Sunday, October 31, 2004

Just back from the John Kerry Rally in Manchester, NH

A busy, busy day --- we've been up in Manchester since 11am and just got back with enough time to throw some dinner at the kids and send them out for trick-or-treating.

The ol' digital camera decided it no longer liked the CF SanDisk (blinky 'CF') so I was forced to rely on the limited internal memory and take photos at the lowest quality. Fortunately I had the ol' Minolta SLR, which was working and took three rolls, but those will have to wait until tomorrow.

At this rally I took some notes between keeping a eye on the kids -- Wendy had a 'pink ticket' which means she got to stand up on stage with Kerry and a ton of other folks.

Right now most of the kids are our prowling the neighborhood so a writeup will have to wait unti later. There were a ton of people there!

Head over to flickr to see some kinda crappy photos from the event.

Fear my StrongBad Pumpkin!

StrongBad pumpkin 2004

Saturday, October 30, 2004

John Kerry in Manchester, NH tomorrow

George W. Bush was in Manchester at the Verizon Center on Monday and word is they were hoping for 12,000 but only 7,000 showed up! The gossip at the kids soccer game today was lots of people didn't bother to go when they heard Red Sox pitcher Kurt Schilling backed out at the last moment. Weakening Bush support in NH!

From the flyer:

- - -

See John Kerry for the final New Hampshire Rally

Sunday, October 31st

Gates open at 12:00

City Hall Plaza, Manchester

900 Elm Street

Featuring:

* Musical Guests Bruce Hornsby
* Children's Halloween Costume Content
* Candy and Free Kerry Gear

Please limit personal items

No Bags. No Signs. No Umbrellas.

For more information:

Manchester Democratic Headquarters

311 Lincoln Street

(603) 622-2549

- - -

I strongly recommend that you call the headquarters and try to get tickets for the indoor portion.

Here are some directions to City Hall Plaza.


[ Yahoo! Maps ]
Directions to
900 Elm St
Manchester, NH 03101-2007

Thursday, October 28, 2004

Digital photo of last night's lunar eclipse

This photo I took with an HP 318 digital camera came out much better than
those taken with the SLR.





A coworker said "gee, I just used my timer to take the picture so I don't have the jitter". D'oh!

Tuesday, October 26, 2004

Creating an audio blog reply using Festival

I listened to Dave Winer's Coffee Notes for 24-Oct-2004 podcast on the way home tonight and felt compelled to reply to him with an audio reply email about Richard Scoble/Scooble's voice mail. Here is how I created it.

* Get the Festival Speech Synthesis package for your Debian GNU/Linux box


$ sudo apt-get install festival

[...bunch of status about installing a festival and dependancies removed...]
$


* Create a snappy reply. I like emacs. This is exactly what hi-dave.txt looks like:

Hi Dave!

This is Marc No-zell and I just listened to your Coffee Talk with
Richard Scoble. It sounds like Microsoft's voice mail system is using
a descendant of the DECK-talk system that was created by DECK in the
1980s.

I'm creating this audio reply using the Festival Speech Synthesis
System on my Deb-ian GNU Linux laptop. Neener, neener, neener!

Well, thanks for the Coffee Notes!

Now I did do a little cheating here. Festival follows strict pronunciation rules and sometimes gets words wrong. For example my surname would be said as 'nozzel', so I spell it how I want it to sound. The same is true for DECtalk and DEC, which sounds like 'dec-tork' and 'december' (trying to be a little too clever ;-)

* Convert from text to wave format:


$ text2wave hi-dave.txt -o hi-dave.wav


* Convert from wav to mp3 format


$ lame hi-dave.wav hi-dave.mp3



* Listen to the result:


$ xmms hi-dave.mp3

Monday, October 25, 2004

Wendy introduces John Kerry at rally in Dover, NH

This morning Wendy had the honor to introduce John Kerry at this Dover, NH rally.

Check out some of these photos:

John Kerry rally in Dover, NH (25-Oct-2004)

He was on fire today!

[update 27-Oct-2004]

Check out this picture on JohnKerry.com -- Wendy looks so serious. Here is a taste:

See johnkerry.com for larger image

Thanks to Shannon for this picture:

John Kerry hugs Wendy Thomas after she introduces him in Dover, NH

Some other coverage of the event
can be found on Betsy Devine: Funny Ha-Ha or Funny Peculiar?

Friday, October 22, 2004

Installing ubuntu 4.10 on an Compaq Armada m700 laptop

In addition to a work-provided nc6000, I also have personal Compaq Armada M700 and gave ubuntu 4.10 a install this evening.

Absolutely no problem installing or having X properly configured! One nice touch is the installer found the Orinoco wireless PCMCIA card and configured it so the network was available immediately on boot.

Installing ubuntu 4.10 on an HP/Compaq nc6000 laptop

Here are my notes on install ubuntu 1.0 on an HP/Compaq nc6000 laptop.

Used warty-install-release-i386.iso downloaded on 21-Oct-2004. (md5sum a491903a2d2197651864dec3836d85e0)

The laptop has currently installed WinXP (hda1), Debian/Sarge (hda7) and now ubuntu (hda6).

Booted the laptop while in the docking bay and started install. Complained that it couldn't find a NIC, I told it to continue and not to use a static IP address.

The nc6000 has:

* Pentium M (should do power management, but stock debian kernels don't seem to include it), 1G memory, 60g internal drive, 30G or CD/RW in multibay
* embedded intel wireless -- works with ndiswrapper
* bluetooth -- don't have any other bluetooth devices, haven't tried
* IR -- haven't tried, but should try to get going with my palmpilot
* Broadcom nic -- works
* SD bay -- works under WinXP, but appears to be impossible under Linux

The docking bay pretty much just has a USB breakout, passthrough nic and power. There are 2 multibays which usually have a CD/RW and/or an extra disk.

At the point it asked about installing GRUB in the master boot record, I skipped that and continued
on with the installation. I prefer to let debian/sarge manage grub.

After the ubuntu installer finished, I booted into debian/sarge and added the following to
it's menu.lst file:

title Ubuntu 1.0
root (hd0, 5)
kernel /vmlinuz root=/dev/hda6 ro
initrd /initrd
savedefault
boot

Then rebooted to Ubuntu...

After about 40 minutes it started poking around and found that kacpid was sucking up 95% of the cpu. I did

renice 19 -p 5 (which was the pid of kacpid)

and the install proceeded much faster.

The X displayed looked nice along with the drum sounds.

But the Broadcom or tg3 driver wasn't loaded. Using 'sudo network-admin' fixed that.

Still looking around.

[still installing -- watch here for more info]

Thursday, October 21, 2004

quick anti-Bush joke from the internets

Q: What's the difference between Vietnam and Iraq?

A: Bush had a plan for getting out of Vietnam.

Sunday, October 17, 2004

Today's Del.icio.us bookmarks

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user MarcN on 2004-10-17

Friday, October 15, 2004

Today's Del.icio.us bookmarks

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user MarcN on 2004-10-15

The first year we put out political signs...

We've been in our home 11 years and our mailbox has been fine the whole time. This is first year we put out political signs and our mailbox is vandalized. Hmm.

Well, now in addition to a couple Kerry/Edwards, there are now signs for Pam Green and Deborah Pignatelli

Monday, October 11, 2004

Wednesday, October 6, 2004

Tuesday, October 5, 2004

Today's Del.icio.us bookmarks

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user MarcN on 2004-10-05

Saturday, October 2, 2004

Today's Del.icio.us bookmarks

Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user MarcN on 2004-10-02

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