I Am Not a Smart Man, But I Know What Erase Means

Note to Self: When using a disk cloning utility to save your system image so that you can wipe the drive and set the partitions up in a more sensible manner, it is best not to save the backup to a partition on the drive that you plan to erase. If you do this, you may accidentally delete said image when you proceed with the repartitioning process and not realize that the image has been deleted until you are ready to restore it.

Ugh… Not a brilliant move.

There Was a Dream

“And it comes in black and it comes in white
And I’m frightened by those who don’t see it.”

It reminds me very much of Jacob’s Ladder. This is not a bad thing.

The Jackboot of Corporate Democracy

Via John Cole…

After the oil rig explosion in the Gulf, Transocean appears to have engaged in a deliberate scheme of isolation, sleep deprivation, and intimidation in order to extort signatures out of the workers. After being pulled out of the sea after the explosion, the workers were held on the ships offshore for 36-40 hours, denied access to phones or radios in order to call loved ones, drug tested, deprived of sleep, and then told to sign on the dotted line “or else”. From the Guardian UK:

By Davis’s estimate, it took 12-15 minutes to get from the rig to the work boat, but it would take another 36-40 hours before they were to return to shore – even though there were dozens of boats in the area and Coast Guard helicopters airlifting the most severely injured to hospital.

Some of the men were openly furious, while others, like Davis, were just numb. He says they were denied access to the onboard satellite phone or radio to call their families.

When the ship finally did move, it did not head for shore directly, stopping at two more rigs to collect and drop off engineers and coast guard crew before arriving at Port Fourchon, Louisiana.

The company was ready for the men then, with portable toilets lined up at the dock for drug tests. The men were loaded on to buses, given a change of clothing and boxes of sandwiches, and taken to a hotel in Kenner, Louisiana, where finally they were reunited with their families.

Lawyers say the isolation was deliberate and that Transocean was trying to wear the men down so they would sign statements denying that they had been hurt or that they had witnessed the explosion that destroyed the rig.

Teabonics

Also, this.

Weekend News, the Big Finale, and the Saga of the Vermont Computer Continues

It’s been a pretty big weekend here at the ol’ household. A number of projects were crossed off, and it is only Sunday morning (though I don’t think there will be much time for projects today, more on that later).

On Friday, we got our entire veggie garden planted. Jenn did a wonderful job tilling on Thursday evening, so it was all prepared for us when we got home on Friday. This year, we tried using some of that ground covering stuff (the fabric they sell in rolls for this express purpose) in a few places in the garden, with the hopes that it will actually help keep the weeds down (we are both incredibly lazy about weeding). It really made the planting process a lot more challenging, though, so if it doesn’t really work, we probably won’t do that next year. It is awfully hard to dig a hole with a mess of fabric in the way! I also tried planting first, then laying the fabric down, and then snipping through where the plants were. This seemed to work better at first, but it smashed the plants fairly badly, and finding and snipping through with any kind of precision (and not snipping through the “baby” plants themselves) was quite challenging. Either way, it went pretty well. Of course, as always, our eyes were bigger than our garden plot, and we ended up with seeds for a variety of vegetables that we didn’t actually end up planting. We do have:

• lettuce (red, green leaf, and buttercrunch)
• spinach
• red and yellow bell peppers
• cubanelle peppers
• “chili red” hot peppers (who knows what they actually are, that’s what they were labeled)
• carrots
• cortland onions
• leeks
• a variety of different kinds of tomatoes
• pole beans
• green cabbage
• broccoli
• Brussels sprouts