linuxin' ain't easy

Why do companies hate me for using Linux? I have been happily downloading MP3s off Amazon for years. At first I used their downloader and then through pymazon. I just bought an album earlier today and was met with this nonsense:

Install the Amazon MP3 Downloader We apologize — Linux is not supported. Unless you already have the Amazon MP3 Downloader installed, you will have to download songs individually from Amazon Cloud Player. JavaScript must also be enabled.

I sent them an angry email which surely has Beszos shaking in his 100,000 dollar alligator nutsack boots.

Why do you hate me? Did it cripple Amazon when I was able to *gasp* download a WHOLE ALBUM of songs at one time? I hope you realize that if I have to go log into windows somewhere there is now no reason for me not to use iTunes for my music purchases. Boo on you. Roger

I apologize that this is the first thing I've posted in so, so long, but it ticks me off! And I want all of you 2 to be outraged and tweet them into capitulation. Go forth my winged friends!

Dear Regina

One of my new faves, Andrew Bird, is coming to your town to make sweet, sweet love to you via musical entropy. I have no idea what I'm saying. At any rate, he is going to something called the Regina Folk Festival. Now, my feed reader for Andrew Bird is a constant disappointment as it never says CLEVELAND. For Lincoln's father's sake couldn't we get a band I like to come here, posthaste (ok, New Pornographers are, but somebody else). Hell - I'd even take the Happy Monster Band appearing in a drunken hallucination. So, I do not trust it and I am suspicious when it says a pass for said folk fest is 89 dollars . . . ? (. . . ? ='s this is a fact that I refuse to believe is true). Maybe with your 90 large you get a haircut from Andrew Bird. I don't know. Sorry I can't help.

I have been bad about writing. I'm not sure why. I still mentally construct posts, but then I don't write them. Oh, I have constructed a more solid back-up strategy, the finishing touches of which I have been applying. And that has required some time at the old terminal here. I am now secure-shelling into my parent's computer and storing things there. They have no idea! I swear, if any of you mad math geniuses try to hack into my parents' computer, I won't be pleased (*cough* Janny *uncough*). Anyway, I think I might add some Amazon s3 storage for most-critical data and call it a strategy. You're welcome.

your baby doesn't love you anymore

At least that's what you think when he's all, "MOMMA!" when you go to give him smoochies too in the morning. WTFL? We were like best buds 12 hours ago now you're gettin' all maternal on me??

So, I have just given up an epic battle with my sister-in-law's computer. You are thinking, "Don't quit Roger! You can do it." Can I? No, I cannot. I cannot out tech support the devil. It's just not possible. It has some kind of hardware problem and hardware problems are the enemies of IT nerds everywhere. So much harder to diagnose and lull you into a false sense of security then WHAMMO, here's some 4-bit display modes (uhhh, rub vaseline on your eyes for an approximation).

But, the computer is old and I hoard computer stuff. After I admitted failure, I took an old machine of mine and made it the unholy union of the two of our computers. Hers was a stupid dell with all it's jacked up innards. Oh well, I think I've saved her from buying a new machine. At least for a week or so.

Anyone in Cleveland on 2/4, I'm getting a group together to go to Lake Erie Monsters game. This is hockey for all you Canucks out there. Like, NHL - so close. What's the drive from Regina? 45 minutes? I'm not good at geography or driving.

geeky complaint

[ed. Not a lot of payoff for a lot of confusion, but what else do you have going on?]

RE: Brothers (Amazon MP3 Exclusive Version) [+digital booklet]

I run 64-bit Ubuntu on my machine and have been unable to get your downloader working. I like to think I have a life outside these 4 walls, so I'd prefer not to spend anymore of my precious time on this mortal coil trying to debug the process. I am sure there is a way, but having spent far too much time on a previous version of Ubuntu, the will fails. Instead, I tried using another product called Pymazon to download my songs, but it appears that Amazon is claiming I have "already downloaded" these songs. I assure you this is hogwash as I am unable to do anything of the kind.

Why am I unable to re-download? This was simple and easy before. Has Amazon turned off that service? I was just espousing that very functionality as a reason for a friend to switch his music purchases to Amazon from iTunes after having been through the ringer with Apple trying to reclaim purchased product that I had lost. It is really not that hard to get songs to me. Why require such a tight-fisted, unfriendly process? I am sorry I do not use windows or 32-bit ubuntu, but this is where I am in my life. I know that songs can be "shared" all-too freely and that is sometimes unfortunate. But, I promise I was just going to burn a cd for my enjoyment in the comfort of my own home. In fact, I had planned to ear-plug my family and scare off any passers-by who might be lingering around my home in the hopes of consuming the Black Keys, Brothers for free.

Ok, that's a little beside the point, but it would be nice if you opened the download api for the creation of third-party products which would work with my current installation. Either that or you can send me a Windows 7 cd which I will take even more of my precious time to install on my native OS as a virtual machine. I know you "kind of" try to support Linux, but it's precious little. And I know I am in the minority here, but I'd like to think I'm worth it. I'm good enough that when I buy an album, I should be able to listen to it.

Thanks,
Roger

[ed. There's 45 seconds you're never getting back. Sucker!]

three teeth

Lincoln has 3 teeth now. Two of which he likes to grind together. Apparently, babies don't have the phrase "nails on a chalkboard" as part of their vernacular. Yowsers.

