I like the new behind-the-scenes layout, though it’s a significant change that will take a bit of time to get used to. The plugin auto-upgrade feature is rather handy for those times when you just don’t feel like opening a term or can’t for technical reasons. I’d never enabled it in 2.7, so it’s new to me.

I was surprised that my layout and widgets all seem to be functional after the upgrade, and I was even more surprised when a long overdue update for the Livejournal Crossposter plugin showed up in my list of upgrades. Considering I’ve been limping along with a manually modified 1.x version of that from when the developer went AWOL…

Now that the electronic house is in order, back to packing and getting the real life one in order.

Update: One item with the LJ-XP upgrade; it uses a default hostname of www.livejournal.com, which then tosses a bogus error about not being able to get db master at /home/lj/cgi-bin/User.pm – this doesn’t appear to be documented anywhere… Do NOT use the default; remove the www. and use livejournal.com instead, and it works fine.

Today, I’m pulling some of my recent history out of my twitter stream manually, and maybe editing them a bit for readability where required; adding spaces and vowels and context. I copied them out in reverse order, with the newest at the top. I wasn’t really thinking that through, and the work to reverse the order isn’t worth it, so understand that you’re going backwards in time if you read top-down.

1:10pm, May 15, 2009 — Doing a pre-screen hoop jumping today with a recruiter and heart’s just not in it… Can’t stop looking and interviewing without OFFER…

12:03pm, May 15, 2009 — @arnicare says “People are looking at Boiron Arnicare as a safer option for pain relief” – Safer because… IT’S WATER.

10:55am, May 15, 2009 — There are meetings booked for next friday in Toronto, travel plans to follow. Pantless telephone interviews may work, but not so in-person.

9:43pm, May 14, 2009 — The Sun, The Shuttle, The Satellite – very cool Transit: 0.8s. Alt: 600 km. Speed: 7 km/s (25000 km/h). Length of Atlantis: 35m, length of Hubble: 13m. Photographer’s site

9:05pm, May 14, 2009 — @jemmen beat the problem to death with the corpse of a developer?

8:24pm, May 14, 2009 — Thinking that we need to make a sign to correct the “You are now leaving Halifax” signs for when we leave. /Hali/Helli/

7:24pm, May 14, 2009 — @DrOttematic You doctors, judging the geeks with the drinking on the job thing, just because nobody lets you guys :)

11:05am, May 14, 2009 — @snfu apparently – I’ve seen posters up for the all-ages in Halifax finally. I’ll bring some old fishermen for Chi.

12:30am, May 14, 2009 — Said by the guy who released a BILLION remixes of “Closer” … RT: @trent_reznor You people are incredibly tedious. Goodnight.

9:01pm, May 13, 2009 — Hmm, next weekend @SNFU is in Halifax, and if things progress in Toronto, I might not be in Halifax to see them play…

3:12pm, May 13, 2009 — Another call from 3 interview position in Toronto. Talk of logistics on flights to go meet team… Not an OFFER but good sign..

12:11pm, May 13, 2009 — David Byrne / Brian Eno live EP as fund raiser for Amnesty International

11:04am, May 13, 2009 — Interesting note about RIM #7: MacBook Pro is an official, company-supplied computer on the cool teams.. even if it doesn’t work w/ BB Storm

10:03pm, May 12, 2009 — LAME. Pixies ‘new’ release “Minotaur” is merely an over-priced studio album re-issue with new artwork. CD:$150 VINYL:$450

7:10pm, May 12, 2009 — @trishussey If nothing else, raising 1 zone ride (on Vancouver’s buses and Skytrain) to $3.50 will convince people that cars aren’t so bad….

6:04pm, May 12, 2009 — That @CrystalMethod / @Matisyahu track off the new album passes a couple listens unscathed http://tr.im/l8tl

4:36pm, May 12, 2009 — Nice open letter to @oprah (Oprah Winfrey, of course) – Dear Oprah “Pull your support from @JennyFromMTV (Jenny McCarthy) and her platform of anti-vaccination.”

2:43pm, May 12, 2009 — I just saw a guy leave liquor store with case of Alpine beer on shoulder. He was wearing a sweater, tuque, and a scarf. Weather is okay today – is he just in character?

1:17pm, May 11, 2009 — New interview confirmed and some discussion about another one. Not sure if I want to see winters in Montreal though…

10:51pm, May 10, 2009 — @jemmen Butter Chicken Sausages. As God is my witness, I will have those one day.

