I guess my recent blogging hiatus has mostly been innocent. I upgraded my PC, in several stages, from XP Pro to Windows 7 Professional 64-bit, and the upgrades didn't go very smoothly. My computer was down for well over a week.

But it's back now. I was actually very pleasantly surprised by the two different Microsoft support girls I talked to. They were very patient and knowledgeable. I also like to imagine that they were hot.

So now there are no more excuses for not writing anything. None except the usual ones, that is. None of that has changed. Just more of the same old shit.

Tonight, my tentative plan is to go out to my garage, glare at my phone, and drink a New Holland Night Tripper. It's a very yummy beer, and it's 10.8% ABV. So maybe I'll be loosened up enough to actually write something later.

I'm not making any promises, though.

This dude at work got himself a new toy. A Macbook Pro. So we're all huddled around watching him play with it.

It seems really cool. I can almost see myself drinking the Apple Kool Aid before too long. I already took a sip when I bought my iPhone, I guess taking a gulp with a Macbook wouldn't kill me. Except financially.

CartGirl says I should definitely get one. I didn't tell her who already has one.

Four bad capacitors on one of the boards. Cost me $365.98 including trip charge.

There'd better be something good on TV soon, but I'm not holding my breath waiting for that to happen.

I mentioned that my TV is broken. That's not entirely true. Only parts of it are broken. The parts that cause it to display moving pictures and emit sounds synchronized with those pictures.

There's a little green light on the front of the thing. That light's been flashing since Saturday morning. So that light works just fine, thank you very much. And there may be other, more subtle components that also remain unbroken.

Meanwhile, I've got my diminutive 36" TV down in the basement. So when I absolutely have to watch something on TV, I can just go down there.

And sit in my basement with my technology like a damn Morlock. Hasn't happened yet because I hardly ever watch TV in the Summer.

I guess LaptopDad thinks the problem is likely a bulb. He's probably right, but those bulbs are expensive and I don't want to spend that kind of money unless I know for sure that it will allow the TV to be a TV again. Instead of what it is now, which is a 600-lb, $3500, flashing green light.

So I called a TV repair shop today. They'll be out on Wednesday to diagnose the problem, unless I cancel on them.

I need to try a couple more things. I'll unplug it from the wall for two minutes, cross my fingers, and then plug it back in. My cable company will be so proud - that's exactly the advice they give me every time I complain that my cable modem isn't working.

My next step might be to find myself a line conditioner. I think I can get a good enough one for around $200. And I've needed one for quite a while anyway.

If I have the repair guy come out, he'll charge me $95 just for showing up, but at least after he's done I'll know what's wrong and how much money I'll need to throw at the problem to make it go away.

Glared at my fucking phone all night. Nothing.

So I went to bed, trusting that it would woo-hoo should the need arise.

Well, at 1:47, finally, I got an email. Not that I knew anything about it until this morning.

Because my phone didn't woo-hoo.

The cursed thing wasn't even blinking, when I finally got my lazy ass out of bed at 8:30.

I don't know what happened, but if I can't trust the woo-hoo, then what can I trust?

Looks like my email is down for a while, and the website itself seems kinda fucked.

Anyway, If you need to get in touch with me, you'd better call or text.

I'll update this when my email is fixed.

But don't hold your breath, because I don't even know what's wrong yet.

UPDATE 8:07: Seems to be working now. At least for the important people.

One of the things I've wanted to write about here, when things got slow enough and when I didn't feel like writing anything interesting, was this:

Anyway, it's got this auto-spelling feature. What happens is that I press keys like I'm spelling something, and it guesses what I'm trying to spell.

Sometimes this works quite well, but sometimes it sucks.

My own name, for example, is spelled with the keys 4-?-7-1. But the word Dave isn't what it decides that I'm typing. Nope, in its minuscule hardwired brain, it decides that I'm typing the word face.

There are many other examples. One of which is that the keys 5-3-2-? can spell hits, guys, guts, or huts.

It always gives me a choice, but far too often I forget to look at the presented choices. I just take the default. Which is quite often wrong. Which quite often makes me look like an idiot.

But that's not even the worst thing about the auto-spelling. The worst thing is that, I know this one girl named Amanda, and when I type her name into my Blackberry, it decides that what I'm really trying to type is the word Smands.

