Today I stopped by Java City to give the staff a “heads up” about some books being sent by BookCrossing user KimKerry. Good thing I showed up when I did, since the box had just arrived! The following books are now on the OBCZ bookshelf:
Thanks, Kim, for helping us keep the bookshelf filled!
I finished reading Monstrous Regiment last night, after starting it on Saturday evening. It took me about 10-20 pages to get hooked on this story, and quite a few more for me to figure out what was going on. (Is this a fantasy novel? Science Fiction? Some weird alternate fantastic history?)
This was my first experience with the Discworld setting, and I think it would have been helpful for me to have some background before reading this book. As it was, I enjoyed it enough to go hunting for more Discworld novels — it turns out there are plenty to choose from! Terry Pratchett has been working on this series since 1983, so I guess that’s no surprise.
Now I’ll have to peruse the list of Discworld novels and figure out what to read next. I’ll probably go back and read some of the early books, just to get a feel for this universe.
Thanks to Stu (no URL) and Ant, I think I’ve made some progress on scplugin! For some background, see my post on Subversion on Mac OSX and my subsequent attempts to get SCPlugin to work with Finder.
After trying Stu’s and Ant’s suggestions, I now get a Subversion menu when I control-click or right-click on a file/directory in the Finder. Woo hoo! Everything looks good, too. If I open the Subversion menu on a file which isn’t part of a svn working copy, only the Checkout and About menu items are available (as expected). Subversion working copies show the full menu (or whatever is appropriate). However, there are two things that still seem to be broken: the svn status indicators (icon overlays?) aren’t showing up in Finder, and I seem to have hosed the connection to my repository. Doh!
We’re using smb file shares to host our repository. When I first set this up, I connected to the file share (⌘K in Finder) and checked out a working copy of the repository. I could only work via the command line, but everything worked. Fastforward to a few days ago (when Stu and Ant dropped comments). I’m now trying to use scplugin again (not the command line), and all of the sudden nothing is working. It finally dawned on me that perhaps I should try the command line again. It turns out that when I first created my working copy, I must have somehow given a connection-specific smb string instead of the server name followed by the share. Here are the errors I’m getting:
svn commit -m 'Changed script to be user-independent' my_script
subversion/libsvn_client/commit.c:873: (apr_err=180001)
svn: Commit failed (details follow):
subversion/libsvn_ra_local/ra_plugin.c:285: (apr_err=180001)
svn: Unable to open an ra_local session to URL
subversion/libsvn_ra_local/split_url.c:125: (apr_err=180001)
svn: Unable to open repository 'file:///Volumes/server-3/my_proj/trunk/my_script’
The /Volumes/server-3 bit is where the problem lies–It should be /Volumes/sharename, instead of the third connection to this server. I did some hunting around on the net and found out how to fix broken svn repository references: use svn switch --relocate, such as:
svn switch --relocate file:///Volumes/server-3 file:///Volumes/sharename workingcopyroot
or so I thought. 
Now I’m getting the following error:
svn commit -m 'Changed script to be user-independent' my_script
subversion/libsvn_client/commit.c:873: (apr_err=5)
svn: Commit failed (details follow):
subversion/libsvn_subr/io.c:2199: (apr_err=5)
svn: Can't write to file '/Volumes/sharename/my_proj/db/transactions/3-1.txn/rev': Input/output error
Bummer. It may be time for a bug report…
I took this picture a while back, when it was really cold outside.
Her Majesty (red tabby in the back) normally wouldn’t tolerate either of the kittens lying near her; likewise, the kittens wouldn’t usually stay put if Her Majesty jumped onto the bed. (They like their fur on their bodies, not in bloody clumps in Her Majesty’s claws.) But they all three know that if they start fighting they’ll get put out in the cold.
I don’t care much for television, which partially explains why the last time I bought a TV was over 20 years ago. I was a college student, i.e. poor, but I managed to scrounge up about $300 one summer and bought a 19″ Zenith that had been used as a display model. No remote–this is old school, you have to get up off your butt and walk over to the TV to change channels.
This has served me (and later my family) for quite some time, but its age has been showing. About five years ago, it developed a need to “warm up” when first turned on. The picture would be fuzzy or completely garbled, then it would suddenly snap into a clear picture after a few minutes. Lately, this delay has been getting longer and longer. It never bothered me overmuch, but it did bother my wife. A few months ago she started working an extra half-day each week to save up for a new TV. Last weekend it took over half an hour to warm up, and I finally decided to throw in the towel with my old Zenith.
