Traditional Xmas Pine Smoke

Bushfire Season in Melborg. The sun hangs red in the sky, the air is smoky and muggy, there's an orange light cast over everything, and my hair reeks of wood smoke.

The heat seems to be affecting my ability to sleep through the day too. Hoping that isn't really the case.
I might need to up the 'B' vitamins because I've spent serious sleep time lately worrying about things that proved to be of no consequence. I spent some time at the doc's last week, but fortunately only my credit card was unhealthy. Having bumped the one thing off the list that could potentially have been worth worrying about, I moved on to 'did I get people presents they wanted'? 'Did I send the boxes to the right addresses'? (Possible as I didn't *triple check* the shipping labels. I'll take photos next time.)
Now that I've confirmed *that* stuff is okay (the parcels arrived via rocket camel) I've moved on to really inconsequential stuff, the day to day paranoias. I forget that I live and work with fairly reasonable people, and I start taking all kinds of things the wrong way, and start extrapolating wild alternate realities where Everything Goes Wrong and I Can Do Nothing Right. For example, the english language and I usually have a pretty good relationship, but there will be this horrible lurking fear that what I though was concise and well-written, is crappy and incomprehensible, and that I'm just lucky nobody's realized it yet. (With the corrollary that in fact, nobody at work really reads what I write. Hmph).

It's the weekend tomorrow, though. All I have to do is finish this week and it's off to Virtual Xmas (working on the 25th), Wii sports and WarCrack.

So, I'm not tone deaf

Go figure. I always assumed I had tin ears. I can't hear the mosquito ring tone, I assumed my pitch perception was just as crappy.
FWIW, it doesn't seem to be an Internet Inflated Test (See : any IQ test on the internet). Plenty of people scored lower than I did.
It's not a *useful* skill, but it was a surprise.

DeadPod

My MacBook Pro is back, with a fresh new logic board. If Temperature monitor isn't lying to me, the main CPU temperature diode sits at about 57 degrees C in normal use. The whine is pretty much gone, I hear it extremely faintly on AC sometimes.

So that meant it was time for my iPod to sign off. I can't blame the battery upgrade for this. There was some hard drive clicking and abrupt disconnecting from my computer that I'd actually put down to the battery. So when I replaced the battery, I'd expected my iPod to just behave and not unmount itself.
It started unmounting itself after a few seconds today, and I heard the iPod hdd frantically clicking. I pulled the iPod open again and checked the IDE connector and battery connectors, but to no avail. I guess using the iPod for only a couple of hours a day (all the battery would hold) had held back its demise, but since I'd started USING it again it couldn't keep up. The hard drive controller is toast. It's an ex-Pod.

As an interim measure I've bought an iPod shuffle. If I'd realised I was getting *one* playlist I might have sprung for a Nano. It's charging though, and I look forward to using it.
One reason I didn't get a Nano was that the Nano gets the best accessories, and my stop-gap solution plus add-ons would really quickly start heading for the full price of a 5.5 Video iPod anyway. I'm not fussed on the Video iPods, the video functionality feels a bit hacky. I was waiting for the 6G, that hasn't changed.

Crazzy Go Nuts on Graveyard Shift

I've been without my laptop since Wednesday. Doesn't feel like the two full days it has been - these shifts are a blessing in disguise I guess.
*Twitch* *twitch*

Mac-less

I send my MacBook Pro in for service for its Rev A issues . Hopefully it comes back de-whined, with a new MLB and accompanying thermal grease. *Crossing Fingers*.
So Dave's old Pentium II has been pressed into service, running Ubuntu. I *highly* recommend Fluxbox for older hardware, and Automatix2. And Gkrellm so you know why you're waiting. Yay, computing 90's style.
At least I can watch DVDs and web surf.

iPod surgery

I just replaced the battery in my 3G iPod. The patient has a scar, as I started cracking open the case with a metal screwdriver as the supplied iPod prysticks were just bending under pressure. When you start opening the case you have no idea how much force it will take to get the back off, so I misjudged and the screwdriver skidded off and gouged the metal case. But it's a battle-scarred iPod anyway. Only the first scratch matters :). Ask my MacBook Pro.

