Geek stuff

The tivo is in pieces at the moment. Sounds like the 45 gig western digital drive is the one that is dying. I will give it some time to cool down then try and dupe it. The drive was manufactured in sept 2000. So this drive is almost 4 years old. Man it must have been expensive when I bought it. It only has a 3 year warranty so I needed to buy a new hard disk anyway. I ended up getting a Seagate 80 gig for $39 after mail in rebates. It was $89 before rebates.

Mmm I smell a bug

We did it again and the same thing happened,” said Darren Chesin, a consultant to the state Senate elections and reapportionment committee. “The problem was not with the paper trail. The paper trail worked flawlessly, but it caught a mistake in the programming of the touch-screen machine itself. For some reason it would not record or display the votes on the Spanish ballot for these two ballot measures. The only reason we even caught it was because we were looking at the paper trail to verify it.
https://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,64569,00.html

This is why we wanted paper trails in the first place. Hell the UK still uses paper for its votes and that seems to work,

I really need to go change the channel

I have been listening to some religious program that is all about staying a virgin. Fuck this is so biased. You have one guy saying that condoms don’t work. I wonder how long the section on STD’s will last compared to the “stay a virgin” section.
One kid was saying that he was disgusted with him self because he groped his girl friend.

Unfinished business

I didn’t
Replace the Tivo Hard disk,
Finish installing the dead bolt in the basement door,
Build thumb nails and indexing for 13 rolls of film,
top up the litter box,
Finish my filing,
Cook food
I did
Drive down to DC and leave a vase of flowers in HY apartment,
Leave her some emergency supplies, pizza, mac and cheese, bread, soy milk, ice cream, chocolate, jar of pringles, OJ, banna’s, apples, top ramin (for some reason she eats that stuff), and a couple other things.
Make her bed and left Chip guarding a java book on her bed (in joke)
install all the latest patches for OSX
listen to people at work avoid discussing XP SP2 on a call about patches.
try and meet up with two different friends in DC and failed.
try and see if the Mac store has the new air port express (but they were closed)
Listen to about 15 minutes of Love Line (my usual way to pass the time on the drive back to baltimore)

When is it going to end.

Just as I am starting to clean up from a hard disk failure on my file server another hard disk fails, this time in the Tivo. *sigh* I guess I need to go to best buy and buy another hard disk. This time I am getting a western digital since most of the failures seem to be Maxtors.
I have a friends cat staying with me, she doesn’t like me, she hisses at me every time I walk past her. This morning at 5am she was playing let see who is boss cat with Sarah. She is currently sulking on top of a book case.
Yesterday I laid some insulation in the roof. I guess the guy who did the original remodeling left it in the loft since it has been up there since I moved in. So I just cut it to size and put it in place. There are still lots of space with out insulation so need to buy some more at some point. I have painted the back door and all the exterior woodwork on the back of the house.
I finished organizing my MP3 collection. I had to re rip all my CD (see comment about hard disk failure) over the last few weeks.
I also finished scanning my photos from the Seattle trip and the UK trip. Man, the roll adaptor for the CoolScan 5000 really makes scanning easier. Expect some new photos soon.
I am currently burning photos off to dvd (see comment about hard disk failure)

Baltimore is not Bike Friendly yet.

In response to the sun article on July 12th about the critical mass bike ride in Baltimore I would applaud the riders. I have lived in Baltimore 2 years and after working with Constellation Energy to get a bike rack placed between the Candler building and 750 East Pratt the majority of my commute has been on bike. I am happy to say that I can no longer use the bike rack on most days because it is full.

I see more and more cyclists on the street every day especially in the summer but I would not call the city bike-friendly as Mr. Brown said. The Inner Harbor has a critical shortage of bike racks. Parking has always been an issue in the city and one way to encourage cyclists is to provide a safe and secure place to lock up your bike. I would urge all shops, supermarkets and offices in the area to look for a location where they could put a bike rack.

The Inner Harbor also lacks a safe place for cyclists to ride. The service lane that runs along Light Street and Pratt street which is briefly marked as a bike lane outside the National Aquarium would be perfect. However it is frequently blocked by Delivery Trucks, Taxies, and worst of all Tour Busses. I would like to see the whole of the service road clearly marked as a dual use bike lane and horse and carriage lane with a divider down the middle and the bike lane symbol at each entrance. I would also like to see the police ticketing illegal parking. Eventually this could be expanded from Fort McHenry to fells point or Canton.

My final note is to the National Aquarium. Please have someone on duty to guide tour buses to legal parking location. Your location quite often has close to 8 or more buses waiting to pick up or drop off people and many are blocking a clearly marked bike lane. I really hope that your new extension has plans for ample parking these tour buses when finished so they will no longer block the only section on Pratt that is marked as a bike lane.

I am very happy living in Baltimore and I hope that it will become more bike friendly over time.

Ian Macdonald
Baltimore City Resident

Grumble Mac grumble.
When I copy a folder into a directory that already contains the folder I expect it to copy the files into the folder not delete the folder then copy new files in. This might be a Mac OSX talking to a samba file server, but it is fucking annoying.