captbrando's log

I’m headed home from Vegas and I wanted to share a few things I learned along the way.

• People who are just sitting at a slot machine and punching the buttons every so often are either trying to get a free drink (which seems hard to come by), or is just renting a chair for a few.  I paid $3 to rent a chair for twenty minutes.
• Good things do not happen immediately following a dramatic increase in music volume.
• Bartendresses must dance violently on the bar every thirty minutes at Centrifuge.  Their outfits will make you wonder if you are in a gentleman’s club as they throw their hips around.
• When the bartender asks you to move your drink so HE can get up and dance on the bar, move it, and turn away (unless you enjoy watching the dancing pork sword).
• Sirens are not always for show, sometimes they will shut down the strip.
• It is apparently acceptable to sit at the Verizon Recharge Station with your cell plugged into an outlet and carry on a conversation in a foreign tongue, ON SPEAKER PHONE.  Please duly note that.

Thank you for your attention, please continue on with your day!

I am a Road Warrior.

It comes with the job, and there are days that I really enjoy it.  I could trade some days for others, but it’s days like today that make it all worth while.

I’m sitting at the Las Vegas airport waiting for my new flight (previous one is probably going to cancel now) and someone from the TSA hops on the public address system.  I was ready for a “To the person who left your ID at the security checkpoint, please return to claim your item,” type announcement.  What came on instead was:

“To the person who left the false teeth and hearing aid at the security desk, if you can hear me, please return to claim your items.”

How freaking awesome is that?

Tonight (and this trip) is really my first Vegas experience.  I was here for Defcon a few years ago, but it was at a hotel off the strip (across the street from the Hard Rock).  I did have some fun gambling when I was here last, but tonight was my first good-strong experience.

I played Blackjack for a while and had mixed results.  Finally left when the table went cold.  Went over to the Irish Pub here at New York, NY, and then tried my luck at Roulette.  Sure enough, I started winning.  Then the roller coaster started (not the one outside my window).  I was down, then I bet on 24 (love you Chris) and WON!  After a few hours down in the casino, I am only down $15 (minus the $5 ATM fee… jeepers).

Better luck tomorrow, and hopefully I’ll end on a high note!  I speak at 4pm Pacific.

Fixing the file system issue I had was FUN.

Full of Unexpected sNafus.

Parted works great! Except when you need to move the STARTING position of where a partition is. Ouch.

For those of you out there who have run into this, in order resize a partition where you need to change the start of the partition, you essentially have to move all the data off and delete it. There are ways to create new partitions in the space you have left free by shrinking another partition, but I ran into problems there because I was goofing around with a mixture of primary and extended partitions. That did not work out well.

So three hours later, everything is up and running. And as of this post, all is fully back to normal. Went from 78% full to 39% full on the partition in question.

After making the switch to Mac at home, I’ve been able to streamline a lot of what I was doing at the house. The only complaint I have is that Apple hates ergonomics. Don’t believe me? Go look at the keyboard they ship. I had to dump the wireless one for a wired ergo one from Goldtouch.

Apple, get a clue!

Anyway…. I’m trying to slog through some work laptop issues (they won’t give me a MacBook… bastards!), I really noticed I have taken for granted the Mac’s propensity to notify me of updates for the software I use often. Really, how simple is the “Hey, I’ve got a new version, want to update?” functionality? Almost ALL Mac software has this, but very few PC titles do.

Well, hopefully I can get my PC up and running to have a semi-productive day.

After hitting pause on my iTunes for the fifth call that came in, I figured there had to be an easier way to get my music and phone to sync up. It’s not a big deal, except I usually forget to turn my speakers back up (or resume my music), and I work in silence until my conscious mind alerts me.

Thanks to the guys over at RustyBrick, I have implemented an automatic pause/resume system. I have a PHP script that connects to my Asterisk box and watches it for relevant activity. When a call comes in, I get the Caller ID through a Growl notification, and AppleScript tells iTunes to pause. When I hang up, AppleScript tells iTunes to resume. If I make a call, it pauses as well.

It sure took some hacking to get it to work though. The RustyBrick guys may have been using an older version of Asterisk, and parts of the AppleScripts did not work on Leopard. It’s OK though as I’m just using this for me, so I just hard coded a few things in there.

Fun stuff!