nothing happens

So we had another electrician out to the house who claims that, contrary to the findings of the one who was here yesterday, the neutral does indeed have current flowing through it. He believes that the corrosion on the neutral isn't fatally bad, but that this case may be consistent with a previous recent experience of his in which current flowed through the neutral sometimes, but through the pipes other times (yesterday's electrician initially could not get a spark off the water pipes by tapping then with a wrench, but then later got a 2.9A reading off them; the plumber from a few weeks ago got a jolt from the water lines at first, but then failed to get a spark from them later on); in that case, the ground wire of the service connection was loose and disconnected part of the time, subject to influence of the weather, particularly wind. He's calling the utility company to look into it.

Other major upheavals are very possibly afoot around the Centipede Farm, however… but I'm keeping quiet on those for the moment.

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Some more recent live stuff for you: here's Radio Dramamine's set from Saturday night.

1. Opt Out
2. Jenny Sequoia
3. Scanning For Threats
4. Drunk At The Library
5. '62' Manflower
6. Hell Is Flooded
7. Buffalo Sweat
8. I Wanna Be Your Dog (cover, by The Stooges)
9. Novelty (cover, by Joy Division)
10. Zombie Police

And here's a zip file of the whole thing.

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I've decided to post downloads of some of my music now and again. Originally I was going to wait to do this sort of thing until I got a new site launched that was more specifically music-oriented, but then I realized that nothing would be stopping me from just putting these up on that new site over again once it was up.

I frequently record my shows; the sound quality doesn't always come out stellar, and I occasionally edit a couple songs out if we/I didn't play them so great. If I'd feel comfortable putting it on a demo though, I'll put it up for download.

Here is six songs from my solo set on May 8. Quite a bit of this material has been previously performed by Exit Drills, The Cactus Rats, No Consensus. It was a pretty raw performance, so if you like that sort of thing, you're in for a treat.

1. Twisted Pair
2. High Roller (cover, by Cheap Trick)
3. The Toaster Takes Too Long
4. Jackhammer
5. Out Of Focus (cover, by Blue Cheer)
6. Along For The Ride

Or you can grab all six songs in one zip file.

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Holy fuck.

So, evidently, my house requires some serious electrical work, which in the opinion of a certain local electrician, "needs to be addressed immediately," renders the house unsafe to occupy, or at least, to bathe in, that the electricity to the house "really should probably shut off," but which is a larger job than his company has time for. And when and if I get this piece fixed (assuming I survive long enough, which seems to be in question as long as I remain here and keep the power on), the city is going to require a complete upgrade of the system which will cost a whole pile more than just fixing the current problem.

When it rains, it fucking pours.

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Somehow my previous post of this content got hax0red. The post's real url still appeared in the address bar, but you got a stupid online pharmacy spam page. So I've deleted it and am reposting. If anyone has any idea how this was done, I'm curious — to my knowledge, it wasn't done using a comment, since the post showed having 0 comments. And I don't think I'd call it a redirect, since the post's URL still showed in the address bar. Weird.

chuck@dell-desktop:~/workspace2$ history | awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
88 ls
62 svn
53 sudo
39 vim
39 cd
31 mysql
16 cp
15 rm
15 apt-cache
9 mkdir

I guess I don't really see the appeal of this one. I heard about it from Plouj. Also, I couldn't so the "as root" version because I'm using Ubuntu… which explains sudo being so high on the list.

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• Up or Out: Solving the IT Turnover Crisis
  

  Employees – especially the most talented ones – are not “dating around” and moving from place to place in search of the Perfect Company at which they can grow old and retire at. They’ve already aced the first four rungs of Maslow’s hierarchy and are in search of self-actualization: the instinctual need of humans to make the most of their abilities and to strive to be the best they can.

• The state of the software development crisis: status quo
  

  Software is hard. Really hard. This should not be surprising to anyone who understands that it is really the field of assembling instructions for doing… anything. Anything that people want to get done. It’s sort of a meta-field that encompasses almost all other fields, with more being added every day.

  …

  The Cult of Smart. … This leads to things like the “Agile Methodology”, as in “I’m so Agile I don’t need a Methodology.”

