Money and Music

There is lots and lots of scary financial and business news out there. I've been reading about folks who have lost a decade or more of market value gains from their 401ks, folks my age who looked upon accounts they established in their early working lives that have started to implode.

I started the race rather late, and right at the time when, to paraphrase Ambassador Kosh from Babylon 5: "The avalanche has already started; it is too late for the pebbles to vote."

I've done everything I can do to retrench; all I can hope to do is to ride out the storm.

On a related note: with all those bank failures out there, I am telling anyone that will listen that moving one's funds to a good credit union might be a good idea. The bigger banks like BofA, Welles Fargo and WaaahMooo are, IMHO, about as safe as an unshielded kilogram of Cobalt 60 in your codpiece.

On an unrelated note that has little or nothing to do with doomsday scenarios or radioisotopes in an uncomfortable proximity to your family jewels: Seanan McGuire is coming out with a new CD of filk music goodness, Red Roses and Dead Things. Seanan is an awesome songwriter, a poet, comic strip artist and author. You owe it to yourself and to future generations (those not roasted by that hot lump of Co-60 in your shorts) to hie yourself over to her website and preorder a copy.

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Now playing: Seanan McGuire - Vampire Slayer Blues
via FoxyTunes

Stoopid StarCraft Install Tricks v 1.0

OK, so there I was, at work, installing the copy of StarCraft I got as a prize on my MacBook via Firewire target disk mode (due to the bad optical in this MB) when the evil nasty badness began. My MB was on battery and in the middle of the install it shut down, out of power.

One of the "thall shalt nots" of FireWire Target Disk Mode is "do not forcibly dismount the target volume during data transfer or you will hose the target disk."

Oops.

I restarted my MB, hoped for the best and got the worst. Dreaded apple /gear startup. Disk Utility confirmed that the volume was as hosed as Chicago in 1871.

So, I reformatted the hard drive, reinstalled Leopard from a FWTDM'd workstation and went home.

Once home, I started first time setup and restored from my Time Machine external backup volume.
EVERYTHING is BACK -- all my gaming notes, my bookmarks, email, iLife suite, music, pictures of Her Cuteness, and oh yes World of Warcraft. Only a couple of hours lost in restoring. Had I had a working optical I could have restored while booted from it.

Mac users: if your machine can run Leopard, and you have not installed it yet, your data is at risk...If you've installed Leopard and not gotten an external hard drive for Time Machine, your data is at risk . . .if your machine cannot run Leopard, get one that does. You know you want to, and it is the right thing to do.

If you're not using a Mac, well you need to.

Update 1: Ran software update and it hosed my HD AGAIN! Fortunately, archive and install fixes this crap.

The very best thing about Leo . . .

Two words: TIME MACHINE.
Time Machine is the very best single reason for a Mac user to buy and install Leopard . . . and of you are a Windows user, the very best reason to go get a new Mac. Time Machine is a backup and restore utility. In a word, you can, at need, "go back in time" and restore your entire system or even a single file from any 1-hr increment in the last day, any day in the last month and any month thereafter. So, if in the middle of writing your master's thesis your MacBook Pro's internal HD packs it in, if you have TM and an external hard disk, you can restore the last backup (not to mention OS X, all your preferewnces, email, etc) of your thesis once the hard disk is replaced, and on you go.

You can restore a single file, your whole iTunes Library or thw whole fscking startup partition. No more need to use Target Disk Mode and another Mac. No more "log in as root, drag and drop your Home folder (c:\Documents and settings\yourname for you windows users) and HOPE you got it right." For some users, enabling the OS X "root" account is like handing a drunk with Tourette's Syndrome a greased grenade . . . only "sudo rm -R /* is capable of more damage in less time (think dropping to DOS, cd c:, then del *.*). No more Retrospect, .Mac backup 3.x (not a bad program, but it's about as intuitive as brain surgery when compared to TM) or needing to rely on a non-Apple solution.

Best of all, TM does this silently and automaticly..

Windows, by comparison, has "system restore" which is great for restoring Windows system files . . . but it does nto do jack about your master's thesis or your email, pics, music, videos or porn.

I had been looking forward to buying a new external hard drive to try this feature out once my finances allowed for it. Fortunately for me, I won a nice 250 gigabyte USB 2.0 drive today for quarterly sales performance. This is plenty of space to allow me to back up the 100 GB drive in my MacBook (currently about 40 gigs free). I'm going to put at least three partitions on the disk: one OS X for TM (I'm going to names it "HD Welles"), one also OS X (one just big enough to serve as a 10.5 startup disk, probably named "DaVinci" -- as in Leo-nardo) to install Leopard so I can boot off this drive at need and one formatted for FAT32 (Disk Utility does not speak Windows NTFS) so my good friends Michelle and David can back up their docs/music/pics/etc/omg/wtf/bbq.

