"Murphy was an optimist!"
From the mouths of babes August 28, 2011 9:55 pm
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Cathy, Daily Life, Evan, Family, From the mouths of babesEvan, 6 years old: "Can I go next door and go swimming?"
Mom: "Were you invited?"
Evan: "No, I’m going to ask."
Mom: "That would be inviting yourself and is wrong."
Evan: "So can I go see if they will invite me?"
Mom: "No. That would still be inviting yourself."
Evan, stomps off exasperated: "I’ll just go stick my head in the toilet!"
Evan, from the back of the house: "Quit laughing!"
Happy Anniversary Cathy! August 25, 2011 5:14 pm
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Anniversary, Cathy, Daily Life, Family, HolidayTen years ago today and after nearly two years of dating, Cathy and I were married at Gatlinburg’s Ye Ol’ Tyme Photo Boothe and its been one grand adventure since then!
This has the best decade of my life beyond any shadow of a doubt!
add a commentIt’s hard to be teen August 24, 2011 6:18 pm
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Daily Life, Family, Noah, Of Being DadMy 15 year old now rides the city bus to school. I love the concept! He loves getting a seat to himself, having air conditioning, and getting to use wifi on the ride to school. I have to believe that after a cost analysis, the school system will find that the cost of the city wide bus pass is cheaper than contracting the big yellow buses.
There are hiccups of course. Today, I dropped him at his stop and received a phone call once I was on the interstate, "Dad, I forgot my wallet." I turned around and picked him up. We drove home and he ran into the house, returning with his wallet. He accompanies me to Mojoe’s Trailside Coffeehouse and enjoys a frozen mango something or other while I drink a red eye and the both of us explain the STEM academy to the owner. Eventually, I give Noah the option of hopping on the bus at a nearby stop or having me drop him off. He opts to be dropped off at the school.
Later I’m talking with my wife and she asks, "Did you know that Noah forgot his bus pass today?" Of course, I brought him home to get his wallet. She replies, "but his pass is still in yesterday’s pants…" Good thing I didn’t leave him at that second bus stop!
add a commentFrom the mouths of babes August 24, 2011 6:10 pm
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Daily Life, Evan, Family, From the mouths of babesMe: "Evan, did you wake up on the wrong side of the bed?"
Evan, 6 years old: "Yeah, I woke up on the edge."
‘Modesty’ to be removed from the Oxford English Dictionary August 24, 2011 1:15 pm
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Daily LifeI’m fairly certain that if I combined all the female body parts which have been either purposely or inadvertently flashed at me today that I saw one completely naked woman all before lunch.
add a commentUS Eastern Seaboard Becomes Like California August 23, 2011 2:26 pm
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Of InterestAbout an hour ago, the United States eastern seaboard felt a 5.8 earthquake centering in Washington, D.C. Here’s an image from http://folkworm.ceri.memphis.edu/recenteqs/
The Greatest Ad Tool in the World August 22, 2011 5:55 pm
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Daily Life
See also
add a commentWhere did the day go? August 21, 2011 9:06 pm
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Daily LifeI’m tired for no apparent reason.
add a commentDown the ‘recover dead hard drive’ rabbit hole August 21, 2011 1:16 pm
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Hardware, Software, TechnologySo I’ve had a friend’s computer for what must be 4 weeks now. Fortunately, he has other computers on which he can do his work. His hard drive failed badly. I said I could work on it in the evenings and weekends. We bought a 1.5TB hard drive and I proceeded to fight to get the data from the old drive to the new. I succeed in recovering most if not all the data by installing Ubuntu 11.04 on the new drive, installing Gnu’s ddrescue, using GParted to resize Ubuntu and create a partition to hold Windows Vista, the used ddrescue to recover the dying drive to the new partition. Data saved!
Unfortunately, GRUB2 detects both operating systems but fails to boot to Vista, ergo, a crazy path of chkdsk and recovery console nonsense that eventually led to GRUB2 not even coming up. So, after 4 weeks or so, I decided this post will chronicle the recovery moving forward.
Sunday, 1:10pm: Grub fails to load. The last repair of Ubuntu says it couldn’t load a boot manager and one will have to be installed manually. fdisk claims "partition[s] do not end on cylinder boundary” but supposedly this doesn’t matter. GParted has been used to resize Ubuntu partition to end on cylinder boundary but Vista partition could not be resized at this time. GParted reports 3 bad sectors on the Vista partition. Running chkdsk again but it looks like I may have to blow away the partition and start again. Fortunately I have a backup on a good drive.
Update Saturday, August 27: My friend has grown irritated at the length of time this has taken. I have grown frustrated at the near pointless hours upon hours put into this machine. However, I have had several near successes. I feel like we are right at the finish line and giving up. I have reformatted the 1500GB hard drive and reinstalled Ubuntu 11.04. I’ve checked the firmware on the hard drive to confirm it is the latest. I’ve checked the motherboard bios to confirm it is the latest. I’m now using GParted to resize Ubuntu so that I can do the final copy of the Windows data so that even if I cannot get the machine to boot to windows, my friend will be able to read his data.
add a commentBacon just isn’t enough – This will be my Thanksgiving meal! August 19, 2011 6:26 pm
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Of InterestVegans, avert your eyes! Everyone else, get your AEDs out because you might need them.
add a commentMANKIND from Grooks by Piet Hein August 19, 2011 8:46 am
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Philosophy, Poetry
From the mouths of programmers August 17, 2011 7:06 pm
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Daily Life, From the mouths of babes, Programming, Technologyadd a commentNow that the day is over, I can finally begin my work.
Of Grasshoppers August 17, 2011 9:49 am
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Of Grasshoppers, PhilosophyStudent: I’ve let myself down.
Master: You aren’t alone.
Please allow your APIs to bypass 2 factor authentication – Mint and Paypal, I’m talking to you! August 16, 2011 1:15 pm
Posted by Doug McCaughan in : Security, Technology
I use and love Mint.com. I use and love my Paypal security key. However, I cannot use the two together. Either I use mint.com without my paypal details (undesirable) or I lower the security on my Paypal account by deactivating my security key (undesirable).
Two-factor authentication (TFA, T-FA or 2FA) is an approach to authentication which requires the presentation of two different kinds of evidence that someone is who they say they are.
What is desirable is the ability for to authorize certain applications to bypass 2 factor authentication in the same way that Google Accounts allows me to bypass their 2 factor authentication for applications that I trust. So, I should be able to go into my Paypal settings and say “trust mint.com without 2 factor authentication” and it would assign a key (guid, long string of characters, whatever) specifically for mint.com that effectively would be mint’s password into my Paypal account.
To make this work, would require cooperation between Mint and Paypal of course. To see this in practice, go to Google Accounts, turn on 2 factor authentication, then set up Gmail on an iPhone, Blackberry or Android. There’s the model.
See also: Google’s Getting started with 2-step verification for a demonstration of application specific passwords.
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