Perley's Pontificating Place

This years trip to Block Island has, as always, been fun and relaxing, although the relaxing took a bit more work this year. Despite looking forward to a relaxing trip, I had to be a bit pro-active in staying calm.

I'm sure it was mostly because of my mood that I got annoyed at a bunch of nit-picky stuff. We got started later than planned and just made the ferry, but didn't stop at the nearby Dollar Tree like we have in past years. Should have been no biggie since we didn't actually plan on it, but I had been expecting the stop even though I didn't say so.

We usually rent bikes for one of our days here, and I always find the bikes a joy to ride, especially on hills, to the point of inquiring about buying a used one. This years inquiry led us to the right place, and they told us they expected some more in later in the day.

Sadly, this years bike experience wasn't as good. for some reason (my mood?), the bike seemed older. The first bike they gave me only had the back gears, so it wasn't going to be as easy doing the hills, but I didn't notice that until the chain came off and got my hands all greasy (they really grease up the chains and seat posts :-).

Back to the rental shop for a different bike, and off for breakfast at Bethany's Airport Dimer, which has a fabulous Crab Cake Benny. This is when I determined that I couldn't get the front gear to shift into low, and the chain came off in the attempt. Since I had used the rental shops Lava soap to wash the last grease off, I tried using some paper napkins I had with me to avoid getting greasy. Dang paper kept sticking to the greasy chain.

After my Crab Cake Benny, it was back to the rental shop for a third bike. This one I was able to get into low, although it took some doing. Our hope weren't high for the state of the used bikes we would be seeing later.

Oh, I did title this 'Block Island Glasses' didn't I. Stepping back a bit, when we were checking in, a couple of women who were just wrapping up checking in were searching for a Tony screw to the sunglases of one of them. She was sure she had set it right there on the counter but they couldn't find it.

Whenever I am throwing out broken glasses, I take the screws out, as they are so easy to lose. I keep some in my backpack, in a small case with other assorted small handy things. I got a couple different styles out for them to try, and before we left my wife Sandy spotted their screw on the floor. They didn't offer my screws back, but no big deal as I have plenty. It wasn't until later I realized they likely didn't have a small screwdriver, which I could have offered.

At some point early on, Sandy realized she left her sunglasses in the car. I gave her the pair from my jacket, which I carry because the bifocal nature of my regular reading bifocal sunglasses sometimes annoys me. The spare pair are simple black framed sunglasses with purple lenses I got from the Dollar Tree. Heck, the bifocals are dollar sunglasses I got from Target once, without realizing what they were. They have turned out to be very useful. and I haven't found any others like them since.

Which leads to the next glasses incident. Just after breakfast at Bethany's, we were sitting in the airport foyer before setting out, and I noticed the left temple if my bifocals seemed looser. Upon closer examination I realized the top tap where they screw onto the frames was broken. A little test and the screm popped out. Again, Sandy to the rescue, spotting the screw. I screwed it back in, and we were off.

We next stopped by the library before riding out to the labyrinth, and on the way in, the temple came off again. It was clear more repair was needed. Eventually, I found the screw to be of no use anymore, and cut up some small strips of flexible fabric bandaid ends to basically 'duct tape' the temple on. The glasses werenot as convenient, but functional for the time being.

On a positive glasses note, a few weeks ago I had found some reading glasses someone else lost and I thought might be a pair I had recently lost. They weren't but were very comfortable and the magnification I use. No one has yet claimed them, and they are my favorites. Unfortunately, during a trip to Six Flags, at the end of the day I found a temple had come off. Sure they were broken, I was upset, but stuck them in my jacket pocket for a later repair attempt.

Relaxing in our room, I had some time to check them out, and found that they were just missing a screw. Yup, I still had some left after the earlier attempt to help, so it was a quick fix and I've got my favorite reading glasses back. I'm using them now, as a matter of fact.

One annoyance we haven't encountered as much in previous years is the number of restaurants not open. The first one was more of a timing issue, but was the first of a trend. Froozie's is a nice little vegitarian place by the library, and we planned to have lunch there when we arrived. Nope, they aren't open on Tuesdays.

Then there was McPhail's, a new place that has a location on Martha's Vineyard. They are listed in the dining guide we picked up on the ferry, and looked good, they weren't open the whole time we were there.

Harry's Cafe is another place we have often tried to check out, but never seem to manage it. Sure enough, they are only opened on weekends, at least at this time of year. No Thai for us.

We had dinner at Finn's, and while there was a cute Golden Retriever outside, the food was disappointing. I love seafood, but this was not as good as I had hoped, or wrongly remembered. Oh yeah, and a personal grouse, BI seems to be a Pepsi haven, so on those rare occassions I want some caffeine, I'm usually stuck with Pepsi. Bleh.

