Monthly Archives: January 2016

First Monday of the year

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Well it's Monday. Woke up with a call from the staffing agency, confirming our 3pm and to remind me about another posting that has RedHat Linux all over it. Got up, got moving. I'm kind of anxious, even though this is really just a 'get to know' and paperwork meeting. *crosses tentacles* Hoping this leads to something...not sure if I'm hoping for the next 12 years of my career, or just something to fill in some gaps. Trying to not set expectations or dreams yet.

Had crazy dreams, one about having to hire a divorce lawyer to get out of a very big mistake marriage, the other was going to Glasgow with friends, and I kept running into relatives. Second is slightly more plausable, as my paternal grandmother was born in Glasgow. Still, was odd.

Now I'm kind of just killing time. Was watching a movie, but I started going all obsessive about how long it was vs when I had to be in Irving. (3pm btw), so I queued up some music and started writing this, along with general internet wanderings. The plan for after the meeting is to meet up with Amythest to pick up my tablet (left it there yesterday) and I'll probably do chores around the house tonight. The laundry pile is terrifying, and I need to get it under control.

Not much else. Will probably go get obsessive over how I look in a bit, put on the interview duds. Oh yeah, and eat. Well eat first. *twitch* So yeah, wish me luck on not babbling like a loon. Ciao.

So the NYD results, and the Saturday of busy

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The answer to the question 'How will Vulpine's 2016 be?' has been answered, at least if my superstition is correct...

I slept in, I watched all 5 Resident Evil movies, one silly monster movie and one serious horror flick, while wearing fuzzy PJs. Updated VMs, wrote a script for doing ship's bells, and figured out a really silly way to test my log parser without forcing the system to do something crazy to generate a log entry. I made dinner and did a arseload of dishes. It then finished with an anxiety attack (boo) and going to bed to read Brian Lumley's Mythos fiction.

So 2016 should be full of sleep, zombies, geeking, tentacles and pasta. Oh yeah, and anxiety...but no year is perfect.

Day two of the new year was spent down at Amythest's helping her with stuff around her house. Got some very good play time with her weasels, even if my right hand looks like I fought with a cheesegrater and lost. Frick, one of her weasels, is a bit aggressive/bitey so my hand got nommed quite a bit. He's learning though, and nothing too bad. After we labored, Amythest made a pot of very tasty chicken soup which we devoured, and we watched a couple of NCIS episodes. Then I called it a night, came home. I was in a 'Sci-Fi/Horror' mood, so I threw on 'Event Horizon'. Film producers, we need more 'Ghosts in Space' movies, please.

Going to bed in a while, right now I'm feeling pretty good. Queued up a few books by Ramsey Campbell, one of his Mythos collections and a novel about a 'lost film' that I've been meaning to read for the last 15 years or so, but never got around to. Lets hope for a good night's sleep, and a calm Sunday, then Monday going my way. *crosses tentacle* Lets also hope my little superstition comes true, I'd like a pretty darn good year. With a side of tentacles.

8 bells and all’s well

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I'm a geek. This should surprise noone reading this. I'm also a nut for all things nautical. After watching a movie with a phantom ship and it's bell, I came up with the idea of having my computer alert me every hour, with a bell. Basically a reminder to get up every now and again and move, so I don't end up with more back issues. Simple enough, add a cron entry of

0 * * * * /usr/bin/play /home/vulpine/.wavs/Dagon-Bell.wav

Simple...but not historically accurate. Traditionally, a bell was rung every half hour in a watch, up to 8 times. Watches started at midnight, and ran 4 hours. So if you started at midnight, and heard 5 bells, you'd know it was 2:30am and you still had 90 min to go. Simple enough

So I started pondering how I could write a script to do this...and after a few minutes of pondering counts and calls and such, I went for the not so elegant, but easy process of writing 8 seperate crontab entries, one for each bell count. So it looks as such.

