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.

Took my family to see Guardians of the Galaxy last night. I had only heard good stuff about it and it was a fun movie. What's funny is I thought it was pretty good while my wife and kids thought it was amazing. My son kept going on about it and my wife said she wanted to go watch it again. Usually with a film like this it would be the other way around and I'd be the one who was more enthusiastic. Funny.

August 13, 2014

In the bathroom at Millersylvania State Park, I found two baby mice. One was cowering against a wall, shivering, moving very slowly. Another was in the hallway, likewise shivering and not moving much or at all.

I thought of putting them outside, in the forest. I assumed their mother had been killed by a trap or something. (I had seen a squirrel earlier, running with what seemed to be a dead mouse in its mouth.)

I tried to pick up one mouse by the tail, but it kept squeaking and running away. I left it alone.

I went for a hike on the trails.

When I got back, I had resolved to get a box and move the mice outside. I went back to the bathroom to check on them.

I found a streak of fresh blood where one had been, it's flattened, mangled body a few inches away, jammed under a closed door. I found two others behind another door, also flattened and bloody.

I had seen only two, there must have been another behind a door somewhere.

I'm guessing someone, some kid, stomped on them.

I whistled Flee as a bird as I walked away from the bathroom.

I thought of Robin Williams recent suicide. A Fresh Air interview with him was replayed, a bit with the punchline: "Life is not for everybody."

But those mice weren't given a chance. They could have been saved. They didn't have to die violently, by murder, for no purpose other than that they perhaps annoyed someone.

Got my main machine running with the Nvidia card again. I crack myself up. It seems to be working o.k. so far. We'll see how long it lasts.
 
Being in Arizona this summer was nice. It was crazy hot of course. That's the norm. But it has been a while since I'd been able to really enjoy the desert. I did miss it. I love the big sky, the cactus, the beautiful sunsets and the smell. We had some storms and there is a very unique odor that is a wet Sonoran desert. I love it. It brought back a lot of memories from my childhood.
 
Our family got to go to a Diamondback's game and timed it very well as they won, which is something they aren't doing a lot this season. It was a lot of fun for my son, who is a big baseball fan. In fact, a friend let him be a part of time with a batting coach once a week while we were home. That was very generous and was great for my boy as well. There is little league in Hungary but not the same level of resources as in the US.
 
We went out shooting one day. What could be more American than that? It was a lot of fun for my kids. A very strange thing has happened while we were away. It is pretty much impossible to buy .22 ammunition near where we lived. I don't know the causes but it was crazy. I have a couple .22 rifles and a .22 pistol that I thought would be great for the kids to shoot. I couldn't find ammunition for them anywhere. Fortunately I had friends who were able to give me some.
 
I have a lot of friends who are gun enthusiasts and I don't know if my kids appreciated the variety of weapons they got to try out. They did have fun - though I couldn't afford to do that too often, even if we did still live there. I always enjoyed archery a bit more. No need for hearing protection, less expensive over time and no cleaning when you are done. But still the fun challenge of hitting a target from a distance.
 
We spent a week up in the mountains. I took the family to Woods Canyon Lake, up on the rim. It was super, super busy. The campgrounds were all full and the lake was pretty crowded. We were driving out and my son says, "It would be cool to see an elk." I said, "You wont see any around here today. Way too many people around for that." Not two minutes later here comes an elk with a big beautiful rack just wandering on through. We pulled over and watched it for a while. I'm guessing it's become accustomed to people. That's not good - but it was cool to see.
 
I think next time we visit Arizona (probably in 2 or 3 years) we'll hike Havasupai and the Grand Canyon. The kids will be old enough and it will be a good chance for us to do something like that together before the kids start leaving the nest.It is hard for me to think that we've come that far.
 
Oh - back to the gun thing quickly - my kids were worried about getting shot at all the time. It's funny how crazy that aspect of American life is when you've stepped outside of it for a while. I had to keep reassuring them that they were not in constant danger of being gunned down. They hear about shootings in the US so much, and it's something that pretty much never happens in Hungary. I didn't realize how much they'd thought about it though or how it worried them until we got home. I used to be a big pro gun ownership guy but not so much any more.
 
That said - I don't plan on getting rid of the guns I do own there. If we moved back I would teach my kids to be more proficient with them. As long as the laws are the way they are I think it's better to take that approach. And it was nice for the times we were in areas where I was concerned about animals. I didn't normally carry but I did in a few situations where I knew we might run across javelina and some other critters.
 
I don't think there's much else of note. It was great to see friends and family but I don't need to record any of those details here. Oh - movies. We say Edge of Tomorrow. Pretty good. Also went and saw the latest Transformers. Not the best but still delivered what I want most out of that kind of movie - giant robots fighting. I watched Pacific Rim on the flight over. That movie really delivered. What else did I watch on planes? Grand Budapest Hotel. Rather charming I thought. Fiennes is an amazing actor. The new Captain America which I thought was pretty week. I can't remember what else I watched. I know at least one other movie. You know what else? Americans love to talk about movies. We really do. Not necessarily to any depth but more recommending them to one another, recounting favorite scenes, etc. It's funny how often we do that. I wish I could remember the other one I watched on the plane. My kids watched Mr. Peabody and Sherman. I was napping then but caught a bit of it on their screens. OH - when we saw Transformers they had a trailer for The Giver. I just read that a couple months ago. Judging by the trailer they are pulling a Running Man. The movie will vaguely resemble the book - sort of. But all amped up hollywood style.
 
All right - back to work.

I had one package that caused some warning but it was really out of date so I just removed it. It was VLMC and I'm not going to be using it on that machine anyway.
 
