Ack, my marriage is dying

Hmm. It’s the day after the House of Commons said gay people should be able to get married. So far my marriage hasn’t disintegrated but we’re on full alert here at tweed central. Since I’ve yammered about this before (not that you can find it at the moment since I have still yet to transfer my files over) I’ll just throw out some random thoughts on the process.

– It’s about bloody time.
– Didn’t you love the bit when Harper started crying that the bill was being propped up by separatists?
-And does he have no one on staff who thought that was a stupid idea?
-When is David Foley going to announce he’s been playing the role of Stephen Harper for the last year and a bit. I know it won’t be as dramatic as doing it say at Rideau Hall but it might mean he’d get a couple of votes.
-Are you worried that there might actually be enough people angry about the gay marriage bill to put him into power given the first past the post system?
-Aren’t you surprised that I’m worried about giving him power since I’m a fiscal conservative? I know I am.
-Who the hell am I going to vote for now? So far the marijuana party is beginning to look reasonable.
-Wasn’t Ken Dryden’s article in the Toronto Star the best seen on the topic in ages?
-Is there a pool I can get into for when the institution of marriage starts visably combusting? I’ve got five bucks that needs wasting.

TNA

Thanks to their lack of a television deal TNA has put up a torrent of this week’s Impact. Looks like I’ll finally see what the hype is about.

plucking away

I think I have finally gotten Seraph to worry about me. I borrowed a guitar from my father-in-law last weekend. I now can play two songs: Rose Colored Glasses by John Conlee and Hit Me Baby One More Time by the ‘lovely’ Ms. Spears. Or Ms. Yokel. I’m not sure if she took Cletus’ last name. And before you ask the latter has five chords: Am, E, C, F, G in more or less that order. I hit the F with surprising regularity. Perhaps it’s due to the fact that I’m no longer 8 years old and my fingers have gotten slightly bigger.

Installing nvidia in debian sarge

After a bunch of hacking and one duh moment (after you install nVidia you kinda have to tell your computer to use it) I now have a computer that recognizes my video card. Since I got confused I’ll write it down here in the hopes that it will help someone (aka me since I can never remember how to do this)

Step #1 apt-get install nvidia-kernel-source
Step #2 cd /usr/src then tar zxvf nvdia-kernel-source-tar.gz
Step #3 follow the instructions in /usr/share/doc/nvidia-kernel-source/README.debian (it’s there for a damned reason). Be advised you might need to get rid of rivafb using modconf. I did.
Step #4 modconf to add nvidia to the kernel
Step #4b Restart (you know, shutdown -r now). I have no idea if you can just keep going. Don’t ask me. If I have to do this again I’ll try it without restarting and update this step.
Step #5 dpkg-reconfigure xsettings-xfree86 set the video card to nv or nvidia (whichever shows up)
Step #6 google mb to kb to find the converter site if you can’t figure out how much 32 MB is in kb (32768 btw)
Step #7 Restart your xserver. I cheated and told it to start xchdm or whatever the hell the remote x login is called. Then I hit cancel. It restarted things nicely. If you know a better way to restart the xserver without killing it and typing startx (which won’t give you gdm or whatever it is you use) let me know. Please. Edit: Duh! Control-Alt-Backspace. I should have known this.

That’s it folks. That’s the summation of about 5 different google searches. Hopefully if you need to do this my site comes up sooner in the search results.

Update:
This post is officially useful. I screwed my original installation because I edited the partition tables wrong. I had to do a complete reinstall (it’s only a 10 Gb hard drive so I just threw it all in one section this time) and used this post to get my video card up and working. Thanks me.

look out WWE

From the Toronto Star today (full link is here but it’s probably needs a login)

Things are definitely looking up south of the border, too.

The CFL has agreed to deals with a bunch of regional cable networks in the U.S. such as Comcast and Cox Sports and is now available in 70 million homes, 20 million more than last year.

“We’ve found a hole in the programming on Friday nights,” says CFL broadcast director Chris McCracken. “There’s a hole in the schedule that needs to be filled and Americans love football.”

The CFL isn’t making any money off those deals, but McCracken believes that could change.

“It would be great to have big rights fees down the road … but for the time being we just want to build the product and tell the story on a national basis,” McCracken says.

Whether Canadian football will be anything more than cable filler in the U.S. is doubtful, but there’s no denying it’s a big hit here.

A hole in the programming eh? Guess who’s moving to Fridays come September? That’s right. The WWE’s main sports competitor for Smackdown will be the CFL. What makes this more interesting is the fact that the season will be heading towards the playoff picture in the fall after what looks like might be a really exciting season. I think it would be the funniest damn thing in the world if the CFL outdrew the WWE, though I probably wouldn’t be so happy if they actually had Smackdown be a proper show instead of gutting it over the last few weeks of the draft.

honour among thevies?

It looks like I’m a bit slow on this news article but it nonetheless amuses me.

