The Barbie car — painted bright pink, pink rims, even a Barbie logo on the window! Throw in a pet unicorn and it’s every little girl’s dream come true.
Spotted on Jan 28th at 330 Ritch outside Little Skillet / Cento.
Archive for January, 2010
Fixing Linux when it “gave up waiting for a root device”
January 26th, 2010Recently I was installing Kubuntu 9.10 (also known as Karmic Koala) when my system refused to boot. I was informed that my system had “given up waiting for a root device.”
But there’s a simple solution!
I suspect many of you may be in a similar situation and that’s why you’re here. Let’s first consider the “gave up waiting for root device” error.
What does it all mean? Well, your boot loader was trying to see if your main hard drive (i.e. “root device”) was starting up. But guess what? It didn’t start — probably because it wasn’t there.
“But I didn’t take it out!” you exclaim, because you’re not stupid enough to take your hard drive out of your computer and then be surprised when it doesn’t work.
No, the problem is because your computer couldn’t find your drive.
You’ve got to fix the boot loader, and you have two options. If you’re lucky like me, your computer drops to a “Busy box” shell on this type of error. This is a sort of bare minimum shell that does just enough to get your computer running. If this happens, you’ll see some instructions on the screen regarding Busy box.
Use Busy box to access your drive
Here’s what to do if you’re using the Busy box command line:
- Create a new folder to mount your hard drive.
- Mount your hard drive to the folder you just made.
- In my example, my hard drive was located at /dev/sda1 and I suspect this is pretty normal. Your drive may be sda2, sdb1, sdd0… who knows! It may take a few tries. If you guessed the number incorrectly, you can always try again by unmounting and then going back to step 2. Here’s how you unmount your drive:
umount /drive
- Make your hard drive the root so we can fix it.
mkdir /drive
mount /dev/sda1 /drive
chroot /drive
From here you can use nano, emacs, or vi to fix your problem. Skip below for more info.
Without Busy box
If you’re not lucky enough to get Busy box prompt, you can always boot off of a Linux Live boot CD. The regular Ubuntu install CD can be used in live boot mode, as can Knoppix. When you boot off of that CD you’ll be taken to a full-fledged Linux environment where you can fix your problem in the same way. Your hard drive should be easily accessible, probably with a nice GUI and everything. Just open the drive and you’re ready to go.
What to do next
If you have a similar problem as me, the official Ubuntu 9.10 KarmicUpgrades doc has a resolution.
Otherwise, try Googling around some more. It’s probably a very similar boot loader issue that can be fixed easily once you’ve completed the above steps.
WTF: Bell Plumbing advertisement
January 13th, 2010I’ve been noticing some strange ads lately for a company called Bell Plumbing North here in San Francisco. Their ad is one major WTF after another.
And then some.
Here’s the ad in question:
So there’s a smiling guy with the word PLUMBING in big red letters next to him. Not so strange… or is it?
Let’s look a little closer.
Yes, that’s a phone. It’s an ad for plumbing, and he’s holding a phone. Not a pipe; a PHONE.
What does a phone have to do with plumbing? Everybody knows you can call a plumber on a phone, you don’t need this concept presented visually.
Is the idea that you can use a telephone to call a plumber particularly surprising to anyone? The add effectively states “we’re not like those other plumbing places where you have to send a telegram.”
But it gets stranger — look at his shirt.
Do you see what I see? Because what I see is this:
But wait… that’s the logo for Bell Telephone. The guy in the ad is wearing a phone company uniform. Does he work for the phone company during the day, and moonlight as a plumber at night?
Or perhaps he’s the customer. He’s a phone operator, and the men’s room at the phone company is flooding, so he’s calling a plumber.
No explanation could possibly be satisfactory.
Lastly, let’s look at where this company advertises.
Yes… that’s the front cover of a phone book. They advertise on the PHONE BOOK. Phones… plumbing? Huh?
Where’s the connection? If they were a company that sold phones I would get it. But now I’m more confused than ever, and the circle of insanity is complete.
Surprise blood orange
January 6th, 2010Does this ever happen to you? You just pick up a regular orange, peel it, and it’s actually a blood orange?
It’s like opening a wrapper and finding you won a contest.
