Check it out:  The Two Classes of Airport Contraband

There’s an article in this morning’s Hartford Courant, but interestingly enough they won’t allow any comments on the article. Well, actually it is not interesting, because Hartford Mayor Eddie Perez recently berated the Courant for the negative publicity the city receives. I guess the Courant is buckling under to the “Little Professor.”

The shootings took place in three attacks after the West Indian Pride Parade. The 11 victims included a 7 year old boy and a 17-month old girl.

A follow-up article relates that Perez and the police chief (how does this guy keep his job?) have imposed a 30-day curfew. Anyone under 18 who is out after 9pm without a parent or guardian will be picked up by police and take to a community center where the parents can pick them up.

Wow. Lotta teeth in that, eh? Well, at least they’ll be out of the line of fire. Unless a shooting erupts at the community center.

Things were never this bad when Mayor Mike ran the show.

Technorati Tags: Hartford, Connecticut, violence

Loveland Pass, Continental Divide, originally uploaded by fgw_three.

It’s hard to believe that it has been a year since we went out to Denver for Havanese Nationals ‘07.

While we were there we took a side trip up to Loveland Pass on the Continental Divide. We did hike up one of the trails a ways on the other side of the pass from where this photo was taken.

The girls ran up the trail like mountain goats. It was hard to breathe for me, but I did not get headaches or anything. It was really fun.

I miss being up there…..

Amero, you may remember, was the substitute teacher accused of 30-odd counts of risk of injury to a minor, alleging that she allowed seventh grade students to view pornography. Ultimately, Judge Strackbein set aside the conviction because it was clear that the Norwich Police Department totally screwed up the investigation. In fact, the Norwich Police Department appeared to be as computer-illiterate as Julie Amero.

The Norwich School District failed to take the simplest precautions to protect their computers from spyware, and instead tried to blame a substitute teacher for the flood of pop-ups that occurred on the computer.

Amazingly enough, this case is still open on the books. The State won’t seek dismissal of charges, probably because they are trying to save face.

Here is a link to the most recent column by Rick Green that describes the current state of this travesty.

In this day and age, where taser-happy police departments routinely trample people’s civil rights, encouraged by a government that things nothing of routinely spying on its own people, the Connecticut State’s Attorney should step up to the plate and get this case off the books by requesting that charges against Amero be dismissed. If nothing else, it might help restore the faith of the people in a small part of their government.

Okay, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not the world’s biggest basketball fan. In fact, if you made me rank it, I’d rank it 4th among the four major sports: baseball/football tied for first, then hockey, then basketball.

And since the days of Bird, Parrish, McHale, Maxwell and Ainge, NBA hoops was far down on the list. Far down.

To me, the game evolved away from a team game and into an urban playground game of who could be the baddest ass and dunk the best.

Then, a year ago, Danny Ainge pulled the proverbial rabbit out of his hat, in response to an abyssmal season, and even more abyssmal luck (as if it were possible)in the draft. There was some buzz about Celtics basketball again.

Even without the Celtics buzz, it’s been a great decade to be a Boston fan!

OK, in the interest of full disclosure, I’m a NY Giants football fan (don’t ask, long story, subject of another post), but watching the Pats has become a second favorite obsession with me. Between the Pats and my beloved Red Sox, how could you not love Boston sports?????

And then there was the second worst season in Celtics history, resulting in the second worst record in the NBA, and I’m figuring they’re getting Odin. Yeah, right.

Instead, when the ping-pong balls throw a 5th place pick, Ainge starts wheeling and dealing and gets Garnett and Allen.

I decided to watch some early season games. Then, I decided to watch a few more. And when I couldn’t watch, I’d check stuff out on-line….

The other night the Celtic annihilated the Lakers. They cried ‘Havoc’ and let slip the dogs of war — crying ‘Havoc’ meant no mercy, no quarter. Every time Ray Allen drained a three, the stake was driven a little bit deeper into the heart of LA…. And every trey made me love these guys a little bit more….