30 0,4,8,12,16,20 * * * /usr/bin/mplayer -loop 1 /home/vulpine/.wavs/Dagon-Bell.wav
00 1,5,9,13,17,21 * * * /usr/bin/mplayer -loop 2 /home/vulpine/.wavs/Dagon-Bell.wav
30 1,5,9,13,17,21 * * * /usr/bin/mplayer -loop 3 /home/vulpine/.wavs/Dagon-Bell.wav
00 2,6,10,14,18,22 * * * /usr/bin/mplayer -loop 4 /home/vulpine/.wavs/Dagon-Bell.wav
30 2,6,10,14,18,22 * * * /usr/bin/mplayer -loop 5 /home/vulpine/.wavs/Dagon-Bell.wav
00 3,7,11,15,19,23 * * * /usr/bin/mplayer -loop 6 /home/vulpine/.wavs/Dagon-Bell.wav
30 3,7,11,15,19,23 * * * /usr/bin/mplayer -loop 7 /home/vulpine/.wavs/Dagon-Bell.wav
00 0,4,8,12,16,20 * * * /usr/bin/mplayer -loop 8 /home/vulpine/.wavs/Dagon-Bell.wav

 I used mplayer over play or other apps because it was the easiest to find a command to play X repeates (the -loop). The cron times match up with when each bell set would ring, so 8 lines and about 3 min vs Cthulhu knows how long to write a single script that was called every 30 min, and kept a self count. Given my druthers, and my career of writing these kind of kludges because I had some crazy file foo dumped on my desk, and I didn't want to manually tweak the data, I prefer the 3 min kludge.

If you're bored, and want your computer to be all Age of Sail, all need is the above crontab entries (modified for your home directory path, and if mplayer is located somewhere else in your directory structure), the bell sound (there's a ton of free ones out there, the one I use can be grabbed here), and well a Unix based install with mplayer installed. Mac users, this probably will work for you, though you may need some other player program. Windows users, sorry...while it shouldn't be hard to replicate this, I have no clue off the top of my head. Good luck?

If you don't have your bells and watches memorized, here's a handy guide.

Time as marked by the bells

Mid Morning Forenoon Afternoon Dogs First
0030 - 1 bell 0430 - 1 bell 0830 - 1 bell 1230 - 1 bell 1630 - 1 bell 2030 - 1 bell
0100 - 2 bells 0500 - 2 bells 0900 - 2 bells 1300 - 2 bells 1700 - 2 bells 2100 - 2 bells
0130 - 3 bells 0530 - 3 bells 0930 - 3 bells 1330 - 3 bells 1730 - 3 bells 2130 - 3 bells
0200 - 4 bells 0600 - 4 bells 1000 - 4 bells 1400 - 4 bells 1800 - 4 bells 2200 - 4 bells
0230 - 5 bells 0630 - 5 bells 1030 - 5 bells 1430 - 5 bells 1830 - 5 bells 2230 - 5 bells
0300 - 6 bells 0700 - 6 bells 1100 - 6 bells 1500 - 6 bells 1900 - 6 bells 2300 - 6 bells
0330 - 7 bells 0730 - 7 bells 1130 - 7 bells 1530 - 7 bells 1930 - 7 bells 2330 - 7 bells
0400 - 8 bells** 0800 - 8 bells 1200 - 8 bells 1600 - 8 bells 2000 - 8 bells 2400 - 8 bells
(Guide cheerfully commandeered from the US Navy website, original site is at http://www.navy.mil/navydata/questions/bells.html)

So that's how I've spent a bit of New Year's Day. Let me know how it works for you, or if you have questions, or you spot a glaring bug. Ciao.

New Years Day

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And it's New Years Day. Survived last night, party was fun, friends are good things, even if due to scheduling and life the crowd was pretty small. Then the countdown happened, the year ticked over to 2016 and my mood crashed like a UFO at Roswell. Just...everything this last year, and the last few years hit at once. Blah. Came home soon after midnight, and stayed up listening to music and avoiding ranting online, since everyone was posting positive stuff, and I didn't want to be the emo Sith Lord of 2016. Ended up going to bed with a book, went to sleep, and at least had good dreams. Mood is still kind of blah. *sigh*

Got up a little while ago, made some lunch, and have the 'Resident Evil' movies playing. Weekly run of VM updates, but not much to update...it's been a quiet week in Linux land. Which means I'll probably have to come up with a new geek plan. Or something.

Nothing much else to talk about. Probably going to be a kind of rough day for me. But I honestly can't say I want to do much about it right now either. Oh well. At least I have zombies. Catch you all later hominids.