from the edge of the deep green sea

I have some stuff I am getting rid of. If interested and you live in Costa Rica please leave a comment (use your real e-mail, it won’t be displayed) and I’ll contact you. Or just write an e-mail to:

me AT grumpytico DOT com

Amazon Kindle 2nd Generation

This kindle includes the leather cover ($30) and 2 year extended warranty ($71.29). I bought the kindle on August 15th 2009 and I have used it 5 times, so it’s basically brand new. I bought it for $299 and I’m willing to let the whole thing go for $250 (includes the warranty and the leather cover).

Why am I selling it? I bought as a reference book for programming books, which I usually scribble and take notes. The Kindle is not a good candidate for this, but if you would just use it to read w/o taking notes, it pretty much works like a charm.

More info on the same unit sold by Amazon found here.

Apple Time Capsule 500 GB (SOLD!!! NO LONGER AVAILABLE!)

I bought this unit back in January 2009, this model is no longer available, only the 1 TB by Apple which sells for $300. It is a great router, I was using to transmit audio to my outside porch which is far form where the router used to sit, and let’s just say that music streaming was not great. If you want to use for anything else, it works like a charm. It has a speedy 500GB hard drive, which works great for using with Time Machine.

Even though this unit is out of warranty, if you have a Mac that has AppleCare, this unit’s warranty is covered under the same contract, read about it here. (I called Apple and they confirmed this as well).

Price: $200.

Call of Duty – Modern Warfare 2 XBOX 360

I really don’t know what the hype is behind this game, I really did not found it that amus…ehhrr…I mean, it’s the most super intense most awesome game ever – yours to keep for $40.

Presidential elections in Costa Rica are mere days away from happening. At this point, I’ve been absent from the presidential debates and other political events that could raise awareness on what their plans are. While I try to figure out on whether I should vote or take a sharpie and draw a picture of a penis and vote for it on the ballot (yes, I quite frankly believe a random johnson is a better candidate sometimes), I can’t help but ponder on what these people could offer to make Costa Rica a better place. This post, as offensive as it may be to some, is about those ideas. On how one man whose alter ego is known as Grumpytico, can make Costa Rica a better place

Drugs, sex, and rock and roll

This one is easy. Legalize pot, just do it. Counterpoints to this idea would be that pot is a gateway drug, and that could be, but so are alcohol and cigarettes, which are available to anyone and can cause a physical addiction whereas pot doesn’t. The difference between those 2 and pot is that the government can profit from taxes sold on those products. So just legalize pot. If you have ever smoked weed you know it’s nothing, and if you have never smoked it, then you are not entitled to an opinion.

What good can come from this? Government can make money from pot taxes and my friends could get quality pot whenever they wanted. If you are my nephew/niece and you are reading this: “Drugs are bad…mmmmmmmkay?”

Let’s all help the poor

Poor people are always mentioned during the pre-elections. Every candidate has a master plan on helping those who don’t work and procreate like rats to have a better life. This is one of the points for which I won’t vote for Otton Solís. His magic plan involves giving poor people lots of money and taxing the living shit out of those who make money to help them. Nice thinking, dick-wad – you are basically punishing those who work and rewarding those who do jack shit.

Am I saying that we should not help the poor? No, I am just saying giving a bunch of money to someone who is poor is not going to solve the problem. In order to help the poor overcome their condition is to educate/train them in some way so that they can actually have good jobs. Create incentive programs for all the junkies and people who live at or below poverty levels to become better people somehow. Be tough on parents who won’t let their kids go to school because they send them to be beggars on the street. Try to attack everything that annihilates all people’s chances of becoming better citizens at the root. Giving them money is like covering a pothole with asphalt, and we know how well that works in this country.

Separation of Church and State

The government should be spending the money that is destined to help the Catholic Church in something else (see above). The Catholic Church is LOADED with money, they can build their sanctuaries and pedophiliac torturing devices all by themselves. I’ve touched this point plenty of times here, so I won’t dive into details.

Abortion

When a woman cannot have a choice on whether to have an unwanted baby or not, we have lost our right to choose. Of course this does not mean that every pregnant woman should abort, it’s just about giving people a choice. There should be a limit on weeks of pregnancy that this should be allowed (unlike Cartman’s mom who wanted to abort when the kid was 10 years old – you need to be a South Park fan to get this one .