Apparently phisers have a new enemy, defacers. I’ve only seen one defacing, someone’s wedding website (no comment about whether it was improved by the attack). I think this is great. Vigilante justice by the so-called quasi-criminal element just serves to show that even rebels have social beliefs. It also strikes a chord with those who believe that defacers are not in the same criminal league as other electronic criminals. If you are dumb enough to leave a security hole, you deserve to be defaced (he says smugly while secretly hoping that his own site is secure). It is still illegal. But at least vigilantism isn’t becoming boring.

out of the handbasket and into the gondola

Poor Lucifer must be tearing out his hair over the last couple of weeks. First the release of Debian ‘sarge’ dropped the temperature in hell to a new rock bottom low. Then a WWE sponsored ECW event that had no WWE manipulation at the production level (with the added bonus of WCW being mocked and it’s public face man humiliated) occurred. The engagement of Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes finally started the process of the world righting itself again by filling existence with trivial oddities. But all was for nought. After clawing his way back to normal levels of heat and sulfur emissions this has to happen.

Dear CRTC,

Good job.

Sincerely,

Me

With those two words hell has once again become the skiing paradise of the supernatural world. For the first time in a long while (I won’t say forever) the CRTC has made a decision that not only makes sense given the Canadian context, but has gone out of it’s way to actually be reasonable.

Let’s take a little look at the decision.

  • Canada does not have nor will it have in the near future (if ever) a series of communication satelites that will allow radio broadcasting. So what do they do? Accept that fact.
  • By not having the atmospheric resources we know that it will be far too expensive to start up our own system. So what do they do? Accept that fact.
  • The Americans have been doing this for a few years now and have really started to push in their own market. Any system set up will probably have to be piggy-backed on their. So what do they do? Accept that fact.

That’s a lot of accepting for an organization prone to hypernationalism. So what happened? First I think they knew they were on shaky ground to begin with. The FCC has no regulatory framework for keeping check on this new form of broadcasting (one of it’s biggest marketing points south of the border) and any overt attempt would force the companies to start a legal action that would more than likely result in the CRTC being shown to have a similar lack of authority. Second, the companies were being nice by coming to them to begin with. There’s already a huge underground market. No one was forcing them to head north. Thirdly, they actually recognized that we have no chance in hell at competing simply because we didn’t bother to set up the hardware necessary to do so. It all adds up to the fact that the CRTC made a decision based on logic rather than fear. By setting up some simple requirements to make sure that Canada got a fair shake it allows a system to grow in an area that is in some desperate need of competition. CHUM and Roger’s own most of Canada’s radio stations and the ones they don’t are pretty much pointless in their broadcasting power as CHUM’s stations are in their programming choices (oddly enough the Roger’s stations generally attempt to put new music on (or in my case of listening habits better sports programs), go figure).

And what was the reaction that for every 9 foreign channels there had to be a Canadian channel? Sure. Sirius alone has changed their technology to provide for oodles of more channels. What’s three more than they were proposing?

The biggest complaint thus far is, surprise surprise, from CHUM. The CRTC didn’t make their lives easier by forcing the market to cater to their whims. Boo hoo. For once in the longest time I can remember the CRTC made a decision that will actually force Canadian companies to, gasp, act according to standard business models instead of forcing rampant protectionism that stifles any outside force from actually competing.

Now the biggest choice is which broadcaster to sign up with. At the moment I’m leaning towards XM radio. Sirius has Howard Stern. That alone pretty much solidifies my choice (creative genius? yes. mindlessly boring and derivative? absolutely). XM also has the better sports deal right now with MLB (my radio sport of choice). The fact that Chris Jericho has a radio show has nothing to do with it at all.

still trying

Movable Type keeps trying to reassert control. I’ve now deleted the mysql database it uses (the content is saved in a couple of locations).

The next step will be wading through the 325 posts, selecting those to be published on this blog, deleting the sex and poker trackback pings, and uploading them into the history. This might take a while.

Hello world!

Wha happened???

Due to the fact that the public life and private life portions of my site are now interfering with each other I am having to do something I’ve been thinking about for over a year: separating the tweed from the man. I need to have a place where I can relate what is going on in my life on a personal level. However that does not mean that it should be open to the public. I also need a place to keep all my rants about politics and religions, reviews on linux, and general hilarity mongering. This does need to be public. So over the next few days I’m going to be retooling the site. I’m also taking advantage of this by moving to wordpress as my primary blogging tool. There’s nothing wrong with Movable Type. I just don’t feel right using the free version of their program when I might be stepping more into what they classify as a commercial site (if I publish anything I’ll be posting it here after all).

So I hope you have a good weekend. I work Saturday and thus have the Monday off. I’ll hopefully be finished tweaking by that point. The personal site will be password and login protected to keep things even privater. This will probably involve me having to do some php and mysql scripting so please be patient with me while I hack my way through it.

Cheers

Update. It’s Thursday and I’ve managed to isntall WordPress and configure things. Now the fun of themes begins.