When a package arrived on Friday, I had a feeling it was something for me, so I deliberately didn’t look at the return address, I just set it beside P’s desk and waited. When he got home, he said I could open it if I wanted, because a “pwrincess birfday” (I am not making that up) is too important to be a single-day event, so it would be okay to open one small thing early. I opened it, and I am now the proud owner of a Keytronic board that is no surprise as to model (since it’s the only model I’ve used since…oh, 2000, I think), but is black this time. Maybe not such a big deal to most people, but I must say that I am very happy to have RCtrl and Menu keys that work reliably. On my old one, they’d sometimes work and sometimes not, but that was, after all, the board I rescued after dumping half a bottle of Smirnoff Twisted V Pomegranate Fusion over it (didn’t have a spare…that was my spare). The new one is clicky (I need audio feedback), but pretty quiet now, though that will last only until I’ve had it long enough to pound the bejeezus out of it because old Mrs. Ogden taught me too well how to type. That’s why I buy these boards…they’re tough enough to stand up to my taught-on-a-manual typing style longer than most. One of these days, I’m going to go to a yard sale or the Salvation Army store and hunt down an old full-size Remington manual typewriter because I’d be willing to bet I can still manage to do a three-copy carbon on one. Can you even buy carbon paper anymore? Mrs. Ogden, you may be long dead, but your commanding, “fff, space, jjj, space, ddd, space, kkk….” like a Marine drill sergeant will live on in my memory (and my typing style) forever.

Saturday dawned as it often does, with both me and my hangover waking up in barely enough time to get my eyes open and put some clothes on before going bug hunting. It was cooler than it had been (I actually got to wear jeans again, though I was sorry for it by noon), so I thought I’d probably not have many bugs, but I was wrong because it was a fantastic day for The Bughunter. Lots of leaf-footed bugs and squash bugs (nymph and adult), a couple of Carolina mantises (one L5 nymph, one adult female), a beautiful tan male Chinese mantis, two green stink bug nymphs, the spiky nymph of Euthochtha galeator (helmeted squash bug), three types of assassin bugs (wheel bugs, an adult Zelus and a Sinea nymph), lots of Phymata ambush bugs “in flagrante” (it’s mating season for them…hehe), tussock moth, dagger moth and fall webworm cats (shot them, then collected them for Valerie), a dog-day cicada (just collected that for Valerie)…I couldn’t shoot them as fast as I was finding them. Dumbass that I am, I’d not bothered to recharge my batteries because I didn’t think there would be much around (too cool), so I was getting a low battery warning when I found the patch of late boneset in bloom that had attracted a Painted Lady and a couple of Cabbage Whites. I got the Lady in my sights, took a few shots and crossed my fingers that the battery wouldn’t die, but just as I was getting up good and close to her, the camera started beeping at me; not low battery, but “memory card is full”. Goddamn…forgot I had the 1GB in and not the 2GB because I’d thought I might use the RAW hack script. I never did get the Cabbage White because they disappeared by the time I switched cards. Not that they aren’t common enough, but the fluttery little bastards fly low, don’t land for more than 0.24 nanoseconds, and never on anything like an attractive background. Oh, well…another time.

When we got home, I unloaded the camera and took a quick look through my shots. I thought about logging onto Flickr, but it’s been so goddamned long that I know I’ve got a shit-ton of messages, comments I’ve not answered, and I don’t even want to think about “photos from your contacts”. I really should just get rid of everyone who’s not on my “elite” list; I don’t have the time or inclination to spend hour after hour making comments on photos I probably like, but which aren’t anything really special to me (and neither are the people who shot them). Anyway, I didn’t bother with Flickr, or even go to my fish board (disaster awaits there, too), I just took a nap. Fuck it…it’s my birthday weekend, and I’m gonna do what I want to do. We woke up really late; it was almost beer-thirty when I was still working on coffee and getting my eyes open. After a few drinks, though, it finally occurred to P to tell me that he’d made my “pwrincess birfday” a holiday by taking Monday off work. Bless his heart; he hasn’t done that for the past couple of years because it was already on the weekend, but I really didn’t think he’d remembered, or thought he might be too busy to afford the time off. Again, I was wrong, but this is a good kind of wrong. After a few drinks, he asked me whether I wanted my other present, and even though my birthday isn’t technically until Monday, we’d already made it a four-day event (Fri-Mon), so I thought, “Ah, why not?”

