Ramblings

It’s another Monday morning. I came in a few minutes late again, not sure why I continue to do that. Oh well, I’m here and ready to rock and roll, but I can’t until I hear back from one of the people over in the Business Office.

I moved a bunch of stuff around in my apartment yesterday. I decided I was going to try and move away from the college mentality of everything in one room. I used to have my computer, TV, and a small couch in my bedroom along with the standard bedroom stuff. I’ve since moved my computer and TV out into the living room area, and moved the couch around so it makes a good reading spot.

There were several advantages to this. It significantly lowered the ambiant temp in my room (I do not like the room to be warm at all when I sleep), it cut almost all ambiant noise out (my CPU fan sounds like a jet engine), and I have some more room now. My living room has always been nice and cool, so dumping my computer in there shouldn’t make much of a difference.

I think I like the new set up. I’ll have to take some pictures with my new camera that is due in today by 4:30.

I decided to move my blog over to a WordPress installation from the MovableType one that it was on. MT was all CGI based, which opened a few security holes that I would rather not have open, and it required that I “publish” my pages since it stored them all as flat files. WP uses PHP (which I love!) and MySQL (which I also love) to store and generate the blog pages. This results in a performance hit since it has to generate the pages everytime they are requested, but hey, this is a low-low-low traffic site and the server is nice and fast.

This has been a rough morning. My alarm went off at it’s usual time today, but I didn’t get to bed until around 2AM last night. The alarm must have gone off during the wrong part of my sleep cycle (that part where you don’t want to get up). Of course the fact that I was very restless all night didn’t help, it just deprived me of any restful sleep. But, on the bright side, it’s Friday. Friday’s are good because they mean that Saturday and Sunday are on their way, and those two days mean sleep … blessed sleep.

I didn’t realize that they had caught the person responsible for the Sasser worm, but it appears they have : Reuters article

It’s a wonder that more of the people who create worms/virii aren’t eventually caught.

While surfing around on Slashdot via Alterslash, I ran across this posting.

The important thing to note here is that I have not used GNOME 2.6, I’m still stuck back on 2.4, and therefore have not used the new spatial Nautilus. There was a nice rebuttal by someone over on their own blog.

It’s been a while since I’ve actively participated in the Church Sound Check mailing list, but I do watch the emails that come across. Today, this little gem came across the wire and made me laugh. It was posted by Dave Marks.

Here’s my profile of the typical CSCer. Don’t cringe if you see yourself in this!

• Male, mid 40′s.
• Holds a technical day job, in engineering, or sales.
• Has been married an average of 15 years, has 2.5 kids.
• Wife is active in the church as well.
• Is a closet guitar/bass player, once had his room plastered with KISS posters and still loves Peter Frampton.
• Drives a four door sedan with Burger King debris in the back seat.
• Really wants an SUV but made the sacrifice so the wife could buy the van.
• Has at least 2 computers in the house and 2 cell phones.
• Has at least 3 dead computers in the garage.
• Has at least one hard drive doorstop.
• Has all of Stan Freeburg’s albums.
• Spends just a *little* too much time at church doing those things that wouldn’t get done.
• Carries a Swiss Army knife or Leatherman/SOG equivalent.
• Has hole in right pocket from said tool wearing through the pocket.
• Subscribes to all the worship email lists.
• Reads all the ads in Church Production magazine.
• Longs for a digital board and intelligent lighting but settles for intelligent worship leader and a board that doesn’t hum.
• “Technical” bookmark list in web browser is 8 times longer than “Potential Vacation” bookmarks.
• Has been known to mix with one hand and run PowerPoint with the other hand.
• Coils cable in his sleep.
• Drives wife nuts by calling out the model name of all mics used during Grammies, Oscars, Golden Globes, and Wheel of Fortune.
• Has telepathic abilities with pastor, choir director, worship leader. Unfortunately telepathic abilities do not extend to wife.
• Gets strange glances when visiting other churches by craning neck upward through out service trying to identify speakers.
• Thinking about writing “A Soundman’s Spotter’s Guide to Speaker Clusters”.
• Knows phone number for Parts Express by heart.
• Can’t remember birthdays of wife, children, or parents. Often forgets his own birthday.
• Has Mag lites in every size and color.
• Can point out various soldering scars on hands and remember exactly when and where each “oops” occurred.
• Drives wife nuts by calling home, asking her to dig into pile of manuals, pull out the manual from the bottom of the pile, turn to page 236 , and read dip switch settings from top to bottom. “Wait, are you sure you’re reading from the top down?”
• Talks about Curt and Tom and Ray as if he’s known them all his life even though he’s never met them.
• Has people at his church convinced that Ray invented dirt.
• Longs for a LAB 12 subwoofer.
• Drives wife nuts on long trips by tapping out Morse Code on steering wheel “just to stay in practice”.

Well, I finally took the plunge and bought a digital camera. I’ve needed/wanted one for so long that I couldn’t stand it anymore. I bought two 256M CF cards at the same time, so I shouldn’t be hurting when it comes time for TJOC. I bought a Canon A70, which if I’m not mistaken is the camera that JROTC is using these days. Whoever made that choice made the right one. My camera will be here in a week or so, no rush on the shipping.

I finally got my hands on a bunch of new photos for the JROTC website. Erica and my father brought home what looks like about 2Gigs of them for me to go through. I’m usually not too picky about what gets published, but I do like to look them over before I push them out for everyone to see. That means that I get to transfer all of them here. It’d be quicker to get my father to burn CDs of them and drop them in the mail.

It looks like I will actually get some pictures of teams other than Orienteering this year which is great. As much as I like orienteering, the site needed a little diversity. All it has really had in the past is orienteering, military ball, and a few battalion events.

Anyways, keep an eye on http://jrotc.net/photo_gallery/index.php for the new pictures to start appearing.

Dwight dumped an old Compaq laptop on me this weekend. It’s a 133MHz class machine with 64M of RAM and a 2G hard drive. The thing has Windows 98 on it, not even sure if it is SE, and I’ve considered loading some Linux distro on it. The only thing about loading Linux on it is that I’m not ready for a major battle if it comes to that.

The hard drive is more than large enough for me to transfer stuff back and forth from campus … in other words, I can fit a movie or a couple of TV episodes on it. It is short a network card, but John has one that I think I can borrow for a short while, but even if I can’t, they aren’t that expensive.

Thanks Dwight!

Well, I spent a bit of time over the weekend helping friends move. Most of the moving I helped with was just providing transportation off campus. One of the guys that used to live in the Quad (Darryl) is renting a house behind campus and is subrenting it out to a bunch of friends.

John is staying around for a month or so before he heads off to camp then to work for IBM (in LA). Colin and Justin are both staying, at least for a little while, over at Darryl’s as well.

David, Scum, and Joel are gone, and knowing Scum and Joel, never coming back. I plan on getting together with Runyon via email to coordinate some floor history and traditions stuff before next semester, but it won’t be the same as talking in person.

Life sucks.