the frig blig

Those assembled for this year’s chili-fueled poke-fest were F&S, A&M, C&C, P&A, B, J, A&L, R, and J. However C, B, J, A and L chose not to poke; and P&A took the fruits of their pokin’ home prior to the photo session. So without further ado, here they are:

Like thousands of other guys all over this land, I created a playlist of songs for our upcoming halloween party. Some are appropriate for the music, or the words, or the overall effect, or the title. A few are a slight thematic stretch, but were included just because I like them.

Anyway since this here blig is all about sharing, here’s this year’s list:

phantom_of_the_opera - the_music_of_the_night
built_to_spill - you_were_right
dissecting_table - shikkogaki_remix
pixies - ed_is_dead
zevon_warren - werewolves_of_london
soundgarden - black_hole_sun
phil_ochs - the_highwayman
mission_of_burma - dead_pool
iron_maiden - run to the hills
pink_floyd - careful_with_that_axe_eugene
velvet_acid_christ - never_worship
weill_kurt - the_ballad_of_mack_the_knife
tool - undertow
tom_waits - misery_is_a_river_of_the_world
screaming_trees - the_looking_glass_cracked
phallus_dei - body_and_soul
frank_zappa - goblin_girl
kronos_quartet - black_angels
alice_in_chains - them_bones
mose_allison - everybody_cryin_mercy
beck - devils_haircut
metallica - the_unforgiven
cohen_leonard - the_future
suicide_machines - i_hate_everything
trance - ennui
green_day - jinx
nirvana - something_in_the_way
avenged_sevenfold - city_of_evil
a_frames - surveillance
meat_puppets - we_dont_exist
tom_waits - gods_away_on_business
talking_heads - listening_wind
radiohead - fake_plastic_trees
bach_johannes_sebastian - toccata__fugue_in_d_minor_s565
soundgarden - searching_with_my_good_eye_closed
sonics - the_witch
beatles - maxwells_silver_hammer
medeski_martin_and_wood - anonymous_skulls
phish - the_story_of_the_ghost
black_sabbath - children_of_the_grave
the_receiving_end_of_sirens - dead_men_tell_no_tales
husker_du - bed_of_nails
dylan_bob - man_in_the_long_black_coat
boris - six_three_times
led_zeppelin - the_battle_of_evermore
john_zorn - graveyard_shift
phallus_dei - earth_go_back_rough_mix
u2 - helter_skelter
legion - the_somnambulist
motorhead - bad_religion
nocturnal_emissions - never_give_up
motorhead - hellraiser
premature_ejaculation - death_works_as_you_drift
blue_oyster_cult - dont_fear_the_reaper
art_decade - my_death
metallica - enter_sandman
paul_lemos - somnambulation_remix
husker_du - how_to_skin_a_cat
metallica - the_god_that_failed
premature_ejaculation - red
husker_du - she_floated_away
bloc_party - hunting_for_witches
dylan_bob - everything_is_broken
dear_hunter - the_church_and_the_dime
dixon_willie - I_Aint_Superstitious
the_phantom_of_the_opera

Today’s guest post is by Pete Karman of New Haven, who’s following letter was published in the Oct. 21 New York Times Magazine:

What Americans have in mind when they want other countries to be “democratic like we are” is our political system, in which voters get to choose between two corporatized parties, financed by the same moneyed interests that agree on major issues, while elections focus on lesser issues, personalities and smears. Policy options and citizen involvement are minimal. Candidates who stray beyond conventional rhetoric or propose more than cosmetic reforms are quickly relegated to the “extremes.” Voters are obliged to pick the lesser evil and so end up with more evil no matter who wins.

There is a thriving business of interchangeable corporate and government political operatives working to reproduce this system in other lands. Their obvious aim is not to spread actual democracy but to earn their money by setting up compatible, and therefore more easily dominated, outposts of the American empire. The rest of the world got wise to this a long time ago.

It’s a shame that this is still news to so many of America’s own citizens, that it’s so difficult to change, and that this environment engenders cynicism among its populace.

Saw this bus parked on Bagley whilst walking to Zoka this morning. “Awww, Ma, do I hafta go to school today?”

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met with human rights advocates at the American ambassador’s house in Moscow yesterday. That’s right, the same administration which initiated warrantless wiretapping of its own citizens, secretly legalized the torture of prisoners, and suspended the right of habeus corpus is meeting with human rights advocates in Russia.

“Human rights are more important in countries thousands of miles away from America” Rice said, continuing “These activists pose less of a threat to our agenda…the further from our border, the greater our support for human rights.”

The old NAS is >90 percent full and it’s old tech to boot so I decided to replace it with a linux server running samba. Purchased a used 2U server on ebay with RAID controller, but after installing CentOS 5.0 the system didn’t see the onboard NICs. I tried installing PC-BSD and that system didn’t see the NICs either (although the connection LEDs lit on the back and the front of the server when connected to the switch). I booted the Ubuntu 6.06 live CD (which usually sees all hardware I’ve thrown at it) and it didn’t see the NICs. I booted a Microsoft WinPE (Vista) boot CD and it didn’t see the NICs. So I finally realized it must be a hardware problem and emailed Supermicro tech support. It turned out that the NICs were disabled via a jumper on the X5DP8-G2 motherboard.

Why would anyone ship a server with the NICs disabled? And not tell the customer?

I’m not going there…now that it’s on the net I added it to DNS and can move ahead with installing disks and setting up samba. I’ll buy a couple of HP/Compaq 146G 15k drives to replace the 2 Maxtor 147G drives in the DL385, pop those Maxtors into the Supermicro and add a matching third drive for RAID 5. That’s the plan. Hopefully using genuine HP/Compaq drives will fix the problem where creating a new vmware disk crashes the RAID 1 array. Then I just copy the contents of the old NAS to the new box, wipe the drives, and sell it on ebay.

BTW I ended up with PC-BSD on the new box. I changed my default shell to tcsh and am looking forward to spending more quality time with BSD (I’ve had a shell account on a BSD system for years but haven’t ever managed one before). The adventure continues…

Chris Cornell’s performance at the Paramount last night was pure quality entertainment. He had a great band, had a blast onstage, and his voice is as powerful as ever. He performed three Temple of the Dog tunes, and many Soundgarden songs. He covered an acoustic version of ‘Billie Jean’ and the band’s final encore was ‘Whole Lotta Love.’

Warmup NYC trio Earl Greyhound wasn’t too shabby either.

If you like Soundgarden and this tour comes to your town, I say don’t miss it. I’m still hearing his tunes in my head.

S and I alternately laughed and cried watching the film Outsourced last night at the Majestic Bay. Locally produced with lots of assistance from India, the film tells the story of a call-center manager who has to lay off his entire staff and then travel to India to train his replacement. We award it five bindis.