Puppies Update

It’s time for the puppies to go to their homes. I pick my little guy up this weekend. I was the third deposit for a red male and there were only three red males so I have no choice as to which pup I get. The other two owners chose their pup last night and so I know which is mine at this point. He is the cutest of the bunch with a small mask over his left eye. Unfortunately he is one of three in the litter of ten that has unilateral hearing… meaning he is deaf (or significantly attenuated) in one ear. From what I am reading that’s not a big deal and should not present a problem over the course of the dogs life. Anyways… he’s mine on Saturday.

Puppies Update

Puppies are at 4 weeks now. Looks like they have been weaned as they are feeding on dry food now. Hopefully I can get out to them around week 6.

Homemade Digital Photo Frame Part 1

I’ve got a Powerbook G4 in my hands and I am tasked with turning it into a large digital photo frame for wall mount. Here goes the story on how it was done….

First, I know zero about a Mac. I’ve never touched one. From the start I had to have someone show me how to eject a damn CD. The only constraint I had with the laptop is that the owner wanted the data untouched. My immediate thought was to shrink the OS X partition and dual boot Linux on the laptop because:

  1. I am familiar with the OS
  2. It’s extremely flexible
  3. I knew of QIV which is perfect for a digital photo frame
  4. I knew I could script this to boot and run QIV with no user intervention

With that, I set out to install Linux (dual boot). What should have been a simple task turned out to be a pain in the ass. First, I was unable to run the live CD of Ubuntu. I kept getting an authorization failed error at the login screen. Huh?!?! After much searching it turned out to be an issue with PRAM (which I am still not clear on) on the Mac. Essentially the PRAM backup battery was dead and the RTC was filled with junk. It simply needed a valid date. To do this, I had to issue a goofy keystroke combination on boot (apple + option + O + F) which got me into a command prompt of ‘open firmware’. Huh?!?!?! Anyways, issuing the following command…

decimal dev rtc sec min hour day month year set-time

… reset the time (based on the arguments I supplied at the time). I then followed with a…

mac-boot

… which continued booting. Now, another trick was learning that I needed to hold down C during boot to get it to boot from the CD.

So, now I am up and running with the live CD and I run into my next problem. The installer will not let me shrink the existing hfs+ partition which consumes the entire physical drive. This took quite a while to figure out why. There were no clues at all. With a lot of rummaging through Ubuntu/Linux forum posts I finally produced the answer. OS X does something called journaling which I gather is used for a restore point (?? perhaps not ??). Regardless, this is interfering with the resize process. Now, disabling it was another pain in the ass. OS X provides something called disk utility. In this utility you can enable journaling, but you can’t disable it. Why?!?!? Well, indeed there is a way, through a terminal session. I had to execute…

diskutil disableJournaling /Volume/VolumeName

… and that seemed to do the trick. Finally, I was able to shrink the partition using parted run from the live CD.

With that out of the way it was time to get the slide show rolling. This required a simple apt-get from the repository… qiv is the application. Once installed I performed a quick test to get the options right. This was a breeze. Next, I needed to write a small little bash script. That went a little something like this…


#!/bin/sh

#Required sleep to get this to work at startup
sleep 10

#Formulate date for log entry
NOW=$(date +"%b-%d-%y %H:%M:%S")

#If USB drive mounted, use it for pictures and copy them locally
if grep '/media/8021-0434' /etc/mtab > /dev/null 2>&1 ; then
echo "$NOW Running from mounted USB drive" >> PictureFrame.log
qiv -feitsr -d 10 /media/8021-0434 &
cp -rvu /media/8021-0434/* /home/lbjoco/Pictures/ > /media/8021-0434/MediaTransfer.txt
#If no USB drive mounted, use local source
else
echo "$NOW Running from local source" >> PictureFrame.log
qiv -feitsr -d 10 /home/lbjoco/Pictures &
fi

Basically this script checks for the presence of a particular USB thumb drive. If it is present, the slide show starts using it as the source and copies any new items from it to the hard disk. If it is not present, then the slide show utilizes the files present on the hard disk. A log file is kept and the output from the copy command is redirected to a text file on the USB thumb drive so that it can be analyzed without having to access the picture frame.

