So I’m in Orange County, CA visiting my sister this weekend, and have gone to some length to get my bike out here. So what happens? I demolished my chain within 60 seconds of our first ride. In all my years, I’ve never twisted a chain. Gah!

The wreckage:

[1] [2]

The attempted repair, using nothing but pliers and a standard screwdriver:

[1][2]

’twas unsuccessful, stupid chain won’t rail around the smaller gears. D’oh!

Off to the bike shop in the morning for parts and supplies. In the mean time, we’re off to the local pub to sample the local Guinness :)

So I finally got rid of my truck, which was sad. However I did something good with it — rather than going thru the hassle of trying to sell it, I donated it using donateacar.com which is a non-profit which facilitates people donating their cars, auctions them off, and donates the proceeds to a charity. Pretty cool, eh? Worked out quite well for me because I knew I’d have some trouble selling my truck here in Chicago.

Importantly, I did save the license plate :)

Been taking lots of pictures :)

Go ahead, laugh.  I know it’s funny that I somehow managed to break my old camera while making dinner.  What can I say.  I like to take pictures of things that I cook.  It just seems that it’s a bad idea to do so while excessively drunk, which is what finally did it in the end.

I’m one who loves old things, particularly when it comes to electronics.  Like sting, my P2 router.  Or my truck.  Or…well you name it, it’s old. So let me introduce my old camera - a Fujifilm FinePix A205 with a whopping two megapixels which I bought sometime in 2003:

So here’s my shiny new camera, a Canon Powershot SD1000:

For laughing effect, here’s tonight’s dinner:

(mmm, tasty!)

(no cameras were hurt in the process of making this dinner.)

To make life tastier, it worked right out of the box w/ gphoto and f-spot.  Wohoo!

I did however learn that the latest trunk of libgphoto2 is breaking ABI, which upsets f-spot’s crufty old version of libgphoto2-sharp.  Perhaps I’ll get back on the horse and get that sorted out sometime soon…

At work we always marvel about the comments we come across in our code. Indiana Jones stories that somehow get related back to the code by it, how tired the programmer was when writing the code, indications of the [lack of] sobriety of the programmer, random musings about various wildlife…you name it. There’s nothing better than finding a gem. Feel free to submit your own stories.

Actually, I take that back. There is! Discovering your own gems!

So this isn’t exactly code, but it really got me. When I upped to GNOME 2.20, I noticed my task list applet had some gibberish on the right-hand side of it. Strange, eh? Perhaps some sort of bug, perhaps? Naw, something that obvious would’ve been spotted a long time ago. I’ve done something strangely, I was sure of it. As always, a visual is best [red indicates my thoughs at the time…]:

It took me a few weeks of not being able to read such small text and not bothering to even try to before I even thought twice about it. It’s scary. It’s new. It’s something. It’ll go away. Or I’ll figure out what it’s there for.

Ah hah! All it took was a few drinks, and it all made sense. Those must be workspace names! But…uh…gosh, those are strange names when you manage to look close enough to read them. “comes after 11″ — who the hell named these things?!

Yep, that’d be me. Guilty as charged.

And I remember. Years ago. Naming my workspaces because “Workspace {1..4}” simply was unacceptable to me. But there was no good reason to stick a proper name on the workspace anyway, so I didn’t. I bet I childishly giggled to myself while writing those. But now it seems they’re used. And I’m laughing even more. Yep. Gem discovered.

Moral of the story: It’s better than finding $20 in your back pocket!

For those of you who can count, what /is/ after 11? I could never figure it out.

[but then I looked it up on Wikipedia…lo and behold!]

/* note to reader: it’s the american dream! [eddie izzard] */

So I finally got my power turned back on tonight a bit after 6:00…have been without since Thursday afternoon.  Only really frustrating part was throwing out a lot of good food.  Hardest part was trying to figure out what to do with myself having no computers/internet other than my N770 on GPRS.  Mostly looking forward to a warm shower!

I wasn’t home during the storm and downtown (just a few miles away) it wasn’t that bad down there.  Neighbors reported that it was the scarriest storm they’ve been thru (for whatever reason, Chicago seems to never really get hit that hard?)  One even mentioned that the windows in their home were bowing from the crazy winds/pressure.

I’m amazed by some of the huge trees that came down — uprooted and all.  The pictures speak for themselves.

In the last 30 days, I’ve killed so much hardware it’s not even funny anymore.

