/dev/zero

border="0" alt="Which OS are You?"/>
Which OS are You?

So I’ve seen the term “RSS” knocked around a bit here and there but never paid much attention to it.
After getting a paid LJ account, I added some syndicated feeds to my journal, mostly various cartoons I like. I had BBC news for a while but there were just too many posts from them and often they repeated themselves.
Well reading the FAQ tonight I saw that you could add the journal of a user on OTHER LJ based sites to your friends list, not just actual LiveJournal users. So I added ’s sister’s DeadJournal. Saves me having to have two separate browser windows / bookmarks / whatever to keep up with both my LJ friends and that particular off-site site.
An added bonus here is that, if you click on the “comment” link on LJ, the comment appears on LJ, but isn’t actually added to the original post on her DJ, so Sara will never see any snippy comments made. (Are you listening, Laura? So it seems LJ uses RSS feeds to do that. Sounds kind of nifty. “Think I’ll look into this ‘RSS’ stuff” says I to myself.
Turns out there’s all kinds of RSS enabled sites and it’s a pretty nifty feature. Really helps the Web to live up to it’s promise of an interconnected world. Of course I’m sure all those news sites who’ve been fighting those legal battles over “deep linking” for years just hate the idea. After all, it allows you to share your content with other sites! Someone might see the CONTENT of a site without that sites lucrative advertising! Horrors! I’ll have to see what else I can do with RSS, both on LJ and my own personal site.

Like , I haven’t updated recently. Not much to say.

My house mate lost custody of her kids today. She’s been fighting a long, drawn out, very ugly battle with her ex husband.
He managed to convince the judge that sexuality has become “politicized” in her household and that the girls were being exposed to it.
She gets them every other weekend, from Friday after school to Tuesday morning.

I got a guy on the phone today, starts out asking me about Need For Speed SE (about 7 years old), then Need For Speed II, then Need For Speed 3. Even NFS 3 is about 5 years old.
And he’s complaining about their performance under Windows XP. NFS 3 will function just fine with the right settings and I walked him through that. But he wanted to know how to make the other two, DOS based games, as well as Extreme Pinball, also DOS based, to work on XP. Sorry, no can do. Shouldn’t have upgraded to XP if you wanted to play these games.
And he wanted us to make patches for them. Ok, buddy, these games are 7 or more years old. That’s ancient in computer terms. And you want us to waste time and money patching them for the latest operating system? Dude, go spend the 30 bucks to get the current version of the game that looks 100x better. I think you’ve gotten your money’s worth out of the old ones. If you want to continue playing them, go spend $50 and get yourself an old retired Pentium with Win98.

After several months of sleeping on the couch, then sleeping in the “girls room”, I finally have a private space of my own in the house.
Because I couldn’t pay the rent on the cottage where I’d been living, and my landlord / friends really needed that money, I had to move out so someone who could pay the rent could move in. But there was no place to put me in the house. I slept on the couch for a while, but that didn’t work too well, being in the same room as all the computers and my housemates like to be up all night.
I moved into the “girls room” (since they’ve been with their dad for months while he and Gunilla fighout out their custody), but since Gunilla is about to get them back, I needed to be out of there and I couldn’t be on the couch with the girls around (and I don’t want to be anyway). So Rabbit and Andi moved out of the corner room (they’re just kinda squatting) so I could move in. Now I truely have my own room (and I have my bed back! I was tired of sleeping on a futon. I like my full queen bed. MUCH better!

How much do you really know about me?

So my supervisor asks me to come speak to him when I finish up with the customer I’m talking to. I figured he wanted to ask me about working email support over the weekend.
Nope. I’ve been instructed to do a write up on how to do support for games in Linux: what questions I would ask to get technical information about their system, how to figure out what version of Linux they’re running, etc.
Very interesting…

Talk about hitting close to home…
http://www.queenofwands.net/d/20030115.html

A while back posted about one of his “worst personal bad habits”.
He mentioned to me once that I had caught him a couple of times. The first was when he had told Becky about what they’d “forced him to drink” at 12 Shots the pervious year. Except he hadn’t been to 12 Shots. He couldn’t remember what the other thing I’d caught him in was, except that he said I had researched it and caught him at it.
I wracked my brain for about a week trying to figure out what it was.
Last night while lying in bed trying to drift off to sleep, it suddenly hit me. I know exactly what it was.

---

On the bookshelf in his front room is a small sheath knife. Sort of crude styling, but well made.
I was admiring it one day when he started telling me about how he came to have it. It’s a Finnish brand, J Marttiini. He said a coworker had gone to Finland on business and brought it back for him as a gift. A $600 gift, he said.
Ok, I know fine knives can be expensive, but that seemed a little high for this crude looking knife. This looked like the kind of thing one would use in hunting or day to day stuff. Which, it turns out, is exactly what that model is for.
A few days after he told me about this, I was walking down a street in San Francisco when I walked past a curio shop. Being curious and having time on my hands, I stepped in to have a look around. Son of a gun, there’s a J Marttiini sitting in a display case. In this case, a fillet knife. Believing this was an expensive knife, I inquired about it. It was $12. I snapped it up, despite the blade not being in the greatest of shape.
I then went home and started researching my new purchase online.
The most expensive gift / collectors knife J Marttiini makes is about $220.
His lynx knife is £24.99, or $38.90.

