Memories

Looking through my live journal

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Been perusing old entries, starting from Day One.

Somethings to catch my minds eye, I was a LCpl in [SAS] at the time. My laptop is at leas 2 years old, found the day I was made a Cpl. A few memories of my early programs (mostly C), the time I started to learn HTML. Read a fair bit of my computing history, and certainly hoping that my grammar has improved a /little/ bit since then, haha. General reminder, that I hate cups and samba for the most part, then again? I hate printers to start with lol. My initial encounters with various programs, and even testing PC-BSD, gee… it always has been lacking polish, ain’t it?

Certainly notable that over the past year and a half, my use of profanity has had it’s surges and falls, but much higher then it once was.

Found my PC-BSD Users Review, which kinda took on a small life of it’s own, I eventually locked the commenting for spams sake, the PC-BSD v1.2 release is ancient history; to most people other then myself. Found one on how I joined [SAS], and some history since. Found what looks like an extended version of my ~/.vimrc file. Which has seen at least 2 or 3 rewrites for all intents and purposes over the years. My current vimrc, residing safely in a private CVS server, where I can quickly check in / out revisions to it from any of my boxes.

Hmm, I remember how pissed I was at the Win4BSD incident, in which the lead developer of PC-BSD released a PBI that broke the rules; but hey, it was done for a company, so he changed the rules on us… We later got them to change it back, when PBIs were at, so far there 1st or 2nd lowest in quality control. I say 1st or 2nd, because I’m not sure what was worse… The amount of people it fucked, or the other most worse one, which was largely a maintenance problem. This looks like my cool down, now that I read it, I’m actually kind of disappointed when I look back upon PBIs history; between then and now.

Dug up an old memory, ahh… When the idea of automating the creation of PBI was purposed and laughed at as “impossible”, I took up a personal challenge to try and create a tool to do it. I learned a lot about designing programs from it’s successes and failures, whatever value it had, the fatal flaw of it all? Was having to depend on PC-BSDs PBC program to create the PBI files. That is basically what derailed the project, so it never came to fruition. I can even see how much the scripting API for PBC has changed since those days, now instead of being useless, it’s a brain damaged form of assembly; unless you want to make horse crap.

I feel just how abusive my todo lists and such things have been over the year, abusive to my free time. But, well? I do have my reasons, and their are worse solutions to workohol.

Just stumbled on the first version of my Vi User How-to. I used to have that in my sigblock on PC-BSDs support forum, until I decided it was time to rewrite it into something a bit better for learning Vi form. In fact, I’ve got the LaTeX files in my home directory somewhere, but I never finished it. Just to much other crap to take care of :. Hmm, something on PC-BSD and QEMU (the emulator).I’ve still got the text of it stored in ~/Documents/Computers/HOWTOs/QEMU_Howto.txt.

I can see, some of the ebbs and flows in my ways of programming things. And how much I’ve come to like revision control for some things hehe. Although, I still operate on a system of zip/tar files for most of it. I’ve got things that I really want under revision control, tucked away in the CVS server. I’m kinda glad, that I post more links in my journal entries now; there were a few things, I really would like to check the cross references with. Heh, a lot of times when I post, I can see these little [1] boxes in my sentences, where my brain makes wiki-links to the thoughts they represent. Now, I just post links and save myself the trouble 2 years later ^_^. And I can see some of my frustations, past and present in my posts. Sometimes I wonder, is my life better or worse then it once was? Although, I have to admit… There were times when I was much more miserable then these times of late.

Heh, found the time I went paranoid with upgrading seamonkey. Kinda before I really started logging various interactions with my system. (Later) posts on setting up Samba, MySQL, various upgrades and what not remind me just how much I’ve used (and abused) my live journal as a post it for notes. I can also see, just how slow my studies of the German language have been… to little time. Honestly, I don’t think I’ll ever reach my goals, but at least I can enjoy as much of it, as I am able to learn. I would love someday, to be able to read/write/speak German well enough, that I could get around a German city just as good as an American city. As long as I have access to a dictionary for words I don’t know, I can generally read well enough, but composition is a bit crappy. And I’m not even going t comptemplate my speech, let’s just say; my voice does not do such a fine language any justice!

Mmm, just found a report on my fifth live op. I’ve playd in many a live op, not so many these days… Since the maps these young whipper snappers, hell? What am I saying lol. I’m talking about our current SNCOs >_>, but any ways… They tend to dig up maps, that I’ve played on or used to train myself on. I guess, that’s a price of being around [SAS] so long. That reminds me, I still never got the sound bites done; I need them to finish my “live week” that became a live year, that’s now been over 2 years in the running I think lol.

I could count how many live ops I’ve been in, and how many I have conducted… but I’m not gonna lol.

Even found an old script that I made, a more complex version of a quickie I did when the Amarok PBI broke a few things. I’ve used a much better and simpler form of it, on numerous occasions. Both for my own projects, and occasionally in PBI’s that I had made. Hmm, here is one of the very few times I’ve felt threated for my families safety.

I can see, in reading my old posts, how much life has gotten to me in some ways. To quote myself, “I think, I hate my life…. dispair out rules joy I think, for me any way. “. Despite the various ups and downs I’ve had over the past 5 years, life is still pretty much the same, only I have even less of a life worth living.

Found an old posting on system backups under PC-BSD, never finished it. Still got the file, but never finished it. That reminds me, last year I had started work on a backup program for PC-BSD. It was a learning project for Qt, maybe 40% finished. Hmm, here is when Wiz, Me, Rasa, and Rouge; were promoted to troop captain, squadron sergeants major *2, and regimental sergeant major, respectively. As SSM, I always had to find work for me to do, as Captain poor Wiz had to work himself to the bone.

