True story.

I have written the greatest post-rock ever!

Except it’s just me and my electric guitar and my foot pedal and my microphone and Ardour and Hydrogen and Jack on Ubuntu. But it works!

I bought a couple Brother laser printers for here at work, a HL-2040 and one of their multifunction printer/copiers. They’re generally okay; they’re not great like the Xerox that would not stop running or the current HP LaserJet that replaced the Xerox but cannot replace its memory.

My two constant complaints with these printers is that 1) they curl pages, and 2) the printer thinks the toner cartridge is empty long before it actually is.

As it turns out, #1 is just a function of Brother printers being pretty much cheap crap. Not to say you don’t good bang for your buck, but you also get bad curl for your page. So much for that.

But #2 seems either malicious on Brother’s part, or incompetent on their engineer’s part. The sensor that detects low toner is placed above the empty level so there’s still toner left when the printer errors out and won’t let you print any more. Why it does this instead of simply printing until I can see that the toner is gone is beyond me; it’s disgustingly wasteful.

But though you can’t do anything about #1, you most certainly can deal with #2. This advice, though, comes without warranty. If you wreck your printer or something, don’t come complaining to me about this. For all I know, this is not safe.

If the printer is erroring out, saying that you are out of toner, place a bit of electrical tape over the sensors windows on each side of the toner cartridge. To do this you have to lift the cover, pull the drum out, remove the cartridge from the drum, and locate the windows. They should be small, round, semi-translucent windows on each side of the cartridge. Both will be located in exactly the same spot, as it seems the toner sensor is optical and basically shines a light right through to detect the toner level.

Place small bits of electrical tape or something else vaguely dark over the apertures, slide the cartridge back into the drum, slide the assembly back into the printer, close the top, and away you go. You will probably get at least 50% more life out of those cartridges.

• Transit strikes.

I can get on board with unions. They’re necessary to balance the interests of workers against the interests of corporations. I get that. Yet when it comes to transit workers, some of the most overpaid and impolite unionised individuals in existence barring perhaps automotive workers, I’m not on their side. Especially when the TTC members reject an offer that would make them the highest paid transit workers in the country, even in the face of their union recommending they take the deal. Especially when they give an hour or less notice that they’ve decided to strike, stranding tens of thousands of people who count on the TTC to operate. They could not possibly have engendered less public support for their actions. Almost everyone I’ve talked to about the strike is enraged at the TTC. Couldn’t the union have simply started a work-to-rule campaign wherein they stopped accepting fares? That would have put pressure on the city without garnering for themselves the further, aggravated dislike of an entire city.

• Shark fin soup.

I watched Sharkworld last night. The film is amazing, but the events portrayed in the film are a travesty. An unmitigated, utterly barbaric raping of the oceans. Frankly, anyone who eats shark fin soup should have his arms and legs chopped off and be left to starve on the side of a road somewhere. If flaunting your wealth involves damaging the life-support system of the entire earth, perhaps you should be made to feel the cost of that. I hope future generations look back on the Chinese and Taiwanese as a sort of barbarian race of ecological terrorists whose actions severely diminished the richness of the world’s oceans. Not that I have much of a high horse to speak from; Canada’s seal hunts and government subsidised fisheries are just as ruthless and unconcerned with long-term impact. Personally, I stopped eating fish — any fish, at all — about six months back, after reading A Short History of Nearly Everything. And it’s sad to see that a bunch of nutcases at Greenpeace are doing God’s work (in their own strange, rabid way) while the vast majority of Christians don’t bother to tend to the world’s largest garden: the seas.

• Evangelicals in bed with the Republican party

Certainly after Mr Bush’s disastrous dual terms in office, some of the Republicans in the States must be second-guessing their religious affiliation with their party. That it took a bunch of crooks to do that is a great tragedy. That some will never question that affiliation is a greater tragedy still. Still, with the mythology of the Pilgrims and Religious Freedom and Democracy and Fighting The Evil British and God Is On Our Side still going strong, it’s not really that strange. It’s just… sad. America is no more on God’s side than Charlemagne or Constantine (whose in hoc signo vinces should still ring as an affront to the very ethic of Jesus, and one of the greatest lies the devil has managed to perpetuate over the ages). You mix your religion with your politics and you find that they make very bad bedfellows. Your religion must of course inform your political views, but politics must not ever inform your religion. Politics is about the exercise earthly power; Jesus is about the exercise of heavenly power. These things are very, very different. They are oil and water. You should not mix them up, or soon you find people painting Jesus on the side of their nuclear warheads.

