WIJFR: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Mikael Blomkvist, a once-respected financial journalist, watches his professional life rapidly crumble around him. Prospects appear bleak until an unexpected (and unsettling) offer to resurrect his name is extended by an old-school titan of Swedish industry. The catch – and there’s always a catch – is that Blomkvist must first spend a year researching a mysterious disappearance that has remained unsolved for nearly four decades. With few other options, he accepts and enlists the help of investigator Lisbeth Salander, a misunderstood genius with a cache of authority issues.

Today I finished reading “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” by Stieg Larsson, the first book of his Millennium series.

Recently disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist is approached by industrialist Henrik Vanger to write a book about the Vanger Family history in return for information that can clear his name. The book is just a cover story (pardon the pun) for Henrik’s ulterior motive for Blomkvist: solve the mystery of his niece’s disappearance over 40 years ago.

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Lightning strikes!!

After going down 3 games to 1 to Pittsburgh in the Stanley Cup playoffs quarterfinals, the Tampa Bay Lightning have won 7 straight games and just completed a sweep of the #1 seeded (Southeast Division champions) Washington Capitals. Incredible!

The Bolts now await the outcome of the Boston/Philadelphia series (Boston currently leads 3-0).

I had tickets to Game 6 of this semifinal series against the Caps, but I’m more than happy not to get to use them. Instead I’ll try to snag some finals tickets.

GO BOLTS!!

Ah, the promise of spring sports

At the beginning of this month I posted about how the Lightning had clinched a spot in the playoffs and it was the first day of baseball. Now, as April ends and May begins:

Yep, my Cleveland Indians are in first place in the AL Central and the American League overall (2 games ahead of the Yankees, with my Tampa Bay Rays only 1.5 games behind them). Seeing Boston in last place in the AL East certainly doesn’t hurt my mood either! 😉

I know it’s only one month into the season, so it’s definitely early, but I still need to take a moment to bask in the glory of the current standings.

Meanwhile, the Tampa Bay Lightning staged an amazing comeback, down 3 games to 1 to the Pittsburgh Penguins in the NHL quarterfinals, winning three in a row including a Game 7 shutout. Then yesterday they won the first game of the semifinals against the #1 seeded Washington Capitals. GO BOLTS!

Notes on the Natty Narwhal

April is almost over, which means it’s time for another Ubuntu release! Today Canonical released Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal. As I am wont to do (with Maverick, Lucid, Karmic, Intrepid, etc.) I upgraded my server right away. The entire process took about 7 hours start to finish, but most of that was waiting for the 722mb to download (the download servers were understandably overloaded).

Like my previous server upgrades, the process itself was easy and straightforward. After the ‘do-release-upgrade‘ was complete, I re-applied my customizations to various configuration files, rebooted, and I was back in business on the new version. Also like my previous upgrades, I ran into a few snags:

  • NUT 2.6.0 wouldn’t connect to my CyberPower UPS anymore: I found others reporting this issue and was able to compile 2.6.0 from source with a patch to get it working again.
  • something “broke” in postfix with the upgrade from 2.7.1 to 2.8.2: the system couldn’t send e-mail until I added the port number (:25) to the end of the relayhost parameter. I couldn’t get it to work either running in the chroot jail or not, so it wouldn’t seem to be a permissions thing but I haven’t figured out the root cause yet.
  • calibre wouldn’t run: python would throw a “magic number” error. I found a similar report in Launchpad but was able to fix this by simply removing calibre and then installing it again.
  • I had to ‘apt-get install’ lsscsi to remove a minor error in phpSysInfo

So now I’m set until October, when Oneiric Ocelot will be released!

TiVo Slide remote

I guess I didn’t write about the TiVo Slide remote when I first got it last October but after going without it for a few days recently I realized how much I like it.

The Slide is a combination infrared and Bluetooth remote that works with the TiVo Premiere, TiVo HD, and TiVo Series 3 (OLED) boxes. The remote is the same familiar peanut shape as TiVo’s previous remotes, but smaller and heavier. Its shorter length allows for easier operation without having to shift the remote up and down in your hand to switch between the navigation D-pad and number buttons (my daughter thinks it’s a “cute” baby TiVo remote). The back of the remote is textured so you can figure out which way is “up” by feel. It comes with a small Bluetooth USB dongle that you plug into the back of your TiVo and then pair it with the remote.

The primary feature of the Slide is the slide-out QWERTY keyboard, as shown in the photo. The keyboard makes it a snap to enter long strings of text when searching for shows, creating WishLists, etc. The fact that the remote uses Bluetooth also means it’s more responsive (read: faster!) than the IR remotes. This is great for me because I was able to stop using my slow (but functional) IR extender since my TiVo is in an enclosed media cabinet (no line of sight for infrared signals). The Slide is a learning remote, like the Glo remotes, so you can program it to control other components like your TV, receiver, etc. It obviously uses IR for that, not Bluetooth. The little LED on the top of the remote above the TiVo button flashes orange when sending IR and blue when sending Bluetooth.

If you don’t want to get a whole new remote but still would like easier text entry on your TiVo, try a wireless USB keyboard! There are quite a few shortcuts available for navigating the TiVo interface with a keyboard. Or, of course, there’s TiVo’s own iPad app (which currently works with the Premiere only).

So, why was I without my Slide for a few days? Let’s just say it took a few too many accidental drops on the tile floor and had to be replaced. 🙁

No foolin’ – it’s a promising sports day

It’s April Fools Day (which means there’s the typical slew of tech-related gag news stories) but it’s no joke that today is opening day for my Cleveland Indians and Tampa Bay Rays … a fresh start and a new season baseball.

Ever better, the Tampa Bay Lightning secured a spot in the NHL playoffs with their victory over the Pittsburgh Penguins last night. This will be the Bolts’ first return to the post-season since 2007. I’m actually flying to Chicago this weekend to visit my sister and go see the Lightning take on the defending Stanley Cup champion Blackhawks on Sunday night … should be fun!

On the other side of the coin, the Cavaliers are eight games away from closing out their joke of a 2010-2011 season. With only 15 wins going into April, it’s still possible they might not finish dead last in the NBA.

Another Galleon (local radar) weather fix

It’s been almost three years since I last fixed the local radar image in Galleon’s Weather application. Earlier this week TCF user ajayabb pointed out that just like last time, the image was showing N/A again.

I tracked down the bug to a change in weather.com’s HTML page and was able to make a simple change to fix it.

“Official” Galleon releases are few and far between (2.5.5 was released two years ago) so rather than wait for that you can download my revised weather.jar file here. Just replace the existing one in the ‘apps’ sub-directory and restart the Galleon server.

WIJFR: FreedomTM

The computer program Daemon has taken over the Internet, and millions have joined its virtual world. Now the effect is spilling into the real world as Daemon assumes control of financial institutions, and the program’s real-life converts flock to small towns to re-create a sustainable lifestyle amid the agribusiness monoculture of the Midwest.

During my trip to Arizona last week for Spring Training ’11 I finished “FreedomTM,” Daniel Suarez’s sequel to “Daemon.”

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