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GRAFFITI -- December 26, 2005 thru January 01, 2006>> 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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December 26, 2005
1344 - Good afternoon. Continuing on the road to improved health, I was only awake for one brief period between midnight and 0900. That's superb, by the standards of the last week or so. Yesterday was relatively icky by comparison, I had all the get-up-and-go of the offspring of a sloth crossed with a slug. I was so unmotivated that I even forgot my weekly time spent observing a moment or five in quiet reflection for our fallen troops...
I have seventeen things I'd like to accomplish, and I'll be lucky to get through two or three of them. So I'll strike while the iron's hot, and get those must-do chores out of the way and see how this determination sticks with me thereafter. See you tomorrow.
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December 27, 2005
0745 - Good morning. Already at work, it was a light drive in this morning. I expect it to remain that way much of this week, as a great number of people manage to take the week off. As I headed out this morning, I took out the trash and recycling. I had explicitly not done so the night before, as we were in the midst of some reasonably gusty winds, and I didn't want to chase the trash all over this morning. Sad to say, most of the other people in the development didn't manage to think that far ahead, and ... well, there was trash all over the place. Maroons.
Speaking of maroons, the student who reported to his professor that he'd been visited by DHS agents after requesting a copy of Mao's Little Red Book from the library turns out to have been a liar. Heh, but the story was so plausible, and given the administration's stance and behaviour, no one seemed very surprised by such a story. What's not clear from the Boston Globe story is why the student fabricated the tale at all. Was it for fun? Had he missed an assignment, and chose a really good new excuse? Silly person.
Now I've got to get to work. Plenty to do here, and with a quiet week ahead, I expect to get lots done. Well, I can dream, anyway. Ciao!
1955 - Hi. Just doing a few updates and getting ready for the end-of-year housekeeping around this joint. Don't mind the workmen, and keep your eyes peeled, or you'll step in that bucket of whitewash. Later...
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December 28, 2005
0735 - Good morning. Time flies when you're having fun. Yesterday's fun involved about 5 hours of training on our new phone system's administrative and call accounting features. That and I built a debian Stable box to be a file server for ISO images, software builds and the like. I'd done another one recently, but that one was too small (storage-wise) so I build the new one with a terabyte of storage, instead of 250 gigabytes. Should be much happier going forward.
Remind me never to patronize Steam-distributed games, ever. While I've got HalfLive 2 and it plays well enough under Cedega... but every few weeks, Steam or Valve puts out an "update" that breaks compatibility with Cedega's Wine implementation. Then the game sits, unplayable until Cedega figures out what the doofus change was, and issues an update to make it work again. Other people have had so much trouble just getting their "Steam-powered" games working, either by dialup (pain beyond pain) or broadband (where stuff that should just work, doesn't, even under the native Windows platform ... uhhhhh, okay) that they've just thrown the game in the trash. I'm leaning hard towards doing that with HL2, both because it's like an old Jaguar motorcoach, more often not running, and because with all the happy-crappy stuff that comes with HL2 on Steam, like something called CounterStrike Source, and some other thing called Lost Coast ... well, the storage requirements for this one game on my system today are 5.7 G. Yow!
Yay. Moshe's posting again! Of course, it's via this route that I learn that he's left XenSource. Looking at the XenSource homepage, it's possible that this phrase, "Operationalize Xen", by itself drove him from the building. But as he says, he has a vested interest (say no more!) in their continued success. Hmmm, Xen is one of those things I keep promising myself that I'll try one of these days, real soon now. All in all, I'm glad to see Moshe posting again. That's mostly because, like so many other of my friends whom I met first on the Internet ... well, we're all horrid at keeping up. We don't write, we never call! It's not as bad as a college kid, because we don't ask for money to do a beer-hike in the Outback as a "Semester Abroad".
Today I'll finish that server rotation, stand up a new mailserver for some experiments that should end in its taking over duties for our current internal box, and handle a number of the lesser items on my to-do list.
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December 29, 2005
No Post....
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December 30, 2005
1958 - Good evening. Yikes! I've let time get the better of me. There were a lot of people out, at work this week, so I was picking up pieces from a number of different plate-juggling acts. The good news is that the week ended well. We got out the shipments we wanted to, hammered out some new procedures in the process, and had a good laugh while the few of us worked fingers to bone.
Meanwhile, network and system architectural changes are coming around here. Some of my hardware is pretty bloody old. Desktop drives that are teetering on the old_age/pre-fail precipice, according the S.M.A.R.T. data, production systems (backup, DNS, local email repository) running on 7 year old hardware. While that's fine, as far as it goes, it's time to modernize and consolidate a little bit. So I'm turning the Sempron box with two 250G SATA drives in it, into the new Vroomfondel, home server. The old Vroomfondel, a P3-933 with a heart of gold, retires. tServe, a near duplicate of Vroomfondel, finds new life as an OpenBSD gateway server, in light of the service changes that Comcast is thrusting upon us, whether we like it or not.
