Month: April 2005

Adagio Teas

I’m normally a coffee drinker. Heck, let’s be honest here; I’m more than just a coffee drinker. I’m both a coffee addict and a coffee snob. I’ll gladly pay ~$5 for a well brewed cup of espresso with a shot of flavored syrup in it and I regularly buy fresh beans from Gevalia rather than try to choke down that crap my office claims is coffee.

But for all that, coffee is not my exclusive poision. Particularly in the warmer months, nothing is quite so refreshing as a cold glass of ice-tea. To make my ice-tea, I generally put 5 bags of Lipton into a 1 gallon glass jar and stick it in the window for a few hours. It’s slow, but it turns out wonderful. Why am I talking so much about this?

Well, I had been reading through the various blogs on my portal page, when I saw an interesting note over at shades*of*grey. He mentioned an interesting marketing technique from Adagio Teas. Far too interesting to resist in my book, so I’m linking them up here –and in my sidebar– hoping to get a freebie. 🙂

This morning while I was booted into windows and checking on the weather; I noticed that there was a high chance of thunderstorms. Having had enough trouble of late with my computer, I decided to shut it down while I was at work1. When I got home from work this evening, I let it try booting into Linux again as I wanted to grab the exact errors I’ve been getting so I could do some googling for a solution. Much to my surprise, it booted straight into Linux without a problem. Then I ran YOU and had it reload the latest kernel from SuSE and this time when I rebooted to complete the install; it came up perfectly. *schweet*

Of course, staying home to fix my computer means I missed another Mindbridge meeting but I doubt they’ll really miss me there as usually I just sit there silently. Hopefully next month, I’ll be able to make it to a meeting again And come to think of it, I probably won’t make it to next month’s meeting as that’s awful close to my wedding day. *shrug* You win some, you lose some.

1 Usually, it’s up & running either grabbing new, fansubbed anime via BitTorrent or transcoding video files for burning to disc.

This afternoon while I was home for lunch, I noticed that SuSEWatcher was showing this icon: There are new security updates available; hardware detection is idle.

This means that there are new security updates available. I launched YOU to get the new updates and noticed it was an updated kernel. I didn’t think much beyond that and let YOU do it’s thing. But after I rebooted I couldn’t get into my Linux install; it looks like some of the kernel modules didn’t get installed correctly. Specifically the one for the filesystem that my harddrive is formatted in. *grumpf* I’m doing research online to figure out how to revert back to a previous kernel to fix this.

That was the bad news. The good news is I got a bit ornery with my iPod not syncing with iTunes & fought with it again. After getting several BSODs, I just randomly decided to plug the iPod back into the onboard firewire port and for whatever reason it worked! Wheee! Now if I could just get my Linux install fixed; I’d be a happy camper…. At least until the next computer screw up!

I’ve not been posting around here in a while and mostly it’s been do to a lack of *umpf*. The way work’s been going of late has strongly discouraged my creative urges and since I have no desire to get dooced I can’t really talk about that much. I’ve been doing some job hunting but that’s slow going as there aren’t too many jobs around here that I’m qualified for and that wouldn’t totally suck (e.g. 2nd shift & a pay-cut).

Still, life isn’t all bad. Ariesna and I are getting married in a little over a month from now1 and I’ve got all the parts of my outfit. That’s right no simple tux for me but rather a modern kilt with a formal jacket and all the trimmings. I’ve tried the lot on and you’ll have to forgive me but I think it looks rather sharp. 🙂

Also, I’ve been secretly working on a theme for WP 1.5 so when I upgrade this site; it’ll be all shiny and new. I’m holding off on the upgrade currently while I wait for some WP plugin developers make 1.5 versions of their stuff, though I’ve also started looking at alternative plugins as well.

Other than that, the only vaguely interesting thing to report is my iPod appears to have gone insane. For a while there, I couldn’t get it to work properly with iTunes and a quick peek through the Apple support forums convinced me to try an Adaptec Fireconnect 4300 PCI firewire card. That worked for a while but then Windows started blue-screening when I connected the iPod though occasionally it would work if the iPod was connected when I booted into Windows. Eventually, that stopped working but I was able to get it work with gtkpod under Linux but now even that seems to no longer work. I’ve not found anybody else with the exact same problems as I from some rather intense googling. During my last test, it looks like my Linux system got stuck in a loop trying to access the iPod; so I’ll be digging through my old receipts and seeing precisely how long ago I bought it as I did buy the extended warranty on it from Best Buy when I picked it up. I’m crossing my figures that I’m still w/in the warranty period and they’ll replace it for me. That would be pretty schweet if it happens. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see for now.

1 If you feel up to the whole gift-giving thing; we’re registered at Dillard’s, Kohl’s, Target, Walmart and Amazon.com.