/dev/zero

Yadda, Yadda, Yadda…
Not a lot happening these days.
Moved all my DNS stuff off of my laptop to a new machine in our co-lo rack, so I could shutdown the laptop and collect it from my friend’s place. Thanks Dave, for hosting it for me for so long.
Got it back, screen is worse than it was before. Backlight only comes on about 1 in 3 boots. And still bad keyboard, toasted battery.
and I went down to Got.net yesterday so we could download a bunch of Red Hat updates and the patches to “Civilization: Call To Power”. Didn’t manage to get the patch.
Went to Coffeetopia where they have Surf’n'Sip (wireless Internet) and discovered I had left my power supply at got.net. Martin grabbed the 25mb patch, then we went back to his place to enjoy some yummy cabbage and corned beef.
I took apart my laptop to try to fix the screen. 2 hours later it was put back together. Screen works better (backlight comes on every time now) but we found out why it was doing it: a capacitor in the backlight system is shorting. Once it gets hot the backlight cuts out. Eventually it will quit entirely. Put a bid on a replacement LCD panel on Ebay.
Then we tried to patch our copies of CivCTP (1.0 crashes when you try to go into a multiplayer game) and discovered the 25mb download was the wrong file. Martin hooked up his laptop to the phone line an downloaded the right files (luckily 2 4mb files) and we started playing.
At about 4AM we decided it was time to sleep.

Wow, it’s been over a week since I last posted. You might think nothing really interesting has happened in my life lately. And you’d mostly be right.
More to the point, I’ve been spending more time AWAY from the damn computer doing other things. Reading mostly. I used to consume a book or two a week when I was in school. Now I rarely pick up anything that isn’t a technical book, so I read one or two a year. I’m just about finished with my second book for the week and have two more on the shelf ready to go. One I haven’t read before, even.

One of the reasons I’ve been on-line less is that I got fed up with some of the drama. One of my friends was posting about being upset with someone she’d been involved with at some point, and missing him, or somehow being hurt buy him or something. She indicated his name started with “Da”. I had a pretty good idea (I thought) who she was talking about, as she’d spoken about a guy whose name began with those letters both in her journal and to me on the phone. One night I see her on AIM so I IM her, saying “So, things not going so well with XXXXX, eh?” meaning merely to be conversational, and if possible, supportive.
Instead I got back an angry response about making assumptions about her sex life, how it “wasn’t the first time” and knock it off.
Oooook…. The only assumption I’d ever made about her sex life is that she had one.
Until she jumped down my throat about it, I had no idea she was talking about a sexual relationship, or that she had been involved thus with the person I thought she was talking about (but wasn’t.)
Clearly I had to re-evaluate my friendship with this person. I don’t take too kindly to being snapped at for things I didn’t do, let alone smacked in the face for trying to be a friend.

School has been going quite well for me though. All my friends are on spring break, since they go to UCSC or UC Davis and just finished the winter quarter. I’m going to Cabrillo, which is on the semester system. They were in the middle of finals and I’m not even up to midterm yet. But I did have a quiz and an exam last week. Got 95% and 96% respectively. But pretty soon I’ll actually have to buy the book for my shell scripting class. To this point I can just about teach the class, but I think we’ll probably start hitting the stuff I don’t know pretty soon.

I installed a new server and have slowly been migrating customer domains to it over the last couple of weeks. Unfortunately every time I turn around SOMETHING gets messed up in DNS and a customer’s domain goes down. Becky’s has had her mail go down like 3 times this last week and she’s actually expecting important email’s from potential sponsors. She is understandably frustrated and annoyed. Two other customer’s had similar things happen. I got a nasty email from accusing me of being lazy and not doing anything to fix things when she mentions them to me, or just plain ignoring her. Which just pissed me off more. (See previous comment about being accused of things I didn’t do (or in this case, not doing things I did.))