My photos and music are already copied to my lovely new…320GB WD external HDD. Again, bless his heart; he knew I’d wanted a new keyboard because I’d given him one of those “hints” that he likes so much (the kind that come in email format with links to product pages so he doesn’t have to guess about anything), but I hadn’t for that; I’d just mentioned once or twice that I really needed more storage space. I have backups of my photos and music on DVD, of course, but my photos are all irreplaceable, and even though I could probably get at least most of my music again if push came to shove, it’d be an enormous pain in the arse to do, so redundancy is all good. The drive came with nearly half a gig of install crap for Windows and Mac on it, but I installed GParted and got rid of it all, then partitioned it with 100GB to use for stuff XP needs to see, and 220GB for Linux. Jesus, I love Ubuntu software installation. I couldn’t remember whether I had GParted or not, so I opened a terminal and did a whereis. It didn’t find anything, so I apt-cache searched to see whether it was in the repos. It was, and installation was as easy as sudo apt-get install gparted. If that was Windows, I’d have to google the name of the software to find the page/download site, then save the install file, then run it and click “Next” forty-six times, then it would probably make me reboot. I really miss that when I use openSUSE; YaST is much better than it was, but it’s still goddamned slow compared to a terminal. I don’t think there’s anything like urpmi for SUSE, so you’re pretty much stuck with the GUI. Dumbing it down for Win-switchers, I guess. Anyway, I’ve got a new keyboard, more storage space, lots of bugs, and another long weekend, plus P said he’d be Bucket Boy when I have to do water changes tomorrow (fish don’t care whether it’s my birthday). What I have to do right-fucking-now, though, is call Mickey because I promised her I’d let her know when I received the photos she sent (and the money order she stuck in the birthday card…wish she wouldn’t do that), and I keep forgetting to do it until it’s so late that she’d be getting ready for bed, or already in bed. If I don’t do it right now, it’ll be beer-thirty before I know it, and I’ll be stuffing my face with barbeque…whatever P’s got on the menu for tonight. I may not like the summer heat here, but I damn-sure do like having a birthday that’s still in summer. I remember going for a walk one very early morning on my birthday when I still lived on the mountain, and not only were the leaves changing colour, but there was….fucking frost. Gah!

OMG!!! I almost forgot the best part of all! P told me about a house he’d seen that’s all of: not in town (but we think it’ll still be within broadband range), no close neighbours (ours are all white trash, waaaay too loud and too many barking Dobermans/pit bulls), bigger than this house (he estimated nearly twice as large), and on a relatively large piece of property. He said the front porch does need some work, but I’m not allergic to a little home repair, and the fact that it does need some work, and that it’s not in town (and not in the “upscale” part of Walnut Hill) just means it’s more likely to be affordable. It’s not far from Jeff’s place, but it’s not like I’d have to actually hang out with Renae or anything (I wouldn’t), and P doesn’t like Jeff enough that we’d be expected to be more than, “wave and hi” neighbours. I could live with that. I haven’t seen it yet, but he said he’ll show me tomorrow…fingers crossed. This used to be a good neighbourhood, but the trash just keeps moving closer and closer, and it’s time for us to go. A place like that, away from people and outside town…that would be the best birthday present of all!

This is Frazzle. I liberated him from some site that I’ve since forgot. I didn’t name him; that is his real name. Frazzle is cute. He looks like I feel most days. I ♥ Frazzle.

Is it weird to dream of black widow spiders and exploding NiMH batteries?

I’m all warm and fuzzy inside ’cause I get to be part of the important group now! I’m just like everyone else…I have malware! If I go to www.0scan.com/winscan, I am immediately greeted by this screen:

Since I run FF with NoScript, it doesn’t do anything, but if I allow scripts for that page to run, it’ll resize my browser window to a tiny box (I hate that) and this dialog box will pop up.

Any click (I clicked Cancel) on the dialog box will begin the scan, complete with progress bar. This must be a really effective malware scanner because it was able to find and scan DLL files on an Ubuntu system!

Oh NOES! My system is infected!!!11 I have 45 infected files, viruses, win32 spyware…some are even marked “Critical” in scary red letters! Look–there’s the Windows Defender shield-thing, so I know this is legitimate. Well, no wonder the computer isn’t running as fast as I’d like! You know what, though? I think I’d like to do a backup check with another malware scanner, just to make sure that none of these are false positives. I wouldn’t want to mess up my install by accidentally deleting important files. I’ll click, “Ignore”.