I finally got my taxes done. Life was so crazy this year that I just kept not getting around to it. Which is stupid on my part as I'm just leaving money sitting with the government that I could be using. I had a really odd thing this year, my Foreign Earned Income Exclusion was smaller than it has been in the past. I don't know why- but I doubt it's worth the time and cost to find someone who would know. With 3 kids and our income not too high, my tax liability is very, very low. And so it's all pretty small amounts involved.
 
We've been back a couple weeks now and I'm back to the weight I was before we went to the US. For that 6.5 weeks we visited we ate out a lot. There were a lot of places we missed that we wanted to eat at. And of course lots of good Mexican. That's pretty much impossible to get here. And in general we just consumed more. I think the first time we went out, they gave me my huge glass of diet coke that they would refill the moment it was empty and I must have gone through like 6 of those before we had even finished the appetizer. So funny.
 
Anyway, if we lived back home we wouldn't eat like we did when just visiting. The one thing that really struck me is how much more expensive fast food has become in the 3 years since we left. It used to be around 20 bucks for our family to go to McDonalds/Burger King. Now it's more like 30.
 
Of course gas and milk still felt ridiculously cheap compared to here in Hungary. I know why gas costs so much here, not sure why milk is so much. Probably due to the same reasons though - government choices. Just not sure which government, in which direction. Are Hungarian dairy prices inflated or does the USDA (or whoever manages dairy in the US) keep US milk prices artificially low? It was also fun to be able to buy milk in a gallon container. Buying it a liter at a time is a pain. Our kids go through them quickly.
 
That's all for today, more tomorrow.

I haven't written a journal in a while. We spent a good chunk of this summer in the U.S.A. It was a pretty full/busy time. We came back and then left again for a couple days hiking in Austria. Now we are home for a bit. I don't plan on going anywhere until next month.

I'm upgrading my Dell to Fedora 20 right now and trying to clean up my office. It's funny. It's a Latitude D620 and when I got it in 2006 it was the most powerful computer I had ever owned. It's got a dual core processor and has 2 gig of ram. At the time that blew me away and now I just use it for stuff where I don't mind how slow it is.

It is nice and sunny out. I brought a hammock back from Arizona - now I need to figure out how I'm going to put it up. Today would be a perfect day to take a nap in the sun.

2014-7-14

Two dream scenes:

1) IMF associated with old growth trees, as if reserves were symbolized by the giant, 1000-year-old living trunks.

Is this how they think of reserves? I don't. Money reserves are artificial, human-invented, not natural like the trees.

2) My right hand being eaten by a fish, caught in the big fish's mouth, entirely inside the ring of the teeth. I awoke feeling pain in my right hand, trapped under a thigh.

Dream as a somatic warning.

2014-7-15
Island Camp, WA

Two dream memories:

1) I was female. I was in a multi-story department store. My right arm would shiver periodically, and an amphibian-like creature, writhing, green, long-legged (like a frog), would come twitching out from my sleeve at a fast speed; it would shoot towards the floor, tumbling, then bound off somewhere. The offshoots springing from my (right) arm were different sizes, though all of the same general form (amphibian-like) and color (green on top, whitish belly).

I have a vivid memory of looking down at one as it emerged, at a greater speed than gravity would have given it had it just been falling from my shoulder's height; it felt as if it had squirted out from an aperture, a slit, somewhere on my upper arm, which I could not see because I was wearing a long-sleeved shirt (blouse?). The creature was falling beyond my sleeve upside-down, its whitish lizard-like belly at an angle slanted upwards, towards my head; its head cocked, its neck turned so it was making eye contact with me as it descended backwards towards the floor.

I was moving between floors in the department store, taking the stairs. I was trying to hide these amphibian births from the store security. I felt that if someone saw me squirting out these frog-like creatures, something bad would happen. It was embarrassing, if nothing else.

I had no control over the births.

---

Dream interpretation:

Day residue: I saw a frog a few days ago. And some tadpoles a day or so after that, a couple days ago. I still think of the salamanders I saw in a pond in the Willipa Hills, a few weeks ago.

I was feeling a lot of insect bites, or what I took to be insect bites, during the night before the dream. After waking up I scratched my upper right arm, wondering if there was an insect there giving birth?

I thought of the dream I had a few nights ago, in which my right hand was being bitten by a large fish. When I woke from that dream my hand was trapped under a thigh, being painfully squeezed. Was this latest dream some kind of somatic warning, as well?

Another interpretation:

The live births were memes, pushed out from my right arm as it wrote them down on paper. The memes (ideas, thoughts, written words) were dangerous to the employees of the business-oriented environment I was in, so I tried to hide. What I was outputting was out of place in the sterile, cut-and-dried world of the department store. My production was disruptive, disturbing, weird, uncontrolled.

2) Second dream memory:

I was consorting with a rich person, a businessman. He showed me a card with some ideas on it, asked my opinion. I wrote in my reactions on the card. He seemed interested. He was busy, and left. When he said goodbye I felt a sense of loss, as if I should have pressed him for further meetings about my ideas; why didn't he hire me, pay me a salary, give me some money for my contributions (which definitely interested him) so I could have a decent standard of living instead of living way below the poverty line.

Later I saw something produced by the rich man's company. It was the same card he had showed me, and my ideas and scribbles were on it. He had photocopied the card with my contributions and was distributing it. I wasn't credited. He appeared to be making money from the card. I wasn't.

Interpretation: A businessman takes my ideas and profits from them, without crediting of paying me. I'm not pushy, so I don't ask when I have the chance to be part of the business.