Category: entertainment

Speed Scrabble® – what an awesome game!

I’ve been a Scrabble fan for a long time. Because I didn’t do well playing it as a kid, I figured, I’m a grown-up now – the same handicap I had back then no longer applies, so I’m going to learn and be the best I could at it. I think a lot of the skills I learned playing Boggle helped me in Scrabble as well.

Anyways, a good friend’s wife, Barbara, just introduced me to a game called Speed Scrabble. Here’s a link to the rules:

http://www.mrkland.com/games/spscrab.htm

We played pretty much that way except that we started with 4 tiles instead of 7.

I was instantly impressed after learning how much faster the game goes and how the flexibility of being able to rearrange tiles on the fly. There’s obviously a different strategy in playing the game and I’m probably going to play this game more often.

Mandarin Garden in Berkeley, CA *****

This restaurant has the absolutely the most delicious Peking duck! I say, visit the place for the duck itself. It’s definitely worth driving a few miles for. They come with tortilla like wrapping paper instead of your typical bread – the skin is crispy and meat is juicy. In the bread, we put some hoisin sauce and cucumbers and green onions along with the meat/skin. The waiter was nice enough to give us a demonstration as well. The staff is very friendly and can speak Chinese, Japanese and English.

Aside from the duck, we’ve had other items on the menu that were quite good. I really liked the pot stickers and they seem to have a specialty called stuffed eggplants that other restaurants don’t seem to carry.

I’ll definitely visit the restaurant again should I be in Berkeley.

Living vs. Existing – Michael E. Gerber

“The difference between great people and everyone else is that

great people create their lives actively, while everyone else is

created by their lives, passively waiting to see where life takes

them next. The difference between the two is the difference between

living fully and just existing.”

– Michael E. Gerber

How to get USB devices to work in Linux or the ESX console

Here is how I’ve gotten a couple of cdroms / usb memory sticks / hard drives to work.

1) modprobe usb-ohci
Or
modprobe usb-uhci
(one of them should work, one may fail)

2) modprobe usb-storage

3) tail /var/log/messages
Or
dmesg
and you should see something like this:
Feb 8 14:50:56 supp15 kernel: Initializing USB Mass Storage driver…
Feb 8 14:50:56 supp15 kernel: usb.c: registered new driver usb-storage
Feb 8 14:50:56 supp15 kernel: scsi1 : SCSI emulation for USB Mass Storage devices
Feb 8 14:50:56 supp15 kernel: Vendor: SanDisk Model: Cruzer Mini Rev: 0.4
Feb 8 14:50:56 supp15 kernel: Type: Direct-Access ANSI SCSI revision: 02
Feb 8 14:50:56 supp15 kernel: VMWARE SCSI Id: Supported VPD pages for sdb : 0x1f 0x0
Feb 8 14:50:56 supp15 kernel: VMWARE SCSI Id: Could not get disk id for sdb
Feb 8 14:50:56 supp15 kernel: :VMWARE: Unique Device attached as scsi disk sdb at scsi1, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
Feb 8 14:50:56 supp15 kernel: Attached scsi removable disk sdb at scsi1, channel 0, id 0, lun 0
Feb 8 14:50:56 supp15 kernel: scsi_register_host starting finish
Feb 8 14:50:56 supp15 kernel: SCSI device sdb: 2001888 512-byte hdwr sectors (976 MB)
Feb 8 14:50:56 supp15 kernel: sdb: Write Protect is off
Feb 8 14:50:56 supp15 kernel: sdb: sdb1 Feb 8 14:50:56 supp15 kernel: scsi_register_host done with finish
Feb 8 14:50:56 supp15 kernel: USB Mass Storage support registered.

4) Now that we know that it’s sdb1,
Create the mountpoint directory:
mkdir /mnt/usb
Mount the device:
mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/usb

That’s it. Your files should be in /mnt/usb. To check, just run ls /mnt/usb

In a case that you don’t have /dev/sdb1 there, which is what happened to me once with a Dell CDrom, I had to mknod the device.
After plugging the usb cdrom into the machine, /var/log/messages showed:

date hostname kernel: sr0: scsi3-mmc drive: 10x/10x cd/rw …..

Unfortunately, if you type: “mount /dev/sr0 /mnt/mountpoint”, it will say:
“mount: special device /dev/sr0 does not exist” and that doesn’t do us any good. So what I did after that was:
cd /dev
mknod sr0 b 11 0

With that, /dev/sr0 existed and hence I was able to run:
mount /dev/sr0 /mnt/mountpoint

or, I could run:
ln -s /dev/sr0 /dev/cdrom
and run:
mount /dev/cdrom /mnt/mountpoint

That’s it!