I arrive home from a successful shopping expedition with a shiny new Eee PC 1005PE. The first thing I do is unpack it and skim through the instruction booklet before charging ahead and powering the device up. Of course, that involved attaching the battery and connecting it to a power socket, none of which was particularly difficult.

Now the first thing I am greeted with is the Windows installation process. This I was expecting. However, I was most certainly not expecting that process to take nearly two hours to complete from the initial startup to the Windows desktop appearing in a useful manner. Even once the Windows desktop appeared, the device was horribly slow. In fact, it was basically unusable. I wonder if even the collected powers of good and evil in the entire universe have even the faintest idea what it was doing.

Since I did not intend to use Windows on the machine, I had already prepared a USB stick with the Netbook edition of Ubuntu 10.04. After a bit of fiddling around, I managed to get the machine to boot off the USB stick and start up. Again, this was a slow process but it only took about ten minutes to fully start up to the point of being useful. I played around for a few minutes until I was sure the system was functioning correctly under Ubuntu then began the install process. Since I had had a horrible experience with Windows 7, I told it to use the entire disk.

It took something like half an hour to do the full installation after which point I rebooted and Ubuntu started up without problems. I was now faced with a wonderfully snappy interface which took me a little while to figure out, but once I did, I found it quite efficient. Some real thought went into the design of the netbook interface. After installing all the operating system updates and rebooting once more, the system was even snappier.

I did some fiddling around to get the environment configured to my liking and I have to say, the experience under Ubuntu is light years ahead of the Windows 7 experience. Once I got my various software packages installed and configured correctly, I found the system simply just worked.

I should point out that while I always intended to use Ubuntu on the device, I fully intended to give the pre-installed Windows 7 a chance. However, it was so brutally slow at doing anything that there was no valid reason to keep it once compared to even the Ubuntu live boot.

That wasn’t all that annoying, however. The fact that the power stayed out until 2:30PM did annoy me since it prevented me from doing my job (I work from home). Fortunately, I had nothing particularly pressing that needed doing.

No, what annoyed me was when the power came back on. My computer was fried. I did the obvious thing and replaced the power supply. However, it seems like when the power supply fried, it took out the motherboard. Now the computer is well past its prime and I’ve been making noises about replacing it for a while now, but I rather wanted to replace it when I could afford to, not because I have to. Alas, that was not to be the case.

In all honesty, given the age of the system, it was inevitable that it would conk out at some point and it makes sense it would happen when the electricity is unstable. But wouldn’t it be wonderful if that sort of thing would only happen when one is prepared for it?

I suppose, on the bright side, I’ll come out of this with a much better system.

Okay, I’ll admit that the two sites cited above are mine. You would think I would know just why a person would do that on account of having done it myself. I don’t. Well, not really, anyway. My contention is that it has something to do with entertainment. It’s entertaining to come across a gag like that sometimes. And it’s great conversation material.

No doubt, I’ll continue to renew the domains for my gag sites. And I’ll probably create more of them in the future. So what do all three of my readers think? Have you seen some great gag sites out there? Why do people create them?

Today, however, I finally won Spider. And I have a screen shot of the win to prove it. The screen shot is not doctored in any way. I will admit that I did use "undo" in a couple of cases but that is not relevant to the question of whether the game is winnable or not. An unwinnable game will remain unwinnable no matter how many moves a person takes back. So, for all you folks who are frustrated with the Spider game, it really is winnable.

The version I was playing is the AisleRiot version from Gnome. As far as I can see, it implements the rules correctly.

We had a number of guest speakers come in, some of whom are blogger types. It’s really freaky when you find yourself being quoted by someone with a name like Regina Lynn, the author of Sex Drive at Wired. I’m not complaining, mind you. And it is a hazard of speaking at any kind of event.

Of course, if you’re going to make comments like, "You can be totally anonymous and have no privacy. All it takes is no one knowing who you are." That’s going to be memorable enough for someone to quote you. (That particular statement is a little bit deeper than it appears on the surface. And, no, context doesn’t help.)

It should be interesting to see what else shakes out of the trees in the following days.

We are going to delay the memorial until spring when the ground thaws and travel conditions are better. Mom will be going to Winnipeg to help out my uncle with the necessary arrangements such as what to do with the estate and so on. I suspect that she is also going so that she and her brother can help console each other, and that is perfectly understandable.

The timing could have been better, though. The news comes while Dad is in Thunder Bay to visit his parents as his father is actually home from the hospital after undergoing very major surgery back in April. It would be very nice for Mom if Dad could be home to support her but, alas, that’s not to be.

Personally, though I’ve been expecting this for a while and understand that it is no tragedy that Grandpa passed on (and was likely a mercy for him), I’ve still been hit by the news. It has put me face to face with my own mortality for a third time in less than a year. That is hard for anyone to deal with and made even harder for me because I don’t believe in any form of an afterlife. Personally, I find facing up to my own mortality to be much more difficult emotionally than the loss of a loved one.

Still, life continues for the living and nothing will change that basic fact of existence. We all deal with tragedy and most of us are able to move on after a time. Doubtless, this instance will be no different.

First, Windows Server 2003 didn’t like the vendor provided driver for the onboard RAID controller in a new server system. To make things even more entertaining, Windows can only accept third party drivers from a floppy. That’s so last century. You’d think that it would at least accept drivers from a CD. Nope. Floppy only. Never did solve that one and ended up going with the built in software mirroring in Windows.

To add insult to injury, the slide rail kit for the server appears to be explicitly designed not to work with racks that have #10-32 threaded mounting holes. Those seem to be rather common so that baffles me somewhat. At least I was able to engineer a solution for that.

Mixed among all of the server woes, a router decided to have trouble. First a NIC failed and that took a while to track down. Then, today, all the cooling fans in the system except the CPU fan turned out to be toast and needed replacing. That’s easier said than done.

Then, of course, there was the usual stuff that needed doing during the past few weeks along with routine emergencies and so on.

And that doesn’t say anything about the freaking loonies and idiots on the road. Today, for example, on my way home from the office after a rather long and trying day, some idiot makes to change lanes right in front of me. He signalled but didn’t bother looking to see if anyone was coming. It’s not often you actually have to slam on the brakes and have your reaction time tested. Fortunately, I was watching him on account of he had ended up behind a transit bus at a bus stop. I hope the guy had such a fright he learns from it. (Hey, I’m not saying I’m the world’s best driver but when the other guy’s at fault, he’s at fault.) It it wasn’t just the guy today that’s nearly clobbered me lately.

And then there’s just plain bad luck on the road. Normally a particlar usage of lanes affords a decent opportunity to get into the correct lane well in advance after arriving downtown. Lately, it hasn’t been working out so well. That doesn’t take into account traffic jams either, like yesterday’s jam which delayed my arrival at the office by half an hour. (That’s half an hour to go 7 blocks.)

I suppose that’s enough whining for now. I think it helped a bit.

I can’t say just how accurate the portrayal of fallout from a nuke is. That said, it feels more accurate than many portrayals. Jericho is, at least theoretically, far enough away from Denver that it would have survived the initial blast without feeling anything. I’m not convinced the rain storm is quite correct but it might be and I can believe that rain could be contaminated with radioactive particles.

Of course, we have the obvious outsider right from the start (no, not Jake) who seems to have materialized from nowhere just before the catastrophe (just like Jake). We quickly find out that he knows something that the rest of us don’t but we don’t know whether to trust him or not. Even so, he doesn’t do anything particularly despicable and, on the whole, seems to be helping more than hindering. It does add an interesting dynamic to the show, however.

In fact, so far, the show seems to excel most at the interpresonal dynamics of a town under duress. Every kind of character from selfish to altrusitic is present with tempers fraying. In fact, we see not only the important people in the town dealing with the disaster but also some of the regular citizens as they deal or not as the case may be.

Still, Jericho has its problems. There is too much open space around Jericho, even for the plains. Why have there been no people from other towns in the area? After all, they would have survived just as well as those in Jericho. If they are trapped for some reason, say by military means, why not Jericho? Surely a town the size of Jericho would not go unnoticed if smaller places didn’t? Perhaps there will be an explanation. After all, there was nothing at all on the radio, not even on the amateur radio bands. The implication is that pretty much nobody is left. Even if that is the case, where are the ruins and ghost towns?

On the subject of amateur radio, there should have been something on the HF bands. Especially considering the signal picked up in the bar which seemed to be from China. HF would have propagated something around the planet, even if it were unintelligible. Then again, I didn’t notice any antennas appropriate for the 80m or 40m bands so that might explain that.

The biggest thing that got me was in this week’s episode. The power comes back on. I have no objection to that since the transmission lines are likely mostly still present and would be relatively easy to repair. However, the fact that every telephone in Jericho rang all at once is a bit of a stretch. Classic telephones (the ones that don’t have an AC plug) are powered fully by the phone line. It is highly unlikely that any telephone exchange can provide enough power to simultaneously ring every telephone connected to it. Likewise, it is unlikely that any exchange will be able to activate all lines with sufficient power to broadcast a message. Of course, it is technically possible to do so, but it is highly unlikely.

