Someone Think of the Colorless

September 12, 2005 by Eric Richardson

In high school they had "Computers" classes where they taught you how to use things like Word and Excel. I never took those classes. I did "independent study computers" and built the school web site.

But tonight some of that might have come in useful. I've been trying to make some charts in gnumeric, to lay out financial info for tomorrow's DLANC meeting. I've successfully figured out how to make the charts, but it would appear that gnumeric has zero support for choosing sensible colors that will show up in grayscale. Does Excel handle that better? How hard can it be to have a "I'm printing in grayscale option" in the properties that alters the behaviour of the code that picks colors?

I was able to manually set bar elements to different gray levels, but pie charts appear to only let you say "Automatic", in which case half of what it picks just shows up as white when run through my laser printer.

I refuse to touch Open Office's oocalc app. I've messed with it before and despise its UI much as I do that of OO's word processor. I also installed kchart (can't find a working website for that one) and couldn't handle (or understand) the UI. gnumeric feels very nice, but pie charts where half the elements come out white aren't very useful to me.

Advice to Remember

September 12, 2005 by Eric Richardson

Word of advice: Don't leave your dhcpd.conf file in an unusable state when your server is running headless. A power outage can make it quite a pain to get things back up and running.

My Lunch on Saturday

September 12, 2005 by Eric Richardson

I have to say that I was very pleased with my lunch on Saturday. I don't cook very often, but this is one of those meals I can make fairly quickly and without a ton of mess to clean up.

The fried okra is just store-bought frozen stuff that I dump into oil. So nothing special there, but I like it.

The chicken is from frozen boneless breasts that I defrost a bit and then slice into strips. Then I lay down some aluminum foil (for mess containment) and pour some flour onto it. Into that I dump a healthy portion of McCormick Spicy Montreal Steak Seasoning. Mix it around a little, then roll the chicken in it, and throw it in the pan.

Just a little bit later you've got a nice little lunch, and leftovers.

The Joy of Good Drivers

September 09, 2005 by Eric Richardson

The printer I ordered two days ago came in today (it acutally would have come in yesterday, but a film shoot blocked the building and Fedex didn't deliver). I brought it up to the apartment this evening, and just set it up. Within five minutes I was printing. Installing the Samsung print utilities took 30 seconds and worked perfectly with LPRng, which I installed instead of my mortal enemy CUPS. I just printed the $50 mail-in rebate form, and I'm about to print the invoice.

The ML-2010 does curl the paper a bit, but I think if I get heavier paper it'll take care of that.

Midnight Ridazz: The Heavy Metal Ride

September 09, 2005 by Eric Richardson

Today was the second Friday of September, so that means it was time for Midnight Ridazz. The theme for this month was Heavy Metal and the route took us from Echo Park west on Sunset, up Hillhurst, east on Los Feliz, and evntually over to Eagle Rock. I actually made a cursory attempt to show up in costume. Point to keep in mind for the future: a leather jacket doesn't breathe at all when riding a bike.

Despite getting hot and sweaty, I did make the 10 miles or so of this month's ride in blue jeans, a black leather jacket, and a yellow headband. I'm not sure if that's at all heavy metal, but it was the best I could do on short notice.

I think my favorite parts of this ride were the three or times when I stopped to cork an intersection. If you're not familiar, corking's when a few riders will stop and block cross traffic so the group can continue through a changing light. Yes, it's illegal, but when you've got probably 500 bikers in your group you can't afford to let lights break people up.

It's funny watching people in cars as this mass of bikes just keeps going by. I was up at the front of the ride when we hit Los Feliz and I think Griffith Park. I stopped in front of a car sitting at the light waiting to cross, and a couple others joined me. The guy in the car yelled at us to get out of the intersection, and one of the riders told him to calm down, there were going to be a lot of us coming through. He honked and yelled a bit more, but then as more and more bikes kept going through I think he just started laughing. What else can you do when a nearly ten minute stream of cyclists passes by you at 10:30pm?

Anyway, it was another great ride. Anyone with a bike in LA needs to check Midnight Ridazz out.