Anyhow, allowing women to choose gives them a better chance of having a kid when they are ready. And sometimes being stupid, horny, and drunk at a party is not the best ‘ready’ there is.

Families can have as many kids as they want – if they can afford it

This one is delicate, as it may quickly fall into the same pattern in which China only allows one family per kid and then some families let their newborns die of they are not male. All I am saying is that if a family has a child and they are living under conditions which would make it impossible to sustain another child, then either the dad or the mother (or both) should be neutered (I know this is the term for dogs but I was too lazy to look for the one that applies to humans).

This may seem crude, inhumane, and downright disgusting. But if you have not seen it on T.V., I urge you to go to any community that lives below poverty levels and try and find a family with less than 2 kids. What do you think will happen to those kids? Chances are, they will not go to school, end up selling drugs or mugging people and procreating like rabbits.

Same-Sex Marriage

Gay people should have the same chance straight people have when it comes to being miserable, so let them get married if that’s what they want. Catholic Church doesn’t like it? Who gives a flying fuck? It’s about time the Church goes away. Denying a right to any person due to his race, sexual orientation, or eye color is wrong, period.

Organ Market (could not think of a better name for this, sorry)

Let’s see…someone at a hospital is in a waiting list for a kidney transplant. This person is loaded but will die soon enough if the transplant is not received on time. On the other side of a country a healthy person has to feed his family, was laid off, and has no money at all, he has nothing…except…except an extra kidney – ch-ching!

Yes, it is immoral and deplorable but works both ways. The organ donor recipient gets to live and the person in dire need of money gets a shitload of dough…oh, and the donor gets also the shirt above, it’s a mega win.

Criminal Punishment

This one is as easy as pie. If you murder someone, you will be put to death. If you steal, you will rot in jail. I don’t see why this is so difficult to modify in our Constitution. Fishman, a candidate who for a political party that has being tied with various incidents of corruption, bestows upon us the magic formula: hire 2x cops, double their salary.

This is as effective as washing a rotten tooth with twice as much toothpaste and twice the times you normally would. The teeth is rotten, and just like these criminals need to be taken out of our society, it needs to be pulled out.

If you are a cop, and your job is to put bad people in prison, how would you feel if the fucker you caught is freed after months, or even days after the apprehension? This would demoralizing, demotivating, and worrying as well (will this criminal that I put behind bars look for some kind of retaliation?).

So, Mr. Fishman, your formula is as stupid as the naive idea that somehow you had a chance in hell to represent this country someday. We need severe laws with severe punishment. Society has give you a chance since you are born to be part of it; if you decide to blow it all away by violating the integral laws that make up this society, then you should be secluded from it; and trust me, you will not be missed.

Animal Rights

Stray animals are constantly being tortured and killed by unscrupulous people that are practicing to become serial killers and rapists. Where does the government stand in all this? It doesn’t. Check out this jewel (Spanish, though just by watching you will understand):

If you ever owned an animal, you know how loyal, caring, and ever-loving they can be. Having random idiots torturing them without consequence makes my blood boil. If this were to me, I’d also put the death penalty on these fuckers (via a live event in which the idiot would die in the same way he/she tortured the animal, we can even charge admission for this….fuck I think I am really sick ).

These animals are defenseless and I believe that they should be protected by incorporating some kind of amendment that would make the torturing of animals a crime.

So there, it all boils down to legalizing pot, sending the Catholic Church where it belongs (hell), legalizing abortion, opening the market for organ sales, putting some balls on crime sentences, legalizing same-sex marriage, protecting animal rights, educating the poor and finding a job they can carry out.

Now let’s see which of the candidates have something like this on their agenda…. …. … Yup, seems like I’m voting for dick, I’ll go get my sharpie.

Of course it’s not the best quote ever, but it made me laugh nonetheless. Where did I find this marvelous quote? Facebook is PLAGUED with people who want to put on religious statuses to show how great their faith is. You know, it’s very important to show everyone your faith, that way, everyone know you are a good person. Are you ready? Here it is:

When Jesus says, “Just believe … ,” he is imploring, “Don’t limit your possibilities to the visible. Don’t listen only for the audible. Don’t be controlled by the logical. Believe there is more to life than meets the eye!”

