Lauren Goes Grocery Shopping

:)

Leonard Part 6

I am a movie fan(atic). I'll watch any and all forms of movies, even chick flicks as evidence by my watching Kelly's new DVD Twilight (yes, I watched it last night. Shut up.). Earlier on Sunday I decided to satisfy some morbid curiosity and watch, via Netflix streaming, Leonard Part 6, the 1987 comedic disaster starring none other than Bill Cosby.

The basic premise of this movie is Cosby was a CIA agent who resigned from the service after his wife left him. Cosby later opened a resturant that would become "San Francisco's best". The CIA needs Cosby back after losing eight agents in one week to the diabolical Medussa Johnson, a vegetarian who has learned to control the minds of animals via some kind of orb that is never fully explained. Using this power she assassinates CIA agents. How? She has divers deploy a barking rainbow trout in salt water that inexplicably finds a way to swim into a swimming pool and devour one agent. No, I'm not making that up. Another agent meets his demise when thousands of frogs simultaneously hop up and down lift a car and tossing it over the side of a parking garage while an agent was doing surveillance on a building. No, I didn't make that up either.

Leonard (Cosby) does indeed return to the service and saves the world using magic meat given to him by a gypsy. But that's not all - Leonard also deploys magic ballet slippers to defeat the "bird dancers", a group of strict vegetarians dressed in bird-themed costumes. And thank god for the Magic Queen Bee that follows Leonard's verbal commands. The story would have surely fallen apart without the Magic Bee.

Leonard releases the animals from the evil vegetarian headquarters and proceeds to fight the "bad guys" using thawed magical beef patties that burn on contact. Oh, and one guy eats a magical hot dog that makes his head explode (mine nearly did too at this point). Leonard, having defeated the people and survived an attack by mind-controlled lobsters using magical melted butter, starts to destroy the building and he finds an ostrich still looked in an enclosure of the burning building. Leonard destroys vats of some kind of colorful liquid that factored into a larger plan to do something to San Francisco using plain old non-magic Alka Seltzer and makes it to the roof of the burning building riding, yes, riding the ostrich. The ostrich, a flightless bird, flies Leonard to the ground safely.

So is this the worst movie of all time? No. It doesn't even come close to indy flick Trailer Town. But for a studio-produced movie it's pretty damn bad. Even Cosby himself tried to convince people not to see the movie before it was released! Cosby went as far as purchasing the TV rights to the movie himself to keep it from ever being shown on television! Wow, you know you have a stinker when the star of the movie goes to that length to keep it under wraps. Had Cosby foreseen people in 2009 watching this stinker on the Roku I'm sure he would have tried to stop that as well.

* 1/2 out of *****

But I thought Europe was a country

Wow. There's "naturally dumb" and then there's the super-dumb that comes not from daydreaming your way through school but actual avoidance of learning at all costs.

Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War

Tae Guk Gi has been called "The Saving Private Ryan of Korea". I suppose that description is apt. Like Ryan the battle scenes are just as intenese and bloody. There are many more battles fought during this movie than Saving Private Ryan, however. Like Ryan the movie opens with a shot of an old man and the movie then shifts back in time and ends in the present day. The parallels end there, I think. Tae Guk Gi is a unique movie and not a Ryan rip-off by any stretch of the imagination. The Korean War was a hard-fought, bloody disaster of a war and it was refreshing to see the movie focus and remain in a Korean point-of-view. The Americans are mentoined several times but not really shown, unless you could the anaonymous aircraft pilots.

The movie is about two bothers for Seoul, one an uneducated shoeshine the other a promising student ready to enter college. War breaks out and both brothers are drafted to serve. The older brother, the shoeshine, is wary of is younger brother serving in combat as he (the younger) has a weak heart. All men are drafted in depseration and only those who are blind, deaf or missing limbs are allowed to remain behind. During the first battle, set during the defence of the Pusan Perimeter, the younger brother nearly dies of a heart attack brought on by stress of battle. He is saved by his older brother and it is then the elder talks to an officer and agrees to take any and all dangerous missions in an effort to win the Korean Medal of Honor. If he wins the medal the officer agrees to let his younger unwell brother go home to continue his education and provide and assuming the head of the household (the bother's father passed away young though no mention was made how he died).

