Archive for November, 2006

milk after the day

Thursday, November 9th, 2006

Jerry is absolutely right. It terrifies me. I was gonna have some cereal today and for some reason or another it’s been a while since I had milk. I still had a carton in there, pretty full. But when I saw the date on it, it was two days past the expiration date. I actually glanced at the container, saw the date, put it back in the fridge, went back to my room to check the date on the computer and decided “no way”. I’ve seen bad milk in the past, it curdles, awful stuff. For added drama, the brand I usually get was actually sold out, so this carton was another brand I hadn’t tried before. It tasted remarkably….. alike. But that doesn’t mean I was going to take a chance on it past the date. I poured it out into the sink, it actually looked perfectly fine. But two days is way past the accepted standard, even when I have milk on the day I’m sort of thinking “did they mean noon or 8pm?”, it already makes me uneasy.

I may be liberal on some things, but on milk past the date I’m definitely conservative.

software suspend, oy vey

Tuesday, November 7th, 2006

It is so damn annoying to spend hours trying to fix something which appears to be so simple (and which happens to work perfectly on that other OS) without even getting anywhere. Software suspend has been problematic in linux for years, and that’s really why I’ve never insisted on fixing it on my laptop. But enough is enough, and today I decided I was going to fix it once and for all. Easier said that done.

Like I said, it has been years since people started trying to get this working and there’s now tons of howtos and personal stories about what they did and what worked. Of course, just about everything that people say is model specific and what works for one laptop is not sure to work for any other etc. The number of options alone underlines that problem. But it seems that the most widely used (or should I assume the method that has the widest catchment area) is suspend2. So I started out with that, suspend2-sources, setting up the kernel etc. Of course, the more refined your setup is, the more pain you are about to receive. I have a nice framebuffer with a boot screen, which I dumped along the way just to simplify things.

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Michael Jackson is a woman (?)

Monday, November 6th, 2006

I used to be a huge Michael Jackson fan as a kid, my room was plastered with his posters, I had all the albums, I listened to his music _all the time_. In 1993, he was on tour and I badly wanted to go to the concert in Oslo. One Saturday morning, at about 8am, my friend and I had just left Oslo S and we were heading for a record store. The line from the entrance almost encircled the entire block and finally we arrived at the end of the line. We were an hour early, quite a few people had gotten there ahead of us. Literally minutes later we witnessed the line grow incredibly fast, we couldn’t even see the end anymore as it was wrapped around the last corner of the block. At 9am, the doors opened and the tickets went on sale. We got ours and it felt pretty amazing knowing we would be going to a live performance.

The problem with these concerts, of course, is that there are way too many people, and when you’re 12 years old and pretty damn short, it’s pretty much a given you’re not going to get much out of pushing your way to the front of the pack. We actually grabbed our seats at the very back, the stadium where the concert was had this grassy hill on one side and we sat there quite comfortably. (Seeing wasn’t a problem either with huge screens on either side of the stage showing what was happening.)

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calling it a ’she’

Sunday, November 5th, 2006

Ugh. Annoying habit. Or isn’t it even a habit? I think it’s more of a passion. Something people don’t do without actively thinking about it every time.

I have a clear recollection of my history teacher back in high school doing it. He was extremely passionate about history, we got the impression he was up at night reading history books. When he described the Bolshevik revolution to us, he did so in astounding detail, how a bunch of guys traveled across town, what they were wearing, what route they took through St. Petersburg. *That* guy used to refer to countries as ’she’. When he did, his eyes lit up a little.

But that’s not all, guys say that all the time. Yeah, *guys*. Imagine a woman ogling over a brand new car, “isn’t she beautiful?”. No, that doesn’t happen. It’s always guys, as if they’re picturing whatever it is they see as a female form that they worship.

Let’s set the record straight here. A car is not a she, it doesn’t have a gender. It’s an it. A country is an it, a plane is an it, a computer is an it, got it? Enough of this stupid wishful personification of things that aren’t people.

mealy mangos

Saturday, November 4th, 2006

What the hell? :wth: Is it a sign that they’re not ready or beyond ripe or what? By the color I’d say they’re a bit raw, but certainly within the reasonable standards. It’s rare to pick up a mango that is *just* right. But even if they aren’t quite ready, they can be a bit hard and not as tasty, but I’ve never had a mealy mango before. :lazy: