I learned something today. It is not acceptable to substitute buttermilk for butter and milk. Seriously. Don't.

poeticdream is no longer using livejournal. She started using it before I did, back in 2001. She has almost 3000 posts (I have slightly less than half that number, despite having had mine almost as long). She's writing in a paper journal now, as she often has. Why? SUP, since they have bought Livejournal have reversed previous SixApart and LJ practices and business decisions. Notably in the case of basic users (which were ad-free), SUP recently switched these accounts to sponsored overnight with no notice. Now, from the company which once promised to remain ad-free forever, you have the option of either liking ads with your journal, or paying for the privilege of your creative content remaining ad-free.

Sorry guys, but you're going to have to throw in a lot more added benefit than just "no ads" for me to want to pay to have a journal. I'm seriously giving thought to hosting my journal on private webspace. I don't know if i'm retro chic enough to revert to paper like Robin.

poeticdream and me talking about painting the hallway:

me: "I'm going to paint the wall and drink beer, and then... [pauses for dramatic effect, then sways back and forth a bit] i'll be high!"
abigail_m whines: "i wish i could paint the walls and get high..."
me: "someday I'm sure you will, Abby."

it reminds me of a conversation Lindsay Leclair had with her mom when she was in high school: Lindsay: "I don't think I'll ever do drugs mom, I just don't get the point." her mom: "oh, you'll do them..."

last night abigail_m was drawing in her sketchbook. she said she was drawing a few different things. first she said she drew a ballerina, which looked like a mass of random scribbles and chicken scratches. then she said "penis!", which was a bit of a nonsequitur, but i came over to look and indeed, she had drawn a penis.

why is it that my 3 year old can draw penises?

The scene: Just now as abigail_m and I were walking up our driveway to the street level we saw two police cars that had pulled over someone for who-knows-what. The cops had the perp out of the car and were talking to him and rummaging around in his car.

me: "hey! they blocked the driveway!"
abigail_m: "what?"
me: "look, those two police cars parked right in front of our driveway!"
Abby: "yeah! it's like they think it's a parking lot!"

Abby will be three on Monday.

setting: earlier, at WRFR.

cast: abigail_m, poeticdream, and yours truly, riffraff.

[Abby produces a chocolate, by sleight of hand or magic, we're not sure which]

Robin, incredulously: "Abby, where'd you get chocolate from?"

Abby, triumphantly: "From my pocket!"

Robin: ...

Kim: *sputters and hyperventilates, laughing out of control*

Abby: "Take a deep breath..."

Robin: ...
Kim: ... *takes a deep breath*

abigail_m has declared that while egg noodles shall still be called egg noodles, tortellini shall henceforth be called "tiny pasta"

Best part of the superbowl, imho? The Giants' coach saying, in slo-mo: "godddd daaaamn iiit, sonnnnn oooof a biiiiiitch..."

Seeing it in HD at the Strand theatre for free was pretty cool too. The commercials this year? Lame. (the ones I saw at least)

earlier:

me: "ready for dinner?"
abigail_m: "noooo....."
me: "why not? aren't you hungry?"
abby: "i am, but... I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER dot com" *grin*
me: ...

poeticdream: "I'm going to have some coffee. Do you want some coffee?"
abigail_m: "No, I don't like coffee!"
Robin: "Why not?"
Abby: "Because it's too caffeinated."

lastday?

tomorrow will i be a runner?

Abby and I played a game of Crazy Eights and she tied me. so, I guess she's gonna be a card shark. Anyone want to play her?

if they saw this post, Scott Stevens of weatherwars and The Shift fame, and as my new friend Dave might chuckle.

Today for the first day in a long time, I see no weather modified skies here in Rockport. Perhaps this is an anomalous area and simply nobody has their fingers in this part of the pie. Perhaps even the WM folks are taking a well-deserved break from their climate control agenda (a well-deserved break from tire-track trails and cottage-cheese clouds on the part of uninformed citizens of the planet, that is).

Whatever the reason, I salute the clear skies! Note that not only are the puffy cumulus clouds natural-looking, but also that the sky visible between the clouds looks pristine, clear, and deep azure blue. None of that smoggy, gray, DOR (Deadly Orgone Radiation) look that we've become accustomed to (if that last reference throws you for a loop, go do yourself a favor and read some Reich). Mayhap I'll go out for a stroll and see if Nature reacts differently to not being smothered, as it too has grown accustomed.

Please, unknown, shadow corp-gov Weather Modification gnomes, take more holday breaks, I implore you! and a Happy Christmas Eve to you!

For poeticdream, who always asks me what real clouds look like:

note to self: someone else's filtered friends-only posts only work right when you don't leave yourself logged in.

oops. sorry, folks.

abigail_m, smacking me on the chest lightly with a diaper (for emphasis) as we walk to change her diaper: "after *smack* this *smack* set of diapers *smack* I'm *smack* potty-trained. OK?"
me: "o rly?"
abby: "yes."

this is how it goes with her, she wears the old paradigm into the ground, then, one day out of the blue she chooses a new one and, more often than not, sticks with it.

abigail_m: "can i borrow your credit card because i don't have a credit card"

Almost two years ago I discovered James McCombe's GLTerminal. Some people hacked it to work with Tiger, but I (and others) discovered after upgrading to Leopard that the Classic Terminal view was oddly scrambled, so to fix it I rearranged the character bitmap, as you can see under the cut:
( a tale of two character maps )

new and worksafe

As others noted, the original icon was a little over-the-top (jwz quote: "most inappropriate fanboyriffic application icon evar."), so I made it something more work-safe, a VT220 screen with "GL TERM" in green text.

old and "animeriffic"

To make Classic Terminal mode work (the pictured green-phosphor look) you still need to open the Preferences and re-select the "Classic Terminal" plugin, then click Save. I re-ordered the tabs with "Renderer" being the default, so at least you don't have to click on the Renderer tab like you used to; click-count - 1. If someone could reverse-engineer it so this step wasn't necessary, that would be nice. If James McCombe would update it (or even release the original source), that would be even better. Petition him via email, if you like.

Oh, and lastly it works pretty well with Spaces in full screen mode, though the window doesn't display right when looking at all your spaces (not bad for an app made in 2002, five years before Spaces was even developed).

Download GLTerminal updated for 10.5, sil vous plait.

Got a bad or dying hard drive? Read on. This is part tutorial, part introduction to data recovery ideas, and part case study. Also, I've linked to some PPC Mac binaries that are useful if you don't have the Developer Tools installed on your Mac and you need to recover some data, hence this whole post is somewhat Mac-skewed, though the theory is applicable no matter what kind of computer you have. Hopefully this is of some help to someone.

Not to be confused with the similar and similarly named dd_rescue and dd_rhelp (which were precursors to this program), the GNU ddrescue program is a useful command-line utility that helps restore failing hard drives. Here is a zipfile containing a Mac PPC binary and a readme, should you be having trouble getting ddrescue working on your Mac. Note that it's available for compilation on just about any unix-like OS; google ddrescue if you need more information or if you need to compile it for different architectures.

The basic idea is that because block-wise data recovery can stall for long periods of time at errors, it's prudent to read all the good data off the drive quickly first, then go back to revisit problem areas and work at them until (hopefully) all the data can be recovered; at worst in the output file there are blank areas where there were unrecoverable sections of the original disk. Because this process can take a significant amount of time it is possible to run the program, abort it (with a control-C), and resume it again later to finish recovery, if necessary (though make sure you specify the same logfile so it is able to pick up where it left off).

Save the above .zip archive to the desktop and extract it. It should produce a ddrescue folder, inside which will be the unix (Mac PPC executable, runs under Rosetta emulation on Intel macs) and a text file explaining usage. Launch Terminal and cd to the ddrescue folder (type "cd " then drag the folder icon onto the Terminal window). Copy the executable to your /usr/bin directory with the following (it should prompt you for your password):
sudo cp ddrescue /usr/bin/ddrescue

Figure out which drive you need to run ddrescue on by running Disk Utility, then getting info on the partition you wish to rescue. The Disk Identifier is the string you need (hooking up a failing laptop hd in a firewire enclosure, knowing I want the second partition of the disk yields the identifier "disk1s2"; yours may well be different).

Run ddrescue with the correct disk specified (all the disks live under the /dev/ hierarchy), your desired output file, and a logfile name for later resuming in case you need to stop and start over (the process can take a LONG time). In my case, the command line was:
ddrescue /dev/disk1s2 ACER.dmg logfile
which runs ddrescue on the correct block device, outputs the reconstructed disk image to ACER.dmg and logs progress in logfile (both files go in the current directory).

In my case, the partition to be rescued was about 54GB in size with (at max) about 140 errors—represented by 9000KB (just shy of 10MB) of bad blocks. The better areas of the drive read after some time (about 18 hours), and then the remainder of the time was focused on the bad areas (only about 3MB, with ddrescue scrubbing repeatedly over them to extract data thus reducing the number of errors and the size of the error regions—it shows the stats in real time on the command line, which is moderately more interesting than paint drying, though heartening if you have a vested interest in the data you are recovering). I stopped it a few times with control-C after rescuing most of the drive and reran it with --max-retries=2 (less obsessive but faster). In the end I was left with a little under 3MB unrecovered, which was gudenuff (I could have stuck it in a ziplog bag and chucked it in the freezer for a few, and then tried again if I was really crazy about that last 3MB).

Also, the zipfile ddrs2r.zip contains some perl scripts that summarize the log file and also let you use other utilities to figure out what files are hosed on your recovered disk image. See here for more info on these scripts. A GUI would be nice, but so far it seems no one has stepped up to the plate and made one.

A final note: when using the recovered disk image, it would be prudent to lock it (make it read-only) first before looking around it and playing, lest you change it (which, if you wish to keep running ddrescue to get the last few blocks, might really F things up). In my case it looks like all the data that my client cares about is recovered! Yay for happy clients!

Thank you, poeticdream! now if only we could find your cell... methinks we should get your Treo functioning again.

FYI, my cell phone is currently missing as well as poeticdream's. I don't know how we both managed to lose our phones in the same week, but there you have it. email is the best way to get in touch with me right now, that and IM.