I don't want to ruin the movie for you so that's where I'll stop with the spoilers. What I will say is the last quarter of the movie took a very unexpected and bizarre turn.

This is a very well-made movie. The movie was released in 2004 and filmed in 2002, and 2003. With that in mind the graphics looked advanced for the time (but not for 2009). The production was solid, the story was well-written and the movie was beautifully shot.

**** out of *****

Amazing pictures of the Red River Flooding

Wow. That first picture really brings the flooding into perspective.

I like robots

And these robots are freakin' amazing! Awesome in fact! How awesome? Better than sharks with freaking laser beams on their heads!

Apple store makes a brief cameo in a new PC ad

You'll need Silverlight to watch this so be warned. Microsoft has a new ad running that tries to dis Apple but just makes themselves look kind of stupid. Lauren wants a big screen laptop for under $1000.00. The Apple Store didn't have what she wanted ("only one with a 13" screen"). She flatly states "I guess I'm not cool enough to have a Mac". I hate to spoil it for you but Lauren ends up with a HP with a 17 inch screen running Vista and she spends less than $1000.00.

Congratulations, Lauren. You just bought the computing equivalent of a Yugo.

We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto

"The time is now to take whatever precautions are needed for you and your interests to endure 24-36 hours of potentially life-threatening blizzard conditions."

The National Weather Service is calling this storm EPIC. This could be the largest blizzard to hit Kansas, northwestern Oklahoma, the Panhandle of Texas and southeastern Colorado in almost 20 years.

Friday we could have a tornado Super Outbreak from Arkansas all the way to Tennessee and possibly tornadoes in North Carolina on Saturday. The temperature forecast for Saturday has been upped to 75 and while that isn't warm enough to F-3 and greater tornadoes (generally) that does not preclude formation of smaller, yet still deadly and destructive, tornadoes.

This is going to be a rock-n-rolla weather weekend. Perhaps it's time we pray for Omarion.

Wolfenstien 3D arrives for the iPhone

Oh yeah. I might have to download this one.

Queue the song Another One Bites the Dust

My beloved Linux server has served me well this past five years but now it is time for an upgrade. The "mighty" Dell was really something back in the day but now it is old and tired, ready to be put to pasture. It will probably find life on the Outer Banks network as a combined shared drive (Samba) and proxy server (Squid) replacing an even less powerful and more ancient Toshiba laptop.

The problem with my server is not processor. Rather it is very limited disk space. But if I am going to upgrade the internal disk (long overdue) I may as well upgrade to a newer box with a better processor and more RAM while I'm at it. The upgraded machine (a Pentium IV with 512 megs of RAM and 80 gig HD) should last a decade at least, barring any mechanical failures.

Before it is replaced I'd like to provide the following specifications of my old server if only to prove that old PCs never really die, they just find a more useful life running Linux long after they can no longer play the Windows game.

vendor_id : GenuineIntel
model name : Pentium III (Coppermine)
cpu MHz : 731.217
bogomips : 1462.71
MemTotal: 384488 kB
(df -h) 8.8G 6.9G 1.5G 83% / (most of that cleared today)

Two computers is one too many

I'm finding myself constantly irritated by my dual-computer setup. I have a very reliable and downright solidly built IBM Thinkpad T42 (this laptop predates the sale of IBM personal computer line to Lenovo, I think, maybe). For home computing I have the FANTASTIC SUPER-AMAZING 15" Macbook Pro and I love it. I'd like to make this computer my primary and sole computer covering both work and home.

For those not working for a global mega-corporation allow me to say while this tasks sounds simple and straight-forward dropping my work PC for a Mac is anything but. Many applications that are required for the day-to-day functions of my job are PC only or Mac versions are not licensed. Furthermore my employer has strict policies about co-mingling of personal and professional data (mostly as an effort to keep viruses brought in from home to a minimum).

So what are my options?

1) I could install my laptop in the computing and networking lap and control the computer via VNC or straight-up Remote Desktop.

Problem: The company has strict policies about brining in outside devices and plugging them into the corporate LAN. Contractors, for instance, are issued work-built laptops for use during their contracts. There are plans, someday, to reach a point where 3rd party computers will be allowed on the network but we're not there yet. So I can't put my Mac on the company LAN, at least not directly.

