CYN.ICAL.US

Hah! This is great, I just had to post it!

One morning, three Southerners and three Yankees were in a ticket line at a train station. The three Northerners each bought a ticket and watched as the three Southerners bought just one ticket.

"How are the three of you going to travel on only one ticket?" asked one of the Yankees.

"Watch and learn," answered one of the boys from the South.

All six boarded the train where the three Yankees sat down, but the three Southerners crammed into a restroom together and closed the door.

Shortly after the train departed, the conductor came around to collect tickets.

He knocked on the restroom door and said, "Ticket, please." The door opened just a crack and a single arm emerged with a ticket in hand. The conductor took it and moved on.

The Yankees saw this happen and agreed it was quite a clever idea. Indeed, it was so clever that they decided to do the same thing on the return trip and save some money.

That afternoon when they got back to the station, they bought a single ticket for the return trip and watched while to their astonishment, the three Southerners didn't buy even one ticket.

"How are you going to travel without a ticket?" asked one of the perplexed Yankees.

"Watch and learn," answered the three Southerners boys in unison.

When they boarded the train, the three Northerners crammed themselves into one restroom and the three Southerners crammed into another one just down the way. Shortly after the train began to move, one of the Southerners left their restroom and walked over to the one in which the Yankees were hiding.

The Southerner knocked on the door and said, "Ticket, please."

There's just no way on God's green earth to explain how the Yankees won that war.

I replaced a dying drive in my CentOS 3* Linux server yesterday. While I was doing it, I thought that it was possible that I had two tips that other people may not know about. It took a fair bit of reading to get them myself.

First, because the drive I replaced is just a storage drive, and not the system drive, I formatted it with EXT3 this way:

# /sbin/mkfs.ext3 -m 0 -j /dev/hdf1

The -m 0 tells format to not reserve any space for root, and the -j creates an ext3 journal. There's no real need to reserve 10 or 15 GB of space for root on a large drive that is only being used for data storage. This is overhead that is really only important on the system drive, to keep the drive from completely filling up and totally freezing the OS - root can still access the system. It also helps to have that extra space available so that the EXT3 filesystem can keep the likely more heavily used system drive reasonably defragmented. But it just wastes space on a drive being used solely for data storage, so get your gigs back!

Second, I also keep my tuned hdparm settings for all drives in /etc/sysconfig/harddisks. A few disks have their own parameters, so I copy /etc/sysconfig/harddisks to /etc/sysconfig/harddiskhda (hdb, hdc...) and modify it for that particular drive. Each disk that has no special parameters will use the defaults. Using this method, instead of just dropping the hdparm commands into rc.local to be executed near the end of the boot, will boost your drive to maximum speed at least halfway through the boot process, hopefully making for a faster bootup. This works for Redhat-based systems... other distros may have the option of setting some drive options (like DMA) in LILO, or, you may need to manually specify hdparm settings in a startup file that gets executed earlier in the boot process.

As a bonus tip, I also specify the '-S' option for hdparm (I use '-S180' which is 15 minutes at idle before spinning down), to spindown my additional storage drives when they are not actively being used, in order to save power, and hopefully, some wear and tear on the drives.

*Meh. Older version, I know. It works, is all I can say.

So I buy a Gateway 160GB USB external hard drive from CircuitCity.com in late November 2007. Gateway calls it a 'Portable Media Drive' and it says it has a 1 year warranty from Gateway, which I think is rather short for a drive warranty, but the price is right and I need one for backing up my laptop's hard drive. It has a Seagate OEM 2.5" harddrive inside the unit. This is the unit on Gateway's website.

It works and I use it for months with my laptop, but then in late March and early April, I start having problems with the drive. I seem to be losing some data, and seeing odd behavior when accessing the drive. I run a Scandisk check on it, and it reports several bad sectors. I continue to use it. A week or two later, I'm really having problems with the drive. The FAT appears to have been corrupted, and my data is getting difficult to access. I can barely access the drive, as it hangs the operating system for a while when I plug the drive into a USB port. Another Scandisk check reports over 10,000 bad sectors. The drive is obviously failing. I discontinue using it and put it aside for me to deal with later. Over the next few months, I manage to recover some data off the drive that I need. When done with that, I try to reformat, but the drive isn't cooperating and a full format never completes.

It's now June 18, when I first contact Gateway support. I get an inkling of what to come when the help agent's software apparently can't deal with the fact that my drive, though supposedly with a Gateway warranty, is neither a laptop or a desktop computer system, with the accompanying laptop or desktop serial number, and so she can't enter it into her system. She manages to get rid of me by pointing me toward a diagnostic hard drive utility, and suggests that I call customer service again if I still have problems.

On Friday, August 22, I call customer service again, and I am passed along like a hot potato between several departments and agents, and all of them continuously ask whether my problem is with a Gateway laptop or a desktop computer system. They seem unable to deal with the fact that I have a peripheral device supposedly covered by a Gateway warranty, even when I explain it to them in simple terms. Their excuse is that the support system that they use can only handle laptops or desktops, and that they must use this system. There is apparently nothing they can do with peripherals, since they can't even enter it into their system to start the process.

