John Goerzen: A Clarification
You may remember my post Monday in which I told Mother Nature to "bring it on".
I would like to clarify that remark at this time. I would have preferred Mother Nature to interpret this in the President Bush sense of "please don't hurt us", rather than the "let's just knock out power to the entire plains region". A nice little romantic power outage Tuesday evening would have been nice.
We lost power at 3:10 on Tuesday according to my workstation's logs. It's still out, and our rural electric cooperative is estimating it will be another week until it's back, though that's better than the Dec. 22 date the state's much larger for-profit utility is giving people. We were lucky enough to be able to find a generator to rent on Wednesday morning. $35 a day isn't cheap. But on the other hand, we don't have a flooded basement due to not pumping out the sump pump, our food isn't spoiled, and our pipes aren't frozen.
At work, our Internet connection went down Tuesday morning. We use a fixed wireless connection, and this was the first time our ISP's radios have been tested in ice. Some antenna designs performed flawlessly. Then there were the antennas we had. 80% packet loss or worse. It wasn't safe to get up on the roof to deice them until Wednesday afternoon, and even then we couldn't get all the ice off. Finally today the connection was back to normal.
That two weeks after someone -- yes -- dug through Sprint/Embarq's apparent only fiber-optic link into town. Took down all long-distance calling into or out of the town, most cell towers, as well as all access to 911 (since dispatch is in another town) for about 8 hours. If we had still be using wired T1s, we would have been out of service with Internet as well.
All told, 200,000 households or business customers of the state's largest utility have been without power. Dozens of other utilities have also had significant outages. Ours alone lost 700 power poles and there are substations in need of repair all over the eastern part of the state. And we weren't even the hardest hit.
On the generator, we can generally pick any three of refrigerator, server, workstation, or furnace to run. So sometime warm, I'll upload the pictures I've taken so far. We have one nice CFL-powered electric lamp we're using, flashlights, and a kerosene lamp. It's amazing how after just a few days of this, we're starting to want to go to bed earlier. Or perhaps that was because I haven't had the chance to get a lot of sleep lately...
When we look out the house to the east, we see pitch black. Normally we can see some yard lights in the distance. Not this week. Nothing at all to the east. To the west, we can see yard lights tantalizingly close -- only 2 miles away, fed from a different location. Ah, the joys of being at the very end of a utility's network.
All this despite the fact that this storm wasn't really all that bad. The roads were never really terrible, and there weren't as many trees down as there were in the ice storm of 2005.
I heard a comment on the news today from an Iowa Republican who had followed the GOP debate yesterday. She mentioned that Romney made a comment like "Well, guess there's no global warming in Iowa with an ice storm like this, huh?" She pointed out that if Iowa was still as chilly as it used to, it would have been a snow storm instead of an ice storm. I agree.
I would like to clarify that remark at this time. I would have preferred Mother Nature to interpret this in the President Bush sense of "please don't hurt us", rather than the "let's just knock out power to the entire plains region". A nice little romantic power outage Tuesday evening would have been nice.
We lost power at 3:10 on Tuesday according to my workstation's logs. It's still out, and our rural electric cooperative is estimating it will be another week until it's back, though that's better than the Dec. 22 date the state's much larger for-profit utility is giving people. We were lucky enough to be able to find a generator to rent on Wednesday morning. $35 a day isn't cheap. But on the other hand, we don't have a flooded basement due to not pumping out the sump pump, our food isn't spoiled, and our pipes aren't frozen.
At work, our Internet connection went down Tuesday morning. We use a fixed wireless connection, and this was the first time our ISP's radios have been tested in ice. Some antenna designs performed flawlessly. Then there were the antennas we had. 80% packet loss or worse. It wasn't safe to get up on the roof to deice them until Wednesday afternoon, and even then we couldn't get all the ice off. Finally today the connection was back to normal.
That two weeks after someone -- yes -- dug through Sprint/Embarq's apparent only fiber-optic link into town. Took down all long-distance calling into or out of the town, most cell towers, as well as all access to 911 (since dispatch is in another town) for about 8 hours. If we had still be using wired T1s, we would have been out of service with Internet as well.
All told, 200,000 households or business customers of the state's largest utility have been without power. Dozens of other utilities have also had significant outages. Ours alone lost 700 power poles and there are substations in need of repair all over the eastern part of the state. And we weren't even the hardest hit.
On the generator, we can generally pick any three of refrigerator, server, workstation, or furnace to run. So sometime warm, I'll upload the pictures I've taken so far. We have one nice CFL-powered electric lamp we're using, flashlights, and a kerosene lamp. It's amazing how after just a few days of this, we're starting to want to go to bed earlier. Or perhaps that was because I haven't had the chance to get a lot of sleep lately...
When we look out the house to the east, we see pitch black. Normally we can see some yard lights in the distance. Not this week. Nothing at all to the east. To the west, we can see yard lights tantalizingly close -- only 2 miles away, fed from a different location. Ah, the joys of being at the very end of a utility's network.
