My favorites — poke my dog, milo the silo, and furburgers.

Happy Trails….

So…the real reason for me breaking my silence is that I’ve finally have achieved the next level of Zen in Killing Fuzzies. My youth was spent with various BB guns and smaller rifles/shotguns harassing sparrows and bunnies on the farm. In recent memory, bunnies are still fun to shoot — but the main drive has been for deer and elk. I used to fly back every Thanksgiving for the usual meal with the family, then would abandon them for 2 or 3 days to head up into the hills in search of fuzzies. I always managed to get a deer (and oh what joy it is to check a cooler full of venison and dry ice on an airplane), but elk eluded us — mainly because we are the Great White Truck Hunters. In 4 or 5 years of hunting Elk, we only saw 2. They were ~2000 yards away and just a bit out of range.

Last year marked me getting serious — I purchased a Browning Medallion 300 WSM, Leupold 3-10×40 scope for my hunting pleasures. For those who case — I am shooting a 180 grain Winchester Supreme Ballistic Tip. I got my deer with it last year, but was not having that great of luck this year — jsut an odd year of deer getting shot and then running away. Furburgers. I am chalking it up to the fact that I’ve moved back to Montana and was hunting earlier than my Karma was used to.

Well.. this last Friday turned my luck around. I went hunting with my sister’s beau and his father. Our main goal was to fill out our deer tags in this last weekend of hunting. To make a long story short…we didn’t see any deer right away, but found a nice big Elk for me to take home. It is likely the largest animal that I will ever shoot, future elk included. It even made the beast ride odd — the rear end had enough weight to make it bounce a bit on the highway when we hit dips. The 5×7 rack measured in with bases of 11.5″, spread of 39.5″ and longest side of 50.5″. Yes friends, it is getting mounted on the wall — But only a full European (skull & horns), mainly because it had a broken skull at one point and the horns are offset — very cool. It is now at the butcher and I should have the meat back in a day or two. Yummy! Oh yeah — I found the round in the Elk too — it was fully mushroomed (lead core missing) and just under the hide on the exit side — talk about it leaving all of the energy in the animal. Grunt

So, yeah, the real point is that I realized how chatting via email or IRC/AIM/Yahoo/MSN is so limited. I think they work ‘OK’ for technical work, but the more I get involved with project management where the needs are more on a personal and not a technical level, that the comms used really lack the ability to fully communicate The Messsage. I’d like to think that I am pretty good about communicating on a personal level with people when I am face to face, but when it comes to email or chat, that level of connection, mutual understanding, or whatever you’d like to call it, seems to really go missing and I feel like either I’ve not gotten the point across or that the other person(s) have not acknowledged that I have. Who knows, this might just be my brain craving more personal interaction and showing it by disliking the non-personal interactions.

I have found that voice conversations are pretty good for most things, especially as far as communicating raw data or discussing something is concerned, but the rhythm can be difficult to find and the conversations can get quite skewed towards one person talking more than the other, as there is no out of band (body language) way to change that.

On a slightly related note, I believe someone made the comment “Honestly, what year is it again?” in reference to some sort of technical project that did not go as expected. This whole chat thing has me thinking too — why hasn’t the technology for this really exploded ? Or has it, and has been seen in the last 5 years, the USA is just lagging behind the tech acceptance curve ? For instance, you hear all about these crazy Japanese or Finish people who use these nifty G3 cell phone features every day. Perhaps if the US had a better (read cheaper, faster and generally less sucky) broadband solution, perhaps we would have a higher incident rate of video conferencing or similar conversation applications ? Speaking of which — has anyone ever used an iSight ? I’m really quite expecting that for most anything I want to do it will be either Windows or Apple based, as Linux solutions tend to interoperate pretty poorly. I’m so willing to be proven wrong though. I’m also curious as to how well using a webcam type thingy will do for Yahoo or MSN type chatting. Hrm, food for thought, that is.

I, for one, am estatic about this. If you have Tivo, you know the sweet sweet bliss that it is. Those who don’t, shame on you!

Details that might help:

• iTunes under cxoffice works well
  • don’t forget to turn on hardware emulation
  • it will do the whole rendevous thing and allow you to play music from any iTunes machine, OS X or Windows
• linux iTunes Server — fakes being an iTunes export
  • several links gentoo wiki & macosxhints & linux gazette
  • you might need lame or faac
  • Rendezvous compile instructions
  • you want to use Rendezvous-58.8 not the latest, as it works better on linux
  • line for firewall changes
  • Remember: it will take some time for daapd to plow through your library, so be patient and wait before trying to use the export that shows up in iTunes.
• mt-daapd looks to work much better than regular daapd
  • mt-daapd homepage
  • great link on setting up mt-dappd on linux

Now…I wonder if I can adapt that for birds or a dog.

Here is the code that I added, complete with ugly debugging code!:

add_action('publish_post', 'add_meta_tunes', 7);
function return_wp_itunes($limit = 10) {
        global $wpdb, $table_itunes, $blank_image, $local_offset;

        $results = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT * FROM $table_itunes ORDER BY added_date DESC LIMIT $limit");
        $retstring = "";
        if ($results) {
                foreach ($results as $itune) {
                        if ($itune->image == "")
                                $itune->image = $blank_image;

                        $retstring .= "<div class="itune">n";
                        $retstring .= "$itune->artist - $itune->album - $itune->trackn";
                        $retstring .= "</div>n";
                }
        }
        return $retstring;
}

function add_meta_tunes($post_ID) {
        global $wpdb, $tablepostmeta;
        global $debug;

        if( !isset($post_ID)) $post_ID = $_REQUEST['post_ID'];

        $metakey       = $wpdb->escape("tunes");
        $metavalue     = $wpdb->escape(return_wp_itunes(1));
        $log = fopen("/tmp/wpitunes.log", "w");
        fwrite($log, "Just testingn");
        // Quick-n-dirty check for dups:
        $dupcheck = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT post_id FROM $tablepostmeta WHERE post_id='$post_ID'",ARRAY_A);
        if ($dupcheck[0]['post_id']) {
                $id = $dupcheck[0]['post_id'];
                fwrite($log, "Skipping duplicate post ID = $idn");
                fclose($log);
                return $post_ID;
        }

        fwrite($log, "name = $metavaluen");
        fclose($log);

        if (!empty($metavalue)) {

                $result = $wpdb->query("
                                INSERT INTO $tablepostmeta
                                (post_id,meta_key,meta_value)
                                VALUES ('$post_ID','$metakey','$metavalue')
                        ");
        }
        return $post_ID;
}
<pre>

Jan 18 13:42:12 009027cafcca kernel: hda: dma_intr: status=0x51 { DriveReady SeekComplete Error }
Jan 18 13:42:12 009027cafcca kernel: hda: dma_intr: error=0x40 { UncorrectableError }, LBAsect=26824299, sector=26824159
Jan 18 13:42:12 009027cafcca kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev hda, sector 26824159
Jan 18 13:42:12 009027cafcca kernel: raid1: hdc: unrecoverable I/O read error for block 24574240

and of course this is /dev/md2, serving what you might ask? Of course! :

[root@009027cafcca root]# grep /dev/md2 /etc/fstab 
/dev/md2 / ext3 defaults 1 1

and the best part – where in the rebuild this occurs:

md2 : active raid1 hda6[0] hdc6[2]
      12287424 blocks [2/1] [U_]
      [===================>.]  recovery = 99.8% (12268672/12287424) finish=0.0min speed=12697K/sec

Well, off to mandrake to download the latest CDs. Luckily I do have a spare drive I can place in that machine.