Since the disk will be partitioned three ways, I think I'll call it "Gaul." Of course, people will look at me funny (not that they don't do that already . . .).

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Listening to: Styx - Suite Madame Blue
via FoxyTunes

I love Sac RT . . .

Yes. Really. However, in the words of one of Kevin Smith's characters in Clerks:

"This job would be great if it weren't for the fscking customers."

As far as I'm concerned, the Sacramento version of Light Rail rocks on toast. Back in the early 90s, I was without a car for about a year, and Light Rail was my main transportation. I did a lot of walking as well, but my terms on a bus were relatively few and far between.

Yes, I love Light Rail, but there are some things about the people on Sacramento RT and Elk Grove e-Tran that get on my fscking nerves. The bus would be great of it weren't for the the other passengers . . .

To wit:

1. Operators who converse on their cellphones (even with Bluetooth headsets) while driving the bus. OK, folks, this one really hjorked my spazz-button when I first saw it. During the duration of my ride on a bus, my very life and that of every other soul aboard that bus is in the hands of an operator who may be suffering from divided attention due to domestic drama or some other conversational or emotional state. I don't know what state law or sac RT's operating instructions say, but I'm going to find out if professional drivers are allowed to use wireless headsets and drive. In either case, if it is allowed, it's unprofessional at best and fscking dangerous to passengers.
2. Light Rail passengers who engage in extremely LOUD cellphone conversation about matters that should not be publicly shared. Folks, you may not be driving, but some of your cannot-help-but-overhear due to your LOUD voiced conversations are the very definition of Too Much Fscking Information. I'm all for free speech, and I'm barely shocked by what passes for conversational profanity anymore . . . but if you must discuss intimate details of your lives in my presence, could you please lower your voice?
3. LOUD cellphone ring tones. Yes, I understand that most of the ring tones sold from AT&T and other wireless providers are from popular tunes, and this art form consists of some very angry and profane speech. Again, I'm pro-First Amendment -- NOBODY has ANY right to tell you you cannot listen to or use part of a song for a ring tone on your cellphone. If you did your fellow passengers the dignity of turning down the volume on the ringer in public (and OFF in certain venues, like theaters, for the love of Eris), I'd be your very best friend.

3. Light Rail passengers who play their music aloud in direct violation of LRT rules. Guys, this one is posted as verboten on EVERY LRT car and every bus. Of all of my gripes, this one is the least excusable. After all, you cannot control when the phone rings or remember to turn it down, and I can understand it if you're deep into conversation and not practicing consideration for others. Why is there NO FSCKING EXCUSE? EVERY CD / mp3 player comes with headphones ...please use them, OK? If you do this, for me, and listen to your music with headphones, I'll refrain from blasting you with Tom Smith, Seanan McGuire, or going nuclear with bagpipe music.

5. RT rent a cops with that wannabe cop attitude. There was this Wackenhut guard at the Marconi-Arcade LRT station hassling some poor schmoe because he was standing between the tracks, waiting for the train. The next trains were several minutes out and the passenger was harmless, not drunk or otherwise whacked. Just standing there, looking up the tracks. The rent-a-cop on patrol looked to me for a minute he was about to go tactical on this poor guy. I got my phone out and set the video camera to record if the whack job of a security officer was about to Rodney King the passenger. The passenger finally realized that Dirty Harry meant business and sat down shaking his head. He saw my phone in camera mode and smiled his thanks.

I encountered more than a little of this attitude back when I worked as a security guard. I worked as a guard for a couple of reasons. Security was very easy work. In those days I had lost all confidence in my abilities as a technician and figured I could never work in the field again . . . so I took a job that required almost no thought whatsoever. It also was a job that allowed me to do child care during the day while Ex#1 worked and /or went to school. Among the high school dropouts and fellow losers (as I freely admit I was, back then) was a small number of people who thought a stint as a security guard would look good on a resume when they applied for the police department, other law enforcement agency, or (Goddess forbid!) the military. All I can say is that some of the extreme head cases left as soon as they realized we were in the observe-and-report business and not in the kick-ass-and-take-names industry. Some did manage to perform auto-rectocraniectomies. One colleague did become a Sacramento PD officer, another went into the Army as a military policeman.