At least I got all the DNS stuff moved off my laptop, which has been sitting on a friend’s DSL for months. I thank him for letting me use one of his static IPs to host a DNS server for so long, but it’s been a bit of a problem when is unreliable Pac Bell (of course) DSL goes out and my DNS server is offline for more than a week. I’ll be retrieving the laptop on Tuesday (if I can get enough gas money together) and I’ll have a machine I can take to class. That will leave one more school machine available for another student, and I can more readily transport my notes and work between school and home. That is, if the screen or keyboard don’t flake out on me… that laptop is nearly dead.

Maybe my financial aid will come through soon (fingers crossed!). I’m broke. REALLY broke. My checking account has been overdrawn for a week or so now. With financial aid, I can buy the book I need for the shell scripting class, put gas in my car (so I can get to and from school) and maybe even buy a replacement laptop (I know where to get one that will meet my needs cheap). Oh, and maybe pay some rent to the Leavitts this month…
Anyone know of any jobs here in Santa Cruz? As mentioned, they be scarce around her. I don’t even want a tech job right now. I’ll settle for slinging coffee at one of SC’s innumerable coffee houses. Anything to get some pocket change.
Ugh. It’s 3 AM. I have class in 10 hours. Need to get some sleep.

My house mate, and I went up to Palo Alto today to help the sysadmin at his old buisness partners New company (yeah, follow that train of thought…) get their new offices all wired up.
We had to locate about half the wiring, which for some reason was all coiled up inside the drop ceiling, then we had to trace down which bundle of wires went to which section of the patch panel.
Then Denis got back from his lunch meeting and we got to work figuring out which bundles needed to be re-routed to other parts of the office to accomodate the cubicle plan.
In the process of working out the layout of the cubicles and running the wire, we discovered that whoever had desinged the cubicle layout for them was either on crack or seriously trying to cheat them. The design called for back-to-back cubicles 7′ deep (plus the width of the cubicle walls) in a space 20′ wide. Ok, that leaves 3′ for a corridor on either side folks. I don’t think the fire marshall will like that.
Then we measured and found it isn’t 20′. It’s 19′ 9″. So figuring cubicle walls 3″ thick, that’s 14′ 9″, leaving 2.5′ for corridors. My own shoulders won’t fit in that space. I’m pretty sure the fire code calls for at least 42″.

, you should be amused (or annoyed) by this:
When French fries, aren’t.

and I went and saw Office Space tonight. Good movie. Never seen it before. Must buy a copy now.

Bah. My sister and her kids are out on the street. Again.

And my housemate’s are fighting again.
I heard and yelling at each other in the kitchen, and the door to the laundry room, which is 6 inches from my bedroom door, slamming several times. When I came out to ask what their problem was this time, of course they accused eachother. And both denied the door slammed. They claimed they were just trying to “close” it and it sounds like slamming in my room. No, I know the difference between a door being closed and being SLAMMED. Then they said it was because the door was already closed and the girls were slamming the front door, which caused the laundry room door to rattle. I don’t think so.
They were fighting because Gunilla was cleaning the sink and asked Thomas to empty the dishwasher for her so she could put dirty dishes in. Her back is out again so she couldn’t bend over to take dishes out of the lower rack. Thomas, in his usual way, decided he didn’t want to do what she asked, so he was going to sweep the floor instead and declare that he doesn’t care what she wants, she’s being illogical and he’s “tired of no one else taking responsibility for cleaning the house.”
That pissed me off. At that point I walked over to him, got right in his face, and told him “Thomas, I clean out that sing every single day. I’m the only one who does the dishes around here. So I don’t want to hear about no one else doing anything to clean, since YOU are the one who puts the most dirty dishes IN the sink.”
Kudos to Gunilla for making an effort on the sink. That is my single biggest pet peeve: that she cooks, but never cleans up after herself. There’s this tenant in the “Flylady” program that one should always “polish your sink”. She was trying to get back on track with that. I wish her luck.