We don’t watch much (if any) broadcast television, and we don’t have cable, so we didn’t need an [HD]TV tuner or cable input. But we do like to watch movies, so we wanted a wide screen (9:16 aspect ratio) capable of displaying HD images. We also wanted a large wall-mountable display for about $3,000. We toyed around with a bleeding-edge “1080p” unit, but almost all of the currently-available units are projection systems (not wall-mountable), or LCD systems that are too expensive or smaller than we’d like.
We’re planning to mount this on the wall in the living/family/great room once we remodel the house. There will be a lot of windows on the south side of this room, so we need a fairly bright technology with a reasonable viewing angle. LCD’s and plasma displays were what we finally settled on. I did a lot of research on Consumer Reports online and came up with a few possible candidates.
After checking some prices online, I wasn’t sure that we were going to be able to get everything we wanted. CR suggested that warehouse membership stores often had the best prices (as well as very flexible return/refund policies), so we headed over to the nearest CostCo to do some first hand research. The LCD and plasma displays were in two adjacent aisles, but by standing in one particular spot we were able to get a good head-on view of all the displays. The best thing about checking these out at CostCo is the crappy lighting/viewing conditions, compared to a dimly-lit “home theater” store. The LCD panels might be fine given better (i.e. dimmer) lighting, but in the warehouse it was immediately obvious to me that plasma was the way to go. My wife didn’t notice much of a difference at first; however, as soon as I asked her to compare the backgrounds in the images she too voted for plasma. (We were watching Olympic figure skating, and there wasn’t much difference between the images of the spotlighted skaters. But on the plasma screens you could see the faces of people in the darkened stands, whereas on the LCD screens you could merely see the outlines of heads and shoulders.) Then a clip from a basketball game was played, and that clinched it–whenever a player moved across the screen very quickly, the LCD pictures got “chunky” while the plasma screens displayed the motion smoothly. I’m not much of a sports viewer, but it sure makes a good “stress test” for TV’s!
I jotted down all the model numbers and prices of suitable displays at CostCo and we came back home to do some more research on CR-online. Of course, none of the models that CostCo was selling were reviewed by CR, but we got some good comparisons of brands and features. We settled on a Panasonic 50″ plasma screen, model TH-50PM50U. After some online price shopping, it looked like CostCo did indeed have the best price. (Plus we would get the unit home that same day–instant gratification!) So my wife and I hopped in the truck and drove back to CostCo and picked up a monster-sized TV screen.
(For comparison, the tape measure in this image is still set to 19″ as in the Zenith picture at the top of the article.)
Since it’ll be very difficult to get a good look at this later, here are pictures of the connection panel and the manufacturer’s information:
Panasonic model TH-50PM50U, ser#YP6140357 (Not that anybody else cares about this–it’s just here for my future reference.)
I started this article last year when we bought the display, but for some reason I never published it. The article date is accurate, although it was “published” today.
Grrr! Soma’s “Morning Rush” coffee cup holder uses a Cat Eye H-27 bracket, which (of course) is not the same bracket that came with my HL-350 headlight, which is the only Cat Eye headlight stocked by my LBS (Peak Adventures). So I searched the Cat Eye catalog for headlights that use the H-27 bracket (part #533-8591). A Google search for site:cateye.com 533-8591 returns 3 matching items:
Peak Adventures is willing to special-order the light for me, but I found it in stock at City Bicycle Works (mid-town store) so I’ll just pick it up there.
Raley’s gave out an amazing recipe for chipotle beef for Cinco de Mayo back in 2001. We loved it, but we managed to lose the recipe last year when we moved. Here’s our best guess as to the original recipe.
Ingredients:Dump everything into a crock pot and stir to mix. Cover and cook on low heat for about 8 hours. Take off the lid and cook on high heat for about an hour. Use a slotted spoon to remove the beef from the crock pot. Shred the beef with a pair of forks (more difficult, but you get to eat sooner), or refrigerate it for several hours and shred it with your fingers (much easier, but you will be tormented by the delicious aroma while the beef cools).
- 3 lb. boneless chuck, fat trimmed, cut into ~2″ chunks
- 16 oz. jar of Pace chipotle salsa
- 1 yellow onion, chopped
- 4 oz. can of diced green chiles
- 3 canned chipotles in adobo sauce, coursely chopped
- ~2 tsp. oregano
- ~1 tsp. cumin
- 3 cloves of garlic, minced
We usually make burritos out of this, just because they’re quick and we’re usually ravenously hungry after smelling this cook all day. If you have the will power and imagination to come up with another use, feel free to leave a comment!
