Wesley's Tool-Box

요즘 폭설과 맹렬한 추위 때문에 전력수요가 무진장 올라간 상태입니다. 언론에서는 전력낭비가 심하다면서 절약을 종용하는 기사도 흘리고 있고요.

하지만 여러분은 전력수요 폭등에도 딱히 뭔가 전기를 쓰는데 느껴지는 게 없을 겁니다. 정전이 되는 것도 아니고 말이죠. 그건 저희 회사에서 전력수요에 따른 공급량을 정신없이 맞춰주고 있기 때문입니다.

이게 잘 되려면 '버퍼'에 해당하는 '예비율'이 있어야 하는데, 지금 그 예비율이 사상최저로 떨어진 상태입니다. 그래서 비상이라는 것입니다. 보통 10% 이하로 떨어지면 안 좋게 보는데 어제 6.1%까지 떨어졌습니다.

Rain and snow tend to slow down the traffic a bit, so I need to be prepared for that. I headed out to the bus stop about an hour early just so that I can beat the snow that's been falling since early morning.

Well, it seems that the massive snow blizzard effectively stopped all traffic in the nearby area. I waited about an hour in the freezing weather, but the cars on the road won't budge. My bus had been coming around a few hundred meters up, but never made it to my bus stop, as far as I was concerned. I reported the situation to the workplace and filed a half-day leave.

Well, this is it. 2009 is almost history. Lots of things happened. Important people died, economy was in turmoil, and man... The flu scare. But lots of good things happened as well. I have a cute daughter now, and I got my iPhone to write this post on, among other things.

I wonder if I can return to posting Toon-Box soon. I have lots of things on my hands now that the whole thing was put on the back burner. Oh well...

So long, the year of the bull. Happy new year!

Well, I thought I'd never see, let alone take in the extremely popular drug that's sweeping the nation - Tamiflu - in person. The so-called Swine Flu, 'New Flu', or Influenza A (H1N1), as it is formally called, is spreading out all over the world in epic proportions, and it turns out that I'm not one of the lucky ones to avoid it.

I've been having hot fever since last Sunday, and the body temperature had been creeping up for two days, peaking around 39.1C. Seeing that this isn't how my usual fevers go, I paid a visit to the local hospital to get a check-up. Quick (1-hour result) test showed that I was positive for the Flu A. I was prescribed Tamiflu, but in order for me to get a sick leave from work, I needed a formal, written diagnosis from a central hospital. So I went to one that's closest to home, and I got that as well. The paperwork was faxed to the company, and now I'm locked in at home for the week.

I still feel pretty lousy. Thanks to the ton of other medicine in addition to Tamiflu, the major symptoms have subsided for now, but that's not enough to make me feel normal. Hopefully, all will return normal in a few days.

There had been mentions of Snow Leopard (Mac OS X 10.6) pre-release builds supporting read/write support for NTFS (native file system for current Windows versions). Read-only NTFS support was available since Tiger (10.4) days, so this was an interesting development. Unfortunately, read/write support was apparently dropped in the final release build of SL.

It turns out the support is still there, but disabled by default. This post by Chrysaor at MacRumors shows how to modify fstab to force an NTFS partition to mount in read/write mode. The drawback of this trick is that you have to manually do it to every partition you want to mount, and you need to unmount and remount the partition after applying the trick to get it to work. Hardly elegant, mind you.

Luckily, there is a much simpler and elegant way. Click below to find out.