The Screaming Viking

I was reading through this list about the 100 most powerful people in sports. It lists their name and their position, #1 is Rodger Goodell, Commissioner of the NFL. You have sorted VP’s, Presidents, CEO’s and so forth…but there are two names that stand out, two names among the 100 that are linked in a way no others are. They are not corporate moguls, they are not owners of some franchise, they are not directors on some random board…they are identified by only one word. No matter who you are, young and old…this description rings true. From my grandmother to Samantha everyone with a pulse knows these names. There is a chill that goes down the spine when they are described with this one word. A 500 page biography does not do the justice to their legacy like this one word. We all think it, most of us say it and there is no modern day athlete that will achieve this status:

Arnold Palmer PGA LEGEND
Magic Johnson NBA LEGEND

as seen here Griese to start!

Hope this isn’t bullshit…and with any luck a conservative offense with less mistakes is what it will take to turn the season around. BTW, grossman is in a contract year…

Got into a hell of a fight with the resident manager over the weekend about the kid’s birthday party. Apparently she felt that 730 pm was too late for the girls (6 total) to be outside playing and making little girl type noise. They were in the back, and sara was sitting on our balcony over looking them. “stay away from the cars, don’t ride the bikes too far…” etc…she was right on top of things. The manager called, sara answered and the info that was relayed to me was that they are being too loud and needed to come up. I was -livid- and went down stairs to yell at her for awhile. We went back and forth with neither side gaining ground. I walked away and began plotting her demise. Around 1 am I came home, as sara and I were sitting out side the sound of wind chimes danced across my ears. Confused as to how I was to sleep with such a racket, I proceeded to go to the manager’s door, wake her up and inform her that she needed to do something about the noise. Satisfied that I adequately disturbed her slumber…I went to sleep.

The next day I went down there with a list of things that need to be repaired and my instructions that the manager is not to be alone with any repair personnel in the apartment because of “trust issues” and our “valuable and dangerous” items. She informs me that they do not have a lease on file for me. I told her this was odd since I have my copy upstairs. She said I would have to sign another…which I refused, then she told me they would back date it. I was astonished they would have me sign fraudulent paper work and stated as much. She asked for a copy of the copy I had and I advised her that I am uncomfortable with that, and she should really take more care to hone her filing practices.

Sooooooooo, due to the list I stayed home this morning to talk to the refrigeration dude, looks like the fridge is shot. He said it was low on freon…and as most of us know for it to get low there has to be a leak somewhere. This explains the high electric bill and the minor problems here and there with the unit. The drain in the bathtub also appears to work quite well after the plumber was called to take a look. There is still the matter of the spot in the bedroom and the leak in the roof of the garage, neither of which I expect will be addressed any time soon. But, I do expect to save about 20/mo in electric with a new fridge… I should have gotten pissed off sooner.

For now, we’ll settle with just the repairs and any other menial shit I can find…I’m rather undecided if I will be continuing to pester the manager. I’m not terribly sure it’s worth my time…and in the end, the old people will win anyhow. I think I’ve stated on here before that we’ll either be moving into a house or a different apartment the end of may. I’d rather not have to up that time table, as a house payment is not going to be feesable till after the first of the year and I can’t see any apartment manager giving me a 6 mo lease in a decent place. Plus, we’re young…we’re obviously going to move…these old people are going no where and social security checks cover rent in this place. It seems that they would be much happier if they converted the apartment into a retirement community. There would probably be some age discrimination type shit…dunno though. As long as they don’t kick people out, but just fill the apartments with old people as they come open.

I got MS office 2k3 working on Linux via Wine last nite. It seems to work pretty well so far. I had to get the x.37 version of wine though as the newer version simply will not work. It’s got something to do with how it handles the Microsoft installer or something…I dunno for sure. I -should- be able to run almost any program through wine…but we all know that what you should be able to do is far different from what you can. Outside of office though, I can’t think of much else I’d need on there.

We’ll see how turning in my school work done in Open Office will go over with the school.

I got the VM install of windows to recognize the DVDRW as well. It took a little studying, but once I realized that it looks at the hardware address and not where Linux mounts the drive…it all fell in to place. I have yet to test actual burning, but right clicking and telling it to eject worked fine. All the burning programs recognize the drive correctly as well. I did notice something new with Nero 8 though…apparently it has some form of “phone home” feature, where it checks the key against a db of known pirated keys then pops up a nag window every 30 seconds telling you it’s a pirated key and that you should by the software. This seems like a reasonable step in the war against piracy and i can’t say that I’m too disappointed. With a little bit of research, you can find an open source equivelent to most of the -COMMON- applications.

It would be really nice if Microsoft would do something similar to what several of the Linux distributions have done with their free packages. Keep things in a repository and users can browse through it via a small application on their machine, it will install/upgrade all the software with just a keystroke. Pull down a piece of software and all it’s dependencies with just the click of a button….it sounds so Utopian.

Not a whole lot to say about the game last nite. The defense got pounded, and suffered several key injuries. The offense was anemic, putting up only 1 super bowl caliber drive, well shit maybe NFL caliber drive. Grossman slipped back to his old self, watching the receiver he is going to from the time the huddle breaks until the interception is made. It’s such a shame he can’t get the mental part of the game rolling, he has a very strong arm…even when his feet aren’t set you can see the power in his arm. People seem to be concerned about the “long term” but the bears are not a team building for the future, they are a now or never assembly of talent. The defense is spending too much time on the field and needs sustained offensive drives to provide the needed rest. Fatigue causes injuries. I’m not sure that Greise would be a better choice, but we can see for sure that he is not a worse choice. I’m disappointed in Lovie. Last nite with 3.xx min left in the game, the bears have no clear chance to win….Greise should have been inserted into the line up. It wouldn’t have signaled Rex’s departure necessarily, and it would have shown a little glimpse into how he might perform. We’ll see how things move forward…but I’m thinking more and more all the time that the guy that needs to be changed the most is the one with the headset.

There seems to be more and more discussion about Linux forking to appeal to the “masses”. You can read another article here. It seems like in the blogs that support not forking the kernel the arrogance and uppitiness of the Linux community shines through. For an OS that is designed from the ground up to be flexible and “code it yourself if you want something different” I can’t understand why anyone would do anything but encourage a group of people in to reworking the kernel to suite their needs. The people and companies that want to work on the server fork would put there efforts there, and the companies that want to work on the desktop fork put their efforts there…it seems like win win for everyone. I guess I don’t understand.

I’ve been running Ubuntu on the desktop for a week or so now and it seems to be working out very well. The windows VM runs fine as well. The only issue I’m having (and hope to have it solved today) is burning from the windows VM. 95% of the stuff I need to burn I can do with NeroLINUX, but I have a piece of software that works slick as hell for converting *.avi’s to DVD, under windows. So I either need to figure out how to do the same thing in Linux, or figure out how to burn in windows. There are a couple other minor things, like syncing up my phone on the windows VM and so forth. I’m not willing to say I could convert every machine to Linux…yet. And to be fair, I haven’t put a lot of effort into configuring the VM to do everything it needs to.

For anyone looking to get their feet wet with Linux, Ubuntu is definitely a good distro to give a chance. There is very little configuration necessary to make it work…but all of the functionality is still there so you can monkey around with things.