“Look Ma, here comes an ‘s’! Quick–run to the gun cab’nit an’ git me an apostrophe!”

For the love of FSM, you idiots…LEARN HOW TO USE A GODDAMNED APOSTROPHE BEFORE I LOSE MY FUCKING MIND!

No, no, NO! They are not “cory’s” and “oto’s” because you are talking about the fish, not something they own. Apostrophes are for possessives (except “its”) and to indicate that a letter has been dropped, often for a contraction, like don’t, or it’s (which, dumbasses, means “it is” not “belonging to it”). Apostrophes are not used for plurals except in the case of single lower-case letters (“That word has too many d’s”, but “That word has too many Ds”). You can get away with something like DVD’s or CD’s and most people won’t know the difference, but I will. Do you know why?

BECAUSE I KNOW HOW TO USE A GODDAMNED APOSTROPHE!!!

Okay, so we’ve established that I’m a ‘Splo’Ho’ after all, and that although I don’t try to game the system or even do anything to try to get in, I’m always at least mildly amused when I do. I spent some time yesterday just poking around Flickr, not logged in so nothing could be “suggested” to me, and I found some goddamned good photography. Much of it, though, had few comments and views, and sometimes none at all. Some were because they had poor titles (usually default name assigned by the camera software) and hadn’t been submitted to any groups, but others had, and still…nothing. Now, I certainly make no claim to be a photo critic, and I know that the Magic Donkey algorithm doesn’t pick “the best” photos, but rather those with the highest “interestingness” score, but still, one would think that some of this good stuff would at least get in over the latest boring fucking (“contents of my purse”, wardrobe remix, water droplet, sunset, macro of book and eyeglasses, cute kid/puppy/kitten portrait, whatever). Submitted to no groups at all (didn’t do that until I answered the invitations this morning, and JEEE-ZUS, I hate those “post one, comment two-three-twelve-fifteen with our award” groups) not one, but both shots of my little jumping spider made it into Explore. A fairly boring macro of a little beige-brown jumping spider…but not the gorgeous stuff I saw yesterday? Yeah, that’s fucked; I think the donkey smokes crack or something. 🙂

When my blog disappeared, I wasn’t too worried; figured it was just a minor fuckup on the server. When it wasn’t back the next day, I was somewhat concerned, and I called. Turns out that one of the servers upon which lived their MySQL databases (including mine) had a catastrophic hardware failure, and the hard drive died. When the tech (using the term in its most generous sense) told me that, I immediately thought, “Oh, so they’ll restore from a backup and I’ll lose the last couple of posts…no big deal,” but my optimism was unfounded. If they had any recent backups, they didn’t tell me that; she said they were sending the HDD to a data recovery company, and they wouldn’t know anything for a few days. I heard nothing, and although I kept checking, I’d just get a message that I had not installed WordPress. Not that I’d die without my blog (though I do have a large audience, and “hi” to both of my fans!) but that’s not the point…they killed it. My most recent backup was made on 17 December, thanks in large part to my ESLs, with whom I’ve spent so much time that I haven’t been making backups as I usually would, and I didn’t want to restore from that if they’d be able to save more recent data. On Thursday, I got this email:

We have recently encountered issues with the mySQL server that your databases are utilizing. On Sunday, February 17, 2008, our System Administration team took the mySQL server offline for scheduled maintenance and while they were performing this maintenance, they found that one of the hard drives was failing. Our team worked as quickly as they could to preserve as much data as possible.

Our System Administrators were able to save, and restore, approximately 80% of the data. We realize that 80% is not acceptable, therefore, we have sent the failed drive to a data recovery specialist. They have stated that they should be able to recover 95 – 100% of the data by Friday, February 29, 2008. It will take this long due to the damage to the drive and the amount of data on it. At that time, our System Administration team will do a complete backup of the current data on your mySQL server and then begin restoring the data we received from the data recovery specialist. We are going to make a current complete backup in case you have uploaded content since the hard drive failure. We will be prepared to do a restore, if needed, of this content.

We are very sorry about the inconvenience that you have suffered due to this incidence. We are providing compensation to our customers that have been adversely affected by this occurrence. Please place a ticket to our billing department and they will review your request as quickly as possible.

Thank you very much for your patience and understanding.