Don’t be controlled by the logical? Of course not. Why would Jesus want us to use logic? It’s not like he gave us a brain or something.

In case my review in Amazon does not get published:

This book will not make you quit smoking, let’s make the clear before you buy. I smoked 10 years and I suddenly decided (after a very bad hangover) to try it once and for all (the most I had not smoked since I started was 2 days).

I bought a lot of sunflower seeds and started to read this book every time I felt the “urge”. Quitting smoking is one of the hardest things you will EVER do. This book, however, will slap you in the face every time you feel like you need to smoke and defy every stupid smoking myth you have (smoking calms me, I’ll get fat if I quit, etc). Think of it as your personal trainer for kicking this horrible habit.

I read 1/2 through it and it has been 8 years since I quit. Again, this is no guarantee that you will succeed, but I can assure you that it will make the process easier.

If you are reading this, then you, or someone you care for is trying to endure this process. And to you, my friend, I give you all the positive vibes in the world so you can reclaim what is rightfully yours – your life.

Cheers!

There are two things that I love about getting drunk:

1. It gives me the ability to always be right in any argument
2. It gives me the ability to always be right in any argument

What’s that, you say?  They are the same thing?  Fuck you, they’re not.  See how powerful my super ability is?

Today, while receiving Twitter messages, I saw a wave of  twits that addressed the same thing:

what’s that?  you guys did not want CAFTA?  HAHAHAH…well you guys are screwed, here listen to this: http://www.canara.org/comentario_det.asp?idcom=2795

The commentary is from the Costa Rican National Chamber of Radio (CRNCOR), in which they bitch that some very evil companies are trying to charge a lot of money for the music that is transmitted through Costa Rican airwaves.   Well boo-hoo, isn’t that a shame?  Could you imagine a world without Costa Rican radio?  It’s not like there is a networked world out there to transmit TV Shows, radio shows, for free…nope, that is way ahead in the future, when they invent something called “The Internet”.

Quite frankly, I am a big fan of U2’s message back in the Zooropa years (when they did not suck ass) that said “Kill Your TV”.  Let’s take that down a notch and say “Kill your Radio”.  Sticking to radio is as stupid and sick as the last scene in the Clockwork Orange where you are fed all kinds of bullshit while you are forced to keep your eyes (ears) wide open.

So what I am getting  at is that the approval of CAFTA and this so-called side-effect is actually a good thing for all you soulless people who find any kind of comfort in sitting in your car listening to someone who makes you laugh.  You know how sick is that?  You have the option of listening to anything, yet you choose being fed whatever the hell  because you just dial in to a device that the car manufacturer implanted in your car.  Talk about 1984.

And you know what, losers of the CAFTA agreement?   We, winners of the CAFTA agreement, secretly enjoy you bitching every moment of “so you guys voted for CAFTA, well you are screwed!” comment.  Yes we do, because this is a free country and the majority voted for what is best for our country.  The rest of you have to sit back and suck it up, making us believe that charging for intellectual property is a bad thing.  When you get a real argument, please get back at us, until them, let’s all push forwards in making this country a better place.

Whether you like it or not, iTunes can handle huge mp3 libraries pretty good.  Now, I am not trying to brag (of course I am), but iTunes does handle very well my collection of *ahem* 41,778 songs (full albums, with covers and lyrics).  I have all of these stored on an external drive and I decided to move my library from one hard drive to the next.

This procedure is fairly straightforward:

1. Copy Files from Drive A to Drive B
2. Tell iTunes your files now reside on folder X of Drive B

I’ve done this in the past many many times, and never encountered an error.  Today this was different.

After playing my songs, I started seeing those gray exclamation marks that translate to “file is missing on your hard drive.  kbyethnx”, you know the dreaded “!”:

I used  Powertunes to find out how many were missing and they came out to be 16,000.  SIXTEEN THOUSAND!!!!

At this point, I was about to take a Fokitol and recreate everything from scratch, but there is a problem with this approach: the playlists that you have created will be forever lost, and this is not acceptable for me as I have many many playlists. 

