/dev/zero

Boing Boing: Jailed for using a nonstandard browser

Armed police, a van, a police cell and national news later the police
have gone in SWAT styley and arrested someone having their lunch.

This is the kind of thing that just infuriates me.
Someone is doing nothing wrong, indeed, something very right in trying to be a decent human being, and they get their door busted down and arrested. Just because they weren’t geing a Good Citizen and using an Approved Piece of Software. Not to mention the MORON who can’t read a server log.

This very site was hit 32 times by Sun Solaris just in the last 5 months of 2004. 72 times with Lynx
Man, I’d be in trouble if I got my knickers in a twist every time someone “attempted to hack” my server with Lynx on Solaris!

OK, just noticed my last two posts were both titled “Strange ${hardware} behavior”…
Combine that with the car acting up… this is a disturbing trend…

I got up this morning and schlepped the laptop down stairs, sat down and went to get my mail… but there was no network.
Windows says the only wireless network is “default”, and it’s not giving out IP addresses.

I figured my laptop was f’d up, so I rebooted. No joy.
Walk over to Mom’s computer and boot it up, same thing. That’s odd. Not my laptop then. Her computer sees 3 networks: 2 named “default” (on channels 3 and 11) and one named “NETGEAR”, also on 11. That would be the neighbor’s.
I go up stairs and reset the WAP, but no joy.
So I sit down at the server and log into the router via Ethernet. Or try to. My password isn’t working. OK, that’s a bad sign…
I logged in without a password and saw that the router had been reset to factor defaults. Odd. The only way I know of to do that is to log in and click “factor default”. I don’t even know how to do it from hardware, and I certainly didn’t try to. It was fine when I went to bed last night.
Luckily I had downloaded the router’s config just a couple days ago, so I just uploaded it and reset the router and we’re back in business. I hope this isn’t a sign of an impending hardware failure. I’d have to go back to using the Apple Airport (original graphite). 64 bit encryption, lousy internal antenna, no MAC locking… no thanks.

I was running some long over-due web server stats (awstats) on my home server, cranking through 1.3G of server logs last week.
I just wasn’t getting the performance I ought out of that system, and suspecting there was a configuration issue for a while now (basically since I upgraded from the P-III/500 a couple of months ago) I shut down and started playing with the FSB jumper settings.

Somehow I managed to kill the system. It won’t boot. Period. No POST, no beeps, nothing. Hard drives spin up, power supply fan blows, CPU fan spins, but that’s it. I put the FSB speed jumper back where it was, still no joy. I don’t know if I killed the mobo, the CPU, the RAM or what. Doesn’t really matter. I need all 3 for the machine to work. $150 down the tube.
Yesterday I gave up and put the old P-III mobo back into the system.
The system I killed was an Athlon 2400+ XP, 1 512MB stick of PC-2100 RAM with UDMA100 controllers.
The old mobo is a Pentium III 500mhz with 2 256MB sticks of PC-100 RAM and UDMA66 controllers.
That little P-III is cranking through the web server stats about 10x as fast as the Athlon. Something was DEFINITELY not right.

It is totaly impossible to concentrate on anything with Mom in the same room. Every time it gets quiet enough to settle into concentrating on something, Mom will start talking to one of the cats (as if the cat was a baby), about one of the cats (as if everything the cats do is fascinating and worth comment), think out load, comment on whatever SHE is concentrating on, or make any of a number of bodily noises (burping, farting, whatever) and totaly destroy my concentration. Then it will quiet down again long enough for me to start getting back into whatever I’m doing. Wash, rinse, repeat.

And now I just made the mistake of finally commenting aload about this (one of the cats did something, so she had to tell me about it and I made a frustrated noise), and she’s acting hurt.
Bleh.

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | US TV legend Johnny Carson dies

I was supposed to have lunch with Larry today, but the car was dead again. So dead I couldn’t even unlock the doors. (The key only works in the trunk. From the trunk I can unlock the whole car, but there wasn’t enough power in the battery to throw the electric locks on the doors)

I found Dad’s battery charger and and have it charging the battery, but I don’t know what I’m going to do about class tonight. If the battery went completely flat while I was in Baking Tues night, I expect it will do the same in American Regional, also a 4 hour class, tonight. And I forgot to get the jumper cables out of Mom’s trunk and put them in my car.
At least this time I’ll know to ask someone to stick around after class until I know if my car will start.

