My Pitiful Knowledge of Akron

Very shortly, I'll be coming up on my one year anniversary at work, which is in Akron. According to the entry for the city on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], Akron is the 82nd largest city in the US.

Somehow, I have managed to work there for almost an entire year, and about the only streets that I have any knowledge of whatsoever are the ones that I use to get from the highway to the building I work in. It's sad.


Also, after an entire year of working there, I have eaten at a grand total of four restaurants in that city. Those four restaurants are:

• El Rincon [citysearch.com] - fantastic Mexican food, maybe the best I've ever had...


• Bricco [briccoakron.com] - yuppie-type restaurant, with bordering-on-unacceptably-slow service, but excellent food.


• Crave [eatdrinkcrave.com] - this whole place SCREAMS yuppie.


• House of Hunan [thehouseofhunan.com] - decent enough food, with sushi about as good as can be expected of a city this size.

I think that the moral of this story is that I really need to get out more. I'll be interested in checking out (Pretenders lead singer) Chrissie Hynde's new restaurant: VegeTerranean [ohio.com].

Picture of Main Street in Akron, OH, courtesy of kevinq2000's Flickr photostream [flickr.com].

We Got Harry Potter-ed

In short, we caved.

We weren't going to submit to the Harry Potter-mania that has been sweeping the nation. But nothing has been made clearer to me than the fact that the release of the latest Harry Potter book has been bigger than the Superbowl.

We were going to wait until it came out on paperback, or until our turn came up in the library's unbelievably long queue, or until someone who bought it would loan it to us. Heimlich and I have read all of the other books, but we never bought them within a month of them being released.

But it has become completely impossible to read the news (or other weblogs, for that matter) without accidentally reading a spoiler. I keep half expecting to show up to work and see someone wearing a shirt with a Harry Potter related spoiler (such as "____ Kills ____").

So, we are lame, and we went out and bought a copy. I have noticed that Harry Potter seems to be very polarizing. Or maybe it is not Harry Potter itself, but the media coverage of it that is so polarizing. Everyone I know either seems to be a fan, or militantly against it -- they're not against it because of some moral reasoning or anything like that, but they just don't understand. They remind me of people who don't have Tivos or cell phones.

Community Supported Agriculture

On one of our visits to New York this year, a friend of ours started talking about the CSA (or Community Supported Agriculture [wikipedia.org]) she was participating in. Heimlich and I thought to ourselves, "You get what from the who?" It is times like those that make me feel as though I must be living under a rock.

Since then, without even looking, I have seen articles about CSAs showing up in the news sources that I read anyway. Apparently, you pay up front for that season's worth of vegetables, usually to a small local farm. And every week or so, you get a share of whatever has been harvested lately.


Of course, there is good news and bad news. The main piece of bad news in my head is that you don't get to choose what vegetables you get. You get a part of whatever is harvested. So, if they are harvesting radishes (yech!) or whatever, you're getting a basket-full of them.

On the other hand, there are tons of things that I don't know how to cook, because I haven't done enough experimentation. Sometimes I feel as though I am stuck in a rut, and am not trying to learn how to cook new things. Lately, all I have been cooking with are green peppers, onions, and tomatoes. But there must be plenty of other tasty things out there to try.

Picture of vegetables courtesy of bullish1974's Flickr photostream [flickr.com].

@$&@* Debian Kernel Packages!

Self, you are an idiot. There should be licenses required to operate computers, so that yours could be revoked. Repeat after me: Set the status of kernel packages to hold. Set the status of kernel packages to hold.

On my primary machine (which happens to be a laptop), I am running Debian Etch (which earlier this year became the Stable branch, after long being the Testing one). For years, I have been using apt-get to handle package management, but it is quickly losing it's luster in my eyes. I liked it because I could type:

# apt-get upgrade

and it would go through and automatically update all of the packages I had currently installed to the latest versions. The problem is that every time a new kernel image is released, it totally hoses up stuff for the custom kernel that I have compiled. So, I end up having to download the newest kernel source and compile another custom one. Which just seems like too much work (although getting the latest kernel source is good), and I wouldn't have to do all of that, if I would just remember to set the status of those packages to hold (which tells apt not to download and install the newest version). Mental note, to set packages to hold:

echo "package_name hold"|dpkg --set-selections

This would be so much easier if I would stop trying to do all of my package management at the command line...

Wait, am I on YouTube?

My sister sent me a link to a pretty hilarious video on YouTube [youtube.com]:


Ok, first off, the video is hilarious as is. It's two guys lip-synching to the song "Two Princes", by the Spin Doctors. And these guys have all of the props, like the flowers in the above screenshot.


