I haven’t posted an unadorned punchline in quite a while; I came across this one just last week, and was frankly surprised that, for as old as I am, I’d never heard the joke. The punchline goes like this:
NO! Use your finger like everyone else!
Thanks, Dave!
-k-
In the Rest of the Story Department, Dave served as the inspiration for this punchline series from the git-go.
I sent this photo to Dave several years back, as part of my initiation into the EGC Style Council.
The pic was taken by MLB, while she and I were en route to Martinsville for a NASCAR race. We always take the Skyline Drive, the Blue Ridge Parkway, or both on our way. We like the scenery, the history, and the general slower pace of the SD and the BLP. The picture was taken at one of our must stop places on the Blue Ridge Parkway.
Since then, I’ve used this pic for:
The Red Hat Summit starts on Tuesday, 9/1, in Chicago. MLB and I are heading there; she’ll visit with some Chicago friends, whilst I soak up technical tips and network exchange resumes with peers.
This year’s Summit has its own networking site, as well as the usual Twitter/Friend Feed/Facebook bolus. I registered on the Summit site, and got another use of the photo for my Summit site. As I uploaded it, I thought what the hell, I’ll just take the EGC shirt there as well, and wear it on the streets of Chicago.
One more clothing item to pack, but small potatoes compared to the checking out of the electronics required for such a venture.
Geek is, as geek does.
-k-
I’m hard-pressed to pick my favorite NASCAR event of the year. The Daytona 500 wakes me from my winter NASCAR drought, the Brickyard is iconic, the Coke 600 is a Decoration Day classic.
But, for slam-bam balls out racing, Bristol is hard to beat. 500 laps. 36o banked concrete. 165000 fans. Under the lights. Saturday night.
Only way to beat that is to add a few beers, and some good spareribs. Oh, wait. We’re doing that here at tbbs WorldHQ.
Enjoy the spectacle! Racin’ the way it oughta be.
-k-
My regular daily driver, a 2001 Saturn, just turned over 107000 miles a day or two ago. This makes it #1 in MLB and my “cars with the most miles driven” category.
The ’01 actually eclipsed the 106K+ miles of MLB’s ’98 Saturn much earlier, but since I couldn’t remember the ’98′s exact mileage, I decided to wait until the aught-one had exceeded 107K to lay claim to the miles title.
It still looks good and runs all right. Not sending in a monthly check to GMAC makes it look better and better.
As much as I get excited about new cars, and as much as certain Ford1 models turn my head, I can still say, Long may the Saturn live.
-k-
1
The WordPress upgrade of the week elevates tbbs-land to 2.8.4.
More security-related items were fixed:
Yesterday a vulnerability was discovered: a specially crafted URL could be requested that would allow an attacker to bypass a security check to verify a user requested a password reset. As a result, the first account without a key in the database (usually the admin account) would have its password reset and a new password would be emailed to the account owner. This doesn’t allow remote access, but it is very annoying.
I’m sure it would be.
-k-
It’s my week in the barrel with the stinking on-call pager yet again. I detest the stinking on-call pager; the events to which I respond are either:
Imagine my surprise then, when our NOC calls my home number at around 11PM a few nights ago. I was in bed, drifting off, and MLB answered the phone. The first question the NOC mope asks MLB is Is Ken on call?
NOC mope, some advice:
MLB now knows the drill; any calls from 703-XXX-*, other than a carefully selected group, go to voice mail.
Even given that, (4) above remains unsolvable.
NOC mope, you are an asshole.
-k-
calibre, an e-book reader’s best companion, has been upgraded to v. 0.6.5.
In keeping with my history of tips and tricks for installing calibre on Fedora, I offer the following, based on the install I just completed. I’m running Fedora 11, and this worked for me.
I had to install
poppler-devel-0.10.7-2.fc11.i586
poppler-qt4-0.10.7-2.fc11.i586
poppler-qt4-devel-0.10.7-2.fc11.i586
to get calibre to install and have full PDF support. Said packages are available from the Fedora repo.
The install was error-free, following the usual
wget -O- http://calibre.kovidgoyal.net/downloads/calibre-0.6.5.tar.gz | tar xvz
cd calibre*
python setup.py build && sudo python setup.py install
sudo calibre_postinstall
Though you couldn’t tell it, I have completed about 90% of a Fedora RPM for calibre. It handles dependency checking well, and lays down the required files properly. The postinstall section of my RPM needs some work; there’s a nasty blow-up that I need to investigate.
Previous calibre posts, for your reading pleasure, can be had here.
-k-
From the Frederick (MD) News-Post, linkage provided, the fact that it may be broken tomorrow notwithstanding:
Fake 911 calls lead to charges
This story details the actions of one Bryan Paul Blanchard, who apparently had a habit of calling 911 and leaving the phone off the hook because he “needed someone to talk to.”
I don’t defend Mr. Blanchard; I won’t address the obvious contradiction in calling anyone and leaving the phone off the hook because you “need someone to talk to.”
My quarrel is calling this a Fake 911 call. The calls were made, and went through, right? Maybe it was a frivolous 911 call, maybe even a harassing 911 call, but whatever it was not a fake.
We are, however, talking about Maryland. Maybe that explains it.
-k-
As documented here, $DAYJOB is detracting from my blogging a bit. I pour most of my vim and vigor into the now required Daily Status Report. I arbitrarily added a couple of sections to my DSR; Observations, Mood, and Thought for the Day. These sections are used for unsolicited editorial comments, at least some of which have been well received by my Overlords.
Lest this turn into one of those posts lamenting my lack of posting, I really have something to say this time.
I’ve also switched from TicklerWiki to DokuWiki for the production of the DSR. TicklerWiki is based on Tiddly Wiki. Any of the TW family has the wiki entirely contained within a single html file, which is makes portablilty trivial. Just copy the file to a thumb drive, transport it, and use it anyplace you have a web browser. No web server, just file -> open, and you’re wikified. And it was a great ride, until a few weeks ago when the TW file got unaccountably and unexpectedly truncated. While TW’s auto-backup feature mitigated the impact of this, I decided to implement a new platform.
Enter DokuWiki. Requiring a web server and PHP, DW is only slightly more involved in its setup. However, DW stores all the wiki pages as plain text. No Postgres, mySQL, or any other database backend needed. Plain text. An old Unix graybeard’s dream come true. The entire wiki content can still be transferred to a thumb drive for portability. So, I stood up a webserver on localhost, fired up DW, and I was off and running.
As I started doing the DSRs on DokuWiki, I realized that DW had many more uses. Now, my entire day’s activities live in DW. Examples:
My enthusiasm for DokuWiki precipitated a skunkworks project to use DW to update our aging knowledge base system. And skunkworks projects are the most fun of all.
-k-
Last Monday, tbbsLand went to WordPress 2.8.2, and I sadly neglected to document that event.
Tonight, in another painless upgrade, this old blog went to WP 2.8.3. Both were security-related updates.
If they want an upgrade a day, I’ll do that, too.
Thanks, WordPress!
-k-