Borrowed shamelessly from : The Realities of Love

Interesting read. I’ll probably print that and pin it up in my cubicle at work.

I got home from work tonight, sat down at my computer and fired up YM and Trillian.
Almost immediately Becky messages me asking for help with her printer. Unfortunately I couldn’t figure it out. She’d already done most of the stuff I would have done. It’s Windows, it’s ME, it’s a USB printer. Not my bailiwick.
So then she logs out without even so much as a thank you or even saying goodbye.

I emailed a friend in Davis who could show Becky around and asked if she minded me passing her contact info to her. She emailed back saying sure, go ahead.
I messaged Becky while she was offline sending the info over, then later this evening Becky logs back on. I asked if she got her printer working. All I got back was “no”.

Strongbow (11:06:13 PM): Did you get XXX’ contact info?
Becky (11:09:39 PM): look iam really sorry but iam busy right now
Strongbow (11:09:55 PM): Just checking that you got it ok, that’s all.

No response. No acknowledgement that she got it or didn’t get it, no thank you for trying to help earlier, nothing.
I was surprised as hell when she messaged me at work today, to just basically say hi. She hasn’t initiated conversation in weeks.
Then she talks to me when she needs something, then won’t talk to me again, not even a courtesy acknowledgement of receipt of info.
If she didn’t get XXX info, I’m not inclined to send it to her again until she apologizes. Like that’s going to happen.

Following up on the post I made earlier about goths, I was chatting with this evening about her sister. She nearly freaked out when I mentioned I posted a comment to her sister’s DeadJournal.

Laura: ARGH!
Laura: WHY?!
Laura: Why did you do that?!

A bit later, there was a post to her DJ about family reading her journal. I thought the gig was up for a min, until I realized she posted that almost 1/2 before I posted my comment. So I didn’t tip her off that her family is reading her journal, which is what Laura was worried about.

But we (Laura and I) had an interesting conversation about female body image and what magazines like Teen and YM and Cosmo tell young women they should be like.

And on another note, I see a number of people on my friends list discussing being offended at being removed from other people’s friends lists lately. It seems to be an interesting phenomena. Someone gets added to someone’s friends list, it’s an honor. They get deleted, it’s an insult. I don’t quite understand it. I put people on my friends list because I want to read their journal, or I want them to be able to read my private entries (which I make very few of). Since I make very few “friends only” entries, there’s really nothing to get upset over if you get removed from my friends list. You can still have me on yours and read (most of) what I have to say. But there seems to be this pervasive attitude that it’s just plain rude to delete someone from your friends list without telling them why. Did I tell any of my “friends” why I put them on my list to begin with?
An interesting corollary: I’ve been playing The Sims Online (Hey, I work for the company. Sue me.) and have now gone through two sets of housemates. This is a game where the goal is to build a sort of community. You join a property and work with your housemates cooperatively and make more money and skills faster. But while the game allows for “possession” of objects, it seems perfectly acceptable to move your housemates objects around at will. I logged off last night, back in again today and all my bedroom stuff was spread out all over the house.
Ok, my “possessions” didn’t really go anywhere, they were all still right there in the house, undamaged, but does the fact that they are virtual and the game places no limitation on housemates messing with them make it “ok” to do so?
The online world has some very interesting concepts of “ownership” and privacy and friendship. I may write more on this later, but I have to get to bed now. 6:15 comes awfully early.

I run a small web / domain hosting business.
Over the last 4 days my server has crashed 3 times. I can’t explain why.
Ok, it hasn’t actually crashed, it just gets so loaded it no longer responds.
Each time I’ve rebooted, I can see from the Sendmail logs how high the load went (Sendmail is configured to refuse incoming connections at a load average of 25. It logs every attempt to connect, and what the load average was at that time.)
I rarely see this machine go above 5. Only once in my career had I seen a machine go above 20, and that was a shell/web server at Best Internet which hit 70 (hosting something like 20,000 domains.)
The first time forge (my server) went as high as 119.
The second time, 206.
This time, 210.

I think it has something to do with my spam filter. I run SpamAssassin. I’ve seen spamd processes with as much as 1:06 of CPU time. Normally no instance should ever run up more than a couple of fractions of a second of CPU time. It starts to look like it’s having issues connecting to Razor. It’s SUPPOSED to time out after 5 seconds if Razor isn’t responding, but it’s not doing that. I turned off all but local tests so it won’t use Razor any more. I hope that works.

