Dec 30

Should auld acquaintance be forgot

By linc Books, Home Life, TLLTS No Comments »

Time for some catchup again I think. I had a great Christmas, and I hope the same for you all. Invariably, people want to know “whatcha got”, so here ’tis:
I got a radio/cdplayer. I had been wanting a radio for the house for some time now. Now I just need to find a place in the house with some decent radio reception :-)
I got some of my nasty little cigars (Black-n-Mild Fast-Breaks). Something I can smoke fast enough to not freeze to death out on the porch in the cold.
My wife bought me the Scott Sigler books I wanted, “Infected” and “Contagious”. I also have received some review books lately from APress, Automating Unix and Linux System Administration, Pro Ubuntu Server Administration and Beginning Portable Sell Scripting. These looks like fantastic books, as all the APress books are. I just need a little time to peel through them.

During the Christmas break I finally got a chance to finish Daniel X Alien Hunter, which I had mentioned previously. Indeed, the illustrations and artwork are fantastic, however, the story line is quite disjointed. It is fragmented so much that in most of the cells there is a narrative box which serves to fill you in on the story a little more so you don’t get lost from frame to frame :-) Perhaps I am being too harsh. Then again, maybe not. I’d love to hear from anyone else that read it to see their opinion though.

That brings me to the New Year celebration:
We are bring in the new year with the TehShow, so do everyone a favor and get your booze on and join us on IRC. Stay home and stay safe (no drinking and driving anywhere). Personally, I am making my wife Sex On The Beach and Cosmo’s, and I am having Wild Turkey and Honey, Scotch and Coke, probably some Apricot Brandy, and maybe a little hillbilly Boonesfarm to wash it down. Then when I am good and warm, I’ll be talking on the show :-)
I am sure some of you remember that I am not a beer drinker. Dann and Pat usually take care of that!
Unfortunately I have to work the 31st, so I can’t make an early start of it. Remember, 31st at 8:30pm EST at http://tllts.org.

Dec 22

Reading Lately

By linc Books, Home Life, Humor, Movies, Pets 1 Comment »


A couple weeks ago, Dann was saying how he was reading the Watchmen, and remarking on how good it was. Well, I hadn’t EVER read a graphic novel, or even touched a comic since I was maybe 10, so I decided to pick it up to see what I was missing.

Well, I am finished with it now and my opinion is that is really was very good! The story line was sufficiently adult enough to hold my attention. There was a lot of action going on. The character development was done well. The artwork was absolutely fantastic!


This brings me to the second portion of my post. Since I was so enamored with the Watchmen (hey it was a great read while on the train all week), I wanted to see if I could find another graphic novel to read during my transport. I stopped by Barnes and Knoble and looked around a bit but didn’t initially see anything that really caught my eye. There are a lot of graphic novels there, but the artwork in most is really bad (imho) and in still others, the subject matter is a tad juvinile. Then, just as I was about to leave, I spied a large cardboard end-display with copies of DanielX Alien Hunter on it. A quick peek inside revealed really nice drawings, so off I went with it. I hope to get a chance to start reading it soon.

In other news:

I had the opportunity this weekend to watch both “Wanted” and “Meet Dave”. Wanted was a really good action flick (I thought anyway) and Meet Dave was a really funny alien comedy with Eddie Murphy. Both were good enough that I would watch them again, so if you are looking for some way to kill a couple hours this week while you are off, pick one or both of them up. Just be warned that Wanted contains inappropriate subject material for young people.

Lastly, I found out that, although it isn’t too terrible, my ferrets do not necessarily enjoy taking a bath. I decided that they were getting pretty dirty so it was bath time. With tear-free shampoo in hand I proceeded to dip them one by one into the sink. Puff, slightly distracted enough to dig at the water while he was in there, did the best, although he was not into staying very long. Stinkerbell literally had the crap scared out of her. Teddy was big enough to be able to reach to edge of the sink, where he held on for dear life almost long enough to get wet. He’s quite a handfull when he is focused on getting away from the evil water stuff! In retrospect, I should have taken pictures, however, my hands were quite busy :-) Perhaps next time.

Dec 19

Pictures anyone?

By linc Friends, work 2 Comments »

A buddy of mine at work is a very good budding photographer. Occasionally he will put one of his pics up as wallpaper on his machine so I can catch a glimpse. I have been bugging him to get some online presence going so I can see some more of his work and finally, this morning he threw me a URL.

Check it out!

http://www.mike-wagner.com/

and his newest stuff:

http://www.mike-wagner.com/new/index.html

Dec 18

Folding At Home

By linc Ubuntu No Comments »

Just thought I’d stop in to say that I checked the TLLTS Folding at Home Team Stats today and noticed that we are ranked 230th out of almost a million and a half other teams! Congratulations!

