Imablog Perspectives of a Canadian in the Old/Deep/New/Geographic South: This is where I ramble on about nothing in particular and post a few nice pictures.

New photos

Finally sorted through all the pictures from my trip to Edmonton and posted a bunch in my gallery. Go check them out.

This is the corner grocery store/diner that Dad used to own when we were kids. Mom used to take us there on weekends where we'd either hang out in the back or help out getting stuff off the shelves or bagging. Sometimes we even got to play with the calculator. Dad eventually closed the diner part (turning it into more grocery store space) and then closed the store for good in the early 80s. It seems to have been a succession of pawn shops ever since then.

Desktop fry-age

Smoked, and not in a tasty BBQ sort of way either.

Not sure what happened, but while I was sitting at my desk at work catching up on some reading, all the fans on my desktop computer suddenly spun up and the thing started sounding like it was ready to take off.

This was followed very closely by the unmistakable odour of fried electrical components.

Naturally this all happened just before I was ready to leave for the day, so I haven't had an opportunity to do any diagnostic work yet. That will have to wait until the morning. Hopefully the data on the hard drives is still intact. There's a lot of data I'd hate to lose. Scrounging enough parts to figure out what's wrong or to build another desktop could be challenging.

37 years ago

Mom says I was 10 months old in this picture.

I brought back my old photo album with me, so there are plenty of pictures that I need to digitize. Time to go scanner shopping.

Hardware snafus

Well, my desktop at work booted up this morning, but I suspect not all is well. One of the hard drives is making an annoying high pitched whining sound, which wasn't happening before I left. A check of the system log shows it's been rebooting almost daily since I left for some odd reason that's not indicated in the log file. Backing up my home directory now onto what is hopefully the good drive and not the whining one. Hopefully the whole 11GB of my home directory can be backed up before another shutdown occurs.

Still not sure what caused yesterday's meltdown, but I suspect something's overheating in the case.

Rebuilding

Bad: The 40GB drive (the one that came from the old computer) in the desktop died. It was the drive storing my home directory.

Good: I was able to back up my home directory before it expired.

Inconvenient: Fedora needs to be reinstalled, all the miscellaneous packages I use reloaded and my home directory restored.

Bleh.

10 years of /.

In Internet time, Slashdot is the great grand-daddy of all the techie news sites. This month /. is marking its 10 year anniversary with locally organized gatherings all over the place. Almost makes me feel old to think that I've been reading /. for nearly all of those 10 years.

The local gathering of /.ers is set up for Terri's Sports Bar on James Island on Oct 20 at 8PM. Should be fun to meet other /.ers around here. Go sign up and let the rest of us know if you're coming.

Upgrading Fedora sans DVD

The Fedora LiveCD image is pretty cool for new installations but as I've discovered, not much good for upgrading an existing Fedora. Fedora's done away with the CD ISO images (probably a good thing, since Fedora 6 consisted of 5 CD ISO images) and only makes DVD images available now. Since my desktop doesn't have a DVD burner or reader, I thought I was going to be stuck. After doing a bit of research and experimenting, I've come up with a procedure that let me upgrade my desktop from Fedora 8 Test 2 to Test 3 that seems to have worked. It's based on this message from fedora-list.

Disclaimer: The following steps worked fine for me on my system. Since it was a relatively minor upgrade from one test version to another, I've encountered very little breakage (so far). You may have to adjust things a little to get it to work on yours. YMMV.

1. Download the Fedora ISO for your architecture
2. Mount the ISO using the loopback device:
   mount iso_filename /mnt/Fedora -t iso9660 -o loop
   replacing iso_filename with the filename of the Fedora ISO you just downloaded
3. Create the directory /boot/Fedora and copy the contents of /mnt/Fedora/isolinux there
4. Add the following to /etc/grub.conf (add it to the end of the file):
   

   title Fedora
   root (hd0,0)
   kernel /Fedora/vmlinuz
   initrd /Fedora/initrd.img
   

5. Copy the ISO image to another computer and mount it to some location as in Step 2 (I used Fedora in my home directory). I had to do this step because I couldn't get the upgrade process to find the DVD image on the local hard drive. I think it may have had to do with the image being on an LVM partition. If you don't have any LVM partitions, you may be able to skip this step.
6. Create an NFS export for the mounted Fedora image you just created.
7. Reboot and select the Fedora boot profile. If all goes well, the computer should boot up using the new Fedora image and the upgrade process should kick off.
8. Follow the prompts to the point where it asks where the Fedora disk image is
9. Select the NFS option and provide the host and full path information to where you mounted the ISO on the remote computer (from Step 5).
10. At this point the upgrade should proceed as if you were upgrading from a physical DVD

If anybody knows a better way, feel free to enlighten me.