I finally get passed up to Chris in Level 2 Support, since everyone else along the way can't seem to help me. Chris explains to me the limitations of the system they use, after we go through the whole "is it a laptop or a desktop?" ordeal again. I politely tell him that it seems like a broken system from my point of view. I explain my problems to him, and he seems sympathetic to my plight and tries to help me. He wonders if my warranty is actually a Gateway warranty, perhaps it is covered by another company, and surely it must have a different customer service phone number on it? Nope, the phone number on it is the same phone number I called that got me there to talk to him. (This is the exact Gateway warranty document enclosed with my portable drive.) Well, maybe, he says, you can take it back to Circuit City and they'll replace it for you? I say nope, it's been longer than 30 days since I bought it, and why would Circuit City replace a product under warranty that Gateway said they would warranty? He agrees, and is apparently just tossing out ideas for possible solutions. Seagate, the drive manufacturer, is also brought up as a possibility, but I know that an OEM drive such as this one is specifically sold without a warranty by the manufacturer, since the company using it as a component in their own product (which is Gateway) is supposed to warranty it.

Chris has been in talks with his supervisor, and, apparently, other managers, about what they can do for me. The supervisor(s) remains a shadowy figure in the background through it all, and refuses to talk to me directly. After much discussion among themselves while I wait on hold, Chris says that they may be able to help me, (presumably by replacing the drive?), but they need a copy of my receipt and such to verify my claim. Chris wants me to fax these documents in (apparently their system can't handle email either). When I fax them in, and he verifies them, he will call me back on Monday, as it is now late on Friday afternoon. So, I fax them the documents he wanted within 30 minutes of getting off the line with Chris. But come Monday, I get no return call. In fact, I get no return call at all. At this point the story ends rather anticlimactically... I got caught up in my own life and didn't have the available time, or desire, to track down Chris through the Gateway support phone system to find out what happened about the replacement for a $70 drive. But I've seen enough of Gateway's rigid and inflexible support that I will never even consider buying a Gateway laptop or desktop. Even if I did have a laptop or a desktop to get over that first hurdle, I suspect that if I had a problem that didn't fit into the neat little organizer slots in their system, that my experience would be this same run around all over again. And who needs that? I'm quite happy with my Dell XPS laptop, and I get treated much better by Dell XPS support, who, so far, actually seem to be capable of solving my issues with their products.

So... PETA, would shrimp, lobster and other sea crustaceans be... sea hamsters??? We really want to know.

K found this on the internet... on one of her boards.

I’m thinking of starting a counter campaign after talking to my mom a little while ago. The conversation likely would have resulted in wild shrieking from the Sea Kitten Crowd. Mom picked up a rare little delicacy on her way home from a late meeting up North, live Maine shrimp. The season is really short and they almost never leave the region, and yes they’re sold live. The conversation went like this…

Mom : How do I cook these.

Me : First melt some butter in the skillet then you pull the head off and toss it in the pan.

Mom : The eyes are moving.

Me : Good that means they’re fresh. Just pull the head off and toss it in the pan with some butter.

Mom : It’s looking at me.

Me : It won’t be looking at you after you pull the head off.

Mom : Will it hurt?

Me : I dunno ask Mary Queen of Scots

Mom : You’re sick.

Me : And you’re hungry hurry up before you burn the butter.

Mom : OK I did it … wow these smell delicious.

Me : Save the heads in a baggie in the freezer for me, I’ll use them to make stock.

The moral … Real Yankees know sea kittens are yummy and we’re pretty frugal as well.

"One of the reasons for conspiracy theories is an assumption that people in high places always know what they are doing. When they do something that makes no sense, devious reasons are imagined by conspiracy theorists, when in fact it may be due to plain old ignorance and incompetence."

-Thomas Sowell
(1930- ) Writer and economist

It seems that eggs do indeed freeze. I had been wondering about that.

*Note to self: collect eggs earlier in the day, most especially during periods of subzero temperatures.

It's quite a different experience to crack open a semi-solid egg and have to scoop it out of the shell. Or to have a solid egg, like a hardboiled egg, yet still raw.

I fried them up. They came out fairly close to normal. There was a different texture in parts... especially the yolk, more of a quiche or scrambled egg texture. But it tasted about the same.

Ok, well it's time to post another one of these... they're fun. There's also a feedback loop here that I find amusing. Google must love me. Oh, and my apologies, if you just searched Google and came here expecting to get a real answer. You should realize that someone else did the same thing at some point in the past and now we're laughing at them. And, now that you're here, in the future, we could be laughing at you!

*Note that any spelling errors, punctuation errors, or general stupidity in these search terms is the fault of someone else, and not me.

gluteus maximus pain after sitting in car a long time

Would this be from something kinda kewl like a stakeout, or were you just stalking your ex-girlfriend again?

