I just upgraded the server to MovableType 3.2. It wasn’t quite as painless as some upgraders have claimed. I had one little glitch, but that’s mostly because my configuration is rather old and crufty, it goes back to the early days of MT, I think even before version 2. Oh well, everything should be running OK now (with the exception of the video server, which is still down).
I am considering moving this blog to a ISP-hosted server, so I can use their video server. I am just waiting for a response from their tech support, to see if I can point my current domain to their server. I think it might be time for me to buy a real domain name for this blog, but I don’t want to break any old links, so I’m trying to set up a clever way to forward all the old links to any new domain I register. I know how to do it, I just don’t know if the ISP will allow me to do it.
Hawkeye Rapist Pierre Pierce Pleads Guilty
Notorious Hawkeye Rapist Pierre Pierce has finally come to justice, and pleaded guilty to multiple felonies, including burglary, attempted rape, and kidnapping. Rapist Pierce avoided a prison sentence during his last trial for rape, but a career criminal like Rapist Pierce cannot evade justice forever. Today, his day of retribution is at hand.
Iowa Assistant Attorney General Patricia Houlihan said she will ask the court to sentence Rapist Pierce to the longest possible prison sentence of four years. It is likely that Rapist Pierce will receive the stiffest possible prison sentence, in light of his his long criminal history, and willful violation of previous court orders to avoid contact with the victim of his heinous crimes. The citizens of Iowa deserve protection from Rapist Pierce’s repeated crime sprees, the only way to protect the public is by locking him up and throwing away the key.
Hawkeye Football Thug Antwan Allen Convicted of Felony Assault
Yet another Hawkeye Football thug has been convicted of a violent crime. Thug Antwan Allen has been convicted of Assault Causing Injury, for punching an innocent bystander from behind and breaking his jaw. As usual, local news coverage (PDF) is in denial about the seriousness of Thug Allen’s violence.
Thug Allen faces a potential prison sentence of up to 1 year with a fine of up to $1500. However, Iowa Football Coach Kirk Ferentz said, “…if he is found to be guilty of the charges, then there’s going to be further discipline.” Presumably Coach Ferentz will impose the usual strict penalty for Hawkeye Thugs convicted of felonies, running extra laps during practice sessions, and a suspension from playing for several weeks (as long as those weeks are preseason, when no games are played).
News coverage has focused on the impact Thug Allen’s conviction will have on the football season. Thug Allen has already been redshirted once, so he cannot be redshirted again while serving a prison sentence. Thug Allen’s last year of eligibility could be lost. But Thug Allen’s loss is someone else’s gain. Preserving Thug Allen’s spot on the team, despite his conviction, would keep other law-abiding football players from the game. Sophomore standout Adam Shada is warming the bench, ready to play on the first string, as soon as Thug Allen exchanges his Hawkeye uniform for prison stripes.
Conspicuously absent from news coverage is any analysis of the Hawkeye Football team’s practice of actively recruiting violent thugs from gang infested slums in large cities outside of Iowa, and unleashing them on the unsuspecting populace of Iowa City. Thug Allen hails from the slums of Tampa, Florida. When he arrived in Iowa, he was immediately redshirted, sitting out his first year of eligibility, the coaches judged he was too young and immature to deserve a spot on the team, even as a benchwarmer. Alas, he has still not matured, unless you count his maturing into an outstanding violent thug, convicted of one of the most serious crimes of any Hawkeye Thug to date.
Thug Allen has voluntarily served community service, in advance of his conviction, in an attempt to reduce his eventual sentence. But picking up trash along the highways is paltry compensation for a crime of drunken violence that maimed an innocent bystander. Since the Hawkeye coaches are unwilling to impose any meaningful punishment, it is up to the Courts to speak on behalf of the citizens, and mete out the strictest possible sentence, a full year in prison. This will send a clear message that Hawkeye Football Thugs can no longer depend upon their position of privilege to avoid the consequences of their violent acts within the community. This will set a clear precedent for the upcoming trials of Thug Richard Kittrel, Rapist Pierre Pierce, and all the other Hawkeye Thugs that will follow in their footsteps.
Update Sept 2, 2005: Thug Allen has escaped a jail sentence, as do all Hawkeye Football Thugs. Thug Allen was given a deferred sentence, if he completes 100 hours of community service and an anger management course, his felony conviction for Assault Causing Injury will be completely expunged. Furthermore, he will escape any retribution under the University of Iowa’s new Student Athlete Code of Conduct, because the code was enacted after his arrest. But ultimately, Thug Allen has received the harshest possible penalty available to the University, Coach Ferentz suspended him from playing football for one week.
