Jun 30th, 2006 by bwann
Today’s lesson on foreign policy: (picture me almost yelling at the person on the phone so they hear me)
Me: “I need the hard drive serial number. it starts with WCAL, then eight digits.”
Tech: “WD2500SD drive parameters 255 cylinders 63 sectors”
Me: “Ok, that’s the model number. What is the serial number?
Tech: “Server number?” *proceeds to give me the server serial number*
Me: “No no, the hard drive serial number.”
Tech: “Yes yes, it is a serial aye tee aye hard driver”
Me: *cry*
Jun 29th, 2006 by bwann
Either my MacBook Pro with sketchy RAM (which only reboots about once every two weeks now) or the 10.4.7 update screwed me over. During the update it rebooted and hosed the OS. There’s all sorts of whacky unresolved dependancies causing the MBP to not boot. It even reverts to text mode at startup to cry for help. I figured out I can boot into “Safe Boot” mode and have a minimally working desktop, but not enough to save me. I tried re-applying the 10.4.7 update with little success so far. Starting Software Updater dies with Java symbol errors. Interestingly I can run Safari so I downloaded the 10.4.7 package (only en0 work as wireless is disabled since no kernel extensions are loaded). The package silently exists when I try to install it. Looks like I’m going to have to blow away the OS and start over. I hear the OS X installer has a “Archive and Reinstall” which will basically reinstall /System and other stuff, while preserving /Users/. I’ll have to do a backup before I fiddle with this. This will be the fifth time I’ve done a stunt like this and have gotten exceedingly efficient at it.
In other news, I now own a welding helmet, jigsaw, 4″ angle grinder and ten pounds of e-6013 and e-7018 welding electrodes. The punchline to this is that in order to use the grinder outside, I’m going to have to run a 100′ extension cable from my apartment, or hookup a hugeass 1000-1500 watt inverter and drain a marine battery.
At this rate I could really use a house with a garage or some tin work shack on an acre of land.
A friend from work offered to let me use his welder this weekend, so I can build my hitch-mounted vise. Tomorrow I’m picking up 2″ square tubing and a vise from Harbor Freight. I need to go by an Army surplus store to find me some work clothes. Old Army BDUs have made nice welding clothes; I don’t really care if I set them on fire, they’re comfortable, lots of pockets, slip over whatever I’m wearing at the time, and cheap. Plus I can see if there’s anything else that’d be useful in the desert. I’d really like to have a shemagh.
I did manage to finally get my ticket to Seattle. It was furiously aggrivating to do. I first looked at prices Sunday night on Travelocity. Monday afternoon I looked again, prices had actually dropped and there were more flights available, including a good price through Alaskan Airlines. I tried buying, then all I kept getting was “this price is no longer available”. I went over to Orbitz, same thing. I tried directly on alaskaair.com. That time I got as far as putting in my credit card information before getting denied. I gave up and called Alaska Air and booked it that way. I give e-commerce a failing grade in this case.
Anyways, I’m leaving for Seattle on Tuesday and returning early Sunday morning. Plenty of time to hang out with Alex & Victoria!
Jun 27th, 2006 by bwann
I had a dream last night I had ordered a pizza, I kept waiting and waiting, an hour and a half later, it never showed up. At some point this morning I thought I really did order one. I’m hungry now.
I keep having this reocurring dream where I’m running a race/marathon and my legs get so heavy early into it, I have to slow down and pick them up and move them into position. I’ve been having this dream occassionally for months. I don’t know what’s up with it. I think twice I’ve had a dream where I was able to run unemcumbered and it felt great.
Jun 26th, 2006 by bwann
As each day goes by, I’m my hatred for advertising, marketing, and to a degree, capitalism is growing. I loathe when marketing runs contrary to technology and convienience. It has gotten to the point where it highly annoys me when people try to sell me things, no matter the method. I see it as a con, somebody is trying to make me part with money for an object I’m perfectly fine without. If I really needed something, I’d go out and buy it or improvise my own. I don’t need somebody else telling me I need to buy their widget.