WHAT DOES YOUR gluteus maximus look like

Hah! Wouldn't you like to know! Freak.

can i disable a speaker in the mall where i work 
quickly

You sound suspicious. Actually, you sound kinda fun too.

how to grow a bigger gluteus maximus

Don't they have a pill for that?

rants about jury duty and serving hassles

Hey! Go make your own, buddy! Don't be trying to steal them from others!

too stupid to avoid jury duty

Was that a self-description? This isn't a self-help site, dude.

gluteous men exercise (videos)

I'm sorry. You need professional help. And, thanks to you, there are many people on the internets who now also need help because they saw this and had many disturbing images flash through their minds.

what can i say to make sure i don't get chosen for 
jury duty

Anything at least semi-crazy ought to work just fine. Can you drool creatively? Can you constantly keep brushing those freaking feathers off yourself while looking to see where they are coming from? How about lashing out violently at the spirits that constantly mock you?

excused from jury duty for depression

I'm sorry... they obviously thought that you needed to go home and close all the curtains and contemplate your sad life while surfing the internet.

jury duty how many times can miss 

You can miss 17 times, but whooooo!, on the 18th, you're going to jail, buddy! What? Isn't that what you discovered by googling this phrase?

consequences for not going to jury duty 

Finally! A practical use for the internet! Finding out first what the consequences are for not going. Way to use the internet, dude!

how to disqualify yourself from jury duty

Try to wet yourself in the first 10 minutes and leave a rather large puddle... and then wet yourself again in 30 minutes. That should do it. (Remember to drink lots of water.)

avoiding jury duty

There we go, right to the point. Next time, put '[Your Name] is avoiding jury duty', so we can tell who you are. And maybe we'll also call you up and shout 'JUROR DODGEE!' when we're bored.

how to use jury nullification to get out of jury duty

*smack* Bad! Now, go sit next to the lawyers!

what does a gluteus maximus do for us

Apparently nothing! Who would have thought! You can just amputate yours. It'll save you some weight too.

pain in my Gluteus maximus

You should work harder to avoid the person causing this.

gluteus maximus seizure

Hint: Don't do this to that pretty woman you just met... they hate that.

gluteus maximus wifi

Wow... sitting at the Starbucks takes on a whole new meaning!

product to get a big gluteus

I recommend: Dastardly Dan's Miracle Grow Tonic. Only $29.95 for a three month supply!

definition of the gluteus maximus in turms kids would
understand

Oh, I assure you. The kids already understand it. But, apparently, there seems to be something that you're not quite grasping...

jury duty a duty or pain

Oh! Wow! A multiple choice question in a search term! ... Oh boy, this is a hard one!

gluteus pain at night

Let me spell it out for you... try to remember to put all your Hot Wheels cars away before you go to bed.

So, I'm sure that everyone is familiar with the fiasco known as "Indiana Jones: The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull", so this shouldn't result in any spoilers.

We watched the film a number of weeks ago and were aghast at the goofs that made it impossible to suspend belief enough to really enjoy the movie. George Lucas has definitely lost whatever storytelling ability that he might have had. And, from the interviews on the DVD, it seems that Steven Spielberg was apparently the lone voice of reason and helped tone down some of the more ridiculous aspects of the film, but couldn't kill off every stupid Lucas idea.

Now it's not just the Nuking of the Fridge that was the problem. I had to pause the movie and rant for a few minutes very early into the movie when they were using 'magnetic' gun powder and "magnetic" lead shot to find the chest in the warehouse. I don't know if the problem is that Hollywood movie people are just so disconnected from the scary guns that they fear, that they just have no idea how they work in the real world, or, if they think that Americans just won't notice or care? I lean toward the former option.


Hollywood Movie Director: "And so, the bad guys here just start firing with their AKs, as the good guys come running by to get the girls."

Outside Consultant (former soldier): "So the good guys are moving from cover to cover as the bad guys are reloading?"

Movie Director: "What?! No! An AK is an assault weapon! It's a machine gun! You don't have to reload them."


So while that and the fridge nuking were bad enough, the main thing that totally ruined the movie for me, besides the aliens, was just that it wasn't actually an Indiana Jones movie - sure it had Harrison Ford, and the whip, but all the cool archeology stuff and traps and puzzles and all that which makes Indiana Jones different from the latest action flick, weren't there. It seems that in order to do all the kewl action scenes, they had to cut more of the slow, suspenseful, dashing archeology stuff. In one scene, Indy holds back Mutt with a warning as they are inside a tomb looking for stuff... but then nothing actually happens and they solve the puzzle in 30 seconds, and are in and out in under 2 minutes.

So my conclusion is... this supposed Indiana Jones IV is definitely not part of the canon. Obviously, some people got a bit mixed up in the studio's labeling department. This movie was supposed to be something like Firewall 2. With aliens. Or something. Ok, maybe we'll go with "Shanghai Conquistadores", but bad, without Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson.

"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain." --John Adams, Letter to Abigail Adams, May 12, 1780.

But, yes... I'm posting an LOL Cat.

Hey now! Is the floor that your jaw is scraping, actually clean?

Anyways I thought it was rather funny... and oddly appropriate for today too. heh heh heh.