OneFreeVoice

There’s been ongoing debate for a while now on the status of detainees in Guantanamo Bay, and whether they have certain rights within the US Courts.

I say let them. It would be a case of “Out of the frying pan and into the fire”. While we argue about whether or not they are being tortured, and what torture really is or isn’t… here the detainees themselves are wishing upon themselves the ultimate form of torture… trying to navigate the US Legal system. I say if they want to bring that kind of torture upon themselves, then let them.

We can come up with all the schemes we want to in order to disrupt the finances of terrorists, but how many of them are truely effective. I suggest everyone go read Bleak House by Dickens, and let’s be prepared to bankrupt these guys in the courts.

I was originally planning to see my brother this weekend, since my wife is out of town and we didn’t get together last weekend. But by mid-day yesterday I was so tired that I called him and told him I wasn’t going to make it. I planned on working on the garage door today, doing laundry, ironing, starting on my taxes and stuff. But after finishing the garage door so quickly yesterday, I just decided to jump in the car and go. It’s only a 3 hour drive. So I packed up Cosmo and away we went.

Jake had picked up some Sam Adams Doublebock, which is really good stuff that’s kind of hard to find. So we drank a bunch of those and talked and played with the dogs, and played some more guitar.

This morning we layed around… we watched the old Bert Reynolds nascar movie “Stroker Ace”, which I couldn’t resist buying at Best Buy for $6. Then we went to lunch, and we went to check out this music store down town. The music store was closed though. We also checked out a recording studio a block away from the music store. They have a deal where you can do 10 hours for $600 with 50 CDs. We certainly don’t need the CDs, so I’m hoping maybe we can get them down. I need to find out what kind of equipment they have and more importantly what kind of microphones. I’m really hoping that we can get them down to like $30/hour. I’m hoping to just do tracking there, I think as long as I get a portable format, I’ll have better luck mixing them on my own (a lot cheaper that way too).

My garage door has been giving me problems lately… it doesn’t go down smoothly, and so it starts to shimmy, and half of the time it jams and the garage door opener reverses itself.

I finally go around to looking at it today. I unhooked the traveler arm thingy from the garage door opener, and rode it up and down a couple of times to see if I could identify where it was snagging. Without the noise of the garage door opener, I was able to hear some odd clicking noises and quickly identified it as a bad pulley. I looked at the pulley, and sure enough it was totally shot. I then looked at the other 3 pulleys, and all of them were either shot, or mostly shot. I went to Home Depot and got 4 new pulleys. It took me about 20 minutes to replace all 4. When I got the old pulleys off, I verified that they were completely shot by looking at the bolts. The center part of the pulley is supposed to be stationary, but some of the bolts holding the pulleys on had the threads worn off completely – indicating that the entire pully was rotating, not just the outside portion.

It really felt great hitting the garage door button and watching the garage door smoothly lower itself.

It was also great knowing that I didn’t have to replace the 10 wheels on the garage door. They aren’t expensive, but it’s a pain because you have to take the hinge off in order to get the wheels out and replace them. If I do that, I’m just going to replace the hinges too. But it looks like I won’t need to do that for a while (knock on wood).

Today was a pretty lite day. I took the Jag in for service, and while I was there I gotta a lot of reading done. After that, I had lunch with Ed Corrado and John LeMasney. I gave John a sort-of working copy of the ISO, so he could work on icons. I’m really happy that John is really excited about the project.

Then Ed stopped by after work and we hashed out a way to fix a kudzu problem I was having. It seems that kudzu generates a xorg.conf file if it doesn’t see one, or if there is new video hardware, it will move the current copy to backup and make a new one. This was trumping the method that the ISO uses to allow the user to select a custom resolution. That file, prefdm, also looks for a xorg.conf file. Both prefdm and kudzu call system-config-display, but prefdm is a text file, so during the boot process, we can feed the custom resolution switch to system-config-display via sed. Kudzu is binary, so we can’t really do anything with it unless we hack it and recompile. But we have a pretty good plan for fixing it… I’ll keep you in suspense until I actually get it working ;-)

Well, I followed Ed’s advice… even though I did that before he actually posted it…

I started thinking about why I hadn’t achieved many of my goals for becoming a better manager. My main excuse was that I just didn’t have the time. I was too busy writing php code, working on the LUG/IP ISO, preparing for my LPIC exams, etc. I started thinking… this stuff that I do in my spare time, this really reflects who I am and what I want to do. So I wrote and submitted my draft IDP plan for this year, and I basically just outlined my personal goals. I want to learn J2EE and C, pass the LPI 102 exam and get my Level I cert, and read more books like “the Art of Unix Programming” (which I am thoroughly enjoying at the moment). These things are too far out of line from what our department needs are. There are a few J2EE apps in our department, and no one really knows anything except the companies that sold them too us. So, she hasn’t given me her reaction yet, but it will be interesting to say the least.