bluh

Yeah, it’s been a while. So what’s new?

• Turns out the bike/car wreck was my fault, according to the eyewitnesses. Whoops. Needless to say, it has been handed over to my insurance company for them to deal with. I’m 99% physically healed but my ego is still bruised… as big of a stickler as I am for Same Road Same Rules Same Rights, I caused a wreck. Damn. I am making everything right on the car repair side and turning my mangled Raleigh Grand Prix into a parts bike for a road frame Charlie gave me years ago.
• My Senator got elected to be the next POTUS which delights me greatly.
• It’s cold here. And snowy. Just in time, too – I like seasonal weather.
• We had Fakesgiving III/Bullshit Thanksgiving 2008 at the home of Pete & Miz Royal. Fried a turkey in the chilly 15°F weather, had a couple Manhattans courtesy of Mr. Scott Action (Anton LaVey Jr.) and a great time was had by all.
• I’m keeping track of what I eat again. And losing weight again. I need to do this, badly. I’ve got two data points from this year. One where I signed up for fitday last year and one where I got weighed for a weight-loss contest at work in August. I’m back down near my August weight but have about 20 pounds to go until I’ve erased 2008’s ravages from my body.
• Out of homebrew. For now. Apple juice should start getting really, really cheap soon which means it’s about time to make another keg of hard cider.
• Work’s keeping me busy. One of my projects entails modifying some of our equipment, including getting the die set out of one of our presses, and nobody there has had it out before – fun, challenging and downright scary at times. You go elbows-deep in an 80 ton press and tell me it ain’t scary.
• My buddy Markh is comin’ up this weekend with his special lady in tow, which excites me. I haven’t seen Mark much since I moved 700+ miles away. Funny, that.

In short, first I:

But now:

And soon I shall again be:

New cell number in effect as an effort to stay ahead of theman, email me for details. Banana will be getting a fresh format soon, so if you have anything on that machine, I highly recommend you move it elsewhere. AFAIK I’m pretty much the only person that uses it, but you have been warned.

My late 2002 vintage iBook is probably dead.

It has finally succumbed to the very common logic board GPU solder failure common to the dual-USB G3 iBooks. Oh, and not only is the charger plug all bent to hell and back, the charging cord is almost worn completely through – so much so that it started arcing a bit.

Yes, G3. I’ve been using a 700 MHz G3 iBook for over 5 years now. For what I “need” a laptop for, this is plenty of muscle. After I graduated, my computing needs at home have been limited mostly to browsing the intertubes, listening to musics, deleting ads for boner pills and sshing into my linux machines. I have simple needs, but a 5 year old iBook without the ability to display video or charge does not fulfill any of them.

I “need” a new laptop. I don’t care about that widely-used OS from Redmond – we already have a wintendo around the house. I’m also sufficiently tired of Apple’s douchebaggery and excessive asshole tax to opt for something else. Lixnu should fit my needs well and has fairly recently become good enough for most Real People to use as their only OS.

I got a couple options. Option zero, which doesn’t solve any problems, really, but might be kinda fun, is to “resolder” the failing solder joints on the logic board with a votive candle and some white gas. This doesn’t solve the sparky charger and most certainly doesn’t solve the 5 year old laptop problem. Lil’ sparky could be replaced for about $20 on fleabay. So for a cool Jackson plus some flammable fun I could have a functioning iBook again… but for how long?

Option one is to see if work would sell me my 4 year old Dell Latitude D400, which I am budgeted to get replaced next year. I might be able to score it from the fine folks in the IT department at work for a couple hundred bucks – they’ve been going on fleabay for about $2-300. Aside from the buzzy little hard drive and paltry half gig of RAM, it’s in good shape and of the 12.1″ screen variety I prefer in a laptop. Drop in a 100+ GB drive and a full gig of RAM and it should be in pretty good shape. However, this hinges on being able to buy it for cheap. Upgrading to a gig of RAM and a big hard drive would tack on another $200 or so to whatever I paid for it and then I’ve still got a 4 year old machine. I’ve also read that the included Broadcom wireless sucks to make work in linux.

