with a stick, and/or have delicate gears exposed to the elements? Or would they rather have a rather simple and sturdy weapon like a Colt Single Action Army or the Henry Repeating Rifle?

Both existed during the period steampunk is loosely based on. Heck, I've been told that the time period was turn of the 20th century (I thought for a long time that it was closer to early-mid 19th). That means we get into the era of John Moses Browning, often referred to as the patron saint of gun design by gun nuts. While his 1911, BAR, and Browning M2 .50 machine gun are probably just at the cut off point, many of his designs were created before or just after 1900. Heck, even his Auto-5 semi-auto shotgun was designed before the turn of the century.

I'm thinking that steampunk specific mods should be left specifically to things like scopes, and, if you do build a custom odd looking weapon, it should have a story explaining why standard arms wouldn't suffice. Remember, a firearm needs to be as simple as it can to do its job. Consider that the owner is usually going to clean and maintain it themselves and any failure is probably going to be disastrous due to the nature of the function of the tool.

Of course, one of the big questions is how would most conventions look upon someone with something like this or this strapped to their side or this slung over their back with little to no modifcations.

There's also the fact that I may be missing something entirely, and I'm always open to discussion with someone more knowledgeable than I on the genre. Oh, and don't worry, I'm not going to go up to someone and say "your prop is very pretty, but stupid." I recognize hard work when I see it, and it's their costume, so it's their rules.

3 years ago today, I was woken from sleep by the fire alarm going off and smoke pouring out of the AC vents.
3 years ago today, I found out just how well you can find things when you're in a true emergency.
3 years ago today, I thought that I was watching everything I owned go up in flames.
3 years ago today, I thought I had lost my cat because she fled into a closet and I couldn't find her.

3 years ago today, I saw the best in neighbors I had never met.
3 years ago today, I would learn how good my friends truly were.

For those that helped naienko and I through that time, thank you. We wouldn't be where we are now without you. I don't know how we would have come out without you guys.

For everyone, remember that sometimes the best you can do is to keep breathing. If you find yourself there, let people know. The people that care about you can't help if they don't know you're hurting, and there are probably more of them out there than you think.

A true friend isn't necessarily always there when you want them, but is when you need them.

Even without the craziness of things that are going on right now, I think it's important that everyone knows that there is the family that you're born into and the family that you choose. If you're in the Nashville area and don't already have plans with family, you're invited to join us for Thanksgiving. Just let us ...know so we can make sure there's enough food.

Name : English Brown Ale
Recipe:
3.3 lbs. Plain Amber Malt Extract
2 Lbs. Plain Amber Dry Malt Extract
8 oz. Crushed Crystal Malt 60L
1 oz. Willamette Hops (Bittering, 60 min)
1/2 oz. Willamette Hops (Finishing, 5 min)
11g Nottingham Yeast
(Above ingredients are the contents of a Brewer's Best English Brown Ale kit)

Brew Date: 21 Nov 2009
Bottling Date: 13 Dec 2009
Drinking Date: Christmas!

Starting Gravity: 1.040
Final Gravity: 1.009
ABV: 4.1%
Calories: 131.5
Carbs: 12.9

(Calculations from Mr. Good Beer)


This time I'm fermenting down in cellar of the house, rather than inside. This is 100% closed off from sunlight and since it is underground on 3 sides is stays a pretty constant temperature in the mid 50s.

I also finally got to use the banjo burner that my parents gave me for Christmas last year. The nice thing is that it easily cut 45 minutes off of the time it takes to brew a batch of beer, because it heats up the kettle very quickly! The downside is that the black paint on the diffuser bubbled off as soon as I started using it and left a sooty, black residue all over the bottom of my brew kettle. I don't know what the manufacturer was thinking, because I didn't even have the thing turned up full blast. I guess people don't think everything through when designing a product. Hopefully it's caked/burned off enough to not force me to get out the brillo pads again after the next batch.

I'm thinking about getting some folks together to do some random gaming. We can do a one shot RPG, cards games, or board games. I don't really care, just want an excuse to get together and have some fun.

Anyone interested?

pics from another succcessfull phreaknic can be found here

Well in just one more week our household will be down to a single income. My wife and I thought long and hard about it, but the cost of daycare is just too much, so we decided to have her stay home with the kids.

Well, that's what we decided, but then our son's daycare had a spot open up in the Pre-School class and moved him up. A year ahead of schedule. Yeah. Now he's learning things at the same pace as the rest of the class. So we've now decided that my wife will still stay home and keep our 5 month old daughter, but we are going to keep paying for our son to stay in day care for as long as we can. If we get to where we can't pay the bills each month then we'll pull him out, but we're going to take advantage of the opportunity as long as we can.

