John has a link to pictures and a map from the F1 Tornado that struck the ISU campus yesterday. Fortunately damage was mostly to the trees and a few buildings, with only one injury requiring hospitalization, according to the ISU Daily.
Today marks my parents' 35th wedding anniversary. Congrats Mom & Dad! For those of you keeping score at home, this means I narrowly missed being a bastard by nearly six years.
One of the best shows ever on TV goes out with one of the best finales I've ever seen, making us laugh through tears and feeling sad and hopeful all at the same time. I'm going to have the music from the last several minutes in my head for days. Fortunately, Holly already purchased it from iTunes, though you have to do the whole album (which is great) to get it. Now pass the Kleenex...
There's a great deal on Canon's ZR300 camcorder at Dell, it supports widescreen shooting, comes with a remote control, and can be used to capture analog video to digital through your computer's firewire interface. It'll work great with iMovie on a Mac, as well.. There's a review here. First, add the camera to your cart.
Next, add something cheap to your cart to get your total over $500, like a $9.86 ethernet cable.
Now, apply coupon code JQWFN3RR7NJ?F5 to save $60.
Then, apply coupon code 2S32?67G18S33Q to save 25%.
Now, print out and send in this $50 rebate.
Total cost, after rebate, free ground shipping, and no tax (at least for me) will be $278.10. Since list price on this camera is $499, this is a great deal...
If you want an even lower-cost deal on a JVC mini-DV cam, this one is also from Dell.
I've upgraded this blog to beta 3 of Movable Type 3.2, and everything seems to be working. I like the new look, and the whole system just "feels" a lot more robust. Now we'll see if the junk filtering does a good job of reducing the amount of trackback spam I clean out daily.
Well, according to Bill O'Reilly, I'm an ally of terror. Look out, I'll get you all! He didn't name me, personally, but he said anyone who supports the ACLU is, and I'm a card-carrying member. Well, now that my secret is out, I guess I can scrap that trip to Pakistan for my terrorist boot camp next year, and I was so looking forward to living in a cave... So, if the terrorists "hate us for our freedoms" as Bush suggested, O'Reilly's solution is to take them away?
Have we already lost the "War on Terror"? Excuse me, I meant the "Global Struggle against Extremism". If people in favor of civil liberties are the new enemies of the state, it would appear so.
I don't know if Sun is trying to turn off customers or what, but I installed Solaris 10 on the old Sun Blade I've got kicking around my cubicle, but the simple task of updating it may prove to be beyond me. They have about four different unfriendly methods to accomplishing this, none of which seem to work. There's a built-in utility called smpatch that should do the trick, but fails to install 95% of the patches it claims I need.
It seems to be indicating that I also need some other piece of software, which is actually required to do the updates, a Sun Patch Manager. Why this isn't installed, I don't know, but I attempt to get it from their web site. Oops, wait, no, you have to have a valid support contract to download it. Okay, I have a valid support contract, I give it to them, they still won't let me download it, and the web site insists I'm not logged in, though the screen clearly greets me as Seth Bokelman and says I am.
Why do I need a support contract when Solaris is now free? Is Sun trying to build up a large reputation for having their operating system exploited often by not letting people who have installed it patch?
Why is it so difficult to make patching easy? Assuming this new smpatch system works, my understanding is that one only has to run "smpatch update". That's reasonable, I can handle that, but why didn't it install ready for me to do that? There's a GUI installer, it made installation a breeze. Isn't the first thing most people would do after installing a system is update it? I think so, but Sun apparently thinks you should be able to install a system with an IQ of 75, but you need to be a trained professional to run an automated patch process.
Now, I'll be the first to admit I know very little about Solaris, but I can handle updating my Red Hat box with "up2date -u" and I update numerous Windows boxes via my WSUS server. If Sun can't make the updating process easy enough for me to sit down and do it in under an hour, they don't deserve to survive in their ongoing struggles with Microsoft and the Linux vendors.
Without spoiling it for others, let me just say that tonight's episode of Six Feet Under was some of the best television I've ever seen. I'm going to be sad when this show goes off the air, what other show uses a word like Ecotone?
So, I just found out that one of my best friends from junior high is now in prison. Another classmate was trying to find out where people were now, to possibly plan a reunion next year, and she called his house (he was in the phonebook) where his ex-wife filled her in. Here's his inmate record, he's not eligible for parole until 2011, so I don't think he's going to make it. I have to say, I'm completely stunned.
Hubert H. Humphrey: "'The right to be heard does not automatically include the right to be taken seriously.'
(Via Quotes of the Day.)
