This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter).
Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon
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So this morning I was at the daily meeting we have at work. I had my work laptop open and had booked a meeting relevant to some stuff being discussed, I was looking at my to do list for the day, and OK, maybe during some of the slow parts of the meeting I snuck a peak at a news site. But then one of the people was giving a presentation on what they had been working on, so I closed the laptop and paid attention to the presentation.
About mid-way through, my laptop gave off a loud, completely unexpected BEEP. Well, at the end of the presentation I opened it up, and it was showing an angry error about not finding the hard drive. And then it just generally wouldn’t start. Kept cycling through the initial start up, but never actually starting up.
Sure enough, initial suspicions were confirmed a couple hours later by the guy here who deals with this sort of thing:
Your HD is bad. They are shipping a new one. You will have a new hard drive, OS, and software installed by the end of the week. Probably fully functional end of day Friday. Let me know if you need another computer to use in the mean time. […] You also might want to put together a list of the programs you will need installed on the laptop when I rebuild it, and then send the list to me when it’s complete. […] Sorry there was nothing I could do to recover the hard drive.
Yes, indeed. Dead hard drive. Lost everything that wasn’t already copied onto the network. All of the important finished documents were copied onto our document library, but works in progress, my email archive for work, all that fun stuff, all gone.
Luckily, unlike last time when I lost important things like emails back and forth between my friends as they insult and tease each other, this time it was just work stuff, so nothing important. I’m not really that concerned, although it still sucks.
I am however waiting for a third important hard drive in my life to fail. I’ll be double checking all my backups tonight.
Yesterday I was walking around the house cleaning up some in preparation for the arrival of Brandy’s mother. She is staying with us for a week because at 19 October 2004 09:54:54 UTC Amy will be exactly 9 years old. (Although, not being as precice as I am, the date she considers her “birthday” is a day later.)
Anyway, as I was walking around the house I noticed something wrong with my car. I had just had it detailed last week because it was a mess, and so I saw something. It took me about 5 seconds, then it suddenly came to me when the problem had originated. And with horror I determined it had been there for over a year and a half…
I had been screwed back in March of 2003. You see, back on my 2003 Q1 random trip to Ohio, I had busted up my back right tail light… Click below and check out the picture about 1/5 of the way down of my smashed taillight.
2003 Q1 Random Vacation – Day 3
OK, that was on 15 Feb 2003. On 1 Mar 2003 I went back to Ohio to pick up the car. Check out the picture about 1/3 of the way down of the fixed taillight below…
2003 Q1 Random Vacation – Epilogue
OK, what is wrong here???
Now, I should have noticed it right when I was picking up the car. Or at least sometime in the same year. Or maybe earlier this year. It isn’t like yesterday was the first time it was visible. And yes, I don’t wash my car as often as I should, but it isn’t the first time it has been clean, and I should have seen it anyway…
Do you see it???
When they put on the new back right panel, they did NOT restore the pinstripe!!!! It goes down the right side of my car to the back door, then STOPS. It does not continue through to the back like it is supposed to!!!! In the March 3rd picture of my car covered with snow on the page above, if you look carefully, you can see how the line stops at the end of the door and does not continue like it should.
(In both the 1 Mar 2003 and 3 Mar 2003 pictures there is something that looks a little like a pinstripe, but if you look carefully you can tell it does not match the pinstripe from the 15 Feb 2003 pictures and is really just a reflection from the shape of the car at that point.)
So now, I haven’t even noticed this for a year and a half, but now that I HAVE noticed it, it is driving me nuts and disturbing me. The car is uneven! The left side has the pinstripe all the way and the right side does not! It is all unbalanced!! I now feel self concious about driving the car. It is just WRONG.
It has been a year and a half, and Ohio is a long way again, so I’m certainly not running back to Ohio to complain at this point. But you can be sure when I go to my next regularly scheduled service with Saturn in about 3000 miles, I am going to have them fix this!
Argh!!!! I can’t believe I’ve been driving all lopsided for so long and not even known it!
Why didn’t anybody tell me!!!
