Slackerbit.ch

While on the train, homeward bound, I once again had the pleasure to experience todays kids…
I know, that kids like to speak what’s on their mind. I did it, too, when I was little. But what I didn’t do, was repeat it incessantly. Saying once, or maybe twice, when no one took notice, was enough.
But this kid sounded like a broken record:

“Look, someone peed there. Look, someone peed there. Look, someoneone peed there. Look someone peed there.”

And he didn’t even do this because no one was paying attention. And that wasn’t the only time he did it. Almost every sentence uttered came out in this form.

Had this been the only time that I had seen this behaviour, I would not be writing this rant. But unfortunately, this behaviour has been more and more common. So I am starting to wonder: What is fucking these kids up?
Is it the media, which keeps bombarding them with ever-repeating messages, so they think that this is the best form of communication?
Or is it that parents don’t really notice them anymore, unless they start to get really annoying?
Is it fluoride in the water?

It looks like the same thing that happened to icicle is happening to blogical.
Both were coded mostly in a coding frenzy, until they got to a stage that they did what they were supposed to do, with minimal error checking and no documentation. Then a few bugfixes, and suddenly, the interest in the program stops, and it just sits there, in a questionable state.
I hope that switching blogical development over to glade will speed things up a little, because, frankly, doing Perl/GTK+ development by hand is rather tedious. But it had to be done once, to get a feel for things.
And I found out, that I don’t really miss a graphical bloggin client. Since I do most of my productive work in xterms anyway, what I really need is a curses based tool. So I downloaded the Curses::Application module from CPAN and will play around with that.

Lately, I had trouble burning audio CDs. What was curious about it was, that I had the same problems at home and at work, and I didn’t have them a while ago, on neither computer.
After some sleuthing, I found the solution, and here it is, in case anyone has the same problem: At work, I used to have an Adaptec SCSI card, that got put into out backup server, and as a replacement I put in a DawiControl 2974 card.
And at home, I used to have an Adaptec, too, which got exchanged for a Tekram DC390 card. And both the DawiControl and the Tekram card use the same driver (tmscsim). When I switched to an older driver for the card, the burning worked like a charm.
So, if you have a CD burner (in my case a HP 9200), and a SCSI card using the tmscsim driver, expect cdrdao to abort after 3 Megabytes with an error. Short term solution: Use the (old and unmaintained) AM53C974 driver, or get another SCSI card.

That was my kind of weekend.
It started with my new TV arriving saturday morning. Call me materialistic, but that thing was the missing piece in my living room. And now Ican re-watch all my DVDs on the 16:9 screen.
The TV was put to good use on sunday, when Birgit came over to continue our Buffy-thon. We’re now 4 episodes into season three (the best season, IMHO), and I can’t wait for season 4, since that is in 16:9 *drool*
And sunday afternoon, it was bakin’ time. Since the holiday season is approaching, I made coco macaroons, which seemed just about festive enough.
And they actually taste good.

Came across this: brand eins Wirtschaftsmagazin over at Heise.
It’s an interesting article about the current state of radio and the effects on the music industry (in german)