Hmm, a note about the Technical Manual to the NCC-1701D U.S.S. Enterprise, been ages since I’ve read that book. I loved reading that book when I was younger, lol. I can see some of the various mission plans and tactical ideas I’ve posted here between public/private. I can als see, the times when my work load in real life was at it’s more extreme levels. There was a time, when I was working 2 to 3 gigs a day, every day of the week, with only 1 or 2 days off during the entire month… Oh man, that was living hell.

I can see how very much, my family has managed to piss me off during my off work hours, usually spent trying to work on things, or wasting time until I could work on stuff lol. Less of a problem now, more of a way of life… Even my general response to it, seeing the choice for destruction or construction, I took the constructive route.

Ahh, the eventual fait of my Lexar UFD. I remember being happy I got my e-mail and stuff off the drive, before the case finally split. $65 wasted, because of laying in bed with a laptop, and having to get up every five damn minutes to do things around the house lol. The USB drive got bent apart, picking up / putting down the laptop on the bed all the time, *sigh*. The search to remedy the loss, was a long one. Spanning Samba, SSHFS, NFS, and eventually falling into total disuse lol. As well as various attempts to solve the e-mail/bookmarks situation, which has ended in webmail (gmail) and online bookmark storage (ma.gnolia)

I see, my rise from admin teams little helper, to admin team member, and getting transitioned to webmaster in [SAS]. Various posts of humour, media, songs I’ve liked, dreams I’ve dreamt, etc. Various screen shots of my laptops user interface, been a long time since I’ve rearranged it. Been a long time since I’ve /needed/ to, I guess that my work flow has gotten more of a efficient rut to it now lol. Hmm, notes on various stuff I’ve made note to buy, but usually never had the chance :. Hmm, even found an interesting system tweak, that’s so old it doesn’t work anymore hahaha.

Various things about movies and programs. Hmm, that how evil are you thing.

You Are 16% Evil

You are good. So good, that you make evil people squirm.

Just remember, you may need to turn to the dark side to get what you want!

Looks like I’ve put on 2% in the past year and 3 quarters, not sure if I like that :.

Ooo, the first time I ever made it into the stance, mmm, wish I was a more athletically inclined person really. Hmm, found a link I never got around to reading, about in-line assembly under GCC, never got around to learning much of assembly on the Pentium either…

Various projects that I’ve worked on, a few unpublished SWAT 4 mods, the [SAS] skins, Neo Ports Manager, various helpers or time passing apps, site work, work on the SOP rewrites, diving deeper into code, and a more recent but classified programming project. Hmm, first dates with Qt, Sockets programming, the Curses library, Python, OpenBSD, pax(1), AWK, Scheme, diff/path, gdb, particle physics, gcc front ends, MySQL, whatever.

Found the date, that I converted Vectra from FreeBSD to OpenBSD. It was my first install of OpenBSD. Some nice quotes. Various books I’ve read, some that I never finished. Groans of portability concerns, and trying to wrap myself into suitable tools. Mmm, the programming language I never had time to learn, but really would like to someday!

Hahha, my screen shot of abusing Firefox… with huge numbers of tabs open. Something that woke me up when I was sleepy, and made me go track it down, now if I still remembered the solution without having to dig up the code, lol.

The general notion, that the odds of ever having a job, which pays me for using my brain, is next to null… And more then a couple periods of frustration, with my family making it very hard on me to learn stuff of interest. Hmm, a number of times that I posted about the training sessions I’ve held in [SAS], it’s been awhile since I’ve really done those, Jonsi is a Trp now ^_^. Found a few screen shots from games, result of various personal training exercises. Times when data structures and algoritims were one of my most intense fascination’s. Oh, the day the freezer died, man if I had strength left, that would’ve been a long post lol.

The Troopers Call, something I wrote back when a teammate was still a young trooper.

Problems sleeping, being drowned in work, and a number of writings, some of which I actually forget to store in my personal folder.

Hmm, the time I was promoted to Regimental Srgeant Major in [SAS], Rouge to Captain and Wiz to Major, and a sigh of releaf on my face lol. Hmm, my notes both public/private on the “Claudia affair”. Some encounters with *DD* and other clans. A short story I wrote one late night, related to Volume III of a project I never finished.

The day Macy died in my arms, one of several short gigs out in the country, one of the several times I was stung or pissed off by PBI, and the incompentence of PC-BSD….

A review of a PC-BSD Beta release. Various todos, lists, plans, etc of work I’ve done on my laptop. I’ve installed PC-BSD on it several times over the years, even had Debian, Ubuntu, and FreeBSD on a 2nd partiton I rarely used. But now she runes FreeBSD, all the way baby!

Hmm, I see Live Journal just toggled to their “Undead Journal” theme ^_^.

Oh, this is a movie I haven’t seen in awhile! Hmm, a post about How old I am in terms of Recruits in [SAS], need to make a more up to date one of those one day. some plans for live ops, hehe. A rare but real ROFL momenet in my life. Getting interested in binary, hexadecimal, bitmasks, Strong Space. Ahh, some jokes.

Various looks public/private at maths related stuff, I really regret that I never had time to learn more of things that are of /real/ interest, way life is around here, I probably will never get to either :. Various postings, about software, todos, schedule, opinions, feelings, whatever. Hmm, even getting heavy into using Perl for a lot of programming/scripting stuff. I don’t use Perl a lot these days, but I often use it in situations that call for quick data processing or a game of golf. But I’ve really been trying to use Python for that stuff now, since I’ve been using Python as my standard scripting language now’re days.