So posted a link to her sister’s “DeadJournal” and I started pursuing it. Yes Laura, she is every bit as disturbed as you made her out to be.
“Delirium” mentioned she had posted an ad to Gothic Personals in one of her posts, so out of curiosity I started reading through some of them.
It’s laughable. “Follow me to certain death” one writes as the title for her add. “THOUGHTS are rarely INTERESTING” another writes. Some of them are pretentious beyond words.
What was amusing was finding ’s ad. Yes, I know it’s you Laura. How many 19 y/o “single, poly, bi, theater arts (design) students” into Fair/e and allergic to pot are there in Santa Cruz? Nice pic, by the way.

http://members.cox.net/tauntaun/SW/Sith.swf

http://www.queenofwands.net/d/20020916.html

These are entries to a competition asking for a
rhyme with the most romantic first line, but least
romantic second line:

Love may be beautiful, love may be bliss
but I only slept with you, because I was pissed

I thought that I could love no other
Until, that is, I met your brother

Roses are red, violets are blue, sugar is sweet, and
so are you.
But the roses are wilting, the violets are dead, the
sugar bowl’s empty and so is your head.

Of loving beauty you float with grace
If only you could hide your face

Kind, intelligent, loving and hot
This describes everything you are not

I want to feel your sweet embrace
But don’t take that paper bag off of your face

I love your smile, your face, and your eyes-
Damn, I’m good at telling lies!

My darling, my lover, my beautiful wife:
Marrying you screwed up my life

I see your face when I am dreaming
That’s why I always wake up screaming

My love you take my breath away
What have you stepped in to smell this way

My feelings for you no words can tell
Except for maybe “go to hell”

What inspired this amorous rhyme?
Two parts vodka, one part lime.

should enjoy this:

http://www.aoc.nrao.edu/epo/pr/2003/gravity/

My server is down. I won’t be able to get to it to try to fix it until about 20:00.

Nothing like being on the phone with a customer and having the building fire alarm system scream at you.
We just had a fire alarm here in our building. I think the customer I was talking to could hear it. He didn’t give me any trouble about cutting the call short. It was a false alarm, though it’s going to cost EA some bucks, having 5 fire trucks show up.

Ryan (logging into Aspect phone system): Hey! My phone says ‘hairy nipple’!”
Rebecca & Stan: What??
Me and Shauna: Don’t ask.
Shauna: It’s a long story.
Rebecca: Not asking. Don’t tell.
Mike wanders past.
Me: There’s the hairy nipple now.
Mike: Wanna see the hairy nipple?
Me, Ryan & Timmy: NO!
Mike: How ’bout a pierced hairy nipple
Timmy: AAAUGH! BAD VISUAL! BAD VISUAL!

This week’s midnight movie at the Del Mar is Clerks.

Let’s get a group together!
Who’s going?

Mike: Shauna, go home!
Shauna: I can’t. I’m waiting for my ride. It’s cold.
Mike: Wimp!
Shauna: Perhaps you haven’t noticed the lack of breasts?
Mike: What are you talking about? I have breasts to.
(innocent) me: Na! NA! NA! (covering ears. I’m not hearing this!)
Shauna: I would have mentioned lack of penis, but Andrew would have been sitting here going “Na! NA! NA!”
Me: No, cause if Mike had mentioned a lack of penis on his part, I’d be rolling on the floor laughing my ass off!
Mike: Suck the hairy nipple!
(innocent) Ryan: Na! NA! NA! (hands covering ears)
Me: I think you got Ryan with that one, Mike!
Mike: Does Ryan suck the hairy nipple?
(innocent) Ryan: THUD! (forehead intersecting with desk)
Me: No, but he does bang his forehead into his desk.

Uhm… wow. The place across the street REALLY believes in peanuts in their kung pao chicken.

Strongbow1800: Can you use a mouse to play madden?
DrkLrdTre1: *blinks* I don’t think that’s possible. come here so I can smack you for that question.
DrkLrdTre1: wait.. there IS a mouse mode.

Lunch today:

Salmon with a tomato basil sauce,
garlic mashed potatoes,
Steamed zucchini, squash and tomatoes.

Yummmmm.

And for desert, 1 Cahootz. (Ok, it was really two…)

I sooo overslept today. I remember my alarm going off, getting up, hitting snooze a dozen times, just like always.
Then I woke up at 7:55. I have to be at work at 8:00. Work is an hour away.
I rolled over and went back to sleep. What the hell, I was going to be an hour late anyway. Only intended to sleep another few minutes though.
I woke up again at 10:00. Ok, so I go in after lunch.
The upside is, I’m actually caught up on sleep. And I don’t have to rush to work.

So, end of the day comes, the phones get shut off, but all queues are behind on their emails. Especially Maxis. Maxis needs help. All them Sims players, after all…
We are informed that no one goes home until the emails are cleared out. That first we would take care of clearing out our own queue’s mail, then everyone would dig in to help out Maxis.
No prob. We’re a team.
Come 7:30 and we’re still working on our own mail. Oh, and look! Maxis went home at 6:00.
The entire rest of the dept is pissed. We will NOT be staying over time tomorrow to help them dig themselves out of that backlog now.

In contrast to the shitty day I was having earlier, I just got off the phone with a customer who was desperate to fix The Sims for his daughter.
They kept getting a BSOD “Fatal exception OE has occurred at blah blah blah in module asp4wav”
I had him adjust his sound hardware acceleration level down from Full to Basic.
His game runs perfectly. He was quite happy. He wouldn’t let me get off the phone until his daughter could get on to thank me to.

I like it when the customer is happy when we’re done.