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Dear Lazyweb,

I've been trying for about two years to make this demon spawn Dell XPS400 take a proper decent dual-boot install, and it seems I need help with some GRUB incantations or possibly BIOS wrangling…

The latest distro I'm attempting is the latest Ubuntu, AMD64, but in the past both Fedora and Debian and probably a couple others have been tried. The deal is that I ordered this machine not having ever encountered SATA or knowing anything about it before, assuming that I could just add a certain Seagate drive that I keep a lot of "important" data (the entire Ragman Records archive, among other things) on to the machine as an extra drive and everything would be fine. So I get the thing and realize that I've nowhere to hook this drive up; the board has one IDE connector and it's home to the CD/DVD drives. So I head down to that awful place in the blue building with the big yellow sign and purchase me an Adaptec ASH-1233 IDE controller, slap it into a PCI slot, hook the drive up as secondary master. Windows has no problem with this: "Hey look, another hard drive, and it's not the one I'm booting from. I'm going to love it and hug it and squeeze it and call it G:"

Here's the deal: I want to install dual boot, with the Linux partition on the same drive with the Windows one (the SATA the box came with). I boot the Ubuntu Live CD, and everything is great. The Windows partition and the old Seagate are detected and slapped into the "Places" menu where I can mount them and do whatever to them. Yay!

Booting once actually installed is another matter, however. During install, once the partitioning step comes up, note that the drive with the Windows partition shows up as sdb and "SCSI3", but the Seagate pops in as sda-something and SCSI2.

By default, the installer decides to put the bootloader on the Seagate, which it has decided is (hd0), I don't know why, but it is what it is. So if I go ahead with that, I can boot either Windows or Ubuntu, but to do so I have to hit F12 during startup and pick the Seagate drive from the boot menu; and if I then proceed to boot the new Ubuntu install, it appears to have no idea that any other drives/partitions exist — the Seagate and the Windows partition are nowhere to be found, and that sucks.

On the other hand, if I tell the installer to put the bootloader on (hd1) a.k.a. sdb instead, and let the machine boot to the SATA drive, GRUB comes up, but neither OS will boot. Selecting Ubuntu gives me error 17 "Could not mount partition," and selecting Windows gives me error 22 "Partition Does Not Exist." And that sucks way worse.

I'm semi-convinced that if I can just convince this machine that the SATA is sda instead of sdb, and/or is (hd0) or is a lower SCSI(\d) than the Seagate, consistent with the general concept that i intend it to be my "main" drive and the other drive is "second," my troubles will be over. Also, having to boot from the drive that has no OS installed on it just feels wrong.

Some things I've tried:

• giving the ide=reverse option to the liveCD in hopes it will detect the drives in the opposite order and install GRUB to do likewise. ide=reverse appeared to have no effect.
• moving the Seagate to the primary connector on the IDE controller. Might not have been a good idea, since I think it conflicts with the CD drives there, I didn't go that far. What I do know is, it doesn't seem to change anything about how the drives get detected.
• going to BIOS setup and changing SATA behavior to "Combination Mode." Before I did this, the live CD/installer would show the SATA drive as SCSI5 instead of SCSI3 as described above. I'm not sure if this has helped, hurt, or been neutral. Everything else seems to be the same.
• messing with device.map in GRUB by switching the way around that the drives are listed. I gave up on this because I only sort of know what I'm doing here, and once I went into the GRUB console after making this edit, my attempts at doing a "root" or "setup" were met with only error messages.
• going into the IDE controller's BIOS. I got a small menu that said something along the lines of "Press F1 to add HDD set, press F2 to remove HDD set." I had no idea what it was talking about here, but I pressed one of those keys and was asked to enter a number. Having even less idea what was going on at this point, and not being able to find any documentation on the subject, I ditched on this plan as well.

Thing I have not tried because it would involve babysitting a partition-resize:

• putting a /boot partition on the SATA drive.

Any light bulbs go on out there?

Update:

I think I might be almost ready to call this fixed… those of you who have this problem and can't boot to the partition at all, however, are going to have to boot from the live CD to get somewhere where you can edit the menu.lst. For this you'll need to get to a terminal, do a sudo -s, mount the partition you installed to, and chroot to it.

Even more update: Yeah, I think that did the trick… unfortunately I'm going to have to do it all over again, as it seems that somewhere in my experimentations I managed to bork my Windows install. The data was still there, Ubuntu mounted the partition fine, but it wouldn't boot anymore. So I had to reinstall Windows, which unfortunately clobbers the MBR, meaning I'll have to redo GRUB entirely. A fine way to waste a couple days.

Update #3: It may be specific to how my system is set up, but there seems to be no way to put GRUB on the SATA drive without borking the Windows partition's boot section (not the MBR). I ended up doing fixboot and fixmbr from a recovery disk and installing Ubuntu again with GRUB on the Seagate. I guess I'll just have to put up with F12ing to the boot device menu. Also: 64-bit dual core my ass, this Dell XPS400 still runs Ubuntu like a lumbering dinosaur (and as I found out from doing a Windows reinstall, it's even worse in Windows XP if you use the drivers it installs with by default, until you go install all of Dell's). It gets almost acceptable if I turn off all the effects in GNOME. Worst computer I've ever owned.

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Good times were had yet again at The Reverb. Some folks were surprised at the size of the turnout since the UNI students were moved out as of Friday night; others commented more the age of the turnout, thinking some parents must be there to see their kids play or something. Presumably this would apply to Old Men, Dead Dogs, who were the newest and newest-looking band on the bill, but they didn't look like high schoolers either. To be sure, there were a lot of faces at the show I don't usually see much of; my theory is that a lot of locals decided that it's safe to go out now that they don't have to deal with annoying college kids swarming all over the place.

So Long! sounded pretty good, playing fast enough that they constantly sound like they're about to go off the rails entirely. They had a bassist who looks new, but was unremarkable apart from having glasses and a cool-looking amp. He pretty much just stuck to the old roots on the eights routine. Kevin G is their new drummer, and his skills are legendary; much of their material constrains him to the archetypal standard 90s-and-later punk beat, however. In a few fills and slower sections he was able to do his trademark "one drummer that sounds like two" thing, though it was hard to make out all the detail he throws in over the volume of the guitar amps. Here's a tip for you kids playing rock out there: if you've got two guitarists with half-stacks and you're playing a small club, a little restraint is called for if you don't want to end up just making it impossible for the audience to hear the vocals and other instruments. And then you wonder why you have to keep asking for things to be turned up in the monitors… Still, despite the new lineup only having about 25 minutes of material worked up as yet, there was sort of a new presence to them last night. I have a feeling that when they start working on some new stuff, something really interesting is going to happen.

Old Men, Dead Dogs kind of just sounded like So Long but not nearly as what you'd call tight — they actually did fall off the rails quite a bit. The singer had more of a classic hardcore kind of stage presence, and they too only had about a 25 minute set. Word is they've been at it about a month now. So Long! was actually a bit miffed at having to play before them, but the deal is that the singer had to work until 10. My attention definitely wandered though, I can only take the standard-issue modern hardcore/punk rock thing for so long.

I think we played pretty well. A lot of positive feedback followed; there were some sound issues from Tyler's amp as usual — something about the combination of that amp and the Reverb's microphones turns it into kind of an overdriven mess; then again it sounds kind of cool that way. Tyler played pretty decently though, despite being characteristically inebriated. May have been one of our better executed sets so far. No less a local music-scene figure than Amy G was raving about our set to me afterwards, which was very encouraging.

The Venom Electric, depending on which way you look at it, are either a reincarnation of Dylan Sires's earlier band The Panama Kids or a Teddy Boys side project. They're a product of that Teddy Boys/Beat Strings power-pop scene and they sound like it. Some bunch of local kids apparently grew up around the good Beatles records being played a lot, and we end up with bands like these, built around crafty songwriters with great melodic sense who seem to just eat, breathe, live, exude music continuously. You'll get no complaints from me on that. Brian C. recently imparted to me during a Teddy Boys set, "I love Tapes & Tapes, and these guys destroy Tapes & Tapes." Dylan and Harper of The Teddy Boys are both in The Venom Electric, and their sound is very much in the same vein but with the arrangements stripped down somewhat, and with Dylan doing a lot more singing, as does the bassist who sort of reminds me of Peter back when he played in Exit Drills.

As usual, Tyler bailed before he could help load out. Chris who lives across from the Reverb invited us to come hang out after the show but by the time 2:00 rolled around he had disappeared. I felt like getting to bed anyway, as did Bret. All in all, a pleasant, satisfying evening of being musician guy.

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I really shouldn't let this stuff get to me so badly. But it really is aggravating.

