whitebread

Turn off the annoying instructions that nobody needs to hear anymore:

For Sprint:
1. Access your voicemail box.
2. Press 3, for personal options.
3. Press 2, for greetings.
4. Press 1, to change your personal greeting.
5. Press 3, to add or remove the caller instructions.
6. Follow the prompts to turn instructions on or off.

Thanks to ohdog for the link via google reader

Subversion version skew
Using a 1.5 client with a 1.4 server creates problems if you have other machines still running the 1.4 client.
If you upgraded your local copy of the svn client, but the server did not get upgraded, and you’re running ubuntu:

1. Uninstall subversion and libsvn using synaptic
2. Go here here and pick the version of your server/other clients
3. Download both subversion and libsvn in the desired version
4. run sudo dpkg -i on both libsvn and subversion
5. Open synaptic, search for subversion
6. Select the (now old) version of subversion
7. Open the packages menu and select “lock package”
8. Do the same for libsvn

This will mean that your client won’t be upgraded automatically, but should work with your server.

Only a day late this year! That’s an order of magnitude better than last year, if you’ll recall. By next year I might just be on time.

So happy birthday my dear. I’m looking forward to many more with you.

New Global Ad Campaign Captures Youthful Optimism; Evian Unveils Roller Break-Dancing Babies to the Beat of Rapper’s Delight Remix
the rest is here

As in any resource-rich developing country with weak institutions and woeful oversight, corruption and official misconduct go easily unchecked. Scrutiny is not welcome, and Alaskans of every age and station, of every race and political stripe, unself-consciously refer to every other place on earth with a single word: Outside.

So, of all the puzzling things that Sarah Palin told the American public last fall, perhaps the most puzzling was this: “Believe me, Alaska is like a microcosm of America.”

Believe me, it is not.

More here

Tony Kushner’s husband reminds me of Coleman:

You’ve come up with a perfectly shaped 14-word phrase of English that’s guaranteed to give [Republican U.S. Rep.] Michele Bachmann a heart attack, and it doesn’t even have an active verb in it

PZ Meyers is my hero:

She [Michele Bachmann] claims that not one study has ever been produced to show that CO2 is harmful, and she goes further to claim that CO2 is a harmless gas. We could correct that in just a few minutes: give me a large tank of CO2 and a small room containing Michele Bachmann, and we’ll give her a personal experience.

Remedial knocks it out of the park again

Wallabies get high,
And people make excellent comments for once:

I’ve lived in Tasmania for many years. Not only do wallabies congregate in poppy fields, but also on the local golf courses. They do this mainly at night and I can only assume they’re playing several rounds of golf while avoiding greens fees. You only need to be really worried when one of the stoned wallabies gets into a golf buggy.

Going uphill on the way home from work, I passed a pickup truck with a cover over the bed. Usually such vehicles in urban areas annoy me, but this one didn’t. From a distance I could tell that this particular terrorism-supporter had a vanity plate. As I got closer, I could see that it read: WALLSTIB

Regardless of what he intended, this guy announces to everyone he passes that he’s responsible for the investment banking failure and the overall downturn of the economy.

No matter how you read it, “WALLSTIB” is just a stupid thing to put on your plates. So this SUV just made me laugh and push harder on the pugs to get me up the hill.

In other news,
Three nights left to make the dump look like a place of residence. Don’t tell b, but the progress has been slow. More and more bikes keep finding their way upstairs…I should probably get one of those plastic expandable gates or something.

Two more cool things about *nix that I discovered recently:
One.
If you start a command on a remote machine, and realize it won’t finish before you have to disconnect, but don’t want to lose your progress:
1. Press ctrl+z to suspend it
2. Type ‘bg’ to put it in the background
3. Type ‘disown -a’

Your process will continue when you log off.

Two.
Not as cool, but nice to know nonetheless:
Tar has a –checkpoint option that periodically prints status messages. So if you have a really big tar that you’re creating or extracting, you can get updates to make sure it’s still working.
tar –checkpoint -xf bigtar.tar

B returns in a week and a day. Hooray! (though I only have a week to convert a disaster into an apartment. if anyone finds a linux command for this, let me know asap)

Not to completely rip off remedial’s analysis, but it turns out that post-nine-eleven a death threat is a valid form of id. In reading remedial’s link, when I got to the point where he starts threatening death and the bank–apparently–says, “oh, well, in that case, let’s just get that money…” I thought to myself, it’s a good thing I’m Warren Buffett. Yep that’s me. Oh you want some ID? People gonna die…

Woke up, put on brand new BR pants, drove to work, made tea. Picked a phish show to listen to with Harry Hood somewhere in the setlist. Spilled tea on lap. Scalded important parts, soaked new pants. Got back in car, made usual left turn at illegal time. Got ticket, took pants to drycleaners, back to work just in time to hear Harry Hood.

Life is good.