Random Thoughts

My New Beer Blog

I’ve decided that there aren’t enough beer blogs in the world, so I’m turning this one into one.

But as a special variation, I’m going to be beer blogging while I’m handling Gmane deletion requests. Which I haven’t done for a couple of months.

This one is quite good. Yum.

“i am a user who is seeing some kind of disk I/O error when attempting to use an SQLite3 database. “

This is kinda the same, only it tastes different.

” Could one of you please respond? I’m getting sleepless because of this problem as am getting a feeling that all my emails go unnoticed.”

This one is more dark and stuff. Hm. Dunno.

“Infocon notice: The following messages are also being flagged under threat level 2 in my affidavit and I have a request for you to remove them.”

Kinda eww. It has a weird smoky aftertaste and an astringent taste.

“Hello, please don’t display my name ” in the threats. If there is not possible, i will logout of the mailing list.”

Eurmn… nice. Hoppy.

“Failing to do so may bring about legal action against Gmane.”

Eau de Sewage. Terrible.

“In light of Google’s newest algorithm change, I need to request that you remove every link to from your website.”

Fruity! Sparkly! Nice!

“We have received a report of phishing site hosted on Domain “comments.gmane.org”/IP 80.91.229.6 which is under your control.”

Hoppy! Hoppy! Skippy!

“I would like all my posts sent from this email id to be permanently deleted as they are confidential in nature. Please do the needful and confirm.”

Flowerin’

It’s summertime, so all the flowers are in bloom! Just look at these bountiful aloes and haworthias!

Ok, not very impressive. But the roses are doing well, at least.

Readin’

I’ve always bought more books than I can possibly read.

It’s under control, though. Just a fraction more. But it means that the section of the bookcase(s) that contain the unread books grows, slowly but inevitably.

That’s fine.

I put the books I read at the top of the bookcase, and the unread ones sort of have a sedimental journey towards the bottom.

So they remain sorted in the order I’ve purchased them, and the ones at the bottom become the ones I never look at, because I assume that they’re something that I’ve determined that I’ll never actually read.

So this “summer” (for some value of) and autumn I’m going to do a grand experiment: I’m going to read an older section. I picked out at random this one shown on the right there.

It’s all books bought in 1995, as far as I can tell from circumstantial evidence (copyright notices and the books around them).

And when I say “read”, I mean “try”. I have no compunction about finishing books. The second they start to bore me, I ditch them. There are plenty of books in the world.

I’m going to hazard a guess that that light blue book over there to the right will be ditched toot sweet. But time will show.

Special CD

I was ripping CDs tonight, and one was giving me more problems than usual.

It was a cd by the band called disc, which is a Matmos offshoot.

I took the CD out of the drive and stared at it a bit.

Oops. I think it might be one of those conceptual non-playable CDs. And how did they make these pre-destroyed CDs?

Very inventive.

Software Sucks

The machine that runs my stereo is a seven year old Hush machine. The last time I rebooted it, it kinda didn’t want to boot at all, except then it did anyway.

So I’m thinking that it’s probably going off for the fjords one of these days.

To avoid some horrible music-less days I’ve bought a replacement machine.

It has the same stereo-ey form factor, which is nice.

Not a lot on the inside, but it has room for the PCI sound card, which is the important thing. And no fans, of course.

Heat pipes! It’s a 2.8GHz Ivy Bridge machine, so it has plenty of oomph.

It has an external PSU, but there’s so much room in the case that I just put it inside.

PCI riser will probably fit the sound card.

Anyway, since I had a new machine to play with, I connected it up to the CD ripping box to see whether I could get higher ripping speeds with this machine.

The computer says no.

So, basically, if I’m ripping straight from the SATA plugs on the main board, and I’m ripping a single CD, I get a ripping speed of 25x.

If I rip three CDs in parallel, I get 8x on each CD.

This is just pitiful. Four years ago I got over 40x on each CD while ripping in parallel. Something must have happened to the Linux kernel to make ripping from SATA be dog slow.

Anybody know what?

Too bad I can’t just install a four-year-old kernel. It won’t support the new chipsets etc, so it just won’t work.

Linux sucks.