So, that is it! Now that it functions like a digital photo frame the next step is to make it look like a digital photo frame.

Chops… Limited Time Only

I took a one day detour while shaving off my beard… promised my boss I’d come in with mutton chops and I did not disappoint. This would have been awesome for my next Halloween costume… white trash 2.0.

Goalie Update

It’s been over a year since my last goalie post. I had a set back when I tore my MCL. I had to sit out for a little over 3 months. Fortunately I could skate out after just 8 weeks so I didn’t take my own life. Anyways, I still suck, but, I am getting much better. A few weeks ago a teammate of mine was shooting photos of the game with the friggin hubble telescope as a lens. Looking through the photos is quite helpful. I can see things I am doing wrong and things I am doing right. Let me show you….

First off I needed to relax a bit. I may have overdone this here as you can see I am lounging around with my protective gear on the top of the net while casually sipping on some water.

After a few close calls I learned it’s much safer with gear on.

The next thing I have learned is that it’s always best if you make it look good when you get beat. In this next photo you’ll see that I demonstrate this quite well. Just by looking at the picture you get the impression that this shot was a laser beam to the back of the net right?

Also, it’s very wise to exaggerate even the shots that go wide as demonstrated here…

Don’t rely on your hands and feet for making saves. If you’ve got to eat pucks… EAT EM!

As a last resort, ALWAYS blame your defense. It’s NEVER your fault!

Seriously though, I am improving and even though these are still shots I can see that improvement in the photos. Take a look at this sequence where the player cuts across the top towards the right trying to beat me on the glove side. You can see the knee already dropping in picture 2 and the nicely executed butterfly slide (minus the poor positioning of the blocker) in 3 and 4. I am square with the shooter at all times. Oh… and what’s that… is that the look of frustration?

My stance is also a hell of a lot better…

I am tracking, rotating, loading and pushing like a champ. This sequence doesn’t show the push but you can see the puck come in, rebound (shitty rebound I know), I track it out and in the final picture you can see that my push foot is already up and I am ready to go.

As I stated, I still suck, but I am significantly improved. I actually won an ‘A’ level game with a 5-3 decision a few weeks back. That’s two levels higher than the play pictured and it’s the highest level at the rink. Now, I won’t mention the game that I played in about 3 months back in which I lost by a score of 13-3. We’ll pretend that never happened.

Puppies Are Here!

I got an e-mail a short bit ago. Looks like Trouble (the dam) whelped 10 puppies (5 blue females, 1 red female, 1 blue male, 3 red males). Given that there are 3 red males and a total of 4 males I believe I am guaranteed my red male. That is if I remember her explanation of the other deposits correctly. More when I know it…

Beards

It took 33 years but I decided it was time to grow a beard. This post serves to document the fact so that I can now shave it. Gonna try some mutton chops next… at least for a day.

Long Time, No Post

I haven’t posted in a while… and probably wouldn’t have if not for a conversation in the locker room this weekend. Apparently there are many of you who find this useless crap entertaining. So, I promised I’d revive this thing with some back posts and a new post about beards since all of you are so jealous of my manliness. Sissies! Anyways, I’ll put some crap up here over the next few days to appease all of you… especially the guy without a job right now… you know who you are.

Champions… again

We took the ship in ‘B’ again! This was not even a close game. We smoked them 6-1. Myself, I had a really good game. I had 1 goal and 4 assists in the victory.

Puppies

I’ve decided it’s time for me to get a puppy. I never have had a dog but love Jann’s dogs. The breed, Australian Cattle Dog, is the best in my opinion. Extremely intelligent and loyal dogs. I’ve been communicating with several different breeders in CA and finally decided to place a deposit on a litter due early October. So, I’ve got a puppy… as long as there are at least 4 males, and one is a red (because of the others in front of me asking for males). Below is a pup from the previous litter. Cute huh? Anyways… more news in October.