The weird thing about this problem is that the files were where they were supposed to be in the hard drive, iTunes was just being a deep shit and did not see them.  There are many ways to fix this, but I found an approach that works in ANY iTunes version and will keep your playlist and file information intact:

1. From iTunes, select File –> Library –> Export Playlist
2. Save the playlist somewhere on your HD
3. Open the playlist with a powerful text editor (TextMate for OS X did the trick for me)
4. Within the text file, look for song that is messed up in your iTunes
5. Check its Location element – is it correct?

In the picture below, I clearly saw it was fuxored:

iTunes had been stupid enough to keep the old file location (/Volumes/Gigan/ Music) for some tracks.  To fix it, I did a quick Find/Replace of the wrong path by the right path.  This was a 75 MB XML file, so it took a while to finish.  Once done, I just saved the file and then:

1. Closed iTunes
2. Started iTunes with “Option” key pressed
3. Created a New Library (to avoid messing the messed one)
4. Went to File –> Library –> Import Playlist
5. Selected the File that I edited

The import is dog slow, took about 2 hours but the end result was worth it.  I went down from 16K messed up files to 13.

So there you are, buy me beer if this saves your ass in the future.

Peace!

Today I lost 2 hours of my life thanks to Apple.  See, unlike PCs, Macs cannot eject DVD/CDs whenever you click the eject button (which was added about 2-3 years ago).  Whenever you want to eject a CD/DVD, you must do it from the OS or at boot time by pressing the mouse button (no, not the eject button) after you hear the startup chime.   This is the stupidest method there is, if you want to eject a freakin’ CD, pressing a button in any stage should do the trick.  The way Apple has done it has caused so many issues with stuck CDs, and today I was a victim.

I inserted a DVD onto my Macbook Pro and nothing showed up.  The eject key did not work, so I shot Disk Utility, which immediately froze (so much for a stable OS: http://vimeo.com/3188497).  So I rebooted thinking that I would just press the mouse button at boot, eject the CD and go on with my day.  Wrong.  Dead Wrong.

The machine booted and showed a grey background and would not past this stage.  I could hear the DVD drive spin and nothing happened.  After searching for all kinds of solution, I came to this post: http://www.silvermac.com/2006/dvd-stuck-in-macbook-pro/

So I used a little trick, I inserted a small piece of thin battery pack cardboard just above the disc and twisted it (the cardboard) a little so the disk can’t spin when starting up. I turned the computer on and held down the trackpad button. I could hear the sound of the optical drive inside, not the spinning sound but rather sound of something moving ever so slightly. I heard it only two times and the third sound was a well known one – the offending DVD came out.

The post on SilverMac should win a Nobel prize for kick-assedness.  I tried the same trick only to feel relief when the stupid CD came out of the slot-loading drive and the machine booted back to OS X.

I really really find amusing that a faulty DVD can cause the whole computer to stop working.  My questions to Apple are the following:

• Why on Earth is the machine trying to boot from the DVD drive if the hard drive is working?
• Why the hell didn’t the machine eject the DVD with the ‘click on startup’ trick?
• Why isn’t this stuck problem documented anywhere in your knowledge base?

Sometimes these machines are a blessing, and other times they can a curse from hell.  Oh well…on with my life..

Listening to LastFM is amazing, you can find amazing music there based on the music you currently listen to. I was growing a bit tired of copying and pasting artist and album info to find some of their music in torrent sites, so I wrote some applescript code that gets the job done.

This code ONLY works if you are listening to Last.FM with iScrobbler, because the script uses the iTunes applescript dictionary to get the current iTunes song, and iScrobbler does exactly that – play LastFM tracks on your iTunes.

You can watch the script in action in the following link: LastFMFinderinAction

So in order to use:

1. Open Script Editor and paste the script below
2. Compile the Code and save it as an Application so you can quickly invoke it, call it “FindLastFMAlbum” or something more creative
3. Download and Install iScrobbler
4. Tune in a station that you want
5. When you find hear a song you like, invoke the app, it will use artist + album parameters to find the album that has the song

