Reading (For Dummies)

More on Fahrenheit 9/11

More on the film. Stephen and I went to see a matinee showing of the film. The theater was packed, probably in the ballpark of 500 people. For a matinee showing. On a weekday.

The movie was full of cheering and jeering from the audience at various sound bites. I can only say that it was an extremely well-packaged bit of political powerhouse...I find it amusing how many people are arguing that it's false, or it's true, when I have yet to see anybody present a real bit of paper evidence for or against the arguments. Not that I'd believe one way or the other: the curse of the information age is that information, both true and false, is so ubiquitous that we can't tell one end of a horse's arse from the other.

It is what it is, and it is a film damning to the most corrupt presidency of my lifetime (if ever). Take a gander at it before judging. Don't be like the picketers outside our movie theater (holding signs "Michael Moore made this movie for profit. Don't see it," nevermind that he donates a not-so-wee bit of money to other filmmakers and the American Library Association). I ended up waving an extended middle finger at our out-of-work friend picketing the movie. I was happy when he yelled back at me. Free speech is free speech is free speech, after all...why trample on anyone's rights?

So what do we hope to get out of such a movie? I doubt conservatives are going to watch it without sticking their fingers and ears singing "la la la." The hope is that people will jump at the idea that John Kerry is a douchebag, but I'm voting for him anyway.

Fahrenheit 9/11

Interesting things about this movie, which is scheduled to come out tomorrow. It's playing in the Carousel Center locally, which is kind of a shocker as the rumor mill says it only opens on 1,000 screens. It is also the top requested search for showtimes on MovieFone. The reviews on the IMDB are pouring in by the thousands, while only a handful of people have seen the movie (it only having 3 screenings so far, and not opening for another 3 hours). 93% percent of these votes are either 1 or 10 stars out of 10 (best score).

I also bumbled through some message boards (both the pro and con messages are, of course, clueless, pulling fake statistics and facts out of the air) and came across another documentarian, making a movie about Mr. Moore. Rather intriguing, although Michael's first movie was not entitled "Roger Smith Hates America," while trying to track him down. Alas, it may be an interesting flick. I suppose tomorrow will tell for real (as opposed to those 2,200 IMDB "viewers").

More Motorcycle Maintenance

I've begun POR-15'ing my gas tank in earnest today.

How to seal the petcock holes

There was some question in my mind (and I've found various references on the web) about how to seal the fuel petcock holes on the bottom of the tank. Most people have done elaborate setups involving using rubber seals on strips of aluminum, or rubber cement on metal or wood. I think those are a bit too much now.

I cut out two pieces of a Zip-Loc bag (one of the thicker freezer varieties), and used some silicon fish tank sealant to lock them down. I just made sure to put a liberal amount of silicon around all three holes (encircle both screw holes and the main valve hole) before putting the plastic down. I've gone through two treatments of the Marine Clean and they are holding up just fine, so unless the Metal Ready has some adverse reaction to silicon or plastic (seems unlikely), I should be just fine. Will have some pics of the finished Clean tomorrow or the next day, as well as some water shots (it's nasty nasty nasty red from fuel and rust).

End of an Era

Say Goodbye...

The Red House, or the Red Haus to which it was more popularly referred, has changed owners. No longer lived in by a bunch of dirty starving artists, it is now inhabited by a fraternity. The sign declaring its name on the front and the pink flamingo in the yard, classic staples of the Haus' nerdery, have been replaced by a Zoo indicator, and a Miller neon sign in the front window.

The Red House and I go a long way back. I discovered the Haus while living with old roommate Ted Harbourt, and met a lot of cool hippie free-lovin' artists through that place. It's quite a shame that it is changing hands to a vile bunch, but I guess the old jocks versus nerds thing will never die...

Working through it

Trying to get back on track after the hard drive failure.

*ahem*

So I've been back at work on the motorcycle. The most recent project is still the front brake.

Rusty Caliper

I dismantled the front caliper for real this time, and got a new piston (the old one, shown at the bottom, is both rusty and scratched up on the outer surface). I also think I'll repaint it something colorful...

After reworking the brake, it was off to Albany to see my favorite unknown artist, Rebecca Angel.

Playing some new tunes in her basement venue

After visiting Becca and Pat and Luke and Lilly for a night of sanity, I'm reminded once again that families can work, even if most of them don't. Fortunately, theirs is one of the former.

Then it was down to New Paltz for biking with Erik, and ultimately off to New Jersey for my grandmom's actual 80th birthday party.

Gam then: yeah she was a hottie

Gam now: still kickin' it like a hip MC

It was a wonderful little trip, if a bit overwhelming in the "meeting people who I last saw when I was two" sense. I'll be a bit happier to visit with the grandfolks in a slightly smaller setting...

Disaster != Averted

Weird how computer disasters get played up in the mind. Last night I had a nightmare that Iraq launched an ICBM against Philadelphia (a slightly larger target than the Baldwins, I guess). Red rain fell down at the ocean.

Anyway, the laptop is getting there. I've managed to restore some files from tarballs that I made, though a lot of stuff got messed up. The old master directory block was corrupt, about 7,000 unlinked inodes (apparently without the MDB, HFS couldn't figure out where the inodes were supposed to go. In my opinion this is unforgivably non-robust). I'm pretty surprised that a journalling filesystem could suffer this kind of damage. I formatted the disk and ran a bad block scan and nothing is physically wrong with it...it was all just filesystem corruption (how???).