I checked this evening….lo, and behold, they were able to recover all of my stuff. All of my Euro-fans (hee hee) are in bed, so now would be a good time to make a DB backup…if I was sober. 😉

I get the biggest kick out of B. and the way his mind works; I never know what to expect. I know he’s naturally curious about a wide range of subjects, and I’ve always told him that he can ask me anything whether it’s about grammar, spelling, vocabulary or something entirely unrelated; that if I know, I’ll explain to the best of my ability, and if I don’t know, I’ll do my very best to find a satisfactory answer for him. Most of the stuff he asks, I can answer easily because it’s mostly things like how to know whether to use “me” or “I” in a sentence, or the definition of a word, or how to differentiate between homophones. Other stuff I can give at least a reasonably accurate answer, like the time he asked what would happen if he put a plant upside down in an entirely dark cupboard and put a light up at the top (asking whether plants were more affected by gravity or by photosensitivity). He’s asked me stuff like how we can tell the difference between a sound directly behind us and a sound behind us, but off to one side (had to research that one because I didn’t know myself), and why certain insects are the colours they are (sometimes I know that, sometimes I don’t). This time, though, he came right out of left field with….the question of whether male birds have penises. I have no idea what he was thinking about to prompt that question, but I laughed my arse off because out of the fucking blue, he says, “I want to know do male birds have any cock?” (he didn’t intend to be crude, just didn’t know the proper word.) I didn’t even ask why he wanted to know because I didn’t want to know the reason, but it was still interesting because in order to completely answer his question, I had to do a little research and learned a few things I didn’t already know. I already knew that most birds do not have anything that could really be called a penis–just a little bump in the cloaca that swells during breeding season–but some birds do have pretty impressive reproductive equipment, like this duck with his 42.5cm corkscrewed “pecker” (heh). It’s a good thing they keep the phallus retracted in the body because I’d imagine that swimming around a pond with this thing hanging down in the water might garner some very enthusiastic attention from the fish! 😆

Posted in the ID Please Flickr group, there was a picture of framed butterfly specimens. I clicked–I can ID most North American species–and looked, and thought, “This must be an accidental submission–someone posted to all of his/her groups”. Nope, ID Please was the only group to which it was posted, so it was no accident!

Oooo-kay. What would you like me to ID? Shall I just read the complete species (including subspecies) name from the card at the bottom, or would you like me to ID something else? The frame appears to be metal and the stand could be Lucite. 😉 The genus name has been changed, but a quick search would’ve brought up records under both names, and its common name, too–Arizona Viceroy. Jesus, people are dumb!

I have added to the context menu a Delete command that bypasses the trash. I don’t use it often, but some stuff I know I want deleted, and I keep my trash can neatly stored in a drawer on the panel because I don’t like clutter on my Desktop, so emptying it means a couple of extra clicks. I know that once I’ve burnt that LiveCD of KDE 4, I don’t need the ISO again, so I just delete it rather than sending it to the trash where it can languish for a month until it occurs to me to empty the trash.

I was organising photos on the FAT32 partition of my storage drive today because I haven’t been taking many pictures and really haven’t paid too much attention to them, so I had January and February photos together. I created a January directory, cut all of the January photos from the temp directory (where I keep photos during the month they were taken), and pasted them in. I accidentally copied the picasa.ini file, which is just a little text file that contains information about the photos’ location. Since I’d moved them, it wouldn’t be valid anymore; I always toss the ini in the trash and Picasa creates a new one the next time it scans for changes.

I may be over the worst of the flu, but I still have a terrible cough. The “Delete” command is right below the “Move to trash” command, and just as I right clicked the picasa.ini file, I started coughing and accidentally dragged the pointer down to Delete. No big deal because the ini file isn’t important anyway, but since I’d just cut and pasted the January photos, they were still selected. Uh-oh.

The partition the photos are on is used only for storage; it’s a 250 GB drive, divided into three partitions. I made one FAT32 because I did it before NTFS write access was reliable in Linux (it is now with ntfs-3g), and since it’s only for photos and music, the 4GB size limit for a single file doesn’t matter. Anyway, since it’s only storage, I just didn’t do anything to it after I realised I’d deleted the goddamned pictures, and I installed PhotoRec, which is currently running an undelete. I told it to scan the whole partition and recover everything rather than (faster) just scanning the unused space; I’d rather have it take longer and find files I don’t want than to have it take less time and not find January’s files. I can re-delete stuff I don’t want. Nothing I shot in January was really wonderful, but they’re my pictures, and besides, I’ve always wanted to see how PhotoRec works because I’ve heard a lot about it but never had occasion to use it. So far it has found 1676 jpg files, 233 mp3 files, 68 text files, 46 gif, 46 psd, 21 png, 8 zip, 6 doc, 5 asf, 5 pdf and 8 “other”. Oh well….better to find too many than too few! 😉

EDIT: Changed my mind after actually reading the instructions for PhotoRec….hehe. Scanning now only for jpg files, and only unallocated space, since that tells it to look only for deleted files, not attempt to recover corrupted files. This should take much less time. 🙂

EDIT AGAIN: Perfect! Took just a couple of minutes to find my 166 deleted photos, and even sorted them by time and date, so to rename them, all I had to do was find the beginning and end of the group of shots from a particular day, and rename them from there. They’re all comfortably ensconced in the January directory, and my February shots are in the temp folder where they’ll stay until the end of the month. Yay for PhotoRec!!