I have been busy. I am trying to rsync files to my parents' computer remotely. This is DEFCON 3 computer dorkery! BEWARE! So, I get kind of obsessed with figuring out how to do it. I have told you before, but back your stuff up. Burn it to a DVD. Go. Now. You will lose it. It's just the way life is. And if you don't lose it, it will only be because you have a nearby backup.

What else is new? Hmmm, back to LL. He crawls now and does calculus, so that's cool. He kissed the baby on a diaper box. OH and I'm the worst father ever.

I thought I could grab his bottle from across the hall without him doing any damage to himself. Long story short, he touched the space heater. OMG. And he had a cold, so his daddy-induced screams of pain were kind of muted by his laryngitis. It made me cry. And then he got tiny little blisters on his tiny little hands and the shame and guilt of a million Catholics descends on me whenever I see his right hand. For serious. The next day I emailed a buddy and asked him to tell me that he too had irreparably harmed one of his children, even if it was a lie. I'm not sure, but I think he still loves me. I hope.

save everything - twice

Well, I've been all panty-twisted tonight trying to find my super-secret, ultra-fun fantasy football draft spreadsheet. This spreadsheet is directly responsible for in-excess of 1% of any winnings I've ever had playing fantasy football, meaning it's netted me about 5 dollars.

But, the spreadsheet, she is comforting. She also took a really long time to develop and will fill out a person's team as it goes, on a separate "teams" sheet. If you do any work with excel, you can appreciate that it did not take five minutes. In fact, it took a lot of man hours, no doubt. And no doubt, my company would be very upset if I were to lose all that work, because, truth be told, I did a lot of the "development" at the office one year. I figured, hey, it's like work, right. It actually was and I learned a lot about excel. Unfortunately, I have yet to apply any of that new-found knowledge. Oh well.

At any rate, my yahoo email account saved the day. I had a version of it in the way-back sent folder. And much gnashing of teeth subsided. The moral of the story is, save everything. Times 10. Storage is cheaper by the day and losing stuff is annoying and costly to recreate.

I have a new blog.

In case you hadn't noticed, this blog, like, sucks. So I made a new one! It's called, A Different Sucky Blog. Enjoy!

You actually probably won't as it's going to be exclusively about programming/computer stuff as opposed to this blog which is about my inability to cope with growing older. (What? You didn't know that? That's a motif, yo.) So if that kind of thing interests you (Larry), then go on over and be bored with me on a whole new array of topics (see, already a computer joke - BING!).

what if I told you . . .

this blog was made by PIZZA HUT?!

<pottymouth - earmuffs! blindfolds!>
I ate a lot of bacon tonight in an attempt to soothe myself after a particularly troubling and maddening Indians loss. Why bacon? Because bacon is delicious. I was not about to eat tomatoes, which would have only infuriated me further. Seriously, the only thing that would have made me feel better would have been if Jensen Lewis were here cooking me the bacon whilst I berated him (or perhaps boxed him about the ears?) for being such a shitty pitcher and all-around asshole. Ok, ok. He had a bad day and it wasn't (entirely) his fault and he seems like a nice guy, and really it's the "trends" of the season that are upsetting me. It's kind of like when you can tell a relationship is going badly and you don't necessarily want to get the boot. You know it won't happen right away. So you try to hold on till August (when anything can happen!), but kid, it ain't happening. You can't ski the K-12.

I can't prove this statistically but the Indians fucking suck have developed a habit of "finding a way to lose." That's what the coaches are always talking about, right? If it's not the starters screwing up, it's the relievers. If it's not the relievers, it's the starters. Should they both decide to pull it together the hitting and defense go AWOL.

insert big fat Charlie Brown *sigh* here.
</pottymouth - earmuffs! blindfolds!>

<computer dorkery>
Ok. I'm over it. And now is the time for backing up some partitions on my hard drives because that's how I'm rolling with my BRAND-NEW SATA II 640GB hard drive that I have to install some stuff on so I can put the PATA hard drive in the tv box machine. What is the tv box machine? It's this Frankenstein of computers that I put together so I could watch Netflix instantly at a higher quality than what s-video offered. So far so good, but I fear I might have wireless throughput issues. Watch this space for further updates!

I hope Larry reads this post or those exciting insights will totally fall on blind eyes or whatever.
</computer dorkery>

I also partially cross-posted this at Draft Day Suit. I don't post there enough because I'm lazy/figure people can only take 1 or 2 of my whiny monologues per year.

machine go boom (literally)

So my work computer exploded. Not literally, but figuratively. Actually, probably more literally. The hard drive got fried. Sunny side up. Hard. At any rate, I don't have my laptop yet so I'm working at a desk in a "lab." Lab computers don't have any applications on them, instead I have to interface with all my applications via crappy, crippled web versions of everything. FAIL.

The moral of the story is - backup. Now. Go. I had the 10th percentile most important docs backed up to our network, but since they don't give us a ton of network space, there was a lot I left off. Well, more and more, as I sit here, I am realizing it's going to be a monumental pain in the bridge of my nose to get everything back to "just so." All of my paranoid email archiving - gone. All of my quarter posts for this blog - lost. My people to kill list - forgotten to history. It's tragedy really.

In the mean time, I'm expected to produce stuff sitting here with this 30's style computer. *blech*