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Covert Affairs (Theme/Opening Credits)

Erik J. Barzeski — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 14:02:17 +0000

I really like the opening credits for Covert Affairs on USA.

The song feels rather "spy-like" and the opening animation is reminiscent of some old-school spy type stuff. The song and animation go well together.

And yes, I do watch the show. It's bad, but it passes the time when my wife's asleep and I'm up late doing some work.

P.S. Too bad they have to insert real people into it. I'd love it more if the whole opening credits were like the motorcycle part.

Oldie but a Goodie

Erik J. Barzeski — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 02:14:25 +0000

Steve Jobs in 1997.

Accent Wall

Erik J. Barzeski — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 22:04:46 +0000

Note to future self:

When creating an accent wall, choose a color that is about ten times more different than the one you initially want to choose.

Interestingly, in the video above, you can see what an effect the color temperature of the light has. Though the iPhone camera doesn't render the colors quite correctly (far too green), the difference between sunlight and 2700k CFL lighting is obvious.

More photos of the room to come. Now comes the "fun" part - getting the wood flooring people to install the flooring and then assembling a bunch of IKEA furniture.

Is the iPad a “Computer”?

Erik J. Barzeski — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 21:38:00 +0000

Is the iPad a "computer" in your mind?

Real Wood Floors

Erik J. Barzeski — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 00:15:38 +0000

Well, the little one is getting real wood flooring in her bedroom. After considering it earlier this year, we found out that some hardwood floors are actually not much more expensive than laminate flooring.

We decided to purchase the following:

Century Flooring
Style: Cabot Oak
Species: Oak
Color: Amber Oak
Item Number: AO3C
Construction: Solid
Finish: Semi-Gloss/Superior Shield
Edge Type: Eased Edge/Square End
Thickness: 3/4"
Widths Available: 2 1/4" and 3 1/4"
Shade Variation: Medium/High
Hardness Rating: 1290
Installation: Nail and Staple

Total cost, installed, is about $1250 (the room is mostly square and about 165 square feet, including the closet).

Do Eye-Fi Cards Work?

Erik J. Barzeski — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 01:58:26 +0000

These things have been out for awhile and they still exist, so they must work… but do they work well? An 8 GB card costs ~$125. What happens to video (it does work with video too, right?) files that you record but aren't within range of your computer? Do they automatically sync over when you get back to within range?

I think these kinds of things would be compelling in some of the golf lessons we find ourselves teaching - we could record initial video of students while someone else grabs the video and imports it into the correct student, then begins the analysis, all before the student even knows we've really "begun."

A few other applications might work nicely as well, and if nothing else the lack of an SD card reader or plugging the camera in at all seems like a nice plus.

So, again, do these cards work? Do they fail easily? $125 is a lot of money for a card you can get for $40 without the WiFi option.

Getting Tired of BusyCal’s Screwups

Erik J. Barzeski — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 23:36:35 +0000

I have a fairly simple (though, apparently not) BusyCal arrangement.

My main computer (Bunny) maintains a few calendars - "Erik" and "Kiddo" and "Chores."
I share all three calendars over the LAN, and the "Kiddo" and "Chores" calendars are read/write while "Erik" is read only.

Bunny's BusyCal also syncs with three Google Calendars with read/write access for golf-related stuff.

My wife has a computer with BusyCal on it, and she maintains the "Carey" calendar which is published to the LAN and read-only. She can make changes to the "Kiddo" or "Chores" calendar. Both of us can view each others calendars, but we can't make changes to them and we don't get alarms for them.

We each sync our calendars (technically the iCal data, I suppose) with MobileMe so that our phones get our calendars as well.

If this were as complex as our setup got, we'd be fine. The above all works well 99% of the time.

The problem comes in when I introduce my second computer - a laptop named Penguin. It subscribes to all three of the same calendars. It also syncs with MobileMe and subscribes to the same three Google calendars. I can read/write everywhere on Penguin that I can on Bunny.

Quite often - far too often - I'll get duplicate or even triplicate (or more) data in my BusyCal simply for opening BusyCal on Penguin. It seems as though Bunny and Penguin can't decide which iCal data to ignore and which to add as "new" despite the fact that it's supposed to be synchronized and BusyCal should essentially ignore MobileMe data except to write it - when it reads the data, that seems to be the problem.

Also, my subscribed Google calendars will often show up as "my" calendars. They'll add themselves to the list at the top of the left side and they'll duplicate the calendars to which I am still subscribed.

That's all a guess, of course. Perhaps BusyCal is just barfing somehow and MobileMe doesn't come into play. Technically I only need to sync my calendars via MobileMe through one computer (Bunny), so I'm tempted to turn off calendar syncing on Penguin to see if solves the problem.

Other than this incredibly obnoxious, annoying problem that has cost me more time and more headaches than I care to imagine, BusyCal is great.

rsync Out, SuperDuper In

Erik J. Barzeski — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 01:51:47 +0000

For weeks now my nightly schedule rsync copy would fail mysteriously, quietly. The command was simply two lines:

/usr/sbin/diskutil repairPermissions /; /usr/local/bin/rsync -axq --delete / /Volumes/Roger

In other words, I repaired permissions and then archived (which enables a few options), quietly, and deleted files/folders which no longer existed.

But rsync would launch three processes, and two would sit rather idly and the third would get hung up on a file for hours and hours and hours and hours and hours, using 100% (or close to it) CPU time.

I ran the line with "-v" and without "-q" and saw that, for example, the "store.db" file would halt rsync's progress. I'd let it go for hours and it simply wouldn't budge past store.db. Or some other random file really, REALLY early on in the process.

Not worth the hassle. I'd sudo kill -9 17236 or whatever the PIDs were and they'd eventually (after five minutes or more) bail out.

So now SuperDuper - yeah, a GUI app - is part of my nightly backup. I'm not entirely comfortable with it, but it seems to work okay, and nightly backups take only 20 minutes or so (the first took, predictably, eight or nine hours). I already owned a license, so that was all good.

I don't know why rsync stopped working though. Bummer.

Error: Success

Erik J. Barzeski — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 00:57:37 +0000

Uhhh…???

Thanks, Family Feud on Facebook.

Passed the PGA Pre-Qualifying Test

Erik J. Barzeski — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 02:08:14 +0000

Prior to becoming an Apprentice in the PGA program, you must pass the PAT, pass a pre-qualifying test, and do a few other things (largely show that you're employed). The three items on which you're tested are:

1) Introduction to the PGA PGM Program
2) PGA History and Constitution
3) The Rules of Golf

The first and last ones are fairly easy. The second one worried me a bit - you have to know what the Board of Control does, how the Board of Directors are assembled, etc.

The Qualifing test will consist of a total of 75 questions and will cover the three qualifying courses. The time allowed for the test is 90 minutes and the passing score is 70%. You should bring a clean, unmarked, unhighlighted USGA Rules of Golf book to the test session.

I've always been a great student. High A grades, set the curve all the time, etc. I was a bit worried about this test, but then I realized "I barely have to get a D to pass" (69% was a D in high school). Turns out the side of me that said "don't worry" was right. I passed with 97% accuracy, missing only two questions.

So now I'll enter Level 1 - as soon as the PGA fixes my online account to properly reflect my status - and will look to take the Level 1 Seminars sometime this coming February. Yay.