The Empirical Manifesto

Sorry for the lack of coherency in this one, but I did dream of Cameron again last night (though she looked like Skylar from Alphas.) She lived with us in some capacity or another, only we all awoke one morning to have found she'd inadvertently killed and partially eaten her brother, Simon Tam! It was a nasty mess, and we were all very frightened at what she might do next - up to and including harming us!

Apparently I was a photographer for the local police department somewhere on the East Coast! Everyone wore dark brown trench coats and there were rows and rows of row houses. I got called to a crime scene of a partially eaten body alone in a house with no signs of struggle and no evidence of forced entry. The lead investigator had to step down for some conflict of interest reason and handed me the reins - my first assignment on point! Many people were in and out of the townhouse complex when I got a call from the chief of police, an African-American woman who wanted to know how to get to the crime scene. I awkwardly explained it was the same house in which she had just left - but because I had to take the call from a phone booth down the sidewalk, I didn't notice Cameron walking around the crime scene!

It all started to make sense. This was her doing, and I had to protect her to protect myself. She was still family no matter what. Sadly, I could tell that she was suffering from a glitch and back in full terminator mode. Her new mission parameters were to hunt down and kill...drax0r!

She was getting ready to head to Wichita to murder him, and while I knew drax0r wasn't in Wichita, I also knew she'd kill all my friends and family in trying to get his location from them and I couldn't let that happen either. I was somehow able to get her to wait until later in the afternoon, and escorted her back home. Once there, I quickly devised a brilliant plan! We got her all packed up and I asked her if she'd take a note to my kin there. When she agreed I handed her a pencil and a notepad and asked her to dictate.

I started, "Cameron - " She looked at me, I indicated she should write this down, "Tony is not in Wichita."

She wrote it out, I continued, "Everyone in Wichita - I know you don't know where Tony is, but next time you talk to him, tell him I said, "Hi.""

I thought myself very clever.



Skylar

I'm no scholar

• I was supposed to have recited the poem, "Paul Revere's Ride" to my class, but since I hadn't *actually* memorized it, I instead orated a very colorful retelling. The instructor was so enamored, I received an A.
  


• I always had a book with me in school. When not working on a project, I was reading a novel. All my book reports were on novels I happened to be reading at the time. The only failing paper I turned in was my report on John Irving's The Water-Method Man. That evening, my father explained to me how to write a book report on a book such as that in a way to remain completely free of the subject matter.
  


• For my December "Holiday-themed" report in Public Speaking I spent fifteen minutes discounting every myth of a traditional Christmas, revealing its origins, its symbolism, and its meanings. Most of this I was able to pull from and cite various Christian Encyclopedias. When I concluded, there was a stillness over the room I'd never experienced. I was the only student who wasn't applauded at the end of their speech.
  


• I have read a lot of the classics. I love them. I did not, however, enjoy James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohican's. For my book report, I instead turned in what can only be called a graphic novel. It was a highly-detailed, full-color illustrated report, bound & covered with those report protectors. I received an A.
  


• Once, we were discussing a new server. It was an ODS server. "Output Data System." Our manager was giving us the pitch on how our team was going to help test it. One of the new airmen asked what ODS meant. The manger thought for a moment and said, "I don't know." I dramatically reached for a dictionary, opened it, and read aloud, interrupting the meeting, "Odious - repugnant, detestable. Loathsome." Half the team had worked with me a long time, and laughed out loud at my show. The other half, believed I seriously thought our manager was talking about an odious server. I was amused at both outcomes.
  

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Apple Support Forums

Concerning the OSX NFS issue, I made progress, then hit a wall, succumbing to submitting a request on the Apple Support Forum two days ago. I have not yet received a single reply:

I am trying to NFS export a FAT32 formatted external USB device, which fails with the error:

/sbin/nfsd: Can't export /Volumes/: Operation not supported (45)

I am able to export internal/HFS drives, which have the "Owners Enabled: Yes" attribute, and therefore assume I need to set the flag accordingly on my external drive.

Despite the fact that the device has been assigned a uuid (it appears to be in place in .fseventsd and running 'repair disk' echos it in syslog), I get this error when running vsdbutil:

vsdbutil: Couldn't update volume information for '/Volumes//': Invalid argument
vsdbutil: no valid volume UUID found on '/Volumes//': Invalid argument

And diskutil returns this:

Permissions are not enabled on the disk (-9973)

I attempted to add the uuid to /var/db/volinfo.database in order to set the permissions there, to no effect.

I don't believe that I am the only person who has attempted this, but I can find no evidence to the contrary. Thank you.

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Ineffective Solutions

I can't get any linux software to burn dual-layer. This has negatively affected my inventory of blank dual-layer media. Thankfully, the price has easily dropped half of what my first spindle cost me. I can, however, burn dual-layer through my wmware XP installation. I decided to make a backup of my backup of my iTunes database in order to burn it off on dual-layer media (the only DL burner I have is on my ubuntu laptop). However, since I boot from my external 500GB drive, and that's also where I dumped my library (apparently, I don't have enough external drives capable of containing my entire repository of music) which means vmware gave me the finger when I asked it to also mount up my iTunes directory.

Fine. I relocated my XP .vmx image locally, then attached the directory. I decided to use iTunes built-in "Backup" solution, which failed after burning six DL DVD's.

Back to the drawing board.

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Politics

The Greater Anna Chamber of Commerce is hosting "Meet the Candidate" tonight. I'm linking my candidate's site on this page (http://www.beckyglover.net) because this blog gets indexed by Google rather quickly. drax0r was testing various CMS's for all the projects we find ourselves in, and while were were dabbling in Drupal, we now jump for joy with Joomla. Both are cumbersome, but Joomla is far less difficult to work with. I'll be installing it soon at darkvoyager.homeunix.com to help familiarize myself with it, as there are several 'gotchas' that drax0r was able to overcome, and my familiarization with it will greatly increase my efficiency.

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Pathetic

I have checked http://lalalandrecords.com twice a day, everyday, for a month now, in hopes they will soon be releasing Bear McCreary's Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles score. I'm on their mailing list, but I always get the email a day after the announcement and I'm unsure I could handle that amount of delay. I often find myself on my Theme Clips post, listening to the two online offerings over and over in mournful anticipation.

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This entry has gone on far too long.