December 31, 2005

26

Hrm… I think I’ll try something new this year. As some of you know, 12/31 is my birthday, and I’m 26 now. That makes it twice as good to look back on my life and reflect. So what’s changed? Quite a bit. I always had a goal growing up, that when I was 25, it would be the one of the best years of my life. Looking back, I think that it very well could be.

December 27, 2005

a new trick: Electronics

One thing I’ve been putting off for years was learning electronics. Like everything else, I’m not immediately good at it, but I think with persistence I’ll learn the basics and hopefully become competent. I picked up an Electronics Demystified book about 3 months ago and read the first chapter; I decided to put off reading more until I had a chance to get my 130 in one electronics kit that I got when I was younger.

December 19, 2005

redhats named

a question I had in IRC today… anyone want to take a shot? 08:21 ok, explain this to me. 08:21 I wrote an iptables script that was pretty strict. 08:22 it only allows tcp and udp on 53 for dns, and tcp for ssh. and related,established for all 08:22 the defauly policy is to drop 08:22 when I try to halt this redhat box, it locked up while trying to shut down Named

December 19, 2005

Things every new Gentoo admin/user should know.

I’ve been using Gentoo for over 2 years now. Before that it was Debian. Before that it was Redhat. Spattered inbetween I’ve used slackware, mandrake, suse, knoppix, ubuntu, xandros and sorceror. I’ve noticed when I pick up a new distribution, there’s always little bits and tips that people forget to tell you about. I’m gonna try to make a list for gentoo. emerge Emerge is the main package management tool for gentoo- as such, there are several useful tips that may make your life easier.

December 19, 2005

insomnia is teh suck

so the cat woke me up at 2:50am hoarkin’ and I’ve been up since. I’ve been having sleep problems since I was about 14. probably longer than that, but that’s roughly when I got my own room and could stay up half the night. it’s weird, like my clock is set for a 30 hour day with two 4 hour naps rather than 24 with 8 hours of sleep. I have about 2 hours before I normally get up.

December 14, 2005

fun at my old job

so it sounds like the two new hires are discovering the joy of working for my old company. poor bastards. SPX apparently decided to have the christmas party early in december, so I didn’t get a chance to warn them… here’s what they had to look forward to… dinner at the smithsonian a live band Oh, but that wasn’t all they got- they also got the following: no actual food. sitting at the kiddie table staring at a tray full of sandwiches that the band got to eat a table from the back room when they realized there weren’t enough seats.

December 8, 2005

goodbye slashdot

This started with a comment from my friend Shedao about putting a life ban on slashdot. I’ve been reading slashdot since 2000 or so. I’ve seen the ups and downs. I listened to geeks in space and cheered when katz went away. So why am I deciding to leave slashdot? Because of Beatle Beatle, the submission spammer. You see, slashdot has a lot of power in the google pagerank system because of it’s size, links and traffic.

December 4, 2005

visible.

After being tracked down by a guy I went to HS with, I’ve decided, hell, I’m not hiding from anyone. I might as well attach a picture to the name. I think of it this way- if someone was to do a casual search, they won’t find a recent picture of me via GIS, but if they really wanted to, they could find me. So, here it is.

December 3, 2005

Pod XT Live

So jackie and I did our christmas stuff early (sorta- we’re still trying to pick out a monitor for her) and I got a Pod XT Live. My friend Ryan told me about his brother’s Pod way back when I started playing guitar, and it seemed pretty cool. I’ve wanted one ever since. What’s it do? it models certain amplifiers, stompboxes and setups, effectively emulating thousands of dollars of equipment I could never afford.

December 1, 2005

I love my new job

a coworker from my last job just told me the following (names changed to protect the moronic): 13:06 [ shaldannon] sooo 13:07 [ shaldannon] Bill got assigned to relocate a link to a form from one page to another 13:07 [ shaldannon] the "SPX Invention Disclosure Form" 13:08 [ shaldannon] JK asked Bill to alphabetize it under 'I' for 'Invention ...' rather than under 'S' 13:08 [ shaldannon] thing is....it' 13:08 [ shaldannon] it's the only link on the page 13:08 [ shaldannon] how do you realphabetize a single item?