I seem to be making a lot of bicycle-related posts lately, so I guess it’s time for another hobby entry.
I got my first bike, a Schwinn Stingray, for my 7th birthday and I’ve been riding ever since. In fact, I didn’t even own a motor vehicle until I graduated from college and got a professional job at the age of 24. At that point, bicycling went from a necessity to a pastime. That was nearly 20 years ago, and I’ve found that the sedentary lifestyle doesn’t suit me. In May 2005 I was finally able to move close enough to my job to allow me to commute by bike, although it wasn’t until January 2006 that I got to the point that I was bicycling to work more often than not.
Over the last couple of months, I’ve been looking at Sacramento-area bicycling clubs. I’ll do a post some other time showing all the clubs I found, but the club I decided to join was the Sacramento Bike Hikers. They seem to have a lot of organized rides starting near my house, so that tipped the balance heavily in their favor.
One of my co-workers introduced me to BikeJournal, a world-wide online cycling community. Sadly you can’t really explore the site until you register, but a few days ago I wrote a post about BikeJournal and included some links (no registration required!) demonstrating the site.
Between the online- and meatspace communities that I’ve joined, I managed to find a few commuting buddies over the past two weeks. We had some pretty nice cycling weather in Sacramento last month, but March is off to a nasty start. Hopefully the rain will clear up soon and I’ll be able to return to commuting by bike!
Semper fidelis, the Marine’s motto, means “always faithful”. I thought it was appropriate for this post. Read on…
Waaay back circa 1985, I was forced to buy a new bicycle when somebody stole my then-current bike. I didn’t own a vehicle, so every trip I made was by foot, public transit, or bike, with the vast majority of my trips being via bicycle. In addition to commuting and errands, I also did quite a bit of riding for pleasure. In fact, I would often ride the entire American River Bike Trail, (approximately 100 km/62 miles round trip), several times per week during the summer. So it was pretty important to me that I buy a bike suited to riding long distances. I went to my LBS, then known as the Mountain Wolf Co-op but now Peak Adventures. I told them what I was interested in, and they suggested that I get a touring bike. Here she is, still ride-worthy after 20 years:
Back in the 80’s, a Japanese toy company named Takara was re-branding and selling inexpensive bicycles, and this was the brand that the Moutain Wolf Co-op was carrying at that time. Tribute was the model name for their touring bike. My bike above is almost stock–the only changes I’ve made are leather bar grips (the best!) and a longer (120 mm) stem, both of which were done almost the day I got the bike.
I put thousands of kilometers on this bike when I first bought it. (Remember, it was my primary mode of transportation!) But then in the summer of 1987 I got a professional job, and about a month later I bought my first motor vehicle. I still rode for pleasure, but not nearly as much as I had been. In the spring of 1992 my wife, daughter, and I left Sacramento (and the American River Bike Trail), and we moved about 35 miles south to Galt. This is a fairly rural area with relatively low traffic, but the roads are brutal on skinny 120 psi tires! My poor Tribute spent about five years gathering dust in the garage, while I braved the local farm roads (and ornery cowboy kids playing “chicken”, pickup truck versus bicycle) on a more suitable bike.
Things began looking up for my Tribute in the summer of 1997. I was laid off, along with 90% of my coworkers, from my job in Manteca. The very next day, I landed my current job at CSUS. One of the first things I did was rent a bike locker on campus. I dusted off my faithful, neglected Tribute, brought it into the LBS on campus for some maintenance, and resumed riding the American River Bike Trail, right across the Guy West Bridge from campus, woo hoo! Last May (2005), the situation improved further when we moved from Galt back up to Sacramento. I’m now doing most of my commuting (3 to 5 days per week, unless it’s raining) on my 20-year-old Tribute.
I’m getting ready to do some long distance (≥100 km) rides again this summer, but I’m way out of shape compared to 20 years ago. There’s no way I’ll be able to climb a hill with the current gearing on this bike, so I’ll be replacing the stock double chainring (42- and 52 teeth) with a triple chainring (30/39/53). The chainring comes with a new external-bearing bottom bracket as well as 172.5 mm cranks. (My current cranks are 170 mm.) The parts just arrived today, so hopefully they will be installed tomorrow! I’m also thinking about changing to clipless pedals, mostly so that my knees won’t be “twisted” by the cleats, but that will probably have to wait until my birthday. (Barb, are you reading this? Hint, hint…)
