Archive for category Actual Events

$70 Lesson

Posted by Andrew Flanagan in Actual Events, Ranting & Ravings on October 26, 2007

Our washer machine didn’t work on Monday. I smelled what seemed to be that electrical burning smell and freaked out. This week has been BUSY and although normally I poke and prod dying electronics of all shapes and sizes I broke down immediately in this case and called up the repair people. They came today. Hmm — “Did you realize that the circuit’s off?”. *click* now it works!

What a pain… Ironically, I must mention that my wife TOLD ME to check the circuit box before I called.

Good wife. Bad Andrew.

Hey, at least I’m stimulating the economy!

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4 Comments

WordPress Tagging

Posted by Andrew Flanagan in Actual Events, Geekiness, MetaData on October 5, 2007

I just upgraded to WordPress 2.3 which supports tagging natively. There’s a new spot under the Edit window where you can enter tags. I’m lazy though so I’d like it if it could present me with a list of my tags so I could click and add them automatically… I just modified the code a little bit for one file in WordPress and it appears to work… here’s what I did.

In the file wp-admin/edit-form-advanced.php, insert the following:

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        <script type="text/javascript">
        function setTag(text)
        {
                var curvalue = document.getElementById('tags-input').value;
 
                if (curvalue == "")
                {
                        document.getElementById('tags-input').value = text;
                }
                else
                {
                        document.getElementById('tags-input').value = curvalue + ", " + text;
                }
        }
        </script>
        <?php
        $output = "<legend>";
        $tags = (array) get_terms('post_tag', $args);
        foreach ($tags as $tag)
        {
                $output .= "<a href=\"#\" onClick=\"setTag('".$tag->name."')\">".$tag->name."</a>,";
        }
        $output = substr($output, 0, strlen($output) - 1);
        $output .= "</legend>";
        echo $output;
        ?>

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Vertical Farming

Posted by Andrew Flanagan in Actual Events, Somewhat Random on October 5, 2007

Vertical Farming is a neat, futuristic approach to producing food within urban environments. I’m not terrified of running out land and of populations booming too much nor am I running scared of global warming or cooling or whichever it is but I still think that the idea is very neat.

Image courtesy ©atelier SoA architectes I think it could actually be made a cost saver in large cities. The idea is sort of similar to terracing unusable land to make it usable but instead of making land flat, you stack it. I really do think that the answer to a lot of “society’s woes” is that these things will at some point become cheaper than doing them the “old” way. I just see this one as becoming worthwhile sooner than some of the other wacky ideas. So I guess I view this as more of an investment in new technology than just philanthropy to support these projects.

The reality is that shipping and transportation is becoming more and more difficult and massively increases the price of products. I’ve not seen it mentioned, but why not have the first floor be the “fresh produce” grocery store?

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2 Comments

OpenVPN

Posted by Andrew Flanagan in Actual Events, Geekiness on September 27, 2007

Well in my drug-induced down time I’ve been fiddling with my Gentoo server some more… I added Wake-on-Lan support to the kernel so that I can power the system up from upstairs or across the country. It’s nice because I don’t tend to leave it on all the time and even when I’m home, it’s a pain to hit the power button since I keep the system squirreled away in a cabinet.

In addition however, I also added OpenVPN support to the server. I punched a hole in the firewall and set up Ethernet bridging in order to give me full access to the entire network when I’m away from home. It works amazingly well. It wasn’t quick to set up but it was kind of fun. Basically you create an Ethernet bridge between a “real” network adapter and the virtual OpenVPN adapter and assign that bridge the IP address of the old “real” network adapter. I like.

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3 Comments

More Bash Scripts

Posted by Andrew Flanagan in Actual Events, Geekiness on September 25, 2007

I need to copy all of my FLAC files out of my directory tree but preserve the folder structure that they were in… Here’s my script.

Unfortunately, it’s not a “perfect” solution as there are issues when handling special characters in files (especially newline characters). However, since my file really just have spaces in them, that’s all this was designed to beat.

SOURCEDIR="/var/mirror/Data/Audio/My CD Archive"
TARGETDIR="/var/mirror/FLAC"
 
mkdir "$TARGETDIR"
 
find "$SOURCEDIR" -type d | while read DIR; do
  if [[ "$DIR" != "$SOURCEDIR" ]]; then
    SHORTDIR=`echo $DIR | sed 's/.*///g'`
    mkdir "$TARGETDIR/$SHORTDIR"
    echo "Now in $DIR"
    find "$DIR" -name "*.flac" | while read FILE; do
      SHORTFILE=`echo $FILE | sed 's/.*///g'`
      echo "Now moving $SHORTFILE"
      mv "$FILE" "$TARGETDIR/$SHORTDIR"
    done
    echo "--------------------"
    sleep 1
  fi
done

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Done? Good, now start again.

Posted by Andrew Flanagan in Actual Events, Ranting & Ravings on September 14, 2007

That’s how I feel these days. There’s always been “overhead” stuff that I have to do. You have to take showers and dress and clean up after yourself (at least somewhat). You have to spend time getting ready for work and driving to work and reading emails and just doing all the boring monotonous things that no one enjoys but are required.

Well, I’ve now hit the point where about the time I’m wrapping up all the “overhead” tasks and ready to do something useful I realize I’m out of time. More “overhead” tasks crowd in around me and it’s time to brush my teeth and get to bed early so I can wake up early and repeat.

It’s terrible.

Granted, I have time to write this blog entry. But you know what? I’ve sadly actually tried to allocate “overhead” time to write to my blog! I guess I feel as if it’s a journal in many ways and so writing in it is part of this complete healthy life.