What takes it totally over the top for everyone in my family is the resemblance. The guy on the right looks EXACTLY like my nephew. The first time I saw the video, I was almost convinced that it was him. And the guy on the left looks very similar to me (see above picture), only he's obviously much cooler for having a video on YouTube.

My Lax Password Security Procedures

Like everyone else, I don't change my passwords often enough.

Most of the time, it's ok. I mean, most of the passwords are to things like message boards and whatnot. So, if someone manages to get my password and starts posting as me, who cares? I'm sure that everyone who knows me through a message board already thinks that I'm an asshole...

But then there are passwords that I use when checking email, changing my server settings, checking my credit card statements, etc. I'm actually relatively paranoid about those -- to the point where I don't even trust Firefox's password manager to handle them (which, unfortunately, is a fear that is not unfounded [slashdot.org]). But I still don't change them often enough.

I think that I know part of the problem. For the longest time, I have been relying on my (terrible) memory to judge when each password should be changed. And because of the uncertainty of when they were last changed, I tend to wait too long until the next change. So, from now on, I am recording the date when each password was last changed, which will hopefully encourage me to change it more often.

Sanctuary

A few months ago, I mentioned that I was thinking about starting to watch Sanctuary [sanctuaryforall.com], which is a new sci-fi series being distributed on the internet only. Amanda Tapping (Major Carter from Stargate SG-1 [imdb.com]) is the executive producer.

I have only been able to watch the first episode, and that also features David Hewlett, who played the hilarious Rodney McKay on Stargate: Atlantis [imdb.com].

I read some reviews of Sanctuary (like this one [moviesonline.ca]) before deciding to give it a shot.

The show is actually shockingly well produced. There are several scenes that require a lot of computer graphics, and most look flawless. A couple of the scenes near the end start looking video game-ish, but that was alright. The sets and the costumes also looked very good (although some of the costumes looked ridiculous at times). The entire production was very good.

Why does Amanda Tapping have to have a British accent? The accent is actually good enough to be believable, but it's really distracting.

The first episode was pretty intriguing, but leaves the viewer with a ton of questions. Who are these characters? They seem to have supernatural abilities, but are they good or evil? What is the nature of those abilities? The entire episode just feels like a huge cliffhanger. Every scene just generates more questions.

Due to the short length of the episode (just under 20 minutes), there isn't a lot of time for plot or character development. But it leaves the viewer wanting more, which I guess is the point.

I'd give it a 7 out of 10, but I am optimistic about the next few episodes.

New Linux GUI

Someone sent me a link to this video [uol.com.br], which shows new developments in one of the Linux GUIs.



The user demonstrates how to switch between desktops, switch between applications, and move windows around on a touchscreen. I was pretty impressed.

I am probably going to be replacing my aging laptop next year, and I am trying to figure out what type of computer I am going to want to buy. It would be nice if new operating systems actually contained features that I want, instead of needless cruft.

Pictures of Me and Work

Heimlich has been worried about my having a weblog and work. I'm not exactly sure why, since it's not exactly a secret that I have been keeping a weblog.

She seems particularly concerned about the pictures that I post of myself, like the one that I posted yesterday.

I would like to think that my coworkers have a pretty good sense of humor. But if any of my coworkers have any problems with me posting pictures of me making funny faces to the internet... I promise to stop posting them to my weblog, and go back to only making those faces at work.

Remember Me?

Dear Terence,

Remember me? I'm your weblog. You know, that place where you go on and on about topics that you know absolutely nothing about? Why haven't you been writing anything lately? The other weblogs and I haven't had anything to make fun of lately. What gives?

Your Weblog

--

Dear Weblog,

Decompression

Due to the high number of trips that we've been taking lately, I'm way behind in everything. I'll be back next week, once I get everything else done.

Crash Testing

Check out this website [bridger.us] that I ran across... It has pictures of a Mini Cooper and a Ford F-150 after a 40mph offset crash. It is unbelievable how different the structures of the vehicles look afterward, and which one appears to be safer.

It also lists a bunch of fairly common cars, and driver deaths per million of those cars. According to those statistics, there are a ton of mid-size and compact cars that are among the safest vehicles on the road. The author speculates that is not because they protect the passengers better in an accident, but because it is easier to avoid being in an accident in those vehicles.

Golf

Does anyone know that I used to play golf? Yeah, that was before I had really decided that I hate golf.



Above is a picture of me from over the weekend. A bunch of people in my family play golf, so I went to a driving range with them. It is safe to say that this picture was taken moments before I either completely whiffed, or I made the ball go a whole 10 feet.

Luckily for me, a bunch of people were taking videos, so we have lots of those to save for posterity. It's like an instant Dorf on Golf [wikipedia.org] video -- just add Terence.