• Zen Micro died today. After my first look it was grim. Put it back together tonight and surprisingly enough, it actually partially works. I even once got it to power on to the recovery screen. I also managed to crash Banshee with it once (that’s good sign!) But the touchpad is completely fried. This is bad. However, I think that my selection of tool was adequate for the task :)
  • A replacement may well be on it’s way…
• Nokia 770 is on the fritz. Been dealing with multiple issues:
  • Battery doesn’t seem to be physically stable anymore. I find my N770 turned off sometimes, and sometimes even a small wiggle of the battery does it.
  • Hasn’t been powering on all the time. Usually takes me ten minutes of futzing with it to make it come alive, and even then it crashes a lot at first. This seems to have steadied off a bit, if such a thing is possible.
  • Did I mention crashing? Yes, lots of crashing. Applications dying, particularly Opera. Kernel panics. Lost my maemopad database the other day, and my backup had puked the night before so I lost some important notes.
• Lost a hard drive, likely related to moving. Was a nice WD SATA 160 gig from a RAID1 setup. Thank goodness for Linux MD support being awesome and handling this properly, you’ve saved me oh-so-many times over the years.
  • Neat fact: I installed that hard drive nearly two years ago. That’s probably the longest I’ve ever had a hard running data drive last. Much better than the WD 60 gig drives I used to have to buy every six months!
• My stupid onboard IDE controller is on the fritz. I swear, it has a timeout of 8 hours, and then it dies, and I have to reboot. Fortunately that just means that I loose my optical drives. Unfortunately for me, it means that I lose my temper at midnight when I’m in the middle of a good movie, half asleep, and the movie quits. Don’t mess with me that late at night.
• Laptop is finally giving in again. I blame this on the travels. The LCD backlight won’t stay on for more than a few seconds. So it’s pretty much become an incoming SSH only box. As a matter of fact, I haven’t actually used it for anything in two weeks.
• Camera is dying. I’d blame this on the travels, but this is actually because I dropped it^W^W^W it’s getting old. Seems that some days the zoom motor just refuses to move. 2003 was a great year for digital cameras, but it isn’t anymore.

So with that, send me your hardware folks, and I promise — I’ll send it back in pieces!

Oh and I’ve broken other things…I’ve smashed this…and I’ve run the cat out the window! (Eddie Izzard joke) (you should laugh)

So yesterday I was quite convinced that I was going to make it down to see the Chicago Air and Water Show, hoping I could see the Thunderbirds.  Well lets just say that we got water alright.  I stood out in the rain for well over an hour hoping to see something, but it turns out that they cancelled much (if not all of it).  I came home soaked to the bone, but I had been smart enough to put all the electronics in my bad inside a spare plastic bag — or had I?

Last night I was unpacking my bag and found my Creative Zen Micro down at the bottom of the bag.  It was a sad sight.  I might as well have just gone for a swim in the lake while I was at it, because it was dripping, and I could see water inside the screen.  Tonight, with the help of this handy article at hardwarezone.com, I took it apart and found what I expected — pools of water inside the device. I’m hopeful that I can pull the ole “let it dry, reassemble and it’ll work” game, but I’m doubtful.

Does anyone have an old/spare MTP device that they’d be willing to donate or provide cheaply so I can work on MTP stuff for Banshee?  I’m going to comb eBay of course, but would be happy to take one off someone’s hands if they have a spare.  I don’t really have the cash or need these days to buy anything new.  If you have one, drop me a line!

In the mean time, I guess I’ll just have to write really clean code for Banshee that works perfectly, right? ;)

So as a part of me taking a crazy vacation, I made it to Paris (for a whopping 24 hours) with one goal: The Tour de France!

Photos to make anyone who wasn’t there jealous:

This is mostly to brag to my siblings, if they haven’t heard yet…

I will be taking the Eurostar train from London on the 28th down to Paris, France.  Will stay the night, and then the next morning get up to watch the final stage of the Tour de France.  How cool is that?!

Any of my fellow free software hackers know a decent cheap place to stay a night in/around Paris?

So I arrived in London around 6 AM; everything went quickly.  Plane ride was fun, albeit quite cozy. Took the paddington express train, which is super slick, jumped on the underground to Euston, and wandered around for a while until my train up to Birmingham. The train ride up was so much faster than I had expected — we don’t have quick, cheap trains like that in the US! By the way — if you want a fun bit of adventure when travelling…don’t bring a map of your destination city with you. Half the fun is wandering around (looking quite touristy with my huge bag) and trying to figure out where the heck I am. Then buy a map :)

I’ve been meeting up with a number of GNOME folks that I’ve known over the last year and a half online, and it’s been a great experience. It’s kinda cool to have a team of Banshee hackers and supporters all roaming around. So many ideas! The hacking itch needs to be scratched this week. Big time.

So rather than turn up and go to sessions, what did I do? I walked across town with a bunch of the guys and watched the big football match. It was a blast! I went thru about 3 sets of batteries taking pictures, which I’ll post soon. Lots of funny action shots of people missing the goal. Hilarity.

Then of course, went out and got some beers and the fixings for some good ‘ol homemade pizza. Brought it back to the hostel where we’re staying at and made some pizza! Thanks to Aiden for helping us out and making it a lot of fun. Combine that with some beers, and then meeting up with a few folks later at a bar, and it was a great evening.  Also managed to give away an Ubuntu live cd to one of the guys working at the hostel — he was quite curious about free software and wanted to give it a try.  We didn’t even have to try to “sell it” — he asked for it!