Below are the 16 most recent journal entries recorded in Moving Torb's LiveJournal:

Tuesday, October 21st, 2008
12:17 am	disk imaging Anyone familiar with Clonezilla Live or other open source disk imaging solutions? I only want to clone a single machine. Clonezilla seemed to have one of the simpler sets of instructions, but I'm running into trouble embarrassingly early in the process. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, January 20th, 2008
10:16 pm	congratulations! I was just going to post to congratulate minorninth on breaking the top 10 all time downloads on sourceforge, but it turns out that I will mostly congratulate him and rowneet on their engagement. Hooray! You two are such a cute couple. On an unrelated note, I had the new experience today of having a pheasant follow me on a two block walk to CoHo. Well, sometimes it walked ahead of me. It was a little surreal. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, December 14th, 2007
5:16 pm	Hawaii? A delegation from kuddliphish's family is going down to Hawaii in February, and they have enough room for us as well, so if we paid for airfare, we'd have a place to stay. We haven't decided what to do, though. Basically, we're worried that getting there and back would be stressful and that we might find that we might end up feeling constrained in what we could do once we got there by having an infant and three-year old along. Not that I know exactly what I'd do in Hawaii even without kids other than hang out on a beach or something. So, should we go? If so, what should we do once we get there? I'll leave it to kuddliphish to fill in details like which island it is and such. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, October 7th, 2007
6:36 pm	computer noises Our computer has recently started making unhappy grindy fan noises when it starts up. It usually goes away in a few minutes (maybe 2-5 in most cases), but I don't trust it. I opened it up yesterday and narrowed it down to the fan on the graphics card. This is about the limit of my experience to date with this sort of hardware stuff. The computer is about 4 years old. We had the power supply replaced while still under warranty because it developed similar symptoms, but we haven't had any other trouble with it, and it's still doing everything we need it to. So, um, what does anyone think I should do? Are there usually other symptoms that will come up before the fan actually fails? If the fan fails, will it probably just take out the graphics card, or might it cause more extensive damage? Is this the sort of fix I should try myself, and if not, would it be cheap enough to be worth while on a 4-year old machine? (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, September 8th, 2006
11:27 pm	( Today I have an html question... ) (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, July 13th, 2006
6:33 pm	researching our own comparables I think we may want to do some research of our own into what comparable houses in our area have sold for recently. How would you go about that? In one foray to the town office, they didn't seem especially cooperative, but we could try that again. Zillow doesn't cover our area, but I haven't tried more thorough web searches yet. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, July 10th, 2006
11:43 pm	So we're considering going with Pack and Ride for moving our stuff from Maine to Oregon. Is anyone familiar with them? Heard good or bad things? Rumors? Speculation? Conspiracy theories? For those who aren't familiar with them, they come and drop off 7x7.5x4 foot containers (we'd probably go with 2), which you then load up. They then come back and load the containers onto a truck, drive it where you're going, drop them off, and you unload them. We went with ABF U-Pack for a previous move, and it went pretty well, but the two things we didn't like were having to get stuff up into the truck (they were kind of rushed because they'd been delayed by wildfires and didn't have the ramp we had requested) and dealing with the partition. Pack and Ride costs a bit more, but their approach seems like it would avoid those two problems. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, June 25th, 2006
9:50 am	bird brains The day after we got back from Oregon, I noticed that there were some funny smudge/scratch-type marks on the lower pane of a window at our house. At first I wondered what the cat had done to make them, but then I noticed that they were also on the upper pane, so he'd have to work pretty hard to do that. A closer look revealed that the marks were actually on the outside of the window. Did a whole flock of birds run into the window, I wondered, peering at the ground outside for a pile of small feathered bodies. None to be seen. Oh well, continue with morning routine. A minute or two later, I'm sitting in a chair putting on my socks, when a sparrow lands on the window sill and starts tapping at the window. Tap tap, every two or three seconds, walking back and forth, and sometimes flying up to tap high on the lower pane or to tap the higher pane. Huh, well I guess that solves that mystery. This sparrow has since become a regular visitor, tap tap tapping on all of our ground floor windows at the back half of the house each day. Okay, I don't know if it taps every window every day -- it seems to prefer some of them over others. It's still kind of amusing, but between the tapping and the smudges and the droppings on the sills, it's also getting a little annoying. So, dear readers, what do you think would lead a bird to this kind of behavior? What would be a good way of gently discouraging this bird, or why should I not discourage it? Discuss. Current Music: tap tap tap (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 22nd, 2004
9:49 pm	It's been a while So, seeing this post, you may think that I've chosen to break my rather lengthy silence with some interesting anecdote from my life (or more likely, a request for help with some programming-related thingy). Well, it's not so, but I will ( go on at some length about the rules of the Illuminati game ) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 16th, 2004