At any rate, I had to vent. Don't let this rant keep you off public transit. I know, transit has its limitations and there are many times when you gotta drive . . . but taking transit when it is feasible helps reduce your carbon emissions footprint, which makes the Goddess smile. The exercise you get from walking to bus and train stops will make your healthcare provider smile, too.

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Listening to: Seanan McGuire - Dorothy
via FoxyTunes

More Leopard FUN

The only reason I did not install Leopard on my personal machine on the first day it was released was that my personal machine has an optical drive that keeps on ejecting discs. Again. But tonight I got the cat to purr as it should.

OK, so how did I manage to get Leo installed? Four very important words to the Mac Geek: Firewire Target Disc Mode. "FWTDM" allows a Mac to boot up and say to all the world that it is nothing but a hard disk. When that Mac (the "target") is connected via Firewire (aka IEEE 1394, if you're keeping score) to another Mac booted normally into OS X, the target disk is treated like another external disk -- it is visible on the desktop and accessible through the Finder (the Mac answer to Windows Explorer).

FWTDM is a godsend for those times when a drive will be recognized and "mount" (become accessable by the Finder) but you cannot boot from that drive into Mac OS X. You can use it for data rescue (most common use). Another use for FWTDM is for times when you want to mount optical discs from one Mac's optical drive to one where the optical is nonfunctional on the targeted system.

So all i needed to do is borrow a Firewire cable and wait until after work to use my iMac workstation's optical drive to install my copy of Leopard onto this system.

That is the theory.

Install attempt number 1: I got clever and did an Archive and Install preserving instead of the usual upgrade install. One of my favorite tech sites suggested it, and their reasons made sense to me. Sadly for me, the AC power glitched enough to shut off the targeted iMac (the MacBook didn't blink thanks to the battery). Installus Interruptus. Welcome to my nightmare scenario. This is a bad place to be; most of the time this is a reformat. The MacBook, predictably enough, booted to the classic "Apple / Gear" screen that is the hallmark of damaged system files or filesystem. If damaged files, no worries, a straight archive and install fixes that. If damaged filesystem, then I'd have to reformat the drive, lose everything on the system, and reinstall. Your basic nuke and pave reinstall. Fortunately, Disk Utility dubbed the filesystem to be OK. Dodged that bullet!

Attempt number 2: Archive and install preserving user settings. Worked fine until I tried to log into my user account -- bad password. Tried to reset it with the Password reset utility, and it would not reset. Disk util said things were still OK with the filesystem, thank Eris. Then the MacBook started kernel panicking (BSOD for you Windows users). Ick. Deja Vu all over again.

Attempt number 3: OK, I decided then and there to do one more A&I, but this time NOT preserving the user account. If this install screwed the pooch, it was time to bite the bullet and nuke it from orbit. This install was smooth as glass. The system booted to first time setup as usual, Made a brand new account with the exact same name as my old one and a four letter password (fsck, of course). Lo and behold, the MacBook booted to the Leo desktop.

Thirty minutes of user account migration and a password change in System prefs later, my email, bookmarks, address book, documents, wireless peripherals, Bluetooth enabled phone, and World of Warcraft were working perfectly. Not to mention iPhoto and the uber-neat Screen Sharing feature. Now to make sure that I install Palm Desktop (Arch and install ALWAYS breaks Palm Desktop's Transport Monitor), my printer drivers (nice thing about leo is that the open-source Gutenprint driver set I use with my "OEM drivers for Windows ONLY" printer (HA!) is now included with a standard install) and a few other apps I can download form the Internet and I'll be jake.

Not to mention that none of the 'puters on which I have Leo installed on have taken any kind of performance hit. Startup is still fast and there are a few strange behaviors. The only major casualty of the install has been my Windows partition because the arch and installs eat disk space.

Oh well, Windows can wait until I get the optical fixed.

Not a bad night's worth of hands-on teching!

Bizarre...

The rune pull was very applicable, but more so to its traditional meaning. My car broke down friday night, the starter was making sounds that are not normally associated with a starter. A AAA tow and a good mechanic's look later, the issue was a physical misalignment caused (probably) by the collision my beastie had with the center divider on southbound I-5 back in December. One very through, well placed beating (the starter, not me!) and sixty bucks later, I was rolling again.

Kudos as always to AAA and their contract tow guys. AAA customer service is, as a writer friend of mine might put it, a hardcore shot of Pure Awesome. The tow truck driver was a young guy and a total professional. He also tried beating on the starter, but to no avail.

