Blue Sparks

So, I upgraded my blog from bblog to wordpress. I figured it was about time for a change. I was really getting tired of all the spam comments and bblog’s lack of ability to deal with them. I probably should have changed a long time ago, but I was just lazy…

Wordpress is definitely nice, but probably waaaaay more full of features than I really need. Oh well, it looks and feels very nice. I’ve added another last.fm plugin for wordpress, and this one actually downloads album images rather than just song names!

I also tried to upgrade my gallery from gallerypy to gallery2. I’ve tried this upgrade in the past, and it didn’t go so well. I should have stuck with my gut feelings, but I was interested to see how a wp->g2 plugin would work. While it worked reasonably well, I still can’t get past gallery2’s stupidness. I really hate that I can’t just point it at a folder of pictures, which are already on my site here, and have it parse them. I don’t have the time or willpower to sort thousands of pictures into albums… when the folder heirarchy I already have does that just perfectly as it is!

Anyway, I just hacked the template for gallerpy so it would look like the blog. It’s exactly the same thing I did with bblog a couple years ago! C’est la vie… take the easy route I guess!

Another quick entry. I attended FanExpo 2008 yesterday. I think I stated that the last time I went (2006) I was a little underwhelmed… well, this time it was even worse. Difficult to believe maybe, but it is true.

There were 3 booths selling tickets for the show, ending up in a lineup of an hour and half!!! Yes, I waited for 90 minutes in order to pay $25 to get in. I think this is utterly ridiculous. You would think that since they’ve been doing this for a while now that there would be some extra ticket booths open in order to quell the rush. Hell, make an automated ticket booth or something that I can stick my credit card into!

Secondly, the vendor displays were again a little poor. I used to remember a wide variety of different things for sale in these expos, but I didn’t see that. If you weren’t looking for comic books, action figures, or DVDs there was nothing really there for you. We tried to check out the gaming section to see if there was any interesting board games on display, but were underwhelmed. We ended up sitting down and playing ‘Settlers of Catan’ for an hour and a half. A game that several of us own and didn’t have to pay $25 each for the privilege of playing.

Maybe I used to be more into the stuff that was there… or maybe I’m just losing touch with my geekdom. Personally, I was happier when we went back to Matt’s place and played D&D for the rest of the night. I just wish we hadn’t wasted half the day doing other stuff when we could have been doing that!

Well, I decided to test out the new Alpha version of Ubuntu over the past few days. Unfortunately it’s been nothing but problems. That should be expected with an Alpha, but my main concern was with graphic drivers and sound… two VERY important parts of the system.

First off - the Video. Apparently ATI hasn’t release a version of their driver which will work with the new Xorg (version 7.4) that is shipping with Intrepid. This isn’t Ubuntu’s fault, so I won’t dwell on it. I will mention that ATI did just release a new driver about five days ago which we were hoping for support, but it didn’t come.

So to alleviate the issue, I switched to the open source Radeon driver. Not a real problem, since I’ve had to do this several times before. The driver works nicely, and I can get one monitor up in its native resolution (1680×1050). The problems start when I try to get the dual-head (two monitors) configuration going. The MergedFB method which used to work doesn’t. The Xinerama route does work, but my VGA monitor is EXTRA bright. It’s so bright that I can’t read anything that’s on a white background. Unfortunately that means this solution doesn’t work either. The ‘official’ way of doing this now is supposed to be with a tool called XRandR, but I’m not having much luck here either. Sometimes I can get the dual-head to work, but it will consistently revert back to a mirrored configuration showing the same desktop on both monitors. That makes this slightly unusable in my opinion.

Secondly there’s the sound issue. I’m not certain exactly what the issue was, but previously I had a USB headset connected to the computer for gaming and applications like Skype. Usually it defaults to the secondary output and I can select it in the preferences if I would like to use it. The issue seems to be that Ubuntu wants to use it as the primary all of the time! And, to top it all off I can’t get any sound out of the sound card (SB Audigy2) any more now that I have the headset unplugged.

So, as I type this I’m burning a copy of Hardy Heron (8.04) in order to reinstall. Not a big deal though, it’s one of those things that lets me get rid of all the extra crap I installed and don’t need anymore! This is actually made quite easy as well since my “/home” partition is on a nice RAID and everything else is on an 80GB partition of another HD.

Looks like it’s done… so time to format and start again!

Right, new pictures are up of our trip. Right now I’ve only got our pictures, but we should get some from the rest of the family to add later as well!

Bear Lake 2008

So we arrived home from Bear Lake on Saturday, and the trip was very good! I won’t bore you with the details, but the weather wasn’t bad; it was mostly sunny with a little rain. The fishing was also pretty good. Jackie’s dad took us up into a back lake which we had to portage the canoe into, but I lost count of the number of Bass I caught up there at around 10, and that is not where the fish stopped either. We also went to Science North] one day. I was most impressed by the IMAX video we saw on the Great Lakes, which focused on the Lake Sturgeon and the attempts to restock its dwindling population.

