2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014 AL Central Division Champs!

I was shocked when Laurence Fishburne first showed up in those Capitol One commercials. He was so great in Pulp Fiction and the Matrix, I thought, oh no, is his career over already? And now Jennifer Garner (no doubt the daughter of Jim Rockford) is shilling for the same.

The creepiest is Matthew McConaughey driving around at night in a butt-ugly Lincoln SUV softly waxing sweet philosophical nothings to us.

The latest is (the now forgettable) Sarah Marshall and Punk'd Employee of the Month (who I just found out are married (to each other, I mean)) doing like a minute and a half mongo commercial where a Samsung Galaxy tablet is part of every aspect of their lives.

And just like that, poof, the shame and presumed damage to one's career for resorting to "acting" in TV commercials is now gone evidently.

It used to be just voices. Like I can never forget a face, I can pick out a famous actor's voice (I just can't remember names for shit). That way an actor could lend a brand some familiarity, without getting himself all soiled in it. For example I most recently heard a new spot with King Ralph as the voice of it. Have no idea what the product or service was, as in my case I'm usually distracted by the familiar voice.

Which I would think is even more of a down-side when they actually appear in the commercials. As in, the focus is on the spokesperson and not the product or service being pitched. When I see Flo (who, incidently, was in that Ben Stiller honeymoon movie before becoming Ms. Progressive) or Red, I think car insurance or Wendy's. When I think of Matthew McHowdoyouspellhisnameagain, I think of Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, not a dying carmaker division whose vehicles' front ends all look like hideous barn owl faces.

Google struggles dealing with people who are in one place but want to use a language from another place.

It's gotten better in chrome on a computer. I can pretty much search in chrome and get my results in English. But on android it's a mess.

When I search in Android Chrome - I get google.hu and I haven't found a way to get it to use google.com

Today I decided to start using 2 factor authentication with gmail. Seems like a good idea and it's free so why not? Once I turned it on and set it up on my computer then I went to my phone. On my Android phone it said, "Now you need to go to the web." and took me to a form in Hungarian. There was no option to switch it to English.

Everything in my phone is set to use English but this is all completely ignored in favor of where the browser has decided that I am physically located. Does that make sense to you? It does not make sense to me. I want it in US English - no matter where I am in the world.

It's a weird thing. On the one hand I love that they are willing to sms the codes to any number world wide (though I switched to the app). So in some ways they are way ahead of others. But then you run into something that is just so backwards. And finding a way to send feedback to Google? Not so easy.

I enquired about when subscription renewal would be available again and the reply I got was that the subscription process will not be coming back. Must not make enough income to make it worthwhile. I liked seeing stories a little early and would try to quickly email and warn of dupes when I could. But it is a business. So it goes.

A long, long time ago I registered a domain that I thought would be awesome to use for a number of purposes. SleepingArmadillo.com Actually I thought the best use of this would be as a name for a craft beer. But I thought it would be good for almost anything but I never actually did anything with it. I just had a static html page with a photo of a 'sleeping' armadillo taken on a road near my home when I was living in Florida.

I ended up selling it to a band. The page they have now has a cool little cover image - I like it. I didn't make any profit on the deal but I enjoyed doing it.

It made me want to register something else that may be useful someday. It's not easy to do. I ended up with busypenguin.com I have no idea what I'll do with it. Right now I think it could be a clever Linux site but I don't have the time or desire to do it. I don't think it would be a good beer name. Sleeping Armadillo was genius. Busy Penguin was just the best I could get that day. I like it, don't get me wrong, just not sure at all what I'll do with it.

this guy is clearly NOT a mathematician, but if he was:
 
You have 4 wives on earth. Each one of those wives has 70 black eyed virgins for you in paradise. Each one of those black eyed virgins has 70 servant girls. That is 19,884 women for you to have sex with in paradise.
 
But it gets worse. Each one of those women has been given YOU by Allah for a term of 70 years. That means you will be having sex, nonstop, from the time you die for the first 1,391,880 years you are in paradise. You're going to need eternity from then on just to rest up from that.

Don't forget Benghazi, either.

Hate Crime on Video

Went with some friends tonight to watch Hungary play Northern Ireland in their Euro Cup qualifier match.

