Author: Synetech

Germans—and The Simpsons fans—will understand what I really mean:

Die
Spammers
Die

I fully condone and endorse physical violence towards spammers.

I recently bought a memory card reader (more importantly writer) so that I can put files back on to the memory card since my digital camera does not do disk mode. Unfortunately I listened to the advice of the clerk at the store instead of getting the one I was looking at—hey, I figured if he’s saying that the $20 one is better (specifically faster) than the $23 one, then it must be right? I bought it and went home and anxiously tried to install it (it is an internal one, not a portable one). What the clerk failed to mention, and this is pretty important, is that this particular card reader does not have a USB connector cable, but rather a USB header cable. That means that I have to connect it to a USB header on the motherboard (using both ports if I want to use the USB connector on the reader). Of course my old motherboard only has a single header which is already occupied. I was screwed.

(I should also mention that my old motherboard only had USB 1.1 which is why I bought a USB 2.0 card that same day; fortunately that part was not problematic.)

A quick check found that there are actually very few USB male A to USB header cables. There are a small handful of places to buy one online and probably none in brick-and-mortar stores. In any case, I wasn’t about to spend another $5 (plus any shipping) to use a product that I just bought—and was expecting to have a USB cable like most other readers. Of course this particular store (Cutting Edge Computers) has horrible store policies which include seven day exchange and no-return (not to mention processing fees for credit card purchases). Anyway, I figured I’d just make my own adapter.

This turned out to be a little harder than I thought since I don’t have any spare USB cables; the few that I’ve got are already attached to peripherals. Like I said, I wasn’t about to buy two brand new cables and cut them up either. I needed to try to get free ones since they would be cut up anyway.

I posted an ad on Kijiji requesting one or two old/broken USB cables. The only reply I eventually got was from someone offering a box full of USB cables for $30. Um, no thanks.

I got out the phone book and began calling all of the computer stores in town and asking them if they have a box of old cables in the back. I started with the used computer and repair stores. No luck. I then got to The Mac Outpost. Bingo! I explained that I needed an old USB cable and he said that he had one. I asked how much it would be and he said that he would just give it to me. Yes! I gave him my name and told him that I could be by the next day to get it. I still needed another one for the USB port on the reader so I continued my search more hopeful. I hit up a few couple of more computer stores with no luck. I decided to try the other Mac store in town, Mostly Digital (formerly Mostly Mac). Double bingo! He said that he had an old one that he would just give me. Again I gave my name and arranged to pick it up the next day.

I was anxious. I ended up getting a ride and heading out that day—no time like the present. I went to Mostly Digital first. Even though it was only an hour later, the gentleman I had spoken with was not there, but he had left the cable with a sticky with my name on it. Another clerk gave it to me and after a round of thanks, I was off to get the other one. I went to Mac Outpost. This time it took longer because Ian was busy with a customer (a whole family). About five or ten minutes later—I lost track of time—he was done with them and got me the cable. Another round of thanks and I was off to make my adapter.

In the end I ended up saving the two cables that they gave me. The one from Mostly Digital was actually an Apple brand USB extension cord (which was probably thrown in the back because it’s too tight, but still works, albeit kind of dirty). The one that Ian gave me was new and had some really nice shielding. I couldn’t bring myself to cut them up so I cut one of my other USB cables that was of lesser quality. Luckily I already had some header type pins and connectors so I made the adapter. I plugged the reader in and it worked. A while later I reinforced it to be a better connection (the original one was just a quick and loose test). I still don’t have use of the USB port on the reader for now, but I’ll eventually attend to that (it’s actually kind of important since all of the USB 2.0 ports are at the back of the computer and my two hubs are 1.1). In the meantime, I have a card reader/writer, and I am thrilled because it is much easier to pop in the card and do whatever I need to do rather than going through the camera. (I installed CHDK on the 16MB card that came with the camera and played around with that; a task not possible without a card writer.) I should also point out that Jake failed to mention that the card reader does not support SDHC, which is why I am already looking for a replacement. Basically I paid $20 for nothing; thank goodness I didn’t waste even more money on cables.

I learned two valuable lessons: (1) don’t listen to Jake the next time I shop at Cutting Edge—assuming I have to at all—and (2) Mac people are generous. (Of course a logical explanation would be that anyone who can afford a Mac can afford to be generous.)

Well, it seems that my entire family is afflicted with at least one permanent, incurable ailment.