But this makes me think: maybe it’s not that I get nothing but overhead done but rather that I’ve put far too many tasks into the “overhead” category merely because they repeat frequently. Nowadays, virtually everything I do is scheduled. I schedule my oil changes, how many times we vacuum the house, every odd job and maintenance task is updated on my calendar if I can think of it. My daily status report for work is scheduled (and I receive a horrible email warning me about it every day). If Sarah and I want to have fun, we generally schedule some event weeks in advance and I shuffle some of the chores off of that day in the calendar and reallocate them to make a little extra room.

So maybe it’s not about overhead, maybe it’s about spontaneity and the realization that precious little can be done on the spur of the moment anymore.

I hate routine. Maybe I should write a program that takes my tasks and in an intelligent way re-arranges them to surprise me without totally destroying any sense of order.

Hmm… that sounds like a program that would probably have to pass the Turing test. I think what I’ll do is make an entry in my calendar to write this program. Maybe next Tuesday. That sounds good.

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7 Comments

Investments

Posted by Andrew Flanagan in Actual Events on September 6, 2007

So… it’s been a bad quarter for the markets. However, my emerging markets fund has still been performing relatively well. What does this mean from a market perspective? With so much supposed instability in Asian markets I would have thought that it would take a larger hit… However, here’s what I have:

Emerging Market Fund (USEMX)- QTD: 3.36% YTD: 20.43% Last 12 months: 41.87%

Cornerstone Strategy Fund (USCRX) – QTD: -0.96% YTD: 4.84% Last 12 months: 12.73%

Small Cap Stock Fund (USCAX) – QTD: -4.13% YTD: 5.49% Last 12 months: (not enough data)

I need to get into this more so that I can attempt to make good decisions (or at least feel snotty when I tell people why I’m making decisions). I don’t believe in “beating” the market, but if I can invest in such a way that I can hedge losses that may affect me in other areas I’d be interested. For example, if I’m concerned about massive outsourcing by U.S. high-tech companies (which will affect the entire industry, including my potential earnings) then where should I invest to balance this loss? That sort of thing.

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3 Comments

Oozy rat in a sanitary zoo

Posted by Andrew Flanagan in Actual Events, Geekiness, Somewhat Random on August 12, 2007

I stumbled across a website that was talking about the “magical number seven, plus or minus two“. The Wikipedia article that I link to has some great stuff. It’s really quite fascinating. I myself have found that I am able to really track 8 things at a time. If I’m stressed it seems to drop to 6. I use this quite a bit for making lists. Most lists I wish to make are short (less than 7 items) but I often wish to make them when I’m without a writing device (no PDA, pen and paper, etc.). So what I do is simply think out the list and make sure I firmly remember the number of items. Then, when I need to recall the list, I quickly think of the appropriate number (which is easy to remember) and the items tend to “fall out” of my memory quite easily. I have tried to track multiple lists and can succeed in juggling a few (although it’s unnecessary since I rarely have more than one list in my mind at a time).

Sometimes I wish I was autistic (since many of autistic people seem to have this cognitive numeric limit removed). It would be fun to track lists that contained hundreds or thousands of items.

Okay, well maybe not “fun” but useful.

Or I could just get a digital voice recorder.

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4 Comments

Storage

Posted by Andrew Flanagan in Actual Events, Geekiness on August 10, 2007

So… Back on march 30th I posted an entry on my storage solution. I had built a computer and had added a basic RAID configuration to it:

I finally got my RAID solution in place. I went cheap and got two 500GB hard drives ($145 each) and a HighPoint RocketRAID 1740 RAID 0/1/5 4 channel SATA 3.0 GBps card ($110).

So… With this configuration I get 500GB of storage (430GB or so after formatting). This was great for a while. However, recently I realized I needed more. All of my personal “stuff” that’s somewhat irreplaceable doesn’t take up much room. Add my ripped CDs in and you get about 100GB. I have another 25-50GB of random things (disk images for linux installs, video rips (which I haven’t in the past kept for very long so I was okay with not backing them up)). So I wasn’t exactly out of room but I was using a fair bit. However, I also wanted to snag a relation’s (who will remain unnamed) music collection. It’s 499GB. That’s 272 days worth of music if played continuously. We follow a strict rule to ensure compliance with copyright law: we don’t tell anyone.

Whoops.

Anyway — I needed more storage so I picked up some hard drives from Fry’s online (why is their online store called “Outpost”? It makes no sense). They were cheap! $89 per 500GB drive. They came with free shipping and I shipped them to Virginia when I was there on travel to save on state sales tax. When I got back, I copied my existing data to a 500GB external drive, added the new drives, prayed a quick prayer that my system wouldn’t overheat and started it up. I reconfigured the RAID array from a 2 x 500GB RAID 1 array to a 4 X 500GB RAID 5 array. This gives me 1.5TB (1.4 TB or so formatted). It’s nice. I’ve loaded everything on there and since I have so much extra breathing room I’ve immediately started piling on stuff that I previously had kept on local hard drives. Here’s my usage currently:

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It’s nice to have some room…

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2 Comments

The Temporal Me

Posted by Andrew Flanagan in Actual Events, Somewhat Random on August 10, 2007

I have a terrible memory. Even so, I remember enough of what I do to realize that I’m always somewhat disappointed and underwhelmed by my past self. I feel as if the person I was 6 months ago was a much more immature person who said and did all sorts of ridiculous things. Now, the odd part is knowing that 6 months from now, I’ll scroll the archives of my blog (but not too far since I don’t post much) find this entry and gently shake my head and tut-tut.

It’s disillusioning.

There is at least a slight benefit though. If people think poorly of my opinions, just wait! I won’t be the same person in 6 months and I’ll have the class and sophistication to agree that I was wrong!

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