This is the second time I’ve seen this picture on the blog page for one of my favourite radio stations. The site is non-English, but one would think that the person’s name would be useful. Not so in this case because….it’s “Robin”. That might be helpful elsewhere, but here in North America, Robin can be a girl’s name or a guy’s. One minute I look at this picture and I think it’s a particularly masculine (and rather homely) girl, but then I look again and it seems to be a metrosexual guy. It doesn’t really matter, of course, but the fact that I can’t tell is driving me nuts. Robin, what are you? ♂ ♀ ⚤ ??

I feel like I have a terrible cold. Why is that a good thing? Well, for the past three days, I’ve felt like I’d rather be dead. Flu SUCKS, but I’m not fever-delirious anymore, so I’ll take it! 😉

I knew there was a reason I liked that Florence Valentin song.

Pokerkväll i Vårby Gård

Rudie Can’t Fail

There’s a PP presentation circulating around the net; a collection of pictures with a story about some Australian fisherman who saved the life of a female great white shark, and now “Cindy” (I am not making that up) follows him around everywhere, allowing herself to be petted and scratched on the tummy like some cute little puppy. As soon as I saw the first picture, I knew it was a hoax because I recognised the image as one that was taken in South Africa for a documentary (or article, or something like that) about sharks. As the slideshow played, though, I thought, “Nobody is seriously dumb enough to believe this….right?” I was wrong, though, because people really are. I suppose that if you’re the sort of person who believes that the Invisible Sky Wizard created sharks, it wouldn’t be a stretch to believe that they have emotions like humans do, or that they could feel gratitude to humans for saving their lives, but if you’ll believe the Invisible Sky Wizard created the earth and everything on it in six days, you probably own a Q-ray bracelet and a mattress full of magnets, too. Disney doesn’t help, but at some point in time, one would think that a rational adult would figure out that a shark is a fish–a primitive fish, even. A fish is on the lower end of the evolutionary scale, below even small mammals, let alone humans. Its brain is perfectly adapted for a top aquatic predator, but that does not mean it has the type of brain capable of feeling emotion. It doesn’t; it has a brain devoted to its senses and instincts, like all fish. We do suspect that some of the more highly evolved mammals feel emotion, but certainly not fish, and even if it is true that non-human mammals do feel emotion (which we cannot prove for certain), we have no reason to believe that it’s emotion like our own. We have nothing else with which to make any kind of judgement, so that is what we use, but a laughing rat might not find the same jokes funny as we do, and if dogs can fall in love with one another, we have no idea how that does or doesn’t feel to them. It’s very interesting that humans seem to think of everything in “human terms”. We are at the top of the food chain, but we got here by being different from the lower animals, not by being the same! Anyway, if I get that presentation sent to me again, I’ll forward my own reply to the first one, which was more than anyone ever wanted to know about sharks and their behaviour. Hehe.

I’d never bothered much with VNC before because…well, because I didn’t need it. This morning, though, I got bored and decided to see whether I could control my laptop with the desktop and vice-versa, and it works fine. Now, I can share files between them because I have Samba working, and I can control both no matter where I’m sitting. Since I am awesome and have dual displays on the desktop, I can have the desktop’s Desktop on one screen, and the laptop’s Desktop in a VNC session on the other. The laptop doesn’t have dual displays, but it does mean I can lie in bed and use the laptop to control the music playing on the desktop, which is a vast improvement over getting off my arse to change it, or just letting Rhythmbox play random tracks. Actually, I’m so awesome that I’m pretty much made of 100% pure awesome. Okay, so it was easy to do, but I don’t know why it didn’t occur to be before. Probably because I was so busy being awesome with other stuff like Samba and dual displays. Nerds rule! 😀

Oh, and I like this (found it in someone’s signature on the Ubuntu forums):

A person with ubuntu is open and available to others, affirming of others, does not feel threatened that others are able and good, for he or she has a proper self-assurance that comes from knowing that he or she belongs in a greater whole and is diminished when others are humiliated or diminished, when others are tortured or oppressed.