Oh, dear…it seems the malware threats were too important to ignore, so in spite of my click, I am offered the option to save the file AV2008install.exe, or open it with Wine. I’ve never changed the default, so “Save” is automatically checked for me. I guess I’ll just have to run it later, though it does seem rather strange to me that my dialog box doesn’t look like the one pictured on the page. Hmm…maybe it’s got something to do with Ubuntu? 🙂

I didn’t bother to save the file, even though running it might have been interesting. Wine works pretty well, but I don’t think I want to go to the trouble of using it to install Windows-only spyware on my Ubuntu PC. That actually was a pretty good malware installation attempt, though. Most people do surf without NoScript or disabled scripts, and most people do use Windows. A power user would certainly know the progress bar was an animation, and that a file called “AV2008setup.exe” from some random site calling itself “0scan” probably isn’t something that’s safe to run, but the average user? Nah–clueless. This is actually the reason that I believe Linux is not only for geeks. It’s for geeks because geeks like to tinker, but imagine how much less damage a clueless user could do if they were using locked-down Linux box? Windows can be locked down to a point, but many apps assume (usually correctly) that you’re running as Admin, so they don’t work (or at least don’t work correctly). Even Vista doesn’t do more than pop up a nag screen with a button you have to click (like the average Windows user doesn’t just click whatever makes the annoying box go away). Linux does not; it actively discourages users from doing day-to-day tasks as root, and every time you want to do something as root, you must enter the password. Yes, it’s annoying, but it’s a good kind of annoyance because it makes you pay attention to what you’re doing. I remember the first time I couldn’t figure out how to do something as root with the command line, so I logged out (this was Mandrake) and logged back in as root. My pretty blue desktop was gone, replaced by one in screaming-jesus red, and I had a big warning on login that I was operating as root and that was a very dangerous thing to do. Ubuntu won’t even let you log into a full session as root unless you first enable a password for the root account. By default, the root account has a randomly generated password that the user does not know, and the user is granted root privileges (assuming the user is a member of the allowed group) on a case-by-case basis. Let the Windows power users keep their XP or Vista or whatever, but I say give the clueless people limited-access Linux workstations, and a nearby geek to explain why they can’t install the “Really awesome screensaver!” that came attached to their email. It’s from a friend, so it must be safe, right? 😉

Jesus Christ that irritates me. I stumbled across a photo slideshow about how to identify insects and their bites. I thought, “Oh, this looks interesting,” or at least until I got to the point where a black widow was described as “poisonous”, and the venom of a brown recluse as, “extremely poisonous”. NO, NO, NO, NO and a million times, fucking NO! Of those two spiders, the most dangerous is probably the black widow because its venom is hemotoxic and can cause anything from severe nausea and vomiting to paralysis. They have only a small amount of venom, so the bite of a single black widow is unlikely to kill anyone but children, the elderly and those whose systems are somehow “compromised”. The brown recluse is also a small spider, and its fangs are so small that many people do not even realise they’ve been bitten until the redness and swelling start to show. Its bite won’t make you sick or paralyse you, but if it goes the wrong way, it will make you sorry you ever came into contact with the spider. Some brown recluse bites heal without incident; presenting as no more than a small red mark that might be mistaken for a mosquito bite, and gone in a few days. When they don’t heal, though, they really don’t heal because tissue turns necrotic and begins to rot. People have lost fingers and big chunks of flesh as a result of surgical removal in an effort to stop the necrosis. What these two spiders do have in common (aside from the fact that both species are found in this area) is that….

THEY ARE NOT FUCKING POISONOUS.

Poisonous is for puffer fish and poison dart frogs; don’t ingest it and you’ll be fine. I could hug a puffer fish every day of the week and be perfectly healthy. I could handle poison dart frogs as long as I didn’t have open wounds on my hands, and washed my hands immediately afterward, definitely before I made a peanut butter sandwich. Do not lick poison dart frogs. They are poisonous. Spiders, snakes, scorpions, bees, wasps, ants, gila monsters, lionfish and stonefish are venomous. Blue-ringed octopus and platypus, too. The delivery of their toxins involves biting, stinging or stabbing to get the venom beneath the skin. I could eat a brown recluse on my peanut butter sandwich and I’d be fine as long as it didn’t bite me first.

I know–pedantic–but I don’t care because it’s wrong. Poisonous is for puffers, dart frogs, deadly nightshade and mushrooms…stuff you shouldn’t eat or apply to broken skin. Venomous is for the rattlesnake you shouldn’t tease, the cottonmouth moccasin you don’t want in the ol’ swimming hole when you go skinnydipping, and the black widow spider you don’t want under the stairs when you reach in blindly for the camping equipment. Don’t step on the stonefish. Poison, ingest. Venom, inject. It’s high school biology, not fucking rocket science, and I’d expect better from something with “MD” in the name, even if it is only WebMD.

