Swedish Porn, Part Två As keen mediageeklife readers will recall, I bought a house earlier this year, and subsequently have become much more interested in home decor. Back in May, just after buying the house, I drooled over the delights in the Ikea catalog, though ended up buying a lot of swanky used non-designer "mid-century modern" furniture locally.

Saturday we finally ended up at Ikea, with our excuse that we were already up in Chicago visiting my friend Dan. The main item that I was looking for was a new TV stand. I upgraded to a Panasonic flat-screen 27" TV this summer, and it's much deeper than most TVs of a similar screen size, so it won't fit on the stand I used for my old 20" and most inexpensive stands are still not deep enough (most top out at 19" deep, and this TV is 22" deep).

We stayed pretty on-task and directed at Ikea (which, if you've ever been there, you know can be hard to do), finding what we were looking for, and, of course, some other $1 and $2 items that were hard to pass up. I found my TV stand, and it even matches my Ikea stereo stand I bought three years ago.

But when I got the stand home I opened up the box and found that the corner of the top piece was a bit munched. Not awful, but that's not what you want from your new TV stand. I called Ikea Sunday and they said, "sure, just return it." I said, "uh, but I live 135 miles away." And so they said they'd send a new piece out, no hassles. Oh, the Swedes.

Again, I find myself thinking, gee, I gotta get some pictures of our digs up on the site, and, again, I haven't done it.

almost totally screwed Today I decided to be brave and update Moveable Type--the software that runs the mediageek blogs--from version 2.21 to version 2.5. It's all done in Perl and SQL, and hosted on a Linux server. Now, I'm not a hardcore command-line jockey by any means--in fact I gave up programming around age 17, promptly forgetting most of my programming skills and unix. But MT is pretty well documented and made pretty easy to install and upgrade for a linux server app. And one of our brilliant IMC techs actually did the original install of MT for me, and the update looked even easier.

And.... you see it coming... it wasn't quite so... easy. Seems the mt updater script couldn't find a bunch of files, even though I could. I hacked the script so that it would complete, but then all the backend pages were fucked up looking, with some unclosed angle brackets screwing everything up.

"Fuck," I thought, and mucked around with resetting permissions for 45 minutes before deciding to go home and eat dinner. After eating I mucked around some more, and even decided to do a second install just to see if that would work... all to no availl.

Then browsing around the directories, I noticed that the capitals had all been changed to lowercase, and smartly remembered that Linux is case-sensitive. Damnit! My secure ftp program changed the case of directories! So I went back, fixed the cases, and voila! We're running MT 2.5!

Every so often I think I should get back to doing scripting and command-line shit more often so that I don't get caught like this and am more geekily self-sufficient.

And then I don't.

screwy, annoying CPU fan

I've got a screwy annoyingly buzzy CPU fan in my PC and it's starting to really drive me nuts. The CPU is a slot 1 P-III, and the heat sink and fan on it are el cheapo because I got the CPU off an on-line auction for cheap. The fan looks like the kind they used to glue to old first-generation Pentium chips, and so somehow I think it doesn't like to be oriented the way it is on the slot-based chip. rrrrgh.

Took me a while to figure out that's what the noise was. Before I just heard buzzing from inside the machine, making me worry that the case fan, power supply fan or even a hard drive was about to die. Now I've got the case open and when it buzzes I tap the thing with a finger and that usually kills it for ten minutes. Of course, it's just a matter of time until I screw up the CPU doing that.

Gotta see if I can get a fan that'll fit OK. It's not time for a new computer yet.

Falwell Loves Israel? I saw the most frightening thing on 60 Minutes last night. The story was about fundamentalist right-wing Christians who have become stark-raving Zionists in support of not only Israel's right to exist, but to claim all of Gaza and the West Bank, too. The likes of Jerry Fallwell are now calling the hard-core Isreali settlers in the West Bank heroes.

And why? Because, according to them, the Bible says that when the Jews have fully returned to their homeland, then the second coming and endtimes is nigh. Several fundamentalists with the eyes of a coked-up porn star stared at the camera with an evil empty smile and repeated this mantra with the eeriest of straight face.

Of course, in the coming of end times 2/3 of the Jews will be killed in the strife that results, and the remaining 1/3 will embrace the messiah. But those are mere details, right?

It's like all of Israel has become a lucky rabbit's foot for most crazed and deluded segment of the Christian public. Of course, you know the ironic thing about a lucky rabbit's foot is that it's never so lucky for the rabbit.

What makes it so over-the-top disturbing for me is that as a kid I remember these fucking brainwashed fundamentalists harassing my jewish friends, throwing pennies at them, tripping them in the hallway, telling them that they killed Jesus, and so on. I know that truly that the true heart of the fundamentalist loves a Jew like a snake loves a mouse. Merely a means to an end.

And, yet, there was a representative of the Anti-Defamation League there saying that's OK with them, so long as the fundies support Israel. Christ, 60 Minutes even had a former member of the Mossad saying that the Fundies leaping to the defense of Israel in order to expidite the second coming is a bad, scary thing. Can I remind the ADL that they're motto is "Anti-Defamation League: Fighting Anti-Semitism, Bigotry and Extremism Since 1913." You're in bed with Jerry Fucking Falwell.

I have to admit, though, compared to the emotional sensationalist pap typically seen on Dateline NBC, 60 Minutes still looks like real journalism, covering issues and things that represent real trends that I haven't otherwise heard about. Whereas Dateline focuses on individual tragedies, that, while sad or bizarre, don't have much bearing on an overall understanding of the world.

the fresh new mediageeklife OK, so now I've converted mediageeklife over to Moveable Type as well. In so doing, I had to face up to the fact that I hadn't updated since the end of Aug. Mostly, the delay is the result of my procrastinating the shift to the new server and MT.

My last post was about my recent spate of listening to anarcho-grindcore. It continues, facilitated by my picking up a pile of 7-inches while in Seattle a few weeks ago. As I noted before, there's no place in this area to find new 7" records, which is one of the primary media for grindcore. But while eating in the Belltown area of the city, I stumbled upon an all-punk record store. As such, it has a section just for grindcore and very related sub-genres. Ah, how easy to get a nice sampling of new grind!

Of course all my swag is in another room (where the turntable is), and 'cause I'm almost ready for bed after getting mglife running again, I'm also too lazy to go get 'em to tell ya about 'em. Maybe tomorrow...