Never been one to let the carrier drop

Kayti points out that I haven’t really posted anything about my life in several months. There isn’t really a lot new to mention – I’m still trying to get MetricMind to get me a replacement cable for my EV (apparently the company that made the original cables has been bought out, which caused all sorts of confusion). We’re thinking of moving in May or June to someplace slightly cheaper – or at least someplace that has central air. My court case finally resolved.. I’m pretty sure that I’m out a significant chunk of money even if I don’t need any further physical therapy, but for a wide variety of reasons that I will document at some later date, my lawyer thought that probably the settlement I got was about as good as I was going to do. I hate insurance companies, I hate the U.S. legal system. Nothing new there, though.

I’m moderately hopeful that the current economic collapse will help bring us one step closer to a world with a more sensible way of handling resource allocation. I still hate money. I still like Barrack, although I still can’t pronounce his name right and probably just mispelled it. I still love my cat, Allie, and he’s still adorable and (unfortunately) very sharp and a destruct-o-matic kitten-47. I’m still working on a web 2.0 application for a startup, and getting very close to beta on it. I’ve only got two clients (as opposed to five a few months ago) so I’m looking for some more peicemeil work to fill in the holes. I am still hopeful that sometime in the near future I can get a job writing software for EVs or AFVs. I’m still trying to get up the energy to drag the rack of recording gear (A/D converters, tube preamps, and the like) to the living room where all the rest of the music gear has gone so I can start recording. I’m hoping sometime soon to buy a friend’s x86 mac and move my music recording software to x86 mac as it’s looking increasingly likely that the x86 macs are more reliable than their G4 cousins.

Hm. I’m not sure what else to say. Me and Kayti keep discussing our wedding plans, off and on, and while I sometimes feel like I can’t breathe whenever we talk about such planning, I’m starting to look forward to it. I think. I’m slowly financially recovering from the last 3 months of 2008.

I’m hoping to have paid off all my credit cards in June of ’09. I’m trying to decide between several excessive expendatures to do after having done so 😉

I haven’t been tracking the social internet as well as I’d like.. it’s been weeks since I’ve read my LJ friends page – although I’ve been doing moderately good at watching facebook. I’m developing sort of a love-hate relationship with facebook – I love the people that the site has attracted – many friends from a wide variety of my life – but I pretty much hate what the site itself does. 😉 I wish I could get the same people in a livejournal feed. Actually what I want is something halfway in between the many paragraphs of LJ and the single-line updates of facebook – and with better privacy controls than facebook has – and less confusing ones.

I also want a world in which people don’t get fired for what their facebook photos show. I think it’s pathetic that anyone would be fired because facebook showed them naked in a hot tub or smoking a bong. Part of what’s wrong with this universe in my opinion.

I’m dreading my taxes, but I’ve started the process of calculating them already. Also, I dread them less than last year’s, because I think Barrack is likely to do more things I *agree* with with the money. Less machines for killing people, more machines for making people’s lives easy and wonderful. 😉

(if you’re looking for updates about my life, just ignore this geek article mostly posted so people googling for help on a subject I recently had trouble with will find their answer)

Just thought I’d post, in case anyone out there in google-land has a Thunder K8S motherboard and large (>500GB) hard disks, that flashing a new BIOS (3.09) image (see ftp://ftp.tyan.com/bios/2882_309.zip and flashing utility ftp://ftp.tyan.com/bios/flash/s2707/AMIFLASH.COM) will allow you to access those large drives without hanging on boot because of a bug in the SATALink bios. One interesting cavaet: you *must* clear the BIOS memory after flashing, or the system will not boot. Also, on my systems, after clearing the BIOS, I needed to load defaults (F2 at the ‘press F1 to run setup, or F2 to load defaults’) before I could go into setup and fix things – *anything* I did once in setup would just return me to being unable to boot. Clearing the BIOS is a matter of moving JP8 to the other two pins (it’s on the lower lefthand corner of the board, right next to the IDE sockets – see the manual at www.tyan.com. I *strongly* suggest writing the bios boot block as part of the flashing operation.

If anyone is trying to flash the BIOS from a USB CDROM, I suggest booting using the OpenDOS image on the ultimate boot CD (http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/) – choose option 3 immediately after booting, because you do not want EMM386 as it doesn’t play nice with SMP on this motherboard – and then burning the files above on a seperate CD and exchanging the ultimate boot CD for it. Or something.

http://www.perl.com/pub/a/2005/04/21/win32ole.html

I know. It’s been around forever.. the elephant lurking in the corner. Two technologies that I’ve used extensively on their own, but somehow never mixed.

Until today. 😉

I only publish the link because I’m sure a lot of my three readers are perlsters, and perhaps have never thought about how powerful a tool perl can be in win32 land. I first noticed some of it’s capabilities when writing a perl script to do symlink management for my girlfrancée. It’s capable of automating filesystem manipulation in ways that aren’t even easy – or obvious – in MFC or .NET. Yes, the digital duct tape language knows no bounderies. (Thanks, in part, to the good people over at ActiveState)

So, me and Kayti have decided on 6-06-10 as the date that we will be married. Mark your calandars 😉

here is a palm-based smartphone. Well, sort of. Apparently the OS is ‘all-new’. I cringe a little bit, but then I remember that nothing could be worse than windows CE and that I really like my current PalmOS Treo, so one would hope that they put some of the same stability into WebOS. Not that I’m saying my Treo never crashes, but I think I average about one crash a week, and they’re nearly always when I’m starting up the ssh client – and I have to admit, a ssh client is a pretty hairy thing to be running on a cell phone.

I’m currently trying to economize my life in general.. I actually had to debate with myself for several days before buying the Strong Bad video game