Eureka - its the Altima a bagless vac that sucks

It sucks (no pun intended) to be cleaning the house on a Saturday night, but when else are we gonna do it before the holiday right? We have this vacuum, and every time I use it, I cuss at it and it's bad design. This vacuum is definitely not for anybody that has pets, and pet hair. In this bagless vac, while cleaning our house the very small dust cyclone chamber quickly fills with dog-hair and must be emptied constantly, else you risk gumming up the whole damn thing and having to clean the "filters" inside. It would be great for anybody else I suspect, but if you are in the market for a bagless vac, don't get one of these if you have pets. I think I'm gonna go and get one of those old school Hoover vacs that are the standby; when the bag fills, you chuck it and pop another one in, no farting around with the dust chamber and dumping it in the trash 20 times when you are cleaning the house.

Justice - Cross

Last night I was browsing around on iTunes and found a link of the Best of 2007 editors choice list http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewCustomPage?name=pageEditorsChoice2007 and was checking out the Dance & Electronic category - when I found Justice - Cross - an electro-house treat of an album that is really fresh - check it out, its very dynamic and doesn't bore - try it cranked on headphones for a transportation into a heavenly electro space of tuneage.. definitely worth the $9.99. According to wikipedia "Justice is a French electro house[1] duo consisting of Gaspard Augé (b. 21 May 1979) and Xavier de Rosnay (b. 2 July 1982).[2] They are the most successful group on Ed Banger Records,[3] and are managed by the label's head, Pedro Winter. Their main trademark is a large light-up cross that shines throughout their shows"

Upgrading really old Bugzilla

This past week I was faced with upgrading a really old installation of Bugzilla, version 2.18rc3 and move it forward to the current stable, 3.0.2 - what was of course critical, that the existing database of bugs be moved to the new version, so that bug numbers wouldn't change etc. I first tried to upgrade in-place the existing installation via CVS; this didn't work so happy as apparently moving from 2.18 to 3.0.2 isn't very easy due to numerous changes. So I decided to setup a new installation (even on a new server, so I could have my way with the environment and not worry about affecting the old one) - after getting all the pre-requisites of 3.0.2 taken care of and checksetup.pl finally ran and didn't complain about anything I was faced with moving the existing bugs from the old installation (and server) to the new one. In the documentation I had read about move.pl and importxml.pl and possibly something in contrib that would help in moving the bugs from one installation to another. I tried getting the move button working in the old version so I could some how do a search, tag everything and then have it send all the bugs via xml stuffed emails over to the new installation - this was simply not required. I decided to dump the old mysql database using mysqldump - then copy this file over to the new server, I scratched the database so it was fresh and simply read in the backup sql file I had made on the old server - when I properly set the dbpass in localconfig on the new version, and ran checksetup.pl - I was surprisingly given options to upgrade and convert the database to a new format (with a scary warning about UTF-8) - I forged ahead and said sure, go ahead, convert - it sat for a few minutes and cranked modifying all sorts of stuff in the tables and then it was done. -- I started up the web server on the new server and bang -- I have bugzilla 3.0.2 working with my old bugs, sweet - so far. Seems this method of moving forward is not mentioned or documented except in a few random posts on newsgroups as last ditch things to try - maybe I totally missed something, but it worked for me and this particular installation. We will see how it plays out once the users are directed to the new release URL.

Wegmans - the great grocery store

So I made the normal Sunday pilgrimage to Wegmans to get food for the coming week; I love this store, they have such a selection and you never have to wait to check-out. While I was looking for a picture for this post I noticed quite a controversy http://www.wegmanscruelty.com/on the subject of egg-laying hens and the conditions in which they live in, and that Wegmans is somehow on the "bad" list - for either stocking eggs from these farms, or possibly owning the facilities, not sure - guess it will make me think twice about purchasing the cage-free eggs next time. Wonder if the facility they talk about in NY is the source of eggs sold in Dulles?

Think you know what Trance and House is?

I'm into Trance, Techno and many other variations of electronic music, you think you know what these sound like and all the subtle differences? Check out this beyond-cool application that allows you to free-form explore the different types of music, and listen to some classic songs that embody each. -- http://techno.org/electronic-music-guide/

Chipotle - porking out on pork burritos

Tonight Irina and I made our way over to Chipotle and split a huge double-meat pork burrito, it was beautiful; even without hot sauce. These guys do things right. MMM.

Hot Wheels!

Wow, so so many or more years ago I was on the floor playing in my Mom and Dad's apartment with my Hot Wheels cars - that fab orange track with the magenta-red connectors, you could line up a race all the way from the back bedroom all the way out to the living room if you and a friend could piece together your tracks. Don't ask me why I thought about this recently, but remembered fondly of playing with this stuff; my friend even had a battery powered "car wash" that would eject the cars and make them go faster, used a dual-rubber wheel setup inside. Lots of fun. And they still make this orange track? -- The track that your parents could whoop your ass with when you were bad... heh.