Other World

I actually made these just before going to Hawaii. One of my co-workers was on a demotivator kick and I was a bit disappointed with most of the Doctor Who ones I saw. So I made my own.

We welcomed a new addition the the family today: Chess the corn snake. While technically she’s too young to determine gender, we’re referring to her in the feminine. She’s only four or five months old right now and quite small. Right now I’m living with Kristen (my sister), and Hannah (Julie recently moved out). Victoria decided that she will be moving down in the fall, and while Kristen is moving out for summer, she is returning in the fall. This is the first time I’ll not have at least one roommate who can’t stand snakes. I was planning on waiting until fall to get one. But Victoria made me go dress shopping so I made her go to the pet store with me. After holding her I waited 24 hours, thought it over, and went back today to buy her.

Chess joins my Beta fish, Tamale, and my Scorpion, Lesath. I do enjoy critters. I hope to someday have some larger ones, like horses and dogs. I’ll soon be adding galleries of all my pets, plus my gardening work. This weekend I’m going to work on a table-top aeroponics unit. Victoria is doing research on greenhouses. We’re hoping to start working on a greenhouse and experimenting with aeroponics and hydroponics.

I need to put a computer in the kitchen. Right now whenever I want to look up one of my recipes I have to drag in a laptop or print something out. Until I get back to practicing Ruby on Rails with a Cookbook program I’m going to use this thing to put some of my favorite recipes online so that I can easily access them. I don’t have my computers properly networked yet and right now all my recipes are in Vim. The following is a recipe I found online for a Cafe Rio Salad knock off. Works pretty good. This part will only have the Pork, Rice and Salad dressing. Maybe later I’ll add some of my personal touches, like the salsa, and guacamole. I’m making it for a dinner party tonight for some out of town friends.

PORK

Slow cook your pork roast in a crock pot with garlic and a little water until you can pull it apart (8+ hours). At that point add the following

1 can diced green chilis
1 to 2 cans of medium or hot enchilada sauce (the red stuff), depending on how much pork you use
1 can of either Dr. Pepper or Coke (I use Coke)
At least 1 cup of brown sugar but use as much more as you want to get your sweetness
salt to taste.

Make your recipe a little on the strong side as once you add it to a tortilla it mutes the flavors just a bit

CILANTRO-LIME RICE

1 cup uncooked rice
1 teaspoon butter or margarine
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 teaspoon lime zest
1 can (15 oz) chicken broth
1 1/4 cup water
2 tablespoons freshly squeezed lime juice
2 teaspoons granulated sugar
3 tablespoons fresh chopped cilantro

In a saucepan combine rice, butter, garlic, lime peel, chicken broth and water. Bring to a boil. Cover and cook 15-20 minutes, until rice is tender. Remove from heat. In a small bowl combine lime juice, sugar and cilantro. Pour over hot cooked rice.

SALAD DRESSING

1 1/3 cups sour cream
3/4 cup mayonnaise
1 bunch of cilantro
1 package ranch dressing mix
4 tbsp. salsa verde (green salsa)
2 cloves of garlic
1/8 tsp. Tabasco sauce
juice of one lime

Mix together in the blender… and that’s it!

It’s that time again. Spring is gardening time. I’ve already bought seeds for herbs and veggies. I’m going to the hardware store today to pick up some flowers to dress up the porch. While I’m at it I think  I’ll pick up some wood. I’m determined to start a worm bin this year.

Graveyard shift has me interested in another project. Sleeping during the day has been tricky. The light coming in and the noise of the grounds keepers tends to wake me up. I’m sleeping longer during the day than I should be. On top of that the plants in my room are suffering from the lack of light since my blinds are closed during the day. I think I’ll move my  bed to the other end of my room. I want to build a sort of headboard to go with it. I want it to be wide enough to put my stereo on it so that I can play music to drown out the noise without playing it too loud. I’ll also hang some dark fabric from it to keep out the light so I can keep the blinds open for my plants.

My latest project is in action right now. I’m typing this post on my new OLPC laptop. I asked for one for Christmas and play time has finally started. It only just arrived. I’ve been quiet jealous of others who received theirs earlier, but it’s been worth the wait. It’s so small and light and cute! I might need to plug in a USB keyboard. I doubt this one is ergonomical. Still, I love it and I’m anxious to see what all it can do.

I’ve moved to doing tech support during the graveyard shift. I started Sunday night. So far the biggest adjustment hasn’t been my sleep schedule. It’s been my eating schedule. We have no lunch break on Graves and I like to climb in bed as soon as I get home. This means that if I’m not careful I could go 16 hours without food. So far I’m compensating with a Hot Pocket around 4am. I took leftovers from my dinner last night to my shift, but I can’t seem to muster up the motivation to eat anything big that late at night. The weird eating schedule has me feeling a little sick.

My new supervisor is quite nice. My first night he told me that if I needed to I could leave at 3am or 4am. I’m pleased that I’ve made it through four nights on the shift so far without any serious trouble. Tonight is my first night off. I’m happy to have time off, but this has been my first real challenge in staying awake since I started. My goal was to stay up until about 4am, and then “go to bed early.” It’s not even 1am and I’m struggling, hence the rather pointless blog post. I should be taking this time to get some school work done. School is the reason I made the shift in the first place. I may be able to get a few small assignments done, but I’m running a little low on energy and motivation tonight. I also plan on taking these nights off to hit the Gym. During the day when I’m wide awake, swimming laps for a few hours sounds rather peaceful and plesant. We’ll see if that bears true.