Smands is the default choice it gives me for the keys ?-9-?-8-4-?.

How stupid is that?

Smands wouldn't even make a cute pet nickname, were I so inclined to use one.

Also, a while ago I needed to type the name Heinlein into my Blackberry.

At that point, upon getting 5-1-3-8-'-1-3-8 as input, the auto-spell circuits overheated and the entire Blackberry burst into flames.

What a piece of shit, it never even heard of Robert Heinlein.

One time, around 1990, my car (Suzuki Samurai) was in the shop for a couple of weeks. I got a rental car to tide me over. It was a Honda something or other, I think.

The car would talk to me. It would say things like, "Your headlights are on," and, "Please engage the parking brake."

Shit like that.

Anyway, one of the things it would always say, if I put my keys into the ignition before the door was fully closed or if I opened the door before I took my keys out of the ignition, was, "Your door is a jar."

Not that my door was "ajar."

Nope, it was two distinct words. And it was a long A sound. A pause jar period.

My door was "A Jar," it would tell me.

And I'd always argue with the car. I'd say, "No it's not, it's a fucking door, you stupid car."

My home computer has died. At least some part of it has died.

So, until I get it repaired and/or replaced, I will be a little harder to reach. Especially to those of you accustomed to IMing me.

*coughStalkerGirlcough*

I'll still have access to my email via my work computer and my blackberry though, so all is not lost.

Depending on how much this crap ends up costing, it could be as long as two weeks before I have a real computer at home again.

I feel like a caveman.

I wasn't going to mention this at all.

I almost made it. I almost made it to the point where it would be old news, not worthy of an entry.

Almost.

But then, I figured, you guys have already seen me at my absolute worst, yet still some of you remain unrepulsed.

So a reminder is in order.

A reminder of my stupidity.

Got a new server at work last week. I think it was Wednesday. I do my Solaris installations over the network. It is 2006 after all. Installation CDs are so last century.

Anyway, I ran through all of the steps needed to make sure that the boot/installation server was running properly and that it was ready for the new equipment.

• I added the new MAC address to the NIS ethers database.
• Same thing with the IP address in the NIS hosts database.
• I made sure that all of the Solaris 10 CD images were mounted and shared properly.
• I created the proper TFTP entries.
• I had the network people configure the new server's switch port for auto/auto and had them put in the correct VLAN.

Wrong.

I rackmounted the new server, connected its network and console cabling, opened a terminal to the console port, and fired it up.

Watching the boot/installation server's logfiles and snoop output, I saw the RARPs go out from the new server. I saw the proper responses given. Then I watched the TFTP transfer of the boot image take place.

Everything was going very smoothly.

But then, then the new server installation failed with the message Unable to mount remote filesystem.

WTF?

I logged into another server on the network and verified that the installation CD images were indeed mountable. They were, so that wasn't the problem. So why couldn't the new server mount the fucking things?

I must have tried for four hours to get the new server to install. I even killed the rpc.bootparamd and tftpd and mountd processes and restarted them in debug mode, hoping that would shed some light on the problem.

Well, it did, in a way.

The problem was me.

It wasn't so much the output that I was seeing, it was what I wasn't seeing.

I wasn't seeing the boot/install server even trying to share out those CD images.

Finally, I figured it out.

See, up until a month or so ago, I'd used another server for Solaris installations. Up until about a month ago, another server had possesion of the IP address handed out by the rpc.bootparamd service.

And that other server, because it had access to the same NIS ethers database as the current boot/installation server, that other server was actually the one trying to serve up the Solaris CD images. Problem was, of course, that this other server didn't have access to those images anymore - they'd been migrated over to the new boot/install server along with the IP address used to identify the boot/installation server!

Duh.

So I killed the rpc.bootparamd process on the old server, and everything went as planned from that point on. The new server installed correctly. No thanks to me.

That's four hours out of my life that I'd really like to get back.

Today, I actually accomplished two things.

Not much in the grand scheme of things, to be sure, but two things nevertheless.

There have been, for quite some time now, two glaring problems with this site.

1. You couldn't select text when using the Internet Explorer browser.
2. If you made your browser very wide the text just kept on getting wider with it.

