Mark Turner

Freeing up time the wrong way

I’ve been tinkering with Event Calendar 3, a great WordPress iCalendar server plugin so I can easily serve up important community events to my neighbors. Part of this is testing it with various calendar clients like Exchange. Since I don’t have Windows running anywhere in the house, I thought I’d try the next best thing: Kelly’s Mac with Microsoft Entourage 2004 installed.

Entourage suffers from Microsoft’s peculiar habit of putting all its eggs in one basket. All Kelly’s email, events, tasks, and contacts live in one big file called (wait for it!) “Database.” If anything happens to that one file, you’re screwed. Back to that in a moment.
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MV Arctic Sea

Remember the Russian cargo ship MV Arctic Sea that allegedly disappeared after being hijacked? Experts familiar with piracy say the ship’s ordeal was anything but a typical piracy, as the ship officially carried a load of timber worth a mere $1.8 million. It was also allegedly hijacked in a busy European shipping lane where piracy is extremely rare.

A Russian journalist who was among the first to discount the official story has been told in a mysterious phone call to flee the country or be arrested: advice which he successfully took. This fuels further speculation that the MV Arctic Sea was carrying more than the load of timber that was officially reported.

Some think the ship was carrying unsanctioned cruise missiles and anti-aircraft units bound for Iran. Other speculation suggests that the Israeli Mossad or top officials in Russia found out about the smuggling operation and initiated the “hijacking” to intercept the shipment. The alleged arms shipment, some say, may have been put together by high Russian officials acting outside of the law, a “weapons mafia” as one Russian general termed it.

What is clear is that many media reports about the ship’s disappearance were deliberate falsehoods designed to disguise the real activity surrounding the ship. I suppose it will be a long time, if ever, that the public learns the truth about this mysterious incident.

Broughton traffic

I know school just started and I’m hoping things settle down, but in the past two weeks it’s proven difficult to get past the St. Mary’s intersection of Wade Avenue due to the traffic going to Broughton High School. I don’t remember traffic being this bad back in the spring.

Again, it’s early in the school year but so far getting around Broughton sucks.

Taste of Fall

This morning began a bit crisper than we’re used to here. The first day of September brought some decidedly fall-like weather. Today should be sunny with a high temperature in the mid-70s. This is about 10 degrees cooler than we’ve had for the past few weeks.

Bring it on, I say.

I’m on a Boat

Navy-Im_On_A_Boat

My friend Jamie sent a link today to a music video made by officers of the USS John Paul Jones (DDG-53). It’s set to the parody rap song I’m on a Boat by The Lonely Island (YouTube). The John Paul Jones version is a pretty good copy, considering the guys were limited in their props.

This video and another version of I’m on a Boat made by different sailors goes to show you what pulling six months worth of 12-hour shifts can do to one’s sanity. It’s a long way back from the Persian Gulf to California and sailors get a little slap happy. This is the kind of thing I would’ve put together on the end of a deployment if I’d had a MacBook back then.

Check out this version of Pump It by the VAW-116 Sunkings and the British Royal Navy doing Bohemian Rhapsody. Good times.

Warning: some videos contain explicit language.

Update 7 Oct 2009: The John Paul Jones video is also available here.

Roomba Doom-ba

Roomba-Wheel-Switch

Our Roomba has been doing what I call a “wiggle walk” lately, where it waddles about a foot in one direction then turns around and waddles in the other direction. I contacted iRobot’s support and provided a video clip of our Roomba’s walk. The diagnosis from iRobot was a problem with the wheel sensor. They suggested giving it a thorough cleaning to make sure the internal sensor wasn’t being blocked by dust.

I “popped the hood” today and vacuumed our vacuum out. That’s when I noticed the root of the problem: the left wheel sensor switch didn’t look like the right. The switch was broken, the little arm that goes with the switch was missing. iRobot’s support department told me iRobot can’t send a replacement switch and that the only thing that can be done is to replace the Roomba.

I just bought a new battery for the Roomba and don’t want to junk it just for a little switch. I refuse to believe I have to put Roomba down like a horse with a broken leg. I figure one can’t own a robot without knowing how to fix it, so I’m thinking about how to either fix the switch or work around it. Since Roomba is used mostly on the first floor and has almost no chance of falling, I think I may safely bypass the switch. We’ll see!

Update 10 Feb 2010: I did wind up hardwiring the switch, which breathed more life into my robot friend at the risk of having it run off a cliff someday. Fortunately I only use Roomba on the ground floor. Success!

Wrestling MythTV into submission

mythtv

As the All Your Base video meme said, “main screen turn on!”

I got my MythTV frontend working with my HDTV again after a ridiculously tough set of issues to resolve. First, the PC in question is my old Thinkpad laptop and is barely functional to begin with. If you touch it ever so lightly, for instance, the display and keyboard will cease to function. I had to carefully position it through trial and error before I got it to keep its video alive.

Once that was done I was happy to see mplayer doing something on my big screen, only it wasn’t showing any video. GNOME would dutifully draw a border around where my video was supposed to be showing but all there was was an empty box. Instead, the ATI Radeon video driver was showing my video on the laptop screen – the booby-trapped one, remember? No good. No good at all.
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