• Cliches in sermons.

If you are attempting to preach an authentic sermon, something that resonates in the hearts and minds of your listeners, don’t use cliches. Don’t use marketspeak. You’re not a motivational speaker. You’re not an entertainer. You must approach scripture and let it inform your method of preaching. People do not need handy bullet points that rhyme and have a particularly pleasing cadence. Bullet points do not impart truth, at least not any sort of useful truth. As anyone trying to implement and idea will tell you, it’s not simply enough to have a great idea: you need a great implementation. That is to say that while a turn of phrase might be handy to encapsulate the thrust of your message, the nuances are where the magic lies. Or, you might say, the difference between Mac OS X and Windows. There’s a reason Jesus used parables and not a lot of handy tracts. You can mine a parable for ages, you can look at it from different directions and see things you didn’t see before, you can over-analyse it, you can approach it with too much gravitas, you can do all kinds of things. A bullet point is boring. A bullet point that rhymes and sticks in your head is annoying and boring.

I have to expand on this. Jesus told stories that had a particular richness to them. They weren’t simple anecdotes with simple points. They were designed so you have to look at them just the right way — often in hindsight — to get the point. And often you’ll quite dislike the point because it hits you dead-centre.

These days preachers tend to tell stories both brief and humorous that make a particular broad point that lines up with their sermons. These stories are blunt instruments. They’re not really narrative: they’re cleverly disguised bullet points. There’s no meat. There’s no content. They’re like a dancing monkey with colourful clothes: it might be briefly entertaining, but you certainly wouldn’t want to marry the monkey. It’s just a monkey. Take off all the clothes and strip away the dancing routine and it’s just a monkey. And you’ll find that monkeys are rather boring, after all.

I’d like to be told the truth. Not a particularly one-dimensional version of the truth that can fit in three points and thirty minutes. If telling the truth means you need to go into overtime and tell stories and confuse me and dig deeper than I’m prepared to go, DO IT. God knows I’m never going to do that myself, willingly.

Edit: Don’t read this. It’s just an angry rant. Read this instead, as it has actual information in it.

When I was contemplating upgrading from Ubuntu 7.10, the thing I was most worried about was the new PulseAudio subsystem being integrated into the system this release cycle. I know how much pain this caused a lot of people in the Fedora community, and I was a little apprehensive about it.

Turns out that PulseAudio actually works better than the old ESD/ALSA crap. It works way better, in fact. I installed padevchooser and it just worked. Still not the most user-friendly tool ever, but good enough for my purposes. All my applications seem to work with PulseAudio just as well as with the old and busted.

What I hadn’t been expecting, and what blind-sided me, was the X.org changes. I had heard rumblings about the auto-whatever, the new screen choosing/cloning applet, et cetera. Upon install X detected my two primary monitors (and nvidia-settings stitched them together with TwinView), which is fine and dandy, but that’s not all that I have connected to my computer. I have two X screens, not just one. Two monitors are connected to one screen, one monitor and a TV output are connected to the other. I can move between the two with my mouse, and I had learned xorg.conf-speak in order to be able to do this.

8.04 just destroyed that setup. The stupid, useless, craptacular, utterly functionality-bare Screen Resolution tool won’t detect my two primary monitors on videocard0, much less actually stitch them together to make one giant monitor like it should. Very much less detect the other two screens on videocard1. It won’t do this with the nv driver, it won’t do this with the nvidia driver from the repos, it won’t do this with the beta driver from Nvidia.com, it just doesn’t work. Period. Ubuntu’s default install still lacks all the tools needed to operate with two monitors, something that quite a few people I know are fond of and even find indispensable.

I’m so utterly frustrated with the whole fiddling with configurations thing. I recognize that Ubuntu, so far, is the best in breed of distributions, and when setting this computer up from scratch, I have no other complaint except for displays. That’s it. But this has been a thorn in the side of the Linux Desktop for many, many years now. I don’t know if the blame lies in using what seems to be an antiquated display system or binary drivers or whatever, but I simply can’t stand how this goes on and on and on.

