I never promised myself a rose garden

Viking to the left, Pink Fairy to the right

But now I have a rose balcony.

I wanted to have something growing on the balcony (in addition to the dirt), so I went to buy a rose bush.  I got a bit carried away, as usual, and got three of them.  A (I’m not kidding) Pink Fairy, a (I’m still not kidding) Viking, and a (how boring) Sympathie.

The Pink Fairy is the hardiest one, of course.

So now I just have to wait a couple of months, and I’m sure they’ll end up looking just like on the last picture.

Right?  I don’t have to remember to water them or anything?

Right?

I should write an Emacs-based watering interface.

Sympathie
This is what they’ll look like.  Right.

RAID Fun Redux

Addonics Mini Storage Tower

You will remember me getting a new eSATA box with the crappiest thermal design ever.  To recap, there’s a big fan situated a few millimeters from an almost totally non-holey wall, Batman.  When fans are that close to an obstruction, the air flow makes a lot of noise.  So I unplugged the fan to see whether it would work as a fanless box.

And it didn’t.  One disk died after a week or so, presumably from heat stroke.  So I plugged the fan in again, and lived with the sound of a vacuum cleaner emenating from the hall closet.

Cthulhu Attacking

Until today, when a new enclosure (from Addonics) arrived.  As you can see, there’s nothing obstructing the air flow here.  However, it’s not really a hot-plug enclosure, which is disappointing.  With all the various loose wires inside the box, it looks like Cthulhu exploded inside it.

But it’s pretty quiet.  I can’t hear it at all on a two meter distance, if the closet doors are shut.

So I give this a two thumbs up on a five star scale.

It’s like the 4th of July

I’ve been celebrating the Norwegian constitutional day (I think it’s celebrating that we were rid of the tyrannical rule of the Danes, or the Swedes, or somebody equally tyrannical and heinous) by putting up more book shelves.

I’m not digital at all in the book dept.  It’s still all papery stuff.  It takes a lot of space!  Nature abhors walls without book shelves, so, after doing an intensive search for something that would fit this rather small wall, I settled on these Ikea shelves.

The wall is rather thin particle board, and I didn’t actually do the whole anchor thing, so they’re probably going to fall down after a while, but here’s the fun fact: I paid more for the screws than the shelves themselves!

That’s so sexist.

Is Amazon Insane or Just Deranged?

So, I stumbled onto Suddenly, Tammy! having their third album (which was recorded in 1997, but held (and not released) by Warner’s (they fired the band, but refused to give back the music to the band (record labels are scum)) finally seeing the light of day yesterday. (You can untangle the tenses, I think.)  So I googled for the album, and Amazon came up first.

The album was only released digitally, so I 1-clicked it (Amazon so deserved that patent), and then the screen at the right appeared.

So: To download the mp3s, Amazon wanted me to install an executable!?

Are they insane?  Or just deranged?  I don’t install an executable on my precious machine for anybody, unless it comes from debian.org, or is in source code form.

Why, by Emacs, would downloading a set of mp3s require installing an executable on my machine?

To add insult to injury, the executable wasn’t actually available on my machine, since it’s only for 32-bit Linuxen.

What.  Ever.

I clicked further into the Google results, and on page fourteen i finally stumbled onto 7digital, which allowed just, like, downloading the mp3s (in a zip archive).

Yay.  Music.