Death of the Base Station

You've waited... you've asked... you've requested.... you've suggested... you've pleaded... you've begged... you've offered amazing favours... so here it is.

My landlady is an artist and she has a lovely bottle-shaped kiln that she keeps in the depths of our huge and gorgeous garden. We usually like to pack it out with wood and issue loud oohs and ahhhs as impressive jet effects emerge out of the top.

You can figure out the rest but... well, blogs aren't designed for brevity. Anyway she put the kiln away as part of the prep for her daughter's wedding which was cleverly scheduled for the week before my birthday party (thanks for the fairy lights and porno pond, Carol!). Naturally, we were invited to the wedding and summarily carried the kiln back to its rightful position during proceedings - and recommenced burning shit as usual. The wedding guests were impressed. I'm still in touch with one of the cuter ones.

The kiln again played its prominent role during my birthday party, providing heat and jet-engine effects for the assembled faithful, and we incinerated an impressive amount of stuff. And then the idea struck.... what a great send-off for the shitface base station from hell! Apparently there is video somewhere of the insertion but those guys are headed back to vermont so who knows whether the footage will survive.

For now, here is detailed photographic evidence of the aftermath. Note that the fuckface bastard didn't succumb entirely, further proving that it is in fact Satan's own networking device.

when diplomacy fails

the gate to to the area under our back deck basically has one mission in life - to trap innocent people, who are doing the Right Thing by disposing of garbage and recycling correctly, into being ruthlessly tortured by wheelie bins and the other mutated denizens of this toxic wasteland.

the gate has a two-pronged attack - first, it automatically closes at a frightening rate, with enough satanic force behind it that it won't stay open even when wedged by a black hole. second, it makes an awful dread howl as it closes, which is the sign to Make a Break for It Fast. i have so far resisted lubing its hinges (with battery acid) because otherwise its attack would be silent and therefore infinitely more effective.

the picture shows the aftermath of one traumatic occasion where it almost caught me. after a brief struggle i lashed out and caught its midriff - it opened just enough to let me squeeze through, and although the injury clearly meant nothing to it, i did imagine that just for a second it looked a little hurt and chastised.

DVD scam: time for violent action

as we all know, but few ever admit, DVDs are a pile of wank designed to extract the most cash out of us with little or no return. the usual picture quality is grainy and pixelated and the menus plumb new depths of crap user interface design. but these are little things compared to the real problem with DVDs, which is...

...they don't fucking work! DVDs are supposedly designed to handle corruptions on the disk by storing data redundantly and employing algorithms that can fill in when data is missing due to a scratch or someone breathing on it or even fucking owning it for a month or two. i don't think anyone actually implemented this stuff, it's all marketing gook written by the same people who told us CDs were indestructible. right. and of course if your media screws up, then you have the right to buy another copy at the cost of the media. has anyone tried that? tell me how far you got. yeah, i know. wankers.

so of course every time my DVD player decides to freeze over, or "remix" video, or whatever evil shit it decides to do to your movie (like crash 15 minutes from the end, which my player liked to do for a while), it's clobberin' time. usually i just throw shit around the living room and see what happens. well, this time, my player screwed up a complete chapter of Pitch Black, and, as every Riddick fan knows, it didn't know with whom it was fuckin'.

so after a few repeated whacks on the floor, the remote finally gave forth its guts. in fact, i still haven't found some of them. amused, i tried to put it back together, which is missing the point really, but i thought it might be fun. i still haven't managed to find the lens on the end of the unit, and Dave was the one that finally coaxed it back into life (of course, it wouldn't do that for ME, oh no), but it's back working.

until the next time............. [fx: jaws theme]

swiss army knife 1, powerbook screen 0

now, i do love my powerbooks. for the most part, cdrom drive shenanigans aside, they've been troopers for the years that they have been put through hell by yours truly.

unfortunately this is nothing when compared with the Power of the Crazy Juice.

we had a Bear River boys outing last week. now usually these things are reasonably tame - a few beers in the PCB followed maybe by the hard core of the group taking in a whiskey and soda in the Uptown on the way home. for some reason, this one turned into a rager. the hard core turned out to be 5 people total, all of which were buying double rounds at the Uptown. this means big trouble.

now the Crazy Juice takes a little while to come on, and i didn't realise this when i was pedalling back up the hill. i should have realised, because i was in a gear which is completely impossible usually. also i was chanting various kinds of nonsense to myself all the way too.... however, the exertion must have brought the Juice on, because BAM when i got in i was completely wasted, couldn't stand up, etc. i yelled that i was hungry, dave offered to warm up some cheese pie, i told him to sod off, he went to bed. i decided i needed a glass of water, but ducked into my room first to throw my keys onto my desk....

