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GRAFFITI -- August 18 thru August 24, 2003>> Link to the Current Week <<Last Week << Mon Tues Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun >> Next Week Welcome to Orb Graffiti, a place for me to write daily about life and computers. Contrary to popular belief, the two are not interchangeable. About eMail - I publish email sometimes. If you send me an email and you want privacy or anonymity, please say so clearly at the beginning of your message.. |
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August 18, 2003 - Updates at 1934 EST
Good morning. ... Well, good evening is more appropriate. After working 26 hours or so this weekend, I was a little bushed. But since I've been told on more than one occasion that there's no rest for the wicked, I was back on the road by 7 this morning, onsite by 0745. The good news is that nearly everything that was supposed to be working by this morning really was, and the bits that weren't ... we put most of those items from the punch list to bed before three this afternoon. The downside is that my eyes are still pointing in different directions, and I don't think that's how they were designed. So this is brief, and I'll hopefully have more to say of use tomorrow.
G'nite...
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August 19, 2003 - Updates at 1159
Good morning (just barely). As you might be able to tell from the time of day stamp, I'm onsite, rather than writing this at home with my first cup of coffee. Many small tasks yet remain to make this site into a fully operational death star. And I slept in as late as I could this morning. So no fun yet for here. More later.
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August 20, 2003 - Updates at 0723
Good morning. I'm going to try getting back into my normal routine around here. The last few days around me have been pretty frantic, as you can tell from the tenor of my abbreviated posts. As it was, I got home about 6 last night and did yard work including the mowing well into twilight. Then I stayed up too late finishing up one of David Drake's Fleet anthologies. Good stuff, including pieces by the late Poul Anderson and E. Gary Gygax, among many other wonderful writers.
Highlights of the last few days included maneuvers not unlike those of a carrier battle group. The big boy was a Sun E450, which survived the transit virtually unaffected, except for a SCSI card which unseated itself and caused RAID failures. All is well there,though. The peripheral machines that made the move were an eclectic mix of rack and tower boxes, running everything from Windows 3.1 to Win2K to Red Hat and Debian. With the first phase of the physical move over, we got all the first bits running, then started cutting over outside connections, configuring Sonicwall devices, breaking some service or another in the process, then making it work again. Now, fundamentally, everything that can be working at the new site is, and that's a good thing.
I've got a short day today - six or five hours onsite at an different client. I'm going to finish doing the DCOM updates, having taken care of their edge boxes and firewall configs remotely last week. Additionally, I'm going to be training one or more of their people on the use of Mailman (http://www.list.org/) and checking into a problem printer.
My girls, Marcia and Sally, are both mending well. In the last couple of days, Marcia has tackled both laundry and sewing classes. At the end of the day, she's pretty whacked, but that's to be expected yet. Sally is chasing bunnies around the back yard when she gets the chance, and not catching a one of them.
The latest Sobig-varient virus went critical yesterday, with predictable results for Windows users who can't help themselves but simply must open any attachment sent their way. Keep your virus definitions up to date, your scanner running, and don't open attachments. More information about the current outbreak can be found at this link.
Now it's time for me to go. Have a lovely day, see you around.
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August 21, 2003 - Updates at 10.30
Good morning. You may note that I said yesterday that I was trying to get back into my routine. Well, in a sense, that's still true - I'm writing this post shortly after getting out of bed, while I drink my first cup of coffee. It's just that after a long run of long days, it was time for a day off. So I did. I first woke up shortly before normal alarm time, around 0553. I made a quick trip to the head, then climbed back into bed. No alarm, how lovely! I probably could have slept longer, but my back was rebelling at the prospect of remaining prone for even one more minute, so up I am.
I got a new disk drive for Goldfinger - a 160 gigabyte Maxtor with 8 megabytes of cache and 7200 RPM spindle speed. That's not the fun part though. This is the first drive I've ever bought where the price per gig was less than a dollar. I'm taking advantage of the situation to rebuild my system and I'm looking hard at moving away from Gentoo. My box went wonky again, video-wise, on me when I updated the other day. Believe me, I do like being on the bleeding edge, but not quite that close. Now, I could back down from the testing portion of Gentoo, to stable. But instead I'm thinking of going back to Debian, and running unstable there (which is generally more stable than any other released distribution). I also pulled down Mandrake 9.2 beta ISO images overnight last night. I might muck about with those a bit, too. In a 160 gig sandbox, many things are possible.