To help offset the costs, though, my wife is now selling Pampered Chef goodies all over Nashville. I thought it was somewhat unbelievable that with all of the Pampered Chef consultants out there that the domain nashvillepamperedchef.com was even available.

And yeah, I need to get some free time available to brew some more beer. I've had empty kegs for the last couple of months, but now that the baby is getting easier to manage, that may actually happen.

On the way home from work the other day, I got stuck behind a fairly new Town Car that was puffing blue smoke at every red light. It definitely had oil leaking into the engine and probably a few other things. Looked at it's plates, and, sure enough, it was from a couple counties away.

For those of you that don't live around here, if you live in Nashville or the immediate area, you have to go through a yearly emissions check along with registering your vehicle. It's not a big deal, just a sensor shoved up your tailpipe or cable connected to your car's computer (depending on age), check to make sure the catalytic converter is still there, and a check to make sure that the gas cap still seals properly. This vehicle had new tags and would easily fail those tests.

Here's why this pisses me off (other than choking on this guys fumes). People are constantly harassing the government to put stricter and stricter restriction on the car manufacturers to put out clean, more fuel efficient vehicles. The truth is that the stuff coming out of the tail pipes of brand new cars are as clean, if not cleaner, than the air of many cities. The big polluters, as far as cars go, are the ones that have been on the road for a few years and not properly maintained. Not only that, but if the car can't pass the test, the engine is probably not running as well as it should and is probably wasting gas.

Right now, several cities require testing, but the majority of the US does not. I say we should make it mandatory across the US. Yes, it would be a pain in the ass to do, but I think some good would come out of it. It will actually do some good for the environment, the cars actually on the road will get better mileage, and the vehicles will probably be in better mechanical shape.

Bottom line is we should either get serious about our environmental controls or shut up about it.

This month I just got an eBill from NES (the electric company) which was supiciously really high, after last month thinking that I'd somehow managed to miss the August bill and paid double in September.

After a little digging, I've got payment confirmation for that double payment, but apparently NES doesn't show it.

After a little more digging I see that this apparently happened in June as well and I just didn't catch it then.

Me and NES are going to have a talk on Monday about why I'm having to pay an extra $3.95 fee to the idiots they've outsourced things to who are clearly screwing up on a regular basis.

• o hai twitter! fergot u wuz. mah srry, i will buy u a drank (cuz u so fine too) #

So, apparently I put up with someone's bullshit for six years merely to be told:

"I just never felt like I could trust you."

That from the person who broke up with me on more than one occasion so she could go date someone else for awhile.  What a load of crap.


In other news, I'm single again.

In honor of talk like a pirate day, they're giving away Monkey Island: Episode 1 for free at http://www.playlikeapirate.com.

Dear Comcast,

Stop fucking with your traffic shaping bullshit if you can't make it work correctly.  Preventing me from ssh'ing to my equipment at home is only going to make me start giving my money to AT&T instead.

Not all your users are so stupid that they can't work a sniffer and see that you guys are in fact, tampering with connection traffic, again.

In short, DIAF.


Sincerely,

Dagmar

• got a lil wet on the ride but its all goood! time to play Zelda II (NES) on the projector! (yeah im a geek, but i love it =P) #
• @arafatm there is a new Buffalo Wild Wings that opened here in Hermitage, its on OHB before Lebanon Pike (from 40) #
• headin to Big Bang for a bit! #
• needs moar cowbell! #
• i lubz DMB, makes falling asleep that much mo'betta #
• back from a 320 mile ride out to Jamestown! #

Today is 9/11 and it's clear it's time for a change.

It's time for America to just put it behind them, because the press and politicians will never stop exploiting the incident for a buck.  Those who lost family and friends in the horrible incident should be even more offended that their loss is being used by others merely to draw attention to themselves.

Half of the news coverage today is a bunch of nonsense about who is doing what to show how patriotic they are, although after this many years they've been so busy talking about what they'll do that they've barely been able to pave over the site.

It's time to simply stop paying attention to those people and get on with life.

