Divine Lunacy

I got my bike back on Saturday. It finally switches well. My brother got a new bike… He bought the same model tha I have.

My boots came in today. They’re really comfortable and sexy. ( as any pair of vasque boots should be. ) I stil can’t get over replacing italian boots with chiniese boots, but I’ll have to live with it. I can smell the sexy polished leather as I type this. ( just thought I’d mention that… ) I got a new pack too. I’ve been using an external frame back. Albeit they do distribute the weight better, they are nowhere near as comfortable as an internal frame. My new pack is also a lot larger. I believe it is about 55,000 Cu. in., which is plenty to hold ALL my gear, including tent, stove fuel, water, etc with lots of extra space.

I’m on the bleeding edge now!!! I’ve finally gotten around to subscribing to wordpress nightly builds. I’ll probably write a script to handle the upgrade. I’m thinking about going perl and while I am at it, I’ll use drDave’s database backup idea and throw them both in the crontab. I have also begun writing a few plugins for wordpress. They are nowhere near done. ( well… the ‘unplugged’ part is… ). I’m currently working on adding the hooks, etc… ( well… I actually haven’t started one… ) I’ll mention more about them later, I suppose.

Yeah.. soo.. I bought some sexy monster fiber optic cable. It makes me happy :)…

Its been a while since I actually wrote a post with some logical flow of events…

I finally took my bike to be repaired—for real this time. Last year, on a campout, my chain broke right before we left camp for a several hour bike ride. It took us about an hour to find a bike store; It must have been the only one for miles… The nice bike store guy offered to change the chain for us. ( for a small fee… ). While he was doing so, he noticed that the bike didn’t switch gears very well. ( Never had really. ) He just happened to have another bike of the same model in the shop at the time. Turns out my bike didn’t have the factory crank on it. ( Although, it is the crank that was on it when I bought it new ). To get the gears switching correctly, and prevent subsequent damages to the chain(s), I would need to have the crank replaced, or the spindle shortened. ( Gears were too far away from bottom bracket ). Shorty after that campout, we took the bike to the store we bought it from. I told the dude that the gears were not switching properly and suggested that he replace the crank or shorten the spindle. He decided to replace the front derailleur… It still didn’t switch correctly… We gave up with that place. This time, we took it to EPICycle’s North Attleboro location. The dude there also noted that the crank was not the one that comes with the bike. He sounded like he really knew what he was talking about it. Unlike the “other place”, this dude intends to take it for a ride and make sure it is working well before returning it.

Soo… While we were out in the old country ( North Attleboro… I used to live there ), we stopped at Emerald Square Mall ( lived right down from the street from that. I remember when it was being built, but that is a different story ). They discriminate against chains there… Some security dude made me tuck my chains in. I don’t get it… ( I suppose it is good that my knives were concealed. ) While at the mall, we stopped at EMS to buy some pants for Philmont. Generally, I dislike EMS, but the prices aren’t so bad when you have a boy scout membership card to flash. ( 15% discount ). I didn’t have a valid card, but he took my eagle card :). I ended up paying roughly $41 for a pair of pants. They are very nice. The pockets are over a foot deep :). I’ll probably end up buying several more pairs.

Ever been to a fast food restaurant with free refills? I’m sure we all have… It seems to be popular to buy the smaller size and pay less. You still get infinite soda ( theoretically… ). The small size definitely has more disadvantages than it does advantages. With a small, you have to get up more frequently. ( not that I really mind that… ). More importantly, with a small, you walk out with less…

Remember the boots? Yeah… I finaly got around to ordering a new pair of boots to replace the $200 pair I hatcheted… They were made in italy. Nice, sexy italian leather boots… mmm… When buying a new pair, I decided to buy the new model. They’re made in china. I can’t believe I replace Italian boots with chinese boots. I have a serious lack of morals. The boots came in yesterday. The same size as the hatcheded pair, but they didn’t fit… It occured to me that I hadn’t worn my boots with synthetic wool socks and sock liners in a while. I put them on, and they didn’t fit. Now, I have to send them back for a 10.5…

I went to visit WPI on Saturday. The campus is beautiful. They have cable TV, 10BaseT Ethernet ( or 100BaseT for a small fee ) in every room in addition to campus-wide WIFI. According to a brochure, there are more computers on campus than there are students. Definitely my kind of place.

