Eric’s Blog

Yep, Z and I finally saw it tonight- mainly because it was about to leave the theater, but there was a place nearby that will still showing it.  So a few big points- I can’t believe they made this only a PG-13! The thought of my nephew being able to go in and see this by himself really saddens me- some people say this isn’t dark, but I suppose all things are relative, and if you compare this to something like Leaving Los Vegas? That placated acceptance is just wrong.

Two other things that irked me- could they have cut down on Batman’s gruff voice? I mean, please.  Secondly, I could see mouths moving in the last 5 minutes of the movie (and honestly pretty much the whole movie was like this), but I have NO idea what they were saying- the music was as loud as their speech, so whatever the movie was trying to convey was completely lost (unless there wasn’t anything to the dialog anyway, so what does it matter?).

Too bad. Overall, I think I’d give this a 6.5/10. Despite this, I can absolutely agree Heath’s performance was beyond impressive. What a loss to no longer have him with us.

So a while back, at work over lunch, the conversation turned to dentistry for some reason, and that reminded me of something that happened to me when I was back in the Army.  After my tour in Germany, I finished things up at Ft. Polk Louisiana (where when everyone got their orders from my unit shutting down- the only one that said anything was Sgt. Dobbs, and he said ‘well son, the only thing I can say is I was there, and I got bit on the neck by a brown recluse‘). Nice.

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So, PHP’s random number generation is pretty weak- it uses the rand() function which is positively atrocious for anything more than playing a guessing game. So, I wrote the following to give me something a bit better- maybe someone else can use it too (and it’s fast). The good thing is if it can’t read /dev/urandom, it’ll fall back to the mediocre mt_rand() function:

public function random($min = 0, $max = 0) {
   $response = 0;

   if (($fd = fopen("/dev/urandom", "rb")) !== FALSE) {
      # 32 bits of data
      $read_len = 4;

      # MD5 is probably not needed, but whatever.
      $random = md5(fread($fd, $read_len), TRUE);
      fclose($fd);

      $val = 0;
      for($i = $read_len - 1; $i >= 0; $i--) {
         $ch = substr($random, $i, 1);
         $val = ($val << 8 ) | ord($ch);
      }

      $response = ($val % ($max - $min + 1)) + $min;
   } else
      $response = mt_rand($min, $max);

   return $response;
}

When Z was in Le Grand-Saconnex, Switzerland, I headed there to see her, and figured it’d be a great time to get a GPS so we can use it for our road trips. The one I eventually picked was the Magellan eXplorist XL- it was a monster, but it had a big screen on it, and the reviews seemed favorable. I felt clever in that I used my change jar, and took it to the change-machine you find at many grocery stores. If you buy something from Amazon, they waive the transaction fee. Perfect! Things didn’t stay on the up-and-up for long with this thing…

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So, I had a old 32″ TV that finally had to be put to sleep - craigslist style. In exchange my buddy Isac gave me his 35″ tv that works great. Several months ago (at least 6 now I think), Z canceled our TV service (DirecTV), and we just have Netflix now. I think this sums up why we neither have satelite, nor a Hi-Def TV. This is my kind of humor!

So I have yet to write up how the movie Idiocracy creeped me out, but it’s a dark comedy that is really dumb for most people, and super scary if you look at what it’s really saying. Z and I both loved it. Anyway, here’s a video clip of Brawndo- one of the drinks in the movie that you can now buy. I went to buy a case, but saw the shipping was $20. What a bummer. So, without further ado, here’s the commercial:

So on my Opensolaris server at home, Zelda has a bunch of messed up MP3s in one of my zfs filesystems. I have since made a snapshot of the zfs filesystem, and removed the messy files to tidy things up. The thing is that the snapshot eats up about 40GB of space, and I need that space. SO, the solution is really quite simple- put that snapshot into a file, and pipe it to my linux desktop (which is using a 500GB hard drive). So easy:

# zfs send tank/home@pre_cleanup_of_zeldas_music | ssh -t -c blowfish \
elysium "cat > /export/home-pre_cleanup_of_zeldas_music.zfs"

If I ever need it again? No problem- mount the snapshot, and grab what I need. God, I love ZFS.

I swear I’m not intentionally writing chain army stories, but there are so many funny/crazy ones. I suppose this one falls in the ‘funny’ category.

I totally forgot about this one, and it came to me when I was taking all this junk that was at the house out to the curb for Santa Clara’s annual “we’ll pick up anything and any amount on the street” day. It’s a shortie, and so it’s a good one to write about before I hit the hay.

So as I stated before, my unit in Hontheim was being shut down, and we were tasked to ‘clean up’- usually that involved dumping a lot of crap in the HUGE ‘barns’ we had (P1 to P3 barn). So, I forget who told me to do it (pretty sure it was Sgt. Lamar), but RIGHT BEFORE lunch, he wanted me to dump a HMMW-V full of scrap metal and other shit in the P1 barn. Ugh- you gotta be kidding me- right before lunch?!? So not cool. I was probably napping with my crew, so I may have been a bit moody after this. I’m sure they got stuck mowing the grass.
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I think everyone can say that Fridays are the sweetest days of the week- it’s the longest period in time before we all have to go back to work. Much is the same everywhere, including my time in Germany. The problem is many did not have a European driver’s license (the battalion Command Sgt. Major gave me one for some unknown reason while I was still in ‘processing’ before I got to my unit). Anyway, to give all the troops a means to go back to Spangdahlem, a sergeant would grab the shuttle (this top heavy Mercedes Benz ‘bus’ that you see everywhere in Europe), load it up with about 40 people, and make haste to the base (where we’d load up at the Class-6 - the booze store), or the PX for audio equipment.
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Of all the memories I have of being in the Army, this is one of my favorites. Not sure why, but it’s got a bit of humor, and really epitomizes what the Army was. I remember this story because it’s soon Spring, and like most things in Spring, the lawn starts growing again. At my unit in Germany, there is grass everywhere, and like every other domesticated place, it has to be mowed. The decision of who gets to do this is easy- give it to the people that don’t have shit to do (namely my crew- the ‘Stingers’, for the missiles we were trained to fire).

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