Author: cdwan

I am now the proud owner of a Linux system. First time I’ve ever owned one. I’ve worked on a lot of them, but never took the time to build my own.

I built GenToo for my ancient Dell P-III (500 MHz). I picked Gentoo because, unlike SUSE or RedHat 7.3, their default image booted the machine. I took that as a good sign and went through the three-days-and-counting build process. Right now it’s building apache from scratch. It seems to be the way these things are done in gentoo. I understand that I could just download the binaries, but why? I’ve got days to kill, since I don’t actually *need* this server for anything.

Hopefully it’ll house backups of the laptops, as well as the photo collection which is about to explode my 500MB limit at my personal website. I plan to use some truly geeky cron and MySQL hacks to keep the links live without paying for a static IP address.

A new source of random crap! Tap the mother lode that is MemePool. A few examples:

Sign your credit cards…

Duuuuuuuuude…

Dance well, and salvation is yours…

In more geeky news, I’m building Gentoo Linux on my old P-III 500 MHz machine. Hopefully it’ll drive the Smart Home X10 stuff that I’m going to be getting soon.

Welcome to the dead space of the year.

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Back at BWI. Sitting in the airport. Our flight to Providence seems to be one of the few that’s actually listed “on time.” I think I briefly saw the status of the flight to Buffalo as “boned,” but they changed it back to “scheduled 6:25pm, it’s 10:15pm now, merry Christmas” shortly thereafter. The natives have gone through anger, dispair, and bargaining, and now they’re singing Christmas Carols. It’s really kind of heart warming, in a sick sort of way.

Got to see the fam. Sw33t gifts were exchanged. Sadly, the time in Northern VA was too short to catch up with anyone except the nuclear family. Such is life. Sooner or later Jen and I will have real jobs, which will allow us to travel for three or four weeks at a time and see more than the absolute legal minimum of people that we care about.

Happy Holidays everyone.

A buddy of mine was, until today, a product designer at Hasbro. Today he got laid off.

If anybody knows of openings for a senior type (late 30s? early 40s?) product designer, I’d appreciate the leads. He’s a good guy, though I’ve never seen his work. He’s willing to relocate, and actually wants to get out of the toy industry.

So, since my impulsive decision to forgo coffee on Thursday, I’ve been pretty severely limiting my intake. It’s been an unmitigated success. The exhaustion that used to settle on me in the afternoon is gone, as is the brutally sudden onset of “must sleep now” in the evening. The headaches only lasted a couple of days, and I easily kept them at bay by going through two whole boxes of tea. My concentration and focus have improved, and I think that I would be sleeping better if I had more time to get sleep. I certainly fall asleep a lot easier. Waking up is actually almost pleasurable now.

The only surprising thing is that my rage towards and hatred of the stupid freaks around me hasn’t subsided. Maybe that wasn’t the coffee after all.

Well, we tasted the lambic for the first time, and it was bad. It may just be a sour beer very fresh in the bottle (5 days out from bottling,) but man that was tart. After taking away the samples I had offered people and providing them with fresh and non-vile beverages, I retired to see if I could puzzle out the nature of its badness. The hop character is minor, as intended, it’s just got this huge sour note to it, combined with the sourness of 10 pounds of raspberries whose sugar has been eaten away by yeast.

I hope it improves with age.

In other news, the ham went over well, and we successfully fed 6 people at our table.

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