Today was the first day of classes for the 2005 Spring semester.
My first class was Fundamentals of Baking. I hadn’t originally signed up for this class (it was going to be Photography II), but I got a call last week to let me know the section of American Regional Cuisine for which I’d signed up was canceled due to insufficient number of students. I specifically wanted to take another class with Chef Holmburg, so I dropped Photo and signed up for Baking.

The good part of class tonight: As soon as I walked out of the kitchen to my car to get my note book (class hadn’t started yet) I ran into Kim, a fellow student from my Intermediate Food Prep. class last spring. Very nice young lady. I was actually hoping I’d run into her in another cooking class.
Chef declared me his “Sous chef” for this class. I’m honored. Especially given the reception I got when I joined his Advanced Food Prep class in Fall ‘03 (being a beginning student, I didn’t know anything and he was clearly not impressed.)
When it came time to divide the class up into work groups, he alloted the task to me. He told the class if anyone wanted to be paired with someone else, they should let me know. Kim immediately declared she wanted to be in my group. Otto (Chef) then declared Kim was to be my assistant (The “Sous, Sous Chef” as he put it.)
I got one of the other rather attractive women in my group as well. (Kim’s already taken. Second thing she told me tonight: “I got engaged over New Year!”)

Sucky things: For some reason the dome light in my car stayed on through class. This being a 3 hour class, and a cold night, that was enough to kill my battery. Kim (who was parked right next to me) didn’t have jumper cables and neither do I. I had to call Mom to come give me a jump start.
It appears the dome light timer (the dome light stays on for several seconds after you get in) has died and doesn’t turn the dome light once you close the door. The in-dash computer has also gone haywire. I don’t know that these are related, but it’s an odd coincidence if they’re not. Hopefully my car will start tomorrow (I shut my dome light off completely to avoid the battery drain. They shouldn’t have been able to completely the battery that fast.)

Thurs: lunch with Larry.
Thurs. evening: American Regional Cuisine with Chef Brantley. (Tougher grader than Otto)
Sat morning: International Cuisine with Chef Severs.

I just had the shortest job interview of my life.
2 minutes.

Apparently Fry’s Electronics has a special policy for re-hiring former employees.
The application has to be sent back to corporate headquarters to be approved by Randy or Kathy Fry.
I worked for Fry’s 10 years ago, for 6 months.
I’m guessing they figure a former employee knows what it’s like to work for Fry’s, and therefor know how little respect and how much distrust employees suffer.

Weight today: 232.6 lbs (105.5 kg.)
Lost so far: 8.6 lbs (3.9 kg.)

I recently bought some food items to send to a friend living in another country as a Xmas “Care Package”.
One of those items was a pack of Oreo cookies.

Before I got them to the post office I broke down and opened the package and ate a cookie. I could always go to the store and buy another pack of Oreos. Then Mom started eating the cookies to. Pretty soon everyone in the house was grabbing a cookie every time they walked by that counter in the kitchen, which was fine since obviously I’m not going to send an open package anyway.
The next time she went to the store Mom bought another pack of Oreos to replace the one that got eaten. I made the mistake of putting them next to the now open pack. By Friday the original pack had been completely consumed.
Dad came home for the weekend. And opened the new pack.

Starting weight: 241.2 lbs (109.4 kg.)
Goal in 3 months -10% - 217.1 lbs. (98.5 kg.)

If you’ve been looking at my main MT blog page lately, you may have noticed some changes.
My external links are now imported from my Bloglines feed.
I’ve added some buttons for syndicating via RSS / ATOM.
While I’m at it, I’m using CSS for my RSS / ATOM / Bloglines feed feed buttons, but they are over sized and I can’t figure out why. If anyone has a clue why, can you give me a hint?

The IT Conversations feed is part of my podcast list.
Doug Kaye has a “donate” button to help support the site. He disabled the button and requested that if you’re inclined to make a donation to IT Conversations, donate that money to an organization involved with tsunami reliefe instead.
Now that’s class.

Here are just some organizations you might consider:

International Red Cross
UNICEF
Oxfam
Doctors Without Borders