While I did not feel so good after the walk home and felt bad all weekend (backaches and my friend Mister Upset Stomach), I'm now most assuredly OK.
The best news of all is that I was able to make the walks I needed to make from Kaiser (where the car died) t0 home and back. This bodes well for weight control because as recently as a month ago, I would not have been physically able to make a walk of such distance because of back pain or being out of breath. I know that this a long way from a triathalon, sure, but I felt like such a fatass slug two months ago I was winded just crossing the parking lot and getting to my cube at the office.

Fortunately, one of my favorite places is just two traffic lights away, or about the distance from here to the Kaiser medical offices. Incentive, anyone?

I had a question for the runes...

There are some new opporutnities about to emerge at work, and I'm being encouraged to apply for them. I am comfortable in my current duties, but things have become stagnant for the last six months or so. I've pulled runes for virtually every career decision I've hade in the last few years, and all of the draws have been dead-on with respect to what happened later.

"Should I avail myself of these opportunities?" I asked my runes and pulled one.

I got this:

Ehwaz: (E: Horse, two horses.) Transportation. May represent a horse, car, plane, boat or other vehicle. Movement and change for the better. Gradual development and steady progress are indicated. Harmony, teamwork, trust, loyalty. An ideal marriage or partnership. Confirmation beyond doubt the meanings of the runes around it. Ehwaz Reversed or Merkstave: This is not really a negative rune. A change is perhaps craved. Feeling restless or confined in a situation. Reckless haste, disharmony, mistrust, betrayal.

My read: the new opportunity is with a new mobile technology. This fits the rune's traditional meaning since this technology is mobile. Not only that, the rune implies trust and teamwork, which is what this new tech group is all about. I think I'll apply for it!

Ten things that make me smile when I'm a bit down . . .

Right now, as I write this, I'm too damned fragged emotionally to be good company to anyone or to fall asleep.

When I'm in that state, I strive for complete control of my surroundings, what RTS players call "turtleing" -- I fort up, getting the hell away from people because I'm not at my best. My 1337 50ci@1 skillz are not mad enough to deal with social situations when I'm like this.

In Trek terms: shields up, red alert, phasers on desocialize, emoton torpedoes on overload.

When the ick subsides to the point where I'm no longer antisocial, I cheer myself by thinking of, visiting, doing / warching / reading these things (not in order of which has the highest "cheer me up" factor):
1. Michelle, David and Kaia. Hanging out with them helps keep me sane; the cats and I are old friends, and M's veggie cooking is teh r0xx0r.
2. A good book I've read before, any of my desert island books will work as does the 1632 series (alternate early modern history set up by a cosmic accident that drops a West Virginia mining town scirca 1997 smack in the middle of Germany during the height of the Thirty Years' War).
3. Iz. For far too many reasons to list here.
4. World of Warcraft. WoW's good for catharic venting onto poor virtual monsters.
5. Babylon 5. Best. TV. Space. Opera. Evah. Quotes like this one help me cope:

"Then I will tell you a great secret, Captain. Perhaps the greatest of all time. The molecules of your body are the same molecules that make up this station and the nebula outside, that burn inside the stars themselves. We are starstuff, we are the universe made manifest, trying to figure itself out. As we have both learned, sometimes the universe requires a change of perspective."

 -- Delenn to Sheridan in Babylon 5:"A Distant Star"

Firefly is NOT space opera, and is just as quotable.

6. I come up with game stuff. As an immediate example: when I went looking for the above quote, I found another B5 quote from Marcus Cole that will find its way into my "In Hoc Signo Vinces" D&D game. I'm keeping that one to myself for now . . .
7. Hearing songs I havn't heard in a decade or more, and thinking back to where I was then.
8. Reviewing my weight loss so far
9. Looking back on where I was 1, 3, 5, and 10 years ago and comparing then to now. Now almost always comes off better. I've come a long way since then, but in life it's grow or die.
10. A crisp wind, warm sunshine, running water, green grass.

"I'd rather meet Harry Dresden than Harry Potter"

Now she tells me.

Jim Butcher's wizard-as-detective show The Dresden Files is also a series on Sci-Fi Network.

Something you who read this may or may not know about me: I hate television. I do not own a television, and have not purchased one since my first ex and I bought one (over my vehement protests) in 1984, said set going to teevee heaven in 2001 when said set just would not do for ex #2.

Of course, this means that over the years I've missed missed some really good shows -- one of them being Babylon 5, which is to epic space opera science fiction on TV as The New Yorker magazine was to popular magazines in the 60s, 70s and 80s -- "The best magazine that ever was, or ever will be." Bab5 was incredibly satisfying to me: part military campaign, part political thriller, part conspiracy theory, and all well-written, well-acted human drama. I eventually caught the entire series on DVD, watched the whole story from beginning to end, as it was meant to be watched. Another I missed when it originally aired was Firefly, a series that is every bit as downright awesome as Babylon 5. As with Bab5, I caught Firefly on DVD.