Fire trucks

At about 9:20 as I was crossing the Ashley River bridge heading into work this morning (trying to catch up on x-ray equipment surveys), there was this long slow moving procession of fire trucks headed the other way into West Ashley. Lights flashing, sirens wailing but apparently not in a hurry to get anywhere.

Not sure where they were headed or what occasion they were marking, but they were going somewhere. Anybody out there know what they were doing?

Big screen Trek

I need to go see this

On Tuesday, November 13, the two-part Star Trek Remastered version of "The Menagerie" will beam onto the big screen in a special engagement with selected theatres. The screening — a first for episodic Star Trek on this scale — will be seen in nearly 300 venues across the U.S. and Canada. This one-night-only event will also feature a special introduction by Eugene "Rod" Roddenberry, son of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, plus an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the making of the Remastered series.

Here are the theatres it's showing at in the Charleston area

• Movies @ Mt. Pleasant Stadium 12, Mount Pleasant
• Charles Towne Square Stadium 18, North Charleston
• Movies @ Azalea Square 16, Summerville

It starts at 7:30PM. Anybody want to join me? I'll probably go to the showing in Mt. Pleasant, but I'm flexible.

I've only seen a couple episodes of the Remastered series. The local station (WTAT) shows it at the most inconvenient time (Sundays at 1AM). I think I'll just wait for the DVD.

Another turtle heads back home

Another recovered sea turtle is being released back into the ocean this weekend by the SC Aquarium. Any stranded or injured sea turtles found in the area usually end up recuperating in the Sea Turtle Hospital. This weekend Edisto gets to go back to where he belongs. Come on out and watch! Then you can stick around, interrogateask the aquarium staff questions and hang out on the beach.

Edisto's release at the Folly Beach County Park is going to be held between 11:30 a.m. and noon on Saturday, October 13th. The time is being pushed forward a bit to give the high tide a little time to go out, hopefully allowing us all to be on the beach with the turtle!

Now, a few things to remember:

The County Parks cost $5 per car to park in their facilities.

This is a HUGE, live animal so if there are delays, please bear with us. There are far worse places to be than on the beach waiting for a sea turtle!

It will probably be crowded so be kind to the folks around you, especially if they are small!

The turtle is going in rain or shine.

The most important thing is to have fun! Interact with Aquarium Staff and Volunteers on the beach and enjoy the release.

It's right toward the end of my volunteer shift at the Aquarium, so I'm going to try to head out there with my camera as soon as I finish. I'll have to work fast and try to get done a little early so I make it out there on time.

Studies imported into PACS

Our PACS group gets a lot of patient studies on CDs to be imported into the PACS archive. The other day I was asked if it was possible to split out the study and image counts for these imported studies to get an idea of the imported study volume relative to the total.

Fortunately it turned out to be a relatively easy query since all imported studies use the same prefix for the accession number. After experimenting with a few SQL queries, I managed to come up with data to make this graph showing the fraction of imported studies and images relative to the total volume.

It's been climbing pretty steadily (something that definitely has not gone unnoticed by the person who does the importing), but is still a pretty small fraction of the total volume.

This will be good stuff to put into my paper.

Marathoning for the critters

One of my dog park friends has been training to run a marathon for the last few weeks now, and is putting her training efforts towards raising funds for the new JASPCA shelter.

To showcase their training and fund raising efforts, Kathleen and her training buddy started up the Road to Richmond site (they're planning on doing the Richmond Marathon on Nov 10).

If you want to help them raise a bunch of money for a much needed new animal shelter, check out their site and make a donation. Or donate directly to the JASPCA. Either way, it will go to a very worthy cause.

More radio transitions

This morning instead of hearing boppy 80s tunes on the radio, I was jarred awake by country music on my regular radio station, 96.9. The station's website redirects over to 95SX too. It seems that like 96 Wave, 96.9 has also undergone a radical format change without much in the way of warning (at least none I noticed). At least 96 Wave seems to have switched back to the original format though.