2) Use wireless.

Problem: This is conidered the same as using the company LAN. In a word - forbidden.

3) Cry about this on my blog.

Problem: Yours. That is what I'm doing right now in case you haven't noticed.

4) Use VMware Converter and image my laptop thus preserving the applications and move the image to my laptop running VMware Fusion.

Problem: But you said you can't put that machine on the corporte LAN, isn't that the same thing?

Yes, and thank you for paying attention. You win a cookie. But what I have yet to say is I have, at my desk, access to an "outside" DSL line via a regular, old ISP. We use this connection for testing remote access to different locations around the globe and it's a handy thing to have indeed. So, in the strictest of senses I could put the Mac on the DSL line and launch a VPN session via my VMware virtual machine.

Performance won't differ much from being on the corporate LAN. Really. Quite a bit of my work is done overseas anyway so simply connecting up to the VPN concentrations in the country of choice isn't that much of an inconvience. Actually it's none at all and could be extremely beneficial for testing RFC1918 address conflicts that appear nearly constanlty because we, as a company, seem to be afraid of IPv6. But that's another story for another time.

Connecting the Mac to the DSL line and the XP virtual machine to the VPN gives me, in effect, a split-horizon setup that I'd really like. I could fark.com away over the Internet connection skipping the proxies entirely (or I could set up Firefox with a reverse proxy to somewhere else entirely and keep Safari "directly connected".

What are the next steps? Investigate VMware Converter a bit more. I occasioanlly have to attending meetings, etc, and it would be nice to have a still-functional Thinkpad in case I've got to sit in a meeting room (walking in with a non-standard machine would create a stir and one that I don't necessarily want to flaunt my choice in computing platform and the extent I'm willing to go in order to get the machine I want to use on a daily basis.

No, I'm not trying to "get away" with anythere here. There are just times when applications I have my Mac, namely Photoshop, would be very nice to have at my fingertips and right now that's just not possible. Work isn't going to license Photoshop for my work PC nor should they. Just because I could do some occasional work for the group using that applciation do not a business justification make.

Tonight beings the forklift upgrade of Parallels with the purcahse of VMware Fusion via Amazon or Apple.com (most likely apple.com). No, on second though I'd better do that tomorrow. I have to check and see what my connection options are on the back of my montior. Monitors are another story - people have purchased their own monitors and brought them into work. Yeah, technically it's a no-no too but it's not like you're going to spread a virus around with a monitor so people tend to look the other way. Someday I'd like to have a 24" Apple monitor to go along wth my laptop but that will have to wait for a bit (and, yes, a 30" monitor would be ever better but I'm not going to drop $1800 for a monitor that is nearly as large as my entire cubicle).

We're going live in three, two...

Today was a F-U-N day. Friend and co-worker Heath Roberts asked (a while back) if I'd be interested in filling the role of volunteer camera operator during a UNC TV (public tv) fund raising show featuring celebrity chef Rick Bayless. Given my interest in film, tv and general video production I jumped at the chance.



Am I glad I did!! I was camera operator for Camera #3 and my duties were limited this being the first time I've ever operated a production video camera. The director commented that I did a good job for a newbie and I was proud of that. He even cut to my camera several times when it was not already scripted to do so. I felt good about that. I hate, even as a newbie at anything, to be a 5th wheel dragging down the quality work of everyone else.

In all we had four cameras and four operators: two professional cameramen, Heath (5 time volunteer) and myself (n00b).

Would I do this again? You bet. When? Not sure. The cameras used these days, including the ones we shot "manual" today, are all robotic and remotely controllable. Only when a director prefers to use camera operators is the work called for, and I think that particular call might be sent out fewer and fewer times going forward. In addition there was an ENORMOUS gap in skills between the professional operators, Heath then I in descending order of usefulness. Camera #2 and the boom camera (#4) were both professionally operated and, wow, these guys had their stuff down, big time. Heath did a great job too and maybe someday I'll graduate to his level but it's going to take a bit of time.

But this was all kinds of fun and I'm going to do add "UNC TV Volunteer Camera Operator" to my list of things I like to volunteer for (also including working at the Durham Food Bank). And that reminds me, it's been a long while since I've been to the food bank. Perhaps it's time, and likely well past time.

