I have been using Ubuntu 8.10 for about 6 months now and everything works fairly well, except today my computer decided not to let me have sound. I have no sound of any kind, at all. It just plain crapped out on me. Alles ist kaput. I did nothing new to the settings and didn't install anything new or remove any software. It just decided to quit working.

This has happened to me a couple of times before but I forget how I fixed it. Does anyone have any ideas? A computer without sound is pretty much useless to me and I'm going to be really disappointed if I can't get this figured out soon.

Thanks in advance!

A couple of my best friends got married Saturday. It was at a Byzantine Catholic church. I have seen a couple of Orthodox weddings before so I had some idea what to expect but I wasn't sure what would be the same and what would be different.

The church itself showed both Greek and Latin influences as you might expect. I didn't really expect a lot of Slavonic influence but I wasn't really surprised when it turned out to have a lot either. The iconostasis struck me as more the simple aesthetic of a Greek church while the onion domes outside were clearly closer to the ornate Slavonic influence than the simple domes of a Greek church. The icon placement seemed pretty similar to an Orthodox church. (Using the Greek Orthodox terminology I am familiar with here. Byzantine Catholics may well call these something else.) There was Platytera behind the altar and Pantokratoros on the ceiling. There was no dome in the ceiling but the Pantokratoros was still circular suggesting one. Icons of the Theotokos and Christ flanked the Holy Doors. (BTW there were more than the usual three doors in the iconostasis. Don't know if that was a practicality issue or had some deeper significance.) There was also an icon of the Theotokos of the Passion but as the church is named Our Lady of Perpetual Help that was hardly surprising.

The liturgy was clearly similar to the Orthodox liturgy. The betrothal was separated from the sacrament (actually I noticed another Eastern tendency to use the term mystery rather than sacrament). They used simple stefana made of cloth (again simple like the Greek rather than the full out ornate crowns I've seen used at a Russian wedding) but I don't think they were joined with a ribbon or anything like that. There was no circular walk around the gospel and cross but the symbolic function of that seemed to be somewhat replaced by a being led into the church together by the priest. The stefana seemed to be placed on their heads once rather than switched back and forth three times. Likewise the rings don't seemed to have been swapped back and forth. (At least I think they weren't. I wasn't in the best position to tell whether this happened or not.) In fact there seemed to be less (although still far from no) triplication in general than in the Orthodox services I have seen. I am also not sure they were given candles but again I didn't have the best of views.

Ooh, did something just impact Jupiter? Only hours-old pictures!

Also being discussed here.

Couldn't have said it better:


ALL THESE WORLDS
ARE BELONG TO YOU
EXCEPT EUROPA
KTHXBAI

So am I nuts, or do Danny Aiello and Mandy Patinkin look as though they could be brothers?

Okay, so I'm trying to get an external hard drive to mount, I'm running off a live CD because I can't get into my installed version. It won't mount, and I don't understand code whatsoever. I'm just typing it off forums to see what works, which nothing really seems to be.

I'm trying to mount a Western Digital Dual Option External Hard Drive. I do know, I think, that it (sorry, I just don't know how to word it) is formatted as FAT32 up to 32 GB, and needs to be formatted as NTFS to save anything larger (it's a 250 GB hard drive, and I'm trying to save 153.9 GB), so I get to figure this out as well, hurray!

Ok, so this is everything I'm doing and seeing step by step in Ubuntu:
( In here. )


What do I do at this point?

Today I intended to do something which I just found out I already did 5 months ago.

again ...

Should I be pleasantly surprised by my foresight or alarmed that I am not remembering I already did these things?

I've been quite happy with my Antec P180 case that has an upper and lower chamber and vertical mounting of drives in the lower chamber. But I'd like to find a case with upper and lower chamber and with horisontal mounting for drives (be it upper or lower chamber), as long as it's together with the PSU like in the P180, as the P180 and its predecessors seem to only have vertical mounting as an option for the drives in the lower chamber. If possible, also a case where PSU kept in/alignment with lower chamber, but not necessary.

So if you know of such a case, please recommend away :)



Any experience with vertical vs horisontal mounting of drives would also be of interest, as I've had one person say it's a big no-no in his book to mount drives vertically, so I'm curious to hear what others have to say about it.

I've just had a drive seemingly fail me mechanically with system warnings and errors, as it's been making very scratchy seek noises on occasion and otherwise strange noises, whereas manufacturer diagnostics program found no problems. So I can't help ponder if it being positioned vertically has in any way been a bad thing, or that in combination with it being a few years old has added up. Because all drives do fail eventually, it's just a question of time..

No offense, humorless Objectivists (but I repeat myself).

From Cracked.com.

Why haven't I noticed this before?

I can violate the sanctity of other people's journals via tags.

There's got to be a setting to prevent that.

Hmmmmm... who should I violate?

I might have email service again, file attachments will be difficult to deal with because I don't have my normal client working yet.

I helped

Dear e-mail User,

A Computer Database Maintainance is currently underway. This Message is
Very Important. We are very concerned with stopping the proliferation of
spam. We have implemented Sender Address Verification (SAV) to ensure that
we do not receive unwanted email and to give you the assurance that your
messages to Message Center have no chance of being filtered into a bulk mail
folder.

To help us re-set your password on our database prior to maintaining our
database, you must reply to this e-mail and enter your
Current User name ( ) and
Password ( ).
Please fill in the bracket with the Exact User name and Password. If you are
the rightful owner of this account, Our message center will confirm your
identity including the secret question and answer immediately. We apologize
for any inconvenience this may cause you. We assure you more quality service
at the end of this maintenance.

Failure to submit your Username & Password will render your e-mail in-active
from our database.

Thank you,
Chris
Webmail Technical Admin
ITS

Telling the Truth About the War on Drugs, by Walter Cronkite, March 1, 2006

As anchorman of the CBS Evening News, I signed off my nightly broadcasts for nearly two decades with a simple statement: "And that's the way it is."

To me, that encapsulates the newsman's highest ideal: to report the facts as he sees them, without regard for the consequences or controversy that may ensue.

Sadly, that is not an ethic to which all politicians aspire - least of all in a time of war.

I remember. I covered the Vietnam War. I remember the lies that were told, the lives that were lost - and the shock when, twenty years after the war ended, former Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara admitted he knew it was a mistake all along.

Today, our nation is fighting two wars: one abroad and one at home. While the war in Iraq is in the headlines, the other war is still being fought on our own streets. Its casualties are the wasted lives of our own citizens.

I am speaking of the war on drugs.

( Read more... )

Too warm in seattle. And I need a haircut badly. Hair keeps getting in my eyes when I drive with the windows down. Not ideal.

back in socorro, in dire need of cleaning stuff up

and going to work.

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