Neither of these is a problem anymore.

The first problem was quite aggravating for me. It ended up being caused by a bug in Internet Explorer that only came up when "position:absolute" was used for layer positioning. I removed all such declarations from my stylesheets and html files and the problem went away.

While I was messing with my stylesheets anyway, I assigned a maximum width to the "body" element so that there's essentially a maximum width for the site - no matter how wide you want to make your browser window. This has been something that's annoyed me for a long time, but it obviously wasn't as serious as the text selection bug.

Oh yeah, I also moved the side panel to the right side of the screen. Looks pretty different over there, doesn't it?

Friday night at Rich O's was fairly crowded, but I guess it wasn't too bad because I actually got to park in the main parking lost - first time that's happened on a Friday in months.

I ended up sitting on the throne and having a pretty tame night.

My first beer was this:

La Rulles Triple

(draft) A fairly standard tasting tripel. Perhaps a little more citrus than I'd prefer, but very drinkable.

There were some PBDs that I sort of know sitting around me, and ExBartender and CoffeeDude were around as well. I stayed pretty quiet.

One of the PBDs was drinking a Chouffe Bok, and, based on his recommendation, that's what I had next.

Chouffe Bok 6666

(draft 2002 vintage) A nice reddish-brown. Had a fruit component that wasn't the apples I'm used to from Belgians. I'm going to call the flavor a mix of cherries and beets. Not too bad, but not worth a second glass.

RealTrainGirl and MisunderstoodGirl came in. They'd got new call phones with cameras in them but it looks like we cannot send pictures between us. I guess Sprint and Verizon are not playing well together. I text-messaged a couple of people to have them try to send a picture to my phone but none of the people I tried have camera phones. Oh well.

Any of you faithful readers out there want to try go head and contact me via e-mail or the message form at the side of the page. I'll respond with my cell phone number.

(update: A few people have managed to send pictures to my cell phone. None of them have been with Verizon though.)

I'm having some trouble with 'bots again.

This time, however, it's my fault.

Basically, the 'bots are indexing the pages that contain dynamic 'blog entries.

For example, Google might index my index2.shtml page and note that it contains the word "Freeze" - but once I type a few more entries, the one about Polly's Freeze is no longer displayed on index2.shtml because it's not one of the ten newest entries anymore.

This means that somebody can Google the words "double poo-poo" and get led to my main page, but when they get there those words are nowhere on that page. That's just too much disappointment for me to want to take responsibility for. I mean, when you want to read about double poo-poo you just shouldn't have to wait.

What I need to do is have the 'bots follow the links on pages like index2.shtml, but not index those pages themselves.

That way the links to the single entries, like this one, are followed, and only those (static) single-entry pages are indexed.

So here's what I've done:

1. I put this line into the code for my non-static pages:

This tells the 'bots that honor this type of line to follow any links found on the page, but not to index the page itself.

2. I put this line on all of my single-entry pages:

This does the exact opposite - it tells the 'bots that it's okay to index the page but not to follow any further links. These pages are a dead-end, in other words.

Of course these modifications only work if the 'bots are well-behaved. The ones that aren't I try to take care of with my robots.txt and .htaccess files as described in this old entry.

The whole thing would make Rube Goldberg proud.

I really need to simplify my 'blog configurations when I do my next site redesign. Until then I'll probably just do some minor tweaks like the one I made tonight.

I just added a new category for my 'blog entries.

The pictures category can be accessed via the 'blog search form, or if you're lazy you can just click here.

I've also had to make some changes to the underlying software to handle multiple category assignments. I think it's all working correctly, but bugs do have a way of appearing. If you notice anything broken just let me know.

My next (related) task is to go back through all of my old entries and assign multiple categories where needed.

I think I'll also add some more categories. Here are some that come to mind:

• daily
• ramblings
• sanity
• memories

There will probably be more that reveal themselves as I peruse my old entries.

Just a couple of small changes to the site that I want to make public. Very boring stuff.

First of all, I've recently been slammed by some searchbots that are retrieving, then ignoring, my robots.txt file. This file specifically states files and folders that I don't want indexed by 'bots. I make these areas off-limts for bandwidth reasons, or for simple site functionality purposes.

