We interrupt the “feeding the damned cat” posts with a video of my hero: a ten-year-old yo-yo master.

When I was a teen I got into yo-yo’s (in high school, we all had our gimmicks). I was pretty good (better than anyone else in my school - I’m a bit of a competitive person), but nowhere near the skill of this kid. I mean nowhere. Light years beyond anything I even knew was possible.
One of my favorite moments (and probably the most pimp) comes at 2:58 - watch for the rollover.

Simply amazing.

Here’s a little waste of your time that hopefully will take your mind off of your shrinking 401(k), WaMu buyouts, bullshit debate dodging, and the rest of reality:

Damn It Feels Good To Be A Banker — A Wall Street Musical from Leveraged Sell-Out on Vimeo.

And The Official Obama/McCain Debate Drinking Game

So I’ve been working more on my ImageServer2 application (massive image asset library, replacing Extensis Portfolio Client/Server system) for my employer.

In preparing for the complete departure from Extensis Portfolio Client/Server, I have found the one piece of my application that has been missing is the massive asset import and conversion (two visual previews: one a 600×600 constrained JPG and a 110×110 BLOB preview saved in a database). The missing piece was handled by the combination of Client/Server from Portfolio, but without these tools I needed to create a mechanism to handle massive imports (hundreds of images from CD/DVD or the Web).

I’ve been researching conversion tools (ImageMagick, GD, GM, Perl, Altercast, etc) and have found a combination of Perl and GM (similar to ImageMagick in features, but much faster) will be how I accomplish media tranformation (seven formats).

I’ve been testing this conversion process on a Linux tower (a Dell Optiplex GX620 running Ubuntu 7.10), and am in the process of setting up an Apple G4 tower running OpenSuse 10 to take on the heavy work of image conversion and database injection.

It’s not been an easy process. I first tried with Ubuntu 6.0.6 PPC version, which has failed constantly. Therefore, I decided to give OpenSuse 10 (more current) a try. I’ve had various failures, and it looks like today I’ve gotten my system nearly installed without error.

Here’s what I ran into:

1. I was using a KVM switch to handle multiple machines (the G4 included). The KVM had a USB mouse and an Apple Aluminum Keyboard. The G4 didn’t recognize the keyboard in time during it’s disk boot mode so I couldn’t succesfully hold down the “C” key to initiate boot from CD mode. Switching to an older USB keyboard (or plugging a keyboard directly into the Mac) solved that problem.

2. The OpenSuse installation needed to repartition the installed drive on the G4. This process constantly failed as OpenSuse has an issue with converting Mac partitions. After searching on the Web for awhile, I found that if I used the Mac OS install disk (10.4 desktop in my situation) and used the Disk Utility included to manually delete the partitions on disk I was ready for OpenSuse to take over. What I actually did was deleted any resident partitions, then created a single whole-disk partition with the Unix Filesystem (when creating partitions, check the dropdown, there’s tons of options).

3. Back in the OpenSuse installer, I allowed OpenSuse to use it’s default partitioning method to delete the Unix partitions (Apple’s Disk Utility actually created three partitions - go Apple!), and the install continued without any other errors.

I’ve now rebooted post install and am adding the root administrator password, etc. Things are looking up.

Once the install is finished I’ll be installing Perl modules, GM, and crossing my fingers that all my conversions work like magic.

If I learned anything from Spaceballs, it’s Merchandising, Merchandising, Merchandising!

A few months ago, I created a sticker that I distributed throughout Seattle. As time went on, I got several requests to turn these into t-shirts.

Tonight, I got the last request that broke the resistance’s proverbial back (wow, that was horrible).

I’ve created a CafePress Web store for selling the “I Drink Your Mocha” t-shirts.

I’ve added a $2.00 markup to the shirts, I hope you readers don’t mind. My wife reminds me that I do way too much, for way too cheap (free most times!).