The other thing that bugs me is I'm now asked pretty much every day when this project I'm working on will be done. That kind of pressure thing really bothers me, especially when my actual work on said project is interrupted for it. I don't really know how long this project is going to take yet — I got my first look at any actual code on Tuesday. The rest of the week from then has been spent detangling that mass of linear code, rife with rampant duplication and hard-coding, into something I can sensibly work with. Once I get to the point of being able to start adding new functionality (pretty basic stuff really, some content editing and an image gallery) I'll have a much better idea. I end up feeling kind of like I'm being badgered — I'd been working on it a whole two days for crap's sake, and I'm already getting the old "are you done yet? are you done yet? are you done yet?" And furthermore, if you ask me at 4:30 one day, don't ask again at 9 AM the next.

I thought about being a smartass and giving an estimate based on the relative complexity of the project versus a project consisting of purchasing two items of furniture and getting them to the office. I'd break down the two projects, assign some number of function points or story points or whatever you want to call them to each step, conclude that this bit of programming has something like eight or ten times as much work or difficulty as the project of purchasing office furniture, so given that the furniture purchase (that is, a decent chair and desk for myself) is up to about two and a half months now, we can expect this project to be completed in approximately a year and a half.

Anyway, I let myself get pretty worked up over that kind of stuff, sure, but I'm just getting really sick of putting up with this kind of thing for months and months, on several different things at different times, first in one job, now another. And I've been burned by my previous job in other ways that I won't be going into here. So my tolerance for being dicked around has gotten really low lately. I dare say my paranoid streak is showing.

For now, I've concluded that the way I'm going to deal with the furniture and wireless issues is to just work at home. The office is no place for me to get work done in, and it's quite obvious that they just plain don't have room for me… so why bother showing up there? Sometimes 'tis better to ask for forgiveness than for permission.

I won't be able to say that I didn't get the shit done for them, because I have every intention of completing this particular project. But it's a real possibility that they will have a serious problem with this… so I'll still be looking for outside gigs in the meantime.

And of course, this work-from-home arrangement, while it addresses the office facilities issue, still leaves open the fact that the hosting they use as a dev environment is stuff I wouldn't even host a cat picture blog on. So the constant re-logging-in to FTP every couple minutes is still going to be going on, at least until I get all the hard-coded paths in the site code changed so that it will run on my machine. Which is how it should have been written in the first place…

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Pretty good time at the Reverb last night. Played my set reasonably well, and the turnout wasn't too bad for a mid-week in early May in a college town. Several people seemed appreciative and/or intrigued, and this got me some interesting conversation, though nobody bought any CDs.

Audio Spaghetti sounded pretty much like what you'd expect a band with a name like Audio Spaghetti to sound like, especially if you pictured them as a bunch of twentysomethings based out of a smallish college town. You know, the usual high-polish mish-mash of alt-rock and white-kid funk with dashes of jazz and reggae and pseudo-intellectual lyrics about opening your mind and all that shit, all played at pretty much one same tempo. Conspicuous lack of splash cymbal, though, so that was odd. I imagine they draw respectably around their hometown (some place in Kansas), which makes me wonder why they'd want to bother losing money by going on tour and playing places like Cedar Falls where no one knows who they are or is likely to give much of a shit. Seemed like nice guys though, and it's hard to say they played badly, because of course they didn't.

Mehfunk was, of course, funky. I forgot to introduce them after my set with the line "be sure and stick around to get funked up; the great thing about playing in a funk band is you can always use that pun." A bit excessive on the jammy angle, but tight and appealingly gritty, and they definitely know what they're doing. They insisted on setting up the drum kit ahead of time while I was setting up my shit, claiming that Cody had told them they'd be going on at 11:30 at the latest, when it was already about 11:10 when I was setting up… so they wanted to save as much time as possible… which ended up seeming rather at odds with the fact that their set ran somewhere between an hour and a half and like three days, during which somewhere between three and fourteen different vocalists got up and sang with them on different numbers. So anyway I had to put up with two of them wandering around the stage and just generally being irritating, moving my amp around and even going so far as to ask if I "need any help setting up." Are you fucking kidding me? I'm one guy with a guitar and some pedals. I think I got it covered, thanks. Their set did rock though. I recommend checking them out if you're in a party mood and they happen to be playing.

Erik H. showed up and chatted me up at length. I was worried he'd disappeared from Cedar Falls, but turns out he plays in Project Sock Monkey now. Also, his website is back up, I guess he missed a couple hosting bills a while back, so I'll be putting the link to his site back in the sidebar just as soon as I'm done typing this. I noticed that there's a link there to a newer blog he's been doing, maybe I should link to that too, or perhaps instead…

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