Mmmmmm….. yummy coffee. can make coffee for me any day!

I was still hungry at 2:00 (Hey, I didn’t get out of bed until 14:00) so I started making quesadillas. came in the door from the 24 hour peace vigil down town just as I finished cooking the first one, so I offered to make him some to. He looked cold and was.
In the middle of cooking, the smoke alarm started going off. After about the third time, woke up. When Thomas told her it was going off because I was cooking quesadillas, she asked me to make her one, to. Then she ambled into the kitchen and started a pot of coffee.
I now know why she uses the cast iron skillets instead of the griddle built into the range. It’s a nice feature, but it takes forever to heat up. The heat doesn’t appear to be completely even, either.
However, as I pointed out to Gunilla, when I’M don cooking on the stove, the stove is clean. (I scrubbed it, and the sink, before I started, and I wiped things down when I was done. That took me all of 30 seconds.) When she’s done, it looks like she lost a small war. Or maybe just a major battle. It doesn’t help that the other occupants of the house make even bigger messes and are just as lazy about cleaning them up.

First she pees on my bed.
Now she barfed on my monitor!
After peeing on my bed 3 times in 48 hours, Soba is no longer allowed to roam around my bedroom freely when I’m not there and awake. When I go out, or go to bed, she goes in her cage. I got up today and let her out of the cage so she could eat and drink and be with her brother and me. I stepped out of my room, came back in and noticed a puddle of kitty barf on my computer desk. Aside from the “ew, gross”, I counted myself lucky that it didn’t get on anything important and cleaned it up.
Then I saw the side of the monitor. No big deal, I wiped that up. Then I saw the TOP of the monitor. Now I started to get a little worried, but there didn’t seem to be much… but the power light on the front of the monitor was blinking and the screen was blank. Not a good sign. I turned it off and back on. <blink> <blink> <blink>. (sigh).
I disconnected it and took it apart to asses the damage. Cleaned it up as best I could. Didn’t APPEAR to have gotten all over everything, but it did bridge a couple of contacts. Cleaned it up with Qtips and plugged it in again. No dice. It’s dead, Jim.
R.I.P., my beloved Sun GDM 20e20.
My spare, the GDM 20d10 was also dead.

It’s just not my day with computers.
Lynnaea asked me to get her and Lynessa’s computer up and running so she could play games at the same time Lynessa was playing on Thomas’ computer, but I couldn’t find a mouse to save my life.
Then wanted me to put in her new SCSI and video cards. The SCSI card turned out to be the wrong kind (only had an internal connector. She needs it to hook up my flatbed scanner, so an external connector is needed.) and the video card just wouldn’t work. I plugged it in, switched the BIOS to PCI primary and the best I could get out of it was a pattern of verticle lines about one in 5 boots.

At least there was this spare Nokia monitor sitting around. It’s much smaller than my beloved Sun monitor, but has a beautiful screen.

Well, all my homework for the week is done and turned in (gotta love classes where you can turn your homework in over the ‘Net) and my homework for CIS 130 from last week is re-done. What I turned in the first time satisfied the requirements of the assingment, but it just felt like a kludge, so I re-wrote it a little more elegently. I doubt I’ll get any extra credit for that, but I had to do it.

Nothing like noting in the comments where you could have done things a better way, but that isn’t how the instructor asked for the assingment to be done (why use the -exec option of find to do an ls -l? Just do -ls…)

I just got my homework for this week’s CIS 130 class turned in. And noticed it
was due yesterday… Ooops.
Oh well, it just says due on the 4th. Which leaves up until midnight. And
since I doubt he’s in the office yet, I doubt he’ll count anything that
arrives between midnight and his office hours as “late”.
Now to get some sleep so I’ll be rested before class.

I’m home all day and no incidents. I go out for 3 hours and when I come home, a wet spot in the middle of my bed. And not the kind that got there by having fun, either.

Which Firearm are you? brought to you byStan Ryker

Now, off to social coffee in San Jose…

I cleaned my room last night. I was tired of having to squeeze between the stereo and dresser, and the stack of boxes at the foot of my bed to get to my computer.
I moved into this room a month or more ago and I still hadn’t finished unpacking things. The time consuming part was dealing with all CDs. A lot of them were out of their cases and had been exposed to all sorts of things. So I brought in a couple of rags and a bowl of lightly soapy water and cleaned each one and it’s case, when I could find it. Took me about 4 hours (with a 2 hour break in the middle) and when I was done I had about a dozen CDs with no cases, and another dozen cases with no matching CDs. The later really bothers me. Some of my favorite CDs have gone missing. And I have LOTS of scratched CDs. I ended up just throwing about a half a dozen away as they media layer itself was scratched.
So now I have a neatly organized room. All the dirty laundry is in a basket, all the clean laundry is folded and in the dresser or hanging in the closet. All the computer games are in a milk crate in the bookshelf, the books on another shelf (I’ve lost most of my books the last few years.) The DVDs neatly tucked away below the stereo. Floor swept, everything dusted. My pictures hung up on the wall covering the little dents and cracks Rabbit left behind when he moved out. The room is CLEAN and a proper living space.
and when I go to crawl into bed is when I discover what Soba thought of all this cleaning.
She peed on the bed. Again. I found a spot on the bed earlier in the day and that was part of what set off the cleaning frenzy. I cleaned it up as best I could, flipped the mattress over and put on my other set of sheets (I had to dig to find them, so I started cleaning), made the bed and spent the next 6 or 8 hours cleaning the room. Only to find she’d peed on the freshly made bed again. I am so sick of this. I’ve been fighting with this cat about where the appropriate place to pee is since the day I got her 5 years ago. She’s peed on just about everything I own in that time. I don’t know why I put up with her. Senar was easy. The day I got them, he went straight for the litter box and I didn’t have to do ANYTHING to train him. After I discovered she likes to pee on paper, I got her own litter box which I keep lined with newspapers. That’s been working great for a couple of months now. She always peed on the paper in the box and nothing else. I thought the problem was finally beat. She still shit on the floor, but with hardwood floors that was easy to deal with. Cat poop doesn’t damage things the way pee does, as long as it’s cleaned up promptly, and she always did it directly on the floor.
Sunday night I put fresh papers in her box. By Monday afternoon the papers were still clean and dry. I thought this was a little odd. I can’t figure out why she suddenly won’t use them.
Hmmm… (just checked her box) Well how about that? Dry papers, but there’s a poop in the box. Well that’s… interesting…

just let me know that Babs’ dad called. Babs is in critical care. She had a gastric bypass a week ago yesterday. She was released from the hospital yesterday then had severe abdominal pain. Her dad took her to the emergency room and they found one of her staples had let go and she’s been leaking fluid into her abdominal cavity. She’s sedated and out of it and in serious, but apparently at this point stable, condition. Very sad. I hope she pulls through. I wonder how Saxon and Vincent are taking it?

and I worked some more on project TFG last night. I need to make a phone call and type up our notes.

I took the Inner Dragon online quiz and found out I am a Copper Dragon on the inside. My Inner Dragon is the mighty warrior of dragon-kind. It’s just that simple. Coppers show up when someone’s about to die. Coppers don’t mess around, and they don’t play evil games like Red Dragons. They don’t bother with magic, like Gold Dragons. They exist for a purpose, and they serve it well.

But what sort of a dragon would I be if that really was the whole story? I also like to stomp my enemies, start the occasional war, and spend lazy hours preening my battle aura. My favorable attributes are strength, physical abilities, thriftiness, warmth, and longevity in battle. Just in case some puny human (or conniving Red Dragon) thinks they can get the drop on me, I’ve got a concealed breath weapon - gigantic masses of Fire. Hey, it’s the tried and true way to cook a cow in 0.75 seconds.