I promised my thoughts on the various debates, and keep forgetting to do that, so here goes. Since the first thoughts are what I really want, I’ll grab things from emails I sent at the time when I can…
First Presidential Debate
(my comments sent at 1 Oct 2004 04:02:40 UTC)
I though Kerry definitely won. He came off much more together and coherent and his answers were a lot more thought out. He did a lot better than I expected. Bush did just about how I expected. I was surprised at just HOW much he just kept repeating his stock phrases and prepared stock answers. I expected both of them to do some repetition, it is part of what you do. And they both did. But over and over W kept going back to the same few things, even when it wasn’t related to the question at all… and I was just amused by some of the long pauses.
Vice Presidential Debate
(my comments sent 6 Oct 2004 11:18:19 UTC)
Unlike the other one, this one was a fair fight where both contestants were in the game. In the first half though, Cheney was running circles around Edwards. Edwards looked and sounded like a young wippersnapper who had a few lines he wanted to get off, while Cheney sounded like an authoratative adult who knew what the hell he was talking about. Edwards did a little bit better in the second half when they got to domestic policy, but just a little bit better, not a lot. He never pulled ahead. Cheney won this one.
I also note, that although I probably still would have issues picking a candidate, I’d be a lot happier if these were the two choices rather than Bush/Kerry. Either one of these guys would be better than the ones above them on the tickets.
(IE: I may still violently disagree with Cheney on many things, but at least it is obvious he has thought about the issues and has some complexity and depth behind his positions. Edwards is less of a difference, but I’ve just had a better reaction to him than Kerry, going all the way back to the primaries. He’s slick in a Clintonian way, but I still trust him more than Kerry.)
Second Presidential Debate: Well, I didn’t really comment much at the time in any form I can cut and paste. I thought it was much more even. Bush did a good job. Kerry did a good job. No knockouts, nothing significant. I was not impressed by the format. If you are going to have a town hall, have a real town hall. If you are just going to do what they did there, dispense with the audience and just have the moderator do it.
Third Presidential Debate: Well, to be honest… Domestic issues kind of bore me for the most part (with some exceptions) and I was kind of tired to begin with. I fell asleep at least three or four times trying to watch this debate. If it wasn’t for the Tivo I never would have made it through. As it was it took me several days. And I end up with very groggy impressions of it. So I can’t put a real opinion together. The polls and such seem to have Kerry coming out better from it.
Well, that is my debate opinion summary.
On Friday the Daily Show’s Jon Stewart was on Crossfire on CNN. And he just completely lit into them. Go Jon! Follow the link for the full transcript, or go here for the video. Here are my favorite bits…. (The […] indicates I’ve left stuff out, sometimes several minutes of stuff, so some context and back and forth is missing… I took out a bunch of the times Carlson and Begala inturrupted… go read the full transcript or watch the video to get the whole thing…)
Crossfire Transcript for 15 Oct 2004
CARLSON: Right. But of the nine guys running, who do you think was best. Do you think he was the best, the most impressive? […]
STEWART: I thought Al Sharpton was very impressive. I enjoyed his way of speaking. I think, oftentimes, the person that knows they can’t win is allowed to speak the most freely, because, otherwise, shows with titles, such as CROSSFIRE. Or “HARDBALL” or “I’m Going to Kick Your Ass” or.. Will jump on it. In many ways, it’s funny. And I made a special effort to come on the show today, because I have privately, amongst my friends and also in occasional newspapers and television shows, mentioned this show as being bad. […] And I wanted to — I felt that that wasn’t fair and I should come here and tell you that I don’t — it’s not so much that it’s bad, as it’s hurting America. […] So I wanted to come here today and say… […] Here’s just what I wanted to tell you guys. […] Stop. Stop, stop, stop, stop hurting America. […] See, the thing is, we need your help. Right now, you’re helping the politicians and the corporations. And we’re left out there to mow our lawns.
BEGALA: By beating up on them? You just said we’re too rough on them when they make mistakes.
STEWART: No, no, no, you’re not too rough on them. You’re part of their strategies. You are partisan, what do you call it, hacks. […] You know, it’s interesting to hear you talk about my responsibility. […] I didn’t realize that — and maybe this explains quite a bit. […] is that the news organizations look to Comedy Central for their cues on integrity. […] So what I would suggest is, when you talk about you’re holding politicians’ feet to fire, I think that’s disingenuous. I think you’re… […] So what I would suggest is, when you talk about you’re holding politicians’ feet to fire, I think that’s disingenuous. I think you’re… […] No, no, no, but what I’m saying is this. I’m not. I’m here to confront you, because we need help from the media and they’re hurting us. And it’s — the idea is…
BEGALA: Let me get this straight. If the indictment is — if the indictment is — and I have seen you say this — that… […] And that CROSSFIRE reduces everything, as I said in the intro, to left, right, black, white. […] Well, it’s because, see, we’re a debate show. […] It’s like saying The Weather Channel reduces everything to a storm front. […] We’re 30 minutes in a 24-hour day where we have each side on, as best we can get them, and have them fight it out.
STEWART: No, no, no, no, that would be great. To do a debate would be great. But that’s like saying pro wrestling is a show about athletic competition.
CARLSON: Jon, Jon, Jon, I’m sorry. I think you’re a good comedian. I think your lectures are boring. […]
STEWART: Now, this is theater. It’s obvious. How old are you?
CARLSON: Thirty-five.
STEWART: And you wear a bow tie. […] So this is theater. […] Now, listen, I’m not suggesting that you’re not a smart guy, because those are not easy to tie. […] But the thing is that this — you’re doing theater, when you should be doing debate, which would be great. […] It’s not honest. What you do is not honest. What you do is partisan hackery. And I will tell you why I know it.
CARLSON: You had John Kerry on your show and you sniff his throne and you’re accusing us of partisan hackery?
STEWART: Absolutely.
CARLSON: You’ve got to be kidding me. He comes on and you…
STEWART: You’re on CNN. The show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone calls. […] What is wrong with you?
CARLSON: Well, I’m just saying, there’s no reason for you — when you have this marvelous opportunity not to be the guy’s butt boy, to go ahead and be his butt boy. Come on. It’s embarrassing.
STEWART: I was absolutely his butt boy. I was so far — you would not believe what he ate two weeks ago. […] You know, the interesting thing I have is, you have a responsibility to the public discourse, and you fail miserably.
CARLSON: You need to get a job at a journalism school, I think.
STEWART: You need to go to one. The thing that I want to say is, when you have people on for just knee-jerk, reactionary talk…
CARLSON: Wait. I thought you were going to be funny. Come on. Be funny.
STEWART: No. No. I’m not going to be your monkey.[…]
CARLSON: I do think you’re more fun on your show. Just my opinion. […]
STEWART: You know what’s interesting, though? You’re as big a dick on your show as you are on any show.
(via Fark)
Now, I haven’t watched Crossfire in a long time. (Although I was in the audience for one taping a few years back.) It was interesting back in the Buchanon/Kinsey days, but since then I just have found it annoying. But this is one of the best Crossfires I have ever seen. They get taken to task about the whole premise of their show and similar shows.
I Tivo the Daily Show every day. I usually don’t watch it until a week or more later, but I do watch it all the time. And I watch and listen to news and commentary from a lot of other sources every day, mostly online. (I don’t watch nearly as much TV news as I used to.) And the striking thing time and time again is that Stewart is the only one doing a really good and consistant job of calling both the media and the politians on when they are being hypocritical, when they are just using vapid words with no content, etc.
I’ve heard talking heads on the various news networks or elsewhere talk sadly about how “young people get their news from the Daily Show” and how bad this was since they were not getting “real news”. I think it is even sadder that a comedy show can time after time provide a more insightful view into current events than the “real news”.
Anyway, watch the clip. It is good stuff.
This is pretty cool. Check it out. Try www.abulsme.com first, then look at other sites you may be interested in!
TouchGraph GoogleBrowser
(forwarded to me by Prem T. at work, thanks!)