Not a format change I'm liking, so I guess it's time to switch the radio at home to 100.5. It's something I've been meaning to do anyway.

Sea turtle release

It turned out to be a very nice day for Edisto to head back to the ocean.

By the time I got to the beach, there was already quite the crowd assembled and waiting for Edisto's arrival.

After a bit of a wait, Edisto finally arrived and was taken out of the pickup truck.

It took about 6 guys to haul Edisto out of the truck and deposit him gently onto the beach. I think the large crowd may have spooked him a little because he just kind of stayed there on the beach for a while. They had to pick him up about 3 more times and carry him closer to the water. The device attached to Edisto's back is a GPS tracking device that will be used to track his movements while he's out at sea.

With a little bit of encouragement, he started moving on his own toward the edge of the water.

When Edisto finally made it into the water, the crowd sent him off with a great big cheer.

Today's release was a pretty cool event. There are still a few more turtles recuperating at the Aquarium's Sea Turtle Hospital so if you missed this one, there will be others coming up. They can always use donations so if you can, help them out a little.

You'll find a few more pictures over in my photo gallery.

Blognic '07

I thought I'd head on over to Wannamaker park early so the dogs could check out the new dog park there. They definitely had a good time, especially once they discovered the muddy pit passing for a pond. I'm not sure if it's supposed to be there or not, or if it's supposed to be more full than it was, but the dogs were enjoying it as much as they could. At least there was a hose available to wash them off a bit.

Then it was off to find where we were 'blognic'ing this year. I found Vera and Patrick, and then we eventually found Heather and everybody else. There were about 12 that showed up, along with a half dozen or so kids. I think we all had a pretty good time hanging out, and it was a great day for it too.

Heather's daughter managed to capture everybody's attention at one point or another

Proof that Heather does have different shirts other than the black Home Ec 101 shirt.

Vera just had to check out the sports scores

What photographer can resist food photography?

More pictures over in the gallery.

RAM good

Fedora 8 Test 3 runs much better with at least 512MB of RAM out of the box. It's an absolute slug with anything less. Methinks Fedora's starting to bloat a little.

Language humour

The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility.

As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as 'Euro-English'.

In the first year, 's' will replace the soft 'c'. Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard 'c' will be dropped in favour of 'k'.. This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter.

There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome 'ph' will be replaced with 'f'. This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.

In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible.

Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling.

Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent 'e' in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.

By the 4th yer people wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing 'th' with 'z' and 'w' with 'v'.

During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary 'o' kan be dropd from vords kontaining 'ou' and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensibl riten styl.

Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.

Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas.

If zis mad you smil, pleas pas on to oza pepl

My what big eyes you have

Note to self: Schedule eye exams for first thing in the morning from now on. Walking out in the morning daylight is much easier than having dilated eyeballs seared out of your skull by the bright noon day sun.

Routine eye exam time. No significant changes in prescription since the last time, although I am noticing that it's a lot more work to focus on nearby things. Either I'm just getting really lazy or my eyeballs are starting to get old. Not ready for bifocals just yet though. Perfectly healthy near-sighted eyes.

This is the prescription I came out of my eye appointment with.

The right eye seems to have improved over the years, since I remember a time not so long ago when both eyes were near -9.75. I still have to wait for the one room at my eye doctor's office with the equipment that can handle my prescription though.

Getting really busy soon

The new hospital tower is getting ready to open. The Siemens people have been busy installing some of the new equipment that's going in there. Now it's time to start doing the acceptance testing on the new stuff.

All together, there are about 21 units being installed in the new hospital building. Some of it is existing equipment that's being moved over, but the bulk of it is new. All of it has to be tested by the end of the year, and that's all on top of the 25 or so of our already existing systems that I have left to test. At least with the new stuff I don't have to worry about availability.

I need to clone myself like the Chinese guy did in that AARP commercial.

Nothing like a good soaking

Spent the day helping out with the acceptance testing on two of the new CT scanners at the new hospital, and then 10 minutes getting thoroughly soaked by the rain on the walk back to my office. After walking through the second ankle deep pool of water, I gave up trying to stay dry.

When I walked out to go home 15 minutes later, the sun was out.

