My Quiet Life

The Nashville Homeless Power Project is happy with Mayor Purcell. At today's Housing Summit, the Mayor largely addressed "affordable housing", but he also addressed the concerns of the homeless by commiting to $600,000 in funds for 50 housing units as part of the Mayor's Commission to End Chronic Homelessness. He also said this was not the end and that continuing funds would be made available as budgetary review proceeds.

From the NHPP's press release:

This commitment is as a result of a request that the Chair of the Commission, Vice Mayor Gentry, made to the Metro Social Services Commission in December 2006.

The Nashville Homeless Power Project became even more hopeful as the Mayor turned and addressed the 25 homeless individuals who attended the Mayor's Summit and said that the $600,000 was not the end. That he was aware of our proposal and that he was still at the table to look at additional funds in the capitol budget.

Clemmie Greenlee, an organizer for the Nashville Homeless Power Project and a Commissioner of the Mayor's Commission shares: "We are ready to walk along side the Mayor. We could feel his spirit and his willingness and are confident that he will help us find a way to create at least 200 units
before he leaves office.

Wow:

If you are a male and understand that men were made by God to be the head of their home (master) or if you are a female and understand that women were made by God to be subservient to their husbands in all things (bondslave) then join us here and post your questions and comments.

Just when I thought all hope was lost for my love life.

Following the instructions here, I decided to construct a cheap off-camera wireless flash to play with:

1 Vivitar 283 EX+ Thryistor Flash with Varipower Module: $43.00
1 RD616 Receiver and 1RF616 transmitter (check ebay): $26.90
1 Flash Hot-Shoe Tripod Adapter: $12.95

Total: $82.85

Not bad. I still need to get some velcro tape or something to secure the receiver to the flash head itself. There's no E-TTL obviously, or anything, so the power, shutter-speed and aperture is really all guesswork, but I'm hoping it will still be fun to play with. I haven't done much with it besides take pictures of it for this post:

(more...)

I had some repairs done on my laptop today -- the extended support plan is gonna expire soon, so I had them replace the LCD, keyboard and hard drive (the old one was yielding frequent IDE channel resets). So, the Dell rep shows up and goes to work, and all goes well. As he's walking out the door, he says "by the way, it looks like the hard drive they (Dell) sent you wasn't a new one -- I fired it up just to make sure, and it booted up Windows 2000 with a Department of Defense login".

"Har har, very funny," I smirked and walked him out the door. So I return to my desk to get started on the tedium of re-installing operating systems. I power it up and accidently let it bypass the USB CDROM boot selection, and what do I see? Sure as shit, it actually does boot up right into Windows 2000:

So, I hit CTRL-ALT-DEL, and to my utter amazement, this is what I see (click to enlarge):

No fuckin way. Dell actually gave me a hard-drive straight from the Department of Defense. The big cheese. Interestingly, the last username to login was a "drumsfeld".. (Okay, not really, I made that part up.) So, a couple of questions that perplex me:

1. Why is the Department of Defense returning unwiped hard-drives to Dell? I mean, come on, guys.
2. Why is Dell sending me used replacement parts? (I intend to call them about this.)
3. Does this happen often?

PS: Dear feds, I already wiped it and put Linux on it. Your state secrets died at the push of a button. Please don't send me to Gitmo. Sincerely, yours in unwavering patriotism, Chris.

Just heard this news:

01-24-2007 11:38 AM — Updated 2:47 p.m. -- Education Networks loses decade-old work first won during Sundquist Administration

I know that this isn't a death knell for them, as I think they've been doing well and won a few other contracts, but it sure is interesting. ENA's contract with the state has been an institution up until now.. I am not overly fond of the company, but there are a lot of good people workin over there. Here's hoping they pull through..

For that special someone.

So, I bought a dehydrator. I've been making a lot of beef jerky. Aside from the fact that it gave me something to do compulsively, the thing that rules the most about it is that it's like having an air freshener that smells like delicious. Except the delicious is real, and you can eat it when it's done.

Not long after I took this shot, a cop came by and stopped next to them and told them to move along. Er, well, by "told", I mean that he sounded his siren. He didn't actually "tell" them, per se. He used his siren. He sounded it. And then sounded it again. and again. See, he couldn't actually be bothered to get out of his car -- it's awfully cold out, see. But they had to move along. So he sounded his siren, until they woke up, rubbed their eyes, and left. Where did they go? I don't know -- probably somewhere colder.

The cop never got out of his car.