jr conlin's ink stained banana

i think i've changed.

i was going through this here blog cleaning up various bits (getting rid of the broken things, old files, etc.) and figured i'd spend an hour or two dragging the theme from it's original 1.7 layout to the bright and shiny new 2.x version. All the calls are the same, how hard could it be?

Well, suffice to say that after 2 hours of trying to duplicate my blog to a work area so that i didn't have to do things live, i gave up. It wasn't worth it to me. i suppose i could have spent the time to redo the default template like i did when i started this blog six years ago, but the pain to value threshold really wasn't there. i'd have to rewire the comments form, again, to show all the comments instead of some stupid "comments >>" link, then rejigger things to avoid the retarded "single page" stuff, and… well.. i just couldn't be bothered.

i must be getting older because i just don't see the value in charging in and mucking with this stuff constantly. i've got other, more interesting things to do. Could i do it? i'd bet my old Sega Dreamcast i could but it'd be like betting someone i could rake my front yard.

i'm probably just getting too damn tired of trying to fight systems i shouldn't, and coming to realize that some battles aren't worth the prize. Eventually things will break as the old code gets more and more crufty, but that's when i'll deal with fixing it.

Heck, i'm also realizing that although the general population does stupid things, it's kinda stupid for me to try and convince them they're being dumb. So this upcoming year, i'm making a few resolutions to stop being so damn bullheaded about things. i'm not going to do stuff like use Google for everything in my life, but i am going to set up a few more things to poke at them. And yes, i'm probably going to be getting an ipod touch late January. i still don't like apple nor do i think they bestow utter perfection like a beneficent god, frankly, they make crappy devices and abuse their customers like $2 whores, but if i'm supposed to help work with said abused customers, i got to know what it feels like to be Steve's bitch.

i'm going to wait 'til after Mac world when the prices drop.

i have a 500GB USB2 drive. i use it to back up things. When i first got it, the nice folks at the factory formatted it as a FAT32 device. While that's great if you want something brain dead simple and portable to any configuration, it sucks because you're limited to files no bigger than 2GB, (So much for storing DVD ISOs there kids.) and you lose a horrific amount of overhead to the file system.

So i reformatted it as NTFS, which got me a system that's mountable on most OS's and lets me install things like my backup of various live DVDs. i've got. All was reasonably well with the world. Well, until i hotswapped the drive without properly unmounting it under Windows and NTFS-3G on Linux bitched that it wouldn't mount the drive. Considering that two of my workhorse boxes are running Linux, and this was one hell of a sneaker between them, that got really annoying really fast. Plus, it seemed odd to me to have an NTFS drive living under Linux.

So i reformatted it as ext3.

(This was a bit harder than i thought since qtparted kept choking on the commands for some reason. Fortunately,
sudo parted /dev/sdi1 mkfs ext3
sudo parted /dev/sdi1 name 1 500G
worked just fine.)

i even found a spiffy windows based ext3 driver that lets me mount up the drive under Vista.

The one thing i noticed is that performance seems to have gotten better, even for ext3 under USB2. Probably due to some aspect of node management, but at around 27MB/s write transfers, i'm not really complaining.

i think i know what i don't like about Twitter vs. Blogs. Twitter makes you less important.

Hang on, it's a question of context.

Granted, in Twitter, folks can build small messages and post to each other, so, fr'instance i can do things like post messages such as: "@HydrogenGuy Well, only if you turn left and cough."

Now, if you happen to be HydrogenGuy, you'll find my jape about his dream of becoming a chain smoking NASCAR driver uproariously funny. Even though you posted 11 other tweets since then. If you're not HydrogenGuy, you'll think that i'm a pervert for providing him that reply to "Should i let my niece hold my antique Christmas globes?" since that's the last message he posted. Thus making me a victim of Date Jape.

Plus, you have no context since there's no real threads. You can see the "in reply to" but that's about it. Unless you're either myself or HydrogenGuy, you're not part of the conversation.

What makes it even worse is that if you are either myself or HydrogenGuy and someone else posts up "@HydrogenGuy, that just kinda confirms what we talked about, huh?" after my reply, i have no idea if RobotKarateMan is talking about me, the NASCAR/niece mixup, or some interesting new property related to the Mössbauer Effect he discovered while spinning a pie plate at a rock he had stuck in an outlet.

You simply don't know, and since you're not part of that singular conversation, you'll have no idea. Twitter is mono- or at most bi-directional, only. It does a great job of making the personal You (the individual reading this) very important, it makes the larger You (everyone who reads this) far less a factor.

Counter this with blogs, where you've got somewhat temporal posts, but a definite thread based (Even more so once i get around to fixing up this theme so that they show up.) Granted, at the moment, i focus more on the larger You of folks that visit, but it's trivial for me to also focus on the singular You.

Possibly inappropriately so.

i kinda get the idea of Twitter. It's the bathroom stall of the internet. Short scrawls meant for nobody and everyone all at the same time. It also explains why no other company has been able to duplicate twitter. Nobody has as popular a bathroom stall.

For the record, driving from San Jose to north San Diego takes Seven Hours, Twenty Four minutes, including one stop for gas and another stop for petrol.

i take 101 because 45 minutes is not worth losing my sanity on 5.

It's hard to stop and take scenic photos of El Camino Real for Ricky when your drive looks mostly like this.

Passing out electronics to nieces is delightfully evil. (Although Uncle JR has no pity on Cheep Cheep Beach.)

Is it sad that i've already got a Christmas 2009 gift picked out for someone? (Now i just need to make sure they have it on the return trip)

Happy Hanukkah
Festive Yule
Good Kwanza
Peaceful Rohatsu
Eid Mabrook
A slightly early Makar Sankranti (ok, three weeks is a bit more than "slightly" so, i'll also hope you had an Enlightened Bodhi too)
Joyous Saturnalia
Benevolent Solstice
Good Dong zhi
A Warm Yalda
Happy Birthday (at least in Japan)
Righteous Sol Invictus
Tolerable Festivus
Honorable batlhjaj
and a Bountiful Booty Day

There. Got them all, right?

Oh, right.