/dev/zero

Dad sent me a joke by email, which I forwarded to a couple of mailing lists. Arwen posted it in her journal.

And some ass calling himself “rtav” jumped on it as a perfect example of why people who like dogs or cats are “shitheads” and “socially irresponsible”.

That kind of thinking just boggles my mind.

Dear Dogs and Cats,

When I say to move, it means to go someplace else, not switch positions with each other so there are still two of you in the way.

The dishes with the paw print are yours and contain your food. The other dishes are mine and contain my food. Please note, placing a paw print in the middle of my plate and food does not stake a claim for it becoming your food and dish, nor do I find that aesthetically pleasing in the slightest.

The stairway was not designed by NASCAR and is not a racetrack. Beating me to the bottom is not the object. Tripping me doesn’t help, because I fall faster than you can run.

I cannot buy anything bigger than a king size bed. I am very sorry about this. Do not think I will continue to sleep on the couch to ensure your comfort. Look at videos of dogs and cats sleeping, they can actually curl up in a ball. It is not necessary to sleep perpendicular to each other stretched out to the fullest extent possible. I also know that sticking tails straight out and having tongues hanging out the other end to maximize space used is nothing but sarcasm.

My compact discs are not miniature Frisbees.

For the last time, there is not a secret exit from the bathroom. If by some miracle I beat you there and manage to get the door shut, it is not necessary to claw, whine, try to turn the knob, or get your paw under the edge and try to pull the door open. When I exit this room, I will come out the the same door I entered. In addition, I have been using bathrooms for years. Canine/feline attendance has never been necessary.

The proper order is kiss me, then go smell the other dogs’ butt. I cannot stress this enough. It would be such a simple change for you.

In return for your following these simple rules, I have posted the following message on our front door:

Rules for Non-Pet Owners Who Visit and Like to Complain About Our Pets:

1. They live here. You don’t.
2. If you don’t want their hair on your clothes, stay off the furniture.
3. I like my pet a lot better than I like most people.
4. To you, it’s an animal. To me, he/she is an adopted son/daughter who is short, hairy, walks on all fours and doesn’t speak clearly.
5. Dogs and cats are better than kids. They eat less, don’t ask for money all the time, are easier to train, usually come when called, never drive your car, don’t hang out with drug-using friends, don’t smoke or drink, don’t worry about buying the latest fashions, don’t wear your clothes, don’t need a gazillion dollars for college, and if they get pregnant, you can sell the results.

So, I did something very unusual for me.
I asked a woman out.

Not surprisingly, I got the usual response, but those who know me know it’s unusual for me to ask a woman out.
We’ve sat next to each other in our math class for 3 months and gotten kinda friendly. On Thursday, when I took my hair out of it’s pony tail and re-did it, she observed that my hair was longer than hers. Later she flicked a scrap of paper at me. When I looked at her, she grinned and said she just “felt like flicking it (my) way” in that “I’m trying to get your attention” kind of way. Or so it seemed anyway. So today I figured “what the heck” and asked her out after class. I started with asking her about the speech class she’s taking this semester (I’m going to take the other speech class offered at CCCCD over Wintermester), and the conversation wandered around for a bit. Eventually around to asking if she’d like to go out some time and I got the old standby, “I’m currently seeing somone, but if I wasn’t…” excuse. I stood there chatting with her while she sat in her car for another 20 minutes or so, then her mother called her on her cell phone, so we parted company.
Anyway, it was nice to not have someone trying to get away as soon as possible after I’ve asked them out.

I registered for Spring semester today, and got exactly the classes, with the exact sessions I want.

Threat rating: Medium. Your total lack of decent
family values makes you dangerous, but we can
count on some right wing nutter blowing you up
if you become too high profile.

What threat to the Bush administration are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

It has come to my attention that some of those of you interested enough to read this journal have missed the previous posts to the effect that I no longer use this journal.
For those who actually want to read my journal, it is at http://andrew.pure-chaos.com/.
You can also add the syndicated feed, to your friends list.

Be aware that I haven’t been posting a lot as of late.

1) <lj cut> people. Learn it. Use.
2) If you have seen the new Matrix movie, do NOT post about it in your journal! Posts of “wow, that was really cool!” or “Damn, awesome, deffinitly worth seeing!” or even “What the fuck is this shit? Don’t waste your money!” are OK. But for the LOVE OF GOD! Don’t talk about what happened!
3) <lj cut> people. It might save your life some day.

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I took the target="_blank">What Mythological Creature Are you? test by
!

Finally, nearly two years after buying a bunch of network hardware for my family so they can connect all their computers, everything is connected and working.
We punked the HPNA stuff since it never worked right, and had a tendancy to take the phone line out with it.

Cable Internet is up and running. We’ve got the Airport basestation set up, the laptop is connecting to the net through the wireless card, Mom’s computer is now talking to the ‘net via a USB 802.11b connection. This was especially difficult.
Every time I tried to install the driver and software for the 802.11 device, it would screw up the IP stack. winipcfg would report a fatal error. I’d uninstall all network devices and TCP/IP, reboot, reinstall the Dialup Adapter. IP would work, winipcfg would show correct settings. Then I reinstall the 802.11 software and suddenly everything disappears from the Network control panel and winipcfg would go nuts again. I found an entry in Microsoft’s knowledge base explaining which files to delete from the DOS prompt to clean out the IP stack and reinstall it. Nothing worked.
Finally I upgraded her machine from Win98 to Win98 SE. This took a little creativity, since I only had an SE full-install version, this proved an interesting challange. The trick is to copy the win98 folder off the CD to the hard drive, boot into DOS, nuke (or just rename) c:\windows\win.com, cd into the win98 folder and run setup. When it warns that it has detected another installation of Windows in c:\windows and would you like to install into c:\windows.000 or other, be sure to select “other”, then enter c:\windows instead. It will overwrite the original and keep your old settings.
This done, the IP stack was straight and I was able to install the software for the 802.11 software. FINALLY, after almost 3 years, Mom’s and Dad’s computers are networked and sharing a single Internet connection.
Finally, I activated WEP on the base station, the laptop and Mom’s computer so all that traffic won’t be in the clear for just anyone driving by with an 802.11b card to sniff. Of course, it’s only 40/64bit encryption, so it’s not as strong as it could be, but probably good enough for our purposes. If I can get my hands on an Orinoco Gold card, I can upgrade the Airport to 128bit. But by then we’ll probably just replace the Airport with something newer, that can handle routing and firewalling for our whole network, rather than just doing NAT routing for the wireless clients. Mom’s computer still isn’t surfing the net as quickly as it should, but I think now it’s down to the computer itself, not the network connection. It’s an older HP Pavillion 6350. Every time you click a link, it goes to the hard drive, so I suspect the slowdown is in it trying to decide what to do, and accessing it’s cache, etc, more than in actually getting the data off the net.

I’m the square root of 2. My lucky number is 1.414… (which just happens to be teh square root of 2)
I find this entirely too amusing, since we just finished the unit on irrational and imaginary numbers in Int. Algebra. Scary thing is I actually understood it. So much for flunking the class 3 times in the past. The other scary thing is that I got my lowest grade ever on a test in this class on this unit. I’ve been doing 80%+ on all the tests, but only got 60something% on this one. Bad. I’ll have to study harder before the next test. At least I can be comforted by the fact that the rest of the class didn’t do very well either.

I’m experimenting with a new configuration for my mass dynamic virtual hosting of domains on my web server.

Currently, I have all domains / hostnames served out of /home/domains/domain.tld, with a symlink from /home/domains/www.domain.tld pointing to /domain.tld. I also have to create a symlink from domain.othertld to domain.tld if the customer owns both domain.com and domain.org, for example.

All these symlinks are messy. It makes the /home/domains directory look cluttered, and it’s not easy to see what’s there, really. It’s also error prone. All it takes is forgetting to make one symlink when setting up a new domain and something is broken.
Of course, all this is significantly less broken than having to edit the apache config file every time we add a domain. (with mass dynamic virtual hosting, the config file has certain wild cards for directory path names, so domain names never need to be entered into the config. Basically, if the right dir exists in /home/domains and DNS resolves to the IP address of the server, Apache knows what to do.)

So, the current config looks like this:
<VirtualHost *>
ServerName _default_
DirectoryIndex index.php index.html index.htm index.shtml
ServerSignature email
LogLevel warn
VirtualDocumentRoot /home/domains/%0/htdocs
VirtualScriptAlias /home/domains/%0/cgi-bin
</VirtualHost>

The new one I’m playing with looks like this:
<VirtualHost *>
ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
VirtualDocumentRoot /var/www/%-2/%1/html
DirectoryIndex index.php index.html index.htm index.shtml
ServerSignature email
LogLevel warn
</VirtualHost>
(My sandbox has a different directory structure than my production server, hence a path in /var/www instead of /home/domains)
The new structure would have path (on the production server) of /home/domains/${domainname}/hostname/htdocs
All TLDs would point to the same directory, and all subdomains / hostnames would be under the domain.
There are only two problems left: How to best have domain.tld and www.domain.tld point to the same place (without more messy symlinks) and how to have domain.com and domain.org point to DIFFERENT places if the customer requests it.

Han Sol, a young Korean friend of the family, went Trick or Treating for the first time.

He’s a newbie. Spending a year and a half in the United States, learning American customs. Every American holiday is a new experience for him (and his mother).

So Mom and Kelly took Han Sol around the neighborhood trick or treating. When he got home, they went through the ritual of checking the candy for tampering (OK, I did that part.) and the sorting of the candy. To say he was overjoyed with hauling home a bag full of candy was an understatement. To say he is unfamiliar with American candy is also an understatement. He kept wanting to give away candy he didn’t recognize. He tried to give me his Tootsie-Roll pops. He had never seen one before. I explained that it had hard candy outside, then picked up a Totsie-Roll (something he does recognize) and said “It has one of these in the middle.”

“COOL!” he said and happily took them back.