Nobody famous, just “some guy” on Reddit, and I have no idea who the “someone” who “once said” it might be…

Someone once said that infantile societies value warriors, adolescent societies value entertainers, and mature societies value teachers. I hope our society is given a chance to mature.

I’d never seen this (anonymous) poem before, but after having tried to read it aloud and having to pause a couple of times, I have new respect for anyone who’s trying to learn this mess as a second language…

I take it you already know,
Of tough and bough and cough and dough.
Others may stumble, but not you,
On hiccough, thorough, laugh and through.
Well done! And now you wish, perhaps,
To learn of less familiar traps.
Beware of heard, a dreadful word,
That looks like beard and sounds like bird.
And dead – it’s said like bed, not bead,
For goodness’ sake, don’t call it ‘deed’!
Watch out for meat and great and threat,
(They rhyme with suite and straight and debt).
A moth is not a moth in mother,
Nor both in bother, broth in brother.
And here is not a match for there,
Nor dear and fear for bear and pear.
And then there’s dose and rose and lose –
Just look them up – and goose and choose.
And cork and work and card and ward,
And font and front and word and sword.
And do and go and thwart and cart –
Come, come, I’ve hardly made a start!
A dreadful language? Why man alive!
I’d mastered it when I was five.

I will no longer complain about the k that sounds like k or sh, or that “hhcsh” sound that sounds like an angry raccoon trying to speak, and the g that sounds like g or y or doesn’t have any sound at all, and the ä that sounds like “cat” or like ä in German, depending upon whether it’s short or long (not sure how I’m supposed to know the difference). Well, there’s also o that sounds kind of like an American trying to say “eau” without ever having heard it, and the d that is silent sometimes and sometimes not. Actually, maybe English isn’t so bad after all… 🙂

Oh, and the funniest thing I’ve ever heard about a language…
“To speak Danish, just get drunk and speak Swedish. Even better if your mouth is full.” 😆

What has been seen, can never be un-seen. I was listening to some folk music played on a nyckelharpa yesterday, and as it played, I happened to look over at the track name for one particular piece, called, “Randig kjortel”. I know that randig means striped, or streaked, or even brindled (or somehow, there is a pattern of lines involved), but kjortel was not familiar. I guessed it probably meant something like “kirtle” because it sort of sounds like it, and this is traditional folk music, so a song is far more likely to be about a kirtle than low-rise jeans. Rather than bother with translating the word, I just did a quick Google image search for “kjortel”. I’m never doing that again. The first few images were fine, and a kjortel is indeed a garment very similar to the kirtle worn in England in the Middle Ages, but one of the thumbnails featured the kjortel lifted in front, and I thought, “Oh…that’s to display what was worn beneath them,” and I clicked. According to Norwegian modern artist Odd Nerdrum, the appropriate apparel to wear beneath a kjortel is…an enormous gut and an obvious erection? Jesus. I have nothing against naked guys in art, photos or real life, but why does it always seem the ones anxious to show off the goods are the ones you wish would keep them covered? The shirtless road crew worker isn’t the hot guy with six-pack abs and those cute little indentations above the hip, it’s the beer gut guy with moobs, hair on his back and plumber-bum. The artist who wants to get naked for a painting called “Selvportrett i gylden kjortel” isn’t Michelangelo’s “David”, it’s this guy. Odd…indeed!

While we’re on the subject of Norwegian modern artists, I’d be willing to bet that Bjarne Melgaard is making more money than I am, even though what he’s claiming is “art” looks like stuff I drew in elementary school. How delusional must the art world be if someone would pay actual money for this? I might stick it on my fridge with magnets if he was cute enough, but…

This one’s worse…I could’ve done this before I even started school!

Um…yeah. Well, if I ever get tired of what I’m doing, I think I can handle a career in modern art!