Ohwell, I lost a lot of pictures (last couple of weeks' worth) and a lot of music, but I'll live. Now I just have to rebuild Fink.

So remember, make frequent backups. I'll be buying a second disk for this purpose shortly.

Nice Guys Finish Last

I am now playing taps for my iBook. Well, at least its hard disk. Last night, a bunch of files disappeared from my user home directory. I immediately made a disk image of the whole disk and copied it to my PC, then started mucking about with fsck. Turns out both the superblock and backup superblock are ruined. No problem, I thought, I'll just mount the image, wipe the disk, and copy over what I can. Naturally, disk images can't be mounted over SMB, and there's not mac here with enough room to copy the gargantuan disk image. So I tried to copy it using Disk Utility, and didn't check the option "Erase target first", hoping it would just overwrite files. No such luck, it ended up zapping what was left of the disk before telling me that it couldn't copy the image over.

So there goes the PGP key I generated last week. Nice guys finish last because I gave the hard disk I used to use for backups away to my brother a few weeks ago. Stupid stupid stupid...

Rolling through

I found this rather random and pretty gear looking (in my opinion) photo from the Jersey trip, floating in the ether of my camera's compactflash card.

Sunset at 75 miles per hour

I snagged it somewhere on 476 near Wyoming Valley. Fortunately there weren't any other cars on the road, as I remember almost swerving off the road as I took it.

I worked at my job some today, and spent the afternoon widdling away on my motorcycle.

No Atkins diet for bikers

I pulled off the carbs a while back, but was afraid to take them too much apart because I didn't know how carbs worked and went together. Fortunately I got the manual from my mom's house, and have been taking them apart. So they're soaking in carb cleaner fluid, and will likely need other work. As seen in the photo, the choke and throttle linkages are pretty well rusted. Not really sure what to do about that, as these parts are a little hard to find. Fortunately Mike's XS is proving to be the definitive resource for parts for these 30 year old bikes.

I also bought some aluminum polish, and have been giving the carb exterior and the engine block a little wax-on, wax-off. I can't wait to have the before and after pics...

Jersey Biaxident

I accidentally went to New Jersey last week, thinking that my grandmum's birthday party was this weekend (slight difference between the 13th and the 19th, it seems). I do enjoy the level the unpredictability it presents to my friends and family though. Noone knew that I was coming home, and I left with just as little fanfare. I still got to visit some old friends, if only briefly.

MK and Morgan have a brush with the past

I met up with Marykate in North Jersey somewhere and went to Morgan's shore house (near Asbury Park, a fine neighborhood). We hung out and gabbed of days and weeks past, curiosities and beer. I feel old, though. I don't stay up late, and I wake up early. So I headed out on Saturday morning whilst everyone was asleep in the shore house after a beer party, and went bike riding.

Feel the burn

I was halfway to Long Island when I ran into a group of a hundred bikers. It was the Central Jersey Bicycle Club. I followed a peloton of about 30 of them for some distance, then overtook them. Two of their riders jumped out of the pack and gave chase. We raced for about 45 minutes. I pedaled until my muscles burned and my heart pumped battery acid. And then I rode some more. The guys were drafting me, and they finally gave up. "You're an animal," one of them said, "awesome, keep going." I felt great about that until I slowed down to talk with them. They were on mile 120 of a double-century ride, known as the Longest Day. No wonder they were having trouble keeping up!

After the ride I ran into old friend Lauie briefly, and then came back up to Syracuse on a midnight drive. It looks like I'll be going down to New Jersey for next weekend too, so more crazy adventures will need doing.

10 Years on the 'Net

It's hard to believe. I've been on the Internet for 10 years this week. My first ISP ran on an Indy R4000 and a Pentium 60 (without the FPU bug) running Slackware Linux, with kernel 1.2! Those were amazingly powerful machines a long time ago. I remember naively sharing my account with a student at Texas Aggie (a mudder) so he could compile his homework faster. He taught me my first tidbits about the C programming language, and how to compile and figure out why Make failed (missing libraries, etc). I've come a long way...

My first Internet account was courtesy of my Mom. Actually, courtesy of my mom's High School, which decided to pay for all its teachers to have Internet accounts. Of course, my dear mom didn't know what an Internet was, and I was the computer geek, so she just handed the information packet to me. My first e-mail address? ewight@rsabbs.com (don't bother, it's been dead for years).

A year or two later, I ran a BBS using Public Address on our second phone line, during the times that I wasn't being an Internet junky. I never told my parents, but I actually set the computer to dial into the Internet at about midnight using the house line, and disconnect at 5am -- I let my BBS users send email and surf the web using lynx during those hours, as they could dial in on the other line. So I was acting as a micro-ISP. Except that my Mac kept crashing all the time (Public Address was written very poorly, and Mac OS 7/7.5 were even worse).

Ah, nostalgia.

Fahrenheit 9/11

Following Michael Moore's recent win at the Cannes Film Fest, he has finally found a distributor for his new movie. And it comes out June 25th. Check out the trailer.

While it may have some stiff competition from movies like Cruel Intentions 3, I somehow envision Moore's documentary doing pretty well that weekend...