oddprocess.org

As you can clearly see, Emily really likes to giggle and smile!

The official word came out today, the Spectrum will be closed and demolished sometime next year. I believe the plans are to build “Philly Live!, a destination retail, dining and entertainment district.”

I’ve been to quite a few games at the Spectrum, and it certainly did have “character.” Let’s hope they will sell the seats to fans like they did with the old Vet, I could really use another pair…

Wow, it has been a long time. Everything is pretty much running status quo. Same old same old as they say. Emily is doing great and has now started day care, which means I am in charge of transportation since the daycare is right across the street from my office.

I also bought a set of golf clubs in the hopes of fiddling around on the links. I need to start out at the driving range and get a bit of consistency before I actually go and play a round. I just need to find the time I guess.

We still have plenty of projects to finish at the house, but I don’t see the need to hurry to get them done. Why do today what you can put off until tomorrow.

I was talking with one of my neighbors the other day. We like to shoot the breeze once and a while. Not about anything specific, just chewing the fat. Anyway. Out of the blue, he asked if I was a sports fan.

Heh. What?

“I thought so. A few weeks ago I heard you screaming at the top of your lungs, yelling YEEEAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH.”

Whoops. I’m sure he has heard far worse then “YEEEAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH” considering the Flyers were wiped out of the playoffs. Oh well, they are just words…

That’s right, it’s day 1 of central air conditioning for 2008. It is 84 degrees out and I just couldn’t take it anymore.

I should move to Alaska or Siberia (a cold part. Thanks eric) or something.

The Stanley Cup Finals are off to a great start this year. To be honest, I really hate both teams. I’ve always hated the Detroit Red Wings. I hate the Pittsburgh Penguins even worse, mainly because of their star kid Sidney Crosby. Let me get some stuff out of the way first. I think Sid The Kid is extremely talented. I think he is one of the best players in the league and will be for a long, long time.

However. The kid needs to grow up and learn to be a man. By default, I am required to hate him. That’s how us Flyers fans are. But us fans can only take the diving and complaining and crying so long. This only continued in last nights game 2. If you saw the game, you saw Sid pull a ref over to the Pen’s bench and whine and complain about god knows what. You would think that the Pen’s coach Therrien would be used to complaining. He apparently wasn’t used to it, because he took the time to do some whining of his own:

It’s really tough to generate offense with that team. They’re good at obstruction. It’s going to be real tough. If the rules don’t change, they’re just good at obstruction.

He then had the nerve to call Detroit’s goalie Chris Osgood “a good actor and diver.” That really is too funny…

Come on A-Rod, don’t be such a wuss! For those of you whom only read headlines, here it is:

Wife: Rodriguez fainted during first daughter’s birth.

Too funny.

$ find /mnt/raid5/mp3/ | grep -c "\.mp3"
17971

20,000 mp3s, here I come!

Although, I have no idea why I keep all of the different music I have. As you can clearly see by my last.fm stats, I usually only listen to Tool.

All I had to do was come up with a quick and dirty bash script to export the right information and mrtg does the rest. Here is the script:

#!/bin/bash
TEMP=`owread -F /10.8889C7000800/temperature`
echo $TEMP
echo $TEMP
echo "as long as I can remember"
echo "Basement Temperature Sensor"


And the output:

$ ./tempmrtg.sh
59
59
as long as I can remember
Basement Temperature Sensor


For the most part, you can graph just about anything with mrtg as long as your script outputs 4 things. In, Out, uptime, and a name. Since mrtg was designed mainly to be used with traffic monitoring, you need to specify input and output. But for something simple like temperature, those can both be the same number.

Yes it is 59 degrees in the basement. Whatever.

I’ve been using IPcop for years. I use it as a secondary router/firewall at work and it has been my main firewall at home for years. At home it used to run on the first computer I personally ever purchased. It was an IBM Aptiva AMD K6-2 233MHz system with about 128MB of RAM and an upgraded 20GB hard drive. After years of faithful service, I ran into some “trouble.” I walked into the basement to hear quite a loud whirring and whining from the corner where the computer was installed. The router was amazingly still working, I assume everything was running from memory and not the disk. I started searching for parts but realized that I no longer had an old ATA hard disk in my parts bin; Everything I had was SATA or too large to be wasted on a small home firewall. Luckily my main wireless access point is a more then capable Linksys WRT54GS. It took a bit of conversion, but now I am running with the Linksys alone. IPcop was really nice, I just no longer see the need for it at home. It’s served me well and I continue to use it at work and can say nothing but good things about it.

I’ve also been messing with some Dallas 1-Wire temperature sensors. They are pretty simple to mess with and get working as most of the drivers are already in the Linux kernel. There are a few software packages that allow you to interface them directly. Some work rather well, some not so well. I’ve been messing with owfs and that seemed to work the best for me. Each sensor has a hardware address and owfs allows you to query it directly to get the current temperature:

$ owread -F /10.8889C7000800/temperature
61.5875

That’s the current temperature in our basement. I have to do a little wiring to move the sensor away from our pellet stove, otherwise when that is turned on the thing will jump up to an inaccurate temperature. I’ve also been working with a few different programs to help graph the temperature trends. Once that is all working, I can get sensors for all over the house. Why? Really, why not. Because I can.