• RAAWWWRR! its Tuesday! #
• bike night was fun, saw a SWEET 08 Suzuki B-King! #
• mmm Five Guy's burger for lunch! #
• BWW with Steph, cmon out! #

"oooo... I made my brain vibrate. That was fun."
"Now *I'm* laughing and I don't know why."
-naienko

• cant shake this love #
• lookin' for my ninja Bovice. where you at Bovice? #
• HAHAHAHA http://bit.ly/zqlIy #
• happy birthday to me #
• follow @shitmydadsays for some lulz #
• thinkin' bout a time and a place that aint no more~ #

• cant shake this love #
• lookin' for my ninja Bovice. where you at Bovice? #
• HAHAHAHA http://bit.ly/zqlIy #
• happy birthday to me #
• follow @shitmydadsays for some lulz #
• thinkin' bout a time and a place that aint no more~ #

• ugg, this is supposed to be my vacation time! #
• looking for a 2004 or newer R6 / CBR600 / GSX-R 600! if ya know of something (outside of ebay / cl / etc) shoot me a link! #
• Do you want to date my avatar? -> http://bit.ly/ylffp #
• Put my kayak + gear up for sale, if you're interested lemme know!

  http://nashville.craigslist.org/boa/1333320544.html #

• picking up the new R6 tomorrow, cant sleep! #
• Party at @timoguin's house tonight for @laraoguin and me! Our birthdays are all this week. You're invited. Message for directions, or call. #
• wondering if this after motorcycle high will always be there when I finish a full day of riding <3 #

This past Saturday, I tested for my next rank in Tae Kwon Do (green belt with a stripe/5th gup). I screwed up and showed up to the morning test and wasn't supposed to test until the afternoon. Ah well, got to watch the white and yellow belts test. Which was good.

My test started after lunch. We started with kick techniques, and I felt kind of sorry for the guy holding target for me when we got to turn sidekicks. He was significantly smaller than me and one the black belts in my class kept telling me to kick harder. I think he was relieved when it was over. After than was forms, which I got some compliments about later (even though Wiz admonished me for not be confident about part of one of them). I still need to work on them some to try to keep them straight in my head. Then the part I've always had issues with since coming back: sparring.

The biggest problem I have with sparring is breathing. Due to general allergies, my nose is almost always clogged up. I also don't have the endurance that I did 10 years ago. This means that I'm quickly soaked in sweat and breathing like a stuck pig. I did much better this time around, but I still need to work on it. Especially if I'm going to be sparring these teenage black belts. One of which was literally half my age.

The last thing you do at testing is board breaking. I couldn't figure out what I wanted to break with until the last minute. I was handed 3 boards and decided to break them with a turn sidekick. Usually, I break boards on the first or second hit. This time, I think it took 8. It was a combo of either not going fast enough and/or not being on target (I missed the boards entirely a couple times). I finally broke them and went up to receive my stripe. I was handed a blue belt instead (next level up).

I have been told I had a rather funny look on my face as I first looked at Mr Shine (who handed me the belt) and then Wiz thinking that it was a mistake. Wiz told me to take it, and then announced that she was pleased with how hard I had worked since coming back. Last time she embarrassed me be essentially calling me lazy in front of everyone (which I am), and this time she embarrassed me be declaring how hard I had been working. Guess that's a good thing.

Of course, now I have that many more forms to learn and am now at the low end of being a senior belt and may have to start teaching the white and yellow belts in class.

Conversation I had with my boss a little while ago:
me: I think I'll head south tomorrow to install those wireless APs that we got in.
her: I'm going to be out of the office all day in meetings tomorrow, and Rob is taking the day off..
me: right. Staying here then.

First there was the Lego (or was that Playmobil--I think it was LEGO tho) Hazardous Waste Cleanup kit, and now we've got LEGO zombies, a-la carte.  :)

(Sorry about your paycheck, Mike)

http://www.toywiz.com/blebcocufiwe.html

• wantin' to throw the frisbee, but has no one to throw with #
• killed the interview! should be working again on the 1st, but til then…. LAX #
• @essdodson always gettin' jobz mane! in reply to essdodson #
• watchin' Choke #
• joined at the soul with a pair of headphones, we need nobody to let ourselves go~ #
• wishin i was @ LP field! #

• @ladymerlin looks like they would fly a bit better than the wooden chairs haha in reply to ladymerlin #
• old number is old. dont txt or call my old number (for my names sake! lol) please, thnx #
• looking for employment opportunities of all kinds! holler at me if you know of something #
• sleep time, dont call me. oh wait… life is good, at the moment and overall #
• anyone going to nash2600 tonight? #
• @timoguin get some sun for me in reply to timoguin #
• fallin' asleep to Alice in Chains #
• going fishing / camping on the lake #