I practiced driving a manual in my driveway more. My dad says it is a really good place to practice ( the hill…), but I rather dislike it. Every time I drive up the driveway, I have to back down. Backing down is no small feat when in a truck… S < -- My driveway looks kind of like that. I swear. One of these days, I am going to end up rolling into the middle of the road...

Alas. Yesterday… Nothing interesting. We started clearing out a more permanent parking space for the truck… It involved moving a lot of leaves. I blew them, then sucked them up into a bag with the lawnmower. The flies weren’t very happy about that. They attacked me. The bit. They swarmed. They drove me out…

I upgraded spam karma to 2.0 pre-alpha. Its pretty sexy…

SO much for the logical flow of events… I finally settled on a media player. I am using xine-ui. I have always had problems with xine-ui… Random crashes, etc, but I find they are greatly reduced with a different skin. The lircd support works well. My biggest complaint is that the mute function doesn’t seem to work… I might end up writing a shell script to toggle mute using amixer…

There are always a few “rough edges” in linux… Every once in a while, I sit down and try, once again, to fix one of them. yesterday, I decided I wanted to get the remote control for my Creative Soundblaster Audigy 2 Platinum Pro ZS working. Getting the signal to be recieved and decoded wasn’t really that hard. When it came time to make the buttons actually do something, things got worse ( still working on that ). The “livedrive” sends the commands from the remote control to a midi device. In my case, this device is: /dev/snd/midiC0D1. TO check and make sure the commands were being recieved from the remote, I did: [mario@mario snd]$ cat midiC0D1 . There was output each time a button was pressed. It was then time to install LIRC. I configured it to use The livedrive midi thing. The install/compile went flawlessly. I then downloaded the config file for my remote from the lirc website. To start lircd, I used this command: root@mario lirc-0.7.0]# /usr/sbin/lircd --driver=livedrive_midi --device=/dev/snd/midiC0D1 --output=/dev/lircd. [mario@mario ~]$ irw /dev/lircd Verified that everything up to this point was working correctly. ( it Outputs the name of the button pressed each time a button on the remote is pressed. ) Ironically, I thought it would be easy from there… Making the commands actually do something is easyily setup through the lircrc file ( ~/.lircrc or /etc/lircrc ). I was able to make it control my volume using amixer:
begin
    prog = irexec
    button = Vol_Up
    config = amixer Set Master 5+
    delay = 0
    repeat = 1
end
That worked fine, but in order to release the full power of the remote, I need it to control a media player… I was able to make it control MPlayer using irxevent to generate “fake” x events. It was still not good enough for me.

Still lacking a “good” media player, I decided to try installing totem again… I’m still at that part. I finally managed to make it past the configure, but it failed during compilation. After downloading the newest sources, I’m stuck compiling the latest version of GTK+. Why does everything end up at GTK+ with me?!? Amazingly, GTK compiled smoothly. Alas, a dependency nightmere. Now I have to run along and fine ‘iso-codes’. hmm… That was easily found and compiled… w00t!!! Totem configured!!! Now compiling totem… Now cursing because the compilation failed… Now, I will spend all day trying to get some verscion of totem installed. Perhaps I will even try an RPM. I bet it would be easier to compile a gnome media player if I actually had gnome.

