Some things only change a little, so the sense of Nostalgia is more like a haze that lingers over the current reality. Coney Island Hotdog in Worcester is sort of like that for me. The place is close enough to being the same as when I was a kid that I can picture the ghosts of waitresses that would call you “hun” and banana cream pies, just an old layer that has been peeled off or faded away.

Nantasket Beach / Paragon Park is one of those more painful incidents of nostalgia. All you see is the dirty broken ghost of a layer left. The heart of things is long gone. There is little reminder of what once was, leaving you doubting that it ever really was at all.

I used to got to Nantasket Beach and Paragon Park every now and then when I was a kid. Late seventies to mid eighties. I think I went the most in my mid-teens. My father and I would drive down in the evening. Convertible top down. Play some pinball or video games. Get a box of salt water taffy and eat most if it on the drive back.

Arcades lined the whole strip there in front of the park. There were tons of games. Lots of them were pretty beat up, but the depth in time that they represented was amazing. There was just so much going on and it was teaming with life.

I would go again just after Paragon Park had been shut down. Rode out there with my dad and other friends on our motorcycles. I think my girlfriend (now wife) was on the back. Things were shutdown, but it was all there still at least.

This past weekend I made a trip down to Nantasket Beach on Sunday morning to see what it was like. And this is basically all that there was to it:

Nantasket Beach strip in 2010

Now admittedly I had been here before in the past years, but I always made excuses like “Oh, maybe I am just here too early in the season, it will be much more active later on.” But this is the start of August, and all there is to show for it here is one limp arcade, a food stand, a crappy gift shop and a boarded up arcade home to who-knows what. It is basically what it was when I went there over four years ago.

Same photo from 2006

The only good thing is that nothing has changed in these last four years. The bad thing is it is all just as depressing now as it was then. I can only hope that it was a case that the old amusement park and arcades were just losing money hand over fist and couldn’t survive in the times, not that someone with a bit more money decided that the world would be better served by yet another big ugly condo complex. Perhaps the residents of Hull like it better this way. Their town is quieter now and it can be a little sleepy seaside town with a few shops, some ice cream and hot dogs and a carousel. That bit of nostalgia in me hates them for it either way.

There is an appropriately titled “check_raid_amrstat – Dell AMR PERC4 FreeBSD” plugin already on Nagios Exchange and Monitoring Exchange, but as usual I can’t seem to be content with some other people’s code.

I cleaned up the code a bit. It is a bit more in sticking with the plugin writing guidelines. Presents a bit more info than the original in a more compact format, with output similar to my MegaRAID SAS plugin. Nothing radical at all, but I like it better and present it here in case you want to see an alternative.

So today we had a meeting at work and it was my big chance to show off how well this plan was work. I hook the iPad up to our projector with the VGA adapter. Oddly, I don’t get any mirrored display.

Change around inputs on the projector looking for signals. Still nada.

Go into iPad settings to see if any new option has popped up recognizing the attached bit of hardware. Also nada.

Google around a bit and… oh damn. According to Apple (Article HT4108):

The iPad Dock Connector to VGA Adapter can play content to a VGA display when using the following apps:

• Videos
• Photos—Slideshow playback only
• YouTube
• Keynote
• Safari—Video content on webpages

So until I actually start playing a video, photos, etc. I get no output at all from the VGA. I can’t browse websites in Safari over VGA, so I can’t, for example, use the iPad to go through our help desk ticketing system during the weekly group meeting. Can’t demonstrate application configuration on the big screen, etc etc. I generally like Apple hardware, and I really want to like this and for it to work, but it has just turned into a big failure and disappointment.

I understand that Apple might want to, under some circumstances, restrict your video output so you aren’t arbitrarily dumping licensed content out over a digital connection. Instead with this they are limiting you so tightly over what they will allow you to output, for no real explainable reason. Wouldn’t it be easier to just have the VGA output be universal and then restrict certain flagged content (which they already do) if you try to push it out over the adapter?

I can only come up with two possible explanations for why this is done this way:

1. The iPad is running an OS that is still fundamentally thinking it is dealing with something more along the lines of an iPod Touch, and that all that there really is worth displaying on a big screen is videos and photos.
2. If you were able to hook up the iPad to an external display and use a Bluetooth keyboard on it, you would pretty much kill some large percentage (lets just say 20%) of the market for notebooks like the MacBook Air. So cripple the iPad to force consumers to move further up the foodchain to get full video out capability.

Hopefully this is just the first case and things will improve with the next OS release. I really do like my iPad, but this feature has pretty much killed a large part of its intended functionality.

I have had a bit of a bug lately to get something pen or pencillish, so yesterday I decide to act on it and popped into Bob Slate while I was in the area. I was feeling more pencillish I guess, so I bought a pencil, pad of paper and the above sharpener. Thrilling eh?

There were plenty of sharpeners to choose from, but I was attracted by the simplicity of this one. It is cute and small, but has a warm practical feel to it. It seems right to sharpen a wooden pencil with a little wooden block. It is certainly $1.49 worth of happiness.

Here is the new one installed:

Yes, looking at that picture makes me realize that I need to replace the hardware store fillers for my old mirror mounts with something better.

The other change I had made while the bike was being serviced was a bit more subtle. Last year I noticed that there was a fair amount of dry rot going on with some rubber hoses connecting to the front top of the cylinder heads. The shop guys at the time said they looked ugly but were still functional and cracks wouldn’t be an issue. This year I decided that they were looking a lot worse and it was time to replace them. When I looked a bit more closely at just what the hoses were I realized that they were part of the Secondary Air Injection (SAI) system. A lot of Triumph forum posts I have read have maligned the SAI on the Triple, saying it causes all of the popping on deceleration as well as increasing the engine heat. Now the popping I don’t mind, but the heat I do. So I had the shop pull the SAI hoses and install a block off kit.

Here are the old hoses and valve:

Here is a shot of how it looks now without the hoses, not the best pic, but it is certainly cleaner in there: