Kevin's musings

We are finally getting some more snow. Not supposed to be too much,
but it’s pretty to watch fall. Went out and ran some errands and
got some supplies for the anti-superbowl party
tomorrow. Hopefully a few folks will brave the snow and show
up. 4pm my house. Be there.

My laptop survived the night ok, no issues. I did get a full backup of
it last night too, so thats all good. My current suspicion is
one of two things: It could be software suspend, which appears
to work fine, but might cause some memory problem that only
shows up later? or it could be the CPU fan, which I cleaned out
last time it locked up. It did have a small dust bunny in it
that is now removed. Oh well, if it’s still up and stable
tomorrow I will do a suspend/resume cycle and see if it’s still
stable after that. If it locks up then I can start looking more
at software suspend.

Well, another thursday, another hacking society. Decided that I had
been to the Southern Sun too much of late, so I went up to
Boulder early and hit the Tandori Grill for dinner. Very
nice. The Chicken Tkia Masala (spicy) was pretty spicy and
yummy. Garlic Nann was also good. They got mobbed just as I was
finishing up, but got pretty good service until then. I left
there and went up to the Southern Sun to see if anyone was there
and ran into rise. He said no one else was there, and the wait
for a table was more than an hour, so we just went over to Caffe
Sole instead. This brings me to the laptop woes.

My laptop has been flaky of late. I had it marked down to the swsusp
patches I had been playing with, but when I woke up this morning
my laptop was locked up. Looks like it locked at about 3am
(which is when my backups fire off). It was blinking the num
lock light which indicates a panic, but of course the screen was
blanked. When I powered it down and back on it wouldn’t even
come up, just turned off. Finally it came up. Tonight when I got
to Caffe Sole it came up ok, but then it decided to spew a disk
error and mark the drive read only. I shut it down and ran a
fsck.jfs on it, and it came up ok after that. Sure looks like
the drive is hosing up, which is strange since I just got this
new drive in december. They sure don’t make them like they used
to. I did take it out of the laptop and re-seat it and it sounds
a lot quieter, perhaps it was just a connector. The other
possible weird thing that could be causing problems is my USB
wireless. I have switched that off for now and am using a pcmcia
one, so that should tell me if thats the culprit.

Of course since my laptop is my main machine (I am on it probibly 18
hours a day) I looked around to see if I could see a good
replacement one. The HP zt3000 looks pretty sweet. You can get a
1980×1200 screen in a 15.3″ form factor. Seems to run linux
pretty well and it’s about 6.5 lbs. The downside is that it’s
only got at best a 1.7ghz p4 in it, which would in fact be
slower than my current 1.8ghz. They even have a credit card buy
deal that would let you pay 0% interest if you pay it all off in
12 months. Tempting, but I really like my current laptop if I
could get it stable.

Well, the Clumsy Lovers show last night was pretty good. Got in there
early and got a place to sit and had some dinner with Jeremy,
then a pile of others showed up for the show. Much beer, much
music. Good times.

Oh, and I should do my part to keep the google search happy:
Miserable Failure.

I decided to revive an old tradition and plan on doing an
anti-superbowl party this coming sunday. Get folks over and have
highbrow conversation, drink wine and eat pate.

Called FINE excel energy this morning. They sent me a bill for
1100ish. The person I finally got to talk to after threading the
dangerous phone maze was very nice. Seems they had taken a
reading on my meter in July 2002, and had been estimating my
usage from that. Then they took another reading in December
2003. The new reading was much higher, so they redid my last 6
months of billing and hit me with a bill for the diffrence. It
still didn’t add up tho. It was much higher than it should have
been. They had me read off the current meter reading and in the
last month it’s been higher than it was, but still not near what
they were billing me for. The reason they were estimating it was
that they couldn’t get into my yard, because I have a padlock on
the gate. So, finally they decided they would cancel this bill,
tell their billing people to re-figure it and send me a new
bill. They would also send me a schedule for when they read
meters here so I can possibly open the gate for them. What a
pain, but at least they were nice about it.

In other news,
The Clumsy Lovers are
playing the southern sun tonight. I am gonna head over around
8ish and get a late dinner and have beers and watch the
show. Anyone in the area reading this should go.

So far a pretty wasted weekend. Just stayed home friday night and
watched dvd’s. Saturday I went out and got some pretty yummy
indian food and then up to boulder to get some Stone smoked
porter. Yummy stuff. Watched
X2 saturday
night. It was an amusing ride, but had very little seeming
point. There were a few times the plot had such big holes in it
that I wanted to watch the truck drive through it.

I should go out tonight and be social. Wonder if there is anyplace
that has any nice live music?

Some
pictures
from some walks with the dogs in the last week. Some cats were out
one day, you could see 4 or 5 of them just laying around in this
sunny spot. They didn’t seem concerned that the dogs were going
by. The sign is on a tennis court near my house. It says “NO”
and then all the text under it is gibberish.

Another thursday, another hackingsociety. Didn’t get anyone else
showing up at southern sun, so I just enjoyed my beer and ate at
the bar. Had a pretty good turnout of people at Sole though. I
think we had about 10 folks at one point. Managed to get some
changes made to the security HOWTO and got it submitted for
update.

Well, the snow didn’t last, but it was fun while it was falling. Today
it got warm enough to melt the snow and turn it into mud. I
think I mostly kept the dogs from tracking all the mud in, but
it’s not an easy task.

Watched
Hamlet^H^H^H^H^H^HStrange Brew tonight.
Needed to grab a screen capture of ‘hosehead’ the dog so we could put
it on our labels for our beer.

SNOW! Hurray!

Went up to the beer store and bottled beer tonight. Will need to age a
week or two, but then should be ready to drink. We sampled as we
bottled and it’s got a very nice flavor to it, even though it’s
green. Nice hoppy red. We are going to call it “hosehead red”.