Oh yeah, and to convert wma files to mp3, the instructions I found don’t work; I had to do it with pcm:waveheader instead of pcm -waveheader. This worked just fine:

for i in *.wma ; do mplayer -vo null -vc dummy -af resample=44100 -ao pcm:waveheader “$i” && lame -m j -h –vbr-new -b 160 audiodump.wav -o “`basename “$i” .wma`.mp3″; done; rm -f audiodump.wav

I’d only just got out of bed this AM when Lars sent me an MSN message that said, “GOOOD MOOOOORNING USA!” He doesn’t usually shout at me, but what he wanted to tell me today was really pretty cool. He sent me a link to something called Simplify Media; he’d discovered it as an iPhone app and knew I’d be interested because we’d been talking about tastes in music and listening habits a few days ago. The app is fairly awesome; a way to share music with friends (up to thirty), but legally, and it works with iTunes, Winamp and best of all, Rhythmbox. I created an account, and now, if we’re both logged in and I run Rhythmbox, his music collection from his XP box and his MacBook appear under “Shared” and I can listen to his stuff as if it were my own. I can’t copy it, or burn it to CD, but that doesn’t matter to me; I can listen to it as long as I like, either choosing songs individually, or letting Rhythmbox pick at random. I can see what he’s listening to from my collection, he can access mine from PC, Mac or his iPhone, and there’s a chat window as well. I couldn’t get it to work at first, but then I realised it wanted to make him a DAAP share, so all I had to do was re-enable the DAAP plugin in Rhythmbox that I’d disabled because I didn’t use it, then run the script in the “rhythmbox_Ubuntu_8_04” directory and restart Rhythmbox. Works like a charm, isn’t hard on resources, and doesn’t interfere with my regular web activities. For now, I’ve set it to start when I log in; we’ll see whether I decide to keep it that way or not (depends on whether it becomes annoying, but I suspect it won’t). He can listen to my stuff on either of his computers, or his iPhone, and when I figure out how to install this on openSUSE, I’ll be able to listen to his on my laptop as well as my desktop. That does, of course, mean that I have to use Rhythmbox rather than Songbird, but only if I want access to his stuff as well as my own, but that’s all right because I found the option to automatically scan my directory for updates, which was the only thing that annoyed me about Rhythmbox in the first place. Some of his tags are incorrect, but so are many of mine, his collection is as eclectic as my own (though less organised) and he’s got some good music…some I like and didn’t even know I liked! 🙂

Yay–works on openSUSE, too. It’s supposed to work with Banshee, but I don’t like Banshee, so I didn’t try all that hard. All I had to do was install Rhythmbox and then run the script, same as I did for Ubuntu.

When I forget that I installed a Nautilus script and that is how I’ve been magically uploading files to my FTP server without having to start gFTP, it’s in my /home in Software, and it’s called File_2_FTP. The gzipped copy in there obviously doesn’t have my user information entered, and there is a secure version that asks for a user name and password, but I didn’t get it because the point of this is that I’m too lazy to even start gFTP and go to a bookmark that fills in information for me, let alone enter a user name and a reasonably secure password. When I forget that I got the cool (whatever logo I used to make whatever) from a font, it’s called OpenLogos, it lives in ~/.fonts, and the listing is….

amarok = ?
apache = @
archlinux symbol = A
archlinux logo = B
blender = C
bsd = D
centos = E
copyleft = F
cc = G
creativecommon = H
cygwin = I
debian = J
edubuntu symbol = K
edubuntu logo = L
enlightenment = M
fedora symbol = N
fedora logo = O
firefox = P
gentoo = Q
gimp (wilber) = R
gnome = S
gnome (no text) = T
gnu = U
gtk = V
inkskape = W
joomla = X
kde = Y
knoppix = Z
kubuntu symbol = [
kubuntu logo = \
kurumin = ]
linux = ^
lua = _
mandriva symbol = `
mandriva logo = a
mcn = b
mozilla = c
mysql = d
openclipart = e
openoffice = f
opensource = g?@
open suse = h
pardus = i
php = j
php mascot = k
postgresql = l
python = m
qt = n
redhat symbol = o
redhat logo = p
slackware = q
suse mascot = r
suse = s
tux = t
ubuntu symbol = u
ubuntu logo = v
wikimedia = w
wordpress = x
xfce = y
xorg = z
xubuntu = {

Oh yeah…and when I forget how I changed the default “Start button”….

If it’s a custom theme, then replace the icon called “start-here.png” in ~/.icons/(nameoftheme)/24×24/places

If it’s the default theme or one installed by the system, then the path is /usr/share/icons/(nameoftheme)/24×24/places

I ♥ my little Linux start button (for now…until I get bored and change it). It’s from the “Start Crystal” set, which includes distro buttons, as well as this generic Linux button, and it’s in my ~/Software.

There. Some Nautilus FTP scripting and pretty button love for openSUSE, on my laptop, too! 🙂

For the last fucking time, it’s catalpa. Not catawba, not catoba, not ca-anything else…CA-FUCKING-TALPA. Catalpa speciosa, most likely, but it’s never, ever anything but catalpa. Jesus Christ.