Sex sells. This one annoys me the worst. People will stick a hot girl or guy (or even “secret sex tips to drive your man wild” for the reading crowd) on the cover, box, TV commercial, home page or whatever just to market it to the general population. And it works, extremely well. If it doesn’t result in a sale, it certainly results in attention which is a gold mine to a marketer (think booth bunnies).
I have truely gotten in the mindset that if it’s marketed with a hot girl, watch out — the girl is bait, somebody is trying to get me to spend money on something I wouldn’t otherwise. Whatever was actually sold, there has to be enough perceived value behind that hot girl to get the person to keep spending money again and again. This takes place over, and over, and over again.
Take Maxim for example (for sake of argument, we’ll pick one that doesn’t show nudity, but I believe it holds true for any), it shows hot girls on the cover and throughout the magazine to get you to buy the magazine. It throws in enough video game tips, football coverage, fashion tips and a few cocktail recipies to prop up the percieved value to coax you into subscribing. The rest is advertising to the age/gender demographic that happens to fall for that particular magazine By then, you’ve already paid money; the editors will put in the minimal amount of expense and effort to keep you buying that magazine.
Herding people to websites. Everyone does it, unsuccessful websites don’t. You’re either doing it for yourself — where you herd people to your web site so you can market your product on the hopes you’ll close sales; or you’re doing it for somebody else — herding people to your site to make people see/interact with advertisers and sponsors.
Tricks that require me to interact with a website when there’s viable time consuming alternatives
really
piss
me
off.
Let’s take MySpace for example. Social networking websites are pure money machines. When a friend (that you’ve suckered into joining, and laughed at them for doing so) sends you an email, MySpace will send your primary email account saying “you have a new MySpace message — log in to the website to read it!”
…
You’ve just sent me an email, asshole, why not send the actual message to me and make it more convienient for me? No, it will never happen, they want me to go to the website where I’ll be exposed to advertisers. And because I’m already there, I will stick around for a few minutes which exposes me to more advertising.
GMail did something that surprised me. It’s predominately a web-based service, yet they give you POP3 access so you can read your email without having to go to the website. I haven’t used that method to see what the catch is. POP3 is a pretty basic protocol, no frills there. IMAP offers way more functionality, but you’re not going to see it offered (Gmail please prove me wrong) because it’s going to reduce the amount of eyeballs going to the website to read those targeted ads.
Soda cap instant win games have actually taken a step BACK when it comes to convienence. Back in the day, you’d twist off the lid and it would tell you “you’re a winner” or “sorry, drink more.” Marketing got clever and started putting codes under the bottle caps like “X48JJP”, then tell you to visit a website to tell you if you’re a winner. Why? So they can grab your attention for a longer amount of time and try to market more to you. Maybe this works well because people like codes.
Gathering information from customers. “May I get your address?” “May I get your telephone number?” “Would you like to be on our mailing list?” My answer to these questions have always been no. I’ve gotten countless shocked looks because I refuse to give somebody my telephone number or ZIP code at the register. I must surely be some undesirable riffraff who doesn’t play the game! One might say, “it’s such a trivial piece of information”, but my response is it has absolutely nothing to do with the transaction — totally unnecessary. It wastes my time giving it out, zero incentive. *Maybe* every now and then they’ll need it for credit card verification, that’s fine (and usually unescapable).
My Marriott Rewards statement came in the mail today. Two inches of actual account information, accompanied by eight pages of Marriot marketing material. Why couldn’t they send this to me via email? If they did, would they send me an actual statement, bury it with marketing, or make me log into the website to view it?
Alas, I’m selfish. I’ve been in business long enough and played both sides of the game. I’ve mined data from my customer base to use to market and cross-sell (didn’t use any hot blondes though, maybe that’s where I went wrong). I’ve convinced people to spend money. When those same attempts are used against me, I get annoyed. Sigh.
