Month: June 2006

Waiting for the train

I hate rain.  A lot.  What’s worse is having to sit out in it while waiting for a train to come in that’s already 4 hours late.  Actually, hate isn’t the best word to describe my feeling toward rain.  I do enjoy sitting on the porch on a rainy summer day just listening to the droplets ping against the leaves, feet propped on a bench, sipping an ice cold beer…  No, rain isn’t all bad, but sitting on a window ledge of a train station, surrounded by cement, rocks, steel, and smog, and not a clue when you’ll be able to leave?  That rain sucks.  It sucks hard.

Update on the last post

Yeah, I’m what we call a moron…  Automatix removed universe and multiverse from my repositories list.  Turns out Synergy, Beagle, and Banshee are all in the repositories and work great.

Other news: there’s no remote plugin packaged with Gaim 2.0.0B3, so there’s no way to configure aim:goim links from firefox to work with Gaim2.0.0B3.  It works fine with Gaim1.5 (which is the latest included with Ubuntu), so if you want to set that up, check out this article.

In yet more news, Pucker Fuckers are great, but are definitely supposed to be served as shots.  When you drink 4 coffee mugs full of Pucker Fucker, you’re just asking for trouble.  Thanks Friday night!

Rebuilding

I hosed my Ubuntu install on my junkbox yesterday.  Turns out the kernel image packages do something with X settings, and I change a lot of X settings.  Thus, X fails to start.  I could have manually edited the document from the command line and gotten it back up, but what’s the fun in that?  Instead, I slicked the drive, made a 40GB partition for WinXP MCE 2k5 (only to stream vids to my Xbox360) and reinstalled ubuntu on the rest of the 250GB drive.  Works like a charm might I add.  In the process, I found out there’s a new version of Synergy, and that there’s a package on the ubuntu site, but strangely not in the repositories, so I ended up installing from source (which I wrote the wiki article on btw).  Next, I installed Automatix, which pretty well hosed my PreSession and Init scripts to run Synergy prior to login, then proceeded to look for Beagle and Banshee, which apparently aren’t in the repositories either.  WTF?!  What’s a linux n00b supposed to do if the best programs aren’t even available without some serious research!  Tonight I’ll get on and see what else I can get into, as well as building both Beagle and Banshee from source, and installing Picasa and Google Earth Beta, which both rule hard.

People for Indecency in America

I’m thinking of starting a sister site in the RedKrieg blog network…  People for Indecency in America.  I consider this now that I know that approximately 99.8% of the complaints filed with the FCC over indecency on television are from the Parent’s Television Council.  Well, those bastards can suck it…  I want boobs, butts, shits, fucks, blood, gore, strippers, and more.

Yeah, I’m gonna get this shit going.  You in?  If so, hit me up via the "contact me" link on the left.  Alright, peace.

Things to think about

I’ve been trying to avoid thinking as much as possible lately…  here are a few of the things I’ve tried not to think about:

What other people are thinking when I talk to them
Why Synaptic Package Manager has proxy settings seperate from the system defaults, why it doesn’t have credentials or NTLM support of any kind, and why ISA 2004 sucks almost as hard as ISA 2000 at passing innocuous packets
Why mysterious figures from my past are suddenly talking to me again
How someone can ask me why they don’t talk to me anymore when I never knew in the first place (yeah, they forgot)
When I’ll get some new fucking computers in the training rooms
Why my screen name signs on from a third, undisclosed location every night shortly after 8pm, then doesn’t respond when I send it a message (my password is difficult to brute force, and I’ve never told it to anyone, or written it down anywhere, nor have I told it to remember in any location not within my reach at this very moment)
Quantum Particle-Wave Duality
Why everything’s better deep fried
Where all my cool T-Shirts are
Where my copy of Hackers is

Stupid Admin

I just made the oldest stupid admin mistake in the book, lol.  I used stock code with a default password to ensure spammers had no access to my backend system.  Naturally they tried the default passvariable and got through.  I fixed that little problem with a nice, 255 character randomized string.  Easy to implement, pain in the ass to break.  I love it.

The dig

I dug a huge fishing net out of the sand at the beach night before last.  Went with a few good friends, lots of fun.

There was a girl working at the 7-11 on the way there and it was quite obvious she was into me, but I failed to ask for even her number.  Regret is one of those itchy things, if you scratch it it gets worse, but if you just ignore it, it goes away.

Last night, on the other hand, ended up with me sitting at home alone watching a movie because my friends didn’t return my calls or bother to call me.  I did get in touch with one friend, but she was about to go to sleep, so it would have been unfair of me to ask for her company.  Loneliness is one of those itchy things…

So, today I’ve just been working on web stuff and wishing the A/C was on.  Good times.

If I owe you a web design, please know that I’m working on it, I’ve just been really distracted by lots of itchy things lately.

-B

P.S. – I finally stopped the spammers that have been pounding my site.  The great thing is, the solution is completely transparent to you users.  Gosh I’m clever.

P.P.S. – If you want to do anything, make contact with me (try my myspace page, linked to the left).  I may also make a contacts post shortly and link it in my navigation.  EDIT: Contacts are up.

Quantico

I’ve been in Quantico for four days now.  Yesterday I was actually on base until 11pm.  Needless to say, training has me a bit tired this week, lol.

In other news, I’m trying yet another method for blocking spam.  After this comes completely disabling trackbacks and putting a captcha on comments.  That will at least make sure the spammers are human before they get to be seen on my homepage.

If any of you bastard spammers actually read this thing, could you just make a temporary screen name and message me?  My screen name is RedPicasso and I’d really like to discuss a few things with you.  It’ll be like the movie Enemy Mine, except there’s no way in fuck I’m going to try to learn your language.

I actually wonder if you speak any language at all.  If you were intelligent at all, I know you’d find a job to make money and not spend all day every day harassing people who just want to share tidbits of their life.  You’re pathetic.  What you do is akin to putting stickers on people’s cars in parking lots advertising things that have nothing to do with cars or parking lots.  Do you really think my readership gives a flyng fuck about penis enlargement (half my regulars are chicks dude…), cheap airline tickets (heard of priceline.com?), or internet gambling (here, let me give you money I don’t have so you can put spyware on my computer)?  It’s retarded, really.

Meh, I’m too disgusted to continue.  Time to get some training in.

How not to get killed on the way to Virginia Tech

Just minutes ago I was in some kind of freak rainstorm on the way to VT.

I’m driving along, maybe 30 miles outside of charlottesville, va when it starts to sprinkle. Over the course of the next 10 seconds that sprinkle turned to a god damned waterfall. I shit you not when I say I could have filled a glass with water just by holding it out the window for a few seconds. Visibility beyond the front of my hood was somewhere between 5 and 10 feet, so I could either stay way back, drive slow and hope to god there was no reason for the guy in front of me to slam on his brakes (or the road curved, I couldn’t see the lines), or do what I did… Tailgate so close the SUV ahead of me blocked most of the rain and rely on my cat-like reflexes to save my ass. Needless to say it was a rather stressful 5 miles before the rain just stopped as suddenly as it had begun. WHOO HOWDY good times…