And so Banner #17 will hang from the rafters. Somewhere, Red is enjoying the cigar he gave to Paul Pierce with instructions: “I won’t be there. Hang on to this and enjoy it for me.” Somewhere, DJ was sitting back with Red and lovin’ every minute of it…

The last seven years in Boston have been pretty incredible. Three Patriot Supes, two World Series (one for the grandparents and one for the current generation, as they say) and now Celtic Green has another. All we need is for the Bruins to get off the schneid….

Way to go Boston! Way To Go!!!!!!

Technorati Tags: sports, Celtics, championship, basketball, baseball, football

I have an external USB drive that seemed to get a bit overheated, and dropped a couple of sectors. That was bad, since I couldn’t access it from Windows XP, and chkdisk didn’t help.

chkdisk could find the bad sectors but couldn’t repair them.

So I turned to Linux to help fix the problem.

What I Needed

First I needed to pick up another USB external drive. Did that from newegg.com (they had the best prices at the time, and free shipping).

Then I created a Knoppix live CD. I had recently read an article on this, and a couple of the guys from the office recommended it too. I suppose I could have hooked the drives to my Red Hat Linux box, but I wanted to try something new anyway.

I went to the Knoppix download page and pulled down the ISO, which I burned to CD.

From doing research on the web, I found an open source utility called TestDisk. The readme for TestDisk was most helpful, and mentioned that TestDisk, dd_rescue also came on the Knoppix Live CD. It also mentioned a faster and perhaps better implementation of a disk rescue called ddrescue, from Antonio Diaz.

I downloaded ddrescue, built it on my Linux box, and stowed it on my C: drive on my Windows box, just in case.

Getting Started

My original effort was to boot Knoppix and use the dd_rescue program that came with the Live CD. It was slow. Over a 20 hour period it had only done about half of the disk.
I needed my Windows box back for certain things, so I aborted the process.

When I came back to it several days later, I tried the ddrescue instead.

ddrescue works in two passes. On the first pass, it grabs all the good sectors.

./ddrescue -n /dev/old_disk /dev/new_disk rescued.log

The second pass grabs the error stuff, reading the info from the rescued.log

./ddrescue -r 1 /dev/old_disk /dev/new_disk rescued.log

This went much faster, and since I had to be out all day, I just let it run. The next morning, it had completed, and I ran the second pass — took maybe 15 minutes.

I’m Back, Baby!

And so, after all of that, I have my stuff back on my new drive. I’ll format the old one and use it for temporary things, things that i can afford to lose if it goes flakey again…..

Knoppix — check it out.

Technorati Tags: knoppix, linux, disk resuce, live cd, pc

The demand for Billy Joel’s shows has been phenomenal of late, and the performer added more shows to his schedule as his scheduled shows sold out. We had decent seats, and it was my first experience seeing a concert at Mohegan Sun.

As to the venue, it was great, and at approximately 10,000 seats, it was more intimate than the Hartford Civic Center (oh, excuse me, the “XL Center” now). And the staff were far more courteous than I can remember at any other place we’ve been — the Oakdale, the Meadows, or the Civic Center. All were upbeat, and I must’ve heard “enjoy the show” fifty times on my way in.

Joel and his band were the only performers, there was no opening act.

The show was great. Billy was lively, and it almost seemed as if he were sitting in my living room giving me a private concert. He played most of his hits, all favorites of mine, but also included a couple, “Zanzibar”, “Vienna”, and “This Night” that didn’t top the charts.

His backup musicians were incredibly talented, and his guitar roadie, Chainsaw, did a wonderful rendition of AC/DC’s “Highway to Hell” as a break in middle of the show.

Versions of “Captain Jack”, “River of Dreams”, “We Didn’t Start the Fire”, and “New York State of Mind” were all excellent, and had the crowd singing along. He also played “Root Beer Rag”, which I never imagined he’d play in concert.

His encores, “Scenes from an Italian Restaurant”, “Only the Good Die Young”, and, of course, “Piano Man” brought the house down.

