dannyman.toldme.com


Politics

Voting in Illinois

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/11/02/voting-illinois/

I couldn’t sleep this morning, but I still managed to stay in bed. I thought the polls opened at 7, but they actually open at 6, so I should have gotten up, but hey.

Yayoi walked me to the polls. She wishes she could vote too, but we’ll be happy enough when she gets her Green Card. We do punch cards here, which is fine with me. At the end you put your punch card in a computer which checks that you voted the right number of times for each office. Last time I skipped all the “vote yes or no on judges” and other elections I know nothing about, and had to reassure the guy that I intentionally voted as an “undercount.” This time, just to reassure us all, I voted Democrat on everything, and said “yes” retain all the judges. For such an important election, it is nice to please the computer. All the same, I verified nice clean holes on 4 and 16, Kerry and Obama, respectively.

Down in Urbana, Tim, like me, had merely to sign his name and be handed a ballot. But he also had to help his first-time voter friend past some election judge shenanigans at Daniels Hall.

“She’s a student voter; for various reasons, students are held to a higher standard to prove that they’re eligible to vote. Bringing a photo ID and proof of address is the rule of the day; this is supposed to discourage voter fraud, in some nebulous way that only applies to student (read: Democrat) voters.”

Long story short, Tim had to call someone who called a lawyer who verified that yes, a credit card bill works as a utility bill. Tim is far more stubborn than most folks. I’m glad he fought and won, but I’d be more glad if he didn’t have to fight.

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Jokes

Anyone know what is an Alien Registration Number?

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/11/01/alien-registration-number/

Question: What is my Alien Registration number?

Answer: “It is an eight digit number, preceded by an ‘A,’ that is assigned to you by the Department of Homeland Security. It is used as your file or case number by the Court.”

Answer: Musaab notes that you will be assigned an Alien Registration Number by USCIS as needed when you apply for certain benefits. If you have not received an Alien Registration Number, just put “NONE”.

Note: I am not an immigration lawyer and the above information should be taken with a grain of salt. If you absolutely must get this right consult a real immigration lawyer. I’m just a random schmuck with a blog that has pretty good PageRank.

Original post:

<dman> Anyone know what is an Alien Registration Number?
<TanAdept> Just put down 2515049.
<dman> Q. What is an Alien Registration Number?
<dman> A. It is an eight digit number, preceded by an “A,” that is assigned to
you by the Department of Homeland Security. It is used as your file or
case number by the Court.
<TanAdept> A2515049, then
<Nicko> your missing a digit
<TanAdept> Shush.
<Adam> Hey, just shush the DHS guys when they come to your house.
<Adam> To take away your unregistered alien.
<Adam> Or misregistered.
* Nicko first interpreted that as “the DHL guys”
<Adam> Them, too.
<Nicko> they’ll just ship your misregistered aliens

20 Comments


Free Style

Alien-chan!

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/11/01/alien-chan/

<Adam> dman: What’s that for?
<dman> Adam: Petition for alien relative.
<dman> Excuse me, my alien relative is serving dinner now.
<Adam> Ah. Enjoy INS!
<Adam> I hope they make your alien relative welcome!

Yes, I hope that Alien-chan can become Conditional Permanant Resident-san. I hate paperwork, but I love Yayoi, so what can you do?

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FreeBSD, Technical

FreeBSD: Overriding the System Timezone

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/11/01/freebsd-user-timezone/

I just stumbled on this. My e-mail server is in California, but I am in Chicago. However, I launched my current screen before we ran tzsetup on the server, so my IRC window and mutt were displaying times in GMT.

Now the server is displaying times in Pacific time. Yet for my login shells it is displaying in Central time. How? (more…)

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Politics

Four More Days

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/10/29/four-more-days/

It just occurred to me . . .

FOUR MORE DAYS!
FOUR MORE DAYS!!
FOUR MORE DAYS!!!

. . . and if that dork does get re-elected, I can flee to Japan now. :)

And, per an e-mail from John Kerry, I send him some dough.

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Jokes

Management Strategies: The Body Meeting

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/10/29/management-body-meeting/

Forwarded to me from a colleague: (more…)

1 Comment


FreeBSD, Technical

PostgreSQL Database Restored from Filesystem

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/10/28/postgresql-database-restored-from-filesystem/

lnk.to is back online. I was even able to restore the database. I was skeptical, at first, because I could not understand quite how the Postgres database was laid out, filesystem-wise. And the install provided was different in layout than the install that had preceded it. How much fighting with Postgres would be required? (more…)

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Jokes, Politics

George Bush’s Next Job?