4:34 pm	JavaScript I've been playing around with JavaScript a little recently, but the reference I've got right now is from 1998 (The Definitive Guide, 3rd edition). Does anyone have any advice for or against any more recent JavaScript references? I'm also interested in online references, but in addition to a book, not instead of one. While I'm at it, I'll mention that JavaScript seems like a sort of quirky language based on my experience with it so far. Are there less quirky alternatives out there? (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, January 19th, 2004
5:12 pm	Italicized = I have passed through but not really visited Bold = I have visited Underlined = I have lived Alabama Alaska Arizona Arkansas California Colorado Connecticut Delaware Florida Georgia Hawaii Idaho Illinois Indiana Iowa Kansas Kentucky Louisiana Maine Maryland Massachusetts Michigan Minnesota Mississippi Missouri Montana Nebraska Nevada New Hampshire New Jersey New Mexico New York North Carolina North Dakota Ohio Oklahoma Oregon Pennsylvania Rhode Island South Carolina South Dakota Tennessee Texas Utah Vermont Virginia Washington West Virginia Wisconsin Wyoming Washington D.C. I'm considering a visit to be a specific destination in the state, and going with roughly 3 months as my minimum for "lived in". I'm certainly leaving some out, but I'm not sure which ones. The only state I know for certain I've never even passed through is Hawaii. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 11th, 2003
9:14 pm	using a Darwin door, or something So, our house arguably has two Darwin doors in the master bed room. The first one is the standard sort where, should the need arise, you simply open it, step out from the bedroom, and fall to your death (or other less dramatic stop). The second one is more complicated, though. Half of the bed room has a high ceiling, and the other half has a standard ceiling. In the half-wall where the two ceiling heights meet, there is a Darwin door that would let you fall into the bed room. Unfortunately, there is no other way into the attic-like-room on the other side of the Darwin door. What I'm trying to decide is how I could make it fairly convenient to use this Darwin door to fall into the bed room. As it stands, you would have to bring a ladder up to the bed room, and set it up before you could climb up to the mini-attic and make use of the Darwin door. How is it ever going to help clean up the gene pool like that? I need something more convenient so the door has a better chance of fulfilling its reason for existing. Maybe a rope ladder or just a knotted rope, that's always attached at the top and can go over a hook or something to keep it out of the way when it's not in use. Any thoughts? Current Mood: contemplative (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, September 19th, 2003
5:48 pm	JDBC question I apologize in advance for being so boring, ( but oh well... ) (14 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, June 20th, 2003
9:22 pm	how embarrassing I just realized tonight that I had been mis-spelling my user name all this time... Well, at least it's fixed now. [Edited to add:] Or rather, it's my name I've been spelling wrong (it should apparently be Torb, not Torg). The spelling of maxemulien is definitely correct. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Monday, June 9th, 2003
10:13 pm	hmm... Here are my answers to questions from bagoffarts. If you ask me for questions as a comment on this post, I'll ask you five. You then post your answers in your own journal, along with this same offer. 1. Gnomes of Zurich, Bavarian Illuminati, Discordians, Servants of Cthulhu, Bermuda Triangle, UFOs, Society of assassins, Shangri-la, or the Church of the Sub-Genius? Why? I'm going to go with the Servants of Cthulhu. Despite the fearsome reputation of their better known cousins, the kuddliphishes are surprisingly friendly and very skilled at recruiting for the great old ones. 2. If you had a super power, what would it be? The thing with super powers is that once one person gets a super power, it's a sure bet that they'll be a dime a dozen by the middle of the following month. Keeping this in mind, it would be very important to ensure that those super powers fall into the right hands. If randomly selected people just acquired super powers with no strings attached, I think you'd mostly end up with a very bland super-powered world. So I would at least strongly consider the power to grant super powers, weaknesses, and conditions to others. Prospectives of all sorts could be screened for wit and stage presence. I could audition aspiring super villains to weed out those whose plans are insufficiently grand or convoluted. Heroes and villains would have to be carefully balanced to make sure no one got bored. It would also let me enforce various important aspects of comicdom, by the use of clauses like "To sustain your new super powers, you must appear in public at least three times a week wearing nothing but brightly colored underwear or pajamas." 3. Sally sells seashells by the sea shore; what would you sell and where would you sell it? I'm going to have to go with scalping indulgences to people waiting in line outside the gates of hell. I hear the profit's pretty good on the above-the-board retail side of the business, and I'll bet scalping would be even better. 4. If you were to change one thing about the current world, what would it be? On principle, I'll say that I'd give it more voltage and more Tesla coils, but I don't really do much in that world myself. 5. Are you a god? I'm so gaudy it hurts. Current Mood: contemplative (Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 6th, 2003
10:25 pm	Cower in terror before Darth Vader, dark lord of the pigs!! </tr> Darth Vader's Battle Imp is Ouurd Backstabbing: 1 Dodgin': 1 Guts: 3 Magic Mojo: 1 Smackdown: 2 </td> Will your battle imp beat Darth Vader's? Enter your name and fight. Beware, Darth Vader takes no prisoners! (But not for lack of trying.) Current Mood: predatory Current Music: John Williams: The Imperial March (Empire Strikes Back) (2 Comments |Comment on this)