So a burkha is a whiskas bag?

http://www.news.com.au/perthnow/story/0,21598,20647626-948,00.html

Sheik Taj al-Din al-Hilaly makes the argument that men, in his own community, and probably outside it, are no smarter than tomcats. Like stray cats, it's probably much too difficult to train them otherwise after years of reinforcement by their communities and men like the Sheik himself.
If you are a meat product (veal, chicken, steak, woman - though pork is probably safe) and traditional Muslim dress is not available, foil or cling wrap would work pretty well in a pinch to prevent sexual assault (and would hold in freshness).
Also, we quite often euthanaize stray cats, and few would be terribly sorry to see it happen to rapists as well, Muslim or otherwise.

C0rruPti0n

I really have no explanation for this. My MacBook Pro froze up on me, posted below is what I found in system.log after a reboot. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

I've pretended those kernel panics didn't happen. And as for that occasional video corruption - who isn't a bit confused when they first wake up? The whining I could ignore.

And the TmOP errors I got with the hardware test after that time Deus Ex crashed on me... well, it might have been overworked.

Ok, I really didn't want to bring it in to get fixed. What if it comes back scratched, whinier, or boomerang shaped? But I can't put it off any longer.

Oct 18 11:54:14 Caffeine /Applications/smcfancontrol_1_1/smcFanControl.app/Contents/MacOS/FanControl: removeDisplayMapping: _CGSUnmapFramebuffer returns -536870206 Oct 18 11:54:14 Caffeine /Applications/Adium.app/Contents/MacOS/Adium: removeDisplayMapping: _CGSUnmapFramebuffer returns -536870206 Oct 18 11:54:14 Caffeine /System/Library/CoreServices/rcd.app/Contents/MacOS/rcd: removeDisplayMapping: _CGSUnmapFramebuffer returns -536870206 Oct 18 11:54:14 Caffeine FrontRow[1471]: removeDisplayMapping: _CGSUnmapFramebuffer returns -536870206 Oct 18 11:54:20 Caffeine loginwindow[93]: removeDisplayMapping: _CGSUnmapFramebuffer returns -536870206 Oct 18 11:54:20 Caffeine loginwindow[93]: removeDisplayMapping: _CGSUnmapFramebuffer returns -536870206 Oct 18 12:20:17 Caffeine /System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/ScreenSaverEngine: CGContextSetFillColorWithColor: invalid context Oct 18 12:20:17 Caffeine /System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/ScreenSaverEngine: CGContextSetStrokeColorWithColor: invalid context Oct 18 12:20:18 Caffeine /System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/ScreenSaverEngine: CGContextSetFillColorWithColor: invalid context Oct 18 12:20:18 Caffeine /System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/ScreenSaverEngine: CGContextSetStrokeColorWithColor: invalid context ^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@^@

(It does this for a while. I had to cut it out because it breaks the formatting on my blog. Below is the log as the machine then reboots......)

Oct 18 14:01:38 localhost kernel[0]: hi mem tramps at 0xffe00000 Oct 18 14:01:38 localhost kernel[0]: PAE enabled Oct 18 14:01:38 localhost kernel[0]: standard timeslicing quantum is 10000 us Oct 18 14:01:38 localhost kernel[0]: vm_page_bootstrap: 254336 free pages Oct 18 14:01:38 localhost kernel[0]: mig_table_max_displ = 71 Oct 18 14:01:38 localhost kernel[0]: Enabling XMM register save/restore and SSE/SSE2 opcodes Oct 18 14:01:38 localhost kernel[0]: 106 prelinked modules 54%

Writing With a Scalpel #2

I'm trying to cut out sluggish exposition. This means I write the version where everybody explains things first, then I hack the action and dialogue down to the what audience should be able to understand by inference.
Also, House gets away with a one-scene introduction because people have no problem believing in hospitals, doctors, or jerks.
I went back and watched pilots for genre shows, and the first episode is always thick with awkward exposition. In fact mid-arc episodes can also be thick with exposition.
(It seems the most important rule of diplomacy on Babylon 5 is not to start mentally re-organizing your wardrobe when anybody starts a sentence like - 'On *my* homeworld.....'
This goes double for Sheridan. )