For example, I don't want 'bots bumping up any 'blog entries - those are for actual people who like the entries.

I also don't want 'bots searching the raw 'blog files themselves, and I don't want them downloading all of my movies files.

Well I've become sick of 'bots ignoring these rules, so I've decided to block them completely. This was done with an easy addition to my .htaccess file:

As I see new 'bots ignoring my simple robots.txt file I'll block their asses as well.

(Just after I posted this entry I got slammed by another asshole, so his address is now blocked as well.)

Another thing that's been bugging me lately is that I've been getting what's called referer spam. This is when assholes modify their browser to change where they appear to be coming from. Many people, for privacy reasons, will simply change this value to a blank or something. But these assholes are replacing the real referer value with a URL to a site they're hawking.

My .htaccess file can deal with these people as well:

In the example of above I send anyone with the string viagra in their referer to a site that I'm hoping will get them fired if they hit it at work.

On a completely unrelated note, I've changed my site search function to just go to Google. My own home-made search script wasn't working correctly and I just haven't found the time to debug it. This change was for the site search only - the 'blog search is still home-grown.

And finally, I'm beginning to contemplate another site redesign. If I actually decide to do this then barenada.com V5.00 will feature a cleaner design and will make even more use of CSS.

Went to Best Buy yesterday and bought a replacement for my failed drive. Also bought a replacement for another drive that's at least six years old and, I figure, due for a meltdown of its own.

On the advice of a coworker I removed the old drive and gave it a little rap with the heel of my hand. Imagine my surprise and delight when I reinstalled the thing and it fired right up.

I was able to transfer all of my files from the old drive before it failed again, this time probably for good.

Once I had both new drives in place, and all of my files transferred from the old drives, I ran a complete backup of everything on my system.

I don't want to have to go through that kind of worry again anytime soon.

In fact, if I wasn't so senile that I left my wallet at home today, I think I'd go ahead and buy a replacement for my third disk as well.

It looks like I've lost one of my hard drives at home.

I got a screech, the system rebooted, and when it came back up it didn't even recognize that a drive was there at all.

I'm moderately freaked out. This disk contained, among other things: all of my e-mail storage, all of my Terragen source files, all of my web site files including those for past versions, and the My Documents folder.

My last backup was probably at least a year ago, so I'm probably looking at a pretty substantial loss.

At least I can get my web site files back - they're all on the public server of course.

I'm just starting to look into some of the professional data recovery service companies. They sound pretty expensive though.

This sucks.

I almost never ever write anything about work here.

It's partly because I don't want to become another Queen of Sky but the main reason is that it's just not very interesting stuff.

I mean, writing about the beer I drink or the shows I watch on my personal time becomes simply mesmerizing when you start comparing it to things like how many hardware quotes I requested or how many spreadsheets I updated at work.

Sent out quote requests for the new Oracle servers today. I only gave the vendors three days to respond this time, but it's a pretty simple order. Somebody's hair is on fire about replacing these servers so I'm trying to speed up the process as much as I can. I always get quotes from several vendors but I pretty much always know ahead of time who's going to come back with the lowest price.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Where was I?

Oh yeah, work.

I'm so buried in paperwork that just about the only technology I touch anymore is this here keyboard. I do get to have fun when new equipment comes in, and when old equipment goes out, but for the most part my days are spent crunching numbers and researching new technologies and justifying expenditures and plotting project timelines and attending meetings.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Huh? Wha?

Oh, sorry.

So, when a rare chance to actually get my hands dirty arises, I jump all over it.

Like today, when I found that I was no longer able to talk to some equipment. We'd recently replaced a broken component and, apparently, we got the cables screwed up in the process.

Anxious to do some "real work" I grabbed a Fluke and made my way into the datacenter.

The Fluke consists of a couple of small pieces of orangey-yellow equipment. You connect the doohickey part to a network cable, and then you use the thingabob part to find the other end of the cable. The thingabob emits a tone when it's over the right cable, so this is called "toning out" a connection.

At least that's the way it's supposed to work. That's the way it works for everyone but me.