If you are not running FAH and on our team, it’s not too late to start!! Well, what are you waiting for?

:-)

Dec 10

Money where your mouth is…

By linc Books, TLLTS No Comments »

OK, you MUST GO TO junauza.com and vote for TLLTS. It’s time for some well deserved recognition dang it.

And once you are done with that, go and buy some of Scott Sigler’s books. They are really good. You can get them at Amazon.com.

I hope my wife reads this because I really want “Infected” and “Contagious”!

Dec 05

Behind the times

By linc Home Life, Movies 1 Comment »

Ok, so I am a little behind the times. I *FINALLY*, just yesterday had the opportunity to watch the new Willy Wonka movie, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Wow!

They took a wonderfully eccentric, yet warm Willy Wonka character, best played by the brilliant Gene Wilder and made him into a somewhat creepy, dysfunctional psychopath with some OCD tendencies, played by the equally creepy Johnny Depp and his annoying fake teeth.

They also butchered the really cool Ooompa Loompas and turned them into some really ugly middle aged Indian guys with bad hair who can’t sing (*OR DANCE*). If that wasn’t bad enough, the same 4 Indian guys were reused over and over again in the movie and, since the OL’s are supposed to be short, they resorted to camera trickery to give that illusion. The problem with that is poor camera work which portrays them in several different perspectives and sizes that are inconsistent throughout the film.

The worst part of all this is I just learned that the film received an academy award nomination, although not for the story or the acting thankfully. What were they thinking!

At any rate, obviously, do not bother with this movie if you haven’t yet seen it. I actually feel dumber for having watched it. Go and watch the one with Gene Wilder in it. It’s what the movie should be.

Dec 03

Catch up

By linc Books, F/OSS, Home Life, Programming, RackSpace No Comments »

I know I haven’t posted in a while again. It’s getting to be one of those things where I have so much going on I don’t know where to start :-)

I have been working on my RackSpace application a bit. Well, enough to get it registered on Sourceforge. Not sure what else to do with it there yet as it’s my first time on Sourceforge with anything and I haven’t had a lot of time to investigate.

I have been playing with my New Ferrets. Cute little fuzzies, they are. Puff is absolutely full of energy all the time. I also think he *may* be deaf – or at least hard of hearing. Teddy is very lovie, however, he has taken to play biting your arm if you hold him long enough. He thinks it’s playing, but he occasionally draws blood. Those fuzzies have darn sharp teeth!

I have been working on my OpenServerMon program a bit lately. Again, this is more of a monitoring framework that takes advantage of the telnet command for tcp port checks and takes advantage of the great bash scripting language. It’s amazing what you can do with a few bash modules! I am so lucky to be able to work on this at work as well. That just means that I will actually have something more substantial (and tested/vetted) to offer here. It’s also monitoring my personal servers just fine so far.

Finally got all my hardware here at the homestead running that way it should. I recently replaced both my router and then my cable modem. Installed Ubuntu Intrepid on my wife’s laptop as she really needed a clean install. Just how *do* people get their systems crudded up like that? Anyhow, it looks like it runs really nice and I would like to do that same on my main systems, but no time yet.

I wrote some backup scripts that will help me get my backups automated. Of course I didn’t add them into cron yet because I am stupid and a glutton for punishment, but they are written and work. Here’s your friendly reminder to do YOUR backups before you lose all your important stuff like I will.

Had to run to Staples tooday to buy a labeler. $20, ya can’t beat it and it seems to do the job, although I haven’t had a lot of time to play with it yet. While I was there I picked up a Cyber Acoustics USB headset/microphone. I picked it up hoping that there would be some info somewhere that let me know if it worked with Linux. There wasn’t. I took the dive anyhow and opened it up to test and it appears to work just fine. Of course I thought this would be a great thing for the TechShow since everybody pisses about our audio, and mine always seems to be the worst. Of course, there were immediate complaints about how crappy I sounded while I was on the show using the headset, however, I *think* I may have that nailed down to the codec I was using by default. No time to test again tonight so it’ll have to be next time.

Lastly (for right now anyhow) I have been working on my timelogger program. It’s been a long time since I have touched it, but I have been using it literally for over a year every day. Basically it’s a project/time tracker program written, of course, in bash. I am such a command line junkie. It also uses sqlite, which is a nice little DB that I think I will wrap into some logging on the OpenServerMon. And that’s how I tie all this together.

OH, and I also have a book or two from my friends at APRESS to review. Stay tuned for that too!

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