For more photos of the show today please see my Picasa album or if we're friends on Facebook you can view the pictures there as well.

The Tucson Citizen given a brief reprieve

Amazingly the Tucson Citizen did not close its doors this past Friday. All is not well however. They are operating on a "day to day" basis so the final edition could be right around the corner.

The Radio I Want

I'll amend my previous iterations of my dream HAM radio to now including the following:

1) low power embedded device with two, perhaps three RP-TNC connector for the radio and good old Ethernet for configuration and control. Device capable of running in harsh (i.e. hot, like in my attic) conditions to keep cable lengths to a minimum. More likely this device would be on my desk in the bonus room but why not build it to withstand some punishment? Why the multiple connectors? I'd have to have multiple antennas, yeah, but I'd like to have 2 meter/70 cm on one chip then one independant 2 m and 70 cm chip for spectrum analysis. This may be possible all on one chip, I don't really know.

2) control of the radio via two methods:
a) software application running on a Mac controls the functions of the embedded radio. Control is via Ethernet but we'll throw in 802.11n for those times when you want to move the rig outside and do a bit of outdoor hamming. Yes, using the public space is likely to raise some hackles with other fellow HAMs. If this becomes a problem just make sure you pack a long Ethernet cable.
b) software application running on the iPhone. Yeah, the iPhone. Why? Why not? A handset could be devised that would allow for PTT and the iPhone has everything already built in: 802.11, bluetooth (I don't really see a reason to use it) plus it has that fantastic touch screen interface. Click a band, roll around using a virtual wheel and tune in.

I'm sure it wouldn't work as well as why I'm invisioning in my head but it sure sounds neat. I have no way of building this as I've got a "perfect storm" of extremely limited programming skills and exactly zero electronics engineering education. Time is short too so that makes picking up these skills in a reasonable amount of time close to impossibe. Oh well. Still, if I could "reboot my 20s" I think I would have majored in something useful like electronics engineering. But I didn't. Maybe I'll go back to school when I retire. Perhaps I'll start taking classes now (that's actually the plan - I'm investigating serveral programs at local colleges). When I get things moving again I'll let everyone know.

73s.

Where's the bottleneck?

22% 450MB 5.6MB/s

Ouch! Over a LAN with one switch hop and the slowest component is 100 meg, full duplex? Yikes. Someone has a throughput issue. That's ok, though. Not all machines can be file servers. It's not the end of the world.

Sign(s) of the times

"A local bakery and cafe in Jackson Heights in the New York borough of Queens that catered to freelance writers and others with laptops has covered up and padlocked its electrical outlets to discourage customers from overstaying their welcome. Laptop users can now stay only as long as their battery lasts."

This and other side effects of the economic collapse today on Reuters.

Does anyone speak Japanese?

I'd love to read the translation of this video. Some background: Japan's Mount Mihara is an active volcano where (this is hard to believe) people have, in the past and in great numbers, committed suicide by jumping into running lava through "skylights" in lava tubes. In fact, in one particularly bad year, over 600 took the final plunge at this volcano.

Let's focus on 1986. Mt. Mihara erupted with furious anger and news crews did as they do and rushed to the area to get video of the eruption. What I imagine they did not suspect to film was a human (man?) walking across the ejected pyroclastic lapilli towards a burned-out building exceptionally close to the edge of the massive eruption.

What became of this person is a mystery, at least I think that is the case because I can't translate Japanese. After the eruption a news crew visited the building where the mystery man was last seen either entering or walking in front of. What they found was unclear to me; I did not see a toasted person, just what appeared to be a heavily damaged building. Regardless what happened to this person I find the whole thing creepy.

Paging ex-Ocularer Seth. What is being said in this video? And while I have you here, how the heck are you? Long time, no hear. Drop me a line sometime.

Goodbye to the Tucson Citizen

The Tucson Citizen, the afternoon paper in The Valley of the Sun, will close up shop for good March the 21st assuming a buyer is not located by that date. (are they ever?) I hate to see the paper go after 138 years of continuous operation. For a three year window of that paper's history I delivered the afternoon papers aboard my 20 inch Hutch BMX bike (later I would switch to a 24" GT, but I still was single-gear only).