AAAAAHH it’s 1:12 AM and I’m wide awake and bored. I had better not wind up going to IHOP from 3AM-5AM like I did Sunday morning because I couldn’t sleep. I think the waiter guy was on speed, he kept coming by the table every 3 minutes asking if everything was ok. For fucks’s sake, let me enjoy my big breakfast platter in peace!
I’m in a flighty mood again where I don’t want to come home. Fortunately, I have a trip to Seattle coming up in two weeks.
Somehow either I talked myself into, or I was talked into, building a roof rack for Alex’s Land Rover. New, they run for $1300; I figure we can build one for less than $300. The part I’m sort of working on now is fabricating rain gutter mounts. It’s an interesting project in that the Rover is 2,500 miles away from me so I can’t like make something using trial and error, and I don’t have a proper workshop with metal working tools (chop saw, oxy-aceteylene torch, plasma-arc cutter, drill press, MIG welder, sheet metal brake, pipe bender). The goal is to fabricate what I can in Austin, then take it with me to Seattle and build the rest of it up there — and hope it all fits sight unseen. I’m pretty confident I can get creative and improvise what I need. I have a decent amount of tools I can use now to build the mounts; hammers, large pliers, propane torch, jigsaw with a bunch of metal cutting blades, drills, angle grinder. What I really need at this point is a vise that’s mounted on a reciever hitch bar, since my apartment has no workbench. They don’t exactly sell them at Harbor Freight or Sears, usually some rancher builds his own. If I had access to the cutting and welding gear, I’d make my own. I suspect I’ll jury-rig some sort of vise/hitch setup somehow. Stay tuned…
Jun 25th, 2006 by bwann
Two battery side-post extensions that were too long, bolt cutters and file later, I have solved nothing. I still have alternator whine in my radio. I’m going to have to try moving my positve lead from the accessory bus to the battery directly.
Later… I redid the positive side. It’s a big improvement, but not a completely solved problem. There’s still a tinge of high pitched whine over 2500 RPM. “That’s good enough” but I suspect I’ll keep trying to eliminate it.
Jun 25th, 2006 by bwann
World Cup! World Cup! I haven’t watched any of the games in a week, looks like I’ve missed a lot of action. Ecuador vs England is playing at the moment… and England wins. Portugal vs Sweden is up next.
My parents came down to visit earlier last week. I’ve been a slacker and haven’t made it up to Oklahoma since Christmas, so they decided to come down here.
The day after they left, I flew out to Virginia. It was a very full trip, I was working from the time I arrived, all night long, then started early the next morning. There was no incentive for me to work all night, but I still only spent four hours at the hotel sleeping. IHOP in Sterling at 2 AM is where the action’s at. Several groups of seemingly drunk people started shuffling in around that time.
On the way home, IAD was crazy, so many people; it took about 40 minutes to get through self-checkin and security. My plane was already full by the time I got on it. So much for getting there in time to grab lunch. I couldn’t sleep on the way back because of a non-reclining chair, but it was offset by chatting with the extremely attractive Dell sales woman next to me who was visiting Round Rock. She saw me reading my “French for Travellers” book, we started talking about Europe and places she’s been and where I need to go. She tells me in Belgium I can get a plate of mussels+french fries almost anywhere I go. Odd, but sounds so good.
I spent yesterday afternoon running coax for my CB and scanner. I properly grounded my antenna mounts and re-tuned my antennas, now things work much better. Even brought out the multimeter and tested for grounding and impedance on my connectors and end-to-end. I quickly figured out my 6 watt battery-operated soldering iron was useless for soldering on PL-259 plugs. I bought a 25 watt iron, it was barely hot enough to get the job done. I had it plugged into my inverter, I was afraid it was going to melt my cigarette lighter outlet wiring, but it survived. I should’ve just bought the butane powered torch. I still have alternator whine, but I think I can fix this by buying a battery terminal extension and running it directly to the negative post on the battery.