I suppose I shall be the first to post about this: At approximately 1240, school time, the first alarm began chirping loudly. ( yes, it chirps ). After being outside for about 3 minutes, a police officer came flying in. Clearly, something was amiss. Two minutes later, 1245, we were all herded into the tennis courts where we stayed for about 5 minutes, at which point we were corralled in the area behind the tennis courts. By that time, rumors were spreading quickly. The most popular, of course, was the bomb threat idea. We left the area behind the tennis courts at about 1315, at which point we stood around at the student entrance for five minutes before being herded into the old gym. Then came Trogisch’s Address to the students and faculty. There had been a bomb threat. Three teams searched the school for suspicious objects, which leads me to my next comment… They don’t search backpacks… If someone put a bomb in a backpack, it would apparently be overlooked because a backpack is not suspicious… In is speech, Trogisch vowed to catch the prank caller before the police. ( Kind of makes me think O.J. ) I do wonder… what will he do with the person? Torture him? Put his arm around his him? ( eeek ) He values our learning time far more than us. For someone to disrupt that learning time is unspeakable.

For some reason unknown to me, I uploaded the cookie picture to: here

The semi-ish-sort-of annual Troop 102 canoe campout was this weekend. We canoed that river I can’t remember how to spell all the way to warden’s pont again. It was the first campout for the youngins… The last half hour of canoeing on the river was extremely buggy. Whenever Brian and I slowed down, we were attacked by a swarm of mosquito-like critters. They didn’t seem to bite, but they did land on us, which was very annoying. When alas we did make it to the pond, we played a game of auction pitch whilst letting the northeaserly wind carry us. It was a half hour before the canoe behind us caught up. We let them and three other canoes pass us before catching up top all but one of them and finishing second. ( although it wasn’t a race…). The previous night, Brian and I played pitch to determine the duties for the day. I played for the spider patrol, he the scorpians. The winner made breakfast, the loser cleaned breakfast. I won 12 to 2. :). It was an extremely bad weekend for my gear… The medium hone of my gatco sharpening kit fell off of its mount. ( easily fixed ) That wasn’t so bad, but I was devistaded when I hatcheted my $200 vasque boots which were supposed to last through philmont and many years beyond… SO much for that. In all my years, I have never once hit my boot… I would rather have had it hit my leg. I have hatched my leg before, not bad. It isn’t like it was going fast or anything. I had just sharpend the hatchet, so it wouldn’t have caused much pain cutting all the way through to the bone— just a lot of blood. I have a fit when my boots get scuffed, let alone sliced. As if that wasn’t enough, my headlamp began strobing sporadically. part of the wire was bent. I easily fixed it but cutting it, removing 1.5 inches and resoldering it… As if all that wasn’t enough, I found out today that I am failing physics… So much for not doing homework. Now I have a bunch of makeup work and two reports to crank out before twenty one hundred.

Sooo… I spent an hour trying to get a trailer hitch on that truck today. One would think you could just slide the square thing into the square hole. BUT NO! If not slide, shove? No, it wouldn’t shove nor would it slide. It wouldn’t bang either… The previous owners didn’t cover up the hole. Fools. There was a lot of caked on dirt crap in there. Took me a really really long time to get it all out, but eventually, I had the hitch moving in and out of the hole freely.

I started practicing driving a standard yesterday. My dad really loves our driveway all of a sudden… He keeps on raving about how good it is to practice shifting on. Yeah great. He had me out there practicing while he was away today… I backed out of the parking spot and then I was like rolling down the driveway… I was afraid to take my foot off the brake and put on the gas for fear of stalling the thing and rolling. ( Duh… That is what the brake is for. ) Now that I think about it, I wouldn’t have gone anywhere… I would have had to turn the truck to get it into the road, but it was still pretty scary. I also had a taste of backing down part of my driveway… Let me tell you, that is a pain in the ass… ( and the neck ) And it would have been my ass had I hit any of my mother’s plants… Damned spartan truck. Makes me cry. I am soo used to driving my parents Subarus. It is harder trying to get out of mud with only two wheels. I could have shifted into 4 wheel drive, but I was already going crazy trying to manage an extra pedal, let alone an extra shift.