Time for another thing I would have posted if I’d had a blog at the time. This is from the runup to Hurricane Charlie. I sent this to family and friends at August 14th 2004 03:34:23 UTC. I was in such a hurry that I forgot to actually put in a subject line.
Well, at about 00:30 UTC (8:30 PM Eastern) out power went out. Some neighbors on one street adjacent to ours still had power, but most of the neighborhood was out. We lit candles and switched from TV news to radio news. This was around when the eye was in the Orlando area.
Note from Brandy: Sam can be a whiny brat when you take away his TV!!!
Back to Sam…
We got some wind, but never even close (I don’t think) to the predicted speeds. At Noon they were saying Melbourne would get 80 mph winds. At 3 PM they were saying 70 mph. At 6 PM they were saying 60 mph. Those were sustained. We probably got some gusts that were close to that for maybe a minute or two at a time, but nothing long term. And there were brief periods of a few minutes each when it rained pretty hard, but nothing that seemed much worse than the afternoon thunderstorms we get all the time around here.
Basically, it went to the northwest of us, and was much more compact than expected. So the really high winds were confined to a tight corridor which is within a 20 minute drive of here, but which is not here.
We did have a tornado warning that just expired a couple minutes ago for a likely tornado just south of us by a few miles. But once again, nothing visible here. Which I guess is a good thing. :-)
We are still without power though. I’m writing this on the laptop on battery power, to go out at some point in the future. We still have the land line phone, and my cell phone (which I can use to get online too) and I can charge the laptop in the car, so I guess I may send before we actually have power again. Maybe.
Anyway, looks like the actual storm part is over, but the radio is saying 100s of thousands of people without power, so it may well be awhile until we have power again. Dunno.
Just went outside a few seconds ago to walk the dog. It is clear. You can see the sky. There is a nice breeze, but not huge winds. But… the clouds… are moving really really fast. It is like watching a time lapse movie. They are really low and lit from the lights below (including our street light, which is still on). It is very neat looking. Although a bit creepy!
At August 14, 2004 19:16:48 UTC I sent an update, where I also forgot a subject line:
Well, we ended up having no electric for fifteen and a half hours, and some ice cream melted and we had to realign the satellite dish, but that was about it. It basically missed us. A normal thunderstorm this afternoon was almost worse.
Whelp, that’s the last update on this subject. :-)
I updated the State Department Warnings Graph again. Since last time the world is a little safer. Down to 28 countries with warnings from 29 before. The Turks and Caicos and The Bahamas are now safe to visit again. Guess they fixed their hurricane damage. Meanwhile though the Cayman Islands got hit by Hurricane Ivan and got added to the list. So wait a little while before you visit there, K?
I just made some minor updates to my Random Trip Pages.
I used to live at each of the two overlapping blue diamonds. Now I live at the red diamond.
Yes, indeed, I have updated the main map to show my new location. Woo!
I have also changed things to indicate that, unfortunately, the Chacchoben, Quintana Roo, Mexico Random Trip did not actually happen in 2004 Q3. With everything going on with moving down to Florida, and the fact we are trying to keep money in as much order as possible to buy a house, it just was not a good time. I’m putting the new target as 2005 Q1, but that may yet slip too. But we will get down there damn it! We will!
I also updated the Random Spot Generator so it now centers itself on the house we are renting in Melbourne, Florida rather than my old place in Yardley, PA. Of course, that is only the default center, users can change it to center wherever they want. Well, pretty much… I think it will get confused if you center yourself on one of the poles, I haven’t got the right exception cases in the code to deal with those sigularities.
So anyway, play around with the tool a bit and generate some random spots until you find a place you would like to take a trip to. It is a fun way to kill an hour!
Yesterday I did something that made me shiver. For the first time since 1993, I *intentionally* deleted email. Yes, I did. I have actually been preparing for this moment for several months, but the events of the last few days prompted this action.