Lusha is diabetic, and has been for over a year now. She has been getting insulin shots for about 10 months and still isn’t cured (cats are the only known creatures for whom diabetes can go into remission), so she will probably have it for life. 🙁

Adora apparently has asthma. We had him x-rayed yesterday, and the vet wants to start him on some anti-inflammatories and allergy medicine (and steroids if needed). Of course asthma is also permanent, so he’ll be stuck with that forever too. It doesn’t seem to affect his behavior—the little freak actually seems to enjoy exercise! :D—but he does heave a lot (I blame my mother since his heaving is exactly like her own smoking-induced heaving.)

My mother’s got all kinds of incurable problems like a herniated vertebrae, rheumatoid arthritis, heart murmur, and on, and on, and on. Honestly, she is quite the freak considering how well she has held together despite her innumerable ailments.

I was always quite healthy and actually admired my body and immune system for its effective maintenance. Unfortunately, ever since I graduated and got dumped out into the “real world” six years ago, my life has become a living Hell. I have been under constant, consistent, and ever-increasing stress and pressure because no matter what I do, no matter how hard I try, I just cannot make a living. The pressure and stress has manifested in all kinds of bodily degradations like my gums disappearing overnight and sudden onset carpel-tunnel. Also, bruises and injuries don’t heal anywhere near as fast as they used to.

Money can buy happiness and health. If we had money, then we could afford to take the cats to the vet for anything and everything, thus keeping them healthier instead of having to wait until we have to. If we had money, we could get surgeries and competent doctors to fix our problems. If we had money, we could remove our poverty-induced stress which is the primary cause of health problems. Money can not only directly buy happiness and health, it also buys them indirectly by removing stress. Suck it losers who coin and use those bogus adages.

And I mean that literally; they are complete morons. It has gotten to the point that they are calling a couple of dozen times per day, starting really early and going well into prime-time (after hours). What, do they think that they can annoy me into repaying my students loans with money that I don’t have? If annoying me has any effect, it is that their rude, inconsiderateness is making me decide to not pay them back even if I ever do have money.I don’t know which debt(s) it is/are (which student loan: governmental/privatized) because the morons don’t leave messages anymore. Then again, that’s a good thing because it would only serve to infuriate me even more if I had to hear their damned, and impotent voices attempting to threaten me with lawsuits that unfortunately never seem to come. Also, they would waste space on the answering machine if they left messages, and the machine is often intelligent enough to not even register a message if it is blank.The problem of course is that most people do fall for collector’s threats and harassment techniques, so they continue to use them; they are just spammers: if even a few people respond, then they continue their despicable behavior.

My New Year’s resolution this year was to shift focus to optimism. It occurred by chance. Thanks in part to the writer’s strike, I began watching kid’s shows more than anything else, and I love it. I have also begun watching more kid’s/family movies.

This weekend I watched several including The Game Plan and The Pacifier (as a double feature). I knew these two would have happy endings for obvious reasons, but when I watched Because of Winn Dixie (especially towards the end), I was worried that it would have a sad ending. Fortunately I was wrong and it had a happy ending.

I do not understand adults’ masochistic desire to feel bad, and thus the prominence of sad, depressing, and pessimistic themes in film—particularly award winners—but I prefer to watch things that make me feel good. I like movies that don’t end crappily-ever-after.

About six weeks ago I began watching some children’s cartoons in the morning on the Family/Disney channel because I have to get up early to give my cat her insulin shot. I did that for a couple of weeks. The new year began and the television season resumed. Thanks to the writer’s strike (and I don’t mean that sarcastically) there were very few shows that actually had new episodes. I watched a couple of other kid’s shows and before I knew it, I was hooked.

For the past three weeks I have been watching the Family/Disney channel almost exclusively and couldn’t be happier. I still watch whatever episodes air of the adult shows I watch, but I have given up A Daily Show and Colbert Report (which are worthless without writers anyway).

Stress is a mental condition yet can manifest physical symptoms (which can actually be permanent). If feeling bad can damage your health, then why can’t feeling good improve it? They do say that laughter is the best medicine… In that vein, I now prefer children’s programming to adult programming. For some reason adults are obsessed with feeling bad. Adult shows and movies insist on depicting sad and depressing events with characters getting sick and dying. Just take a look at Oscar-winning movies: the vast majority of them are crappy, dramatic, retarded-gay-child-has-horrible-life-and-gets-cancer-and-dies types; the more depressing the better. Children’s programs on the other hand are all optimistic and hopeful. They still portray conflict, but nothing serious or permanent, and always fixable by the end of the episode.