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/10/27/george-bushs-next-job/

<junta> Baer has come up with the perfect answer: “like all confused job
seekers, Bush should follow his passion, which is clearly bringing
freedom and democracy to Iraq. That is why if John Kerry is elected
president, he should appoint Bush to be his ambassador to Iraq.”

Well, I got a chuckle out of that.

3 Comments


Technical, Technology

Better Unix Through System Graphs

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/10/27/unix-viz-good/

Unix people tend to be comfortable in their non-visual command-line world. But sometimes a picture says an awful lot:

Nice Delivery Flood

Read that as “around 11:40, someone sent a mass e-mail through the server. It took twenty minutes to process, peaking at 916 deliveries per minute.”

What’s more, the vast majority of the deliveries were successful, and some failed. That looks like a legitimate bulk mailing to a fairly well-maintained list, and not some random virus or brute-force spam attempt. Server resources are not being wasted on nonsense.

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Unsorted

Cleaning Up

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/10/27/cleaning-up/

On Friday I got married. There will be more on that later. News has been delayed considerably because at about the time I was getting married, the server hosting this web site went kaput.

After much reinstalling, and recovering data (there were no system-level backups, but my web site files were undamaged, and I had a database dump for the blog data to October 1, and I was able top pull the latest October entries off a cached RSS feed, but anyway) I’m back online! Yay!

Props to Andrew, who has been doing a lot of the recovery legwork here, and to Joe, who brouht the hardware back online.

-danny

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FreeBSD, Technical

Dovecot: IMAP Server Sounds Good (So Far)

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/10/19/dovecot-sounds-good/

I’ve done UW-IMAP, Cyrus imap and Courier. Dovecot sounds like it took the best of all three:
(Thanks, Photo Matt)

(more…)

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Politics

Yuppies versus Hooligans

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/10/18/yuppies-versus-hooligans/

I was brought up to believe that gentrification is kind of a sad thing. The old-time working class families are pushed out by young, clean-cut, materialistic people who don’t know how to keep it real.

Brian told me there was another car fire this Saturday by Ekhart Park. I made a Republican face and said “Mark my words — we will gentrify you out of this neighborhood! You can run, but you can’t hide. Your people will be moved out beyond Aurora!” (more…)

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Unsorted

Marriage House Party 23 October Saturday

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/10/16/marriage-party/

What follows is an announcement for the benefit of the hopefully small minority of my friends in the greater Chicago area who did not receive an e-mail from me or Yayoi. In which case, you should drop me a line to make sure you live in my address book properly. Thanks! (more…)

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Technical

MPlayer Keyboard Shortcuts

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/10/16/mplayer-keyboard-shortcuts/

Yesterday we were abuzz on IRC because Jon Stewart appeared on Crossfire, and castigated them for doing a disservice to the people. Pretty funny to watch — if you watched it. Which I had not. And not even my TiVo could offer any help, because unlike Comedy Central, CNN doesn’t rebroadcast each show they do fifteen times a day.

Necessity being the mother of invention, I was shown the ways of BitTorrent, which distributes piping hot digital warez of all flavors through distributed bandwidth, and when Microsoft Media Player proved useless in the presence of a DiVX CODEC, I found that there was a Windows port of MPlayer, invented for Linux weenies who for a long time had limited video capabilities. Forced to fend for themselves, MPlayer now surpusses what ships with your Windows OS. So much for the value added retail price of $500 or whatever Windows costs these days. (more…)

5 Comments


Technology

C’est tout! Au revoir, dannyland.org!

Link: https://dannyman.toldme.com/2004/10/15/au-revoir-dannylandorg/

[English version available further below]
 
Cher client,
 
Vous recevez ce message car vous êtes contact des domaines listés
ci-dessous (voir tout en bas de ce message).
 
Ces domaines sont arrivés à échéance il y a 30 jours et aucun payement
n'a eu lieu pour leur renouvellement.
 
Aussi, ces domaines viennent d'être définitivement détruits, et sont
donc maintenant disponibles à l'enregistrement au public.
 
Merci d'avoir utilisé nos services.
 
========================================================================
 
Dear client,
 
You are receiving this email because you are contact of the
domains listed below.
 
Your domains have expired 30 days ago and no payment has been received
for their renewal.
 
Thus these domains have been definitively destroyed and are now
available again for anyone to register.
 
Thank you for using our services.
 
=================================================================
 
Liste de vos domaines / List of your domains:
 
Expiration           Creation             Domain(e)
2004-09-15 04:00:00  1996-09-16 00:00:00  DANNYLAND.ORG
 
 
--
Gandi
http://www.gandi.net/

My incoming spam has been reduced considerably in the past month.

But 1996 is pretty respectable for a domain name. :)

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