It was held at Groupama Arena. It was my first time there and it is a very nice facility. We bought lower priced tickets but it still felt like we were very close, especially compared to what it is like at Ferenc PuskÃs Stadium.

It was 0 - 0 through the first 75 minutes. I felt like Hungary had the majority of the possession over that time and the bulk of the scoring chances. They had a corner and I told one of my friends, "It would be a shame if Hungary don't get something more than a draw out of this match." Seconds later they scored.

It was fun and I was pretty excited. Unfortunately Hungary appeared to finish playing defense at around 80 minutes and ended up losing 2 to 1. Really a disappointing result. They could have and should have won.

If your genetilia has been turned into a fine red mist by the dynamite vest you just blew up to kill 30 infidels in a coffee shop?

Take my money please.

The drive died but not before I got copied what I wanted copied. Clonezilla failed and then it just totally tanked. So I just put in the drive I was trying to clone over to and did a fresh install. Now I'm copying back some stuff.

My Slashdot subscription ended and you can't buy it any more. The page seems to say this is temporary but I wonder if that is going away?

As I was doing my setup after installation I found some helpful notes from past journal entries. I need to collect all that stuff in one place.

Booted up my Fedora box at work this morning but instead of starting normally it put me in emergency mode with a message to check the logs. On the whole I'm very pleased with this development. It gave me a prompt to give it the root password and then I could view the logs with journalctl from there.

Unfortunately though the resolution of the text was such that I couldn't read most of it - it went off the screen. So that's a bit of a problem. I had the system start up to the default state and then I was able to look at the logs in Konsole - which was a lot nicer. Looks like the hard drive is on its way out the door.

I ran smartmon and double checked. So now I'm copying everything off that I might be worried about. (In addition to my normal backups. I like to do this just in case.) And I think I've found the Western Digital drive that I'll be buying to replace this Seagate drive that is toast.

From what I've read WD is much more reliable than Seagate. Though I can't complain. It is the original drive that came with the machine and I bought in 2010. I don't think 4 years is an impressive time for a drive to last but I don't think it is terrible either.

But kudos to Fedora for alerting me to the problem and giving me time to plan ahead. The system still seems to run fine, I'm typing this JE from it - but I know that this wont stay true. And probably I could route around the damage for a while but I'd rather not. Storage is too cheap nowadays. I'll be picking up another TB drive for about $50.

A while back due to a freak accident, the glass broke on my S3. I decided to buy a kit and replace it myself. It went o.k. but I wasn't too crazy about the result. Touch didn't work as well afterwords and the home button was a little too recessed. I figured either I didn't get the adhesive set right or the glass was thicker.

Not long after I fixed it ( within 6 months?) my daughter knocked my phone off a counter and the glass broke again. So I ordered another kit.

This one came with a sticker on the glass packaging. It said, "There is a thin layer of plastic on the glass that is very difficult to see. Be sure to remove it."

As I pulled up the glass I installed the first time it broke - it pealed away with a layer of plastic under it. The first kit hadn't had that warning and I installed the glass without removing the plastic. Now that I have it in correctly it fits much better and everything works much better. I celebrated by updating Cyanogenmod and now I'm running KitKat.

So my daughter did me a favor busting the glass on my phone.

So right after I wrote my last je I googled a bit and set it up so that I could access my Fedora vm from the host OS (Mavericks).

It was pretty simple though I had to piece together exactly what to do from a few different places. These instructions work well though they leave out one part. The first part about creating a new interface - for me vboxnet0 wasn't already there. I needed to do go into the VirtualBox preferences, then in the networking section I needed to create a host-only network. Then it made it possible for me to create the host-only connection.

Now I can ssh to the guest and browse to it. Very nice. This will allow me to be a lot more productive when I travel.

I am getting more used to my Apple Laptop.

It still makes me crazy when I need to hook it to external displays. I wanted to show a video to some friends the other night and thought I would just connect the mac to my tv via hdmi. Couldn't get it to work. Crazy. I just switched to my PC that is always connected and downloaded the video there.

This post I am writing though from inside a VirtualBox instance running Fedora 20. It took me a little bit to get it working properly but now it is pretty good. I need to figure out how to get the mac to connect to the virtual machine so I can run the vm like a server.

I don't know how often I'll use the vm but I like having it. Sometimes it feels good just to get back into Linux and have a break from the Mac way.