The way it works for me is that one of three things happens:

1. The thingabob starts making noise as soon as I enter the room and doesn't shut up until I leave.

2. The thingabob refuses to make a single sound no matter how much I beg.

3. The doohickey breaks as soon as I turn it on.

This is all eerily reminiscent of my younger days when I'd fry a new watch within a few days of owning it.

I have a magnetic personality, you see.

Some sensitive technology just doesn't like me, and that's just the cross I have to bear. And it may be getting worse. I've been spending so much time with paperwork that people are actually starting to doubt My Technical Supremacy.

There are even threats (made in jest, at least for now) that my datacenter access will be revoked if I continue down this path of ever-increasing administrative work.

I can envision a day when lights will dim when I enter a room. People with pacemakers will clutch at their chest and keel over. Planes will fall from the sky when I go outside to check my mail.

Eventually, I figure, the government will kidnap me, dissect me, study me, to find the secret of my power and use it as a weapon.

Did you hear about Tehran? They got Siltzed back to the stone age.

Eventually, my powers will spiral out of control, wiping out all of the progress we've made over the centuries, and a new Golden Age of Man will ensue. One unencumbered by the shackles of technology. All living things will exist in harmony.

And you'll have me to thank for your newfound paradise. But you'll have to thank me in person, because e-mail and telephones won't be working anymore.

Forgot to mention...

I didn't like the new phone that work gave me the other day, so I talked them into letting me go and buy one I do like.

So now I have a camera phone and it's pretty cool.

Got my new phone today and it is not a picture phone.

Sorry ladies, but all that picture trading we were planning will just have to wait.

You'll just have to continue using your imagination.

Still playing with CSS, I've made some of the letters that begin pages/sections stand out.

I thought this was a really good idea at first, but now I'm second-guessing myself.

I suppose I'll leave it like this for a while to see if I get used to it.

Today I went and bought one of the new Sony dual-layer DVD burners.

My main goal with this purchase was to get a drive that would burn anything and since the new drive does indeed work I accomplished that goal.

The ability to burn to two layers is just a bonus, and not really much of one as blank dual-layer media costs about $10 each.

This morning I removed the stupid SP2 from my computer and surprise!

I can burn DVDs and CDs again.

Wait, scratch that.

I can now burn CDs again. DVDs now will not only not burn, they can't even be read by my drive.

Suspecting that SP2 had managed to irrecovably fubar my DVD burner, I went ahead and used goback to add SP2 back to the system, and decided to go out and buy a new DVD burner.

My lack of entries over the last few days was not caused by a lack of things to say.

Well, may be a lack of topics played a small part, but a much larger part was played by Microsoft and their XP service pack 2.

I must have tried a half-dozen times to get that damn thing installed, and once I finally did, I realized that both my DVD burner and my CD burner had become inoperative.

At this point I've tried just about everything imaginable to get my burners working again, with no luck whatsoever.

I'd now like to state, for the record, that Microsoft sucks, SP2 sucks, and I suck for installing SP2 without completely backup my system up first.

One of the reasons I first decided to learn some CSS was to have the ability to wrap text around images.

Now I've finally got that ability. You can see examples on some of my cats' pages.

Also today I added a couple of little mini-forms, one on the main page and one on the FAQ page, to allow short messages or questions to be sent to me.

Today I started work on an entirely new 'blog software suite.

I've gotten to sick of all the typos and other errors on my posts - errors that I sometimes don't discover for months.

I was first just going to work on the spellchecking function of my existing software but in the end decided that it would just be easier to start from scratch.

I hope to have the new (email based!) software ready for production use this weekend. Hopefully nobody will even notice the difference except that it might be a little faster.

The hardest part will actually be converting all of my old posts to the new format. I haven't quite figured out how to do tackle that problem yet.

I've been tweaking the layout of the 'blog entries - mainly just adding a background and a border as you can see.

I have some more to do. The text padding above the entry headers is not consistent.

I'll have to dig out my CSS book to see what I'm doing wrong.

I'm pretty sure that I've solved the problem where the font on my 'blog entries would change for no good reason.

It seems to have been the little trademark characters I was putting after some nicknames.

I've removed them all and everything seems okay with the fonts now.

It's too bad. I liked the trademark signs, and now people can freely steal all of my cool nicknames.