As it turned out, when we went back to the bike rental place that. sold used bikes, they ended up having a couple that we felt good with, and the price was good considering the caliber of bike. Needless to say, more bikes, more grease. :-)

Sandy had been looking forward to getting some clothes from a shop she had had success with in past trips, but it was either something else or gone, as we couldn't find it. as she said during the trip, it was likely we were suffering from too high expectations of the near perfection we remembered from past trips.

I gave my new bike a good ride, down to the South lighthouse for a photo series, and around the long way back, checking out Painted Rock on the way. it was a nice workout, and helped me relax a bit.

The annoyance wasn't over though. I bought another magnet ring, like the one I bought last year and lost not long after. They only had one in my size, but I was glad to replace it. Sadly, when I was moving our 'new' bikes to a bike rack closer to the ferry today, it somehow got broken. Grrr. No more of them for me.

it sure sounds like we had a miserable trip, but really, we had fun, enjoyed the great weather and had lots of quality time together. As I started this post saying, the annoyances were more annoying as a result of mood than importance. We are headed home, and already looking forward to next year, although we will be glad to see our boys soon.

  Last spring, I was part of the large purging Sun did just before Oracle announced they were going to acquire Sun. At this point, Oracle's acquisition has completed, and many folks are lamenting the loss of Sun. I think it will be a long time before Sun truly fades, but time will tell. Fortunately for me, the skills I learned at Sun continue to serve me well.

  In my current job, one of the values I bring to the table is my experience with Solaris. Not surprisingly, some of this work involves working with zones. Even at the top of my game, it can be easy enough to loose track of which terminal is ssh/logged in to which zone, and even more so when multiple machines are involved.

   In an effort to keep track of which zone/host a terminal is connected to at any moment, and to help reduce opportunities for human error to cause issues :-) , I've started using a command prompt customized to reflect the user, hostname and zonename, in a manner similar to the following:

user@host:zone >

  This can be done by using the PS1 environment variable, but the tricky part is how/when to use it. The following is an example demonstrating how to get the prompt I use:

PS1="`echo '\033[1,35m'``/usr/ucb/whoami`@`echo '\033[1,30m'``/usr/bin/hostname``echo '\033[1,34m'` (`zonename`)`echo '\033[0,0m'` # "

   Due to the fact that executing a shell script creates another instance of the shell to execute the script in and then that shell instance goes away, trying to run this via a shell script won't work to affect the shell you are in. How do other environment variables get set for a new terminal window shell? When executed as a 'login' shell, there are special files that a shell will use on creation to set things like this up. The most common is the profile file. At a global level, for all users on the system, this file is /etc/profile, and on a per user basis, it is the .profile file in the user's home directory.

  Add the example PS1 setting above to your .profile and you will get a command prompt like the one I use. Better yet, add it to the /etc/profile, and all users will get it. Adding it to the /etc/profile also makes it easier to propagate this to each of the zones you work with. But wait, there are some other potential challenges, due to the login/non-login nature of shells. More on that in a later post. ^_^

    My current exercise regime includes early morning Step Aerobics classes at a gym near work. Combining the early morning and hard workout's effects on my mental state might explain my slow response to realizing my confusion this morning. On my way in, I'm usually focused on getting to class, so I didn't pay much attention to the 3-legged sign they were putting up in the lobby.

    After my workout and shower, on my way out, I decide to see what it was about. Across the top was written 'Exercise' 3 times, and there was a notice about there not being hot water due to problems at the steam plant. Odd, as I had a nice hot shower. As I purchased my usual Nantucket Nectars, I mentioned that I had plenty of hot water. The staff person said it was an exercise.

    Well of course, this is a gym, it's where you exercise. I tried puzzling out what exercise room or function would use hot water besides showers. We went back and forth a bit before light finally dawned on marblehead. As some ad from my youth used to go, "It's not an air conditioner air conditioner, it's an air conditioner, Herb". This was a noun exercise, to put the procedures for letting patrons know about problems through it's paces, rather than a reference to verb exercise, which most folks were there to do. OK, I go back to bed now. ^_^

    In my day job, I work with a lot of Sun machines, running Solaris 10 mostly. I do a lot of sysadminy kinds of things, from formatting disks, configuring ZFS pools, setting up zones, installing apps, etc. Recently, a co-worker and I noticed something unusual while laying down some Solaris slices.