As a side benefit, whereas adult’s programs are—very—slow paced and get boring very quickly, children’s programs are designed for shorter attention spans, and are thus much more entertaining and engaging. I have found that I can watch them much more easily than adult programming, and they hold my attention until the end. The one down side is that they tend to have silly sound effects and stuff which can occasionally be irritating.

Ever since I began watching kid’s shows, I have noticed that I do in fact feel better and my depression has lessened. I also feel better physically and have fewer pains and aches.

So if you are sick and feeling terrible, just take a couple of kid’s shows and call me in the morning.

I made a big mistake last week. My script that cleans out all caches and deletes all possible temporary files to free up as much space as possible malfunctioned. Windows did a weird thing it has done a couple of times in the past few months were the TEMP environment variable stops expanding any variables it contains, and thus pointing to an incorrect directory. It is solved simply by rebooting, but I unwisely decided to clear the caches (which is a task I often do prior to shutting down) before rebooting. When the script executed, instead of deleting the files in the temp directory, it deleted C:\, recursively. That’s right, it deleted Windows, Program Files, Documents and Settings, and everything in C:. Unfortunately I did not notice this until it had made its way through most of the drive. Fortunately, I stopped it before it got too far into the Documents and Settings folder. It managed to wipe out all files in \Windows and \Program Files that were not in use (open) which included most of Windows and the files required to boot.

Obviously the first thing to do was to NOT reboot. At that point, rebooting would have been death since most of the files required to boot were gone. I managed to keep a cool head and quickly popped in the DVD that contains the most recent PowerQuest DriveImage image of the Windows drive (which unfortunately was from 2006). I opened it with the PQIExplorer (the PQIBrowser is really, really slow when extracting files), and extracted all files from C:\ in it to C:\ making sure to click NO to the overwrite prompts. The problem was that clicking No-To-All doesn’t work and seems to just be the same as the Cancel button, which hence required clicking No (or rather pressing the N key) a whole lot of times. I actually tried using macros to automate it, but that didn’t work as expected and caused more problems. A good, simple, effective, low-tech solution was to simply place a small, heavy object on the N key to hold it down and come back in an hour.

Eventually, the drive was restored (for all intents and purposes), and it was time to chance a reboot. As expected, it did not work. Luckily I knew instantly what the problem was: the boot files were missing. Apparently I focused too much on restoring the folders and forgot the files in the root. Doh! I spent the next couple of hours trying to figure out how to use the pqiextd command line tool to extract the missing files from the image in DOS mode. I could neither find the BAT file I used last time I needed to extract files from a PQI image from the command line, nor could I view the manual since the DOS PDF viewer (Adobe Acrobat 1.0) could not open that version of PDF files. Eventually, it dawned on me to just get a copy of the files (ntldr and ntdetect.com) from the Windows install CD. That took all of five seconds and I rebooted once again.

This time, Windows actually managed to start, and even boot! I went to bed and spent the following day restoring the system as much as possible. This included removing apps that have been removed since the last backup, installing apps that were installed since then, updating some others, reinstalling some device drivers, and checking and re-updating Windows.

Amazingly enough, the system was about 80-90% restored—although some settings files are gone—in only about one day. Despite what the haters may say, Windows is surprisingly resilient and not as spaghetti-code as they make it out to be. DLL-Hell nothing, Windows managed to bounce back from near-annihilation with little effort. Let’s see OSX or *nix do that.

*UPDATE*
I updated the clearing script to prevent this from happening again. It was as simple as placing a protected dummy marker file in the temp folder’s parent, and testing for it’s existence in the script, before deleting. Nice.

Lusha has been unlucky in health all her poor life. I don’t know why she has been condemned, but she has likely used up several of her nine lives.

Adora has faired better, but is not immune either. He has been coughing for a several months. It is clearly more than just an innocent cough. It is a weird, wet, gurgly cough that comes from the lungs. Listening to his chest (assuming that you can listen when he’s not purring), is even more distressing. It is unclear whether the gushing, gurgling is coming from his lungs or his heart, but neither one is good.

One diagnosis is that he could have asthma which while not good, is probably the least-worst.

