Thing about having a basement apartment, even if it’s in a building that lacks certain important features–like, say, security–is you have certain built-in benefits at no extra cost, be it for electricity or the extra convenience. Like small-time central air. I think it’s a law internal to the building. Usually, it doesn’t matter what part of the building I end up in. If it’s warm outside, it’s pretty nearly hot in here. Step into the hallway and it kind of slaps you in the face. But, step into this apartment, and holy crap. Temperature drops a good 10-15 degrees the second the door closes. I almost never open the windows in here. It’d be a sort of violation of the laws of summer, I swear. In here, the laws work in reverse. And at no extra cost. I can live with that. I can really live with that. Now, let’s see if it keeps being liveable in about, oh, August.
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Who needs air conditioning? This place has it all natural like.
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The eastern conference is coming to a head. Boston gets dumped from 3 0.
This is the perfect situation for a Montreal Canadians meltdown. They haven’t won the cup since 93. No team has come back from being down 3 games to none in a series since 1975. Prior to that, it was since 1942–the 1942 Maple Leafs, to be exact. Boston had a stranglehold on the series going into game 4, whereas the Penguins weren’t quite so fortunate against Montreal–I still have no idea how it is the Canadians pulled it off without cheating. In the last possible moment, Boston went from hero to zero in 60 minutes. And the Flyers managed to surprise the hell out of just about everyone who isn’t a diehard fan of the team. On Friday, in the seventh game of the series, boston was sent golfing. On Sunday, Flyers versus Canadians, game 1 will fill my living room television. And I will be toasting every Flyers goal between now and the end of the conference finals. Go Flyers go!
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End of an era: the original Law and Order has been dismissed.
If you’re a fan of the original Law and Order, you may not be watching new episodes next year. The end of May marks the end of a run of 20 years on NBC, who’s just officially cancelled the series. Hopefully for the fanatics out there, another network picks it up. In the meantime, thank God I watch SVU–which just found itself on NBC’s roster next year, for a twelfth season. Now, let’s see if I can’t find the hard drive space for the resulting torrents.
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The update I was putting off doing. No, not that kind.
There’s probably an actual, about me update that needs doing at some point–probably around the same time I start having something not rant-ish to talk about. Which means probably after I figure out where this college thing’s gonna land me. In the meantime, have a techy type update. Folks not fans of linux can skip it if they so choose–there’s a little something for everyone up here somewhere.
One of the biggest knocks against Gentoo is the fact it’s pretty much entirely built from source. Which escentially means it’s not a matter of just hit install, twiddle your thumbs for a minute and a half, hit okay and go on about your business. It also means if there’s an update that has the potential of breaking things, the breakage tends to be a little bit on the larger than life side. So you don’t tend to do the update unless you’re sure you can block off a bit of time for any required troubleshooting afterwards. I’ve been using my gentoo instalation as a sort of means of learning my way around linux in both a technical and non-technical aspect. Which, is largely why it’s not yet made it to my production machine–if I break something horribly, which has yet to actually happen, I prefer to be able to just work at fixing it whenever and not have to bother with needing to borrow someone else’s machine for the important stuff. Although, using this machine for the test bed might have made this most recent update go just a tiny bit faster.
I don’t perform a complete system update very often–usually once every couple weeks, if I think about it. The rest of the time I spend tinkering with what I’ve got installed and seeing if I can get it to play just that little tiny bit nicer. So, this last update ended up being a pretty healthy one, including upgrades to several core libraries and utilities. thankfully, this update didn’t touch anything that belongs to the Gnome desktop interface, so I wasn’t left waiting all day for that to get around to finish compiling. Or, you’d think anyway.
turns out it did come with an update to the library that deals with processing and manipulating PNG-formatted images, known as libpng. While not a majorly huge update, 1.2 to 1.4, it was enough that I ended up being in for a rather long night anyway. I have a couple packages installed on the server for image handling outside of the gnome environment, as requirements for things like PHP–I’d planned to run a tiny webserver on my laptop, mostly for a testing environment if I didn’t want to take up my webspace with a project that may not exist for more than a week. One of those utilities also got some love. Only problem is when I went to compile it, it was nice enough to throw me this error in return. Seems it was hardcoded to look instinctively for libpng 1.2, which was no longer present on the system. Oopsies.
In comes one of Gentoo’s more popular utilities–revdep-rebuild, which escentially goes back through your entire dependancy tree and recompiles anything that could possibly be missing a library, or providing a library something else is missing. It’d been reported on that forum thread and on the Gentoo mailing list that that utility alone might not fix me, so I’d escentially blocked out the next couple days to diagnose, triage, clean out and recompile just about everything under the sun manually. If that didn’t fix me there were bigger problems here than I’m qualified to deal with. So I had that utility run, and surprisingly, it didn’t explode all over the place.