Option two is an Asus Eee PC, which would not only be stylish in black, but energy efficient, silent, compact, lightweight, almost entirely open source (by now, or very soon). Low storage capacity and horsepower, true, but I have plenty of storage capacity on other machines around the house and it would be faster than the machine it replaces. Not to mention purchasing said machine from Costco would afford me 90 days to return it should it not work out and a full two year warranty on it.

So,  given a low budget  and low demands, what would you do?

Of course, there’s always option three: use my evenings to practice the banjo, ride my bicycle, cook a delicious meal, enjoy refreshing time with my lady or pet my cats/dogs rather than be on a computer by default.

We have no bandwidth at home. None. The deathstar decided it would be a good idea to cancel our working DSL on our original phone line before activating it on the secondary phone line. The DSL might get turned back on as early as Monday. Might.

We had to pull out phone books yesterday to find a telephone number. This shit has got to get fixed.

Please, call us and release us from our boredom. If you’ve got my cell number, the message will tell you the real cell number on which to call me. If you have my home number, it should work.

Maybe our neighbors have wireless access and haven’t activated WEP/WPA. We’ll see.

I actually considered dialup for this weekend.

HJALP.

I think this thing is back up and running.

LAST CALL!

we’re moving to a hosted account, one that isn’t reliant on commonwealth edison for power or the deathstar for internet access. there may be a few days of pain, but it will all be worth it, trust me.

this machine will still be reachable via sammich.dyndns.org but there will likely be nothing here – apache may continue to operate but only on a non-standard port, sshd has on such a port for a long time now, qmail will be turned off completely. the ease and cost of hosting has made it very attractive to not run my own server anymore.

but, like i said, the machine will remain up and working until it doesn’t – i like having a shell account mostly reachable from the outside world as my own sandbox to piss in.

so, like a wiser feller than myself says every single night:

YOU DON’T HAVE TO GO HOME BUT YOU CAN’T STAY HERE

Once again this may affect at most two of y’all what read this.

Having not found a satisfactory solution to blogger not allowing SFTP on nonstandard ports, not wanting to keep the standard ssh port on my machine open and not having success using their FTP even though I can use regular FTP myself without a hitch, I moved the fortressblog from its old repository to my hosted account, here.

Enjoy, or die in a fire.

And you thought a horrible idea never goes unpunished. As reported by Roninspoon, our own Crooklyn DJ PORKCUBE made it happen.

This is about four times as horrible as you would expect it to be. Feel glad that it’s only 43 seconds long.

OH MICKEY YOU’RE SO FINE PEANUT BUTTER JELLY TIME

This morning, Ed and I discovered the worst possible mashup that seems so terribly obvious now. A compatriot (Keith, if you must know) was complaining about having a song in his head. Because Ed and I are often of singular mind and the nicest, most charming jerks you’ll ever meet, we both launched into different songs to get one of those stuck in Keith’s head.

The exchange went something like this.

(Keith) can’t get the theme from Rome out of his head.
Ed: HEY MICKEY YOU’RE SO FINE! YOU’RE SO FINE YOU BLOW MY MINED! HEY MICKEY! HEY MICKEY YOU’RE SO FINE! YOU’RE SO FINE YOU BLOW MY MINED!
Me: IT’S PEANUT BUTTER JELLY TIME! PEANUT BUTTER JELLY TIME! IT’S PEANUT BUTTER JELLY TIME! PEANUT BUTTER JELLY TIME!
Ed: PEANUT BUTTER WITH A BASEBALL BAT
Me: WHERE YOU AT? WHERE YOU AT? WHERE YOU AT? WHERE YOU AT?
Me: PEANUTBUTTERJELLYWITHABASEBALLBAT PEANUTBUTTERJELLYWITHABASEBALLBAT
Ed: HEY MICKEY YOU’RE SO FINE! PEANUT BUTTER JELLY TIME!
Me: IT’S PEANUT BUTTER JELLY TIME! HEY MICKEY YOU’RE SO FINE! PEANUT BUTTER JELLY TIME YOU’RE SO FINE YOU BLOW MY MIND
Ed: PEANUTBUTTERMICKEYWITHABASEBALLBATSOFINE

We expect a mashup (or mix or whatever you call it) within 24 hours.

Get to it, internets.

pfSense has been rokken like dokken, and now I’ve found the option that gives me access to this jambox from the internal network.

System -> Advanced -> disable the “Disable NAT Reflection” option.