Having to watch one of my master pieces crumble, that was a hell of a day, and I tell ya… that post doens’t even have half of the agony of it. Hmm, flirtation with lisp and the scheme dialect, been awhile since I’ve had time for scheme. Mmm, notes public/private on the Damocles Project, a semi-classified research and development bit I did when I was RSM. Hahaha, I haven’t said this in a little while, been leaving out the profane part most of the time ^_^.

Various stuff on my time in [SAS], public/private reflections. I do have a general policy, of keeping the necessary level of confidentiality, down to whats posted “for my eyes only” on my live journal. LOL, learning the ingredients of Riesens the hard way. Ahh, an important note on the Damocles Projects findings, think I’ve still got a (newer) hard copy somewhere. Note to self, encrypt it.

The blog file I kept during my 2nd working vacation, which was not as stressful as the first. Vacation, as in as close to one as I would get. Working, in the sense of having to take care of the bosses dogs, maintain area security, and clean lol.

Hmm, another reminder of a book I was writing. The first upgrade to my file server. Ahh, my stealth run on SAS hallway, found my attempts and frustrations trying to complete the ‘Spidey Speed Run Challenge’, which I had issued as an RSM, to encourage a higher level of training among recruits. It really nagged me, that I couldn’t do what I was asking others to do, so I had to set out and do it myself. Strangely, to this date, I am the only asshole to pull off passing my training challenge….. Ahh, my motto. And getting pissed at SWAT 4s game design.

The 10th Anniversary of my grandmothers death, which reminds me of the day just before the 11th anniversary. Mmm, a post I made about C Keywords, sorted by dialect (traditional, c89, c99). Java on FreeBSD, so easy hehe. This had to be one of my most frustrating times ever.

The time I found some jokes when I was half a sleep, after debugging some code. A rare couple of days off work for some R&R. Hmm, the time I tested KateOS, when I switched from KDE to WindowMaker on my PC-BSD install. One night when I got a bit playful with an algorithm for finding greatest common denominator (gcd), that I found on Wikipedia. I did a lot of tests later on, wonder if I still have the extra results stored… Hmm, some old links I posted on learning to manage stress, loool one of the times I’ve managed to drain my laptops battery, because I never plugged in the adapter, it’s really that rare I unplug it lol.

Most of the end of 2007 and beginning of 2008 was spent working on NPM, a project I really would like to finish sometime… but I’ve got so much other crap that demands dong :. Oh man, the Tiger Stripe skin prototype, I never could get it to work….

Oh yeah, the [SAS] Christmas Party, I wonder what we are doing this year hehehe. And something a bit more closer to the holiday.

I don’t know if I’m going to bother and look through the last ~10 months or so, One thing that does make me happy, there’s less of the things that litter my various document folders, then I managed to post between the start of this journal and the start of 2008. One thing I do know, I’m either grabbing some crisps or some ceral, and hitting the hay.

The only question is, will Willow let me have a place on my own bed, dogs take eveththing and they don’t give it back !!!

Birdy fortress

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If the bird gets out of there, I’m calling Guinness!

If Coco gets in there, I’m reclassifying her as a mole, not a dog!

Mikes old set up was like this:


|-------Solid wall--------------------------
S |--------------------------|
o |                   |-----||
l ||------|  |------| | | | ||
i || cage |---      | | | | ||
d ||         playpen| | | | ||  << cloths rack
w ||      |---      | | | | ||
a ||------|  |------| | | | ||
l |                   |-----||
l |--------------------------|
|Table |           Netting
|      |

After we got the dogs, we cut up the box from my computer chair & wrapped it around the south-eastern border; to keep the dogs from eating bird seed off the rug. Well, that never worked to well… When it gets to thundering, Coco gets to looking for a place to hide. And her favorite is to push the box aside and sit under Mikes cage lol.

Now, there is wadding and barricade sealing the holes Coco made in the bottom of the netting, more boxing preventing Coco from pushing the box aside; plus reenforcement on the outside, creating a tripple-layered protection wrapping part way around the cage, and the opposite (north-eastern) corner has been sealed with wadding, barricade, and reenforcement tucked inbetween the (jam-packed) bookshelf built into the wall. And to top that off, the netting is secured in a way, that if Mike did penetrate the netting, he won’t be able to flutter-up and away from the boxes, and into waiting jaws. It’s like a birdy fortress protected by many overlapping redoubts ! hehe

Birds, Dogs, and Feathers on my…

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I’m glad I’m a fairly sedate person, other wise I would need a tranquilizer…

stack trace:

0 – Sitting in bed, writing code
1 – Ma walks by the hallway on the way to the bathroom: “I thought you were sleeping”, “I was”, “Go to bed”, (walks away), “fuck off” (or something to that effect).
2 – I heard the bird screaming and flying about
3 – Willow jumps off the bed
4 – *sigh*
5 – thinking if the bird doesn’t stop in 3, get up and calm him down.
6 – Ma comes and tells me somethings wrong with Mike (The birds name is Mikey).
7 – Get up, bulldoze through hall, into kitchen, flick on the kitchen and dining room lights on at once
8 – found Willow near the cage, keep visual-scan according to SAS SOP.
9 – Bird found laying on it’s backside on the ground half under the table
10 – Willow lunges a the bird
11 – Bird tries to flee
12 – I try to capture him, until finally nabbing him
13 – move into kitchen for visual exam
14 – bird sinks his beak into my hands in reactitory-fear; hardest bite he’s ever given, but he wasn’t playing.
15 – bird gets loose and is recaptured both by me and the dog a few times
16 – Quick analysis shows lower mid-chest wound and bleeding
17 – switched on the water fosit and let it flow on the wound
18 – dose wound and surrounding area in hydrogen peroxide
20 – Applied flour to his abdomen and rubber it gently on the wound area (to help clotting)
21 – Held bird tightly trying to calm him down
22 – Bird feels warm but beyond having the strength to resist
23 – wrapped bird in dry wash cloth and continued to try to calm him
24 – placed bird in shoe box, wrapping in cloth, to keep him in a secure (hands free) place.
25 – Instructed Ma to prep cage for entry (e.g. remove covers, clear wide opening in the netting, etc)
26 – Bird attempted to flee from shoe box
27 – recalmed bird and began computating contigent next courses of action
28 – Placed wash cloth in bottom of open cage
29 – Picked up bird and wrapped snuggly in my hands, to keep him from flight
30 – Garbage truck arrives, thanks guys, you’re days late and come around 0400 in the morning!!!
31 – Ma, while holding Willow; opens door to verify my audiary senses.
32 – Bird appears alert, aware of changing lighting conditions and the door being opened and closed.
33 – Placed bird in cage on cloth
34 – Closed door quickly as he jumped off, in case of flight
35 – Bird leapt to the cages middle perch
36 – Began search for his cages water bowl
37 – Bird climbed (I think climbed anyway) to the highest
38 – Filled his water
39 – Filled his seed
40 – Rotated his seed and water bowls, just in case he drops off the upper perch… for fear that he might drown in the water bowl.
41 – Resecure netting, just in case the bird figures a way to force open the food/water-dish holding/door things and escape
42 – Check bird
43 – Wash hands
44 – Remind willow she’s been bad, “You can’t play with birds! They’re too fragile”
45 – clean up the mess of feathers and pin feathers on the floor
46 – noted that his missing tail feathers came out at the calamus (quill); reminded me of some duck feathers me and my brother had when I was 5~6 years old.
47 – throw out feathers
48 – check bird, he’s looking as if to say, “Why am I in the cage?”
50 – put out the lights so the bird could rest
51 – wash hands
52 – move laptop (on the bed) so the lower vent is also clear
53 – Remind Willow what shes done
54 – strip down and washed up for the night
55 – check bird, he’s calm
56 – finally free to search google
57 – searches for data (survival rates, treatment) of bitten birds becomes futile
58 – searches for dog health returns positive, he’s always been a healthy bird.

Willow wasn’t trying to hurt him, she just wanted to play. Nothing less then any other dog would’ve done, but she was playful, not predatory. Reminds me, Macy once ate a wild bird, presumably whole, and was fine.

Mike I think is fine injury wise, my primary concern wa the stres of it all. If Willow had really done harm or “bitten him”, I think the birds abdominal injury would’ve looked more like the cut from harakiri or a persons chest slashed with a large knife. Odds are he just had feathers ripped out in the scuffle, b/c I don’t think he’d have survived long if it was a serious cut.

But birds can’t take a lot of torment, they just can’t hold up to it. Extreme fear or stress, or flying into things is really bad for birds. I remember Mrs G (first person we worked for) once told me, that if a humming bird got trapped in one of the orb-webs outside, the thing would die from the ordeal of fighting through it (humming birds are really fragile, nimble creatures with a super rapid-heart-beat).

Mikey must be tough enough to be in this family, ‘cus he managed to survive it without dying of shock. At least, I think he would’ve died a long time before the whole thing ended if he got to seriously into it. Mikey is loud and stubborn enough to prove he’s in the right family, so I hope he’s got the titanium-disposition to… He drives me crazy at times, but I would never wish him serious harm, I love the little critter.

We got him like May of 2000, and he’s been “netted in” to his play area (cage on table, play pin on stack of boxes, cloths rack full of toys) for years. He’s a smart little bugger, so I’m sure he could figure out a way out if there is one. Coco also tends to burrow through into the bottom of the netting and sit under his cages-table when it thunder…

Odds are he’ll be confined to the cage indefintitly, in case of a repeat performance.I think if he isn’t KiA by the time I get up tomorrow, he’ll probably be fine unless he gets an infection. But I guess, Willows mouth is probably cleaner then mine is lol :

It’s about ten after 0600, need to be up for work in a few hours… best try for some sleep.

EDIT: He’s doing good so far, just missing a lot of tail feathers. He was really pissed off when we got home from work, at having been stuck in his cage. The current problem is what to do next….

This one is just to much

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Ok, now this one has me putting my hands up an shoutin’ “this one’s to much!”

I’m working on rewriting an old pile of sludge that hurts my eyes, properly porting it to the new interface that works better… So far, so good, except for the fact that the actual bi-language mingle used for both logic and display, is about as undocumented and about as helpful, as a bullet in the toe.

All was going well in trying to understand it, until I saw this kind of thing:

/* NB: I probably added most of this indentation myself */
    $query4 = *_query("look up a user", $dbh); 
    $name=*_fetch_array($query4, $dbh);
    echo "<font color='#6699ff'><b".$name['the users name']."</b></font><BR><BR>";
    echo "<table border='1' cellspacing='0' cellpadding='3'><tr  border='0'><td align='left' border='0'><font color='#6699ff'><b>some header</b></font>";

    $query = *_query("look up first section from database", $dbh);
    if ($query) {
        $nr = *_num_rows($query, $dbh);
        for ($k=0;$k<$nr;$k++) {
            $topic = *_fetch_array($query, $dbh);
            echo "&nbsp;".$topic['the topics name']."&nbsp;";
            // ... do other crap

Where ‘the topics name’ is looking up a row in the database, which contains a non breaing space: &nbsp; ALL THAT FOR WRITING A FREAKING BLANK SPACE !? I have no idea if that was a quick and dirty way of cutting an item out of the list or what (before I took over), but for crying out loud… If I ever did something so moronic, I would shoot myself before leaving it for someone to find.