Up until June of this year, my email client would filter the spam into a spam folder and out of my main mailbox so I wouldn’t have to slog through them when dealing with my real email. Then once every few weeks I’d look through the spam folder for things that got in there by mistake, move them back into my inbox, and then file all the spam into my perminant archive in the correct folders. (I organize all my old email by the sent date by month, and because spam often has goofy dates, I have mail folders going back to 1901 or so, and going forward to the 2050’s sometime.) So it would all get filed. None would be lost.
As of July 1st at 00:00 UTC I have been taking the spam from the spam folder and actually putting it in the trash rather than filing it into my month by month folders. I had however turned off the automatic emptying of the trash, so it wouldn’t really be gone and I could change my mind if I wanted to. I was holding off on actually pulling the trigger on emptying the trash.
Well, in the aftermath of the whole saga outlined in the previous few blog postings, I was slowly copying over the 20,000 spams that had been miraculously saved out of my remote cache and into my pure local folders, so that when I reconnected to the mail servers again they wouldn’t be wiped out like the real mail had been.
About two hours into that effort… it took awhile because interspersed with the ones where I had full caches were some where I did not, and they would give errors when I tried to copy them and I had to work around that… anyway…
About two hours into it, I suddenly said “What the hell am I doing???” I was spending lots of time and effort saving spam messages I didn’t give a damn about. So after doing one last check for real mail in there by mistake (I found about 20 real messages out of the 20,000 in the spam folder) I just went ahead and trashed them all.
And then turned back on the setting for trash over one month old to be automatically purged perminantly. A lot of the trash went away instantly. Boom.
I have deleted email. On purpose.
I have deleted spam.
This is a major milestone for Sam.
I feel a little queasy, and if I think about it hard I regret it a little bit.
But it is done. There is no going back.
Kinda sad really.
Still debating if I retroactively go back and delete all the spam from before July. Probably not.
So for those of you advocating for me not perminantly archiving all the spam I get… you have won the battle!
One last word about the data loss thing from last night. (Well, at least until I put out the September and October email results.)
Losing 2000 emails of current vintage that I hadn’t yet “dealt with” including personal stuff, some business stuff (house stuff and the like) and a lot of messages I use for task management and the like threw me into a major psychological tailspin from which I am just starting to recover. But there is an important thing to remember. When it comes to obsessive compulsive things like saving every email I have sent or recieved since 1993 (including spam) I am just a tad… I say a tad… neurotic. And I know this. I know that the level to which I get upset is a bit beyond where it should be on a rational basis. I am working on that. I am getting better at these things. I am trying to keep a positive attitude and move forward without forever dwelling on the couple minutes where I could have prevented it. Having said that though, I know I still overreact.
And, as part of that, I want to publicly apologize to Chris.
Although I was actually trying to be “good” when talking (OK, IMing) with him about the difficulties last night, it has been pointed out to me that I did not actually succeed and ended up being very insensitive. Given my mental state at the time, I guess that is no surprise. I was so wrapped up in my own little neurotic disaster to properly acknoledge the great lengths Chris had gone to, with many many hours without sleep, to try to salvage the situation. And to the fact that while I lost a bunch of stuff, with perhaps a few exceptions, if I wasn’t quite as psycho about my mail, very little of it was truly “important” to anybody but me. (Although it WAS very important to me.) Meanwhile, both Rebecca and Chris lost lots of data as well. And much of Chris’s was work related. And, as with mine, there most often was not a way to recover it.
I’m sorry Chris. I *do* realize the amount of work you did, having done that kind of emergency repair work a few times on my own when drives have failed. I realize how stressful it is, and how heartbreaking it is to even be in that situation, and to know there is a lot you will not be able to get back. And I recognize that you have both lost a lot of value as well.
Last night when we IMed I was too wrapped up in my own loss to be sensitive to the work you had done, or your own loss. Most of my anger and frustration was actually directed at myself for having let my own routine backup strategy lapse. Once upon a time I had automatic daily backups of everything that mattered. I let that slip away. I also up until the very last second if I had been thinking could have just made a local backup “just in case”. I did not. And that is my fault, not yours. And regardless of that, I should have been commiserating in our mutual loss and thanking you for your hard work, rather than just being snippy.
I humbly apologize.
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