blog of testiclese this is where the shit went down, but before you got here

Vince:Fix these bugs.

Me: Fixed.

Vince: There is one more, hold on.
Me: BZZZZZZTT!!

(choose your own adventure here.)

Vince: Don’t get all Fifth Element on me. (this is what actually happened.)

OR!

Vince: Don’t make me go Corey Feldman on you. (this is what I heard.  it is consequently much funnier.)

And I had a forty. Shout outs to Satchmo, we had a forty ounce friday.

Schulte and I then spent the next ninety hours trying to set up MythTV.

Some things that I learned from the process:

• Networking device company Linksys hates Linux, freedom.

We spent the first four or eleven hours trying to set up the wireless card, to no avail. Ever. As it turns out, most of the walkthrough’s require an internet connection to set up an internet connection. This seems counterintuitive at first, and continued to seem so once we moved the computer into the basement where the router is. My basic plan for the evening was to read the walkthrough, copy paste things, and if nothing happened, it must have worked correctly. Basic theory for using Linux is, if you didn’t get an error, you did it correctly.

Here’s an example of a successful initialization of the TV decoder card:

# /sbin/depmod -a
# /sbin/modprobe ivtv
#

Success!

Usually you get an error. We used yum to install some stuff, and eventually I got tired and went to bed.

On Sunday I worked up the courage to go and work on it again, keeping the principle stated above. I hadn’t really tested anything, and I wasn’t really sure if any of my devices were set up correctly (see above).  I tested some stuff, and it turns out that I got audio and video back from the TV, at which point I shit my pants.

Post cleanup, I installed MythTV, set up my channels, downloaded listings, etc, and booted it up.  Everything worked mostly smooth, the config for MythTV is pretty painless if you can pay attention, a difficult task for me.  All that’s left is moving it upstairs and seeing if it’ll hook up to the tv.  Then I’ll break it in having it record every episode of Hogan’s Heroes ever.

I had a radical idea the other day, in which I came up with the greatest band name ever, for a fake band. That name is Hot Awesome. I was going to make a fake review, and fake album, and then post it. It was going to be incredibly hysterical, at least for me. The sad news comes when I go to try and find some images for the album cover, and I do a search on “Hot Awesome.” It turns out that some Canadians already decided that “Hot Awesome” would be a sweet name for a band, and they took it. It’s your standard Canadian indie pop, but it’s crisp, and clean, and I would probably be caught listening to it at some time. The track titles are not as funny as mine would have been, except for maybe “Holy Pants.” In any event, I have to give those Canucks credit for coming up with a band name that is clearly spectacular. So I am saddened that they have stolen my thunder, but happy for our neighbors in the north.

I guess you could go check them out, if you’re into that kind of thing.

Their myspace page

Something interesting happened today at work. The power shut on and off. This was not the interesting thing. In the hubbub amidst running around turning computers back on, and rebooting servers, an interesting smell was found to be emitted from a vent near my desk. I am not a fireman, but I would describe this smell as “some sort of electrical fire.” This is a smell that I have created a few times in my own right, to the destruction of several pieces of personal electronics. I feel safe in saying that I was not at all responsible for the smell this time. There was however, the concern that there may be something on fire above our heads. To the closet someone with more motivation than me went, to pull out the ladder, which could then be used to investigate the smell; something I suggested that we leave to professionals. As a non-professional, I have found first hand the error of trying to create a controlled blaze, or the pain of attempting to control an uncontrolled blaze. Needless to say, one of my co-workers had his head stuck up in the ceiling, long enough for me to take a picture, on top of my already busy schedule of watching a co-worker stick his head in the ceiling to investigate a possible eletrical fire.