Monthly Archives: November 2007

Legal day

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Today was a legal sort of day. I had to report for jury duty and spend the afternoon in a courtroom for jury selection. Then this evening, I completed online traffic school for a speeding ticket that I got in September. Well, I did the online part of the online traffic school – I have to go t a UPS store to take a final exam before I am truly done, but that should only take a few minutes.

Incidentally, jury duty is not over. I have to report to the courthouse again tomorrow at 8:30 am for continued jury selection.

Finished The 4400 Season 2

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A few of us have been getting together on occasion to watch the sci-fi show The 4400 (on DVDs from Netflix). It doesn’t seem to be a hugely popular show, but it’s actually quite good. It’s the tale of what happens when 4400 people who disappeared over the course of several decades suddenly reappear together in a field, delivered by a mysterious ball of light. The 4400 haven’t aged a day, are totally unaware of where they’ve been, and are beginning to show interesting abilities (a la Heroes).

Last night, Nicole and I fired up our new popcorn popper for the first time and watched the last episode of Season Two (and a few special features on the single DVD for that episode). It did not disappoint – some good cliffhangers. Looking forward to
Season 3…

Mac OS X Screenshot Secrets

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On OS X, taking a screenshot is not as easy as pressing PrtScn (Print Screen). Well it’s easy to do, but it’s not easy to remember and thus I present these shortcut keys from O’Reilly’s Mac OS X Screenshot Secrets:

Key Combination Result
Command+Shift+3 Capture entire screen and save as a file
Command+Control+Shift+3 Capture entire screen and copy to the clipboard
Command+Shift+4 Capture dragged area and save as a file
Command+Control+Shift+4 Capture dragged area and copy to the clipboard
Command+Shift+4 then Space bar Capture a window, menu, desktop icon, or the menu bar and save as a file
Command+Control+Shift+4 then Space bar Capture a window, menu, desktop icon, or the menu bar and copy to the clipboard

Just added these to my Mac OS X Switch Guide page, which has various OS X tips, especially suited for new converts from the world of Windows.

Ubuntu mirror troubles

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This has been happening all day every time I attempt to do apt-get dist-upgrade:

The following packages will be upgraded:
  libsmbclient samba samba-common smbclient smbfs
5 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 11.0MB of archives. After unpacking 4096B will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?]
Writing extended state information... Done
Err http://security.ubuntu.com feisty-security/main smbfs 3.0.24-2ubuntu1.3
  403 Forbidden
Err http://security.ubuntu.com feisty-security/main smbclient 3.0.24-2ubuntu1.3
  403 Forbidden
Err http://security.ubuntu.com feisty-security/main samba 3.0.24-2ubuntu1.3
  403 Forbidden
Err http://security.ubuntu.com feisty-security/main samba-common 3.0.24-2ubuntu1.3
  403 Forbidden
Err http://security.ubuntu.com feisty-security/main libsmbclient 3.0.24-2ubuntu1.3
  403 Forbidden
E: Failed to fetch
http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/main/s/samba/smbfs_3.0.24-2ubuntu1.3_i386.deb:
403 Forbidden

links for 2007-11-16

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Bookcase

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This is the “bookcase” that was issued to me (and many of my colleagues) at work.

Bookcase

As you can see, it’s not very practical, especially with the height of the shelves, which makes it impossible to fully utilize the space without resorting to stacking and the overall height makes it too tall to fit under my standard-issue cubicle desk, pretty much forcing it to be in the one particular spot where it partially blocks my whiteboard.

In general, the new building and the cubicles are very nice, but the bookcases I think missed the mark.