For months I've been convinced that my 'blog software was corrupting some of my entries, and that I'd need to wait for a new release to solve the problem.

Well I've identified the real problem - located between my chair and my keyboard.

It was all my fault. My program that I wrote to display the log entries had a malformed expression, that, given the proper characters, could completely mangle the offending sentence.

I've fixed it now, but there's no telling what other bugs still lurk.

Today, after over a week's worth of phone calls, I finally got in touch with two people at Sony that are not stupid.

I managed to convince them that my DVD burner is broken, and that it's not my fault. Now I actually get to have the thing fixed.

I was really starting to wonder if I'd be able to send the drive in for repairs before the warranty ran out in April.

I've tracked down the cause of my incredible Internet slowdown. It was the ad-blocker program WebWasher.

I've switched back to AdSubtract and I'm running at broadband speeds once again.

After installing Linux last week I then realized that my spare PC needed Windows since it was running my license server. I mentioned before that I needed Linux to run Apache, and now it turned out that I needed Windows as well.

The solution? Virtualization.

It seems that every technology vendor and manufacturer I've talked to during the past year has been talking about "virtual this" and "virtual that" - all with different meanings of what virtual means.

In this case it means that I'm running XP with a cute little virtual Linux instance inside it.

The XP portion runs my license server while the Linux portion runs Apache. It all seems to be working pretty well, though the performance of both systems could be better. It's not like I hammer them or anything so I think this setup will be fine for my needs.

After struggling, and failing, to get IIS to properly display a local copy of this site I took my spare PC and installed Red Hat Linux on it.

The installation went smoothly though very slowly. The Apache Web Server was already installed so I wsa able to get it up and running with my local site copy pretty quickly.

By a pretty strange coincidence all of this work broke the Wacom mouse on my main PC.

I noticed today that when I set up the site search function I sorta broke the 'blog search function. Well, not really broke it, I just caused it to display every matching entry twice.

I fixed it quickly enough, but I should have noticed it way before today.

I've reimplemented the Site Search Function, accessible from the main page.

Maybe I'll add some bells and whistles someday.

I've got the site search function working - but not well enough to implement it yet.

I need to decide how much of a matching page to display. I could chose to display only the matching line(s), I could add in a couple of lines before and after the match, or I could just display the entire page.

Whatever decision I make I'll probably change the 'blog search function to display the same amount on a match.

I should have this ironed out within a few days.

Had to remove the site search function that was provided by my hosting company as I found it was searching everything and there's no way to configure it to skip the 'blogs.

I'll need to either write a new site search function or (more likely) create a combined function to search the site and/or 'blogs.

Just finished paying my cable, satelite, and telephone bills via the Internet. When needed I can also use the 'Net to pay for my credit card, insurance, and magazine subscriptions. Hell, I can even pay my taxes online if I want.

In fact, the only major payee that I still need to physically mail a check to each month is my electic company. This is made even more of a pain by the fact that I've got something going on with my mail and I only get a bill every couple of months.

This is 2003 people! Just because you're stuck in West Bunghole, Indiana doesn't mean you can't get with the times and offer online bill payment.

Forgot about the ability to search blog entries. I'll get to that soon I guess.

I've finally wrestled these archive templates to the ground and kicked the shit out of them.

Actually what I did was run screaming from the templates and write my own CGI scripts to handle the archive displays.

Either way, it still works, and I think I can say that I've got the blogs fully implemented.

Now I've managed to cause the blog software to forget how to do any rebuilds. Just trying to add some new categories. If this entry shows up in the "technology" category then I guess I got lucky.

I'm not an idiot, I just play one on the Internet.

I'm not a particularly stupid person. I know there are some who'd disagree with that statement, but they're the stupid poopieheads, not me.

There are occasions, however, where I'm made to feel about as smart as the crap clinging to Happy's butt fur. This is one of those times.

I'm implementing these weblogs and the damn templates are driving me crazy. Why they have to make these things so complicated I'll never know.

The problem I'm having here is that all of the templates assume that I want to build complete pages. That's not the case. All I want is the weblog data itself so I can SSI it into my own pages.

I will figure this out, but for now I've removed the blog search and archive links since they were pointing to broken pages anyway.

Agnitum Outpost Firewall.