Author: Mark

Mark works as a [REDACTED] for [REDACTED], currently residing in Iowa. CoffeeBear.net is a place for him to blather on about whatever strikes his fancy. He currently spends his "free" time working on a photography project, playing with his cat and attempting to keep his wife happy (not necessarily in that order).

What a wretched, steaming pile of poo this movie was. Two thumbs all the way down. The wacky, over-the-top stupidity of the script turned what should have been a fun night at the movies into a constant groan fest as things went from bad to worse to crap. I’d been warned off the film by friends with good taste in movies, but we were heading down to the in-law’s anyway…. And while we’d been warned off we’d heard from others that the movie wasn’t too bad. Unfortunately it was worse than I’d been expecting and I knew within the first 15 minutes or so that I was going to hate the film. Near the beginning of the film, Indy & a friend are captured by the bad guys and taken to a government facility out in a desert. The bad guys do some weak exposition and we’re taken inside a warehouse. If you hadn’t realized they were at Area 51 yet, the filmmakers decided to pound the point home with a 80lb sledge by painting 51 in 2 story tall numbers on the inside of the warehouse doors.  *sigh*

And things just went downhill from there.  True there were moments in the film which were enjoyable, but they were the exceptions not the rule.  I highly recommend staying away from this wretched, steaming pile of poo.

A recent visitor to the CB pointed out a problem on some of my older entries.  It’s something I was expecting to have to fix but got sidetracked and never got around to.  Basically with the upgrade to WordPress 2.5.x, there are a couple of new settings in the wp_config.php file which have WordPress to use UTF-8 character encoding to better handle non-English langauges/characters.  However as older versions of WordPress automatically converted standard quotes/astrophes to their fancy/curly versions and those fancy versions are dependent upon which character encoding scheme they are written in.  Since I wasn’t sure how many entries I had that are affected by this and I wanted to leave the UTF-8 encoding enabled; I ran this SQL query to fix at least some of the problems: UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = REPLACE(post_content,''','\'') WHERE post_content LIKE '%'%';

There are probably other characters I need to fix yet, so if you happen to see something like hieroglyphics on this site or other gibberish, let me know what entries you found it on so I can fix them.  And my thanks to Lynsey for prompting me to fix these entries.

The one thing I don’t like about my house would have to be the weather we seem to get around it.  In the 10-12 years I lived in that stupid apartment in Coralville, IA, I only remember going for shelter from tornado warnings maybe 4 or 5 times.  I think we’ve done that many so far this spring alone.  In the house, we hunker down in our basement in the sauna.  Unfortunately the door to the sauna doesn’t close properly so I have to hold it shut.  At the moment I’m doing so by wrapping a belt around the door handle and around my leg.  It sucks.

What sucks worse is while I’m doing it, the weather “reporter” announces that there is no warning for my city but there is for my county and doesn’t clarify WTF she’s talking about.  Never mind I’ve been exhausted all weekend from sinus issues and would love to be asleep in bed, nope.  I’m stuck in a sauna in a basement during a tornado warning with an idiot broadcasting nonsense.  *sigh*

On the bright side, the sauna is small and my lovely wife is with me.  Now if we actually get a proper latch on the door so I don’t have to hold it shut next time this could be kind of cosy.  *grin*

Side note: We brought the cat down with us as well and he’s getting petted by the wife at the moment.  I mostly know this because he’s twitching his tail in bliss and smacking my arm with the tail.

Red Flowers by Manzabar | Flickr.com

I haven’t felt much like writing anything here of late, but I started to get into the habit of carrying my camera with me everywhere. Since the camera is handy, I’m taking more photos1. When I walked out of the house the other day, the light on this bush in our appealed to me

1 Just snapshots really.

I I finally set about upgrading my home server1 from Dapper to Hardy yesterday. I had been hoping for a less traumatic experience then upgrading my desktop computer from Dapper to Gusty2. Unfortunately I once again ran into problems. First off, it’s been nearly a week since Hardy was officially released but when I tried to run the official upgrade tools they all initially told me I was running the latest version. According to the documentation, I should have been able to run either sudo do-release-upgrade or sudo update-manager but neither worked. I was only able to start the upgrade process by running sudo update-manager -d and my understanding is that “-d” tells the program to grab the latest development version. Weird, but oh well. Then the process just dragged on and on and on and on and on…. I eventually went to bed leaving it running. The only reason I stayed up as late as I did with it was the excellent book I was reading.

When I got up this morning, it was still running but was hung up on a question I needed to answer. I clicked through the question and a few more before heading off to work. When I got home, again the upgrade was hung up on a question. I worked my way through answering all the questions and let the upgrader do its job. Unfortunately the upgrader eventually failed on these packages: gnome-applets-data, gnome-applets, ubuntu-desktop and update-manager. I clicked through the errors and then the upgrader said:

Could not install the upgrades
The upgrade aborts now. Your system could be in an unusable state. A recovery will run now (dpkg –configure -a).

I clicked ok to the error, something flashed up and then the upgrader died/vanished/went away. I tried running:

  • sudo aptitude update but it sat there for far too long for my sleep deprived and impatient self.
  • sudo aptitude upgrade, only it said there wasn’t anything to upgrade.
  • sudo aptitude autoclean, *shrug* it's part of my standard script for updating my systems.
  • sudo aptitude dist-upgrade, only it said there wasn’t anything to upgrade.
  • sudo dpkg --configure -a, it said there were unconfigured packages but it couldn’t fix them automagically. It mostly complained about gnome-applets-data.

I ended up running sudo aptitude install gnome-applets-data gnome-applets ubuntu-desktop update-manager and that fixed up those errors no problem. For giggles of insanity I tried running sudo aptitude -s -f install to see what else might be left to update3. It found another 111 packages it wanted to remove but some of them I want to keep, so I’ll have to look into that more closely. Most likely all these errors were caused by my own foolishness, as at one point I was testing some stuff out on the machine and enabled some 3rd party repositories to install unsupported apps. *blech* I don’t think I’ll be doing that again. I was able to reboot the machine and connect to it via SSH and SMB, but HTTP seems to be broken at the moment. *bugger* Apache is one of the packages sudo aptitude -s -f install wanted to remove. I guess looking into that just got bumped up my priority list.

1 An old Dell Dimension desktop with a PII-400 CPU and 256 MB of RAM.
2 Never fear, Fritz (my desktop PC) is next on my list of machines to upgrade.
3 More accurately, I found some instructions when upgrading my desktop from Dapper to Gusty that recommended doing that to ensure all apps got updated.