I’m currently in Portland for a friend’s wedding, and it’s my first time being here. I was excited to visit a new city, but so far, I’m not overly impressed.
It seems to have weather similar to Seattle; it’s gloomy and chilly. Parking is costing me an arm and a leg, plus hotel costs at the Benson. For an almost 5 star rated hotel on Expedia, I expected better; that’ll be another review to come.
Right after checking into the Benson Hotel, me and my campadre decided to have dinner at a pasta joint that was favorably reviewed on Yelp: Pastini Pastoria.
It seemed to be a typical pasta place, there wasn’t anything special or bad about it. We ordered fusili Parmesan and fettuccine red pepper cream. I also had a glass of the summer sangria.
I definitely wouldn’t recommend the fettucine red pepper cream because the flavors seemed very muddy to me. The fusili was actually fairly good, as was the summer sangria.
After dinner, we went shopping. About 30 minutes in to it, I was hit with an incredible wave of dizziness. I staggered my way to the restrooms and promptly spewed nastiness out both ends. I had severe stomach cramping, and I almost passed out. That hour ranks among the one of the worst I’ve ever endured in my life…being stuck in a public restroom trying not to lose consciousness while sprawled out across the toilet in the handicap stall and a pile of vomit on the floor, I could just see the headlines now. Thank goodness I’m not famous.
I guess I had a side of food poisoning with my dish. My friend also suffered a mild episode with the bathroom as he’d taken 2 bites from my pasta.
Ok. After having had my iPhone for 9 months now, I was finally motivated to jailbreak it. Up till now, I was being a timid chicken shit about it, or maybe just a lazy bastard, or all of the above. This time though, I know that soon I will be making a trip down to my alma mater, Cal, which is 13+ hours away driving. Now, I’m addicted to the internet the way others are to heroin or crack, so the idea of being in a car for that long without internet was unthinkable.
Enter my decision to jailbreak. At first, I thought, oh I can fork over the money to AT&T to tether my phone for just the month I make the trip. However, upon signing in to my account, I found that the parasites are charging $45 for 2gb worth of data in the whole month! At the time I saw this, I probably uttered a few words that would need to be bleeped out. So I said, “fuck it, I’m gonna have to jb my phone.”
The one good thing in waiting to jb for so long is that it has gotten easier and easier in the meanwhile, especially with miraculous stuff like Spirit around. I downloaded the program, hit the button, and literally about 40 seconds later all was done. Phone rebooted itself and all my stuff was still on there, with the addition of Cydia.
The jb appeared to have well nuff, except for the Cydia installation. Something was buggy with it, so that everytime I accessed it and then exited, all my app icons were gone, leaving just the names of them behind. So I’d had to respring/reboot to get the normal appearance back. This was night #1.
The next day, my productivity was pretty much shot to hell from wondering why Cydia was causing that. I researched and read dozens of sites, and also kept bothering another friend with endless hypotheses. My friend suggested I just re-jb, but Spirit only works on original firmware, so I’d have to restore and then re-jb. This idea did not appeal to me. Finally, I determined that I would delete and reinstall Cydia (as if I was some kind of fucking leet iPhone user who knew what I was actually doing).
Via Mobile Terminal + Aptitude/Apt07 I ran the command to delete Cydia per instructions I found on a couple of sites. However, after deleting Cydia, I ran into a snag when I tried to input the install command as the instructions said—the Cydia installation simply refused to work.
So, I was basically sol. I now had a jb phone with no Cydia. This began the next 3-4 hours of researching the error message and trying to find some other method of installing Cydia. I love how a lot of the sites I found said to just re-download Cydia via Rock. I was like, that’s just great pal, but wtf do I do if I don’t have Rock either?!!!
I finally concluded that I had to restore my original 3.1.3 firmware.
However, I then ran into another problem…when I first ran Cydia, I guess some bug was the reason why when I hit “make my life easier” to store my shsh blobs, it stored them for 4 and 4.01 instead of for 3.1.3. After going home and spending the most irritated-gouge my eyes out- punch/kick the wall hopping mad 2 hours trying to restore my iOS, I gave up. I’m guessing the shsh blobs stored on the Cydia server are for 4/4.01 like the app says, so I went back to trying to find some way to re-install Cydia.
After scouring the internet, I found this lovely little gem: http://iphoneworld.codinghut.com/2009/08/installing-cydia-over-ssh/
I <3 you SSH + Winscp.
This method finally worked where all the others had failed: the key is that you need 2 installation files, one normal and one for essentials. If you try to install just the Cydia one, the installation fails. No wonder!!! It makes me curse out all the other people who posted the so-called easy instructions which apparently weren’t even complete.
All this to have internet on the road. Makes me want to go to Tibet or some other barren place and be a hermit or something.
I just watched this movie over the weekend. It was a typical guy movie: big things getting smashed with a simple plot and minimal effort from the actors.
Personally, Ed Norton wouldn’t have been my choice to play Bruce Banner. Something about his demeanor is too unassuming and wussy-like to me to play an overpowered superhero. I know, I know, Bruce is a scientist so maybe that’s what the casting director was thinking when he cast Norton for the role.
I don’t know how much of my opinion of Norton was formed from watching Rounders first, but I suspect a great deal. I know that actors take on roles like skins, but sometimes I think that those skins don’t come off very easily if they seem to fit a little too well with the actor. I guess that’s why the term “typecast” came about. At least his body was pretty hot; you can’t deny that Norton did his homework for working out.
Anyway, the movie isn’t anything really special; conflicted hero, some type of unresolved issue with a woman, lots of stuff being blown up, and various power-hungry evildoers. End of story. I rate it 5 out of 10.
So, I agreed to take my coworker’s cat for 5 days while she was out of town. Her cat isn’t shy in the least and is very affectionate, so I thought it might be a good opportunity to see how Tabitha fared with another cat around. However, my coworker warned me the day before that her cat hates all other cats, without exception. I thought to myself, let’s see how this goes. Boy, was this ever the mistake of a lifetime!
In the past 4 days, that cat has done the following: Today is the last day of the ordeal. Obviously, I’ll be uber happy to get rid of that crazy devil’s spawn.
If you know anything about Microsoft at all, then you know that a very large percentage of the people who work there are actually contractors. The prevailing joke is that most of the work around here gets done by the contractors, while the FTEs are off on their little “morale events” and vacations.
Anyway, a lot of us contractors get put into little bays with desks. Imagine the typical cubicle hell minus all the little cubicle walls separating each desk from the next. We just have one set of walls around the entire section. You get the picture.
What I find somewhat irritating is that every now and then people walk through our bay instead of the walkway right next to the bay. Yes, you can technically get to point B walking through our bay. Does that mean you should do it?
For all intents and purposes, the bay is our office. Do you wander through other peoples’ offices just because they happen to have a door on each end? No, you say? THEN WHY THE HELL DO YOU DO IT TO US??
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