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The second wine tasting will be held at Eileen’s on November 3rd

We will be tasting:

• Chablis
• Riesling
• Gewürztraminer
• Rioja
• Chianti
• Cotes du Rhone

More details to come.

I’ve been planning to do a wine tasting for a while now, and I’ve finally organized myself enough to accomplish it. I will attempt to host a wine tasting at my apartment in Poughkeepsie once a month. Each month will have a different theme, and we may even stray into Beer tastings seasonally.
I imagine things will sort themselves out as we go, but here’s the basic gist:

• Each tasting will cost $10 per person, so I can purchase wine.
• The tastings will be announced here, along with the theme.
• I’ll try to put something together so we can rate each wine.

More details about the first tasting after the jump.
Read the rest of this entry »

I think I’ve finally found out what has been causing the bizarre hangs that my new computer has been experiencing. It turns out that Western Digital has a Firmware Update for my hard drive to fix what is, in essence, an infinite loop within their on-board diagnostic routines.

http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?
p_faqid=1493&p_created=1168299631&p_sid=J5W_Lywi&
p_accessibility=0&p_redirect=&p_lva=&&p_li=&p_topview=1

The most unfortunate part is that the symptoms of the problem in this writeup are not very clear. At work, we call these write-ups APARs, and writing poor APARs is one of the worst things a technician can do. I now have a good sense of what our customers must go through.

One thing I like about Linux and other pieces of open source software is error reporting.

Recently my console has been displaying the following errors at startup:


ata1.00: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x0
ata1.00: cmd ef/05:fe:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/40 tag 0 cdb 0x0 data 0
res 51/04:fe:00:00:00/00:00:00:00:00/40 Emask 0x1 (device error)
ata1.00: configured for UDMA/133
ata1: EH complete


This is gibberish to most everyone, and it doesn’t cause a problem, so I ignored it until I got bored today.

I clearly have a ton of information here… I just have no idea what it means. So, being pedantic, I went to the source: the ATA Command Set

Command x’EF’ is “Set Features”
SubCommand x’05′ is “Enable Advanced Power Management”
Setting x’FE’ is “Full Performance”

So it looks like my system is trying to set my hard drive in high performance mode. And from the return codes, my hard drive doesn’t like being told what to do.

I’m still not sure what part of the OS caused these messages to start appearing, but now I’ve got a good idea where to check. This obnoxious power-save daemon has acted up before. I guess it is time to finally get it configured properly.

This post is for anyone else getting this error who isn’t anal-retentive enough to go look up the ATA specification.

At work, keeping the “young kids” around is a really big problem.

You see, I work for a division that has been around for 40 years in a company that is over 120 years old. My division had its heyday in 1980 and most of its employees are aged to match. They are all creeping nearer and nearer retirement and my employer is having difficulty solving the need for new blood in preparation for the soon-to-be boomer exodus.

In the time I’ve been employed there, almost all of the people with whom I started have left and been replaced with fewer, younger employees. Management has only recently grasped the enormity of the problem, and is still treating it with the backroom secrecy that was popular before the dot-com bubble.

They are of the same mind and opinion as the people who researched and wrote this article:
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/011008-young-workers-hard-to-retain.html

Lets talk about why this article is so completely out of touch with reality, shall we?
Read the rest of this entry »

Many people have been pestering me to get my weblog back up and running since I’ve gotten my new server up and running. I really had no idea how many people actually read this thing… get a life people!

This weekend I decided to finally sit down and attempt a massive data recovery of the old server. Fortunately for me, the dead hard-disk wasn’t as utterly dead as I had thought and managed to let me extract most of my historic wordpress database without issue. I also managed to save all of my pictures from my trip around the world, which can now be found in my gallery.

I did all of this without having to stick the hard drive in the freezer! (I really was looking forward to that though.) If you are lucky, I’ll tell you how I managed to extract the bad data and use some hardcore Linux tools to read and correct the bad sectors on the disk.

Finally, along with the gallery came the massive amounts of comment spam in the buffers. I’m going to try to clean those out and re-implement the “captcha” so they stop coming… I might even use CMU’s newfangled one which helps decode electronic books.

Don’t wait for me to finish the rest of the website… thats a long way away. And don’t hold your breath for more blog posts, I’m pretty tired.

Did you know that the attempted colorization of Citizen Kane prompted Hollywood to mandate that any modification of a film be accompanied by an explanation?

I didn’t either, but I learned it while watching a colorized version of Miracle on 34th Street. I’m not certain it is true (there were no citations and the only Internet resources I could find were Wikipedia and IMDB Trivia) but its an interesting idea.

Frankly, I think Citizen Kane is overrated.

EDIT: Bless the Internet… I found a reputable source (I think)

The Museum of Broadcast Communication states the following:

The main legacy of colorization is the National Film Registry, established by Congress in 1988 in response to the colorization controversy. The Registry is a list of films, selected by experts and expanded annually, that, if colorized, will have to be labeled with a disclaimer. 

Hello loyal elYoung readers.

If you haven’t noticed, this weblog has been poorly updated. The main reason is because my primary hard drive crashed and burned. elYoung.com has been running off of my smaller secondary hard drive with scant amounts of free space for quite a while.

Good news is on the horizon, however. I’ve been a busy shopper, and I’ve purchased both a new phone (to replace the one that has been nothing but trouble) and all of the components for a new computer.

The new computer is a dual-proc, quad core, AMD Opteron system with 1TB of disk space. Yes, you read that right: Terabyte. Most of the 1000GB of space are going to be used for media hosting as part of Patrick’s and my home theater/media system. The rest will be used for eYoung.com and any other crazy schemes I think up.

I like to dream that this new computer will finally encourage me to fully update and flesh-out this website. We’ll just have to see.

The prostitute(s) are back!

OK, well I haven’t seen more than one of them, and she doesn’t seem to be standing in the same place all the time like before, but its definitely her. She is the 60 year-old chain-smoking Asian one. I’m not sure if she’s actually 60, if it is the chain-smoking, or if it is a combination of the two, but she is unpleasantly thin and wrinkly… from 50 ft.

For those of you who don’t remember, my apartment used to have front row seats to a veritable porn-ucopia of prostitutes for fetishists. There was the old, chain-smoking Asian one; the pregnant Hispanic one; the crack-whore "blond" white one; and the snappy potential-dominatrix black one.

Then, one fairly uneventful day, the street walkers (who never did much walking) didn’t come back. The traffic pattern got a little better, the bar lost a little business, the dealers moved on to greener pastures, and I got blinds because the peep show had ended.

But today was a red-letter day! Today I had a small housewarming for my coworkers, and went to show them where the prostitutes used to stand. And what to my wondering eye should appear, but the very harlot I used to hold dear! (When I saw her I made such a clatter, they sprang to their feet to see what was the matter.) 

I wonder whether she just happens to be the most gristled and weather-beaten that she is back walking the streets before the others (she indeed is walking now, up and down the block) but I’m sure time will tell. I’ll see if I can get a picture of her when it is light out so you can all revel in my neighborhood.

So, I got a text message and instead of doing something helpful, my phone decided to crash. While it has happened before, it has never taken all of my data with it.

This means I had to restore from backup all of my data. Unfortunately, I don’t frequently see the need to backup my phone… so I’m looking at a loss of almost a year of data.

It is time to get a new phone I think. I just wish Palm got their act together and released the new Linux-based palm-OS sometime soon. Otherwise I’m going to be getting the Treo 700p and hoping it doesn’t crash like my Kyocera 7135.

If you’ve changed your phone number in the past year, or you’ve only given it to me recently, let me know and I’ll re-add you.