It's been a long time, (Oct 2010,) since I've posted anything here... I blame Facebook. I've been doing a lot of things since then, but I've only mentioned any of them on Facebook or google+. I think perhaps I will maybe commit a little bit to possibly posting on blogger at some time in the next month or two or three or so... See? I can commit to something...

Instructables

I just posted my first instructable.


Replacement ear-tips for in ear headphones - More DIY How To Projects

Post title: self pity sucks

My life is AWESOME*!!!

I get at least 4 solid job-possibility emails a week - all in DC, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia.... Meanwhile, I have spent 1/2 of my daughter's life away from home... All I want is a respectable Remedy Dev job working on custom code in Oregon or SW Washington... Is that too much to ask? I make amazing awesome shit, but no one in the PNW is hiring. Unemployment + living with your parents is AWESOME*!!!







* and by awesome, I mean this shit sucks...

New Old Post

I had a post just hanging out in draft mode without knowing it. I have published it.

Super Duper vs. Carbon Copy Cloner

You have failed me for the last time Pandora...

Justin Timberlake? Really? Again? I've already thumbs downed 3 or 4 songs by him, you think you'd get the hint... And Enya? For fucks sake, how is it even possible to have a Pandora station that plays both Justin Timberlake and Enya?

Just exactly what sort of Faustian deal did you make with the record labels? Are you secretly pimping for them by clandestinely slipping newly released shit into my music?

You have failed me for the last time Pandora.

Oh shit, who'm I kidding? Just like Megatron and Starscream I'll have let you back into my inner circle by next weeks episode so that you can betray me again.

I hate you Pandora -

terrorist?

Ok - I'm no terrorist, but Jesus...

I know nothing about explosives except what I learned by growing up as a male in the 80s and 90s in the united states and even I could have done a better job than that dumb motherfucker in New York... I mean - gasoline and firecrackers? shit.... I don't want to give any instructions or spoilers or anything, but have you ever heard of a pipe bomb? (There's this thing called the internet - it can give you some details....) Is there someone stupider? I think that's the greatest weakness of the latest batch of "terrorists." They are all stupid. Chronically stupid. Debilitatingly stupid. If we ever had someone with half a brain wanting to damage the united states, we'd be in trouble.

This all brings me back to one of my (least) favorite topics: the TSA (douchebags.)

I'm not going to talk about the time that they cut off my TSA approved locks instead of using their TSA master key to just unlock them or the time they used a screwdriver to pry open (and break) the case to a "tool-less" external hard drive enclosure... Instead - recent events have confirmed my conclusion that these low-paid, un-vetted non-technical gorillas are doing nothing to keep us "safe" and secure. Further - it seems to me that our government cares much more about making it appear as if they are making us safe then they do about actually making us safe.

It's like our "war on drugs"... Fighting the war on drugs is much more important than putting an end to drug crime. The western world has plenty of examples on how to reduce crime and reduce drug related crime, but we turn a blind eye because we think it's a public relations "win" to keep fighting the "war on drugs." I'm disgusted...

Ok - sorry. Rant over.

I may or may not have made disparaging remarks about white castle in my blog in the past.... Any such past remarks may or may not have been completely valid at the time they were made...

However, the past is the past and the present is the present and white castle is the fucking shit y'all....

as to the suggestion that my opinion of white castle burgers might be influenced by the hour (it's 3:29 AM currently) or the amount of beers I've consumed I must respond by saying "Fuck you. White castle is the shit. You're just jealous that you aren't munching on 6 burgers while watching poker on espn classic at 3:30 AM. Bitches....."

What do you have to say about that?

A-Team Movie Dream Team

So - the latest on the A-Team movie as of a few months ago is that they postponed it for at least a year or two, don't have a completed script, and lost their director. Because of the way the world works, I'm sure there will eventually be an A-Team movie. I don't expect it to be great cinema or anything, but I do expect it to be a fun, sometimes silly, action movie staying mostly true to the spirit of the original while rebooting it for modern times. Instead of being Vietnam vets, they'll be gulf war vets, etc... Who knows - maybe the van will be a suburban or something...