Writing With A Scalpel

I'm doing some serious writing at the moment... and the gears are very, very rusty. I've also discovered that some ideas don't come out without a lot of writing to dislodge them.
Basically, I need my stuff there on paper so I can understand exactly how crap it is, and how it would be better if character y didn't do z.
And then the ideas come.
I can remember being able to dump whole stories out of my brain and onto paper but that doesn't seem to be the case anymore.
So these days its braindump to notebook (paper, the visceral thing seems to help. Also, unlike my laptop, if it got stolen I'd feel sorry for the recipient). Then scalpel it until the redundancy is excised.

I'm re-watching the House pilot because there are things I can learn from it. If you watch the first scene featuring House himself (along with Wilson), you learn pretty much everything you need to know about the character. You can make a list, and then check it off as you go through that first scene.
Then, just in case you missed that he was *smart*, the Scoobies re-iterate that he is smart in *their* first scene.
That sort of economy looks like genius when you've re-written your opening scenes several times over and the dialogue is *still* stilted.

Housecleaning

We looked at a unit in the city. We expressed interest in the unit. We toasted the buying of the unit. I started mentally decorating the unit. Then we did the math with a mortgage broker, and realised that we could not buy the unit without our wallet getting reamed *severely* (sans KY). We mourned the loss of the unit. That was just this last weekend.

So I'm stuck with my ridiculous commute. I'm heartily sick of it and I hope we move soon. We can afford to pay more for rent, and it's about damn time we moved to a better flat. As it is, today the hotplate on the (40s?) stove died. As if certain people who get at least 3 hours a day more rest at home than I do need a hint that Its Time To Move, there's another one.
The thermometer rising is another clue that we need to leave. Very soon, our drafty little box is going to become a stuffy little box, and I need to sleep through the day sometimes.

Moving is not negotiable.

I've been continuing the process of de-cluttering my life. The first of a few bags of too-large clothing have gone to charity. Not cheap, and they haven't all been replaced yet, but they were just taking up space.

Ouch

D and I are back from our holiday. I had an extra stop in Darwin to see my family. 
I've just recovered from what I can only describe as Tropical Bowel. While medication set me right for the duration of the 4 hour flight back, the joints and muscles that were cramped up in my little space on a Virgin Blue flight are all complaining VERY loudly today. Ow. Ow. Ow.
Guess I'm getting old.... or perhaps just too old to fly economy. 
This rubbish plastic student swivel-chair thing that I'm sitting on is going to be replaced very soon, by something well-padded with arm rests. 
Back to work tomorrow.  

Armageddon

Thankyou Daily Show, for your entertaining education on how the US is Different. Oh my goodness.



And in the same vein, here's Colbert. Laugh or you'll cry.

A series of tubes

I have the Festy Throat Virus this week, yesterday was spent mostly asleep, too listless to even push my Night Elf around Ashenvale. I need to kill more things. But not until the weekend. Pushing around a mouse is hard work today.

 

Apple sent over a replacement battery for my one that has been recalled. The old one seemed fine, but having said that I full expect to get home and find its gone Pufferfishy. Now I just need to get the logic board swapped for one less hot and whiny.

 

 

 

Updates

Today's Earworm- In A Dark Place, Gary Numan

Dave has clocked in a year sans egregious carbs, losing 60kgs.
Despite occasional spills off the wagon, the 20-ish that I ditched haven't found me again yet.... now I'm picturing the action scenes from Terminator 2, starring me running away from a giant cherry danish.
In my case, being a big weirdo was invaluable in pursuing a diet divergent from the sammich-and-timtam stuff everybody else gets away with eating. I'm a mac-using, Linux-using, female IT monkey. I'm my whole peer group. It makes my life very easy. While the women I work with (correction, in the same building as) are all compelled to buy the same pair of shoes from different vendors, seeking an ideal distillation of bootyness and pointyness, I'm in sneakers. Not hard to apply the same principles to food, especially when you're working the same hours as Angel Investigations.

