Wayne D's Blog

What used to make me mad and raise my blood pressure now becomes fodder for the blog grist mill. How is that for a mixed metaphor?

I had a couple of checks to deposit and needed to get some cash to buy some Clamato juice on the way so I detoured off my regular route home to stop at the new CIBC banking centre on Jane Street across from Canada's Wonderland. I drove around the back to the drive through bank machine but after seeing the three cars lined up waiting to use it I instead decided to park and go the machines inside. I walked to the front door and stuck my card in the obligatory slot to open the door. Nothing happened, the door stayed locked. As I walked around the front of the buidling to check for an alternate entrance someone else walked up to the door and also tried the door with more persistance than I did. I went back to the car and drove back to the drive through bank machine only to find an armoured car blocking the driveway to the machine. As I exited the parking lot I saw another group of people trying to open the front door. Epic fail on communication with your customers in this case CIBC. High profile location, no profile service just confused customers.

I had to contribute to the carbon footprint of the planet by going out of my way to an alternate CIBC branch on the way home which led me to the closeby No Frills store to buy my Clamato juice. I grabbed the juice and headed to the express checkout line where I ended up behind a lady who obviously had more than 16 items in her basket. It didn't matter because the customer in front of her had decided not to bring the case of bottled water with her to the checkout but instead had asked the cashier to get someone to fetch it for her. We waited while he paged, once, twice, sent the employee who responded off to fetch the item and then return. It took about 5 minutes. Once her arrived the item was scanned and then the water bottle customer asked how much the bill was. She then proceeded to dig through her wallet looking for money. One $20 bill appeared and then a second. The bill was $50 so more digging ensued. Eventually realizing she was cash poor she began searching for her bank card. Sigh, at least there was a cute baby in line behind me, we chatted the first woman apid and then while the 24 items in the express line lady blocked the aisle with her cart. After paying for my purchase she relented and let me move her cart out of the way so I could escape the store leaving her to finish packing her groceries.

Nuff said.

I took this picture yesterday, it looks even worse and itches like mad.

Now that hard drives are so cheap I decided to copy a whole stack of archival DVD's onto a hard drive. I wanted to use a shell script because the copy was running on a machine that didn't have a monitor or keyboard attached. The idea was to feed it DVD's every time the drawer popped open until the stack was done.

Step 1 was to add a HAL callout to run a script whenever the DVD was inserted. I create a file called 31-dvdinsert.fdi in /usr/share/hal/fdi/information/20thirdparty/ which is where these things go in Centos or Redhat 5 systems. The name isn't that important but the extension .fdi is. Forget the .fdi and it won't work. On this particular system the DVD drive resides at /dev/hdc, using ls -l /dev/cdrom will show you where it is on your system. The contents of the file were:

XML

Next I created a shell script in /usr/libexec called dvdinsert

Code

The purpose of this script is to call another script to do the actual copying. HAL callouts can only run for a very short time before they are terminated. This script passes the Volume name of the DVD inserted to dvdinsert1 which is run as a detached process. THe contents of dvdinsert1 are shown below.

Code

For a number of years the Explorer group that I help out with has gone canoing around this time of year near Parry Sound Ontario. One of the reasons to go at this time is to avoid the biting insects including black flies and mosquitoes which are prevalent earlier in the season. In previous years I have even napped unprotected in the middle of the day and remained unmolested. Any bugs that we did encounter occurred at sunset and were minimally disruptive. This year was a different story, the bugs were savage and unrelenting. Other than when we were on the water we were surrounded by clouds of insects. Everyone was wearing bug nets almost constantly. At one point while seated on the commode in the woods I looked down to see more mosquitoes than I have ever seen in one place hovering around my uncovered legs. It looked like the old mosquito repellent commercial where the researcher placed his unprotected arm in the clear box of mosquitoes. One the left side of my neck I have a number of bumps where my mosquito net was resting against my neck which the insects took full advantage of. When I went to take a shower after returning home one of my socks was ringed with small blood stains where the black flies had came up my one pant leg and bitten me at the top of my sock. Strangely the other ankle only had one bite. The gruesome picture below, which is not for the faint of heart, shows the bites on the other ankle. I have used a smaller thumbnail than normally to minimize the horror. I also had a bite right in the middle of my forehead. They all itch like mad but I didn't feel the bugs when they were biting me. Is this unusual insect activity one of the side effects of global climate change? Only time will tell.

I have recently noticed a bunch of generic search.live.com searches showing up in my blog referrer logs. These searches are for single words amd include the words; links, summer, rogers, tired, install, click, system, third, December, weather, place and others. Why would people be searching for generic terms like that and why would they be clicking on links to my blog? The mystery deepens when I check the IP addresses and find they come from a block owned by Microsoft. What could the dudes in Redmond be up to? Hmmmmmmm, anybody got any theories out there?

You may have notice the Emusic.com banner at the bottom of the page. I've been a member of emusic.com for a number of years, complained when they turned me down for their affiliate program and when they apologized and let me in I then neglected to add a badge to my page for oh, about a month. Now it's done, I have sucumbed to the desire to make this pile of bytes pay me back in some small monetary way. I'm not expecting much and the only reason I'm putting an emusic banner on the page is because I think they are a worthwhile service for anyone who is into indie music. Check them out, take the 25 free mp3 and cancel right away if you wish. That was my plan when I signed up over 2 years ago. I dare you to see if you can stop at 25.