Author Archives: Brian

New office – theme?

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With our new home, I’m getting my own office. I really want to theme it, and I’m trying to decide what to go with. Note that there will be 3 arcade games in the office: Star Wars, Tron, and Discs of Tron. Some options:

  • Space: I have some beautiful space-themed canvas prints for the walls (Thanks, sister!) which would make a good start to the theme, and the Star Wars arcade game fits in.
  • Robots: I want to have a place to display my robot collection and this could be cool, especially with some robot-themed art work
  • Portal: I saw a cool Portal-themed office recently that really made me want to try. Do the wall, have some Portal knick-knacks around, and some Portal art on the walls. Could be cool.
  • Star Wars: I have a few Star Wars collectibles to display plus the Star Wars arcade game. Could be good if not overdone. I saw an office once (and have a picture somewhere) that looked like the cockpit of the Millenium Falcon – that would be cool.
  • Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: I have a framed and signed poster from Douglas Adams, a 42 towel, a C64 HHGTTG game, etc. This would be subtle but classy and my robots could fit in as long as I have a Marvin in there.
  • Tron: I’m leaning towards NOT doing Tron. The only way to do it right is glowing blue on black and that’s not the look I want.

Ideas? Leave a comment!

Spelling help for elementary students

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Found a great use for the iphone app Orchestra. Its main purpose is to help you make todo lists by speaking them and it converts it to text. But… I found a cool trick… my daughter frequently needs help spelling longer words she hasn’t learned yet for papers and reports, etc. It would take her a while to look up the word online or in a dictionary and it really added up when she had a long paper to write and had to look up the spelling of lots of words. Now, I let her use Orchestra – she just says the word and it shows her how to spell it almost instantly. For every individual word she has tried it (so far) has been 100% correct.

Upgrading Perl in Linux Mint

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WARNING: don’t do this – it could hose your system like it did mine… details to follow once i figure out how to undo it.

Figured I’d share this since it was a PITA to figure out. Linux Mint 11 ships with Perl 5.10. I was trying to install icinga and it needs Perl 5.12.4 or greater.

To make it happen I had to:

  • add this line to /etc/apt/sources.list: deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian wheezy main
  • install/upgrade with this: apt-get install gcc perl -o APT::Immediate-Configure=0 (from linux mint forums)

and Bob’s your uncle.

AND…. to put 5.10 back in place…

  • remove the entry you put in /etc/apt/sources.list and replace it with deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian squeeze main
  • sudo apt-get install perl=5.10.1-17ubuntu4 perl-base=5.10.1-17ubuntu4 perl-modules=5.10.1-17ubuntu4

upgrading to 5.12 caused lots of problems – Pidgin wouldn’t work and most importantly, my VPN stopped working – it would disconnect after about 30 seconds.

French press coffee – attempt #1

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I couldn’t handle not having coffee any more and the coffee at work is horrible so I bought a French press from Amazon and it arrived yesterday. This morning was my first attempt at making French press coffee. It looked weak and it is a bit on the weak side, but it’s still pretty darn good. I’ll tweak the steps a bit for tomorrow – I think within a week I will have the recipe/ratios/steps figured out.

Blog you should be reading: The Surfing Pizza

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If you are not reading http://thesurfingpizza.com you should be. The first time I found the site, I read maybe 12 articles and laughed so hard I was crying. Unfortunately, I didn’t make note of the ones that made me LOL, so here are a few that are entertaining (but the PEZ story *did* make me LOL multiple times):

Much of his writing is LOL funny, but today he wrote this brilliant piece about being good at something (anything). Check it out.