At almost 60-years old Joel still has it. He can play like hell, he still hits the high notes, and his give and take with the audience is stellar.

In short, it was worth every penny, and then some….

Technorati Tags: music, concerts, Billy Joel, Mohegan Sun Arena

On Friday evening, my wife and I had tickets for the Billy Joel concert at the Mohegan Sun Arena. We also had a gift certificate to the Michael Jordan Steakhouse restaurant there, so we decided to make a day of it and head to the casino early.

I’m not much of a gambler, but the atmosphere at the Mohegan Sun is definitely electric (it was my first time there), and the decor is extremely well done. I prefer the whole atmosphere to Foxwoods, which seems a bit sterile compared to Mohegan Sun.

We spent the early afternoon browsing through the shops, and having a drink at the bar in front of the waterfall. Since Michael Jordan’s opens at 4 p.m., and since we did not have reservations, we headed up there for when they opened.

We gave our names, and headed to the bar. The atmosphere was friendly, and make no mistake, the drink prices were on the high side. Lagavulin, my preferred single malt these days, was $18. Glenlivet was $10.

As with any upscale restaurant, the liquor prices are high — that’s where the money is made after all, but we enjoyed our drinks at the bar until they seated us.

The menu choices were varied, and the choice of steaks was decent. I opted for the Kansas City Strip ($46) and Kim opted for the Delmonico ($35). The sides were a la cart, and she chose a spinach salad, and I chose Mashed Yukon Gold Potatoes with Lobster and Creme Freche. Having our drinks from the bar, we stuck with ice water and not a bottle of wine.

(BTW, the water down there is great. Not sure if it is “city water” or not, but for regular, non-bottled water, it was very nice).

Our meals were incredibly delicious. They did a wonderful job with the steaks. If I’m paying that much for steak, it needs to be superb, and it was. In fact, words don’t adequately describe how nice the experience was. It was a phenomenal meal.

If I were passing out gold forks, Michael Jordan’s would get five from me, and I would definitely eat there again.

Technorati Tags: food, restuarant, review

One of the things I noticed however, was that three times during the ceremony, people’s cell phones went off.

Now, don’t get me wrong. You all know I’m a techno-geek, and that I wouldn’t be without my cell phone. But, there is a time and place for everything.

My idea of cell phone etiquette in public gatherings/ceremonies is as follows:

• If you do not need your cell phone on (i.e., you are not on-call, you do not have someone calling you in an emergency) then turn it off. That’s what voice mail is for.
• If you need your cell phone on, because work, or your young children, or their babysitter might need to contact you, turn it on vibrate.
• If you do need to take a call, answer it QUIETLY, and either tell them you’ll call them right back, or quietly move to an area where you will not distrub someone.

I think if more people did that, then less people would hate cell phone users.

So, my nephew Marc is now a doctor, and will very shortly begin his surgical residency. I hope for his sake, no one has their cell phone on in the operating room!

Technorati Tags: cellphone, technology, etiquette

For what? He’s lousy at the plate. A decent base stealer when he gets on (which seems rare these days — and last year too) but that’s probably about it.

For the second time in three nights Lugo booted an easy grounder which kept an inning alive which ended up costing the Sox two runs.

Poor, poor Julio. He says everyone is too negative. Well, Julio, here’s a positive for you: you are positively stinkin’ up the joint!

Theo Epstein has done a phenomenal job of building this team up, but I don’t understand where his predilection for messing with shortstop comes from. So Cabrera may have partied too much. He eventually settled down and was great while he was here. Then we got Edgar Rent-a-wreck who had a lousy tenure here in Boston because he couldn’t stand the pressure. (Take heart Edgar — at the pace Lugo is going he’s going to make your tenure here look like Hall of Fame material). Then Gonzalez who was great defensively and would have been fine.

But instead Theo brings in Lugo, who supposedly was going to be this offensive force.
He’s offensive alright….

Here’s a positive tip for Julio: take some extra infield practice!!!