    Without going into a lot of nitty gritty detail, Solaris prepares a disk by configuring it into 8 slices, from 0 to 7. Slice 2 represents the whole disk, while the remaining slices can be sized and mounted as needed. When you've been working with Solaris for a while, you get used to the slice approach. In this case, slice 2 was not configured as the whole disk, and instead of a slice 7, there was a slice 8 marked as reserved.

    Using my OK Googlefu skills, I did a quick search and found <a href="http://www.experts-exchange.com/OS/Unix/Solaris/Q_22107829.html">something similar here</a>. Using the 'format' command to view the partition table, this is similar to what we saw. Note that Part 2 is unassigned, and Part 8. Hmmmm

Part      Tag    Flag     First Sector       Size       Last Sector
 0       root    wm                34    128.00MB        262177    
 1       swap    wu            262178    128.00MB        524321    
 2 unassigned    wm                 0         0             0    
 3 unassigned    wm                 0         0             0    
 4 unassigned    wm                 0         0             0    
 5 unassigned    wm                 0         0             0    
 6        usr    wm            524322    735.97MB        2031581    
 7 unassigned    wm                 0         0             0    
 8   reserved    wm           2031582      8.00MB        2047965    


    Neither of us had seen this before, nor were we familiar with what an EFI label was, but it was pretty clear that regardless of how this disk got configured, we wanted it configured with an SMI label. Straight from the website we found, here are the steps for using the 'format' command with the '-e' command line parameter to change the label from EFI to SMI.

#format -e
format> la
[0] SMI Label
[1] EFI Label
Specify Label type[1]: 0
Auto configuration via format.dat[no]? n
Auto configuration via generic SCSI-2[no]? y
Ready to label disk, continue? y
format> q
#
--------------------------

   As it turns out, I wasn't paying enough attention to the line up for this year's Boston Science Fiction Marathon, as I was a little disappointed that The Thing was being shown again, having been on the schedule last year as well. Only last year it was the original 'The Thing From Another World', which is what I thought this years was too. By the time we got to the 'Thon, I was actually looking forward to the original with feelings on nostalgia.

   Upon looking at the printed schedule, I realized my mistake. This year they were showing 'The Thing', the more recent remake. It was nice that it wasn't a repeat from last year, but I had been kinda looking forward to the original. Ah well, it was good none the less.

   While watching it, Ken, one of my friends from my cohousing neighborhood mentioned that it was closer to the book than the original, which made me notice in the credits the reference to John Campbell's 'Who Goes There?', the story both movies were based on. I'm in the midst of reading some of John Campbell's early stuff and thought it would be fun to read the story inspiring these films.

   I went a Googling, and in the process I needed to go to the IMDB to verify the title of John Campbell's book. That's where I found out that there is another remake in progress, due to be released in 2011. I hope they do a good job, because I'm looking forward to it now that I'm getting into The Thing. :-)

   The John Campbell stories I've been reading came from Project Guttenburg, but they didn't seem to have 'Who Goes There?'. A bit more Googling, and I found a text copy, but the formatting made it a bit tricky to read via Safari on my iPhone, and everytime I went back to it, it got reloaded, so I lost my place. Hmmm.

   This is when I recalled Calibre, a cross-platform e-book library and conversion app. It lets you read e-books in many formats, can convert between them, and can act as a server, to make your e-book collection available over a network. It has support for Stanza, one of the more popular e-book readers for the iPhone, and the one I use most.

   So, I did some find and replace work on the text file to clean up the formatting, imported it into Calibre, converted it to the EPUB e-book format, and then started the server functionality. On my iPhone, I started Stanza, selected Get Books and then the Shared tab, and it showed my MacBook. Clicking my MacBook, it gave me 3 options for how to sort titles, and after selecting by title, it listed 'Who Goes There?'. I downloaded it, and I'm enjoying reading the story that inspired the movies. As a matter of fact, I'm going to get back to it now. ^_^

  The Boston Science Fiction Marathon ended, although late, about 7 hours ago. It was another fun year, with a great selection of movies. None of them were a disappointment, although getting dinner during 'The Giant Gila Monster' helped cull the weak ones. I enjoyed 'Night of the Comet', not only because it was an enjoyable film, but because of the nostalgic memories it brought back of the time in my life when I first saw it, and how much I focused on cute girls then. :-)

  I think my 2 favorites were the opening movie, 'Moon', and the closer, Sleep Dealer'. Both were interesting stories told in a 'near' future world, which can make movies hit home a little easier if done right.

  One of the things I confirmed, with my friend Ken agreeing, is that there is a balance in deciding where to sit. The main floor does have more leg room, and will tend to be the more active, participatory crowd, but it also fills up quicker. Meanwhile, the balcony has the lure of height that balconies tend to have, has more seats available usually, and has more nooks and crannies to find a snoozing place, if you want to do that. We got to the marathon earlier this year than recent years, to give us the flexibility of choosing where to sit, and chose the middle of the right hand section, with plenty of seats.