It found both image handling utilities outside of the Gnome environment, and another 96 packages inside that environment to rebuild. Fun times. So, 98 packages and 30 hours later–it’s a 5-year-old HP laptop I’m testing this on, remember–the thing managed to piece itself together without first collapsing in on itself. And I only had some minor cleanup work to do afterwards.
I found three interesting surprises in dealing with this latest round of coax the software. Gentoo is an awesomely cool OS to goof off with. If I wanted to start doing production-ready things with it, like I’m doing for both my servers–this website may end up moving to one of said servers at some point, it could probably run circles around this machine–yes, even if it’s on a 5-year-old box. Second, the OS handles itself supremely well during major rebuilding tasks–operations like this, if I attempted it on Ubuntu, would have probably resulted in epically catastrophic failure. And, most importantly, I don’t care which OS you’re using, rebuilding of even a small part of Gnome sucks. Royally. Just thought it needed to be said. But, at least if I have to rebuild Gnome I know it’ll probably not result in mass amounts of hair pulling. Now, if I can just get around to wrapping my head around the Apache configuration files, I’ll be in business.
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Logic goes on vacation at second career HQ. Go figure.
So, remember when I said I just needed to fill out some paperwork and I should be good to go? Apparently not quite. The second career program, in its infinite wisdom, has apparently decided that in order to even possibly maybe be approved for funding, you must already be enrolled in the course of your choosing. Not exactly a tough expectation to meet–if you’re not applying for funding because you can’t invent it on your own. I’m not sure how it works outside of Ontario, but here, just to submit your application off to a college ends up costing you nearly $100. Not much if you’re working a minimum wage job with the same kind of bills I’ve got, but a bit of creativity will be required for anyone who has the pleasure of not having a minimum wage income. Like, for example, just about anyone who qualifies for second career funding.
So now, you go off and pay the non-refundable $95 application fee, apply to your college(s) of choice, get accepted, then wait for the government to decide if they’re going to let you actually be able to aford to take the course in question. Their reason? They want to see exactly what kind of fees they’ll be stuck on the hook for paying while I go through this course. Um, which I thought was the point of me walking into the office with a listing of the applicable fees for the course I’m thinking about taking already.
Logic has clearly gone on vacation this week. Now, I go attempt to spit $95 worth of quarters. Maybe I’ll get lucky and the lottory ticket I bought a couple days ago won’t turn out to be a complete waste of $6. Hey, I can dream, can’t I?
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Montreal cheats, gets into conference finals. The hell?
In a twist that could only be carried out on TV–until this week, anyway–Vancouver gets tossed out on Tuesday, and on Wednesday, Montreal puts the Penguins on ice. This after just about everyone pretty much ruled the latter out of the playoffs after, say, the last game of the season. The explanation is a simple one–Montreal cheated. Has to be it, really.
Starting this weekend, I will renew with much more effort my own participation in the No habs No campaign. For every goal scored against Montral in the conference finals, I will permit myself the enjoyment of one more vodka and coke through the duration of the particular game(s). By the end of the series, I will either be very drunk, or very disappointed. Or maybe both, if they end up dragging it out to seven games and winning again–bastards. Either way, it’ll be quite fun. Anyone wanna join me?
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the NHL playoffs just broke. No, really.
Canada’s team got walked over on Tuesday. I mean, really walked over. In the clearest demonstration of the hockey gods’ hatred of us, Vancouver is now a member of the golfing elite. Yes, this means the only team north of the border still in the playoffs is those other people. I may be wrong, but I don’t think “No Habs No” is having quite the affect it was intended to have…
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Could make it seven really be for real?
There be a nasty little rumour floating around that says there’s a tentative schedule being poked at that shows a potential team–possibly formerly from Phoenix–in Winnipeg. It’d join the same division as Vancouver, which I do believe is where the last team to call Winnipeg home was based out of. If the schedule’s an accurate representation, it’s about time. Here’s an entry I wrote on it at the end of march when thoughts of moving to Winnipeg made their fifty-thousandth appearance. It’s still valid.
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A gentle nudge to Ontario colleges.
College admins, take note. I’m trying, via Ontario’s second career program, to give you money. I’m actually standing here with my hand out, with untold dollars in said hand. We have just one problem. Your websites do not tell me how much of said untold dollars you want for courses and/or residence fees where applicable. Nor, I’ll add, do you respond to my phone and email requests for same. In fact, if I didn’t know better I’d say you were trying to make me not want to give you money. You’re succeeding.
Congrats to the two colleges that actually volunteered, either via their website or via telephone inquiries, tuition and/or residence information where necessary. Can you please educate some of the others on doing same? I’m looking at you, Seneca. Your email. Read it. Respond to it. Thank you.
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Red wings? Now, shark food.
Again, I’m late to the party. Again, I’ve been insanely busy. And again, Detroit doesn’t do a whole lot in the playoffs. Gone in the second round, at the hands of San Jose. Who, er, might get a shot at playing Chicago unless Vancouver picks up their socks. The fun never stops.