I do however strongly suspect that he has the same problem that I do. The house—and especially my room—is extremely dusty. Breathing in a room as dusty as that fills our lungs, throats, tonsils, sinuses, ears, etc. with dead skin cells. The moisture of our mucus membranes rehydrates the dead cells and turns them into disgusting, chunks of rotten flesh, festering inside us (and they smell like grim death—and old people). Not good; not good at all. I have noticed that sometimes when my tonsils get full of that junk, my throat will hurt pretty badly, and picking them out will let my throat heal soon. I have thus been picking them out of my throat whenever I can. Unfortunately, I cannot pick them out of Adora. He keeps hacking a few times a day, but cannot seem to get them out. I hope that if I can clean the house well enough so that there is no dust to replenish the supply, that he will be able to expel what is stuck in him and clean his lungs and stuff out.

I still worry about heart-worms though. It took several months to convince my mother to have Lusha examined, and now we are even more broke (read in debt) than before with the cost of Insulin, syringes and special food, so paying for a check-up and x-rays is hard, especially with vets like those.

Merry freaking Christmas.

After several months, I finally managed to convince my mother that something is wrong with Lusha. She was walking strangely. When she walked, her back legs would splay out to the sides as though she were walking on ice and slipping around. I tried cleaning her paws, thinking that maybe the pads were calloused and not getting traction, but that did not help. Even more disconcerting was that her front paws were bending backwards!!! When she stood up, her front legs would bend the wrong way about mid-way between the wrist and elbow. It looks like the forearms are broken. I don’t know how my mother did not notice this (which has been getting more and more pronounced over the past several months), but she finally did.

We took her to the vet and our worlds were shattered. Lusha was diagnosed with diabetes.

She was put on a diet of expensive, available from the vet only, specialized dietetic food, and an insulin regimen. After a month or two she showed improvement. She was able to stand and walk again, her front and back legs were back to normal, and eventually she was able to jump again.

After a month or two of disarray and confusion as to how to arrange the shelves and bed so that she can continue to look out the window, I finally managed to create a way up for her that amounts to nothing more than one extra shelf. That’s right, after designing a fancy, stair-well system, I ended up just adding one more shelf so that instead of having to make two jumps, she can make three smaller ones to get up to the shelf and top bunk.

We really thought it was the end of the world and nearly went blind from crying. However as luck would have it, even the most sensitive person will come to terms with even the worst tragedy once the situation comes under control and the pain will lessen. Even better, there is hope that she can live a long, healthy life despite the diabetes, and better yet, there is hope that she may even be cured, or at least become insulin-independent. Apparently cats are the only creatures who’s diabetes can go into remission. Lucky us. Unfortunately, the most important step is to lose weight, and while she was already overweight to start with (not exceedingly so, just our bad luck), she has actually GAINED weight being on the “diet”-management food—even eating a little less than the prescribed portion size.

We need to find a feline-diabetes specialist instead of relying on the vets who get kick-backs from the food (which I have found out is actually harmful crap) that they prescribe and sell. If only I had learned to feed our cats non-dry, non-manufactured food earlier, we probably would not be in this situation in the first place.

Happy freaking birthday.

I spent this past weekend going through my email doing an ultimate spam sort.

For the past few years I have been sorting and organizing my emails to a relative level of success. I have numerous rules that determine whether or not a message is spam. After that, the legitimate messages are sorted and put into the appropriate folders as are spam. I have countless levels of valid email to keep things nice and organized, but I also have various “buckets” of spam where I keep even junk email organized instead of one big bin. I find it interesting to see what types of spam I am getting. More importantly, I do not throw any messages away because I do not like the idea of losing a message that was incorrectly classified as spam. I figure that if I keep everything, and make sure that they are all sorted, then should I ever miss a message, I can easily find it, even if it’s in the spam bin.

Unfortunately, this policy of keeping every message is no longer feasible. Spammers have taken to sending graphical spam instead of textual, which means that the size of spam messages has exploded from an average of 2KB per message to over 30KB. I have even seen spam on the order of more than ½MB! A quick calculation shows that I am now receiving about 250MB of spam per year. Clearly this is an untenable situation. My message store used to be about 74MB and now it is 350MB. I can no longer afford to keep everything. Which bring us to this past weekend.

I decided to ditch anything that is genuine spam. This is however a task that is easier said than done. It took many hours (lets say about 10). Worse still, it required actually looking at the content of the spam, which goes against the very purpose of fighting spam. However it eventually ended and I was able to clean out more than 31,000 spam messages from my system and over 250MB. Yay! In the process a few messages grabbed my attention for one reason or another. They were just so amusing that I decided to start a spam roll where I post the most interesting spams I receive. Here is a link to the first entry.

Now that I’ve got this massive stockpile of aggravating, infuriating, garbage, I need to decide whether to simply delete it or to bundle it up and send it to a spam analysis firm. I wonder if they can take 250MB files…