Yesterday started off with me waking up an hour late because my son decided to get up five times in the night. A dandy way to kick-off the day.

I had an oil change appointment with Wellesley Mazda later in the morning. I’ve gone there every time for my oil change, for the past five years — it’s where I bought my car, the RX-8. I know I pay more for my oil change there than … well, anywhere else, but I know they knew how to treat my car. Plus, I got a “free” hand car washing afterward. Sure, it takes an hour to get my oil changed, but they have WiFi so I’m OK.

Yesterday I waited the hour for my car, paid the bill (which is almost double what I’d pay at Jiffy Lube), and head out to my car. It’s fucking filthy. I swear it looked worse than when I drove it in. So, I head into the office and ask why it wasn’t washed. They told me it’s a “new policy” to not wash the cars any more, that I could have them wash it or ten bucks more. I told him I’d gotten it washed for years, but he just shrugged it off. Jiffy Lube from now on for me.

Then, I forgot to take lunch to work. So I figure I’ll grab some trail mix from our little snack area. Yeah, it’s free, but I’ve got a gripe with the packaging. Check out the photo on the right.

See that microscopic tear in the top-right corner? That’s where we’re supposed to open he bag from. So you’re forced to tear down on the package and you have fricken seeds, nuts and raisins spilling all over your desk, keyboard, lap and floor. I wanted to punch the Planter’s Peanut in the groin.

“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 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 -q --scripts -p 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]

No cheating and clicking over to YouTube to find out!

(UPDATE: Wow, looks like I stumped all one of you reading this site!)

• I thought I remembered hearing that Guitar Hero III would have a new guitar with buttons for tapping, closer to the guitar body. I noticed that at least with the wireless 360 guitar, the neck is a separate piece from the body. Hopefully in future games, if they support finger tapping, you can just buy a new neck for your existing guitar.
• The next Guitar Hero better have Molly Hatchet’s “Flirtin’ With Disaster”. And something — anything — by Joe Satriani. If you know GH, go listen to that song and you’ll understand why it’d be fun to play.
• The folks at Infinity Ward are geniuses. They put the crack-like addiction of leveling up into an incredible FPS, Call of Duty 4, and made matchmaking a pure pleasure on XBL. Thank God the game itself doesn’t require a monthly fee to keep your skills and leveling intact.

It’s time again for techie talk. Yes, this is because I was unable to easily locate this information using Google, so doing some digging of my own lead to this discovery.

If you’re creating your own custom LiveCD for Ubuntu (we’re doing this at my FTJ in order to allow customers to boot a LiveCD with a demo/training version of our product right from a CD), you’ll probably want to get rid of that annoying ‘Install’ icon that sits on the default user’s (”ubuntu”) desktop. Deleting it from the desktop and saving that configuration aside doesn’t get rid of it. Instead, you need to alter some scripts.

First, if you’re following the Ubuntu LiveCD customization wiki page instructions, you’ll have an ‘edit’ directory with the contents of the CD available for editing. Comment out lines 49-54 in the file ‘edit/usr/share/initramfs-tools/scripts/casper-bottom/10adduser’ that read:

for file in /usr/share/applications/ubiquity-gtkui.desktop /usr/share/applications/kde/ubiquity-kdeui.desktop; do
    if [ -f "/root/$file" ]; then
        chroot /root install -D -o $USERNAME -g $USERNAME $file /home/$USERNAME/Desktop/$(basename “$file”)
        break
    fi
done

You will then need to ‘chroot’ back into the ‘edit’ directory and remake initrd:

mkinitramfs -o /initrd.gz 2.6.15-23-386

Replace the final arg in that line with the applicable kernel version (look in /lib/modules).

Exit from the chroot jail and move this file to extract-cd/casper:

mv edit/initrd.gz extract-cd/casper/

Continue with the rest of the instructions on that wiki page. Done! Hope this helps someone.