http://harrymarnell.net/20-107.pdf

http://mail.cfgeeks.org:81/pipermail/cfgeeks/2009-November/002124.html

Ok I really cannot budget such a thing right now but I went to B&N (Altamonte Mall) Friday and talked with a Nook evangelist (a steampunker BTW he was talking about downloading Jules Verne from the public domain sites for research on steampunk models). He practically had me sold on it. Not only will it (unlike the Kindle) display the PDF versions it will also support the old Palm pdb file format (of which I have a bunch) as well as the emerging epub standard. You can “load” (their term) books to another Nook user or even another B&N supported device like my Touch. Oh also you can buy or download books now through B&N app on the iPhone and they can be transferred to the Nook later. It will not read (audio) books like the Kindle (guys says B&N is afraid of lawsuits that happened to Amazon) which is a bummer but it does support mp3 (no ogg) player.And like the Kindle you do get ubiquitous and free (but feature limited) 3G wireless access and free wifi in all B&N stores (one of my pet peeves about B&N and Books a Million for that matter). And it has a bay for a Micro SD or SDHC card and the (are you hearing me Apple??) battery is replaceable. Like the Kindle you get a USB cable. I am frankly sold however there are now so many rumors of even more open ebook readers appearing on the market I may just wait a bit but if I had to choose the Nook would definitely be my choice. Unfortunately the stores don’t have demo units till the 30th like everyone else. B&N says they are surprised at the interest and was not prepared. Guys recommends pre-ordering in order to get before Christmas let alone Nov. 30th but that may be hype.

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/nook/support/

These are observations I have made since the middle of last year and have been added to in my head since March 2009. I decided last night to finally write them down. I will add to these as a wiki article as time goes on.

Because of the internet (or technology): Newspapers, music biz,
software development (cloud and web based mostly), radio broadcasts (television to come much later),

Because of NAFTA, global trade (imbalances and tariffs):
manufacturing, trucking, shipping, produce, farming, floral, tree
farms, manufacturing (electronic test included),

Because of over building and sub prime lending: real estate, housing, construction,

Because of GM foods and Monsanta: migrancy, family farms, food selection, grocers,

Because of shifts in culture and population centers heading into
cities: automobiles,

Because of emergence of digital over analog: engineers,
mathematicians, higher math,

Because of obsolescence: mainframe, old and legacy technologies

Because of the economy: IT, managers (too many who generalize or not enough who specialized in the “Thing of the Month”(tm) (today and right now)

Because of an aging work force: teenage jobs

Because of mega corporations and large scale mergers: competition and most importantly choice.

Things in demand:

Because of aging: health care workers, insurance industry

Because of world politics: DHS, NSA, CIA, intel analysts, spies, government workers, defense spending (small arms and intelligence more so than munitions or rockets)

Because of complicated B2B relationships: knowledge workers, PMP, PMI, managers and process laden people (as opposed to so much
technologists).

Because of networking emergence: network engineers, installers,
wireless installers, broad band communications tech, cellular techs,

soo… what do you tell a young person what to go for these days?

I recently disconnected my POTS telephone service and switched to using Skype with an unpublished number for friends and family. Here is my wiki article on how I did it. https://kevininscoe.com/wiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MyPublicTechnicalNotes-TricksAndHOWTOs-WholeHouseSkypeUsingLinux

This morning I manually ran my daily Gentoo Sunrise layman updates and discovered the following message:


# layman -s sunrise
* Running command "/usr/bin/svn update "/usr/portage/local/layman/sunrise""...
At revision 8512.
*
* Success:
* ------
*
* Successfully synchronized overlay "sunrise".
*
* Errors:
* ------
*
* The source of the overlay "sunrise" seems to have changed. You currently sync from "http://overlays.gentoo.org/svn/proj/sunrise/reviewed/" while the global layman list reports "svn://overlays.gentoo.org/proj/sunrise/reviewed/" as correct location. Please consider removing and readding the overlay!
*


Normally I run this via cron and dump the contents to a log file but I had not really been checking the logs. According to my searches this changed around April 7, 2009. Ok no big deal I do as they say I removed and then re-added the overlay to portage with the following command:


# layman -d sunrise && layman -a sunrise
....
* Successfully added overlay "sunrise".


Now to run the update again:


# layman -s sunrise
* Running command "/usr/bin/svn update "/usr/portage/local/layman/sunrise""...
At revision 8512.
*
* Success:
* ------
*
* Successfully synchronized overlay "sunrise".


Ahh much better!

At “Site 1″ my pet name for the Inscoe compound here in Deltona I have been busy upgrading all the non-experimental Gentoo hosts to now stable xorg-server 1.5.3. Most of them because I keep my configurations modular and straight forward have gone without problem. I did however this Easter morning hit one snag as I upgraded my main workstation before everyone awoke. My mouse suddenly would not work. I am using a Logitech wireless mouse into a Outlook KVM soft-switch. But dutifully I checked the cable connections, plugged a mouse directly into the PS/2 port and still no mouse movement. I had a mouse pointer, the logs show they detected my mouse. I tried changing Options from auto to “Protocol” “IMPS/2″. Made sure the mouse device still existed and the driver loaded. Check, check. I had also rebooted this morning prior to restarting X. I then started googling around and came across this article and this bug report. I tried the bug report first which lead to several changes in my xorg.conf file. None of which worked to restore the mouse movement. I then started reading the article and this mention jumped out at me:

“Just to be safe, run emerge $(qlist -C -I x11-drivers/) -1av to rebuild your X drivers (portage may have updated things in the wrong order, better safe than sorry)”

Then as a lark I decide to re-emerge my X mouse input driver.

