It’s been a little while….

I’ve been busy as hell with work lately, and time for this place has, as I am sure you can imagine been less than existent, but I find myself with some time tonight, so I might as well fill the world in on the new toys, as well as the status of some older toys.

Opiate (The Compaq notebook) is dead. It was in my case about 2 weeks ago, I grabbed it on the way out of the store to head home, only to hear a stomach churning ‘thud’ as I realized I had not zipped up my laptop case. The machine still boots, I am able to access it over the network, and every thing seems to be fine, except the screen doesn’t come up at all. I have a tech who is looking at it, and I am hoping the repair bill will be less than $300.

Hush (The Asus EEEPC) is still kicking along with out a problem, except every since I did a dist-upgrade to xubuntu 8.04.1 my Atheros wireless card will not connect to any network that has encryption enabled. Pain in the ass. I plan on moving it back to Gutsy this weekend.

Flood (The Q6600 Media Beast White Box) is kicking along nicely as well, after being upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 as well, other than for some reason Apache will not run, it segfaults every time. I am planning on wiping the box clean this weekend, and reinstalling from scratch. Purging and reinstalling the Apache packages has not helped.

I picked up a Canon SD1000 Digital Camera around new years, I’ve put it to fairly good use, I just haven’t uploaded a lot of the pictures from it, I need to get back on that, and update the photolog script so that it works with the new systems, as well as the new host.

I bought a 1 gig iPod shuffle about 2 months ago. It’s junk.

My Blackberry 8310 has died a rather spectacular death due to leaving it in the car while camping all weekend, during a period of very heavy rain. I replaced it just yesterday with a Blackberry 8120, the Pearl with Wi-Fi. I’ve tested both the VO-IP abilities of the phone tonight, as well as the data capabilities using Wi-Fi, and so far I am impressed. Even with our cable modem maxed out on a torrent download (Debian DVD images) the call quality was reasonable, although not ideal. It would be considerably better if we had a more stable router. That’s something to ponder…

I’ve started painting again. This is detailed . It’s been nice to rekindle the old attachment, it is something that is fairly mindless for me, and let’s me take my mind off work for an hour at a time or so. I will upload more pics as my progress on that, as well as other pieces comes along.

It’s been a while. I guess I had ’shunned’ myself from a lot of the online community when I realised how pathetically f*cked-up it can be - the passing of Daco, related events, and reactions from some ‘people’ that associated with him in his past had me reeling. But I’ve come to accept some of my experiences, and now that I have, I’ve developed an itch to swan-dive back into the goo-bucket.

My computer rig has changed. I have upgraded to win9x, icq99a,netsca… haw! Not really. 1 gateway/firewall, 2 workstations, a server, and an ibook. My gateway still tracks ’stable’ in Debian, which it should. Workstation 1 is no different either OS wise… tracking Gentoo. But, my idea of a UI has changed. My better half had issues trying to use my workstation in any way. Felt it was time to add a user friendly touch to it, and installed Gnome. My plan was to run Openbox inside of Gnome, as opposed to my very personalised Openbox only setup. I wasn’t that happy about the change. Started screening the interweb for ideas and a 3D generated desktop caught my eye. Might as well ‘use‘ my 3D card for other things than games. Compiz Fusion was installed, along with composite based tools such as Avant Window Navigator. Productivity hasn’t dropped, I can ‘wobble’ a window or two for amusement. Heck I just like it. She likes it. It’s quite a dramatic change from my previous, somewhat minimal, set-up… but… I have that still on my Debian based ibook though so it’s all good Workstation 2 is a dual booter - Studio 64, which is a Debian based(Etch) multimedia focused distribution. I use it as a DAW. Realtime capabilities, Ardour, JAMin, and all that jazz. I’ve used it for recording musical compositions - work and personal. The same machine also has WinXP on it. That’s more for my parents when they visit. My server is now tracking Gentoo’s ‘Hardened’, and offers a secure Q2 service, httpd, network backups,and a few other things… but they are a secret

I have set myself up with a project to get me back into the zing of things. Going to try and incorporate gtk2 into ‘daco-tools’ since it would be nice to have a GUI, since some fonts don’t display the ‘funky’ function too well in a terminal. Going to be difficult since I aint no stinkin’ programmer, but I’ll give it a crack. I couldn’t think of anything else to do!

Good times