The emergency broadcast system kicking in is believable although they don’t quite have it right. Of course, they probably aren’t allowed to do it right so that’s excusable. However, what really got me was the portrayal of the Internet and the behaviour of the computers. This is something I know and I know that behaviour was just plain wrong. The commercial Internet was most definitely not built to survive a nuclear attack. Nor does the military rely on the commercial Internet for communication (at least not exclusively). Thus there would have been no reason to interrupt Internet access, even supposing it might still have been running. (And, if the telephone system is working well enough to ring all the phones in Jericho, it is conceivable that some of the Internet would be working, too.) There is also no way to intercept the Internet in such a way as to interpose the emergency broadcast system on it nor would it forcibly take over computer terminals as shown in this episode. Of course, this is a classic misportrayal of computer technology.

There was one bit of humour with the Internet bit. The supposed IP address was not valid. An IP address has four numbers separated by dots. Each of those numbers ranges from 0 to 255. At least two of the numbers were higher than 255 thus making the address invalid. It was clearly created by someone who knew that each number was at most three digits but not how the rest of it worked and they just threw in some random numbers. That could have been the actress who did it, too. Of course, I wasn’t expecting a real address but they might have used 127.x.x.x or 10.x.x.x or 169.254.x.x or 192.168.x.x or a number of other possible ranges which are not generally routable on the Internet (like the classic 555 phone numbers on TV). I can forgive this, though, as you really wouldn’t want a real IP address to appear on a show.

For the most part, though, I haven’t really noticed the deficiencies during the show, only when reflecting on them after the fact. Thus, they haven’t been too distracting. Overall, I’ve found Jericho to be an entertaining ride and if it keeps up at its current pace, I’m sure I’ll enjoy it through. Indeed, it feels a lot like Jeremiah in that respect. There are a lot of questions which are unanswered; we don’t know what happened or why and we don’t know what the current situation is. What we do have are characters with unknown motives and mysterious pasts.

After this week’s episode, there are a great deal of possibilities with regard to the backgrounds of Jake and Mr. Hawkins. Neither of them is quite what he seems. We know Jake told different stories about where he had been when he got back and we know Hawkins is an alias. We know that Hawkins is part of some group or other that knew the bombs were coming. We know also that Hawkins now knows something about Jake and we also know that Jake has suspicions about Hawkins. The question, of course, is just who is on which side and how many sides there are. Just what was Jake going to tell his father today? What did Hawkins learn? Why does Jake know so much about so many things? It’s almost like Hawkins and Jake had similar training somewhere.

A close second to the Jake/Hawkins situation is just what happened and what is going on now? No doubt Hawkins knows what happened and it’s possible Jake has some suspicions. It is also fairly clear that Hawkins doesn’t know exactly what is going on at the present but has made some educated guesses. Still, the situation doesn’t make total sense. Why does Jericho still exist if nobody else seems to be around anywhere? Where are all the survivors from surrounding towns? Kansas is not nearly so baren as they’ve made out so far.

Hopefully the writers have explanations for the lack of outside survivors but I suppose I can suspend my disbelief about that and enjoy the rest of the show as long as it provides some substance with respect to the Jake/Hawkins situation and as long as the interpersonal dynamics continue to be at least passable and interesting.

So, my final verdict at this point is that Jericho is an excellent show with excellent possibilites. However, it also has a great many possibilities to derail or plain jump the shark. Whether they manage to avoid the lion pits remains to be seen. All I can say is that I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt until it hits too many of those lion pits.

I’ve got pretty much everything switched over except the stuff on the main server – email and web sites. It’s actually quite a bit of work to futz everything into working in the new configuration. It’s not just a simply copy and forget problem since I’ve got custom configurations for just about everything. Great fun, really.

To make things more complex, I’m using this as an opportunity to upgrade PHP and Apache as well as implement suPHP. That means there are wrinkles to work out with that as well. It’ll be worth it, though, when everything gets sorted.

So far, I’ve debugged my site into working on the new virtual machine. Now to work on switching the other stuff over.

First, let me say, FUCK! That really backed things up. Not only was Deerfoot useless, but all the traffic that normally goes nowhere on Deerfoot had to find an alternative route to go nowhere on. That pretty much put paid to any northbound route anywhere in the proximity of Deerfoot where proximity is defined as "has a connection to through one or more additional roads". That meant Edmonton Trail which is usually pretty clear was jammed to the rafters. It’s not often you see it take 30 minutes to go from 32 Ave to McKnight Boulevard. That’s a whopping average speed of two (that’s right, two) miles per hour.

I think I speak for every commuter in Calgary when I say the following: would the fucking idiots that cause most of these accidents on the roads please quickly remove themselves from our misery?

And for the rest of us: drive safely and carefully. Pay attention. Be patient. Traffic would move better if people were just patient and followed the rules. That means no blocking intersections, changing lanes without signalling or looking, obeying speed limites, and so on.

I know I’m preaching to the apathetic here but it has to be said.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled mostly familiy friendly ramblings.