That said - I've heard many many things about who will be cast in this movie over the years - some good and some not so good.... Just as a fun speculation, I thought I would list who I thought would be best for the roles (and work well together,) and then invite others to suggest other names that might be good. With that out of the way - here goes:
(Note - Some of these have been suggested by others - I'm mostly putting together a list of the best I've seen suggested so far. A couple of them I thought of without having someone else suggest it first.)

Colonel John "Hannibal" Smith - Bruce Willis
Lieutenant Templeton "Faceman" Peck - Brad Pitt
Master Sergeant Bosco Albert ("B.A.") Baracus - Ice Cube
Captain H.M. "Howling Mad" Murdock - Woody Harrelson

Input? What do you guys think?

Attention Internet -

Ok look, if I were to devote my life to correcting the misuse of the English language that I found on the internet, I would never be able to leave my computer. It would be more futile than visiting each and every individual in the galaxy and personally insulting every one of them.

However, there is a particularly disturbing abuse that I have seen three times in the last week and I feel compelled to mention it.

If you type "John could of done it differently" in some forum or blog thread you will make everyone who reads it think that you are an idiot. The people who assume this will probably be assuming correctly.

What you meant to type was "...could have..." or perhaps if you really wanted to emulate spoken English, you could stretch it and type "...could've...," which even my spell checker insists is wrong, but is still worlds better than "... could of..."

Which brings me to another point... I'm not going to try to squeeze too much in here but, if you can not spell words correctly, the least you could do is switch to a browser like Firefox that has a built in spellchecker.

Ok - I'm done now.
Please people - post to the internet responsibly.

Thank you.

Mac cloning solutions: Super Duper vs. Carbon Copy Cloner

I just found this old draft blog post just hanging out not quite finished. I didn't even realize that I hadn't published it. Even though it's a little dated, CCC is still just awesome. I use time machine for system backups, but when cloning a hard drive nothing out there beats CCC. I used it again recently when I upgraded Mathea's machine from a 250gb to a 500gb drive, my parents from a 160gb to a 320gb, and mine from a 500gb to a 750gb... Yes, in one month I had to crack open 3 apple laptops and swap hard drives. Anyway, Carbon Copy Cloner is great and you should try it out.

I also still have a couple of laptop hard drives available if anyone wants them. Installation services included.
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I've been a big fan of Super Duper for a long time. The interface is clean; it's reliable; while you are supposed to pay for it, you get most of the functionality for free. It can do incremental or full backups. Nice software.

Carbon Copy Cloner has been around for a long time also, but I never really checked it out until today. (I'll get to the reason in a minute.) I have to say I'm impressed. The UI is just a tiny tiny bit less clean, clear, and easy. But really, just a tiny bit. There's nothing wrong with the UI, it's just not as polished as Super Duper is.
However - there are two other areas where CCC is very superior to Super Duper. The first is pricing. I know I just finished telling you that almost all functionality in Super Duper is free, but... Well, the developer of CCC says it best - here is a quote from the product page:

Making donations

CCC is considered donation-ware (uncrippled shareware). I worked hard developing CCC and its methodology and documenting it on the internet for the rest of the Mac OS X community. If you find CCC indispensable, please consider making a donation. Please note that if you are using CCC for an educational institution, you should NOT donate to Bombich Software. My heart is in Education and all software that I write shall always be free to Education.

I love it.

Now, the reason I went to CCC in the first place is that I'm copying my nearly full 320GB that's currently in my MBP to a new 500GB that I just bought via firewire 800. I started a copy using Super Duper. Even though I had configured it to erase the destination drive before starting and then clone the source drive to the destination drive, (copy EVERYTHING) it was evaluating each file to determine if it needed to be copied before it copied it. I'm not positive that that's what slowed it down, but it was going very slow and the progress display kept saying that it was evaluating files (and then copying them.)

The 320 --> 500 is the biggest I've ever done from my mac and I just couldn't take how slow it was going. After half an hour it was maybe 15% done so I canceled it knowing that perhaps I had just cost myself 30 minutes and would have to just start over again.

I downloaded Carbon Copy Cloner just to give it a try. I'm so glad I did.