I know it’s only December, but I’m already making plans for this coming October. I bought some wooden 3D puzzles with Christmas money. I bought a Chinese Phoenix and a combined phoenix dragon puzzle. The combined puzzle in particular should make for a nice pumpkin carving. I paid way too much money for my puzzles at a booth in the mall. The following website has these puzzles for a much better price: http://www.ecclecstacy.com/puzzeled2.html.

In related news, I was searching Google pictures for “Chinese Phoenix pumpkin” One of the top three results was my Chinese dragon carving, and it wasn’t from my web page. The link to the site is http://www.anytimecostumes.com/chatter/2007/10/7-pumpkin-design-ideas/.

I noticed when I got home that I couldn’t play movies on my laptop. It’s running Fedora 8. I tried running Totem movie player. Got sound, but the screen was just blue. Blue screen of death for Linux I guess, only it didn’t take out my whole laptop. A little research suggested that my Compiz settings might be interfering. Compiz lets me do nifty desktop graphics like full transparency on my terminals and the workspace cube. Turning compiz off didn’t help. The following link got me started: https://answers.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+question/16972. I ran gstreamer-properties in a terminal and went to the video tab. I then selected “X Window System (No Xv)” under “Default Output.” That didn’t work.

I then installed xine and gxine to see if it was just a Totem problem. That didn’t work either but it helped later. I changed my search to look for xine issues instead of Totem. From there I found a site that suggested opening the xine_config file. Most distros have this located in your home folder under .gnome2/Totem. In that file I ran a search for “video driver.” I changed the following lines:

#video driver to use
#string, default: auto
#video.driver:auto

to

#video driver to use
#string, default: auto
video.driver:xshm

After rebooting the computer I still wasn’t getting anywhere. But the following forum at least had a good clue to getting something working.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2859

The original poster noted that he could play movies if he had more than one player open at once. So I opened Totem and gxine and started both playing. Both brought up video. Now I can open just one and it works fine. Strange work-around, but video problem solved.

On the down side, my parents home computer is in really bad shape. I had it booting Knoppix and we had started some data backup. But now it won’t boot at all. Unless I figure out why and am able to fix it, that machine may be a lost cause. I should still be able to move the hard drives to another machine to recover the data.

Today my family’s primary computer stopped working. Starts to boot, then reboots with the option to start in Safe Mode. None of the safe modes are working. I called my dad and explained the problem. Something similar happened to his primary work computer a few years ago. He asked me if I could “Linux” it. I love that. When his work machine went down a few years ago I used a Knoppix CD to connect it to his network and pull all the data off. He’ll bring home that same CD tonight so that we can rescue the data from this machine. I do wish I could convince him to just let me put Linux on the machine. There is the possibility that a hard drive is acting up, but I doubt it. A nice Ubuntu distro could be styled to look like Windows. My mom wasn’t able to use the computer last night to view pictures on a CD. I brought them up without a hitch on my Fedora box.

It would be just my luck that when I have the best chance to convert the home family computer I leave all my best CDs at home. Linux just makes everything better.

Welcome to prettyprettylights.com. This page is largely here because I get a free domain with my new job. But I’ve been meaning to break into the blogosphere for a while now. Assuming I’m consistent with this the topics could range from technical to a standard journal entry. To kick off, this blog isn’t the only thing that’s finally up and running.

After over a month of being down my mythtv box is finally back up and running. Background: In mid-October my Dell GX240 Optiplex mini-tower blew a power supply. This was just prior to my changing it to Linux MCE. I had the Kubuntu DVD and had begun backing up my favorite programs. Now power supplies are expensive and I was being affected by the Novell layoffs at the time. So the machine has been dead until tonight.

Tuesday a new power supply that I ordered online arrived. However, ti was the wrong size, and didn’t have enough cables for my two hard drives and DVD-ROM. Happily, tonight was the BYU computer surplus sale. I picked up what I though was another GX240 that had been stripped of RAM and hard drives. All I needed was the power supply. But it’s a pain getting them out of these boxes. So I ended up moving the PCI cards and drives to the new box. The upside is that I was wrong. For $20 I picked up a GX270, with has more RAM slots and a faster processor. But the RAM from my GX 240 didn’t match up. A trip to CompUSA and I now have more RAM too (the old box came with 256MB, I picked up a 1GB stick)! Even better, after plugging everything in it booted right back up. No OS re-install! I made some adjustments to the date and time in the BIOS, and had a little trouble with the network card, but I’m back in action.

For reference, the box is running Debian Testing. In Gnome the network shows as being down. Clicking on my network icon brought up the following error: “SIOGIFFLAGS error: No such device.” I opened the network settings and set up eth1 with DHCP instead of a static IP. From there it looked like the card was up and running, but after restarting the network the icon still showed no connection. After some googling on another machine and running a few commands, like ifconfig -a , I noticed that I had an IP address and the settings looked fine. lspci and dmeseg showed no errors. I pinged google and got a response. Turns out the connection is working, but my icon isn’t reflecting this fact. I don’t know why. But for tonight, I’m happy. All I need at this point is a subscription to a TV Listing service and I’ll be good as new. I think I’ll wait a few days to try the Linux MCE install. End of semester is bad timing for big projects.

To finish off, this won’t be the permanent look for the site. But so far this is my favorite theme. I’ve been having trouble with Firefox’s Web Developer plugin. Wen I go to edit this page’s CSS I lose the CSS completely. Never had that one happen before. So expect changes.