# emerge -av x11-drivers/xf86-input-mouse


Sure enough I restarted X and viola my mouse now had movement!

So even though everything else seemed to be working ok I followed through with the above advice and ran:

# emerge $(qlist -C -I x11-drivers/) -1av


So despite the one mouse issue the upgrade is now completed with large success.

This may come in handy some day.

I had a problem when upgrading from xorg-server 1.3 (which had been stable in Gentoo for a very long time) to 1.5.3 which recently went stable. The emerge would run for some time until it aborted and an examination in the build log showed:

connection.c: In function ‘AuthAudit’:
connection.c:606: error: invalid initializer

The solution was found in this bug (263274). It’s this simple:

Prior to emerging xorg-server (oh BTW you need to emerge –unmerge xorg-server-1.3.x first because of blockers)

# mv /usr/bin/dtrace /usr/bin/dtrace.orig

The continue with the emerge as normal. Hope they fix this bug in configure but it seems to have been happening for some time now.

After you are done move dtrace back to it’s proper file name.

There seem to be lots of misattribution to the author of these rules but it is generally accepted that Charles J. Sykes wrote these 14 Rules for Kids sometime in 1996. No mater who wrote them or when they are just as true and apply just as strongly as today. Also see my article Kevin’s Thirty Seven Explanations of Life Through Movie Quotes. And now the 14 Rules:

“Rule No. 1: Life is not fair. Get used to it. The average teen-ager uses the phrase “It’s not fair” 8.6 times a day. You got it from your parents, who said it so often you decided they must be the most idealistic generation ever. When they started hearing it from their own kids, they realized Rule No. 1.

Rule No. 2: The real world won’t care as much about your self-esteem as much as your school does. It’ll expect you to accomplish something before you feel good about yourself. This may come as a shock. Usually, when inflated self-esteem meets reality, kids complain that it’s not fair. (See Rule No. 1)

Rule No. 3: Sorry, you won’t make $40,000 a year right out of high school. And you won’t be a vice president or have a car phone either. You may even have to wear a uniform that doesn’t have a Gap label.

Rule No. 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait ’til you get a boss. He doesn’t have tenure, so he tends to be a bit edgier. When you screw up, he’s not going to ask you how you feel about it.

Rule No. 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your grandparents had a different word for burger flipping. They called it opportunity. They weren’t embarrassed making minimum wage either. They would have been embarrassed to sit around talking about Kurt Cobain all weekend.

Rule No. 6: It’s not your parents’ fault. If you screw up, you are responsible. This is the flip side of “It’s my life,” and “You’re not the boss of me,” and other eloquent proclamations of your generation. When you turn 18, it’s on your dime. Don’t whine about it, or you’ll sound like a baby boomer.

Rule No. 7: Before you were born your parents weren’t as boring as they are now. They got that way paying your bills, cleaning up your room and listening to you tell them how idealistic you are. And by the way, before you save the rain forest from the blood-sucking parasites of your parents’ generation, try delousing the closet in your bedroom.

Rule No. 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers. Life hasn’t. In some schools, they’ll give you as many times as you want to get the right answer. Failing grades have been abolished and class valedictorians scrapped, lest anyone’s feelings be hurt. Effort is as important as results. This, of course, bears not the slightest resemblance to anything in real life. (See Rule No. 1, Rule No. 2 and Rule No. 4.)

Rule No. 9: Life is not divided into semesters, and you don’t get summers off. Not even Easter break. They expect you to show up every day. For eight hours. And you don’t get a new life every 10 weeks. It just goes on and on. While we’re at it, very few jobs are interested in fostering your self-expression or helping you find yourself. Fewer still lead to self-realization. (See Rules No. 1 and No. 2.)

Rule No. 10: Television is not real life. Your life is not a sitcom. Your problems will not all be solved in 30 minutes, minus time for commercials. In real life, people actually have to leave the coffee shop to go to jobs. Your friends will not be as perky or pliable as Jennifer Aniston.

Rule No. 11: Be nice to nerds. You may end up working for them. We all could.

Rule No. 12: Smoking (or drug use) does not make you look cool. It makes you look moronic. Next time you’re out cruising, watch an 11-year-old with a butt in his mouth. That’s what you look like to anyone over 20. Ditto for “expressing yourself” with purple hair and/or pierced body parts.

Rule No. 13: You are not immortal. (See Rule No. 12.) If you are under the impression that living fast, dying young and leaving a beautiful corpse is romantic, you obviously haven’t seen one of your peers at room temperature lately.

Rule No. 14: Enjoy this while you can. Sure parents are a pain, school’s a bother, and life is depressing. But someday you’ll realize how wonderful it was to be a kid. Maybe you should start now. You’re welcome.”