Hugh's Worthless Blog

Well, since my last post the Rams have gone an unimpressive 1 of 3, first getting clobbered by the unstoppable Patriots, then winning in a solid game to beat the Seahawks, but then reverting to their more typical inconsistent selves to lose to the Bills. And what was the genius, Mark Martz's solution to fix the team? They fired their very reliable punter, Sean Landetta. Wow, what a stroke of genius! When the other team returns punts for touchdowns it is the punter's fault, right? Or could it possibly be the awful return coverage? No, then it is too hard to figure out who to replace. Just replace the punter instead. Tonight they get to play the Packers in Lambeau Field. I am guessing another ugly Monday Night collapse by the Rams in the deep Wisconsin cold. Amazingly the Rams would actually move into first place in the NFC West if by some miracle they show up and actually play and win tonight. That just shows how bad the Seahawks and the rest of the NFC West are playing. In t...

Well today is the big day for Mozilla Firefox 1.0 and it looks like its home page is swamped! I suppose that is good news, but you would have thought they would have prepared the web servers for the bombardment. Fortunately the ftp servers seems fine (since they are actually distributed everywhere) and it was easy to grab a copy of the new official release. So far so good! Fedora Core 3 was released yesterday and I grabbed all the ISO images via BitTorrent. If only I had write permissions on wuarchive, I would write them there, but alas, no such luck! So instead I have them on my own mirror site . Looks like a new MyDoom virus variant e-mails just simple HTML links which are not so easily caught by virus catchers. Instead I had to search for the particular text strings in the messages themselves in our system /etc/procmailrc file. Luckily that should stop the little buggers. What an annoyance!

Boy, oh boy, do I hate rebates. It is so much work for so little possible gain. When you see a promotional flyer or e-mail showing a low, low price on something, it almost always now says after mail-in rebate tacked to the end of it. Ooooh, how that drives me crazy. It is bad enough doing it for home, but when it is for a business or large organization (like a university, for example!) it is even more ridiculous. To save $5 on a spindle of CD's, I am supposed to print out some form, fill it in, attach a receipt (which I was supposed to turn into accounting, which means I need to make a copy of it). Then I mail it in, costing an envelope and postage, hoping in 6 to 8 weeks I get a check back. Then I have to take that check and send it to our accounting group to take the measly $5 and put it back into our budget. What a long convoluted chain of events to save my organization a lousy $5. Do any organizations really do this? Or does one of the employees just take the rebate check them...

Well, the folks over at CTS gave me an account on wuarchive again so I can start putting some Linux distributions back online. All they have now is debian and whitebox. Debian is good to have for all the "apt-get" folks, but whitebox? Who in the heck uses that? I will start some rsync mirroring for mandrake, fedora, ubuntu, knoppix and my favorite, mepis once I actually get write access (hello?) on the 1.5TB RAID. It seems to be a nice little box though.