Now along comes The Dresden Files. The mage as detective bit goes back at least as far as the late Randall Garrett's Lord Darcry stories (which are terriffic reads). I'm still reading Storm Front, and it's terriffic. I'd love to see Harry Dresden on the big screen someday.

But even then, I'm not buying a teevee set. Not as long as my computer has a DVD drive!

Item number 27 on my list of reasons Iz Rocks: Harry Dresden.

The weigh-in manefesto

Yesterday, I joined WeightWatchers.

It's past time for me to get busy losing weight and keeping it under control. I no longer can put up with the way I currently feel, and if this keeps up, I'll more than likely be dead before I am 55, or maybe 50.

This isn't about maximizing any sort of "chick-magnet" physical assets (something my first ex did after separating with me was to lose 100lbs to maximize her physical appeal -- her plan worked), or "getting back" with ex #2, or proving anyone wrong about me or my capacity to change, or even wearing more stylish clothes. I'm not actively looking for another love (my Femseek(tm) sesnors are entirely on passive mode atm, but if Ms. Absolutely Right suddenly crossed my bow, it's going to be "Fool Speed Ahead!" aboard USS RichO) and I am not about teh stylin clothes. It's about survival past middle age. It's about living long enough to be there if my daughter and her husband one day decide to become parents. It's about being there for my Godsdaughter as well. It's about having my personal energy not bound up in a glacis of fat anymore.

I am doing this for one person and only one person.
Not for Catnyp.
Not for my daughter.
Not for ex#2.
Not for any other friend, enemy, job, cause, ideology, or faith.
I'm doing it for me.

I was shocked when I got the news of my starting point: 471 lbs. I should not have been.

Fortuntely, like life itself, WW isn't about where you start the process, it's about the transformative physical journey, making changes of thought and habit that are for me about about three decades overdue.

Fortunately, I have help in working the plan, someone who has lost 100 lbs on WW and knows how to work the plan.

Weight control is going to be a, uhm, big part my life . . . but only a part of it. I'm not going to turn this into a weight loss-only blog, writing about my every meal choice in soul-rending detail. That's a form of imbalance I'm not going to embrace right now. I'll post progress reports every weigh-in and any blinding insights I get while working the plan.

Goals are important. WW says shoot for 10% of starting weight (for me, 424). Personally, I think I should shoot to get below 399, say 350. Good health guidelines like Body Mass Index put me around 200 as a good healthy weight. I was last at under 200 back when I was in uniform. I'll lose till I feel good and healthy, then work on maintaining it.

And, to incentivize myself . . . FABULOUS PRIZES!! At the 10% loss point, I'm getting myself a Bluetooth cell phone, prolly a RAZR or maybe a Treo. To mark every 5 lbs of incremental loss, I'm buying myself some kind of gamer thing, a supplement or a book off my Amazon.com Wish List.

"Food is nourishment, not a reward, psychological first-aid, social lubricant or idle pastime."

Bush Scandal Fatigue....

Incredible. The hits just keep on coming from this pathetic excuse of an "administration." So much so, in fact, that I am in the throes of Bush Scandal fatigue.

I pride myself on doing a good job of keeping up with things, despite a severe mental allergy to teevee news. The symptoms of my affliction parallel those of Tourette's Syndrome, where I shout "No! You IDIOT!" at the talking heads on the screen, with occasional difficut to suppress desires to toss shoes and other objects at the TV set. I read the news for myself, mostly from the online editions of major newspapers and of course the political blogosphere. That way I miss the freak-of-the week / kid down a well / disease of the week / Hollywood gossip / "Didja see what happened on 'The Apprentice?' stuff that passes for culture.

Of course, the blogosphere isn't immune to trivial horsecrap, either. Tempests can erupt in anyone's teacup, or pot. Some of the best political blogs (like this one) have a very personal touch.
Nonetheless, between the vet medical care scandal, USAgate, the Palme leak scandal and more, I'm now in an incredible screaming rage against Shrub and his co-conspirators. For the sake of my mental health, I'm on the verge of something I have never done willingly in my 40+ years as a political junkie: going cold turkey from reading any form of political news on the Internet. Yes, no Sacramento Bee or New York Times Online, no Atrios, no DailyKos or Huffington Post.

Perhaps all I need is a break.

Rules for Gunfighting

You Serenity players, take note.