“Joe, did you start the Biology paper yet?”
“No. You?”
“Nah. Want to do it together?”
“Uh… I dunno.”
“What, you don’t know or you don’t want to? Come on.”
“Uh, yeah, sure. I just wasn’t sure what I was doing yet but OK.”
“Good because I dunno this shit at all.”

Bullied over XBL. Poor, poor, young fool.

I’m just testing to see how jott works with Word Press. listen

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For the past couple of weeks, just about every online acquaintance I know has mentioned or attended SxSW. I heard about it last year and didn’t pay it much attention, but then this Twitter thing came by and then everyone I follow on Twitter was yapping about it and how drunk they were getting at it.

From what I understand of the festival, I don’t really get how bloggers are able to attend this thing on their employer’s dime. What are you really getting out of it other than debauchery and networking — not necessarily bad things, I might add, but do they really add to your employer’s investment?

Part of me writes out of jealousy for not having the time, resources or my once youthful desire to attend SxSW, but the other makes me really wonder what I missed in the first place. Would I be a better writer for having attended this thing? Would anyone paying my way to SxSW get their money’s worth? My bet is that most people attending by way of their employer’s checkbook somehow talked them into the value of the event, when they were really hiding their true goal: meeting people to party with while listening to new music.

That money they spent flying your ass to a multi-day party could have been used to, I dunno, send someone to cover a real event. Honestly, have you read any worthwhile posts that came out of SxSW that were newsworthy?

(more…)

Maybe I’ll send this off to Apple as a suggestion…

I’d really love to be able to annotate Time Machine backups so I can better refer back to when I made a certain change to my system that I’d like to restore from. For example, I upgraded an application yesterday at noon. Let’s say it starts acting up on me now. Unless I remember I made the change around noon yesterday, I have to hunt around for it. Instead, it would be great if a user can manually add a note to certain backups for restore points. Like “installed new such-and-such application”. Then you know to restore from the backup just previous to that one.

This seems like such an easy and handy feature. Where the hell is it?

I guess we’ll need to wait just a little bit longer to throw HD-DVD on the cart.

UPDATE: “He’s dead now!”

It’s time again for another Techie Time post. I will sometimes use these to post notes about technical issues I’ve run into that had nary a single hit on Google for help. So, in the event someone else has the same issue, welcome!

For anyone uninterested in the subject, you can look away now. You were warned.

For the past few weeks I’d been keeping my work system completely updated with Fedora 8. Suddenly, at some point, I noted that ‘rpcbind’ wasn’t updating, failing with an RPM script error. Here’s that error:

error: %pre(rpcbind-0.1.4-13.fc8.x86_64) scriptlet failed, exit status 4
error:   install: %pre scriptlet failed (2), skipping rpcbind-0.1.4-13.fc8

Eventually, this error caught up with me and NFS started not working and was wreaking havoc on our network. Here’s what I had to do to get the latest rpcbind installed:

rpm -ql rpcbind-0.1.4-13.fc8.x86_64.rpm > /tmp/scripts

Within that new file I took out just what I needed and edited it a bit. In particular, note the ‘-o’ with useradd and groupadd:

/usr/sbin/userdel  rpc
/usr/sbin/groupdel rpc

# Now re-add the rpc uid/gid
/usr/sbin/groupadd -o -g 32 rpc
/usr/sbin/useradd -o -l -c "Rpcbind Daemon" -d /var/lib/rpcbind -g 32 \
-M -s /sbin/nologin -u 32 rpc

The ‘-o’ is necessary because this RPM kept failing because “32″ was not a unique userid. Thing is, it’s not in /etc/passwd (note that it removes it first!), so why it’s complaining I can only guess has to do with LDAP, though I haven’t had time to test yet.

Next, I forced the RPM to install without scripts, then ran the script:

rpm -U --force --noscripts rpcbind-0.1.4-13.fc8.x86_64.rpm
sh /tmp/scripts

Anyway, I hope that helps someone else.

Have you seen these ads by Budweiser, where the CEO (or owner or whoever) is going on about how brewing a lager is so much more difficult because you can see through it and therefore see any “imperfections” in the beer? He then basically says that darker beers can get away with slacking off because they can hide impurities in the beer.

Uh, Budweiser … those “impurities” are from the use of actual, good malt and what gives the beer something you lack: FLAVOR. Claiming you have it tougher than darker beers is like Poland Spring saying they have it tougher than tap water.

OK, an odd post to make when I don’t have much to say here lately (or time to do it), but I had to share these home-hitting PSA ads from Canada. Holy. Shite.

I will never carry a big vat of boiling oil around a kitchen. Ever.

[via Digg]

Quick thought: Why is Harmonix even bothering with making deals with bands and artists to feature their songs in Rock Band and Guitar Hero? The next big version of these games should simply be notes that correspond with a song that you either download to the game system’s hard drive from your own collection or from a connected network drive or Windows Media connection, iTunes, etc. That way you’re not paying silly royalties to the artists or having to use cover bands to play some of the tunes.

Maybe this announcement will be a step in that direction.