To that end, I'm in a hardware/data dance right now. I want to keep as many services up and running as possible while I reconfigure systems to take on the new duties. And in the midst of this stürm ünd dräng, the dogs want me to lose track of my place and take them downstairs for a treat. I guess they run this house, now, so I'd best hop to it. Happy New Year's Eve Eve.
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December 31, 2005
1050 - Good morning. First up, I followed the trail from the ISC Handler's Diary to the F-Secure Weblog to Ilfak Guilfanov's Hex blog. Ilfak is, by all reports, one of the top-notch low-level windows programming blokes on the planet. He's not waiting for Microsoft to come up with a patch for the WMF vulnerability, he's written his own. If you need the functionality that the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer provides (like the business that Greg supports), then you can't unregister the Shimgvw.dll (Microsoft's current workaround suggestion). Applying the patch that Ilfak wrote and posted in his Windows WMF Metafile Vulnerability HotFix post should do the trick for you. I'll be applying this to Marcia's machine in a few minutes, and please do note that while I can't promise that this won't delete all your data, distort your child's world view, and rape the cat, I don't think that it'll do any such harm. More when I know more.
1256 - Winding down the year. I've been at my current employer, NFR Security, for a shade over 14 months now. As with any job, there are ups and downs, but I have fun, learn new things, and I'm blessed to be working with a bright bunch of astonishingly sarcastic folks. What a blast it's been, and I'm looking forward to the upcoming year. Marcia changed employers too, moving on from Mercury to Wily Technologies. That shortened her commute from 7 miles each way to coffee pot and back (yeah, that means full time telecommuter, folks), with the exception of rare face-time meetings at customer sites, and the bi-annual sales meetings at HQ in California.
Also in January of 05, I finally got USB2 drives, rsync, and crypto filesystems working in harmony to give me reliable, secure offsite backups, both for home and work use. As February rolled in, I built a new box around an Asus motherboard and an AMD Sempron 3100+ CPU. That's served a couple of different purposes (mostly experimental) during the past year. As this year ends, it's finally being pressed into service in a permanent infrastructural role as a primary home server. I'll be moving one of the old servers into the OpenBSD gateway role, and retiring the other altogether.
Cousin Tom Brady and his mates on the New England Patriots squad romped through to another Super Bowl victory in February, too. Aside from the play on the field, which was good, there was the fun in the commercials, especially that GoDaddy ad. My, what a ... healthy young woman she is.
Our President's Iraq entanglement appears to possibly be bearing some fruit, at a cost of over 2000 US lives and growing, and at a cost of George having to spend most of his political capital on that venture, leaving the Social Security revamp (or gutting, depending on your viewpoint) lying in the gutter. Oh, and hh, my, doesn't our Commander-In-Chief sure know how to spend a trillion bucks like water through fingers.
Money is also important to other organizations, like Public Broadcasting Stations. Unfortunately, one of our locals, WETA, managed to ask for more money above and beyond our annual membership contribution so many times that I'd finally had enough. I told them they'd lost our membership and that extra money would go to double our contribution to MPT (Maryland Public Television). In December I held true to my promise: the WETA renewal got shredded, and MPT got double, along with a warning about what happened with WETA and how it could happen to them, too. So far, MPT's been much less aggressive, at least with me. One can only hope.
A Lexus driver fell asleep on the Beltway, on the morning of February 22, and plowed into the back of my Elantra a couple of times, sending me crashing into the BMW that I was stopped behind. The BMW was unharmed, the Lexus was damaged, and they very nearly totalled the Elantra between them. The best face to put on it is that I was uninjured. It took three weeks to get the car repaired, and until the beginning of December to get all the money out of his insurance company. But all's well that ends well.
March was the month of yardwork. I cut in a border and gravel-filled a 15' x 4' area around the services entries (gas, electric, cable, etc) part of the side of our house. Mowing into there had always been a nightmare, and fraught with potential for disaster. No more. Then, as if that wasn't enough, in the back half of March, I built 7 new raised bed planters and filled them with 9 yards of mixed leaf compost and topsoil. That was a bloody crapload of work, and with the proper soil amendments, I hope that the garden will do better than last year (which still was better than the year before. In early April, I started mulching beds, planting some of the early-start flowers, and assembling our new hardwood deck furniture. Note to self: Don't plant in April. Late frosts bite!
In May, the big news was implants. Dental implants, to be precise. After a couple of visits with our wonderful dentist, Doug Drewyer, we setup a plan to get implants and crowns in place of the 4 molars that I've had yanked over the course of the last 20 years. It'll do wonders for my long-term dental health, and make eating generally much more enjoyable. The downside? As a pre-existing set of conditions, virtually none of the work was covered by insurance. The upside: Nearly $20K in medical expenses pushes us over the top and able to take a deduction for those in this upcoming tax season (that's always one of the questions our tax adviser asks). Seven months later, all that dental work is done. Is it worth it to me? You bet!