I’m Back. BlogTV is Down. QWest Sucks.
I managed to get the Disinfotainment server back online, sort of. The web server is working, but the streaming video server is down. This is solely due to the horrible net connection I’m using. QWest has consistently lied and given lame excuses as to why they will not provide DSL to this location, even though they have the necessary equipment in place, ready to go. So I’m stuck on a cable modem, with a promised 256k upstream bandwidth. 256k is just not sufficient to stream video, and I cannot configure the video server to work over DHCP on a cable modem (it requires multihoming static IPs). Even worse, I’m not getting anything close to 256k with this cable modem, I get more like 100k upstream. Pathetic. So for now, I’ll limp along with a text-and-pictures blog, no multimedia streaming for now. We Apologize For The Inconvenience.
Oh Crap, No DSL!
I just rented a new apartment, and while arranging the utilities hookups, I discovered that it’s not certified for DSL availability! I wouldn’t have rented this apartment if I had known I couldn’t get DSL, I guess I should have checked it out in advance. But it never occurred to me that such a common service would be unavailable in the middle of a metropolitan area.
QWest says the apartment might be OK for DSL, but they won’t know for sure until they send a lineman to hook up the phones and check the lines. So I might be stuck with a cable modem, which could make it impossible to run this server properly. I might have to migrate the server contents to a professional hosting service, which would not be cheap since there aren’t many affordable hosts for QuickTime Streaming Server, one of the key features of this site.
I expect the server to go offline temporarily within the next week, while I move the CPU to my new apartment. There is a possibility that this server may be offline longer than expected, or resume service with some high-bandwidth features disabled. Stay tuned for more developments.
Update August 2, 2005: QWest officially says DSL is not available at my location because I am too far from their switching facility, so they did not even bother to send a lineman to test my lines. However, there are multiple reports from QWest customers on the same block as my apartment that DO have DSL. There is even one report that QWest installed a new DSLAM only 8 blocks from my apartment, so I am definitely not too far away to get service. Everyone says QWest DSL is available, except QWest. I’m still trying to get QWest to recognize that they built new facilities specifically to expand service in my area, but they just don’t believe me. The problem is, the QWest offices are in Seattle and Denver, they know nothing about the local network here in Iowa.
Update August 3, 2005: I called QWest DSL tech support under my old account, to see if they could do anything for me. The techs said they can look up my new location in their “circuit database” and it shows my apartment is qualified for DSL, and there is an available “pair” (copper wires) ready to install the service, IF I can get a QWest lineman to go out and check the line quality and give the approval. And they’re sure it would work, IF we can just get the “line conditioning” work done. But he also says that the QWest sales database will NOT show the location as OK for DSL, so they won’t even send out a lineman to check it out, and on top of that, QWest Sales says they won’t do line conditioning anymore. I am at an impasse. QWest CAN sell me DSL, but they WON’T. This is ridiculous.
iPod Requires Native USB2
I solved a minor oddity with my iPod Mini. Every time I put my Mac to sleep with the iPod attached via USB2, when I wake the machine, I get an error message that one of the drives (the iPod obviously) was not disconnected properly. This actually corrupted the iPod disk once, but that’s not such a big deal, just reformat, reload, and it’s back in operation.
I finally figured out that iPods require a native USB2 port. My PowerMac MDD dual-1Ghz only has USB1 so I added an Adaptec USB2 card. Unfortunately, that isn’t good enough, you must have a USB2 port that is built in to the machine, an aftermarket USB2 card won’t work. The iPod Mini only comes with a USB2 cable, so I bought the inexpensive iPod Firewire cable, not the expensive dual FireWire/USB2 cable, just the plain old FireWire cable.
Now everything works fine. When my Mac goes to sleep, the iPod automatically disconnects, and reconnects when the CPU wakes from sleep. I must have read this somewhere, I don’t recall where, it’s pretty obscure, so I figured I’d post it so if someone is Googling for info, they could find it out easily.
My Email Address is Changing
I am about to lose my oldest email address, an account I have maintained for over 10 years. I just received notice from my ISP that they have lost control of the domain name that contains my address (how did that happen?!?) so I will have to move my account to a new domain. I have other email addresses, so I guess I will discontinue that account entirely. This means I’ll probably lose contact with some people that only know my old address, but on the other hand, this account is so old and well-known that it attracts a ton of spam. So you win some, you lose some.
My email address ceicher@inav.net will be deactivated as of July 31. You can continue to contact me at my other account, I’ll have to put it up here in a slightly cryptic format so spammers don’t harvest it from my website: email me at (ceicher) and then insert the @ symbol, and then the domain (mac.com).
This is all getting a bit complicated. My server is being relocated as of July 15, so this server will go down just 3 days from now. [Update: the telco hasn’t yet pulled the plug as of Monday so I might still be online for a while longer.] I haven’t been able to arrange for new hosting, so it might be a while before I get the server back online. This message isn’t going to get out to everyone in time, so I hope it will be cached by Google in the meantime, in case anyone searches for my address. I’m going through a bit of a rough transition, but things should be back in place next month, with luck. We Apologize For The Inconvenience.
Cheat Sheet
A long time ago, I was walking down the street in Los Angeles’ Little Tokyo, and I came across a strange thing lying in the street. I found a pen with a label stuck on the side, bearing cryptic Asian writing. I had no idea what it was since I had not yet started studying Japanese at that time. I saved the pen, it’s been quite a few years since I have seen it, but I just ran across it today so I thought I’d scan it in and preserve an image of it.
Here’s a closer look at some of the writing on the pen. The text says “shinbun” (newspaper) in both kanji and hiragana.
It was many years later, after years of study of Japanese that I finally figured out what the pen was for. It’s a cheat sheet for the Japanese Language Proficiency Test, which is given annually in the location where I found the pen. But words like “shinbun” are very simple, even a beginner would know them, so this would be a cheat for the lowest level test. If you need to cheat on L4 on the JLPT, you might as well not even take the test. The funny thing about this pen is that both the kanji in ‘shinbun” are wrong. But there’s one more odd thing about this pen. You have to fill out the JLPT test with a number 2 pencil, so this cheat pen would have stuck out like a sore thumb.
The Ten Pound Note
While rummaging through some old papers, I found some money, a single bill worth ten British Pounds. It was old, but not of any numismatic value, so I just took it to my bank for a currency exchange. I went online and checked the rate before I went to the bank, ten Pounds Sterling was worth $18.37. Not too bad, that’s almost like finding a twenty dollar bill.
So I went to the bank, they said they can’t exchange it on the spot, they’d send it along to their head office, do the conversion, and deposit it in my account, and it would take a few days. So today I got the receipt, they valued the £10 at $17.19. Well, I suppose that’s fairly normal to get a bad exchange rate, that’s how the exchange services make a profit, by skimming a little bit off every transaction. In this case, they made $1.18, about a 6% surcharge, a fairly standard rate for money exchangers.
But that wasn’t the final insult. The bank charged me a $7.00 fee for the transaction. They never mentioned that when I gave them the money. If they had mentioned a 40% service charge, I never would have deposited it through them. I only got $10.19 out of the deal. I could have saved the £10 bill until I traveled somewhere by airline, and exchanged it at an airport for free.
I phoned the bank to get to the bottom of all this. They transferred me to the branch Manager, but all I got was her voicemail, and she did not call back by the end of the day. So the next morning, I headed down to the bank, I figured I’d start at the bottom and work my way up to the Manager. I went to the teller and showed my receipts, and explained that nobody told me there would be a $7 service fee, and was it the bank’s normal policy to assess fees without advance notice? All I got was a bunch of explanations of how their foreign currency exchange works, and what the $7 fee was for. I asked for a refund of the $7 fee, as a courtesy. The teller refused. I demanded my £10 note back. The teller again refused. Things started getting a little heated, so the bank’s receptionist stepped in and suggested I speak directly with the Branch Manager.
I explained the situation again, and the Branch Manager instantly credited my account with $7.
Disinfotainment Server Outage Coming Soon
I will be moving soon, and the Disinfotainment server will need to be relocated. This means the server will be disconnected and unavailable for some time. It is my goal to keep this server continuously available on the net, but there will probably be a service outage starting around July 15. I’m currently working on transition plans for the server, but I’m still working on it and nothing is finalized.
I’ll try to post an update if and when I get more info, but I thought that for now, I should post a warning in case the server suddenly goes away. If that happens, you can be assured that I plan on putting it back up online as soon as I can.