I booted into Ubuntu just now with my two monitors and Twinview seemed to work fine. The splash page, at least, did that annoying thing where it centered the login prompt in the middle of the 2880 x 900 screen, right in the middle of the gap between two monitors, so that half my login is on one monitor and half on the other. This is okay with me; I’ve grown used to sort of glancing from one to the other. It lets me know that Twinview is working and that when Gnome starts up, I’ll be able to use all that screen real estate.

Nope! Gnome decides to switch one of my monitors off! Wonderful, thank you Gnome. It turns out that I have two metamodes in my xorg.conf, one for both monitors one, one for one monitor off and the other on, and that Gnome decided in its inexplicable wisdom to choose the second. Before you ask me why I don’t just eliminate one metamode, I’ll tell you that I play UrbanTerror, and if I don’t have that second metamode, when it plays fullscreen it does that annoying center-of-the-screen thing (like the Gnome splash), and while I can tolerate that elsewhere, playing a game is different. I want it on one screen. So I need both metamodes.

So I surf the web trying to find an answer. There is none. Most people seem rather confused as to why xorg.conf is just a stub these days, and I keep hearing rumblings about something called xrandr whose manpage is — in typical UNIX fashion — complete and utter gibberish to anyone who doesn’t already understand the tool. So I’m left to figure out on my own why X can’t initialize two screens with four monitors, using a perfectly good xorg.conf that worked just fine on Ubuntu 7.10 and the three releases before that. Finally, I decide to fire up displayconfig-gtk, which I’m told can hose my display configuration (couldn’t get more hosed, thank you!), and I find to my utter surprise that while X, nvidia-settings, and Screen Resolution cannot detect my monitors, displayconfig-gtk can… just not all four. Only two. One on each videocard. Hooray! So I set the second (on videocard1) to the primary display and find to my great astonishment that it works just fine. But only it works, and nothing else. Just the one monitor. And though nvidia-settings says the TV-out is working, it is not. So I have just the one monitor now.

I say to myself, okay, this sucks, I’ll go back to the original settings. I do this, and lo and behold I log out and log back in to find that Gnome has magically decided to use the first metamode and not the second. The second metamode is still there — I checked — but Gnome is using the first now. Why? I have no idea. I’m afraid to restart the computer now, as if I do, I might never be able to use Twinview properly again.

I absolutely cannot believe this. I know I’m a edge use case. Not a lot of people are running this many screens and monitors. But for the love of all that is good, why does my old xorg.conf not work? Has Hardy introduced a regression that causes dual videocard motherboards to ignore the second card unless a live chicken is sacrificed and something goes horribly wrong?

Gah. I’m going back to Gutsy, I really am. I can install PulseAudio myself, and install FF3 myself, thankyouverymuch. I can’t see any other big changes — except for, you know, the bad ones — that would compel me to do otherwise. I just hope that torrent is still alive somewhere.

Another old song I just dug up. Not my favourite, but I’m going to rework this bad boy.

Sometimes I fall. Sometimes I can’t get up.
Sometimes I crawl, always left feeling stuck.
Sometimes I know, but mostly I’m confused.
Will the madness never end? Will the transient befriend
the holiness that he can see but hardly understand?

Sometimes I rise. Sometimes I hit the waves.
Sometimes surprised but most of the time afraid.
Sometimes I see, but mostly flying blind.
Will the deadness never dies? Will the madness always lie
below this skin? It’s thin and I can barely understand.

Sometimes I sink, lungs full of holy air.
Sometimes I think that maybe you won’t be there.
Sometime you come, but mostly I’m alone.
Will perception be the lamp showing angels round the camo?
Protection I’m afraid that I will never comprehend.

But if you aren’t a liar, and if I’m not a fool,
would you be my desire, and could I be your tool?
And I’m not a halfwit, and if you’re not unclear,
I can’t believe that you’re gone and I’m left standing here.
Come and calm the fear.

Sometimes I grin. Sometime I know your love.
Sometimes I win what I’ve been dreaming of.
Sometimes I pray that you will come again,
bring the madness to an end, let the sojourner befriend
that only thing he wants to know but hardly understands.

I was no Trent Reznor, that’s for sure. Please excuse the amateurishness of this post, I wrote it when I was a mere child.

It hurts to be alive. Sometimes I can’t wake up, it seems.
Some days I drive and drive but this road only leads to dreams.
And I can’t be sure it’s real; have I gotten past the peel?
Am I ever going to know?