In other news, Apple released a bluetooth Mighty Mouse. I think I'll go a Logitech v270 though, at $70-ish vs Apple's $109.

I wonder if I can dispose of my old Apple BT Mouse on EBay? There have got to be people out there who are frightened of this brave new world of multiple mouse click options.

Bags

After work on Saturday I stomped up and down Glenferrie Rd looking for a new laptop bag. I had a small Crumpler laptop backpack (Sheep Scarer) that I'd been really happy with. It can't hold a MacBook Pro though, so new bag shopping I went.
My first choice was a bigger Crumpler but as those are...not cheap... I wanted to give other bags a shot. The STM backpacks had a nice velour-lined lappy slot. I saw some other bags in the adventure gear shops.
The best camoflaged bag I saw was a Caribee Campus 30. 60 bucks and *nobody* is knocking that off looking for a laptop.  
In the end though, after seeing many many bags, I still picked the arguably overpriced Crumpler bag, a King Single backpack in Loud Red. It'll look better with some road grime (Crumplers tend to). 
It has a laptop slot, no dividers other than the fully covered lappy compartment, which actually makes for more capacity in the bag. The pockets on the front can easily hold the nalgene flask I also bought (water's important for low-carbers). 
I liked the older style backpack I had more (the Team Player was the next size up, I think?). The color of the lining on the new bag is buff, I'm not sure about that with red. The older bag has robin's egg blue lining, and matches the phone holder I just transplanted to the new bag. These sorts of things aren't dealbreakers though and having slept on it, I felt I'd made the right decision. 
These bags are cute though - www.bumbakpaks.com. If these were available, they would have made my short list! The shoulderstrap to backpack strap thing is clever! 

Lois *does* know. Ok?

Today's Earworm- Infa-Red, Placebo

After reading a whole lotta debate on the interwebs about Superman Returns, can I state for some people who missed it, Lois Lane *does* know who Jason's father is, she does remember sleeping with Supes, and *she does remember who Clark Kent is*. Mmkay?

It might seem a stretch, but bear with me here. It works in a universe where Supe's super-rohypnol wears off after a period of time, especially when Lois starts putting things together about the time period Superman II takes place in. She's not supposed to be an idiot. She might not remember everything, but she'd haved pieced together enough.

She ignores Clark at the office, much as how you'd ignore an ex. Things are predictably awkward. She can't ignore Superman (as in the plane).
She gets very little screen time with Clark so the audience isn't given much information to work with, but it's there if you look. She unloads on Clark in the taxi scene about him taking off on her. She doesn't want to work with Clark.

Just before she flies with Superman, she mentions that Clark told her that Supes didn't say goodbye because it hurt too much, she feels it's a load of crap. It might look like she doesn't know Clark = Supes, but look closer. I think she knows, but she realises that Supes probably still thinks she's mindwiped. She's giving him a shot at explaining himself. He blows it by pretending he doesn't know Clark (I'll have to see if in the original 2 films its established that he does know who Clark is, as one of his 'pals'. I think that it is). She plays along ("so, same old Clark!").

She's playing along with the whole 'secret identity' mess because she has a vested interest in keeping his identity secret, and also she might be waiting to see if he explains himself. She's testing him, to see if she can trust him.
Also, this is a big can of worms to open with her fiance nearby. She has no time during the course of the movie to bail him up and get the truth out of him.

There's a couple more hints that I can think off the top of my head. There's the glasses thing where she drops her bag, and brusqely hands Clark back his glasses without even looking at him. She knew what she was going to see. Also when her fiance connects the dots between Clark and Superman's return, who is it that deflects this line of inquiry? Lois.

There's a final subtle hint from Lex. "Superman can tell when people lie. Especially women." Lex is always wrong about Superman. Supes sure as hell didn't know she was lying about Jason's parentage, or that she didn't remember. It's a throwaway line, but considering the cuts to this movie, that line was there for a reason.

I know that all of that seems a stretch, but its a small one. I don't have any problem with the timing of the pregnancy. She's a busy woman, she might not have realised she'd missed her period for a couple of months. Things had ended abruptly with Superman, and then she took up with her fiance, possibly partially as a rebound. He might even have been lurking around the Daily Planet before Clark was, Lois only 'noticed' him when she was emotionally needy. Doesn't matter if she remembered or not at this point, she probably felt lonely regardless.