What I'll remember most about delivering the paper is how when the only road in and out of my side of town was closed due to flooding The Citizen hired a helicopter to deliver my stacks of papers to a strip mall a few miles away. That was dedication you don't normally see and my subscribers were quite shocked to see me out delivering the papers that day.

Sundays were a special time as a delivery boy. The weight of the shoulder bag could at least quadruple on Sundays making the trip somewhat uncomfortable but the scenery in pre-dawn Tucson was spectacular. Many coyotes and jalavinas would be out and about where they would normally be hunkered down hiding from the afternoon sun. Good times.

VoIP and IPv6

It is well known that Asterisk does not yet support IPv6 despite being what can only be described as the leading Open Source VoIP solution.

Watch out, Asterisk. There's a newcomer in the 'hood gunning for the top spot. Created by a former Asterisk developer, FreeSWITCH not only supports IPv6 but a lot of other cool features too. What reinvent the wheel? I'll let the lead developer answer that question.

Granted, I've only installed Asterisk and heard the sweet sound of ring tone from a Linux system exactly one time so I'm far from the ideal person to read a web page and provide thoughts on superiority vs inferiority.

That said I'm going to install FreeSWITCH and see just what it can and can't do. The best news? FreeSWITCH is currently being integrated into cousin of m0n0wall pfsense. That could be one heck of an appliance! Imagine - a truely hardened V0IP applicance via point-and-click! I'm sure the VoIP command line Linux purists are throwing objects at their laptops but just for a second consider the ease of deployment (not to mention redeployment in event of catastropic office event: fire, flood, etc).

Most of us ended up with nightmares and stomachaches

What could have caused that?

What year?

What year is this jag?

Who started this?

More and more I see "Do the needful" or "please do the needful". Who started this and how does can it be stopped?

cutting my commute in half

I could cut my commute to the Outer Banks in half by flying a Piper Arrow.

Yes, I know I'm dreaming. But only a little.

The Missing OpenWRT Internal Diagram

An there it is, I finally found it. This is the diagram I've been searching for. It is located in the VLAN Bridging and Concepts document but seemingly not in the general configuration pages related to VLANs. Now the internals make perfect sense (except for that oddball eth1 interface that isn't used but exists on the Broadcom chip. I've always wondered about that port, but nomatter, it's unusable).

I'm setting up a second VLAN on the device so I can get guest wireless working once again (this is at the Outer Banks). I'll be doing the reconfigure at lunch.

In the left corner....

Tonight begins the Fight of the Soekris Boards! In the left corner is the newly emerged contender pfsense and in the right corner is the tried and true champion m0n0wall. Two will enter this epic battle but one will emerge victorious. True, the Net4501 boards are a touch underpowered for pfsense but they will work. I've been wanting to try this out for a while now. It's hard for me to imagine not running m0n0 having done so for so long and with so few problems. But I have the opporunity to investgiate something new that, truth be told, is supposed to have superior VPN technology built-in. I'll give it a whirl and see how work it works.

Dead coyote spotted on I-85

During my commute I noticed a dead coyote on I-85. This is the first confirmed spotting on a coyote (by me) in North Carolina.

Five years.. it was a good run.

No sooner did I write how stable my m0n0wall firewalls are than I blew one all to hell and back during a firmware upgrade. How you may ask. How indeed. I'm not sure what went so wrong. But wrong it went. Now the entire beach network is running off one very busy WRT54GL running OpenWRT. I'll get that corrected this week and I'll replace the unit next weekend.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!

Without realizing it my Soekris net4501 m0n0wall firewalls have surpassed five years of nearly uninterrupted, error-free service. Those guys and gals at Soekris know how to develop stable hardware.

Movie Mania

I've been watching a lot of movies with few reviews posted. I look to remedy that today (with as-short-as-possible reviews). All movies viewed via Netflix Streaming.



Oasis

Mentally disabled Korean man falls for Korean woman with severe cerebral palsy. Really. After being jailed for his brother's crime Jong-du Hong is released from prison to find his family finds itself better off without him around. The social misfit falls in love with the disabled relative of the man he is accused of having killed four years prior.

A really weird tale of forbidden love.

** 1/2 out of *****



Memories of Murder.