THANK GOD THAT I DID NOT CREATE THIS MODULE …. Even if I’m the sap whose got to keep it running like a swiss clock :

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Well, this was some bad news.

My mother told me to get off the computer, so I did (for once). Turns out that the other end of her phone call wasn’t who I thought it was, my Aount called and told her that Grandpa Ken passed away on Monday.

I’ve never met him, so I guess that’s what bothers me. Most of my life, Grandpa Ken has sent me a check every birthday and Christmas, but never a card…. The one thing I actually wanted from him, was the card! (or even a note) But as Ma always said, it wasn’t his way of doing things.

It reminds me, a couple of weeks ago; I had a very strange dream. I dreamt that for some reason we were all in Texas, and everyone was going off somewhere. But I was staying wih my grandfather and having lunch with him (Chili). In all my years of memories, never once can I recall dreaming of him :. And I remember a few months ago as well, one of my pictures fell un-provoked on two occasions. In my room, on top of the TV is perched the DVD player, and an array of pictures standing guard. My mother and Father, and then one of each set of grandparents. The thing that had alarmed me, was that it was my parents picture to fall over… That really got me praying for my familes safety.

My mother usually reports that certain things will happen when certain other things happen, e.g. stuff falling for no reason == death. I don’t really believe in such things, but she’s generally as accurate as a sniper in the long run…

Ma is a little annoyed, because it’s likey that my Aunt will get everything and I won’t get crap. I don’t want anything, I’ve never cared about money, people are what’s important. I would very much have liked to see him, or at least to pay my respects at the funeral… Probably just as well, no way to have made the trip to and back anyway +S. To be honest, if I did inherit anything, I’d rather it be film of him and the rest of our family, or something like that rather then anything else.

That’s another face, that I’ll have to look for in heaven someday. My father, now both sets of grandparents, only one of which I ever met… A good friend, and two older brothers. And my God mother, but that’s a day hopefully in the far future.

R.I.P. Grandpa Ken

Esmeralda

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Sitting here day dreaming of a sexy lady…

Dual (2 x) Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450 CPUs (Yorkfields) running at 2.66Ghz clock / 1333Mhz FSB — these chips are to drool for!!!

6~8GB of PC2-5300 *ECC* Memory for good measure 😉

4 x 250GB Seagate SATA hard drives in RAID 5

Dual (2 x) graphics cards with twin dvi ports per card; twin nVidia 8600 or 7800s would be nice if possible.

4 x LCD Monitors -> 17″, 19″, 19″, 17″ or larger.

1 x Floppy disk drive, old tech but still valuable.

2 x DVD Burner

1 x CD Burner

1 x 5 button laser mouse

1 x standard issue PC keyboard

Running FreeBSD 7-STABLE AMD64 for the operating system of course.

Shit load of fans and one hell of a powerful PSU not to mention a huge desk !!!!!!!!!!!!!

The only problem, other then that the mother board needed for something like that would cost an arm and a leg alone…. Is that nVidia’s drivers for FreeBSD 64-Bit (amd64) suck and there’s only so much ram addressable by 32-bit systems without hacks like PAE.

Oh man, I think I need a cup to catch the drool, this calls for a song

Slap ya grandma that would be one beautiful rig !!!

I think my laptop is ready to disown me ^_^

BSD Forever

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Well, my Darling Dixie is now running FreeBSD 7.0-Release 🙂

I finished last minute backups of files and off loaded them to Vecta, just in case hehe. Unlocked my wireless network and installed from the three CDs I have for FreeBSD 7.0-Release. Since I don’t use the CD sets to install more extras then X.Org, I only needed disk one as usual.

I almost always use a custom installation of FreeBSD because I find it more expedient and very concise. Used sysinstall to finish the last bit of configuration before the first boot: nfs client on, sshd on, dhcp on ath0, set root password.

With the first boot I mounted my backups over NFS, copied the over and unpacked for reference — rc.conf, rc.conf.local, xorg.conf, and wpa_supplicant.conf. I also setup my users and groups via pw and edited loader.conf to load my sound driver.

Merged changes as desired into rc.conf and an xorg.conf file generated via X -configure. Then copied over a small script I had made to automate installing most software I use and started a review of it while running porsnap on anohtr vtty.

While the script ran, I poked around /usr/src with vi to pass the time. All went well until I started getting funky errors from pkg_add. Killing the script, I checked with df and sure enough, / was showing at 107% of capacity! Now that all is said and done, it seems I miscalculated about 600MB of dependencies lol.

mv /root/pkgs /usr/pkgs
sh
for JUNK in `du -ch /usr/pkgs/* | grep 0B | awk '{ print $2 }'`; do rm $JUNK; done

problem solved. I also found out the hard way that the csh is a pain in the ass, hence starting a new shell to handle the removal of empty packages. Used the scroll lock to check the terminals backlog for the last successful package add and modified my script to pick up where it left off.

/usr/pkgs is 834M of packages — just in case I need to reinstall, I won’t have to download them from my $PACKAGEROOT again, I can just bring them over from Vectra and save bandwidth for both my favorite mirror and myself.

