VaxCave

Michelle and Simon called us. Just now. 1:30am. I’m not sure people should drink that much. A phone ringing at that time of night is scary. Of course the ensuing conversation was hilarious. Wow.

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Filed by AxsDeny at 2:10 am under Funny, General
2 Comments

My hard drive that houses my music collection went crazy this morning. I opened Disk Utility to let it work its magic. After running “verify” It reported the following:

Verifying volume “lacie”
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Keys out of order
The volume lacie needs to be repaired.

Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit
1 HFS volume checked
Volume needs repair

I clicked on “repair” and waited for the good doctor to make my troubles go away. It looks like the patient might be terminal.

Verify and Repair disk “lacie”
Checking HFS Plus volume.
Checking Extents Overflow file.
Checking Catalog file.
Invalid key length
Volume check failed.

Error: The underlying task reported failure on exit

1 HFS volume checked
1 volume could not be repaired because of an error

After fretting about losing all that music that I bought on the iTunes Music Store and the idea of having to rip all my CDs again I decided it was time for some UNIX magic. Enter “dd.”

“dd” is a disk copying utility that allows you to copy, bit for bit, the contents of a disk or file. By telling the program to not report errors on bad blocks it will just plow its way over the errors. The error areas will have null bits inserted into them to act as filler for the messed up blocks. This allows me to at least look at the file and determine how screwed up it is rather than simply trashing it. The command that I ran is:

dd bs=512 if=/dev/rdisk2s6 of=/Volumes/Purgatory/foo.dmg conv=noerror,sync

The souce disk (/dev/rdisk2s6) is copying to my external Firewire drive (Purgatory) at a crawling pace. At the rate that it is going it will take at least 72 hours total. It is also reporting some interesting stuff in the terminal. Of course I have no idea what this means, but it’s saying it pretty often.

114300577+0 records in
114300577+0 records out
58521895424 bytes transferred in 59426.141337 secs (984784 bytes/sec)
dd: /dev/rdisk2s6: Input/output error


I’ll report back once it is actually done. Hopefully the image will actually open and I can recover some of this stuff. We’ll see.

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Filed by AxsDeny at 4:34 pm under General, Rants
4 Comments

You’d think that this would be a post about blog spam, but it’s not. I’ve tried a few different online poker sites, but they all want your credit card number to charge you an “entertainment fee.” I’ve never been comfortable giving my credit card number to such a site, so I never had a chance to participate. I was watching TV this morning and saw a commercial for an online poker site called bodog.net. The signup was free and required no credit card to verify information. I was granted $500 in “play money” and was sitting at a table in less than 2 minutes. It was quite fun and even worked in Safari on Mac OS X. Woohoo! I ended up leaving the table with $751. There are some tutorials and card combination charts to give you an idea of what are better hands. Great for a novice such as myself. Here’s one of my hand transactions on one of the limited heads-up tables:

Starting hand #167985474
Dealer: AxsDeny posts the small blind $2.00
Dealer: evo404hp posts the big blind $5.00
Dealer: DEALING POCKETS
Dealer: AxsDeny calls $3.00
Dealer: evo404hp raises $5.00 to $10.00
Dealer: AxsDeny calls $5.00
Dealer: DEALING FLOP(JD, 3H, 5D)
Dealer: evo404hp bets $5.00
Dealer: AxsDeny raises $5.00 to $10.00
Dealer: evo404hp raises $5.00 to $15.00
Dealer: AxsDeny raises $5.00 to $20.00
Dealer: evo404hp raises $5.00 to $25.00
Dealer: AxsDeny raises $5.00 to $30.00
Dealer: evo404hp calls $5.00
Dealer: DEALING TURN(3C)
Dealer: evo404hp bets $10.00
Dealer: AxsDeny raises $10.00 to $20.00
Dealer: evo404hp calls $10.00
Dealer: DEALING RIVER(3D)
Dealer: evo404hp checks
Dealer: AxsDeny bets $10.00
Dealer: evo404hp calls $10.00
Dealer: AxsDeny shows a Full House, Threes full of Jacks
Dealer: evo404hp shows a Flush
Dealer: Hand 167985474: AxsDeny wins ($140) with a Full House, Threes full of Jacks

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Filed by AxsDeny at 10:49 am under Entertainment, General
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This is making the rounds on the internet so I thought I might as well link it up for those of you that haven’t seen it yet. Last week on Saturday Night Live there was a digital short called Lazy Sunday. It’s funny. After watching it, I found a link to a (NSFW, language & partial nudity) project that Samberg was (is?) involved in called “Lonely Island Boys.” I can see the correlation between what happens stylistically in this short and what Samberg did with Lonely Island Boys. It’s good to see some new blood bringing new ideas (at least nothing that SNL has seen) to the table.

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Filed by AxsDeny at 5:01 pm under Entertainment, Funny, General
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Seems pertinent to our current state of affairs.

“Those who would sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither.”
~Benjamin Franklin

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Filed by AxsDeny at 11:49 am under General, Politics
9 Comments