Eric Covener’s Journal

… makes Run Ronnie Run look like Run Lola Run.

Second disappointment in a row from Simon Pegg. An okay movie with a few highlights, but not something worth seeing in the theater.

http://money.cnn.com/2008/03/31/news/economy/copes/index.htm?eref=rss_topstories

Kent and Mysti Cope met and fell in love working for one of the nation’s top subprime lenders

The two didn’t say exactly how much money they made at their last jobs but Kent admitted they each had six-figure incomes.

Today, they’re trying to get by on his unemployment benefits of about $450 a week, which covers only about an eighth of the basic payments they owe every month.

Their home equity line, mortgage, health and life insurance premiums alone cost about $10,000 a month. Still, they are trying to hang onto what they call their dream home …

… they’ve made cutbacks: trading in Kent’s Corvette for a Suburban and getting rid of the gardener

… and you pay a lot for your home and you can’t get what it’s worth now

http://www.aboutcolonblank.com/2008/03/31/street-fighter-returns-chalkboard-stylee/

Iceland Woos Data Centers As Power Costs Soar

for every dollar spent on computing equipment in data centers, an additional half dollar is spent each year to power and cool them; and half the electricity used goes for cooling. Iceland, with its cool climate and abundant cheap power, is courting big users like Google and Microsoft as a future data center location

http://www.wftv.com/news/15735444/detail.html#

Ritas Water Ice is here! We visited the (big) walk-in store just off of Davis&540.

No pretzels yet, but oh-so-delicious gelati. The ice-jockey said he thought there might be soft pretzel manufacturing moving to NC in the future!

From Dick Morris, Mr. back-to-back Time magazine covers himself:

http://www.dickmorris.com/blog/2008/03/26/hillarys-other-fabrication

Interviewed on the Today Show one week after 9-11, she spun an elaborate yarn. The kindest thing we could say was that it was a fantasy. Or a fabrication.

She said that Chelsea was jogging around the World Trade Center on 9-11 and happened to duck into a coffee shop when the airplanes hit. She said that this move saved Chelsea’s life. But Chelsea told Talk Magazine that she was in a friend’s apartment four miles from ground zero when the first plane hit. Her friend called her, waking her up, and told her to turn on the TV. On television, she saw the second plane hit, disproving Hillary’s claim that “she heard the plane hit. She heard it. She did.”

So why did Hillary make up the story about Chelsea? Most likely to was because her co-Senator (and implicit rival for the voter’s affection), a real New Yorker Chuck Schumer spoke of his daughter, who attended Stuyvesant High School (Dick’s alma mater) located next to the Trade Center, being at real risk on 9-11. Hillary needed to make herself part of the scene.

She invented the entire story on national television, the Today Show, and didn’t blink an eye.

Her fabrication on the Today Show was no unique foray. It is her standard M.O. It gives us pause in evaluating all of her stories and calls into question her entire credibility.

http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/03/27/823924.aspx

Some folks outside the scientific mainstream have asked darker questions as well: Could the collider create mini-black holes that last long enough and get big enough to turn into a matter-sucking maelstrom? Could exotic particles known as magnetic monopoles throw atomic nuclei out of whack? Could quarks recombine into “strangelets” that would turn the whole Earth into one big lump of exotic matter?

I saw a system today where one lonely RHEL4 package had been installed, and it caused a conflict during 5.0->5.1 upgrade that ultimately “hid” the kernel package.

The last two messages in yum upgrade

–> Processing Conflict: kernel conflicts e2fsprogs < 1.37-4
Error: No Package Matching kernel.ppc64

rpm -q e2fsprogs showed a .EL4 version of the package, lucked out in resolving it!