...fumbled totally and nailed my powerbook screen not just with my keys but my swiss army knife too. i'm still piecing together what happened because obviously it's all toxic fog at this point. tired and emotional, i then went on a kicking spree around the kitchen. various things including the evil bin got a dose, as did various things in the recycling box. this brought eric to investigate, though by the time he arrived i had already fallen over onto my bedroom floor, and passed out (it seems). he looked into my room and couldn't see any movement at all.

i vaguely remember getting off the floor at some point and getting into bed, i'm not sure though....

so now i have to survive with only 75% of the usable space on my powerbook screen. it's actually not too bad, though i do have to go fishing for my drive icons after a reboot. jolly fun. good job i didn't nail the other side, that would have been major inconvenient...

revenge on the airport base station

my airport base station and i go back a long way. my relationship with this piece of evil shit, going back 5 years, is a sordid story of bitter rivalry, duelling at dawn, complex strategy, out-and-out slugfests, sneaky rear-guard actions, and suicide missions. i want back all the years of my life i spent trying to outwit this alien butt-plug into doing what its manual suggests it might be able to do if it was ever in a good mood. which it isn't.

the basic problem is that it's very picky about who it talks to. examples -

- pretty trashed sony vaio laptop, complete with cheap and cheesy usb wireless adapter. given that most of its hardware has shit out, it's amazing that it works at all. but my airport base station is its bitch. the sony pulls about 1 megabyte per second through my traitorous scumbag of a wireless router. pretty respectable for an original series base station.

- scruffy powerbook g4/667/dvi, with original series airport card. this usually runs the latest and greatest (in terms of the number of unfixed bugs) version of MacOS X. when X gets to be releasable in terms of quality, they will give it a real version number. anyway the last version of MacOS that my fuckwit of an airport router liked was 10.3.8, and it's been pulling very cruel tricks with every version since. on this machine, its fave trick is to drop the connection towards the end of a long transfer, or in the middle of a remote compile, or just when you're enjoying your browser session. at most, this machine and the base station, despite being apple products from end to end, barely manage 200k/sec.

- trashed powerbook g4/667, again with original series airport card. this is the machine that played every Lovemakers show but one. the exception was the last cafe du nord show, where it ate its disk and i had to use Adam's laptop instead. anyway, this machine and the piss artist base station got on reasonably well under 10.3.2, but after the disk crash apple forced me to go to 10.3.9. (i'm not going to tiger on this machine until the audio fuckups stop, and as of 10.4.7 they have not.) now as we all know, and as my wankbrain base station thoroughly enjoys, 10.3.9 is a cruel joke played on the macintosh user base in order to force them to go to tiger. i literally could not get any of my machines to talk to the network reliably on 10.3.9. i could hear my base station chuckling through the night when it thought nobody was listening. anyway the music machine had to stay on 10.3.9, so it barely managed one bar (when the tiger machine thought there was full bars) and throughput was a thoroughly crap 100k. maybe.

- of course, when i rebooted the music machine under 9.2, which put it back in the shitface base station's good books, throughput tripled to 300k and connection stability was fine. proof that apple's X airport drivers were the product of the colons of fetid dingos before, during, and after release.

of course, that's not all. the shitstation has regularly refused to talk to the setup utility and the admin utility, and also switches its passwords around at random. it also won't work at all unless placed in the middle of the kitchen floor. no dice otherwise.

naturally, this little bastard was ripe for a bit of sweet revenge after all this. dave arrived home with a netgear router a few weeks ago and after some screaming at it it works fine. so.... up till now, i've only wreaked terrible vengeance on the PSU, but the crapstation itself knows its day is coming. stay tuned for the Final Day of the Base Station. if you have any juicy ideas about how it might meet its maker, comment on....

Kicked Bin

the bin in my kitchen is a total bastard. it has real personality problems that regularly crystallise into very bad behaviour. for instance, it always pushes itself back into its alcove, so that attempts to open it with the pedal result in approximately 2" of travel, at most. not very polite. also it has this nasty habit of snapping at me when i feed it.

but the absolute worst thing is that it throws a major wobbler when you empty it. you might think that this is doing the bin a favour, but no - it seems that despite trying to prevent me giving it stuff, once it has hold of something, it wants it FOR EVER.

first it won't open far enough to enable removing its liner, and then when you finally wrestle it clear, it pulls a major snap attack. not content with that, it has sneakily applied superglue to the bag inside the liner, so even when you get free of the bin itself, it can still attack.

needless to say, this bitch got a good kicking.

Welcome to Total Destruction

aka Juvation Blog 2.0

the other blog was boring, and so i decided to kill it and resurrect it as my destruction diary. you see, after almost 40 years, i have finally realised that i have a tendency to destroy things. sometimes, when things aren't going well, or there has been too much crazy juice under the bridge, only destruction will put things right. i hope that there will be enough destruction to keep the blog going, but hey, who knows. the first few posts should be fun enough.