The script:

property this_artist : “”

property this_track : “”

property this_album : “”

property serch_url : “”

tell application “iTunes”

try

if not (exists current track) then return

set this_artist to (get artist of current track)

set this_track to (get name of current track)

set this_album to (get album of current track)

end try

end tell

–Demonoid

set searchString to replace_chars(this_artist, ” “, “+”) & “+” & replace_chars(this_album, ” “, “+”)

set search_url to “http://www.demonoid.com/files/?category=2&subcategory=All&quality=All&seeded=0&external=2&query=” & searchString & “&uid=0&sort=”

open location search_url

–PB

set searchString to replace_chars(this_artist, ” “, “%20″) & “+” & replace_chars(this_album, ” “, “%20″)

set search_url to “http://thepiratebay.org/search/” & searchString & “/0/99/100″

open location search_url

on replace_chars(this_text, search_string, replacement_string)

set AppleScript’s text item delimiters to the search_string

set the item_list to every text item of this_text

set AppleScript’s text item delimiters to the replacement_string

set this_text to the item_list as string

set AppleScript’s text item delimiters to “”

return this_text

end replace_chars

I should create a “mega drunk post” category for this one…had taken it offline, but what hell, here it is again:

Ya estoy hasta la mierda harto de la picha de esta pais de secuestros, robos y cuanta mierda mas ataca a aquellos que trabajamos. Estoy HARTO HARTO HARTO que este fucking pais llamado COSTA RICA se venda como la fucking SUIZA CENTROAMERICANA cuando es una timo para poder atracar a cuanto turista entra. Y saben cual es el primer lugar donde se COGEN al turista? Justo cuando esta recogiendo sus fucking maletas, en el tipo de cambio de la oficina que hosteada por la maldicion MAS FUCKING grande que le ha pasado al Santamaria que es ALTEA. Ojala le quiten el poder a este pocos de playos que lo unico que han hecho es estagnar el desarrollo de esa picha de aeropuerto.

Estoy demasiado harto de todo Costa Rica. Hoy me meti a leer la fucking nacion y lo primero que veo es un articulodo de un secuestro. Ya no fucking mas, me cago en los diputados que no hacen ni PICHA en reformar esta mierda de constitucion que lo unico que hace es darle privilegios al fucking ladron y escudarse en la mierda de derechos humanos para darle una excusa mas para no poder cortarle las manos al que roba, en quitarle la vida al que mata – FUCKING OJO POR OJO.
Como soluciona todos los problemas de este pais propongo lo siguiente:

• Si se agarra robando a algun malparido, se le corta una mano, a las 2 veces se le corta la otra
• Se secuestra a alguien y se le agarra, la persona que trato de secuestrar tiene la opcion de cerrarlo a pichazos por X cantidad de tiempo con un bate de baseball con opcion de muerte. Esto seria televisado por Teletica todos los Sabados en vez de la estupidez de bailando/cantando por un suenno
• Cada crio parido tiene que estar respaldado por mosca por los malparidos que hicieron la torta. Si despues de X cantidad de crios se demuestra que el malparido prennador no tiene para pencion, se castra al HP y si la cabra sigue pariendo como gata en celo sin tener manera de mantener a sus crios, se le cortan las trompas de falopio, o el utero o la vagina, pero algo que cierre ese chinamo

Un poquito crudo? Talvez. Pero prefiero ponerle fin a estos malparidos delincuentes antes de logren engendrase en un ser humano que logre matareme porque los malparidos tatas estaban demasiado ocupados mandando a Greivin, Maynor y Usnavy e vender crack mientras el pequenno Junior estaba aprendiendo a usar la fucking cuchiclla.

Y sorry por los errores ortograficos, esta picha de Windows 2008 no tiene spell checker en espannol…

Well, I finally made up my mind and got myself a dog. After debating on what breed of dog I wanted for a while, the unexpected visit by a mixed Rottweiler to my sister’s house made my decision very clear. The dog my sister saved is called Zurquí, and he was left to starve to death by the moron who took care of farm. My sister found Zurquí and his sister, but unfortunately only Zurquí made it

After looking for quite some time for a Rottweiller, I found one in the local newspaper ads. We went to visit the place where they were selling them and found 5 amazing puppies. I quickly picked up the one I wanted. Demian was very active and beat the crap out of his siblings, which I though was hellavu cool. He also had a kick ass pounce, so he quickly was the winner.

In less than a week the dog has grown quite a bit. He is extremely smart and learns everything very fast. He has very dimmed yellow eyebrows, so he looks like his moody and pissed all the time. He is not as grumpy as I would like to, but I am working on it. Check out more pics:

http://gallery.mac.com/csaborio/100147