Joe's Random Ramblings

The owner tries to get compensated for it, and of course gets nowhere.
So he writes a song about it, and puts it up on YouTube:

The full story is here: http://www.davecarrollmusic.com/story/united-breaks-guitars.
After the song hit the Net, United now is apparently willing to pay for his broken guitar...

From the interview Mrs. Palin gave to ABC about why she resigned as Governor of Alaska:

As to whether another pursuit for national office, as when she joined Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., in the race for the White House less than a year ago, would result in the same political blood sport, Palin said there was a difference between the White House and what she had experienced in Alaska. If she were in the White House, she said, the "department of law" would protect her from baseless ethical allegations.

"I think on a national level, your department of law there in the White House would look at some of the things that we've been charged with and automatically throw them out," she said.

Last I looked, there is no "department of law" at the White House.
So, what is this lady smoking? Is the fish up in Alaska so contaminated, with oil and whatever else, that people who eat it utter such pure nonsense?
She clearly should never have gone into politics. It is way over her head. She is and remains Caribou Barbie.

I just came across a blog post from somebody who survived a horrible crash with a 18-wheeler truck in his Mazda Miata (MX-5).
Driving a Miata myself, I always get this "is it safe" question...
As that crash shows, the car, as small as it is, has some surprising qualities.
I actually have a rollbar installed in my car, to help protecting me in case of a flip-over.

In my ongoing quest to get IPv6 tunneling working with my AT&T DSL connection, I stumbled across more stupidity...

In an effort to resolve the 15-second DHCP renewal time I was seeing on a D-Link DSL modem that I tried (mentioned here,) I first contacted D-Link tech support about the issue. Unfortunately, the technician couldn't help me, so I ended up returning the DSL modem.
I now got a Motorola 2210-02 DSL modem (originally developed by Netopia, which apparently got bought by Motorola.)
This modem has the AT&T firmware installed. This firmware allows modifying the DHCP lease time, just like my old Speedstream did.
However, and that's a BIG issue, the 2210 does not respond to pings, i.e., ICMP packets. This prevents me from updating the IPv6 tunnel at HE's tunnelbroker service. They try to ping the IPv4 address entered...
I can go through the universal Ipv6 tunnel at 192.88.99.1, though, so this modem at least doesn't block IPv6.

I was on the phone with AT&T level 2 tech support for quite some time, but this didn't go anywhere, except for trying bridge mode, where the PPPoE handling is done on the computer. For a variety of reasons, a major one being that this would prevent me from just plugging in another computer, e.g., for testing, I do not particularly like bridge mode.
The last time I set up PPPoE on my Linux box was about 10 years ago, when I still had connectivity through ISDN... I had assumed that we are past that unfriendly setup by now

And for completeness, I also tried a Motorola 2210-02 with a non-AT&T firmware. While that didn't have the ping issue and let ICMP through fine, it was only marginally better than the D-Link in that it had a DHCP lease renewal time of 2 minutes, non-changeable of course
Why can't the modem manufacturers not just provide a firmware that isn't crippled???

Until recently, I held Adaptec SCSI controllers in high regard.
But, it turns out the "RAID" support on their 39320 cards is just fake RAID, in other words, software RAID.
And they don't even provide the kernel driver module for Linux (called a320raid), except in binary form for some rather specific Linux distributions with specific kernels.
I found this out the hard way, trying to set up a RAID system with an Adaptec 39320A-R card

I have a real hardware RAID card in another Linux system, using an LSI Logic Megaraid card.
If I wanted software RAID, I could have used the raidtools on Linux without an expensive Adaptec card.

So, bottom line: Adaptec will not get any more of my money. Ever.