If you want creepy, I was driving around last night listening to the scanner and picked up a baby monitor. I heard a argument between some girl and her “asshole liar” boyfriend, with a baby cooing periodically.
I picked up a general class amateur radio study guide last night and I’ve been eating it up. A chunk of the DC electronic stuff I already know, yet the radio wave propogation and antenna theory stuff was really interesting. I finally understand how capacitors filter out AC and how rectifiers work.
Listening to Morse code at 5 words per minute is painfully slow, 15-20 seems like a good starting point. Hearing 40+ wpm is insane. Here’s a 40 WPM AARL practice file. I know Morse isn’t required for a Technician class license, but it’s still cool to learn it.
While Googling for Morse code stuff last night, I found a clip from Leno with a SMS text messaging vs Morse code competition. A SMS “speed champion” was pitted against a pair of ham operators. The girl from the audience was so confident that SMS would win, but the radio guys clobbered them.
Jun 13th, 2006 by bwann
So I get this email from my apartment management saying:
Hello Bryan,
Are you thinking about moving? Sometimes, the right decision is to just STAY the course, steady as she goes. No need to rock the boat! We think you should just STAY and keep your current address! No forwarding mail, printing new checks, and sending out notices. Just STAY! You could save yourself the expense of moving and your friends would prefer a fun night out to lifting boxes. STAY and none of your important possessions will be broken, disassembled, miss-packed, miss-labeled, lost or stolen because you decided to STAY.
We’re so happy you are going to STAY here with us, and when you think you should be too. Call us today to sign a new lease and STAY!!
Sincerely,
Your Team at AMLI
What? Stay the course? Are they part of the Republican party or the Bush administration? Can I leverage this to get cheaper rent? Are they trying to coerce me into STAYing?
Date: Tue, 13 Jun 2006 08:22:28 -0500 (CDT)
From: Bryan Wann <bryan wann.net>
To: lantanahills amli.com
Subject: Re: AMLI at Lantana Hills – Don’t move STAY with us!
What kind of weird fear mongering tactic is this?
kind regards,
bryan
Then again, I suppose my lease is set to expire soon.
I so brought it.
12:55PM <raptor> I dreamed this morning I was setting up my tent and forgot a bunch of shit, like water bottles
12:55PM <raptor> I tasted the playa in my sleep
12:55PM <alex> Until it starts happening to you, there’s really no point in discussing it.
Date: Sun, 11 Jun 2006 12:12:21 -0700 (PDT)
From: Burning Man Tickets <support burningman com>
To: bwann-burn wann net
Subject: Confirmation of your order
====================================================
Burning Man Tickets Confirmation #:
====================================================
Who’s next?
I guess now I should figure out just how long I’m staying for, how I’m getting out there and what I’m doing for shelter. I still have my water jugs from last time. This year I definately need to rig up a collection pond for greywater; dumping it into tupperware containers laying out in the sun didn’t cause it to evaporate too fast. We wound up duct taping the sorrid mess shut and dumping it into a dumpster in Salt Lake City somewhere.
This reminds me, I haven’t practiced with my poi in a number of months. Nevertheless, there will be plenty of other fire to watch out there.
P.S. Electroluminescent wire is damn cool stuff, it’s also damn expensive stuff.
Jun 10th, 2006 by bwann
A long time ago I ran across an awesome real-time flight tracker website and never could find it again. Usually whenever I tried googling for it, I usually found sites that were trying to sell me tickets or give me arrival times. I finally found what I was looking for, Flight Aware. It’s a website with a nice feel, and more importantly, useful information. It will also show you a snapshot of every flight in the US at any given time. The animated flight maps is interesting to, shows the major airways going to Europe, Asia, the Caribbean, and a few scant flights to Hawaii. Here’s my IAD->DFW flight from Saturday.