Small town detective Park Doo-Man (played by Song Kang-ho, The Host, J.S.A. among others) finds himself int the middle of an investigation of South Korea's first serial killer. A seasoned detective from Seoul is dispatched to help with the investigation but both men seem outmatched by the killer. Based on a true, and still unresolved, series of crimes.

*** out of ***** (if you aren't fleunt in Korean get ready to read.. a LOT. This movie is heavy with dialogue.)



Kicking It.

Homeless? Love soccer? Then compete with your homeless teammates from the same country in the Homeless World Cup. Really.

** 1/2 out of *****



Surfwise.

Raising nine children and leading a life of nomadic surfers? Apparently it can be done as demonstrated by Doc Paskowitz and family. It's not always easy or pretty but they made it work. After giving up a life of an established doctor in Hawaii Doc Paskowitz leaves it all behind, introduces surfing to Israel, meets his future wife and together they embark on an unusual nomadic life, even for full-time RVers, and raise nine (!!!) children in a RV.

*** out of *****



Crazy Love.

The story of Burt Pugach, a successful New York City Attorney who, while married, falls for a younger woman named Linda Riss. When the relationship ends it is Burt who can't handle the loss and he hires thugs to throw liquid lye into the face of his former girlfriend in an attempt to blind and disfigure her.

And that is only the beginning of a very unusual and true love story.

**** out of *****



Half Nelson.

A drama about a New York High School history teacher with a drug addiction. Dan Dunne (Ryan Gosling) befriends student Drey (Shakira Epps) who is in danger of becoming a drug runner to make a quick buck, and possibly wind up in jail like her older brother. The two misfits attempt to save each other, possibly at the cost of losing their own person battles.

**** out of *****




My Father the Genius.

What do you get when you mix a gifted architect with an inability to commit to married life and a vision of who the world ought to exist? You get Glenn Howard Small who is undeniably a gifted architect. Mr. Small has visions, big lofty visions, of a world where we live in cities that look like they belong on a Yes album cover. But those never quite get off the ground and Mr. Small is left to build contemporary houses on the West coast.

Mr. Small hires his daughter to write his biography but instead she would prefer to make a documentary. Mr. Small agrees and the rest is (living) history. The film pulls no punches and tells the story like it is. A refreshing biographical documentary.

**** out of *****

Great line of text

"We need to prepare for the next Burger King."

Using only that sentence I'd bet 100 random people would never guess what Reid Hoffman was writing about.

today's snow

Photo taken around 11:30 am. Off to Wake Forest to pick up lunch. Much of the snow had already melted and the snow plows in Franklin County had been active much of the morning.

six inches of snow

We got just under six inches of snow last night and today in Youngsville. I worked from home today. My employer was operating under a two hour delay but I found it easier to work from home rather than go in.

Tomorrow I don't have a choice - I've got to go in. The boss is going to be in town and there's much going on between work and school.

But more on that tomorrow.

Good Day, Paul

Paul Harvey died today at the age of 90. Pual Harvey had a true gift of storytelling and could breath life into even the most mundane subject. As is the case with many TV and radio personalities Mr. Harvey's best work was, in my opinion, his social commentary rather than his political.

The story I most remember Paul spinning was that of an anonymous young man who died in the Alaskan wilderness. That person was later identified as Chris McCandless and the story of his short life would later be written into a best seller by Jon Krakauer titled Into The Wild that would later be made into an excellent movie of the same name directed by Sean Penn.

What the book and Krakauer's original article, Death of an Innocent, mentions that the movie did not was the fact that Paul Harvey's excellent on-air piece about the nameless man in Alaska had a direct impact in the investigation and idententification of Chris McCandless. During Harvey's boardcase Wayne Westerberg, a grain silo owner in South Daktota, happened to hear the broadcast and phoned the Alasakan authorities that the on-air description sounded a lot like his former employee (McCandless) and, as it turns out, it was.

That was the beauty of Paul Harvey's stories: he could so accuretly write and speak about a topic that it would paint an incrediably accurate mental picture. Not many people have such an ability. Paul Harvey did. So accurate and rich in detail where his stories at times that it made possible to place a name and face with a deceased person found in an abandoned bus in the Alaskan brush.

Goodnight, Paul. We'll miss your unique brand of story telling.