2:50pm, May 09, 2009 — Angry hipsters upset that @trent_reznor made a comment about Weezer, question NIN relevancy while embracing Weezer’s? http://is.gd/y7nq

4:57pm, May 08, 2009 — @voteforharper @pmharper No. No no no no no. Never. Not now, not ever. No.

8:59pm, May 07, 2009 — @thesneeze it’ll soon be replaced by the Rabid Cougar Flu. It’s much much scarier, and involves leopard print spandex.

7:15pm, May 07, 2009 — @mercerch I met someone who claimed to be Tucker Max once. That guy was a pretentious dick, and while I have my doubts it was the guy…

3:50pm, May 06, 2009 — (Slate article on Oprah and Jenny) “A pediatrician is a person with a medical degree who takes care of children. Some of them are said to trust science more than celebrities when it comes to health care.”

For both of you unfamiliar with Twitter, the @ signifies a Twitter user name follows, and the initialism RT stands for “Retweet” where I’m quoting another user’s statement

Last night I was moving files around from drive to drive, and had shut a system down to swap one of the drives I new was dying out. It’s been overdue for a change, and I finally got around to moving all the data off of it.

I’ve replaced Dying Drive with MP3 Drive from the other file server, and apply power to the system. I’m just idly staring at the stack of hard drives, waiting for the system to power and test the drives, listening to the click click-click-click of the drives spinning up.

Hang on. These drives don’t have built in LEDs… so why is that… oh shit. Now it’s making click-rebound-click-rebound-click-… noises. None of this is good.

I immediately power down the system and pull generating-light-but-shouldn’t-be drive carefully.

You know that drive that’s been slowly dying and that I’ve shut down to replace? Well, this isn’t it. The MP3 Drive transferred in is fine too. This is another drive that has spontaneously decided to end it all. In the blurry photo above, you can see the path that the Magic Smoke that powers computer systems took to get out of that resistor pack on the circuit board.

The drive contains a lot of data, but none of it is really vital… It’s full of recorded TV shows that I’d like to have, but that aren’t really vital. I don’t think that there’s anything else of interest on there that doesn’t exist in at least a half dozen other places here, so I’m not highly concerned with the data.

There’s a bit of a dilemma here… the newly dead drive is under warranty from Seagate, as I tended to buy the five-year warranty drives, I have a couple years left on this one. However, I already have a spare, identical drive that I bought at the same time, and it’s blank. I could, in theory, swap the circuit boards and get at the data on Burnie and continue to use it, or I can just file a warranty claim and forget about the data.

I have to dig up my hex drivers and see how the boards are attached; looks like these Seagates have a pretty straight-forward connection to the drive mechanism, and no obvious tampering security, so I may be able to do the board swap, pull any interesting data of Burnie and then swap them back to return Burnie as a full, original unit.

Something for the weekend, I suppose.

Wow, have they ever expanded the service since I last used it. There’s both a twitpic and a twitter; not sure on the differences.

I’ve setup my flickr account for the primary publishing, and setup a handful of CC accounts that it will also publish to for me; my gmail account, facebook and twitpic so far. Maybe I’ll sign up for accounts on each of the supported services just because…

• 23Hq


• 3FotoAlbum


• AOL Xdrive


• BBC News


• blip.tv


• BBC News


• blip.tv


• Bluestring


• Box.Net


• BritGlyph


• Buzznet


• Cellfish


• CNN Exchange


• Dailymotion


• Divshare


• Easyshare


• Email


• Facebook


• Flickr


• Freewebs


• Friendster


• FTP


• Google Blogger


• HotSMS


• Hyves


• Ipernity


• Kodak Easyshare Gallery


• LiveJournal


• MetaWebLog


• moblogUK


• Multiply


• Netlog


• Now Public


• Ovi


• Phanfare


• Photobox


• Photobucket


• Photoshop.com


• Picasa Web Albums


• Pikeo


• qipit


• Reuters


• Samsung Fun Club


• Scoopt


• Seesmic


• SmugMug


• Snapfish


• Twitpic


• Twitter


• TypePad


• Uploaded (ITV News)


• Vox


• WebShots


• Windows Live Spaces


• WordPress (.com)


• YouTube

The qipit service sounds interesting; though just changing a camera phone image into a PDF is nothing amazing; it would be really cool if it did OCR on the image and sent THAT as well.

