Rantings of a Lunatic

Washington Dulles has to be one of the worst experiences I have had at an airport. The airport staff are so qualified to be interfacing with customers I am vaguely surprised they are not volunteers. I don’t think the AC was on in the C terminal, and nobody even cared about the bird that was flying around inside. I arrived and departed from runway level stairs, which I have had enough of. They don’t have a tram system, they have giant diesel powered people movers, which are like giant living rooms mounted on a monster truck frame. No doubt they are as economical as they are ecological. And then there is my departure flight. At first we pulled out of the gate, while the flight attendants were giving their FAA mandated spiel that nobody pays attention to. Then as the rear attendant, Wendy, sat down the plane did a 360, and pulled forward the 200 feet back into the gate. Apparently there was a mechanic on-board who was needed to repair a plane in a different terminal. At first I would say what, but maybe there really is only one mechanic at this airport who is qualified to do some particular form of maintenance on a particular type of plane. Next issue, they burned up so much fuel on the false start 360 we had to stop and get more fuel. And to make it even better, the fuel truck is at a different terminal. By the time that we make it to the fueling station the captain comes on and says “our” mechanic is done with his repair project, (if it was that easy couldn’t someone else have done it?), and he was in the plane right next to us, so he would be able to make the flight afterall. Now we just needed to wait a few minutes for the fuel truck to arrive…
An hour late we finally started heading for the runway.
[Read more]

I have been incredibly busy recently, between the website hacking, all of the work, and the freelance stuff, I haven’t had much time. Thats not to say I haven’t had any time, just not much. I have gotten my motorcycle license, I went and hung out with some friends and watched Ghostbusters in the theater, and even took a couple of vacation days. I did some fishing a couple of weeks ago. I even fixed my mythbox which had crashed. The culprit ended up being a layer of cat hair wedged between the heat-sink and the fan on the processor, so the chip was over heating and shutting down as it tried to poll the device list. There are more posts coming, but I did a bunch of theme hacking this morning, and now I need to get some lunch. I do have some more theme hacking to do, but its in a mostly stable state right now, and I will figure out what I want to do with the rest of it.

So, I have some plans for some different pieces of computer equipment, and this has caused me to realize that I need to backup my external HD to DVD and reformat it to better use it. It is currently storing about 400Gb of data from OS X, and is formatted HFS+. I went over a couple of different options, and then on a whim figured I would just plug it into my linux box, and see if it would read it. The good news is that it popped right up and is fully readable, I didn’t check if its writable, but I don’t care, as long as I can read it to burn the DVDs from I will be fine. I am a little worried about the files still being readable on a mac after burning them, because I doubt the meta-data will transfer correctly, but thats really only a concern for Apps, which are all inside DMGs as far as I have checked. [Read more]

Just a quick question, I prefer the abridged RSS feed, but am wondering if you would rather see the whole post? Leave a comment and let me know.

Well, I promised a review, and honestly I liked it so much that I have been holding off so that I wouldn’t have to give any spoiler alerts. And until I really write what I think, and can feel free doing so while talking in specifics, see Ken’s blog. I completely dis-agree with him about Batman Begins. I loved that movie, and I think at the time that was probably my favorite Batman movie. Just awesome. But he is right on every point on the new one. And honestly, I hadn’t ever been bothered by Bale’s voice in the last one, but in this one it really caught me as just too much.