  I didn't do any count, nor did I ask, but it seemed like attendance was lower this year than last. One reason is that we ended up having 2 or 3 extra empty seats to our selves for stuff, which would normally be unusual for the main floor. Looking around, it seemed that we weren't the only ones. In addition, the energy level seemed more subdued this year. Perhaps there was more MST3K style partipation during 'The Giant Gila Monster', being the cheesy 50s B movie it is, but there weren't nearly as many witty or other comments during any of the other flicks. Since this year the whole week was made into the Boston Science Fiction Fest, with a variety of films being shown most nights last week, the pent up need for science fiction watching may have been spent on some of those less taxing nights.

  With the family home, and sleeping for most, I close my eyes with another pleasant set of memories, not only of the fun and movies, but of having spent it with my dad and son. I'm glad Alexei has enjoyed it, and I look forward to more years of going together. And if my live blogging posts have not been too repetitive over the years, maybe I'll see some of my current and future readers there too.  ^_^

Everytime I come to the 'Thon, I'm reminded of some of the 'rituals' that make this event fun, even though I often forget them when telling others about the 'Thon. While they are fresh, here are some of them :

1) Mark - during movies, whenever someone says 'mark', as the name or action, the audience says 'mark' loudly as well. Sorry, I don't currently know the history on any of these.

2) Ray Guns - a popular accutrement for any sci-fi outing, and even more so for this event, as you'll see in the next item. They have been selling some cool ones last year and this year. Maybe a Ray gun action shot is in order. :-)

3) Fire - Whenever 'fire' is said during a movie, again as a verb or noun, anyone with a ray gun shoots it.

4) Rice Chex/Wheat Chex - At audience inspired moments through out the event, though rarely during movies, someone will yell either Rice Chex or Wheat Chex. What ensues is a 'tastes great/less filling' style shouting match by the audience, with each half of the theatre usually taking a different side, as they shout Rice Chex then Wheat Chex.

5) Single clap per name - This one involves the beginning, and sometimes ending credits. As names appear on the screen, the goal is to clap once for each name currently on the screen. No more and no less. Can be tricky at times, particularly with companies named after their owner.

Just finishing up a horror oriented selection of films, with 'Night of the Creeps', a campy remake involving brain eating slugs as the driving force behind zombies, followed by 'Rabid', featuring Marilyn Chambers (yes, that Marilyn Chambers). Now for some end of the world flicks. ^_^

Cool news. The Somerville Theatre has added Surround Sound, and upgraded their projector to include support for 70mm films. OK, I'm no pro at this cinema stuff, so I hope I got it right.

Another feature that returned this year is the Manila folder full of sci-fi goodies, like comic books, paperbacks, t-shirts, etc. Much reading in my future, sharing with my family and friends. :-)

I noticed that my first post of the day didn't hit Twitter. Apparently I posted the second one before the hourly check that Twitterfeed was set to check posts for. So I reset my Twitterfeed to 30 minute checks, even though it's unlikely I'll post that quickly again soon.

The first film today was Moon, a really interesting story about mining resources on the moon, and the consequences. The next 2 flicks were man vs machine with different visions of the resulting future.

We probably should have thought more about where to have dinner, as we were some what indecisive when the time came. To my surprise, Alexei said he was OK with Ondian food, and so we ended up at Diva, where he enjoyed some Chicken Tikka Marsala. We made it back in time for Labirynth, the Jim Henson film with David Bowie.

We are all having fun, and we're not halfway through yet. See what you're missing. ^_^

OK, I'm in need of more practice with Snappy, the photo app I'm using. My pics so far this year of action scenes need some work timing wise.

So, Atomic Fireballs in our mouths, and if the pic isn't obvious, Duck Dodgers had us laughing. Now for 'Moon', a film I haven't seen yet. ^_^

Let the blogging begin. Three generations of males in my family, and a friend, got to stand in this line, waiting to be admitted to the Somerville Theatre in Davis Square for the 35th Boston Science Fiction Marathon. Our tickets were waiting for us, and they are selling the cool ray guns again. Since the ones I got last year for the boys didn't survive, I got them new ones, as well as I for me this year.
We are in luck, as the weakest movie, from my perspective anyway, is on at 5pm, perfect for dinner out. Now we have to choose from all the great restaurants here in Davis Square. After a bite at Dunkin Donuts for breakfast, we are headed back to settle in for Duck Dodgers in the 24th and a half Century. ^_^