Also in May we started Anatomy of a Murder Mystery, a series of seminars presented weekly down at the Smithsonian. Marcia, it turns out, is an aspiring mystery writer, a fact I gleaned from the copy of an emailed reply from our friend Bob Thompson to Marcia about the uses and effects of assorted "undetectable" poisons. Needless to say, that got my attention something fierce! Grin. The seminars was sort of a present to us, surrounding our seventh wedding anniversary. Yay, us! May wrapped up with a visit from all of the Thompsons, and a Memorial Day party that was a real blast with many good friends. The first couple of strawberries from Marcia's little patch ripened, and were promptly eaten by Molly. That engendered both threats to life and well-being, followed by a fencing project to keep the dang dawg away from those yummy berries.
June started with Strawberries, fresh out of our garden. And isn't that much more pleasant than the next event. That was dental surgery day, where I had one extraction, four implants, and an upper-left sinus lift and bone graft, all done in one sitting. Yeesh! Then back to fun stuff a short while later, as we went up the the Barnes Foundation in Upper Merion, PA for a day of art and intensity. Great stuff, but whooo, sure is a lot of it.
In July, the gardens finally took off, with strong growth of both corn and tomato plants. The squash were, however, remarkable only for providing disappointment, followed by death. The cucumbers, too, didn't produce much fruit, just leaves. Another note to self: Need More Nitrogen! We did well with flowers, though, both in the front beds, and potted in back.
By August, I was finally getting plenty of tomatoes and peppers, and making some real kick-ass home-grown salsa. Also in August, I was briefly in the running for an open director-level position at the firm. That didn't work out, and given the circumstances, I guess I'm glad that it didn't, although the extra money sure would have been handy. Cousins Barb and Shirley were out to visit from Michigan, and we had an unexpected week of horsedog-sitting, when my friend Dodge had his sitter crap out on him with less than 24 hours notice before a week-long family trip. So we took care of Yugi.
September started with a bang, as Katrina killed New Orleans, and a bunch of other Gulf state sites. The big effect up here was gouging that doubled the price of gasoline overnight. There's still been no consequences for that rape of the pocketbook. The Feds in the guise of FEMA fell flat on their collective ass in response to Katrina, and sacrificed Michael Brown, Chief Incompetent, to the ScapeGoat God. Also in September, I refinished the coffee table, enjoyed Talk Like A Pirate Day, and also enjoyed a short visit from Marcia's sister Sue and her husband Bill. The final tally on the back gardens: Peppers, carrots, and tomatoes did quite well, nothing else really did.
The second of Marcia's solo vacations was in October. Yeah, back in the previous year, when Marcia had 5 weeks of vacation coming to her in 2005, she'd planned a week in Paducah, and a week in New England, since I didn't have but two weeks coming to me. Then she changed gigs, and had two weeks of vacation to go with her two vacations. So we didn't vacation together... And after all that, the New England trip didn't happen, because Barbara Thompson was too busy helping Bob wrap up the latest O'Reilly title, Repairing and Upgrading Your PC. So Marcia went down there instead, taking Lucy as a Road Dog.
November's stand-out news item was hearing from the Syroids! It'd been far too long, and we're letting them re-engage at their own pace (that is, we haven't heard back from either of them since Leah called that Saturday in November. Intelligent Design got big play, too, and is getting the boot everywhere except Kansas. I'll bet by 2010 that you'll have to ship your car around Kansas, and only use horse, buggy and buggy whip while in-state. Thanksgiving was spent at our gracious hosts, the Thompsons, and we dined on the day at Barbara's sister's home, with lots of family around. Great fun! Oh, and in November, I shaved. Eight years with a beard, it was time for a break.
This last month has been interesting. Federal Air Marshals shoot down a self-proclaimed bomb holder, and the weepy wringing-hands spine-free liberal spin machine goes into hyper-plaid-overdrive. It's reported that Bush screams that the Constitution of the United States is "...just a goddamned piece of paper!", and most media fail to pick up the story, or any of my anger over that on top of all the other idiot never-should-have-been-elected crap that this sorry excuse for a President's been up to. I spent most of a week prepping and painting the condo our friend Linda Rose purchased (on her own, thank you very much). When all that work was done and the move completed, I had my final two crowns installed, finishing the process begun back in May. Then I fell to some flu/cold combo bug that downed me for two days before Christmas, and lingers to this very day. Lovely stuff. And here we are, up to the moment.
Finally, here's the wrap-up list, just to get it out of my system:
(I never was much good at lists).
That wraps up this post, and this year. Have a safe New Year's Eve celebration, and a happy and prosperous New Year. Be seeing you...
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January 1, 2006
0000 - Happy New Year!
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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.
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