I also had a bit of a problem with some port installations failing with strange pkg-descr missing messages, found out today while wrapping up that it was referecin $PKGDIR => /usr/pkgs :.

my packing list so far:

#!/bin/sh

cd /where/ever

# environment / compat
PKGDIR="`pwd`/pkgs"; export PKGDIR
GCC_VER="42"
PHP_VER="5"
MYSQL_VER="50"
pkg_add -Kr compat6x-i386

# languages
pkg_add -Kr javavmwrapper
# manual install needed for JDK/JRE
(cd $PKGDIR; pkg_add diablo-jdk-freebsd6.i386.1.5.0.07.01.tbz)
(cd $PKGDIR; pkg_add diablo-jre-freebsd6.i386.1.5.0.07.01.tbz)
pkg_add -Kr gcc${GCC_VER}
pkg_add -Kr perl
pkg_add -Kr python
pkg_add -Kr php${PHP_VER}
pkg_add -Kr ruby 
pkg_add -Kr rubygem-rtags && pkg_add -r rubygem-rake
pkg_add -Kr guile
pkg_add -Kr scheme48

# libraries
pkg_add -Kr qt4
pkg_add -Kr gtk-2
pkg_add -Kr p5-DBI
pkg_add -Kr p5-DBD-mysql${MYSQL_VER}
pkg_add -Kr p5-DBI-SQLite
pkg_add -Kr p5-DBI-CSV
pkg_add -Kr p5-Digest


# development tools
pkg_add -Kr gmake
pkg_add -Kr ctags
pkg_add -Kr cscope && pkg_add -Kr kscope
pkg_add -Kr webcpp
pkg_add -Kr subversion

# games
pkg_add -Kr kdegames
pkg_add -Kr xgalaga
pkg_add -Kr prboom
pkg_add -Kr doom-data
pkg_add -Kr wesnoth
pkg_add -Kr supertux
pkg_add -Kr chromium

# graphics software
pkg_add -Kr gimp && pkg_add -Kr gimp-gap
pkg_add -Kr inkscape
pkg_add -Kr xv
pkg_add -Kr kdegraphics
pkg_add -Kr dia

# browsers
pkg_add -Kr linux-flock
pkg_add -Kr lynx

# e-mail and news
pkg_add -Kr thunderbird && pkg_add -Kr thunderbird-i18n
pkg_add -Kr mutt

# kontact and related
pkg_add -Kr kdepim


# chat
pkg_add -Kr konversation
pkg_add -Kr pidgin && pkg_add -Kr pidgin-hotkeys 
pkg_add -Kr pidgin-guifications && pkg_add -Kr pidgin-libnotify
pkg_add -Kr pidgin-otr && pkg_add -Kr pidgin-encryption
pkg_add -Kr teamspeak_client

# install vim / emacs
pkg_add -Kr emacs || pkg_add -Kr xemacs 
pkg_add -Kr mg
(bunzip vim-7.1.tar.bz2; tar -C /tmp -xf vim-7.1.tar; cd /tmp/vim71/src; 
  ./configure 
 --enable-perlinterp --enable-pythoninterp --enable-rubyinterp 
 --with-x --enable-cscope --enable-fontset --enable-gnome-check 
 --with-features=huge --enable-gui=gtk2 && gmake && gmake install)

# multimedia
pkg_add -Kr nspluginwrapper
pkg_add -Kr libdvdread
pkg_add -Kr libdvdplay
pkg_add -Kr libdvdnav
pkg_add -Kr cdrtools
pkg_add -Kr mplayer
pkg_add -Kr linux-mplayerplug-in
pkg_add -Kr xmms && pkg_add -Kr xmms-pipe && pkg_add -Kr xmms-skins
pkg_add -Kr k3b
# this is an rpm
(cd /usr/ports/multimedia/linux-realplayer && make install clean distclean)

# documents
pkg_add -Kr gnumeric && pkg_add -Kr abiword
pkg_add -Kr koffice

# personal
pkg_add -Kr zsh
pkg_add -Kr rxvt-unicode 
pkg_add -Kr terminus-font
pkg_add -Kr windowmaker
pkg_add -Kr blackbox
pkg_add -Kr bbkeys && pkg_add -r bbrun && pkg_add -r bbpager
pkg_add -Kr docker
pkg_add -Kr hsetroot
pkg_add -Kr fastest_cvsup
pkg_add -Kr psearch

# misc
pkg_add -Kr bsdstats
pkg_add -Kr amarok
pkg_add -Kr lzma
pkg_add -Kr unrar
pkg_add -Kr zip
pkg_add -Kr e2fsprogs
pkg_add -Kr pdksh
pkg_add -Kr sudo
pkg_add -Kr v7sh
pkg_add -Kr xcb

I had to install the ports manually because of the $PKGDIR thing, did that this afternoon. Which amounted to multimedia/libdvdcss, x11-wm/fvwm-devel, sysutils/gkrellm2, and just for the heck of it, www/linux-flashplugin9 and www/flashplugin-mozilla hehe. I also had the JDK and JRE packages in cold storage from my last installation, so no need for manual fetching them.

Some last minute additions were gdm and trayer — I actually like Gnomes Display Manager. I still need to compile mencoder, maybe install a few Perl/Python/Ruby binndings for good measure, etc but I’m basically done.

One thing that shocked me, The flash plugin v9 is working !!! I installed it just to see if the thing would crash my webbrowser but it works :

I need to get pf, sshd, and my kernel configuration setup and probably play with freebsd-update (I’ve never used it) but I’m essentially ready to rock and roll, it only took about 4 hours, because I downloaded all of the packages I wanted.

Compared to reinstalling Windows XP? Hahahahhahahahah !!!!

If I ever reformated my XP machine, it would take 3 hours to install XP from the vendors disks, 2 weeks to download all of the hotfixes, updates, and patches and crap, reinstall my firewall and ruleset from backup, then systematically install all of my games, programs, and such by manually visiting each website or inserting each disk — then spend time re-shoehorning XP into something livable with all of the little setting tweaks here and there.