Go figure.

Mystery nuts

I don't suppose anybody out there can tell me what kind of nuts these are.

They've been falling all over the place on one side of the house, and the dogs love to pick them up and crunch on them. Not knowing what kind of nuts they are, I make the dogs drop them whenever they pick one up.

They fall from a tree with leaves that look like this

Fez for dinner

Up the road from me Fez opened up a little while ago in the space formerly occupied by Lulu's Bistro. The food is billed as French-Moroccan, so the wife and I tried it out tonight.

It's nicely decorated inside, although a tad on the dim side. We suggested to the staff that they consider using taller candles on the tables because we were quite literally eating in the dark at our table off in the corner. Next time I'm going to make sure to grab a table underneath one of the lights so I can see my food.

At least the food was tasty. I started with the Moroccan style mussels while the wife had the kefta (2 skewers of a spiced veal meatball type thing). A little small for the price ($7), but I thought it was pretty good. The mussels were excellent in a rich tomato-citrusy broth.

For the main course we each tried one of the tagine dishes. She had the braised short rib tagine, which was well prepared but was seasoned with something she didn't care for too much. I had the lamb tagine, which was a definite winner. The lamb was tender and flavourful and nicely enhanced with figs and apricots adding some sweetness to the dish.

Dinner was rounded out with a sugar coma-inducing chocolate and sesame cream and creme brulee. The chocolate sesame cream was excellent - pudding like (much thicker though) layers of rich dark chocolate and light sesame with some really strongly cherry flavoured something at the bottom of a martini glass. The chocolate pretty much overwhelms any sesame flavour, but since I've never met a chocolate I didn't like, I didn't mind. The chocolate combined with a little bit of the cherry was really good. The creme brulee came out with a nice solid top of brulee and was well made but turned out to be infused with lavender, not a flavour the wife is fond of.

Fez is definitely a place to check out if you're looking for new flavours to try. I'm looking forward to going back to try some of the French style dishes. It's a little on the pricey side ($15+ for the entrees) and I didn't end up with any leftovers. You do get some really good food though and a cozy, albeit dim, atmosphere to enjoy dinner in.

Edging to the Mac side

I really, really want to get one of the new iMacs especially after seeing some of the uber-spiffy things OS X Leopard can do, but I'm less than enthused about the circa 2006 hardware specs. Then again, considering the circa 2001 hardware I'm using now, a new iMac would be a huge improvement. And it would look really good on my desk. ATI HD 2600 with 256 MB video RAM though? Is that enough for Leopard?

And seriously, WTF is up with charging $700 to go from 2 GB up to 4 GB of DDR2 RAM? You can buy like 14 GB of memory for that much retail.

Still saving up for a new computer for next year. Whether it will be Mac or something else is still up in the air.

It's too bad I can't just buy OS X to run on a computer I put together myself.

Pet Fest

I meant to post these pictures from last weekend's Pet Fest earlier, but never got around to it until now.

Some of the JASPCA's adoptable dogs.

Basset hound pups with the Carolina Basset Hound Rescue.

The doggie costume contest

Cooling off in the pool

Temperature perception

What is it about Charleston that makes me feel like I need to wear a sweater or jacket when it's 15°C outside, yet be perfectly comfortable in a t-shirt when it's 15°C back home in Edmonton?

What not to bring

One of the funnier commercials I've seen in a while

I especially like the last bit.

Pumpkins

There were only 9 pumpkins entered in this year's pumpkin carving contest. I think the cafeteria people need to promote the pumpkin contest a little more. The number of pumpkin entries has been going down each year.

This one with a "Don't Drink and Drive" theme from the people down in 1West (Trauma) was the most elaborate one, and probably the one that will win first prize. I thought it was a pretty cool pumpkin.

Another turtle release

From the Turtle people at the Aquarium:

"Cape Romain" has been officially cleared for release! As the weather is quickly cooling, we are eager to get this 275-pound adult male loggerhead out to sea. Being released with "Cape Romain" is "Lady Lisa," a 65-pound juvenile loggerhead that was caught on the SC Department of Natural Resources Marine Resources Division (SCDNR MRD) In-Water research vessel, the Lady Lisa. The release will be held at the pier between 14th Ave. and 10th Ave. on Isle of Palms at 11:00 am, Saturday, November 3rd.