The other goal for the day, to catch up on a few chores... Well, that might just wait for the weekend. I've not had a day of bumming about accomplishing very little in a long time. So I think I'll do that. For your sake, I hope your day is busier and more productive than mine is likely to be. Have a good'un.
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August 22, 2003 - Updates at 1040
Good morning. Well, yesterday was successful as a complete waste of time. I restructured and rebuilt Goldfinger a few times - very relaxing. Now I've got lots of work to do here, so you'll have to bear with me until later or tomorrow. Thanks for dropping by...
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August 23, 2003 - Updates at 0900
Good morning. Yesterday was a busy and good day at work. Here at the home front, I've had Mandrake 9.2 Beta 2 on disk first. That was almost a complete bust. The worst of it was that they left off an RPM that made the installation fail dead in the water. Silly French folk. I just managed to get around it, but only just, and it left much of the back end configuration process off of the installation. There were some important bits I couldn't seem to figure out easily. While I could do it, I decided not to put my efforts forth in that direction. Then I went to Debian. Unfortunately, that's also been just a small bust, but just a small one. Debian is much happier when used on hardware that's been exercised for a while. There's nothing in Debian to run my video card - I had to go get experimental packages for XFree 4.3 to get the ATI 9700 Pro card running. And sound isn't working at all. I'm totally befuddled by that.
At this moment, I'm actually about to go back to Gentoo. Yeah, that's right - I may have sounded unhappy the other day, but Gentoo has spoiled me. So I guess I'll get that process going, then get started on some of the chores around here - cleaning and such. Have fun this weekend!
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August 24, 2003 - Updates at 1015
Good morning. I made much progress yesterday. Currently I'm running Fluxbox (a lightweight window manager) via the "stable" version of Gentoo Linux on Goldfinger. I have sound working again, something I wasn't able to accomplish with Debian for some very strange reason. I've got Bluefish installed (the editor I use to compose this site every day), Evolution (for mail), Galeon (for browsing) and XChat for IRC. I'm going to install a few more applications today, in between shopping and chores, like XMMS for tunage, and so on. Yeah, I know. But at least I'm switching around within Linux-space, rather than hopping back to Windows. I only using the Gaming OS for it's intended purpose: Gaming. This month's game is a puzzle-adventure called Syberia from The Adventure Company. Decent story line, and pretty graphics. Fun stuff, in the hour here and there I've given to it.
The Guest Head sub-theme is history. No one has ever commented on it (oh, now I remember, Jan Svenson did once...), missed it when it was missing, wrote to say that they liked it when it was there. So the question mark above leads elsewhere... to a site called Gaggle, subtitled surf like an asshole. I'm not sure why that is so, it's sort of a neat premise. It generates from one to three random words, and lets you choose between feeling lucky and not. Then it feeds the terms to Google, executing searches you'd (probably) never run on your own. Fun stuff - my third search led me here: Living the Outlaw Life: Freeing Your Inner Outlaw, on the Backwoods Home Magazine. Follow that link and read, some of you will go back for more later... I will, in my not-so-copious spare time.
Yesterday's chores went okay - the bottom half of the house is clean. But that's all - there's the second floor today, my desk, the lawn, and shopping to be done. Where does the time go? I suppose I'd best be about it. Have a great day!
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Visit the rest of the DAYNOTES GANG, a collection of bright minds and sharp wits. Really, I don't know why they tolerate me <grin>. My personal inspiration for these pages is Dr. Jerry Pournelle. I am also indebted to Bob Thompson and Tom Syroid for their patience, guidance and feedback. Of course, I am sustained by and beholden to my lovely wife, Marcia. You can find her online too, at http://www.dutchgirl.net/. Thanks for dropping by.
All Content Copyright © 1999-2003 Brian P. Bilbrey.