FreeBSD, back online in a flash — hehe.

Family Memories

by

Hmm, a rare surprise in the mail today. My Aunt sent me some family photo’s, mostly of when my Father was younger and a couple of when I was little. My Mother also gave me a few more photo albums, ones that belonged to my Dad.

Spent some time tonight looking through them, basically covering 1946 through 1963 with a couple gaps in between. One thing that really stuck out, a picture of my Dad about 4 years old sitting on their front step with my Aunt. He had his leg crossed in just the same way that I usually have mine crossed lol. Guess it goes back further then I thought >_>

As fate would have it, I know a lot more about my Mothers side of the family then my Fathers… But his albums are also a bit neater, well annotated, I think someday it would be nice to go through them with my Aunt and see what she can remember of some of their vacations and stuff. One thing that I found out when looking through the photos; that I never knew before, my Dad was in the boy scouts when he was a kid.

I was also looking through a book from when he was doing the recruit training/etc in 1963, of course I looked through the company photographs to find him (y). Some of the pictures my Aunt sent me were of him in his summer whites, most of the ones we have are in the winter blues. I think the USN is dealing away with those now’re days, oh well :. In side the pages I also found a greyhound envelope with bus tickets from the time and a few photo’s of aircraft.

I know he hated the Navy more or less, he was supposed to be stationed in Texas close to home but wound up in Florida — someone out of state got Fort Hood, and then later shipped off to Midway when life was going a bit better. Talk about getting the short end of the stick lol. But then again, if it wasn’t for that I probably would never have been born ~20 years later ^_^

I’m a somewhat sentimental kinda guy, not exactly a big person on photo albums but it’s good to be reminded every now and then of where you come from. It’s sort of like looking at a small picture into another time, another place. Some of the older photo’s are quite faded but I guess 60 years or so will do that to a photograph. But all in all most of them were in pretty good shape, quite a pleasant stroll you could say.

One thing that was a bit odd, one of the Christmas photos showed my Dad getting a tub of “American Plastic Bricks”, they look like a cross between something simpler I used to play with as a boy when I was a few years younger and the LEGO bricks so ubiquitous with much of my generation. I also sighed at the sight of my Dad and Aunt sitting around the tree with a new record player — someone was telling me the other day that they were looking for an MP3 Player >_>.

I was born in ’89 and my memory goes about as far back as 1990~1991 and I don’t think I’ve really seen a record player in years. Heh, now this makes me feel old myself… When I was a lad we had Walkman and similar products with your choice of ear buds or or supra-aural headphones — now they are selling WIRELESS HEADPHONES !!! Not to mention that Compact Disks (CDs) and now more modern iPods and flash based devices are becoming common… The Compact Cassettes of my day are probably long dead and buried by now.

I wonder what my Dad would think of this new fan dangled technology, personally I think I would stick with the record player if it wasn’t for computers.

One of these days I really would like to get everything scanned, organized, and tagged on the computer. Because unlike a photograph, a file doesn’t fade out so easy. If I ever have kids, I know I would like to be able to show them about their ancestors. My ~/Pictures folder is only ~255mb so adding about a dozen photo albums can’t hurt that much, can it?

Writer’s Block: Funniest Thing Ever.

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Out of all the funny things that have ever happened to you, which experience still cracks you up?

Live Journals Writer’s Block

Without a doubt?

Cored in a second flat!

I was in a casual game of MechWarrior 4: Mercs with a friend, her smoke signals host (AOL Dial up), and the Op4 was three of her killer ‘Mech configs piloted by level 9 bots (the hardest mode). I was piloting my Shadow Cat, a 45 Ton medium ‘Mech and iirc she had her Black Knight.

I was like, “Ok I’ll go destract them you go flank” and before she could warn me, I jump jetted over the wall and BAM

My ‘Mech exploded as they cored out my Shadow Cat about as fast as my legs cleared the wall hahahaha !!

Crap, we were laughing till it hurt after that one lol. Normally bots can’t fight worth a darn on any difficualty level let along the maximum but when shes the engineer — RUN FOR IT !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Hmm, it’s been awhile since I last thought about the ‘cored in a second flat’ thing hehe. That’s one thing I always liked about playing with Lioness, she was brilliant at putting together strike packages. Blending the perfect mixture of weapons payloads to balance both human and bot skills with the desired effect, and to top it off grouping them into strike groups of demi-lances or larger. Often 2 assault ‘Mechs and a heavy or a med, hvy, and aslt.

Some of those configurations were scary :

And I’m a guy who used to train versus like 12 level 9 bots lol.

My favorite part about Mech Warrior was the ability to design ‘Mech configurations. I was never really happy that in competitive play, I usually ended up in ‘Mechs designed for the more natural ‘stand up fight’ of a league drop — weapons were largely limited to the heaviest hitting ones grouped in mass, alpha striking was the goal. Like the common street-fight Highlander every body used for short to medium range work and urban ops.

About 90 tons of jump ‘Mech with low slung arms, big torso sections and tall legs. But that sucker could pack a heavy gauss rifle (the biggest gun back then) plus still cram in clan guass, light gauss rifle (basically super long range), and a capacitor packed particle projector cannon (PPC) — meaning one big alpha strike. It only had a 600 Metre rang eon the heavy gauss but the closer you got, the harder the gauss rifles hit. Heck if you got as close as 400m the heavy gauss would probably critical most heavy ‘Mechs in one center torso shot.