At the end of the movie, how could Lois not be incredibly, *blazing fire of a million suns* angry with Supes for knocking her up, if she had no pre-knowledge of their tryst? And if she remembers that, she'd have pieced together the stuff about Clark too.

I like the idea of Supes trying to relieve her of the pain of the breakup in SII, but in reality not handling it too well himself, and then leaving to try to find the truth of himself in the ashes of Krypton. Sure beats that stuff he was doing in the sequels where he kisses Lois to restore her memory when *he* needs some love, then promptly roofies her again to erase her memory. *That's* some high Superdickery.

Turning off SMP on a single app or game

Legacy games running BootCamp on a MacBook Pro (or any dual core processor) can sometimes crash, because they don't support multiprocessing. Two that I know of -
- System Shock 2
- Deus Ex 2

Neither of those games are getting multiprocessor updates anytime soon.

Deus Ex 2, for example, will sputter and sound-loop on the title screen. I've seen some crappy workarounds, but here's one that works.
1) Get a copy of imagecfg.exe . This tool lives in one of the Windows resource kits. There are places you can get it on its own, Google away.

2) Make a backup of your main game executable. I.e. I made a copy of DX2Main.exe that was called DX2Main.exe.backup

3) run imagecfg -u c:\Your game path\your game.exe
This sets the executable to have an 'affinity' with CPU 0, that is, it will run on one core.

And that's it, your game will run without you having to alt-tab, view processes, and set the CPU affinity every time the game runs (it was getting very old on DX2), or any other mullarkey.

Hope this helps any fellow retrogamers out there.
Now as for getting Shock 2 running on XP at all.. lets say there's a FAQ. A long one over at http://www.ttlg.com/forums/.

MacBook Pro Observations

Ok. Here's a bunch of MacBook Pro observations, in no particular order.

-- The MBP has a DVD drive that is very picky about Region codes. My iBook would play any DVD with VLC, my MBP will not. The DVD will just fail to play in VLC without a warning. Region 4 DVDs will play without a hitch (I'm in Australia).
Region 1 DVDs (I tested it with 'Primer') will play fine in an external drive.

-- Speedit v0.5 (http://www.increw.com/products/speedit/screen_shots.html) makes my Mac seize up periodically. The previous version works fine though for getting CPU temps.

-- Shutting off the keyboard backlight conserves battery.

-- On batteries, the calibration process is very different to previous Macs, read your manual.

-- If you install BootCamp, check your System Preferences for what your 'Startup Drive' is set to. If it hasn't got a default setting, your machine boots *Windows* by default. Yes, really.

-- If the above applies, or your machine is set to boot Windows, Safe Sleep *will not work for you*. You'll just find yourself back in Windows when you boot up after replacing your battery.

-- I discovered the above when I tested Safe Sleep after installing Boot Camp. Don't kid yourselves, Boot Camp is still Beta.

-- When idling, my machine will do about 30C to 40C above ambient. It will ratchet to 90C under full load, then fall back to the low to mid 80s as the fans kick in. This is warm, but it looks like the thermal system actually does work. I think it needs to be more aggressive though. a PrefPane setting ('Louder + cooler' vs 'quieter and hotter') would be nice.

-- I'm tempted to try to address the above issue with a 6 pack of beer, a tube of Arctic Silver 5, and an Apple Certified Tech.

-- I'll probably just wait for a firmware update though.

-- And I hope its out before Summer.

-- The MBP doesn't get too hot for lap use, but then again it is sitting on a foofbag normally. WoW is quite good even on powersaving settings.

Fruit Fly

7pm - Checked Startrack. No change

9pm - 7pm - Checked Startrack. No change

10pm - Refreshed Stratrack page. No change

11pm - My foofpod will be here tomorrow, but no change on Startrack.

Yeah I know. My MBP will *get* here when it *gets* here. Like tomorrow.

12am - Going home to clean house for inspection this week. Startrack still says 'Scanned in transit'