I’ve got the marks to prove, I pinched until I broke the skin,
and time cannot remove the scars I left behind again.
I’ve got the baggage in my trunk from another ship that sunk.
Am I ever going to know?

And I will wrestle with the thought,
’cause I think it’s all I’ve got
left to keep.
And I will hunt myself until
I finally catch my will
and I sleep.

It hurts to be alone. I’d give myself for love, and rice.
But I’m frozen to the bone, and far too poor to pay the price.
They’re staring at me strange, as I’m looking for some change.
Didn’t they say that change is good?

So maybe I’ll admit I’m waiting for the ache to fade,
and I want to breathe a bit before the next mistake is made.
But I know which one I’ll choose, and the dignity I’ll lose.
Do I really want to know?

And I will wrestle with the plot
till I find out if I’m not
supposed to see.
And I will hunt you down until
you tell if you will
hunt for me.

But I want to know
if this is what I need.

When I buy a cellphone, I am quoted a price for the accompanying plan. The price is essentially a lie, or at best an attempt at obscuring the real costs of the plan. If you get a $20.00 per month plan, you pay that, plus an additional system access fee, plus a 911 access fee, plus taxes. On a $20 per month plan, these costs nearly double the cost of the plan.

Isn’t this deception? Isn’t it misleading and underhanded? Why should I pay a fee to access a system that I’ve already paid to access in the form of a cell phone plan? The name doesn’t even make sense! I’ve already paid to access your shitty network! That’s what the plan is for! And to add insult to injury the cellphone companies may simply raise their system access fee at any time. If their profits aren’t quite where they feel they should be, boom, up goes the system access fee.

Frankly, I’d like to launch a class action lawsuit under consumer protection laws, if only to make sure that the full costs of each phone plan are actually named in the plan’s cost, including 911 access fees and whatever other fee cell phone companies want to foist on consumers.

My sister Kristin has an LG Chocolate that has recently decided to throw up a white screen instead of a regular boot-up screen. This is a common problem according to the internet; the LG Chocolate is an expensive phone, but apparently also a low-quality phone. After about six months of use the LG Chocolate, it tends to simply stop working properly, most likely due to a malfunction in the flex cable that connects the two sliding parts. I can’t count the number of comments I found on the internet bewailing this exact problem. There were literally thousands of them, all complaining about the quality of the LG Chocolate.

Basically, the LG Chocolate is a crap phone. As far as I can tell, you should avoid buying one at any cost.

She brought the phone to the Telus store. It was still under warranty. She expected, reasonably, that Telus would fix or replace the phone, due to what appeared to be a manufacturing defect. Instead, she was told, due to a moisture-sensitive sticker that had turned red behind her battery, that her warranty was void, and that they would reject the phone for warranty work. On top of that, they told her that if she sent it in, she’d be charged $25 even if they did nothing to the phone. The icing on the cake was when they offered her $100 off a new phone, as if that makes junking a $300 phone after six months okay.

That’s disgraceful service. Utterly abysmal to the point of being a slap in the face to Kristin, a customer who simply wants a mobile phone that works.

Verizon is replacing LG Chocolates because of this defect. It’s a well documented defect. Yet here’s Telus essentially denying there’s a problem, inventing a flimsy excuse to void her warranty, and saying, “We don’t care about you.” That’s awful.

Here’s a though for all you people who like to say, “I CAN’T IMAGINE THIS SORT OF MUSIC YOU ENJOY WILL BE AROUND IN A HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS HUUUUURRRRRR!”

Have considered how full of hubris that is? How arrogant? How completely self-centred and full of pride? To jump from I do not like this music … to … this music is not of a sort to have any lasting significance? Do you not see the only connection between those two thoughts is… you? Are you really going to set yourself up as the arbiter of what will and will not stand your vaunted test of time?

Have you also considered that the test of time is no test of greatness? It’s only a test of its supposed worth at the time, that many copies were made and thus endure. Or it’s a fluke. Maybe that piece of music from near the beginning of time was a piece of crap; you don’t know.

All you can say is that on average a more popular piece of music is copied more times and is more likely to pass into history intact.

Which leads me to this: you’re not only the arbiter of what will survive by virtue of your own taste, but what will survive from a historical standpoint is what’s popular. Can you see how you’re full of shit?