*** WARNING, FISH STORY BELOW ***

On the topic of Big Fish I should not that while I was bass fishing with Jackie’s Dad, I happened to land a muskie (muskellunge). Let’s just say that was an experience and a half!!! I was fishing with a buzz bait on the top, hoping to get some largemouths to strike, but what I happened to get was much mroe than I bargained for. A large fish, which I first assumed was a Pike, rolled out of the water and slammed the lure. I knew it was a big fish, but estimated only about 15-20lbs from what I saw of it originally.

I’ll skip the 15 minutes of battle with the fish, and just note that I was using 8lb test line with no steel leader. This fish could have escaped me with a wrong move! By the time I got the fish up the boat Jackie’s dad informs me that we have a muskie, not a pike, and that it’s almost four feet long ( about 35 - 40lbs of fish ). I threw him the tape that I keep in my tackle box, but it only measures 36 inches. We estimated the fish was about 45-48 inches long though.

Now that we have the fish, we need to figure out what to do with it. We only have a small bass net, no cradle, and our boat is only a 12 foot aluminum. Any attempt to grab this fish is probably going to end up with us in the water, or even worse it thrashing around in our little boat! We eventually decided to beach the fish, and try to release it there. It was easy enough to get it into the shallows and on the rocks, but that’s when it got really mad. I tried to pull the hook with some pliers, but had no luck. Eventually it rolled itself up in my line and it didn’t stand a chance vs 35+ lbs of fish and no water for buoyancy.

I left the lure and pushed the fish back into the water, where it sat in the shallows for a few minutes gathering its strength again. Soon enough it skulked back into the weeds to continue on its merry life. All in all the whole episode probably took us 20 minutes or so, but it’s an experience of a lifetime I have to tell you!

To top it all off, this was the only night I *didn’t* bring my camera fishing with us. That means there is no picture, just the word of myself and my father-in-law. I caught enough fish up there during the week I don’t need to exaggerate, but I know how some people feel about fish stories!!!

I updated the Gallery a week or two ago. It’s added some photos since the last dump I did, which was probably back in November or December after we got back from Sean’s wedding.

We finished our kitchen renovations (finally)… at least for the most part. There are little things to do still, like putting the caulking along the wall and touching up paint where we messed it up, but overall it’s finished. There are some photos up in the gallery. Some are before pictures, and the others are with us at about 75% done.

On the topic of renovation, I was helping Sean put new floor in his condo with my father on Saturday. Overall things went pretty smoothly, except that my legs are absolutely killing me from being hunched over all day. There was preexisting laminate in his place, but he wanted to cover two rooms in the same colour so I picked up the old floor. That’s a project for another month though.

To top off the muscle pain, I went fishing yesterday morning in the Grand River. I always fish off the banks, and they’re not exactly easy to traverse down by mom and dad’s place. On the plus side I managed to land quite a few smallmouth bass down there! I went angling the weekend before with Jackie’s dad, Uncle Ron, and their friend Roger down in Lake Erie for bass season opening and I caught less (and was in the water much much earlier).

Fishing has actually been quite productive so far this year. Up at the SC Johnson cottages I landed a lot of bass, even though I was fishing for pike - bass weren’t in season yet. At the ponds in Mt Pleasant the same thing, bass and more bass when attempting to lure in some trout - again, bass still not open. Although the Saturday that bass season opened I only managed to get one out of the ponds.

And next week we’re up to the cottage on Bear Lake again. I’m hoping my luck holds out in the fishing area since that is where I will be spending most of my time!

If you want to set up your own site to build pictures of Pi, I have put the PiPic script up for download. It is available under the GNU GPL.

PiPic

As some of you already know I host a page on my site here which will show you 4 million digits of Pi. You may ask why, and I really couldn’t tell you. It’s just something I thought was neat, and so I did it. The calling of a true blooded nerd I guess…

Well, I took it one step further this week. I’ve heard of pages which will show you pictures of Pi before by mapping digits on to images, but they didn’t do so on demand. So I’ve taken it upon myself to help everyone out. Now you can view Pi at any resolution you would like, from 1×1 to 2048×2048. It could go larger as well, although my current script is limited in size because I have (wait for it) 4 million digits of Pi stored here (and what’s 2048×2048?).

So, if you’re nerdy enough you can check it out too:

Pi 300x300

Today I feel just ‘meh’. I’m not exactly certain why, so I’m just blaming the winter. I really just feel like sleeping the day away…

It’s been a long time since I’ve put an update here. No real excuses. I pretty much forgot about the ‘blog.’ Oh well, I guess. I’ll try and update again at some point…