I’ve been a member of the User Friendly Fan mailing list for several years, and one of it’s administrators for the last couple of years.
I AM the sys admin / postmaster / webmaster for the site. I’ve also been running a monthly list stats program that I wrote to generate a humorous little stats message (tells who posted the most, and what days had the most messages, etc). Every month that message includes a little blurb “For suggestions, questions, comments, feature requests, etc” send email to me.
In all the time I’ve run the stats I have received a grand total of ONE feature request. Nothing else.
Another member of the list, a fellow admin no less, gets impatient every month if I don’t run the stats immediately on the first of the month.
This month she got so impatient she just ran her own stats. I admit it, the package she used is better than mine. Much better. It implements lots of features I would have liked to put into my stats package, but didn’t know how (I don’t really know perl all that well). The thing that pisses me off is that she did this without even telling me she was going to.
Ok, anyone on the list has a right to post pretty much whatever they want. But I post the stats every month. She could have at least asked me if I minded if she did it, or pointed me to the web site for this package, or just plain told me she was going to do it, instead of me finding out my program was being dumped by seeing her stats posted to the list. Hey, had I seen what this thing could do, I would have been the first (well, second, I guess) person to suggest it be used in place of mine. I have no ego about that. But she could have said something first.

and I took off this morning (Sunday) to show his car to a woman in Alameda. He’s been trying to sell it for a while and may have a buyer on the line.
First stop was a car detail place in San Jose. Dropped off his car for a detail than walked half a block to Baker’s Square. I had their country skillet and he had a grilled cheese.
When we got out of the restaurant, the car was done. Except we had to go back and have them touch up a couple spots they missed.
Then we headed up to Alameda to show the car. I sat on the woman’s front porch while they test drove it and he told her all about the features built into the car.
After that Martin and I headed up and across the Bay Bridge to San Francisco. Walked around Chin Town a bit (I would have been happy skipping that. Once you’ve seen China Town, you’ve seen China Town.) then over to Coit Tower. Stupid me, didn’t bring my camera. It’s been 20 years since I’ve been to Coit Tower and the view from the top of Telegraph Hill is amazing. 360 degree view of the San Francisco Bay. you can see all of the Golden Gate Bridge, down to Alcatraz (amazing how small that island is, and how close to shore really), Angel Island, the Bay Bridge and Treasure Island, the top of Twin Peaks, down to Fisherman’s Wharf… I have to go back next weekend with my cameras. Dumb me.
Then we went down to Fisherman’s Wharf for some dinner. I had a clam chowder bread bowl, Martin had the lobster bisque bread bowl. It was while munching on our yummy bread bowls that Martin got a great idea, expressed jokingly.
We moved on from there to Ghirardelli Square, then headed back to the car. Stopped along the way to look at an art gallery that had some really pretty acrylic pieces. Cast nudes, but the impressive part was the shapes INSIDE the piece. Took me a while to figure out how they did that.
Back to the car and heading home, we talked more about his idea and fleshed it out. What started as a joke may actually work…

I slept in late today. called around noon and asked if I wanted to go with him over the hill to just go do fun stuff. I declined. I’d only been in bed for 4 hours.
Around 4ish I got out of bed and took the shower I so badly needed by then. Sat down in front of the computer and called again to ask if I wanted to come over for dinner. Went over there, we went to Trader Joes and picked out some food and went back to his place where he made lovely stir fried veggies with calamari over rice, with steamed mussels.
Afterwards we went around UCSC delivering his little bags of cookie goodness. wasn’t in. wasn’t in either, but her roommate was, so cookies got left with her (I could tell it was Smoofy’s room from all the fairy wings stacked on top of the bureau.) Also dropped some with ’s friends Nicole and Arthur.
On the way back from UC, Martin realized it was Friday night and he was missing the LARP downtown. He took me back to his place where I got my car, then went back downtown for the game. I went for a drive down to Fort Ord (er, CSU Monterey Bay) and back.