That’s how competitive MW4 play was, speed was a luxury for most, heat sinks dead weight, armour was cheap compared to guns. And if it couldn’t destroy any ‘Mech in the game with two direct hits, your ‘Mech was too weak for combat. Although of course in games where we got points by damage done rather then kills (never very popular) people would mix in some shredders using short or long range missiles.

The only big difference between long range and short range combat was for brawling we took shotguns (LBX Autocannon) and heavy lasers most times, for sniping we took Gauss rifles, PPC, and ER Large Lasers :. So what if I could work a 70 Ton Nova Cat with 7 ER Lasers, minimal reflective armour, 90+ KPH engine and no heat sinks what so ever, and go hill-humping as the Nova-style sniping was nick named, blasting away ‘Mechs ? I much rather have been in a little ol’ Shadow Cat or a Raven zigging and zagging through the battlefield.

In some ways, I envy my old partner in the engineering wing. She never played competitively (good for me because her personal ‘Mech was the Queen of Alpha Strikes) but she also always used the style of ‘Mechs that she preferred to bring into virtual combat (y).

She was always a great one at designing ‘Mechs for all range combat, a skill very few people ever developed well. My own line of bots got used for training but were never quite up to par with Lionesses monsters from a Doom speed run lol.

Although, I did work together a group of bots that cored my shadow cat in half a second once lol.

They were never quite up to that same nightmare configs that she cooked up :-(.

I remember she once gave me her personal ‘Mechs configuration, a 75-Ton Black Knight that had an alpha strike that put 100 ton ‘Mechs to shame!!! When I brought it to bare against’ my friends ‘Mechs they couldn’t believe it hit so hard haha. It was like bringing a midget to a sumo match and packing the death stars super laser !

With Lionesses very much respected permission, I eventually gave my buddies the config so they could stop (wrongly) trying to reverse engineer it on her >_>.

*shakes head*, that girl was a bloody genius of ‘Mech Engineering!

Writer’s Block: Lame jobs

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What’s the worst job you’ve ever had?

Live Journals Writer’s Block

The

worst

job I have ever had…

Without a single doubt that is definitely one of our old clients. We used to work there every Thursday, boss one of the kind it don’t matter if the worlds coming to end your still wanted to come kind of jobs. Also the kind if the phone rings in the morning, you pray it means you don’t have to show up !!!

The mother had energy problems so she never cleaned anything, with that house who wouldn’t have energy problems (no offense meant). The youngest daughter ADHD, although it’s classified as an attention span disorder… The way that kid was, I called her HDD — Hyper Destructive Disorder, I never noticed an signs of ADHD, just that she practically demolished the place lol. The elder daughter was going to and from collage and planning a wedding… So she was in the boat, trash it but don’t leave it better then it was found 8=)

To top it off, they had like 6 dogs and two floors. Oh my word was that house a nightmare…

Every week there would be garbage piled everywhere, leftover food, dishes, snacks, homework, dog wastes, clothes, everything plus infinity composited into one massive mess and us two stooges (workin’ cheap) had to pick it all up, no one in the house ever lifted a bloody finger : (can you say taken advantage of). Just bending over half way would get my nose running and sneezing from proximity to the hardwood floor, what was _left_ of it that is. With my allergies I usually travel ‘fully loaded’ with a paper towel in each pocket but it wasn’t enough for over there.

I don’t mean no disrespect and have nothing against them (nice family) but, holy guacamole ! If they ever tried to sell that house, no one on earth would buy the place. The family would have to burn the house down, fumigate the ashes, then drop a tactical nuke on the vacant lot before rebuilding… It really was that bad man, like if you had to sit on the floor to do something, you’d want to disinfect your ass on the way out kind of nasty.

Needless to say, when the client couldn’t afford us any longer…

when I heard we were being let go

,

IT WAS THE HAPPIEST DAY OF MY LIFE THUS FAR !!!!

I’ve had to do lots of crap over the years but there are only two jobs that I’ve ever regretted having to do. To me work is work, that’s it — you get your fat ass out of bed and go to work, even if… You’d rather be anyplace but >_>. That was the dirtiest, most stressful, most exhausting job I’ve ever had to live with and I’m glad it’s gone.

This reminds me of a scene in Wild Hogs when Martin Lawrence (a plumber) comments about wearing condoms on his shoes:

Tim Allen: Did you ever wake up one morning and wonder what happened to your life?

[John Travolta nods his head]

Tim Allen: You know, I thought my life would be an adventure. All of a sudden, I’m a suburban dentist.

Martin Lawrence: Look, Doug, I feel your pain, man. I mean I swore I would never return to a job where I had to where condoms on my shoes.

John Travolta: You’re still at The Firm?

Martin Lawrence: Yea. I get yelled at by an ungrateful wife. I swear the whole thing has made me…

Tim Allen: …a wimp.

Martin Lawrence: I was gonna say miserable.

Martin Lawrence: [pause] What? You think I’m a wimp?

Tim Allen: No, I thought you were gonna say wimp, so I’d thought I’d say it for you.

John Travolta: You’re a wimp, Bobby. I’ll say it. I mean you’re afraid of women. It’s kinda embarrassing.

William Macy: I’m afraid of women.

John Travolta: You’re afraid to talk to women. Bobby’s afraid they’ll kill him in his sleep.

[Tim Allen and John Travolta laugh]

William Macy: Wow… now I’m really afraid of women.

Wild Hogs is a good movie (y), I liked the end scene though hehe… When they’re riding and Macy ends up on the wrong side of the road, and he’s like, “Yeah!” he had finally made it without crashing into something. And his friends are there, and then they look ahead, and oh shit! And crash while he’s driving off chuckling. You could say that the Code Monkey had the last laugh xD