Randi is doing a simple demo of those counterfeit detection pens and how they don’t quite work.

The comments from the video are amusing, as Jim Callahan defends himself and attacks Randi with a mix of junior high school debate techniques and elementary school spelling. Oddly, on this video he doesn’t respond to my own posts; perhaps it’s because he can’t defend himself.

Some classic Jim responses to comments on the video;

Jim: “Posibly [sic] Randi & the JREF are not the people to be thinkng [sic] for you.”

Jim: “Because the JREF cult boys will do whatever they can to protect the cult.”

Jim: “Second he is doing this with children present. What message does that send to kids?”

Jim: I don’t need moral ground. What I do is legal.

A slight re-edit of some of my comments in the thread follows; “you” in this case is Jim Callahan, The Paranormalist.

Lying to the public and claiming paranormal abilities is legal… potentially amoral and disgusting, but legal.

Wow… the stupid is amazing….

Well, that Jim calls this a crime is the stupidest part of this video however.

He used the ‘bill’ as an example and destroyed it at the end. It’s printed on standard paper in a standard photocopier? Then it should never be confused as the real thing due to size and feel differences.

You target the stupid and the ignorant with your “mystical feats” in the same way that Sylvia Browne and John Edward do. Won’t YOU think of the children?

You claim that people aren’t thinking for themselves, and can’t happen to agree with Randi without being slaves to the JREF?

I independently came to the conclusion that you’re a fraud before I ever heard Randi speak of you. I used critical thinking to come to that conclusion.

Thinking critically is the enemy of your type , and it’s ironic that you suggest people learn to think, when that’s the last thing you want. Hard for YOU to print money if the audience can see through you.

Jim fancies himself the modern day Uri Gellar, which just makes him a limited talent who deals in lies. Go see Penn & Teller, Banachek, Derren Brown, or James Randi if you want to see amazing things without being condescended to. Seriously, if you have a chance to see Randi speak, go. He really is Amazing.

However the voting goes, the results could be contested, but the hack can’t be verified. Gosh, technology is great. I’m looking forward to CNN having to announce the news… “In a landslide victory, we would like to announce that it appears that the new president of the United States will be Libertarian candidate Bob Barr. Diebold has certified the election as accurate, as their verification techniques are completely without fail. In another interesting twist, all 35 seats that were up in the Senate have been won by a single, small cocker spaniel named Bubbles.”

I’ve had this name since 2000, when the .ca name space opened up to regular Canadians. Prior to that you had to be incorporated federally in order to garner a .ca name, or provincially to get a .bc.ca (or another province), or had to be a municipal entity for a vancouver.bc.ca address. Not ideal. The auction came up, and I had placed a half dozen bids on domains like arcti.ca, antarcti.ca, eroti.ca, and a number of other potentially amusing names. As the auction was first come, first served, you were at the mercy of your registrar’s speed and luck. I did win fuc.ca and foo.ca. While I did enjoy the humorous potential of mutha.fuc.ca, I let that registration go, and kept only foo.ca for the longest time.

It looks good on business cards, and “xinit@foo.ca” can communicate something about the person on the other end when it’s on a card or on a resume. It’s a nice short domain for watermarking my images on etsy, and it’s handy to link to. There’s an established traffic and an established presence here on foo.ca and there has been for nearly 9 years; most of a decade.

All that said, for the right price, I’d let you walk off with foo.ca. That price, however, is not low.

How does someone put a price on of this? Easy; start with any six numbers from zero to 9; choose them at random if you’d like. Now line them up in a row, place a number between one and ten to the left of that string, write this whole list numbers in the amount field on a cheque, sign it, date it today, and as soon as the cheque clears your bank account, we’ll get the technical details worked out. If you have something really interesting that you’re going to place on the domain, I might want in on that too, but that we can discuss that while we’re waiting for the cheque to clear.

If your heart is cold and dead and you feel that you can’t watch this, at least try to watch with the sound on from 2:00 until 2:20 and from 4:15 until you can pick your jaw back up off the floor. He does things after the four minute mark that no mere mortal should be able to accomplish without a pact with the dark one…

The video is from Stickergiant who I’m likely going to have print up some stickers for both Binarysoul and a little project that came to mind earlier today.