All this despite the fact that this storm wasn't really all that bad. The roads were never really terrible, and there weren't as many trees down as there were in the ice storm of 2005.
I heard a comment on the news today from an Iowa Republican who had followed the GOP debate yesterday. She mentioned that Romney made a comment like "Well, guess there's no global warming in Iowa with an ice storm like this, huh?" She pointed out that if Iowa was still as chilly as it used to, it would have been a snow storm instead of an ice storm. I agree.
DeBaBaReTools seems to work good enough that writing an early-stage HOW TO seems to worth the time :)
After a lot of hacking I've now got chronicle displaying comments upon entries.
Since my blog is compiled on my home desktop machine and comment submission happens upon a remote machine the process involves a bit of a hack:
On Monday I was at a 
Maybe you have heard about Nokia, or rather a Nokia employee speaking in the name of the company, spreading FUD about ogg theora and proposing it shouldn't be recommended in HTML5. 
As my aging ThinkPad is starting to show signs of an impeding retirement, I recently began looking for a newer laptop to replace it. My current choice would be for an LG Electronics model E200-A.CPPPV laptop. However, when trying an Ubuntu Feisty live CD on it, X failed to find any usable screen resolution and aborted. Thus I was wondering if anybody had better results using a Gutsy CD? In principle, the hardware should be supported, since it's all Intel and ATI components but, these days, you never know, especially with graphic and wireless chipsets. Comments?
I got a Sony Ericsson k608i. It's fairly old and I don't like Sony
(rootkit distributors that they are), but it was very cheap... if I
didn't have the opportunity to use that, I'd've probably got one of
3's 50-quid Skypephones and ignored the Skype bit. I don't really
know enough yet to buy smart and I'm not a 3G Power Phoner, so I
suspect the bog standard would be good enough for me.
A week on, it works pretty well. 3mail seems to be free to receive
and read, so I can set my mail sieve to redirect copies from my
heavily-filtered inbox to it and then choose between 10p/mail replies
or 50p/day unlimited internet and use mujMail and MIDPssh. Typing on
the phone isn't much fun, but it's not too bad.
The speakerphone is good enough that I don't need to carry a headset
around with me and some of the free video like animated weather maps
are quite fun, but I'm not sure how much I'll use them. I usually
have access to a TV, after all. Even larger train stations often have
TVs around. 2.50 for unlimited access to BBC One, Three, News24 and
itv1 may be useful if there's something I really want to watch, but
I'd expect it to eat battery. Also, the video seemed to flake out far
too easily when moving on local trains.
The camera seems OK, although I haven't figured out how to make it
flash and I've not yet copied pictures off to a bigger screen or a
printer. I've got bluetooth working, but I think I also need to
install obex. I need more time.
Has anyone got either headsetd or alsa pcm type bluetooth working
well? My headset seems to have a very quiet microphone, is slow to
start and has been unstable so far.
(2007-12-12: 1 comment)
So much for KDE 4 ... after a lengty downgrade and package picking session
(Yay! for dependency handling in Debian!) I'm now back to the trusted KDE 3.5.x
(mostly x == 8) and will wait until KDE4 hits testing (which would be after
lenny, I guess.) KDE 4 sort of worked - but I'd not call this
&ldqupbeta%rdquo; at this stage, and apparently the KDE people joined the
use-as-much-screen-surface-as-possible-for-funky-stuff crowd, leaving less
space for actual application content than before. I hope the final versions
can at least be configured to be smaller.
I hoped the 
A while back, I needed to do something with a mainboard made by
Intel. The mainboard doesn't have a PS/2 connector; so I had to use a
USB keyboard. In itself, this is horrible; USB is an incredibly bad
interface to connect a keyboard to, IMO. But, well, sometimes the
decision isn't yours, you know. Bad Intel.
Given my above-stated opinion on USB, I guess it's not surprising
that I don't have a USB keyboard; I don't believe in them. But,
well, a mainboard without a PS/2 connector doesn't suddenly get one
because I look at it, so I went to a nearby computer shop with the
intention to buy me a keyboard.
While it's bad enough that I had to get me a USB keyboard, they
managed to make things worse. The 
The main project I'm currently working on for money is a device driver for an actual bit of hardware.
Since people working on Windows are slightly more used to the idea that money is exchanged for goods and services, this is the primary target platform.
After dealing with all the interesting bits concerning development on this platform, I now have a .sys, a .inf, a .dll and a .xsl to install. The DLL was easy, Windows Installer has special handling for COM DLLs; the XSL file was a bit tricky since it needs to be placed in a "special" directory that will be phased out before Longhorn (the documentation is that old...), and I'm completely lost on the other two as the Installer does not know about the special registration system for drivers at all.
At this point, I started entering the rabbit hole.
